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Show THE TROUBLES IN IRELAND. The coming question of British politics is undoubtedly the land question. It is hardly too much to say that this is already the leading question. In Ireland the land question certainly overtops all others at the present moment. The agrarian murders that have occurred with more or less frequency have been a proof that there was a profound and widespread dissatisfaction among the peasantry with the present system of land-tenure. The Home Rule agitation in Parliament has shown that this dissatisfaction is not confined to the peasantry, but is shared by the cultivated and well-to-do Irish who are not landowners. These signs of a coming storm have been contemptuously ignored. With the usual short-sightedness of politicians, the Conservative party has during its power sat on the safety-valve of Irish discontent until an explosion is imminent. Those who have pooh-poohed every suggestion of danger are now becoming thoroughly alarmed. The Times, it is true, affects to find encouragement in the improvement of the harvest prospects which is reported from the greater part of Ireland; but the Times is a semi-official journal, and so bound to look on the bright side of things. Very different is the tone of the Pall Mall Gazette, which has hitherto been as incredulous as any English journal when the danger of an uprising among the Irish tenantry has been hinted at. It acknowledges that the danger is now a serious one, and must be promptly met by wise statesmanship, and not by some stop-gag or temporizing measures. The immediate cause of the present agitation in Ireland is the comparative failure of the crops this year. This, added to the misfortunes of previous years, has made it really impossible for tenants to pay their rents. Landlords threaten eviction if the rents are not paid, and this threat has aroused the passions of the peasantry. Mr. Parnell, the ablest of the Home Rule representatives in Parliament, advises the tenantry to refuse to pay rents and to resist eviction. What the peasants demand is such a reform of the land system as shall give the tenant a fixed tenure. At the last session of Parliament the old statute prohibiting conventions in Ireland was repealed, and a National Convention is soon to be held to consider this and kindred subjects. That the land system of Ireland should be reformed there can be no reasonable doubt. That it will be reformed, if the end is sought by the Irish people with moderation and firmness, is tolerably certain. But the needed reform would be indefinitely delayed by a general uprising, or by a wholesale system of agrarian outrages. Englishmen will yield much to agitation in constitutional ways, even if the yielding is slow; but no nation so obstinately refuses to yield an inch when an appeal to force is made. "The syllogism of violence" the English mind never can comprehend. On the other hand, if the landlords enforce relentlessly their legal rights under the present system, and evict from their homesteads all who refuse to pay rent-equally whether the refusal proceed from inability or disinclination to pay-a series of agrarian murders will surely follow. The landlords, their agents and the officers of the few will be shot down whenever and wherever opportunity offers. In the present state of feeling among the Irish peasants, a wholesale eviction would lead to such disturbance that an army would be needed to preserve the peace. As the Pall Mall Gazette says, there would result "something hardly distinguishable from civil war." The Conservative party has already arrayed itself on the side of the landowners. This means certain defeat in the coming election, and the return of the Liberal party to power once more. It is not only possible but almost certain that if Mr. Gladstone lives five years longer he will add to the glory of having disestablished the Irish Church, the honor of reforming the land system of Great Britain and Ireland.-N. Y. Examiner and Chronicle. |