THE LAND WAR.

IT is a very common remark amongst the rank and file of Liberal Unionists that whilst it is only too true that the past history of English rule in Ireland is written in fire and blood, it is also a fact that the English Government has of late years devoted its best energies to promoting the welfare of the Irish people, and the said Irish people are a thankless crew not to acknowledge the blessings they have received, and therewith rest content.
    It is not for an Anarchist to contest the point that the English Government has done, and is doing, its best for Ireland. When men band themselves together for the purpose of ruling their fellow men they appear to lose, in their collective capacity, both head and heart, and commit acts of folly and cruelty, of which each as a private individuals would be thoroughly ashamed. There is not a government in the civilised world, from the despotism of Russia to the democracy of America, which is not guilty every year of a series of outrages upon humanity, any one of which would consign any single individual to a prison or a lunatic asylum. The "Representatives of the English people" are neither better nor worse than the rest. The rulers, each and all, are as tyrannical and as arbitrary as the ruled will permit; and the English Government of Ireland is no exception. Let us concede that it is doing its best, and turn to the result.
    It is not four months since the British public was horrified by the story of the blazing huts of Glenbeigh, of the sick child dragged out to die in a pig-sty, of the sticks of furniture, the sole possession of the peasants, destroyed in revenge for their inability to pay black mail to a person calling himself the landlord. We had, perhaps, just been reading some story of the black mail levied upon peaceful workers, by the robber barons of old, and in our smug hypocrisy were thanking God we were not as those men were, nor our days as theirs. And here before our eyes in the common'-place pages of a daily paper started out a tale of guilt and wrong, beside which the story of ancient robbers and their deeds seemed idle and pale. Here were honest, hard-working men and women, who by their labour had made a barren soil productive and habitable, a soil so barren that like that of the Scotch crofters it is some of the poorest under cultivation and yields no surplus produce, and here was a man who had done no work, nor his fathers before him, but who called himself the Lord of the land, and got the other people in a like position in Ireland and England to stand by him in his monstrous claim; they all had a fellow-feeling, for they or their ancestors had, all won their property, as they call it, by cunning or force, and one and all they feared the awakening of the people to consciousness of the theft. This landlord levied black mail on the peasants of Glenbeigh, as a price for leaving them in peace to till the soil. They could only get enough to pay it by hiring themselves out as farm labourers and domestic servants, or from the gifts of their friends in America, and when bad times came and they could not get work, they could no longer pay and live. The love of life is strong: they refused to pay, and were evicted by the aid of an armed English force.
    Since then the English Government has gone on doing its best for Ireland in endeavouring to pass a Coercion Bill, the shameful provisions of which we explained in our Notes last month, and in assisting the revenge of other landlords upon those unfortunate peasants who refuse to pay black mail.
    Evictions are of daily occurrence, but of late the form of the evictions of Glenbeigh has paled before that of the evictions of Bodyke. At the cost of £1,000 a day to the English workers a posse of soldiers and mounted police aids the hirelings of the landgrabber to batter down the walls of the peasants' cottages, break to pieces their poor furniture, and drive off their cattle, whilst the sick youth moans by the roadside, or the mother nurses her baby on the dung heap in the pouring rain.
    Scenes to make a man's blood boil; and after witnessing them Michael Davitt has spoken out words of weight and truth for the ears of all men oppressed and enslaved, whether by landlords or capitalists.
    "The chief criminals in Ireland are landlords and the only crime the crime of eviction . . . . . I was disagreeably surprised at the little resistance that was offered by those turned out . . . . . I have no doubt more determination could have been shown in defence of their rights and their hearthstones if it were not for the way in which men like myself--for I accuse myself and others in this movement--have been preaching to our people for the last seven or eight

