Cornelius O'Dowd. [June, IRELAND-IN TERROREM. Landlord murder in Ireland might seem, to any one unacquainted with the country, to be the most gratuitous and unrewarding of all crimes, since, shoot how they may, the race of proprietors will still be continued, and the son, or the nephew, or the far-off relative will succeed, and rent-day will return with the revolving year, and all the horrors of paying for his land will press on the heart and the patriotism of long-suffering Paddy. Though this be all true, yet is there another side to the question, and by this side we see that the real efficacy of murder in Ireland lies in the terror it creates. Nothing can more clearly demonstrate this than the fact that very frequently the man singled out for assassination is neither a severe landlord nor a cruel taskmaster, nor is he one generally unpopular in his neighbourhood. As in the case which occurred a few months back, Mr Baker was a man well liked by the people, and reputed to be humane and kindly in all his dealings. The system, however, looks higher than the individual; and the result aimed at is such an amount of panic as may teach other landlords that they hold their properties by the most precarious of all tenures, and that all the prescription of title-deeds is not proof against the argument of the bullet. I do not believe that throughout the length and breadth of Europe you will find a more fearless and gallant race of gentlemen than the landlords of Ireland. With facts of individual bravery which are known to me I could fill a volume; and I lay stress on the point because I am fully persuaded that, were these men as a class cruel, oppressive, or tyrannical, they never would have to maintain that courage we have been able seen them exhibit amidst perils such as few are called on to ensciousness of a good cause could counter. Nothing but the conhave sustained them in such emergency as they have been placed in; for it is not alone the hand of the assassin they have to dread, but the force of a public feeling directed against them, with all the power of a hostile press; and they have to stand up and meet the imputation that to them and their treatment of the peasantry all the ills for them and their grinding exof Ireland are ascribable—that but actions there would be neither crime nor misery—that it is they who make the Irish difficulty, and that in the cruel assertion of their rights they have damaged the respect men should accord to law, and made the whole country ungovernable. against them were only uttered by So long as the denunciations the local papers, so long as the sympathies with the defiant tenant were only extended by the organs of the rebellious press, which looks to calumny for its circulation, the landlords, sore pressed and peril-bound as they were, still looked to England-the source of all law or order in the land-to maintain them in those rights which are the very foundation of property; but when they discovered that powerful journals which form and fashion public opinion in the empire took part against them, holding up as warning examples individuals exceptionally cruel, and denouncing special cases as though they were specimens of a system then, indeed, they appear to have lost heart, and the "ultimo ratio" of the murderer gained an augmented force from that current of popular sympathy which loved to expatiate on the sufferings of the evicted tenant, impoverished landlord or a ruined but never wasted a thought on an gentry. We have had some years of this now, and the result is not only an amount of crime only to be equalled by the darkest annals of Whiteboyism, but a degree of terror and apprehension throughout the land, to which no living man's memory can record anything the equal. The Irish press does not condescend to be any longer apologetic for the crime of the country. It openly adduces the cases as they occur as the evidences of a system for which the people themselves have found out the cure; and a great English orator has only bewailed the geographical difficulty of Ireland, and declared that, with less proximity to England, the remedy of her ills had been completely in the hands of an avenging people. Now, so long as these were the mere utterances of a very degraded press, or the impassioned outbursts of an after-dinner eloquence, insulting as they were, and unfair, they might yet be endured; but it is harder to bear them when we see them lifted to the elevation of a creed, and declared to be the basis of a Governmental policy. A popular cant of the day declares that, to rule Ireland with success, the country must be administered with distinct reference to the feelings and ways of Irishmen. From various writers on the subject, Englishmen have learned that there are special peculiarities in this people which are unknown amongst their own; not that I believe they in the least understand what these peculiarities are, where they exist, or what they point to; and it is the Irishman of the stage, or of Punch, or, worse again, of Mr Senior, who is in their thoughts, and not that composite Paddy who has more of good and bad welded together in his nature than any other human being in creation. Their ideal Pat, however, serves their purpose, though he be as like the real living Irishman as the turbaned Cockney of a fancy ball is like the impassive Το dweller on the Bosphorus. study this ideal personage—to imagine his instincts, divine his tendencies, and analyse his passions, would appear to be now the favourite task of our rulers; and in the spirit of that maxim that declares "who rules o'er freemen should himself be free," they have come to believe that to legislate for Ireland in an Irish spirit entails an unscrupulous contempt for everything that Englishmen cherish, and an open declaration, that to the west of St George's Channel the rights of property have no other existence than such as may consist with the claims of party and the security of office. Con A careful study of their Irishman has shown him to be the most bigoted and intolerant of all Catholics. What so likely, then, to gratify the fervent believer in his creed as the downfall and disgrace of the Church which opposed him? An equally acute investigation of Irish instincts has proved that the grievance of landlordism is remediable by the bullet, and the panic of an organised assassination has at length paralysed the power of the proprietor. Why not adapt this ingenious system, then, to the wants of Government, and