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

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Mr. Parnell landed at New York on the 1st of January 1880. An interview
with him, written out on board of the steamer which took him to America
by a correspondent detailed for that purpose, was published on the
morning after his arrival. It made on the whole an unfavourable
impression in America, which was not improved by an injudicious quarrel
into which he drifted with a portion of the American press, and which
was distinctly deepened by his inexcusable misrepresentations of the
conduct of Queen Victoria during the famine of 1847, and by his foolish
attacks upon the management and objects of the Duchess of Marlborough's
fund for the relief of Irish distress. The friends of Mr. Davitt in
America, however, and the leaders of the most active Irish organisations
there, came to the rescue, and as the two American parties were
preparing their lines of battle for the Presidential conflict of 1880,
Mr. Parnell was not only "put through" the usual course of "receptions"
by Mayors and State legislatures, but invited on an "off-day" to address
the House of Representatives at Washington. His tour, however, on the
whole, harmed more than it helped the new Irish movement on my side of
the Atlantic, and when he was called back to take his part in the
electoral contest precipitated by Lord Beaconsfield's dissolution of
Parliament at Easter 1880, Mr. Davitt went out to America himself to do
what his Parliamentary associate had not succeeded in doing. During this
visit of Mr. Davitt to the United States, Mr. Henry George finally
transferred his residence from San Francisco to New York, and made his
arrangements to visit England and Ireland, and bring about a practical
combination between the advocates of "the land for the people" on both
sides of the ocean. These arrangements he carried out in 1881-82,
publishing in 1881, in America, his treatise on the Irish Land question,
while Mr. Davitt, who had been arrested after his return to Europe by
Mr. Gladstone's Government in February 1881, on a revocation of his
ticket-of-leave, lay a prisoner at Portland. Mr. George himself, while
travelling in Ireland with an academical English friend, came under
"suspicion" in the eyes of one of Mr. Forster's officers, and was
arrested, but at once released. During the protracted confinement of Mr.
Davitt at Portland, the utter incapacity of Mr. Parnell and his
Parliamentary associates to manage the social revolution initiated by
the founder of the Land League became fully apparent, not only to
impartial, but even to sympathetic observers in America, long before it
was demonstrated by the incarceration of Mr. Parnell in Kilmainham, the
disavowal, under pressure, of the no-rent manifesto by Archbishop Croke,
and the suppression of the Land League. In sequestrating Mr. Davitt, Mr.
Forster, as was shown by the extraordinary scenes which in the House of
Commons followed his arrest, had struck at the core of the revolution,
and had the Irish Secretary not been deserted by Mr. Gladstone, under
influences which originated at Kilmainham, and were reinforced by the
pressure of the United States Government in the spring of 1882, history
might have had a very different tale to tell of the last six years in
Ireland and in Great Britain.[6]

V.

It was after the return of Mr. George from Ireland to New York in 1882
that the first black point appeared on the horizon, of the conflict,
inevitable in the nature of things, between the social revolution and
the Catholic Church, which assumed such serious proportions two years
ago in America, and which is now developing itself in Ireland. Among the
ablest and the most earnest converts in America to the doctrine of the
new social revolution was the Rev. Dr. M'Glynn, a Catholic priest,
standing in the front rank of his order in New York, in point alike of
eloquence in the pulpit, and of influence in private life. Finding, like
Michael Davitt, in the doctrine of Henry George an outcome and a
confirmation of the principle laid down in 1848 for the liberation of
Ireland by Finton Lalor, Dr. M'Glynn threw himself ardently into the
advocacy of that doctrine,--so ardently that in August 1882 the Prefect
of the Propaganda, Cardinal Simeoni, found it necessary to invite the
attention of Cardinal M'Closkey, then Archbishop of New York, to
speeches of Dr. M'Glynn, reported in the _Irish World_ of New York, as
"containing propositions openly opposed to the teachings of the Catholic
Church."

It did not concern the Propaganda that these propositions ran on
all-fours with the policy of the Irish Land League established by Mr.
Davitt, and accepted by Mr. Parnell. What concerned the Propaganda in
the propositions of Dr. M'Glynn at New York in 1882 was precisely what
concerns the Propaganda in the programme of Mr. Davitt as mismanaged by
Mr. Dillon in Ireland in 1888--the incompatibility of these
propositions, and of that programme, with the teachings of the Church.

