Chapter XV: Epilogue

Not once, but a hundred times, during the visits to Ireland recorded in this book, I have been reminded of the state of feeling and opinion which existed in the Border States, as they were called, of the American Union, after the invasion of Virginia by a piratical band under John Brown, and before the long-pending issues between the South, insisting upon its constitutional rights, and the North, restive under its constitutional obligations, were brought to a head by the election of President Lincoln.

All analogies, I know, are deceptive, and I do not insist upon this analogy. But it has a certain value here. For to-day in Ireland, as then in America, we find a grave question of politics, in itself not unmanageable, perhaps, by a race trained to self-government, seriously complicated and aggravated, not only by considerations of moral right and moral wrong, but by a profound perturbation of the material interests of the community.

I well remember that after a careful study of the situation in America at the time of which I speak, Mr. Nassau Senior, a most careful and competent observer, frankly told me that he saw no possible way in which the problem could be worked out peacefully. The event justified this gloomy forecast.

It would be presumptuous in me to say as much of the actual situation in Ireland; but it would be uncandid not to say that the optimists of Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, and Tennessee had greater apparent odds in their favour in 1861 than the optimists of Ireland seem to me to have in 1888.

Ireland stands to-day between Great Britain and the millions of the Irish race in America and Australia very much as the Border States of the American Union stood in 1861 between the North and the South. There was little either in the Tariff question or in the Slavery question to shake the foundations of law and order in the Border States, could they have been left to themselves; and the Border States enjoyed all the advantages and immunities of "Home Rule" to an extent and under guarantees never yet openly demanded for Ireland by any responsible legislator within the walls of the British Parliament. But so powerful was the leverage upon them of conflicting passions and interests beyond their own borders that these sovereign states, well organised, homogeneous, prosperous communities, much more populous and richer in the aggregate in 1861 than Ireland is to-day, practically lost the control of their own affairs, and were swept helplessly into a terrific conflict, which they had the greatest imaginable interest in avoiding, and no interest whatever in promoting.

I have seen and heard nothing in Ireland to warrant the very common impression that the country, as a whole, is either misgoverned or ungovernable; nothing to justify me in regarding the difficulties which there impede the maintenance of law and order as really indigenous and spontaneous. The "agitated" Ireland of 1888 appears to me to be almost as clearly and demonstrably the creation of forces not generated in, but acting upon, a country, as was the "bleeding Kansas" of 1856. But the "bleeding Kansas" of 1856 brought the great American Union to the verge of disruption, and the "agitated Ireland" of 1888 may do as much, or worse, for the British Empire. There is, no doubt, a great deal of distress in one or another part of Ireland, though it has not been my fortune to come upon any outward and visible signs of such grinding misery as forces itself upon you in certain of the richest provinces of that independent, busy, prosperous, Roman Catholic kingdom of Belgium, which on a territory little more than one-third as large as the territory of Ireland, maintains nearly a million more inhabitants, and adds to its population, on an average, in round numbers, as many people in four years as Ireland loses in five.

I have seen peasant proprietors in Flanders and Brabant who could give the ideal Irish agent of the Nationalist newspapers lessons in rack-renting, though I am not at all sure that they might not get a hint or two themselves from some of the small farmers who came in my way in Ireland.

Like all countries, mainly agricultural, too, Ireland has suffered a great deal of late years from the fall in prices following upon a period of intoxicating prosperity. Whether she has suffered more relatively than we should have suffered from the same cause in America, had we been foolish enough to imitate the monometallic policy of Germany in 1873, is however open to question; and I have an impression, which it will require evidence to remove, that the actual organisation known as the National Land League could never have been called into being had the British Government devoted to action upon the Currency Question, before 1879, the time and energy which it has expended before and since that date in unsettling the principles of free contract, and tinkering at the relations of landlord and tenant in Ireland.

But I am trenching upon inquiries here beyond the province of this book.

