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TEETH  LIKE   PEARLS, 

■white  and  sound  teeth,  perfect  freedom  from  decay,  a  healthy  action  of  the  gums,  and  delight- 
fully fragrant  breath  can  best  be  obtained  by  discarding  rritty  tooth  powders  and  acid  washes 
and  nfimg  daily 


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non-gritty 
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defects,  anc 
articlss,  of : 


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FOR  THE 

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nary, 

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nd  lEON 
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t  Free. 

ATER, 

>st  Free. 


ASP!NALL'S   ENAMEL  WORKS, 


SIX-SHILLING    NOVELS. 


A  Terrible  Legacy.     By  G.  Webb  Appleton. 

In  Jeopardy.     By  George  Manville  Fenn. 

The  Master  of  the  Ceremonies.     By  G.  Manville 
Fenn. 

Double  Cunning.     By  G.  Manville  Fenn. 

The   Lady   Drusilla:     A    Psychological    Romance. 
By  Thomas  Purnell. 

Tempest  Driven.     By  Richard  Dowling. 

The  Chilcotes.     By  Leslie  Keith. 

A  Mental  Struggle.     By  the  Author  of  ''  Phyllis." 

Her    Week's    Amusement.       By    the    Author    of 
"  Phyllis." 

The  Aliens.     By  Henry  F.  Keenan. 

Lil  Lorimer.     By  Theo.  Gift. 

Louisa.     By  Katharine  S.  Macquoid. 

A  Lucky  Young  Woman.     By  F.  C.  Philips. 

As  in  a  Looking  Glass.     By  F.  C.  Philips. 

That  Villain,  Romeo!     By  J.  Fitzgerald  Molloy. 

The  Sacred  Nugget.     By  B.  L.  Farjeon. 

Proper  Pride.     By  B.  M.  Croker. 

Pretty  Miss  Neville.     By  B.  M.  Croker. 

The   Prettiest   Woman   in   Warsaw.     By  Mabel 
Collins. 


Three-and-Sixpenny  Novels. 

Two  Pinches  of  Snuff.     By  William  Westall. 

The  Confessions  of  a  Coward  and  Coquette. 

By  the  Author  of  "  The  Parish  of  Hilby,"  &c. 

A  Life's  Mistake.      By  Mrs.  Lovett  Cameron* 
In  One  Town.     By  E.  Downey. 
Anchor  Watch  Yarns.     By  E.  Downey. 
Atla.     By  Mrs.  J.  Gregory  Smith. 
Less  than  Kin.     By  J.  E.  Panton. 
A  Reigning  Favourite.     By  Annie  Thomas. 
The  New  River.     By  Somerville  Gibney. 
Under  Two  Fig  Trees.  By  H.  Francis  Lester. 

Comedies    from    a    Country    Side.     By   W. 

Outram  Tristram. 


T^^TO  -  SliilliM^g    No^rels. 

In  a  Silver  Sea.     By  B.  L.  Farjeon. 
Great  Porter  Square.     By  B.  L.  Farjeon.    yth 
Edition. 

The  House  of  White  Shadows.     By  B.  L. 

Farjeon.     5th  Edition. 

Grif.     By  B.  L,  Farjeon.     loth  Edition. 

Social  Vicissitudes.     By  F.  C.  Philips. 

The  Last  Stake.     By  Madam  Foli. 

Snowbound  at  Eagle's.     By  Bret  Harte.    4th 
Edition. 

The  Flower  of  Doom.  By  M.  Betham-Edwards. 
2nd  Edition. 

Viva.     By  Mrs.  Forrester.     3rd  Edition. 

A  Maiden    all    Forlorn.      By  the  Author   of 
*'  Molly  Bawn."     4th  Edition. 

Folly  Morrison.  B^  Frank  Barrett.  4th  Edition. 

Honest  Davie.    By  Frank  Barrett.    3rd  Edition. 

Under  tS.  Paul's.     By  Richard  Dowling.     2nd 
Edition. 

The  Duke's   Sweetheart.      By  Richard  Dow- 
ling.    2nd  Edition. 

The  Outlaw  of  Iceland.     By  Victor  Hugo. 


THE    PAENELL    MOVEMENT. 


L 


THE 


BY 


T.  P.  O'CONNOR,  M.P., 

author  of 
'Gladstone's  house  of  commons,'  'the  life  of  lord  beaconsfield,*  etc. 


NEW  AND  REVISED  EDITION, 


LONDON : 

WAED    AND     DOWNEY, 

12,    YORK     STREET,     COVENT    GARDEIS^,     W.C, 

1887. 
{All  Rights  Reserved,] 


1?A 


CONTENTS. 


CHAPTER 

I.    THE   FALL   OF   O'CONNELL... 

II.   THE   COMING   OF   THE   FAMINE 

III.  THE   FAMINE 

IV.  THE   GREAT   CLEARANCES 
V.    THE    GREAT   BETRAYAL 

VI.  RUIX   AND   RABAGAS 

VII.  REVOLUTION 

VIII.  ISAAC   BUTT 

IX.  FAMINE   AGAIN 

X.  THE   LAND  LEAGUE 

XI.  THE   COERCION  STRUGGLE 

XII.  THE   FRUITS    OF   COERCION 

XIII.  THE   TORY-PARNELL   COMBINATION 

XIV.  THE   HOME   RULE   STRUGGLE 


PAGE 

7 

15 

30 

45 

84 

Ill 

134 

139 

164 

175 

212 

...   240 

264 

274 

THE    PAENELL    MOVEMENT. 


CHAPTER,  I. 

THE   FALL   OF   o'CONNELL. 

The  main  purpose  of  these  pages  is  to  describe  the  movement  which  is  as- 
sociated with  the  name  of  Mr.  Parnell,  That  movement  cannot,  however, 
be  understood  without  some  acquaintance  with  other  movements,  of  which 
it  is  the  child  and  successor.  To  the  history  of  events  in  our  own  day,  I 
have  thought  it  best,  accordingly,  to  prefix  a  sketch  of  some  of  the  events 
by  which  they  were  preceded  and  prepared.  I'or  various  reasons  I  have 
deemed  it  sufficient  to  start  at  the  year  1843. 

The  Irish  people  had  good  reason  for  the  honour  they  paid  to  O'Connell 
after  he  had  won  for  them  Catholic  Emancipation.  When  he  arose,  they 
were  literally  aliens  in  their  own  country. 

The  passionate  prejudices  of  the  greater  and  stronger  nation  were  against 
the  Catholics  ;  the  Protestant  section  of  their  own  countrymen  held  all  the 
land  and  all  the  positions  of  trust  and  power  ;  the  Catholics  were  unarmed, 
and  opposed  to  them  were  all  the  resources  by  land  and  sea  of  one  of  the 
world's  greatest  empires  :  and  against  all  this,  O'Connell,  by  the  sheer 
force  of  his  intellect,  and  with  no  other  weapon  than  his  voice,  had  suc- 
ceeded. He  was  proclaimed  the  Liberator  of  his  country  ;  all  other  forces 
in  the  nation  and  all  other  men  were  overshadowed  by  his  single  name ; 
and  he  established,  without  the  assistance  of  a  bayonet  or  of  a  musket,  an 
omnipotence  over  the  democracy  as  unquestioned  and  unquestionable  as 
that  of  a  Czar  with  millions  of  soldiers  behind  him. 

It  was  not  long  before  O'Connell  and  the  nation  found  that  the  glories  of 
Catholic  Emancipation  were  but  a  mockery  and  an  illusion.  He  had  calcu- 
lated that  with  this  lever  he  would  have  been  able  to  wring  -with  promptitude 
all  the  other  reforms  which  he  deemed  necessary ;  and  the  evils  for  which 
he  demanded  redress  were  sufficiently  pressing.  The  tithes  still  existed ; 
and  the  clergymen  of  the  opulent  Protestant  Establishment  gathered  their 
dues  of  wheat  from  a  poverty-stricken  Catholic  peasantry,  backed  by  sol- 
diers and  police  and  guns,  and  sometimes  amid  scenes  of  mad  passion  and 
much  bloodshed.  O'Connell,  in  order  to  gain  Emancipation,  had  committed 
the  terrible  mistake  of  consenting  to  the  abolition  of  the  forty-shilling  free- 
holder :  this  had  taken  away  from  the  landlords  one  of  the  most  effective 


8  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

reasons  for  sparing  the  tenant  at  will ;  and  evictions  were  perpetrated  on 
an  unusually  large  scale.  In  short,  the  material  condition  of  Ireland  was 
worse  in  the  years  succeeding  than  it  had  been  for  several  _years  before 
the  Act  of  Emancipation. 

O'Ccnnell's  attempts  to  change  all  this  through  the  Imperial  Parliament 
proved  miserably  abortive ;  he  determined  to  enter  on  a  new  agitation — ■ 
this  time  the  object  being  the  Repeal  of  the  Act  of  Union:  and  this 
brought  the  second  of  his  great  disillusions.  He  had  throughout  his  career 
been  the  staunchest  of  Liberals  ;  to  every  measure  of  Liberal  reform  he  had 
given  his  passionate  adhesion  ;  of  the  Reform  Act  of  1832  he  was  one  of  the 
most  effective  advocates :  and  now  the  Liberal  Party  failed  him.  He  had 
no  sooner  entered  upon  the  agitation  for  the  Repeal  of  the  Union  than  he 
came  into  collision  with  the  representatives  of  English  Liberalism  in  Ire- 
land. The  association  v^^hich  he  founded  was  declared  to  be  illegal ;  the 
Marquis  of  Anglesey,  the  Liberal  Lord-Lieutenant,  proclaimed  his  meet- 
ings :  his  letters  were  opened  by  the  hands  of  Liberals  in  the  Post  Ofhce  ;^ 
and  he  was  finally  brought  by  Liberal  law  officers  before  an  Orange  judge 
and  a  packed  Orange  jury.  Declining  to  plead,  he  was  convicted,  but  was 
never  called  up  for  judgment.  It  was  under  the  exasperation  caused  by 
these  high-handed  acts  that  he  hurled  at  the  then  Liberal  Administration 
the  words  which  have  often  since  been  quoted  with  rare  delight  by  Irish 
speakers.  He  spoke  of  the  Ministry  as  the  '  base,  brutal,  and  bloody 
Whigs.' 

But  these  experiences  had  their  effect  upon  him  ;  and  still  more  the 
bitter  experiences  he  had  in  Parliament.  He  brought  forward  his  motion 
(April  23,  1834)  in  favour  of  Repeal  of  the  Union;  it  was  laughed  at  by 
both  sides  of  the  House ;  and  when  he  went  into  the  lobby,  he  was  sup- 
ported by  but  40  votes. 

Then  he  made,  perhaps,  one  of  the  worst,  though  one  of  the  most  natural, 
mistakes  of  his  life.  Instead  of  keeping  the  attention  of  his  countrymen 
and  of  the  Legislature  fixed  upon  Repeal — which,  if  granted,  involved  the 
redress  of  every  other  grievance — he  determined  to  reverse  the  process.  He 
tried  to  make  the  removal  of  other  grievances  the  stepping-stone  to  gaining 
Repeal,  instead  of  standing  by  Repeal  as  the  be-all  and  end-all  of  national 
rights.  He  had  an  additional  reason  for  hoping  for  the  redress  of  griev- 
ances, in  the  promises  of  the  Liberal  statesmen  of  the  period.  They  had 
declared  over  and  over  again  their  readiness  to  place  Ireland  on  a  perfect 
equality  with  England  ;  and  O'Connell,  before  long,  got  strong  evidence  of 
the  reality  of  the  promise.  In  spite  of  continued  opposition  by  the  Con- 
servatives and  of  repeated  rejections  by  the  House  of  Lords,  an  Act  was 
passed  which  threw  open  the  municipal  councils  of  Ireland  to  the  Catho- 

1  During  the  fierce  excitement  caused  in  1845  by  the  opening  of  the  letters  of  the 
brothers  Bandiera  to  Mazzini  by  Sir  James  Graham,  a  Parliamentary  Eeturn  was 
ordered  of  the  various  Ministers  who  had  exercised  the  power  of  opening  the  letters 
of  private  persons.  According  to  this  return,  Mr.  Secretary  Littleton  (afterwards 
Lord  Hatherton)  had  done  so  in  1S34,  and  Lord  Mulgrave  (afterwards  Mai-quis  of 
Normanby)  in  1835.  In  1836  the  same  noble  Marquis  inspected  private  Irish  corre- 
spondence, with  the  assistance  of  Mr.  Drummond,  the  Irish  Secretary.  In  1837  Mr. 
O'Connell's  private  letters  to  his  friends  were  opened  by  order  of  Lord  Chancellor 
Plunket  and  Dr.  Whately.  Archbishop  of  Dublin  and  a  Member  of  the  Privy  Council, 
the  seals  or  envelopes  being  softened  by  the  application  of  steam,  and  skilfully  re- 
sealed  after  the  letters  had  been  copied.  In  1838  the  same  sort  of  espionage  was 
carried  on  by  Lord  Morpeth  (afterwards  Lord  Carlisle),  in  1839  by  Lords  Normanby 
and  Ebrington  and  General  Sir  T.  Blakeney,  and  again  by  Lord  Ebrington  in  1840. — 
(Parliamentary  Retum,  Session  of  1845.    Papers  relating  to  Mazzini.) 


THE  FALL  OF  a  CON  NELL.  g 

lies;  and  which  enabled  O'Connell  himself  to  be  elected  Lord  Mayor  of  Dublin. 
The  spectacle  of  their  great  leader  clothed  in  the  robes  of  the  chief  magistrate 
of  the  metropolis  was  a  sight  that  proved  delightful  to  the  Catholics  of 
Ireland  at  that  period,  in  a  way  that  few  people  can  now  understand.  The 
Corporation  of  Dublin  had  been  the  great  home  of  Orange  Conservatism ; 
and  its  aldermen  were  among  the  most  prominent  spokesmen  of  the  insult- 
ing and  maddening  creed  of  Protestant  ascendancy.  To  see  O'Connell  in 
the  seat  that  up  to  this  time  had  been  uninterruptedly  occupied  by  one  of 
their  bitterest  enemies  appeared  to  the  people  the  visible  sign  of  a  momen- 
tous triumph.  But  here,  again,  a  great  concession  was  accompanied  by  a 
villainous  proviso.  Neither  O'Connell  nor  the  people,  in  thsir  enthusiastic 
welcome  of  municipal  reform,  attached  much  importance  to  the  condition 
that  the  appointment  of  the  high  sheriff  should  rest  in  the  hands  of  the 
Crown.  By-and-by  the  importance  of  the  provision  was  brought  home  to 
O'Connell  when  he  was  placed  on  his  trial;  and  the  High  Sheriff  of  Dublin, 
as  the  man  charged  with  the  impanelling  of  the  jury,  held  O'Connell, 
and  through  O'Connell  the  fate  of  all  Ireland,  in  his  grip. 

The  grant  of  municipal  reform  by  the  Whigs  once  more  threw  O'Connell 
into  their  hands ;  and  he  trusted  that  other  reforms  v/ould  f  ollov/.  He 
spoke  warmly  on  behalf  of  the  Ministry  of  Lord  Melbourne  ;  and  called 
upon  the  Irish  people  to  rally  around  it.  Bi;t  in  1841  the  period  of  Liberal 
ascendancy  came  to  an  end  ;  and  Sir  Robert  Peel — the  bitter  and  uncom- 
promising enemy  of  all  Irish  Reform — came  to  the  head  of  the  Government 
with  a  huge  majority  behind  him.  O'Connell  lost  all  hope  of  redress  from 
the  Imperial  Parliament,  and  once  more  started  the  Repeal  agitation. 

O'Connell's  first  move  was  to  raise  a  debate  on  Repeal  in  the  Corporation 
of  Dublin.  His  speech  on  the  occasion  is  regarded  by  competent  critics  as 
perhaps  one  of  the  finest  of  his  whole  life.  It  may  still  be  read  with  ad- 
vantage as  an  epitome  of  the  case  against  the  Union,  and  as  a  syllabus  of 
the  hideous  ruin  which  that  ill-starred  Act  has  inflicted  upon  the  Irish 
people.  A  full  and  interesting  description  of  it  will  be  found  in  Sir  Charles 
Gavan  Duffy's  '  Young  Ireland '  (pp.  191-207).  The  chief  antagrnist  of 
O'Connell  on  this  occasion  was  a  man  who  afterwards  played  an  important 
part  in  Irish  history,  and  who  will  often  appear  in  these  pages.  Isaac  Butt, 
at  this  time  a  young  man  of  thirty  years  of  age,  was  the  rising  hope  of  the 
Irish  Orange  Party,  and  was  thought  of  so  highly  as  to  be  put  forward  as  a 
worthy  antagonist  of  the  great  agitator.  O'Connell's  motion  was  carried 
by  45  votes  to  15.  This  debate  gave  the  new  agitation  an  extraordinary 
stimulus.  The  subscriptions  rushed  up  from  £239  in  March,  the  week  after 
the  debate,  to  £683  in  the  beginning  of  May  ;  many  classes  of  the  popula- 
tion which  had  held  back  flocked  in  ;  a  number  of  the  bishops  gave  their 
adhesion  to  the  movement  either  openly  or  silently  ;  and  as  time  went  on 
Repeal  of  the  Union  was  the  passionate  cry  of  a  unanimous  nation. 

Doubt  is  still  felt  in  many  minds  whether  when  he  first  started  on  this 
new  enterprise  O'Connell  really  meant  to  persevere  with  it ;  or  whether  he 
intended  to  use  the  larger  demand  of  Repeal  as  a  lever  for  obtaining  the 
smaller  reforms  of  tenant  right,  the  disestablishment  of  the  Irish  Church, 
and  other  reforms.  Whatever  his  original  motives,  the  story  of  the  Repeal 
agitation,  which  he  now  started,  was  that  it  was  strong  almost  from  the  very 
commencement ;  that  its  strength  increased  in  geometrical  progression  ;  and 
that  finally  it  reached  proportions  so  gigantic  that  it  controlled  its  leader 
instead  of  being  controlled  by  him. 

The  most  significant  and  imposing  sign  of  the  hold  which  the  new  agita- 


10  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

tion  had  taken  upon  the  country  were  the  popular  gatherings.  These,  from 
the  immense  numbers  that  attended  them,  came  to  be  known  as  the 
'monster  meetings,'  and  probably  were  the  largest  assemblages  of  human 
beings  that  a  political  cause  ever  drew  together  in  the  history  of  the  world. 
These  meetings  were  held  in  almost  every  part  of  Ireland,  and  gathered 
volume  as  they  went  along  ;  until  at  Tara,  sacred  with  the  most  ancient 
and  proud  memories  of  the  Irish  nation,  there  was  a  demonstration  which 
numbered  half  a  million  of  human  beings. 

The  assembling  together  of  so  many  hundreds  of  thousands  of  people,  all 
inspired  by  the  same  thought,  excited  something  like  a  national  frenzy. 
The  country  was  quivering  in  every  nerve,  and  there  was  a  state  of  excite- 
ment that  miade  everybody  anticipate  a  morrow  either  of  complete  victory 
or  of  an  outbreak  of  baffled  hate.  The  condition  of  England  was  one  of 
excitement  almost  as  intense.  The  attention  of  Sir  Robert  Peel  was  called 
in  Parliament  by  some  of  his  Irish  Orange  followers  to  these  meetings  ; 
and,  after  a  certain  amount  of  shilly-shallying,  he  had  distinctly  pledged 
himself  that  these  meetings  were  seditious,  and  that  the  agitation  for  the 
Repeal  of  the  Union  should,  if  necessary,  be  drowned  in  blood.  '  I  am 
prepared,'  he  said,  '  to  make  the  declaration  which  was  made,  and  nobly 
made,  by  my  predecessor.  Lord  Althorp,  that,  deprecating  as  I  do  all  war, 
but  above  all  civil  war,  yet  there  is  no  o.lternative  which  I  do  not  think  pre- 
ferable to  the  dismemberment  of  this  Empire.' 

The  effect  of  these  words  was  to  exasperate  public  opinion  on  both  sides 
of  the  Channel.  It  roused  by  insult  the  anger  of  the  Irish  people,  and  by 
provocation  the  anger  of  the  English.  The  two  nations  stood,  in  fact, 
opposed  to  each  other,  maddened  by  all  the  fierce  national  passions  that 
immediately  precede  sanguinary  warfare. 

It  is  O'Connell's  action  at  this  hour  that  has  given  rise  to  the  most  fre- 
quent and  bitter  conti'oversies  over  his  career.  His  enemies  and  many  of 
his  warmest  admirers  have  ever  since  declared  that  he  proved  unequal  to 
the  situation  ;  that  he  had  victory  in  his  own  hand,  and  threw  it  away, 
from  want  of  courage  and  want  of  insight. 

He  would  be  a  very  unsympathetic  or  a  very  unimaginative  man  who 
would  not  pity  the  great  agitator  at  this  supreme  crisis  of  his  career. 
Never,  perhaps,  had  a  political  leader  graver  difficulties,  more  perplexing 
problems — a  responsibility  so  vast,  so  overwhelming,  so  undivided.  On 
the  one  side  he  saw  the  great  resources  of  the  Empire  arrayed  against  him  : 
and  Peel  and  the  Duke  of  Wellington  had  taken  care  that  the  reality  of 
these  resources  should  be  brought  home  to  the  mind  of  O'Connell  and  the 
Irish  nation  in  a  manner  the  most  galling  and  the  most  palpable.  Troops 
.vciv.  poured  into  the  country  until  there  were  no  less  than  35,000  men  in 
Ireland  ;  and  there  were  ships  of  war  around  the  whole  coast.  O'Connell 
knew  that  to  all  this  force  he  had  nothing  to  oppose  but  the  bare  breasts  of 
a  brave  but  also  an  unarmed  and  an  undisciplined  people.  On  the  other 
hand,  there  was  the  whole  nation,  with  strained  eye  and  ear,  wanting  some- 
thing, they  knew  not  what — filled  with  wild  hopes  and  passions,  longings, 
and  dreams.  And  high  uplifted  above  all  these  surging  and  strained 
millions  he  stood  :  worshipped  as  an  inspired  and  resistless  prophet ;  omni- 
potent over  their  destinies,  their  hearts,  their  lives  ;  gigantic,  solitary,  most 
miserable. 

For  it  is  now  certain  that  at  this  period  O'Connell  knew  moments  of  per- 
haps deeper  anxiety  than  ever  he  had  experienced  during  the  many  chequered 
years  of  his  previous  life.     When  the  last  shout  had  died  away  ;  when  he 


THE  FALL  OF  a  CONN  ELL.  ti 

had  been  proclaimed,  amid  such  tumults  of  cheers,  the  uncrowned  King  of 
Ireland,  and  he  found  himself  once  more  with  a  single  companion  to  whom 
he  could  show  the  nudity  of  his  soul,  he  frequently  uttered  in  a  cry  of 
anguish  and  despair,  '  My  God,  my  God  !  what  am  I  to  do  with  this 
people  ?' 

His  habits  at  this  period  throw  a  considerable  light  on  his  motives  and 
on  the  history  of  his  country.  In  spite  of  occasional  laxity  of  moral  con- 
duct, he  was  all  his  life  a  devoted  member  of  the  Catholic  Church  ;  and 
towards  the  end  of  his  days,  his  daily  life  was  that  rather  of  an  anchorite 
in  a  state  of  ecstasy  than  of  a  fierce  politician  in  the  midst  of  a  raging  and 
relentless  struggle.  He  used  not  only  to  attend  mass,  but  also  to  receive 
Holy  Communion  every  morning  of  his  life  ;  and  it  was  marked  as  indica- 
tive of  his  whole  theory  of  political  duty  that  he  always  wore  on  these 
occasions  a  black  glove  on  his  right  hand — the  hand  that,  having  shed  the 
blood  of  D'Esterre  in  a  duel,  was  tmv/orthy  to  touch  even  the  drapery 
associated  with  the  mysteries  of  his  religion. 

On  the  other  side,  there  was  the  fierce  democracy  demanding  excite- 
ment, encouragement,  inspiration  ;  and  O'Connell  would  have  been  more 
than  human  if  the  fumes  of  this  incense  from  millions  did  not  occasionally 
disturb  his  brain,  and  if  he  were  not  now  and  then  carried  away  on  the 
spring-tide  of  so  vast  and  enthusiastic  a  movement.  Finallj'',  O'Connell's 
hot  language  was  often  the  outcome  of  the  cold  calculation  of  a  most  astute, 
experienced,  and  successful  politician.  For  Peel  he  had  a  feeling  of  both 
loathing  and  contempt.  He  thought  him  at  once  a  hypocrite  and  a  coward. 
His  smile,  he  used  to  say,  was  like  the  silver  plate  on  a  coffin.  With  Peel 
and  Wellington  a  bold  game  had  been  played  before  ;  and  had  forced 
Catholic  Emancipation,  with  hundreds  of  broken  promises  and  abandoned 
principles,  down  their  throats.  The  tactics  that  had  won  Emancipation 
might  win  Repeal. 

These  are  the  various  considerations  that  account  for  the  strange  in- 
consistency of  O'Connell's  language  and  acts  during  this  momentous  time. 
At  one  meeting  he  spoke  in  terms  of  enthusiastic  loyalty — indeed,  he  never 
was  anything  but  loyal  in  his  language  to  the  throne — and  he  preached  the 
doctrine-  that  he  would  not  purchase  the  freedom  of  Ireland  by  shedding 
one  drop  of  human  blood.  Soon  after,  stung  by  some  insult  from  the 
authorities  to  the  people,  he  burst  forth  in  language  of  vehement  defiance. 
There  was  one  speech  of  the  latter  kind  which  especially  attracted  notice, 
and  afterwards  v/as  used  against  him  with  much  effect.  Speaking  at  the 
banquet  in  the  evening  after  a  meeting  in  Mallow,  he  used  these  remarkable 
words  :  '  Do  you  know,'  said  O'Connell,  '  I  never  felt  such  a  loathing  for 
speechifying  as  I  do  at  present.  The  time  is  coming  when  we  must  be 
doing.  Gentlemen,  you  may  learn  the  alternative  to  live  as  slaves  or  die 
as  freemen.  No  ;  you  will  not  be  freemen  if  you  be  not  perfectly  in  the 
right  and  your  enemies  in  the  wrong.  I  think  I  see  a  fixed  disposition  on 
the  part  of  our  Saxon  traducers  to  put  us  to  the  test.  The  efforts  already 
made  by  them  have  been  most  abortive  and  ridiculous.  In  the  midst  of 
peace  and  tranquillity  they  are  covering  our  land  with  troops.  Yes,  I  speak 
with  the  awful  determination  -with  which  I  commenced  my  address,  in  con- 
sequence of  news  received  this  day.  There  was  no  House  of  Commons  on 
Thursday,  for  the  Cabinet  were  considering  what  they  should  do,  not  for 
Ireland,  but  against  her.  But,  gentlemen,  as  long  as  they  leave  us  a  rag  of 
the  Constitution  we  will  stand  on  it.  We  will  violate  no  law,  we  will 
assail  no  enemy ;  but  you  are  much  mistaken  if  you  think  others  will  not 


12  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

assail  you.'  (A  voice,  '  We  are  ready  to  meet  them.')  '  To  be  sure  you  are. 
Do  you  think  I  suppose  you  to  be  cowards  or  fools  ?' 

And  a  little  later  on  in  the  speech  he  used  almost  the  best-remembered 
words  of  his  life  :  '  What  are  Irishmen,'  he  asked,  '  that  they  should  be 
denied  an  equal  privilege  ?  Have  we  the  ordinary  courage  of  Englishmen  ? 
Are  we  to  be  called  slaves  ?  Are  we  to  be  trampled  under  foot  ?  Oh,  they 
shall  never  trample  me — at  least,  ( '  No,  no  !')  I  sa}^  they  may  trample  me,  but 
it  will  be  my  dead  body  they  will  trample  on,  not  the  living  man  !' 

Whatever  O'Connell  may  have  meant  by  these  words,  the  interpretation 
put  upon  them  by  at  least  all  the  young  and  enthusiastic  and  brave  men  of 
the  country  was,  that  they  were  meant  to  be  a  threat  of  violence  in  answer 
to  Peel's  threat  of  violence.  The  Kepeal  movement,  O'Connell  was  under- 
stood to  say,  was  a  constitutional  movement,  conducted  by  legal  and  con- 
stitutional methods,  and  if  an  attempt  were  made  to  deprive  the  Irish 
citizens  of  their  constitutional  right  of  public  meeting  for  advancing  this 
movement,  the  attempt  would  be  resisted  by  force. 

Meantime  O'Connell's  words  became  bolder  and  more  encouraging  as  lie 
went  along.  He  declared  at  the  monster  meeting  in  Roscommon  that  the 
close  of  the  struggle  had  almost  come.  '  The  hour,'  he  said,  '  is  approaching, 
the  day  is  near,  the  period  is  fast  coming,  when — believe  me  who  never  deceived 
3^ou — your  country  shall  be  a  nation  once  more.'^  '  And  this  poetry  of  the 
orator,'  sardonically  adds  Sir  Charles  Gavan  Duffy,  '  was  translated  into 
unequivocal  prose  by  Mr.  John  O'Connell  at  the  next  meeting  of  the 
association.  "The  Repeal  of  the  Union,"  he  declared,  "could  not  be 
delayed  longer  than  eight  or  ten  months."  '  - 

The  moment  at  last  came  when  O'Connell's  power  and  determination 
were  to  be  p;it  to  the  test.  A  meeting  was  announced  for  Sunday,  October 
5,  1843,  at  Clontarf — a  suburb  of  DubHn  made  glorious  in  Irish  hearts  by 
the  decisive  victory  of  Brian  Boru  over  the  Danish  invaders.  The  Ministry 
made  up  their  minds  to  strike  the  blow  which  they  had  been  long  preparing  : 
they  proclaimed  the  meeting  ;  took  every  means  to  carry  out  their  order  by 
force — or,  as  some  people  even  said,  to  provoke  violence  in  order  to  make 
bloodshed  inevitable.  The  meeting  had  been  in  preparation  for  weeks ;  but 
it  was  not  until  half-past  three  o'clock  on  the  Saturday  before  the  meeting 
that  the  proclamation  was  issued.  It  was  only  by  the  despatch  of  special 
mounted  messengers  that  the  people,  who  were  swarming  in  from  the 
surrounding  country,  were  told  of  the  action  of  the  Government. 

There  had  already  grown  within  the  ranks  of  O'Connell's  own  following 
a  section  which  bitterly  differed  from  his  policy,  and  in  time  broke  his 
power.  The  Nation  newspaper  had  been  founded  in  October,  1842,  by 
Mr.  (now  Sir)  Charks  Gavan  Duffy,  and  he  had  among  his  assistants 
Thomas  Davis,  John  Dillon,  and  subsequently  John  Mitchel.  The  Young 
Irelanders,  as  they  were  called,  represented  an  entirely  new  phase  in  Irish 
politics.  The  Nation  for  the  first  time  presented  the  Irish  people  with  a 
journal  of  real  literary  merit  ;  and  the  vaiters  acquired  an  influence  over  the 
popular  mind  hitherto  unknown  in  Irish  journalism.  Even  in  those  days 
of  high-priced  newspapers  and  ill-developed  communication,  it  circulated 
largely  in  the  remotest  towns  in  Ireland.  It  was  devoured,  not  read.  It 
convinced  ;  it  inspired  ;  it  roused  loftiest  hopes  and  fiercest  passions.  The 
writers,  joining  the  Repeal  Association  of  O'Connell,  soon  brought  a  new 
force  into  its  councils.     In  the  first  place,  they  were  determined  not  to  sub- 

^  Gavan  Duffy,  'Young Ireland,'  p.  349.  ^  lb. 


THE  FALL  OF  a  CONN  ELL.  13 

mit  with  the  same  passiveness  as  was  generally  the  custom  to  the  dictator- 
ship of  O'Connell.  This  brought  them  into  collision,  not  only  %vith 
O'Connell  himself,  but  with  the  formidable  group  of  men  he  had  gathered 
around  him.  Many  of  these  intimates  of  the  great  agitator  were  broken 
in  health  and  fortune  and  character  ;  but  O'Connell  stood  by  them  with  the 
natural  constancy  of  a  man  of  keen  affections  to  old  retainers  ;  and  one  of 
the  bitterest  quarrels  between  him  and  the  Young  Irelanders  was  over  the 
continuance  in  salaried  positions  of  these  men.  The  Young  Irelanders  made 
demands  for  the  publication  of  accounts,  which,  though  accompanied  by 
strong  professions  of  loyalty  to  O'Connell  himself,  produced,  not  unnatur- 
ally, irritation  in  his  mind.  In  short,  for  the  first  time  in  his  life,  the  ex- 
perienced veteran  found  himself  face  to  face  with  young  foes  who  had  not 
the  same  regard  as  their  elders  for  his  past  services,  who  depended  not  on 
his  will,  and  who  wielded  an  influence  outside  his  control.  There  was  in 
addition  to  these  ca.uses  of  personal  difference  a  raore  important  and  fun- 
damental difference  of  principle.  The  Young  Irelanders  maintained  that 
they  were  pushed  by  other  forces,  and  especially  by  O'Connell  himself,  into 
the  doctrine  of  physical  force  :  at  this  moment  the  struggle  over  that 
question  Iiad  not  arisen.  There  was,  however,  the  difference  in  the  pre- 
ference of  the  younger  section  for  resolute,  and  the  older  for  moderate 
courses. 

John  Mitchel,  one  of  the  Young  Irelanders,  writing  many  years  after 
O'Connell's  death,  and  in  another  land,  deliberately  repeated  the  opinion 
he  held  at  the  time  as  to  O'Connell's  duty  on  the  day  of  the  Clontarf 
meeting.  '  If  I  am  asked,'  he  writes,  '  what  would  have  been  the  very  best 
thing  O'Connell  could  do  on  that  day  at  Clontarf,  I  answer  :  To  let  the 
people  of  the  country  come  to  Clontarf — to  meet  them  there  himself,  as  he 
had  invited  them  ;  but,  the  troops  being  almost  all  drawn  out  of  the  city, 
to  keep  the  Dublin  Repealers  at  home,  to  give  them  a  commission  to  take 
the  Castle  and  all  the  barracks,  and  to  break  down  the  canal  bridge  and 
barricade  the  streets  leading  to  Clontarf.  The  whole  garrison  and  police 
were  5,000.  The  city  had  a  population  of  250,000.  The  multitudes 
coming  in  from  the  country  would,  probably,  have  amounted  to  almost  as 
many.  .  .  .  There  would  have  been  horrible  slaughter  of  the  unarmed 
people  without,  if  the  troops  would  fire  on  them — a  very  doubtful  matter — 
and  O'Connell  himself  might  have  fallen.  ...  It  were  well  for  his 
fame  if  he  had  ;  and  the  deaths  of  five  or  ten  thousand  that  day  might 
have  saved  Ireland  the  slaughter  by  famine  of  a  hundred  times  as  many.' 

These  words  represent  the  gospel  of  a  large  section  of  Irishmen  for  many 
a  day  afterwards  ;  they  led  to  the  almost  contemptuous  tone  in  which 
O'Connell's  memory  was  treated  by  a  vast  number  of  his  countrymen 
during  a  considerable  period  after  the  first  outburst  of  worship  after  his 
death  ;  they  formed  the  fundamental  idea  of  the  love  of  revolutionary 
methods  and  the  hatred  of  Parliamentary  leaders  which  is  the  under- 
current of  much  of  the  Irish  history  that  followed  ;  above  all,  they  added 
to  the  hideous  disaster  of  1846  and  1847  another  element  of  Avoe  in  the 
thought  of  what  might  have  been. 

The  immediate  consequence  was  the  break-up  of  O'Connell's  mighty 
movement.  He  himself  and  several  of  his  colleagues  were  immediately 
afterv/ards  prosecuted  ;  and  the  most  shameful  methods  were  adopted  for 
obtaining  a  conviction.  Out  of  the  entire  panel  one  slip,  containing  mostly 
Catholic  names,  was  lost  ;  when  finally  there  were  left  eleven  Catholi-j< 
out  of  a  panel  of  twenty-four,  the  Crown  used  their  full  power  of  challeng? ; 


14  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

every  single  one  of  the  eleven  was  driven  from  the  box,  and  the  jury  con- 
sisted exclusively  of  Orange  Conservatives,  who  were  as  impartial  in 
deciding  the  case  of  O'Connell  in  those  days  as  would  be  a  jury  of  Southern 
slave-holders  in  the  case  of  an  Abolitionist  immediately  befoi^e  the  Civil 
War  in  America.  Then  the  judges  were  notoriously  partisan.  An 
accidental  phrase  is  still  remembered  which  brought  this  out  in  full  relief. 
Chief  Justice  Pennefather,  in  alluding  to  the  counsel  for  the  defence, 
spoke  of  them  as  *  the  other  side.'  Of  course,  before  such  a  judge  and  such 
a  jury,  conviction  was  a  foregone  conclusion.  Everybody  cried  out  shame 
on  the  iniquitous  proceedings  ;  O'Connell  walked  into  the  House  of 
Commons  amid  the  debate  upon  the  trial,  which  was  at  the  moment  being 
denounced  by  English  Liberals  as  vehemently  as  it  could  have  been  by 
himself.  It  was  generally  expected  that  the  verdict  would  be  reversed  on 
appeal — as  it  was  ;  and  an  effort  was  made  to  have  a  Bill  passed  v/hich 
would  have  allowed  O'Connell  to  remain  out  on  bail  until  the  case  was 
finally  decided.  But  the  Bill  was  rejected — principally  through  the  efforts 
of  Brougham,  who  had  a  violent  hatred  of  O'Connell ;  and  the  end  of  it 
all  was  that  O'Connell  had  to  go  to  gaol.  This  was  the  beginning  of 
the  end. 

But  it  did  not  look  so  at  the  time.  In  his  prison  O'Connell  held  levees 
more  like  those  of  a  prince  tha,n  the  unofficial  head  of  a  democracy  ; 
bishops,  priests,  town  councillors,  rushed  to  see  him  from  all  parts  of 
Ireland.  '  Here,'  writes  Mitchel  of  the  imprisonment  of  O'Connell  and 
his  companions  in  Richmond,  '  they  rusticated  for  three  months,  holding 
levees  in  an  elegant  marquee  in  the  garden  ;  addressed  by  bishops  ;  com- 
plimented by  Americans  ;  bored  by  deputations  ;  serenaded  by  bands  ; 
comforted  by  ladies  ;  half  smothered  with  roses  ;  half  drowned  in  cham- 
pagne.'^ And  when  the  case  was  brought  before  the  House  of  Lords  the 
verdict  was  reversed  ;  Chief  Justice  Denman  denounced  the  proceedings 
of  the  law  officers  as  reducing  trial  by  jury  to  a  '  mockery,  a  delusion, 
and  a  snare  :'  and  O'Connell  was  released  from  prison  amid  circumstances 
of  wild  triumph. 

But  all  the  same,  the  fact  remained  that  O' Conn  ell's  conviction  broke 
up  his  movement.  The  mighty  dictator — to  whom  millions  of  men  looked 
up,  for  whom  thousands  would  have  willingly  died — had  been  dragged  at 
the  tail  of  a  policeman  ;  and  the  hero  of  a  thousand  fights  had  been  beaten 
for  the  first  time  in  his  life.     The  prestige  of  unbroken  victory  was  gone. 

'  The  Repeal  year,'  as  Mitchel  pointedly  puts  it,  '  had  conducted,  not  to 
a  parliament  in  College  Green,  but  to  a  penitentiary  in  Richmond.' 
O'Connell,  too,  left  the  prison  physically  and  mentally  a  broken  man.  It 
was  discovered  after  his  death  that  he  had  been  for  years  suffering  from 
softening  of  the  brain,  and  the  date  generally  assigned  for  the  first  appear 
ance  of  the  disease  was  that  of  his  imprisonment.  He  was  besides,  as  we 
have  since  learned,  involved  in  domestic  trouble.  ^ 

But  though  the  fearful  excitement  of  the  Repeal  agitation  had  broken  down 
his  robust  frame,  he  remained  still  the  same  to  his  people.  Keen  observers 
remarked  the  feebleness  of  his  own  defence  at  his  trial ;  and  when  he 
began  to  address  meetings  again  after  his  release,  he  was  noted  to  carefully 
avoid  all  subjects  upon  which  the  people  were  most  eagerly  desirous  of  in- 
formation and  direction.  Here,  again,  most  of  the  critics  of  O'Connell 
declare  that  he  lost,  a  great  opportunity.     Mitchel,  and  many  men  still 

^  '  Last  Conquest  of  Ireland.' 

==  Duffy,  '  Young  Ireland,'  pp.  530-32. 


THE  FALL  OF  O'CONNELL.  15 

living,  and  with  the  hot  blood  of  youth  cooled  by  mature  years,  declare 
that  he  ought  to  have  called  upon  the  people  to  make  some  stand,  and  that 
the  people  not  only  would  have  obeyed,  but  at  the  time  panted  for  the 
word.  The  population  of  Ireland  at  this  period  was  eight  and  a  half 
millions  ;  and  though  there  was  terrible  poverty  in  the  country,  there  had, 
as  yet,  not  been  anything  like  universal  starvation.  The  masses  of  men 
who  marched  to  the  demonstrations  are  universally  described  as  stalwart, 
bold,  and  well  drilled  ;  and  it  is  argued  that  by  mere  force  of  overwhelming 
numbers,  and  a  frenzy  that  was  national,  they  would  have  borne  down  the 
defences  of  the  Government.  In  support  of  this  view,  and  against  the 
damning  testiaiony  of  subsequent  abortive  attempts  at  insurrection,  the 
argument  is  used  that  the  means  and  methods  of  warfare  have  been 
revolutionized  since  that  period.  Soldiers  in  those  days  were  armed  with 
no  better  weapon  than  the  '  Brown-Bess  ;'  and,  as  an  ancient  revolutionary 
may  now  in  many  a  part  of  Ireland  be  heard  to  exclaim,  with  a  sigh  :  '  In 
those  days  every  man  had  his  pike.'  The  first  charge  might  have  killed 
hundreds  ;  but  after  the  first  charge,  soldiers  at  that  time  would  have  been 
impotent  against  a  resolute  people  a  hundred-fold  more  numerous. 

But,  wisely  or  foolishly,  O'Oonnell  was  determined  not  to  permit  any 
bloodshed.  His  courage  was  proved  on  too  many  a  scene  to  be  open  to 
question  ;  but  it  was  nob  the  desperate  courage  that  stakes  life,  fortune, 
and  a  whole  national  issue  upon  a  single  cast  of  the  die.  Then  his  whole 
training  had  been  that  of  a  man  who  had  found  in  words  weapons  more 
potent  than  armies  and  navies.  The  victories  he  had  obtained  were 
victories  in  law  courts,  and  in  deliberative  assemblies  ;  and  possibly,  and 
probably,  he  honestly  thought  he  would  still  be  able  to  utilize  the  en- 
thusiasm of  the  people  in  wringing  from  Parliament,  if  not  Repeal,  a 
blessing  so  great  and  so  needed  as  security  to  the  tenant-at-will  from 
starvation  and  eviction. 

There  was  one  fatal  obstacle  to  his  success  in  a  Parliamentary  move- 
ment ;  and  this  is  a  fact  which  should  always  form  a  central  consideration 
with  those  who  criticise  adversely  O'Connell's  career.  The  half -million  of 
people  who  gathered  around  him  at  Tara  were  not  those  to  whom  he  had 
to  appeal  for  the  most  potent  weapon  in  the  Parliamentary  conflict.  He 
had  to  pass  away  from  them  to  the  miserable  handful  of  voters  who,  in  all 
the  smaller  constituencies,  had  the  fate  of  elections  in  their  hands  ;  and  at 
that  time,  and  for  many  a  day  afterwards,  personal  interests  begot  of  abject 
poverty,  a  spirit  of  clique  or  other  mean  or  subsidiary  motives,  exercised 
deeper  influence  than  great  national  issues.  In  the  year  1843,  when  he 
was  still  at  the  very  height  of  his  power,  his  supporters  in  the  House 
of  Commons  did  not  reach  beyond  the  miserable  total  of  twenty-six 
members. 

From  this  time  forward  the  history  of  O'Connell  is  the  history  of  Repeal 
decay.  Arms  Acts  and  Coercion  Acts  meantime  took  from  the  people 
what  few  weapons  they  had,  and  the  Government  filling  gaols  with 
prisoners,  accelerated  the  break-up  of  that  tide  of  passion,  enthusiasm, 
and  desperate  courage,  which,  if  taken  at  its  flood,  might  then  have  led  on 
to  fortune. 

With  disaster  comes  inevitable  disunion.  Between  him  and  the  Yoimg 
Irelanders  the  quarrel  that  had  been  long  smouldering  had  at  last  broken 
into  open  flame.  Sir  Robert  Peel,  by  the  concession  of  a  larger  grant  to 
Maynooth,  still  further  disintegrated  the  forces  of  O'Connell  by  bringing 
pressure  on  the  Vatican,  and  through  the  "Vatican  on  some  of  the  bishops  ; 
and  so,  O'Connell's  power  began  graduallj'  to  melt  away. 


1 6  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT.       " 

CHAPTER  II. 

THE  COMING  OF  THE  FAMINE. 

While  thus  a,ll  the  national  forces  of  Ireland  were  being  reduced  to  impo- 
tence, there  was  coming  over  the  country  a  calamity  which  was  to  complete 
the  work  of  national  destruction  ;  to  inflict  on  Ireland  one  of  the  most 
widespread  and  one  of  the  most  terrible  disasters  recorded  in  human  his- 
tor}^ ;  and  to  prove  the  need  of  a  native  legislature  by  the  tragic  testimony 
of  a  starving  nation. 

There  never  was  an  event  in  human  history  which  could  have  been  more 
clearly  foreseen,  or  that  was  more  frequently  foretold,  than  the  Irish  famine 
of  1846-47.  The  circumstances  of  Vv'hich  it  was  the  iinal  outcome  had  been 
in  progress  for  centuries.  The  destruction  of  the  Irish  m.anufactures  by 
the  legislation  of  the  British  Parliament  had  thrown  the  entire  population 
for  support  on  the  land  ;  and  the  fierce  competition  thus  induced  had 
raised  the  rents  to  a  point  far  beyond  anything  the  tenant  could  ever  hope 
to  pay.  On  the  other  side,  the  landlords,  brought  up  to  no  profession, 
spendthrift,  separated  from  the  tenant  by  creed,  race,  and  caste,  aggra- 
vated all  the  evils  of  the  system.  According  to  testimony  as  unanimous 
as  that  on  any  human  affair,  they  left  to  the  tenant  the  whole  improvement 
of  the  farm  :  the  fencing,  the  building  of  houses  and  ofliices — all  the  work 
that  from  time  immemorial  had  been  done  in  England  by  the  landlord  ; 
and  then,  when  the  tenancy  was  determined  either  by  the  lease  or  by 
caprice,  they  rewarded  the  tenant  by  eviction,  or  a  rise  in  the  rent.  The 
complaints  of  the  neglect  of  their  duties  by  the  Irish  landlords  run  with  a 
monotonous  iteration  through  the  extensive  literature  of  tlie  Irish  land 
question.  Spenser  railed  against  the  Irish  landlord  in  1596  for  his  prefer- 
ence of  tenancies  at  will  to  the  grant  of  leases.  The  exactions  of  the 
landlords,  and  the  terrible  Avant  thereby  caused  among  the  people,  sug- 
gested to  Swift  his  perhaps  most  ten  ible  satire — '  The  Modest  Proposal ' 
— and  his  bitterest  passages.  In  1729  Mr.  Prior  wrote  a  pamphlet  to  ex- 
pose the  evils  which  absenteeism  inflicted.  In  1791,  the  Protestant  Bishop, 
Dr.  Woodward,  denounced  rack-renting  and  the  '  duty-work '  which  the 
landlords  exacted  ;  and  so  on  with  scores  of  writers  on  the  subject. 

The  land  question  had  been  the  stock  subject  of  politicians  as  of  littera- 
teurs ;  innumerable  Parliamentary  committees  had  sat  and  investigated 
and  reported  upon  it.  To  begin  with  the  period  after  the  Union,  a  Parlia- 
mentary committee,  appointed  on  the  motion  of  Sir  John  Newport  in  1819, 
reported  that  there  was  great  want  of  employment ;  that  the  want  of 
employment  was  due  to  the  want  of  capital ;  and  that  the  want  of  capital 
was  caused  on  the  one  hand  by  the  absenteeism  of  a  number  of  the  land- 
lords, and  on  the  other  through  the  consumption  of  all  their  capital  by  the 
tenants  on  the  improvement  of  their  holdings.  In  1823,  another  committee 
drew  attention  still  more  emphatically  to  the  difference  between  the  action 
of  the  English  and  the  Irish  landlords,  and  denounced  strongly  the  preva- 
lent rack-renting.  In  1829  there  was  another  committee  which  considered 
a  Bill  brought  in  by  Mr.  Brownlow  in  favour  of  the  reclamation  of  waste 
lands  and  the  drainage  of  bogs — a  favourite  remedy  of  those  days.  In 
1830  a  committee  reported  that  '  no  language  could  describe  the  poverty  ' 
in  Ireland,  and  recommended  the  settlement  of  the  relations  of  landlord 
and  tenant  on  '  rational  and  useful  principles.' 

There  is  an  equally  embarrassing  riches  both   of  speeches  and  of  Bills. 


THE  CO  AUNG  OF  THE  FAMINE.  i? 

In  November,  1830,  Mr.  Doherty,  the  then  Solicitor-General  for  Ireland, 
described  the  houses  of  the  tenantry  as  such  as  the  lower  animals  in  Eng- 
land would  scarcely,  and  as  a  matter  of  fact  did  not,  endure.  The  Duke 
of  Wellington  denounced  the  evils  of  absentee  landlordism  in  the  same 
year  ;  and  in  the  following  year  Lord  Stanley — afterwards,  as  Lord  Derby, 
the  obstinate  advocate  of  the  landlord  party — called  scornful  attention  to 
the  fact  that  during  a  crisis  of  awful  distress  in  Mayo  there  had  been  but 
a  subscription  of  ii\^^  from  two  persons  out  of  a  rental  of  £10,400  a  year, 
and  described  the  rents  at  the  same  time  as  exorbitant.  Li  the  same  year 
Lord  Melbourne,  who  had  been  Chief  Secretary  for  Ireland,  maintained 
that  all  the  mtnesses  examined  before  the  different  Select  Committees  on 
the  subject  had  united  in  the  statement  that  the  disturbances  in  Ireland 
were  due  to  the  relations  between  the  landlords  and  tenants. 

In  the  same  manner  Bill  after  Bill  had  been  proposed.  Mr.  Brownlow's 
Bill  was  brought  in  in  1829.  It  passed  through  the  House  of  Commons  ; 
it  passed  the  second  reading  in  the  House  of  Lords  ;  it  was  referred  to  a 
Select  Committee  ;  but  they,  on  July  1,  reported  that  at  such  an  advanced 
period  of  the  session  it  was  impossible  to  proceed  any  further.^  In  the 
following  year  Mr.  Henry  Grattan  called  upon  the  Government  to  bring 
in  a  Bill  for  the  improvement  of  the  waste  lands.  In  the  next  year,  1831, 
Mr.  Smith  O'Brien  introduced  a  Bill  for  the  relief  of  the  aged,  hopeless, 
and  infirm.  In  1835  Mr.  Poulett  Scrope  asked  in  vain  for  a  Land  Bill ; 
in  the  same  year  Mr.  Sharman  Crawford  brought  in  a  Bill."-^  In  the  follow- 
ing year  Mr.  Crawford  got  leave  to  introduce  his  Bill  again  ;  but  it  never 
got  further  than  that  stage.  In  the  following  year  a  Mr.  Lynch  recurred 
to  the  old  proposal  of  a  Bill  for  the  reclamation  of  waste  lands  ;  but  he 
also  failed.  In  1842  a  small  attempt  was  made  to  deal  with  the  question 
of  the  waste  lands  by  the  Ii'ish  Arterial  Drainage  Act.  In  1843  came  the 
Devon  Commission  ;  this  caused  a  pause  in  the  efforts  to  amend  the  law. 
The  Devon  Commission  recommended,  as  is  known,  legislation  in  the  most 
emphatic  manner  ;  but  no  legislation  came.  In  1845  Lord  Stanley  brought 
in  a  Bill.  The  Bill  was  read,  a  second  time,  was  referred  to  a  Select  Com- 
mittee, and  was  then  abandoned.  In  the  same  session  Mr.  Crawford 
reintroduced  his  Bill,  but  had  to  abandon  it.  The  next  session,  after  some 
severe  pressure,  the  Earl  of  Lincoln  introduced  a  Bill ;  this  was  destroyed 
by  the  resignation  of  the  Ministry. 

It  will  be  seen  from  this  rapid  sketch  that  the  conditions  of  the  problem 
were  intimately  known  ;  that  all  parties — except  a  few  of  the  Irish  land- 
lords themselves — were  in  favour  of  a  change  in  the  law  ;  that  attempt 
after  attempt  had  been  made  to  create  this  change,  and  that  attempt  after 
attempt  had  failed.  Meanwhile,  landlords  and  tenants  were  carrying  on 
their  warfare  after  their  own  lawless  fashion.  Allusion  has  been  already 
made  tu  the  great  clearances  which  followed  the  abolition  of  the  forty- 
shilling  freeholder  ;  eviction  had  also  been  made  easy  by  legislation,  of  which 
more  presently.  In  1843  there  were  no  less  than  5,244  ejectments,  withl4,81d 
defendants,  from  the  Civil  Bill  Courts,  and  1,784  ejectments  from  the  Superior 

^  '  Parliamentary  History  of  the  Irish  Land  Question,'  by  R.  Barry  O'Brien,  pp.  36-7. 

=  This  Bill  put  no  restriction  whatever  on  the  power  of  eviction ;  it  simply  asked 
that  when  a  tenant  was  evicted  he  should  receive  compensation  for  those  permanent 
inaprovements  which  he  had  made  with  the  consent  of  his  landlord.  In  the  case  of 
Improvements  made  without  the  consent  of  the  landlord,  the  chairman  of  Quarter 
Sessions  was  to  decide  whether  they  presented  a  case  for  compensation.  This  was 
the  basis  of  all  the  Land  Bills  which  followed ;  it  was  the  high-water  mark  of  Land. 
Reform  in  those  days.    Mr.  Sharman  Crawford's  Bill  will  often  recur  in  these  pages, 

2 


1 8  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT, 

Courts,  with  16,503  defendants — making  a  total  of  7,028  ejectments  and 
31,319  defendants.  And  in  the  five  years  from  1839  to  1843,  no  less  than 
150,000  'tenants  had  been  subjected  to  ejectment  process.' •'■  Unprotected  by 
the  law  from  robbery,  and  face  to  face  with  starvation,  the  tenants  formed 
secret  and  murderous  organizations,  and  assassination  and  eviction  accom- 
panied each  other  in  almost  arithmetical  proportion.  As  poverty  increased 
indebtedness,  and  indebtedness  increased  eviction,  times  of  poverty  and 
times  of  disturbance  were  synonymous  terms.  With  disturbance  the 
Legislature  showed  itself  ready  and  eager  to  deal — when  the  remedy 
applied  took  the  shape,  not  of  remedial  legislation,  but  of  Coercion  Acts. 
The  year  was  the  exception  in  which  Ireland  was  living  luider  the  ordinary 
law.  The  Habsas  Corpus  Act  was  suspended  in  1800,  in  1801,  in  1802,  in 
1803,  in  1804,  in  1805  ;  it  was  suspended  again  from  1807  till  1810  ;  from 
1814  to  1817  ;  from  1822  to  1828  ;  from  1829  to  1831  ;  again  from  1833 
to  1835.  Side  by  side  with  the  suspension  of  the  Habeas  Corpus  Act 
there  were  other  and  special  Coercion  Acts  ;  frequently  there  were  two 
Coercion  Acts  in  the  same  year,  sometimes  in  the  same  session  :  in  the 
very  first  3'ear  of  the  Union  Parliament  no  less  than  five  exceptional  laws 
were  passed.  These  Coercion  Acts  were  of  a  ferocious  character  :  many  of 
them  abolished  trial  by  jury  ;  some  of  them  established  martial  law  ; 
transportation,  flogging,  death,  were  the  ordinary  sentences. 

It  is  a  singular  and  instructive  commentary  on  the  Act  of  Union,  that 
the  Union  Parliament  had  not  only  passed  five  Coercion  Acts  in  its  first 
session,  but  that  it  had  sat  for  but  two  months  when  it  passed  a  Coercion 
Act  severer  than  any  passed  even  in  the  stress  of  the  rebellion  of  1798. 
This  was  one  of  the  terrible  code  known  as  the  Insurrection  Acts.  Under 
the  Act  of  1800,  courts-martial  had  the  right  to  try  prisoners  ;  two-thirds 
of  the  officers  could  pronounce  sentence,  and  the  sentence  might  be  the 
sentence  of  death.  To  encom-age  these  tribunals  in  doing  their  duty,  the 
oificers  were  instructed,  in  the  v/ords  of  the  Act, '  to  take  the  most  vigorous 
and  effective  measures  ;'  and  the}'"  received  still  further  encouragement  by 
being  made  absolutely  irresponsible  ;  '  no  act,'  decreed  the  Legislature, 
'done  hj  these  tribunals  shall  be  questioned  in  a  court  of  lav/.'  In  1817 
a  modified  Insurrection  Act  was  passed,  which  in  some  respects  was  worse 
than  the  preceding  Acts.  A  body  of  justices — that  is,  of  landlords — were 
entitled  to  form  a  tribunal  if  they  were  presided  over  by  a  Serjeant-at- 
law  or  a  Queen's  Counsel,  and  this  tribunal  had  the  right  to  pass  sentences 
varying  from  one  year's  imprisonment  to  seven  years'  transportation  ;  they 
were,  like  the  courts -martial,  irresponsible,  for  there  was  no  appeal  and 
no  certiorari.  These  courts  were  employed  in  the  trial  of  persons  de- 
scribed as  '  idle  and  disorderly,'  and  the  '  idle  and  disorderly '  were  in- 
cluded in  the  following  extensive  category  : 

(1)  Anyone  found  out  of  his  or  her  dwelling-house  between  two  hours  after  sunset 
and  sunrise,  who  could  not  prove  to  the  satisfaction  of  the  tribunal  that  he  or  she  was 
upon  his  or  her  'lawful  occasions  ' — the  mere  fact  of  being  out  was  sufficient  authority 
to  a  policeman  to  arrest  and  detain  till  trial  ;  (2)  persons  taking  unlawful  oaths,  or 

I  This  is  how  O'Connell  puts  it  (Hansard,  Ixsxv.,  p.  520).  By  tenants,  he  probably 
means  heads  of  families.  Mr.  Bernal  Osborne,  who  spoke  in  the  same  debate  subse- 
quently to  O'Connell,  puts  the  figures  in  another  way.  '  There  were,'  he  said,  '  70,982 
civil  bill  ejectments  between  1889  and  1843,  exclusive  of  the  number  of  individual 
occupiers  served  with  process.  Counting,'  he  added,  'five  for  a  family,  this  would 
show  a  totril  of  354,910  persous  evicted  in  this  period'  {Ih.,  p.  534).  It  will  be  seen 
presently  v/hat  became  of  the  persons  evicted,  and  how  they  helped  to  bring  about 
the  Famine. 


THE  COMING  OF  THE  FAMINE.  19 

(8)  having  arms,  or  (4)  found  between  9  p.m.  and  6  a.m.  in  a  public-house  or  unlicensed 
house  in  which  spirituous  liquors  were  sold  and  not  being  inmates  or  travellers  ;  (5) 
persons  assembled  '  unlawfully  and  tumultuously '  ;  (15)  persons  hawking  'seditious 
papers,'  unless  they  disclose  the  persons  from  whom  they  received  them. 

It  would,  of  course,  be  assumed  by  many  readers,  especially  English 
readers,  that  these  statutes  were  severe  only  in  wording  or  intention  and 
not  in  practical  operation.  But  there  was  not  one  of  these  Acts  which 
was  not  carried  not  only  to  the  full  lengths  authorized  by  the  words  and 
intentions  of  the  Act,  but  to  a  large  extent  farther.  In  order  to  make 
the  dread  provisions  of  the  Insurrection  Act  just  described  applicable  to  a 
locality,  it  had  to  be  proclaimed ;  and  this  is  an  instance  of  how  such  a 
proclamation  was  brought  about : 

'  I  am  perfectly  acquainted  with  that  part  of  Kilkenny  now  under  proclamation 
adjoining  the  Queen's  County,'  said  Mr.  John  Dunn,  a  witness  examined  before  the 
Lords'  Committee  of  lS2i. 

'  Had  there  been  any  disturbance,'  asked  one  of  their  lordships,  'at  the  time  the 
Act  was  put  into  execution?'  'Not  in  the  barony  of  Innisfadden  adjoining  the 
Queen's  County  ;  I  am  aware  of  none.' 

'  Can  you  state,'  goes  on  the  examination,  '  on  what  ground  it  was  the  Insurrection 
Act  was  applied  for,  so  far  as  respects  that  barony,  and  the  circumstances  attending 
it?'  'I  understand  that  some  few  trees — some  two  or  three — had  been  failed  in  the 
domain  of  Lady  Ormonde,  and  I  am  tiot  aware  of  any  other  transaction  at  all  that 
would  justify  the  application  of  such  a  measure.'^ 

Thus  the  felling  of  two  or  three  trees  was  sufficient  to  expose  everybody 
in  this  Kilkenny  barony  to  the  chance  of  being  transported  for  seven  years 
by  a  Queen's  Counsel  and  a  body  of  landlords  to  whom  he  was  for  any 
reason  obnoxious,  if  he  only  happened  to  stay  beyond  nine  o'clock  in  a 
public-house. 

An  Irish  writer  who  has  written  an  excellent  article  on  the  coercive 
legislation  of  Ireland  in  the  Pall  Mall  Gazette  of  September  18,  1885,  will 
doubtless  appear  far-fetched  wiien  he  says  of  the  Insurrection  Act  of 
1822-25,  that  if  '  it  had  been  in  force  in  England  during  the  Anti-Corn 
Law  agitation,  Mr.  Cobden  and  Mr.  Bright  mighr;  have  been  transported 
for  seven  years  by  justices  or  landlords  interested  In  maintaining  che  tax 
on  food.'  But  the  illustration  is  literally  and  strongly  justified,  for  in 
1814  the  Insiirrection  Act  was  used  by  Sir  Robert  Peel  to  put  down  the 
Catholic  Board  and  to  prevent  popular  demonstrations  ;  that  is  to  say,  to 
suppress  all  agitation  against  the  exclusion  of  the  millions  of  Irish  Catholics 
from  any  share  in  the  government  of  their  own  country  ;  and  chat  was  an 
agitation  as  legitimate,  legal,  and  constitutional  as  that  for  the  repeal  of  the 
Corn  Laws. 

There  were  several  Acts  for  the  purpose  of  putting  dov\Ti  the  disturbances 
which  the  terrible  sufferings  of  the  tenantry  generated,  and  some  of  these 
Acts  permitted  the  sentence  of  '  whipping.'  Ilere,  again,  it  will  be  thought 
that  the  words  were  formal  and  mmatory  ;  but,  says  O'Connell,  who  lived 
all  through  these  coercion  laws,  *  I  have  known  ins jances  where  men  have 
been  nearly  flogged  to  death. '  ^ 

Besides  the  Insurrection  Acts,  supplemented  by  suspensions  of  the 
Habeas  Corpus,  there  were  special  Coercion  Acts  for  every  form  of  defence 
that  the  tenantry  could  devise.  It  has  become  the  fashion  of  modern 
English  statesmen  to  eulogize  O'Connell ;  when  he  was  alive,  English 
statesmen  met  him  at  every  point  in  his  career  by  every  agency  of  coercion 

'  Report  Lords'  Committee,  1324,  p.  432.    Quoted  by  O'Connell  (Hansard,  IxxxT. 
p.  503). 
^  Hansard,  Ixxxv.,  p.  503. 

2—2 


20  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

that  the  Legislature  could  devise.  It  has  been  seen  how  the  Insurrection 
Act  was  employed  by  Peel  in  1814  to  put  down  the  Catholic  Board  in 
which  O'Connell  had  a  part.  Between  1825  and  1836  no  less  than  four 
Acts  of  Parliament  were  passed  for  the  purpose  of  suppressing  political 
organizations  which  he  had  founded,  and  as  the  organizations  were  under 
the  control  of  O'Connell,  it  is  needless  to  say  that  they  were  legal,  consbi- 
tutional  and  peaceful  in  their  methods.  The  Irish  people,  driven  from 
open  agitation,  were  then  met  by  a  disarming  code,  lest  they  should  seek 
their  emancipation  by  force  ;  and  when,  finally,  they  thought  of  secret 
organization,  they  were  confronted  by  another  code  of  laws  Avith  terrible 
penalties.  Anybody  who  administered  or  aided  in  administering  an  oath 
for  what  were  called  '  seditious  purposes  '  might  be  transported  for  life  by 
one  of  the  tribunals  consisting  of  landlords  and  a  Queen's  Counsel,  and 
anybody  who  took  the  oath  might  be  transported  for  seven  years. 

Nor  does  this  represent  the  complete  case  in  the  contrast  between  the 
action  of  the  Legislature  towards  the  landlord  and  the  tenant.  While 
every  attempt  had  failed — no  matter  how  moderate— to  improve  the  con- 
dition of  the  tenant,  the  Legislature  had  passed  law  after  law  to  increase 
the  power  of  the  landlord.  Thus  the  56  Geo.  III.,  cap.  88,  gave  to  the 
landlord  a  power  of  distraint  which  he  never  had  enjoyed  up  to  this 
period.  Under  this  Act  the  landlord  could  distrain  the  growing  crops 
of  a  tenant,  could  keep  them  till  ripe,  could  save  and  sell  them 
when  ripe,  and  could  charge  the  tenant  with  the  accumulated  ex- 
penses. This  terrible  Act  was  the  starting-point  of  the  great  evictions 
which  have  been  the  chief  causes  of  agrarian  crime  in  Ireland.  Two 
years  afterwards  came  another  Act  to  complete  the  evil  work  begun. 
The  58  Geo.  TIL,  cap.  39,  established  the  power  of  civil  bill  eject- 
ments. The  previous  Act  had  given  the  landlord  the  means  of  ruining 
the  tenant  by  the  seizure  of  his  crops  ;  this  Act  enabled  the  landlord  to 
complete  the  ruin  by  turning  the  tenant  off  his  holding.  The  1  Geo.  IV., 
cap.  41,  extended  still  further  the  power  of  civil  bill  ejectment ;  the  1  Geo. 
IV.,  cap  87,  enabled  the  landlord  to  get  security  for  costs  from  defendants 
in  ejectments — that  is  to  say,  took  away  in  a  large  proportion  of  cases  any 
chance  from  the  tenant  of  resisting  the  demand  for  the  verdict  of  eviction ; 
the  1  and  2  Wm.  IV.,  cap.  31,  gave  the  landlord  the  right  of  immediate 
execution  in  ejectment  cases  ;  the  6  and  7  Wm.  IV.  gave  still  further 
facilities  for  civil  bill  ejectments  ;  and  thus  the  whole  eviction  code  was 
made  entirely  complete,  without  chink,  without  flaw,  without  possibility 
of  improvement.^  These,  then,  were  the  legislative  benefits  by  which  the 
Irish  people  were  taught  the  enormous  gain  of  having  their  interests 
attended  to  by  an  Imperial  and  United  Legislature.  It  should  also  be 
remarked  that  these  Eviction  Acts,  and  some  of  the  worst  of  these 
Coercion  Acts,  were  passed  when  the  late  Sir  Robert  Peel  was  Chief 
Secretary  ;  for,  as  we  are  told  in  Cates's  '  Dictionary  of  General  Biography,' 
*  in  181ii  Peel  was  made  Chief  Secretary  for  Ireland — an  office  which  he 
held  with  much  advantage  to  the  country  till  1818.'^  The  'advantage' 
to  the  country  was  the  preparation  of  the  famine. 

Let  us  now  put  the  whole  case  in  tabular  form  by  way  of  making  it  more 
intelligible. 

For  the  Landlobd. 

1800.  Habeas  Corpus  suspended ;  Coercion  Act. 

1801.  Habeas  Corpus  suspended  ;  two  Coercion  Acts. 

^  O'Connell,  in  Hansard,  Ixxxv.,  pp.  522,  523.  ^  P.  857  (second  edition).  ' 


THE  COMING  OF  THE  FAMINE.  21 

1S02.  Habeas  Corpus  suspeuded  ;  two  Coercion  Acts. 

1803.  Habeas  Corpus  suspended  ;  two  Acts 

1S04.  Habeas  Corpus  suspeuded. 

1805.  Habeas  Corpus  suspended  ;  one  Coercion  Act. 

1807.  February  1,  Coercion  Act. 

,,      Habeas  Corpus  suspended  ;   August  2,  Coercion  Act. 

1808.  Habeas  Corpus  suspended. 

1809.  Habeas  Corpus  suspended. 

1814.  Habeas  Corpus  suspended  ;  one  Coercion  Act. 

1815.  Habeas  Corpus  suspended  ;  Insurrection  Act  continued. 

1816.  Habeas  Corpus  suspended  ;  first  Eviction  Act ;  Insurrection  Act  continued. 

1817.  Habeas  Coi-pus  suspended  ;  one  Coercion  Act ;  second  Eviction  Act. 

1818.  Second  Eviction  Act. 

1820.  Tliird  Eviction  Act  ;  same  year,  fourth  Eviction  Act. 
1822.  Habeas  Corpus  suspended  ;  two  Coercion  Acts. 
1823  to  182d.     Habeas  Corpus  susiaended,  and  one  Coercion  Act  in  1823. 
-    1829.  Habeas  Corpus  suspended. 

1830.  Habeas  Corpus  suspended  ;  Importation  of  Arms  Act. 

1831.  Wtiiteboy  Act ;  Stanley's  Arms  Act  ;  fifth.  Eviction  Act. 

1832.  Importation  of  Arms  and  Gunpowder  Act. 

1833.  Habeas  Corpus  suspended  ;    Suppression  of  Disturbance  Act ;    Change  of 

Venue  Act. 

1834.  Habeas  Corpus  suspended ;    Suppression  of  Disturbance  Amendment  and 

Continuance  Act ;  Importation  of  Arms  and  Gunpowder  Act. 

1835.  Public  Peace  Act. 

1836.  Another  Arms  Act ;  sixth  Eviction  Act. 
1S3S.  Another  Arms  Act. 

1839.  Unlawful  Oaths  Act. 

1840.  Another  Arms  Act. 

1841.  Outrages  Act ;  another  Arms  Act. 

1843.  Another  Arms  Act ;  Act  consolidating  all  previous  Coercion  Acts. 

1844.  Unlawful  Oaths  Act.  ^ 

Fob  the  Tenant. 

1829.  Mr.  Brownlow's  Bill  dropped  in  House  of  Lords. 

1830.  Mr.  Grattan's  demand  for  an  Improvement  of  Waste  Lands  Bill  refused. 

1831.  Mr.  Smith  O'Brien's  Bill  for  the  Kelief  of  the  Aged  dropped. 

1835.  Mr.  Sharman  Crawford's  Bill  dropped. 

1836.  Mr.  Sharman  Crawford's  Bill  dropped. 
,,      Mr.  Lynch 's  Reclamation  Bill  dropped. 

1842.  Irish  Arterial  Drainage  Act  passed. 

1845.  Lord  Stanley's  Bill  dropped. 

„      Mr.  Sharman  Crawford's  BiU -dropped.  ) 

Nor  had  outraged  Nature  neglected  to  give  abundant,  warning  of  the 
Nemesis  she  exacts.  The  famine  of  1846-47  differs  in  degree  only  from 
the  famines  which  had  recurred  at  almost  regular  intervals  in  preceding 
periods  of  Irish  history.  Beginning  with  the  last  century,  it  was  the 
chronic  starvation  among  a  considerable  portion  of  the  people  that  drew 
from  Swift  in  1729  the  savage  satire  already  alluded  to  ;  and  in  the  year 
of  the  publication  of  '  The  Modest  Proposal '  there  had  been  three  years  of 
dearth,  and  the  people  were  reduced  to  the  last  extremity.  In  1725,  1726, 
1727,  and  in  1728  the  harvests  were  very  bad  ;  and  in  1739  there  was  a 
prolonged  frost  that  produced  in  the  following  years  a  famine  which  was 

^  This  list  I  have  compiled  from  O'Connell  (Hansard,  Ixxxv.,  p.  505),  and  from  a 
pamphlet  by  Mr.  I.  S.  Leadam,  quoted  by  Mr.  Healy  in  his  pamphlet,  '  Why  there  is 
a  Land  Question  and  an  Irish  Laud  League,'  pp.  68,  69,  first  edition.  O'Connell's 
calculation  is  that  there  were  seventeen  Coercion  Acts  up  to  August,  1837.  There 
were  nearly  double  that  number— if  not  of  Acts  generally  called  Coercion,  at  least  of 
Acts  of  an  exceptional  and  restrictive  character.  Thus  O'Connell  enumerates  three 
Coercion  Acts  in  the  first  year  after  the  Union  :  there  were  five.  Nor  does  he  include 
Arms  Acts  in  his  list ;  though,  of  course.  Arms  Acts  are  Coercion  Acts.  Thus,  in 
1807,  he  mentions  two  Coercion  Acts  ;  there  were,  besides,  two  Arms  Acts. 


22  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

cne  of  the  worst  on  recoi-d.  Of  that  famine — the  famine  of  1740-41 — we 
have  many  contemporaneous  descriptions.  According  to  one  writer,  four 
hundred  thousand  persons  died.  Bishop  Berkeley  has  left  behind  touching 
descriptions  of  the  misery  that  came  before  his  own  eyes  and  smote  his 
loving  heart ;  and  another  writer  gives  a  picture  as  terrible  as  any  even  in 
the  history  of  famines,  '  I  have  seen,'  says  this  writer,  '  the  labourer  en- 
deavouring to  work  at  his  spade,  but  fainting  for  want  of  food,  and  forced 
to  quit  it.  T  have  seen  the  aged  father  eating  grass  like  a  beast,  and  in  the 
anguish  of  hi&  soul  wishing  for  his  dissolution.  I  have  seen  the  helpless 
orphan  exposed  on  the  dunghill,  and  none  to  take  him  in  for  fear  of  infec- 
tion :  and  I  have  seen  the  hungry  infant  sucking  at  the  breast  of  the 
already  expired  parent.'-^ 

In  1822  there  was  again  a  serious  famine  of  considerable  dimensions. 
Colonel  Patterson,  stationed  at  the  time  in  Galway,  tells  how  hundreds  of 
half -starved  wretches  arrived  daily  from  a  distance  of  fifty  miles,  many  of 
them  so  exhausted  by  want  of  food  that  means  taken  to  restore  them 
failed,  owing  to  the  weakness  of  their  digestive  organs  (quoted  from  John 
Mitchel's  '  History  of  Ireland,'  p.  15).  And  certain  official  returns  of  the 
time  state  that  in  the  month  of  June,  in  Clare  County  alone,  99,630 
persons  subsisted  on  daily  charity  ;  and  in  Cork,  122,000  (Alison's  '  History 
of  Europe,'  quoted  in  John  Mitchel's  'History  of  Ireland,'  p.  154).  Yet 
there  was  in  1821  a  good  grain  crop,  amounting  to  1,822,816  quarters, 
and  in  1822  to  more  than  1,000,000  quarters  (Thom's  'Directory,'  quoted 
by  John  Mitchel,  p.  123).^ 

It  was  the  peculiarity  of  the  Act  of  Union  and  of  the  land  legislation 
that  it  was  ultimately  a  curse  as  great  to  the  landlord  as  to  the  tenant. 
In  the  pages  which  immediately  follow  there  will  be  terrible  stories  of 
cruelty  by  the  Irish  landlords  ;  and  these  stories  will  often  tempt  the  reader 
to  ask  whether  the  men  who  perpetrated  such  crimes  could  have  had  the 
same  flesh  and  blood  as  himself.  The  landlords  of  Ireland  were  no  less 
human  beings  than  the  Southern  planters  who  upheld  the  slavery  of  the 
negro,  or  than  the  noblesse  whose  tyranny  produced  the  horrors  of  the 
Erench  Revolution.  Like  their  serfs,  they  were  the  victims  to  some  extent 
of  circumstances.  Behind  their  action  in  the  days  of  the  famine,  there  stood 
at  least  a  century  of  extravagance.  In  the  last  century  the  Irish  squire 
never  dreamt  that  the  time  would  come  when  the  native  Parliament  of 
Ireland  would  be  destroyed,  and  acted  as  if  Ireland  were  to  be  always  his 
chief  home,  and  Dublin  always  the  capital  to  which  the  Parliament  of  his 
country  would  bring  the  fashion  and  the  society  of  Ireland,  The  result 
was  that  he  spent  more  in  proportion  to  his  means  on  the  construction  of 
his  house  than  probably  his  English  brother.  The  aristocratic  mansions  in 
Dublin — which,  if  they  be  fortunate,  are  now  occupied  as  public  offices, 
and  if  unfortunate,  have  sunk  to  the  degradation  of  tenement  houses — were 
finer  in  the  days  before  the  Union  than  most  of  the  houses  which  were  then 
occupied  by  the  aristocracy  that  dwelt  in  London. 

^  Lecky,  '  History  of  England,'  ii,  218,  219. 

^  Cobbett,  in  his  '  Register,*  remarked  u]3on  this  strange  phenomenon  of  abundant 
food  and  widespread  starvation.  '  Money  it  seems,'  he  wrote,  '  is  wanted  in  Ireland. 
Now,  people  do  not  eat  money.  No,  but  the  money  will  buy  them  something  to  eat. 
What?  The  food  is  there,  then.  Pray  observe  this,  and  let  the  parties  get  out  of  the 
concern  if  they  can.  The  food  is  there  ;  but  those  who  have  it  in  their  possession  will, 
not  give  it  without  the  money.  And  we  know  that  the  food  is  there  :  for  since  this 
famine  has  been  declared  in  Parliament,  thousands  of  quarters  of  coi-n  have  been  ex- 
ported every  week  from  Ireland  to  England.'— Quoted  in  Mitchel's  '  History  of 
Ireland,'  p.  153. 


THE  COMING  OF  THE  FAMINE.  23 

Then  came  the  Union  ;  the  price  for  which  a  large  number  of  the  Irish 
nobility  betrayed  the  liberties  of  their  country  was  a  step  in  the  peerage. 
With  the  departure  of  the  Irish  Legislature  Dublin  ceased  to  be  the 
seat  of  Irish  fashion  ;  the  Irish  peer  suddenly  found  himself  obliged  to  live 
in  the  richer  and  more  expensive  country,  in  the  larger  and  more  expensive 
metropolis  ;  and  then  began  the  creation  of  debt,  alleviated  occasionally  by 
the  Irishman's  proverbial  luck  in  the  capture  of  a  rich  parti.  When  the 
famine  came,  a  vast  number  of  the  Irish  landlords  were  inextricably  in 
debt  ;  the  Encumbered  Estates  Act  had  not  yet  been  passed ;  and  accord- 
ingly there  was  no  means  whatever  of  rescue.  It  often  happened,  therefore, 
that  the  nominal  and  the  real  owner  were  two  different  persons.  The 
nominal  owner  was  an  O 'Flaherty  or  a  Blake  ;  the  real  ovv^ner  was  the 
Hebrew  gentleman  resident  in  London  from  whom  the  O'Flaherty  or  the 
Blake  had  borrowed  as  much,  or  more,  than  the  estate  could  bear.  The 
Irish  landlord  of  the  period — as  to  a  very  recent  date — was  insolent,  tyran- 
nical, ignorant  ;  a  spendthrift,  a  gambler,  often  a  drunkard  ;  but  he  often 
stood  to  be  shot  at  for  deeds  which  were  the  natural  sequence,  not  of  his 
own  follies  and  vices,  but  of  the  follies  and  vices  of  those  who  had  gone 
before  him. 

The  future  of  Ireland  which  all  these  causes  were  preparing  was  fore- 
cast in  several  of  the  official  reports  already  alluded  to,  and  above  all  in  the 
Report  of  the  Devon  Commission. 

A  few  extracts  from  these  reports  will  complete  the  picture  of  Ireland  in 
the  days  before  the  famine.  These  extracts  will  be  very  few  and  very  brief, 
but  they  are  sufficient  to  justify  the  assertion  already  made,  that  the  famine 
was  inevitable  without  land  reform  ;  and  that  its  advent  could  fail  to  be 
foreseen  only  by  invincibly  ignorant  Ministers  and  Parliaments. 

'I  have  seen  a  great  deal  of  the  peasantry,'  said  the  well-known  engineer  Alexander 
Mnuno,  whose  name  is  perpetuated  by  a  pier  in  the  town  of  Galway,  in  his  evidence 
before  the  committee  of  1824.  '  I  have  sometimes  slept  in  their  cabins,  and  had 
frequent  intercourse  with  them, "especially  in  the  south  and  west  of  Ireland,  1  con- 
ceive the  peasantry  in  Ireland  to  be  in  the  lowest  possible  state  of  existence ;  their 
cabins  are  in  the  most  miserable  condition,  and  their  food  is  potatoes,  with  water,  very 
often  without  anything  else,  frequently  without  salt ;  and  I  have  frequently  had 
occasion  to  meet  persons  who  begged  of  me  on  their  knees,  for  the  love  of  God,  to 
g-ive  them  some  promise  of  employment,  that,  from  the  credit,  they  might  get  the 
means  of  supporting  themselves  for  a  few  months  until  I  could  employ  them.'  ^ 

'  Nothing  can  be  worse  than  the  condition  of  the  lower  classes  of  the  labourers,  and 
the  farmers  are  not  much  better,'  said  Mr.  J.  Driscoll  before  the  1824  committee. 
'  They  have  nothing  whatever,  I  think,  but  the  potatoes  and  water  ;  they  seldom 
have  salt. 

The  committee  before  whom  this  and  the  like  evidence  was  brought  re- 
ported : 

That  a  very  considerable  proxjortion  of  the  population,  variously  estimated  at  a 
fourth  or  a  fifth  of  the  whole,  is  considered  to  be  out  of  employment ;  that  this, 
combined  with  the  consequences  of  an  altered  system  of  managing  land,  is  stated  to 
produce  misery  and  suffering  which  no  language  can  possibly  describe,  and  which  it 
is  necessary  to  witness  in  order  fully  to  estimate.  2 

The  situation  of  the  ejected  tenantry,  or  of  those  who  are  obliged  to  give  up  their 
small  holdings  in  order  to  promote  the  consolidation  of  farms,  is  necessarily  most 
deplorable.  It  would  be  impossible  for  langu,age  to  convey  an  idea  of  the  state  of 
distress  to  which  the  ejected  tenantry  have  beoa  reduced,  or  of  the  disease,  misery,  or 
even  vice  which  they  have  propagated  where  they  have  settled ;  so  that  not  only  they 

1  P.  226  of  the  Report.     Quoted  by  O'Connell  (Hansard,  Ixxxv.,  p.  507). 

2  Pp.  380,  381  of  the  Report  of  1824.  Quoted  by  O'Connell  (Hansard,  Ixxxv., 
p.  508). 


24  THE  FARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

who  have  been  ejected  have  been  rendered  miserable,  but  they  have  carried  with 
them  and  propagated  that  misery.  They  have  increased  the  stock  of  labour,  they 
have  rendered  the  habitations  of  those  who  have  received  them  more  crowded,  they 
have  given  occasion  to  the  dissemination  of  disease,  they  have  been  obliged  to  resort 
to  theft  and  all  manner  of  vice  and  iniquity  to  procure  subsistence  ;  but  what  is 
perhaps  the  most  painful  of  all.  a  vast  number  of  them  have  perished  of  want.  ^ 

The  Poor  Law  Inquiry  of  1835  reported  that  2,235,000  persons  were  out 
cf  work  and  in  distress  for  thirty  weeks  in  the  year.- 

Finally,  the  Devon  Commission  reported  that  ib  'would  be  impossible  to 
describe  adequately  the  sufferings  and  privations  which  the  cottiers  and 
labourers  and  their  families  in  most  parts  of  the  country  endure,'  'their 
cabins  are  sel  Jom  a  protection  against  the  weather,'  '  a  bed  or  a  blanket  is 
a  rare  luxury,'  '  in  many  districts  their  only  food  is  the  potato,  their  only 
beverage  water.'  ^ 

The  evidence  which  I  have  now  quoted  as  to  the  Land  question  may  be 
best  summed  up  in  the  words  cf  Mr.  Mill:  'Returning  nothing,'  he  writes 
of  the  Irish  landlords,  '  to  the  soil,  they  consume  its  whole  produce  minus 
the  potatoes  strictly  necessary  to  keep  the  inhabitants  from  dying  of 
famine.'  ^ 

It  was  this  state  of  relations  between  landlord  and  tenant  that  gave  to  the 
potato  its  fatal  importance  in  the  economy  of  Irish  life.  The  compromise 
between  the  two  sides  was  that  all  the  wheat  and  oats  which  were  grown  on 
the  land  and  all  the  stock  should  go  to  the  payment  of  the  rent;  and  also  so 
much  of  the  potato  crop  as  was  not  required  to  keep  the  tenant  and  his  family 
from  absolute  starvation.  The  potato  was  found  to  be  particularly  well 
suited  for  the  position  of  the  tenant.  It  produced  a  larger  amount  per  acre 
than  any  other  crop  ;  it  suited  the  soil  and  the  climate  ;  it  supplied  a  vege- 
table which,  alone  among  vegetables,  supported  life  without  anything  else. 
The  potato  meant  abundant  food  or  starvation,  life  or  wholesale  death. 
It  was  the  thin  partition  between  famine  and  the  millions  of  the  Irish 
people. 

The  plant  that  had  so  dread  a  responsibility  had  its  bad  qualities  as 
well  as  its  good;  it  was  fickle,  perishable,  liable  to  wholesale  destruction, 
and  more  than  once  already  had  given  proof  of  its  terrible  uncertainty.  It 
will  be  seen  by-and-by  that  the  readiness  of  the  potato  to  fail  played  a  very 
important  part,  and,  indeed,  was  the  main  factor  in  Irish  life,  not  merely 
in  the  epoch  with  which  we  are  now  dealing,  but  in  a  period  a  gTcat  deal 
nearer  to  our  own  time. 

There  was,  however,  no  anticipation  of  disaster  in  1845.  The  fields 
everywhere  waved  green  and  flowery,  and  there  was  the  promise  of  an 
abundant  harvest.  There  had  been  whispers  of  the  appearance  of  disease, 
but  it  was  in  countries  that  in  those  days  appeared  remote — in  Belgium 
or  Germany,  in  Canada  or  the  Western  States  of  America.  It  was  not 
until  the  autumn  of  1845  that  it  made  its  appearance  for  the  first  time 
in  the  United  Kingdom.  It  was  first  detected  in  the  Isle  of  Wight,  and 
in  the  first  week  of  September  the  greater  number  of  the  potatoes  in 
the  London  market  were  found  to  be  unfit  for  human  food.  In  Ireland 
the  autumnal  weather  was  suggestive  of  some  calamity.  For  weeks  the 
a-ir  was  electrical  and  disturbed  :  there  was  much  lightning,  unaccompanied 

^  Quoted  by  O'Connell,  ih.  Report  of  Select  Committee  of  1830,  p.  S.  Quoted  by 
O'Connell,  i6.,  pp.  508,  509. 

2  Quoted  by  Mr.  Labouchere,  '  Annual  Register,'  1847,  p.  9. 

3  Quoted  by  O'Connell  (Hansard,  Ixxxv.,  p.  509). 

4  Quoted  in  Healy,  '  Why  there  is  a  Land  Question,'  etc.,  p.  55. 


THE  COMING  OF  THE  FAMINE.  25 

by  thunder.  At  last  traces  of  the  disease  began  to  be  discovered.  A  dark 
spot — such  as  would  come  from  a  drop  of  acid — was  found  in  the  green 
leaves  ;  the  disease  then  spread  rapidly,  and  in  time  there  was  nothing  in 
many  ot  the  potato-fields  but  bleached  and  withered  leaves  emitting  a 
putrid  stench. 

The  disease  first  appeared  on  the  coast  of  Wexford,  and  soon  reports  of 
an  alarming  character  began  to  come  from  the  interior.  It  was  still  a 
hopetul  sign  that  a  field  of  potatoes  remained  sound  long  after  all  the  sur- 
rounding fields  had  been  touched  by  the  blight.  The  plague,  however,  was 
stealthy  and  swift,  and  a  crop  that  was  sound  one  day,  the  next  was  rotten. 
As  time  passed  on,  the  disaster  spread  ;  potatoes,  healthy  when  they  were 
dug  and  pitted,  were  found  utterly  decayed  when  the  pit  was  opened.  All 
kinds  of  remedies  were  proposed  by  scientific  men — ventilation,  new  plans 
ot  pitting  and  of  packing,  the  separation  of  the  sound  and  unsound  parts  of 
the  potato.  All  failed  ;  the  blight,  like  the  locust,  was  victor  over  all  ob- 
stacles, omnipotent  over  all  opposing  forces. 

O'Connell  and  the  public  bodies  of  the  country  called  tne  attention  of 
the  Government  to  the  impending  calamity.  The  Royal  Agricultural 
Society — an  association  of  landlords — declared  that  a  great  portion  of  the 
potato  crop  was  seriously  affected.  The  Dublin  Corporation  called  a  public 
meeting  under  the  presidency  of  the  Lord  Mayor,  which  O'Connell  at- 
tended. He  there  drew  attention  to  one  of  the  facts  which  excited  the 
most  attention,  and,  afterwards,  the  fiercest  anger  of  the  time.  This  was, 
that  while  wholesale  starvation  was  impending  over  the  nation,  every  port 
was  carrying  out  its  wheat  and  oats  to  other  lands.  Side  by  side  with  the 
fields  of  blighted  potatoes  in  1845,  were  fields  of  abundant  oats.  In  one 
week — according  to  a  quotation  from  the  JSIarh  Lane  Expi'ess  in  O'Con- 
nell's  speech — no  less  than  16,000  quarters  of  cats  were  exported  from 
Ireland  to  London.  O'Connell  joined  in  the  proposal  that  the  export  of 
provisions  to  foreign  countries  should  be  immediately  prohibited,  and  that 
at  the  same  time  the  Corn  Laws  should  be  suspended,  and  the  Irish  ports 
opened  to  receive  provisions  from  all  countries. 

Here  it  is  well  to  pause  for  a  moment  on  this  point.  In  favour  of  the 
proposal  of  closing  the  ports,  O'Connell  was  able  to  adduce  the  example  of 
Belgium,  of  Holland,  of  Russia,  and  of  Turkey  under  analogoiis  circum- 
stances. Testimony  is  as  unanimous  and  proof  as  clear  as  to  the  abundance 
of  the  grain  crop  as  they  are  to  the  failure  of  the  potato  crop.  'Everyone,' 
said  Lord  John  Russell,  in  a  letter  he  wrote  to  the  Duke  of  Leinster  in 
1847,  'who  travels  through  Ireland  observes  the  large  stacks  of  corn  which 
are  the  produce  of  the  late  harvest.'  ^  This  corn  was  scattered  far  and 
v/ide.  John  Mitchel  quotes  the  case  of  the  captain  who  saw  a  vessel  laden 
with  Irish  corn  at  the  port  of  Rio  in  South  America.  On  this  point,  more 
will  be  said  by-and-by. 

The  complamt  of  the  Irish  writers  is  that  this  wholesale  exportation  was 
not  arrested,  and  on  this  they  founded  charges  against  the  Ministers  of  the 
period,  some  grotesque,  but  some  most  true.  It  is  grotesque  to  charge  it 
as  a  crime  against  the  English  people  that  they  ate  the  food  which  was  sup- 
plied to  them  from  Ireland :  they  obtained  the  right  to  eat  the  food  by 
having  paid  for  it.  But  the  charge  is  just  that  it  was  the  land  legislation 
which  the  Imperial  Parliament  had  passed  and  maintained  that  rendered 
necessary  the   export  of  these  vast  provisions  amidst   all   the  stress  and 

*  Quoted  in  '  History  of  the  Irish  Famine,'  by  Rev.  J.  O'Roarke,  p.  248. 


26  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT, 

horrors  of  famine.  There  was  scarcely  a  single  head  of  all  these  cattle,  there 
was  scarcely  a  sheaf  of  all  this  corn,  the  price  of  which  did  not  go  to  pay  the 
landlord  over  whose  exorbitance  and  caprice  the  Legislature  had  again  and 
again  refused  to  place  any  legislative  restraint.  The  Irish  land  system 
necessitated  the  export  of  food  from  a  starving  nation.  The  Imperial  Par- 
liament was  the  parent  of  this  land  system  ;  the  Imperial  Parliament  was 
then  responsible  for  the  starvation  which  this  exportation  involved. 

The  appeals  which  O'Connell,  the  Dublin  Corporation,  and  other  bodies 
in  Ireland  addressed  to  the  Government,  grew  in  intensity  and  urgency  as 
the  crisis  advanced,  and  as  the  reports  began  to  reach  Dublin  of  numerous 
cases  of  starvation  throughout  the  country.  These  appeals  met  with  dila- 
tory answers.  The  Government  were  noting  all  that  took  place  ;  then  they 
were  inquiring  ;  finally  they  had  appointed  a  scientific  commission  to  inves- 
tigate the  facts  of  the  case ;  and  so  on.  Meantime  the  destrojring  angel 
was  advancing  with  a  certain  and  swift  wing  over  the  doomed  country. 

It  was  one  of  the  necessary'  consequences  of  the  Legislative  Union  that 
Ireland  was  inextricably  involved  in  the  struggles  of  English  parties.  And 
at  this  moment  England  was  in  the  very  agony  of  one  of  her  greatest  party 
struggles.  The  advent  of  the  Irish  famine  was  the  last  event  that  broke 
down  Peel's  faith  in  protection.  When  these  warnings  of  impending  dis- 
aster and  these  urgent  prayers  for  relief  came  from  Ireland,  Peel  was  in 
the  unfortunate  position  of  being  convinced  of  the  danger,  and  at  the  same 
time  impotent  as  to  the  remedies.  He  was  at  that  moment  in  the  midst 
of  his  attempts  to  carry  over  his  colleagues  to  free  trade  ;  and  so  his  hands 
were  tied.  He  did  propose  that  the  ports  should  be  opened  by  Order  in 
Council,  but  to  this  proposal  he  could  not  get  some  of  his  colleagues  to 
agree.  Then  there  came  a  Ministerial  crisis  :  Peel  resigned  ;  Lord  John 
Russell  was  unable  to  form  an  Administration  ;  and  Peel  aga,in  resumed 
ofi&ce.  The  result  of  these  various  occurrences  was  that  the  ports  were  not 
opened  and  that  Parliament  was  not  summoned  ;  and  thus  three  months — - 
every  single  minute  of  which  involved  wholesale  life  or  death — were 
allowed  to  pass  without  any  effective  remedy. 

Assuredly  under  such  circumstances,  O'Connell  and  the  other  leaders  of 
the  National  Party  were  justified  in  drawing  a  contrast  between  this 
deadly  delay  and  the  promptitude  that  a  native  Legislature  would  have 
shown.  '  If,'  he  exclaimed  at  the  Repeal  Association,  '  they  ask  me  what 
are  my  propositions  for  relief  of  the  distress,  I  answer,  first.  Tenant-right. 
I  would  propose  a  law  giving  to  every  man  his  own.  I  would  give  the 
landlord  his  land,  and  a  fair  rent  for  it ;  but  I  would  give  the  tenant  com- 
pensation for  every  shilling  he  might  have  laid  out  on  the  land  in  per- 
manent improvements.  And  what  next  do  I  propose  ?  Repeal  of  the 
Union.'^ 

And  then  he  went  on  with  stiU  greater  force  :  '  If  we  had  a  domestic 
Parliament,  would  not  the  ports  be  thrown  open — would  not  the  abundant 
crops  with  which  Heaven  has  blessed  her  be  kept  for  the  people  of  Ireland 
— and  would  not  the  Irish  Parliament  be  more  active  even  than  the  Belgian 
Parliament  to  provide  for  the  people  food  and  employment  ?'2 

But  Ireland  had  not  won  her  Legislature  ;  and  she  had  accordingly  to 
wait  patiently  until  January  22,  when  it  suited  the  English  Premier  to  coll 
Parliament  together.  The  mysterious  replies  of  the  Ministers — the  perfect 
paralysis  of  independent  effort  which   these   suggestions   had   caused   in 

*  '  History  of  Ireland,'  by  John  Mitchel,  ii.  205.  ^  j^^ 


THE  COMING  OF  THE  FAMINE.  27 

Ireland — all  tended  to  turn  the  eyes  of  the  Irish  people  with  feverish  long- 
ing and  expectation  to  this  event.  The  opening  hours  of  the  session  were 
suflBcient  to  damp  all  these  hopes.  On  means  of  affording  relief  the  Queen's 
Speech  was  vague  ;  but  on  the  question  of  coercion  it  spoke  in  terms  of 
unmistakable  plainness.  '  I  have  observed,'  said  that  document,  '  with 
deep  regret,  the  very  frequent  instances  in  which  the  crime  of  deliberate 
assassination  has  been  of  late  committed  in  Ireland.  It  will  be  your  duty 
to  consider  whether  any  measures  can  be  devised  calculated  to  give  in- 
creased protection  to  life,  and  to  bring  to  justice  the  perpetrators  of  so 
dreadful  a  crime.'  I  will  deal  with  the  justification  for  the  new  Coercion 
Bill  when  I  come  to  describe  the  memorable  struggle  that  took  place  on 
that  measure.  Meantime,  let  it  suffice  to  say  that  the  characteristic 
contrast  between  the  tender  solicitude  of  the  Government  for  the  land- 
lords, and  its  half-hearted  regard  for  the  tenants — at  the  moment  when 
of  the  tenants  a  thousand  had  died  through  eviction  and  hunger  for 
every  one  of  the  landlords  who  had  met  death  through  assassination — 
roused  the  bitterest  resentment  in  Ireland.  '  The  only  notice,'  exclaimed 
the  Nation,  '  vouchsafed  to  this  country  is  a  hint  that  more  gaols,  more 
transportations,  and  more  gibbets  might  be  useful  to  us.  Or,  possibly,  we 
wrong  the  Minister  ;  perhaps  when  her  Majesty  says  that  "  protection  must- 
be  afforded  to  life,"  she  means  that  the  people  are  not  to  be  allowed  to  die 
of  hunger  during  the  ensuing  summer — or  that  the  lives  of  tenants  are  to 
be  protected  against  the  ext-ermination  of  clearing  landlords — and  that  so 
' '  deliberate  assassinations  "  may  become  less  frequent — God  knows  what 
she  means — the  use  ot  Royal  language  is  to  conceal  ideas.' 

The  measures  proposed  by  the  Government  for  dealing  with  the  distiess 
were,  first  the  importation  of  corn  on  a  lowered  duty  through  the  repeal  of 
the  Corn  Laws  ;  and,  secondly,  the  advance  of  two  sums  of  £50,000,  one 
to  the  landlords  for  the  drainage  ot  their  lands,  and  the  other  for  public 
works.  The  ridiculous  disproportion  of  these  sums  to.  the  magnitude  of 
the  calamity  was  proved  before  very  long  ;  but  to  all  representations  the 
Government  replied  in  the  worst  and  haughtiest  spirit  of  official  optimism. 
'  Instructions  have  been  given,'  said  Sir  James  Graham,  '  on  the  responsi- 
bility of  the  Government  to  meet  any  emergency.'^  Only  one  good  measure 
was  covered  by  the  generous  self-complacency  of  this  round  assertion. 
Under  a  Treasury  minute  of  December  19,  1845,  the  Ministry  had  in- 
structed Messrs.  Baring  and  Co.  to  purchase  £100,000  worth  of  Indian 
com.  This  they  introduced  secretly  into  Ireland,  and  its  distribution 
proved  most  timely. 

Still  the  Irish  members  pressed  for  more  definite  assurances  and  larger 
proposals.  But  their  suggestions  and  Peel's  beneficent  intentions  were 
frustrated  by  the  fatal  entanglement  of  Irish  sorrows  in  the  personal  ambi- 
tions and  the  partisan  warfare  of  St.  Stephen's.  Peel  had  put  forward  the 
Irish  famine  as  the  main  reason  for  his  change  of  opinion  on  the  Corn 
Laws  ;  and  the  Irish  famine  became  one  of  the  great  debatable  topics 
between  the  adherents  of  free  trade  and  of  protection.  All  the  Protec- 
tionist Party  in  Parliam_ent,  all  the  organs  of  the  landlords  in  Ireland, 
united  in  the  statement  that  the  reports  of  distress  were  unreal  and  ex- 
aggerated. '  The  potato  crop  of  this  year,'  wrote  the  Evening  Mail  of 
November  3,  1845,  '  far  exceeded  an  average  one  ;'.  '  the  corn  of  all  kinds 
is  so  far  abundant' — which,  indeed,  was  quite  true — 'the  apprehensions  of 

■'  Mitchel,  ii.  205. 


28  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT 

a  famine  are  unfounded,  and  are  merely  made  the  pretence  for  withholding 
the  payment  of  rent,'  Some  days  after  it  repeated,  '  there  was  a  sufficiency, 
an  abundance  of  sound  potatoes  in  the  country  for  the  wants  of  the  people.' 
'  The  potato  famine  in  Ireland, '  exclaimed  Lord  George  Bentinck,  '  was  a 
gross  delusion — a  more  gross  delusion  had  never  been  practised  upon  any 
country  by  any  Government.'^  '  The  cry  of  famine  was  a  mere  pretence  for 
a  party  object.'^  '  Famine  in  Ireland,'  said  Lord  Stanley,  was  'a  vision — 
a  baseless  vision.'^ 

The  second  great  obstacle  to  the  proper  consideration  of  measures 
to  meet  the  distress  was  the  Coercion  Bill.  It  was  quite  true  that  there 
had  been  several  atrocious  murders  in  Ireland  ;  but  the  provocation  to  out- 
rage had  been  terrible.  A  passion — that  looked  something  like  an  epidemic 
of  homicidal  mania — had  seized  many  of  the  landlords  for  wholesale  clear- 
ances at  the  very  moment  when  the  people  were  confronted  with  universal 
hunger.  One  of  the  very  worst  of  these  cases  had  taken  place  within  a  few 
days  of  the  discussion  on  the  Coercion  Bill.  A  Mr.  and  Mrs.  Gerard  had 
turned  out  in  one  morning  the  entire  population  of  the  village  of  Ballinglass, 
in  the  county  of  Gal  way — 270  persons  in  number.  Neither  the  old,  the 
j-oung,  nor  the  dying  had  been  spared  ;  and  even  after  the  eviction  the 
tenants  had  been  pursued  with  a  frenzied  hate.  The  roofs  had  been  taken 
off  their  sixty  houses  ;  and  when  the  villagers  took  refuge  under  the  skeleton 
walls  they  were  driven  thence,  and  the  walls  were  rooted  from  their  founda- 
tions. Then  they  took  shelter  in  the  ditches,  where  they  slept  for  two 
nights  huddled  together  before  fires — some  of  them  old  men  eighty  years  of 
age,  others  women  with  children  upon  their  breasts.  They  were  forced 
from  the  ditches  as  from  their  hearths.  The  fires  were  quenched,  and  the 
outcasts  were  driven  to  wheresoever  they  might  find  a  home  or  a  grave. 

The  proposals  of  the  Coercion  Bill  of  the  Government  were  certainly 
startling.  Under  the  Bill  the  Lord-Lieutenant  could  proclaim  any  dis- 
trict, and  could  order  every  person  within  it  '  to  be  and  to  remain '  within 
his  own  house  from  one  hour  before  sunset  to  one  hour  before  sunrise.  No 
person  could  with  safety  visit  a  public-house,  or  a  tea  or  cotfee-shop,  or  the 
house  of  a  friend.  A  justice  of  the  peace  had  the  power  to  search  for  and 
drag  out  aU  such  persons.  The  penalty  was  as  terrible  as  the  offence. 
Any  person  outside  his  own  house,  whether  wandering  on  the  highway  or 
inside  another  house,  was  liable  to  be  transported  beyond  the  seas  for  seven 
years.  '  From  four  or  five  o'clock,'  said  Earl  Grey,  criticising  the  Bill  in 
the  House  of  Lords,^  '  in  the  afternoon,  till  past  eight  on  the  following 
morning,  during  the  month  of  December,  no  inhabitant  of  a  proclaimed 
district  in  Ireland  was  to  be  allowed  to  set  his  foot  outside  the  door  of  his 
cabin  without  rendering  himself  liable  to  this  severe  punishment.  He 
might  not  even  venture  from  home  during  that  time  to  visit  a  friend,  or  to 
enjoy  at  any  place  a  few  hours  of  harmless  recreation.  Nay,  he  dared  not 
even  go  to  his  work  in  the  morning,  or  return  from  his  work  in  the  even- 
ing, so  as  to  gain  the  advantage  of  the  hours  of  daylight,  without  rendering 
himself  liable  to  arrest  at  the  will  of  a  police-constable,  and  to  be  kept  in 
confinement,  in  default  of  proving  what  no  man  could  prove — that  he  was 
out  vnth  innocent  intentions.' 

Such  a  Bill,  ferocious  at  any  time,  was  still  more  ferocious  in  the  circum- 
stances of  Ireland  at  that  moment.  The  man  found  outside  a  house  between 
sunset  and  sunrise  was  liable  to  transportation  for  seven  years  ;  and  in  this 

^  Quoted  by  O'Rouvke,  p,  104,  ^  <  Annual  Register,'  1846,  p.  68. 

3  lb.,  p.  80.  4  Hansard,  Ixxxiv.,  p.  697. 


7ilk  COMING  OF  THE  FAMWE.  t'g 

year  the  roads  of  all  Ireland  were  crowded  with  wanderers,  houseless,  home- 
less, starving,  and  dying.  Then  the  Bill  enabled  the  Lord-Lieutenant  to 
inflict  taxation  on  the  proclaimed  district  for  additional  police,  for  additional 
magistrates,  for  compensation  to  the  relations  of  murdered  or  injured  per- 
sons ;  and  it  was  especially  enacted  that  the  taxation  could  be  levied  by 
distress,  and  levied  on  the  occupiers  only.  The  landlords,  who,  through 
absenteeism,  or  rack-renting,  or  the  clearances,  were  the  direct  authors  and 
instigators  of  the  despair  that  led  to  the  crimes,  were  especially  exempted 
from  all  taxation.^  Every  tenant  was  liable  ;  and  so  resolute  were  the 
Government  to  inflict  the  tax,  that  the  merciful  exemptions  by  the  Poor 
Law  were  abrogated.  Under  the  Poor  Law  all  persons  in  houses  under  £4 
valuation  were  free  from  the  rates  ;  under  the  Coercion  Bill  the  occupier 
of  any  house,  whether  above  £4  or  under  £4,  was  liable  to  the  tax.  And 
this  at  the  moment  when  the  inhabitants  of  the  greater  number  of  the 
houses  in  Ireland  had  not  one  meal  of  potatoes  a  day  ! 

But  cruel  as  was  such  a  Bill  at  such  a  time,  it  would  have  been  passed 
with  a  light  heart,  and  by  huge  majorities  from  all  English  parties,  if  the 
exigencies  of  English  party  warfare  had  not  at  this  moment  produced  a 
curious  and  a  not  very  moral  alliance  between  the  English  Whigs,  the 
English  Protectionists,  and  the  O'Connellites.  The  English  Whigs  were 
anxious  to  return  to  oflB.ce  ;  the  Protectionists  raged  with  the  desire  to  be 
avenged  on  Peel  for  the  abandonment  of  protection  ;  and  the  two  parties 
saw  in  a  combination  against  this  Bill  an  opportunity  of  attaining  their 
different  ends.  There  were  some  slight  obstacles,  it  was  true,  in  the  way. 
Lord  John  Russell  had  voted  for  the  first  i-eading  of  the  Bill,  and  Lord 
George  Bentinck,  in  response  to  some  overtures  to  use  it  against  the 
Ministers,  had  responded  with  fierce  indignation  and  a  vehement  defence 
of  the  measure.  But  Lord  John  Russell  had  a  counsellor  in  his  own  am- 
bition, and  Lord  George  Bentinck  as  sinister  an  adviser  in  Mr.  Disraeli  : 
with  the  result  that  each  performed  a  volte-face  as  prompt  as  it  was  shame- 
less. They  both  condescended,  of  course,  to  sujDply  most  excellent  and 
strictly  decorous  reasons  for  their  change  of  attitude.  Lord  John  Russell 
announced  the  discovery — made  with  the  suddenness,  and,  as  will  be  seen 
by-and-by,  lost  again  with  the  suddenness  of  a  modern  miracle  —  that 
coercion  aggravated  instead  of  curing  the  evils  of  Ireland  ;  and  Lord 
George  Bentinck,  declaring  that  the  Government  had  displayed  insincerity 
in  postponing  the  Bill  so  long,  proceeded  to  prove  his  own  sincerity  by 
taking  care  that  it  should  be  postponed  to  the  Greek  Kalends.  It  was 
under  conditions  like  this  that  an  Irish  Coercion  Bill  was  defeated  for  the 
first,  and  up  to  the  present,  for  the  last,  time  in  the  whole  history  of  the  Im- 
perial Parliament. 

On  June  26,  1846,  the  second  reading  of  the  Coercion  Bill  was  rejected 
by  292  votes  to  217.  On  June  29  Sir  Robert  Peel  announced  his  resigna- 
tion.    In  the  opinion  of  the  majority  of  the  Irishmen  who  survive  from 

^  Earl  Grey  :  '  It  was  not  just  to  exempt  the  landlords  ;  though  they  Trere  not  the 
cause  of  these  outrages  and  evils,  Ireland  never  would  have  got  into  its  present  state, 
the  existing  state  of  society  there  would  never  have  been  such  as  it  was,  if  the  lanl- 

lords,  as  a  body,  had  done  their  duty  to  the  population  under  them ; he 

believed  that  of  late  years  an  improvement  had  taken  place  in  the  conduct  of  the 
landlords  of  Ireland  towards  their  tenantry  ;  but  if  they  looked  to  the  past  history  of 
that  land,  the  awful  state  of  things  now  existing  would  be  seen  to  be  a  direct  conse- 
queuce  of  the  dereliction  of  their  duty  b,y  the  upper  classes  of  that  country,  which 
was  an  historical  fact  known  not  only  to  England  but  to  all  Euroxie.'— Hansard,  Ixxxiv., 
pp.  694,  6yo. 


30  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT, 

that  period,  the  change  of  Administration  was  dearly  botight  by  Ireland, 
even  by  the  defeat  of  a  Coercion  Bill.  The  steps  that  had  been  taken  by 
Peel  were  certainly  grossly  insufficient  ;  but  the  disaster  with  which  he  had 
to  deal  was  small  in  comparison  with  that  which  confronted  Lord  John 
Russell ;  and  the  opinion  of  posterity — at  least  of  Irish  posterity — is  that, 
as  a  Minister,  Lord  John  Russell  was  vastly  inferior  to  Peel,  and,  there- 
fore, much  less  competent  to  deal  with  the  terrible  crisis  which  had  now 
come  upon  Ireland. 

Amidst  the  throes  of  these  great  struggles,  Ireland  was  entering  upon  a 
new  and  a  still  more  terrible  chapter  in  hei  tragic  annals.  The  Famine  of 
1846  was  coming  ! 


CHAPTER   III 

THE   FAMINE. 


Nothing  brings  the  desperate  position  of  the  Irish  tenant  home  with  more 
terrible  clearness  to  the  mind  than  the  fact  that  the  awful  warning  of  1845 
was,  and  had  to  be,  unheeded.  The  potato  was  still  cherished  as  the  only 
friend,  the  one  refuge,  the  single  resource  of  the  peasant.  He  stuck,  then, 
to  the  plant — not  with  the  tenacity  of  despair  ;  not  with  the  obstinacy  of 
incurable  fatuity  ;  but  because,  in  his  circumstances,  the  potato,  and  the 
poto.to  alone,  offered  him  hope. 

Strangely  enough,  it  was  in  no  spirit  of  apprehension  that  the  tenantry 
set  to  work  in  the  preparation  of  the  potato  crop  of  1846.  Contemporary 
testimony  is  unanimous  in  describing  them  as  working  at  that  period  with 
an  energy  that  was  frantic,  with  a  hopefulness  that  was  tragic — with  a 
determination  to  risk  all  on  the  one  cast  that  exhibited  for  oiice  a  nation 
carried  in  the  maelstrom  of  the  gambler's  desperation.  'Although,'  writes 
Mr.  A.  M.  Sullivan,^  '  already  feeling  the  pinch  of  sore  distress,  if  not  actual 
famine,  they  worked  as  if  for  dear  life  ;  they  begged  and  borrowed  on  any 
terms  the  means  whereby  to  crop  the  land  once  more.  The  pawn-offices 
were  choked  with  the  humble  finery  that  had  shone  at  the  village  dance  or 
christening  feast  ;  the  banks  and  local  money-lenders  were  besieged  with 
appeals  tor  credit.     Meals  were  stinted  ;  backs  were  bared.' 

The  signs  of  the  seasons  were  watched  throughout  the  year  with  fierce 
anxiety.  The  spring  was  unpromising  enough.  Snow,  hail,  and  sleet  fell 
in  March  ;  and  in  Belfast  there  was  snow  as  late  as  the  first  week  in  April. 
But  when  the  summer  came,  it  made  amends  for  all  this.  The  weather  in 
June  was  of  tropical  heat ;  vegetation  sprang  up  with  something  of  tropical 
rapidity  ;  and  everybody  anticipated  a  splendid  harvest.  Towards  the  end 
of  June  there  was  again  a  change  for  the  worse.  The  -weather  broke  ;  in 
Limerick  there  was  on  the  19th  a  sudden  downfall  of  copious  rain  ;  then 
came  thunder  and  lightning,  and  after  that  intense  cold.  So  also  in  July, 
there  was  the  alternation  of  tropical  heat  and  thunderstorm,  of  parching 
dryness  and  excessive  rain.  St,  Swithin's  Day  was  looked  forward  to  with 
great  eagerness.  There  was  a  continuous  downpour  of  rain  ;  and  on  the 
following  day  a  fearful  thunderstorm  burst  over  Dublin.  Still  the  crop 
went  on  splendidly ;  and  all  over  the  country  once  again  wide  fields  of  waving 
green  and  flowery  stalks  promised  exuberant  abundance  of  the  staple  pro- 
duct of  Ireland. 

I  '  New  Ireland,'  p.  59  (eighth  edition). 


THE  FAMINE.  31 

It  was  in  the  early  days  of  August  that  the  first  s5miptoms  of  the  coining 
disaster  were  seen.  The  calamity  was  heralded  by  a  strange  portent  that 
was  seen  simultaneously  in  several  parts  of  Ireland,  and  that  at  once  sug- 
gested the  ghastly  truth  to  those  who  had  carefully  watched  the  signs  of 
the  previous  year.  A  fog — which  some  describe  as  extremely  white,  and 
others  as  yellow — was  seen  to  rise  from  the  ground  ;  the  fog  was  dry,  and 
emitted  a  disagreeable  odour.  A  Mr.  Cooper  saw  it  on  the  Ox  Mountains 
in  Sligo  ;  Justin  McCarthy  remembers  to  have  seen  it  in  Bantry  Bay  in 
county  Cork.  Mr.  Cooper  at  once  suspected  the  real  truth,  and  caused  in- 
quiries to  be  made.  The  companion  who  was  with  Mr.  McCarthy  at  the 
time  at  once  exclaimed  that  the  blight  was  coming.  And  they  were  right; 
the  fog  of  that  night  bore  the  blight  within  its  accursed  bosom.  The  work 
of  destruction  was  as  swift  as  it  was  universal.  In  a  single  night  and 
throughout  the  whole  coimtry  the  entire  crop  was  destroyed,  almost  to  the 
last  potato.  '  On  the  27th  of  last  month  '  (July),  writes  Father  Mathew, 
*  I  passed  from  Cork  to  Dublin,  and  this  doomed  plant  bloomed  in  all  the 
luxuriance  of  an  abundant  harvest.  Returning  on  the  3rd  instant  (August), 
I  beheld  with  sorrow  one  wide  waste  of  putrefying  vegetation, '  ^ 

The  meaning  of  the  dread  calamity  burst  upon  the  people  at  once  ;  but 
the  suffering  was  yet  to  come.  In  the  meantime,  they  gave  way  to  the 
poignancy  of  their  grief  or  to  the  apathy  of  their  despair.  'In  many 
places,'  writes  Father  Mathev/,  '  the  wretched  people  were  seated  on  the 
fences  of  their  decaying  gardens,  wringing  their  hands  and  wailing  bitterly 
the  destruction  that  had  left  them  foodless.'  ^  '  Blank  stolid  dismay,  a  sort 
of  stupor,  fell  upon  the  people,'  writes  Mr.  A.  M.  Sullivan,  '  contrasting  re- 
markably with  the  fierce  energy  put  forth  a  year  before.  It  was  no 
uncommon  sight  to  see  the  cottier  and  his  little  family  seated  on  the  garden 
fence,  gazing  all  day  long  in  moody  silence  at  the  blighted  plot  that  had 
been  their  last  hope.  Nothing  could  arouse  them.  You  spoke  ;  they 
answered  not.  You  tried  to  cheer  them  ;  they  shook  their  heads.  I  never 
saw  so  sudden  and  so  terrible  a  transformation.'  ^ 

'  Famine  advances  on  us  with  giant  strides,'^  wrote  Captain  Wynne,  one 
of  the  officials  of  the  time,  from  Ennis  in  the  autumn  of  1846  ;  and  his 
words  were  soon  confirmed.  Towards  the  end  of  August  the  calamity 
began  to  be  universal,  and  its  symptoms  everywhere  to  be  seen.  Some  of 
the  people  rushed  into  the  towns  ;  others  wandered  listlessly  along  the  high- 
roads, in  the  vague  and  vain  hope  that  food  would  somehow  or  other  come 
to  their  hands.  They  grasped  at  everything  that  promised  sustenance  ; 
they  plucked  turnips  from  the  fields  ;  many  were  glad  to  live  for  weeks  on 
a  single  meal  of  cabbage  a  day.^  In  some  cases  they  feasted  on  the  dead 
bodies  of  horses  and  asses**  and  dogs  ;''  and  there  is  at  least  one  horrible 
story  of  a  mother  eating  the  limbs  of  her  dead  child.^  In  many  places 
dead  bodies  were  discovered  with  grass  in  their  mouths  and  in  their 
stomachs  and  bowels.*^  In  Mayo,  a  man  who  had  been  observed  searching 
for  food  on  the  seashore  was  found  dead  on  the  roadside,  after  vainly 
attempting  to  prolong  his  wretched  life  by  means  of  the  half -masticated 
turf  and  grass  which  remained  unswallowed  in  his  mouth.     Nettle-tops, 

^  'The  Census  for  Ireland  for  the  Year  1851.'    Part  V.     '  Table  of  Deaths,'  vol.  i. 
p.  270.  2  Ih. 

3  '  New  Ireland,'  p.  ^9.  4  O'Rourke,  p.  366. 

5  Census  Commissioners,  p.  273.  6  O'Rourke,  pp.  390,  391. 

7  Census  Commissioners,  p.  243.  §  /&.,  p.  310.  9  lb,,  pp.  243,  288, 


3a  THE  PARNELL  M0VEMEN7\ 

wild  mustard,  and  watercress  were  sought  after  with  desperate  eagerness. 
The  assuaging  of  hunger  with  seaweed  too  often  meant  the  acceleration  ot 
death,  but  seaweed  was  greedily  devoured/  so  also  were  diseased  cattle,'-^ 
and  there  were  inquests  in  many  places  on  people  who  had  died  from 
eating  diseased  potatoes.^  Another  general  effect  of  the  famine  was  that 
the  characteristic  merriment  ot  the  peasantry  totally  disappeared.^  People 
went  about,  not  speaking  even  to  beg,  with  'a  stupid  despairing  look  \^ 
children  looked  'like  old  men  and  women  ;'^  and  even  the  lower  animals 
seemed  to  feel  the  surrounding  despair  ;  '  the  few  dogs,'  says  a  visitor  to 
INIayo,  '  were  poor  and  piteous,  and  had  ceased  to  bark.'''  Even  the  ties  of 
kindred  were  rent  asunder.  Parents  neglected  their  children,  and  in  a  fev/ 
localities  children  turned  out  their  aged  parents.^  But  such  cases  were 
very  rare,  and  in  the  most  remote  parts  of  the  country.  There  are,  on  the 
other  hand,  numberless  stories  of  parents  willingly  dying  the  slow  death  of 
starvation  to  save  a  small  store  of  food  for  their  children.^ 

The  workhouse  was  then,  as  it  is  now,  an  object  of  dread  and  loathing. 
Within  its  walls  were  accustomed  to  take  refuge  the  rustic  victims  of  vice 
and  the  outcasts  of  the  towns.  Entrance  into  the  workhouse  then  was 
reo-arded  not  merely  as  marking  the  advent  of  social  ruin,  but  of  moral 
degradation.  Thus  it  came  that  fathers  and  mothers  died,  and  allowed 
their  children  to  die  along  with  them  within  their  own  hovels,  rather  than 
seek  a  refuge  within  those  hated  walls.^°  But  the  time  came  when  hunger 
and  disease  swept  away  these  prejudices,  and  the  people  craved  admission 
to  the  once- dreaded  bastilles.  Here  again,  however,  hope  was  cheated  ; 
the  accommodation  in  the  workhouses  was  far  below  the  requirements  of 
the  people.  At  Westport  3,000  persons  sought  relief  in  a  single  day,  when 
the  workhouse,  though  built  to  accommodate  1,000  persons,  was  already 
•  crowded  far  beyond  its  capacity.'^^  It  was  this  town  that  Mr.  Forster 
described  as  showing  '  a  strange  and  fearful  sight  like  what  we  read  of  in 
beleaguered  cities  :  its  streets  crowded  with  gaunt  wanderers  sauntering  to 
and  fro  with  hopeless  air  and  hunger-struck  look.'^^  At  Carrick-on-Shannon 
there  were  110  applications  in  one  day  ;  there  were  thirty  vacancies.^-^ 
Driven  from  the  workhouses,  the  people  began  to  die  on  the  roadside,  or, 
alone  in  their  despair,  Avithin  their  own  cabins.  Corpses  lay  strewn  by  the 
side  of  once-frequented  roads,  and  at  doors  in  the  most  crowded  streets  of 
the  towns.  '  During  that  period,'  writes  Mr.  Tuke,  '  roads  in  many  places 
became  as  charnel-houses,  and  several  car  and  coach  drivers  have  assured 
me  that  they  rarely  drove  anywhere  without  seeing  dead  bodies  streAvn 
along  the  roadside,  and  that  in  the  dark  they  had  even  gone  over  them. 
A  gentleman  told  me  that  in  the  neighbourhood  of  Clifden  one  inspector 
of  roads  had  caused  no  less  than  140  bodies  to  be  buried  which  he  found 
along  the  highway.'^^  'In  our  district,'  writes  Mr.  A.  M.  Sullivan,^^  'it 
was  a  common  occurrence  to  find  on  opening  the  front  door  in  early 
morning,  leaning  against  it,  the  corpse  of  some  victim  who  in  the  night- 
time had  rested  in  its  shelter.  We  raised  a  public  subscription,  and  em- 
ployed two  men  with  horse  and  cart  to  go  around  each  day  and  gather  up 
the  dead.' 

I  Census  Commissioners,  p.  272.  '^  lb.,  p.  243. 

3  lb.,  pp.  271.  277.  '^  n.,  p.  242.  5  i&.,  p.  283. 

6  lb'.,  p.  273.  7  lb.,  p.  284. 

S  lb.,  p.  242.  9  i6.,  p.  242  ;  O'E'-v.rke,  pp.  401,  102. 

^<=  Census  Commissioners,  p.  92.  "  O'Rourke,  p.  Z-dZ. 

^=  Census  Commissioners,  p.  283.  ^^  ib.,  p.  273. 

»4  O'Eouike;  p.  3S4.  '  '5  '  New  Ireland,'  p.  G5. 


THE  FAMINE.  33 

The  scenes  that  were  revealed  when  some  of  the  cabins  were  entered 
were  even  more  horrible.  When  the  inmates  fomid  t]/at  death  was  inevit- 
able, they  made  no  further  struggle,  sought  the  assistance  neither  of  the 
Government  nor  of  their  neighbours  ;  and  occasionally,  as  Mr.  Tuke  tells 
us,  the  last  survivor  of  a  whole  family  '  earthed  up  the  door  of  his  miserable 
cabin  to  prevent  the  ingress  of  pigs  and  dogs,  and  then  laid  himself 
down  to  die  in  this  fearful  family  vault.'^  Men  entering  the  cabins  found 
the  dead  and  the  dying  side  by  side — lying  on  the  same  pallet  of  rotting 
straw,  covered  with  the  same  rags.  '  The  only  article,'  says  an  eye-witness 
of  a  scene  in  Windmill  Lane,  Skibbereen,  '  that  covered  the  nakedness  of 
the  family,  that  screened  them  from  the  cold,  was  a  piece  of  coarse  packing 
stuff  which  lay  extended  alike  over  the  bodies  of  the  living  and  the  corpses 
of  the  dead  ;  which  served  as  the  only  defence  of  the  dying  and  the 
winding-sheet  of  the  dead,'^ 

'  The  first  remarkable  sign,'  writes  Mr.  A.  M.  Sullivan,  '  of  the  havoc 
which  death  was  making  was  the  decline  and  the  disappearance  of  funerals.'^ 
The  annals  of  the  time  are  full  of  the  instances  of  this  sinister  change  in 
the  habits  of  Christian  lands.  The  bodies  of  those  who  had  fallen  on  the 
road  lay  for  days  unburied.  Husbands  lay  for  a  week  in  the  same  hovels  with 
the  bodies  of  their  unburied  wives  and  children.  Often  when  there  was  a  funeral 
it  bore  even  ghastlier  testimony  to  the  terror  of  the  time.  '  In  this  town,' 
^vrites  a  special  correspondent  of  the  Corh  Examiner  from  Skibbereen, 
*  have  I  v^itnessed  to-day  men,  fathers,  carrying  perhaps  their  only  child  to 
its  last  home,  its  remains  enclosed  in  a  few  deal  boards  patched  together  ; 
I  have  seen  them,  on  this  day,  in  three  or  four  instances,  carrying  those 
coffins  under  their  arms  or  upon  their  shoulders,  without  a  single  in- 
dividual in  attendance  upon  them  ;  without  mourner  or  ceremony — without 
wailing  or  lamentation.  The  people  in  the  street,  the  labourers  con- 
gregated in  the  town,  regarded  the  spectacle  without  surprise  ;  they 
looked  on  with  indifference,  because  it  was  of  hourly  occurrence.'-*  _  A 
Catholic  priest,  who  was  a  curate  in  county  Galway  during  the_  famine, 
tells  a  story  of  meeting  a  man  with  a  cart  drawn  by  an  ass,  on  Avhich  there 
were  three  coffins,  containing  the  bodies  of  his  wife  and  two  children. 
When  he  reached  the  churchyard  he  was  too  weak  to  dig  a  grave,  and  was 
only  able  to  put  a  little  covering  of  clay  on  the  coffins.  The  next  day  the 
priest  found  ravenous  dogs  making  a  horrid  meal  from  the  corpses.^  In 
another  part  of  the  country  a  woman  with  her  own  hands  dug  the  grave  of 
her  dead  son.^ 

Meantime,  what  had  the  Government  been  doing  ?  They  had,  to  put  it 
briefly,  been  aggravating  nearly  all  the  evils  that  were  reaping  so  rich  a 
harvest  of  suffering  and  death  in  Ireland.  The  measures  which  Sir  Robert 
Peel  had  taken  during  the  recess  of  1845  and  in  the  early  portions  of  the 
session  of  1846  have  been  already  mentioned.  As  time  went  on  he  had 
taken  other  steps  to  meet  the  crisis.  Donations  to  the  amount  of  £100,000 
had  been  given  from  the  Treasury  in  aid  of  subscriptions  raised  by 
charitable  organizations.  A  still  more  important  step  was  the  setting  ou 
foot  of  works  for  the  employment  of  the  destitute. 

The  initial  blunder  of  Lord  John  Russell  was  suddenly  to  close  the 
works  which  had  been  set  on  foot  by  Peel.  At  the  time  when  this  decree 
went  forth  there  were  no  less  than  97,900  persons  employed  on  the  relief 

I  O'Rourke,  pp.  384,  385.  "^  Ih  p.  272. 

3  '  New  Ireland,'  p.  64.  4  O'Rourke  pp.  272,  273. 

5/J>.,i>.  379.  6^6.,  p.  405. 

3 


34  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

works  ;  and  the  effect  of  adding  this  vast  army  of  unemployed  to  the 
population  whose  condition  has  just  been  described,  can  easily  be  imagined. 

The  speech  in  which  Lord  John  Russell  announced  his  own  policy  fol- 
lowed on  August  17,  1846;  and,  well-intentioned  as  it  doubtless  was, 
there  was  scarcely  a  sentence  in  it  which  did  not  do  harm,  not  a  proposal 
that  did  not  work  mischief.  The  first  important  statement  was  that  the 
Government  did  not  propose  to  interfere  with  the  regular  mode  by  which 
Indian  corn  and  other  kinds  of  grain  might  be  brought  into  Ireland.  The 
Government  proposed  '  to  leave  that  trade  as  much  at  liberty  as  possible.' 
'They  would  take  care  not  to  interfere  Avith  the  regular  operations  of 
merchants  for  the  supply  to  the  country  or  with  the  retail  trade. '^  Then 
he  described  the  new  legislation  v^^hich  he  proposed.  Relief  works  were  to 
be  set  on  foot  by  the  Board  of  Works  when  they  had  previously  been  pre- 
sented at  presentment  sessions.  For  these  works  the  Government  were  to 
advance  money  at  the  rate  of  3^  per  cent.,  repayable  in  ten  years.  In  the 
poorer  districts  the  Government  were  to  make  grants  to  the  extent  of 
£.'')0,000.  This  Bill,  when  it  became  law,  was  known  as  the  '  Labour  Rate 
Act.' 

The  evil  effects  of  this  speech  and  this  legislation  were  not  long  in 
showing  themselves.  The  declarations  mth  regard  to  non-intervention 
with  trade  were  especially  disastrous.  The  price  of  grain  at  once  went  up, 
and  while  the  deficiency  of  food  was  thus  enormously  increased,  specu- 
lators were  driven  to  frenzy  by  the  prospect  of  fabulous  gains.  Strange 
and  almost  incredible  results  followed,  ^yheat  that  had  been  exported  by 
starving  tenants  was  afterwards  reimported  from  England  to  Ireland  ; 
sometimes  before  it  was  finally  sold  it  had  crossed  the  Irish  Sea  four 
times — delirious  speculation  offering  new  bids  and  rushing  in  insane  eager- 
ness from  the  Irish  to  the  English  and  from  the  English  to  the  Irish 
market  in  search  of  the  daily  increasing  prices.  Stories  are  still  told  in 
Ireland  with  grim  satisfaction  of  the  abject  ruin  that  was  the  Nemesic  to 
the  greedy  speculators  in  a  nation's  starvation.  More  than  one  Shylock  kept 
his  corn  obstinately  in  store  while  the  people  around  him  were  dying  by 
the  thousand,  and  when  he  at  last  opened  the  doors  found,  not  his  longed-for 
treasure-house,  but  an  accumulation  of  rotten  corn,  which  had  to  be 
emptied  into  the  river.  '  A  client  of  mine,'  writes  the  late  Master  Fitz- 
gibbon,^  'in  the  winter  of  1846-47,  became  the  owner  of  corn  cargoes  of 
such  number  and  magnitude  that  if  he  had  accepted  the  prices  pressed 
upon  him  in  April  and  May,  1847,  he  would  have  realized  a  profit  of 
£70,000.  He  held  for  still  higher  offers,  until  the  market  turned  in  June, 
fell  in  July,  and  rapidly  tumbled,  as  an  abundant  harvest  became  manifest. 
He  still  held,  hoping  for  a  recovery,  and  in  the  end  of  October  he  became 
a  bankrupt.' 

*  The  Government,'  said  Lord  .John  Russell,  'did  not  propose  to  inter- 
fere with  the  regular  mode  by  which  Indian  corn  might  be  brought  into 
Ireland.'  What  was  the  result  of  this  ?  According  to  a  report  from  Com- 
missary John  Hewetson,  dated  December  30,  1846,  Indian  corn  which 
had  been  bought  for  £9  or  £10  a  ton  was  selling  for  £17  5s,  in  Cork ;  was 
not  to  be  had  for  any  price  in  Limerick,  but,  in  the  shape  of  meal,  was 
fetching  from  £18  10s.  to  £19  a  ton.  '  These,'  said  he,  *  are  really  famine 
prices  ;'^  and  then  he  tells  how  in  Cork  alone  one  firm  was  reported  to 
have  cleared    £40,000    and    another    £80,000,    from    corn    speculations. 

*  Hansard,  Ixxxviii.,  p.  776.         =  '  Ireland  in  1S68,'  p.  205.        3  O'Rourke,  p.  171. 


THE  FAMINE.  35 

The  reason  for  the  non-intervention  with  the  supply  of  Indian  corn  was 
that  the  letail  trade  might  not  be  interfered  with  ;  and  that  at  this  period 
retail  shops  were  so  tew  and  far  between  for  the  sale  of  corn  that  bhe 
labourer  in  the  public  works  had  sometimes  to  walk  twenty  or  twenty-five 
miles  in  order  to  buy  a  single  stone  of  meal.^ 

It  will  be  seen,  presently,  how  the  inflated  price  of  corn,  and  the  difl&- 
culty  of  obtaining  it  at  any  price  high  or  low,  co-operated  with  some  pro- 
visions of  the  Labour  Rate  Act  to  enormously  increase  the  sum  of  suffering 
and  the  total  of  deaths. 

These  were  the  days  when  free  trade  was  a  doctrine  professed  with  all 
the  exaggeration  and  misconception  of  a  new  faith.  The  reader  need  not 
fear  that  I  am  about  to  inflict  upon  him  any  of  the  senseless  and  utterly 
unmeaning  abuse  of  free  trade  and  political  economy  with  which  ignorant 
or  half -educated  writers  are  in  the  habit  of  vexing  intelligent  men.  The 
tree  trade  under  which  Lord  John  Russell  and  his  subordinates  justified 
their  fatal  errors  in  1846  and  1847  was  not  free  trade,  but  a  ghastly  travesty 
of  the  doctrine,  and  a  hideous  misunderstanding  of  the  teachings  of  sound 
political  economy.  It  will  be  seen  by-and-by  that  Lord  John  Russell  and 
aU  his  subordinates  had  themselves  to  make  this  acknowledgment,  and  to 
announce  a  palinode  as  shameful  as  any  in  Parliamentary  history.  But  in 
the  end  of  1846  they  were  still  unshaken  in  then-  crazy  misunderstanding 
of  the  subject — and  indeed  lectured  the  starving  Irish  nation  with  the 
supremacy  of  superior  beings  and  the  remote  calm  of  dwellers  on  Olympian 
heights.  The  oiiensiveness  of  the  attitude  and  the  absurdity  of  the  doc- 
trines were  a  good  deal  intensified  by  the  fact  that,  with  characteristic 
tenderness  for  Irish  feeling,  the  preachers  selected  to  announce  those 
doctrines  were  self-sufficient  English  or  Scotch  civil  servants,  with  more 
than  the  usual  amount  of  the  rancorous  dogmatism  characteristic  of  their 
race.^ 

There  was  to  be  no  interference  with  the  ordinary  operations  of  trade. 
Thus,  it  was  decreed  that  the  food  which  was  in  the  food  depots  that  had 
been  established  at  various  points  in  Ireland  should  not  be  sold  at  moderate 
prices — and,  in  fact,  should  not  be  sold  at  all  until  the  autumn.  The  result 
was,  that  people  died  with  money  in  their  hands,  knocking  at  the  doors  of 
the  Government  stores,  and  vainly  begging  for  food.  ^ 

The  Labour  Rate  Act  was  made  even  worse  in  operation  by  the  rules  of 
these  same  officials.  First,  the  whole  policy  of  the  Act  was  to  make  the 
famine  a  Government  business.  It  was  Government  that  had  the  carrying- 
out  of  all  the  works  ;  the  Government  had  to  be  consulted  about  every- 
thing, to  give  their  approval  to  everything.  The  result  was,  that  all 
independent  initiative  and  effort  were  stifled ;  local  bodies  in  their 
paralysis  were  sent  from  one  department  of  the  circumlocution  office  to 
another  ;  then,  in  their  despair  and  distraction,  did  nothing.  The  rule  of 
Red  Tape  was  established  with  plenary  powers  and  disastrous  results.     In 

^  O'Rourke,  p.  172. 

^  As  an  instance  :  a  deputation  waited  on  Sir  R.  Routh,  head  of  the  Commissary 
Department,  from  Achill,  representing  the  total  destruction  of  the  potatoes  there, 
the  absence  of  green  crops,  and  asking  for  a  supply  of  food  from  the  Government 
stores,  for  which  the  inhabitants  were  ready  to  pay.  The  reply  of  Sir  R.  Routh  was  a 
peremptory  refusal,  coupled  with  the  statement  that  '  nothing  was  more  essential  to 
the  welfare  of  a  country  tlian  strict  adherence  to  free  trade.'  Then  he  '  begged  to 
assure  the  reverend  gentleman ' — meaning  one  of  the  deputation — '  that  if  he  had 
read  carefully  and  studied  Burke,  his  illustrious  countryman,  he  would  agree  with 
him  (Sir  R.  Routh).'— O'iiourke,  pp.  222,  223 

a  O'Rourke,  p.  226. 

3—2 


36  IHE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

April,  1846,  Messrs,  Jones,  Twistleton  and  Co.  were  able  to  report  that  they 
had  sent  to  Ireland  '  ten  thousand  books,  besides  fourteen  tons  of  paper.' 
'  Over  the  whole  island,'  writes  John  Mitchel,  '  for  the  next  few  months, 
was  a  scene  of  confused  and  wasteful  attempts  at  relief — -be\vildered  barony 
sessions  striving  to  understand  the  voluminous  directions,  schedules,  and 
specifications  under  which  alone  they  could  vote  their  own  money  to  relieve 
the  poor  at  their  own  doors  :  but  generally  making  mistakes — for  the  un- 
assisted human  faculties  never  could  comprehend  these  ten  thousand  books 
and  fourteen  tons  of  paper  ;  insolent  commissioners  and  inspectors  and  clerks 
snubbing  them  at  every  turn  and  ordering  them  to  study  the  documents  ; 
efforts  on  the  part  of  the  proprietors  to  expend  some  of  the  rates  at  least  on 
useful  works — reclaiming  land,  and  the  like — which  efforts  were  always  met 
with  fiat  refusal,  and  a  lecture  on  political  economy.  .  .  .  plenty  of  jobbing 
and  peculation  all  this  while.'  ^ 

With  a  view  to  prevent  competition  with  private  enterprise,  the  money 
was  all  to  be  devoted  to  exclusively  'unproductive  works,'  by  which  were 
excluded  railways,  reclamation,  and  the  like.  The  positive  and  negative 
results  of  this  restriction  were  equally  prejudicial.  There  were  railways 
demanding  extension  ;  millions  of  acres  of  waste  land  demanding  reclama- 
ation  ;  miles  of  marsh  ready  to  be  drained — all  such  work  was  forbidden. 
The  look-out  was  then  for  unproductive  work  ;  and  unproductive  work,  in 
a  sense  a  good  deal  more  literal  than  the  Government  wanted,  was  dis- 
covered. The  stories  told  of  the  kind  of  work  done  under  these  loans 
would  be  incredible  if  they  were  not  so  well  attested — among  other  things, 
by  solid  monuments  that  exist  to  this  day.  Roads  were  made  leading  to 
nowhere  ;  hills  were  dug  away  and  then  were  filled  up  again  ;  and  so  utterly 
useless  was  this  kind  of  labour,  that  sometimes  good  roads  were  actually 
spoiled,  and  traffic  was  impeded  for  some  time  by  these  supposed  im- 
provements. Hardly  any  of  the  roads  were  ever  finished.  '  Miles  of 
grass-grown  earthworks,'  writes  Mr.  A.  M.  Sullivan,^  'throughout  the 
country  now  mark  their  course  and  commemoi-ate  for  posterity  one  of  the 
gigantic  blunders  of  the  famine  time.'  '  While  on  the  subject  of  mistakes,' 
said  the  Knight  of  Glin,  a  well-known  landlord  of  the  period,  '  he  might 
mention  on  the  Glin  Road  some  people  are  filling  up  the  original  cutting 
of  a  hill  with  the  stuff  they  had  taken  out  of  it.  That,'  he  added  naively, 
'  is  another  slice  of  our  £450  ' — the  sum  lent  to  Shanagolden  Union  for  relief 
works. 

Even  this  useless  work — as  has  been  seen — was  not  allowed  to  be  done 
without  the  maddening  preliminaries  of  vexatious  and  imbecile  official 
delays.  But  this  was  not  from  the  want  of  a  sufficiently  large  staff. 
There  were  no  less  than  10,000  officials;  and  these  appointments  , were 
given  from  the  most  corrupt  motives.  This  example  of  corruption  at  the 
top  had  a  good  deal  to  do  with  the  disastrous  and  universal  spirit  of  cor- 
ruption below.  And  the  most  heart-rending  feature  of  it  all  was  that  all 
this  machinery,  all  this  vast  army  of  officials,  all  these  vast  sums  of  money, 
not  only  did  no  good,  but  were  productive  of  an  increase,  instead  of  a 
diminution,  of  the  miseries  of  the  country.  As  to  a  large  portion  of  the 
people,  the  relief — such  as  it  was — came  too  late.  '  The  wretched  people 
were  by  this  time  too  wasted  and  emaciated  to  work.  The  endeavour  to 
do  so  under  an  inclement  winter  sky  only  hastened  death.  They  tottered 
at  daybreak  to  the  roll-call,  vainly  tried  to  wheel  the  barrow  or  ply  the 

*  'History  of  Ireland,'  ii.  215.  ^  'New  Ireland,'  p.  64. 

3  Mitchel,  ii.  210. 


THE  FAMINE.  37 

pick,  but  fainted  away  on  the  cutting,  or  lay  down  by  the  wayside  to  rise 
no  more.'^ 

But  officialism  was  not  convinced,  and  insisted  on  making  the  Act  still 
more  cruel  by  the  regulations  under  which  it  was  to  be  worked.  '  Those 
w^ho  choose  to  labour  may  earn  good  wages,'  wrote  Colonel  Jones  to  Mr. 
Trevelyan  - — the  one  the  head  of  the  Board  of  Works,  the  other  the  repre- 
sentative of  the  Treasury  ;  and  in  accordance  with  this  superfine  dictum  of 
the  official  mind,  it  was  decreed  that  the  work  done  should  be  task- work. 
In  other  words,  the  feebler  a  man  was,  the  less  help  he  was  entitled  to 
receive  ;  the  nearer  to  starvation,  the  more  quickly  he  should  be  pushed 
by  labour  into  the  grave.  Hapless  wretches,  often  with  wives  and  several 
children  dying  of  hunger  at  home — sometimes  with  the  wife  or  one  of  the 
children  already  a  putrid  corpse — crawled  to  their  work  in  the  morning, 
there  drudged  as  best  they  could,  and  at  the  end  of  the  daj^  often  had  as 
their  wage  the  sum  of  fivepence — sometimes  it  went  as  low  as  threepence.^ 
To  earn  this  sum  too,  it  often  happened  that  the  starving  man  had  to  walk 
three,  four,  five,  eight  Irish  miles  to,  and  the  same  distance  from,  his  work, 
rinally,  owing  to  blunders,  he  was  frequently  unable  even  to  get  this  pit- 
tance at  the  end  of  the  week  or  fortnight :  and  then  he  returned  to  his 
cabin  to  die — unless,  as  often  happened,  he  died  on  the  wayside.^ 

Even  when  he  was  paid,  the  meal-shop  was  miles  away — for  the  retail 
trade,  with  which  the  Government  would  not  interfere,  existed  only  in 
Government  imagination  ;  and  meal-shops  were  only  to  be  found  at  long 
intervals.  Or,  if  he  reached  the  meal-shop.  Government  measures  again 
had  raised  the  price  of  meal  beyond  the  reach  of  relief  work  wages  ;  and 
if  he  knocked  at  the  doors  of  the  Government  depots,  a  harsh  and  alien 
voice  replied  that  in  the  name  of  political  economy  he  should  die.^ 

rinally,  the  evil  done  by  the  Labour  Rate  Act  was  in  attracting  from 
the  cultivation  of  their  o"\vn  fields  nearly  all  the  farmers  of  the  country. 
The  prospect  of  immediate  wages  proved  more  enticing  than  the  uncer- 
tainty of  a  remote  and  fickle  harvest ;  and  the  universal  peculation,  com- 
bined with  the  absolute  uselessness  of  the  works  done,  spread  a  spirit  of 
hideous  demoralisation.  The  farmers  flocked  to  them  '  solely,'  as  Mr. 
Fitzgibbon  puts  it,  '  because  the  public  work  was  in  fact  no  work,  but  a 
farcical  excuse  for  getting  a  day's  wages. '^  The  labourers,  having  the 
example  of  a  great  public  fraud  before  their  eyes,  are  described  byMitchel  as 
'  themselves  defrauding  their  fraixdulent  employers — quitting  agricultural 
pursuits  and  crowding  the  public  works,  where  they  pretended  to  be  cutting 
down  hills  and  filling  up  hollows,  and  with  tongue  in  cheek  received  half 
wages  fnr  doing  nothing.''' 

The  Conservative  organs  of  the  period,  which  were  no  friends  of  the 
national  newspapers,  joined  them  in  the  descriptions  of  the  hideous  de- 
moralisation which  these  works  were  producing  :  and  they  foretold  with  a 
fatal  accuracy  the  effects  of  it  all  on  the  follov/ing  year.  '  There  is  not  a 
labourer  employed  in  the  county  except  on  public  works,'  wrote  the  Diihlin 
Evening  Mail,  '  and  there  is  prospect  of  the  lands  remaining  untilled  and 
unsown  for  the  next  year.'  '  The  good  intentions  of  the  Government,' 
wrote  the  Cork  Constitution,  '  are  frustrated  by  the  worst  regulations — 
regulations  which,  diverting  labour  from  its  legitimate  channels,  left  the 
fields  without  hands  to  prepare  them  for  the  harvest.'  ^     To  sum  up  the 

*  •  New  Ireland,'  p.  64.  2  O'Rourke,  p.  209. 

3/6.,  p.  206.  4  73,.^  p.  258. 

5  lb.,  p.  225.  6  '  Ireland  in  1868,'  p.  206. 

7  '  History,'  ii.,  p.  215.  8  '  History,'  ii.,  p.  216. 


38  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

case  in  reference  to  this  effect  of  the  Labour  Rate  Act — the  means  that 
were  taken  to  meet  the  famine  of  1846  proved  the  precursors  and  the  pre- 
parers of  the  famine  of  1847. 

The  records  of  the  sufferings  from  hunger  in  1847  are  almost  more 
revolting  and  terrible  than  those  of  1846. 

Meantime,  another  and  a  bitter  calamity  was  added  to  those  from  which 
the  people  were  already  suffering.  Pestilence  always  hovers  on  the  flank 
of  famine,  and  combined  with  Vv^holesale  starvation,  there  were  numerous 
other  circumstances  that  rendered  a  plague  inevitable — the  assemblage  of 
such  immense  numbers  of  people  at  the  public  works  and  in  the  workhouses, 
the  vast  number  of  corpses  that  lay  unburied,  and  finally  the  consumption 
of  unaccustomed  food.  The  plague  which  fell  upon  Ireland  in  1846-47 
was  of  a  peculiarly  virulent  kind.  It  produced  at  once  extreme  prostra- 
tion, and  everyone  struck  by  it  was  subject  to  frequent  relapses ;  in  Kin- 
sale  Union,  out  of  250  persons  attacked,  240  relapsed.^ 

The  name  applied  to  it  at  the  time  sufficiently  signified  its  origin.  It 
was  known  as  the  '  road  fever.'^  Attacking  as  it  did  people  already 
weakened  by  hunger,  it  was  a  scourge  of  merciless  severity.  Unlike 
famine,  too,  it  struck  alike  at  the  rich  and  poor — the  well-fed  and  the 
hungered.  Famine  killed  one  or  two  of  a  family  ;  the  fever  swept  them 
all  away.     Food  relieved  hunger  ;  the  fever  was  past  all  such  surgery. 

Many  of  the  people,  worn  out  by  famine,  had  not  the  physical  or  mental 
energy  even  to  move  from  their  cabins.  The  panic  which  the  plague 
everywhere  created,  intensified  the  miseries  of  those  whom  it  attacked. 
The  annals  of  the  time  are  full  of  the  kindly  but  rude  attempts  of  the 
poor  to  stand  by  each  other.  It  was  a  common  custom  of  the  period  to 
have  food  left  at  the  doors  or  handed  in  on  shovels  or  sticks  to  the  people 
inside  the  cabins  ;  but  very  oiten  the  wretched  inmates  were  entirely  de- 
serted. Lying  beside  each  other,  some  living  and  some  dead,  their  passage 
to  the  grave  was  uncheered  by  one  act  of  help,  by  one  word  of  sympathy. 
Here  is  a  brief  but  complete  picture  of  this  dread  phase  of  the  days  of  the 
plague  :  '  A  terrible  apathy  hangs  over  the  poor  of  Skibbereen  ;  starvation 
has  destroyed  every  generous  sympathy  ;  despair  has  made  them  hardened 
and  insensible,  and  they  sullenly  await  their  doom  mth  indifference  and 
without  fear.  Death  is  in  every  hovel ;  disease  and  famine,  its  dread 
precursors,  have  fastened  on  the  young  and  the  old,  the  strong  and  the 
feeble,  the  mother  and  the  infant ;  whole  families  lie  together  on  the  damp 
floor  devoured  by  fever,  without  a  human  being  to  wet  their  burning  lips 
or  raise  their  languid  heads  ;  the  husband  dies  by  the  side  of  the  wife,  and 
she  knows  not  that  he  is  beyond  the  reach  of  earthly  suffering  ;  the  same 
rag  covers  the  festering  remains  of  mortality  and  the  skeleton  forms  of  the 
living,  who  are  unconscious  of  the  horrible  contiguity  ;  rats  devour  the 
corpse,  and  there  is  no  energy  among  the  living  to  scare  them  from  their 
horrid  banquet ;  fathers  bury  their  children  without  a  sigh,  and  cover  them 
in  shallow  graves  round  which  no  weeping  mother,  no  sympathising  friends 
are  grouped  ;  one  scanty  funeral  is  followed  by  another  and  another. 
Without  food  or  fuel,  bed  or  bedding,  whole  families  are  shut  up  in  naked 
hovels,  dropping  one  by  one  into  the  arms  of  death, '^ 

The  fever-stricken  wretches  who  had  energy  enough  to  crawl  from  their 
own  homes  and  seek  a  refuge,  became  the  heralds  of  disease  wherever  they 

I  Census  Commissioners,  p.  304.  ^  Ib.^  p.  278. 

3  Cork  Examiner.  Quoted  by  Census  Commissioners'  'Tables  of  Death,'  vol.  i., 
p.  272. 


THE  FAMINE,  39 

went,  and  often  suffered  tortures  more  prolonged  and  darker  than  those 
who  had  lain  down  and  died  by  their  own  hearthstones.  Many  of  them 
directed  their  steps  to  the  towns.  *  From  the  commencement  of  1847,* 
writes  Dr.  Callanan,  *  Fate  opened  her  book  in  good  earnest  here,  and  the 
full  tide  of  death  flowed  everywhere  around  us.  During  the  first  six 
months  of  that  dark  period,  one-third  of  the  daily  population  of  our  streets 
consisted  of  shadows  and  spectres,  the  impersonations  of  disease  and  famine, 
crowding  in  from  the  rural  districts  and  stalking  along  to  the  general  doom 
— the  grave — which  appeared  to  await  them  but  at  the  distance  of  a  few 
steps  or  a  few  short  hourss.  ^ 

'  In  cases  succeeding  exhaustion  from  famine,'  says  another  writer,  *  the 
appearances  were  very  peculiar — the  fever  assuming  a  low  gastric  type,  in- 
dicated by  a  dry  tongue,  shrunk  to  half  its  size,  and  brown  in  the  centre  ; 
lips  thin  and  bloodless,  coated  with  sordes  ;  skin  discoloured  and  sodden  ; 
general  appearance  squalid  in  the  extreme,  and  hunger-stricken.  These 
symptoms,  and  a  loathsome,  putrid  smell  emanating  from  their  persons,  as 
if  the  decomposition  of  the  vital  organs  had  anticipated  death,  rendered 
these  unhappy  cases  too  often  hopeless.  They  used  to  creep  about  the  city 
while  their  strength  allowed,  and  then  would  sink  exhausted  in  some  shed 
or  doorway,  and  often  be  found  dead.'^ 

The  workhouses  and  the  hospitals  were  besieged  more  than  ever  ;  and 
death  now  raged  with  a  terrible  promptness  and  universality.  There  was 
the  same  difficulty  as  when  star\'ing  thousands  clamoured  for  admission 
and  help  in  buildings  in  which  only  hundreds  could  be  attended  to  ;  and 
there  are  descriptions  of  scenes  enacted  outside  the  hospitals  and  work- 
houses so  revolting  as  to  be  almost  incredible.  '  Before  accommodation  for 
patients,'  writes  the  Census  Commissioners,  *  approached  anything  like  the 
necessity  of  the  time,  most  mournful  and  piteous  scenes  were  presented  in 
the  vicinity  of  fever  hospitals  and  workhouses  in  Dublin,  Cork,  Waterford, 
Galway,  and  other  large  towns.  There,  day  after  day,  numbers  of  people, 
wasted  by  famine  and  consumed  by  fever,  could  be  seen  lying  on  the  foot- 
paths and  roads  waiting  for  the  chance  of  admission  ;  and  when  they  were 
fortunate  enough  to  be  received,  their  places  were  soon  filled  by  other 
victims  of  suffering  and  disease  !'^ 

'  At  the  gate  leading  to  the  temporary  fever  hospital,  erected  near 
KUmainham,  were  men,  women,  and  children,  lying  along  the  pathway  and 
in  the  gutter,  awaiting  their  turn  to  be  admitted.  Some  were  stretched 
at  full  length,  with  their  faces  exposed  to  the  full  glare  of  the  sun,  their 
mouths  open,  and  their  black  and  parched  tongues  and  encrusted  teeth 
visible  even  from  a  distance.  Some  women  had  children  at  the  breast  who 
lay  beside  them  in  silence  and  apparent  exhaustion — the  fountain  of  their 
life  being  dried  up;  whilst  in  the  centre  of  the  road  stood  a  cart  containing 
a  whole  family  who  had  been  smitten  down  together  by  the  terrible  typhus, 
ana  had  been  brought  there  by  the  charity  of  a  neighbour.''^ 

'  Fever,'  writes  the  Freeman's  Journal,  '  has  increased  in  Galway  and 
Loughrea  ;  numbers  may  be  seen  lying  in  rags  or  straw  in  the  streets  in  the 
height  of  disease.'  'Alarming  spread  of  fever  in  Dublin,'  is  the  language 
of  the  same  journal ;  '  crowds  lying  on  the  ground  at  Glasnevin  and  in  Cork 
Street  waiting  for  admission  to  the  hospital.  '^ 

Outside  the  workhouses  similar  scenes  took  place.  The  case  of  West- 
port  workhouse  has  been  mentioned  already,  where  as   many  as  three 

^  Census  Commissioners,  p.  301.  *  id.,  p.  302. 

3  7&.,  p.  248.  4  i&.,  p.  297.  5  lb. 


40  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

thousand,  suffering  from  hunger  and  fever,  sought  admission  on  the  same 
day.  '  Those  who  were  not  adm^itted — and  they  were,  of  course,  the 
great  majority — having  no  homes  to  return  to,  lay  down  and  died  in  West- 
port  and  its  suburbs. '^  Mr.  Egan  was  clerk  of  the  union  at  the  period, 
and  in  a  conversation  mth  Father  O'Rourke,  pointing  to  the  wall  opposite 
the  workhouse  gate,  said  :  '  There  is  where  they  sat  down  never  to  rise 
again.     I  have  seen  there  of  a  morning  as  many  as  eight  corpses  of  those 

miserable  beings  who  had  died  during  the  night.     Father  G (then  in 

Westport)  used  to  be  anointing  them  as  they  lay  exhausted  along  the  walls 
and  streets,  dying  of  hunger  and  fever. '^ 

Admission  to  the  fever  hospital,  and,  still  more,  to  the  workhouse,  was 
but  the  postponement,  and  often  the  acceleration  of  death.  Owing  to  the 
unexpected  demands  made  upon  then-  space,  the  officials  of  these  institu- 
tions were  unable  to  adopt  the  primary  and  fundamental  measures  for 
diminishing  the  epidemic.  The  crowding  rendered  it  impossible  to  separate 
the  sick  and  the  healthy,  sometimes  to  separate  even  the  dead  and  the 
dying  ;  there  were  not  beds  for  a  tithe  of  the  applicants  :  and  thus  the 
epidemic  was  spread  and  intensified,  instead  of  being  alleviated  and. 
diminished.  'Inside  the  hospital  enclosure'  (the  fever  hospital  at  Kil- 
mainham),  says  a  writer  already  quoted,  '  w^as  a  small  open  shed,  in  which 
were  thirty-five  human  beings  heaped  indiscriminately  on  a  little  straw 
thrown  on  the  ground.  Several  had  been  thus  for  three  days,  drenched  by 
rain,  etc.  Some  were  unconscious,  others  dying  ;  two  died  during  the 
night.'^  '  We  visited  the  poorhouse  at  Glenties  '  (county  of  Donegal),  says 
Mr.  Tuke  in  the  '  Transactions  of  the  Relief  Committee  of  Friends,' 
'  which  is  in  a  dreadful  state  ;  the  people  were,  in  fact,  half  starved,  and 
only  half  clothed.  They  had  not  sufficient  food  in  the  house  for  the  day's 
supply.  Some  were  leaving  the  house,  preferring  to  die  in  their  own 
hovels  rather  than  in  the  poorhouse.  Their  bedding  consisted  of  dirty 
straw,  in  which  they  were  laid  in  rows,  or  on  the  floor — even  as  many  as 
six  persons  being  crowded  under  one  rug.  The  living  and  the  dying  were 
stretched  side  by  side  beneath  the  same  miserable  covering. '  The  general 
effect  of  all  this  is  summed  up  thus  pithily  but  completely  in  the  report  of 
the  Poor  Law  Commissioners  for  1846:  'In  the  present  state  of  things 
nearly  every  person  admitted  is  a  patient ;  separation  of  the  sick,  by 
reason  of  their  number,  becomes  impossible  ;  disease  spreads,  and  by  rapid 
transition  the  workhouse  is  changed  into  one  large  hospital.''* 

The  workhouses  and  the  hospitals  were  not  the  only  public  institutions 
which  were  filled  to  overflowdng.  The  same  thing  happened  to  the  gaols. 
The  prison  came  to  be  regarded  as  a  refuge.  Only  smaller  ofl'ences  were  at 
first  committed  ;  and  an  epidemic  of  glass-breaking  set  in.  But  as  times 
went  on,  and  the  pressure  of  distress  became  greater  and  the  hope  of 
ultimate  salvation  less,  graver  crimes  became  prevalent.  Thus  sheep- 
stealing  grew  to  be  quite  a  common  offence  ;  and  a  prisoner's  good  fortune 
was  supposed  to  be  complete  if  he  were  sentenced  to  the  once  dreaded  and 
loathed  punishment  of  transportation  beyond  the  seas.  The  Irishman  was 
made  happy  by  the  fate  which  took  him  to  any  land — provided  only  it  was 
not  his  own.  And  Botany  Bay  was  transformed  in  peasant  imagination 
from  the  Inferno  of  the  hopeless  to  the  Paradise  of  sufficient  food  and  a 
great  future. 

But  here  again  the  refugees  were  confronted  by  the  same  horrors  which 

^  O'Rourke,  p.  393.  2  Ih. 

3  Censi;s  Commissioners,  p.  272,  4  Ih. 


THE  FAMINE..  41 

awaited  those  who  obtained  admission  to  the  workhouses  and  the  fever 
hospitals.  The  prisons,  without  a  tithe  of  the  accommodation  necessary  for 
the  inmates,  became  nests  of  disease ;  and  often  the  offender  who  hoped 
for  the  luck  of  transportation  beyond  the  seas,  found  that  the  sentence  of 
even  a  week's  imprisonment  proved  a  sentence  of  death.  In  1846,  the 
Inspectors -General  of  Prisons  reported  that  the  increase  of  committals  in 
that  year  over  1845  sometimes  amounted  to  one  hundred  per  cent.,  and 
then  stated  that  *  in  a  very  great  number  of  instances  small  crimes  have 
been  committed  for  the  purpose  of  obtaining  that  support  in  prison  which 
could  not  be  procured  elsewhere.'^  In  1847  they  write:  'The  terrible 
catastrophe  which  has  disorganised  the  whole  framework  of  society  in 
Ireland  fell  with  its  full  force  on  establishments  under  our  charge.  Disease 
and  death  increased  to  a  degree  that  could  never  be  contemplated  by  those 
acquainted  with  the  usual  orderly  and  healthy  state  of  our  gaols.  Tlie 
crowding  together  of  12,883  prisoners  in  gaols  only  calculated  to  contain 
5,655,  increased  the  deaths  in  the  Irish  prisons,  in  a  single  year,  from  131 
to  1,315.'^  '  In  March,'  writes  Dr.  Browne  of  the  Castlebar  Gaol,  '  our 
county  gaol  was  crowded  to  more  than  double  its  capability,  those  com- 
mitted being  in  a  state  of  nudity,  filth,  and  starvation.'  Typhus  broke  out, 
and  '  by  the  end  of  April  we  were  in  a  state  of  actual  pestilence.  Every 
hospital  servant  was  attacked,  and  from  our  wretched  overcrowded  state 
the  mortality  v/as  fearful — fully  forty  per  cent.  ;  .  .  .  .  not  a  few  of  those 
committed  were  inmates  of  the  fever  wards  a  few  hours  after  committal.'^ 

The  years  1848  and  1849  present  the  same  features.  The  increase  of 
committals  in  1848  over  those  of  1847  was  no  less  than  34,105.^ 

In  1849  there  was  again  an  increase  of  committals,  to  the  extent  of 
3,466  on  the  previous  year,  and  the  Inspectors-General  comment  on  this 
significant  phenomenon,  'The  evil  thus  produced  is  so  enormous  as  to 
threaten  the  total  demoralisation  of  the  lower  orders,  showing  itself  in  the 
abolition  of  all  distinction  between  right  and  wrong,  and  germinating  a 
habit  of  committing  crimes  either  for  the  sake  of  obtaining  board  and 
lodging  in  a  gaol,  or  else  for  the  remoter  advantages  of  superior  diet  in  the 
convict  prisons,  and  the  ultimate  benefit  of  gratuitous  emigration.'^ 

^  Census  Commissioners,  p.  304.  =  76.,  pp.  304,  305.  3  7-5.,  pp.  300,  301. 

4  This  is  the  comment  of  the  Inspectors-General  :  '  The  calamitous  visitation  of 
the  last  few  years,  operating  with  no  exclusive  pressure — affecting  the  most  opulent 
and  the  humblest  poor  alike  —  suspending  employment,  and  staying  the  hand  of 
charity  —  has  sorely  tried  the  integrity  of  our  people.  Larcenies  have  multiplied, 
because,  ordinarily,  men  will  steal  food  rather  than  die  ;  but  to  such  as  have  made 
criminal  compliance  with  necessity  must  be  added  vast  numbers  who,  without 
means  of  earning  subsistence,  and  unable  to  procure  charitable  aid,  notoriously 
appropriated  articles  of  trifling  value  that  they  might  obtain  the  shelter  of  a  prison 
under  the  guise  of  a  commitment  for  a  criminal  offence.' — Report  of  Inspectors- 
General  of  Prisons  :    Census  Commissioners'  '  Tables  of  Deaths,'  p.  311. 

