AN IRISH PREMIER ON IRELAND. L ORD PALMERSTON'S speech on Tuesday
on the condi- tion of Ireland was a good example of the best and the worst peculiarities of his mind. Mr. Maguire, in a speech temperate as if he had been born in England, as full of facts as if an Irishman could by possibility respect statistics, moved for a Royal Commission to "inquire into the state of the agricultural classes of Ireland," because the measures of 1860 in the direction of tenant-right had proved inoperative. Speaker after speaker rose to repeat some one of Mr. Maguire's propositions in italics ; Mr. Roebuck made a clever but un- practical suggestion ; Sir Robert Peel poured out a strange " discoorse," which reads like a lecture to a Young Man's Society, on the tenures prevalent among mankind ; and then the Premier stood up to order the division. His usual wea- pon, tact, was for the evening laid aside ; the rapier was ex- changed for the club, and he struck out hard. He did not attempt to deny the distress—" we all admit and deplore it" —but he attributed it to the seasons, over which no Govern- ment has any control. He did not question the proportions which the new exodus has assumed, but openly doubted whether Ireland was not over-populated, and the departure of her people not in itself a blessing. He did not shirk the question of tenure, but asserted point-blank that any arrange- ment which left the landlord less than absolute was "con- fiscation," and "a subversion of all the fundamental principles of social order." He denied the possibility of remedy save from the seasons, and called on the House to refuse the motion, which the House did by a majority of 128 to 49.
It is impossible not to admire the political courage which tells the inhabitants of a kingdom that there is no hope for them save banishment; impossible not to distrust the sciolism which pronounces so boldly that the consequences of an un- natural social condition are in reality its causes. If Lord Palmerston's theories are true, nothing can be more beneficial to Ireland than the way in which he states them. If it be the fact that Ireland to be prosperous must be a desert, if her fate is " prairie" instead of "clearings," if her people are a nuisance, and their hopes chimeras, the more thoroughly the country understands those hard truths the better for its population. Political reticence is never worth much, and the suave etiquette which lets a people perish rather than cease to prophesy smooth things is the worst, because the most injurious, of the hundred forms of lying. But then it ought, at least, to be clearly proved that the curses are truths, that our blunt friend is telling us things visibly for our good, and not assuming frankness in order to feed fat a secret grudge. The Premier spoke with earnestness, and being an Irishman can hardly be suspected of anti- national prejudice, but his reasonings seem as feeble as his convictions are strong. Mr. Maguire, in common with most contemporary thinkers, and notably Mr. J. Stuart Mill, ascribes the evils of Ireland to what he terms the land tenure. He means, we believe, though he did not bring out the point, not the tenure itself, which is simply the absolute right of the owner, and which works well enough in England and Scotland, but the incessant conflict between the tenure sanctioned by law and the tenure sanctioned by opinion. The law makes the land- lord absolute, enables him to turn corn-fields into pasture or pasture into corn-fields at discretion, to split his land among pauper cottiers, or to remove the population en masse that sheep may have space to feed. There is no limit to his right except the one which is the safety-valve of our society, and which binds him, if he allows the population to stay, to see that in the hour of extremity, while he has anything, they shall not die of hunger. Absolutism corrected by a poor-law is the English landlord theory and the lawyers' theory in Ireland, and, once admitted by all classes, is, we honestly believe, upon the whole the best. Only, the Irish don't admit it. Their theory, strengthened by a custom of three hundred years, is that the landlord has absolute right of property, but the tenant an equal right of occupancy, so long as he pays the acknowledg- ment fixed by the lord, and, of course, law and opinion are at incessant war. The tenant, justified, perhaps, by precedents stretching through centuries, improves, or sells his improve- ments, or transfers his right of occupancy for a consideration. The landlord, justified by the law, takes the improvements, annuls their sale, or claims to transfer the occupancy under no restraint save his own will and pleasure. Of course, there is a struggle, and unhappily for Ireland the contempt for life which is at the very root of the Celtic nature, which is the spring of the French passion for glory as well as of Irish murders, of the Parisian readiness for barri- cades as well as the Irish sympathy for assassins, makes that strugglo a bloody and therefore a crimi- nal one. Englishmen long ere this would have met a system which they hated as the Irish hate this by a passive resist- ance, before which the landlords would be as powerless as the Legislature. Suppose a county threw up its holdings, accepting poor relief till its leases were signed! Irishmen meet it,—we are pleading their cause, but shall blink no truth—like assassins, by cowardly shots from behind hedges, and still more cowardly menaces of future vengeance in writing. Of course, atrocities of that kind rouse the manli- ness of the landlords, as well as their instinctive hate of restraints on property, and so the conflict grows daily worse, the gulf between class and class deepens and widens, the pea- sant betakes himself more readily to his weapon, the landlord is almost ready—as Sir E. Grogan showed in his speech—to call for despotic measures of public safety. It is into the possibility of remedying this state of affairs that Mr. Maguire asks Parliament to inquire, and it is an inquiry ihto this con- dition of affairs that the Premier, backed, we allow, by the Liberal party, speaking, we admit, the sentiments of five- sixths of England, blankly declines to grant.
