Against Home Rule (1912). Various
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to the abominable "middleman" system by which the owner leased great stretches of land to some one who undertook to "manage" it for him, and who in turn sub-let it in smaller patches at rack-rents to those who, to get back their money, had to sub-let again at still higher rents. The result was, as an official report in the eighteenth century states: "It is well known that over the most part of the country, the lands are sub-let six deep, so that those who actually labour it are squeezed to the very utmost." And Lord Chesterfield, when Viceroy, complained of the oppression of the people by "deputies of deputies of deputies." The eighteenth-century policy of checking or suppressing the industrial enterprises of the English colony aggravated the evil until, as Lord Dufferin expressed it: "Debarred from every other industry, the entire nation flung itself back upon the land, with as fatal an impulse as when a river whose current is suddenly impeded, rolls back and drowns the valley it once fertilised."
In time the middleman tended to die out, but the evil results of the system in preventing direct and friendly and helpful relations between landlord and tenant remained. Here and there, even in Arthur Young's time, enterprising and devoted landlords had established something like the "English system" on their estates, but, as a rule, the landlord remained a mere rent charger. The report of the Devon Commission says:—
"It is admitted on all hands that, according to the general practice in Ireland, the landlord neither builds dwelling-houses nor farm offices, nor puts fences, gates, etc., in good order before he lets his land to a tenant. The cases where a landlord does any of these things are the exception. In most cases, whatever is done in the way of building or fencing is done by the tenant, and in the ordinary language of the country, dwelling-houses, farm buildings, and even the making of fences, are described by the general word, 'improvements,' which is thus employed to denote the necessary adjuncts of a farm without which in England or Scotland no tenant would be found to rent it."
In a word, as one who owned land both in England and in Ireland put it, "In England we let farms, in Ireland we let land." And by law an unjust landlord had the power at any moment to expel a tenant or a group of tenants, although no rent was owing, and without giving any compensation for the "improvements" which were the sole work of the tenant. Most landlords acted reasonably and equitably in such matters, but, especially among the new class of purely mercantile purchasers who came in under the Landed Estates Court after the great famine of 1846, there were too many who insisted on their extreme legal rights, thus disturbing the peace of the country and producing the Irish Land Question in an acute form that called for State interference.
The systems of "compensation for improvements" (1870), and of rent fixing by itinerant tribunals (1881), were tried in turn, but each was found to raise more difficulties than it settled, until finally Mr. Parnell and his Land League set the whole country in a flame, and produced a series of strikes against the payment of any rent. For some years it is hardly too much to say that the law of the League, with its purely revolutionary propaganda, supplanted the law of the land and reduced large areas to a condition of chaos, the decrees of the "village ruffians," who ruled the situation, being enforced by systematic outrage and assassination.
The first statesman who made a really serious attempt to meet this appalling state of things was Mr. Arthur Balfour, who, as Chief Secretary for Ireland, resolutely took up the task, first of repressing crime and enforcing the law, and then of recasting the whole land system in such a way that the tenant, transformed into an owner, would for the first time feel it his interest to range himself on the side of the law and of orderly government. At the same time, a systematic attempt was made to deal with the question of perennial poverty in the extreme West of Ireland in what came to be known as the "Congested Districts." The construction of railways and piers, the draining of land, and the provision of instruction in agriculture, fisheries, etc., speedily gave promise of a new era in the economic history of a hitherto helpless and hopeless population.
All this was done by Mr. Balfour and his successors in spite of opposition and obstruction of a kind such as no Chief Secretary had ever before had to encounter. Formerly, all through the centuries, whenever a Viceroy or Chief Secretary was face to face with an organised outbreak of crime and sedition in Ireland, both British parties united in supporting and strengthening the hands of the executive as representing the Crown. Mr. Gladstone's extraordinary reversal of policy and principle in the winter of 1885–86 put an end to all this, and gravely increased the difficulties of the Irish Government.
When Mr. Gladstone was first confronted with the demand for Home Rule, even in the mild and constitutional form advocated by Mr. Isaac Butt, and his Home Government Association, founded in the autumn of 1870, he promptly declared, like Mr. John Morley, that legislative Union with Great Britain was the only position permanently possible for an island situated as Ireland is. In a speech at Aberdeen[19] he indignantly asked—
"Can any sensible man, can any rational man, suppose that at this time of day, in this condition of the world, we are going to disintegrate the great capital institutions of this country for the purpose of making ourselves ridiculous in the sight of all mankind and crippling any powers we possess for conferring benefits on the country to which we belong."
And for fifteen years, in power or in opposition, Mr. Gladstone preached and acted upon the same doctrine. When the Land League was founded he denounced it as an organisation whose steps were "dogged with crime," and whose march was "through rapine to the dismemberment of the Empire." The League was finally "proclaimed" by his Government as a criminal conspiracy and its members, from Mr. Parnell downwards, arrested and imprisoned without trial as being "reasonably suspected" of criminal practices.
This continued until in an unfortunate moment for himself Mr. Gladstone discovered, in November, 1885, that the votes of Mr. Parnell and his eighty-six colleagues were necessary for his own return to power as Prime Minister, whereupon he entered into negotiations which resulted, on the one hand, in his securing the necessary votes, and on the other in his accepting the principles and the policy of those whom until then he had denounced and imprisoned as instigators to crime and sedition. He rightly recognised that there was no half-way house, and that he could not become a Home Ruler without accepting and defending the actions of the Home Rulers. He worshipped what he had formerly burnt, and he burned what he had hitherto worshipped. The result was that for several years England beheld for the first time the scandalous spectacle of men who had held high office under the Crown openly defending—and even instigating—lawlessness and disorder, shielding and excusing criminals, proved such before the courts, and thwarting, misrepresenting, and obstructing those whose duty it was to restore order and legality in Ireland.
Such were the difficulties that confronted Mr. Arthur Balfour as Chief Secretary for Ireland from 1887 to 1891, difficulties which he surmounted with such resolution and such statesmanship that he retired from an office that has been called "the grave of reputations" with a reputation so much enhanced as to ensure him the leadership of his party and the gratitude of Irishmen of all classes for generations to come. And yet his method was a supremely simple one—to reassert the supremacy of the law, to neglect, almost ostentatiously, all merely political cries, and to set himself seriously to deal with the real Irish question, that of conferring some measure of security and prosperity on a population which over wide districts had known too little of such things.
Occupying ownership of Irish land by means of State credit was not, of course, a new policy in Mr. Balfour's day. The Bright clauses (1869) had introduced the principle into the Statute-book, and Lord Ashbourne's Act (1885) had carried it several steps further. But it was Mr. Arthur Balfour and his successors, Mr. Gerald Balfour and Mr. George Wyndham, who carried it by a series of boldly conceived steps almost within sight of completion. So thorough was the success of this policy of land purchase, and so marked was the cessation of crime and outrage and seditious agitation in every district into which it was carried, that those who made their living by agitation grew alarmed, and did all in their power to stop the working of the Purchase Acts. One Nationalist member declared that the process had gone "quite far enough," and that he wished it could be stopped. The farmers who had purchased their holdings were declared to have become selfish, and "as bad as the landlords." In other words, they had become orderly and industrious, and had ceased to subscribe for the upkeep of the United Irish