Either the land of Ireland rightfully belongs to the Irish
landlords, or it rightfully belongs to the Irish people; there can be
no middle ground.
- If it rightfully belongs to the landlords, then is
the whole agitation wrong, and every scheme for interfering in any
way with the landlords is condemned.
- If the land rightfully belongs
to the landlords, then it is nobody else's business what they do with
it, or what rent they charge for it, or where or how they spend the
money they draw from it, and whoever does not want to live upon it on
the landlords' terms is at perfect liberty to starve or emigrate.
- But
if, on the contrary, the land of Ireland rightfully belongs to the
Irish people, then the only logical demand is, not that the tenants
shall be made joint owners with the landlords, not that it be bought
from a smaller class and sold to a larger class, but that it be
resumed by the whole people.
To propose to pay the landlords for it
is to deny the right of the people to it. The real fight for Irish
rights must be made outside of Ireland; and, above all things, the
Irish agitators ought to take a logical position, based upon a broad,
clear principle which can be everywhere understood and appreciated.
To ask for tenant-right or peasant proprietorship is not to take such
a position; to concede that the landlords ought to be paid is utterly
to abandon the principle that the land belongs rightfully to the
people.
To admit, as even the most radical of the Irish agitators seem to
admit, that the landlords should be paid the value of their lands, is
to deny the rights of the people. It is an admission that the
agitation is an interference with the just rights of property. It is
to ignore the only principle on which the agitation can be justified,
and on which it can gather strength for the accomplishment of
anything real and permanent. To admit this is to admit that the Irish
people have no more right to the soil of Ireland than any outsider.
For, any outsider can go to Ireland and buy land, if he will give its
market value. To propose to buy out the landlords is to propose to
continue the present injustice in another form. They would get in
interest on the debt created what they now get in rent. They would
still have a lien upon Irish labor.
And why should the landlords be paid? If the land of Ireland
belongs of natural right to the Irish people, what valid claim for
payment can be set up by the landlords? No one will contend that the
land is theirs of natural right, for the day has gone by when men
could be told that the Creator of the universe intended his bounty
for the exclusive use and benefit of a privileged class of his
creatures – that he intended a few to roll in luxury while their
fellows toiled and starved for them. The claim of the landlords to
the land rests not on natural right, but merely on municipal
law – on municipal law which contravenes natural right. And,
whenever the sovereign power changes municipal law so as to conform
to natural right, what claim can they assert to compensation? Some of
them bought their lands, it is true; but they got no better title
than the seller had to give. And what are these titles? Titles based
on murder and robbery, on blood and rapine–titles which rest on
the most atrocious and wholesale crimes. Created by force and
maintained by force, they have not behind them the first shadow of
right. That Henry II and James I and Cromwell and the Long Parliament
had the power to give and grant Irish lands is true; but will any one
contend they had the right? Will any
one contend that in all the past
generations there has existed on the British Isles or anywhere else
any human being, or any number of human beings, who had the right to
say that in the year 1881 the great mass of Irishmen should be
compelled to pay – in many cases to residents of England, France,
or the United States – for the privilege of living in their native
country and making a living from their native soil? Even if it be
said that might makes right; even if it be contended that in the
twelfth, or seventeenth, or eighteenth century lived men who, having
the power, had therefore the right, to give away the soil of Ireland,
it cannot be contended that their right went further than their
power, or that their gifts and grants are binding on the men of the
present generation. No one can urge such a preposterous
doctrine.
And, if might makes right, then the moment the people get power to
take the land the rights of the present landholders utterly cease,
and any proposal to compensate them is a proposal to do a fresh
wrong.
Should it be urged that, no matter on what they originally rest,
the lapse of time has given to the legal owners of Irish land a title
of which they cannot now be justly deprived without compensation, it
is sufficient to ask, with Herbert Spencer, at what rate per annum
wrong becomes right? Even the shallow pretense that the acquiescence
of society can vest in a few the exclusive right to that element on
which and from which Nature has ordained that all must live, cannot
be urged in the case of Ireland. For the Irish people have never
acquiesced in their spoliation, unless the bound and gagged victim
may be said to acquiesce in the robbery and maltreatment which he
cannot prevent. Though the memory of their ancient rights in the land
of their country may have been utterly stamped out among the people
of England, and have been utterly forgotten among their kin on this
side of the sea, it has long survived among the Irish. If the Irish
people have gone hungry and cold and ignorant, if they have been
evicted from lands on which their ancestors had lived from time
immemorial, if they have been forced to emigrate or to starve, it has
not been for the want of protest. They have protested all they could;
they have struggled all they could. It has been but superior force
that has stifled their protests and made their struggles vain. In a
blind, dumb way, they are protesting now and struggling now, though
even if their hands were free they might not at first know how to
untie the knots in the cords that bind them. But acquiesce they never
have.
Yet, even supposing they had
aquiesced, as in their ignorance the
working-classes of such countries as England and the United States
now acquiesce, in the iniquitous system which makes the common
birthright of all the exclusive property of some. What then? Does
such acquiescence turn wrong into right? If the sleeping
traveler
wake to find a robber with his hand in his pocket, is he bound to buy
the robber off – bound not merely to let him keep what he has
previously taken, but pay him the full value of all he expected the
sleep of his victim to permit him to get? If the stockholders of a
bank find that for a long term of years their cashier has been
appropriating the lion's share of the profits, are they to be told
that they cannot discharge him without paying him for what he might
have got, had his peculations not been discovered?
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