years: Don't commit any outrage, don't be guilty of any violence, don't break the law . . . . . I am heartily ashamed of ever having given such advice to the Irish people . . . . . Just look at the example that has been set us now by the farmers of North Wales. They are defending their rights-aye, as men with hearts in their bosoms which claim to have the courage in their manhood ought to stand by such rights . . . . ."
    All honour to the man who, after soul wearying years of imprisonment, dares thus to own himself in the wrong for his misplaced moderation, and speak the truth that may once more consign him to a convict's cell. All honour to the brave Irish peasantry, men and women, who, disregarding the councils of politicians, resist the tyranny of the evictors by all means at their disposal, who barricade their homes, and greet the crow-bar brigade with boiling water and boiling meal, with swarms of bees, and deluges of whitewash. All honour to kindly neighbours who lend all hands to the task of re-instating the evicted, so that the last of the red-coats has scarcely disappeared over the hill before the smoke is rising again from the dismantled hut. All honour to the energetic Welsh farmers, too, who have driven the tithe collectors from their valleys, and defied the crack college of Oxford and the Ecclesiastical Commissioners to exact a penny from the produce of their labour. All honour to the heroic Kelts of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, who are leading the land war, and setting at naught that bogey of law which is the formulated injustice of Society.
    Let us leave the government of the property owners to do its best to hold us peasants, labourers, and workmen alike beneath the heel of our masters; and let us boldly recognise, with Michael Davitt, that it is only by direct revolutionary action that the despoiled can meet the violence, masked and unmasked, of the monopolists.

PRACTICAL QUESTIONS.

WE said in our last issue that "Nationalisation of Land." if it becomes the watchword of the next movement in this country, will simply mean nothing more than the expropriation of the landed aristocracy, and the seizure of land by the middle classes; the creation of middle-class land proprietors who may prosper for a number of years, and even increase the amount of agricultural produce raised in this country, who will monopolise the land in their turn; while the small land-proprietor will be ruined by competition, taxes, and mortgages. In short, something like what happened in France by the end of the last century, when the soil was also transferred on a large scale from the landed aristocracy to the wealthier farmers and peasants.
    Is it worth moving a finger for so pitiable a result?
    To this our Socialist friends will probably answer that their work will not be lost; that by the time when some modification in the present system of property grows ripe, their propaganda will also bear its fruits; and that it will result as well in a nationalisation of the mines, the manufactures, and the means of communication.
    We hope so too. But we cannot restrain from asking, Are our Socialist friends really preparing to achieve this result, and if they are, what ways and means do they propose for accomplishing the desired modification?
    The question is the more necessary, as it often happens now that after having formulated the aims of Socialism, the realisation of those aims is considered as something very remote, so remote that it must be left to future generations. Many a "sympathiser" joins the ranks of Socialism precisely because he sees in it nothing that might be realised soon; while earnest Socialists are precisely those who consider that an attempt at bringing their principles into life must be made at the next opportunity, and they prepare the opportunity itself.
    If it is meant in earnest that the next movement in Europe must be an attempt towards restoring the land, the machinery, and the capital to the producers, it is high time to consider also the means of realising this immense change. Of course, we do not mean that a programme of action ought to be traced beforehand. The General Staff of Germany may trace beforehand a plan of invasion of France in all its details--we can not. The chief element for a sudden modification of institutions centuries old is the people; and no politician can foresee how the movement of ideas may grow in the masses of the people.
    But there are, at least, some leading features which ought to be

agreed to; some leading principles, so important that not to settle them would simply mean to move without knowing where to go, and thus prepare the indubitable failure of the undertaking.
    One of these features which we already have insisted upon, is that of local and extra-parliamentary action. And we maintain that nobody can concretely reason upon the ways and means of modifying the present system of property without perceiving that unless there is local action, unless full play to local initiative is given, the change cannot be even so much as attempted.
    Suppose that a Government, or, a body of representatives who have driven away the people sitting now at Westminster, and who proclaim themselves Government, launch decrees to the effect that all the land, all manufactures, and railways are proclaimed a property of the State. Will anything be changed?
    The decrees will remain dead letter, because every land-proprietor and every proprietor of manufactures would arm a band of cut throats to defend his property. And as long as it is not seized de facto by somebody, he will remain proprietor of the land or of the factures.
    What a nice collection could be made of decrees launched, not only by dictators but even by so powerful a body as the Convention, whose watchword was "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity--or Death!"--death very speedily following the menace,--decrees which remained dead letter, and even had not so much as a beginning of accomplishment!
    But suppose the private property is seized in the name of the nation--what next? We are told, the Socialists will organise the production. But which production? The wage-production of our days, when the State will supersede the employer? Is it possible? And the production of what? Of velvet? of lace? of jewellery? of cottons and iron for export to France and Italy while the world-trade will be shaken by the commotion? Of objects of luxury while there will be no corn for feeding the masses, because the revolted Russian, Hungarian, and Indian peasants surely will prefer to keep the corn for themselves instead of selling it every autumn for the payment of taxes?
    Thousands of like questions rise before the mind as soon as one, begins to reason about the possible organisation of society on new Socialist principles. And we, earnestly invite all those who take heart the cause of Socialism to discuss those questions.
    We invite them the more to do so because we are persuaded that as soon as they discuss concretely the means of realising the changes they aim at, they will be compelled to arrive, as we did, at the following conclusions:--
    The change cannot be made by law, It must result from thousands of separate local actions, all directed towards the same aim. It cannot be dictated by a central body: it must result from the numberless local needs and wants.
    And the change must aim above all at satisfying the wants of the. masses; its starting-point must be in the wants of the consumers,--not in the present production, which takes no account of these wants, And if it takes these wants for its starting-point, it unavoidably will come to the necessity of immediately taking a Communist direction--instead of trying the mitigated wage system of Collectivism.
    We shall return again to this last, most important question. In the meantime let us remind our Socialist friends that Socialism is already entering a new phasis of development. Its critical phasis, when it merely criticised the existing conditions, is already accomplished. The criticism has been done under all aspects. It remains only to spread its results and to induce everybody to act up to it.
    But let us not remain indefinitely in this first phasis. One of the causes why former attempts at bringing Socialism into life failed was --among others--the want of a concrete idea as to the ways and means for realising the aims of Socialism.
    Let us not repeat the same error.

