not be the first time that English Liberals have deliberately faced exclusion, rather than abandon a just, generous, and in the long run. an inevitable policy of conciliation towards Ireland. "The time will come," said Macaulay in one of the finest pieces in the records of English oratory, "when history will do justice to the Whigs of England, and will faithfully relate how much they did and suffered for Ireland; how for the sake of Ireland they remained out of office more than twenty years, braving the frowns of the Court, braving the hisses of the multitude, renouncing power and patronage and salaries and peerages and garters, and yet not obtaining in return even a little fleeting popularity." All this was done for the sake of Catholic Emancipation. The successors of these eminent men are not likely to have to undergo as much as this in the great work of carrying out that Emancipation to its natural and unavoidable political consequences. But it is to be wished that they would face the prospect before them, whatever sacrifice it may involve, and that prospect, as every serious politician is well aware in his heart, comprehends a great deal more than a Land Bill.

In Fox's time conciliation with Ireland was a wise and humane article of policy. In our time it is nothing short of a great necessity of state. Ireland is no longer reduced to take anything that she can get. The prosperous multitudes of Irishmen across the Atlantic have given her both heart and material resources. One of the commonest arguments against separation is that, if England were ever drawn into a war, she would have in an independent Ireland a hostile power on her flank. As if we had not a hostile power on our flank now. As it is, if England is ever drawn into a war, shall we not be still forced to keep an army in Ireland, and cruisers on its coasts, exactly as if it were the seat of an independent enemy? It is too clear to need argument that the disaffection of Ireland is a direct and not inconsiderable source of military weakness to Great Britain, and that it is more so now than it ever was. There are other ways in which we are weakened from a military point of view, and our hands tied. What these are we need not now stay to discuss; but, for one thing, it is rather serious to find that Ireland is failing us as a recruiting-ground. The advocates of a spirited foreign policy and English ascendancy in the counsels of Europe ought to be the most eager for the reconciliation of Ireland, for the latter is an indispensable condition of the former. In domestic policy it is the same. Everybody can see for himself that we shall get little English legislation accomplished so long as the Irish members are expected by their constituencies to do their best to prevent it. Changes in the rules of Parliamentary procedure may slightly lessen the evil, but they will in no sense remove it. Unless we recognise and act upon Fox's (1) Speech on Repeal of the Union, February 6, 1833.

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doctrine that the only way of governing Ireland is to please the people of Ireland, we may be quite sure that the people of Ireland will find means, as they have found means, of preventing us from governing ourselves. Let any one who doubts this consider the history of the last session and of this.

Conciliation must depend upon pleasing the people of Ireland, but we shall instantly be told that the only way of pleasing the people of Ireland is to let them go away from us altogether, bag and baggage, and set up on their own account. This decisive utterance is supposed to settle the question. Conciliation in plain English means separation; separation is impracticable; argal, conciliation is impracticable. This would be conclusive enough, and desperate enough, if the two premisses of the syllogism must be taken as demonstrably true. As a matter of fact neither one nor other of these has yet been proved. To take the minor premiss first. I am one of those who believe that separation would be a distinct step backwards, and would be a disadvantage to Ireland itself. I am not thinking of what an independent Ireland would do in the way of endowing the Catholic clergy, making education denominational, and unjustly using the landlords. Such things as these she would manage better than they are likely to be managed for her by a country which gives the power of veto to the landlords alone in one branch of the legislature, and which is so little sympathetic with Catholicism that not a single Catholic is returned by an English or Scotch constituency to the other. But there are more serious aspects of an independent Ireland, precisely from the Irish point of view. Not to name more than two considerations. An independent Ireland, as Mr. Mill and others have pointed out, besides having to defend herself against all other enemies, internal and external, without English help, would feel obliged to keep herself always armed and in readiness to fight England. "An Irishman must have a very lofty idea of the resources of his country who thinks that this load upon the Irish taxpayer would be easily borne. A war-tax assessed upon the soil, for want of other taxable material, would be no small set-off against what the peasant would gain even by the entire cessation of rent."1

The second consideration is that an independent Ireland would be sure to resort at once to that evil economic policy which has found favour in our colonies, and in the United States. They are only able to endure its consequences because they have immense natural resources to fall back upon. But Ireland has none of these natural resources to save her from the ruinous scrape in which protective duties, bounties, and subsidies would in no long time assuredly involve her. If these two considerations stood alone, they are enough to make a sensible Irishman think twice before he commits (1) England and Ireland, p. 28.

himself to the cry for separation. But though separation would be a disgrace to us, and a misfortune to them, it is absurd to say that it is impossible. Not only is it not impossible, but we are bound to accept and allow Macaulay's fervid ejaculation, "If, on a fair trial, it is found that Great Britain and Ireland cannot exist happily together as parts of one empire, in God's name let them separate.'

But let us turn to the first proposition. Is it clear that conciliation is only another word for separation? It is undoubtedly true that the majority of the population of Ireland have been alienated from Great Britain; that they neither understand nor like the English character; and that they bitterly dislike and resent the English system of government. It would be nothing short of a miracle if this were otherwise. But let us not overlook the following very pertinent considerations on the other side. 1. There is a powerful and resolute part of the population of Ireland, which at present stands firm by the English connection, and is all the more likely to adhere to it if the demands of the Ulster tenants are satisfied. 2. There is no reason to believe that even outside of Ulster the desire for separation is profound, passionate, and urgent. We know how irresistible the cry for Repeal once seemed, yet, as has been justly pointed out, it all died away, and for twenty years Parliament was free from any combination aiming at the legislative independence of Ireland. Mr. Parnell failed utterly to secure a strong demonstration for Home Rule until he tacked Land Reform on to it. 3. If the Irish voters felt that there was any real chance of separation, they would soon begin to count the cost. If they were living under a land system suited to their particular requirements, and if they felt that they had a real voice in the settlement of their own business, they are not so little like other human beings as to sacrifice peaceful stability of this kind for the sake of a new arrangement, which they would have to fight for, and which after all would give them no more substantial advantages than they would enjoy without it.