Fortunately it is not necessary to my object in printing these volumes that I should either form or formulate any positive opinions as to the origin of the existing crisis in Ireland. Nor need I volunteer any suggestions of my own as to the methods by which order may best be maintained and civil government carried on in Ireland. It suffices for me that I close this self-imposed survey of men and things in that country with a conviction, as positive as it is melancholy, that the work which Mr. Redmond, M.P., informed us at Chicago that he and his Nationalist colleagues had undertaken, of "making the government of Ireland by England impossible," has been so far achieved, and by such methods as to make it extremely doubtful whether Ireland can be governed by anybody at all in accordance with any of the systems of government hitherto recognised in or adopted for that country. I certainly can see nothing in the organisation and conduct, down to this time, of the party known as the party of the Irish Nationalists, I will not say to encourage, but even to excuse, a belief that Ireland could be governed as a civilised country were it turned over to-morrow to their control. A great deal has been done by them to propagate throughout Christendom a general impression that England has dismally failed to govern Ireland in the past, and is unlikely hereafter to succeed in governing Ireland. But even granting this impression to be absolutely well founded, it by no means follows that Ireland is any more capable of governing herself than England is of governing her. The Russians have not made a brilliant success of their administration in Poland, but the Poles certainly administered Poland no better than the Russians have done. With an Irish representation in an Imperial British Parliament at Westminster, Ireland, under Mr. Gladstone's "base and blackguard" Union of 1800, has at least succeeded in shaking off some of the weightiest of the burdens by which, in the days of Swift, of Grattan, and of O'Connell, she most loudly declared herself to be oppressed. Whether with a Parliament at Dublin she would have fared as well in this respect since 1800 must be a matter of conjecture merely--and it must be equally a matter of conjecture also whether she would fare any better in this respect with a Parliament at Dublin hereafter. I am in no position to pronounce upon this--but it is quite certain that nothing is more uncommon than to find an educated and intelligent man, not an active partisan, in Ireland to-day, who looks forward to the reestablishment, in existing circumstances, of a Parliament at Dublin with confidence or hope.

How the establishment of such a Parliament would affect the position of Great Britain as a power in Europe, and how it would affect the fiscal policy, and with the fiscal policy the well-being of the British people, are questions for British subjects to consider, not for me.

That the processes employed during the past decade, and now employed to bring about the establishment of such a Parliament, have been, and are in their nature, essentially revolutionary, subversive of all sound and healthy relations between man and man, inconsistent with social stability, and therefore with social progress and with social peace, what I have seen and heard in Ireland during the past six months compels me to feel. Of the "Coercion," under which the Nationalist speakers and writers ask us in America to believe that the island groans and travails, I have seen literally nothing.

Nowhere in the world is the press more absolutely free than to-day in Ireland. Nowhere in the world are the actions of men in authority more bitterly and unsparingly criticised. If public men or private citizens are sent to prison in Ireland, they are sent there, not as they were in America during the civil war, or in Ireland under the "Coercion Act" of 1881, on suspicion of something they may have done, or may have intended to do, but after being tried for doing, and convicted of having done, certain things made offences against the law by a Parliament in which they are represented, and of which, in some cases, they are members.

To call this "Coercion" is, from the American point of view, simply ludicrous. What it may be from the British or the Irish point of view is another affair, and does not concern me. I may be permitted, however, I hope without incivility, to say that if this be "Coercion" from the British or the Irish point of view, I am well content to be an American citizen. Ours is essentially a government not of emotions, but of statutes, and most Americans, I think, will agree with me that the sage was right who declared it to be better to live where nothing is lawful than where all things are lawful.

The "Coercion" which I have found established in Ireland, and which I recognise in the title of this book, is the "Coercion," not of a government, but of a combination to make a particular government impossible. It is a "Coercion" applied not to men who break a public law, or offend against any recognised code of morals, but to men who refuse to be bound in their personal relations and their business transactions by the will of other men, their equals only, clothed with no legal authority over them. It is a "Coercion" administered not by public and responsible functionaries, but by secret tribunals. Its sanctions are not the law and honest public opinion, but the base instinct of personal cowardice, and the instinct, not less base, of personal greed. Whether anything more than a steady, firm administration of the law is needed to abolish this "Coercion" is a matter as to which authorities differ. I should be glad to believe with Colonel Saunderson that "the Leaguers would not hold up the 'land-grabber' to execration, and denounce him as they do, unless they knew in fact that the moment the law is made supreme in Ireland the tenants would become just as amenable to it as any other subjects of the Queen." But some recent events suggest a doubt whether these "other subjects of the Queen" are as amenable to the law as my own countrymen are.

