THE PERIOD FROM THE UNION UNTIL THE REJECTION OF THE FIRST HOME RULE
BILL.
As soon as the Union had become law, the opposition to it died down
rapidly. All the members who had voted for it who became candidates
for the Imperial Parliament were elected, and Irish orators soon began
to make their mark in the greater Assembly. In 1805, however, there
was another slight rebellion, led by Robert Emmett. It never had
a chance of success; the mass of the people, thoroughly tired of
anarchy, refused to take part in it; and though the rebels succeeded
in committing a few murders, the movement was speedily quelled, mainly
by the yeomen of Dublin. At the trial of Emmett, Plunket, who had been
a vehement opponent of the Union, was counsel for the prosecution, and
in his speech bitterly denounced the conduct of those men who,
having done their utmost to oppose the Irish Parliament, now made the
abolition of that Parliament the pretext for rebellion. "They call for
revenge," said he, "on account of the removal of the Parliament. These
men, who, in 1798, endeavoured to destroy the Parliament, now
call upon the loyal men who opposed its transfer, to join them in
rebellion; an appeal vain and fruitless."
It will be observed from statements already quoted, that the
Nationalists of to-day claim that they are the successors of
Emmett; he is counted amongst the heroes who fell in the cause of
Ireland--thus making it all the more clear how wide is the gulf
between the Parliamentary opponents of the Union and the modern
Nationalists.
During the early part of the century, Ireland had another period of
prosperity. Travellers through Ireland at the present day cannot fail
to notice how many of the country seats (now, in consequence of later
legislation, mostly deserted and already beginning to fall into ruin)
were built at that time. No doubt much of the prosperity was caused
by the rebound which often takes place after a period of anarchy and
desolation; and it would not be fair to attribute it wholly to the
effect of the Union; but at least it proves that the melancholy
prognostications of the opponents of the measure were happily
unfulfilled. The total value of the produce and manufactures exported
from Ireland between 1790 and 1801 amounted to £51,322,620; between
1802 and 1813 it amounted to £63,483,718. In 1800 the population
of Ireland was under 5,000,000; in 1841 it was over 8,000,000. The
tonnage in Irish ports in 1792 was 69,000; by 1797 it had fallen to
53,000; before 1852 it had risen to 5,000,000. The export of linen
in 1796 was 53,000,000 yards; in 1799 it had fallen to 38,000,000;
in 1853 it had risen to 106,000,000; and every other department of
industry and commerce showed figures almost as satisfactory.
There were, however, three important measures which the leading
advocates of the Union had desired to see carried as soon as possible
after the great change had been effected, but which--as many writers
of various schools of thought to this day consider unfortunately--were
postponed. The first was a provision by the State for the payment of
the Roman Catholic clergy. The bishops had fully expected that this
would be carried. Some modern Nationalists, wishing to win the
favour of the English Nonconformists, have represented that the Roman
Catholic Church refused to accept the money; but that is not the case.
Whether the policy of "levelling up" would have been a wise one
or not, it is useless now to conjecture; for once the policy of
"levelling down" had been decided upon, and the Irish Church had been
disestablished and disendowed, it became impracticable. The second
measure was Roman Catholic emancipation. This had been intended by
Pitt and other statesmen who helped to bring about the Union; but
unforeseen difficulties arose; and unfortunately nothing was done
until the agitation led by O'Connell brought matters to a crisis;
and the emancipation which might have been carried gracefully years
before, and in that case would have strengthened the Union, was
grudgingly yielded in 1829.
The third measure was a readjustment of tithes. All will now admit,
and very many politicians and thinkers at the time fully realized,
that the old law as to tithes was a cruel injustice; but no change
was made until the opposition to the payment of tithes amounted to
something like civil war, involving a series of murders and outrages.
Then the fatal precedent was set of a successful and violent revolt
against contracts and debts. In 1838 an Act was passed commuting
the tithes into a rent-charge payable not by the occupiers but the
landlords. Some modern writers have argued that the change was merely
a matter of form, as the landlords increased the rents in proportion;
and it seems such a natural thing to have happened that earlier
writers may well be excused for assuming that it actually occurred.
