It is as easy to go too far back as it is not to go back far enough in the study of such a revolutionary movement as that of which Ireland is just now the arena.
Many and sore are the historical grievances of the Irish people. That they are historical and not actual grievances would seem to be admitted by so sympathetic and minutely well-informed a writer as Dr. Sigerson, when he gives it as his opinion, that after the passage of the Land Act of 1870, “the concession in principle of the demands of the cultivators as tenants” had “abolished the class war waged between landlords and their tenantry.”
The class war between the tenantry and their landlords, therefore, which is now undoubtedly waging in Ireland cannot be attributed to the historical grievances of the Irish people. The tradition and the memory of these historical grievances may indeed be used by designing or hysterical traders in agitation to inflame the present war. But the war itself is not the old war, nor can it be explained by recurring to the causes of the old war. It has the characteristics no longer of a defensive war, nor yet of a war of revenge absolutely, but of an aggressive war, and of a war of conquest. In his able work on “The Land Tenure and the Land Classes of Ireland,” Dr. Sigerson, writing in 1871, looked forward to the peaceful co-existence in Ireland of two systems of land-holding, “whereby the country might enjoy the advantage of what is good in the ‘landlord,’ or single middleman system, and in the peasant proprietary or direct system.”
What we now see in Ireland, after nearly twenty years of legislation, steadily tending to the triumph of equal rights, is an agitation threatening not only the “co-existence” of these two systems, but the very existence of each of these systems.
To get at the origin and the meaning of this agitation we must be content, I believe, to go no further back than ten years, and to look for them, not in Ireland, but in America, not to Mr. Parnell and Mr. Gladstone primarily, but to Mr. Davitt and Mr. Henry George.
III.
In a very remarkable letter written to Earl Grey in 1868, after the Clerkenwell explosions had brought the disestablishment of the Irish Protestant Church into Mr. Gladstone’s scheme of “practical politics,” the Archbishop of Westminster, not then a Cardinal, called the attention of Englishmen to the fact, not yet I fear adequately apprehended by them, that “the assimilating power of America upon the Irish people, if seven days slower than that of England in reaching Ireland, is sevenfold more penetrating and powerful upon the whole population.” By this the Archbishop meant, what was unquestionably true, that even in 1868, only twenty years after the great Irish exodus to America began, the social and political ideas of America were exerting a seven-fold stronger influence upon the character and the tendencies of the Irish people than the social and political ideas of England. Thanks to the development of the cables and the telegraph since 1868, and to the enormous progress of America since that time in wealth and population, this “assimilating power” reaches Ireland much more rapidly, and exerts upon the Irish people a very much more drastic influence than in 1868. This establishes, of course, a return current westward, which is as necessary to he watched, and is as much neglected by American as the original eastward current is by British public men.
In this letter of 1868 to Earl Grey, the Archbishop of Westminster desiring, as an Englishman, to counteract, if possible, this influence which was drawing Ireland away from the British monarchy, and towards the American Republic, maintained that by two things the “heart of Ireland” might be won, and her affections enlisted with her interests in the support of the unity, solidity, and prosperity of the British Empire. One of these two things was “perfect religious equality between the Catholics and the Protestants of Ireland.” The other was that the Imperial Legislature should by statute make it impossible for any landlord in Ireland to commit three wrongs,—“first, the wrong of abusing his rights by arbitrary eviction; secondly, by exacting an exorbitant rent; thirdly, by appropriating to his own use the improvements effected by the industry of his tenants.”
Perfect religious equality has since been estab lished between the Catholics and the Protestants of Ireland. The three wrongs which the Archbishop called upon the Imperial Legislature to make impossible to Irish landlords have since been made impossible by Statute.
Yet it is on all hands admitted that the “unity, solidity, and prosperity” of the British Empire have never been so seriously threatened in Ireland as during the last ten years. Was the Archbishop wrong, therefore, in his estimate of the situation in 1868? Or has the centripetal influence of remedial British legislation since 1868 failed to check a centrifugal advance “by leaps and bounds,” in the “assimilating power” of America upon Ireland?