THE EXPEDIENCY OF COERCION IN IRELAND.
WE stand nearly alone in the Press of London in depre- cating coercion in Ireland, and if events continue at their present rate, we shall be as nearly alone in Britain. The recurring murders, committed, as Englishmen think, with no motive but extortion, and no excuse but a form of suffering not here considered terrible,create a just horror which overbears all considerations of good policy. If Parliament were sitting, coercion would be imperative ; and if the Land League cannot or will not stop assassination by the use of their social machinery, Parliament will insist on being called together. It is therefore with a full sense of the odium we must incur,
even among our constituency, which, as a rule, will give a hear- ing to any argument that is clearly stated, that we once more put down our reasons for deprecating a departure from a policy of legality and patience. We doubt the success of co- ercion even in arresting outrage ; we feel certain it will provide no cure for the deep-seated evil of Ireland, the hatred incessantly breaking out between landlord and tenant ; and we deny most strongly that this is an opportune time for its employment. Perhaps for the third argument we may find a hearing. Nothing, all serious politicians will acknowledge, could be better for the future of Ireland than that this agitation against rent should break down of itself ; that it should be checked by unexpected social forces, or disappear before a reawakened national con- science. We see, or believe we see, at this distance, what may naturally be imperceptible both to landlords and Land Leaguers in the island itself, that this is actually happening. The Catholic Church has declared distinctly against confiscation. The Archbishop and the prelates have spoken out with such effect that violent orators call for groans for Dr. McCabe, and the priests are following the Episcopate, declaring everywhere that they are for the " three F's," fixity, fair rent, and free sale. The uprising of the labourers has so emboldened those whom they can protect, that an agent, Mr. Walsh, representing Mr. Penn Gaskell, a proprietor in Cork, himself a Land Leaguer, has been able openly to defy the League,—to tell them face to face that he will never attend another meeting, and to declare that their clients are " schemers," who calumniate him without cause. Irish- men are brave, for all their timidity in the face of social move- ments, and Mr. Walsh will find many imitators. The moneyed and shopkeeping classes are beginning to find that they are threatened also, and to say so so vigorously, that Mr. Parnell has been compelled to try and soothe them by one of the most extraordinary speeches of his career. At a meeting of the "National Land League," on Saturday, Mr. Ferguson, the head of the Glasgow Home-rulers, who, though an ex- treme partisan of the agrarian movement, has something of Scotch sense, deprecated resistance to shopkeepers' demands, and elicited from Mr. Parnell the following opinion, which he declares to have been long meditated When a farmer bought goods from a trader, he ought to recollect it, and pay him, if he possibly could. He thought a farmer must expect to have his property sold for the benefit of his creditors, in the same way as any other member of the community. The same remark applied to farms hypothecated to Banks. It was ex- ceedingly dishonest of farmers who had borrowed money from the Banks, and hypothecated their interest in their holdings as security for the loan, to turn round after a while, and try to diminish the value of their land. It was injurious to the whole community, because it tended to diminish the credit of the tenant-farmers. At the same time, he would hope and trust the shopkeepers and bankers would, as he believed they were doing to a great extent at present, deal leniently with them, and recollecting that the value of property was so much de- preciated at present, would not foreclose, and force a sale just now."
This is, in fact, a declaration that the landlord is an enemy to human society, and not entitled to any rights at all.
