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

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The not less imposing warehouse of Richardson and Co., built of a
singularly beautiful brown stone, and decorated with equal taste and
liberality, adjoins that of Robinson and Cleaver. The banks, the public
offices, the clubs, the city library, the museum, the Presbyterian
college, the principal churches, all of them modern, all alike bear
witness to the public spirit and pride in their town of the good people
of Belfast. With more time at my disposal I would have been very glad to
visit some of the flax-mills called into being by the great impulse
which the cotton famine resulting from our Civil War gave to the linen
manufactures of Northern Ireland, and the famous shipyards of the Woolfs
on Queen's Island, As things are, it was more to my purpose to see some
of the representative men of this great Protestant stronghold.

I passed a very interesting hour with the Rev. Dr. Hanna, who is reputed
to be a sort of clerical "Lion of the North," and whom I found to be in
almost all respects a complete antitype of Father M'Fadden of Gweedore.

Dr. Hanna is not unjustly proud of being at the head of the most
extensive Sunday-school organisation in Ireland, if not in the world;
and I find that the anniversary parade of his pupils, appointed for
Saturday, June 30th, is looked forward to with some anxiety by the
authorities here. He tells me that he expects to put two thousand
children that day into motion for a grand excursion to Moira; but
although he speaks very plainly as to the ill-will with which a certain
class of the Catholics here regard both himself and his organisation, he
does not anticipate any attack from them. With what seems to me very
commendable prudence, he has resolved this year to put this procession
into the streets without banners and bands, so that no charge of
provocation may be even colourably advanced against it. This is no
slight concession from a man so determined and so outspoken, not to say
aggressive, in his Protestantism as Dr. Hanna; and the Nationalist
Catholics will be very ill-advised, it strikes me, if they misinterpret
it.

He spoke respectfully of the Papal decree against Boycotting and the
Plan of Campaign; but he seems to think it will not command the respect
of the masses of the Catholic population, nor be really enforced by the
clergy. Like most of the Ulstermen I have met, he has a firm faith, not
only in the power of the Protestant North to protect itself, but in its
determination to protect itself against the consequences which the
northern Protestants believe must inevitably follow any attempt to
establish an Irish nationality. Dr. Hanna is neither an Orangeman nor a
Tory. He says there are but three known Orangemen among the clerical
members of the General Assembly of the Irish Presbyterian Church, which
unanimously pronounced against Mr. Gladstone's scheme of Home Rule, and
not more than a dozen Tories. Of the 550 members of the Assembly, 538,
he says, were followers of Mr. Gladstone before he adopted the politics
of Mr. Parnell; and only three out of the whole number have given him
their support. In the country at large, Dr. Hanna puts down the
Unionists at two millions, of whom 1,200,000 are Protestants, and
800,000 Catholics; and he maintains that if the Parliamentary
representatives were chosen by a general vote, the Parnellite 80 would
be cut down to 62; while the Unionists would number 44. He regards the
Parnellite policy as "an organised imposture," and firmly believes that
an Irish Parliament in Dublin would now mean civil war in Ireland. He
had a visit here last week, he says, from an American Presbyterian
minister, who came out to Ireland a month ago a "Home Ruler"; but, as
the result of a trip through North-Western Ireland, is going back to
denounce the Home Rule movement as a mischievous fraud.

When I asked him what remedy he would propose for the discontent stirred
up by the agitation of Home Rule, this Presbyterian clergyman replied
emphatically, "Balfour, Balfour, and more Balfour!"

This on the ground, as I understood, that Mr. Balfour's administration
of the law has been the firmest, least wavering, and most equitable
known in Ireland for many a day.

Later in the day I had the pleasure of a conversation with the Rev. Dr.
Kane, the Grand Master of the Orangemen at Belfast. Dr. Kane is a tall,
fine-looking, frank, and resolute man, who obviously has the courage of
his opinions. He thinks there will be no disturbances this year on the
12th of July, but that the Orange demonstrations will be on a greater
scale and more imposing than ever. He derides the notion that
"Parnellism" is making any progress in Ulster. On the contrary, the
concurrence this year of the anniversary of the defeat of the Great
Armada with the anniversary of the Revolution of 1688 has aroused the
strongest feelings of enthusiasm among the Protestants of the North, and
they were never so determined as they now are not to tolerate anything
remotely looking to the constitution of a separate and separatist
Government at Dublin.

