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The Land War In Ireland (1870) by James Godkin

J >> James Godkin >> The Land War In Ireland (1870)




History, moreover, teaches them that, as a matter of fact, the
government in the reign of James I.--and James himself in repeated
proclamations--assured the people who occupied the lands of O'Neill
and O'Donnell at the time of their flight that they would be protected
in all their rights if they remained quiet and loyal, which they
did. Yet they were nearly all removed to make way for the English and
Scotch settlers.

Thus, historical investigators have been digging around the
foundations of Irish landlordism. They declare that those foundations
were cemented with blood, and they point to the many wounds still open
from which that blood issued so profusely. The facts of the conquest
and confiscation were hinted at by the Devon Commissioners as
accounting for the peculiar difficulties of the Irish land question,
and writers on it timidly allude to 'the historic past' as originating
influences still powerful in alienating landlords and tenants, and
fostering mutual distrust between them. But the time for evasion and
timidity has passed. We must now honestly and courageously face
the stern realities of this case. Among these realities is a firm
conviction in the minds of many landlords that they are in no sense
trustees for the community, but that they have an absolute power over
their estates--that they can, if they like, strip the land clean of
its human clothing, and clothe it with sheep or cattle instead, or lay
it bare and desolate, let it lapse into a wilderness, or sow it with
salt. That is in reality the terrific power secured to them by the
present land code, to be executed through the Queen's writ and by the
Queen's troops--a power which could not stand a day if England did not
sustain it by overwhelming military force.

Another of the realities of the question is the no less inveterate
conviction in the tenants' mind that the absolute power of the
landlord was originally a usurpation effected by the sword. Right or
wrong, they believe that the confiscations were the palpable violation
of the natural rights of the people whom Providence placed in this
country. With bitter emphasis they assert that no set of men has any
divine right to root a nation out of its own land. Painful as this
state of feeling is, there is no use in denying that it exists. Here,
then, is the deep radical difference that is to be removed. Here are
the two conflicting forces which are to be reconciled. This is the
real Irish land question. All other points are minor and of easy
adjustment. The people say, and, I believe, sincerely, that they are
willing to pay a fair rent, according to a public valuation--not a
rent imposed arbitrarily by one of the interested parties, which
might be raised so as to ruin the occupier. The feelings of these two
parties often clash so violently, there is such instinctive distrust
between them, the peace and prosperity of the country depend so much
on their coming to terms and putting an end to their long-standing
feud, that it is still more imperatively necessary than in the
Church question, that a third party, independent, impartial, and
authoritative, should intervene and heal the breach.

There was one phrase constantly ringing in the ears of the Devon
Commissioners, and now, after nearly a generation has passed away, it
is ringing in the ears of the nation louder than ever--'_the want
of tenure_.' All the evidence went to show that the want of security
paralysed industry and impeded social progress. It seems strange that
any evidence should be thought necesary to prove that a man will not
sow if he does not hope to reap, and that he will not build houses for
strangers to enjoy. This would be taken as an axiom anywhere out of
Ireland. Of all the people in Europe, the Irish have suffered most
from the oppression of those who, from age to age, had power in the
country. Whoever fought or conquered, they were always the victims;
and it is a singular fact that their sufferings are scarcely ever
noticed by the contemporary annalists, even when those annalists
were ecclesiastics. The extent to which they were slaughtered in the
perpetual wars between the native chiefs, and in the wars between
those chiefs and the English, is something awful to contemplate, not
to speak of the wholesale destruction of life by the famines which
those wars entailed. On several occasions the Celtic race seemed very
nearly extinct. The penal code, with all its malign influence, had one
good effect. It subdued to a great extent the fighting propensities
of the people, and fused the clans into one nation, purified by
suffering. Since that time, in spite of occasional visitations of
calamity, they have been steadily rising in the social scale, and they
are now better off than ever they were in their whole history. When
we review the stages by which they have risen, we cannot but feel at
times grieved and indignant at the opportunities for tranquillising
and enriching the country which were lost through the ignorance,
apathy, bigotry, and selfishness of the legislature. There was no end
of commissions and select committees to inquire into the condition
of the agricultural population, whenever Parliament was roused by the
prevalence of agrarian outrages. They reported, and there the matter
ended. There were always insuperable difficulties when the natives
were to be put in a better position. Between 1810 and 1814, for
example, a commission reported four times on the condition of
the Irish bogs. They expressed their entire conviction of the
practicability of cultivating with profit an immense extent of land
lying waste. In 1819, in 1823, in 1826, and in 1830, select committees
inquired into and reported on drainage, reclamation of bogs and
marshes, on roads, fisheries, emigration, and other schemes for giving
employment to the redundant population that had been encouraged to
increase and multiply in the most reckless manner, while 'war
prices' were obtained for agricultural produce, and the votes of the
forty-shilling freeholders were wanted by the landlords. When, by the
Emancipation Act in 1829, the forty-shilling franchise was abolished,
the peasant lost his political value. After the war, when the price of
corn fell very low, and, consequently, tillage gave place to grazing,
labourers became to the middleman an encumbrance and a nuisance that
must be cleared off the land, just as weeds are plucked up and flung
out to wither on the highway. Then came Lord Devon's Land Commission,
which inquired on the eve of the potato failure and the great famine.
The Irish population was now at its highest figure--between eight and
nine millions. Yet, though there had been three bad seasons, it was
clearly proved at that time that by measures which a wise and willing
legislature would have promptly passed, the whole surplus population
could have been profitably employed.

