Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) by William Henry Hurlbert

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No man had a keener or more accurate sense of this than the most
eloquent and illustrious Irishman whose voice was ever heard in America.

In the autumn of 1871 Father Burke of Tallaght and San Clemente, with
whom I had formed at Rome in early manhood a friendship which ended only
with his life, came to America as the commissioned Visitor of the
Dominican Order. His mission there will live for ever in the Catholic
annals of the New World. But of one episode of that mission no man
living perhaps knows so much as I, and I make no excuse for this
allusion to it here, as it illustrates perfectly the limits between the
lawful and the unlawful in the agitation of Irish questions upon
American soil.

While Father Burke was in New York Mr. Froude came there, having been
invited to deliver before a Protestant Literary Association a series of
lectures upon the history of Ireland. My personal relations with Mr.
Froude, I should say here, and my esteem for his rare abilities, go back
to the days of the _Nemesis of Faith_, and I did not affect to disguise
from him the regret with which I learned his errand to the New World.
That his lectures would be brilliant, impressive, and interesting, was
quite certain; but it was equally certain, I thought, that they would
do a world of mischief, by stirring up ancient issues of strife between
the Protestant and the Catholic populations of the United States.

That they would be answered angrily, indiscreetly, and in a fashion to
aggravate prejudices which ought to be appeased on both sides of the
questions involved, was much more than probable. All this accordingly I
urged upon Father Burke, begging him to find or make time in the midst
of his engrossing duties for a systematic course of lectures in reply.
What other men would surely say in heat and with virulence would be said
by him, I knew, temperately, loftily, and wisely. Three strenuous
objections he made. One was that his work as a Catholic missionary
demanded all his thought and all his time; another that he was not
historically equipped to deal with so formidable an antagonist; and a
third that America ought not to be a battle-ground of Irish contentions.
It was upon the last that he dwelt most tenaciously; nor did he give way
until he had satisfied himself, after consulting with the highest
authorities of his Church, and with two or three of the coolest and most
judicious Irish citizens of New York, that I was right in believing that
his appearance in the arena as the champion of Ireland, would lift an
inevitable controversy high above the atmosphere of unworthy passion,
and put it beyond the reach of political mischief-makers.

How nobly he did his work when he had become convinced that he ought to
do it, is now matter of history. But it is a hundredfold more needful
now than it was in 1871 and 1872, that the spirit in which he did it
should be known and published abroad. In the interval between the
delivery of two of his replies to Mr. Froude, Mr. Froude went to Boston.
A letter from Boston informed me that upon Mr. Froude's arrival there,
all the Irish servants of the friend with whom he was to stay had
suddenly left the house, refusing to their employer the right to invite
under his roof a guest not agreeable to them. I handed this letter,
without a word, to Father Burke a few hours before he was to speak in
the Academy of Music. He read it with a kind of humorous wrath; and when
the evening came, he prefaced his lecture with a few strong and stirring
words, in which he castigated with equal sense and severity the
misconduct of his country-people, anticipating thus by many a year the
spirit in which the supreme authority of his Church has just now dealt
with the social plague of "boycotting," whereof the strike of the
servant girls at Boston sixteen years ago was a precursory symptom.

Father Burke understood that American citizenship imposes duties where
it confers rights. Nobody expects the European emigrant who abjures his
foreign allegiance to divest himself of his native sympathies or
antipathies. But American law, and the conditions of American liberty,
require him to divest himself of the notion that he retains any right
actively to interfere in the domestic affairs of the country of his
birth. For public and political purposes, the Irishman who becomes an
American ceases to be an Irishman. When Mr. Gladstone's Government in
1881 seized and locked up indefinitely, on "suspicion" of what they
might be about to do, American citizens of Irish birth, these "suspects"
clamoured, and had a right to clamour, for the intervention of the
American Government to protect them against being dealt with as if they
were Irishmen and British subjects. But by the abjuration of British
allegiance which gave them this right to clamour for American
protection, they had voluntarily made themselves absolute foreigners to
Ireland, with no more legal or moral right to interfere in the affairs
of that country than so many Chinamen or Peruvians.

Having said this, I ought, in justice to my fellow-citizens of Irish
birth, to say that these elementary truths have too often been obscured
for them by the conduct of public bodies in America, and of American
public men.