Here  is  a  grim  description  of  a  prison  of  the  period  ;  it  is  written  of  Galway  Gaol, 
under  date  February  8,  1848  :  'It  presented  the  appearance  not  only  of  a  prison, 
but  that  of  a  poorhouse  and  infirmary.  The  prisoners  were,  in  general,  the  most 
wretched  class  of  human  beings  I  ever  beheld — badly  clothed,  and  emaciated  from 
the  destitution  to  which  they  had  been  exposed,  and  from  which  many  sought  refuge 
in  the  gaol  by  asking  alms  and  bv  the  commission  of  petty  crimes.  Fever  and 
dysentery'-  are  prevalent  amongst  the  prisoners,  and  some  die  before  they  can  be 
brought  to  the  hospital,  which  is  filled  with  the  sick  and  the  dying.  Clad  in 
miserable  rags,  crowded  together  during  the  day  and  heaped  together  during  the 
night,  contagious  disease  has  taken  root  within  the  prison  walls  ;  and  an  extensive 
mortality  was  apprehended  as  the  speedy  and  inevitable  result.'  It  is  added  that,  of 
the  S8S  inmates,  more  than  120  were  suffering  from  fever  and  dysentery. — lb. 

5  76.,  p.  322. 


42  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

Thus  the  plague  worked — within  the  cabins,  on  the  roads,  in  workhouses, 
in  hospitals,  in  gaols.  Of  the  numberless  proofs  of  its  dread  activity  let 
the  following  specimens  suffice  : — • 

Fever  first  demands  attention.  In  one  week  50  persons  died  in  the 
workhouse  at  Castlerea.^  In  Carrick-on-Shannon  there  were,  on  April  16, 
1847,  300  cases  of  fever.  The  weekly  deaths  were  50.^  In  one  hosf)ital  in 
Dublin,  Cork  Street,  12,000  cases  applied  in  ten  months.^  At  Cork  there 
were  174  deaths  in  seven  days,  or  more  than  a  death  every  hour.^  In  one 
day  in  the  beginning  of  February,  1847,  there  were  44  corpses  in  the  work- 
house in  the  same  city,  and  on  the  10th  of  the  same  month  in  that  year, 
100  bodies  were  conveyed  for  interment  to  a  single  graveyard  outside  the 
town.-^  In  the  week  ending  April  3,  1847,  of  the  entire  number  of  inmates 
la  the  Irish  workhouses — viz.  104,485 — 26,000  were  sick,  and  of  these 
9,000  were  fever  patients.^  During  that  week  the  number  of  deaths  was 
2,706,  and  the  average  of  deaths  in  each  week  during  the  month  was  25 
per  thousand  of  the  entire  inmates.^ 

Fifty-four,  out  of  one  hundred  workhouse  officials  who  were  attacked 
with  the  fever,  died  between  January  1  and  April  2,  1847.^  Of  the  entire 
medical  staff  employed  in  the  different  institutions  of  the  country,  one- 
fifteenth  died  in  the  same  year.^  '  Taking  the  recorded  deaths  from  fever 
alone,' write  the  Census  Commissioners,^*^  '  between  the  beginning  of  1846 
and  the  end  of  1849,  and  assuming  the  mortality  at  one  in  ten,  which  is  the 
very  lowest  calculation,  and  far  below  what  we  believe  to  have  occurred, 
above  a  million  and  a  half,  or  1,595,040  persons — being  one  in  4'11  of  the 
population  in  1851 — must  have  suffered  from  fever  during  that  period.' 
'  But,'  continued  the  writers,  '  no  pen  has  recorded  the  numbers  of  the  for- 
lorn and  starving  who  perished  by  the  wayside  or  in  the  ditches,  or  of  the 
mournful  groups,  sometimes  of  whole  families,  who  lay  down  and  died  one 
after  another  upon  the  floor  of  their  miserable  cabin,  and  so  remained  un- 
coffined  and  unburied  till  chance  unveiled  the  appalling  scene.'^^ 

The  deaths  from  fever  in  1845  were  7,249.  From  that  figure  they  rose 
to  17,145  in  1846  ;  to  57,095  in  1847.  In  1848  they  were  45,948  ;  in  1849 
they  numbered  39,316  ;  in  1850  they  fell  to  23,545.  Finally,  the  total 
deaths  between  1841  and  1851  from  fever  were  222,029.  But,  allowing  for 
'deficient  returns,  250,000' — a  quarter  of  a  million  of  people — 'perished 
from  fever  alone. '^^ 

The  famine  and  the  fever  were  naturally  accompanied  and  followed  by  all 
those  other  maladies  which  result  from  insufl^ciency  and  unsuitability  of 
food.  The  potato  blight  continued  with  varying  virulence  until  1851,  its 
existence  being  marked  by  the  prevalence  in  more  or  less  severe  epidemics 
of  dysentery,  which  carried  off  5,492  persons  in  1846,  25,757  in  1847,  the 
annual  totals  swelling,  until  in  1849  the  deaths  from  this  disease  alone 
amounted  to29,446;^''*of  cholera,  which  destroyed  35,989  lives  in  1848-49  -^^  of 
small-pox,  to  which  38,275  persons  fell  victims  in  the  decennial  period  between 
1841  and  1851.^^  The  deaths  from  small-pox,  however,  did  not  greatly  swell 
the  total  of  mortality  between  1845  and  1851.  It  should  be  added  that  as 
a  direct  consequence  of  the  famine  many  thousands  suffered  severely  from 

^  Report  of  Inspectors-General  of  Prisons  :  Census  Commissioners'  *  Tables  of 
Deaths,'  p.  278. 

2  Ih.,  p.  296.  3  11,^  p.  298.  4  76.,  p.  284.  5  76.,  p.  282. 

6  II.,  p.  304.  7  n.  s  Ib.,T£>.  293.  9  Jb.,  p.  30. 

*°  lb.,  p.  243,  "  lb.  "  lb.  ^3  jb.,  p.  251. 

i4  lb.,  p.  252.  IS  Jb. 


THE  FAMINE.  43 

scurvy,  and  that  the  recorded  cases  of  ophthalmia  swelled  from  13,812  in 
1849,  to  45,947  in  1851.1 

In  addition  to  this  appalling  loss  of  life  from  actual  disease,  the  number 
of  deaths  registered  by  the  Census  Commissioners  under  the  heading  of 
'  Starvation  '  were  6,058  in  the  year  1847,  and  21,770  during  the  decennial 
period.  Only  117  deaths  from  starvation  were  registered  in  the  previous 
decennial  period.^  Under  heading  'Infirmit}^,  Debility,  and  Old  Age,'  the 
Commissioners  record  10, 609  deaths  in  1845,  23,285  in  1847,  and  from  1841 
to  1851  inclusive,  a  total  of  133,923  ;  but  they  acknowledge  that  many  of 
these  cases  would  be  more  appropriately  ranked  among  the  deaths  from 
'  starvation.'^ 

It  was  the  terrible  mortality  of  these  epidemics,  and  especially  of  the 
fever,  that  led  to  the  most  sinister  invention  of  the  time.  This  was  the 
hinged  coffin.  The  coffin  was  made  with  a  movable  bottom  ;  the  body  was 
placed  in  it,  the  bottom  unhinged,  the  body  was  thrown  into  the  grave, 
and  then  the  coffin  was  sent  back  to  the  workhouse  to  receive  another  body. 
Sometimes  scores  of  corpses '  passed  in  this  way  through  the  same  coffin. 
The  hinged  coffin  was  used  extensively  in  Cork.  Justin  McCarthy,  a  youth 
of  seventeen,  just  then  started  on  his  professional  career  as  a  reporter  on 
the  Corlz  Examiner,  many  times  saw  the  hinged  coffin  in  actual  use.  In 
Skibbereen,  which  was  one  of  the  worst  scourged  places  or  districts,  the 
hinged  coffin  was  perhaps  more  largely  used  than  in  any  other  district. 
The  traveller  is  to-day  pointed  out,  as  historic  spots  of  the  town,  two  large 
pits,  in  which  hundreds  of  bodies  found  a  coffinless  grave. 

Appalled  by  the  spread  of  death,  the  Ministry  were  compelled  in  1847 
to  change  their  whole  procedure.  New  legislation  was  introduced  ;  all  the 
ideas  were  abandoned  to  which  the  Government  had  adhered  with  an  ob- 
stinacy t?■^at  the  deaths  of  tens  of  thousands  of  people  could  not  for  months 
change.  The  Irish  Relief  Act  was  the  official  title  of  the  new  enactment : 
it  was  familiarly  known  as  the  Soup  Kitchen  Act.  Relief  committees  were 
to  be  formed  throughout  the  different  unions  :  they  were  to  prepare  lists  of 
persons  who  were  fit  subjects  for  relief  :  food  was  to  be  given — at  reason- 
able prices  to  some,  gratuitously  to  the  absolutely  destitute.  Here  was  a 
departure  with  a  vengeance  from  the  solid  principles  of  political  economy  that 
had  been  preached  with  such  unction  to  the  benighted  Irish,  with  references 
to  Burke,  by  the  official  prigs  who  had  undertaken  to  manage  Irish  affairs 
for  the  Irish  people,  and  had  managed  them  with  such  disastrous  results. 

But  here  again  the  good  intentions  of  the  Government  and  their  legisla- 
tion were  defeated  by  characteristic  blunders.  One  of  the  objects  of  the 
Government  was  to  induce  the  people  to  till  their  own  fields  so  as  to  avoid 
the  repetition  in  1848  of  the  loss  of  the  harvest  that  had  followed  the  blun- 
dering legislation  of  1846  ;  and,  accordingly,  it  was  ordered  that  the  relief 
v/orks  should  be  gradually  dropped,  and  that  relief  through  the  soup 
kitchens  should  take  their  place.  At  the  end  of  March  the  number  of  per- 
sons employed  was  to  be  reduced  by  twenty  per  cent.,  and  by  May  1  the 
works  were  to  be  entirely  discontinued.  It  was  intended,  too,  that  by  the 
time  the  relief  works  came  to  an  end  the  soup  kitchens  would  be  in  exist- 
ence ;  and  thus  the  people  would  be  supplied  with  a  substitute. 

The  number  of  people  employed  on  the  relief  works  was  gigantic.  In 
the  week  ending  October  3,  1846 — the  first  week  of  the  relief  works — the 

^  Census  Commissioners,  p.   253.    As  a  resiilt,  Ireland  had  the  largest  proportion 
of  blind,  compared  with  its  population,  except  Norway. — lb. 
=  lb.,  p.  253.  3  /6.,  p.  245. 


44  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

mimber  of  persons  employed  was  but  20,000  ;  but  in  March,  1847,  when  the 
number  on  the  works  began  to  be  reduced,  the  total  had  reached  the  enor- 
mous number  of  734,000.  The  disarrangement  of  a  scheme  on  which  so 
many  people  depended  for  food  was  a  project  of  strange  rashness,  and,  as 
usual,  it  was  carried  out  by  the  officials  of  the  Government  in  a  manner  to 
aggravate  all  the  evil  tendencies  of  the  original  plan.  The  intention  of  the 
Government  was  that  the  reduction  of  twenty  per  cent,  was  to  take  place 
in  the  aggregate,  and  not  in  each  place — the  object,  of  course,  being  that 
regard  should  be  had  to  the  different  conditions  of  each  locality  :  the 
officials  lowered  the  number  of  persons  employed  in  every  district  with 
perfect  uniformity.  Then  the  intention  of  the  Government  was  that  the 
Soup  Kitchen  Act  should  be  in  full  working  order  when  the  relief  works 
came  to  an  end.  By  May  1,  when  the  whole  mighty  army  of  three-quar- 
ters of  a  million  of  people  were  turned  away  from  work,  there  was  not  a 
single  relief  committee  in  full  working  order,  not  a  single  can  of  soup  had, 
in  all  probability,  been  manufactured.  The  result  was  that  there  was  in 
1847,  as  there  had  been  in  1846,  a  hideous  interregnum  during  which  some 
of  the  worst  sufferings  of  the  famine  days  were  repeated. 

But  when  the  scheme  did  get  into  working  order,  it  proved  on  the  whole 
effective  and  beneficial.  Deaths  from  starvation  came  to  an  end  ;  fever 
grew  less  intense  in  the  hospitals  ;  and  the  fields  were  fairly  well  tilled. 
Thus  the  severest  verdict  on  the  early  incompetence  of  the  Government 
was  passed  by  the  result  of  their  own  later  legislation.  And,  indeed,  with 
an  appalling  candour,  the  Ministers  themselves  confessed  to  their  own 
tragic  mistake.  In  the  preamble  to  the  Soup  Kitchen  Act  the  measure  is 
justified  :  it  has  become  necessary  because,  '  by  reason  of  the  great  increase 
of  destitution  in  Ireland,  sufficient  relief  could  not  be  given '  under  the 
Labour  Rate  Act.-*-  M.  Jules  Sandeau  tells  in  one  of  his  stories  how  a 
royal  prince  gave  the  child  of  a  faithful  Breton  family  a  smile  ;  the  royal 
smile,  he  bitterly  comments,  had  been  purchased  by  three  lives.  The 
preamble  to  the  Soup  Kitchen  Act  had  been  purchased  by  many  and  many 
thousands  of  lives  that  might  have  been  saved. 

But  all  these  things  came  too  late,  and  especially  too  late  to  retain  the 
population.  Emigration  received  a  terrible  impetus,  and  the  people  fled  in 
a  frenzy  of  grief  and  despair  from  their  doomed  land.  But  even  in  their 
flight  they  were  pursued  by  the  demons  they  had  endeavoured  to  leave 
behind.  The  brotherhood  of  humanity,  powerless  to  frame  just  laws  and 
to  give  national  rights,  asserted  itself  in  disease  and  death.  To  England, 
as  the  nearest  refuge,  the  Irish  exiles  first  fled.  No  less  than  180,000  are 
said  to  have  landed  in  Liverpool  between  January  15  and  May  4,  1847.^ 
In  Glasgow,  between  June  15  and  August  17,  26,335  arrived  from  Ire- 
land. Many  were  '  aged  people  unfit  for  labour  ;'  out  of  1,150  patients  in 
the  Glasgow  fever  hospital  at  the  period,  750  were  Irish.^  At  last  the 
Government  had  to  interfere  to  protect  the  English  people  from  the  horrors 
which  the  errors  and  folly  of  British  administration  had  created  in  Ireland. 

^  The  testimony  is  overwhelming  that  if  the  policy  of  the  Soup  Kitchen  Act  had 
been  originally  adopted,  a  large  amount  of  the  horrors  of  the  famine  would  have  been 
prevented.  '  The  cost  of  the  Kenmare  soup-kitchen,'  reports  the  Relief  Committee, 
'  from  April  25  to  September  1,  amounted  to  £2,205  13s.  4d. ;  the  amount  of  money  paid 
for  public  works  in  the  same  district  from  November  23,  1846,  to  May  1,  was  £5,583, 
during  which  time  the  people  were  dying  on  the  roads  and  dropping  in  the  streets. 
Since  the  soup-kitchens  were  set  on  foot,  we  can  safely  affirm  that  not  one  human 
being  died  from  starvation.' — Census  Commissioners,  p.  290. 

=>/&.,  p.  305,  3  /J. 


THE  FAMINE.  45 

An  Order  in  Council  was  issued  by  which  deck  passengers  were  subjected  to 
quarantine.  Shortly  afterv/ards,  at  the  request  of  the  Government,  the 
fares  for  deck  passengers  were  increased  by  the  owners  of  four  steamships 
plying  between  England  and  Ireland.  These  passengers  were  all  Irish 
tenants,  fleeing  from  their  farms,  voluntarily  or  by  compulsion,  through 
hunger  or  through  eviction. 

Vast  masses  tried  to  make  their  w^ay  to  America.  In  the  year  1845, 
74,969  persons  emigrated  from  Ireland  ;  in  1846  the  number  had  risen  to 
105,955  ;  during  1847  it  rose  to  215,444.  No  means  were  taken  to  preserve 
these  poor  people  from  the  rapacity  of  shipowners.  The  landlords,  delighted 
at  getting  rid  of  them,  made  bargains  for  their  conveyance  wholesale,  and 
at  small  prices  ;  and  in  those  days  emigrant-ships  were  under  no  sanitary 
restrictions  of  any  effectiveness.  Thus  the  emigrants,  already  half-starved 
and  fever-stricken,  were  pushed  into  berths  that  '  rivalled  the  cabins  of 
Mayo,  or  the  fever-sheds  of  Skibbereen.'  '  Crowded  and  filthy,  carrying 
double  the  legal  number  of  passengers,  who  were  ill-fed  and  imperfectly 
clothed,  and  having  no  doctor  on  board,  the  holds,'  says  an  eye-witness, 
'  were  like  the  Black  Hole  of  Calcutta,  and  deaths  in  myriads.'  ^ 

The  statistics  of  mortality  bear  out  these  words.  Of  493  passengers 
during  the  year  in  the  Queen,  136  died  on  the  voyage  ;  of  552  in  the  Avon, 
236  died  ;  of  476  in  the  Virginius,  267  died  ;  of  440  on  the  Larch,  108 
died  and  150  were  seriously  diseased.  89,783  persons  altogether  embarked 
for  Canada  in  1847.  The  Chief  Secretary  for  Ii-eland  reported  with  regard 
to  these  that  6,100  perished  on  the  voyage  ;  4,100  on  their  arrival  ;  5,200 
in  hospital ;  1,900  in  towns  to  which  they  repaired.  '  From  Grosse  Island 
up  to  Port  Sarnia,  along  the  borders  of  our  great  river,  on  the  shores  of 
Lakes  Ontario  and  Erie,  wherever  the  tide  of  emigration  has  extended,  are 
to  be  found  one  unbroken  chain  of  graves,  where  repose  fathers  and 
mothers,  sisters  and  brothers,  in  a  commingled  heap,  no  stone  marking  the 
spot.     Twenty  thousand  and  upwards  have  gone  down  to  their  graves.'  ^ 


CHAPTER    IV. 

THE   GREAT   CLEAEANCES, 

It  was  at  the  moment  when  Ireland  was  being  scourged  with  all  these 
plagues  that  her  political  leaders  aggravated  her  sufferings  by  their  dissen- 
sions. 

It  has  already  been  told  that  the  rise  of  the  Nation  newspaper  intro- 
duced into  the  counsels  of  O' Council  a  new  element,  which  he  found  it 
impossible  to  control.  As  disaster  came  upon  the  country  these  differences 
were  bound  to  increase  ;  defeat  outside  being  always  the  solvent  of  imity 
inside  a  political  organization.  The  hideous  magnitude  ot  the  sufferings 
of  Ireland  at  this  moment,  too,  was  another  element  which  v/as  bound  to 
increase  the  tendency  to  discord.  The  young  and  strong  and  brave  can 
never  reconcile  themselves  to  the  gospel  that  there  is  such  a  thing  in  this 
world  as  inevitable  evil.  The  sight  of  so  many  thousands  of  people  perish- 
ing miserably  naturally  suggested  a  frenzied  temper,  and  the  extreme  course 

^  Sir  Charles  Gavau  Duffy,  '  Four  Years  of  Irish  History,'  p.  531. 
*  Ib.t  p.  532. 


46  THE  PaRNELL  MOVEMENT. 

that  such  a  telnper  begets.  Among  the  young  men,  therefore,  who  gathered 
round  the  leaders  of  the  Nation  newspaper,  there  was  a  constant 
teeling  that  encugh  was  not  being  done  to  save  the  people.  O'Connell,  on 
the  other  hand,  was  now  approaching  the  close  of  along  and  busy  life.  As 
has  Deen  already  mentioned,  he  had  been  at  the  period  when  the  famine 
broke  out  already  suffering  for  some  years  from  the  depressing  influence  of 
brain  disease.  It  would  take  me  far  beyond  my  purpose  to  go  through  the 
details  of  the  many  questions  upon  which  the  two  sides  came  into  collision. 
One  of  the  great  causes  of  the  split  between  Young  and  Old  Ireland  was 
m  reference  to  what  are  called  the  'peace  resolutions.'  Some  of  the  utter- 
ances of  the  Young  Irelanders  had  suggested  the  employment  of  physical 
force  under  certain  circumstances  ;  and  O'Connell,  whose  alarms  were  fed 
and  increased  by  disreputable  retainers,  and  by  his  son  John — an  intellec- 
tual pigmy  of  gigantic  ambition — insisted  upon  the  Repeal  Association 
solemnly  renewing  its  adhesion  to  the  resolutions.  These  resolutions,  passed 
at  its  formation,  laid  down  the  memorable  doctrine  that  no  political  reform 
was  worth  purchasing  by  the  shedding  of  even  one  drop  of  blood.  It  is 
hard  to  believe  that  O'Connell  ever  did  accept  in  its  entirety  the  doctrine 
that  physical  force  was  not  a  justifiable  expedient  under  any  imaginable 
circumstances.  There  is  no  record  in  his  speeches — at  least,  none  that  I 
remember — of  his  reprobation  of  the  American  Colonies  for  having  laid  the 
foundation  of  their  liberty  and  of  their  present  greatness  in  armed  insur- 
rection. There  is  q  famous  speech,  which  formed  part  of  the  case  of  the 
Crown  against  him,  in  which  he  spoke  of  himself  as  the  Bolivar  of  Ireland — 
and  the  triumphs  of  Bolivar  were  not  gained  -^^ithout  the  shedding  of 
blood.  All  O'Connell  probably  meant  to  say,  in  the  moments  when  he  was 
free  from  a  certain  kind  of  devotional  ecstasy,  was  that  Ireland  was  so 
weak  at  that  time  when  compared  to  England,  that  a  resort  to  physical  force 
could  have  no  possible  chance  of  success,  and  that  it  was  as  well  to  recon- 
cile the  people  to  their  impotence  by  raising  it  to  the  dignity  of  a  great 
moral  principle.  The  Young  Irelanders  left  the  Repeal  Association  ;  and 
from  this  time  forward  there  were  rival  organizations,  rival  leaders,  and 
rival  policies  in  the  National  Party. 

O'Connell  did  not  survive  to  see  the  complete  wreck  of  the  vast  organi- 
zation which  he  had  held  together  for  so  long  a  period.  Rarely  has  a  great, 
and  on  the  whole  successful,  career  ended  in  gloom  so  appalling  and  so 
unbroken.  The  imprisonment  of  1843  was  so  ignoble  an  ending  to  the 
glorious  promise  and  the  wild  and  tempestuous  triumph  of  that  period,  that 
it  probably  gave  his  spirit  a  shock  from  which  it  never  recovered.  He 
worked  on  as  energetically  as  ever,  for  he  was  a  man  whose  industry  never 
paused.  But  both  he  and  his  policy  had  lost  their  prestige.  The  young  and 
ardent  began  to  question  his  power,  and  still  more  to  doubt  his  policy. 
Then  came  1846  and  1847,  with  the  people  whom  he  had  pledged  himself 
to  bring  into  the  promised  land  of  self-government  and  prosperity  dying 
of  hunger  and  disease,  fleeing  as  from  an  accursed  spot,  and  bound  to  the 
fiery  wheel  of  oppression  more  securely  than  ever.  In  breaking  health  and 
with  broken  spirits  the  old  man  fought  doggedly  on.  On  April  3,  1846, 
he  delivered  a  lengthened  speech  to  the  House  of  Commons,  of  which  an 
historic  but  a'n  entirely  inaccurate  description  is  given  in  Lord  Beacons- 
field's  '  Life  of  Lord  George  Bentinck.'  The  speech,  whether  supplied  to 
the  newspapers,  as  suggested  by  Lord  Beaconsfield,  or  not,  appears  in 
*  Hansard,'  and,  however  much  the  voice  and  other  physical  attributes  of 
O'Connell  may  have  appeared  to  have  decayed,  this  speech,  in  its  selection 


THE  GREAT  CLEARANCES.  47 

of  evidence,  and  in  its  arrangement  of  facts  and  its  presentation  of  the 
whole  case  against  the  land  system  of  Ireland,  may  be  read  even  to-day  as 
the  completest  and  most  convincing  speech  of  the  times  on  the  question. 
In  Dublin,  too,  the  old  man  attended  the  relief  committees  day  after  day. 
He  spoke  in  the  House  of  Commons  for  the  last  time  in  February,  1847, 
and  then  it  was  that  he  displayed  that  utter  debility  which  is  transposed  in 
the  '  Life  of  Bentinck '  to  the  April  of  the  previous  year.  He  was  next 
day  seriously  ill,  and  was  ordered  change  of  air.  He  went  abroad,  and 
was  everywhere  met  by  demonstrations  of  respect  and  affection.  But  his 
heart  was  broken.  A  gloom  had  settled  over  him  which  nothing  could 
shake  off.  He  did  not  even  reach  the  goal  of  his  joiu-ney.  He  died  at 
Genoa  on  May  15,  1847.  His  last  will  was  that  his  heart  should  be  sent  to 
Home,  and  his  body  to  Ireland.     He  lies  in  Glasnevin  Cemetery, 

Meantime,  the  removal  of  his  imposing  personality  from  Irish  politics 
aggravated  the  dissensions  between  Old  and  Your."'  Ireland.  O'Connell 
was  largely  dominated  in  his  later  years  by  his  son,  John  O'Connell  ;  and 
the  father  bent  much  of  his  efforts  towards  handing  on  to  his  son  the 
dignity  of  popular  leader.  But  there  is  no  divine  right  in  popular  command, 
except  that  which  is  given  by  supreme  talents  ;  and  John  O'Connell  was 
utterly  devoid  of  qualifications  for  the  new  position.  He  was  weak,  vain, 
and  shallow,  and  the  disproportion  between  his  pretensions  and  his  abilities 
did  much  to  aggravate  the  bitterness  and  accelerate  the  rupture  between 
the  two  schools  of  political  thought. 

The  evils  of  the  country  grew  daily  worse  ;  hope  from  Parliamentary 
agitation  died  in  face  of  a  failure  so  colossal  as  that  of  O'Connell  ;  and 
some  of  the  Young  Irelanders,  seized  with  a  divine  despair,  resolved  to 
try  what  physical  fore  3  might  bring. 

The  first  important  apostle  of  this  new  gospel  was  John  Mitchel — one  of 
the  strangest,  most  picturesque,  and  strongest  figures  of  Irish  political 
struggles.  He  was  the  son  of  an  Ulster  Unitarian  clergyman  ;  and  he  was 
one  of  the  early  contributors  to  the  Nation.  He  separated  in  time  from 
Sir  (Mr.)  Charles  Gavan  Duffy,  and  started  a  paper  on  his  own  account. 
In  this  paper  insurrection  was  openly  preached  ;  and  especially  insurrection 
against  the  land  system.  The  people  were  asked  not  to  die  themselves, 
nor  let  their  wives  and  children  die,  while  their  fi.elds  were  covered  with 
food  which  had  been  produced  by  the  sweat  of  their  brows  and  by  their 
own  hands.  It  was  pointed  out  that  the  reason  why  all  this  food  was 
sent  from  a  starving  to  a  prosperous  nation  was  that  the  rent  of  the  land- 
lord might  be  paid,  and  that  the  rent  should  therefore  be  attacked  ; 
afterwards  he  advised  an  attack  upon  some  of  the  taxes. 

The  Ministry,  in  order  to  cope  with  such  writing  and  the  other  results 
of  a  period  of  universal  hunger  and  disease,  succeeded  in  having  a  whole 
code  of  coercion  laws  passed.  The  Cabinet  had  changed  its  political  com- 
plexion. The  fall  of  Peel  had,  as  has  been  seen,  been  brought  about  by  the 
defeat  of  his  Coercion  Bill  through  a  combination  of  the  Wliigs,  the  Pro- 
tectionists, and  the  O'Connellites.  Lord  John  Russell  had  been  the 
leader  of  the  Whigs  in  the  triumphant  attack  on  coercion  ;  and  Lord  John 
Russell,  now  transformed  from  the  leader  of  Opposition  to  the  head  of  the 
Government,  brought  in  Coercion  Bills  himself. 

Mitchel  was  the  first  of  the  Young  Irelanders  who  was  attacked.  He 
was  brought  to  trial  ;  Lord  John  Russell,  questioned  in  the  House  of 
Commons  about  the  trial  a  few  days  before  it  took  place,  pledged  himself 
that  it  should  be  a  fair  trial.     He  had  written,  he  declared,  to  his  noble 


4Sl  The  PAkNELL  MO  VEME^T. 

friend  (Lord  Clarendon)  that  he  trusted  there  would  not  arise  any  charge 
of  any  kind  of  unfairness  as  to  the  composition  of  the  juries,  as,  for  his  own 
part, '  he  would  rather  see  those  parties  acquitted  than  that  there  should  be 
any  such  unfairness.'  Most  Engiishmen  who  read  this  statement  came  to 
the  conclusion — the  very  natural  conclusion — that  the  word  of  an  English 
Prime  Minister  thus  solemnly  pledged  was  carried  out  ;  and  if  there  were 
any  complaints  by  Irish  members  afterwards,  they  were  dismissed  as  the 
emanations  of  the  hopeless  mendacity  or  the  incurable  folly  of  a  race  of 
persistent  grumblers.  Yet  was  the  pledge  most  flagrantly  broken ;  and  the 
packing  of  the  jury  of  John  Mitchel  under  the  premiership  of  Lord  John 
E-ussell  was  as  open,  as  relentless,  as  shameless,  as  the  packing  of  the  jury 
of  O'Connell  under  the  premiership  of  Sir  Robert  Peel.  The  Crown 
challenged  thirty-nine  of  the  jurors — of  these  thirty-nine,  nineteen  were 
Catholics,  the  rest  were  Protestants  suspected  of  National  leanings — with 
the  final  result  that  there  was  not  a  single  Catholic  on  the  jury,  and  that 
the  Protestants  were  of  the  Orange  class  who  would  be  quite  willing  to 
hang  Mitchel,  or  any  other  man  of  his  opinions,  without  the  formality  of 
trial,  or  without  any  evidence  at  all. 

With  such  a  jur}'  Mitchel  was,  of  course,  convicted.  He  was  sentenced 
to  fourteen  years'  transportation  ;  in  a  few  hours  after  the  sentence  he  was 
in  a  Government  boat,  on  the  way  already  to  the  land  to  which  he  was  now 
exiled.  One  of  the  questions  debated  at  the  time  most  seriously  was 
whether  Mitchel  should  be  allowed  to  be  taken  out  of  the  country  without 
some  attempt  at  rescue.  His  own  expectation  was  that  the  Government 
would  never  be  allowed  to  conquer  him  without  a  struggle,  and  that  his 
sentence  would  be  the  longed-for  and  the  necessary  signal  for  the  rising. 
But  it  was  deemed  wisest  by  the  other  leaders  of  the  Young  Ireland  Party 
that  the  attempt  at  insurrection  should  be  postponed  until  the  people  were 
organised  and  armed.  By  successive  steps  these  men  were  in  their  turn 
driven  to  extremities,  and  to  the  conviction  that  an  attempt  at  insurrection 
should  be  made. 

The  leader  of  this  movement  was  Mr.  Smith  O'Brien.  Mr,  O'Brien  was 
the  member  of  an  aristocratic  family.  His  brother  afterwards  became 
Lord  Inchiquin,  and  was  the  nearest  male  relative  to  the  Marquis  of 
Thomond.  Per  years  he  had  been  a  member  of  the  English  Liberal  Party, 
honestly  convinced  that  the  Liberal  Party  would  remedy  all  the  wrongs  of 
the  Irish  people.  But  as  time  went  on,  and  all  these  evils  seemed  to 
become  aggravated  instead  of  relieved,  he  was  driven  slowly  and  un- 
willingly into  the  belief  that  the  Legislative  Union  was  the  real  source  of 
all  the  evils  of  his  country  ;  and  he  joined  the  Repeal  Party  under 
O'Connell.  By  successive  steps  he  was  driven  into  the  ranks  of  Young 
Ireland,  and  by  degrees  into  revolution.  When  he,  Mr.  John  Blake 
Dillon  (father  of  the  John  Dillon  of  our  own  day),  Mr.  D'Arcy  M'Gee, 
and  Mr.  (now  Sir)  Charles  Gavan  Duffy  were  finally  forced  into  the  attempt 
to  create  an  insurrection,  they  probably  had  a  strong  feeling  that  the 
attempt  was  hopeless,  and  that  they  were  called  upon  to  make  it  rather 
through  the  calls  of  honour  than  the  chances  of  success.  The  attempt  at 
all  events  proved  a  disastrous  failure.  After  an  attack  on  a  police  barrack 
at  Ballingarry,  the  small  force  which  O'Brien  had  been  able  to  call  and 
keep  together  was  scattered.  He  and  the  greater  number  of  the  leaders 
were  arrested  after  a  few  days,  and  were  put  on  their  trial.  The  juries 
were  packed  as  before,  the  judges  were  partisans  of  the  Orange  school,  and 
O'Brien  and  the  rest  were  convicted,  were  sentenced  to  death,  and,  this 


THE  GREAT  CLEARANCES.  49 

Bentence  being  commuted,  were  transported.     Dillon  and  M'Gee  succeeded 
in  escaping  to  America. 

This  was  the  end  of  the  Young  Ireland  Party.  The  party  of  O'Connell 
did  not  survive  much  longer.  In  1847  there  wai=!  a  general  election.  The 
graphic  account  of  that  election  in  Sir  Charles  Gavan  Duffy's  book  is  one 
of  the  most  depressing  and  most  instructive  chapters  in  Irish  history,  and 
makes  several  years  of  Irish  history  intelligible.  The  election  was  fought 
out  between  the  Young  Irelanders  and  Conciliation  Hall — the  place  where 
O' Council's  Repeal  Association  used  to  meet — on  the  principle  whethex* 
there  should  or  should  not  be  a  pledge  against  taking  office. 

The  idea  of  Gavan  Duffy  and  the  other  Young  Irelanders  was  an  in- 
dependent Irish  Party — independent  of  Whig  as  of  Tory  Governments. 
But  O'Connell's  heirs,  as  he  himself,  taught  a  very  different  creed.  It  was 
O' Conn  ell's  persistent  idea  that  his  supporters  were  justified  in  taking 
offices  under  tii3  Crown.  It  is  easy  to  understand,  though  it  may  be  hard 
to  forgive,  his  reasons  for  adopting  such  a  policy.  When  O'Connell 
started,  as  to  a  large  extent  when  he  ended,  his  political  career,  every  post 
of  power  in  Ireland  was  held  by  the  enemies  of  the  popular  cause.  The 
Lord-Lieutenant,  the  Chief  Secretary,  ail  the  judges,  all  the  county  court 
barristers,  all  the  sheriffs,  all  the  men  in  any  public  position,  great  or  small, 
were  Protestants,  and  most  of  them  Orange  Conservatives.  Irish  history 
teaches  this  lesson,  if  no  other,  that  apparently  popular  and  even  Liberal 
institutions  may  exist  in  name  and  be  the  mask  for  the  worst  vices  of  un- 
checked despotism.  Ireland  had  all  the  forms  which  in  England  are  the 
guarantees  of  freemen  and  freedom,  but  these  forms  became  the  bulwarks 
and  instruments  of  tyranny.  It  was  in  vain  that  there  were  in  Ireland 
judges  who  had  the  same  independence  of  the  Crown  as  their  brethren  in 
England,  if,  from  violent  political  partisanship,  they  could  be  relied  upon 
to  do  the  behests  of  the  Government  as  safely  as  if  they  were  the  creatures 
of  the  Crown.  Trial  by  jury  was  a  '  mockery,  a  delusion,  and  a  snare,'  if 
it  meant  trial,  not  by  one's  peers,  but  by  a  carefully  selected  number  of 
one's  bitterest  political  and  religious  opponents.  And  no  laws  could 
establish  political  or  social  or  religious  equality  when  their  administration 
was  left  to  the  unchecked  caprice  of  a  hierarchy  of  unscrupulous  political 
partisans. 

O'Connell  found  how  true  this  was  in  the  days  that  succeeded  Catholic 
Emancipation  ;  and  he  thought,  therefore,  that  one  of  the  first  necessities 
of  Irish  progress  was  that  the  judiciary  and  the  other  official  bodies  of  the 
country  should  be  manned  by  men  belonging  to  the  same  faith  and  sympa- 
thizing with  the  political  sentiments  of  the  majority  of  their  countrymen. 

There  were  some  other  reasons,  too,  of  a  less  creditable  character. 
O'Connell  was  the  leader  of  a  democratic  movement  with  no  revenue  save 
such  as  the  voluntary  subscriptions  of  his  followers  supplied.  It  was  not 
an  unwelcome  relief  to  his  cause  if  occasionally  he  was  able  to  transform 
the  pensioners  on  his  funds  into  pensioners  on  the  coffers  of  the  State.  It 
is  to  be  remembered,  too,  that  at  this  period  the  Irish  leader  had  a  much 
more  circumscribed  class  from  which  to  draw  his  Parliamentary  supporters 
than  at  the  present  day.  The  property  qualifications  still  existed  ;  a  mem- 
ber of  Parliament  was  obliged  to  have  £300  a  year  to  be  a  borough,  and 
£600  a  year  to  be  a  county  member.  There  are  many  amusing  and  many 
sad  stories  of  the  strange  characters  which  this  necessity  compelled  O'Con- 
nell to  introduce  as  advocates  of  the  sacred  cause  of  Irish  nationality. 
There  were  large  classes  of  the  population  who,  while  they  had  the  property 

4 


50  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

qualification,  were  in  other  respects  entirely  unsuited  for  the  position  of 
members  of  a  popular  party.  The  landlords  were  almost  to  a  man  on  the 
side  of  existing  abuses,  and  the  greater  number  of  the  members  of  this  body 
whom  O'Connell  was  able  to  recruit  to  his  ranks  were  declassis.  They 
were  usually  men  of  extravagant  habits  and  of  vicious  lives,  and  politics 
was  the  last  desperate  card  with  which  their  fortunes  were  to  be  marred  or 
mended.  Next,  the  constituencies  of  Ireland  had  at  this  moment  a  very 
narrow  electorate.  It  was  all  very  well  for  half  a  million  of  people  to  meet 
O'Connell  at  Tara,  or  at  any  other  of  the  monster  meetings,  and  to  show 
that  he  commanded,  as  never  did  popular  leader  before,  the  affections,  the 
opinions,  and  the  right  arms  of  a  unanimous  nation.  But  when  it  came  to 
the  time  for  obtaining  a  Parliamentary  supporter — the  only  available 
weapon  for  his  struggle  with  English  Ministries — it  was  not  upon  the  voice 
of  the  people  that  the  decision  rested.  He  could  carry  many  of  the  coun- 
ties, even  though  support  of  him  meant  sentences  of  eviction,  and,  through 
eviction,  of  death  or  of  exile,  to  thousands  of  his  adherents.  In  the 
boroughs  it  was  half  a  dozen  shopkeepers,  face  to  face  with  the  always 
impending  bankruptcy  of  small  towns  in  an  impoverished  country,  who  had 
the  decision  of  an  election  in  their  hands.  This  is  a  central  fact  in  the 
consideration  of  O'Connell's  career,  and  must  always  be  taken  as  supplying 
at  least  some  explanation  of  his  many  mistakes,  and  his  many  disastrous 
failures. 

The  result  of  this  theory  of  O'Connell's  was  the  creation  in  Ireland  of  a 
school  of  politicians  which  has  been  at  once  her  dishonour  and  her  bane. 
This  v/as  the  race  of  Catholic  place-hunters.  Throughout  the  following 
pages  men  of  this  type  play  a  large  part  ;  it  will  be  found  that  in  exact 
proportion  to  their  success  and  number  were  the  degradation  and  the  deep- 
ening misery  of  their  country  :  that  for  years  the  struggle  for  Irish  pros- 
perity and  self-government  was  impeded  mainly  through  them  ;  and  that 
hope  for  the  final  overthrow  of  the  whole  vast  structure  of  wrong  in  Ireland 
showed  some  chance  of  realization  for  the  first  time  when  they  were  expelled 
for  ever  from  Irish  political  life. 

The  way  in  which  the  system  worked  was  this.  A  profligate  landlord,  or 
an  aspiring  but  briefless  barrister,  was  elected  for  an  Irish  constituency  as 
a  follower  of  the  popular  leader  of  the  day  and  as  the  mouthpiece  of  his 
principles.  When  he  entered  the  House  of  Commons  he  soon  gave  it  to  be 
understood  by  the  distributors  of  State  patronage  that  he  was  open  to  a 
bargain.  The  time  came  when  in  the  party  divisions  his  vote  was  of  con- 
sequence, and  the  bargain  was  then  struck — the  vote  from  him,  and  the 
office  from  them. 

Under  O'Connell  this  hideous  system  had  not  reached  the  proportions  to 
which  it  afterwards  attained  ;  but  it  had  gone  so  far  as  to  create  a  vast 
scandal ;  and,  along  with  the  via-etched  tail  which  in  the  course  of  his  long 
struggle  O'Connell  had  gathered  about  him,  gave  that  uncleanness  to  his 
proceedings  which  excited  the  just  indignation  of  the  young  and  ardent  and 
high-minded  men  who  formed  the  Young  Ireland  Party.  The  final  event 
that  made  separation  between  O'Connell  and  the  Young  Irelanders  inevit- 
able was  the  struggle  between  the  demand  for  an  independent  Irish  Party, 
with  no  mercy  to  place-hunters,  and  the  resolve  of  O'Connell  to  stand  by 
the  old  and  evil  system  of  compromise.  Richard  Lalor  Shell,  one  of  the 
most  eloquent  colleagues  of  O'Connell  in  the  old  struggle  for  Catholic 
Emancipation,  had  never  joined  in  the  agitation  for  Repeal,  had  kept  out 
of  all  popular  movements — some  said  because  the  despotic  will  of  the  great 


THE  GREA  T  CLEARANCES.  51 

tribune  made  life  intolerable  to  any  but  slaves — and  had  in  time  sunk  to 
the  level  of  a  Whig  office-holder.  In  1846,  having  been  appointed  Master 
of  the  Mint  in  the  Ministry  of  Lord  John  Russell,  Sheil  stood  for  Dungar- 
van,  and  the  Young  Irelanders  demanded  that  he  should  be  opposed  by  a 
man  who  was  in  favour  not  of  the  government  of  Ireland  by  English  Min- 
isters, whether  Whig  or  Tory,  but  of  the  government  of  Ireland  by  the 
Irish  people  themselves.  O'Connell  stood  by  his  old  associate  and  his  old 
creed,  and  Sheil  was  elected. 

The  struggle  on  this  point,  which  had  raged  in  the  days  of  O'Connell, 
burst  out  with  even  greater  fury  when  he  was  dead  ;  and  the  Young  Ire- 
landers  had  to  contend  with  his  puny  and  contemptible  successor.  The 
Young  Irelanders  proposed  that  no  man  should  be  elected  who  did  not 
pledge  himself  to  take  no  office  under  the  Crown.  And  assuredly  if  such 
a  pledge  were  ever  necessary  or  justifiable  it  was  at  that  moment.  Between 
Parliament  and  Ministers,  between  the  land  laws  and  the  landlords,  the 
Irish  nation  was  being  murdered;  and  the  demand  for  relief  should  come, 
not  from  beggars  seeking  the  pence  of  the  Treasury,  but  from  independent 
men  caring  only  for  the  redress  of  the  hideous  wrong  and  the  cure  of  the 
awful  suffering  of  their  country. 

But  Mr.  John  O'Connell  and  the  Repeal  Association  refused  to  accede  to 
any  such  pledge  ;  and  at  this  supreme  crisis  raised  those  false  side-issues 
which  are  the  favourite  resort  of  unscrupulous  traffickers  in  political 
struggles.  A  favourite  expedient  was  to  whisper  doubts  of  the  religious 
orthodoxy  of  the  Young  Irelanders ;  and  their  proposals  being  first 
described  as  revolutionary,  dread  warnings  were  by  an  easy  transition 
drawn  from  the  sanguinary  teachings  and  acts  of  the  revolutionaries  of 
Trance.  But  the  great  side-issue  was  the  attitude  the  Young  Irelanders 
had  adopted  towards  O'Connell.  They  were  described  as  having  'murdered 
the  Liberator.'  The  disappearance  of  O'Connell,  especially  in  circumstances 
of  such  tragic  and  pitiful  gloom,  had  produced  on  the  whole  Irish  people 
the  impression  which  Mrs.  Carlyle  so  well  describes  as  her  feeling  when  the 
news  came  to  England  that  Byron  was  dead.  It  seemed  as  if  the  sun  or 
moon  had  suddenly  dropped  out  of  the  heavens.  In  such  a  condition  of 
the  popular  mind  it  was  easy  to  raise  a  howl  of  execration  against  the  men 
who  had  opposed  his  policy  ;  the  Young  Irelanders  were  everywhere 
denounced  ;  in  many  places  they  were  set  upon  by  mobs,  and  were  in 
danger  of  their  lives. 

The  revulsion  of  public  feeling  against  them  threw  great  difficulties  in 
the  way  of  the  policy  which  they  recommended  ;  and  that  policy  did  not 
receive  anjrthing  like  a  fair  hearing.  Their  candidates  were  everywhere 
defeated,  and  in  their  stead  were  chosen  men  who  were  openly  for  sale. 
The  one  title  for  election  in  many  cases  was  a  hasty  adhesion  to  the 
Repeal  Association  just  before  the  general  election.  The  subscription  to 
this  body  was  £5  ;  hence  these  men  came  to  be  known  as  the  '  Five  Pound 
Repealers.'  Thus,  instead  of  seventy  independent  and  honest  Irish  repre- 
sentatives, there  was  returned  a  motley  gang  of  as  disreputable  and  needy 
adventurers  as  ever  trafficked  in  the  blood  and  tears  of  a  nation.  The 
expected  result  soon  followed.  Of  the  entire  number  no  less  than  twenty 
afterwards  accepted  places  for  themselves,  and  twenty  more  were  continu- 
ally pestering  the  Government  Whips  for  places  for  their  dependents.  Mr. 
John  O'Connell  himself  had  refused  to  take  the  pledge  against  office-taking, 
on  the  ground  that  if  the  name  he  bore  was  not  a  sufficient  guarantee,  he 
would  condescend  to  no  more.      The  guarantee  was  scarcely  trustworthy  ; 

4  —  9 


52  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

for  he  had  at  the  time  a  brother  and  two  brothers-in-law,  and  a  train  of 
cousins  in  office.  He  himself,  within  a  short  time  afterwards,  was  being 
trained  as  a  captain  of  militia  to  fight  against  the  men  whom  the  sight  of 
their  country's  ruin  was  driving  to  the  desperate  resort  of  rebellion  ;  and, 
finally,  ended  as  Clerk  of  the  Hanaper. 

Thus  the  Repeal  Party  broke  up,  and  Ireland  was  left  without  an  ad- 
vocate in  Parliament.  The  ruin  and  helplessness  of  the  country  were  now 
complete.  Insurrection  had  been  tried  and  had  failed  ;  constitutional 
agitation  had  produced  a  gang  of  scoundrels  who  were  ready  to  sell  them- 
selves to  the  highest  bidder.  Ireland,  starving,  plague-stricken,  disarmed, 
■unrepresented,  lay  at  the  mercy  of  the  British  Government  and  of  the 
Irish  landlords.  It  will  not  be  uninstructive  to  see  what  use  the  two 
classes  made  of  their  omnipotence  over  the  country  which  death,  hunger, 
and  plague,  abortive  rebellion  and  political  treachery,  had  given  over  to 
their  hands. 

First  as  to  the  landlords.  The  potato  crop  in  1848  and  1849  had  again 
failed,  and  there  were  throughout  the  country  the  same  scenes — especially 
in  1849— of  starvation  and  plague  as  in  1846  and  1847.  In  1848,  2,043,505 
persons  received  poor-law  relief — 610,463  being  in  the  workhouses,  and 
1,433,042  recei\'ing  outdoor  relief.^  Fever  and  dysentery  raged  in  the 
workhouses,-  the  gaols,^  the  schools,'^  and  in  some  places  along  the  western 
coast  with  such  destructiveness  as  to  almost  entirely  depopulate  them. 
'  Along  the  coast  of  Connemara,'  says  a  medical  writer,  '  for  near  thirty 
miles,  where  the  villages  are  very  small  and  hundreds  of  cabins  detached, 
sickness  and  death  walked  hand-in-hand  until- they  nearly  depopulated  the 
whole  coast.' ^  In  Mayo  hundreds  of  people  died  of  starvation  ;^  in  the 
townland  of  Moyard,  County  Galway,  five  persons — four  sons  and  a 
daughter — died  in  one  family  ;  ^  in  Ballinahinch,  in  the  same  county,  six 
persons  in  the  same  family  died — the  husband,  two  daughters,  and  three 
sons  ;  ^  in  Ballinasloe,  in  the  same  county,  eight  persons  died  in  the  same 
family,  '  The  survivors  have  endeavoured  to  live  on  nettles  and  water- 
cresses.'^  Though  there  were  41,083  fewer  deaths  than  in  1847,  the  total 
reached  the  enormous  figure  of  208,352,  and  of  these  97,076  died  of 
epidemic — that  is,  of  famine -produced  diseases.^*^  And  eventually, 
although  there  was  a  decrease  of  37,285  on  the  emigration  of  1847,  no  less 
than  178,159  persons  left  Ireland  in  1848. 

The  failure  was  not  so  complete  in  1848  as  in  1847,  but  still  it  v/as  very 
extensive,  and  there  was  terrible  and  -widespread  suffering.  In  1849  the 
blight  worked  more  disastrously.  The  potatoes  were  '  almost  universally 
blighted.'  ^^  The  year  1849  was  thus  a  return  to  the  greater  ghastliness 
and  more  multitudinous  horrors  of  1847.  As  in  previous  years,  the  har- 
vest began  with  promises  of  abundance.  In  May  the  crops  looked 
'  luxuriant  and  flourishing '  ;  ^-  but  as  early  as  June  the  blight  appeared 
in  County  Cork  and  County  Tipperary  ;  in  July  and  August  it  appeared 
in  several  other  counties.  By  the  18th  of  the  latter  month,  in  passing 
along  the  roads  in  the  Mourne  district  of  County  Douti,  '  the  peaty  smell 
— a  symptom  of  the  fatal  disaster — was  perceived  distinctly.'  By  Septem- 
ber 14  the  report  was  :  '  The  potato  blight  has  now  become  unmistakable, 
changing  in  one  night's  time  the  green  and  healthy-looking  appearances 

^  Census  Commissioners,  p.  310. 
*>  lb.  ' 

7  ih.,  p.  311. 
»o  Ih.,  p.  31 


2  ih. 

,  p.  310. 

3  lb.. 

,  p.  311. 

S  lb., 

,  p.  312. 

6  lb. 

8  Ji. 

9  lb., 

,  p.  312. 

^'Ib., 

p.  319. 

^=  lb.. 

,  p.  315, 

THE  GREAT  CLEARANCES.  53 

of  the  potato-stalk  to  blackness  and  decay.'  October  1  :  '  The  potatoes 
are  bad  everywhere.'  ^ 

As  in  the  autumn  of  1845,  the  people  had  staked  their  all  on  the  success 
of  the  potato  crop.  '  Should  the  crop  fail,'  wrote  the  Irish  Farmers' 
Gazette,  '  the  country  will  be  in  a  wretched  condition,  for  the  poor  people 
have  risked  their  all  in  the  planting  of  potatoes  this  year.'  -  One  of  the 
agricultural  instructors  sent  out  by  the  Lord-Lieutenant  to  lecture  on  im- 
proved methods  of  farming,  reports  from  Koscommon  instances  of  people 
having  '  sold  their  only  cow  to  procure  seed  potatoes,  and  of  persons 
having  sold  their  beds  for  the  same  purpose.'^  Another  instructor  makes 
a  statement  which  it  will  be  well  to  remember  in  reading  an  account  of 
the  working  of  landlordism  some  pages  further  on  :  '  They  ' — the  tenants 
— 'have  nothing  now  left  but  the  shelter  of  a  miserable  cabin,  and  them- 
selves and  the  land  in  a  corresponding  stat*  of  misery  ;  though  they  are 
still  clinging  to  their  huts  with  the  greatest  tenacity,  and  seem  better 
pleased  to  perish  in  the  ruins  than  surrender  what  they  call  their  last  hope 
of  existence.''* 

The  same  suffering  as  in  1847  followed  the  failure  of  the  staple  crop. 
*  The  earlier  months  of  1849,'  report  the  Poor  Law  Commissioners,  '  were 
marked  by  a  greater  degree  of  suffering  in  the  western  and  south-western 
districts  than  any  period  since  the  fatal  season  of  1846-47.  Exhaustion  of 
resources  by  the  long  continuance  of  adverse  circumstances  caused  a  large 
accession  to  the  ranks  of  the  destitute.  Clothing  had  been  worn  out  and 
parted  mth  to  provide  food  or  seed  in  seed-time. '  ^ 

Keports  of  all  kinds  present  pictures  as  terrible  as  those  of  1847,  with 
deeper  elements  of  tragedy  in  many  cases,  as  the  evils  of  1849  came  upon 
a  people  already  exhausted  by  their  dread  experiences  of  the  previous 
years.  Then  there  had  been  added  another  burden  to  the  famine-stricken 
people  in  the  additional  taxation  imposed  by  the  legislation  of  the  Im- 
perial Parliament,  for  the  people  had  to  pay  for  the  legislation  that  had  so 
terribly  aggravated  their  sufferings,  and  that  had  murdered  instead  of 
saving  hundreds  of  thousands  of  the  nation. 

'  The  people,'  reports  one  of  the  agricultural  instructors,  '  complain  bitterly  [of 
the  immense  poor  rate]  ;  they  say  it  will  be  impossible  for  them  to  stand  the  payment 
of  the  taxes  for  another  season.  They  likewise  say,'  adds  this  instructor,  '  that  if  they 
improve  their  farms,  they  know  in  their  hearts  they  are  doing  so  for  other  persons.'^ 

And  now  for  a  few  pictures  of  the  state  of  things  which  existed  among 
the  people. 

'  The  state  of  the  coim try  here,'  writes  one  of  the  instructors  from  Clifden,  Conne 
mara,  '  as  in  many  other  places,  is  utterly  hopeless,  and  exhibits  the  most  bonifying' 
picture  of  poverty  and  destitution.  The  neglected  state  of  the  land — the  death-like 
appearanceof  the  people  crawling  from  their  roofless  cabins  ....  the  pitiful  petitions 
of  the  desponding  poor  craving  that  charity  which  the  "rate"  of  23s.  Id.  to  the 
pound  puts  out  of  the  power  of  humanity  to  bestow — some  may  conceive,  but  few  can 
descriVje.  It  is  not  vei-y  likely,  indeed,  that  any  good  can  accrue  to  such  people  from 
my  visits.  "We  will  not  sow,  for  we  cannot  work  without  food,"  is  the  general 
answer  made  to  me  by  those  patient  sufferers.'? 

'  Anything,'  writes  another  instructor  from  the  Ballinrobe  Union,  County  Mayo,  'to 
equal  the  misery  and  starved  appearance  of  the  people  here  I  have  not  yet  seen — no 
more  sign  of  tillage,  or  any  prepai-ation  for  it,  than  on  the  top  of  a  barren  mountain, 
though  very  fine  land  ....  I  begged  of  them  to  prepare  the  land  ;  their  reply  was, 
"  How  can  a  hungry  man  work,  sir?  we  are  all  nearly  starved  ;"  and  really  they  had 
starvation  in  their  worn  faces  ...  I  met  half-starved  creatures  in  the  fields  every- 
where, picking  weeds  and  herbs  to  eat  them.  I  have  no  hesitation  in  saying  that  five 
out  of  six  of  the  really  destitute  will  be  dead  on  July  l.'S 

^  Census  Commissioners,  p.  315.  ^  Ib.,-p.  319.  3  2b.,  p.  317. 

*  lb.  5  /6.,  p.  320.  6  lb.,  p.  317.  7  i5.,  p.  321.  8  lb. 


54  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

'  Deaths  from  starvation  occur  almost  daily,'  writes  another  instructor  from  Balli- 
nahinch  Estate,  Connemara,  '  and  the  remains  of  hunger's  victims  are  quietly  laid  in 
the  groimd  iinrecorded.'  ^  In  the  neighbouring  islands,  '  which  had  quite  run  out  of 
cultivation,'  the  inhabitants  were  '  either  dead  or  supported  by  public  relief  and  by 
that  system  of  petty  theft  which  unfortunately  pervades  the  country,  as  the  food 
supplied  is  barely  sufficient  to  enable  the  living  skeletons  to  go  in  search  of  a  further 
supply.' 

Finally,  here  are  a  few  extracts  from  the  newspapers  of  the  time.  *  The 
distress  in  the  west  of  Ireland  was  very  great  ;  many  died  of  want.' 
'  Great  destitution  at  Athlone  ;  never  were  the  poor  in  so  deplorable  a 
condition,'  '  A  family  of  six  lived  for  one  week  upon  the  carcase  of  an 
ass  in  the  parish  of  Ballymackey,  County  Tipperary.'  '  Great  distress  in 
Ulster — people  eating  ass-flesh.'  Deaths  from  starvation  were  reported 
from  Cong,  County  Mayo,  from  Lettermore,  County  Tipperary,  and  also 
from  the  County  Clare.  '  January  17  :  Twenty-two  deaths  from  famine 
and  destitution  reported  throughout  the  country.'  ^ 

As  has  already  been  stated,  the  epidemic  of  cholera  was  added  to  the 
other  scourges  which,  in  the  latter  part  of  1848  and  all  through  1849, 
followed  on  the  other  epidemics.  The  total  number  of  deaths  in  1849  was 
240,797,  being  the  greatest  number  for  any  one  year  in  the  decennial 
period  between  1841  and  1851  except  1847.  The  deaths  from  zymotic 
diseases  were  larger  than  in  1847,  being  123,386,  which  is  7,021  more  than 
in  1847.3 

Such,  then,  was  the  state  of  Ireland  in  these  two  years.  I  now  proceed 
to  describe  the  conduct  of  the  landlords.  It  would  be  esisy  to  quote  the 
general  denunciations  of  their  conduct  all  over  the  country,  which  appeared 
in  the  speeches  and  newspapers  even  of  England,  but  I  have  thought  it  a 
better  plan  to  take  up  one  particular  district  and  show  the  landlords  at 
work  there. 

To  anybody,  then,  who  desires  to  obtain  a  detailed  and  realistic  picture 
of  what  Irish  landlordism  in  the  days  of  the  famine  really  meant,  the 
perusal  of  the  paper  No.  1089,  entitled  'Reports  and  Returns  relating  to 
Evictions  in  the  Kilrush  Union,'  will  be  of  absorbing  interest.  The 
Ministers,  in  order  to  give  Parliament  some  idea  as  to  the  merits  of  the 
controversy  between  them  and  the  landlords,  presented  in  this  volume  a 
series  of  extracts  from  the  Report  of  Captain  Kennedy,  who  had  been  sent 
down  to  this  union  as  representative  of  the  Poor  Law  Commissioners. 
These  extracts  begin  on  November  25,  1847,  and  conclude  on  June  19, 
1849.  They  tell  over  and  over  again  the  same  tale,  until  the  heart  growa 
sick  with  the  repetition  of  ghastly  and  almost  incredible  horrors.  Kilrush 
\vas  one  of  the  unions  in  which  neither  famine  nor  fever  worked  with 
such  deadly  effect  as  in  some  other  parts  of  the  country. 

The  following  extracts  from  Captain  Kennedy's  report  are  given  without 
comment,  and  may  be  trusted  to  speak  for  themselves  : 

^November  25,  1847. — An  immense  number  of  small  landholders  are 
under   ejectment,   or   notice   to   quit,    even   where   the   rents   have   been 

paid  up.* 

\ 

'     *  Census  Commissioners,  p.  321. 

2  FrteTuan's  Jowrnol  and  Saunders's  Newsletter,  quoted  by  Census  Commissioners, 
pp.  320,  321. 

3  Census  Commissioners,  pp.  328,  324. 

4  Blue-book  No.  1089 :  Reports  and  Returns  relating  to  Evictioim  in  the  Kilrush 
Union,  1849,  p.  3. 


THE  GREAT  CLEARANCES.  55 

'  February  11,  1848. —  . .  .  Upwards  of  120  houses  have  been  "  Uimhled" 
on  one  property  within  a  few  weeks,  containing  families  to  a  greater  number, 
many  of  whom  are  burrowing  behind  the  ditches,  without  the  means  of 
procuring  shelter.^ 

'  March  16,  1848. — We  admitted  a  considerable  number  of  paupers, 
among  whom  were  some  of  the  most  appalling  cases  of  destitution  and 
suffering  it  has  ever  been  my  lot  to  witness.  The  state  of  most  of  these 
wTetched  creatures  is  traceable  to  the  numerous  evictions  which  have  lately 
taken  place  in  the  union.  When  driven  from  their  cabins,  they  betake 
themselves  to  the  ditches  or  the  shelter  of  some  bank,  and  there  exist  like 
animals,  till  starvation  or  the  inclemency  of  the  loeather  drives  them  to  the 
icorkhouse.  There  ivere  three  cartloads  of  these  creatures,  ivho  could  not 
icalk,  brought  for  admission  yesterday,  some  in  fever,  some  suffering  from 
dysentery,  and  all  from  icant  of  food.  ^ 

'3farch  23,  1848. — Whole  districts  are  being  cleared  and  re-let  in  larger 
holdings.^ 

'March  28,  1848. — Cabins  are^being  thrown  doion  in  all  directions,  and 
it  is  really  extraordinary  and,  to  me,  unaccountable  where  or  how  the  evicted 
find  shelter.'^ 

'  March  30,  1848. —  .  .  .  The  pressure  is  coming,  and  -wtU  continue  ; 
and  this  will  not  surprise  the  Commissioners  when  I  state  my  conviction 
that  1,000  cabins  have  been  levelled  in  this  union  loithin  a  very  few  months. 
The  occupants  of  many  of  these  were  induced  to  give  them  up  on  receipt  of 
a  small  sum  of  money  ;  and  that  once  spent,  they  must  seek  the  workhouse 
or  starve.^ 

'April  6,  1848. — The  destitution  in  degree  and  character  is,  I  trust, 
unknown  elsewhere ;  improvident,  ignorant,  thriftless  parents,  scarcely 
human  in  habits  and  intelligence,  only  present  themselves,  with  nine  or  ten 
skeleton  children,  when  they  themselves  can  no  longer  support  the  p)angs  of 
hunger  and  their  luretched  offspring  are  beyond  recovery.  The  state  of  this 
union  must  be  seen  to  be  beheved  or  comprehended.^ 

'  April  6,  1848. — While  hundreds  are  being  turned  out  houseless  and 
helpless  daily  on  one  small  property  in  Killard  division,  no  less  than  twenty - 
three  houses,  containing  probably  one  hundred  souls,  were  tumbled  in  one 
day,  March  27.  I  believe  the  extent  of  land  occupied  with  these  twenty- 
three  houses  did  not  exceed  fifty  acres.  The  suffering  and  misery  attendant 
upon  these  wholesale  evictions  is  indescribable.'^  The  number  of  houseless 
paupers  in  this  union  is  beyond  my  calculation  ;  those  evicted  crowd  neigh- 
bouring cabins  and  villages,  and  disease  is  necessarily  generated.  On  its 
first  appearance,  the  loretched  sufferer,  and  probably  the  whole  family  to 
which  he  or  she  belongs,  is  ruthlessly  turned  out  by  the  roadside.  The 
popular  dread  of  fever  or  dysentery  seems  to  excuse  any  degree  of  in- 
humanity. The  workhouse  and  temporary  hospital  are  crowded  to  the 
utmost  extent  they  can  possibly  contain  ;  the  crowding  of  the  fever  hospital 
causes  me  serious  anxiety.  The  relieving  officer  has  directions  to  send  no 
more  in  :  yet,  not-withstanding  this  caution,  panic-stricken  and  unnatural 
parents  frequently  send  in  a  donkey -load  of  children  in  fever  a  distance  of 
fourteen  or  ff teen  miles  for  admission.  How  to  dispose  of  them  I  know 
not.^ 

^  Blue-book  No.  1089 :  Reports  and  Returns  relating  to  Evictions  in  the  Kilrush 
Union,  1849,  p.  3. 

2/&.  3  7Z).  4  7J,.,p.  4.  5/5. 

6/6.,  p.  4.  7iZ;.,  p.  5.  8/6. 


56  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

'April  8,  1848. — I  calculate  that  Q,000  Jiouses  have  been  levelled  since 
November,  and  expect  500  Tuore  before  July?- 

'April  13,1848. — These  wholesale  evictions  are  most  embarrassing  to 
the  guardians.  The  Avretched  and  half--\vitted  occupiers  are  too  often 
deluded  by  the  specious  promises  of  under-agents  and  bailiffs,  and  induced 
to  throw  down  their  own  cabin  for  a  paltry  consideration  of  a  few  shillings, 
and  an  assurance  of  "  outdoor  relief." 

'June  27  th,  1848. — Several  of  these  wretched  dens  were  without  light  or 
air,  and  I  loas  obliged  to  light  a  piece  of  bog-fir  to  see  tvhere  the  sick  lay, 
xvhile  many  good  and  substantial  houses  lay  in  ruins  about  them.  What- 
ever the  necessity,  or  whatever  future  good  these  clearances  may  effect,  they 
are  prodAictive  of  an  amount  of  p)resent  suffering  and  mortality  ivhich 
ivoidd  scare  the  proprietors  were  they  to  see  it.  And  the  evil  still  goes  on. 
During  the  last  w"eek  about  sixty  more  souls  have  been  left  houseless  on 
one  small  property,  to  crowd  into  the  already  overcrowded  cabins  and 
create  disease.^ 

'July  5,  1848. — Twenty  thousand,  or  one -fourth  of  the  population,  are 
now  in  receipt  of  daily  food,  either  in  or  out  of  the  workhouse.  Disease  has 
unfortunately  kept  pace  with  destitution,  and  the  high  mortality  at  one 
period  since  last  November,  in  and  out  of  the  workhouse,  was  most  dis- 
tressing. I  have  frequently  been  astonished  by  the  sudden  and  unexpected 
pressure  from  certain  localities  ;  this  naturally  induced  an  inquiry  into  the 
causes,  and  eventually  into  a  general  review  of  the  whole  union.  The 
result  of  this  inquiry  has  convinced  me  that  destitution  has  been  increased 
and  its  character  fearfully  aggravated  by  the  system  of  wholesale  evictions 
ivhich  has  been  adopted  ;  that  a  fearful  amount  of  disease  and  mortality  has 
also  resulted  from  the  same  causes,  I  cannot  doubt.  I  have  painful  experi- 
ence of  it  daily.  To  make  this  understood,  I  may  state,  in  general  terms, 
that  about  900  houses,  containing  probably  4,000  occupants,  have  been 
levelled  in  this  union  since  last  November.  The  wretchedness,  ignorance, 
and  helplessness  of  the  poor  on  the  western  coast  of  this  union  prevent 
them  seeking  a  shelter  elsewhere  ;  and,  to  use  their  ovTn  phrase,  "  they 
don't  know  where  to  face  ;"  they  linger  about  the  localities  for  iveehs  or 
Tnonths,  burroiving  behind  the  ditches,  under  a  few  broken  rafters  of  their 
former  dwelling,  refusing  to  enter  the  ivorkhouse  till  the  parents  are  broken 
down  and  the  children  half  starved,  ivhen  they  come  into  the  workhouse  to 
swell  the  Tnortality  one  by  one.  Those  who  obtain  a  temporary  shelter  in 
adjoining  cabins  are  not  more  fortunate.  Fever  and  dysentery  shortly 
make  their  appearance,  when  those  aiiected  are  put  out  by  the  roadside  as 
carelessly  and  ruthlessly  as  if  they  were  animals  ;  when  frequently,  after 
days  and  nights  of  exposure,  they  are  sent  in  by  the  relie^dng  officers  when 
in  a  hopeless  state.  These  inhuman  acts  are  induced  by  the  popular  terror 
of  fever.  I  have  frequently  reported  cases  of  this  sort,  l^he  misery 
attendant  upon  these  wholesale  and  simidtaneous  evictions  is  frequently 
aggravated  by  hunting  these  ignorant,  helpless  creatures  off  the  property, 
from  tvhich  they  perhaps  have  never  ivandei-ed  five  miles.  It  is  not  an 
unusual  occurrence  to  see  forty  or  fifty  houses  levelled  in  one  day,  and 
orders  given  that  no  remaining  tenant  or  occupier  shoidd  give  them  even  a 
night'' s  shelter.  I  have  known  some  ruthless  acts  committed  by  drivers  and 
sub-agents,  but  no  doubt  according  to  law,  however  repulsive  to  humanity  ; 
wretdied  hovels  pulled  down,  where  the  inmates  were  in  a  helpless  state  of 

I  Blue-book  No.  1089 :  Keports  and  Ketums  relatiug  to  Evictions  in  the  Kili-ush 
Union,  1849,  p.  5.  2  Ih.,  p.  7. 


THE  GREAT  CLEARANCES.  57 

/ever  and  nakedness,  and  left  hy  the  roadside  for  days.  As  many  as  300 
souls,  creatures  of  the  most  helpless  class,  have  been  left  houseless  in  one 
day,  and  the  suflfering  and  misery  resulting  therefrom  attributed  to  insuffi- 
cient relief  or  maladministration  of  the  law  :  it  would  not  be  a  matter  of 
surprise  that  it  failed  altogether  in  such  localities  as  those  I  allude  to. 
When  relieved,  charges  of  profuse  expenditure  are  readily  preferred.  The 
evicted  crowd  into  the  back  lanes  and  wretched  hovels  of  the  towns 
and  villages,  scattering  disease  and  dismay  in  all  directions.  The  character 
of  some  of  these  hovels  defies  description.  /  not  long  since  found  a  widoic, 
tvhose  three  children  loere  iri  fever,  occupying  the  piggery  of  their  former 
cabin,  which  lay  beside  them  in  ruins  ;  however  incredible  it  may  appear, 
this  place,  where  they  had  lived  for  weeks,  measured  five  feet  by  four  feet, 
and  of  corresponding  height.  I  ofifered  her  a  free  conveyance  to  the  work- 
house, which  she  steadily  refused  ;  her  piggery  was  knocked  down  as  soon 
as  her  children  were  able  to  crawl  out  on  recovery,  and  she  has  now  gone 
forth  a  rvanderer.  I  could  not  induce  any  neighbour  to  take  her  in, 
even  for  payment  ;  she  had  medical  aid,  and  all  necessary  relief  from  the 
union.^ 

^August  13,  1848.  —  /  regret  to  say  that  these  monster  evictions  still 
continue.  During  the  last  week  forty-four  families  were  evicted,  and  the 
houses  levelled,  on  one  property.  ...  A  band  of  paupers,  taken  from  some 
distant  stone-breaking  dep6ts,  and  armed  with  spades,  crowbars,  and  pick- 
axes, completed  this  work  of  destruction.  .  .  .  These  helpless  creatures,  not 
only  unhoused  but  driven  off  the  lands,  no  one  remaining  on  the  lands 
being  allowed  to  lodge  or  harbour  them.  .  .  .  When  winter  sets  in  these 
evicted  destitute  will  be  in  awful  plight,  as  their  temporary  sheds,  behind 
ditches  or  old  fences,  are  quite  unfit  for  human  habitation,  and  if  they 
attempted  to  build  anything  permanent  they  woidd  be  immediately  abolished. 
If  the  records  of  the  sheriff's  office  connected  with  the  union  for  the  last 
nine  months  were  produced,  they  would  account  for  much  of  the  death  and 
destitution  of  the  union.^ 

^  August  26,  1848. — In  reply  to  your  communication  of  the  24th  instant, 
I  have  the  honour  to  inform  you  that  the  band  of  paupers  therein  adverted 
to  were  hired  by  the  sub-agent,  and  taken  away  from  the  stone- breaking 
depot  for  the  purposes  I  have  stated.  They,  of  course,  received  no  relief 
for  the  day  they  were  absent,  nor  for  some  days  after,  as  the  relieving 
officer  ascertained  that  they  received  a  high  rate  of  wages  for  this  service. 
I  did  not  intend  to  convey  that  the  implements  used  by  these  paupers  were 
union  or  public  property.  '^ 

^August  27,  1848. — Numerous  evictions  have  taken  place  during  the 
last  week  :  the  numbers  and  particulars  will  be  forwarded  on  an  early  day. 
The  ultimate  fate  of  this  class  is  a  matter  of  curious  speculation  when 
their  utter  destitution  and  helplessness  are  fully  understood.'^ 


EXTKACT   FKOM   THE  ViCE-GUAKDIANS'   RePOET. 

*  October  21,  1848. — The  number  of  houses  now  thrown  down,  and  of 
families  thereby  rendered  totally  destitute,  is  daily  increasing  to  a  fearful 
extent.'^ 

^  Blue-book  No.  1089 :  Reports  and  Returns  relating  to  Evictions  in  the  Kilrush 
Union,  1849,  pp.  7,  8. 
2  11.,  p.  19.  3  Jb.,  p.  20.  »  lb.,  p.  23.  5  i&.,  p.  30. 


58  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

EXTKACTS  FKOM  REPORT  OF   CaPTAIN   KENNEDY. 

^December  4,  1848.  —  My  acquaintance  with  the  state  of  this  union 
does  not  allow  me  to  believe  that  the  numbers  becoming  chargeable  to  the 
rates  will  stop  short  of  20,000.  This  can  hardly  be  a  matter  of  surprise 
when  I  state  (what  the  Commissioners  are  in  possession  of)  that  I  have 
forwarded  returns  of  the  eviction  of  6,090  souU  since  last  July.^ 

^January  22,  1849. — /  cannot  estimate  the  evictions  in  the  union  much 
under  150  souls  per  week?  .  .  .  The  destitution  in  this  union  is  a  mighty 
and  fearful  reality  :  it  is  in  vain  to  strive  to  falsify  or  forget  its  existence  ; 
yet  no  combined  eflfort,  and  hardly  an  individual  one,  is  made  to  alleviate 
or  arrest  it.  A  few  philanthropic  individuals  continue  to  afford  their  unit 
of  relief  and  employment,  but  their  example  is  not  taking.  There  is  a 
general  lack  of  energy  ;  the  better  part  of  the  community  seem,  for  the 
most  part,  as  apathetic  as  if  the  country  were  comparatively  prosperous  ; 
while  demoralization,  disease,  and  death  are  spreading  like  a  cancer.  /  see 
the  masses  of  the  people  starving,  and  the  land,  which  could  be  made  to 
feed  treble  the  number,  lying  all  but  ivaste.'^ 

Extract  of  Report  from  the  Vice-Guardians. 

'January  22,  1849. — Evictions  and  throwing  down  houses  continue  to 
he  carried  on  to  large  extent,  and  the  Quarter  Sessions,  noio  going  on, 
shows  that  a  large  number  of  ejectments  are  in  process;  and  we  know  that 
within  a  fortnight  upwards  of  800  beings  have  been  evicted  from  their 
houses.  We  cannot,  therefore,  make  any  calculation  that  may  come  near 
the  amount,  but  are  of  opinion  that  at  least  2,000  persons  will  be  added  in 
some  parts  of  the  intermediate  season,  and  that  about  the  same  number  will 
be  off  the  list  in  the  months  of  April  to  June  ;  they  increase  from  that  to 
October.' 4 

Extract  from  Report  of  Captain  Kennedy. 

'April  3,  1849. — On  one  farm  alone,  in  Kilmurry  {the  most  miserable 
district  in  the  union),  lohere  there  were  seventy-three  houses  tvithin  the  last 
ten  Tnonths,  there  are  now  but  thirteen.  I  also  enclose  a  petition  marked 
"  E,"  being  one  of  hundreds  which  I  have  received  to  the  same  purport. 
This  houseless  class  becomes  more  embarrassing  daily,  and  I  fear  a  money 
allowance  for  lodging,  in  addition  to  food,  will  ere  long  be  forced  upon  the 
Vice-Guardians.'^ 

The  following  is  the  petition  : 

'  The  humble  petition  of  Patt  Lumane, 
'  Showeth, 

'  That  he  has  neither  house  nor  home,  nor  place  to  shelter  him ;  no 
person  would  admit  him,  or  give  him  a  night's  lodging.  He  has  five  in 
family,  exposed  to  all  sorts  of  persecutions  ;  therefore  he  applies  to  the 
Board  of  Guardians  to  admit  him  and  family  into  the  workhouse  to  shelter 
them. 

'  He  was  upon  outdoor  relief,  and  had  no  asylum  to  eat  it. '  ^ 

^  Blue-book  No.  1089  :  Reports  and  Returns  relating  to  Evictions  in  the  Kilrush 
Union,  1849,  p.  36. 
-'  lb.,  p.  13  3  75.,  p.  45.  4  /5.  5  zj,.,  p,  43.  6  JT,.,  p.  46. 


THE  GREA  T  CLEARANCES.  59 

ExTEi^lCT   FROM   REPORT   OF    CaPTAIN   KENNEDY. 

*  May  7,  1849. — I  find  that  my  constant  and  untiring  exertions  make  but 
little  impression  upon  the  mass  of  fearful  suffering.  As  soon  as  one  horde 
of  houseless  and  all  but  naked  paupers  are  dead,  or  provided  for  in  the 
workhouse,  another  wholesale  eviction  doubles  the  mimher,  who,  in  their  turn, 
pass  through  the  sawe  ordeal  of  loandering  from  house  to  house  or  burrow- 
ing in  bogs  or  behind  ditches,  till,  broken  dow7i  by  privation  and  exposure  to 
the  elements,  they  seek  the  icorkhouse,  or  die  by  the  roadside.  The  state  of 
some  districts  of  the  union  during  the  last  fourteen  days  baffles  description ; 
sixteen  houses,  containing  twenty-one  families,  have  been  levelled  in  one 
small  village  in  Killard  division,  and  a  vast  number  in  the  rural  parts  of 
it.  As  cabins  become  fewer,  lodgings,  however  miserable,  become  more 
difficult  to  obtain  ;  and  the  helpless  and  houseless  creatures,  thus  turned 
out  of  the  only  home  they  ever  knew,  betake  themselves  to  the  nearest  bog 
or  ditch,  with  their  little  all,  and,  thus  huddled  together,  disease  soon 
decimates  them. 

'  Notwithstanding  that  fearful  and,  I  believe,  unparalleled  numbers  have 
been  unhoused  in  this  union  within  the  year  (probably  15,000),  it  seems  hardly 
credible  that  1,200  more  have  had  their  dwellings  levelled  within  a  fortnight. 

*  I  have  a  list  of  760  completed,  and  of  above  400  in  preparation.  It 
appears  to  me  almost  impossible  to  successfully  meet  such  a  state  of  things  ; 
and  the  prevailing  epidemic,  or  the  dread  of  it,  aggravates  the  evil.  None 
of  this  houseless  class  can  now  find  admittance,  save  into  some  over- 
crowded cabin,  whose  inmates  seldom  survive  a  month.  I  have  shown  Dr. 
Phelan  some  of  these  miserable  nests  of  pestilence,  which  I  am  at  a  loss  to 
describe. 

^  Five  families,  numbering  twenty  souls,  are  not  unfrequently  found  in  a 
cabin  consisting  of  one  small  apartment.  At  Doonbeg,  a  few  days  since,  I 
found  three  families,  numbering  sixteen  persons,  one  of  whom  had  cholera, 
and  three  in  a  hopeless  stage  of  dysentery.  The  cabin  they  occupied  con- 
sisted of  one  wretched  apartment,  about  twelve  feet  square.  It  was  one 
of  the  few  refuges  for  the  evicted,  and  they  were  unable  to  reckon  how 
many  had  been  carried  out  of  it  from  time  to  time  to  the  grave.' ^ 

There  are  one  or  two  further  extracts  which  illustrate  very  forcibly  the 
working  of  the  land  system.  Thus,  the  foUovsdng  extracts  from  Captain 
Kennedy's  report  show  the  manner  in  which  the  excessive  competition  for 
land  brought  up  prices  far  beyond  their  value  and  far  beyond  the  capacity 
of  the  tenant  to  pay  : 

'  Hundreds  of  instances  occur  where  an  acre  of  land  worth  15s.  is  let  for 
£3,  and  the  occupier,  in  default  of  full  payment,  bound  to  give  140  days' 
labour  to  his  lessor  during  spring  and  harvest,  when  the  occupier  himself 
requires  them  most ;  this  would  (valuing  his  labour  at  8d.  per  day)  amount 
to  £4  13s.'2 

The  farmer,  oppressed  himself,  naturally  acted  in  like  manner  with 
regard  to  the  labourer  : 

'  The  same  system  obtains  as  to  the  letting  of  cabins  ;  100  or  120  days' 
labour,  during  the  only  period  the  wretched  labourer  would  earn,  is  exacted 
for  a  cabin  worth  perhaps  7s.  6d.  a  year.'^ 

I  Blue-book  No.  1089  :  Reports  and  Returns  relating  to  Evictions  in  the  Kilnish 
Union,  1849,  p.  46.  2  Ih.,  p.  4.  3  /?,.,  p.  5. 


6o  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

And  here  is  a  definition  of  an  able-bodied  labourer  that  suggests  curious 
reflections : 

' .  .  .  .  There  are  but  few  who  realize  any  idea  of  an  able-bodied  labourer ; 
the  great  mass  of  them  are  called  so,  more  in  relation  to  their  years  than 
their  physical  power,  or  in  contradistinction  to  those  who  are  in  the  last 
stage  of  disease  or  existence.  Men  are  called  able-bodied  here  who  would 
not  be  so  designated  elsewhere. '•"■ 

Then,  as  to  the  action  of  the  landlord,  here  are  two  extracts  which  give 
a  curious  idea  of  his  feelings  and  conduct : 

'  Tilt  lands  have  been  already  literally  swept  for  rent.  I  frequently 
travel  fifteen  miles  without  seeing  five  stacks  of  grain  of  any  kind  ;  all 
threshed  and  sold.  Bent  has  seldom  or  ever  been  looked  for  more  sharply, 
and  levied  more  unsparingly,  than  this  year.'^ 

'  Of  the  proprietors  there  are  but  few  resident.  I  cannot  speak  of  their 
mea^ns  ;  I  only  know  that  there  has  not  been  any  amount  of  poor-rate  levied 
in  this  union  seriously  to  injure  them  ;  no  more  than  any  man  of  common 
humanity  ought  voluntarily  to  bestow  in  disastrous  times.  That  they  are, 
generally  speaking,  embarrassed,  I  fear  is  a  melancholy  truth,  and  goes 
far  to  account  for  the  existing  want  of  employment  and  consequent 
destitution.'^ 

The  result  of  these  wholesale  clearances  was  to  extort  from  Parliament 
an  Act  which  compelled  the  landlord  to  give  forty-eight  hours'  notice  to 
the  Poor  Law  Guardians  of  his  district,  so  that  they  might  be  able  to  make 
provision  for  giving  food  and  shelter  to  those  whom  his  eviction  had  left 
starving  and  homeless.  The  Act  was  called  '  An  Act  for  the  Protection 
and  Relief  of  the  Destitute  Poor  evicted  from  their  Dwellings  in  Ireland.' 
There  is  no  Act  of  the  Legislature  which  throws  so  ghastly  a  light  on  the 
social  condition  of  Ireland.  The  first  section  enacts  that  notice  of  an 
eviction  must  be  given  forty-eight  hours  before  to  the  relieving-officers,  and 
prohibits  evictions  two  hours  before  sunset  or  sunrise,  and  on  Christmas 
Day  and  Good  Friday  !  The  seventh  section  makes  the  pulling  down,  de- 
molition, or  unroofing  of  the  house  of  a  tenant  about  to  be  evicted  a  misde- 
meanour. The  fact  that  such  an  Act  could  be  passed  through  two  Houses 
of  Parliament  in  either  of  which  the  landlord  interest  was  predominant  is 
the  strongest  evidence  of  the  dread  condition  of  things  then  existing  in 
Ireland.  But  even  the  merciful  provisions  of  this  extraordinary  Act,  small 
as  they  were,  the  landlords  and  their  agents  managed  to  evade.  The  corre- 
spondence between  Captain  Kennedy  and  the  Poor  Law  Commissioners 
abounds  with  instances  of  inquiries  with  regard  to  the  violation  of  the  law 
in  this  respect.  But  the  landlords  ultimately  found  out  the  way  in  which 
the  Act  might  be  evaded,  as  will  be  seen  from  the  following  extract  from 
the  Vice-Guardians'  Report,  dated  October  21,  1848  : 

'  In  most  instances  the  plan  adopted  by  the  landlords  has  been  to  pro- 
ceed by  civil  bill  against  the  person  of  the  tenant,  and,  on  his  being  arrested, 
to  discharge  him  from  gaol  on  his  having  the  house  thrown  down,  and 
possession  given  to  landlord  by  the  remainder  of  his  family,  or  by  his 

^  Blue-book  No.  1089  :  Reports  and  Returns  relating  to  Evictions  in  the  Kilrush 
Union,  1849,  p.  44. 

2  n,,  3  lb.  pp.,  44,  45. 


THE  GREAT  CLEARANCES.  6i 

friends  ;  in  other  cases,  a  small  sum  is  given  to  the  tenant,  and  discharge 
from  all  claim  of  rent,  on  the  house  being  thrown  down  and  possession 
given  up.  In  both  these  cases  the  landlord  is  not  obliged  to  give  notice  ; 
nor  does  he  incur  any  penalty,  as  no  ejectment  or  legal  process  has  been 
instituted  for  the  recovery  of  the  lands  and  premises,  and  the  object  in- 
tended by  the  Act,  "  to  allow  preparation  to  be  made  for  the  reception  or 
subsistence  of  the  families,"  is  totally  defeated.'^ 

As  Captain  Kennedy  observed  :  ^ 

'  It  may  be  asked  why  the  occupier  submits  to  what  is  illegal  ?  The 
answer  is  simply  that  the  great  mass  are  tenants-at-will,  and  dare  not 
resist  ;  and  on  many  properties  notice  to  quit  is  served  every  six  months, 
to  enable  the  lessor  to  turn  out  the  occupiers  when  he  pleases.  This  is  a 
ruinous  system,  and  one  much  complained  of.' 

An  extract  from  the  report  of  Mr.  Phelan,  one  of  the  Poor  Law  officials, 
dated  May  16,  1849,  shows  even  more  plainly  than  do  the  many  extracts 
from  Captain  Kennedy  that  it  was  eviction  rather  than  famine  and  fever 
which  was  accountable  for  the  horrible  condition  of  the  people.     He  says  : 

'  I  have,  in  many  of  the  western  and  southern  unions,  seen  sights  of  the 
most  harrovdng  description,  but  I  do  not  think  that  I  have  ever  seen  so 
much  wretchedness  arising  from  destitution  as  in  these  places  in  1847-48. 
Epidemic  fever  and  dysentery,  produced,  it  is  true,  in  considerable  measure 
by  want,  caused  great  misery  ;  but  here,  in  the  absence  of  fever  and  of 
dysentery,  except  that  arising  from  want  of  food,  destitution,  although 
endeavoured  to  be  met  by  indoor  and  outdoor  relief,  has  assumed  a  shape 
which  even  in  Clifden  was  not,  I  think,  presented.  Families  are  here 
literally  naked,  and  at  the  same  time  progressing  surely  and  quickly  to  the 
grave  by  diarrhoea  and  dropsy.'^ 

EXTEACT   FROM  RePOET  OF   CaPTAIN   KENNEDY. 

^Mayl,  1849. — In  a  cow-shed  adjoining  this  wo-etched  cabin,  I  found 
"  Ellen  Lynch  "  lying  in  an  almost  hopeless  stage  of  dysentery.  She  had 
been  carried  thither  by  her  son  when  "  thrown  out "  of  her  miserable 
lodging,  and  was  threatened  with  momentary  expulsion  from  even  this 
refuge  by  the  philanthropic  owner  of  it ;  her  only  safety  rested  in  the  fears 
of  all  but  her  son  to  approach  her.  I  was  ankle-deep  in  manure  while 
standing  beside  her.  This  poor  woman  is  nearly  related  to  an  elective 
member  of  the  Ennis  Board  of  Guardians,  and  also  to  one  of  the  late 
Kilrush  Board.  Her  husband  had  been  lately  evicted,  and  died.  I  had 
ull  conveyed  to  the  workhouse.  They  were  all  in  receipt  of  out-relief,  and 
had  even  got  medical  assistance. 

'  While  inspecting  a  stone-breaking  depot  a  few  days  since,  I  observed 
one  of  the  men  take  off  his  remnant  of  a  pair  of  shoes  and  started  across 
the  fields  ;  I  followed  him  with  my  eye,  and  at  a  distance  saw  the  blaze  of 
a  fire  in  the  bog.  I  sent  a  boy  to  inquire  the  ca,use  of  it,  and  the  man 
running  from  his  work,  and  w-as  told  that  his  house  had  been  levelled  the 
day  before,  that  he  had  erected  a  temporary  hut  on  the  lands,  and  while 
his  wife  and  children  were  gathering  shell-fish  on  the  strand,  and  he  stone- 
breaking,  the  bailiff  or  "driver"'  fired  it.  These  ruthless  acts  of  barbarity 
are  submitted  to  with  an  unresisting  patience  hardly  credible.'^ 

^  Blue-book  No.  1089  :  Reports  and  Returns  relating  to  Evictions  in  the  Kilrush 
Union,  1849,  p.  30. 

=  ;&.,p.  5.  3/6.,  p.  47.  4JJ, 


62  .      THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

Extract  from  Mr.  Phelan's  Report. 

^  May  16,  1849. — •  ....  Many  of  these  wretched  creatures  have  not 
the  benefit  of  a  one-roomed  house,  nor  even  of  a  hut.  I  felt  it  my  duty  to 
go  into  several  temporary  shelters  got  up  on  the  roadside,  in  fields  and  in 
bogs,  which  shelters  were  merely  a  few  hurdles  thrown  across  from  the 
ground  to  the  ditch  or  wall,  with  some  loose  straw  or  rushes  or  scrav:s  laid 
on.  These  places  can  only  be  entered  on  hands  and  knees  ;  the  utmost 
height  is  not  above  three  feet,  even  a  boy  or  girl  cannot  stand  up  in  them  ; 
yet  I  found  a  family  of  four  or  five  in  these  places,  usually  all  or  most  sick. 
But  in  some  I  have  found  the  children  naked  in  bed,  the  mother  gone  for 
the  "relief,"  and  the  father  "stone -breaking.'^ 

In  order  to  make  the  picture  complete,  I  will  give  some  few  names  from 
the  nominal  lists  of  the  evicted  which  Captain  Kennedy  was  in  the  habit 
of  appending  to  his  reports,  \\dth  the  observations  made  upon  them. 

^  Blue-book  No.  10S9  :  Reports  and  Returns  relating  to  Evictions  in  the  Kllrush 
Union,  1849,  p.  48. 


THE  GREAT  CLEARANCES. 


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THE  GREAT  CLEARANCES,  67 

I  have  thought  it  necessary  for  several  reasons  to  present  this  picture  of 
a  district  in  Ireland  during  the  famine  period  with  fuluesa  of  detail.  A 
picture  like  this,  drawn  by  an  official  hand,  cannot  be  accused  of  partiality 
or  over-colouring.  The  reports  of  Captain  Kennedy,  it  is  true,  often  make 
the  blood  run  cold,  and  one's  breath  come  faster  ;  but  there  is  not  one  in 
their  hosts  of  appalling  statements,  of  which  Captain  Kennedy  does  not 
give  his  proofs  with  all  the  neat  precision  of  a  statistician,  and  in  lists  of 
passionless  figures.  It  will  be  remembered,  of  course,  that  I  have  de- 
scribed but  one  district  in  Ireland  ;  and  that  what  was  going  on  in  the 
Union  of  Kilrush  was  repeated — possibly  even  exceeded — in  many  other 
parts  of  Ireland. 

The  reader  now  has  an  opportunity  of  seeing  Irish  landlordism  at  work. 
I  feel  justified  in  summing  up  this  part  of  the  case  by  the  sta.tement  that  I 
have  proved  the  Irish  landlords  to  have  used  their  powers — amid  a  national 
calamity  of  almost  unprecedented  extent — with  a  cruelty  more  atrocious 
than  that  of  any  other  class  of  men  in  the  modern  history  of  civilized 
countries.  Since  the  earlier  editions  of  this  work  were  published,  England 
and  the  whole  civilized  world  have  been  shocked  by  the  story  of  Glenbeigb. 
In  the  midst  of  his  gratitude  for  this  outburst  of  human  sympathy  with  his 
people,  the  Irishman  could  not  help  reflecting  that  in  the  Famine  period 
there  had  been  a  hundred  thousand  evictions  worse  than  Glenbeigh  ;  and 
that  England  and  the  world  heard  nothing  of  them,  or  gave  them  but  a 
passing  thought.  Of  all  the  crimes  an  Irishman  has  to  lay  at  the  door  of 
the  Union,  there  is  none  more  hori-ible  and  none  more  maddening  than  the 
deafness  which  the  Union  produced  to  the  loudest  cry  of  Irish  agony. 

I  have  given  a  picture  of  Irish  landlordism  in  the  days  of  Ireland's 
supreme  agony  ;  let  us  pass  to  the  second  part  of  the  inquiry.  What 
were  the  G-overnment  doing  ?  They  were  not  ignorant  of  what  was  going 
on  in  Ireland.  If  official  reports  could  have  spared  the  country  any  misery, 
there  were  enough  reports  to  have  defeated  the  worst  efforts  of  famine  ; 
and  Parliament,  besides,  was  being  constantly  reminded  by  debates  of  what 
was  going  on.  The  great  clearances  were  the  subject  of  constant  and  per- 
sistent discussion,  and  Sir  Robert  Peel  was  far  more  energetic  than  Lord 
John  E-ussell  or  any  of  the  other  Liberal  Ministers  in  denouncing  their, 
cruelty.  The  reports  of  Captain  Kennedy,  from  which  extracts  have  jusb 
been  given,  supplied  him  with  materials  for  making  a  strong  speech  upon 
these  evictions.  '  I  must  say,'  he  remarked,  '  that  I  do  not  think  that  the 
records  of  any  country,  civil  or  barbarous,  present  materials  for  such  a 
picture  as  is  set  forth  in  the  statement  of  Captain  Kennedy,'  Then  the 
Conservative  leader  takes  up  some  of  the  instances  which  stand  out  in 
relief  even  in  this  catalogue  of  horrors.  These  are  the  cases  of  the  two 
children  lying  asleep  on  the  corpse  of  their  dead  father  while  their  mother 
w-as  dying  fast  of  dysentery  ;  the  case  of  Ellen  Lynch  (Captain  Kennedy's 
report,  see  ante,,  p.  61)  ;  and  the  case  of  the  man  v»^ho  ran  avv^ay  from 
breaking  stones  when  he  saw  the  fire  put  to  the  hovel  in  which  he  had 
placed  his  wife  and  children  (Captain  Kennedy's  report,  see  anto,,  p.  61). 
*  Three  such  tragical  instances,'  he  went  on,  '  I  do  not  believe  were  ever 
presented  either  in  point  of  fact,  or  as  conjured  up  even  in  the  imagination 
of  any  human  being, '^ 

It  is  in  a  speech  of  Sir  Robert  Peel,  too,  that  one  finds  another  of  the 
worst  cases  of  eviction  in  this  period  disinterred  from  the  voluminous 
reports  in  the  Blue-books.     It  is  the  case  of  an  eviction  by  a  man  named 

^  Hansard,  June  8,  1849. 

5—2 


68  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

Blake — a  justice  of  the  peace  in  GaVay.  Quoting  the  account  given  by 
Major  McKie — an  official  employed  like  Captain  Kennedy  by  the  Poor 
Law  Commissioners — Sir  Robert  Peel  said  : 

'  It  would  appear  from  the  evidence  recorded  that  the  forcible  ejectments 
were  illegal,  that  previous  notices  had  not  been  served,  and  that  the  eject' 
nients  were  perpetrated  under  circumstances  of  great  cruelty.  The  time 
chosen  was  for  the  greater  part  nightfall  on  the  eve  of  the  New  Year.  The 
occupiers  were  forced  out  of  their  houses  with  their  helpless  children,  and 
left  exposed  to  the  cold  on  a  bleak  western  shore  in  a  stormy  winter's 
night  ;  that  some  of  the  children  were  sick  ;  that  the  parents  implored  that 
they  might  not  be  exposed,  and  their  houses  left  till  morning  ;  that  their 
prayers  for  mercy  were  in  vain,  and  that  many  of  them  have  since  died. 
"  I  have  visited  the  ruins  of  these  huts  (not  at  any  great  distance  from  Mr. 
Blake's  residence)  ;  I  found  that  many  of  the  unfortunate  people  were  still 
living  within  the  ruins  of  these  huts,  endeavouring  to  shelter  themselves 
under  a  few  sticks  and  sods,  all  in  the  most  wretched  state  of  destitution  ; 
many  were  so  weak  that  they  could  scarcely  stand  when  giving  their 
evidence.  The  site  of  these  ruins  is  a  rocky  wild  spot  fit  for  nothing  but  a 
sheep-walk."  '^ 

It  will  be  seen  from  these  extracts  that  Parliament  was  perfectly  familiar 
with  the  horrible  intensity  of  the  problem  that  demanded  redress  ;  and 
again  the  story  is  that  Parliament!  did  nothing,  or  worse  than  nothing. 

The  expulsion  of  bankrupt  landlords  appeared  for  a  time  to  commend 
itself  to  the  minds  of  English  statesmen  as  the  one  remedy  required. 
This  led  to  the  passage  of  the  Encumbered  Estates  Act  in  1848.  The 
object  of  this  Act  was  to  enable  the  estates  of  landlords  to  be  sold,  in 
spite  of  the  elaborate  machinery  by  which  the  feudal  laws  of  the  country 
guarded  against  alienation.  Under  the  operation  of  this  Act,  some  of  the 
most  ancient  families  of  Ireland  were  driven  from  their  properties.  Here 
again  the  land  legislation  devised  by  the  British  Parliament  proved  once 
more  a  curse  to  the  landlord  as  to  the  tenant.  The  landlords,  forced  to 
sell  at  a  time  of  terrible  depression,  were  unable  to  get  anything  like  the 
true  value  of  their  lands.  Then  the  new  race  of  proprietors  that  were 
substituted  for  the  old,  were  in  rare  cases  an  improvement.  They 
came  from  the  shopkeeper  class  who  had  amassed  money  in  trade  :  the 
class  of  promoted  bouor/eois  does  not  shine  in  the  history  of  any  race  or 
country,  and  in  Ireland  it  is  made  by  the  circumstances  of  the  country, 
political  and  social,  a  peculiarly  odious  generation.  The  new  landlords 
were  more  insolent  than  the  old,  looked  on  the  land  as  purely  an  invest- 
ment, almost  always  signalized  their  advent  of  possession  by  an  increase  of 
rent,  and  mercilessly  evicted  when  the  tenant  at  last  found  the  struggle 
between  hunger  and  rack-rent  unequal.  To  the  class  of  new  proprietors, 
too,  we  owe  many  of  the  place-hunting  generation  of  politicians — the 
meanest,  most  unscrupulous,  and  most  pestilent  race  of  politicians  that 
ever  shamed  or  cursed  a  race. 

The  Encumbered  Estates  Act  was  also  an  Act  of  gigantic  plunder.  As 
Mr.  Gladstone  has  since,  over  and  over  again,  told  Parliament,  no  account 
was  taken  of  the  improvements  of  the  tenants  ;  and  the  improvements  of 
the  tenants  gave  to  the  land  all  the  difference  between  its  actual  and  its 
prairie  value.  When  the  new  landlord  raised  the  rent,  then,  he  created 
rent  out  of  the  labour  of  the  tenantry  :  the  industry  of  the  robbed  gave 

^  Hansard,  June  8,  1849. 


THE  GREAT  CLEARANCES.  Co 

the  ground  and  fixed  the  proportion  of  the  robbery  ;  the  larger  the 
property  the  tenant  had  created  in  the  land,  the  higher  the  amount  he 
paid  to  his  plunderer.  The  amount  of  ransom  was  regulated  by  the  wealth 
the  tenant  had  added  to  the  soil.  It  speaks  eloquently  of  the  difference 
between  these  days  and  ours — it  is  the  most  potent  testimony  to  the  help- 
lessness of  the  tenant,  and  the  profound  demoralization  of  pxiblic  opinion  in 
Ireland  at  that  period,  that  these  acts  of  robbery  were  not  concealed  and 
were  not  largely  resented.  In  the  advertisements  in  which  the  coming 
sales  of  estates  were  announced,  no  statement  was  more  regular  than  that 
the  property  was  low-rented,  and  that  the  rents  could  be  considerably 
raised. 

Finally,  the  main  object  of  the  Encumbered  Estates  Act,  and  of  much 
other  legislation  of  the  period,  was  the  introduction  into  Ireland  of  a  new 
element  of  proprietor.  It  was  one  of  the  chief  dreams  of  that  period  that 
the  Celtic  race  should  be  replaced  by  the  sturdier  and  more  self-reliant 
race  that  populated  England  and  Scotland — the  assumption  being,  of  course, 
that  it  was  Irish  vice,  laziness,  and  incapacity,  and  not  English  laws,  that 
caused  the  hideous  breakdown  of  the  English  land  system  in  Ireland.  The 
commencement  was  to  be  made  with  the  landlords.  This  was  one  of  the 
objects  of  the  Encumbered  Estates  Act ;  and  in  March,  1850,  as  that  Act 
did  not  seem  to  fulfil  the  purpose,  another  Bill  was  introduced  for  the  pur 
pose  of  establishing  land  debentures.  '  They  had  devised  a  plan,'  said  the 
Solicitor- General,  in  introducing  the  measure,  '  which  he  hoped  would 
induce  capitalists  from  England  to  take  an  interest  in  the  sales.'  And  Sir 
Robert  Peel  Jiimself  took  the  trouble  of  elaborating,  in  several  speeches 
before  the  House  of  Commons,  a  scheme  for  a  new  plantation  of  Ireland 
by  the  substitution  of  English  and  Scotch  for  Irish  landlords. 

But  it  was  not  the  landlords  of  the  Celtic  race  that  were  to  be  gob  rid 
of  ;  these  the  country  could  very  well  afford  to  do  without ;  and  possibly 
a  generation  of  English  or  Scotch  landlords  would  have  been  incapable  of 
the  hideous  cruelty  depicted  by  Captain  Kennedy  and  so  many  other 
writers  of  the  time ;  it  required  the  training  in  centuries  of  unchecked 
racial  and  religious  ascendancy,  through  which  the  Irish  landlords  had 
passed,  to  inure  their  hearts  to  such  revolting  crimes.  It  was  apparently 
the  desire  of  the  English  statesmen  of  that  period  to  get  rid  of  as  many 
of  the  peasantry  of  the  Celtic  race  as  possible.  In  these  days,  when 
emigration  as  a  panacea  for  all  evils  is  the  creed  of  but  a  few  feather- 
brained philanthropists,  it  "will  scarcely  be  believed  that  after  all  the 
ravages  of  hunger,  the  decimation  through  fever,  the  terrible  emigration, 
it  was  deemed  that  the  true  remedy  for  Ireland  was  more  emigration  ! 
Indeed,  the  unfitness  of  Ireland  for  the  Irish  race  and  the  Irish  race  for 
Ireland,  was  a  dogma  preached  with  something  like  the  fine  frenzy  of  a 
new  revelation  in  those  days.  *  Remove  Irishmen,'  wrote  the  Times 
(February  22,  1847),  '  to  the  banks  of  the  Ganges  or  the  Indus,  to 
Delhi,  Benares,  or  Trincomalee,  and  they  would  be  far  more  in  their 
element  there  than  in  a  country  to  which  an  inexorable  fate  has  confined 
them.'  A  Select  Committee  of  the  House  of  Lords  was  equally  catholic 
in  its  search  for  a  better  land  for  Irishmen  than  the  land  which  had  given 
them  birth.  They  relate  that  they  had  taken  evidence  respecting  the  state 
of  Ireland — Where  ?  the  reader  will  ask.  '  In  British  North  American 
colonies  (including  Canada,  New  Brunswick,  Nova  Scotia,  Newfoundland), 
the  West  India  Islands,  New  South  Wales,  Port  Philip,  South  Australia, 
Van  Diemen's  Land,  and  New  Zealand.'     And  not  satisfied  with  this, 


70  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT, 

they  actually  apologize  for  not  having  examined  other  countries  as  well. 
'  The  committee,'  says  the  Eeport  sorrowfully,  '  are  fully  aware  that  they 
have  as  yet  examined  into  many  points  but  superficiaily,  and  that  some — 
as,  for  example,  the  state  of  th,.3  British  possessions  in  Southern  Africa, 
and  in  the  territory  of  jSTatal — have  not  yet  been  considered  at  all.'  '  The 
important  discoveries  of  Sir  T.  Mitchell  in  Australia  have  also  been  but 
slightly  noticed,'  is  added  with  a  final  sigh. 

An  Association,  consisting  of  six  peers  and  twelve  commoners,  styled 
'  The  Irish.  Committee,'  also  devoted  itself  very  earnestly  to  the  question 
of  emigration.  In  this  Irish  Committee  were  two  Englishmen — Mr. 
Godley  and  Dr.  Whately — the  latter  the  well-known  Archbishop  of 
Dublin.  Dr.  Whately's  nam.e  is  still  held  in  affectionate  and  respectful 
remembrance  by  many  people  in  England.  At  this  epoch,  and,  as  will  be 
seen,  still  more  in  a  subsequent  epoch  of  Irish  history,  his  counsels  were 
among  the  most  fatal  to  the  prosperity  of  Ireland.  This  body  drew  out  an 
elaborate  scheme  under  which  a  million  and  a  half  of  the  Irish  people 
were  to  be  sent  to  Canada  at  a  cost  of  £9,000,000,  which  was  to  be  levied 
in  the  shape  of  an  income  tax. 

But  all  this  time  the  idea  never  occurred  to  any  of  the  English  leaders 
that  there  should  be  the  slightest  interference  with  the  power  of  the  land- 
lords. The  power  of  the  landlords  had  been  the  main  cause  of  the  horrors 
throuAjh  which  Ireland  was  passing ;  and  yet  the  landlords  v/ere  to  be  left 
that  power.  The  mass  of  the  people  v\^ere  to  be  exported  to  Canada  or 
Australia,  to  Natal  or  Van  Diemen's  Land — and  the  country  was  to  be 
delivered  entirely  to  their  lords  and  masters.  The  land  of  Ireland  was  to 
be  laid  waste  of  as  many  of  six  millions  of  people  as  ten  thousand 
landlords  chose  to  condemn  to  banishment.  Such  v/as  the  theory  of  the 
time. 

At  this  point  it  will  be  instructive  to  pause  for  a  moment,  and  consider 
the  action  of  the  Imperial  Parliament.  Lord  John  Russell,  as  has  been 
seen,  had  got  into  office  on  the  rejection  of  an  Irish  Coercion  Bill.  He  had 
objected  to  the  Coercion  Bill  of  Sir  Robert  Peel,  not  merely  on  account  of 
the  harshness  of  its  provisions,  the  weakness  of  the  case  in  its  favour,  the 
sufficiency  of  the  ordinary  law  ;  his  chief  ground  of  objection  was  that 
Ireland  was  in  crying  need  of  remedia.1  legislation,  and  that  no  Coercion 
Bill  ou;;ht  to  be  considered  by  Parliament  unless  it  was  accompanied,  and 
accompanied  even  stage  by  stage,  by  remedial  proposals.  His  reference  to 
the  ills  of  Ireland  were  pitched  in  as  high  a  key  as  even  the  most  vehement 
of  Irish  Repealers  could  have  wished.  He  had  recapitulated  the  well-worn 
evidence  before  the  multitudinous  committees  which  in  drear  succession 
had  inquired  into  the  Irish  problem,  and  then  he  went  on  : 

'We  have  here  the  best  evidence  that  can  be  procured — the  evidence 
...  of  magistrates  for  many  years,  of  farmers,  of  those  who  have  been 
employed  by  the  Crown — and  all  tell  you  that  the  possession  of  land  is 
that  which  makes  the  difference  between  existing  and  starving  amongst 
the  peasantry ;  and  that,  therefore,  ejections  out  of  their  holdings  are  the 
cause  of  violence  and  crime  in  Ireland.  In  fact,  it  is  no  other  than  the 
cause  which  the  Great  Master  of  human  nature  describes  when  he  makes 
a  tempter  suggest  it  as  a  reason  to  violate  the  law.' 

Then  he  quoted  Romeo's  address  to  the  Apothecary  ;  and  went  on  : 

'  Such  is  the  incentive  which  is  given  to  the  poor  Irish  peasant  to  break 


THE  GREAT  CLEARANCES.  yi 

the  law,  which  he  considers  deprives  him  of  the  means,  not  of  being  rich, 
but  of  the  means  of  obtaining  a  subsistence.  On  this  ground,  I  say,  then, 
if  you  were  right  to  introduce  any  measure  to  repress  crime  beyond  the 
ordinary  powers  of  the  law,  it  would  have  been  right  at  the  same  time  to 
introduce  other  measures  by  which  the  means  of  subsistence  might  be 
increased,  and  by  which  the  land,  upon  which  alone  the  Irish  peasant 
subsists,  might  be  brought  more  within  his  reach,  and  other  modes  of 
occupation  allowed  to  him  more  than  he  now  possesses.'^ 

So  strong  was  Lord  John  Russell  in  this  demand  for  the  accompaniment 
of  coercive  by  remedial  legislation,  that  he  even  wanted  that  the  two  classes 
of  measures  should  go  on  side  by  side,  stage  by  stage — either  both  or  none 
should  be  accepted  by  Parliament. 

'I  know,'  be  said,  'indeed,  the  noble  lord'  (the  Earl  of  Lincoln)  'has 
introduced  within  the  last  two  or  three  days  measures  upon  a  very  com- 
plicated subject — the  law  of  landlord  and  tenant ;  but  I  think  those 
measures  should  have  been  introduced  at  the  same  time  with  the  vieasure 
noio  before  the  House.  How  is  it  possible  for  this  House,  upon  such  a 
subject,  to  be  able  to  tell,  from  the  noble  lord's  enumeration  of  them, 
whether  upon  such  a  delicate  subject  such  measures  ai-e  suflB.cient  ?'^ 

And  shortly  afterwards  he  declared  that,  while  he  opposed  the  measure, 
the  state  of  crime  did  not  supply  '  sufficient  ground  for  passing  a  meas^u^e 
of  extraordinary  severity.'  The  reason,  '  above  all,'  of  his  hostility  was 
that  the  Coercion  Bill  had  'not  been  accompanied  .  .  .  with  such 
measures  of  relief,  of  remedy,  and  conciliation,  affecting  the  great  mass  of 
the  people  of  Ireland,  who  are  in  distress,  as  ought  to  accomjjany  any 
measure  tending  to  increased  rigour  of  the  laiv.'^ 

And  then  he  sketched  the  measures  by  which  the  condition  of  the 
peasantry  might  be  relieved.  He  proposed  a  grant  for  the  reclamation  of 
waste  lands,  and  he  proposed  a  Bill  for  '  securing  at  the  same  time  the 
lives  and  properties  of  those  who  reside  on  the  land  ;'*  in  other  words,  a 
scheme  of  tenant-right.  If  such  measures  were  not  proposed  promptly, 
there  might  come  'a  dreadful  outbreak,  when,  indeed,  you  will  hastily 
resort  to  measures  of  remedy  and  conciliation,  but  which  measures  will 
lose  half  their  practical  effect  and  almost  all  their  moral  effect.'^ 

And  this  remarkable  speech  wound  up  mth  an  exhortation  in  favour  of 
making  the  Union  acceptable  to  Irishmen,  by  proving  that  the  Imperial 
Legislature  was  as  anxious  as  a  native  parliament  could  be  to  remedy  the 
grievances  of  Ireland.^ 

Again,  in  IS47,  while  the  stress  of  the  famine  made  the  neglect  of  Irish 
reform  too  shameful  a  thing  for  even  the  British  Parliament  to  stomach, 
Lord  John  E-ussell  was  strongly  in  favour  of  reform.  In  the  speech  at  the 
beginning  of  the  session,  in  which  he  proposed  the  Soup  Kitchen  Act,  he 

'  Hansard,  Ixxxvii.,  pp.  507-S. 

s  lb.,  p.  508.  3  2b.,  p.  510.  4  lb.   p.  514.  5  lb 

6  '  If  you  wish  to  maintain  the  Union— if  you  wish  to  improve  the  Union,  to  make 
the  Union  a  source  of  happiness,  a  source  of  increased  rights,  a  source  of  blessing  to 
Ireland  as  well  as  England,  a  source  of  increased  strength  to  the  United  Empire, 
beware  lest  you  in  any  way  weaken  the  link  which  connects  the  two  countries.  Do 
not  let  the  people  of  Ireland  believe  thar  you  have  no  sympathy  with  their  afflictions, 
no  care  for  their  wrongs,  that  you  are  intent  only  upon  other  measures  in  which  they 
have  no  interest.' — Hansard,  Ixxxvii.,  p.  516. 


72  THE  PARNELL  MOVEAIENT. 

declared  that  there  was  urgent  necessity  for  some  permanent  alteration  in 
the  land  laws.  The  miseries  of  Ireland,  he  laid  down  in  the  most  emphatic 
language,  were  not  due  to  the  character  of  the  soil. 

'  There  is  no  doubt,'  exclaimed  Lord  John  Russell,  '  of  the  fertility  of  the 
land  ;  that  fertility  has  been  the  theme  of  admiration  with  wi-iters  and 
travellers  of  all  nations.'^ 

He  was  equally  emphatic  in  denying  that  these  miseries  were  due  to  the 
character  of  the  people. 

'  There  is  no  doubt  either,  I  must  sa}^,  of  the  strength  and  industry  of  the 
inhabitants.  The  man  who  is  loitering  idly  by  the  mountain-side  in 
Tipperary  or  in  Derry,  whose  potato-plot  has  furnished  him  merely  with 
occupation  for  a  fe^v  days  in  the  year,  whose  wages  and  whose  pig  have 
enabled  him  to  pay  his  rent  and  eke  out  afterwards  a  miserable  subsistence 
^that  man,  I  say,  may  have  a  brother  in  Liverpool,  or  Glasgow,  or  London, 
who  by  the  sweat  of  his  brow,  from  morning  to  night,  is  competing  with  the 
strongest  and  steadiest  labourer  of  England  and  Scotland,  and  is  earning 
wages  equal  to  any  of  them. 

'I  do  not,  sir,  therefore  think,' wound  up  Lord  John  Eussell  emphatically, 
'  that  either  the  fertility  of  the  soil  of  Ireland  or  the  strength  and  industry 
of  its  inhabitants  is  at  fault.'- 

Earl  Grey,  another  eminent  Whig,  was  equally  outspoken  in  his  declara- 
tions. Like  Lord  John  Russell,  he  had  declared  against  coercion  unac- 
companied by  remedial  measures.  He  enumerated  that  long  list  of 
Coercion  Acts  which  I  have  already  set  forth, ^  winding  up  with  the 
Insurrection  Act,  passed  in  1833,  renewed  in  1S34,  and  but  five  years 
expired. 

'  And  again,'  he  said,  'in  1846,  we  are  called  on  to  renew  it.  We  must 
look  further,'  continued  his  lordship  ;  '  we  must  look  to  the  root  of  the  evil  ; 
the  state  of  the  law  and  the  habits  of  the  people,  in  respect  to  the  occupation 
of  the  land,  are  almost  at  the  roots  of  the  disorder.  It  was  undeniable  that 
the  clearance  system  prevailed  to  a  great  extent  in  Ireland  ;  and  that  such 
things  could  take  place — he  cared  not  how  large  a  population  might  be 
suffered  to  grow  up  in  a  particular  district — was  a  disgrace  to  a  civilized 
country.'^ 

In  1848  the  Famine  had  not  passed  away.  As  has  been  seen,  the  succeed- 
ing year  was  the  very  worst  in  the  century,  except  1847.  But  the  British 
people  and  the  Imperial  Parliament  had  by  this  time  grown  accustomed  to 
the  deaths  of  thousands  by  starvation  and  to  plague  in  Ireland  as  a  thing 
of  little  meaning,  though  the  sound  Avas  strong,  and  Lord  John  Russell 
entirely  changed  his  tune.  He  met  every  dema^nd  for  reform  with  an  un- 
compromising negative.  The  Irish  tenants  had  no  grievances  to  speak  of — 
self-reliance,  industry,  that  is  what  they  should  rely  on. 

'  Wliile,'  said  Lord  John  Russell,  '  I  admit  that,  with  respect  to  the 
franchise  and  other  subjects,  the  people  of  Ireland  may  have  just  grounds 
of  complaint,  I,  nevertheless,  totally  deny  that  their  grievances  are  any 
sufficient  reason  why  they  should  not  make  very  great  jDrogress  in  wealth 
and  prosperity,  if,  using  the  intelligence  which  they  possess  in  a  remark* 

^  Quoted  in  O'Rourke,  p.  322.  2  Ih. 

3  S"ee  anU.  4  Quoted  in  Mitcliel,  ii.,  p.  228. 


THE  GREAT  CLEARANCES.  73 

able  degree,  they  would  fix  their  minds  on  the  advantages  which  they 
might  enjoy  rather  than  upon  the  evils  which  they  suppose  themselves  to 
suffer  under. '■■■ 

Then  he  made  allusion  to  a  Bill  which  had  been  brought  in  by  Sir  William 
Somerville,  the  Chief  Secretary,  for  dealing  with  the  Land  question.  Its 
proposals  were  indeed  modest.  It  gave  compensation  to  tenants  for  per- 
manent improvements  ;  but  those  improvements  had  to  be  made  with  the 
consent  of  the  landlords,  and  it  was  not  proposed  that  the  Bill  should  be 
retrospective. 

But  modest  as  these  proposals  were,  they  did  not  gain  the  full  approval  of 
the  Prime  Minister,  and  did  not  secure  the  safety  of  the  Bill.  '  I  have 
j^ielded  my  own  conviction,'  said  Lord  John  Russell,  '  to  what  appears  to 
be  the  universal  opinion.  I  think  we  have  gone  as  far  as  we  can  with 
respect  to  that  subject.'  But  whether  the  Premier  had  gone  far  enough  or 
not  did  not  much  matter  ;  for  '  there  will  not,'  said  he,  '  be  time  to  pass  it 
during  the  present  session,  and  therefore  it  will  be  postponed. '- 

To  any  such  proposal  as  fixity  of  tenure  the  Liberal  Prime  Minister  would 
offer  his  strongest  hostility. 

'  The  Tenant  Right  advocated  by  the  honourable  member  ' — Mr.  Shar 
man  Crawford,  who  had  introduced  a  motion  calling  for  the  redress  of  the 
grievances  of  the  Irish  tenantry — '  would  amount  to  thi.^,  that  the  tenant  in 
possession  has  a  right  to  the  occupation  of  the  land  provided  he  pay  his  rent 
punctually.  Can  anything  he  inore  confipletely  subversive  of  the  rights  of 
property  .  .  .  ?  It  is  impossible  for  the  Legislature,  icith  any  regard  for 
justice,  to  pass  such  a  laiv  ;  and  tf  such  a  law  were  passed  for  Ireland,  it 
would  strike  at  the  root  of  property  in  the  whole  United  Kingdom.^ 

And,  finally,  he  concluded  with  this  proposal  for  the  solution  of  the  great 
Irish  Land  problem  : 

'  But,  after  all '  (said  Lord  John  Russell),  '  that  which  we  should  look  to 
for  improving  the  relations  between  landlord  and  tenant  is  a  better  mutual 
understanding  between  those  who  occupy  those  relative  positions.  Volun- 
tary agreements  between  landlords  and  tenants,  carried  out  for  the  benefit 
of  both,  are,  after  all,  a  better  means  of  improving  the  land  of  Ireland  than 
any  legislative  measure  which  can  be  passed.'^ 

The  'better  mutual  understanding  '  on  which  the  Prime  Minister  relied 
for  an  improvement  in  the  relations  of  landlord  and  tenant  at  this  moment 
was  hounding  the  landlords  to  carry  on  those  wholesale  clearances  which 
have  been  described  in  the  words  of  Sir  Robert  Peel  and  Captain  Kennedy  ; 
which,  in  the  opinion  of  Earl  Grey,  were  '  a  disgrace  to  a  civilized  country  ;' 
v\^hich  had  been  denounced  over  and  over  again  by  Lord  John  Russell 
himself  ;  and  which,  in  the  opinion  of  most  men,  remain  as  one  of  the 
blackest  records  in  all  history  of  man's  inhumanity  to  man.  In  the  year 
after  the  exhortation  of  the  Prime  Minister  to  voluntary  agreements  '  for 
the  benefit  of  both,'  the  landlords  evicted,  according  to  somu  authorities, 
no  less  than  half  a  million  of  tenants  from  their  estates. 

As  the  Ministers  were  opposed  to  any  land  legislation,  no  success 
naturally  attended  the  efforts  of  private  members  to  deal  with  the 
questiou. 

Two  other  facts  must  also  be  recollected  in  connection  with  this  period. 

*  Hansard,  C,  p.  943.  a  jj.^  p.  945.  3  /&.,  p.  945. 


74  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

The  final  split  between  Young  Ireland  and  O'Connell  was  precipitated,  it 
will  be  remembered,  by  the  attitude  which  O'Connell  insisted  on  taking  up 
tow^ards  the  Whig  Ministry.  The  Young  Irelanders  maintained  that  the 
Irish  Party  should  hold  towards  Russell  the  same  independent  attitude  as 
liad  been  taken  up  towards  the  Tory  INIinistry  of  Peel  ;  that  the 
repeal  agitation  should  be  continued,  and  that  the  nominees  of  the  Whig 
Ministry,  like  Shell,  should  meet  the  same  opposition  as  all  other  op- 
ponents of  Repeal  and  all  other  British  office-holders.  O'Connell's  main 
argument  against  these  demands  of  the  Young  Irelanders  was  the  good 
intentions  and  the  promises  of  Lord  John  Russell ;  and  he  over  and  over 
again  asserted  that  the  Whig  Ministry  would  pass  measures  of  reform  for 
Ireland, — among  others,  of  course,  a  Bill  of  Tenant  Right.  The  Young 
Irelanders  would  not  place  the  same  faith  in  Whig  promises  as  O'Connell^ 
the  organization  was  broken  up,  O'Connell's  power  was  destroyed,  the 
Irish  people  were  divided  and  impotent  in  face  of  the  most  awful  crisis  in 
their  history,  and  O'Connell  died  of  a  broken  heart.  And  here  was  Lord 
John  Russell,  on  whom  O'Connell  had  placed  his  reliance,  to  whose  good 
faith  O'Connell  sacrificed  his  party  and  himself  and  his  country,  justifying 
the  very  worst  predictions  of  the  Young  Irelanders,  wrecking  the  hopes 
and  blasting  the  lives  of  the  Irish  nation.  It  is  the  second  great  occasion, 
described  in  these  pages,  of  an  Irish  leader  placing  confidence  in  a  Whig 
Minister.  In  each  case  the  result  was  exactly  the  same  ;  the  trust  was 
betrayed,  openly,  shamelessly,  heartlessly, 

Purthermore,  it  will  be  remembered  that  the  great  point  of  dispute 
between  the  Young  Irelanders  and  John  O'Connell  in  the  General  Election 
of  1847  was  whether  or  no  the  Irish  Pa.rty  should  consist  of  men  pledged 
to  accept  no  office  from  a  British  Minister,  and  bound  to  a  policy  of  inde- 
pendence alike  of  Whig  and  Tory.  John  O'Connell  maintained  that  such 
a  pledge  was  unnecessary,  and  succeeded  in  defeating  the  Young  Irelanders 
hip  and  thigh.  The  fruit  was  now  showing  itself.  The  Whig  Minister 
was  able  to  answer  every  demand  for  justice  with  flouts  and  jibes  and 
sneers,  for  he  had  nothing  to  fear  from  a  party  of  beggars  and  adventurers 
who  daily  besieged  his  doors  with  petitions  for  themselves  or  their  friends. 
This  is  the  fact  that  explains  the  brutal  and  shameful  tergiversation  of  the 
British  Premier,  and  that  really  accounts  for  the  rejection  of  all  the  Irish 
demands  for  a  redress  of  the  grievances.  The  nation  was  shorn  of  two 
millions  and  a  half  of  her  people,  and  in  the  next  decade  her  population 
was  reduced  by  still  another  million.  Faith  in  "Whig  promises — a  de- 
pendent Irish  Party — these  were  the  chief  parents  of  these  disasters. 

Let  us  continue  the  dreary  chapter  of  Land  proposals  in  the  House  of 
Commons 

On  February  25,  1847,  Mr.  Sharman  Crawford  brought  in  a  Bill  pro- 
posing to  extend  to  the  rest  of  Ireland  the  tenant-right  custom  which 
existed  in  Ulster.  So  little  did  the  Ministers  think  of  the  importance  of 
this  proposal,  that  not  a  single  member  of  the  Cabinet  was  present  when 
the  Bill  was  proposed  ;  and  after  the  debate  had  been  adjourned,  it  was 
rejected  by  the  decisive  majority  of  112  to  25.  In  February,  1848,  Sir 
William  Somerville,  Chief  Secretary  for  Ireland,  introduced  a  Bill  dealing 
with  the  question.  The  fate  of  that  measure  ha,s  just  been  indicated.  It 
was  read  a  second  time,  it  was  referred  to  a  Select  Committee,  and  the 
Select  Committee  had  not  time  to  report  before  the  close  of  the  session. 
In  the  same  year  (1848)  Mr.  Sharman  Crawford  again  brought  in  his  Bill. 
It  was  denounced  by  Mr.  Trelawney,  an  English  member,  as  a  measure  of 


THE  GREAT  CLEARANCES.  75 

confiscation.  Sir  William  Somerville  demolished  the  suggestion  of  ex- 
tending the  tenure  of  Ulster  to  the  rest  of  Ireland  by  the  epigram  that 
the  Ulster  custom  was  good  custom,  but  bad  law  ;  and  the  Bill  was 
defeated.  On  July  23,  1849,  Mr.  Horsman  moved  an  address  on  the  state 
of  Ireland,  pointing  out  that  that  country  was  now  entering  on  its  fourth 
year  of  famine,  and  that  sixty  per  cent,  of  its  population  were  in  receipt  of 
relief.  '  What  are  the  causes  which  have  produced  such  results  V  asked 
Mr.  Horsman.  '  Bad  legislation,  careless  legislation,  criminal  legislation, 
has  been  the  cause  of  all  the  disasters  we  are  now  deploring.'  But  bad 
legislation,  careless  legislation,  criminal  legislation  remained  untouched, 
for  the  debate  was  followed  by  no  measure.  In  1850  Sir  William  Somer- 
ville brought  in  another  Bill.  It  was  read  a  second  time,  it  was  sent  into 
committee,  and  then  it  was  no  longer  heard  of.  On  June  10  in  the  same 
year  Mr.  Sharm.an  Crawford  again  brought  in  his  Bill,  and  again  v/as 
defeated.  On  April  8,  1851,  Sir  Henry  Barron  moved  for  a  committee 
'  to  inquire  into  the  state  of  Ireland,  and  more  especially  the  best  means 
for  amending  the  relationships  of  landlord  and  tenant.'  But  Lord  John 
E,ussell  would  hear  nothing  of  such  a  resolution.  If  the  law  of  landlord 
and  tenant  needed  amendment,  said  the  Liberal  Prime  Minister,  the 
proper  course  to  be  taken  was  for  some  private  member  or  for  the  Govern- 
ment to  bring  in  a  Bill  on  the  subject,  and  not  to  raise  the  question  by 
way  of  a  resolution  of  a  character  so  vague.  And  Lord  John  Russell 
from  that  day  until  he  left  office  never  brought  in  a  Bill  himself  on  the 
subject,  nor  supported  a  Bill  brought  in  by  a  private  member. 

The  neglect  of  all  reform  in  the  land  tenure  of  Ireland  at  this  epoch,  as 
in  previous  epochs,  is  made  the  more  remarkable  by  its  contrast  with  the 
action  of  the  Legislature  in  reference  to  demands  upon  its  attention  by  the 
landlords.  The  frightful  state  of  things  in  1847  naturally  produced  a  con- 
siderable amount  of  disturbance.  Many  of  the  tenants  were  indecent 
enough  to  object  to  being  robbed  of  their  own  improvements,  even  with 
the  sanction  of  an  alien  Parliament,  and  went  tl7e  length  of  revolting 
against  their  wives  and  children  being  massacred  wholesale,  after  the 
fashion  described  in  Captain  Kennedy's  reports.  In  short,  the  Bent  was 
in  danger,  and  in  favour  of  that  sacred  institution  all  the  resoiTrces  of 
British  law  and  British  force  were  promptly  despatched.  The  Legislature 
had  shown  no  hurry  whatever  to  meet  in  '46  or  '47  when  the  question  at 
issue  was  whether  hundreds  of  thousands  of  the  Irish  tenantry  should 
perish  of  hunger  or  of  the  plague.  Parliament  came  together  at  the  usual 
time  in  1846,  and  at  the  usual  time  in  the  beginning  of  1847.  When  the 
Bent  was  threatened,  Parliament  could  not  be  summoned  too  soon,  and  a 
Coercion  Bill  could  not  be  carried  with  too  much  promptitude.  The 
Coercion  Bill  of  Lord  John  Russell  and  of  1847  was  in  all  essentials  the 
Coercion  Bill  of  Sir  Robert  Peel  and  1846.  There  were  powers  to_  pro- 
claim districts  by  the  Lord-Lieutenant,  and  when  a  district  was  proclaimed, 
everybody  was  obliged  to  stop  within  his  house  from  dusk  till  morning 
under  pain  of  transportation.  There  were  orders  for  the  delivery  of  arms, 
for  the  drafting  of  additional  police  into  districts,  and  for  the  addition  of 
the  burdens  thus  imposed  to  the  rates  already  payable  by  the  starving 
tenants. 

The  reader  will  not  fail  to  notice  the  abject  inconsistency  between  the 
action  of  Lord  John  Russell  and  the  other  Whig  leaders  in  opposition  and 
in  povrer.  It  will  not  be  necessary  to  recall  the  quotations  which  have 
just  been  made  from  the  speech  of  Lord  John  Russell  in  opposing  the 


76  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

Coercion  Bill  of  1846.  Suffice  it  to  say  that  while  in  1846  he  had  objected 
to  the  Coercion  Bill,  *  above  all '  because  it  was  not  accompanied  with 
measures  '  of  relief,  of  remedy,  and  conciliation,'  and  that  he  had  gone  so 
far  as  to  pledge  himself  to  the  principle  that  some  such  proposals  ought  to 
accompany  any  measure  which  tended  to  'increased  rigour  of  the  law,' 
Lord  J  ohn  Ptussell  was  now  himself  proposing  a  measure  for  greatly  '  in- 
creased rigour  of  the  law,'  not  only  without  accompanying  it  with  any 
measure  of  '  relief,  of  remedy,  of  conciliation '  on  his  own  part,  but  vehe- 
mently opposing  any  such  measure  when  brought  in  by  any  other  person. 
Lord  Grey  has  been  quoted  for  his  opinion  on  the  clearance  system ; 
here  was  the  clearance  system  going  on  worse  than  ever,  and  Lord  Grey 
remained  a  member  of  the  Ministry  which  through  coercion  gave  that 
clearance  system  an  enormous  impetus. 

The  police  at  the  same  time  were  urged  to  unusual  activity,  and  large 
bodies  of  the  military  even  were  pressed  into  the  service  of  the  landlords, 
seized  the  produce  of  the  fields,  carried  them  to  Dublin  for  sale — acted  in 
every  respect  as  the  collectors  of  the  rent  of  the  landlord,  and  thus  shared 
with  the  landlord  the  honour  of  starving  the  tenants. 

A  second  conti-ast  between  the  acceptance  of  remedial  and  coercive 
legislation  by  the  Imperial  Parliament  occurred  in  1848.  A  number  of 
Irishmen,  as  has  been  seen,  driven  to  madness  by  the  dreadful  suffering 
they  everywhere  saw  around,  and  by  the  neglect  or  incapacity  of  Parlia- 
ment, had  sought  the  desperate  remedy  of  open  revolt.  The  men  who, 
for  wrongs  much  less  grievous,  rose  in  the  same  year  in  Hungary  or  France 
or  Italy  were  the  idols  of  the  British  people,  and  were  aided  and  encour- 
aged by  British  statesmen.  The  action  of  the  very  same  statesmen 
towards  Ireland  was  to  pass  a  brand-new  Treason  Felony  Act,  and  to  sus- 
pend the  Habeas  Corpus  Act.  The  circumstances  under  which  the  Habeas 
Corpus  Act  was  suspended  are  very  instructive. 

'  The  next  day,  although,  being  Saturday,  it  was  out  of  course  for  the 
House  of  Commons  to  sit,'  says  the  '  Annual  Eegister  '^  of  the  Coercion 
Bill  of  1848,  Parliament  came  together.  Lord  John  Russell  brought  for- 
ward his  Bill.  Sir  Ilobert  Peel  at  once  '  gave  his  cordial  support  to  the 
proposed  measure.'^  Mr.  Disraeli  'declared  his  intention  of  giving  the 
measure  of  Government  his  unvarying  and  unequivocal  support.'-^  Mr. 
Hume  was  '  obliged,  though  reluctantly,  to  give  his  consent  to  the  measure 
of  the  Government.'^  And  when  the  division  came,  there  were  for  the 
amendment  against  the  Bill  proposed  by  Mr.  Sharman  Crawford  eight 
votes,  and  for  the  first  reading  of  the  Bill  271.^  But  this  was  only  the 
beginning  of  the  good  day's  work.  Lord  John  Eussell  said  that,  '  as  the 
House  had  expressed  so  unequivocally  its  feeling  in  favour  of  the  Bill,  it 
would  doubtless  permit  its  further  stages  to  be  proceeded  with  instanter. 
He  moved  the  second  reading.''^  Of  course  the  House  permitted  the 
further  stages  to  be  proceeded  with  instanter,  and  the  Bill,  having  passed 
through  committee,  'Lord  Pussell  moved  the  third  reading,'  which  was 
agreed  to,  '  and  the  Bill  was  forthwith  taken  up  to  the  House  of  Lords.' 
'  On  the  next  day  but  one,  Monday,  July  26,'  goes  on  the  '  Annual 
Ptegister,'  '  the  Bill  was  proposed  by  the  Marquis  of  Lansdowne,  who 
concluded  his  speech  in  its  favour  by  moving,  "That  the  public  safety 
requires  that  the  Bill  should  be  passed  with  aU  possible  despatch."  '     Of 

^  '  Annual  Register '  for  1S4S,  p.  100.  =  Ih.,  p.  102.  ^  Ib.,-g.  105 

4  lb.,  p.  106.  5  lb.,  p.  107.  6  Ih.,  p.  108. 


THE  GREAT  CLEARANCES.  77 

course  the  motion  was  accepted  by  their  Lordships  *  that  the  Bill  should 
be  passed  with  all  possible  despatch.'  Lord  Brougham  'cordially  seconded 
the  motion  of  Lord  Lansdowne,'  and,  as  the  'Kegister  '  winds  up,  'the  Bill 
passed  nem.  dis.  through  all  its  stages.' 

Such  was  the  action  of  the  Imperial  Parliament  upon  the  Irish  question. 
The  agitation  for  Repeal,  which  had  reached  such  mightj'-  and  apparently 
resistless  proportions  in  1843,  had  vanished  amid  dissensions,  hunger,  fever, 
emigration,  and  a  vast  multitude  of  corpses.  The  upholders  of  the  Legisla- 
tive Union  were  able  to  look  abroad  on  the  face  of  Ireland,  and  to  rejoice 
that  sedition,  in  the  shape  of  the  demand  for  Repeal,  and  treason,  in  the 
form  of  open  insurrection,  was  gone.  The  Imperial  Parliament  was  un- 
checked mistress  of  the  destinies  of  Ireland  ;  and  this  was  how  it  was 
fulfilling  its  mission. 

And  now,  having  described  the  Famine,  but  two  questions  remain  to  be 
discussed.  Was  the  Famine  inevitable  ?  or  was  it  preventable  evil — evil 
that  was  created  by  bad,  and  that  could  have  been  prevented  by  good, 
government  ? 

I  have  sufficiently  debated  already  the  measures  which  were  taken  by 
the  English  Ministers  to  meet  the  calamity.  I  think  most  impartial  men 
will  see  in  the  results  which  followed  these  measures  a  dread  condemnation 
of  these  Ministers.  Most  persons  will  hold  that  a  civilized,  highly 
organized,  and  extremely  wealthy  government  ought  to  be  able  to  meet 
such  a  crisis  as  the  Irish  Famine  so  effectually  as  to  prevent  the  loss  of  one 
single  life  by  hunger.  I  have  already  alluded  to  the  language  in  which 
some  Irish  writers  are  accustomed  to  speak  of  the  actions  and  intentions  of 
the  Government.  Their  theory  is  that  the  terrors  and  horrors  of  the 
Famine  were  the  result  of  a  deliberate  conspiracy  to  murder  wholesale  an 
inconvenient,  troublesome,  and  hostile  nation.  Such  a  theory  may  be 
promptly  rejected,  and  yet  leave  a  heavy  load  of  guilt  on  the  Ministers. 
In  political  affairs  we  have  to  look  not  so  much  to  the  intentions  as  to  the 
results  of  policies  ;  and  it  is  undeniable  that  in  1846  and  in  1847  there 
were  as  many  deaths  as  if  the  deliberate  and  wholesale  murder  of  the 
Irish  people  had  been  the  motive  of  English  statesmanship.  Statesmen,  I 
say,  must  be  judged  by  the  results  of  their  policy.  The  policy  which 
created  the  Famine  was  the  land  legislation  of  the  British  Parliament.  The 
refusal  of  the  British  Legislature  to  interfere  with  rack-rents  ;  the  refusal 
to  protect  the  improvements  of  the  tenaiits;  the  facilities  and  inducements 
to  wholesale  evictions — these  were  the  things  that  produced  the  Famine  of 
1846  ;  and  such  legislation,  again,  was  the  result  of  the  government  of 
Ireland  hj  a  Legislature  independent  of  Irish  votes,  Irish  constituencies, 
Irish  opinion. 

This  must  also  be  said,  that  the  Act  of  Union,  which  produced  the 
Famine,  and  then  aggravated  it  to  the  unsurpassable  maximum,  had  also 
the  effect  of  increasing  the  existing  hatred  between  the  English  and  the  Irish 
nations ;  and  the  strangest  and  saddest  thing  about  it,  is  that  the  increase  of 
hatred  was  undeserved  by  the  one  nation  and  by  the  other.  The  hatred  of 
England  for  Ireland  was  caused  by  Ireland's  political  opinions ;  and  Ireland's 
political  opinions  were  right.  The  hatred  of  Ireland  for  England  was 
caused  by  England's  political  action,  and  England's  political  action  was 
conscientiously  taken,  and,  above  all,  was  the  outcome  of  a  good,  and  not 
of  an  evil,  heart.  The  chief  cause  of  the  hatred  of  England  for  Ireland 
was  the  agitation  for  the  Repeal  of  the  Union,  followed  by  the  abortive 
rebellion.     Peel  says  so  in  his  •'  Memoirs.' 


78  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

'  There  will  be  no  hope,'  wrote  Peel  in  the  Memorandum  he  submitted 
to  his  Cabinet  on  November  1,  1845,  '  of  contributions  from  England,  for 
the  mitigation  of  this  calamity.  Monster  meetings,  the  ungrateful  return 
for  past  kindness,  the  subscriptions  in  Ireland  to  repeal  rent  and  O'Connell 
tribute,  will  have  disinclined  the  charitable  here  to  make  any  great 
exertions  fcr  Irish  relief. '•'■ 

But  what  testimony  could  be  so  overwhelming,  so  tragic,  in  favour  of 
Kepeal  oi  the  Union  as  the  Irish  Famine,  with  all  its  attendant  horrors  of 
plague,  emigration,  eviction  ?  And  so  the  hatred  of  England  for  Ireland  was 
hideously  unjust.  On  the  other  hand,  it  is  easy  to  understand  how  the  Irish 
should  have  been  embittered  to  frenzy  when  they  saw  the  dominant  nation, 
that  claimed  and  had  carried  its  superior  right  to  govern,  so  performing  its 
functions  of  government  that  roads  throughout  Ireland  Avere  impassable 
with  the  gaunt  forms  of  the  starving,  or  the  corpses  of  the  starved,  and 
that  every  ship  was  freighted  'with  thousands  fleeing  from  their  homes. 
Tc  this  day  the  traveller  in  America  will  meet  Irishmen  who  were  evicted 
from  Ireland  in  the  great  clearances  of  the  Famine  time ;  there  is  a  strange 
glitter  in  their  eyes,  and  a  savage  coldness  in  their  voice  as  they  speak  of 
these  things,  and  their  bitterness  is  as  fresh  as  if  the  wrong  were  but  of 
yesterday.  It  was  these  clearances,  and  the  sight  of  wholesale  starvation 
and  plague,  tar  more  than  racial  feelings,  that  produced  the  hatred  of 
English  government  which  strikes  the  impartial  Americans  as  some- 
thing like  frenzy.  It  was  the  events  of  '46  and  '47,  of  '48  and  '49,  that 
sowed  in  Irish  breasts  the  feelings  that  in  due  time  produced  eager  sub- 
scribers to  the  dynamite  funds. 

And  yet,  I  say  again,  while  the  hatred  of  the  English  institutions  which 
produced  these  horrors  was  just,  the  hatred  of  the  English  people  themselves 
was  not  deserved.  The  English  people,  indeed,  did  much  to  earn  very 
different  sentiments.  'No  one,'  writes  Justin  McCarthy,  whose  feelings  in 
these  days,  as  will  be  seen  by-and-by,  were  keen  enough  to  make  him  a 
rebel. 'could  doubt  the  goodwill  of  the  English  people.'^  Relief  societies 
were  formed  almost  everywhere.  '  The  British  Association  for  the  Relief 
of  Extreme  Distress  in  Ireland,  and  the  Highlands  and  Islands  of  Scot- 
land,' collected  no  less  a  sum  than  £263,251.'*  A  Queen's  letter  was  raised 
with  the  same  object,  and  no  less  than  £171,533  were  collected.  I  have 
myself  heard  an  Englishman  say  that  he  remembered  the  Famine  because, 
being  a  child  at  the  time,  he  wad  not  permitted  to  take  butter  with  his 
bread,  in  order  that  some  money  might  be  saved  for  the  starving  poor  of 
Ireland.  It  was,  then,  not  the  English  people  that  were  to  blame  for  the 
horrors  of  the  Irish  Famine,  excepting  so  far  as  they  were  responsible  for 
their  choice  of  representatives,  and  for  the  maintenance  of  English  institu- 
tions in  Ireland.  It  was  the  British  Parliament  and  the  British  Ministers 
*;hat  worked  the  wholesale  slaughter  of  Irishmen,  and  that  produced  the 
m.urderous  hatred  of  so  many  of  the  Irish  race  for  England.  In  other 
words,  the  Act  of  TTnion  is  the  great  criminal.  It  is  the  government  of 
Ireland  by  Englishmen  and  by  English  opinion  that  has  the  double  result 
of  ruining  Ireland  and  endangering  England — of  producing  much  unde- 
served and  preventable  suffering  to  Irishmen,  and  much  undeserved  and 
preventable  trouble  and  hatred  to  England. 

1  '  Memoirs,'  by  Sir  E.  Peel.    Part  III.,  p.  143. 

2  '  History  of  Our  Own  Times.' 

3  Census  Commissioners,  quoted  from  Trevelyan's  '  Irish  Crisis,'  p.  288. 


THE  GREAT  CLEARANCES. 


79 


The  second  point  that  requires  discussion  is,  whether  the  Famine  was 
avoidable  or  unavoidable,  John  Mitchel  speaks  of  the  Famine  as  an 
*  artificial '  famine,  and  other  Irish  writers  maintain  that,  in  spite  of  the 
loss  of  the  potato,  there  was  enough  of  food  produced  in  Ireland  during  these 
very  famine  years  to  have  prevented  a  single  person  in  the  country  from 
dying  of  starvation.  I  have  already  made  mention  of  the  fact  that  ships 
were  bearing  away  from  the  ports  of  Ireland  wheat  and  cattle  in  abundance  ; 
and  I  have  quoted  the  observation  of  Lord  John  Russell,  pointing  to  the 
fact  that  in  the  year  1817  the  wheat  crop,  instead  of  being  under,  was 
above  the  average. 

We  have  no  trustworthy  statistics  in  reference  to  the  live  stock  and 
agricultural  produce  of  Ireland  in  the  years  1845  and  1846 — for  it  was  not 
till  1847  that  statistics  on  this  head  were  collected  in  a  regular  manner.  But 
we  have  fairly  trustworthy  statistics  with  regard  to  the  export  of  produce 
in  the  first  of  those  two  years,  and  also  to  the  export  of  produce  and  live 
stock  in  the  second.  First  dealing  with  the  year  1845,  the  following  are  the 
statistics  of  the  export  of  produce  for  1845  and  the  four  preceding  years  -.^ 


Year. 

Wheat  and 

wheaten 

flour. 

Barley- 
including 
bere  or 
bigg. 

Oats  and 
oatmeal. 

Rye. 

Peas. 

Beans. 

Malt. 

Total. 

qrs. 

qrs. 

qrs. 

qrs. 

qrs. 

qrs. 

qrs. 

qrs. 

1S41 

218,708 

75,568 

2,539,380 

172 

855 

15,907 

4,935 

2,855,525 

1842 

201,998 

50,297 

2,261,435 

76 

1,551 

19,831 

3,046 

2,538,234 

1843 

413,466 

110,449 

2,648,032 

371 

1,192 

24,329 

8,643 

3,206,482 

1844 

440,152 

90,656 

2,242,308 

264 

1,091 

18,580 

8,155 

2,801,204 

1845 

779,113 

93,095 

2,353,985 

165 

1,644 

12,745 

11,144 

3,251,901 

It  will  be  seen  from  this  that  the  export  of  wheat  and  wheaten  flour, 
instead  of  being  diminished  in  1845  by  the  blight  of  the  potato  and  the  con- 
sequent famine,  v/as  enormously  increased.  The  number  of  quarters  ex- 
ported in  1845,  779,113,  is  nearly  double  that  exported  in  the  two  preceding- 
years,  and  considerably  more  than  treble  that  exported  in  the  years  1841 
and  1842.  The  export  of  barley,  93,095  quarters,  is  larger  than  any  of  the 
preceding  years  except  1843.  In  oats,  the  export  is  about  the  average. 
The  grand  total  of  exported  produce  is  nearly  1,000,000  quarters  beyond  the 
exports  of  1841,  1842,  and  1844,  and  is  higher  than  the  export  of  1843^  which 
had  the  largest  export  of  the  preceding  four  years.^ 

The  exports  of  articles  of  food  in  1846  were  : 


Wheat  and  wheat  flour 
Barley,  etc. 
Oats  and  oatmeal 

Peas       

Beans     ...          

Malt      

v^uariers. 

393,462 

92,854 

...      1,311,592 

2,227 

14,668 

11,329 

Total 


1,826,1323 


I  McCuUoch,  '  Dictionary  of  Commerce,'  latest  edition,  by  A.  J.  Wilson,  p.  450. 
"  Thom's  '  Almanack '  for  1S4S  states  that  the  total  imports  of  Irish  produce  into 
IdYcrpool  alone  increased  in  value  from  £4,149,428  in  1S42  to  £6,383,498  in  1845. 
?MeGulloch,  '  Dictionary  of  Commerce,'  p.  450. 


8o 


THE  PARMELL  MOVEMENT. 


Here  there  is  a  considerable  reduction  as  compared  with  the  figures  of 
the  preceding  years,  but  still  there  remains  a  total  of  1,826,132  quarters  of 
food  exported  from  a  starving  nation.  Coming  now  to  the  export  of  live 
cattle,  here  are  the  figures  for  1846  : 


Oxen,  bulls,  and  cows. 
Calves    ... 
Sheep  and  lambs 
Swine    ... 


186,483 
6,363 
259,257 
480,8271 


These  figures  of  exported  cattle  from  Ireland  in  the  midst  of  the  horrors 
of  1846  make  a  very  formidable  total  indeed. 

Passing  on  to  1847,  we  find  the  exportation  of  food  to  be  as  follows  : 


V/heat  and  wheat  flour 
Barley,  etc. 
Oats  and  oatmeal 

Rye        

Peas 

Beans    ... 

Malt      

Total 


Quarters 

184,024 

47,527 

703,465 

1,498 

4,659 

22,361 

5,956 

969,490 


This  is  the  total  quantity  of  produce,  excluding  potatoes  :^ 


Description  of  Crops. 

Extent  under  Crops. 

Quantity  of  Produce. 

Wheat       

Oats           

Barley       

Bere 

Rye           

Beans 

Total         

Statute  acres. 

743,871 

2,200,870 

283,587 

49,068 

12,415 

23,768 

Quarters. 

2,926,733 

11,521,606 

1,379,029 

274,016 

63,094 

84,456 

3,313,579 

16,248,934 

The  live  stock  of  the  year  is  estimated  in  the  agricultural  returns  as  being 
of  the  value  of  £24,820,547,  and  Thorn  calculates  that  the  value  of  the  stock 
and  agricultural  produce  together  amounted  to  £38,528,224.^ 


^  McCulloch,  '  Dictionary  of  Commerce,'  p.  450. 
s  Census  Commissioners'  Report.  1851,  p.  281. 
3  Thorn's  '  Almanack,'  184;&. 


THE  GREAT  CLEARANCES. 
In  1848  the  agricultural  returns  of  cereal  crops  were  } 


%i 


Description  of  Crops. 

Extent  of  land 
under  Crops. 

Quantity  of  Produce. 

Wheat       

Oats 

Barley 

Bere 

Rye         

Beans  and  peas    ... 

Statute  acres. 

565,746 

1,922,406 

243,235 

53,058 

21,502 

50,749 

Quarters. 
1,555,500- 
9,050,490 
1,135,120 

263,415 

105,375 

172,508         I 

Exports  of  produce  in  1848  are  : 

Wheat  and  wheat  flour 

Barley    ... 

Oats  and  oatmeal 

Rye      

Peas       ...  ...         ... 

Beans     ... 

Malt      

Total 


Quarters. 

304,873 

79,885 

1,546,568 

15 

2,572 

12,314 

6,365 

1,952,5922 


In  the  same  year  the  value  of  the  live  stock  is  given  in  the  official  returns 
as  £23,112,518.3 

Ofl&cial  returns  give  the  subjoined  figures  as  to  the  cereal  crops  in  1849  •} 


Description  of  Crops. 

Extent  under  Crops. 

Quantity  of  Produce. 

Wheat       

Oats 

Barley 

Bere 

Rye         

Beans  and  peas    ... 

Total  cereal  crops  ... 

Statute  acres. 

687,646 

2,061,185 

290,690 

60,819 

20,168 

59,916 

Barrels. 

3,641,198 

15,738,073 

2,441,176 

496,037 

164,877 

1,436,262  bushels 

3,174,424 

2,182,514  tons 

In  the  same  year  the  value  of  the  live  stock  was  £25,692,617.^ 
produce  sent  to  Great  Britain  in  1849  amounted  to  : 


Food 


^  Census  Commissioners'  Report,  1S51,  p.  308. 
^  McCulloch,  '  Dictionary  of  Commerce,'  p.  450. 

3  The  valuation  of  the  live  stock  is  founded  on  the  same  estimate  of  pHces  as  inlS4l. 
The  returns  for  1S48  do  not  include  Waterford,  Tipperai'y,  and  the  metropolitan 
district  of  Dublin,  the  inquiry  in  these  parts  of  the  country  being  abandoned  on 
account  of  the  disturl^ed  state  of  the  cuuntry. 

4  Census  Conunissioncra'  Report,  1851,  p.  315.  5  H, 


82  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 


Wheat  and  wheat  flour 

Barley    ... 

Oats  and  oatmeal 

Rye        ... 

Peas 

Beans    ... 

Malt       


Quarters 

234,680 

46,400 

1,123,469 

414 

3,369 

22,450 

5,181 


Total  1,435,9631 

These  figures  may  well  be  left  to  tell  then'  own  tale.  One  thing  necessary 
to  bear  in  mind  in  considering  the  number  of  quarters  of  foods  exported 
from  Ireland  is  that  one  quarter  of  wheat  is  equal  to  392  pounds  of  flour,  or 
to  470  pounds  of  bread,^  and  this  has  been  calculated  as  about  the  average 
annual  consumption  of  an  individual.  It  is  a  simple  sum  in  multiplication 
to  find  how  many  daily  rations  of  bread  for  starving  peasants  were  exported 
in  each  of  these  years. 

A  second  basis  of  calculation  is  a  comparison  between  the  value  of  the 
live  stock  and  the  agricultural  produce  in  any  of  these  years,  and  the  amount 
of  money  which  was  required  for  meeting  the  distress.  The  Soup  Kitchen 
Act  (Relief  Act,  10  Vict.,  c.  7)  came  into  operation  in  March,  1847,  and 
ceased  on  September  12,  in  the  same  year.  Under  this  Act  there  were  in 
July,  1847,  three  million  twenty  thousand  seven  hundred  and  twelve  per- 
sons who  received  separate  rations  in  one  day.  We  have  thus  an  easy 
means  of  calculating  what  the  feeding  of  the  people  in  distress  in  Ireland 
would  cost  for  these  months.  The  period  of  distress  during  which  this  Act 
operated  was  the  very  worst  period  of  the  whole  cycle  of  years.  The  number 
requiring  relief  then  reached  the  highest  point,  and  therefore  we  have  in 
this  sum,  spent  under  this  Act,  a  m.aximum  beyond  which  the  numbers  de- 
pending on  Governmental  or  pu.blic  aid,  ought  not  to  go.  The  sum,  then, 
authorised  under  this  Act  was  £2,200,000  ;  the  smn  actually  spent  was 
£1,676,268  •?  in  other  words,  about  a  million  and  a  half.  Put  this  sum  of 
a  million  and  a  half  beside  some  of  the  figures  which  have  just  been  quoted. 
It  is,  for  instance,  one-sixteenth  of  the  value  of  the  live  cattle  in  Ireland  in 
this  same  year  of  1847.  Taking  the  value  of  the  cattle,  sheep,  and  swine 
on  the  figures  of  1841,  the  value  of  the  total  exported  was  £1,988,492. 
Thus  there  was  exported  in  cattle,  sheep,  and  swine  alone  in  this  year — to 
say  nothing  whatever  of  the  969,490  quarters  of  cereals — nearly  half  a 
million  more  in  money  value  than  was  required  to  feed  three  millions  of 
starving  people  in  the  same  year.  Finally,  a  miUion  and  a  half  was  the 
amount  spent  under  the  Soup  Kitchen  Act,  and  the  absentee  rents  alone 
were  five  millions  sterling. 

The  position,  then,  is  this.  The  landlords  took  from  the  tenants  all  the 
produce,  '  minus  the  potatoes  necessary  to  keep  them  from  famine  ' — to 
fall  back  upon  the  phrase  of  John  Stuart  Mill.  When  the  potato'^s  failed, 
the  remainder  of  the  produce,  instead  of  being  divided  between  the  Imdlords 
and  the  tenants,  was  sent  to  either  home  or  foreign  ma^rkets  for  the  purpose 
of  paying  the  rent  of  the  landlords.  In  other  words,  it  was  the  consump- 
tion of  food  by  rent  instead  of  by  the  people  that  produced  the  Famine.  It 
was,  as  Mitchel  calls  it,  an  artificial  Famine — starvation  in  the  midst  of 
food. 

^  McCuUoch,  '  Dictionary  of  Commerce,'  p.  450.  ^  Thorn's  'Almanack,'  184S, 

3  Census  Commissioners'  Report,  i^p.  287,  2S8, 


THE  GREAT  CLEARANCES.  '  Sj 

Meantime  a  change  had  come  over  Ireland  which  has  been  noted  by  every 
writer,  either  during  or  since  that  time.  Testimony  is  unanimous  as  to  the 
sadness  and  the  completeness  of  this  change.  '  Here  are  twenty  miles  of 
country,  sir,'  said  a  dispensary  doctor  to  me,  '  and  before  the  Famine  there 
was  not  a  padlock  from  end  to  end  of  it.  Under  the  pressure  of  hunger, 
ravenous  creatures  prowled  around  barn  and  store-house,  stealing  corn, 
potatoes,  cabbage,  turnips — anything,  in  a  word,  that  might  be  eaten. 
Later  on,  the  fields  had  to  be  watched,  gun  in  hand,  or  the  seed  was  rooted 
up  and  devoured  raw.  This  state  of  things  struck  a  fatal  blow  at  some  of 
the  most  beautiful  traits  of  Irish  life.  It  destroyed  the  simple  confidence 
that  b  ilted  no  door  ;  it  banished  for  ever  a  custom  which  throughout  the 
island  was  of  almost  universal  obligation — the  housing  for  the  night,  with 
cheerful  welcome,  of  any  poor  wayfarer  who  claimed  hospitality.  Fear  of 
"the  fever,"  even  where  no  apprehension  of  robbery  was  entertained,  closed 
every  door,  and  the  custom  once  killed  off  has  not  revived.  A  thousand 
kindly  usages  and  neighbourly  courtesies  v/ere  swept  away.  When  sauve 
qui  pent  has  resounded  throughout  a  country  for  three  years  of  alarm  and 
disaster,  human  nature  becomes  contracted  in  its  sympathies,  and  "every 
one  for  himself  "  becomes  a  maxim  of  life  and  conduct  long  after.  The 
open-handed,  open-hearted  ways  of  the  rural  population  have  been  visibly 
affected  by  the  "  Forty-seven  ordeal."  Their  ancient  sports  and  pastimes 
everywhere  disappeared,  and  in  many  parts  of  Ireland  have  never  returned. 
The  outdoor  games,  the  hurling-match,  and  the  village  dance  are  ceen  no 
more.'i 

The  Famine,'  says  Gavan  Duffy,  '  swallowed  things  more  precious  than 
money  and  money's  worth,  or  even  than  human  lives.  The  temperance 
reformation,  the  political  training  of  a  generation,  the  self-respect,  the 
purity  and  generosity  which  distinguished  Irish  peasants,  were  sorely 
wasted.  Out  of  the  place  of  the  damned,  a  sight  of  such  piercing  woe  was 
never  seen  as  a  Munster  workhouse,  with  hundreds  of  a  once  frank  and  gal- 
lant yeomanry  turned  into  sullen  beasts,  wallowing  on  the  floor  as  thick  as 
human  limbs  could  pack.  Unless,  indeed,  it  were  that  other  spectacle  of 
the  women  of  a  district  waiting  in  pauper  congregation  around  the  same 
edifice  for  outdoor  relief.  New  and  terrible  diseases  sprang  out  of  this 
violation  of  the  laws  of  nature.  There  was  soon  a  workhouse  fever,  a  work- 
house dysentery,  a  workhouse  ophthalmia  ;  and  children,  it  was  said,  were 
growing  up  idiots  from  imperfect  nourishment.  In  eight  of  the  worst 
poor-law  unions,  the  contract  coffin  left  the  v/orkhouse  seventy  times  a  week 
with  the  corpse  of  a  human  being.  The  ophthalmia  often  carried  with  it 
consequences  more  painful  than  death,  when  it  left  the  sufferer  unfit  to  earn 
his  bread  any  more  in  the  world.  There  were  upwards  of  2,000  cases  of  this 
disease  within  ten  months  in  the  Tipperary  Union,  and  as  many  in  the 
Limerick  Union.  In  Tipperary,  Sir  William  Wilde,  one  of  the  Census 
Commissioners,  saw  eighty-seven  patients  whose  sight  was  permanently 
damaged,  eighteen  incurably  blind  figures,  thirty-two  who  had  lost  one  eye. 
In  Connaught,  where  poverty  was  long  the  chronic  condition  of  the  country, 
the  famine  had  actually  created  a  new  race  of  beggars,  bearing  only  a  dis' 
tant  and  hideous  resemblance  to  humanity.  Wherever  the  traveller  went 
in  Galway  or  Mayo,  he  met  troops  of  wild,  idle,  lunatic-looking  paupers 
wandering  over  the  country.  Gray-headed  old  men,  with  faces  settled  into 
a  leer  of  hardened  mendicancy,  and  women  filthier  and  more  frightful  than 
harpies,  who  at  the  jingle  of  a  coin  on  the  pavement  swarmed  in  myriads 

^  A.  M.  Sullivan's  '  New  Irela-d,'  pp.  67,  6S. 

6—2 


84  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

from  unseen  places,  struggling,  screaming,  shrieking  for  their  prey  like 
monstrous  and  unclean  animals.  Beggar-children,  beggav-girls,  with  faces 
gray  and  shrivelled,  met  you  everywhere  ;  and  women  with  the  more  touch- 
ing and  tragic  aspect  of  lingering  shame  and  self-respect  not  yet  effaced.  I 
saw  these  accursed  sights,  and  they  are  burned  into  my  memory  for  ever. 
Poor,  mutilated,  and  debased  scions  of  a  tender,  brave,  and  pious  stock,  they 
were  martyrs  in  the  battle  of  centuries  for  the  right  to  live  in  their  own 
land,  and  no  Herculaneum  or  Pompeii  covers  ruins  so  memorable  to  m.e  as 
those  which  \v^.  buried  under  the  fallen  roof-trees  of  an  "  Irish  extermi- 
nation." '  ^ 

These  two  pictures  from  brilliant  WTiters  agree  with  hundreds  of  others 
dra"wn  by  Irish  pens.  It  is  certain  that  to-day  Ireland  is  the  saddest 
country  in  this  world  of  many  countries  and  many  tears.  With  the  Famine 
joy  died  in  Ireland ;  the  day  of  its  resurrection  has  not  yet  come. 

One  word  finally.  The  population  of  Ireland  by  March  30,  1851,  at  the 
same  ratio  of  increase  as  held  in  England  and  Wales,  woiild  have  been 
9,0iS,799 — it  was  6,552,385.^  It  was  the  calculation  of  the  Census  Com- 
iru^sioners  that  the  deficit,  independently  of  the  emigration,  represented  by 
the  mortality  in  the  five  Pamine  years,  was  985, 366, -^  nearly  a  million  of 
people.  The  greater  proportion  of  this  million  of  deaths  must  be  set  down 
to  hanger,  and  the  epidemics  which  hunger  generated.  To  those  who  died 
at  home  must  be  added  the  large  number  of  people  who,  embarking  on 
vessels  or  landing  in  America  or  elsewhere  with  frames  weakened  by  the 
Pamine  or  diseases  resulting  from  the  Paniine,  perished  in  the  manner  already 
described.  Pather  O'Rourke,'*  calculating  these  at  17  per  cent,  of  the  emi- 
gration of  1,180,409,  arrives  at  the  total  of  200,668  persons  who  died  either 
on  the  voyage  from  their  country  or  on  their  arrival  at  their  destination. 
This  would  raise  the  total  of  deaths  caused  through  the  Irish  Pamine  to 
upwards  of  a  million  of  people. 


CHAPTER  V. 

THE   GKEAT   BETKAYAL. 

At  last  it  seemed  as  if  the  very  excess  of  the  evil  was  about  to  produce  its 
own  remedy.  The  wholesale  evictions  filled  the  peasants  of  the  south  with 
a  desperate  resolve  to  make  another  attempt  for  the  relief  of  their  position  ; 
and  the  rack-renter  in  Ulster  was  gradually  working  up  that  province  to  a 
state  of  feeling  as  bitter  as  that  of  the  southern  counties.  Por  the  Ulster 
farmer  was  finding  that  the  Ulster  custom  gave  him  no  security  against  the 
increase  of  his  rent,  and  that  thus  the  large  amount  of  capital  he  invested 
in  the  purchase  of  the  tenant  right  of  the  farm  was  turning  out  a  disastrous 
investment.  In  this  way  the  north  and  south  were  ripe  for  a  new  move- 
ment in  favour  of  tenant  right.  The  movement,  when  started,  was  not  long 
in  gaining  strength  ;  the  leaders  in  the  different  parts  of  the  country  saw 
and  understood  each  other;  and  a  combination  was  made  between  the  tenant- 
right  leaders  of  the  north  and  of  the  south. 

^  Extract  from  Lecture  ou  '  Why  is  Ireland  poor  and  discontented  ?'  delivered  in  the 
Polytechnic  Hall,  Melboiirne,  on  February  23,  1S70,  by  the  Hon.  Gavan  Duffy,  M.P. 
London  :  Burns,  Oates  &  Co.,  and  Dublin  :  Jain  as  Duffy.  Printed  with  'Is  Ireland 
irreconcilable  ?'  an  article,  reprinted  from  the  DvMin  lievieto,  by  John  Cashel  Hoey. 