EVICTION.

STRETCH'D a score of straggling hovels scatter'd down the mountain
    side,
Throng'd the tenants at each threshold famine-stricken, terror-eyed;
Age in every shape of suffering, feebleness, decrepitude--
Manhood fire-eyed, husky-throated,--tear-brimm'd, wan-faced woman-
    hood,
Youth wild-wondering, expectant, awestruck in an unknown dread,--
Infancy, eye wonder lacking in the sharper lack of bread;
All a hamlet watching, waiting; terror-stricken, dazed, aghast;
Such a night upon the moor-side, roofless in the winter-blast!
All the straggling, scattered hamlet waiting, watching through the
    snow,
For the crowning act of "justice,"-for--Rent's lawful murder-blow!

Scatter'd, huddled by the moorside, all a hamlet's chattels, cast,
Thrust from hovel, hut and cabin, to the snow-drift and the waste
Crouch'd around each little home-wreck, round each squalid household
    heap,
Age and infancy and sickness in as squalid clusters creep;
While a score of clanking troopers, while a score of arm'd police,
Guard "emergencies" commiss'd in the name of law and peace,
By a Christian queen's strict warrant, 'neath a Christian government,
To unhouse, unroof a village in the sacred name of Rent!

--From 'The Dawning Grey,' by J. H DELL.

WOMEN'S LABOUR.

