Chapter XVII: Lex Licinia

It would have been pleasant to conclude these pages without recording too harsh a judgment against England, one of the two or three nations for ever dear to the thinker; one of those who possess a brain of her own, not merely a chain of nervous nodosities presiding over the organic functions; one of those who lead the Human Race along the hard road where it toilingly drags its miseries and delusions. It would have been pleasant at least to find some kind of extenuating circumstances for the attitude she maintains doggedly towards Ireland. But this is sheer impossibility.

All that can be pleaded on behalf of England is that she is truly unconscious of the wrong she has been doing for centuries, and that she firmly believes herself to have acted within her rights. Nations, still more than individuals, are the slaves of their temperament, of their faults and their qualities. Shall we call the tiger a murderer, or reproach vultures because they feed on human flesh? They obey their instincts, and merely follow the dictates of nature. So it is with nations. Considered no longer in the individuals that compose it, or in the intellectual _élite_ that speaks in its name, but in the fifteen or twenty generations that have woven the woof of its annals, a people is an irresponsible and blind organism, fatefully obeying its impulses, be they noble or base.

Try to talk with a Protestant landlord about the wrongs and grievances of Ireland. He will tell you in all good faith that the Irish alone are to blame. Ignorant, slothful, given to drink, sly and cunning, a nation of liars,—weak, in a word, and vanquished beforehand,—this is the verdict he pronounces on them from the height of his respectable rent-roll. If they have failed in the struggle for life, it is because they came into it badly armed and unprepared. So much the worse for them,—let them make way for the stronger ones! Such is the theory.

There can be no doubt that it is put forward in all sincerity by a majority of Englishmen. But this does not prove that it rests on any sound foundation. It only proves once more that they are incapable of understanding anything about the Irish temperament.[4] This reasoning is merely the classic sophistry. They mistake the effect for the cause, and are blind to the fact that those vices they so bitterly reproach the Irish with, are the inevitable result of three centuries of bad administration and England’s own work. Wherever it has been liberated from the English yoke, has not, on the contrary, the Irish race displayed abundant energy, activity, genius? Do not the Irish hold the first rank in the United States, in Canada, in Southern America, in Australia, wherever emigration has carried them. In England even are they not at the head of all liberal professions, letters, the daily press, the bar, science? Those who have seen and closely studied that nation, crushed under its secular burden, ground under the heel of the conqueror, cannot but feel surprised at the bare fact that it survives; and this fact alone presupposes the most admirable gifts. One could even question whether, deprived of the Irish Celt element, for leaven, for chiefs, for counsellors, in letters, and in assemblies, the heavy Anglo-Saxon race could ever have founded its flourishing colonies. These prosper, one may say, in direct proportion to the number of Irish that come to them, even as the mother island slowly decays in direct proportion to the number of her children that are driven from her shores.

Why should such slanderous explanations be sought for a fact sufficiently explained by history? The great misfortune of Ireland is not to be a nation less richly gifted than its conqueror, but only to be too small a nation, established in an open island. The Irish have been neither more vicious, nor more fanatical, nor more slothful than the English; they have been less numerous, less well armed; and John Bull, according to his deplorable custom, has taken advantage of their weakness for bullying them, for levying heavy toll on them, for bleeding them to death without mercy. He has taken their land, their freedom, their industry, and still wrests from them the product of their labour. And, to crown all, he dares to call them to account for their misery as for a crime—this misery, which is his own work, with all its wretched following of vices and degradation.

Before such a sight as this involuntary indignation must be felt. One wishes to say to the English—

“You pirates, begin first by giving back to Ireland all you have taken from her, and you shall see then if she be guilty of this poverty you consider as a crime! Let us reckon. Give her back her land, which your nobles occupy. Give her back the bravest of her sons, that you have driven to emigration. Give her back the habit of work which you have destroyed in her. Give her back the wealth which you prevented her accumulating, by forbidding her commerce and industry. Give her back the millions which you still exact every year upon the produce of her agricultural energy. Give her back the experience of freedom that you have so long crushed in her. Give her back the faculty of coolly reasoning about her beliefs, which persecution took from her. Give her back the right of self-government according to her genius, her manners, her will, that right which you declare sacred and imprescriptible for every nation, that you grant to your most insignificant colonies, to the meanest island of your Empire, and which you refuse to her, the biggest of all. Give her back all this, and let us see then if Ireland be all you say.”

