Irish History And The Irish Question Part 6

Viceroyalty, with Castle executive, was retained. This may be said to be a relic of dependence. But the need of a separate administration unfortunately has never ceased. When, in 1850, it was moved to abolish the lord-lieutenancy, Ireland protested, and in deference to her veto the measure was withdrawn. Ireland retained her separate judiciary and for some time her separate department of finance.

It was in regard to the religious question that the union was for the time a failure. Pitt kept his word. He proposed Catholic emanc.i.p.ation to his cabinet and pressed it on the king. He was foiled by the rogue and sycophant Wedderburn, who for his personal ends played on the king's morbid conscience and was aided in his work by the influence of two archbishops, through whom a state church once more rendered its political service to the nation. Pitt paid the debt of honour by resignation. It is said that if he had persevered he would have prevailed, and the king would have submitted, as he did in other cases, such as the acknowledgment of American independence, the dismissal of Thurlow, the permission to Lord Malmesbury to treat with France, the recall of the Duke of York, and the admission of Fox to the government. But not one of these was a case of religious conscience, nor in one of them had the king a great body of national sentiment on his side, as he had, and knew that he had, in his resistance to Catholic emanc.i.p.ation. He afterwards turned out the Grenville ministry, which proposed to admit Catholics to military command, and in so doing was manifestly sustained by the nation. After all, Pitt must have known best what could be done with the king. That his resignation was less of a sacrifice, because he thus escaped the necessity of treating for peace with France, is conjecture, and does not affect the actual propriety of his course. The king having in consequence of the excitement been threatened with a recurrence of his malady, Pitt waived the Catholic question for the king's lifetime, and, when called by the extreme need of the country, returned to power on that understanding. He would have done little good, and not have gratified the nation by driving the king mad and transferring the government in the midst of the great war to the Prince of Wales as Regent and the revellers of Carlton House. In criticising the action of public men at this period, we must always bear in mind the overmastering exigencies of the war. Pitt, though he waived his principle on the subject of Catholic emanc.i.p.ation, never renounced it.

It pa.s.sed to his pupil Canning, and within a generation prevailed.

The only concession made at this time to the Catholics was the endowment of Maynooth as a seminary for the Catholic priesthood of Ireland, cut off from the seminaries of the continent by the war.

Since the union, there has been much that was deplorable in the state of Ireland and in the relations of the two islands, the main source of which, however, as will presently appear, was not political. There has been a hateful series of coercion acts. But there have been no Tudor hostings; there has been no 1641; no 1689; no 1798. No fleet of an invader has anch.o.r.ed in Bantry Bay. Belfast, once the seed-plot of revolution, has prospered and been content. Two years afterwards revolution flamed up again for a moment in the abortive rising of Emmet. Then it died down, to break forth seriously, at least as civil war, no more.

The union must be taken to have been a union in the full sense of the term, putting an end to separate ident.i.ty, not merely a standing contract between two parties, each of which retained the right of enforcing the contract against the other. On this understanding Parliament has acted, and is likely again to act in the case of the representation, as well as in the disestablishment of the Irish Church. The United Kingdom cannot be hide-bound forever by the terms which, necessarily having reference to the circ.u.mstances of its formation, must, like those circ.u.mstances, have been deemed liable to change.

It is unfortunate that no common name for the united nationality could be found. "British" excludes the Irish, "English" both the Irish and the Scotch, and separatist sentiment is fostered by the retention of the old national name.

Victory over the French Revolution and Napoleon was accompanied by an ascendancy of Toryism, which kept Liverpool at the head of the government for fourteen years. In this both islands fared alike. But the Cabinet was divided on the subject of Catholic emanc.i.p.ation. Plunket, still a Liberal though now a Unionist, showed his power as a debater in the Catholic cause. Castlereagh and Canning were on the Liberal side. Emanc.i.p.ation was carried in the Commons, thrown out in the lords, while old Eldon drank to the thirty-nine peers who had saved the Thirty-nine Articles, little thinking how soon he was to be smitten in the house of his friends. On Liverpool's death there were a few months of Canning and a brief interlude of Goodrich. Then power reverted to the Tory and anti-Catholic section of the Liverpool combination, at the head of which were Wellington and Peel.

