Daily globe. [volume] (St. Paul, Minn.) 1878-1884, 1880-02-27

thus ever poor, thus ever miserable2
The English government has always been quick
to answer-it is all the fault of Ireland herself;
she has but her own self and her own children
to blame. It is time that Ireland should be
heard in her own defense, and valuing as she
does her good name, more even than life, and
the esteem of the American speople, more even
than their presents of bread and gold, she has
sent to us her representatives to; tell US the
true cause of her poverty and her woes. They
are with us this evening, the representatives
of Ireland, the ambassadors, 1 may call them,
of a brave and venerable nation, whose escut-
cheon for score of centuries, however dis
tressful she may seem to-day, has been blazon-
ed with the glOries of ten thousand noble
deeds. Their mission we cheerfully ackn0wl-
edge, though NO regal pen has: signed their
credentials. and no sceptrel head has bowed
them onward. l name them that you do them
homage John Dillon and Charles Stewart Par
nell.
The evil of Ireland, the fertile source
Of her miseries. they will tell you, is the Irish
system of land tenure, the legacy to Ireland
of civil wars and imperial confscations. which
British parliaments doggedly refuse to
alter. The land is Gods first gift to nations
for the maintenance and temporal felicity of
the human family, aud where the use of God S
gift is entrammeied by perverse laws and bane-
full traditions, tho nation necessarily wrlthes
in agony, and is q stranger to the comforts and
happiness of civilization.
In Ireland, more than in any
other country ON the globe, are just
laws needed to regulate the tenure
of land. For the land has been made by Eng
lish laws Ireland's solitary resource. Her in
dustries were systematically strangled, and her
commerce ontlawed. King Williams reply to
the lords and commons of England who ex-
planned to his majesty of the prosperous con-
ditiOn of the wooden trade in Ireland sums up
the implacable policy with which the indus
tries of Ireland were pursued until they were
so completely annihilated that it has been since
impossible to revive them. The royal reply
was that che would do all that in him lay to
discourage the wooden manufacture of Ire
land" Deprived of all other means of sub
sistence, the Irish people Rugged the land with
the desperation of shipwrecked crew reaching
out on the open sea for a few floating planks
and the land met their embrace bristling with
inhuman laws that necessarily doomed them to
ceaseless want and suffering. "The landlords
in Ireland" says MIR. Froude, represent con-
quest and confscatien, and they have gone on
with an indifference TO the welfare of their ten
ants that would never be tolerated in England
and Scotland" The title deeds of most Irish
landlords date back to the dark days of war and
conquest. mention this fact not that ques-
ton the settlement of their estates after two or
three centuries of possession, but because the
of sympathy and mutual understanding that
has been such marked feature in the relation
between landlords and tenants in Ireland. The
landlords have been the few in number. To-
day with six hundred thousand tenant farmers
in Ireland, there are only eleven thousand
proprietors, and of the six hundred thousand
tenant farmers five hundred thousand are mere
tenants-at-will, the remaining one hundred
Thousand holding the land Under leases usually
for such short periods that practically they do
not fare much better than their fellow-farmers,
the tenants. as-will. A tenant at-will can be
dispossessed of his home at the within of the
landlord. If custom and common decency re-
quire pretext for sending him notice to quit
the rent is raised and on his refusal to pay it,
the wbar brigade appears at his cabin door.
Eviction from his holding means for the Irish
peasant starvation by the roadside or the work
house. They are not many whose savings will
allow them to purchase passage ticket to the
hospitable shores of America. The rents are
high. To pay them the tenant will sell the
last firkin of butter, and the last fatted pig;
potatoes and corn meal must be the food for
himself and his children. His manhood is
broken, he tremDles before the command Of his
landlord, however demeaning to him that COM
mand may be, for the landlord holds in his
hand the lifeblood of the tenants children. No
room ia allowed him for energy or ambition.
Incidence and desp,ir are forced upon him.
He fears to improve his land Lest
Irish people, says Mr.. Mill, have pre-
MUM set for them upon Incidence and laziness.
Their morality is threatened A late article in
the Contemporary RevicW shows that on certain
estates the tenants cannot marry without the
landlords permission. The land laws of Ire
land, in the words of Dean Swift,
break down the spirits of the peo-
pie and fit them for slavery. The
result of the laws has been that no impartial
traveller has ever visited Ireland, without hav-
ing to record that the Irish people are ''the
worst fed, the worst clothed, and the worst
housed people in Europe" The wonder before
the world to-day surely is not that the Irish
people clamor in stentorian voices for a reform
of their land laws, but that there still exists
between the Atlantic Ocean and st. Georges
Channel an Irish people having voice and life
to cfam0r before the world in this nineteenth
century.
1t is to remedy the great evil of Ire
land, her fatal system of land tenure, that the
present land league agitation has been organic
ed in Ireland. The occasion is propitious. A
dire famine. the periodical result of these laws,
is raging in the island, and arguments IN favor
of a change of laws are visible and palpable.
The chief agitator is our guest this evening,
Charles Stewart Parneli, himself an Irish land
lord, but true IrishInan, whose superior pow
ers of mind and heart lift him up to that
height of vision which enable him to see the
salvation of his country in the destruction of a
system which fosters his own private material
interests. 1t is part of his mission to Ameri-
ca to enlist in favor of the agitation our moral
aid, to stregthen the voice of Ireland, by unit
ing with it our own, until the British parlia-
ment shall be compelled to listen.
Withsut agitation there is no hope.
The British parliament will not of its own
accord take up for consideration
the Irish question. Concessions to Ireland it
has made on different occasions within the
nineteenth century; they were always wrung
from it by agitation. At a recent meeting in
Manchester. the Catholic bishop of Stafford,
himself an Englishman, was able to say with
out fear of being contradicted that no import
ant concession in favor of even the reasonable
demands of Irishmen had ever been obtained
from the imperial government, except by
means of agitation. To say to-day to Mr.. Par
nelrs countryraen to stop all monster meet
ings. to cease their loud demands for reform, is
to say to them to forget their manhood, to be
contented with their chains, to fall back into
the silence of the grave.
No fault can be found with the ag-
itation; the means are legal, the demands are
reasonable. The land league agitation coun-
sells no shedding of blood, no agrarian out.
RACES; moral force is its sole arm. It fosters no
hatred against the persons of Irish landlords;
its antagonist is the system of Irish landlord
ism, to which the better natures of landlords.
1