THE STATE OF IRELAND.
THE state of Ireland excites as much alarm among Liberals as it does among Tories,—perhaps, indeed, rather more, for while the Tories feel a certain distinct elation, as Lord Salisbury's speech at the Colston dinner showed, at what they think the failure of the Liberal prescriptions for curing Irish disaffection, the Liberals feel that if these remedies had really failed, Liberalism itself would have in some degree failed with them. And in that view we heartily concur. If the Irish Land Act renders it, not more easy, but more difficult than before to rule Ireland justly, the Liberal creed, as well as the Liberal party, will suffer, and suffer justly, in the eyes of practical men, by the collapse. But the truth is that the very circumstance which has caused some of our greatest difficulties in doing justice to Ireland,—the cir- cumstance that we have to carry with us a. double popular opinion, both British and Irish, in all that we do,,--also dis- turbs our judgment of the result, and makes us unduly im- patient for fruits which it is not in the least. reasonable to expect so soon. Politicians are all alive—a great deal too much alive—to the question how to justify to the English and Scotch constituencies what has been done. As. Ireland does not at once begin to pay its just rent, as outrages go on, and multiply with the dark days, as the Sub-Com- missions get attacked on all sides,—on this side by the tenants for unjustly leaning to the landlords, on that side by the landlords for confiscating their property to their tenants, —those who are looking chiefly at. the impression made on British constituencies fall into an impatient. despair, and begin to lose faith in the policy of justice. It is not the first time that such despair has been felt. The cry that " All things continue as they were from the beginning of Creation" has been raised in greater crises than this, when a seed of great promise had been sown, and no sign even of the blade could be traced where it was most anxiously expected. Men are always in too great a hurry for the harvest; and forget how liberal Providence is in the use—or what we often think the waste—of time, for ripening all that is most fruitful. No doubt, many of us had hoped. that the rent would be paid, and that the outrages would cease, as soon as the tenant-farmers began to look for justice. But when a large class had been encouraged to withhold rent, and half promised that they should pay no rent again,.except the rent of the wild land, it-is hardly likely that, pending the ultimate decisions of the Land Courts, and pending the question as to what would be done to enforce the payment of just rent when the just rent had been fixed, the farmers would anticipate the result by giving up, as they would tidbit very prematurely, the attitude of injured beings waiting for justice. Delay in the
payment of rent after such a crisis was obviously to be ex- pected, Then, as to the outrages, it is not supposed by any well-informed person that the scoundrels who commit the outrages are to any considerable extent tenant-farmers at all, even of the poorest class. They are mostly, no doubt, labourers and idle persons, who have found the terrorising work suit them and pay them better than industry of any kind ; and till you cut off the source from which their supplies come, you will not cut off their agency of evil. In the case of the tithe war, the outrages continued for some time after the cause of the grievance had been removed ; and still more is it likely to be so now, when not only the chief disturb- ing element, the money raised to foment disturbance, is present, but when the excitement caused by the revision of rents all over Ireland stimulates in the minds of all classes that social effervescence which, in the lowest class, takes the form of agrarian outrage. Not till the rents are for the most part settled, and the peasantry feel the steady pressure of fairer and reasonable contracts, and find the Administration prepared to enforce their performance of those contracts, can we hope to reap the advantages of acting justly to a people who sometimes almost seem to prefer oven a de- fect of justice to that which neither exceeds nor falls short of exact equity. Till the popular fermentation is over, we shall not see what the result on the political mind of Ireland has been. And in our belief, the best thing that the Government can do in Ireland would be to get through the work to be done as thoroughly, efficiently, and as soberly as possible,—to keep as firm a hold as possible on the agents of disorder, to strengthen the law, if they must, but to strengthen it perma- nently,—say, by doing away with juries in the class of cases in which juries will not be guided by evidence, but not by the passing of any more exceptional or unconstitutional measures, and to reach as soon as possible the stage where the Irish farmers will learn that they cannot escape paying the new and fair rents, unless they are prepared to forfeit their tenancy, with its generally increased value and great additional security.
For this purpose, there is, at least, one step for which we think the Government would do well to provide at once,—we mean the hearing of as many of the typical appeals by the Land Commission itself, as may be needful either, on the one hand, to satisfy the tenant-farmers that their new hopes are to be realised, or, on the other hand, to prevent those hopes from becoming too confident before they are dashed to the ground. We are told that some of the landlords are crying out that the Sub-Commissioners are lowering rents against all the equities of the case ; while the tenant-farmers, on the other hand, in these very districts, are complaining bitterly that they have had nothing like justice. We do not say which of these assertions is true, or whether either of them is true. But we do say that it is most undesirable for the Irish tenant-farmer, in his present condition of mind, to be kept in uncertainty whether the Court of Appeal will increase or reduce his rent, or will sustain the judgment of the lower tribunal. No change for the better can be expected in Ireland, till the electric condition of the atmosphere subsides. And the electric condition will not subside while there is so much at issue, both administratively and legislatively. The first re- quisite for quiet is a re-establishment of order on the new basis. And for that purpose, nothing is more needful than the final judgment of the highest tribunal on all typical cases, and also the steady action of the lawin enforcing the revised contracts against both parties. The Land Court should be urged to give a hear- ing to the more important cases of appeal with as little delay as possible. And the Administration should begin as soon as may be to enforce the payment of rent, where the amount of the rent is undisputed, so that the Irish farmer may give up his dreams of both having his cake and eating it,—getting from the landlord all that it would be fair that the landlord should grant to a good tenant, and then refusing all that a good tenant gives to his landlord. We entirely decline to believe that the Irish tenant-farmer is prepared to forfeit all that he has gained under the Land Act, in the vain hope of placing Mr. Parnell at the head of an Irish Republic which might confiscate the whole land of Ireland to the peasantry.
But in the meantime, the English and Scotch constituencies must not fret because outrages do not cease and rents do not come in. If Rome was not built in a day, still less could Ireland be tranquillised in a day. It is the last country in the world to settle down quickly after a great social up- heaval such as has been going on there recently. It may well be that the Coercion Act does not work well. We never liked exceptional and unconstitutional powers of this kind, aid
always preferred a strengthening of the permanent law against agrarian outrage ; for Ireland never really gets the good of an Act which is known to be temporary, and to stand in need of periodic renewal ; or rather, if it does get the good of it, it gets a disproportionate set-off of ill, too. Every great Parliamentary struggle on such a measure is a reinocula- tion of disease ; and every approach of the period when such an Act expires is a new source of danger. We sincerely hope that if the Government decide to take fresh powers, they will ask for permanent modifications of the criminal law, and not for short-lived arbitrary powers ; that they will see the neces- sity of putting an end to these prostrating Parliamentary con- flicts, and to these mischievous alternations of loss of power and of excessive accumulation of power at the seat of Govern- ment. After justice, steadiness and constancy are the two great needs for Ireland ; and till we can secure them, we shall never know what a just policy has effected. Above all, let us not be impatient. Let us trust to the operation of principles which never grow old, and not chafe because the mischief which we were hundreds of years in doing, cannot be undone even in a generation.
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