STREET COURTESIES. EMBRYO SMOKER.-"Say, guv'nor, gimme a light, will yer?" TALL DITTO.-"Certainly. Where's your stepladder?" "I beg your PUBLI THE CITY OF DUBLIN. UBLIC attention is again turned toward Ireland, and the struggle which it is making to secure independence, or more freedom of action from the British government. Whether she will succeed is a question that can be answered now as well as a year hence. Ireland will fail if she resorts to arms, and will fail in obtaining any more advantages than she now possesses, for the simple reason that England has the power, the money, and a well-organized army and navy to do her bidding, with a blind obedience, and John Bull prejudice and determination that never falters, and never fails, no 31 matter how great the odds are against or for her. itation in the Green Isle. It has prevailed We all deplore the state of unrest and ag for many years, and is destined to continue for many years to come. her quiet and peaceable, prosperous and happy, with enough to eat for every man, woWe would have man, and child; with good houses, and warm firesides, with plenty of money to take care of old age and sickness, with an abundance of work, and a scant supply of whiskey, with rational merry makings, and less wakes and fighting fairs, with good schools, and intelli gence, more books, and less pipes and shil- | beautiful waterfalls, like the Devil's Glen, lalahs. - its verdant mountains, — like the famed Gap of Dundee, County Kerry,- or its lakes, like that of Middle Lake, in Killarney, or its famed cities, like that of Dublin, with its handsome women, intelligent men, and handsome buildings. But one would not care to own land there, and expect to be Boycotted every time he asked for his rent, so if a man was to throw beautiful views aside, and consult his safety, he would avoid Ireland, and settle in Scotland, where the mountains are not quite so green, or the valleys so fertile, but the lakes equal those of Ireland, even if they do not surpass them. All these things we wish for Ireland, but they will not be obtained by riots and bloodshed, and by defying her old enemy, Great Britain. Even with complete independence, entire freedom to manage her own affairs, we doubt if Ireland would be more prosperous than she is at present. The island would be convulsed with internal revolutions, with sections waging a pitiless war against each other, and all striving for supremacy, to the neglect of the land and everything that tended to make a nation strong and prosperous, happy and content ed. In our own country we have seen that civil war was the result of a disagreement on a certain institution which was recognized by custom as lawful, and yet both sections of the country were prosperous and happy, and every man, except the blacks, was guaranteed freedom, and the right to do as he pleased, to pay rent or taxes, or to avoid them by squatting on the public domains, and making a fuss if he was removed by due process of law. If our people could fight for an idea, how can we expect the mercurial Irishman to abstain from doing the same thing, even if Great Britain should remove her heavy hand, and grant Ireland the right to make her own laws, and see them executed, the same as Australia, Canada, and other dependencies of England. It is about eighty years since Ireland surrendered her independence, brought about by bribery and the most flagrant corruption; and during all that time agitation has never ceased, yet many concessions have been made, and many experiments tried to convince the Irish that they ought to be happy and prosperous, like Scotland and Wales. But the results have not been all that could be desired for many reasons, and one of the principal ones is that at times there are men who live on agitation and excitement, and sail into office as friends of the people, and think they must do something striking to keep their names before the public, and have a following that makes them a power for good or evil. Scotland is happy and prosperous, the people thrifty and industrious, and yet the soil is not so productive and fertile as that of Ireland, and the winters are more rigid. But the temperament of the two people is different. One is hard-headed and cool. The other is soft-hearted and impetuous. One saves all that he can get hold of, and puts it away. The other spends all that he can earn, and trusts to luck for tomorrow, caring nothing for sunshine or storm, sickness or old age; and yet of the two places one would rather live in Ireland, with its green pastures and picturesque valleys, its We have traveled in those countries, and can say much in praise of both, for we met with only kind treatment wherever we rested, but the Scot holds out his hand for a fee with a grave, hard face, and the Irishman with a smile and a laugh, and a wish of long life if the gratuity is near his expectation, and a bit of blackguardism if it is not. Money is valuable in both countries, if you would travel with comfort, and blessings on your head instead of curses and surly contempt. But the English statesmen of the present day have a serious difficulty before them, and how they will finally settle the matter is a mystery to the most profound thinker of the world. We should say cut the knot that binds the two islands, and let Ireland take care of herself, as a republic or monarchy, and then we could see what effect home rule would have on the affairs of the new nation, and how long it would be before disorders would arrive, and the struggle for power commence between the factions, while the Orangemen would be crushed to pieces between the mill-stones of the various parties. England will never relinquish her hold of Ireland until she is so feeble that she is incapable of retaining possession, and the Green Isle will never cease struggling for free lands, free rent, free parliament, and absolute independence. We could wish for better things, but if wishes could have effected a cure for the diseases under which Ireland suffers, the country would have been in a healthy state even in the days of Queen Elizabeth, whose sweet disposition was sorely tried by her Irish subjects, and once the virgin queen said, "Damn them! will nothing but death keep them still?" Ireland caused her many sleepless nights, but she laid her white hand on the land, and it yielded to her persuasion, backed by stout soldiers, and ball and powder. Cromwell found Ireland a thorn in his side, but he dealt it some staggering blows, and then there was peace for many years. William of Orange was not liked by the Irish, but he made them respect him in his peculiar manner, and after the Stuarts had ceased their machinations there was calm content, if not perfect peace, for some of the best blood of Ireland emigrated to France, and served in the French armies, and rose to high rank, and their descendants are there at the present time, with good old Irish names, like that of the Marshal McMahon, at one time president of the Republic, and resigned sooner than sign a bill which he thought unjust to his old companions-in-arms. Justin