XIV

From disestablishment of the Church Gladstone, now in the full swing of his Liberalism, proceeded next year to reform the land system of Ireland. Taking his cue from Ulster tenant-right, perhaps also from English copyhold, he passed an act, the first of a series which, by giving compensation for improvements and for disturbance, restricting eviction, regulating rents, and furnishing to the tenant by government loans the means of purchasing the fee, has gone far towards transferring the ownership from the landlord to the tenant. Some of these measures have virtually involved confiscation, notably in the case of purchasers under the Encumbered Estates Act, to whom full ownership had been morally guaranteed.

Economically, the tendency, indeed the aim, of the land acts has been to make Ireland a land of peasant proprietors. The social tendency of such legislation is to the abolition of the gentry, of the value of whose leadership to a people eminently in need of leaders, Gladstone, personally ignorant of Ireland, might not be a competent judge. Unquestionably, the relations between landlord and tenant called for reform. The appropriation of the tenant’s improvements by the landlord was in itself plainly unjust, and the sweeping evictions yielded in cruelty only to the famine. But for overpopulation the immediate remedy was depletion. Had Gladstone said that the overpopulation was originally the consequence of misgovernment and repression of industry which, reducing the people to abject misery, had wrecked their self-respect and self-restraint, he would have been emphatically right, and the fact cannot be too constantly kept in mind. Gladstone might also have said with truth that emigration was a mournful cure, though it transferred the emigrant to a far happier land and lot. But the overpopulation having taken place, whatever the cause, the only remedy was depletion. No expansion of manufacturing industry, commerce, or mining adequate to the absorption of the surplus population could be expected in time to meet the pressing call for relief. Irishmen are sensitive on this point, but no disparagement of the Irish race is implied in the recognition of the facts. Overpopulation was not the fault of the people, but their misfortune. There has been a very large migration of the Irish into England and Scotland as well as into the colonies and the United States.

Gladstone’s measure, however, fell short of Irish expectation, which was the three F’s: Fixity of tenure; Fair rent; Freedom of sale. A land war presently broke out and became combined with a struggle nominally for Home Rule, really for separation from Great Britain. The political part of this agitation, rebellion as it really was, had its main source and support, not in Ireland, but in the Irish population of the United States. Even before the famine there had been an emigration of Irish to America, so large as by its political effects to alarm American patriotism and give birth to the great Know-nothing Movement in defence of American nationality. The Irish, being highly gregarious and unused to large farming, settled in cities. When they went out to work on railways or canals, it was in large gangs. They were drawn into the vortex of politics and became the retainers of crafty politicians, who, in secret, smiled at their simplicity. They fell almost invariably into the Democratic party. The name may have attracted them; but the Democratic party was that of the Southern slave-owner, who was glad to enlist the Irishman as his humble ally at the North and to pay him out of the treasury of political corruption. The rank and file of Tammany were largely Irish. O’Connell had been nobly hostile to slavery. His kinsmen and admirers on the other side of the Atlantic were, on the contrary, vehement supporters of slavery, and jealous assertors of their superiority over the enslaved race. Such is the tendency of the newly enfranchised. In the war between the North and the South the Irish in New York rose against the draft and committed great outrages, especially against the negro, among other things setting fire to a negro orphan asylum. They were ruthlessly put down. After the famine, emigration greatly increased. Family affection among the Irish is beautifully strong, and the members of a family who had gone before sent home their earnings to pay for the passage of those whom they had left behind. It has been reckoned that the Irish have expended twenty millions sterling in this way. With a passionate love of Ireland the American Irish combined a still more passionate hatred of England as Ireland’s tyrant and oppressor. Invasion and destruction of England were their dream. Always addicted to secret fraternities and natural adepts in conspiracy, they formed associations for war on England; that of the Fenians and that of the still more rabid and bloodthirsty Clan-na-Gael, whose utterances were frenzies of hatred. Large sums were subscribed; Irish servant-girls, with a patriotism which in any case was honourable to them, giving freely of their wages. American politicians flattered the mania, and harvested the Irish vote. The war bequeathed to the Fenians some regular soldiers, among others, Mitchel, who had been conspicuous in the ranks of slavery. The Fenians invaded Canada and overthrew a corps of Canadian volunteers, but retired on the approach of regulars; a bad omen for their conquest of England. Conquest of England the Fenians did not attempt, beyond a farcical essay at Chester. But they helped greatly to kindle rebellion in Ireland, to provide it with money, and to supply it with assassins. The National League, the form which, in Ireland, political combined with agrarian rebellion assumed, almost ousted the law and the queen’s government. It resisted the payment of rents. Those who opposed its will were “boycotted,” a term of which this is the origin. Sometimes they were murdered. A stripling was murdered for having served a master who had come under the ban of the League. A wife was mobbed on her way home from viewing the body of her murdered husband. Lord Frederick Cavendish, the Irish secretary, going to Ireland with the kindest intentions, and the permanent secretary, Mr. Burke, were stabbed to death in the Phœnix Park. Mr. W. E. Forster, distinguished by his humane efforts at the time of the famine, was marked for assassination. At the outbreak of the rebellion a policeman escorting Fenian prisoners had been murdered at Manchester, and an attempt made to blow up Clerkenwell Prison, where a Fenian was confined, had caused the deaths of twelve people and the maiming of one hundred and twenty. Gladstone had made the mistake of treating the alarm caused by those outrages as a motive for doing justice to Ireland. The motive for doing justice to Ireland was justice.

