a much better Land Bill of their own long ago.' No doubt; and the bill would have embodied the principles recently laid down by Mr. Parnell before the moral Parliament of the Irish people,' and elsewhere. These principles are: (1) That the landlord's interest is the value of the land when the waters of the flood left it;' (2) that this interest has been already paid for by the tenants in the form of excessive rent; and (3) that the landlords should be compelled to disgorge at least one-half of their ill-gotten goods.' 3 Such is Mr. Parnell's programme, 'based upon justice and the immutable decrees of Providence.' Truly we are only beginning to understand the meaning of the Rights of Man,' as Mr. O'Connor declares! These very rights' led the French peasants of the Revolution to precisely similar conclusions. In 1790 the Constituent Assembly abolished a number of valuable feudal services without compensation, on the dangerous plea that even the bonâ fide purchaser of an oppressive right is a wrongdoer, and must take the consequences. At the same time the tenants were empowered to buy off the remaining rents and services at a fixed rate. Do you not know (they cry indignantly) that what was called a landlord was but an unpunished usurper? That abominable law of 1790 is the ruin of all copyholders (propriétaires censitaires). . . . It is all to the advantage of the landlords. . . . We can never enfranchise ourselves. And enfranchise ourselves from what we do not owe! Enfranchise ourselves from hateful rights! + From the very beginning the peasant made up his mind that he owed nothing and would pay nothing. The dues preserved were not paid any more than those suppressed. Whole villages came to inform the landlord that they would not in future pay him any rent (redevances). The forces of the state nowhere protected his legal right. . . He was plundered through the connivance, the indifference, and the weakness of all the authorities who should have defended him.5 Many gentlemen were ruined. They were deprived of half their income by the law, and of the residue in spite of the law. This is the beginning of 'la grande opération révolutionnaire,' the general bankruptcy, which directly or indirectly destroyed all contracts and abolished all debts in France. The Assembly has laid the axe to the root of the tree' by asserting the fatal principle that the State can annul without compensation rights which it has guaranteed.' Rude hands will not be lacking to drive it home. (i. 202.) The complaints of the unhappy landlords are terribly like those which come to us from Munster and Connaught. How (they ask) are we to bear the oppression to which we are abandoned? There is no safety for us, for our properties, or our families. We are threatened 3 Speech at the Convention; speeches at Cookstown, Fintona, Strabane, and Gortin. Original 'cahier' quoted, i. 200. 5 i. 201.. daily with fire or the gallows by scoundrels who are in our debt: small farmers who rob us of our income. We have not one quiet day; nor a night which we can feel sure will pass untroubled. Our persons are exposed to the most atrocious outrages. . . . We are robbed with impunity of our rents, and our property is openly attacked. . . . The very Government seems afraid to compromise itself by demanding for us the protection of the laws. To be pointed to as an aristocrat is enough to deprive us of safety. . . . Doubtless the laws are most wise, but they are nowhere respected.' It was not hatred that urged the peasants on. It was land hunger,' l'instinct d'acquisition,' which in France, as in Ireland, raged as fiercely against the kind and liberal landlord, as against the harsh and exacting. The landlord is always the creditor, past, present, or future; at all events the possible creditor, that is to say, the worst and most hateful of enemies.'7 The Revolution is in fact a war, 'the war of those who have not against those who have,' as the middle classes quickly learned.8 And the Government would not do their duty in this war. They thought that force was no remedy.' ... In the eyes of our legislators (writes M. Taine) obedience should ever be spontaneous, never forced: to suppress despotism they suppress government. . . . They have not the sense of social danger which makes the true leader, and subordinates the emotions of nervous pity to the call of public duty. They do not know that it is better to take the lives of a hundred good citizens than suffer them to hang an unconvicted criminal. Repression in their hands is neither prompt, stern, nor constant. . . . They are prolific in reports, proclamations, and correspondence. [By degrees] rulers and ruled lose all conception of the State; the first through humanity exaggerated to a duty, the latter through turbulence exaggerated to a right. . . . Everywhere the magistrates forgot that the preservation of society and civilisation is a good infinitely superior to the lives of a handful of criminals and fools; that the primary object of government, as