THE IRISH PRELATES UPON IRISH CRIME.
AMID the profound discouragement with which the recent terrible series of agrarian crimes has affected men's minds the well-wishers of Ireland were disposed to turn readily to any quarter for light and comfort. At such a moment, in spite of our experience of the empty pomposity of similar documents, we looked hopefully even to the mani- festo which has just been issued in Dublin by the Roman Catholic hierarchy. These hopes have been doomed to dia. appointment. On those episcopal lips the message of peace and good will itself degenerates into a dogged muttering of the watchwords of strife. Nevertheless, it is not the virulent attack of these holy men on the Government of which it is our purpose to complain ; it is the privilege of a losing cause to rail unheeded and unchecked. In that contest which is raging in some sort or other throughout Catholic Europe between the laity and the episcopacy, and from which the inferior clergy are now beginning to stand aloof, the English people have been the steadiest and most powerful opponents of the hierarchy. In all countries, however, it makes common cause, and the Irish bishops, too astute to declare war on England, not unnaturally pour out all their bile upon the Government which has faithfully represented the feelings of the country.. But it becomes a duty to protest when minis- ters of religion shrink from endangering their power over a savage people by rebuking their favourite crimes, or at least sulkily qualify their censures and half extenuate the out- rages which they are compelled in decency to deplore. Two cold sentences of warning and regret dispose of those un- lawful combinations whose secret counsels are now resulting in open murder, which the peasantry passively abet, while whole paragraphs set forth the "injustices" which the Irish suffer, and the " manifest inequality before the law" which, as is alleged, inspires their lawlessness and palliates their crimes. Offensive, however, as is the tone in which this manifesto is couched, dispassionate minds will not the less weigh its practical suggestions, and extract honey, if it may be, even from the bitter flowers of episcopal rhetoric. But, except the monster evil of the existence of the Protestant Establishment—a grievance which is after all rather senti- mental than practical, and can have no influence in inciting the assassin who strikes at Catholic and Protestant landlords with stern impartiality—there are but two practical griev- ances, bearing on the social condition of the country, which the Irish prelates are able to prefer. They demand an in- creased expenditure of public money on public works, and such changes in the laws " as may give greater security to industrious tenants." On the first of these heads all we shall say is that so far as it allures the peasantry into the position of labourers and so diminishes the competition for land, it would have a tendency to diminish crime ; but we believe that the more the subject was examined the more it would appear how vast has been the Imperial expenditure for many years past, and how little reason Ireland has to complain. With respect to the second point, the tenant- right question, as it is called, deserves a more impartial con- sideration than it generally receives. The real obstacle to the fair consideration of this question is to be found in the inveterate application of English ideas to Irish facts—of rules deduced from the social condition of the one country and applied to the very different social con- dition of the other. Land, the most secure species of pro- perty, and desired for political and other reasons, pays a low rate of interest, and has, therefore, in this country long been the investment only of the very rich. Landlords are, as a rule, able, and, in order to keep complete power over their estates, are always willing, to erect the requisite farm build- ings and effect necessary permanent improvements at their own expense. The cultivators, again, are men of capital and intelligence. Farming is to them only one of many means of subsistence—that, probably, which they prefer, but would, nevertheless, abandon if it would not yield them the ordinary rate of interest on their capital. Between men of this kind, who meet on equal terms, any interference of the law is always unnecessary and mostly mischievous. Their bargains are sufficiently regulated by their private interests and by the operation of the laws of supply and demand. The social condition of Ireland is altogether different. The cultivation of the soil is not one pursuit among many, but the only pursuit of the population. There are no manufactures. Capital has never accumulated in the hands of the middle classes. What little there is is required to carry on the retail trade of the country. There are practically no farmers in any sense in which Englishmen use the term—no middle- men between landlord and labourer, hiring land on the one hand and labour on the other, in order to make a profit by agriculture. The land is cultivated by the peasantry, who take a few acres directly from the landowner. In such a country the persons who want farms are necessarily very numerous : the landowners, of course, are comparatively few. The tenant must get a farm or starve : the landowner can wait and make his own terms. Landlord and tenant, therefore, do not in Ireland meet on equal terms. Tenants must take such terms as they can get. They can neither enforce, nor, indeed, afford a lease. The landowners, on the other hand, are usually poor, and fling on the tenants those duties which are in England always dis- charged by the former. " It is admitted on all hands, said the report of the Devon Commission in 1845, " that, ac- cording to the general practice, the landlord builds neither dwelling-house nor farm-offices, nor puts fences, gates, &c., into good order, before he lets land to a tenant." Now, land cannot be cultivated without buildings, and the tenant, there- fore, must erect them in the best way he can. Yet he may be ejected at a moment's notice and lose the whole result of his labour ; or what is more usual, the landowner may get into debt, and the mortgagee raise the tenant's rent in exact pro- portion to the improvements which