Ireland Under Coercion - vol. 1 | Page 9

admitted by the best informed authorities that Mr. Sheridan had no
responsibility, was driving Mr. Parnell and his Parliamentary associates
into disavowals of the extreme men of their connection, which, but for
Mr. Sheridan's coolness and consciousness of his well-assured
domination over them, might have led to extremely inconvenient
consequences to all concerned.[5] But whatever "Home Rule" may or
may not mean, I went to Ireland, not to find some achromatic meaning
for a prismatic phrase, which is flashed at you fifty times in England or
America where you encounter it once in Ireland, but to learn what I
could of the social and economical condition of the Irish people as
affected by the revolutionary forces which are now at work in that
country.
I have watched the development of these forces too long and too
closely to be under any illusion as to the real importance relatively with
them of the so-called "Parliamentary" action of the Irish Nationalists.
II.
The visits to Ireland, of which this book is a record, were made on my
return from a sojourn in Rome during the celebration of the Jubilee of
His Holiness Leo XIII. What I then and there learned convinced me
that the Vatican was on the eve of grappling in Ireland with issues
substantially identical with those which were forced, in my own
country, two years ago, upon a most courageous and gifted member of
the American Catholic hierarchy, the Archbishop of New York, by the
open adhesion of an eminent Irish American ecclesiastic, the Rev. Dr.
M'Glynn, to the social revolution of which Mr. Henry George is the
best-equipped and most indefatigable apostle. Entertaining this
conviction (which events have since shown to have been well-founded),

I was anxious to survey on the spot the conditions under which the
conflict so vigorously encountered by the Archbishop in New York
must be waged by the Vatican in Ireland.
To suppose that the Vatican, in dealing with this conflict, either in
Ireland or in America, is troubling itself about the balancing of political
acrobats, British or American, upon the tight-rope of "Home Rule," is
as absurd as it would have been to suppose that in 1885 the Vatican
concerned itself with the subterranean intrigues which there is reason to
believe the Irish Nationalists then sought to carry on with the
wire-pullers of the two great British political parties. To get a correct
perspective of the observations which I came from Rome this year to
make in Ireland, my readers, as I have already said, must allow me to
take them across the Atlantic, and must put aside as accessory and
incidental the forensic and polemic phenomena of Irish politics, with
which they are perhaps only too familiar.
It is as easy to go too far back as it is not to go back far enough in the
study of such a revolutionary movement as that of which Ireland is just
now the arena.
Many and sore are the historical grievances of the Irish people. That
they are historical and not actual grievances would seem to be admitted
by so sympathetic and minutely well-informed a writer as Dr. Sigerson,
when he gives it as his opinion, that after the passage of the Land Act
of 1870, "the concession in principle of the demands of the cultivators
as tenants" had "abolished the class war waged between landlords and
their tenantry."
The class war between the tenantry and their landlords, therefore,
which is now undoubtedly waging in Ireland cannot be attributed to the
historical grievances of the Irish people. The tradition and the memory
of these historical grievances may indeed be used by designing or
hysterical traders in agitation to inflame the present war. But the war
itself is not the old war, nor can it be explained by recurring to the
causes of the old war. It has the characteristics no longer of a defensive
war, nor yet of a war of revenge absolutely, but of an aggressive war,
and of a war of conquest. In his able work on "The Land Tenure and

the Land Classes of Ireland," Dr. Sigerson, writing in 1871, looked
forward to the peaceful co-existence in Ireland of two systems of
land-holding, "whereby the country might enjoy the advantage of what
is good in the 'landlord,' or single middleman system, and in the
peasant proprietary or direct system."
What we now see in Ireland, after nearly twenty years of legislation,
steadily tending to the triumph of equal rights, is an agitation
threatening not only the "co-existence" of these two systems, but the
very existence of each of these systems.
To get at the origin and the meaning of this agitation we must be
content, I believe, to go no further back than ten years, and to look for
them, not in