TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE HOUSE OF LORDS AND IRELAND.
THE House of Lords, which, for many purposes, is a great Trades-union of landowners, have decided, by an immense majority, a majority of between five and six to one, that the Government shall not be perinitted to take steps for suspending the eviction of even the most deserving of Irish tenants by the least deserving of Irish landlords during a season of extreme dis- tress, even though it is certain that some of the latter class are availing themselves of the pinch of the season to evict, with- out compensation,—that is, on much better terms for themselves than they could have evicted in ordinary years,—tenants who till the famine came had paid their rents punctually and well. In other words, one branch of the Legislature which has been so eager to protect landlords that it has never hesitated about any suspension of personal liberty suggested by the Government of the day as a consequence of agrarian crime, declines with contempt to listen to a pro- posal made also by the Government of the day for securing to the Irish peasant that exemption from unjust evic- tion which the Act of 1870 intended to confer on him, and in ordinary seasons did confer on him. This is not an event of good omen for the influence of the National Legislature in Ireland. And it is made worse by the fact that the resistance was led by a great Whig landlord, whose estate in Kerry is one of those of the severe administration of which, both in former times and at present, there have been the bitterest complaints, —complaints certainly well-founded thirty years ago, what- ever they may be now. The whole transaction looks wonder- fully like the action not of a dispassionate Legislature, but of a passionate trades-union. And yet the Government is bound to uphold the law as it is left by the decision of this passionate trades-union. Of course, the trades-union on the other side, the trades-union of cottier tenants known as the Land League, will make all the use they can of this blow struck by the trades-union of landlords at the Govern- ment, and will do whatever is in their power—and unfortu- nately, only too much is in their power—to make Ireland ungovernable. It is no pleasant position for an Administration to be placed in, to have to wield the whole force of the Executive for carrying out a law which they, in their places in Parliament, have declared to involve serious injustice ;—to become the instruments of grasping landlords for the clearing of estates which at no other time and under no other circum- stances they could have cleared with any profit to themselves. What is required of the Government is to inflict grave injustice—which they admit to be injustice—on the poor with one hand, and to punish the poor man who rebels against it with the other. What could the House of Lords have required of the Administration better adapted to weaken the moral authority of the Crown in Ireland, and to deepen that Irish horror of the Union with Great Britain of which we English so bitterly complain ?
But the Bill for saving the respectable Irish cottiers from a grievous injustice is not only rejected, but rejected with an accent of contumely of which there is hardly any previous example. Lord Beaconsfield took pains to insist that if you appeal to the nobler feelings of the Irish for seditious pur- poses, you do not do much damage, for with the Irish the nobler feelings have not any very durable life ; but this Bill, he said, appealing, as it did,—for so Lord Lansdowne had " well expressed " it,—to the " sordid instincts" of the people, would on that very account involve very much more permanent and dangerous consequences. It is difficult to believe that the leader of any party would launch such an insult as this at a whole nation deliberately and with full intention ; and yet it is almost impossible to suppose that the following passage, coming from so acute a statesman as Lord Beaconsfield, could have been uttered without deliberation and the fullest intention. After describing previous agitations which were " varnished over " by "generous feeling," he went on to say :—" If this agitation is fostered by the Government, it is one which will not easily terminate, because it is an agi- tation addressed to. the most sordid part of the character of the Irish people ; not to the romantic imagination, but as the noble Marquis who addressed us with so much power [the Marquis of Lansdowne] so well expressed it, to the sordid in- stincts of the people. An agitation conducted by men who have been taught to believe that the property of others ought to belong to them, and that if they exert themselves, must belong to them,—an agitation conducted in such a spirit and for such a result, is one which her Majesty's Government will find more difficulty in dealing with, than the agitations of previous years." Might not the Irish retort that those who- speak so confidently of their sordid instincts as the most serious. and dangerous basis for agitation, can speak only from self- knowledge, since, indeed, there is no other field in which you can adequately measure the comparative strength of sordid and generous instincts? And certainly, the unanimity with which. the House of Lords reject a measure the moment it appears to threaten any iota of the rights of landowners, does look a good deal like convincing testimony to the perverse strength of sordid instincts. Irishmen when thus taunted with the deep and tena- cious roots of the sordid element in their character, will of course, reply that 'like sees like,'—that it is the sordid fears of the House of Lords which make them tremble before the sordid hopes of Irish cottiers. Assuredly it will not lighten the task of keep- ing order in Ireland, that the leader of the majority in the House of Lords has not only rejected this measure of bare jus- tice to a certain class of the small tenants, but has coupled that rejection with a general accusation against the Irish of the dangerous tenacity of the sordid side of their character.
We are not surprised, of course, at the opinion of the House of Lords. We are quite aware that the Bill is one based ors a balance of considerations, of which those which tell in its' favour, though they are the stronger and the more important for large-minded and generous statesmen, are yet to be set off against others of a really weighty character, which are sure to appear to many the more serious, because the more in keeping- with legislative precedent, of the two. What we are surprised at is not that the House of Lords is so unanimous in condemn- ing the Bill, but that it is so unanimous in hazarding the peace of Ireland by openly overruling the Government and the. House of Commons. What it had to consider was not the- wisdom or want of wisdom in the measure itself, but the wisdom or want of wisdom in rejecting it when the House of Commons and the Government were absolutely committed to it_ The two questions, as we pointed out last week, are entirely dif- ferent ones, and especially are they different when the matter at issue is one affecting the special class of which the House of Lords is made up. They are the Judges in their own. suit, and, as Lord Derby insisted, it is not a very wise thing for a Bench of Judges, who cannot by any possibility be any- thing but profoundly self-interested, to seize the chance of delivering judgment in their own suit, against the judgment of a fairly elected body representing the whole community. This, however, is what the House of Lords have done, and done with a unanimity that is almost magnificent in its insouciance. And the. moral of the result, as suggested by Lord Beaconsfield, is this, —that when sordid fears conspire to crush sordid hopes, then, indeed, we see unanimity on both sides such as political life does not often show. The fifty-one Peers who endeavoured' to mediate between the Landowners and the Land League cannot make much fight against either host. But that a stronger sense of justice and a milder display of selfish fear would have had a better chance against the force of selfish greed, the future is but too likely to prove.
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