red on many accounts. It will bring the clergy in
Ireland face to face with the situation, which will be a good thing
both for them and for the people; and it should result in making an end
of the pernicious influence upon the popular mind of such extraordinary
theological outgivings; for example, as the circular issued in 1881 to
the clergy and laity of Meath by the Bishop of that diocese, in which it
was laid down that "the land of every country is the common property of
the people of that country, because its real owner, the Creator who made
it, has transferred it as a voluntary gift to them."

Language of this sort addressed to ignorant multitudes must do harm of
course whenever and by whomsoever used. It must tend to evil if
addressed by demagogues to the Congress of a Trade Union. But it must do
much more harm when uttered with the seeming sanction of the Church by a
mitred bishop to congregations already solicited to greed, cunning, and
dishonesty, by an unscrupulous and well-organised "agitation."

Not less instructive than Mr. Davitt's outburst from the Church is his
almost furious denunciation of the Irish tenants who obeyed an instinct,
thought honourable to mankind in most ages and countries, by agreeing
together to present to their landlord, Earl Fitzwilliam, a token of
their respect and regard on the celebration of his golden wedding day.

These tenants are denounced, not because they were paying homage to a
tyrannical or an unworthy landlord, though Mr. Davitt was so transported
beyond his ordinary and cooler self with rage at their action that he
actually stooped to something like an insinuation of disbelief in the
excellence of Lord Fitzwilliam's character. The true and avowed burden
of his diatribe was that no landlord could possibly deserve well of his
tenants. The better he is as a man, the more they ought to hate him as a
landlord.

The ownership of land, in other words, is of itself in the eyes of Mr.
Davitt what the ownership of a slave was in the eyes of the earlier
Abolitionists--crime so monstrous as to be beyond pardon or endurance.
If this be true of Great Britain and Ireland, where no allodial tenure
exists, how much more true must it be of New York? And if true of the
man who owns a thousand acres, it must be equally true of the man who
owns an acre. There could not be a better illustration than Mr. Davitt
has given in his attack on the Fitzwilliam tenants of the precise
accuracy of what