Peel, in whom hereditary Toryism was combined with natural openness of mind and practical sagacity, as well as with supreme skill in administration, seemed specially sent to carry England safely by the bridge of Conservatism over the gulf between the old era and the new. He had been one of the anti-Catholic section of the Liverpool government, and in that character had been elected to Parliament by the clerical and then Protestant University of Oxford. But he had administered Ireland for six years; had seen the state of things there; had been impressed and shown symptoms of a change of sentiment. He dealt liberally with Catholics in the matter of patronage. He and Wellington now acquiesced in the relief of the Dissenters by the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. Probably they were hesitating on the brink of Catholic emanc.i.p.ation when they were impelled by a new force. The Catholic cause had found for itself a first-rate leader, organizer, and orator, Daniel O'Connell.

XIII

Daniel O'Connell, whose figure fills the next page in Irish history, was a Dublin barrister who, having gained a unique reputation as a skilful or more than skilful winner of verdicts, pa.s.sed from the forensic to the political field. He was of pure Irish blood, Irish in physiognomy, typically Irish in character. Nature had endowed him with all the gifts of a popular leader, bodily as well as mental; for he had a voice of unrivalled power and compa.s.s as well as extraordinary tact in dealing with the ma.s.ses and skill in the conduct of agitation. His oratory was such as never failed to tell with his Irish audience, while its violent exaggeration, its disregard of truth and offensiveness of expression too often excited the just resentment of those whom he a.s.sailed and repelled all moderate and right-minded men. At the same time he knew how to play the courtier, as he showed when George IV. visited Ireland. He entered public life without the blessing of the veteran Grattan, who accused him of setting afloat the bad pa.s.sions of the people, venting calumny against Great Britain, and making politics a trade. That his motives were mixed is probable. But of his Irish patriotism there could be no doubt. O'Connell was a most devout Catholic, enjoyed the hearty confidence of the priesthood, and was able to make full use of its influence in calling out and marshalling the people. He thus opened a new era in the history of Irish agitation. In return, he supported the priesthood in its extreme pretensions; notably in defeating a proposal for the admission of Catholics to political power subject to securities for the loyalty of their Church which conflicted with high priestly pretensions, though it had been favourably entertained at Rome. It was on this point that he and Grattan broke. O'Connell, with the aid of his priestly fuglemen, formed a great Catholic a.s.sociation to overawe the government. On the other side, the Orangemen, now heartily Unionist, rushed to arms. A fierce conflict ensued in Ireland, with some danger to the peace. In the course of it the Duke of York, heir presumptive to the Crown, electrified the country and filled the heart of Eldon and true blue Protestantism with joy by a solemn declaration that if he became king he would veto Catholic emanc.i.p.ation.

After trying his power by carrying some elections, O'Connell determined to bring the conflict to a head by himself standing for Parliament in defiance of the law by which, as a Catholic, he was excluded. He carried his election for Clare against the candidate of the gentry by the votes of the Catholic peasantry, the forty-shilling freeholders; the influence of the Church with its sacraments being openly employed in his support. Peel and Wellington now gave way and carried the admission of the Catholics to Parliament, only tempering the shock to their Tory supporters by the abolition of the forty-shilling freehold; no great blow to liberty, since the only question was whether the forty-shilling freeholder should be the tool of the landlord or of the priest. The refusal to O'Connell of the rank of king's counsel, to which he had become eligible, was defended as another sop to the Tories; but it really was a mark of resentment, very unwise as well as undignified, though partly excused by the offensiveness of O'Connell's bearing and language. It may have been unwillingness to confess change of opinion that led Wellington and Peel to ascribe the concession of Catholic emanc.i.p.ation to fear of civil war. O'Connell could not have put into the field any force capable of making head against the forces of the government, Ulster, the Orangemen, and the Irish gentry. He was himself utterly unwarlike, and there was no foreign power to come to his aid. The measure was a concession of right demanded not only by the Irish Catholics themselves, but by a large party in England which included the best intelligence of the country and the most powerful organs of the press, without the help of which it could not have been carried. Unhappily it was made to appear as a concession of fear.

