$1 
 
Gladstone and Irish Grievances. 
 
 AN ESSAY 
 
 ON THE 
 
 IRISH LAND LAWS, TENURES AND GRIEVANCES; 
 
 THEIR PROPOSED SOLUTION; 
 
 THE GLADSTONE COERCION ACT AND LAND BILL; 
 
 AND 
 
 THE LAND LEAGUE. 
 
 BY 
 
 HENRY A. BRANN, 
 
 OF THE 
 
 few |kffc §»*, 
 
 e **^§i[8t§S!§3S^ 9 
 
 NEW YORK : 
 Bun j. H. Tyrrel, Printer, 74 Maiden Lanh 
 
 1881. 
 

 Entered according to Act of Congress in the year 1881, 
 
 BY HENRY A. BRANN, 
 
 In the office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. D. C. 
 
/ 
 
 
 
 TO 
 
 MY BEST FRIEND AND TUTOR 
 
 lev. §unty % $*amt, §.§., 
 
 A8 A TOKEN OF GRATITUDE AND LOVE 
 
 THI8 PAMPHLET 18 DEDICATED 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 Americans are by nature generous, grateful, consider- 
 ate and tenacious. They love liberty and hate oppression: 
 they are cool and cautious, hence slow to change 
 opinions once formed. Their European knowledge being 
 derived almost exclusively from English authors, who. 
 either from ignorance or prejudice, misrepresent everything 
 anti-English, it is not surprising to find frequently the 
 American mind poisoned against the staunchest friends and 
 the best interests of the Republic. The education and 
 training of the average American youth are such as to ren- 
 der him quick and self-reliant, but he is very rarely cor- 
 rectly informed upon European questions. He studies too 
 many things to be more than ordinarily proficient in any- 
 thing. Nor is this true only of those compelled to earn 
 their livelihood at an early age, but also of many of the 
 members of the learned professions. How many even 
 among the graduates of colleges have read the Penal Code, 
 or know the true history of Ireland ? Yet how often have 
 we heard these very men declaim against the turbulence 
 and ignorance of the Irish I 
 
 How many of them picture Irish gentlemen in the per- 
 sons of their coachmen, or Irish ladies in the persons of 
 their cooks? How many form sweeping opinions of 
 the Irish from reports in the daily press of arrests and 
 convictions among the criminal classes 2 How many look 
 upon the swaggering official occasionally met at the City 
 Hall as the true representative of Irish gentility, or recog- 
 nize in the blatant assemblyman at Albany the true type 
 of Irish culture ? 
 
 Yet it is as unjust to judge the Irish by such persons 
 as it would be to measure the intelligence of Americans by 
 that of the backwoodsman of the North, or that of the 
 emancipated slave of the South. Is it fair to compare the 
 Lettered American with the unlettered Irishman ; the pro- 
 fessional with the layman ; the cultured with the uncul- 
 tured ; the mechanic with the unskilled laborer i 
 
VI 
 
 The Irish, with few exceptions, come to this country to 
 earn their bread by manual labor, not to acquire literary 
 fame or to gain professional distinction. With equal advan- 
 tages, and under similar conditions in life, the Irish will 
 compare favorably even with Americans. 
 
 This brochure has been written with the view of reflect- 
 ing sufficient light upon the Irish Question to induce the 
 inquisitive American, for whose special benefit it is pub- 
 lished, to examine Irish as well as English authorities on 
 the subject, and then draw his own conclusions which, no 
 doubt, will be impartial. 
 
 New York, April 15, 1881. 
 
 HENRY A. BRANN. 
 
Gladstone and Irish Grievances. 
 
 The question of Irish grievances has been agitating the 
 world, but particularly the English speaking portion of it, 
 for many centuries, and it yet remains unsolved. The 
 people of Ireland have been obliged to emigrate to Great 
 Britain and to her colonies, as well as to Continental 
 Europe, and wherevei they go they are to her a cause of 
 anxiety and disturbance. Even into lands not subject to 
 her imperial sway, as the United States, or in countries 
 foreign to her in race, creed and speech, they have carried 
 the story of their wrongs, and transmitted the ever burning 
 tradition of her injustice and persecutions. The gory 
 ghost will not down at her bidding. Neither enormous 
 capital nor a powerful press can smother the irrepressible 
 coniiict of Irish public opinion, aggressive, persistent and 
 ever growing in force in every spot where an Irish colony 
 exists, whether in London or Glasgow, in Australia or 
 Canada, in the United States or in France. Spain or 
 Austria. The bitter hostility of the Irish blood, to the 
 English government is as strong in the McMahons, 
 O'Donnells or Nugenfs, now French, Spanish or Austrian 
 for several geneiations, as in the millions of naturalized 
 Irishmen and their descendants in our own mighty Repub- 
 lic, of whose strength they constitute one of the most im- 
 portant and powerful elements. A marked peculiarity 
 of this Irish public opinion is that English concessions- 
 only make it stronger. Repeatedly has the English 
 government, morally forced into yielding, relaxed the 
 severity of its oppression ; and yet the Irish cry is still for 
 more concessions ; each hard wrung light serving but as 
 another step in the climax of aspiration for race indepen- 
 dence and national liberty. The cry for Home Rule and 
 for the abolition of oppressive laws has been taken up by 
 
8 
 
 the Liberals even of England, and, swelled by the accreti 
 of the public sympathy of impartial thinkers elsewhere, 
 grows lender and stronger with age, as every cause mi 
 which is based on the idea of right and justice. Truth 
 powerful and eventually will prevail. Right may 
 stricken down and lie helpless fora time, but, as the id 
 which sustains it is immortal, it can never be annihilate 
 but like an indestructible germ it will burst into li 
 though wrapped for ages in the cerements of a mummy. 
 At the present time there is no subject more striking 
 
 presented to the American people than the Irish qnestio 
 To some of them it is an offensive question. They are tin 
 of hearing it discussed and often at a loss to understni 
 its meaning ; the meaning of the denunciation by t! 
 organs of Irish public opinion of a government that is ge 
 erally supposed to be the most free in the world, and th 
 has been pluming itself for centuries on its superiority 
 continental despotisms; the meaning of inflammatoi 
 speeches by Irish orators ; of Fenian insurrections, subs 
 dized by the contributions of even the poorest servant gir 
 and laborers ; the meaning of a thing hitherto unknown i 
 Irish history, a partial renunciation of sacerdotal leadershi 
 in political matters by the Irish laity ; and, stranger yet, 
 renunciation in some cases by Irish enthusiasts' of the fait 
 of their fathers, because it seemed to trammel their revi 
 lutionary purposes ; the meaning of the recent Iris 
 famine, and the wild ovations given by Irishmen in ever 
 city of this glorious Republic to a man whose avowed pu 
 pose is to overthrow English supremacy by abrogating tl 
 land laws which give to the British nobility and gentr 
 their prestige and their power, and thus Americanize th 
 whole English system of land tenure and politics. 
 
 There are two causes of grievances, two sources of hoi 
 tility on the part of the Irish against their English cor 
 qnerors, the one religious, the other political. Th 
 element of race, technically so called, has little t 
 do with the difficulty ; for, as the blending of Brittons 
 Romans, Saxons and Normans has destroyed the origins 
 Anglo-Saxon breed, so has the blending of Danes, No] 
 mans and English with the Irish Celts changed their norms 
 condition. There is, it is true, an Irish national type, a 
 
9 
 
 there is an English national type, bat there is neither a 
 pare Celtic nor a pare Anglo-Saxon race in existence. 
 
 Although the religions element of discoid between the 
 two nations is not so old as the political one, it may be well 
 to say a word aboul it first, as it is gradually losing its im- 
 portancein the straggle. Since Catholic Emancipation in 
 1829, a spirit of religions liberty has spread throughout 
 the British Empire. 
 
 The attacks made upon the Anglican Church by 
 infidelity and the independent sects, has made her 
 more desirous of forming an alliance with the old con- 
 servative Church which is now rising into power, and 
 developing into numerical strength in every town and 
 city of Great Britain, from the Highlands of Scotland to 
 Land"-. End. The Anglicane want a truce with the Catholic 
 Church even though they may not love her. 
 
