THE SUCCESS AND FAILURE DT IRELAND.
THE debates of Thursday week and of last Saturday brought out both the success and the failure of the Irish policy of the Government in a very vivid light ;—its success in tran- quillising Ireland, and in carrying out two separate enterprises of vast difficulty, of enormous extent, and of immeasurable import- ance, with extraordinary, if rude, efficiency, in an incredibly short time : and its complete failure, so far as the smallest conciliation of the people of Ireland is concerned,—a country where it is evidently far more conducive to popularity to utter against the Government the coarsest and most baseless abuse that the imagination can devise, than it is to recognise in the most reserved and frigid language the different temper displayed
towards Ireland by this administration from that of any admin- istration which has preceded it. It was hardly possible that either the success or the failure of the Government in Ireland could be brought out in stronger outlines than those in which the recent debates enable us to present them. First, Ireland has been pacified. Instead of the state of things which existed in the early part of last year, when in the month of May, for instance,—by no means the worst month,—there were 396 agrarian outrages, including two murders, against only 93 in this last May, none of which were murders, Ireland is really a safer country for the mass of the people now than England itself. Instead of murder on the scale of the winter before last, instead of incendiary fires in almost all parts of Ireland, instead of intimidation on such a scale that no one knew whether it were safe for him to perform the ordinary duties of life, Ireland is now a quieter and more peaceable country than probably any other part of the United Kingdom ; for agrarian crime has always been the worst part of Irish crime, and outside agrarian crime Ireland is a country singularly free from crime.
In the next place, the Government have effected,—very likely rudely, for a new resettlement of such a country as Ireland accomplished within two years and a half from its commencement cannot but be rude,—the labour of a political Hercules in rela- tion to the revision of rent. Mr. Trevelyan gave a brief outline of the facts in his speech of Thursday week, and this outline is borne out fully by the returns presented to Parliament. Of 98,614 applications for the fixing of a fair rent up to July 31st last, no fewer than 61,354 cases had been dis- posed of ; and taking into account also the number of agree- ments made out of Court,109,000 cases had been disposed of. Mr. Parnell remarks, in depreciation of this extraordinary achieve- ment, that there are in Ireland over half a million of holdings. No doubt there are. But many of them are held by the same tenants ; and besides, a great many of them are held by tenants who are quite satisfied at present, and do not wish their rent revised by a Court of any kind. The only way to esti- mate the progress towards a successful resettlement. of the land of Ireland, is to estimate the amount of work done in pro- portion to the work demanded ; and as we can say that three- fifths of the work required is already done, and that the work of the Land Commission is going on at the rate of 137 cases a day, it is but fair to expect that by the end of the year, or at any rate by the spring of next year, the whole of this huge task,— excepting only the appeal cases, which are not at present being decided at a satisfactory rate,—will have been fairly achieved, and this with results that sufficiently show, as against the allegations of the Lords, that there has been no great caprice and no great variation in the decisions of the Sub-Commissioners. As Mr. Trevelyan told us in his speech, the average reductions of rent have varied from 18 to 23 per cent., and show a very fair uniformity of something like a general average of 20 per cent. The reduction of rent had amounted in all to something like £350,000 a year up to the end of last July, a reduction which holds good for fifteen years. Nor was that anything like the whole effect produced, for landlords all over Ireland had been anticipating the action of the Land Act, and had thereby immensely increased, indirectly, the effect of the Land Act. The Arreaes Act, too, has been worked with the utmost efficiency, so that almost all the advances authorised have been already made, and a very great number of poor tenants enabled thereby to avail themselves of the beneficent effects of the Land Act. We doubt whether a measure of such gigantic import- ance has ever in any country been carried out in better fashion, or with more substantial justice. The result is, as we have said, that Ireland is pacified, and that she is availing herself heartily of the new provisions which Parliament has passed for securing something very like fixity of tenure to her farmers.
