MR. T. W. RUSSELL'S APOLOGIA, AND A REPLY.* MR. T.
W. RUSSELL'S book may be taken as designed to a large extent for the purpose of accounting for, and, if possible, justifying, the remarkable modification, not to say transformation, of his political attitude, which has caused surprise, and even pain, in many quarters. There is in its historical portions a great deal with which we agree. It is marked by much of the clearness and cogency of statement in dealing with complicated issues which generally characterise Mr. Russell's public utterances. But, with all this, there is a sense of chasm between the case actually made out and the position which the advocate himself reaches. In the main, the review which he offers of British policy in Ireland since the Union is both ably and fairly done. The ground has, no doubt, been pretty well worked before, and we do not think that over the greater part of the story Mr. Russell's contri_ bution will serve appreciably to modify the conclusions already arrived at by fair-minded students of the period under consideration. At the same time, we should like to emphasise the fact that, dark as the general effect of his narrative is, Mr. Russell's review of events from 1800 to 1870 is not at all an undiscriminating indictment of British statesmen and politicians. He does full justice to the intention, and even to the fruits, of their efforts at different periods, before and since the latter of those dates, in face of the magnitude of the " religious difficulty " in Ireland, to provide, or stimulate the provision of, education of various grades in that country, though he thinks, as we do, that much more remains to be done in the University sphere before Parliament can be thought to have discharged its duty in that regard. Nor can he be said to lay any unfair stress on British responsibility in relation to the terrible tragedy of the Famine. Again, when we come to the period (1868) of what Mr. Russell calls the " Great Awakening," we should not wish for a sketch written, on the whole, in a fairer spirit of the successive efforts made by both political parties to grapple with the needs of the Irish situation as they respectively became alive to them. The same temper animates the following lines—quoted from the excellent
• (1.) Deland and the Empire a Review, 1800-1900. By T. W. Russell, 31.P. for South Tyrone. London : Grant Richards. [6s.]—(2.) The Irish Land Problem, and How to Solve it : a Defence of Irish Landlords. By Dudley S. A. Cosby. London: B. Brimley Johnson. [1s. 6d. net.]
chapter on " Balfourian Amelioration"—in which the effects of the thirty and more years of effort since the " awakening" are summed up :— " No one," says Mr. Russell, "can say that these have been years either of neglect or of wrong-doing. In the main, these years have been full of well-doing, marked by a real desire to serve the country; and the harvest has been, and is now being, reaped. For many years Ireland has enjoyed profound peace ; illegal methods have been at a discount; law and order have reigned supreme It is impossible to doubt the healing effect of the great policy which has been carried out. It is on
the Land Question the real peace of the country depends Making every allowance for the shortcomings of legislation, allow- ing for maladministration by officials, and for the unfortunate interpretation placed upon certain sections of the statutes by the Courts, the results are clear and manifest. The United Irish League is a very different organisation from the Land League; its methods are not so appalling as those of the Plan of Cam- paign. It would be impossible now to get large numbers of men to give up their farms and go out on the roadside. All that kind of thing is over and done with for ever. The people would not rise to it; their leaders would not stoop to ask the sacrifice. No : the Land Acts have told upon the peace of the country, and the Irish Members are strong enough to secure by constitutional means all that is required to make the code com- plete and effective."
Excellent, all this, both in substance and in tone. But —and here is the chasm of which we have spoken—when we follow Mr. Russell, we find him landed, not in a series of amendments to the present land code, but in a strenuous and impassioned contention that, as now worked, it produces such injustice to tenants as compared with landlords, and also such anomalous inequalities among different classes of occupiers, that its continued existence is intolerable. These injustices, these anomalies, must all be swept away, and instead of any attempt at the further rectification of the working of dual ownership, there must be established all over the country one single proprietary class, to consist of those persons, and those alone, who at the time of the Act to be passed for their benefit happen to be in occupation of the land. And further, we are plainly given to understand that if the British taxpayer, through his representatives in Parliament, declines to favour the pledging of the national credit for the rapid carrying through of this vast economic revolution, Ireland will be plunged once more into disorder, to which concession will be necessary :—
" Whether the end [of Irish landlordism] is to come by violent or by constitutional means," writes Mr. rtussell, "is the only question open. Every good citizen must prefer—vastly prefer— the latter. I believe the revolution can be carried peacefully, that the landlords can be saved from the absolute ruin that otherwise awaits them. But the end, in any case, is certain. It is for the British Parliament and the British people to decide between constitutional action and those violent and illegal pro- ceedings which have secured so much for the Irish people in the past. Violence, as I have shown, has been their main weapon ; it is high time that common-sense had a turn."