 The removal of penal disabilities from the Catholics of 
 [reland, and especially the recent Disestablishment has 
 made them comparatively content on the score of religion. 
 Of course there are still many annoyances to which Catho- 
 lics are subject; the spirit of the penal laws survives 
 their death ; but there is a general dying out of the old 
 spirit of bigotry which butchered Catholic women and 
 children at Drogheda, and Wexford, under Cromwell; 
 bigotry nurtured by the butcheries of Coote in Wicklow 
 and Meath. These massacres of Irish " papists" and 
 countless others, done with the full sanction of the English 
 Parliament, must naturally still foster a feeling of bitter- 
 ness in the minds of the Catholic Irish. Nor has the mem- 
 ory of the penal laws been yet effaced. By those laws no 
 Catholic could settle a jointure on his Catholic wife, or 
 charge his land with any provision for his daughters ; or 
 make a will disposing of bislanded property. If the wife of 
 a Catholic declared herself a Protestant, she could force her 
 husband to give her a separate maintenance and to transfer 
 CO her the guardianship of all their children, thus creat- 
 ing discord in the family. If the eldest son of a Catholic 
 father, however young, declared himself a Protestant, he 
 thereby made his father strict tenant for life, depriving 
 him of all right to sell or dispose of his estate, and such 
 son became entitled to the absolute domain and ownership 
 
10 
 
 of the estate. If any other child than the eldest became a 
 Protestant, that child became free of parental control, and 
 the father was compelled to support the rebel. ^ 
 
 Thus did the law not only sanction bat encouraged dis- 
 obedience to the commandment of God, k ' Honor thy father 
 and thy mother." Any Protestant could take away the 
 land bought by a Catholic and pay him nothing for it. 
 Thus the Catholic lost both his money and his land. No 
 Catholic could inherit land from any relative. Any 
 Protestant could take by law such land from its Catholic 
 owner. If a Catholic leased a farm of land for a term not ex- 
 ceeding thirty-oneyearsan I by his labor and industry so im- 
 proved it as to make it yield a profit:, not exceeding one-third 
 of the rental, any Protestant might then by law evict him 
 and enjoy for the residue of the term the fruits of the labor 
 and industry of the C itholic. Thus was there a penalty put 
 upon the labor and industry of the Catholic. If a Catholic 
 had a horse worth more than five pounds, any Protestant 
 could take it by offering this amount, although the horse 
 might be worth one hundred pounds. Any Catholic conceal- 
 ing such horse from a Protestant was liable to three months' 
 imprisonment and a line of three times the value of the 
 horse. These were the chief penal laws against Catholics 
 holding property. k The laws against Catholic education 
 were still worse. If a Catholic kept a school or taught 
 any person, Protestant or Catholic, any species of liter- 
 ature or science, he was punishable by banishment, and if 
 he returned fiom banishment he was liable to be hanged 
 as a felon. A Catholic child attending a Catholic school in 
 Ireland, forfeited all his property, present or future. The 
 same punishment was inflicted on a Catholic child that 
 went abroad to be educated in a Catholic college. Any 
 Irishman paying for the education of a child in a 
 foreign Catholic college,' forfeited all his property. A 
 Catholic could not be an officer in the army or navy ; he 
 could not be even a private soldier. He could hold no 
 office in the state of any description. He could not be a 
 judge, grand juror, sheriff, barrister, solicitor, attorney, 
 agent or even a gamekeeper. 
 
 In some Irish towns Catholics were not permitted to 
 dwell. They were politically like the negro slaves in the 
 
11 
 
 South before the war. They had no rights which a 
 Protestant was bound to respect. The penal laws against 
 the clergy were simply brutal. To teach the Catholic 
 religoQ was a felony punishable by transportation. To 
 convert a Protestant was a capital offense, punishable as 
 treason. Monks or friars were banished, and if they 
 returned they were adjudged guilty of high treason and 
 hanged. Bishops or abbots were transported, and if they 
 returned they were hanged, disemboweled and quartered. 
 Large rewards were offered for the apprehension of Catho- 
 lic schoolmasters and priests, so that the '.'knife" which 
 Curran says is the proper symbol of the informer's pro- 
 fession became the idol of the "priest-hunter." The 
 celebrated Edmund Burke, an Irish Protestant, speaking 
 of the system of penal laws says : "It had a vicious per- 
 fection; it was a complete system, full of coherence and 
 consistency, well di jested and well disposed in all its parts. 
 It was a machine of wise and elaborate contrivance, and 
 as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment, and 
 degradation of the people and the debasement in them of 
 human nature itself as ever proceeded from the perverted 
 ingenuity of man." It is not so long since those laws have 
 been abolished that the Irish Catholics should have for- 
 gotten them. The child does not forget in the afternoon the 
 lashing of the morning. Still the spirit of Christian charity 
 and the love of national liberty are gradually effacing the 
 vestiges of those infamous laws which must have been 
 "framed by devils and hatched in hell." In religious 
 matters England has become liberal, and we can agree 
 with Cardinal Manning, that Catholics are to-day better 
 treated in his Protestant country, than in many of the so 
 called Catholic nations of Europe. Irish grievances on 
 the score of religion may be considered virtually settled. 
 A peaceful revolution, prompted by the interest and good 
 sense of the English people may solve the political griev- 
 ances of Ireland before the end of the present century. 
 If not, they will eventually be solved by a bloody conflict. 
 The religious grievances of Ireland began with the Re- 
 formation ; her political grievances began at an earlier date, 
 they commenced with the Norman invasion and English de- 
 mi'iion in Ireland, about the middle of the twelfth century. 
 
12 
 
 The two grievances were BOmetimes united, as during 
 the days of the penal laws, but the political troubles pre 
 existed ami have Burvived the religious. While the 
 religious grievances existed, the Irish, always ardently 
 attaohed to their religion, sometimes sacrificed their politi. 
 oal interest to their religious Peeling. This is especially 
 true in iho case of their defenoe of the English King .lames 
 11. They shed their blood tor him although he cared ven 
 little for them and manifested no appreciation of their 
 Loyalty and fidelity, He was an ungrateful, weak, coward- 
 ly man. far inferior in every respeol to William of Orange, 
 The Irish made the blunder of fighting for a despol and 
 were severely punished foril by his political competitor. 
 Neither Charles 1 nor James 11 deserved the sympathy or 
 support of the Irish nation. These kings were foreigners, 
 and appreciated the Irish only bo far as ii subserved their 
 own selfish interests. Thej paid taxes and filled the royal 
 coffers ; they were good Boldiers and fought the royal 
 battles. The invading Normans, although nominally 
 Catholics, treated the Irish with extreme cruelty. Their 
 attempt to subjugate the island, however, was never fully 
 successful. For several centuries a small portion of the 
 Eastern province of Leinster, called the "rale/* was 
 the only part of Ireland that acknowledged the English 
 power. War raged between the English colony and the 
 Irish from A. D, 1178, for about five hundred years, eon 
 tinuing through the reign of Elizabeth, who made des- 
 perate efforts to subdue the Irish, until the reign of 
 James 1, when, if not conquered, they were at least 
 for a time kept silent. During these centuries of struggle, 
 massacre and confiscation marked the advance of the 
 invading power. 'The Norman, always cruel, seems to 
 have outdone his ordinary barbarity while endeavoring to 
 subdue the Irish, The} were denominated " Irish enemies " 
 in all the royal proclamations, royal charters and acts 
 of parliament. The English were prohibited from inter 
 marrying with them, as the Irish wives succeeded in de 
 nationalizing their English, husbands and making them 
 ••more Irish than the Irish themselves," and what is still 
 stranger, the English were forbidden to sell wares or goods 
 of any kind to them. To murder an Irishman was no crime 
 
for an English coloniHt; unlesH th« Irishman happened to 
 have made submission and had been received into English 
 allegiance, and even in thie ca ie ait murder was punishable 
 only by fine. U is nor to be supposed that the Irish 
 remained patient during those ages of war, They retaliated 
 h all their native rindictiveness, and who could blame 
 tnemJ and many an English garrison and marauding party 
 fell rictims to the fierce valor of the Irish chief tains The 
 early confiscations of Irish property for the benefit of Nor 
 man adventurers were surpassed by the subsequent ones 
 During the reign of James [, in the early part, of the seven 
 teenth century, the entire province of 01 >ter was taken away 
 from its native owners, who were all either banged, 
 raghtered or driven into the Western bogs and mountains. 
 Their place weie filled with Scotch adventurers who 
 had embraced Prote tantism, and petted and fostered 
 a the ehave ever been by the parent government ; indti itrj 
 and commerce of various kinds encouraged among them, Ks 
 ii any wonder thai they should have succeeded where the 
 hunted and persecuted Irish p< have failed? Is it, j. 
 