“Alas! from that national inheritance of which you robbed her one can only find now, recognise and therefore give back, the land and the money. The land stands always there; and money is not wanting in your coffers. A good impulse, then! All has to be paid for in this world—defeat and failure like anything else. If one lose a game, one must know how to pay for it gallantly. If one has, personally, or in the person of one’s father, committed an unjust act, one must know how to atone for it. Your railway companies give indemnities to the families of those they have crushed to death. Yourselves, as a nation, have paid in the Alabama affair, once convinced of being in the wrong. Here also, in Ireland, the hour of Justice has come. Evidence is over. Your work rises in your throat and sickens you. You cannot any longer doubt, and your writers daily repeat it, that the cause of all Ireland’s sufferings is in your spoliation, complicated by your administration. Well, the remedy is clear. Ireland herself points it out to you, and your conscience whispers it: you must give back her inheritance to Ireland, with the right of administering it according to her own lights.”

* * * * *

England is fond of comparing herself to Rome, though it is Carthage rather that she resembles. She can find in Roman history a precedent for the solution that is obviously suited to Ireland. The _Lex Licinia_, promulgated in the year 376 before the Christian era, limited to 500 arpents, that is to say, almost exactly 500 acres, the extent of land that the patricians were entitled to possess in a conquered country. This was the law that the Gracchi wanted to bring to life again, and for which they paid the penalty of death. It has long been believed, and Mably repeated it with Montesquieu, that the question was the dividing of private property between all the citizens. Niebuhr and Savigny have re-established historical truth, and shown that the question at issue was merely the limitation of, or atonement for, usurpations that ruined the State by ruining the rural populations. It is a Licinian Law that is wanted in Ireland, and it is to be hoped that England will give it to her before long.

The disease of Ireland may be defined: the feudal system or landlordism, complicated by absenteeism and usury, having for its consequences extreme penury of capital, rural pauperism, and the incapacity for struggling against American competition.

The case of Ireland, more acute by reason of its special sphere, is only a striking instance of a fact that the legislators of the old world must necessarily take into account henceforth, the fact that the immense area of land newly cleared in the two Americas, in Australia, and India, are, four-fifths of them at least, the property of those that cultivate them personally. They have no other burden to bear than taxes, and are therefore in a condition of crushing superiority in the struggle with the countries in which dual ownership obtains. With an equal fruitfulness (and that of virgin soil is almost always greater), it is clear that the soil which supports only those that cultivate it, instead of two or three superposed classes of participants in its products, must always be able to give those products at a lesser cost price, and therefore will be able to throw them on the market at a lower rate. It is not merely common sense, it is the immutable course of human progress that condemns landlordism to disappear ere long from the face of the globe.

* * * * *

Reduced to its elementary terms, the Irish question stands thus: 12,000 landowners, of foreign origin, possessing almost the whole of the island; 1940 of these proprietors detaining two-thirds of this soil; 744 holding the half of it. All these lands parcelled out into insufficient holdings, and cultivated by 720,000 native farmers, for the most part entirely devoid of capital. The agricultural product of the island, divided between two schedules on the official rolls of the income tax: the first one of £2,691,788 only, representing the income of the 720,000 Irish farmers and their families; the second, of £13,192,758, representing the income of the 12,000 English landlords. The half at least of this sum leaving the island every year, and being spent outside it by the _absentee_ landlords. Not one farthing of this lordly income coming back to the soil, either directly or indirectly, in the shape of manure, buildings, or agricultural improvements; nor to industry, which is nil. General pauperism, resulting from the feudal organization that stops development of wealth in its germ, and more and more unfits the country for a struggle with the more normally organized nations. Unpaid rents, landlords and tenants eaten up by usurers, a permanent conflict of interests shown at each term by three or four thousand evictions, without mentioning the still more numerous cases in which eviction is not carried out because it would prove useless. A universal bankruptcy; a chronic state of social war; a growing contempt of the law; agrarian violence; the suspension of public liberties; a gradual return of the soil and its inhabitants to the savage condition; a constant augmentation in the area of uncultivated land; a regular emigration of the adult and able population; a quarter of the remaining inhabitants living at the expense of the ratepayers, either on outdoor relief or in the workhouses; financial grievances, added to historical and political grievances; hunger sharpening the rancour of the vanquished race; its hatred of the conqueror shown periodically by the return to the House of Commons of 85 members whose only mandate is to obstruct the regular working of the British machinery. Such is the epitome of the results obtained in Ireland by the English after an occupation of seven centuries. Never did history register such a scandalous failure.

