THE NEW AGRARIAN MOVEMENT IN IRELAND.
AV E have some right to claim to be heard by Agrarian I V reformers in Ireland, even by those of the most extreme wing. Throughout the discussions on the Land Act the Spectator maintained, to the annoyance of many Liberals and the alarm of its own constituency, who are necessarily conserva- tive about property, that owing to certain historical and econo- mical conditions, the Irish Land Question would never be settled without perpetuity of tenure, the tenant holding his farm as long as he pleased, at rents varying with the prices of produce, like the tithe. We still believe that this system, which prevails over half the world, would greatly enrich the landowners, would increase the saleable value of land by five years' purchase, and would make the Irish peasantry one of the most conservative peoples as re- gards property in the world, almost as conservative as French peasants. Peasant ownership would be better, but as the country will not buy out the landlords, and as even Parliament has no right of theft, perpetual tenancy is the practical, and would be the successful, solution of the diffi- culties created by the fact that while English law is based on the absolute ownership of the rent-receiver, Irishmen, like Asiatics and Italians, think that the first right in the soil rests with him who makes it produce. They will bear any quit-rent, but not eviction. Having consistently preached this doctrine for years to very unwilling English hearers, it is from no anti-Irish prejudice, or prejudice in favour of absolute property in the soil, that we condemn unreservedly the tone of the recent meeting at Westport, in county Mayo, Connaught, where, unless the reporters are inventing, an anti- rent movement of the most serious character has commenced. The depression in agriculture, so bitterly felt in England and Scotland, has, it appears, extended to Ireland, and the farmers being comparatively poor, they are unable to struggle on, as the cultivators on this side of the Irish Channel are for the present doing. They have less money, and they pay, all things considered, higher rents. The landlords, again, being poorer than the similar class in England, and perhaps not equally friendly to tenants so apt to threaten, are not making the reductions and allowances which have been made here. They talk of evictions, and the farmers, as usual in Ireland, seeing no occupation save the land, are driven into a sort of frenzy by grief and alarm. We state their case as they state it them- selves, and no doubt it is a pitiable one, but it is no excuse whatever for the language and the resolutions in which the farmers of Mayo have permitted themselves to indulge. In spite of the determined opposition of the Catholic clergy, which, to do it justice, is always hostile to violence, five thousand of them met together on Monday, and passed resolutions, of which the following is the last and most significant :—" That the occupiers being unable to pay the current rents, owing to bad harvests and other depreciations of farmers' produce, any landlord who evicts a tenant for non-payment of an unfair rent is an enemy to the human race, and we pledge ourselves to pro- tect by every means in our power the victims of such oppression." In other words, the farmers of Mayo, knowing the history of Ireland, knowing the terrible tendency of Irish agriculturists when irritated to resort to the bullet, still resolved, publicly, that any landlord who insisted on his tenant's contract being fulfilled should be treated as a dangerous outlaw. We do sot say, for we wish to be strictly just, that they threatened him with physical violence. They did not, but they did say he deserved outlawry for his conduct. At least, that is the meaning which everywhere else, and certainly in
Ireland itself, will be placed upon the expression that an evicting landlord is "an enemy of the human race," more especially when the speakers to the resolutions had been talking of refusing rents, and "keeping a grip" on the farms, and dying on the field of battle rather than be evicted, and calling for cheers for the Zulus, and all the rest of it. At the very least, the meeting intended to pledge all present to a confederacy for resistance to the due collection of rents, a resist- ance almost certain to lead to the shedding of blood.