 in new of the different treatment given by the government 
 to the native Irish, and the important " Ulster Plantation'' 
 to attribute the commercial superiority of the latter to innate 
 thrift or natural industry? The veriest drones would have 
 thriven and prospered nnder such encouragemenl as James, 
 a Scotchman himself , gave to bis Scotch countrymen settled 
 in Ireland. In the reign of Charles the [, the crown cordis 
 cated the estates of the Irish in three provinces to the amount 
 of over one million acres of land, ye( the J 
 committing a fault, similar to that which they afterwards 
 repeated in defending the rights of Jame II, againsl William 
 of Orange, took np arms for Charles, and igh 
 
 L .Monro*-. Tichboume, Triton. ' om 
 
 At the end of this I omwell transported eighty 
 
 thousand [rish to the West indies to be sold 
 .Ian.' ■'•oiid. although a Catholic, took eighty thousand 
 
 acres of the land confiscated by his father, yet the [rish foi 
 gave him and foolishly med their blood for him afterwards 
 at the battle of the Boyne. The Irish army, thirty thousand 
 strong, capitulated lo William of Orangeat Limerick. The 
 treaty of Limerick, guaranteed to the [rish the free and 
 
 
14 
 
 unfettered exercise of their religion, but it was broken M ere 
 the ink wherewith 'twas writ could dry." The Irish conic 
 expect little better from William, a foreigner, whom the En- 
 glish had called to be their king. The penal laws followec 
 and remained 'more or less in force until Catholic Eman- 
 cipation became an accomplished fact, in 1829. Since 
 that time the chief Irish grievances have been of a 
 political character. The Irish complain that the English 
 Government discourages commerce and puts a penalty 
 on the industry ol the people. They point to the harbors ol 
 Cork, Limerick, Kingstown, Gal way and Waterford, and 
 the many seaports on the insular coast, and ask the English 
 Government why it has done nothing for Irish commerce 
 The answer is that the English merchants do not wish the 
 trade to be diverted from Liverpool, Plymouth, and the other 
 English seaports. There are mines of copper in Wicklow, 
 Waterford, Cork and Tipperary ; gold in Wicklow, and lead, 
 tin, zinc, marble and salt beds in various parts of tlie island. 
 Why does not the English Government encourage the work- 
 ing of these industries? Because they would interfere with 
 the mines of Cornwall or Wales. Rivers and lakes abound 
 in the island ; yet the laws prevent the people from catching 
 the fish in them. The laws prevent the peasants from fishing 
 in the waters that are owned by feudal lords living in baro- 
 nial splendor, while the poor serfs are dying of starvation in 
 the hovels within sight of the leaping trout and salmon. 
 
 The serf dares not shoot a bird, or spear a salmon, or 
 catch a hare for himself and his famishing children. The 
 law forbids it, and forbids him further to own a gun or a 
 pistol, or a pike or a spear. The birds may fly in the air 
 the fish may leap in the brook, destined by nature's God for 
 the sustenance of the poor, yet the law, the iniquitous law, 
 will condemn to penal servitude the starving Irishman who 
 dares to assert his right to them by force. Yet the 
 Irish are not by nature a patient people. Religion holds 
 them in check. 
 
 As there are neither factories nor commerce in Ireland, 
 owing to the selfish policy of the English Government, the 
 peasantry are obliged to depend chiefly on the land for their 
 support. When the land fails them they have nothing. 
 The English or Scotch farmer can go to Glasgow or Liver- 
 
15 
 
 pool, or Manchest- 9 -Id. if the paternal acres be 
 
 foand too small to rapport him. and find in the many 
 chann-ls of commerce the me: pport. A few hoars' 
 
 in the railway cars brings him from the home of penary 
 into comparative pie S : so the poor Irisman : he does 
 
 not understand commerce, for the:- - : r him to learn 
 
 in Ireland. He mist le~. mtry ail _■ 
 
 foreign part?, and there m- for Wa 
 
 country and his creed. He therefore depends on the land 
 sLj for sapper: : and th- chief Irish n-ierance at the 
 present time is the land question. The Irish peasant has 
 reason to believe that when Sr. Patrick he snakes and 
 
 toads from the land, they took possession of the cruel land- 
 lords, and still live in them. He looks around him and sees 
 that nearly all the land now ownel by the landlords, was 
 confiscated p-rhaps only a hundre a . and that 
 
 some of it was then owned by his own an Traditions 
 
 are always vivid in a pastoral or an agricultural commu- 
 nity. I natural that doubts at validity of the 
 present ow - - .onld cros3 his mind, especially if he 
 knows that prescription, occupancy or possession, can n- 
 remove the cloud from a title acqnired by ^nd fir. 
 He is a tenant to the grandson of some William:- . in- 
 well ian soldier : a tenant at will, liable - evicted on 
 shor: notice, with a helpless family to provide for. 
 
 He is but a tenant ; he can never be an owner. The law 
 
 ents him from ever owning an inch of I I which he 
 
 tills, and which K _ re him tilled: of the 
 
 spot in which he was born, and in which his ancestors for 
 generations may have been born. For it is well to remember 
 that although mere tenants at will, still Irish cottiers have 
 lived for a century in the same place, owing to the good will 
 of the landlords. Certain families, slaves in the South, w 
 son Ad when the planters 1 
 
 of a benevolent race, and the: sorb. But the 
 
 danger and fear of sale, like the terror of e n for an 
 
 i peasant family, always hung like the sword of 
 Damocles over their head. The peasant not only can t 
 become an owner, but there is a penalty for his industry. 
 1 him cultivate the acres too welt let the hedges bloom 
 in beauty, instead of remaining dilapidated ; let him dress 
 
16 
 
 well, or dare to dress his children well, or assume the ap 
 pearance of comfort at his peril. If he do, his rent will b< 
 increased by a landlord who lives in Paris or London, an( 
 manages his estates in Ireland through some unprinciplec 
 "squireen"' of the " Corry Kinchella" stamp. He pays ren 
 from the sale of the crops ; sells a pig, or a calf, or a foa 
 once or twice a year at a neighboring fair, and thus tries t< 
 eke out a miserable existence from year to year, his famili 
 ever increasing, for the Irish peasant is not a believer in tin 
 theology of Malthus. Now if the season is bad, or if th< 
 crops fail, what becomes of the poor peasant ? He starve* 
 and dies, as he died from 1847 to 1851, and as he died during 
 the recent famine ; dies by the operation of English lawi 
 cruelly kept in existence by the English Parliament througr. 
 the influence and selfishness of landlords and capitalists. 
 
 If he were an infidel he would assassinate his landlord 
 or join a secret society for murdering capitalists like th( 
 Carbonari, of Southern Italy, or the Nihilists of Russia 
 Being a Catholic, obedient to his Church, he is patient anc 
 suffers, to use his own familiar phrase, "his purgatory in this 
 world." Is it a wonder, in view of such a state of affairs 
 that the Irish peasant sometimes in his great trials loses his 
 patience, loses it when he sees his wife and babe evicted and 
 dying of hunger in the ditch ; refuses to hear the voice o1 
 his priest, and plots the murder of the heartless landlord \ 
 Is it a wonder in view of such a state of oppression, thai 
 there should have been an Irish rebellion in 1798, and anothei 
 in 1848, and that generous Protestants laying aside theii 
 religious feelings should have been its leaders, for Emmett. 
 Wolf Tone, Smith O'Brien, and John Mitchell, were all Pro- 
 testants ? 
 