In this great land controversy, on which side lies the truth? Is it
the fault of the people, or the fault of the law, that the country is
but half cultivated, while the best of the peasantry are emigrating
with hostile feelings and purposes of vengeance towards England? As
to the landlords, as a class, they use their powers with as much
moderation and mercy as any other class of men in any country ever
used power so vast and so little restrained. The best and most
indulgent landlords, the most genial and generous, are unquestionably
the old nobility, the descendants of the Normans and Saxons, those
very conquerors of whom we have heard so much. The worst, the most
harsh and exacting, are those who have purchased under the Landed
Estates Court--strangers to the people, who think only of the
percentage on their capital. We had heard much of the necessity of
capital to develope the resources of the land. The capital came,
but the development consists in turning tillage lands into pasture,
clearing out the labouring population and sending them to the
poorhouse, or shipping them off at a few pounds per head to keep down
the rates. And yet is it not possible to set all our peasantry to work
at the profitable cultivation of their native land? Is it not possible
to establish by law what many landlords act upon as the rule of their
estates--namely, the principle that no man is to be evicted so long as
he pays a fair rent, and the other principle, that whenever he fails,
he is entitled to the market value by public sale of all the property
in his holding beyond that fair rent? The hereditary principle,
rightly cherished among the landlords, so conservative in its
influence, ought to be equally encouraged among the tenants. The man
of industry, as well as the man of rank, should be able to feel that
he is providing for his children, that his farm is at once a bank and
an insurance office, in which all his minute daily deposits of toil
and care and skill will be safe and productive. This is the way to
enrich and strengthen the State, and to multiply guarantees against
revolution--not by consolidation of farms and the abandonment of
tillage, not by degrading small holders into day labourers, levelling
the cottages and filling the workhouses.

If the legislature were guided by the spirit that animates Lord Erne
in his dealings with his tenantry, the land question would soon
be settled to the satisfaction of all parties. 'I think,' said his
lordship, 'as far as possible, every tenant on my estate may call his
farm his castle, as long as he conducts himself honestly, quietly, and
industriously; and, should he wish to leave in order to find a better
landlord, I allow him to sell his farm, provided he pleases me in a
tenant. Therefore, if a man lays out money on his farm judiciously, he
is certain to receive back the money, should he wish to go elsewhere.'
He mentioned three cases of sale which occurred last year. One tenant
sold a farm of seventy acres in bad order for 570 l., another thirty
acres for 300 l., and a third the same number of acres in worse
condition for 200 l. The landlord lost nothing by these changes. His
rent was paid up, and in each case he got a good tenant for a bad one.
Lord Erne is a just man, and puts on no more than a fair rent. But
all landlords are not just, as all tenants are not honest. Even where
tenant-right is admitted in name, it is obvious that the rent may be
raised so high as to make the farm worth nothing in the market. To
give to the tenant throughout the country generally the pleasant
feeling that his farm is his castle, which he can make worth more
money every day he rises, there must be a public letting valuation,
and this the State could easily provide. And then there should be the
right of sale to the highest solvent bidder.