But there is no excuse for repeating the charge now; for in
consequence of recent legislation it has been necessary for the Land
Courts to investigate the history of rents from a period commencing
before 1838; and the result of their examination has elicited the
strange fact that in thousands of cases the rent remained exactly the
same that it had been before the Tithe Commutation Act was passed.
But ere long economic causes were at work which tended to check the
prosperity of Ireland. It was soon found that the proportion which by
the Act of Union Ireland was to contribute to the Imperial Government
was too large for the country to bear. The funded debt of Ireland
which amounted to £28,000,000 in 1800 rose by 1817 to £130,000,000;
in that year the whole liability was taken over by the Imperial
Government. Then the fall in prices which naturally resulted from
the peace of 1815 pressed heavily on an agricultural community.
Improvements in machinery and the development of steam power squeezed
out the handlooms of Ulster and the watermills of other parts of the
country. Wages were low; and the people who depended mainly on the
potato were underfed and undernourished. In 1846 and 1847 came the
two terrible blows to Ireland--first, the potato disease; and then the
Repeal of the Corn Laws, which made the profitable growing of wheat
with its accompanying industries, impossible. During the fearful years
of the potato famine, it is only too probable that some of the efforts
for relief were unwisely conducted and that some persons sadly failed
in their duties; no measures or men in the world are ever perfect; and
the difficulties not only of obtaining food but of getting it to the
starving people in days when there were few railways and no motors
were enormous. But when modern writers shower wholesale abuse over
the landlords of the period, and even hint that they brought about the
famine, it is well to turn to the writings of an ardent Home Ruler,
who was himself an eye-witness, having lived as a boy through the
famine time in one of the districts that suffered most--Mr. A.M.
Sullivan. He says:--
"The conduct of the Irish landlords throughout the famine
period has been variously described, and has been, I believe,
generally condemned. I consider the censure visited on them
too sweeping. I hold it to be in some respects cruelly unjust.
On many of them no blame too heavy could possibly fall.
A large number were permanent absentees; their ranks were
swelled by several who early fled the post of duty at
home--cowardly and selfish deserters of a brave and faithful
people. Of those who remained, some may have grown callous;
it is impossible to contest authentic instances of brutal
heartlessness here and there. But granting all that has to be
entered on the dark debtor side, the overwhelming balance
is the other way. The bulk of the resident Irish landlords
manfully did their best in that dread hour ... No adequate
tribute has ever been paid to the memory of those Irish
landlords--they were men of every party and creed--perished
martyrs to duty in that awful time; who did not fly the
plague-reeking work-houses or fever-tainted court. Their names
would make a goodly roll of honour ... If they did too little
compared with what the landlord class in England would have
done in similar case, it was because little was in their
power. The famine found most of the resident gentry of Ireland
on the brink of ruin. They were heritors of estates heavily
overweighted with the debts of a bygone generation. Broad
lands and lordly mansions were held by them on settlements
and conditions that allowed small scope for the exercise
of individual liberality. To these landlords the failure of
year's rental receipts meant mortgage fore-one and hopeless
ruin. Yet cases might be named by the score in which such men
scorned to avert by pressure on their suffering tenantry the
fate they saw impending over them.... They 'went down with the
ship.'"