make terror a weapon of administration? fiscation of the Church property may well hint to landlords what awaits them if they will persist in the iniquity of demanding rent. The generous treatment which respected life-interests in the one case may possibly be transferred to the other. Who knows but by a stretch of liberality their "edifices may be accorded to them, and on some favoured night of the session, when royal highnesses and illustrious visitors crowd the galleries of the House, the great rhetorician of the age will declare that the tenure of land in Ireland only needs Voluntaryism to receive a stimulus which shall develop all the excellent qualities of the people, and make this country Cornelius O'Dowd. the paradise nature had intended The present Government has de- These are very high pretensions; and certainly if we only regard the powerful nature of the remedies employed, one cannot deny that the doctors are in earnest. land herself, she has been so long As for Irethe subject of treatment, and with remedies so various and often contradictory, that she only follows the traditional lot of the invalid in coming at last to the quack. The present Cabinet, however, goes farther than mere claiming to be the first that ever sympathised with Ireland. It also assumes to be original in its plans; and it is this I deny, and this pretension that I now desire to stigmatise as a plagiarism. To ascertain how the Irish would wish to be dealt with, our rulers have set themselves to see how the Irish deal with themselves; and this inquiry shows that Pat, having tried many things, has found nothing that answers his purpose like TERROR! The denunciation from the altar, the threatening notice, the warning nailed on the hall door, with a coffin at the top, the intimation to quit a new tenure or are all modes which aspire to considerable success. The denounced man in Ireland would not be an Irishman if he did not read in any misfortune that befel him the accomplishment of the curse pronounced on him; and thus it is that every possible accident of human life swells the list of penalties invoked on the ill-doer. Didn't he get the palsy for it? [June, didn't his daughter die of the fewheat? are the common expresver didn't the smut come on his sions that show how the people connect injury with vengeance, dence as an agent to vindicate their and recognise the decrees of Proviwrongs. the motive principle of Irish life. Terror in one shape or other is The landlord withholds the lease that he may have the threat of eviction, and the peasant shoots the more amenable to argument; and landlord to make his successor this system of Terror, organised and disciplined to a high perfection, the Liberals have stolen, and the original method to deal with proclaim they alone have found out Ireland. I mean the language of that pacifiTheir language to the peasantcation on which they pride themsee the admirable use you have made selves-may be stated thus: We of TERROR; we recognise in it a great governmental principle; and has been attended with. Still, as we own the admirable success it physicians are reluctant to employ remedies which of themselves are to cure even ague by arsenic, we baneful influences, and do not like bullet, heroic remedy though it be, on similar grounds object to the for Irish wrongs; and we would then suggest that you would leave already disendowed the Church. the TERRORISING to us! We have stupid, think you, as not to see Are the landlords of Ireland so that once we have gone so far we can go further? It was no easy matter, one might suppose, to reconcile a British Parliament to an Act of Confiscation; but we have political millennium the old Whig hit upon happy times, and in this the proprietors of Irish property lies down with the Radical. If are not alarmed now, they must Here is an Establishment linked be more or less than human. loyal in Ireland to the very hearts of all that was the strongest - 66 bond that bound them to England, the main condition of the Act of Union, the refuge against the aggressions and extravagances of an intolerant Church, swept away by the triumphant vote of a party, whose elements, like those of a street mob, all agreed on destruction, and yet have no other tie between them. Must not estated proprietors see that, if pacification call for it," they may be meted by the like measure? The Government that would introduce such a policy need not fear that worst of all political jibes-they cannot be called pedlers in politics. It will be assuredly a "great measure;" the bonfires on a thousand hills that will hail the "first reading" will show the gratitude of that warm-hearted and oppressed people, who at length have found the man to understand Ireland and sympathise with Irishmen. The mighty newspaper, that rules public opinion, cannot but sustain a policy to which their ablest leaders have so long pointed. All who are sick of Ireland, tired of her importunity, and wearied and worried by the contradictions of her condition, all these will be delighted to know that here at length is finality. There can surely come nothing after extinction. No small merit will it be, besides, to the Premier to outbid Mr Bright, and leave him halting lamely behind him. How meanly will any measure of leasehold or tenantright seem beside the grand bill that sweeps away the proprietor like the parson, and tells him "that his mission has proved a failure;" that the happiness of a people is of more account than the "integrity of a system;" that there were two barren fig-trees in Ireland, and that he is one of them;-in fact, that he was the last remnant of a penal law which the enlightenment of the age repudiated, and that the hand of the clock can be no longer held back, in which Ireland must be treated with justice, and Irishmen be the owners of their own soil! INDEX TO VOL. CV. Abraham de Sta Clara, the sermons of, Addison on the immorality of the Airolles, Beaumarchais's exposure of, 39. Americans, the, their want of rever- André, Father, the sermons of, 215. ARMY ORGANISATION, ON, 152-causes Arnold, Dr, a fellow-student of Keble's, ARTS IN THE HOUSEHOLD, THE, 361. Auckland gold-fields, the, 305. Austrian military system, its failure in 559. Balaklava, the battle of, 75 et seq. Ballet, the, general fondness for it, Ballot, the, by O'Dowd, 446. Barnard, General, 585. Barrow, Isaac, his sermons, 225. -the position of philosophy, 1-his Bernard, St, as a preacher, 209. Bismark, changes in the Prussian mili- |