THE PRESENT ANARCHY.

For the past four or five months Ireland has presented a spectacle to which no parallel can be found in any civilised country. Her own miserable annals, indeed, offer only too many parallels, but the fact simply warns us that Irish civilisation is scarcely skin-deep. In some parts of Turkey and Greece there is imperfect security for life and property, but even in those border-lands of Europe there is no organised conspiracy to defeat and trample upon law. In Ireland such a conspiracy has been at work since last summer with fatal success. Early in the autumn the peasants in Mayo and Galway began to boast that 'the English law was broke,' and this is now the language commonly used throughout Connaught and Munster, in a great part of Leinster, and in some districts of Ulster. This popular belief has kept pace with the establishment of the branches of the Land League throughout the country and the working out of the policy long ago proclaimed by Mr. Parnell. Its practical application, however, goes far beyond the avowed limits of the Land League system. The Land League recommends the peasantry to combine for unlawful objects, to enforce by menaces the abrogation of existing contracts and to intimidate all who do not at once yield to the mandate of the Leaguers. But the lesson of lawlessness is carried further by those who are told that legal right may be thrust aside at the bidding of agitators. The small farmers have the strongest inducement to make the system of the Land League effective, and if mere threats of popular displeasure and of a social ban such as that by which Captain Boycott was crushed do not avail, they do not hesitate to extort submission by murder, torture, incendiarism, and cruel mutilation of living animals. Boycotting' itself can rarely be made perfect, unless the refusal to carry it into effect is punished by outrage. When obnoxious landlords and agents are placed under the ban, it is necessary for the purposes of the Land League policy that no shopkeeper shall be allowed to deal with them, no artisans or labourers to work for them, no innkeepers to entertain them, no vehicles to carry them, no messengers to bring them letters or telegrams. The same treatment must be rigorously applied to land-grabbers,' as farmers are now called who venture to take holdings from which defaulting tenants have been evicted; and to respectable men who knowing

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that they hold their land on reasonable terms and are reluctant to break their word, are audacious enough to pay their rents without insisting that the landlord shall accept Griffith's valuation.' Against all these classes are employed the weapons of organised agrarian terrorism which have been employed in Ireland during several months with almost complete impunity and with too conspicuous a success over a daily increasing area. In some counties the system has so thoroughly quelled all spirit of resistance that few outrages are any longer needed to enforce the Land League Code. In others the struggle continues, and wherever it is maintained, the record of crime is terribly augmented.

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The magnitude of the evil was daringly denied, not by followers of Mr. Parnell only, but by English members for democratic constituencies down to the beginning of December. It was alleged that the amount of crime was exaggerated, and that there was reason to believe that the powers of the ordinary law' were being used to keep under control that which existed. Mr. Gladstone himself at the banquet on Lord Mayor's day, intimated that he was still waiting for demonstration of the fact that the ordinary law had failed to cope with the enemies arrayed against it in Ireland. When the Cabinet, after frequent meetings and rumours of dissension on this very question, separated at the end of November without taking steps to obtain additional powers for the Irish Executive, the reports of outrage did not cease or lessen, but exaggeration was the answer in the mouth of every Ministerial apologist. On the opening of the Winter Assizes for Munster, Leinster, and Connaught, the charges of the judges made a full disclosure of the actual state of things. Mr. Justice Fitzgerald in Cork, Mr. Justice Barry in Waterford, and Baron Dowse in Galway had the same tale to tell. Crime has greatly increased in amount since the last summer assizes, and practically it has been unchecked by public justice. It is unnecessary to recapitulate the facts stated in these charges: one or two taken from Baron Dowse's will be sufficient. In Galway (county and city) the police have returned 291 offences of a grave character as having been committed since July last, but only twelve cases have been sent for trial. In Mayo 236 grave offences were returned, and again only twelve cases were for trial. In these two counties 493 persons, either through a desire to shield the guilty or through terror,' refuse to give any information by which the criminals could be brought to justice. If this state of affairs,' says Baron Dowse, is allowed to continue much longer, immediate danger to Ireland will be the consequence and ultimate disgrace to the empire of which she forms a part.' Mr. Justice Barry spoke scarcely less strongly, though in the south-eastern counties the evil had not yet reached the same proportions as in Galway and Mayo. If, he said, even one-tenth of the outrages reported be true, no sane and candid man can deny that there exists in many parts of this country a state of things demanding grave and

