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There are of course other classes of Nationalists, but in comparison with the immense preponderance of rural voters they do not count for much. Mr. McGregor, of Anglesea Street, Dublin, once an earnest Gladstonian, said: – "The corner-men are Home Rulers because they want to spend what they never earned, and the farmers because they hope to get the land for nothing." The Dublin hotel-keepers are mostly Home Rulers, and the proprietor of Jury's, next door to the proposed House in College Green, is supposed to be consumed with patriotic fire. The hotel has recently been refitted. The Dublin shopkeepers, "those of the largest size," are strangely lacking in patriotism, and mostly support the Union. Patriotism is claimed for the Nationalist members, who, according to Nationalist sheets, were lifted from bog-holes, tripe shops, and small whiskey shops to decide the destinies of empires, to revel in comparative luxury, to enjoy a certain social distinction, to exchange their native bogs for the British metropolis, and to draw a salary beyond their wildest dreams. These questionable gentlemen, with the horse's tongue and cow's tail cutters, the firebrand priests and landlord-shooters, the moonlight marauders who shoot old women and children in the legs, burn the haystacks of their neighbours, refuse coffins and decent burial for the dead, apply the fiendish tortures of boycotting to innocent women and children, refusing them the means of subsistence, and poisoning their water supply with human filth – these are patriots. Only their patriotism must cost them nothing, It must be cultivated at the expense of others. The patriots subscribe only under compulsion, and yet hope to make a profit by the transaction. As of a certain party of old, it may be said of them, "License they mean when they cry Liberty." Plunder they mean when they cry Patriotism. The sober and industrious portion of the Irish people, the pick of every part of Ireland, being opposed to Nationalism, are denied the virtue of patriotism. The merchants and manufacturers of Dublin and Belfast, the leading professional men of Ireland, the most learned scholars of her great University, her great soldiers, White, Wolseley, Roberts, her greatest living authors, the whole of her Protestant clergy of whatever sect, with their congregations, the pith and marrow of everything that is strong, stable, cultured, enlightened, prescient, must be pronounced unpatriotic – if Nationalism is Patriotism. Contrary to all human experience and to the course and constitution of nature, the people of England are asked to believe that love of their native land and desire to do the best for the commonweal, are the sole possession of the ignorant and rowdy classes of Irishmen, and notwithstanding the undeniable fact that Nationalist Irishmen of every colour accuse the Nationalist members of self-seeking, and of absolute indifference to everything: outside their own interests, we are asked to give to them exclusively the honour due to men who sacrifice all for their country and care for nothing but her welfare. Gladstonians themselves, in the deepest depths of their credulity, cannot in their hearts believe in Nationalist patriotism, except, perhaps, such as that of Mr. Kelly, of Athenry, who said, "I'm a Home Ruler out and out. The counthry's within a stone-throw of hell, and we may as well be in it altogether."

Birmingham, August 11th.

