Ireland Under Coercion - vol. 1 | Page 3

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
exists, how much more true must it be of New York? And if true of the
man who owns a thousand acres, it must be equally true of the man
who owns an acre. There could not be a better illustration than Mr.
Davitt has given in his attack on the Fitzwilliam tenants of the precise
accuracy of what I have had occasion to say in these volumes of the
"irrepressible conflict" between his schemes and the establishment of a
peasant proprietorship in Ireland. It is more than this. It is a distinct
warning served upon the smallest tenants as well as upon the greatest
landlords in the United Kingdom that fixity of any form of individual
tenure is irreconcilable with the Agrarian agitations.
I anticipated this demonstration, but I did not anticipate that it would
come so fully or so soon.
I anticipated also abundant proof from my own side of the water of the
accuracy of my impressions as to the drift of the American-Irish
towards Protection and Republicanism in American politics. This, too,
has come earlier and not less fully than I had expected. Mr. Patrick
Ford, the most influential leader of the American-Irish, issued early in
August a statement of his views as to the impending Presidential
election. "The issue to-day," he says, "is the Tariff. It is the American
system versus the British Colonial system. The Irish are instinctively
Protectionists." And why? Mr. Ford goes on to explain. "The fact," he
observes, "that the Lion and the Unicorn have taken the stump for
Cleveland and Thurnan is not calculated to hurt Harrison and Morton in
the estimation of the Irish, who will, I promise, give a good account of
themselves in the coming Presidential election." Hatred of England, in
other words, is an axiom in their Political Economy!
Mr. Davitt's menacing allusion to Parnell as a landlord, and Mr.

O'Leary's scornful treatment in a letter to me of the small-fry English
Radicals,[1] when taken together, distinctly prefigure an imminent
rupture between the Parnellite party and the two wings--Agrarian and
Fenian--of the real revolutionary movement in Ireland. It is clear that
clerical agitators, high and low, must soon elect between following Mr.
George, Dr. M'Glynn, and Mr. Davitt, and obeying fully the Papal
Decree.
It is a most curious feature of the situation in Ireland that much more
discontent with the actual conditions of life in that country seems to be
felt by people who do not than by people who do live in Ireland. It is
the Irish in America and Australia, who neither sow nor reap in Ireland,
pay no taxes there, and bear no burdens, who find the alien oppression
most intolerable. This explains the extreme bitterness with which Mr.
Davitt in some recent speeches and letters denounces the tameness of
the Irish people, and rather amusingly berates the British allies of his
Parnellite associates for their failure to develop any striking and
sensational resistance to the administration of law in Ireland. I have
printed in this edition[2] an instructive account, furnished to me by Mr.
Tener, of some recent evictions on the Clanricarde property in Galway,
which shows how hard it is for the most determined "agitators" to keep
the Irish tenants up to that high concert pitch of resistance to the law
which alone would meet the wishes of the true agrarian leaders; and
how comparatively easy it is for a just and resolute man, armed with
the power of the law resolutely enforced, to break up an illegal
combination even in some of the most disturbed regions of Ireland.[3]
While this is encouraging to the friends of law and order in Ireland, it
must not be forgotten that it involves also a certain peril for them. The
more successfully the law is enforced in Ireland, the greater perhaps is
the danger that the British constituencies, upon which, of course, the
administrators of the law depend for their authority, may lose sight and
sense of the Revolutionary forces at work there. History shows that this
has more than once happened in the past. Englishmen and Scotchmen
will be better able than I am to judge how far it is unlikely that it should
happen again in the future.
As to one matter of great moment--the effect of Lord Ashbourne's

Act--a correspondent sends me a statement, which I reproduce here, as
it gives a very satisfactory account of the automatic financial
machinery upon which that Act must depend for success:--
"Out of £90,630 of instalments due last May, less than £4000 is unpaid
at the present moment, on transactions