The Sun.
London, England, 1866-10-31 00:00:00

from the change that I would recommend, what has
the honest landowner to fear? (Cheers.) The his-
tory of Europe and of America for the last hun-
dred years offers scarcely any • picture more pain-
ful than that which is presented of the landowners in
this kingdom. The Irish landowner has been different
from every other landowner, for the bulk of their land to
them has only been but half cultivated, they have had to
collect their rents by a process approaching to the evil of
civil war. Their property has been very insecure; the
sale of it has sometimes been rendered impossible, and the
landowner himself has often been hated by those who
ought to have loved him. He has been banished from his
ancestral home by terror, and not a few of the landlords
have lost their lives without the sympathy of those who
ought to have been their protectorsandtheir friends. (Loud
cheers.) I would like to ask what could be much worse than
this—if in this country 50 years ago as in Prussia there had
arisen statesmen who would have taken a third or half of
the land and given it to the tenants ? The Irish landowner,
great as the injustice might have been, would have been
richer and happier than he is now. What is the first
remedy which you would propose ? First, and this is the
most practicable, and would most speedily touch the con-
dition of the country, that the property which the tenant
should invest in his farm should be secured to the tenant
by law. (Loud cheers.) I believe that if Parliament were
fairly to enact this it would make a change in the whole
temper of the country, and I recollect, in the year 1849,
being down in the county of Wexford, I called at the
house of an old farmer of the name of Stafford. He lived
in a good house—the best farmhouse, I think, that I had
seen since leaving Dublin. He lived on his own farm,
which he had bought 15 years before, and the house was a
house which he had built. He was a venerable old man,
and I had some rather interesting conversation with
him. I asked him how it was that he had so good a
house, and he said the farm was his own, and the
house was his own, and, as no man could disturb
him, he had built it a much better house than was com-
mon for the farmhouses in Ireland. (Cheers.) I said to him,
" If all the farmers in Ireland had some security for the
capital they laid out on their farms, what would be the re-
sult?" The oldman almost sprung out of his chair. Ho said
" Sir, if you will give us that encouragement we'll bate the
hunger out of Ireland." (Cheers.) It is said that all this must
be leftto contract between the landlord and the tenant ; but
the public, who may be neither landlord nor tenant, have a
great interest in this question, and I maintain that the inte-
rests of the public require that Parliament should secure
to the tenant the property which he has invested in his
farm. (Cheers.) But I would not stop here. There is ano-
ther, and what 1 should call a more permanent and far-
reaching remedy for the evils of Ireland, and I hope those
persons who stickle so much for political economy will
follow me in this. The grand evil in Ireland is this—that
the Irish people—the nation, are. dispossessed of the soil.
What we ought to do is to provide for and aid their restora-
tion to it by all measures of justice. Should you tolerate
in Ireland the law of primogeniture ? Why should you
tolerate the system of entails and long settlements? Why
should the object of the law be to accumulate land in great
masses in few hands, and to make it almost impossible for
persons of small means and tenant farmers to become pos-
sessors of land ? If you go to other countries—for ex-
ample, to Norway, to Denmark, to Holland, to Belgium,
to France, to Germany, to Italy, or to the United States,
you will find that in all those countries those laws .of
which I complain have been abolished—(cheers) —and the
land is just as free to buy and 'sell, and hold and culti-
vate as any other description of property in the kingdom.
No doubt your Landed Estates Court and your Court of
Titles Act were good measures, but they were good be-
cause they were in the direction that I want to travel
further in. I would go further than that : I would deal
with the question of absenteeism. (Cheers.) lam not
going to propose to tax absentees ; but if my advice were
taken, we should have a Parliamentary Commission em-
powered to buy up the large estates in Ireland belonging to
the English nobility for the purpose of selling them ou
proper terms to the occupiers of the farms and to the tenan-
try of Ireland. (Cheers.) Now, let me be fairly understood.
I am not proposing to take any of their property from them,
but I propose this—that a Parliamentary Commission
should be empowered to treat for the purchase of these
large estates with a view of selling them out to the
tenantry of Ireland. Here are some of them. The
present Prime Minister, Lord Derby, the Marquis of
Lansdowne, Lord Fitzwilliam, tho Marquis of Hertford,
the Marquis of Bath, the Duke of Bedford, the Duke
of Devonshire, and many others have large estates in Ire-
land. Many of them, I daresay, are just as well managed
as any estates in the country ; but what you want is to
restore to Ireland a middle proprietary of the soil,
and I venture to say that if these estates could be pur-
chased, and could be sold out farm by farm to the tenant
occupier in Ireland, it would be infinitely better in a Con-
servative sense than that they should belong to great pro-
prietors living out of the country. I have said that the
disease is desperate, and that the remedy must be search-
ing. I assert that the present system of government
with regard to the Church and with regard to the land
has failed disastrously in Ireland. Under it Ireland has
become an object of commiseration to the whole world, and
a discredit tc the United Kingdom of which it forms a
part. It is a laud of many sorrows. Men fight for supre-
macy and call it Protestantism. They fight for evil and
bad laws, and they call it acting for the defence of
property. Now, are there no good men in Ire-
land ? of those who are opposed to us in politics, are
there none whu can rise above the level of party ? If there
be such, I wish my voice might reach to them. I have
often asked myself whether patriotism is dead in Ireland,
Cannot all the people of Ireland see that the calamities of
their country are the creations of the law ; and if that be so,
just laws only can remove those calamities. If the Irish
were united ; if your 105 members were for the most part
agreed, you might do almost anything you liked, even in
the present Parliament. But if you are disunited, then I
know not how you can gain anything from a Parliament
created as the Imperial Parliament now is. The class that
rule will hear your cry as they have heard it before, and
they will pay no attention to it. They will see your peo-
ple leaving your shores, and they will think it no ca-
lamity to the country ; they know that they have force to
suppress insurrection, and therefore you can gain nothing
Parliament, representing fairly
Well, what is your hope,
then
?thelitr
ifseairns.
a(beChtetee
rrs.p)
the United Kingdom. (Loud cheers.) The movement
which is now in force in England and Scotland is your
movement as much as ours. If there were 100 more
members, the representatives of large and free constituen-
cies, then your cry would be heard, and the people would
give you that justice which a class has so long denied to
you. The great party that is now in power—the Tory
party—denies that I have any just cause of complaint. In
a speech delivered the other day in Belfast there is much
said of the enforcement of the law, but there is nothing
said about any change or amendment of the law. With
the English party terror is the only specific, and they have
no confidence in allegiance except where there is no ability
to rebel. I believe that at the root of a general discon-
tent there is in all countries a general grievance and
a general suffering ; the surface of society is not inces-
santly disturbed without a cause. I recollect in the poem
of the greatest of Italian poets he tells us that he saw in a
vision the Stygian Lake, and standing upon its banks he
observed a constant commotion that there was on the sur-
face of the pool, and-the guide explained it to him thus :
" This, too, for certain, know that underneath
The waters dwells a multitude, whose sighs
Into these bubbles make the surface heave,
As thine eye tells thee, wheresoe'er it turns."