BELFAST, _Tuesday, June 26._--Sir John Preston, the head of one of the
great Belfast houses, and a former Mayor of the city, dined with us last
night, and in the evening Sir James Haslett, the actual Mayor, came in.

I find that in Belfast the office of Mayor is served without a salary,
and is consequently filled as a rule by citizens of "weight and
instance." In Dublin the Lord Mayor receives L3000 a year, with a
contingent fund of L1500, and the office is becoming a distinctly
political post. The face of Belfast is so firmly set against the
tendency to subordinate municipal interests to general party exigencies,
that the Corporation compelled Mr. Cobain, M.P., who sits at Westminster
now for this constituency, to resign the post which he held as treasurer
and cashier of the Corporation when he became a candidate for a seat in
Parliament. I am not surprised, therefore, to learn that the city rates
and taxes are much lower in the commercial than they are in the
political capital of Ireland.

Both Sir John Preston and Sir James Haslett have visited America. Sir
John went there to represent the linen industries of Ireland, and to
urge upon Congress the propriety of reducing our import duties upon
fabrics which the American climate makes it practically imposssible to
manufacture on our side of the water. Senator Sherman, who twenty years
ago had the candour to admit that the wit of man could not devise a
tariff so adjusted as to raise the revenue necessary for the Government
which should not afford adequate incidental protection to all legitimate
American industries, gave Sir John reason to hope that something might
be done in the direction of a more liberal treatment of the linen
industries. But nothing practical came of it. Sir John ought to have
known that our typical American Protectionist, the late Horace Greeley,
really persuaded himself, and tried to persuade other people, that with
duties enough clapped on the Asiatic production, excellent tea might be
grown on the uplands of South Carolina!

In former years Sir John Preston used to visit Gweedore every year for
sport and recreation. He knew Lord George Hill very well, "as true and
noble a man as ever lived, who stinted himself to improve the state of
his tenants." He threw an odd light on the dreamy desire which had so
much amused me of the "beauty of Gweedore" to become "a dressmaker at
Derry," by telling me that long ago the gossips there used to tell
wonderful stories of a Gweedore girl who had made her fortune as a
milliner in the "Maiden City."

This morning Mr. Cameron, who as Town Inspector of the Royal Irish
Constabulary will be responsible for public peace and order here during
the next critical fortnight, held a review of his men on a common beyond
the Theological College. About two hundred and fifty of the force were
paraded, with about twenty mounted policemen, and for an hour and a
half, under a tolerably warm sun, they were put through a regular
military drill. A finer body of men cannot be seen, and in point of
discipline and training they can hold their own, I should say, with the
best of her Majesty's regiments. Without such discipline and training it
would not be easy for any such body of men to pass with composure
through the ordeal of insults and abuse to which the testimony of
trustworthy eye-witnesses compels me to believe they are habitually
subjected in the more disturbed districts of Ireland. As to the
immediate outlook here, Mr. Cameron seems quite at his ease. Even if
ill-disposed persons should set about provoking a collision between "the
victors and the vanquished of the Boyne" his arrangements are so made,
he says, as to prevent the development of anything like the outbreaks of
former years.

On the advice of Sir John Preston I shall take the Fleetwood route on my
return to London to-night.

This secures one a comfortable night on board of a very good and
well-equipped boat, from which you go ashore, he tells me, into an
excellent station of the London and North-Western Railway at Fleetwood,
on the mouth of the Wyre on the Lancashire coast. Twenty years ago this
was a small bathing resort called into existence chiefly by the
enterprise of a local baronet whose name it bears. Its present
prosperity and prospective importance are another illustration of the
vigour and vitality of the North of Ireland, which is connected through
Fleetwood with the great manufacturing regions of middle and northern
England, as it is through Larne with the heart of Scotland.