This might be one way of securing permanent tenure, or stimulating the
industry and sustaining the thrift of the farmer. But the nature
of the different tenures, and the effect of each in bracing up or
relaxing the nerves of industry, will be the object of deliberation
with the Government and the legislature. It is said that, in the hands
of small farmers, proprietorship leads to endless subdivision; that
long leases generally cause bad husbandry; that tenants-at-will often
feel themselves more secure and safe than a contract could make them;
that families have lived on the same farm for generations without a
scrape of a pen except the receipt for rent. On the other hand, there
is the general cry of 'want of tenure;' there is the custom of serving
notices to quit, sometimes for other reasons than non-payment of rent;
there are occasional barbarities in the levelling of villages, and
dragging the aged and the sick from the old roof-tree, the parting
from which rends their heart-strings; and, above all, there is the
feeling among the peasantry which makes them look without horror on
the murder of a landlord or an agent who was a kind and benevolent
neighbour; and, lastly, the paramount consideration for the
legislature, that a large portion of the people are disaffected to
the State, and ready to join its enemies, and this almost solely on
account of the state of the law relating to land. Hence the necessity
of settling the question as speedily as possible, and the duty of all
who have the means to contribute something towards that most desirable
consummation, which seems to be all that is wanted to make Irishmen of
every class work together earnestly for the welfare of their country.
It is admitted that no class of men in the world has improved more
than the Irish landlords during the last twenty years. Let the
legislature restore confidence between them and the people by taking
away all ground for the suspicion that they wish to extirpate the
Celtic race.

Nor was this suspicion without cause, as the following history will
too clearly prove. A very able English writer has said: 'The policy
of all the successive swarms of settlers was to extirpate the native
Celtic race, but every effort made to break up the old framework
of society failed, for the new-comers soon became blended with and
undistinguishable from the mass of the people--being obliged to ally
themselves with the native chieftains, rather than live hemmed in by a
fiery ring of angry septs and exposed to perpetual war with everything
around them. Merged in the great Celtic mass, they adopted Irish
manners and names, yet proscribed and insulted the native inhabitants
as an inferior race. Everything liberal towards them is intercepted in
its progress.

'The past history of Ulster is but a portion of Scottish history
inserted into that of Ireland--a stone in the Irish mosaic of an
entirely different quality and colour from the pieces that surround
it.

'Thus it came to pass that, through the confiscation of their lands
and the proscription of their religion, popery was worked by a most
vehement process into the blood and brain of the Irish nation.'

It has been often said that the Irish must be an inferior race, since
they allowed themselves to be subjugated by some thousands of English
invaders. But it should be recollected, first, that the conquest,
commenced by Henry II. in the twelfth century, was not completed till
the seventeenth century, when the King's writ ran for the first time
through the province of Ulster, the ancient kingdom of the O'Neills;
in the second place, the weakness of the Celtic communities was not so
much the fault of the men as of their institutions, brought with them
from the East and clung to with wonderful tenacity. So long as they
had boundless territory for their flocks and herds, and could always
move on 'to pastures new,' they increased and multiplied, and allowed
the sword and the battle-axe to rest, unless when a newly elected
chief found it necessary to give his followers 'a hosting'--which
means an expedition for plunder. Down to the seventeenth century,
after five hundred years' contact with the Teutonic race, they were
essentially the same people as they were when the ancient Greeks
and Romans knew them. They are thus described by Dr. Mommsen in his
'History of Rome:'--'Such qualities--those of good soldiers and of bad
citizens--explain the historical fact that the Celts have shaken all
States and have _founded none_. Everywhere we find them ready to rove,
or, in other words, to march, preferring movable property to landed
estate, and gold to everything else; following the profession of arms
as a system of organised pillage, or even as a trade for hire, and
with such success that even the Roman historian, Sallust, acknowledges
that the Celts bore off the prize from the Romans in feats of arms.
They were the true 'soldiers of fortune' of antiquity, as pictures and
descriptions represent them, with big but sinewy bodies, with shaggy
hair and long moustaches--quite a contrast to the Greeks and Romans,
who shaved the upper lip--in the variegated embroidered dresses which
in combat were not unfrequently thrown off, with a broad gold ring
round their neck, wearing no helmets and without missile weapons
of any sort, but furnished instead with an immense shield, a long
ill-tempered sword, a dagger and a lance, all ornamented with gold,
for they were not unskilful in working in metals. Everything was made
subservient to ostentation--even wounds, which were often enlarged for
the purpose of boasting a broader scar. Usually they fought on foot,
but certain tribes on horseback, in which case every free man was
followed by two attendants, likewise mounted. War-chariots were early
in use, as they were among the Libyans and Hellenes in the earliest
times. Many a trait reminds us of the chivalry of the middle ages,
particularly the custom of single combat, which was foreign to the
Greeks and Romans. Not only were they accustomed in war to challenge
a single enemy to fight, after having previously insulted him by words
and gestures; in peace also they fought with each other in splendid
equipments, as for life or death. After such feats carousals followed
in due course. In this way they led, whether under their own or
a foreign banner, a restless soldier life, constantly occupied in
fighting and in their so-called feats of heroism. They were dispersed
from _Ireland_ and Spain to Asia Minor, but all their enterprises
melted away like snow in spring, and they nowhere created a great
state or developed a distinctive culture of their own.' Such were
the people who once almost terminated the existence of Rome, and were
afterwards with difficulty repulsed from Greece, who became masters of
the most fertile part of Italy and of a fair province in the heart
of Asia Minor, who, after their Italian province had been subdued,
inflicted disastrous blows on successive Roman generals, and were only
at last subjugated by Caesar himself in nine critical and sometimes
most dangerous campaigns, B.C. 51.

