CHAPTER IV
THE QUESTION OF THE IRISH LAND (continued)—THE IRISH LAND ACT OF 1870—THE LAND LEAGUE AND THE NATIONAL LEAGUE—THE LAND OF 1881—SUBSEQUENT LEGISLATION AS REGARDS THE LAND SYSTEM OF IRELAND
State of landed relations in Ireland in 1869-70—Mr. Gladstone Prime Minister—The Land Act of 1870—Its merits and defects—A short period of prosperity in Ireland—Ominous symptoms—Michael Davitt—The teaching of John Finton Lalor in 1848—The ‘New Departure’ in Fenianism arranged in America—Foundation of the Land League—It was a foreign rebellious conspiracy, with an agrarian side, under a constitutional mask—Parnell the master spirit of the League—His visit to America and the results—A short period of distress in Ireland—Conduct of the Irish landlords—Progress of the Land League—Mr. Gladstone again Prime Minister in 1880—The Compensation for Disturbance Bill rejected by the House of Lords—Outburst of agrarian crime, as the Land League increases in power—Rents at Griffith’s valuation—Boycotting—Frightful state of Ireland in 1881—After a short attempt to repress it, Mr. Gladstone surrenders to the Land League—The Land Act of 1881—Mr. Gladstone breaks the pledges he had made in 1870—His promise of compensating the Irish landlords—The Land Act of 1881 a bad and unjust measure directly inconsistent with that of 1870—The ‘No Rent Manifesto’—The Kilmainham Treaty—The Phœnix Park tragedy—Coercion—Parnell founds the National League, the successor of the Land League—Renewal of agitation in 1886—Struggle with law and the Government—Subsequent agrarian legislation for Ireland—This is really a concession to agitation, for the benefit of Irish tenants, and to the injury of Irish landlords.
Mr. Gladstone, after his conversion to Home Rule, more than once declared that, almost from early manhood he had given special attention to Ireland; either his memory was at fault, or he had kept the fact to himself. He had been a conspicuous figure in politics, for many years before 1868; but until he had been placed at the helm of the State, he had shown little acquaintance with Irish questions, and, indeed, had expressed few opinions on them. In 1866 he had said in the House of Commons, that the existence of the Anglican Irish Church would be probably long; he had been in high office almost since 1853, and, as a colleague of Lord Palmerston, had acquiesced in the philippics of that statesman against Irish tenant right, conduct that revealed ignorance of the land system of Ireland. But, in 1868, when the Fenian outbreak had caused the nation to demand large reforms in Ireland, he suddenly abandoned his attitude of reserve; he threw himself into Irish affairs; his zeal, it may be remarked, as often happened, fell in with his interests, and with those of the Liberal party, and gave him a leverage to drive Disraeli from office. During months before the General Election that ensued, the orator thundered on Irish grievances, and on the manifold ills of Ireland; in figurative and impassioned language, he said that the island was blighted by a huge upas tree, the Church, the land, and education being the three main branches. These harangues, addressed to the new democracy, contributed powerfully to the fall of the Conservative Ministry; it was little noticed, at the time, that one of the results was ere long to compel Mr. Gladstone himself to subject Ireland to severe repressive measures, for Whiteboy and agrarian outrages became frequent In 1869, the Minister addressed himself to the task of hewing down the first branch of the poisonous upas; he disestablished and disendowed the Protestant Church of Ireland. This is not the place to comment upon that great measure; it was well designed upon its professed principles; it dealt liberally, nay, generously, with the voluntary Church, which replaced the Church of the State it overthrew. But essentially it was a scheme of destruction, formed in Nonconformist not in Irish interests, and opposed to the views of generations of statesmen; it made no provision for the clergy of the Irish Catholic Church, a policy which Pitt, Castlereagh, and Lord John Russell had had at heart, which had been all but a condition of the Union, and which, if carried into effect, would have done much to strengthen and maintain that fundamental law, and to promote tranquillity in Ireland and her general welfare.