he has effected in the property at his own expense. It is idle to tell the tenant he should make a bargain ; he is in no position to do so. And the question is, whether under these circumstances there is anything unjust, anything contrary to principle in the demand of the Irish people that the State should super- intend the dealings of landlord and tenant and ensure justice to the weaker of the two ? The real fact is, that in England the State has constantly interfered in similar cases. What else is the Factory Act, which limits the hours in which it is lawful for women and children to work ? What else, indeed, is the Truck Act ? Labourers were numerous ; they were compelled to take any termsfrom their employers, who began to pay them in goods instead of money. The State, seeing this to be an engine of oppression, interfered, and prohibited the practice. It did not pretend to raise the rate of wages, any more than in Ireland it could lower the rent of land, but it can and ought to see that justice is observed by the stronger party in his relation with the weaker. The demand has so often assumed in the mouths of its supporters an unreasonable aspect, that it has been involved for the most part in odium or ridicule. Yet the position constantly assumed by the Times, for instance, that the tenant can obtain for himself if he pleases all that he asks from the law, is opposed to the plainest facts of the case. This was recognized seventeen years ago by theDevon Commission. At the head of it sat the late Lord Devon, a man by nature little inclined, even if his habits of thought as a successful lawyer and position as a great peer had not forbidden him, to sympathize with extravagant ideas of any kind. His four colleagues were selected from the upper classes. They took an incredible mass of evidence in every county of Ireland from witnesses in every class of life. Yet while they ex- pressed a preference for leaving the remuneration for im- provements to private agreement wherever it was practicable, they declared that in Ireland a legislative measure was ne- cessary to provide for cases in which the parties were unable to agree. They recommended that the tenant should have power "to serve notice on his landlord of any proposed im- provement in farm-buildings, offices, or exterior fences, the suitableness thereof to be reported on by mutually chosen arbitrators, with power to the Assistant Barrister on such report, and after examination, to decide and certify, the maxi- mum cost not exceeding three years' rent. If the tenant was ejected or his rent raised within thirty years the land- lord to pay such sum, not exceeding the fixed maximum, as the work should then be valued at." Is it uncharitable to ask whether in a House of Commons, which was less essentially a house of landowners, this recommendation would have been so long a dead letter ?
The necessity for such a measure is probably by no means as urgent now as it was then. The Incumbered Estates Court has transferred the land to a wealthier class of men, and emigration has somewhat diminished the numbers pressing on it for existence. But though diminished in severity, the old pressure still exists ; and where injustice can be done with impunity it would be a sentimental weak- ness to imagine that it will not be done. Nor could the landlord be really injured by such a bill. The moment the Assistant Barrister has reported in favour of the improve- ment he can step in and carry it out himself. The effect of the bill in compelling the landowner to carry out desirable improvements would be the most valuable form of its opera- tion. And where he cannot or will not, he ought not to be permitted to stand in the way of the public interest. For the public is deeply interested in the efficient cultivation of the soil, and the possession of land has always been held to be subject to restraints such as it would be unjust to enforce on other kinds of property. The State has always exercised the right of resuming land which is required for public pur- poses on giving compensation to the owner, and it has equally the right to lay down the rules under which it must . be held. The landowner's property is really rather in the value of his land than in the land itself Besides, through- out the province of Ulster the system of tenant right already prevails. The outgoing tenant sells the good will of his farm to the incoming tenant, even where he is a mere tenant-at- will. In Ulster, therefore, the law only would be altered, not the practice, and landlords would only do on compulsion of law what they now do voluntarily under the pressure of opinion. Nor is it reasonable to expect that the tenantry of the three other provinces will ever cease to demand—what their countrymen practically enjoy—the benefits of a system which exists by their side, and which landlords and tenants alike are ready to uphold.
But it may be objected, How is any such measure as this to soften a vindictive and uninstructed people, whose crimes can be palliated by no provocation, and are seldom in fact provoked even by such petty injuries as it is adapted to redress? Aud it is impossible to assert that it could. But thus much is certain, that these outrages always arise out of the relation of landlord and tenant, and that the sense of wrong in the ownership and management of the soil has rankled for years in the heart of the Irish peasant. Fre- quent confiscations, penal laws, religious differences, igno- rance and want, have perverted his moral nature, and his wrongs are but too often as fanciful as his crimes are real. But something would be gained by taking his only practical grievance out of his mouth, and by showing him at least in some instances the law acting not as his enemy, but his friend. Crime would still have to be repressed by the strong hand of civil justice, but at least we might hope to see the disappearance of that horrible apathy which leaves the murderer's victim unwarned, unaided, and =avenged. For the rest, the only remedies are time, education, and justice— but in the peculiar state of Ireland the law does sometimes permit wrong to be done to a tenant, and it is of vital im- portance that that wrong should be redressed.
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