THE IRISH LAND QUESTION.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3103, 8 June 1881, Page 3

THE IRISH LAND QUESTION.

If the events which have passed in Ireland since 1810 bud passed in England, the public opinion of the latter country would haee imperiously compelled the Legislature to turn our land customs into Acts of Parliament. If any sensible proportion oE the English, counties -were to be seen moving down upon tho Thames for embarkation to America, and dropping by the road-side from hunger and fever, and it had been heard at tho way-side that they were tenants-at-will, evicted for any cause whatsoever, the public opinion of the country would have risen to render impossible the repetition of such absolute and irresponsible | exercise of legal rights. If five urllions, i i.e., one fourth of the British people, had ' either emigrated in a mas 3 by reason of disI content, misery, or eviction, or had died by I fever and famine since the yenr 1848, the •wholo land system of England would have been modified so as to render the return of a national danger impossible for eve". But both these suppositions have been verified in Iroland. It is precisely because tho suppositions have been verified in Ireland wo aro now face to face with a most dangerous agitation. There is now a loud , and bitter cry against landlordism, aud the due distinction bei.wcen bad and good landlords is often disregarded ; but it is undeniable that th 4 3 anti-landkud agitation, so ' far as it goes, is a reaction against the un- | i principled extortion and the anti-nationnl ' ctlitude of a large proportion of Irish land- ; owners. The late Lord Derby had the '■ truth and courage to charge the Irish ■ landlords with insatiable avarice, and so j nolfljjou? was, this spirit of avarice ; that

Walker, the compiler of the best of dictionaries, defined the word mekrent to mean the rent usually extorted by Irish landlords ii'o:u their tenants.

I have talked freely for many years with men of mo'.t countries ia Europe. I have found everywhe c a profound sympathy wit 1 ) Ireland ia no way flattening to England. Our ir?srlav.ity keep 3 these things from our exs, and we therefore sootbe ourcelves with the notion of our own superiority to other men. But such an abuse of the of propevty is without parallel, at least in this century, on the continent of Europe. Our self-respect should lead us to give up the illusion that any office in tbe civil'sel word is to teach the nations how '.o live.

It maybe thought that I bave venture! to speak upon a subject which is beyond both my capacity and my duty. But I have clone so from the profound conviction that the deepest and the sorest cause of the discontent and unrest of Ireland is the Land Question. I am clay by day in contact w.'th an impoverished race driven from home by the Land Question. I see it daily in the destitution of my flock. The religious inequality does, indeed, keenly wound and exci';,e the liish people. Peace and goodwill can never reign in Troland until every stigrea is removed from the Catholic Church and Faith, and tbe galling injustice of rel'gious inequality shall have been redressed. This, indeed, is true. But the Land Question, as we call it by a somewhat heartless euphemism, means hunger, thirst, nakelness, notice to quit, labor spent in vain, the toil of years seized upon, the breakirg up of homes, the misery, sicknesses, death of parents, children, wives, the wildness and despair which spring up in the hearts of the poor when legal force like a sharp harrow, goes over the rights of mankind. All this is contained in the Land Question. It is this which spreads through the people in three-fourths of Ireland, with an all-pervading and thrilling intensity. It is this intolerable grief which lias driven hundreds of thousands to America, there to abide the time of return. No greater self-deception could wo practice on ourselves than to imagine that Fenianism is the folly of a few apprentices and shopboys. Fenianism could not have survived for a year if it we -, e not sustained by the traditional and just discontent of almost a whole people. Let us not r'.eceive ourselves. Ireland is between two great assimilating powers, England and America. The play and action of America upon Ireland, if it be seven days slower in reaching Ireland than the influence of England, is sevenfold more penetrating and powerful upon the whole population. The assimilating power of England, which has overcome the resistance of Scotland, and absorbed it into itself, is met by a stern repulsion in Ireland, which keeps the two races asunder. The assimilating power of America is met and welcomed with gratitude, sympathy and aspiration, and the attitude of Ireland has long been as S ,- r Robert Peel described in Parliament twenty-five years ago, with her baclc turned to England, aud her face turned towards the West. —Exfcrat from a letter on the Irish Land Question, addressed to Earl Grey in 1868 by the Archbishop of Westminster.