Ireland's Disease: Notes And Impressions

It is indeed a chronic and constitutional disease that Ireland is labouring under. Twice within the last fifteen months it has been my fortune to visit the Sister Isle; first in the summer of 1886, at the apparently decisive hour when the die of her destiny was being cast in the ballot-box, and her children seemed on the point of starting upon a new life; then again, twelve months after, in the summer of 1887, when I found her a prey to the very same local disorders and to the same general anxiety that I had previously observed.

Last year it looked as if the solution was nigh, if Mr. Gladstone’s spirited eloquence was going to carry the English nation along with it. The seasons, however, have followed one another in due course, bringing with them the usual run of unpaid rent, eviction, and reciprocal violence; a new Crimes Act has been added to the long record of similar measures that the British Parliament has scored against Ireland in eighty-seven years of so-called Union; a few cabins have disappeared, have been unroofed or burnt down by the arm of the bailiff; a few more skulls have been broken; some hundred thousand more wretched beings have embarked in emigrant ships for the United States or Queensland; some more hunger-stricken women and children have swollen the list of obscure victims that green Erin annually pays to the Anglo-Saxon Minotaur. But nothing essential is altered. Things are in the same places and passions at the same pitch. The two nations are facing each other with defiance in their eyes, threats in their mouths, revolvers or dynamite in hand. The problem has not advanced one step. Social war is still there, filling the hearts, paralysing the action, poisoning the springs of life. It may be read in the alarmed looks of mothers, in the sullen faces of men; it is lurking behind every hedge.

Before such an unparalleled case of a whole race’s physiological misery, how could one help being seized with an ardent curiosity mingled with pity? Who would not wish to plunge to the bottom of the matter, to make out, if possible, the secret of the evil, to deduce from it a lesson, and, may be, a general law?

That want I have felt most deeply, and I have tried to gratify it by personal observation; looking at things through my own spectacles, without animus or hatred, passion or prejudice, as they came under my gaze; noting down what seemed to be characteristic; above all, avoiding like poison the contact of the professional politician on either side: then drawing my own conclusion.

I need hardly add that for the intelligence of what I saw, I have always availed myself of the printed sources of information, such as the standard works on Irish history, Black’s excellent Guide to Ireland, the Parliamentary Reports, the national literature, and last but not least the graphic accounts of current events published by the English and native press. Of the Pall Mall Gazette, especially, I must state that I have found its files a mine of precise, well digested, and thoroughly reliable information on the subject.

That my studies are above correction, I will not venture to hope. That they are in every case founded on facts, and, to the best of my belief, accurate, I earnestly vouch. As far as possible, I have made a point of giving the names of the persons mentioned. When it might have been inconvenient to them, however, or when delicacy forbade such a liberty, I have either suppressed the name or substituted a fictitious one. It should be understood that what I wanted, as a total stranger in the country, and what my French readers wanted, were not personal but typical instances.