Soon after the famine, the Incumbered Estates Act was passed, by which
the creditors of incumbered landlords could force a sale. This in
effect worked a silent revolution; for whatever might have been said
up to that time about the landed proprietors being the representatives
of those who acquired their estates through the Cromwellian
confiscations, after those proprietors had been forced to sell and the
purchasers had obtained a statutory title by buying in the Court, the
charge became obsolete. The motive of the Act was a good one; it
was hoped that land would thus pass out of the hands of impoverished
owners and be purchased by English capitalists who would be able to
execute improvements on their estates and thus benefit the country
as a whole. But the scheme brought with it disadvantages which the
framers of the Act had not foreseen. The new purchasers had none of
the local feelings of the dispossessed owners; they regarded their
purchases as an investment, which they wished to make as profitable as
possible, and treated the occupants of the land with a harshness which
the old proprietors would never have exercised. Like most things in
Ireland, however, this has been much exaggerated. It is constantly
assumed that the whole soil of Ireland after this belonged to absentee
proprietors who took no interest in the country. That absenteeism is a
great evil to any country, and to Ireland especially, no one can deny;
but a Parliamentary enquiry in 1869 elicited the fact that the number
of landed proprietors in the rural area of Ireland then (and there
is no reason to suppose that any great change had taken place in
the previous eighteen years) was 19,547, of whom only 1,443 could
be described as "rarely or never resident in Ireland"; and these
represented 15.7 per cent. of the rural area, and only 15.1 per cent.
of the total poor-law valuation of that area.
Between 1841 and 1851 the population of the country fell from
8,200,000 to 6,574,000. The primary causes of this were of course the
famine and the fever which broke out amongst the half-starved people;
but it was also to a large extent caused by emigration. A number
of devoted and noble-hearted men, realizing that it was hopeless to
expect that the potato disease would disappear, and that consequently
the holdings had become "uneconomic" (to use the phrase now so
popular) as no other crop was known which could produce anything
like the same amount of food, saw that the only course to prevent a
continuation of the famine would be to remove a large section of the
people to a happier country. In this good work the Quakers, who had
been untiring in their efforts to relieve distress during the famine,
took a prominent part; and the Government gave assistance. At the
time no one regarded this as anything but a beneficent course; for the
emigrants found better openings in new and rising countries than
they ever could have had at home, and the reduced population, earning
larger wages, were able to live in greater comfort. One evidence of
this has been that mud cabins, which in 1841 had numbered 491,000
had in 1901 been reduced to 9,000; whilst the best class of houses
increased from 304,000 to 596,000. In 1883 the Roman Catholic bishops
came to the conclusion that matters had gone far enough, and that in
future migration from the poorer to the more favoured districts was
better than emigration from the country; but they did not say anything
against the work that had been done up to that time. Yet a recent
Nationalist writer, wishing to bring every possible charge against the
landlords, has hinted that the total loss of population from 1841 to
1901 was caused by the brutality of the landlords after the famine,
who drove the people out of the country! To show the fallacy of this,
it is sufficient to point out that the powers of the landlords for
good or evil were considerably reduced by the Land Act of 1870, and
after that they were further diminished by each successive Act until
the last shred was taken away by the Act of 1887; yet the population
went down from 5,412,377 in 1871 to 4,453,775 in 1901--the emigration
being larger in proportion from those counties where the National
League was omnipotent than from other parts of Ireland.
In the early thirties O'Connell commenced his famous agitation for the
Repeal of the Union. After he had disappeared from the scene, his work
was taken up by those of his followers who advocated physical force;
and in 1848 an actual rebellion broke out, headed by Smith O'Brien. It
ended in a ridiculous fiasco. The immediate cause of its failure, as
A.M. Sullivan has pointed out, was that the leaders, in imitation of
the movement of half a century before, endeavoured to eliminate the
religious difficulty and to bring about a rising in which Orange
and Green should be united; but their fight for religious tolerance
exposed them to the charge of infidelity; the Roman Catholic priests
(who now possessed immense political influence) denounced them; and
their antagonism was fatal to the movement.
But one of the most far-seeing of the party--J.F. Lalor--perceived
that mere repeal would never be strong enough to be a popular cry--it
must be hitched on to some more powerful motive, which could drag it
along. As he clearly explained in his manifesto, his objects were the
abolition of British government and the formation of a National one.
