TOPICS OF THE DAY.
MR. GLADSTONE'S AIM.
IN the short but very important speech which Mr. Glad- stone made to the Liberal deputation at Knowsley on Thursday, he succeeded in defining, as well as justifying, the real aim of his Irish policy—the vindication of true liberty in Ireland—with singularly impressive effect. As the object of the Land Act was to protect the equitable rights which the tenants had gained in the soil, and by protecting these rights to protect all just landlords against the social consequences of the odium due to the unjust acts of other members of their own class, so the object of the Coercion Acts, and especially of the use recently made of these Acts, was to protect the free right of all Irishmen to take full advantage of the Land Act, without risk from the de- spotic intervention of the Land League. Hateful as coercion is, especially to a Liberal Government, it is necessary to coerce a few, when they threaten to deprive the many of their most valuable privileges ; and undoubtedly, the Land Court could never have been opened with any promise of popular usefulness to Ireland, in the presence of a powerful organisation avowing its intention either to wrest all its decisions to one unjust result, or to make it a dead-letter in the country. The usefulness of the Land Court depended, firstly, on its authority and the respect it might gain for itself in the country; and secondly, on the free resort to it of all Irishmen who might think them- selves unjustly treated by their landlords. With such an association as the Land League wielding something like the old ecclesiastical powers of interdict and excommunication, and declaring its intention to use these powers for the purpose of either reducing all Irish rent to the rent of wild land, or of extinguishing the Court -Which refused to sanction such an act of plunder, neither would the authority of the Land Court have been an appreciable quantity, nor would any general resort to it by the timid Irish peasantry have been possible. The imprisonment of the leaders of the Land League tyranny, and the subsequent suppression of the association itself, so soon as its illegal object was avowed, have sustained the authority of the Court, and restored liberty of action to thousands of Irishmen, for every single Irishman placed under arrest. That was the very aim of Mr. Gladstone's Government, in using the arbitrary powers conferred on them by Parliament; and arbitrary as these powers are, they are exerted, not for the extension, but for the suppression of tyranny, for the protection of the Court which Parliament had set up, and for securing to every peasant who desired it free access to that Court, without personal or moral risk to himself from the enmity of the Land League. And Mr. Gladstone tells us facts which justify his assertion that the action of the Government has secured to the Irish farmers the liberty to avail themselves freely of the new law. More than 2,500 applications to the Court have already been made. An urgent desire expressed that the first sitting of the Court shall be so far prolonged as to enable a very much larger number of applicants to commence pro- ceedings in it on its _first sitting—which is necessary, in many cases, to secure rights that would otherwise expire—has been acceded to by the Commissioners. And thirty thousand forms of notice have been demanded, and distributed by the Court. In Mayo a private printing-press has been put at work, to help the small farmers there to obtain the forms of notice requisite; and everything tends to show that the Irish farmers will avail themselves freely of the new law, which it is certain that they could not have done, had the social tyranny of the Land League been allowed to continue. So painfully, indeed, was that tyranny felt, that for the first time we hear of an agrarian murder directed, not against a landlord, but against an active member of the Land League, who had denounced some of his brother-farmers for paying their rent. Nothing could show more powerfully how oppressive the intimidation of the Land League had been, than the murder of an advocate of no- rent for denouncing those who desire to pay it. The meet- ing at Wicklow, at which both farmers and landlords attended to denounce the practice of boycotting, and to set on foot a system of co-operation for mutual defence against the tyranny of the League, is another evidence that the action of the Govern- ment has really had the effect which Mr. Gladstone declared to have been the aim of the recent arrests,—namely, the restoration of liberty to the friends of law, The Prime Minister's remark that if forkt repression of the Land League's tyranny had been juatily ,c-- s Mr. Lowthca: and AD? Tnries assert—
before the remedy for the grievances of the Irish farmers had been applied, it is infinitely more instead of less justifiable now that the remedy of Parliament has come into actual operation, is simply unanswerable. Of course, Liberals do and must feel a certain amount of legitimate hesitation in stopping up the only vent which popular grievances can find for them- selves, even though that vent results in moral lawlessness before a remedy is devised. But when that remedy has been devised, there can be no such scruple in putting down the lawlessness which not only is mischievous in itself, but even more mischievous as interfering with the remedy and aggravating the disease. Liberty, not tyranny, is the aim of Mr. Gladstone in Ireland ; and the evidence that he is succeed- ing in his aim, is the new life which is being thrown every day into the application of legal remedies to the old abuses, as well as into those efforts to promote a hearty co-operation between the recently estranged classes of which the important Wicklow meeting is the best proof. When a landlord pro- mises that so long as a tenant is boycotted, he will not demand from him a shilling of rent, we may fairly expect the tenants to pay their rent, even though threats of boycotting are still numerous. Liberty in Ireland may, we trust, be soon sufficiently re-established, to make it safe to set even so dangerous a foe of liberty as Mr. Parnell at liberty himself.
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