THE PROSECUTION OF THE ANTI-RENT AGITATORS.
NYE do not think it just to blame the Government for prosecuting anti-rent agitators in Ireland. They may have selected the wrong individuals, or have spared men who should have been attacked first ; but they are obviously sincere, for on the eve of a general election they have forfeited all chance
of the Home-rule vote, and they may well have acted under an imperative sense of public duty. We cannot ourselves doubt that the Irish demand for fixity of tenure is just, or resist a strong wish that Irish agitators should be allowed to express extreme opinions with impunity, until their impracticableness becomes evident, even to Irishmen ; but the Government, being responsible, can hardly be so calm. It must protect threatened subjects, even if protection should be from the historian's point of view premature, and this agitation threatened individuals. The fiercer spirits always to be found in Ireland have been excited by the speeches of the agitators, the quiescence of the Government, and the suffering of the people, until they have tried to quicken the change they think needful by direct terrorism, applied in a form which is fatal to the institution of property,—that is, to civilisation of any sort. Nobody denies or questions that landlords are being threatened for demanding rent, that tenants are barbarously punished for paying it, and that direct incentives have been given to armed resistance to the law. In that state of affairs, the whole history of Ireland shows that it is necessary either to kill excite- the matter of Emancipation, ment by concession, as in or to indicate distinctly, as n the Repeal case, that the law restraining agitation within certain limits will be put in force against the agitators, who in Ireland are not so much eloquent though misguided debaters as actual leaders, pointing out— or believed by the people to be pointing out—a course to be followed in defiance of foreign law. As no Government can make any concession of the rights of property without sanc- tioning revolution, the second course had to be pursued, and it has been pursued so far in the regular way. It is nonsense to accuse a Government of tyranny which only remits persons whom it considers guilty of sedition to be tried in public, by a jury of their countrymen before the ordinary Courts of the land. They may all be acquitted. The Government has not suspended the Habeas Corpus, or established Special Commissions, or proposed a Coercion Act, but has carried out the ordinary law in the ordinary way. We may deplore, and do deplore, the sort of secrecy observed, the suddenness of the arrests, the military force collected ; but a Government has in such matters a duty, which humane Liberals should not forget. It is bound to take care that ignorant and innocent, but excited, persons are not tempted to destruction by vain efforts at rescue, or at resistance to legal arrests; and in Ireland this i
often justifies precautions which n themselves look tyrannical, or at least over-distrustful of anything but force. In that island, the people are still unconvinced that law is irresistible. And we may deplore also, and do deplore, the permanent i impression of Irishmen that n political cases the Courts sway distinctly to the side of authority, an impression founded on past history ; but that is no fault of the Government, which has only to choose between the ordinary Judges of the land, as a rule competent and honest men, or Special Commissioners, to be authorised by special Acts, and exposed to the doubt that they are appointed only to cordemn. So far as we can see, no tyranny has been practised, and nothing done beyond what every Government must do, when called upon to restrain an agitation which, amidst an excitable people, under circumstances of great distress, threatens to imperil social order. No Irishman of any party at this moment will deny that the right of eviction for non-payment of rent, upon which landed property rests, is threat- ened with extinction, not by the legal conversion of tenants into owners—which, if it be possible without robbery, is a just object of effort—but by force and menace. That being so, a Government has only to protect that right, and the most moderate method of protection is to ask the Courts whether verbal attacks on the right, leading to violent resistance, are legal offences or no.
While, however, we hold that Liberals should uphold the Government in its general action in this matter, we are by no means certain that the Government is right in its selection of individuals. They may be aware that the three persons seized—a barrister presumably without heavy business, a minor journalist, and a Fenian, once convicted before—are leaders of importance, and therefore fit subjects to be singled out, but evidence is wanted of their position. It is most important in all such cases to avoid creating an impression that the weak are struck and the strong spared, and in Ireland there cer- tainly will be such an impression spread. The feeling there will be that the three accused have talked wildly, just as scores of others have talked wildly, and that it is very hard that they should be punished, and that more cautious talkers, of infinitely more importance, should be let off free. And unless more evidence is forthcoming, there will be justice in that impression. The three men seized may have broken the law a dozen times, for what we know—the juries must decide that— but nobody believes them to be the real authors of the anti- rent agitation, and it is the real authors whom a wise Government would endeavour to restrain. Mr. Parnell, to give one example, may be entirely within the law— there is strong legal opinion in favour of that view— but still, frank men will think it would have been more just to try the question by prosecuting him, than to pick out people who, it would seem, are hardly rich enough without popular aid to secure adequate defence. The reason, we pre- sume, was the usual dread of abortive prosecutions; but we are not so sure that an acquittal is always a triumph, and do not forgot that Daniel O'Connell, to the everlasting credit of English lawyers, was at last the victor in his trial. It would have been more generous not to have struck so low, and generosity counts for a great deal in Irish politics. This, however, is a question of political judgment., rather than of right or wrong, and must be left to Pailiament, as must the much greater question whether it would not have been wiser to announce with the prosecutions the Government ideas as to relief. We hold that it would. Something must be done about the supply of fuel at any rate, this winter ; and it should have been announced, before the old, weary, semi- legal, semi-violent warfare against anarchical opinions recommenced. We cannot and we do not blame the Government, which, under the circumstances, has acted with moderation and legality ; but we trust they will take every opportunity of showing that they regret as deeply as Liberals the course they have been compelled to follow,—the reopening of the old chasm between Irish opinion, however mistaken, and English law, however just. These Irish people are bound to us by inseparable bonds ; they are our helpers in every work of peace and every field of battle ; wherever the Empire reaches they are dying, as Louis Cavagnari died the other day, on our behalf ; and yet we can never help doing acts which suggest to all the world that they hate us, and that we at heart think them possible rebels. There is no help, for justice must be done to the rich as well as the poor ; but there is a pressing neces- sity to import into the doing of it no malignity, no unfairness, and, above all, no scorn. The arrest of the anti-rent de- claimers may be wholly unavoidable—we ourselves can see no road out of that conclusion—but none the less is it one of the most regrettable incidents of our time. A new land-law in 1870, and a new agrarian struggle nine years after 1
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