2  Census  Commissioners'  Eeport,  1851,  p.  245,  3  Ih.,  p.  240.  4  Ih.,  p,  499. 


THE  GREAT  BETRAYAL,  85 

This  union  had  elements  of  hope  for  the  future  of  Ireland  beyond  the 
mere  chance  of  settling  the  Land  Question.  Everybody  knows  that  religious 
dissensions  have  been  the  most  fruitful  cause  of  that  division  among  the 
Irish  people  by  which  their  oppressors  have  been  able  to  conquer  and  to 
hold  them.  Here  were  the  Presbyterians  of  the  north  standing  on  the 
same  platform  as  the  Catholics  of  the  south — fighting  against  the  same 
relentless  enemy,  and  for  the  same  sacred  rights.  The  hopefulness  of  the 
spectacle  is  best  proved  by  the  fears  and  condemnation  which  it  received. 
Religious  bigots  were  in  a  terrible  state  of  alarm,  and  prophesied  woeful 
things.  The  leader  of  this  odious  feeling  in  the  north  was  a  clergyman 
named  Dr.  Cook,  a  man  of  great  eloquence  and  of  great  force  of  cha- 
racter, who  was  for  nearly  half  a  century  the  most  commanding  force  in 
the  Presbyterian  Church.  He  was  a  Conservative  of  the  Conservatives, 
and  hated  his  religious  opponents  with  the  fervour  of  the  Middle  Ages. 
But  the  demand  for  tenant  right  made  itself  heard  even  in  the  conventions 
where  he  was  the  most  prominent  and  powerful  figure.  For  such  demands 
he  had  nothing  but  condemnation.  They  were  Socialism,  Communism, 
and  the  like,  and  it  all  came  from  the  original  abomination  of  Presbyterian 
clergymen  associating  with  the  servants  of  Baal  in  the  shape  of  the  Catholic 
clergymen. 

Nevertheless,  this  unholy  alliance  went  on,  gathered  strength  as  it  pro- 
ceeded, and  might  have  led  to  a  permanent  alliance  on  the  basis  of  common 
triumphs  which  would  have  been  full  of  blessings  for  all  the  Irish  race. 
The  movement  at  last  took  shape,  and  a  circular  was  sent  around  calling 
for  a  Tenant  Pight  Convention,  The  circular  itself  was  a  proof  of  the 
change  that  was  coming  over  the  times.  It  was  signed  by  three  men, 
among  others — all  members  of  different  creeds — by  Dr.  (afterwards  Sir 
John)  Gray,  an  Episcopalian  Protestant  ;  by  Dr,  MacKnight,  a  Presby- 
terian ;  and  by  Mr,  Frederic  Lucas,  a  Catholic,  In  obedience  to  this  call 
an  influential  meeting  was  assembled  on  August  6,  1850,  in  the  City 
Assembly  House,  William  Street,  Dublin. 

'  The  sharp  Scottish  accent  of  Ulster,'  writes  A.  M.  Sullivan,  describing 
the  gathering,  '  mingled  with  the  broad  Doric  of  Munster.  Presbyterian 
ministers  greeted  Popish  priests  with  fraternal  fervour.  Mr.  James 
Godkin,  editor  of  the  staunch  covenanting  Derry  Standard  ....  sat  side 
by  side  with  John  Francis  Maguire,  of  the  ultramontane  Corh  Examiner. 
Magistrates  and  landlords  were  there  ;  while  of  tenant  delegates,  every 
province  sent  up  a  great  arniy.'^ 

It  is  curious  to  look  back  in  this  year  on  the  proposals  put  forward  at 
this  convention.  The  resolutions  practically  demanded  what  have  since 
come  to  be  known  as  the  three  '  F's  ' — Fixity  of  Tenure,  Free  Sale,  and 
Fair  Rents.  Another  question  which  has  since  been  made  familiar  also 
came  before  the  convention.  This  was  the  question  of  the  arrears  of  rent. 
It  was  represented  that  during  the  period  of  Famine  it  was  perfectly  impos- 
sible for  the  tenants  to  pay  any  rent,  la,rge  or  small  ;  and  that  if  the  land- 
lords chose  to  insist  on  their  rights  they  could  evict  the  greater  part  of  the 
whole  Irish  population.  Accordingly,  a  resolution  was  passed  to  the  effect 
that  the  arrears  should  be  subjected  to  inspection  by  a  valuator ;  that  he 
should  estimate  the  amount  due  on  consideration  of  the  prices  and  other 
circumstances  of  the  Famine  period  ;  that  he  should  compare  the  actual 
amount  paid  in  rent  by  the  tenant  to  the  landlord  ;  and  that  if  there  were 

^  '  New  Ireland,'  p,  149, 


E6  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT, 

any  balance  still  due  on  such  a  comparison,  it  should  be  paid  to  the  land- 
lords in  instalments  spread  over  a  certain  period. 

To  any  impartial  reader  who  has  read  the  pages  in  which  the  story  of  the 
Famine  has  been  told,  this  proposal  will  not  appear  to  be  very  unreasonable ; 
but  the  times  were  not  ripe  for  reason  on  the  Irish  Land  Question.  The 
arrears  of  the  Famine  period  were  allowed  to  continue  ;  they  came  to  form 
a  dread  feature  of  the  Irish  peasant's  life  imder  the  name  of  the  '  hanging 
gale  ;'  and  for  thirty-four  years  the  '  hanging  gale '  was  allowed  to  realise 
its  ill-omened  name,  leaving  the  fortunes  and  the  lives  of  nearly  a  hundred 
thousand  families  at  the  absolute  mercy  of  their  landlords. 

The  movement  which  was  thus  initiated  took  the  country  by  storm,  and 
was  the  first  break  in  the  disastrous  gloom  that  had  overhung  everything 
since  the  advent  of  the  Famine  and  the  dov/nfall  of  O'Connell.  Ff<,  nine 
had  now  apparently  done  with  the  country — at  least,  for  an  interval  ;  the 
cataclysm  under  which  the  wretched  party  returned  in  1847  had  been  able 
everywhere  to  debauch  or  deceive  constituencies  and  drive  all  public  honesty 
out  of  the  representation  of  the  country  was  now  in  the  past,  and  there 
seemed  a  chance  once  more  for  the  country,  for  constitutional  agitation, 
and  for  honest  and  unselfish  public  men.  Gavan  Duffy  thought  the 
season  so  promising  that  he  consented  to  stand  for  a  constituency  ;  and  his 
newspaper  wrote  of  the  movement  and  of  the  coming  time  in  a  strain  of 
sanguine  expectation,  which,  representing  as  it  did  the  hopes  of  the 
country  generally,  makes  darker  the  tragedy  in  which  these  hopes  were 
eclipsed. 

'  On  as  solemn  a  summons,'  writes  the  Nation,  Dufiy's  paper,  '  as  ever 
drew  men  together  in  any  nation  of  this  earth,  since  the  sun  first  reached 
her  solstice  over  it,  do  the  delegates  of  the  Irish  people  assemble  on  next 
Tuesday.  ...  In  a  people  beggared,  broken,  brutalized  in  some  sense,  they 
have  undertaken  to  inspire  the  vigour  and  the  comeliness  of  independence. 
They  gird  their  strength  to  redeem  a  fallen  land  to  its  true  place  in  the 
zodiac  of  nations.  And,  before  God  and  man,  they  are  amenable  for  griev- 
ous ignorance  of  the  opportunity,  and  a  heavy  dereliction  of  duty,  if  the 
next  week  pass  unused  or  misused  by  them.' 

The  most  promising  feature  of  the  new  movement  was  that  it  put  a  de- 
finite, a  single,  a  great  and  absorbing  issue  before  the  country.  The  farmers 
formed  still  the  majority  of  the  electorate :  they  were  known  to  be  ready 
to  stand  by  the  representatives  of  their  interests,  in  spite  of  the  omnipotence 
still  exercised  over  them  by  the  landlord  ;  and  of  course  they  were  united 
to  a  man  in  the  demand  for  security  for  their  industry  and  their  homes. 
They  had  the  will  and  they  had  the  power  to  return  a  majority  of  the  Irish 
representatives  ;  and  an  Irish  Party  has  since  shown  that  a  body  of  men, 
earnest  and  honest,  resokite  and  united,  can  wring  from  a  Ministry  a  great 
measure  of  land  reform,  without  even  being  the  majority  of  the  Irish  repre- 
sentatives. It  is  no  exaggeration,  then,  to  say  that  the  Tenant  Right 
movement  of  1850  might  have  succeeded  in  all  its  purposes  :  might  have 
won  fixity  of  tenure  and  free  sale  and  fair  rent,  might  then  have  gone  on 
successfully  to  the  demand  for  Home  Rule,  and  might  thus  have  saved 
Ireland  a  quarter  of  a  century  of  the  darkest  and  most  bitter  events  in  her 
history. 

But  it  was  not  to  be.  The  movement  that  began  in  such  hope  and  with 
so  many  promises  of  complete  success  ended  in  fiercer,  completer,  more 


THE  GR£AT BETRAYAL.  87 

enduring  disaster  than  any  of  those  which  had  preceded  it.  Two  men  were 
mainly  responsible  for  this  :  the  one  was  a  weak  and  foolish  Englishman, 
the  other  a  strong  and  an  evil  Irishman.  The  two  men  were  Lord  John 
Russell  and  William  Keogh, 

The  conference  of  the  Tenant  League  took  place,  as  has  been  seen,  on 
August  6,  1850  ;  in  November  4  in  the  same  year  Lord  John  Russell  pub- 
lished the  'Durham  Letter.'  This  was  the  letter  addressed  to  the  Bishop 
of  Durham  in  which  he  denounced  the  movement,  howled  at  in  that  period 
and  laughed  at  in  this,  as  '  Papal  aggression.'  The  Pope  had  changed  the 
titles  of  the  Catholic  archbishops  and  bishops  in  England  and  Scotland 
from  titles  in  partihus  into  titles  borrowed  from  English  places.  Thus 
Cardinal  Wiseman  was  created  Archbishop  of  Westminster.  This  inno- 
cent step  called  forth  a  tempest  of  indignation  among  the  ignorant  and 
fanatical  in  the  English  population.  There  rose  one  of  those  periodical '  No 
Popery '  storms,  and  there  was  a  panic-stricken  cry  for  legislation  against 
the  revival  of  the  rule  of  the  Pope.  Lord  John  Russell  was  weak  enough 
or  mean  enough  to  allow  himself  to  be  carried  away  by  the  ruling  frenzy, 
wrote  a  letter  in  denunciation  of  the  action  of  the  Pope,  and  promised 
legislation. 

In  Ireland  this  new  move  on  the  part  of  the  British  Minister  provoked 
a  counter-storm  of  popular  passion  as  wild  and  as  widespread.  As  the 
English  people  were  startled  by  the  bugbear  of  the  ever-hateful  Pope,  the 
Irish  were  roused  to  fury  by  the  dread  that  their  religion  was  once  more, 
and  in  the  nineteenth  century,  to  be  subjected  to  some  renewal  of  the 
Penal  Code,  which  is  one  of  the  worst  and  bitterest  recollections  in  the 
history  of  English  rule  and  Irish  suffering.  It  was  probable  that  in  this 
feeling  all  other  interests  and  passions  would  be  swallowed  up. 

This  was  the  danger  which  the  really  honest  members  of  the  Tenant 
League  foresaw%  The  '  No  Popery '  agitation  roused  up  again  those 
passions  between  Irishmen  of  different  creeds  which  had  been  submerged 
in  the  great  movement  for  tenant  right  ;  and  the  different  creeds,  forgetting 
their  common  wrongs  and  sufferings,  might  be  drawn  off  by  sectarian  pas- 
sion from  the  Land  question.  While,  then,  the  southern  tenant-rightera 
sympathized  with  their  countrymen  in  their  hatred  and  contempt  of  the 
bigotry  and  the  imbecility  of  Lord  John  Russell,  they  saw  with  consider- 
able  misgiving  the  prominence  which  the  new  and  the  sectarian  agitatioa 
was  taking  in  the  popular  mind. 

There  was  another  body  of  men,  however,  to  which  this  new  movement 
was  a  godsend.  Of  this  party  William  Keogh  and  J  ohn  Sadleir  were  the 
chief  spokesmen — two  of  the  most  remarkable  and  most  sinister  figures  in 
Irish  history. 

Physically  and  mentally,  Keogh  was  intended  for  a  leader  of  democracy. 
Though  small  of  stature,  he  had  a  chest  of  enormous  depth,  had  a  muscular 
and  powerful  frame,  and  a  courage  that  was  arrogant,  audacious,  inflexible. 
The  face  bespoke  the  immense  moral  and  mental  force  of  the  man.  In  his 
earlier  years  it  bore  a  singular  resemblance  to  that  of  the  first  Napoleon, 
and  even  when  it  had  grown  flaccid  and  flabby,  it  still  wore  an  appearance 
of  dignity  and  strength.  His  look  was  calculated  to  inspire  respect  and 
even  awe.  Though  ignorant  of  law  and  generally  illiterate,  he  had  a  mar- 
vellous co^nmand  of  fluent,  striking,  vigorous  language.  He  was  coarse 
and  vulgar  in  taste,  and  there  was  a  dash  of  commonplace  in  everything  he 
said.  The  Nation,  which  was  his  chief  assailant  throughout  his  political 
(Career,  described  his  '  invective  '  as  a  '  deluge  of  dirt,'  and  his  '  most  pre- 


88  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT, 

tentious  oratory  '  <is  '  a  jumble  of  bog  Latin  and  flatulent  English.'  But 
his  words,  set  off  by  a  sonorous  voice,  vivid  gesture,  and  his  expressive  and 
commanding  face,  made  him  the  idol  of  mobs  and  the  most  competent  orator 
at  popular  meetings.  At  the  time  when  he  entered  politics  he  embarked 
upon  his  new  career  as  on  a  desperate  chance  that  would  lead  on  to  great 
fortune  or  hopeless  ruin.  In  one  of  the  most  exciting  and  critical  moments 
of  his  career  the  bailiffs  were  said  to  be  in  his  house,  and  even  when  he  was 
fighting  one  of  his  hard  electoral  contests  the  House  of  Commons  was 
wading  through  sheaves  of  his  unpaid  bills,  in  order  to  find  whether  he  had 
the  then  necessary  qualification  of  £300  a  year  over  all  his  debts.  But  of 
this  afterwards. 

A  judicial  office  in  Ireland  was  then,  as  indeed  it  is  now,  the  haven  in 
which  the  hard-pressed  lawyer  discovered  wealth,  ease,  and  dignity.  On 
the  principle  that  runs  uniform  through  all  the  veins  and  arteries  of  English 
administration  in  Ireland,  the  salaries  of  judicial  office  are  fixed  at  a  figure 
far  beyond  what  even  the  most  successful  lawyer  is  in  the  habit  of  making 
at  the  Bar.  In  fact,  a  puisne  judgeship  in  Ireland  occupies  towards  the 
working  lawyer  an  exactly  reverse  position  to  that  ^vilich  it  holds  in 
England.  In  England,  the  lawyer  who  accepts  a  puisne  judgeship,  or  even 
a  much  higher  office,  usually  does  so  at  an  immense  sacrifice  of  income  ;  in 
Ireland,  the  judicial  office  usually  gives  to  the  lawyer  the  first  opportunity 
in  his  life  of  making  something  like  an  equilibrium  between  income  and 
expenditure.  Then  the  number  of  judges  being  far  in  excess  of  the  require- 
ments of  public  business,  the  fortunate  holders  of  the  judicial  office  spend 
all  the  year  in  comparative,  and  nearly  half  the  year  in  absolute,  idleness. 
The  judges  in  Ireland,  too,  are  members  of  the  Privy  Council.  They  meet 
and  discuss  with  the  other  great  officers  of  the  State  questions  of  policy  and 
of  government,  with  a  mixture  of  judicial  and  executive  functions  which 
in  England  would  shock  every  accepted  principle  of  sound  administration. 
The  Irish  judge  is,  therefore,  after  his  elevation  to  the  Bench,  at  once  an 
active  and  a  combative  politician — one  of  the  rulers  of  the  State.  It  was 
one  of  the  worst  features  in  a  thoroughly  unsound  state  of  things  that  the 
puisne  judge  was  often  promoted  to  a  higher  office — the  Chief  Justiceship 
of  his  own  Court,  the  Mastership  of  the  Rolls,  or  the  Lord  Chancellor- 
ship. Sometimes  he  received  a  solace  for  being  passed  over  in  a  great 
and  highly-paid  commission  ;  such  as  the  Comniissionership  of  the  Irish 
Church  Act,  with  a  salary  of  £2,000  a  year,  that  was  conferred  on  Mr. 
Justice  Lawson. 

To  such  a  man  as  Keogh  such  an  ofl&ce  offered  the  highest  prize  of  fortune. 
It  conferred  high  pay,  and  he  was  dreadfully  needy  ;  dignity,  and  he  was 
notoriously  disreputable  ;  security,  and  his  life  was  a  series  of  hairbreadth 
escapes  in  the  tempestuous  sea  of  Irish  politics.  It  is  now  clear  that,  from 
the  first  moment  he  embarked  on  a  political  career,  a  judgeship  was  Keogh's 
single  purpose. 

For  this  end  he  was  ready  to  don  the  livery  of  every  political  party  in 
turn  ;  to  pass  through  mud-baths  of  deception,  Ijdng  and  broken  oaths  ;  to 
assume  all  the  worst  arts  of  the  demagogue  ;  to  be  foul-mouthed,  audacious, 
eometimes  even  murderous  in  advice  ;  and  then  to  betray  the  mob  as  quickly 
and  shamelessly  as  he  had  pandered  to  its  worst  passions. 

His  first  entrance  into  public  life  was  in  1847.  At  that  time  he  was 
known  as  a  barrister  without  clients  and  without  law  ;  indeed,  at  no  period 
of  his  professional  career,  until  he  became  a  law  officer  of  the  Crown,  did  he 
obtain  as  much  professional  business  as  would  keep  the  bloodhound  of  insur- 


THE  GREAT  BETRAYAL.  89 

mountable  debt  from  the  door  ;  and  never,  to  his  dying  day,  did  he  master 
even  the  elementary  principles  of  his  profession. 

It  was  for  my  native  town  of  Athlone  that  Keogh  stood.  Tradition  still 
retails  many  of  his  strange  exploits.  His  courage,  for  instance,  was  over 
and  over  again  proved  by  the  absolute  fearlessness  with  which  he  encoun- 
tered mobs  inflamed  with  drink  and  the  violent  passions  that  election  con- 
tests excite.  He  was  known  to  march  through  the  streets  when  a  perfect 
hailstorm  of  stones  were  flying  against  him  and  his  supporters.  On  one 
occasion,  when  he  was  delivering  a  speech  from  a  window  to  a  noisy  and 
violent  crowd,  somebody  threw  a  soda-water  bottle  at  his  head.     '  That's  a 

mighty  bad  shot, ,'  saidKeogh,  mentioning  the  name  of  the  person  who 

had  thrown  the  bottle — a  well-known  local  politician.  Equally  are  ther6 
stories  of  the  desperate  remedies  to  which  men  resort  who  are  hard  pressed 
for  money  and  neither  troubled  by  scruples  nor  abashed  by  shame.  Tor 
instance,  he  is  said  to  have  raised  money  in  several  cases  by  the  trick,  not 
unknown  to  the  London  police  courts,  of  borrowing  five  poiinds  on  each  half 
of  a  five-pound  note.  Then  there  is  the  dim  recollection  of  a  strange  scene, 
which  forecast  the  tragic  end  to  his  strange  and  evil  career.  One  night  he 
was  expecting,  as  the  tradition  goes,  some  money  from  one  of  the  political 
clubs  of  London  in  aid  of  his  candidature.  A  near  relative  was  to  be  the 
bearer  of  the  much-needed  treasure  ;  and  when  he  arrived  he  had  to 
announce  that  his  mission  was  a  failure.  Keogh  fell  prone  on  the  floor, 
grovelled  there  with  the  contortions  and  groans  of  one  demented,  and 
finally,  when  the  agony  had  passed,  rose  up,  went  out  into  the  town,  and 
harangued  the  mobs  with  a  self-confidence  as  great,  a  wit  as  ready,  a  hope- 
fulness as  inflexible,  as  if  his  highest  expectations  had  been  realized. 
Another  reason  of  his  success  was  his  conviviality.  He  was  all  through  his 
life  a  heavy  drinker,  and  loved  all  the  pleasures  of  the  table.  However  late 
the  night  or  heavy  the  drinking,  Keogh  w^as  always  the  first  to  rise  in  the 
morning;  and  with  the  'terrible  familiarity'  with  men's  names  and 
characteristics,  which  was  one  of  his  talents,  he  was  at  the  bedside  of 
the  companions  of  his  debauch  the  next  morning  with  a  brandy-and-soda 
in  his  hand  and  the  Christian  name  of  the  scarcely  recovered  inebriate  in 
his  mouth. 

In  order  to  understand  the  history  of  the  time,  it  is  also  necessary  to 
know  something  of  the  constituency  in  which  Keogh  played  these  parts. 
In  defence  of  my  native  town,  I  must  premise  that  it  was  neither  better  nor 
worse  than  the  majority  of  the  Irish  and  the  English  constituencies  of  that 
period.  Its  eminence  consisted  in  the  fact  that  the  number  of  the  voters 
was  small,  and  that,  therefore,  the  amount  of  the  bribe  was  high.  It  was 
generally  computed  that  this  bribe  averaged  £30  or  £40  the  vote  ;  and  there 
were  tales  of  a  vote  having  run  up  to  even  £100  in  one  of  Keogh's  most 
hotly  contested  elections.  The  town,  finely  situated  on  the  Shannon,  with 
a  large  barracks  and  a  castle  old  in  story,  plays  an  important  part  in  the 
history  of  Ireland,  and  was  for  many  centuries  the  most  prosperous  centre 
in  the  midland  counties  ;  biit  the  famine  swept  the  country  round,  and  for 
years  before  the  period  at  which  Keogh  began  to  figure  in  its  history, 
Athlone  had  been  steadily  deteriorating.  A  large  number  of  its  people 
were,  therefore,  engaged  in  a  desperate  struggle  with  hard  fortune,  and, 
though  centuries  old,  the  position  of  the  town  had  some  resemblance  to  one 
of  the  mushroom  towns  of  the  United  States — say  Virginia  City — which, 
owing  their  rise  to  some  accidental  and  transitory  cause,  like  the  discovery 
of  a,  mine,  have  a,  season  of  extreme  prosperity,  and  then  for  years  continue 


90  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

the  struggle  with  departing  fortune.  In  such  a  town  it  is  not  surprising 
that  the  election  played  a  prominent  part.  With  many  of  the  people  the 
periodic  bribe  entered  into  the  whole  economy  of  their  poor,  shrivelled, 
squalid,  weary  lives.  Men  continued  to  live  in  houses  that  had  better  have 
lived  in  lodgings,  because  the  house  gave  a  vote.  The  very  whisper  of  a 
dissolution  sent  a  visible  thrill  through  the  town  ;  the  prospect  of  common 
gain  swallowed  up  amid  the  people  all  other  passions,  religious  and  political, 
and  united  ordinarily  discordant  forces  in  amity  and  brotherhood.  There 
was,  as  there  is,  a  tolerably  strong  minority  of  Protestants  in  the  tOA^Ti  ; 
between  the  Protestant  and  the  Catholic  there  was  in  those  days  irrecon- 
cilable difference  of  political  as  well  as  of  religious  feeling  ;  and,  indeed, 
there  was  rarely  any  social  intercourse  between  people  of  the  two  creeds. 
But  at  election  time  the  Catholic  and  the  Protestant  forgot  their  rivalries, 
remembered  the  interests  only  of  their  town,  and  fought  strenuously  and 
side  by  side  in  loving  union  for  the  man  who  gave  the  highest  bribe.  There 
was  a  highly  respected  Protestant  tradesman  in  the  town  when  I  was  a  boy 
who  had  a  large  repute  for  political  wisdom,  and  was  generally  esteemed  ; 
and  I  remember  hearing  a  well-known  saying  of  his  quoted  which  put  the 
philosophy  of  Irish  electioneering  in  these  times  in  a  compendious  form. 
'  I  am  a  Protestant,'  Ned  used  to  say,  '  and  my  father  was  a  Pro- 
testant, and  his  father  before  him  ;  but  the  man  I  want  to  see  returned  for 
Athlone  is  the  man  that  leaves  the  money  in  the  town.' 

Such  was  the  constituency,  the  representation  of  Vv'hieh  Keogh  sought  in 
1847.  The  circumstances  of  his  candidature  sufficiently  foreshadowed  his 
subsequent  career.  In  that  year,  as  has  been  seen,  the  supreme  struggle  in 
Ireland  was  between  Young  Ireland  and  the  Repeal  Party.  But  Keogh  had 
no  part  in  this  struggle  between  different  sections  of  Irish  Nationalists. 
He  knew  his  owti  purpose  and  he  knew  his  constituency.  Attachment  to 
.  either  of  these  two  sections  might  have  been  inconvenient  in  subsequent 
years  to  a  seeker  after  English  office,  and  the  constituency  cared  for  the 
money  and  not  for  the  politics  of  its  candidates.  He  stood,  then,  as  a 
member  of  an  English  party  ;  he  called  himself  a  Peelite.  This  political 
character  had  the  additional  advantage  of  being  entirely  indefinite  ;  for 
this  was  the  period  of  the  schism  between  the  Eree  Trade  Conservatives 
under  Sir  Eobert  Peel  and  the  Protectionist  Conservatives  under  Mr. 
Disraeli  ;  and  it  was  still  an  undecided  question  whether  the  healing  of  the 
schism  would  turn  the  Peelites  back  into  the  Conservative  fold  or  its  con- 
tinuance would  transform  them  into  Liberals,  Another  curious  fact  about 
the  candidature  of  Keogh  was  that  the  expenses,  or  a  portion  of  them,  were 
paid  by  an  Englishman.     This  was  Mr.  Attwood,  the  well-known  banker. 

Mr.  Attwood  had  some  doctrines  on  the  currency  question  which  he  was 
anxious  to  have  advocated  in  Parliament,  and  he  thought  that  the  expenses 
of  a  contest  in  Athlone  would  be  compensated  for  by  the  assistance  of  the 
glib  and  brilliant  tongue  of  Keogh.  Keogh  was  opposed  by  a  local  gentle- 
man named  O'Beirne.  Keogli  v/as  elected.  The  numbers  at  the  poll  tell 
their  own  tale  of  the  state  of  the  country  and  the  character  of  the  con- 
stituency.    They  were  : 

Keogh,  William 101 

O'Beu-ne,  WiUiam 95 

But  this  success  did  not  for  some  years  bring  Keogh  any  change  in  his 
desperate  fortunes.  It  rather  aggravated  his  difficulties.  Professional 
business  did  not  come ;  the  ©lection  for  Athlone  WS/S  an  expensive  luxury 


THE  GREA  T  BETRA  YAL.  91 

and  cost  more  than  Mr.  Attwood  had  supplied,  and  Keogh  was  sunk  in  a 
profounder  morass  of  debt  than  before. 

At  the  same  election  of  1847  John  Sadleir  had  been  returned  for  Carlow. 
In  every  respect  Sadleir  was  the  antithesis  of  Keogh.  Keogh  was  garru- 
lous ;  Sadleir  was  taciturn  :  Keogh  was  the  boisterous  and  familiar  hoii 
vivant,  with  exuberant  health  and  spirits  ;  Sadleir  was  reserved,  unsocial, 
and  had  the  sallow  complexion  of  the  man  who  neither  cares  for  nor  enjoys 
the  pleasures  of  the  table  ;  finally,  Keogh  was  hopelessly  poor,  and  Sadleir 
had  the  reputation  of  boundless  wealth,  John  Sadleir  was  trained  as  a 
solicitor,  and  was  intended  by  his  people  probably  for  the  quiet  life  of  an 
Irish  lawyer.  But  he  was  ambitious  and  self-confident,  and  made  for 
London.  Here  he  became  a  'Parliamentary  agent,'  and  gained  an  ac- 
quaintance with  the  financial  state  of  Ireland  which  he  afterwards  turned 
to  great  use.  He  gradually  drifted  into  a  financier,  seized  with  the  idea  of 
malting  a  great  fortune  rapidly.  He  adopted  an  excellent  plan  to  stax't 
with.  The  Irish  farmer  had  not  yet  become  to  any  large  extent  a  depositor 
in  banks  ;  Sadleir  established  the  Tipperary  Joint-Stock  Bank.  He  came 
of  a  family  that  had  the  reputation  of  being  wealthy,  his  own  claim  to 
financial  ability  was  everywhere  admitted,  and  the  people  deposited  their 
money  with  the  confidence  of  unquestioning  faith.  '  From  the  Shannon  to 
the  Suir,'  writes  A.  M.  Sullivan,^  '  "Sadleir's  bank"  was  regarded  with  as 
much  confidence  as  "  the  old  lady  of  Threadneedle  Street "  commands  from 
her  votaries.'  The  money  which  Sadleir  thus  obtained  from  the  grimy 
pockets  of  the  Irish  farmers  he  invested  in  English  speculations,  became  in 
this  way  intimate  with  the  money  market  of  London,  and  was  made  chair- 
man of  the  London  and  County  Joint-Stock  Bank.  Every  day  he  was 
credited  with  greater  schemes  and  with  more  fabulous  success. 

To  such  a  man  Parliament  offered  chances  of  still  further  increasing  his 
wealth  and  satisfying  his  ambition.  His  large  command  of  money  gave 
him  a  great  advantage  in  the  political  fortunes  of  Ireland,  in  that  dread 
period  of  desolation  and  demoralization,  and  he  conceived,  and  to  a  large 
extent  carried  out,  the  project  of  building  up  in  the  Hoiise  of  Commons  a 
party  bound  to  him  by  ties  of  blood  or  of  financial  aid.  One  cousin — • 
Robert  Keatinge — was  returned  at  the  same  time  as  himself  for  County 
Waterford  ;  Prank  Scully,  another  cousin,  was  returned  for  Tipperary. 
This  was  at  the  1847  election  ;  subsequently,  in  1852,  Mr,  Vincent  Scully, 
his  nephew,  was  returned  for  County  Cork.  The  Sadleirite  party  consisted, 
besides,  of  two  brothers  named  O'Plaherty  (Anthony  and  Edmund),  of  a 
Doctor  Maurice  Power,  of  Mr,  Monsell  (now  disguised  under  the  name  of 
Lord  Emly),  and  of  Mr.  William  Keogh.  How  far  and  how  many  of  these 
men  were  indebted  to  Sadleir  for  pecuniary  assistance  it  is  impossible,  of 
course,  to  say  ;  but  two  of  them  were  certainly  •■  in  his  pay — Edmund 
O'Plaherty  and  William  Keogh.  The  desperate  fortunes  of  Keogh  craved 
for  help  wherever  it  might  come  from  ;  Sadleir  on  one  occasion,  as  will  be 
seen,  subscribed  £100  for  his  election  expenses  ;  and  subsequently  the  name 
of  Keogh  was  to  many  of  the  bills  which  were  put  in  circulation  by 
Edmund  O'Plaherty,  Keogh  said  his  name  was  forged  ;  possibly  the  state- 
ment was  true  ;  but  it  would  not  be  surprising  if  it  were  false.  This  is  not 
an  uncharitable  or  unwarrantable  conclusion,  as  will  be  subsequently  seeru 

The  object  of  Sadleir  and  his  associates  was,  of  course,  personal  advance- 
ment, and  personal  advancement  alone.  But  personal  advancement  could 
only  be  obtained  from  an  English  Minister  ;  and  the  rise  of  the  new  Tenant 

^  *  New  Ireland,'  p.  157. 


92  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

Right  movement,  hostile  to  the  principles  of  every  English  Ministry  of 
that  period,  was,  therefore,  to  the  Sadleirites  the  omen  of  defeat,  and  not 
the  augury  of  hope.  It  seemed  probable  that  the  movement  would  become — 
as  every  national  movement  before  or  since,  that  has  ever  got  a  chance  in 
Ireland,  has  become — a  great  national  force,  impossible  to  resist  ;  and  that 
no  constituency  would  accept  any  man  who  did  not  fight  in  its  ranks. 
Then  an  idea  was  being  put  forward  which  would  be  still  more  fatal  to  such 
purposes  as  those  of  Sadleir  and  Keogh.  It  will  be  remembered  that  the 
great  point  of  controversy  between  Old  and  Young  Ireland  was  as  to  the 
pledge  against  office-seeking.  The  break-up  of  the  hideous  party  of  1847 
gave  terrible  confirmation  to  the  objections  which  the  Young  Irelanders 
had  brought  against  the  tribe  of  office-seekers,  and  all  Ireland  now  agreed 
in  the  opinion  that  nothing  was  to  be  gained  from  any  Ministry  by  any 
party  but  a  party  of  independent  men.  Gavan  Duffy,  and  the  other  survi- 
vors of  Young  Ireland  who  had  jftined  in  the  new  movement,  insisted  that 
the  old  pledge  should  be  revived,  pointing  out  that  the  Land  Question  could 
never  be  settled  in  any  other  way.  Thus,  then,  the  Tenant  Right  move- 
ment had  two  distinct  principles — a  principle  as  to  the  end  to  be  attained, 
and  a  principle  as  to  the  policy  for  attaining  it.  The  party  not  only  be- 
lieved that  Tenant  Right  was  essential  for  the  prosperity  of  Ireland,  but 
believed  as  firmly  that  Tenant  Right  could  only  be  won  by  an  Irish  Party 
which  would  oppose  every  Ministry  that  did  not  make  Tenant  Right  a 
policy  by  which  to  stand  or  fall.  In  other  words,  the  policy  of  the  Tenant 
Righters  was  the  very  opposite  of  that  of  the  Sadleirites  ;  the  one  wanted 
Tenant  Right,  and  did  not  care  for  Ministries  ;  the  other  wanted  office, 
and  did  not  care  for  Tenant  Right.  The  struggle  was  visible  in  the  very 
earliest  days  of  the  Tenant  Right  movement  ;  its  break-out  was  inevitable  ; 
and  if  a  struggle  had  taken  place  while  the  country  was  united  and  enthu- 
siastic about  Tenant  Right,  it  is  probable  that  Sadleir  and  Keogh  would 
have  been  driven  from  public  life  and  the  Tenant  Right  battle  have 
been  won. 

But  the  Ecclesiastical  Titles  Bill  produced  the  disastrous  diversion  that 
postponed  this  struggle.  Sadleir  and  Keogh  were  not  slow  to  see  the  use 
to  which  Lord  John  Russell's  proposals  could  be  turned.  Of  course,  the 
Ecclesiastical  Titles  Bill  was  a  question  upon  which  certain  sections  of  the 
English  people  felt  strongly  at  that  moment.  But  Keogh  and  Sadleir 
probably  knew  that  such  outbursts  of  passion  are  as  transitory  as  they  are 
violent.  Then  the  Bill  was  not  a  favourite  with  any  English  party  ;  Mr. 
Disraeli  gave  it  at  first  but  a  half-hearted  support  on  the  part  of  the  Con- 
servatives ;  it  had  strong  opponents  in  Mr.  Gladstone,  Sir  James  Graham, 
and  the  other  Peelites  ;  and  there  was  every  reason  to  think  that  even  Lord 
John  Russell  himself  had  no  great  joy  in  his  legislative  child.  It  was  un- 
like Tenant  Right,  which  menaced  great  interests,  at  that  moment  as 
supreme  in  the  Lower  as  in  the  Upper  House  of  Parliament,  and  which 
was  equally  unacceptable  to  all  sections  of  Parliamentary  opinion  except 
the  insignificant  group  of  Radicals.  On  the  Ecclesiastical  Titles  Bill,  then, 
a  politician  could  be  as  violent  as  he  pleased,  without  making  himself  ever- 
lastingly objectionable  to  anybody  except  to  Mr.  Newdegate  ;  while  a 
strong  position  on  the  Land  Question  might  mean  permanent  exclusion  from 
office.  Finally,  Sadleir  and  Keogh  knew  the  passionate  attachment  of  the 
Irish  people  to  their  religion,  and  shrewdly  calculated  that  any  politician 
who  was  able  to  pose  as  a  defender  of  that  religion  would  establish  a  claim 
to  their  confidence  and  affections  which  it  would  take  much  to  shake. 


THE  GREA  T  BE  TRA  YAL  53 

Accordingly,  in  the  House  of  Commons,  Keogh  and  Sadleir  opposed  the 
Ecclesiastical.  Titles  Bill  with  extraordinary  vehemence  of  language  and  of 
tactics.  They  exhausted  the  forms  of  the  House,  they  fought  the  Bill 
obstinately  and  clause  by  clause.  A  portion  of  the  Irish  people,  looking 
on  at  this  struggle,  were  easily  led  to  believe  that  it  was  heroic  ;  and  the 
Sadleirites,  playing  upon  another  weakness,  endeared  themselves  still 
further  to  Irish  hearts  by  styling  themselves  '  the  Irish  Brigade ' — the 
name  of  those  exiled  Irish  warriors  who  fought  heroically  on  every  battle- 
field of  Europe,  after  unjust  laws  had  exiled  them  from  their  own  country. 
By  the  English  the  party  were  known  by  the  less  flattering  title  of  the 
*  Pope's  Brass  Band.' 

In  Ireland,  meantime,  the  two  agitations  went  on  side  by  side.  Great 
Catholic  demonstrations  were  ever^^where  held,  and  Sadleir  was  the  organizer 
and  Keogh  the  orator  of  these  demonstrations.  At  these  meetings  the 
Bishops  of  the  Catholic  Church  attended,  and  Keogh  excelled  everybody 
else  in  the  extravagant  fulsomeness  of  the  eulogies  which  he  poured  upon 
their  heads.  It  was  a  singular  fatality  that  at  this  very  period  an  Irish 
prelate  was  first  getting  into  prominence  who  was  destined  to  be  a  main 
though  unconscious,  and  perhaps  innocent,  instrument  in  the  game  Keogh 
and  Sadleir  were  playing.  This  was  Paul  Cullen,  afterwards  Cardinal 
Cullen  and  Archbishop  of  Dublin.  At  this  period  he  had  just  been  ap- 
pointed Archbishop  of  Ai'magh.  He  had  been  for  many  years  the  head  of 
the  Irish  College  iu  Pome,  and  it  was  a  favourite  reproach  against  him  that 
he  was  more  of  a  Poman  monk  than  an  Irish  patriot.  So  far  as  I  can 
gather  his  policy,  he  regarded  it  as  his  main  if  not  sole  duty  to  look  after 
the  interest  of  his  Church,  rather  than  the  purely  secular  interests  of 
politics.  Eor  this  reason  his  whole  political  influence  was  thrown  in  on 
the  side  of  any  politician  who  had  anything  to  give  the  Church.  In  after- 
struggles.  Cardinal  Cullen  was  always  on  the  side  of  the  '  Government '  as 
against  all  struggles  of  Nationalists,  on  the  principle  that  England  could 
do  more  for  the  interests  of  the  Church  than  any  National  Party.  England 
could  serve  the  Church  in  Ireland  through  concessions  on  the  education 
question  ;  she  could  serve  the  Church  generally  and  in  a  wider  area  by  her 
influence  as  a  great  power  in  the  Councils  of  Europe ;  and  she  could  tolerate 
or  persecute  millions  of  Catholics  scattered  through  her  world-wide  empire. 
This  policy — intelligible  from  the  standpoint  of  the  Churchman — Cardinal 
Cullen  pursued  for  upwards  of  a  quarter  of  a  century  with  a  purpose  that 
never  swerved,  and  with  a  devotion  that  belonged  to  a  man  whose  life  was 
swallowed  up  in  his  principles.  At  a  period  later  than  this.  Cardinal 
Cullen  had  means  for  giving  effect  to  his  will  so  large  as  to  make  him  the 
greatest  standing  force  in  Irish  politics.  The  power  of  the  Catholic  clergy- 
man was  almost  unshaken  ;  throughout  every  town  and  village  in  Ireland 
the  Catholic  priest,  strong  in  the  affection  of  his  flock,  and,  in  the  majority 
of  cases,  the  best  educated  man  in  his  district,  was  almost  a  political  auto- 
crat ;  and  over  the  action  of  nearly  every  priest  in  Ireland  Cardinal  Cullen 
had.  control.  He  was  the  prelate  whose  voice  was  practically  law  at  the 
Holy  See  in  regard  to  all  Irish  ecclesiastical  affairs  ;  a  few  clergymen  who 
resisted  his  will  were  summarily  crushed,  and  every  vacancy  in  the  episco- 
pate was  filled  with  his  nominees.  Archbishop  MacHale,  and  a  few  of  the 
elder  generation  of  prelates  who  had  shared  in  O'Connell's  struggle  for  re- 
peal of  the  Union,  resisted  his  influence  to  the  end  ;  but  practically,  for 
many  years,  Cardina,!  Cullen  was  the  Catholic  Church  in  Ireland,  and  had 
all  that  mighty  organization  under  his  word  of  command. 


94  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

On  August  19, 1851,  a  great  meeting  was  held  in  tlie  Rotunda,  in  Dublin, 
for  the  purpose  of  forming  a  '  Catholic  Defence  Association,'  Over  this 
meeting  Archbishop  Cullen  presided.  Mr.  John  Sadleir  was  one  of  the 
secretaries,  and  William  Keogh  was  the  chief  speaker.  To  the  chairman 
of  the  meeting  Keogh  was  laboriously  complimentary.  '  I  now,'  he  said, 
'  as  one  of  her  Majesty's  Counsel,  whether  learned  or  unlearned  in  the  law, 
holding  the  Act  of  Parliament  in  my  hand,  unhesitatingly  give  his  proper 
title  to  the  Lord  Bishop  of  Armagh.'  These  words  received  further  em- 
phasis as  he  held  the  Act  of  Parliament  thus  defined  in  his  outstretched 
hand.  At  a  meeting  of  his  constituents  in  Athlone  he  paid  even  higher 
court  to  Archbishop  MacHale — who  then,  and  for  many  years  afterwards, 
exercised  enormous  influence.  'I  see  here,'  said  Keogh,  'the  venerated 
prelates  of  my  Church,  first  among  them,  "  the  observed  of  all  observers," 
the  illustrious  Archbishop  of  Tuam,  who,  like  that  lofty  tower  which  rises 
upon  the  banks  of  the  yellow  Tiber,  the  pride  and  protection  of  the  city,  is 
at  once  the  glory  and  the  guardian,  the  decus  et  tutamen  of  the  Catholic 
religion.'     John  Sadleir  was  also  one  of  the  speakers  at  this  meeting. 

MeantimxC  the  Tenant  Pight  movement  had  been  growing,  and  Keogh 
and  Sadleir  found  it  necessary  to  affect  devotion  to  its  purposes  and  policy. 
Over  and  over  again  they  pledged  themselves  not  to  accept  office  from  any 
Ministry  that  did  not  make  Tenant  Pight  a  Cabinet  question.  Nor  was 
this  all.  Under  the  example  of  the  Tenant  League,  the  Catholic  Associa- 
tion also  formulated  the  policy  of  pledging  the  Irish  members  to  accept  no 
office  from  any  Ministry  vi^hich  did  not  make  the  Pepeal  of  the  Ecclesi- 
astical Titles  Act  a  Cabinet  question  ;  and  to  that  pledge  Keogh  over  and 
over  again  gave  his  adhesion. 

But  Gavan  Duffy,  the  other  ^vriters  in  the  Nation  and  Freeman's  Journal, 
and  all  the  earnest  Tenant  Pighters,  still  disbelieved  in  the  '  Irish  Brigade,' 
and  Keogh  and  Sadleir  were  more  than  once  accused  of  being  office-seekers. 
These  charges,  repeated  over  and  over  again,  made  wider  a  distinct  line  of 
cleavage  in  the  Tenant  League,  as  the  Tenant  Pight  organization  was 
called.  The  two  parties  were  watchful  and  distrustful  of  each  other,  and 
between  the  two  there  arose  a  fight  for  life.  The  position  of  Sadleir  and 
Keogh  at  this  period  was  desperate.  The  fight  in  which  they  were  engaged 
meant  dazzling  success  or  shameful  and  abysmal  ruin.  Sadleir,  as  will  be 
seen,  Vv^as  reaching  the  point  where  he  had  to  make  the  awful  choice  between 
the  life  of  the  convict  and  the  death  of  the  suicide.  The  position  of  Keogh 
was  equally  desperate.  He  was  deeper  than  ever  in  debt  ;  as  has  been 
seen,  the  waiters  at  some  of  the  entertainments  in  his  house  in  Dublin  were 
bailiffs  in  disguise  ;  arrest  dogged  his  fleeing  footsteps  wherever  he  went, 
and  arrest  meant  social,  professional,  political  death.  The  hungry  army  of 
his  creditors  watched  the  rise  and  fall  of  his  chequered  fortunes  with  the 
vv'olfish  glare  of  peasant  depositors  in  a  shaky  bank ;  the  least  slip  or  mishap, 
and  they  were  down  upon  him,  and  then  chaos  was  come  again.  It  was 
possible  that  fate  had  a  darker  future  for  him  than  even  enforced  exile. 
How  far  he  was  acquainted  with  the  financial  enterprises  of  John  Sadleir 
is  not  known,  nor  how  deeply  he  was  involved  in  the  embezzlements  of  Mr. 
Edmund  OTlaherty.  But  he  was  an  intimate  and  a  debtor  of  the  two 
men,  and  might  well  be  implicated  in  some  of  their  misdeeds.  In  his 
darker  hours  he  may  have  shuddered  at  the  thought  that  he  had  brought 
himself  within  the  reach  of  the  criminal  law.  The  judicial  bench  or  the 
convict's  dock — these  were  the  dread  stakes  that  awaited  the  result  of  the 
game. 


THE  GREAT  BETRAYAL.  95 

And  the  game  was  one  of  the  wildest  chance.  The  whole  national  press 
of  the  country  was  against  him.  Sadleir  had  established  a  paper  called 
the  Catholic  Telegraph.  It  was  a  journal  of  ultra-religious  fervour,  went 
into  fits  of  lunacy  over  the  Titles  Bill,  and  while  upholding  Sadleir  and 
Keogh  as  the  spotless  champions  of  the  Church,  shook  its  head  sadly  over 
the  orthodoxy  of  Gavan  Duffy  and  the  other  advocates  of  Tenant  Right. 
But  the  Catholic  Telegrajyh  had  not  the  power  of  the  national  journals, 
and  day  after  day  the  FreemavUs  Journal,  week  after  week  the  Nation, 
dogged  the  utterances,  watched  the  shifts,  exposed  the  devices  of  Sadleir 
and  Keogh.  The  overwhelming  majority  of  the  country,  too,  believed  in 
the  Tenant  Highters,  and  disbelieved  in  the  Catholic  champions.  Against 
this  mighty  combination  in  front,  Keogh  had  in  his  flank  the  few  desperate 
shopkeepers  of  Athlone,  whom  his  money  had  bought,  and  the  money  of 
another  man  could  buy  again.  Thus  attacked  in  front  and  behind,  and 
from  all  sides,  he  had  no  weapons  of  defence  but  his  tongue,  his  brazen 
audacity,  his  desperate  courage,  and  the  adhesion  or  neutrality  of  a  certain 
number  of  Catholic  bishops. 

These  facts  will  explain  to  the  reader  the  strange  manoeuvres  Keogh  had 
to  employ.  The  thing  above  all  things  he  wanted  w^as  office  ;  the  thing 
he  was  called  above  all  things  to  forswear  was  office.  At  all  the  meetings, 
then,  whether  of  the  Catholic  Defence  Association  or  the  Tenant  League, 
he  was  bound  to  be  loud  above  all  others  in  the  pledge  against  taking 
ofiice. 

*  As  I  said,  Whigs  or  Tories,  Peelites  or  Protectionists,'  he  said  to  his 
constituents  at  Athlone  in  the  speech  already  alluded  to,  in  which  he  paid 
Archbishop  MacHale  such  fulsome  compliments,  '  are  all  the  same  to  me. 
...  I  know  that  in  the  career  in  which  we  are  engaged  we  will  have  to 
meet  open  hostility.  That  we  can  do.  We  had,  and  I  know  we  will  have 
again,  treacherous  friends.  These  also  we  cp^n  dispose  of.  I  will  fight  for 
my  religion  and  my  country,  scorning  and  defying  calumny,  meeting  boldlj'' 
honourable  foes,  seeking  out  treacheroas  friends  ;  and,  as  long  as  I  have 
the  confidence  of  the  people,  I  declare  in  the  most  solemn  manner,  before 
this  august  assembly,  I  shall  not  regard  any  party.  /  knoio  that  the  road 
I  take  does  not  lead  to  preferment.  I  do  not  belong  to  the  Whigs  ;  / 
never  icill  belong  to  the  Whigs.  I  do  not  belong  to  the  Tories  ;  /  never 
will  have  anything  to  do  with  them.'' 

Thus  he  had  separated  himself  from  the  two  great  parties  in  the  English 
Parliament.  There  was,  however,  a  third  party  in  the  House  of  Commons, 
which  was  one  of  its  most  noticeable  and  important  elements.  This  was 
the  party  of  the  Peehtes — the  party  under  whose  banner  Keogh  had  fought 
when  first  he  stood  for  Athlone.  Prom  that  party  also  the  incorruptible 
patriot  cut  himself  oflf. 

'I  have  read  in  the  newspapers  this  morning,'  he  said,  *that  Mr. 
Frederick  Peel  has  joined  the  Whig  Government,  and  that  it  is  likely  men 
of  whose  acquaintance  I  am  proud,  will  become  component  parts  of  the 
Administration.  Here,  in  the  presence  of  my  constituents  and  my  country 
- — and  I  hope  I  am  not  so  base  a^  man  as  to  make  an  avowal  which  could  be 
contradicted  to-morrow,  if  I  was  capable  of  doing  that  which  is  insinuated 
against  me — I  solemnly  declare,  if  there  was  a  Peelite  Administration  in 
office  to-morrow  it  would  be  nothing  to  me.  ...  If  all  the  Peelites  in  the 


95  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT, 

House  joined  the  Whig  Administration,  /  xvoiild  he  their  unmitigated,  their 
untiring,  their  indefatigable  opjwnent,  until  we  obtain  full  justice.'-^ 

And  then,  to  be  completely  explicit,  he  went  on  to  define  what  he  meant 
by  the  '  full  justice,'  the  attainment  of  which  should  precede  any  accept- 
ance  of  office. 

'  And  what  is  that  justice  ?  I  can  state  the  terms  of  it  weH.  I  will  not 
support  any  party  which  will  not  make  it  the  first  ingredient  of  their 
political  existence  to  repeal  the  Ecclesiastic?J  Titles  Bill.  I  will  not  join 
any  party  which  does  not  go  much  farther  than  that.  I  will  have  nothing 
to  do  with  any  party  which,  without  interfering  with  the  religious  belief  of 
the  Protestant  population,  will  not  consent  to  remove  fi'om  off  the  Catholics 
of  this  county  the  intolerable  burden  of  sustaining  the  Church  Establish- 
ment with  which  they  are  not  in  communion.  . . .  And  .  . .  I  v:ill  not  supiport 
any  'political  party  which  does  not  make  it  part  of  its  political  creed  to  do 
all  justice  to  the  tenant  in  Ireland.  I  will  not  support  any  party  xohich 
icill  not  place  on  a  satisfactory  footing  the  relations  of  landlord  and 
tenant.'  ^ 

Nothing  could  be  more  explicit  than  this  language,  nothing  more  binding 
than  those  pledges  ;  the  whole  gospel  of  the  Tenant  League,  and  even 
something  more,  was  subscribed  to  by  Mr.  Keogh.  And  yet — and  yet  the 
Tenant  Leaguers  were  suspicious.  The  Freeman''s  Journal  and  the  Nation 
still  openly  expressed  their  want  of  faith  in  even  these  solemn  j)ledges  of 
the  champions  of  religion.  An  incident  confirmed  these  doubts.  In 
[February,  1852,  Lord  John  Russell  was  defeated  by  the  combination  of 
Lord  Palmerston  with  the  Conservatives  on  the  Militia  Bill,  and  the  first 
Derby-Disraeli  Administration  came  into  office.  Dr.  Maurice  Power,  M.P. 
for  Cork,  was  offered  and  accepted  office  as  Governor  of  St.  Lucia.  Dr. 
Power  was  a  foremost  and  active  member  of  the  'Irish  Brigade  ;'  and  at 
once  the  Tenant  Leaguers  foretold  that  as  Power  had  gone,  so  also  would 
go  Sadleir  and  Keogh.  These  doubts  were  finally  expressed  to  Keogh's 
face. 

Immediately  after  the  promotion  of  Power,  Keogh  and  Sadleir  started  Mr. 
Vincent  Scully,  a  nephew  of  Sadleir,  as  their  candidate.  On  Monday, 
March  8,  1852,  Keogh  was  present  at  a  meeting  in  the  city  of  Cork  in 
support  of  Mr.  Scully.  He  had  been  assailed  with  even  more  than  its 
usual  vigour  in  that  week's  issue  of  the  Nation.  Mr.  McCarthy  Downing, 
who  long  years  afterwards  was  mem.ber  for  County  Cork,  belonged  to  the 
Tenant  Pighters,  and  at  this  meeting  openly  expressed  his  doubts  of  the 
honesty  of  Keogh  and  Sadleir  and  the  '  Irish  Brigade.' 

*  I  will  tell  the  meeting  fairly  a,nd  honestly,'  said  Mr.  Downing,  '  that  I 
believe  the  Irish  Brigade  are  not  sincere  advocates  of  the  Tenant  Right 
question.  I  state  that,  and  I  believe  it  is  in  the  presence  of  two  of  them. 
I  attended  two  great  meetings  in  the  Music  Hall  in  Dublin,  at  the  inaugu- 
ration of  the  Tenant  League,  at  my  o'wn  expense,  when  a  deputation 
waited  upon  the  Brigade  to  attend  the  meeting,  and  I  protest  I  never  saw 
a  beast  drawn  to  the  slaughter-house  by  the  butcher  to  receive  the  knife 
with  more  difficulty  than  there  v/as  in  bringing  to  that  meeting  the 
members  of  the  Irish  Brigade.'"^ 

*  '  A  Record  of  Trnitorism  ;  or,  The  Pelitical  Life  and  Adventures  of  Mr.  Justico 
Keogh,'  by  T.  D.  Sullivan,  p,  5. 
2  lb.,  pp.  5,  6.  3  ii,.,  p.  7. 


THE  GREAT  BETRAYAL.  97 

Then  up  mse  Mr.  Keogh,'  writes  A.  M.  Sullivan,^  'and  never,  perhaps, were 
his  marvellous  gifts  more  requisite  than  at  this  critical  moment.  The  future 
fate  and  fortunes  of  his  leaders  and  party  hung-  on  the  turn  affairs  might  take 
at  this  meeting,  an  open  challenge  and  public  charge  having  been  thus  flung 
down  against  them.  There  were  a  few  hostile  cries  when  he  stood  up,  bub 
silence  was  after  a  while  obtained.  With  flushed  countenance  and  heaving 
breast  he  burst  forth  in  these  words  : 

'  "Great  God  !"  he  exclaimed,  "in  this  assemblage  of  Irishmen,  have  yon 
found  that  those  who  are  most  ready  to  take  every  pledge  have  been  the 
most  sincere  in  perseverance  to  the  end  ?  or  have  you  not  rather  seen  that 
they  who,  like  myself,  went  into  Parliament  perfectly  unpledged,  not 
supported  by  the  popular  voice,  but  in  the  face  of  popular  acclaim,  vv^hen 
the  time  for  trial  comes  are  not  found  wanting  %  I  declare  myself  in  the 
presence  of  the  bishops  of  Ireland,  and  of  my  colleagues  in  Parliament, 
that  let  the  Minister  of  the  day  be  whom  he  may — let  him  be  the  Earl  of 
Derby,  let  him  be  Sir  James  Graham,  or  Lord  John  Russell — it  was  all  the 
same  to  us  ;  and,  so  help  me  God,  no  matter  who  the  Minister  may  be,  no 
matter  who  the  party  in  power  may  be,  I  will  neither  support  that  Minister 
nor  that  party,  unless  he  comes  into  power  prepared  to  carry  the  measures 
which  universal  popular  Ireland  demands.  I  have  abandoned  my  own 
profession  to  join  in  cementing  and  forming  an  Irish  Parliamentary  Party. 
That  has  been  my  ambition.  It  may  be  a  base  one.  I  think  it  an  honour- 
able one.  I  have  seconded  the  proposition  of  Mr.  Sharman  Crawford  in 
the  House  of  Commons,  I  have  met  the  Minister  upon  it  to  the  utmost 
extent  of  my  limited  abilities,  at  a  moment  when  disunion  was  not  ex- 
pected. .  So  help  me  God  !  upon  that  and  every  other  question  to  which  I 
have  given  my  adhesion  I  will  be — and  I  know  I  may  say  that  every  one 
of  my  friends  is  as  determined  as  myself — an  unflinching,  undeviating,  un- 
alterable supporter  of  it." 

*  No  wonder,'  writes  A.  M.  Sullivan,  continuing  his  description  of  the 
scene,  '  the  assemblage,  who  had  listened  as  if  spellbound  while  he  spoke, 
sprang  to  their  feet,  and  with  vociferous  cheering  atoned  for  their  previous 
doubts  of  the  man  whose  oath  had  now  sealed  his  public  principles.'^ 

In  the  midst  of  this  struggle  between  the  different  sections  of  the 
Irish  members,  the  Derby-Disraeli  Ministry  went  to  the  country.  At  the 
General  Election  in  Ireland  there  were  four  parties.  Roughly,  the  candi- 
dates may  be  divided  into  Tories  and  Whigs,  pledged  to  either  of  the  two 
great  English  parties,  the  Tenant  Leaguers,  and  what  were  known  as  the 
Catholic  Defenders.  The  latter  were  the  men  who  were  pushing  the 
sectarian  questions  to  the  front  in  order  to  drive  the  Land  Question  to  the 
rear,  and  they  were  under  the  direction,  secretly  or  openly,  of  the  Keogh- 
Sadleir  brigade.  In  some  constituencies  the  two  sections  came  into 
collision ;  but  the  final  result  was  a  drawn  battle,  in  which  both  sides 
gained  and  lost  something. 

Some  of  the  most  important  leaders  of  the  Tenant  Leaguers  had  been 
returned.  Gavan  Duffy  was  elected  for  New  Ross,  John  Francis  Maguire 
for  Dungarvan,  George  Henry  Moore  for  the  county  of  Mayo,  and  Frederic 
Lucas  for  the  county  of  Meath.  Moore  was  a  great  addition  to  the 
strength  of  the  Tenant  Leaguers.  A  landlord,  he  yet  sjrmpathized 
vehemently  with  the  demand  of  the  tenants  for  security  in  their  holdings. 

'  '  New  Ireland,'  p.  161.  «  i&.,  p.  162. 


98  TBB  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

He  had  also  oratorical  gifts  pf  a  high  order,  and  his  political  honesty  was 
inflexible.  Frederic  Luoas,  an  Englishman  and  a  Protestant  by  birth,  had 
changed  Doth  his  religious  and  political  faith  ;  he  had  become  a  Catholic 
and  an  Irish  Nationalist.  Connected  by  marriage  with  Mr.  John  Bright,  Sj 
man  of  independent  fortune,  and  of  a  pure  and  lofty  character,  he  held 
high  rank  in  his  party,  and  his  name  still  has  its  place  in  the  affections  of 
che  Irish  people.  He  was  proprietor  of  the  Tablet,  a  journal  which  still 
exists.  The  Tablet  at  this  period  was  a  strongly  national  journal,  and 
was  one  of  the  constant  assailants  of  Keogh  and  Sadleir.  There  was  one 
important  defeat.  Dr.  (afterwards  Sir  John)  Gray,  proprietor  of  the 
Freeman's  Journal^  was  defeated  at  Monaghan.  The  Irish  Brigade  was 
entirely  successful.  Sadleir  and  his  three  relatives,  Francis  and  Vincent 
Scully  and  Robert  Keatinge,  were  re-elected  ;  James,  his  brother — of 
whom  more  anon — was  elected  for  Tipperary  ;  Anthony  O'Flaherty  was 
re-elected  for  Gahvay ;  Mr.  Monsell  for  Limerick  ;  and  Keogh  for 
Athlone. 

In  the  General  Election  Keogh  took  a  prominent  and  active  part.  His 
tongue  was  at  the  service  of  everybody  who  fought  tinder  the  flag  of  the 
Catholic  Defence  Association — that  is,  of  John  Sadleir  and  himself.  His 
speeches  were  remarkable,  even  in  that  vituperative  period,  for  the  violence 
of  their  language,  the  brutality  and  criminality  of  his  appeals  to  the  mob. 
One  of  his  speeches  in  particular  became  the  object  of  notice.  In  West- 
meath  the  struggle  was  between  Captain  Magan,  a  friend  and  associate  of 
Keogh,  and  Sir  R.  Levinge,  a  local  landlord.  In  the  town  of  Moate,  Keogh 
made  a  speech  in  favour  of  Captain  Magan,  and  in  the  course  of  that 
speech  he  used  these  words  : 

'  Boys,  we  are  in  the  midst  of  a  delightful  summer,  when  the  days  are 
long  and  the  nights  are  short  ;  next  comes  autumn,  when  the  days  and 
nights  are  of  equal  length  ;  but  next  comes  dreary  winter,  v/hen  the  days 
are  short  and  the  nights  long  :  and  woe  be  to  those,  during  those  long 
nights,  who  vote  for  Sir  Kicharu  Levinge  at  the  present  election.'^ 

These  terrible  words  derived  additional  significance  from  the  surround- 
ings under  which  they  were  delivered,  Westmeath  is  one  of  the  counties 
where  eviction  has  raged  m^ost  fiercely,  with  most  widespread  desolation, 
with  circumstances  of  tragic  suSering.  To-day,  one  driving  through  West- 
rnoath  passes  for  miles  through  a  land  bare  of  houses  or  human  beings,  and 
studded  all  around  with  the  skeleton  walls  of  ruined  homes — silent  memorials 
of  the  dread  times  through  which  the  country  has  passed.  The  people  of 
the  county  are  a  fierce  and  stalwart  breed,  and  resisted  doggedly,  though 
impotently,  their  tyrants.  In  Westmeath,  accordingly,  the  Ribbon  and 
other  societies,  bound  by  oath  to  meet  eviction  with  assassination,  used  to 
be  particularly  strong  ;  and  the  county  has  been  the  scene  of  some  of  the 
most  terrible  murders,  and  occasionally  of  the  most  violent  epidemics  of 
crime.  It  was  more  than  probable  that,  among  the  audience  to  which  these 
words  were  addressed,  there  were  many  men  goaded  to  blind  fury  by  evic- 
tion, suft'ered  or  impending,  and  organized  with  the  object  of  avenging 
their  wrongs  in  blood. 

The  election  of  1852  was  at  last  over,  and  the  Tenant  Leaguers  were  the 
chief  victors.  They  had  not  been  able  to  exclude  the  Catholic  Defenders, 
but  they  had  compelled  them  to  swallow  the  Tenant  League  pledge.  The 
country  instinctively  felt  the  soundness  of  the  doctrine,  that  to  beg  for 

*  '  New  Ireland,'  p.  167. 


THE  GREA  T  BETRA  VAL.  gg 

office  from  the  Minister  and  to  demand  justice  for  the  tenant  were  irrecon- 
cilable positions  ;  and  accordingly  the  pledge  against  taking  office,  except 
from  a  Government  that  made  the  settlement  of  the  relations  between 
landlord  and  tenant  a  Cabinet  question,  was  enforced  from  every  candidate 
for  a  popular  constituency.  When,  accordingly,  the  Leaguers  held  a  Tenant 
Right  Conference  on  September  8,  1S52,  all  the  Irish  members  returned  on 
popular  principles — whether  as  Tenant  Righters  or  as  Catholic  Defenders 
— were  compelled  to  attend.  There  were  forty  Irish  members  present  in 
all.  A  resolution  was  proposed  which  put  into  definite  form  the  pledge 
already  taken  at  the  hustings.     It  was  in  these  words  : 

Resolved  :  That  in  the  opinion  of  this  conference  it  is  essential  to  the 
proper  management  of  this  cause  that  the  Members  of  Parliament  who 
have  been  returned  on  Tenant  Right  principles  should  hold  themselves  per- 
fectly independent  of,  and  in  opposition  to,  all  Governments  which  do  not 
make  it  part  of  their  policy,  and  a  Cabinet  question,  to  give  to  the  tenantry 
of  Ireland  a  measure  embod^'ing  the  principles  of  Mr.  Sharman  Crawford's 
Bill.' 

This  resolution  was  proposed  by  Keogh  himself  ;  it  was  carried  with  but 
one  dissentient — Mr.  Burke  Roche,  M.P.,  afterwards  Lord  Fermoy — '  amid 
great  cheering. '^ 

The  position  of  parties  in  the  House  of  Commons  at  the  moment  rendered 
it  perfectly  possible  to  carry  out  this  policy  to  a  successful  issue.  There 
were  then  three  parties  :  the  Whigs,  under  Lord  John  Russell  ;  the 
Protectionist  Conservatives,  tinder  Mr.  Disraeli  ;  and  the  Peelites.  No  one 
of  these  three  parties  had  come  back  from  the  election  sufficiently  powerful 
to  govern  by  itself,  and  a  Coalition  Ministry  was  plainly  the  only  one 
possible.  The  Irish  Party,  numbering  between  forty  and  fifty  members, 
had  it  in  their  power,  if  they  preserved  their  unity,  to  make  or  mar  any 
Ministry  that  could  be  formed  by  either  of  these  contending  sections  ;  they 
were  absolute  masters  of  the  situation.  The  Peelites  had,  as  has  been  seen, 
opposed  the  Ecclesiastical  Titles  Bill,  and  that  gave  them  a  place  in  the  con- 
fidence of  the  Irish  people.  It  was  the  universal  expectation  in  Ireland  that 
the  Tenant  Leaguers  would  form  a  coalition  with  the  Peelites,  based  on  the 
repeal  of  the  Titles  Act,  and  the  grant  of  security  of  tenure  to  the  tenants. 

Parliament  met  on  November  4,  1852  ;  on  Friday,  December  17  follow- 
ing, the  Budget  of  Mr.  Disraeli  was  rejected  by  a  combination  of  different 
parties,  and  the  Ministry  resigned.  The  words  of  A.  M.  Sullivan,  who  was 
an  active  politician  at  the  period,  best  describe  what  followed  : 

'  A  shout  went  up  from  Ireland.  A  thrill  of  the  wildest  excitement 
shook  the  island  from  the  centre  to  the  sea.  Now  joy  and  triumph — now 
torturing  doubt — now  the  very  agony  of  suspense,  prevailed.  What  would 
the  Irish  Party  do  ?  Here  was  the  crisis  which  was  to  shame  their  oaths  or 
prove  them  true.  No  Liberal  or  composite  Administration  was  possible 
without  them,  and  their  demand  was  one  no  Minister  had  ever  deemed  to 
be  just.  What  would  the  Irish  members  do  ?  The  fate  of  the  new 
Ministry,  the  fate  of  Ireland,  was  in  their  hands, 

'  As  terrible  deeds  are  said  to  be  sometimes  preceded  by  a  mysterious  ap- 
prehension, so  in  the  last  week  of  that  old  year  a  vague  gloom  chilled  every 
heart.  The  news  from  London  was  panted  for,  hour  by  hour.  At  length 
the  blow  fell.  Tidings  of  treason  and  disaster  came.  The  Brigade  was 
sold  to  Lord  Aberdeen  !  John  Sadleir  was  Lord  of  the  Treasury  !  William 
^  T.  D.  Sullivan's  '  Record,"  p.  7. 


,  roo  7 HE  PARNELL  MOVEAIEN'T. 

Keogh  was  Irish  Solicitor-General !  Edmund  OTlaherty  was  Commissiotier 
of  Income-Tax  !  And  so  on.  The  English  people,  fortunately  accustomed 
for  centuries  to  exercise  the  functions  of  political  life,  may  well  be  unable 
to  comprehend  the  paralysis  which  followed  this  blow  in  Ireland.  The 
merchant  of  many  ships  may  bear  with  composure  the  wreck  of  one.  But 
here  was  an  argosy,  freighted  with  the  last  and  most  precious  hopes  of  a 
people  already  on  the  verge  of  ruin  and  despair,  scuttled  before  their  eyes 
by  the  men  who  had  called  on  the  Most  High  God  to  witness  their  fidelity  ! 
The  Irish  tenantry  had  played  their  last  stake  and  lost.  A  despairing 
stupor  like  to  that  of  the  Famine  time  shrouded  the  land.  Notices  to  quit 
fell  "like  snowflakes  "  all  over  the  counties  where  the  hapless  farmeis 
had  "  refused  the  landlord  "  and  voted  for  a  Brigadier.  But  the  banker- 
politician  had  won.  His  accustomed  success  had  attended  him.  He  was 
not  as  yet  a  peer,  but  he  was  a  Treasury  Lord.  From  their  seats  on  the 
Treasury  bench  he  and  his  comrade,  "the  Solicitor-General,"  could  smile 
calmly  at  the  accusing  countenances  of  Duffy  and  Moore  and  Lucas.  The 
New  Year's  chimes  rang  in  the  triumph  of  John  Sadleir's  daring  ambition. 
Did  no  dismal  minor  tone,  like  mournful  funeral  knell,  presage  the  sequel 
that  was  now  so  near  at  hand  ?'  ■"■ 

But  all  was  not  yet  lost.  The  new  officials  had  to  go  before  their  con- 
stituencies for  re-election  ;  and,  poor  as  was  the  opinion  of  Irish  patriots  of 
the  political  morality  of  the  constituencies  of  that  period,  it  was  hoped  that 
the  people  would  not  be  ready  to  condone  treason  so  flagrant  and  so  disas- 
trous. It  was  resolved  by  the  Tenant  Leagaie  to  oppose  the  return  both  of 
Keogh  for  Athlone  and  Sadleir  for  Carlow,  and  deputations  were  appointed 
to  go  to  both  places.  But  when  the  deputations  arrived  at  the  constituen- 
cies they  were  astounded  and  shocked  to  find  that,  Avhile  all  the  rest  of  the 
country  was  loud  in  its  curses  or  desperate  in  its  wail  over  the  destruction  of 
national  hopes,  the  constituencies  thought  either  that  nothing  particular 
had  happened,  or  that  the  traitors  were  to  be  congratulated  on  having  got  at 
the  money  and  the  patronage  of  the  Government,  and  their  constituents  to 
be  equally  congratulated  on  their  prospect  of  obtaining  a  share  of  the  spoil. 
The  state  of  feeling  in  Athlone  and  Carlow  at  this  crisis  of  Irish  history  is 
one  of  the  saddest  proofs  of  the  degradation  which  poverty  and  alien  rule 
can  bring  about,  even  in  a  country  so  undying  as  Ireland  in  the  ardour  of 
its  struggle  against  oppression.  In  Athlone  in  particular  had  bribery, 
poverty,  and  despair  done  their  work  effectively.  The  desperately  needy 
voters  saw,  in  a  Government  official,  a  man  the  better  able  to  bribe  them- 
selves, and  to  obtain  situations  for  their  sons.  These  were  the  days  before 
open  competition,  and  nomination  to  a  Civil  Service  situation  was  the 
appanage  of  the  Parliamentary  representative,  and  one  of  his  chief  means  of 
advancing  his  interests  with  his  constituents.  This  was  especially  the  case 
in  Ireland.  Who  but  an  Irishman  can  know  the  full  hopelessness  of  the 
youth  of  one  born  in  the  lower  middle-class  of  an  Irish  country  town  ?  At 
home  he  sees  squalor,  the  saddened  foreheads  of  his  parents,  consumed  by 
mean  cares,  by  the  bitter  struggle  to  keep  up  appearances,  by  climbing  Tip 
the  ever-climbing  wave  of  pecuniary  embarrassment,  in  towns  where  the 
years  bring  dwindling  poiDuIation,  decreasing  trade,  more  hopeless  effort. 
To  the  youth  himself  the  future  is  utter  darkness  and  dread  emptiness. 
The  shops,  advancing  in  many  cases  to  bankruptcy,  offer  but  small  wages  ; 
of  manufactories,  the  young  Irishman's   only  knowledge   is   through  the 

^  'New  Ireland,'  pp.  167,  163. 


THE  GREAT  BETRAYAL.  loi 

crumbling  rums  of  the  wool -mill  or  the  distillery  ;  he  can  become  a  doctor 
only  if  he  have  the  luck  to  live  in  a  town  with  a  Queen's  College  ;  the  legal 
profession,  with  its  dinners  in  London  and  fees,  used  to  be  as  inaccessible  as 
a,  throne  ;  and  so  it  is  that  in  Ireland,  perhaps  alone  of  all  countries,  the 
limbs  even  of  youth  are  shackled,  and  its  ardent  spirit  caged.  The  one 
pursuit  the  Act  of  Union  has  left  to  the  youth  of  Ireland  is  the  Civil  Ser- 
vice. Thus  it  has  come  to  pass  that  in  Somerset  House,  at  St.  Martin's-le- 
Grand,  and  at  all  the  other  great  Civil  Service  establishments  of  London, 
so  great  a  proport  on  of  the  clerks  are  Irishmen.  Entrance  to  a  clerkship  in 
the  Civil  Service  ha  1  thus  come  to  be  regarded  by  the  Athlone  boy  as  the 
first  s  ep  on  the  golden  ladder  of  fortune.  Keogh  used  his  power  of  nomi- 
nation in  the  most  lavish  manner  ;  it  was  a  saying  in  Athlone  in  his  day 
that  every  young  fellow  who  could  or  could  not  write  his  name  had  obtained 
a  place  in  the  Customs,  or  some  other  of  the  public  departments.  It  vrill 
be  seen  that  the  use  which  Keogh  made  of  this  '  appointing  power '  was  one 
of  the  charges  which  were  brought  against  him  afterwards. 

This  was  the  state  of  feeling  by  which  the  ardent  spirits  of  the  Tenant 
League  found  themselves  confronted  when  they  reached  Athlone,  and  a 
similar  state  of  things  awaited  those  who  went  to  Carlow.  But  the  corrup- 
tion of  the  people  proved  less  shocking  than  the  attitude  of  the  clergy  ;  they 
also  not  only  condoned  but  applauded  the  action  of  the  traitors.  An  appeal 
was  made  by  the  Tenant  Leaguers  to  the  bishops.  From  Dr.  MacHale, 
Archbishop  of  Tuam,  from  the  Bishop  of  Meath,  and  from  the  Bishop  of 
Killala,  there  came  prompt  and  emphatic  condemnation  of  the  acts  of 
Keogh  and  Sadleir.  This  was  good  ;  but  there  were  other  prelates  whose 
disapproval  was  more  urgently  required,  and  would  have  been  decisive. 

Dr.  Cullen  had  been  elevated  from  the  See  of  Armagh  to  the  Arch- 
bishopric of  Dublin,  and  had  at  the  same  time  been  appointed  Papal  Legate. 
The  whole  country  waited  for  a  word  from  the  new  prelate,  but  Dr.  Cullen 
obstinately  held  his  peace,  and  silence,  at  the  period,  meant  approval.  In 
Athlone  the  bishop  took  even  stronger  action  in  favour  of  Keogh.  His 
name  was  Dr.  Bro\\Tie,  and  he  had  a  reputation  beyond  that  of  any  other 
bishop  of  the  period  for  gentleness  and  piety.  O'Connell  had  called  him 
the  '  Dove  of  Elphin,'  and  by  this  name  he  was  familiar  and  dear  to  the 
people  of  his  diocese.  I  can  remember  him  as  he  used  to  sit  in  the  parish 
chapel  in  Athlone  ;  a  man  of  venerable  appearance,  with  a  singular  resem- 
blance to  the  pictures  of  some  of  the  saints  whose  looks  the  great  painters 
have  made  immortal.  The  people  of  his  diocese  had  for  him  a  respect  that 
amounted  almost  to  worship,  and  in  Athlone  he  was  especially  beloved. 
The  people  of  the  town  had  got  it  into  their  heads  that  Athlone  really  held 
the  first  place  in  his  heart ;  and  there  was  an  understanding  that,  when  he 
died,  Athlone  would  be  privileged  to  receive  his  sainted  remains.  The  man 
who  gained  the  support  of  the  bishop  was  certain  of  election,  and  the 
bishop  gave  his  support  to  Keogh.  The  result  of  this  difference  of  attitude 
produced  even  among  the  priests  and  bishops  themselves  a  bitterness  of 
feeling  that  prevailed  for  many  years,  and  between  two  of  the  bishops,  Dr. 
MacHale  and  Cardinal  Cullen,  it  led  to  an  estrangement  that  closed  only 
with  the  grave.  In  every  class,  in  fact,  the  fight  was  fought  out  with  the 
frenzy  which  leads  an  armed  population  from  words  to  civil  war. 

Meantime,  while  the  whole  country  was  looking  with  such  desperate 
tension  to  the  result  of  the  contest  in  Athlone,  Keogh  was  faced  by  a  diffi- 
culty that  threatened  to  wreck  all.  The  reader  knows  of  the  property 
qualification  of  this  period  ;  it  was  charged  against  Keogh  that  he  had  no% 


102  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT, 

this  qualification,  and  a  committee  of  the  House  of  Commons  had  been 
appointed  to  investigate  the  charge.  In  Ireland,  the  investigation  was 
watched  with  a  feeling  of  suspense,  not  unmixed  with  amusement.  The 
financial  difficulties  of  Keogh  were  notorious  ;  it  was  known  that,  instead 
of  having  £300  a  year  over  and  above  all  incumbrances,  he  was  in  a  shore- 
less sea  of  debt,  and  was  not  the  possessor  of  three  hundred  pence  that  he 
could  call  his  own.  But  he  swore  bravely  before  the  committee.  The  com- 
mittee went  through  complicated  rolls  of  bank  bills,  by  which  the  briefless 
barrister  had  been  able  to  keephimself  afloat  and  live  the  life  of  the  Member 
of  Parliament ;  and  in  the  end,  after  the  easy  fashion  of  those  good  old 
days,  held  that  he  had  proved  his  qualification,  and  so  he  was  free  to  stand 
for  Athlone.  The  influence  of  the  bishop,^  the  sums  of  money  Keogh  had  at 
his  disposal,  with  the  prosperous  turn  in  his  fortunes,  and  a  system  of 
organized  mob  violence,  were  greatly  in  his  favour.  Mr.  Thomas  Norton, 
his  opponent,  was  an  able  man — he  was  known  many  years  afterwards  as  a 
man  of  some  social  and  political  prominence  in  London  society,  as  Master  of 
the  Queen's  Bench,  and  Chairman  of  the  Political  Committee  of  the  Preform 
Club  ;  but,  owing  to  the  desertion  of  his  own  committee,  some  of  whom 
were  the  very  first  to  vote  for  Keogh,  Norton  resioTied  during  the  polling- 
day,  and  Keogh  was  returned,  the  figures  standing  thus  :  Keogh,  79 ; 
Norton,  40.^ 

I  In  his  speech  on  the  hustings,  Keogh  made  the  following  allusion  to  the  attitude 
of  the  bishop  :  '  Since  I  came  into  town,  no  matter  where  I  went,  no  matter  by  whom 
I  was  accompanied,  whetiier  in  the  town  or  around  the  town,  upon  the  hill-side  or 
the  ditch-side,  on  the  public  road  or  the  narrow  by-way,  or  in  any  other  imaginable 
place,  I  have  been  received  as  the  man  of  the  people.  How  many  hundred  women 
have  said  this  morning,  "  May  God  bless  you  !"  How  many  hundred  pretty  girls 
have  wished  me  success  !'  (A  female  voice — '  You  have  the  bishop's  blessing,  which 
is  better  than  all.')  Mr.  Keogh  :  '  Yes  ;  and  I  am  authorized  to  announce  to  you,  and 
he  does  not  shrink  from  the  announcement— you  all  know  it ;  you  all  saw  it — that  I 
have  the  support,  the  confidence,  the  kind  wishes,  and  the  anxious  throbbing  expect- 
ations for  my  success  of  my  revered  friend  the  Roman  Catholic  bishop  of  this 
diocese." — Quoted  in  T.  D.  Sullivan's  '  Record,'  p.  20. 

^  It  is  hard  to  bring  home  to  the  mind  of  any  but  an  Irish  reader  the  gigantic  con- 
sequences on  the  future  of  Ireland  which  the  action  of  Keogh  produced,  and  it  is 
necessarily  as  hard  to  understand  the  fierce  hatred  which  was  then  and  ever  after- 
wards felt  for  him  by  the  Irish  people.  The  foUov/ing  quotation  from  the  Nation  of 
the  period  will  perhaps  do  something  to  bring  home  to  the  reader  of  to-day  the  ideas, 
and  still  more  the  temper,  of  the  time.  It  appeared  on  April  23,  1853,  and  was  in 
reply  to  Keogh's  speech  on  the  hustings  at  Athlone  :  '  Mr.  William  Keogh  has  given 
tongue  at  last.  For  five  months  he  has  kept  the  silence  of  conscious  infamy,  while 
the  whole  island  has  been  ringing  with  his  shame.  For  five  months  the  highest  and 
the  holiest  voices  in  the  land  have  been  raised  to  accuse  and  to  curse  him,  and  he  has 
held  his  peace.  Words  that  would  have  made  an  honest  man's  blood  choke  him  have 
met  his  eyes  in  every  paper  he  read,  and  he  has  swallowed  them  without  retort.  He 
knew  at  the  time  that  he  dare  not  appear  in  an  assembly  of  honest  Irishmen,  or  he 
would  be  hooted  from  their  sight.  And  he  felt  still  nearer  the  touch  of  his  own 
ignominy.  In  the  Hall  of  the  Four  Courts,  at  his  swearing  in,  a  little  gaug  of  political 
blacklegs  replaced  the  crowded  array  of  the  bar  which  used  to  attend  the  inaugu- 
ration of  a  law  official  of  the  Crown.  As  he  has  driven  through  the  streets  of  Dublin 
his  furtive  eye  seemed  to  dread  the  fall  of  a  dead  cat  or  a  shower  of  rotten  eggs.  For 
five  months  of  place  and  power  and  emolument  he  has  seen  hatred  and  contempt  of 
him  wherever  he  turned.  To  remain  silent  in  such  a  storm  of  execrations  must  have 
been  hard  for  one  of  his  passionate  and  voluble  temper.  But  at  last  he  has  uttered 
himself.  At  last  all  the  bitterness  and  anger  which  had  been  fermenting  for  five 
months  in  his  heart  have  broken  loose.  And  it  has  been  like  lifting  a  sluice-gate  from 
a  sewer.  For  hours  he  spoke,  and  the  words  rolled  in  one  long  gush  of  impure  filth 
froba  his  lips.  For  hours  he  spoke,  and  spared  neither  truth  nor  decency  in  his  course. 
Bullying  abuse  that  would  demean  a  fishwoman,  false  scandal,  and  braggadocio,  and 
dastardly  innuendo  he  used,  and  used  without  stay  or  scruple.  .  .  .  There  is  a  diseasQ 
which  is  the  last  to  feed  upon  a  debauchee's  bad-tempered  frame— when  the  cousti- 


THE  GREAT  BETRAYAL.  103 

In  the  meantime  the  same  good  fortune  had  not  attended  the  other 
members  of  the  '  Brass  Band.'  John  Sadleir  had  stood  again  for  Carlow. 
Like  Keogh,  he  was  supported  by  large  sums  of  money  and  by  violent 
mobs.  He  got  a  letter  from  the  Bishop  of  Kildare  and  Leighlin  '  express- 
ing the  most  earnest  anxiety '  for  his  success  ;^  he  was  backed  by  the  priests. 
One  of  his  mobsmen  was  requested  by  the  Rev.  Father  Maher  to  keep 
quiet  and  not  disgrace  '  a  good  cause.  "^  In  spite  of  all  these  influences  he 
was  beaten  by  Mr.  Alexander^  the  Conservative  candidate,  by  a  majority 
of  six. 

Keogh,  though  he  had  won  the  election  at  Athlone,  was  not  yet  safe. 
The  violence  of  his  temper,  the  unscrupulous  audacity  of  some  of  his  acts, 
his  terrible  speeches,  his  desperate  expedients,  had  all  been  made  notorious 
by  the  utterances  of  che  press,  and  his  conduct  was  brought  in  various 
ways  before  Parliament.  Gavan  Duffy  obtained  the  appointment  of  a 
committee,  known  as  the  '  Corruption  Committee,'  to  investigate  the 
charges  against  Keogh  and  others  of  having  used  their  position  to  make 
corrupt  promises  to  obtain  situations  through  their  influence  as  members 
of  Parhament.  Keogh,  appointed  originally  a  member  of  this  committee, 
was  obliged  to  resign  ;  the  evidence  against  him  became  so  strong  that  he 
had  to  pass  from  the  position  of  judge  to  that  of  accused.  The  facts  wero 
notorious  in  Athlone.  As  has  been  seen,  his  wholesale  promises  of  situa- 
tions were  one  of  many  reasons  why  he  had  been  able  to  overcome  all 
opposition  against  him  in  the  town.  Again  he  escaped  by  the  sheer  force 
of  audacious  lying.  One  of  the  charges  against  him  v^as  that  he  had 
induced  a  Colonel  Smith,  of  Athlone,  to  lend  him  £500  on  the  promise 
that  he  would  obtain  for  that  gentleman  a  stipendiary  magistracy,  and 
that  this  promise  he  had  failed  to  keep.  He  denied  every  one  of  these 
charges,  declared  that  the  money  raised  by  Smith  had  been  raised  in  the 

tution,  rotten  to  its  very  springs,  is  only  strong  enougli  to  secrete  vermin,  and  the 
unliappy  victim  lives  crav^ling,  sick,  and  ashamed  of  his  own  foul  existence.  By  this 
disease  Mr.  Keogh  has  chosen  to  illustrate  the  way  in  which  he  has  been  recently 
afflicted.  He  has  felt  the  morhus  pedicuiaris  of  his  own  igTiominy  itching  him  to  the 
bone,  and  he  says  that  we  infected  him  with  it.  In  an  ei^isodical  attack  upon  the 
Nation,  meant,  we  r; appose,  to  be  the  coarsest  and  the  foulest  passage  of  his  harangue, 
he  says  that,  "unable  to  slay,  and  afraid  to  stab,"  we  have  "tried  to  inflict  upon  hina 
the  morbus  pediculans."  We  thank  him  for  the  word.  The  metaphor  is  a  nasty  one. 
It  is  one  we  have  been  loth  to  apply.  But  he  has  invented  it,  and  let  it  stick  to  him. 
It  completely  illustrates  a  sense  of  degradation,  patent  and  foul,  and  set  in  a  natural 
quarantine  from  all  honest  men.  "Unable  to  slay"!  "What  does  the  gentleman 
mean?  His  character  is  dead,  decomposed — it  stinks.  We  do  not  estimate  how  far 
we  have  helped  to  scotch  it.  Let  it  rest.  But  "afraid"!  Afraid  of  what  ?  Afraid  of 
whom  ?  We  have  never  hesitated  to  express  the  greatest  contempt  for  Mr.  William 
Keogh's  character  when  there  was  occasion.  We  have  never  put  a  tooth  in  anything 
we  had  to  say  about  him.  We  have  stigmatized  his  conduct  in  the  very  broadest  and 
plainest  terms  we  could  find.  To  be  "  afraid  "  of  him  is  something  too  absurd  for  us 
to  conceive.  Afraid  of  a  charlatan,  afraid  of  a  cheat,  afraid  of  a  public  profligate  and 
liar  upon  his  oath,  afraid  of  the  greatest  political  scamj)  of  his  country,  and  the  type 
j)ar  excellence  of  Irish  demagogue  rascality !  Why,  there  are  some  men  whom  it 
requires  courage  to  differ  from  and  daring  to  assail.  And  we  believe  we  have  not 
wanted  either  upon  occasion.  But  this  paltry  adventurer,  who  would  be  nothing 
were  it  not  for  his  readiness,  his  flippancy,  his  contempt  of  scruples,  and  his  flow  of 
animal  spirits — whose  invective  is  only  a  deluge  of  dirt — whose  most  pretentious 
oratory  is  a  jumble  of  bog  Latin  and  flatulent  English — whose  character  has  been  the 
by-word  of  everybody  in  this  city  for  years  as  a  sort  of  political  Barnum— and  whosa 
legal  standing  is  on  a  level  with  his  ancestral  patrimony — the  Lord  deliver  us  froia 
fear  of  such  a  creature  as  that !' — Quoted  by  T.  D.  Sullivan,  '  Record,'  pp.  21,  22. 

'^  Dublin  Evening  Post.     Quoted  by  T.  D.  Sullivan,  '  Record,'  p.  14. 

»  T.  P.  Sullivan,  '  Record,'  p.  15. 


104  1^^  PARNELL  MOVEMENT^ 

Conservative  interest,  and  not  in  that  of  himself  personally,  and  repre 
sented  himself  as  having  remained  on  terms  of  intimacy  with  Smith  to  the 
day  of  his  death.  As  a  matter  of  fact.  Smith  was  driven  to  bankruptcy 
by  the  failure  of  Mr.  Keogh  to  keep  his  engagements,  bitterly  complained 
of  the  foul  treatment  he  had  received,  and  in  the  end  he  had  to  fly  from 
his  liabilities  to  America.  ^ 

But  this  Avas  not  the  most  serious  attack  made  upon  him.  The  reader 
will  remember  the  terrible  speech  in  recommendation  of  assassination 
which  he  had  delivered  to  the  Hibbonmen  of  Westmeatli.  The  Conservative 
press  of  Ireland  had  denounced  the  appointment  to  a  law  office  of  a  man 
capable  of  such  a  speech,  just  as  vehemently  as  the  Freeman^ s  Journal 
and  the  Nation.  '  No  Prime  Minister,'  wrote  the  Evening  Mail,  '  ever 
offered  a  more  audacious  insult  to  his  sovereign  than  Lord  Aberdeen  has 
done  in  naming  him  to  be  one  of  her  Majesty's  law  officers.'^  Conserva- 
tives took  up  the  same  position  in  the  House  of  Lords.  On  June  10,  Lord 
Westmeath  first  drew  attention  to  the  assassination  speech.  He  quoted 
the  terrible  words  already  mentioned,  in  which  a  contrast  was  drawn 
between  the  short  nights  of  summer,  the  longer  nights  of  autumn,  and  the 
still  longer  nights  of  winter,  with  the  significant  wind-up,  '  and  then  let 
everyone  remember  who  voted  for  Sir  ±i.  Levinge.'  (There  are  several 
versions  of  the  speech,  but  they  singularly  agree  in  essential  points.)  The 
Ministerial  speakers  had  nothing  to  reply  to  this  charge  ;  Lord  Aberdeen 
had  heard  nothing  of  them  ;  and  the  Marquis  of  Clanricarde  did  not  think 
this  was  language  which  the  House  of  Lords  should  be  called  upon  to  pay 
any  attention  to  !^ 

But  the  Conservative  Opposition  was  not  willing  to  allow  the  Ministry 
to  escape  so  easily.  Lord  Derby  thought  the  matter  did  not  deserve  to  be 
treated  so  '  lightly.'  It  was  a  serious  matter  if  such  language  had  been 
used  by  a  man  who  had  been  appointed  to  '  an  office  of  all  others  in  the 
world  which  was  connected  with  the  maintenance  of  the  law  and  the  sup- 
pression of  turbulence  and  violence  in  Ireland  ;'■*  and  Lord  Eglinton,  who 
had  just  ceased  to  be  Lord-Lieutenant  of  Ireland,  described  Keogh,  if  he 
used  this  language,  as  having  '  openly  recommended  assassination.'  The 
language  '  could  bear  no  other  construction  than  that  he  was  distinctly 
recommending  the  people  whom  he  was  addressing,  when  the  long  nights 
would  admit  of  it,  to  commit,  if  not  murder,  the  most  violent  outrages.'^ 

The  matter  again  came  up  on  June  17.  The  use  of  the  words  by  Keogh 
was  so  notorious  that  even  an  attempt  at  denial  filled  everybody  with  sur- 
prise. Two  magistrates,  the  rector  of  Moate,  where  the  speech  was  made, 
and  three  others,  wrote  to  emphatically  declare  that  they  had  heard  the  words 
recommending  assassination.  A  policeman  had  been  sent  to  report  the 
speeches  at  the  meeting.  '  I  have  no  more  doubt,'  added  the  Marquis  of 
Westmeath,  '  that  the  report  of  that  constable  may  be  found  on  the  table 
of  the  Lord-Lieutenant,  if  he  likes  to  look  for  it,  than  that  I  have  now  the 
use  of  my  right  hand.'^  But  the  Duke  of  Newcastle  did  not  produce  the 
report  of  the  constable  ;  his  only  defence  was  a  letter  from  Mr.  Keogh,  in 
which  he  did  not  deny  the  use  of  the  words.  He  confined  himself  to  the 
bold  statement  that  he  had  no  recollection  of  having  vised  them  ;  his  recol- 
lection was  confused  by  a  speech  that  *  did  not  occupy  five  minutes,'  and 
be  trusted  to  the  evidence  of  friends.     Then  a  letter  was  enclosed  from  a 

J  T,  D.  Sullivan's  ♦Record,'  pp,  39,  40.  ^  lb.,  p,  24.  3  ib.,  pp.  24,  25. 

4  lb.,  p.  26,  5  i^.  #  /6.,  pp.  27,  28. 


THE  GREAT  BETRAYAL.  105 

'  friend,'  declaring  that  Keogh  had  used  no  such  language.^  The  '  friend  * 
was  a  solicitor  named  R.  0.  Macnevin,  whose  timely  testimony  was  after- 
wards rewarded  by  the  Registrarship  in  the  court  of  Judge  Keogh.  This 
was  assuredly  a  very  weak  reply  to  so  grave  a  charge.  As  the  Conservative 
Evening  Mail  put  it,  '  Mr.  Keogh  and  his  friends  virtually  entered  a  plea 
of  guilty.'^'  Lord  Eglinton  pressed  home  the  charge  to  absolute  conviction 
by  further  declarations.  A  letter  from  a  magistrate  declared  that  'twenty 
gentlemen  of  independence  and  station,'  who  were  present  on  the  occasion, 
were  ready  to  testify  to  the  use  of  the  words  '  on  oath  ;'  and  then  Lord 
Eglinton  summarized  the  case  in  these  vigorous  terms  : 

'  Mr.  Keogh's  speech  was  only  one  amongst  many  others  which  were 
brought  under  my  notice.  I  certainly  little  expected  these  words  had 
fallen  from  a  man  who  was  to  become  Solicitor-General  for  Ireland  ;  but, 
as  I  have  said,  they  came  before  me  along  with  hundreds  of  other  such 
reports  and  speeches,  urging  incitements,  not  only  to  riot,  but  even  to  dis- 
loyalty.   But  I  CONFESS  that  duking  the  whole  time  I  WAS  IN  Ireland, 

NO  WORDS  WERE  BROUGHT  TO  ME  WHICH,  IN  MY  OPINION,  SO  DISTINCTLY 
RECOMMENDED   ASSASSINATION.  '^ 

Several  other  charges  were  brought  against  the  new  law  officer.  In  the 
assassination  speech  he  was  accused  of  also  asking  the  Westmeath  '  boys  ' 
to  come  to  Athlone  with  their  shillelaghs  and  to  use  them,  and  with  having 
headed  himself  a  charge  upon  the  hotel  of  his  opponent.  The  '  boys ' 
obeyed  the  command,  and  the.  intimidation  which  the  shillelaghs  created 
was  one  of  the  forces  which  won  the  election.  This  charge  also  was 
boldly  denied  by  Keogh  ;  but  it  was  proved  beyond  any  possibility  of 
doubt."*  Finally,  a  controversy  arose  between  him  and  Lord  Naas  (after- 
wards Earl  of  Mayo) ;  Keogh  affirming,  and  Lord  Naas  positively  denying, 
that  office  had  been  offered  to  him  by  tlie  Conservative  leaders.  When 
challenged  for  proof,  he  appealed  again  to  the  testimony  of  a  friend  of  his, 
whom  he  described  as  '  a  gentleman  of  honour,  veracity,  and  high  cha- 
racter.'^ The  gentleman  so  described  was  Mr.  Edmund  O'Flaherty,  of 
whom  we  shall  hear  a  little  more  presently. 

Thus  Keogh  had  surmounted  all  the  difficulties  that  at  every  turn 
seemed  certain  of  overwhelming  him.  Success  for  the  moment  seemed  to 
attend  the  other  members  of  the  gang  also.  Sadleir,  defeated  for  Carlow, 
cast  about  for  some  other  constituency.  The  Sligo  of  those  days  was  not 
unlike  the  Athlone  ;  it  had  the  reputation  of  being  among  the  most  corrupt 
boroughs  of  the  country,  and  it  has  since  been  disfranchised.  It  had  been 
won  by  an  Englishman  named  Townley,  but  the  means  of  corruption  he 
had  employed  were  so  open  that  he  had  been  unseated  for  bribery,  and 
thus  the  vacancy  had  been  created.  Sadleir  employed  exactly  the  same 
means  as  previous  aspirants  for  the  representation  of  the  place.  It  was 
proved  afterwards  that  several  of  the  voters  received  sums  running  up  to 
£25  for  their  votes.  Sadleir,  besides,  though  he  was  bitterly  opposed  by 
some  of  the  clergy,  had  the  support  of  several  of  the  priests,  and  was 
actually  proposed  by  a  parish  priest  ;  and  he  had  also  the  advantage  of 
the  intimidation  of  those  hired  mobs  which  he  and  Keogh  had  introduced 
into  the  factors  of  Irish  electioneering.  He  was  returned  by  a  majority 
of  four  votes.     There  was  a  petition ;  the  bribery  was  clearly  proved ;  but 

^  T.  D.  Siilliyan's  'Eecord,'  pp.  28,  29.  s  /&.,  pp.  29,  30, 

3  Uk,  p.  30,  4  lb.,  pp.  82,  33.  5  J6.,  p.  45. 


io6  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

according  to  the  loose  and  shameless  customs  of  the  times,  the  tools  were 
convicted  while  Sadleir  v/as  declared  innocent.  He  actually  retained  his 
seat,  and  was  perhaps  in  the  House  at  the  very  moment  when  the  Attorney- 
General  moved  for  leave  to  prosecute  some  of  the  men  whose  bought  votes 
had  obtained  him  admission  into  the  House.  In  1855,  Lord  Aberdeen 
was  replaced  by  Lord  Palmerston,  and  Keogh  was  raised  to  the  Attorney- 
Generalship  in  place  of  Mr.  Brewster,  who,  being  a  Peelite,  did  noh  think 
it  consistent  to  accept  the  change  to  a  completely  Whig  Administration. 
Keogh  also  had  begun  life  as  a  Peelite  ;  but,  of  course,  he  was  not 
troubled  by  the  subtle  distinction  between  one  Ministry  and  another,  and 
gladly  accepted  promotion.  Pie  had  to  seek  election  once  more  ;  but  so 
broken  was  the  spirit  of  the  country  that  no  attempt  was  made  to  defeat 
him  ;  and  to  add  to  the  tragic  completeness  of  the  situation.  Dr.  Browne, 
the  '  Dove  of  Elphin,'  came  to  the  hustings  and  proposed  Keogh  as  a  '  :Mt 
and  proper  person  '  to  represent  the  constituency. 

And  thus  the  triumph  of  the  Irish  Bi-igade  was  complete.  All  the  men 
who  had  opposed  them  were  crushed  ;  some  of  the  priests  who  had  taken 
the  true  view  of  the  situation  were  harried  by  their  ecclesiastical  superiors, 
or  compelled  to  abstain  from  all  action  or  speech  on  political  matters. 
Prederic  Lucas,  who  brought  to  the  Irish  cause  a  rare  spirit  of  self-abnega- 
tion, resolved  to  go  to  Rome  to  lay  the  case  at  the  feet  of  the  Pope,  and  to 
call  for  redress  and  freedom  for  the  priests  that  had  endeavoured  to  avert 
from  Ireland  one  of  the  greatest  disasters  and  blackest  shames  of  her 
history.  But  the  Pope  had  received  other  inform_ation,  and  the  mission 
was  a  failure.  Lucas  returned  to  England  in  breaking  health  and  with  a 
broken  heart.  He  never  saw  again  the  land  of  his  adoption,  which  he  loved 
so  dearly  ;  he  was  taken  sick  on  his  return  journey,  and  died  at  Staines  on 
October  22,  1855.  His  death  was  taken  by  the  Irish  people  as  a  calamity 
in  addition  to  all  those  already  suffered.  Shortly  afterwards  another  of  the 
band  of  Tenant  Leaguers,  who  had  fought  so  bravely  against  the  traitors, 
gave  up  the  fight.  Gavan  Duffy  despaired  of  the  time.  In  such  a  season 
'there  was,'  he  said,  'no  more  hope  for  Ireland  than  for  a  corpse  on  the 
dissecting-table.'     On  November  6,  1855,  he  sailed  for  Australia. 

It  was  at  the  moment  of  their  complete  triumph  that  Nemesis  began  to 
fall  on  the  men  who  had  destroyed  and  sold  the  hopes  and  fortunes  of  their 
country.  Sadleir  was  the  first  to  meej  disaster.  At  Carlow,  one  of  the 
agencies  he  had  employed  m.ost  extensively  and  relentlessly  to  secure  his 
return,  were  the  accounts  of  the  bankrupt  shopkeepers  with  the  Tipperary 
Bank.  It  was  a  favourite  plan  of  his,  as  of  other  Parliamentary  aspirants 
afterwards,  to  lend  money  to  the  voters  in  the  intervals  between  the  elections 
on  renewable  bills,  and  with  this  unpaid  bill  he  always  held  his  power  over 
the  hapless  elector,  and  could  count  on  his  vote  when  election  time  came. 
A  man  named  Dowling,  an  elector  of  Carlow,  was  suspected  of  intending  to 
vote  against  Sadleir,  and  he  was  arrested  for  debt  on  the  morning  of  the 
election.  Dowling  took  an  action  for  false  imprisonment ;  there  were 
many  damaging  revelations  against  Sadleir  in  the  trial,  and  he  had  to  go 
into  the  witness-box.  He  swore  boldly  and  unflinchingly,  and  the  jury  had 
either  to  brand  him  or  Dowling  a  perjurer  ;  the  jury  gave  the  verdict  for 
Dowling.  The  result  was  that  Sadleir  had,  in  January,  1854,  to  resign  his 
oflBce  as  a  Lord  of  the  Treasury. 

This  was  the  first  turn  of  the  tide.  In  March  of  the  same  year  there 
began  to  be  rumours  that,  instead  of  being  a  millionnaire,  he  was  in  financial 
difficulties,  but  the  rumours  were  laughed  out  of  existence.     Public  confi- 


THE  GREAT  BETRAYAL.  10/ 

dence  had  but  been  restored  in  the  financier  of  the  '  Brass  Band '  when 
another  scandal  shook  its  credit.  People  began  to  ask  where  was  Mr. 
Edmund  O'Flaherty,  the  Commissioner  of  Income  Tax.  This  was  the 
'gentleman  of  honour,  veracity,  and  high  character'  whom  Keogh  had 
called  in  proof  of  his  statement  that  Lord  Naas,  and  not  he,  had  lied  in 
reference  to  the  offer  of  office  from  the  Conservatives  ;  this  also  was  the 
gentleman  who  had  sent  round  the  hat  for  Keogh  at  the  time  when, 
desperate  and  driven,  he  was  about  to  stand  for  Athlone  after  he  had 
accepted  the  office  of  Solicitor-General.  Before  many  days  the  whole  world 
knew  that  the  Commissioner  of  Income  Tax  had  fled  no  one  knew 
whither,  and  that  he  had  left  behind  bills  amounting  to  £15,000  in  circula- 
tion, some  of  them  bearing  names — Keogh's  among  the  rest — which  were 
stated  to  be  forged. 

This  flight  spread  a  painful  degree  of  uncertainty  in  the  public  mind,  and 
people  began  to  ask  who  would  be  the  next  to  go.  The  situation  was 
rendered  more  complicated  and  painful  by  the  fact,  which  the  Opposition 
papers  took  care  to  largely  advertise,  that  the  absconding  O'Flaherty  had 
been  on  terms  of  the  closest  intimacy  with  the  Peelite  leaders,  and  had  been, 
beyond  doubt,  the  go-between  in  the  infamous  bargain  by  which  the 
Peelites  gave  office  and  the  '  Irish  Brigade  '  sold  a  country.  It  was  proved 
that  O'Flaherty  was  on  visiting  term_s  with  the  Duke  of  Newcastle ;  a  letter 
of  his  was  published  addressed  to  Mr.  Richard  Swift,  M.P.,  in  which  the 
subscription  was  suggested  that  paid  the  expenses  of  Keogh  for  his  contest 
in  Athlone  ;  and  in  the  list  of  persons  v/ho  had  already  subscribed,  the 
honoured  name  of  Sidney  Herbert  with  a  subscription  of  £100  appears  side 
by  side  with  that  of  John  Sadleir  for  the  same  amount.  And  finally,  the 
fact  was  notorious  that,  v/hen  the  Income  Tax  v/as  extended  to  Ireland, 
Mr.  O'Flaherty  received  a  reward  for  his  services  from  the  Peelites  by  his 
appointment  as  Commissioner. 

The  thing  blev/  over  for  a  while,  and  Sadleir  once  more  was  sailing  before 
the  wind.  The  death  of  Lucas  and  the  departure  of  Gavan  Duffy  seemed 
to  complete  his  triumph,  and  he  was  everywhere — especially,  of  course,  in 
England — congratulated  on  the  dispersal  of  his  enemies. 

Meantime  he  was  approaching  the  abyss.  The  rumours  that  he  was  in 
financial  difficulties  were  true.  The  vast  schemes  in  which  he  had  embarked 
proved  in  many  cases  disastrous  ;  and  then  he  took  to  all  kinds  of  ex- 
pedients for  raising  money  ;  and  finally  he  resorted  to  the  forgery  of  title- 
deeds,  conveyances,  and  bills.  In  February,  1856,  the  crash  came.  Glyns 
dishonoured  some  of  the  bills  of  the  Tipperary  Bank.  The  news  spread  ; 
a  run  took  place  on  some  of  the  branches  ;  but  next  day  it  was  announced 
that  a  mistake  had  been  committed  and  the  drafts  were  honoured.  The 
crisis  might  be  averted  if  only  a  little  ready  money  could  be  obtained. 
'All  right,'  telegraphed  James  Sadleir  to  '  John  Sadleir,  Esq.,  M.P.,  Reform 
Club,  London,'  '  at  all  the  branches  :  only  a  few  small  things  refused  there. 
If  from  twenty  to  thirty  thousand  over  here  on  Monday  morning  all  is  safe.' 
This  v/as  received  on  a  Saturday.  Sadleir  went  into  the  City  to  see  a  Mr. 
Wilkinson,  with  whom  he  had  large  transactions  ;  proposed  various  plans 
for  raising  money  ;  all  were  rejected.  '  He  then  becam.e  very  excited,'  says 
Mr.  Wilkinson,  describing  the  scene  afterwai-ds,  '  put  his  hand  to  his  head, 
and  said,  ''  Good  God  !  if  the  Tipperary  Bank  should  fail  the  fault  will  be 
entirely  mine,  and  I  shall  have  been  the  ruin  of  hundreds  and  thousands." 
He  walked  about  the  office  in  a  very  excited  state,  and  urged  me  to  try  and 
help  him,  because  he  said  he  could  not  live  to  see  the  pain  and  ruin  inflicted 


io8  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

on  others  by  the  cessation  of  the  bank.     The  interview  ended  in  this,  that 
I  was  unable  to  assist  hira  in  his  plans  to  raise  money. '^ 

As  the  day  went  on,  Sadleir  heard  news  more  disastrous.  Mr.  Wilkinson 
had  previously  lent  him  large  sums  of  money.  The  money  had  been  lent  on 
one  of  the  many  securities  Sadleir  had  forged  during  the  previous  year,  and 
the  suspicions  of  Mr.  Wilkinson  having  been  aroused,  he  had  sent  over  his 
partner,  Mr.  Stevens,  to  Dublin  to  inquire  into  the  matter.  This  was 
probably  a  portion  of  the  news  which  was  brought  to  Sadleir  at  ten  o'clock 
on  the  night  of  this  eventful  Saturday  by  Mr.  Norris,  solicitor,  of  Bedford 
Kow,  one  of  his  intimate  friends.  The  two  talked  over  the  situation.  It 
was  agreed  that  there  was  no  help  for  it,  and  that  on  Monday  the  Tipperary 
Bank  must  stop  payment.  At  half-past  ten  Mr.  Norris  left.  Sadleir 
spent  some  time  in  writing  letters.  He  then  got  up  to  go  out.  As  he 
passed  through  the  hall,  and  was  taking  his  hat  from  the  stand,  he  met  his 
butler,  told  him  not  to  stay  up  for  him,  and  then  shut  the  door  with  a  firm 
hand.  As  he  left  it  was  just  striking  twelve  ;  it  was  Sunday  morning. 
The  next  morning,  on  a  mound  on  Hampstead  Heath,  tlie  passers-by 
observed  a  gentleman  lying  as  if  asleep.  A  silver  tankard  smelling  strongly 
of  prussic  acid  was  at  his  side.  It  was  the  dead  body  of  John  Sadleir — dead 
by  his  own  hand. 

'  On  Monday,'  writes  A.  M.  Sullivan,-  '  the  news  flashed  through  the 
kingdom.  There  was  alarm  in  London  ;  there  was  wild  panic  in  Ireland. 
The  Tipperary  Bank  closed  its  doors  ;  the  country  people  flocked  into  the 
towns.  They  surrounded  and  attacked  the  branches  ;  the  poor  victims 
imagined  their  money  must  be  within,  and  they  got  crowbars,  picks,  and 
spades  to  force  the  walls  and  "dig  it  out."  The  scenes  of  mad  despair 
which  the  streets  of  Thurles  and  Tipperary  saw  that  day  would  melt  a 
heart  of  adamant.  Old  men  went  about  like  maniacs,  confused  and 
hysterical  ;  widows  knelt  in  the  street,  and  aloud  asked  God  was  it  true 
they  were  beggared  for  ever.  Even  the  Poor-Law  Unions,  which  had  kept 
their  accounts  in  the  bank,  lost  all,  and  had  not  a  shilling  to  buy  the 
paupers'  dinner  the  day  the  branch  doors  closed.  .  .  .  Banks,  railways, 
assurance  associations,  land  companies,  every  undertaking  with  which  he 
had  been  connected,  were  flung  into  dismay  ;  and  for  months  fresh  revela- 
tions of  fraud,  forgery,  and  robbery  came  daily  and  hourly  to  view.  By  the 
month  of  April  the  total  of  such  discoveries  had  reached  £1,250,000.' 

'  Considerably  above  the  middle  height,'  Sadleir  is  described  by  one  who 
knew  him  ;  '  his  figure  was  youthful,  but  his  face — that  was  indeed  remark- 
able. Strongly  marked,  sallow,  eyes  and  hair  intensely  black,  and  the  lines 
of  the  mouth  worn  into  deep  channels.'"^ 

OTlaherty  fled  ;  Sadleir  dead  ;  how  was  it,  meantime,  with  Keogh  ? 
His  name  had  been  coupled  with  Sadleir  and  with  Edmund  O'Flaherty  in 
the  most  intimate  political  association  for  nearly  six  years  ;  was  he  going 
to  be  exposed  also,  and  to  choose  flight  or  death  in  preference  to  shame  and 
exposure  ?  There  was  no  such  fate  in  store  for  him.  It  was  reported  that 
he  was  going  to  be  raised  to  the  bench  !  At  once  the  national  press  of 
Ireland  protested  against  this  last  indignity  upon  the  country. 

'  Mr.  William  Keogh  a  judge  !'  wrote  the  Nation  at  an  earlier  period, 
when  the  report  was  first  circulated,  '  with  life  and  death  on  his  hands  ; 

*  'New  Ireland,'  p.  179.  »  76.,  pp.  180,  181.  3  75.,  p.  igo. 


THE  GREA  T  BE  TEA  YAL.  log 

with  the  peace,  and  honour,  and  property  of  the  community  hanging  on 
the  breath  of  his  lips  ;  with  the  liberties  and  the  safeguards  of  society 
under  his  direct  control.  Mr.  William  Keogh,  with  the  antecedents  of  his 
unprincipled  political  career,  his  mediocre  professional  character,  his  false 
pledges,  his  disreputable  associates  ;  this  gentleman  a  judge  !  And  the 
youngest  judge,  and  the  judge  of  the  least  standing  at  the  bar,  who  has 
mounted  the  Irish  bench  within  the  memory  of  living  man.  We  hesitate 
to  believe  it  can  be  possible.'^ 

Then  it  spoke  of  the  other  judges  on  the  bench,  condemning  their  political 
partisanship,  but  admitting  their  professional  claims  and  their  personal 
integrity. 

'  There  is  not  a  man  am-ong  them,'  it  v/ent  on,  '  who  has  solemnly  called 
God  to  witness  a  pledge  of  public  conduct — who  has  ratified  that  pledge 
after  months  of  mature  consideration  with  another  equally  solemn — and 
who  has  scandalously  broken  both.  There  is  not  a  man  among  them  who, 
within  seven  years  of  public  life,  has  been  a  Tory,  a  Whig,  a  Catholic 
Conservative,  an  anti-Repealer,  an  Ultramontane  Radical,  and  a  Tenant 
Leaguer — who  has  written  pamphlets  and  spoken  speeches  on  every  side  of 
every  question,  and  tried  the  cushions  of  every  bench  in  the  House  of  Com- 
mons. There  is  none  of  them  who  need  fear,  when  he  takes  up  an  indict- 
ment for  forgery,  that  he  will  find  the  name  of  his  bosom  friend  at  its  head 
— the  name  of  the  man  upon  whose  word  of  honour  he  relied,  and  sustained 
himself  in  a  position  compromising  his  own  political  character.  There  is 
none  of  them  who,  when  the  officer  of  justice  administers  the  oath  of  evi- 
dence before  him,  need  blush,  as  the  words  "  So  help  me  God  "  are  uttered, 
to  think  how  that  most  solemn  of  human  adjurations  could  not  bind  even 
him,  a  judge  of  the  land,  to  the  truth. '^ 

When  after  the  death  of  John  Sadleir  the  rumours  were  again  re- 
sumed : 

'  It  is  very  generally  supposed,'  wrote  the  Nation,  '  that,  after  the  scan- 
dalous conduct  of  Mr.  Edmund  O'Flaherty,  the  hideous  suicide  of  Mr.  John 
Sadleir,  Government  may  feel  a  difficulty  in  elevating  to  the  ermine  of  a 
justice  a  gentleman  who  was  so  intimately  identified  with  both  in  their 
political  profligacies,  and  who  had,  indeed,  rather  a  worse  public  character 
than  either. '3 

'  Can  such  a  profanation  be  possible?'  asked  the  Wexford  Peo-ple.  'Can 
public  decency  be  so  outraged  ?  .  .  .  We  believe  the  Government  of  Lord 
Palmerston  is  capable  of  doing  a  large  amount  of  iniquity  ;  but  there  is  a 
limit  beyond  which  they  dare  not  pass,  or  the  whole  world  would  cry  shame 
on  them,  and  this  is  one.'^ 

•"It  was  in  the  month  of  March,  1856,'  whites  T.  D.  Sullivan,5  «that 
these  protests,  and  scores  of  others  such  as  these  against  the  probable 
elevation  of  Mr.  Keogh  to  the  bench  of  justice,  were  being  published, 
The  papers  at  the  tim.e  were  being  loaded  with  the  details  of  the  Sadleir 
forgeries  and  swindles  ;  the  law  courts  were  glutted  with  trials,  motions, 
and  all  sorts  of  proceedings  arising  out  of  them  ;  the  air  was  ringing  with 
the  cries  of  the  unfortunate  people  who  were  reduced  from  a  state  of  sol  • 

'  T.  D.  Sullivan's  '  Record,'  pp.  4G,  47,  2  77,.^  p.  47. 

3  lb.,  p.  53.  4  lb,  5  iJj.,  p.  64. 


!  10  TBE  PARNELL  MO  VEMENt. 

vency  a,nd  comfort  to  one  of  pauperism  by  the  Sadleirite  plunder.  It  was 
little  wonder  that  the  bare  idea  of  the  advancement  of  Mr,  Iveogh  to  the 
bench  at  such  a  time  should  have  caused  ia  the  minds  of  honest  men  almost 
a  frenzy  of  pain  and  horror.' 

The  protests  were  in  vain.  The  death  of  Judge  Torrens  was  announced 
in  the  Dublin  papers  of  the  morning  of  Tuesday,  April  1,  On  Wednesday, 
April  2 — the  day  after — Keogh  had  obtained  the  vacancy,  and  was  one  of 
her  Majesty's  judges. 

'  The  administration  of  justice  in  Ireland,'  said  the  Nation,  'has  sustained 
a  most  grievous  disgrace — a  disgrace  which  would  not  be  tolerated  by  the 
bench,  hy  the  bar,  or  the  people  of  any  other  country  on  the  face  of  the  earth. 
.  .  .  Fancy  the  effect  of  Mr.  William  Keogh  going  judge  of  assize  to  try 
the  Westmeath  Ribbonmen  whom  he  cited  to  m.idnight  violence — trying 
perjury  in  Athlone  or  Cork,  before  whole  communities  who  heard  him 
swear  the  oath  of  whose  breach  his  presence  on  the  bench  before  them  is 
the  startling  evidence  !  It  is  an  exam^ple  sufficient  to  disgust  or  to  de- 
moralize the  whole  profession,  and  shake  faith  in  justice.  .  .  .  What  a  start- 
ling and  a  scandalous  spectacle  it  is  to  see  this  man,  yet  young — every  year 
of  whose  life  has  been  marked  by  infamous  political  tergiversation,  whose 
career  has  never  had  in  it  a  day  of  that  patient,  arduous,  and  laborious 
effort  which  is  the  peculiar  dignity  of  the  forensic  robe,  but  has  been  like 
the  advance  of  the  chamois-hunter,  springing  from  peak  to  peak,  and 
always  on  the  point  of  toppling  over — now,  after  having  been  everything 
by  turns  and  nothing  long,  broken  faith  with  ever}'  party  and  laughed  at 
every  principle,  set  in  ermine  over  this  city,  a  judge  among  the  tv/elvs 
judges  of  the  la^nd  !' 

'  Well  may  it  be  asked,'  continues  the  national  journal  in  the  same 
article,  '  Has  God's  providence  cea.sed  to  rule  in  Ireland  ?'^ 

There  is  one  scene  more  in  this  episode  of  Irish  history.  One  prominent 
member  of  the  '  Irish  Brigade  '  had  not  been  made  a  judge  or  committed 
suicide.  It  was  James  Sadleir,  brother  of  John.  On  February  16,  1857, 
Mr.  J.  D.  Fitzgerald,  then  Attorney- General  for  Ireland,  moved  the  expul- 
sion of  James  Sadleir  for  having  fled  before  charges  of  fraud,  and  the 
motion  was  carried,  nemine  contracUcente. 

An  Englishman  was  lam.enting,  a  short  time  ago,  to  a  brilliant  Irishman 
v/ho  had  formerly  sat  in  Parliament,  the  disagreeable  contrast  between  the 
Irish  members  of  former  days  and  the  tmpleasant  specimens  of  the  present 
hour.  The  Irishman  surprised  his  interlocutor  by  admitting  the  contrast, 
but  not  after  the  same  fashion.  Then  he  put  thus  tersely  the  story  which 
has  just  been  told  :  '  There  were  four  members  of  Parliament,  personal  in- 
timates and  political  associates.  One  was  a  forger,  and  committed  suicide ; 
the  other  was  a  forger,  and  was  expelled  from  Parliament ;  the  third  was 
a  swindler,  and  fled  ;  and  the  fourth  v.^as  made  a  judge.' 

^  T.  D.  Sullivan's  '  Record,'  pp.  56,  fi7. 


R  UlN  AND  RABA  OAS.  1 1 1 

CHAPTER  VI. 

EUIN   AND   EABAGAS. 

The  years  ^yhich  followed  the  treason  of  Judge  Keogh  are  among  tha 
darkest  in  Irish  history.  The  British  Government  and  the  landlords  saw 
their  powder  once  more  unquestioned  by  popular  leaders  a,nd  unopposed  by 
popular  organization  or  popular  hopes.  The  landlords  took  advantage  of 
the  situation  after  their  usual  fashion. 

And  here  again  I  must  pause  in  the  narrative  to  add  another  chapter  to 
the  long  and  monotonous  history  of  the  Land  Question.  The  oppression 
v/hich  the  landlords  practised  on  their  tenants  at  this  period  knew  no  limit 
of  age  or  sex  or  circumstance  ;  it  penetrated  into  the  smallest  as  well  as 
the  largest  affairs  of  the  tenant's  life.  The  rent  was  raised  year  by  year, 
the  landlord  knoAving  no  other  limit  to  his  exactions  than  those  of  his  own 
appetites  or  caprice  or  vv"ants.  The  building  of  a  new  mansion  in  London, 
a  bad  night  at  the  card-table,  the  demands  of  generous  and  exacting 
beauty,  or  the  loss  of  a  great  race,  remote  as  they  vrere  from  the  concerns 
of  the  Irish  farmer  in  his  cabin  and  on  his  patch  of  land,  influenced  and 
darkened  his  destiny ;  and  year  after  year  his  rent  steadily  kept  rising. 
When  at  last  successive  generations  of  folly  and  vice  swept  the  old  land- 
lord into  the  maelstrom  of  debt,  the  change  of  landlord  meant  in  nearly 
every  case  a  rise  of  rent  and  a  master — penurious,  perhaps,  where  the  old 
proprietor  had  been  spendthrift,  but  as  grinding  and  as  greedy. 

There  was  in  connection  with  most  of  the  properties  a  code  for  the 
regulation  of  the  tenantry  which  went  under  the  name  of  '  office  rules.' 
These  rules  dogged  every  action  of  the  tenant's  life. 

A  minute  system  of  fines  existed.  Take  these,  for  instances  :  William 
Bewley,  a  tenant  on  one  of  the  estates  of  Lord  Leitrim,  was  fined  £11 
because  he  sold  hay  contrary  to  the  rules  of  the  estate  ;  Lord  Leitrim 
himself  visited  this  man's  house  in  order  to  find  fault  with  him,  and  the 
sight  of  this  dreaded  landlord  and  his  brutal  language  drove  Bewley's 
daughter  insane.  The  widowed  mother  of  the  Rev.  Mr.  Lavelle,  a  well- 
known  Catholic  priest,  v/as  evicted  because,  contrary  to  the  rules  of  the 
estate,  she  took  in  her  son-in-law  and  daughter  for  companionship.  A 
tenant  on  Lord  L^lcan's  estate  was  fined  10s.  for  being  three  days  late  in 
the  payment  of  his  rent,  and  another  tenant  was  fined  14s.  8d.  for 
receiving  a  tenant's  daughter  into  his  house  while  her  husband  was  in 
England.  On  the  Ormsby  estate  in  County  Mayo,  this  system  of  petty 
fining  reached  its  highest  development.  Thus  a  woman  named  Ann 
Cassidy  could  recall  the  infliction  of  the  following  fines  upon  her  husband: 
5s.  for  being  absent  from  duty  work  one  day;  10s.  for  a  similar  offence; 
2s.  6d.  for  being  absent  from  duty  work  on  the  day  of  his  child's  burial ; 
2s.  6d.  because  a  pig  rooted  part  of  his  land  ;  2s.  6d.  for  allowing  an  ass 
to  stray  on  the  road  ;  10s.  6d.  because  the  top  stone  of  a  gable  was  not 
rightly  v/hitewashed.  James  Sheerin,  formerly  a,  tenant  on  the  Ormsby 
estate,  was  fined  10s.  for  cutting  a  branch  from  an  ash -tree  which  he 
himself  had  planted  ;  5s.  because  a  pig  strayed  back  into  a  house  from 
v/hich  he  had  been  evicted  ;  and  Is.  6d.  because  a  horse  was  allowed  out 
on  the  road.  Margaret  Conlon  describes  how,  on  the  same  estate,  her 
husband  was  fined  7s.  6d.  for  not  making  a  drain  at  a  time  when  he  was 
engaged  in  mowing  for  the  landlord  ;  12s.  6d.  for  changing  a  window 
from  one  side  of  the  house  to  the  other  in  order  to  get  more  light  ;  anrl 


lU  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

2s.  6d.  for  being  too  late  at  his  work.  Charles  Durkin,  a  tenant  on  the 
est;.te  of  Sir  Robert  Blosse,  was  fined  for  taking  carts  of  bog-mud  from 
one  part  of  his  land  to  manure  another  ;  and  £2  17s.  6d.  for  cutting  loads 
of  turf  from  a  bog  for  which  he  was  paying  £1  8s.  per  acre.^ 

Thus  beggared  and  driven,  the  tenant  naturally  took  refuge  or  found 
some  consolation  in  the  contemplation  of  his  religion,  which  promised  a 
future  life  in  which  the  poverty  and  tyranny  of  this  world  would  exist  no  more, 
and  where  hearts  would  find  peace,  and  sorrow  could  dry  its  tears.  But 
even  the  poor  luxury  of  his  intercourse  with  the  Unseen  the  landlord 
would  not  permit  the  tenant  to  enjoy  in  peace.  Lord  Plunket,  for 
instance,  evicted  a  large  number  of  his  tenaiits  because  they  refused  to 
send  their  children  to  the  proselytizing  schools.  This  system  of  prosely- 
tizing M^as  one  of  the  worst  portents  of  the  time.  A  society  was  formed, 
and  is  still  in  existence,  the  nominal  purpose  of  v/hich  is  to  wean  the 
Catholic  population  from  the  errors  of  their  religion  by  lectures.  Under 
this  organization,  known  as  the  Irish  Church  Mission,  the  Catholics  of 
Ireland  have  the  privilege  of  seeing  in  the  streets  on  public  placards  the 
most  flagrant  reflections  on  the  most  sacred  mysteries  of  their  creed.  In 
the  poorer  parts  of  the  country,  food  was  the  bribe  by  which  the  starving 
parents  were  seduced  into  selling  the  creed  of  their  children.  During 
periods  of  very  deep  distress  these  missions  enrolled  some  of  the  popula- 
tion, but  the  return  of  such  prosperity  as  the  Ii-ish  farmer  was  allowed  to 
enjoy  brought  back  the  people  to  the  observance  of  the  faith  in  which 
they  believed.  In  some  parts  of  the  country  the  small  churches  which  at 
one  time  had  congregations  of  Catholics  converted  by  such  means  are 
now  empty  and  in  ruins.  The  parents  who  thus  deserted  their  religion 
naturally  became  the  objects  of  their  neighbours'  contempt.  They  and 
their  tempters  were  called  by  a  nickname  which  sufficiently  indicated  the 
reason  of  their  change  of  faith.  '  Souper  '  is  one  of  the  vilest  epithets 
that  one  person  in  Ireland  can  htirl  at  another,  even  up  to  the  present 
hour.  In  another  way  also  the  landlords  substituted  a  penal  code  of  their 
own  for  that  abolished  by  statute.  On  several  estates  every  effort  was 
directed  towards  expelling  the  Catholic  population  so  as  to  replace  them 
by  Protestant  tenants. 

It  might  have  been  expected  that  the  tenant  thus  reduced  to  an  ill-paid 
labourer,  as  absolutely  dependent  as  a  serf,  would  not  be  an  object  of  any 
fiu'ther  misgiving  or  annoyance  to  his  landlord.  But  the  frenzy  for  the 
destruction  of  the  people  that  set  in  towards  the  beginning  of  the  century 
seerncd  still  to  rage  like  an  unholy  and  accursed  mania  in  the  souls  of  the 
landlords  ;  and  the  period  is  marked  by  wholesale  clearances  on  a  scale 
that  is  appalling,  and  amid  circumstances  of  horror  and  cruelty  that  are 
sca,rcely  credible. 

The  instances  are  so  numerous  of  such  wholesale  clearances  that  one 
has  to  pick  and  choose.  It  will  suffice  to  take  out  a  few  of  the  typical 
cases  ;  they  will  indicate  what  landlordism  meant  in  those  days. 

Five  names  stand  out  in  bold  relief  among  the  wholesale  evictors  of  this 
and  other  periods  and  that  immediately  preceding  it.  These  are  the 
Marquis  of  Sligo,  the  Earl  of  Lucan,  Mr.  Allan  Pollock,  Lord  Lei  trim, 
and  Mr.  John  George  Adair.     The  Marquis  of  Sligo  cleared  out  at  various 

^  These  cases  were  supplied  to  tlie  solicitors  for  the  traversers  in  the  case  of  the 
Queen  v.  Pamell  and  othei-s,  by  persons  who  were  prepared  to  swear  to  their  occur- 
rence. The  briefs  containing  this  evidence  were  placed  at  my  disposal  by  the  widow 
Oi.'  A.  M.  Sullivan.     It  will  be  referied  ts  as  '  Evidenoe  for  Queeii  v.  Pamell,' 


7? UIN  AND  RABA  GAS.  \  1 3 

periods  no  fewer  than  two  thousand  families,  witli  the  result  that  a  single 
tenant  of  his,  with  a  few  herds,  occupied  an  area  of  no  less  than  two 
hundred  square  miles.  The  Earl  of  Lucan  absolutely  swept  from  the 
earth  the  town  of  Aughadrina.  Mr.  Pollock  evicted  one  hundred  families 
from  one  estate,  fifty  from  another.  He  was  a  Scotchman,  and  one  of  the 
objects  of  these  wholesale  evictions  was  to  replace  the  Irish  population  by 
men  of  another  race,  and  the  tenantry  by  sheep  and  bullocks.  '  Before 
the  face  of  this  "stranger"  no  less  than  five  thousand  souls  had  to  fly  the 
bounds  of  their  country  and  their  sweet  fields.'^  In  1856  Mrs.  James 
Blake  evicted  fifty  families,  not  one  of  whom  owed  her  a  penny  of  rent, 
and  the  land  was  changed  into  grass  land.  '  Some  of  the  tenants  then 
evicted  are  beggars  in  Loughrea,'  says  Dr.  Duggan.'^  In  County  Cavan, 
seven  hundred  tenants  were  turned  out  by  Messrs.  O'Connor  and  Malone 
in  the  course  of  two  days.  In  County  Meath,  Mr.  Nicholson  cleared  out 
from  eighty  to  one  hundred  people  in  1862,  and  about  three  hundred 
persons  in  1869-70,  and  the  land  was  entirely  turned  into  pasture.  In 
1857,  Mr.  Rochford  Boyd,  a  Westmeath  landlord,  evicted  a  large  number 
of  tenants,  not  one  of  them  owing  any  rent. 

Wholesale  eviction  of  this  kind  could  not  be  carried  on,  of  course, 
without  terrible  hardship.  Sometimes  people  were  turned  out  on  Christ- 
mas Eve.  Here  is  a  case  described  by  Father  Lavelle.  'A  certain 
landlord  in  County  Galway  got  a  cheap  decree  at  Quarter  Sessions  against 
a  tenant  on  his  property.  This  was  early  in  October  ;  October  and 
November  passed  over,  and  a  gleam  of  hope  began  to  enter  the  poor  man's 
soul  that,  at  least,  he  would  be  permitted  to  pass  the  Christmas  holidays  in 
his  old  home.  December  was  fast  running  out ;  the  sun  of  Christmas 
Eve  had  actually  risen,  and  with  it  the  poor  man  and  his  wife  and  famil}^, 
when,  horror  of  horrors  !  whom  does  he  see  approaching  his  cabin  door, 
followed  by  a  jposse  comitatus  of  the  Crowbar  Brigade,  but  the  sheriff 
surrounded  by  a  detachment  of  the  constabulary  force  !  The  family  were 
flung  out  like  vermin,  and  the  work  of  demolition  occupied  but  a  fevv' 
minutes.  The  evicted  family  passed  that  and  the  subsequent  Christmas 
night  with  no  other  covering  but  that  of  the  wide  canopy  of  heaven,  as 
strict  prohibitions  had  been  issued  to  all  the  other  tenants  to  harbour  him 
on  pain  of  similar  treatment.'^ 

Father  White,  of  Milltown-Malbay,  tells  hov/,  in  the  winter  of  1884  or 
1865,  he  was  present  at  the  eviction  of  five  or  six  families  on  Mr.  Westby's 
estate  in  the  parish  of  Carrigaholt.  It  was  late  in  the  evening  of  a  cold 
winter's  day  ;  the  bailiffs  were  in  the  act  of  carrying  out  an  old  woman 
about  eighty  years  of  age,  and  apparently  in  a  dying  state.  She  had  been, 
it  seemed,  taken  from  her  bed,  being  wrapped  in  a  sheet.  They  laid  her 
on  the  dunghill.  '  I  was  so  shocked  that  I  threatened  to  prosecute  the 
sub-sheriff  for  murder  if  she  died,'  says  Father  White.'*  The  eviction  of 
each  of  these  tenants  was  carried  out  in  the  most  heartless  manner.  The 
houses  were  nearly  ail  afterwards  unroofed.  These  tenants,  until  the  bad 
years  of  1862-3-4,  were  all  comfortable  and  well-to-do.  They  held  from 
five  to  forty  acres. 

'Whilst  in  Newmarket  parish,'  says  the  same  clergyman,  'about  1872, 
Lord  Inchiquin  raised  the  tenants'  rents  considerably — I  believe  added 

^  Lavelle's  '  Irish  Landlord  since  the  Eevolution,'  p.  271. 
^  Evidence  for  Queen  v.  Parnell. 

3  Lavelle,  pp.  271,  272. 

4  Evidence  for  Queen  v.  Parnell. 

8 


114  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

about  £5,000  to  his  rental.     He  evicted  a  number  of  tenants,  not  owing  a 
penny  rent,  for  the  purpose  of  adding  to  his  demesne.' 

At  an  eviction  in  1854,  on  a  property  under  the  management  of  Marcus 
Keane,  James  0'Gorman,one  of  the  tenants  evicted, died  on  the  roadside.  His 
wife  and  ten  children  were  sent  to  the  workhouse,  where  they  died  shortly 
afterwards.  John  Corbet,  a  tenant  on  another  townland,  was  evicted  by 
the  same  agent.  He  died  on  the  roadside  ;  his  wife  had  died  previously  to 
the  eviction  ;  his  ten  children  were  sent  into  the  workhouse  and  there 
died.  Michael  McMahon,  evicted  at  the  same  tune,  v/as  dragged  out  of 
bed  to  the  wallside,  where  he  died  of  want  next  day.  His  wife  died 
of  want  previously  to  the  eviction,  and  his  children,  eight  in  number,  died 
in  a  few  weeks  in  the  workhouse. ■"• 

^  Though  it  does  not  belong  to  this  period,  it  may  be  well  to  quote  here  a  description 
of  an  eviction  which  has  become  historical.  The  eye-witness  to  it  was  the  Most  Eev. 
Dr.  Nulty,  Lord  Bishop  of  Meath,  and  the  event  occurred  in  September,  1S47,  near 
Mount  Nugent,  Co.  Cavan.  The  names  of  the  owners  of  the  projiurty  were  O'Connor 
and  Malone  ;  that  of  the  agent  was  Mr.  Guiness,  then  M.P.  for  Kinsale,  but  shortly 
afterwards  unseated  for  bribery.     Dr.  Nulty  says  : 

'  In  the  very  first  year  of  our  ministry,  as  a  missionary  priest  in  this  diocese,  we 
were  an  eye-witness  of  a  cruel  and  inhimian  eviction,  which  even  still  makes  our 
heart  bleed  as  often  as  w^e  allow  ourselves  to  think  of  it. 

'  Seven  hundred  liuman  beings  were  driven  from  their  hom.es  in  one  day  and  set 
adrift  on  the  world,  to  gratify  the  caprice  of  one.  who,  before  God  and  man,  probably 
deserved  less  consideration  than  the  last  and  least  of  them.  And  we  remember  weK 
that  there  was  not  a  single  shilling  of  rent  due  on  the  estate  at  the  time,  except  by 
one  man  ;  and  the  chai-acter  and  acts  of  that  man  made  it  perfectly  clear  that  the 
agent  and  himself  quite  understood  each  other. 

'  The  Crowbar  Brigade,  employed  on  the  occasion  to  extinguish  the  hearths  and 
demolish  the  homes  of  honest,  industrious  men,  worked  away  with  a  will  at  their 
awful  calling  until  evening.  At  length  an  incident  occurred  that  varied  the 
monotony  of  the  grim,  ghastly  ruin  which  they  were  sj^reading  all  around.  They 
stopped  suddenly,  and  recoiled  panic-stricken  with  tenor  from  two  dwellings  which 
they  were  directed  to  destroy  with  the  rest.  They  had  just  learned  that  a  frightful 
typhus  fever  held  those  houses  in  its  grasp,  and  had  ah-eady  brought  pestilence  and 
death  to  their  inmates.  They  therefore  supplicated  the  agent  to  spare  these  houses 
a  little  longer ;  but  the  agent  was  inexorable,  and  insisted  that  the  houses  should 
come  down.  The  ingenuity  with  which  he  extricated  himself  from  the  difficulties  of 
the  situation  was  characteristic  alike  of  the  heartlessiiess  of  the  man  and  of  the 
cruel  necessities  of  the  work  in  which  he  was  engaged.  He  ordered  a  large  winnow- 
ing-sheet  to  be  secured  over  the  beds  in  which  the  fever  victims  lay — fortunately 
they  happened  to  be  jjerf  ectly  delirious  at  the  time — and  then  directed  the  houses 
to  be  unroofed  cautiously  and  slov/ly,  "because,"  he  said,  "he  very  much  disliked 
the  bother  and  discomfort  of  a  coroner's  inquest."  I  administered  the  last  sacrament 
of  the  Church  to  four  of  these  fever  victims  next  day  ;  and,  save  the  above-mentioned 
winnowing-sheet,  there  was  not  then  a  roof  nearer  to  me  than  the  canopy  of  heaven. 

'  The  horrid  scenes  I  then  witnessed  I  must  remember  all  my  life  long.  The 
wailing  of  women — the  screams,  the  terror,  the  consternation  of  children — the 
speechless  agony  of  honest,  industrious  men — wrung  tears  of  grief  from  all  who  saw 
them.  I  saw  the  officers  and  men  of  a  large  police  force,  who  were  obliged  to  attend 
on  the  occasion,  cry  like  children  at  beholding  the  cruel  sufferings  of  the  very  people 
whom  they  would  be  obliged  to  butcher  had  they  offered  the  least  resistance.  The 
heavy  rains  that  usually  attend  the  autumnal  equinoxes  descended  in  cold,  copious 
torrents  throughout  the  night,  and  at  once  revealed  to  those  houseless  sufferers  the 
awful  realities  of  their  condition.  I  visited  them  nest  morning,  and  rode  from  place 
to  place  administering  to  them  all  the  comfort  and  consolation  I  could.  The  appear- 
ance of  men,  women,  and  children,  as  they  emerged  from  the  ruins  of  their  former 
homes — saturated  with  rain,  blackened  and  besmeared  M-ith  soot,  shivering  in  every 
member  from  cold  and  misery — presented  positively  the  most  appalling  spectacle  I 
ever  looked  at.  The  landed  proprietors  in  a  circle  all  around—  and  for  many  miles  in 
every  direction — w^arned  their  tenantry,  with  threats  of  their  direst  vengeance, 
against  the  humanity  of  extending  to  any  of  them  the  hospitality  of  a  single  night's 
shelter.  Many  of  these  poor  people  were  unable  to  emigrate  with  their  families ; 
while,  at  home,  the  hand  of  every  man  was  thus  raised  against  them.  They  were 
driven  from  the  land  on  which  Providence  had  placed  them ;  and,  in  the  state  of 


RUIN  AND  RA*BAGAS.  115 

In  one  estate  at  least  an  '  office  rule '  regulated  even  the  marriage  rela- 
tions of  the  tenantry.  One  of  the  estates  on  which  this  practice  was  most 
rigidly  carried  out  was  that  of  the  Marquis  of  Lansdowne.  The  late  Sir 
John  Gray,  in  a  speech  in  the  Free  Trade  Hall  in  Manchester  (October  18, 
1S69),  describes  this  episode  of  landlord  life  in  these  graphic  terms  -?■ 

*In  the  book  he  had  already  quoted  from — "Realities  of  Irish  Life" — 
there  was  told  a  very  pathetic  story  of  "Mary  Shea,"  the  pretty  black-eyed 
girl  of  seventeen,  who  lived  with  her  parents  on  a  mountain  farm.  Mr. 
Trench  tells  with  touching  pathos  how,  when  the  "  hunger  " — the  name 
given  by  the  people  to  the  famine — came,  Mary's  mother  died,  and  was 
buried  in  the  garden,  because  Mary  and  her  father  had  not  strength  to 
carry  her  to  the  churchyard.  He  tells  how  Mary  smothered  the  bees  she 
had  reared  herself,  though  they  all  knew  her  well,  and  sold  their  store  of 
honey  for  15s.,  and  bought  meal,  and  kept  her  father  alive  for  a  month,  but 
how,  when  it  was  exhausted,  her  father  died  too,  and  how  he,  too,  was  buried 
in  the  garden  by  herself  and  "  Eugene,"  and  how,  thus  left  an  orphan  and 
alone,  the  kind-hearted  Eugene  took  home  "  Mary  Shea  "  to  his  mother's 
house,  and  shared  the  scanty  meal  with  her.  Mr.  Trench  with  great 
power  described,  in  the  book  he  held  in  his  hand,  this  sad  "  reality,"  and 
told  how,  when  walking  one  day  through  his  pleasure-grounds,  he  saw  two 
bright  spots  shining  from  behind  a  holly-tree,  and  coming  nearer  he  saw  that 
behind  the  tree  something  moved,  and  forth  came  Mary  Shea,  the  graceful 
Irish  maiden  of  seventeen,  with  Spanish  face,  and  almost  kneehng,  she 
said  with  blushing  confidence,  "Please,  yoi^y."  honour,  will  you  put  Eugene's 
name  on  the  book  instead  of  mine  ?"  Then  a  beautiful  tale  was  told  of 
Mary's  woes,  of  her  modesty,  of  her  beauty,  and  of  her  marriage,  on  perusing 
which  no  English  matron  or  noble  maiden  with  tender  or  womanly  heart 
could  restrain  their  tears,  so  sweetly  was  told  the  affecting  story  of  Mary 
Shea.  But  alas  !  Mr.  Trench  did  not  tell  the  dismal  truth  of  landlord 
tyranny  that  was  concealed  behind  the  rose-tinted  romance  of  this  "reality 
of  Irish  life."  He  did  not  tell  why  it  vras  that  this  blushing  maiden  of 
seventeen,  the  black-eyed  Mary  Shea,  came  to  him,  a  man  she  had  never 
before  seen,  to  tell  of  her  innocent  lovq,  and  to  introduce  Eugene  ;  he  did 
not  tell  that,  by  "  the  rule  of  the  estate,"  had  Mary  Shea  or  any  other 
tenant  dared  to  get  married  without  the  leave  of  "his  honour"  the  agent, 
she  would  be  hurled  from  her  farm,  an.d  the  roof  torn  down  about  her 
bridal-bed.'  (Cries  of  '  Shame  on  him  !'  and  loud  cheers.)  '  He  (Sir  John 
Gray)  would  now  read  for  them  an  extract  from  a  petition  to  a  noble 
marquis,  whose  narce  was  given  in  the  title-page  of  Mr.  Trench's  book  as 
one  of  those  nobles  whose  agent  he  is,  which  would  tell  some  of  the 
true  realities  of  Irish  life  ;  for  these  were  realities  of  Irish  life  of  which  no 
glimpse  was  given  in  Mr.  Trench's  book.  In  the  title-page  of  that  book  it 
would  be  found  that  the  autiior,  Mr.  Trench,  was  agent  to  a  noble  marquis 
and  two  other  great  estated  persons  in  Ireland  ;  and  in  M.  Perraud's 
"Ireland  in  1862,"  he  found  a  copy  of  a  petition  presented  no  farther 
back  than  1858,  by  the  whole  body  of  the  tenantry  of  the  noble  marquis,  who 
was,  he  believed,  the  landlord  of  black-eyed  Mary  Shea. '  (Cries  of  '  Name, 


society  surrounding  them,  every  other  walk  of  life  was  rigidly  closed  against  them. 
What  was  the  result  ?    After  battling  in  vain  with  privation  and  pestilence,  they  at 
last  graduated  from  the  workhouse  to  the  tomb  ;  and  in  little  more  than  three  years, 
nearly  a  fourth  of  them  lay  quietly  in  their  graves.' 
^  'Authorised  Eeport,'  pp.  28 — 30. 

8—2 


ri6  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

name.')     '  The  name  of  the  landlord  was  the  Marquis  of  Lansdowne,  the 
estate  was  in  Kerry,  and  this  was  the  petition  : 

'"We  (the  tenants)  have  been  made  keenly  sensible  of  this  abject 
dependence,  by  certain  rules  and  regulations,  which  are  now  forced  on  this 
estate.  By  these  rules  no  tenant  can  marry,  or  procure  the  marriage  of 
his  son  or  daughter,  without  permission  from  your  lordship's  agent,  even 
Avhen  no  change  of  tenancy  would  arise."  '  (Cheers,  and  loud  cries  of 
'  Shame.')  '  That  was  the  petition  of  the  tenantry  of  Lord  Lansdowne  in 
April,  1858.' 

The  Lansdowne  property  brought  another  of  the  many  'rules'  on  estates 
over  Ireland  to  its  logical  and  tragic  conclusion.  Again  the  words  of  Sir 
John  Gray  will  be  quoted  : 

'  He  would  now  ask  leave  to  read,  not  from  the  petition  of  the  tenantry, 
but  from  the  judgment  of  the  Chief  Baron  of  the  Irish  Court  of  Exchequer, 
another  illustration  of  the  "  rule  of  the  estate,"  which  forbade  a  tenant  to 
give  shelter  even  to  a  relative  in  his  most  dire  distress  upon  that  very 
same  property.  Passing  sentence  upon  some  persons  in  the  dock  who  were 
accused  of  the  manslaughter  of  a  boy  of  twelve  years  of  age,  Chief  Baron 
Pigott  said:  'The  poor  boy  whose  death  you  caused  was  between  twelve 
and  fourteen  years  of  age."  Now  mark  the  history  of  that  boy,  as  told 
by  the  Chief  Baron:  "His  mother  at  one  time  held  a  little  dwelling 
from  which  she  teas  expelled.  His  father  was  dead.  His  mother  had  left 
him,  and  he  was  alone  and  unprotected.  He  fo^md  refuge  with  his  grand- 
mother, who  held  a  little  iaxra,  from  ichich  she  was  removed  in  consequence 
of  her  harbouring  this  j^oor  boy,  as  the  agent  of  the  property  had  given 
public  notice  to  the  tenantry  that  expidsion  froin  their  farms  would  be  the 
penalty  inflicted  upon  them  if  they  harboured  any  persons  having  no 
residence  on  the  estate."  These  two  cases,  not  of  eviction,  but  cases 
where  eviction  did  not  occur,  showed  that  the  tenantry  were,  because  of 
the  extraordinary  powers  conferred  by  law  on  landlords,  in  such  a  state  of 
serfdom,  that  the  mother  could  not  receive  her  daughter — that  the  grand- 
mother could  not  receive  her  own  grandchild  unless  that  child  was  a  tenant 
on  the  estate  '  ('Shame,'  'Inhuman')- — 'and  the  result  in  the  case  he  was 
referring  to  .  .  .  was  this,  that  the  poor  boy,  without  a  house  to  shelter  him, 
was  sought  to  be  forced  into  the  house  of  a  relative  in  a  terrible  night  of 
storm  and  rain.  He  was  immediately  pushed  out  again,  he  staggered  on  a 
little,  fell  to  the  ground,  and  the  next  morning  was  found  cold,  stiff,  and 
dead.'  (Sensation.)  'The  persons  who  drove  the  poor  boy  out  were  tried 
for  the  offence  of  being  accessories  to  his  death,  and  their  defence  was, 
that  what  they  did  was  done  under  the  terror  of  "  the  rule  of  the  estate," 
and  that  they  meant  no  harm  to  the  boy.'    (' Shame.') ^ 

Finally,  on  this  point  there  were  cases  in  which  the  landlord  had  made 
even  harder  claims.  The  droit  de  seigneur  reigned  as  completely  in  Ireland 
as  in  France  ;  but  while  in  the  one  case  it  ended  with  the  French  Revolu- 
tion, it  endured  in  Ireland  —  thanks  to  British  rule — until  our  own  times. 
Lord  Leitrim  in  this  way,  as  in  many  others,  raged  like  a  plague  over  the 
people,  whom  a  hideous  destiny  and  evil  laws  left  entirely  at  his  mercy. 
On  his  estates  a  comely  girl  was  ordered  to  come  nominally  as  a  domestic 
servant  inside  bis  house.  The  house  became  a  prison,  and  the  service  was 
the  service  of  shame.  In  due  time  the  lord  of  the  seraligo  sent  the 
'  '  Authorised  Report,'  pp   SO,  31. 


R  UIN  AND  RABA  GAS.  1 1 7 

distasteful  mistress  to  America,  and  to  some  other  hapless  girl  on  his 
estate  the  dread  choice  was  offered  between  entering  the  harem  or  exposing 
ber  parents  and  her  family  to  eviction,  ^.e.,  starvation. 

Such  are  a  few  instances,  selected  out  from  hundreds,  of  what  landlordism 
meant  for  Ireland  during  the  years  between  the  treason  of  Keogh  and  the 
year  1865.  To  complete  the  picture  it  is  necessary  to  describe  in  some 
detail  one  other  eviction  scene,  which,  from  its  peculiar  cruelty,  attracted 
universal  attention.  The  story  of  Glenveigh  has  been  told  often  since,  not 
merely  in  history,  but  in  romance.  Derryveigh  is  situate  in  the  highlands 
of  Donegal,  and  has  some  of  the  most  beautiful  scenery  in  Ireland.  The 
beauty  of  its  scenery  attracted  the  attention  of  Mr.  John  George  Adair,  a 
Queen's  County  landlord,  while  on  a  sporting  visit  to  the  locality,  and  he 
resolved  to  buy  the  property.  Up  to  this  period  the  population  enjoyed  a 
universal  reputation  for  the  virtues  associated  usually  with  remote  moun- 
taineers. They  were  quiet,  industrious,  and  on  excellent  terms  with,  their 
landlords.  The  advent  of  Mr.  Adair  changed  all  this.  The  struggle  between 
him  and  his  tenants  began  in  a  small  dispute  about  his  right  to  shoot  over 
some  land  formerly  in  the  possession  of  one  of  their  landlords.  The  farmers 
attempted  to  prevent  Mr.  Adair  shooting  ;  there  was  a  scufHe  ;  litigation 
ensued  with  varying  success,  and  with  increasing  bitterness  between  Mr. 
Adair  and  one  of  the  tenants.  A  further  cause  of  dispute  arose  soon  after. 
Mr.  Adair  had,  like  some  other  of  the  landlords,  imported  a  number  of 
Scotch  black-faced  sheep,  which  were  supposed  to  be  a  very  profitable  in- 
vestment. These  sheep  disappeared  in  considerable  numbers  ;  Mr.  Adair 
charged  his  tenants  with  having  maliciously  destroyed  them,  and  succeeded 
for  a  while  in  obtaining  large  sums  in  compensation  from  the  grand  jury. 
These  taxes  fell  very  heavily  upon  the  tenantry,  and  tended  to  exasperate 
feeling  still  further.  It  was  represented,  too,  that  while  the  sheep  only  cost 
7s.  6d.  to  10s.  a  head,  the  amount  claimed  at  the  presentments  was  from 
17s.  6d.  to  25s.  a  head.  The  Judge  of  Assize — the  late  Chief  Justice 
Monahan — indignantly  refused  iojiat  these  monstrous  claims,  and  an  im- 
pression began  to  prevail  that  the  disappearance  of  many  of  the  sheep  at 
least  was  due,  not  to  malice,  but  to  the  stress  of  weather. 

This,  however,  was  not  the  view  taken  by  Mr.  Adaix.  He  had  been 
exasperated  so  much  by  the  quarrel  over  the  rights  of  sporting  and  the 
disappearance  of  the  sheep,  that  he  came  to  regard  himself  as  engaged  in 
a>  fierce  and  merciless  struggle  with  the  tenantry.  He  had  prepared  for 
such  a  struggle  by  getting  possession  of  the  entire  district  by  purchase  at 
different  but  closely  following  dates,  and  he  was  in  the  end  the  absolute 
master  of  ninety  sqiiare  miles  of  country.  Several  small  acts  led  up  to  a 
final  cause  of  quarrel.  Two  of  his  dogs  were  poisoned,  as  he  thought 
maliciously,  although  the  grand  jury  refused  him  compensation,  and  an 
outhouse  was  set  on  fire.  Finally,  one  of  his  herds  was  murdered.  Thia 
fixed  Mr.  Adair's  determination  :  the  banishment  of  the  whole  population 
— nothing  less  would  feed  fat  his  big  revenge. 

The  tenantry  heard  of  this  fell  intention,  but,  removed  from  much  con- 
tact with,  the  outside  world,  and  unable  to  face  even  in  imagination  such,  a 
terrible  possibility,  they  went  on  without  taking  any  particular  notice. 
But  they  were  the  only  persons  who  were  undisturbed.  The  other  land- 
lords, alarmed  at  the  transformation  of  the  country  from  its  normal  tran- 
quillity into  all  this  tumult  of  conflict,  passed  a  strong  resolution  in  favour 
of  the  tenantry  ;  the  clergymen  of  all  denominations  were  as  vehemently 
on  their  side  ;  the  local  authorites  were  loud  in  their  anger.     '  Is  it  my 


Ii8  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

duty,'  wrote  Mr.  Dillon,  the  resident  magistrate,  to  Sir  Thomas  Larcom, 
then  Under-Secretary  at  Dublin  Castle,  '  to  stand  by  and  give  protection 
while  the  houses  are  being  levelled  V  In  Dublin  Castle  itself  they  were  in 
a  fever  of  apprehension,  and  they  made  preparations  for  assisting  the  land- 
lord in  this  act  of  brutal  and  v/holesale  cruelty  as  extensive  as  if  they  were 
preparing  for  a  small  campaign.  Mr.  Adair's  bailiffs  were  supplied  with 
the  services  of  a  large  numbe?  of  soldiers  and  police.  On  the  night  of 
Sunday  this  body  took  possession  quietly  and  wthout  any  warning  of  all 
the  approaches  to  the  valley  in  which  the  doomed  people  slept :  on  the 
following  morning — Monday,  April  8 — the  work  of  eviction  began.  The 
Dtrry  Standard,  a  Presbyterian  journal  of  the  district,  described  through 
its  special  correspondent  what  followed  : 

'  The  first  eviction  was  one  peculiarly  distressing,  and  the  terrible  reality 
of  the  law  suddenly  burst  with  surprise  on  the  spectators.  Having  arrived 
at  Lough  Barra,  the  police  were  halted,  and  the  sheriff,  v/ith  a  small  escort, 
proceeded  to  the  house  of  a  widow  named  M' Award,  aged  sixty  years, 
living  with  whom  were  six  daughters  and  a  son.  Long  before  the  house 
was  reached  loud  cries  were  heard  piercing  the  air,  and  soon  the  figures  of 
the  poor  widow  and  her  daughters  were  observed  outside  the  house,  where 
they  gave  vent  to  their  grief  in  strains  of  touching  agony.  Eorced  to  dis- 
charge an  unpleasant  duty,  the  sheriff  entered  the  house  and  delivered  up 
possession  to  Mr.  Adair's  steward,  wherevipon  six  men,  who  had  been 
brought  from  a  distance,  immediately  fell  to  to  level  the  house  to  the 
ground.  The  scene  then  became  indescribable.  The  bereaved  widow  and 
her  daughters  were  frantic  Avith  despair.  Throwing  themselves  on  the 
ground,  they  became  almost  insensible,  and,  bursting  out  in  the  old  Irish 
wail — then  heard  by  many  for  the  first  time — their  terrifying  cries  re- 
sounded along  the  mountain-side  for  many  miles.  They  had  been  deprived 
of  the  little  spot  made  dear  to  them  by  associations  of  the  past — and  with 
bleak  poverty  before  them,  and  only  the  blue  sky  to  shelter  them,  they 
naturally  lost  all  hope,  and  those  xA\o  witnessed  their  agony  will  neve? 
forget  the  sight.  No  one  could  stand  by  unmoved.  Every  heart  was 
touched,  and  tears  of  spnpathy  flowed  from  many.  In  a  short  time  we 
withdrew  from  the  scene,  leaving  the  widow  and  her  orphans  surrounded 
by  a  small  group  of  neighbours  who  couM  only  express  their  sympathy  for 
the  homeless,  without  possessing  the  power  to  relieve  them.  During  that 
and  the  next  two  days  the  entire  holdings  in  the  land  mentioned  above 
were  visited,  and  it  was  not  until  an  advanced  hour  on  Wednesday  the 
evictions  were  finished.  In.  all  the  evictions  the  distress  of  the  poor  peopit: 
was  equal  to  that  depicted  in  the  first  case.  Dearly  did  they  uling  to  their 
homes  till  the  last  m.oment,  and  while  the  male  population  bestirred  them- 
selves in  clearing  the  houses  of  what  scanty  furniture  they  contained,  the 
women  and  children  remained  within  till  the  sheriff's  bailiff'  warned  them 
out,  and  even  then  it  was  vv'ith  difficulty  they  could  tear  themselves  away 
from  the  scenes  of  happier  days.  In  many  cases  they  bade  an  affectionate 
adieu  to  their  former  pieaceable  but  now  desolate  homes.  One  old  man, 
near  the  fourscore  years  and  ten,  on  leaving  his  house  for  Jhe  last  time, 
reverently  kissed  the  doorposts,  with  all  the  impassioned  tenderness  of  an 
emigrant  leaving  his  native  land.  His  wife  and  children  followed  hia 
example,  and  in  agonised  silence  the  afflicted  family  stood  by  and  watched 
the  destruction  of  their  dwelling.  In  another  case  an  old  man,  aged 
ninety,  who  was  lying  ill  in  bad,  was  brought  out  of  the  house  in  order 


RUIN  AND  RABAGAS.  119 

that  formal  possession  might  be  taken,  but  readmitted  for  a  week  to  permit 
of  his  removal.  In  nearly  every  house  there  was  some  one  far  advanced 
in  age — many  of  them  tottering  to  the  grave — while  the  sobs  of  helpless 
children  took  hold  of  every  heart.  When  dispossessed,  the  families  grouped 
themselves  on  the  grovmd,  beside  the  ruins  of  their  late  homes,  having  no 
place  of  refuge  near.  The  dumb  animals  refused  to  leave  the  wallsteads, 
and  in  some  cases  were  with  difficulty  rescind  from  the  falling  timbers. 
As  night  set  in  the  scene  became  fearfully  sad.  Passing  along  the  base  of 
the  mountain  the  spectator  might  have  observed  near  to  each  house  its 
former  inmates  crouching  round  a  turf  fire,  close  by  a  hedge  ;  and  as  a 
drizzling  rain  poured  upon  them  they  found  no  cover,  and  were  entirely 
exposed  to  it,  but  only  sought  to  warm  their  famished  bodies.  Many  of 
them  were  but  miserably  clad,  and  on  all  sides  the  greatest  desolation  was 
apparent.  I  learned  afterwards  that  the  great  majority  of  them  lay  out 
all  night,  either  behind  the  hedges  or  in  a  little  wood  which  skirts  the 
lake  ;  they  had  no  other  alternative.  I  believe  many  of  them  intend  re- 
sorting to  the  poorhouse.  There  these  poor  starving  people  remain  on  the 
cold  bleak  mountains,  no  one  caring  for  them  whether  they  live  or  die. 
'Tis  horrible  to  think  of,  but  more  horrible  to  behold. '■■• 

This  tragedy  excited  the  attention  of  many  people.  An  appeal  was 
made  for  assistance,  and  the  appeal  was  signed  in  a  province  unfortunately 
remarkable  for  religious  dissension  by  the  Catholic  bishop,  the  Protestant 
rector,  the  Presbyterian  minister,  and  the  Catholic  parish  priest  of  the  dis- 
trict, who  united  in  warm  defence  of  the  people  against  their  landlord.  In 
Australia,  meantime,  one  of  their  countrymen,  who  was  a  member  of  the 
Legislature — the  late  Hon.  Michael  O' Grady — had  formed  a  relief  com- 
mittee, and  offered  to  assist  them  to  homes  in  a  better  and  freer  land  than 
their  own.  The  late  Mr.  A.  M.  Sullivan — from  whose  book  I  have  quoted 
the  details  of  the  story — actively  interested  himself  in  their  welfare. 
'  The  poor  people,'  he  writes,  '  were  sought  out  and  collected.  Some  by 
this  time  had  sunk  under  their  sufferings.  One  man,  named  Bradley,  had 
lost  his  reason  under  the  shock  ;  other  cases  were  nearly  as  heartrending. 
There  were  old  men  who  would  keep  wandering  over  the  hills  in  view  of 
their  ruined  homes,  full  of  the  idea  that  some  day  Mr.  Adair  might  let 
them  return  ;  but  who  at  last  had  to  be  borne  to  the  distant  workhouse 
hospital  to  die.' 

*  With  a  strange  mixture  of  joy  and  sadness,'  continues  Mr.  Sullivan, 
'  the  survivors  heard  that  their  friends  in  Australia  had  paid  their  passage- 
money.  On  the  day  they  were  to  set  out  for  the  railway  station  en  route, 
for  Liverpool,  a  strange  scene  was  witnessed.  The  cavalcade  was  accom- 
panied by  a  concourse  of  neighbours  and  sympathisers.  They  had  to  pass 
within  a  short  distance  of  the  ancient  burial-ground  where  the  "  rude 
forefathers "  of  the  valley  slept.  They  halted,  turned  aside,  and  pro- 
ceeded to  the  grass-grown  cemetery.  Here  in  a  body  they  knelt,  flung 
themselves  on  the  gi'aves  of  their  relatives,  which  they  reverently  kissed 
again  and  again,  and  raised  for  the  last  time  the  Irish  caoine,  or  funeral 
wail.  Then — some  of  them  pulling  tufts  of  the  grass,  which  they  placed 
in  their  bosoms — they  resumed  their  way  on  the  road  to  exile. '^ 

It  was  not  alone  to  the  tenants  themselves  and  the  country  population 
generally  that  these  wholesale  clearances  were  disastrous.     Agriculture  is 

.»  Quoted  in  '  New  Ireland,'  pp.  227,  228.  a  Ih.,  p.  229,  230. 


126  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

practically  the  one  industry  of  Ireland,  and  with  the  disappearance  of  the 
farmers  around  disappeared  the  customers  and  the  trade  of  the  towns. 
Nor  was  this  the  only  way  in  which  the  towns  suffered  from  the  general 
exodus.  The  evicted  farmers,  in  many  cases,  had  not  sufficient  capital  to 
pay  their  passage  to  America,  and  drifted  into  the  towns.  There  but  a 
comparatively  small  number  of  them  could  obtain  employment,  and  they 
were  transformed  by  due  gradation  into  the  vast  army  of  beggars  that  in- 
fest the  Irish  towns,  or  into  the  paupers  that  rot  in  idleness  within  the 
workhouses.  The  towns  thus  suffered  doubly  in  the  decrease  of  the 
customers  and  the  increase  in  the  pauper  population  ;  and  hence  it  is  that 
to-day  there  is  in  the  villages  and  the  smaller  towns  of  Ireland  poverty 
more  hopeless,  chronic,  and  appalling  than  we  can  find  even  in  the 
country.  The  agricultural  labourers,  the  misery  of  whose  condition  has 
passed  into  a  by-word  even  among  Irish  Chief  Secretaries,  and  into  the 
facts  sadly  acknowledged  by  even  the  most  hostile  and  opposite  sections 
of  Irish  opinion,  are  for  the  most  part  farmers  whom  eviction  divorced 
from  the  soil. 

On  the  decadence  which  the  clearances  brought  to  the  Irish  in  towns, 
the  evidence  is  overwhelming  ;  indeed,  any  Ii-ishman  that  has  revisited 
after  some  years  of  absence  his  native  place  can  give  testimony  on  this 
point  by  recounting  the  painful  impressions  the  terrible  change  he  every- 
where sees  has  left  upon  his  mind.  He  finds  a  painfully  large  proportion 
of  the  people  he  has  known  gone  in  despair  from  the  place — to  America, 
or  Australia,  or  England.  Of  those  who  remain  behind,  the  majority  are 
in  the  unrelaxing  grip  of  unconquerable  poverty.  Take,  out  of  the 
numberless  instances,  the  case  of  two  towns.  Mr.  John  Hynes  tells  ^  how 
on  Mr.  Lahiff's  estate,  close  to  the  town  of  Gort,  there  used  in  his  young 
days  to  be  two  hundred  families  and  a  mile  in  tillage.  Now — he  was 
speaking  of  1880 — all  was  grazing  land  and  the  town  of  Gort  had  been 
changed  for  a  lane,  and  prosperous  town  to  a  struggling  village.  Erancis 
Nicholls  tells-  the  effect  of  the  clearances  by  Mr.  Nicholson  on  the 
neighbouring  town  of  Kells  ;  the  pauper  population  had  been  largely  in- 
creased, and  it  was  impossible  to  tell  how  many  of  them  lived  through  the 
winter  months.     These  people  were  in  almost  every  case  evicted  families. 