And so in Ireland for generations back the misery and
sighs of the geople have made their sign and found their
voice in constant insurrection and disorder. I have said
that Ireland is a country of many wrongs and many sor-
rows. Her past has almost all been in the shadow; her
present is full of anxiety and peril ; her future depends
ou the power of her people to substitute equality
and justice for supremacy, and a generous patriotism for
the spirit of faction. In the effort now making in Eng-
land to create a true representation of the people you have
the deepest interest. (Hear, hear.) Ihe people never
wish to suffer, and never wish to inflict injustice. They
have no sympathy with the wrongdoer, whether in
Great Britain or Ireland, and when they are fairly repre-
sented in the Imperial Parliament—as I hope they will be
one day—they will speedily, effectively, and finally answer
that old question of the Parliament of Kilkenny, " How
comes it to pass that the King has never ben the richer
for Ireland ?" The hon. gentleman resumed his seat amid
loud and prolonged cheers.
Mr. KENNEDY, M.P., next proposed the health of the
chairman, to which the OTONOGRUE responded.

The CHAIRMAN then proposed the toast of "A speedy
settlement of the land question, on the fundamental prin-
ciples of property, securing the rights of the tenant and
the interests of the landlord," to which Mr.BAowELL, M.P.,
responded.
Sir JOHN GRAY, M.P. for Kilkenny, proposed " Civil
and Religious Liberty." He said, there existed not a race
who had suffered more, endured more, and sacrificed
more for the rights of conscience than the Irish, and on
no ear did the words "civil and religious liberty" fall with
a sweeter cadence than on the Irish ear, and to no heart did
it appeal with more of a magic spell than the Irish heart.
(Cheers.) That country, through a baptism of blood, tes-
tified its faith in the great principles of his sentiment. If
they inquired into the causes of tho difference between the
condition of the tenants in the south and in the north, the
maintenance of the Church was at the root of all. (Hear.)
The education controversy had its origin in the same mis-
chievous cause. Churchmen alone wore allowed to teach,
and the enforcing of the mixed system on Ireland now by
Sir it. Cairns, at Belfast, and the Lord Chancellor, in Dub-
lin, was but the tail of that cloud of educational persecu-
tion which was commenced in centuries gone by for the
maintenance of Church ascendancy. (Applause.) Did the
Catholic people in other matters enjoy perfect eqiality
with their Protestant fellow-subjects in Ireland? (No, no.)
In the Emancipation Act were inserted Church protection
clauses for the suppression of the Catholic ecclesiastical or-
ders, which wore deemed offensive by the Church party--
the Derby party of the day—and the penalty of banishment
and transportation was enacted against these orders. Why
did their chief governor, Lord Derby's Viceroy in Ireland,
inaugurate his official career by declaring that the most
cherished of Catholic doctrines was damnable? (Cheers.)