While it is as true now of the predominantly Catholic south of Ireland
as it was when Sir Robert Peel made the remark forty years ago, that it
stands "with its back to England and its face to the West," this
Protestant Ireland of the North faces both ways, drawing Canada and the
United States to itself through Moville and Derry and Belfast, and
holding fast at the same time upon the resources of Great Britain
through Glasgow and Liverpool. One of the best informed bankers in
London told me not long ago, that pretty nearly all the securities of
the great company which has recently taken over the business of the
Guinnesses have already found their way into the North of Ireland and
are held here. With such resources in its wealth and industry, better
educated, better equipped, and holding a practically impregnable
position in the North of Ireland, with Scotland and the sea at its back,
Ulster is very much stronger relatively to the rest of Ireland than La
Vendee was relatively to the rest of the French Republic in the last
century. In a struggle for independence against the rest of Ireland it
would have nothing to fear from the United States, where any attempt to
organise hostilities against it would put the Irish-American population
in serious peril, not only from the American Government, but from
popular feeling, and force home upon the attention of the
quickest-witted people in the world the significant fact that while the
chief contributions, so far, of America to Southern Ireland, have been
alms and agitation, the chief contributions of Scotland to Northern
Ireland have been skilled agriculture and successful activity. It is
surely not without meaning that the only steamers of Irish build which
now traverse the Atlantic come from the dockyards, not of Galway nor of
Cork, the natural gateways of Ireland to the west, but of Belfast, the
natural gateway of Ireland to the north.

EPILOGUE.

Not once, but a hundred times, during the visits to Ireland recorded in
this book, I have been reminded of the state of feeling and opinion
which existed in the Border States, as they were called, of the American
Union, after the invasion of Virginia by a piratical band under John
Brown, and before the long-pending issues between the South, insisting
upon its constitutional rights, and the North, restive under its
constitutional obligations, were brought to a head by the election of
President Lincoln.

All analogies, I know, are deceptive, and I do not insist upon this
analogy. But it has a certain value here. For to-day in Ireland, as then
in America, we find a grave question of politics, in itself not
unmanageable, perhaps, by a race trained to self-government, seriously
complicated and aggravated, not only by considerations of moral right
and moral wrong, but by a profound perturbation of the material
interests of the community.

I well remember that after a careful study of the situation in America
at the time of which I speak, Mr. Nassau Senior, a most careful and
competent observer, frankly told me that he saw no possible way in which
the problem could be worked out peacefully. The event justified this
gloomy forecast.

It would be presumptuous in me to say as much of the actual situation in
Ireland; but it would be uncandid not to say that the optimists of
Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, and Tennessee had greater
apparent odds in their favour in 1861 than the optimists of Ireland seem
to me to have in 1888.

Ireland stands to-day between Great Britain and the millions of the
Irish race in America and Australia very much as the Border States of
the American Union stood in 1861 between the North and the South. There
was little either in the Tariff question or in the Slavery question to
shake the foundations of law and order in the Border States, could they
have been left to themselves; and the Border States enjoyed all the
advantages and immunities of "Home Rule" to an extent and under
guarantees never yet openly demanded for Ireland by any responsible
legislator within the walls of the British Parliament. But so powerful
was the leverage upon them of conflicting passions and interests beyond
their own borders that these sovereign states, well organised,
homogeneous, prosperous communities, much more populous and richer in
the aggregate in 1861 than Ireland is to-day, practically lost the
control of their own affairs, and were swept helplessly into a terrific
conflict, which they had the greatest imaginable interest in avoiding,
and no interest whatever in promoting.

I have seen and heard nothing in Ireland to warrant the very common
impression that the country, as a whole, is either misgoverned or
ungovernable; nothing to justify me in regarding the difficulties which
there impede the maintenance of law and order as really indigenous and
spontaneous. The "agitated" Ireland of 1888 appears to me to be almost
as clearly and demonstrably the creation of forces not generated in, but
acting upon, a country, as was the "bleeding Kansas" of 1856. But the
"bleeding Kansas" of 1856 brought the great American Union to the verge
of disruption, and the "agitated Ireland" of 1888 may do as much, or
worse, for the British Empire. There is, no doubt, a great deal of
distress in one or another part of Ireland, though it has not been my
fortune to come upon any outward and visible signs of such grinding
misery as forces itself upon you in certain of the richest provinces of
that independent, busy, prosperous, Roman Catholic kingdom of Belgium,
which on a territory little more than one-third as large as the
territory of Ireland, maintains nearly a million more inhabitants, and
adds to its population, on an average, in round numbers, as many people
in four years as Ireland loses in five.