of the police, is to maintain order by force; that a policeman is not a philanthropist; that he should use his sword if attacked at his post; and that it is a breach of duty when he flinches through fear of hurting his assailants. Let us now turn for a moment to the men who developed this monstrous system, and the means they employed, and compare them with the chiefs and the measures of the Land League. The Jacobin Club sprang from the purely political 'Amis de la Constitution,' just as the Land League has grown out of the Home Rule movement. With some rare exceptions, neither the hereditary aristocracy, nor the higher ranks of the magistracy; neither the upper middle class, nor the resident landowners, nor the chief manufacturers, traders, or officials-in a word, none of the men who are, or deserve to be, of social weight,10 supply recruits to the party. During the elections of 1791 the Club talked of nothing but the abolition of the fish-ponds and rents, and the great orators confined themselves to declaring that no rents should be paid.11 • Original documents quoted by M. Taine, pp. 208–9. • Letter of Pétion, 10 Fév. 1792; quoted ii. 139. 10 ii. 34. 7 i. 394. i. 251, 261; ii. 241. Letter from the Archives Nationales, quoted ii. 34. ... In other words (says M. Taine) the Jacobins promised the greedy tenants the property and income of the landowners. . . . In the new Assembly not a noble or a prelate of the old régime, not a single great landowner, not a single head of a department, not one specialist distinguished in diplomacy, finance, administration, or war [was to be found].12 Out of the 745 deputies four hundred, says a contemporary writer, were barristers, taken mainly from the lowest ranks of the profession. [There were] a score of conforming priests, and the same number of poets and authors of little repute; almost all sans patrimoine. . . . Most of them were under thirty, sixty were under twenty-six: nearly all were formed in the clubs and popular assemblies. But it is in their organisation, and the means adopted to enforce their policy on the country, that the resemblance between the two parties is most remarkable. Most men are too much occupied with their business and their pleasures to devote themselves to politics. Where places are elective, political life becomes itself a business to those who find their personal advantage in it. There are five or six such men in every village, twenty or thirty in every town, some hundreds in every city. They alone give all their time and attention to public affairs, write to the papers and the Paris deputies, receive and pass (colportent) the word of command on all great questions, hold conclaves, get up meetings, make motions, and draw up petitions; watch, rebuke, and denounce the local magistrates; form themselves into committees, start and patronise candidates, and canvass the suburbs and the country voters.13 This dominant majority is recruited from two classes; enthusiasts and adventurers. Village attorneys, political priests, local journalists, and local orators, who for the first time find an audience, applause, influence, and a career,11 are the mainstay of the party.' During the latter half of 1790 they are to be seen forming themselves into popular associations like the Paris Jacobins, under the name of 'Friends of the Constitution.' In every town and hamlet there springs up a club of patriots, who meet nightly or many nights a week, to co-operate for the safety of the commonwealth. A new organ, a self-developed and superfluous parasite, is forming in the social body by the side of the legitimate organs. Insensibly it will grow, draw to itself the substance of the others, use them for its ends, substitute itself for them, act by itself and for itself alone. 15 Naturally the Club returns' candidates who are pledged against rent;' men disposed to tolerate all the excesses of the people.' 16 Such deputies are the mere delegates of the mob. Formerly,' as Mr. Healy puts it, 'the people were waiting to listen to their members of Parliament,' but now the members of Parliament are obliged to listen to what the people have to say.' 'Etant leur chef, il faut bien qu'il les suive.' It is one of the first principles of '89, or rather As the branches multiply, and the organisation is perfected, the Club is installed, not only as a state within the state, but as a sovereign state within a vassal state.17 [The Jacobins are] the constant and systematic apologists of insubordination and revolt. . . . All property is shaken; every wealthy man suspected. . . . In short, it is an open conspiracy against society in the name of society itself, and the sacred image of Liberty is used to seal the impunity of a knot of tyrants." The ramifications of the Club are spread throughout the kingdom, and even to foreign countries. It has its treasure, its committees, and its code, which governs the Government and judges the law. 19 [It is a confederation of twelve hundred oligarchies, manoeuvring their following