No. 60. – LAND HUNGER: ITS CAUSE, EFFECT, AND REMEDY

That Irish Nationalism is not Patriotism has been demonstrated by an appeal to admitted facts. The farmers hope to be relieved from payment of rent, the labourers hope to be employed in the mining of treasure at remunerative wages, the agitators hope for place and power, and everyone who has nothing hopes in the general confusion to make off with something. There is, in short, a shrewd popular notion that the foundering of the British ship of state would yield good wreckage. The false lights have done excellent service. Dillon, Davitt, O'Brien. Healy, and the rest of the would-be wreckers are shivering with excitement at the prospect of the crash which they fondly believe to be imminent. The helmsman is under their orders – will he be heaved overboard before he has done his work? If so, farewell to hope of plunder, farewell to hope of religions domination, to freehold farms for nothing, to gold mines, to every hope that made life pleasant, to all the fatuous beliefs that are the basis of Irish Nationalism. It has been shown that "patriotic" subscriptions could only be raised by threats, that the names of non-subscribers were posted on chapel gates, that resolutions fixing the minimum were passed, with a rider to the effect that persons not subscribing would be considered "out of sympathy," and that this fund was for the defence of the patriots Dillon and O'Brien, who afterwards ran away. The rush of the "patriot" depositors on the Post Office Savings Banks so soon as it was known that in the event of Home Rule the floating balance would constitute the working capital of the new Parliament, and would therefore be in the hands of brother "patriots," has been adduced as a fair measure of patriotic sincerity, and endless minor examples might have been given. We might have mentioned Delany, the principal clothier and outfitter of intensely patriotic Limerick, who had not a yard of Irish tweed in his stores; or the Dungannon folks, who think foul scorn of their own coal, and persist in buying the English product at double the cost; or Mr. Timony, of "patriotic Donegal," might have been quoted. "Irishmen," said the great draper, "will not wear Donegal tweed. But for England we should have no market at all." The patriots will not "part." "I'm sorry for you," said the kind old lady. "How much are you sorry?" said the tramp. Tried by this test, Irish patriotism comes out very small. If "patriot" members had to live on the voluntary offerings of their constituencies, the trade would expire of inanition. The members would return to their bogs, their tripe shops, their shebeens, and patriotism would become a lost art. Irishmen will applaud with enthusiasm. They like a red-hot patriotic speech. But, like the crowd listening to the harp and fiddle at the street corner, they begin to shuffle off when the bag comes round.

Irish land hunger is easy to understand and simple to define. The bulk of the population are agricultural, and closely wedded to custom. Their fathers lived on the land and by the land, and they expect to do likewise. Sæva paupertas, et avitus apto cum lare fundus. Their ideas of existence are inseparably connected with the land. Whatever knowledge they have relates to the land. Their farming skill is very limited; indeed, it may almost be said that they have none beyond that possessed by savages – but it is their only possession. They have no turn for mechanics. The rural Irishman is uneducated, and knows little beyond what he sees around him. So far as his experience goes, to be without land is to be without the one means of livelihood. The English small farmer is differently situated. If farming will not pay he has other resources. He can migrate to fifty towns having factories or great public works. And besides this, the Saxon is not crippled by an ignorant conservatism and a congenital inability to adapt himself to changed circumstances. Paddy is content with little, if he have his ease. He loves to put in the seed and then to sit down and wait for the crop, varying the proceedings with fairs and festive gatherings. Such is his conception of life. The ding-dong regularity of factory work does not suit him, so he clings to the land, which provides him with a bare subsistence, and that is all he wants. No ambition to be more luxurious than his father troubles him at all. Short spells of work, and long spells of play, are ensured to the fortunate holder of land. This is Paddy's conception of Paradise. Suppose the land held were at first sufficient to maintain his family. The boys grow up, and, according to custom, the paternal farm is divided, in the next generation again subdivided, until at last the amount of land remaining to each family is insufficient for its maintenance. Then the district becomes congested. The poverty of the people is attributed to the landlords, who are denounced as non-resident, notwithstanding the demonstrations of an affectionate tenantry, who now and then shoot one or two, pour encourarger les autres. If the people have food they have little or no money. The agitator comes and promises No Rent, the opening of gold mines and mighty factories, paying liberal wages, under the fostering wing of an Irish Parliament. The people are ignorant and credulous. They are, however, certain as to their own poverty, and they desire a change. The Roman Catholics regard themselves as the chosen people, the true sons of the soil, but they see that most of the great landowners are Protestant, that the Protestant farmers often hold uncommonly good land, and that if these were once dispossessed the righteous might again flourish as green bay trees. For while Papal Ireland is largely rock and bog, the heretical portion is reclaimed and tilled, the bogs drained, the primeval boulders rolled away, broken up, and made into fences. All this is tempting. Irish land hunger is foreshadowed in the story of Naboth and his vineyard.