Niebuhr observes that at that time the form of government was
everywhere an hereditary monarchy, which, when Caesar went into Gaul,
had been swallowed up, as had the authority of the Senate, in the
anarchy of the nobles. Their freedom was lawlessness; an inherent
incapacity of living under the dominion of laws distinguishes them as
barbarians from the Greeks and Italians. As individuals had to procure
the protection of some magnate in order to live in safety, so the
weaker tribes took shelter under the patronage of a more powerful one.
For they were a disjointed multitude; and when any people had in
this manner acquired an extensive sovereignty, they exercised it
arbitrarily until its abuses became intolerable, or their subjects
were urged by blind hatred of their power to fall off from them, and
gather round some new centre. The sole bond of union was the Druidical
hierarchy which, at least in Caesar's time, was common to both nations.
Both of them paid obedience to its tribunal, which administered
justice once a year--an institution which probably was not introduced
till long after the age of migrations, when the expulsion of the
vanquished had ceased to be regarded as the end of war, and which must
have been fostered by the constant growth of lawlessness in particular
states--being upheld by the _ban_, which excluded the contumacious
from all intercourse in divine worship and in daily life with the
faithful. The huge bodies, wild features, and long shaggy hair of the
men, gave a ghastliness to their aspect. This, along with their fierce
courage, their countless numbers, and the noise made by an enormous
multitude of horns and trumpets, struck the armies arrayed against
them with fear and amazement. If these, however, did not allow
their terror to overpower them, the want of order, discipline, and
perseverance would often enable an inferior number to vanquish a vast
host of the barbarians. Besides, they were but ill equipped. Few of
them wore any armour; their narrow shields, which were of the same
height with their bodies, were weak and clumsy; they rushed upon their
enemies with broad thin battle-swords of bad steel, which the first
blow upon iron often notched and rendered useless. Like true savages,
they destroyed the inhabitants, the towns, and the agriculture of the
countries they conquered. They cut off the heads of the slain,
and tied them by the hair to the manes of their horses. If a skull
belonged to a person of rank, they nailed it up in their houses and
preserved it as an heirloom for their posterity, as the nobles in rude
ages do stag-horns. Towns were rare amongst them; the houses and
the villages, which were very numerous, were mean, the furniture
wretched--a heap of straw covered with skins served both for a bed
and a seat. They did not cultivate corn save for a very limited
consumption, for the main part of their food was the milk and the
flesh of their cattle. These formed their wealth. Gold, too, they
had in abundance, derived partly from the sandy beds of their rivers,
partly from some mines which these had led them to discover. It was
worn in ornaments by every Gaul of rank. In battle he bore gold chains
on his arms and heavy gold collars round his neck, even when the upper
part of his body was in other respects quite naked. For they often
threw off their parti-coloured chequered cloaks, which shone with
all the hues of the rainbow, like the picturesque dress of their
kinspeople the Highlanders, who have laid aside the trousers of the
ancient Gauls. Their duels and gross revels are an image of the rudest
part of the middle ages. Their debauches were mostly committed with
beer and mead; for vines and all the plants of southern regions were
as yet total strangers to the north of the Alps, where the climate in
those ages was extremely severe; so that wine was rare, though of all
the commodities imported it was the most greedily bought up.