The assassination of Cavendish and Burke, it is right to say, was the act, not of the Land League or of any conspiracy in Ireland itself, but of the Invincibles, a club of frenzied Irish in the United States. By the Irish leaders it was heartily condemned. That it was regarded with utter abhorrence in the Irish quarters of English cities was denied by observers at the time. Fierce and blind were the passions of those days.

To repress what was in fact a rebellion fed by foreign aid, to uphold the law, and rescue life and industry in Ireland from the lawless tyranny of the National League, as it was called, the government, as was its plain duty, sought and obtained extraordinary powers, and threw a number of the leaders of the rebellion into prison. It was time, when loyal citizens were joining the League for protection in their callings, which the queen’s government could no longer afford. When the Irish rose against the draft in New York, the Americans shot down several hundreds of them without process of law.

In the British Parliament the “rebel” party, as Bright justly called it, had found a leader of mark in Parnell, a man of great ability and force of character, incisive and forcible, if not eloquent, as a speaker. He had supplanted in the leadership Mr. Butt, a man of social sensibility and refinement, unfitted for an aggressive part. The agitation under Parnell combined agrarianism with repeal, thus giving the political part of the movement a hold upon the people and a force and a formidable extension in Ireland which by itself it had never had. The Land League, becoming the National League, almost supplanted the queen’s government in Ireland.

Parnell’s avowed aim was the foundation of a peasant proprietorship. Neither he nor any of his party seem to have cared to study dispassionately the natural aptitudes of the country, and to satisfy themselves whether it was capable of supporting the population which disastrous events and sinister influences had accumulated upon it. Their main object was political. It was, under the guise of repealing the union, to sever Ireland from Great Britain. As an inducement to the peasantry to support them in that attempt, they offered to transfer the property in the land from the landlord to the tenant, though with a decorous promise of indemnity. Mr. Parnell’s name was English, and he had been educated at Cambridge. It was understood that his bearing towards his Celtic associates was high and that he was peremptory as well as absolute in command. At his side was Mr. Biggar, whose great gift was unparalleled effrontery. The two undertook to coerce the British Parliament by obstruction. Had the British Parliament been itself, it would quickly have asserted its dignity. But it was split into factions, upon the balance of which Parnell and Biggar were able to play. Gladstone succumbed so far as by an equivocal agreement, nicknamed the Kilmainham Treaty, to release Parnell and his associates from prison. On the other hand, the Conservatives coming into power struck the flag of the law by refusing to renew the Crimes Act for the protection of loyalty in Ireland, while they angled for the Parnellite vote by casting reproach on the conduct of a lord-lieutenant who had done his duty.

