Borris would be forgotten, and all his confidence in Irish sincerity and loyalty annihilated. though he was irreconcilably hostile to fixity of tenure, he thought that the principle of free sale might be further extended wherever it did not interfere with the claims of justice or with the moral authority of the landlord, to which he continued to attach great importance. To this end the landlord was to have "a veto on an objectionable incoming tenant," and in districts For Ireland, however, Kavanagh was able to do pretty nearly as much out of doors as he could have done in the House of Commons. Mr. Gladstone's Land Act of 1881 created a new sphere for his activity. He had supported such parts of the first Land Act as he thought, under existing circumstances, might be the lesser of where enormous sums have been spent by the two evils, thus showing himself no enemy landlords in improving their properties -on to exceptional legislation when necessary. some few properties it has been proved that But the second he denounced in terms the English system exists in its purity, the which carried conviction to every impartial mind. If we quote one passage from a speech made at the Rotunda on a phase of the question which has long since become ancient history, it is only because a disposition has been manifested to apply the same principle to the tithe question. It has been announced [he said] that the rent is to be fixed, not according to the value of the land itself, but according to the capability of the occupying tenant to get value out of it. The extravagance of such a principle is too glaring to require comment. A holding may be of the best description, the land of the richest quality, with every facility for realizing its productiveness. It may be that these very facilities were conferred by the landlord's expenditure. But according to this new theory, if it be held by a drunkard, a thriftless, idle, or slovenly tenant, who fails to work the holding to profit, the landlord is to get nothing out of it: A direct premium is held out to all kinds of extravagance, by which it would not be difficult for the tenant to arrive at the stage of not paying any rent at all.. It was We have another announcement not a whit less extraordinary in the case of a tenant holding a rich bit of meadow-land in the vicinity, I think, of the city of Limerick. proved that the land had been of considerable value from its fertility. But this went for nothing on the landlord's behalf, because it was proved for the tenant that by taking excellent crops off it year by year, without putting a single bit of manure on it, he had completely exhausted it. The rent was reduced to the value, I believe, to which the tenant had by his wanton and, I might almost say, his malicious conduct, deteriorated it. Kavanagh was a member of the Bessborough Commission appointed in July, 1880, and he sent in a separate report which we have at full length in an appendix. It is extremely interesting, and testifies to the firm grasp of the subject which Kavanagh possessed, as well as to the breadth and liberality of his views, and the openness and flexibility of his mind. He thought that the act of 1870 did not give quite enough security to the tenant; and landlords having made all the improvements and on holdings where tenant right formerly existed and has been bought up by the landlord, instances of which have been provedits extension or re-establishment would in my rantable and arbitrary interference with rights opinion be simple confiscation, and an unwarof property which the circumstances could in no sense justify. His great work at this time, however, was the Land Corporation, of which he gave a full account in a letter to the Times, of June 24, 1882. On the 17th of March following, the company was registered, and the effect was instantaneous. The object of it was to counteract the operations of the League, and this it was proposed to do by the formation of a fund for the cultivation of derelict lands— lands, that is, for which the owner could find no occupier in consequence of League intimidation. The Corporation would either advance him the money wherewith to cultivate it himself, or take it off his hands and farm it for him. If necessary, they would buy it. It might be asked how they could procure labor; but it is to be noted that Kavanagh, in his Bessborough report, comments on the fact that the genuine agricultural laborer in Ireland had little in common with the farmers either small or great. There was therefore no difficulty on that score. The mere threat of handing over the land to the Corporation was often enough to bring the tenant to his senses; and in a letter to Mr. W. H. Smith in September, 1888, Kavanagh gives some examples of its working which inspire him with good hopes for the future. Tenants were beginning to come forward on several estates for the evicted farms, even on less favorable terms than were offered them in the beginning of the struggle. In fact all Kavanagh's belief in the possible regeneration of his country was founded on what he held to be an in disputable fact, namely, that there were two Irelands, of one of which the outside than is necessary to promote a healthy circulation. The class above is constantly recruited from among the fittest of the class below. Such men are very likely to amass money, and to add acre to acre till they accumulate a small estate. Where the owners of land are miscellaneous, and buy it for a variety of reasons, there will always be sellers; and thus the danger of subdivision is counteracted as fast as it arises. But where a class of petty farmers is created by artificial means; where the growth is forced by State assistance; where the occupier is turned