MANY Socialists have joined in the outcry of certain Trade Unionists and Radicals against the employment of women in work which the women think suitable and the men do not. They have done so on the plea that the women's labour is simply used by capitalists to reduce men's wages. Their argument is perfectly correct as far as it goes, but it goes a very little way. Roughly speaking, it is probably true that the total of men's wages is decreased by something like the amount they would require to support the said women as their chattel-slaves. The women become the wage-slaves of the capitalist, and the workman is deprived of his dependent domestic serf. A man and woman both working often earn between them only about as much as the man alone could earn before the competition of women came into his labour market; or, putting it in another way, about as small a share of the fruit of their labour falls into the hands of the wage-workers as a class, if women are employed in productive labour, or if they were not so occupied. But if the women work outside their homes, they become independent of their lovers and male relatives, and the family is broken up.
    After all this is the great point. Amid the misery of this period of transition, and its misery would be hard to exaggerate, this solid good remains; the individualist family system, i.e., the dependence of the individual woman upon the individual man, is being slowly and surely undermined, and with it one of the bases of our detestable civilisation.
    It is a necessary step towards the realisation of a free Socialism that men and women alike should learn to recognise their direct relation to society; that they should be loosed from individual dependence and individual obligation, and learn to live and work directly for the commonwealth, for each and all-not for this person and that.
    True, landlord and capitalist effectually stand in the way of any such common and social life and work in the present; but landlord and capitalist are frankly recognised as enemies to be overcome by every worker who is at all awake to his position; whereas, the idea that each individual man must necessarily have the support of his wife and children hung round his neck like Christian's burden of sins, is fixed in the minds of many as a law of the Medes and Persians. Nevertheless, the increasing competition of women in the labour-market is a direct negative to this assumption. This competition, with all its attendant ills, is yet one of the disturbing forces at work in our rotten social system, preparing the way for the growth of new and more healthy human relations in the future. In the present, too, it is helping to form the army of the down-trodden workers into line.
    When a large number of women have come into direct personal conflict with the masters, they will cease the opposition to revolutionary action, which at present hang a dead weight upon the cause. How many a well-meaning fellow accepts a dog's terms from his master today because his wife is so afraid he will lose his place if he dares to resist. Whereas, if she were directly and personally galled by the employer's brutality, she would be ready to face any privation rather than submit. The time is passing when factory owners found their female "hands" so humble and submissive. When men and women work together and a strike is agreed upon, e.g., in the chain trade, the women are by no means the first to give in. And when women are brought into direct conflict with the cruelty and injustice, as in the land war in Scotland and Ireland, they often display, as Michael Davitt truly said at Bodyke, more revolutionary spirit than men.
    To turn from general considerations to the special subject of discussion now before the public, the employment of women at the pit brow.
    I suppose if there is one universal medical prescription which might safely and advantageously be given to the whole mass of puny and ailing women in the United Kingdom, it is, adopt a comfortable and rational style of dress, and take up some useful and sociable out-of-doors occupation which will exercise and develop your muscles. Those of us who have lived in the country know how gladly many women hail the summer field work, heavy and exhausting as it is, for the health-giving change it brings them. The work of a pit-girl may be dirty and hard, but she leads a healthier life and one more worthy of a human being than most of the fine ladies who live on her labour, or the maid-servants who wait on those ladies' whims and caprices.
    One more word out of the many to be said on this matter. What I claim have any class or section of the community to forcibly decide for another what is or is riot a "suitable" occupation for them? What has become of the old Radical precept, wholesome as far as it went, about class legislation? Have our Radical fellow-workers found the legislation of capital for labour such an unmixed blessing, that they set about the analagous business of the legislation of men for women? As for us, our cause is that of the down-trodden and oppressed of humanity, whether they be men or women, not the temporary relief--such relief is never more than temporary--of this section or that at the expense of the others. Surely our Socialist comrades, of any school, fall short of their own beliefs when they espouse a sectional dispute amongst the workers, whose cause, could they but realise it, is one and indivisible.

"Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity, self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but mariners and custorns."--Emerson.

