About Ireland written by E. Lynn Linton
E >>
E. Lynn Linton >> About Ireland
ABOUT IRELAND
BY
_E. LYNN LINTON._
LONDON:
METHUEN & CO.,
18, BURY STREET, W.C.
1890.
EXPLANATORY.
I am conscious that I ought to make some kind of apology for rushing
into print on a subject which I do not half know. But I do know just a
little more than I did when I was an ardent Home Ruler, influenced by
the seductive charm of sentiment and abstract principle only; and I
think that perhaps the process by which my own blindness has been
couched may help to clear the vision of others who see as I did. All
of us lay-folk are obliged to follow the leaders of those schools in
politics, science, or religion, to which our temperament and mental
idiosyncracies affiliate us. Life is not long enough for us to examine
from the beginning upwards all the questions in which we are
interested; and it is only by chance that we find ourselves set face
to face with the first principles and elemental facts of a cause to
which, perhaps, as blind and believing followers of our leaders, we
have committed ourselves with the ardour of conviction and the
intemperance of ignorance. In this matter of Ireland I believed in the
accusations of brutality, injustice, and general insolence of tyranny
from modern landlords to existing tenants, so constantly made by the
Home Rulers and their organs; and, shocking though the undeniable
crimes committed by the Campaigners were, they seemed to me the tragic
results of that kind of despair which seizes on men who, goaded to
madness by oppression, are reduced to masked murder as their sole
means of defence--and as, after all, but a sadly natural retaliation.
I knew nothing really of Lord Ashbourne's Act; and what I thought I
knew was, that it was more a blind than honest legislation, and did no
vital good. I thought that Home Rule would set all things straight,
and that the National Sentiment was one which ought to find practical
expression. I rejoiced over every election that took away one seat
from the Unionists and added another vote to the Home Rulers; and I
shut my eyes to the dismemberment of our glorious Empire and the
certainty of civil war in Ireland, should the Home Rule demanded by
the Parnellites and advocated by the Gladstonians become an
accomplished fact. In a word I committed the mistakes inevitable to
all who take feeling and conviction rather than fact and knowledge for
their guides.
Then I went to Ireland; and the scales fell from my eyes. I saw for
myself; heard facts I had never known before; and was consequently
enlightened as to the true meaning of the agitation and the real
condition of the people in their relation to politics, their
landlords, and the Plan of Campaign.
The outcome of this visit was two papers which were written for the
_New Review_--with the editor of whom, however, I stood somewhat in
the position of Balaam with Balak, when, called on to curse the
Israelites, he was forced by a superior power to bless them. So I with
the Unionists. The first paper was sent and passed, but it was delayed
by editorial difficulties through the critical months of the
bye-elections. When published in the December number, owing to the
exigencies of space, the backbone--namely the extracts from the Land
Acts, now included in this re-publication--was taken out of it, and my
own unsupported statements alone were left. I was sorry for this, as
it cut the ground from under my feet and left me in the position of
one of those mere impressionists who have already sufficiently
darkened counsel and obscured the truth of things. As the same
editorial difficulties and exigencies of space would doubtless delay
the second paper, like the first, I resolved, by the courteous
permission of the editor, to enlarge and publish both in a pamphlet
for which I alone should be responsible, and which would bind no
editor to even the semblance of endorsement.
I, only half-enlightened, write, as has been said, for the wholly
blind and ignorantly ardent who, as I did, accept sentiment for fact
and feeling for demonstration; who do not look at the solid legal
basis on which the present Government is dealing with the Irish
question; who believe all that the Home Rulers say, and nothing that
the Unionists demonstrate. I want them to study the plain and
indisputable facts of legislation as I have done, when I think they
must come to the same conclusions as those which have forced
themselves on my own mind--namely, that the Home Rule desired by the
Parnellites is not only a delusive impossibility, but is also high
treason against the integrity of the Empire, and would be a base
surrender of our obligations to the Irish Loyalists; that, whatever
the landlords were, they are now more sinned against than sinning;
and that in the orderly operation of the Land Acts now in force, with
the stern repression of outrages[A] and punishment of crimes, for
which peaceable folk are so largely indebted to Mr. Balfour, lies the
true pacification of this distressed and troubled country.
E. LYNN LINTON.
ABOUT IRELAND.
I.
