22 THE LAND QUESTION.
sive, more heartless and hopeless, than feudalism ? whether, amid the abundance their labor creates, the producers of wealth are to be content in good times with the barest of livings and in bad times to suffer and to starve ? What is involved in this Irish Land Question is not a mere local matter between Irish landlords and Irish tenants, but the great social problem of modern civilization. What is arraigned in the arraignment of the claims of Irish land- lords is nothing less than the wide-spread institution of private property in land. In the assertion of the natural rights of the Irish people is the assertion of the natural rights that, by virtue of his existence, pertain everywhere to man. It is probable that the Irish agitators did not at first perceive the real bearing and importance of the question they took in hand. But they the more intelligent and earnest of them, at least must now begin to realize it.* Yet, save, perhaps, on the part of the ultra-Tories, who would resist any concession as the opening of a door that cannot again be shut, there is on all sides a disposition to ignore the real nature of the question, and to treat it as springing from conditions peculiar to Ireland. On the one hand, there is a large class in England and elsewhere, who, while willing to concede or even actually desire that something should be done for Ireland, fear any extension of the agitation into a questioning of the rights of landowners elsewhere. And, on the other hand, the' Irish leaders seem anxious to confine attention in the same way, evidently fearing that, should the question assume a broader aspect, strong forces now with them might fall away and, perhaps to a large extent, become directly and strongly antagonistic.
- The Irish World, which, though published in New York, has
exerted a large influence upon the agitation on both sides of the Atlantic, does realize, and has from the first frankly declared, that the fight must be against landlordism in toto and everywhere.
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