THE LOGIC OF COMMUNISM

IT is a Common cant with many of those who are on the road to Socialism that in the renovated order which they contemplate, each worker shall enjoy the full fruits of his own labour. (Even our comrades of the Socialist League, while preaching on one page of the Commonweal pure Communist doctrine, have on others held out this promise to the proletariat). It is a promise that in reality is meaningless, and in the meaning commonly attached to it, delusive and impossible to be fulfilled. That the phrase should be used is intelligible enough. We charge against the prevailing social system that by it the workers are robbed of the wealth which they produce, by the exaction of rents for the opportunities of working. And it seems merely restating the same truth to say that when we have destroyed that system, each man shall reap the full product of his own activity. It is necessary to recognise clearly that the proposition cannot be connected in this manner, and that Socialism cannot, if it would, make any such promise.
    It is assumed by those who do confidently make it, that, once the law-supported monopoly of the material instruments of production is done away, every man will receive from Society a meed of wealth proportional to the usefulness of his work. Calling themselves Socialists, they speak as though this were the full content of Socialism, and our aim were no more than the removal of certain artificially privileged classes of pillagers, in order that the shares in the game of grab may thenceforward be divided by natural abilities and opportunities alone. (If this statement be judged unfair, it need not be pressed). But the real weakness of the position we would criticise lies more generally in the assumption that in a socialised community, and consistently with Socialist principles, the value of a man's work can be appraised and the actual product of the activity of individuals assigned to them, in some manner analogous to the remuneration of different sections of the proletariat at the present time.
    We speak, in the language of the prevailing industrial system, of the work of one as more valuable than that of another. But as Socialists we can never forget that the "value" of such services is and can be appraised only by competition. If we admit the most elementary and fundamental principle of Socialism, we leave ourselves no power of claiming that there is any justification, á priori, for the more able worker receiving a more ample remuneration. For we recognise, firstly, that every man's powers for useful work are vested in him by pure accident. Each man's abilities, of brain or sinew, are the apex of a million converging threads of physical and social evolution, and bow should be be entitled more than his brother or sister, or any man or woman of his nation, to be clothed in purple and fine linen and fare sumptuously while others go bare and hungry, merely for his exercise of this deposit of human energy. Nay, transfer him, ability and all, from his present social environment, and he may be unable to produce anything that could be called wealth at all, either for his own needs or for other's satisfaction. All his powers are due to Society, and all his opportunities for their exercise. Who, then, save Society itself, has any claim of right to the product of those powers and opportunities?
    Secondly, we remember that in developed societies, no man's wealth is the actual product of his own activity. The division of labour has ended that. Whatever a worker in a modern community may be producing, his wealth is the amount of necessaries-comforts, or advantages which lie receives in exchange, But the fact that he can exchange the product of his labour for anything depends entirely on the utility of that labour for others. The tailor may starve in a country where clothes are unknown, as the clothmaker may starve in England if the fashion changes. Each man's power to produce "wealth" depends upon the wants of his fellows.
    Seeing then, how each man's ability is purely relative, how each depends upon his fellows for his own efficiency, how every generation owes more than the last to all that have preceded it, we are forced irresistibly to the conclusion that all labour must be recognised as essentially gratuitous, and that it is impossible by any considerations of merit or of natural propriety to assign a higher wage to one willing worker than to another.
    How is it that those who speak of "the product of a man's own labour" never go further, and try to define what the product of a man's "own" labour is? The contention of Socialism is that in no circumstances is it possible to do this. As between co-workers in the same industry, the director and the executor of directions, the land, the instruments and machines, the present workers and the generations out of whom they and their industry and their nation have been unfolded, who can sift and separate the contribution to the product of each of the elements assisting? Where the crop of one field has failed through drought, and that of the neighbour has had rain in season, what is the product of the labourer where no crop has ripened, and of him who has reaped the abundant harvest?
    There is no means of judging on the premises attainable, and the only guide for the distribution of the products that remains is that equality should be aimed at, and equality not of quantity of goods but of satisfaction therefrom, for thus will the whole amount of satisfaction be greatest for the community. When a roan is willing to work from social motives, he will delight to work to his full strength, and his reward cannot be meted in material wealth. From the Socialist

point of view, for moralised, developed, socialized human beings, there can be but one rule for work and wages--

"From each according to his ability,
To each according to his needs."

S.O.

PRISONS AND THEIR EFFECTS.