He says, and those who vote with him say, this is not the true disease, but the diseases they quote may be proved to be only symptoms. It is overpopulation, says Lord Pahnerston, but population is only an effect. Why should Irelani be over-populated any more than Great Britain? The theory of marriage is the same, the age of marriage among the agricul- tural classes the same ; the women are not more prolific, the people singularly and enigmatically free from all forms of sexual vice. They were but a million once, and the problem is to discover why they should have increased on the land like rabbits, while Englishmen bred like human beings. Are not the true causes the poverty and the recklessness which spring of the social disorganization, which is produced by the class hostility which, in its turn, has its root in the tenure? It is the cottier system ? The French, who do not multiply, are cottiers too. It is the national character ? In what respect does that character differ from that of the Poles, who, so far from multiplying, have in all probability decreased? It is the national creed? Bah! Look at Lombardy, where a Catholic population turn a drought-stricken plain into the richest of gardens, without eating one another up by their numbers. Then, suggests Lord Palmerston, if it be not over- population, it is the rainfall. Ireland is a wet country. Well, Lombardy is a dry one ; or take Bengal, which is wetter yet, and which is over thousands of square miles cultivated like a garden. The use of scientific cultivation, as we understand it, is to meet local difficulties of soil and climate and season, and the reason scientific cultivation does not exist in Ireland is simply the absence of capital, produced by the class-war which has its root in tenure. To say the island cannot under any conditions feed its people is simply to accuse Providence of being rather more stupid than Scotch landlords, who con- trive to make a poorer soil keep their people fat.
"But," argues Sir E. Grogan, "it is not over-population or the tenure, but disorder and idleness." Crush down disorder by force, and make the people work hard. Yet for three hundred years we have tried this crushing system under the most favourable circumstances, and with the effect we see. A Government supported by a race who at almost any time in their history could, had they chosen, have extermi- nated the Irish, was for three hundred years released from scruples by a difference of creed, and applied its pitiless strength without a shudder or a remorse to this one end, and failed. It has not even secured the one poor result, which in vast and swarming countries like India it has secured, viz, the personal safety of the rich—the end which a Govern- ment like that of Naples, abandoned of God and detested of man, did still contrive to obtain. Are we to recommence that system, and live over again three centuries of cruelty, to find ourselves at the end either with a desert to repeople, or a new effort to begin the career of justice upon which we are at last fairly embarked ? Statesmen, we submit, will for once agree with philanthropists that if all efforts are to fail, and Ireland still to be a wound rather than a limb in the body politic, they may at least accept that fate more easily by retaining the consciousness that, as at present, Ireland suffers under no intentional injustice. As to industry and energy, the very ground of inquiry is that the Irish who abroad succeed, at home despair, the very object to be sought is the cause which produces the admitted difference. The shiftless, improvident, lying heap of rags and geniality who in Ireland potters over a half-drowned potato patch, crouches to the priest and shoots at the landlord, is in Ohio a hard-working farmer, believing in broad-cloth, and spiteful only to the priest who objects to a Protestant school. The
wretched squireen, who is in Ireland the worst specimen extant of civilized man, is in India a successful administrator, or in Austria founds a family honoured for generations. The rebel, who in Ireland writes mad verses in the Nation, or talks lying trash about the "Saxon," or rushes with a mob of kalf-armed wretches on the same wretches civilized by English discipline, is in Australia a working and very successful Minister of State, in Canada a large proprietor—a man whose opinion carries English votes, whose letters of warning sound to Englishmen masterpieces of eloquent sense. The cause of the difference is social disorganization ; the root of disorgan- ization is the tenure ; and into the possibility of amending that tenure Parliament refuses to inquire.
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