I have seen peasant proprietors in Flanders and Brabant who could give
the ideal Irish agent of the Nationalist newspapers lessons in
rack-renting, though I am not at all sure that they might not get a hint
or two themselves from some of the small farmers who came in my way in
Ireland.

Like all countries, mainly agricultural, too, Ireland has suffered a
great deal of late years from the fall in prices following upon a period
of intoxicating prosperity. Whether she has suffered more relatively
than we should have suffered from the same cause in America, had we been
foolish enough to imitate the monometallic policy of Germany in 1873, is
however open to question; and I have an impression, which it will
require evidence to remove, that the actual organisation known as the
National Land League could never have been called into being had the
British Government devoted to action upon the Currency Question, before
1879, the time and energy which it has expended before and since that
date in unsettling the principles of free contract, and tinkering at the
relations of landlord and tenant in Ireland.

But I am trenching upon inquiries here beyond the province of this book.

Fortunately it is not necessary to my object in printing these volumes
that I should either form or formulate any positive opinions as to the
origin of the existing crisis in Ireland. Nor need I volunteer any
suggestions of my own as to the methods by which order may best be
maintained and civil government carried on in Ireland. It suffices for
me that I close this self-imposed survey of men and things in that
country with a conviction, as positive as it is melancholy, that the
work which Mr. Redmond, M.P., informed us at Chicago that he and his
Nationalist colleagues had undertaken, of "making the government of
Ireland by England impossible," has been so far achieved, and by such
methods as to make it extremely doubtful whether Ireland can be governed
by anybody at all in accordance with any of the systems of government
hitherto recognised in or adopted for that country. I certainly can see
nothing in the organisation and conduct, down to this time, of the party
known as the party of the Irish Nationalists, I will not say to
encourage, but even to excuse, a belief that Ireland could be governed
as a civilised country were it turned over to-morrow to their control. A
great deal has been done by them to propagate throughout Christendom a
general impression that England has dismally failed to govern Ireland in
the past, and is unlikely hereafter to succeed in governing Ireland. But
even granting this impression to be absolutely well founded, it by no
means follows that Ireland is any more capable of governing herself than
England is of governing her. The Russians have not made a brilliant
success of their administration in Poland, but the Poles certainly
administered Poland no better than the Russians have done. With an Irish
representation in an Imperial British Parliament at Westminster,
Ireland, under Mr. Gladstone's "base and blackguard" Union of 1800, has
at least succeeded in shaking off some of the weightiest of the burdens
by which, in the days of Swift, of Grattan, and of O'Connell, she most
loudly declared herself to be oppressed. Whether with a Parliament at
Dublin she would have fared as well in this respect since 1800 must be a
matter of conjecture merely--and it must be equally a matter of
conjecture also whether she would fare any better in this respect with a
Parliament at Dublin hereafter. I am in no position to pronounce upon
this--but it is quite certain that nothing is more uncommon than to find
an educated and intelligent man, not an active partisan, in Ireland
to-day, who looks forward to the reestablishment, in existing
circumstances, of a Parliament at Dublin with confidence or hope.

How the establishment of such a Parliament would affect the position of
Great Britain as a power in Europe, and how it would affect the fiscal
policy, and with the fiscal policy the well-being of the British people,
are questions for British subjects to consider, not for me.

That the processes employed during the past decade, and now employed to
bring about the establishment of such a Parliament, have been, and are
in their nature, essentially revolutionary, subversive of all sound and
healthy relations between man and man, inconsistent with social
stability, and therefore with social progress and with social peace,
what I have seen and heard in Ireland during the past six months compels
me to feel. Of the "Coercion," under which the Nationalist speakers and
writers ask us in America to believe that the island groans and
travails, I have seen literally nothing.

Nowhere in the world is the press more absolutely free than to-day in
Ireland. Nowhere in the world are the actions of men in authority more
bitterly and unsparingly criticised. If public men or private citizens
are sent to prison in Ireland, they are sent there, not as they were in
America during the civil war, or in Ireland under the "Coercion Act" of
1881, on suspicion of something they may have done, or may have intended
to do, but after being tried for doing, and convicted of having done,
certain things made offences against the law by a Parliament in which
they are represented, and of which, in some cases, they are members.

