THE FENIAN FOLLY.
THE Irish are a peculiar people, not zealous of good works.. With all their admirable and endearing qualities, they are the most wilfully and pertinaciously unlucky race on earth. Their innate destitution, or rather defiance of logic, goes so deep into their nature as to mar nearly everything they say or do. In political and social matters especially this national peculiarity drives their best friends half wild with perplexity and despair. There is so little relation. between their wants and their demands, between their grievances and their complaints, between their real sufferings and the causes to which they attribute them, and the remedies they insist on prescribing for them. They are almost silent about their real wrongs, and perversely clamorous and eloquent over their imaginary ones. They cherish their worst evils and repine at their greatest blessings. They are in a chronic state of discontent, ever and anon menacing to break out into open sedition against the kindest and justest Government they ever had, and persist in attributing their miseries to Saxon rule because their fathers used to do so before them,—shutting their eyes to the two main facts,—that they are governed on wholly different princi- ples to those under which their fathers were governed, and that of all the grievances and wrongs of which their fathers might righteously complain but one or two remain unredressed and unremedied now, and that no government ever was so bad as that of their native chiefs. They deplore and resent that emigration which opens a future of almost certain and magnificent prosperity to those who leave the country, and steadily and surely improves the condition and augments the earnings of those who remain behind, and which was, probably, an indispen- sable preliminary to all national advancement. They have one want and one wrong—the want, a sound system of land tenure—the wrong, the establishment and endowment of an alien Church. About the latter the people, as a rule, say little and feel less; it is valuable to agitators as a grievance to declaim against, but the peasant scarcely thinks about it, since his crop ceased to be actually and visibly tithed for the behoof of a Protestant parson. Probably he is dimly conscious of the truth that if the revenues of the Irish Church were con- fiscated by the State to-morrow or shared with the Catholic hierarchy, as policy and justice both demand, his rent would not be lowered by a single sixpence, and his priest would .exact fees and Easter offerings as before. So the only thoroughly indefensible portion of our treatment of Ireland is the only one which, by Irishmen, is almost never attacked. The remonstrances against it proceed almost entirely from English Liberals. Again, there can be no doubt that the re- lation of the Irish peasant to the land, and his notions in re- gard to it, really lie at the root of half his bitterness and disloyalty, and of nearly all his poverty and wretchedness. There can be no doubt that here he has some warrantable ground for demanding a searching inquiry and a thorough rectification, and the Government is anxious and willing to apply one as soon as one can be found. But the subject is one of extraordinary difficulty, and the Irish, instead of con- tributing anything to its elucidation, contrive to involve it in almost hopeless complication by their utterly irrational, antique, half-Maori, half-Hindoo ideas about property in land, and by mixing up under the general term " Tenant- right" a claim which in itself is indisputably just and fair, and -a claim which is utterly mischievous and monstrous. Tenant- right, in the sense of aright of the out-going tenant to remunera- tion for all unexhausted improvements in value which his out- lay and labour have conferred upon the land, ought to be at ,once liberally conceded and carefully secured to him. Tenant- right, in the sense of a sum of money over and above his rent to the landlord, which is paid by the incoming to the outgoing tenant, in order to secure peaceful possession of his holding, is one of the greatest abuses and curses of that unhappy country. The peasant has not only, in effect, to rent his crop from the proprietor, but to buy it from his predecessor, and of course in five cases out of six he is hopelessly in debt and irretrievably ruined. Lord Dufferin, in his evidence before the Committee which sat last Session, placed this in a singularly clear light. He was asked to define what is meant by tenant-right, and in answer to the question said :—" I think the custom of tenant- right is a very difficult one either to describe or to explain, and perhaps very few people would be disposed to agree as to its historical origin. The custom may be, I think, thus defined : Tenant-right is a custom under which the tenant farmers of the north of Ireland, or at all events in those districts where that custom prevails, expect when they have occasion to give up possession of their farms that their landlords will allow them to obtain from the incoming tenant such a sum as shall remunerate them for their improvements upon those farms. But at the same time, though I think that that is a perfectly legitimate definition of the custom of tenant-right as