These are great results, against which we have, however, to set off a no less startling failure. Nothing can be more remark- able than the contrast,—the strange and striking contrast,— between the achievement of the Government in satisfying and pacifying Ireland, and the failure of the Govern- ment in the effort to win the smallest vestige of con- fidence from the Irish people. The Sligo election this week only showed what the Wexford election had showed a few weeks ago, and the Monaghan election a few days before that.,—that no trace of confidence in, or even respect for, the Government is felt in Ireland. But this is not the worst. No Member of the House of Commons knows what he is about better than Mr. Healy. He knows exactly
what is popular in Ireland and what is not popular, and he regulates his speech in Parliament accordingly. When he told Mr. Trevelyan on Saturday last that if he had been in office in Cromwell's time, he would have got up with just as much aplomb to justify the spitting of Irish babies on English bayonets, as he now showed in defending the action of the Constabulary, Mr. Healy was not, we believe, speaking in passion or striking out wildly, but deliberately counting on the delight with which these savage words would be read in Ireland, and the willing credulity with which they would be received. The extreme Irish party are, no doubt, justly convinced that the Irish Constabulary often act with great violence and with great injustice. The truth is, that without its being any special fault of theirs, the Irish Constabulary are some of the worst instruments for preserving order which any Government could have. They have been trained on a military system, which is the worst system conceivable for a police. They are Irish in their variability of temper, and while they are all hand-and-glove with the popu- lation at. one moment, they will break out into furious passion with the population at another moment. Under a slack hand, they do their best to conceal crime and connive at the escape of criminals. Under a strong hand, they find themselves com- pelled to arrest criminals ; and when that embroils them with the people, they get furious, and often attack when they ought to wait in the coolest way for any attack upon themselves. We do not at all deny that Mr. Healy and his friends have just reason to complain of the Constabulary ; and we hope with all our hearts that Mr. Trevelyan may make the reorganisa- tion of the Irish Police one of the first of his objects during the Recess. But Mr. Healy and his friends know all the difficulties of the situation as well as Mr. Trevelyan himself, and know, moreover, as well as Lord Spencer and Mr. Trevelyan know, that never was there an administration in any country less desirous to hound on the Constabulary to un- just accusations, than the present. It is simply for the sake of the popularity produced by their hostile attitude in Ireland, that the Irish Members affect to believe Lord Spencer and Mr. Trevelyan to be bloody-minded men, anxious to instigate the Constabulary to violence, and ready to defend any act, however shocking, even to the spitting of babies on bayonets, which the Constabulary may please to be guilty of. It is be- cause the more just the attitude of Parliament becomes towards Ireland, the more delight the Irish seem to take in the invec- tive hurled at England, that Mr. Healy and his friends launch at the present administration those coarse invectives, which suggest to the Irish people that no more malignant rulers than the present were ever charged with the Irish Government, and that all that the Government have done in the concession of justice has been forced from them by the Secret Societies and the Land League, and the basest fear of Mr. Parnell.
The impressive and touching speech in which Mr. Gladstone urged on the Irish Members the unpatriotic character of the effort they are thus making to render Ireland and England absolutely irreconcileable by their passionate and violent outbreaks, did apparently produce some effect in Ireland itself. At least, it elicited from the Freeman's Journal an appeal to the Irish party to consider the danger and the mischief which this super-heated language may produce. But it did not soften Mr. Healy. He persisted in it that war between England and Ireland was only prevented by the hope- lessness of the struggle ; that the state of feeling in Ireland towards England is simply a war feeling ; and that that war feeling is justifiable, and can never be removed by anything but the measures for which he and his party contend. We have no doubt that so long as Ireland chooses such represen- tatives as Mr. Healy and his friends, this will be so, for it is in their power,—and they use the power freely,—to persuade the Irish that they ought to hate the English, and that they do hate the English with a perfect hatred ; and that that hatred is even intensified by the attempts to do justice which England has lately made. It is this last fact which seems to us the dis- astrous feature in the case. If we do justice absolutely, and put down crime at the time we are doing justice, we shall have a perfectly tranquil Ireland. But we shall not, apparently, have even an approach to a loyal Ireland; nor could we, in our opinion, ever gain a loyal Ireland by giving up Ireland to the whim of Home-rule ; indeed, we believe that in that case we should soon have a very mach more disloyal Ireland than ever. The only hope is that by doing justice steadily, as Mr. Gladstone has taught us to do it, and ignoring with equal steadiness the disloyalty of Irish Members so long as they keep
within the limits of the law, we may, at the cost of a considerable succession of weak Governments, always liable to be upset by Irish cabals, at length tire out the dis- loyalty of the Irish people, and teach them that they will gain nothing and lose much by always affecting to believe that we wish them harm and grudge them a reasonable local independence. Bat, as yet, only half the problem is solved. We have found the secret of pacifying Ireland. We have not found the secret of gaining over Ireland to any sort of co- operation with the rest of the Empire. For the present, Ireland insists on sulking and indulging illusions, only because we cannot give her the moon for which she cries.
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