into an owner, not because he is fit to be a propri etor, but because he is unwilling to be a tenant; where the owners of the land would all belong to one class, with no other prospects in life than what is afforded by it, the case is very different indeed. Under the one system the tendency is always towards consolidation, in the other towards subdivision. In the one there is change, variety, and progress; in the other immobility and stagnation. world knew very little, and two sources of Moreover, under the artificial system you do not get a picked class who have raised themselves by their own merits, and whose success nobody grudges. You get men with no claim to such good fortune beyond their fellows, to which all, therefore, will seem equally entitled, and which all, therefore, will equally demand. Now it is a remarkable fact that while advocating a wide extension of the Land Purchase system, Kavanagh insisted on the necessity of its being gradual. Any sudden or sweeping change would, he We must suppose, therefore, that the thought, be very dangerous. It is plain, great problem to be solved in connection therefore, that he must either have overwith the Irish land question did not seem looked such considerations as the aforeto him insoluble-and that is, how to said, or have thought such apprehensions combine the establishment of peasant-pro- groundless. No doubt there is this to be prietors on a large scale with the mainte- remembered, that all his ideas on the subnance of an order of landed gentry, which ject of land purchase were based on the it is perfectly clear that Kavanagh had no indispensable condition that the orderly thoughts of giving up. From an unpub-classes should be efficiently, universally, lished paper composed in 1883, from an- and permanently protected. But by these other written at the Carlton just after the means he seems to have still thought it election of 1886, and seen only by a few possible that the better class of sentiments friends, and from the letter addressed to surviving in the Irish people would have Mr. W. H. Smith in September, 1888, we room secured for their expansion and demay glean his general views, though it is velopment, till in time they had leavened impossible to say whether the particular the whole population, and made the trade difficulties foreseen by writers on the Irish of the agitator worthless. He reinforces question at the present moment had pre- this argument by referring to the efforts sented themselves to his mind. In En- of the Land League to prevent tenants gland or in any other country where the from buying, knowing that the general growth of peasant-proprietorship is left to success of the Land Purchase Act would natural causes, the process is inevitably be fatal to themselves. But nothing could gradual, and creates no further disturb be done - he admitted that—unless the ance in the land system of the country Irish people were convinced that they had a tive. got to the bottom of England's conces | purchaser for a holding rendered vacant by sions. "There is," he writes in 1886, the action of the State in enforcing payment. growing belief in the minds of the ten- The most powerful weapon in the Land ants," based upon some speeches of Mr. League policy would thus be made inoperaJohn Morley, "that the powers of the State will not be much longer used to en- It is much to be assured that, with his force payments of rent, and that by obtain- knowledge of the Irish people and the coning money from the State to purchase their dition of Irish agriculture, with his sound holdings, they would be exchanging a lia- judgment, temperate disposition, and great bility which they would be forced to meet capacity for business, all united with for one which they would not." Hence strong conversative and aristocratic inhe sees the chief impediment to the work-stincts, Kavanagh regarded the prospects ing of any such scheme not more in the of such a measure as the present govern. unwillingness of landlords to sell than in ment have brought forward with a favorthe unwillingness of tenants to buy, and able eye. At the same time, he founded talks of compulsion being applied to these his hopes of its success chiefly on the last. Any way, however, we are only permanence of conditions which cannot be landed in this dilemma- namely, that if otherwise than precarious, and on a change the tenant did jump at the proposal, there in our method of administration to which would be an ugly rush, and that if they it would take some time for the English hung back nothing would be done. But people to become accustomed. His deKavanagh himself declined to be nailed mand was for continuity, continuity, con. to either of these alternatives. He be- tinuity-continuity in the administration lieved that means might be found of inducing the tenants to purchase, without creating any dangerous discontent among those who were obliged to wait, without necessarily compelling the landlords to part with their estates, and, last but not least, without any financial risk to the State. The tenants must be convinced that they had no further concessions to expect. Subdivision might be guarded against by reserving to the State or the landlord some powers of intervention. The landlords, when they pleased, instead of parting with the fee-simple, might grant long leases or "perpetuities,' " and the State would have excellent security. In the first place, it would have the feesimple of the land bought. In the second, it would have the value of the tenants' interests, evidence of which is afforded by the enormous prices still paid for "tenant-right." People who would lightly forfeit the possession of land would not be so eager to acquire it as the prices they pay for it