McCarthy, the Irish novelist, a member of Parliament, and a man who is cool and careful enough to give his views without being influenced by blind passion, in writing of the present condition of Ireland, says, "Unless one can get the fact into his mind that the land is the life of the Irish peasant, it is impossible that he can understand the present controversy at all." And he goes on to point out that there are but few manufactures in Ireland, little possibility of establishing any, and but few great towns, so that there is no refuge for the starving peasant, and the question for the government to consider is whether it will sacrifice the privileges of the proprietors or the prosperity of the people. Going into detail a little, he shows how a tenant suffers from the custom which obliges him to make all improvements himself, and then allows the landlord to raise his rent simply because he has made them; and says that although oppression of this kind is not common on the estates of great peers, but rather on the land of those small proprietors who find it necessary to squeeze all they can out of the tenantry, still it is enough that there should be so many cases of this kind as to put into the mind of every occupier the fear that he may be the victim of such an extortion, to act as a permanent and paramount discouragement to any efforts in the way of industry and self-improvement. He considers the Irish law of eviction, that system of tenantry-at-will which Lord Dufferin says that no Christian would offer and no one but a madman would accept, saying that it is the case above all others to which the principle of unrestricted competition cannot possibly be applied, since the tenants must eat to live, and it is only by cultivating the soil that they can live. He touches lightly on the fact that the whole system of land tenure is English, and has been imposed upon the Irish without their consent, and has been made more offensive by confiscation after confiscation, so that to all the other causes which make the Irish people discontented, to the pressure of a false and fatal system, to a mistaken political economy, and to all the evils that can arise from an unrestricted power over a poor population in the hands of a very small class of men, there is added the sense that those who now own the land of Ireland are not strictly Irishmen, but are foreigners imposed by the foreign power in the place of the native possessors whom force has terminated. landlord to give compensation to a tenant evicted for non-payment of rent. Moreover, it encouraged the consolidation of farms and the extinction of small tenancies by leaving the landlord and the tenant to the unrestricted operation of what is called "free contract," in all cases where the farm was above a certain extent of acreage. Thus, therefore, it became the natural desire of every landlord to get rid of as many ten-* ants as possible, and to make his farms as large as he could, in order to be free from and above the operation of Mr. Gladstone's act. And, lastly, it referred all disputed questions to the Irish county courts, the ex-judges of which would naturally be on the side of the landlord. Meanwhile the Ulster custom was neutralized even in Ulster by the unrestricted power of raising the rent, and Ulster seemed likely to be as distressed as Munster or Connaught, and after the passage of the land act matters grew worse. Then came bad harvests, Fenianisn, nationalism, and lastly Home Rule, and Ireland was told that not even the discussion of the last subject would be allowed, and then the LandLeague agitation began. The question is still further complicated by the difference of religion between the landlord and tenant, and, naturally, Mr. McCarthy says Ireland has had famines in 1822 and 1831, a famine of ghastly proportions in 1846, and in 1879 a period of such keen distress that at one time it seemed likely to turn into positive famine. Mr. McCarthy then reviews the course of the English Parliament with regard to Ireland, beginning with the Devon commission appointed in 1845, and which reported in favor of changes that would have given an occupier something like a right to his holding. Speaking of the fact that the work of this commission was nullified by the efforts of the political economists as by those of the landlords, he says that the only political economist who ever saw into the heart of the question was John Stuart Mill, who always pointed out that the essential conditions of land rendered property in it differ-been ent from property in any commodity which can be increased and multiplied; and that therefore there could not be in land the same unrestricted freedom of contract which we are all glad to see in the case of property of a different kind. No association in Ireland, if we go back to the days of O'Connell's repeal movement, ever had anything like the same strength among the people," says Mr. McCarthy. "It is all but dictatorial; and I am bound to say that, considering the difficult and complicated interests he has to deal with, it has proved of immense service to the country. Many agrarian excesses and crimes have no doubt been committed, but they have not ment." committed either at the instigation or by the connivance of the Land League. Simple arithmetical facts show that agrarian outrage of every kind has been decreasing of late years, and is almost out of all proportion less now than it used to be twenty or thirty years ago. What the Land League But no attempt to deal with the question has done is to force the whole question of in a liberal way was made until Mr. Glad-land tenure on the consideration of Parliastone came into power with a determination to deal with the land-tenure system, and in 1870 introduced his act legalizing the Ulster tenant-right system, and laying down a scale of compensation for improvements made by a tenant evicted from caprice. Mr. Bright introduced some clauses by which tenants anxious to become possessors of their land were to be assisted with purchase money by the Government, and between the Lords and the Commons the bill and the additions were so mutilated that they were of little value, and not only did not do any great good, but in some cases did distinct harm. The original bill defined neither the Ulster custom nor improvements, and, after it had passed the lords, it did not compel a We think that Mr. Gladstone is disposed to aid Ireland and its people, and it strikes us that it would have been far better if the Home-Rule members of Parliament had determined to vote with him in a body, and assisted him in every way possible to bring about some change for Ireland that would have been for Ireland's benefit. We have spoken of the civil wars that existed in Ireland when Elizabeth was queen. Then the country was agitated by the civil wars of the O'Neils in the north, and the Desmonds in the south, aided by Spain. These troubles ended in the ruin of the leading insurgents. James I. introduced into Ulster many Scotch and English Protestant settlers. The civil wars in England |