Vainly do Oxford and Cambridge, in order to explain or palliate it, resort to all their scholastic sophistry. Vainly it is endeavoured to discover its cause in some inherent vice of the Irish race, in their ignorance, their religion, their laziness, and even a sort of “melancholy” imparted to them, it is alleged, by the neighbourhood of the ocean (_sic_).

Ireland is not the only country edged by the Atlantic: neither is it the saddest. Her children are not in any marked degree more illiterate now-a-days than those of England, and if they were so for a long time—when they had to slip off to unlawful and clandestine “hedge schools” if they wanted to learn their alphabet—we know too well who was responsible for such an outrage on civilization. The Celts of Erin are Roman Catholics, it is true, but after all there are on our planet a certain number of nations who have not died yet of this religion. As for their political capacity, they vindicate it every day by the wisdom and firmness they display in sustaining the struggle against the oppressor.

One must bow to evidence and do justice to Ireland. And for this there are not two formulas. There is only one, in two articles:

1.—Expropriation of the landlords with a fair indemnity, to the profit of the Irish tenantry.

2.—The extension to Ireland of Home Rule, which is the invariable rule of all British possessions, near or far, guaranteed of course by all the precautions judged necessary for the security and unity of the United Kingdom.

* * * * *

It is the glory of Mr. Gladstone to have understood and to have had the moral courage to declare that there is no other solution. And as we think of this, is it not a strong argument in favour of the superior justice of agrarian revendications in Ireland, that it should have imposed itself to the reason of that illustrious politician, the most English assuredly of all the statesmen that have succeeded each other in office since the time of William Pitt? Those common reasoners who rebel against a necessary restitution, should think of this. Here is an old man seventy-eight years of age, who, ever since he left Eton, had no other care, no other occupation than the affairs of his country; the most energetic, the most active and brilliant of leaders, the most experienced in finance; of all the orators in the British Parliament the most lucid and pungent; a refined scholar, an accomplished Hellenist, the possessor of an hereditary fortune that frees him from domestic cares, the son of a British merchant-prince, and the father of an Anglican clergyman, himself Protestant to the core, and fond of officiating in the place of his son in the church of Hawarden; a man whose predominant quality is his earnestness, and whose supreme rule of conduct is a well-regulated love of his country. This statesman, who has been ten times in office since the year, already so far from us, when he entered it under the leadership of Robert Peel, and who knows everything about the affairs of his country at home and abroad, has made his life-study of the Irish question. Twenty times in forty years has he attempted to grapple with it, to unravel it, to solve it. All the remedial measures that have been applied to the wounds of Ireland since 1860 had him for their initiator. He was the first to realize the odious wrong of an established Anglican Church in that Catholic country. To him is due the political and intellectual enfranchisement of the Irish; it was he who gave them national schools and who put them (by dint of what Titanic struggles!) on the same electoral footing as the other British subjects. It was he who promoted, defended, and succeeded in passing all the Land Bills meant to soften the wretched fate of the Irish serf. Lastly, one must not forget it, he never hesitated, when he thought it necessary, to claim laws of repression against agrarian violence. Mr. Gladstone is assuredly no anarchist. He is neither a madman nor is he in his dotage. Never was his genius clearer, his word more eloquent. Add to this that this man, enamoured of power like all those who have passed their life in it, knew that he was courting a certain fall when he proposed his solution of the Irish question, and could entertain no doubt of the schism that would take place in his party on the subject....

And yet his conscience could oppose no resistance to the blinding light of facts. He clearly saw that palliatives were insufficient, and that there was an urgent need to take the evil at its root. As a conclusion to half a century spent in studying the case, and to twenty local attempts at healing it, after two or three thousand nights spent in the House of Commons in discussing the question under all its aspects, he comes forward to say: “_Justice to Ireland!_ we must give back to her what was taken from her—her inheritance and her freedom!”

Can one suppose for a moment that Mr. Gladstone came to such a conclusion without the most decisive and powerful motives? Can anyone feel himself strong enough to hold opinions better founded than his on this matter? We must congratulate his adversaries on their happy self-confidence; but we cannot do so on their moral sense or on their modesty.

I.—MR. GLADSTONE’S SCHEME.