Nothing dies so hard as prejudice, unless it be sentiment. Indeed,
prejudice and sentiment are but different manifestations of the same
principle by which men pronounce on things according to individual
feeling, independent of facts and free from the restraint of positive
knowledge. And on nothing in modern times has so much sentiment been
lavished as on the Irish question; nowhere has so much passionately
generous, but at the same time so much absolutely ignorant,
partisanship been displayed as by English sympathisers with the Irish
peasant. This is scarcely to be wondered at. The picture of a gallant
nation ground under the heel of an iron despotism--of an industrious
and virtuous peasantry rackrented, despoiled, brutalised, and scarce
able to live by their labour that they may supply the vicious wants of
oppressive landlords--of unarmed men, together with women and little
children, ruthlessly bludgeoned by a brutal police, or shot by a
bloodthirsty soldiery for no greater offence than verbal protests
against illegal evictions--of a handful of ardent patriots ready to
undergo imprisonment and contumely in their struggle against one of
the strongest nations in the world for only so much political freedom
as is granted to-day by despots themselves--such a picture as this is
calculated to excite the sympathies of all generous souls. And it has
done so in England, where "Home Rule" and "Justice to Ireland" have
become the rallying cries of one section of the Liberal party, to the
disruption and political suicide of the whole body; and where the less
knowledge imported into the question the more fervid the advocacy and
the louder the demand.
It is worth while to state quite quietly and quite plainly how things
stand at this present moment. There is no need for hysterics on the
one side or the other; and to amend one's views by the testimony of
facts is not a dishonest turning of one's coat--if confession of that
amendment is a little like the white sheet and lighted taper of a
penitent. Things are, or they are not. If they are, as will be set
down, the inference is plain to anyone not hopelessly blinded by
preconceived prejudice. If they are not, let them be authoritatively
contradicted on the basis of fact, not sentiment--demonstration, not
assertion. In any case it is a gain to obtain material for a truer
judgment than heretofore, and thus to be rid of certain mental films
by which colours are blurred and perspective is distorted.
No one wishes to palliate the crimes of which England has been guilty
in Ireland. Her hand has been heavy, her whip one of braided
scorpions, her rule emphatically of blood and iron. But all this is of
the past, and the pendulum, not only of public feeling but of legal
enactment, threatens to swing too far on the other side. What has been
done cannot be undone, but it will not be repeated. We shall never
send over another Cromwell nor yet another Castlereagh; and there is
as little good to be got from chafing over past wrongs as there is in
lamenting past glories. Malachi and his collar of gold--the ancient
kings who led forth the Red Branch Knights--State persecution of the
Catholics--rack-rents and unjust evictions, are all alike swept away
into the limbo of things dead and done with. What Ireland has to deal
with now are the enactments and facts of the day, and to shake off the
incubus of retrospection, as a strong man awaking would get rid of a
nightmare.
Nowhere in Europe, nor yet in the United States, are tenant-farmers so
well protected by law as in Ireland; nor is it the fault of England if
the Acts passed for their benefit have been rendered ineffectual by
the agitators who have preferred fighting to orderly development. So
long ago as 1860 a Bill was passed providing that no tenant should be
evicted for non-payment of rent unless one year's rent in arrear.
(Landlord and Tenant Act, 1860, sec. 52.) Even then, when evicted, he
could recover possession within six months by payment of the amount
due; when the landlord had to pay him the amount of any profit he had
made out of the lands in the interim. The landlord had to pay half the
poor rate of the Government Valuation if a holding was L4 or upward,
and all the poor rate if it was under L4. By the Act of 1870 "a yearly
tenant disturbed in his holding by the act of the landlord, for causes
other than non-payment of rent, and the Government Valuation of whose
holding does not exceed L100 per annum, must be paid by his landlord
not only full compensation for all improvements made by himself or his
predecessors, such as unexhausted manures, permanent buildings, and
reclamation of waste lands, but also as compensation for disturbance,
a sum of money which may amount to seven years' rent." (Land Act of
1870, secs. 1, 2, and 3.) Under the Act of 1881 the landlord's power
of disturbance was practically abolished--but I think I have read
somewhere that even of late years, and with the ballot, certain
landlords in England have threatened their tenants with "disturbance"
without compensation if their votes were not given to the right
colour--while in Ireland, even when evicted for non-payment of rent, a
yearly tenant must be paid by his landlord "compensation for all
improvements, such as unexhausted manures, permanent buildings, and
reclamation of waste land." (Sec. 4.) And when his rent does not
exceed L15 he must be paid in addition "a sum of money which may
amount to seven years' rent if the court decides that the rent is
exorbitant." (Secs. 3 and 9.) (_a_) Until the contrary is proved, the
improvements are presumed to have been made by the tenants. (Sec. 5.)