now understood, there is undoubtedly another element which exists, and which influences the operation which I have described. But that element is a very impalpable one, because, although of late, since the question has been agitated, and the real elements of tenant-right have been analyzed by public discus- sion,even the farmers themselves will describe their claim as a claim on account of improvements, there can be no doubt that the sums which were paid hy the incoming tenant to the -outgoing tenant very often had no relation whatever to the real value of those improvements, and the thing sold, instead of being called the tenant-right of a farm, which is now the term generally applied to it, used more commonly to be called the good-will of the farm, ance-under that desig- nation I think a different thing would be understood than a payment made for the value of the improve- ments into the enjoyment of which the incoming tenant was
about to enter. I think under the term ' ' would be recognized something approaching to what I may call black mail,' paid by the incoming tenant to the out-going tenant, in order to induce the out-going tenant not to interfere with his
quiet possession of the farm I am quite pre- pared to say, that so far as tenant-right represents the cus- tom under which the landlords of the north of Ireland have been in the habit of allowing the outgoing tenant to receive from the incoming tenant a fair compensation for the per- manent improvements which he shall have placed on the farm during the time of his tenancy, and for which lie shall not have had time to recoup himself, the custom has been an excellent one ; but so far as tenant-right is a custom under which, without any reference whatever to the improvements into the possession of which the new tenant is about to enter, he has been in the habit of paying over to the outgoing tenant an enormous sum of money, amounting sometimes to ten, fif- teen, or, I believe, even twenty years' purchase of the rent, the custom is a most unfortunate one."
We scarcely know any sadder occupation than reading the Irish newspapers—and not the Nation only—just now, when the deplorable phenomenon called Fenianism is in the as- cendant. The puerilities that are written, the worse than puerilities, the atrocious mixture of nonsense and ill-feeling that is talked, fill us with despondency. It makes us feel that the Irish will never become grown men and civilized men, but must remain to the end of time half children and half barbarous. The " movement," as it is called, seems to us simply silly, and not at all formidable. The Irish are hereditarily fond of playing with edged tools, and especially with that edged tool called treason. No doubt there is drilling going on, but we apprehend more because it is forbidden than because people think it likely either to be wanted or to be useful. No doubt there are a certain number of returned emigrants come back from America, excited to more than ordinary Hibernian inflation by the scenes they have been engaged in, and with their inherent taste for civil broils whetted by participation in an actual civil war. These men have brought back a certain American recklessness and accus- tomed to American forms of speech, talk big about their numbers and designs. No doubt, too, many of the wildest of the Americans may have some vague design of making cats' paws of the wildest of the Irish to aid their filibustering schemes against Canada. Beyond all question, if ever the American Government do patronize or foster the Fenian Brotherhood, it will be for the purpose of seizing our colonies, not for that of liberating Ireland from Saxon thraldom. But we have no fear of Irishmen who go about in railway cars, exhibit- ing swords, and bowie knives, and revolvers, creating a sensa- tion among fellow-passengers, by boasting of the plans of the wide- spread conspiracy of which they are the accredited agents, and proclaiming along the high road what they are goineb to do, and where their depots of arms are to be stored. Still less are we alarmed when either votaries or renegades write long letters to the newspapers, laying bare the real, as contrasted with the professed, objects of the Secret Brother- hood. Men who are in earnest in their treason usually con- spire in silence, and conspirators who are to be dreaded are mere sensible than to select vulgar swaggerers as their instruments and avant couriers. The Government, however, is probably right in keeping a vigilant eye upon the movement, though it be nothing but mere wind, and in interfering promptly and quietly wherever the folly breaks out into actual violations of law, for the law must be enforced, if only for the sake of example, even though the makers of it are silly and con- temptible. As far as we can learn, the movement is dis- countenanced and despised by every class except the most ignorant among the peasantry ; certainly neither the priests nor the Catholic landowners have anything to do with it, nor does it appear to have at all infected the middle classes of the towns. Probably it will soon die out, as we trust the cholera and the Rinderpest will do, and perhaps more speedily than either.
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