TOPICS OF THE DAY.
MR. DrLLON. AND PURCHASE BILLS.
WE wish every Unionist in England would read Mr. Dillon's speech of Monday at Swinford, and read it not only with care, but with a determination not to allow his understanding to be clouded by irritation. It is most difficult work, we confess. Mr. Dillon's furious assertions that the main object of Government in a time of scarcity is to collect landlords' rents ; that they are doing nothing to relieve the people ; that when relief is given, it is given not for the people's benefit but for that of the landlords, are so utterly unjust, such travesties of the facts, that, like all statements palpably due to hatred, they rouse an intellectual antagonism fatal not only to assent but to consideration. They are verbal blows, not arguments, and beget an angry convic- tion that further listening is useless, and, indeed, incon- sistent with self-respect. Mr. Dillon's " advice " is even more trying, for it is an affront to most men's moral sense. Keep back the rent,' he says, till you and your children are fed,' which is exactly equivalent to saying, 'Do not pay the baker until you have filled yourself with his bread.' The baker's right is not altered by his cus- tomers' hunger, nor is that of the landlord, who provides the soil just as much as the baker provides the oven and the firing. Rhetoric of this sort is endlessly irritating, and we are not surprised that some of our contemporaries sum up and condemn the whole speech as "predatory," a mere advocacy of theft. Their wrath is natural, or, it may be, commendable; but then, it is entirely useless. Suppose we prove Mr. Dillon's speech to be a breach of the whole Deca- logue, and of the law of the land besides : we have not advanced one step towards the ultimate end, which is so to -act, if that be possible, that such speeches shall cease to be well received in Ireland. Why is a speech like this, which seems to most Englishmen wrong as well as false, delivered by a man who is a leader among his own people ; and why does it seem to those people reasonable as well as exciting ? Why does it bite ? That is what we have to ascertain before we can even think either of remedy or prevention ; and no amount of swearing at Mr. Dillon, even if the swearing be of the most artistic kind, will help us to the needful comprehension. To us it seems absolutely patent that no such speech could have been delivered, or could, under the circumstances of Swinford, have been well received, unless hatred of the existing tenure of land had risen in Ireland into a positive mania, an overwhelming passion which sweeps away reasoning power, and leaves the mental eyes blinded by the perpetual nearness of a single object. The cultivators are tenants; therefore, in Ireland, morality does not bind, facts are invisible, argu- ments are not heard. Grant that Mr. Dillon is sincere, and we have the phenomenon that hatred of the tenure can utterly blind both the judgment and the conscience of a man whom his people have chosen out of thou- sands like him to be a favourite leader. Grant that he is insincere, and we have the fact that, whatever the circumstances, whatever the distress, whatever the need for practical advice, the one thing to which the people, in the judgment of a leader who knows them, will listen with delight is denunciation of rent. To say, as the Times says, that they denounce no other burden, that they pay the tradesmen, and the usurer, and the priest, and the League, is only to strengthen our case, which is, that the Irish peasant hates his tenure with a hatred which is a mania, which makes him regard this debt not as a debt, as is even the debt to the usurer, but as an exaction by a powerful enemy, claimed out of malignity and greed, and incapable of being justified even by a contract, which in his opinion is not free. To be rid of it is his supreme object, the one moving spring of his politics, and the man who promises to rid him of it, whatever his character or his creed or his plan, is for the time his accepted leader. That leader may quarrel with men held to be the purest of patriots, like the old Nationalists • he may denounce Bishops whom his audience all the while regard as agents of Heaven ; he may even arrest the distribution of British money,— and all is forgiven to him, for he sympathises in the popular hatred of the demand for rent. That is the one object so close to the peasant's eyes, that he can see nothing else. It is this truth which we want Unionists to perceive as hitherto they have not perceived it, for then they will urge on Purchase Bills with an energy which as vet they have not displayed. Nothing but ownership will make of an Irish peasant a reasonable citizen, and except through those Bills, and measures like them, there is no conceivable- mode, consistent with common justice, of making him the owner. He has not and never will have the means of buying the land in open market. He cannot compel the landlord to accept the rent as rent, and as payment for the too. And he cannot by a universal refusal to till except on his own terms, compel the conversion of hia tenancy into a freehold on a quit-rent, a thing, be it observed, which the house-builders of Scotland have, an regards all building plots, actually done. There is no hope of the change except through State assistance and manage- ment upon an enormous scale. The leaders in both parties see that quite clearly, and would, we believe, if they could, widen their measures until they covered the whole soil. Mr. Gladstone stated, when he introduced his Home-rule Bill, that he meant to settle the tenure quarrel before the Irish Parliament sat; and we _ do not doubt that Lord Salisbury, Mr. Goschen, and Mr. Balfour, the three men who are now governing the Kingdom, would, if they were free to act, run all the risks involved in settling the question at a blow. They know perfectly well that it is in the peasants' mania about the land that the agitator finds his never-failing lever; that it is this alone which makes South Ireland almost unanimous for Home- rule ; and that even if discontent survived the reform, it would take utterly different and much more manageable shapes. It is the rank and file of the Unionist Party who are not convinced,—some because they dread the pecuniary risk of buying out the landlords, others because they cannot endure to let a revolution succeed which has been attended by such an epidemic of crime, but the majority because they. cannot realise the condition into which tradi- tion, economic circumstances, and the teaching of genera- tions have upon this subject thrown the Irish mind. They do not know what land-hunger is, or the causes which have made it a dominant passion over three- fourths of the world, and in their hearts do not believe that sane men can hate one kind of debt almost to mad- ness, and yet pay half-a-dozen others, some of them, like the usurers' charges, much heavier, with grumbling equanimity. They think of the Irish hatred of the English tenure as a craze like a currency craze, or one of the hundred forms of human reluctance to pay money, like the refusal of whole races to submit to direct taxation, and cannot perceive that while it is a craze, and is in part based on sordidness, it is also some- thing more,—the protest of a whole race against a distribution of its soil in a manner contrary to its traditions, its temperament, and its rooted notion of its own personal dignity. The average Unionists, therefore, including the Conservatives, are not zealous for Purchase Bills. They vote for them in reliance on their chiefs, and because of party discipline ; but they do not urge them, and intrigue for them, and risk their seats for them, as they would do were they thoroughly in earnest. Yet, if they would read a collection of Parnellite speeches, they would find ample reason for earnestness. The tenure is to Parnellite orators the King Charles's head which was always turning up in Mr. Dick's memorials. Let them begin where they like, and they sometimes do begin far away, they always come back to the rent, always denounce landlords, always trace to the mode of letting land. all the miseries of Ireland. That, we may be sure, is not from want of words. An English Liberal on a platform fre- quently brings in an allusion to Mr. Gladstone, because he wants to gain the time allowed by cheering in order to collect his thoughts ; but Irish orators need no tricks of that kind. They feel no reason why they should ever stop ; and it is only because they know their people that they recur, in season and out of season, to the topic which at once carries their audiences out of themselves. Had Mr. Dillon paid the rent of Swinford for the year out of League funds, but defended rent, not all the gratitude of the people could have saved. him from being hooted. That, and. the feeling it indicates, is by itself full justification for any just Purchase Bill. Grant that the hatred of rent is criminal, and still our business is to root out causes of crime, and. no one has even suggested any other way.
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