THE NEW SOCIAL SYSTEM IN IRELAND.
rilRE is not much chance, we should say, of any ce anger to Mr. Balfour's Bill in the Commons. The Tories of Ireland, it is asserted with some authority, threaten to resist it, and no doubt such of them as are embarrassed must dread its provisions ; but there will be several members of the Gladstonian Party, especially from Wales and the Highland districts of Scotland, who will find it most difficult to record their votes against a measure the principle of which would delight their own constituents. There will be endless canvassing of details, Mr. Madden will be overwhelmed with "requests for information," and there may be some deliberate obstruction; but we do not believe in the defeat of a Bill which will give to every Irish tenant the prospect of becoming a freeholder, and to every Irish landlord a precedent for claiming twenty years' purchase for expropriation. The real danger of the Bill will be in the Lords, where the Peers, though they may pass it in deference to necessity and Lord Salisbury, will certainly not like it, on two grounds, the second of which may be worthy of some discussion. The first—the inadequacy of the landlords' compensation —we hold it useless to discuss. Ireland has arrived at a position, partly through the operation of circumstances, and partly through the landlords' own fault in performing as capitalists so few of a capitalist's duties to the land, in which landowners must be bought out, and in which, at the same time, the fullest compensation cannot be given, because the House of Commons will not vote it. That is most unfortunate for many landlords, but all that can be said is that the Government yields to force majeure, that the compensation proposed will enable unencumbered landlords to re-establish themselves in life, and that if they persuade the Lords to reject the Bill, they will repent it all their lives. They must submit, like the rest of us, to misfortune, and will, after all, suffer less than those English landowners who have been com- pelled to sell during the bad years. They should not compare themselves with proprietors in the Midlands who have made reductions of 15 per cent., but with proprietors, like some of those in Essex, who have been compelled to sell their farms at auction at ten years' nominal value.
The second argument which will weigh heavily with the Upper House, is one with which, though we reject it, we feel a certain sympathy. It is alleged that the Government, in order to restore order in Ireland, is sacrificing something which it has no right to sacrifice,— namely, the prospects of Irish civilisation. The landlords who are bought out will be compelled, it is said, in order to earn their livings, to depart, and with them will disappear the only class which keeps up in the country districts a higher ideal of life than that entertained by the peasant. There will be no one left in many districts except the gombeen-man or usurer, the Roman Catholic priest, a farmer or two with a decent farm according to English ideas, and the body of the peasantry ; and social life will, therefore, decidedly retrograde. There will be no beauty left in it, no standard of manners, and very little amenity of any kind, the gombeen- man being too vulgar, the priest too separate, the farmer too indifferent to culture, and the peasant himself too much harassed with labour, and with the cares which fall upon those who have no margin beyond the amount needful for actual support. There is some truth in that argument, which in England would be a grave one, but in Ireland it admits of a partial answer. Is it, to begin with, at all certain that the landlords will leave, except as most Scotchmen leave their houses for part of their lives,—that is, to acquire a little more income ? They will keep their houses and demesnes, and as their secular struggle with the peasantry will be over, they may become, we should say will become—for we do not believe the talk about a division caused by creed—much more popular with the people, whom at present they not only do not influence for good, but do not influence at all, unless we class repulsion among the influences. England may be in some ways pleasanter than Ireland to live in, but England is very dear and very provoking to a .proud class with little money ; and there is something in Ireland, something in her social system, which Englishmen do not quite comprehend, but which exercises an almost magical attraction over her own people. We fancy they find life livelier there, more full of incidents, and with more about it of what we may best describe as scenery. English life outside London strikes them as decidedly dull, and they return to their own people with something of the feeling with which a Londoner returns from a " quiet " though beautiful village. There will, we suppose, be no more hunting, for peasant-proprietorship is fatal to hunting everywhere ; but those who stay will have every other enjoyment they ever had, except the sense of power, which of late years can have been worth very little. They will have lost no essential dignity, they will be the natural leaders of the people, and they will have just as many careers open to them as younger sons with some means have in England. They may stay ; and if they stay, they will be more of a civilising influence than they have ever been yet, for the barrier between them and the people will have disappeared. On the other hand, if they depart, either to England, or to the Continent, or to Dublin, their places will be taken by other men. The attraction of country life is felt in Ireland as elsewhere ; the social war will, so far as the Bill extends its operation, have ceased to rage; there is still money made in Ireland or by Irishmen ; and " residents " will soon grow as numerous