anxious consideration.' According to Mr. Justice Fitzgerald, in nine-tenths at least of the cases of reported criminality, no one has been made amenable;' yet in several districts embracing a great part of Munster true liberty has ceased to exist, and an intolerable tyranny prevails. Life is not secure, right is disregarded, the process of the law cannot be enforced, and dishonesty and lawlessness disgrace the land.

It is not too much to say with Mr. Justice Fitzgerald that a criminal organisation, acting on the cupidity, the passions, and the fears of the people,' 'had reduced some districts of the country to anarchy and confusion, differing little, if at all, from civil war.' The English sympathisers with the agrarian movement in Ireland denied this down to the last moment. One expositor of Radicalism, writing at the end of November, boldly asserted that agrarian murders and outrages have not been frequent,' and attributed the prevailing alarm to the fact that events are viewed through the disturbing and exaggerating medium of fear." The imperturbable courage which refuses in Piccadilly to recognise the dangers threatening other people in Mayo or Kerry is to be admired, but the charges of the Irish judges dispose of the theory that the crisis has merely been developed out of a landlords' panic.' The same critic, nevertheless, admitted that if it were shown that the operation of the law in its normal state was insufficient, that assassinations, outrages, and other crimes of violence were being committed in alarming or unprecedented number, that constitutional authority had completely collapsed, there would be fair grounds for the institution of coercive measures.'. Most persons will be of opinion that the required proof has been abundantly given in the figures cited by the judges. But those figures were not brought to light at the assizes. They have been collected by the county inspectors of constabulary and, as a matter of course, the Government has been made acquainted with them from day to day. Mr. Forster has seen the evidence grow under his eyes since Parliament was prorogued; he was able to lay it before the Cabinet in November, and it is currently believed that he then represented the necessity of giving the Irish Executive peremptory and summary powers for the repression of crime. But if he did so he was overruled by his colleagues, and he did not emphasise his protest in the only effective way, by presenting his resignation as the alternative of the rejection of his policy.

Whatever were the causes which determined the conduct of the Cabinet, and of the Irish Secretary in particular, the fact remains that the anarchy and confusion differing little, if at all, from civil war,' which is denounced from the judicial bench, were allowed to make head and to set justice at defiance. The judges lament the impotence of law and the triumph of lawlessness. But the Government has made no sign. The members of the Cabinet, indeed, do

Fortnightly Review, Home and Foreign Affairs.'

not contradict a report that, when Parliament assembles on January 6, a Coercion Bill is to be introduced. The Irish, however, believe that the hesitation of the Ministry has been due to the threats of Mr. Parnell. The Home Rule leader, who has repeatedly declared that he is working at the land question only as the most convenient line of attack upon the British connection, has declared that he will not allow any measure of coercion to pass, and the peasantry believe him as they believed O'Connell, when he used solemnly to pledge his word that in six months Repeal of the Union would be extorted from England. They are fortified in this belief by the stress which Mr. Bright has laid upon the statement of what is in one sense a truism, and in another an irrelevancy, that force is no remedy.' Radical politicians and publicists harp upon this string, and the new Birmingham machine enforces an appearance of unanimity. Meanwhile, Ireland is going from bad to worse, as surely and swiftly as a fire, to extinguish which no efforts have been made, wraps a whole pile of buildings in flame. Mr. Bright and his friends steadily refuse to call the fire-engines, until there has been a scientific inquiry into the origin of the fire, and a law passed to compel the use of safety matches.