Ireland  to-day  bears  the  still  fresh  scars  of  the  terrible  sufferings  of  the 
years  I  am  describing  and  the  years  which  immediately  preceded  them. 
The  most  prominent,  the  most  frequent,  the  ever-recurring  feature  of  the 
Irish  landscape  is  the  unroofed  cottage.  There  are  many  parts  of  the 
country  where  these  skeleton  walls  stare  at  one  with  a  persistency  and  a 
ghastly  iteration  that  convey  the  idea  of  passing  through  a  land  which 
had  been  swept  by  rapidly  successive  and  frequent  waves  of  foreign 
invasion — by  war,  and  slaughter,  and  the  universal  break-up  of  national 
life.  Or  shall  I  rather  say  that  Ireland  conveys  the  idea,  not  of  a  nation 
still  young  in  hope  and  daily  increasing  in  wealth  and  in  possibilities,  but 
rather  the  image  of  one  of  those  Oriental  nations  whose  history  and 
empire,  wealth  and  hopes,  belong  to  the  irrevocable  past.  There  are 
several  counties  where  one  can  pass  for  miles  without  ever  catching  sight 
of  a  house  or  of  any  human  face  but  that  of  the  shepherd,  almost  as 
isolated  as  his  hapless  brother  in  the  stretching  plains  of  California. 

Meantime,  while  throughout  Ireland  this  ghastly  destruction  of  a  nation 
was  going  on,  the  season  was  the  most  pleasant  and  profitable  that  the 
political  adventurer  has  ever  known  in  Ireland.     The  counti-y  had  fallen 

^  Evidence  for  Queen  v.  Parnell.  *  Ih. 


KUIN  AND  RABAGAS.  121 

from  rage  to  despair,  and  from  despair  to  cjmicisra.  The  electoral  contests 
ot  the  time  were  conducted  on  a  principle  well  understood  though  not 
publicly  avowed.  The  political  aspirant  was  to  make  profession  of  strong 
patriotic  purpose,  which  the  elector  professed  on  his  side  to  believe,  and, 
as  the  candidate  used  Parliament  solely  for  the  purpose  of  personal 
advancement,  the  elector  pocketed  the  bribe  while  professing  to  believe 
the  candidate.  A  good  deal  of  this  corruption  was  the  result  of  two  other 
causes  besides  the  daily  increasing  poverty  of  the  country.  First,  there 
was  no  great  or  commanding  personality ;  secondly,  there  was  nothing  like 
the  unity  of  a  national  purpose.  This  latter  fact  is  a  most  important 
factor  in  this  as  in  several  other  periods  of  Irish  history.  Election  contests 
turned  on  purely  personal  or  local  issues.  This  man  was  preferred  in  one 
place  because  he  was  a  better  speaker  or  a  more  genial  fellow  ;  and  one 
constituency  wanted  a  harbour  and  another  a  bridge.  Thus,  for  instance, 
in  Galway  the  chief  desire  of  the  people  was  that  there  should  be  some 
means  of  utilizing  the  splendid  bay  of  the  town  and  its  geographical 
destiny  as  the  entrepot  between  the  old  and  the  new  world.  This  aspira- 
tion of  Galway  was  so  notorious  that  it  was  utilized  by  all  kinds  of  people. 
One  of  my  boyish  recollections  is  of  a  travelling  show  which  added  to  the 
attractions  of  the  then  newly-discovered  ghost  of  Professor  Pepper  a 
panorama  of  America — a  country  which  at  that  time,  in  spite  of  the  vast 
number  of  Irish  emigrants,  was  a  terra  incognita.  The  lecturer  who 
accompanied  the  show  had  taken  the  precaution  to  consult  some  of  the 
knowing  men  of  the  town  as  to  the  local  weaknesses,  and  turned  the 
information  thus  received  to  excellent  account.  He  was  describing  one 
night  some  bay  in  America,  and  after  a  eulogy  of  its  beauties  in  language 
of  Transatlantic  fervour,  he  wound  up  with  the  statement  that  it  was  the 
most  beautiful  bay  in  the  world  with  two  exceptions — the  bay  of  Naples 
and  the  bay  of  Galway.  The  election  in  Galway  was  fought  throughout 
these  years  on  the  question  of  the  bay  and  a  Transatlantic  mail  service  ; 
and  an  English  gentleman  was  returned  more  than  once  because  he  had 
succeeded  in  getting  a  subsidy  from  Lord  Derby  for  a  mail  service  between 
Galway  and  New  York. 

A  third  reason  of  the  political  corruption  of  the  constituencies  was 
that  the  people  had  a  distrust  so  profound  in  the  men  who  sought  their 
representation.  They  regarded  them,  one  and  all,  as  adventurers  who, 
assuming  different  names — Tory,  Whig,  Peelite,  Patriot — had  all  the  same 
common  end — personal  aggrandisement.  When  men  in  Athlone,  for 
instance,  were  reproached  for  taking  bribes,  the  retort  was  that  whether  it 
was  one  self-seeker  or  another  got  in  made  no  difference,  and  that  a  poor 
man  might  be  well  excused  if  he  made  one  or  other  of  the  rogues  pay 
for  his  promotion. 

The  candidate  of  these  days  belonged,  as  a  rule,  to  one  of  three 
classes.  Eirst,  there  were  a  certain  number  of  Englishmen  or  of  Irishmen 
settled  in  England  who  were  anxious  for  a  seat  in  Parliament,  because  of 
the  advantages  it  gave  them  in  floating  companies  and  other  financial 
operations  in  the  city  of  London.  Then  there  were  the  children  of  the 
bourgeoisie,  who  desired  to  gild  the  wealth  gained  by  their  parents  in  the 
sale  of  tea  or  of  whisky.  These  men  had  become,  as  a  rule,  landed  pro- 
prietors. The  establishment  of  the  Incumbered  Estates  Court  had 
enabled  a  large  number  of  the  bankrupt  gentry  of  Ireland  to  dispose  of 
their  estates,  and  a  new  generation  of  landlords  grew  up  in  the  shape  of 
successful  tradesmen  who  had  the  Celtic  passion  for  the  acquisition  of  land 


122  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

and  the  general  desire  to  enter  the  county  families  which  belongs  to  the 
successtul  men  of  trade  in  all  parts  of  the  three  kingdoms.  To  make  the 
transformation  in  snch  a  case  complete,  a  title  was  necessary  ;  and  many 
of  the  children  of  the  hourgeoisie  spent  tens  of  thousands  of  pounds,  and 
followed  the  Ministerial  whip  with  the  abject  devotion  of  ten  years,  in  the 
hope  of  receiving  a  baronetcy  at  the  end  of  it  all  ! 

But  the  most  common  type  of  Irish  politician  in  these  days  was  the 
man  wdio  entered  Parliamentary  life  solely  for  the  purpose  of  selling  him- 
self for  place  and  salary.  This  was  the  golden  season  when  every  Irishman 
who  could  scrape  as  much  money  together  as  v/ould  pay  his  election 
expenses  was  able,  after  a  while,  to  obtain  a  governorship  or  some  other  of 
the  many  substantial  rewards  which  English  party  leaders  were  able  to 
give  to  their  followers.  The  chief  persons  to  benefit  by  this  time  of 
universal  corruption  were  the  Irish  barristers.  They  had  advantages  over 
all  other  competitors.  They  were  accustomed  to  speaking  ;  their  names 
were  familiar  to  the  public  ;  in  short,  they  were  marked  out  for  political 
life  above  all  other  classes  in  Ireland,  as  in  every  other  country  where 
there  are  Parliamentary  instit-ations  and  a  legal  profession.  Parlia,ment 
was  made  during  this  whole  period  the  sole  avenue  through  which  profes- 
sional promotion  could  be  obtained.  It  v/as  one  of  the  many  things  which 
helped  to  embitter  Irish  opinion  against  English  rule,  in  those  robust 
natures  where  national  feeling  still  lived,  that  English  Ministers  at  this 
period  seemed  to  delight  in  increasing  the  chances  of  political  adventurers, 
and  sought  to  maintain  the  hated  Act  of  Union  by  means  as  shameless  as 
those  by  which  it  had  been  passed.  Por  nearly  a  quarter  of  a  century  there 
were  only  two  cases  in  which  men  were  raised  to  the  bench  who  had  not  in 
the  first  instance  been  members  of  Parliament.  These  two  cases  were,  I 
may  add,  those  of  two  Conservatives  and  Protestants — Mr.  Christian  and 
Baron  Fitzgerald,  who,  according  to  universal  acknowledgment,  were  two 
of  the  greatest  judges  that  ever  sat  upon  the  Irish  bench.  In  every  other 
instance  the  judge  passed  first  through  a  Parliamentary  career.  The  man 
who  was  sure  of  a  constituency  was  certain  of  a  judgeship,  even  though  he 
v/as  ignorant  of  the  very  elements  of  law,  and  had  rarely  even  received  a 
brief. 

The  career  of  most  of  these  politicians  had  a  certain  resemblance  to  that 
of  Judge  Keogh,  though,  of  course,  there  were  wanting  the  circumstances 
that  gave  such  fatal  results  to  his  treachery,  and  were  conceived  in  a  minor 
key  of  lies  and  pledges.  The  barrister  started  as  a  patriot  of  rather  a  pro- 
nounced type,  lamented  the  emigration,  called  for  a  Land  Bill,  and  spoke 
disrespectfully  of  the  Government.  A  typical  case  was  that  of  the  gentle- 
man who  is  now  known  as  Lord  Pitzgerald.  He  was  present,  when  a 
young  barrister,  at  a  banquet  in  Cork  to  the  Lord-Li!»3utenant,  and  being 
called  upon  to  make  a  speech,  he  astounded  everybody  and  shocked  the 
greater  part  of  a  servile  audience  by  bursting  into  a  violently  national 
speech,  and  uttering  things  about  the  miseries  and  wrongs  of  Ireland 
which,  though  true,  were  not  deemed  such  as  Viceregal  ears  should  hear  or 
a  rising  and  ambitious  barrister  should  utter.  But,  in  the  midst  of  the 
interruptions  of  the  loyal,  Mr.  Fitzgera,ld  went  on  his  way,  and  in  the  end 
became,  or  affected  to  become,  so  frenzied  by  his  grief  at  his  country's 
wrongs  that  he  jumped  on  the  table,  and  there  continued  his  harangue. 
A  young  reporter  who  was  present  at  this  strange  scene  remarked  to 
Serjeant  Murphy — a  cynical  Irishman  who  had  been  a  member  of  Parlia- 
ment for  many  years,  and  had  nothing  in  the  shape  of  political  corruption 


kVlN  AND  RaBAGAS.  123 

Co  iearn — what  a  pity  it  was  that  a  promising  young  barrister  like  Fitz- 
gerald iiad  rumed  himself.  '  Ruined,'  said  MurpJiy  with  a  laugh  ;  '  why, 
he  has  marfe  himself  !'  And  the  prophecy  was  correct,  for  shortly  after- 
wards Mr.  Fitzgerald  was  a  law  ofhcei  of  the  Crown,  then  in  due  time  was 
created  a  judge,  and  atoned  for  any  patriotic  passion,  real  or  simulated,  of 
his  electioneering  days  by  the  fervour  with  which  he  has  persecuted  all 
national  movements  ever  since.  The  reporter  who  had  the  conversation 
with  Murphy  just  recorded  reappears  in  these  pages ;  he  was  Justin 
M'Carthy. 

Another  typical  case  is  that  of  Mr.  Justice  Lawson.  Mr.  Lawson 
be:;an  life  as  a  Conservative,  and,  as  a  Conservative,  sought  election  for 
Trinity  College — a  Conservative  stronghold.  In  his  election  address  he 
made  no  mention  of  the  Irish  Church.  When  reproached  with  the  omis- 
sion, the  nimble-tongued  and  unabashed  lawyer  was  ready  with  an  answer. 
He  had  made  no  mention  of  the  Irish  Church  for  the  same  reason  that 
there  was  no  mention  of  parricide  vw  the  Roman  law.  The  attack  on  the 
Church  by  one  of  her  sons  was  like  the  murder  of  a  parent  by  a  child — a 
crime  too  horrible  to  be  contemplated,  and,  therefore,  not  to  be  mentioned. 
This  was  in  1857,  when  the  Irish  Church  stood  solid  and  unassailed.  Four 
years  passed  away  ;  the  Disestablishment  of  the  Irish  Church  became  the 
cry  of  a  great  English  party  ;  and  Mr.  Lawson  stood  as  an  advocate  of  the 
destruction  of  the  Chi:irch  of  his  fathers.  He  was  returned  for  Portarlington, 
and,  as  Attorney- General  for  Ireland,  was  one  of  the  most  prominent  and 
active  of  the  men  who  helped  Mr.  Gladstone  in  his  great  enterprise. 
Haised  in  time  to  the  bench,  he  has  never  missed  an  opportunity  of  flouting 
and  trampling  on  the  people  through  whose  votes  he  reached  dignity  and 
wealth.  If  still  another  example  were  required,  there  is  the  case  of  Mr. 
William  (nov/  Mr.  Justice)  O'Brien.  Mr.  O'Brien  stood  for  Ennis  in  1879 
and  1880  as  a  Home  Huler.  He  was  rejected  ;  but  he  has  since  been 
elevated  to  the  bench,  and  he  has  used  all  his  strength  and  position  to 
oppose  the  advent  of  Home  Rule.  Another  point  is  worth  noting  in  con- 
nection with  these  gentlemen.  They  were  nearly  all  elected  by  small  and 
therefore  corrupt  constituencies,  and  they  obtained  election  by  corruption. 
Judge  Keogh  bribed  heavily  and  almost  universally  in  Athlone.  Judge 
Lawson  was  returned  for  Portarlington  in  1865.  The  character  of  the  con- 
stituency may  be  judged  from  the  poll — Lawson,  46  ;  Damer,  35.  It  is 
scarcely  an  exaggeration  to  say  that  every  one  of  the  46  voters  who  gave 
Mr.  Lawson  Parliamentary  existence  and  then  judicial  eminence  was  paid 
in  Mr.  Lawson's  hard  money  for  the  service.  Chief  Justice  Morris  bribed 
heavily  in  Galvvay  ;  the  late  Lord  Chancellor  of  Ireland,  Sir  E.  Sullivan, 
bribed  heavily  in  Mallow.  It  is  hard  to  say  which  of  the  two  competitors 
in  the  old  days  for  Dungarvan  bribed  the  more  heavily — Lord  Justice 
Barry  or  Mr.  Henry  Mathews,  her  Majesty's  Principal  Secretary  of  State 
at  the  present  moment. 

I  deem  it  necessary  to  bring  out  and  to  accentuate  these  facts  for  more 
than  one  reason.  They  are  notorious  in  Ireland,  but  they  are  probably 
revelations  to  the  people  of  England.  Many  of  the  judges  whose  names 
I  have  mentioned  have  been  able  to  pass  themselves  off  on  English  opinion 
as  pure  men  of  public  spirit  and  patriotic  purpose.  They  have  nearly  all  of 
them  distinguished  themselves  in  times  of  trouble  ;  for  they  have  aU  been 
ready  to  deliver  charges  which  can  serve  Irish  Chief  Secretaries  with  argu- 
ments and  cases  for  coercion ;  and  these  charges  have  been  taken  by  English- 
men as  the  pronouncements  of  calm,  impartial,  upright  men.     I  have  told 


124  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

enough  to  show  that  their  utterances  are  those  of  violent  partisans  who 
hate  the  people  they  have  betrayed  and  the  principles  they  have  abandoned 
with  the  characteristic  hatred  of  the  renegade.  These  facts  will  account 
for  what  might  otherwise  appear  to  be  the  unreasonable  hatred  of  Irishmen 
for  the  Irish  judges,  and  for  attacks  on  these  personages  which  often  sur- 
prise and  even  shock  Englishmen.  The  difference  between  the  judicial 
benches  of  the  two  countries  may  be  summ^ed  up  as  this  :  that  in  England 
the  bench  consists  of  the  best  of  men,  and  in  Ireland  it  is  largely  recruited 
from  the  worst. 

This  further  reason  I  have  for  dwelling  upon  this  painful  topic.  One  of 
the  points  in  the  scheme  of  Mr.  Gladstone  which  was  most  assailed — especi- 
ally by  Liberal  Unionists — was  the  bestowal  on  the  Irish  Executive  of  the 
power  to  appoint  the  judges  and  the  other  persons  entrusted  with  the  ad- 
ministration of  the  law.  Sir  George  Trevelyan,  the  most  candid  and  the 
most  courteous  of  the  opponents  of  Mr.  Gladstone's  scheme,  practically 
pledged  himself  to  the  acceptance  of  Home  Rule,  if  this  portion  of 
Mr.  Gladstone's  plan  were  abandoned.  The  Irish  members  would 
probably  have  rejected  the  Bill  if  Sir  George  Trevelyan's  support  had 
been  purchased  by  such  a  concession,  and  their  rejection  would  have 
come  from  precisely  the  same  reason  as  Sir  George  Trevelyan's  ac- 
ceptance ;  that  is  to  say,  having  exactly  the  same  zeal  for  the  mainten- 
ance of  law  and  order  as  Sir  George  Trevelyan,  they  would  regard  that  as 
the  most  potent  instrument  against  law  and  order  which  Sir  George 
Trevelyan  thinks  its  most  effective  guarantee.  Judges  appointed  by  the 
imperial  authority  would  be  political  judges,  and  political  judges  looking 
for  approval  to  the  politicians  and  public  opinion,  not  of  their  own  country, 
but  of  another.  This  would  mean  judges  who  would  intrigue  with 
English  Ministers,  and  fight  for  English  party,  and  appeal  to  the  passions 
and  the  prejudices  of  the  English  people.  We  should  have  in  Ireland  a 
continuance  of  the  pestilent  race  of  Keoghs,  aiid  Lawsons,  and  O'Briens  ; 
and  this  would  mean  the  continuance  of  two  of  the  worst  features  in  the 
existing  situation.  It  would  mean  that  in  all  times  of  trouble  we  should  have 
Irish  judges  making  vehement  political  harangues  to  the  order  of  English 
Ministers  and  English  opinion,  and  such  men  would  help,  not  to  calm, 
but  to  infuriate  the  angry  feelings  between  the  two  nations.  And  such 
judges  would  perpetuate  that  gulf  betv/een  law  and  the  Irish  nation 
which  at  present  exists,  to  the  disturbance  of  Ireland  and  to  the  perplexity 
of  England.  In  short,  to  have  judges  English-made  would  be  to  poison 
law  at  its  source. 

In  the  controversy,  then,  on  this  point  we  have  two  parties  advocating 
two  diametrically  opposed  plans  for  the  same  end.  Whether  native  or 
foreign  writers  are  the  wisest  and  most  trustworthy  authorities  in  such  a 
matter  of  domestic  concern  I  leave  the  reader  to  decide,  with  this  final 
word,  that  I  vehemently  deny  that  the  Irish  politicians  have  a  desire  less 
ardent,  or  an  interest  lfct>s  keen,  in  proper  safeguards,  for  the  maintenance 
of  law  and  order  than  the  English  politician  of  any  school.  V7hy  should 
not  the  Irish  politician  want  the  maintenance  of  law  and  order  under  a 
Home  Rule  Administration  ?  The  relations  between  landlord  and  tenant 
and  the  government  of  Irish  local  affairs  by  an  Imperial  Parliament  are 
the  only  obstacles  to  the  sympathy  between  the  Irish  nation  and  the  law. 
Home  Rule  would  remove  the  second  obstacle  ;  the  advent  of  Home  Rule 
presupposes  in  most  minds  the  settlement  of  the  Land  Question,  and  there- 


RUIN  AND  RABAGAS.  '  125 

fore  the  removal  of  the  first  obstacle.  If  Irish  politicians  wanted,  there- 
fore, to  perpetuate  the  conflict  between  the  law  and  the  nation,  it  must  be 
from  an  incurable  love  for  crime,  and  in  hostility  to  their  own  interests,  to 
the  best  interests  of  the  nation,  and  to  the  preservation  of  that  self- 
government  for  which  they  are  so  ardently  struggling.  Some  at  least  of 
the  most  prominent  leaders  of  the  Irish  Party  of  to-day  will  have  some 
share  in  the  administration  of  a  self -governed  Ireland,  and  to  put  down 
disorder,  to  punish  crime,  to  preserve  peace,  will  be  their  business.  That 
business  well  done  will  mean  their  political  success;  that  business  neglected 
will  mean  their  political  destruction. 

Returning  from  this  digression,  though  political  profligacy  was  thus  trium- 
phant in  this  disastrous  interval  in  the  Irish  struggle  I  am  now  describing, 
the  struggle  was  not  wholly  abandoned.  The  old  principle  of  the  Tenant 
League,  that  the  candidate  should  remain  independent  of  both  the  English 
parties  and  fight  for  the  cause  of  Ireland  alone,  was  still  preached.  This 
principle  was  known  as  the  policy  of  Independent  Opposition.  At  every 
election  Independent  Opposition  candidates  were  started,  and  occasionally 
they  managed  to  get  returned.  But  they  were  always  few  in  number,  and 
the  number  became  smaller  as  time  went  on.  As  every  army  contains 
within  its  ranks  a  certain  number  who,  being  miserably  base,  become 
deserters,  every  Irish  Party  had  its  quota  of  corrupt  or  mean  natiires,  that 
were  in  time  transformed  from  Irish  patriots  into  Liberal  or  Tory  camp- 
followers.  In  this  way  many  candidates,  elected  as  members  of  an  Inde- 
pendent Irish  Opposition,  became  place-holders  under  some  English 
Administration.  The  times  were  out  of  joint,  and  Independent  Opposition 
never  realized  the  proportions  of  a  large  and  effective  party. 

There  was  one  other  influence  vv^hich  deserves  to  be  mentioned.  Throup-h- 
out  all  these  years  of  apparently  hopeless  struggle  the  Nation  newspaper 
remained  true  to  the  principles  of  its  founders.  It  preached  in  season  and 
out  of  season  the  right  of  Ireland  to  national  existence,  of  the  tenant  to 
protection,  and  Independent  Opposition  as  the  only  means  by  which  these 
great  ends  could  be  attained.  In  face  of  the  British  Government,  un- 
checked by  perfidious  Parliamentarians,  by  omnipotent  landlordism,  by  the 
narrow  electorate  sunk  in  open  corruption,  and  of  the  masses  buried  in 
despair,  A.  M.  Sullivan  and  his  brother,  T.  D.  Sulli'/a.n,  worked  on,  hoped 
on.  To  these  two  brothers  Ireland  owes  it  that  the  lamp  of  national 
faith  and  hope  was  held  aloft  through  this  long  and  apparently  endless 
night  of  eviction,  hunger,  emigration,  triumphant  tyranny,  and  political 
perfidy. 

Meantime  the  moment  has  come  again  for  surveying  the  position  of 
Ireland  from  the  standpoint  of  the  Unionist  Liberal  and  Tory.  Ireland 
was  now  in  the  position  which  oiiglit  to  appear  the  very  ideal  position  to 
the  Unionist  and  the  Tory.  As  after  the  overthrow  of  O'Connell,  so 
after  the  treason  of  Keogh,  there  was  no  party  either  of  open  violence  or  of 
a  constitutional  character  seeking  any  change  in  the  legislative  relations 
between  England  and  Ireland.  On  the  contrary,  the  overwhelming  majority 
of  the  representatives  from  Ireland  were  pledged  and  firm  upholders  of  the 
Act  of  Union.  Whiggery  was  in  a  position  in  Ireland  equally  ideal  and 
equally  prosperous.  The  Whigs  had  during  all  these  years  an  almost  undis- 
puted monopoly  of  power.  Lord  Palmerston,  in  the  period  between  1855 
and  1865,  occupied  a  position  of  something  like  dictatorship  in  English 
politics  ;  and  Ireland  supplied  to  his  ranks  a  large  majority  of  representa- 


126  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

tives  whom  no  neglect  ot  theii  country  could  madden  into  a  patriotic  out- 
burst, and  no  insult  could  rouse  to  a  moment  of  stalwart  manhood.  The 
National  Party  was  extinct — murdered  by  Irish  treason  and  Whig  corrup- 
tion :  in  its  stead  reigned  the  Whig  Party,  and  to  the  Imperial  Parliament 
the  Irish  people  could  alone  look.  It  ought  to  follow,  according  to  the  con- 
clusions which  Unionist  reasoning  regards  as  inevitable,  that  this  would  be 
a  period  of  halcyon  and  dazzling  prosperity  for  the  country.  Proof  has 
been  given  of  how  much  prosperity  there  was,  and  now  it  is  well  to  turn 
from  the  country  advancing  daily  more  rapidly  to  depopiilation,  mth 
tyranny  more  and  more  aggressive,  and  see  what  the  Imperial  Assembly, 
with  its  Whig  majority,  was  doing  for  the  Irish  people. 

The  tale  of  the  Imperial  Parliament  may  be  summed  up  in  a  sentence. 
Every  proposal  for  the  reform  of  the  land  tenure,  or  of  any  other  Irish 
abuse,  met  with  steady  and  usually  with  contemptuous  rejection. 

In  1852  Mr.  Shavman  Crav/ford  brought  in  a  Tenant  Right  Bill  once 
again  ;  it  was  defeated  on  the  second  reading  by  167  votes  to  57.  In 
jSTovember  of  the  same  year  the  Conservative  Government  were  in  power, 
and  the  first  gleam  of  light  broke  the  long  eclipse  of  the  question.  It  was 
an  Irish  Conservative  that  deserves  the  credit  of  making  the  attempt  to 
settle  the  question.  Mr.  (afterwards  Sir)  .Joseph  Napier  brought  in  a  series 
of  Bills  ;  three  were  in  the  interests  of  the  landlords,  one — the  Tenant 
Compensation  Bill — was  in  favour  of  the  tenants.  These  Bills  and  a  Bill 
by  Mr.  Sharman  Crawford  were  referred  to  a  committee.  In  February, 
1853,  the  committee  met,  and,  principally  through  the  influence  of  Lord 
Palmerston,  Sharman  Crawford's  Bill  was  rejected,  and  the  Tenant  Com- 
pensation Bill  of  the  Conservative  law  oiiicer  was  amended  for  the  worse. 
This  Bill  passed  the  three  stages  in  the  House  of  Commons  ;  it  was  sent  up 
to  the  House  of  Lords  in  August  ;  there  was  an  immediate  concourse  of 
their  lordships,  and  the  Bill  was  hung  up.  In  the  following  year  (1854) 
their  lordships  resumed  the  consideration  of  the  Bills.  The  three  measures 
favourably  changing  the  law  for  the  landlords  were  accepted,  the  Tenants' 
Compensation  Bill  was  rejected,  and  thus  came  to  a  final  end  the  well- 
meant  and  bold  effort  of  a  Conservative  statesman  to  give  the  tenant  some 
compensation  for  the  expenditure  of  his  capital. 

The  Irish  Tenant  Ptighters  still  hoped  on,  and  in  1855  the  work  of  intro- 
ducing Bills  was  again  renewed,  and  again  Irish  demands  met  in  each 
succeeding  session  the  same  reception.  Serjeant  Shee,  who  brought  in  a 
Bill,  proposed  that  compensation  should  be  given  for  improvements  both 
retrospective  and  future.  Lord  Palm.erston  could  not  tolerate  such  an 
interference  with  the  rights  of  property,  and  carried  an  amendment  limiting 
the  period  to  which  compensation  for  improvement  should  be  confined  to 
twenty  years.  This  destroyed  the  good  that  vv'as  in  the  Bill,  and  it  was 
dropped.  In  1856,  again,  Mr.  George  Henry  Moore  brought  in  a  Bill  ;  its 
object  v/as  to  extend  the  Ulster  custom  to  all  Ireland.  It  Avas  read  a  second 
time  on  June  8.  The  next  day  Mr.  Horsman,  the  Liberal  Chief  Secretary, 
announced  that  the  Governm.ent  intended  to  opjDose  it,  and  it  was  dropped. 
In  1857  Mr.  Moore  again  brought  forward  a  Bill,  but  he  could  not  secure  a 
day  for  its  discussion,  and  it  was  dropped.  In  1858  Mr.  John  Francis 
Maguire  brought  in  a  Bill ;  it  was  defeated  on  tlie  second  reading,  mainly 
through  the  influence  of  Lord  Palmerston, 

In  1860  the  question  was  taken  up  by  the  Ministry,  and  they  passed  two 
Acts  ;  both  were  completely  inoperative,  oixe  most  fortunately  so.  Mr. 
Cardwell  passed  an  Act  giving  limited  owners  a  right  to  grant  leases,  but 


R  UlN  A  ND  RABA  GA S.  127 

the  terms  were  so  severe  and  so  unsuitable  tliat  nobody  took  advantage  of 
it,  and  year  after  year  returns  showed  the  same  result — in  no  single  instance 
had  anybody  taken  any  advantage  of  the  Act.^ 

The  other  Act  passed  in  the  same  year,  and  known  as  Deasy's  Act,  was 
intended  to  make  tenancies  in  Ireland  entirely  a  matter  of  contract,  and  to 
deprive  the  tenants  of  all  those  rights  which  they  had  claimed  from  time 
immemorial,  and  which,  though  robbed  of  them  by  the  landlord,  they  really 
were  entitled  to  by  the  common  law  of  England.  It  was  doubtful  whether, 
under  that  common  law,  the  tenant  was  not  entitled  to  compensation  for 
his  improvements.^  Deasy's  Act  set  all  this  at  rest,  for  it  declared  that  the 
tenant  could  lay  no  claim  to  any  improvements,  save  such  as  had  been  made 
by  express  contract  with  the  landlord.  The  meaning  of  this  Act,  if  it  had 
been  carried  out,  would  be  that  practically  all  the  improvements  made  by 
the  tenants  throughout  Ireland  were  by  a  stroke  of  the  pen  confiscated  to 
the  landlord.  In  successive  sessions  after  this  till  186S  the  Land  Question 
met  with  the  same  fortunes.  All  reform  was  steadily  refused,  and  with  the 
accompaniment  of  bitter  insolence. 

'  It  is  indeed  almost  impossible,'  justly  remarks  Mr.  J.  Cashel  Hoey,  'to 
realize  now  the  depth  of  imbecility  and  insolence  which  characterized  the 
language  of  the  Liberal  statesmen  of  this  period  whenever  they  spoke  of  the 
affairs  of  Ireland.* 

'  Tenant  right  is  landlord  wTong  !'  exclaimed  Lord  Palmerston,  when  one 
Land  Bill  was  brought  before  the  House,  '  It  would  be  trij3ing  with  the 
House  and  an  abuse  of  its  forms,  to  read  it  a  second  time,'  he  said  with 
regard  to  another.  When  Mr.  Macguire  obtained,  in  1865,  a  Select  Com- 
mittee to  inquire  into  the  question,  Mr.  Roebuck  was  cheered  from  all 
parts  of  the  House  when  he  declared  that  the  committee  ought  to  be  'a 
committee  composed  of  men  of  cross-examining  powers,  or,  as  1  once  heard 
a  learned  friend  term  it,  eviscerating  powers.'  '  If  a  committee  contained 
good  cross-examiners,'  replied  Lord  Palmerston,  genially  nod  ding  to  Mr.  Roe- 
buck, 'so much  the  better.'  '  I  am  exceedingly  glad,'  exclaimed  Mr.  Cardwell, 
on  June  23,  1865,  '  that  we  are  not  about  to  separate  under  the  imputation  of 
having  given  an  uncertain  sound  upon  this  subject.  I  wish,'  he  said,  '  to 
express  my  individual  opinion  that,  by  whatever  name  it  may  be  called, 
compulsory  compensation  for  improvements  effected  against  the  will  of  the 
landlord  is  not  a  principle  v/hich  is  consistent  with  the  rights  of  property. 
I  am  convinced,'  he  wound  up  in  a  final  flourish,  '  that  it  is  more  in 
accordance  with  the  feeling  of  a  high-spirited  people  that  they  should  be 
spoken  to  in  plain  terms  ;  and  I  have  that  opinion  of  the  Irish  people  that 
I  do  not  tli'nk  they  would  approve  an  insincere  and  uncertain  course  on  an 
important  subject  like  this,  or  that  they  would  at  all  thank  the  committee 
for  giving  an  ambiguous  opinion  upon  it.'^ 

To  the  list  of  outbursts  of  insolent  ignorance  which  Mr.  Cashel  Hoey  has 
arrayed,  many  others  could  be  added — some  by  the  gentlemen  vdiom 
he  has  quoted.  Mr.  Lov/e,  speaking  in  the  debate  on  a  small  Tenant  Right 
Bill  in  1865,  denounced  any  attempt  to  interfere  between  landlord  and 
tenant  in  unmeasured  terms  : 

I 'Is  Ireland  Irreconcilable?'    (reprinted    from  the  DuUin  Eevievj)  by  J.    Casliel 
Hoey,  p.  10. 
2  See  Barry  O'Brien,   '  The  Parliamentary  Historr  of  the  Irish  Land  Question.' 
,113. 
s  J.  Cashel  Hoey,  '  Is  Ireland  Irreconcilable  ?'  pp.  S-13. 


128  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

'  If  the  tenant  chooses  to  improve  the  land,  unless  he  takes  the  precaution 
to  obtain  the  consent  of  the  landlord — tvhether  he  increases  the  value  of  the 
property  or  not — he  has  no  business  to  meddle  witii  it.  It  is  in  the  nature 
of  a  deposit  on  his  hands,  and  he  ought  to  return  it  as  he  received  it.  He 
receives  it  for  a  particular  purpose,  and  for  that  purpose  only  ought  he  to 
use  it.  If  he  uses  it  for  another  purpose — to  build  a  house  on  it,  for  instance 
— it  may  be  a  great  improvement,  but  he  has  no  right  to  do  it  ;  it  is  beyond 
the  contract  he  entered  into.  '^ 

'  No  attempt,'  he  again  said,  '  has  been  made  to  show  that  there  is  any 
case  of  practical  grievance.  ...  I  do  not  believe  that  there  is  any  really 
serious  demand  on  the  part  of  the  tenantry  of  Ireland  for  this  measure.' 
( '•  Oh  !  oh  !')  '  I  do  not  pretend  to  have  any  extensive  knowledge  of  Ireland 
or  its  people.  ...  I  do  not  find,  after  hearing  the  evidence  of  a  great  number 
of  gentlemen,  that  there  was  any  such  demand.  .  .  .'^ 

But  it  was  in  Ireland  itself  that  the  Irish  people  were  preached  at  in  the 
most  maddening  form.  While  all  around  their  country  was  being  reduced 
to  a  desert,  and  the  people  were  flying  with  curses  from  their  shores,  the 
English  authorities  kept  proving  that  the  country  was  never  in  a  more 
prosperous  position.  Of  this  gospel  there  were  three  preachers  prominent 
above  all  others — Archbishop  Whately,  Mr.  Nassau  Senior,  and  Lord 
Carlisle. 

'  If  a  piece  of  land  is  your  property,'  writes  Archbishop  Whately,  '  you 
ought  to  be  at  liberty  to  dispose  of  it  like  any  other  property  ;  either  to 
sell  it,  or  to  cultivate  it  yourself,  or  to  employ  a  bailiff  and  labourers  to 
cultivate  for  you,  or  to  let  it  to  a  farmer,' 

There  the  absolute  claim  of  the  landlord  at  this  period  to  do  what  he 
liked  with  his  own — to  starve  through  rack-rent,  to  impoverish  or  even  kill 
through  eviction — was  represented  not  as  the  greedy  and  heartless  gospel  of 
a  dominant  class,  but  as  a  great  scientific  truth. 

'  If  you  were  to  make  a  law  for  lowering  rents,'  writes  Archbishop 
Whately,  '  so  that  the  land  should  still  remain  the  property  of  those  to 
whom  it  now  belongs,  but  that  they  should  not  be  allowed  to  receive  more 
than  so  much  an  acre  for  it,  the  only  efect  ivould  be  that  the  landlord  would 
no  longer  let  his  land  to  a  farmer,  but  woidd  take  it  irito  his  own  hands, 
and  employ  a  bailiff  to  look  after  it  for  him' 

These  words  were  ^vritten  at  a  time  when  the  Irish  farmers  were  engaged 
in  an  efEort  to  bring  about  the  passing  of  a  law  that  would  lead  to  the 
'  lowering  of  rents,'  and  under  which  the  landlords  '  should  not  be  allowed 
to  receive  more  than  so  much  an  acre  for  it '  ;  in  other  words,  for  the  fair 
rent  fixed  by  a  Law  Court  which  has  been  conferred  by  the  Land  Act  of 
1881.  The  children  of  these  farmers  were  taught — and  in  the  name  of  the 
Science  of  Political  Economy — that  the  only  effect  of  getting  what  they 
were  demanding  would  be  the  utter  ruin  of  their  class.  For  it  is  a  signifi- 
cant fact  that  the  extracts  I  have  quoted  appear  in  one  of  the  reading-books 
supplied  by  the  Commissioners  of  National  Education  in  the  so-called 
National  Schools  of  Ireland. 3 

The  opinions  of  Mr.  Senior  are  scattered  over  several  volumes.     His 

^  '  Hansard,  vol.  clxxxiii.,  p.  1079.  ^  Ih.,  pp.  1082-1084. 

3  Fifth  Reading  Book,  pp.  257,  262,  Sixth  Edition.  These  extracts  were  also,  I 
bi^heve,  in  the  earlier  editions. 


R  urn  A  ND  RABA  GAS.  1 29 

*  Journals,  Conversations  and  Essays  relating  to  Ireland  '  give  the  best 
insight  into  his  own  ideas  and  the  ideas  then  dominant  among  English, 
thinkers  and  statesmen.  Mr.  Senior  spent  the  greater  part  of  his  time  in 
Ireland  among  those  landlords  and  agents  who  were  remarkable  above 
others  for  their  ruthless  persecution  of  the  tenantry,  and  he  quotes  with 
much  approva,l  their  nostrums  for  the  cure  of  the  Irish  malady, 

'  Mr.  Trench  spoke  highly  of  his  cousin,  Mr.  Francis  Trench,'  writes  Mr. 
Senior.  'His  intelligence,'  he  said,  'may  be  estimated  by  what  he  has 
done.  Soon  after  the  Famine,  the  Duke  of  Leinster's  tenants  in  Kildare 
threw  up  their  hcildings  (amounting  to  about  2,000  acres  in  all),  frightened 
by  the  potato  failure  and  the  poor-rates.  Francis  Trench  had  undertaken 
the  agency  a  few  yearti  before.  He,  cleared  the  land  by  an  extensive  emi' 
gration,  and  advertised  widely  in  the  Scotch  papers  for  tenants.  In  time, 
the  estate  was  relet.  The  rental,  ivhich  had  been  ^35,000  a  year,  ivas  by 
improved  'management,  and  by  the  falling  in  of  very  old  leases,  raised  to 
.i?J:5,000;  and  the  tenants  (especially  the  Scotch)  are  doing  well.'^ 

2  Journals,  vol.  ii.,  pp.  85,  86.  The  italics-  are  mine.  This  Mr.  Trench,  who  found 
the  conduct  of  his  cousin  so  admirable.^  had  etctcd  on  the  same  principle  on  more  tiian 
one  estate  himself — in  the  district  of  Farney,  for  instance,  in  County  Monaghan.  This 
area,  70,000  acres  in  extent,  was  seized  from  the  il'Mahon  and  given  to  the  Earl  of 
Esses.  He  relet  it  to  Evor  M'Mahon  for  £-250  a  year.  The  land  became  more  viiluable 
as  time  went  on  :  in  1729  the  estimated  value  was  £2,000  a  year  ;  in  1769,  the  barony 
having  been  divided  between  two  sisters,  co-heiresses,  the  two  estates  were  valued  at 
£8,000  a  year  ;  and  '  in  the  year  1S43,  and  seventy-four  years  after  the  estimated  value 
■of  the  year  1769,  I  found,  on  my  arrival  at  Carrickmacross,  that  the  rent-roll  of  the 
two  estates  together  amounted  to  upwards  of  £40,000  per  annum,  whilst  the  in- 
habitants had  increased  in  such  an  extraordinary  manner  that  by  the  census  of  1841 
the  population  amounted  to  something  upwards  of  44,107  souls.'  ('Realities  of  Irish 
Life,'  quoted  in  Sir  John  Gray's  speech  at  Manchester,  p.  25.)  In  1867,  the  rent  had 
increased  still  further  to  £54,833.  '  No  doubt,'  said  Mr.  Trench  in  a  Committee  of  the 
House  of  Commons,  1867  (quoted  by  Gray,  p.  26),  '  the  rise  in  the  price  of  produce  and 
the  value  of  land  has  done  much  iu  causing  this  increase.  But  the  main  cause,. beyond 
all  question,  is  that  the  bai-ony  had  increased  enormously  and  rapidly  in  population, 
and,  as  a  consequent  necessity,  in  cultivation.  In  1633  there  were  only  38  tenants 
acknowledged  in  the  barony,  and  though  I  believe  there  were  a  considerable  number 
of  undertenants,  yet  the  population  must  have  been  very  small.  In  1841  there  were 
upwards  of  8,000  tenants,  and  the  population  amounted  to  44,000  persons  ;  in  fact,  a 
human  being  for  every  Irish  acre  of  land.  This  vast  population,  driven  to  extremities 
to  support  themselves,  gradually  converted,  by  their  own  laboar,  the  lands  of  the  barony 
from  being  a  waste  unenclosed  alder  plain,  into  one  of  the  most  cultivated  districts  in 
Ireland,  well  enclosed  arable  land,  while  scarcely  an  acre  of  reclaimable  land  now  hes 
\inreclaimed.'      'Mr.  Trench,'  comments  Sir  John  Gray  (pp.  26,  27),   '  admitted  that 

*  the  main  cause,  beyoud  all  question,'  of  the  conversion  of  the  wild  and  waste  alder 
plain  into  a  tract  of  the  richest  and  best  cultivated  land  in  Ireland,  and  the  consequent 
increase  of  its  value,  was  due  to  the  energetic  and  unrelaxing  toil  of  the  tenant 
farmers  who  lived  upon  it,  but  who,  when  they  had  made  the  barren  plain  fruitful, 
and  when  there  remained  no  more  land  to  be  reclaimed  for  the  landlord's  benefit, 
were  felt  to  be  an  intolerable  burden  upon  the  landlord's  hands,  with  whom  they 
'  had  to  deal.'  (Hear,  hear,  and  cheers.)  How  these  t>nling  industrious  people  were 
'dealt  with,' what  became  of  these  Celts  who  were  permitted  — 'allowed,'  was,  he 
believed,  the  phrase— to  increase  and  multiply  in  Farney,  who,  by  their  laboiur  had 
changed  the  value  of  the  esto'Se  from  £250  a  year  to  £40,000,  increased,  according  to 
Mr  Trench's  sworn  evidence,  to  £54,833  in  1867,  he  (Sir  John  Gray)  could  not  tell,  nor 
did  he  think  it  would  be  of  much  use  now  to  inquire  (hear,  hear)  ;  but  this  he  could 
tell,  that  the  population  of  Farney,  which  was  44,107  in  1841,  and  Mr.  Trench  says  it 
was  '  something  uiDwards  '  in  1S43,  when  he  came  to  rule  over  it,  has  in  eight  years  of 
his  rule  been  reduced  to  31,519,  and  that  in  the  same  period  2,009  houses  were  levelled. 
(Cheers.)  More  than  12,588  of  the  '  surplus  population '  of  that  barony  were  moved 
out  of  it  in  eight  years — some  to  America-  some  to  Australia — some  to  the  pauper's 
grave.  (Hear,  hear.)  All  were  gone.  As  the  sheep  who  had  eaten  down  all  the  rape 
and  ti-ampled  the  refuse  into  the  land  could  fertilize  it  no  more  and  were  sent  to  the 
shambles,  so  the  Celts,  at  one  time  '  allowed  to  multiply '  in  Farney,  could  reclaim  no 
more,  and  they,  too,  were  sent  off  as  useless  incumberers  of  the  ground.     (Cheers  ) 

9 


I30  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

Again,  Mr.  Senior  records  a  conversation  with  a  gentleman  disguised  as 
'  Dr.  G.'     They  are  talking  about  the  land  question. 

'Well,'  said  Dr.  G.,  'we  have  got  our  Poor  Law,  and  it  is  a  great  instru- 
ment for  giving  the  victory  to  the  landlords.  Another  and  a  still  more 
powerful  instrument  is  emigration,  and  it  is  one  never  used  on  such  a  scale 
before.  No  friend  of  Ireland  can  wish  the  war  to  be  prolonged- — still  less, 
that  it  should  end  by  the  victory  of  the  tenants  ;  for  that  wotild  plunge  Ire- 
land into  barbarism  worse  than  that  of  the  last  century.  The  sooner  Ire- 
land becomes  a  grazing  counto-y,  with  the  com2:)aratively  thin  jpoiJulation 
which  a  grazing  country  requires,  the  better  for  all  classes.' 

Mr.  Senior  is  naturally  delighted  with  such  sound  opinions.  '  Earnestly 
wishing,  as  joxi  do,'  he  says  to  Dr.  G.,  *to  see  Ireland  a  grazing  country, 
and,  therefore,  thinly  populated  as  respects  its  agricultural  population,' 
etc.  ■» 

The  gospel  that  emigration  was  the  real  cure  for  Ireland  h?.d  an  even 
more  potent  advocate  in  the  Lord-Lieutenant  of  the  period.  Erom  1855  to 
1858  Lord  Carlisle  was  Viceroy,  and  again  from  1.859  till  1864.  Two  ex- 
tracts -will  suffice  to  show  the  crass  gospel  of  this  enlightened  ruler. 

'Nor  can  I  be  debarred,'  said  Lord  Carlisle,  speaking  at  the  Annual 
Cattle  Show  of  the  Royal  Agricultural  Society  in  Athlone,  on  August  7, 
1855,  'even  by  the  golden  promise  of  those  harvests  which  now  gladden 
our  eyes,  from  urging  you  to  bear  in  mind,  what  Nature  in  her  wise  economy 
seems  specially  to  have  fitted  this  island  for,  is  to  be  the  mother  of  flocks 
and  herds  ;  to  be,  if  I  may  say  so,  the  larder  and  dairy  of  the  world  ;  to 
send  rations  of  beef  and  bales  of  bacon  to  our  armies  wherever  they  are  ; 
and  to  send  firkins  of  butter  to  every  sea  and  harbour  of  the  habitable 
globe.'"" 

In  a  speech  at  the  cattle  show  at  Cork  (July  5,  1860),  and  indeed 
in  nearly  every  one  of  his  speeches,  the  same  gospel  was  laid  down,  that 
the  more  people  left  Ireland  the  more  prosperous  the  country  was,  and  that 
the  great  ideal  of  legislation  was  to  change  as  much  of  the  land  as  possible 
into  pasture. 

'  Cattle,'  he  said,  '  above  all  things,  seem  to  be  rendered,  by  the  condi- 
tions of  soil  and  climate,  the  most  appropriate  stock  for  Ireland.  .  .  . 
Hence,  the  great  hives  of  industry  in  England  and  Scotland  across  the  Chan- 
nel can  draw  their  frequent  shiploads  of  corn  from  more  southern  and  drier 
climates,  but  they  must  have  a  constant  dependence  in  Ireland  for  a  supply 
of  meat.  .  .  .  With  reference  to  the  general  concerns  of  Ireland,  I  feel  I  am 
justified  in  speaking  to  you,  upon  the  whole,  in  the  terms  of  congratulation 
and  hopefulness.  .  .  .  Then  ....  the  mud-cabins  of  Ireland  amounted  in 
1841,  not  twenty  years  ago,  to  491,000  ;  they  have  now  diminished  to 
125,000.^  The  number  of  emigrants,  which  had  been  gradually  decreasing 
for  some  years,  has  somewhat  increased  in  the  last  and  present  years.  .  .  . 

^  Journal,  vol.  ii.,  pp.  282,  283.  In  justice  to  Mr.  Senior,  it  should  bo  said  that  ho 
was  perfectly  impartial  as  to  all  nationalities  in  his  doctrine,  that  the  fewer  people 
were  on  the  land  the  better.  In  the  same  conversalion  he  speaks  of  the  '  absorption 
of  the  surplus  population  of  the  Highlands  of  Scotland,  when  black  cattle  and  sheep 
took  the  place  of  men  as  '  one  of  the  largest  and  most  beneficent  cleai'ings  on 
record'  (ib.,  p.  282). 

^  'The  Speeches,  Lectures,  and  Poems,  etc.,  of  the  Earl  of  Carlisle,' pp.  158,  159, 
By  J.  J.  Gaskin. 

3  He  does  not  say  what  had  become  of  the  occupants. 


RUIN  AND  RABAGA3.  131 

Th&y  now  comjprise,  many  young  people  of  both  sexes  who  have  been  com- 
paratively well  educated,  and  who  hope  to  find  in  a  less  crowded  commu- 
nity a  better  market  for  their  industry,  and  a  more  adequate  demand  for 
their  natural  and  acquired  intelligence  ;  but  I  conceive  this  is  not  a  symj>- 
tom,  with  whatever  immediate  and  local  inconvenience  it  may  no  doubt  be 
attended,  at  which,  viewed  at  large,  vje  ought  torepine.^  ^ 

A  few  statistics  will  bring  clearly  before  the  mind  of  the  reader  how  the 
policy  of  expatriation  was^working  : — 

Emigkation  fkom  Ikeland. 

1849-1860 1,551,000 

1861-1870 867,000'^ 

And  another  table  will  be  still  more  instructive  :  it  is  the  ratio  of  the 
ages  of  the  emigrants  ^ : — 

Under  15  years       .         ,         .         ,         15  per  cent. 
15  to  35       ,,  ....         75         „ 

Over  35       „  ....         10         „ 

Thus  it  will  be  seen  that  only  half  the  case  is  stated  when  it  is  said  that 
emigration — with  great  assistance  from  hunger,  plague  and  eviction — within 
the  years  1845  and  1885  has  reduced  che  population  by  nearly  one-half  :  the 
half  that  emigrated  was  the  better,  the  half  that  remained  was  the  worse, 
half  of  the  population.  Seventy-five  per  cent,  of  the  emigrants  were 
between  fifteen  and  thirty-five — the  best  years  in  the  life  of  men  or  women. 
'Durmg  the  seven  months  of  the  year  '  (1863),  wrote  the  Times,"^  '  80,000 
chiefly  young  men  and  women,  have  left  Ireland,  most  of  them  for  ever 
They  have  gone  off  with  money  in  their  pockets,  and  with  strong  limbs 
and  stout  hearts.  They  have  left  behind  the  ailing,  the  weak,  and  the 
aged.' 

There  is  no  passion  like  the  suppressed  passion  of  statistics  ;  and  I  leave 
these  figures  to  tell  their  own  moral.  Meantime,  there  was  one  force 
further  which  must  be  reckoned  among  the  factors  that  produced  the 
temper  of  Ireland  at  this  epoch. 

The  sight  of  a  race  rushing  from  its  native  land  in  millions  might,  it 
would  be  thought,  have  touched  even  enemies  as  marking  the  very  height 
of  tragic  suffering.  But  such  was  not  the  effect  upon  the  journalism  of 
England.  As  the  Irish  peasants  left  their  country  in  curses  and  tears,  the 
English  newspapers  seized  every  opportunity  of  mocking  at  their  suff'erings 
and  their  demands  for  the  reform  of  the  laws  by  which  their  misery  and 
their  enforced  exile  were  produced.  The  Times  and  other  English  journals 
over  and  over  again  pointed  with  exultation  to  the  probability  that  the  Irish 
race  would  be  annihilated  in  Ireland,  and  that  the  country  would  then  be 
entirely  seized  by  the  population  of  the  stronger  country. 

'  If  this  goes  on  long'  (it  wrote  of  the  emigration  in  1860),  '  as  it  is  con- 
tinuing to  go  on,  Ireland  will  become  very  English,  and  the  United  States 
very  Irish.  When  an  English  agriculturist  takes  a  farm  in  Galway  or 
Kerry,  he  will  take  English  labourers  with  him.'° 

'  The  Irish  will  go '  (it  wrote  in  1863).  '  English  and  Scotch  settlers  must 

*  'The  Speeches,  Lectures,  and  Poems,  etc.  of  the  Earl  of  Carlisle,'  pp.  178-lSl. 

"  Mulhail's  '  Dictionary  of  Statistics,'  p.  168. 

3  Ih.  '^Quoted  in  Nation,  Oct.  24,  1S63. 

5  Quoted  in  Irishman,  May  12,  1860. 

9—2 


132  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

be    speedily  got  in  their  places,  for  Great  Britain  will  suffer,  the  British 
markets  will  go.'^ 

'  The  Celt '  (it  wrote  again  in  1865)  '  goes  to  yield  to  the  Saxon.  This 
island  of  160  harbours,  with  its  fertile  soil,  with  noble  rivers  and  beautiful 
lakes,  with  fertile  mines  and  riches  of  every  kind,  is  being  cleared  quietly 
for  the  interests  and  luxury  of  humanity. '- 

This  extract,  finally,  from  the  leading  English  journal : 

'  Curran  used  to  say  that  his  countrymen  made  very  bad  subjects,  but 
much  worse  rebels.  The  7)iot  was  a  good  one  in  its  own  day,  but  it  has  not 
lost  its  point.  .  .  .  Comparative  anatomists  of  political  societies  might,  by 
a  close  study  of  it,  perhaps  make  a  complete  sketch  of  the  social  monstrosity 
which  such  a  phrase  would  fit — a  discontented,  hungry,  empty-bellied  com- 
munity, begging  for  alms  ;  too  idle  to  work,  too  shrewd  to  fight,  too  pro- 
foundly convinced  of  the  dishonesty  of  its  own  members  to  do  aught  but 
shout  and  roar  and  threaten  and  beg.'^ 

An  Irish  priest,  lamenting  the  wrongs  of  Ireland,  was  described  in 
the  Dmly  Telegraph  as  '  a  surpliced  ruffian  ;'  a  Catholic  Archbishop, 
mourning  over  the  emigration,  was  described  by  the  Saturday  Review  as 
regretting  the  departure  '  of  the  demons  of  assassination  and  murder.' 

'  The  Lion  of  St.  Jarlath's  '  (said  the  article  of  the  Saturday  Review, 
November  28,  1863)  'has  growled  in  grievous  dudgeon  that  bucolic  tastes 
are  prevailing  in  Ireland.  Archbishop  John  of  Tuam  surveys  A^nth  an 
envious  eye  what,  in  a  Churchman,  it  seems  rather  profane  to  style  the  Irish 
Exodus  ;  and  in  a  letter  addressed  to  Mr.  Gladstone  .  .  .  he  sighs  over  the 
departing  demons  of  assassination  and  onurder.  Like  his  friend  Mr. 
Smith  O'Brien,  he  regrets  the  loss  of  the  raw  materials  of  treason  and 
sedition.  Ireland,  he  says,  is  relapsing  into  a  desert,  tenanted  by  lowing 
herds  instead  of  howling  assassins.  So  complete  is  the  rush  of  departing 
marauders,  whose  lives  were  profitably  employed  in  shooting  Protestants 
from  behind  a  hedge,  that  silence  reigns  over  the  vast  solitude  of  Ireland. 
.  .  .  Ireland  has  long  been  seething  in  the  flames  of  misrule  and  agitation 
and  sedition.  Ireland  is  boiling  over,  and  the  scum  flows  across  the 
Atlantic ;  and  the  more  the  Archbishop  and  the  like  of  him  blow  at  the 
fire,  the  more  the  scum  will  boil  over.  It  can  be  spared,  and  the  many 
excellencies  of  the  Irish  people  will  only  become  the  more  excellent  by  the 
present  process  of  defecation.' 

The  people  who  were  thus  described  were  as  like  the  pictures  drawn  of 
them  as  real  human  beings  usually  are  to  the  portraits  of  political  opponents. 
They  were  attached  to  the  country  in  which  they  were  not  permitted  to 
live  with  a  patriotism  remarkable  for  its  fervour  even  among  the  many  pas- 
sionate patriotisms  of  the  world  ;  and  their  family  ties  were  peculiarly  close 
and  strong.  A  look  at  the  railway-stations,  and  then  at  the  fields,  of 
-r'eland  would  have  brought  to  any  sympathetic  eye  the  inner  meaning  of 
»ie  terrible  and  widespread  tragedy  that  was  there  being  enacted.  At 
every  railway-station  crowds  of  people  were  to  be  seen  locked  in  each  other's 
arms,  shouting  aloud  in  their  grief,  and  exchanging  eveiiasting  farewells. 
What  these  partings  meant  could  only  be  understood  by  those  who  know 
and  sympathize  with  the  home-life  of  the  Irish  poor.     There  is  perhaps  no 

^  Quoted  in  Nation,  Nov.  4,  1863.  » lb.,  Aug.  26,  1865. 

3  i&.,  Nov.  6,  1858. 


R  UIN  AND  RABA  GAS.  133 

country  in  the  world  where  the  sense  of  the  duty  of  the  members  of  a 
family  to  each  other  is  held  more  sacred.  How  sacred  the  feeling  is 
receives  yearly  proof  in  the  vast  sums  which  are  sent  over  out  of  hardly- 
earned  wages  by  the  Irish  in  America  to  the  Irish  at  home.  Then,  too,  the 
authority  of  the  head  of  the  house  is  carried  in  Ireland  still  to  extremes 
that  in  most  countries  are  as  dead  and  ancient  as  the  other  ways  and  ideas 
of  the  patriarchal  period.  As  a  result,  the  child  has  less  self-confidence  at 
years  comparatively  mature  than  is  acquired  in  other  countries  at  a  much 
earlier  age  ;  and  the  parent  looks  at  a  grown  young  man  or  woman  as 
having  all  the  innocence  and  helplessness  of  childhood.  The  sense ^  of 
separation  was,  accordingly,  terribly  embittered  by  the  awful  apprehension 
for  the  future  of  those  children  cast  on  the  unknown  and  terrible  tempta- 
tions of  the  great  world.  The  latent  sense  that  was  in  the  mind  of  the 
father  or  mother  who  followed,  panting  and  sobbing,  the  train,  was  that  the 
engine  with  its  accursed  haste  was  carrying  off  the  loved  ones  to  want  or 
vice,  to  early  and  painful,  or  perchance  shameful  death  amid  strange  faces. 
It  was  this  factor  in  the  separation  that  gave  to  it  much  of  its  poignant 
grief  and  tragic  import.  To  many  a  cabin  in  Ireland  emigration  meant  that 
the  light  of  a  life  had  gone  out,  and  that  aged  parents  never  more  knew  a 
bright  or  happy  hour. 

Over  the  country  is  to  be  seen  to  this  day  the  marks  of  this  dreadful  and 
terrible  time.  There  are  many  parts  of  Ireland  to-day  that  still  look  as  if 
they  had  just  been  passed  over  by  an  invading  army  led  by  a  commander 
with  the  spirit  of  Attila.  The  traveller  can  pass  for  miles  through  some  of 
the  best  land  in  the  County  Meath,  and  see  a  country  on  which  not  a  single 
human  being  remains  ;  the  frequent  ruin  speaks  of  a  vanished  population  as 
effectually  scattered  as  the  populations  of  those  entombed  cities  in  Italy,  the 
ruins  of  which  to-day  with  such  compelling  silence  tell  the  tale  of  tumultuous 
life  reduced  to  stillness  and  death. 

Such,  then,  was  the  condition  of  Ireland  in  the  interval  between  1855  and 
1865.  It  is  one  of  the  saddest  and  most  dreadful  stories  in  all  history.  It 
is  the  spectacle,  under  the  semblance  of  law,  and  without  any  particular 
noise,  and  certainly  without  attracting  any  particular  attention,  of  an 
ancient  and  brave  nation  being  slowly  but  surely  wiped  out  of  existence. 
Not  a  section,  or  a  class,  or  a  percentage,  but  the  whole  people  were  being 
swept  away,  their  land  was  yearly  becoming  more  desolate,  and  all  the  pro- 
babilities pointed  to  the  near  advent  of  the  period  when  the  country  would 
be  one  great  sheep  and  cattle  farm,  with  the  vast  desert  broken  only  at  long 
intervals  by  the  herd. 

Meantime  the  Imperial  Parliament  looked  on  and  did  nothing  ;  the 
rulers  declared  that  the  hellish  work  was  good  ;  the  press  of  the  dominant 
coimtry  hissed  out  triumphant  hate  ;  and  popular  representation  had  fallen 
into  the  hands  of  self-seekers,  heartless,  lying,  and  base.  It  is  in  such 
periods  that  a  desperate  spirit  is  evoked  and  is  necessary.  The  masses  of 
the  people  were  still  sound,  and  there  were  among  the  population  chosen 
spirits  who  were  resolved  to  show  that  the  struggle,  which  had  been  main- 
tained through  so  many  centuries,  was  not  even  yet  at  an  end  ;  that,  if  the 
Irish  nation  were  to  be  murdered,  at  least  her  people  would  try  to  make  one 
final  and  desperate  stand  ;  and  that  her  political  life  would  find  other  tjrpea 
than  the  pestilent  race  of  K-abagas. 


134  "-THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT, 


CHAPTER  VII. 

REVOLUTION. 

I  HAVE  written  very  clumsily  if  the  reader,  whatever  be  his  nationality, 
does  not  now  understand  the  forces  which  produced  Fenianism.  This 
movement,  like  many  other  movements  before  and  since,  took  its  rise  in 
America,  where  the  men  evicted  under  such  circumstances  as  I  have 
described,  daily  brooded  over  the  means  whereby  they  might  avenge  their 
pergonal  and  political  wrong.s.  M"*agher  and  Mitchel,  after  escaping  from 
the  penal  settlements  to  which  t^i  .;  had  been  condemned  after  the  failure 
of  1848,  supplied  the  Irish  of  America  with  names  and  ability  to  keep  alive 
and  to  inspire  the  movement  for  the  rescue  of  Ireland.  To  America,  too, 
had  gone  James  Stephens,  who  as  a  young  man  had  stood  by  Smith  O'Brien 
at  Ballingarry.  Stephens  was  in  Ireland  in  1858,  and  he  visited,  among 
other  places,  the  town  of  Skibbereen,  in  which  had  been  recently  established 
a  society  half  literary,  half  political,  and  the  chief  spirit  of  which  was  a 
man  whose  name  was  destined  to  be  long  afterwards  a  name  of  horror  and 
of  fear.  This  was  Jeremiah  O'Donovan,  as  he  was  originally  called,  and 
Jeremiah  O'Donovan  (Rossa)  as  he  is  now  better  known.  Between 
O'Donovan  and  Stej^yhens  an  interview  took  place,  at  which  Stephens 
informed  O'Donovan  that  the  Irish  in  America  were  willing  and  anxious 
to  supply  arms  for  insurrection  to  so  many  Irishmen  as  would  be  enrolled 
in  a  revolutionary  conspiracy  in  Ireland.  The  bargain  was  sealed,  and  the 
movement  made  some  way,  but  was  confined  in  its  operations  to  the  south- 
west districts  of  the  country.  Finally  the  Government  were  informed  of 
the  position  of  matters,  and  the  conspirators  were  put  on  their  trial.  Many 
of  them  were  convicted,  among  others  O'Donovan  (Rossa),  but  the  Crown, 
despising  the  movement  as  futile,  did  not  insist  on  heavy  punishments  being 
inflicted  on  any  of  the  conspirators. 

The  Irish -American  revolutionaries  now  set  to  work  again,  and  the  busi- 
ness of  propagandism  continued  to  go  on  actively.  No  particular  progress 
was  made,  however,  and  probably  the  movement  would  not  have  assumed 
formidable  proportions  but  for  the  outbreak  of  the  Civil  War  in  America. 
This  portentous  evenb  brought  into  actual  warfare  many  thousands  of  the 
exiled  Irish,  made  them  familiar  with  the  use  of  arms,  and  thereby  gave  a 
stimulus  to  the  idea  of  liberating  Ireland  through  insurrection.  An  acci- 
dental occurrence  gave  the  propagandists  of  the  revolution  an  immense 
start.  Terence  Bellew  McManus,  one  of  the  '48  leaders,  having,  like  the 
others,  escaped  from  Australia,  settled  and  died  in  San  Francisco  in  1861. 
It  was  resolved  that  his  remains  should  be  buried  in  his  native  country. 
The  body  was  conveyed  across  America  with  every  circumstance  of  pomp 
and  solemnity.  To  Ireland  at  last  came  the  funeral  procession  that  had 
thus  swept  solemnly  across  the  vast  continent  and  the  wide  expanse  of 
ocean.  Such  a  spectacle  was  well  calculated  to  inspire  the  imagination  and 
to  stimulate  the  patriotic  passions  of  the  people.  The  coffin  was  landed  at 
Queenstown  on  October  30,  1861,  and  the  funeral  took  place  in  Dublin  on 
Sunday,  November  10.  Fifty  thousand  people  followed  the  remains  ;  at 
least  as  many  lined  the  streets  ;  and  the  procession  solemnly  paused,  with 
uncovered  heads,  at  every  spot  sacred  to  the  memory  of  those  who  had 
fought  and  died  in  the  good  fight  against  English  tyranny.  Finally,  aa 
night  closed  in,  the  body  was  deposited  in  Glasnevin  Cemetery. 

From  this  time  forward  the  advance  of  Fenianism  was  extraordinarily 


REVOLUTION.  135 

rapid.  Organizers  went  all  over  the  island,  swearing  in  men  by  the  dozen, 
sometimes  by  the  score,  every  night.  In  one  quarter  the  conspiracy  met 
with  unexpected  and  almost  inexplicable  success.  This  was  in  the  army. 
At  that  time  there  were  in  Ireland  a  large  number  of  Irish  regiments. 
Several  of  the  ablest  of  the  Fenians  became  soldiers  for  the  purpose  of 
gaining  recruits  to  their  ranks.  The  calculations  of  the  Fenians  them- 
selves, even  in  these  days  of  cool  reflection,  is  that  by  1865  they  had  en- 
rolled in  their  ranks,  amongst  the  British  army  alone,  15,000  men. 

With  the  close  of  the  American  war  hundreds  of  Irish-American  officers 
were  released  from  their  duties.  They  poured  into  Ireland,  and  the  air 
became  thick  with  rumours  of  the  impending  rising.  Meantime,  the 
Government  were  kept  well  informed  of  everything  that  was  going  forward 
by  their  spies  in  the  enemy's  camp.  The  Irish  People,  the  organ  of  the 
revolutionaries,  was  seized  on  September  15,  1865.  Mr.  Luby,  Mr.  John 
O'Leary,  and  O'Donovan  (Rossa)  were  arrested,  and  in  the  following 
November  Mr.  Stephens.  Before  the  latter  was  brought  to  trial  he  suc- 
ceeded, by  the  aid  of  two  prison  officials,  in  escaping  from  Kichraond  Gaol. 
Parliament  promptly  suspended  the  Habeas  Corpus  Act,  and  throughout 
the  country  the  leaders  of  the  movement  w-ere  seized  and  imprisoned. 

When  these  prisoners  were  brought  to  trial,  there  occurred  the  spectacle 
of  such  ghastly  familiarity  to  the  student  of  Irish  history.  The  criminal 
courts  at  Green  Street  and  throughout  the  country  were  for  months  em- 
ployed in  the  trial  of  prisoners,  and  man  after  man  Avas  convicted  and 
sentenced  to  penal  servitude. 

It  was  one  of  the  many  scandals  in  these  trials  that  the  most  prominent 
judge  in  trjdng  them  was  Judge  Keogh.  Of  all  men  and  forces  that 
created  Fenianism,  Judge  Keogh  was  the  most  potent.  It  was  his  treason 
that  broke  down  all  faith  in  constitutional  agitation,  and  it  was  the  want 
of  faith  in  constitutional  agitation  that  drove  men  to  the  desperate  risks  to 
life  and  liberty  of  a  physical-force  movement.  It  was  the  treason  of  Judge 
Keogh  that,  destroying  the  Tenant  Right  movement  of  1852,  brought  the 
dread  epoch  of  rack-renting,  eviction,  and  widespread  emigration,  and  it 
was  the  horrors  of  these  things  that  produced  the  frenzied  temper  of  which 
revolutionary  movements  are  born.  The  columns  of  the  Irish  People,  the 
organ  of  Fenianism,  supply  abundant  testimony  of  this.  Whenever  a  voice 
was  raised  in  favour  of  constitutional  agitation  and  constitutional  agitators, 
the  Irish  People  mentioned  the  names  of  I^eogh  and  Sadleir,  and  there 
was  no  reply.  The  original  scandal  of  appointing  such  a  man  to  preside 
over  the  Fenian  trials  was  aggravated  by  his  conduct  of  the  cases.  He 
bullied  the  prisoners  so  flagrantly  that  at  last  some  even  of  th©  English 
press  cried  shame.  And  occasionally  he  poured  upon  some  unhappy  crea- 
ture he  was  about  to  send  to  penal  servitude  for  several  years  the  plenteous 
vials  of  his  abundant  Billingsgate. 

But  the  conspiracy  was  not  yet  dead.  The  men  in  America  still  cherished 
the  idea  that  an  armed  rising  was  necessary  and  possible,  and  sent  en- 
couraging messages  home.  Stephens  publicly  pledged  himself  that  there 
would  be  a  rising  in  1866.  1866  went  by,  and  no  insurrection  came.  At 
last  the  conductors  of  the  movement  at  home  became  desperate,  and  it  was 
resolved  that,  whether  assistance  came  from  America  or  not,  the  insurrection 
should  be  attempted.  Sporadic  efforts  occurred  all  over  the  country  ;  men 
assembled  to  the  word  of  command,  and  met  at  the  trysting-place,  but  they 
found  no  arms  there,  and  were  easily  dispersed. 

Another  series  of  State  trials  followed,  at  which  the  chief  spirits  of  the 


136  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

movement  were  again  sentenced  in  batches  to  penal  servitude.  The  move- 
ment was  now  apparently  extinct,  but  before  its  conclusion  it  was  marked 
by  two  incidents  that  have  exercised  a  deep  influence  on  succeeding  events. 
Much  of  the  strength  of  Fenianism  lay  among  the  Irish  population  of 
England,  and  emissaries  were  constantly  passing  between  the  tvv^o  countries. 
It  thus  came  to  pass  that  some  of  the  leaders  were  arrested  and  lodged  in 
English  gaols.  One  of  these,  General  Burke,  was  incarcerated  in  Clerken- 
well  prison.  It  was  resolved  that  he  should  be  rescue  1.  The  task  was 
entrusted  to  ignorant  hands.  A  barrel  of  gunpowdei  was  placed  in  a 
narrow  street  by  the  side  of  the  w?Jl  in  that  part  of  the  prison  where 
General  Burke  was  supposed  to  be  exercising.  The  wall  v/as  blown  down. 
The  prisoner,  fortunately  for  himself,  was  not  in  that  portion  of  the  prison 
at  all  ;  if  he  had  been,  his  death  would  have  been  certain.  A  number  of 
unfortunate  people  of  the  poorer  classes,  living  in  tenement  houses  opposite 
the  prison,  were  the  victims.  Twelve  were  killed,  and  a  hundred  and 
twenty  maimed.  This  occurred  on  December  13,  1S57.  A  man  named 
Barrett  was  tried  and  convicted,  and  was  hanged  in  front  of  Newgate 
prison. 

The  second  event  brought  out  with  equal  emphasis  the  hold  which  the 
insurrectionary  movement  had  taken  upon  the  Irish  in  England,  and  the 
reality  and  proportions  of  the  danger  to  the  empire.  The  conduct  of  the 
movement  had  passed,  after  the  arrest  of  Stephens,  and  during  his  absence 
in  America,  into  the  hands  of  Colonel  Kelly.  In  the  autumn  of  1867 
Colonel  Kelly  was  in  Manchester,  at  a  Fenian  meeting.  As  he  was  return- 
ing home  with  a  companion.  Captain  Deasy,  the  two  were  arrested  on 
suspicion  of  loitering  for  a  burglarious  purpose.  They  gave  false  names, 
but  were  soon  discovered  to  be  the  formidable  leader  of  the  conspiracy  and 
one  of  his  chief  lieutenants.  The  Fenian  organization  was  at  the  time 
extremely  strong  in  Manchester,  and  a  rescue  was  resolved  uiDon.  On 
Wednesday,  September  18,  1867,  the  prison  van,  v/hile  being  driven  to  the 
county  gaol  at  Salford,  was  attacked  at  the  railway  arch  which  spans 
Hyde  Road  at  Bellevue.  A  party  of  thirty  rushed  forward  with  revolvers, 
shot  one  of  the  horses,  and  the  police,  being  unarmed,  fled.  An  attempt 
was  made  to  open  the  door  of  the  van  with  hatchets,  hammers,  and  crow- 
bars, but  this  failsd  ;  and  meantime  the  police  came  back,  accompanied  by 
a  large  crowd.  Sergeant  Brett,  the  policeman  inside,  had  the  keys,  which 
some  of  the  party,  opening  the  ventilator,  asked  him  to  give  up.  He  re- 
fu.icd  ;  a  pistol  was  placed  to  the  keyhole  for  the  purpose  of  blowing  open 
the  lock  ;  the  bullet  passed  through  Brett's  body,  and  he  fell  mortally 
wounded.  The  keys  were  taken  out  of  his  pocket  and  handed  out  by  one 
of  the  female  prisoners  ;  Kelly  and  Deasy  were  released,  and  hurried  off 
into  concealment,  and  were  never  recaptured.  Meantime,  a  crowd  had 
gathered,  several  of  the  rescuing  party  were  seized  and  almost  lynched  ; 
one  of  them,  William  Philip  Allen,  was  almost  stoned  to  death.  Soon 
after  William  Philip  Allen,  Michael  Larkin,  Thomas  Maguire,  Michael 
O'Brien  (alias  Gould),  and  Edward  0'Mea.ra  Condon  (alias  Shore)  were 
tried  for  the  wilful  murder  of  Sergeant  Brett.  They  were  convicted,  and 
all  sentenced  to  be  hanged.  The  trial  took  place  amid  a  hurricane  of 
public  passion  and  panic.  The  evidence  was  tainted,  and  was  so<m  unex- 
pectedly proved  to  be  utterly  untrustworthy.  Thomas  Maguire,  tried  on 
the  same  evidence,  identified  by  the  same  witnesses,  convicted  and  sen- 
tenced by  the  same  judges,  was  proved  so  conclusively  innocent  that  he 
was  released  a  few  days  after  his  trial.     Allen  and  the  others  declared 


REVOLUTION.  137 

solemnly  that  they  had  not  intended  to  hurt  Sergeant  Brett.  Condon,  in 
speaking,  used  a  phrase  that  has  become  historic:  'I  have  nothing,' he 
said,  in  concluding  his  speech,  '  to  regret  or  to  take  back.  I  can  only  say, 
*'  God  save  Ireland."  '  His  companions  advanced  to  the  front  of  the  dock, 
and,  raising  their  hands,  repeated  the  cry,  'God  save  Ireland.'  Maguire 
was  released,  and  Condon  was  reprieved.  For  some  time  there  was  a  hope 
that  the  breakdown  of  the  trial  in  the  case  of  Maguire  would  result  in  a 
reprieve  in  the  cases  of  the  other  three.  But  the  authorities  ultimately 
decided  that  the  three  men  should  be  hanged,  and  on  the  morning  of 
November  23,  1867,  Allen,  Larkin,  and  O'Brien  were  executed  in  front  of 
Salford  gaol.  A  short  time  afterwards  their  bodies  were  buried  in  quick- 
lime, in  unconsecrated  ground,  within  the  precincts  of  the  prison. 

It  is  impossible,  even  after  the  considerable  interval  that  has  elapsed,  to 
forget  the  impression  which  this  event  produced  upon  the  Irish  people.  In 
most  of  the  towns  in  Ireland  vast  multitudes  walked  in  funeral  processions 
through  the  streets  to  testify  the  terrible  depths  of  their  grief.  A  few  days 
after  the  execution,  Mr.  T.  D.  Sullivan  wrote  the  poem  with  the  refrain 
uttered  from  the  dock,  '  God  save  Ireland  !'  and  wherever  in  any  part  of 
the  globe  there  is  now  an  assembly  of  Irishmen,  social  or  political — a  con- 
cert in  Dublin,  a  convention  at  Chicago,  or  a  Parliamentary  dinner  in 
London — the  proceedings  regularly  close  with  the  singing  of  '  God  save  Ire- 
land.' 

To  one  Irishman,  then  a  youth,  living  in  the  country-house  of  his  fathers, 
and  deeply  immersed  in  the  small  concerns  of  a  squire's  daily  life,  the  exe- 
cution of  the  Manchester  martyrs  was  a  new  birth  of  political  convictions. 
To  him,  brooding  from  his  early  days  over  the  history  of  his  country,  this 
catastrophe  came  to  crystallize  impressions  into  conviction,  and  to  pave  the 
way  from  dreams  to  action.  It  was  the  execution  of  Allen,  Larkin,  and 
O'Brien  that  gave  Mr.  Parnell  to  the  service  of  Ireland. 

An  indirect  effect  of  all  these  startling  occurrences  was  to  force  the  atten- 
tion of  the  English  people  and  their  Parliament  upon  the  Irish  Question. 
In  other  words,  the  evils  that  had  been  allowed  to  eat  out  the  vitals  of  Ire- 
land for  so  long  a  period  amid  apathy  temipered  by  scoffs,  began  to  attract 
attention  when  Irishmen  abandoned  the  paths  of  constitutional  and  tran- 
quil agitation,  and  sought  remedy  in  conspiracy  and  force.  By  several 
circumstances  the  Irish  Chui-ch  was  pushed  to  the  front,  the  Irish  Members 
began  to  actively  discuss  it  in  Parliament,  and  finall}',  as  everybody  knows, 
after  a  fierce  struggle  and  a  General  Election,  the  Church  was  disendowed 
and  disestablished. 

This  great  reform  turned  attention  once  more  to  Parliamentary  methods  ; 
the  spirit  of  apathy,  which  had  given  the  fruits  of  electoral  contests  without 
care  or  regret  to  the  first  adventurer,  was  broken,  and  people  began  to 
think  again  that  it  was  of  some  importance  whether  an  honest  man  or  a 
rogue  should  be  sent  to  Westminster  to  represent  Ireland.  The  awakening 
of  Ireland  from  the  long  slumber  since  1845  had  begun,  and  the  awakening 
of  Ireland  means  the  revival  of  an  agitation  for  self-government.  Another 
movement  was  destined  to  add  a  new  and  even  more  potent  force  to  the 
growing  cause  of  Home  Rule.  Though  the  Church  Question  had  been 
pushed  to  the  front,  the  Land  Question  still  retained  its  place  as  the  su- 
preme issue  to  the  majority  of  the  population.  Throughout  the  country 
mass  meetings  were  held,  and  the  demand  of  the  farmers  was  put  forward 
with  thunderous    emphasis.      The  demand   was    for  the    '  Three   F's '  — 


138  THE  FARJSIELL  MOVEMENT, 

fixity  of  tenure,  free  sale,  and  fair  rent ;  and  the  farmers  had  heard 
this  demand  advocated  so  often,  had  shouted  themselves  hoarse  by  so  many 
hillsides  in  uttering  it,  had  been  so  stimulated  and  encouraged  by  the  sight 
of  their  battalions  in  regular  array,  Sunday  after  Sunday,  and  in  county 
after  county,  that  by  the  time  Parliament  met  they  regarded  the  '  Three 
F's '  as  having  already  passed  from  the  region  of  popular  platforms  to  that 
of  Parliamentary  debates  and  ct  statute  law. 

The  introduction  of  Mr.  Gladstone's  Bill  w^as  the  mournful  awakening 
that  came  to  all  these  splendid  dreams,  for  the  measure  of  the  Prime  Min- 
ister Ptcpped  far  short  indeed  of  the  '  Three  ¥''&.'  The  sentimental  forces 
which  had  been  gathering  in  such  might  in  favour  of  self-government  were 
now  materially  increased  by  the  accession  of  the  mighty  battalions  of  the 
disillusioned  and  disappointed  farmers  of  the  country. 

But  the  foundati  jn  of  the  Home  Rule  movement,  curiously  enough,  was 
laid,  not  in  obedience  to  the  impulse  of  the  masses  of  the  people,  but  in  the 
rancour  of  a  small  and  a  defeated  minority  of  the  population.  The  Dises- 
tablishment of  the  Church  had  brought  loack  a  certain  proportion  of  the 
Protestant  population  to  that  spirit  of  nationality  which  had  found  its  most 
eloquent  advocates  in  the  exclusively  Protestant  Parliament  of  the  ante- 
Union  days.  A  certain  number  of  very  moderate  gentlemen  of  the 
Catholic  faith  saw  in  a  movement  which  Protestant  Conservatives  were 
able  to  support  elements  which  need  not  alarm  the  most  milk-and-water 
adherents  of  the  doctrine  of  Nationality.  There  were  more  stable  elements 
in  constitutional  agitators  who  had  fought  doggedly  on  for  a  Native  Par- 
liament through  the  long  eclipse  of  national  faith  between  1855  and  that 
hour,  like  Mr.  A.  M.  Sullivan  ;  and  in  some  men — such  as  Mr,  O'Kelly, 
M.P.  for  Roscommon — who,  appearing  under  disguised  names,  sought,  after 
the  breakdown  of  their  efforts  to  free  Ireland  by  force,  v/hether  there  was 
any  chance  of  success  through  Parliamentary  action.  The  latter  element 
took  up  this  attitude  at  that  period  with  a  certain  amount  of  trepidation, 
and  at  some  personal  risk  ;  for  the  distrust  of  constitutional  agitation,  and 
the  hatred  of  constitutional  agitators,  still  survived  among  the  relics  of 
Penianism,  and  the  new  movement  was  looked  upon  by  them  with  the  same 
latent  and  perilous  distrust  as  all  its  predecessors.  The  meeting  was  held 
on  May  19,  1870,  in  the  Bilton  Hotel,  Sackville  Street,  Dublin. 

At  this  meeting  were  present  Conservatives  as  well  known  as  Mr.  Pur- 
don,  then  Conservative  Lord  Mayor  of  Dublin  ;  Mr.  Kinahan,  who  had 
been  High  Sheriff  ;  and  Major  Knox,  proprietor  of  the  Irish  Times,  a  Con- 
servative organ  ;  nor  should  the  name  be  omitted  of  a  gentleman  who  was 
for  a  considerable  time  to  play  a  prominent  part  in  the  new  movement — 
Colonel,  then  Captain,  Edwax-d  P.  King-Harman.  Mr.  Butt  was  the  chief 
speaker,  and  on  his  proposition,  and  without  a  dissentient  voice,  the  resolu- 
tion was  passed, 

'  That  it  is  the  opinion  of  this  meeting  that  the  true  remedy  for  the  evils 
of  Ireland  is  the  establishm-ent  of  an  Irish  Parliajiient  with  full  control  over 
our  domestic  affairs.' 

A  new  organization  was  founded  under  the  name  of  '  The  Home  Govern 
ment  Association  of  Ireland.'      Before  long,  the  movement  spread  with  the 
rapidity  which  always  comes  to  movements  founded  on  indestructible  as- 
pirations.    Now,  just  as  in  1843,  the  people  had  only  to  see  a  movement  in 
favour  of  self-government  to  flock  enthusiastically  to  its  ranks.      Then  the 


REVOLUTION,  139 

Prime  Minister  had  passed  another  measure  which  transcended  in  import- 
ance any  other  of  the  great  Acts  which  made  his  first  Premiership  so 
momentous  an  epoch  in  the  resurrection  of  Ireland.  This  was  the  Ballot 
Act.  Por  the  first  time  in  his  history  the  Irish  tenant  could  vote  without 
the  fear  of  eviction,  with  the  attendant  risks  of  hunger,  exile,  or  death. 
The  Ballot  Act  ~  as  an  act  of  emancipation  to  the  Irish  tenant  in  a  sense 
far  more  real  tbc^a  the  Emancipation  Act  of  1829.  Prom  the  passage  of 
that  Ballot  Act  is  to  be  dated  the  era  when,  for  the  first  time  in  her  history, 
the  real  voice  of  Ireland  had  some  opportunity  of  making  itself  heard.  The 
nevr  force  advanced  against  all  opponents,  and  every  constituency  that  had 
its  choice  declared  with  unfaltering  fidelity  in  favour  of  the  National  can- 
didate. 

In  four  bye-elections  the  Home  Rule  candidates  triumphed  over  every 
obstacle.  The  struggle  between  Whiggery  and  Home  Eule  was  now  over. 
Ireland  had  definitely  declared  for  the  new  movement.  This  will  be  the 
place  to  tell  the  end  of  Judge  Keogh.  In  the  year  1878  the  sensational 
rumour  reached  Dublin  that  he  had  developed  symptoms  of  insanity  in 
Belgium,  whither  he  had  been  removed  for  the  benefit  of  his  health,  and 
that  he  had  attempted  to  kill  his  attendant  and  himself.  The  rumour 
proved  correct.  Prom  this  period  forth  he  seems  never  to  have  recovered 
full  possession  of  his  senses,  and  gradually  sank.  He  was  removed  to  Bin- 
gen,  and  there  died  on  September  30,  1878.  An  Englishman,  with  charac- 
teristic appreciation  of  Irish  character,  is  said  to  have  placed  a  stone  over 
his  remains  with  the  inscription,  '  Justwn  et  tenacem  jjro'positi  virum.* 
The  country  which  he  had  betrayed  and  ruined,  on  the  other  hand,  con- 
gratulated itself  in  not  having  received  his  remains.  Indeed,  some  desper- 
ate spirits  had  resolved  that  the  remains  should  never  rest  in  hallowed  Irish 
ground  ;  a  plot  was  complete  for  seizing  the  body  during  the  funeral  and 
throwing  it  into  the  Liffey. 


CHAPTER  VIII. 

ISAAC   BUTT. 

Isaac  Butt,  the  leader  of  the  new  movement,  was  the  son  o£  a  Protestant 
clergyman  of  the  North  of  Ireland.  The  place  of  his  birth  was  near  the 
Gap  of  Barnesmore,  a  line  of  hills  which  is  rarely,  if  ever,  without  shadow 
— not  unlike  Butt's  own  life.  It  was  one  of  his  theories  that  people  born 
amid  mountain  scenery  are  more  imaginative  than  the  children  of  the 
plains.  His  own  nature  was  certainly  imaginative  in  the  highest  degree, 
with  the  breadth  and  height  of  imaginative  men,  and  also  with  the  doubt- 
ings,  despondency,  and  the  dread  of  the  Unseen. 

For  many  years  he  stood  firmly  by  the  principles  of  Orange  Toryism, 
and  he  had  the  career  which  then  belonged  to  every  young  Irish  Protestant 
of  ability.  He  went  to  Trinity  College,  which  at  the  time  presented  large 
prizes,  and  presented  them  to  those  only  who  had  the  good  luck  to  belong 
to  the  favoured  faith.  Butt's  advancement  was  rapid.  He  was  not  many 
years  a  student  when  he  was  raised  to  a  Professorship  of  Political  Economy. 


I40  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

When  he  went  to  the  Bar  his  success  came  with  the  same  ease  and  rapidity. 
He  was  but  thirty-one  years  of  age,  and  had  been  only  six  years  at  the 
Bar,  when  he  was  made  a  Queen's  Counsel.  In  politics,  however,  he  had 
made  his  chief  distinction.  It  will  be  remembered  that  when  O'Connell 
sought  to  obtain  a  declaration  in  favour  of  Repeal  of  the  Union  from  the 
newly  emancipated  Corporation  of  Dublin,  Butt  was  selected  by  his  co-re- 
Jigionists,  young  as  he  was,  to  meet  the  Great  Liberator,  and  his  speech 
«'as  as  good  a  one  as  could  be  made  on  the  side  of  the  maintenance  of  the 
Union  ;  and  many  a  year  after,  when  he  had  become  the  leader  of  a  Home 
Kule  Party,  was  quoted  against  him  by  Sir  Michael  Hicks-Beach,  the  Irish 
Cliiof  Secretary  of  the  period. 

Of  great  though  irregular  industrj^,  deeply  devoted  to  study,  with  a  mind 
of  large  grasp  and  a  singularly  retentive  memory,  he  was  intimately  ac- 
quainted wdth  all  the  secrets  of  his  profession  ;  and  throughout  his  life 
was  acknowledged  to  be  a  fine  lawyer.  He  represented  in  Parliament 
both  Yoiighal  in  his  native  county,  and  Harwich  in  England.  His  entrance 
into  Parliament  aggravated  many  of  his  weaknesses.  It  separated  him 
from  his  profession  in  Dublin,  and  thereby  increased  his  already  great 
pecuniary  liabilities.  His  character  in  many  respects  was  singularly  feeble. 
Some  of  his  weaknesses  leaned  to  virtue's  side,  and  many  of  the  stories  told 
of  him  suggest  a  resemblance  to  the  character  of  Alexandre  Dumas  pere. 
He  borrowed  largely  and  lent  largely,  and  often  in  the  midst  of  his  sorest 
straits  lavished  on  others  the  money  which  he  required  himself,  and  which 
often  did  not  belong  to  him.  Throughout  his  life  he  was,  as  a  consequence, 
pursued  by  the  bloodhound  of  vast  and  insurmountable  debt.  At  least 
once  he  was  for  several  months  in  a  debtors'  prison,  and  there  used  to  be 
terrible  stories — even  in  the  days  when  he  was  an  English  member  of 
Parliament — of  unpaid  cabmen  and  appearances  at  the  police-courts. 

But  he  was  a  man  of  supreme  political  genius  ;  one  of  those  whose  right 
to  intellectual  eminence  is  never  questioned,  but  willingly  conceded  with- 
out effort  on  his  side,  without  opposition  on  the  part  of  others.  The 
irregularities  of  his  life  shut  him  out  from  official  employment,  and  he  saw 
a  long  series  of  inferiors  reach  to  position  and  wealth  while  he  remained 
poor  and  neglected.  There  is  a  considerable  period  of  his  life  which  is 
almost  total  eclipse.  There  came  an  Indian  summer  when  he  returned  to 
the  practice  of  his  profession  in  Ireland,  and  once  more  joined  in  the 
political  s-truggles  of  his  countrymen. 

Mr.  Gladstone's  dissolution  of  1874  came  upon  Butt  with  the  same 
bewildering  surprise  as  upon  so  many  other  people.  That  election  found 
him  in  a  cruel  difficulty.  On  the  one  hand,  the  country  was  be37ond  all 
question  with  him  ;  he  knew  that  he  could  count  on  the  masses  to  vote  in 
favour  of  self-government  as  securely  as  every  other  popular  leader  who  has 
ever  been  able  to  make  the  appeal.  The  majority  of  the  constituencies 
were  ready,  he  knew,  to  return  Home  Rule  candidates  ;  and  thus  the 
General  Election  afforded  him  the  opportunity  of  creating  a  greater  Home 
Rule  Party.  But,  on  the  other  hand,  elections  cannot  be  fought  without 
money  ;  elections  were  dearer  then  even  than  they  are  now,  and  Butt 
wanted  to  fight,  not  a  seat  here  and  there,  but  a  whole  national  campaign  ; 
for  three-fourths  of  the  constituencies  could  be  won  by  a  Home  Rule  candi- 
date if  a  Home  Rule  candidate  could  be  brought  forward.  For  so  immense 
a  work  he  had  nothing  to  fall  back  on  but  a  few  hundreds  of  pounds  in  the 
funds  of  the  Home  Rule  Association,  and  he  himself  was  at  one  of  his  re- 


ISAAC  BUTT.  141 

current  periods  of  desperate  need.  He  was  arrested  for  debt  on  the  very 
morning  of  the  day  when,  learning  of  the  dit^solution,  he  was  making  his 
plan  of°campaign.  though  the  matter  was  arranged  in  some  way  or  other, 
he  had  to  fly  to  England,  and  this  prevented  him  from  exercising  that 
personal  supervision  over  the  General  Election  which  is  absolutely  re- 
quired from  the  leader  of  a  movement. 

Butt  could  only  adopt,  imder  the  circumstances,  a  policy  of  compromise, 
and  make  the  best  out  of  bad  but  inevitable  material.  Where  there  was  a 
real  and  genuine  Home  Rule  candidate  ready  to  come  forward,  and  able  to 
bear  the  expenses  of  an  election  contest,  Butt  fought  the  seat.  In  this  way 
he  was  able  to  bring  into  public  life  many  earnest  men  who  had  for  years 
found  it  impossible  to  take  any  Parliamentary  part  in  rescuing  the  country. 
His  party  contained  A.  M.  Sullivan,  Mr.  Biggar,  Mr.  Ptichard  Power,  Mr. 
Sheil,  and  several  others,  who  were  really  devoted  to  the  National  cause. 
On  the  other  hand,  he  had  to  accept,  in  constituencies  where  he  had  not 
the  men  or  the  money  to  fight,  the  '  deathbed  repentance,'  as  it  was  called, 
of  men  who  had  grown  gray  in  the  service  of  one  or  other  of  the  English 
parties.  These  time-worn  Whigs  or  Tories — such  as  Sir  Patrick  O'Brien 
and  Sir  George  Bowyer — of  course  swallowed  the  Home  Rule  pledge. 
Some  of  the  new  men  were  little  better.  The  race  of  Pv,abagas  had  been 
scotched  but  not  killed,  and  among  Butt's  recruits  was  a  certain  proportion 
of  lawyers,  who  were  as  ready  as  any  of  their  predecessors  to  sell  them- 
selves and  their  principles  to  the  highest  bidder.  Many  of  them  have 
since  received  office  ;  all  of  the  tribe  have  expected  and  asked  it.  It  was, 
then,  a  very  mixed  party  Butt  had  gathered  around  him — a  party  of  patriots 
and  of  place-hunters,  of  men  young,  earnest,  and  fresh  for  struggle,  and  of 
men  physically  exhausted  and  morally  dead,  a  party  of  life-long  Nationalists 
and  of  veteran  lacqueys.  There  was  a  tragic  contrast  between  such  a  party 
and  the  renewed  and  sublime  and  noble  hopes  of  the  nation.  Of  the  103 
Irish  members,  sixty  were  returned  pledged  to  vote  for  the  entire  rearrange- 
ment of  the  legislative  relations  between  the  two  countries. 

Such  was  the  party  ;  and  now  how  was  it  with  the  leader  ?  His 
weakness  with  regard  to  pecuniary  matters  has  been  already  touched  upon ; 
he  had,  besides,  all  the  other  foibles,  as  well  as  the  charms,  of  an  easy-going, 
good-natured,  pliant  temperament.  Though  his  faults  were  grossly  exag- 
gerated— for  instance,  many  intimates  declare  that  they  never  saw  him, 
even  during  the  acquaintance  of  years,  once  under  the  influence  of  drink — 
he  had,  unquestionably,  made  many  sacriflces  on  the  altars  of  the  gods  of 
indulgence.  It  may  be  that  with  him,  as  with  so  many  others,  the  pursuit 
of  pleasure  was  but  the  misnomer  for  the  flight  from  despair.  He  was  all 
his  life  troubled  by  an  unusually  slow  circulation,  and  it  may  be  that  the 
central  note  of  his  character  was  melancholy.  In  his  early  days  he  was  a 
constant  contributor  to  the  Duulin  University  Ifagazine,  and  his  tales  have 
a  vein  of  the  morbid  melancholy  that  runs  through  the  youthful  letters  of 
Alfred  de  Musset.  Allusion  has  been  already  made  to  his  imaginative- 
ness :  this  imaginativeness  did  much  to  weaken  his  resolve.  Curious  stories 
are  told  of  the  superstitions  that  ran  through  his  nature.  Though  a  Pro- 
testant, he  used  to  carry  some  of  the  religious  symbols — medals,  for  instance 
— which  Catholics  use,  and  he  would  not  go  into  a  law  court  without  his 
medals.  There  are  still  more  ludicrous  stories  of  his  standing  appalled  or 
delighted  before  such  accidents  as  putting  on  his  clothes  the  wrong  way, 
and  other  trivialities.     Then,  the  demon  of  debt,  which  had  haunted  him 


142  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT, 

all  his  life,  now  stood  manacing  behind  him.  He  had  just  re-established 
himself  in  a  considerable  practice  when  he  again  entered  Parliament,  and 
membership  of  Parliament  is  entirely  incompatible  with  the  retention  of  his 
entire  practice  by  an  Irish  barrister.  He  was,  throughout  his  leadership, 
divided  between  a  dread  dilemma  :  either  he  had  to  neglect  Parliament, 
and  then  his  party  was  endangered  ;  or  neglect  his  practice,  and  then  bring 
ruin  on  himself  and  a  family  entirely  unprovided  for,  deeply  lo\dng  and 
deeply  loved.  There  is  no  Nemesis  so  relentless  as  that  which  dogs  pecu- 
niary recklessness  ;  the  spendthrift  is  also  the  drudge  ;  and  in  his  days  of 
old  age,  weakness,  and  terrible  political  responsibilities,  Butt  had  to  fly 
between  London  and  Dublin,  to  stop  up  o'  nights,  alternately  reading  briefs 
and  drafting  Acts  of  Parliament :  to  make  his  worn  and  somewhat  un- 
wieldy frame  do  the  double  work,  which  would  try  the  nerves  and  strength 
of  a  giant  with  the  limber  joints  and  freshness  of  early  youth.  And  at 
this  period  Butt's  frame  was  worn,  though  to  outward  appearances  he  was 
still  vigorous.  The  hand  of  incurable  disease  already  held  him  tight,  and 
the  dark  death,  of  which  he  had  so  great  a  horror,  was  not  many  years  o£f ; 
finally,  in  1874,  he  was  sixty-one  years  of  age.  On  the  other  hand,  he  had 
great  qualities  of  leadership.  He  was  unquestionably  a  head  and  shoulders 
above  all  his  followers,  able  though  so  many  of  them  were,  and  was,  next 
to  Mr.  Gladstone,  the  greatest  Parliam.entarian  of  his  day.  Then  he  had 
the  large  toleration  and  the  easy  temper  that  make  leadership  a  light  burden 
to  followers  ;  and  the  burden  of  leadership  must  be  light  when — as  in  an 
Irish  Party — the  leader  has  no  offices  or  salaries  to  bestow.  And,  above 
all,  he  had  the  modesty  and  the  simplicity  of  real  greatness.  Every  man 
had  his  ear,  every  man  his  kindly  word  and  smile,  and  some  his  strong 
affection.  Thus  it  was  that  Butt  was  to  many  the  most  lovable  of  men  ; 
and  more  than  one  political  opponent,  impelled  by  principle  to  regard  him 
as  the  most  serious  danger  to  the  Irish  cause,  struck  him  hard,  but  wept 
as  he  dealt  the  blow. 

This  sketch  of  the  cho^racter  of  Butt  will  show  the  points  in  v/hich  he 
was  unsuitable  for  the  work  before  him.  He  was  the  leader  of  a  small 
party  in  an  assembly  to  which  it  was  hateful  in  opinion,  and  feeling,  and 
temperament.  A  party  in  such  circumstances  can  only  make  its  v/ay  by 
audacious  aggressiveness,  dogged  resistance,  relentless  purpose  ;  and  for 
such  Parliamentary  forlorn  hopes  the  least  suited  of  leaders  was  a  man 
whom  a  single  groan  of  impatience  could  hurt,  and  one  word  of  compli- 
ment delight. 

The  history  of  Butt's  attempts  to  obtain  land  or  any  other  reform  in 
Ireland  from  the  Imperial  Parliament  was  the  same  as  that  of  so  many  of 
his  predecessor-.  Year  after  year,  session  after  session,  there  was  the  same 
tale  of  Irish  demands  mocked  at,  denounced  with  equal  vigour  by  the 
leaders  of  both  the  English  parties  alike,  and  then  rejected  in  the  division 
lobbies  by  overwhelming  English  majorities. 

The  follovring  is  the  list  of  the  Laud  Bills  proposed  by  Parliament 
between  1871  and  1880  :i 

*  Healy,  p.  67. 


ISAAC  BUTT. 


HJ 


1871 

1S72 
1873 
1873 

1S73 

1S74 

1874 

1874 
1874 
1875 
1875 

1876 

1876 

1876 
1877 
1877 

1878 

1878 
1878 
1878 

1878 
1879 
1879 
1879 
1879 

1879 

1880 

ISSO 


j  Landed  Property.  Ireland,  Act,  1847, 

j      Amendment  Bill     

j  Ulster  Tenant  Right  Bill      

I  Ulster  Tenant  Right  Bill      

Landlord    and    Tenant    Act,    1870, 

Amendment  Bill     ...        

Landlord    and   Tenant    Act,    1870, 

Amendment  Bill,  No.  2 

Landlord    and    Tenant    Act,    1870, 

Amendment  Bill     

Landlord    and    Tenant    Act,    1870, 

Amendment  Bill,  No.  2     

Ulster  Tenant  Right  Bill      

Irish  Land  Act  Extension  Bill 
Landed  Proprietors,  Ireland,  Bill   .. 
Landlord  and  Tenant,  Ireland,  Act, 

1870,  Amendment  Bill      

Landlord  and  Tenant,  Ireland,  Act, 

187C,  Amendment  Bill        

Tenant    Right    on    Expiration    of 

Leases  Bill 

Land  Tenure,  Ireland,  Bill 

Land  Tenure,  Ireland,  Bill 

Landlord  and  Tenant,  Ireland,  Act, 

1870,  Amendment  Bill       

Landlord  and  Tenant,  Ireland,  Act, 

1870,  Amendment  Bill      

Tenant  Right  Bill       

Tenant  Right,  Ulster,  Bill 

Tenants'    Iraprovements,     Ireland, 

Bill      

Tenants'  Protection,  Ireland,  Bill... 

Ulster  Tenant  Right  Bill      

Ulster  Tenant  Right  Bill,  No.  2  ... 
Landlord  and  Tenant,  Ireland,  Bill 
Landlord  and  Tenant,  Ireland,  Act, 

1870,  Amendment  Bill      

Landlord  and  Tenant,  Ireland,  Act, 

1870,  Amendment  Bill,  No.  2 
Landlord  and  Tenant,  Ireland,  Act, 

1S7C,  Amendment  Bill      

Ulster  Tenant  Right  BUI      


INTRODUCED  BY 


Serjeant  Sherlock 
Mr.  Butt  ... 
Mr.  Butt ... 

Mr.  Butt  .... 

Mr.  Heron 

Mr.  Butt ... 

Sir  J.  Gray 
Mr.  Butt  ... 
The  O'Donoghue 
Mr.  Smyth 

Mr.  Crawford 

Mr.  Crawford 

Mr.  Mulhollaud 
Mr.  Butt ... 
Mr.  Butt  ... 

Mr.  Crawford 

Mr.  Herbert 
Lord  A.  Hill 
Mr.  Macartney 

Mr.  Martin 
Mr.  Moore 
Mr.  Macartney 
Lord  A.  Hill 
Mr.  Herbert 

Mr.  Taylor 

Mr.  Downing 

Mr.  Taylor 
Mr.  Macartney 


Withdrawn 

Dropped 

Dropped 

Dropped 

Dropped 

Dropped 

Dropped 
Dropped 
Dropped 
Dropped 

Rejected 

Withdrawn 

Dropped 
Rejected 
Rejected 

Withdrawn 

Dropped 
Rejected  by  Lords 
Withdrawn 

Rejected 

Dropped 

Rejected 

Withdrawn 

Dropped 

Dropped 

Rejected 

Dropped 
Dropped 


The  English  journals  at  the  same  time  gave  equally  abundant  testimony 
of  the  invincible  ignorance  of  English  opinion  iipon  Irish  questions.  While 
in  every  part  of  Ireland  the  tenants  were  being  crushed  under  a  yearly  in- 
creasing load  of  rack-rents  into  a  deeper  abyss  of  hopeless  poverty,  and  the 
whole  country  was  drifting  once  again  to  the  periodic  famine,  an  influential 
London  journal  was.  gaily  declaring  that  Mr.  Butt's  whole  case  rested  on 
an  agreeable  romance.  Of  the  squalid  lives  of  Irish  farmers  in  their 
miserable  patches  of  over-rented  land  ;  of  the  crushing  of  hearts  and  the 
break-up  of  homes  through  eviction  and  emigration  ;  of  the  swift  and 
inevitable  advance  of  tlie  spectre  of  famine — of  all  the  cruel  and  intoler- 
able suffering  and  v/rong  that  provoked  the  cyclone  of  the  Land  League, 
the  Daily  Telegraph  could  write  this  airily  and  pleasantly : 

'  A  large  allowance  must  be  made  for  the  vivid  fancy  of  Irishmen.  But 
for  that  reflection  the  sad  story  which  Mr.  Butt  told  the  House  of  Oommona 


144  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

last  night  about  the  effects  of  the  Irish  Land  Act  (of  1870)  would  be  dis- 
heartening indeed.  .  .  .  Mr.  Butt  warns  us  that  the  old  "  land  war  "  is 
breaking  out  again  ;  not  through  any  fault  of  the  farmers,  he  is  careful  to 
explain,  but  through  the  infatuation  of  those  landlords  who  have  used  their 
wits  to  make  the  Act  a  dead  letter.  Were  all  this  true,  we  should  not 
wonder  at  Mr.  Butt's  demand  for  a  Royal  Commission  to  see  how  the  Act 
works.  But  then,  we  repeat,  allowance  must  be  made  for  the  vivid  imagi- 
nation of  Irishmen.  ...  It  might  have  been  contended  that  Mr.  Butt  had 
mr.de  a  fair  case  for  a  small  inqviiry,  if  he  had  not  betrayed  at  every  turn 
of  his  speech  his  real  aim,  which  is,  not  to  amend  the  Land  Act,  but  to 
secure  the  Irish  farmers  fixity  of  tenure  at  a  rent  arranged  on  some  general 
ground.  .  .  .  Mr.  Butt  could  scarcely  have  expected  the  Government  to 
treat  such  a  project  seriously,  and  he  must  have  been  prepared  for  its 
decisive  rejection  by  the  House. '^ 

Butt  was  very  much  pained  and  disappointed  by  this  universal  rejection 
of  all  his  proposals,  and  began  to  have  gloomy  forebodings  as  to  the  success 
of  his  policy.  Intimately  acquainted  as  Butt  was  with  the  working  of  the 
Land  Act  of  1870,  he  probablj'  knew  very  well  that  a  crisis  was  inevitable 
— such  as  came  upon  Ireland  in  1879.  And  possibly,  in  one  of  those 
moments  of  gloom  and  depression  with  Mdiich  he  was  too  familiar,  he  may 
have  anticipated  an  hour  when  there  would  come  the  same  tragic  and 
terrible  close  to  his  agitation  which  had  wound  up  the  career  of  O'Connell 
— a  country  not  freed  and  prosperous,  but  once  more  tight  \x\  the  grip  of 
huno-er,  and  more  helpless  than  ever  against  oppre?sior,.  To  preach 
patience  to  a  people  under  such  conditions  was  to  mock  a  starving  ma.n 
with  honeyed  words. 

There  was,  however,  another  and  a  graver  danger  to  the  success  of  Butt's 
movement.  Butt  knew  very  well  that,  as  time  went  on,  he  was  bound  to 
lose  a  certain  proportion  of  such  a  party.  When  there  is  on  the  one  side  a 
certain  number  of  men  willing  to  sell  themselve""^  and  on  the  other  a 
Government  with  vast  resources  and  occasional  wed  for  the  services  of 
corrupt  Irishmen,  the  moment  when  the  two  will  come  to  a  bargain  is  a 
matter  of  mutual  arrangement.  The  Home  Rule  Party  had  not  been  many 
years  in  existence  when  tv/o  or  three  of  its  members  had  accepted  place, 
and  there  was  not  the  least  doubt  that  several  others  were  willing.  Then, 
apart  from  the  want  of  pence,  which  was  driving  several  of  Butt's  followers 
into  office-seeking,  the  party  was  suffering  from  that  hope  deferred  which 
depresses  and  then  disintegrates  political  bodies.  Session  passed  after 
session,  motion  after  motion.  Bill  after  Bill,  and  still  no  advance  was  made. 
Then  the  party,  drawn  from  elements  so  heterogeneous  as  Colonel  King- 
Harraan  and  Mr.  Gray,  Sir  Patrick  O'Brien  and  Mr.  Ricliard  Power,  could 
not  be  held  in  any  strict  bonds  of  discipline.  Butt  was  exceedingly  anxious 
to  get  the  party  to  act  together  as  a  party  on  the  great  questions  which 
divided  the  two  English  parties  ;  all  his  efforts  in  this  direction  failed.  In 
the  Parliament  of  1874,  it  gave  Sir  Stafford  Northcote  very  little  concern 
if  Colonel  King-Harman  voted  in  favour  of  Home  Rule,  after  the  annual 
and  academic  discussion,  when  the  Irish  were  put  down  by  a  combination 
of  all  the  English  parties  in  the  House  ;  for  in  all  English  party  divisions 
he  was  secure  of  Colonel  King-Harman's  vote,  as  though  he  had  not 
corrupted  the  general  purity  of  his  Conservatism  by  the  heresy  of  Home 
Rule.     And,  similarly,  even  Lord  Hartington  might  excuse  the  occasional 

*  Quoted  in  '  New  Ireland,'  pp.  393,  399. 


ISAAC  BUTT. 


145 


error  of  an  expectant  Whig  like  Mr.  Meldon,  when  Mr,  Meldon's  vote 
against  the  Tories  was  as  certain  a;s  his  desire  for  a  place. 

Butt  fully  grasped  this  truth  of  Parliamentary  tactics,  but,  of  course,  was 
unable  to  get  men  to  act  as  an  Irish  Party  v/ho  were  bound  by  corrupt  hopes 
or  party  predilections  to  give  their  first  allegiance  to  an  English  Party  and 
an  English  leader.  Thus  his  whole  policy  was  founded  on  sand.  All 
these  various  causes,  w^orking  together,  had  produced  in  the  Irish  Party  of 
1874  disorganization,  depression,  the  breakdown  of  the  barriers  of  shame 
among  the  coi-rupt,  the  sealing  up  of  the  fountains  of  hope  among  the 
pure.     The  period  of  dry-rot  had  set  in. 

In  the  light  of  subsequent  events,  it  is  now  easy  to  see  the  dread  abyss 
to  which  the  Home  Eule  Party  was  once  more  bringing  Ireland.  The 
accession  of  a  Libera.1  Ministry  would  have  immediately  completed  the 
disaster  which  the  defeat  of  Butt's  proposals  had  begun.  At  least  half 
the  party  would  at  once  have  become  applicants  for  office,  and  probably  a 
considerable  number  Avould  have  realized  their  wishes.  The  remainder 
would  gradually  have  sunk  deeper  and  deeper  into  a  position  of  obedience 
to  the  English  whips,  and  Irish  national  interests  would  once  more  have 
been  made  absolutely  subservient  to  the  interests  of  a  single  English 
party,  to  the  convenience  of  Ministers,  and  to  the  opportunities  of  an 
overworked,  listless,  and  generally  hostile  BLouse  of  Commons.  The  first 
result  of  this  state  of  things  would  have  been  to  break  down  once  more  all 
faith  in  Parliamentary  agitation.  A  portion  of  the  people  would  have 
found  some  hope  for  the  redress  of  intolerable  grievances  in  another  resort 
to  revolutionary  methods.  The  majority,  following  the  precedent  of  the 
period  immediately  subsequent  to  Keogh's  betrayal,  would,  in  the  cynicism 
begotten  of  blighted  hope,  once  more  have  chosen  bad  or  good  men,  honest 
patriots  or  self-seeking  knaves,  in  the  spirit  of  chance  and  of  caprice. 
This  downfall  of  constitutional  agitation  would  have  been  made  the  more 
disastrous  by  events  which  at  this  moment  w^ere  hurrying  upon  Ireland. 
The  year  1879,  as  will  presently  be  seen,  brought  one  of  those  crises  which 
were  bound  to  recur  in  Ireland  as  long  as  its  land  system  remained  unreformed. 
Famine  would  have  followed  the  distress  of  1879,  as  it  followed  the  blight  of  ' 
1846.  The  country,  without  an  honest  and  energetic  Parliamentary  repre- 
sentation, would  have  been  left  at  the  mercy  of  the  ignorance,  and  the  flippant 
levity  of  English  Ministers,  and  Ireland,  once  more  on  the  threshold  of  a 
successful  movement,  would  have  been  dragged  back  for  another  generation 
into  the  slough  of  hunger,  eviction,  dishonest  representatives,  and  futile 
insurrection. 

The  men  and  the  methods  that  warded  off  this  catastrophe  were  chosen 
with  the  ironical  capriciousness  of  destiny.  The  one  was  a  man  already 
advanced  in  years,  without  the  smallest  trace  of  oratorical  ability,  without 
culture,  with  no  political  experience  wider  than  that  to  be  acquired  on  a 
water  board  or  a  town  council.  The  other,  at  this  time  at  least,  v/as  a 
yovmg  and  obscure  country  gentleman,  who  had  given  no  pledges  to  the 
political  future  save  those  of  a  very  unsuccessful  election  contest,  and  two 
or  three  stumbling  and  very  ineffective  attempts  at  public  speech. 

On  the  night  of  April  22,  1875,  the  House  of  Commons  was  engaged  in 
the  not  unaccustomed  task  of  passing  a  Coercion  Bill  for  Ireland.  Mr.  Butt, 
for  some  reason  or  other,  thought  it  desirable  that  the  progress  of  the 
measure  on  this  evening  should  be  slow,  and  he  asked  a  member  of  his  party, 
who  was  still  young  to  the  House,  to  speak  against  tune.  *  How^  lono-,' 
aslred  the  member  of  his  leader,  *  would  you  wish  ms  to  speak  ?'     '  A  pretty 

10 


146  THE  FARNELL  MOVEAIENT. 

good  v/hile,'  was  Mr.  Butt's  reply.  Mr.  Biggar,  who  was  the  member 
appealed  to,  gave  an  interpretation  to  this  'mot  cVordre  far  larger  than 
probably  Mr.  Butt  had  ever  imagined  or  intended.  It  was  five  o'clock 
when  Mr.  Biggar  rose,  it  was  five  minutes  to  nine  when  he  sat  down. 

Let  us  quote  Hansard  for  a  description  of  the  scene  ;  its  unconscious 
humour  and  significance  will  be  interesting  : 

The  hon.  member  joroceeded  tc  read  extracts  from  the  evidence  before 
the  V/estmeath  Committee — as  was  understood — but  in  a  manner  which 
rendered  him  totally  unintelligible.     At  length 

'  The  Speaker,  interrupting,  reminded  the  hon.  gentleman  that  the  rules 
required  that  an  hon.  member,  when  speaking,  should  address  himself  to 
the  Chair.     This  rule  the  hon.  gentleman  was  at  present  neglecting. 

'  Ml.  Biggar  said  that  his  non-observance  of  the  rule  was  partly  because 
he  found  it  difficult  to  make  his  voice  heard  after  speaking  for  so  long  a 
time,  and  partly  because  his  position  in  the  House  made  it  very  inconvenient 
for  him  to  read  his  extracts  directly  towards  the  Chair  ;  he  would,  however, 
v/ith  permission,  take  a  more  favourable  position. 

'  The  hon.  member  accordingly,  who  had  been  speaking  from  below  the 
gangway,  removed  to  a  bench  nearer  to  the  Speaker's  chair,  taking  with 
him  a  large  mass  of  papers,  from  which  he  continued  to  read  long  extracts, 
with  comments. 

'  At  length  the  hon.  member  said  he  was  unv/illing  to  detain  the  House 
at  further  length,  and  would  conclude  by  stating  his  conviction  that  he  had 
proved  to  every  impartial  mind  that  the  Government  had  made  out  no  case 
for  the  maintenance  of  this  monstrous  system  of  coercion,  and  that  their 
proposal  was  perfectly  unreasonable.  The  hon.  gentleman,  who  had  been 
speaking  nearly  four  hours,  then  moved  his  amendment.' ■■■ 

Neither  Mr.  Butt,  nor  the  House  of  Commons,  nor  Mr.  Biggar  himself, 
could  possibly  have  foreseen  the  momentous  place  which  this  night's  work 
was  destined  to  hold  in  all  the  subsequent  histor^^  of  the  relations  between 
England  and  Ireland.  It  was  on  this  night  that  the  policy  was  born  which 
has  since  become  known  to  all  the  world — the  policy  knov/n  as  '  obstruction  ' 
by  its  enemies  and  as  the  '  active  policy  '  by  its  friends. 

There  are  few  men  of  wlaom  friends  and  enemies  form  so  different  an 
estimate  as  Mr.  Biggar.  The  feelings  of  his  friends  and  intimates'  is 
afi'ectionate  almost  to  fanaticism.  When  there  are  private  and  convivial 
meetings  of  the  Irish  Party,  the  effort  is  always  made  to  limit  the  toasts  to 
the  irreducible  minimum,  for  talking  has  naturally  ceased  to  be  much  of 
an  amusement  to  men  who  have  to  do  so  much  of  it  in  the  performance  of 
public  duties.  There  is  one  toast,  however,  which  is  never  set  down  and  is 
always  proposed.:  this  toast  is  the  '  Health  of  Mr.  Biggar.'  Then  there 
occurs  a  scene  which  is  pleasant  to  look  upon.  There  arises  from  all  the 
party  one  long,  spontaneous,  universal  cheer,  a  cheei  straight  from  every 
Tnan's  heart ;  the  usually  frigid  speech  of  Mr.  Parnell  grows  warm  and  even 
tender  ;  e-verything  shows  that,  whoever  stands  highest  in  the  respect,  Mr. 
Biggar  holds  first  place  in  the  affections  of  his  comrades.  There  is  another 
and  not  uninteresting  phenomenon  of  these  occasions.  To  the  outside 
world  there  is  no  man  presents  a  sterner,  a  more  prosaic,  and  harder  front 
than  Mr.  Biggar.  On  such  occasions  the  other  side  of  his  character  stands 
revealed.  His  breast  heaves,  his  face  flushes,  he  dashes  his  hand  with 
nervous  haste  to  his  eyes  ;  but  the  tears  have  already  risen  and  are  rushing 
down  his  face. 

*  Hansard,  vol.  ccsxiii.,  p.  1458. 


ISAAC  BUTT.  147 

To  his  intimates,  then,  Mr.  Biggar  is  known  as  a  man  overflowing  with  kind- 
ness ;  of  an  almost  absolute  unselfishness,  A  man  once  bitterly  hated  Mr. 
Biggar  until  he  had  a  conversation  with  one  of  Mr.Biggar's  sisters,  and  found 
that  she  was  unable  to  speak  of  all  her  brother's  kindness  with  an  unbroken 
voice.  In  the  House  of  Commons,  with  all  his  fifty-seven  years,  he  is  at  the 
beck  and  call  of  men  who  could  be  almost  his  grandchildren.  Mr.  Healy 
is  preparing  an  onslaught  on  the  Treasury  Bench  :  '  Joe,'  he  cries  to  Mr. 
Biggar,  'get  me  return  so-and-so.'  Mr.  Biggar  is  off  to  the  library.  He 
has  scarcely  got  back  when  the  relentless  member  for  Monaghan  requires  to 
add  to  his  armoury  the  division  list  in  which  the  perfidious  Minister  has 
recorded  his  infamy,  and  away  goes  Mr.  Biggar  to  the  library  again.  Then 
Mr.  Sexton,  busily  engaged  in  the  study  of  an  official  report,  approaches  the 
member  for  Cavan  with  a  card  and  an  insinuating  smile,  and  Mr.  Biggar 
sets  forth  on  an  expedition  to  see  some  of  the  importunate  visitants  by 
whom  J^,Iembers  of  Parliament  are  dogged.  As  a  quarter  to  six  is  approach- 
ing on  a  Wednesday  evening,  and  Mr.  Parnell  thinks  it  just  as  well  that 
the  work  of  Government  should  not  go  on  too  fast,  he  calls  on  Mr.  Biggar, 
and  Mr.  Biggar  is  on  his  legs,  filling  in  the  horrid  interval — Heaven  knows 
how  !  The  desolate  stranger,  v/ho  knows  no  Member  of  Parliament,  and 
yearns  to  see  the  House  of  Commons  at  work,  thinks  fondly  of  Mr.  Biggar, 
and  obtains  a  ticket  of  admission.  He  is  seen  almost  every  night  surrounded 
by  successive  bevies  of  ladies — young  and  old,  native  and  foreign— whom 
he  is  escorting  to  the  Ladies'  Gallery.  Nobody  asks  any  favour  of  Mr. 
Biggar  without  getting  it.  The  man  who  to  the  outside  public  appea.rs  the 
most  odious  type  of  Irish  fractiousness  is  adored  by  the  policemen, 
worshipped  by  the  attendants  of  the  House  ;  and  there  is  good  ground  for 
the  suspicion  that  there  w^as  a  secret  treaty  betvveen  him  and  the  late 
Serjeant-at-Arms,  the  genial  and  universally  popular  Captain  Gossett, 
founded  on  their  common  desire  to  bring  sittings  to  the  abrupt  and  in- 
glorious end  of  a  '  count  out.' 

But  this  is  only  one  side  of  his  character.  His  hate  is  as  fierce  and  nn- 
questioning  as  his  love,  and  he  hates  all  his  political  opponents.  He  has 
the  true  Ulster  nature:  uncompromising,  downright,  self-controlled,  narrow. 
The  subtleties  by  which  men  of  wider  minds,  more  complex  natures,  less 
stable  purpose  and  conviction,  are  apt  to  palliate  their  changes  are  entirely 
incomprehensible  to  Mr.  Biggar,  and  the  self -justifications  of  moral  weak- 
ness arouse  only  his  scorn.  His  purpose,  too,  when  once  resolved  upon,  is 
inflexible.  It  is  this  inflexibility  of  purpose  that  has  made  him  so  great  a 
political  force.  Pinally,  he  is  as  fea,rless  as  he  is  single-minded.  The 
worst  tempest  in  the  House  of  Commons,  the  sternest  decree  that  English 
law  could  enforce  against  an  Irish  patriot,  and  equally  the  disapproval  of 
his  own  people,  are  incapable  of  causing  him  a  moment  of  trepidation.  He 
has  said  many  terrible  things  in  the  House  of  Commons  :  the  instance  has 
got  to  occur  of  his  having  retracted  one  syllable  of  anything  he  has  ever  said. 
There  is  a  scene  in  '  Pere  Goriot '  in  which  the  pangs  of  Ihe  dying  and 
deserted  father  are  depicted  v/ith  terrible  force.  He  is  speaking  of  his 
daughters  and  of  their  husbands  :  of  the  one  he  speaks  with  the  tendei-ness 
of  a  woman's  heart ;  of  the  other,  with  the  ferocity  of  an  enraged  tiger. 
The  passage  suggests  the  two  so  contrary  sides  of  Mr.  Biggar's  natui-e  :  in 
the  depth  of  his  love,  in  the  fierceness  of  his  hate,  he  is  the  '  Pfere  Goriob'  of 
Irish  politics. 

A  great  difficulty  meets  the  biographer  of  Mr.  Biggar  at  the  outset.    He 
is  not  uncommunicr.tive  about  himself,  but  he  does  not  understand  himself, 

10—2 


148  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT, 

and  he  much  underrates  himself.  Asked  by  a  friend  to  write  his  auto- 
biography, his  answer  was  :  '  I  am  a  very  commonplace  character. '  In  his 
early  days,  when  he  used  to  be  asked  to  make  a  speech,  he  cheerfully  started 
out  on  the  attempt,  having  made  the  preliminary  statement,  '  I  can't  speak 

a   d d   bit.'     He   was   born   in   Belfast   on  August  1,  1828,  and  was 

educated  at  the  Belfast  Academy,  where  he  remained  from  1832  to  1844. 
The  record  of  his  school-days  is  far  from  satisfactory.  He  was  very  indolent 
— at  least,  he  says  so  himself — he  showed  no  great  love  of  reading — in  this 
regard  the  boy,  indeed,  was  father  to  the  man — he  was  poor  at  composition, 
and,  of  course,  abjectly  hopeless  at  elocution.  The  one  talent  he  did  ex- 
hibit was  a  talent  for  figures.  It  was,  perhaps,  this  want  of  any  particular 
success  in  learning,  as  well  as  delicacy  of  health,  which  made  Mr.  Biggar's 
parents  conclude  that  he  had  better  be  removed  from  school  and  placed  at 
business.  He  was  taken  into  his  father's  office,  who — as  is  known — was 
engaged  in  the  provision  trade,  and  he  continued  as  assistant  tmtil  1861, 
when  he  became  the  head  of  the  firm.  This  part  of  his  career  may  be  here 
dismissed  with  the  remark  that  he  retired  from  trade  in  1880,  and  is  now 
entirely  out  of  business. 

Mr.  Biggar  always  took  an  interest  in  politics,  and  it  will  not  surprise 
those  acquainted  with  his  subsequent  career  to  know  that  he  was  always  on 
the  side  Avhich  v/as  in  a  hopeless  minority,  and  which  opposed  the  reigning 
clique  and  the  established  regime,.  For  instance,  when  the  late  Mr. 
McMechan  sought  on  one  occasion  the  representation  of  Belfast,  he  had 
only  fourteen  supporters  in  all,  and  Mr.  Biggar  was  one  of  the  four- 
teen. In  1868,  Mr.  Biggar  had  a  share  in  creating  the  curious  combination 
by  which  Mr.  William  Johnston,  of  Eallykilbeg,  was  elected  by  Orange 
Democrats  and  Catholic  Nationalists. 

In  1870  Mr.  Biggar  made  an  attempt  to  get  into  the  Tov/n  Council, 
standing  for  his  native  ward,  which  had  always  been  regarded  as  a  Tory 
stronghold.  He  Vv-as  well  beaten.  Mr.  Biggar  received  his  defeat  with 
the  declaration  that  he  would  fight  the  ward  on  every  occasion  until  he  be- 
came its  member.  In  the  following  year  he  again  stood,  v/ith  the  result 
that  he  was  returned  at  the  head  of  the  poll.  He  had  previously  to  this 
obtained  a  seat  on  the  Water  Board,  and  he  was  chairman  of  that  body 
from  August,  1869,  to  March,  1872.  Some  stormy  scenes  occurred  during 
Mr.  Biggar's  tenure  of  office  \  for  the  future  member  for  Cavan  gave  his 
colleagues  some  specimens  of  that  absolutely  irreverent  freedom  of  speech 
which  has  since  alternately  .shocked  and  amused  a  higher  assembly.  There 
was  a  meeting  in  county  Antrim  for  the  purpose  of  expressing  sympathy 
with  the  Qu-en  on  the  recovery  of  the  Prince  of  Wales  ;  and,  whether  it 
was  because  of  his  disbelief  in  princes  generally,  or  because  he  was  dis- 
gusted with  the  fulsomeness  of  some  of  the  language  employed,  Mr.  Biggar 
wrote  to  the  newspapers  to  say  that  the  attendance  at  the  meeting  did  not 
exceed  fifty.  When  his  year  of  office  closed  he  was  superseded,  and  was 
even  refused  the  customary  vote  of  thanks. 

Mr.  Bio-gar's  first  attempt  to  enter  Parliament  was  made  at  Londonderry 
in  1872.  He  had  not  the  least  idea  of  being  successfid  ;  but  he  had  at 
this  time  mentally  formulated  the  policy  which  he  has  since  carried  out 
with  inflexible  purpose — he  preferred  the  triumph  of  an  open  enemy  to  that 
of  a  half-hearrted  friend.  The  candidates  were  Mr.  (now  Sir  Charles) 
Le\\ds,  Mr.  (now  Chief  Baron)  Palles,  and  Mr.  Biggar.  At  that 
moment  IMr.  Palles,  as  Attorney- General,  was  prosecuting  Dr.  Duggan  and 
other  Cathtlio  bishops  for  the  part  they  had  taken  in  a  famous  Galway 


ISAAC  BUTT.  149 

election,  and  Mr.  Biggar  made  it  a  first  and  indispensable  condition  of  his 
withdrawing  from  the  contest  that  these  prosecutions  should  be  dropped. 
Mr.  Palles  refused  ;  Mr.  'Biggar  received  only  89  votes,  but  the  Castle 
official  was  defeated,  and  he  was  satisfied.  The  bold  fight  he  had  made 
marked  out  Mr.  Biggar  as  the  man  to  lead  one  of  the  assaults  which  at  this 
time  the  rising  Home  Rule  Party  was  beginning  to  make  on  the  seats  of 
Whig  and  Tory.  When  the  General  Election  of  1874  came,  it  was  repre- 
sented to  Mr.  Biggar  that  he  would  better  serve  the  cause  by  standing 
for  Cavan.  He  was  nominated,  and  returned,  and  member  for  Cavan  he 
has  since  remained. 

It  was  not  long  after  the  night  of  Mr.  Biggar's  four  hours'  speech  that  a 
young  Irish  member  took  his  seat  for  the  first  time.  This  was  Mr.  Parnell, 
elected  for  the  county  of  ISIeath  in  succession  to  John  Martin — a  veteran 
and  incorruptible  patriot  who  had  died  a  few  days  before  the  opening  of 
this  new  chapter  in  the  Irish  struggle. 

When  the  dissolution  of  February,  1874,  came,  Mr.  Parnell  wished  to 
stand  for  Wicklow  ;  but  he  v/as  then  high  sheriff  of  the  county,  and  the 
Government  would  not  allow  him  to  qualify  himself  by  resigning.  Shortly 
after.  Colonel  Taylor's  acceptance  of  office  as  Chancellor  of  the  Duchy  in 
the  new  Disraeli  Administration  made  a  vacancy  for  the  county  Dublin, 
and  it  was  deemed  advisable  to  fight  the  seat.  The  contest  was  regarded 
as  a  forlorn  hope,  and  was  known  at  the  same  time  to  be  necessarily  an  ex- 
pensive one.  The  offer  of  Mi\  Parnell  to  fight  the  seat  at  his  own  expense 
came  at  a  time  when  there  was  scarcely  a  penny  in  the  exchequer  of  the 
National  Party,  and  the  mere  fact  alone  of  his  willingness  to  bear  the 
burden  in  such  a  contest  was  enough  to  secure  him  a  hearing  ;  but  there 
were  many  doubts  and  fears,  and  the  first  impression  was  that,  if  a  young 
landlord,  hitherto  entirely  unknown  in  the  national  struggle — for  the  outer, 
and  still  more,  the  inner  history  of  this  shy,  reserved  young  man,  buried  in 
his  Wicklow  estate,  was  a  closed  book  to  everybody  \x\  the  world — if  such  a 
man  wished  to  represent  a  constituency,  it  was  from  no  higher  motive  than 
social  ambition ;  and  men  who  had  become  Members  of  Parliament  for 
such  reasons  have  left  a  long  record  of  half-hearted  adherence,  ending  in 
violent  hostility  to  the  national  cause.  At  last  it  was  agreed  that  the  young 
aspirant  should  at  least  get  the  privilege  of  a  hearing,  and  he  had  a  per- 
sonal interview  with  the  Council  of  the  Home  Hule  League.  John  Martin 
and  Mr.  A.  M.  Sullivan  were  favourably  impressed  ;  the  latter  undertook 
to  propose  his  adoption  at  a  meeting  in  the  Rotunda,  and  here  is  his 
account  of  what  followed  and  o5-Mr.  Parnell's  dehut  in  public  life  : 

*  The  resolution  which  I  had  moved  in  his  favour  having  been  adopted 
with  acclamation,  he  came  forward  to  address  the  assemblage.  To  our 
dismay  he  broke  down  utterly.  He  faltered,  he  paused,  went  on,  got  con- 
fused, and,  pale  with  intense  but  subdued  nervous  anxiety,  caused  everyone 
to  feel  deep  sympathy  for  him.  The  audience  saw  it  all,  and  cheered  him 
kindly  and  heartily  ;  but  many  on  the  platform  shook  their  heads,  sagely 
prophesying  that  if  ever  he  got  to  Westminster,  no  matter  how  long  he 
stayed  there,  he  would  either  be  a  "Silent  Member,"  or  be  known  as 
"  Single-speech  Parnell."  '^ 

Nobody  was  surprised  when,  as  the  result  of  the  election.  Colonel  Taylor 
was  returned  by  an  overwhelming  majority.  If  anything  were  needed  to 
account  for  the  expected  result,  and  to  encourage  hope  for  a  better  chance 

^  •  New  Ireland,'  p.  409. 


15©    ■  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

next  ^iMd;  ^  *?as  found  in  the  universal  sentiment  that  the  Nationalists  had 
been  represented  by  an  extremely  poor  candidate.  Then,  as  now,  Mr. 
Parnell  had  none  of  the  qualities  which  had  hitherto  been  associated  with 
the  idea  of  a  successful  Irish  leader.  He  has  now  become  one  of  the  most 
potent  of  Parliamentary  debaters  in  the  House  of  Commons,  through  his 
power  of  saying  exactly  what  he  means  and  his  thorough  grasp  of  his  own 
ideas  and  wants.  ^  But  Mr.  Parnell  has  become  this  in  spite  of  himself. 
He  retains  to  this  day  an  almost  invincible  repugnance  to  speaking  ;  if  he 
can,  through  any  excuse,  be  silent,  he  remains  silent,  and  the  want  of  all 
training  before  his  entrance  into  political  life  made  him  a  speaker  more 
than  usually  stumbling.  Then  his  manner  was  cold  and  reserved  ;  he 
seemed  entirely  devoid  of  enthvisiasm,  and  he  spoke  with  that  strong 
English  accent  which  in  Ireland  has  come  to  be  inevitably  associated  with 
the  adherents  of  the  English  garrison  and  the  enemies  of  the  national 
cause. 

But,  if  the  truth  were  known,  Mr.  Parnell,  in  entering  upon  political 
life,  was  reaching  the  natural  sequel  of  his  own  descent,  of  his  early  train- 
ing, of  the  strongest  tendencies  of  his  own  nature.  It  is  not  easy  to  describe 
the  mental  life  of  a  man  who  is  neither  expansive  nor  introspective.  It  is 
one  of  the  strongest  and  most  curious  peculiarities  of  Mr.  Parnell^  not 
merely  that  he  rarely,  if  ever,  speaks  of  himself,  but  that  he  rarely,  if  ever, 
gives  any  indication  of  having  studied  himself.  His  mind,  if  one  may  use 
the  jargon  of  the  Germans,  is  purely  objective.  There  are  few  men  who, 
after  a  certain  length  of  acquaintance,  do  not  familiarize  you  with  the  state 
of  their  hearts,  or  their  stomachs,  or  their  finances  ;  with  their  fears,  their 
hopes,  their  aims.  But  no  man  has  ever  been  a  confidant  of  Mr,  Parnell. 
Any  allusion  to  himself  by  another,  either  in  the  exuberance  of  friendship 
or  the  design  of  flattery,  is  passed  by  unheeded  ;  and  it  is  a  joke  among  his 
intimates  that  to  Mr,  Parnell  the  being  Parnell  does  not  exist.  But  from 
various  casupJ  and  unintentioned  hints  the  following  may  be  taken  as  a  fair 
summary  of  his  life  and  its  influences. 

The  history  of  his  own  family  was  well  calculated  to  make  him  a  strong 
Nationalist,  The  family  comes  from  Congleton,  in  Cheshire,  and  it  is  from 
this  town  that  one  branch,  raised  to  the  peerage,  has  taken  its  title. 
Thomas  Parnell,  the  poet,  vv^as  one  of  the  race.  The  Parliamentary  dis- 
tinction dates,  in  the  Parnell  family,  from  the  early  part  of  the  last  century. 
John  Parnell  was  member  for  Maryborough,  in  the  Irish  House  of  Com- 
mons, one  hundred  and  fifty  years  ?^go.  He  was  son  of  a  judge  of  the 
Queen's  Bench.  He  died  in  1782,  and  he  was  immediately  succeeded  by 
his  son  John,  afterwards  Sir  John.  In  1787  Sir  John  was  made  Chan- 
cellor of  the  Exchequer.  In  the  *  Red  List,'  in  which  Sir  Jonah  Barrington 
sums  up  his  impressions  of  the  Irish  politicians  of  his  time,  he  writes  oppo- 
site the  name  of  Sir  John  Parnell  the  one  v/ord  '  Incorruptible.'  He 
proved  his  claim  to  the  title  by  giving  up  the  office  he  had  held  for  seven- 
teen years,  and  voting  steadily  against  the  Union, 

Henry  Parnell,  the  son  of  Sir  John,  was  a  member  of  the  Irish  House  of 
Commons  at  the  same  time,  and,  like  his  father,  stood  steadily  by  Grattan 
and  the  other  advocates  of  Irish  nationality  to  the  last.  Sir  John  was 
elected  to  the  United  Parliament,  but  died  in  the  first  year  of  his  new  posi- 

^  '  No  man,  as  far  as  I  can  judge,  is  more  successful  than  the  hon.  member  in  doing 
that  which  it  is  commonly  supposed  that  all  speakers  do,  but  which  in  my  opinion, 
few  really  do — and  I  do  not  include  myself  among  those  few — namely,  in  saying  what 
■fee  means  to  say.' — Mr.  Gladstone,  Hansard,  vol.  cclxxvii.,  p.  482. 


ISAAC  BUTT.  151 

tion,  and  was  immediately  succeeded  by  Henry.  Sir  Henry  Parnell  was 
for  many  years  a  strong  advocate  of  the  rights  of  his  fellovv-conntrymen, 
and  was  in  favour  of  the  abolition  of  the  Corn  Lav/s,  short  Parliaments, 
extension  of  the  franchise,  vote  by  ballot,  and,  curiously  enough,  the  aboli- 
tion of  flogging  in  the  army  and  navy,  at  a  period  when  such  doctrines  were 
associated  with  advanced  Radicalism.  He  was  Secretary  for  War  in  Lord 
Grey's  Ministry  for  1832,  and  Paymaster  of  the  Forces  in  the  Administra- 
tion of  Lord  Melbourne,  and  in  1841  he  was  created  first  Baron  Con- 
gleton. 

John  Henry  Parnell,  of  Avondaie,  was  grandson  of  Sir  John  Parnell,  and 
nephew  of  the  first  Lord  Congleton.  Making  a  tour  through  America 
while  still  a  young  man,  he  met,  at  Washington,  Miss  Stewart.  Miss 
Stewart  was  the  daughter  of  Commodore  Charles  Stewart,  who  played  an 
important  part  in  the  history  of  America.  It  was  he  who,  in  his  ship  the 
Constitution,  in  the  war  between  England  and  America  in  1815,  met, 
fought,  beat  and  captured  the  two  English  vessels — the  Cyane  and  the 
Levant — with  the  loss  of  seventy-seven  killed  and  wounded  among  the  Brit- 
ish, and  only  three  killed  and  ten  wounded  in  his  own  vessel.  It  is,  perhaps, 
characteristic  of  the  love  for  legality  in  his  race  that  he  did  not  enter  upon 
this  engagement  until  the  British  vessels  first  attacked,  for  he  had  received 
from  a  British  vessel,  three  days  before  the  engagement,  a  copy  of  the  Lon- 
don Times,  containing  the  heads  of  the  Treaty  of  Ghent,  as  signed  by  the 
Ministers  of  the  United  States  and  Great  Britain,  and  said  to  have  been 
ratified  by  the  Prince  Pegent.^  After  a  series  of  striking  adventures, 
Stewart  reached  home  with  his  vessel.  His  victory  excited  extreme  enthu- 
siasm among  the  Americans,  and  every  form  of  public  honour  was  bestowed 
tipon  him.  In  Boston  there  was  a  triumphal  procession  ;  in  New  York  the 
City  Council  presented  him  with  the  freedom  of  the  city  and  a  gold  snuif- 
box,  and  he  and  his  officers  were  entertained  at  a  dinner ;  at  Pennsylvania 
he  was  voted  the  thanks  of  the  Commonwealth,  and  presented  with  a  gold- 
hilted  sword.  Congress  passed  a  vote  of  thanks  to  him  and  his  officers, 
and  struck  a  gold  medal  and  presented  it  to  him  in  honour  of  the  event. 

Afterwards  Commodore  Stewart  was  sent  to  the  Mediterranean,  vvhere 
there  was  something  approaching  a  mutiny  amongst  the  officers  under  a 
different  commodore.  He  soon  came  to  a  definite  issue  with  his  subordi- 
nates. He  ordered  a  court-martial  on  a  marine  to  be  held  on  board  one  of 
his  vessels.  The  officers  preferred  to  discuss  the  case  at  their  leisure  in  a 
hotel  in  Naples,  and  there  tried  and  convicted  the  marine.  The  commo- 
dore promptly  quashed  the  conviction,  and,  when  the  Court  passed  a  series 
of  resolutions,  put  all  the  commanding  officers  of  the  squadron  under  arrest. 
The  result  was  the  complete  restoration  of  order,  and  the  approval  of  Com- 
modore Stewart's  conduct  by  the  President  and  the  Cabinet. 

Admiral  Stewart,  as  he  became,  lived  to  a  great  age,  and  in  time  had 
taken  a  place  in  the  affections  of  his  countrymen  somewhat  similar  to  that 
of  old  Eield-marshal  Wrangel  among  the  Germans  of  our  day.  He  used 
to  be  known  as  '  Old  Ironsides,'  and  the  residence  which  he  purchasw.l 
in  Bordentown  was  baptized  'Ironsides  Park.'  He  was  once  promi- 
nently spoken  of  as  a  candidate  for  the  Pi-esidency,  and,  in  less  than 
four  months,  sixty-seven  papers  pronounced  in  his  favour.  He  was 
eighty-three  years  of  age  when  Port  Sumter  was  fired  upon.  At  once  he 
\yrote  asking  to  be  put  into  active  service :  '  I  am  as  young  as  ever,'  he 

» '  Tlie  Life  of  Charles  Stewart  Parnell/  by  Thomaa  Sherlock,  p.  23. 


152  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

declared,  '  to  fight  for  my  country.'^      But  of  course  the  offer  had  to  be  re- 
fused.    He  survived  nine  years. 

The  following  is  a  description  of  his  appearance  and  character : 

*  Commodore  Stewart  was  about  five  feet  nine  inches  high,  and  of  a  digni- 
fied and  engaging  presence.  His  complexion  was  fair,  his  hair  chestnut, 
eyes  blue,  large,  penetrating,  and  intelligent.  The  cast  of  his  countenance 
was  Roman,  bold,  strong,  and  commanding,  and  his  head  finely  formed. 
His  control  over  his  passions  was  truly  surprising,  and  under  the  most 
irritating  circumstance  his  oldest  seaman  never  saw  a  ray  of  anger  flash 
from  his  eye.  His  kindness,  benevolence,  and  humanity  were  proverbial, 
but  his  sense  of  justice  and  the  requisitions  of  duty  were  as  unbending  as 
fate.  In  the  moment  of  greatest  stress  and  danger  he  was  as  cool  and 
quick  in  judgment  as  he  was  utterly  ignorant  of  fear.  His  mind  was  acute 
and  powerful,  grasping  the  greatest  or  smallest  subjects  with  the  intuitive 
mastery  of  genius.'^ 

It  is  said  that,  in  many  respects,  Mr,  Parnell  bears  a  strong  resemblance 
to  the  characteristics  of  his  grandfather,  whose  name  he  bears.  In  physique 
he  is  much  less  English  or  Irish  than  American.  The  delicacy  of  his 
features,  the  pallor  of  complexion,  the  strong  nervoiTS  and  muscular  system, 
concealed  under  an  exterior  of  fragility,  are  characteristics  of  the  American 
type  of  man.  Mentall}'',  also,  his  evenness  of  temper  and  coolness  of  judg- 
ment suggest  an  American  temperament. 

Mr.  Parnell  was  born  in  Avondale,  county  Wicklow,  in  June,  1846, 
Curiously  enough,  nearly  the  whole  of  his  early  life  was  passed  in  England, 
and  in  entirely  English  surroundings.  When  he  was  six  years  of  age  he 
was  placed  at  school  in  Yeovil,  Somersetshire.  Next,  he  was  under  the 
charge  of  the  Rev,  Mr.  Barton  at  Kirk-Langiey,  Derbyshire  ;  next,  under 
the  Rev.  Mr.  Wishaw,  in  Oxfordshire  ;  and,  finally,  he  went  to  Cambridge 
University — the  alma  mater  of  his  father.  He  did  not  graduate,  and 
probably  did  not  pay  any  very  great  attention  to  the  study  of  the  curricu- 
lum of  the  university. 

He  is  not  a  man  of  large  literary  reading,  but  he  is  a  severe  and  constant 
student  of  scientific  subjects,  and  is  especially  devoted  to  mechanics.  It  is 
said  to  be  one  of  his  amusements  to  isolate  himself  from  the  enthusiastic 
crowds  that  meet  him  everyv/here  in  Ireland,  and,  in  a  room  by  himself,  to 
find  delight  in  mathematical  books.  He  is  a  constant  reader  of  Engineer- 
ing and  other  mechanical  papers,  and  he  takes  the  keenest  interest  in  all 
machinery. 

The  surroundings  of  the  house  in  which  he  was  born  and  still  lives  were 
well  calculated  to  arouse  in  young  Parnell  the  hereditary  disposition  to 
strong  national  opinions.  Wicklow,  on  the  whole,  is  the  most  beautiful 
and  the  most  historic  county  in  Ireland,  and  Avondale  is  in  the  centre  of 
its  greatest  beauties  and  its  most  historic  spots. 

Many  of  the  lessons  which  these  historic  spots  were  calculated  to  teach 
were  reinforced  by  the  servants  around  the  family  mansion.  I  have  made 
the  remark  that  it  is  particularly  difficult  to  follow  the  mental  history  of 
a  man  v/ho  is  neither  introspective  nor  expansive  ;  and  it  is  not  from  the 
lips  of  Mr.  Parnell  himself  that  one  could  learn  much  of  his  internal 
history.  But  one  day.  sitting  in  his  house  at  Avondale,  he  happened  to 
mention  the  name  of  Hugh  Gaffney,  a  gate-keeper  in  Avondale,  and  retold 

*  '  The  Life  of  Charles  Stewart  Parijell,'  by  Thomas  Sherlock,  p.  2?. 
'  lb.,  p,  28, 


ISAAC  BUTT.  153 

A  story  which  the  gate-keeper  used  to  tell  him  when  he  was  a  youth. 
Gaffney  was  old  enough  to  have  seen  some  of  the  scenes  of  the  Rebellion  ; 
and  one  of  his  stories  was  of  a  man  who  was  taken  by  the  English  troops 
in  the  neighbourhood.  The  sentence  upon  him  was  that  he  was  to  be 
flogged  to  death  at  the  end  of  a  cart.  The  interpretation  of  the  sentence 
by  Colonel  Yeo — such  was  the  name  of  the  commander — was  that  the 
flogging  was  to  be  inflicted  on  the  man's  belly  instead  of  on  his  back. 
Gaflney  saw  the  rebel  flogged  from  the  mill  to  the  old  sentry-box  in  Rath- 
drum — the  town  near  which  Avondale  is  situate — and  heard  the  man  call 
out  in  his  agony,  '  Colonel  Yeo  !  Colonel  Yeo  !'  and  appeal  for  respite 
from  this  torture  ;  and  also  heard  Colonel  Yeo  reject  the  prayer  with 
savage  words  ;  and  finally  saw  the  man,  as  he  fell  at  last,  with  his  bowels 
protruding.  When  Mr.  Parnell  told  the  story,  in  his  usual  tranquil 
manner,  the  thought  suggested  itself  to  my  mind  that,  at  last,  I  had 
reached  one  of  the  great  influences  that  made  Mr.  Parnell  the  man  he  is, 
and  that  in  this  poor  gate-keeper  Avas  to  be  found  the  early  instructor 
whose  lessons  on  British  rule  and  its  meaning  imbued  the  young  and  im- 
pressionable heir  of  the  Parnell  name  and  traditions  with  that  love  and 
admiration  for  British  domination  in  Ireland  which  have  characterized  his 
public  career. 

Such  stories  appeal  to  what  is,  beyond  doubt,  the  strongest  feeling,  the 
most  positive  instinct  of  Mi-.  Parnell's  nature — his  hatred  of  injustice.  He 
has  the  loathing  of  masculine  natures  for  cruelty  in  all  forms.  This  feeling, 
though  never  expressed  in  words,  finds  strong  manifestation  often  in  acts. 
One  of  his  acts  while  still  the  unknown  squire  was  to  prosecute  a  man,  for 
cruelty  to  a  donkey.  Recently,  while  a  very  important  and  vital  resolu- 
tion v/as  under  discussion  at  a  meetings  of  the  Irish  Party  called  to  arrange 
the  plan  of  the  electoral  campaign,  the  meeting  was  amused,  and  a  little 
disconcerted,  to  see  Mr.  Parnell  rise  with  na)'f  unconsciousness,  leave  the 
chair,  and  disappear  from  the  room.  He  was  followed  by  a  handsome 
dog,  which  had  been  presented  to  him  by  his  friend  and  colleague,  Mr, 
Corbet  ;  and  the  meeting  had  to  tranquilly  suspend  its  discussions  until 
the  leader  of  the  Irish  people  had  seen  after  the  dinner  of  a  retriever.  It 
was  characteristic  of  the  modesty  and,  at  the  same  time,  scornfulness  of 
his  nature,  that  all  through  the  many  attacks  made  upon  hi^n  by  Mr. 
Porster,  and  other  gentlemen  who  wear  their  hearts  upon  their  sleeves,  he 
never  once  made  allusion  to  his  own  strong  love  of  animals  ;  but  to  his 
friends  he  often  expressed  his  disgust  for  the  outrages  that,  during  a  por- 
tion of  the  agitation,  w^ere  occasionally  committed  upon  them. 

In  1867,  the  ideas  that  had  been  sown  in  his  mind  in  childhood 
first  began  to  mature.  His  mother  was  then,  as  throughout  her  life, 
a  strong  JSTationalist,  "and  so  was,  at  least,  one  of  his  sisters.  There  is  a 
tradition  among  the  survivors  of  the  literary  staff  of  the  Irish  Peojyle 
newspaper  of  a  young  lady,  closely  veiled,  coming  with  a  contribution  to 
the  oifice  of  the  journal  dining  its  troubled  career.  This  was  Miss  Fanny 
Parnell.  Many  of  the  Eenian  refugees  found  shelter  and  protection  in  the 
house  of  Mrs.  Parnell,  and  were  in  this  way  enabled  to  escape  from  the 
pursuing  bloodhounds  of  the  law.  It  was  at  this  epoch  that  the  execution 
of  Allen,  Larkin,  and  O'Brien  took  place  in  Manchester  ;  and  this,  as  has 
already  been  mentioned,  was  the  turning-point  in  the  mental  history  of 
Mr.  Parnell,  and  set  him  irrevocably  in  favour  of  Nationalist  principles. 

However,  it  was  a  considerable  time  before  he  even  thought  of  entering 
political  life.     Like  his  father,  he  spent  some  time  iri  travel  in  America, 


154  ^/^-^  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

While  there  he  met  with  a  railway  accident  in  company  with  his  brother 
John.  '  The  best  nurse  I  ever  had,'  said  Mr.  John  Parnell  to  me  in 
America,  '  was  my  brother  Charlie.'  And  then  he  told  me  how,  for  weeks, 
his  brother  had  remained  night  and  day  by  his  side. 

In  1871,  Mr.  Parnell  returned  to  Avondale,  and  began  the  life  of  a 
country  squire.  His  American  blood  showed  itself  in  a  keener  sense  of 
the  possibilities  of  his  property  and  of  his  own  duties  than  are  usually 
associated  with  the  Irish  landlord.  Then,  though  he  cannot  be  described 
as  a  joyous  man,  he  takes  a  keen  interest  in  life  and  everything  going  on 
around  him,  and  could  not,  under  any  circumstances,  keep  from  being 
actively  occupied  in  some  puirsuit.  He  hunted  and  he  shot  like  those 
around  him  ;  but,  besides  this,  he  set  up  saw-mill  and  brush  factory,  and 
sunk  shafts  in  search  of  the  mineral  ore  in  which  Wicklow  was  said  to 
abound.  He  was  a  kind  and  generous  landlord,  and  enjoyed  the  affection 
of  all  around  him.  His  subsequent  history  has  been  told  ;  and  now  the 
narrative  returns  to  an  account  of  his  Parliamentary  career. 

Ml.  Biggar  and  Mr.  Parnell  brooded  for  some  tim.e  over  the  strange 
spectacle  of  the  impotence  that  had  fallen  upon  the  Irish  Party.  Both 
were  men  eager  for  practical  results  ;  and  debates,  however  ornate  ard 
eloquent,  which  resulted  in  no  benefit,  appeared  to  them  the  sheerest  waste 
of  time,  and  a  mockery  of  their  country's  hopes  and  demands.  Probably 
they  drifted  into  the  policy  of  '  obstruction,'  so  called,  rather  than  pursued 
it  in  accordance  "with  a  definite  plan  originally  thought  out.  When  one 
now  looks  back  upon  the  task  which  these  two  men  set  themselves,  it  v/ill 
appear  one  of  the  boldest,  most  difficult,  and  most  hopeless  that  two  indi- 
viduals ever  proposed  to  themselves  to  work  out. 

They  set  out,  two  of  them,  to  do  battle  against  656  ;  they  had  before 
them  enemies  who,  in  the  ferocity  of  a  common  hate  and  a  common  terror, 
forgot  old  quarrels  and  obliterated  old  party  lines ;  while  among  their  own 
party  there  were  false  men  who  hated  their  honesty  and  many  true  men 
who  doubted  their  sagacity.  In  this  work  of  theirs  they  had  to  meet  a 
perfect  hurricane  of  hate  and  abuse  ;  they  had  to  stand  face  to  face  with 
the  practical  omnipotence  of  the  naightiest  of  modern  empires  ;  they  were 
accused  of  seeking  to  trample  on  the  power  of  the  English  House  of 
Commons,  and  six  centuries  of  Parliamentary  government  looked  down 
upon  them  in  menace  and  in  reproach.  In  carrying  out  their  mighty  enter- 
prise, Mr.  Parnell  and  Mr.  Biggar  had  to  undergo  labours  and  sacrifices 
that  only  those  acquainted  with  the  inside  life  of  Parliament  can  fully 
appreciate.  Those  who  undertook  to  conquer  the  House  of  Commons  had 
first  to  conquer  much  of  the  natural  man  in  themselves.  The  House  of 
Commons  is  the  arena  which  gives  the  choicest  food  to  the  intellectual 
vanity  of  the  British  subject,  and  the  House  of  Commons  loves  and 
respects  only  those  who  love  and  respect  it.  But  the  first  principle  of  the 
active  policy  was  that  there  should  be  absolute  indifference  to  the  opinions 
of  the  House  of  Commons,  and  so  vanity  had  first  to  be  crushed  out. 
Then  the  active  policy  demanded  incessant  attendance  in  the  House,  and 
incessant  attendance  in  the  House  amounts  almost  to  a  punishment. 
And  the  active  policy  required,  in  addition  to  incessant  attendance,  con- 
siderable preparation  ;  and  so  the  idleness,  which  is  the  most  potent  of  all 
human  passions,  had  to  be  gripped  and  strangled  with  a  merciless  hand. 
And  finally,  there  was  to  be  no  shrinking  from  speech  or  act  because  it  dis- 
obliged one  man  or  offended  another  ;  and  therefore,  kindliness  of  feeling 
was  to  be  watched  and  guarded  by  remorseless  purpose.     The  years  of 


ISAAC  BUTT.  155 

fierce  conflict,  of  labotir  by  day  and  by  night,  and  of  iro»  resistance  to 
menace,  or  entreaty,  or  blandishment,  must  have  left  many  a  deep  mark  in 
mind  and  in  body.  '  Parnell,'  remarked  one  of  his  followers  in  the  House 
of  Commons  one  day,  as  the  Irish  leader  entered  with  pallid  and  worn 
face,  *  Parnell  has  done  mighty  things,  but  he  had  to  go  through  fire  and 
water  to  do  them.' 

Mr.  Biggar  was  heard  of  before  Mr.  Parnell  had  made  himself  known  ; 
and  to  estimate  the  character  of  the  member  for  Cavan — and  it  is  a  cha- 
racter worth  study — one  must  read  carefully,  and  by  the  light  of  the  pre- 
sent day,  the  events  of  the  period  at  which  he  first  started  on  his  enterprise. 
In  the  session  of  1875  he  was  constantly  heard  of  ;  on  April  27  in  that 
session  he  '  espied  strangers '  ;  and,  in  accordance  with  the  then  existing 
rules  of  the  House  of  Commons,  all  tlie  occupants  of  the  different  galleries, 
excepting  those  of  the  Ladies'  Gallery,  had  to  retire.  The  Prince  of  Wales 
was  among  the  distinguished  visitors  to  the  assembly  on  this  particular 
evening,  a  fact  which  added  considerable  effect  to  the  proceeding  of  the 
member  for  Cavan.  At  once  a  storm  burst  upon  him,  beneath  which  even 
a  very  strong  man  might  have  bent,  Mr.  Disraeli,  the  Prime  Minister, 
got  up,  amid  cheers  from  all  parts  of  the  House,  to  denounce  this  outrage 
upon  its  dignity ;  and  to  m.ark  the  complete  union  of  the  two  parties 
against  the  daring  offender.  Lord  Hartington  rose  immediately  afterwards. 
Nor  were  these  the  only  quarters  from  which  attack  came.  Members  of 
his  own  party  joined  in  the  general  assault  upon  the  audacious  violator  of 
the  tone  of  the  House.  Mr.  Biggar  was,  above  all  other  things,  held  to  be 
wanting  in  the  instincts  of  a  gentleman.  '  I  think,'  said  the  late  Mr. 
George  Bryan,  another  member  of  Mr.  Butt's  party,  *  that  a  man  should 
be  a  gentleman  first  and  a  patriot  afterwards,'  a  statement  which  was  of 
coiu-se  received  with  wild  cheers.  Finally,  the  case  was  summed  up  by 
Mr.  Chaplin.  'The  hon.  member  for  Cavan,'  said  he,  'appears  to  forget 
that  he  is  now  admitted  to  the  society  of  gentlemen.'-'-  This  was  one  of 
the  many  allusions,  fashionable  at  the  time — among  genteel  journalists 
especially — to  Mr.  Biggar's  occupation.  It  was  his  heinous  offence  to  have 
made  his  money  in  the  wholesale  pork  trade. 

'  Heaven  knows'  (said  a  writer  in  the  World)  '  that  I  do  not  scorn  a  man 
because  his  path  in  life  has  led  him  amongst  provisions.  But  though  I 
may  unaffectedly  honour  a  provision-dealer  who  is  a  Member  of  Parliament, 
it  is  with  quite  another  feeling  that  I  behold  a  Member  of  Parliament  who 
is  a  provision-dealer.  Mr.  Biggar  brings  the  manner  of  his  store  into  this 
illustrious  assembly,  and  his  manner,  even  for  a  Belfast  store,  is  very  bad. 
When  he  rises  to  address  the  House,  which  he  did  at  least  ten  times  to- 
night, a  whiff  of  salt  pork  seems  to  float  upon  the  gale,  and  the  air  is  heavy 
with  the  odour  of  the  kippered  herring.     One  unacquainted  with  the  actual 

^  Mr.  Biggar's  action  on  this  occasion  had  a  secret  history,  which  may  here  be  told. 
It  was  the  desire  of  the  Liberals  to  bring  the  relations  of  the  press  with  Parliament 
into  a  more  satisfactory  position.  Especially  it  was  felt  to  be  a  gi-ievance  that  the 
press  could  be  excluded  by  a  single  member.  Mr.  Disraeli  favoured  leaving  things 
as  they  were  :  and  it  was  thought  that  he  should  be  brought  to  his  senses  by  such 
patent  proof  of  his  mistake  as  the  ordering  out  of  the  reporters  by  the  words,  '  1  espy 
strangers.'  Mr.  Biggar's  intrepidity  suggested  him  as  a  proper  person  to  take  so 
audacious  a  step.  A  few  nights  afterwards,  when  Lord  Hartington  was  demanding 
a  reform,  and  Mr.  Disraeli  was  advocating  the  old  state  of  things,  Mr.  A.  M.  Sullivan 
cleared  -the  House  ;  and  the  whole  Liberal  Party  cheered  him  to  the  echo.  Mr. 
Biggar  was  deserted  and  denoiinced,  though  he  acted  on  the  suggestion  of  others, 
because  he  happened  to  interfere  with  the  convenience  of  Royalty. 


156  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

condition  of  affairs  might  be  forgiven  if  he  thought  there  had  been  a  largo 
failure  in  the  bacon  trade,  and  that  the  House  of  Commons  was  a  meeting 
of  creditors  and  the  right  hon.  gentlemen  sitting  on  the  Treasury  Bench 
were  members  of  the  defaulting  firm,  who,  having  confessed  their  inability 
to  pay  ninepence  in  the  pound,  were  suitable  and  safe  subjects  for  the  abuse 
of  an  ungenerous  creditor,'^ 

These  things  are  mentioned  by  way  of  illustrating  the  marks  and  symp- 
toms of  the  time  through  which  Mr.  Biggar  had  to  live,  rather  than  because 
of  any  influence  they  had  upon  him.  On  this  self-reliant,  firm,  and  mascu- 
line nature  a  world  of  enemies  could  make  no  impress.  He  did  not  even 
take  the  trouble  to  read  most  of  the  attacks  upon  him.  Those  that  were 
made  in  the  House  of  Commons  in  his  own  hearing  neither  touched  him 
nor  angered  him.  The  only  rancour  he  ever  feels  against  individuals  is  for 
the  evil  they  attempt  to  do  to  the  cause  of  his  country.  This  little  man, 
calmly  and  placidly  accepting  every  humiliation  and  insult  that  hundreds 
of  foes  could  heap  upon  him,  in  the  relentless  and  untiring  pursuit  of  a 
great  purpose,  may  by-and-by  appear,  even  to  Englishmen,  to  merit  all  the 
affectionate  respect  with  which  he  is  regarded  by  men  of  his  own  country 
and  principles. 

The  Irish  people  have  long  since  decided  between  Mr.  Biggar  and  the 
members  of  his  own  party  with  Avhom  he  v/as  at  war.  If  anj^one  desire  to 
see  how  far  that  party  is  removed  from  the  party  of  to-day,  he  has  but  to 
read  the  descriptions  of  some  of  the  encounters  between  the  member  for  Cavan 
and  some  of  his  colleagues  upon  the  Coercion  struggles  of  those  days.  Thus, 
on  one  occasion,  Mr,  McCarthy  Downing,  a  so-called  Nationalist,  went  out 
of  his  way  to  compliment  Sir  Michael  Hicks-Beach  on  the  courtesy  with 
which  he  treated  the  Irish  members  when  carrying  through  the  House  a 
Bill  destructive  of  the  liberties  of  their  country.  This  was  the  speech 
which  drew  from  Mr.  Ronayne  the  grim  remark  that  such  compliments  to 
the  Minister  in  charge  of  a  Coercion  Bill  reminded  him  of  the  shake-hands 
of  the  murderer  with  his  executioner.  On  another  occasion,  when  Dr. 
O'Leary  proposed  an  adjournment  of  a  stage  of  a  debate  on  a  Coercion  Bill 
to  another  dav,  his  own  colleagues  rose  in  revolt  against  the  unreasonable 
proposal  ;  and  Dr.  O'Leary,  scared  and  overwhelmed,  had  to  consult  the 
convenience  of  the  Government  to  accelerate  the  destruction  of  his 
country's  liberties,  and  to  withdraw  his  motion  for  adjournment.  More  in- 
teresting than  these  collisions  with  small  and  now  forgotten  men  was  Mr. 
Biggar's  conflict  with  the  leader  of  his  party.  The  contest  between  these 
two  men  is  one  of  the  most  picturesque  in  Parliamentary  history.  Karely 
has  a  struggle  appeared  more  unequal.  The  House  of  Commons  never  had 
an  opportunity  of  seeing  Butt  at  his  best,  but  with  an  audience  before  him 
sympathetic  with  his  views,  he  was  a  speaker  of  a  persuasiveness  as  great 
as  that  of  Mr,  Gladstone  himself.  There  was  not  a  resource  of  the  orator, 
a  trick  of  the  lawyer,  a  device  of  the  Parliamentary  tactician's  art  unknown 
to  him.  He  was,  indeed,  marked  out  as  a  leader  of  men  in  Parliamentary 
struggles. 

Mr,  Biggar,  on  the  other  hand,  had  not  one  of  the  gifts  that  make  a 
great  Parliamentarian.  He  spoke  haltingly,  and  with  difficulty  ;  his  sparse 
education  was  not  improved  by  reading  ;  he  was  absolutely  new  to  Parlia- 
mentary and,  practically,  to  political  life.  But  the  moral  chasm  between 
Biggar  and  Butt  was  as  wide  as  the  intellectual  chasm  between  Butt  and 

X  March  5,  1875. 