And Irish land hunger is largely responsible for Irish rents. Friends and neighbours – aye, even relatives near as brothers and sisters, compete against each other, and eagerly force up the price. Every Irish land agent will tell you of underhand intrigue in connection with land. Not only do brothers secretly strive to obtain advantage over each other by means of higher bidding, but bribery is tried. Mr. Robert Hare, of the Dublin Board of Works, said: – "My father was an agent, and on one occasion he was weighing the respective claims of two brothers to a piece of land which was about to become vacant and perhaps considering their respective offers, when one sent him a ten-pound note. He cut it in two and returned one-half, with an intimation that on receiving a receipt he would forward the other." I never met anyone in Ireland who would not readily admit that high rents were mainly due to the action of the tenants themselves, who, being actuated by what is called land-hunger, which is nothing more in the majority of cases than the necessity to live, had in their desperation bid more than the land was worth. Mr. Thomas Manley, of Trim, County Meath, said: – "The tenant farmer has cried himself up, and the Nationalists have cried him up as the finest, most industrious, most self-sacrificing fellow in the world. But he isn't. Not a bit of it. The landlords and their agents have over and over again been shot for rack-renting when the rents had been forced up by secret competition among neighbours and even relations. Ask any living Irish farmer if I am right, and he will say, Yes, ten times yes." As an Irish farmer and the son of an Irish farmer, living for sixty years on Irish farms, and from his occupation as a horse-dealer, claiming to have an intimate acquaintance with the whole of Ireland, and with almost every farmer who can breed and rear a horse, Mr. Manley is worth a hearing. Continuing, in the presence of several intelligent Irishmen, some of them Home Rulers, but all agreeing with the speaker, Mr. Manley said: – "Rents have been forced up by people going behind each other's backs and offering more and more, in their eagerness to acquire the holding outbidding each other. Landlords are human; agents, if possible, still more human. They handed over the land to the highest bidder. What more natural? The farmers offered more than the land could pay. But why curse the landlords for what was their own deliberate act?" Mr. Manley's knowledge of England enabled him to say that "the Irish farmer is much better off than the English, Scotch, or Welsh farmer, not only in the matter of law, but also in the matter of soil." The legal point is demonstrable. Let us see how the Irish tenant stands. The disinclination of the Irish for factory work, as exemplified in the closing of the Galway jute factory, because of irregularity of attendance, and the refusal of the starving peasantry of congested Donegal and Connemara to accept regular employment in the thread factory of Dunbar, MacMaster and Co., notwithstanding the most tempting inducements, as set forth in my letters from Ireland, has strangled enterprise, except in the North. The ceaseless agitation of the revolutionary party has given rise to a feeling of insecurity which deters capitalists from investing money in Ireland. And it is only fair to say that a large majority of the most intelligent men of every political colour concur in attributing much of the poverty of Ireland to unrestricted Free Trade. Thus a variety of causes have created land hunger, with its resulting land clamour, which has brought about extraordinary legislation – extraordinary because going far beyond the principles recognised by Republican America, which in the first article of its Constitution draws the line thus: – "No State shall pass any law impairing the obligation of contracts." Well might Lord Salisbury, in extending the Land Purchase Act, carefully dissociate the Conservative party from the principle of interference with free contract in the open market. In England a thing is worth what it will fetch. It is not so in Ireland.