Mr. Gladstone’s scheme was framed in two organic Bills. By the first the British Government undertook to expropriate the landlords, and to redeem the Irish lands on a basis of twenty times the actual rent, to be paid in English Consols, at par. These lands would then be sold to the Irish tenants at a discount of 20 per cent., payable in forty-nine years by instalments equal to about half the former rent. The second Bill provided for the local government of Ireland, while it reserved for Great Britain the general control of the revenue and the right of keeping military forces in the island. Thanks to a coalition of a fraction of the Liberal party with the Tories, this programme fell to the ground at the General Election of 1886, and was set aside by Parliament.

It may be that the loss is not much to be regretted. Very likely Mr. Gladstone’s scheme was, in his own thoughts, only meant as a trial, what we call a _ballon d’essai_. Excellent in its twofold principle, his solution had the very serious drawback of substituting, in the place of the 12,000 present landlords of Ireland—a single one, the State. It looked as if it solved all difficulties, and perhaps it would have caused fresh complications. In fact, it amounted to requiring that the unavoidable liquidation should be paid—by which people? By those who could least afford it—the Irish tenants. Whence might the poor devils have taken the money for their annuities? And even admitting that they could have found it, can one refuse to see that their culture, so wretched already, would have become still poorer? Has ever man chosen, to buy an estate, the moment when he is a confirmed bankrupt?

But it would have been to them a nett gain of one-half on their actual rent, it will be objected.

A nett gain of one-half _on nothing_, then, as they cannot afford to pay any rent just now, unless they deduct it from their capital (supposing that they have any), and there is no reason to suppose that things will be better for the next fifty years.

Besides, if you admit that by paying for forty-nine years half the actual rent as judicially fixed, the Irish tenants ought to have the ownership of the land, why, in the name of all that is fair, refuse to see that they have paid it more than ten times already, in the shape of excessive rent?

“They were free not to pay it and go out, with their goods and chattels,” says my old friend, the Economist. I answer: No. They were not, for a thousand reasons, and had to obey the will of the vampires, as long as it was strictly possible.

Either the tenants, having become proprietors in name but not in reality (or, as it were, proprietors of a shadow of land mortgaged for half a century), would have paid their annuity,—and in that case they were as poor as before; or they would not have paid it, and then the Liberal party would have heard a fine din!

In fact the Gladstone plan rested on an entirely chimerical hope: that of settling the Irish question without its costing a penny to the British Exchequer. To entertain such a hope is clearly to prove that one sees indeed the evil, but without descrying its deeper cause.

This cause lies in the IMPOSSIBILITY to the modern tenants, in the face of the competition of better organized countries, and generally under the present conditions of the world’s agriculture, TO PAY ANY RENT WHATEVER.

The Irish tenant is a bankrupt, because he has paid, for too long a time already, the rent that he could not afford. The land is impoverished for the very same reason. Now, to sell it to a penniless buyer is absurd enough; but to pretend to believe that the penniless buyer shall render it prosperous and make it yield riches, is perhaps more absurd still.

Such illusions ought to be discarded. If England really wants to settle the Irish question, as her honour and her true interest both command her to do, she must manfully accept the idea of a pecuniary sacrifice and a real restitution. It would be useless to cheat herself into acceptance of half-measures. She had much better weigh the real cost of an imperious duty, pay it, and square matters once for all.

Not only must she give, _gratuitously give away_ as a present, the land to the Irish tenant, but she must provide him, at the lowest rate of interest, with the capital necessary for putting that land in working order.

This consummation might perhaps be attained at a lesser cost than would at first sight appear possible,—let us name a figure,—at a cost of one milliard francs, or £40,000,000. But this milliard should be forthcoming in cash, presented by the British nation to the sister isle as a free gift, a premium paid for peace, or rather a lump sum of conscience-money, such as we see sometimes advertised in the columns of the _Times_.

II.—AN OUTSIDER’S SUGGESTION.

The ideal solution for the innumerable difficulties of the Irish question would evidently be the _tabula rasa_,—the hypothesis that would transform Ireland into a newly-discovered island of virgin soil, barren and uninhabited, where England had just planted her flag, and out of which she wished to get the fullest value in the shortest possible time.

What would her policy be in such a case? She would begin by surveying the whole extent of her new acquisition, by parcelling it out in lots carefully, then by calling in colonists and capital.

