The Land-War In Ireland (1870) | Page 5

a nation into the bosom of another people which it came to destroy, and the scattered fragments of which it retained as an integral portion of the new system of society, in the status merely of personal property, or, to use the stronger language of records and deeds, a clothing of the soil. He must not picture to himself on the one hand the king and despot; on the other simply his subjects, high and low, rich and poor, all inhabiting England, and consequently all English. He must bear in mind that there were two distinct nations--the old Anglo-Saxon race and the Norman invaders, dwelling intermingled on the same soil; or, rather, he might contemplate two countries--the one possessed by the Normans, wealthy and exonerated from public burdens, the other enslaved and oppressed with a land tax--the former full of spacious mansions, of walled towns, and moated castles--the latter occupied with thatched cabins, and ancient walls in a state of dilapidation. This peopled with the happy and the idle, with soldiers, courtiers, knights, and nobles--that with miserable men condemned to labour as peasants and artisans. On the one side he beholds luxury and insolence, on the other poverty and envy--not the envy of the poor at the sight of opulence and men born to opulence, but that malignant envy, although justice be on its side, which the despoiled cannot but entertain on looking upon the spoilers. Lastly, to complete the picture, these two countries are in some sort interwoven with each other--they meet at every point, and yet they are more distinct, more completely separated, than if the ocean rolled between them.'
Does not this picture look very like Ireland? To make it more like, let us imagine that the Norman king had lived in Paris, and kept a viceroy in London--that the English parliament were subordinate to the French parliament, composed exclusively of Normans, and governed by Norman undertakers for the benefit of the dominant State--that the whole of the English land was held by ten thousand Norman proprietors, many of them absentees--that all the offices of the government, in every department, were in the hands of Normans--that, differing in religion with the English nation, the French, being only a tenth of the population, had got possession of all the national churches and church property, while the poor natives supported a numerous hierarchy by voluntary contributions--that the Anglo-Norman parliament was bribed and coerced to abolish itself, forming a union of England with France, in which the English members were as one to six. Imagine that in consequence of rebellions the land of England had been confiscated three or four times, after desolating wars and famines, so that all the native proprietors were expelled, and the land was parcelled out to French soldiers and adventurers on condition that the foreign 'planters' should assist in keeping down 'the mere English' by force of arms. Imagine that the English, being crushed by a cruel penal code for a century, were allowed to reoccupy the soil as mere tenants-at-will, under the absolute power of their French landlords. If all this be imagined by English legislators and English writers, they will be better able to understand the Irish land question, and to comprehend the nature of 'Irish difficulties,' as well as the justice of feeble, insincere, and baffled statesmen in casting the blame of Irish misery and disorder on the unruly and barbarous nature of Irishmen. They will recollect that the aristocracy of Ireland are the high-spirited descendants of conquerors, with the instinct of conquest still in their blood. The parliament which enacted the Irish land laws was a parliament composed almost exclusively of men of this dominant race. They made all political power dependent on the ownership of land, thus creating for themselves a monopoly which it is not in human nature to surrender without a struggle.
The possession of this monopoly, however, fully accounts for two things--the difficulty which the landlords feel in admitting the justice of the tenant's claims for the legal recognition of the value which his labour has added to the soil, and the extreme repugnance with which they regard any legislation on the subject. Besides, the want of sympathy with the people, of earnestness and courage in meeting the realities of the case, is conspicuous in all attempts of the kind during the last half-century. Those attempts have been evasive, feeble, abortive--concessions to the demand that something must be done, but so managed that nothing should be done to weaken the power of the eight thousand proprietors over the mass of the nation dependent on the land for their existence. Hence has arisen a great amount of jealousy, distrust, and irritability in the landlord class towards the tenantry and their advocates.
The Irish race, to adopt Thierry's language, are full of