To call this "Coercion" is, from the American point of view, simply
ludicrous. What it may be from the British or the Irish point of view is
another affair, and does not concern me. I may be permitted, however, I
hope without incivility, to say that if this be "Coercion" from the
British or the Irish point of view, I am well content to be an American
citizen. Ours is essentially a government not of emotions, but of
statutes, and most Americans, I think, will agree with me that the sage
was right who declared it to be better to live where nothing is lawful
than where all things are lawful.

The "Coercion" which I have found established in Ireland, and which I
recognise in the title of this book, is the "Coercion," not of a
government, but of a combination to make a particular government
impossible. It is a "Coercion" applied not to men who break a public
law, or offend against any recognised code of morals, but to men who
refuse to be bound in their personal relations and their business
transactions by the will of other men, their equals only, clothed with
no legal authority over them. It is a "Coercion" administered not by
public and responsible functionaries, but by secret tribunals. Its
sanctions are not the law and honest public opinion, but the base
instinct of personal cowardice, and the instinct, not less base, of
personal greed. Whether anything more than a steady, firm administration
of the law is needed to abolish this "Coercion" is a matter as to which
authorities differ. I should be glad to believe with Colonel Saunderson
that "the Leaguers would not hold up the 'land-grabber' to execration,
and denounce him as they do, unless they knew in fact that the moment
the law is made supreme in Ireland the tenants would become just as
amenable to it as any other subjects of the Queen." But some recent
events suggest a doubt whether these "other subjects of the Queen" are
as amenable to the law as my own countrymen are.

That the Church to which the great majority of the Irish people have for
so many ages, and through so many tribulations, borne steadfast
allegiance, has been shaken in its hold upon the conscience of Ireland
by the machinery of this odious and ignoble "Coercion," appears to me to
be unquestionable. That the head of that Church, being compelled by
evidence to believe this, has found it necessary to intervene for the
restoration of the just spiritual authority of the Church over the Irish
people all the world now knows--nor can I think that his intervention
has come a day or an hour too soon, to arrest the progress in Ireland of
a social disease which threatens, not the political interests of the
empire of which Ireland is a part alone, but the character of the Irish
people themselves, and the very existence among them of the elementary
conditions of a Christian civilisation.

It would be unjust to the Irish people to forget that this demoralising
"Coercion" against which the Head of the Catholic Church has declared
war, seems to me to have been seriously reinforced by the Land
Legislation of the Imperial Parliament.

No one denies that great reforms and readjustments of the Land Tenure in
Ireland needed to be made long before any serious attempt was made to
make them.

But that such reforms and readjustments might have been made without
cutting completely loose from the moorings of political economy, appears
pretty clearly, not only from examples on the continent of Europe, and
in my own country, but from the Rent and Tenancy Acts carried out in
India under the viceroyalty of Lord Dufferin since 1885. The conditions
of these measures were different, of course, in each of the cases of
Oudh, Bengal, and the Punjab, and in none of these cases were they
nearly identical with the conditions of any practicable land measure for
Ireland. But two great characteristics seem to me to mark the Indian
legislation, which are not conspicuous in the legislation for Ireland.

These are a spirit of equity as between the landlords and the tenants,
and finality. I do not see how it can be questioned that the landlords
of Ireland have been dealt with by recent British legislation as if they
were offenders to be mulcted, and that the tenants in Ireland have been
encouraged by recent British legislation to anticipate an eventual
transfer to them, on steadily improving terms, of the land-ownership of
the island. Mr. Davitt is perhaps the most popular Irishman living, and
I believe him to be sincerely convinced that the ownership of the land
of Ireland (and of all other countries) ought to be vested in the State.
But if the independence of Ireland were acknowledged by Great Britain
to-morrow, and all the actual landlords of Ireland were compelled
to-morrow to part with their ownership, such as it is, of the land, I
believe Mr. Davitt would be further from the recognition and triumph of
his principle of State-ownership than he is to-day with a British
Parliament hostile to "Home Rule," but apparently not altogether
unwilling to make the landlords of Ireland an acceptable burnt-offering
upon the altar of imperial unity. Probably he sees this himself, and the
existing state of things may not be wholly displeasing to him, as
holding out a hope that the flame which he has been helped by British
legislation to kindle in Ireland may already be taking hold upon the
substructions and outworks of the edifice of property in Great Britain
also.

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