THERE is no question with which Anarchists are more commonly met than, "What is to be done with criminals in a society where there is no government? You say that the present system of coercion is a cruel wrong to human nature; you say that the masses, when they rise to overthrow the economic tyranny of the property owners, will destroy all this elaborate machinery of law-court and prison, and indeed it is a fact that the opening of prison doors has been a prominent feature of popular revolts; but surely you cannot wish and intend to let the criminal class loose upon society?" And the most selfish and brutal of respectable objectors will go on discoursing about the "criminal class" in the tone of the Pharisee of all ages when be has occasion to allude to the Publican.
    Even people whose kindly disposition shrinks from carelessly condemning other human beings to a fate which they themselves look upon with loathing, and who are consequently dissatisfied with existing penal arrangements, are afraid to face the abolition of the institutions they shrink from and prefer to contemplate some reform which may mitigate the sufferings of "criminals."
    But those of our readers who are too honest to trifle with their sense of humanity and justice, and who long to free themselves from the prejudices that divide man from man, are probably already in revolt against the theory that any class of men should be treated as social scapegoats on whom is laid the burden and pain of the errors and faults of all; they do not see the right and justice of "society first," as Lord Coleridge said, ""manufacturing criminals and then punishing them." To such minds the point of view suggested by our comrade P. Kropotkine in the concluding chapters of his recently published work on Prisons¹ will be interesting and welcome.
    After relating his personal experience of Russian prisons, in the capacity both of official and of prisoner, describing the horrors of the Russian penal system, and of exile in Siberia and Sakhalin island, and the neat and orderly wretchedness of French prison life, he goes on to dwell upon the terrible moral and physical degradation resulting from imprisonment, even under the best regulated conditions:
    "One fact--the most striking in our penal institutions--is, that as soon as a man has been in prison, there is three chances to one that he will return thither very soon after his release. . . . Whatever the schemes hitherto introduced either for the seclusion of prisoners, or for the prevention of conversation, prisons have remained nurseries of criminal education."
    Why?
    "First of all, none of the condemned people--a few exceptions apart --recognise that their condemnation is just." They are the unlucky people who get caught-the biggest rascals are the lucky ones outside and the warders and officials who bully and fleece the prisoners within; and the prisoner spends his prison days in planning how he may be equally fortunate.
    Secondly the degrading labour. "There is labour and labour; there is the free labour, which raises the man, which releases his brain from painful or morbid thoughts--the free labour which makes a man feel a part of the immense life of the world. And there is the forced labour of the slave which degrades man, which is done reluctantly, only from fear of a worse punishment, and such is prison labour. . . . While all humanity works for the maintenance of their life, the man who picks oakum is condemned to perform a work which nobody Deeds. He is an outcast. And if be treats society as an outcast would, we can accuse nobody but ourselves."
    Thirdly: Isolation fro healthy, moral influences, and all social ties. "In a prisoner's greyish life, which flows without passions and emotions, all those best feelings which may improve human character soon die away. Even those workmen who like their trade and find some aesthetic satisfaction in it, lose their taste for it. Physical energy is soon killed in prison."
    It is interesting to note how completely this view of the evil of social isolation in prison life is endorsed by Mr. Horsley, the wellknown Chaplain of Clerkenwell, who is certainly no Anarchist: "It is the monotony, the solitude, the absence of all contact with the outside world which renders hard labour fatal." He says--"You need above all to flood the gaol with the vivifying influences of healthy outside life." "Since prisons were centralised under the Home Office, officialism has become more and more exclusive. Discipline is regarded as the be-all and end-all of our prisons, and anything that would give officials more trouble or endanger the perfection of discipline at present attained is frowned upon. But the result is disastrous to the prisoners. They may become better automata when inside jail, but they are worse men when they go out."

¹ In Russian and French Prisons.' By P. Kropotkine. Ward and Downey.

    The absence of all passing impressions upon the brain such as crowd upon and freshen the life of a free man, and the absence of all opportunity to exercise the will generally, already too weak in the criminal, are regarded by Kropotkine as two great causes of the moral and physical deterioration of imprisoned men, and both are essentially the outcome of our highly organised penal system. Moreover everything is done in our prisons to destroy a man's self-respect. "He is a numbered thing, which must move about according to regulations. . . . A rancorous feeling against a society which always was but a step-mother to him grows within the prisoner. He accustoms himself to hate-cordially to hate-all those I respectable' people who so wickedly kill his best feelings in him."
    After alluding to the morbid imagination of the mind cast upon itself, which make our prisons hot-beds for the most revolting forms of vice I Kropotkine goes on to inquire if, after all, prisons, with all their abominations and all their cruelty, are a necessary evil.
    "Prisons do not moralise their inmates ; they do not deter them from crime. And the question arises: What shall we do with those who break, not only the written law-that sad growth of a sad past-but also those very principles of morality which every man feels in his own heart!
    We propose next month to summarise Kropotkine's answer to this question, for those of our readers who have not been able meanwhile to procure and read it for themselves.

LAW AND ORDER IN IRELAND.