 Do we wonder more at Fenian insurrections, and the hatred 
 of the Irish for the English Government ? For mark there is 
 a little more than twenty millions of acres of land in Ireland. 
 "One-third of this land is owned by two hundred and ninety- 
 two persons. One-half by seven hundred and forty-foui 
 persons. Twelve men in Ireland own one hundred and eighty 
 thousand acres of land each, while about three millions of the 
 people are tenants at will, that is, they can practically nevei 
 own an inch of Irish soil so long as the present laws regarding 
 land tenure exist, and are completely at the mercy of theii 
 
17 
 
 landlords. These three millions live from hand to mouth."* 
 Their food is of the poorest quality ; their clothing of the 
 coarsest. There are thousands of Irishmen who seldom or ever 
 eat a morsel of roast beef, beefsteak or mutton, during their 
 natural lives. Oat meal and potatoes are the diet of the 
 Irish small farmer and laborer, very rarely a bit of bacon 
 with his greens on Sunday, but rarely, if ever, fresh meat of 
 any description. He may buy a herring for a half-penny; 
 but the good salmon and trout must go to the table of the 
 landlord. It must sound strangely in American ears to learn 
 that many of the able-bodied Irishmen, aged twenty-five and 
 thirty, who daily land upon our shores, have never tasted 
 fresh meat in their own country, yet the ancestors of these 
 very men who are thus starving, were the rightful owners of 
 the three millions of acres confiscated by James I, in Ulster ; 
 of the eight millions of acres confiscated by Cromwell, 
 and of the million acres confiscated by William of 
 Orange. They know this and they feel it just as keenly in 
 this country as they did in Ireland. 
 
 There is no chance for an Irish peasant farmer ever to own 
 the land which he tills. The feudal law of primogeniture, 
 unjustly gives all the land of the father to the eldest son, 
 and treats the younger sons as if they were illegitimate ; and 
 mediaeval laws of entail, which in some cases deprive the 
 female children of all rights to their father's landed pro- 
 perty, serve to keep up the land monopolies and to increase 
 rather than diminish the power and wealth of the landlords, 
 almost half of whom are absentees, never live in Ireland, but 
 spend in living in luxury and licentiousness abroad the 
 money wrung from the poor Irish serfs. Some ten years ago 
 an attempt was made to modify the land monopoly despotism 
 of Ireland by the passage of what is known as " The Encum- 
 bered Estates Court Act." By this act the law of entail was 
 abolished in regard to estates that had become embarrassed 
 by mortgages or other encumbrances. Formerly such estates 
 could be thrown into Chancery and held by the creditor un- 
 til his debts were paid. They then reverted back to the 
 original owners. But they could not be sold. Now they 
 can be sold, but the tenants cannot buy them, for they are 
 
 *John Bright, Birmingham Speech. 
 
18 
 
 not sold in small parcels but as a whole, and are generally 
 bought up by large corporations composed of English and 
 Scotch speculators, so that the law intended to benefit only 
 injures the tenantry, for their new landlords are, if possible, 
 more exacting and heartless than their old ones. 
 
 The tenants cannot buy their homesteads even if they 
 have the money, for they cannot compete with London and 
 Glasgow capitalists. If the land were sold in small parcels 
 the tenants could purchase, for foreign corporations or spec- 
 ulators would not take the trouble to buy small pieces of 
 land, as the investment would be too insignificant. " The 
 Encumbered Estates Court Act " has therefore proved an 
 absolute failure ; after a fair trial it has not accomplished 
 the object for which it was passed, nor does it in any way 
 relieve the necessities or supply the wants of the people. 
 
 Mr. Gladstone, in a speech delivered at the opening of 
 Parliament in January, 1881, said: " We are obliged, by 
 the evidence, to admit that the 2)rovis ions of the act (o/*1870) 
 have 7iot prevented undue and frequent augmentations of 
 rent tohich were not justified by the real value of the hold- 
 ing, but have been brought in in consequence of the superior 
 strength of the position of the landlords." 
 
 In Ireland there is no real estate market as in this coun- 
 try ; nor, owing to the law of entail and primogeni- 
 ture, which regulate the descent, and transmission 
 of property, can real estate there be said to be at all 
 in commerce. While the American, Frenchman, Belgian 
 or Prussian can own his own house and lot, sell it to 
 whom he pleases, buy another if he has the money, the 
 Irish peasant is, properly speaking, houseless. No wonder 
 the hovels of these poor people should be wretched, and not 
 fit for cattle to live in, why should the peasants embellish 
 them 1 They are not theirs, they belong to the landlords, 
 " and the landlords must be a degraded set of human 
 beings, to leave such evidence of human misery erect on 
 their estates ; and force their tenants to live with pigs and 
 cows "* Nor is it fair to charge these peasants with lack of 
 thrift, and contrast them with the Scotch. We in the United 
 States know that the Irish are thrifty. Their thrift and 
 
 *Fannie Parnell's Irish Hovels. 
 
19 
 
 industry have been proven beyond question in Canada arid 
 Australia, as well as here. They save their money, educate 
 their children, buy farms, become successful merchants and 
 agriculturalists, distinguished physicians, authors, actors, 
 lawyers, and statesmen, whenever and wherever they get a 
 fair opportunity. 
 
 In Ireland industry is punished by higher rents, and 
 thrift is rewarded by eviction ; and this state of affairs has 
 lasted for centuries. It is a great mistake to suppose that 
 the Scotch are naturally more industrious than the Irish. It 
 is true that the " Plantation of Ulster" flourished under the 
 fostering care of James I. The same royal Scotchman 
 favored his own country when he became King of England. 
 Scotland gained by the union of the crowns. 
 
 She was not conquered by invasion like Ireland. 
 It was she that annexed England, and put her 
 James VI on the English throne ; she kept her own 
 laws, her own Church supported by the State, and 
 obtained all the commercial favors she desired from 
 England after the union in the reign of Queen Anne. Ireland 
 invaded, persecuted, crushed, her national religion outlawed, 
 her lands confiscated for the benefit of her enemies, and her 
 national life almost extinguished, how can she be compared 
 with ever-favored Scotland ? Yet such is the vitality of the 
 Irish people that, although scarcely fifty years have elapsed 
 since Catholic Emancipation, and after centuries of despotic 
 cruelty sufficient to have stamped out of existence every 
 spark of manhood and independence in an ordinary people, 
 she is now rising into great power despite the recent famine. 
 She counts her sons as twenty-five millions, scattered in every 
 part of the earth. 
 
 In Cromwell's time they were not more than a million. 
 Their political power is felt in the very largest centres of 
 English wealth ; and they actually rule her colonies. But a 
 few years ago, one of her exiled sons, Charles Gavan Duffy, 
 governed Australia, while D' Arcy McGee controlled Canada, 
 and both were Irish rebels of 1848. To-day her band of 
 resolute obstructionists is feared in the Imperial Parliament 
 which has hitherto sneered at the mere mention of Irish 
 political grievances. In fact a new era has dawned for the 
 Irish peoj)le, and they may soon add to the glory of being 
 
80 
 
 the only raoe who supporl Christianity on the voluntary 
 principle, thai of reforming the British Constitution, destroy 
 ing its superannuated feudalism, and Americanizing illiberal 
 
 law s. 
 
 How shall this be donel How shall an end be pm to 
 Irish grievances 1 Will ii be by a peaceful revolution, bi 
 constitutional measures, dictated by the good senseand fair 
 lw^s o( the English Parliament, or will it be by a civil war! 
 There are many answers to these questions. There isa class 
 of [rishmen who believes in dynamite and the dagger ; who 
 consider any means justifiable to gel rid of [rish landlords 
 and English oppression. They would have in [reland, if 
 they could, a Sicilian vespers, or a St, Bartholomew's day, 
 and it' possible would induce the tenant fanners, armed with 
 daggers, to take every man his landlord and end the des 
 potism b\ a genera] assassination. 
 
 The English iio\ eminent should mark well the increase in 
 the numbers o( [rishmen who, despite of priest and law, ate 
 strong believers in this horrible remedy tor the woes o( their 
 country. The late Earl of Leitrim, a powerful landlord, was 
 assassinated, and the government, although offering a Large 
 ie\\ aid. has nol yet been able to find the assassin. 
 
 It is sad to see Irishmen become Nihilists or Carbonari. 
 The Fenians, who have so frequently been heard of during 
 the last twent) years, although nol supporters of the assas 
 
 sination remedy, yet do believe in the sword, in civil war 
 and insurrection. 
 