ISAAC  BUTT.  157 

Bi»gar.  The  telentless  self-control  of  Biggar,  the  subordination  of  all  hia 
wants  to  his  means/  his  inflexible  courage,  and  his  unshakable  persistence, 
made  him  a  dangerous  competitor  for  a  man  of  the  loose  habits,  of  the  easy 
self-indulgent  nature,  of  the  weak  will  and  capricious  purpose  of  Butt. 
Biggar  was  ultimately  conqueror  in  this  struggle.  Sheer  strength  of  cha- 
racter broke  down  sheer  intellectual  superiorit}'. 

The  new  policy,  which  had  been  inaugurated  by  Mr.  Biggar  in  the 
session  of  1875,  was  developed  rather  than  formulated.  It  began  simply 
in  the  practice  of  blocking  a  number  of  Bills  in  order  to  bring  them  under 
the  half -past  twelve  rule,  which  forbids  opposed  measures  to  be  taken  after 
that  hour.  It  also  became  the  custom  of  either  the  member  for  Cavan  or 
the  member  for  Meath  to  propose  motions  of  adjournment  in  various  forms 
when  half -past  twelve  was  reached,  on  the  ground  that  proper  discussion 
could  not  take  place  at  so  late  an  hour.  Then,  interstices  of  time  which 
the  Government  would  gladly  employ  for  advancing  some  stage  of  their 
measures  were  filled  in  by  the  Irish  members.  Thus,  for  instance,  a  Bill 
standing  for  second  reading  would  be  approaching  that  stage  at  twenty 
minutes  past  twelve  at  an  ordinary  sitting,  or  half -past  five  on  a  Wednesday. 
To  the  horror  and  disgust  of  everybody  else,  Mr.  Biggar  or  Mr.  Parnell  would 
rise  and  occupy  the  time  between  that  hour  and  half -past  twelve  or  a 
quarter  to  six,  wlien  contentious  business  could  be  no  longer  discussed,  and 
further  consideration  of  the  measure  had  to  be  postponed  to  another  day. 
In  this  manner  the  two  members  gradually  felt  their  way,  became  more 
practised  in  speaking,  and  obtained  an  intimate  acquaintance  with  the  rules 
of  the  House.  Throughout  all  this  time,  of  course,  they  were  harassed  by 
interruptions,  shouts  of  '  Divide,'  groans,  and  calls  to  order  ;  and  for  a 
time,  at  least,  Mr.  Parnell  used  occasionally  to  lay  himself  open  to  effective 
interruption  by  his  yet  immature  acquaintance  with  the  laws  of  the 
assembly.  'How,'  said  a  young  follower  of  his  to  the  Irish  leader,  'aie 
you  to  learn  the  rules  of  the  House  V  '  By  breaking  them,'  was  Mr. 
Parnell's  reply  ;  and  this  was  the  method  by  which  he  himself  gained  his 
information. 

It  was  not  till  the  session  of  1877  that  Mr.  Parnell  and  Mr.  Biggar  be- 
came engaged  in  the  passionate  and  exciting  scenes  which  made  their  names 
known  all  over  the  world,  and  brought  the  House  of  Commons  definitely  face 
to  face  with  the  new  and  portentous  force  which  had  unmasked  itself  within 
the  Parliamentary  citadel.  Anyone  who  has  been  a  member  of  the  House 
of  Commons  will  know  how  tremendous  is  its  reserve  power.  There  had 
been  '  obstructives,'  of  course,  before  the  time  of  Parnell  and  Biggar. 
During  the  great  Ministry  of  Mr.  Gladstone,  between  1868  and  1874, 
obstruction  had  been  developed  to  a  fine  art  by  several  of  the  gentlemen 
who  at  this  moment  held  official  positions  under  Lord  Beaconsfield.  Every- 
body remembers  how  the  Church  Bill  and  the  Land  Bill,  the  Ballot  Bill, 
and  the  Bill  for  the  abolition  of  purchase  in  the  army,  had  been  dogged  at 
every  step  of  their  progress  by  endless  and  silly  amendments,  by  speeches 
against  time,  and  by  countless  motions  for  adjournment. 

It  was  part  of  the  skilful  tactics  of  Parnell  and  Biggar  that  their  inter- 
vention in  the  debates  of  the  House  was  always  rational.  They  did  not 
indulge  in  any  wild  declamation,  nor  make  speeches  full  of  empty  and 
purposeless  talk:.     Their  plan  was  to  propose  amendments  to  the  different 

^  Mr.  Biggar  lost  heavily  in  his  lausiness  for  a  couple  of  years  while  he  -^-as  a 
Member  of  Parliament.  He  so  rigidly  economised  that,  instead  of  dining  in  tha 
Houee,  he  trotted  off  to  a  cheap  restaurant  outside^ 


j^S  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

measures  before  the  House  ;  aud  their  amendments  were  rarely,  if  ever,  open 
to  the  charge  of  irrelevance  or  frivolity.  On  March  26,  1877,  there  was  a 
lengthy  discussion  on  some  new  clauses  of  the  Prison  Bill  for  the  better  treat- 
ment of  prisoners.  At  a  little  after  one  o'clock  Mr.  Biggar  proposed  to  report 
progress.  Some  eight  members,  who  had  acted  with  the '  obstructives  '  up 
to  this  time,  now  deserted  ;  and,  when  the  division  was  called,  there  were 
in  favour  of  the  adjournm.ent  but  10,  while  138  voted  against  it.  Motions 
for  adjournment  folloAved  each  other  in  rapid  succession,  and,  at  three 
o'clock  in  the  morning,  the  Government  gave  way.  Mr.  Butt  had  watched 
these  proceedings  with  no  friendly  eye.  There  was  no  doubt  about  his 
genuineness  as  a  Home  Ruler,  but  he  had  been  a  Conservative  for  many  years, 
and  a  friend  and  associate  of  the  party  in  power,  and  he  was  certainly  con- 
siderably under  the  influence  of  its  leaders.  Curiously  enough,  one  of  the 
men  who  was  supposed  to  have  the  most  influence  over  him  was  the  then 
Chief  Secretary,  Sir  Michael  Hicks-Beach,  though  there  had  never  been  a 
Chief  Secretary  who  met  all  demands  for  Irish  reform  with  rejection  more 
uncompromising  and  more  insolent.  It  is  characteristic  of  the  natures  of 
the  tv/o  men  that  it  was  the  attitude  of  Hicks-Beach  towards  Mr.  Butt 
which  drove  Mr.  Biggar,  as  much  as  anything  else,  forward  into  the  policy  he 
had  now  adopted.  He  .was  asked  by  Sir  Michael  to  chide  his  supporters, 
and  he  consented.  It  showed  a  strange  want  of  any  appreciation  of  the  real 
facts  of  the  case  that  the  Irish  leader  should  have  thus  interpreted  the  request 
addressed  to  him.  The  recognition  of  his  power  csime  only  when  it  was 
employed  in  meeting  the  views  of  the  Ministry  and  in  yielding  to  the  tcm- 
psr  of  Parliament ;  it  had  received  no  recognition  so  long  as  it  was  used  in 
pressing  forward  against  the  Ministry,  and  against  the  House — demands  for 
the  redress  of  the  intolerable  wrongs  of  his  country.  Where  was  his 
memory  gone  of  the  contemptuous  rejection  for  the  past  three  years  of 
every  one  of  the  proposals  that  he  made  with  the  assent  of  the  overwhelm- 
ino-  majority  of  his  countrymen  %  A  leader  who,  Avith  such  recollections, 
and  such  incontestable  proof  of  the  futility  of  soft  methods,  of  appeals  to 
the  sense  of  justice  in  English  Ministries,  and  to  the  reason  of  Parliament, 
could  think  of  the  'dignity  of  Parliament,'  and  not  the  wrongs  of  Ireland, 
'lacked  gall  to  make  oppression  bitter.'  Mr.  Butt,  however,  threw  in  his 
lot  with  the  enemies  of  his  country,  and  attacked  his  two  subordinates 
with  fierce  anger  and  reproach. 

Condemned  by  their  own  leader,  and  by  the  majority  of  their  own  party, 
INIr.  Parnell  and  Mr.  Biggar  were  naturally  the  more  hated  by  the  House 
of  Commons,  and  their  conduct  the  more  bitterly  resented  ;  and  the  resolve 
to  put  them  down  grew  more  vehement  and  more  passionate.  It  was  on 
the  South  African  Bill  that  the  long-pent-up  storm  burst  forth  with  tem- 
pestuous violence.  On  July  25,  1877,  the  House  was  in  committee  on  the 
Bill.  Mr.  Jenkins  had  rendered  himself  obnoxious  to  some  of  the  mem- 
bers of  his  own  party  by  his  opposition  to  the  measure,  and  Mr.  Monk 
accused  him  of  abusing  the  forms  of  the  House.  Mr.  Jenkins  rose  to  order, 
vehemently  denied  the  charge,  and  then  moved  that  those  words  be  taken 
do%vn.  Mr.  Parnell  at  once  rose.  '  I  second  that  motion,'  he  said  ;  'I  think 
thelimitsof  forbearance  have  been  passed.  I  saythat  Ithinkthelimits  of  for- 
bearance have  been  passed  in  regard  to  the  language  which  hon.  members 
opposite  have  thought  proper  to  address  to  me  andto  those  who  act  with  me.' 
At  once  Sir  Stafford  Northcote,  who  was  then  Chancellor  of  the  Exchequer 
and  leader  of  the  House,  rose  and  moved  that  the  latter  words  of  Mr.  Parnell 
be  taken  down.   The  motion  of  Mr.  Jcnking  -s^a^s  Irregularly  got  rid  of  by  the 


ISAAC  BUT7.  159 

intervention  of  the  Chairman  of  Committees — Mr.  RaikeS— who  declared 
that  the  words  of  Mr.  Monk  were  not  a  breach  of  order,  The  chairman,  how- 
ever, proceeded  to  raise  another  subject  of  dispute  by  calling  upon  Mr.  Par- 
nell  to  withdraw  his  statement,  '  accusing  hon,  members  of  this  House  of 
intimidation.'  '  The  hon.  member  must  withdraw  that  expression,'  said  Mr. 
E,aikes,  amidst  the  cheers  and  intense  excitement  of  the  House.  Mr,  Parnell 
rose  to  explain  ;  he  was  constantly  interrupted  by  '  conversation,  coughs,  ex- 
clamations, cries,  and  groans.'  He  denounced  tlae  Bill  as  mischievous  both 
to  the  colonists  and  to  the  native  races,  and  instituted  a  comparison  between 
Ireland  and  the  South  African  colonies ;  '  therefore, 'he  went  on,  'as  an  Irish- 
man, coming  from  a  country  which  had  experienced  to  its  fullest  extent  the 
result  of  English  interfersnoe  in  its  affairs,  and  the  consequence  of  English 
cruelty  and  tyranny,  he  felt  a  special  satisfaction  in  preventing  and  thwart- 
ing the  intentions  of  the  Government  in  respect  to  this  Bill.' 

The  moment  these  words  had  been  uttered,  the  House  thought  that  it 
had  at  last  ca  ught  the  cool,  wary,  and  dexterous  Irish  member  in  a  moment 
of  forgetfulness  and  passion,  and  that  he  had  given  the  long-sought  oppor- 
tunity for  bringing  him  to  account.  Amid  loud  shouts.  Sir  Stafford  North- 
cote  rose  and  moved  that  the  words  of  Mr.  Parnell  be  taken  down  ;  and 
this  having  been  done,  he  proposed  that  all  further  business  should  be 
stopped,  and  that  the  Speaker  should  be  sent  for.  The  Speaker  was  brought 
in,  the  House  filled  with  an  excited  crowd,  and  Sir  Stafford  Northcote 
moved  that  Mr.  Parnell  '  be  suspended  till  Eriday  next.'  Mr.  Parnell  was 
called  upon  to  explain.  While  the  House  was  storming  around  him,  and 
he  was  brought  face  to  face  with  the  prospect  of  undergoing  Parliamentary 
censure  after  a  manner  unprecedented,  and  thus  viewed  with  horror  by  all 
the  men  around  him,  he  began  by  a  technical  objection.  He  pointed  out 
that  another  motion  had  been  proposed  to  the  House  before  that  of  Sir 
Stafford  Northcote's,  and  that,  therefore,  the  m-otion  of  the  leader  of  the 
House  was  out  of  order.  But  the  Speaker  ruled  tiiis  objection  as  untenable ; 
and  Mr.  Parnell  had  to  proceed  with  his  own  defence.  He  addressed  to 
the  House  a  speech  full  of  the  boldest  defiance  and  of  stinging  suggestion. 
The  House  was  now  beside  itself  with  rage,  and  there  were  loud  shouts 
that  Mr.  Parnell  should  withdraw,  as  is  the  custom  when  the  conduct  of  a 
member  is  under  consideration.  Mr.  Parnell  left  his  seat  and  calmly  pro- 
ceeded to  a  place  in  the  Speaker's  Gallery,  and  from  this  point  of  vantage 
looked  down  on  the  proceedings  in  which  he  himself  was  the  subject  of  debate. 

Sir  Stafford  Northcotenow  moved  that  '  Mr.  Parnell  having  wilfully  and 
persistently  obstructed  the  public  business,  is  guilty  of  contempt  of  the 
House,  and  that  Mr.  Parnell  for  his  said  offence  be  suspended  from  the 
service  of  the  House  till  Friday  next.'  A  fatal  flaw  was  discovered  in  the 
proposal  of  Sir  Stafford  Northcote.  Mr.  Parnell  had  certainly  declared 
his  interest  in  '  thwarting  and  preventing  the  designs,'  not  of  the  House, 
which,  of  course,  would  be  obstruction,  but  *  of  the  Government,'  which  is 
the  object  and  the  legitimate  pursuit  of  every  opponent  of  a  Ministerial 
measure.  Sir  Stafford  Northcote  had  evidently  lost  his  head  in  his  eager- 
ness to  throw  a  Christian  to  the  lions,  and  he  was  obliged  to  postpone 
turther  debate  upon  the  question  imtil  the  following  Friday.  Mr.  Parnell, 
escorted  by  Mr.  Biggar,  re-entered  the  House,  stood  up  again,  and  resumed 
his  speech  exactly  at  the  point  at  which  he  had  been  interrupted  two  hours 
before  by  the  impulsive  motion  of  Sir  Stafford  Northcote. 

On  the  Friday  following  Sir  Stafford  Northcote  proposed  two  new  rules. 
The  first  was,  that  any  member  called  to  order  twice  by  the  Speaker  or  the 

^  '  New  Ireland,'  p.  424. 


i6d  THE  PARNELL  MOVEM&NT, 

Chairman  of  Comiiiittees  could  be  suspended  for  the  remainder  of  ths 
sitting  ;  and  the  second,  that  no  member  be  allowed  to  propose  more  than 
once  in  the  same  sitting  a  motion  for  reporting  progress  or  the  adjournment 
of  the  debate.     The  resolutions  met  with  some  criticism  from  the  Liberal 
benches,  but  the  Irish  members  offered  no  opposition,  and  the  two  rules 
were  adopted  for  the  session.     On  Wednesday,  July  31,  occurred  the  first 
of  those  prolonged  sittings   which   have  since   become  so   familiar.     The 
Government,  owing  to  the  dogged  and  persistent  opposition  of  Mr.  Parnell 
and  Mr.  Biggar,  and  to  some  extent  of  the  Radicals  below  the  gangway, 
were  very  far  behind  with  their  legislative  proposals,  and  especially  with 
the  Sovith  African  Bill.     At  last  it  was  resolved  that  the  measure  should 
be  pushed  through  on  the  night  of  Tuesday,  the  31st ;  and  on  that  night, 
for  the  first  time,  the  expedient  of  relays  which  has  since  become  so  familiar 
v/as  employed.     The  Irish  members,  aAvare  of  the  arrangement  that  had 
been  made  against  them,  accepted  the  challenge,  and  determined  to  carry 
on  the  contest  as  long  as  their  strength  would  hold  out.     There  were  but  a 
few  of  them  to  make  the  fight — seven  in  all.     They  were  supported  for 
some  time  by  Mr.  Courtney,  who  was  as  hostile  as  they  to  the  principle 
of  the  South  African  Bill,  and  who  has  since  been  justified,  as  well  as  Mr. 
Parnell  and  Mr.  Biggar,  by  the  disastrous  termination  to  the  measures  of 
which  the  South  African  Bill  was  the  starting-point.     But  Mr.  Courtney 
gave  up  the  struggle  in  the  small  hours  of  the  night.     The  fight  still  went 
on.    At  a  quarter-past  eight  in  the  morning,  after  he  had  been  fifteen  hours 
at  work,  Mr,  Parnell  retired  to  rest ;  he  came  back  at  a  quarter-pas  i;  twelve, 
four  hours  later,  and  resumed  his  share  in  the  debates.    At  two  o'clock  the 
last  amendment  on  the  South  African  Bill  was  disposed  of,  and  the  Bill 
was  through.     When  the  House  rose  it  had  been  sitting  for  twenty-six 
hours.     One  other  little  incident  is  worth  recording.     Throughout  the  long 
watches  of  the  night  the  Ladies'  Gallery  was  occupied  by  one  solitary  and 
patient  figure  ;  this  was  Miss  Fanny  Parnell,  who  shared  and  inspired  the 
convictions  of  her  brother,  and  who  afterwards  gave  to  the  Irish  cause  some 
of  its  most  stirring  lyrics  and  its  ablest  argumentative  defences,  and  an  in- 
cessant labour  amid  daily  increasing  weakness  and  fast-a.pproaching  death. 
This  unprecedented  sitting  in  the  House  of  Commons  produced  in  Eng- 
land a  tempestuous  burst  of  anger  and  excitement,  and  for  some  days  Mr. 
Parnell,  Mr.  Biggar,  and  their  associates  were  denounced  with  a  wealth  of 
invective  that  would  not  have  been  unequal  to  the  merits  of  Guy  Fawkes 
or  Titus  Oates.     In  their  own  party,  too,  the  dissent  from  their  tactics  was 
reaching  a  climax  ;  Mr.  Butt  seemed  resolved  to  throw  down  the  final  gage 
of  battle,  and  call  upon  the  party  to  make  their  choice  between  the  con- 
tinuance of  his  leadership  and  the  suppression  of  the  two  mutineers.     But 
all  efforts  to  get  the  party  to  take  decisive  action  proved  abortive.     Time- 
servers  and  office-seekers,  they  wanted  to  survive  till  the  advent  of  the 
blessed  hour  when  the  return  of  the  Liberals  to  power  would  give  them  the 
long-desired  chance  of  throwing  off  the  temporary  mask  of  national  views, 
to  assume  the  permanent  livery  of  English  officials.     Before  that  period 
could  arrive,  they  well  knew  that  a  General  Election  had  to  intervene,  and 
who  knew  what  control  over  that  election  might  be  exercised  by  si;cli 
extremists  as  Mr.  Parnell  and  Mr.  Biggar  ?  This  fact  adds  another  element 
of  tragedy  to  the  woeful  eclipse  in  which  the  last  days  of   Butt  ended. 
His  opponents  were  honest  and  resolute  ;  his  friends,  self-seeking,  treacher- 
ous and  half-hearted,  ready  to  turn  without  a  blush  or  a  pause  from  the 
worship  of  the  setting  to  tlmt  of  the  rising  sun. 


ISAAC  BUTT.  i6i 

There  was  another  portent  of  the  time  which  still  more  disquieted  Butt, 
and  brought  the  peril  of  the  situation  more  clearly  and  unmistakably  before 
his  eyes.  The  policy  of  Mr.  Parnell  and  Mr.  Biggar  might  not  as  yet  have 
won  the  intelligence  of  Ireland,  but  it  had  beyond  all  question  gained  its 
heart.  The  session  of  1877  had  ended  on  August  13  ;  on  the  21st  of  the 
same  month  there  was  a  meeting  in  the  Rotunda  in  Dublin  in  honour  of 
Mr.  Parnell  and  Mr.  Biggar  ;  the  meeting  was  crowded  ;  the  reception  was 
enthusiastic  ;  the  verdict  of  Dublin  was  given,  and  it  was  in  favour  of  the 
new  men  and  the  new  policy. 

The  reader,  to  understand  the  success  of  the  active  policy,  has  to  recall 
the  fact  which  I  have  endeavoured  all  through  this  narrative  to  imprint 
upon  his  mind  as  a  central  fact  of  Irish  politics.  This  was  that,  since  the 
betrayal  of  the  national  cause  by  Keogh  and  Sadleir  in  1855,  the  heart  of 
the  Irish  people  had  never  been  won  for  Parliamentary  agitation  ;  there 
was  ever  the  tendency  to  the  cynic  doubtfulness  of  those  who  have  once 
been  greatly  deceived.  This  had  a  bad  effect  in  several  ways.  In  the  first 
place,  it  was  a  steady  obstacle  to  that  infectious  enthusiasm  by  the  aid  of 
which  alone  the  scattered  interests  and  forces  and  tendencies  of  a  nation 
can  be  moulded  into  the  unity  of  a  great  national  movement.  It  left  the 
constituencies  to  make  the  fight  on  local  or  capricious  or  non-essential 
issues  instead  of  a  common  national  platform  ;  above  all  things,  it  left  the 
Parliamentary  Party  without  that  force  of  national  passion  behind  them 
without  which,  in  a  struggle  in  an  assembly  alien,  ignorant  and  generally 
hostile  like  the  House  of  Commons,  the  words  of  Irish  national  representa- 
tives were  but  as  sounding  brass  and  tinkling  cymbal.  To  give  the  people 
faith — that  was  the  first  necessity  of  a  great  movement  in  Ireland  ;  that 
w^as  the  object,  and  that  is  the  chief  justification,  of  the  policy  of  the  active 
party. 

Meantime  the  struggle  was  going  on  inside  the  bosom  of  the  Home  Rule 
Party  itself.  On  Monday  and  Tuesday,  January  14  and  15,  1878,  a  confer- 
ence was  held  in  Dublin.  There  had  been  reports  that  the  two  parties 
w^ould  come  into  serious  collision  at  this  meeting.  A  notice  appeared  in 
the  name  of  Mr.  Butt,  recapitulating  resolutions  which  had  been  passed 
after  the  election  of  the  party  in  1874 — resolutions  pledging  the  party  to 
act  independently  of  both  the  English  parties,  and  at  the  same  time  in 
unity  with  each  other,  and  containing  the  suggestion  that  'no  Irish  member 
ought  to  persevere  in  any  course  of  action  which  shall  be  declared  by  a 
resolution  adopted  at  a  meeting  of  the  Home  Rule  members  to  be  calculated 
to  be  injurious  to  the  National  cause.'-*- 

On  the  other  hand,  Mr.  O'Connor  Power  had  given  notice  of  a  resolution 
which  declared  that,  in  consequence  of  the  hostility  with  which  the  just 
and  constitutional  demands  for  self-government  made  by  a  majority  of  the 
Irish  representatives  had  been  met  '  by  both  English  parties  in  the 
House  of  Commons,  it  was  essential  to  the  success  of  the  Irish  cause  that 
more  determined  and  vigorous  action  should  be  taken  by  the  Parliamentary 
Party. '2 

As  the  time  for  the  conference  approached,  however,  Butt  again  found 
that  he  was  fighting  without  his  army.  A  private  meeting  of  the  Irish 
members,  held  on  the  Saturday  before  the  conference,  arrived  at  a  com- 
promise. The  rival  resolutions  were  withdra-wn,  and  a  set  of  resolutions 
proposed  by  a  Mr.  P.  McCabe  Fay  were  accepted,  which,  if  anything, 
were  more  favourable  to  Mr.  Parnell  than  to  Mr.  Butt. 

•  NQ.tioti  January  19,  1878.  "  Ih. 

11 


.r6fi  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

So  the  conference  ended  in  a  drawn  battle  ;  but  the  session  of  1878  was 
soon  to  show  how  impossible  it  was  to  do  anything  with  the  existing  party, 
or  with  Mr.  Butt  himself.  A  more  regular  attendance  on  the  part  of 
members  was  requested,  and  the  only  result  was  that  often  when  an  impor- 
tant Irish  Bill  w^as  proposed  there  were  not  half  a  dozen  Irish  members  in 
their  places.  Joint  action  had  been  recommended  on  the  Eastern  Question, 
and  when  the  great  party  division  came  the  members  took  different  sides. 
There  was  even  a  graver  scandal,  for  Mr.  Butt,  the  leader  of  the  party,  not 
only  voted  with  the  Ministry,  and  thereby  swelled  the  majority  of  a  party 
that  had  up  to  that  time  refused  every  single  demand  of  the  Irish  people, 
but  he  spoke  in  a  tone  far  more  worthy  of  an  Imperialist  '  Jingo  '  than  of 
an  Irish  Nationalist. 

The  victoryof  Mr.  Parnell  at  the  conference  had  been  immediately  preceded 
by  another  important  gain.  Tliere  are  no  Irishmen  more  fierce  or  resolute  in 
the  national  faith  than  the  Irishmen  settled  in  England  and  Scotland. 
They  are,  though  this  is  not  generally  thought,  far  more  extreme  in  their 
views  than  the  majority  of  the  Irish  in  America,  and  they  have  an  un- 
broken unity  and  a  clear-sighted  appl-eciation  of  the  essential  truth  in 
grave  national  controversies  that  might  well  put  to  the  blash  the  half- 
heartedness,  the  wavering  purposes,  and  the  divided  counsels  of  the  Irish 
who  have  remained  in  Ireland.  The  Irish  in  England  were  from  the  very 
first  on  the  side  of  Mr.  Parnell.  They  were  enrolled  in  an  organization 
known  as  the  Home  Kule  Confederation,  and  Mr.  Butt  was  its  president.  At 
the  annual  convention  of  the  Confederation  at  the  close  of  1877,  Mr.  Butt 
was  deposed,  and  Mr.  Parnell  was  elected  in  his  place.  The  man  who 
proposed  the  change  bore  to  Butt  that  extraordinary  affection  with  which 
this  weak,  kindly,  unassuming,  and  childishly  simple  old  man  was  accus- 
tomed to  inspire  nearly  every  man,  and  could  with  difficulty  maintain  his 
composure  as  he  gave  the  tottering  Caesar  the  fatal  stab. 

Mr.  Butt  now  virtually  retired  from  the  leadership  of  the  Home  Pule 
Party.  His  resignation  of  his  position  was  not  accepted, and  he  was  induced 
to  remain  on  the  condition  that  his  attendance  should  not  be  regular  ;  this 
condition  was  for  the  purpose  of  allowing  him  to  devote  his  attention  to 
his  practice.  Like  0' Conned,  he  had  virtually  to  abandon  his  profession 
when  he  undertook  the  duties  of  Parliamentary  leadership.  In  this  way 
his  alreadv  vast  load  of  debt  had  been  increased,  and  his  hours  of  waking 
and  sleeping  were  tortured  by  duns,  threats  of  proceedings,  and  all  the 
other  shifts  and  worries  of  the  impecunious.  His  quarrel  with  the 
'  obstructives '  had  now  come  to  interfere  with  his  financial  as  well  as  with 
his  political  position.  A  national  subscription  had  been  started.  In 
Ireland  the  response  of  the  people  to  the  needs  of  their  leaders  has  often 
been  bountifully  generous,  more  often  than  perhaps  in  any  other  country  ; 
but  those  who  depend  on  the  assistance  of  the  public  are  subject  to  the 
chances  of  fortune  that  always  dog  the  dependents  in  any  degree  on  the 
popular  mood.  There  are  times  and  seasons  when  even  the  most  popular 
leader  will  not  receive  one-tenth  the  support  which  will  be  given  in  more 
favourable  circumstances,  and  the  popular  leader  dependent  for  his  living 
on  the  pence  of  the  people  has  the  life  of  the  gambler  or  the  theatrical 
speculator.  The  support  of  the  people  had  been  definitely  transferred  from 
Mr.  Butt  to  Mr.  Parnell,  and  financial  support  followed  the  tide  of  popular 
favour.  The  subscription  was  a  miserable  failure,  and  Butt  was  now  with- 
out any  resource  but  his  profession. 

But  the  time  had  passed  when  he  could  do  anything  there.   The  weakness 


ISAAC  BUTT.  163 

of  the  heart's  action,  which  had  pursued  him  from  his  early  years,  was 
rapidly  becoming  worse,  and  in  1S78  there  were  many  warnings  of  the 
approaching  end.  In  that  year  he  made  the  remark  to  a  friend,  speaking 
of  some  troublesome  sjnnptoms  from  his  heart,  '  Is  not  this  the  curfew  bell, 
warning  us  that  the  light  must  be  put  out  and  the  fire  extinguished  V  Still 
he  fought  on,  attending  the  law  courts  daily,  and  now  and  then  joining  in  a 
desperate  attempt  to  meet  his  daily  triumphant  opponents.  His  last 
appearance  was  at  a  meeting  in  Moles  worth  Hall,  on  February  4,  1S79. 
He  was  at  this  time  engaged  in  the  cause  celebre  of  Bagot  v.  Bagot.  The 
appearance  of  the  old  man  at  this  meeting  has  left  a  deep  and  a  sad  impres- 
sion on  the  minds  of  all  those  who  were  present.  When  he  came  in  tho 
look  of  death  w;ts  on  his  face  ;  the  death  of  his  hopes  and  his  spirits  had 
already  come.  There  were  many  faces  among  those  around  that  once  had 
lighted  at  his  look,  and  that  now  turned  away  in  estrangement.  '  Won't 
you  speak  to  me  V  he  said  in  trembling  tones  to  one  man  who  had  been 
his  associate  in  many  fights  and  amid  many  stirring  scenes.  But  his 
old  persuasive  eloquence  was  still  as  fresh  as  ever,  and  ha  defended 
his  whole  policy  with  a  vigour,  plausibility,  and  closeness  of  reasoning 
that  were  wortlay  of  his  best  daj^s.  This  was  the  last  meeting  he  ever 
attended.  The  next  day  he  fell  sick.  The  heart  had  at  last  refused 
to  do  its  work  ;  the  brain  could  no  longer  be  supplied  ;  he  lingered  for 
nearly  a  month  with  his  great  intellect  obscured,  and  on  May  5,  1879, 
he  died. 

The  people  retained  a  kindly  feeling  for  him  to  the  end,  but  he  had  un- 
questionably outlived  his  usefulness  ;  and  his  triumph  over  Mr.  Parnell  at 
this  period  of  Irish  history  would  have  been  a  national  calamity  that 
might  have  brought  hideous  disasters.  Sufficient  time  has  elapsed  since 
his  death  to  pronounce  a  calm  estimate  of  his  career.  The  unwisdom  of 
his  policy  was  largely  due  undoubtedly  to  the  difficulties  of  his  circum- 
stances. He  had  a  wretched  party — with  one  honest  and  unselfish  man  to 
five  self-seekers — but  he  laid  the  foundations  of  a  great  party  in  the  future, 
and,  more  than  any  other  man,  he  prepared  the  people  for  the  new  struggle 
for  self-government.  It  was  his  misfortune  to  come  at  the  unhappy  interval 
of  transition  from  the  bad  and  old  and  hopeless  order  of  things  to  a  new 
and  a  better  and  brighter  epoch.  Between  the  era  of  1865  and  the  era  of 
1878  Ireland  was,  so  far  as  constitutional  movements  were  concerned,  in  a 
political  morass.  It  was  Butt  that  carried  the  country  over  that  dangerous 
ground.  His  foot  was  light,  and  slippery,  and  timid  ;  but  the  ground  over 
which  he  had  to  pass  was  treacherous,  perilous,  and  full  of  invisible  and 
bottomless  pools. 

But  all  the  same,  it  wa.s  well  for  Ireland  that  Butt  died  at  this  moment. 
The  country  was  again  approaching  one  of  those  crises  the  outcome  of 
which  was  to  mean  either  a  re-plunge  into  the  Slough  of  Despond,  such  as 
she  had  been  immersed  in  from  1845  to  1865,  or  the  start  of  a  new  era  of 
hope,  effort,  and  prosperity.  If  Butt  had  survived,  and  had  retained  the 
leadership,  there  is  little  doubt  that  he  would  have  been  incapable  of  rising 
to  the  height  of  the  argument,  and  would  have  counselled  shilly-shallying 
where  shilly-shallying  meant  death,  and  moderation  where  extreme  courses 
were  required  to  avert  a  national  disaster,  wholesale,  violent,  and  perhaps 
fatal  ;  or,  if  he  had  not  retained  the  full  leadership  by  the  destruction  of 
the  rising  efforts  of  Mr.  Parnell  and  Mr.  Biggar,  and  if  he  and  they  still 
remained  in  political  existence,  and  to  some  extent  in  political  alliance,  then 
there  would  have  be^^n  divided  counsels  5  and  the  time  was  one  for  unity. 

11—2 


i64  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

All  the  meanness  and  servility  and  half-heartedness  of  the  countfy  would 
have  found  in  Butt  a  rallying-point,  and  the  crisis  was  one  that  demanded 
all  the  energy  and  courage  and  concentrated  purpose  of  the  country.  For 
the  year  of  1879  was  at  hand. 


CHAPTER  IX. 

FAMINE  AGAIN  ! 


Befoee  coming  to  1879,  a  few  words  more  on  the  progress  of  Mr,  Parnell. 
The  arrangement  in  the  Home  E-ule  Party  was  to  elect,  not  a  leader  by  that 
name,  but  a  sessional  chairman.  Mr,  Shaw  was  elected  as  the  successor  of 
Mr.  Butt.  Meantime  the  Ministry  was  about  to  supply  Mr.  Parnell  with 
the  best  of  all  justifications  for  his  policy.  It  hns  been  seen  with  what 
contemptuous  scorn  the  Government  rejected  all  Mr.  Butt's  proposed  re- 
forms. Mr.  Butt  and  his  methods  had  thus  been  flouted  for  three  years  ; 
within  one  year  of  the  growth  of  '  obstruction,'  the  Government  proceeded 
to  bring  forward  concessions  to  Ireland.  In  the  session  of  1878  they  intro- 
duced an  Intermediate  Education  Bill,  This  was  especially  satisfactory  to 
Mr.  Parnell ;  his  practical  mind  judges  every  policy  by  its  results,  and  he 
was  now  able  to  show  to  the  Irish  people  a  practical  result  from  his  policy. 

In  the  session  of  1879  Mr,  Parnell  succeeded,  after  his  dexterous  fashion, 
in  catching  hold  of  a  subject  upon  which  it  was  possible  to  address  the 
House  with  great  frequency  and  at  great  length.  The  Army  Regulation 
Bill,  among  other  things,  regulated  the  question  of  flogging.  In  the  pre- 
vious session,  Mr,  Parnell  and  Mr.  Biggar  had  been  left  to  fight  the 
question  of  flogging  alone.  Now  the  curious  spectacle  was  presented  of  the 
Irish  '  obstructives  '  being  supported  by  Mr.  Chamberlain  and  by  several 
other  prominent  and  promising  members  of  the  Radical  section.  In  the  end, 
Parnell  and  Biggar,  seeing  how  well  their  purpose  was  being  served  by  the 
Liberal  Opposition,  drew  slightl}'"  into  the  background,  and  allowed  the 
question  to  be  practically  taken  out  of  their  hands  ;  and  this  brought 
curious  developmen'i-.  As  Mr.  Parnell  had  been  left  fighting  alone  the 
battle  against  flogging  when  he  began  the  struggle,  so  Mr.  Chamberlain  was 
left  alone  by  the  orthodox  Liberals  when  he  took  it  up.  In  the  same  way, 
too,  as  Mr.  Parnell  had  been  vehemently  attacked  by  the  whole  force  of  the 
two  parties  combined  in  his  early  days  of  assault  upon  the  lash,  the  per- 
sistence of  Mr.  Chamberlain's  agitation  of  the  question  in  the  House  drew 
down  upon  him  a  rebuke  from  the  Marquis  of  Hartington,  and  there  was  a 
sharp  scene  between  the  two.  But  in  the  end  the  agitation  against  the 
lash  became  strong  enough  to  be  taken  up  by  the  orthodox  Liberals,  and  in 
the  same  way  as  Parnell  was  succeeded  by  Chamberlain,  Chamberlain  was 
succeeded  by  Lord  Hartington  and  the  Liberal  leaders.  The  result  of  this 
was  that  the  lash  became  one  of  the  prominent  subjects  of  debate  between 
the  two  parties,  and  in  more  than  one  constituency  a  Conservative  member 
was  hounded  out  of  public  life  by  the  vehement  speeches  of  Liberals  upon 
the  question. 

It  is  needless  to  say  that  Mr,  Parnell  was  not  allowed  to  go  through  the 
sessions  of  1878  and  1879  without  occasionally  passing  through  storms  of 
the  most  tempestuous  violence.  '  Mr,  Parnell,'  wrote  the  World  (March 
29,  1876),  'is  always  at  a  white  heat  of  rage,  and  makes  with  savage  ear- 
nestness fancifully  ridiculous  statements,  such  as  you  may  hear  from  your 


FAMINE  AGAIN  1  165 

partner  in  the  quadrille  if  you  have  the  good  fortune  to  be  a  guest  at  the 
annual  ball  at  Colney  Hatch.'  '  The  writer,'  said  the  same  journal  (same 
date),  '  who  cherishes  a  real  affection  for  Ireland,  and  who  has  an  unaffected 
admiration  for  the  genius  of  her  sons,  bittei-ly  reproaches  Meath  that  it 
should  have  wronged  Ireland  by  making  such  scenes  possible  under  the  eye 
of  the  House.'  And  finally,  the  sapient  writer  said  (same  date),  '  Mr. 
Biggar,  though  occasionally  endurable,  is  invariably  grotesque.  .  .  .  But 
Mr.  Parnell  has  no  redeeming  qualities,  unless  we  regard  it  as  an  advantage 
to  have  in  the  House  a  man  who  unites  in  his  own  person  all  the  childish 
unreasonableness,  all  the  ill-regulated  suspicion,  and  all  the  childish  cre- 
dulity, of  the  Irish  peasant,  without  any  of  the  humour,  the  courthness, 
or  dash  of  the  Irish  gentleman.' 

Meantime  events  were  developing  in  Ireland  which  were  destined  to 
mould  his  future  and  to  meet  his  career  at  the  true  psychological  moment. 
What  had  been  the  state  of  Ireland  since  1870  ?     The  Land  Act  of  1870 
made  no  provision  against  rack-rent  ;  rack-renting  went  on  in  many  parts 
of  Ireland,  especially  in  the  province  of  Ulster,  more  relentlessly  and  con- 
tinuously than   perhaps   ever  before.     Eviction  was  but  partly  provided 
against  by  an  arrangement  that  compelled  the  landlord  to  give  compensa- 
tion for  disturbance.     It  was  supposed,   and  perhaps   intended   by  Mr. 
Gladstone,  that  this  compensation  should  bear  some  relation  to  the  loss  of 
the  tenant  ;  but  in  a  country  where  the  land  supplied  a  man  with  the  onlj'' 
means  of  livelihood,  it  was  plain  that  the  only  compensation  which  would 
really  supply  the  place  of  his  lost  farm  would  be  a  compensation  that  would 
give  him  an  income  for  the  remainder  of  his  days.     Thus  compensation  for 
disturbance  was,  in  Ireland,  practically  a  contradiction  in  terms  ;  to  talk  of 
a  man  being  compensated  for  disturbance  was  the  same  thing  as  to  talk  of 
the  compensating  of  an  ocean  waif  for  the  loss  of  the  raft  which  alone  gives 
him  a  hope  of  safety.     In  the  next  place,  the  courts  to  which  the  question 
of  disturbance  was  referred  had  prejudices  and  conceptions  on  the  relations 
between  landlord  and  tenant  which  rendered  it  absolutely  impossible  for 
them  to  administer  justice.     It  must  be  remembered,  as  one  of  the  leading 
facts  of  this  whole  controversy,  that  the  whole  bent  of  the  land  law  in 
Ireland,  not  for  years  or  for  generations,  but  for  centuries,  was  to  make  the 
landlord  omnipotent  :  that  the  lawyers  dealing  with  the  question,  whether 
Protestant  or  Catholic,  Conservative  or  Liberal,  were  saturated  with  the 
principles  of  a  law  founded  on  this  basis  ;  and  that,  therefore,  the  rights  of 
the  tenants  were  often  honestly  held  to  be  legally  infinitesimal.     Finall)', 
there  was  no  provision — at  least  no  adequate  provision — in  the  Land  Act 
of  1870  for  compensation  for  disturbance  in  cases  where  the  tenant  was 
unable  to  pay  the  rent.     This  also  was  contrary  to  the  spirit  of  the  Act, 
because  Mr.  Gladstone  plainly  laid  down,  in  discussing  the  Bill,  that  over 
and  above  his  right  for  any  improvements  he  might  have  made  upon  the 
soil,  the  tenant  was  entitled  to  compensation  from  the  mere  fact  of  being 
disturbed  or  evicted  ;  and  it  was  plainly  the  spirit  of  the  Land  Act  of 
1870,  that,  even  when  the  tenant  was  unable  to  pay  his  rent,  eviction  should 
not  necessarily  deprive  him  of  compensation  for  his  own  property  in  the 
shape  of  improvements  added  to  the  land.     But  as  the  law  stood,  or  was 
interpreted,  the  way  the  Act  of  1870  worked  was    that  the  landlord  was 
enabled,  on  the  one  hand,  to  raise  the  rent  to  the  highest  point  he  thought 
fit  ;  that  the  tenant  could  only  obtain  compensation  for  eviction  ;  and 
finally,  that  when  either  through  the  rack-rent  or  bad  seasons  the  tenant 
was  uiiaible  to  pay  his  rent,  all  his  improvements  could,  be  confiscated  bjr 


i66  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

the  landlord,  and  he  himself  be  thrown  upon  the  world  without  housef 
without  resources,  without  mercy. 

It  was  obvious  to  anybody  who  considered  the  Irish  Land  Question  with 
an  impartial  mind  that  legislation  of  this  kind  could  only  be  endured  as 
long  as  the  people  were  utterly  incapable  of  having  it  mended.  Another 
fact  was  equally  obvious,  that  it  only  required  the  strain  of  a  few  bad 
seasons  to  reduce  the  greater  portion  of  the  tenantry  of  Ireland  to  a  state 
of  bankruptcy.  And,  finally,  with  the  farmers  dependent  for  the  most 
part  on  a  crop  whose  fic'vleness  had  been  proved  by  such  tragic  testimony 
in  the  previous  history  o:  Ireland,  it  was  plain  that  such  stress  was  bound 
at  some  period  to  come.  It  is  an  instructive  commentary  on  the  effect  of 
the  Government  of  Ireland  from  Westminster  that,  seventy-nine  years 
after  the  Act  of  Union,  the  farmers  remained  in  practically  the  same 
position  as  at  the  "beginning  of  the  century  ;  that  in  these  seventy-nine 
years  there  had  been  two  famines,  one  among  the  most  tragic  in  the  awful 
depths  of  its  horrors  and  sufferings  of  all  human  events  ;  and  that,  af t^ 
two  famines,  the  country  was  approaching  a  third.  In  1S79,  too,  as  in 
1846,  the  potato  crop  could  without  exaggeration  be  described  as  the  thin 
partition  which  stood  between  famine  and  a  vast  number  of  the  Irish  ten- 
antry. Let  us  take  this  fact  in  connection  with  the  following  figures 
showing  the  depreciation  in  the  potato  crop  for  the  years  1876,  1877, 
and  1878. 

Value.i 

1876  ..,                 ...  ...  £12,464,382 

1877  ...                ...  ...  5,271,822 

1878  ...                ...  ...  7,579,512 

There  was  hope,  of  course,  that  1879  would  repair  the  loss  Vv^hich  had 
been  inflicted  by  the  two  previous  years  ;  but  1879,  instead  of  bringing 
relief,  aggravated  the  disaster,  and  brought  a  supreme  national  crisis. 
The  state  of  the  weather  and  the  re^Dorts  from  the  country  showed  clearly 
to  any  observer  of  the  time  that  a  disaster  was  impending  that  might, 
unless  properly  met,  plunge  Ireland  into  the  odious  and  tragic  horrors  of 
1846  and  1847.  Another  circumstancj  tended  very  much  to  aggravate  the 
distress  in  the  poorer  parts  of  the  country.  It  is  the  habit  of  a  consider- 
able section  of  the  farmers  of  Mayo,  Galway,  and  Donegal  to  migrate  to 
England  and  Scotland  for  the  harvest  season  every  year.  The  sums  which 
they  thus  earned  by  the  migration,  calculated  at  about  £100,000,  went, 
not  to  their  wives  and  families,  but  to  the  landlord.  Labour  for  English 
and  Scotch  farmers  was  part  of  the  tribute  they  had  yearly  to  pay  to  their 
oppressors.  It  Vv^as,  indeed,  a  peculiarity  of  the  Irish  land  system  that  it 
pursued  the  Irish  race  wherever  that  race  want.  The  son  or  daughter  of 
the  Irish  farmer  who  had  emigrated  to  America,  or  Australia  or  New 
Zealand  did  not  leave  behind  in  Ireland  the  curse  of  his  race.  The  wages 
earned  as  a  labourer,  or  a  servant-maid,  or  a  miner,  or  a  sheep-farmer  in 
any  of  these  places  of  exile  went  home  to  help  their  parents  in  their  yearly 
deepening  poverty,  through  their  yearly  increasing  rent.  It  has  been  cal- 
culated that  between  the  years  1848  and  1864  no  less  a  sum  than 
£13,000,000  was  sent  by  the  Irish  in  America  to  their  people  at  home.^ 
The  people  at  home,  in  the  meantime,  remained  either  in  the  same  con* 

^  Thorn's  Directory. 

s  Lord  Dufferin,  quoted  by  Healy,  p,  49. 


FAMINE  AGAIN!  ibj 

dition  or  usually  sank  deeper  into  the  mire  of  inextricable  poverty.  In 
other  words,  the  money  sent  from  the  Irish  in  America  did  the  farmer  no 
good  :  it  was  all  swallowed  up  by  the  Irish  landlord  ;  it  was  part  of  the 
world-wide  tribute  this  caste  was  able  to  extort.  This  incontestable  fact 
adds  another  element  of  humour  to  the  complaint  of  the  landlord  class 
that  the  subscriptions  which  were  brought  into  the  Irish  National  League 
by  the  Irish  race  in  America  and  Australia  came  mostly  from  servant-girls, 
and  much  rhetoric  was  expended  from  the  same  quarter  in  denunciation  of 
the  agitators  who  lived  on  their  hard-won  wages.  These  denunciations, 
which,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  were  not  founded  upon  truth,  would  have  been 
more  becoming  if  they  had  not  proceeded  from  a  class  which  had  been  for 
a  generation  the  greatest  tax  and  the  most  prominent  burden  of  the 
servant-girls  of  New  York,  Chicago,  Melbourne,  and  every  other  city 
where  exiled  Irish  labour  seeks  the  market  it  has  been  refused  at  home. 

The  loss  of  the  migratory  labourers  in  1877  is  calculated  by  Dr.  Nelson 
Hancock  at  £250,000.^  The  amount  of  value  of  the  potato  in  1879'-^  was 
£3,341,028.  In  other  words,  two-thirds  of  the  entire  potato  crop  was 
gone,  and  in  some  parts  of  the  country  the  crop  was  entirely  gone.  '  The 
potato  crop,'  said  the  Registrar-General,  '  will  be  deficient  in  every  province, 
county,  and  union.'  '  The  salient  point  is,'  says  the  same  authority,  '  that 
in  1878  the  estimated  produce  of  potatoes  in  Ireland  was  50,530,080  cwt. 
the  average  for  ten  years  being  60,752,910  cwt.,  whereas  the  estimated 
yield  for  1879  is  only  22,273,520  cwt.,  a  most  alarming  decrease.'**  The 
meaning  of  these  figures  was  unmistakable.     Famine  was  coming  again  ! 

The  next  factor  in  the  situation  was  the  action  of  the  landlords.  The 
action  of  the  landlords  in  1879  justified  their  whole  traditions.  The  deeper 
grew  the  distress  of  the  farmers,  the  more  exacting  became  the  demands 
and  the  more  merciless  became  the  attitude  of  the  landlords.  Here  are 
the  ofiicial  figures  upon  the  subject,  and  they  may  be  left  to  tell  their  own 
tale : 

Evictions. 

1876  ...  ...  ...  ...  1,269 

1877  ...  ...  ...  ...  1,323 

1878  .^  •  ...  ...  ...  1,749 

1879  .«  ...  ...  ...  2,667 

It  was  at  first  sight  apparently  one  of  the  tragic  facts  of  the  case  that 
the  Chief  Secretaryship  of  Ireland  at  this  period  of  impending  and  awful 
disaster  was  held  by  such  a  man  as  Mr.  James  Lowther.  The  appoint- 
ment of  such  a  person,  with  his  illiterate  mind,  his  mediaeval  and 
impenetrable  ignorance,  his  bold  but  perilous  stubbornness,  was  universally 
regarded  as  one  of  the  jokes  by  which  Lord  Beaconsfield  occasionally 
gratified  the  wanton  caprice  of  great  power.  As  if  to  deepen  the  contrast 
between  the  condition  of  Ireland  and  the  tenure  of  the  Chief  Secretary's 
ofl&ce  by  such  a  man,  Mr.  Lowther  was  accustomed  to  clothe  his  thoughts 
in  a  brusque  humour  that  smacked  somewhat  of  the  stable,  but  at  the 
same  time  was  not  unamusing.  But  the  Irish  people  were  not  in  the  con- 
dition to  relish  jokes,  especially  at  their  own  expense ;  and  to  them  it 
seemed  an  almost  intolerable  aggravation  of  their  lot  that  this  hopelessly 
ignorant  and  densely  obstinate  man  should  grin,  buffoon-like,  as  the  suc- 
cession of  scenes  in  the  national  tragedy  unveiled  themselves  before  his  eyes. 
*  Healy,  p.  72.  ^  Jb  3  /&.,  p.  n. 


i68  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

During  the  earlier  months  of  1S79  the  attention  of  the  Chief  Secretary 
had  been  called  more  than  once  to  the  calamity  that  was  impending  over 
Ireland.  He  received  all  these  statements  with  easy  and  jaunty  denials. 
At  last,  on  May  27,  when  the  House  was  adjourning  for  the  Whitsuntide 
recess,  the  Irish  members  made  a  final  attempt  to  force  the  condition  of 
the  country  upon  the  attention  of  the  Chief  Secretary.  Entreaty, 
argument,  intimate  acquaintance  with  the  facts  of  the  case — graphic 
pictures  of  the  dire  distress  of  the  country — all  were  lost  on  Mr.  Lowther. 
He  was  ready  to  go  so  far  as  to  acknowledge  that  there  was  '  some  ' 
depression  in  the  agriculture  of  Ireland  ;  but  he  went  on  to  say  he  was 
glad  to  think  that  that  depression,  although  undoubted,  was  '  neither  so 
prevalent  nor  so  acute  as  the  depression  existing  in  other  parts  of  the 
United  Kingdom.'^  'Seldom,'  justly  remarks  Mr.  A.  M.  Sullivan,  'did 
an  English  Minister  speak  a  sentence  destined  to  have  more  memorable 
results.  In  that  moment  Mr.  James  Lowther  sealed  the  doom  of  Irish 
landlordism  ;'^  for  Mr.  Lowther's  answer  drove  Mr.  Parnell  into  the  ranks 
of  the  Land  League.  The  agrarian  movement  in  Ireland  meantime  had 
been  greatly  stimulated  by  Mr.  Davitt — a  remarkable  man  with  a  remark- 
able history. 

Michael  Davitt  was  born  in  1846,  near  the  small  village  of  Straid,  in 
the  county  of  Mayo.  His  father  was  a  farmer  who  was  among  the  many 
thousand  victims  of  those  wholesale  evictions  in  that  dread  period  which 
have  been  fully  described  in  previous  pages  of  this  book.  Mr.  Davitt  was 
but  four  years  of  age  when  he  saw  his  home  destroyed.  His  father  and 
mother  came  to  England,  '  and  had  to  beg  through  the  streets  of  England 
for  bread.'  The  family  settled  in  the  little  town  of  Haslingden  in  Lanca- 
shire. His  mother  was  in  the  habit  of  frequently  repeating  the  details  of 
this  cruel  and  memorable  episode  in  his  earliest  years  ;  and,  undoubtedly, 
it  was  this  eviction  scene  which  influenced  the  fortunes  of  his  entire 
family,  and  has  been  the  fiercest  incentive  of  Davitt's  attitude  towards 
landlordism  ever  since.  Over  and  over  again  references  to  this  incident 
occur  in  his  speeches.  Replying  once  to  an  ungenerous  attack  made  upon 
him,  which  appeared  under  the  name  of  the  late  Archbishop  MacHale, 
though  probably  never  written  by  him,  he  wrote  : 

'  Some  twenty-five  years  ago  my  father  was  ejected  from  a  small  holding 
near  the  parish  of  Straid,  in  Mayo,  because  unable  to  pay  a  rent  which 
the  crippled  state  of  his  resources,  after  struggling  through  the  famine 
years,  rendered  impossible.  Trials  and  sufferings  in  exile  for  a  quarter  of 
a  century,  in  which  I  became  physically  disabled  for  life,  a  father's  grave 
duo'  beneath  American  soil,  myself  the  only  member  ever  destined  to  live  or 
die  in  Ireland,  and  this  privilege  existing  only  by  virtue  of  "  ticket-of- 
leave,"  are  the  consequences  which  followed  that  eviction.'^ 

When  he  was  still  a  child  he  was  sent  to  a  mill  to  work,  and  there  he 
was  by  an  accident  deprived  of  his  right  arm.  At  this  time  he  had 
received  but  the  m,erest  rudiments  of  education,  and  this  accident  obtained 
for  him  the  advantage  of  another  instalment  of  instruction.  At  ele^'en 
years  of  age  he  secured  employment  in  the  local  post-office  ;  and  as  the 
postmaster  had  also  a  business  in  printing  and  stationery,  Mr.  Davitt  had 
an  opportunity  of  taking  an  occasional  peep  at  books. ' 


4 


^  Hansard,  vol.  ccxlvi.,  p.  246.  =  '  New  Ireland,'  p.  438. 

?  D.  B.  Cash  man's  '  Life  of  Michael  Davitt,"  p.  96. 
*  •  Land  of  Eire,'  by  John  Dcvoy,  p.  38. 


FAMINE  AGAIN!  169 

In  this  way  he  had  already  attained  some  prominence  among  tho 
Irishmen  of  his  district  ;  but  up  to  this  time  he  had  not  formed  strong 
national  opinions  ;  or,  if  there  were  the  germs  of  such  opinions  in  his 
mind,  they  had  not  assumed  definite  shape.  One  night  he  went  to  hear 
an  address  on  an  Irish  subject.  The  wrongs  of  Ireland  were  narrated  by 
an  eloquent  tongue.  All  the  latent  forces  and  unformed  notions  in  Mr. 
Davitt's  nature  were  at  once  crystallized  ;  and  from  that  hour  forward  he 
was  an  ardent  Irish  Nationalist.  He  soon  became  an  active  member  of 
the  Fenian  organization,  and  he  took  part  in  the  attempted  seizure  of 
Chester  Castle.  *  Unable  to  shoulder  a  rifle  with  his  single  arm,  he 
carried  a  small  store  of  cartridges  in  a  bag  made  from  a  pocket-hand- 
kerchief.'^ 

After  the  failure  of  the  enterprise,  he  managed  to  escape  arrest  and 
return  to  Haslingden  ;  but  he  soon  entered  on  active  operations  again  in 
connection  with  the  movement,  and  was  employed  in  the  work  of  pur- 
chasing arms  and  forwarding  them  to  Ireland.  On  May  14,  1870,  he  was 
arrested  in  London  along  with  an  Englishman  named  John  Wilson,  a 
gunsmith  of  Birmingham,  and  he  was  convicted  mainly  on  the  evidence  of 
an  informer  named  Corydon,  and  sentenced  to  fifteen  years'  penal  servi- 
tude. He  was  often  subjected,  like  the  other  Irish  political  prisoners,  to 
that  brutality  of  punishment  which  England  and  Russia  are  alone  among 
European  countries  in  inflicting  upon  political  prisoners.  It  is  impossible 
for  a  man  of  any  nationality  to  read  his  own  account  of  the  sufferings  and 
indignities  through  which  he  had  to  pass  without  feelings  of  burning 
anger.  A  rebel  against  laws  which  had  broken  up  his  home,  impoverished 
and  exiled  those  dearest  to  him,  he  had  resorted  to  the  only  weapons  which 
then  seemed  capable  of  arresting  the  attention  of  that  country  whose 
apathy  to  Irish  ruin  Mr.  Gladstone  has  so  well  described,  and  he  was  but 
ante-dating  reforms,  most  of  which  have  since  passed  into  law  ;  but  he 
was  sent  to  herd  with  murderers,  pickpockets,  and  burglars,  passed  through 
solitary  confinement,  and  was  overworked,  underfed,  and  exposed  to  all 
changes  of  the  seasons. 

At  last,  on  Wednesday  morning,  December  19,1877 — after  seven  years 
and  seven  months  of  this  dread  suffering — he  was  released.  A  series  of 
enthusiastic  receptions  awaited  him  and  the  three  other  Fenian  prisoners 
who  had  been  released  about  the  same  time,  namely,  Colour- Sergeant 
McCarthy,  Corporal  Thomas  Chambers,  and  Private  John  P.  Brvan.  It 
had  been  constantly  denied  that  Sergeant  McCarthy  had  been  ill-treated 
in  prison,  and  asserted  that  his  health  had  in  no  way  suffered.  Two  days 
after  his  arrival  in  Dublin,  however,  McCarthy  gave  testimony  that  could 
no  longer  be  denied.  Mr.  Davitt,  McCarthy,  and  the  two  other  released 
prisoners  had  been  invited  by  Mr.  Parnell  to  breakfast  with  him  in  Morris- 
son's  Hotel.  While  they  were  awaiting  breakfast,  McCarthy  was  observed 
to  grow  pale  and  totter  across  the  room,  and,  having  been  laid  on  the  sofa, 
in  a  few  moments  he  was  dead.  The  twelve  years  of  penal  servitude  had 
at  last  done  their  work. 

Mr.  Davitt  then  proceeded  on  a  lecturing  tour  throughout  England  and 
Scotland.  Later  on,  he  determined  to  go  to  America  to  see  his  mother  and 
other  relatives  who  had  settled  in  the  town  of  Manayunk  in  Pennsylvania. 
He  landed  in  New  York  about  the  beginning  of  Augiist,  1878.  At  this 
time  he  had  very  few  acquaintances  in  America  ;  he  soon,  however,  came 
in  contact  with  some  leading  Irishmen  settled  in  that  country,  and  made 
^  'T,and  of  Eire,"  by  John  Devoy,  p.  38, 


I70  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

a  favo;irable  impression  upon  them.  After  various  consultations,  Mr. 
Davitt  formed  an  outline  of  a  land  movement ;  but  his  ideas  were  still  in 
a  crude  and  indefinite  shape. 

When  he  returned  to  Ireland,  time  and  the  seasons  fought  upon  his 
side.  Widespread  distress  threatened  to  be  most  severe  in  the  West, 
and,  curiously  enouafh,  there  already  existed  in  that  region  the  germs  of  a 
land  movement.  The  tenants  had  kept  up  some  form  of  association  from 
the  moment  at  which  the  worthlessness  of  the  Land  Act  of  1870  was 
discovered.  In  Dublin,  for  instance,  there  was  an  organization  known  as 
'  The  Central  Tenants'  Defence  Association,'  the  object  of  v/hich  was  the 
attainment  of  what  afterwards  became  known  as  the 'Three  F's.'  There 
was  also  a  local  organization  which  subsequently,  perhaps,  did  more  than  any 
other  to  beget  the  Land  League  ;  this  was  the  Tenants'  Defence  Associa- 
tion of  Ballinasloe.  The  foremost  figure  of  this  association  was  a  man 
named  Matthew  Harris.  Matthew  Harris  is  one  of  the  most  interesting 
and  striking  fig-ures  of  the  Irish  movements  of  the  last  thirty  years. 
During  all  this  period  he  has  devoted  himself  with  self-sacrificing  and 
unremitting  zeal  to  the  attainment  of  complete  redress  of  his  country's 
grievances.  In  this  respect  politics  are  with  him  an  absorbing  passion, 
almost  a  religion.  In  pursuit  of  this  high  and  noble  end  he  has  risked 
death,  lost  liberty,  ruined  his  business  prospects.  Eager,  enthusiastic, 
vehement,  he  has  at  the  same  time  that  grim  tenacity  of  purpose  by  which 
forlorn  hopes  are  changed  into  triumphant  fruitions.  He  has  fought 
the  battle  against  landlordism  in  the  dark  as  well  as  in  the  brightest 
hour  with  unshaken  resolution.  Reared  in  the  country,  from  an  early  age 
he  saw  landlordism  in  its  worst  shape  and  aspect  ;  his  childish  recollections 
are  of  cruel  and  heartless  evictions.  Thus  it  is  that  in  every  movement 
for  the  liberation  of  the  farmer  or  of  Ireland  during  the  last  thirty  years 
he  has  been  a  conspicuous  figure,  as  hopeful,  energetic,  laborious  in  the 
hour  of  despair,  apathy,  and  lassitude,  as  in  times  of  universal  vigour, 
exultation,  and  activity. 

But  it  was  not  in  the  county  of  Galway  that  this  movement  took  its 
birth.  Mr.  Davitt,  as  has  been  seen,  was  a  native  of  the  neighboiiring 
county  of  Mayo,  and  there  he  determined  to  make  the  first  start.  The 
Land  League  may  be  dated  from  one  of  these  meetings.  This  was  a 
gathering  which  assembled  on  April  20,  1879,  at  Irishtown,  in  the  county 
of  Mayo.  This  meeting  was  convened  for  the  purpose  of  protesting 
against  some  acts  of  oppression  on  the  part  of  the  landlords  of  the  district. 
The  promoters  of  the  meeting  were  Mr.  Davitt  and  Mr.  Brennan,  the 
latter  afterwards  secretary  of  the  Land  League.  Mr.  Davitt  did  not 
attend  the  meeting,  and  the  chief  speaker  at  it  was  Mr.  O'Connor  Power, 
M.P.  Several  other  meetings  followed.  The  deej)ening  distress  among 
the  farmers  and  the  increase  of  evictions  by  the  landlords  supplied  an 
impetus  which  had  the  effect  of  advancing  the  movement  with  extra- 
ordinary rapidity.  The  times,  in  fact,  were  ripe  for  an  agrarian  revolt. 
But,  as  yet,  the  movement  was  local  and  obscure.  Scarcely  any  reports 
found  their  way  into  the  metropolitan  newspapers,  and  the  country  was 
generally  unconscious  of  the  portentous  new  birth.  Deservedly  great  as 
was  the  influence  of  Mr.  Davitt,  and  immense  as  were  his  exertions,  the 
movement  could  not  be  said  yet  to  have  reached  its  pinnacle  until  the 
leader  came  to  whom,  at  this  moment,  the  eyes  and  hopes  and  affections 
of  all  Irish  Nationalists  were  gradually  turning.  One  of  the  great  forces 
which  had  inspired  the  hope  and  strength  that  made  the  new  movement 


FAMINE  AGAIN!  \;i 

possible  was  the  spirit  excited  througliout  Ireland  by  the  attitude  of 
Mr.  Parnell  and  Mr.  Biggar  in  the  House  of  Commons.  The  scenes — • 
vexatious,  indecorous,  wanton,  or  boorish,  as  they  appeared  to  the  English 
public — were  to  the  people  of  Ireland  the  electric  messages  of  new  hopes. 
Every  v/ord  of  these  scenes  was  read  with  fierce  and  breathless  eagerness. 
The  representatives  of  a  country  trodden  under  foot  for  centuries  were 
seen  in  the  citadel  of  the  enemj'-,  aggressive  and  defiant.  The  Parliament 
that  trampled  upon  every  Irish  demand  for  so  many  generations  was  seen 
raging  in  hysteric  and  impotent  fury  against  the  growing  omnipotence  of 
two  determined  men.  The  movement  that  starts  from  1879  will  not  be 
understood  unless  the  fact  is  grasped  that  Ireland  at  that  moment  was 
living  under  the  burning  glow  of  Parliamentary  'obstruction.'  The  temper 
which  this  fact  produced  was  the  oi-iginal  impulse  in  preventing  the  farmers 
of  1879  from  lying  down,  dumb,  helpless,  and  cowering,  under  eviction, 
famine,  and  plague,  as  was  done  by  their  fathers  in  1846-47. 

The  position  Mr.  Parnell  had  already  attained  marked  him  out  as  a 
man  who,  if  he  undertook  the  leadership  of  a  movement,  would  carry  it 
through  every  defile  of  difficulty  and  danger  to  the  end.  He  was  rapidly 
becoming  the  idol  of  the  people,  who  could  fuse  their  passions  and  their 
affections  into  a  united  and  mighty  effort.  Eor  a  considerable  time  Mr. 
Parnell  hesitated  before  taking  a  step  beyond  the  'Three  F's,'  but  at  last 
he  crossed  the  Rubicon  and  joined  the  ranks  of  those  who  declared  that 
the  struggle  on  the  Land  Question  should  only  end  with  the  transfer  of  the 
proprietorship  of  the  soil  from  the  landlord  to  the  tiller.  This  was  to  be 
the  final  settlement  of  the  question  ;  but,  meanwhile,  the  wolf  was  at  the 
door.  How  was  the  emergency  of  deepening  distress,  of  ever-advancing 
famine  and  ever-increasing  eviction  to  be  met  ?  This  was  the  terrible 
problem  which  Mr.  Parnell  had  now  to  face. 

Ajad  now  I  have  come  to  one  of  the  cross-roads  in  my  story.  All  that 
I  have  written  will  have  failed  in  its  purpose  if  the  reader  do  not  see  the 
road  to  take  at  this  crisis,  clearly  marked  out  as  with  an  iron  finger.  My 
chief  reason  in  bringing  into  this  chapter  of  Irish  history  an  account  of 
1846  and  1847  and  the  years  immediately  after,  was  because  1846  and  1847 
are  the  background  of  1879  and  1880.  The  second  epoch  is  entirely  un- 
intelligible without  a  knowledge  and  true  appreciation  of  the  first.  1846 
and  1847  left  two  memories  :  the  memory  of  the  terrible  suffering,  and  the 
memory  of  how  that  suffering  was  submitted  to.  Ever  since  there  has 
been  no  feeling  so  bitter  in  the  hearts  of  Irishmen — especially  the  hearts  of 
young  Irishmen — as  the  feeling  that  nmch  of  the  awful  suffering  could 
have  been  prevented  if  the  people  only  had  had  the  courage  to  act  in  their 
own  defence  ;  to  refuse  to  allow  food  to  be  exported  from  a  starving  nation; 
to  refuse  the  payment  of  impossible  rents  that  one  man  might  luxuriate  in 
an  hour  of  national  cataclysm  and  tens  of  thousands  perish  in  the  agonies 
of  hunger  and  of  typhus  fever  ;  to  refuse  submission  to  decrees  of  eviction, 
and,  through  eviction,  of  death  or  exile  from  lands  brought  to  fertility  by 
their  toil,  from  houses  built  in  their  own  sweat  and  blood  and  tears.  And 
this  is  Si5mething  more  than  a  mere  feeling.  The  idea  will  stand  the  test 
of  the  severest  examination,  that  in  a  moment  of  national  crisis,  such  as 
the  Irish  famine,  the  safety  of  the  nation  demanded  some  sacrifice  on  the 
part  of  the  landlords — a  sacrifice  best  if  willingly  made,  as  by  the  land- 
lords in  England  and  in  Scotland  ;  in  any  case,  a  sacrifice,  whether  willing 
or  unwilling. 

Mr,  Parnell  found  the  majority  of  the  farmers  face  to  face  with  either 


172  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

of  these  two  dilemmas  :  If  they  had  all  the  rent,  they  might  give  every 
penny  to  the  landlord,  and  allow  themselves,  their  wives,  and  their  children 
to  perish.  If  they  had  not  the  rent,  and  the  landlord  insisted  on  his 
*  rights,'  they  were  subject  to  eviction  on  a  scale  as  wholesale  as  the  clear- 
ances that  followed  1846  and  1847.  To  call  upon  the  people,  under  circum- 
stances like  these,  to  pay  all  their  rent,  was  to  recommend  them  to  follow 
the  example  of  1846  with  the  sequels  of  1847 — wholesale  starvation  and 
wholesale  eviction.  This  was  not  the  policy  that  recommended  itself  to 
Mr.  Parnell ;  such  a  policy  would  have  been  that  of  a  coward  and  a 
traitor.  The  first  Land  meeting  attended  by  Mr.  Parnell  took  place  at 
Westport  on  June  8,  1879.  Mr.  Parnell,  in  his  speech,  laid  down  on  clear 
and  distinct  lines  the  Land  policy  of  the  future  and  the  policy  of  the 
hour.  He  declared  in  favour,  not  of  the  '  Three  P's,'  but  of  Peasant 
Proprietary. 

'  In  Belgium,'  said  Mr.  Parnell,  '  in  Prussia,  in  Prance,  and  in  Hussia 
the  land  has  been  given  to  the  people — to  the  occupiers  of  the  land.  In  some 
cases  the  landlords  have  been  deprived  of  their  pi'opertj''  in  the  soil  by  the 
iron  hand  of  revolution  ;  in  other  cases,  as  in  Prussia,  the  landlords  have 
been  purchased  out.  If  such  an  arrangement  could  be  made  without 
injuring  the  landlord,  so  as  to  enable  the  tenant  to  have  his  land  as  his 
own,  and  to  cultivate  it  as  it  ought  to  be  cultivated,  it  would  be  for  the 
benefit  and  prosperity  of  the  country.' 

But  this,  as  he  said  immediately,  was  to  be  regarded  as  the  final  settle- 
ment of  the  question  ;  the  immediate  point  was  what  the  people  were  to 
do  in  order  to  avert  the  calamity  which  was  at  that  moment  at  their  very 
doors. 

*  Now,'  he  said,  '  what  must  we  do  in  order  to  induce  the  landlords  to 
see  the  position  ?  You  must  show  the  landlords  that  you  intend  to  hold  a 
firm  grip  of  your  homesteads  and  land.'-"- 

The  phrase  had  such  appropriateness  to  the  situation  and  to  the  time 
that  it  at  once  passed  into  men's  mouths.  While  in  the  train  which 
brought  him  to  this  meeting,  Mr.  Parnell  was  passing  over  in  memory 
some  of  the  scenes  in  which  Mr.  Biggar  and  himself  had  taken  part  in 
Parliament.  He  was  musing  over  the  deadly  tenacity  with  which  the 
member  for  Cavan  always  stuck  to  his  purpose.  Tenacity  was  translated 
into  the  shorter  word  '  grip,'  and  thus  was  born  the  memorable  and  potent 
phrase  *  hold,'  or,  as  it  was  afterwards  expressed,  '  keep  a  firm  grip  of 
your  homesteads  and  land. ' 

Prom  the  moment  Mr.  Parnell  put  himself  at  the  head  of  the  Land 
movement  it  spread  with  enormous  rapidity,  and  soon  reached  startling 
proportions.  Meeting  after  meeting  was  held  in  many  parts  of  Ireland, 
and  before  long  it  was  evident  that  Mr.  Parnell  was  at  the  head  of  the 
mightiest  popular  movement  since  the  days  of  O'Connell  and  1845. 
Meantime,  the  Government  and  the  London  press  looked  on  with  sinister 
eye.  A  central  organization  was  formed  in  September,  1879.  On  October 
21,  1879,  a  meeting  was  held  by  circular  in  the  Imperial  Hotel,  Lower 
O'Connell  (then  Sackville)  Street  ;  Mr.  A.  J.  Kettle  presided.  The 
Land  League  was  then  and  there  founded.  The  following  resolutions  set 
forth  the  principles  of  the  new  organization  : —    • 

I.  That  the  objects  of  the  League  are,  first,  to  bring  about  a  reduction 
^  Freeman's  Journal^  June  8, 1879, 


FAMINE  AGAIN  I  173 

of  rack-rents  ;  second,  to  facilitate  the  obtaining  of  the  ownership  of  the 
soil  by  the  occupiers. 

II.  That  the  objects  of  the  League  can  be  best  attained  (1)  by  promoting 
organization  among  the  tenant  farmers  ;  (2)  by  defending  those  who  may 
be  threatened  with  eviction  for  refusing  to  pay  unjust  rents  ;  (3)  by  facili- 
tating the  working  of  the  Bright  Clauses  of  the  Land  Act  during  the 
winter  ;  and  (4)  by  obtaining  such  reform  in  the  laws  relating  to  land  as 
will  enable  every  tenant  to  become  the  owner  of  his  holding  by  paying  a 
fair  rent  for  a  limited  number  of  years. 

Mr.  Tarnell  was  elected  president,  and  Mr.  Kettle,  Mr.  Davitt,  and  Mr. 
Brennan  were  appointed  honorary  secretaries.  Mr.  J.  G.  Biggar,  M.P,, 
Mr.  W.  H.  O'Snllivan,  M.P.,  and  Mr.  Patrick  Egan  were  appointed 
treasurers,  and  a  resolution  was  passed  calling  upon  Mr.  Parnell  to  go  to 
America  and  obtain  assistance.  Mr.  John  Dillon  was  to  accompany  Mr. 
Parnell  to  America. 

This  was  the  first  time  that  the  leader  of  a  constitutional  movement  had 
gone  among  the  Irish  in  America  for  the  purpose  of  obtaining  assistance 
for  the  people  at  home.  Mr.  Parnell 's  tour  was  a  series  of  enthusiastic 
receptions.  Wherever  he  went,  and  in  nearly  every  town  through  which 
he  passed,  he  addressed  thousands  of  people.  Officials  of  the  United 
States  attended  and  presided  over  his  meetings,  and  at  last  he  was  paid 
the  compHment  of  which  only  two  other  men — Kossuth  and  Dr.  England 
— had  been  the  recipients  in  the  whole  course  of  American  history  :  he  was 
permitted  to  address  the  House  of  Representatives  at  Washington.  The 
financial  results  of  this  tour  were  extraordinarily  large.  The  Land  League, 
owing  to  the  severity  of  the  distress  throughout  the  country,  had  resolved 
to  devote  a  portion  of  their  funds  to  the  relief  of  the  distress.  The  funds 
raised  by  jMr.  Parnell  were  divided  into  two  parts — one  for  the  purpose  of 
organization,  the  other  for  the  relief  of  distress.  Por  both,  about  £72,000 
had  been  subscribed. 

The  indirect  effects  of  this  tour  were,  perhaps,  even  more  important. 
The  reality  of  Irish  distress  could  no  longer  be  denied,  and  there  grew  up 
a  competition  between  different  sections  as  to  which  should  most  liberally 
contribute  towards  the  movement  for  preventing  famine.  Thus,  although 
Mr.  Lowther  as  Chief  Secretary  had  denied  the  existence  of  distress,  the 
fact  had  been  brought  so  clearly  home  to  the  mind  of  the  Lord-Lieutenant, 
that  his  wife,  the  Duchess  of  Marlborough,  issued  an  appeal,  giving  a  dark 
picture  of  the  state  of  the  country,  and  formed  a  relief  committee.  The 
Lord  Mayor  of  Dublin  for  1880  happened  to  be  a  man  of  great  energy  and 
ability — Mr.  E.  Dvvyer  Gray — and  he  also  formed  a  committee  of  relief  ; 
and  thus,  by  the  beginning  of  1880,  no  fewer  than  three  committees  were 
working  to  prevent  the  occurrence  of  famine.  Thus  the  action  of  Mr. 
Parnell  and  the  Land  League  had  brought  the  condition  of  the  country 
from  the  region  of  debate  into  that  of  admitted  fact,  notorious  to  all  the 
nations  of  the  world, 

_  Even  Mr.  Lowther  and  the  Parliament  were  compelled  at  last  to 
listen.  Acknowledging  the  distress,  they  adopted  a  method  for  meeting 
it  which  is  perhaps  unexampled  even  in  the  history  of  the  legislation  of 
the  House  of  Commons  on  the  Irish  Land  Question .  While  the  landlords 
were  scattering  notices  of  eviction  over  the  country  wholesale,  the  Govern- 
ment conceived  the  felicitous  idea  that  the  landlords  formed  the  most 
suitable  agency  for  supplying  relief  to  the  tenants.     Accordingly,  a  Bill  waa 


174  TBE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

introduced,  the  effect  of  which  was  to  lend  to  the  landlords  the  sum  of 
£1,092,985  without  interest  for  two  years,  and  one  per  cent,  at  interest  after- 
wards. This  money  was  to  be  used  by  the  landlords  in  giving  emploj^ment 
to  their  tenants,  and  in  thus  preventing  the  spread  of  famine.  With  tm- 
conscious  humour  this  extraordinary  measure  was  called 'The  Kelief  of 
Distress  Act.' 

In  March,  1880,  Lord  Beaconsfield  decided  to  dissolve  Parliament. 
The  cry  he  chose  was  an  anti-Irish  manifesto.  I  will  not  stop  m  this  place 
to  examine  into  the  morality  of  the  statesman  who,  at  the  moment  when 
Ireland  was  in  the  very  agony  of  famine,  did  not  scruple  to  arouse  tlffe  fierce 
racial  passions  of  the  more  powerful  against  the  weaker  nation. 

The  news  of  the  impending  Dissolution  reached  Mr.  Parnell  on  March 
8,  when  he  was  speaking  at  Montreal.  At  once  he  saw  that  it  was 
necessary  for  him  to  proceed  to  Ireland  without  one  moment's  delay.  His 
lecture  delivered,  he  started  for  New  York.  On  the  very  morning  of  his 
departure  he  laid  the  foundation  of  a  Land  League  in  America,  and  on 
March  10  he  sailed  for  home.  He  reached  Queenstown  on  March  21  ;  the 
Dissolution  took  place  on  March  24,  and  the  first  election  in  Ireland 
^\'as  on  April  1.  The  interval  for  a  general  electoral  campaign  was  small 
indeed.  However,  the  moment  he  landed  in  Ireland  he  proceeded  to  fight 
the  election  with  an  energy  that  seemed  diabolic.  He  rushed  from  one 
part  of  the  country  to  another,  made  innumerable  speeches,  had  interviews 
with  most  of  the  Parliamentary  candidates,  himself  stood  for  three  con- 
stituencies. Throughout  all  this  feverish  struggle  there  was  ever  by  his 
side,  sharing,  and  often  doing  most  of  his  work,  the  bright,  fiercely  in- 
dustrious, sleeplessly  active  young  secretary  whom  he  had  summoned  to 
him  in  America. 

Mr.  Parnell  fought  the  entire  election  with  the  sum  of  £1,2.50 — £1,000 
which  he  obtained  as  a  personal  loan,  £100  sent  from  Liverpool,  and  £150 
which  was  obtained  by  his  astute  secretary  from  political  opponents  after 
a  fashion  not  unamusing.^  He  was  thus  unable  to  put  forward  candidates 
for  several  constituencies  in  which  his  name  would  have  ensured  success, 
and  he  was  obliged  to  put  up  with  the  wrecks  of  broken  faith  and  falsified 
pledges  which  previous  Parliaments  had  laid  high  and  dry  on  the  political 
shore.  In  some  other  constituencies  he  did  not  find  time  or  opportunity 
to  interfere  at  all.  And  in  this  way  he  and  the  constituencies  and  the 
Irish  cause  were  deprived  of  many  a  man  who  might  have  swelled  the 
ranks  of  those  who  fought  throughout  the  memorable  years  between  1880 
and  1885.  His  toughest  contest  was  in  the  city  of  Cork,  which  he  wonfrom 
Mr.  Nicholas  D.  Murphy,  a  characteristic  specimen  of  the  class  of  Catholic 
Whigs  whose  timidity  and  treachery  have  been  one  of  the  most  potent 
agencies  in  the  hands  of  English  Ministers  for  prolonging  the  reign  of  Irish 
misery  and  of  Irish  servitude.  The  result  of  the  whole  election  was  that 
there  were  sixty-eight  men  returned  as  Home  Rulers.  The  deceptiveness  of 
this  total  will  Idb  judged  from  the  fact  that  among  the  Home  Rulers  were 
reckoned  such  men  as  Mr.  J.  Orrell  Lever,  returned  as  one  of  the  members 
for  Galway,  and  Mr.  Whitworth,  returned  for  Drogheda.  Of  the  other 
Home  Rulers  the  majority  were  reckoned  supporters  of  Mr.  Shaw,  and 
but  a  small  minority  were  openly  pledged  to  follow  Mr.  Parnell  ;  a  con- 
siderable number  had  not  made  a  definite  choice  between  the  policies  of 
the  rival  leaders. 

I  T.  M.  Healy  in  JJniUd  Ireland,  August  29,  1S83. 


TH^  LAi^D  LEAGUE.  l^^ 


CHAPTEK,  X. 

THE   LAND   LEAGUE. 

The  struggle  between  the  two  sections  of  the  Home  Eule  Party  soon  began. 
Without  "any  consultation  with  Mr.  Parnell  a  meeting  of  the  new  party 
was  called  for.  Several  of  the  new  members  refused  to  attend.  A  second 
meeting  had  to  be  convened,  and  this  took  place  at  the  City  Hall,  Dublin, 
on  May  17.  On  this  occasion  nearly  every  one  of  the  new  men  who  had 
been  returned  to  support  Mr.  Parnell  was  present.  To  the  general  world 
they  were  unknown,  obscure,  and  to  some  extent  despised  ;  and  many  of 
them  were  young.  But  there  was  scarcely  one  of  them  whose  previous 
career  had  not  been  a  preparation  for  the  position  which  he  now  held,  and 
who  had  not  been  living  a  life  either  of  action  or  of  thought  to  which  mem- 
bership of  a  party  led  by  such  a  leader  as  Mr.  Parnell  was  an  appropriate 
climax.  Amid  their  varied  characters  they  all  possessed  something  alike 
in  a  certain  dash  of  fanaticism.  Mr,  Justin  McCarthy  had  been  elected 
before.  Almost  from  his  entry  into  the  House  of  Commons  he  had  drifted 
towards  the  side  of  Mr.  Parnell.  Some  surprise  was  felt  when  he  consented 
to  stand  and  be  elected  as  an  Irish  member  ;  probably  there  was  more  than 
one  city  in  England  or  Scotland  that  would  have  felt  honoured  by  such  a 
representative  as  the  author  of  the  '  History  of  Our  Own  Times,'  and  there 
certainly  would  in  time  have  been  a  Liberal  Administration  that  would  have 
been  glad  to  have  counted  him  among  its  members.  Even  many  Irishmen 
at  the  start  of  Justin  McCarthy's  career  may  have  felt  that  he  would  have 
taken  his  place  in  the  ranks  of  an  English  Liberal  Government  as  appropri- 
ately as  in  those  of  an  Irish  National  Party.  And  yet  Justin  McCarthy 
had'^a  past  of  which  but  few  people  knew  ;  but  to  those  who  knew  that 
past,  its  most  complete  and  fitting  sequel  was  that  Mr.  McCarthy  should 
be  one  of  the  leaders  of  the  first  really  independent  party  in  the  British 
Parliament. 

Justin  McCarthy  was  born  in  Cork  in  1830.  When  he  was  a  boy  the 
capital  of  Munster  could  lay  claim  to  really  deserve  the  traditional  reputa- 
tion of  the  province  for  learning.  Mr.  McCarthy's  father  was  one  of  the 
best  classical  scholars  of  the  day,  and  there  was  at  that  time  a  schoolmaster 
named  Goulding — the  name  is  familiar  to  many  a  Corkman  still — who  was 
a  really  fine  scholar.  Justin  McCarthy  Avas  one  of  Goulding's  pupils,  and 
when  he  left  school  he  had  the  not  common  power  even  among  hard  stu- 
dents of  being  able  to  read  Greek  fluently,  and  to  write  as  well  as  translate 
Latin  wnth  complete  ease.  He  had  taught  himself  shorthand,  and  his  first 
employment  was  that  of  a  reporter  on  the  Cork  Examiner.  It  may  be  an 
interesting  fact  to  note  that  his  hand  still  retains  its  cunning,  and  that  he 
may  often  be  observed  taking  down  on  the  margin  of  the  Parliamentary 
Order  Paper  the  exact  words  of  som.e  important  Ministerial  statement  for 
quotation  in  his  leading  article.  There  are  two  other  important  reminis- 
cences of  Mr.  McCarthy's  reporting  days.  He  was  present  at  the  meeting 
in  Cork  at  which  the  late  Judge  Keogh  swore  that  oath  which  played  so 
tragic  a  part  in  Irish  history  ;  and  he  was  also  present,  as  has  been  seen,  at 
the  famous  dinner  at  which  the  present  Lord  Eit.?:gerald,  then  a  rising  yo-ang 
lawyer,  in  the  ardour  and  virulence  of  his  patriotism,  bearded  a  Lord- 
Lieutenant,  and  scandalized  an  audience  of  Cork's  choicest  Whigs.  It  was 
in  1847  that  Mr.  McCarthy  started  his  professional  life,  and  everybody 
knows  that  all  that  was  young,  enthusiastic,  and  earnest  in  Cork  shared  the 


176  The  parnell  movement. 

political  aspirations  of  that  stormy  time.  There  had  been  in  existence  fof 
many  years  a  debating  society  known  as  the  '  Scientific  and  Literary 
Society,'  and  one  of  the  many  forms  in  whicli  the  new  spirit  roused  by 
Young  Ireland  showed  itself  was  the  starting  of  a  body  known  as  the  Cork 
Historical  Society,  as  a  rival  to  the  older  and  tamer  association.  Among 
the  members  of  this  body  were  many  young  fellows  who  afterwards  rose  to 
importance.  Sir  John  Pope  Hennessy,  lately  Governor  of  the  Mauritius, 
and  Justin  McCarthy  himself,  were  among  its  first  recruits.  The  Historical 
Society  became  a  recruiting  ground  for  Young  Ireland  ;  nearly  all  its  mem- 
bers joined  the  party  of  combat,  and  they  founded  one  of  the  many  Con- 
federate Clubs  that  were  started  to  prepare  for  the  coming  struggle. 

President  Grevy  in  his  sober  age  remembers  the  day  when  he  mounted  a 
barricade.  Similarly  Justin  McCarthy,  in  his  maturity  of  philosophic  calm, 
can  look  back  to  a  time  when  he  dreamed  of  rifles  and  bayonet  charges,  and 
death  in  the  midst  of  fierce  fight  for  the  caiise  of  Ireland.  To  those  who 
know  him  there  is  no  difference  in  the  man  of  to-day  and  the  man  of  '48. 
He  has  still  the  same  unflinching  courage  as  then.  In  this  respect,  indeed, 
Justin  McCarthy  is  a  singular  mixture  of  incompatibilities.  There  is  no 
man  who  enjoys  the  hour  more  keenly.  He  has  the  capacity  of  M.  Renan 
for  finding  the  life  around  him  amusing  ;  enjoys  society  and  solitude,  work 
and  play,  a  choice  dinner  or  an  all-night  sitting.  But  he  has  eminently  '  a 
two  o'clock  in  the  morning  courage  ' — a  readiness  to  face  the  worst  without 
notice.  With  his  fifty-seven  years  lie  is  still  a  man  of  sanguine  tempera- 
ment ;  but  in  '48  he  w^as  only  eighteen.  He  naturally,  therefore,  belonged 
to  the  section  which  had  Mitchel  for  its  apostle,  and  open  and  imn)ediate 
insurrection  for  its  gospel.  Mitchel  was  arrested,  and  no  attempt  was  made 
to  rescue  him  ;  and  there  were  many  among  the  companions  of  McCarthy 
who  saw  in  this  failure  the  death  of  their  hopes,  the  end  of  their  efforts  for 
the  Irish  cause.     Justin  McCarthy  was  not  one  of  those. 

Even  after  Mitchel's  arrest,  and  the  miserable j^asco  in  which  the  rebel- 
lion of  1848  had  ended,  thei-e  were  still  some  young  and  unconquerable  men 
who  thought  that  all  hopes  of  resurrection  through  revolution  should  not  be 
allowed  to  die.  Probably  they  did  not  hope  to  win  in  the  struggle  against 
the  might  of  England  ;  but  the  awful  tragedy  thus  being  enacted  in  Ireland 
made  acquiescence  a  crime,  and  they  resolved  to  do  something  which  would 
get  the  world  to  stop  and  listen,  and  perhaps  pity  and  help.  If  they  could 
not  win,  they  would  show  at  least  that  there  were  some  Irishmen  who  knew 
how  to  die,  and,  perchance,  out  of  their  graves  might  come  some  hope  for 
the  awful  despair  of  the  Irish  nation  in  this  epoch  of  famine,  plague  and  evic- 
tion. They  enrolled  members,  gathered  arms,  drilled,  settled  a  scheme  of 
simultaneous  revolt  in  various  parts  of  the  country.  In  all  these  things 
Justin  McCarthy  took  his  part,  and  in  the  region  where  the  Cork  Park  now 
stands,  the  future  historian  swore  in  the  members  of  a  revolutionary  organ- 
ization. The  effort  ended  as  so  many  before  and  since  :  there  was  a  mis- 
take about  the  signal ;  the  simultaneous  outbreak  did  not  take  place,  and 
the  few  sporadic  risings  which  did  break  out  were  crushed. 

With  this  episode  ended  for  the  moment  Justin  McCarthy's  political  his- 
tory, and  from  this  period,  for  many  years,  his  story  is  that  of  the  literary 
man.  In  the  year  1851  Mr.  McCarthy  first  tried  his  fortunes  in  London. 
The  attempt  ended  in  failure,  and  he  had  to  return  to  the  reporter's  place 
in  Cork.  Not  long  after  this  he  met  with  his  first  piece  of  luck.  There 
was  at  that  time  a  Royal  Commission  for  inquiring  into  the  fairs  and  mar- 
kets of  Ireland,  and  the  secretary  having  broken  down,  Justin  McCarthy 


THE  LAND  LEAGUE.  177 

\;\^as  taken  on  as  the  official  shorthand  writer.  His  a'ptitude  was  such  that 
some  member  of  the  Commission  urged  him  to  again  go  to  London,  and 
armed  liim  "oath  letters  of  introduction  to  persons  of  influence.  This  was  in 
1852.  McCarthy  again  tried  his  chance,  and  went  to  the  Times  and  other 
offices,  but  without  success.  Before  he  could  continue  this  fruitless  labour  he 
heard  of  the  Northern  Times,  the  first  provincial  daily  of  England,  which 
was  just  about  to  be  started  in  Liverpool,  applied  for  a  situation,  and  was 
accepted. 

But  he  was  still  only  a  reporter,  and  even  he  himself  did  not  j^et  very 
well  know  whether  he  was  fitted  for  better  things.  He  worked  on,  gave 
literary  lectures,  and  in  the  end  was  allowed  the  privilesre  of  contributing 
to  the  editorial  columns.  He  remained  in  Liverpool  ti'J  I860  ;  in  that  year 
the  Northern  Times,  pressed  hard  by  more  daring  rivals,  failed.  McCarthy 
v/as  contended  for  by  several  Liverpool  journals,  but  he  declined  all,  fixed 
in  the  resolve  to  make  or  mar  his  fortune  in  London.  At  this  time  the 
j^oung  journalist  had  a  counsellor  who  for  many  years  was  the  chief  arbiter 
of  his  destiny.  Before  he  had  left  Cork  he  had  seen,  but  he  had  never 
spoken  to.  Miss  Charlotte  Allman,  a  member  of  the  well-known  Munster 
family,  and,  in  the  meantime,  Miss  Allman  had  come  to  reside  with  her 
brother  in  Liverpool.  The  two  J^oung  people  resolved  to  marry,  in  spite  of 
the  strong  opposition  of  relatives  and  in  face  of  the  frowning  fortunes  of  a 
young,  a  badly  paid,  and  as  yet  unknown  journalist  ;  and  in  1855  they  were 
married  in  the  town  of  Macclesfield.  To  those  who  knew  Mrs.  McCarthy 
there  is  no  need  to  dilate  on  the  resistless  charm  of  her  truly  beautiful 
nature.  She  never  wrote  a  line  ;  she  did  not  even  pretend  to  any  literary 
power  ;  but  she  had  the  keen  intelKgence  of  sympathy,  she  had  faith  in  her 
husband,  and  she  had  indomitable  courage.  It  was  she  that  induced  Mr. 
McCarthy  to  refuse  all  the  Liverpool  offers,  and  that  turned  his  face  steadily 
to  the  larger  hopes  of  London.  The  joint  capital  of  the  young  couple  when 
they  landed  in  London  was  £10.  Of  that  they  spent  more  than  £1  in  buy- 
ing an  olive  or  some  other  sprout,  which  was  planted  with  lofty  hopes  in 
the  garden  of  their  new  house  in  Battersea,  and  which,  of  course,  perished 
after  a  short  and  sickly  existence. 

Mr.  McCarthy's  first  engagement  in  London  was  as  a  Parliamentary 
reporter  on  the  Morning  Star.  He  found  time  to  do  other  work  in  the 
intervals  of  this  hard  occupation,  and,  mainly  through  the  persuasions  of 
his  wife,  tried  his  hand  at  an  essay  for  one  of  the  big  magazines.  He  had 
taught  himself  French,  German,  and  Italian  ;  was  familiar  with  the  three 
literatures  ;  and  his  first  attempt  at  essay-writing  had  Schiller  for  its 
subject.  He  next  tried  the  Westminster  Revieiu,  and  two  articles  of  his  in 
that  periodical  suggested  views  so  novel,  and  at  the  same  time  so  correct, 
that  they  attracted  the  attention  of  John  Stuart  Mill.  The  philosopher 
was  introduced  to  the  young  writer,  showed  a  friendly  interest  in  his 
welfare,  and  helped  to  advance  his  fortunes.  Promotion  at  last  began  to 
come  rapidly.  In  the  autumn  of  1860  he  was  appointed  foreign  editor  of 
the  Morning  Star,  and  in  1865  he  became  editor-in-chief.  Those  who  re- 
member the  journal  and  the  times  when  it  lived  will  know  what  splendid 
service  it  did  to  the  cause  of  Ireland,  which  at  that  period  seemed  terribly 
hopeless  indeed  ;  and  its  tone  of  energetic  and  even  fierce  advocacy  of  Irish 
national  claims  was,  of  course,  largely  due  to  the  inspiration  of  the  ardent 
Irishman  who  was  then  at  its  head.  It  was  while  lie  was  in  this  position 
that  Mr.  McCarthy  became  intimately  acquainted  with  Mr.  John  Bright. 
The  great  tribune  was  fond  of  spending  some  hours  in  the  office  of  the  Star, 

12 


178  THE  PARNELL  MO  VEMENT. 

in  which  his  sister — the  widow  of  Samuel  Lucas,  who  was  brother  of  the 
Frederick  Lucas  of  Irish  history — had  some  shares  ;  and  many  an  hour  did 
the  editor  and  the  politician  spend  together  in  discussing  the  oratorical 
exploits  of  Mr.  Gladstone,  the  thing  that  did  duty  for  a  conscience  in  Mr. 
Disraeli,  or  the  comparative  merits  of  Shakespeare  and  Milton.  It  is  one 
of  the  unpleasant  consequences  of  the  fierce  struggles  of  the  last  few  years 
that  those  two  old  friends  have  ceased  even  to  speak  to  one  another.  But 
in  1868,  when  it  became  clear  that  Mr.  Bright  was  going  to  become  a 
Minister,  and  when  he  sold  out  his  share  in  the  Morning  Star,  Mr. 
McCarthy  lost  all  desire  to  be  further  connected  with  the  journal,  and 
resigned  his  position. 

He  then  went  to  America.     His  reputation  had  gone  before  him,  and  he 
found  an  embarrassing  choice  of  offers  awaiting  him.     He  had,  while  still 
editor  of  the  Star,  published  his  first  novel,  '  Paul  Massey  '  (this  appeared 
in  1866) — a  story  written  after  the  sensational  fashion  of  that  hour,  which 
Mr.  McCarthy  has  since  suppressed.     This  had  been  followed,  in  1867,  by 
the  '  Waterdale  Neighbours  ' — a  charming  story.     One  of  Mr.  McCarthy's 
first  engagements  was  to  write  a  series  of  stories  for  the  Galaxy,  then 
perhaps  the  chief  literary  magazine  in  America.     He  was  also  asked  to 
lecture,  and  partly  because  the  terms  were  extremely  remunerative,  and 
partly  out  of  a  desire  to  see  the  country,  he  consented.  He  was  an  extremely 
successful  lecturer,  and  between  his  pen  and  his  tongue  found  the  United 
States  the  El  Dorado  it  has  proved  to  so  many  from  the  old  world.     He 
paid  a  brief  visit  to  London  in  the  middle  of  1870,  returned  again  in  the 
autmnn  of  that  year,  and  finally  in  the  autumn  of  1871  came  back  to  Eng- 
land for  good.     His  name  meantime  had  been  kept  steadily  before  the 
English  reading  public.     In  1869  '  My  Enemy's  Daughter,'  which  had  been 
written  nearly  ten  years  before,  ran  through  Belgravia,  then  under  the 
management  of  Miss  Braddon.    Immediately  after  his  return  Mr.  McCarthy 
was  offered,  and  accepted,  an  engagement  on  the  Daily  Neivs  as  Parlia- 
mentary leaxler  writer.     Eor  years  he  was  one  of  the  best-known  figures  in 
the  Reporters'   Gallery,  and  was  looked  up  to  by  most  of  his  editorial 
colleagues,  as  the  man  who  took  the  most  rapid  and  the  most  accurate  view 
of  a  Parliamentary  situation,  and  as  having  the  most  sagacious  head  of  the 
political  writers  of  his  time.     His  literary  fortunes,   meantime,   steadily 
advanced  ;  and  in  '  Dear  Lady  Disdain '  he  wrote  a  novel  which  everybody 
talked  about,  and  upon  which  there  was  a  real  run.     With  the  versatility 
which  is  so  singular  he  soon  after  devoted  himself  to  another  and  a  very 
different  kind  of  work,  undertaking  a  contemporary  chronicle,  under  the 
title   'The  History  of  Our  Own  Times,'   the  first  two  volumes  of  which 
were  published  in  1878.     Everybody   knows   the  result.     The  book — to 
quote  the  hackneyed  expression — took  the  towni  by  storm.     It  was  praised 
wdth  equal  fervour  by  Conservative  and  by  Liberal  critics  ;  its  style  was 
as  much  an  object  of  eulogy  as  its  tone  and  its  temper.     It  was,  indeed,  a 
model  of  what  contemporary  history  should  be.     Equal  justice  was  dealt 
out  to  all  parties  ;  the  portraits  of  men  were  clear-cut  and  sympathetic, 
and  the  style  was  evenly  melodious  without  one  single  attem.pt  at  rhetoric, 
without  one  phrase  or  one  passage  that  could  be  called  pretentious.     The 
book  sold  with  enormous  rapidity,  and  edition  followed  edition  in  rapid  suc- 
cession.    Great  as  was  its  success  on  this  side  of  the  water,  it  had  a  success 
still  greater  in  America.     PJval  publishers  brought  out  rival  editions,  and 
the  present  writer  never  remembers  to  have  gone  on  any  journey  in  America 
without  seeing  a  copy  of  the  '  History  of  Our  Own  Times  '  in  the  hands  of 


THE  LAND  LEAGUE.  179 

several  of  the  passengers.  But  the  hapless  author  gamed  little  from  this 
enormous  American  sale,  for  as  yet  there  is  no  copyright  betv/een  England 
and  America.  His  old  publishers,  the  Messrs.  Harper  and  Brothers,  Avith 
that  fair  dealing  which  characterises  all  their  transactions,  did  send  him 
voluntarily  an  occasional  instalment  of  a  hundred  pounds  or  so,  but  they 
at  the  same  time  told  him  that  if  there  had  been  an  international  copyright 
they  could  have  well  afforded  to  have  given  him  £10,000  for  his  rights.  It 
may  be  interesting  to  note  that  Mr.  McCarthy's  profits  from  the  book  up  to 
the  present  have  been  £6,000. 

Little  has  been  said  of  Mr.  McCarthy's  modern  political  career.  The 
member  for  Longford  is  one  of  the  men  who  does  not  owe  Mr.  Parnell  any- 
thing— as  the  Irish  leader  would  himself  be  the  first  to  acknov,dedge — but 
Mr.  McCarthy  soon  saw  that  in  Mr.  Parnell  there  was  the  real  chief  of  that 
honest  and  independent  Parliamentary  Party  for  which,  like  so  many  of 
the  old  '48  men,  he  had  been  vainly  looking  upwards  of  thirty  years  ;  to 
Mr.  Parnell,  then,  he  unreservedly  gave  his  confidence  and  his  support. 
Sagacious,  tranquil,  and  experienced,  he  was  thrown  into  a  prominent 
position  at  an  epoch  of  fierce  and  tempestuous  passions  ;  but  nobody  was 
readier  to  see,  when  the  time  came,  the  necessity  for  strong  action.  He 
has  been  ready  on  every  emergency  to  take  his  share  of  the  unspeakable 
drudgery  to  which  Irish  members  have  been  subjected  during  the  last  few 
years  ;  and  it  imposed  a  greater  sacrifice  on  him  than  on  any  other  member 
of  the  Irish  party  to  face  the  odium  and  the  loss  of  personal  and  profes- 
sional jirestkje  which  a  part  in  these  unpopular  labours  involved.  If  the 
delivery  of  Mr.  INIcOarthy  were  eqiial  to  his  intellectual  and  rhetorical 
powers,  he  v/ould  be  amongst  the  foremost  speakers  of  the  House.  He  is 
ready  ;  he  has  eminently  clearness  of  head  and  calmness  of  temper  ;  and 
his  ideas  clothe  themselves  in  language  of  beauty,  smoothness,  and  appro- 
priateness with  an  unerring  regularity  which  belongs  to  but  two  other 
speakers  in  the  House — Mr.  Gladstone  and  Mr.  Sexton.  He  has  in  more 
than  one  debate  delivered  the  best  speech  in  point  of  matter  and  of  form. 
His  v/as  the  best  speech  in  the  strange  debate  which  occurred  on  Msw 
O'Donnell's  suspension  for  his  attacks  on  M.  Challemel-Lacour,  and  his 
was  the  most  effective  of  the  many  effective  replies  given  to  Mr.  Forster's.- 
historic  attack  on  Mr.  Parnell.  Mr.  McCarthy  in  one  style  of  speech  is 
fa,r  and  away  superior  to  any  of  his  party,  and  probably  to  any  man  in  the 
House — that  is,  as  an  after-dinner  speaker.  He  bubbles  over  with  wit  of 
the  most  delicate  and  playful  kind,  and  can  keep  the  table  in  a  roar. 

Finally,  let  this  sketch  of  Mr.  McCarthy's  career  be  closed  w-ith  the 
mention  of  the  saddest  and  darkest  page  of  his  life.  Just  as  his  long 
struggle  was  crowned  with  success,  and  as  he  became  from  the  poor  and 
obscure  reporter  the  popular  novelist,  the  successful  historian,  and  the 
member  of  Parliament,  the  woman  without  whom  he  would  have  remained, 
in  all  probability,  poor  and  obscure  to  the  end,  was  seized  with  a  lingering 
illness  and  died.  It  would  be  unbecoming  to  even  attempt  a  description 
of  what  this  loss  meant  to  Mr.  McCarthy. 

Few  can  paint  a  character  completely,  and  it  is  acquaintance  only  with 
the  member  for  Longford  that  can  make  intelligible  the  peculiarly  strong 
hold  he  has  over  the  affections  and  admiration  of  his  intim-ates.  It  is  not 
often  that  there  are  found  united,  in  the  same  man  modesty  and  literary 
genius,  a  toleration  of  others  with  a  power  of  absolute  self -abnegation,  <3, 
sane  enjoyment  of  every  hour,  with  the  courage  of  calmly  facing,  for  thn 
eake  of  the  right  cause,  Fortune's  worst  blov/s,  Destiny's  most  cruel  decrcrf^^ 

12—2 


I  So  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

Moderate  in  advice,  when  the  fortunes  of  his  country  are  at  stake,  he  is 
always  boldest  when  acts  involve  only  personal  risk  to  himself.  It  is  this 
curious  mixture  of  tenderness,  shyness,  and  almost  feminine  romanticism 
with  a  thoroughly  masculine  and  fearless  spirit,  that  make  him  so  beloved. 
There  is  something  incomplete,  says  the  French  epigram,  in  the  noble  life 
that  does  not  end  on  the  scaffold,  in  the  prison,  or  on  the  field  of  battle. 
May  Justin  McCarthy  have  many  and  prosperous  days,  and  a  tranquil  and 
honourable  end  !  But  it  is  almost  a  pity  that  he  cannot  be  hanged  for 
high  treason,  to  shov/  how  calmly  a  quiet  man  could  die  for  Ireland. 

In  the  debates  of  the  meeting  in  the  City  Hall,  Mr.  Thomas  Sexton 
broke  silence  for  only  a  fcAv  minutes.  Nobody  could  help  reraai'king  that 
his  voice  was  peculiarly  melodious  ;  but  few  had  any  conception  of  the 
great  things  that  were  in  this  thin,  delicate,  rather  retiring  man. 

Thomas  Sexton  was  born  in  Waterford  in  1848.  He  had  not  yet  reached 
his  thirteenth  birthday  when  he  entered  a  competition  for  a  clerkship  in 
the  secretary's  oflfice  of  the  Waterford  and  Limerick  Company.  The  post 
was  naturally  unimportant ;  the  salary,  of  course,  small  ;  but  that  did  not 
prevent  thirty  youths  entering  the  lists.  Of  these  Sexton  was  the  youngest, 
but  he  obtained  the  first  place.  He  remained  in  the  secretary's  office  till 
he  was  between  twenty  and  twenty-one  years  of  age,  when,  as  will  be  seen, 
he  left  his  native  town,  drawn  to  Dublin,  like  most  young  men  of  ability 
and  enterprise. 

The  influence  of  his  many  years  of  dry  toil  in  an  office  is  visible  in 
Sexton  to-day.  It  has  often  been  remarked  that  he  has  what  is  considered 
an  un-Irish  talent  of  dealing  readil}'',  clearly,  and  accurately  with  figures. 
This  is  no  new  talent.  When  he  was  in  the  railway  office  in  Waterford 
his  friends  used  to  amiase  themselves  by  giving  him  a  long  sum  in  com- 
pound addition,  which  most  people  would  find  it  hard  to  calculate  rapidly 
even  with  the  aid  of  jjen  and  ink.  Sexton  would  close  his  eyes,  and  in  a 
few  minutes  v/ould  give  the  answer  with  invariable  accuracy.  He  used  to 
say  that  the  figures  were  'written  on  his  brain.'  Sir  George  Trevelyau 
once  brought  in  a  Bill  to  increase  ofiicial  pay ;  and,  sj)eaking  within  a  few 
minutes  after  the  Chief  Secretary  had  concluded.  Sexton  was  able  to  tell, 
almost  to  a  penny,  what  the  sum-total  meant  to  each  individual,  and  waa 
complimented  by  Sir  George  on  his  accuracy.  But  Sexton  had  another 
life  beside  that  of  the  railway  official.  In  his  boyhood's  days  there  was 
still  a  good  deal  of  literary  and  social  activity  in  the  Irish  provincial 
towns.  The  Mechanics'  Institute  and  the  Catholic  Young  Men's  Society 
were  both  flourishing  institutions  in  Waterford,  and  Sexton  soon  be- 
came the  most  prominent  figure  in  both.  He  established  a  debating 
society  ;  lectured  when  he  was  but  sixteen  on  Oliver  Goldsmith  and 
John  Banim,  and  on  one  occasion  did  duel  in  the  To^vn  Law  with  a 
delegation  from  the  Portland  Debating  Society — a  neighbouring  rival 
— on  the  still  vexed  question  of  emigration.  It  speaks  well  for  their 
instinctive  appreciation  of  genius  that  the  people  of  Waterford  did  not 
allow  Sexton  to  leave  their  towm,  though  he  was  but  twenty-one  years 
of  age,  altogether  unnoticed.  A  public  dinner  was  held  in  his  honour, 
and  he  received  addresses  from  the  societies  in  which  he  had  figured  so 
largely. 

This  was  the  end  of  Sexton  as  a  public  speaker  for  a  long  series  of 
years.  In  Dublin,  where  he  arrived  in  1869,  he  at  once  became  a  leader- 
writer  on  the  Nation,  then,  as  so  long  before,  the  most  outspoken  advocate 


THE  LAND  LEAGUE.  i8l 

of  Nationalist  principles.  Sexton  also  in  time  became  editor  of  the  Weeldy 
News  and  of  Young  Ireland,  two  publications  also  issued  from  the  Nation 
office.  Immersed  in  these  things,  and  of  a  temperament  shy  and  easy- 
going, Sexton  never  sought  or  even  accepted  any  opportunity  of  displaying 
his  great  oratorical  powers.  He  took  his  share  in  all  the  National  move- 
ments, but  it  was  as  a  silent  and  unknown  member  of  those  committees 
which  do  the  practical  work  and  leave  the  speech-making  to  others. 
Probably  there  was  not  one  even  of  his  intimates  who  suspected  that  this 
retiring  litterateur,  fond  of  his  cigar,  of  pleasant  company,  and  of 
prolonged  vigils,  would  ever  have  the  courage  to  face  an  audience  larger 
than  the  petit  comite  which  his  wit — sly,  delicate,  slightly  cynic — used  to 
delight.  But  in  1879 — the  year  of  the  Land  League  and  of  revolutionary 
upheaval — Sexton  was  brought  at  last,  and  almost  in  spite  of  himself,  into 
the  stormy  arena  of  public  life.  In  1879  he  was  sent  by  the  Council  of  the 
Land  League  to  address  a  meeting  in  Dromore  West,  County  Sligo.  To 
the  credit  of  the  people  there  be  it  said  that  his  speech  made  a  profound 
impression,  and  that  his  great  gifts  received  immediate  recognition.  But 
Dublin  still  did  not  know  him  ;  and  when  the  General  Election  came 
he  went  very  near  being  excluded  from  the  ranks  of  the  new  Parliamen- 
tarians. He  was  proposed  for  his  native  county,  but  he  was  withdrawn ; 
and  when  he  was  sent  to  Sligo  he  had  to  overcome  many  difficulties,  and 
even  friends  thought  an  attack  by  so  young  and  so  obscure  a  man  on  a  great 
magnate  like  Colonel  King-Harman  was  a  hopeless  enterprise.  But 
Sexton  stumped  the  county,  roused  enthusiasm  everywhere,  and  drove 
Colonel  King-Harman  from  the  seat. 

In  Parliament,  Sexton  again  showed  no  anxiety  to  push  himself  pre- 
maturely forward.  During  his  first  session  of  Parliament  he  remained, 
comparatively  speaking,  unnoticed.  He  was  phenomenally  constant  iu 
attendance,  and  he  was  in  the  habit  of  putting  what,  in  these  early  days  of 
the  new  Irish  Party,  was  considered  a  very  large  number  of  questions. 
But  nobody  yet  had  any  idea  that  there  was  anything  in  him  above  very 
earnest  and  very  respectable  mediocrity,  nor  during  the  recess  which 
followed  did  he  advance  his  position  to  any  appreciable  degree.  He  was 
certainly  one  of  the  most  consttint  among  the  speakers  at  the  Land  League 
meetings  throughout  the  country  ;  but  this  fact,  while  it  procured  him  the 
notice  of  the  Government  so  far  that  he  was  included  in  the  famous  trial 
of  the  traversers,  did  not  have  any  very  perceptible  effect .  upon  his  own 
political  fortunes.  It  was  on  an  evening  when  Mr.  Forster's  Coercion  Bill 
was  under  discussion  that  Sexton  broke  upon  the  House  for  the  first  time 
as  a  great  orator.  The  House  was,  when  he  rose,  but  ill-prepared,  indeed, 
for  a  patient  acceptance  of  any  speech  from  an  Irish  member  ;  for  of  the 
subject  it  was  already  sick  to  death ;  and  the  final  outcome  was  as  pre- 
destined as  the  procession  of  the  earth  through  the  regions  of  the  air. 
The  physical  circumstances  of  the  moment  tended  to  increase  the  pre- 
valent depression,  for  it  was  a  dull,  dark,  dismal  evening.  The  House  was, 
therefore,  listless,  sombre,  and  but  thinly  filled  when  Sexton  rose.  He 
spoke  for  two  hours,  not  amid  the  enthusiastic  plaudits  which  greet  a 
powerful  exponent  of  a  great  party's  principles,  but  amid  chilling  silence, 
interrupted  occasionally  by  the  thin  cheers  of  the  small  group  of  Irishmen 
around  him — and  yet  when  he  sat  down  the  whole  House  instinctively  felt 
that  a  great  orator  had  appeared  among  them.  In  the  London  newspapers 
the  speech  was  reported  in  but  a  few  lines.  But  members  talked  of  it  in 
the  lobby  and  the  smoke-room  ;    Sir  Stafford  Northcote  was  reported  to 


1 82  THE  PAR  NELL  MOVEMENT. 

have  praised  it  highly,  and,  among  members  of  the  House  of  Commons  at 
least,  Sexton's  reputation  was  established. 

In  the  councils  of  his  party,  the  voice  of  Sexton  has  always  been  for 
good  sense.  Sagacity  is,  indeed,  the  very  soul  of  his  orator3^  To  think 
of  him  merety  as  the  eloquent  speaker  is  to  forget  the  still  greater  claim  to 
respect  he  holds  as  a  man  of  remarkably  well-balanced  mind,  of  keen  and 
almost  faultless  judgment.  To  describe  the  characteristics  of  Sexton'a 
oratory  is  a  task  of  extreme  difficulty.  He  can  marshal  facts  ;  he  can  dis- 
cuss figures  with  the  driest  statistician,  and  can  balance  arguments  with 
the  most  logic-chopping  member  of  the  House  ;  and  he  can  at  the  same 
timiC  invest  every  subject  with  the  glory  of  splendid  language. 

For  the  rest,  Sexton  is  a  keen  observer,  and^his  reading  of  men's  motives 
is  helped  by  a  slight  dash  of  cynicism.  In  ordinary  affairs  Mase  and 
jDhysically  lethargic,  his  political  industry  is  marvellous.  He  enters  the 
House  of  Commons  when  the  Speaker  takes  the  chair,  and  never  leaves  it 
until  the  door-keeper's  cry  of  '  Who  goes  home  V  is  heard.  He  sits  in  hia 
j)lace  during  all  those  long  hours,  grudging  the  time  he  spends  at  a  hasty 
dinner — practically  the  one  meal  he  takes  in  the  day — or  the  few  minutes 
he  gives  to  the  smoking  of  the  dearly-loved  cigar.  Before  he  goes  down  to 
the  House  he  has  mastered  all  the  business  of  the  day,  and  his  breakfast 
is  of  Blue  Books.  Orderly  in  many  of  his  habits,  he  rarely  approaches  the 
discussion  of  any  question  without  full  knowledge  of  all  the  facts  carefully 
arranged  and  abundantly  illustrated  by  letters  or  other  documents.  He 
has  great  mastery  of  detail.  Probably  he  was  the  only  one  except  Sir 
Charles  Dilke  v/ho  knew  all  the  figures  connected  -with  the  Redistribution 
Bill.  With  every  measure  that  in  the  least  degree  concerns  Ireland  he  is 
acquainted  down  to  the  last  clause,  and  thus  it  is  that  he  enters  on  all 
debates  with  a  singularly  complete  equipment.  Finally,  his  mind  is  extra- 
ordinarily alert.  His  opponent  has  scarcely  sat  down  when  he  is  on  his 
feet  with  counter-arguments  to  meet  even  the  plausible  case  that  has  been 
made  against  him.  It  seems  impossible  to  take  him  unawares,  and  words 
come  without  hesitation  to  express  every  shade  of  meaning.  This  gift, 
aided  by  sangfroid,  m.akes  him  a  most  formidable  opponent,  and  even  the 
Speaker,  backed  by  all  the  new  rules  of  the  House,  and  his  own  large  and 
generous  interpretation  of  his  powers,  has  had  more  than  once  to  succumb 
before  the  ready  answer  and  the  cool  temper  of  Mr.  Sexton. 

Not  one  man  in  a,  hundred  v/ould  ever  guess  when  he  heard  Mr.  Arthur 
O'Connor  addressing  the  House  of  Commons  that  he  had  a  drop  of  Irish 
blood  in  his  veins.  The  whole  air  of  the  member  for  Queen's  County  is 
rigid,  serious,  icy.  He  drops  his  words  with  calculated  slowness,  and  the 
subjects  he  selects  for  treatment  are  dry  and  formal  and  statistical — the 
subjects,  in  short,  which  are  supposed  to  attract  the  plodding  mind  of  the 
typical  Englishman.  The  physique  of  Arthur  O'Connor,  too,  suggests  the 
same  idea  of  a  calmness  and  unem.otional  self-control  which  an  Irishman  is 
rarely  supposed  to  possess  ;  he  is  tall,  thin,  with  a  sombre  air,  and  a  cold, 
dark-blue  eye.  But  to  those  who  have  learned  to  know  him,  all  these  out- 
ward presentments  are  but  a  mask  ;  in  the  whole  Irish  Party — with  all  its 
fierce  and  strange  spirits — there  is  not  one  whose  heart  beats  with  emotion 
so  profound,  with  a  hatred  so  fierce,  a  holy  rage  so  lethal.  The  keen 
analysis  of  the  French  mind  has  divided  enthusiasm  into  two  kinds — the 
enthusiasm  that  is  warm,  and  the  enthusiasm  that  is  cold.  The  enthusiasm 
of  Arthur  O'Connor  is  of  the  cold,  that  is,  of  the  perilous,  type. 

Arthur  O'Connor  was  born  in  London  on  October  1,  1844.     His  father 


THE  LAND  LEAGUE.  183 

v^as  a  county  Kerry  man,  and  was  for  many  years  one  of  the  most  eminent 
physicians,  and  at  the  same  time  one  of  the  best-known  figures  in  the  social 
life  of  London.  Arthur  was  educated  at  Ushaw  ;  and  in  the  year  1863 
began  life  for  himself  by  competing  for  a  clerkship  in  the  War  OflB.ce. 
There  was  but  one  vacancy,  and  there  were  thirty  competitors  ;  O'Connor 
got  the  place,  obtaining  a  higher  average  of  marks  tha,n  any  Civil  Service 
competitor  for  many  years.  For  the  space  of  sixteen  years  the  young 
Irishman  led  the  dulJ,  sombre,  monotonous  life  of  the  Civil  Servant  in  the 
gloomy  building  in  Pall  Mall.  He  was  a  model  clerk  in  being  always  ac- 
cui'ate,  attentive,  hardworking  ;  there  never  was,  and  there  never  could  be, 
a  charge  of  a  single  act  of  neglect  or  stupidity  during  the  entire  period.  But 
outside  his  office  Arthur  O'Connor  was  the  most  unclerklike  of  men.  He  had 
political  opinions — and  political  opinions  of  the  most  unpopular,  the  most  un- 
fashionable, above  all  of  the  most  unprofitable,  chai-acter.  An  effusive  and 
unmeaning  address  to  some  monarchical  personage  was  once  being  hawked 
around  the  War  Office  ;  it  came  in  the  end  to  Arthur  O'Connor's  desk.  *  If 
you  don't  take  that  away,' said  O'Connor  to  the  gentleman  who  was  collecting 
signatures,  '  before  I  count  twenty,  I  will  put  it  into  the  fire.'  Then  he  not 
only  professed  Irish  National  principles,  but  he  joined  an  Irish  organiza- 
tion, and  in  time  became  one  of  its  rulers  ;  for  he  was  elected  a  member 
of  the  executive  of  the  Home  Rule  Confederation.  Tinally,  he  began  to  be 
seen  in  the  lobby  in  the  House  of  Commons  in  earnest  and  frequent 
colloquy  with  Mr.  Parnell,  and  the  whisper  went  abroad  that  the  statistical 
clerk  was  priming  the  Irish  agitator  with  obstructive  powder  and  shot.  In 
this  connection  it  may  just  be  as  well  to  make  the  passing  observation  that 
O'Connor  never  on  a  single  occasion  told  Mr.  Parnell  even  one  word  in 
reference  to  matters  which  official  honour  called  upon  him  to  keep  private. 
Arthur  O'Connor  was  by  no  means  anxious  to  remain  in  his  dingy  rooms 
in  Pall  Mall.  Under  a  scheme  of  reorganization,  an  offer  was  made  to 
him,  as  well  as  to  other  clerks,  to  retire  if  he  chose.  He  did  so  choose,  and 
shook  the  dust  of  the  War  Office  from  off  his  feet. 

He  had  already  given  a  taste  of  his  quahty  as  a  political  gladiator  in 
minor  theatres,  and  the  poor-law  guardian  in  his  case  was  veritably  the 
father  of  the  member  of  Parliament.  In  1879  he  was  elected  member  of 
the  Chelsea  Board  of  Guardians,  and  the  main  purpose  which  he  and  his 
friends  had  in  getting  this  place  was  that  he  might  look  after  Catholic 
interests.  These  interests  did,  indeed,  stand  in  sad  need  of  some  advocate. 
Por  six  months,  not  one  of  the  Catholic  inmates  of  the  workhouse  had  been 
allov/ed  to  go  out  to  Mass,  either  on  a  Sunday  or  on  a  holiday ;  nor  was  a 
Catholic  priest  permitted  to  enter  the  place  ;  no  Catholic  prayer-books 
were  given  to  be  read,  and  the  Catholic  children  were  sent  to  Protestant 
schools  ;  and,  finally,  the  institution  was  not  stained  by  having  a  single 
'  Ptomanist ' — as  the  phrase  went  in  the  vocabulary  of  the  Board — among  its 
officials.  On  the  very  first  day  on  which  O'Connor  took  his  seat,  the  most 
eligible  of  all  the  applicants  for  the  humble  position  of  'scrubber '  was  re- 
jected on  the  sole  ground  that  he  was  a  Catholic.  This  was  the  large  and 
complete  penal  code  which  the  new  member  set  out  to  destroy,  and  the  task 
seemed  certainly  audacious  and  desperate  enough.  The  Board  consisted  of 
twenty  membei-s.  O'Connor  was  the  single  Catholic  in  the  whole  number 
— it  was  one  man  against  nineteen.  O'Connor  started  on  his  enterprise  in 
a  characteristic  fashion.  He  was  not  aggressive  in  manner,  nor  violent  in 
language  ;  he  made  no  speeches,  either  strong  or  long,  nor  did  he,  on  the 
other  hand,  intrigue,  or  smile  or  coax.     He  relied  on  two  weapons  alone 


I §4  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

— the  weapons  of  knowledge  and  of  hard  work.  He  first  mastered  the 
whole  complicated  system  of  the  poor-law  code  :  after  a  while  he  had  be- 
come snch  an  expert  in  the  law  of  the  workhouse,  and  was  withal  so  calm 
and  so  composed,  that  his  fellow-guardians  abandoned  any  attempt  to  trip 
him  up. 

But  this  was  only  a  small  part  of  O'Connor's  work.  He  had  been  elected 
a  member  of  the  General  Purposes  Committee — this  was  when  he  was  still 
an  unknown  quantity  to  his  fellow-guardians — and  the  General  Purposes 
was  the  committee  which  had  the  contracts  to  give  and  to  examine,  which 
dealt  with  accounts  and  otlier  matters  of  high  import  in  the  economy  of  the 
workhouse.  O'Connor  devoted  days  and  weeks  to  the  study  of  all  these 
accounts,  with  the  result  that  he  knew  every  item  as  intimately  as  if  he 
had  to  pay  it  out  of  his  ov/n  pocket.  This  was  of  all  forms  of  knowledge 
the  one  which  made  O'Connor  most  formidable.  It  became  impossible  for 
a  penny  to  pass  muster  for  which  full  and  satisfactory  explanation  was  not 
given — jobbery  trembled  beneath  the  pitiless  eye  of  this  cold  and  calm 
inquisitor,  and  rogues  fled  abashed.  AH  this  could  not  be  accomplished 
without  terribly  hard  work.  The  meeting  of  the  General  Purposes  Com- 
mittee and  of  the  Board  was  on  the  same  day — Wednesday- — and  every 
Wednesday,  as  inevitable  as  night  or  death,  O'Connor  was  in  his  place  on 
the  Committee  and  afc  the  Board  ;  and  though  this  work  of  ten  extended  con- 
tinuously from  ten  o'clock  in  the  morning  till  eight  at  night,  with  the 
exception  of  half  an  hour  for  lunch,  in  his  place  he  remained  all  the  time. 
The  Board  was  shocked  at  this  indecent  scrupulousness,  this  shocking 
conscientiousness,  this  rude  industry,  and  disappointed  jobbers  began  to 
ask  how  it  was  that  a  man  could  at  the  same  time  perform  efficiently  the 
duties  of  a  Civil  Servant  and  a  poor-law  guardian.  *  How,'  asked  a 
guardian,  'could  Mr.  O'Connor  attend  every  Wednesday,  mthout  excep- 
tion, from  ten  to  eight,  v/ithout  neglecting  his  official  duties  for  at  least  one 
day  in  the  week  V  This  guardian  resolved  to  have  the  matter  out,  and 
proposed  a  resolution  calling  the  attention  of  the  Secretary  for  War  to  tlie 
conduct  of  the  War  Office  clerk.  The  gentleman's  disgust  may  be  imagined 
when  Mr.  O'Connor  himself  stood  up  to  second  the  resolution  ;  and  so  had 
it  laughed  out  of  court.  O'Connor  had  nothing  to  fear  from  any  investiga- 
tion by  the  War  Secretary,  or  anybody  else,  for  he  had  not  neglected  his 
official  duties  :  he  had  not  lost  one  single  day,  and  the  manner  in  which  he, 
carried  out  this  programme  will  indicate  the  kind  of  man  he  is.  In  the 
War  Office,  as  in  the  other  Civil  Service  departments,  each  clerk  is  entitled 
to  a  month's  vacation,  and  this  vacation  he  is  generally  allowed  to  take  at 
such  times  as  he  may  wish.  He  may  take  it  in  a  continuous  month,  or  in 
a  week  now  and  a  week  again,  or  even  by  days  if  he  like.  Now  the  year 
of  the  War  Office  began  in  January  ;  that  of  the  Board  of  Guardians  some 
months  subsequently  ;  the  poor-law  year,  therefore,  overlapped  the  year  of 
the  War  Office,  Thus  O'Connor  was  able  to  take  the  War  Office  vacation 
of  two  years  within  the  single  year  of  the  Board  ;  and  his  two  years'  vaca- 
tion were  the  Wednesdays  which  he  spent  at  the  Board  of  Guardians  ! 
The  men  are  not  many  who  would  seek  recreation,  rest,  enjoyment,  in  ten 
hours'  work  every  Wednesday  of  every  week,  and  in  work  without  pay, 
without  gloiy,  and  entirely  for  the  benefit  of  the  poorest  and  lowliest  of 
mankind.  Never  was  reformer  so  completely  and  so  rapidly  successful. 
He  was  but  one  year  a  member  of  the  Board  of  Guardians — the  combined 
forces  of  bigotry  and  jobbery  took  care  that  he  should  not  be  elected  a 
Becond  time.     As  has  been  said,  he  was  one  Catholic  against  nineteen 


THE  LAND  LEAGUE,  185 

Protestants,  most  of  them  bigoted  Protestants,  too  ;  and  at  the  end  of  that 
year  every  Catholic  could  go  to  church  on  Sunday  or  holiday  ;  the  Catliolic 
priest  was  admitted  to  the  workhouse  once  a  week  to  instruct  the  inmates  ; 
Catholic  prayer-books  were  distributed  in  the  same  way  as  Protestant ; 
Catholic  children  were  sent  to  Catholic  schools  :  in  short,  of  the  vast 
multitude  of  Catholic  grievances  not  one  remained  unredressed.  And  yet 
all  this  had  been  accomplished  without  a  departure,  perhaps,  for  one 
second,  on  the  part  of  O'Connor,  from  his  cold,  calm  delivery  :  without  one 
violent  word,  with  that  exterior  of  perfect  and,  on  occasion,  almost  genial 
courtesy,  under  which  lay  concealed  fierce  passion  and  relentless  purpose. 

Arthur  O'Connor's  part  in  Parliament  has  been  such  as  one  might  have 
anticipated  from  his  previous  career.  He  at  once  devoted  himself  to  the 
work  which  was  sorest  and  most  uninviting  ;  had  acquired  in  a  short  time 
a  knowledge  so  intimate  of  the  rules  of  the  House  as  to  be  a  terror  to  all 
Speakers,  and  was  a  more  potent,  more  dangerous,  a  more  detailed  critic 
of  the  Estimates  than  Parnell  or  Biggar  in  their  palmiest  and  most  '  active' 
days.  It  is  curious  to  see  O'Connor  enter  the  House  with  a  bundle  of  notes, 
which  apparently  must  have  consumed  days  in  their  preparation  ;  to  hear 
him  put  Mr.  Courtney  to  shame  as  he  describes  the  extravagant  wages  of 
a  charwoman  in  the  Foreign  Office  ;  and  to  bring  confusion  to  the  mind  of 
the  Pirst  Commissioner  of  Works  as  he  dilates  on  the  bad  quality  of  the 
mortar  in  the  last  repairs  of  a  Poj^al  Palace.  All  this  is  done  with  an  air 
of  unbroken  severity,  but,  at  the  same  time,  of  unruffled  temper  and  of 
inflexible  courtesy.  O'Connor  is  the  calm,  patient,  lofty  spirit  of  economy 
that  chides,  but  pities,  and  that  speaks  in  the  accents  of  sorrow  rather  than 
of  anger.  At  some  moments  it  is  an  explanation  which  O'Connor  prays 
for  with  his  inimitable  air  of  sad  deference.  A  small  speech  is  required,  of 
course,  to  preface  the  inquiry.  The  Minister  having  answered,  a  second 
speech  is  necessary  in  order  to  have  a  further  word  on  just  a  trifling  little 
difficulty  that  still  remains  to  disturb  O'Connor's  mind.  Then  the  Minister 
again  explains,  and  O'Connor,  now  fully  satisfied,  has  to  express  his  gratitude 
and  content  ;  and  the  expression  of  his  gratitude  and  content  requires  a 
third  speech.  And  thus  it  goes  on  hour  after  hour — O'Connor  calm, 
deferential,  appallingly  inquisitive,  miraculously  omniscient — the  Minister 
restless,  apologetic,  divided  between  the  desire  to  swear  and  the  dread  of 
its  consequences — with  the  result  that,  when  the  night  is  over,  the  Treasury 
has  got  about  one  out  of  every  fifteen  votes  it  had  hoped  to  carry.  Work 
of  this  kind,  which  is  constantly  done  by  such  men  as  O'Connor  and  Biggar 
— and  in  former  days  by  gallant  Lysaght  Pinigan — is  and  can  never  be 
reported,  is  rarely  even  described,  is  rarely  even  heard  of  ;  but  it  is  in 
willingly,  patiently,  relentlessly,  continuously  going  through  the  hideous 
drudgery  of  unrecognised  toil  like  this  that  such  men  show  the  depths  of 
their  self-devotion,  the  reality  and  earnestness  of  their  self-forgetfulness. 
With  the  doubtful  exception  of  Mr.  Parnell,  Arthur  O'Connor  has  the  most 
thoroughly  and  the  best  Hon  se-of- Commons  style  of  any  man  in  the  party. 
Clear,  deliberate,  passionless  in  language,  gesture,  delivery,  he  is  the  very 
best  model  of  an  official  speaker.  The  narrow  limits  within  which  he 
confines  himself  do  injustice  to  his  powers.  The  only  occasion  on  which 
he  did  prominently  enter  into  general  debate  was  on  the  Bradlaugh  question ; 
and  his  answer  to  Mr.  Bright  on  that  occasion  suggested  possibilities  of 
sober,  but  lofty  eloquence. 

Finally,  the  sternness  of  Mr.  O'Connor's  faith  does  not  prevent  him  from 
being  one  of  the  kindliest  of  companions,  one  of  the  most  tolerant  and  even- 


i86  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

tempered  of  counsellors ;  though  he  has  much  of  the  antiqae  E,oman,  he  has 
much  also  of  the  social  charms  of  the  modern  Irishman. 

*  Few  sights,'  wrote  the  late  A.  M,  Sullivan  of  Bantry  Bay,  by  whos3 
shores  he  and  his  brother  T.  D.  Sullivan  were  born,  '  could  be  more 
picturesque  than  the  ceremony  by  which  in  our  bay  the  fishing '  season  was 
formally  opened.  Selecting  an  auspicious  day,  unusually  calm  and  fine,  the 
boats,  from  every  creek  and  inlet  for  miles  around,  assembled  at  a  given  - 
point,  and  then,  in  solemn  procession,  rowed  out  to  sea,  the  leading  boat 
carrying  the  priest  of  the  district.  Arrived  at  the  distant  fishing-ground, 
the  clergyman  vested  himself,  an  altar  was  improvised  on  the  stern-sheets, 
the  attendant  fleet  drew  around,  and  every  head  was  bared  and  bowed 
while  the  Mass  was  said.  I  have  seen  this  "  Mass  on  the  ocean"  when  not 
a  breeze  stirred,  a^nd  the  tinkle  of  the  little  ball  or  the  murmur  of  the 
priest's  voice  was  the  only  sound  that  reached  the  ear  ;  the  blue  hills  of 
Bantry  faint  on  the  horizon  behind  us,  and  nothing  nearer  beyond  than 
the  American  shore.  Where  are  all  these  now?  The  "Mass  on  the 
ocean  "  is  a  thing  of  the  past,  heard  of  and  seen  no  more  ;  one  of  the  old 
customs  gone  apparently  for  ever.  The  fishermen — the  fine  big-framed 
fellows,  of  tarry  hands  and  storm-stained  faces  1  The  workhouse  or  the 
grave  holds  all  who  are  not  docksidemen  on  the  Thames  or  the  Mersey,  on 
the  Hudson  or  the  Mississippi.  The  boats  ?  I  saw  nearly  all  that  remains 
of  them  when  I  last  visited  the  little  cove  that  in  my  early  days  scarce 
sufficed  to  hold  the  fleet  at  low  water  ;  skeleton  ribs  protruding  here  and 
there  from  the  sand,  or  the  shattered  hulks  helplessly  mouldering  under 
the  trees  that  dropped  into  the  tide  when  at  full.' 

Timothy  Daniel  Sullivan  v/as  born  in  1827.  The  home  of  the  Sullivans 
was  thoroughly  National,  raid  amid  the  stirring  times  of  1848,  and  the 
hideous  disasters  of  the  two  preceding  years,  there  were  all  the  circumstances 
to  make  the  National  faith  of  the  family  bitter  and  robust.  The  father 
was  carried  away,  like  the  majority  of  the  earnest  and  energetic  Irishmen 
of  that  time,  by  the  Gospel  which  the  Young  Ireland  leaders  were  preaching 
with  such  fascination  of  voice  and  pen,  became  one  of  the  leaders  of  the 
local  '48  club,  and,  as  a  reward,  was  dismissed  from  his  employment  by 
one  of  the  local  magistrates.  T.  D.  Sullivan,  like  the  rest  of  his  brothers, 
though  brought  up  in  a  small  and  remote  town,  had  an  opportunity  of 
receiving  a  good  education  in  the  best  sense  of  the  word,  and  the  family 
was  essentially  literary  as  well  as  National  in  its  tendencies.  The  Sullivans 
were  closely  associated  with  another  Bantry  household,  which  was  destined 
by-and-by  to  give  a  prominent  figure  to  the  Irish  history  of  the  present 
day.  The  chief  and  the  best  schoolmaster  of  the  town  was  Mr.  Healy,  the 
grandfather  of  the  two  members  of  the  present  House  of  Commons  of  the 
same  name.  It  was  from  Mr.  Healy  that  Mr.  Sullivan  learned  probably 
the  most  of  what  he  knows.  The  ties  between  the  two  families  were 
afterwards  drawn  still  closer  when  T.  D.  Sullivan  married  Miss  Kate 
Healy,  the  daughter  of  his  teacher.  Though  A.  M.  Sullivan  was  younger 
than  T.  D.,  he  was  the  first  to  leave  home  and  seek  fortune  abroad.  After 
trying  his  hand  as  an  artist,  A.  M.  ultimately  adopted  journalism  as  a 
profession,  and  became  connected  with  the  Dublin  Nation.  T.  D.  meantime 
had  also  allowed  his  mind  to  run  into  dreams  of  a  literary  future,  and  had 
filled  a  whole  volume  with  his  compositions  ;  but,  with  the  secrecy  which 
youth  loves,  he  had  not  confided  his  transgression  to  anyone.  Two  or  three 
of  the  pieces  had  appeared  in  print,  but  it  was  not  till  he  came  to  Dublin 


THE  LAND  LEAGUE.  187 

and  began  to  write  in  the  Nation  that  the  pnetical  genius  of  T.  D.  Sullivan 
sought  recognition.  Into  the  columns  of  that  journal  he  began  at  once  to 
pour  the  verses  which  he  had  hitherto  so  religiously  kept  secret,  and  from 
the  first  his  songs  attracted  attention.  From  this  time  forward  the  name 
of  T.  D.  Sullivan  is  inextricably  associated  with  the  Nation. 

Though  T.  D.  Sullivan  has  written  love-poems  and  tender  elegies,  his       ^ 
preference  has  always  been  for  the  muse  that  stirs  and  cheers.     Many  of      i 
his  poems  became  popular  immediatel}^  on  their  appearance,  and  spread       j 
over  that  vast  world  of  the  Irish  race  which  now  extends  through  so  many       ; 
of  the  nations  of  the  earth.     A  well-known  story  with  regard  to  the  '  Song 
from  the  Backwoods '  will  illustrate  the  influence  of  T.  D.  Sullivan's  muse. 
Most  Irishmen  know  that  splendid  little  poem,  with  its  bold  opening,  and 
its  splendid  refrain  : 

Deep  in  Canadian  woods  we've  met,  \ 

Frora  one  bright  island  flown  ;  ' 

Great  is  the  land  we  tread,  but  yet 

Our  hearts  are  with  our  own. 
And  ere  we  leave  this  shanty  small,  i 

While  fades  the  autumn  day, 
We'll  toast  old  Ireland  ! 
Dear  Old  Ireland  ! 
Ireland,  boys,  hurrah ! 

The   song,  which   was   published  in  the  Nation  in  1857,  first  became  -.- 
popular  among  the  members  of  the  Phcenix  Society — who,  it  will  be  re- 
membered, Vv^ere  at  work  in  1858 — and  was  carried  to  America  by  Captain 

D.  J.  Downing,  one  of  the  association.     It  rapidly  became  popular,  both  * 

among  the  Fenians,  who  v»^ere  beginning  to  be  organized,  and  among  the  ' 

Irish  soldiers  who  were  fighting  in  the  American  army.     Every  man  of  the  ; 

Irish  Brigade  knew  it,  and  it  was  often  sung  at  the  bivouac  fire  after  a  i 

hard  day's  fighting.     An  extraordinary  instance  of  its  popularity  was  given  | 

by  a  writer,  signing  himself  'Homeo,'  in  the  New  York  Irish  People  of  \ 

March  9th,  1867.      'On  the  night,'  he  writes,  'of  the  bloody  battle  of  j 

Fredericksburg,  the  Federal  army  lay  sleepless  and  watchful  on  their  arms,  ! 

with  spirits  damped  by  the  loss  of  so  many  gallant  comrades.     To  cheer  h  [' 

brother  officer,  Captain  Downing  sang  his  favourite  song.     The  chorus  of  5 

the  first  stanza  was  taken  up  by  hjs  dashing  regiment,  next  by  the  brigade,  j 

next  by  the  division,  then  by  the  entire  line  of  the  army  for  six  miles  along  j 

the  river  ;  and  when  the  captain  ceased,  it  was  but  to  listen  with  inde-  \ 

finable  feelings  to  the  chant  that  came  like  an  echo  from  the  Confederate  ^ 

lines  on  the  opposite  shore  of  j 

Dear  Old  Ireland,  >. 

Brave  Old  Ireland,  j 

Ireland,  boys,  hurrah  !  / 

The  song  'God  save  Ireland  '  became  popular  with  even  greater  rapidity. 
It  Avas  issued  at  an  hour  when  all  Ireland  was  stirred  to  intenser  depths  of 
anger  and  of  sorrow  tlian  perhaps  at  any  single  moment  in  the  last  quarter 
of  a  century,  and  this  profound  and  immense  feeling  longed  for  a  voice. 
When  '  God  save  Ireland '  was  produced  the  people  at  once  took  it  up,  and 
so  instantaneously  that  the  author  himself  heard  it  sung  and  chorussed  in  a 
railway  carriage  on  the  very  day  after  its  publication  in  the  Nation. 

On  several  other  occasions  the  pen  of  T.  D.  Sullivan  has  given  popular 
expression  to  popular  sentiment.  It  has  been  his  invariable  rule  in  com- 
posing these  songs  to  make  them  '  ballads '  in  the  true  sense  of  the  word— 


i88  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

songs,  that  is  to  say,  that  expressed  popular  sentiment  in  the  language  of 
everyday  life,  that  had  good  catching  rhymes,  and  that  could  be  easily  sung. 

It  will  not  be  necessary  to  write  at  any  great  length  of  the  Parliamentary 
career  of  T.  D.  Sullivan.  He  was  elected,  as  is  known,  along  with  Mr.  H. 
J.  Gill,  for  county  VVestmeath,  at  the  General  Election  of  1880  ;  and,  in 
spite  of  the  absorbing  nature  of  his  journalistic  duties,  he  has  been  one  of 
the  most  active  and  one  of  the  most  attentive  members  of  the  party.  He 
has  been  perhaps  still  more  prominent  on  the  platform  :  and  it  is  at  large 
Irish  popular  gatherings  that  his  speech  is  most  effective.  He  is  Irish  of 
the  Irish,  and  expresses  the  deep  and  simple  gospel  of  the  people  in  language 
that  goes  home  ;  and  then  his  keen  sense  of  humour  enables  him  to  supply 
that  element  of  amusement  which  is  always  looked  forward  to  with  eager- 
ness by  the  crowd.  He  often  lights  up  his  Parliamentary,  like  his  conver- 
sational efforts,  with  bright  flashes  of  wit.  Speaking  of  special  clauses  in 
the  Crimes  Act  for  the  protection  of  certain  humble  agents  of  the  law  one 
night,  he  declared,  'There's  a  divinity  doth  hedge  a  bailiff  rough  A'wsehim 
how  we  will.'  '  Punctuality,'  he  said  once  to  a  colleague  who  turned  up  at 
a  meeting  with  characteristic  lateness,  *  punctuality,  in  the  opinion  of  the 
Irish  Party,  is  the  thief  of  time.' 

It  is  when  the  county  meeting  is  over,  and  T.  D.  Sullivan  sits  amid  a 
genial  crowd  of  sympathetic  friends,  that  his  best — certainly  his  most 
attractive — talents  are  seen.  Like  all  the  Sullivan  family,  he  has  plenty 
of  musical  ability,  and,  like  poor  A.  M.,  has  a  splendid  voice.  A  song  by 
T.  D.  Sullivan  has  never  been  really  understood  until  it  has  been  heard 
sung  by  T.  D.  himself.  His  voice — loud,  clear,  penetrating — easily  leads 
the  chorus,  no  matter  how  many  voices  join  in,  and  he  throws  himself  into 
the  spirit  of  the  thing  with  all  his  heart  and  soul.  His  singing  of  '  Murfcy 
Hynes '  is  worth  going  many  miles  to  hear.. 

Such  has  been  the  career  of  T.  D.  Sullivan — honourable,  consistent,  and 
tranquil.  He  has  to-day  the  same  convictions  which  guided  his  pen  when 
he  wrote  surreptitious  verses  ;  he  has  stood  by  these  convictions  through 
years  of  trial  and  failure  ;  he  is  as  fresh  and  as  vigorous  in  pushing  them 
forward  at  this  hour,  when  his  hairs  are  gray,  as  he  was  when  he  sailed  in 
boyhood's  auroral  days  over  Bantry  Bay.  His  verses  have  marked  the 
epochs  which  they  have  helped  to  produce,  have  won  for  him  the  affection 
of  millions  of  Irish  hearts,  and  form  one  of  the  many  potent  chains  of 
memory  and  love  that  bind  the  scattered  children  of  the  Celtic  mother  to 
their  race  and  to  their  cradle-land. 

James  O'Kelly  was  born  in  Dublin  in  the  year  1845.  He  made  ac- 
quaintance at  an  early  age  with  the  passions  which  make  the  Irish  patriot. 
Among  his  companions  in  the  Irish  metropolis  were  a  number  of  young 
men  who,  even  in  the  dark  hours  between  '55  and  '65,  worked  and  hoped 
for  the  elevation  of  the  country  :  and,  on  the  other  hand,  he  learned  in  a 
school  in  London,  in  which  he  spent  a  part  of  his  boyhood,  the  scorn  that 
belongs  to  the  child  of  a  conquered  race.  O'Kelly  accordingly  entered  upon 
political  work  at  an  unusually  precocious  age,  and  certainly  had  not  reached 
his  legal  majority  when  political  aims  had  become  the  lode-star  of  his 
dreams.  This  was  the  dark  period  when  the  treason  of  Sadleir  and  Keogh 
had  broken  all  faith  in  Parliamentary  activity  and  constitutional  agitation  ; 
and  when  Youth — especially  if  it  had  the  mental  and  physical  robustness 
of  O'Kelly — was  not  inclined  to  listen  to  statistical  comparisons  between 
the  resources  of  England  and  Ireland.  The  '  set '  to  which  O'Kelly 
belonged  were  certainly  arch-heretics  against  the  orthodox  creed  of  consti- 


THE  LAND  LEAGUE.  I'Sg 

tutionalism,  and  had  made  up  their  minds  to  set  about  the  liberation  of 
Ireland  in  quite  a  different  kind  of  style.  The  companions  with  whom 
O'Kelly  then  mixed  lived  to  try,  and  many  of  them  to  suffer  for,  their 
experiment.  Many  of  them  are  dead.  Some  of  them  survived,  and  are  to- 
day as  active  and  as  hopeful  as  if  they  had  not  passed  through  hideous 
suffering  and  abysmal  disaster. 

In  1863  O'Kelly  was  enrolled  in  the  Foreign  Legion  in  Paris,  and  was 
immediately  called  upon  to  enter  into  active  service.  The  Arabs  in  the 
province  of  Oran  were  in  rebellion,  and  here  O'Kelly  had  an  opportunity 
of  learning  all  the  wiles  as  well  as  all  the  dangers  of  Arabian  warfare. 
The  rebellion  had  scarcely  been  suppressed  when  the  French  army  was 
called  to  another  and  a  very  different  scene  of  operations.  Everybody 
remembers  that  when  Maximilian  was  made  Emperor  of  Mexico,  French 
forces  were  sent  by  the  Emperor  Napoleon  to  win  for  his  nominee  his  new 
dominion,  and  O'Kelly's  regiment  was  one  of  those  which  were  detailed  for 
this  service.  In  all  the  fighting  which  went  on  O'Kelly  had  his  share. 
O'Kelly  was  made  prisoner  by  the  forces  of  General  Canales  in  June,  1866. 
O'Kelly  had  now  a  period  of  restraint,  discomfort,  possibly  of  danger  to 
look  forward  to  ;  but  an  attempt  to  escape,  unless  successful,  meant  death. 
O'Kelly  decided  to  make  a  dash  for  liberty  ;  his  guards  proved  careless, 
and  in  the  darkness  of  the  night  he  eluded  their  vigilance,  and  rushed  out 
into  the  Unknown.  For  days  he  had  to  wander  about  in  hourly  peril  of 
his  life.  At  one  time  he  took  to  the  river,  hoping  to  float  down  to  the 
point  wdiere  Mexican  territory  joined  the  United  States.  The  inducement 
to  attempt  this  mode  of  escape  was  his  discovery  by  the  banks  of  the  river 
of  what  is  called  a  '  dug-out ' — a  rude  boat  made  from  a  hollowed-out  tree 
• — and  in  this  primitive  craft  he  floated  with  the  stream  for  a  day.  He  had 
at  last  to  come  to  land,  owing  to  the  attentions  of  some  Mexicans  on  the 
shore.  They  proved,  however,  not  unfriendly,  and  finally  O'Kelly  made 
his  way  into  Texas.  On  American  soil  he  was  once  more  a  free  man  ;  but 
that  was  the  end  of  his  blessings.  He  had  not  a  cent  ;  his  clothes,  after  his 
many  days  of  wandering,  were  ragged  ;  and  who  looks  so  disreputable  as 
the  soldier  in  a  travel-stained  uniform  ?  However,  O'Kelly  managed  to 
'  strike '  a  f ellow-countrjmaan,  and  was  by  him  given  a  job.  The  job — 
historical  accuracy  is  especially  desirable  in  the  biography  of  a  soldier — 
was  that  of  removing  some  lumber.  He  managed  finally  to  make  his  way 
to  New  York,  and  when  he  got  there  he  was  confronted  with  stirring  news 
that  led  him  for  a  while  to  the  hope  that  the  next  time  he  went  a-soldiering 
it  would  be  for  his  own  land. 

The  stories  which  w^ere  current  in  these  days  of  the  possibilities  and  the 
resources  for  rebellion  in  Ireland  have  been  described  long  since  by  many 
pens,  and  have  produced  a  bitterness  of  controversy  that  warns  off  any 
%vriter.  SuflBce  it  to  say  that  O'Kelly  did  not  find  things  as  he  expected, 
that  he  had  seen  too  much  of  real  warfare  to  have  any  faith  in  unarmed 
crowds,  and  that  he  was  one  of  those  who  most  fiercely  opposed  any 
attempt  at  insurrection.  Everybody  knows  that  these  counsels  did  not 
then  prevail,  and  that  in  1867  there  came  some  sporadic  risings  with  their 
sad  sequel  of  wholesale  arrests,  imprisonments,  and  long  terms  of  penal 
servitude.  For  years  O'Kelly  had  to  pass  through  the  daily  and  nightly 
risks,  the  never-ceasing  strain,  the  strange  underground  life,  of  the  revo- 
tionary.  O'Kelly  passed  through  it  all  with  that  calm  courage  and  that 
cool-headedness  which  everybody  recognises,  and,  through  determination, 
vigilance,  and  prudence  combined,  succeeded  in  coming  out  unscathed. 


190  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

Again  the  French  cause  drev/  him  from  politics,  and  during  the  Franco  = 
Prussian  war  he  rejoined  the  French  army  ;  when  Paris  surrendered,  lie 
once  more  left  the  French  service. 

He  then  went  to  New  York.  Up  to  this  time  he  had  not  seriously 
contemplated  adopting  journalism  as  a  profession,  and  his  efforts  hp„d  been 
confined  to  occasional  correspondence  in  the  National  weeklies.  He  applied 
for  a  situation  on  the  New  York  Herald,  and  his  application,  like  that  oi 
most  beginners  in  all  manners  of  life,  was  received  coolly  enough.  At  last, 
through  the  absence  of  all  the  regular  employes  of  the  journ?J  on  a  special 
Sunday  morning,  O'lvelly  got  his  opportunit}^  General  Sheridan  was  to 
arrive  from  Europe  on  that  morning,  and  there  v/as  a  general  anxiety  to 
know  what  the  American  Napoleon  had  to  say  about  the  military  resources 
and  the  military  strategy  of  the  old  world.  The  task  of  interviev/ing  so 
distinguished  a  soldier  was  a  highly  honourable  one,  but  it  had  one  great 
drawback — General  Sheridan  was  a  man  who  v/as  known  to  hold  the 
'  interviewer '  in  mortal  hate.  There  was  a  whole  host  of  reporters  on 
board  the  steamer  which  went  out  to  meet  the  General.  The  competition, 
therefore,  was  keen  with  a  keenness  which  nobody  who  has  not;  been  in 
America  can  completely  understand.  Each  reporter,  in  his  turn,  tried  his 
hand  on  the  General,  and  each  went  back  disappointed.  At  length  O'Kelly 
made  the  attempt.  He  began  his  attack  altogether  out  of  the  ordinary  : 
mentioned  places  in  France  which  the  General,  as  well  as  he,  had  recently 
seen,  gave  a  military  estimate  or  two,  and  in  this  way  conveyed  the  im- 
pression to  the  General  that  he  was  something  of  a  kindred  spirit,  and 
knew  what  he  was  talking  about.  The  General  unbent,  and  O'Kelly,  who 
was  the  '  greenhorn,'  as  newcomers  are  scornfully  called,  of  the  journalistic 
host,  was  the  one  vvho  was  able  to  give  the  best  account  of  General 
Sheridan's  views  on  his  European  tour. 

O'Kelly,  starting  thus  vv^ell,  was  gradually  advanced,  until  he  became  one 
of  the  leader-writers — or  '  editors,'  as  they  are  called  in  America — of  the 
New  Yorh  Herald.  In  1873  there  arose  an  opportunity  of  making  or 
marring  his  fortune — an  opportunity  which  O'Kelly  gladly  embraced,  but 
which  ninety-nin3  out  of  every  hundred  vaen  would  have  absolutely  and 
unhesitatingly  rejected.  The  rebellion  in  Cuba  was  going  on,  and  it  was  a 
movement  in  which  the  people  of  the  United  States  took  a  keen  interest, 
these  being  the  days  when  the  annexation  of  Cuba  was  one  of  the  political 
possibilities  and  aspirations  of  the  hour.  But  what  was  the  nature,  and  what 
were  the  methods,  of  the  rebels  ?  These  were  points  upon  which  no  trust- 
worthy information  could  apparently  by  any  possibility  be  obtained.  The 
Spaniards  had  the  ear  of  the  v/orld,  and  the  story  they  told  was  that  there 
was  no  such  a  thing  as  a  rebellion  at  all.  If  there  had  ever  been  anything 
of  the  kind,  it  was  entirely  crushed,  and  Cespedes,  its  leader,  was  dead. 
What  now  remained  was  simply  a  few  scores  of  scattered  marauders,  who 
were  nothing  but  itinerant  robbers  and  murderers.  There  was  a  strong 
conviction  in  the  United  States  that  these  representations  were  not  alto- 
gether to  be  relied  on,  and  there  were  plenty  of  Cuban  refugees  and  insur- 
rectionary committees  in  the  United  States  who  circulated  reports  of  quite 
a  different  character.  It  was  said,  for  instance,  that  the  Spanish  troops 
were  guilty  of  horrible  cruelties — that  they  gave  no  quarter  to  men,  and 
foully  abused  women  ;  and  the  rebellion,  instead  of  being  repressed,  was 
represented  as  fiercer  and  more  determined  than  ever.  But  how  were 
these  statements  to  be  confirmed  ?  The  rebels,  whether  few  or  many,  were 
hidden  behind  the  impenetrable  forests  of  the  Marabi  Land  (as  the  country 


THE  LAND  LEAGUE.  191 

frequented  by  them  vva,s  called)  as  completely  as  if  they  had  ceased  to  exist. 
To  reach  these  rebels,  survey  their  forces — in  short,  attest  their  existence — 
was  the  duty  which  O'Kelly  volunt^  jred  to  perform. 

He  knew  when  he  set  out  for  Cuba  that  his  task  was  difScult  enough, 
but  it  was  not  until  he  arrived  in  Cuba  that  he  realized  to  the  full  the 
meaning  of  his  enterprise.  He  imagined  that  he  might  have  been  able  to 
accompany  the  Spanish  troops,  then  to  pass  through  their  lines  to  the  rebels, 
and,  investigations  among  the  latter  being  completed,  to  return  to  the 
Spanish  lines  again.  He  therefore  asked  a  safe-conduct  from  the  Captain- 
General  ;  but  that  functionary  soon  made  it  apparent  that  nothing  would 
induce  him  to  facilitate  O'Kelly's  task  in  any  way  ;  and  he  plainly  told  him 
that,  if  he  persisted  in  trying  to  get  to  the  rebels,  he  would  do  so  at  his 
own  risk.  O'Kelly  soon  realized  the  true  meaning  of  these  words.  Through- 
out all  Cuba  there  was  a  perfect  reign  of  terror.  Tribunals  hastily  tried 
even  those  suspected  of  treason,  and  within  a  few  hours  after  his  arrest  the 
'suspect '  was  a  riddled  corpse.  Any  person  who,  therefore,  was  under  the 
frown  of  the  authorities  was  avoided  as  if  he  had  the  plague.  Thus  O'Kelly 
v/as  invited  to  dinner  in  the  heartiest  manner  by  a  descendant  of  an  Irish- 
man ;  but  when  this  gentleman  heard  of  O'Kelly's  mission,  he  begged  him 
not  to  pay  the  visit,  and  promptly  went  to  the  Spanish  authoi'ities  to 
explain  the  unlucky  invitation.  '  It  was  not  possible,'  writes  O'Kelly  in 
'The  Mambi  Land,'  the  interesting  volume  in  which  he  afterwards  re- 
counted his  adventures — '  it  was  not  possible  to  turn  back  without  dis- 
honour, and,  though  it  cost  even  life  itself,  I  would  have  to  visit  the  Cuban 
camp.'  '  My  word,'  he  says  in  another  place,  '  had  been  given  to  accom- 
plish this,  and  at  whatever  cost  it  should  be  done  ' — language  that  in  the 
mouth  of  a  man  like  O'Kelly  really  means  the  resolve  to  meet  the  worst 
that  fortune  could  inflict. 

He  made  various  efforts  to  accompany  expeditions  of  the  Spanish  troops 
which  were  supposed  to  be  marching  against  the  insurgents  ;  but  these  ex- 
peditions either  were  postponed,  or,  after  they  had  been  started,  turned 
back  "\\athout  coming  even  within  sight  of  the  rebel  lines.  Then  O'Kelly 
thought  that  his  purpose  might  be  carried  out  if  he  got  into  communication 
with  some  of  the  secret  sympathizers  with  the  rebellion  who  remained  in 
the  towns  ;  but  they,  carrying  their  lives  every  hour  in  their  hands,  would 
not  trust  a  stranger.  At  last  he  formed  the  desperate  resolve  to  set  out  for 
the  rebel  lines  alone,  with  the  chances  of  being  shot  by  the  Spaniards  as  a 
rebel,  by  the  rebels  as  a  Spaniard,  through  a  country  which  in  jjarts  was 
supposed  to  be  overrun  by  robbers,  quite  ready  to  murder,  with  impartial 
ferocity,  Spaniard  or  rebel ;  and  into  the  midst  of  almost  impenetrable 
forest,  where  the  loss  of  the  trail  meant  death.  But  he  had  not  proceeded 
far  on  his  way  when  he  v/as  placed  under  arrest  by  the  Spanish  authorities. 
Then  came  an  order  which  made  the  situation  still  more  hopeless  :  the 
order  was  that  under  no  circumstances  should  O'Kelly  be  permitted  to 
penetrate  to  the  rebel  lines,  and  the  penalty  was  affixed  in  no  obscure 
language.  Brought  before  General  Morales,  one  of  the  Spanish  authorities, 
O'Kelly  made  the  remark,  '  I  should  regret  very  much  if  one  of  these  days 
you  should  be  obliged  to  shoot  me.'  '  I  would  regret  it  very  much  also,' 
was  the  reply  of  the  Spaniard  ;  '  but  if  you  are  found  in  the  insurgent 
lines,  or  coming  from  them,  you  will  be  treated  as  a  spy  or  as  one  of  the 
insurgents  ' — in  other  words,  shot. 

And  still  O'Kelly  persevered.     His  plan  now  was  to  trust  to  the  sym- 
pathizers with  the  rebellion  ;  and  at  last  he  found  a  letter  on  the  floor  ol 


192  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT, 

his  room  in  his  hotel  one  night,  telling  him  that  if  he  would  proceed  to  a 
certain  point  alone  on  the  following  day,  he  would  be  conducted  to  the 
rebel  lines.  O'Kelly,  armed  with  a  couple  of  revolvers,  set  out  the  next 
day,  reached  the  trysting-place,  and  after  hours  of  waiting  in  the  blackness 
of  a  dark  night,  was  conducted  into  the  rebel  lines,  saw  General  Cespedes, 
President  of  the  Republic,  and  spent  a  month  in  marching  and  counter- 
marching, and  in  generally  studying  the  resources,  the  customs,  and  the 
prospects  of  the  rebels.  His  task  he  had  now  succeeded  in  accomplishing, 
though  every  other  person  attempting  it  had  failed.  He  had  ascertained 
the  existence  and  estimated  the  chances  of  the  rebels,  and  the  only  thing 
now  left  for  him  was  to  return  to  America.  Cespedes  offered  to  send  him 
home  by  Jamaica,  but  O'Kelly  thought  it  necessary  to  go  into  the  Spanish 
lines,  in  order  that  there  might  be  no  possibility  of  a  denial  that  he  had 
actually  entered  into  the  rebel  camp.  He  had  scarcely  returned  to  the 
settlements  of  the  Spaniards  when  he  was  thrown  into  a  dungeon  in  a 
fortress,  where  the  stench  was  terrible,  his  only  companion  a  forger  ;  and 
he  was  convinced  that  the  object  of  his  captors  was,  if  they  could  not  shoot 
him,  to  kill  him  through  scarlet  fever.  Tor  w^eeks  he  was  daily  tortured 
while  in  this  terrible  den  by  inquisitions  and  threats  of  immediate  execu- 
tion, alternating  with  tempting  offers  of  large  bribes  and  immediate  release 
if  he  would  betray  the  men  who  had  helped  him  to  reach  the  Cuban  lines. 
In  time  he  was  removed  to  another  prison,  bound  with  ropes  as  he  was 
conveyed  there.  In  this  guise  he  reached  Havana,  and  there  again  he  was 
incarcerated  in  a  cell — this  time  of  such  sickening  odour  that  he  had  to  fly 
continually  to  the  grated  door  in  the  hope  of  breathing  a  little  fresh  air. 
It  was  evident  that  the  Spanish  authorities  were  thoroughly  bent  on  in- 
ducing his  death  from  yellow  fever.  He  escaped  all  these  perils,  hov/ever, 
was  sent  to  Spain,  and  then,  through  the  united  efforts  of  General  Sickles, 
Seiior  Castelar,  and  Isaac  Butt,  was  set  at  liberty. 

Later  on,  in  the  war  with  '  Sitting  Bull '  and  the  Sioux  Indians, 
an  expedition  of  considerable  peril,  O'Kelly  remained  throughout  the 
business,  until  '  Sitting  Bull '  was  driven  to  take  refuge  in  Canada. 
More  recently  O'Kelly  conceived  the  bold  idea  of  reaching  the  Mahdi. 
The  continued  obstacles  which  were  placed  in  his  way  frustrated  his  object, 
but  he  did  not  abandon  his  purpose  until  he  had  adopted  many  expedients 
of  characteristic  daring  and  adroitness.  The  letters  which  he  contributed 
to  the  Daily  News  excited  much  attention,  and  were  the  first  to  throv/  any 
light  upon  the  character  and  strength  of  the  movement  under  the  Mahdi. 
With  singular  accuracy  he  pointed  out  the  future  of  the  movement,  and 
some  time  later,  in  a  series  of  articles  in  the  Freeman^s  Journal,  on  the 
strategy  of  Lord  Wolseley,  he  forecast  the  perils  and  the  final  failure  of  the 
campaign  with  striking  truth.  He  writes  with  the  bold,  slightly  rugged, 
realistic  pen  of  the  special  correspondent  diverted  to  journalism  from  his 
true  avocation  as  a  soldier.  Though  he  has  given  proof  so  abundant  of  a 
courage  that  dares  all,  O'Kelly's  advice  has  always  been  on  the  side  of  weli- 
calculated  rather  than  rash  courses  ;  he  has,  in  fact,  the  true  soldier's 
instinct  in  favour  of  the  adaptation  of  ways  and  means  to  ends,  of  mathe- 
matical severity  in  estimating  the  strength  of  the  forces  for-,  and  of  the 
forces  against,  his  own  side.  He  is,  like  so  many  men,  a  bundle  of  contra- 
dictions. His  whole  temperament  is  revolutionary  ;  he  chafes  under  the 
restraints  of  Parliamentary  life,  and  hates  the  weary  contests  of  words  ; 
and,  on  the  other  hand,  he  insists  on  every  step  being  measured,  every 
move  calculated.     A  friend  jokingly  described  him  once  as  the  '  Whig- 


THE  LAND  LEAGUE.  193 

rebel,'  Again,  his  large  experience  of  life  and  the  ruggedness  of  his  sense, 
give  to  his  thoughts  the  mould  of  almost  cynic  realism,  and  yet  he  is  an 
idealist  of  the  first  water  ;  for  throughout  his  whole  life  he  has  held  to  the 
idea  of  his  country's  resurrection  with  a  fanatical  faith  which  no  danger 
could  terrify,  no  disaster  depress,  no  labour  fatigue.  And  it  is  as  a  steady 
though  silent  labourer  for  the  elevation  of  his  people  that  O'Kelly  would 
himself  wish  to  be  remembered.  '  My  best  work,'  he  wrote  to  a  friend, 
'  was  not  the  showy  pages  which  have  caught  the  general  eye,  but  rather 
the  quiet  political  work  which  I  have  done  for  the  last  twenty  years.  To 
the  mere  sabreu7-^s  part  of  my  life  I  attach  no  importance  whatever,  except 
that  within  certain  limits  it  has  furnished  me  with  the  opportunity  of 
observing  men,  and  acquainting  myself  with  the  motive  forces  which  induce 
men  to  do  or  not  to  do.' 