Mr. Gladstone now turned to the second branch of the upas, the land system of Ireland and her landed relations. His whole career, especially in its Home Rule phase, proves that his knowledge of Ireland was not exact or profound; at this time he had had little experience of the Irish land question. But the mind of England was still attracted to Irish affairs; a number of distinguished Englishmen and Scotchmen went to Ireland, to investigate the state of the country on the spot; the British Press sent some of its best contributors; the time was singularly opportune for a fair and complete inquiry; no Minister has had, before or since, such assistance in dealing with Irish problems. I must glance at the state of the Irish land system in 1869-70, as this was fully explored and made manifest.[55] The material progress being made, since about 1854, had been largely developed in by far the greatest part of the island. The population was being still diminished by emigration and other causes; the area for real husbandry had been greatly extended; the rural community, at least in its lower grades, was infinitely better off than it had been before the Famine. The look of the country, in most places, bore witness to a change beneficent in the main; it had been almost transformed since 1844-45. The cottar system, no doubt, was to be found in backward counties; but even in these it had been largely effaced; it was all but passing away in the more thriving counties; masses of indigence were to be seen only in tracts west of the Shannon; and these were aggregated on an area comparatively small. The general consolidation of farms had, meanwhile, gone on; and though Ireland remained, on the whole, a land of small farms, her land system had, from top to bottom, ceased to depend for its support on a perishable root. In every conceivable respect a marked improvement was visible in the state of the peasantry; they were by many degrees better clothed and fed than their fathers had been; the wages of agricultural labour were still rising, and were now paid in money, and not in plots of potatoes; and though the habitations of this whole class were, as a rule, still mean, the dwellings of the class of substantial farmers had shown signs of distinct social progress. At the same time agriculture had made a marked advance, owing to the influences I have referred to before; fine specimens of extensive farming were very commonly to be seen; thousands of acres had been reclaimed and enclosed of late years; at no period certainly had the landed gentry, in a great measure through moneys borrowed from the State, expended such large sums in improving their estates, especially in arterial drainage, and the introduction of the best breeds of stock of all kinds. The wealth of Ireland, too, was increasing, if not rapidly; and a change for the better might be traced in what we may describe as her general social life. Her middle class was still weak and small compared to that of England and Scotland; but it had been growing in wealth and power; and this, to some extent, had had a good effect on a community still mainly dependent on the land.
The material and even the social progress of Ireland, since the Famine, had thus been marked; it had been more decided than it has been, at any period, except, possibly, that from 1782 to 1800. Her land system, too, had become better in important parts; but in many respects it remained vicious; some of its vices had been aggravated, or were more sensibly felt. The hope that the land would pass generally into the hands of large farmers, able to develop its resources, had not been realised, or had been realised only to a relatively trivial extent; it was still held in the main by a peasantry of small occupiers of the soil, though the consolidation of farms had gone on over extensive areas, especially over wide tracts of pasturage, in the eastern, midland, and western counties, and this, in some instances, through a process of harsh eviction. The profound divisions of race and faith, the distinctive feature in the organic structure of the whole community, were at least as visible as ever in the land system; from causes I have pointed out before, they had, not improbably, been widened; this tended to increase the old dissension in landed relations, and the long-standing separation between the landed classes. Middleman tenures, with their mischievous effects, had, since the Famine, well-nigh disappeared; but the new landlord had largely replaced the middleman; absenteeism remained what it had been; and though absentee estates, as a rule, were under good agents, there was too much of that ‘absenteeism of the heart,’ condemned by Tocqueville as a grave social danger. The purchasers under the Encumbered Estates Acts, with some honourable exceptions, no doubt, were too often oppressive landlords; the old landlords, as a class, had, certainly, done much for their estates, but they had lost their political and largely their social influence; partly owing to apprehensions as regards tenant right, partly to the assurances of statesmen that their position was safe, they had become perhaps more exacting in their dealings with their dependents; in the existing situation, they more and more resembled a weak caste, controlled by the central Government, and isolated amidst a community, to a great extent, not friendly. All this tended to produce a want of stability and insecurity in the land system, which was ominous of social strife and trouble; but the most active element of disturbance was to be certainly found in the contact with the rebellious movement which Ireland had lately witnessed. Fenianism had been scotched, but by no means slain; and though the peasantry had held aloof from it, Fenian emissaries were going through the country, appealing to the passions and the greed of the occupiers of the soil, for different reasons not contented with their lot, hostile, in a great degree, to the order of things around them, and more alive to their grievances than in the past generation; at this very time a cry against the payment of rent, and against ‘landlordism,’ as it was called, was being heard in a few counties. It was significant that agrarian crimes—some of the worst type—and agrarian disorder were distinctly increasing; and it should be added, that, in spite of Cardinal Cullen, the younger Catholic priests, in some districts, were beginning to play the part of agitators again.