of prolétaires by orders sent from Paris. It is a state, complete, organised, active; with a central government, an armed force, an official paper, a regular correspondence, an avowed policy, and an established authority. It has its local representatives and agents,20 a machine better contrived to fabricate an artificial and violent opinion, and make it appear the spontaneous wish of the nation to give a noisy minority the rights of the silent majority and force the hand of the government.21 We have all the common sophistries and shameless falsehoods, so lavishly used by the party in Ireland. The dead are slandered to excuse their murderers, and assassination becomes a recognised form of patriotism.' Henceforth there are two moral codes in France. What would be crime against a patriotic neighbour is allowable against the reputed aristocrat.22 It is they' (the Land League) who maintain law and order; and it is the Government and the landlords. who are the real disturbers of the peace of the country.' 23 C'est la noblesse et le clergé,' says Perron, qui allument les incendies.' Of course; and Mr. Gray believed, 'deliberately' and 'honestly' and in his soul,' that the executive provoked a collision with the people, 'to give to the Government an opportunity of shedding blood.' 24 The Leaguers, like the Jacobins, are ardently devoted to liberty, and the measure of that liberty is given by Mr. Sexton when he warns 'any man who may differ from him, . . . to be prudent, rather than stand too much upon his own individuality.' 25 They are almost the very words of the Jacobin menace to Mallet-Dupan: 'il vous est défendu d'aller contre l'opinion dominante.' 26 And such threats are not empty. The Jacobins too, had their executioners 23 Speech of Mr. Justin McCarthy at Longford; speech of the Rev. Mr. Hum. phreys at Thurles. 24 Mr. Gray has since altered his belief, and retracted his statement. 25 Speech at the meeting to promote an Industrial Exhibition in Ireland. 26 Article by Mallet-Dupan; quoted ii. 52. and their police; men who erected gibbets for all who pay fines or quit-rents,' who 'threaten death to the landlords who demand their rents' and the tenants who pay them, men who work at night masked,' who break into houses, and rob, and murder, and burn.27 Such were the famous 'tape-dur'; the Jacobin Rorys'; men who could act promptly on a hint, and understand the playful humour of such speeches as Mr. Parnell's description of the Arms Bill, as a bill to deprive every honest farmer from shooting the birds that are eating up his crops.' And the murders are not provoked by any great or violent resist ance. Never did an aristocracy suffer deprivation with such patience, or employ less force to defend its prerogatives, or even its estates. . . . The nobles struggle to escape murder and robbery, nothing more. . . . It is not against the new order of things that they band themselves, but against brutal disorder. . . . If they were treated like the townsman or the peasant, their neighbours; if their persons and properties were respected, they would support the new régime without bitterness.28 They are as eager for liberty as the Jacobins themselves; but 'liberty without crimes, liberty which is maintained without ruptures, without inquisitors, incendiaries, and brigands, without enforced oaths, lawless coalitions, and lynch-law.' 29 How comes it, it may well be asked, that this tyranny, intolerable to the vast body of the middle classes, is endured? 'It is,' answers M. Taine, because a nation cannot defend itself against internal usurpation as against foreign conquest, save through its government' (ii. 64). It is because the classes attacked are the civilised classes; because they are accustomed for generations to the procedures of an organised society, interested from father to son in the observance of the law, troubled by the thought of consequences, affected by manifold ideas, incapable of understanding that in the state of nature to which France has fallen there is but one idea worth a thought-the idea of the citizen who accepts the war declared against him, meets force with force, and with loaded rifle goes into the street to encounter the savage destroyers of human society,30 The middle classes cannot bring themselves to this. They appeal to Roland, the patriotic minister, the determined foe of anarchy.' And Roland calls on the oppressors to stay their hand, and exposes himself to the terrible reply Have you forgotten after the tempest, what you yourself said when the storm was at its height-that the nation must save itself? Well, this is what we have done. . . . Remember that the citizen minister has but to execute the will of the sovereign people.31 It was this helplessness of the upper classes, and a judicious exercise of lynch-law by the village tyrants,' which enabled the 27 i. 373, 381; ii. 322. 28 i. 388-9, 392. 29 Mercure de France, Sept. 3, 1791: quoted i. 393. 30 ii. 212. 31 ii. 364. Original letters to Roland in the Archives Nationales. |