One  figure  was  absent  from  this  gathering  which  was  destined  to  play  a 
prominent  part  in  subsequent  struggles.  This  was  Mr.  John  Dillon.  Mr. 
Dillon  at  this  moment  was  absent  in  America  completing  the  organization 
of  the  Land  League  movement  that  had  been  started  by  Mr.  Parnell  before 
his  departure  from  that  country.  Mr.  Dillon,  as  so  often  happens,  is  the 
very  opposite  in  appearance  and  manner  from  what  the  readers  of  his 
speeches,  especially  the  hostile  readers,  would  expect.  He  came  in  the 
course  of  time  to  be  regarded  by  large  sections  of  the  English  people  as  the 
embodiment  of  everything  that  was  brutal  and  sanguinary  in  th"  Irish 
nature.  He  was  accustomed  during  the  fiercer  days  of  the  Land  League 
to  the  most  violent  denunciation,  and  he  was  daily  in  receipt  of  letters  of 
menace  or  of  insult.  To  those  who  know  him  this  popular  image  was 
grotesquely  inaccurate.  Tall,  thin,  frail,  his  physique  is  that  of  a  man  who 
has  periodically  to  seek  flight  from  death  in  change  of  scene  and  of  air. 
His  face  is  long  and  narrow  ;  the  features  singularly  delicate  and  refined. 
Coal-black  hair  and  large,  dark,  tranquil  eyes,  make  up  a  face  thai  Imme- 
diately arrests  attention,  and  that  can  never  be  forgotten.  A  stranger 
would  guess  that  Mr.  Dillon  was  an  artist  of  the  school  that  found  delight 
in  painting  Madonnaj^',  that  spoke  of  the  pursuit  of  art  for  art's  sake  alone, 
with  a  sublime  unconcern  for  the  struggles  and  aims  and  welfare  of  the 
workaday  world.  A  tranquil  voice  and  a  gentle  manner  would  further 
combat  the  idea  that  this  was  one  of  the  protagonists  in  one  of  the  fiercest 
struggles  of  modern  days.  The  speeches  of  Mr.  Dillon  are  violent  in  their 
conclusions  only.  The  propositions  which  startled  or  shocked  unsympa- 
thetic hearers  are  reached  by  him  through  calculations  of  apparently  mathe- 
matical frigidity,  and  are  delivered  in  an  unimpassioned  monotone. 

John  Dillon  is  the  son  of  Mr.  John  Blake  Dillon,  one  of  the  bravest  and 
purest  spiiits  in  the  Young  Ireland  movement.  His  father  was  one  of 
those  who  opposed  the  rising  to  the  last  moment  as  imprudent  and  hopeless, 
and  then  was  among  the  first  to  risk  liberty  and  life  when  it  was  finally 
resolved  upon.  John  was  born  in  Blackrock,  county  Dublin,  in  the  year 
1851.  He  never  went  to  a  boarding-school,  and  probably  he  owes  more  of 
his  education  to  home  than  to  other  influences.  He  was  mainly  instructed 
in  the  institutions  connected  with  the  Catholic  University  :  first  in  the 
University  school  in  Harcourt  Street,  Dublin,  and  afterwards  in  the  Uni- 
versity buildings  in  Stephen's  Green.  He  v/as  intended  for  the  medical 
profession,  passed  through  his  course  of  lectures,  and  took  the  degree 
of  Licentiate  in  the  College  of  Surgeons.  His  entrance  into  the  political 
struggle  was  not  precocious.  It  was  not  until  after  the  arrival  of  John 
Mitchel  in  Ireland  to  fight  the  Tipperary  struggle  after  his  many  years  of 

13 


194  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

exile  that  Dillon  first  appeared  in  the  political  arena.  Mitchel  had  been 
one  of  the  oldest  friends,  as  he  had  been  one  of  the  earliest  companions,  of 
his  father ;  and  John  Dillon  was  among  those  who  went  down  to  Queenstown 
to  bid  a  welcome  to  Ireland  to  the  returning  and  still  unrepentant  rebel.  He 
then  took  an  active  part  in  the  electoral  contest,  and  helped  to  get  Mitchel 
returned.  The  rise  of  Mr.  .Parnell  and  the  active  policy  brought  Mr. 
Dillon  more  prominently  to  the  front.  He  was  one  of  the  first  to  appre- 
ciate correctly  the  new  policy,  and  to  see  the  road  to  salvation  to  which  it 
pointed  the  way.  At  once  he  became  an  eager  advocate  of  Mr.  Parnell 
and  his  policy.  This  brought  him  into  direct  collision  with  Mr.  Isaac 
Butt,  and  his  was  the  fiercest  and  most  damaging  speech  made  against  the 
old  leader  in  the  Molesworth  Hall  meeting,  at  which  Butt  made  his  last 
political  speech.  When  the  Land  League  movement  was  started,  Dillon  at 
once  threw  himself  into  the  agitation,  and  was  appointed  to  accompany  Mr. 
Parnell  upon  his  historic  visit  to  America. 

There  were  many  other  members  at  the  meeting  in  the  City  Hall  whose 
history  would  throw  light  upon  the  circumstances  and  tendencies  of  Irish 
life,  social  and  political,  but  I  have  not  space  to  give  them  more  than  a  few 
passing  words.  Richard  Power,  who  was  elected  in  1874,  when  he  was 
barely  of  age,  is  a  member  of  a  Waterford  family  which  has  played  a 
prominent  and  often  a  romantic  part  in  Irish  history  for  centuries.  Richard 
Lalor,  one  of  the  members  for  Queen's  County,  represented  a  family  ancient 
in  Irish  struggle.  His  father  was  one  of  the  fierce  spirits  that  led  the 
movement  against  the  tithes,  and  for  many  years  was  the  foremost  man  in 
every  political  effort  in  the  Queen's  County.  James  Pinton  Lalcr,  his 
brother,  was  perhaps  the  most  truly  revolutionary  temperament  of  '48. 
He  lives  again  in  the  pages  of  Duffy,^  and  he  it  was  who  suggested  to 
Mitchel  the  No  Rent  movement,  which  Mitchel  is  alleged  to  have  spoiled, 
and  which  for  the  first  time  was  carried  into  effect  more  than  a  quarter  of 
a  century  after  Pinton  Lalor's  fiery  and  restless  spirit  had  passed  to  rest. 
Another  brother,  who  sought  a  home  in  Australia,  was  the  leader  in  a  small 
insurrection  at  Ballarat,  and  there  lost  an  arm.  When  the  reforms  he 
fought  for  were  granted,  he  became  one  of  the  ruleis  of  the  country,  and  is 
now  Speaker  of  the  Victorian  Parliament.  Richard  Lalor  is  of  the  same 
stern  spirit  as  all  bis  stock.  To-day  he  is  a  feeble  and  bent  man  with 
wearied  eyes  and  a  thin  voice,  and  a  constant  prey  to  ill-health,  but  his 
spirit  is  exactly  the  same  as  in  his  hot  youth.  In  1848  he  had  his  pike 
and  his  thousands  of  pikemen  ready  for  action  ;  to-day,  as  then,  he  is  the 
unconquerable  and  irreclaimable  reToel — the  Blanqui  of  Irish  politics. 

The  O 'Gorman  Mahon,  to  whom  was  entrusted  the  duty  of  proposing  the 
name  of  Mr.  Parnell,  belonged  to  even  an  older  agitation.  Tall,  erect  as  a 
pine,  with  huge  masses  of  perfectly  white  hair  and  a  leonine  face,  he  is  the 
majestic  relic  of  a  stormy  and  glorious  youth.  He  is  the  last  survivor  of 
the  once  multitudinous  race  of  the  Irish  gentleman,  as  ready  vidth  his 
pistol  as  with  his  tongue.  Nobody  can  enumerate  the  number  of  times  he 
has  been  '  out,'  and  the  still  larger  number  of  occasions  in  which  he  de- 
spatched or  received  the  cartel.  A  man  of  the  spirit  of  The  O'Gorman 
Mahon  was  necessary  in  such  times  as  those  of  his  youth.  The  Irish 
Catholic  was  still  an  unemancipated  serf,  and  the  Lords  of  Ascendency 
looked  down  tipon  him  with  the  contempt  of  centuries  of  unbroken  sway. 
It  was  at  such  a  time  that  the  swaggering  adherent  of  English  domination 

I  See  '  Four  Years  of  Irish  History '  (A  new  Tribune,  a  >^'>^  Policy),  pp.  464-532. 


THE  LAND  LEAGUE.  195 

had  to  be  met  by  a  representative  of  the  ancient  faith  and  of  the  hidden 
longings  of  the  oppressed  majority,  before  whose  eagie-eye  privilege  had  to 
quail.  O'Connell  was  the  tongue,  but  The  O'Gorman  Mahon  was  the 
sword,  of  the  Irish  Democracy  rising  against  its  oppressors  after  its  cen- 
turies of  bondage  ;  and  so  he  did  his  own  useful  work  in  his  own  day. 
There  was  something  strangely  picturesque  in  the  appearance  in  that  group 
of  young  men  engaged  in  a  still  infant  movement  of  a  man  who  had  stood 
by  the  side  of  O'Connell  at  the  Clare  election  v/hich  won  Catholic  emanci- 
pation. It  was  almost  as-  if  Thomas  Jefferson  v/ere  to  rise,  and  with  the 
same  pen  that  had  wo-itten  the  '  Declaration  of  Independence '  to  join  in 
the  composition  of  Abraham  Lincoln's  proclamation  against  slavery.  In 
the  years  that  had  passed  since  that  day,  The  O'Gorman  Mahon  had  gone 
through  a  life  of  strange  and  varied  adventure.  When,  in  the  whirligig 
of  time,  he  was  thrust  from  Irish  politics,  he  had  gone  to  South  America, 
and  there  had  taken  part  in  the  struggles  of  the  young  Reptiblics  for  emanci- 
pation. Returning  to  his  native  land,  he  found  Isaac  Butt  starting  the 
new  movement  for  Home  Rule.  Several  constituencies  competed  for  him, 
but  he  had  chosen  the  historic  county  in  whose  history  he  had  played  so 
prominent  a  part. 

Garrett  Byrne,  member  for  Wicklow,  is  in  direct  descent  from  Garrett 
Byrne,  who  was  hanged  in  the  Rebellion  of  '48.  John  Barry,  his  colleague, 
beginning  life  at  almost  its  humblest  rung,  had  become  an  important 
member  in  a  Scotch  manufacturing  firm,  and  shortly  afterwards  was  in 
business  for  himself.  He  had  also  taken  a  share  in  political  struggles  the 
history  of  which  has  yet  to  be  told.  Mr.  Corbet  was  a  member  of  an 
ancient  Irish  family,  and  a  man  himself  of  culture  and  of  considerable 
literary  power. 

One  more  figure  requires  description.  On  '^he  first  day  of  the  meeting  of 
the  Irish  Party  the  chair  was  occupied  by  the  Lord  Mayor  of  Dublin,  Mr. 
E.  Dwyer  Gray,  M.P.  for  the  county  Carlow.  Mr.  Gray  is  the  son  of  the 
late  Sir  John  Gray,  whose  name  has  figured  so  frequently  in  preceding 
pages.  He  was  born  in  the  year  1846.  Brought  up  from  his  earliest  youth 
in  the  opinions  of  his  father,  whose  favourite  son  he  was,  he  attained  at  an 
early  age  a  correct  judgment  of  political  affairs.  His  father  had  received 
many  bitter  lessons  during  a  long  political  career.  One  story  he  was  never 
tired  of  repeating  to  his  son.  It  was  of  a  man  who  offered  to  him,  during 
the  Young  Ireland  excitement,  a  plan  of  the  defences  of  Dublin  Castle. 
Gray  treated  the  offer  of  the  surrender  of  the  Lord-Lieutenant's  citadel 
with  suspicion,  and  a  few  days  afterwards  was  not  surprised  to  find  that 
the  would-be  traitor  was  a  police-spy  in  disguise.  The  mind  of  the  son  is 
even  clearer  than  that  of  his  father,  and  refuses  steadily  to  accept  any 
doctrine  or  course  until  it  has  been  fully  thought  otit.  In  this  way  Gray 
has  sometimes  been  regarded  as  backward  when  he  was  simply  demanding 
the  full  reason  for  the  proffered  policy,  and  had  not  yet  been  able  to  see  its 
eventual  outlet.  He  succeeded  his  father  in  the  management  of  the 
Freeman's  Journal,  the  chief  newspaper  of  Ireland,  and  soon  raised  it  to 
double  its  previous  circulation.  Becoming  a  member  of  the  Dublin  Cor- 
poration, of  which  his  father  had  been  the  guiding  star  for  many  years,  he 
soon  attained  to  the  position  of  its  leading  figure,  and  took  a  keen  interest 
in  advancing  the  hygienic  improvements  of  the  city.  At  this  period  he 
was  Lord  Mayor,  and  had  under  his  control  vast  sums  which  had  been 
subscribed  to  the  Mansion  House  for  the  relief  of  distress.  Anticipating  a 
little,  Gray  subsequently  came  into  fierce  collision  with  James  Carev,  whom 

13—2 


196  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT, 

he  exposed  for  an  attempted  fraud  upon  the  Corporation  ;  and  Carey  from 
that  day  was  his  bitter  and  relentless  enemy.  Gray  had  been  returned  to 
the  House  of  Commons  shortly  after  the  death  of  his  father,  and,  thou,c:h 
not  a  frequent,  was  already,  as  he  is  still,  one  of  its  most  influential  de- 
baters. There  is  no  man  in  the  Irish  Party,  and  few  outside  it,  who  can 
state  a  case  with  such  pellucid  clearness.  When  Gray  has  completed  his 
statement,  the  whole  facts  are  as  clear  to  the  minds  of  his  hearers  as  they 
have  already  been  to  his  own  searching  intellect. 

The  great  question  to  be  decided  at  this  meeting  was  the  future  leader- 
ship of  the  party.  Up  to  a  few  days  before  the  meeting  there  was 
practically  no  intention  even  of  proposing  Mr.  Parnell  as  a  leader.  The 
idea  never  even  assumed  shape  until  the  night  before  the  meeting  in  the 
City  Hall.  There  happened  to  be  stopping  at  the  Imperial  Hotel  several 
gentlemen  who  had  been  returned  or  had  resolved  to  support  Mr.  Parnell's 
policy.  Among  them  they  discus.^ed  the  question  of  leadership.  The 
gentlemen  who  took  part  in  this  informal  and  accidental  conference  were 
Mr.  John  Barr^',  Mr.  Pichard  Lalor,  Mr.  O'Kelly,  Dr.  Commins,  Mr. 
Biggar,  Mr.  T.  P.  O'Connor,  and,  strangely  enough,  Mr.  McCoan  ;  Mr. 
Healy,  who  had  not  yet  been  elected  a  member  of  Parliament,  was  also 
present. 

There  was  an  understanding  rather  than  a  formal  resolution  among  these 
gentlemen  that  they  would  propose  Mr.  Parnell  as  leader.  He  himself 
did  not  come  to  Dublin  until  next  morning  ;  some  gentlemen  went  to  his 
hotel  and  others  met  him  on  his  way  to  the  City  Hall.  In  his  bedroom, 
and  afterwards  as  he  passed  through  the  streets,  mention  was  made  to  him 
of  the  suggestion  that  had  been  made  at  the  informal  meeting  of  the  pre- 
vious night.  He  neither  rejected  nor  encouraged  the  idea,  but  seemed,  on 
the  whole,  rather  inclined  to  the  notion,  in  case  Mr.  Shaw  were  displaced, 
of  proposing  that  the  office  should  be  held  by  Mr.  Justin  McCarthy.  This 
was  the  state  of  things  when  the  meeting  assembled.  Finally  the  vote  was  : 
for  Mr.  Parnell,  23;  for  Mr.  Shaw,  18.^  Mr.  Shaw  apparently  received 
his  defeat  at  the  moment  with  good  humour,  but  v/hen,  the  next  day,  the 
party  formulated  its  policy  and  declared  in  favour  of  Peasant  Proprietary 
as  the  final  solution  of  the  Land  Question,  Mr.  Shaw  already  indicated  a 
certain  difference  from  Mr.  Parnell  and  his  friends. 

When  the  party  came  over  to  London  the  first  occasion  arose  for  the  two 
sections  taking  opposite  sides.  It  was  on  a  seemingly  trivial  question. 
The  point  at  issue  was  the  part  of  the  House  in  which  the  Irish  members 
should  take  their  seats.  In  the  view  of  Mr.  Shaw  and  his  friends,  the 
existing  Ministry  was  so  friendly  to  Ireland  that  the  Irish  Party  should 
signify  their  general  adherence  by  sitting  on  the  same  side  of  the  House. 
The  supporters  of  Mr.  Parnell  maintained  that  even  between  a  friendly 
Liberal  Ministry  and  an  Irish  National  Party  there  might  arise  irreconcil- 
able difference  on  the  Irish  National  Question  and  on  sev^eral  others.  They 
held  that  the  only  hope  of  a  satisfactory  solution  of  the  Irish  Question  was 
that  Irish  members  should  maintain  a  position  of  absolute  independence  of 
the  English  parties,  that  therefore  the  attitude  of  Irish  Nationalists  was 

^  The  members  on  both  sides  were  :  For  Mr.  Parnell — Sexton,  Arthur  O'Connor, 
O'Kelly,  Byrne,  Barry,  McCarthy,  Biggar,  T.  P.  O'Connor,  Lalor,  T.  D.  Sullivan, 
Commins,  Gill,  Dawson,  Lcamy,  Corbet,  McCoan,  Finigan,  Daly,  Marum,  W.  H. 
O'SuUivan,  J.  Leahy,  O'Gorman  IMahon,  and  O'Shea.  For  Mr.  Shaw — Macfavlano, 
Brooks,  Colthurst,  Synan,  Sir  P.  O'Brien,  Foley,  Smithwick,  Fay,  Errington,  Gabbett, 
Smyth,  R.  Power,  Blake,  McKenna,  P.  Martin,  Meldon,  Callan,  and  Gray, 


THE  LAND  LEAGUE.  197 

one  of  permanent  opposition  to  all  English  Administrations,  and  that  this 
political  attitude  should  be  signified  by  their  continuing  to  keep  their  seats 
on  the  Opposition  side  of  the  House. 

Meantime,  in  Ireland,  the  Land  Question  was  reaching  a  crisis.  The 
increase  of  evictions,  which  had  begun  with  1877 — the  first  year  of  the 
distress  — showed  still  further  signs  of  increase  :  the  number  of  tenantry 
unable  to  meet  their  rents  was  reaching  daily  larger  proportions,  and  the 
Rtlief  Committee  had  on  their  rolls  something  like  500,000  recipients  of 
charity.  Side  by  side  with  all  this  the  Land  League  was  daily  advancing 
with  gigantic  strides,  and  every  week  was  receiving  a  vast  impetus  through 
the  immense  subscriptions  sent  fi-om  America.  It  was  clear  that  the  time 
had  come  when  Ireland  must  make  a  tremendous  step  either  of  advance  or 
retrogression.  Either  distress  was  to  develop  into  famine,  and  famine  to 
lead  to  wholesale  eviction,  and  another  lease  of  landlord  power  and  oppres- 
sion, or  the  Irish  people  were  to  throw  oft'  the  chains  of  centuries,  to  revolt 
against  the  perpetuation  of  their  miseries  and  of  their  servitude,  and  to 
dash  forward  in  an  efi"ort  for  a  new  and  a  better  era. 

Such  was  the  state  of  Ireland,  and  such  the  position  of  the  Irish  Party, 
when  Parliament  met  in  1880.  But  how  was  it  with  the  Ministry  ?  They 
did  not  know  the  existence  of  the  distress  ;  they  did  not  know  the  strength 
of  the  agitation  ;  they  were  far  more  ignorant  of  the  condition  of  the 
island  than  of  countries  separated  by  thousands  of  miles  on  land  or  by  sea  ; 
above  all  things,  they  had  no  idea  whatever  of  making  an  attempt  to  deal 
with  the  Land  Question. 

The  first  witness  of  the  state  of  feeling  among  the  Ministry  is  the  Duke 
of  Argyll,  who,  speaking  in  1881,  said  : 

'The  present  Government  was  formed  with  no  expressed  intention  of 
bringing  in  another  great  Irish  Land  Bill  ...  it  formed  no  part  of  the 
programme  upon  which  the  Government  was  formed.  Perhaps  no  Govern- 
ment was  ever  formed  on  a  greater  or  wider  programme,  if  we  are  to  take 
the  speeches  of  my  right  hon.  friend  the  Prime  Minister  in  the  course  of 
the  Midlothian  campaign  as  the  programme  of  the  Government  ;  but,  so 
far  as  I  recollect  and  am  concerned,  it  was  not  intimated  in  those  speeches 
that  it  was  the  intention  of  the  Government  to  unsettle  the  settlement  of 
the  Land  Act  of  1870.'^ 

In  the  Session  of  1880  the  Marquis  of  Hartington  showed  that  his  mind 
was  not  only  not  made  up  in  favour  of  Land  Reform  in  Ireland,  but  that 
he  was,  on  the  whole,  rather  antagonistic  to  any  such  reform. 

He  was  speaking  in  reply  to  a  motion  of  Mr.  Justin  McCarthy  that  a 
tenant  farmer  should  be  added  to  the  Commission  of  Inquiry  into  the 
Land  Question.  Several  of  the  Irish  members  had  spoken  of  the  Land  Act 
of  1870  as  an  absolute  failure,  and  had  taken  it  for  granted  that  the 
Ministry  had  made  up  their  minds  that  another  and  a  larger  Land  Act  was 
required.     Thus  Lord  Hartington  rebuked  them  : 

'  The  Marquis  of  Hartington  said  he  was  not  surprised  that  the  hon. 
member  for  Tralee  (The  O'Donoghue)  objected  to  the  composition  of  the 
Commission,  seeing  that  with  him  the  failure  of  the  Land  Act  was  a  fore- 
gone conclusion.  To  some  minds  the  conclusion  was  not  so  absolutely 
certain  that  the  Land  Act  had  failed,  or  that  it  had  not,  and  it  was  in 
solving  that  question  that  the  Commission  was  expected  to  be  useful.    The 

^  Hansard,  vol.  cclxii.,  pp.  1754,  1755. 


198  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

speeches  attacking-  the  Commission  had  all  been  pervaded  by  a  fallacious 
supposition,  namely,  that  the  Government  loolied  to  Baron  Dowse  and  the 
other  members  of  the  Commission  for  a  comprehensive  scheme  of  land 
reform.  .  .  .  What  they  wanted  was  facts.  In  tlie  last  four  years  there 
had  been  almost  continuous  debates  on  the  Irish  Land  Question.  .  .  .  The 
result  was  that  neither  the  House  nor  the  Government  could  arrive  at  any 
certain  conclusion  on  the  matter.  What  could  be  more  advisable  under 
these  circumstances  than  to  ask  a  set  of  honest  and  impartial  men  to  make 
inquiry  on  the  spot,  and  to  report  the  facts  brought  under  their  notice  ? 
That  was  the  object  of  the  Commission,  and  not,  as  the  hon,  member  for 
Longford  (Mr.  Justin  M'Carthy)  seemed  to  suppose,  the  elaboration  of  a 
comprehensive  scheme  of  land  reform. '  ■'■ 

The  chief  and  most  significant  testimony  of  the  mind  of  the  Ministry  at 
this  period  is  that  given  by  Mr.  Gladstone  himself.  During  his  visit  to 
Midlothian  in  the  autumn  of  1884,  he  said  : 

*  I  must  say  one  word  more  upon,  I  might  say,  a  still  more  important 
subject — the  subject  of  Ireland.  It  did  not  enter  into  my  address  to  you, 
for  what  reason  I  know  not  ;  but  the  Government  that  was  then  in  power, 
rather,  I  think,  kept  back  from  Parliament,  certainly  were  not  forward  to 
lay  before  Parliament,  what  was  going  on  in  Ireland  until  the  day  of  the 
Dissolution  came,  and  the  address  of  Lord  Beaconsfield  was  published  in 
undoubtedly  very  imposing  terms.  ...  I  frankly  admit  that  I  had  had 
much  upon  my  hands  connected  with  the  doings  of  that  Government  in 
almost  every  quarter  of  the  world,  and  I  did  not  know — no  one  knew — the 
severity  of  the  crisis  that  was  already  swelling  upon  the  horizon,  and  that 
shortly  after  rushed  upon  us  like  a  flood. '  ^ 

Such,  then,  was  the  condition  of  the  problem  presented  to  Mr.  Parnell 
and  his  followers.  In  their  own  country  thousands  of  people  face  to  face 
with  starvation  ;  land  tenure  still  in  such  a  position  that  the  tenant  had  no 
protection  from  rack-rent  and  from  eviction,  and  therefore  from  periodic 
famine  ;  an  agitation  rising  daily  in  passion  and  in  strength  ;  the  hour 
demanding  revolutionary  land  reform  ;  and  the  mind  of  even  aii  honest 
Ministry  either  blank  or  hostile. 

This  contradiction  between  the  demands  of  the  Irish  Question  and  the 
resolves  of  the  Government  is  a  central  fact  in  all  that  follows.  It  will 
justify  to  any  candid  man  measures  which  at  the  time  appeared  uncalled 
for  and  extreme  ;  and,  above  all  things,  it  will  explain  how  it  was  that  the 
Parnellites  were  driven  at  the  very  outset  of  the  Session  of  1880  into  an  atti- 
tude of  hostility  to  a  Ministry  that  was  Liberal  and  inclined  to  be  friendly. 

The  Queen's  Speech  was  soon  to  give  evidence  of  the  unmistakable 
ignorance  and  unreadiness  of  the  Government.  It  was  of  considerable 
length  ;  it  dealt  with  Turkey,  and  Afghanistan,  and  India,  and  South 
Africa  ;  but  it  contained  not  one  word  about  the  Irish  Land  Question. 
Immediately  after  the  reading  of  the  Hoyal  Address  the  Irish  members 
retired  to  the  dingy  rooms  in  King  Street,  Westminster,  which  were  then 
their  offices.  The  omission  of  all  mention  of  the  Irish  Land  Question  was 
pointed  out  with  indignant  surprise,  and  it  was  immediately  resolved  that 
the  moment  the  House  reassembled,  the  Irish  members  should  take  action 
by  at  once  giving  notice  of  an  amendment  to  the  Queen's  Speech.     The 

*  Hansard,  vol.  cclv,,  pp.  1415-16- 
'  Times,  September  2,  ISSi, 


THE  LAND  LEAGUE.  199 

amendment  to  the  Queen's  Speech  in  1880  was  the  germ  which  afterwards 
was  transformed  into  the  Land  Act  of  1881. 

The  section  led  by  Mr.  Shaw  had  much  to  say  in  favour  of  the  difficulties 
of  the  Government,  and  could  urge  with  some  justice  that  it  was  unfair  to 
demand  immediate  treatment  from  the  Ministry  of  a  question  of  such  vast 
importance  and  such  extraordinary  complexity  as  the  Irish  Land  Question. 
The  section  led  by  Mr.  Parnell,  on  the  other  hand,  pointed  out  that  the 
Irish  Land  Question  had  already  reached  a  stage  when  further  delay  meant 
wholesale  destruction  ;  showed  how  long  and  patient  had  already  been  the 
endurance  of  the  postponement  of  the  land  settlement  by  their  constituents  ; 
and,  above  all,  urged  that  the  primary  consideration  of  a  National  Party 
was  the  need  of  the  Irish  people,  and  not  the  fortunes  of  an  English 
Ministry.  If  the  Irish  demand  were  allowed  to  occupy  a  second  and 
subsidiary  place  ;  if  that  demand  were  made  dependent  upon  the  conveni- 
ence of  the  Ministr}^,  it  was  held  by  Mr.  Parnell  and  his  followers  that  the 
cause  would  be  lost. 

The  amendment  was  brought  forward  on  the  reassembling  of  the  House 
after  the  interval  which  follows  the  reading  of  the  Queen's  Speech.  It 
was  in  these  words  : 

'  And  to  humbly  assure  her  Majesty  that  the  important  and  pressing 
question  cf  the  occupiers  and  cultivators  of  the  land  in  Ireland  deserves 
the  most  serious  and  immediate  attention  of  her  Majesty's  Government, 
with  a  view  to  the  introduction  of  such  legislation  as  will  secure  to  these 
classes  the  legitimate  fruits  of  their  industry.' 

It  was  on  the  night  when  this  amendment  was  brought  forward  that 
Mr.  Parnell  spoke  for  the  first  time  in  Parliament  since  he  had  reached  his 
new  position.  He  rose  about  eleven  o'clock  ;  the  House  was  crowded  and 
eager  ;  and  when  the  Speaker  called  out  the  name  of  the  member  for  Cork, 
there  was  a  movement  of  keen  interest,  and  in  the  galleries  reserved  to 
strangers  almost  everybody  got  up  to  have  a  look  at  the  new  Irish  leader. 
Mr.  Parnell  spoke  briefly,  but  with  vehemence  and  force.  He  drew  a 
rapid  picture  of  the  state  of  things  in  Ireland,  which  was  listened  to  with 
more  curiosity  than  sympathy,  and  the  general  result  was  that  Mr.  Parnell 
was  estimated  as  a  very  violent  and  rather  ii-rational  man,  who  represented 
nothing  but  a  small  and  irresponsible  knot  of  senseless  irreconcilables.  The 
attitude  of  the  House  to  Mr.  Shaw  was  very  different.  He  himself  seemed 
to  challenge  comparison  with  his  successor,  for  the  moment  Mr.  Parnell 
sat  down,  Mr.  Shaw  rose.  The  first  and  most  significant  fact  was  that  the 
two  men  spoke  from  different  parts  of  the  House.  Mr.  Parnell  had  risen 
from  a  seat  below  the  gangway  on  the  Opposition  side.  Mr,  Shaw  spoke 
from  the  very  bosom  of  the  Radical  section,  and  when  he  rose  he  was 
rewarded  with  a  burst  of  hearty  cheers  from  all  the  Liberal  benches.  He 
spoke  in  the  style  that  is  now  so  well  known  ;  his  speech  gave  a  great  deal 
of  satisfaction,  and  the  opinion  was  freely  expressed  by  the  English  members 
that  his  remarks  were  in  welcome  contrast  to  the  heat  and  exaggeration  of 
Mr.  Parnell.  The  contest  between  the  two  men  was  still  held  to  be 
undecided.  There  was  much  contempt  for  the  group  of  young  men  who 
formed  Mr.  Parnell's  chief  support,  and  the  expectation  was  universal  that 
Mr.  Parnell's  tenure  of  office  would  be  brief  and  inglorious.  The  appearance 
of  the  two  men  in  the  debate  strengthened  this  conviction  in  the  English 
mind,  and  English  members  might  be  heard  to  comment  with  cheerfulness 
that  Parnell  might  be  a  dashing  guerillero,  but  Shaw  was  the  sagacious 
statesman  and  the  real  leader. 


200  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT, 

But  the  Ministry  and  the  House  of  Commons  were  soon  to  find  that, 
however  much  Mr.  Shaw's  methods  might  be  more  agreeable  than  those  of 
Mr,  Parnell,  it  was  with  Parnell  and  his  colleagues  that  they  had  to  count. 
The  new  Ministers,  confident  in  the  magnificence  of  their  recent  victory,  in 
the  still  verdant  and  unbroken  strength  of  their  party,  and  in  the  loftiness 
of  their  hopes,  could  not  understand  their  path  being  crossed  by  this  then 
insignificant  section  of  the  House.  Between  them  and  the  Irish  Party 
open  war  had  not  been  declared,  and  its  possibility  would  not  be  even  con- 
templated, especially  by  men  who  had  given  such  repeated  assurances  of 
their  sympathy  for  Ireland  as  Mr.  Gladstone  and  Mr.  Bright.  The  Liberal 
Ministers  and  the  followers  of  Mr.  Parnell  were  at  that  stage  in  which  it 
was  yet  undecided  whether  doubting  affection  would  end  in  closer  bonds 
or  in  permanent  estrangement ;  bixt,  meantim.e,  Mr.  Parnell  and  his  friends 
contemplated  a  second  move.  The  great  object  at  that  time  was  to  stay 
the  hand  of  the  landlord,  made  omnipotent  over  the  tenantry  by  the  failure 
of  the  crops  ;  and  to  meet  this  emergency  the  Irish  Party  brought  in  the 
Suspension  of  Evictions  Bill.  The  second  reading  of  the  Suspension  of 
Evictions  Bill  came  on  at  two  o'clock  one  fine  morning,  to  the  horror  and 
surprise  of  the  Treasury  bench.  Mr.  Gladstone  looked  up  from  the  paper 
on  which  he  was  writing  his  nightly  report  of  Parliamentary  proceedings  to 
the  Queen,  with  a  gaze  first  of  pained  amazement  and  then  of  pathetic 
appeal  to  the  serried  and  resolute  ranks  opposite  him.  But  the  Irishmen, 
who  had  to  think  of  hundreds  of  thousands  of  other  faces  that  looked  to 
their  inner  minds  with  hungry  hope  from  cabin  and  field,  had  their  advan- 
tage, were  determined  to  hold  fast,  and  declared  that  the  discussion  of  the 
Bill  must  go  on.  The  Premier  yielded  to  the  inevitable,  made  the  im- 
portant announcement  that  the  Government  themselves  would  consider 
the  subject  raised  by  Mr.  Parnell's  measure,  and  so  the  Irish  Land 
Question,  which  but  a  few  days  before  had  been  scouted  out  of  court, 
which  had  never  been  mentioned  at  the  first  Cabinet  Council,  of  whose 
existence  the  Queen's  Speech  knew  absolutely  nothing,  had  already  within 
a  couple  of  weeks  after  the  meeting  of  Parliament  been  taken  up  by  the 
Government  as  one  of  the  chief  and  primary  questions  of  the  Session  ;  and 
the  starving  tenants,  just  emerging  from  famine,  might  hope  that  the  land- 
lords would  not  be  allowed  to  work  unchecked  their  wicked  will.  This,  in 
fact,  was  the  first  Parliamentary  victory  that  the  Land  League  gained. 

The  Disturbance  Bill  of  Mr.  Forster  was  the  Suspension  of  Evictions 
Bill  of  Mr.  Parnell  under  another  name.  The  Parnellites,  so  far,  had 
gained  their  point,  but  they  were  to  reap  still  further  advantage.  The 
speakers  for  the  Government  had,  of  course,  to  array  the  terrible  figures  of 
eviction  increasing  with  distress,^  to  make  strong  speeches  and  urge 
powerful  reasons  in  favour  of  a  measure  which  went  counter  to  so  many  of 
tne  prejudices  of  the  House  of  Commons.  Irish  distress  thus  became  the 
cry  of  an  English  as  well  as  of  an  Irish  party,  and  striking  statements  and 
valuable  admissions  were  made  which  justified  the  whole  position  of  the 
Land  League.  Por  instance,  it  was  during  a  debate  on  the  Disturbance 
Bill  that  Mr.  Gladstone  committed  himself  to  the  famous  doctrine  that,  in 

^  '  If  we  look  to  the  total  numloers  we  find  that  in  1878  there  were  1,749  evictions-; 
in  1879,  2,607  ;  and  as  was  shown  by  my  right  hon.  and  leanied  friend,  1,690  in  the 
five  and  a  half  months  of  this  year— showing  a  further  increase  upon  the  enormoua 
increase  of  last  year,  and  showing,  in  fact,  unless  it  be  checked,  that  15,000  individuals 
will  be  ejected  from  their  homes,  without  hope,  without  remedy,  in  the  course  of  the 
present  year.'— Mr.  Glai)ST©nEj  Hansard,  vol.  ccliii.,  p.  1066. 


THE  LAND  LEAGUE.  201 

the  circumstances  of  distress  in  which  Ireland  then  was,  a  sentence  of 
eviction  might  be  regarded  as  equivalent  to  a  sentence  of  death  ;  ^  and  it 
was  this  and  such  like  expressions  of  opinion  that  long  paralyzed  the  hand 
of  the  Government  against  the  Land  League  agitation.  Everybody  knows 
that  the  Disturbance  Bill  was  fiercely  opposed  stage  after  stage  by  the 
Tories  in  the  House  of  Commons,  that  it  was  finally  carried  by  overwhelm- 
ing majorities,  and  that,  when  it  went  to  the  House  of  Lords,  it  was 
throT\'n  out  with  every  circumstance  of  ignominy  and  contempt. 

This  ending  to  the  business  placed  both  the  Government  and  the  Irish 
Party  in  a  strange  and  diificult  position.  It  had  been  stated  by  Mr. 
Gladstone  that  a  sentence  of  eviction  was  equivalent  to  a  sentence  of 
death,  and  the  equally  significant  and  appalling  statement  had  been  added 
by  him  that,  according  to  the  statistics  supplied  by  the  Irish  authorities, 
15,000  persons  were  to  receive  the  sentence  of  eviction  within  that  single 
year.  The  reality  of  the  dangers  to  the  peace  of  Ireland  Mr.  Forster  was 
himself  foremost  in  acknowledging  ;•  and  were  they  then  to  allow  Ireland 
to  drift  unhelmed — or,  to  use  Mr.  Gladstone's  own  words,  '  without  hope 
and  without  remedy  ' — to  the  abyss  of  wholesale  eviction,  tempered  by  whole- 
sale assassination,  towards  which  the  action  of  the  House  of  Lords  had 
pushed  it  ?  It  is  hard  at  this  moment  to  say  what  the  Government  could 
have  done.  They  had  just  come  from  the  country  with  a  triumphant 
majority.  Was  it  in  political  human  nature  that  they  should  risk  this 
majority  by  another  appeal  to  the  country  within  a  few  months,  and  before 
they  had  fulfilled  a  single  item  in  the  vast  programme  they  had  set  before 
them  ?  The  Ministry  might  have  been  greatly  weakened,  and  the  mighty 
weapon  for  the  repair  of  past  Conservative  errors  and  for  future  Liberal 
conquest  might  have  been  returned  to  the  hand  of  Mr.  Gladstone,  pointless 
and  broken.  The  truth  is,  the  difficulty  of  the  situation  was  the  permanent 
and  incurable  difficulty  of  the  present  Parliamentary  relations  of  England 
and  of  Ireland  ;  it  was  the  difficulty  of  having  to  govern  one  country 
through  the  public  opinion  of  another.  An  Irish  Minister  face  to  face 
with  such  a  crisis  could  with  confidence  have  appealed  against  a  verdict  so 
plainly  hostile  to  the  interests  of  Ireland  as  the  rejection  of  the  Suspension 
of  Evictions  Bill,  with  the  full  knowledge  that  the  public  opinion  of  his 
own  people,  at  once  sympathetic  and  informed,  would  have  redoubled  his 
power  of  meeting  so  portentous  an  emergency.  But  the  English  Minister 
had  to  appeal  to  a  public  almost  entirely  ignorant  of  the  merits  of  the 
controversy,  and  fickle  in  its  sympathies  because  of  ignorance. 

But  there  was  one  step  which  might  have  been  taken,  and  which  might 
have  resulted  in  some  good.  On  August  24:th  Mr.  Eorster  made  an  im- 
portant statement  : 

'  He  had  always  said  they  must  carry  out  the  law  ;  but  he  must  also 
repeat  that,  if  they  found,  as  they  had  not  within  the  last  two  or  three 
weeks  found,  and  as  thfey  hoped  they  would  not  find,  that  the  landlords  of 
Ireland  were  to  any  great  extent  making  use  of  their  powers  so  as  to  force 

I  '  In  the  failure  of  the  crops,  crowned  by  the  year  1S79,  the  act  of  God  had  replaced 
the  Irish  occupier  iu  the  condition  in  which  he  stood  before  the  Land  Act.  Because 
what  had  he  to  contemplate  ?  He  had  to  contemplate  eviction  for  his  non-payment 
of  rent :  and  as  a  consequence  of  evictipn,  starvation.  And  ...  it  is  no  exaggeration 
to  say,  in  a  country  whei'e  the  agricultural  pursuit  is  the  only  pursuit,  and  where  the 
means  of  the  payment  of  rent  are  entirely  destroyed  for  a  time  by  the  visitation  of 
Providence,  that  the  poor  occupier  rna\^  under  these  circumstances  regard  a  sentence 
of  eviction  as  coming,  for  him,  very  near  to  a  sentence  of  death.' — Hansard,  vol. 
scliii.jp.  l(jG3. 


202  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT, 

the  Government  to  support  them  in  the  exercise  of  injustice,  the  Govern- 
ment  should  accompany  any  request  for  special  powers  "wdth  a  Bill  vi^hich 
would  prevent  the  Goverinnent  from  being  obliged  to  support  injustice. 
He  would  go  further  and  say,  under  any  circumstances  if  it  was  found  that 
injustice  and  tyranny  were  largely  committed — although  he  did  not  believe 
that  such  would  be  the  case — it  would  then  be  their  serious  duty  to  con- 
sider what  their  action  should  be,  and  he  did  not  think  that  any  man  in 
the  House  would  expect  him  to  remain  any  longer  the  instrument  of  that 
injustice.' ■■■ 

Here  was  some  promise  of  a  break  in  the  run  of  disaster  v/hich  now 
menaced  Ireland.  The  landlords  might  evict  on  a  wholesale  scale,  and  all 
their  history  down  to  that  very  year  pointed  to  their  making  full  and 
savage  use  of  every  power  v/hich  the  law  and  the  seasons  had  placed  in 
their  hands  ;  but  if  a  Minister  of  the  Crown,  rather  than  carry  on  this 
law,  were  to  resign  his  office,  the  public  opinion  of  the  country  would 
necessarily  be  fixed  upon  the  difficulties  and  the  horrors  of  the  problem  ; 
and  the  Ministry,  with  such  a  force  behind  them,  would  have  been  able  to 
dictate  to  the  House  of  Lords  a  prompt  and  comj^lete  remedy.  But  many 
days  had  not  elapsed  when  this  hope  disappeared.  A  cold  fit  had  supervened 
with  extraordinary  rapidity  upon  the  outburst  of  angry  and  worthy  resolve, 
and  Mr.  Forster,  catechised  by  the  Opposition,  explained  his  words  until 
his  great  purpose  vanished  into  thin  air  and  meaningless  talk.  The  final 
result  of  the  Session  then  was  this  :  A  Relief  of  Distress  Bill  had  been 
passed,  through  which  money  was  to  reach  distressed  tenants,  having  first 
passed  through  the  hands  of  the  landlords  ;  and  a  Commission  of  Inquiry 
had  been  added  to  the  long  and  dreary  inquisitions  that  had  investigated 
the  Land  Question, 

The  situation  which  Mr.  if*arnell  had  now  to  consider  was  one  of  extreme 
difficulty.  The  composition  of  the  Land  Commission,  the  words  of  Lord 
Hartington,  and  the  silence  of  the  other  Ministers,  gave  but  too  much 
reason  to  believe  that  the  mind  of  the  Government  was  not  even  yet  made 
up  for  anything  like  a  large  measure  of  land  reform.  The  refusal  for  so 
many  years  of  any  measure  of  relief,  followed  by  the  miserable  insufficiency 
of  the  Land  Act  of  1870,  were  too  much  calculated  to  make  Mr.  Parnell 
draw  pessimist  conclusions  from  such  facts.  The  great  evil  he  had  to 
avoid  was  that  the  mighty  agitation  of  ISSO  should  not  end,  as  did  that  of 
1869-70,  in  an  abortive  and  halting  measure.  Meantime  there  was  the 
country  before  him,  organizing  itself,  as  it  had  rarely  ever  been  organized 
before,  with  mightier  forces  making  in  the  direction  of  complete  reform 
than  had  ever,  perhaps,  stood  behind  any  movement.  The  nature  of  Mr. 
Parnell  impels  him  to  drive  in  political  matters  the  hardest  of  hard  bargains 
within  his  power  ;  his  grip  of  a  political  advantage  for  his  countrymen  is  as 
relentless  as  the  grip  of  death.  His  course  in  the  months  that  followed  was 
dictated  mainly  by  the  sense  that  through  no  word  or  act  of  his  should  the 
chance  of  the  people  for  a  full  and  final  settlement  of  all  their  claims  be 
jeopardized  or  diminished. 

It  is  another  essential  evil  of  the  present  relations  between  England  and 
Ireland  that  no  great  reform  can  be  carried  out — especially  on  the  Land 
Question — without  bringing  the  people  of  Ireland,  as  Llr.  Chamberlain 
said,  to  a  state  bordering  on  revolution  ;  and  to  a  state  bordering  upon  re- 
volution the  Irish  people  were  now  fast  approaching.     Mr.  Parnell  nafcur- 

^  Hansard,  vol.  cclv.,  pp.  2022,  2023. 


THE  LAND  LEAGUE.  203 

ally  gave  no  encouragement  to  the  idea  that  the  position  of  the  Irish  Land 
Question  had  not  yet  passed  beyond  the  stage  of  inquiry.  The  movement 
in  its  new  phase  received  its  first  word  of  real  guidance  from  Mr.  Parnell 
at  a  meeting  held  in  Ennis  on  September  19,  1880,  and  the  speech  he  then 
delivered  gave  the  keynote  of  the  situation.  First,  he  told  the  people  to 
place  no  confidence  in  the  Government  Commission  ;  and,  while  he  did  not 
positively  advise  the  farmers  against  giving  evidence,  he  warned  them 
against  the  danger  of  the  acceptance  of  any  responsibility  for  the  proceed- 
ings of  that  body.  Then  he  passed  on  to  the  declaration  which  after- 
events  did  so  much  to  prove  correct — that  it  was  to  themselves  and  their 
own  organization  the  farmers  were  mainly  to  look  for  redress. 

'  Depend  upon  it  (he  said)  that  the  measure  of  the  Land  Bill  of  next 
session  will  be  the  measure  of  your  activity  and  energy  this  winter  ;  it  will 
be  the  measure  of  your  determination  not  to  pay  unjust  rents  ;  it  will  be 
the  measure  of  your  determination  to  keep  a  firm  grip  of  your  homesteads  ; 
it  will  be  the  measure  of  your  determination  not  to  bid  for  farms  from 
%vhich  others  have  been  evicted,  and  to  use  the  strong  force  of  public  opinion 
to  deter  any  unjust  men  amongst  yourselves — and  there  are  many  such — 
from  bidding  for  such  farms.  If  you  refuse  to  pay  unjust  rents,  if  you  re- 
fuse to  take  farms  from  which  others  have  been  evicted,  the  Land  Question 
must  be  settled,  and  settled  in  a  way  that  will  be  satisfactory  to  you.  It 
depends,  therefore,  upon  yourselves,  and  not  upon  any  Commission  or  any 
Government.  When  you  have  made  this  question  ripe  for  settlement,  then, 
and  not  till  then,  will  it  be  settled.'^ 

And,  finally,  he  gave  the  advice  with  regard  to  '  boycotting  '  which  was 
afterwards  quoted  hundreds  of  times  against  him. 

'  Now  what  are  you  to  do  (he  said)  to  a  tenant  who  bids  for  a  farm  from 
which  another  tenant  has  been  evicted  ? 

'  Several  voices  :  Shoot  him  ! 

'  Mr.  Parnell  :  I  think  I  heard  somebody  say  "  Shoot  him  !"  I  wish  to 
point  out  to  you  a  very  much  better  way — a  more  Christian  and  charitable 
way,  which  will  give  the  lost  man  an  opportunity  of  repenting.  When  a 
man  takes  a  farm  from  which  another  has  been  unjustly  evicted,  you  must 
show  him  on  tlie  roadside  when  you  meet  him  ;  you  must  show  him  in  the 
streets  of  the  town  ;  you  must  show  him  in  the  shop  ;  you  must  show  him 
in  the  fair-green  and  in  the  market-place,  and  even  in  the  place  of  worship, 
by  leaving  him  alone  %  by  putting  him  into  a  moral  Coventry  ;  by  isolating 
him  from  the  rest  of  his  country  as  if  he  were  the  leper  of  old — you  must 
show  him  your  detestation  of  the  crime  he  has  committed.'^ 

There  have  been  few  things  that  Mr.  Parnell  has  said  throughout  his 
career  which  have  been  more  bitterly  criticised  than  the  counsel  given  in 
these  words.  Barristers  have  assailed  him  in  the  House  of  Commons  who 
would  have  mercilessly  boycotted  the  counsel  that  held  direct  intercourse 
with  a  client  without  the  mediation  of  a  solicitor  ;  doctors  who  would 
mercilessly  boycott  a  professional  brother  who  advertised  or  compounded 
medicines,  or  violated  any  other  article  of  a  complex  professional  code ; 
politicians  who  had  mercilessly  driven  out  of  their  organizations  the  back- 
sliders from  political  principles  ;  members  of  clubs  who  had  ostracized 
offenders  against  the  .laws  of  honour  or  of  conventionality  ;  representatives 
of  v/orking  classes  who  had  va-ung  from  a  Conservative  Ministry  the  right 

*  Freeman's  Jourxial,  September  20, 1880.  "  Ibid, 


204  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

of  woikmen  to  boycott  avaricious  employers.  The  principles  of  boycotting 
have  thus  been  applied  in  ordinary  times,  and  in  ordinary  occupations,  by 
some  of  those  who  most  loudly  denounced  it.  One  of  the  most  fertile 
sources  of  landlord  wrong  and  tenant  suffering  was  the  fierce  competition 
for  the  possession  of  land  It  had  induced  tenants  to  offer  a  rent  measured 
not  by  the  capacities  of  the  land,  but  by  their  own  despair  ;  and  it  is  per- 
fectly clear  that  as  long  as  eviction  produced,  through  this  unchecked  com- 
petition, an  increase  of  rent,  eviction  was  a  temptation  and  not  a  horror  to 
the  landlord.  At  this  moment  the  Irish  tenants  were  engaged  in  a  great 
effort  to  break,  once  and  for  ever,  the  thraldom  of  centuries.  Against  this 
effort  were  arrayed  the  mighty  forces  of  the  empire.  By  a  strict  combina- 
tion alone  among  themselves  could  the  Irish  tenantry  hope  for  success  ; 
and  the  boycotting  of  any  man  who  lent,  by  land-grabbing,  assistance  to 
the  landlord  was  essential  to  success.  Boycotting  was  abused  ;  it  was 
occasionally  used  for  private  purposes  ;  it  sometimes  led  to  crime  ;  but  it 
was  at  least  a  far  less  savage  mode  of  warfare  than  assassination,  which  it 
largely  replaced.  Until  coercion  brought  homicidal  frenzy,  it  did  much  to 
keep  down  the  number  of  outrages  ;  and,  as  Mr.  John  Dillon  said  in  reply 
to  an  attack,  it  kept  the  roof  over  the  heads  of  many  a  thousand  men  and 
women  who,  witliout  it,  would  have  been  thrown  on  the  roadside  to 
perish. 

The  meeting  at  Ennis  was  followed  by  several  other  demonstrations,  at 
most  of  which  there  were  the  same  array  of  numbers,  which  had  been  un- 
paralleled since  the  days  of  the  Liberator,  At  all  of  these  meetings  Mr. 
Parnell  practically  preached  the  same  principles.  It  v/ould  be  well  worth 
while  for  anybody  who  wishes  to  study  the  strange  career  of  this  Irish 
leader  to  read  over  again  those  speeches  ;  for  he  will  find  in  them  that 
foresight,  and  that  grasp  of  the  central  and  essential  facts  of  the  situation 
and  the  real  necessities  of  the  time,  which  justify  Mr.  Parnell's  extra- 
ordinary reputation.  He  had  to  fight  at  this  period  not  merely  the  halting 
purpose  of  the  Ministry,  but  also  the  feeble  resolves  of  some  men  within 
the  National  ranks.  They  solemnly  recommended  moderation  to  the 
farmers,  when  the  real  danger  was  not  in  the  extravagance  of  the  demands 
made  by  the  Irish  people,  but  in  the  grudging  bestov.al  of  minimized  con- 
cession by  the  House  of  Commons  and  the  House  of  Lords.  They  amused 
themselves  with  elaborate  schemes,  instead  of  leaving  the  responsibility  to 
the  Ministers.  They  had  much  to  say  of  the  difficulties  of  Mr.  Forster, 
and  little  of  the  difficulties  of  the  peasants  who,  with  their  backs  to  the 
walls,  fought  a  life-and-death  struggle  with  hunger  and  eviction.  Mr. 
Parnell,  while  personally  courteous  and  tolerant  to  a  degree  that  looks 
almost  weakness,  at  this  time,  to  these  gentlemen  and  their  proposals, 
steadily  pursued  his  own  path. 

He  used  to  point  out  the  objection  to  the  '  three  F's  '  as  either  a  practical 
or  a  final  solution  to  the  question.  The  settlement  which  he  proposed  was 
Peasant  Proprietary. 

*  We  seek  as  Irish  Nationalists  (he  said  at  New  Ross  on  September  25, 
1880)  for  a  settlement  of  the  Land  Question  which  shall  be  permanent — - 
which  shall  for  ever  put  an  end  to  the  war  of  classes  which  unhappily  has 
existed  in  this  coimtry  ...  a  v/ar  which  supplies,  in  the  words  of  the 
resolution,  the  strongest  inducement  to  the  Irish  landlords  to  uphold  the 
system  of  English  misi'ule  which  has  placed  these  landlords  in  Ireland. 
And  looking  forward  to  the  future  of  our  country,  we  wish  to  avoid  all 
elements  of  antagonism  between  classes.     I  am  willing  to  have  a  sti-uggle 


THE  LAND  LEAGUE.  205 

between  classes  in  Ireland — a  struggle  that  should  be  short,  sharp,  and 
decisive — once  for  all  ;  but  I  am  not  willing  that  this  struggle  should  be 
perpetuated  at  intervals,  when  these  periodic  revaluations  of  the  holdings 
of  the  tenants  would  come  under  the  system  of  what  is  called  fixity  of 
tenure  at  valued  rents. '■'■ 

It  is  well  to  add  that,  in  every  one  of  the  speeches  in  which  he  spolce  of 
peasant  proprietary,  he  definitely  laid  down  the  doctrine  that  peasant  pro- 
prietary was  to  be  obtained  not  by  violence,  but  by  the  payment  of  reason- 
able compensation  to  the  landlords. 

'  Now,  then,  is  the  time  for  the  Irish  tenantry  to  show  their  determina- 
tion— to  show  the  Government  of  England  that  they  will  be  satisfied  with 
nothing  less  than  the  ownership  of  the  land  of  Ireland  .  .  .  And  I  see  no 
difficulty  in  arriving  at  such  a  solution,  and  in  arriving  at  it  in  this  way  : 
by  the  payment  of  a  fair  rent,  and  a  fair  and  fixed  rent  not  liable  to 
recurrent  and  perhaps  near  periods  of  revision,  but  by  the  payment  of  a 
fair  rent  for  the  space  of,  say,  thirty-five  years,  after  which  time  there 
would  be  nothing  further  to  pay,  and  in  the  meantime  the  tenant  would 
have  fixity  of  tenure.'^ 

One  sentence,  finally,  from  his  speeches  of  this  period.  Mr.  Parnell's 
mode,  means,  and  end  were  impulsively  described  once  by  Mr.  Gladstone 
as  passing  through  rapine  to  dismemberment.  I  have  already  qxtoted  the 
sentence  which  will  effectualh'-  dispose  of  the  charge  of  rapine,  and  now  for 
one  on  which  the  seeking  of  dismemberment  was  mainly  founded.  Speak- 
ing at  Galway  on  October  24,  1880,  Mr.  Parnell  said  : 

'  I  expressed  my  belief  at  the  beginning  of  last  session  that  the  present 
Chief  Secretary,  who  was  then  all  smiles  and  promises,  should  not  hav£» 
proceeded  very  far  in  the  duties  of  his  office  before  he  would  have  found 
that  he  had  undertaken  an  impossible  task  to  govern  Ireland,  and  that  the 
only  way  to  govern  Ireland  is  to  allow  her  to  govern  herself  .  .  .  And  if 
they  prosecute  the  leaders  of  this  movement  ...  it  is  not  because  they 
wish  to  preserve  the  lives  of  one  or  two  landlords  .  .  .  but  it  will  be 
because  they  see  that  behind  this  movement  lies  a  more  dangerous  move- 
ment to  their  hold  over  Ireland  ;  because  they  know  that  if  they  fail  in 
upholding  landlordism  here — and  they  will  fail — they  have  no  chance  of 
maintaining  it  over  Ireland  ;  it  v/ill  be  because  they  know  that  if  they  fail 
in  upholding  landlordism  in  Ireland,  their  power  to  misrule  Ireland  will  go 
too.  I  wish  to  see  the  tenant  farmers  prosperous  ;  but  large  and  important 
as  is  the  class  of  tenant  farmers,  constituting  as  they  do,  with  their  wives 
and  families,  the  majority  of  the  people  of  this  country,  I  would  not  have 
taken  off  my  coat  and  gone  to  this  work  if  I  had  not  known  that  we  were 
laying  the  foundation  in  this  movement  for  the  regeneration  of  our  legisla- 
tive independence.'-^ 

This  sentence,  which  was  often  quoted,  as  it  will  be  seen,  simply  demands 
the  restoration  of  the  Irish  Parliament  ;  and  that  is  not  dismemberment. 
It  was  almost  enough  to  make  an  Irishman  frenzied  to  hear  this  sentence 
of  Mr.  Parnell  quoted  over  and  over  again  as  the  sudden  revelation  of  some 
new,  diabolical,  unheard-of  policy.  Mr.  Parnell  announced  himself  a 
Home  Kuler,  Was  there  anything  new,  or  diabolical,  or  unheard-of  in 
that  ?  Mr.  Butt  was  a  Home  Puler,  so  were  all  his  followers  ;  Mr.  Parnell 
himself  had  been  elected  as  a  Home  Ruler  five  years  before  the  Galway 

*  Freevians  Journal,  September  26  18S0.  ^  Ibid.         3  Ibid.,  Octobsr  25,  ISSO. 


2o6  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT, 

speech.  To  say  that  he  could  not  have  entered  into  the  Land  agitation  if 
he  did  not  believe  that  it  \vould  help  towards  Home  Rule,  was  to  make 
the  not  very  unnatural  declaration  that  the  reform  of  the  Land  system 
would  tend  towards  the  restoration  of  an  Irish  Parliament. 

In  the  meantime,  while  thus  the  movement  in  Ireland  was  reaching  its 
spring-tide,  how  was  it  with  the  Chief  Secretary  ?  From  this  period  forward 
Mr.  Forster  disappears  from  history  as  an  advocate  of  reform,  and  becomes 
the  chief,  the  fiercest,  and  the  main  champion  of  coercion.  As  the  days  went 
on,  instead  of  resignation  came  symptoms  of  the  most  stringent  resolution 
to  carry  out  the  unjust  law  to  its  bitterest  end.  Extra  police  were  drafted 
into  the  counties  of  Mayo  and  Gal  way,  thus  raising  the  burden  of  taxation 
upon  the  two  counties  that  had  sufft-red  the  most  bitterly  and  escaped  the 
most  narrowly  from  the  bitterest  horrors  of  famine.  The  Orange  writers 
in  the  North  of  Ireland  adopted  their  usual  policy  of  representing  as  a 
vast  conspiracy  against  Protestantism  a  movement  the  unsectarian  character 
of  which  was  universally  acknowledged,  and  sought  to  prevent  an  alliance 
of  Protestant  and  Catholic  farmers  against  their  common  enemy  by  the 
characteristic  effort  to  rouse  the  dying  embers  of  religious  hate.  The 
landlord  organs  began  to  cry  out  for  repression  ;  and  the  London  papers 
played  their  characteristic  part  of  blackening  events  in  Ireland  and  of 
exasperating  the  growing  resentment  between  the  two  countries. 

Towards  the  beginning  of  October  the  cry  for  coercion  had  swollen  to  a 
tempest,  but  for  a  moment  it  was  laid  by  two  remarkable  speeches  from 
Mr,  Bright  and  Mr.  Chamberlain. 

'  I  saw,'  said  Mr.  Bright,  '  the  statement  the  other  day  that  about  100  of 
them  (the  Irish  landlords),  equal  nearly  to  the  number  of  the  Irish 
members,  had  assembled  in  Dublin  and  discussed  the  state  of  things,  and 
they  had  nothing  but  their  old  remedy — force,  the  English  Government, 
armed  police,  increased  military  assistance  and  protection,  and  it-  might  be 
measures  of  restriction  and  coercion  which  they  were  anxious  to  urge  upon 
the  Government.  The  question  for  us  to  ask  ourselves  is.  Is  there  any 
remedy  for  this  state  of  things  ?  Force  is  no  remedy '  (loud  cheers). 
'There  are  times  when  it  may  be  necessary,  and  when  its  employment  may 
be  absolutely  unavoidable,  but  for  my  part  I  should  rather  regard,  and 
rather  discuss,  measures  of  relief  as  measures  of  remedy,  than  measures  of 
force,  whose  influence  is  only  temporary,  and  in  the  long-run,  I  believe,  is 
disastrous.'  ^ 

A  conflict  then  arose  within  the  Cabinet  itself.  I  cannot  pretend  to 
tell  the  story  of  this  internal  struggle,  and  I  can  only  repeat  what  was  the 
gossip  of  the  period.  It  was  said  that  Mr.  Chamberlain,  Sir  Charles  Dilke, 
and  Mr.  Bright  held  out  steadily,  and  for  a  considerable  time,  against  the 
demand  for  coercion  made  by  Mr.  Forster.  But  Mr.  Forster  put  forward 
this  demand  with  daily  increasing  vehemence.  For  some  days,  according 
to  the  remark  of  the  time,  the  Cabinet  was  within  short  distance  of  being 
broken  up.  The  main  argument  before  which  the  hesitations  of  the 
Ministry  broke  down  was  the  enormoiis  increase  which  Mr.  Forster  was 
able  to  show  in  the  outrages  in  October  and  November.  And  the  increase 
which  appeared  in  the  figures  he  laid  before  his  colleagues  was  enormous 
indeed.  By-and-by  these  figures  will  be  examined,  and  it  will  be  seen 
what  the  merits  of  the  case  were  upon  v/hich  Mr.  Forster  based  his  de- 
^  TiTMS,  November  17,  18S0. 


THE  LAND  LEAGUE.  207 

mands.  For  the  present,  suffice  it  to  say  that  Mr.  Forsfcer  carried  his 
point  ;  the  opponents  of  coercion  resolved  to  remain  in  the  Cabinet,  and  it 
was  announced  that  the  next  session  of  Parliament  would  open  with  a 
proposal  for  the  enactment  of  coercive  legislation.  Meantime  a  blow  was 
made  at  the  leaders  of  the  movement.  On  November  2,  1880,  an  informa- 
tion was  filed  at  the  siiit  of  the  Right  Hon.  Hugh  Law,  then  the  Attorney- 
General,'^  against  Mr.  Parnell  and  four  of  his  Parliamentary  colleag-ues, 
Mr.  T.  D.  Sullivan,  Mr.  Sexton,  Mr.  John  Dillon,  and  Mr.  Biggar  ;  and  also 
against  Mr.  Patrick Egan,  treasurer,  and  Mr.  Brennan,  secretary,  of  the  organ- 
ization. In  the  indictment  were  also  bundled  several  persons  who  held  sub- 
ordinate places  in  the  organization,  or  were  entirely  unconnected  vdth  it. 

There  were  nineteen  counts  in  the  indictment  against  the  traversers. 
The  main  charges  were — conspiring  to  incite  the  tenantry  not  to  pay  their 
rents  ;  deterring  tenants  from  buying  land  from  which  other  tenants  had 
been  evicted  ;  conspiring  for  the  purpose  of  injuring  the  landlords ;  and 
forming  combinations  for  the  purpose  of  carrying  out  these  unlawful  ends. 
This,  then,  was  the  proceeding  of  the  Government !  There  is  scarcely  one 
of  these  charges  which  was  not  the  glory  instead  of  the  shame  of  Mr. 
Parnell  and  his  fellow-traversers,  Mr.  Parnell  had  found  the  people  face 
to  face  with  famine  and  groaning  under  the  oppression  of  centuries.  He 
had  brought  them  to  such  assertion  of  their  rights,  to  such  a  potent  com- 
bination, that,  instead  of  being  swept  away,  as  in  all  previous  crises, 
by  wholesale  hunger  and  plague  and  eviction,  and  thereafter  reduced  to 
deeper  wretchedness  and  more  hopeless  slavery,  not  one  man  among  them 
died  from  hunger  or  from  disaster,  and  that,  rising  up  from  their  misery 
and  impotence,  they  gradually  reached  the  position  of  practical  omni- 
potence over  their  oppressors.  The  events  and  calamities  which  seemed  to 
drive  the  tenantry  back  into  the  doom  of  hunger  and  of  servitude  had 
brought  to  them  a  new  birth  of  political  hope  and  power  ;  and  an  hour  of 
apparently  darkest  misery  had  been  changed  into  the  dawn  of  a  new  and  a> 
better  day.  A  man  of  any  other  nationality  who  had  accomplished  such 
things — if  he  had  been  an  Italian  or  a  Pole  ;  still  more,  at  this  epoch,  if  be 
had  been  a  Bulgarian  or  a  Montenegrin — would  have  taken  an  imperish- 
able place  in  the  adoration  of  Englishmen  ;  and  his  reward,  being  an 
Irishman,  was  that  a  Liberal  Administration  dragged  him  through  the 
mire  of  a  criminal  court.  The  trial  was  opened  by  a  startling  episode. 
With  their  usual  mistake  in  regarding  things  in  Ireland  as  necessarily  the 
same  as  in  England,  because  called  by  the  same  names,  the  English  public 
were  and  are  accustomed  to  look  upon  an  Irish  judge  as  raised  above  the 
passions  of  political  partisanship.  They  were  strangely  shocked  in  the 
course  of  the  preliminary  proceedings  of  the  trial  to  read  a  judgment  of 
the  Chief  Justice  of  the  Queen's  Bench,  in  which  the  trial  was  to  take 
place— a  judgment  in  which  the  traversers  were  denounced  with  vehement 
passion.  The  times  had  been  so  changed  since  the  elevation  of  a  man  like 
Judge  Keogh  to  the  Bench,  that  the  Lord  Chief  Justice  found  that  even 
the  English  people  could  not  stomach  such  conduct,  and  he  retired  at  the 
opening  of  the  trial. 

The  trial  was  one  of  the  solemn  mockeries  of  the  time.  It  was  known 
by  the  Crow^n  that  no  impartial  jury  would  convict  the  saviour  of  the 
nation  of  treason  to  the  nation  ;  and  after  a  trial  extending  over  twenty 
days,  the  jury  were  discharged  without  agreeing  to  a  verdict,  ten,  accord- 
ing to  universal  rumour,  being  in  favour  of  acquittal  and  tv/o  for  conviction. 
Another  erent  of  importance  occurred  during  this  recess.     Shortly  after 


2oS  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT, 

his  arrival  in  America  on  his  memoralDle  mission,  Mr.  Parnell  found  the 
services  of  a  secretary  absolutely  necessary.  He  had  previously  made  the 
acquaintance  of  a  young  Irishman  who  at  that  period  was  secretary  in  a 
London  house  of  business  and  the  London  correspondent  of  the  Nation 
newspaper,  Tlie  young  man  had  made  a  strong  impression  upon  the  Irish 
leader,  had  gained  his  confidence,  and  had  taken  part  with  some  others  in 
many  of  the  important  consiiltations  at  critical  moraents.  This  was  Mr. 
T.  M.  Healy.  To  Mr.  Healy  Mr.  Parnell's  thoughts  turned  when  he  foixnd 
himself  immersed  in  a  hopeless  sea  of  correspondence.  He  requested  Mr. 
Healy's  presence  in  America  by  telegraph.  On  the  day  he  received  this 
telegram  Mr.  Healy  threw  up  his  situation,  and  on  that  same  evening  he 
was  on  his  way  to  the  vessel  which  took  him  to  America. 

Timothy  Michael  Healy  was  born  in  Bantry,  county  Cork,  in  the  year 
1855.  Bantry,  as  has  been  seen,  is  also  the  birthplace  of  the  Sullivans,  and 
here  Healy  had  beheld  all  the  scenes  of  quick  decay  which  have  been 
.already  described.  He  had  peculiar  opportunities,  indeed,  for  becoming 
familiar  with  the  awful  horrors  of  the  famine,  for  his  father,  at  seventeen 
years  of  age,  had  been  appointed  Clerk  of  the  Union  at  Bantry,  and  his 
occupation  brought  him  into  contact  with  all  the  dread  realities  of  that 
terrible  time.  He  has  told  his  son  that  for  the  three  famine  years  he 
never  once  saw  a  single  smile.  Outside  the  abbey  in  which  the  forefathers 
of  Healy  and  the  other  men  of  Bantry  are  buried,  are  pits  in  which  many 
hundreds  of  the  victims  of  the  famine  found  a  coifinless  grave  ;  and  Mr. 
Healy  will  tell  you,  with  a  strange  blaze  in  his  eyes,  that  even  to-day  the 
Earl  of  Bantry,  the  lord  of  the  soil,  will  not  allow  these  few  yards  of  land 
to  be  taken  into  the  graveyard,  preferring  that  they  should  be  trodden  by 
his  cattle.  Reared  in  scenes  like  these,  it  is  no  wonder  that  Healy,  %vhose 
nature  is  vehement  and  excitable,  should  have  grown  up  with  a  burning 
hatred  of  English  rule  in  Ireland. 

He  went  to  school  to  the  Christian  Brothers  at  Fermoy  ;  but  fortune 
did  not  permit  him  to  waste  any  unnecessary  time  in  what  are  called  the 
seats  of  learning  ;  for  at  thirteen  he  had  to  set  out  on  the  difficult  business 
of  making  a  livelihood.  It  is  characteristic  of  his  nature  that,  though  he 
has  thus  had  fewer  opportunities  than  almost  any  other  member  of  the 
House  of  Commons  of  obtaining  education — except  such  as  his  father,  an 
educated  man,  may  have  imparted  to  him  as  a  child — he  is  really  one  of 
the  very  best  informed  men  in  the  place.  He  is  intimately  acquainted 
with  not  ordy  English  but  also  with  Erench  and  with  German  literature, 
and  the  '  rude  barbarian '  of  the  imagination  of  English  journalists  is 
keenly  alive  to  the  most  delicate  beauties  of  Alfred  de  Musset  or  Heinrich 
Heine,  and  could  give  his  critics  lessons  in  what  constitutes  literary  merit 
and  literary  grace.  Another  of  the  accomplishments  which  Mr.  Healy 
taught  himself  was  Pitman's  shorthand  ;  and  shi^rthand  in  his  case — as  in  that 
of  Justin  McCarthy  and  several  other  of  his  colleagues — was  the  sword  with 
which  he  had  in  life's  beginning  to  open  the  oyster  of  the  world.  At  sixteen 
years  of  age  he  v/ent  to  Engla-nd  and  obtained  a  situation  as  a  shorthand 
clerk  in  the  office  of  the  superintendent  of  the  North- Eastern  Railway  at  New- 
castle. Newcastle-on-Tyne  has  a  very  large  and  a  very  sturdy  Irish  popula- 
tion, who  take  an  active  part  in  all  political  movements  that  are  going  on,  and 
when  Healy  went  there  he  found  himself  at  once  surrounded  by  countrymen 
who,  if  anything,  held  to  the  National  faith  more  sturdily  than  their 
brethren  at  home.  Probably  he  himself,  if  he  were  to  trace  the  mental 
history  of  his  political  progress,  would  declare  that  m  his  case,  as  in  that  «f 


THE  LAND  LEAGUE.  209 

FO  many  other  Irishmen,  it  was  an  English  atmosphere  that  first  gave  form 
and  intensity  to  his  political  convictions.  At  all  events,  the  newcomer  was 
not  long  at  Newcastle  when  he  was  a  persistent  and  an  active  participator 
in  all  the  political  strivings  of  his  fellow-countrjrnien,  and  it  speaks  strongly 
of  his  force  of  character  and  their  discrimination  that,  though  yet  but  a 
stripling,  he  was  chosen  for  several  positions  of  authority.  Newcastle  is 
one  of  the  few  towns  in  England  that  can  boast  of  having  a  society  exclu- 
sively devoted  to  Irish  purposes,  and  of  the  Irish  Literary  Institute  Mr. 
Healy  was  for  a  considerable  time  the  secretary.  He  was  also,  as  far  back 
as  1873,  secretary  to  the  local  Home  Rule  Association.  Of  Mr,  Healy's 
habits  in  Newcastle  a  characteristic  account  is  given  by  one  of  his  friends. 
He  lodged  in  the  house  of  an  excellent  Irish  family  —known  to  every  Irish 
visitor  to  Newcastle — and  in  the  family  there  was  a  Celtic  abundance  of 
children.  It  will  relieve  many  friends  of  Mr.  Healy  to  be  informed  that 
this  man,  befcre  whom  Ministers  tremble,  and  even  potent  officials  grow 
pale,  is  the  delight  and  the  darling  of  children,  whose  foibles,  tastes,  and 
pleasures  he  can  minister  to  with  the  unteachable  instinct  of  genius.  The 
moment  the  young  clerk  put  his  foot  inside  his  lodgings  there  came  a  shout 
of  welcome  from  the  young  world  upstairs  ;  the  next  minute  he  was 
romping  with  them  all  ;  and,  during  the  whole  period  of  his  stay  within 
doors,  he  was  the  gayest  and  the  youngest  in  the  house.  But  when  the 
time  came  for  starting  into  the  outside  world  of  Newcastle  and  of  English- 
men, Healy  at  once  put  on  his  suit  of  mail  ;  his  hat  was  tightened  down 
on  his  head,  his  face  assumed  a  frown  of  a  most  forbidding  aspect,  and 
even  his  teeth  were  set.  And  so  he  went  out  to  encounter  the  world  of 
strangers  among  whom  he  lived. 

In  March,  1878,  he  removed  to  London.  He  is  distantly  related  to  Mr. 
John  Barry,  M.P.  for  Wexford,  and  at  that  period  Mr.  Barry  was  asso- 
ciated with  a  large  Scotch  floor-cloth  factory.  Mr.  Healy  was  employed  as 
confidential  clerk  in  this  firm.  He  began  at  the  same  time  to  contribute  a 
weekly  letter  to  the  JSlation  on  Parliamentary  proceedings,  which  had  just 
begun  to  get  lively.  Erom  this  time  forward  his  face  accordingly  became 
familiar  in  the  lobby  of  the  House  of  Commons.  He  had  previously  made 
the  acquaintance  of  Mr.  Parnell  and  the  other  prominent  Irish  figures  of 
the  last  Parliament  at  Home  Rule  meetings  and  elsewhere  ;  and  his  con- 
nection vvT.th  the  Sullivan  family  had  made  him  more  or  less  familiar  with 
the  '  inside  '  of  Irish  political  movements.  He  at  once  threw  all  his  force 
on  the  side  of  the  '  active  '  section  of  the  old  Home  Rule  Party,  and  Mr. 
Parnell  has  several  times  remarked  that  it  was  to  Mr.  Healy's  advocacy 
and  explanation  of  his  policy  in  the  colunms  of  the  Nation  that  the  active 
party  owed  much  of  its  success  in  those  early  days,  when  its  objects  and 
tactics  were  misunderstood  and  actively  misrepresented.  The  London  cor- 
respondence of  Mr,  Healy  was,  indeed,  a  rare  journalistic  treat.  In  the 
opinion  of  many,  his  pen  is  even  more  effective  than  his  tongue  ;  mor- 
dant, happy  illustratioi^,  trenchant  argument — all  this  was  to  be  found 
in  those  London  letters,  and  is  still,  happily,  at  the  service  of  Irish 
national  journalism.  The  style  of  Mr.  Healy  is  founded  palpably  on  that 
of  John  Mitchel,  and  he  has  many  of  the  excellences,  and  a  few  also  of  the 
faults,  of  that  writer  ;  but  these  very  faults  only  make  him  the  more 
readable  ;  for  liveliness,  after  all,  is  the  first  attraction  of  journalistic 
prose. 

Anticipating  a  little,  Mr.  Healy  had  scarcely  taken  his  place  in  the 
House  when  he  set  to  work,  and  his  first  speech  was  in  reply  to  the 

14 


210  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMBl^T. 

Marquis  of  Hartington.  It  was  late  at  night  when  the  young  membel 
rose  ;  the  deputy-leader  of  the  Ministerialists  had  made  an  effective 
address,  and  most  of  Mr.  Healy's  friends  felt  rather  anxious  as  to  the 
result.  Mr.  Healy  can  now  bear  to  be  told  that  there  were  very  divided 
opinions  as  to  the  merits  of  his  first  appearance.  His  speech  was  delivered 
in  a  hard,  dogged  style,  and  gave  evidence  rather  of  fierce  conviction  than 
of  debating  power.  It  was  some  time,  indeed,  before  the  Plouse  would 
acknowledge  that  there  was  anything  in  Mr.  Healy  ;  and  there  has  scarcely 
ever  been  an  Irish  member  who  had  in  his  early  days  to  face  the  fire  of 
such  brutal,  mean,  and  cowardly  attack.  Gentlemen  of  the  Press  professed 
to  be  shocked  at  the  intelligence  that  the  new  member  was  poor — that  he 
actually,  like  themselves,  wrote  for  a  living  ;  and  even  the  cut  of  his 
clothes  afforded  proof  of  the  ignobility  of  his  character.  But  Mr.  Healy 
took  no  notice  of  all  this  ribaldry,  except,  perhaps,  to  become  fiercer  in  his 
wrath  and  more  persistent  in  his  activity.  In  the  nine  weeks'  struggle 
against  coercion  he  was,  though  a  novice,  one  of  the  three  or  four  men  who 
did  the  largest  amount  of  talking,  and  one  has  to  go  to  the  records  of 
Biggar's  best  days  and  Sexton's  longest  speech  to  find  any  approach  to  the 
performances  of  Healy.  When  at  last  the  Coercion  Bills  v/ere  done  with, 
in  1S81,  Mr.  Healy  found  more  profitable  employment  in  discussing  the 
details  of  the  Land  Bill.  While  ninety-nine  out  of  every  himdred  of  the 
members  of  Parliament  were  floundering  in  the  mazes  of  that  extraordinary 
measure,  Mr.  Healy  had  found  the  key  of  the  labyrinth,  and  was  perfectly 
familiar  with  its  details.  He  worked,  as  is  known,  night  and  day  at  the 
Bill,  obtained  several  concessions,  and  finally  succeeded,  under  circum- 
stances to  be  presently  described,  in  having  the  'Healy  Clause'  adopted. 
These  various  successes  at  last  made  the  House  begin  to  change  its  opinion 
of  its  latest  recruit.  It  was  observed  that  Mr,  Gladstone  and  Mr.  Law 
used  to  listen  with  the  utmost  attention  to  anything  Mr.  Healy  had  to  say. 
The  Premier  was  even  one  night  beheld  in  pleasaht  converse  with  his 
young  and  unsparing  antagonist,  and  at  once  the  servile  herd  of  Tory 
journalists  began  to  recognise  Mr.  Healy's  talents.  The  saying  of  the  time 
is  well  known,  that  but  three  men  in  the  House  of  Commons  knew  the 
Land  Bill — Mr.  Gladstone,  Mr.  Law,  and  Mr.  Healy. 

A  few  words  as  to  Mr.  Healy's  general  characteristics.  Perhaps  the 
most  remarkable  of  all  his  qualities  is  his  restless  industry.  Prom  the 
moment  he  crosses  the  tessellated  floor  of  the  lobby,  at  about  four  in  the 
evening,  till  the  House  rises,  he  is  literally  never  a  moment  at  rest — 
excepting  the  half  hour  or  so  he  spends  at  dinner  in  the  restaurant  within 
the  House.  He  has  almost  as  many  correspondents  as  a  Minister,  and  he 
tries  to  answer  nearly  every  letter  on  the  day  of  its  receipt.  Then  he 
takes  an  interest  in,  and  knows  all  about,  everything  that  is  going  on,  great 
or  small,  English,  or  Irish,  or  Scotch.  With  eyes  ablaze,  he  comes  to  tell 
you  of  some  atrocious  job  that  is  perpetrated  under  sub-section  B  in  the 
schedule  to  a  Scotch  Bill  on  Hypothec,  or  a  Welsh  measure  on  threshing- 
machines  ;  and  he  points  out  the  advantage  to  an  Irish  Bill  for  reforming 
the  grand  jury  by  a  '  block '  he  has  put  against  a  Bill  for  increasing  the 
number  of  Commissioners  in  Bankruptcy.  The  extent  of  his  knowledge  of 
Parliamentary  measures  is  astonishing  ;  many  bitter  opponents  in  public, 
policy  seek  his  aid  in  this  regard  ;  and — tell  it  not  in  Gath  ! — there  have 
been  occasions  when  he  has  been  seen  explaining  in  the  Library  the 
mysteries  of  legislation  to  Mr.  Herbert  Gladstone,  Indeed,  Healy  holds 
himself  at  the  servig©  of  everybody.     A  puzzled  colleague  comes  to  ask  for 


THE  LAN-D  LEAGUE,  2ix 

enlightenment ;  Healy  has  put  his  ideas  into  the  shape  of  an  amendment 
before  he  has  had  time  to  give  them  full  expression.  Besides  all  this, 
Healy  has  frequently  to  write  a  column  or  two  for  a  newspaper  in  the 
course  of  the  evening.  And  he  is  never  absent  from  the  House  when  any- 
thing of  importance  is  going  forward.  He  is,  perhaps,  the  only  man  in  the 
House,  except  Mr.  Gladstone,  who  cannot  bear  a  moment's  idleness  ;  and, 
like  the  late  Premier,  he  is  distinguished  from  other  members  by  the  fact  that 
even  in  the  division-lobbies  he  is  to  be  seen  utilizing  the  precious  moments 
by  writing  at  one  of  the  tables.  The  characteristics  of  his  oratory  are  by 
this  time  familiar.  Often,  when  he  stands  up  first,  he  is  tame,  disjointed, 
and  ineffective  ;  but  he  is  one  of  the  men  who  gather  strength  and  fire  as 
they  go  along,  and  before  he  has  resumed  his  seat  he  has  said  some  things 
that  have  set  all  the  House  laughing,  and  some  that  have  put  all  the  House 
into  a  rage.  Finally,  Healy  has  the  defects  of  his  qualities.  The  ardour 
of  his  temperament  and  the  fierceness  of  his  convictions  often  tempt  him 
to  exaggeration  of  Language  and  of  conduct.  Those  who  play  the  compli- 
cated game  of  politics  for  such  mighty  stakes  as  a  nation's  fate  and  the 
destinies  of  millions  ought  to  keep  cool  heads  and  steady  hands.  A  quick 
temper  and  a  sharp  tongue  cause  many  pangs  to  his  friends,  but  keener 
tortures  to  Healy  himself.  He  is  betrayed  into  a  rude  expression,  and 
then  goes  home  and  remains  in  sleepless  contrition  throughout  the  night. 

It  was,  of  course,  inevitable  that,  when  the  Land  League  agitation  broke 
out,  one  of  these  antecedents  and  of  this  temperament  should  throw  him- 
self into  the  movement  ;  and  to  those  who  now  know  Mr.  Healy,  it  will 
not  be  surprising  to  hear  that  he  worked  with  fierce  energy  and  often 
spoke  with  passionate  vehemence.  Passing  through  the  South  of  Ireland, 
Mr.  Healy  became  acquainted  with  the  case  of  Michael  McGrath. 
McGrath  had  held  for  years  a  farm,  but,  the  rent  having  been  raised  from 
£48  to  £105,  had  at  last  to  yield  in  a  struggle,  and  was  evicted.  His 
land  was  'grabbed'  by  another  farmei  jciamed  Cornelius — or,  as  he  was 
called  in  the  district,  '  Curley ' — Mangan,  and  a  decree  of  ejectment  was 
given  against  McGrath  for  the  house  which  had  been  built  by  his  own 
hands  or  by  those  of  his  father.  McGrath  and  his  family  did  not  tamely 
submit  to  the  judgment  of  the  law.  They  stood  a  siege  for  some  days, 
and,  whenever  the  evicting  party  approached  near  enough,  threw  boiling 
water  upon  them.  The  family  were  watched  so  closely  that  they  were 
unable  even  to  go  out  to  get  a  drink  of  water,  and  at  last  were  reduced  by 
famine  to  capitulation.  But  the  struggle  was  not  over.  McGrath  went 
back  to  his  farm,  and  was  sent  to  gaol.  His  wife  took  possession,  and  was 
sent  to  gaol.  His  sister  took  possession,  and  was  sent  to  goal.  As  each 
member  of  the  family  was  released  he  or  she  went  back  again,  and  again 
they  were  each  in  turn  sent  to  gaol.  At  last  they  had  to  give  up  the 
struggle  for  the  house,  and  they  then  adopted  an  expedient  which,  perhaps, 
could  only  be  resorted  to  in  Ireland,  of  all  civilized  lands.  McGrath  got 
a  boat  and  turned  it  upside  down,  and  under  this  boat  lived  himself,  his 
wife,  his  sister,  and  his  children.  The  many  tourists  who  crowd  in  the 
summer  season  to  the  beautiful  regions  of  Glengariff  were  accustomed  to 
stop  on  the  road  between  Glengariff  and  Bantry  to  see  this  curious  house- 
hold. Mr.  Healy  was  much  struck  with  the  story,  and  he  and  Mr.  J.  W. 
Walsh,  then  an  organizer  of  the  Land  League,  paid  a  visit  to  Mangan  to 
remonstrate  with  him  on  the  injustice  he  had  done  to  the  tenant,  whose 
property  he  had  helped  the  landlord  to  rob. 

For  his  action  in  this  matter  Mr.  Healy  was  arrested,  and  this  was  the 

14—2 


212  THk  PAR^ELL  MOVEMENT. 

first  promluent  arrest  by  the  new  Chief  Secretary  of  the  Liberal  Govern- 
ment. Mr.  Parnell  and  his  friends  at  once  resolved  to  make  a  retm-n 
blow.  The  lamented  death  of  Mr.  William  Redmond  left  a  vacancy  for 
the  borough  of  Wexford.  Mr.  Healy  was  immediately  nominated,  and  re- 
turned without  even  the  mention  of  opposition.  But  he  had  not  yet 
escaped  from  Mr.  Forster's  vengeance.  He  was  charged  under  one  of  the 
Acts  in  the  terrible  code  known  as  the  Whiteboy  Acts.  The  Acts  date 
froxi  the  last  century,  and  the  prisoner  convicted  under  them  is  liable  to  a 
lengthened  term  of  penal  servitude,  and  to  be  once,  twice,  or  thrice 
publicly  or  privately  whipped,  each  year.  The  case  came  before  Judge 
Fitzgerald,  and  he  joined  the  prosecuting  counsel  in  exhausting  every 
effort  to  procure  a  conviction.  The  two  prisoners,  Mr.  Healy  and  Mr. 
Walsh,  were,  in  the  first  place,  tried  at  the  winter  assizes,  and  this  was  in 
itself  an  unusual  and  suspicious  occurrence.  The  winter  assizes  are  in- 
tended for  the  relief  of  prisoners  who,  being  imprisoned,  would  otherwise 
have  to  wait  till  the  spring  assizes  without  having  their  cases  decided  ;  but 
Mr.  Healy  and  Mr.  Walsh  were  not  imprisoned.  They  were  put  on  bail, 
and  this  was  perhaps  the  first  instance  in  which  bailed  prisoners  were  tried 
at  these  assizes.  The  disadvantage  to  Mr.  Healy  and  Mr.  Walsh  was  that 
they  were  not  tried  hy  a  jury  of  county  farmers,  many  of  whom  might  be 
in  their  favour,  as  their  crime,  if  any,  had  been  committed  in  defence  of 
the  farmers'  caixse.  Then  they  were  tried  as  misdemeanants,  which  re- 
duced their  power  of  challenge  to  six  names  ;  and,  throughout  the  trial. 
Judge  Fitzgerald  was  a  far  more  effective  cross-examiner  on  behalf  of  the 
Crown  than  the  prosecuting  counsel.  But  in  spite  of  all  these  efforts,  Mr. 
Healy  and  Mr.  Walsh  were  acquitted. 

It  is,  perhaps,  as  well  here  to  tell  the  fate  of  McGrath.  He  continued 
in  his  boat  for  some  years — still  pursued  by  the  many  agencies  that  are  on 
the  side  of  the  landlords  in  Ireland.  For  instance,  he  was  charged  by  the 
county  surveyor  with  trespassing  on  the  road  on  which  this  boat-house  was 
placed,  and  he  only  escaped  through  the  inexhaustible  ingenuity  of  Mr. 
Maurice  Healy,  Mr.  Healy's  brother.  But  finally,  through  exposure  to  the 
weather,  poor  McGrath  caught  typhus  fever,  passed  through  the  illness 
under  the  boat,  died  under  it,  and  was  there  waked.  Since  then  neigh- 
bours have  built  a  small  house  for  his  widow  and  children. 

The  scene  now  changed  from  the  agitation  in  Ireland  and  from  the 
State  Trials  :  and  interest  was  transferred  from  Dublin  to  Westminster. 
The  result  of  the  trial  of  Mr.  Parnell  was  regarded  as  foregone,  and  excited 
but  a  languid  interest.  The  real  centre  of  attraction  was  the  House  of 
Commons.  The  Government  had  pledged  themselves  to  propose  coercion  ; 
the  Irish  members  at  their  annual  meeting,  held  in  the  City  Hall,  Dublin, 
had,  on  their  side,  pledged  themselves  to  exhaust  every  effort  in  opposing 
coercion.  Everyone  was  anxious  to  see  the  opening  of  the  portentoua 
struggle, 

CHAPTER  XI. 

THE   COERCION    STRUGGLE. 

Parliament  met  on  Thursday,  January  6.  Nobody  felt  Certain  as  to  what 
would  be  the  fate  of  the  coercion  proposals  of  the  Government.  The 
terms  of  the  Queen's  Si:)eech  were  eagerly  scanned  ;  the  statements  with 
regard  to  coercion  were  strong,  the  allusions  to  the  coming  Land  Bill  werd 


THE  COERCION  STRUGGLE.  213 

weak,  '  Attempts  upon  life,'  said  the  Queen's  Speech,  *  have  not  grown  in 
the  same  proportions  as  other  offences.'  The  burden  of  the  charge  was 
that  what  was  called  '  an  extended  system  of  terror  had  been  established  ' 
which  had  'paralyzed  almost  alike  the  exercise  of  private  lights  and  the 
performance  of  civil  duties.'^  In  other  words,  the  main  offence  was  that 
the  organization  of  the  tenantry  throughout  the  country  had  been  made  so 
complete  that  the  landlords  found  it  impossible  any  longer  to  get  the 
tenants  to  play  their  game  by  internecine  struggle  for  the  privilege  of 
paying  a  rack-rent  for  the  land.  If  such  a  conspiracy  existed,  it  was  a 
national  conspiracy  ;  for  membership  of  the  Land  League  at  this  period 
was  practically  coterminous  with  the  citizenhood  of  four-fifths  of  the 
country.  The  statement  was  frequently  put  forward,  of  course,  that  the 
terrorism  which  existed  was  the  creation  of  a  few  agitators  who  were  at 
the  head  of  the  Land  League  ;  but  this  theory  was  gradually  dropped,  and 
war  was  declared  against  the  Land  League  as  a  body — that  was,  against 
the  Irish  people  as  a  nation. 

The  allusions  in  the  Prime  Minister's  speech  to  the  coming  Land  Act 
were  even  more  vague  and  unsatisfactory  than  those  of  the  Queen's  Speech. 
He  still  stuck  to  the  Act  of  1870  as  fairly  successful. ^  He  passed  a  general 
eulogium  upon  the  landlords  as  a  class,  and  he  even  denied  that  there  had 
been  any  general  increase  of  the  rents.^  Probably,  for  strategical  reasons, 
he  also  did  his  best  to  minimize  the  reforms  which  he  was  about  to  propose. 
His  legislation  was  to  be  nothing  better  than  a  development  of  the  prin- 
ciples of  the  Act  of  1870.  There  were  some  faint  promises  of  a  tribunal 
for  settling  fair  rent  and  of  free  sale,  but  he  studiously  avoided  all  mention 
of  fixity  of  tenure — the  third  of  the  '  three  F's.''*  This  speech  increased  the 
general  alarm  ;  and  when  the  Irish  members  complained  of  the  insufficiency 
of  the  proposals  which  the  Government  had  shadowed  forth,  they  were  re- 
ceived with  cheers  from  the  Radical  benches.^ 

The  Irish  members,  as  has  been  seen,  had  pledged  themselves  to  oppose 
coercion  by  all  the  forms  of  the  House,  and  the  plan  they  adopted  was  to 
propose  several  amendments  in  succession.  Mr.  Parnell  started  by  pro- 
posing *  That  the  peace  and  tranquillity  of  Ireland  cannot  be  promoted  by 
suspending  any  of  the  constitutional  rights  of  the  Irish  people.'  Mr. 
McCarthy  followed  with  an  amendment,  '  Humbly  to  pray  her  Majesty 
to  refrain  from  using  the  naval,  military,  and  constabulary  forces  of  the 
Crown  in  enforcing  ejectments  for  non-payment  of  rent  in  Ireland,  until 
the  measures  proposed  to  be  submitted  to  her  Majesty  with  regard  to  the 
ownership  of  land  in  Ireland  have  been  decided  upon  by  Parliament.'  And 
finally  Mr.  Dawson  proposed  '  That  in  the  opinion  of  this  House  it  is  ex- 
pedient to  submit  a  measure  for  the  purpose  of  assimilating  the  Borough 
Franchise  in  Ireland  to  that  in  England,  as  promised  in  her  Majesty's  most 
gracious  speech  last  session.' 

This  brought  the  debate  on  the  Queen's  Speech  up  to  Thursday, 
January  20.  By  this  time  the  aspect  of  affairs  had  undergone  a  consider- 
able change.  The  exasperation  caused  by  this  prolonged  resistance  created 
a  similar  exasperation  outside  the  House  of  Commons.   There  was  gradually 

j:  Hansard,  vol.  cclvii.,  p.  6. 

2  '  We  are  not  at  all  prepared  to  admit  that  the  Land  Act  has  been  a  failure.' — 
Hansard,  vol.  cclvii.,  p.  119. 

3  *  I  do  not  wish  at  all  to  convey  that  it  is  my  impression  that  rents  in  Ireland 
would  in  general  be  described  with  any  fairness  as  being  unfair  or  exorbitant.' — 
Ihid.,  p.  120. 

4  Ibid.,  pp.  120, 121.  5  Ibid.,  p.  222. 


214  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

rising  one  of  those  tempests  of  popular  passion  in  England  which  sweep 
down  party  ties.  The  Radicals  grew  fewer  and  fainter  in  their  opposition, 
the  two  English  parties  practically  coalesced,  and  the  House  was  united 
against  the  little  Irish  phalanx.  The  latter,  on  their  part,  exhausted,  but 
still  angry  and  determined,  resolved  to  fight  on  ;  and  they,  too,  were 
backed  by  the  rising  temper  of  their  own  country.  The  Land  League 
grew  daily  in  power  and  in  resources  ;  the  subscriptions  from  America  rose 
to  an  amount  that  a  short  time  before  would  have  been  considered  fabulous  ; 
and  on  January  13  the  treasurer  was  able  to  announce  that  during  the  week 
then  past  there  had  been  received  from  various  sources  no  less  a  sum  than 
£4,050.  Eviction  became  daily  more  impossible,  and,  though  all  the  forces 
of  the  Crown  w^ere  placed  at  the  disposal  of  the  landlords,  the  decree  fre- 
quently had  to  remain  unfulfilled  in  the  presence  of  crowds  of  peasants 
armed  with  pitchforks,  scythes,  and  pike-heads,  and  ready  to  perish  in 
defence  of  their  homesteads.  These  various  circumstances  were  also  aggra- 
vated by  the  daily  contests  at  question-time  between  Mr.  Forster  and  the 
Irish  representatives.  Every  act  of  repression  to  which  he  resorted  lent 
fuel  to  the  flame,  and  from  this  period  forward  he  took  up  an  ultra-Tory 
attitude.  He  admitted  no  case  of  exceptional  hardship,  defended  the 
police  through  thick  and  thin,  and  in  fact  adopted  the  policy  of  repression 
pure  and  simple. 

At  last,  on  the  night  of  Thursda,y,  January  20,  the  third  Irish  amend- 
ment was  disposed  of.  On  January  12  it  was  announced  that  Mr.  Shaw 
had  retired  from  the  Home  Rule  Party.  He  was  followed  by  all  the  other 
Home  Rulers  who  with  him  had  remained  seated  on  the  Liberal  side  of 
the  House ;  and  thus  the  Irish  Party  found  themselves  deserted  by  their  own 
friends  in  face  of  the  enemy,  and  in  the  very  agony  of  pitched  battle. 

On  Monday,  January  24,  Mr.  Forster  introduced  the  first  Coercion  Bill. 
The  speech  which  he  delivered  was  one  of  the  ablest  that  he  ever  ad- 
dressed to  the  House.  The  matter  was  well  arranged,  the  delivery  was 
good,  the  fierce  passion  which  he  felt  lent  effect  to  his  denunciations,  and 
the  speech  was  full  of  those  asides  and  suggestions  which  were  natural  to 
one  of  the  greatest  masters  of  adroit  suggestiveness  the  House  of  Commons 
ever  saw.  Its  effect  upon  the  House  was  very  great,  and  the  newspapers 
of  the  next  morning  proclaimed  with  unbroken  unanimity  that  he  had 
clearly  and  triumphantly  proved  the  case  for  coercion. 

Let  me  examine  rapidly  the  grounds  on  which  Mr.  Forster  demanded 
coercion. 

Mr.  Forster's  first  position  was  that  the  total  of  crime  was  enormous  and 
unprecedented  ;  and  this  he  proceeded  to  prove  by  stating  that  the  total 
number  of  outrages  in  the  year  1880  was  2,590,  and  that  this  was  the 
greatest  total  of  crime  ever  recorded  fi-om  the  date  when  agrarian  crimes 
were  first  distinctly  tabulated — which  was  another  way  of  stating  that  the 
crime  of  1880  was  the  largest  of  any  year  on  record.  This  statement  of 
the  case,  if  true,  gave  a  strong — almost  an  unanswerable — argument  in 
favour  of  coercion.  But  the  statement  was  entirely  unti-ue.  In  the  first 
place  Mr.  Forster  had  to  reduce  his  big  total  of  2,590  down  to  1,253,  for 
the  balance  of  1,337  were  threatening  letters.  If  the  House  had  been  in  a 
reasonable  temper  this  announcement  would  have  been  so  startling  as  to 
make  it  suspicious  of  the  whole  case  of  Mr.  Forster ;  for,  of  course,  when 
Mr.  Forster  spoke  to  his  colleagues  of  the  appalling  total  of  2,590  crimes, 
what  they  would  infer  was  that  he  was  talking  of  crimes  actually  perpetrated, 
not  of  crimes  intended  or  threatened. 


THE  COERCION  STRUGGLE. 


215 


Mr.  Forster  diverted  attention  from  this  astonishing  revelation  of  the 
weakness  of  his  case  by  appearing  to  frankly  admit  it  ;  and  by  still  con- 
tending that  even  if  this  distinction  were  made  between  actual  offences 
committed  and  mere  threatening  letters,  still  the  year  18S0  stood  out  in 
bold  and  bad  relief  from  all  the  other  years  of  Irish  crime  in  the  extent  of 
its  criminality". 

'  In  1880  (he  said),  exclusive  of  threatening  letters,  the  number  of  agrarian 
outrages  was  1,253  ;  in  1845,  they  were  950— that  is  to  say,  that  they  were 
32  per  cent,  higher  last  year  than  they  were  in  the  lai-gest  year  of  which 
we  have  any  special  record.  Hon.  members  are  well  aware  that  there  is 
now  a  great  difference  in  the  population.  The  population  of  Ireland  is  now 
some  5,000,000,  compared  with  8,000,000  in  1845.  Therefore,  taking  into 
account  the  difference  of  population,  the  actual  agraria,n  outrages  of  last 
year,  exclusive  of  threatening  letters,  were  more  than  double  what  they 
were  in  the  worst  year  we  have  any  record  of,  namely,  the  year  1845.'  ■■■ 

Here  again  we  have  a  statement  which  is  entirely  untrue,  to  the  extent 
that  it  gives  a  grossly — it  may  be  said,  a  gigantically — false  representation 
of  the  state  of  affairs.  It  is  entirely  untrue  to  declare  that  the  year  1880 
was  more  criminal  than  any  year  from  1844.  It  would  be  far  more  correct 
to  say  that  the  year  1880  was  a  year  startlingly  free  from  crime  in  com- 
parison with  several  of  the  years  from  1844.  The  criminal  character  of  a 
year  should  assuredly  be  tested,  not  so  much  by  the  number  of  its  crimes 
as  by  their  character.  A  year  that  had  a  hundred  cases  of  petty  larceny 
and  no  mui-der  v/ould  certainly  be  less  criminal  than  a  year  that  had  fifty- 
two  crimes,  of  whicli  fifty  were  petty  larceny  and  two  were  wilful  murder, 
though  there  was  a  difference  of  forty-eight  between  the  criminal  totals  of 
the  one  year  and  the  other.  A  test  of  the  criminality  of  these  different 
years  would  be  a  comparison  of  such  serious  crimes  as  homicides,  whether 
murder  or  manslaughter.  Let  us  apply  this  test  to  1880  and  other  years, 
and  this  is  what  we  find  : 


Homicides,  desckibed  as  Agraeian 


1844 
1845 
1846 
1847 
1849 


18 

1850 

18 

1851 

16 

1869 

16 

1879 

15 

1880 

18 
12 
10 
10 


It  will  be  seen  from  this  table  that,  in  serious  agrarian  crime,  the  year 
1880  bore  a  most  favourable  contrast,  not  merely  with  many  years  since 
1844,  but  also  with  the  very  year  which  preceded  it. 

Let  us  try  another  form  of  comparison  between  the  criminality  of  1880 
and  that  of  preceding  3'ears.  The  distinction  made  between  agrarian  and 
other  outrages  would  seem  to  have  been  very  lax  in  the  early  years  of  the 
statistical  records.  For  instance,  in  the  year  1847  the  total  outrages  in 
Ireland  are  set  down  as  2,986,  and  of  these  but  620  are  placed  to  the  credit 
of  agrarian  outrages.  This  must,  of  course,  be  inaccurate  ;  for  1847,  as  has 
been  seen,  was  a  year  of  agrarian  upheaval,  and,  instead  of  the  proportion 
of  crime  between  agrarian  and  non-agrarian  being  fairly  represented  by 
620  on  the  one  side,  and  the  balance  of  the  total  of  2,986  on  the  other,  it 
would  seem  far  more  likely  that  the  greater  number  of  the  2,986  crimes 

*  Hansard,  vol.  cclvii.,  p.  1209. 


2l6 


THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 


were  agrarian  crimes — the  crimes  of  starving  and  desperate  peasants 
fighting  for  their  patch  of  land  and  their  meals  of  potatoes.  In  any  case, 
let  us  now  compare  the  total  crime  of  1880  with  that  of  other  years  : 

Total  of 
Outrages. 

14,908 

10,639 

9,144 

5,609 

This  table  will  show  a  startling  difference  between  the  crime  of  1880  and 
that  of  several  of  the  years  by  which  it  was  preceded. 

Finally,  let  us  compare  the  total  of  murders  of  all  kinds  in  1880  with 
those  of  preceding  years 


Total  of 

Tear. 

Outrages. 

Tear. 

1844 

6,327 

1849 

1845 

8,088 

1850 

1846 

12,374 

1851 

1847 

20,986 

1880 

1848 

14,080 

Homi- 

Ilomi- 

Tear. 

cides. 

Tear. 

cides. 

1844        

..      146 

1851        ... 

157 

1845       

..      139 

1852       ... 

140 

1846       

..      170 

1853       ... 

119 

1847       

..     212 

1870       ... 

77, 

1848       

..     171 

1871       ... 

71' 

1849       

..     203 

1880       ... 

69 

1850       

..     139 

But  the  strongest  evidence  of  the  comparative  freedom  from  serious 
crime  of  1880  in  comparison  with  other  years  in  found  in  the  speech  of  Mr. 
Forster  himself. 

'  Some  honourable  members,'  he  said,  '  have  said  that  after  all  there  have 
been  but  few  cases  of  murder,  or  attempt  at  murder ' — and  when  this  state- 
ment was  received,  as  was  natural,  with  cheers  from  the  Irish  members,  the 
Chief  Secretary  made  the  reply — '  but  they  were  not  necessary  ;'■■■  and  this 
answer  was  considered  so  satisfactory  by  the  House  generally,  that  the 
Ministerialists  and  Conservatives  cheered  in  accord. 

Later  on  the  Marquis  of  Hartington  made  exactly  the  same  admission. 
*I  find,'  he  said,  'that  during  the  year  1879,  when  Ireland  was  ruled  by  a 
beneficent  Conservative  Government,  there  were  ten  agrarian  homicides  or 
murders,  and  in  the  year  which  has  just  elapsed  there  were  seven.' 

I  have  now,  from  the  \vords  of  the  Queen's  Speech,  from  the  words  of 
Mr.  Forster,  from  the  words  of  Lord  Hartington,  and  from  the  figures, 
proved  that  in  serious  crime  1880,  instead  of  being  exceptionally  criminal, 
was,  compared  with  years  of  disturbances,  exceptionally  innocent ;  and  that 
disposes  of  Mr.  Forster's  first  plea  for  coercion. 

The  second  plea  for  coercion  was  the  enormous  increase  of  crime  in  the 
latter  half  of  the  year  1880,  and  especially  in  the  last  three  months  of  that 
year. 

'  I  am  also  (said  Mr.  Forster)  obliged  to  tell  the  House  that  there  has 
been  a  great  increase  in  the  last  three  months  of  last  year.  Exclusive  of 
threatening  letters,  719  outrages  out  of  the  total  of  1,253  for  the  entire 
year  occurred  in  the  three  months  of  October,  November,  and  December  ; 
and,  including  threatening  letters,  1,696  out  of  2,590.  That  is  to  say, 
two-thirds  of  the  total  agrarian  outrages  occurred  within  the  last  quarter 
of  the  year,  and  58  uer  cent,  of  these,  exclusive  of  threatening  letters.     It 

*  Hansard,  vol.  cclvii,,  p.  1213. 


THE  COERCION  STRUGGLE.  217 

is  also  right  to  say  that  the  number  which  occurred  in  the  month  of  December 
was  much  more  than  it  is  for  October  and  November  put  together.'-'- 

This  was  an  argument  which  carried  great  weight  with  the  House  of 
Commons,  and  unquestionably  it  was  the  argument  that  finally  induced 
Mr.  Forster's  colleagues  to  accept  coarcion.  And  the  figures  certainly 
were  sufficiently  startling.  The  total  for  September,  1880,  was  167  ;  in 
October  the  total  had  risen  to  268,  in  November  to  561,  and  in  December 
it  had  reached  867. 

With  this  part  of  Mr,  Forster's  case  I  will  not  deal  just  for  the  moment. 
The  outrages  for  the  year  1880  were  published  in  Blue  Books,  giving  the 
crimes  for  each  month  of  the  year  separately.  The  first  Blue  Book  was  not 
produced  at  the  opening  of  the  Session,  nor  for  several  days  after  ;  it  was 
produced  at  a  time  when  the  case  of  Ireland  had  already  been  decided. 
The  story  of  the  Blue  Books  I  will  tell  a  few  paragraphs  later  on  ;  and 
then  it  will  be  seen  that  the  case  for  the  increase  of  crime  in  the  latter  half 
of  1880,  and  in  the  months  of  October,  November,  and  December,  was  just 
as  much  without  real  foundation,  and  was  as  much  a  tissue  of  misrepre- 
sentation and  false  pretences  as  the  representation  that  1880  was  remark- 
able for  the  depth  of  its  criminality  above  all  years  from  1844.  With  the 
year  1880  considerably  under  the  total  of  the  previous  year's  murders,  and 
immensely  under  the  total  of  that  of  many  other  years,  by  what  means  did 
Mr.  Forster  succeed  in  fooling  a  body  of  intelligent  men  into  the  belief  that 
Ireland  was,  in  that  year,  a  perfect  pandemonium  of  hideous  and  revolting 
crime  ? 

Mr.  Forster's  chief  device  was  to  select  some  special  and  isolated  case  of 
horrible  ill-usage,  and  represent  this  as  of  constant  occurrence,  and  typical 
of  the  general  condition  of  the  country.  For  instance,  in  one  of  his  eflfec- 
tive  asides  he  described  '  carding  ' : 

'  I  do  not  know  (he  said)  whether  honourable  members  know  what  card- 
ing means,  and  perhaps  I  had  better  explain  it.  An  iron  comb  used  for 
agricultural  purposes  is  applied  to  a  man's  naked  body,  and  the  torture 
must  be  very  great. '^ 

The  sentence  in  which  he  introduces  this  description  will  sufficiently 
prove  that  he  meant  to  indicate  that  '  carding  '  was  an  extremely  common 
occurrence. 

'  A  disguised  party  of  men  (he  said),  consisting  of  ten,  twenty,  or  even 
more,  come  to  a  lone  farmhouse  at  night,  drag  the  farmer  out  of  bed,  beat 
him,  and  card  him.' 

And  he  then  went  on  after  his  dexterous  aside : 

*  Then  the  man  is  threatened  and  warned  against  disobeying  the  orders 
of  the  organization  any  longer.  Shots  are  fired  over  his  head,  and  some- 
times at  him.  Let  hon.  members  think  of  the  terrors  thus  produced. 
Imagine  a  small  farmer  in  a  desolate  situation — his  house  on  the  side  of 
some  hill,  or  near  some  bog.  There  is  no  help  near  ;  no  police-station  is  at 
hand  ;  and  the  man  himself  is  powerless  to  resist.  Naturally,  he  submits 
to  this  cruel  tyranny  and  intimidation.  And  no  wonder,  when  such  things 
as  these  are  taking  place,  that  the  hon.  member  for  Tipperary  (Mr.  Dillon) 
is  right,  and  that  the  Land  League  reigns  supreme.'^ 

'■  Hansard,  vol.  cclvii.,  pp.  1209,  1210. 

2  Ihid.,  p.  1212.  "  3  IbidL. 


^i8  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

Y^T'hat  will  be  thought  of  the  candour  of  the  Chief  Secretary  in  making 
such  a  representation  when  it  is  said  tha(3  in  the  Blue  Book  containing  the 
crimes  from  February,  1880,  to  October,  1880,  there  is,  in  the  whole  total 
of  1,048  crimes,  just  one  single  instance  of  '  carding  '  ? 

But  in  the  absence  of  murders,  and  with  but  one  case  of  'carding,'  Mr. 
Forster  had  plenty  of  stories  with  regard  to  the  mutilation  of  cattle.  The 
Chief  Secretar}^  relied  on  the  fact  that  the  story  of  such  offences  w^ould 
naturally  have  great  effect  upon  an  audience  of  Englishmen,  with  their 
strong  and  just  hatred  of  cruelty  to  animals. 

"When  Mr.  Forster  had  exhausted  his  harrowing  description  of  these 
outrages  upon  animals,  what  was  the  dread  total  he  had  to  bring  of  such 
cases  before  Parliament?  'In  1880,'  he  said,  'the  number  of  cases  of 
maiming  cattle  amounted  to  101.'^  With  similar  reasonableness  Sir 
Charles  Dilke,  in  a  speech  made  during  the  recess,  had  suggested  the  neces- 
sity of  coercion  from  the  fact  that  in  ten  months  of  1880  there  had  been 
47  cases  of  maiming  or  killing  animals.  Forty-seven  outrages  on  animals 
in  ten  months,  101  in  twelve — a  small  total  to  destroy  a  nation's  liberties  ! 
In  1876  there  were  in  England  2,468  convictions  for  cruelty  to  animals  ; 
in  1877,  2,726  ;  in  1878,  3,533.  In  the  very  month  of  November  of  1880, 
the  Society  for  the  Prevention  of  Crueltj''  to  Animals  M'^as  able  to  advertise 
323  convictions,  or  more  than  three  times  the  number  of  cases  in  all  Ireland 
for  the  entire  year.  If  the  liberties  of  England  were  at  the  mercy  of  an 
ignorant  and  hostile  opinion  in  Ireland,  one  can  well  imagine  how,  by  a 
judicious  manipiilation  of  these  statistics,  the  habits  of  the  English  people 
might  be  falsely  illustrated  to  the  Irish  people  as  those  of  a  nation  of 
savages  and  monsters. 

There  was  one  device  finally.  It  was  the  foundation  of  the  whole  case  of 
the  Chief  Secretary  that  his  legislation  was  directed,  not  against  the  Land 
League  as  an  organization,  nor  against  the  masses  of  the  Irish  people. 
His  whole  cue  was  that  the  Act  was  directed  against  the  few  criminals 
who  with  their  own  hands  perpetrated  these  outrages  :  the  Bills,  in  fact, 
were  in  defence  of  the  nation  generally  against  a  few  criminals  among  its 
population.  Answering  the  argument  that  they  ought  to  have  introduced 
Land  Reform  before  coercion,  the  Chief  Secretary  said  :  '  My  ansv/er  is 
that  the  Irish  people  cannot  wait  for  protection,  and  they  ought  not  to 
wait  for  protection.'^  The  criminals,  on  the  other  hand,  were  'village 
tyrants,'  the  '  mauvais  siijets  '  of  their  neighbourhood  ;  the  '  contemptible, 
dissolute  ruffian  and  blackguard,'  who  was  '  shunned  by  every  respectable 
man,'^ 

This  miserable  minority,  too,  of  persons  who  committed  outrages  were 
well  knowTi  to  the  police. 

'  It  is  not  (said  Mr.  Forster)  that  the  police  do  not  know  who  these 
village  tyrants  are.  The  police  know  perfectly  well  who  plan  and  perpe- 
trate these  outrages,  and  the  perpetrators  are  perfectly  aware  of  the  fact 
that  they  are  known.'  ■* 

The  moment  the  Habeas  Corpus  Act  was  suspended,  these  men  would 
either  fly  the  country  or  be  arrested. 

'  The  men  who  plan  and  execute  these  outrages  desist  from  fear  of  being 
arrested.     They  are  aware  that  the  police  know  who  they  are.  .  My  belief 

^  Hansard,  vol.  cclvii.,  p.  12H.  ^  Ibid.,  Tp.  1235. 

3  Ibid.,  pp.  1226,  1227.  4  Ibid.,  p.  1226. 


THE  COERCION  STRUGGLE,  219 

is  that  if  you  pass  this  Act  you  will  cause  an  immense  diminution  of 
crime.'  ^ 

It  will  be  seen  later  on  in  what  shameful  difference  was  the  application 
of  the  Coercion  Act  and  the  limitation  by  the  Chief  Secretary  of  the  pev^ons 
to  whom  it  should  apply,  and  in  what  grotesque  and  horrible  contrast  were 
his  expectations  of  what  the  fruits  of  coercion  would  be  and  what  the  fruits 
of  coercion  really  were. 

The  Returns  on  which  Mr.  Forster  had  founded  his  claim  for  coercion 
were  distributed  among  members  for  the  first  time  on  the  morning  of  the 
day  on  which  he  asked  leave  to  introduce  his  Coercion  Bill.  On  Thursday 
evening,  January  27,  the  analysis  of  the  Returns  was  in  the  hands  of  an 
able  and  skilful  assailant  in  the  person  of  Mr.  Henry  Labouchere.  He 
went  through  the  Returns  and  exposed  astonishing  cases  of  multiplication 
and  exaggeration.  Mr.  Labouchere  picked  out  some  of  the  most  amusing  ; 
and  his  speech  was  a  great  success. 

In  truth,  the  Returns  were  so  full  of  incredible  absurdities,  that  several 
speakers  freely  resorted  to  them,  certain  that  quotations  from  them  v/ould 
be  sure  to  enliven  the  dulness  of  the  House.  This  is  the  very  first  outrage 
that  stood  in  the  Book  : 

*  A  portion  of  the  front  wall  of  an  old  unoccupied  thatched  cabin  was 
maliciously  thrown  down,  in  consequence  of  which  the  roof  fell  in.' 

The  8th  outrage  reported  for  the  West  Riding  of  Co.  Cork  was  thus 
described  : 

'  A  wooden  gate  broken  up  with  stones,  and  half  an  iron  gate  taken 
away,  the  property  of  W.  S.  Bateman.' 

Here  is  the  4th  outrage  reported  for  the  North  Riding  of  Co.  Tip- 
perary  : 

*  A  small  wooden  gate,  the  property  of  Lord  Dunally,  v/as  taken  off  its 
hinges,  brought  into  a  field,  and  broken  with  large  stones.' 

The  41st  outrage  reported  in  the  County  Cavan  is  as  follows  : 

'  Several  panes  of  glass  were  maliciously  broken  in  the  windows  of  an 
unoccupied  house.' 

Here  is  the  6th  outrage  reported  for  the  County  Derry : 

'  Three  perches  of  a  wall  maliciously  thrown  down.' 

Here  is  the  100th  outrage  in  the  West  Riding  of  County  Gal  way  : 

*  A  barrel  of  coal  tar  maliciously  spilled.' 

These  discoveries  of  the  true  character  of  the  outrages  by  which  Mr. 
I^'^rster  had  been  able  to  draw  his  lurid  picture  of  the  state  of  Ireland  were 
sufficiently  startling  ;  but  a  more  bewildering  and  a  more  disturbing  dis- 
covery was  the  manner  in  which  one  offence  was  manufactured  into  several. 
Sometimes  the  one  outrage  was  made  to  do  duty  for  two  or  more.  Thus 
in  page  120  of  the  Return  an  outrage  in  the  County  Mayo  is  described 
as  follows  : 

'  A  party  of  men  came  to  Tighe's  house  at  night,  and  warned  him  that 
they  would  kill  him  unless  he  gave  up  a  meadow  which  he  bought. 
'  Same  party  before  leaving  broke  Tighe's  window.' 

^  Hansard,  vol.  cclvii.,  p.  1231. 


220 


THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 


This  occurrence  figures  as  two  outrages.     As  '  intimidation '  it  is  outrage 
No.  104  ;  as  injury  to  property,  it  is  outrage  No.  105. 

In  the  same  page  of  the  Return  there  are  these  two  separate  records  : 

'Mr.  Walsh  was  fired  at  when  returning  from  his  lodge  from  Achill  Sound, 
by  one  of  four  men  whom  he  passed  on  the  road  ;  he  was  not  injured,' 

And: 

'  Mr.  Walsh,  when  fired  at,  at  once  dismounted  from  his  horse,  and,  while 
doing  so,  was  struck  with  a  stick  and  knocked  down,' 

This  occurrence  also  figures  as  two  outrages.    As  '  firing  at  the  person '  it 
is  outrage  No.  110  ;  as  'aggravated  assault '  it  is  outrage  No,  111. 

Sometimes  the  same  occurrence  is  manufactured  into  five  crimes,  thus  : 


No.  of 
Outrage. 

Names  of 
injured  persons. 

Offence : 
Description. 

Short  details. 

87 

Thorn  as'R.  Talbot 

Taking  and  hold- 

Mr.  Talbot    took  a  farm    from 

and  caretakers. 

ing  forcible  pos- 

which James  Murphy  (accused) 

session. 

was  evicted,  and  placed  care- 
takers in  charge  of  it.     About 

88 

Ditto. 

Administering  un- 

2 a.m.  an  armed  party  forcibly 

lawful  oaths. 

reinstated  Murphy  and  family, 

89 

Ditto. 

Assault    on    care- 

swore him  not  to  leave  it,  as- 

takers. 

saulted  caretakers,  set  fire  to 

90 

Ditto. 

Incendiary  fire. 

about  £60  worth  of  property, 

91 

Ditto. 

Robbery  of  arms. 

and  robbed  the  caretakers  of 
their  arms — three  loaded  guns,^ 

And  finally,  that  grotesque  absurdity  might  reach  its  climax,  an  assault 
by  a  man  is  represented  as  one  outrage,  and  then  the  assault  on  him  by 
those  whom  he  attacked  figures  as  another.     Here  is  the  entry  : 


No.  of 
Outrage. 

Date. 

Names  of 
injured  persons. 

Nature  of 
offence. 

Short  details. 

86 
37 

April  3. 
April  3. 

JIargaret  Lydou. 
Patt  Whalen. 
Bridget  Whalen. 

John  Lydon, 

Aggravated 
assault. 

Ditto. 

A  dispute  arose  about  the 
possession  of   a  small 
plot  of  ground.     John 
Lydon    assaulted    the 
injured  persons. 

Lydon  was  assaulted  at 
the  time  of  the  above 
dispute  about  the  land.  ^ 

When  the  Returns  for  November  and  December  were  published,  a  con- 
siderable time  afterwards,  there  were  the  same  extraordinary  phenomena. 
In  page  15  of  the  Return  for  November,  the  9th  crime  is  : 
'  At  an  early  hour  four  locks  were  maliciously  broken  off  gates  at  James 
Penton's  farm.' 

In  page  39,  the  7th  crime  and  outrage  in  the  County  of  Tipperary  is  thus 
described : 

'  On  the  night  of  the  20th  November  the  windows  of  the  injured  man's 
house  were  broken,  and  the  tops  knocked  off  two  corn  ricks.' 

^  Return,  Agrarian  Crime  (Ireland),  part  i.,  p.  54.  »  Ihid. 


THE  COERCION  STRUGGLE.  221 

The  9th  outrage  on  the  same  page  is  thus  described  :     - 

•  Four  panes  of  glass  were  broken  in  the  injured  man's  house  on  the  night 
of  the  20th  November.' 

In  the  Return  for  December,  in  page  9,  the  second  crime  and  outrage  in 
the  King's  County  is  in  these  words  : 

'  The  head  of  a  large  cock  of  hay,  the  property  of  Mr.  Gaynor,  was 
knocked  off,  causing  considerable  damage  to  the  hay  ;  also  an  iron  gate  was 
carried  away  and  his  cattle  driven  into  the  road.' 

In  page  43  the  83rd  agrarian  outrage  was  described  : 

'  Three  beehives  and  some  shrubs  were  maliciously  injured.' 

It  would  be  rash  to  say  that,  if  these  false  Returns  had  been  presented 
to  ParLament  at  an  early  period  of  the  session,  they  would  have  largely 
increased  the  number  of  opponents  to  coercion  ;  but  if,  at  the  time  of  the 
struggle  within  the  bosom  of  the  Cabinet  itself  for  and  against  the  adoption 
of  repressive  measures,  Mr.  Forster  had  not  confined  himself  to  laying 
before  his  colleagues  the  simple  total  of  increased  crimes,  it  seems  hardly 
open  to  doubt  tliat  the  opponents  of  coercion  would  have  been  able  to  con- 
tinue their  resistance.  That  he  submitted  only  the  totals  to  his  colleagues 
was  clearly  manifest.  During  the  delivery  of  Mr.  Labouchere's  speech  the 
face  of  the  Prime  Minister  grew  clouded  and  disturbed.  He  asked  for  the 
Returns  just  published,  and  was  observed  to  scan  them  eagerly  and  anxiously. 

Mr.  Gladstone  spoke  on  the  third  night  of  the  debate.  It  is  worth 
while  quoting  a  couple  of  passages  to  show  the  honest  intentions  with 
which  Mr.  Gladstone  supported  coercion,  and  how  Mr.  Porster  had 
succeeded  in  completely  misrepresenting  the  case  of  Ireland  to  him.  '  We 
aim  by  this  Bill,'  said  Mr.  Gladstone,  'and  aim  solely  at  the  perpetrators 
and  abettors  of  outrage.'^ 

'  I  stand  (continued  Mr.  Gladstone)  upon  the  words  of  the  legislation  we 
propose,  and  I  say  that  they  do  not  in  the  slightest  degree  justify  the  suspicion 
that  we  are  interfering  with  the  liberty  of  discussion.  I  will  go  further. 
We  are  not  attempting  to  interfere  with  the  license  of  discussion.  There 
is  no  interference  here  with  the  liberty  to  propose  the  most  subversive  and 
revolutionary  changes.  There  is  no  interference  here  with  the  right  of 
associating  in  the  furtherance  of  those  changes,  provided  the  furtherance  is 
by  peaceful  means.  There  is  no  interference  here  with  whatever  right  hon. 
gentlemen  may  think  they  possess  to  recommend,  and  to  bring  about,  not 
only  changes  of  the  law,  hut  in  certain  cases  breaches  of  positive  contract. 
I  am  not  stating  these  things  as  a  matter  of  boast,  I  am  stating  them  as 
matter  of  fact.  I  must  say  it  appears  to  me  that  it  is  a  very  liberal  state  of 
law  which  permits  hon.  gentlemen  to  meet  together  to  break  a  contract  into 
ivhich  they  have  entered."-^ 

These  words  clearly  prove  that  Mr.  Gladstone  was  as  averse  then 
as  he  is  now  to  the  prosecution  of  combination  in  political  opposition. 
If  the  Coercion  Act  afterwards  falsified  these  predictions  of  Mr. 
Gladstone,  as  it  did,  that  does  not  prove  the  non-existence  or 
the  insincerity  of  Mr.  Gladstone's  intentions.  Mr.  Forster  was  the  man 
responsible  for  the  working  of  the  Coercion  Act,  and,  besides,  pledges  as  to 
how  coercion  will  be  carried  out,  made  in  the  bland  serenity  of  Parliamen- 
tary debate,  can  never  be  fulfilled  amid  the  fierce  passion  of  the  social  war 
*  Hansard,  vol.  cclvii.,  p.  1686.  =  Ibid.,  pp.  1686,  1687. 


222  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT, 

which  coercion  begets.  The  contrast  between  the  purposes  to  which  Mr. 
Gladstone  thought  coercion  should  be  devoted  and  its  actual  operation  is 
one  of  the  strongest  arguments  against  coercion,  and  not,  as  is  stupidly  or 
dishonestly  argued,  an  argument  in  favour  of  its  renewal. 

The  debate  was  resumed  on  Monday,  January  31,  Mr.  Gladstone 
announced  that  the  first  stage  of  the  Bill — that  of  the  introduction — should 
be  finished  at  that  sitting.  The  Prime  Minister  made  this  announcement, 
as  it  were,  carelessly  ;  but  there  was  a  portentous  underswell  in  his  voice 
which  showed  the  supreme  importance  he  attached  to  it.  The  Ministerial- 
ists, of  course,  understood  the  tnot  d'ordre  of  the  speech,  and  loudly 
cheered  ;  the  Conservatives,  equally  exasperated  against  the  Irish,  and 
equally  delighted  at  the  success  of  their  efforts  in  hounding  on  the 
Government,  shouted  their  applause,  and  the  small  Parnellite  band,  quite 
as  quick  as  anybody  else  to  see  the  dire  significance  of  the  Premier's 
announcement,  set  up  a  cry  not  as  loud,  but  quite  as  defiant,  as  anj''  that  had 
come  from  either  of  the  other  parties. 

The  debate  resumed  its  course  with  apparent  placidity.  The  House  was 
almost  empty  during  the  whole  evening,  and  it  was  not  tintil  one  o'clock 
that  the  contest  began.  At  that  hour  the  usual  motion  for  adjournment 
was  made.  The  reply  of  the  Prime  Minister  was  laconic  and  emphatic. 
*  I  beg  to  say,'  he  answered,  '  on  the  part  of  the  Government,  that  we  pro- 
pose to  resist  that  motion.'^  The  strange  calm  that  had  reigned  over  the 
House  during  the  evening  was  now  broken.  Passion  was  let  loose,  and 
active  steps  were  taken  on  both  sides  for  hot  and  sharp  encounter.  The 
Ministerialists,  on  their  side,  had  begun  their  preparations  for  the  coming 
contest  at  an  early  hour.  About  half-past  ten  there  began  to  be  a  gradual 
melting  away  of  the  House,  and  there  were  left  no  more  than  half  a  score 
of  the  dullest  and  drowsiest,  the  most  reticent  and  most  docile  members  of 
the  Ministerial  Party.  Of  the  men  thus  told  off  to  remain  through  the 
sitting,  the  majority  left  the  House  and  were  lost  to  observation  in  the 
various  departments  of  the  building.  The  Irish  members  settled  down 
steadily  to  their  work,  and  followed  each  other  in  the  empty  House  in 
monotonous  succession.  During  the  first  night  the  proceedings  were  not 
ill-humoured  on  either  side.  Mr,  Biggar  was  grotesquely  humorous  after 
his  fashion,  and  the  few  English  members  in  the  House  sympathized  with 
his  mood.  When  he  declared  that  the  Irish  members  were  accused  of 
wasting  time,  there  came  from  English  members  a  deprecatory  '  No,  no,' 
v/hereu]'  in  the  member  for  Cavan  beamed  on  the  House,  and  the  House 
beamed  back  upon  the  member  for  Cavan. 

The  struggle  continued  all  through  Tuesday,  Dr.  Lyon  Play  fair  taking 
the  place  of  the  Speaker  when  the  latter  became  exhausted.  About  eleven 
o'clock  on  Tuesday  night  an  appeal  was  made  by  Sir  Richard  Cross,  on  the 
part  of  the  Conservatives,  to  the  Speaker  to  put  in  use  the  rule  against 
wilful  obstruction.  The  Speaker  did  not  think  the  time  had  come  for 
putting  this  rule  into  operation,  but  at  the  same  time  hinted  very  plainly 
that  in  his  view  there  was  very  strong  evidence  of  '  combination  for  the 
purpose  of  wilful  and  persistent  obstruction,'  After  giving  this  ruling, 
Mr.  Brand  retired  from  the  chair,  and  Dr,  Lyon  Playfair  again  took  his 
place.  For  a  while  the  point  as  to  '  obstruction  '  was  dropped  ;  but  soon 
Sir  Stafford  Northcote  came  forward,  and  again  urged  the  Chair  to 
deal  summarily  with  the  Irish  members.  But  Dr.  Playfair  still  refused  to 
take  action  ;  and  when,  finally,  an  appeal  was  made  to  him  by  Sir  Stafford 

^  Hansar  3,  vo'  cclvJi.,  p.  1809. 


THE  COERCION  STRUGGLE.  22% 

Northcote  to  name  Mr.  Parnell,  and  he  still  refused  to  act,  Sir  Stafford 
and  the  Conservative  Party  left  the  House  in  a  body. 

The  Irish  members  now  changed  their  course,  and,  abandoning  any 
further  motions  for  adjournment,  proceeded  to  debate  the  main  question, 
which  was  an  amendment  on  the  part  of  Dr.  Lyons  in  opposition  to  Mr. 
Forster's  demand  for  leave  to  introduce  the  Coercion  Bill.  Each  member 
spoke  at  the  greatest  length  that  either  his  physical  or  his  mental  resources 
would  permit.  Under  this  change  the  House  became  transformed  :  the 
heat  and  excitement  of  a  croAvded  Chamber  gave  place  to  the  languor, 
silence,  and  calm  consistent  with  a  House  of  but  eight  or  nine  members, 
most  of  them  either  fast  asleep  or  in  broken  slumber.  The  visitors, 
whose  attendance  throughout  the  scene  had  been  marvellously  regular, 
broke  down  under  disappointment  of  the  hope  of  further  excitement ;  the 
Ladies'  Gallery  became  absolutely  deserted  ;  there  were  vacancies  even  in 
the  Strangers'  Gallery,  which  had  up  to  this  remained  crowded  ;  and  but 
one  or  two  persons  remained  in  the  gallery  for  distinguished  strangers. 
The  mournful  silence  of  the  Chamber  was  broken  only  by  the  voice  of  the 
Irish  member  and  the  snore  of  a  sleepy  member.  It  was  something  of  a 
relief  to  the  dread  quiet  when  Sir  William  Harcourt  now  and  then  carried 
on  a  low  but  audible  conversation  with  some  of  his  colleagues.  It  was  on 
this  morning  that  Mr.  Sexton  delivered  the  second  of  the  remarkable 
speeches  by  which  he  was  at  last  forcing  himself  into  the  position  of  one 
of  the  most  adroit  and  most  eloquent  orators  of  the  House.  He  spoke  from 
a  quai'ter  to  five  until  twenty  minutes  to  eight.  This  speech,  delivered  to 
an  audience  of  seven  or  eight  people,  nearly  every  one  of  them  in  a  state  of 
complete  or  partial  slumber,  was  complete  in  every  one  of  its  sentences,  had 
every  idea  well  worked  out,  every  word  happily  chosen.  Mr.  Shaw-Lefevre,. 
one  of  the  few  representatives  of  the  Ministry  who  remained  on  the 
Treasury  bench  throughout  the  night,  afterwards  declared  that  he  had 
listened  to  every  word  that  Mr.  Sexton  had  uttered,  and  that  there  was 
not  throughout  it  all  a  superfluous  syllable. 

Meantime  other  Irish  members  were  preparing  to  follow,  and  to  con- 
tinue the  struggle  as  long  as  their  physical  strength  v/ould  hold  out.  Some 
of  them  had  ta,ken  broken  snatches  of  sleep  while  one  of  their  comrades 
was  speaking,  and  at  this  time  were  washing  off  in  the  lavatories  around 
the  House  the  fatigues  of  the  night.  Inside  and  outside  the  House  a  state 
of  electrical  excitement  prevailed  that  can  only  be  appreciated  by  those 
who  passed  through  these  scenes.  There  were  affrighting  v/hispers  of  what 
might  be  done  by  savage  mobs  of  Englishmen  on  the  one  side,  by  Irish 
desperadoes  on  the  other.  Some  of  the  Irish  members  had  been  subjected 
to  a  certain  amount  of  inconvenience  as  they  walked  home  in  the  early 
hours  of  the  morning.  No  one,  in  fact,  knew  what  was  going  to  happen, 
but  everybody  had  a  vague  feeling  that  something  was  about  to  occur, 
and  something  of  a  startling  character.  Inside  the  House  there  was  a 
vague  suspicion  of  an  impending  catastrophe.  An  English  member  in- 
formed Mr..  Sexton,  when  the  member  for  Sligo,  after  his  speech,  dragged 
himself  down  to  the  smoking-room,  that  '  something '  would  take  place  at 
nine  o'clock. 

Mr.  Leamy  followed  Mr.  Sexton,  and  about  a  quarter  to  nine  Mr.  Biggav 
stood  up.  Mea:ntime  there  were  many  signs  that  the  dreaded  '  something  ' 
v/as  about  to  take  place.  As  if  by  some  mysterious  and  occult  influence, 
the  House  filled  with  extraordinary  rapidity.  As  the  clock  approached  the 
hour  of  nine,  Dr.  (now  Sir  Lyon)  Play  fair  began  to  look  very  anxious  and 


224  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

expectant.  Mr.  Gladstone  and  Sir  Stafford  Northcote  had  come  in,  and  at 
nine  o'clock  the  Speaker  made  his  appearance.  He  was  received  \vi.th  a 
burst  of  enthusiastic  cheers,  and  it  was  evident  from  the  benches  on  both 
sides,  which  were  now  almost  crowded,  that  both  the  English  parties  had 
been  told  of  what  was  about  to  come.  Mr.  Biggar  had  resumed  his  seat 
when  the  Speaker  came  in,  and  now  rose  to  continue  his  speech,  but  the 
Speaker,  who  had  entered  with  an  air  of  strange  determination,  and  with 
an  ominous  roll  of  paper  in  his  hand,  remained  standing  and  refused  to  see 
the  member  for  Cavan.  He  then  read  the  historic  declaration  that  he 
would  now  close  the  discussion.  Each  sentence  of  his  speech  was  received 
with  boisterous  applause  from  both  Liberals  and  Conservatives.  It  is  still 
painful  to  recall  the  looks  of  furious  hate  with  which  the  Tory  members 
looked  towards  the  Irish  benches.  Meantime,  the  latter  were  without  the 
assistance  of  their  leader,  for  Mr.  Parnell  had  gone  to  snatch  a  few  hoars' 
sleep  at  the  Westminster  Palace  Hotel  close  by.  Their  hasty  consultation 
was  not  concluded  when  the  Speaker  had  put  the  question  whether  Mr. 
Torster's  motion  or  Dr.  Lyons'  amendment  should  be  accepted.  In  the 
midst  of  this  imcertainty  the  precious  seconds  passed  away.  At  last  the 
doors  of  the  House  w^ere  closed,  and  nothing  remained  but  to  take  part  in 
the  division.  In  sullenness  and  silence  on  both  sides  the  division  was 
taken.  It  was  noticeable  that,  as  the  members  passed  each  other  to  go 
into  the  different  lobbies,  there  w^as  not  even  a  single  exchange  of  the 
passing  word  between  men  of  the  opposite  camps  which  usually  relieves  in 
an  agreeable  manner  the  conflict  of  parties.  The  Speaker  then  announced 
the  numbers  :  Eor  the  original  question,  164  ;  against,  19  ;  majority  for 
the  Government,  145. 

The  Speaker  immediately  afterwards  proposed  to  put  the  original  ques- 
tion, that  leave  be  given  to  bring  in  the  Bill.  Mr.  Justin  McCarthj'-,  as 
deputy-chairman  of  the  party,  rose  to  protest.  The  Speaker  took  no  notice, 
and  the  member  for  Longford  and  he  were  standing  and  speaking  at  the 
same  time,  but  not  a  word  of  either  could  be  heard.  The  Irish  represen- 
tative was  met  with  a  storm  of  interruption  which  vs^as  almost  deafening. 
Mr.  McCarthy,  with  a  tranquil  and  resolute  smile,  still  held  his  ground. 
By  a  happy  inspiration  the  Irish  members  determined  not  to  go  through 
the  farce  of  a  second  division.  Eirst  two,  then  two  or  three  more,  and 
finally  all  of  them  jumped  to  their  feet,  raised  their  hands — in  most  cases 
clenched  in  passion — and  shouted,  'Privilege!  privilege!'  for  several 
seconds,  many  shaking  their  clenched  fists  with  desperate  anger,  and 
moving  their  lips  as  if  they  were  accompanying  these  menacing  gestures 
with  words  of  violence.  Mr.  Gladstone  was  notably  pale  and  disturbed. 
The  Speaker  still  remained  standing,  saying  nothing,  and  the  House  became 
somewhat  less  vehement.  At  last  the  Irish  members  brought  the  painful 
incident  to  a  conclusion  by  walking  out  of  the  House  in  single  file,  Mr. 
McCarthy  leading  the  way,  and  bowing  to  the  Speaker  as  they  left.  Some 
of  the  younger  members  of  the  House  slightly  cheered,  but  the  Assembly 
generally  remained  silent.  Then  the  original  question  was  put,  and  it  was 
carried  without  dissent.  Immediately  afterwards  enthusiasm  and  excite- 
ment once  more  broke  forth,  and  the  cheering  became  still  louder  when 
Mr.  Forster,  in  the  usual  manner,  walked  up  the  floor  of  the  House  from 
the  bar  wdth  his  Bill  in  his  hand.  Then  there  was  a  renewal  of  cheers  when 
the  measure  passed  its  first  reading  without  any  dissent,  and  the  sitting, 
after  its  forty-one  hours'  duration,  came  to  an  end. 

The  Irish  members  retired  from  the  House  to  the  conference -room,  to 


THE  COERCION  STRUGGLE.  225 

consider  their  course  of  action.  They  had  scarcely  arrived  there  when 
Mr.  Parnell,  to  whom  Mr.  Healy  had  conveyed  the  news  of  these  stirring 
events,  entered.  He  wore  his  usual  placid  smile  ;  but  his  followers,  hot 
from  their  wild  encounter,  under  the  inflvience  of  one  of  those  crises  which 
draw  tight  the  ties  between  leader  and  followers,  burst  into  spontaneous 
cheers.  The  Irish  Party  was  young  in  those  days,  and  this  fact  will 
account  for  their  gravely  discussing  one  of  the  most  foolish  propositions 
ever  submitted  to  a  body  of  politicians.  Mr.  O'Connor  Power  proposed 
the  following  resolution  : 

*  That  the  irregular  and  unprecedented  course  adopted  by  Mr.  Speaker  in 
summarily  closing  the  debate  on  the  Coercion  Bill,  by  which  the  Irish 
members  have  been  deprived  of  the  opportunity  of  protesting  against  the 
suspension  of  constitutional  liberty  in  Ireland,  requires  to  be  taken  notice 
of  ;  and  that  a  protest,  signed  by  Irish  members,  be  forwarded  to  Mr. 
Speaker  and  circulated  in  the  public  press  ;  and  that  we,  the  Irish 
members,  retire  from  the  House  pending  the  result  of  a  consultation  with 
our  constituents.'^ 

The  debate  was  most  interesting  and  most  able.  All  the  speakers  who 
took  part  in  it  put  their  cases  with  vigour,  and,  indeed,  in  most  cases  with 
vehemence.  The  long  vigils  of  so  many  days  and  nights  had  begun  to  tell 
on  the  nerves  of  most  of  them,  and  there  was  a  certain  shrillness  in  the 
voices,  a  certain  feverishness  in  the  language  and  gestures  of  the  debaters, 
that  told  of  systems  which  had  been  subjected  to  too  severe  and  too  pro- 
longed a  strain.  But  these  were  the  very  things  which  lent  passion  and 
force  to  the  debate,  and  therefore  it  is,  probably,  that  it  remains  so  dis- 
tinctly in  the  memories  of  all  who  were  present.  After  a  lengthy  discus- 
sion, it  was  decided  that  it  was  the  duty  of  the  Irish  members  to  remain  in 
their  places  in  Parliament  and  to  go  on  with  the  struggle. 

The  Wednesday  immediately  following  the  close  of  the  forty-one  hours' 
sitting  was  again  wasted  in  motions  for  adjournment.  Just  before  the 
sitting  on  Thursday  there  came  the  stunning  report  that  Mr,  Davitt  had 
been  arrested.  Mr.  Davitt  had  now  been  more  than  three  years  out  of 
prison.  He  had  alreadj'',  as  the  reader  knows,  passed  through  the  hideous 
tortures  of  seven  years'  confinement.  The  Coercion  Bill  was  passed  soon 
after  this,  and,  though  the  expectation  was  general  that  he  might  be 
placed  under  restraint  under  the  new  legislation,  nobody  suspected  that  the 
Government  would  have  proceeded  to  lengths  so  great  as  to  send  back  to 
penal  servitude  one  of  the  leaders  of  the  agitation.  The  news  deeply 
affected  Mr.  Parnell  and  the  other  Irish  members.  When  the  House 
met,  however,  there  was  no  indication  of  the  coming  storm.  Mr.  Parnell 
rose  from  his  seat  in  his  usual  tranquil  fashion,  and  asked,  in  a  tone  of 
apparently  no  great  concern,  whether  it  was  true  that  Mr.  Davitt  had 
been  arrested.  '  Yes,  sir  !'  -  was  the  laconic  reply.  It  speaks  eloquently 
of  the  hideous  passions  which  coercion  begets  that  this  intelligence  was 
received  with  a  tempest  of  cheers  that  would  have  formed  a  fitting  wel- 
come to  a  mighty  victor  in  the  field  or  the  accomplishment  of  a  momentous 
popular  reform. 

When,  a  few  minutes  after,  Mr.  Gladstone  rose  to  propose  the  Rules  of 
Urgency,  Mr.  Dillon  rose  at  the  same  time.  The  Speaker  called  upon 
Mr.  Dillon  to  sit  down,  and  that  gentleman  shouted  above  the  tumult  of 
'  Order,  order  !'  and  '  Name,  name  !'  the  words,  '  I  rise  to  a  point  of  order.'* 
The  Speaker  resolutely  refused  to  allow  Mr.  Dillon  to  proceed.  Mr. 
*  Freeman's  Journal,  Feljruary  3,  ISSl.    ^  Hansard,  vol.  cclviii.,  p.  66.     3  Jbid.,  p.  69, 

15 


226  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

Dillon  thereupon  folded  his  arms,  and  he  and  the  Speaker  remained 
standing  for  some  minutes  at  the  same  time.  At  last  the  Speaker  was 
understood  to  name  Mr.  Dillon,  though  the  decree  could  not  be  heard 
above  the  mid  din.  His  suspension  having  been  carried,  Mr.  Dillon  was 
called  upon  to  withdraw  ;  he  refused,  and  a  noisy  scene  took  place.  Then 
the  Sergeant-at-Arms  invited  Mr.  Dillon  to  withdraw,  and  when  the  latter 
still  refused,  the  Sergeant  again  advanced  with  the  principal  doorkeeper 
and  a  number  of  messengers,  placed  his  hand  on  Mr.  Dillon's  shoulder, 
and  requested  him  to  obey  the  order  of  the  Speaker.  '  If  you  employ  force 
I  must  yield,'  ^  said  Mr.  Dillon,  and  then  withdrew. 

The  Prime  Minister  had  scarcely  again  risen  when  Mr.  Parnell  stood 
up  at  the  same  time,  and  made  the  motion  that  the  right  honourable 
gentleman  be  no  longer  heard.  The  Speaker,  however,  refused  to  accept 
the  motion,  and  threatened  Mr.  Parnell  with  suspension  in  case  he  con- 
tinued. Again  Mr.  Gladstone  got  up,  and  resumed  the  sentence  which 
had  so  frequently  been  interrupted.  Mr.  Parnell  again  rose.  The 
Speaker  declared  that  the  conduct  of  the  member  for  Cork  was  wilful 
and  deliberate  obstruction,  and  named  him.  When  the  division  took 
place  in  the  case  of  Mr.  Dillon,  the  Irish  members  had  not  yet  made  up 
their  minds  as  to  what  was  the  proper  course  to  adopt  ;  but  by  the  time 
that  Mr.  Parnell  was  named  their  tactics  had  been  resolved  upon.  When 
the  division  upon  Mr.  Parnell's  suspension  was  called,  they  refused  to 
quit  their  seats.  The  division  went  on  without  them,  and  the  House  pre- 
sented a  curious  spectacle  with  the  Speaker  left  alone  with  the  Irish  Party. 
The  deserted  and  tranquil  appearance  of  the  House  might  have  encouraged 
the  illusion  that  the  storm  of  passion  had  subsided,  and  given  place  to 
perfect  quiet.  The  Speaker  warned  the  Irish  members  of  the  consequences 
that  might  result  upon  v/hat  they  were  doing ;  Mr.  Sullivan  declared  that 
they  contested  the  legality  of  the  proceeding.  This  exchange  of  language 
between  the  Speaker  and  the  Parnellites  was  mild  and  courteous.  The 
division  over,  Mr.  Parnell  was  ordered  to  withdraw  ;  but  he  refused  to  go 
unless  compelled  by  fore©',  and  again  the  Sergeant-at-Arms  and  the  mes- 
sengers came  forward  and  touched  his  shoulder.  The  Irish  leader  slowly 
descended  the  gangway,  bowed  to  the  Speaker,  and  walked  out  of  the 
House  with  head  erect  and  amid  the  ringing  cheers  of  his  supporters. 
Once  more  Mr,  Gladstone  resumed  the  unfortunate  sentence,  that,  as  he 
himself  said,  had  been  bisected  and  trisected  already  ;  but  again  he  was 
not  allowed  to  proceed,  for  Mr.  Finigan  rose  and  proposed  the  same 
motion  that  Mr.  Parnell  had  proposed,  that  the  Prime  Minister  be  no 
longer  heard.  Once  more  a  division  was  taken,  and  once  more  the  Irish 
members  refused  to  leave  their  places.  The  tellers  and  clerks  took  down 
the  names  of  the  contumacious  members,  and  after  the  withdrawal  of  Mr. 
rinigan  the  Speaker  read  out  their  names  and  suspended  them  all.  The 
names  were  :  Messrs.  Barry,  Biggar,  Byrne,  Corbet,  Daly,  Dawson,  Gill, 
Gray,  Healy,  Lalor,  Leamy,  Leahy,  Justin  McCarthy,  McCoan,  Marum, 
Metge,  Nelson,  Arthur  O'Connor,  T.  P.  O'Connor,  The  O'Donoghue,  The 
O'Gorman  Mahon,  W.  H.  O'Sullivan,  O'Connor  Power,  Redmond,  Sexton, 
Smithwick,  A.  M.  SulHvan,  and  T.  D.  Sullivan. 

By  this  time  the  passion  of  the  House  was  to  some  extent  exhausted, 
and  there  was  even  some  return  of  good-humour  ;  but  Mr.  Gladstone  re- 
mained grave,  and  proposed  the  suspension  of  the  twenty-eight  members 
with  an  air  of  painfid  preoccupation.  Then  the  division  was  taken,  and 
^  Hansard,  vol.  cclviii.,  p.  70. 


THE  COERCION  STRUGGLE.  227 

oiiee  more  the  Irish  members  refused  to  leave  their  places.  The  Speaker 
then  called  upon  the  different  members  in  their  turns  to  withdraw,  and 
each  in  turn,  and  in  practically  identical  language,  refused  to  do  so  unless 
compelled  by  force,  and  protested  against  the  legality  of  the  whole  pro- 
ceedings. The  protests  of  the  expelled  members  varied  slightly,  and  there 
was  also  a  difference  in  the  manner  of  their  exit.  Some  hurried  away  ; 
while  others,  following  the  example  of  Mr.  Parnell,  bowed  with  gravity  and 
solemnity  to  the  Chair.  The  demeanour  of  the  House  varied  from  moment 
to  moment :  sometimes  it  laughed,  sometimes  it  cheered  ;  finally,  it  settled 
down  into  allowing  the  incident  to  pass  off  in  grave  silence. 

The  debates  dragged  on,  and  the  third  reading  of  the  Coercion  Bill  at 
last  took  place  on  February  25,  1881.  At  this  stage  Mr.  Forster  indulged 
in  triimiphant  phrases  that  sound  somewhat  strangely  at  this  time.  As 
through  the  whole  debate,  he  made  the  claim  that  he  was  acting  for  the 
interests  and  speaking  the  voice  of  the  majority  of  the  Irish  people.  *  We 
have,'  he  said, '  been  delivering  Ireland,  or  trying  our  best  to  deliver  Ireland, 
from  a  great  grievance,  and  v/e  have  been  saving  her,  or  believing  we  are 
saving  her,  from  a  still  greater  peril.' ■'■  And  then  he  said,  looking  at  the 
Irish  members,  and  in  final  victory  over  their  efforts  to  arrest  Coercion  : 
'They  have  tried  to  prevent  it,  and  they  have  failed.'  Even  some  of  the 
English  papers  thought  this  boastful  harangue  over  the  destruction  of  the 
liberties  of  Ireland  a  little  too  strong.  '  We  do  not  see  much  ground,'  says 
the  Pall  Mall  Gazette,  '  for  Mr.  Forster's  rather  uncouth  exultation.  It  is 
true  that  tiie  Irish  members  have  failed  to  stop  the  Bill,  but  we  do  not 
know  that  it  is  a  good  reason  why  a  Liberal  Minister  should  feel  particularly 
triumphant  because  he  has  passed  a  measure  over  the  heads  of  all  the 
Liberal  representatives  of  the  country  concerned.' 

Almost  immediately  afterwards  a  second  Coercion  Bill,  in  the  shape  of 
the  Arms  Bill — Peace  Preservation  (Ireland)  Bill — was  proposed.  This 
also  was  steadily  resisted,  and  it  was  March  11  when  the  third  reading 
was  carried.  Again  Mr.  Forster  took  up  the  theme  that  he  was  acting  in 
accordance  -svith  the  v/ishes  of  the  majorit}"  of  the  Irish  people.  '  He 
should  not  object,'  he  said,  .  .  .  '  to  appeal  from  hon.  gentlemen  opposite 
to  the  people  of  Ireland.  .  .  .  He  was  sure  that  he  could  venture  to  appeal 
with  confidence  from  hon.  members  below  the  gangway  opposite  to  their 
constituents.'^ 

These  sentences  are  quoted  to  illustrate  the  length  to  which  Mr.  Forster 
was  prepared  to  go.  While  he  was  thus  claiming  to  represent  the  majority 
of  the  Irish  people,  he  must  have  known  that  he  was  laying  up  for  himself 
stores  of  hatred  in  their  hearts  that  no  length  of  time  will  ever  exhaust. 
While  he  claimed  to  represent  the  constituencies  of  his  Irish  opponents 
better  than  they  did  themselves,  he  must  have  seen  that  every  member  of 
the  Irish  Party  became  more  popular  in  exact  proportion  to  the  amount  of 
resistance  he  offered  to  Mr.  Forster's  proposals.  The  quotations  have  an 
additional  interest  to-day  as  guides  to  the  statesmanship  of  Mr.  Forster. 

By  this  time  exhaustion  had  completely  set  in  on  both  sides,  and  the 
House  was  more  concerned  at  the  time  with  the  decision  of  one  of  his 
many  law  cases  against  Mr.  Bradlaugh  and  the  report  that  the  Govern- 
ment were  going  to  ask  urgencv  for  Supply.  There  were  three  divisions — 
thin,  heartless,  and  shadowy  things  in  a  poorly  attended  House  ;  and  the 
announcement  that  the  Arms  Bill  had  passed,  and  that  thus  the  long, 
chequered^  and  patsionate  battle  between  coercion  and  obstruction  was  at 

^  Hansard   vol.j  ccMii.,  p.  1820.  =  Ibid.,  vol.  cclix.,  p.  863. 

15—2 


22§  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

an  end,  was  received  in  an  unbroken  silence  that  was  evidently  ihteriiational, 
and  that  marked  a  praiseworthy  desire  on  all  sides  to  escape  from  the  bad 
and  bitter  passions  of  the  struggle. 

Thus,  after  nine  weeks,  the  great  fight  came  to  an  end.  The  merits  of 
the  struggle  can  now  be  surveyed  with  the  calmness  of  an  historical  retro- 
spect. Many  critics,  then  and  since,  have  blamed  the  Irish  Party  for  the 
violence  and  the  vehemence  of  their  action,  and  for  their  prolongation  of 
the  struggle.  But  if  all  these  objections  and  a  great  many  more  were 
true,  subsequent  events  have  justified  the  wisdom  of  the  tactics  that  were 
adopted.  The  nine  weeks'  coercion  struggle  made  the  Irish  Party,  and 
thereby  gave  unity,  cohesion,  and  resistless  strength  to  the  great  move- 
ment for  the  restoration  of  national  rights.  The  first  necessity  at  that 
period  was  to  kindle  into  flames  of  enthusiasm  the  faith  of  the  Irish  people 
in  themselves,  in  their  representatives,  and  in  the  results  that  might  be 
achieved  by  Parliamentary  vvarfare.  The  struggle  that  was  going  on  at  the 
time,  too,  in  Ireland  for  the  possession  of  the  land  was  one  which  required 
all  the  strength  of  revolutionary  enthusiasm  to  carry  it  to  anything  like  a 
successful  issue.  With  all  the  m.ighty  forces  that  v/ere  arrayed  against  the 
cause  of  the  tenant,  the  tenant  could  win  by  determination  and  by  passion 
alone.  Every  scene  of  violence  in  the  House  of  Commons  roused  still 
higher  the  temper  of  the  Irish  people,  and  if  that  temper  had  not  reached 
fever  heat,  the  Land  Bill  of  1881  would  have  gone  to  the  same  bourne  of 
rejected  proposals  as  the  Compensation  for  Disturbance  Bill  and  the 
thoiisand  and  one  other  proposals  for  the  reform  of  the  land  tenure  in 
Ireland  had  gone  before.  The  power,  too,  which  the  Coercion  Act  placed 
in  the  hands  of  Mr.  Forster,  and  the  use  which  Mr.  Forster  made  of  this 
power,  must  always  be  considered  as  among  the  greatest  forces  in  bringing 
the  Irish  cause  to  its  present  position. 

The  Land  Bill  was  introduced  on  April  7.  The  first  impression  produced 
upon  the  Irish  members  was  one  of  pleased  surprise.  It  was  seen  that  the 
proposals  were  bold  and  sweeping.  During  the  Easter  recess,  which  came 
immediately  after  Mr.  Gladstone's  introduction  of  the  measure,  the  Irish 
members  proceeded  to  Dublin  to  consult  with  the  country.  A  convention 
of  the  branches  of  the  Land  League  was  called,  and  was  held  in  Dublin 
during  two  days.  The  two  parties  which  existed  in  the  Land  League,  as  in 
every  orgamzationf  were  inclined  to  take  up  different  attitudes  upon  the 
Bill.  The  majority  of  the  Parliamentary  Party  were  strongly  in  favour  of 
accepting  the  Bill  and  of  making  it  the  starting-point  of  a  new  movement. 
Another  section — resolute,  bold,  vehement — held  as  its  fundamental  belief 
that  the  Land  struggle  should  now  be  pushed  on  to  the  bitter  end  until  it 
was  closed  for  ever,  and  that  it  was  in  the  power  of  the  Irish  people,  by 
the  maintenance  of  a  determined  and  united  front,  to  bring  matters  to  that 
triumphant  issue.  The  weapon  which  this  section  had  in  view,  probably 
from  the  beginning,  was  a  universal  refusal  to  pay  rent.  The  success  which 
had  attended  a  similar  movement  against  the  tithes  was  the  precedent 
chiefly  relied  upon.  The  discussion  occupied  two  days,  and  for  some  time 
the  result  seemed  doubtful.  Finally,  a  resolution  was  passed  which  left 
Irish  members  freedom  either  to  oppose  or  support  the  second  reading  of 
the  measure. 

This  was  the  instruction  from  the  National  Convention  with  which  Mr. 
Parnell  and  his  colleagues  returned  to  Parliament  ;  but  meantime  events 
had  been  happening  which  had  been  doing  a  great  deal  to  force  the  hands 
^f  the  Irish  leader.     When  the  Coercion  Act  was  passed,  the  state  of 


THE  COERCION  STRUGGLE.  229 

Ireland  was  one  of  almost  complete  tranquillity.  The  improvement  in  its 
condition  had  been  further  helped  by  the  character  of  the  Land  Bill.  But 
the  Chief  Secretary  was  soon  to  bring  disturbance  out  of  tranquillity,  for 
he  and  the  Irish  officials  throughout  the  country  began  to  take  steps  which 
were  calculated  to  drive  even  a  less  excited  people  into  frenzy.  He  began 
to  put  the  powers  of  the  Coercion  Act  into  operation  ;  and  he  displayed  a 
sinister  ingenuity  in  discovering  the  men  who  were  least  fitted  to  be 
entrusted  with  the  large  and  arbitrary  powers  of  such  an  Act.  The  most 
prominent  of  these  officials  were  men  who  had  already  given  abundant 
testimony  of  their  unfitness  for  delicate  duties  and  large  authority.  Major 
Bond  had  been  dismissed  from  the  police  force  of  Birmingham  ;  Major 
Traill  was  an  officer  who  had  been  publicly  reprimanded  by  the  Com- 
mander-in-Chief ;  and  his  removal  from  his  regiment  had  been  requested 
by  his  commanding  officer.^  The  character  of  Mr.  Clifford  Lloyd  is  now 
so  notorious  that  it  would  be  a  waste  of  words  to  argue  the  gross  blunder 
and  even  shameful  outrage  of  sending  such  a  man  to  administer  a  Coercion 
Act.  Since  his  career  in  Ireland  he  has  been  tested  in  Egypt,  and  in  the 
Mauritius,  and,  as  everybody  knows,  was  found  to  be  a  person  with  whom 
no  other  colleague  could  work  in  harmony,  and  had  to  leave  the  country 
and  his  office.  But  before  he  was  taken  up  as  a  special  protege  by  Mr. 
Torster,  he  had  already  given  indications  of  the  kind  of  man  he  was.  On 
January  1,  1881,  he  bore  down  upon  a  meeting  in  Drogheda  with  a  large 
body  of  police  with  fixed  bayonets,  and  dispersed  the  meeting  forcibly  ; 
and  even  after  he  had  thus  succeeded  in  accomplishing  his  purpose,  shouted 
to  the  people  :  '  If  you  do  not  be  off  at  once,  I  will  have  you  shot  down.'  ^ 
For  his  conduct  on  this  occasion  he  was  denounced  by  Mr.  Whitworth, 
brother  of  the  then  member  for  Drogheda,  as  a  'firebrand';^  and  the 
member  for  Drogheda  himself — and  no  man  was  a  more  bitter  opponent  of 
the  Irish  Party  and  the  popular  movement — declared  in  a  debate  his  great 
surprise  that  the  Government  had  employed  Mr.  Lloyd.  '  A  more  dangerous 
man,'  said  Mr.  Whitworth,  'they  could  not  send  to  the  South  of  Ireland. 
His  (Mr.  Whitworth's)  brother,  who  was  a  magistrate  in  Drogheda,  told 
him  that  if  this  man  were  sent  to  disturbed  districts,  there  would  be 
bloodshed.'^ 

Major  Bond,  in  spite  of  his  antecedents,  seems  to  have  conducted  himself 
with  more  discretion  than  might  have  been  anticipated  ;  but  Major  Traill 
and  Mr.  Clifford  Lloyd  raged  through  the  population  with  a  perfect  frenzy 
for  insult,  lawlessness,  and  cruelty.  One  of  Major  Traill's  exploits  was  to 
go  to  a  police  barrack  on  a  Sunday,  where  some  men  were  in  custody,  to 
hold  a  court  there  and  then,  with  himself  as  sole  magistrate,  and  to  impose 
on  the  men  sentences  varying  from  eight  days  to  one  month  with  hard 
labour.  Of  course,  when  the  case  was  brought  before  the  Superior  Courts, 
the  action  of  Major  Tradl  was  overruled.  Baron  Fitzgerald,  the  presiding 
judge — a  strong  Conservative — declared  '  that  he  (Major  Traill)  had  sen- 
tenced three  several  men  to  imprisonment  illegally  ;'  and  the  defence  made 
by  Major  Traill's  counsel  was  that,  being  only  a  major  in  the  army,  '  he 

^  Mr.  Forster,  Hansard,  vol.  cclviii.,  pp.  1667,  1668. 

2  Mr.  Healy,  Ibid.,  vol.  cclxiii.,  p.  1255 

3  Ibid.,  p.  639.  Mr.  Clifford  Lloyd  wrote  to  the  papers  afterwards  to  deny  that  he 
ever  used  this  expression  ;  but  Mr.  Healy  and  several  Catholic  clergymen  who  were 
present  declared  that  they  heard  it.  In  nearly  all  such  cases  in  which  Mr.  Clifford 
Lloyd  was  arraigned,  he  gave  a  version  different  from  that  of  the  persons  who  mad,o 
the  complaint. 

4  Ibid,,  vol.  ccM.,  pp.  998,  999. 


230  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

could  not  be  expected  to  l-inow  the  law  accurately,  as  he  was  not  a  lawj^-er.* 
But,  meantime,  the  persons  who  had  thus  been  illegally  convicted  had 
served  the  whole  term  of  their  imprisonment,  and  had  taken  their  sleep 
upon  plank  beds.  Mr.  Forster  thought,  when  the  matter  was  brought 
before  him,  that  Major  Traill  '  had  been  sufficiently  penalised  for  the  error 
he  made,  by  becoming  the  defendant  in  three  actions.'  ■■• 

But  the  exploits  of  Mr.  Clifford  Lloyd  in  Kilmallock  and  the  other  places 
to  which  he  was  sent  leave  in  the  shade  everything  done  by  his  colleagues. 
On  the  first  day  on  which  he  made  his  appearance  in  the  town  of  Kil- 
mallock, he  ordered  the  people  who  were  talking  in  groups  around  the 
town  to  disperse  to  their  homes,  and  when  they  did  not  immediately  obey, 
struck  them  furiously  with  his  cane.  Shortly  afterwards  a  band,  which 
was  playing  as  it  passed  through  the  streets,  was  attacked  by  the  police 
under  the  direction  of  Mr.  Lloyd,  and  the  people  were  clubbed  with  the 
ends  of  the  rifles.^  Mr.  Lloyd  next  attacked  the  women  of  Kilmallock. 
One  evening  a  number  of  young  ladies  were  standing  in  the  street.  The 
police  ordered  them  to  disperse  on  the  ground  that  they  were  obstriicting 
the  highway,  a  charge  of  strange  absurdity  in  the  ghastly  loneliness  of  a 
small  Irish  tov/n.  They  were  brought  up  before  Mr.  Lloyd  and  several 
other  magistrates,  and  the  police -constable  who  acted  under  Mr.  Lloyd's 
orders  accused  the  ladies  of  using  insulting  language,  as  v/ell  as  of  obstructing 
the  highway.  When  the  constable  was  examined,  his  complaint  was  found 
to  be  that  he  had  been  called  '  Clifford  Lloyd's  pet.'  Both  the  charge  and 
the  police-constable,  as  well  as  Mr.  Clifford  Lloyd,  were  laughed  at,  and 
the  young  ladies  had  to  be  discharged.  Mr.  Lloyd  was  more  successful  in 
his  operations  under  the  Coercion  Act.  He  had  inflicted  fines  upon  two 
men  and  a  married  woman,  and  public  sympathy  went  so  strongly  vvdth 
these  people  that  a  subscription  was  raised  to  pay  the  fine,  rather  than 
allow  them  to  go  to  prison.  Andrew  Mortel  and  Edmund  O'Neill  were 
the  two  men  who  carried  around  the  subscription  list.  They  were  arrested 
and  placed  in  prison  under  the  Coercion  Act  on  the  ground  of  intimidation. 
Mr.  O 'Sullivan,  then  member  for  the  County  of  Limerick  and  a  resident 
in  Kilmallock,  got  a  declaration  from  all  the  persons  who  gave  subscrip- 
tions that  they  had  given  the  money  voluntarily.  Mr.  Mortel  and  Mr., 
O'Neill,  however,  remained  in  prison.^  Finally  Mr.  Lloyd  obtained  the 
arrest  of  Father  Sheehy,  and  this  arrest  of  a  priest,  eminent  for  his  abilities 
and  for  his  character,  and  vidth  a  strong  hold  upon  the  affections  of  the 
masses  by  his  fearless  spirit,  added  enormously  to  the  exasperation  of  the 
country.  It  will  be  seen  by-and-by  that  though  at  this  period  Mr.  Lloyd 
had  not  succeeded  in  his  crusade  against  women,  he  was  more  successful 
when  the  regime  of  coercion  was  entirely  unchecked,  and  Mr.  Forster  set 
himself  without  shame  or  scruple  to  the  dragooning  of  Ireland. 

