MR. FROUDE AND THE LANDLORDS
OF IRELAND.

IRISH landlords-or, at least, those of their number who have been expiating the errors of their predecessors and struggling manfully with inherited difficulties have unquestionably for some time past been having what in the expressive slang of the period would be called 'hard lines.' How hard their lines are, and in what their special hardness consists, has never, so far as I know, been very fully and accurately defined. It would be vain to attempt to do so completely within the narrow space which it would be reasonable to ask for in the pages of a periodical; but when it is proposed to criticise something of what has been said and written by one of the hardest of their hard-liners, Mr. Froude, it may be allowable to touch briefly on some of the most salient difficulties which Irish landlords some thirty or forty years since were doomed to encounter.

I shall limit myself to two, which are undoubtedly the most serious-1st, those resulting from the middleman' tenure, which, although they have now pretty nearly passed away, were, at the moment, nothing less than overwhelming; 2nd, the deeply-rooted, widely-ramified, all-pervading, most perplexing difficulties which inevitably sprang from our religious complications, and which, alas! exist at the present day with but slightly diminished intensity. I select these not only on account of their magnitude, but by reason of their speciality to Ireland. Owners of the soil in England know nothing, or next to nothing, of similar inflictions; and as it is very much the habit, not unnaturally, to institute comparisons between English and Irish landlords, and very much to the disadvantage of the latter, nothing can be more unjust than such comparing, if we refuse at the same time to take account of the degree in which the Irish landlord is disadvantageously handicapped.

6

First, then, as to the middleman' evil. It is right to premise that in its origin it is in no degree chargeable against the landlords of Ireland. All the authorities, Mr. Froude included, concur in telling us that it arose from a British enactment which forbade leasing of land to any but Protestants. The small number of lessees

of that faith made it not only physically essential that lands should be let in large tracts, but further involved that they should be let for long terms and at low rents, and, worst of all, that they should be demised with a very insufficient barrier against subdivision. When the religious restriction was withdrawn, the habit had already become stereotyped, and all the politico-social evils resulting therefrom remained and multiplied. Briefly stated, it came to this: that a proprietor who in the early part of the century desired to put an end to so vicious a system was compelled, at the termination of a middleman's lease (if he objected to be an exterminator), to accept his land completely saturated with the densest mass of the poorest possible class of occupiers--men without capital, without agricultural skill, without energy beyond what sufficed to raise a crop of potatoes, and to multiply the population.

Statistics of numbers in individual cases, even if attainable, would here be out of place; fortunately they are not needed. Bearing in mind that middlemen holdings were, in point of density of numbers, as well as of individual misery, far worse than the average of Ireland, it should be enough for our purpose to compare the averages of England and Ireland in regard to population. In the years between 1840 and 1845, as the Irish famine approached, we learn on official authority that in England, with a comparatively productive system of agriculture, with a large proportion of her numbers occupied in trade and manufactures, the population was 250 per square mile; whereas that in Ireland, devoid of trade, devoid of manufactures-all her inhabitants dependent on her miserably cultivated soil-it was 300 for the same area. No reasoning mind will need the deepening by any colouring of this picture. The unfortunate landlord hampered with such lands and such occupiers-the damnosa hæreditas from the middleman-became a standing monument of contradiction as opposed as the clay and the gold of Nebuchadnezzar's image. Perniciously absolute in theory, while practically, for any beneficial purpose, almost impotent, I have often thought the only parallel in nature for his position was to be found in a scene well described by one of our hunters in Africa, where numberless herds of animals of the antelope tribe swept across that continent in countless myriads, carrying off in their midst a monarch of the forest.' His majesty, within his narrow circle, was omnipotent enough, led a particularly jolly life of it, and, in the words of the Irish scholar rendering into English the parable of Dives and Lazarus, he ate his dinner mighty satisfactionably every day;' but for any control over the masses-for any chance of influencing the direction to be taken by the vast multitudes which were hurrying him and themselves to probable destruction-he had no more power than the feeblest parasite that sheltered itself in his shaggy mane.

How, I ask, was the landlord to deal with such a population? To provide every occupier with the most modest slated cabin and cowshed which it would be decent to construct, would have involved a larger expenditure on a given area than was incurred by one of the greatest land magnates of England, some twenty years ago, in effecting improvements for his tenants which earned for His Grace well-merited fame. But whereas the wise expenditure of the English duke secured for owner and occupier a lasting benefit, the larger Irish outlay could but be said to perpetuate an evil; for the petite culture, without any one of the many accessories which are essential (and even then it will be abundantly difficult) to make it a success, is unquestionably an evil. Few landlords in Ireland had the command of capital which would enable them to clear their estates by a costly system of emigration; and although that process was undoubtedly the shortest and surest road to benefiting all the parties concerned, it was generally deemed by the reluctant emigrant, and not unnaturally, a grievous hardship.

Practically, then, the Irish landlord was, as a rule, shut out from rapid and heroic' remedies, and was compelled to content himself with the endeavour to mend gradually and slowly a state of things which it was not possible for him thoroughly to cure; watching patiently his opportunity, by at one moment converting the poorest and smallest farmers into paid labourers, at another seizing a legitimate occasion to consolidate holdings, and so step by step increasing not unreasonably the size of his farm, and improving the agricultural training of the farmer-emphatically learning to labour and to wait.' I am glad to believe that a very considerable number of Irish landlords accepted this humble but not inglorious task, and are fairly entitled to take credit to themselves for much of the marvellous progress of the last twenty-five years.

