I. THE OLIGARCHY.

Throughout the eighteenth century and for a part of the nineteenth the Anglo-Saxon and Protestant Oligarchy remained masters of Celtic and Catholic Ireland. Government, offices, riches, were all in their hands. Their Church was the State Church, and was wealthy with the plunder of the Church of Rome. The Catholics were ignored by the law except for the purposes of "repression and punishment."2 The oligarchy might have developed and civilised the country, but their only thought was to exploit and oppress it. Their instruments of oppression were the Penal Laws, which made pariahs of the "Papists," and condemned them to ignorance, corruption and misery. Landlordism was their method of exploitation. The whole peasantry was held in the bonds of this new type of feudalism by something stronger than custom or law, the fact, namely, that the land was, in the absence of all other industries, their sole means of livelihood. Not only were they forced to pay exorbitant rents, but the landlord made demands upon them that implied slavery, and in return they received no service and no assurance of protection. It is true that this system was to degrade and demoralise the ruling class itself. Abuses were engendered in the church as in the Government, in private as in public life; and the squireen was the scandal and the terror of his neighbourhood. But times changed. While Parliament was still an aristocratic assembly the Irish oligarchy had nothing to fear from the Irish Catholic masses, who, although they had become electors in 1829, exercised no power in the Commons. But the change came in 1865, and more markedly in 1884, when the franchise was largely extended to the democracy. From the day that saw every workman's and peasant's house, every "hearth," invested with the vote, the fate of the Garrison was decided. Irish feudalism received its death

2 Lecky's History of England in the 18th Century, I. 284.

warrant. In 1869 the Irish Episcopal Church was disestablished. In 1870 and in 1881 semi-revolutionary Land Acts put a curb upon landlordism and lowered the status of the landlord to its fit level; then followed a period in which voluntary sale and purchase of land was encouraged by legislation. In 1898 the Ascendancy lost control of local government, which became elective, and therefore democratic.

Thus had the English Garrison during the course of the nineteenth century seen their privileges gradually vanish away. It is true that what they have lost by legislation on the one hand they have often been able to retake on the other. Up to a certain point they have been able to maintain their yoke as much by the ascendancy which they had gained over the people, as by the spirit of servitude which they had impressed on the national mind. The greater part of the landed property is still in their hands, and they dominate the business world and the liberal professions. They are still the rich class, although their wealth has been largely dissipated by the follies of the past. Their parliamentary influence is very limited, for outside Ulster they hold in the House of Commons only the two seats of Trinity College.3 But the Irish representation in the House of Lords is completely Unionist.4 The Garrison no longer make the laws, but they apply them, for it is they who control the greater part of the public functions in the State. They dominate the judicial bench, and are all but absolute among the members of the Bar; and they have Trinity College for the education of their sons. They constitute "society," the "respectable classes"; are the exclusive entourage of the Lord Lieutenant, and exercise a preponderant

At

3 Since this has been written the Unionists have won back a seat in South Dublin; on the other hand, they have lost one in Belfast. 4 The Irish peerage numbers 174 members. The Irish peers select 28 from among themselves for life seats in the House of Lords. the same time a certain number of Irish peers have seats in the Upper House as members of the peerage of the United Kingdom. (Cf. Comte, de Franqueville, Le Gouvernement et le Parlement Britanniques, II., 154-157). Of the 174 Irish peers only 14 are Catholics.

influence on the Government in Dublin Castle, which is still penetrated with their spirit and their prejudices.

In the country districts the social power of the landlords is still very great. This is apparent when one considers that even a smali landlord has about a hundred tenants on his property, while the large holders have several thousand. Moreover, even in cases where the tenants have purchased the land the landlords with their demesnes reserved to them, and lands which they personally manage, will still remain the greatest proprietors in the country. In their districts they are the centre of established authority. They are the Justices of the Peace. The police are at their disposition. The Rector, the Inspector of Police, the Resident Magistrate (when there is one) are their familiars, if not their creatures. Through their agents and stewards, their bailiffs, receivers, and process-servers, they keep the peasant under a yoke of intimidation, espionage, and corruption. Although for a century and more the Catholics have had the right of acquiring land, even to-day nine out of ten landlords will be found to be Protestant. Here and there, indeed, we find a few old Catholic families of Anglo-Norman origin, such as the Fingalls, and even a few descendants of the ancient Celtic chiefs, such as the O'Conors of Connacht, who have been able to preserve their lands throughout the persecutions, thanks sometimes to the fair conscience of Protestant relations and friends. Yet though they have often adopted the most extreme prejudices of the class to which they have attached themselves, there is no Catholic on the list of the twenty-eight peers who represent Ireland in the House of Lords. Catholicism is a badge of inferiority, and to the landlords, as to the bourgeoisie, the Catholic always seems somewhat of an intruder in the Ascendancy ranks.

