BOYCOTTING AND HOME-RULE.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."] SIR,—Your correspondent " Y " asks : What chance would Land League tyranny have in a country that was content ? I answer : The came chance that the tyranny of the Trade- union has all the world over, namely, that afforded by the subservience of its members. In Ireland we have one prominent "trade,"—agriculture,—and subservience to the great agricultural combination is so universal that it assumes to outside observers an importance almost national, and is -credited with a political significance that it does not deserve. The odium of a class becomes the tyranny of a people, and the blackleg—be he land-grabber or emergency-man—finds every man's hand against him. But it is futile to base upon these conditions an argument in favour of Home-rule. The question is not one of high politics, but merely, as elsewhere, one of administration and the maintenance of order. Whether public order would be safer in Irish or British hands, is a -question that every Irish farmer will, when pressed, answer in favour of the existing system.
Universal conformity in economics, as well as in religion, is the Irish ideal. Boycotting represents an acrid demand for this uniformity, and an intolerance of recusancy. In the South and West of Ireland, it would be as dangerous for a Roman Catholic to change his religion as to grab a farm. The penalties, in the form of popular odium, would be of the same kind. To go " agin' the people " is the highest social crime. Would Home-rule cure this intolerance ? The evidence points all the other way. Conformity to a narrowing opinion would be more than ever insisted upon, compulsion would become positive rather than negative, and "exclusive dealing " would b.3 superseded by open violence. Nobody proposes as a cure for the excesses of Trade-unionism in England that the law should stand aloof and allow these excesses to burn themselves out. Yet for Ireland your Radical politicians propose as a cure for tyranny that full legislative power should, as an experiment, be placed in the hands of the tyrants themselves.
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