He considered that neither agitation nor the attempt at military
insurrection were likely to attain those objects, but that the wisest
means for that end were the refusal of obedience to usurped authority;
taking quiet possession of all the rights and powers of government and
proceeding to exercise them; and defending the exercise of such powers
if attacked. He saw that the motive power which would carry itself
forward and drag repeal with it, was in the land. He held that the
soil of the country belonged as of right to the entire people of that
country, not to any one class but to the nation--one condition being
essential, that the tenant should bear true and undivided allegiance
to the nation whose land he held, and owe no allegiance whatever to
any other prince, power or people, or any obligation of obedience or
respect to their will, their orders, or their laws. The reconquest
of the liberties of Ireland, he argued, would, even if possible by
itself, be incomplete and worthless, without the reconquest of the
land; whereas the latter, if effected, would involve the former. He
therefore recommended (1) That occupying tenants should at once refuse
to pay all rent except the value of the overplus of harvest produce
remaining in their hands after deducting a full provision for their
own subsistence during the ensuing year; (2) that they should forcibly
resist being made homeless under the English law of ejectment; (3)
that they ought further on principle to refuse _all_ rent to the
present usurping proprietors, until they should in National Convention
decide what rents they were to pay and to whom they should pay them;
and (4) that the people, on grounds of policy and economy, should
decide that those rents should be paid to themselves--the people--for
public purposes for the benefit of the entire general people. In
that way a mighty social revolution would be accomplished, and the
foundation of a national revolution surely laid.
But these views, though shared by J. Mitchel and other leaders, were
not at the time generally adopted; and the next agitations were more
distinctly political than agrarian. The Fenian movement of 1865--1867,
the avowed object of which was the establishment of an independent
republic, arose in America, where it was cleverly devised and ably
financed. In Ireland it met with little sympathy except in the towns;
and the attempted outbreaks, both there and in Canada, were dismal
failures. Two of their efforts in England, however, led to important
results. Gladstone made the remarkable statement that it was their
attempt to blow up Clerkenwell prison that enabled him to carry
the Act for the Disestablishment of the Irish Church. Many years
afterwards, when this encouragement to incendiarism had done its work,
he denied that he had ever said so; but there is no doubt that he did.
Here I must digress for a moment to refer to the position of the Irish
Church. By the Act of Union it had been provided that the Churches of
England and Ireland as then by law established should be united, and
that the continuation and preservation of the United Church should be
deemed and taken to be an essential and fundamental part of the Union;
and at the time of the agitation for Catholic emancipation the Roman
Catholic Bishops of Ireland solemnly declared that their Church
would never attempt to destroy the Protestant Establishment. This is
interesting as showing how futile are the attempts of one generation
to bind posterity by legislation; and how foolish it is to expect
that men will regard themselves as bound by promises made by their
ancestors. (The same remark may be made with reference to the promises
now being made by Nationalists as to the Home Rule Bill.) The general
provisions of the Disestablishment Act were simple. Existing clergy
were secured in their incomes for life; the disestablished Church
was allowed to claim all churches then in actual use, and to purchase
rectory houses and glebes at a valuation; and a sum of £500,000 was
given to the Church in lieu of all private endowments. Everything
else--even endowments given by private persons a few years before the
Act was passed--was swept away. The members of the Church showed a
liberality which their opponents never anticipated. They bought the
glebes, continued to pay their clergy by voluntary assessments, and
collected a large sum of money towards a future endowment. Nationalist
writers now state that the Act left the Irish Church with an income
adequate to its needs and merely applied the surplus revenues to other
purposes; and hint that the capital sum now possessed by the Church
really came from the State, and that therefore the future Home Rule
Government can deal with it as they please. The alarm felt by Irish
Churchmen at the prospect can be understood.
The other Fenian attempt in England which has historical importance
was of a different kind. Two Fenian prisoners were being conveyed in a
prison van at Manchester. Their friends tried to rescue them by force;
and in the attempt killed the officer in charge. For this crime, three
of them--Allen, Larkin and O'Brien--were tried, convicted and hanged
in November 1867. These were the "Manchester Martyrs," in honour of
whose unflinching fidelity to faith and country (to quote the words
of Archbishop Croke) so many memorial crosses have been erected,
and solemn demonstrations are held every year to this day. At the
unveiling of the memorial cross at Limerick the orator said: "Allen,
Larkin and O'Brien died as truly for the cause of Irish Nationality as
did any of the heroes of Irish history. The same cause nerved the arms
of the brave men of '98, of '48, of '65 and '67. For the cause that
had lived so long they would not take half measures--nothing else
would satisfy them than the full measure of Nationality for which they
and their forefathers had fought."