Passing from the general state of landed relations, the conditions of land tenure, briefly noticed before, had not improved of late years, and were, in some respects, worse. Rents had been rising for a considerable time: but except in comparatively few instances, they were not excessive, as affairs stood; whatever mendacious calumny has since maintained, Ireland, on the whole, was in no sense an over-rented land.[56] But the modes of occupation were essentially bad; they were open to the gravest objections; their vices had become more than ever apparent. The tenant right, under the Ulster custom, had, I have remarked, largely secured the tenant farmer, in parts of the province, what was generally known as the ‘Three F’s,’ Fair Rent, Fixity of Tenure, the power of a Free Sale of the holding;[57] though it should be especially borne in mind that the fair rent was never adjusted by an external agency, but was settled by what Adam Smith would have called ‘higgling’ between the owner and occupier of the soil. The custom, however, had been very powerful; its violation, on anything like a great scale, would have certainly caused a fierce war of classes; and it gave the Ulster tenant, in tens of thousands of cases, a real proprietary right in the land, whatever might be the terms of his contract; a right equivalent to more or less joint-ownership, and that might be described as a precious peculium, subject to conditions that long had made it practically secure. But this most important right, involving property worth many millions, still remained wholly unprotected by law; and though its value had enormously increased, as the wealth of Ulster had been developed, of late years, it was being ‘nibbled away’ on not a few estates, and restricted by limitations of many kinds that had greatly impaired it. An analogous right, like seed scattered by the winds, had partially spread into the southern provinces, as the natural result of the equitable claims, the occupiers of farms had repeatedly acquired, though this had not been recognised on many estates, and its efficacy was not as yet great; but this right, such as it was, like its fellow, was not law-worthy, and depended wholly on the will of the lord of the soil. In addition to the tenant right in the north and the south, the concurrent claims of the tenant farmers, throughout the country, in respect of improvements and of sums paid on the transfer of farms, for ‘good-will,’ had been greatly increasing of late years, especially as prosperity was advancing; and yet tenures had continued to become more precarious; leaseholds were being almost everywhere replaced by tenancies at will. These claims were never so extensive before; often equivalent to joint-ownership, in no doubtful sense, and, in almost all cases, of some value, they were, nevertheless, still outside the ægis of the law, a fact that must ever be borne in mind; they could be destroyed or greatly reduced by the raising of rent, they could be annihilated by a notice to quit, if eviction followed. Unquestionably in the great mass of instances, these rights, whatever their nature, were not invaded; but they certainly had been in a certain number; a single case of invasion created alarm and distrust, and had a bad effect on landed relations; throw a stone into a pond, and it makes a ripple; it has a disturbing influence far beyond the surface it strikes. No wonder, then, that complaints of these modes of tenure had become very general, and were loudly expressed, not only by those who might suffer from them, but by intelligent minds which had mastered the subject. It was an exaggeration to assert, as was said at the time, that the peasant in Ireland lived under a sword of Damocles; but he lived under a system in which law and right were very plainly opposed.
Only a revolution, which Parliament would not have sanctioned, could have effaced the inveterate ills of the Irish land system, running up to the conquests and the confiscations of the past, and the divisions of race and faith in the Irish land; the remark is as true now as it was thirty years ago; and a revolution of the kind, I am firmly convinced, would, even under the best conditions, make infinitely worse whatever was already bad. But it was possible for legislation to remove or mitigate the essential vices in the modes of Irish land tenure; Mr. Gladstone rightly confined himself to this object. He brought in his first Irish Land Bill in the early spring of 1870; he had to address a House of Commons not much in sympathy with a project of the kind. Many of the members were ignorant of the subject; many thought English land tenure perfect, and could not understand why it would not do for Ireland, a prejudice at least three centuries old; some believed Irish tenant right to be a violation of Free Trade, then in the ascendant in every phase of commerce. The Minister’s speech was adapted to those who heard it; it was tentative, moderate, not striking; he drew, indeed, very plain distinctions between British and Irish land tenure, and showed how the first could be no rule of right for the second; but if he enlarged on the just claims of the occupier of the Irish soil, he did not venture to maintain, what he probably felt, that these were often equivalent to a joint-ownership more or less developed. He was, in short, dexterous, but not profound; very inferior to Burke, who, a century before, had grasped the essential facts in this province, though the question was still in the remote future. The most important parts of Mr. Gladstone’s speech, and indeed, of those of his leading followers, regard being had to events by no means distant, were those in which he repudiated, with no doubtful censure, the whole theory of the ‘Three F’s,’ the extreme demand, at this time, of the tenant class in Ireland. ‘Fair Rent’ he argued, especially if adjusted by the State, deprives a landlord of his first proprietary right, and involves his expropriation in the long run; ‘Fixity of Tenure’ means a perpetuity for the tenant, to which he has no just claim, and involves confiscation hardly disguised; ‘Free Sale’ was but a corollary to legislation on these principles.[58] At the same time, Mr. Gladstone protested, with marked emphasis, that the Bill he was introducing was to be absolutely a final measure; it was to effect a permanent settlement of the Irish land; Irish landlords would have nothing more to apprehend, Irish tenants to expect. In this instance, as in that of Home Rule, the orator was to belie himself, and to be a curious example of the irony of Fate; within a few years he was to legislate on the lines he had denounced as dangerous and false; to carry into effect a scheme for dealing with the Irish land, infinitely worse than that of the ‘Three F’s;’ to scatter the ‘finality,’ to which he had pledged his word, to the winds.