Ireland Under Coercion - vol. 1 | Page 2

sufficed to restrain ecclesiastics, not always of the

lowest degree, from encouraging by their words and their conduct
"patriotism" of the type commemorated by the late Colonel Prentiss of
Louisville, in a story which he used to tell of a tipsy giant in butternut
garments, armed with a long rifle, who came upon him in his office on
a certain Fourth of July demanding the loan of a dollar on the ground
that he felt "so confoundedly patriotic!"
The Colonel judiciously handed the man a dollar, and then asked, "Pray,
how do you feel when you feel confoundedly patriotic?"
"I feel," responded the man gravely, "as if I should like to kill
somebody or steal something."
It is "patriotism" of this sort which the Papal Decree was issued to
expel from within the pale of the Catholic Church. And it is really, in
the last analysis of the facts of the case, to the suppression of
"patriotism" of this sort that many well-intentioned, but certainly not
well-informed, "sympathisers" with what they suppose to be the cause
of Ireland, object, in my own country and in Great Britain, when they
denounce as "Coercion" the imprisonment of members of Parliament
and other rhetorical persons who go about encouraging or compelling
ignorant people to support "boycotting" and the "Plan of Campaign."
Yet it would seem to be sufficiently obvious that "patriotism" of this
sort, once full-blown and flourishing on the soil of Ireland, must tend to
propagate itself far beyond the confines of that island, and to diversify
with its blood-red flowers and its explosive fruits the social order of
countries in which it has not yet been found necessary for the Head of
the Catholic Church to reaffirm the fundamental principles of Law and
of Liberty.
Since these volumes were published, too, the Agrarian Revolution in
Ireland has been brought into open and defiant collision with the
Catholic Church by its leader, Mr. Davitt, the founder of the Land
League. In the face of Mr. Davitt's contemptuous and angry repudiation
of any binding force in the Papal Decree, it will be difficult even for the
Cardinal-Archbishop of Sydney to devise an understanding between the
Church and any organisation fashioned or led by him. It may be

inferred from Mr. Davitt's contemporaneous and not less angry
intimation, that the methods of the Parnellite party are inadequate to the
liberation of Ireland from the curse of landlordism, that he is prepared
to go further than Mr. George, who still clings in America to the
shadowy countenance given him by the Cardinal-Archbishop of
Baltimore, and that the Nationalisation of the Land will ere long be
urged both in Ireland and in Great Britain by organisations frankly
Anti-Catholic as well as Anti-Social.
This is to be desired on many accounts. It will bring the clergy in
Ireland face to face with the situation, which will be a good thing both
for them and for the people; and it should result in making an end of
the pernicious influence upon the popular mind of such extraordinary
theological outgivings; for example, as the circular issued in 1881 to
the clergy and laity of Meath by the Bishop of that diocese, in which it
was laid down that "the land of every country is the common property
of the people of that country, because its real owner, the Creator who
made it, has transferred it as a voluntary gift to them."
Language of this sort addressed to ignorant multitudes must do harm of
course whenever and by whomsoever used. It must tend to evil if
addressed by demagogues to the Congress of a Trade Union. But it
must do much more harm when uttered with the seeming sanction of
the Church by a mitred bishop to congregations already solicited to
greed, cunning, and dishonesty, by an unscrupulous and well-organised
"agitation."
Not less instructive than Mr. Davitt's outburst from the Church is his
almost furious denunciation of the Irish tenants who obeyed an instinct,
thought honourable to mankind in most ages and countries, by agreeing
together to present to their landlord, Earl Fitzwilliam, a token of their
respect and regard on the celebration of his golden wedding day.
These tenants are denounced, not because they were paying homage to
a tyrannical or an unworthy landlord, though Mr. Davitt was so
transported beyond his ordinary and cooler self with rage at their action
that he actually stooped to something like an insinuation of disbelief in
the excellence of Lord Fitzwilliam's character. The true and avowed

burden of his diatribe was that no landlord could possibly deserve well
of his tenants. The better he is as a man, the more they ought to hate
him as a landlord.
The ownership of land, in other words, is of itself in the eyes of Mr.
Davitt what