Gladstone's Irish Reforms

In the year following the Manchester and Clerkenwell tragedies, William Ewart Gladstone became, for the first time, prime minister of England (1868). He was already a statesman of long experience, and of unsurpassed genius. He had been a member of the House of Commons for more than thirty years, and had repeatedly sat in previous cabinets. After the retirement from office of Lord Russell (i866), Mr. Gladstone had be-come the acknowledged leader of the Liberal party. He had entered public life as a Tory. But in the course of years his political convictions had constantly become broader and more liberal. He had, moreover, won the confidence of the English people by the long-proved sincerity, uprightness, and moral elevation of his public acts and of his personal character. No statesman could have been better fitted to deal with a subject so difficult, so important, and so replete with moral aspects, as was that of Ireland.

Mr. Gladstone perceived that it was necessary to deal without delay, and with resolute energy, with the state of Ireland. The disaffection of the Irish to English rule, and the great abuses which had grown up under, and had been fostered by, that rule in Ireland, had been so persistently revealed throughout the period succeeding the union of the Parliaments, that it was vitally important, if possible, to apply a remedy. Mr. Gladstone set about the task of removing some of the chief grievances of which the Irish justly complained. His earnest desire was to remove them, and to reconcile the Irish to English rule, by getting rid, as far as possible, of those features of English rule which fostered the discontent of the Irish. Those features were, as he declared, three: "the established church, the system of land tenure, and the system of national education." With each of these he proposed to deal, by framing and passing laws which would either greatly modify them, or get rid of them altogether.

One of Mr. Gladstone's first acts as prime minister was to assert, in the House of Commons, that the Irish Protestant church, as a church recognized and sustained by the state, must cease to exist. It was the church of the small minority of Irishmen; yet it was to a large degree supported, on compulsion, by the contributions of Irish Catholics. It had not increased, and had utterly failed to fulfill the mission entrusted to it, of converting the masses of the Irish to the Protestant faith. It held property to the amount of £14,000,000, for the most part confiscated in preceding centuries from Catholic owners. It was, in short, a slothful and stagnant church, enjoying wealth for which it made no return, and always prominent, in the eyes of the immense majority of the Irish, as a symbol of English oppression. Mr. Gladstone therefore brought in a bill to "disestablish and disendow" the Irish church; that is, to deprive it of its position as the state church, and to take away from it a part, at least, of the property it had, in the process of years, acquired.

EVICTING TENANTS.

After a long struggle, in the course of which the House of Lords once rejected it, the bill was finally passed, and became a law (July 26, 1869). From and after January 1, 1871, the Irish state church ceased to exist. At the same time, the grant which had long been made from the English treasury to the Irish Catholic college of Maynooth, was withdrawn. Only a portion of the property of the Irish church was taken from it. Over £10,000,000 still remained in the hands of its bishops and clergy. The sum of which it was deprived (about £4,000,000) was reserved, to be devoted to the relief of the Irish if a famine, or some other terrible scourge, should come upon them. The next object of Mr. Gladstone's attack was the system of the Irish land. The powers of the landlords, used most often cruelly and oppressively, formed a far more serious material grievance to the Irish masses than the Irish church. The question, too, was a far harder one to solve. To deal justly by the landlords on the one hand, and the tenants on the other, was a task calculated to tax the ability of the greatest statesman.

Mr. Gladstone made two efforts to settle the relations between the Irish landlords and their tenants, so that the rights of both might be protected. His first attempt was made in the year following the disestablishment of the Irish church (1870), and his second attempt was made eleven years after (1881). In his first Irish land bill, Mr. Gladstone sought to lessen the power of the landlords to turn the tenants out of their holdings at the landlords' will and caprice; to secure to the tenants payment for any improvements they might make on their plots of land; to enable tenants, by easy methods, to become absolute owners of the land they tilled; and to give tenants the right to sell out their leases to others, if they wished to do so. Various causes combined, however, to render this measure, though well intended, an ineffectual one. The landlords evaded its provisions, and induced the tenants to make agreements which deprived them of the privileges the new law gave them. The cost of appealing to the courts, to support their rights under the law, was too great for the poor peasants, who lived constantly from hand to mouth; and it soon appeared that Mr. Gladstone's measure was practically a failure.

