or even in some Ulster districts, have become identified with the cause of order; have forgotten the lawlessness of 1880-81; are at heart grateful for the legislation enacted for the redress of their grievances; have an active sympathy with their existing rulers; above all, are free from the vague discontent and the morbid dwelling on an unhappy past which characterize the mass of the Celtic peasantry. But the Land League, it may be fairly said, has lost the tremendous and evil influence it possessed over those unstable millions; its emissaries and agents are no longer able to place whole counties under a rule of savagery enforced by murder, burnings, and outrages of the kind; its manifesto against the payment of rent has been repudiated by its own authors; and, notwithstanding its orators' efforts, the meetings it still holds are but sorry counterparts of the assemblages of 1879-80, huge multitudes throbbing with vehement passion. In Ireland, in a word, a great class-the most important by far in the nation-that of the occupiers and tillers of the soil, is comparatively in a state of rest, having been lately almost stirred to frenzy in Connaught, Munster, and large tracts of Leinster; it has ceased to openly defy the law, to disregard the obligation of contracts, to refuse the payment of just debts; and though there are many signs that it might again respond very generally to the call of its late leaders, it is now, to all outward seeming, quiescent. The calm which prevailed in 1884 throughout, we may say, every part of Ireland, in the vast circle of her landed relations, may be in a great measure transient; but it is very different from the terrific storm which shook them to pieces in 1880-81.

Auspicious, however, as may be these symptoms, Ireland remains in a state which thoughtful persons must regard with alarm and serious misgivings. The elements of disaffection in that distempered frame have been more formidable at other periods; but at no time within living memory, if we except 1880-82, have they been so active and strongly combined. The Land League, taking the name of 'National,' has, as we have said, converted its attacks on property into antagonism to British rule in the island; and a conspiracy, carefully planned and organized, exists throughout the South and in parts of Ulster, which has been fitly described as veiled rebellion. The avowed objects of this combination are to render the existing system of Irish Government unpopular, odious, and at last impossible; to overthrow the institutions and classes through which Ireland is ruled and administered; and, finally, to make the country an independent state, freed virtually from

Discontent and Disloyalty.

3

the control of England. The Nationalist' leaders do not, perhaps, expect to attain completely these extreme ends; but their persistent efforts have not been fruitless; they undoubtedly command large popular sympathy, and they successfully contrive to keep the country in a state of agitation and unrest, apparent under the superficial calm for the moment pervading the landed classes. For several sessions legislation for Ireland has been baffled and marred by modes of obstruction unknown before in the annals of Parliament; the conduct and acts of the Irish Executive have been arraigned with unscrupulous malice, and nothing has been left undone to hold up persons entrusted with power and office in Ireland, to the hatred and scorn of the mass of the people. At the same time separation from England has been loudly advocated under the name of 'Home Rule;' and even the more moderate men of the 'Irish Party' declare that nothing will content 'Ireland' but a parliament given absolute control over every department of Irish affairs, and an Executive wholly subject to it. It would be idle, too, to deny that the movement has, apparently, the support of a large majority of the Irish race in three-fourths of the island, not to speak of the millions of the same people in the United States and our own colonies. At this very moment a Lord Lieutenant, of singularly just and humane nature, cannot ride through Dublin without an armed escort; many of the official classes in Ireland can perform their daily duties only under the protection of police and detectives; and numbers of country gentlemen have tacitly ceased to act as jurors or

justices of the peace. The popular press, too, every day and week pours out rabid and wild invectives against 'the Castle' and its 'vile dependents; and sentiments of the kind are often expressed in the local centres of Irish opinion, boards of guardians, corporate bodies, and the like. The next House of Commons, we should add, will contain, almost certainly, nearly eighty members pledged to follow the lead of Mr. Parnell, to oppose alien' government, and to demand 'Home Rule;' and meantime the island south of the Boyne remains in a mood in which disloyalty and a sullen dislike of the ruling classes mingle with aspirations for some unknown change, and with vain hopes of an impossible future.

The immediate causes of this state of affairs are evident to impartial observers. The condition of Ireland in 1875-76, though showing signs of internal trouble, was certainly one of more content than had been seen since the Great Famine; how has it happened, then, that the country has passed through