O'Connell's victory made him the idol and the master of Catholic Ireland.

A large revenue, called his "rent," was thenceforth raised for him by annual subscription. On this his enemies did not fail to reflect. He defended it as the necessary compensation for the sacrifice of a large professional income to the service of the country. At his ancestral mansion of Darrynane, on the wild, thoroughly Celtic, and Erse-speaking coast of Kerry, the "Liberator" held a rustic court profusely hospitable, amidst a circle of devoted adherents, with an open table at which as many as thirty guests were sometimes seated; thus presenting probably the nearest possible counterpart of the head of a great sept in the tribal days. To Darrynane a pilgrimage was made by Montalembert, who fondly hoped that he had found in its master that union of devotion to the Church with liberty which was the ideal of the liberal Catholic school.

Would Catholic emanc.i.p.ation pacify Ireland? Its authors expected that it would. Even Macaulay appears to think that if the popular religion of Ireland had been treated at the union as the popular religion of Scotland was treated, all in Ireland, as in Scotland, might have been well. The result was disappointing. The Irish cotter had voted and shouted for Catholic emanc.i.p.ation at the bidding of the priests and the platform; but what he wanted and hoped to get by a revolution of any kind was, not so much political or religious change, as more oats and potatoes. His real grievances were hunger and nakedness. To afford those myriads a treacherous food, the behest of nature had been too much disregarded; lands destined for pasture had been turned into potato and oat plots. The millions, reduced to an animal existence, had gone on multiplying with animal recklessness. The increase was greater since rebellion and devastation were at an end. In this sense alone the consequences of the union may be said to have been evil. The priest enjoined marriage on moral grounds, perhaps not without an eye to fees. Between 1801 and 1841 population increased by three millions. More than ever, the homes were filthy hovels shared with swine, the beds litters of dirty straw, the dresses rags, the food the potato, while there was frequent dearth and sometimes famine. Eviction increased, since, the forty-shilling freehold franchise having been abolished, the landlord cared no longer to multiply holdings for the sake of votes. The land system, with its tiers of middlemen, was as cruel as ever. t.i.the, the most odious of all imposts, was still collected in the most odious manner. As a consequence, peasant Ireland was still the scene of a vast agrarian war waged by a starving people against the landlord and the t.i.the-proctor. Arson, murder, carding and mutilation of middlemen and t.i.the-proctors were rife. Victims leaping from the windows of their burning houses were caught on pitchforks. The nation was undergoing a baptism of lawlessness and savagery. All the peasants were in the league of crime and screened the a.s.sa.s.sin. Law was powerless. Prosecution was hopeless. Murder was committed in open day and before a number of witnesses, all of whom, if brought into court, would perjure themselves in the common cause. A deep impression had been made upon Peel by the horrors of the agrarian war. He had been particularly moved by a case showing the transcendent height which social pa.s.sion had attained. A party of Whiteboys entered a house in which there were the man whom they came to murder, his wife, and their little girl. The man was in a room on the ground floor. His wife and their little girl were in a room above, with a closet, through a hole in the door of which the room could be seen. The woman heard the Whiteboys enter and knew their errand. She put the child into the closet, saying to her, "They are murdering your father below, then they will come up and murder me. Mind you look well at them and swear to them when you see them in court." The child obeyed. She looked on while her mother was murdered. She swore to the murderers in court, and they were hanged upon her evidence.

The evil had reached such a height that society in Ireland was almost on the point of dissolution. Ordinary coercion acts, of which there had been a series, failed and the Liberal government of Grey was compelled to have recourse to martial law.

The tide of reform, however, which began to flow in 1830, before it ebbed, brought to Ireland, besides her share in reform of the Parliamentary representation, the opening of the munic.i.p.al councils, which had been universally close and corrupt, and after Catholic emanc.i.p.ation still excluded Catholics. It brought commutation of t.i.the, a measure of immense value, far too long delayed, which shifted the burden of payment from the shoulders of the cotter to those of the landlord. It brought a poor law, cruelly needed in the midst of multiplying evictions. Furthermore, it brought in 1831-1833 the momentous gift of public education, national and undenominational, in the inauguration of which the Anglican primate, Archbishop Whateley, reconciling his advanced liberalism with his anomalous position, took a leading part. Ireland thus in national education preceded England by many years. Whateley had fellow-workers in liberal Catholics, ecclesiastical as well as lay, but the weight of Roman authority and influence was, as it always has been, and still is, against free education. The State Church of the minority succeeded in repelling attack; but it underwent some internal reform, including the suppression of ten superfluous bishoprics; a sacrilegious act of the state which helped to give birth to sacerdotal reaction at Oxford. After the abolition of the t.i.the-proctor, the State Church had become less odious to the people. The Castle administration was growing more liberal.

