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Irish Intransigeance.

When I first read the news of the Parnell arrest and of the events which transpired immediately subsequently, I experienced little or no surprise, but some chagrin. Seven centuries appear a long enough time to try a political experiment, and we have now been attempting, during that period, to achieve the same end by the same means, but with no success, for Ireland is no less resolute now than she ever was, or than she has always been, to sever her connexion with us. Will she at length be induced to recant what Father Sheehy called, the other day, amid a scene of great enthusiasm, the sworn vow of ages? The Irish differ much from us, yet, after all, not so widely as to endure patiently what we must know that we would never tolerate, an alien landocracy and an alien yoke. That is what Father Sheehy calls the sworn vow of ages, the vow of independence. "Les crimes de l'étranger s'expliquent comme s'explique la lutte du faux et du vrai," says Georges Sand, writing to Mazzini in 1848. Yes, rapacity, harshness, uncrupulousness, are to be looked for from the foreigner. It is in the normal course of things that he should often exhibit those qualities. One demands, Why?—why should the foreigner be inequitable? To respond fully to that might, perhaps, require an elaborate psychological analysis, for which I have no space, and which I am most likely incompetent to give. Suffice it that he is known and allowed to be so; suffice it that no people, saving under compulsion, will ever tolerate his dominion. But what more than all else makes Ireland feel keenly her subjection, is that her lands are actually in the hands of foreigners. To contend, as the Times did during the course of the present agitation, that this circumstance has nothing to do with the anti-rent movement, which is, in fact, no more than an objection to the extremely disagreeable process of paying debts in hard times, is on a page 47 par with the contention once raised in the same journal, that slavery had nothing to do with the American Civil War. To denounce the movement as communistic, as the Church has done, is equally beside the purpose. It is well-known that the Irish Nationalists were never welcomed among the political agitators of the Continent, and the reason of it is easy to discover. The mere patriot, the man of crude impulse, may have little in common with the propagandist of revolution upon a broad philosophical basis. A patriot's devotion is, of course, very likely to affect him with national selfishness, and although to insist upon ignoring those of his claims for his country or his race which have their ground and justification in the very nature of things, as the Manchester economists would like to, is surely not the way to cure him of his fault, yet, from dwelling too exclusively upon his central idea, he may find it difficult to work with the cosmopolite, or he may even cry out against cosmopolitanism as if it were something monstrous. Besides, the Irish always remain firmly attached to the Church, even when they emigrate, whereas the Socialist revolutionary movement throughout Europe, which partly originated in a revolt against the pretensions and exactions of the papal hierarchy, has become continually more and more pronouncedly unchristian and Atheistic. It is true that in the Irish World, and even in native Irish papers less vitriolic, one meets with Communistic, or at least Socialistic reasonings, and I can well believe that plenty of the Irish Intransigeants will applaud any argument which seems to favor their views or interests, without, perhaps, very well understanding it—a most culpable looseness, I grant you, but not peculiar to the Irish. But, as Lord Derby says, the leading thought throughout is that of nationality. Ireland for the Irish: that it is which now, as hitherto, gives enthusiasm to the movement, and to the strength and genuineness of that enthusiasm Lord Derby himself bears testimony, and his testimony is, on all grounds, above suspicion. I shall keep referring to Lord Derby, because he has every competence to speak on Ireland, and his article in the Fortnightly Review was no hole-and-corner argument, but very open and explicit.

Lord Derby has no tenderness for patriotism—he would crush it, yet he recognises that crushing it may prove no easy business. In the past we have failed utterly, and not page 48 from being too delicately scrupulous, for we have stuck at nothing. Have we any ground to anticipate any better success in the future? There is everything to favor patriotism in Ireland. The people are purer in race than the Hungarians, and politically more united than the Poles. The sentiment of nationality has been very strongly developed in Ireland, as it never was in the Highlands. The country is considerable in size, wealth and population, and its geographical position as an island is very conducive to patriotism. Above all, the ever-growing and strengthening Irish power in America will always make it its business to fan the flame of native patriotism.