Secondly, as to the religious difficulty. That evil plant found in the social circumstances of the country a soil but too favourable to its development. One out of many most pernicious ingredients was found in the fatal disproportion of numbers between the owners and occupiers of the soil. Even at this day, when the numbers of the former have considerably increased, and of the latter diminished, we have but 13,000 proprietors for over 600,000 tenancies. This, which in any case and in any country would be an evil, was seriously intensified by the fact that, broadly speaking, the owners were of one faith, the occupiers of another. But, still advancing in this painful diagnosis,' we are compelled to remember that the religion of the few and the more wealthy was State-paid, while that of the millions was endowed out of the pittance of the poor. Nor can we stop here, for authentic history as well as local tradition were at hand with their embittering ingredients. The former constantly reminded the Roman Catholic tenant that the State provision

bestowed on their richer Protestant fellow-countrymen had once belonged to their Church; while tradition charged, and not always unjustly, that some proprietors had sacrificed their consciences to their worldly interests, and, forsaking the faith of their fathers, had adhered tenaciously to their ancestral acres; and, still worse, it imputed that in some cases the relatives of 'concealed' Roman Catholic owners had, by a pretended conversion to Protestantism, despoiled the rightful possessor, and seized on his estate.

The aggregate of these separate items was, it will be allowed, quite enough to endanger the good relations of landlord and tenant, and presented too fair a field for the designs of the designing, and for the ill effects of accidents, or of the faults and mistakes on either side, which in human affairs are to be expected. But, bad as all this was, we should be omitting the part of Hamlet from the tragedy if we failed to take account of the degree in which Protestant landowners were injuriously affected by the peculiar position and the resulting action of the Roman Catholic priest. I am well aware that I am here (and specially in relation to Ireland) passing over very thin ice, but I shall say no word that can justly wound the susceptibilities of any individual or of any creed. I impute nothing to Protestant nature nor to Roman Catholic nature; I wish merely to point out that under the laws which regulate human nature in general, if you place a man in a position where the laws of his country, the action of those opposed to him, the sympathy of his friends, all his surroundings and all his memories, his personal and pecuniary interest, tend to make him adopt a particular line of conduct, so surely as water runs down a hill, so surely will he fall into that line, even when he himself fails to realise the motives of his action. I contend, then, that the Irish Roman Catholic clergyman, placed in his parish alongside the landlord, was for many of, or all, these reasons, almost necessitate rei, led to take up a position of hostility to him.

Over and above the causes of severance between the creeds, which I have already detailed, and which must inevitably affect him. in common with his co-religionists, the priest had the additional casus belli that it was against his order that the severest enactments of the penal code had been directed; and if those enactments had not actually touched him, they had reached to the very verge of his day. In his mind the law and the landlord (who had so large a part in framing it) were naturally combined and held jointly responsible. On the other hand, looking at the landlord's position, it was scarcely to be wondered at, though much to be regretted, that he should in a measure look down on, and decline familiar intercourse with, a man who, however important his office, was raised from a very low stratum of society; for at this particular period the Maynooth-taught priest was never drawn from the ranks of the gentry of his creed, and seldom even from the better class of farmer.

As I have indicated, I am very far from approving this line of conduct; on the contrary, I hold that a landlord having such close and important relations with a numerous body of Roman Catholic tenants, was bound to meet their clergyman in a frank and friendly spirit, and by every means, short of a sacrifice of principle, to do his very best to continue with him on amicable relations. I am bound in justice to admit that this course was not generally followed by the landlords of Ireland at the period in question; but the same justice leads us to the conviction that the landlord, as a rule, found in the priest of his parish a man not only predisposed to be hostile, but one who, from his position and circumstances, must prove one of the most formidable of antagonists. Taken, as we have seen, from a very humble station in the rural districts, he left his home to obtain at Maynooth an education which, while it raised him immeasurably above his rustic neighbours, was still of a sectarian and somewhat narrow character. Sent back thence to a rural parish —where, looked down on by the landlord class, worshipped by his humble congregation, he was placed in about as trying a position as poor human nature could be subjected to-he must have been something more than mortal if his character could have escaped a warp of pride at one side, or a tinge of envy and bitterness at the other. And, as if this were not enough, we are bound to remember that the law which had deprived him of his stipend, had thrown him for support on the voluntary but by no means very regular contributions of his parishioners. So elastic and uncertain was the nature of the endowment, that the value of the benefice generally varied with the popularity of the priest, while no road to popularity was so open and so direct, as a conviction in the minds of the tenants that the landlord was a 'despot,' an unreasonable exacter of money, and that the priest was the ex officio barrier between them and that despot. Accordingly that conviction was made gradually to grow into a creed, which took firm root throughout the land-though of course in very varying degrees, proportionate to the good or bad management of property in the respective districts. It is, however, but just to reflect that it was by no means easy for the Irish priest, who had once assumed the leadership of his locality, to abdicate the post; and, if he did not choose to be absolutely effaced, he was not unfrequently driven to lead a movement of which he was very far from thoroughly approving.

One other point remains to be noticed-and that perhaps the most practically important-as to which the antagonism between landlord and priest could manifest itself. I refer to the burning question' of subdivision of land, which to each party was a matter almost of life or death. The landlord, who saw that the process had already gone fatally far, was bound by every consideration-his own self-preservation, his duty to the tenants themselves-to use the most stringent