And  these  offences  were  aggravated  by  the  fact  that  every  single  act  of 
police  tyranny,  petty  or  large,  found  a  staunch  advocate  in  the  House  of 
Commons  in  Mr.  Forster.  The  landlords  at  the  same  time,  too,  proceeded 
to  justify  the  worst  anticipations  of  the  Land  Leaguers.  It  had  been  over 
and  over  again  pointed  out  that  the  effect  of  the  Coercion  Act,  coming  as 
it  did  on  the  threshold  of  the  Land  Bill,  would  be  to  inspire  the  landlords 
with  the  idea  that  the  tenants,  once  more  terrorised  and  broken,  could  be 
treated  with  the  cruelty  of  the  old  times.     Large  numbers  of  the  tenants 

^  Hansard,  vol.  ccxli.,  pp.  11,  12. 

=  Ibid.,  p.  994.     Letter  of  Father  Sheehy  to  Mr,  Parnell. 

3  Jhid.,  vol,  cclxiii.,  pp.  1000,  1001. 


THE  COERCION  STRUGGLE,  231 

had  not  recovered  from  the  reeling  shock  of  1879,  had  not  paid  their  rent, 
and  could  not  pay  it ;  and  even  in  the  Land  Bill  that  was  coming  there 
was  no  provision  for  them.  The  result  was  that  evictions,  which  had  been 
brought  down  when  the  Land  League  was  completely  triumphant,  now 
made  a  sudden  bound  upwards.  In  the  quarter  of  1880  ending  March  31, 
2,748  persons  had  been  evicted  ;  in  the  second  quarter,  ending  June  30, 
3,508  persons  ;  in  the  third  quarter,  ending  September  30,  3,447  persons  ; 
and  in  the  fourth  quarter,  ending  December  31,  when  the  strong  arm  of 
the  Land  League  stood  between  the  landlord  and  the  tenant,  the  number 
of  persons  evicted  had  fallen  to  954,^  The  first  quarter  of  1881  showed 
the  effect  upon  landlords  of  the  promise  of  coercion,  and  the  number  of 
persons  evicted  rose  to  1,732.  When  the  Coercion  Act  began  to  be  applied, 
and  the  various  local  defenders  of  the  tenants  began  to  be  imprisoned  by 
the  Clifford  Lloyds  and  the  Traills,  the  evictions  gave  a  sudden  rise  from 
1,732  to  5,262. 

So  strongly  was  public  opinion,  even  in  Parliament,  impressed  with  these 
facts,  that  Mr.  Labouchere  proposed  a  clause  in  the  Coercion  Act  suspend- 
ing evictions  ;  but,  of  course,  it  was  rejected.  Mr.  Porster  himself,  lapsing 
into  a  moment  of  sympathy  with  the  oppressed,  as  in  the  session  of  1880, 
when  he  declared  that  he  would  resign  rather  than  carry  out  cruel  evictions, 
confessed  that  many  of  the  persons  about  to  be  evicted  were  unable  to  pay 
their  rents.  At  the  same  time  he  stated  that  many  who  were  able  to  pay 
their  rents  were  ordered  by  the  Land  League  leaders  to  withhold  them. 
Mr.  Parnell  at  once  accepted  the  implied  suggestion,  and  for  two  hours 
the  question  was  discussed  in  Parliament  whether  the  Government  would 
refuse  to  lend  the  aid  of  military  and  police  in  throwing  out  the  distressed 
on  the  roadside  if  the  Land  League  leaders  would  respond  by  advising  the 
payment  of  rent  in  cases  where  it  could  be  paid.  But  the  proposed  com- 
promise came  to  nothing.  Evictions,  accordingly,  proceeded  apace  ;  and 
the  suffering  of  eviction  was  aggravated  by  the  gradually  increasing 
severity  of  the  police  regime.  Finally,  matters  reached  a  climax  when  the 
city  of  Dublin  was  proclaimed  under  the  n®wAct,  although  up  to  this  time 
not  a  single  political  crime  had  been  committed  by  any  one  of  its  three 
hundred  thousand  inhabitants.  Mr.  Porster  had  to  confess  that  the  sole 
object  of  proclaiming  the  city  was  to  bring  the  meetings  of  the  Land 
League  held  there  within  the  provisions  of  the  Coercion  Act.  A  short 
time  afterwards  Mr.  John  Dillon  was  arrested,  and  so  the  work  of  driving 
the  country  into  madness  went  on. 

The  first  effect  was  upon  the  Parliamentary  Party.  The  arrest  of  Mr. 
Dillon  was  announced  immediately  before  the  second  reading  of  the  Land 
Bill.  The  Irish  Party  were  called  together  to  decide  upon  their  plan  of 
action.  Again  in  the  conference-room  thirty  of  them  met  under  the  presi- 
dency of  Mr.  Parnell.  A  discussion,  the  full  gravity  of  which  was  felt  by 
all,  occupied  the  party  during  three  hours.  Mr.  Parnell  himself  proposed 
from  the  chair  a  resolution  in  favour  of  abstention,  and  this  resolution  was 
carried  by  17  votes  against  12.  This  decision  produced  a  feeling  of  dis- 
may in  many  sections  in  Ireland,  was  bitterly  criticised,  and  was  openly 
disobeyed  by  some  members  of  the  party.  In  fact,  it  may  now  be  admitted 
that  this  was  one  of  the  very  darkest  hours  through  which  the  Irish  Party 
had  passed  ;  yet  there  will  be  few  to  deny  now  that  the  decision  to  abstain 

^  A  considerable  number  of  those  persons  were  afterwards  admitted  as  caretakers  ; 
but,  as  everybody  knows,  this  deprived  them  of  their  status  as  tenants,  and  left  them 
at  the  mercy  of  the  landlords. 


232  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

was  the  only  expedient  and  consistent  course  which  the  Irish  Party  could 
have  adopted.  That  course  left  the  party  complete  freedom  of  action  in 
the  future  ;  it  expressed  in  the  most  emphatic  manner  the  conviction  that 
the  Land  Bill  was  not  the  final  settlement  of  the  Land  Question  ;  and, 
above  all,  it  helped  the  chances  of  the  measure  with  the  House  of  Lords  by 
raising  in  the  background  the  spectre  of  a  '  No-Eent '  manifesto. 

This  will  appear  more  clearly  by-and-by.  For  the  present  it  will  suffice 
to  say  here  that  the  Land  Bill  was  objected  to  on  the  following  grounds  : 
First,  that  it  would  establish  an  impracticable  and  inconvenient  state  of 
relations  between  landlord  and  tenant  by  endeavouring  to  fix  a  partnership 
in  the  soil  between  two  persons  of  opposing  interests,  and  that  the  only 
solution  which  would  be  just,  complete,  and  final  would  be  the  solution 
proposed  by  the  Land  League — the  transformation  of  rent-pajdng  tenants 
into  peasant  proprietors  ;  secondly,  that  the  Land  Courts  would  not  make 
such  reductions  in  the  rents  as  were  required  by  the  circumstances  of  the 
case  ;  thirdly,  that,  as  a  large  number  of  tenants  were,  owing  to  bad 
seasons  and  by  the  legacy  of  the  '  hanging  gale '  and  other  arrears  from  the 
period  of  the  Great  Famine,  entirely  unable  to  pay  their  rent,  the  new  legis- 
lation could  do  them  no  good,  and  that  they  would  be  just  as  much  at  the 
mercy  of  the  landlords  as  if  no  legislation  at  all  were  passed  ;  fourthly, 
that  the  leaseholders  were  excluded ;  fifthly,  that  due  provision  was  nob 
made  for  saving  the  improvements  effected  by  the  tenant  from  confiscation 
in  the  shape  of  rent ;  sixthly,  the  clause  in  favour  of  emigration  ;  and, 
seventhly,  the  absence  of  provision  for  the  labourers. 

These  objections  were  met  in  the  same  spirit  as  the  objections  made  by 
the  Irish  Parliamentary  Party  to  the  Land  Bill  of  1870  ;  and  subsequent 
events  have,  in  the  case  of  the  Bill  of  1881  as  in  that  of  1870,  proved  the 
unwisdom  of  English  statesmen  and  the  wisdom  of  the  Irish  representa- 
tives. There  is  not  one  of  these  objections  which  has  not  been  proved 
sound,  and  most  of  them  will  reappear  shortly  when  they  pass  from  the 
mouths  of  Irish  representatives  into  measures  passed  by  both  Houses  of 
Parliament.  The  Irish  members  endeavoured  in  vain,  in  the  course  of  the 
proceedings  in  Parliament,  to  introduce  amendments  which  would  have 
the  effect  of  making  the  Bill  a  better  settlement  ;  but  these  amendments 
were  almost  invariably  rejected.  One  amendment,  however,  was  carried 
which  was  destined  to  play  a  most  important  part  in  the  entire  future  of 
the  Land  Question.  Mr.  Healy  stuck  to  his  place  throughout  the  discussion 
of  the  Bill,  and  the  debates  were  often  wholly  carried  on  by  him,  Mr.  Law, 
and  Mr.  Gibson.  The  present  writer  was  sitting  next  to  Mr.  Healy  on  the 
night  when  the  famous  Healy  Clause,  declaring  that  in  future  no  rent  should 
be  chargeable  on  the  tenants'  improvements,  was  carried.  Mr.  Healy 
made  his  proposal  in  mild  and  almost  careless  terms,  and  Mr,  Law  got  up 
and  accepted  the  principle  with  scarcely  the  appearance  even  of  demur. 
But  there  was  a  little  confusion  about  the  exact  wording,  and,  in  order  to 
give  time  for  collecting  thought.  Dr.  Playfair  remembered  that  he  wanted 
his  tea,  and  adjourned  the  House  for  a  quarter  of  an  hour.  The  clause 
was  drafted  meantime,  and  was  added  to  the  Bill.  Apparently  nothing 
very  particular  had  occurred,  the  whole  business  had  passed  off  in  unbroken 
tranquillity  and  overflowing  amicability  ;  but  the  prime  mover  in  the  busi- 
ness knew  well  what  he  had  done.  With  a  face  of  sphinx-like  severity 
Mr.  Healy  whispered  to  the  friend  by  his  side  :  '  These  words  will  put 
millions  in  the  pockets  of  the  tenants.' 

The  Land  Bill  received  the  royal  assent  on  August  22.     The   Irish 


THE  COERCION  STRUGGLE.  233 

leaders  were  now  face  to  face  with  the  gravest  problem  they  had  yet  to 
encounter.     This  was  in  regard  to  the  attitude  they  should  assume  towards 
the  new  Act.     There  were  many  things  in  the  state  of  Ireland  at  that 
period  to  tempt  to  extreme  resolves.     The  Land  League  had  gone  on  daily 
increasing  in  power  ;  coercion,  instead  of  diminishing,  seemed  to  add  to 
its  influence  and  its  prestige.     Though  Parliament  was  engaged  in  the 
passage  of  a  measure  in  many  respects  as  stupendous  as  the  Land  Act  of 
1881,  the  centre  of  political  gravity  and  political  interest  was  in  the  opera- 
tions of  the  Land  League  in  Ireland  rather  than  in  the  debates  and  pro- 
ceedings at  St,  Stephen's.     The  Irish  farmer  could  not  be  blamed  if  he 
observed  with  exultation  the  absolutely  revolutionary  change  which  had 
come  over  his  prospects.     In  this  hour  he  recalled  with  bitter  satisfaction 
that  long  list  of  modest  proposals  for  his  relief  which  the  Imperial  Parlia- 
ment had  ever  rejected,  and  the  gloom,  unbroken  by  one  word  of  sympathy 
or  one  statesmanlike  proposal,  from  the  passage  of  the  Union  till  the  Land 
Bill  of  1870.     The  reader  has  had  set  forth  in  previous  pages  the  history  of 
all  these  futile  appeals  to  the  Legislature  for  relief,  and  also  a  picture  of 
the  awful  evils  for  which  relief  was  sought.     He  will  not  have  forgotten 
the  dread  regime  of  famine  and  fever,  the  wholesale  clearances,  the  merci- 
less rack-renting,  the  tyranny  omnipotent,  mean,  and  ubiquitous,  the  whole- 
sale emigration,  which  formed  the  one  side  of  the  picture,  and  the  ignorance^ 
the  insolence,  the   light-hearted  neglect,  or  the  mocking  insult  of  Eng 
lish   Ministers  and    Parliaments,    which  formed   the   other ;   and  is   the 
hope  vain  that,  whatever  be  his  nationality,  he  will  feel  some  sympathy 
with  the  reversal  of  the  two  parts  at  this  moment — the  Legislature  eager 
with  gifts,  the  farmer  turning  away  in  the  scorn  of  self-dependence  ?     In 
any  case,  the  Irish  farmers  understood  the  change.     They  saw  that  the 
success  of  a  Bill  proposing  changes  against  which  all  the  statesmen,  the 
whole  press,  and  the  entire  landlord  party  of  England  and  Ireland  would 
have  risen  in  revolt  a  few  years  before,  was  longed  for  with  far  greater 
eagerness  by  their  hereditary  and  hitherto  omnipotent  oppressors  than  it 
was  by  themselves.     In   short,    the  slave  had   become  the  master  ;  the 
suppliant  was  transformed  into  the  victor  dictating  terms.     On  the  other 
hand,  Mr.  Parnell  had  placed  before  himself,  as  a  central  point  of  policy, 
by  no  word  or  act  of  his  to  abate  one  jot  of  the  victory  which  the  people 
might  be  able  to  wring  from  their  enemies.     At  this  moment  the  situation, 
as  it  presented  itself  to  his  mind,  was  this  :  the  Land  Courts  had  practically 
the  entire  settlement  of  the  rental  of  Ireland  in  their  hands  ;  the  changes 
required  in  that  rental,  according  to  the  views  of  Mr.  Parnell,  were  not 
small,  nor  narrow,  nor  sporadic,  but  revolutionary,  wholesale,  and  thorough. 
But  what  were  the  chances  of  a  revolutionary  reduction  of  rents  ?     The 
whole  character  of  the  Land  Court  forbade  any  such  expectation.     Judge 
O'Hagan,  the  chief  of  the  court,  was  well  known  to  be  a  man  of  pliant  and 
timid  character.     Of  his  two  colleagues,  Mr.  Litton  was  a  lawyer  who  had 
never  got  beyond  the  peddling  proposals  of  Ulster  Tenant  Leagues,  and  a 
man  utterly  devoid  of  any  boldness  or  initiative  ;  while  Mr.  Vernon,  the 
third  memloer  of  the  commission,  was  agent  for  several  large  landed  pro- 
prietors, was  himself  a  landed  proprietor,  and  had  besides  the  reputation  of 
being  much  stronger  willed  than  either  of  his  colleagues.     Apart  from  their 
own  weakness  of  character,  the  two  legal  members  of  the  chief  commission 
were  men  who  had  grown  old  in  all  the  ideas  and  traditions  of  the  ancient 
laws  with  regard  to  the  tenure  of  land  in  Ireland.     To  the  generation  to 
which  the  youth  of  Mr.  Justice  O'Hagan  and  Mr.  Litton  belonged,  the 


234 


THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 


proprietorship  of  the  tenant  in  the  soil  was  the  code  only  of  the  Ribbon 
Lodge,  and  had  its  only  statutable  sanction  in  the  blunderbuss. 

Again,  when  Mr.  Parnell  and  the  other  leaders  of  the  Land  League 
sought  for  the  probable  effects  of  the  rent-fixing  clauses  of  the  Land  Act, 
they  naturally  turned  to  the  prophecies  of  the  men  by  whom  the  Land  Act 
had  been  framed  and  had  been  carried  through  both  Houses  of  Parlia- 
ment. 

*  If  (said  Lord  Selborne)  you  compare  the  state  of  things  under  the  Bill 
with  that  which  would  exist  if  nothing  of  the  kind  were  done,  the  Bill  may 
be  expected  to  restore,  and,  moreover,  not  diminish,  the  value  of  the  land- 
lords' property.'-"-  '  I  deny  (he  said  again)  that  it  will  diminish,  in  any 
degree  whatever,  the  rights  of  the  landlord  or  the  value  of  the  interest  he 
possesses.'" 

Lord  Carlingford  was  still  more  explicit : 

*  My  lords  (he  said),  I  maintain  that  the  provisions  of  this  Bill  will 
cause  the  landlords  no  money  loss  whatever.'^ 

These  prophecies  Mr.  Parnell  and  his  colleagues  were  certainly  bound  to 
take  as  sincere.  Furthermore,  every  care  had  been  taken  that  the  decisions 
of  the  Land  Courts  should  be  subject  to  Parliamentary  criticism.  The  courts 
were  bound  to  present  to  Parliament  almost  every  detail  of  every  single 
one  of  the  cases  brought  before  them.  A  considerable  number  of  the  sub- 
commissioners  held  but  temporary  appointments,  and,  as  a  matter  of  fact, 
some  were  removed  under  a  continual  hailstorm  of  Parliamentary  criticism  ; 
and  the  Parliamentary  criticism  that  they  had  to  dread  was  not  that  of 
the  small  minority  who  defended  the  interests  of  the  tenant  in  Parliament, 
but  that  of  the  overwhelming  majority  of  the  two  parties  in  both  Plouses  of 
the  Legislature — the  majority  which  represented  the  interests  of  the  land- 
lords. If  the  Land  Court  were  subject  to  the  pressure  of  the  landlords  of 
the  House  of  Commons  and  of  the  House  of  Lords,  and  bound  by  the 
declaration  of  the  Ministers  en  the  one  side,  it  was  necessary  to  procure 
counterbalancing  pressure  on  the  side  of  the  tenants ;  m  other  words,  to 
make  the  court  fair  to  tho  tenants  by  making  the  tenants  to  some  extent 
independent  of  the  court.  These  were  the  steps  of  reasoning  by  which  the 
Irish  leaders  arrived  at  the  conviction  that  by  organization  and  unity  alone 
could  the  farmer  maintain  the  ground  he  had  gained  ;  that  without  this 
organization  and  unity  the  Land  Courts  would  become  but  a  new  machinery 
for  perpetuating  the  yoke  of  impossible  rents,  and  the  Land  Act  turn  out, 
like  so  many  other  previous  statutes,  but  Dead  Sea  fruit  that  turned  to  ashes 
at  the  touch. 

At  the  isam^e  time  there  were  the  Land  Courts  with  their  doors  open.  The 
extreme  section  of  the  Land  Leaguers  were  so  convinced  of  the  omnipotence 
of  the  League,  and  of  the  futility  and  treachery  of  the  Land  Act,  that  they 
strongly  urged  the  policy  of  keeping  the  tenants  out  of  the  courts  altogether. 
But  it  was  perceived  by  Mr.  Parnell  that  such  a  policy  was  impracticable  ; 
and,  therefore,  his  policy  v/as,  not  to  prevent,  but  to  regulate,  the  appeal  to 
these  courts.  To  him  the  best  plan  of  doing  this  appeared  to  be  to  place 
in  the  courts  a  certain  number  of  typical  cases.  The  cases  were  not  to  be 
those  which  exhibited  the  most  flagrant  instances  of  rack-renting.  This 
proviso  in  the  selection  of  cases  was  fiercely  denounced,  but  the  justice  of 
the  proviso  requires  very  little  defence.     Obviously  an  extravagantly  rack- 

I  Hansard,  vol.  cclxiv.,  p.  534.  ^  lUd.,  p.  532.  3  Rid.,  p.  252. 


THE  COERCION  STRUGGLE.  235 

rented  property  would  not  supply  to  the  court  a  fair  and  average  case.  A 
large  reduction  might  be  made  in  such  a  case,  and  at  the  same  time  the 
general  scale  of  rent  in  Ireland  might  remain  too  high.  There  was  the 
danger  of  the  tenants  being  deceived,  by  the  reduction  in  such  a  case,  into 
a  false  estimate  of  what  the  general  attitude  of  the  Land  Courts  would  be. 
A  reduction  of  fifty  per  cent,  on  a  hopelessly  rack-rented  estate  might  well 
dazzle  the  farmers  into  the  belief  that  a  reduction  of  fifty  per  cent,  would 
be  made  all  round.  They  would,  of  course,  have  discovered  their  mistake 
in  time,  but  they  would  not  have  discovered  it  until,  by  their  appeal  to  the 
Land  Court,  they  had  disintegrated  the  organization  which  ought  still  to 
remain  their  main  safeguard  and  buttress.  In  this  way  what  was  known 
as  the  '  Test-Case  '  policy  came  to  be  adopted. 

A  second  great  convention  was  held  in  the  Rotunda  on  September  15 
and  the  two  following  days.     Uj)wards  of  a  thousand  branches  were  repre- 
sented, the  tone  of  the  speeches  was  triumphant,  and  the  whole  assembly 
breathed  a  spirit  of  exultation.      The  members   of   the  extreme  section 
formed  no  inconsiderable  portion  of  the  delegates.     To  this  section  enormous 
strength  had  been  added  by  the  use  to  which  Mr.  Forster  had  put  hi3 
Coercion  Acts.     By  this  time  a  large  number  of  the  men  who  had  been 
most  active  in  building  up  the  mighty  organization  were  in  gaol.     From 
their  cells  these  men  appealed  to  their  colleagues  not  to  give  up  the  fruits 
of  the  victory  for  which  they  had  consented  to  struggle  and  to  suffer,  and  the 
advocates  of  extreme  courses  found  the  most  telling  argument  in  favour  of 
their  policy  in  the  sufferings  of  Mr.  Davitt  and  Father  Sheehy.     The  pro- 
posal of  this  section  was,  that  the  tenantry  should  have  nothing  whatever 
to  do  with  the  Act  ;  that  they  should  continue  the  organization  and  the 
agitation,  and  go  on  to  the  bitter  end,  until  landlordism  was  completely 
crushed,  and  the  Government  could  have  no  choice  but  to  accept  the  pro- 
gramme of  the  Land  League  and  purchase  peace  by  the  expropriation  of 
the  landlords  and  the  creation  of  a  peasant  proprietary.      The  weapon 
which  this  section  held  to  be  the  means  of  bringing  about  this  final  con- 
summation was  a  '  No-E,ent '  manifesto  ;  but  to  this  course  Mr.  Parnell 
and  the  greater  number  of  his  colleagues  were  at  this  moment  opposed. 
They  were  in  favour  of  the  middle  course  which  I  have  described.     They 
thought  it  possible  at  the  same  time  to  maintain  the  organization  and  to 
test  the  Land  Court.     Their  policy  was  well  summed  up  by  Mr.  Parnell 
himself,  as  that  of  '  testing  and  not  using  the  Land  Act.'     The  influence 
of  Mr.  Parnell  and  his  colleagues  prevailed,  and  the  '  Test-Case  '  policy  was 
sanctioned  by  the  convention.     It  was  often  suggested,  immediately  after- 
wards, that  this  policy  was  never  really  believed  in  by  Mr.  Parnell.     I  can 
bear  personal  testimony  to  the  fact  that  he  proceeded  at  once  to  take  the 
means  necessary  for  carrying  the  policy  into  practical  effect.     I  sat  by  his 
side  for  nights  in  succession,  as  he  extracted  from  the  books  of  the  Land 
League  cases  which  appeared  to  him  to  be  such  as  would  fairly  test  the 
disposition  of  the  court,  and  Mr.  Healy  went  down  to  the  South  of  Ireland 
to  visit  the  homes  and  to  investigate  the  farms  of  some  whose  cases  had 
thus  been  selected.     On  the  day  on  which  the  forms  for  application  to  the 
new  Land  Court  were  issued,  Mr.  Parnell  was  so  eager  to  be  among  the 
first  applicants  that  he  visited  the  house  of  the  Land  Commission  no  less 
than  three  times.     In  fact,  he  had  resolved  to  give  the  fair  '  Test-Case ' 
policy  a  hond-Jlde  trial. 
But  this  was  not  to  be. 
Mr.  Gladstone  spoke  at  Leeds  on  October  7.     He  made  an  attack  on  the 


236  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

Irish  leader,  which  was  certainly  strong  ;  but  was,  at  the  same  time,  not 
too  strong  if  the  central  position  of  Mr.  Gladstone  were  correct.  It  was 
Mr.  Gladstone's  case  that  Mr.  Parnell  represented  not  the  majority,  but 
a  minority,  of  the  Irish  people  ;  and  that  the  majority  were  being  terrorised 
by  the  minority.  In  short,  Mr.  Gladstone  thought  at  this  period  that  the 
Irish  people  and  Mr.  Parnell,  instead  of  being  at  one,  were  at  variance. 
This  opinion  he  has  since  found  out  to  be  mistaken  ;  but  that  it  was 
honestly  his  opinion  at  this  time  the  following  extract  from  the  speech  will 
prove  : 

*  The  people  of  Ireland,  we  believe  (said  Mr.  Gladstone),  desire,  in  con- 
formity with  the  advice  of  the  old  patriots,  and  their  bishops  and  their  best 
friends  ...  to  make  a  full  trial  of  the  Land  Act  ;  and  if  they  do  make  a 
full  trial  of  that  Act,  you  may  rely  upon  it,  it  is  as  certain  as  human  con- 
tingencies can  be  to  give  peace  to  the  country.  We  shall  rely  on  the  good 
sense  of  the  people,  because  we  are  determined  that  no  force,  or  fear  of 
ruin  through  force,  shall  as  far  as  we  are  concerned,  and  as  it  is  in  our 
power  to  decide  the  question,  prevent  the  Irish  people  having  the  full  and 
free  benefit  of  the  Land  Act.'  ^ 

A  good  deal  of  hopeless  nonsense  has  been  spoken  about  this  and  further 
passages  in  the  same  speech.  The  real  and  candid  explanation  of  the 
difference  in  the  attitude  of  Mr.  Gladstone  then  and  now  is  not  merely  the 
difference — and  that  is  great — in  the  tactics  of  Mr.  Parnell  and  the  condi- 
tion of  Ireland,  but  in  the  difference  in  the  Parliamentary  position  of  the 
Irish  Part3^  Mr.  Parnell  then  had  35  followers  out  of  103  members  ;  and 
Mr.  Gladstone  might  well  deny  that  Mr.  Parnell  was  representative  of  the 
majority  of  the  Irish  people.  Such  a  denial  became  impossible  as  soon  as 
Mr.  Parnell's  followers  niimbered  85  out  of  103  of  a  total  representation, 
rinally,  Mr.  Gladstone  wound  up  with  this  ominous  passage  : 

'  When  we  have  that  short  further  experience  to  which  I  have  referred, 
if  it  should  then  appear  that  there  is  still  to  be  fought  a  final  conflict  in 
Ireland  between  law  on  the  one  side  and  sheer  lawlessness  on  the  other — 
if  the  law,  still  purged  from  defects,  is  still  to  be  rejected  and  refused,  the 
first  condition  of  political  society  remains  unfulfilled,  and  then,  I  say 
without  hesitation,  the  resources  of  civilization  against  its  enemies  are  not 
yet  exhausted.'  ^ 

To  that  speech  on  Sunday,  October  9,  Mr.  Parnell  replied  at  Wexford. 
The  reception  given  to  Mr.  Parnell  at  this  Wexford  meeting  is  described 
by  those  who  saw  it  as  perhaps  the  most  enthusiastic  of  the  many  recep- 
tions of  almost  frenzied  enthusiasm  which  he  received  during  this  momen- 
tous year.  Triumphal  arches  spanned  the  streets,  evergreens  and  flowers 
covered  the  windows  and  doorways  and  lamp-posts.  Bands  came  from 
several  parts  of  the  country,  and  special  trains  brought  thousands  from  the 
surrounding  districts.  The  speech  of  Mr.  Parnell  was  in  the  same  passion- 
ate tones  as  that  to  which  it  was  a  reply.  Mr.  Gladstone,  in  the  course  of 
his  speech,  had  complained  of  the  want  of  all  support  to  the  efforts  of 
Government  by  the  landlords  and  other  classes  threatened,  and  then  had 
dropped  into  the  astonishing  confession  that  the  *  Government  are  ex- 
pected to  keep  the  peace  with  no  moral  force  behind  them.' 

*  The  Government  (said  Mr,  Parnell,  taking  up  this  point)  have  no  moral 
force  behind  them  in  Ireland.     The  whole  Irish  people  are  against  them. 

»  Freeinan's  Journal,  October  10, 1881.  ^  Ibid. 


TBR  COERCION  STRUGGLE.  237 

Tiiey  have  to  depend  for  their  support  upon  the  interest  of  a  very  small 
minority  of  the  people  of  this  country,  and,  therefore,  they  have  no  moral 
force  behind  them,  and  Mr.  Gladstone,  in  these  few  short  words,  admits 
that  English  government  has  failed  in  Ireland.  .  .  .  I  say  it  is  not  in  his 
power  to  trample  on  the  aspirations  and  the  rights  of  the  Irish  nation  with 
no  moral  force  behind  him.' 

On  the  Monday  following  his  speech  Mr.  Parnell  was  entertained  at  a 
banquet,  and  in  his  speech  he  used  some  words  which  showed  he  had  some 
presentiment  of  what  was  coming. 

*  I  am  frequently  disposed  to  think,'  he  said,  *  that  Ireland  has  not  yet 
got  through  the  troubled  waters  of  affliction  to  be  crossed  before  we  reach 
the  promised  land  of  prosperity  to  Ireland.  .  .  .  There  may  be — probably 
there  will  be — more  stringent  coercion  before  us  than  we  have  yet  experi- 
enced.' 

The  next  day  he  went  to  his  home  in  Avondale,  and  he  reached  Dublin 
by  the  last  train  on  Wednesday  night,  having  promised  to  attend  the 
Kildare  County  Convention,  which  was  to  be  held  at  Naas  on  the  following 
day.  He  was  to  have  left  Kings  bridge  Station  by  the  10.15  a.m.  train.  On 
that  same  Wednesday  a  Cabinet  Council  had  been  held  in  England,  and  in 
the  evening  Mr.  Eorster  had  crossed  over,  authorized  to  arrest  his  chief 
opponent.     Here  is  Mr.  Parnell's  own  account  of  what  actually  occurred  : 

'  Intending  to  proceed  to  Naas  this  morning,  I  oi'dered,  before  retiring 
to  bed  on  Wednesday  night,  that  I  should  be  called  at  half-past  eight 
o'clock.  When  the  man  came  to  my  bedroom  to  awaken  me,  he  told  me 
that  two  gentlemen  were  waiting  below  who  wanted  to  see  me.  I  told 
him  to  ask  their  names  and  business.  Having  gone  out,  he  came  back  in 
a  few  moments,  and  said  that  one  was  the  superintendent  of  police  and  the 
other  was  a  policeman.  I  told  him  to  say  that  I  would  be  dressed  in  half 
an  hour,  and  would  see  them  then.  He  went  away,  but  came  back  again 
to  tell  me  that  he  had  been  downstairs  to  see  the  gentlemen,  and  had  told 
them  I  was  not  stopping  at  that  hotel.  He  then  said  that  I  should  get 
out  through  the  back  part  of  the  house,  and  not  allow  them  to  catch  me. 
I  told  him  that  I  would  not  do  that,  even  if  it  were  possible,  because  the 
police  authorities  would  be  sure  to  have  every  way  most  closely  watched. 
He  again  went  down,  and  this  time  showed  the  detectives  up  to  my  bed- 
room.' 

The  Freeman's  Journal,^  from  which  this  is  quoted,  continues  : 
'  In  Foster  Place  there  was  a  force  of  one  hundred  policemen  held  in 
readiness  in  case  of  any  emergency.  Mr.  Mallon,  when  he  entered  the 
bedroom,  found  Mr.  C.  S.  Parnell  in  the  act  of  dressing,  and  immediately 
presented  him  with  two  warrants.  He  did  not  state  their  purport,  but 
Mr.  Parnell  understood  the  situation  without  any  intimation.  It  is  not 
true  to  state  that  he  exhibited  surprise,  or  that  he  looked  puzzled.  The 
documents  were  presented  to  him  with  gentlemanly  courtesy  by  Mr. 
Mallon,  and  the  hon.  gentleman  who  was  about  to  be  arrested  received 
them  with  perfect  calmness  and  deliberation.  He  had  had  private 
advices  from  England  regarding  the  Cabinet  Council,  and  was  well  aware 
that  the  Government  meditated  some  coup  d'etat. 

'  Two  copies  of  the  warrants  had  also  been  sent  to  the  Kingsbridge 
Terminus,  to  be  served  on    Mr.  Parnell  in  case  he  should  go  to  Sallins 

^  October  14,  1881. 


238  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

by  an  early  train.  Superintendent  Mallon  expressed  some  anxiety  lest  a 
crowd  should  collect  and  interfere  with  the  arrest,  and  he  requested  Mr. 
Parnell  to  come  away  as  quickly  as  possible.  Mr.  Parnell  responded  to 
his  anxiety.  A  cab  was  called,  and  the  two  detectives  with  the  honour- 
able prisoner  drove  away.  When  the  party  reached  the  Bank  of  Ireland, 
at  which  but  a  fortnight  previously  Mr.  Parnell  had  directed  the  atten- 
tion of  many  thousands  to  its  former  memories  and  future  prospects,  five 
or  six  metropolitan  police,  evidently  by  preconcerted  arrangement,  jumped 
upon  two  outside  cars  and  drove  in  front  of  the  party.  On  reaching  the 
quays  at  the  foot  of  Parliament  Street,  a  number  of  horse  police  joined 
the  procession  at  the  rear.  In  this  order  the'  four  vehicles  drove  to 
Kilmainham.  This  strange  procession  passed  along  the  thoroughfares 
without  creating  any  remarkable  notice.  A  few  people  did  stop  to  look 
at  it  on  part  of  the  route,  and  then  pursued  the  vehicles.  But  their 
curiosity  was  probably  aroused  by  the  jDresence  of  '  the  force '  rather  than 
by  any  knowledge  that,  after  a  short  lull,  the  Coercion  Act  was  again 
being  applied  to  the  elite,  of  the  League.  They  stopped  their  chase  after 
going  a  few  perches,  and  at  half -past  nine  o'clock  Mr.  Parnell  appeared  in 
front  of  the  dark  portals  of  Kilmainham.' 

A  few  hours  afterwards  he  was  interviewed  by  a  reporter  of  the 
Freeman's  Journal.  The  interview  closed  with  one  of  those  mots  by  which 
Mr.  Parnell  has  marked  important  epochs  in  his  career.  '  As  I  rose  to 
leave,'  says  the  reporter,  '  Mr.  Parnell  stated,  "  I  shall  take  it  as  an 
evidence  that  the  people  did  not  do  their  duty  if  I  am  speedily  released." 

In  Ireland  the  arrest  of  Mr.  Parnell  was  mourned  throughout  the 
country  as  a  national  calamity.  Indignation  meetings  were  held,  unless 
they  were  dispersed  by  the  police  or  the  soldiery,  in  every  town  and 
village  in  the  country,  and  in  most  cases  the  shutters  were  put  on  the 
windows  as  in  times  of  death  and  funerals.  The  country  was  swept  by 
a  passion  of  anger  and  grief,  the  more  bitter  because  it  had  to  be  sup- 
pressed. Troops  were  poured  into  the  country,  and,  by  way  of  striking 
wholesome  terror,  Dublin  was  given  over  for  two  days  to  the  police  ;  and 
then  occurred  scenes  of  brutality  the  records  of  vv'hich  it  is  not  possible 
to  read  even  at  this  distance  without  bitter  anger.  Under  the  pretext 
that  there  was  danger  of  a  riot  in  O'Connell — then  Sackville — Street,  it 
was  taken  possession  of  by  large  bodies  of  police,  and  when  a  crowd  of 
boys,  attracted  by  this  curious  spectacle,  began  to  jeer  and  groan,  the 
police  made  charges,  struck  the  people  with  their  hdtons  and  clenched 
fists,  and  kicked  those  whom  they  felled. 

'  Their  conduct,'  writes  the  Weekly  Irish  T'mes,^  a  Conservative  organ  in 
Dublin,  '  was  such  as  to  appear  almost  incredible  to  all  who  had  not 
been  to  witness  it.  .  .  .  After  every  charge  they  made,  men,  amongst 
them  respectable  citizens,  were  left  lying  in  the  streets,  blood  pouring 
from  the  wounds  they  received  on  the  head  from  the  hdtons  of  the 
pohce,  while  others  were  covered  with  severe  bruises  from  the  kicks  and 
blows  of  clenched  fists,  delivered  with  all  the  strength  that  powerful 
men  could  exert.' 

This  was  before  ten  o'clock.  Later  on,  another  and  perhaps  even  worse 
scene  was  enacbed  : 

'  The  police  drew  their  hdtons^  and  the  scene  which  followed  beggars 
description.      Charging  headlong  into    the   people,  the  constables  struck 

^  October  22,  1881. 


THE  COERCION  STRUGGLE.  239 

right  and  left,  and  men  and  women  fell  nndei'  their  blows.  No  quarter 
was  given.  The  roadvv-ay  was  strewn  with  the  bodies  of  the  people.  From 
the  Ballast  Office  to  the  Bridge,  and  from  the  Bridge  to  Sackville  Street, 
the  charge  was  continued  with  fury.  Women  fled  shrieking,  and  their 
cries  rendered  even  more  painful  the  scene  of  barbarity  which  was  being 
enacted.  All  was  confusion,  and  nought  could  be  seen  but  the  police 
mercilessly  batoning  the  people.  Some  few  of  the  people  threw  stones, 
of  which  fact  the  broken  gas-lamps  bear  testimony  ;  but,  with  this  ex- 
ception, no  resistance  was  offered.  Gentlemen  and  respectable  working 
men,  returning  homewards  from  theatres  or  the  houses  of  friends,  fell 
victims  to  the  attack  ;  and  as  an  incident  of  the  conduct  of  the  police 
it  may  be  mentioned  that,  besides  numerous  others,  more  than  a  dozen 
students  of  Trinity  College  and  a  militia  officer — unoffending  passers-by 
— were  knocked  down  and  kicked,  and  two  postal  telegraph  messengers, 
engaged  in  carrying  telegrams,  were  barbarously  assailed.  When  the 
people  were  felled,  they  were  kicked  on  the  ground  ;  and  when  they 
again  rose,  they  were  again  knocked  down  by  any  constable  who  met 
them.  * 

Nor  is  it  on  newspaper  accounts  only  that  we  have  to  rely  for  a  record 
of  the  brutality  of  the  police  on  this  occasion.  '  I  have  seen,'  said  Mr. 
Dwyer  Gray,  M.P.,  at  a  meeting  of  the  Dublin  Corporation,  at  which 
the  question  was  discussed — '  I  have  seen  the  conduct  of  the  police.  .  .  . 
I  saw  them  beating  children,  and  acting  in  the  most  wanton  and  shame- 
ful way :  attacking  respectable  men,  beating  them,  striking  them  on  the 
face,  when  going  on  their  way  quietly  and  peaceably  as  they  had  a  per- 
fect right  to  do. '2  'I  can  speak  from  personal  observation,'  declared 
Alderman  Harris,  ' ...  as  to  the  gravity  of  the  result  produced  by 
whoever  had  the  command  of  the  police  making  that  immense  display  of 
force  last  Saturday.  .  .  .  The  police  were  running  after  and  beating  re- 
spectable men.' 3  When  these  facts  were  brought  before  the  Chief 
Secretary  by  a  deputation  from  the  Corporation  of  Dublin,  his  calm  reply 
was,  '  It  cannot  be  altogether  a  milk-and-water  business,  clearing  streets.'  '^ 
Is  it  possible  that  Joe  Brady  or  some  other  of  the  '  Invincibles '  was  in 
the  crowd,  and  thus  saw  the  Metropolis  of  Ireland  given  over  to  this 
savagery  ? 

It  was  assuredly  a  strange  proof  of  the  idea  that  the  Irish  longed  to  be 
liberated  from  the  tyrannj''  of  Mr.  Parnell  that  the  population  had  to 
be  dragooned  by  overwhelming  military  and  police  forces  into  the  tame 
acceptance  of  Mr,  Parnell's  imprisonment.  The  two  nations,  in  fact,  stood 
opposite  each  other — both  unanimous.  Not  a  voice  in  England  was  raised 
in  defence  of  Mr.  Parnell ;  not  a  voice  in  Ireland  was  raised  in  favour  of 
Mr.  Forster.  Ireland  and  England. confronted  one  another  in  universal 
and  undisguised  hatred.  This  was  the  strange  pass  to  which  Mr.  Forster's 
statesmanship  had  brought  the  two  countries. 

The  arrest  of  Mr.  Parnell  was  followed  by  that  of  Mr.  Dillon  and  Mr. 
O'Kelly.  Mr.  Sexton  was  lying  ill  in  bed  when  the  warrant  came  for  his 
arrest  also,  and  he  rose  immediately  and  accompanied  the  police  to 
Kilmainham.  Warrants  were  also  issued  for  the  arrest  of  Mr.  Healy, 
Mr,  Arthur  O'Connor,  and  Mr.  Biggar.  Mr.  Healy  was  on  his  Avay  to 
Ireland  to  give  himself  up,  when  he  was  met  at  Holyhead  by  an  official  of 

^   Weekly  Irish  Times,  October  22,  ISSl. 

=  Free^nan'a  Journal,  October  18,  IBS'" ,  3  iJifJ,  4  _/jj(^. 


240  THR  PARNELL  movement, 

the  League  and  ordered  to  remain  in  England.  Mr.  Arthur  O'Connol'  wasi 
also  ordered  by  Mr.  Parnell  to  escape  arrest  if  he  could,  and  so  was  Mr. 
Biggar.  The  realistic  leader  of  the  Irish  movement  was  anxious  that  as 
many  of  his  followers  as  possible  should  remain  outside  the  gaols,  so  as  to 
carry  on  the  war  against  the  enemy  ;  and  his  followers,  though  reluctantly, 
accepted  his  mandate.  In  Dublin  and  throughout  the  country  every  person 
in  any  way  connected  \vith  the  League  was  arrested.  It  was  evidently  the 
resolve  of  the  Government  to  destroy  the  organization  by  the  removal  of 
its  most  active  members.     Finally,  the  Land  League  was  suppressed. 

At  last  the  extremists,  whom  Mr.  Parnell  had  successfully  opposed, 
were  victorious.  When  Mr.  Forster  became  their  ally  they  were  for  the 
first  time  irresistible.  The  Land  League  leaders,  now  inside  gaol,  were 
brought  face  to  face  with  a  situation  in  which  moderation  was  no  longer 
possible.  Eesort  was  had  to  the  final  weapon,  and,  after  various  consulta 
tions,  the  '  No-Rent '  manifesto  was  issued. 


CHAPTER  XIL 

THE   FRUITS   OF   COERCION. 

To  appreciate  properly  the  effect  of  the  coercion  regime  which  now 
followed,  it  is  necessary  to  recall  to  the  reader  the  state  of  Ireland  as  it 
was  when  Parliament  met  in  January,  1881,  with  Ireland  as  it  became 
during  the  six  months  that  followed  the  arrest  of  Mr,  Parnell.  It  will  be 
remembered  that  Mr.  Forster  himself  had  to  acknowledge  that  the  country 
at  that  period  was  comparatively  quiet  ;  that  the  Returns,  when  dissected, 
proved  that  the  real  amount  of  crime  was  much  less  than  the  gross  total i 
led  one  to  believe ;  and  that  it  was  repeated  so  often,  and  by  so  many^ 
different  speakers,  as  to  become  a  platitude  of  debate,  that  the  number  of  j 
murders,  instead  of  having  increased,  had  actually  been  less  during  the 
days  of  the  Land  League  supremacy  than  at  any  previous  period  of  great; 
political  excitement  and  impending  social  changes.  The  time  had  come, 
when  the  Government  resolved  to  apply  coercion  in  earnest,  when  every 
restraint  of  decency  or  prudence  was  cast  aside,  and  Ireland  was  ruled  with 
a  rod  of  iron  indeed.  It  is  hard  even  now  to  write  of  the  acts  perpetrated; 
at  this  period  under  the  direction  of  Mr.  Forster  without  some  display  of  ■ 
temper  or  some  heat  of  language.  The  pretences  on  which  the  Coercion 
Acts  had  been  originally  obtained  from  Parliament  were  completely 
forgotten.  The  Acts,  as  I  have  shown  by  extract  after  extract  from  the, 
Ministerial  speeches,  were  obtained  for  the  purpose  of  putting  down  crime 
or  the  incitement  to  crime,  and  for  that  alone.  They  were  employed — 
openly  and  avowedly  employed— for  the  purpose  of  compelling  the  payment, 
of  rent.  The  warrants  of  arrest  contained  the  confession  of  this  entire 
change  of  purpose  and  breach  of  faith.  Thus  in  one  of  the  warrants 
against  Mr.  Parnell,  the  charge  was  that  he  had  intimidated  divers  persons 
to  compel  them  to  abstain  from  doing  what  they  had  a  legal  right  to  do — 
namely,  to  pay  rents  lawfully  due  by  them.  The  non-payment  of  rent  may 
be  a  moral  offence,  but  assuredly  it  was  not  the  kind  of  crime  and  outrage 
for  the  perpetration  or  abetting  of  which  Mr.  Gladstone  declared  the 
Coercion  Act  was  required.  Mr.  Forster  had  declared  that  the  Acts  Avere 
required  not  against  any  large  section  of  the  population,  but  against  the 
mauvais  sujets,  the  village  tyrants,  and  a  few  scatt-^red  miscreants  through- 


THE  FRUITS  OF  COERCION.  241 

o\it  the  country  ;  and  writs  were  issued  against  men  in  almost  every  class 
of  society  ! 

The  proceedings  taken  against  women  did  perhaps  more  than  anything 
else  to  expose  the  savage  character  of  the  regime  now  established,  and 
to  create  the  fiercest  popular  passion.  A  number  of  ladies  had  taken  up 
the  work  of  the  organization  as  it  fell  from  the  hands  of  the  men  whom 
Mr.  Forster  had  sent  to  gaol.  What  that  work  was  will  presently  appear. 
Against  several  of  these  ladies  the  Chief  Secretary  ordered  legal  proceedings. 
The  method  of  these  proceedings  was  characteristic  of  a  nature  at  once 
coarse,  clumsy,  and  savage.  In  the  reign  of  Edward  III.  a  statute  was 
passed  against  prostitutes  and  tramps.  It  was  lander  a  statute  like  this 
that  young  ladies,  brought  up  tenderly  and  delicately,  were  tried,  and  such 
of  them  as  were  convicted  were  condemned  in  sentences  which  cannot  be 
described  as  lenient.  Mr.  Clifford  Lloyd  was  now  able  to  enjoy  himself  to 
the  top  of  his  bent.  He  pranced  around  the  country  with  as  large  an 
escort  as  could  have  been  required  by  the  Czar  passing  through  a  Polish 
city  ;  he  arrested  wholesale  ;  he  trampled  on  the  laws  of  the  country,  and 
carried  out  laws  of  his  own  suiting  ;  he  employed  boldly  and  shamelessly 
every  weapon  of  coercion  for  the  purpose  of  extracting  the  rent.  Thus  the 
Coercion  Act  became  simply  one  of  the  additional  agencies  of  the  rent 
office  ;  and  the  non-payment  of  rent  was  raised  to  the  dignity  of  a  criminal 
offence.  One  well-authenticated  case  of  this  kind  will  sufficiently  exem- 
plify the  state  of  things  that  existed  in  Ireland  at  this  horrible  period.  A 
Mrs.  Moroney  was  engaged  in  a  fierce  struggle  with  her  tenantry  in 
Miltown-Malbay,  County  Clare.  One  of  her  tenants  was  summoned  by 
Mr.  Clifford  Lloyd,  and  was  told  that  unless  he  paid  his  rent  he  would  be 
put  in  gaol.  He  refused  to  pay  his  rent ;  Mr.  Lloyd  kept  his  word  :  the 
man  was  arrested  at  daybreak  on  the  following  day  under  one  of  Mr. 
Forster's  warrants  ;  he  was  sent  to  a  prison  in  Ulster,  as  far  removed  as 
possible  from  his  business  and  his  family  ;  and  while  he  was  away  his  wife 
died,  and  it  was  to  a  desolate  home  he  returned  after  his  release. 

Huts  were  erected  by  the  Ladies'  Land  League  for  the  purpose  of  shelter- 
ing the  evicted,  who,  as  will  be  presently  seen,  were  reaching  at  this  point 
numbers  that  startled  and  shocked  and  terrified  the  w^hole  country.  Mr. 
Lloyd  insisted  that  the  huts  were  for  the  purpose  of  intimidation  and  not 
for  shelter,  and  arrested  aiid  sent  every  person  to  gaol  who  was  engiiged  in 
their  erection.  Against  women  he  was  at  last  allowed  to  have  plenary 
powers.  He  sent  Miss  McCormack  to  gaol  for  six  months  ;  he  sent  Miss 
Reynolds  to  gaol  for  six  months  ;  he  sent  Miss  Kirk  to  gaol  for  three  months. 
Of  course  he  always  denied  that  he  imprisoned  these  women  at  all.  All 
he  did  was  to  ask  them  to  promise  to  keep  the  peace  ;  and  he  sent  them  to 
gaol  in  consequence  of  the  refusal.  But  he  knew,  and  everybody  knew, 
that  no  man  or  woman  could,  with  a  particle  of  self-respect,  or  vnth.  any 
hope  of  retaining  the  respect  of  any  of  his  or  her  people,  submit  to  any 
compromise  with  the  brutal  tyranny  that  was  then  desolating  their 
country.  Other  magistrates,  fired  with  noble  envy  of  Mr.  Lloj^d's  exploits, 
also  made  war  upon  wom.en.  Mrs.  Moore  was  sent  to  gaol  for  six  months  ; 
and  Mr.  Becket  sentenced  Miss  Mary  O'Connor  to  six  months'  imprison- 
ment. 

Two  extracts  from  the  reports  of  Hansard  will  complete  this  part  of  the 
picture.  When  Mr.  Forster's  attention  was  called  to  any  of  the  brutalities 
of  Mr.  Clifford  Lloyd,  this  was  how  he  answered  : 

16 


242  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

'  When  an  action  is  taken  up  by  a  magistrate,  it  is  done  on  his  own 
responsibility  ;  and  it  would  be  a  most  serious  matter  to  suppose  that  I, 
as  representing  the  Executive,  have  pov-^er  to  interfere  with  the  action  of 
the  magistrates. '  ^ 

It  is  scarcely  necessary  to  remind  the  historical  student  that  this  answer 
of  Mr.  Forster  is  the  repetition  of  a  trick  venerable  in  the  history  of 
despotisms.  The  magistrate,  who  is  the  tool  and  the  creature  of  the 
Government,  who  carries  out  its  wishes  and  behests,  is  represented  as  a 
perfectly  independent  judicial  functionary,  with  whom  the  Executive 
would  not,  and  even  dare  not,  i^iterfere.  Mr.  Clifford  Lloyd  and  the  other 
magistrates  who  were  carrying  out  this  work  throughovit  Ireland,  were  as 
much  the  servants  and  creatures  of  Mr.  Eorster  as  the  smallest  messenger 
in  his  office  or  the  chambermaid  in  his  house.  They  were  appointed  by 
the  Lord-Lieutenant  ;  they  could  be  dismissed  by  the  Lord- Lieutenant. 
Most  of  them  held  appointments  that  were  distinctly  temporary,  and 
renewable  at  short  periods — from  quarter  to  quarter — and  with  large 
emoluments  dependent  on  the  continuance  of  the  agitation,  of  which  they 
were  among  the  most  unholy  brood.  And  these  were  the  gentlemen  from 
interference  with  whom  Mr.  Forster  shrank  with  the  delicate  respect  for 
constitutional  forms  which  he  was  displaying  in  so  many  ways  at  that 
moment. 

A  second  extract  from  Hansard  will  describe  the  treatment  to  which  the 
ladies  were  subjected  who  were  sentenced  to  be  imprisoned  by  Mr.  Clifford 
Lloyd  and  the  other  magistrates  : 

'  Mr.  Labouchere  asked  the  Chief  Secretary  to  the  Lord-Lieutenant  of 
Ireland  whether  it  is  true  that  Mrs.  Moore,  Miss  Kirk,  and  Miss  O'Connor, 
who  have  been  sentenced  to  various  term_s  of  imprisonment  luider  an 
ancient  Act  for  alleged  intimidation,  by  diflt'erent  stipendiary  magistrates, 
are  kept  in  solitude  for  about  twenty-three  hours  out  of  twenty-four  ;  and 
whether  the  time  has  arrived  when,  in  the  interests  of  the  peace  and 
tranquillity  of  Ireland,  these  ladies  should  be  restored  to  their  friends  ? 

'  Mr.  Trevelyan  :  Sir,  the  ladies  named  in  this  question  have  been  com- 
mitted to  prison  in  default  of  finding  bail,  and  are  treated  in  exact 
conformity  with  the  prison  rules  ;  and,  according  to  the  rules  for  "  bailed 
prisoners,"  they  are  allowed  tv/o  hours  for  exefcise  daily,  and  are  therefore 
in  their  cells  for  twenty-two  out  of  twenty-four  hours.  They  can  at  once 
return  to  their  friends  on  tendering  the  requisite  sureties.'  - 

Thus  it  will  be  seen  that  these  women  were  suffering  far  more  severely' 
than  the  men  arrested  under  the  Coercion  Act.  The  prisoners  under  the 
Coercion  Act  were  allowed  to  have  communication  with  each  other  for  six 
hours  out  of  every  day.  The  young  ladies  sentenced  by  Mr.  Clifford  Lloyd 
were  in  solitude  throughout  the  entire  day.  In  the  prisons  in  which  they 
were  placed  there  were  none  but  the  degraded  of  their  own  sex  ;  and  some- 
times the  young  ladies  attended  their  devotions  in  close  proximity  to  the 
prostitutes  and  thieves  of  their  district. 

LTp  and  down  the  country,  meantime,  the  police  authorities  were  pur- 
suing the  other  methods  which  are  associated  with  unchecked  authority 
and  the  efforts  to  override  a  people.  The  same  war  was  made  on  lads  and 
boys  as  on  women.     A  lad  named  Lee  was  brought  before  the  magistrates 

^  Hansard,  vol.  cclxviii. ,  p.  1&71  =  Ihid. ,  vol.  cclxix. ,  p.  1404, 


THE  FRUITS  OF  COERCION. 


243 


for  whistling.^  Thomas  Wall,  anothei-  lad,  was  accused  by  another  con- 
stable for  the  same  offence,  and  in  addition  was  charged  with  abusive 
language.  The  abusive  language  was  whistling  '  Harvey  Duff,'  a  song 
which  spoke  in  satirical  terms  of  the  police.  *  Do  you  consider,'  the 
accusing  constable  was  asked,  '  that  whistling  "  Harvey  Duff  "  is  using 
abusive  language  ?'  '  Yes,'  answered  the  friend  of  Mr.  Forster,  '  I  do  ; 
and  I  swear  it  is.'^  On  April  16,  1882,  a  policeman  in  Waterford  rushed 
into  a  shop  where  a  woman  Avas  engaged  in  reading  United  Ireland,  threw 
her  down,  and,  kneeling  on  her  stomach,  searched  her  in  an  indecent 
manner.^  In  Cappamore,  County  Limerick,  a  sub-constable  attacked  a 
girl  named  Burke,  twelve  years  of  age,  because  she  was  singing  '  Harvey 
Duff.'     He  drew  his  bayonet,  and  inflicted  a  wound.* 

Was  it  true,  asked  Mr.  Healy  with  his  characteristically  grim  humour, 
that  Daniel  O'Sullivan,  aged  nine  or  ten  years,  '  who  appeared  before  the 
magistrates  crying,'  had  been  prosecuted  by  the  magistrates,  under  the 
Whiteboy  Act,  for  having,  at  two  o'clock  in  the  day,  by  carrying  a  lighted 
torch  in  the  public  streets  at  Millstreet,  promoted  a  certain  unlawful 
meeting  contrary  to  the  statute  made  and  provided,  and  against  the  peace 
of  our  Sovereign  Lady  the  Queen,  her  crown  and  dignity  ?  Was  it  not 
true  that  the  child's  offence  really  consisted  in  heading  a  procession  of 
young  fellows  who  were  after  tilling  the  farm  of  a  woman  whose  husband 
had  died  ? 

"  Mr.  Forster  found  fault  with  the  levity  of  the  question,  and  then  pro- 
ceeded to  state  the  serious  facts  of  the  case.  The  youth  Daniel  O'Sullivan 
was  the  leader  of  a  party  of  boys  from  tv/elve  to  seventeen  years  of  age  ; 
O'Sullivan  himself  was  about  twelve.  When  their  procession  was  stopped 
the  boys  dispersed,  but  they  reassembled  at  the  instigation  of  grown-up 
persons.^ 

The  police  made  domiciliary  visits  by  day  and  by  night  into  the  rooms 
alike  of  women  and  of  men.  They  broke  into  meetings  ;  they  stood  out- 
side doors  and  took  the  names  of  all  persons  entering  into  even  the  house 
of  a  priest  to  take  steps  for  relieving  the  tenantry.^  They  tore  down  a 
placard  in  Tipperary  calling  upon  the  people  to  vote  for  the  popular  candi- 
dates for  poor-law  guardians  ;'^  and  at  a  meeting  of  the  Drogheda  Corpora- 
tion the  sub-inspector  of  police  interposed  in  the  proceedings  with  the 
declaration  that  he  would  not  allow  the  word  '  coercion '  to  be  used.^ 

Meantime  Dublin  Castle  exhausted  the  resources  of  civil  power  in 
helping  on  the  now  unchecked  savagery  of  the  alien  oligarchy  against  the 
nation.  Troops  were  supplied  in  abundance  ;  horse,  foot,  and  artillery 
took  part  in  the  work  of  eviction  ;  and  sometimes  the  blue-jacket  and  the 
war-vessel  were  employed  in  the  unholy  task  of  turning  out  the  starving 
to  die.  To  make  the  grotesqueness  and  horror  of  the  situation  complete, 
it  sometimes  happened  that  the  vessel  which  had  come  to  help  in  evicting 
had  but  twelve  months  before  visited  the  same  shore  and  the  same  people 
to  distribute  among  them  the  food  which  English  charity  had  bestowed  to 
save  them  from  starvation.  It  is  perhaps  only  in  a  system  so  absurd  and 
unnatural  as  the  Legislative  Union  between  England  and  Ireland  that  a 
contradiction  so  glaring  as  generosity  in  one  year  and  starvation  in  the 
next  is  possible. 


^  Hansard,  vol.  ccMii.,  p.  888. 
3  Ibid.,  vol.  cclxviii.,  pp.  993,  1266, 
5  Ibid.,  vol.  cclx.,  p.  1543. 
7  Ibid.,  vol.  cclxviii.,  p.  12. 


2  Ibid.,  vol.  cclxv.,  p.  184. 
*  Ibid.,  vol.  cclxvii.,  p.  25. 
6  Ibid.,  vol.  cclxvii.,  p.  1277. 
^  Ibid.,  vol.  cclxvii.,  p.  1285. 

16—2 


244  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

With  the  Government  making  their  cause  their  own ;  with  all  the 
resources  of  the  British  Exchequer  and  the  British  naval  and'  military 
forces  at  their  back  ;  with  Mr.  Forster  to  imprison  every  popular  journalist 
and  every  popular  orator  ;  with  Mr.  Clifford  Lloyd  to  make  non-payment 
of  rent  a  crime,  and  the  erection  of  huts  for  the  outcast  and  the  dying  an 
act  of  intimidation — the  landlords  acted  as  they  have  always  done  at  every 
period  when  Fate  and  the  British  Government  have  together  delivered 
the  Irish  tenantry  helpless  into  their  hands.  They  were,  too,  in  the  mood 
to  take  full  advantage  of  all  these  things.  For  the  first  time  in  all  their 
annals  of  power  they  had  been  confronted,  defied,  and  beaten.  Under  the 
regimt  of  the  Land  League  they  had  been  compelled  to  surrender  rights  of 
immemorial  date — to  lower  their  rack-rents,  to  stay  eviction,  to  treat  their 
tenants  as  fellow-beings,  and  not  as  so  many  ciphers  or  serfs.  The  mighty 
organization  which  had  made  this  revolutionary  change  was  beaten  and 
dead  :  they  had  not  only  rights  to  re-conquer,  but  passion  to  slake ;  not 
only  rents  to  exact,  but  vengeance  to  feed. 

They  went  to  work  with  a  will  that  recalled  the  spirit  of  the  glorious 
days  which  followed  the  Great  Famine. 

The  evictions  for  the  first  quarter  of  1881  were  1,732  persons  ;  for  the 
second  quarter,  ending  June  30,  they  had  increased  to  5,562  persons  ;  for 
the  quarter  ending  September  30  the  evictions  were  6,496  ;  and  for  the 
quarter  ending  December  31  they  were  3,851.     During  the  entire  year  of 

1881,  17,341  persons  had  thus  been  deprived  of  their  rights  as  tenants,  and 
the  greater  proportion  of  them  had  been  absolutely  thrown  on  the  roadside^ 
It  will  be  seen  that  eviction  was  proceeding  for  at  least  six  months  of  the 
year  in  geometrical  progression,  and  that  the  year  1881,  under  the  influenca 
of  Mr.  Forster's  regime,  was  reaching  a  total  of  evictions  for  any  approach 
to  which  we  must  go  back  to  the  dread  years  of  the  Famine. 

Nor,  of  course,  did  those  evictions  take  place  without  scenes  of  heart- 
rending cruelty  or  desperate  encounter.  In  County  Clare  a  man  was  killed 
by  a  body  of  police  who  were  protecting  a  process-server  ;  in  April  a  police- 
man and  two  farmers  were  killed  ;  in  June  a  police-charge  killed  a  man  ; 
in  October  a  man  was  killed  at  a  Land  League  meeting  by  a  bayonet-thrust 
from  a  policeman  ;  and  later  on  in  that  month  an  event  occurred  which 
produced  M'idespread  and  bitter  indignation.  A  body  of  police  were  sent 
to  collect  poor-rates  due  by  a  number  of  miserable  tenants  on  the  estate  of 
a  Mr.  Blake.  Disputes  have  arisen  as  to  how  the  struggle  between  the 
police  and  the  people  began,  but  the  police  fired  into  the  people,  several 
were  wounded,  and  two  women,  Ellen  McDonongh,  a  young  girl,  and  Mrs. 
Deare — a  feeble  old  woman  of  sixty-five  years  of  age — were  wounded,  and 
subsequently  died.  A  verdict  of  '  Wilful  Murder '  was  given  in  both  cases 
against  the  police. 

The  reader  has  now  the  causes  which  produced  the  fit  of  absolute  frenzy 
which  passed  over  Ireland  during  the  winter  of  1881  and  the  spring  of 

1882.  The  country  stood  at  bay,  and  driven  from  constitutional  and  open 
movement,  with  speech  and  writing  and  organization  suppressed,  with  every 
day  adding  a  new  wrong  and  a  new  insult,  with  wholesale  eviction,  exile, 
and  starvation  once  more  confronting  the  nation  as  in  the  dread  past,  the 
population  resorted  to  the  secret  organization  and  the  revolting  crimes 
which  have  been  the  inevitable  and  hideous  brood  of  despotic  regimes.  A 
wild  and  horrible  wave  of  crime  passed  over  the  country  ;  the  days  of  1880 
might  well  have  been  looked  back  to  as  extraordinarily  peaceful  in  com- 
parisojj  >vith  the  period  yi^hich  had  now  set  in,  a,nd  neither  the  Queen's 


THE  FRUITS  OF  COERCION.  245  . 

Speech  nor  the  Marquis  of  Hartington  could  any  longer  declare  that  there 
were  but  comparatively  few  murders. 

In  the  year  1880,  the  number  of  murders  was  eight,  there  was  no  homi- 
cide, and  there  were  twenty-five  cases  of  firing  at  the  person.  In  1881, 
there  were  seventeen  cases  of  murder,  there  were  five  homicides,  and  sixty- 
six  cases  of  firing  at  the  person  ;  and  in  the  first  six  months  of  1882  there 
were  fifteen  murders,  and  forty  cases  of  firing  at  the  person.  All  these 
crimes,  of  course,  are  crimes  of  an  agrarian  character.  The  increase  of 
crime  was  brought  over  and  over  again  before  Parliament.  '  The  present 
measures  of  coercion,'  said  Mr.  Gorst,  on  March  28,  1882,  '  have  entirely 
failed  to  restore  order  in  Ireland.  The  assizes  just  concluded  show  that 
the  amount  of  crime  now  was  more  than  double  what  it  was  in  all  the 
various  districts  last  year  ;  in  almost  every  case  the  juries  failed  to  convict, 
and  therefore  there  must  be  some  new  departure  on  the  part  of  the  Govern- 
ment.' ^ 

And  on  another  occasion  Mr.  Gorst  gave  from  the  charges  of  the  judges 
a  proof  of  his  statement,  and  the  proof  was  startlingly  damning. 

At  the  Longford  Assizes  there  were  98  cases  of  agrarian  outrages,  against 
75  for  the  preceding  year  ;  in  the  County  Clare  there  were  356  cases,  as 
against  254  in  the  preceding  year  ;  in  County  Sligo  138  cases,  against  97 
in  the  preceding  year  ;  in  Queen's  County  62  cases,  against  21  in  the  pre- 
ceding year  ;  in  County  Donegal  4,105  cases,  against  645  ;  in  County 
Tipperary  159  crimes,  against  75  in  the  preceding  year,  and  so  on.^ 

Curiously  enough,  crime  was  more  abundant  in  some  of  the  districts  in 
which  coercion  had  raged  in  its  most  active  and  its  most  outrageous  form. 
Judge  Barry  stated  at  the  assizes  in  the  County  of  Clare  that  the  outrages 
which  had  occurred  for  the  two  months  previous  to  the  assizes  were  twice 
as  numerous  as  in  the  corresponding  month  of  the  previous  year,^  and  the 
period  of  increased  crime  was  the  period  of  Mr.  Clifford  Lloyd's  appearance 
in  County  Clare. 

Meantime  the  author  of  this  cycle  of  eviction,  imprisonment,  and  brutal 
murder  persevered  in  his  system  with  fatuous  obstinacy,  every  day  pro- 
phesying that  coercion  Vv^ould  be  triumphant,  and  that  murder  or  organiza- 
tions to  murder  were  all  but  extinct. 

At  that  moment  there  was,  as  everybody  now  knows,  right  under  his 
feet,  within  a  few  yards  of  his  o"wn  office,  a  conspiracy  more  murderous  and 
more  powerful  than  any  that  had  existed  in  Ireland  for  probably  half  a 
century.  And  while  the  Chief  Secretary  was  grimly  congratulating  himself, 
as  he  passed  Co  the  station  for  England,  on  the  news  of  complete  victory 
over  crime  he  was  bringing  to  his  colleagues,  his  steps  were  being  dogged 
by  a  gang  of  assassins  armed  against  his  life. 

But  the  colleagues  of  Mr.  Forster  and  the  public  opinion  of  England 
read  the  signs  of  the  times  more  intelligently.  The  daily  list  of  arrests 
and  crime  proved  at  last  too  sickening,  and  so  strong  was  the  revulsion  of 
feeling,  even  in  England,  against  the  horrible  state  of  things  in  Ireland, 
that  the  Conservatives  showed  some  inclination  to  put  a  restraint  upon  the 
career  of  Mr.  Eorster. 

Then  these  various  outrages  upon  the  people  were  brought  constantly 
before  the  House  of  Commons  by  the  Irish  members,  and  naturally  began 
in  time  to  tell.  An  uneasy  feeling  grew  up  that  after  all  such  a  crusade 
Rgainst  every  form  of  free  speech,  and  free  meeting,  and  free  action,  against 

*  Hansard,  vol.  cclxviii.,  p.  210.  Ibid.,  vol.  cclxviii.,  pp.  680,  687. 

3  Ihid.,  p.  1003. 


.246  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

women  and  children,  was  not  entii-ely  creditable  to  the  institutions  or  the 
reputation  of  England.  The  daily  increase,  at  the  same  time,  in  the 
numbers,  character,  and  atrocity  of  crimes  in  Ireland,  helped  to  shake  Mr. 
Forster's  system  ;  the  prevarication  of  which  he  was  frequently  guilty 
spread  uneasy  doubts  in  his  official  pictures  of  Ireland.  The  theory  that 
he  was  warring,  not  with  the  Irish  people,  but  with  a  certain  small  and 
criminal  section  among  the  population,  received  its  final  overthrow  in  the 
local  elections  throughout  Ireland,  in  every  one  of  which  the  men  whom  he 
had  sent  into  gaol  as  either  abettors  or  perpetrators  of  crime  were  raised 
to  the  highest  positions  in  the  gift  of  their  fellow-citizens.  It  was  when 
his  position  was  thus  already  damaged  that  Mr.  Sexton  was  able  to  bring 
before  the  House  of  Commons  a  startling  document.  This  was  a  circular 
issued  to  the  constabulary  of  the  County  of  Clare  by  the  County  Inspector. 
Beginning  with  a  statement  that  attempts  would  probably  be  made  on  the 
life  of  Mr,  Clifford  Lloyd,  it  went  on  : 

'  Men  proceeding  on  his  (Mr.  Clifford  Lloyd's)  escort  should  be  men  of 
great  determination  as  well  as  steadiness  ;  and  even  on  suspicion  of  an 
attempt,  should  at  once  use  their  firearms,  to  prevent  the  bare  possibility  of 
an  attempt  on  that  gentleman's  life.  If  men  should  accidentally  commit 
an  error  in  shooting  any  person  on  suspicion  of  that  person  being  about  to 
commit  murder,  I  shall  exonerate  them  by  coming  forward  and  producing 
this  document.'^ 

Mr.  !Forster  saw  the  spectre  of  coming  ruin  in  the  discovery  of  a  docu- 
ment like  this  ;  prevaricated,  and  professed  to  require  time  to  see  whether 
the  document  was  genuine.  The  interval  he  probably  hoped  to>  employ  in 
explaining  away  to  his  colleagues  the  damning  testimony  of  the  document 
itself.  Bat  Mr.  Sexton  saw  through  this  expedient,  and  insisted  on 
raising  a  discussion  at  once,  and  when  that  discussion  was  over,  Mr. 
Eorster  was  a  ruined  man. 

At  the  same  moment  he  was  assailed  from  another  quarter.  The 
Conservatives  had  seen  plainly  the  rise  of  a  tide  of  popular  disgust  with 
Mr,  Forster  and  his  system  among  the  British  people — who,  to  do  them 
justice,  are  but  poor  hands  at  a  continuance  of  the  brutal  methods  of 
despotic  countries — and  thought  the  moment  had  come  when  a  different 
method  might  be  proposed  for  dealing  with  Ireland.  The  whole  legisla- 
tion of  the  Ministry  had  evidently  broken  down  ;  the  Coercion  Act  had  not 
put  down  crime  ;  the  Land  Act  had  not  closed  the  Land  Question  ;  and 
against  both  the  one  measure  and  the  other.  Conservative  members 
proposed  hostile  motions.  Sir  John  Hay  gave  notice  of  the  following 
motion  : 

'  That  the  detention  of  large  numbers  of  her  Majesty's  subjects  in  solitary 
confinement,  without  cause  assigned,  and  without  trial,  is  repugnant  to  the 
spirit  of  the  Constitution  ;  and  that,  to  enable  them  to  be  brought  to  trial, 
jury  trials  should  for  a  limited  time  (in  Ireland),  and  in  regard  to  crimes 
of  a  well-defined  character,  be  replaced  by  some  form  of  trial  less  liable  to 
abuse.  '^ 

•  And  Mr.  W.  H.  Smith  gave  notice  of  his  intention  *  to  ask  the  First  Lord 
of  the  Treasury  if  the  Government  will  take  into  their  consideration  the 
urgent  necessity  for  the  introduction  of  a  measure  to  extend  the  purchase 
clauses  of  the  Land  Act,  and  to  make  effectual  provision  for  facilitating  the 

^  Hansard,  vol.  cclxviii.,  pp.  991,  1000,  ^  Ihid.,  vol.  cclxviii.,  p.  1945, 


THE  FRUITS  OF  COERCION.  247 

transfer  of  the  ownership  of  the  land  to  tenants  who  are  occupiers  on  terms 
which  would  be  just  and  reasonable  to  the  existing  landlords.'^  If  the 
leaders  of  the  Land  League  required  any  justification  of  their  policy,  here 
it  was.  They  had  declared  all  a,long  that  coercion  would  fail,  and  that 
peasant  proprietary  was  the  only  final  and  practical  settlement  of  the  Irish 
Land  Question  ;  and  while  they  were  in  prison,  and  after  their  country  had 
passed  through  the  agony  of  a  fierce  and  bloody  strife,  two  English  Con- 
servatives came  forward  to  filch  and  to  adopt  their  scheme.  These  are  not 
the  only  cases,  as  will  be  seen  by-and-by,  in  which  there  existed  more  than 
a  platonic  friendship  between  the  Tories  and  the  Irish  Party. 

These  were  the  events  v/hich  prepared  the  Government  on  their  side  for 
a  reconciliation  with  the  Irish  leader.  On  his  side  the  motives  for  desiring 
a  peace  are  apparent,  and,  in  spite  of  all  the  absurd  mystification  with 
which  the  transaction  was  surrounded,  can  be  understood  by  any  reasonable 
person.  Mr.  Parnell  was  alarmed  at  the  vast  increase  in  the  evictions  ;  the 
greater  number  of  the  evicted  he  knew  were  absolutely  unable  to  pay  their 
rents,  the  arrears  which  had  come  as  a  damniosa  hcered'tfas  from  the  Famine 
years  being  a  burden  they  were  incapable  of  shaking  off  ;  and  he  was  much 
too  clear-beaded  a  man  to  suppose  that  in  the  long-run  the  purse  of  the 
Land  League  could  hold  out  against  the  Exchequer  of  England.  The 
Kilmainham  treaty,  as  it  was  called,  was  a  great  victory  for  Mr.  Parnell. 
All  the  forces  of  the  empire  had  been  pitted  against  him,  and  he  had  beaten 
the  empire.  The  terms  of  the  Government  are  sufficient  proof  of  this. 
These  terms,  summed  up  briefly,  were :  First,  the  failure  of  coercion  was 
acknowledged  frankly  and  unreservedly.  The  completeness  of  the  con- 
fession involved  the  sacrifice  of  the  men  chiefly  responsible  for  coercion  ; 
and  accordingly  Mr.  Forster  and  Lord  Cowper  resigned  from  the  Ministry. 
Then  there  was  to  be  no  renewal  of  coercion.  This  is  a  statement  which 
was  much  contested  during  the  debates  that  came  soon  after  ;  but  no  man 
in  his  senses  believes  that  coercion  would  have  been  pressed  forward  by 
the  Government  which  had  shed  Mr.  Forster  and  released  Mr.  Parnell.  It 
is  quite  possible  that  the  Crimes  Bill  would  have  been  introduced,  but  it 
would  have  been  hung  up  after  a  stage  or  two,  and  Ireland  would  have 
returned  to  the  ordinary  law.- 

The  first  indication  of  the  coming  resolves  of  the  Government  was  the 
reception  given  by  Mr.  Gladstone  to  the  new  Land  Bill  brought  in  by  Mr. 
J.  E.  Pedmond  on  behalf  of  the  Irish  Party.  This  Bill  proposed  an 
amendment  of  the  Healy  and  the  Purchase  clauses  of  the  Land  Act,  the 
inclusion  of  leaseholders,  but,  above  all,  the  remission  of  those  arrears 
which  shut  out  so  many  of  the  tenants  from  all  possible  benefit  under  the 
Land  Act  and  from  all  prospect  or  hope.  Mr.  Gladstone  received  the 
proposals  of  the  Bill  with  great  favour,  practically  held  out  that  the  larger 
and  more  remote  questions  of  Land  Peform  would  be  favourably  con- 
sidered :  and,  with  regard  to  the  question  of  the  Arrears,  made  statements 
amounting  to  a  promise  that  the  Government  shared  the  convictions  of  the 

^  Times,  March  11,  1SS2. 

2  The  plan  of  the  Goverument  was  to  give  the  Rules  of  Procedure  priority  over 
the  renewed  coercion,  and  it  was  one  of  Mr.  Forster's  most  bitter  charges  against 
the  Government,  both  during  that  Session  and  the  Session  following,  when  the 
question  was  again  raised,  that  Mr.  Gladstone  did  give  this  priority  to  the  Procedure 
Kules  over  coercion.  Nobody  at  all  experienced  in  Pai-liamentary  affairs  need  be 
told  that  if  the  Procedure  Rules  had  got  the  priority  there  would  be  no  more  mention 
of  tlie  Crimes  Act  during  the  Session.  It  certainh'  would  have  taken  from  May,  tha 
date  of  Mr.  Forster's  fall,  to  the  end  of  the  Session  to  pass  the  Procedure  Rules  alone 


248  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

Irish  members,  and  would  be  prepared  to  deal  with  the  question  immedi- 
ately. 

Such,  then,  were  the  terms  of  the  so-called  Kilmainham  treaty:  abandon- 
ment of  coercion,  the  retirement  of  the  coercion  Minister,  and  the  accep- 
tance, on  the  other  hand,  of  the  chief  demands  of  Mr.  Parnell  for 
amendment  of  the  Land  Act  in  less  than  a  year  after  it  had  become  law, 
and  the  immediate  settlement  of  the  burning  question  of  Arrears.  The 
House  of  Commons  certainly  fully  appreciated  the  greatness  and  complete- 
ness of  Mr.  Parnell's  victory.  The  first  few  days  after  his  release  from 
prison  were  days  of  veritable  triumph.  He  received  every  recognition, 
public  and  private,  of  being  master  of  the  situation.  Doubtful  friends  or 
bitter  enemies  rushed  up  to  shake  his  hand  and  worship  the  rising  sun. 
He  was  recognised  to  be — as  beyond  all  question  at  that  moment  he  was — 
the  most  potent  political  force  in  the  British  Empire.  From  no  man  did 
Mr.  Parnell  receive  a  recognition  so  eloquent,  though  probably  so  grudging, 
of  the  supremacy  of  his  power  and  the  completeness  of  his  triumph  at  this 
moment  as  from  his  baffled  and  beaten  opponent.  By  a  singularly 
dramatic  appropriateness,  it  was  during  the  speech  in  which  Mr.  Forster 
was  explaining  his  resignation  that  Mr.  Parnell  entered.  '  There  are  two 
warrants,'  Mr.  Forster  was  saying,  '  which  I  signed  in  regard  to  the  hon. 
member  for  the  city  of  Cork  also  for  intimidation.     I  have  often  asserted 

that  these  arrests  for  intimidation  were ' 

'At  this  point,'  goes  on  Hansard,  'the  entrance  of  Mr.  Parnell  into  the 
House,  and  the  cheers  with  which  he  was  greeted  by  the  Home  Rule 
members,  drowned  the  voice  of  the  right  hon.  gentleman  and  prevented  the 
conclusion  of  the  sentence  from  being  heard.' ^ 

And  then  Mr.  Forster  went  on  to  use  the  following  words,  which  clearly 
prove  the  omnipotence  of  Mr.  Parnell  at  this  moment : 

*  A  surrender  (said  the  Chief  Secretary  a  few  moments  later)  is  bad,  but 
a  compromise  or  arrangement  is  worse.  I  think  we  may  remember  what  a 
Tudor  king  said  to  a  great  Irishman  in  former  times  :  "  If  all  Ireland  can- 
not govern  the  Earl  of  Kildare,  then  let  the  Earl  of  Kildare  govern 
Ireland."  The  king  thought  it  was  better  that  the  Earl  of  Kildare 
should  govern  Ireland  than  that  there  should  be  an  arrangement  between 
the  Earl  of  Kildare  and  his  representative.  In  like  manner  if  all  England 
cannot  govern  the  hon.  member  for  Cork,  then  let  us  acknowledge  that  he 
is  the  greatest  power  in  Ireland  to-day.'^ 

The  prospect  of  the  Irish  people  was  equally  bright.  With  the  close  of 
the  Land  struggle,  with  the  abandonment  of  coercion  and  the  destruction 
of  the  hated  coercion  Minister,  tranquillity  promised  to  immediately 
return.  On  this  point  two  authorities  as  antagonistic  as  Mr.  Forster  and 
Mr.  William  O'Brien  were  completely  agreed.  Finally,  in  the  pages  of  the 
Times,  which  so  often  have  been  defaced  with  articles  brutally  unfair  to 
Ireland,  there  was  this  startling  confession  : 

'  The  recurrence  of  St.  Patrick's  Day,  with  its  traditional  celebration,  its 
old  toasts  and  its  old  memories,  reminds  us  that  the  Irishman  of  history 
and  of  tale  is  nowhere  to  be  found.  .  .  .  The  Irishman  is  becoming  like 
the  Englishman,  that  is,  the  Englishman  of  the  dull,  morose,  self-satisfied 
sort — the  man  who  sees  everything  and  everybody  from  his  own  point  of 
view,  and  pursues  his  object  with  a  dogged  indifference  to  all  reasons, 
interests,  feelings,  and  beliefs.  The  Irishman,  like  the  Englishman,  is  now 
*  Hansard,  vol.  cclxix.,p.  108.  ^  Ibid.,  p.  111. 


THE  FRUITS  OF  COERCION.  249 

righteous  in  his  own  eyes,  and  his  righteousness  is  to  hold  money  and  land, 
and  have  the  use  of  it  as  long  as  he  can.  .  .  .  He  has  actually  become  a 
citizen  of  the  world,  and  a  very  'cute  fellow.  He  has  played  his  cards  well, 
and  is  making  a  golden  harvest.  He  has  beaten  a  legion  of  landlords, 
dowagers,  and  encumbrances  of  all  sorts,  out  of  the  field,  and  driven  them 
into  workhouses.  He  has  baffled  the  greatest  of  legislatures,  and  out- 
flanked the  largest  British  armies  in  getting  what  he  thinks  his  due.  Had 
all  this  wonderful  advance  been  made  at  the  cost  of  some  other  country, 
England  would  have  been  the  flrst  to  offer  chaplets,  testimonials,  and 
ovations,  to  the  band  of  patriots  who  had  achieved  it.  As  the  sufferers  in 
the  material  sense  are  chiefly  of  English  extraction,  we  cannot  help  a  little 
soreness.  Yet  reason  compels  us  to  admit  that  the  Irish  have  dared  and 
done  as  they  never  did  before.  They  are  welcome  to  that  praise.  But 
they  have  lost,  and  it  is  a  loss  we  all  feel.  Paddy  has  got  his  wish — he  is 
changed  into  a  landowner.'  •■• 

Everybody  knows  how  in  an  hoiir  Mr.  Parnell  was  reduced  from  this 
eminence  of  omnipotence  to  a  position  of  absolute  and  apparently  irre- 
trievable disaster.  On  May  6  Lord  Erederick  Cavendish  and  Mr.  Burke 
were  assassinated  in  Phoenix  Park.  This  tragedy  produced  a  tempest  of 
passion  that  svrept  away  for  the  moment  the  power  of  Mr.  Gladstone  and 
of  Mr.  Parnell  for  good  to  Ireland.  Those  who  remember  the  fatal 
Sunday  when  the  news  reached  London,  and  saw  the  Irish  leader  and  his 
colleagues  that  day,  can  find  consolation  in  the  reflection  that  their  fortunes 
can  never  see  a  darker  or  gloomier  hour.  One  of  the  victims  of  the  knives 
of  the  Invincibles  was  known  to  and  popular  with  the  Irish  members,  as  he 
was  with  all  sections  of  the  House  of  Commons,  and  the  kindly  feeling  was 
recognised,  which  impelled  him  to  offer  himself  as  the  bearer  of  a  new 
message  of  peace  to  Ireland.  Wherever  the  Irish  race  Kved,  the  depth  and 
the  pitifulness  of  the  tragedy,  and  the  magnitude  of  the  disaster,  were  felt 
and  appreciated  ;  and  in  cities  as  distant  as  St.  Louis,  or  San  Erancisco, 
or  Melbourne,  or  Wellington,  the  fatal  day  filled  Irish  households  with 
mourning. 

The  Government  found  themselves  unable  to  resist  the  tide  of  passion 
that  passed  over  the  country  ;  there  was  a  hoarse  cry  for  Coercion  ;  and 
the  Ministers  felt  that,  unless  Coercion  were  dealt  out  with  a  liberal  hand, 
they  could  not  hold  office  for  twenty-four  hours.  It  must,  at  the  same 
time,  be  acknowledged  that  the  English  nation,  as  a  body,  behaved  on  this 
terrible  occasion  with  self-restraint  and  dignity.  The  newspapers,  it  is 
true,  did  their  best  in  one  or  two  instances  to  fan  popular  excitement  into 
fury.  The  Times — true  to  its  immemorial  traditions — suggested  that  the 
Irish  population  of  England,  unarmed  and  innocent,  should  be  massacred 
for  a  crime  which  they  abhorred,  and  that  the  Irish  political  leaders  should 
be  made  responsible  for  a  catastrophe  which  had  dashed  all  their  hopes. 
But  these  shameful  incitements  to  violence  remained  innocuous  before  the 
good  sense  of  the  English  people.  The  most  peculiar  result  of  the  Phoenix 
Park  assassinations  Avas  the  change  it  made  in  the  position  of  Mr.  Eorster. 
The  dread  tragedy  which  was  the  outcome  of  the  frenzy  that  his  policy  had 
generated  was  taken  to  be  the  vindication  of  that  policy,  and  the  un- 
doubted growth  of  a  large  and  potent  murderous  conspiracy  was  held  to  be 
the  proof  of  the  utility  of  coercive  measures  against  the  preparation  and 
the  perpetration  of  crime.     If  the  Phoenix  Park  assassination  preached 

'  Times,  Marcii  17,  1882. 


2S0  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

with  its  bloody  tongue  one  doctrine  more  loudly  than  another,  it  was  the 
futility  and  the  wickedness  and  disaster  of  the  policy  for  which  Mr,  Forster 
was  responsible. 

In  the  debates  which  ensued  nothing  could  be  more  unanimous  than  the 
condemnation  of  the  policy  of  Mr.  Forster  himself.  It  was  one  of  his  own 
colleagues  who  pronounced  the  most  damning  condemnation  of  himself  and 
his  Coercion  Act. 

'  It  was  assumed  (said  Sir  William  Harcourt)  .  .  .  that  the  Protection 
of  Person  and  Property  Bill  was  an  appropria,te  remedy,  and  that  if  we 
only  had  the  summary  power  of  arrest,  it  would  be  sufficient  to  put  down 
crime.  My  right  honourable  friend,  who  had  charge  of  that  measure, 
said  :  "  We  can  discover  the  persons  who  commit  these  crimes — these 
village  ruffians  ;  we  know  them  ;  we  can  put  them  in  prison ;  we  can  put 
down  crime.'"'  That  turned  out  not  to  be  so.  The  men  were  shut  up; 
more  men  were  shut  up  time  after  time  ;  yet  crime  vrent  on  increasing.  IC 
was  never  suggested — nor  did  it  occur  to  anybody — that  that  measure 
would  have  failed  so  completely  as  it  did  in  suppressing  crime.  The  conse- 
quence was,  that  the  shutting  up  of  these  people  did  not  sensibly  diminish 
crime.  On  the  contrary,  the  more  people  were  shut  up  the  more  crime 
increased.'^ 

But,  in  the  heat  and  fury  of  party  conflict,  logic  is  silent.  The  Conserva- 
tives believed,  or  professed  to  believe,  that  Mr.  Forster  and  his  policy  had 
been  vindicated  by  the  murder  of  Lord  Frederick  Cavendish  and  Mr. 
Burke.  Mr.  Forster  was  doubly  interested  in  turning  the  outburst  of 
popular  anger  and  sorrow  over  the  Phcenix  Park  assassinations  to  his  own 
justification,  and  proceeded  to  make  as  much  capital  as  he  could  out  of  the 
tragedy.  He  attacked  his  former  colleagues,  he  made  questionable  use  of 
Cabinet  communications,  he  did  everything  he  could,  while  professing 
friendship  for  Mr.  Gladstone  and  the  other  members  of  the  Ministry,  to 
deal  them  as  many  and  as  deadly  stabs  as  it  was  in  his  power  to  do. 

The  Crimes  Bill,  which  followed  the  Phoenix  Park  murders,  was  fought 
by  the  Irish  members  doggedly,  and  was  marked  by  the  same  scenes  as 
were  enacted  in  the  Session  of  1881.  The  progress  of  the  Bill  was  terribly 
slow  ;  amendments  followed  amendments.  There  came  the  system  of 
relays,  and  then  an  all-night  sitting.  Once  more  tempestuous  passion  was 
aroused  on  both  sides,  and  finally  on  the  morning  of  Saturday,  July  1,  the 
following  Irish  members  were  declared  guilty  of  obstruction,  and  suspended 
tn  masse :  Mr.  Biggar,  Mr.  Callan,  Dr.  Commins,  Mr.  Dillon,  Mr. 
Healy,  Mr.  Leamy,  Mr.  Marum,  Mr.  Metge,  Mr.  McCarthy,  Mr.  T.  P. 
O'Connor,  Mr.  O'Donnell,  Mr.  Parnell,  Mr.  'E,.  Power,  Mr.  Redmond,  Mr. 
Sullivan,  and  Mr.  Sexton.  And  later  in  the  day  the  following  members 
were  also  suspended  :  Mr.  B3a'ne,  Mr.  Corbet,  Mr.  Gray,  Mr.  Lalor,  Mr. 
Leahy,  Mr.  A.  O'Connor,  Llr.  O'Kelly,  Mr.  W.  H.  O'Sullivan,  and  Mr. 
Shell. 

This  had  the  most  extraordinary  consequences.  Thus  Mr.  John  Dillon 
had  been  entirely  absent  during  the  night,  and  when  he  arrived  in  the 
morning  to  enter  the  House,  he  v/as  refused  admission,  and,  for  the  first 
time,  learnt  of  his  suspension.  Similarly,  Dr.  Commins,  Mr.  T.  D. 
Sullivan,  and  Mr.  Biggar  had  been  absent  during  the  night.  Mr.  Richard 
Power  had  actually  not  spoken  even  once  during  the  debates  in  Committee 

*  Hansard,  vol.  cclxxvi.,  pp.  429,  430. 


THE  FRUITS  OF  COERCION.  251 

on  the  Bill,  and  Mr.  Marum  had  taken  so  little  part  that  Sir  John  Hay,  a 
Conservative  member,  got  up  and  protested  against  his  suspension. 

A  word  is  required  for  another  Bill  of  the  Session  of  1882.  In  the  latter 
portion  of  this  session  Mr.  Gladstone  introduced,  and,  after  a  short 
struggle  with  the  Marquis  of  Salisbury,  succeeded  in  passing,  the  Arrears 
Act.  If  Englishmen  were  teachable  on  their  Irish  mistakes,  assuredly  the 
introduction  and  carriage  of  this  Bill  ought  to  have  taught  them  a  great 
lesson.  For  it  was  the  Arrears  Bill  that  ought  to  have  brought  before  the 
minds  of  Englishmen  the  real  meaning  of  the  crisis  through  which  Ireland 
had  been  passing.  The  testimony  as  to  the  circumstances  which  necessi- 
tated the  Arrears  Bill  comes  from  many  different  sources.  Mr.  Gladstone 
spoke  in  favour  of  the  Bill,  Mr.  Forster  spoke  in  favour  of  the  Bill.  It 
w-as  the  great  anxiety  of  Mr,  Parnell  in  Ivilmainham,  and  afterwards  of 
Mr.  Trevelyan  in  Dublin  Castle. 

*  Never  mind  the  *'  suspects," '  said  Mr.  Parnell  to  Captain  O'Shea  in 
Kilmainham  ;  '  we  can  well  afford  to  see  the  Coercion  Act  out.  If  you 
have  any  influence,  do  not  fritter  it  away  upon  us  ;  use  it  to  get  the  arrears 
practically  adjusted.  The  great  object  of  my  life  (added  the  hon.  member) 
is  to  settle  the  Land  Question.  Now  that  the  Tories  have  adopted  my 
view  as  to  peasant  proprietary,  the  extension  of  the  Purchase  clauses  is 
safe.  You  have  always  supported  the  leaseholders  as  strongly  as  myself  ; 
but  the  great  object  now  is  to  stay  eviction  by  the  introduction  of  an 
Arrears  Bill.^ 

'  He  had  felt  (Mr.  Parnell  said  in  the  same  debate)  with  reference  to  the 
question  of  Arrears  in  Ireland,  as  relating  to  the  situation  of  the  smaller 
tenants,  the  very  gravest  anxiety  and  responsibility  for  many  months  ;  and 
he  was  rejoiced  that  the  hon.  member  had  found  some  way  of  placing  the 
views  of  himself  and  those  with  him  before  the  Government.  They  had 
been  av/are  from  what  they  had  seen  in  the  newspapers,  and  from  the 
information  of  prisoners  who  came  in  from  time  to  time,  and  who  received 
letters  from  different  parts  of  the  country,  that  evictions  in  large  and  very 
much  greater  numbers  than  had  occurred  up  to  the  present  were  imminent 
unless  some  such  proposal  as  the  Prime  Minister  had  announced  were  made 
in  regard  to  arrears.  They  had  anticipated  that  there  would  be  three  times 
as  many  evictions  in  the  present  quarter  of  the  year  as  there  were  in  the 
first  quarter,  when  7,000  persons  were  turned  out  of  their  homes.  They 
had  also  every  reason  to  believe  that,  owing  to  the  fact  that  the  smaller 
tenantry  in  Mayo,  Galway,  Sligo,  and  parts  of  Roscommon,  Donegal, 
Leitrim,  and  Kerry  were  sunk  in  arrears  to  the  extent  of  three  or  four 
years — in  many  cases  four  or  five  or  six  years,  and  in  some  cases  ten  or 
twelve  years — the  year's  or  half -year's  rent,  by  the  payment  of  which  the 
tenants  had  obtained  a  temporary  respite  from  eviction,  would  be  but  a 
temporary  respite,  and  that  the  coming  winter  would  see  evictions  resumed 
against  the  smaller  tenants  to  an  extent  never  witnessed  in  the  country 
since  1848.  They  feared  also  that  the  outrages  which  had  been  so  numerous 
during  the  last  six  months  would  increase  as  the  winter  came  on  ;  and  that 
a  state  of  affairs  in  Ireland  would  follow,  owing  to  the  non-settlement  of 
this  question,  the  end  of  which  they  could  not  possibly  foresee.' ^ 

Equally  emphatic  is  the  testimony  of  Mr.  Trevelyan  : 

'  I  think  those  hon.  members  have  left  out  of  sight  what  is  perhaps  the 
governing  consideration  of  this  question,  why  ...  a  very  large  number  of 
^  Hansard,  vol.  cclxix.,  p.  783.  '  Ibid.,  pp.  792,  793. 


252  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

members  think  it  necessary  to  assist  the  tenants  in  Ireland.  It  is  because 
the  times  have  been  most  exceptional.  ...  So  far  as  I  can  remember,  no 
instance  of  this  sort  in  which  money  has  been  asked  to  assist  the  tenants  of 
Ireland  can  be  quoted  since  the  Famine  of  1S46.  The  reasons  why  we 
have  come  forward  now  are  the  bad  years  of  1878  and  1879.  I  only  put 
into  other  words  what  was  said  by  tfee  right  hon.  member  for  Bradford, 
when  I  say  that  the  sudden  rise  in  Irish  agrarian  crime  which  took  place  in 
1879-80  was  connected  with  the  discontent  which  was  fostered  in  an 
atmosphere  of  misery.  There  were  some  parts  of  the  country  where  the 
people  could  not  pay  their  rents.  They  could  not  keep  body  and  soul 
together  without  charitable  assistance,  and  the  helplessness  and  despair  of 
these  people  gave  the  first  material  thirst  for  agitation.'  ^ 

Again : 

Every  day  (went  on  the  Chief  Secretary)  the  Government  gets  reports 
of  evictions,  and  whenever  these  evictions  are  of  tenants  who  can  pay 
their  rents  and  w^ill  not,  the  Government  is  very  carefully  informed  by 
their  officers.  That  is  not  the  case  with  all  evictions,  and  at  this  moment 
in  one  part  of  the  country  men  are  being  turned  out  of  their  houses, 
actually  by  battalions,  who  are  no  more  able  to  pay  the  arrears  of  these 
bad  years  than  they  are  able  to  pay  the  National  Debt.  I  have  seen  a 
private  account  from  a  very  trustworthy  source — from  a  source  anyone 
would  allow  to  be  trustworthy — of  what  is  going  on  in  Connemara.  In 
three  days  150  families  were  turned  out,  numbering  750  persons.  At  the 
headquarters  of  the  Union,  though  only  one  member  of  each  family 
attended  to  ask  for  assistance,  there  was  absolutely  a  crowd  at  the  door  of 
the  vrorkhouse.  It  was  not  the  case  that  these  poor  people  belonged  to 
the  class  of  extravagant  tenants.  They  were  not  whisky-drinkers  ;  they 
were  not  in  terror  of  the  Land  League.  One  man  who  owed  £8  borrowed 
it  on  the  promise  of  repayment  in  six  months  with  £4  of  addition — a  rate 
of  interest  which  hon,  members  could  easily  calculate — that  he  might  sit 
in  his  home.  The  cost  of  the  process  of  eviction  amounted  to  £3  17s.  6d. 
I  am  told  that  in  this  district  there  are  thousands  in  this  position — people 
who  have  been  beggared  for  years,  people  who  have  been  utterly  unable  to 
hold  up  their  heads  since  those  bad  years,  and  whose  only  resource  from 
expulsion  from  their  homes  is  the  village  money-lender.' ^ 

And  it  was  the  tenantry  whose  miserable  condition  is  described  so 
eloquently  and  sympathetically  that  the  landlords  of  Ireland  were  evicting 
during  1881  and  1882,  at  the  time  of  the  supi^ression  of  the  Land  League. 
It  was  tenants  of  this  kind,  17,341  of  whom  were  cast  from  their  homes  in 
the  year  1881.  It  was  to  evict  tenants  of  this  kind  Mr.  Forster  was  filling 
the  gaols,  was  arming  the  landlords  with  soldiers  and  police.  It  was  to 
evict  miserable  and  despairing  wretches  like  these  that  the  mighty  forces 
of  the  British  Empire  were  pitted  against  Ireland  and  Mr.  Parnell. 
Assuredly  it  is  not  too  much  to  ask,  wlien  these  were  the  issues  on  both 
sides,  that  the  sympathies  of  all  real  haters  of  wrong  and  suffering  should 
rejoice  that  the  final  victory  remained  with  Mr.  Parnell  and  the  tenantry, 
instead  of  with  Mr.  Forster,  coercion,  and  the  evicting  landlords. 

On  the  Arrears  Bill  Mr.  Gladstone  staked  the  existence  of  bis  Govern 
ment,  and  even  risked  a  collision  with  the  House  of  Lords  ;  but  that  Bill 
was  the  grant  in  1882  of  a  demand  contemptuously  rejected  in  1881.    The 

*  Hansard,  vol.  cclxix.,  pp.  1327,  1328.  =  Ibid.,  pp.  1328,  1329. 


THE  FRUITS  OF  COERCION.  253 

Bill  itself  was  an  adaptation  of  one  brought  in  by  Mr.  Redmond,  and  again 
the  Bill  brought  in  by  Mr.  Redmond  had  been  drafted,  every  clause  and 
every  line  of  it,  within  the  walls  of  Kilmainham  by  Mr.  Parnell.  This  is 
another  of  the  many  proofs  that  it  is  only  through  the  suffering  of  Irish 
leaders  that  the  dull,  cold  ear  of  Parliamentary  ignorance  can  be  pene- 
trated. Mr.  Parnell  was  quite  content,  of  course,  that  his  scheme  should 
be  taken  up  by  the  Government  and  passed  into  law  ;  but  it  seemed  a  little 
hard  that  he  should  have  had  to  go  through  six  months'  imprisonment  in 
order  to  educate  the  mind  of  the  Ministry. 

It  were  bootless  here  to  enter  into  the  fierce  controversies  that  arose 
between  Lord  Spencer  and  the  Irish  Party  in  reference  to  the  administra- 
tion of  the  Arrears  Act.  That  particular  struggle  happily  belongs  to  the 
past,  with  acts  done  and  v,^ords  spoken  on  both  sides  that  each  willingly 
consigns  to  oblivion.  Suffice  it  here  to  introduce  one  of  the  men  whom 
this  struggle  brought  into  fierce  prominence. 

William  O'Brien  comes  from  a  good  stock,  and  was  brought  up  from  his 
earliest  years  in  those  principles  of  which  he  has  become  so  prominent  and 
so  vigorous  an  advocate.  On  the  day  his  elder  brother  was  born,  in  1848, 
the  sub-inspector  of  police  in  Mallow  had  a  warrant  to  search  the  house 
for  firearms,  but  desisted  from  using  it  because  of  Mrs.  O'Brien's  illness, 
and  on  Mr.  O'Brien  giving  his  word  that  there  were  no  arms  in  the  house. 
O'Brien's  father  was  one  of  the  fiercest  and  most  resolute  spirits  of  the 
Young  Ireland  Party,  but  afterwards,  like  so  many  of  the  men  who  sur- 
vived the  terrible  abortiveness  of  that  time,  was  by  no  means  friendly  to 
physical  force  movements.  In  time  he  had  to  remonstrate  with  some  of  his 
own  offspring  for  their  adhesion  to  Fenianism  ;  but  his  mouth  was  closed, 
whenever  his  remonstrances  became  too  vehement,  by  an  allusion  to  this 
episode  in  the  dcays  of  his  own  haughty  youth. 

WiUiam  was  born  on  October  2,  1852,  in  Mallow,  with  which  town  his 
family  on  the  mother's  side  has  been  connected  from  time  immemorial. 
He  received  his  education  at  Cloyne  Diocesan  College,  This  was  a  mixed 
school,  attended  by  both  Catholic  and  Protestant  children.  There  was  not 
the  slightest  sectarian  animosity  between  the  children  of  the  different 
creeds,  but  there  was  plenty  of  political  argument  and  differences.  The 
Catholic  Nationalists  in  the  school  formed  a  sort  of  small  Irish  Party,  and 
held  their  own  ;  William  O'Brien  being  successful  in  carrying  off  the  class- 
prizes,  while  his  brothers  and  others  carried  off  the  honours  in  cricket, 
football,  and  the  like.  William  from  his  earliest  j^ears  had  the  same  prin- 
ciples as  he  professes  to-day.  Apart  from  the  example  of  his  father,  he 
had  in  his  brother  a  strong  apostle  of  the  epistle  of  national  rights.  To 
this  brother,  his  senior  by  some  years,  he  looked  iip  with  that  mixture  of 
affection  and  awe  which  an  elder  brother  often  inspires  in  a  younger.  This 
brother  was  indeed  of  a  type  to  captivate  the  imagination  of  such  a  nature 
as  that  of  his  younger  brother.  He  was  a  man  of  inflexible  resolution, 
great  daring,  and  boundless  enthusiasm.  Among  the  revolutionaries  of 
his  district  he  was  the  chief  figure,  and  there  was  no  raid  for  arms  too 
desperate,  or  no  expedition  too  risky,  for  his  spirit.  He  took  part  with 
Captain  Mackay,  vs'ho  was  one  of  the  boldest  of  the  Fenian  leaders,  in 
many  of  the  raids  for  arms  on  police  barracks  and  other  places  in  the 
County  of  Cork.  He  was  arrested,  of  course,  when  the  Habeas  Corpus  Act 
was  suspended,  and  underwent  the  misery  and  tortures  which,  as  has 
already  been  described,  were  inflicted  on  untried  prisoners  under  the  best 
of  possible  Constitutions  and  the  freest  of  possible  Governments.     With 


254  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT, 

this  episode  in  the  life  of  the  elder  brother,  the  brightness  of  the  life  of 
William  O'Brien  for  many  a  long  day  ceased.  His  family  history  is 
stranoely  and  terribly  sad.  In  the  O'Brien  household  there  were  at  the 
one  moment  three  members  of  the  family  dying.  The  father  of  the  family 
had  died  before,  and  now  two  of  his  sons  and  his  daughter  were  lying  on 
their  death-beds  at  the  same  time.  The  two  brothers  died  on  the  one  day, 
and  a  fortnight  afterwards  the  sister  died  also.  The  shock  to  a  nature  so 
fiercely  and  intensely  affectionate  as  that  of  William  O'Brien  can  well  be 
imao^ined.  The  death  of  his  father  and  the  illness  of  his  brothers  had 
thrown,  to  a  large  extent,  the  support  of  the  entire  family  on  his  hands, 
and  to  them  he  was  not  merely  a  brother,  but  to  a  certain  extent  a  helpful 
parent.  It  seemed  for  a  time  as  if  he  were  to  be  swept  away  by  the  same 
disease  which  had  proved  fatal  to  so  many  of  his  kin.  He  was  only  saved 
from  death  by  a  journey  to  Egypt,  but  he  has  never  really  recovered  from 
the  shock  to  his  mind  and  heart  which  this  family  tragedy  caused,  and  he 
is,  and  will  be  for  ever,  haunted  by  its  memory. 

The  first  thing  wiiich  William  O'Brien  ever  wrote  was  a  sketch  of  the 
trial  ot  Captain  Mackay.     This  attracted  the  attention  of  Alderman  Nagle, 
the  proprietor  of  the  Corlc  Daily  Herald,  and  he  was  offered  an  engagement 
upon  that  paper.     There  he  remained  until  somev/here  towards  1876,  when 
he  became  a  member  of  the  reporting  staff  of  the  Freeman's  Journal.     He 
had  become,  meantime,  and  remains,  an  expert  shorthand  writer.     He  did 
the  ordinary  work  cf  the  reporter  for  several  years,  with  occasional  dashes 
into  more  congenial  occupation  in  special  descriptions  of  particular  pic- 
turesque incidents.     Whenever   his   work   had   any  connection  with  the 
politics,  condition,  or  prospects  of  his  country,  he  devoted  himself  to  it 
with  a  special  fervour.     It  was  his  descriptions  of  the  County  of  Mayo  in 
the  great  distress  of  1879  which  first  concentrated  the  attention  of  the 
Irish  people  on  the  calamity  impending  over  the  country.     While  he  was 
working  with  an  energy  as  great  as  that  of  any  other  journalist  in  Dublin 
at  his  own  profession,  his  heai't  was  in  the  cause  of  lais  people.     When  the 
Coercion  Act  was  passed  in  1880,  he  thought  the  moment  had  come  for 
him  to  offer  his  services  to  maintain  the  fight  in  face  of  threats  of  danger, 
and  he  proposed  through  Mr.  Davitt  and  Mr.  Egan  that  he  should  take  up 
some  of  the  work  of  the  League.     His  health,  however,  was  at  the  time  so 
weak  that  his  friends  feared  that  the  imprisonment  which  was  almost 
certain  to  follow  employment  by  the  League  would  prove  fatal  to  his  con- 
stitution, and  he  was  dissuaded  from  joining  the  ranks  of  the  movement. 
In  June,  1881,  when  the  conflict  between  Mr.  Forster  and  the  Land  League 
was  at  its  fiercest,  the  idea  occurred  of  establishing  a  newspaper  as  an 
organ  of  the  League  and  Pamellite  Party.     At  once  the  thoughts  of  several 
people  turned  to  the  able  and  brilliant  writer  on  the  Freeman^ s  Journal, 
and  he  was  invited  by  Mr.  Parnell  to  found  United  Ireland  and  to  becomxe 
its  editor. 

It  was  then  for  the  first  time  that  the  higher  powers  of  O'Brien  were 
discovered.  Great  as  was  his  reputation  as  a  writer  of  nervous  and  pic- 
turesque English,  he  had  hitherto  been  unknown  as  the  author  of  editorial 
and  purely  political  articles,  and  few  were  prepared  for  the  political  grasp 
and  feverish  and  bewildering  force  of  the  editorials  he  contributed  to  the 
new  journal.  He  had  now  been  placed  in  the  position  for  which  his  whole 
character  and  gifts  especially  fitted  him.  O'Brien  is  the  very  embodiment 
of  the  militant  journalist.  In  some  respects,  indeed,  his  character  resembles 
that  of  the  French,  rather  than  of  the  Irish,  litterateur.     Though  he  ha?! 


THE  FRUITS  OF  COERCION,  .255 

keen  literary  in>i,vincts  and  a  fine  soul,  his  work  is  important  to  him  mainly 
because  of  its  \<t  litical  result.  Fragile  in  frame  and  weak  in  health,  he  is 
yet  above  all  things  a  combatant,  ready  and  almost  eager  to  meet  danger. 
If  he  had  been  born  in  Paris,  he  would  probably  have  been  found  at  the 
top  of  a  barricade,  or,  like  Armand  Carrel,  might  have  perished  in  a  poli- 
tical duel.  A  long,  thin  face,  deep-set  and  piercing  eyes,  flashing  out  from 
behind  spectacles,  sharp  features,  and  quick,  feverish  walk — the  whole 
appearance  of  the  man  speaks  of  a  restless,  fierce,  and  enthusiastic  character. 

The  times  were  such  as  to  bring  out  to  the  full  all  his  qualities  of  mind 
and  character.  As  has  been  said,  the  foundation  of  United  Ireland  came 
in  the  agony  of  the  struggle  against  coercion.  Its  tone  was  a  trumpet-call 
to  further  and  fiercer  advance  instead  of  an  appeal  to  retreat,  and  naturally, 
before  long,  Mr.  Forster  knew  that  either  United  Ireland  should  be  crushed 
or  the  spirit  of  revolt  would  grow  daily  fiercer  and  more  unbending.  Mr. 
O'Brien  was  accordingly  arrested  the  day  after  Mr.  Parnell,  under  an  Act 
which  was  obtained  for  imprisoning  mauvais  sujets  and  village  tyrants,  the 
perpetrators  and  participators  in  crime  !  It  was  a  part  of  the  sadness  that 
has  followed  his  whole  life  that  at  the  very  moment  of  his  arrest  his  mother 
was  seriously  ill,  a  woman  whose  nobility  of  character  deserved  the  affec- 
tion she  received  from  her  son.  During  his  imprisonment  the  authorities 
were  gracious  enough  to  allow  him  out  under  escort  to  pay  a  visit  to  her, 
and  he  was  released  the  day  before  her  death.  After  various  attempts  to 
have  the  paper  published  in  different  places,  sometimes  in  England  and 
sometimes  in  France,  United  Ireland  was  finally  suppressed  by  Mr.  Forster. 
With  the  overthrow  of  Mr.  Forster,  the  paper  was  again  revived.  Then 
began  a  long  and  lonely  duel  between  Mr.  O'Brien  and  the  Administration, 
which  lasted  with  scarce  an  interruption  for  three  of  the  fiercest  years  in 
Irish  history. 

While  Mr.  O'Brien  was  being  tried  for  a  'seditious  libel,'  a  vacancy 
arose  m  the  representation  of  Mallow,  through  the  promotion  of  Mr. 
Johnston,  the  Attorney-General,  to  a  judgeship.  It  had  been  arranged 
before,  that  whenever  the  General  Election  came  Mr.  O'Brien,  as  a  Mallow 
man,  should  appeal  to  the  town  to  throw  off  its  servitude  to  Whiggery  and 
join  the  rest  of  the  country  in  the  new  demand  for  the  restoration  of  Irish 
rights.  The  opportunity  lor  the  appeal  had  come  sooner  than  anybody  had 
anticipated.  The  prosecution  of  O'Brien  by  the  Government  lent  a  singular 
opportuneness  to  the  struggle,  and  a  still  further  element  of  significance 
was  added  to  the  contest  by  the  Government  sending  down  Mr.  Naish, 
their  new  Attorney-General,  as  his  opponent.  Mallow,  in  some  respects, 
has  a  history  similar  to  that  of  Athlone,  Sligo,  and  some  other  small  con- 
stituencies of  Ireland.  During  the  dread  interregnum  between  the  betrayal 
of  Keogh  and  the  rise  of  Butt,  it  had  followed  the  example  of  the  other 
small  constituencies  in  sending  into  Parliament  the  worthless  represen- 
tatives of  Whiggery  or  Tories.  The  representatives  of  Mallow,  like  the 
representatives  of  Galway  and  Athlone,  and  of  Sligo  and  Carlow,  bought 
that  they  might  sell.  The  contest  for  Mallow,  under  circumstances  like 
these,  attracted  an  immense  amount  of  attention,  and  all  Ireland  looked  to 
the  result  with  feverish  eagerness.  The  reputation  of  Mallow  had  been  so 
bad  for  so  many  years  that  there  were  doubts  mixed  with  hope,  and  the 
utmost  expectation  was  that  Mr,  O'Brien  would  be  returned  by  a  small 
majority.  The  full  significance  of  the  change  that  had  come  over  all  Ireland 
was  shown  when  the  result  was  announced,  and  it  was  found  that  O'Brien 
had  been  returned  by  a  majority  of  72—161  to  89. 


256  THE  PARNELL  MO  VEMENT. 

The  Session  of  1883  opened  in  strange  gloom.  But  meantime  there  had 
come  to  Dublin  Castle  aid  from  an  unexpected  quarter.  On  January  21  a 
number  of  men  were  arrested  on  a  charge  of  being  concerned  in  the  murder 
of  Lord  Frederick  Cavendish  and  Mr.  Burke,  and  some  days  after  the  trial 
opened  the  whole  world  was  startled  by  the  appearance  of  James  Carey, 
the  chief  of  the  gang,  in  the  witness-box.  Speakers  did  not  scruple  to 
suggest  that  while  it  was  Joe  Brady  that  used  the  knife,  the  Irish  members 
Avere  the  men  who  had  supplied  the  funds.  Under  the  influence  of  speeches 
like  this  public  passion  in  England  once  more  became  fiercely  aroused,  and 
the  majority  of  the  English  people  were  firmly  convinced,  in  all  probability, 
that  before  many  days  Mr.  Parnell  would  take  his  place  beside  the 
murderers  of  Lord  Frederick  Cavendish  and  Mr.  Burke.  Irish  members 
are  sometimes  accused  of  being  venomous,  violent,  and  unscrupulous  in 
their  attacks  upon  their  political  opponents.  Their  speeches  in  this  respect 
were  once  compared  by  Mr.  Chamberlain  to  the  use  of  explosive  bullets  in 
civilized  warfare.  This  charge  is  conveniently  but  characteristically 
forgetful  of  the  things  Irish  members  have  had  to  bear  from  the  tongues  of 
their  English  opponents  and  the  pens  of  English  journalists. 

There  was  one  man  who  was  again  dragged  from  the  depths  to  the 
surface  by  the  new  revelations  as  to  the  state  of  Ireland.  By  the  same 
strange  logic  which  had  made  the  hideous  outcome  of  Mr.  Forster's  policy 
in  the  assassinations  its  defence  and  not  its  most  eloquent  condemnation, 
the  revelations  of  the  trials  became  again,  amid  the  fury  of  English  passion, 
to  be  the  vindication  of  his  wisdom.  After  his  fashion  he  resolved  to  take 
full  advantage  of  the  tide  of  passion  that  was  running  so  high.  Mr.  Gorst 
proposed  : 

'  And  we  venture  to  express  our  earnest  hope  that  the  policy  which  has 
produced  these  results  will  be  maintained,  and  that  no  further  attempts 
will  be  made  to  purchase  the  support  of  persons  disaffected  to  her  Majesty's 
rule  by  concessions  to  lawless  agitation  ;  and  that  the  existence  of  dangerous 
secret  societies  in  Dublin,  and  other  parts  of  the  country,  will  continue  to 
be  met  by  unremitting  energy  and  vigilance  on  the  part  of  the  Executive.',-'- 

On  February  22,  1883,  Mr.  Forster  took  part  in  this  debate,  and  at  once 
resolved  to  make  it  the  occasion  of  having  it  out  with  his  old  and 
triumphant  enemy.  He  had  carefully  prepared  himself  for  the  occasion. 
His  notes  were  voluminous  ;  every  sentence  in  his  long  indictment  had 
been  carefully  weighed  ;  the  speech  was  full  of  the  adroit  innuendo  and  the 
deeply  laid  though  apparently  casual  asides  of  which  the  member  for  Brad- 
ford was  a  master.  The  attack  on  Mr.  Parnell  was  made  the  more  palatable 
to  the  House  by  its  being  dexterously  sandwiched  between  attacks  on 
Mr.  Forster's  former  colleagues,  against  whom  at  this  moment  the  tide  ran 
almost  as  high  as  against  Mr.  Parnell  himself. 

The  indictment  was  a  great,  an  immense  Parliamentary  success.  The 
House,  swept  by  its  invective,  was  lashed  into  fury,  and  there  were  loud 
cries  for  Mr.  Parnell's  immediate  rise.  This  demand  was  a  sufficient  proof  of 
the  fairness  of  the  temper  of  the  House.  Mr.  Forster  had  delivered  a 
speech  which  he  had  prepared  for  weeks  ;  the  speech  had  been  extended 
into  the  dinner  hour  ;  and  it  was  this  famished  and  impatient  assembly 
that  Mr.  Parnell  was  expected  to  address  with  an  impromptu  reply  to  a 
most  elaborately  prepared  attack.  Mr.  Parnell,  of  course,  declined  to  be 
bullied  into  premature  speech ;  and,  indeed,  contemptuous  of  this  as  he  is 

I  Hansard,  vol.  cclxxvi.  p.  414. 


THE  FRUITS  OF  COERCION.  257 

of  every  attack,  he  for  some  time  was  doubtful  whether  he  should  take  the 
trouble  of  replying  at  all.  The  English  press,  meantime,  was  in  exultant 
delight.  *  Mr.  Forster's  stern  interrogatories,'  said  the  Times,  '  fell  on 
Mr.  Parnell  like  the  lash  of  a  whip  on  a  man's  face.' 

It  is  worth  pausing  for  a  moment  here  to  say  that  the  whole  cause  of  the 
tempest  against  Mr.  Parnell  and  the  Land  League,  which  raged  for  weeks 
in  England  and  threatened  the  liberty  if  not  the  life  of  some  of  the  Irish 
leaders,  was  the  result  of  a  couple  of  sentences  of  an  informer.  The 
following  are  the  sentences  referred  to.  Carey  is  being  examined  by  the 
Crown  prosecutor : 

*  What  was  the  opinion  amongst  some  of  them  as  to  where  the  money 
came  from  ? — There  were  different  ideas.  Some  said  it  came  from  America  ; 
I  said  I  did  not  believe  that  it  came  from  America. 

'  Where  did  you  say  you  believed  it  came  from  ? — I  said  I  did  not  think 
from  America.  I  think  I  expressed  myself,  but  I  know  between  the  whole 
of  us  it  was  repeatedly  said,  "  Perhaps  they  are  getting  it  from  the  Land 
League."  '^ 

From  this  it  will  be  seen  that  all  Carey  ventured  to  say  was  that  he  or 
some  other  members  of  his  gang  had  a  suspicion  that  the  money  came  from 
the  Land  League.  The  subject  was  never  recurred  to  in  his  evidence,  and, 
of  course,  it  was  never  recurred  to  for  the  reason  that  the  Crown  authori- 
ties knew  that  a  connection  between  the  Land  League  and  the  '  In vincibles ' 
could  not  be  established.  Attention  would  have  been  more  fitly  directed 
to  another  portion  of  the  evidence  of  Carey  which  spoke  in  trumpet  tones 
against  Mr.  Forster.  The  '  Invincibles '  were  the  same  dread  brood  that 
despotism  always  begets,  were  as  much  the  children  of  Mr.  Forster's  regivie 
as  the  Nihilists  are  of  the  autocracy  of  Russia,  and  Carey  himself  was  the 
strongest  witness  in  proof  of  this. 

James  Carey  cross-examined  by  Mr.  Walsh  : 

'  When  you  became  a  member  of  the  Order  of  Invincibles,  was  it  for  the 
object  of  serving  your  country  that  you  joined? — Well,  yes. 

'  And  at  that  time  when  you  joined  with  the  object  of  serving  your 
country,  in  what  state  was  Ireland  ? — In  a  very  bad  state. 

*  A  famine,  I  think,  was  just  passing  over  her  ? — Yes. 

'  The  Coercion  Bill  was  in  force,  and  the  popular  leaders  were  in  prison  ? 
— Yes. 

'  And  was  it  because  you  despaired  of  any  constitutional  means  of  serving 
Ireland  that  you*joined  the  Society  of  Invincibles  ? — I  believe  so.'^ 

It  was,  of  course,  assumed  that  Mr.  Parnell  would  go  down  under  this 
flood  of  hatred  and  calumny.  The  only  effect  in  Ireland  was  to  attract  to 
him  the  more  passionate  affection  of  his  people.  The  idea  had  long  been 
familiar  to  the  minds  of  his  admirers  that  he  should  be  relieved  from  some 
of  the  pecuniary  embarrassments  which  he  inherited,  and  which  he  had 
himself  largely  increased  by  his  generosity  to  his  tenants  both  during  and 
before  the  Land  League  agitation.  The  attack  of  Mr.  Forster  brought 
this  idea  to  practical  shape,  and  the  Parnell  Tribute  was  started  with  a 
letter  from  Archbishop  Croke.  One  thing  only  was  wanted  to  its  success — • 
that  was  another  attack.  This  came  as  a  result  of  the  sinister  counsels  of 
a.  renegade  Nationalist  at  the  Vatican.     The  tribute  went  on  apace,  and 

^  UniUd  Ireland,  February  24,  1883.  »  Ibid. 

17 


258  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

when  it  was  closed    it  had  reached  close  upon  the  handsome  amount  of 
£40,000. 

Another  incident  of  this  period  must  be  mentioned,  in  order  to  introduce 
another  prominent  figure  in  the  struggle  of  to-day.  Mr.  Timothy  Har- 
rington was  one  of  the  prominent  Land  Leaguers  of  County  Kerry  iu  the 
days  of  Mr.  Forster,  and,  after  some  shorter  terms  of  imprisonment,  was 
confined  for  twelve  months  in  Galway  Gaol  under  the  Coercion  Act  of 
1881.  In  October,  1882,  a  new  political  and  agrarian  organization  was 
established,  and  Mr.  Harrington  was  appointed  as  the  secretary.  Soon 
after,  he  had  to  deliver  a  speech  in  Westmeath,  and  in  the  course  of  his 
observations  used  this  language  :  '  Now,  I  ask  the  tenant  farmers  to  come 
forward  generously  and  give  the  labourers  a  fair  day's  wages  for  a  fair 
day's  work.  If  not,  the  agitation  which  has  been  carried  on  in  their  behalf 
wiU  be  turned  against  them  if  they  do  not  come  forward  and  assist  the 
labourers  here  in  their  hour  of  need.'  A  couple  of  those  precious  resident 
magistrates,  who  have  become  so  prominent  of  late,  held  this  language  to 
be  calculated  to  intimidate  the  farmers  of  County  Westmeath,  and  sen- 
tenced him  to  two  months'  imprisonment.  Mr.  Harrington  appealed  to 
the  County  Court  Judge,  and  his  appeal  came  before  Mi-.  J.  Chute  Neligan. 
Mr.  Neligan  is  a  Kerry  landlord  ;  Mr.  Harrington  is  the  proprietor  of  the 
Kerry  Sentinel,  which  has  waged  fierce  war  upon  the  oppression  of  the 
landlords  of  the  County  Kerry ;  and  the  conviction  was  confirmed.  Mr. 
Harrington  was  subjected  to  the  punishment  of  the  plank-bed  for  a  month, 
and  underwent  all  the  other  hardships  that  are  meted  out  to  the  worst 
criminals.  This  sentence,  severe  enough,  was  aggravated  by  the  deter- 
mination of  the  prison  authorities  to  render  his  stay  in  prison  as  odious  as 
possible.  He  was  asked  to  perform  a  duty  the  description  of  which  is  not 
permissible  ;  some  of  the  landlords  of  the  county  could  see  their  hated  and 
fallen  foe  thus  menially  and  disgustingly  employed  from  the  window  of  the 
governor's  house,  and  Mr.  Harrington  refused  to  give  his  enemies  the 
spectacle  of  his  degradation.  In  consequence,  he  was  condemned  by  the 
governor  to  the  loss  of  the  two  hours'  recreation  he  was  allowed  by  the 
prison  rules,  and  for  six  days  he  had  to  remain  within  his  cell,  without 
even  once  tasting  a  breath  of  fresh  air  or  enjoying  a  moment's  exercise.  It 
was  while  he  was  thus  in  the  solitude  of  his  cell  that  he  received  news 
which  was  his  vindication.  A  vacancy  had  been  made  in  the  representa- 
tion of  County  Westmeath  by  the  retirement  of  Mr.  Gill.  Mullingar,  the 
town  in  which  Mr.  Harrington  was  imprisoned,  is  the  capital  town  of 
County  Westmeath,  and  here  the  nomination  of  candidates  had  to  take 
place.  The  constituency,  up  to  the  passage  of  the  Franchise  Act,  consisted 
exclusively,  or  almost  exclusively,  of  farmers  ;  probably  there  was  not  a 
single  labourer  on  the  whole  electoral  roll.  In  other  words,  the  constitu- 
ency consisted  exclusively  of  the  class  whom  Mr.  Harrington  was  convicted 
of  having  intimidated,  and  excluded  every  one  of  the  class  in  whose 
interest  he  was  accused  of  having  employed  intimidation.  Yet  it  came  to 
pass  that  no  less  than  three  nomination-papers  were  sent  in  signed  by 
farmers,  and  Mr.  Harrington's  popularity  was  so  great  that  nobody 
attempted  to  oppose  him.  It  had  been  arranged  that  a  signal  from  the 
railway  embankment,  from  which  the  cell  of  Mr.  Harrington  was  visible, 
should  announce  the  result  of  the  election.  It  is  thus  that  Irish  leaders 
learn  the  difference  between  the  esteem  of  their  own  people  and  the  hatred 
of  their  oppressors.  Since  that  period  Mr.  Harrington  has  worked  inde- 
fatigably  as  Secretary  of  the  National  League.     In  this  great  office  he  has 


THE  FRUITS  OF  COERCION.  259 

as  much  to  do  with  the  popular  government  of  Ireland  as  the  Lord-Lieu- 
tenant, the  Chief  Secretary,  and  all  Dublin  Castle  have  with  the  govern- 
ment of  Ireland  against  her  will.  Under  his  guidance,  at  once  active  and 
sagacious,  the  organization  has  grown  to  be  one  of  the  most  powerful  in  all 
Irish  history.  At  this  moment  it  numbers  close  upon  fifteen  hundred 
branches.  To  stimulate  popular  courage  and  restrain  popular  excesses  has 
been  the  terribly  difficult  task  of  Mr.  Harrington  ;  and  so  well  has  he  per- 
formed it  that  he  was  able  to  meet  and  contradict  all  the  statements  of 
Mr.  Balfour  recently  as  to  illegal  conduct  on  the  part  of  the  League.  Mr. 
Harrington  is  a  born  organizer.  He  has  much  of  the  iron  spirit  of  the 
American  '  boss,'  dashed  with  the  kindliness  of  a  good-humoured  Irishman. 
His  frame,  hardy,  firm-set,  is  capable  of  any  amount  of  physical  or  mental 
etfort.  He  grew  fat  on  the  plank-bed,  and  cheerful  in  solitary  confinement. 
Throughout  his  whole  life  he  has  never  once  tasted  stimulant,  and  this 
perhaps  accounts  to  some  extent  for  his  splendid  health.  He  is  a  curious 
mixture  of  the  intense  pietist  and  the  personal  Puritan  with  the  keen, 
tolerant,  and  good-humoured  man  of  the  world.  No  man  fights  so  fierce  a 
battle,  and  no  man  has  fewer  enduring  enmities.  At  one  time  we  think  of 
him  as  a  latter-day  Vincent  de  Paul ;  at  another,  as  of  the  most  modern  of 
machine  politicians  and  ward-bosses. 

A  more  important  victory  than  even  that  in  Westmeath  soon  came.  The 
promotion  of  Mr.  Givan  to  a  Government  situation  left  a  vacancy  in  the 
County  of  Monaghan.  It  was  at  once  resolved  that  the  seat  should  be  con- 
tested by  Mr,  Healy,  whose  great  services  in  amending  the  Land  Act,  and 
especially  in  obtaining  the  clause  called  after  his  name,  marked  him  out  as 
the  strongest  candidate  for  such  a  contest.  The  attempt  to  gain  a  seat  in 
one  of  the  Ulster  constituencies  was  regarded  as  insane  impudence.  The 
Whigs  demanded  that,  though  representative  of  a  miserable  minority  of 
the  popular  party,  they  should  be  allowed  their  traditional  place  as  the 
officers  of  the  army  of  which  the  rank  and  file  were  almost  entirely  com- 
posed of  Nationalists.-^  These  impudent  pretensions  were  for  once  rejected, 
and  the  Nationalists  determined  to  win  or  lose  with  their  own  man.  Tht 
Tories,  on  their  side,  felt  the  full  importance  of  the  contest,  and  put  for- 
ward one  of  their  ablest  representatives  in  Mr.  John  Monroe,  an  eminent 
Queen's  Counsel.  The  three  parties  were  thus  represented — the  Nationalists 
by  Mr.  Healy,  the  Liberals  by  Mr.  Pringle,  and  the  Conservatives  by  Mr. 
Monroe.  The  contest  was  fought  with  considerable  spirit  on  all  sides,  and 
in  the  end  the  National  candidate  won.  The  Liberal  candidate  exposed 
the  emptiness  of  the  pretensions  on  which  his  party  had  held  the  monopoly 
of  political  power  for  so  long.  Mr,  Pringle  had  but  274  votes  ;  Mr. 
Monroe  received  2,011  votes  ;  Mr.  Healy,  with  2,376  votes,  had  a  clear 
majority  over  the  candidates  of  the  two  parties  combined.  A  few  weeks 
afterwards  Whiggery  received  an  even  more  crushing  blow.  For  the 
vacancy  made  by  Mr.  Healy  there  came  forward  The  O'Conor  Don  and 
Mr.  W.  H.  K.  Redmond.  Mr.  Redmond  was  a  young  man,  scarcely  of 
legal  age  at  the  time  of  the  contest,  and  he  was  absent  in  Australia.  The 
O'Conor  Don,  on  the  other  hand,  was  a  trained  and  m?.ture  politician  ; 
and,  though  he  had  joined  the  ranks  of  his  country's  enemies,  came  from 

^  Ulster  (said  the  Northern  Whig)  is  not  National  and  cannot  be  made  National.  .  . 
The  loyal  Ulster  electors,  Protestant  and  Catholic,  Liberal  aud  Conservative,  have 
only  to  come  to  an  understanding  to  divide  the  representation.  Under  such  an 
arrangement  not  one  Nationalist  candidate  could  be  returned  for  Ulster. — (Quoted  in 
fall  Mall  Gazette,  June  27,  1883.) 

17—2 


26o  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

an  old  Irish  stock.  But  in  the  struggle  he  was  beaten  ignominiously.  The 
numbers  were  :  Redmond,  307  ;  O'Conor  Don,  126. 

In  the  autumn  of  this  year  an  attempt  was  made  from  another  of  the 
anti-National  forces  to  arrest  the  tide  of  National  victory.  The  province 
of  Ulster  has,  with  a  characteristic  ignorance  of  Irish  affairs,  been  always 
regarded  by  the  English  public  as  forming  a  solid  mass  unanimously  in 
favour  of  the  perpetuation  of  English  domination  and  against  the  restora- 
tion of  Irish  liberties.  This  absurd  misrepresentation  of  the  real  state  of 
Ulster  obtained  even  among  a  portion  of  the  Irish  public.  To  the 
southern  Nationalist  the  north  was  chiefly  known  as  the  home  of  the  most 
rabid  religious  and  political  intolerance  perhaps  in  the  whole  Christian 
world  ;  it  was  designated  by  the  comprehensive  title  of  the  'Black  North.' 
But  it  was  not  alwaj^s  so.  In  the  days  of  1798  the  most  stubborn  resis- 
tance to  the  success  of  the  English  forces  was  made  in  Ulster.  It  was 
Ulster  Presbyterians  who,  banished  from  Ireland  by  laws  that  worked 
oppression  without  regard  to  religion,  gave  to  the  American  Revolution  its 
most  steadfast  counsellors  and  some  of  its  best  generals  and  bravest 
soldiers.  It  was  among  Ulster  Presbyterians  that  the  foundation  was  laid 
of  the  association  known  as  the  United  Irishmen,  who  formed,  up  to  the 
days  of  Fenianism,  the  most  formidable  conspiracy  against  English  rule. 
In  more  modern  times  Ulster  Presbyterians  formed  one  of  the  strongest 
elements  of  the  Tenant  Right  Party.  It  is  true  that,  in  the  course  of  time, 
the  Presbyterians  forgot  the  more  robust  faith  of  their  ancestors,  were  in 
some  instances  carried  away  by  the  tide  of  religious  bigotry,  and  in  a  large 
degree  lapsed  to  the  ignoble  compromise  of  Whiggery  ;  but  at  all  times  in 
the  history  of  Ulster  the  Catholics  formed  nearly  a  half  of  the  entire 
population.  These  Catholics  were  Nationalists  to  a  man  ;  and,  living  in 
the  midst  of  a  population  which  the  law  permitted  to  insult,  to  persecute, 
and  often  to  murder  them  with  perfect  impunity,  they  held  to  their  faith 
with  a  fervour  unknown  in  the  almost  exclusively  Catholic  parts  of  the 
country.  But  the  landlords  belonged  to  the  anti-Nationalist  Party  ;  the 
boards  were  all  manned  by  members  of  the  anti-Nationalist  Party  :  the 
occupants  of  the  Bench  were  gathered  from  the  ranks  of  an  organization 
sworn  to  persecution  and  hatred  of  the  Catholics  ;  and,  finally,  under  a 
restricted  franchise,  the  Parliamentary  representatives  were  taken  exclu- 
sively from  the  two  English  parties.  Under  these  circumstances  the 
National  Party  in  Ulster  still  remained  inarticulate,  and  Ulster  continued 
to  present  to  the  outside  world  a  solid  front  of  fierce  antagonism  to  every- 
thing Irish  and  National. 

After  the  Monaghan  election  the  Ulster  Nationalists  decided  that  they 
should  hold  meetings  in  different  parts  of  the  country  for  the  purpose  of 
preparing  for  the  General  Election  by  establishing  registration  associations. 
The  object  was  unquestionably  legitimate  and  even  praiseworthy.  It  was 
in  the  highest  sense  legal,  and  these  meetings  were  organized  and  upheld 
by  something  like  48  per  cent,  of  the  population  generally  in  Ulster,  and  in 
some  of  the  counties  where  the  meetings  were  to  be  held,  by  70  per  cent,  of  the 
population.  The  meetings,  which  were  protested  against  by  Orangemen  as  an 
invasion,  were  summoned,  among  other  places,  for  the  County  of  Cavan, 
and  Cavan,  both  in  the  election  of  1880  and  in  the  last  two  elections,  re- 
turned two  National  representatives  ;  in  Monaghan,  and  Monaghan  is  now 
represented  by  two  National  members  ;  in  Tyrone,  and  two  out  of  four 
seats  in  Tyrone  are  represented  by  Nationalists  ;  in  Fermanagh,  and  the 
two  seats  in  Fermanagh  are  represented  by  two  Nationalists  ;  in  Newry, 


THE  FRUITS  OF  COERCldN.  261 

and  the  return  of  a  Nationalist  in  Newry  was  not  even  opposed.  The 
statistics  of  population  show  with  equal  clearness  the  impudence  of  the 
Orange  claim.  In  Strabane,  where  a  meeting  was  called,  out  of  the  total 
population  of  4,196,  2,720  are  Catholics,  and  there  are  only  693  of  the 
Episcopalian  Protestants,  from  whom  Orangeism  is  largely  recruited,  and 
685  Presbyterians.  Out  of  the  entire  population  of  5,231  in  Pomeroy, 
3,537  are  Catholics,  734  Episcopalian  Protestants,  and  892  Presbyterians. 
Out  of  the  entire  population  of  Castle  Derg,  3,748  are  Catholics,  940 
Episcopalian  Protestants,  and  505  Presbyterians.  And,  finally,  out  of  the 
entire  population  of  6,069  in  Rosslea,  where  there  was  a  most  violent 
attempt  to  break  up  the  Nationalist  meeting,  4,394  are  Catholics,  1,357 
Protestant  Episcopalians,  and  258  Presbyterians  .•'• 

The  landlords  resolved  to  make  a  last  desperate  effort  for  the  preserva- 
tion of  their  power,  and  organized  a  movement  perhaps  as  wicked  and  as 
shameful  as  any  known  to  the  modern  history  of  Ireland.  They  openly 
proclaimed  that  they  would  put  down,  by  force  of  arms  if  necessary,  these 
meetings  of  their  fellow-citizens.  They  organized  bodies  which  had  all  the 
appurtenances  as  well  as  the  spirit  of  armies.  Wherever  a  Nationalist 
meeting  was  arranged  they  organized  a  counter-demonstration.  Their 
followers  went  to  these  demonstrations  as  heavily  armed  as  if  they  were 
marching  to  the  field  of  battle,  and  the  orators  of  the  day  made  speeches 
openly  inciting  to  wholesale  murder. 

'  With  no  uncertain  sound,'  said  an  Orange  placard  published  in  Omagh, 
*  compel  the  rebel  conspirators  to  i^eturn  to  their  haunts  in  the  south  and 
west,  and  under  a  guard  of  military  and  police,  as  in  Dungannon  on  Thurs- 
day.'- '  It  was  a  great  pity,'  said  Lord  Kossmore,  '  that  the  so-called 
Government  of  England  stopped  loyal  men  from  assembling  to  uphold  their 
institutions  here,  and  had  sent  down  a  handful  of  soldiers  whom  they 
could  eat  up  in  a  second  or  two  if  they  thought  fit.'^  '  The  Orangemen,' 
said  Captain  Barton,  *  if  they  liked,  could  be  the  Government  themselves, 
.  .  .  He  only  wished  they  were  allowed,  and  they  could  soon  drive  the 
rebels,  like  Parnell  and  his  followers,  out  of  their  sight.'^  Major  Saunder- 
son  wondered  '  why  those  rebels  abused  the  police  and  soldiers  ;  only  for 
them,  where  would  they  havefbeen  in  Dungannon  ?  They  would  have  been 
in  the  nearest  river  (cheers),  and  at  Omagh  and  Aughnacloy  they  would 
have  been  in  the  same  place.'  ^  The  Rev.  Mr.  Jagoe  '  would  conclude  by 
telling  them  what  John  Dillon,  another  rebel,  said  in  a  speech  in  the  House 
of  Commons,  and  which  he  took  from  a  report  in  the  Freeman's  Journal, 
and  which  he  had  in  his  pocket :  "  That  he  would  advise  the  people  to  shoot 
down  every  Protestant  in  Ireland."  (Groans,  and  cries  of  "We'll  shoot 
them.")'^  'Theirs  was  no  aggressive  party,'  exclaimed  Mr.  Murray  Ker, 
D.L.  .  .  .  'Let  there  be  no  revolver  practice.'  (Cheers.)  'His  advice  to 
them  about  revolvers  was,  never  use  a  revolver  except  they  were  firing  at 
some  one.'  (Laughter  and  cheers.)'^  '  If  the  Government,'  said  Lord  Claud 
Hamilton,  '  fail  to  prevent  Mr.  Parnell  and  Co.  from  making  inroads  into 
Ulster  ...  if  they  do  not  prevent  those  hordes  of  rufl&ans  from  invading 
us,  we  wUl  take  the  law  into  our  own  hands,  and  we  ourselves  will.'^ 
'  Keep  the  cartridge  in  the  rifle,'  said  Colonel  King-Harman  at  Rathmines.''' 
'Keep  a  firm  grip  on  your  sticks,'  said  Mr.  Archdale  at  Dromore.^°     The 

^  '  Loyalty  plus  Murder,'  p.  10.    By  Mr.  T.  M.  Healy,  M.P. 
2  Ibid.,  p.  7.  3  Ibid.,  p.  18.  4  Ibid.,  p.  22. 

5  Ibid.,  p.  23.  6  Ibid.  7  Ibid.,  p.  41. 

8  Ibid.,  p.  42.  9  Ibid.,  title-page.  *°  Ibid. 


262  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

Dally  Express,  the  organ  of  law  and  order  and  of  the  landlords,  whose 
editor  is  the  well-known  Dr.  Patton,  Dublin  correspondent  of  the  Times, 
filled  its  columns  with  direct  incitements  to  murder  which  would  have 
landed,  and  justly  landed,  a  Nationalist  editor  in  penal  servitude. 

'  This  new  attempt  (it  wrote  of  the  Nationalist  meetings  in  Ulster)  .  .  . 
will  be  repelled,  and  the  hireling  disturbers  of  the  peace  of  Ulster  hurled 
back  ignominiously  from  the  frontier  by  the  loyal  men  of  Fermanagh.  .  .  . 
They  have  at  length  aroused  a  spirit  in  the  north  which  will  no  longer 
submit  to  insult.  The  alarm  is  sounded,  and  the  determination  of  the 
Loyalists  of  the  country  expressed  in  another  column.  It  is  a  warning 
which  they  will  do  well  to  respect.  Let  them  call  it  a  threat  if  they  choose. 
There  it  is  to  be  read  and  pondered.  It  is  no  time  to  quibble  about  words. 
The  meaning  is  clear  and  plain,  and  the  men  to  whom  it  is  addressed  do 
not  shrink  from  the  avowal  of  their  final  determination.  They  plainly  tell 
the  disturbers  of  the  peace  .  .  .  that  they  are  determined  to  take  effectual 
measures  to  put  a  stop  to  every  attempt  to  disseminate  pernicious  doctrines 
in  their  midst. '^ 

Commenting  on  the  death  of  an  unfortunate  creature  named  Giffen,  who 
was  killed  by  the  police  at  Dromore,  the  same  organ  wrote  : 

'  As  it  was,  the  fact  that  a  couple  of  men  on  the  Loyalist  side  were 
wounded  with  lances  or  bayonets  is  most  unlucky.  The  men  may  have 
misbehaved,  they  may  have  deserved  what  they  got,  but  it  is  very  painful 
to  the  feelings  of  all  people  to  find  the  Queen's  troops  charging  and  cutting 
down  even  rioters  who  are  urged  on  to  riot  hy  loyalty.''^ 

When  at  last  he  found  that  these  outrages  could  no  longer  be  permitted, 
Lord  Spencer  took  active  measures.  Police  shorthand  writers  were  sent  to 
some  of  the  Orange,  as  previously  they  had  been  sent  to  all  of  the  Nation- 
alist meetings,  and  the  peers  and  the  deputy  lieutenants  and  the  magistrates 
at  once  abandoned  the  tone  of  murderous  incitement.  A  body  of  police 
was  ordered  to  prevent  the  breaking  up  of  a  meeting  by  Orange  rowdies, 
and  the  rowdies,  of  course,  flew  pell-mell  before  the  first  charge  of  the 
police.  There  never  was  a  movement  so  blustering  and  so  cruel  that 
vanished  with  such  rapidity  before  the  first  show  of  determination  on  the 
part  of  the  Government.  Under  a  National  Government  such  a  move- 
ment would  be  almost  unimaginable.^ 

^  '  Loyalty  plus  Murder,'  pp.  32,  33.  2  jUfi,^  p.  53. 

3  It  is  well  to  quote  Sir  George  Trevelyan's  description  of  the  character  and  purpose 
of  the  Orange  counter-demonstrations  :  '  Unfortunately,  however,  the  counter- 
demonstrations  of  the  Orangemen  were,  to  a  great  extent,  demonstrations  of  bodies 
of  armed  men.  At  their  last  meeting  at  Dromore  sackfuls  of  revolvers  were  left  behind 
close  to  the  place  of  meeting.  The  reason  that  they  were  so  left  was  that  a  shrewd  and 
energetic  officer  who  was  present  was  seen  to  search  the  Orangemen  as  they  came 
along.  The  Orange  meetings,  therefore,  were  bodies  of  armed  raen,  many  of  whom 
came  prepared  to  use  their  arms  ;  some  of  them  prepared  to  make  a  murderous  attack 
upon  the  Nationalists.'  ('No!  No!')  'So  far  as  the  Government  knew,  it  was  not 
the  custom  of  the  Nationalists  to  go  armed  to  their  meetings  until  the  bad  example 
was  set  by  the  Orangemen.'  (Hansard,  vol.  cclxxxiv.,  p.  3S3.)  And  here  is  his 
description  of  the  state  to  which  the  Orange  firebrands  had  brought  Ulster :  '  In  [spite 
of  the  fact  that  Ulster  was  full  of  armed  men,  who  were  excited  to  an  extreme  degree 
by  the  violent  speeches  of  their  leaders  ;  that  every  hand  brandished  a  cudgel ;  that 
tens  of  thousands  of  revolvers  were  being  carried  about ;  and  that  the  leaders  of  the 
men  were  telling  them  to  take  a  firm  grip  of  their  sticks,  and  not  to  fire  their  pistols 
except  when  they  were  certain  of  hitting  somebody,  the  winter  had  so  far  passed  with 
no  great  or  striking' disaster.'    {Ibid.,  p.   384.) 


THE  FRUITS  OF  COERCION.  263 

This  was  the  last  effort  of  ascendency  in  Ireland.  In  the  next  Session 
of  Parliament  the  Irish  masses  were  ottered  for  the  first  time  in  all  their 
history  an  opportunity  of  being  truly  represented  in  an  Imperial  Parlia- 
ment. To  the  acquisition  of  their  rights  by  their  countrymen  the  Irish 
Tory  Party  offered  a  frantic  resistance,  but  Sir  Stafford  Northcote  and 
several  other  leaders  of  the  party  refused  to  join  in  the  demand  for  ex- 
cluding Ireland.  Mr.  Chaplin  proposed  an  amendment  the  object  of  which 
was  to  exclude  Ireland  from  the  franchise.  He  was  able  to  quote  in  favour 
of  his  proposition  the  words  of  the  Marquis  of  Hartington — not  more  than 
twelve  months  old — which  described  this  very  measure — the  measure  which 
the  Liberal  Government,  vdth  the  Marquis  of  Hartington  as  one  of  its 
members,  were  now  bringing  in — as  an  act  little  short  of  madness.  But 
his  arguments  fell,  as  he  knew,  upon  deaf  ears  ;  and  after  the  House  had 
listened  for  nearly  half  an  hour  to  his  speech,  he  ran  away  from  his  own 
amendment.^  Mr.  Brodrick,  who,  though  sitting  for  an  English  consti- 
tuency, is  the  son  of  an  Irish  landlord,  rushed  in  where  English  Tories 
feared  to  tread,  proposed  a  similar  amendment,  was  backed  again  by  all 
the  forces  of  the  Irish  landlord  party,  and,  having  foolishly  given  a  pledge 
at  the  beginning  of  his  speech  that  he  would  go  to  a  division,  was  com- 
pelled to  test  the  opinion  of  the  House.  The  attempt  to  deprive  Ireland  of 
her  rights  was  rejected  by  332  to  137 — probably  the  largest  majority  ever 
recorded  in  favour  of  an  extension  of  popular  liberties. 

The  next  attack  upon  the  rights  of  Ireland  was  upon  the  question  as  to 
whether  she  should  retain  her  103  seats.  Mr.  Forster  brought  forward  the 
reduction  in  her  population — a  reduction  caused  by  evil  land  laws  and  the 
Act  of  Union — as  a  reason  why  she  should  be  less  potent  in  the  future  for 
protecting  her  rights  against  the  more  powerful  nation.  He  set  down  the 
number  of  representatives  to  which  Ireland  was  entitled  as  eighty-one.^ 
In  this  crusade  against  Ireland  Mr.  Eorster  found  a  willing  ally  in  Mr. 
Goschen.  When  the  second  reading  of  the  Franchise  Bill  was  proposed, 
Mr.  Goschen  asked  whether  the  number  of  Irish  seats  was  to  be  reduced, 
and  emphatically  declared  that  if  no  guarantee  were  given  by  the  Ministry 
on  this  point  he  would  be  compelled  to  vote  against  the  measure.  But 
neither  the  Irish  landlords,  nor  Mr.  Forster,  nor  Mr.  Goschen  could  prevail 
against  the  forces  which  had  now  been  arrayed  on  the  side  of  Ireland,  and 
amid  the  practically  universal  assent  of  the  House  of  Commons,  Mr. 
Gladstone  announced,  on  introducing  the  Redistribution  Bill,  that  Ireland 
was  to  retain  the  full  measure  of  her  seats.  In  Ireland  itself,  meantime, 
other  victories  had  followed.  The  nominal  Home  Pulers,  at  the  time  of 
their  secession,  were  loaded  with  the  praises  of  English  Ministers,  and  were 
described  by  the  English  press  as  the  real  representatives  of  Irish  feeling, 
and  upright,  outspoken,  and  reasonable  men.  They  belonged,  as  evei"}?body 
in  Ireland  knew,  and  the  people  of  England  were  taught  to  ignore,  to  the 
class  of  office-seekers,  the  analysis  of  whose  mischievous  influence  forms  so 
large  a  portion  of  this  volume.  In  due  time  they  sought  for  the  rewards  of 
their  treason  ;  the  result  in  every  case  was  their  replacement  h^  men 
pledged  to  the  National  principles,  to  the  leadership  of  Mr.  Parnell,  and 
to  entire  co-operation  with  the  Irish  Party.  Mr.  O'Shaughnessy,  promoted 
to  the  Registrarship  of  Petty  Sessions  Clerks,  was  succeeded  by  Mr. 
MacMahon.  Mr.  P.  J.  Smyth,  made  Secretary  of  the  Loan  Fund,  was 
succeeded  by  Mr.  John  O'Connor.  Two  other  constituencies,  whose  names 
occur  in  the  shameful  and  painful  record  of  the  days  when  Rabagas  was 
^  Hansard,  vol.  ocliii.,  p.  1080.  *  Timei,  March  1,  1S84, 


264  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

supreme,  joined  as  heartily  as  the  other  constituencies  of  the  country  in 
returning  National  representatives.  Mr.  Kenny,  opposed  by  a  Conservative 
in  Ennis,  a  town  which  formerly  had  the  shame  of  having  elected  Lord 
ritzgerald,  had  been  returned  by  an  overwhelming  majority.  Athlone, 
which  must  be  irrevocably  associated  with  the  name  and  the  treason  of 
Judge  Keogh,  returned  Mr.  Justin  Huntly  McCarthy  without  a  contest. 
Thus  Ireland  proved  its  solid  unity. 


CHAPTER  XIII. 

THE  TOET-PARNELL   COMBINATION. 

Throughout  the  whole  Parliament  of  1880  to  1885,  the  Tories  and  the 
Irish  Party  acted  in  close  combination,  except  when  the  Government  was 
proposing  coercion.  On  coercion  the  Tories  and  the  Parnellites  parted 
company,  for  when  a  Liberal  Government  proposed  coercion,  it  was  filching 
a  Tory  policy,  and  naturally  found  Tory  support.  But  even  on  coercion 
there  was  some  joint  action.  Lord  Randolph  Churchill,  it  is  known, 
began  making  his  political  career  in  the  Parliament  of  1880,  as  leader  of  a 
small  band  of  Tory  obstructionists  who  came  to  be  known  as  the  Eourth 
Party.  The  Irish  members  were,  doubtless,  in  orthodox  Conservative  eyes, 
a  disreputable  lot ;  but  to  a  young  a.mbitious  aspirant,  they  might  be  made 
useful,  and  for  five  years  it  was  the  central  note  of  Lord  Randolph  Churchill's 
whole  political  action  to  maintain  the  most  close  and  the  most  friendly 
relations  with  the  Irish  members.  He  gave  the  first  indication  of  this 
policy  on  the  Coercion  Bill  of  Mr.  Forster.  He  did  not  dare  to  openly 
oppose  it,  but  he  threw  cold  water  upon  it,  and  when  it  was  about  to  pass 
its  third  reading,  after  the  fierce  conflict  which  has  already  been  described, 
he  made  a  speech  which  he  himself  described  as  giving  the  Bill  '  a  parting 
kick.'  This  attitude  he  maintained  throughout  the  whole  Parliament,  and 
afterwards,  as  w^ill  be  seen. 

The  Irish  Party,  on  the  other  hand,  were  quite  ready  to  accept  this 
alliance.  The  Liberal  Government  had  proposed  coercion,  and  had  carried 
it  out  with  vigour.  Coercion  is  the  negation  of  the  equality  of  Irish 
citizenhood  ;  and  therefore  the  Irish  Party  were  bound  to  resist,  and,  if 
possible,  destroy  any  and  every  Government  which  carried  coercion.  It 
was  quite  true  that  between  the  Liberals  and  the  Irish  Party  there  was 
absolute  agreement  on  nine  questions  out  of  ten  outside  the  Irish  Question, 
and  it  was  with  no  feeling  of  satisfaction,  but  in  obedience  to  the  sternest 
sense  of  duty,  that  the  Irish  members  took  up  an  attitude  of  hostility  to 
the  Liberal  leaders.  In  fact,  the  position  of  the  two  parties  was  in  many 
respects  similar.  Coercion  to  the  Liberal  leaders — or  at  least  to  some  of  them 
— was  '  an  odious  and  a  hateful  incident,'  but  they  felt  bound  to  propose  it. 
To  the  Irish  Party  hostility  to  the  democratic  forces  of  this  country  was  an 
odious  and  a  hateful,  but  also  a  necessary,  incident  in  the  work  of  eman- 
cipating their  country. 

Whether  wise  or  unwise,  however,  the  fact  remains  that  the  Irish  Party 
acted  in  strict  combination  with  the  Tory  Party  throughout  the  whole 
Parliament  of  1880.  In  every  great  division  the  two  parties  voted  solidly 
together,  and  every  victory  which  stirred  Tory  hearts  and  menaced  the 
Liberal  Ministry  was  w^on  by  the  help  of  the  Irish  vote,  and  would  have 
been  impossible  without  that  help.     Let  us  run  rapidly  through  the  chief 


THE  TORY-PARNELL  COMBINATION.  265 

divisions  of  the  Parliament,  According  to  a  Liberal  organ,^  the  strength  of 
the  different  parties  at  the  beginning  of  the  Parliament  of  1880  was  : 
Liberals,  350  ;  Conservatives,  238  ;  Home  Rulers,  64.  There  must  be  one 
slight  correction  made  in  this  ;  the  number  of  Home  Rulers  was  but  63. 
The  mistake  of  the  Daily  News  probably  arose  from  the  fact  that  it  classed 
Mr.  Whitworth  as  a  Home  Ruler,  because  Mr,  Whitworth  had  made 
promises  so  studiously  ambiguous  as  to  leave  him  free  to  be  regarded  either 
as  an  orthodox  English  Liberal  or  a  sound  Irish  Nationalist.  Under  the 
circumstances  let  Mr.  Whitworth  pass  into  the  Liberal  camp.  The  figures 
then  should  stand :  Liberals,  351  ;  Conservatives,  238  ;  Home  Rulers,  63. 
Thus  the  Liberals  had  a  majority  over  the  Conservatives  of  113,  counting 
226  on  a  division,  and  the  Liberals  had  over  the  Conservatives  and  Home 
Rulers  combined  a  majority  of  50,  counting  100  on  a  division.  But,  as 
everybody  knows,  the  Home  Rulers  did  not  remain  a  united  party.  From 
almost  the  start  of  the  Parliament  of  1880  they  divided  into  two  bodies — ■ 
those  who  sat  with  the  Liberal  Ministers  and  generally  supported  them, 
and  those  who,  following  the  example  of  Mr.  Parnell,  sat  on  the  Opposition 
benches  and  generally  acted  as  a  portion  of  the  regular  Opposition  to  the 
Ministry.  Dividing  the  Irish  representation  according  to  these  different 
sections,  it  stood  thus  :  Irish  Liberals,  14  ;  Irish  Conservatives,  25  ;  Home 
'Rulers,  37  ;  Nominal  Home  Rulers,  26.^  This  makes  a  total  of  102  ;  the 
remaining  member,  the  Rev.  Isaac  Nelson,  could  not  be  counted  as  a 
supporter  of  any  section  ;  after  a  few  appearances  in  the  House  he  disap- 
peared to  Belfast,  and  neither  entreaty,  nor  threat,  nor  duty  could  ever 
attract  him  therefrom  again  during  the  entire  Parliament.  Of  the  26 
Nominal  Home  Rulers,  the  Liberal  Party  could  count  in  every  political 
division  on  the  support  of  at  least  23  (exclusive  of  Mr.  Bellingham  and  Sir 
J.  Ennis,  who  usually  voted  with  the  Conservatives,  and  Captain  O'Shea, 
who  in  Irish  divisions  usually  voted  with  the  Irish  Party).  These  23, 
therefore,  must  be  taken  from  the  Home  Rule  total  of  63,  and  added  to  the 
Liberal  total  of  351  ;  and  the  struggle  then  was  between  a  Liberal  Party 
with  a  nominal  strength  of  374,  and  an  Opposition  consisting  of  238  Con- 
servatives and  37  Home  Rulers— 374  against  275,  or  a  majority  of  101  over 
the  combined  Opposition. 

Bearing  these  figures  always  in  mind,  let  us  see  how  they  worked  out  on 
a  few  great  political  divisions.  In  1882  there  was  a  division  on  the  C16ture. 
The  Ministry,  with  a  majority  of  101  over  all  Oppositions  combined,  escaped 
by  a  majority  of  39.  On  May  12,  1884,  a  vote  of  want  of  confidence  was 
proposed  in  the  Egyptian  policy  of  the  Ministry.  The  division  took  place 
on  May  13  :  the  Irish  members  voted  in  a  body  against  the  Government, 
and  the  result  was  that  the  Ministerial  majority  sank  to  28. 

In  1885  a  Conservative  had  been  replaced  by  a  Home  Ruler  in  Athlone 
and  a  Liberal  by  a  Home  Ruler  in  Monaghan.  But  altogether  there  had 
been  no  very  great  change  in  the  strength  of  the  different  sections.  The 
number  added  to  the  Irish  Party  was  altogether  seven,  raising  their  strength 
to  forty -four  ;  and  the  number  lost  by  the  Liberals  altogether  was  but 
three,  and  these  must  be  further  reduced  to  two,  because  they  had  suc- 
ceeded in  returning  Mr.  Sinclair  in  the  place  of  Mr.  Chaine  for  County 
Antrim.     On  February  27,  1885,  a  division  took  place  on  a  vote  of  censure 

^  Supplement  to  the  Daily  News,  December  24,  1885. 

^  The  epithet  '  nominal '  was  first  applied  to  these  gentlemen  by  Mr.  Gladstone  in 
his  Leeds  speech  of  October,  1881.  The  phrase  was  immediately  taken  up  in  Ireland, 
and  became  at  once  not  only  an  appellation  but  an  epitaph. 


266  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

proposed  on  the  conduct  of  the  Government  in  reference  to  General  Gordon. 
The  Irish  members  voted  in  a  body  as^ainst  the  Go\ernment,  and 
the  Ministerial  majority  was  reduced  to  14.  On  May  13,  1885,  the 
Prime  Minister  rose  and  made  the  announcement  that  the  Government 
intended  to  propose  the  re-enactment  of  '  certain  valuable  and  equitable  ' 
provisions  of  the  Crimes  Act  of  1882.  Nothing  further  was  done  until  the 
night  of  Friday,  June  5,  when  Mr.  Gladstone  announced  that  on  the 
following  Thursday  the  new  Coercion  Bill  would  be  introduced.  But  on 
Monday,  June  8,  came  the  division  on  the  second  reading  of  the  Budget 
Bill.  The  general  public  probably  did  not  know  that  on  that  night  the 
apparently  invincible  Government  were  in  any  danger  ;  but  shrewd  on- 
lookers had  smelt  the  danger  from  afar,  and  knew  that  the  night  would 
probably  seal  the  fate  of  the  Ministry. 

