12 JUNE 1886, Page 20

HALF A CENTURY OF IRISH HISTORY.*

" I Au quite convinced," said Sheridan, nearly a hundred years ago, in the English Parliament, "that the misery of that im- portant class [the Irish peasantry] has had its origin and con- tinues to increase with the exactions and imposts of their overgrown landlords." Mr. O'Brien, in his second volume, now before us, speaks of Irish landlords in much the same language. "The exaction of impossible rents, the eviction of industrious tenants in order that farms might be let merely to the highest bidder, the depopulation of whole country-sides to make way for monopolising graziers, the absence of all sympathy with the feelings and needs of the people,—these have at all times been the distinguishing features of the Irish land system." And the object of the book is to show that the main causes of Irish dis- content always have been, and still are, neither racial nor reli- gious, but agrarian in their nature.

Mr. O'Brien writes with no less vigour and lucidity than con- viction. But though an advocate, he is impartial as a judge ; if he seeks to explain systems based on outrage and crime, he by no means palliates or justifies their evil. His record of landlord- ism, from the Peace of Limerick to the last Land Act, terrible as it is, offers no scope to criticism on the grounds of misrepre- sentation or exaggeration. The book is equally free from pre- judice and rancour, and we know of none better meriting a careful perusal by all who desire to form an opinion of their own on the question of the day.

But the author deals, after all, with an element only, though a main one, of the Irish Question. The work is called Fifty Years of Concessions to Ireland. Bat, in fact, the "con- cessions" began in 1778, and from that date to the present the course of concession has been interrupted only by such measures as the disturbed state of the country from time to time rendered, or was believed to render, necessary. The term "concession," by-the-bye, is as unhappy a one as the term "coercion." It is no coercion to prevent people from breaking or abusing the law, and it is no concession to enact • Fifty Years of Concessions to Ireland. By R. Barry O'Brien. Vol. II. London : Sampson Low and Co.

just measures that entail no loss or hardship upon the enacting State. The ascendency party in Ireland, from whom alone "Concessions," at all events during the present century, could proceed, has never assented to the conciliatory policy of England, but has always been concerned for the maintenance of its own ascendency. How could it be otherwise ? The defect of Mr.

O'Brien's treatment of his subject is that he takes no account of the necessities of history. His view of Irish landlordism is not merely that it is selfish in fact, but selfish in deliberate intention also. Irish landlordism, and the Anglo-Irish ascendency bound up therewith, are the inevitable consequents of the ante- cedents of Irish history. The Normans plundered the Irish nobility, the settlers of Cromwell, James, and William plundered both nobility and people too. As Mr. O'Brien justly remarks, the conquest of Ireland was not complete until the fall of Limerick. But the conquest of Ireland was as in- evitable a fact of history as the Anglo-Irish ascendency was an inevitable result of that conquest, and the slow and sullen relin- quishment of their ascendency by the inheritors of the conquest is in equal accordance with the facts of human nature. Inter- national or inter-racial justice is quite a modern conception, and its translation from theory into practice is even now very far from being realised. What, for instance, can be less in accord- ance with natural justice than the policy recently announced by M. de Freyeinet of constraining the Madagascar Government to prefer French contractors above those of any other nationality ? The selfishness of races is not due to caprice, nor is it of a deliberate character. It is the outcome of circumstances, and of what may be termed political ignorance, not inexcusable in certain stages of history.

Upon these general grounds, the picture drawn by Mr. O'Brien of Irish landlordism must be pronounced a misleading one, not on account of any want of fidelity to truth, but by reason of its insufficient presentment of the truth, and a lack of breadth in treatment. Any one reading this book without a full knowledge of Irish and European history could not but regard the landlord class as a class of monsters, which assuredly they were and are not, and England as a mere despotic tyranny of the worst sort, which it never has been. What would have been the history of Ireland in the eighteenth century, were the island situate in the Bay of Biscay, and its people a Protestant people? Then there are special grounds for mitigation of the indictment against England and Anglo-Irish ascendency to which Mr. O'Brien does not even allude. What religious persecution there has been in Ireland has obtained among the Protestants themselves ; the penal laws, though apparently of a religious character, were clearly political in aim. In some Catholic countries, the exercise of the Protestant religion was illegal up to a quite recent date. The peasantry were never serfs under the lash of their lords, as they were even in Mecklenburg until far into the present century, and there is nothing to show that the tenants of Catholic landlords were at any time better off than the farmers and cottiers upon Protestant estates. The atrocities of agrarianism were usually of deeper dye than those of landlordism—Mr. O'Brien tells us of victims put upon spiked saddles, buried up to the neck in pits filled with thorns, and otherwise variously tortured—and made a correspondingly pro- found impression upon the Protestant minority, who ultimately came to regard the native Irish very much as Queensland Colonists regard the Australian " blackies."

The most valuable feature of the present work is the proof it affords that the Irish Question is, and always has been, in essence neither racial nor religious, nor—until quite recently — political, but agrarian. But other countries, including England herself, have been subject to conquest, yet have managed to solve the resulting agrarian difficulties ; and Mr. O'Brien does not afford any explanation of their non-solution in Ireland. The explanation, we believe, lies in great measure in Ireland's unique geographical situation. In England, conquerors and conquered became fused into one people ; this has not taken place in Ireland, because the conquerors, drawn by the attrac- tions of the larger island, have always regarded England as their home, if not in a local, at all events in a racial and political sense. Other causes have, of course, been in operation, especially the several attempts to " plant " Ireland, which, being very imperfectly carried out, merely intensified the social disorder. Nor have English remedies, despite good intentions, been well devised. Dr. Richey, in his excellent little work on the Irish Land Laws, shows that the Act of 1860, which substituted contract for status, in effect merely increased the power of the landlord ; while that of 1870 gave the peasant what he did not want, and withheld from him what he did want. It may be permitted even to doubt whether the Act of 1881 has not added force to the landlords' claim for compensation. Mr. O'Brien closes this very interesting volume with a valuable memoir of Thomas Drummond, which will repay an attentive perusal, and a striking parallel between O'Connell and Mr. Parnell, drawn with great vigour and acumen. Mr. O'Brien's sympathies are plainly rather with the great Liberator, the impassioned Celtic orator, than with the cooler political leader of the Irish party of to-day. He admits the occasional violence and coarseness of O'Connell, but points out that he was no admirer of revolutionary methods, which Mr. Parnell con- demns also, but rather as inopportune or inefficient means of attaining his end than as bad in themselves. O'Connell again created public opinion, which Mr. Parnell dominates— confiscates, one might almost say. The former did not dislike the connection with England ; the latter, though of Teutonic race, like the majority of his Parliamentary followers, never conceals his dislike, or at the least his contempt, for England and her ways. Each resembled the other in "strength of will, courage, and backbone ;" but while O'Connell "made the whirlwind' and produced the storm,' Mr. Parnell leaves that function to others, reserving to himself the task of riding on' the one and directing' the other." With this application of these pregnant expressions, we take leave of Mr. O'Brien's carefully written and knowledgeable contribution to the study of the most thorny among the many difficult questions that are pressing upon the attention of English statesmen.