To the immigrants that came without any other wealth than their stalwart arms, she would make gratuitous concessions of small lots of land, accompanied by seeds, agricultural implements, and an exemption from taxes during a limited period of time. To those who came with capital, she would give more important plots of ground, either demanding a premium of occupation more or less high, shortening the period of exemption for taxes, or again elevating the rate of those taxes. Most likely, too, she would favour the establishment of an Agricultural Bank that would advance to the new colonists such moneys as they desired, according to their wants, their chances of success, and the individual securities they presented.

In reality it cannot be supposed that in Ireland the past, the vested interests and the settled habits of centuries, can be erased. But at least one can try to come near to this ideal; and besides, this island presents, over the barren and uncultivated one, the advantage of having a ready-made population; the country, its climate, its soil, are known; there is a large proportion of able workmen, valuable house property, no inconsiderable provision in agricultural implements, not to mention several thousand head of horse, oxen, sheep, and pigs ready imported.

The advantages of this over a virgin island are, therefore, very clear; they are visibly stronger than the drawbacks, and success is certain if measures of the kind we allude to are vigorously carried out.

England, then, must begin by buying out, not only the properties of the landlords, but also, and this is only justice, the interest that a large number of farmers possess in those lands under the name of tenant-right. The area of cultivated land in Ireland (exclusive of towns) is, in round numbers, fifteen million acres. Before all, the basis of indemnity granted to the landlords must be fixed.

Mr. Gladstone proposed the basis of twenty times the actual rent, as judicially fixed. This seems an exorbitant price, for various reasons. The first reason is that no leased land under the sun normally yields to its owner, at present, anything like the interest supposed by such a valuation. The second reason is that the landlords’ property in Ireland has actually no real value whatever; it could not find a purchaser, probably, at the price of three times the nominal rent, were it put up for sale (let anyone who commands capital, and who looks for a secure investment, consider whether he would ever dream of buying Irish land, just now, at any price). The third reason is that the true responsibility of the Irish disease rests with those very landlords who never did their duty by the country. Granted that their faults (one would rather say crimes) ought to be covered by the benefit of prescription, and that a fair indemnity ought to be given them or their creditors if they are dispossessed by measures of public sanitation, it would look ridiculous,—indecent to go to the length of rewarding them for their moral and economical failure by a disproportionate indemnity taken out of the pocket of the British taxpayer.

When one hears, therefore, Mr. Gladstone speak of giving the landlords twenty times the nominal rent of their land, one is reduced to admit that his idea was to bribe them into acquiescence to his scheme by an exorbitant premium. The Irish landlords did not understand their true interest; they did not see that they should have thrown into the scale the weight of their votes. Very likely they were wrong. They may say good-bye to the Gladstone indemnity; they will never see it again. For the longer they wait to settle this question, the more must farm-rent dwindle away and indemnity shrink to nothingness.

It seems that, at present, in fixing it on the basis of twelve times the judicial rent, the British nation would show great liberality. It would be equivalent to saying that Irish land, as an investment, is worth one-third the capital in English Consols that bears the same interest, which is certainly paying it an unexpected compliment.

As for the tenant-right of the farmer, which it is equally indispensable to redeem if all is to be cleared and there are to be no more conflicts of interests, let us admit that it is worth, on the whole, three or four times the judicial rent. Very likely again this is excessive. But this matters little practically, as will be shown further on. We find thus, for the aggregate interest vested in the Irish soil and subject to indemnity, a common rate of sixteen times the judicial rent.

The average of this judicial rent is ten shillings per acre. For fifteen millions of cultivated acres to be redeemed, this would therefore give a total sum of 120 millions sterling to be paid. Thanks to this indemnity of expropriation, the English nation would become absolutely free to dispose of these lands as she pleased.

But where are those 120 million pounds to be found? and they must be found over and above the capital necessary for the working of these lands, since we admitted in principle that it would be necessary to find it in most cases. This is the way:

As a first outlay, we have admitted that the British Exchequer would put down £40,000,000 sterling in the shape of Consols at par. That capital represents an interest of about one million sterling and a quarter, or an annual tax of about ninepence per head. This certainly would not be a high price to pay for such a precious advantage as the suppression of the Irish plague. There is no decade in which a great nation does not pay more for some unlucky and useless venture—the Afghanistan campaign, as a case in point.