That the Church to which the great majority of the Irish people have for so many ages, and through so many tribulations, borne steadfast allegiance, has been shaken in its hold upon the conscience of Ireland by the machinery of this odious and ignoble "Coercion," appears to me to be unquestionable. That the head of that Church, being compelled by evidence to believe this, has found it necessary to intervene for the restoration of the just spiritual authority of the Church over the Irish people all the world now knows--nor can I think that his intervention has come a day or an hour too soon, to arrest the progress in Ireland of a social disease which threatens, not the political interests of the empire of which Ireland is a part alone, but the character of the Irish people themselves, and the very existence among them of the elementary conditions of a Christian civilisation.

It would be unjust to the Irish people to forget that this demoralising "Coercion" against which the Head of the Catholic Church has declared war, seems to me to have been seriously reinforced by the Land Legislation of the Imperial Parliament.

No one denies that great reforms and readjustments of the Land Tenure in Ireland needed to be made long before any serious attempt was made to make them.

But that such reforms and readjustments might have been made without cutting completely loose from the moorings of political economy, appears pretty clearly, not only from examples on the continent of Europe, and in my own country, but from the Rent and Tenancy Acts carried out in India under the viceroyalty of Lord Dufferin since 1885. The conditions of these measures were different, of course, in each of the cases of Oudh, Bengal, and the Punjab, and in none of these cases were they nearly identical with the conditions of any practicable land measure for Ireland. But two great characteristics seem to me to mark the Indian legislation, which are not conspicuous in the legislation for Ireland.

These are a spirit of equity as between the landlords and the tenants, and finality. I do not see how it can be questioned that the landlords of Ireland have been dealt with by recent British legislation as if they were offenders to be mulcted, and that the tenants in Ireland have been encouraged by recent British legislation to anticipate an eventual transfer to them, on steadily improving terms, of the land-ownership of the island. Mr. Davitt is perhaps the most popular Irishman living, and I believe him to be sincerely convinced that the ownership of the land of Ireland (and of all other countries) ought to be vested in the State. But if the independence of Ireland were acknowledged by Great Britain to-morrow, and all the actual landlords of Ireland were compelled to-morrow to part with their ownership, such as it is, of the land, I believe Mr. Davitt would be further from the recognition and triumph of his principle of State-ownership than he is to-day with a British Parliament hostile to "Home Rule," but apparently not altogether unwilling to make the landlords of Ireland an acceptable burnt-offering upon the altar of imperial unity. Probably he sees this himself, and the existing state of things may not be wholly displeasing to him, as holding out a hope that the flame which he has been helped by British legislation to kindle in Ireland may already be taking hold upon the substructions and outworks of the edifice of property in Great Britain also.

One thing at least is clear.

The two antagonistic principles which confront each other in Ireland to-day are the principles of the Agrarian Revolution represented by Mr. Davitt, and the principle of Authority, represented in the domain of politics by the British Government, and in the domain of morals by the Vatican. With one or the other of these principles the victory must rest. If the Irish people of all classes who live in Ireland could be polled to-day, it is likely enough that a decisive majority of them would declare for the principle of Authority in the State and in the Church, could that over-riding issue be made perfectly plain and intelligible to them. But how is that possible? In what country of the world, and in what age of the world, has it ever been possible to get such an issue made perfectly plain and intelligible to any people?

In the domain of morals the principle of Authority, so far as concerns Catholic Ireland, rests with a power which is not likely to waver or give way. The Papal Decree has gone forth. Those who profess to accept it will be compelled to obey it. Those who reject it, whatever their place in the hierarchy of the Church may be, must sooner or later find themselves where Dr. M'Glynn of New York now is. Catholic Ireland can only continue to be Catholic on the condition of obedience, not formal but real, not in matters indifferent, but in matters vital and important, to the Head of the Catholic Church.

