MR. FROUDE ON THE STATE OF IRELAND.
1/TR. FROUDE has written a somewhat startling paper on kil the state of Ireland in the last number of Fraser's Magazine, under the title, "A Fortnight in Kerry." Mr. Froude is in the habit of spending a fortnight in Kerry occa- sionally at a shooting-box which he holds on Lord Lansdowne's estate, in an isolated district, lately in great part depopulated, and where the majority of the inhabitants are Irish-speaking people. It is not precisely the best point of view, perhaps, from which to study the case of Ireland ; nor does Mr. Froude possess that spirit of sympathy with his subject which can alone make the study of the character, temper, appetites, and aspirations of a people, trustworthy. On the contrary, it may be not unfairly said that Mr. Froude simply loathes the Irish people, not consciously, perhaps, for he professes the reverse. But a certain bitter grudge breaks out despite his will now and then. It colours all his tropes. It adds a sting to the casual allusions of his language. When he wants a figure of speech to express the relation between the two islands, he compares the Irish to a kennel of foxhounds and the English to their master ; and declares that what the Irish want is "a master who knows that he is master, and means to continue master." When, after a year's absence, he revisits his Irish home, he finds that his neighbours are wroth about an article he wrote regarding them last spring (the Irish are not the only people who may mislike a neighbour who is always taking notes of their weak points for print); and this is the tableau by which
he is pleased to realize the interruption of his kindly relations with them :—
"Fewer old women than usual brought their sore legs to be mended s or pitied ; fewer family quarrels were brought to us to arbitrate, inter- minable disputes about 'the grass of a cow,' or the interpretation of a will where a ragged testator had bequeathed an interest in a farm over which he had no more power than over a slice of the moon."
The use of the word "interminable" here is fine. In an Irishman it would savour of exaggeration. Possibly the genius of the place infects Mr. Froude. At all events, we should like to have him cross-examined on oath as to whether he has been called on to arbitrate in, say, six disputes about grass, or to interpret the wills of three tenants-at-will. Suppose the hound were to paint his master ! If an Irishman revisiting a summer residence in Galloway under similar circumstances were to write in an Irish magazine at the first aspect of his Scotch neighbours :—
" Tho number of boys clamorous for sulphur ointment was not so great as last year; but on the other hand the morals of the place have, if possible, deteriorated. Out of six births in the parish within a week, the schoolmaster told us only one was in wedlock,—even in Scotch wedlock."
Or suppose, after a fortnight's glimpse into London high life, some Celtic dog on two legs were to write to his familiar organ at home :—
" The Saturday Review bad prepared me for much, but you will hardly believe that I saw three duchesses very decidedly the worse for wino at Lady Z.'s ball. Everything corresponds. In a considerable section of the English aristocracy the standard of domestic life is that of a rabbit- warren.'
Who would not say that this was a hound of an evil eye ? And is it a beam or a mote that is in Mr. Froude's ? He may, no doubt, love God with all his heart and soul. It is clear he has little left wherewith to love his neighbours at Derreen.
What really vitiates his vision, however, is apparently the class of persons with whom he cultivates relations of actual neighbourhood in Ireland ; who, according to his own account, appear to be the lower and more truculent class of the squire- archy and the higher and harder class of land agents. He relates how he is visited at Derreen by one of each class. The former is "0. F.," "an Irish landlord, whose stern rule had made him notorious for the crimes which he had pro- voked ;" and who did not blush to avow his theory of pro- perty in land to Mr. Froude. It is almost as interesting as a candid revelation of the actual frame of mind of Tropp- mann, or Palmer of Rugeley. The theory in brief is, that all the land of the United Kingdom ought to be divided into two great zones—a zone of great cities and a zone of wilder- nesses, from which the agricultural population had been banished to make more room for stags and bullocks. "There may be other Irish proprietors besides my companion," says Mr. Froude, "who would follow the example, if they dared,"—and if the exterminated population could be more easily removed to the colonies, he adds, "something might be said in defence of Mr. F.'s position. At all events, it would not be utterly detestable." That such a system can be openly advocated in Ireland by men who have the power to put it in exercise is a formidable apology for Irish disaffection. If such a system could be reduced to practice throughout the United Kingdom, as Mr. F. proposed to Mr. Froude, the natural result would of course be either a communistic revolution or a foreign inva- sion. The expulsion of the Squires would soon become a State necessity. How long will it be before the Irish gentry realize the fact that men like this "0. F." are the worst enemies of their order ?