Meanwhile another movement was going on, which seems to have been at
first wholly distinct from the Fenian conspiracy--the constitutional
agitation for Home Rule or Repeal, led by Isaac Butt. It commenced its
Parliamentary action in 1874; but was ere long broken up by the more
violent spirits within its own ranks. As had so frequently happened in
similar movements in Ireland, France and elsewhere, the moderate
men were thrust aside, and the extremists carried all before them.
Fenianism, though apparently crushed in Ireland, continued to flourish
in America. Michael Davitt, who had been a prominent member both of
the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood and of the Fenian Society, had
been convicted of treason felony, and sentenced to penal servitude. On
his release in 1877, he was received as a hero, and amongst those who
took part in the welcome to him were C.S. Parnell, J.G. Biggar, J.
Carey, D. Curley and J. Brady. He went to America and there matured
the plan of his operations on the lines laid down by Lalor, which he
proceeded to carry out in Ireland in 1879 by means of a Society which
was at first called the "Land League" but which has since been known
by various other names. Amongst his allies were J. Devoy, O'Donovan
Rossa, and Patrick Ford. Devoy and Rossa took an active part in
establishing the Skirmishing Fund, which was subscribed for the
purpose of levying war on England with dynamite. Rossa afterwards
publicly boasted that he had placed an infernal machine onboard H.M.S.
"Dottrell," and had sent it and all its crew to the bottom of the
ocean. As a reward for his patriotic conduct he was some years later
granted a pension by the County Council of Cork, payable out of the
rates. Ford was the ablest and most powerful of the number, for by
means of his paper--the _Irish World_--he collected vast sums for the
Parliamentary party. In this paper he strongly advocated the use of
dynamite as a blessed agent which should be availed of by the Irish
people in their holy war; and elaborated a scheme for setting fire to
London in fifty places on a windy night. After D. Curley and J. Brady
had been hanged for the murder of Lord Frederick Cavendish and Mr.
Burke, he collected money for a testimonial to them as heroes, and
prayed that God would send Ireland more men with hearts like that of
J. Brady. Mr. Redmond has recently described him as "the grand old
veteran, who through his newspaper has done more for the last thirty
or forty years for Ireland than almost any man alive"; Mr. T.P.
O'Connor has congratulated him on the great work he is doing for
Ireland; and Mr. Devlin has eulogized him for "the brilliancy in the
exposition of the principles inculcated in our programme."
By 1880 the union between the Dynamite party in America (which bore
many names, such as the Fenian Society, the Irish Revolutionary
Brotherhood, the Invincibles, the Clan-na-gael, and the Physical
Force party, but was essentially the same movement throughout), the
constitutional agitators for Home Rule in Parliament, and the Land
Leaguers in Ireland, was complete. It was but natural that it should
be so, for their objects were the same, though their methods differed
according to circumstances. The American party (according to their own
statements) desired the achievement of a National Parliament so as
to give them a footing on Irish soil--to give them the agencies and
instrumentalities for a Government _de facto_ at the very commencement
of the Irish struggle--to give them the plant of an armed revolution.
Hence they gladly contributed large sums for the Parliamentary Fund.
Parnell, the leader of the Parliamentary party, stated that a true
revolutionary movement should partake of a constitutional and
an illegal character; it should be both an open and a secret
organization, using the constitution for its own purpose and also
taking advantage of the secret combination; and (as the judges at the
Parnell Commission reported) the Land League was established with the
intention of bringing about the independence of Ireland as a separate
nation.
In the preceding autumn the agitation against the payment of rent had
begun; and persons of ordinary intelligence could see that a fresh
outbreak of anarchy was imminent. But Gladstone, when coming into
power in March 1880, assumed that air of easy optimism which his
successors in more recent times have imitated; and publicly stated
that there was in Ireland an absence of crime and outrage and a
general sense of comfort and satisfaction such as had been unknown
in the previous history of the country. His Chief Secretary, Forster,
however, had not been long in Ireland before he realized that this
was the dream of a madman; and that the Government must either act or
abdicate in favour of anarchy; but the Cabinet refused to support him.