The  Irish  members  had  little  doubt  as  to  the  course  they  should  take  ; 
but  if  they  had  any  doubt,  the  Tories  had  taken  care  to  remove  it.  Lord 
Kandolph  Churchill  was  again  prominent  in  forecasting  the  necessity  of  an 
alliance  between  his  party  and  the  party  of  Mr.  Parnell.  Before  Mr, 
Gladstone  finally  agreed  to  propose  the  renewal  of  some  of  the  clauses  of 
the  Crimes  Act,  there  was,  as  everybody  knows,  a  struggle  inside  the 
Cabinet,  Mr.  Chamberlain,  Sir  Charles  Dilke  and  Mr.  Shaw-Lefevre 
leading  the  hostility  to  coercion.  In  the  very  midst  of  this  struggle  Lord 
Randolph  Churchill  made  a  speech  in  the  St.  Stephen's  Club,  strongly 
denouncing  the  idea  of  renewing  coercion.  He  began  by  the  statement  that 
he  was  '  shocked  '  that  the  announcement  of  a  renewal  of  coercion  had  been 
'  received  very  much  as  a  matter  of  course.'  '  I  lay  this  down,'  he  went 
on,  '  without  any  hesitation,  as  an  absolute  and  unimpeachable  constitu- 
tional doctrine,  that  while  any  British  Government  may  reasonably,  and 
with  perfect  confidence,  apply  to  Parliament  in  times  of  great  popular 
disorder  for  exceptional  and  unconstitutional  powers,  at  the  same  time, 
when  that  popular  disorder  has  passed  away,  the  Government  is  bound  by 
the  highest  considerations  of  public  policy  and  of  constitutional  doctrine  to 
return  to  and  to  rely  on  the  ordinary  law.'  Then  he  proceeded  to  explain 
the  state  of  circumstances  which  ought  to  exist  to  justify  the  announcement 
of  the  Government.  '  It  means,'  he  said,  '  that  her  Majesty's  Government 
have  terrible  facts,  terrible  evidence  to  adduce  to  Parliament  in  support  of  . 
their  demand  as  to  the  real  condition  of  Ireland.  It  means  that  the 
Government  will  tell  you  that  the  hearts  of  the  Irish  people  are  full  of 
treason,  that  everywhere  in  Ireland  there  are  bands  of  assassins  and  mid- 
night marauders,  and  of  desperate  men  who  may  be  controlled  by  no 
ordinary  law,  lying  in  wait  ready  to  burst  forth  into  malignant  life  and 
malevolent  activity.  It  means  that  these  desperadoes  will  enjoy  to  a  great 
extent  the  sympathy  of  the  Irish  people.'  But  no  such  state  of  things 
existed  in  the  opinion  of  Lord  Randolph  Churchill.  '  The  published 
returns  presented  to  Parliament,'  he  declared,  '  showed  no  abnormal  amount 
of  crime.'  And  thus  he  wound  up  his  assault  on  the  policy  of  the 
Government.  '  This  demand  for  peculiar  penal  laws  for  Ireland  at  the 
present  moment  would  be  an  act  in  the  highest  degree  impolitic  unless 
supported  by  overwhelming  and  overpowering  evidence  which  no  one  could 
resist.  Because  what  has  been  the  attitude  of  Parliament  in  the  last  year  ? 
Parliament  has  just  enfranchised  considerably  over  half  a  million  of  the 
Irish  people,  and  has  declared  them  capable  citizens  fit  to  take  part  in  the 
Government  of  this  empire.  In  a  few  months  these  new  voters  will 
exercise  their  rights  for  the  first  time.     Now,  I  ask  you,  would  it  not  have 


THE  TORY-PARNELL  COMBINATION.  267 

been  well,  would  it  not  have  been  hopeful,  would  it  not  have  been  cheering, 
if  you  could  have  tried  to  put  some  kind  thoughts  towards  England  into 
their  minds  by  using  the  last  days  of  this  unlucky  Parliament  to  abrogate 
all  that  harsh  legislation  which  is  so  odious  to  Englishmen,  and  which 
undoubtedly  abridges  the  freedom  and  insults  the  dignity  of  a  sensitive 
and  an  imaginative  race  ?  Ho  v  do  you  suppose  all  these  700,000  new  electors 
will  go  to  the  poll  ?  What  thoughts  will  they  have  in  their  minds  ?  Will 
they  not  go  to  the  poll  with  the  knowledge  that  the  Parliament  of  England 
in  its  last  dying  days,  in  a  moment  when  they  were  unrepresented  who 
had  been  declared  to  be  capable  citizens,  had  given  them  what  they  will 
think  a  parting  kick. '  ^ 

Such  a  speech  pretty  plainly  indicated  that  Lord  Randolph  Churchill  would 
oppose  the  coercive  proposals  of  the  existing  Government,  and  that  if  he  had 
any  voice  in  the  policy  of  the  next  Tory  Government — and  everybody  knew 
that  he  was  bound  to  have  a  potent  voice — there  would  be  no  coercion  from 
the  Tory  Government  either.  But  with  even  so  strong  an  assumption, 
the  cautious  and  realistic  leader  of  the  Irish  Party  was  not  satisfied  ;  and 
the  Irish  members  did  not  go  into  the  lobby  to  vote  against  a  Liberal 
Ministry  about  to  propose  coercion  until  there  was  an  g-ssurance,  definite, 
distinct,  unmistakable,  that  there  would  be  no  coercion  from  their 
successors.  It  was  under  these  circumstances  that  the  momentous  division  of 
June  8,  1885,  was  taken.  '  It  was  only,'  I  wrote  in  a  description  of  the 
historic  scene  immediately  after  its  occurrence,  *  as  the  division  was 
approaching  its  end  that  some  suspicion  of  the  truth  began  to  dawn  upon 
the  Tories.  At  once  a  state  of  unusual  and  fierce  excitement  supervened. 
Lord  Randolph  Churchill  was  particularly  vehement.  It  was  seen  that  the 
stream  from  the  Government  lobby  was  getting  thinner,  while  that  from  the 
Opposition  was  still  flowing  in  full  tide  ;  and  each  successive  Tory,  as  he 
got  into  the  House,  was  almost  torn  to  pieces  as  he  was  asked  what  was 
his  number.  There  were  hoarse  whispers,  and  eager  demands,  and  a  slight 
and  tremulous  cheer.  But  it  was  too  soon  as  yet  to  give  way  to  a  joy  that 
might  be  premature.  At  last  certainty  began  to  come  in  thickening  signs. 
Lord  Kensington  walked  to  the  table  from  the  Government  lobby  and 
stated  the  numbers  to  the  clerk.  This  was  almost  decisive,  as  it  showed 
the  exhaustion  of  the  numbers  of  the  Government ;  and  here  were  the 
Conservatives  still  coming  in.  The  number  of  the  Government  was  now 
knovm  to  be  252,  and  the  great  question  was  whether  the  Conservatives 
had  beaten  this.  It  was  soon  known  that  252  had  been  beaten,  and  then 
the  floodgates  were  opened.  Lord  Randolph  Churchill  was  the  leader  of 
the  uproar  ;  and  Gavroche  celebrating  a  victory  at  the  barricades,  or  an  old 
Eton  boy  trium.phing  over  success  at  football,  could  not  have  been  more 
juvenile  in  the  extravagance  of  his  joy.  He  took  up  his  hat  and  began  to 
move  it  madly,  and  soon  he  had  actually  got  up  and  was  standing  on  his 
seat,  and  from  this  point  of  vantage  kept  v/aving  his  hat.  Some  younger 
Tories  sitting  beside  him  imitated  this  mad  example  and  waved  their  hats.'^ 
Here  we  have  the  Tories  rejoicing  over  a  victory  which  was  obtained  for 
them  by  the  Irish  vote  ;  and  in  a  very  few  days  afterwards  they  were 
enjoying  the  spoils  of  office  which  the  same  Irish  vote  had  bestowed  upon 
them. 

Lord  Salisbury  succeeded  to  Mr.  Gladstone.  Lord  Randolph  Churchill 
was  Secretary  for  India,  and  Sir  William  Dyke  was  sent  as  Chief  Secretary 
to  Ireland.    The  new  Tory  Cabinet  honourably  and  promptly  fulfilled  their 

^  Times,  May  21,  1885.  ^  'Gladstone's  House  of  Commons.'  pp.  553,  554. 


268  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

engagements  to  the  allies  who  had  brought  them  into  office.  Coercion  was 
at  once  dropped.  A  still  more  difficult  demand  was  soon  after  made. 
There  was  a  strong  feeling  in  Ireland  that  Myles  Joyce — one  of  the  men 
hanged  for  participation  in  the  hideous  Maamtrasna  massacre — was  inno- 
cent, and  also  some  others  who  were  still  in  penal  servitude.  Several 
times  during  the  existence  of  the  Ministry  of  Mr.  Gladstone  an  attempt 
had  been  made  to  have  the  question  reopened  ;  but  the  Government  had 
always  steadily  refused.  The  attempt  was  renewed  when  there  came  the 
change  of  Administration.  The  position  of  the  new  Government  was  very 
difficult.  The  acceptance  of  the  Irish  demand  meant  the  throwing  over  of 
Lord  Spencer  ;  and  Lord  Spencer  had  carried  out  the  policy  of  coercion  in 
Ireland  with  an  energy  and  courage  that  had  won  him  the  admiration  of 
all  Englishmen.  But  the  Government  had  no  choice  ;  they  promised  an 
inquiry.  It  was  not  for  the  Irish  Party  to  condemn  the  Tory  Administra- 
tion for  doing  their  work  ;  but  Englishmen  generally  joined  in  the  con- 
demnation of  this  vile  abandonment  of  principle  and  this  shameful  desertion 
of  the  brave  Englishman  who  had  passed  for  years  through  hourly  risk  of 
his  life,  a  fierceness  of  attack,  a  universality  of  popular  hate,  more  killing 
than  even  the  assassin's  knife.  A  burst  of  indignation  came  from  all  sides, 
and  even  so  tepid  a  Liberal  as  Mr.  Goschen  was  provoked  into  excited 
comment  on  the  '  Maamtrasna  alliance.'  Soon  after,  the  new  Govern- 
ment gave  a  further  proof  of  their  resolve  to  please  the  Irish  members. 
The  plan  of  the  Irish  Party  for  the  settlement  of  the  Irish  Land  Question 
has  always  been  peasant  proprietary.  At  the  first  conference  of  the  Land 
League — that  much-abused  body — peasant  proprietary,  and  peasant  pro- 
prietary by  purchase,  was  set  forth  as  the  proper  solution.  It  is  worth 
while  reproducing  here  the  programme  of  a  body  that  has  been  represented 
as  proposing  nothing  but  confiscation  and  plunder.  This  was  the  programme 
of  the  Land  League  : 

'To  carry  out  the  permanent  reform  of  land  tenure,  we  propose  the 
creation  of  a  Department  or  Commission  of  Land  Administration  for 
Ireland.  This  Department  would  be  invested  with  ample  powers  to  deal 
with  all  questions  relating  to  land  in  Ireland.  (1)  Where  the  landlord  and 
tenant  of  any  holding  had  agreed  for  the  sale  to  the  tenant  of  the  said 
holding,  the  Department  would  execute  the  necessary  conveyance  to  the 
tenant,  and  advance  him  the  whole  or  part  of  the  purchase-money  ;  and 
upon  such  advance  being  made  by  the  Department,  such  holding  would  be 
deemed  to  be  charged  with  an  annuity  of  £5  for  every  £100  of  such 
advance,  and  so  in  proportion  for  any  less  sum,  such  annuity  to  be  limited 
in  favour  of  the  Department,  and  to  be  declared  to  be  repayable  in  the 
term  of  thirty-five  years. 

*  (2)  When  a  tenant  tendered  to  the  landlord  for  the  purchase  of  his 
holding  a  sum  equal  to  twenty  years  of  the  Poor  Law  valuation  thereof, 
the  Department  would  execute  the  conveyance  of  the  said  holding  to  the 
tenant,  and  would  be  empowered  to  advance  to  the  tenant  the  whole  or 
any  part  of  the  purchase-money,  the  repayment  of  which  would  be  secured 
as  set  forth  in  the  case  of  voluntary  sales. 

'  (3)  The  Department  would  be  empowered  to  acquire  the  ownership  of 
any  estate  upon  tendering  to  the  owner  thereof  a  sum  equal  to  twenty 
years  of  the  Poor  Law  valuation  of  such  estate,  and  to  let  said  estate 
to  the  tenants  at  a  rent  equal  to  3^  per  cent,  of  the  purchase-money 
thereof. 

'  (4)  The  Department  of  the  Court  having  jurisdiction  in  this  matter 


THE  TORY-PARNELL  COMBINATION.  269 

would  be  empowered  to  determine  the  rights  and  priorities  of  the  several 
persons  entitled  to,  or  having  charges  upon,  or  otherwise  interested  in,  any 
holding  conveyed  as  above  mentioned,  and  would  distribute  the  purchase- 
money  in  accordance  with  such  rights  and  priorities  ;  and  when  any 
moneys  arising  from  a  sale  were  not  immediately  distributed,  the  Depart- 
ment would  have  a  right  to  invest  the  said  moneys  for  the  benefit  of  the 
parties  entitled  thereto.  Provision  would  be  made  whereby  the  Treasury 
would  from  time  to  time  advance  to  the  Department  such  sums  of  money 
as  would  be  required  for  the  pvirchases  above  mentioned.' 

These  proposals  were  made  as  far  back  as  1880.  It  is  scarcely  necessary 
to  say  that  they  encountered  fierce  opposition  and  denunciation  from  the 
British  press.  '  They  were,'  said  the  Tiims}  *  clearly  confiscation,  pure 
and  undisguised.'  These  also  were  the  proposals  which  were  put  forward 
by  the  Irish  Party  when  the  Land  Question  was  taken  up  by  Mr.  Glad- 
stone. They  were  rejected  at  that  time,  with  the  result  that  they  were 
taken  up  by  all  parties  at  a  later  period.  It  has  been  seen  that  Mr.  W. 
H.  Smith,  in  1882,  proposed  a  resolution  which  demanded  exactly  the  same 
settlement  for  the  Land  Question  as  had  been  demanded  by  the  Land 
League  in  1880.  In  the  excitement  caused  by  the  assassination  in  Phcenix 
Park,  coupled  with  the  Crimes  Act,  the  question  was  then  dropped  ;  but 
on  June  12  of  the  following  year  it  was  once  more  taken  up,  and  on  this 
occasion  the  sponsor  of  the  Land  League  settlement  of  the  Irish  Land 
Question  was  no  less  a  person  than  Lord  George  Hamilton,  a  leader  among 
the  Conservatives,  and  the  son  of  an  Irish  landlord.  One  English  journal 
at  least  appreciated  the  significance  of  this  appropriation  of  Land  League 
doctrines  by  Conservative  leaders  and  by  Parliament  generally  ;  for  the 
motion  of  Lord  George  practically  commanded  universal  assent. 

In  1884  Mr.  Trevelyan  brought  forward  a  Bill  the  principle  of  which 
was  the  principle  of  the  Land  League  ;  but  the  measure  proposed  was  so 
impracticable  that  the  Bill  was  still-born.  In  1885  the  Government 
showed  no  signs  of  touching  the  question,  and  Irish  members  had  despaired 
of  seeing  any  attempt  to  make  even  the  beginning  of  its  settlement.  But 
the  change  of  Administration  produced  on  the  Land  Question,  as  well  as 
on  the  question  of  coercion,  a  surprising  transformation  of  the  political 
prospect.  The  Conservatives  had  scarcely  got  into  office  when  Lord  Ash- 
bourne— as  Mr.  Gibson  had  become — brought  in  a  Bill  of  a  more  practical 
character,  and  in  a  comparatively  short  time  the  Bill  passed  into  law,  and 
the  programme  of  the  Land  League,  five  years  after  its  publication,  and 
with  all  the  savage  and  dread  incidents  crowded  into  the  dreary  interval, 
was  embodied  in  the  statute-book  of  England. 

It  was  in  Ireland,  however,  that  the  Government  gave  the  most  eloquent 
proofs  of  its  changing  spirit.  Lord  Carnarvon,  a  Conservative  of  kindly 
temper  and  Liberal  views,  was  sent  as  Viceroy.  Owing  to  the  change  in 
the  policy  of  the  Goverment,  he  was  able  to  dispense  with  the  dragoons 
and  foot-soldiers  and  police,  and  to  go  unattended  through  the  country  and 
among  the  people.  His  reception  everywhere,  if  not  cordial,  was  at  least 
not  hostile.  In  the  loneliest  parts  of  the  country  he  found  himself  perfectly 
safe  from  blow  or  from  insult  ;  and,  to  make  the  transformation  which  the 
change  of  Government  had  produced  in  Ireland  dramatically  complete,  on 
one  occasion  he  was  driven  through  the  country  by  Bryan  Kilmartin,  a 
man  who,  having  been  sentenced  to  penal  servitude  for  life,  had  been  re- 
leased on  his  innocence  being  clearly  proved.    Crime  at  the  same  time  sank 

^  May  5, 1881. 


270  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

to  almost  inSnibesimal  proportions.  The  syinpatViy  which  it  was  able  to 
command  when  innocent  and  guilty  were  alike  oppressed  and  harried,  was 
denied  now  that  the  country  was  once  more  free.  The  severity  of  the 
agrarian  crisis  was  mibigated  by  the  reductions  which  good  landlords  made 
voluntarily  and  bad  landlords  made  in  obedience  to  pressure  from  the 
Government  and  to  organization  as  firmly  knit  as  the  trades'  unions  which 
extort  fair  wages  and  honourable  treatment  for  English  workmen  ;  and 
the  bitterness  which  had  sprung  up  between  the  peoples  of  England  and 
Ireland  became  in  some  degree  at  least  softened.  In  this  mood  the  Irish 
people  approached  the  great  turning-point  in  their  history,  and  entered 
upon  the  general  election  of  1885. 

The  incidents  of  the  election  were  but  too  well  calculated  to  maintain 
the  confidence  which  the  Irish  Party  had  in  the  good  intentions  of  the 
Tory  Ministers  and  the  Tory  Party.  There  could  not  be  the  smallest 
mistake  as  to  the  demands  of  the  Irish  Party  ;  and,  indeed,  if  the  consistent 
pursuit  of  the  same  policy  for  years  had  not  been  sufficient  to  teach  the 
Tories  what  the  Irishmen  really  wanted,  there  was  a  distinct  and  out- 
spoken utterance  at  the  very  beginning  of  the  electoral  campaign.  At  a 
banquet  given  in  his  honour  in  Dublin,  Mr.  Parnell  declared  that  the  time 
had  come  v/hen  the  Irish  Party  should  put  forward  one  plank,  and  one 
only,  in  its  platform  ;  and  that  that  plank  was  Home  Rule.  This  was  a 
challenge  to  English  statesmen  ;  and  so  it  was  interpreted  by  more  than 
one  of  them.  Mr.  Chamberlain  met  Mr,  Parnell's  demand  with  a  negative 
which  surprised  very  much  all  those  who  had  made  themselves  acquainted 
with  his  antecedents  and  his  previous  utterances  upon  the  question  of  Irish 
self-government.  His  attitude,  hov/ever,  whether  inconsistent  or  not  with 
previous  utterances,  was  clear,  and,  moreover,  invited  clearness  on  the  part 
of  others.  To  Lord  Randolph  Churchill  he  issued  a  challenge  over  and 
over  again  to  declare  whether  he  agreed  with  or  accepted  the  views  of  Mr. 
Parnell,  but  Lord  Randolph  Churchill  held  his  peace.  Mr.  Parnell's  views 
might  mean,  as  Mr.  Chamberlain  asserted,  separation,  dismemberment,  the 
oppression  of  Ulster  :  Lord  Randolph  Churchill  refused  to  utter  one  word 
against  them.  It  was  evident  that  the  Tory  leaders  desired  to  keep  them- 
selves entirely  free  on  the  question  of  Home  Rule,  so  as  to  be  able,  when 
the  elections  were  over,  to  take  the  course  which  the  fortunes  of  the  ballot- 
box  might  dictate. 

The  Irish  leaders  were  not  alone  in  placing  this  interpretation  upon  the 
attitude  of  Lord  Randolph  Churchill  and  the  other  Tory  leaders.  The 
Tory  candidates  throughout  the  country  took  the  hint,  and  acted  accord- 
ingly. In  a  large  number  of  cases  either  the  scruples  of  conscience  or  the 
determination  to  avoid  any  form  of  inconvenient  pledge,  induced  the  Tory 
candidate  not  to  say  one  word  on  the  Irish  Question.  Indeed,  an  examina- 
tion of  the  Tory  addresses  at  the  election  of  1885  will  reveal  the  astonishing 
fact  that  in,  if  not  the  majority,  at  least  almost  the  majority  of  them, 
there  was  no  mention  whatever  of  the  burning  question  of  Home  Rule. 
This  was  especially  the  case  in  constituencies  where,  there  being  an  Irish 
vote,  the  Tory  candidate  was  anxious,  while  leaving  himself  unpledged,  at 
the  same  time  not  to  say  anything  which  would  estrange  an  Irish  elector. 
The  Houghton-le-Spring  division  of  Durham  contains  a  large  number  of 
Irish  voters.  The  Irish  voters  had  resolved  to  support  the  Tory  candidate, 
and  Colonel  Nicholas  Wood  accordingly  did  not  say  a  word  about  Ireland. 
In  the  West  Toxteth  Division  of  Liverpool  there  is  a  considerable  Irish  vote, 
and  the  Irish  voters  had  resolved  to  support  the  Tory  candidate,  and  Mr. 


THE  TORY-PARNELL  COMBINATION.  271 

Royden  in  return  left  them  to  draw  their  own  conclusions  as  to  his  Irish 
policy  by  not  even  mentioning  the  name  of  Ireland.  In  other  districts 
bolder  spirits  not  only  mentioned  Ireland,  but  came  forward  with  a  pro- 
gramme which  might  be  developed  into  an  adoption  of  Home  K-ule.  Can- 
didate after  candidate  pledged  himself  to  the  support  of  an  extension  of 
local  self-government,  and  an  extension  of  local  self-government  is  a  vague 
term  which  might  dwindle  down  to  a  mere  extension  of  county  govern- 
ment, or  might  be  enlarged  to  such  a  scheme  of  Home  Rule  as  that  pro- 
posed by  Mr.  Gladstone.  But  this  same  class  of  candidates  were  still  more 
outspoken  in  their  denunciation  of  coercion  ;  and,  indeed,  it  was  largely  on 
the  cry  of  coercion  or  no  coercion  that  the  Tories  fought  the  General  Elec- 
tion of  1885.  'I  would  give,'  said  Sir  Frederick  Milner,  the  Conservative 
candidate  for  York,  '  to  the  Irish  every  privilege  which  is  extended  to  the 
other  inhabitants  of  Great  Britain.  I  am  in  favour  of  a  measure  for  the 
extension  of  local  self-government,  and  am  of  opinion  that  we  ought  to  do 
cur  utmost  to  encourage  and  develop  Irish  industries,  and  to  promote 
the  welfare  and  happiness  of  her  people.'  'I  cordially  approve,'  said 
Major  Dixon,  the  Conservative  candidate  for  Middlesboro',  '  of  the  con- 
duct of  the  present  Government  in  not  renewing  the  Crimes  Act  in 
Ireland,  and  hope  to  see  other  coercive  measures  also  abandoned  ;  and  I 
shall  be  prepared  to  support  any  well-devised  scheme  for  giving  to  Ireland 
a  large  amount  of  self-government.'  '  At  home,  what  do  we  find  !'  ex- 
claimed Mr.  Hammond,  the  Conservative  candidate  for  Newcastle-on- 
Tyne.  '  Cur  sister  kingdom — Ireland — ruled  with  the  iron  rod  of  coercion.' 
'  To  Ireland,'  said  Mr.  Gumming  Macdonald,  the  Conservative  candidate  for 
the  Chesterfield  Division  of  Derbyshire,  '  I  would  continue  to  hold  out, 
with  the  Conservative  Party,  the  olive-branch  of  peace,  conscious  that  in 
times  past  she  has  suffered  many  wrongs.' 

In  Hyde,  Manchester,  the  Irish  electors  were  asked  to  '  vote  for  Flattely  ; 
no  Coercion  ;'  similar  placards  were  posted  over  Leeds  in  the  interest  of 
Mr.  Dawson,  the  Tory  candidate.  '  I  have  declared  myself,'  said  Mr.  Jen- 
nings, the  Tory  member  for  Stockport,  when  tasked  in  Parliament  with  his 
attitude  at  the  November  election  of  1885,  '  in  favour  of  a  Liberal  measure 
of  local  self-government  for  Ireland.  I  have  expressed  myself  as  being 
opposed  to  Coercion  Bills,  and  such  Bills  I  have  said  I  never  would  vote 
for ;  and  I  never  will.'  The  name  of  Mr.  Jennings  has  since  appeared  in 
the  divisions  on  the  Coercion  Bill  of  the  present  Government ;  but  that 
does  not  alter  his  own  statement  as  to  his  attitude  during  the  election  of 
1885.  In  one  of  the  Metropolitan  constituencies  Mr.  Wilfrid  Blunt  stood 
as  an  avowed  and  advanced  Home  Ruler,  and  at  the  same  time  as  a 
member  of  the  Tory  Party.  The  relation  between  the  two  parties,  the 
Irish  Nationalists  and  the  Tories,  were  even  more  intimate  in  private  than 
in  public.  The  Tory  candidates  paid  all  the  expense  of  printing  all  the 
documents  of  the  National  League  in  Bolton,  and  the  money  appears  in  the 
official  return  of  the  election  expenses  of  the  two  Tory  members.  At  the 
Flint  Burghs  I  heard  the  Tory  candidate  speak  to  a  meeting  of  Irish 
Nationalists  after  I  had  concluded  my  own  speech.  In  North  Kensington, 
Sir  Roper  Lethbridge  followed  his  return  as  Tory  member  by  paying  a 
visit  to  a  branch  of  the  National  League  in  his  constituency  and  thanking 
them  for  his  return  ;  in  Kennington,  Mr.  Gent  Davis,  the  Tory  member, 
declared  to  one  of  his  Irish  electors  that  if  he  were  ever  to  vote  for  coercion 
the  Irishmen  would  be  at  liberty  to  break  his  windows. 

There  had,  however,  been  more  important  evidences  of  the  prevalent 


272  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

opinion  of  the  Tory  Party  at  this  crisis.  Before  finally  making  up  hig 
mind  as  to  what  direction  the  Irish  vote  ought  to  go  in  Enylaad, 
Mr.  Parnell  had  held  an  interview  with  Lord  Carnarvon.  At  this  inter- 
view Mr.  Parnell  was  given  by  Lord  Carnarvon  to  understand  '  that  the 
Conservative  Party,  if  they  should  be  successful  at  the  polls,  would  offer 
Ireland  a  statutory  Legislature,  with  a  right  to  protect  her  own  indus- 
tries, and  that  this  would  be  coupled  with  the  settlement  of  the  Irish 
Land  Question  on  the  basis  of  purchase  on  a  larger  scale  than  that  now 
proposed  by  the  Prime  Minister.'  ^ 

Under  all  these  circumstances  it  was  the  conviction  of  the  Irish  leaders, 
and  it  is  their  conviction  still,  that  if  the  Tories  had  been  returned  with  a 
small  majority,  in  such  numbers  as  to  enable  them  with  the  support  of 
the  Irish  Party  to  seriously  defeat  the  Liberals,  they  would  have  intro- 
duced a  good  measure  of  Home  Rule.  And  the  introduction  of  such  a 
measure  by  a  Tory  Government  would  have  had  many  advantages  over  ita 
introduction  by  a  Liberal  Ministr}',  even  with  so  potent  a  leader  as 
Mr.  Gladstone.  It  is  the  universal  moral  of  English  history  that  the 
Tories  can  pass  large  and  almost  revolutionary  measures  of  reform  with 
less  difficulty  than  can  Liberals  the  most  modest  measures  of  reform.  The 
reasons  are  simple  and  open  to  every  eye.  The  Tory  Government  pro- 
posing reform  is  free  from  obstacles  in  both  Houses  of  Parliament.  In  the 
House  of  Commons,  instead  of  finding  hostility  and  obstruction  to  reform 
from  the  Liberal  Opposition,  it  receives  encouragement  and  support ;  and 
the  House  of  Lords,  which  would  not  pass  the  smallest  measure  of  reform 
proposed  by  a  Liberal  Minister,  unless  he  be  backed  by  revolutionary  excite- 
ment, swallows  any  reform,  however  large,  which  is  backed  by  a  Tory 
Premier.  It  is  therefore  certain,  if  the  Tories  had  proposed  Home  Rule 
after  the  General  Election  of  1SS5,  that  Ireland  would  be  at  the  present 
moment  self -governed,  and  England  be  spared  all  the  tumult,  unrest,  delay 
of  urgently  needed  reform,  and  all  the  thousand  and  one  other  inconveni- 
ences that  accompany  the  present  disastrous  struggle. 

Under  the  influence  of  these  views  the  Irish  leaders  recommended  the 
Irish  electors  to  vote  for  the  Tory  candidates,  and  with  considerable  effect. 
In  nearly  every  one  of  the  constituencies  where  the  Irish  formed  a  strong 
voting  power,  the  Tory  candidates  were  returned. 

In  Ireland  meantime  the  Irish  Party  had  carried  all  before  it,  even 
beyond  the  expectation  of  its  most  sanguine  friends. 

A  fund  had  been  collected — mostly,  it  m.ay  be  assumed,  by  Englishmen 
whose  venom  was  greater  than  their  intelligence — for  the  purpose  of 
supporting  so-called  Loyalist  candidates  for  the  different  Irish  constituencies. 
The  story  is  told  that  Mr.  Eorster  was  one  of  the  gentlemen  engaged  in 
bringing  this  statesmanlike  enterprise  to  fruition.  The  story  ought  to  be 
true,  for  the  reason  that  it  would  crown  all  his  preceding  success  in  bring- 
ing about  in  Ireland  the  very  exact  opposite  to  that  which  he  desired,  and 
by  his  expedients  strengthening  and  rendering  omnipotent  the  forces  he 
most  detested.  For  these  were  some  of  the  results  of  the  starting  of 
Loyalist  candidates  :  In  South  Cork,  the  Loyalist  candidate  polled  195 
votes  ;  the  Nationalist  4,820.  In  Mid  Cork  the  Loyalist  polled  106,  the 
Nationalist    5,033.      In   North   Kilkenny   the    Loyalist   polled    174,    the 

^  Speech  of  Mr.  Parnell  on  the  second  reading  of  the  Government  of  Ireland  Bill, 
Times,  June  S.  Lord  Carnarvon  denied  some  points  in  this  statement  in  the  House  of 
Lords  next  day.  Anybody  who  reads  the  denial  carefully  will  see  it  is  in  reality  a 
coiifii-mation. 


THE  TOkV-PARNELL  COMBINATION.  273 

Kationalist  4,084.  In  West  Mayo  the  Loyalist  polled  131,  the  Nationalist 
4,790.  In  South  Mayo  the  Loyalist  polled  75,  the  Nationalist  4,900.  In 
East  Kerry  the  Loyalist  polled  30  votes,  the  Nationalist  3,169.  In  the 
North  of  Ireland  alone  did  any  contest  take  place  in  which  the  National 
Party  did  not  win  by  overwhelming  odds.  In  Derry  City  Sir  C.  E.  Lewis 
defeated  Mr.  Justin  McCarthy  out  of  a  poll  of  3,619,  by  29  votes.  In 
West  Belfast  ISIr.  Sexton  was  beaten  with  a  small  majority  of  35  on  a  poll 
of  7,523.  In  North  Tyrone  an  energetic  fight  was  made  by  Mr.  John 
Dillon,  but  he  was  defeated  by  a  majority  of  423.  Mr.  Healy  won  South 
Derry,  though  tlie  Catholics  are  in  a  minority  of  some  thousands  in  the 
population  and  in  a  minority  of  some  hundreds  on  the  electorate.  In 
South  Tyrone,  likewise,  Protestant  farmers  enabled  Mr.  William  O'Brien 
to  beat  the  candidate  of  the  landlords.  This  gave  the  Irish  Nationalists  17 
out  of  33  seats  in  Ulster,  thus  bringing  the  '  Black  North,'  as  it  used  to  be 
called,  into  line  with  the  rest  of  the  country  in  demanding  self-govern- 
ment. The  final  result  was  that  the  Irish  Party  fought  eighty-nine  contests 
in  Ireland  and  were  successful  in  eighty-five.  They  had  besides  won  one 
seat  in  England,  the  Scotland  Division  of  Liverpool,  and  their  entire 
strength  then  at  the  end  of  the  election  v/as  eighty-six  men.  Four  of  these 
had  been  elected  for  two  constituencies.  Of  the  eighty-two  elected 
tv/enty-two  were  put  in  gaol  by  Mr.  Eorster,  warrants  were  issued  against 
four  others,  and  there  were  in  the  number  a  '48  convict,  a  '67  convict,  and  a 
'67  suspect. 

Meantime,  everybody  in  England  acknowledged  the  important  aid  which 
the  Irish  Party  had  given  to  the  Tory  candidates. 

'Fair  Trade  may  have  deluded  a  few,'  said  Mr.  Gladstone,  commenting 
on  the  borough  elections  while  speaking  in  Flintshire  on  behalf  of  Lord 
Richard  Grosvenor,  '  as  Free  Trade  has  blessed  the  many,  but  that  has  not 
been  the  main  cause.  .  .  .  The  main  cause  is  the  Irish  vote. '  ^  '  They  ' 
(meaning  the  Tories), ^  he  wrote  to  the  Midlothian  electors,  '  know  that  but 
for  the  imperative  orders,  issued  on  their  behalf  by  Mr.  Parnell  and  his 
friends,  whom  they  were  never  tired  of  denouncing  as  disloyal  men,  the 
Liberal  majority  of  forty-eight  would  at  this  moment  have  been  near  a 
hundred.'  '  Lancashire,'  he  said,  in  the  Flintshire  speech,  '  has  returned 
her  voice.  She  has  spoken,  but  if  you  listen  to  her  accents  you  will  find 
that  they  are  tinged  strongly  with  the  Irish  brogue.'^  'We  have  had,' 
said  Mr.  Chamberlain,  'a  most  unusual  and  extraordinary  combination 
against  us,  and  I  am  inclined  to  describe  it  as  the  combination  of  the  five 
P's,  and  I  shall  tell  you  what  the  five  P's  are  in  the  order  of  their  impor- 
tance, beginning  with  the  least  important.  They  are  Priests,  Publicans, 
Parsons,  Parnellites,  and  Protectionists.'*  'Whatever  else,'  wrote  the 
Birmingham  Daily  Post,  '  may  be  the  issue  of  the  elections,  or  however 
they  may  benefit  by  the  Parnellite  vote,  Great  Britain  has  most  unquestion- 
ably rejected  the  Tory  Party.  But  for  the  aid  of  the  Irish  allies,  their 
position  on  the  present  polls  would  have  been  as  bad  as  it  was  in  1880,  if 
not  v/orse.'  'But  for  the  Nationalist  vote  in  English  and  Scotch  con- 
stituencies,' said  the  Manchester  Examiner,  '  the  Liberals  would  have  gona 
back  to  Parliament  with  more  than  their  old  numbers.' ° 

But  the  Irish  vote  had  not  succeeded  in  bringing  the  Tories  to  a  position 
in  which  they  would  be  of  any  service  to  Ireland.  When  the  General 
Election    was    over,    the    numbers   were :    Liberals,    333  ;  Conservatives 

'  Sici-iidard.  December  I,  1SS5.        ^  Ib'd.,  December  4.  3  Jlid.,  December  1. 

4  ioit/.,  December  4,  lb'6o.  5  Quoted  in  Fall  3Iall  Gazette,  December  7,  1885, 

18 


274  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

(including  2  Independents),  251  ;  Xationrilists,  86.  The  Liberals  were  tlius 
in  a  majority  over  the  Conservatives  of  82.  If  the  Tories  got  tlie  Irish  vote 
and  were  able  to  poll  the  full  strength  of  their  own  party,  they  would  have 
had  a  majority?  of  but  four  over  the  Liberals ;  and  four  is  not  a  working 
majority.  Besides,  it  was  more  than  doubtful  if  they  Vv^ould  have  cairied 
the  whole  of  their  own  party  with  them  on  a  policy  of  Home  Rule.  All 
or  nearly  all  their  supporters  from  Ireland  belonged  to  that  terrible 
Orange  faction  which  has  obstinately  opposed  every  concession  to  the 
majority  of  the  Irish  nation.  A  certain  number  of  the  same  unholy  gang 
had  been  returned  for  English  constituencies.  There  can  be  little  doixbt 
under  these  circumstances  that  the  proposal  of  Home  Rule  by  the  Tory 
Ministers  would  have  led  to  a  Tory  cave  which  would  have  placed  the 
Government  in  a  hopeless  minority,  and  have  given  them  the  discredit  of 
having  proposed  Home  Rule  without  the  merit  of  having  carried  it.  The 
Tory  and  the  Irish  leaders  had  little  difficulty  in  recognising  that  the  stroke 
of  1885  had  not  succeeded.  A  Tory  statesman  who  had  acted  throughout  in 
a  frank  and  manly  spirit  gave  the  word  to  a  prominent  Irish  member  that 
there  was  nothing  more  to  be  expected  from  the  Tory  leaders,  and  that 
the  Irish  Nationalists  had  better  fix  their  hopes  elsewhere.  The  situation 
was  more  frankly  put  to  the  same  member  by  Lord  Randolph  Churchill 
'  I  have  done  my  best  for  you,'  he  said,  '  and  failed  ;  and  now,  of  course 
I'll  do  my  best  against  you.'     So  ended  the  Tory-Parnell  combination. 


CHAPTER    XIV. 

THE   HOME  RULE   STKUGGLE. 

The  Tory-Parnell  combination  was  at  an  end  ;  but  the  Parnellites  did  nofe 
yet  recognise  that  the  Tories  could  be  guilty  of  the  deliberate  policy  of 
immediately  abandoning  all  the  principles  which  had  been  preached  during 
the  General  Election.  Above  all,  they  were  not  prepared  for  the  action  ol 
Lord  Randolph  Churchill.  It  might  be  true,  they  thought,  that  the 
Government  could  not  propose  Home  Rule,  because  they  had  no  chance  of 
earrjdng  it  ;  it  might  be  true  that  they  would  oppose  any  scheme  of  Home 
Rule  brought  forward  by  Mr.  Gladstone.  These  things  are  part  of  the 
game  of  political  life.  That  did  not  m.ean  that  by-and-by  they  would  not 
take  up  Home  Rule  again,  and  propose  a  scheme  of  their  own  superior  to 
that  of  Mr.  Gladstone, 

Theories  founded  on  the  maintenance  of  the  ordinary  decencies  and  the 
common  honesty  of  political  life  may  now  appear  very  childish  ;  but  the 
Irish  Party  had  not  yet  learned  all  they  have  since  been  taught  of  the  vile 
want  of  principle  and  the  viler  want  of  shame  which  characterize  the 
present  leaders  of  the  Tory  Party.  The  Tory  Government,  which  had  been 
raised  to  power  on  condition  of  not  renewing  coercion,  and  which  had 
pledged  itself,  through  its  candidates,  against  coercion  at  the  election, 
began  its  career  by  announcing  its  intention  of  proposing  the  suppression 
of  the  National  League.  Irish  Nationalists  heard  with  a  smile  of  incredu- 
lity the  report  that  Lord  Randolph  Churchill  intended  to  make  an  attempt  > 
to  rouse  the  Orangemen  to  fury  in  order  to  embarrass  the  movement  for 
Home  Rule  ;  but  in  a  few  weeks  their  doubts  were  set  at  nought.  Lord 
Randolph  Churchill  v/ent  to  Belfast,  accompanied  by  those  very  Orangemen 
whom  his  lieutenants  and  himself  had  so  heartily  despised  in  the  days  of 


THE  HOME  RULE  STRUGGLE.  275 

the  Tory-Parnell  combination,  preached  a  religious  war,  and  so  far  suc- 
ceeded as  to  bring  about,  a  few  months  afterwards,  one  of  the  most  brutal, 
savage,  and  cruel  riots  that  have  ever  disgraced  even  Belfast.  When  the 
Tories  proposed  coercion,  the  Liberal  leaders  resolved  at  once  to  throw 
them  out  of  office.  An  amendment  to  the  Queen's  Speech  of  1886,  pro- 
posed by  Mr.  Jesse  Collings,  was  carried  in  spite  of  the  violent  hostility  of 
the  Marquis  of  Hartington  and  Mr.  Goschen  ;  and  the  Marquis  o  Salisbury 
gave  way  to  Mr.  Gladstone. 

Prime  Minister  for  the  third  time,  Mr.  Gladstone  now  found  himself  face 
to  face  with  the  greatest  task  of  his  great  life  ;  and  the  obstacles  were 
greater,  and  not  smaller,  than  those  he  had  ever  before  encountered.  The 
Marquis  of  Hartington  refused  from  the  start  to  have  anything  to  do  with 
a  Ministry  which  proposed  Home  Rule  in  any  shape.  Mr.  Chamberlain 
and  Sir  George  Trevelyan  had  pledged  themselves  beforehand  against 
certain  forms  of  Home  Rule  ;  but  they  entered  the  Cabinet,  and  it  was  yet 
to  be  seen  whether  Mr.  Gladstone  could  produce  a  plan  which  they  could 
accept.  For  weeks  there  were  contradictory  rumours  every  hour  as  to  how 
the  struggle  in  the  Cabinet  was  going  on  ;  but  all  doubts  were  set  at  rest 
by  Mr.  Chamberlain  and  Sir  George  Trevelyan  taking  their  seats  one 
evening  below  the  gangway,  and  so  announcing  to  the  world  that  they  had 
been  unable  to  agree  with  the  plan  of  Mr.  Gladstone.  But  Mr.  Gladstone 
was  not  to  be  turned  back  from  his  great  purpose  by  the  desertion  of  any 
colleagues,  however  eminent,  and  went  on  with  the  preparation  of  his 
Bills.  The  Tories  meantime  kept  pestering  him  with  questions  every  day, 
apparently  expecting  that  such  a  mighty  problem  as  the  constitution  of  a 
country  could  be  fixed  in  a  few  hours.  It  was  known  that  Mr.  Gladstone 
intended  to  deal  simultaneously  with  the  National  and  the  Land  Question, 
and  the  first  intention  was  to  bring  in  the  Land  Bill  first,  and  the-n  the 
Home  Rule  Bill.  This  plan  was  changed  ;  and  at  last,  on  April  8,  the 
Home  Rule  Bill  was  introduced. 

The  scene  was  as  thrilling  as  any  ever  beheld  in  the  House  of  Commons, 
and  never  have  there  been  more  abundant  signs  of  absorbing  public  interest. 
In  order  to  secure  seats,  the  Irish  members  began  to  arrive  from  six  o'clock 
in  the  morning,  and  by  eight  or  nine  o'clock  every  seat  in  the  House  was 
seized.  The  result  was  that  members  spent  all  the  day  within  the  walls  of 
Westminster  Palace — breakfasting,  lunching,  and  dining  there.  When  the 
sitting  commenced,  a  number  of  members  who  had  remained  without  seats 
brought  in  chairs,  and  placed  them  on  the  floor  of  the  House — a  sight  un- 
precedented, I  believe,  in  the  history  of  the  Assembly.  Mr.  Gladstone's 
entrance  was  marked  by  a  striking  incident.  As  he  sat,  pale,  panting, 
and  still  under  the  excitement  of  the  great  reception  he  had  received  from 
the  crowds  outside,  the  whole  Liberal  Party  (with  four  exceptions)  and  all  the 
Irish  members,  sprang  to  their  feet  and  cheered  him  enthusiastically.  The 
four  exceptions  to  this  general  mark  of  reverence  and  esteem  were  the  four 
Dissentient  leaders.  Lord  Hartington,  Sir  Henry  James,  Sir  George  Tre- 
velyan, and  Mr,  Chamberlain  remained  sitting,  and  in  a  group  by  them- 
selves they  presented  a  curious  look  of  isolation  amid  these  surroundings. 
It  took  Mr.  Gladstone  upwards  of  three  hours  to  set  forth  all  the  details  of 
his  great  measure.  His  voice  lasted  well  to  the  end,  and  the  attention  of 
the  House  never  relaxed  for  a  moment.  The  speech  was  calm  in  language, 
and  the  Tories  were  decent  enough  to  abstain  from  any  outbursts  of  im- 
patience. Indeed,  the  general  desire  to  catch  every  word  of  a  speech  iri 
vvliich  every  sentence  was  fateful,  produced  a  reticence  from  both  friend  and 


276  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

foe.     The  main  provisions  of  the  Bill  are  well  described  in  an  excellent 
summary  of  the  measure  published  by  Mr,  Sydney  Buxton  : 

'  The  Bill  provides  for  the  constitution  of  an  Irish  Parliament  sitting  in 
Dublin,  with  the  Queen  as  its  head. 

'The  Parliament— which  is  to  be  quinquennial — is  to  consist  of  309 
members,  divided  into  two  "orders,"  103  members  in  the  "first  order," 
and  206  in  the  "  second  order." 

'  The  "  first  order  "  is  to  consist  of  such  or  all  of  the  28  Irish  representa- 
tive peers  as  choose  to  serve;  the  remaining  members  to  be  "  elective." 
At  the  end  of  30  years  the  rights  of  peerage  members  will  lapse,  and  the 
whole  of  the  "  first  order  "  will  be  elective. 

'  The  elective  members  will  sit  for  10  years  ;  every  five  years  one-half 
their  number  will  retire,  but  are  eligible  for  re-election.  They  do  not 
vacate  their  seats  on  a  dissolution. 

'  They  will  be  elected  by  constituencies  subsequently  to  be  formed.  The 
elective  member  himself  must  possess  a  property  qualification  equivalent  to 
an  income  of  £200  a  year.  The  franchise  is  a  restricted  one,  the  elector 
having  to  possess  or  occupy  land  of  a  net  annual  value  of  £25. 

'  The  "  second  order  "  is  to  be  elected  on  the  existing  franchise,  and  by 
the  existing  constitu-encies,  the  representation  of  each  being  doubled.  For 
the  first  Parliament,  the  Irish  members  nov/  sitting  in  the  House  of 
Commons  will,  except  such  as  may  resign,  constitute  one-half  the  members 
of  the  "  second  order"  of  the  new  House, 

The  two  orders  shall  sit  and  deliberate  together,  and,  under  ordinary 
circumstances,  shall  vote  together,  the  majority  deciding. 

'  If,  however,  on  any  question  (other  than  a  Bill)  relating  to  legislation, 
or  to  the  regulations  and  rules  of  the  House,  the  majority  of  either  order 
demand  a  separate  vote,  a  separate  vote  of  each  order  shall  be  taken.  If 
the  decision  of  the  two  orders  be  different,  the  matter  shall  be  decided  in 
the  negative. 

'  The  Lord-Lieutenant  has  power  given  him  to  arrange  for  the  procedure 
at  the  first  sitting,  the  election  of  Speaker,  and  other  minor  matters  for 
carrying  the  Act  into  effect. 

'  If  a  Bill,  or  any  part  of  a  Bill,  is  lost  by  the  disagreement  of  the  two 
orders  voting  separately,  the  matter  in  dispute  shall  be  considered  as 
vetoed,  or  lost,  for  a  period  of  three  years,  or  until  the  next  dissolution  of 
the  Legislative  Body,  if  longer  than  three  years.  After  that  time,  if  the 
question  ba  again  raised,  and  the  Bill  or  provision  be  adopted  by  the 
second  order  and  negatived  by  the  first,  it  shall  be  submitted  to  the  Legis- 
lative Body  as  a  Avhole,  both  orders  shall  vote  together,  and  the  question 
shall  be  decided  by  the  simple  majority.  The  Bill  then,  if  within  the 
statutory  power  of  the  Parliament,  and  unless  vetoed  by  the  Crown,  passes 
into  law. 

'  The  Lord -Lieutenant — who,  as  Lord-Lieutenant,  will  not  be  the  repre- 
sentative of  any  party,  and  will  not  quit  office  with  the  outgoing  English 
Government,  and  who  in  future  need  not  necessarily  be  a  Protestant — is 
appointed  by  the  Crown,  and  will  represent  the  Crown  in  Ireland.  Neither 
his  office  nor  his  functions  can  be  altered  by  the  Irish  Parliament. 

'  The  responsible  Executive  in  Ireland  will  be  constituted  in  the  same 
manner  as  that  in  England.  The  leader  of  the  majority  will  be  called 
upon  by  the  Lord-Lieutenant,  as  representing  the  Queen,  to  form  a  Govern- 


THE  HOME  RULE  STRUGGLE.  277 

ment  responsible  to  the  Irish  Parliament.  It  will  stand  and  fall  by  votes 
of  that  Parliament. 

'  The  Queen,  just  as  in  the  case  of  the  Imperial  Parliament,  retains  the 
right — to  be  exercised  through  the  Lord-Lieutenant — of  giving  or  with- 
holding her  assent  to  Bills,  and  can  dissolve  or  summon  Parliament  when 
she  pleases  ;  she  will  probably,  as  in  England,  exercise  the  latter  function, 
and  as  a  rule  the  former,  on  the  advice  of  the  responsible  Irish  Executive. 

'  All  constitutional  questions  which  may  arise,  as  to  whether  the  Irish 
Parliament  has  exceeded  its  powers,  will  be  referred  to,  and  decided  by,  the 
Judicial  Committee  of  the  Privy  Council  ;  their  decision  will  be  final,  and 
the  Lord-Lieutenant  will  veto  any  Bill  judged  by  them  to  contain  provi- 
sions in  excess  of  the  powers  of  the  Irish  Legislature,  and  such  a  Bill  will 
be  void. 

'  The  prerogatives  of  the  Crown  are  untouched.  The  following  matters 
remain  intact  in  the  hands  of  the  Imperial  Parliam^ent  :  The  dignity  of, 
and  succession  to,  the  Crown  ;  the  making  of  peace  or  war  ;  all  foreign  and 
colonial  relations  ;  the  questions  of  international  law,  or  violation  of 
treaties ;  naturalization  ;  matters  relating  to  trade,  navigation,  and 
quarantine,  beacons,  lighthouses,  etc. ;  foreign  postal  and  telegraph  service  ; 
coinage,  weights  and  measures  ;  copyright  and  patents  ;  questions  of 
treason,  alienage ;  the  creation  of  titles  of  honour.  The  Imperial  Parlia- 
ment is,  moreover,  to  keep  in  its  own  hands  the  army,  navy,  militia,  volun- 
teers, or  other  military  or  naval  forces  ;  is  responsible  for  the  defence  of 
the  realm  ;  and  may  erect  all  needful  buildings  or  defences  for  military 
and  naval  purposes. 

'  In  addition,  the  Irish  Parliament  is  not  permitted  to  make  laws  estab- 
lishing or  endowing  any  religion,  or  prohibiting  in  any  way  religious 
freedom,  by  imposing  a  disability  or  conferring  any  privilege  on  account  of 
religious  belief.  Nor  may  they  prejudicially  affect  the  right  of  any  child 
to  avail  itself  of  the  "  conscience  clause  "  at  any  school  it  may  attend  ;  nor 
of  the  private  right  of  establishing  and  maintaining  any  particular  form  of 
denominational  education. 

'  It  cannot,  without  the  leave  of  the  Privy  Council  of  England,  or  the 
assent  of  the  Corporation  itself,  in  any  way  impair  the  rights,  property,  or 
privileges  of  any  body  created  and  existing  under  Eoyal  Charter  or  Act 
of  Parliament. 

'Eor  a  time,  at  all  events,  the  Customs  and  Excise  duties  are  to  be 
levied  by  officers  appointed,  as  now,  by  the  British  Treasury. 

'  With  these  exceptions,  all  other  matters,  legislative  and  administrative, 
are  left  absolutely  in  the  power,  and  to  the  discretion,  of  the  Irish  Parlia- 
ment and  its  executive  government. 

'  It  will  be  responsible  for  law  and  order,  though  the  Imperial  Parlia- 
ment, by  retaining  the  military  forces,  holds  the  ultimate  power.  It  can 
raise  and  pay  a  police  force — as  in  England,  under  local  control. 

'  The  responsible  Government  will  have  the  appointment  of  the  Judges 
(to  be  life  appointments,  as  in  England),  and  of  all  the  other  officials 
throughout  the  kingdom.  The  Parliament  can  make  or  vary  courts  of  law-, 
legal  powers,  or  authorities,  etc. 

'  On  the  recommendation  of  the  responsible  Government,  the  Parliament 
can  levy  such  internal  taxes  as  they  please  (with  the  exception  of  Customs 
and  Excise),  and  can  apply  the  proceeds  to  such  purposes  as  they  think  fit. 
They  can  raise  loans,  and  undertake  public  works  of  every  sort.     They 


278  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

can  manage  their  own  post-offices,  telegraphs,  and  post-office  savings 
banks. 

'  They  can  create  such  local  bodies  as  they  choose.  They  can  regulate 
education  :  in  a  word,  they  will  have  the  power  of  legislating  on  all  local 
Irish  matters. 

'  After  the  first  election,  they  can  alter  any  matter  affecting  the  constitu- 
tion or  election  of  the  "second  order;"  the  franchise,  the  constituencies, 
the  mode  of  election,  the  system  of  registration,  the  laws  relating  to  corrupt 
and  illegal  practices,  the  privileges  and  immunities  of  the  legislative  body 
and  of  its  members,  etc. 

'  To  prevent  any  breach  of  continuity,  existing  laws  will  remain  in  force 
until  altered  or  repealed  by  the  new  Parliament. 

'  All  existing  rights  of  civil  servants  and  other  officials  at  present  in  the 
employ  of  the  Irish  Government  are  carefully  guarded.  In  order  to  pre- 
serve the  continuity  of  Civil  Government,  they  will  continue  to  hold  office 
at  the  same  salary  they  now  receive,  and  to  perform  the  same  or  analogous 
duties,  unless,  from  incompatibility  of  temper,  or  from  motives  of  economy, 
the  Irish  Government  desire  their  retirement,  when  they  will  receive  their 
pension.  In  any  case  if,  at  the  end  of  two  years,  they  wish  to  retire,  they 
can  do  so,  and  will  be  then  entitled  to  a  pension  as  though  their  office  had 
been  abolished. 

'The  judges,  and  certain  permanent  officials,  can  only  be  retired,  or 
allowed  to  retire,  by  "  the  Crown,"  and  they  will  then  receive  their  pension 
as  though  they  had  served  their  full  time. 

'  The  existing  rights  of  the  constabulary  and  police  to  pay,  pension,  etc., 
are  preserved. 

'All  these  pensions  become  a  charge  on  the  Irish  Treasury,  but  are 
further  guaranteed  by  the  English  Treasury. 

'  It  is  not  intended  that  the  Irish  representative  Peers  should  any  longer 
sit  in  the  House  of  Lords,  nor  the  Irish  members  in  the  House  of  Commons, 
but  that  Ireland  (with  the  assent  of  her  present  representatives)  should  be 
practically  unrepresented  at  Westminster. 

'The  Act  constituting  the  Irish  Parliament  cannot  be  altered  in  any 
way,  except  by  an  Act  passed  by  the  Imperial  Parliament,  and  assented  to 
by  the  Irish  Parliament ;  or  by  an  Act  of  the  Imperial  Parliament,  passed 
after  there  have  been  summoned  back  to  it,  for  that  especial  purpose, 
28  Irish  representative  Peers,  and  103  "second  order"  members.' 

'  The  Financial  arrangements  are  as  follow  : 

'  The  imposition  and  collection  of  Custom  duties  and  of  Excise  duties,  so 
far  as  these  are  immediately  connected  with  Customs  duties,  will  remain  in 
the  hands  of  the  British  Treasury.  All  other  taxes  will  be  imposed  and 
collected  under  the  authority  of  the  Irish  Parliament.  The  proceeds  of 
these  latter  taxes  will  be  paid  into  the  Irish  Treasury  ;  the  proceeds  of  the 
Customs  and  Excise  to  a  special  account  of  the  British  Treasury. 

'  From  these  receipts,  certain  deductions  are  first  to  be  made  for  the  Irish 
contribution  to  Inriperial  Expenditure,  etc.,  and  the  balance  is  then  to  be 
paid  over  to  the  Irish  Treasury. 

'Ireland  is  to  pay  one-fifteenth  as  her  portion  of  the  whole  existing 
Imperial  charge  for  debt  (£22,000,000  a  year),  representing  a  capital  sum 
of  £48,000,000,  and  in 'addition  a  small  sinking  fund  ;  and  one-fifteenth  of 
the  normal  charge  for  Army  and  Navy  (£25,000,000),  and  for  Imperial 
Ci^'il  charges  (£1,650,000).     In  addition,  until  she  supersedes  the  present 


THE  HOME  RULE  STRUGGLE. 


279 


police  force,  she  is  to  pay  £1,000,000  a  year  (or  less  if  the  cost  be  less) 
towards  the  cost  of  the  Royal  Irish  Constabulary  and  the  Dublin  police. 

*  Thus  the  Irish  proportion  of  Imperial  expenditure  "wdll  be  as  follows  : 


Debt 

Sinking  fund 

AiTiiy  and  Navy 
Civil  expenditure 


Constabulary  and  police 


£1,466,000 
360,000 


£1,826,000 

1,666,000 

110,000 

£3,602,000 
1,000,000 

£4,602,000 


*  This  is  the  maximum  amount  payable,  and  it  cannot  be  increased  for 
thirty  years,  when  the  question  of  contribution  can  be  again  considered. 

'  On  the  other  hand,  the  amount  can  be  reduced.  (1)  If  in  any  year  the 
charge  for  the  army  and  navy,  or  for  the  Imperial  Civil  Service,  is  less 
than  fifteen  times  the  amount  of  the  Irish  contribution,  then  the  Irish 
charge  will  be  reduced  proportionately.  (2)  If  the  cost  of  the  constabulary 
or  police  fall  below  £1,000,000  a  year,  then  the  difference  will  be  saved 
by  the  Irish  Exchequer. 

'  The  estimated  revenue  from  Irish  Customs  and  Excise  Customs,  duties, 
amounts  to  £6,180,000  annually.  From  this  is  to  be  deducted,  by  the 
English  Treasury,  a  sum  not  exceeding  four  per  cent,  for  cost  of  collection, 
leaving  a  net  amount  of  £5,933,000. 

'  The  debtor  and  creditor  account,  as  between  England  and  Ireland,  will 
then  stand  thus  : 


Expenditure. 

Receipts. 

£ 

£ 

For  Imperial  purposes  ...  3,602,000 

Customs  and  Excise 

...  6,180,000 

Constabulary,  etc.          ...1,000,000 

Collection  of  Customs  and 

Excise,  maximum  4  per 

cent 247,000 

£4,849,000 

£6,180,000 

Leaving  a  balance  of  £1,331,000  to  be  handed  over  by  England  to  the  Irish 

Exchequer. 

'The  Irish  Government  will  take  over  all  loans  due  to  the  British 
Treasury  and  advanced  for  Irish  purposes,  and  shall  pay  the  British 
Treasury  an  annual  sum  equivalent  to  three  per  cent,  interest  on  the 
amount  with  repayment  in  thirty  years.  The  total  amount  outstanding  is 
some  six  millions,  and  the  receipts  and  disbursements  of  the  Irish  Govern- 
ment under  this  head  will  about  balance.  The  balance  of  the  Irish  Church 
surplus  fund — about  £20,000  a  year — is  to  be  handed  over  to  the  Irish 
Government. 

'The  following  will  show  the  further  receipts  and  expenditure  of  the 
Irish  Government,  as  estimated  by  Mr.  Gladstone  on  the  basis  of  existing 
expenditure  and  taxation,  and  may  be  put  in  the  form  of  a  balance-sheet : 


2S0 


THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 


Expenditure. 

£ 
Irish  Civil  charges        ...2,510,000 
Collection     of     revenue, 
etc.       587,000 


Balance,  surplus 


404,000 


£3,501,000 


Revenue, 

E,epaid  by  England 
Stamps    ... 
Income-tax,  at  8d,' 
Other  sources  of  revenue 
— Post  Office,  etc. 


J 


£ 

1,331,000 
600,000 
550,000 

1,020,000 


£3,501,000 

*  This  gives  a  surplus  of  £404,000  to  start  with.  But,  in  addition,  great 
savings  of  expenditure  can  be,  and  ought  to  be,  made  in  the  Irish  Civil 
charges  and  collection  of  revenue.  Per  head  of  the  population,  they 
are  now  double  what  they  are  in  England,  and  at  least  £300,000  or 
£400,000  should  be  saved.  In  addition,  after  a  time,  the  cost  of  the  police 
ought  to  fall  at  least  £200,000  or  £300,000  below  the  million  allotted  to 
that  purpose. 

'  Thus,  with  reasonable  economy,  the  surplus  at  the  disposal  of  the  Irish 
Government  ought  to  amount  to  some  £1,000,000  a  year — a  sum  which 
will  enable  it  readily  to  borrow  money  for  public  wants  and  for  public 
improvements.  '^ 

On  April  16  Mr.  Gladstone  brought  in  the  second  of  his  great  measures  : 
the  Bill  for  the  buying  out  of  the  Irish  landlords.  I  borrow  again  from 
Mr.  Buxton  an  analysis  of  this  measure  : 

'  The  object  of  the  Bill  is  to  give  to  all  Irish  landlords  the  option  of  selling 
their  rented  agricultural  lands  on  certain  terms.  The  tenants  have  no 
power  to  force  the  sale  ;  or  to  prevent  it  if  the  landlord  elects  to  sell,  and 
is  willing  to  accept  the  price  fixed  by  the  Land  Court.  Only  "  immediate 
landlords  "  have  the  power  of  option ;  encumbrancers  cannot,  by  foreclosing, 
obtain  any  right  of  sale  under  the  Bill. 

*  The  normal  price  is  to  be,  under  ordinary  circumstances,  "  on  a  fairly 
well- conditioned  estate,"  20  years'  purchase  of  the  net  rental  of  the  estate 
— equal  to  about  16  years'  purchase  of  the  nominal  rental.  If,  however, 
the  land  be  especially  good,  or  the  estate  in  an  exceptionally  good  condi- 
tion, the  number  of  years*  pui'chase  can  be  increased  by  the  Land  Com- 
mission to  22.  On  the  other  hand,  where,  in  the  opinion  of  the  Commission, 
the  land  is  not  worth  20  years'  purchase,  they  can  fix  a  lower  price  ;  or,  if 
the  land  be  so  valueless  as  to  make  it  inequitable  for  the  State  Authority 
to  purchase,  they  can  refuse  the  offer  altogether. 

'  The  net  rental  of  the  estate  is  to  be  fixed  by  the  Land  Commission,  who, 
in  order  to  find  it,  are  to  deduct  from  the  gross  rental — chief  rent,  tithe 
rent  charge,  the  average  percentage  (over  the  last  ten  years)  of  outgoings 
for  bad  debts,  management,  repairs,  etc.,  and  for  rates  and  taxes  paid  by 
the  landlord.  In  fixing  the  price,  the  Commission  may  take  into  account 
any  circumstances  or  surroundings  they  judge  right. 

'  The  gross  rental  of  an  estate  is  the  gross  rent  of  all  the  tenanted 
holdings  on  the  estate,  payable  in  the  year  ending  November,  1885.  The 
gross  rent  of  a  holding  is  the  judicial  rent,  or,  if  none  be  fixed,  then  a  fair 
rent  is  to  be  fixed  by  the  Land  Commission. 

'  Arrears  of  rent  becoming  due,  between  November,  1885,  and  the  date 
of  purchase  (and  which  the  landlord  has  end^'avoured  to  obtain)  are  to  ])q 
added  to  the  price. 

*  '  Mr.  Gladstone's  Irish  ■Bills,'  pp.  13,  18. 


THE  HOME  RULE  STRUGGLE.  281 

*In  the  cases  of  holdings  at  or  under  £4  annual  value,  if  the  tenant 
does  not  desire  to  become  the  freeholder,  the  State  Authority  shall  become 
the  owner,  the  tenant  remaining  liable  for  rent  as  before. 

'  It  is  provided,  moreover,  that  in  certain  "  congested  districts  " — to  be 
scheduled  afterwards — if  the  State  Authority  buys  the  land,  it  shall  retain 
the  ownership  and  not  vest  it  in  the  occupiers. 

'The  whole  of  the  rented  estate,  including  town  parks,  houses,  and 
villages,  if  part  of  the  agricultural  estate,  but  excluding  the  mansion, 
demesne  land,  or  home  farm,  must  go  together.  If,  however,  the  landlord 
desires,  and  the  State  Authority  agrees,  it  can  buy  the  mansion,  demesne 
land,  and  home  farm.  No  estate,  which  is  within  the  limits  of  a  town,  or 
is  not  in  the  main  agricultural  and  pastoral,  comes  under  the  Act.  Grazing 
lands  of  a  value  of  over  £50  a  year  may  be  excluded  by  the  landlord  from 
the  sale,  or  the  purchase  can  be  refused  by  the  State  Authority. 

'  The  Land  Commissioners  are  to  be  appointed  by  name  in  the  Act.  Any 
vacancy  is  to  be  filled  up  by  "her  Majesty,"  and  the  Commissioners  hold 
ofl&ce  "  during  her  pleasure." 

*  When  the  price  is  fixed,  the  landlord,  and  the  legal  encumbrancers — • 
whose  position  will  not  be  affected  in  any  v/ay  by  the  Act — will  receive  the 
money,  and  the  tenant  will  at  once  become  the  freeholder  of  his  holding, 
subject  to  the  payment  of  a  terminable  annuity  for  49  years,  equal  to  4  per 
cent,  per  annum  on  the  capitalized  value,  at  20  years'  purchase,  of  the  old 
rent. 

'This  annuity,  and  the  rent  in  the  case  of  small  holdings  where  the 
occupier  remains  as  tenant,  is  to  be  collected  by  the  department  of  the  Irish 
Government  called  the  State  Authority  ;  and  the  surplus  (equivalent  to  4 
per  cent,  per  annum  on  the  difference  between  the  capitalized  value  of  the 
old  rent  and  that  of  the  redemption  money)  will  be  applied,  after  payment 
of  the  interest  and  repayment  on  the  capital  advanced  by  the  British 
Treasviry,  to  the  purposes  of  the  Irish  Government. 

'The  State  Authority  will  be  enabled  to  enforce  the  payment  of  its 
annuities  in  such  manner  as  is  afterwards  provided  by  an  Act  of  the  Irish 
Parliament,  and  until  that  provision  is  made,  the  present  laws  relating  to 
the  enforcement  of  the  payment  of  rent,  etc.,  in  Ireland  will  remain  in  force. 

'  During  the  time  that  the  holding  is  subject  to  the  annuity,  the  occupier 
may  neither  subdivide  nor  let  without  the  consent  of  the  State  Authority. 
If  he  does,  or  in  case  of  bankruptcy,  the  holding  can  be  sold. 

'  The  State  Authority  is  to  pay  the  British  Treasury  an  annual  amount 
equal  to  4  per  cent,  on  the  capital  sum  advanced  by  the  latter  and  received 
by  the  landlord.^ 

*  The  total  liability  under  the  Bill  is  limited  to  £50,000,000.  as  follows : 

£10,000,000  in  the  year  ending  March,  1887-8 
£20,000,000  „  „  „         1888-9 

£20,000,000  „  „  „         1889-90 

*  The  applications  from  the  landlords  will  be  considered  in  priority  of 
time. 

'  No  application  can  be  made  after  March,  1890. 

'  The  money  advanced  by  the  British  Treasury  is  to  be  raised  by  the 

^  Thus,  if  the  whole  £50,000,000  be  advanced,  the  State  Authority  will  receive 
£2,500,000  a  year,  subject  to  cost  of  collection,  etc.,  and  have  to  pay  the  British 
Treasury  only  £2,000,000.  It  will  thus,  if  thought  necessary  or  expediept,  be  able  to 
grant  further  remission  to  the  occupier. 


282 


THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 


issue  to  the  landlords  of  3  per  cent,  stock  at  par.  This  stock  is  to  be 
redeemed  by  the  repayment  of  a  terminable  annuity  for  49  j^ears  by  the 
State  Authority. 

'  In  order  to  obtain  security  for  the  loan,  the  British  Government 
appoint  a  E,eceiver-General,  through  whose  hands  the  whole  of  the  Irish 
revenues  are  to  pass,  together  with  the  proceeds  of  Irish  Ciistoms  and 
Excise  ;  but  he  will  have  absolutely  nothing  to  do  with  the  levjdng  of  the 
revenue.  After  deducting  from  these  receipts  the  amount  due  from  the 
State  Authority  for  interest  and  repayment  of  capital  advanced,  and  after 
deducting  also  the  Irish  contributions  to  the  Imperial  charges,  the  balance 
of  the  receipts  will  be  handed  over  to  the  Irish  Exchequer. 

*  Assuming  that  the  whole  loan  is  called  up,  the  Irish  balance-sheet  will 
then  stand  as  follows  : 


Expenditure, 

£ 
For  Imperial  purposes  ...   3,602,000 

Constabulary,  etc 1,000,000 

Collection  of  Customs  and 

Excise ...      247,000 

Annuity  on  loan  advanced 

for  purchase        2,000,000 

Irish  Civil  charges 2,510,000 

Collection  of  revenue,  etc.      587,000 
Collection  of  rent-charge 

and  expenses,  say      ...      100,000 
Surplus ,.     ...      804,000 


£10,850,000 


Revenue. 

Customs  and  Excise 

Stamps    

Income  Tax    

Other  sources  revenue 
Kent -charge    


£ 

6,180,000 

600,000 

550,000 

1,020,000 

2,500,000 


£10,850,000 


'  In  addition,  the  Surplus  will  be  increased  by  the  economies  made  in  the 
Civil  Service,  Constabulary,  etc' 

It  would  be  wearisome  to  go  at  any  length  through  the  story  of  the 
intrigues,  negotiations,  rise  and  fall  of  fortune  that  characterized  the 
interval  between  the  introduction  and  the  second  reading  of  the  Home 
Kule  Bill.  It  became  evident  from  the  start  that  Mr.  Gladstone  had 
enormously  increased  his  difficulties  in  passing  the  Home  Rule  Bill  by  the 
introduction  of  the  Land  Bill.  It  was  quite  true  that  he  had  guaranteed 
the  British  Exchequer  absolutely  against  loss  ;  but  his  enemies  were  either 
stupid  or  unscrupulous  enough  to  misrepresent  his  scheme,  and  to  travesty 
it  into  a  plan  which  would  lose  to  the  British  Exchequer  every  penny 
advanced,  and  ultimately  add  several  millions  to  the  burdens  of  the  British 
taxpayer.  Mr.  Gladstone  was  implored,  both  then  and  at  a  later  stage  in 
the  struggle,  to  drop  his  Land  Bill.  These  appeals  might  have  been 
addressed  with  some  hope  of  success  to  an  unscrupulous  or  a  reckless 
politician  ;  but  they  were  hopeless  to  a  statesman  who  felt  the  obligations 
of  honour  and  the  necessities  of  public  interest.  Some  of  Mr.  Gladstone's 
chief  opponents  were  quite  ready  to  denounce  Land  Purchase  at  one  stage 
of  the  controversy — as  will  presently  be  seen — and  to  advocate  and  propose 
it  at  another  ;  but  recklessness  and  indecency  of  this  kind  belong  to  a 
different  order  of  mind  from  that  of  Mr.  Gladstone. 

Another  difficulty  of  Mr,  Gladstone  was  that  his  opponents  brought 
entirely   opposite   objections   to   his   plan.      The   retention   of   the   Irish 


THE  HOME  RULE  STRUGGLE.  2S3 

members  was  demanded  by  Mr.  Chamberlain  ;  their  exclusion  was,  accord- 
ing to  the  Marquis  of  Hartington,  the  logical  necessity  of  the  plan.  Mr. 
Chamberlain  objected  to  the  scheme  of  Land  Purchase  ;  the  Marquis  of 
Hartington  took  very  good  care  to  say  nothing  which  might  injure  the 
prospects  of  large  monetary  relief  to  the  class  of  which  he  is  a  member. 
The  speech  of  Mr.  Gladstone  at  the  Foreign  Ofl&ce  to  a  meeting  of  his  sup- 
porters was  held  to  make  the  second  reading  of  the  Bill  secure  ;  the  same 
speech  on  the  following  day  in  the  House  of  Commons — Mr.  Chamberlain 
acknowledged  that  the  two  speeches  were  exactly  the  same — lost  the  votes 
of  those  who  the  day  before,  at  the  Foreign  Office,  had  practically  pledged 
themselves  to  support  the  second  reading. 

Among  many  of  the  absurd  charges  brought  against  Mr.  Gladstone  for 
his  conduct  of  the  measure  is  that  he  sprang  the  question  upon  the  country. 
The  charge  is  entirely  untrue.  He  exhausted  ever}?'  means  to  keep  the 
question  within  the  control  of  a  united  Liberal  Party,  and  to  prevent  its 
reference  to  the  tumultuous  and  passionate  tribunal  of  the  ballot-boxes. 
In  those  clauses  which  provoked  criticism  he  promised  amendment,  and 
the  whole  Bill  he  undertook  to  postpone  till  an  autumn  sitting,  after  the 
Hovise  had  affirmed  the  principle  of  Home  Rule  by  passing  the  second 
reading.  It  was  those  who  defeated  the  second  reading  of  the  Bill,  and  so 
provoked  the  General  Election,  that  must  bear  the  responsibility  of  all  that 
has  since  happened.  If  the  second  reading  had  been  carried,  the  interval 
would  have  been  spent  in  the  calm  consideration  of  the  various  points  of 
difference  among  those  who  honestly  accepted  the  principle  of  an  Irish 
Legislative  Assembly,  and  in  all  probability  a  compromise  would  have 
been  arrived  at.  There  had  not  arisen  at  this  period  any  of  that  fierce 
bitterness  which  at  present  rages  between  the  two  sections  of  the  Liberal 
Party,  and  so  the  points  of  difference  could  have  been  debated  in  calmness 
and  settled  by  mutual  concession. 

But  it  was  not  to  be.  The  enemies  of  Mr,  Gladstone  forced  on  the  con- 
test when  they  felt  sure  of  victory.  A  meeting  of  the  Dissentient  Liberals 
was  held  a  few  days  before  the  second  reading  division.  A  letter  was  read 
from  Mr.  John  Bright.  The  letter  has  never  been  produced,  though  Mr. 
Chamberlain  distinctly  undertook  to  produce  it  when  this  fact  was  com- 
mented upon  by  Mr.  John  Morley  in  a  speech  in  the  House  of  Commons  ; 
and  the  world  is  still  ignorant  of  its  character.  It  was  certainly  used  as 
an  argument  in  favour  of  voting  against  the  Bill,  and  it  served  more  than 
anything  else  to  bring  about  that  fateful  decision  ;  but  Avhether  that  was 
the  advice  of  Mr.  Bright,  or  whether  he  advised  abstention,  is  one  of  the 
political  mysteries  that  possibly  this  generation  will  never  penetrate.  The 
decision  of  the  Dissentient  Liberals  to  vote  against  the  Bill  sealed  its  fatOc 
The  division  took  place  on  June  7.  Mr.  Gladstone  wound  up  the  debate 
with  one  of  the  most  effective,  most  powerful,  most  touching  speeches  he 
has  ever  delivered.  But  his  eloquence  for  once  was  impotent :  the  Bill  was 
defeated  by  a  majority  of  30. 

A  few  days  afterwards  Mr.  Gladstone  announced  that  the  Ministry  had 
resolved  to  appeal  from  Parliament  to  the  country  ;  and  thus  a  General 
Election  came.  Never  perhaps  was  a  General  Election  fought  under  such 
curious  circumstances.  The  leaders  of  the  different  sections  of  the  Liberal 
Party  took  up  hostile  positions.  Liberal  was  opposed  by  Liberal ;  and  in 
many  cases  the  Tory  candidate  had  the  full  support  of  the  Dissentient 
Liberal  leaders.  There  had  been  a  bargain — secret  and  unavowed  at  first, 
but  afterwards  admitted — between  the  Tory  leaders  and  the  Dissentient 


284  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

Liberals,  that  no  Liberal  who  voted  against  the  second  I'eading  of  Mr. 
Gladstone's  Bill  should  be  opposed  ;  and  the  bargain  was  honourably  kept 
by  the  Tories,  except  in  two  cases.  Mr.  Gladstone  acted  during  the 
election  as  he  has  throughout  the  struggle.  He  maintained  a  strong  belief 
that  the  Dissentient  Liberals,  professing  to  differ  from  him  only  on  details, 
would  return  in  time  to  the  party  they  had  deserted.  Tor  this  reason  he 
did  not  encourage  attacks  upon  the  seats  of  Dissentient  leaders  ;  and  thus 
several  were  allowed  to  get  in  without  any  contest  at  all,  or  after  a  contest 
begun  too  late  or  too  tamely  conducted. 

The  sight  of  the  most  eminent  men  of  the  Liberal  Party  differing  among 
themselves  naturally  bcAvildered  a  considerable  portion  of  the  countr5\ 
This  fact  was  bound  to  have  more  effect  in  such  a  struggle  as  was  tljen 
going  on  than  in  any  other  kind  of  contest.  It  was  a  struggle  over  the 
Irish  Question  ;  and  there  is  no  subject  so  little  known  in  England — ■ 
perhaps  it  might  be  said  there  are  few  subjects  so  little  known  even  in 
Ireland — as  Irish  history.  The  long  centuries  of  wrong,  of  foul  mis- 
government,  of  terrible  suffering,  which  have  created  the  Ireland  of  to-day, 
were  a  sealed  book  to  the  English  people.  The  demands  of  the  Irish 
leaders  of  to-day  they  had  never  before  heard  spoken  of,  except  wdth 
derision  or  reprobation  ;  and  in  such  circumstances  the  differences  of  their 
leaders  might  well  excuse  differences,  and  doubts,  and  hesitations  of  the 
rank  and  file.  Unhappily  the  opponents  of  Mr.  Gladstone  made  full  and 
most  unscrupulous  use  of  this  ignorance.  Never  at  any  General  Election 
was  there  a  more  foul  and  a  more  full  tide  of  misrepresentation.  The 
election  might  be  described  briefly  as  won  by  lies  addressed  to  ignorance. 
The  Irish  leaders  were  accused  of  desiring  to  destroy  the  suj^remacy  of  the 
Imperial  Parliament,  and  of  working  for  separation  in  face  of  their  distinct 
pledges  that  they  recognised  the  Legislative  Assembly  bestowed  by 
Mr.    Gladstone's   Bill    as   a   subordinate   assembly,^  and   in   face   of  the 

"^  In  his  speech  on  the  second  reading  of  the  Government  of  Ireland  Bill,  Mr. 
Parnell  said  :  '  Now,  sir,  the  right  hon.  member  for  Bast  Edinburgh  spoke  about  the 
sovereignty  of  Parliament.  I  entirely  agree  upon  this  point.  1  entirely  accept  the 
definitions  given  by  the  Under-Secretary  of  State  for  Foreign  Affairs  the  other  day.  We 
have  always  known,  since  the  introduction  of  this  Bill,  the  difference  between  a  co- 
ordinate and  a  subordinate  Parliament,  and  we  have  recognised  that  the  Zegislaturt 
7/jkich  the  Prime  31inister  projyoses  to  constitute  is  a  subordinate  Parliament,  that  it 
is  not  the  same  as  Grattan's  Parliament,  which  was  co-equal  with  the  Imperial  Parlia- 
ment.' In  the  same  speech  the  Irish  leader  again  said  :  '  I  say  that,  as  far  as  it  is 
possible  for  a  nation  to  accept  a  measure  cheerfully,  freely,  gladly,  and  without  reserva. 
tion  as  a  final  settlement — I  say  that  the  Irish  people  have  shown  that  they  have 
accepted  this  measure  in  that  sense.'  Again  he  said  :  '  This  settlement  I  believe  will 
be  a  final  settlement.'  (Reported  in  Times,  June  8,  1SS6.)  The  Chicago  Convention, 
of  which  so  much  has  been  heard,  accepted  the  Bill  of  Mr.  Gladstone  with  equal 
emphasis,  and  by  a  majority  of  971  delegates  against  one  disf^entient.  In  the  resolu- 
tion adopted  at  the  Convention,  it  spoke  of  the  right  of  a  people  '  to  frame  their  own 
laws,'  and  it  went  on  to  define  that  right  in  these  significant  words  :  '  A  right  Wi  icb 
lies  at  the  foundation  of  the  prosperity  and  greatness  of  this  PLcpublic,  and  which 
has  been  advantagi^ously  extended  to  the  colonial  possessions  of  Great  Britcun.'  01 
course,  the  Home  Rule  which  is  given  to  the  colonial  possessions  of  Great  Britain  is 
not  separation,  but  such  limited  Home  Rule  as  would  be  given  by  Mr.  Gladstone's  Bill 
to  Ireland.  The  Convention  still  further  certified  its  feelings  by  expressing  hearty 
approval  of  the  ■  course  pui'sued  by  Charles  Stewart  Parnell  and  his  associates  in  tbe 
English  House  of  Commons.'  As  has  been  seen,  the  course  taken  by  Mr.  Parnell  and  his 
colleagues  was  the  acceptance  of  Mr.  Gladstone's  Bill.  And  finally,  the  sense  of  the' 
Convention  was  further  expressed  by  the  following  resolution  :  '  That  we  extend  oui 
heartfelt  thanks  to  Mr.  Gladstone  for  his  great  efforts  in  behalf  of  Irish  self-govern- 
ment, and  we  express  our  gratitude  to  the  English,  Scotch,  and  Welsh  democracy,  for 
the  support  given  to  the  great  Liberal  leader  and  his  Irish  policy  during  the  recent 
General  Elections.'  This  is  the  Convention  which  is  represented  as  consisting  ot 
dynamitards. 


THE  HOME  RULE  STRUGGLE.  285 

ample  safeguards  in  Mr.  Gladstone's  measure  for  maintaining  the  control  of 
all  the  military  and  naval  forces.  Lying  appeals  were  made  to  religious 
prejudice  ;  and  a  party  led  by  a  Protestant,  and  manned  largely  by 
Protestants,  was  accused  of  desiring  to  persecute  the  Protestant  religion. 

But  these  appeals,  powerful  as  they  were,  had  little  effect  beside  two 
other  factors  brought  into  the  election.  The  first  of  these  was  the  Land 
Purchase  Bill  of  Mr.  Gladstone.  Mr.  Gladstone's  Bill,  in  his  opinion — 
and  he  is  generally  regarded  as  some  authority  on  finance — and  in  the 
opinion,  I  think,  of  every  impartial  critic,  would  have  taken  ample  security 
for  every  single  penny  of  money  advanced  to  the  Irish  State  for  the  buying 
out  of  the  Irish  landlords. 

But  his  enemies  represented  that  the  money  thus  lent  would  be  a  gift  to 
the  Irish  landlords  out  of  the  pockets  of  the  English  tax -payers.  Astound- 
ing calculations  were  made  as  to  the  additions  that  would  thus  be  thrown 
upon  the  English  taxpayers,  *  The  Land  Bill,'  said  Mr.  Alfred  Barnes,  the 
Liberal  Unionist  candidate  for  Chesterfield  Division  of  Derbyshire,  '  which 
Mr.  Gladstone  has  stated  to  be  inseparable  from  the  Irish  Government  Bill, 
would  add  £150,000,000  to  £200,000,000  to  the  National  Debt,  and  thereby 
impose  a  heavy  liability  and  large  increase  of  taxation  upon  our  already 
overburdened  population.'  '  I  ask  you,'  said  Mr.  H.  M.  Jackson,  a  Liberal 
Unionist  candidate  for  the  borough  of  Flintshire,  '  to  remember  that  in 
supporting  my  opponent  you  are  supporting  a  measure  (declared  by  the 
Government  to  be  an  inseparable  part  of  their  Irish  scheme)  which  if  passed 
will  impose  upon  the  National  Debt  of  the  country  an  addition  of  nearly 
£200,000,000  (two  hundred  million  pounds),  of  which  each  one  of  you  will 
have  to  contribute  his  share.'  The  credit  of  having  reached  perhaps  the 
highest  flight  in  these  astonishing  calculations  belongs  to  Mr.  Baumann, 
the  Tory  member  for  Peckham,  'The  Home  Pule  Bill  is  only  half  of 
Mr.  Gladstone's  Irish  policy.  The  Prime  Minister  has  also  laid  before 
Parliament  a  Land  Purchase  Bill  which  he  describes  as  inseparably  con- 
nected with  the  Home  Rule  Bill,  to  buy  out  the  Irish  landlords  by  the 
issue  of  new  British  Consols.  The  precise  amoimt  of  this  addition  to  the 
National  Debt  it  is  impossible  to  get  at,  .  .  .  but  it  is  interesting  to  note 
that  three  years  ago  Mr.  Gladstone  put  the  cost  of  buying  out  the  Irish 
landlords  at  between  three  and  four  hundred  million  pounds. ' 

This  was  dishonest  enough  in  all  conscience  ;  but  the  dishonesty  was  in 
implication  as  well  as  in  open  lie.  For  while  the  opponents  of  Mr. 
Gladstone  were  thus  attacking  his  Land  Bill,  they  never  breathed  a  hint 
that  they  were  favourable  themselves  to  Land  Purchase  in  any  shape.  On 
the  contrary,  the  whole  tendency  and  the  unmistakable  suggestion  of  all 
their  speeches  was  that  to  any  money  in  any  form  for  the  buying  out  of 
the  Irish  landlords  they  were  irreconcilably  opposed.  The  contest  thus 
changed  its  character  in  the  course  of  the  struggle.  It  was  no  longer 
mainly  a  fight  against  the  Home  Pule,  but  against  the  Land  Bill  of  Mr. 
Gladstone.  It  was  whether  the  British  tax-payer  should  guarantee  any 
money  whatever  for  the  buying  out  of  the  Irish  landlord  or  not.  This  is  a 
point  to  which  I  direct  the  especial  attention  of  the  reader  ;  he  will  the 
more  keenly  appreciate  the  grim  irony  of  what  immediately  followed. 

Thus  the  first  great  factor  in  producing  the  defeat  of  Mr.  Gladstone  was 
the  false  representation  of  the  issue  on  the  Land  Question  ;  the  second  great 
factor  was  an  equally  false  representation  of  the  issue  on  Home  Rule.  Mr. 
Gladstone  laid  down  as  the  real  issue  before  the  country  the  question 
whether  Ireland  was  to  be  governed  through  herself  or  by  coercion. 
Between  these  two  courses  he  declared  that  there  was  no  halting-ground, 


286  •   THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

His  opponents  were  shrewd  enough  to  perceive  that  if  this  issue  v/ere 
allowed  to  go  before  the  country  in  its  plainness  and  nakedness,  there  could 
be  little  doubt  as  to  what  would  be  the  result.  Between  enslaving  and 
liberating  a  sister-country  a  nation  of  freemen  could  only  give  one  answer  ; 
and  above  all  other  even  free  nations  the  people  of  England  have  been 
distinguished  by  the  readiness  and  the  abundance  of  sympathy  they  have 
extended  to  other  peoples  struggling  for  their  rights.  Under  these  circum- 
stances it  was  felt  that  the  issue  should  be  obscured  or  the  cause  of  wrong 
was  lost  ;  and  the  main  efforts  of  Mr.  Gladstone's  opponents  were  devoted 
to  showing  that  the  issue  was  not  as  he  put  it — was  not  the  clear,  blank, 
naked  issue  betv/een  Home  Rule  on  the  one  side,  and  coercion  on  the 
other.  It  was  between  Home  Rule  as  Mr.  Gladstone  proposed,  and  another 
and  different  kind  of  Home  Kule.  It  was  not  even  an  issue  between  the 
extreme  Home  E,ule  of  Mr.  Gladstone  and  the  more  moderate  Home  Rule 
of  his  opponents.  Some  of  his  critics  maintained  that  they  were  ready  to 
give  a  wider  Home  E,ule  than  Mr.  Gladstone.  Indeed,  it  was  one  of  the 
charges  against  Mr.  Gladstone's  Bill,  which  some  of  his  opponents  were 
able  to  make  without  laughing,  that  his  Bill  gave  Ireland  too  little  instead 
of  too  much. 

'  You  will  doubtless  remember,'  said  Mr.  Barnes,  the  Liberal  Unionist 
member  for  the  Chesterfield  Division  of  Derbyshire,  in  his  election  address, 
'  that  both  in  my  addresses  and  speeches  at  the  last  two  elections  I  stated 
that  I  was  in  favour  of  Home  Rule  being  granted  in  Ireland  in  the  shape 
of  such  a  measure  of  local  self-government  as  could  be  extended  to  England, 
Scotland  and  Wales,  at  the  same  time  maintaining  the  supremacy  of  the 
Imperial  Parliament  and  the  integrity  of  the  United  Kingdom.  Erom  that 
principle  I  have  never  receded.'  'It  is  mere  sophistry,'  said  Sir  Henry 
Havelock  Allan,  another  Liberal  Unionist,  'to  assert  that  the  only  two 
alternatives  are  an  absolute  and  abject  surrender  to  the  tyranny  of  the 
National  League  on  the  one  hand,  or  else  unmitigated  coercion  on  the 
other.  The  legislative  wisdom  of  Parliament  is  amply  able  to  devise,  and 
I  am  sure  after  the  last  election  will  devise,  a  scheme  by  which,  while  full 
scope  is  given  to  the  legitimate  aspirations  of  the  Irish  people,  as  to  the 
local  management  of  their  own  local  affairs,  this  boon  shall  be  conceded  in 
Sj  shape  not  dangerous  to  the  unity  of  the  empire  or  the  supremacy  of  the 
Imperial  Parliament.'  Having  detailed  a  different  scheme  of  Home  Rule 
from  Mr.  Gladstone's,  including  retention  of  Irish  members,  and  the  ap- 
pointment of  judges  by  the  imperial  authority  with  two  legislative  bodies, 
Sir  Henry  said,  '  I  think  it  highly  probable  that  the  lines  I  have  indicated 
represent  the  precise  shape  in  which  Mr.  Gladstone's  plans  will  be  pre- 
sented to  Parliament  in  October  next.  Should  that  prove  to  be  the  case,  I 
need  not  say  what  sincere  and  hearty  pleasure  it  would  give  me  to  follow 
my  revered  and  honoured  leader  once  more  at  the  head  of  a  united  Liberal 
Party.'  'To  coercion  I  object,'  exclahued  Colonel  Nicholas  Wood,  Tory 
member  for  the  Houghton-le-Spring  Division  of  Durham  ;  '  and  my  firm 
and  hearty  support  will  be  given  to  a  considerable  extension  and  improve- 
ment of  local  government  alike  to  the  people  of  England,  Scotland,  Wales 
and  Ireland,  delegated  by  and  under  the  supreme  control  of  an  Imperial 
Parliament,  m  which  they  are  fully  represented.'  '  I  indignantly  repu- 
diate the  imputation,'  said  Sir  Roper  Lethbridge,  the  Tory  member  for 
North  Kensington,  '  that  the  only  alternative  policy  is  one  of  coercion.  On 
the  contrary,  all  parties  in  the  United  Kingdom,  with  the  exception  of  the 
extremists  led  by  Mr.  Glad.-^tone  and  Mr.  Parnell,  are  now  fairly  agreed 


THE  HOME  RULE  STRUGGLE.  287 

on  the  general  lines  of  a  policy  that  shall  satisfy  all  the  legitimate  aspira- 
tions of  Irishmen  for  local  self-government,  that  shall  secure  the  return  of 
law  and  order  in  Ireland,  that  shall  treat  Ulster  as  fairly  as  the  other  pro- 
vinces, and  that  shall  at  the  same  time  maintain  unimpaired  the  unity  of 
the  empire  and  the  supremacy  of  the  Imperial  Parliament.'  'It  is  sug- 
gested,' said  Mr.  Boord,  Tory  member  for  Greenwich,  '  that  coercion  is  the 
only  alternative  to  Mr.  Gladstone's  scheme,  and  that  it  is  the  policy  of 
Lord  Salisbury.  The  suggestion  is  false.  Coercion,  if  it  means  anything 
in  this  connection,  implies  the  forcible  curtailment  of  the  rights  and  liber- 
ties of  the  Irish  people.  Lord  Salisbury,  on  the  contrary,  recommends  a 
firm  and  constitutional  government,  such  as  Ireland  has  been  unused  to  of 
late,  which,  by  the  suppression  of  crime,  would  secure  the  exercise  of  their 
rights  and  the  enjoyment  of  their  liberties  to  all  alike.'  Mr.  Evel^'i:!,  Tory 
member  for  Deptf ord,  said  '  that  he  could  not  agree  with  Mr.  Gladstone's 
statement  that  there  was  no  alternative  between  Home  E.ule  and  coercion. 
While  he  was  opposed  to  Home  Rule  as  revealed  in  the  new  Bill,  he  was 
also  averse  to  special  measures  of  coercive  legislation,  unless  such  were 
imperatively  necessary.  He  feared  if  by  special  legislation  they  endeavoured 
to  put  down  the  Land  League,  they  would  embark  on  a  dangerous  enter- 
prise, and  secret  societies  might  revive.'  Again  Mr.  Evelyn  said  :  '  I  have 
been  asked  v/hether  I  would  vote  for  coercion  in  Ireland.  I  have  always 
considered,  long  before  I  ever  thought  of  being  a  candidate  for  Deptford, 
that  the  Crimes  Act  which  was  introduced  by  Mr.  Gladstone  and  a  Whig 
Government  in  1SS2  was  a  most  abominable  and  unconstitutional 
measure.' 

So  the  election  was  fought.  The  results  were  much  better  than  might 
have  been  expected.  In  spite  of  all  opposition,  and  division,  and  lies,  Mr. 
Gladstone  was  able  to  carry  with  him  the  parts  of  the  country  where 
political  intelligence  is  most  keen.  Scotland  gave  him  42  supporters  to  30 
opponents  ;  Wales  gave  him  24  out  of  30  seats  ;  in  the  North  of  England 
the  preponderance  of  his  supporters  was  equally  great.  Northumberland 
gave  him  all  the  county  seats,  and  three  out  of  the  four  borough  seats  ; 
Durham  elected  8  Gladstonians  to  3  opponents  ;  and  of  the  county  seats 
in  Yorkshire  the  Gladstonians  won  18,  and  the  joint  opponents,  in  the 
shape  of  Liberal  Unionists  and  Tories,  were  but  10.  It  was  in  Lancashire, 
and  in  London  and  in  the  South  of  England  that  the  elections  went  mainly 
against  Mr.  Gladstone.  In  Lancashire  there  is  a  certain  amount  of  that 
Orangeism  which  hates  an  Irishman  more  because  of  his  religion  than  even 
his  nationality  ;  in  London  there  was  at  the  election  complete  disorganiza- 
tion ;  and  the  absurd  system  of  registration  which  deprives  a  man  of  a 
vote  if,  by  crossing  the  street,  he  gets  into  a  different  constituency,  had 
largely  reduced  the  Liberal  strength  ;  for  the  necessities  of  their  lives 
make  the  v/orking  class  more  migratory  than  other  classes  ;  and  in  the 
South  of  England  the  terrorism  of  the  squire  and  the  parson  still  largely 
prevail.  In  spite  of  all  these  things,  the  results  even  in  these  districts  of 
disaster  were  hopeful.  The  general  result  of  the  election  is  shown  in  the 
following  figures  :  The  aggregate  Liberal  vote  was  1,238,342,  while  the 
aggregate  Unionist  vote  was  1,316,327,  or  a  difference  of  but  77,985  in  a 
grand  total  of  2,554,669  votes.  To  put  it  roughly,  out  of  two  millions  and 
a  half  of  voters  the  Unionists  had  a  majority  of  less  than  eighty  thousand. 
This  was,  considering  the  circumstances,  an  extraordinarily  close  fight,  and 
an  extraordinarily  narrow  majority.  A  look  at  the  election  returns,  too, 
"vvill  show  a  great  falling-off  in  the  number  of  votes  polled,  especially  by  the 


2H8  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

Liberal  candidates.  This  means  that  the  election  was  lost,  not  by  the 
number  of  Tory  votes  or  Liberal  votes  cast  against  the  policy  of  Mr.  Glad- 
stone— it  was  lost  by  the  number  of  Liberals  who  did  not  vote  at  all.  In 
other  words,  it  was  lost  through  the  number  of  Liberals  who,  through  want 
of  knowledge  or  of  boldness  of  mind,  or  through  the  disti-action  caused  by 
the  sight  of  division  among  their  leaders,  the  frantic  appeals  to  save  their 
pockets  from  wholesale  plunder,  their  nation  from  dismemberment,  their 
co-religionists  from  annihilation,  found  themselves  unable  to  make  up  their 
minds.  In  this  respect  the  election  and  all  its  disaster  told  a  hopeful 
lesson.  Never  before  did  a  greac  and  almost  revolutionary  reform  come 
for  decision  before  the  great  tribunal  of  the  people  after  discussion  so  brief, 
and  never  before  in  the  history  of  England  did  a  great  reform  receive  so 
much  support  in  the  first  shock  of  battle.  •■• 

Mr.  Gladstone  resigned  when  the  elections  told  that  he  had  not  carried 
the  country  to  his  side,  and  a  Tory  Administration  came  into  power.  With 
scarcely  a  day's  delay  the  country  had  an  opportunity  of  comparing  the 
cries  of  the  General  Election  and  the  acts  of  those  whom  these  cries  had 
made  victorious.  The  country  had  refused  to  support  Mr.  Gladstone  be- 
cause he  proposed  to  buy  out  the  Irish  landlords,  and  because  his  scheme, 
they  were  told,  would  involve  loss  to  the  British  taxpayer.  The  very  first 
night  of  the  new  Parliament,  the  new  Ministers  declared  themselves  in 
favour  of  a  great  scheme  of  Land  Purchase.  '  I  do  not  believe,'  said  the 
Marquis  of  Salisbury,  '  that  any  tinkering  of  the  land  system  will  have  the 
slightest  eflFect  until  we  can  get  rid  of  the  duality  of  ownership  which  the 
Land  Act  of  1881  introduced.'  And  in  the  House  of  Commons  Lord 
Kandolph  Churchill  used  language  of  a  similar  import.  '  The  system  of 
single  OAvnership  of  land  in  Ireland,'  he  said,  *  we  believe,  may  be  the 
ultimate  solution  of  the  difficulties  of  the  Land  Question.'  This  was  bad 
enough  :  Mr.  Gladstone  had  been  defeated  in  order  to  prevent  Land  Pur- 
chase, and  here  were  his  conquerors  proposing  Land  Purchase  the  moment 
they  appeared  before  Parliament.  But  this  was  not  all.  The  main  argu- 
ment, as  has  been  seen,  against  Mr.  Gladstone's  proposal  was  that  it  would 
impose  taxation  on  the  British  taxpayer.  Mr.  Gladstone  entirely  denied 
this,  and  agreed  with  his  opponents  in  thinking  that  any  burden  on  the 
British  taxpayer  for  the  payment  of  the  Irish  landlord  would  be  monstrously 
inequitable.  But  here  were  his  conquerors,  and  the  chief  of  them  laid 
down  that  not  only  would  the  British  taxpayer  have  to  pay  for  the  Irish 
landlord,  but  that  he  ought.  Lord  Salisbury  was  dealing  with  the  judicial 
rents  fixed  by  the  Land  Courts,  and  with  the  demand  that  these  rents 
should  once  again  be  revised.  Such  a  general  demand  he  described  the 
Government  as  resolved  to  reject.  '  But,'  he  went  on,  '  if  it  should  come 
out  that  the  Courts  have  made  blunders,  and  that  there  is  that  impossibility 

I  The  reader  will  not  fail  to  observe  that  there  is  an  enormous  difference  between 
the  disparity  of  the  supporters  and  opponents  of  Mr.  Gladstone's  policy,  as  shown  in 
the  vote  of  the  people  and  in  the  number  of  members  returned.  The  discrepancy  in 
numbers  is  small :  the  discrepancy  in  members  returned  is  enormous.  In  a  '  Pall 
Mall  Gazette,  extra  '  on  the  General  Election  of  1SS6,  this  curious  fact  is  brought 
out  in  a  very  clear  manner.  The  plan  of  the  Pall  Mall  Gazette  is  to  put  side  by  side  in 
all  contested  elections  in  England  and  Scotland  an  '  ideal '  distribution  of  votes,  that  is 
to  say,  where  the  number  of  members  is  strictly  proportioned  to  the  number  of  votes, 
and  the  actual  distribution  of  votes.  The  result  arrived  at  is  that  proportional  justice 
would  have  given,  by  the  contested  elections,  209  to  the  Unionists  and  198  to  the 
Liberals  ;  whereas  256  have  gone  to  the  Unionists — that  is  to  saj^,  47  more  than  their 
due — and  only  151  (47  less  than  their  due)  to  the  Liberals.  A  verdict  which,  being 
analyzed,  shows  these  results  is  what  Tories  and  Unionists  calmly  describe  as  final  ■ 
and  irreversible. 


THE  HOME  RULE  STRUGGLE.  289 

in  any  case  of  paying  rent,  I  think  it  is  not  the  landlords  ivho  should  hear 
the  loss.  I  think  this  would  be  one  of  the  cases  for  the  application  of  the 
principle  of  purchase  by  the  State,  and  that  the  State,  and  not  the  landlords, 
must  suffer  for  the  errors  that  have  heen  viade.^ 

Let  me  pause  for  just  a  moment  to  examine  this  astonishing  proposition. 
The  assumption  is  that  the  rent  of  the  landlord  has  been  fixed  too  high 
'  through  blunders.'  What  would  be  the  natural  and  equitable  solution  ? 
That  as  the  landlord  has  been  receiving  too  much,  he  should  be  compelled  to 
charge  less  for  the  future,  if  not  to  restore  to  the  tenant  the  balance  between 
a  fair  rent  and  his  rack-rent  in  the  past.  The  plan  of  the  Marquis  of 
Salisbury  is  different.  Because  the  landlord  is  deprived  of  the  excess  over 
a  fair  rent  which  he  has  been  taking  from  his  unhappy  tenant,  he  is  io  be 
rewarded  by  the  assistance  of  the  British  taxpayer.  In  other  words,  some- 
body must  be  robbed  for  the  landlord  ;  if  not  his  tenant,  why,  t-'^en,  the 
English  taxpayer.  This  was  the  pretty  pass  to  which  Liberal  Unionists  had 
brought  things  by  rejecting  the  Land  proposals  of  Mr.  Gladstone. 

As  time  went  on,  more  and  more  of  the  idols  were  shattered  which  had. 
been  held  up  to  the  electorate  at  the  General  Election.  Mr.  Chamberlain 
had  gone  farther  than  almost  any  Irish  member  in  his  declarations  as  to  the 
urgency  and  the  extremeness  of  the  agrarian  crisis  which  had  been  created 
in  Ireland  by  the  depreciation  of  agricultural  prices.  While  denouncing 
the  Home  liule  Bill  of  Mr.  Gladstone,  in  1886,  he  had  proposed  to  meet 
the  agrarian  crisis  by  suspending  all  evictions  for  successive  terms  of  six 
months,  and  had  gone  the  length  of  asking  that  the  British  Exchequer 
should  pay  to  the  landlords  the  rent  the  suspension  of  which  was  thus  brought 
about.  Things  had  not  improved  since  this  speech  had  been  made.  In 
the  previous  Tory  Administration,  and  under  the  good  influence  of  Lord 
Carnarvon,  the  landlords  had  recognised  the  change  in  the  situation  of  the 
farmers,  and  had  given  large  redactions,  not  merely  on  the  ordinary  rents, 
but  even  on  the  judicial  rents,  that  is,  on  the  rents  already  reduced  by  the 
Land  Courts.  In  the  Autumn  Session  of  1886  Mr.  Parnell,  aware  of  the 
state  of  things  in  Ireland,  proposed  a  Bill  the  effect  of  which  would  have  been 
to  allow  the  tenants  to  make  a  claim  for  a  reduction  of  their  rents,  even  in  the 
cases  where  the  rents  had  been  fixed  by  the  Land  Courts.  This  Bill,  of 
course,  has  been  misrepresented,  like  all  proposals  made  by  the  Irish  Party. 
It  has  been  described  as  confiscation,  robbery,  and  all  the  rest,  and  most  of 
its  critics  have  declared  that  it  calmly  proposed  that  the  landlords  should 
be  robbed  of  fifty  per  cent,  of  their  entire  rents.  The  foundation  for  the 
latter  statement  is  that  the  Bill  contained  a  provision  that  the  tenant 
should  deposit  fifty  per  cent,  of  his  rent,  but  the  Bill  did  not  propose  that 
he  should  only  pay  fifty  per  cent.  The  deposit  of  the  half  of  his  rent  was 
the  necessary  preliminary  to  his  even  getting  a  chance  of  being  heard  by 
the  Court.  It  was  the  test  and  the  bond  of  the  tenants'  bona  fides.  The 
Court  had  perfect  liberty  afterwards,  in  case  the  tenant  did  not  make  good 
his  claim  for  a  reduction,  to  call  upon  him  to  give  to  his  landlord  every 
penny  of  the  balance  of  the  fifty  per  cent,  still  outstanding.  The  Tories 
denied,  or  explained  away,  the  existence  of  the  depreciation  in  prices, 
scouted  the  claim  on  behalf  of  the  tenants,  and  by  the  assistance  of  the 
Liberal  Unionists,  some  of  whom  voted  and  some  of  whom  stayed  away, 
were  able  to  reject  the  measure  of  the  Irish  leader. 

The  inevitable  result  followed.  Sir  Michael  Hicks-Beach  himself  found 
that  it  was  impossible  for  the  teiiants  to  pay  the  full  rents,  and  accordingly 
had  to  resort  to  threats  on  the  landlords  to  restrain  them  from  taking 

19 


290  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

advantage  of  their  full  legal  rights.  This  he  called  afterwards  '  pressure 
within  the  law.'  There  is  no  such  thing  as  '  pressure  within  the  law.' 
The  phrase  is  self-contradictory,  and  Sir  Michael  Hicks-Beach  was  simply 
doing  by  his  own  methods,  and  at  his  own  caprice,  that  which  Mr.  Parnell 
had  asked  him  to  do  by  the  statute  of  both  Houses  of  the  Legislature.  The 
leaders  of  the  tenants  followed  this  excellent  example.  On  many  estates 
the  landlords  refused  to  yield  to  the  pressure  of  the  Chief  Secretary,  and 
prepared  to  evict  their  tenants  wholesale  for  the  non-payment  of  rents, 
the  exorbitance  of  which  has  now  passed  out  of  the  region  of  controversy, 
is  admitted  by  landlords  and  confessed  by  the  report  of  the  Koyal  Com- 
mission, and  is  the  justification  for  the  Legislation  proposed  by  the  Govern- 
ment in  the  House  of  Lords.  The  position  was  exactly  the  same  as  in  1880. 
The  grievances  of  the  tenants  were  admitted  ;  the  Legislature  had  been 
asked,  and  had  refused,  to  stand  between  them  and  their  oppressors,  and 
the  people  accordingly  were  thrown  upon  their  own  resources.  This  was 
the  origin  of  what  came  to  be  known  as  the  'Plan  of  Campaign.'  This 
.'plan  of  campaign,'  again,  has  been  very  much  misunderstood  in  this 
country.  Like  Mr.  Parnell's  Bill,  it  has  been  denounced  as  a  measure  of 
pure  confiscation,  and  has  been  represented  as  a  scheme  for  the  robbing  of 
the  landlord  of  all  his  rent.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  what  took  place  under 
the  '  Plan  of  Campaign  '  was  that  the  landlord  was  asked  to  give  a  reduction 
as  small,  and  in  many  cases  smaller,  than  would  be  given  by  the  Land 
Court.  The  tenants  were  gathered  together,  and  asked,  by  begging  or  by 
borrowing,  or  by  any  other  means,  to  collect  all  their  rent,  minus  the  abate- 
ment which  had  been  demanded  ;  if  the  landlord  accepted  the  offer,  the 
money  was  given  to  him  immediately,  and  without  any  abatement  what- 
ever. In  cases  where  the  landlords  refused,  the  money  was  employed  for 
the  protection  of  the  tenants.  This  would  have  been  an  extreme 
expedient  if  the  country  were  in  an  ordinary  condition.  But  in  Ireland, 
with  all  the  resources  of  the  Government  at  the  back  of  the  landlords, 
v/hether  right  or  wrong,  whether  evicting  for  just  or  exorbitant  rents, 
the  tenants  were  perfectly  justified  in  adopting  such  an  extreme  method 
of  self-defence.  In  any  case,  the  '  Plan  of  Campaign  '  has  done  good,  and 
has  been  justified  by  the  action  of  the  Courts,  which  in  more  than  one  case 
made  reductions  larger  than  those  which  had  been  demanded  under  the 
*  Plan  of  Campaign.' 

And  now  we  come  to  the  final  contrast  between  the  pledges  of  the  Tories 
and  Liberal  Unionists  in  the  General  Election  of  1886  and  their  subsequent 
action.  I  have  shown  how  indignantly  the  Liberal  Unionists  and  Torie« 
repudiated  the  idea  that  the  choice  of  the  country  was  between  concession 
on  the  one  hand  and  coercion  on  the  other,  and  how  man  after  man  pledged 
himself  against  coercion.  In  face  of  these  facts  the  Government  began 
the  Session  of  1887  by  the  announcement  of  a  Coercion  Bill.  In  this  way 
they  were  guilty  of  as  flagrant  a  breach  of  faith  with  the  constituencies  as 
the  annals  of  this  country  can  show  ;  and,  in  fact,  this  Parliament,  in  pro- 
posing coercion,  has  exceeded,  perhaps  nob  its  legal  powers,  but  certainly 
its  moral  authority.  I  need  only  sketch  rapidly  a  measure  over  which 
a  controversy  is  still  going  on.  The  opinion  is  universal  among  all 
true  Liberals  that  never  was  a  Coercion  Bill  brought  forward  with  less 
cause  and  with  less  excuse.  In  all  previous  instances  Ministers  have  been 
able  to  give  as  an  apology  for  their  proposals  whole  arrays  of  statistics  as 
proof  of  the  existence  of  an  epidemic  of  crime.  In  the  case  of  the  present 
Bill,  the  Chief  Secretary  began  by  producing  no  statistics  at  all,  and  even 


THE  HOME  RULE  STRUGGLE.  291 

made  it  a  merit  that  he  had  no  statistics.  '  I  stated  before,'  he  said  on 
the  motion  for  leave  to  introduce  the  Bill,  '  and  I  state  again,  that  we  do 
not  rest  our  case  upon  statistics  of  agrarian  crime  in  Ireland.'  The  reader 
has  an  opportunity  of  comparing  the  action  of  Mr.  Balfour  in  this  respect 
with  that  of  the  late  Mr.  Forster  when  he  brought  forward  the  Coercion  Bill 
of  1881.  By-and-by  this  style  of  treating  the  proposals  was  found  too  absurd. 
*  Then  the  Home  Secretary,'  sr,id  Mr.  Morley  (speech  on  going  into  com- 
mittee on  the  Bill) '' and  the  Attorney-General  say,  "Oh,  by  the  way, 
there  are  statistics  of  crime  which  are  of  great  importance."  But  these 
statistics,  though  they  were  furnished  at  first  with  much  triumph,  did  not 
advance  the  cause  of  the  Government.  What  were  these  statistics  ?  The 
Government  abandoned  at  the  very  beginning  of  the  argument  any  com- 
parison between  the  amount  of  crime  which  justified  the  Coercion  Bill  of 
1887,  and  the  amount  of  crime  that  was  held  to  justify  the  Coercion  Bills 
of  1881  and  1882,  And  well  they  might,  for  this  is  how  the  'figures 
stood  : 

Total  of  agrarian 
Year.  crimes. 

1880  ..,         ...         .^         2,585 

1881       ,. 4,439 

1882       3;433 

1886       1,056 

The  enormous  disparity  will  be  at  once  perceived  between  the  crimes  of 
the  years  upon  which  Mr.  Forster  founded  his  claim  for  coercion  and  the 
crimes  of  the  year  which  were  held  by  Mr.  Balfour  to  justify  his  demand 
for  coercion. 

The  expedient  adopted  under  these  circumstances  was  to  confine  the 
comparison  to  the  three  years  preceding  the  proposal  of  coercion.  The 
result  of  this  compa,rison  was  that  the  crimes  of  1884  were  found  to  be 
762  ;  of  1885,  916  ;  and  of  1886,  1,025.  This  certainly  showed  an  increase, 
but  it  would  be  the  grossest  exaggeration  to  say  that  it  showed  that  vast 
increase  of  crime  v\^hich  alone  justifies  coercion.  The  reader  has  again  to 
be  warned  against  taking  these  totals  as  meaning  totals  .of  serious,  aggra- 
vated, heinous  crime.  In  these  statistics  the  pettiest  and  smallest  offence 
is  classed  as  a  '  crime  ' — a  petty  larceny,  an  injury  to  property  to  the  extent 
of  a  few  shillings,  an  assault  that  in  a  London  police-court  would  entail  no 
higher  penalty  than  a  fine  of  five  shillings  or  forty-eight  hours'  imprison- 
ment. This  abuse  of  the  word  '  crime  '  has  already  been  adverted  to  in 
dealing  with  Mr.  Forster's  case  for  coercion  ;  it  is  a  fact  which  has  to  be 
again  and  again  dwelt  upon  in  dealing  with  pictures  of  the  state  of  Ireland ; 
it  is  this  abuse  of  the  word  '  crime '  that  has  given  to  one  of  the  most 
religious,  upright,  and  peaceful  people  in  the  world  the  blackest  criminal 
character  perhaps  among  any  of  the  other  nations  of  the  earth.  But  taking 
coercion  in  its  Ministerial  and  official,  and  not  in  its  popular  sense,  the 
increase  of  crime  in  the  years  1885  and  1886  over  that  of  1884  did  not 
justify  the  demand  for  coercion.  It  was  his  appreciation  of  the  fact  that 
induced  the  Home  Secretary  to  put  forward  a  discovery  which,  if  well- 
founded,  materially  assisted  the  Government.  '  Since  October,  1886,'  he 
said,  '  outrages  in  Ireland  have  risen  83  per  cent '  (speech  on  second  reading 
of  the  Coercion  Bill).  This  statement  produced  a  great  effect,  and  very 
naturally  so  ;  but  it  involved  a  suppression  of  fact  that  again  involved  a 
most  flagrant  suggestion  of  what  was  false.  It  was  quite  true  that  the 
crimes  for  the  first  quarter  of  1887  were  largely  in  excess  of  the  crimes  of 


^^2  TBE  PARNELL  MOVEMENf, 

the  last  quarter  of  1886  ;  but  in  the  first  place,  that  was  no  argument  in 
the  mouth  ot  the  Government.  The  first  quarter  of  1887  ends  on  March 
31  ;  the  Coercion  Bill  was  announced  on  March  21,  and,  of  course,  was 
contemplated  at  a  much  earlier  date.  In  fact,  it  was  resolved  and  con- 
sidered upon  when  the  Ministry  met  Parliament  ;  and  therefore  it  cannot 
have  been  on  the  crimes  of  the  first  quarter  of  1887  that  the  Coercion  Bill 
was  founded.  The  Chief  Secretary  had  not  these  statistics  in  his  hands 
when  he  made  his  speech  introducing  the  Bill,  and  as  has  been  seen,  expressly 
stated  that  he  did  not  found  his  case  on  statistics  of  crime.  The  second 
answer  to  the  statistics  of  the  Home  Secretary  is  that  his  basis  of  com- 
parison is  false.  He  compared  the  crimes  of  the  first  quarter  of  1887  with 
the  crimes  of  the  last  quarter  of  1886  ;  the  proper  method  of  comparison 
15  to  compare  the  quarter  of  one  year  with  the  corresponding  quarter  of 
the  preceding  year,  where  there  is  something  like  a  similarity  of  circum- 
stances. The  following  table  shows  the  crime — or  so-called  'crime' — for 
the  four  quarters  of  1886  and  the  first  quarter  of  1887  : 

For  the  quarter  ending  March  31,  1886 256 

Tor  the  quarter  ending  Jime  30,  1886      297 

Tor  the  quarter  ending  September  30,  1886         ...         ...         ...  306 

Toi  the  quarter  ending  December  31,  18S6         ...  ...         ...  166 

For  the  quarter  ending  March  31,  1887 241 

This  is  a  remarkable  table.  It  shows  that  the  first  quarter  of  1887,  on 
which  the  Home  Secretary  relied  as  upon  a  sudden  and  opportune  revela- 
tion in  favour  of  the  policy  of  the  Government,  had  less  crime  than  any 
quarter  of  the  preceding  year,  except  the  last  quarter.  And  this  last 
quarter  for  1886  deserves  special  consideration  for  its  own  sake,  as  well  as 
a  test  of  the  honesty  of  the  Home  Secretary's  style  of  comparison.  It  had, 
as  has  been  seen,  but  166  crimes  ;  that  is — fewer  crimes  than  the  first, 
fewer  than  the  second,  fewer  than  the  third  quarter  of  1886.  All  this 
although  the  December  quarter  is  nearly  always  the  quarter  which,  in 
Insh  experience,  is  most  deeply  stained  with  crime.  But  in  1886  the  crime 
of  the  December  quarter  is  lower  than  that  of  any  of  the  other  quarters  of 
the  year.  It  stands  out  in  bold  relief  as  the  crimeless  winter  quarter 
of  its  year,  which  makes  two  facts  the  more  remarkable.  First,  that 
this  especially  crimeless  winter  quarter  was  the  quarter  when  the  Plan  of 
Campaign  was  in  fullest  operation  ;  and  secondly,  was  the  quarter  when  the 
Government  resolved  that  Ireland  stood  in  need  of  coercion. 

In  the  absence  of  statistics  Mr.  Balfour  proposed  coercion  on  three  other 
groimds.  The  first  were  a  series  of  stories — 'narratives,'  or  'anecdotes,'  Mr. 
Balfour  himself  called  them — which  were  not  authenticated  nor  confirmed  ; 
in  fact,  were  the  merest  gossip.  '  On  what  authority,'  interrupted  Mr. 
Parnell,  when  the  Chief -Secretary  was  telling  one  of  his  'narratives'  or 
'  anecdotes,'  '  on  what  authority  does  the  right  hon.  gentleman  rely  for 
these  statements  ?'  '  I  am  giving  the  House,'  was  the  reply  of  Mr.  Balfour, 
*  the  facts  M^hich  I  have  obtained  on  my  responsibility  from  what  I  con- 
sider an  autlientic  source  !'  In  other  words,  the  gossip  which  Mr.  Balfour 
heard,  and  Mi.  Balfour  believed,  the  House  of  Commons  was  likewise 
bound  to  accept  as  gospel  truth  !  Were  ever  the  liberties  of  a  single  and 
a  common  pickpocket  taken  away  on  evidence  so  flimsy  as  that  which 
justified  the  Chief- Secretary  in  taking  away  the  liberties  of  a  whole  nation  ? 
But  though  the  Chief-Secretary  was  vague  in  his  'anecdotes,'  and  though 
the  Bill  was  being  hurried  through  as  fast  as  the  Government  could  manage 


THE  HOME  RULE  STRUGGLE.  293 

there  was  plenty  of  time  to  test  and  to  destroy  most  of  the  cases  brought 
forward  by  the  Chief-Secretary.  One  was  the  case  of  a  farmer  named 
Clarke,  mdicted  for  obtaining  money  by  means  of  a  forged  document.  '  The 
case,'  said  Mr.  Balfour,  '  was  proved  in  the  clearest  manner.  .  .  .  The  judge 
charged  strongly  for  conviction,  but  the  jury,  which  consisted  principally 
of  farmers  in  the  same  rank  of  life  as  the  prisoner,  disagreed.'  Mr.  Parnell 
was  able  to  prove  that  Clarke  was  not  a  Catholic  farmer  but  a  Protestant 
maltster,  was  not  a  National  Leaguer,  and  was  acquitted  owing  to  the 
complicated  nature  of  the  accounts  in  dispute.  A  second  case  was  that  of 
a  man  called  John  Hogan.  '  He  was  charged,'  said  the  Chief  Secretary, 
'  with  a  most  horrible  outrage  upon  a  girl.  He  was  acquitted  by  the  jury 
in  face  of  the  clearest  evidence.  And  why?  Because  he  was  a  well- 
known  leader  in  that  neighbourhood. '  The  association  between  an  outrage 
upon  a  woman  and  political  or  agrarian  combination,  is  rather  remote, 
especially  in  a  country  where  such  offences  are  rare,  and  are  bitterly 
resented  ;  but  in  any  case,  the  whole  story  was  an  invention.  Hogan  was 
charged  with  rape  ;  it  came  out  in  evidence  that  he  had  been  five  hours  in 
the  company  of  the  woman  on  the  evening  when  the  offence  was  stated  to 
have  been  committed  ;  it  was  alleged  that  the  consent  of  the  woman  was 
given ;  the  prisoner  himself  was  examined,  and  the  jury  believed  his 
evidence  ;  and  according  to  a  barrister  who  was  present,  and  who  wrote  to 
ail  Irish  member,  were  completely  justified  in  believing  him.  A  third 
'anecdote' — this  was  given  by  the  Attorney- General — perhaps  even  more 
closely  shov/s  the  kind  of  case  on  which  the  Government  made  their  pro- 
posals. '  At  the  County  Kerry  Assizes,'  said  the  Attorney-General,  '  on 
March  11,  1887,  Patrick  Hickey  was  indicted  for  a  moonlight  offence  at 
the  house  of  Mr.  Casey,  a  farmer.  During  the  meltt  the  disguise  of  one  of 
the  attacking  parties  fell  off,  and  Casey  recognised  Hickey,  his  own  cousin. 
No  evidence  was  called  for  the  defence,  and  a  verdict  was  given  "  Not 
guilty."  Here  certainly  was  a  very  bad  case,  if  true  ;  but  what  happened?' 
'  I  rise  to  order,'  said  Mr.  T.  Harrington.  '  I  defended  the  prisoner,  and 
I  pledge  my  word  to  the  House,  and  I  am  willing  to  abide  by  the  decision  of 
Mr.  Justice  O'Brien,  if  he  did  not  directly  charge  for  the  acquittal  of  the 
prisoner  on  the  ground  that  the  charge  was  a  fabrication,  and  if  it  was  not 
at  the  judge's  instance  that  I  declined  to  examine  any  witnesses  for  the 
defence.'  And  the  only  reply  the  Attorney-General  had  to  this  crushing 
refutation  of  this  charge  was  a  joke,  and  the  statement  that  he  had  founded 
his  assertion  on  a  report  of  the  case  in  the  Freeman's  Journal. 

The  second  plea  of  Mr.  Balfour  was  illegal  or  violent  action  on  the  part 
of  branches  of  the  National  League.  '  Everyone  knows,'  said  Mr.  Balfour, 
'  that  boycotting  prevails  over  certain  districts  of  Ireland  and  makes  life 
perfectly  intolerable.  Everyone  knows  that  every  branch  of  the  National 
League  uses  boycotting  as  the  means  of  carrying  out  its  decrees.  ...  I 
have  a  good  many  cases  of  such  occurrences  here,  which  prove  that  it  is 
done  audaciously  all  over  Ireland.  One  instance  is  from  Mayo,  and  it  is 
reported  in  United  Ireland.  In  this  case  a  branch  of  the  League  passed  a 
resolution  '  that  no  tradesman  shall  work  for  any  person  who  cannot  pro- 
duce his  card  of  membership  of  the  League.  The  hon.  member  for  Cork 
stated  that  any  branch  of  the  League  that  put  such  pressure  on  woiild  be 
immediately  dissolved.' 

Mr.  Parnell :  '  So  it  was  ;  that  branch  was  immediately  dissolved.' 
Not  shamed  by  this  exposure,  Mr.  Balfour  went  on  to  another  case,  and, 
it  will  be  seen,  with  the  like  result. 


294  THE  PARNELL  MOVEMENT. 

Mr.  A.  J.  Balfour  :  '  Then  there  was  another  case  in  Sligo.' 

Mr.  T.  Harrington  :  '  Yes,  and  I  called  for  the  resignation  of  the 
committee.' 

Finally  there  were  the  charges  of  the  judges.  One  case  will  be  sufficient 
to  show  the  value  of  this  evidence.  Of  course  the  hero  is  Mr.  Justice 
Lawson,  one  of  the  sinister  brood,  the  story  of  whose  malign  influence  runs 
through  so  many  of  my  pages.  Here  was  the  description  of  County  Mayo 
in  a  charge  of  Judge  Lawson  v.'hich  Mr.  Balfour  quoted  in  his  first  speech 
in  favour  of  his  Coercion  Bill.  '  He  regretted  to  say  that  on  this,  the  first 
occasion  on  which  he  had  the  honour  of  presiding  in  this  court  of  the 
County  Mayo,  he  could  not  say  anything  to  them  in  favour  of  the  state  of 
things  which  existed  in  that  county.  .  .  .  The  present  state  of  things  was 
morally  unsatisfactory,  and  according  to  the  reports  made  to  him,  approached 
as  near  to  rebellion  against  the  authority  of  the  country  as  anything  short 
of  civil  war  could  be.' 

This  charge  was  delivered  on  March  10,  and  it,  therefore,  referred  to  the 
sta,te  of  the  county  in  the  first  quarter  of  1887.  There  was  accordingly  no 
opportunity  of  testing  its  accuracy  until  the  Government  produced  the 
returns  of  crime  for  this  quarter.  When  these  returns  were  published,  an 
astonishing  discovery  was  made.  The  county,  as  has  been  seen,  was 
described  as  being  '  as  near  to  rebellion  against  the  authority  of  the  country 
as  anything  short  of  civil  war  could  be.'  What  were  the  facts?  The 
county  has  a  population  of  230,000 ;  in  three  months  the  total  number  offences 
in  this  vast  population  was  12,  and  of  these  7  were  threatening  letters  !  When 
one  looked  into  the  offences,  the  revelation  was  still  more  extraordinary. 
In  a  county  '  as  near  to  rebellion  against  the  authority  of  the  country  as 
anything  short  of  civil  war,'  there  was  not  one  case  of  murder,  nor  of 
manslaughter,  nor  firing  at  the  person,  nor  of  suspicion  to  murder  ;  not 
one  assault  on  a  bailiff,  or  a  police-constable,  or  a  process-server  ! 

Such,  then,  was  the  case  for  coercion  ;  the  purposes  which  it  was  intended 
to  serve  were  as  difficult  to  understand,  for  each  different  advocate  of 
the  Bill  gave  a  different  ground  for  its  existence.  '  This  was  a  Bill,'  said 
Mr.  Balfour  in  the  House  of  Commons,  *  to  put  down  crime.  ...  It  was 
not  conflicts  between  landlord  and  tenant  they  desired  to  put  down,  it  was 
not  combinations  they  desired  to  crush  ;'  but  the  Marquis  of  Salisbury  in  the 
House  of  Lords  had  quite  a  different  tale  to  tell.  '  Our  position,'  he  said, 
'  is  that  the  Land  War  must  cease.  We  have  offered  to  the  other  House  of 
Parliament  a  measure,  not  without  hesitation,  in  order  to  put  a  stop  to 
certain  combinations.'  Similarly  Mr.  Balfour  and  the  other  Ministers 
vehemently  denied  that  the  Bill  was  aimed  at  political  opponents,  while 
the  Marquis  of  Hartington  blurted  out  in  a  speech  at  Edinburgh  that  the 
main  object  of  the  Bill  was  to  put  down  the  Irish  Party.* 

^  *  I  believed,  as  I  still  believe,  that  I  have  taken  many  opportunities  upon  previous 
occasions  of  saying  that  there  is  in  Ireland  a  revolutionary  party  which  relies  upon 
the  support  of  the  still  more  revolutionary  party  in  America,  who  have  acquired  over 
the  minds  of  the  people  of  Ireland  an  midue  and  excessive  influence,  which  has  to  bo 
contended  with  and  to  be  overthi-own  before  a  tinal  settlement  and  solution  can  be 
arrived  at.  The  conflict  with  that  party  was  a  conflict  which  was  in  progress  during 
the  whole  of  these  years  to  which  I  have  referred,  when  Mr.  Gladstone's  Government 
was  in  power,  from  1880  to  1885.  That  conflict  was  unhappily  suspended  when  the 
Conservative  Government  came  into  office  in  1885  ;  and  that  conflict  was  still  more 
unhappily  absolutely  suspended  when  the  late  Government  came  into  power  on  tho 
basis  of  surrender  and  concession.  That  conflict  is  now  being  renewed  ;  that  conflict 
will  now  have  to  be  decided  one  way  or  the  other,  and  it  will  not  be  until  the  final 
decision  of  that  conflict  has  taken  place  that  the  field  will  in  my  judgment  be  left 


THE  HOME  RULE  STRUGGLE.  295 

When  we  come  to  the  character  of  the  measure  we  find  that  it  carries 
out  the  views  of  Lord  Salisbury  and  Lord  Hartington,  and  not  the  bland 
pledges  of  Mr.  Balfour.  It  makes  no  distinction  whatever  between 
ordinary  crime  and  political  crime.  Under  the  various  clauses  of  the  Bill 
it  is  in  the  power  of  the  Lord-Lieutenant  to  stop  every  word  written  or 
spoken,  and  every  combination,  agrarian  or  political,  which  do  not  recom- 
mend themselves  to  his  views.  In  fact,  the  Coercion  Bill  places  Ireland 
under  a  regime,  as  despotic  as  any  that  exists  in  any  part  of  the  world.  This 
measure,  even  at  the  moment  at  which  I  write,  is  being  carried  through  the 
House  by  an  abundant  use  of  the  closure,  and  before  long  it  will  be  passed 
into  law.  It  is  to  be  accompanied  by  a  Land  Bill,  the  merits  of  which  we 
cannot  finally  pronounce  upon,  but  which  according  to  the  general  impression 
is  as  much  a  sham  as  the  Coercion  Bill  is  a  reality.  We  are  thus  on  the  eve 
once  more  of  a  conflict  between  the  Irish  people  on  one  side  and  despotic 
methods  on  the  other.  In  that  conflict  there  will  be  much  suffering,  and 
sorrow,  and  bitterness,  but  nobody  who  has  read  the  story  in  the  preceding 
pages  of  similar  conflicts  in  the  past  will  have  muxih  doubt  as  to  the  final 
result.  The  Irish  people  have  had  to  struggle  with  Coercion  Acts  before, 
and  have  conquered  them.  This  they  have  done  when  circumstances  were 
much  less  favourable  than  they  are  at  the  present  moment.  Between  the 
present  and  previous  struggles  there  is  a  vast,  a  gigantic  and  revolutionary 
difference.  In  the  past  England  stood  solid  against  Ireland.  In  the 
present  Ireland  has  no  firmer  friends  or  more  ardent  sympathisers  or  more 
active  combatants  on  her  side  than  large  sections  of  the  English  people. 
The  hopeful  thing  about  all  this  controversy  is  the  opportunity  it  has  given 
of  testing  the  conscience  of  a  democracy,  and  the  fact  that  the  democracy 
has  stood  the  test.  Whatever  other  classes  of  British  society  may  do 
against  Ireland,  the  English  masses  stand  steadily  at  her  back.  In  the 
alliance  which  has  thus  been  produced  already  a  large  amount  of  the  old 
bitterness  and  the  old  hatred  between  the  two  peoples  is  perishing.  This 
alliance  has  done  more  to  obliterate  the  evil  memories  of  the  past  than  any 
other  event.  And  so  out  of  the  evil  sown  by  the  Government  good,  for 
once,  has  come. 

I  have  now  traced  for  the  readers  of  this  work  the  history  of  the  greater 
part  of  the  period  that  has  elapsed  since  the  Act  of  Union  was  passed. 
These  pages  are  intended  as  an  indictment  of  the  Act.  I  have  proved 
that  that  Act  has  cost  the  Irish  people  more  than  a  million  of  lives 
by  hunger,  and  upwards  of  three  millions  by  exile  ;  that  it  has  produced 
three  rebellions  and  eighty-seven  Coercion  Acts,  and  that  thus,  while  called 
an  Act  of  Union,  it  has  been  the  cause  of  separation  between  the  two 
nations.  I  close  the  volume  with  a  strong  hope  that  the  last  stage  of  the 
struggle,  though  fierce,  will  be  short,  that  the  drear  and  tragic  monotony 
of  famine,  emigration,  revolt,  imprisonment  and  death  will  at  .  last 
be  brought  to  an  end,  and  that  before  long  the  hideous  facts  recorded 
in  the  preceding  pages  will  read  like  the  recollections  of  nightmares  that 
fly  before  the  growing  day. 


clear  for  any  Government  or  any  party  to  propose  either  a  final  solution  of  the  agrarian 
questions  which  are  the  real  root  of  the  evils  of  Ireland,  or  to  make  a  final  offer  or 
proposal  for  a  concession  to  the  Irish  people  of  those  extended  powers  and  opportunities 
for  self-government  which  we,  as  well  as  any  other  portion  of  the  people  of  this 
country,  are  perfectly  willing  to  grant  to  Ireland,  to  Scotland,  or  to  the  people  of 
England.'— Ti7?tes,  April  18.  1887. 


INDEX. 


Aberdeen",  Lord,  104,  106 
Absenteeism,  16,  17 
Adair,  John  George,  112,  117,  IIS,  119 
Agi-arian  crime  (Ireland),  214,  215,  216, 

217 
Agricultural  labourers  (Irisli),  120 
Alexander,  Mr.,  103 
Allen,  William  Philip,  136 
Allman,  Charlotte,  177 
American  Irish.     See  Irish  Americans 

,,        Land  League,  173 
Anglesey,  Marquis  of,  8 
Archdale,  Mr.,  261 
Argyll,  Duke  of,  197 
Anns  Act,  15,  20,  21,  227 
Arrears  Act,  251,  252,  253 
Arterial  Drainage  (Ireland)  Act,  17,  21 
Ashbourne,  Lord.     See  Gibson 
Atlxlone,  S9,  90,  100,  101,  264 


B. 

Balfotjs,  Mr.   A.  J.,  259,   290,  291,  292. 

293,  294,  295 
Ballingarry,  48 
Ballot,  139 
Bantry,  Earl  of,  208 
Barnes,  Mr.  A.,  285,  286 
Barran,  Sir  H.,  75 
Barry,  John,  195,  196,  209,  226 

,,        Judge,  123,  245 
Barton,  Capt.,  261 
Baumann,iiMr.,  285 
Beaconsfield,  Lord,  29,  76,  92,    98,   155, 

174. 
Belfast,  275 
Bellingham,  Mr.,  265 
Bentinck,  Lord  George,  28,  29,  46,  47 
Berkeley,  Bishop,  22 
Bessborough  Commission,  202 
Biggar,  Joseph  Gillis,  141,  146,  147,  148, 

149,  154,  155,  156,  157,  158,  159, 161,  173, 

196,  207,  222,  223,  224,  226,  239,  250 
Blake,  Mr.,  M.P.,  196 

,,      Mrs.  James,  113 
Blakeney,  General,  8 
Blosse,  Sir  Robert,  112 
Blunt,  Mr.  "W.,  271 
Bond,  Major,  229,  230 
Boord,  Mr.,  287 
Borough  Franchise,  Irish,  213 
Bowyer,  Sir  George,  141 


Boycotting,  203 

Boyd,  Rochford,  113 

Bradlaugh,  Mr.,227 

Brady,  Joe,  239 

'  Brass  Band."     See  '  Pope's  Brass  Band 

Brennan,  Joseph,  207 
,,         Thomas,  173 

Brett,  Sergeant,  136 

Brewster,  Mr.,  106 

Bright,  John,  98,  177,  178,  20D,  206,  283 

Brodrick,  Mr.,  263 

Brooks,  Maurice,  196 

Brougham,  Lord,  14,  77 

Browne,  Bishop,  101,  106 

Brownlow,  Mr.,  16,  17,  21 

Burke,  General  Thomas,  136 

„      Mr.,  Assassination  of,  249,  256 

Butt,  Isaac,  opposes  O'Connell  in  Repeal 
debate  in  Dublin  Corporation,  9  ;  heada 
Home  Rule  movement,  138  ;  his  early 
career,  140  ;  character  and  genius,  140, 
141,  142  ;  political  difficulties,  140  ; 
character  of  his  party,  141  ;  his  early 
policy,  144  ;  its  failure,  145  ;  contrasted 
with  Biggar,  156  ;  reproves  Obstruc- 
tives, 158  ;  denounces  their  tactics, 
158  ;  retires  from  leadership,  162  ;  de- 
cline and  death,  163  ;  review  of  his 
policy,  163  ;  effect  of  his  death,  163. 

Buxton,  Mr.  S.,  276,  280 

Byrne,  Mr.  Garrett,  195,  196,  226,  250 


Callan,  Mr.,  196,  250 

'  Carding,'  217,  218 

Cardwell,  Mr.,  126,  127 

Carey,  James,  195,  196,  257 

Cai-lingford,  Lord,  234 

Carlisle,  Lord,  8,  128,  129 

Carnarvon,  Lord,  262,  272,  289 

Castle.     See  Dublin  Castle 

Catholic  Defence  Association,  94,  95,  98 

Catholic  Emancipation,  S,  11 

Catholic  Telegraph,  95 

Cavendish,  Lord  Frederick,  Assassina- 
tion of,  249,  256 

Census  Commissioners',  39,  42,  43 

Central  Tenants'  Defence  Association, 
170 

Chaine,  Mr.,  265 

Challemel-Lacour,  M.,  179 

Chamberlain,  Joseph,  ]64,  202,  206,  "256, 
266,  270,  273,  283,  289 


INDEX. 


297 


Cliaplin,  Mr.,  155,  262 

Cholera,  42,  54 

Christian,  Judge,  122 

ChurcMll,  LordR.,  264,  266,  267,  270,  274, 

288 
Civil  BiU  Ejectments,  17,  18,  20 
Clanricarde,  Lord,  140 
Clarendon,  Lord,  48 
Clerkenwell  Prison,  explosion  at,  136 
Clontarf  meeting,  12,  13 
Cobbett,  William,  22 
Coercion,  27 
Coercion  Acts,  15,  IS,  19,  20,  21,  27,  28, 

29,  70,  71,  75,  76,  214 
Coffins,  hinged,  4b 
CoUings,  Mr.  Jesse,  275 
Colthurst,  Colonel,  196 
Commins,  Dr.,  196,  250 
Compensation  for  disturbance,  200,  201 
Conciliation  Hall,  49 
Condon,  Edward  O'Meara,  136,  137 
Constabulary     Circular,    extraordinary, 

246 
Cook,  Dr.,  85 

Corbet,  Mr.,  195,  196,  226,  250 
Cork  Daihi  Herald,  254 
Cork  Historical  Society,  176 
Corn  Laws,  Abolition  of,  19 
'  Corruption  Committee,'  103 
Corydon,  J.,  169 
Cowper,  Earl,  247 
Crawford,  Sharman,  17,  21,  73,  74,  75,  76, 

126 
Crimes  Act,  250,  266 
Crimes  (Irish),  291,  292 
Croke,  Archbishop,  257 
Cross,  Sir  R.,  222 
Crowbar  Brigade,  114 
Cuban  rebellion,  190, 191 
Cullen,  Cardinal,  93,  94,  101 

D. 

Daily  Express,  261,  262 

Daily  Neios,  265 

Daily  Telegraph,  132,  143 

Daly,  Mr.,  M.P.,  196,  226 

Davis,  Thomas,  12 

Davitt,  Michael,  168,  169,  170,  173,  225, 

235,  254 
Dawson,  Mr.  C,  196,  213,  226 
Deasy's  Act,  127 
Deasy,  Captain,  136 
Denman,  Judge,  14 
Deputy-Speaker.    See  Playfair 
Derby,  Lord,  104 
Derry  Standard,  118 
Derryveigh,  117 
D'Esterre,  11 

Devon  Conamission,  17,  23,  24 
Dilke,  Sir  Charles,  182,  206,  218,  266 
Dillon,  Mr.  John,  173,  193,  194,  204,  207, 

225,  226,  231,  239,  250,  273 
Dillon,  Mr.  John  B.,  12,  48,  49, 193 
Disestablished  Irish  Church.     See  Irish 

Church 
Disraeli,  Mr.    See  Beaconsfield 
Dissentient  Liberals,  283,  284,  294 
Disturbance  Bill.     See  '  Compensation  for 

Distnrl  1:1  lice ' 


Doherty,  Mr.,  17 

'  Dove  of  Elphin,'  101,  106 

Downing,  Captain  D.  J . ,  187  . 

Downing,  Mr.  McCarthy,  96,  156 

'  Droit  de  Seigneur,'  116 

Drummond,  Mr.,  8 

Dublin  Corporation,  9,  25,  26 

Duffy,  Sir  Charles  Gavan,  9,  12,  47,  48, 

49,  86,  92,  94,  95,  103,  106 
Duggan,  Bishop,  148 
'  Durham  letter,'  87 
'  Duty-work,'  16 
Dyke,  Sir  W.  H.,  267 

E. 

Ebrington,  Lord,  8 
Ecclesiastical  Titles  Bill,  92,  93,  98 
Edward  III.,  statute  of,  241 
Egan,  Mr.  Patrick,  173,  207,  254 
Eglinton,  Lord,  104,  l05 
Emigration  (Irish),  44,  45,  69,  131 
Emigration  (Irish)  (1849-60  and  1861-70), 

131 
Emly,  Lord,  91,  98 
Encumbered  Estates  Act,  23,  68,  69 

,,  Court,  121 

Ennis,  Sir  J.,  265 
Errington,  Mr.,  196 
Estate  Rules.     See  Office  Rules 
Evelyn,  Mr.,  287 

Evictions,  20,  167,  200,  201,  231,  244 
Exports,  Irish  (1841-49),  79,  SO 

F. 

Fair  rents,  85 

Famine,  Irish,  16, 21,  22 

Fay,  Mr.  P.  McC,  162,  196 

Feniauism,  134,  135 

Finigan,  Mr.  Lysaght,  185,  196,  226 

Fitzgerald,    J.    D.    (Judge,    afterwards 
Lord),  110,  122,  212,  264 
„         Baron,  122,  229 

'  Five-pound  Repealers,'  51 

Fixity  of  tenure,  85 

Foley,  Mr.,  196 

Forster,  Mr.  W.  E.,  32,  201,  202,  204,  206, 
214,  215,  216,  21s,  219,  221,  223,  224,  227, 
228,  229,  230,  231,  235,  236,  239,  240,  241, 
242,  245,  246,  247.  248,  249,  250,  251,  255, 
256,  257,  263,  272,  291 

Forty-shilling  freeholders,  17 

Freeman's  Journal,  94,  95,  9Q,  195,  254 

Free  sale,  85 

Free  trade,  35 

G. 

Gabbett,  Mr.,  196 

General  Election  of  1847,  49 

„  „         of  1852,  98 

„  „         of  1874,  140 

„  „         of  1880,  174 

„  „        of  1885,   270,   271,   272, 

273  274 

,,  „         of  1886,    283,   284,    285, 

286,  287,  288 
Gent-Davis,  Mr.,  271 


298 


INDEX. 


Gibson,  Mr.  (Lord  Ashbourne),  232,  269 

Giffen,  262 

GiU,  Mr.  H.  J.,  188, 196,  226,  258 

Givan,  Mr.,  259 

Gladstone,  Mr.  W.  E.,  68,  92,  165, 198,  200, 

201,  221,  222,  224,  225,  226,  235,  236,  247, 

251,  252,  263,  266,  267,  273,  275,  282,  284, 

285,  286,  287,  288,  289 
Gladstone,  Mr.  Herbert,  210 
Gladstone's  Home  Eule   Bill,   275,  276, 

277,  278,  279,  280 
Gladstone  Land  Bill  of  1885,  281,  281,  282 
Glenbeigh,  117 
Glin,  Knight  of,  36 
Godkin,  James,  85 
Godley,  Mr.,  70 
'  God  save  Ireland,'  137 
Gordon,  General,  266 
Gorst,  Mr.,  245,  256 
Goschen,  Mr.,  263,  268,  275 
Gosset,  Capt.,  226 
Graham,  Sir  James,  8,  27,  92 
'  Grahamising  letters,'  8 
Grattan,  Henry,  17,  21 
Gray,  Mr.  E.  D.,  173,  195,  196,  226,  239, 

250 
Gray,  Sir  John,  85,  98,  115,  116,  129,  195 
Green  Street  Court  House,  135 
Grey,  Earl,  28,  71,  76 
©rosvenor,  Lord  E.,  273 

H. 

Habeas  Corpus  Suspension  Acts,  18,  19, 

20,  21,  76,  135 
Hamilton,  Lord  Claud,  261 
,,         Lord  George,  269 
Hammond,  Mr,,  271 
'  Hanging  gale,'  86,  232 
Harcourt,  Sir  W.  V.,  223,  250 
Harrington,  Mr.  T.,  258,  259 
Harris,  Alderman,  239 

,,       Matthew,  170 
Hartington,  Lord,  155,  164,  197,  202,  210, 

216,  262,  275,  283,  293,  294,  295 
Havelock- Allan,  Sir  H.,«286 
Hay,  Sir  John,  246,  251 
Healy,  Mr.  Maurice,  M.P.,  212 
„      Miss  Kate,  186 
„       Mr.  Timothy,  M.P.,  196,  208,  209, 

210,  211,  212,  225,  226,  232,  235,  239,  240, 

250,  259,  273 
Healy  Clause,  232 
Hennessy,  Sir  J.  Pope,  176 
Herbert,  Sidney,  107 
Hicks-Beach,  Sir  M.,  140, 156, 158,  289, 290 
'  History  of  oiu-  own  Times,'  175,  178 
Hoey,  Mr.  J.  Cashel,  127 
'  Home  Government  Association,'  138 
Home  Rule,  125,  138,  140,  141,  144,  145, 

270,  274,  275,  276,.277,  278,  279,  280,  282, 

283,  286 
Home  Rule  Confederation,  162 
,,  League,  149 

Party,  144,  145,  161,  173,  175 
Horsman,  Mr.,  75,  126 


Inchiquin,  Lord,  113 
'Incorruptible  Parnell,'  150 


Independent  opposition,  49,  50,  125 
Insurrection  Acts,  18,  19,  20,  21 
Intermediate  Education  Bill,  164 
'Invincibles,'  23,  257 
Irish  Americans,   78,  133,  134,  135,  166, 

167,  173 
'Irish  Blanqui,'  The,  194 
Irish  Board  of  Works,  34 
'  Irish    Brigade.'       &ee.     '  Pope's    Brass 

Band' 
Irish  Church  Disestablishment,  9,  123, 

137 
Irish  Missions,  112 
'  Irish  Committee,'  70 
Irish  in  England,  136,  162 
Irish  manufactures,  16 
Irish  Members,  suspension  of,  226,  250 

,,     Parliamentary  Party,  15 
Irish  People  (newspaper),  135,  153 
Irish  Times,  138 


Jacksox,  Mr.  H.  M.,  285 
Jagoe,  Rev.  Mr.,  261 
James,  Sir  Henry,  275 
Jennings,  Mr.,  M.P.,  271 
Johnston,  Attoi-ney-General,  255 

„         Mr.  William,  148 
'Journals,  etc.,  relating  to  Ireland,'  129 
Joyce,  Myles,  268 
Judges,  Irish,  88,  122,  123,  124 
Jury-packing,  8,  13,  14,  48 

K. 

Keane,  Mr.  Marcus,  114 

Kelly,  Colonel,  136 

Kenny,  Mr.,  M.P.,  264 

Keogh,  Mr.  W.  (afterwards  Judge),  87,  88, 

89,  90,  91,  92,  93,  94,  95,  96,  97,  100,  101, 

102,  103,  104,  105, 106,  108,  109, 110,  135, 

138 
Kerr,  Mr.  M.,  261 
Kerry  Sentinel,  258 
Kettle,  Mr.  A.  J.,  172,  173 
Kildare  and  Leighlin,  Bishop  of,  103 
KiUala,  Bishop  of.  101 
Kilmainham,  Treaty,  247,  248 
Kilmartin,  Bryan,  269 
Kilrush  Union.  Famine  and  evictions  in, 

54,  55,  56,  57,  58,  59,  60,  61,  62,  63,  64, 

65,  66,  67 
Kiug-Harman,  Colonel,  138,  144,  181,  261 
Kirk,  MiBS,  241,  242 

L. 

Labouchere,  Mr.  H.,  219,  221,  231,  242 
Labour  Rate  Act,  34,  35,  37,  44 
Ladies'  Land  League,  241 
Lahiff,  Mr.,  120 
Lalor,  Mr.  J.  F.,  194 

,,      Mr.  R.,  194,  196,  226,  250 
Land  Act  of  1870,  165,  197 

„     1881,  210,  228,  232 
Land  Acts  and  Bills,  20,  74,  75,  143,  228, 

280,  285 
Land  Bill  (Mr.  Redmond's),  247 

,,      Commission  (Bessborough),  202 

„      Court,  234 


INDEX. 


299 


Land  League,  170,  174,  213,  214,  228,  233, 

235,  240,  247,  268,  269 
Lansdowne,  Lord,  76,  115,  116 
Larcom,  Sir  Thomas,  117 
Larkin,  Michael,  136 
Lavelle,  Father,  111,  113 
Law,  Right  Hon.  Hugh,  207,  232 
Lawson,  Judge,  123,  294 
Leahy,  Mr.,  196,  226,  250 
Leamy,  Mr.  E.,  196,  223,  226,  250 
Leinster,  Duke  of,  25,  129 
Leitrim,  Lord,  111,  112,  116 
Lethbridge,  Mr.  R.,  271,  286 
Letters,  Opening  of,  8 
Lever,  Mr.  J.  O.,  174 
Levinge,  Sir  R.,98,  104 
Lewis,  Sir  C,  148,  273 
Liberal  Unionists,  124,283, 284, 285, 286,287 
Lincoln,  Lord,  17,  71 
Litton,  Mr.,  233 
Lloyd,  Mr.   Clifford,  229,  230,  231,  241, 

242,  245,  246 
Lowe,  Mr.,  127 
Lowther,  Mr.  J.,  167,  168,  173 
Luby,  Mr.  T.  C,  135 
Lucan,  Lord,  111,  112,  113 
Lucas,  Mr.  F.,  85,  97,  98,  106 
Lyons,  Dr.,  223,  224 

M, 

Maofaelane,  Mr.,  196 

MacHale,  Archbishop,  93,  94,  101,  132 

Mackay,  Capt.,  253 

MacKnight,  Dr.,  85 

MacManus,  Terence  Bellew,  134 

MacNevin,  R.  C,  105 

McCarthy,  Colour-Sergeant,  169 

„      Mr.  J.,  31,  43,  78,  123, 175, 176,  177, 

178,  179,  180,  196,  197,   198,  208,  213, 

224,  226.  250,  273 
McCarthy,  Mr.  J.  H.,  264 
McCoan,  Mr,,  196,  226 
McCormack,  Miss,  imprisoned,  241 
M'Gee,  Mr,  T,  D.,  48,  49 
McGrath,  M.,  211,  212 
McKenna,  Sir  J,  K,  196 
M'Mahon,  Evor,  129 
McMahon,  Mr.,  M,P,,  268 
Magan,  Capt,,  98 
Maguire,  John  Francis,  85,  97, 126 

.,         Thos.,  136 
Mahdi,  The,  192 
Maher,  Father,  103 
Mahon,  The  O'Gorman,  194,  196,  226 
Mallon,  Superintendent,  238 
Mallow,  255 
'  Mambi  Land,'  191 
Manayunk,  169 
Manchester,  136 
Marlborough,  Duchess  of,  173 
Martin,  John,  149 
Marum,  Mr.,  196,  226,  250,  251 
Mathew,  Rev.  Theobald,  31 
Mathews,  Henry,  Home  Secretary,  123, 

289, 290 
Maynooth,  Grant,  15 
Mazzini,  8 

Meagher,  Thomas  Francis,  134 
Meath,  Bishop  of,  101 
Melbourne,  Lord,  9, 17 


Meldon,  Mr.  C,  J  45,  196 

Metge,  Mr.,  226,  250 

Mill,  John  Stuart,  24,  177 

Milner,  Sir  F.,  271 

Mitchel,   John,  12,  13,  14,  25,  36,  47,  48, 

79,  134,  176,  193,  194 
Moate,  Rector  of,  104 
Moderate  Home  Rulers.      See  Nominal 

Home  Rulers 
Monaghan,  County,  259 
Monahan,  Judge,  117 
Monroe,  Mr,  J,  (Q.C.),  259 
Moore,  George  Henry,  97.  126 

Mrs.,  241,  242 
Morley,  Mr.  John,  283,  291 
Morning  Star,  177,  178 
Moroney,  Mrs.,  241 
Murphy,  Mr.  N.  D.,  174 

„        Serjeant,  122,  123 
'  Murty  Hynes,'  188 

N. 

Naas,  Lord  (Earl  of  Mayo),  105, 107 

Nagle,  Alderman,  254 

Naish,  Attorney-General,  255 

Napier,  Sir  J.,  126 

Nation  (newspaper),  12,  45,  46,  47,  86,  87, 

95,  96,  109,  110,  125,  180,  181, 187,  208 
National  meetings   in  Ulster,  260,   261 

262 
Neligan,  Mr,  J,  C,  258 
Nelson,  Rev,  Isaac,  226,  265 
Newcastle,  Duke  of,  104,  107 
Newdegate,  Mr.  92 
Newport,  Sir  John,  16 
New  York  Herald,  190 
Nimmo,  Mr.  Alexander,  23 
Nominal  Home  Rulers,  263,  265 
'  No  Popery,'  87 
'No  Rent,' 47,  194,232 
'  No-Rent'  Manifesto,  235,  240 
Normanby,  Lord,  8 
Norris,  Mr.,  108 
Northcote,  SirS,,  158,  159,  181,  223,  224, 

263 
Northern  Times,  177 
Norton,  Mr.  Thomas,  102 
Nulty,  Bishop,  114 

O. 

O'Beirne,  William,  90 
,,  Judge,  123 

„  M.  (alias  Gould),  136 

„  Sir  Patrick,  141,  196 

„  William,  253,  254,  255,  273 

„  William  Smith,  17,  21,  48, 134 

O'Connell,  Daniel,  his  work  for  the  Irish 
people,  7 ;  disappointed  with  Eman- 
cipation, 7  ;  starts  Repeal  agitation, 
8 ;  opposed  by  Liberals,  8 ;  prose- 
cuted, 8  ;  reviles  Whigs,  8  ;  his  Re- 
peal motion  defeated,  8  ;  works  for 
redress  of  minor  grievances,  8  ;  is 
elected  Lord  Mayor  of  Dublin,  9 ; 
supports  Melbourne  Ministry,  9  ;  again 
starts  Repeal  agitation,  9  ;  carries  Re- 
peal motion  in  Dublin  Corporation,  9  ; 
effect  on  agitation,  9 ;  his  action  after 
Tara   meeting,  10 ;    habits  and  daily 


300 


INDEX. 


life    at   this  time,    11 ;    character  of 
speeches,   11 ;    his    attitude  towards 
Young  Irelauders,  13,  14  ;  his    action 
at    Clontarf,    14  ;     effect    on    Repeal 
movement,    14 ;    prosecuted    and   im- 
prisoned, 14  ;  is  released,  14  ;  '  a  broken 
man,'  14 ;  popular  opinion,  15  ;  decay 
of  his  power,  15  ;    calls  attention    of 
Government  to  impending  famine,  25 
his  proposals  for  relief  of  distress,  25 
split  with  Young  Irelanders,  46,  47 
his  great  spech  on  Land  Question,  47 
his  death,  47 ;  character  of  his  Parlia- 
mentary supporters,  47  ;    his  attitude 
towards  the  Russell  Ministry,  47  ;  his 
Parliamentary  party,  50 

O'Connell,  John,  46,  47,  51,  74 

O'Connor,  Mr.  Arthur,  182, 183, 184, 185, 
186,  196,  226,  239,  240,  250 

O'Connor,  Miss  Mary,  241,  242 
5,  Mr.  John,  263 

„  Mr.  T.  P.,  196,  226,  250 

O 'Conor,  Don,  The,  259,  260 

O'Donnell,  Mr.  F.  H.,  179,  250 

O'Donoghue,  The,  197,  226 

O'Donovan  (Rossa),  Jeremiah,  134, 135 

'  Office  Rules,'  115,  116 

OTlaherty,  Anthony,  91,  98 

„  Edmund,   91,  94,    100,    105, 

107,  108,  109 

O'Gorman,  Mahon.  See  Mahon,  O'Gor- 
man 

O'Grady,  Hon.  Michael,  119 

O'Hagan,  Mr.  Justice,  233 

O'Kelly,  James,  137,  188,  189,  190,  191, 
192,  193,  196,   239,  250 

O'Leary,  John,  135 
Dr.,  156 

'  Old  Ironsides,'  151 

Orangeism,  8,  9,  14,  48,  49,  261,  262 

O'Rourke,  Father,  40,  84 

Osborne,  Mr.  Bernal,  18 

O'Shaughnessy,  Mr.,  263 

O'Shea,  Captain,  196.  251,  265 

O'Suliivan,  W.  H,,  173,  196,  226,  230,  250 

Outrages,  agrarian,  214,  215,  216,  217 

P. 

Palles,  Chief  Baron,  148 

Pali  Mall  Gazelle,  227,  288 

Palmerstone,  Lord,  96,  106,  125,  126,  127 

•Parliamentary  History  of  the  Irish  Land 
Question,'  17 

Parnell,  Mr.  C.  S.,  137,  147;  contests 
Dublin  County,  149 ;  repugnance  to 
speaking,  150  ;  history  ot  his  family, 
150  ;  his  early  years,  152  ;  lessons  of 
youth,  152  ;  hatred  of  cruelty,  153  ; 
turning-point  of  life,  153  ;  country  life,' 
154  :  how  he  took  up  Obstruction, 
154  ;  first  efforts  in  the  House,  157 ; 
nucleus  of  his  party,  157  ;  attacked  by 
Butt,  158  ;  wrath  of  the  House,  159  ; 
motion  to  suspend  him,  159 ;  opposes 
South  African  Bill,  159  ;  policy  ap- 
proved in  Ireland,  161,  171  ;  elected 
Pi-esident  of  Home  Rule  Confederation 
of  Great  Britain,  162  ;  fights  flogging 


clauses  of  Army  Regulation  Bill,  164 ; 
opinion  of  London  pajjers  about  him, 
164 ;  how  he  became  a  Land  Leaguer, 
168  ;  at  Westport,  171  ;  declares  for 
'Peasant  Proprietary,'  171;  advises 
farmers  '  to  keej)  a  firm  grip  of  their 
homesteads,'  171  ;  effect  of  his  joining 
Land  movement,  171  ;  Land  League 
founded,  171  ;  visits  America,  173 ; 
founds  American  Land  League,  174  ; 
prepares  for  Election  of  1880,  174  ;  his 
difficulties  as  to  funds  and  candidates, 
174  ;  returned  for  Cork  City,  174 ; 
elected  leader  of  Parliamentary  Party, 
196  ;  speaks  on  Amendment  to  Queen's 
Speech,  199 ;  obtains  concession  from 
Government,  200  ;  difficiilty  as  to 
policy,  201  ;  advises  farmers  not  to 
give  evidence  before  Land  Commission, 
203  ;  recommends  boycotting,  203 ;  his 
justification,  204  ;  his  attitude  towards 
Shaw's  party,  204  ;  opinion  on  '  Three 
F's'  and  'Peasant  Proprietary,'  204, 
205  ;  on  Irish  legislative  independence, 
205 ;  trial  for  conspiracy,  207  ;  his 
amendment  to  Queen's  Speech  (1881), 
213  ;  raises  question  about  Davitt,  225  ; 
moves  that  Gladstone  be  no  longer 
heard,  226  ;  '  named,'  226  ;  suspended, 
226  ;  proposes  abstention  from  second 
reading  Land  Bill,  231  ;  attitude  to- 
wards Land  Courts,  234  ;  adopts  Test 
Case  policy,  235  ;  attacked  by  Glad- 
stone at  Leeds,  236  ;  replies  to  him  at 
Wexford,  236  ;  is  arrested  and  lodged 
in  Kilmainham,  238  ;  his  victory  over 
Government  in  the  Kilmainham  treaty, 
247,  248  ;  Mr.  Forgter's  testimony,  248  ; 
suspension  of  Irish  members  for  oppos- 
ing Crimes  Bill,  250 ;  his  anxiety  as 
to  Arrears  Question,  251  ;  speech  on 
the  subject,  251  ;  drafts  Mr.  Red- 
mond's Land  Bill,  253  ;  Mr.  Forster's 
great  speech  against  him,  256 ;  its 
effect  on  the  Irish  people,  257 ; 
National  Tribute  started,  257 ;  declares 
for  Legislative  independence,  270 

Parnell,  John,  150 
John,  154 
John  Henry,  150 
Miss  Fanny,  153,  160 
Mrs.  153, 

Sir  Henry,  150,  151 
Sir  John,  150 
Thomas,  150 

Fatten,  Dr.,  262 

??eel  Sir  Robert  (late),  9,  10,  11,  15, 19,  20, 
26,  27,  30,  33,  67,  68,  69,  70,  76,  73 

Pennefather,  Judge,  14 

Perraud,  M.,  115 

Phosnix  Pai-k  murders,  249,  250 

Phoenix  Society,  187 

Pigott,  Chief  Baron,  116 

Place-hunting,  50 

'  Plan  of  Campaign,'  290 

Playfair,  SirL.,  222,  223,  232 

Plunket,  Hon.  Mr.,  8 
„        Lord,  112 

Pollock.  Mr,  Allan.  113.  113 


WDEJl. 


?oi 


foor    Law   Commissioners'  Report,   40, 

52,  60 
Poor  Law  inquiry  of  1S35,  2i 
•Pope's  Brass  Band,'  The,  93,  103 
Power,  Dr.  Maurice,  91,  96 

,,        Mr.   John   O'Connor,    161,    170, 

225,  226 
Power,  Mr.  Richard,  141,  194,  196,  250 
Pringle,  Mr.,  259 
Prisons  Bill,  158 
Prisons,  Death  in  (in  1846),  41 

Q. 

Queen's  Speech  (Session  of  1845),  27 
„  Speech  (Session  of  1880),  198 
„        Speech  (Session  of  ISSl),  212,  213 


R. 

Rack-renting,  16 

Raikes,  Mr.,  158, 159 

'  Realities  of  Irish  Life,'  115 

Redistribution  Bill,  182,  263 

Redmond,  Mr.  J.  E.,  226,  247,  250,  253 

„  Mr.  W.  H.  K.,  259,  260 

Reform  Act  of  1832,  8 
Relief  Act,  43 

,,     Committees,  43,  47 
Relief  of  Distress  Bill,  174,  202 

,,     works,  33,  34,  43,  44 
Repeal,  8,  9,  11,  12,  46,  51,  52 
Re3rnoids,  Miss,  imprisoned,  241 
'Road  Fever,'  38 
Roche,  Mr.  (Lord  Fermoy),  98 
Roebuck,  Mr.,  127 
Ronayne,  Mr.,  156 
Rosslea,  261 
Rossmore,  Lord,  261 
Russell,  Lord  John,  25,  26,  28,  30,  33,  34, 

35,  47,  48,  51,  67,  70,  71,  72,  73,  74,  75, 

76,  79,  87,  92,  96,  98 

S. 

Sadleir,  James,  98,  107,  108 

John,  87,  91,  92,  93,  94,  95,  96,  98, 

100,  101, 103,  105,  lOG,  107 
Sadleir's  Bank,  91,  106,  107,  108,  109,  110 
Salisbury,  Lord,  251,  267,  275,  288,  289, 

294,  295 
Saturday  Reviev),  132 
Saunderson,  Colonel,  261 
Scrope,  ]\Ir.  Poulett,  17 
Scully,  Mr.  Frank,  91,  98 

,,     Mr.  Vincent,  91,  96,  98 
Selborne,  Lord,  234 
Senior,  Mr.  Nassau,  128,  129 
Sergeant-at-Arms.     See  Gossett 
Sexton,  Mr.  Thomas,  180,  181,  182,  196, 

207,  223,  226,  246,  250,  273 
Shaw-Lefevre,  Mr.,  223,  266 
Shaw,  Mr.   William,  164,   196,   199,  200, 

213 
Shee,  Serjeant,  126 
Sheehy,  Father,  230,  235 
Sheil,  Mr.,  M.P.,  141,  250 

,,    Richard  Lalor,  50,  51 
Siieridau,  General,  190 


Sinclair,  Mr.,  M.P.,  2g5 
'Sitting  Bull,'  192 
Skibbereeu,  38,  43 
Sligo,  105 

,,    Marquis  of,  112 
Smith,  Colonel,  103 
Smith,  Mr.  W.  H.,  246,  269 
Smithwick,  Mr.,  196,  226 
Smyth,  Mr.  P.  J.,  196,  263 
Somerville,  Sir  W.,  73,  75 
'  Song  from  the  Backwoods,'  187 
'  Soup  Kitchen  Act,'  43,  44 
South  African  Bill,  158,  159,  160 
Speaker,  The  (Sir  H.  Brand),  159,  222, 

224,  225,  226,  227 
Special  magistrates.     See  Magisti'ates 
Spencer,  Lord,  253,  262,  268 
Stanley,  Lord,  17,  28 
Stephens,  Mr.  James,  134,  135 
Stevens,  Mr.,  108 
Stewart,  Commodore,  151,  152 

,,         Miss,  151 
Straid,  168 
Sub-letting  Act,  7 
Sullivan,  A.  M.,  30,  31,  32,  33,  36,  98,  119, 

125,  138,  141,  149,  186,  226 
Sullivan,  Sir  Edward,  123 

Mr.  T.  D.,  125,  137,  186,  187,  1S8, 

196,  207,  226,  250 
Suspension  of  Evictions  Bill,  200,  201 

,,  of  Irish  Members,  226,  250 

Swift,  Dean,  '  Modest  Proposal,' 16,  21 

,,      Mr.  Richard,  107 
Synan,  Mr,,  196 

T. 

Tablet,  98 

Tara   10 

Taylor,  Colonel,  147 

Tenant  Right,  26,  73,  74,  85,  86,  87,  92, 

94,  95,  97,  98,  99,  126,  127 
'  Three  F's,'  The,  85,  137,  138,  204 
Times,  The,  69,  131,  132,  248,  249,  262,  269, 

294 
Torrens,  Judge,  110 
Traill,  Major,  229,  230 
Treason  Felony  Act,  76 
Trench,  Mr.  P.,  129 

,,       Mr.  S.,  115,  129 
Trevelyan,  Mr.  (afterwards  Sir  C),  37, 

242 
Trevelyan,  Sir  G.  O.,  124,  180,  251,  252, 

262,  269,  275 
Take,  Mr.,  32,  33,  40 

U. 

Ulster,  260,  261,  262 

,,       Custom,  75,  84,  126 

,,       Nationalists,  260 

,,       Presbyterians,  260 
Union,  Act  of,  9,  18,  22,  78,  125,  295 
Unionists,  125 
United  Ireland,  254,  255 
Unlawful  Oaths  Act,  21 


V. 


Vatican,  15,  257 
Vernon,  Mr.  233 


302 


INDEX. 


W. 


Walsh,  J.  W.,  211,  212 
Weekly  News,  181 
Wellington,  Duke  of,  17 
Westmeath,  98,  257 

„  Lord,  104 

Wexford  People,  109 
AVhately,  Archbishop,  8,  70,  128 
Whiggery,  125,  126 
Whigs,  8,  29 
White,  Father,  113 
Whiteboy  i\ct,  21 
Whitworth,  Mr.,  229 

„  Mr.  B.,  374,  229,  265 


Wilde,  Sir  W..  84 

Wilkinson,  Mr.,  107,  103 

Wiseman.  Cardinal,  87 

Wolseley.  General,  192 

Women,   treatment  of.   under    Coercion 

Acts.  241,  242 
Wood,  Colonel,  286 
World.  The  (London),  155,  164 

Y. 

'  Young  Ireland '  (book),  9 
Young  Ireland  (periodical),  181 
Young  Ireland  Party,  12.  13,  15,  46,  47,  48, 
49,  50.  51,  74 


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