Mr. Fronde was also visited by a young land agent "Lord L.'s agent, the autocrat of the south-west of Kerry, the brilliant son of the author of 'Irish Realities,'" a Trench, in fact. Mr. Fronde melts at the memory of this visit "out of the clouds." Never had his guest been "more charming ; never for some reason had he appeared more satisfied with the world and with himself." Mr. Froude fears "his modesty might prevent the insertion" of the reason "in the next edition of 'Irish Realities.'" Wherefore he tells the story to illustrate his fortnight in Kerry. Mr. Trench had just succeeded in evicting a tenant,—" a tenant whom for various reasons there had been a desire at head-quarters to see removed ;" not by any means an ordinary tenant, for "his house was like the castle of some border baron, patrolled by huge bloodhounds and wolf- hounds, whose deep bay echoed fearfully through the moun- tains in the midnight air." Stag-hunting is a popular sport in Kerry, and the gentleman no doubt kept a pack of beagles. He was besides "an accomplished master of the pen," but even this did not avail with the author of "Irish Realities," nor has Mr. Fronde a tinge of fellow-feeling. He "held the remains of another tenant's lease, and it was found extremely difficult to dispossess him," but it was well that it should be done before the new Land Act came into operation. It was done accordingly, and done in last- August, at the last possible moment ; and Mr. Trench was happy, and his joy gladdened Mr. Fronde's board. The modesty of Mr. Trench is surely one of the most marvellous of his many astonishing qualities. "It came out," says Mr. Fronde, "confessed perhaps with a shadow of reluctance, that T., who had to pass Mr. —'s gate on his way down to us, unable to conceal his exultation in his triumph, or wishing to give his enemy an opportunity of encountering him on his own dunghill, had stopped his car, walked up to the house, and executed a deliberate parade for some minutes outside the drawing- room windows." Mr. Froude, an English gentleman by birth and education, an Oxford Fellow, and many things be- sides, is not ashamed to relate this act as an heroic feat,— such is the way that his mind has warped from associating with the class of "mean whites" who have hitherto worked the land system of Ireland. The question arose late in the evening whether it was safe for Mr. Trench to return home by the same road. It was quite safe, of course. Had Mr. Trench been caught in the act of executing his "deliberate parade," he might have been insulted or struck ; but Kerry is notoriously not one of those counties in which agents are waylaid and shot. Mr. Trench assured Mr. Fronde "he had done nothing but what was strictly in harmony with Irish proprieties If he allowed himself to be frightened off the road, he could never show his face among the gentlemen of Kerry again." Now, after all, the proprietors of Kerry are one class and their agents are another class ; and many of the proprietors of Kerry happen to be nearly as well known in London as they are in Kerry. Can any one imagine Lord Castle- rosse, or Mr. Herbert of Mucruss, or the Knight of Kerry, or the O'Donoghue, or Sir James O'Connell, or the MacGillicuddy, or Sir Rowland Blennerhassett executing what Mr. Fronde calls a "deliberate parade" before the drawing-room windows of his defeated adversary in a law-suit, especially if the adversary were one of his own tenants ? So little is such an act in harmony with the proprieties of Irish life, that the Kerry pro- prietor who performed such a feat might be tolerably sure that he would find himself cut the next time he showed his face among the gentlemen of Kerry.
We have dwelt over long on this incident, but it is a crucial example of the way in which an acute and profound mind can become dull to the sense of what is manly, and just, and generous by mere atmosphere of association. Mr. Froude's general conclusion is what might be expected under the circumstances. There is no hope of peace between Eng- land and Ireland. "They are tied together like an ill- matched pair, between whom no divorce is possible." He asks, "Are the temperaments of the races so discordant that the secret of their reconciliation is for ever undiscover- able I " And he evidently believes that it is so. But is it a question of race ? To what race did the founders of the modern moderate system of Irish national politics belong,—Swift, Molynenx, Lucas, Grattan, Flood, Hussey Burgh ? To what race the founders of the Society of United Irishmen, the origin of all modern rebellious politics inlreland,—Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Wolfe Tone, the Emmetts, Sampson, Russell? Of what race wereDavis andMitchel,—young Irelanders of opposite types? Of what race are Stephens and Luby, apparently the ablest intellects of the Fenian con- spiracy? The names suffice to tell. There is not a Celt among them. The most formidable adversaries of the English dominion in Ireland for now nearly two hundred years have been men of English or Scotch blood, and of the English or Scotch religion. No one knows this better than Mr. Froude. Yet his complaint is that the one chance of civilizing Ireland was lost when England, jealous of their industry, began to meddle with its management by the Protestant Undertakers. Already, however, the aspiration of the Irish Protestants, —and, in truth, it was the long tradition of Parliament in Ireland,—was legislative independence of England. Mr. Fronde has spoken in his "History" of "the subtle spell of the Irish mind." It is net to be denied that it has generally made the second generation of every colony England has planted in Ireland ipsis Hibernis Riberniore,s. But certainly hitherto a just sense of the wrongs wantonly inflicted on the community into which they had entered, and a conviction that the Imperial Parliament was either unwilling or incapable of doing justice to the country in which their property lay and their children would live, counted with English settlers in Ireland as it would count with English settlers in Australia or in America. They had the less respect for a bad legislature, that oppression was new to them. But it is to be hoped that we have changed all that ; and that England is determined at last and at least to give Ireland fair play. We will not be over sanguine of the result, but we believe it might be in some slight degree facilitated, if Englishmen, who are regarded as representative thinkers and writers, would be a little less wild in the use of their figures of speech. When we are hard. on the National Press of Ireland for its coarseness and violence, let us remember that we have heard Mr. Carlyle compare Ireland to a rat, and England to an elephant, whose business it is to squelch the rat on occasion ; and that Mr. Froude can even nowadays find no better phrase by which to describe the relations of the two islands than that of a kennel of hounds to its master's whip.
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