The “Coercion” which I have found established in Ireland, and which I recognise in the title of this book, is the “Coercion,” not of a government, but of a combination to make a particular government impossible.  It is a “Coercion” applied not to men who break a public law, or offend against any recognised code of morals, but to men who refuse to be bound in their personal relations and their business transactions by the will of other men, their equals only, clothed with no legal authority over them.  It is a “Coercion” administered not by public and responsible functionaries, but by secret tribunals.  Its sanctions are not the law and honest public opinion, but the base instinct of personal cowardice, and the instinct, not less base, of personal greed.  Whether anything more than a steady, firm administration of the law is needed to abolish this “Coercion” is a matter as to which authorities differ.  I should be glad to believe with Colonel Saunderson that “the Leaguers would not hold up the ‘land-grabber’ to execration, and denounce him as they do, unless they knew in fact that the moment the law is made supreme in Ireland the tenants would become just as amenable to it as any other subjects of the Queen.”  But some recent events suggest a doubt whether these “other subjects of the Queen” are as amenable to the law as my own countrymen are.

That the Church to which the great majority of the Irish people have for so many ages, and through so many tribulations, borne steadfast allegiance, has been shaken in its hold upon the conscience of Ireland by the machinery of this odious and ignoble “Coercion,” appears to me to be unquestionable.  That the head of that Church, being compelled by evidence to believe this, has found it necessary to intervene for the restoration of the just spiritual authority of the Church over the Irish people all the world now knows—­nor can I think that his intervention has come a day or an hour too soon, to arrest the progress in Ireland of a social disease which threatens, not the political interests of the empire of which Ireland is a part alone, but the character of the Irish people themselves, and the very existence among them of the elementary conditions of a Christian civilisation.

It would be unjust to the Irish people to forget that this demoralising “Coercion” against which the Head of the Catholic Church has declared war, seems to me to have been seriously reinforced by the Land Legislation of the Imperial Parliament.

No one denies that great reforms and readjustments of the Land Tenure in Ireland needed to be made long before any serious attempt was made to make them.

But that such reforms and readjustments might have been made without cutting completely loose from the moorings of political economy, appears pretty clearly, not only from examples on the continent of Europe, and in my own country, but from the Rent and Tenancy Acts carried out in India under the viceroyalty of Lord Dufferin since 1885.  The conditions of these measures were different, of course, in each of the cases of Oudh, Bengal, and the Punjab, and in none of these cases were they nearly identical with the conditions of any practicable land measure for Ireland.  But two great characteristics seem to me to mark the Indian legislation, which are not conspicuous in the legislation for Ireland.