Ireland Under Coercion - vol. 1 | Page 2

of Louisville, in a story which he used to tell of a tipsy giant in butternut garments, armed with a long rifle, who came upon him in his office on a certain Fourth of July demanding the loan of a dollar on the ground that he felt "so confoundedly patriotic!"
The Colonel judiciously handed the man a dollar, and then asked, "Pray, how do you feel when you feel confoundedly patriotic?"
"I feel," responded the man gravely, "as if I should like to kill somebody or steal something."
It is "patriotism" of this sort which the Papal Decree was issued to expel from within the pale of the Catholic Church. And it is really, in the last analysis of the facts of the case, to the suppression of "patriotism" of this sort that many well-intentioned, but certainly not well-informed, "sympathisers" with what they suppose to be the cause of Ireland, object, in my own country and in Great Britain, when they denounce as "Coercion" the imprisonment of members of Parliament and other rhetorical persons who go about encouraging or compelling ignorant people to support "boycotting" and the "Plan of Campaign."
Yet it would seem to be sufficiently obvious that "patriotism" of this sort, once full-blown and flourishing on the soil of Ireland, must tend to propagate itself far beyond the confines of that island, and to diversify with its blood-red flowers and its explosive fruits the social order of countries in which it has not yet been found necessary for the Head of the Catholic Church to reaffirm the fundamental principles of Law and of Liberty.
Since these volumes were published, too, the Agrarian Revolution in Ireland has been brought into open and defiant collision with the Catholic Church by its leader, Mr. Davitt, the founder of the Land League. In the face of Mr. Davitt's contemptuous and angry repudiation of any binding force in the Papal Decree, it will be difficult even for the Cardinal-Archbishop of Sydney to devise an understanding between the Church and any organisation fashioned or led by him. It may be inferred from Mr. Davitt's contemporaneous and not less angry intimation, that the methods of the Parnellite party are inadequate to the liberation of Ireland from the curse of landlordism, that he is prepared to go further than Mr. George, who still clings in America to the shadowy countenance given him by the Cardinal-Archbishop of Baltimore, and that the Nationalisation of the Land will ere long be urged both in Ireland and in Great Britain by organisations frankly Anti-Catholic as well as Anti-Social.
This is to be desired on many accounts. It will bring the clergy in Ireland face to face with the situation, which will be a good thing both for them and for the people; and it should result in making an end of the pernicious influence upon the popular mind of such extraordinary theological outgivings; for example, as the circular issued in 1881 to the clergy and laity of Meath by the Bishop of that diocese, in which it was laid down that "the land of every country is the common property of the people of that country, because its real owner, the Creator who made it, has transferred it as a voluntary gift to them."
Language of this sort addressed to ignorant multitudes must do harm of course whenever and by whomsoever used. It must tend to evil if addressed by demagogues to the Congress of a Trade Union. But it must do much more harm when uttered with the seeming sanction of the Church by a mitred bishop to congregations already solicited to greed, cunning, and dishonesty, by an unscrupulous and well-organised "agitation."
Not less instructive than Mr. Davitt's outburst from the Church is his almost furious denunciation of the Irish tenants who obeyed an instinct, thought honourable to mankind in most ages and countries, by agreeing together to present to their landlord, Earl Fitzwilliam, a token of their respect and regard on the celebration of his golden wedding day.
These tenants are denounced, not because they were paying homage to a tyrannical or an unworthy landlord, though Mr. Davitt was so transported beyond his ordinary and cooler self with rage at their action that he actually stooped to something like an insinuation of disbelief in the excellence of Lord Fitzwilliam's character. The true and avowed burden of his diatribe was that no landlord could possibly deserve well of his tenants. The better he is as a man, the more they ought to hate him as a landlord.
The ownership of land, in other words, is of itself in the eyes of Mr. Davitt what the ownership of a slave was in the eyes of the earlier Abolitionists--crime so monstrous as to be beyond pardon or endurance. If this be true of Great Britain and Ireland, where no allodial tenure