Lords-lieutenant tried to be fair in distribution of patronage. A Liberal secretary, a man of mark, Drummond, warned the Irish landlords that property had its duties as well as its rights. Peel, as Irish secretary, had laid the foundation of the Irish constabulary, that n.o.ble force of law and order which combines independent intelligence with the discipline of the regular soldier. Drummond rendered a most important service by completing the inst.i.tution. The Irish constabulary has naturally in the main been composed of Protestants. But the Catholic policeman in Ireland has in a marked way resisted seditious influence and been true to the government and his duty. The Irishman follows his commander. Attempts to seduce Irish soldiers from fidelity to the colours seem to have generally failed.

O'Connell, with his following, helped to carry the Parliamentary Reform Bill of 1832, which, in fact, could not have been carried without their vote. He lent a general though not hearty or unwavering support to the Whig ministry of Grey, which, though it paid him some deference, was too strong to be under his control. But on the pa.s.sing of a drastic coercion bill directed against political as well as agrarian disturbance, there was an angry rupture, and the Whigs became "base, b.l.o.o.d.y, and brutal," like all others who crossed O'Connell's will. O'Connell was not handsomely treated. His eminence as a lawyer, combined with his influence in Ireland, ent.i.tled him to a high place. But his bl.u.s.tering violence, his unmeasured vituperation, his venomous abuse of England, and the changefulness of his moods made him a dangerous ally for any government. Cobden said, "O'Connell always treated me with friendly attention, but I never shook hands with him or faced his smile without a feeling of insecurity; and as for trusting him on any public question where his vanity or pa.s.sions might interpose, I should have as soon thought of an alliance with an Ashantee chief."

The Melbourne and Russell ministry was weak and fain to lean on O'Connell with his Irish brigade for support and to allow him a voice in appointments, though it suffered greatly in English eyes by the alliance.

O'Connell shouted with joy when that government was s.n.a.t.c.hed from death and restored to a feeble existence by the refusal of the queen to change her bed-chamber women on Peel's demand. But the advent of Peel to power, with a strong government, filled him with rage and despair. The two men had quarrelled in Ireland, a challenge had pa.s.sed between them, and Peel was the object of O'Connell's bitterest hatred. In principle the new government was hostile to O'Connell, and its strength placed it wholly beyond his influence. His power was threatened with extinction. His rent, moreover, since there had been a lull in agitation, was rapidly falling off, and he was in pecuniary distress. The last, some think, was not his least urgent motive for embarking in another agitation. This time it was for a repeal of the union, of which he had before only thrown out fitful hints. He now raised the standard of repeal and issued his mandate to the priesthood to call out the peasantry in that cause. The priesthood joyfully obeyed. Monster meetings were held and were addressed by O'Connell in his most violent strain, with ostensible respect for const.i.tutional methods, but with constant appeals to national hatred and suggestions of military force. The priests consecrated the meetings and the sentiments, celebrating Ma.s.s on the grounds. It is surely idle to contend that a priesthood acting thus and having its centre in Rome is only a Christian ministry, not a power of political disturbance. An outbreak appeared to be at hand, when the government took direct issue with the agitator by proclaiming a monster meeting which he had appointed to be held at Clontarf; a scene suggestive of military force as it had been the field of the great Irish victory. O'Connell, who, if he was not pacific, was unwarlike, shrank from the conflict and called off the meeting. The government followed up the blow by indicting the agitator for sedition. There was a monster trial at Dublin, in the course of which, to preserve the Irish character of the scene, the attorney-general challenged the counsel on the other side to a duel. O'Connell was found guilty, but the verdict was afterwards quashed on appeal to the House of Lords, for irregularity in the panel, by the judgment of three Whigs against one Tory and the independent Brougham, though it had been upheld by seven of the nine judges to whom the case was referred. O'Connell was set free. But the spell of his ascendancy had been broken. By shrinking from the appeal to force he had forfeited the respect of the fighting section of his party.