 They have attempted rebellion ; have broken out in insur- 
 rection, and s.nno of rhem have paid for their so called trea- 
 son the penalty o( transportation. Theydeny the legal right 
 of England to [reland, and claim that if she ever did have a 
 Legitimate title to the sovereignty of Ireland, she has lost it 
 through neglect and cruelty. They say that the child is not 
 bound to honor the cruel parent or to obey him ; the wife 
 may Leave her husband's bod and board on account ol bad 
 treatment ; why should a whole people be bound by 
 stricter ties of loyal obedience to a despotic government 
 than wife or child 1 When the English Government 
 neglects the people of Ireland and allows them to starve, 
 the obligation of loyalty ceases. They say that the urea t 
 theologian St. Thomas, justifies rebellion under certain eir- 
 
21 
 
 Cumstances, and quote the following from his "8nmm$ 
 Theologia" as proof: " Laws are nnjnst in two ways, first, 
 when they are opposed to the common weal,' 5 as are the 
 In-., vhich caused the famines in [reland, jecond, "when 
 they are onerous, and imposed by a government not for the 
 good of the common jreal, bul for the sake of self-interest or 
 ambition ; or on account of their authors not being rested 
 with proper facul tie • tin they may be anjusl in form, 
 hen the taxes are nnequally divided among the multi- 
 tude . although in other respects tending to the public good." 
 
 ch laws are rather outrages than laws; since St. Aug 
 tine says: "An unjust, law i- nol binding." They willeven 
 Cite from Balmes and Swarez to justify insurrec- 
 
 tion against English misrule in Ireland. Now there are 
 many who, although deeply attached to the conservative 
 teachings of the Catholic Church in the matters of civic 
 obedience to the p< thai be, believe with the Fenians, 
 
 thai the English Government ha- no right of conquest in [re 
 land, or that if she ever had, she has forfeited it by \i<-v ill 
 treatment of the [rish people. Th the relations 
 
 between governed and governing are4M6sMm&; the contract 
 mnsl be kept on both and England I mefully 
 
 broken it, if it ever existed al all. so far as the consent of 
 the irish is concerned. It is said thai if you scratch a R 
 sian you will finda Cossack, and it, will be found generally 
 true, that if you scratch an irishman you will find a Fenian, 
 in theory at leasl The Peniai al i claim thai nothing 
 has ever been, or ever .'.ill be granted to [reland 
 by England, excepl from fear ol the sword, and 
 that agitation an to nothing. Th eloquence 
 
 of Gfrattan, they say, failed utterly to obtain the indepen- 
 
 ce of the [rish Parliament; hut th'.- volunteers of 11 
 presented an argument in favor of the measure which the 
 English Government did not dare to dispute. Jt is true that 
 agitation in th not prolific of good results. 
 
 tesmen then never dreamed of settling national disputes 
 in any other way than by force. 
 
 The mei 3tion of shaming a g ivernmenl into grant- 
 
 ing relief to the oppressed would have been ridiculed, and 
 the idea of forcing a government by threats or warnings to 
 repeal orreform nnjnst and oppressive laws would have been 
 
laughed at as Chatham was when he exclaimed in the V.n 
 glish Parliament, " Do justice to America, do it to night, do 
 it before you si* Bui they forget thai O'Conneli wrung 
 
 Catholio Emancipation from an English Parliament by 
 
 ition, by constitutional means, under the most extraor- 
 dinary difficulti^a For the Irish Catholics, without influ- 
 ence, education, wealth or prestige, were the 011I3 persona 
 j interested in the measure, and the support given tc 
 it l\\ mis w.is accorded only by t ho liberal few, the 
 
 man) being either openlj opposed to it or passively indiiVor 
 out. He was struggling for the Catholics, not for the whole 
 
 rte, at least this seems to have been the view entertained 
 by the great majority of Prot smnts. The Fenians may say 
 that O'Connell was one of the greatest geniuses of tit 
 tury ; for ho not only removed from his countrymen theii 
 religious disabilities, but created for himself the title oi 
 M Liberator," and that, although dead more than 1 
 third of a century, it has never since been even claimed 
 bj an\ man. Phoy may say that there has been but 
 one Daniel O'Connell, and we will not dispute t ho 
 fact ; but lot us remind them that things have changed a^ 
 much for the better, between O'Conneirs day and ours, a; 
 they did between Grattan's day and O'Connell's; that tin 
 
 smanshipof "iron and blood" is not now considered the 
 highest order of statesmanship, but rather the lowest ; thai 
 the sword was thou mightier than the pen, while the reverse 
 is ;ho fact u.m\ ; thai this is the progress; thai odu 
 
 cation is now more general, civiliiation more perfect, and 
 men more enlightened, free and independent. Who doubts 
 for a moment thai had Walter Scott, the prince of novelists, 
 who died as late as 1832, lived to our day, he would laugh at 
 the idea of - ; a man who proposed lightii 
 
 streets >ndon with gas, a dangerous person to be loft at 
 
 liberty 5Tel in his day he entertained this opinion, ab 
 surd and silly as it seems to us. while contemplating tin 
 superior beauty and brilliancy of the electric light. 
 When the electors of Clare son: O'Connell to represent 
 thorn in the English Parliament, the intelligence did 
 not reach thes - v . nearly three weeks 
 
 a Longer time than it took Mr. Parnell to sail from Now 
 s . v j stown; make his canvass >al thes 
 
'■ 
 
 <••.( man in I ne ' ■ ' !ork 5 and re< 
 
 from his admiring frie i : on of 
 
 There are now thirty-nine Irish memb i the Engli 
 
 i'. i liament ror of Home R nd 
 
 millions of li isbmeti ding them with I 
 
 their mon< I theii el Pj i 
 
 from revolution at present. If U the . in 
 
 able only when all other remedu 
 
 rid of their grievan itional 
 
 means i I tl f .ii<;r methods, if theymosl There 
 
 Oi age ;«n'l the 
 Green : i>mIi pennanl i now flo;if, from the same flagstaff 01 
 a united people for the first time in If 
 
 I mnell did rr.'icli ander the rm> 
 
 ' nell and 
 .ill do more nnder circun 
 cioni 'I he union of Pi I 
 
 omen and a tot the nltii ' 
 
 which ■ ■! feeling tfc 
 
 ha re al ed\ 
 
 1 
 jealo 1 much 
 
 of the clan and too little of the ni rit in Ireland. 
 
 Bui thi >f a (tail 
 
 through f.b<; influence of the presenl ' z of the 
 
 .'I. 
 
 from the pre ' nt ; for altln 
 
 become liberal of !af<- 'till unjn 
 
 cruel • [rish. 
 
 iff -A on the b 
 of t: pitable 
 
 still ringing in on; 
 
 hhri'-k of anguish that came from thefamishinj to rend 
 
 our 1 in 
 
 >red in e ion in E 
 
 in Naple andei King B ; in the P 
 
 in our :. in behalf of 
 
 ' led "li 
 
 other people, n 
 the civiliz I of allowing millions of il own 
 
24 
 
 subjects, within sight of its wealthy coast, to starve. Eng- 
 land looked on in apathy. The Queen contributed one day's 
 salary to the famine relief fund ; the Prince of Wales gave 
 one thousand dollars; ihe rest of the royal family gave 
 nothing; the English nobility and English people little or 
 nothing ; while America and France poured in their dona- 
 tions with generous hands. One American gentleman, 
 whose generosity should be remembered with everlasting 
 gratitude, gave one hundred thousand dollars, and collected 
 nearly three times that amount to " clothe the naked and 
 feed the hungry." 
 
 The cruel and parsimonious conduct of England has in- 
 tensified Irish hate ; it has reawakened the memory of the 
 penal laws and of confiscations ; it has sharpened the pike 
 and polished the gun of the revolutionist ; it has rekindled 
 the insurrectionary spirit of Fenianism ; it has increased 
 the dynamite fund ; it has driven many of the most conser- 
 vative into expressions of sedition<t~!i it has cemented 
 the bonds of Irish fraternity in every land where the scat- 
 tered people of Ireland are to be found ; it has made the 
 hearts of the second generation of Irishmen here throb with 
 indignation — and a muttered curse upon the oppressive gov- 
 ernment is the voice of twenty -five millions of the offspring 
 of Erin. 
 
 The leader of the present land reform movement in Ire- 
 land, which has aroused the attention of the civilized world, 
 is Mr. Parnell, but should he be convicted and imprisoned, 
 or even die to-morrow, the idea he rejDresents will live, and 
 Ireland will command another of her sons to take up the Un- 
 stained Banner and advance the cause of her persecuted, 
 starving tenantry. 
 