A tenant can never be evicted unless a whole year's rent is due. The landlord might want the land for himself or for his son, but he cannot have it. The tenant must have six months' notice of eviction, and when actually evicted can recover possession by paying what he owes, and in that case the landlord becomes liable to the tenant for the crops on the land, and for the profits he (the landlord) might have made. In America the length of notice preceding eviction varies from three days to thirty, the latter only in the State of Maine. Yet in Ireland, where we hear so much of brutal evictions, six months' notice is required, a year's rent being due, this boon having been conferred by a "Coercion" Government. An Irish tenant even when voluntarily leaving his farm must be compensated by the landlord for all improvements made by himself or his predecessors, or must be permitted to sell his improvements to the incoming tenant. The tenant-right of a small farm is sometimes a surprising sum. The moonlighting case I investigated at Newcastlewest, Co. Limerick, arose from a tenant-right transaction, William Quirke having bid £590 for the tenant-right of forty-nine acres formerly held by J. Dore who was selling, as against £400 bid by Dore's cousin. Quirke and three of his family were therefore shot in the legs, by way of impressing the advisability of joining in the Onward march to Freedom. But although the tenant is settled on the land for ever, and, so long as he owes less than a year's rent, cannot be molested, it must not be supposed that the rent he agreed to is unchangeable. Suppose the tenant to be paying a judicial rent, which is decided by three persons, one of them a lawyer, the other two acting respectively in the interests of landlord and tenant, having examined and valued the farm. Assume that the tenant gets more than a year behindhand. The landlord desires to evict. Even then the tenant, by applying for another "Fair Rent," can stay eviction. But while the rent may be lowered, the landlord can never raise it under any circumstances. The law is decidely one-sided. Leases may be broken. All leaseholders whose leases would expire within ninety-nine years after the passing of the Land Act of 1887 may go to Court, have their contracts broken, and a judicial rent fixed. No countervailing advantage is given to the landlords. When a tenant's valuation does not exceed £50, the Court before which proceedings are being taken for the recovery of any debt, whether for beef, bread, groceries, clothes, or whiskey, is empowered to stay eviction, can allow the debtor to pay by instalments, and can extend the time for such payment without limit. To the average British mind this will smack of over-legislation, and serious Irishmen make the same complaint. And still, to quote Father Mahony, of Cork, "still the Irish peasant mourns, still groans beneath the cruel English yoke." The fact is, he is almost killed with kindness. He is weighed down by the multitude of benefactions. He reminds you of the tame sparrow you once suffocated by overfeeding. So much has been done for him that he naturally expects more, and instead of being grateful he grumbles more than ever. He regards Mr. Gladstone as having acted under compulsion, and as being an opportunist. The peasantry of Ireland have no respect for the Grand Old Man. "Shure, we bate the bills out iv him. Shure, he never gave us anythin' till we kicked it out iv his skin. Divil thank him for doin' what we ordhered him to do."

But perhaps the Tory Land Purchase Acts are most promising in, the direction of finality. Lord Ashbourne's Act, as it was called (1885), conferred on Irish tenants opportunities of purchasing their holdings of quite an exceptional kind, and its scope and advantages were enormously increased under the Land Purchase Act passed in 1891. If a tenant wishes to buy his holding and arranges with his landlord as to terms, he can change his position from an ordinary rentpayer into that of a payer of an annuity, terminable in forty-nine years, and actually less in amount than the rent! Most Irish landlords are willing to take less than twenty years' purchase, but the tenants are by their leaders advised not to buy. Otherwise the Government is prepared to advance the necessary purchase money, to be repaid at the rate of four per cent. per annum, which covers both principal and interest. Suppose the tenant's rent to be £50, and that he agreed to buy at the seventeen years' purchase so strongly discountenanced by the priest quoted in my last. His rent or rather the annual payment substituted for rent, would amount to £34, being a reduction of thirty-two per cent. If he bought at fifteen years' purchase, rent £50, he would only pay £30 a year, a reduction of forty per cent. If he bought at twenty years, rent £50, he would have £40 a year to pay, being a reduction of twenty per cent. In forty-nine years the holding would belong to him, or to his children. In any case he must largely benefit. His rent is lower, his share in the ownership is always becoming larger, and, if he chooses, he can at any time sell his interest in the concern. Mr. Palmer, of Tuam, said that those who had purchased under this Act were happy and prosperous. Lord Shannon's tenants bought at twelve years' purchase. In other words they exchanged their rent for one-half the amount, payable to Government, the land to be their own in forty-nine years. Lord Lansdowne's tenants agreed to buy at eighteen years' purchase, all arrears to be forgiven on payment of half a year's rent. These buyers are quiet and apparently contented. Their payments are regular, and if they were left alone they would doubtless continue in the path of rectitude. But the agitators, who find nick-names for everything, have already begun to call this repayment of purchase-money a Tribute to England; and the past history of Irish leaders leads honest Irishmen, as well as Englishmen, to the conviction that, once an Irish Parliament were established, with an Irish constabulary under its rule, a No Tribute campaign would ensue, which would lead to deplorable results. The privileges of Irish tenants are far more numerous than I have space to indicate, but perhaps enough has been said to give a clear idea of the chief causes and effects of land hunger in Ireland.