Clearly, then, the Protestant Ascendancy is not yet dead in Ireland. Custom, acquired rights, Government support, conspire to preserve it; but none the less the days of the privileged class are numbered. The worm

eaten edifice has more than half crumbled to pieces already. You may see as you go through the country many a mansion shut up or falling into ruins that was but a little while ago a bustling centre of life and luxury. They stand there as the last witnesses of the fêtes and follies of the past. Within, perhaps, the present landlord drags out a miserable and desolate existence, like some old half-pay officer. He has no relations with the people, and no hopes of improvement, but he continues bound by the chain forged by his ancestors or by himself in the days of splendour, the chain of poverty.5 Can one refuse pity to these "disinherited" magnates who are paying for mistakes which may not have been their own? No one in Ireland any longer defends the "Garrison" as an institution, and when they are gone no one will regret them. Even in England, except in the Upper House and among the Tories, there is no pity or sympathy for this class, which, nevertheless, has given the Empire some of its greatest sons, from a Napier and a Wellesley to a Dufferin and a Lord Roberts. Their part is played, there is nothing left for them to do. Have they not failed in the task which was confided to them, and shown themselves powerless either to Anglicise or to Protestantise Ireland? The young Radical democracy laughs at this fallen Garrison, which is already three-parts disarmed; while the glorious old aristocracy of England is at no pains to hide a certain disdain for this Anglo-Irish nobility, which, according to the well-known saying, has nothing old except its prejudices, and nothing new except its parchments, and whose titles, according to Lecky, the historian, are for the most part connected with memories not of honour but of shame."6

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It seems somewhat unjust that modern England, and

5 Mr. Filson Young in Ireland at the Cross Roads gives a clever picture of the sadness of life among the Irish landlords.

6 An allusion to the titles sold in 1799-1800 in exchange for votes in favour of the Act of Union, and more generally to the fact that England has never honoured Irishmen with titles unless they were supporters of England's cause.

notably since the time of the Great Famine, should thus denounce those who were her representatives in Ireland, and, to clear herself, should throw upon them all responsibility for all the mistakes of the past. It is easy to say that all the evils of Ireland have for sole cause a

bad aristocracy.7 But who created this aristocracy? Human nature is much the same everywhere, and there is no class or nation but numbers within it certain un

worthy or perverse individuals. The Irish oligarchy must not be charged with suffering from a double dose of original sin-a condemnation which some English critics would extend to the whole Irish nation. The truth is that England, who wishes now to make scapegoats of the Irish landlords, is responsible for the oligarchy. They are the product of circumstances; for it was England that gave over a Celtic and Catholic country to these English Protestants, invested them with unlimited privileges, but imposed no duties upon them, and placed them altogether above the law. They became the irresponsible agents of the mother-country, and had nothing either to fear or to hope from the people who had been given to them to be their slaves. There has never been an occasion on which the governors and governed appeared likely to unite but England intervened and threw amidst the combatants a money bribe, or raised the cry of religious war.8 By coercion the British Government has always upheld the worst excesses of the worst landlords. In the middle of the last century it permitted that great social crime, the Clearances, to take place, and did not dare to legislate for the protection of the peasants until 1870. In a word, those circumstances which drew out all the best qualities of the English aristocracy, and produced its best effects, only resulted in Ireland in encouraging vices and abuses on the part of the English Garrison.

7 Gustave de Beaumont, op. cit. 1, 211.

8 For example:-in 1795 England embittered the religious war: in 1898, to win back the landlords who were making common cause with the people on the Financial Relations Question, the Government, by the Local Government Act, gave them a present of the poor rate.