 Men are mortal, ideas are eternal. Should Mr. Parnell 
 fail, another will succeed, and if not by his methods by 
 other means. His are not only the most feasible, but 
 the only methods upon which the great majority of 
 Irishmen will unite at the present time ; let the Irish then 
 test ere they reject or condemn them ; they have been divi- 
 ded too long. The cause he champions has enemies it is 
 true, but so had Emancipation ; it has doubting friends, but 
 so had the Disestablishment. All doubts may be cleared 
 away ; all enemies may be silenced by the grandeur of the 
 
25 
 
 iatesfc political triumph, and Mr. Parnell or some other dis- 
 tinguished Irishman may be called jn the near future to the 
 title left by O'Connell for a worthy successor. 
 
 Whnt does Mr. Parnell seek for the Irish tenants that he 
 should be called a communist f He seeks to abolish the 
 laws of entail and primogeniture, which prevent real prop- 
 erty from being divided up ; to establish lixity of tenure ; to 
 give the tenants the right to purchase land and the privilege 
 to live, and to curtail the powers of the landlords. All of 
 these things have, been done by countries at whose civiliza- 
 tion England sneers. 
 
 The greatest men in England say most of them ought 
 to be done in Ireland. Mr. Gladstone, in his Midlothean 
 speech, said : "' The tenants chiefly effect the improvements 
 in that country (Ireland), and they must be secured in these 
 and their other rights, which are still often threatened or 
 confiscated by the landlords" Mr. Bright said to the elec- 
 tors of Birmingham : " The powers o^ the landlords to evict 
 and to raise the rent reduces to a minimum, security of ten- 
 ure and incentive to industry : they must therefore be cur- 
 tailed or abolished" Are Grladstone and Bright com- 
 munists ? 
 
 But say the landlords, legislative bodies have no right to 
 interfere with freedom of contract. In the sixteenth century, 
 Spencer, speaking of the unsettled character of the Irish 
 peasantry, says : " This inconvenience may be reason enough 
 to ground an ordinance for the good of the commonwealth 
 •against the private behoof or will of any landlord that shall 
 refuse to grant any such term or estate unto his tenant as 
 may tend to the good of the whole realm." It would hardly 
 be considered a compliment to England to say that she was 
 farther advanced in civilization in the sixteenth century than 
 she is in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Mr. 
 Gladstone, on the 27th of November, 1879, in an address at 
 West Calder said : " The legislature are perfectly entitled to 
 buy up the landed proprietors for the purpose of dividing 
 the country into small lots." This is just what the Land 
 League wants them to do. " In principle," he says, "no 
 objection can be taken to it. I freely own that compulsory 
 expropriation is a thing which is admissible, and even sound 
 in principle." In theory, Mr. Gladstone is as good a Land 
 
26 
 
 Leaguer as Mr. Parnell, for he admits the soundness of 
 the principle for the triumph of* which Mr. Parnell is 
 struggling. 
 
 In 1822, J. W. Croker, Chairman of a Parliamentary 
 Committee, described Ireland as consisting of landlords with- 
 out friends or influence : peasants without an interest, al- 
 most without a livelihood in the country ; nothing to de- 
 fend ; nothing to love ; desperate and despairing; ripe and 
 ready for a change. 
 
 " In Ireland,'' he says, " tenure at will is indefinite op- 
 pression ; (enure by lease oppression by lease; rents are 
 not the proportion but nearly (lie whole produce.'''' It need 
 hardly be said that the state of affairs in Ireland to-day is 
 precisely what it was in 1822. Sydney C. Buxton says: 
 " There can be no real freedom of contract between land- 
 lord and tenant in Ireland, and therefore the State can and 
 should interfere in the relations between them.''''* 
 
 J. A. Farrer, says : "By what principle can we say that 
 tenants bargaining collectively with their landlords, are not 
 as much within their rights as a landlord bargaining singly 
 with his tenants? Freedom of contract therefore, if it justi- 
 fies anything, justifies the principles of the 'Land League,' 
 for those very principles are its logical and legitimate con- 
 sequence?' "f Yet the English Government seeks to coerce 
 the Land League. 
 
 Now let us, see if there are any instances in which legis- 
 lative bodies have interfered in favor of the tenantry of a 
 country. In 1793 the provisions of the Permanent Settle- 
 ment of India protected the tenant farmers against exactions 
 of the landlords, by decreeing that whoever held land as a 
 tenant for twelve years preceding, at a uniform rent, was 
 entitled to hold it forever at that rent. 
 
 By the provisions of the Bengal Recovery of Rents Act, 
 passed 1859, " to prevent illegal exactions and extortions" 
 in connection with demands for rent, the rights of the ten- 
 ants were reassured, and '"if the land had diminished in extent 
 from any cause or the value of its produce or productive power 
 had decreased from any cause extraneous to the tenant, 
 
 *Buxton's Hand Book. 
 
 {Fairer Contemporary Review, February, 18*1. 
 
27 
 
 then he had a legal claim to an abatement of the rent to be 
 previously paid." 
 
 Tn France generally since the Revolution of 1789, there 
 has been a peasant proprietorship in the soil and in the south 
 of France, where the Meteyer system prevails, the rent con- 
 sists of a fixed percentage of the produce, so that owner and 
 tiller prosper or suffer together. 
 
 In Portugal where the Aforamento tenure prevails the ten- 
 ant has a hereditary lease at a fixed rent which cannot be 
 increased. In Italy, by the Contrato dl livello the owners are 
 obliged to assign lands to the cultivators for payment ot cer- 
 tain dues and at a fixed rent wliich cannot be increased except 
 by arbitration. In Prussia, Saxony, Hesse, and the greater 
 part of Germany the hereditary lease was established on 
 state domains at the beginning of the eighteenth century. 
 In Holland, where the Beklem-regt tenure exists, the tenant 
 has the right of occupancy at a fixed rent which cannot be 
 increased by the proprietor, and the right of the tenant 
 passes even to his collateral heirs as well as to those in direct 
 line, andean be devised, sold, let, or even mortgaged without 
 the consent of the proprietor. 
 
 In portions of Egypt by an edict issued in 1858 the fel- 
 lahs are allowed hereditary succession which is recognized 
 even among femates. "Lands never return to the state ex- 
 cept in default of heirs, and in this case the village can 
 claim precedence to the state. Whoever reclaims unculti- 
 vated land becomes proprietor of it.'''' 
 
 The Act Maria Theresa, passed June 23, 1772, declared 
 that all waste lands of communes and corporations should 
 be sold at once ; and the law passed March 25, 1847, still in 
 force, authorized the government to sell communal lands 
 not under cultivation, and 33,000 hectares were sold under 
 this act between 1847 and I860.* 
 
 Prosperity and happiness reign in these countries and 
 famines and discontent are there unknown. 
 
 It has been frequently stated, that the land laws of Eng- 
 land, are precisely similar to the land laws of Ireland, and 
 Mr. Justice Fitzgerald, in his charge to the jury in the Land 
 League case, recently tried in Dublin, goes even a step 
 
 *De Lavelye'a Primitive Property. 
 
28 
 
 farther, for he says, "that the laws of Ireland are mort 
 favorable to the tenant than those of Great Britain, Belgium 
 or the United States." This is not true, and Justice Fitz 
 gerald must have known it, or ought to have known it. The 
 laws of entail and primogeniture have been long since abol 
 ished in the United States, but they still exist in Ireland. Tin 
 land laws of Belgium are just, equitable and honest, while 
 those of Ireland are positively infamous.* Now let us see ii 
 the land laws of Ireland are similar to those of England, or, as 
 Mr. Justice Fitzgerald asserts, " more favorable to the ten 
 ant" The tenant laws of Ireland have undergone nc 
 material change since 1868, nor have those of England 
 and Cardinal Manning, writing in that year, says : "Ii 
 England, the traditions of centuries, the steady growtt 
 of our social order, the ripening of our agriculture and in 
 dustry, the even distribution and increase of wealth, have 
 reduced the relation of landlord and tenant to a fixec 
 though it be an unwritten law, by which the rights of botl 
 are protected. Our land customs may be enforced in tJu 
 Courts, and thereby have the force of law. * * * Ii 
 three-fourths of Ireland, there are neither laws not 
 customs. The tenants are tenants at will. * * * I 
 the events which had passed in Ireland since 1810 
 had passed in England, the public opinion of the latter 
 country would have imperiously compelled the Legislature 
 to turn our land customs into Acts of Parliament. If anj 
 sensible portion of the people of English counties were to b< 
 seen moving down upon the Thames for embarkation t( 
 America, and dropping by the roadside from hunger anc 
 fever, and it had been heard by the wayside that they wer( 
 tenants at will, evicted for any cause whatsoever, the pub 
 lie opinion of the country would have risen to render impos 
 sible the repetition of such absolute and irresponsible exer 
 cise of legal rights. If live millions, i. ?.., one-fourth of tin 
 British people, had either emigrated in a mass by reason o 
 discontent, misery or eviction, or had died by fever or f am in< 
 since the year 1848, the whole land system of Englanc 
 
 * In Belgium out of a population of about four millions, one million an 
 property owners, while Ireland, with a population of about five and a hall 
 millions, has less than twenty thousand property holders. 
 