No American public man of reputation, holding an executive office in the
Federal Government, has ever thrust himself, it is true, so inexcusably
into the domestic affairs of Great Britain and Ireland as did Mr.
Gladstone into the domestic affairs of the United States when, speaking
at Newcastle in the very crisis of our great civil war, he gave all the
weight of his position as a Cabinet Minister to the assertion that Mr.
Jefferson Davis had created not only an army and a navy, but a nation,
and thereby compelled the Prime Minister of Great Britain to break the
effect of this declaration by insisting that another Cabinet Minister,
Sir George Cornewall Lewis, should instantly make a speech countering
it, and covering the neutrality of the British Government.[4]

Nor has either House of the Congress of the United States ever been
guilty of the impertinence of adopting resolutions of sympathy with the
Home Rule, or any other movement affecting directly the domestic affairs
of the British Empire, though, within my own knowledge, very strong
pressure has been more than once put upon the Foreign Affairs Committees
of both Houses to bring this about.

But such resolutions have been repeatedly adopted by State Legislatures,
and individual members, both of the Federal Senate and of the Federal
Lower House, have discredited themselves, and brought such discredit as
they could upon the Congress, by effusions of the same sort. The bad
citizenship of Irish-American citizens, however, is not the less bad
citizenship because they may have been led into it by the recklessness
of State Legislatures--which have no responsibility for our foreign
relations--or the sycophancy of public men. If it were proved to
demonstration that Home Rule would be the salvation of Ireland, no
American citizen would have any more right to take an active part in
furthering it than to take an active part in dethroning the Czar of all
the Russias. The lesson which Washington administered to Citizen Genet,
when that meddlesome minister of the French Republic undertook to "boom"
the rights of men by issuing letters of marque at Charleston, has
governed the foreign relations of the United States ever since, and it
is as binding upon every private citizen as upon every public servant of
the Republic.

I must ask my readers, therefore, to bear it constantly in mind that all
my observations and comments have been made from an American, not from a
British or an Irish point of view. How or by whom Ireland shall be
governed concerns me only in so far as the government of Ireland may
affect the character and the tendencies of the Irish people, and
thereby, through the close, intimate, and increasing connection between
the Irish people and the people of the United States, may tend to affect
the future of my country. This being my point of view, it will be
apparent, I think, that I have at least laboured under no temptation to
see things otherwise than as they were, or to state things otherwise
than as I saw them.

With Arthur Young, who more clearly than any other man of his time saw
the end from the beginning of the fatuous and featherheaded French
Revolution of 1789, I have always been inclined to think "the
application of theory to methods of government a surprising imbecility
in the human mind:" and it will be found that in this book I have done
little more than set down, as fully and clearly as I could, what I
actually saw and heard in Ireland. My method has been as simple as my
object. During each day as occasion served, and always at night, I made
stenographic notes of whatever had attracted my attention or engaged my
interest. As I had no case to make for or against any political party or
any theory of government in Ireland, I took things great and small, and
people high and low, as they came, putting myself in contact by
preference, wherever I could, with those classes of the Irish people of
whom we see least in America, and concerning myself, as to my notes,
only that they should be made under the vivid immediate impress of
whatever they were to record. These notes I have subsequently written
out in the spirit in which I made them, in all cases taking what pains
I could to verify statements of facts, and in many cases, where it
seemed desirable or necessary, submitting the proofs of the pages as
finally printed to the persons whom, after myself, they most concerned.

I have been more annoyed by the delay than by the trouble thus entailed
upon me; but I shall be satisfied if those who may take the pains to
read the book shall as nearly as possible see what I saw, and hear what
I heard.

I have no wish to impress my own conclusions upon others who may be
better able than I am accurately to interpret the facts from which these
conclusions have been drawn. Such as they are, I have put them into a
few pages at the end of the book.

It will be found that I have touched only incidentally upon the subject
of Home Rule for Ireland. Until it shall be ascertained what "Home Rule
for Ireland" means, that subject seems to me to lie quite outside the
domain of my inquiries. "Home Rule for Ireland" is not now a plan--nor
so much as a proposition. It is merely a polemical phrase, of little
importance to persons really interested in the condition of Ireland,
however invaluable it may be to the makers of party platforms in my own
country, or to Parliamentary candidates on this side of the Atlantic. It
may mean anything or nothing, from Mr. Chamberlain's imperialist scheme
of four Provincial Councils--which recalls the outlines of a system
once established with success in New Zealand--to that absolute and
complete separation in all particulars of the government of Ireland from
the government of Great Britain, which has unquestionably been the aim
of every active Irish organisation in the United States for the last
twenty years, and which the accredited leader of the "Home Rule" party
in the British Parliament, Mr. Parnell, is understood in America to have
pledged himself that he will do anything to further and nothing to
impede. On this point, what I took to be conclusive documentary evidence
was submitted to me in New York several years ago by Mr. Sheridan, at a
time when the fever-heat of British indignation excited by those murders
in the Phoenix Park, for which I believe it is now 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 Ireland, but in America, not to Mr. Parnell and Mr.
Gladstone primarily, but to Mr. Davitt and Mr. Henry George.

