In
conversation on board these sentiments came up often, and with
enthusiasm, and captain and crew, and the stout ship met with no
measured praise.
Before retiring behind the curtain to shake hands with sea-sickness
again, we had a long, fond look at the land we were leaving. Liverpool
had receded into a long, low line of twinkling lamps. My thoughts went
through the mist to the land of my own people now passing through the
throes of a great change.
Erin, beloved and beautiful, once more
The time of parting comes to thee and me;
The sad delight of pilgrimage is o'er,
And voices call to me across the sea.
In Canada the magic summer shines,
A purple haze upon the mountain broods,
The soft warm breeze is whispering through the pines.
And leaping waters thunder through the woods.
September radiance tints the forest grand,
The maples are aflame upon the hills;
From bursting barns plenty smiles o'er the land,
Where the tall farmer owns the soil he tills.
Erin, thy robe of green is dewed with tears,
Fields outrage-stained, thy west wind thick with sighs,
Thou that hast walked with woe down through the years,
Weighted with all the wrongs of centuries.
Erin, beloved with love akin to pain,
Through woe and outrage, turbulence and strife,
Thou shalt arise and enter once again
Into a higher, freer, glorious life.
A LAST WORD - THE CAUSE OF IRELAND'S TROUBLES.
Because I have had the privilege of being Irish correspondent for the
Montreal _Witness_ for a time, I think it right to explain to you
the change which travelling through my native country has produced in my
sentiments and the convictions forced upon me.
Brought up in the North of Ireland in a purely Hiberno-Scotch
neighborhood, I drank in with my native air all the ideas which reign in
that part of Ireland. The people with whom I came in contact were
Conservatives of the strongest type; from my youth up, therefore, I had
the cause of Ireland's poverty and misery as an article of belief. I
never dreamed that the tenure of land had anything to do with it.
Landlords were lords and leaders, benefactors and protectors to their
tenants in my imagination.
I changed my opinion while in Ireland, and now I believe that the land
tenure is the main cause of Ireland's miseries.
English history is pretty much a history of struggles against monopolies
of one kind and another. There is no monopoly, it seems to me, which
bears such evil fruit as the monopoly of all the land of a country in
the hands of a few. It is bad for the country, bad for the people, and
bad for the landlords, whether the monopolists are honorable companies,
a landed aristocracy, or an ecclesiastical corporation. God's-law, which
is the law of our faith, shows plainly how the Great Lawgiver regards
the monopoly of land by the care which He took to have a direct interest
in the land of Canaan by personal inheritance for every Jew. To guard
against the might of greed, to prevent the poor of the land, touched by
misfortune or snared by debt, from sinking into farm laborers or serfs
of the soil he instituted the year of jubilee when every man returned to
his inheritance.
I first thought over these things in connection with the land question
in Ireland when travelling there and seeing the evils arising from the
existing tenure of land. I met with testimony everywhere of how often
and how fatally the will of a lord interfered to prevent prosperity.
There might have been a seam of coal opened in Antrim but for one
landlord. In the present depressed state of the linen trade what a boon
that would have been to the country. There might have been ship-building
on the Foyle, to the great benefit of Derry and her people, but for the
absentee landlords, the London companies. Donegal might have had a coal
mine opened, but the landlord would neither open it himself nor let
anyone else do it, and yet the great want of Donegal is employment for
her people.
I did not think for a moment that the landlords of Ireland were, as a
rule, naturally worse than other men, but they have too much power, and
when "self the wavering balance shakes, it's rarely right adjusted."
I blame the system, not the men. There were and are landlords in Ireland
too noble to abuse their power, of which class the Earl of Belmore is an
illustrious example; but these men are noble in spite of the system
which afforded every facility for the enormities of Lord Leitrim.
The evil of the Land Tenure is intensified by the fact that one class
makes laws for another, and that the same class has all the executive of
these laws under their control. There was no power in the law to protect
the inhabitants of Milford when the earnings and savings of their whole
lives, and the private property of their minister were confiscated by
the strong hand, and some were reduced in consequence to beg their
bread. The law, planned expressly to be an expensive luxury, was only
for the rich, and was known to the poor, if they dared to contend with
their landlord, as an engine of oppression. The judge who gave the award
in Mrs. Auldjo's case knew better than anyone else the cost of Irish
law, and that the award he gave her under the Act of 1870 was a
defeating of the intentions of the law, as it was really less than the
law costs.