There is a startling inconsistency in the employment of this language of undisguised menace in regard to the agrarian situation by an author who has himself acknowledged, in the passage previously quoted, that " the Irish Members are strong enough to secure by constitu- tional means all that is required to make the [land] code complete and effective." We are unable to reconcile the writer of the one passage with the writer of the other, and we find nothing in the intervening seventy pages, or in those that follow, to justify so extraordinary a transition. Indeed, we must frankly say that the suggestion that violence would be in the least a natural or excusable outcome of the grievances on which Mr. Russell lays stress involves its author in the gravest responsibility. There is nothing new to-day in the special advantages enjoyed by the tenants who have bought under the Purchase Acts of 1885 and 1891. They are, no doubt, very considerable. The average number of years' purchase of the judicially fixed rent, which has been usually made the basis of assisted purchase, is so low--only about seven teen— that the rate of repayment of interest and principal together, spread over forty-nine years, has come to about 25 or 30 per cent. less than the judicial rent, which wherever purchase is not arranged the tenant, of course, goes on paying indefinitely. That is a very agreeable thing for the purchasing farmers, and must commonly, one would think, make tenants ready, and even anxious, to buy. But that the tenant whose landlord does not wish to sell, at any rate at the low figure usually obtain- able, is the victim of an oppressive and provocative grievance, although Parliament has conferred on him security of tenure at a rent fixed (and in the vast majority of cases greatly reduced) by a Court, together with extensive freedom in selling his interest if he wishes to give up his tenancy,— this seems to us to be a position which outrages both common-sense and morality. Into the detail of the state- ments put forward by Mr. Russell as illustrative of pro- landlord bias in the chief Land Commission, as at present constituted, it is impossible, and it would not be necessary if it' were possible, for us to go here, for in the judgment of the British public he will rightly be held to answer those charges of bias over and over again by one of the arguments which he employs in defence of his demand for universal compulsory purchase. In answer to the contention that the landlord ought not to be compelled to sell on terms which would involve him, when the purchase-money was reinvested in Consols, in a heavy reduction of income, Mr. Russell points out that the first and second quindecennial revisions of rent having resulted together in an average reduction of 42 per cent. in rents, it is " almost certain " that the third revision, at the end of another ten years, will result in "widespread ruin" to the members of that class. Could there be a more conclu- sive admission that the Courts have not been, are not now, and are not expected ever to become, biassed hi favour of the landlords ? We have never held any brief for the Irish land- lords, not a few of whom have in the past, in our belief, been the worst enemies of their own order, and we strongly con- demn the action of that section of them who adopted the plan of punishing the Government for their liberal policy in Ireland by securing the return of a nominee of Mr. Redmond's in place of Mr. Horace Plunkett in South Dublin County. But whether that attachment to the -Union which almost all of them have professed in former years was genuine, or was largely based on material motives, as Mr. Russell has now persuaded himself, they are our fellow-creatures and fellow-subjects, many of whom have suffered much, through no fault of their own, from legislation designed to repair the neglect and blunders of Parliament in former years. That being so, the British public, we trust and believe, will not be persuaded by Mr. Russell or any one else into an attempt to put a final term to agrarian troubles in Ireland by the further sacrifice of the interests of a class which happens to be unpopular.
The Irish landlords are hardly to be altogether con- gratulated on the champion whom they have found in Mr. Dudley Cosby, who has lately brought out a little book called The Irish Land Problem, and How to Solve it. Seldom has our reviewing experience brought before us composition of a more slovenly quality than that illustrated by some of Mr. Cosby's sentences. Nor is he, even when his grammar is not halting, an effective writer. Yet undoubtedly those who read his little book, part of which is described as a rejoinder, by which we think he means a reply, to Mr. Russell, will find their attention drawn to several things which Mr. Russell in his more elaborate treatment of the subject from a different point of view has, very strangely, omitted to consider. Such, for example, are the strong and unanimous confirmation by the Commission presided over by Si Edward Fry, which reported in 1898, of many of the allegations made against the working of the Land Courts from the landlord's point of view; the arbitrariness of an enactment turning all exist- ing occupiers into proprietors ; and, in particular, the un- fairness of making a great new land settlement from which the labourers are excluded. Mr. Cosby's own plan for the solution of the Irish land question is, instead of a com- pulsory universal purchase of agricultural holdings by their existing occupiers at some nineteen years' purchase, as (apparently) proposed by Mr. Russell, the offer of an induce- ment to all landlords in the shape of purchase-money or land stock to the amount of twenty-five years' purchase at the existing rents. In the existing state of the national finances, however, we see not the slightest chance of the adoption of either of the plans to which we have called attention as a means of escape from the doubtless very large amount of friction and expense, both public and private, connected with the working of the existing Irish land code. It does not follow that no means exist for the mitigation of those admitted evils. On the contrary, while the gradual extension of an occupring proprietary is unquestionably always to be aimed at, our own belief is that some system of automatic adjustment of rents, such as the Fry Commission evidently had in view, might meet a great part of the need, and that it ought not by any means to pass the wit of man to devise such a scheme on lines the common-sense and eqt4ty of which would command the general assent of Irish opinion.
But though we hold that a scheme of universal compulsory purchase is now impossible, and that having adopted the gradual and voluntary system for the creation of a peasant proprietary we must adhere to it, we hold that it would have been better to have adopted a universal instead of a partial scheme in 1891. We argued so at the time, and believe we argued rightly. But our plea was not admitted, and the voluntary system was established. In this decision of the Legislature, unless we are mistaken, Mr. T. W. Russell at the time acquiesced. In our view, then, we cannot now go back and reverse the decision of 1891, though, as we have said, we would do everything to facilitate the working of the existing Purchase Acts. Without any compulsion they might be made far more attractive to the landlord than they are at present.
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