29 
 
 would have been modified so as to render the return of 
 such a national danger impossible forever. But both these 
 suppositions have been verified in Ireland. * * * The 
 deepest and sorest cause of discontent is the Land Ques- 
 tion. * * * The Land Question, as we call it by a some- 
 what heartless euphemism, means hunger, thirst, nakedness, 
 notice to quit, labor spent in vain, the toil of years seized 
 upon, the breaking up of homes, the miseries, sicknesses, 
 deaths of parents, children, wives, the despair and wildness 
 which spring up in the hearts of the poor, when legal force 
 like a sharp harrow, goes over the most sensitive and vital 
 rights of mankind. All this is contained in the Land 
 Question." If the question of veracity could arise between 
 one of the greatest, purest, and most honorable Englishmen 
 living, and a weak, truculent, partizan, Irish Judge, we 
 confidently believe that the universal verdict would be that 
 Cardinal Manning nad told the truth, and that Justice Fitz- 
 gerald had not. But how can the question of veracity arise 
 between a man who stands like Saul, head and shoulders 
 above his fellows ; whose whole life has been devoted to the 
 material and spiritual welfare of his countrymen ; whose 
 name is synonymous with honor, honesty, truthfulness, and 
 patriotism, and a man who unnecessarily libels Belgium and 
 the United States ; whose position on the bench was ob- 
 tained by cringing to the life-long enemy of his country, 
 who ' ' croo ked the pregnant hinges of the knee that thrift 
 might follow fawning;" whose charge in the recent Land 
 League trial, ' 'taking it all in all," would have disgraced even 
 the notorious Jeffreys ? It would be an insult to the in- 
 telligence of our readers, even to intimate that the question 
 of veracity could ever arise between Cardinal Manning 
 and Justice Fitzgerald. 
 
 While the kindest, the tenderest feelings for all who 
 aided Ireland in the hour of her dire distress, have been ex- 
 pressed and are still entertained, there can be no doubt 
 that Mr. Parnell and his associates, who have dedicated 
 their lives to the removal of the cause of Irish famines 
 and Irish suffering— present and future— are the only 
 persons who take a comprehensive view of the Irish 
 question, and whether they succeed or fail, they are entitled 
 to the support, the sympathy and the admiration of man- 
 
30 
 
 kind. They do not sanction or approve of confiscation, as 
 has been falsely and maliciously stated by their enemies, 
 but even that may come if the unjust laws of entail and pri- 
 mogeniture and the cruel tenant laws be not abolished. 
 Worse than confiscation may come. Assassination may do 
 what the law fails to do. A people who find their rulers 
 heartless or callously indifferent to their just demands or 
 necessities, finally destroy them. They did it in France in 
 1789 ; they did it in England when they beheaded Charles 
 the I ; we did it here in the war of the Revolution. If the 
 Irish have not succeeded in the past, it is probably owing to 
 their impoverished and uneducated condition, both caused 
 by centuries of English misrule. But education has become 
 universal in Ireland. The peasants are beginning to read 
 and think for themselves. A spirit of individualism has 
 grown up among them ; individualism which may be called 
 the Fifth Estate, as journalism is called the Fourth Estate. 
 Even the power of the press is giving way before individual- 
 ism, the last wave in the onward roll of progress. The re- 
 cent elections in Ireland leave no doubt that the influence of 
 the Church is gradually receding from the political arena in 
 which an independent and aggressive laicism is now all promi- 
 nent. 
 
 There is no doubt that the American people who responded 
 so promptly and so generously to the call for pecuniary aid 
 for starving Ireland, whose national House of Representa- 
 tives, by a unanimous vote, censured England for her treat- 
 ment of Ireland, the majority of whose state legislatures pass- 
 ed resolutions to the same effect, will extend their unquali- 
 fied sympathy to the Land League movement when they re- 
 alize that the Irish tenantry are struggling for their very ex- 
 istence and not because they believe in or approve of com- 
 munism^ as has been falsely stated by the English press. 
 Was it communism to object to the stamp act? Was 
 it communism to hurl the tea into the Boston harbor ? 
 If it were, then the present movement in Ireland is com- 
 munistic, and Americans, ever consistent, will sanction 
 it. The kindest feelings have always existed between Ire- 
 land and America. 
 
 There are no people who land upon our shores less for- 
 eigners in sympathy than the Irish, not that they love Ire- 
 
31 
 
 land less, but America more. They can always be relied 
 npon as the bitter enemies of oppression in every form, for 
 the word oppression has been burnt into their inmost souls 
 an^. has rankled there for centuries. They become Ameri- 
 can citizens from love and with enthusiasm. They have no 
 king or queen whom they loved, to re bounce allegiance to ; 
 no home of luxury and splendor to regret ; no laws of equity 
 and justice to sigh for ; they recall no master with tear- 
 bathed cheeks, or moistened eyes ; they come here with the 
 same light hearts and bright hopes with which the Hebrews 
 of old, left Egypt for the Promised Land. This is their Ca- 
 naan. Ireland owes much, very much, to America, and 
 America owes something to Ireland. When our troops were 
 famishing at Valley Forge, the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick 
 of the City of Philadelphia sent them clothing. 
 
 Henry Grattan, whose name is imperishably enshrined in 
 the hearts of the Irish people, was the staunch friend of 
 America in her struggle for independence, as is manifest in 
 his galling invective against Flood. 
 
 History tells us that Burke, Sheridan, Barre and others, 
 did almost as much in the English Parliament for the 
 triumph of the American arms as Washington did in the 
 field ; that Lynch, McKean and Carroll, with the other im- 
 mortal signers of the Declaration of Independence, " pledged 
 their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor" to the 
 cause of American freedom when the great Republic existed 
 only in the bright hopes of the future ; that Sullivan and 
 Langdon seized the guns at Newcastle which blazed forth 
 defiance and death to the British at Bunker Hill ; that 
 Montgomery wrote his devotion to America with his life 
 blood at Montreal ; that General Anthony Wayne attested 
 his fidelity at Miamis and Stony Point ; that Barry, Mc- 
 Donough and Stewart commanded our navies ; that Jackson, 
 the hero of New Orleans, "had not a drop of blood in him 
 that was not Irish ;" and that Clinton was mainly instru- 
 mental in making our State Constitution a model of religious 
 as well as political liberty, despite the bigoted opposition of 
 John Jay. 
 
 On nearly every page of the history of our late civil war 
 are recorded the many deeds of valor performed by the Irish 
 soldiers for the preservation of the Union, and grateful 
 
39 
 
 America will never forget the impetuosity with which 
 Meagher and his Irish Brigade threw themselves upon the 
 advanced linos of the Southern army at Fair Oaks and the 
 Seven Pines. Nor will Americans fail to recall the names of 
 Shields, Sheridan, Kearney and Corcoran ; nor the fact that 
 there was not a division, brigade, Dr oven regimen I in the 
 whole army in which there were not loyal Irishmen; nor 
 that together with their own bravo, patriotic countrymen 
 they climbed the heights of Lookout Mountainand contend- 
 ed for i ho victory in that memorable conflict " fought 
 above the clouds ;" stemmed the torrent, of battle ai Get- 
 tysburg; rolled back the tide at Antietam to save tin 1 Union 
 and the lit'o of the Republic. 
 
