Democracy and Liberty. William Edward Hartpole Lecky

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Democracy and Liberty - William Edward Hartpole Lecky


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service a Government can render to morals seems to be the maintenance of a social organisation in which the path of duty and the path of interest as much as possible coincide; in which honesty, industry, providence, and public spirit naturally reap their rewards, and the opposite vices their punishment. No worse lesson can be taught a nation than that violence, intimidation, conspiracy, and systematic refusal to pay debts are the natural means of rising to political power and obtaining legislative concessions. No worse habit can be implanted in a nation than that of looking for prosperity to politics rather than to industry, and forming contracts and incurring debts with the belief that a turn of the political wheel may make it possible to cancel them.

      To crown the edifice, a measure was introduced by the Government, in 1894, for the purpose of reinstating, at the cost of 250,000l. of public money drawn from the funds of the Irish Church, those tenants who, in spite of judicial reductions and all the delays and indulgences of the law, had been either unable or unwilling to pay their rents, and had been in consequence evicted. By this measure it was proposed to invest three men nominated by the Government, and uncontrolled by any right of appeal, with an arbitrary and almost absolute power of reinstating any Irish tenant, or the representative of any Irish tenant, who had been evicted for any cause since 1879. The only restriction was that the consent of the present tenant must be obtained; but in a great part of Ireland he could not withhold it without imminent danger to his life. The tenant might have been evicted for dishonesty, for violence, for criminal conspiracy, for hopeless and long-continued bankruptcy. He might be living in America. The owner of the soil might have delayed the eviction for years after the law had empowered him to carry it out, and he might have at last taken the land into his own possession, and have been, during many years, farming it himself. He had no right of refusing his consent, and his only alternative was to take back the former tenant, or to sell to him the farm at whatever price a revolutionary and despotic tribunal might determine.

      In the light of this clause and of the persistence with which it was maintained, no reasonable man could doubt the character, the origin, and the motive of the measure. The Government bought the Irish vote by a Bill to carry out their design, and it resolved to devote a large amount of public money to the purpose. It is true that this scandalous instance of political profligacy was defeated by the House of Lords, and that in the Land Bill of the succeeding year the compulsory clause was dropped; but the fact that a British minister could be found to introduce, and a party majority to vote it, is not likely to be forgotten in Ireland. Never, indeed, did a minister of the Crown propose a measure more distinctly calculated to encourage dishonesty, and to persuade a deluded people that a sufficient amount of voting power was all that was needed to make it successful. It has been truly said, that the worst feature of the old penal code against Irish Catholics was that some of its provisions placed law in direct opposition to religion and to morals, and thus tended powerfully to demoralise as well as to impoverish. A system of government has, in our day, grown up in Ireland not less really and scarcely less widely demoralising. Those who have examined its effects will only wonder that so much honesty and virtue have survived it.


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