The Conservative government was invincibly strong. O'Connell's health and physical force had broken down. Thus ended the great Liberator's career.

He bequeathed his body to Ireland and his heart to Rome. There can be no question about his devotion to either, whatever motives may have mingled with his devotion to Ireland. Whether he did more good to the Irish cause by his patriotism than harm by the pa.s.sions which he excited and the enmities he created, is a question about which different opinions have been formed. His blind attachment to the Church, had he been victorious, would have put Ireland under the control of a reactionary priesthood.

For some time before his death, O'Connell, by shrinking from force, had been losing the hearts and the adherence of a party of force on his own side called "Young Ireland," a set of young men, some highly gifted as journalists or poets, whose aim was not repeal but national independence, and who in their organ, _The Nation_, preached rebellion and revelled in the memory of '98.

Peel, victorious, graced his victory by concession, to which indeed he was heartily inclined. He saw that "Ireland was his difficulty," and wanted to treat the problem as liberally as his following of Protestants and squires would let him. He increased the grant to Maynooth, thereby constraining Gladstone, by way of satisfaction to his former self, to go through the form of resignation. He enabled the Catholic Church freely to receive charitable bequests. Not venturing to throw open the fellowships and scholarships of Trinity College to the Catholics, he founded for their special benefit three undenominational colleges at Belfast, Cork, and Galway, forming together a university with power of granting degrees. This measure, excellent in its way, was but a partial success. The priesthood looked with invincible suspicion on free science, while Catholic professors of science, whom the Church might have trusted, were hardly to be found. But Peel touched the real root of the evil, and pointed to effective reform, when, in 1843, he issued a Commission of Inquiry into land occupancy in Ireland and the condition of the peasant occupants. The commission reported that the agricultural labourer of Ireland continued to suffer the greatest privations and hardships; that he was still dependent upon casual and precarious employment for subsistence; that he was still badly housed, badly clothed, and badly fed; and that he was undergoing sufferings greater than those of the people of any other country in Europe. Some tentative motions followed, but there had scarcely been time for the report of the commission to work, when the sentence of nature was p.r.o.nounced with awful distinctness in the form of a great famine with pestilence in its train. The population of Ireland at this time was probably double that which the island could happily bear. A precarious subsistence was afforded by the potato, which, always treacherous, now suddenly and completely failed. Peel, warned of impending calamity, at once opened the ports for the importation of grain, then grasped the occasion for the repeal of the Corn Laws, on the policy of which his own mind had been undergoing change. His administrative power and that of his colleagues would probably have done all that was possible to meet and mitigate the disaster. But at the critical moment his government was struck down by a conspiracy of Russell and the Whigs with the ire of the Corn Law squires and the vengeful ambition of Disraeli. Russell, who took his place, was far more an adept in party strategy than a master of practical administration. There ensued a heartrending scene, the climax of seven centuries of evil accident, maladministration, and Irish woe.