(_b_) The tenant can make his claim for compensation immediately on
notice to quit being served, and cannot be evicted until the
compensation is paid. (Secs. 16 and 21.) A yearly tenant when
voluntarily surrendering his farm must either be paid by the landlord
(_a_) compensation for all his improvements, or (_b_) be permitted to
sell his improvements to an incoming tenant. (Sec. 4.) In all new
tenancies the landlord must pay half the county or Grand Jury Cess if
the valuation is L4 or upward and the whole of the same Cess if the
value does not exceed L4. (Secs. 65 and 66.) Thus we have under the
Land Act of 1870 (i) Full payment for all improvements; (2)
Compensation for disturbance.
The famous Land Act of 1881 gave three additional privileges, (1)
Fixity of tenure, by which the tenant remains in possession of the
land for ever, subject to periodic revision of the rent. (Land Act,
1881, sec. 8.) If the tenant has not had a fair rent fixed, and his
landlord proceeds to evict him for non-payment of rent, he can apply
to the court to fix the fair rent, and meantime the eviction
proceedings will be restrained by the court. (Sec. 13.) (2) Fair rent,
by which any yearly tenant may apply to the Land Commission Court (the
judges of which were appointed under Mr. Gladstone's Administration)
to fix the fair rent of his holding. The application is referred to
three persons, one of whom is a lawyer, and the other two inspect and
value the farm. _This rent can never again_ be raised by the landlord.
(Sec. 8.) (3) Free sale, by which every yearly tenant may, whether he
has had a fair rent fixed or not, sell his tenancy to the highest
bidder whenever he desires to leave. (Sec. 1.) (_a_) There is no
practical limit to the price he may sell for, and twenty times the
amount of the annual rent has frequently been obtained in every
province of Ireland. (_b_) Even if a tenant be evicted, he has the
right either to redeem at any time within three months, _or to sell
his tenancy within the same period to a purchaser who can likewise
redeem_ and thus acquire all the privileges of a tenant. (Sec. 13.)
Even more important than this is the Land Purchase Act of 1885,
commonly called Lord Ashbourne's Act, by which the whole land in
Ireland is potentially put into the hands of the farmers, and of the
working of which much will have to be said before these papers end.
This Act, in its sections 2, 3, and 4, sets forth this position,
briefly stated: If a tenant wishes to buy his holding, and arranges
with his landlord as to terms, he can change his position from that of
a perpetual rent-payer into that of the payer of an annuity,
terminable at the end of forty-nine years--the Government supplying
him with the entire purchase-money, to be repaid during those
forty-nine years at 4 per cent. This annual payment of L4 for every
L100 borrowed covers both principal and interest. Thus, if a tenant,
already paying a statutory rent of L50, agrees to buy from his
landlord at twenty years' purchase (or L1,000) the Government will
lend him the money, his rent will at once cease, and he will not pay
L50, but L40, yearly for forty-nine years, and then become the owner
of his holding, free of rent. It is hardly necessary to point out
that, as these forty-nine years of payment roll by, the interest of
the tenant in his holding increases rapidly in value. (Land Purchase
Act, 1885, secs. 2, 3, and 4.)
Under the Land Act of 1887, the tenants received the following still
greater and always one-sided privileges, (i) By this Act leases are
allowed to be broken by the tenant, but not by the landlord. All
leaseholders whose leases would expire within ninety-nine years after
the passing of the Act have the option of going into court and getting
their contracts broken and a judicial rent fixed. No equivalent power
is given to the landlords. (Land Act of 1887, secs, 1 and 2.) (2) The
Act varies rent already judicially fixed for fifteen years by the
Land Courts in the years 1881, 1882, 1883, 1884, and 1885. (Sec. 29.)
(3) It stays evictions, and allows rent to be paid by instalments. In
the case of tenants whose valuation does not exceed L50, the court
before which proceedings are being taken for the recovery of _any_
debt due by the tenant is empowered to stay his eviction, and may give
him liberty to pay his creditors by instalments, and can extend the
time for such payment as it thinks proper. (Land Act of 1887, sec.
30.)