as in the thinner "resi- dential districts " of Great Britain. There will be no connection at first, it is true, between the new people and the farmers ; but it is certain to grow up, just as the relation has grown up between the latter and all who are not landlords. Professional men exercise that they are sole owners of their farms. ject to that condition. " An annuity is a very serious Besides—and, after all, this is the true argument—what business. It comes over and over every year; and there is is the alternative ? The present system of dual owner- no getting rid of it. I have known a great deal of the ship cannot endure for ever, and if it could, would do far trouble of annuities, for my mother was clogged with the more to ruin Irish civilisation than any expatriation of payment of three to old superannuated servants by Landlords. It does not extinguish the agrarian war, and my father's will ; and it is amazing how disagreeable that war, with its constant quarrels about money, the she found it. Twice every year these annuities were hatred it breeds to the law, and the indifference it pro- to be paid; and then there was the trouble of getting duces to a neighbour's suffering whenever that suffering is it to them ; and then one of them was said to have produced by a breach of the unwritten code of the country- died, and afterwards it turned out to be no such side, is demoralising all Ireland. The best Home-rulers thing. My mother was quite sick of it ; her income was admit this, as well as the best of the priesthood ; and it not her own, she said, with such perpetual claims on it, would be of itself, if we once allow that the origin of the and it was the more unkind of my father, because other- demoralisation is tenure, the full justification of any effort wise the money would have been quite at my mother's to get that tenure changed. Grant that a county could be disposal, without any restriction whatever." That is pre- left, like many an East-End parish, without a resident cisely the state of mind in which the tithe-payer writes such gentleman in it, and still, if the people were fairly con- letters to the Times as those which appeared, for instance, tented, industrious, and peaceful, it would be nearer true in Wednesday's issue, only that such tithe-payers have the civilisation than it is now, with the different classes all excuse which Miss Austen's selfish lady had not, that jarring and suspecting each other, with civil war only kept the revenue which goes to pay services rendered to the down by force, and with the law itself, which ought to be people at large, seems to go to no one in particular, while regarded as the first of benevolent agencies, looked upon the lady who was " quite sick " of paying the annuities by half the people as the instrument by which the specified by her husband's will, did at least know who was foreigner maintains an order of society at variance with the better for it, and did clearly know that the recipients all their inherited aspirations. There are more kinds of had just as much claim for their annuities as she civilisation than one, and we do not know that that which had for the residue left after these annuities were used to reign in so many valleys of our own North, paid. No doubt there are " extenuating circumstances," is by any means the worst. There can hardly be as the juries say, in the inability of a tithe-payer much amenity of life among a purely peasant popu- to realise that what he does not get, the State does get. lation, even if all are freeholders ; and its necessary The State is a very abstract conception, and to many penuriousness will always seem disagreeable to visitors minds, what goes to the people at large seems to dribble bred up in freer ways ; but there may be much religion, away into the sand and be lost. Still, a democracy that some culture, and a deep sense of confidence in the has not learned to value its proper revenues, is a democracy law. The sense of personal dignity, the appreciation of in a very infantine and helpless condition. A great deal home, and the desire for independence, are already strong of the hope of popular government depends upon its firm in the Irish peasant, who has, moreover, a wonderful way grasp of the revenues properly belonging to the people, of attaching himself to the leader who has won his regard. and its wise administration of them. A people that allows There are the materials surely of a fine civilisation its revenues to be frittered away in piecemeal relaxations of here, even if the gentry depart, and, as we have said, the legal claims which it has inherited upon its own citizens, when the shock is once over, the majority of those who is a mere infant among peoples, without the wisdom, the are unembarrassed will elect to remain. For those foresight, and the courage to administer its own affairs. who are already ruined, and whose ruin will only be Tithe, whatever its destination may ultimately be, whether brought home to them by the Bill, there is, we fear, no to endow a National Church or to support a system of hope, except in the strenuous work which, if they have national education, is just as much an appanage of the reached middle age, is for them, we frankly admit, but a State, as the annuities left by the unkind and thoughtless comfortless prospect. No law, however, can protect them husband to the old servants were appanages of those from their doom ; and the existing state of affairs, in elderly family retainers. which they only live by struggling with irritated tenants Of course there is the case in which the fall in the value for the last shilling, does but prolong an agony to which of land has really endangered its being thrown out of the end is always foreseen.
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