 After trampling upon the rights of a respectable minority 
 at the expense of Parliamentary usages and in violation of 
 the letter and spirit of the British Constitution ; after the 
 passage of the infamous coercion acts, which spared 
 neither women nor children, to throttle public opinion 
 in Ireland and set at defiance public opinion and 
 public' sympathy elsewhere; after the brutal murder i^( 
 peaceable women struggling against cruel evictions; after 
 the unjustifiable arrest ami incarceration of Davitt ; after an 
 indecent delay, Mr. Gladstone has condescended to give his 
 attention to what he calls "the most difficult question he 
 has had to deal with in the course of his political life.' 5 
 From the extraordinary reticence of the Ministry, their un- 
 explained delay and the high character of the English Pre- 
 mier, the lovers of liberty and the advocates of human rights 
 tin- world over confidently hoped that the Irish Laud Bill 
 would contain a comprehensive and statesmanlike view of 
 the Irish Question which would solve the present difficulties 
 of Ireland to the entire satisfaction of all impartial thinkers. 
 
 But what must have been their chagrin when they read 
 Mr. Gladstone's encomium upon Irish landlordism, above 
 which " vengeance has been setting" for centuries, "like a 
 vulture o'er a corpse soon to be tasted.' Eulogize Irish 
 landlordism .' that like a cankerworm has been eating the 
 petals out of the heart o\ the Irish nation. His eulogy is in 
 perfect keeping with his bill if the reports of its provisions 
 published in the daily press be correct. No provision is 
 contained in it for the abolition of the laws of entail and 
 
83 
 
 primogeniture, which have been the ban to tin; amelioration 
 of the Irish tenantry, and which have done even more than 
 the cruel tenant laws to keep them in social chains and 
 political slavery for centuries. By the aid of the coercion 
 and arms acts, and a little shrewd manipulation, the meagre, 
 Inexplicit and Indefinite sections of the bill in the interest of 
 the tenants may be rendered almost nugatory. There are 
 t-.o many restrictions in the bill which destroy even its pro- 
 posed reforms, limited us they are. But its worst section is 
 that which gives to the Land (!onrt tin; power of Fixing rent 
 find compensation, [rish Judges are the creatures of Eng- 
 lish Parliaments, and their opinions or judgments have 
 rarely been such as to inspire the Irish people vvith confi- 
 dence or respect. 
 
 They are mostly landed proprietors, and as their human 
 nature is not of the highest older, they can hardly be im- 
 plicitly relied apon to settle with any degree of satisfaction 
 to the tenant the questions likely to arise between him and 
 his landlord. It is notorious that the meanest,, narrowest 
 partizans in Ireland have been Irish Judges, and that their 
 sol.' desire has always been to propitiate their masters rather 
 than to protect their countrymen. The mosl cruel, heart- 
 less and exacting slave-drivers in the South were negroes, 
 and yet they weie often the most, cringing and sub- 
 servient in the presence of the owner. The average Irish 
 Judge in Ireland, although like a, whipped spaniel in 
 the presence of his superiors, has ever been the arrogant, 
 domineering negro slave-driver when dealing with his 
 countrymen. What chance would an Irish tenant, if a 
 Land Leaguer, have; of obtaining justice from .Judge 
 Fitzgerald, who is honest and impartial, so called, com- 
 pared with others who disgrace rather than adorn 
 the bench? Yet it is to the tendei mercies of this 
 clas of public functionaries that Mr. Gladstone consigns for 
 an honest and equitable adjustment the cases of millions of 
 the hish people. This section of the bill is a " mockery, a 
 delusion and a snare.'' Mr. Gladstone has failed, utterly, 
 ignominously failed to solve the Irish Question, and we 
 must look to a greater man and a not her Parliament for its sola 
 tion. Tin; Land League, may, however, accepl the bill, un- 
 satisfactory and defective as it is, but to suppose that it will 
 
34 
 
 satisfy the League is to conclude that its members have 
 taken leave of their senses. It is reported by cable that 
 the noble Duke of Argyll has resigned from the 
 Cabinet because of the revolutionary character of the 
 bill ; this simply proves that the noble Duke has 
 not read between the lines, or that he desires the 
 resurrection oC the Penal Code. It is also reported that 
 the Gladstone Bill will not pass the House of Lords, but 
 will be strangled there by the hereditary piers of the most 
 enlightened country in the world. Before acting rashly it 
 might be well for their lordships to consult the land tenures 
 of other European countries,of half-civilized India and of bar- 
 barous Egypt, and to recall the French Revolution; the fateof 
 Charles I., the result of the American war of Indepen- 
 dence ; the death of Maximilian ; the collapse of the Napo- 
 leonic dynasty ; the abolition of hereditary peers in France ; 
 the existence of a French Republic, and the assassination of 
 the Czar. It is generally conceded that something must soon 
 be done to pacify Ireland and relieve her from the terrible 
 tension of the past year, but the Land League apprehends 
 no uprising ; nor do we hear any of its members hurl at the 
 heads of the noble lords the volcanic outburst of Shiel : 
 "Would you drive the country into insurrection, cut down 
 the People and bid the yeomanry draw forth the swords 
 clotted with the blood of 1793, that they may be brandished 
 in massacre and sheathed in the Nation's heart." 
 
 The Land League has taken pains to avoid any conflict, 
 for it does not wish to have Irishmen try physical conclu- 
 sions with England at present. It has waged and is 
 bravely fighting a battle of the mind, not of arms. It pro- 
 poses to obtain by mental superiority what military heroes 
 have accomplished only at the point of the bayonet, and 
 with the blood of thousands of their countrymen. Tt took 
 O'Connell twenty years to gain Catholic Emancipation. If 
 the Land League continue its noble work with energy, pru- 
 dence and loyalty, there is every prospect of victory crown- 
 ing its efforts in less than ten years. The agitation should 
 be extended into every country where England has a direct 
 or indirect interest ; the oppressed of every land should be 
 made to feel and to realize that every link broken in the 
 chains which have bound the Irish people so firmly, and 
 
35 
 
 which have corroded so deeply, for centuries, is the break- 
 ing of a rivet in their own fetters. 
 
 The Land League should be like a man's hand, the 
 branches like his fingers"; and in sympathy, act, desire and 
 aim like a "shut fist." No jealousies should be permitted 
 to dwarf it ; no party, sectional or national feeling to divide 
 it ; no demagogues to control it ; no temporary disappoint- 
 ments to weaken its faith in the capacity, honor or honesty 
 of its able leader. It should be open to all without regard 
 to creed, nationality or political affiliation. The opposition 
 of American snobs and the indifference and unpatriotic 
 conseroatism of Irish snobs should augment its ranks, and in- 
 crease its zeal, rather than weaken its energy or lessen its 
 membership. It is only the weak and cowardly who falter 
 and faint before the battle; the brave and strong plant 
 their banners upon the highest point of the enemies' citadel 
 or die in the attempt. The heroic self-sacrifices of Michael 
 Davitt should be an inspiration to his countrymen — the 
 country that could produce even one such man — and Ireland 
 has produced many — deserves to have the shackles struck 
 from her limbs, if need be, even by the sword. Make the 
 League universal rather than national, cosmopolitan rather 
 than local or sectional. Have the meetings addressed by 
 Americans, Germans, Frenchmen and Hebrews, as well as 
 by Irishmen. The League is sure of the Irish ; with judg- 
 ment and tact it can make certain of the others. The great 
 heart of Ireland throbs in sympathy with the Land League ; 
 the strong arm of Ireland is behind it ; the manhood and the 
 brains of America approve and sanction its methods and 
 its aims, and its success in the near future is assured if it 
 only remain united and firm to the end. 
 
r 
 
 i 
 
 -*■ 
 
 ■*• 
 
 AN ESSAY 
 
 IRISH LAND LAWS, TENURES AND GRIEVANCES; 
 THEIR PROPOSED SOLUTION; 
 THE GLADSTONE COERCION ACT AND LAND BILL 
 
 AND 
 
 THE LAND LEAGUE. 
 
 / IiY 
 
 HENRY A. BRANN, 
 
 OK THK 
 
 }f\m *Jorfc %nx. 
 
 '•■-"< :■■<■>■-■■■ 
 
 y 
 
 U 
 
 NKW YORK: 
 Benj. H. Tvriikl, Peistee, 74 Maidkn Lank 
 
 1881. 
 
 PRICE 25 CENTS. 
 
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