Ulster was known in ancient times as one of the five Irish 'kingdoms,'
and remained unconquered by the English till the reign of James I.,
when the last prince of the great house of O'Neill, then Earl of
Tyrone, fled to the Continent in company with O'Donel, Earl of
Tyrconnel, head of another very ancient sept. Up to that period the
men of Ulster proudly regarded themselves as 'Irish of the Irish and
Catholic of the Catholics.' The inhabitants were of mixed blood, but,
as in the other provinces of the island, the great mass of the people,
as well as the ruling classes, were of Celtic origin. Those whom
ethnologists still recognise as aborigines, in parts of Connaught
and in some mountainous regions, an inferior race, are said to be
the descendants of the Firbolgs, or Belgae, who formed the third
immigration. They were followed and subdued by the Tuatha de
Danans--men famed for their gigantic power and supernatural skill--a
race of demigods, who still live in the national superstitions. The
last of the ancient invasions was by the Gael or Celt, known as the
Milesians and Scoti. The institutions and customs of this people were
established over the whole island, and were so deeply rooted in the
soil that their remnants to this day present the greatest obstacles
to the settlement of the land question according to the English model,
and on the principles of political economy, which run directly counter
to Irish instincts. It is truly wonderful how distinctly the present
descendants of this race preserve the leading features of their
primitive character. In France and England the Celtic character was
moulded by the power and discipline of the Roman Empire. To Ireland
this modifying influence never extended; and we find the Ulster chiefs
who fought for their territories with English viceroys 280 years ago
very little different from the men who followed Brennus to the sack
of Home, and encountered the legions of Julius Caesar on the plains of
Gaul.

Mr. Prendergast observes, in the introduction to his 'Cromwellian
Settlement' that when the companions of Strongbow landed in the reign
of Henry II. they found a country such as Caesar had found in Gaul
1200 years before. A thousand years had passed over the island without
producing the slightest social progress--'the inhabitants divided
into tribes on the system of the clansmen and chiefs, without a common
Government, suddenly confederating, suddenly dissolving, with Brehons,
Shaunahs, minstrels, bards, and harpers, in all unchanged, except that
for their ancient Druids they had got Christian priests. Had the
Irish remained honest pagans, Ireland perhaps had remained unconquered
still. Round the coast strangers had built seaport towns, either
traders from the Carthaginian settlements in Spain, or outcasts from
their own country, like the Greeks that built Marseilles. At the time
of the arrival of the French and Flemish adventurers from Wales, they
were occupied by a mixed Danish and French population, who supplied
the Irish with groceries, including the wines of Poitou, the latter in
such abundance that they had no need of vineyards.'

If vineyards had been needed, we may be sure they would not have been
planted, for the Irish Celts planted nothing. Neither did they build,
except in the simplest and rudest way, improving their architecture
from age to age no more than the beaver or the bee. Mr. Prendergast
is an able, honest, and frank writer; yet there is something amusingly
Celtic in the flourish with which he excuses the style of palaces in
which the Irish princes delighted to dwell. 'Unlike England,' he says,
'then covered with castles on the heights, where the French gentlemen
secured themselves and their families against the hatred of the churls
and villains, as the English peasantry were called, the dwellings
of the Irish chiefs were of wattles or clay. It is for robbers and
foreigners to take to rocks and precipices for security; for native
rulers, there is no such fortress _as justice and humanity_.' This
is very fine, but surely Mr. Prendergast cannot mean that the Irish
chiefs were distinguished by their justice and humanity. The following
touch is still grander:--'The Irish, like the wealthiest and highest
of the present day, loved detached houses surrounded by fields and
woods. Towns and their walls they looked upon as tombs or sepulchres,
&c.' As to fields, there were none, because the Irish never made
fences, their patches of cultivated land being divided by narrow
strips of green sod. Besides, they lived in villages, which were
certainly surrounded by woods, because the woods were everywhere,
and they furnished the inhabitants with fuel and shelter, as well as
materials for building their huts.

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