THE most scathing indictments of the proceedings of successive English Governments in Ireland may be found in the hearty condemnations which the new men in office passed upon the actions of their predecessors.
    When the kinglet from Scotland took the reins in hand he professed to be able to guide the refractory Irish into the paths of peace and his own immediate flunkeys and toadies into those of prosperity at one and the same time.
    Instead of the heaps of ashes and carcases made by Elizabeth's soldiery, James desired to have little farms well-tilled and pastures well-filled whence would flow a rich stream of gold into the royal coffers.
    The beginning of his reign promised well, for, to quote the notorious sycophant Sir John Davis, "the people having been brayed, as it were, in a mortar, with sword, famine and pestilence, submitted themselves to the English Government, received the laws and magistrates and most gladly embraced the king's pardon and peace in all parts with demonstrations of joy and comfort."
    James having loudly condemned Elizabeth's policy of force and famine, opened his campaign of fraud and treachery by protesting that he was going to place the means of appealing to the protection of English lam, within the reach of every one. The native or Brehon law being totally abolished on the grounds that it was nought but "a lewd and damnable custom," the poor man was at length to be allowed to lift up his voice against the oppression of the rich, and Ulster was selected as the spot whereon to test this Utopian scheme. There the chieftains, who had received regrants of land from Henry VIII., occupied the position of nineteenth century landlords, ignoring as they did all rights or claims to the land of the humbler members of their tribes.
    It was the tribesmen that English law professed in 1603 to take under its loving care and protection. And this is how it was done.
    The Ulster chiefs on tendering their submission to James obtained their letters patent on condition of their promising to exercise authority solely over their demesne lands and yielding up all claim to the rest of the tribal territories, out of which they were to receive as compensation a fixed rent-charge, instead of the irregular "cosherings" by which they had hitherto harrassed their unfortunate tribesmen. This land-reform did not, however, penetrate to the stratum of people whom it would have benefited most.
    Sir John Davis (the Attorney-General) rightly conjectured that his master would be satisfied if the chieftains' resources were crippled, so he proceeded no further in the working of the reform than in establishing the sub-chiefs into freeholders, under whom the great mass of the people became mere tenants-at-will.
    But to give the thing an air of justice, or rather, legality, royal commissions were appointed to survey the land and to enquire into titles. Of which the first result was the plunging of the northern chiefs into the toils of litigation.
    The suit of Tyrone v. O'Kane, concerning rights claimed by the former over territory belonging to the latter, ended in the Court's deciding that neither bad any right to the land in question as it had been vested in the Crown since 1570. This is but one of the many lawsuits that gave infinite satisfaction to to the lawyers of the period.
    In fact Ireland for a whole century came to be regarded as a land where large estates could be won by modes which did not require very strict honesty or prolonged application. It was sufficient to represent to James that a certain man's land was too vast for a mere Irishman to induce that free-handed monarch to make over one-half or two-thirds of the coveted soil to the Scotch or English applicant. Much interesting information as to the ways in which Irish estates could be acquired may be found in the accurate diaries and family histories of certain Scotch lairds. We refer the curious particularly to the Montgomery MSS.
    The most astounding turn in the legal machinery took place in 1611, five years after the flight of the earls Tyrone and Tyrconnel. These men, notwithstanding their avowed loyalty and compliance with the conditions of their letters patent, had been perpetually harrassed by the suspicions of the Government, and so dogged by its spies that Tyrone complained "he could not even drink a full carouse of sack but the State was in a few hours advertised thereof." Feeling that their liberties if not their lives were not worth an hour's purchase, Tyrone and Tyrconnel embarked with their families for Italy and died exiles at Rome.
    The same year, 1606, King James issued a proclamation that all the inhabitants of Ulster were to be secured in their possessions and that he had taken them under his special protection. It was indeed a special protection, for his Majesty in 1611 announced that by the treason of the earls the whole of Ulster was to be escheated to the Crown. And treating the confiscated counties as so much opportunely-created blank space, James proceeded to carry out a long-cherished idea, the making of a new plantation in Ireland, as if he were beginning one in some part of America.
    A most careful and accurate survey of the land was made. The surveyors being protected in their work by strong *military escorts. The province was found to contain 2,836,837 acres, of which 511,465 were valuable, or "fat" land, To the four-fifths of lean land the native proprietors were requested to betake themselves and the 511,465 acres were divided between 109 English and Scotch undertakers, sixty servitors, various educational and ecclesiastical bodies, and the London

guilds. The ruck of the people were disposed of variously. Gangs were despatched to Kerry, Tipperary and Roscommon, where let us hope they became the progenitors of the sons of the soil who are to-day resisting legal tyranny. Many were drafted off to Sweden and "induced," to enlist under the swashbuckler, Gustavus Adolphus.
    A lesson had been drawn from the failure of the Munster plantation. There the land had been given out in grants that proved to be too large to be manageable. In Ulster the planters were so massed together as to serve as a strength and a protection to each other. In Munster, too, many of the peasantry bad been allowed to remain and by making terms, hard enough one may be sure, with the landlords, they managed little by little to regain a foothold on their native soil. But in Ulster only enough were spared to act as hewers of wood and drawers of water to the planters. However the greed of the new men ate into the wise precautions of the Scotch Solomon. They had been forbidden to take any save English or Scotch as tenants and ordered to give to these leases of twenty-one years. The farmers, who took the farms on the vague promise of such leases found when they bad expended money on the land that it was the planters' intent to exploit them, and very sensibly "sold their interest in the holdings and the value of the capital they had sunk" to the natives who were only too ready to get back on to the fat land at any price and at any risk. This practice was not disencouraged by the planters, who naturally preferred less independent tenants whom they might squeeze as sponges of the uttermost farthing.