1

Although, however, for these and other reasons, conciliation of a practical and working kind does seem to be attainable without separation, yet I for one cannot believe that it will ever be attained without a plain recognition in the mind of the English people and by the English Government of the Irish national sentiment. The great miscarriage of our attempt to govern Ireland is due to the fact that we treated them as if they were barbarians up to 1829, and then we suddenly treated them as if they were full-blown Englishmen. What remains to be tried is the plan of treating them as a distinct nationality, with views, traditions,

(1) Mr. Courtney has worked this out in his article in the International Review for January, 1881.

interests, a religion, a character, all of its own. It is odd, or it would be odd, if we English and Scotch were of a more readily imaginative and sympathetic stock, that we so stubbornly refuse to see what every foreigner can see. M. Louis Blanc was in England at the time of the Fenian troubles in 1869, and it struck him as inexplicable that "considering the state of the relations created between England and Ireland by long oppression, the national aspirations of the country which has had so much to suffer should be regarded as the blackest of crimes by the country which has so much to reproach itself with." This, he said, was what nobody with an impartial and equitable spirit could pretend to justify. This is the frame of mind which circumstances will drive us to cast out. Conciliation does not mean separation, but it does mean a recognition of these national aspirations as something which we have no choice but to satisfy. There are perfectly feasible ways of trying to do this, and until we have made the attempt it is mere impotent folly to talk about the ingratitude of the Irish people and the hopelessness of the Irish problem.

II.

It is not difficult to discern the course of the immediate events which have in gradual succession and strictly connected series brought affairs to their condition at this moment. We have now lost sight of the three bad seasons which made the payment of rent impossible, but in fact this circumstance was the source and fountain of all the mischief that has happened since. If there had been no other cause at work this misfortune might have been tided over, as happens in other countries. In Ireland other causes are always close at hand to turn any occurrence into an occasion for a social or a political rising. As it happened, the Act of 1870 had not prevented the raising of rents, but had even in some cases promoted it. In no case was it calculated, and there seems good reason for doubting whether the Bill of 1881 is calculated, to meet the difficulty of falling times. The eternal grievance of the Irish tenant, which had been lulled by the prosperity of the years between 1871 and 1876, was awakened into fresh life by the adversity of the three years which followed. The tenant persists in regarding, and as Professor Richey has pointed out in these pages, the Land Bill now before Parliament agrees in regarding, the relation between landlord and tenant as a relation of partnership. During the bad harvests from 1877 to 1879 the landlord who insisted on rents without abatement seemed to his tenant to be usurping the position of a preference shareholder, leaving all the loss to the holder of ordinary stock. Temporary reductions of rent were made, but it seems to be established that a considerable proportion of (1) Dix Ans de l'Hist. d Angleterre, vol. x. p. 107.

the landlords refused to make any abatements. For evidence of the harsh usage to which many tenants were exposed, we need not go beyond the Disturbance Bill, which was brought into Parliament a year ago. The Government would have been guilty of trifling with Parliament and the country unless they had good reason to believe that some landlords were likely to exact rents which it was neither expedient nor equitable that the tenant should be forced to pay. This real danger to the tenants fell in with the designs of the Irish politicians. Mr. Parnell had already won the enthusiastic confidence of the peasantry, chiefly for the reason which may so well chagrin ourselves, that he was supposed to have found out the secret of harassing, resisting, and humiliating the British Parliament. The ballot had given the peasantry political power, and Mr. Parnell is showing them how to use it for the re-assertion in legal and constitutional form of their claim to a national life of their own. The cry for Home Rule, however, had not kindled any overwhelming amount of enthusiasm. It was necessary to attract the tenantfarmers from another side; their sufferings from bad seasons, and their discontent against the landlords, pointed pretty plainly to the quarter from which they were easily accessible. The Land League was thus the result of a genuine demand for combination on the part of the peasantry, dexterously and energetically utilised by Mr. Parnell and his friends.

The rejection of the Disturbance Bill by the House of Lords was the step which at once confirmed the power and stimulated the activity of the Land League. It was the announcement to the Irish people that, however friendly the Ministers might be, there was a perverse and hostile power in the English system of Government which even well-meaning Ministers themselves could not always keep under control. This was at the outset a signal misfortune for a policy of conciliation. It irritated that suspicious temper which is always (and quite naturally and justly, considering the general tenour of English dealings with Ireland) present in the Irish mind and always ready to blaze out. It had another and a worse effect. If the Land League was to be good for anything, it was bound by all its professions and the very purpose of its existence to protect its clients against those evictions which the Government and the majority of the House of Commons had declared it to be inequitable to carry out. The strike against excessive rents which took place in the autumn, under the guidance of the League, was accompanied by a certain number, though an exceedingly small number, of acts of outrage and intimidation. These were set down to the deliberate instigation and direct contrivance of the Land League. They were, in fact, the spontaneous outbreak of the feeling of the districts where they took place. They were the violent expressions of a public