Upon receiving the instructions of the Propaganda in August 1882,
Cardinal M'Closkey sent for Dr. M'Glynn, and set the matter plainly
before him. Dr. M'Glynn professed regret for his errors, promised to
abstain in future from political meetings, and begged the Cardinal to
inform the authorities at Home of his intention to walk more
circumspectly. The submission of Dr. M'Glynn was approved at Rome, but
it was gently intimated to him that it needed to be crowned by public
reparation for the scandal he had caused. He disregarded this pastoral
hint, and when the Archbishop Coadjutor of New York, Dr. Corrigan, went
to Rome in 1883 to represent the Cardinal, who was unequal to the
journey, he found the Propaganda by no means satisfied with the attitude
of Dr. M'Glynn. Two years after this, in October 1885, Cardinal
M'Closkey died, and Dr. Corrigan succeeded him as Archbishop of New
York.

Between the first admonition given to the sacerdotal ally of Mr. George
in 1882 and this event much had come to pass in Ireland. The Land League
suppressed by Mr. Forster had been suffered to reappear as the National
League by Earl Spencer and Mr. Trevelyan. Sir William Harcourt's
stringent and sweeping "Coercion Act" of July 11th, 1882, passed under
the stress of the murders in the Phoenix Park, expiring by its own terms
in July 1885, Mr. Gladstone found himself forced either to alienate a
number of his Radical supporters by proposing a renewal of that Act, or
to invite a catastrophe in Ireland by attempting to rule that country
under "the ordinary law."

He elected to escape from the dilemma by inviting a defeat in Parliament
on a secondary question of the Budget. He went out of power on the 9th
of June 1885, leaving Lord Salisbury to send the Earl of Carnarvon as
Viceroy to Ireland, and the Irish party in Parliament to darken the air
on both sides of the Atlantic with portentous intimations of a
mysterious compact, under which they were to secure Home Rule for
Ireland by establishing the Conservatives in their places at the general
election in November.[7]

What came of all this I may briefly rehearse. Going out to America in
November 1885, and returning to England in January 1886, I remained in
London long enough to assure myself, and to publish in America my
conviction of the utter hopelessness of Mr. Gladstone's "Home Rule"
measure, the success of which would have made his government the ally
and the instrument of Mr. Parnell in carrying out the plans of Mr.
Davitt, Mr. Henry George, and the active Irish organisations of the
United States. All this is matter of history.

The effect of Mr. Gladstone's speech of April 8, 1886, introducing his
Home Rule Bill, upon the Irish in America was simply intoxicating. They
saw him, as in a vision, repeating for the benefit of Ireland at Dublin,
on a grander scale, the impressive scene of his surrender in 1858 at
Corfu of the Protectorate of the Ionian Islands to Greece.

Upon thousands also of Americans, interested more or less intelligently
in British affairs, but neither familiar, nor caring to be, with the
details of the political situation in Great Britain, this appearance of
the British Premier, as the champion of Home Rule for Ireland,
denouncing the "baseness and blackguardism" of Pitt and his
accomplices, the framers of the Union of 1800, naturally produced a very
profound impression. What might be almost called a "tidal wave" of
sympathy with the Irish National League, and with him as its ally, made
itself felt throughout the United States. Had I witnessed the drama from
the far-off auditorium in New York, I might doubtless have shared the
conviction of so many of my countrymen that we were about to behold the
consummation tunefully anticipated so many years ago by John Quincy
Adams, and--

"Proud of herself, victorious over fate,
See Erin rise, an independent state."

The moment seemed propitious for a resolute forward move in America of
Mr. Henry George, and the other American believers in the doctrine of
"the land for the people." It would have been more propitious had not
the political managers of the Irish party, misapprehending to the last
moment the drift of things in the British Parliament, and counting
firmly upon a victory for Mr. Gladstone, either at Westminster or at the
polls, insisted upon holding a great convention of the Irish in America
at Chicago in August 1886. A proposition to do this had been made in the
spring of 1885, and put off, in judicious deference to the disgust which
many independent Americans of both parties then felt at the course
pursued by Mr. Parnell's friends, Mr. Egan and Mr. Sullivan in 1884,
when these leaders openly led the Irish with drums beating and green
flags flying out of the Democratic into the Republican camp.

As it was, however, Mr. Gladstone having gone out of power a second
time, on the second day of June in 1886, the non-parliamentary and real
leader in Ireland of the Irish revolutionary movement, Mr. Davitt, came
overtly to the front, and crossed the Atlantic to ride the whirlwind and
direct the storm at the Convention appointed to be held in Chicago on
the 18th of August.