THE STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM.

ANARCHISTS are credited by their opponents with many dire vices and crimes, but it is generally admitted that they have at least one good quality--they stick to their principles.
    It is true that in the opinion of many persons this is a rather disparaging admission, after all, an admission which makes Anarchism, in a society where every one changes his opinions as the wind blows, a sort of rará avis. or rather a "public nuisance." Our adversaries do not presume to stick to principles themselves, and indeed they cannot afford it.
    Of course we do not refer here to bourgeois e adversaries. Those lawyers who profess one opinion in court to assist their clients and keep another to themselves, those statesmen who are credited with monstrous duplicity in their dealings with each other and with people at large, those merchants who have their own double standard of honesty, etc., cannot be expected to have scruples of conscience as to the conformity of their conduct with abstract principles. Nay, have they abstract principles?
    But here are workmen striving for their emancipation, not a few of whom, quite in good faith, are made to believe that in order to succeed in their aim they must have a double platform; one for the great doomsday of the Bourgeoisie, another for the every-day campaign; or one set of principles for their own consumption, or rather contemplation--to enliven their hopes and delight their spirits in the prospect of a rather distant millenium,--the other to be acted upon!
    Principles are not to be questioned, they are told; but there are two ways to evade their logical consequences. One-which has been lately illustrated by the attitude assumed by State Socialists in regard to the miners' strike in Belgiumconsists in putting to every principle, which stands on the order of the day, the previous question, that the time has not yet arrived to carry it into effect. This is a very common device. Republicans and monarchists in constitutional monarchies, absolutists and constitutionaIists in despotic countries, Radicals and State Socialists in republics, etc., all these people only disagree with each other and ultimately with the Anarchist on a question of time.
    Nay, even in the matter of means, the same explanation holds good. If the Labour Party goes for eight hours, it is only, they say, because nowadays more cannot be done. If the labour representatives make for office, it is only because at this moment there is no other a vantage to be reaped by the working classes but just this ministerial salary, which the labour representatives hasten to lay hands on. We may go farther and note that ministers are so infatuated with their Coercion Act and Jubilee celebration only because, a's they would tell us, the time is not yet come for better legislation, nor the people educated for it. In one word, the fatal stroke on the clock of history has not been yet heard by the privileged persons who only can, if they so chose, hear it!
    But after all, are not even the most ardent conservatives inclined to admit that there will come, perhaps in a score of centuries, an age when people will live on a footing of equality, happy in their brotherly relations, well off in the exercise of labour, moralised by comfort and solidarity. But, mind, it cannot be now. So they say, and by these words they stop in argument--they would be only too glad if they could stop in fact--the progress of Humanity.
    Now there is a second form of the policy of inconsistency, for an illustration of which we may point to the late municipal election in Paris and to the feelings of admiration it has excited amongst a certain class of Socialists. This method of evading principles is as simple as the first. It is--accept a principle as to the end to be attained, and supersede it in practice by its contrary, and stand ultimately exclusively by the latter.
    The end may be the destruction of the present economical and political system; but the "means" fall far short of this final goal, and remaining a long distance within the present organisation, they allow people who ultimately aim at the thorough destruction of the status quo to temporarily partake in its luxuries.
    There is no little fun in this joke. Theoretical Anarchists sitting in the House of Commons to "educate" actual and ex-prime ministers; working men trying their hands at capitalistic enterprises just to study "how they are done people offering themseleves to degradation, like the drunken slaves at Spartan feasts, only to put them in office--these and like tragic-comedies are presented to us by the distinguishers between ends and means. Of course, sometimes it really happens that even this awkward display of inconsistency brings some good to our cause. It must gain even by our most glaring faults, and by the very crimes of our enemies. But then we are not going to shake hands with enemies; nor are we going to throw ourselves again over the precipice; for once having fallen over it, we have been able to come up with depths wiser men, bent on walking more prudently in future.

NOTICES