HISTORICAL.

Otago Witness, Issue 1891, 1 May 1890, Page 27

HISTORICAL.

A. SHORT SUMMARY OF IRISH HIS- , TORY : WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE ' LAST TWO CENTURIES. { (By an Enolish Protestant Pabson.) Compiled for the Otago Witness Chiefly from S. Gregg's " History for English Readers," Compared with over 40 Recognised Authorities. ,THE LAND ACT OF 1881. The fundamental principle of the Land Act of 1881 was the creation of a laud court by which all disputes between landlord and tenant I might be decided. Appeal to this court was to bo optional ; any tenant could go before the court and demand to have his rent fixed, and this judicial rent was to last for 15 years, during which no rise of rent was possible, and no eviction save for non-payment of rent or other breach of contract could take place. The com t, Which was also to perform the funotiona of a Land Commission, was to consist of three members, of whom one was always to be a judge or ex -judge of the supreme court ; it was also empowered to appoint sub-commissioners to hear applications and fix fair rents. But the events which had produced so great a change iv English public opinion as to render it possible that such a bill as this could become law, had produced a corresponding advance in Irisb demands ; and the Land Bill, which if it had been passed 50 years ago, about the time of the Devon Commission, would have undoubtedly changed the social condition of the Irish people, and which if passed even in 1870 would have satisfied the utmost claims of the Home Rule party, now received only their very cold approval. While it was in progress, Mr Parnell described ifc as a " bill brought forward by the Government iv order to prop up for a few years longer the expirit g system of landlordism." He declared that the land ought to belong to the cultivators, and that he iufcended to get ifc for them at as small a price as possible. "If we could get it for nothing at all," he continued, " the price the farmers have been paying for ifc for generations would be ample compensation." Ifc was well known that Messrs Davifct and Dillon were also in favour of a project for buying out the landlords. Moreover, fche Queen's Speech referred to two measures for Ireland— ; namely, a Coercion Act aad a Land Bill, and it unhappily foreshadowed a strong Coercion Act aad a weak- Land Bill. Nor were the Government to be wholly blamed for the weakness of the Land Bill. They had appointed a commission to report upon this subject, and certainly were anxious to deal with ifc, and to deal with ifc thoroughly, but they had a difficult task. They had enormous class interests opposing both in the House of Commons and in the House of Lords. . No less than 26 measures seeking to adjust this land question had been introduced into the | House of Commons between the yearß 1870 and I 1880, every one of whicß failed to receive even a second reading. " And why ? Not because the justice of the case or bhe need of dealing with the case was one whifc less in those years than in 1881, but because the vis inertias of the public miud and of fche mind of Parliament had not been overcome." So too in 1881, while the authors of the act desired most thoroughly to the best of their ability to deal with the matter, going completely to the root of the thing, yet during the discussions in Parliament the Irish members were constantly reminded that what had to be considered was that the ship was bound for another port; where the waters were shallow. Suggestions which have since been adopted were then made by the Irish members and rejected, not on their merits, but on the ground of the difficulty of piloting the measure with those additions safely through the House of Lords. As a matter of fapfc the act, weakened as it had been by these considerations, was twice amended out of all shape and value by that j ever obstructive Upper House. Ifc was only passed on its third presentation relutcantly and under compulsion. Nor could those incapables leave well alone. The House of Lords in the very year after the act had passed, and before its operation began to be felt in Ireland, appointed a committee to inqu re into its operation; like mischievous children, as Lord Selborne expressed it, who, having planted flowers in their bed one day proceeded the next day to pull them up by the root? to see whether they were growing or not. So striking was their conduct that the House of Commons thought it their duty to pass a resolution, for which there is no parallel in history — viz , " That a Parliamentary inquiry at the present time into the working of the Irish Land Act tends to defeat the operations of the act, and must be injurious to the interests of good government in Ireland." Meanwhile the act itself, though broad and liberal in spirit, had proved to be marred by fabal defects. In the first instance it excluded from its provision the entire body of leaseholders, so that on one side of the road a farmer i with 10 or 15 acres of laud paid a rent, which, under the provisions of the act, he had a right to have reduced to a fair rent through fche machinery of the judicial tribunal, and on the other side of the road a man with a farm of the same extent and under fche same conditions was excluded from the Land Court; the sole difference being that one held the land under a written contract with a piece of sealing wax affixed, and the other held ifc as an ordinary tenant. Again its action was not retrospective — that is, the court was speedily crowded with applications. Those which were heard at the fir&t sittings of fche court were treated as having been cases then begun, and the decisions were dated from that time. As regards cases after that first application, although years elapsed before they could be dealt with and were dealt with, fche effect of the decisions in the reduction of the rent did nofc relate back to the date of the application, but to the date of the judicial decision. Meanwhile there was running on during the intervening period rent and accumulating arrears at the old and presumably fche unjust and excessive rent;. Another barrier in excluding the tenants from the protection of the courts was raised by the accumulation, absolutely unavoidable, in thousands of cases of arrears of rent. With singular inconsistency the act, whilst establishing a tribunal with authority to cut down excessive rents, made no provision for lightening the burthen of the accumulated arrears. A tenant who for years had found himself unable to cope with the difficulties of an exorbitant rent might bring his case into court. It might be found that; the rent was enormously in excess of a fair rent— in excess of ifc possibly by 100, 200, or, as sometimes was the case, by 300 per cent. -An equitable reduction might be effected by the court, but as to fche arrears that had resulted from the excessiveness of this exorbitant rent iv fche past the courts had no jurisdiction to reduce them by one farthing. In some cases landlords, whose rents had been seriously cub

