2 OCTOBER 1886, Page 6

MR. PARNELL'S TEACHING.

ANY one who is interested in Irish politics, but doubts the urgency, the overpowering urgency, of the agrarian question, has only to read the letter addressed by Mr.. Parnell to Mr. Fitzgerald, the President of the Irish National League of America, and published this week as a manifesto to Irish-

men all over the world. Let him read it with attention, and Mr. Dillon's speech after it, and then remember who Mr. Parnell and Mr. Dillon are,—and he will, we think, entertain no further doubts. Mr. Parnell, almost at the commencement of his career, at all events long before he became the personage he is now, avowed openly that he cared little about the land question in Ireland, that he would never have taken his coat off to redress agrarian wrongs, and that his object was not to abolish landlordism, but to make a nation. He belongs, in fact, to the landlord class by birth and position, and is much more like a Nationalist of the old type before the Union,— that is, an Orangeman of the Pale who hated England, and only used the Celt as an instrument—than any Parnellite in his following. It was not till he was convinced by Michael Devitt that his one effective lever was the popular hatred of the English tenure that he took up the land question, which even now he does not profess completely to understand. So thoroughly convinced, however, has he become that now, in what for him is a supreme hour, when he has just been defeated at the polls by the British democracy, he snatches up the old weapon as the only one upon which, in disaster as in triumph, he can thoroughly rely. He raises the cry of freedom—not from England, but from rent. He is the most self-restrained of orators, he is a cool and clear though slow thinker, and his bias of caste, if he has any, is on the other side ; yet in order to rouse his countrymen, he foams against landlords with a passion which he will probably allow in his memoirs, if he writes them, was only an artifice of politics. He knows quite well that the Government would, in its own imme- diate interest, abolish eviction if it justly could, that no landlord in Ireland evicts except at the risk of his life, and that evictions will this winter be more rare in Ireland than in London ; but he asserts that the English Government and the Irish landlords intend " a combined movement of extermination against the tenant-farmers of Ireland." He calls "on his countrymen in free America "- where they evict without a thought or a scruple—to do what in them lies " to frustrate the attempts of those who would assassinrte our nation," and declares that " the powerful and rich Government of England has preached a social war" against his people. By sending money, America "will encourage the weak to bear and resist oppression, and alleviate those feelings of despair in the minds of the evicted which have so often and so unhappily stimulated those victims to a recourse to the wild justice of revenge." These are not, as we see they are described in some places, mere wild utterances, prompted by Mr. Parnell's hatred of England and her people. He hates them hard enough, no doubt, so hard as to lose sight of imperative re- straints; but if he were accustomed to express his hate through that screamy rubbish, he would never have become the " uncrowned king" he is. It is because he knows that even in America the Irish hate of the English tenure rises to a mania that he appeals to it in words which, but for that hate, would seem in their wild exaggeration, even to his audience, absurd. Mr. Parnell, though no screamer, screams aloud on evictions in order to make his followers believe that he shares their grand passion as fully as themselves. So does Mr. Dillon_in another way. Mr. Dillon is a cultivatel man of the Southern type, who is genuinely enthusiastic for Irish inde- pendence, but genuinely hates most of the methods now adopted for securing it, and one who, were Ireland a State, would probably think no more about tenure than any other doctor. Yet he not only advises, but implores his countrymen not to purchase their holdings, as they are beginning to do, except at impossibly low prices. Does anybody believe that he cares two straws whether tenants give ten years' or twenty years' purchase of their rents, or would dream of interfering if they were crippling their means of cultivation by paying too much for tenant-right ? His object is not to save their purses, but to retain for the object he really cares for the leverage he finds in the popular hatred of the tenure, a leverage which, with the landlords bought out, would be extinct. From his point of view—Nationalism being to him a religion—he is right ; and right or wrong, we may rely upon it that Mr. Dillon, who is as essentially Irish as Mr. Parnell is essentially English, understands well what will move his countrymen. They want Home-rule first of all, in order that those who till the land may own it, and, starving or prosperous, may be beyond the risk of expulsion from the holding, which is to them what banishment seems to have been to a Roman,—a doom as terrible as death, so terrible that the words commonly used to describe the death penalty do not seem to them either silly or inflated. That is what, after all the attention recently given to the subject, we English do not yet fully realise. We count up evictions, talk of per-centages, and are perfectly reasonable and cool, for- getting what we should be like if we fancied a class among us to possess the power of inflicting cholera occasionally or on individuals. There are dangers which, though remote, deprive some men of the faculty of reasoning; and to the Irish peasant eviction is such a danger.

We do not mean for a moment to say that greed—a nasty, dirty greed, too—does not enter into the matter. Men who cultivate five acres for their lives, and are two times in five cheated by theclimate or the markets out of their expected reward, become greedy to an extent that happier mortals can hardly understand. There never was a tenure revolt yet into which greed did not enter as a main factor, often in the detestable form of direct bad faith. All we contend is that among some populations and in some places, one of which is Ireland, some- thing besides greed enters into the horror of eviction, and makes of it the agitator's strongest instrument. The cries which appeal at once to selfishness and imagination, to the passion of greed and the passion of pity, are the cries which are dangerously effective. Mr. Parnell by this time knows that well, and will use his weapon unscrupulously, for in his mind scruples are weaknesses, until tenure reform takes it finally from his hand. It is that reform which statesmen must devise if they are to replace Home-rule among Irish counsels of per- fection as a pleasing dream. but not an urgent cry ; and if they will only remember the grand condition, that the Irishman is not seeking prosperity so much as security, they will And that the problem is not insoluble. The big sums which frighten people so much can be heavily reduced by qnit-rents which would not impair security, and by the only tax which can be devised to fall exclusively on the benefited class,—the tax on transfers, both of freehold and tenant-right, which is the sheet-anchor of French finance. Their keenest attention should be directed to this subject during the whole recess, and they should, when resolved, summon up the courage to force their measure through. In exact proportion to the merit of their scheme will be Mr. Parnell's resistance, for he holds agrarian reform a trifle in comparison with Home- rule, and knows that if the former were once secured, Home- rnle would be, even in Nationalist minds, very much what the Christian law is in most Christian countries,—a grand ideal, to be sedulously sought, but with little hope that it will ever be

realised in this world. If this is not done, if there is too much fear of an imaginary parsimony in the electors, or too much reverence for English ideas of tenure, they will find Mr. Parnell next Session as strong as ever, with all the Irish farmers behind him, and two-thirds of the Liberal Party ready to vow that for Ireland there is no hope except in legis- lative separation. The teaching which Mr. Parnell's appeal should bring home to the British people is clear ; and we shall be utterly wanting in political sense if we do not profit by the lesson. When Mr. Parnell wants Ireland to rise in unarmed revolt, he points to the tenure, and he is at once obeyed.