In politics, as in nature, beneficent powers work
quietly, while destructive agencies sweep across the
world with noise and tumult. The fruit tree grows
in silence; the tempest which uproots it shakes the
earth to its centre. The gradual evolution of
society in the development of art, the softening of
manners, the equalization of justice, the respect
for law, the purity of morals, which are its results
and correlatives, comes about as silently as the growth
of the tree; but the wars which desolate nations,
and the revolutions which destroy in a few months
the work of many centuries, are as tumultuous as the
tempest and as boisterous as the storm.
In Ireland at the present moment this rule holds good
with surprising accuracy. Where the tranquilizing
effect of Lord Ashbourne’s Act attracts but
little attention outside its own immediate sphere,
the Plan of Campaign has everywhere been accompanied
with murder, boycotting, outrage, and the loud cries
of those who, playing at bowls, have to put up with
rubbers. Where men who have retained their sense
of manly honesty and commercial justice, buy their
lands in peace, without asking the world to witness
the transaction—those tenants who, having
for years refused to pay a reduced rent or any portion
of arrears, are at last evicted from the land they
do not care to hold as honest men should, make the
political welkin ring with their complaints, and call
on the nation at large to avenge their wrongs.
And the analogy holds good all through. The Irish
tenant yearns to possess the land he farms. Lord
Ashbourne’s Act enables him to do this by the
benign way of peace, fairness, and self-respect.
The Plan of Campaign, on the other hand, teaches him
the destructive methods of dishonesty and violence.
The one is a legal, quiet, and equitable arrangement,
without personal bitterness, without hysterical shrieking,
without wrong-doing to any one. The other is an
offence against the common interests of society, and
a breach of the law accompanied by crimes against
humanity. The one is silent and beneficent; the
other noisy, uprooting, and malevolent. But as
the powers of growth and development are, in the long
run, superior to those of destruction—else
all would have gone by the board ages ago—the
good done by Lord Ashbourne’s Act will be a living
force in the national history when the evil wrought
by the Plan of Campaign is dead and done with.
By Lord Ashbourne’s Act the Irish tenant can
buy his farm at (an average of) seventeen years’
purchase. He borrows the purchase money from
the Government, paying it back on easy terms, so that
in forty-nine years he becomes the absolute owner
of the property—paying meantime in interest
and gradual diminution of the principal, less than
the present rent. The landlord has about L68 for
every L100 he used to have in rent. This Act
is quietly revolutionizing Ireland, redeeming it from