down by the courts, proceeded forthwith to wreak vengeance upon the foolhardy tenants who had made the daring venture of endeavouring by process of law to check the confiscation of possibly the last remnant of their property in their little holdings. This unhappily the law left it fully open to a landlord to do. The power of eviction for the unpaid arrears of the very rent that had been reduced in court remained in the landlord's hands, and in not a few cases was exercised without mercy. To a tenant heavily incumbered with arrears the legal right of access to a court for the fixing of a fair rent was in this state of the law nothing better than a mockery. THE CRIMES ACT OF 1881. The Coercion Act of 1881 was the most Btringent that had been passed since the union ; it destroyed liberty of the press, freedom of speech, and imprisoned 918 persona wibhoub trial, and in many cases without evon letting them know the offeuces with which they were charged. But these drastic measures, far from pacifying the country, brought it to the very verge of civil war, and outrages increased iv number and atrocity. The imprisonment of the " constitutional " agitators gave the country over to secret societies, and though Mr Forster knew it not, a band of assassins dogged his steps, and his life was preserved only by a series of accidents little short of miraculous. The condition of the country throughout the winter of 1881-'B2 was truly appalling ; there were no inflammatory speeches, no seditious prints, yet lawlessness increased, and wag only equalled by the widespread distress. The landlords, hard pressed for money, and many of them with heavy mortgage interests to pay, clamoured for their rents ; the tenants, unable to pay, abandoned by Government, deprived of the advice and support of their leader?, took savage revenge on landgrabbers, process servers, and evicting landlords. These outrages steeled the hearts of the landlords, and so throughout the miserable winter the old story of " brutal repression followed by savage retaliation " was told in a hundred different ways. Among the thousand prisoners who lay iv Kilmainham Gaol, with no definite charge against them, no prospect of being brought to trial or face to face with their accusers, was Mr Parnell. He was engaged with Mr Healy in preparing a bill dealing with the question of arrears and other matters, a measure afterwards adopted piecemeal by successive Governments. A milder policy was determined on by the Cabinet. The suspects were released. Lord Cowper and Mr Forsfcer resigned, and were replaced by Lord Spencer and Lord Frederick Cavendish. On May 6, 1882, Mr Davifct wa3 released from Portland prison, but on that very day Lord Frederick Cavendish and the Undersecretary, Mr Burke, were murdered in Phoenix Park. Never since the murder of Mr Percival iv the lobby of the House of Commons had any event caused so great horror. The motive of the crime was nob known, but ifc seemed a direct answer to the proclamation of a policy of conciliation. Eventually it was discovered that Mr Burke, who was a permanent official, had been marked out; as a victim by the assassination society which had so long dogged the steps of Mr Forster, and that Lord Frederick Cavendish had been killed only because he did not desert his comrade. But the immediate effect of the Phceuix Park murder was to bring the policy of conciliation to a close before it was a week old, and another Coercion Bill was introduced at once. This bill was even more stringent than its forerunner. Its main provisions were to allow trial by three judges without jury, to legalise the right of search by day or night in a proclaimed district, to sanction the arrest without warrant of any person found prowling about after dark, to revive the Alien Act giving power to arrest and remove from the country foreigners who might be considered dangerous to the public peace, to punish intimidation with summary imprisonment, to empower the Government to seize newspapers inciting to crime, and to authorise the viceroy to deal with unlawful assemblies by a conrt of summary jurisdiction consisting of two resident magistrates. The bill was resisted