In the domain of politics the principle of Authority rests with an Administration which is at the mercy of the intelligence or the ignorance, the constancy or the fickleness, the weakness or the strength, of constituencies in Great Britain, not necessarily familiar with the facts of the situation in Ireland, not necessarily enlightened as to the real interests either of Great Britain or of Ireland, nor even necessarily awake, with Cardinal Manning, to the truth that upon the future of Ireland hangs the future of the British Empire.

With two, three, four, or five years of a steady and cool administration of the laws in Ireland, by an executive officer such as Mr. Balfour seems to me to have shown himself to be--with a judicious abstinence of the British Legislature from feverish and fussy legislation about Ireland, with a prudent and persistent development of the material resources of Ireland, and with a genuine co-operation of the people who own land in Ireland with the people who wish to own land in Ireland, for the readjustment of land-ownership, the principle of Authority in the domain of politics may doubtless win in the conflict with the principle of the Agrarian revolution.

But how many contingencies are here involved! Meanwhile the influences which imperil in Ireland the principle of Authority, in the domains alike of politics and of morals, are at work incessantly, to undermine and deteriorate the character of the Irish people, to take the vigour and the manhood out of them, to unfit them day by day, not only for good citizenship in the British Empire or the United States, but for good citizenship in any possible Ireland under any possible form of government. To arrest these influences before they bring on in Ireland a social crash, the effects of which must be felt far beyond the boundaries of that country, is a matter of primary importance, doubtless, to the British people. It is a matter, too, of hardly less than primary importance to the people of my own country. Unfortunately it does not rest with us to devise or to apply an efficient check to these influences.

That rests with the people of Great Britain, so long as they insist that Ireland shall remain an integral portion of the British dominions. I do not see how they can acquit themselves of this responsibility, or escape the consequences of evading it, solely by devising the most ingenious machinery of local administration for Ireland, or the most liberal schemes for fostering the material interests of the Irish people. Such things, of course, must in due time be attended to. But the first duty of a government is to govern; and I believe that Earl Grey has summed up the situation in Ireland more concisely and more courageously than any other British statesman in his outspoken declaration, that "in order to avert the wreck of the nation, it is absolutely necessary that some means or other should be found for securing to Ireland during the present crisis a wiser and more stable administration of its affairs than can be looked for under its existing institutions."

I have heard and read a good deal in the past of the "Three F's" thought a panacea for Irish discontent. Three other F's seem to me quite as important to the future of Irish content and public order. These are, Fair Dealing towards Landlords as well as Tenants; Finality of Agrarian Legislation at Westminster; and last and most essential of all, Fixity of Executive Tenure.

The words I have just quoted of Earl Grey, show it to be the conviction of the oldest living leader of English Liberalism that this last is the vital point, the key of the situation. Let me bracket with his words, and leave to the consideration of my readers, the following pregnant passage from a letter written to me by an Irish correspondent who is as devoted to Irish independence as is Earl Grey to imperial unity:--

"If the present Nationalist movement succeeds, it will have the effect of putting the worst elements of the Irish nation in power, and keeping them there irremoveably. We are to have an Executive at the mercy of a House of Representatives, and the result will be a government, or series of governments, as weak and vicious as those of France, with this difference, that here all purifying changes such as seem imminent in France will be absolutely prevented by the irresistible power of England. The true model for us would be a constitution like yours in the United States, with an Executive responsible to the nation at large, and irremoveable for a term of years. But this we shall never get from England. Shall we make use of Home Rule to take it for ourselves?

"Many earnest and active Irish Unionists now say that if any bill resembling Mr. Gladstone's passes, they will make separation, their definite policy. If Home Rule comes without the landlords having been bought out on reasonable terms, a class will be created in Ireland full of bitter and most just hatred of England--a class which may very likely one day play the part here which the persecuted Irish Presbyterians who fled from the tyranny of the English Church in Ireland played in your own Revolution beyond the Atlantic."

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