$3. The Verdict of Europe.

While the English view of the Irish problem was obscured as we have seen, generation after generation, by the fumes of one English passion after another-now commercial greed, now religious hate; now selfish enmity, now rancorous fear-foreign onlookers, whether or not they hated England, could easily see the case for what it was, absolutely about the worst, and relatively the very worst spectacle of misgovernment in Europe. Nothing could avail more surely to undo the prestige of England, as the land of free institutions, than the picture of their perversion to the constant oppression of Ireland. Foreign critics took it as giving the force of an axiom to the loose generalisation of Montesquieu's school, that the dependencies of free States are always worse governed than those of autocracies. And the few Englishmen who could rise above the vulgar self-satisfaction of their fellows, realising this, vainly sought long ago to open their fellows' eyes. "There is not," said Earl Grey in the House of Lords fifty years ago,1 "there is not a foreigner, no matter whence he comes, be it from France, Russia, Germany, or America, there is no native of any foreign country, different as their forms of government may be, who visits Ireland, and who on his return does not congratulate himself that he sees nothing comparable with the condition of that country at home."

That testimony holds perfectly good to-day. If the people of England, or a majority of them, fail to realise the part their ancestors and themselves have played towards Ireland, the peoples of Europe realise it very fully. When Mr Gladstone said that the voice of civilised Europe declared for Home Rule, even his own party hardly realised the force of the phrase. It passed for a rhetorical generalisation, resting on the hearsay of newspaper correspondents and the civilities of travellers. But it can be justified by a long series of grave and well-studied treatises, representing all shades of European opinion.

In the middle fifty years of this century no French name stood higher in English opinion than that of de Tocqueville,2 the author of Democracy in America. It stood for a sagacious blend of Liberalism and Conservatism, for cool judgment, for thoughtful

1 Speech of 23rd March, 1846, cited by Mr Fox, Key to the Irish Question, p. 322.

2 Still cited by Mr A. V. Dicey as a "profound observer" (A Leap in the Dark, 1893, p. 112).

M

scrutiny, for honourable action. And it was the friend and comrade of de Tocqueville, Gustave de Beaumont, his companion and colleague in the United States, whither they went to report officially on the penitentiary system there in force,-it was de Beaumont who, fifty-seven years ago, drew up one of the solidest works theretofore written on the Irish problem, a work in which the English mismanagement of that problem is dispassionately and unanswerably set forth. That work represented the opinion of de Tocqueville's school in Europe. But at the same period an onlooker from another nation, of another school of thought, the Conservative Prussian von Raumer, came substantially to Beaumont's conclusions. De Beaumont criticised von Raumer's doctrine as revolutionary; but the two writers, as Mill later noted, offered practically the same prescription. He might have added that M. de Sismondi, a Liberal French economist of another school than his own, put the prescription still more emphatically. And while French Liberalism and Prussian Toryism were thus practically at one, French Catholicism chimed in. The more liberal side of that Catholicism was well represented by the Comte de Montalembert, the friend of Lacordaire; and the Comte de Montalembert, after actually seeing O'Connell at work in Ireland in his youth, could in his old age write of Lacordaire as "this liberal who has been among us the descendant and the continuator of Saint Dominic, of Bossuet, and of O'Connell.” 1 I do not say that this estimate is a wise or judicial one, but it shows how the school of Lacordaire and Montalembert felt. Later, we have from Father Adolphe Perraud 2 two large volumes of Études sur l'Irlande Contemporaine (1862), a work published with a preface by the then Bishop of Orléans, and appealing to the orthodox Catholicism of France. Here we have a really industrious research, drawing on English official documents and all manner of English and Irish testimonies. The book is of course zealously Catholic, but it does not rely on mere clerical allocution to carry its point. On the contrary, it supplies to all classes of French readers an amount of exact insight into modern English discussion over and mismanagement of Ireland that they could have obtained in no other way. Such a book, following on de Beaumont's, must have convinced nine out of every ten Frenchmen who read it, be they Catholic or freethinking, that whatever may have been the truth as to Irish grievances in previous centuries, in this century they were the result of English 1 Un Moine au XIXe Siècle, éd. 1881, p. 3.

2 Afterwards Bishop of Autun, and member of the Académie Française (1882).

tyranny, English selfishness, and English unintelligence. Montalembert might seem to many an extravagant zealot, but Father Perraud could not be so set aside; and he had de Beaumont's treatise behind him. Nor did he lack other French corroboration. Besides the documented treatises of de Beaumont and himself there had appeared a series of works on Ireland by French observers, such as the Lettres sur l'Irlande of M. Duvergier de Hauranne, and L'Irlande, by MM. Chavanne de la Girandière and Huillard-Bréholles, all bringing home to the intelligence of Europe the immense failure and wrong of English rule in Ireland. After the work of Monseigneur Perraud there appeared, in 1863, the revised and extended edition of that of de Beaumont, with a new Notice sur l'état présent de l'Irlande, still summing up against England, though without a scintilla of anti-English prejudice.