To improve the system of education in Ireland was the next object of Mr. Gladstone's exertions. Much, indeed, had been done in the previous twenty years to remove the inequalities between the Irish Catholics and Protestants in public instruction, and to give the Irish larger opportunities than before to educate their children. The children of the poorer classes had, to a certain extent, been supplied with common schools. Three colleges, devoted to purely secular instruction, had been established at Belfast, Galway, and Cork, and had been grouped into a university. The Catholic college at Maynooth had been supported in part by grants made from the public treasury. Trinity College, Dublin, moreover, the ancient Irish college, which had once excluded Catholics both from its government, its professorships, and its classes, had recently been thrown open to students of all creeds. The Catholics, however, did not feel that, in the matter of education, they had been placed on an entire equality with their Protestant countrymen; and Mr. Gladstone resolved to try to remove the cause of their complaint.

Three years after the passage of the first land bill, Mr. Gladstone introduced a measure re-organizing the system of Irish education (1873). He proposed to set up a great Irish university in place of those already existing, which were to be abolished. In the new institution, neither theology nor history was to be taught.

The measure met with prompt disaster. It was defeated in the House of Commons by a small majority, and was the cause of the downfall of Mr. Gladstone and his colleagues. They remained at the head of affairs a year longer, it is true; but the blow dealt by the vote on the Irish education bill was fatal to the power of the ministry. After such an event, Mr. Gladstone could not hope to deal successfully with any large measure of reform, either for Ireland or for Great Britain. His successor, Mr. Disraeli, carried a measure which swept away the "queen's colleges" of Belfast and Cork, and which set up a board of examiners, who were empowered to examine Irish students, and to confer degrees upon them. He also devoted £1,000,000 of the money taken from the Irish church, to the support of certain Irish schools.

While English statesmen were thus attempting to make laws which would remove the long and deep-seated discontent of the Irish, a fresh project was being matured by Irish leaders to secure, by agitation, broader objects than those pursued by Mr. Gladstone. A league was formed for the purpose of advocating and urging ''Home Rule" (1871). ''Home Rule" meant, that Ireland should be allowed to make the laws which related to her own local affairs and interests. It was proposed by the league that for this object, an Irish Parliament should be created. The new association was composed of both Protestants and Catholics. Its leader was Isaac Butt, a Protestant lawyer of great ability. Its growth was rapid and, at the next parliamentary election succeeding its formation, fifty-one Home Rulers were chosen by Irish districts to sit in the House of Commons (1874). Mr. Butt and his followers soon found, however, that there was, at the time, a more pressing subject than that of Home Rule which demanded their energies and advocacy. This was the question of the land.

The condition of the tenants and peasants was still wretched. Mr. Gladstone's land-act had failed to relieve them. The landlords were still tyrannical, overbearing, and powerful. Meanwhile the potato-crop again partly failed, and once more Ireland was threatened with famine. The Home-Rule leaders, therefore, for the time abandoned their demand for a local legislature, and vigorously took up the land question. They urged that the Irish tenants should be granted "fixity of tenure, fair rents, and free sale;" that is, that they should not be turned out of their land so long as they paid their rent, that that rent should be a fair one, and that they should have the right to sell their unexpired leases if they so wished. Soon after this agitation to reform the land system had been begun, Mr. Butt died, and was replaced by Mr. Shaw as the leader of the league (1879). Mr. Shaw's leadership was brief. He was speedily forced to give way to a new group of Irish chiefs, who were destined to make Irish agitation for Irish rights more formidable and effective than it had ever been before.