III.

In a very remarkable letter written to Earl Grey in 1868, after the
Clerkenwell explosions had brought the disestablishment of the Irish
Protestant Church into Mr. Gladstone's scheme of "practical politics,"
the Archbishop of Westminster, not then a Cardinal, called the attention
of Englishmen to the fact, not yet I fear adequately apprehended by
them, that "the assimilating power of America upon the Irish people, if
seven days slower than that of England in reaching Ireland, is sevenfold
more penetrating and powerful upon the whole population." By this the
Archbishop meant, what was unquestionably true, that even in 1868, only
twenty years after the great Irish exodus to America began, the social
and political ideas of America were exerting a seven-fold stronger
influence upon the character and the tendencies of the Irish people than
the social and political ideas of England. Thanks to the development of
the cables and the telegraph since 1868, and to the enormous progress
of America since that time in wealth and population, this "assimilating
power" reaches Ireland much more rapidly, and exerts upon the Irish
people a very much more drastic influence than in 1868. This
establishes, of course, a return current westward, which is as necessary
to he watched, and is as much neglected by American as the original
eastward current is by British public men.

In this letter of 1868 to Earl Grey, the Archbishop of Westminster
desiring, as an Englishman, to counteract, if possible, this influence
which was drawing Ireland away from the British monarchy, and towards
the American Republic, maintained that by two things the "heart of
Ireland" might be won, and her affections enlisted with her interests in
the support of the unity, solidity, and prosperity of the British
Empire. One of these two things was "perfect religious equality between
the Catholics and the Protestants of Ireland." The other was that the
Imperial Legislature should by statute make it impossible for any
landlord in Ireland to commit three wrongs,--"first, the wrong of
abusing his rights by arbitrary eviction; secondly, by exacting an
exorbitant rent; thirdly, by appropriating to his own use the
improvements effected by the industry of his tenants."

Perfect religious equality has since been established between the
Catholics and the Protestants of Ireland. The three wrongs which the
Archbishop called upon the Imperial Legislature to make impossible to
Irish landlords have since been made impossible by Statute.

Yet it is on all hands admitted that the "unity, solidity, and
prosperity" of the British Empire have never been so seriously
threatened in Ireland as during the last ten years. Was the Archbishop
wrong, therefore, in his estimate of the situation in 1868? Or has the
centripetal influence of remedial British legislation since 1868 failed
to check a centrifugal advance "by leaps and bounds," in the
"assimilating power" of America upon Ireland?

IV.

Just ten years ago, in 1878, Mr. Michael Davitt and Mr. John Devoy (the
latter of whom had been commissioned in 1865 by the Fenian leader
Stephens, as "chief organiser of the Irish Republican Brotherhood in the
British army"), being then together in America, promulgated, Mr. Davitt
in a speech at Boston, and Mr. Devoy in a letter sent to the _Freeman's
Journal_ in Dublin, the outlines of a scheme for overthrowing British
rule in Ireland by revolutionising the ownership of land in that
country.

The basis of this scheme had been laid thirty years before, in 1848, by
Finton Lalor, John Mitchel, and the present Archbishop of Cashel, then a
simple curate.

It was thus stated by Lalor in his paper, the _Irish Felon_:--

"The entire ownership of Ireland, moral and material, up to the sun and
down to the centre of the earth, is vested, as of right, in the people
of Ireland. The soil of the country belongs as of right to the entire
people of the country, not to any one class, but to the nation."