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It is important to examine carefully the novel application of the doctrine that force is no remedy' in which the new Radical policy of dealing with the anarchy in Ireland is founded. There is nothing in the reasoning employed which restricts the conclusion to Ireland. the mining population of Durham were not only to strike for higher wages, but were to extort concessions by systematic outrage as the 'Molly Maguires' of the Pennsylvania coal-districts succeeded in doing for many years, it would be urged, on these new principles, that no effort ought to be made to put down crime and disorder until grievances had been investigated and redressed. In no civilised society, hitherto, has it been acknowledged that the existence of grievances is a justification of crime, or of systematic defiance of law. It is true that some apologists for anarchy imagine that the Liberal party was formerly identified with a different doctrine; Liberals, it has been asserted, have always repudiated the doctrine that where widespread disloyalty has arisen from substantial causes submission to the law should precede popular remedies.' Take the strongest case possible-the government of the Second Empire in France or the rule of Austria in Lombardy; did any sane Liberals contend that assassination, with which Napoleon III. was repeatedly menaced, and which struck at many Austrian governors and generals, was not to be punished, so long as those Governments subsisted? Whatever political inferences might be drawn from their acts, it was clear that Orsini and other political assassins had forfeited their lives, and the moral right of the Government they attacked to exact the forfeit was Spectator, December 4.

indisputable. In truth, those who use this method of argument do not see where it leads them. What does 'submission to the law' It means that the crimes which at present are perpetrated with impunity in Ireland must be made to cease, by whatever means and whatever the course of Ministerial policy. If Ireland were as badly governed as the kingdom of the Two Sicilies thirty years ago, it would still be as imperative as it is at present to enforce, in some way or other, the elementary securities for life and property without waiting for political reforms. No step in advance can be taken while there is impunity for crime. One may feel shame at being forced to insist upon a point like this; but when it is contested, in bold or ambiguous language, by many Liberal speakers, it is necessary to reassert it in the plainest terms.

A confusion of thought is introduced-not always, I am afraid, undesignedly-between agrarian outrages and the repudiation of existing contracts. Both are examples of the lawless spirit which has sprung up under the influence of the Land League, and in the presence of an impotent legal system and an apathetic Government. But it is to the latter that the apologists for the do-nothing policy turn when they are pressed in argument. It is, they say, of course to be deplored that tenants should refuse to pay their stipulated rents and to surrender possession of their lands upon ejectment; but, after all, these are the very rights with which a reform of the land-laws must deal, and it is not unfair to wait for the Parliamentary settlement. The mischievous consequences of this doctrine might be pointed out; but, admitting that it were consistent with justice and public expediency, it covers only a narrow corner of the question. Refusal to pay rent and resistance to eviction are comparatively unimportant factors in the anarchy described in the Judges' charges. But the reign of terror organised throughout the larger part of Ireland can derive no shadow of legality from any changes in the land-laws. It will neither

Some politicians who ought to know, and do know, better, are not ashamed to repeat the stale calumny that the disorders in Ireland are morally chargeable upon the House of Lords. Mr. Slagg, for instance, one of the members for Manchestera gentleman who is very indignant with the leaders of his own party because, as he elegantly phrases it, they 'turn up their noses at Home Rule'-traces all the present troubles to the rejection of the Compensation for Disturbance Bill. Mr. Slagg voted for that Bill, but, if it is to be assumed that he honestly means what he says, it is plain that, short as the Bill was, he cannot have read it. The Bill was to come into operation only when tenants were ejected, and when they could show to the satisfaction of the County Court judge that the inability to pay rent was due to the prevailing distress. But during the past six months there have been practically no ejectments in Ireland for the very good reason that, as the Judges tell us, the Queen's writs do not run in that country. Few cases, therefore, have arisen in which the proposed law could have been set in motion. Even, however, if those cases had been far more numerous, the condition set forth in the Bill as the excuse for exceptional legislation would have failed. The 'prevailing distress' has disappeared; a harvest bounteous beyond all recent examples has been reaped and turned into money, and no County Court judge could possibly decide, in the presence of these facts, that the