Of course Ireland can show nothing comparable to the unique record of Greece, nor even that of Italy; yet she is not without an authentic history going back into remote ages, and (what may seem strange) her earliest triumphs were won peacefully, in letters and in missionary enterprise. The anti-Irish English, indeed, will not believe Irish history, neither will they believe any testimony at all in favor of the Irish. In modern times Irishmen have shone in the English, the French, the Spanish, the Austrian and the American services, in the field, at the bar, in letters, in diplomacy, yet capacity is absolutely denied to them, for bigotry sticks at nothing. Everything is denied to them; being itself is denied to them, although they are charged with all sorts of faults. Macaulay (oblivious, apparently, of his own very evidently Celtic name) has been among the loudest in this immoderate decrying of the Celts; whilst, as to the champion of Orange ascendency in Ireland, he appears to have contracted the Irish habit of perpetrating bulls, for, after arguing at great length for refusing all rights of citizenship to the native Irish because of their natural inferiority, he goes on to inform us, very gravely, that the people have got so mixed up with other races that the very name has become unmeaning. Of course this is great nonsense, and of course, were it correct, it would simply quash Mr. Froude's case. I remember Punch introducing an Irish patriot saying: "Belave me, sorr, ivviry landlord who lives in the counthry is an absenthay." If Punch can produce the patriot I should think that he and Mr. Froude between them will be able to put the question in a clearer light for us. The eminent and talented historian does not page 49 surely compose under the influence of the national potheen. I have understood that some of the romancists seek inspiration in that manner, and I can fancy that if freely taken, it might he of great assistance to a commentator on the Athanasian Creed, by bringing his ideas more on a level with his subject; but I never heard that it was useful in logic.

Lord Derby believes that Irishmen, out of Ulster, would vote against English rule by four or five to one. The movement is thus a thoroughly nationalist movement, and Irish patriotism is, as we have seen, neither unreal, nor feeble, nor absurd. Shall we be able to extinguish it?

The policy of the early Norman kings was to extirpate the Irish people, and the wisdom and feasibility of this were discussed by Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, and the project was advocated by Edmund Spencer, who (somewhat curiously for a poet of love and war) favored the starvation process by the destruction of the crops and herds, and there is little doubt that Cromwell would have liked to put it in execution. Now, there was a policy, not, at one time, evidently impracticable and not against the morality of the age of chivalry, which, had it succeeded, would have led to a definite result. When the Irish judge sentenced a criminal to be hung he said he hoped it would serve as a warning to him for the future. A second such caution ought not to be required. But coercion, as it has been practised in Ireland during the last two centuries, can lead to no result, because so long as the causes of the discontent remain the discontent will continue, smouldering but always ready to break out, so that coercion must be reckoned on as a constant item in our expenditure in perpetuity.

Lord Derby says that in the opinion of almost all Englishmen the late Bill has given more than justice to Ireland. What is justice for Ireland? I know what an Irishman means by the phrase, but what an Englishman means by it I was never well able to find out. Ireland may have some special grievances; the franchise is not now so liberal in Ireland as it is in Great Britain; but the one grievance which we have always heard most about, before as well as since Disestablishment, before as well as since Catholic Emancipation, has been the status of the tenant farmer in page 50 his capacity of tenant farmer. Now, so far as I am able to interpret English principles from the often incoherent utterances of the London press, the Irish tenant farmer had full justice, as against his landlord, before the passing of the late Bill, before the Bill of 1870, before the Bill of 1860. In the judgment, however, of some (perhaps revolutionary and unpractical persons) the ownership of the soil of a country by aliens and absentees is an institution against nature, and which, therefore, no laws nor prestige can warrant. There are even some who go the length of condemning the absolute domination of one race over another. How far the discontinuance of this might be either desirable or practicable I will not hazard an opinion. Yet Jefferson's witticism about the suffrage, that if a man be unfit to rule himself he must be very unfit to rule another, although clearly inapplicable where the inferior races are concerned, does seem to have some point where the races are about upon a level like the English and the Irish.

The late Bill has been at the least a thoroughly English measure, which is surely a merit. It has been a striking exemplification of that positive preference for illogicalness with which Mill charged the English people. Upon no principle whatever can our treatment of the landlords be justified. We have actually seized from them property we yet pronounced to be rightfully theirs. We have fined them, punished them. What is their crime? Moreover, as Lord Derby points out, the most liberal among them will be the severest sufferers. They will say that we have made scapegoats of them, and—they may say so—we cannot rebut the charge.

Lord Derby is not entitled to speak of the Irish landlords as Irishmen. What is an Irishman? Although, to be sure, as O'Connell said, à propos of the Duke of Wellington, to be born in a stable doesn't make a man a horse, yet a man may be to all intents and purposes a good Irishman and sound patriot without being of purely Celtic extraction or even without having any Celtic blood in his veins. Lord Edward Fitzgerald was sprung from the Norman Geraldines, and Mitchel, the arch-rebel of 1848, was of Lowland Scotch descent. But the absentee landlords of Ireland are many of them in no sense or measure Irish, nor are they in the way of making any progress to become so. When the page 51 Normans intermarried with the Celts, the saying was that their descendants became more Irish than the Irish; but the absentee landlord, whose sole concern with his tenants is to squeeze the maximum of money out of them, is not likely to become more Irish than the Irish. No, we need not fear that. He will not, on the other hand, become more English than the English. We must not hope that. No, but if he have any badness in him, he will be apt to develop qualities which I am happy to think are not very convenient to be cultivated in England.