By these extracts, which do not exhaust the whole of the privileges
granted to the Irish tenant, it may be seen how exceptionally he has
been favoured. Nowhere else has such wholesale interference with the
obligations of contract, such lavish protection of the tenant, such
practical persecution of the landlord been as yet demanded by the
one-half of the nation; nor, if demanded, would such partiality have
been conceded by the other half. Yet, in the face of these various
Acts, and all they embody, provide for, and deny, our hysterical
journal _par excellence_ is not ashamed to publish a wild letter from
one of those ramping political women who screech like peacocks before
rain, setting forth how Ireland could be redeemed by the manufacture
of blackberry jam, were it not for the infamous landlords who would at
once raise the rent on those tenants who, by industry, had improved
their condition. And a Dublin paper asserts that anything will be
fiction which demonstrates that "Ireland is not the home of
rackrenters, brutal batonmen, and heartless evictors"; while political
agitation is still being carried on by any means that come handiest,
and the eviction of tenants who owe five or six years' rent, and will
not pay even one to clear off old scores, is treated as an act of
brutality for which no quarter should be given. If we were to transfer
the whole method of procedure to our own lands and houses in England,
perhaps the thing would wear a different aspect from that which it
wears now, when surrounded by a halo of false sentiment and convenient
forgetfulness.
The total want of honesty, of desire for the right thing in this
no-rent agitation, is exemplified by the following fact:--When Colonel
Vandeleur's tenants--owing several years' rent, refused to pay
anything, and joined the Plan of Campaign, arbitration was suggested,
and Sir Charles Russell was accepted by the landlord as arbitrator. As
every one knows, Sir Charles is an Irishman, a Catholic, and the
"tenants' friend." His award was, as might have been expected, most
liberal towards them. Here is the result:--"We learn that the
non-fulfilment by a number of the tenants of the terms of the award
made by Sir C. Russell is likely to lead to serious difficulties. They
refuse to carry out the undertaking which was given on their behalf,
having so much bettered the instruction given to them that they insist
upon holding a grip of the rent, and not yielding to even the advice
of their friends. About thirty of them have not paid the year's rent,
which all the Plan of Campaign tenants were to have paid when the
award was made known to them. This is the most conspicuous instance in
which arbitration has been tried, and the result is not encouraging,
although landlords have been denounced for not at once accepting it
instead of seeking to enforce their legal rights by the tribunal
appointed by the Legislature."
With a legal machinery of relief so comprehensive and so favourable to
the tenant, it would seem that the Plan of Campaign, with its cruel
and murderous accompaniments, was scarcely needed. If anyone was
aggrieved, the courts were open to him; and we have only to read the
list of reduced rents to see how those courts protected the tenant and
bore heavily on the landlord. Also, it would seem to persons of
ordinary morality that it would have been more manly and more honest
to pay the rents due to the proprietor than to cast the money into the
chest of the Plan of Campaign--that _boite a Pierrette_ which, like
the sieve of the Danaides, can never be filled. The Home Rule
agitators have known how to make it appear that they, and they alone,
stand between the people and oppression. They have ignored all this
orderly legal machinery; and their English sympathisers have not
remembered it. Nor have those English sympathisers considered the
significant fact that this agitation is literally the bread of life to
those who have created and still maintain it. Many of the Home Rule
Irish Members of Parliament have risen from the lowest ranks of
society--from the barefooted peasantry, where their nearest relations
are still to be found--into the outward condition of gentlemen living
in comparative affluence. It is not being uncharitable, nor going
behind motives, to ask, _Cui bono?_ For whose advantage is a certain
movement carried on?--especially for whose advantage is this anti-rent
movement in Ireland? For the good of the tenants who, under the
pressure put on them by those whom they have agreed to follow, refuse
to pay even a fraction of rent hitherto paid to the full, and who are,
in consequence, evicted from their farms and deprived of their means
of subsistence?--or is it for the good of a handful of men who live by
and on the agitation they created and still keep up? Do the leaders of
any movement whatsoever give a thought to the individual lives
sacrificed to the success of the cause? As little as the general
regrets the individuals of the rank and file in the battalions he
hurls against the enemy. The ruined homes and blighted lives of the
thousands who have listened, believed, been coerced to their own
despair, have been no more than the numbers of the rank and file to
the general who hoped to gain the day by his battalions.[B] The good
in this no-rent movement is reaped by the agitators alone; and for
them alone have the chestnuts been pulled out of the fire.
Furthermore, whose hands among the prominent leaders are free from the
reflected stain of blood-money? These leaders have counselled a course
of action which has been marked all along the line by outrage and
murder; and they have lived well and amassed wealth by the course they
have counselled.
From proletariats in their own persons they have become men of
substance and property. These assertions are facts to which names and
amounts can be given; and that question, _Cui bono_? answers itself.
The inference to be drawn is too grave to be set aside; and to plead
"charitable judgment" is to plead imbecility.