We know precisely what our Irish friends will allege in explanation. They will say that even sympathising Sassenachs cannot understand Irishmen, that the farmers intended no incitement to violence, but were indulging of design in exaggerations which they knew would alarm the landlords, and quicken the grant of those reductions which the times demand, and without which whole districts may be thrown out of cultivation. They will point to Mr. Parnell's• speech, and the resolution he proposed, which is one for fixity of tenure, and his suggestion that Parliament should interfere, and should compensate the land- lords, as proof positive that no violence was intended, and will think it very hard that Irishmen should be accused of criminality because, in their acute distress, they indulge, as they always have done, in the rhetorical exaggera- tion without which they would be supposed in Ireland to be but little moved. All that may be very true, and some of it certainly is true ; but it is only a plea in ex- tenuation, and not an answer to the English charge. On the very best view of the matter, the farmers intended to inspire terror in the landlords unless they reduced their rents, that is, they considered it fitting to extort reductions by threats, and to pledge themselves to defiance of the law. Even Mr. Parnell, who kept himself within some bounds of legality, and whose resolution looks to a Parliamentary readjustment of the land-tenure, em- ployed phrases which, if they mean anything at all, mean that the tenantry should keep their homesteads by some sort of force,—" If an arrangement could be made without injuring the land, and by which the tenant would have land of his own to cultivate, it would be better for this country. He looked upon that as a final settlement, and the landlord should be compensated by the Government ; but in the meantime, the tenant, as long as he paid fair rent, should be left to enjoy the fruits of his industry. A fair rent was a rent he could reasonably pay according to the times, but he could not be expected to pay as much in bad times as in good. Now, what must we do,' he said, 'in order to induce the landowners to see the position ? You must show the landlords that you intend to hold a firm grip on your homesteads artd lands. You must not allow yourselves to be dispossessed as you were dispossessed in 1847. You must not allow your small holdings to be turned into large ones. I am supposing that the land- lords will remain deaf to the voice of reason ; but I hope they may not, and that on those properties on which the rents are out of all proportion to the times a reduction may be made, and that immediately ; if not, you must help yourselves, and the public opinion of the world will stand by you, and support you in the struggle to defend your homesteads.'" If those are the words actually used—and we cut them from the uncontradicted report in the Times of Tuesday—they can have but one meaning,—that the tenantry should in some way resist the law, which enables the landlords to turn them out. More fatal advice could hardly be given to Irishmen, and received with applause. It utterly breaks down and destroys the best argu- ment of their English friends, that Irish tenants mean no plunder and no breach of contract, and are contending not against rent, but against a tenure unsuited to the circum- stances of their country. It is not against a particular tenure that the speakers at this meeting were protesting, but against obedience to the law. If they are to resist paying the agreed rent for their farms because the times are hard, why should they not resist paying rent for their houses or for borrowed money, when trade is slack, or in fact break any contract which they dis- like or find inconvenient. Why should they not, for ex- ample, whenever they are ill, deduct twenty per cent, from the bill owing to the baker, and demand that the pawnbroker should charge them only two per cent.? Indeed, why should they not defy the law altogether, declare that they will obey none but their own will, and so introduce anarchy at once? There is nothing in rent, that a dislike to pay it should justify men in defying the law of the land, still less in disobeying the moral law, which they themselves acknowledge. Their obliga- tion to pay, or if they cannot pay, to surrender the farm, does
not rest, as Mr. Parnell seems to fancy, upon English law, but upon that first principle of morals which binds a man to keep his contract, even if it be to his own hurt. Supposing Mr. O'Sullivan's dreams realised, and Ireland by insurrection to shake off the English connection, that would not lighten the obligation to pay past rent one whit. The Irish Parlia- ment might introduce a new tenure, or might order the land to be sold to the tenantry, or might even impose a future maximum of rent, but it could not quash the past debt with- out being guilty of spoliation by violence. Englishmen are all of one mind—Liberals as well as Tories—about that, and Irish tenants may make up their minds that in parading such resolves they are only rousing in England an impatience of their most just demands. What is the use, men will reason- ably say, of making good laws for men who protest they will resist even the ordinary law of contract, or of reforming tenure for farmers who declare that they will not be content until they can settle the amount of their own rent ?
Of course the lesson of the Westport meeting, both for politicians and for Irish landlords, is the advantage of enabling the peasantry to buy their lands. One main reason for the agrarian troubles of Ireland is the fewness of her landlords, who would not furnish the population of a fifth-rate English town. If the farmers of Meath owned their farms, no matter under what weight of mortgages, Mr. Parnell's speech would have cost him his seat ; and if there were a quarter of a million proprietors in Ireland, no man friendly to an agrarian law would ever be returned to Parliament. It would be as difficult to seat a Tenant-right agitator as to seat a Catholic in England ; and we are by no means sure that Ireland would not be the last place where the law of distraint would be finally given up. Those Tories who hesi- tate to improve the Bright Clauses of the Land Act, should re- member that every peasant who buys his holding is two men added to the supporters of the law of property,—namely, him- self as he was, clamouring against rent, who is withdrawn from the agitators ; and himself as he is, who is determined to vote down every one who attacks the sacred right of an owner to do what he will with his own. There are no protectors of property so fierce as those who have very little, which is per- fectly visible, and of which they are very proud. It is safer to steal fruit in London than in Switzerland, and for thorough belief in the righteousness of law, and especially of law pro- tecting property, commend us to a petty New England free- holder. It is in peasant proprietors, and not in dragoons, that we must seek Conservative force in Ireland.
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