The remedy, in the opinion of many advanced and enlightened Home Rulers, must come from a Tory Government. From the multitude of counsellors I met in the thirty-two counties of Ireland, I will select two who represent the vast majority of able men of every political party. Mr. Thomas Manley said: – "Settle the land question, reform the Poor Laws and the Grand Jury laws, and reclaim the land, which would pay ten per cent." Mr. Mason, of Mullingar, said: – "The whole agitation would be knocked on the head by the introduction of a severe land measure. Previous legislation has been very severe, and I do not say that a further measure would be just and equitable. I merely say that the people do not want Home Rule, but that they want the advantages which they are told will accrue from Home Rule." And so said everyone.

To settle the land question is to settle everything. Religious animosity would be silenced by self-interest. The operation of the Land Purchase Act has undoubtedly done much to turn the people using its provisions into good Conservatives – law-abiding and law-supporting, as having a stake in the country. The people have not the land for nothing but they look forward to its becoming honestly their own, and meanwhile they enjoy the security insured by the Government of England. In any attempt to settle this great problem, a Conservative Government would probably be largely supported by the landlords themselves, while the rank and file of Ireland would look with respect and confidence on any bill bearing the honoured name of Balfour. But how shall we decide the scope and character of such a final Land Bill? I do not hesitate to say that it must contain a very strong infusion of the compulsory element. The great measure of 1891 is generous to a fault, but it is voluntary, and the result is that the tenants who give greatest trouble – the poor, idle, ignorant dupes of a scheming priesthood and a corrupt political conspiracy – never come under its benefits, because they unquestioningly accept the advice given them to wait until an Irish Parliament lets them have the land for nothing.

Compulsion is not required for the landlords half so much as it is for the tenants. The conclusion arrived at may be stated in a few words. Perhaps it may be worthy the consideration of our brilliant and far-seeing Unionist leaders: —

The Land Purchase Act, 1891, should be amended by a Bill providing (1) That the existing Land Commission shall be strengthened in order to form a Court to which either Landlords or Tenants shall have the right to apply for an order of the Court placing them under the provisions of the Act of 1891, or such extension of that Act as may hereafter be made. (2) It should be the duty of the Court to inquire into the relations of landlord and tenant, the condition of the estate and of the tenants, and such other circumstances as may in the wisdom of the Court seem necessary. (3) If the Court decides to issue an order, the parties shall at once be placed in the same position as if they had entered into a mutual agreement under the Land Purchase Act, 1891; but it shall be the duty of the Court to fix the number of years' purchase; and it shall have power either to restrict or to enlarge the number of holdings over which its order shall take effect.

This is offered as the mere germ of a suggestion. I am familiar with the arguments that may be brought against it. For the most part they can be urged with equal effect against the whole system of interference with that freedom of contract which prevails in England and Scotland, but which, as I have pointed out, has already been destroyed in Ireland. What I claim is that there must be a means of defeating such a conspiracy to make the law inoperative as that practised – to the grave detriment of Irish tenants' interests – by the omnipresent agencies of the National League, ever since the Unionist party set itself to solve the agrarian sources of Irish discontent.

Birmingham, August 14th.