The plain and simple truth is--the protective legislation that was so
sorely needed for the peasantry is fast degenerating into injustice
and oppression against the landlords. Thousands of the smaller
landowners have been absolutely beggared; the larger holders have been
as ruthlessly ruined. For, while the rents were lowered, the charges
on the land, made on the larger basis, were kept to their same value;
and the fate of the landlord was sealed. Between the hammer and the
anvil as he was and is placed, his times have not been pleasant.
Families who have bought their estates on the faith of Government
sales and Government contracts, and families who have owned theirs for
centuries and lived on them, winter and summer--who have been neither
absentees nor rack-renters, but have been friendly, hospitable,
open-handed after their kind, always ready to give comforts and
medicine to the sick and a good-natured measure of relief to the hard
pressed--they have now been brought to the ground; and between our own
fluid and unstable legislation and the reckless cruelty of the Plan of
Campaign their destruction has been complete. Wherever one goes one
finds great houses shut up or let for a few summer months to strangers
who care nothing for the place and less than nothing for the people.
One cannot call this a gain, look at it as one will. Nor do the
tenantry themselves feel it to be a gain. Get their confidence and you
will find that they all regret the loss of their own--those jovial,
frank, and kindly proprietors who did the best they knew, though
perhaps, judged by present scientific knowledge that best was not very
good, but who at least knew more than themselves. Carrying the thing
home to England, we should scarcely say that our country places would
be the better for the exodus of all the educated and refined and
well-to-do families, with the peasantry and an unmarried clergyman
left sole masters of the situation.
In the desire of Parliament to do justice to the Irish peasant, whose
condition did once so loudly demand amelioration, justice to the
landlord has gone by the board. For we cannot call it justice to make
him alone suffer. His rents have been reduced from 25 to 30 per cent.
and over, but all the rent charges, mortgages, debts and dues have
been retained at their full value. The scheme of reduction does not
pass beyond the tiller of the soil, and the landlord is the sole
loser.[C]
Beyond this he suffers from the want of finality in legislation.
Nothing is left to prove itself, and the tinkering never ends. A
fifteen years' bargain under the first Land Act is broken up under the
next as if Governmental pledges were lovers' vows. When, on the faith
of those pledges, a landlord borrowed money from the Board of Works
for the improvement of his estate, for stone cottages for his
tenantry, for fences, drainage, and the like, suddenly his income is
still further reduced; but the interest he has to pay for the loan
contracted on the broader basis remains the same. Which is a kind of
thing on all fours with the plan of locking up a debtor so that he
cannot work at his trade, while ordering him to pay so much weekly
from earnings which the law itself prevents his making.
If the sum of misery remains constant in Ireland, its distribution has
changed hands. The small deposits in the savings-banks have increased
to an enormous extent, and in many places where the tenants have for
some years refused to pay their rents, but have still kept the land,
the women have learned to dress. But the owners of the land--say that
they are ladies with no man in the family--have wanted bread, and have
been kept from starvation only by surreptitious supplies delivered in
the dead darkness of the night. These supplies have of necessity been
rare and scanty, for the most honest tenant dared not face the
vengeance of the League by openly paying his just due. Did not Mr.
Dillon, on August 23rd, 1887, say, "If there is a man in Ireland base
enough to back down, to turn his back on the fight now that Coercion
has passed, I pledge myself in the face of this meeting, that I will
denounce him from public platform by name, and I pledge myself to the
Government that, let that man be whom he may, his life will not be a
happy one, either in Ireland or across the seas." With such a
formidable organisation as this, what individual would have the
courage to stand out for abstract justice to a landlord? It would have
been, and it has been, standing out for his own destruction. Hence,
for no fault, no rack-renting, have proprietors--and especially
ladies--been treated as mortal enemies by those whom they had always
befriended--for no reason whatever but that it was an easy victory for
the Campaigners to obtain. Women, with never a man to defend them,
could be more easily manipulated than if they were so many stalwart
young fellows, handy in their turn with guns and revolvers, and man
for man a match even for Captain Moonlight. If these ladies dared to
evict their non-paying tenants they would be either boycotted or
"visited," or perhaps both. Besides, who would venture to take the
vacant land? And how could a couple of delicate ladies, say, till the
ground with their own hands? The old fable of the dog in the manger
holds good with these Campaigners. Those who will not pay prevent
others who would; and the hated "landgrabber," denounced from altar
and platform alike, is simply an honest and industrious worker, who
would make his own living and the landlord's rent out of a bit of land
which is lying idle and going to waste.