by the Parnellites as passionately as its forerunner had been, but eventually became law, though some of its most Btringent provisions remained a dead letter. So horrified and dismayed was Mr Parnell by the crime that, yielding to a moment of despair, he offered to Mr Gladstone that he should retire from public life. Messrs Parnell, Dillon, and Michael Davitt at once issued the following manifesto to the people of Ireland :—": — " On the eve of what seemed a bright future for our country that evil destiny which has apparently pursued us for centuries has struck another blow at our hopes, which cannot be exaggerated in its disastrous consequences. In the "hour of sorrowful gloom we venture to give an expression of our profoundest sympathy with the people of Ireland in the calamity which has befallen our cause through a horrible deed, and with those who had determined at the last hour that a policy of conciliation should supplant that of terrorism and national distrust, we earnestly hope that the attitude and action of the whole Irish people will assure the world that assassination such as th-t which has startled us almost to the abandonment of hope for our country's cause is deeply and religiously abhorrent to their every feeling and instinct. We appeal to you to show, by every means of expression possible, that amidafc the universal feeling of horror which the assassination has exo ted, no people are so intense in their detestation of its atrocity, or entertain so deep a sj'uapathy for those whose hearts must bs seared by ifc, as the nation upon whose prospects and reviving hopes it may entail more ruinous effects than have yet fallen to the lot of unhappy Ireland during the present generation. We feel that no act has ever been perpetrated iv our country during the struggle for social and political rights of the past 50 years, that has so stained the name of hospitable Irelau'l, as this cowardly aud unprovoked assassination of a friendly stranger, and that until the murderers of Ltird Frederick Cavendish aud Mr Burke are brought to justice that stain will sully our country's name." At the same time there appeared in the Standard a letter from Mr Davitfc, in which he said : "We place the murders in their true position, as assassins of the peoples' cause, whose capture alone can remove the sfcaia which their crime has left upon the character of Ireland. . . . There has dawned upon my graver thought, in the bitter solitude of a felon's cell, a noble vision, a dream of the fraternisation and enfranchisement of peoples, of the conquering of hate by justice. I have suffered by their power, as I believe by their ignorance end prejudice, but there is iv my heart to-day no sentiment of bitberness towards the English people. The gospel of the land for the people is a universal gospel, and on its triump is involved the social 'regeneration of England, as clearly and as fully as the social regeneration of Ireland. In tho heart of whoever receives it, race bitterness and ancient hatred die away." He referred to his speeches as reported by the Government agents, to prove that from the initiation of the Lind League he had warned the Irish peopa against crime as the greatest danger to their cause. " I did," said he, " my best to lay the demon of revenge, and pointed out the inevitable consequences of revenge being allowed to supplant the moral

forces which love could win our social rights. He avowed himself a convicted Fenian, but said that he would "ask fair-irjiuded Englishmen toreaJ a few pages of Irish history, to put; themselves in imagination in the place of a sob of an evicted Irish peasant, and to answer whether it was any stigma to such an Irishman that he had been a Fenian." In conclusion he said : " How can I or anyone else protest with effect against outrages, when most foul and irritating outrages are being committed in the name of the law, when tender ladies are sent to prison, when huts that charity has orected to shelter the unfortunate are torn down, when little boys are ruthlessly shob down by the constabulary, and when men of the highest character are still held ia gaol on mere suspicion ? "

Flo be continued. )