At the general election which followed, Gladstone went to the country, appealing for a majority which should enable him to settle the Irish question independently of Parnell. Parnell passed the word to all his partisans, both in Ireland and in the Irish quarters of English towns, to vote against the Liberals. They obeyed. Gladstone was defeated. Then he who had denounced Parnell as wading through rapine to dismemberment; who had proclaimed his arrest as a rebel to an applauding multitude at Guildhall; who had thrown him and scores of his followers into prison; who had never given to the nation a hint of his sympathy with Parnell’s agitation, suddenly turned round and coalesced with Parnell. He put forth an apology for his conversion founded on the hidden workings of his own mind. But what availed the workings of his own mind if all the time he was carrying on the policy of repression, misleading the nation thereby? It is true he might have pointed to the coquetting of the other party, or its leaders, with the Parnellites. He might perhaps with more force have appealed to his own unquestionably sincere sympathy with all who were struggling for independence. His retrospective imagination was strong, and having changed so much he had always present to his mind the possibility of further change. It made his language sometimes capable of unforeseen interpretation.

The Liberal party was filled with astonishment, confusion, and dismay. But the Times stood fast and rallied the adherents of the union. To the steadfastness and power of this great journal the defeat of Gladstone’s policy and the salvation of the union were largely due. Bright’s refusal to cast in his lot with the “rebel” party was also a heavy blow to Gladstone. The political connection between the two men had been growing close, and Bright might almost be said to personify justice to Ireland, as to all the weak and oppressed. If there was a man who would have protested against the sacrifice of Ireland to English interests it was John Bright. Lord Hartington presented himself with unexpected vigour as a Unionist leader. Gladstone was defeated in the House of Commons and still more signally in the general election which followed, Conservative and Unionist Liberals voting together on the special issue. In the contest Gladstone lashed himself into fury, appealed to Separatist sentiment, not in Ireland only, but in Scotland and Wales, to the prejudice of the masses against the classes, of the uneducated against the educated and the learned professions. He was fired with enthusiasm for the right. His instincts were always high. But this did not make him a cool-headed statesman warily dealing with a question which touched the life of the commonwealth.

Now fortune played a strange trick. Parnell, the leader and mainstay of the League, Gladstone’s ally, was convicted of adultery. Adultery is not political, but it was too much both for the Irish hierarchy and for the nonconformist conscience. Parnell had to be dragged from the helm of the Irish party, to which he clung with a frantic tenacity, such as proved him after all to be, though a very remarkable, hardly a very great, man.

Raised once more by another turn of fortune’s wheel in the party game to power, Gladstone again brought forward a Home Rule Bill. This time he, with the help of the Irish members, pushed the bill through the House, partly by closure, in a form already condemned by himself, giving Ireland a separate Parliament for her own affairs, and at the same time retaining her representation in the British Parliament, with power there to vote upon all questions. The Irish delegation would have played, as in fact it does now, for its own purposes, on the balance of British parties, and baffled any attempt to enforce restrictions on the doings of its own Parliament which the Home Rule Act might have imposed. The majority for the bill in the Commons was forty-three, including eighty Irish members. British members of the House of Commons who voted for the bill probably reckoned on its being killed in the Lords. Killed it was there with a vengeance. Gladstone appealed to the people against the Lords, but in vain. Thus ended in disaster his wonderful career. His speeches on Home Rule showed, like all his speeches, vast oratoric power, mastery of details, clearness and liveliness in exposition. But weak points are also apparent. The Irish Parliament cannot have been at once a sink of corruption and an institution with which it was sacrilege to interfere. The comparison of the union in criminality to the massacre of St. Bartholomew must surely have made all hearers but the Irish smile. Upon this subject the speaker raves, and generally he forgets that the mission of reconciliation which he had undertaken would not be furthered by opening old sores. The examples of Austria-Hungary and the connection of Norway with Sweden, cited by him as proofs that a conjunction of two Parliaments worked well, would be generally taken not as encouragements but as warnings. The case of Norway and Sweden has since become a warning indeed. The intricate machinery by which the speaker proposes to regulate the action of his two Parliaments has too much the look of a speculative structure elaborated without reference to the peculiar state of Ireland and the forces to be encountered there. Of the force of the Catholic priesthood, nothing is said. In fact, the political architect knew little of the country with which he was dealing, having been in it only for three weeks, and then not at a good point of view.

Thus the Irish question, which the greatest among the public men of his time had failed to settle, was once more thrown into the cauldron of party strife.