**LEST WE FORGET!" 249

to England and her age-long dominion. The eyes of the entire
world turned towards that little, mighty arena.

The Nationalist Party in Parliament had its counterpart in
Ireland. The Land League, though not founded by him, also
marched at Parnell's orders. The one aimed at destroying the
rule of Ireland by the English Parliament; the other her ex-
ploitation by the English landlord. The League was an association
of Catholic tenant farmers and peasants against the Protestant
landowning garrison which had given local rule to Ireland
since the seventeenth century. It prescribed rents, banned or
"boycotted" all who paid more and made the taking of a farm
from which a member had been evicted a social crime.1 It was
accompanied inevitably, though this was contrary to ParnelPs
wishes, by gang intimidation, cattle-maiming, rick-burning and *
murder.

The Liberal rulers of Britain were in a quandary. They
wished well to Ireland. They hated coercion. But they were
also men of peace and lovers of parliamentary government.
They couTd not see law and order flouted and the democratic
machinery of parliament sabotaged. They were forced against
their will to act. They tried suspending the Habeas Corpus Act
and putting Parnell in Kilmainham Gaol. By doing so they
made him a martyr and themselves tyrants. As soon as they
released him he continued the struggle* They were driven to
limit the freedom of parliamentary debate and to abandon part
of the democratic practice of centuries.2 They only heightened
Parnell's prestige. Ireland thrilled at the tale of his triumphs
in the very temple of the Saxon tyrant. To aid his campaign
thousands of pounds poured in from Irish sympathisers in
America.

But the greatest of Parndl's conquests was Gladstone's con-
science. Gladstone was a devout churchman and a man of

1 "When a man takes a farm from which another has been ejected,1* Parnell told
his followers in September, 1880, "you must show *""? on the roadside, you must
show Mm in the streets, you must show him at the shop counter, you must show him
in the fair and in the market place, and even in the house of worship, by leaving him
severely alone, by isolating him from his kind as if he were a leper of old—you must
show >im your detestation of the crime he has committed, and you may depend on it
that there will be no man so full of avarice, so lost to shame, as to dare the public
opinion of all right-thinking men, and to transgress your unwritten code of laws."

* In the view of a great living authority on parliamentary practice, Sir Bryan Fell,
the protective measures then introduced have since been used by the Executiv^to
deprive the private Member of Parliament of his traditional position as the link
between the Government and the Public.