The Express.
London, England, 1868-08-20 00:00:00

LAW AND LANDLORDS IN IRELAND%

TUE outrage in Tipperary furnishes a striking
commentary on Mr. Disessef a speech at the
Mansion-house. Ireland, said the PR= Mune-
Tea, is peaceful and contented ; whereupon Ireland
promptly provided him with a witness to the fact
in the person of Mr. WiLmax SCULLY. It is true
that to wound &landlord and kill two policemen isnot
necessarily to commit a political crime ; but in
Ireland the line of demarcation between political
and social offences is very hard to draw. Of one
thing, however, wemay be quite sure. Buchan event
as this, taken in connection with all the circum-
stances, affords infinitely more encouragement to
Fenianism than an attack on a police barrack or a
raid upon a gunsmith's shop. It gives every
Fenian agitator, whether in Ireland or in Ame-
rica, the exact text he is in search of. With him
disaffection may be a matter of national senti-
ment or political fanaticism, but to commend it to
the people at large it must be connected with
some substantial grievance. He has to overcome
all the passive resistance which is offered by the
dread of unknown evils, and the feeling that,
if they risk a change, it may be only for the
worse ; and what weapon can serve his turn better
than the cry of Mr. Sceux's tenants, " We might
" as well be dead ae alive"? There the preacher
of Fenianism recognises the state of mind
which will give him all he wants. It is
his object to make men reckless, and the work is
as good as done when he find, them already dee-
pairing. Once take away hope from a people, and
the chances are you have taken away fear also.
" We might as well be dead as alive " marks a
state of mind on which all the ordinary induce-
ments to peaceableness and loyalty have ceased to
operate. And, consequently, if the Irish Church
were already disestablished Mr. Dins= would
still be an unfit minister for an empire of which
Ireland is an integral part. Whether his auda-
cious optimism is the product of that good
natured contempt in which he holds everything
that can be reduced to a question of parliament-
ary tactics, or is merely assumed to give point to
an after-dinner speech, matters nothing. In
whichever light it is regarded it is equally fatal to
all pretensions to statesmanship. From the days
of thepropheta downwards to cry peace where there

is no lease has been the mark of th • c'iarbean.
The rician who reeognises the aever.ty II the
dis,rth.r may be mistaken in the remedy he tire-
:, rites, but tben• is more to ix• hope.l from fl't
en adviser than from one who denies that there
is any thing which needs treatment, or who
makes the exceptional character of the disease
plea for depreciating its significance.
No doubt such conduct as that of Mr.
WILLIAM fleetLY is exceptional. But then it
is these exceptions that bring to light the
weak places of the rule. If every landlord was
thoroughly anxious to promote the interests of
his tenant, and every tenant thoroughly anxious
to give his landlord his just due, there would be
no room for a law of landlord and tenant. The
law is meant to be a terror to them that do evil,
and if it fails to discharge this function, it is no
justification of its impotence that the occasions
on which its aid is needed are few and far
between. So long as the law affords no protec-
tion to the tenant against landlords of Mr.
Setnix's type it will be regarded as the accom-
plice of his acts. Even the contented tenantry of
whom we read yesterday can hardly help remem-
bering that, before Mr. WILLIAM Soardx bought
the property the tenantry of Ballycohey were con-
tented too. The arguments which are now used
against interfering between landlord and tenant
in Ireland are all borrowed from the armoury of
the advocates of slavery. Wherever the relations
between master and slave-were what they should
be there was no need for legislation ; and in their
profound satisfaction with this argument its in-
ventors forgot to provide for the opposite possi-
bility. It is easy, no doubt, to blame Mr. SCULLY
for his harshness. So might benevolent slave-
owners have blamed cruelty in their brother
planters. But, after all, if he was doing nothing
beyond what the law authorised the law must
share the odium which his perverse inhumanity has
provoked.