This was a distinct denial of the right of private property in land. If
true of Ireland and the Irish people this proposition was true of all
lands and of all peoples. Lalor, though more of a patriot than of a
philosopher, saw this plainly; and in one of the three numbers of his
paper which appeared before it was suppressed by the British Government,
he said "the principle I propose goes to the foundations of Europe, and
sooner or later will cause Europe to uprise." Michael Davitt saw this as
clearly in 1878 as Finton Lalor thirty years before. He had matured his
plans in connection with this principle during the weary but not wasted
years of his imprisonment as a Fenian at Dartmoor, a place, the name of
which is connected in America with many odious memories of the second
war between England and the United States; and going out to America
almost immediately after his release on a ticket of leave, he there
found the ideas of Finton Lalor and his associates of 1848, ripened and
harvested in the mind of an American student of sociology, Henry George.
Nowhere in the world has what a shrewd English traveller calls "the
illegitimate development of private wealth" attained such proportions in
modern times as in America, and especially in California. Nowhere, too,
in the world is the ostentatious waste of the results of labour upon the
antics of a frivolous plutocracy a more crying peril of our times than
in America. Henry George, an American of the Eastern States, who went to
the Pacific coast as a lad, had grown up with and watched the progress
of this social disease in California; and when Davitt reached America in
1878, Henry George was preparing to publish his revolutionary book on
_Progress and Poverty_, which appeared in 1879. Dates are important from
this point, as they will trace for the reader the formation of the
strongest forces which, as I believe, are to-day at work to shape the
future of Ireland, and, if Cardinal Manning is right, with the future of
Ireland, the future of the British Empire.

The year 1878 saw the "Home Rule" movement in Irish politics brought to
an almost ludicrous halt by the success of Mr. Parnell, then a young
member of Parliament for Meath, in unhorsing the leader of that
movement, Mr. Butt. As the Irish members then had no coherent purpose or
policy, Mr. Parnell had, without much trouble, dominated and brigaded
them to follow him blindly into a system of parliamentary obstruction,
which there is reason to suppose was suggested to him by a friend who
had studied the Congressional proceedings of the United States, the
native country of his mother, and especially the tactics which had
enabled Mr. Randall of Pennsylvania, the leader of the Democratic
minority in the House of Representatives, to check the so-called "Civil
Rights Bill," sent down by the Senate to that House, during a continuous
session of forty-six hours and a half, with no fewer than seventy-seven
calls of the house, in the month of January 1875, some time before Mr.
Parnell first took his seat in the House of Commons.

When Mr. Parnell, early in 1878, thanks to this system, had ousted Mr.
Butt, and got himself elected as President of the Irish "Home Rule
Confederation," he found himself, as an Irish friend of mine wrote to me
at the time, in an awkward position. He had command of the "Home Rule"
members at Westminster, but he had no notion what to do with them, and
neither they nor he could see anyway open to securing a permanent hold
upon the Irish voters. Three bad harvests in succession had thrown the
Irish tenants into a state which disinclined them to make sacrifices
for any sentimental policy, but prepared them to lend their ears eagerly
to Michael Davitt, when, on his return from the United States in the
early spring of 1879, he proclaimed anew, at Irishtown in his native
county of Mayo, the gospel of 1848 giving the land of Ireland to the
people of Ireland. Clearly Mr. Davitt held the winning card. As he
frankly put the case to a special correspondent, whom I sent to see him,
and whose report I published in New York, he saw that "the only issue
upon which Home Rulers, Nationalists, Obstructionists, and each and
every shade of opinion existing in Ireland could be united was the Land
Question," and of that question he took control. Naturally enough, Mr.
Parnell, himself a landowner under the English settlement, shrank at
first from committing himself and his fortunes to the leadership of Mr.
Davitt. But no choice was really left him, and there is reason to
believe that a decision was made easier to him by a then inchoate
undertaking that he should be personally protected against the financial
consequences to himself of the new departure, by a testimonial fund,
such as was in fact raised and presented to him in 1883. In June 1879 he
accepted the inevitable, and in a speech at Westport put himself with
his parliamentary following and machinery at the service of the founder
of the Irish Land League, uttering the keynote of Mr. Davitt's "new
departure" in his celebrated appeal to the Irish tenants to "keep a firm
grip of their homesteads." In the middle of October 1879, Mr. Davitt
formally organised the Irish National Land League, "to reduce rack-rents
and facilitate the obtaining of the ownership of the land of Ireland by
the occupiers," and Mr. Parnell was made its first President. He was
sent out to America in that capacity, at the end of the year to explain
to the Irish-American leaders the importance of supplying the new
organisation with funds sufficient to enable it to take and keep the
field at Westminster with a force of paid members not dependent for
their support upon the Irish constituencies. It was obviously impossible
either to guarantee any considerable number of Irishmen holding property
against loss by a policy aimed at the foundations of property, or to
count upon finding for every Irish seat a member of local weight and
stake, imbued with the spirit of martyrdom.

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