In New York he found Mr. Henry George quietly preparing to put the
emotions of the moment to profit at the municipal election which was to
occur in that city in November, and Dr. M'Glynn more enamoured than ever
of the doctrine of "the land for the people," and more defiant than ever
of the Propaganda and of his ecclesiastical superiors. It was resolved
that Mr. George should come forward as a candidate for the mayoralty in
November, and Dr. M'Glynn determined to take the field in support of
him.

VI.

We now come to close quarters.

Dr. Corrigan, as I have said, had become the Archbishop of New York in
October 1885. The Irish-American Convention met at Chicago, Mr. Davitt
dominating its proceedings by his courageous and outspoken support of
his defeated Parliamentary allies in England. The candidacy of Mr. Henry
George had not yet been announced in New York. But Dr. M'Glynn resumed
his practice of addressing public meetings in support of the doctrines
of Mr. Davitt and of Henry George. The Archbishop's duty was plain. It
was not pleasant. A Catholic prelate of Irish blood living in New York
might have been pardoned for avoiding, if he could, an open intervention
at such a moment, to prevent an able and popular priest from disobeying
his ecclesiastical superiors in his zeal for a doctrine hostile to
"landlordism," and cordially approved by the most influential of the
Irish leaders.

But on the 21st August 1886, while all the Irishmen in New York were
wild with excitement over the proceedings at Chicago, Archbishop
Corrigan did his duty, and admonished Dr. M'Glynn to restrain his
political ardour. The admonition was thrown away. A month later, the
canvass of Mr. Henry George being then fully opened, Dr. M'Glynn sent
Mr. George himself to wait upon the Archbishop with a note of
introduction as his "very dear and valued friend," in the hope of
inducing the Archbishop to withdraw his inhibition and allow him to
speak at a great meeting, then about to be held, of the supporters of
Mr. George.

The Archbishop replied in a firm but friendly note, forbidding Dr.
M'Glynn "in the most positive manner" to attend the meeting referred to,
or "any other political meeting whatever."

Dr. M'Glynn deliberately disobeyed this order, attended the meeting, and
threw himself with ever increasing heat into the war against
landlordism. On the 2d of October 1886, therefore, he was formally
"suspended" from his priestly functions--nor has he ever since been
permitted to resume them. Another priest presides over the great church
of St. Stephen, of which he was the rector. More than once the door of
repentance and return has been opened to him; but, I believe, he is
still waging war in his own way, and beyond the precincts of the
priesthood, both upon the right of private property in land and upon the
Pope.

He is a man of vigorous intellect; and he has defined the issue between
himself and the Church in language so terse and clear that I reproduce
it here. It defines also the real issue of to-day between the Church
speaking through the Papal Decree of April 20, 1888, and the National
League of Ireland acting through the "Plan of Campaign."

No heed having been paid by Dr. M'Glynn to several successive
intimations summoning him to go to Rome and explain his attitude, he
finally, on the 20th of December 1886, wrote a letter in which, with a
single skilful turn of his wrist, he took out the core of Henry George's
doctrine as to land, which really is the core also of the Irish Plan of
Campaign, and thus laid it before the Archbishop of New York:--

"My doctrine about land has been made clear in speeches, in reports of
interviews, and in published articles, and I repeat it here. I have
taught, and I shall continue to teach in speeches and writings, as long
as I live, that land is rightfully the property of the people in common,
and that private ownership of land is against natural justice, no matter
by what civil or ecclesiastical laws it may be sanctioned; and I would
bring about instantly, if I could, such change of laws all over the
world as would confiscate private property in land without one penny of
compensation to the miscalled owners."

There is no shuffling here. With logical precision Dr. M'Glynn strips
Mr. George's doctrine of its technical disguise as a form of taxation,
and presents it to the world as a simple Confiscation of Rents. Many
acute critics of _Progress and Poverty_ have failed to see that when
Mr. George calls upon the State to take over to itself, and to its own
uses, the whole annual rental value of the bare land of a country, the
land, that is, irrespectively of improvements put upon it by man, he
proposes not "a single tax upon land" at all, but an actual confiscation
of the rental of the land--which for practical purposes is the land--to
the uses of the State, without a levy, and without compensation to "the
miscalled owners."