"Famine advances on us with giant strides," wrote an official in the August of 1846. "Towards the end of August," says Mr. T. P. O'Connor, "the calamity began to be universal and its symptoms to be seen. Some of the people rushed into the towns, others wandered along the highroads in the vague hope of food. They plucked turnips from the fields, were glad to live for weeks on a single meal of cabbage a day, feasted on the dead bodies of horses and a.s.ses and dogs. There was a story of a mother eating the limbs of her dead child. Dead bodies were discovered with gra.s.s in their mouths and in their bowels; weeds were sought after with desperate eagerness; seaweed was greedily devoured; so were diseased cattle and diseased potatoes. Despair fell on all hearts and faces. The ties of kindred in some cases failed, parents neglecting their children and children turning out their aged parents. On the other hand, there were stories of parents dying of starvation to save a small store for their children. The workhouses, usually shunned, were overcrowded. In one, three thousand persons sought relief in a single day. They crowded even into the jails. Driven from the workhouses, people began to die by the roadside or alone in their despair within their cabins. Roads and streets were strewn with corpses. One inspector buried one hundred and forty bodies found on the highway. The scenes inside the cabins were even more horrible; husbands lay for a week in the same hovels with the bodies of their wives and children. The decencies of burial were no longer observed. Then came the plague, attacking bodies already weakened by hunger." "A terrible apathy," says an eye-witness, "hangs over the poor of Skibbereen; starvation has destroyed every generous sympathy; despair has made them hardened and insensible, and they sullenly await their doom with indifference and without fear. Death is in every hovel; disease and famine, its dread precursors, have fastened on the young and the old, the strong and the feeble, the mother and the infant; whole families lie together on the damp floor devoured by fever, without a human being to wet their burning lips or raise their languid heads; the husband dies by the side of the wife, and she knows not that he is beyond the reach of earthly suffering; the same rag covers festering remains of mortality and the skeleton forms of the living, who are unconscious of the horrible contiguity; rats devour the corpse, and there is no energy among the living to scare them from their horrid banquet; fathers bury their children without a sigh, and cover them in shallow graves, round which no weeping mother, no sympathizing friends are grouped; one scanty funeral is followed by another and another. Without food or fuel, bed or bedding, whole families are shut up in naked hovels, dropping one by one into the arms of death."[3]

All the devices of government by relief work and in other ways to grapple with the twofold calamity were palliatives and little more. The most effective measure of relief was a vast emigration to the United States and Canada, which also had its horrors. Thousands, already weakened by hunger and suffering, succ.u.mbed to the hardships of the pa.s.sage; another mult.i.tude died on landing. Canada did all she could for the hapless strangers cast upon her sh.o.r.e. But ship-fever followed the fugitives, and graveyards were filled with their dead. It was reckoned that more than two hundred thousand persons died on the voyage or on arrival at their destination. Few Irishmen, however prejudiced against England, will deny that the people of Great Britain and Canada showed unbounded sympathy with Ireland in her affliction, and did their utmost for her relief. O'Connell himself, while he criticised the measures of the government, allowed that individual humanity and charity were abundant; that the n.o.blest generosity was evinced by mult.i.tudes of the English; and that if individual generosity could save a nation, British generosity would do it. He said that he was afraid of not finding words sufficient to express his strong and lively sense of English humanity. To charges of English indifference to Irish suffering, his words are a sufficient answer.

Close upon the famine and pestilence came 1848, the year of European revolution. Young Ireland, the party of force, did not fail to catch the flame. Its organ, _The Nation_, cried, "It is a death struggle now between the murderer and his victim. Strike! Rise, men of Ireland, since Providence so wills it! Rise in your cities and in your fields, on your hills, in your valleys, by your dark mountain pa.s.ses, by your rivers and lakes and ocean-washed sh.o.r.es! Rise as a nation!" _The Irish Felon_, a journal still more advanced, was even more openly for war. But neither in city or field, on mountain or in valley, by pa.s.s or sh.o.r.e, did the people rise at the impa.s.sioned call. Young Ireland found at once that it was but a knot of literary men whose appeals to national feeling, penned as they were with vigour, might be read with sentimental pleasure but would rouse n.o.body to arms. O'Connell's mastery of the people depended on the support of the priesthood, given in a cause originally religious to that zealous champion of the Church who, dying, bequeathed his heart to Rome. Young Ireland was more revolutionary than Catholic, as the priests did not fail to perceive. The desire of political revolution, apart from agrarianism, was not strong enough to rouse the peasantry to arms, though they had learned to hate England as the supposed source of their sufferings. The people, moreover, had hardly recovered from the depression caused by the famine. Young Ireland however raised its flag. Smith O'Brien, with a small party, made a trial trip, appealing to the people of two or three places, but met with no response. A farcical encounter with the police at the house of widow Cormack on the bog of Boulagh, followed by the capture of Smith O'Brien, was the end. The sentence of death pa.s.sed on the leader of the revolt was wisely commuted by the government.

