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

into the condition of artisans, peasants,

and paupers. 'This,' says M. Thierry, 'is the last sorrowful glance cast
back through the mist of ages on that great event which established in
England a race of kings, nobles, and warriors of foreign extraction. The
reader must figure to himself, not a mere change of political rule, not
the triumph of one of two competitors, but the intrusion of 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