Ireland Under Coercion: The Diary of an American (2 of 2) / (2nd ed.) (1888)

by William Henry Hurlbert

The “Coercion” which I have found established in Ireland, and which I recognise in the title of this book, is the “Coercion,” not of a government, but of a combination to make a particular government impossible. It is a “Coercion” applied not to men who break a public law, or offend against any recognised code of morals, but to men who refuse to be bound in their personal relations and their business transactions by the will of other men, their equals only, clothed with no legal authority over them. It is a “Coercion” administered not by public and responsible functionaries, but by secret tribunals. Its sanctions are not the law and honest public opinion, but the base instinct of personal cowardice, and the instinct, not less base, of personal greed. Whether anything more than a steady, firm administration of the law is needed to abolish this “Coercion” is a matter as to which authorities differ. I should be glad to believe with Colonel Saunderson that “the Leaguers would not hold up the ‘land-grabber’ to execration, and denounce him as they do, unless they knew in fact that the moment the law is made supreme in Ireland the tenants would become just as amenable to it as any other subjects of the Queen.” But some recent events suggest a doubt whether these “other subjects of the Queen” are as amenable to the law as my own countrymen are.

That the Church to which the great majority of the Irish people have for so many ages, and through so many tribulations, borne steadfast allegiance, has been shaken in its hold upon the conscience of Ireland by the machinery of this odious and ignoble “Coercion,” appears to me to be unquestionable. That the head of that Church, being compelled by evidence to believe this, has found it necessary to intervene for the restoration of the just spiritual authority of the Church over the Irish people all the world now knows—nor can I think that his intervention has come a day or an hour too soon, to arrest the progress in Ireland of a social disease which threatens, not the political interests of the empire of which Ireland is a part alone, but the character of the Irish people themselves, and the very existence among them of the elementary conditions of a Christian civilisation.

It would be unjust to the Irish people to forget that this demoralising “Coercion” against which the Head of the Catholic Church has declared war, seems to me to have been seriously reinforced by the Land Legislation of the Imperial Parliament.

No one denies that great reforms and readjustments of the Land Tenure in Ireland needed to be made long before any serious attempt was made to make them.

But that such reforms and readjustments might have been made without cutting completely loose from the moorings of political economy, appears pretty clearly, not only from examples on the continent of Europe, and in my own country, but from the Rent and Tenancy Acts carried out in India under the viceroyalty of Lord Dufferin since 1885. The conditions of these measures were different, of course, in each of the cases of Oudh, Bengal, and the Punjab, and in none of these cases were they nearly identical with the conditions of any practicable land measure for Ireland. But two great characteristics seem to me to mark the Indian legislation, which are not conspicuous in the legislation for Ireland.

These are a spirit of equity as between the landlords and the tenants, and finality. I do not see how it can be questioned that the landlords of Ireland have been dealt with by recent British legislation as if they were offenders to be mulcted, and that the tenants in Ireland have been encouraged by recent British legislation to anticipate an eventual transfer to them, on steadily improving terms, of the land-ownership of the island. Mr. Davitt is perhaps the most popular Irishman living, and I believe him to be sincerely convinced that the ownership of the land of Ireland (and of all other countries) ought to be vested in the State. But if the independence of Ireland were acknowledged by Great Britain to-morrow, and all the actual landlords of Ireland were compelled to-morrow to part with their ownership, such as it is, of the land, I believe Mr. Davitt would be further from the recognition and triumph of his principle of State-ownership than he is to-day with a British Parliament hostile to “Home Rule,” but apparently not altogether unwilling to make the landlords of Ireland an acceptable burnt-offering upon the altar of imperial unity. Probably he sees this himself, and the existing state of things may not be wholly displeasing to him, as holding out a hope that the flame which he has been helped by British legislation to kindle in Ireland may already be taking hold upon the substructions and outworks of the edifice of property in Great Britain also.

One thing at least is clear.

The two antagonistic principles which confront each other in Ireland to-day are the principles of the Agrarian Revolution represented by Mr. Davitt, and the principle of Authority, represented in the domain of politics by the British Government, and in the domain of morals by the Vatican. With one or the other of these principles the victory must rest. If the Irish people of all classes who live in Ireland could be polled to-day, it is likely enough that a decisive majority of them would declare for the principle of Authority in the State and in the Church, could that over-riding issue be made perfectly plain and intelligible to them. But how is that possible? In what country of the world, and in what age of the world, has it ever been possible to get such an issue made perfectly plain and intelligible to any people?

In the domain of morals the principle of Authority, so far as concerns Catholic Ireland, rests with a power which is not likely to waver or give way. The Papal Decree has gone forth. Those who profess to accept it will be compelled to obey it. Those who reject it, whatever their place in the hierarchy of the Church may be, must sooner or later find themselves where Dr. M‘Glynn of New York now is. Catholic Ireland can only continue to be Catholic on the condition of obedience, not formal but real, not in matters indifferent, but in matters vital and important, to the Head of the Catholic Church.

In the domain of politics the principle of Authority rests with an Administration which is at the mercy of the intelligence or the ignorance, the constancy or the fickleness, the weakness or the strength, of constituencies in Great Britain, not necessarily familiar with the facts of the situation in Ireland, not necessarily enlightened as to the real interests either of Great Britain or of Ireland, nor even necessarily awake, with Cardinal Manning, to the truth that upon the future of Ireland hangs the future of the British Empire.