prove them to be. As each succeeding instalment was paid to the State by the occupier, his acquired interest in the land would be increased, and he would be the more unwilling to lose it by default. If the occupiers were satisfied that a speedy and irredeemable eviction would follow the nonpayment of the yearly instalments, the necessity of the State having recourse to such would, save in very exceptional cases, at once cease. To provide against these, I would suggest a system of mutual responsibility, so that all living within a certain area would become mutually responsible for each other's pay ments: all sympathy with defaulters would thus be put an end to, and the other occupiers of the area affected would, in their own interests, endeavor to find a solvent substitute or of the law, and continuity in the government of the country. He would have substituted for the present lord lieutenancy a permanent viceroy, independent of all parliamentary changes; and the ap pointment to such a post of a member of the royal family would, he thought, have an excellent effect. It may occur perhaps to some people that if we could only have such a system as this, we should want no Land Purchase Acts. With it or without it, however, Kavanagh thought the experi ment worth trying-and that is perhaps all that its warmest advocates could say for it. We should not' omit to add that Mrs. Steele has given us a most interesting letter, addressed by Mr. Kavanagh to Mr. Goschen in December, 1885, on the cattle trade and cattle breeding of Ireland, showing in the clearest colors the suicidal character of the land agitation. The cattle trade is the main branch of Irish agricul ture. That had been sustained, the foreign stores From The Contemporary Review. MARCH 2, 1891, is the centenary of the death of John Wesley. Many biographies of him have been written, and the minutest incidents of his life are familiar to the members of the religious community who are called by his name. Others are far less acquainted with his personality, and may not be sorry to be reminded what manner of man he was. For, indeed, the reformers of Churches, the redressers of injustice, the reawakeners of dead consciences, the slayers of dragons and monsters, have in all ages been men marked out to their great work by similar characteristics. They who would beat down the hundred-headed hydra of inveterate evils must use the same Hercules club of moral conviction and absolute selfsacrifice. The father of John Wesley was the good vicar of Epworth, and labored for long years in poverty, disappointment, debt, and many trials, amid a rude, hostile, and heavy peasantry. John and his brothers and sisters in a numerous family had, to his own great advantage, to bear the yoke in their youth. Mrs. Wesley was an able, active, and deeply religious woman. She gave herself up, heart and soul, to her home duties and the right education of her children. We are told that she taught her children, even as infants, to cry softly, and trained the little boys and girls in habits of the finest Christian courtesy. The discipline of those days was stern; but in the hands of a good and wise mother it probably erred far less in the direction of sternness than ours does in the direction of effeminacy. Mrs. Wesley set apart an hour every day to talk and pray with her boys in turn, and retained a powerful spell of influence over them, even to advanced age. She did much to mould Wesley's character. In spite of the opposition of the commonplace curate of the parish, and the timid doubts of her own husband, when he was absent in London for the meetings of Convocation, she assembled the parishioners together in her kitchen to a service, which they found more profitable and blessed than the dry and soulless ministrations of the parish church. The little John and Charles were present at these meetings, and we see in them the germ and spirit of their future work. Brought up in such a home, John Wesley grew up so serious, so earnest, and so promising a child that even at the age of eight years his father admitted him to the VOL. LXXIV. 3809 LIVING AGE. Holy Communion. His impressions had been deepened by his remarkable escape from the burning ruins of his father's vicarage when he was six years old. Epworth parsonage was destroyed by fire. The children were all asleep, and John, left alone in the blazing nursery, was only snatched from death at the last moment, after the vain efforts of his father to reach the room. From that day his mother dedicated him to God, and regarded him as a child marked out for great ends. In one of his early publications a house in flames is represented beneath his portrait, with the words, "Is not this a brand plucked out of the fire?" He tells us that till the age of ten he was not conscious of having committed any grave sin, or of having lost the grace of baptism. At that age he was sent to school in London, at the Charterhouse. English public schools in those days were not only very rough training places, but were also scenes of much vice and godlessness. But though Wesley as a schoolboy lost some of his deep religious seriousness, he still continued to go to church, to read his Bible, and to pray both morning and evening. We hear of him as a "brave boy, a good scholar, learning Hebrew as fast as he can," and probably his faults were not more serious than such as rise from a natural buoyancy and hilarity of spirit, which thinks but little of religion in the glow and bloom of opening life. In 1720 he went to Christ Church, Oxford. Although at first he did not recover his old piety, we hear of no fault except that he got into debt; and it was difficult for him to do otherwise with the slender allowance which alone his father