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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