And still the play of criticism goes on. The Irish problem, alas! has survived the efforts of the English Liberalism of the last generation to solve it-efforts partly stimulated by foreign criticism, but never rising to the task in the fashion of the foreign reformers whose work had been held up to them as an example. Von Raumer, the Prussian Conservative, insisted that the woes of Ireland could never be cured save by turning the tenants into peasant proprietors. That was in effect what had been accomplished in Prussia in the previous generation by the measures of von Stein and Hardenberg-or, as von Raumer always puts it, of the King, Frederick William III. Here is his whole prescription:

1. Provision for the schools and churches of the Protestants and Catholics equally, out of existing church property or new endowments.

2. Abolition of tithes.

3. Poor laws (though opposed by O'Connell), but free of the blemishes of the English.

4. Special taxation of absentees by poor-rates.

5. "The complete abolition of the system of tenants at will, and the conversion of all these tenants at will into proprietors."

"On reading this," says von Raumer, "the Tories will throw my book into the fire; and even the Whigs will be mute with astonishment. The whole battery, of 'pillage,' 'jacobinism,' 'dissolution of civil society,' is discharged at me. Even the Radicals ask, with astonishment, how I would work this miracle. There is a 'Sibylline' book, a patent and yet hidden mystery, how this is to be effected; and there is a magician who has

accomplished it—the Prussian municipal law, and King Frederick William III. of Prussia." 1

De Beaumont, while pronouncing von Raumer's proposalapparently under a misconception of von Raumer's meaning"purely revolutionary, proper to engender the most dangerous covetings and the most fatal passions," 2 was equally emphatic for peasant proprietorship, and for radical reform. Specifying first the desirable remedies of new industry, emigration, and poor relief, he prescribed the "abolition of the civil, political and religious privileges of the aristocracy," to be accomplished in abolishing the feudal system of tenures in Ireland (1) by way of prohibiting sub-tenancies and (2) by abolishing the right of primogeniture; and further (3) the disestablishment of the State Church, and (4) the payment of stipends to the Catholic clergy.

The second and third of von Raumer's proposals were realised in that generation; but it was thirty years before the third of de Beaumont's was given effect to, and some years more before even a beginning was made in the direction of von Raumer's fifth; while his first, which concurs with de Beaumont's last, is still not even within sight of being adopted. And meantime the problem itself has developed. Had a system of peasant proprietary been established by the middle of the century, it would undoubtedly have worked great things for Ireland. Had it been established simultaneously with the reforms in Prussia, it might even have limited in some measure the fatality of the famine of 1848, for it would probably have had a restraining effect on population, or at least upon sub-division of holdings. Had it been established before 1860, it would have prevented the Fenian movement; and it would have fitted the peasantry to meet the bad years after 1870 much better than did Mr Gladstone's Act of that year. But with no further land reforms than the Land Acts of 1870 and 1880, the merely modified situation of the Irish peasantry left them unable to meet another series of bad seasons, and the old story of evictions and emigration is told afresh year by year. Thus it comes about that the English Government figures to the eyes of Europe very much as of old, the record of evictions and of emigration being for foreigners the most easily noted phase of the history of things Irish. The attempts of the Liberal party to undo the wrongs of the past seem trivial beside the amount of misery that 1 England in 1835, Eng. tr., iii. 198.

2 L'Irlande, sociale politique et réligieuse, 7o edit., I. lxxxiii.

subsists; and the foreigner shrugs his shoulders as of old over English misgovernment. This is the effect conveyed even by the careful work of M. Fournier, Professor in the Faculty of Law at Grenoble, who was sent to Ireland in 1880-81 by the French Ministry of Public Instruction, on the proposal of the Paris Faculty of Law, to report on the agrarian question. It may be said of the work of M. Fournier that while he has done the historical and technical part of his work with much industry and substantial success, he has failed to realise that the Irish agrarian problem is a changing one, and has consequently erred in attributing all the existing trouble directly to the wrong-doing of past time. It is quite true that but for that wrong-doing the Irish people would be much more able to meet new difficulties; but M. Fournier does not seem to recognise that new difficulties develop, setting all down to the legacy of the ages.

"Parliament has bettered the situation of the rural classes," he writes; "it was out of its power to clear away the prejudices, the rancours, the hatreds which the past has bequeathed to the present, and which, exploited by agitators, magnified by the popular imagination, will retard for yet a long time the re-establishment of public peace in Ireland. The legislator may well seek to organise for the future a more equitable rule: there is no magic ring by which he can make tabula rasa of the past. History does not recommence we may truly say with the Roman juriconsults that no written law can efface things done: Facti causae infectae nulla constitutione fieri possunt.” 1 Here, doubtless, there is a touch of national prejudice; for on such a view all history, French no less than English, would be but a record of inherited curses. That is not the final lesson to be learned. But it is important to realise how, the old misdeeds of England being thus represented as the actual causes of all present troubles, and the misdeeds themselves being freshly set forth with abundant learning, European public opinion regards the refusal of the English majority to let the Irish people grapple with their own problem. It is not too much to say that the retention of our grip over Ireland, with its eternal sequence of penury and hate, causes every display of English sympathy for oppressed aliens to figure in European eyes as a grotesque hypocrisy. When English meetings protest against the mishandling of Armenians by Turks, French and Germans ask whether the difference between direct massacre and the chronic sentence of death" by eviction in Ireland justifies the English

1La Question Agraire en Irlande, 1882, préface.