When a tax is levied, the need by the State levying it of a certain sum
of money must first be ascertained by competent authority, legislative
or executive, as the case may be, and the law-making power must then,
according to a prescribed form, enact that to raise such a sum a certain
tax shall be levied on designated property or occupations. If the
exigencies of the State are held to require it, a tax may be levied upon
property of more than its value, as in the case, for example, of the
customs duty which was imposed in one of our "tariff revisions" upon
plate glass imported into the United States by way of "protecting" a
single plate-glass factory then existing in the United States. This was
an abominable abuse of a constitutional power, but it was not
"confiscation." What Henry George proposes is confiscation, as Dr.
M'Glynn plainly sees and courageously says. What he proposes is that
the State shall compel the annual rental value of all land to be paid
into the public treasury, without regard to the question whether the
State does or does not need such a sum of money. That is confiscation
pure and simple, the State, in the assumed interest of the State,
proceeding against the private owners of land, or the "miscalled
owners," to use Dr. M'Glynn's significant phrase, precisely as under the
feudal system the State proceeded against the private property of rebels
and traitors. No good reason can be shown why the process should not be
applied to personalty and to debts as well as to land.

This was the doctrine indorsed at the polls in New York in November 1886
by 68,000 voters. Nor can there be much doubt that it would have been
indorsed by the few thousand more votes needed to defeat Mr. Hewitt, the
actual Mayor of New York, and to put Mr. Henry George into the Chief
Magistracy of the first city of the New World, had not its teachers and
preachers been confronted by the quiet, cool, and determined prelate who
met it as plainly as it was put. "Your letter," said the Archbishop,
"has brought the painful intelligence that you decline to go to Rome,
and that you have taught, and will continue to teach, the injustice of
private ownership of land, no matter by what laws of Church or State it
may be sanctioned. In view of such declarations, to permit you to
exercise the holy ministry would be manifestly wrong."

In these few words of the Archbishop of New York, we have plainly
affirmed in 1886 the principle underlying the Papal Decree of 1888
against the Plan of Campaign and Boycotting in Ireland. There is no
question of parties or of politics in the one case or in the other. When
Dr. M'Glynn talked about the private ownership of land in New York as
"against natural justice," he flung himself not only against the Eighth
Commandment and the teachings of the Catholic Church, touching the
rights of property, but against the constitutions of the State of New
York and of the United States. That "private property shall not be taken
for public uses without just compensation" is a fundamental provision of
the Constitution of the United States, which is itself a part of the
Constitution of every State of the Union; and the right of private
ownership in land is defined and protected beyond doubt or cavil in New
York under the State Constitution. An Act passed in 1830 provides and
declares that all lands within the State "are allodial, so that, subject
only to the liability to escheat, the entire and absolute property is
vested in the owners according to the nature of their respective
estates."

By this Act "all feudal tenures of every description, with all their
incidents," were "abolished." Most of the "feudal incidents" of the
socage tenure had been previously abolished by an Act passed in 1787,
under the first Constitution of the State, adopted at Kingston in 1777,
a year after the Declaration of American Independence; and socage tenure
by fixed and determinate service, not military or variable by the lord
at his will, had been adopted long before by an Act of the first
Assembly of the Province of New York held in 1691 under the first Royal
Governor, after the reconquest of the province from Holland, and in the
reign of William and Mary. This Act provided that all lands should "be
held in free and common socage according to the tenure of East Greenwich
in England." It is an interesting circumstance that the right of private
ownership in land, thus rooted in our history, should have been defended
against a threatening revolutionary movement in New York by the courage
and loyalty to the Constitution of his country as well as to his Church
of a Catholic Archbishop. For this same Assembly of the Province of New
York in 1693, in an Act "to maintain Protestant ministers and churches,"
enacted that "every Jesuit and popish priest" found in the Province
after a certain day named, should be put into "perpetual imprisonment,"
with the proviso that if he escaped and was retaken he should suffer
death. And even in the Constitution of 1777 the Protestantism of New
York expressed its hostility to the Catholic Church by exacting
subjection "in all matters ecclesiastical as well as civil."

The position of the Archbishop, both as a churchman and as a citizen,
was impregnable. When Dr. M'Glynn advocated the plan of Henry George, he
advocated at one and the same time the immoral seizure and confiscation
of the whole income of many persons within the protection of the
Constitution of New York, and the overthrow of the Constitution of that
State and of the United States. It may be within the competency of the
British Parliament to enact such a confiscation of rent without a
revolution, there being not only no allodial tenure of land in Great
Britain, but, it would appear, no limit to the power of a British
Parliament over the lives, liberties, and property of British subjects,
but the will of its members. But it is not within the competency of the
Congress of the United States, or of the Assembly of New York, to do
such a thing, the powers of these bodies being controlled and denned by
written Constitutions, which can only be altered or amended in a
prescribed manner and through prescribed and elaborate forms.