The famine had at least one good effect. It drew attention to the main source of the evil in Ireland, which was agrarian and social, not political and religious. But now it was supposed that the mischief lay in the inability of the landlords, overwhelmed with debt, burdened with family settlements, and crushed by the demands of the Poor Law, to perform their duty to their tenants. To remedy this evil was created the Enc.u.mbered Estates Court, with power to order the sale of enc.u.mbered property on the pet.i.tion of the creditors and give a clear t.i.tle to the purchaser. The policy seemed sound, yet the result was not good. The court cleared out the old proprietors who lacked means to do their duty; it put in their place a new cla.s.s of proprietors who, having been induced to buy the land on pure speculation, felt that they had no duty to do, and who, unlike their predecessors, had no kindly tie to the people. The new owners naturally proceeded to make the most of their purchase; and the way to make the most of their purchase clearly was to sweep out the cotter tenants and throw the land into large holdings. This some of them proceeded to do, and the consequence was a period of evictions almost vying in cruelty with the famine. Whole districts were cleared and relet in large holdings. Cabins were being thrown down in all directions. A thousand of them were levelled in one union within a few months, and the inmates were cast out helpless, half-naked, starving, to go to the union or perish. The cabins were burned that the people might not return to them. The suffering and misery, says a reporter, attendant upon these wholesale evictions, is indescribable. The number of houseless paupers in one union is beyond his calculation. Those evicted crowd neighbouring cabins and villages, and disease is necessarily generated. In April he calculates that six thousand houses have been levelled since November, and he expects five hundred more by July. Wretched hovels had been pulled down, the inmates of which in a helpless state of fever and nakedness were left by the roadside for days. While inspecting a stone-breaking depot, the reporter observes one of the men take off his remnant of a pair of shoes and start across the fields. He follows him with his eye, and at a distance sees the blaze of a fire in the bog. He sends to inquire the cause of it and of the man's running from his work, and is told that the man's house had been levelled the day before, that he had erected a temporary hut, and that while his wife and children were gathering sh.e.l.l-fish on the beach and he was stone-breaking the bailiff fired it.

This incident was one of several which made a deep impression on Peel, who would probably have moved with effect had he remained in power. Pages are filled with pictures of this kind. Civilized Europe could show nothing like it. It was almost enough to break forever the spirit of the nation, certainly to implant the bitterest memories, and here the main cause was misgovernment and bad law.

Relief works were no cure, nor were they in themselves very rational, since the people, unfed, half-clothed, and living in pestilential mud-holes, were really too weak to work. Parliament so far interfered as to pa.s.s an act requiring forty-eight hours' notice of eviction to the relieving officers, prohibiting evictions two hours before sunset or sunrise, and on Christmas Day and Good Friday, and prohibiting the demolition of the house of a tenant about to be evicted. But this rather throws a lurid light on the state of things than effects a cure. The public even might have some reason to complain of the land-owner who recklessly cast upon the poor rates or upon public charity the human enc.u.mbrances of his land.

Apart from overpopulation and its effects, the Irish land-law unquestionably needed reform. The people, struggling with each other for their sole means of subsistence, undertook to pay exorbitant rents, and their improvements, if they made any, became without compensation the property of the landlord. In Ulster, always exceptional, there prevailed a certain measure of tenant-right, something like the English copyhold. In Ireland the demand for tenant-right now began to be loudly heard. An English Radical, Sharman Crawford, brought forward a measure in Parliament, but without effect. For some years nothing effectual was done in the way of reform. Palmerston, to whom power pa.s.sed, though in foreign policy he dallied with revolution, was conservative, especially on social subjects, at home. "Tenant's right is landlord's wrong" was his judgment on the agrarian question. On the Irish side there was no leader of worth or force. Patriotism was in a trance, and the chronicler of the Nationalist party indignantly proclaims that the cause was betrayed by a series of low adventurers who embraced it as the way to preferment. "The most common type of Irish politician," he says in his anguish, "in these days was the man who entered Parliamentary life solely for the purpose of selling himself for place and salary." "This," he adds, "was the golden season, when every Irishman who could sc.r.a.pe as much money together as would pay his election expenses was able after a while to obtain a governorship or some other of the many substantial rewards which English party leaders were able to give to their followers." The const.i.tuencies, it seems, political feeling being at a low ebb, were ready to elect the man who could bring them public pelf. Of the adventurers, the worst was Sadleir, who, with his set, attempted to intrigue with the Peelites, and who, being a financial swindler as well as a political schemer, became bankrupt and committed suicide. So the cause of the Three F's--Fixity of tenure, Free sale, and Fair rents--made no way. English Radicals in Parliament stood all the time ready to move with the Irish on this question or for Disestablishment; but the Irish members were taken up with intriguing for places for themselves, for appointments of the sons of their const.i.tuents to clerkships in Somerset House, or for a government subsidy to the Galway Packet contract. Irish writers are bound to remember that Englishmen were not responsible for the choice or character of Irish members. They are bound also to remember the impression which the members chosen by the Irish could not fail to make on English minds. The British Parliament could not justly be said to be "deaf, blind, and insolently ignorant," though it was not on the right track. It might be excused for being a little deaf and blind to the appeals of "a motley gang of as disreputable and needy adventurers as ever trafficked in the blood and tears of a nation."