He and the banker are precisely in the same position. The one has advanced his land, and the crop is hypothecated to him for his interest ; and the other has advanced his cash, and the crop is hypothecated to him for his interest. Yet the one is to get his interest and the other is not, or at least only so much of it as, in the face of a written agreement, the borrower may choose to pay. No doubt, in the landlord's case, the tenant, under recent legislation, is to some extent a partner, and in the banker's case he is not ; but what difference does that make ? Is the Eighth Commandment suspended as regards partners ? May joint tenants rob each other with impunity ? There never was such a monstrous doctrine, and never a more significant one. Mr. Parnell desires, at
any sacrifice of logic or consistency, to persuade the shop- keepers, local bankers, and village usurers—not by any means an admirable or philanthropic class—that they have nothing
to fear. They may even evict in perfect safety. They may "exterminate " the cottiers with his full consent. The land- lord who will have his rent or the holding is denounced by name, but the usurer who has been lending till he will have his money or the holding is an excellent or at least a respectable person, only to be mildly entreated not to foreclose. Of course, we understand the meaning of this per- fectly well. Mr. Parnell and his followers are still deluded by a reminiscence. They believe the Irish landlords to be still the English garrison. They think as Mr. Dillon, for instance, said on Sunday, that if they are prosecuted, the farmers can frighten Government by docking the landlords of twenty per cent, of their rent. " Take all the fat boys' watches," says Mr. Dillon, in effect, " and the head master will lock up his cane." But though we understand the blunder, we understand also what it reveals, namely, that Mr. Parnell knows that the Catholic Church, the Orangemen, the labourers, the money-makers, and the shopkeepers of Ireland are all against him, and that his " unanimous Ireland " is only a class, no doubt a most im- portant class, of which he does not control the whole. That he and his friends perceive this, is clear from their change of tone. Mr. Parnell, who has a thousand times promised the peasants the fee-simple of their lands, and has rejected fixity of tenure as an absurd compromise hardly worth discussion, has now openly declared that between the view that the landlord should have full compensation, and the view that he owes compensation to the tenant for taking rent for so many years, there are many halting-places, and that the League has not yet decided at which to halt. He wants, in fact, to be able to return to the practicable, and glides away from the great things he will do as an agrarian agitator to the great things he will do as a pitiless Obstruc- tionist in Parliament. He will worry every Government re- morselessly, until they have agreed to halt at the landing- place which he himself, as he avows, has not yet discovered. That is coming back within the sphere of legality, the exact place in which the friends of coercion say they only wish to compel Irishmen to remain. If they will but retreat there of themselves, Englishmen will be in this position,—that they will have realised how deadly and dangerous is the hate of Irish- men for the existing tenure, and will be able, amid a popula- tion still free, but, nevertheless, obedient to the law, to devise and carry out large plans for the removal of the grievance. That is the position sensible men desire, not the position of rulers who say there is order because their fellow-country- men have been frightened into silence and paralysis. English- men have tried that attitude a hundred times. and have always abandoned it, with an open confession that they could not be eternally balancing themselves on cannon-balls, and a clear perception that things were worse after repression than before.
Those who are in favour of instant coercion, whether by the feeble device of a Disarming Act, which will not succeed in Ireland, any more than in South Africa, or of a suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, which may succeed, bnt which involves the surrender of one grand object of government, always allege that the first duty of every Government is "to make life and property secure." Suppose we admit their apophthegm to be true, still, ought not statesmen in repeating it to insert one word. and say that Government must make them " permanently " secure ? What is the use of securing them for four months, at the price of years of agitation, misrule, and scarcely veile4! rebellion ? The duty of policemen is to arrest thieves, but of statesmen to put down thieving. We should not, however, accept the universally repeated saying, but declare that the first duty of Government was to make life and property secure by justi- fiable and expedient means. We should not hold it justifiable to secure property in a town by blinding all possible burglars, or expedient to secure life by means which made of every murderer an object of pity and compassion. Statesmen know well that to make law hateful is worse for a community than to make it over mild, and that almost any evil is more tolerable than a popular belief that the rulers punish out of malice, and not out of a sense of duty. That is the permanent attendant evil of coercion, the belief in Ireland that the very law is an instrument of the conquerors, that order is sought for the sake of a class and not of the community, and that the public force is used first of all to protect private interests. The day when that was true has passed, thank God, but the tradition lingers, and is the root and source of the majority of evils in the sister- country. Just let such of our opponents as are reasonable think what Ireland would be if the body of its people regarded the Law as English respectables regard it, and its ministers as middle-class Londoners regard the police. There is nothing in Irishmen to make them hate law. On the contrary, there are no people in the world more ready to resort to it, less inclined to resist the action of the community, or more happy when protected by a combina- tion such as the social system affords. The Irish are bad jurymen, bad witnesses, bad special constables, because they have been bred to regard the law as the common enemy, and it is that traditionary conviction which every repetition of the appeal to coercion deepens in a fresh generation. A county is not at peace when it is ruled like a prison, nor can rent be collected in permanence by imprisoning all who publicly preach that it is much too heavy.
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