To these 40 millions sterling, sacrificed by the wealthiest of European nations to its internal peace, shall be added the resources proper to Ireland. These are no despicable ones. Ireland, taxed much lower than Great Britain, nevertheless contributes no less than eight millions sterling, in round numbers, to the general revenue of the United Kingdom.

Of these £8,000,000 about £4,286,519 go to the keeping of the army of occupation and the administration of finances; in other words, to the services meant to remain “imperial” in the hypothesis of Home Rule. About £3,744,462 are paid for the services that would, in this hypothesis, come into the province of the Irish Parliament, viz., public works, law courts, tax-gathering, local administration, registrations, land-surveying, lunatic asylums, schools, prisons, and the like. It seems that a new and poor country, as we suppose Ireland to turn out, ought not to pay for such services as liberally as does wealthy England, and that a reduction of a third on these heads, or £1,250,000, is perfectly feasible. That is about the income for £40,000,000 in English Consols. Here, then, we have sufficient provision for a second milliard in the shape of _interest_.

The interest for the third milliard would easily be raised in the shape of additional taxes, if Irish agriculture were freed from any other charges. That would only increase the annual taxation by about a sixth part, and would not even then put it on a level with the incidence of English taxation. Ireland, on her side, might well do this slight sacrifice to the cause of social and political peace.

There, then, we have the £120,000,000 wanted (in the shape of a special loan, emitted and guaranteed by England), which are found—a third by each of the high contracting parties; a third by a reduction of 33 per cent. on all services that would have become purely Irish.

How ought this magnificent lump of money to be used to make it bear all it can? By lodging the whole in the coffers of a special _Bank of Liquidation_, that would be entrusted with all the operation. This bank, strong in her guaranteed capital of £120,000,000, invested, if necessary, with the power of emitting special paper-money, begins by paying all the lands on the basis fixed upon by law. This implies only, at the most, an outlay of £90,000,000. These lands the bank divides into three classes.

_Class A._—The fee simple of the first class, composed of the holdings under £10 a year, is simply transferred to their actual holders (as would be done in an infant colony in order to attract inhabitants), subject to the single proviso that these lands shall be cultivated after a given system, and according to certain rules, and taken back by the public domain, if this condition be not observed.

Let us remark, in passing, that this free gift will, in the majority of cases, be only the legalization of a _de facto_ gratuitous occupation, most of these small tenants having, for the last three or four years, stopped paying any rent to the landlords.

Where, in that case, will be their advantage? it might be asked. They will be no richer for having become landowners in point of law, as they are now in fact.

This is a material error, as shown by the example of our peasant proprietors in France. One of the chief reasons that prevent the small Irish tenant endeavouring to get all he can out of his land is precisely the rooted wish in his mind not to work for the benefit of the landlord. From the day that he shall be certain of keeping the entire fruit of his labour to himself, he will emulate the French Celt; he will submit himself to the hardest privations and the most unremitting toil; he will abundantly manure his land, ceaselessly tend it, turn it again and again; he will make it yield all it can. Anyhow, if he does not, he will have only himself to blame for it.

_Class B._—The second class of land, composed of holdings from 15 to 20 acres and over, is sold to its actual holders for the price of their tenant right, if they be willing to accept this privilege. In the contrary case, the tenant right is paid down to them at the rate fixed upon by experts, and the fee simple is put up for sale by auction. The ultimate proprietors of these domains of average extent receive, by the hands of the local agents for the _Bank of Liquidation_, every facility to form themselves into unions for the collective culture of their land. They remain, however, free to cultivate it themselves and in their own fashion.

_Class C._—The third portion of the soil, formed by the choicest land, shall be put aside in each district to form a great domain where experiments shall be tried and examples given in agriculture—a domain managed by official agronomists, and cultivated by associations of agricultural labourers, salaried partly in kind on the product of the land, partly by participation in the nett profits. Not only shall there be introduced on those great domains, together with the finest breeds of cattle, the most perfect and scientific modes of culture, but, besides, public demonstrations and lectures shall be made, agricultural pupils shall be formed, and seeds of first quality shall be given at cost price. These model-farms alone remain the property of the State, and are inalienable.

Thus would be constituted at once, together with a class of peasant proprietors, the middle and great cultures which are equally wanting in Ireland.

Special laws abolish entail in the island, submit to expropriation (for 25 years at least) any owner non-resident on his property, and forbid, under pain of heavy fines, to hold or give on lease any parcel of land under 12 acres.