could afford. The religious atmosphere of Oxford at that time was singularly cold and dead, as indeed was that of England, and the Church of England generally. But a decided change soon passed over him. Without extinguishing a natural cheerfulness which made him say that he could never remember being in bad spirits for a quarter of an hour all his life, a sense of religion awakened him to deep seriousness. Young as he was, he wrote to his mother, "Leisure and I have taken leave of one another. I propose to be busy as long as I live, if my health is so long indulged me." After taking his degree, he was elected a fellow of Lincoln, and acquired much reputation as an Oxford tutor. Various books fanned the flame of his religious earnestness. Thomas à Kempis, by the "Imitatio Christi," woke in his mind the desire for a closer walk with God; and the | glory with him." Yet we are astonished purely monastic and ascetic elements of à Kempis's ideal were corrected by Jeremy Taylor's "Holy Living and Dying." His soul was stirred still more deeply by Law's "Serious Call" and "6 Perfection." By these books, he says, "I was convinced more than ever of the impossibility of being half a Christian, and determined to be all devoted to God; to give him all my soul, my body, and my substance." to read that in those days, at an Oxford College, to attend the Sacrament was to make oneself a target for all the polite students, and the practice of visiting the poor was an offence to be punished with the threat of expulsion. Indeed, so serious did the opposition gradually become, that Wesley again sought his father's counsel. His father wrote that he rejoiced to have two sons at Oxford for Charles He was ordained deacon by Bishop had now joined his elder brother, John Potter, and never forgot his advice: "If" to whom God has given grace and cour you wish to be extensively useful, do not spend your time in contending for or against things of a disputable nature, but in testifying against notorious vice, and in promoting real, essential holiness." Another remarkable sentence was addressed to him when he was ordained priest. Dr. Hayward, Bishop Potter's examining chaplain, put to him a question on which he often pondered, and of which his whole after-history was an illustration: "Do you know," he asked him, "what you are about? You are bidding defiance to all mankind. He that would live a Christian priest ought to know that, whether his hand be against every man or no, he must expect every man's hand would be against him." He had already learnt by experience the truth of the remark, for his very goodness, his blameless morals, his efforts to help others, were made grounds for sneers and opposition. To any one who looks a little below the surface, and watches the reception accorded in our own age, as much as in any other, to any line of conduct not purely conventional, this will not appear wholly strange. No one in these days would openly venture to taunt another in the House of Commons as "the honorable and religious gentleman," as one member of Parliament taunted Wilberforce; nor would many men make personal chastity a ground for depreciatory innuendoes, as in the eighteenth century they did to the younger Pitt. But when Wesley stood for election to his fellowship at Lincoln College, there were some who tried to ruin his chance by ridiculing his serious behavior; and he wrote to his father to ask . for his advice. The letter of his father was admirable. "Does any body think," wrote the Vicar of Epworth, "that the devil is dead, or asleep, or that he has no agents left? Surely virtue can bear being laughed at. The Captain and Master endured something more for us before he entered into his glory, and unless we track his steps, in vain do we hope to share the age to turn the war against the world and the devil, which is the best way to con quer them. . . . Go on, then, in God's name, in the path to which your Saviour hath directed you; • • walk prudently, though not fearfully. I doubt whether a mortal can arrive at a greater degree of perfection than steadily to do good, and for that very reason, patiently and meekly to suffer evil. Bear no more sail than is necessary, but steer steady." In 1727 Wesley went to assist his father in the rude hamlet of Wroote, where he stayed till 1729. He tells us that he did not see much fruit of his labors, because, in his preaching, he neither laid the foundation of repentance nor of believing the Gospel, but rather assumed that his hearers were already believers and already penitent. In 1729 he returned to Oxford to find that his brother Charles had there founded a little brotherhood of students to encourage each other in the practice of a holy life. They met for prayer, selfexamination, the study of the Scriptures and the Greek Testament. Later on they formed plans to visit the sick and the prisoners. They were nicknamed "the Holy Club," and Whitefield was one of the little band. They were also called by that name "Methodists," which still ad heres to the society of which they formed the earliest nucleus. The name Methodist had first been invented in the reign of Nero, for a school of physicians who thought that "all diseases could be cured by a specific method of diet and exercise."* Charles Wesley, who was of a more poetic, tender, and emotional cast of mind than John, had been the first leader in the movement, and he added a glow of warmer spirituality to the harder and more prosaic temperament of his brother. The numbers of this little society were never Auson, Idyll, ix. 67: "Triplex quoque forma medendi Cui logos, et methodos, cuique experientia nomen.' "As many more As methodist Musus killed with hellebore." (Marston, Scourge of Villany, 1599.) |