a revolution since that quiet period, and is still vexed with all kinds of disorder? The answer is to be found in a calm survey of the circumstances which have occurred since that time and of the different influences which, for many years, have been operating on the mass of the Irish people. The comparative prosperity enjoyed by Ireland from 1844 to 1877 was suddenly interrupted in 1878-79 by two seasons of bad harvests; and the failure of agriculture, nearly its sole industry, had disastrous results for the whole community, and especially for its humbler orders. It was found impossible to pay rents, which had been rising for a considerable time or to discharge debts, which had grown apace under a system of general and easy credit; and hundreds of thousands of the peasant class, relatively well off a few months before, were rapidily plunged in distress and want. Society soon began to be shaken by a universal calling in of claims: though much less frequent then in former days, the process of eviction, with its frightful hardships, was carried out with no little severity; and the appalling memories of 1846-47, exaggerated, too, by fancy and terror, were suddenly brought home to the hearts of millions. A knot of able men, who had been conspiring in America against our rule in Ireland, saw their opportunity in this position of affairs; and the Land League, founded by Michael Davitt, and for a time subsidized and upheld only by Fenian emissaries from the United States, was ultimately joined by Mr. Parnell and by his followers of the Irish Party.' The paramount object of this combination was to overthrow the power of England in Ireland; but to effect this purpose it made its first attack on the proprietors of land as the most apparent and vulnerable instruments of that authority, and in the circumstances of the time, it found willing allies in masses of peasants reduced to poverty, and terrified at the prospect before them. The movement, as is well known, acquired portentous strength in a few months; by 1881 it had all but detached the tillers of the soil in the southern provinces from law, order, and landlord allegiance; it had gathered into its sphere the scattered elements of discontent, unrest, and disorder, ever prevalent in the Irish community; and in whole districts it had practically set up a government of terror, rapine, and outrage, enforced by barbarous and inhuman mandates, in the place of the lawful government of the Queen. The movement, too, though in this phase agrarian, and chiefly directed against Irish property, retained throughout its original character; it was a conspiracy against British rule in Ireland, a league of rebellion against our supremacy,

Causes of the Agrarian Outbreak of 1880-81.

5

only incidentally, and as an affair of tactics, pursuing secondary and inferior objects.

The peasant rising of 1880-81, and the extraordinary success of the Land League, were thus primarily due to widespread distress. 'Revolutions,' however, said the Greek historian, 'come by little, but through great causes;' and we must look below the surface of things to account for the scenes we have lately witnessed. At no period, we may say for centuries, has the island been free from agrarian disorder, and the terrible disturbance of the last few years was but the explosion of mischievous elements seated in the framework of Irish society. Though, notwithstanding all that has been said, the general and appalling poverty which, forty years ago, was the curse of the country, is infinitely less than it was formerly, still the labourers and humbler tillers of the soil have never emerged from a state of distress; and at least one-third of the so-called Irish farmers are mere cottiers, usually on the verge of want. These have ever been, and will long remain, a dangerous class in the Irish community; the perpetrators of agrarian crime have at all times been obtained from them; they gave the Land League a host of recruits; and in every popular movement they have supplied material of formidable power to unscrupulous demagogues. Again, the system of Irish land tenure was so framed as to secure landlords complete ascendency over their tenants, to draw marked and all but impassable lines of distinction between the two classes, and to provoke general and just discontent among the mass of the occupiers of the soil. A long series of unhappy events had, in the South, and in parts of Ulster, made landlords almost a dominant caste, divided in sympathy from their dependents; and the tenant farmers lived under a scheme of law which, though greatly improved since 1870, still exposed them to extortionate rents, enabled their superiors to destroy rights they had-morally, at least-acquired in the land, and gave them no assurance that they could call the legitimate fruits of their toil their own. Sincere good-will, mutual kindly feeling, and security for the fair claims of the tenant, could not exist in this state of affairs; and though it is utterly untrue that Irish landlords abused, very generally, their powers as a class-at least during the present generation-still instances of oppression were not unfrequent; and it was not in human nature that the Irish tenant should feel content with his lot in life. Two circumstances, besides, had in the meantime tended to make landed relations unfriendly, and to aggravate the sense of subjection and wrong which this land system

spread throughout the peasantry. During the disastrous period of 1846-50 the occupiers of the soil were driven from their homes in thousands, with little thought of mercy; the wrongs certainly often done in those days, have been never forgiven by the new Ireland formed by these exiles beyond the Atlantic; and an intense hostility to Irish landlords, diffused through millions of the Irish race, has been the natural, if the unfortunate, consequence. Simultaneously, too, the steady growth of education and knowledge in Ireland had made the tenant farmers more alive than formerly to what was unjust in their social position; and even the progress in material comfort which raised them out of the serfdom of the past, co-operated in the same direction. If we put all these considerations together, and recollect, besides, that bitter memories of repeated conquests and confiscations of the land, and of penal laws which proscribed his faith, had never been forgotten by the Irish peasant, we can understand how wide was the gulf which separated the landlord classes of Ireland; how agrarian crime and troubles of the kind were the natural growth of these relations; and how, in the circumstances of 1879-80, a rebellious conspiracy proved the means of lifting up, so to speak, from the soil the mass of peasant discontent in the South, and arraying it against authority and law.

The agrarian war, however, of 1880-81 has, as we have said, very nearly ceased; and the Land League has lost its supreme influence. This change is due, in the first instance certainly, to the wise measures for repressing outrage proposed and admirably enforced by the Government after the execrable murders in Phoenix Park. We can understand how a Liberal Ministry long hesitated to demand a law which has, doubtless, removed for the general good constitutional safeguards for the maintenance of liberty, and for the administration of justice; and as Liberals ourselves we may express regret that legislation of the kind was necessary. But the punishment of crime, the securing order, and the preservation of life and property, are the first duties of a civilized state; and if we recollect what was the state of Ireland from 1880 to 1882, we rejoice that Parliament gave the Executive the means of vindicating its just authority, and of putting an end to a reign of terror. Nor are we moved, in the least, by the argument that ultimately the agrarian disorders of Ireland may be ascribed to past wrongs and miseries; statesmen must put aside considerations like these when it had become a question of defending society against lawless and brutal