Other laws, imitated from the _Homestead Exemption_ of the United States, protect the peasant against debt. The _Liquidation Bank_, after having set the new system in motion, secures its working by advancing at the lowest rate of interest the capital wanted by the small and middling landowners, which must before long kill usury and drive it from the country. This bank is, in every sense, the organ and focus of a fiduciary circulation that is amply sufficient, on this broad basis, for all the financial wants of agricultural industry.

Thus, the whole revenue of the land remaining in the country, circulating freely, and incessantly undergoing its normal transformations, health returns by degrees to the social body. There is no longer any question of “unemployed” labourers; on the contrary, it is rather hands that are wanted on all those flourishing estates which have day-work to offer, not only to the owners of small holdings, but even to the unemployed of Great Britain.

And so England begins rapidly, though indirectly, to recover her advance, owing to the quick increase in the returns of the Income Tax; in perhaps four or five years, that increase covers the interest of her £40,000,000. It comes to say that her real outlay turns out to be only a tenth or a twelfth part of that advance. Emigration suddenly receives a check. Nay, a new, liberated, prosperous Ireland sees her children flock back to her shores from abroad, enriched and reconciled, bringing home their capital with their experience. For the Irishman ever keeps in his heart unimpaired the love of his mother country, and will return to her as soon as he can.

Let us carry our hypothesis further.

At the same time when she gave up the responsibilities of the local government of Ireland, England has transmitted them to the representatives of the Irish nation.

Are those representatives to form immediately a single Parliament sitting at Dublin, or are they for the present to be divided into four provincial assemblies for Leinster, Munster, Connaught, and Ulster? This question is of small importance, at least at the beginning. Let the first step be taken; an united Ireland will only be a matter of time. The best way in such cases is to follow the expressed wish of the populations; and supposing that Ulster, or at least a part of Ulster, vote for the continuation of the present _régime_, why should not those territories be excepted from the new arrangements, and either be left _in statu quo_ or joined politically to Scotland, of which they are a geological as well as an ethnical dependency? But I cannot help thinking that if the above system was submitted to the Antrim tenants themselves, they would not be backward to see its advantages.

On the whole question the last word should remain to the voter. If a majority of the electors of Scottish Ireland spoke in favour of Home Rule, what could be objected to them? That they will eventually be oppressed by the Catholics? No great fear of that, I should think; and besides, efficient measures could be taken, guarantees found against that danger; but no such caution will be really wanted. The influence of the Catholic clergy in Ireland has for its principal basis the political state of the country. The day when difficulties are cleared up, national education will soon have put an end to the reign of clericalism in Ireland as elsewhere.

One cannot help feeling firmly convinced that Mr. Gladstone’s formula, “Home Rule and Abolition of Landlordism,” taken in its most general meaning, and applied with a spirit both prudent and liberal, will suffice to heal in a few years the disease of Ireland. Public wealth will rise by degrees, feelings of hatred will die away, the rapidity of the cure will take the world by surprise. Has not already the adoption of the Irish programme by a large number of Englishmen belonging to the Liberal party been sufficient to bring about a partial reconciliation between the two countries? We have seen Irish orators come and preach the Liberal gospel in England, and reciprocally, English orators go and bring the word of peace to Ireland. That alone is an augury of success, a symptom of healing and pacification.

* * * * *

Will it be objected that this is a Utopian picture, an unpractical scheme, or simply one of difficult execution? As for me, the more I look into the matter, the more settled grows my belief that three things only are requisite for substituting so much good for so much evil, viz., money, steadiness of purpose and conscience. Nobody will say that the English have ever shown a lack of steadiness in the pursuit of success; money they have in abundance; will they be wanting in conscience? This is scarcely to be feared. Conscientiousness of a more or less enlightened kind is a characteristic of the Englishman, and it is his highest praise. Men are constantly to be met in England who rule their conduct on the principles of an inward law. It is true that, by a natural consequence, many are good only in name, and their display of conscience is only a sham; but as our great moralist has said, “Hypocrisy is a homage which vice renders to virtue,” and wherever vice is obliged to wear a mask, virtue is bound to conquer.