Lord Derby makes mincemeat of the notion that Ireland owes us gratitude. We have yet to give her the occasion for it. In our dealings with what we are pleased to call, facetiously, the sister isle, the one lesson which we have taken pains to teach her is, that we have no ear for equity, and that we only listen to gunpowder and dynamite. We conceded her native parliament in 1780 to the Irish volunteers, because we were sick with an overdose of civil war in America. The Duke of Wellington, who hated Catholic Emancipation, avowedly conceded it to avert an insurrection. The Clerkenwell explosion won disestablishment, and Mr. Parnell's agitation won the recent Bill.

As to Mr. Parnell and his coadjutors, they simply took the course which hot-headed patriots were sure to take, and cool-headedness has never been among the merits of the Irish patriots. Tone and Fitzgerald were the reverse of phlegmatic, and Emmet's attempt was most unjustifiable, having never a chance of succeeding; and the Liberator, himself, upon whom the Premier has recently lavished such generous eulogies at Mr. Parnell's expense, was not, after all, it must be allowed, exactly cool-headed, nor did ever man use language more inflammatory than he did. True, we know from Sir Charles Gavan Duffy that he never meant anything by it. But is that an apology? To my mind it is an aggravation of the offence. It is a capital good plan for people who mean nothing to say what they mean, especially where their language may be of so much consequence. However, our main concern is with Ireland, and not with Mr. Parnell. And, after all, his incarceration does not much affect the situation, for there was no new principle involved in it.

Boycotting and outrage continue, aggravating rather than page 52 abating, and a good many are obeying the Land League manifesto, and the Premier's son gives dark accounts of the south. Still the Land Court keeps busy, and there appears to be some prospect now that the Act of 1881 may get a fair trial. If it does, how will it operate? Will the tenants buy up their farms? If they can, even at the cost of great pains and privations, thus peacefully abolish landlordism, then certainly this is such a chance as Irelend never had before. Lord Derby judges that they cannot; but what are his arguments? He argues, firstly, from the natural thrift-lessness of the Irish character. He says: "The industry of the French and Belgian proprietors is admirable, though often ill-repaid; but a negro or Red Indian village is not a very beautiful sight." I am puzzled to interpret this language, coming from Lord Derby. He cannot intend to liken the Irishman to the negro or Indian. The Irish race is neither an inferior race nor a race apart. Belgium herself and the north-western provinces of France are full of the same Celtic blood. And does Lord Derby forget that those very French proprietors of whom he speaks were themselves, prior to 1789, sunk in the very lowest state of abjectness to which a human being can descend, and that it is only since the legislative favors which the revolution gave them that they have made such rapid strides in intelligence and prosperity?

Lord Derby reminds us what a bad figure the Irish have cut in California and New York, and it is true that they have been among the ringleaders in some of the worst outrages upon the black and the yellow races. The Arabian proverb has been illustrated—God save me from the enriched beggar and the freed slave. But the New York emigration agents and the Irish American priests could furnish some very different evidence respecting the doings of the Irish in America. They could testify to thousands and thousands of pounds spared from the hard-won earnings of the emigrants to be remitted to the old country—alas! on what a melancholy errand!—to enable their compatriots to quit the one spot upon the globe which seems to be accursed for Irishmen—their native country. Thousands and thou-sands of dollars of the Irish hoardings, too, go to help to swell the army of the black (not the red) international, and even money saved for a bad object does at least prove a page 53 capacity for saving. That the Irish are eminently capable of thrift admits of proof by direct evidence.

Lord Derby goes on to speak of Ireland as a very poor country, but surely this is an exaggeration. The climate of Ireland is too humid, yet is not unfavorable for some profitable crops. In the south it closely resembles that of the Channel Islands, which produce enormously. In this regard France has doubtless a clear advantage over Ireland; but in soil. I imagine, the advantage rather lies upon the other side. Her climate is the making of the southern provinces of France. Some of the best Burgundy wines are grown on soils which an analysing chemist would pronounce poor. Ireland contains a great deal of good soil, and the extensive bogs would generally pay for draining. There is a rather large percentage of more or less barren mountain, but even that could be mostly utilised, either for sheep-walks or for timber. Mr. Trench, a very capable and active land-agent, devoted to the landlord interest, says that opportunities for the cultivation of mountain timber are much neglected, although it would sometimes pay a good and even a pretty quick return. The fisheries are a further source of wealth, and Ireland used to grow the best of flax, and manufacture the best of linen, until the Imperial Parliament assassinated the trade.