From the time of the union to this time there had been, and long after this time continued to be, a series of coercion acts, rendered necessary by agrarian outrage. There were thirty-two enactments of this kind between the union and 1844. It would have been almost better, had it been possible, frankly to suspend the const.i.tution while the true remedy was being applied.

Liberal leadership now devolved from Palmerston on Gladstone, thus bringing on the political field a new and immensely powerful motive power.

Gladstone was in opposition. In his mind a natural, and under the party system legitimate, desire of recovering power for his party and himself perhaps mingled with a sincere though tardily formed conviction of the injustice of such an inst.i.tution as the State Church of a small minority in Ireland. It was unfortunate that he, like Peel and Wellington, gave fear of Irish violence as a motive for doing justice. After some premonitory hints, he, in former days the great champion of state religion, declared for disestablishment. His case was overwhelmingly strong. Faint and feeble were the arguments on the other side. The inst.i.tution was an anachronism, an anomaly, and a scandal. Its past had been miserable. It had made no converts; it had made many rebels. By its tests and its intolerance it had divided the Protestant interest, sending many a Presbyterian across the sea to fight for the American Revolution.

Its ministry had been jobbed, its character defiled, by unscrupulous politicians. Of late, however, it had been greatly reforming itself, and it had got rid of its t.i.the-proctors by the commutation of t.i.thes. Its clergy generally were now on friendly terms with the people. Its last hour was by far its best. Vested interests were respected in the change, and the unblest establishment glided quietly and safely into its new and happier life as a purely spiritual church. Through the Commons the measure pa.s.sed with ease; through the Lords, like other great measures of change, it was forced by fear.

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 pa.s.sed 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 Enc.u.mbered 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 ca.n.a.ls, 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 n.o.bly hostile to slavery. His kinsmen and admirers on the other side of the Atlantic were, on the contrary, vehement supporters of slavery, and jealous a.s.sertors 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 pa.s.sage of those whom they had left behind. It has been reckoned that the Irish have expended twenty millions sterling in this way. With a pa.s.sionate love of Ireland the American Irish combined a still more pa.s.sionate 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 a.s.sociations 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 a.s.sa.s.sins. The National League, the form which, in Ireland, political combined with agrarian rebellion a.s.sumed, 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 Phoenix Park. Mr. W. E. Forster, distinguished by his humane efforts at the time of the famine, was marked for a.s.sa.s.sination. 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 a.s.sa.s.sination 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 pa.s.sions 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. b.u.t.t, 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 dispa.s.sionately the natural apt.i.tudes of the country, and to satisfy themselves whether it was capable of supporting the population which disastrous events and sinister influences had acc.u.mulated 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 a.s.sociates 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 a.s.serted its dignity. But it was split into factions, upon the balance of which Parnell and Biggar were able to play. Gladstone succ.u.mbed so far as by an equivocal agreement, nicknamed the Kilmainham Treaty, to release Parnell and his a.s.sociates 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 pa.s.sed 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 mult.i.tude 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 ma.s.ses against the cla.s.ses, 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 inst.i.tution with which it was sacrilege to interfere.

The comparison of the union in criminality to the ma.s.sacre of St.