A great transformation, the instruments of which are the press, the steam-engine, and the telegraph, has been slowly developing throughout the world during the last few years: a new and powerful influence has been born that might be named “obligatory justice through publicity.” Tennyson has spoken of “the fierce light that beats upon a throne;” thrones now-a-days scarcely exist except in name; the will of the people has taken their place. But let Governments call themselves republics or monarchies, they are equally submitted to that pitiless ray of light which is the ever-wakeful eye of the press, the uncompromising publicity which ignores either rank or station. How many examples of it have we not seen at home! To quote a recent one, take that wretched Schnæbelé affair. Only fifteen years ago there would have been found in it reasons ten times sufficient to bring about a war for those who wanted it. Not so in our days. In less than twenty-four hours the press had brought to light the most minute details of the affair, exposed the naked truth to the eyes of the world, photographed the place where the incident had occurred, submitted, in short, to the great public judge all the evidence of the case. One had to tender apologies under pain of being called the aggressor, and the whole affair evaporated into smoke.

Such results are perhaps the clearest gain that modern progress has given us. If our age has a superiority over the preceding ages, it is assuredly to have succeeded in making injustice more difficult to practise. More and more henceforward will great national crimes become impossible. Mr. Gladstone’s chief merit will be to have understood it before anybody in England, and to have been emphatically the man of his time. In spite of friends and adversaries he has dared to utter the truth, and say: “We must give back to Ireland what we have taken from her. The good of England imperiously demands that sacrifice, for we are entering an age when the honour of a great nation should not even be suspected.”

He is actually the only statesman in Europe who follows a policy of principle; the only one seeking the triumph of his opinions by the sole help of reason. All the others, from the most famous to the most obscure or passing politician, are only jobbers. Disraeli had too much of the mountebank about him to have been able to secure the respect of posterity. Gortschakoff was only a courtier of the old school; Cavour a clever lawyer; Thiers a dwarf, in a moral and political, as in a physical, sense. Bismarck profits by a state of affairs which he did little or nothing to create, and at the most is the belated representative in our times of fossil feudalism. Gladstone alone is a truly modern statesman, and therefore is destined to be set by history above all his contemporaries, if only he succeeds in carrying out his great enterprise; for the more we go the more nations shall be restricted to politics of principle, both because all other systems are exploded, and because the diffusion of learning will be for the future an almost insuperable obstacle to petty or brutal diplomatic conspiracies.

Great Britain, it is earnestly to be hoped, will consent to follow her great leader in the way he has shown to her. She is offered the most splendid opportunity of doing what no nation has achieved as yet,—atoning, of her own free will, for centuries of injustice, and trying one of the noblest social experiments that can ever be attempted. It would be the beginning of a new era in the history of human societies, and pure glory for those who initiated it. Not only could such results be attained at little cost, but the most obvious, the most pressing interest of England invites her to the enterprise. Let her make haste. After having affirmed for half a century the sovereignty of peoples, and their right to govern themselves according to their will, she cannot give herself the lie at home. After having protested against Bomba and the Bulgarian atrocities, she cannot in her own dominions remain beneath “the unspeakable Turk.” After having assumed before the world the attitude of a systematic foe to slave-trade and all kinds of oppression or cruelty, after having carried it even to maudlin sensitiveness, as in the case of pigeon-shooting, “birds’ corpses on women’s hats,” and the like, she cannot decently carry on the slow destruction of a sister race through starvation. She cannot and she will not do it, for it would be branding herself for ever as Queen of Humbug, Empress of Sham.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Absenteeism, in its present form, seems to date only from Grattan’s Parliament, but in some shape or another it may be said to date from the British invasion of Ireland, and to result from the very nature of an insular kingdom transferred wholesale to the nobility of a neighbouring state.

[2] A later instance. On August 30th, 1887, two men armed with guns and wearing masks entered the house of Mr. R. Blennerhasset, at Kells, near Cahirciveen; they went upstairs to Mrs. Blennerhasset’s room and demanded money, which they got to the amount of about £2.

[3] My guide was quite right. In a statistical table of trials between July, 1885, and July, 1886, for the County Kerry, I find the following items: _maiming cattle_, 9; _injury to person_, 7; _murders_, 3; _firing at persons_, 8; _firing into houses_, 15; _threatening letters_, 125; _intimidation_, 36; _malicious injury_, 22; _arson_, 19; _assaults_, 22. The above figures, it should be observed, only relate to outrages brought home to their authors; there can be no doubt that a much larger number of agrarian outrages remain unpunished.

[4] See Appendix, p. 331.