VII.

By the middle of October 1886 it became clear that Mr. George, whose
candidacy had at first been regarded with indifference by the party
managers, both Democratic and Republican, in New York, would command a
vote certainly larger than that of one of these parties, and possibly
larger than that of either of them. To put him at the head of a poll of
three parties would elect him. This was so apparent that he and his
friends, including Dr. M'Glynn and Mr. Davitt, were warranted in
expecting a victory.

It was hardly therefore by a mere coincidence that this precise time was
selected for opening the war in Ireland against Rent. It is quite
possible that if Mr. Dillon and his Parliamentary friends had been in
less of a hurry to open this war before the return of Mr. Davitt from
America, it might have been opened in a manner less "politically
stupid," if not less "morally wrong." But, of course, if Mr. Henry
George had been elected Mayor of New York, as he came so near to being
in November 1886, and Mr. Davitt had returned to Ireland with the
prestige of contributing to place him in the municipal chair of the most
important city in the New World, Mr. Dillon and his Parliamentary
friends would probably have found it necessary to accept a much less
conspicuous part in the conduct of the campaign.

It was on the 17th of October 1886 that Mr. John Dillon, M.P., first
promulgated the "Plan of Campaign" at Portumna, in a speech which was
promptly flashed under the Atlantic to New York, there to feed the
flame, already fanned by the eloquence of Dr. M'Glynn, into a blaze of
enthusiasm for the apostle of the New Gospel of Confiscation.

Had the "Plan of Campaign" then been met by the highest local authority
of the Catholic Church in Ireland, as Henry George's doctrine of
Confiscation was met in New York by Archbishop Corrigan, it might never
have been necessary to issue the Papal Decree of April 1888. But while
the Bishop of Limerick unhesitatingly denounced the "Plan of Campaign"
as "politically stupid and morally wrong," the Archbishop of Dublin
bestowed upon it what may be called a left-handed benediction. Admitting
that it empowered one of the parties to a contract to "fix the terms on
which that contract should continue in force," the Archbishop actually
condoned the claim of this immoral power by the tenant, on the ground
that the same immoral power had been theretofore exercised by the
landlord! Peter having robbed Paul from January to July, that is, Paul
should be encouraged by his spiritual guides to rob Peter from July to
January!

That the Catholic Church should even seem for a time to speak with two
voices on such a point as the moral quality of political machinery, or
that speaking with one voice upon such a point in America, it should
even seem to speak with another voice in Ireland, would clearly be a
disaster to the Church and to civilisation. From the moment therefore,
in 1886, when the issue between Dr. M'Glynn and the Archbishop of New
York was defined, as I have shown, and the Irish National League, with a
quasi-indorsement from the Archbishop of Dublin, had arrayed itself
practically and openly on the side of Dr. M'Glynn and against the
Archbishop of New York, interests far transcending those of any
political party in Ireland, in Great Britain, or in the United States,
were involved. Unfortunately for the immediate and decisive settlement
by Rome of the issue between Dr. M'Glynn and the Archbishop of New York,
a certain vague but therefore more vexatious measure of countenance had
been given, before that issue was raised, to the theories of Mr. Henry
George by another American prelate, the Cardinal Archbishop of
Baltimore, and by more than one eminent ecclesiastic in Europe. Of
course this would have been impossible had these ecclesiastics
penetrated, like Dr. M'Glynn, to the heart of Mr. George's contention,
or discerned with the acumen of the Archbishop of New York the
fundamental difference between any imaginable exercise of the power of
taxation by a Constitutional Government, and Mr. George's doctrine of
the Confiscation of Rent. But this having occurred, it was inevitable
that Rome, which has to deal with a world-wide and complex system of the
most varied and delicate human affairs, should proceed in the matter
with infinite patience and care. In January 1887 the Propaganda
accordingly cabled thus to the Archbishop of New York,--Dr. M'Glynn
persisting in his refusal to go to Rome--"for prudential reasons
Propaganda has heretofore postponed action in the case of Dr. M'Glynn.
The Sovereign Pontiff has now taken the matter into his own hands."

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