Before the end of the year the Government had practically abdicated,
and the rule of the Land League was the only form of Government in
force in a large part of the country. The name of the unfortunate
Captain Boycott will be for ever associated with the means the League
employed to enforce their orders. What those means were, was explained
by Gladstone himself:--
"What is meant by boycotting? In the first place it is
combined intimidation. In the second place, it is combined
intimidation made use of for the purpose of destroying the
private liberties of choice by fear of ruin and starvation. In
the third place, that which stands in the rear of boycotting
and by which alone boycotting can in the long run be made
thoroughly effective is the murder which is not to be
denounced."
And a few years later--1886--the Official Report of the Cowper
Commission stated it more fully:--
"The people are more afraid of boycotting, which depends for
its success on the probability of outrage, than they are of
the judgments of the Courts of Justice. The unwritten law in
some districts is supreme. We deem it right to call attention
to the terrible ordeal that a boycotted person has to undergo,
which was by several witnesses graphically described during
the progress of our enquiry. The existence of a boycotted
person becomes a burden to him, as none in town or village are
allowed, under a similar penalty to themselves, to supply him
or his family with the necessaries of life. He is not allowed
to dispose of the produce of his farm. Instances have been
brought before us in which his attendance at divine service
was prohibited, in which his cattle have been, some killed,
some barbarously mutilated; in which all his servants and
labourers were ordered and obliged to leave him; in which the
most ordinary necessaries of life and even medical comforts,
had to be procured from long distances; in which no one
would attend the funeral, or dig a grave for, a member of a
boycotted person's family; and in which his children have been
forced to discontinue attendance at the National School of the
district."
This was the ordinary form of Government as conducted by the
Nationalists; and any attempt to interfere with it and to enforce the
milder laws of England, is now denounced as "coercion."
In 1881 Gladstone carried another and a more far-reaching Land Act. To
put it shortly, it may be said that all agricultural land (except that
held by leaseholders, who were brought in under the Act of 1887)
was handed over to the occupiers for ever (with free power of sale),
subject only to the payment of rent--the rent not being that which the
tenants had agreed to pay, but that which a Land Court decided to Be
a "fair rent." This was to last for fifteen years, at the end of which
time the tenant might again claim to have a fair rent fixed, and so
_ad infinitum_. The Land Court in most cases cut down the rent by
about 20 or 25 per cent.; and at the end of fifteen years did the
same again. As tithes (which had been secularized but not abolished),
mortgages and family charges remained unchanged, the result was that
a large proportion of landlords were absolutely ruined; in very many
cases those who appear as owners now have no beneficial interest in
their estates.
In examining the Act calmly, one must observe in the first place that
it was a wholesale confiscation of property. Not of course one
that involved the cruelty of confiscations of previous ages, but a
confiscation all the same. For if A. bought a farm in the Incumbered
Estates Court, with a Parliamentary title, and let it to B. for twenty
years at a rent of £100; and the Act gave B. the right of occupying it
for ever subject to the payment of £50 a year, and selling it for any
price he liked, that can only mean the transfer of property from A. to
B. Secondly, the Act encouraged bad farming; for a tenant knew that
if his land got into a slovenly state--with drains stopped up, fences
broken down, and weeds growing everywhere--the result would be that
the rent would be reduced by the Commissioners at the end of the
fifteen years; as the Commissioners did not go into the question of
whose the fault was, but merely took estimates as to what should be
the rent of the land in its actual condition. That farms were in many
instances intentionally allowed to go to decay with this object, has
been proved; and this pressed hard on the labouring class, as less
employment was given. Thirdly, although the remission of debt may
bring prosperity for a time, it may be doubted whether it will
permanently benefit the country; for it will be noticed that the
attempt to fix prices arbitrarily applied only to the letting and
hiring and not to other transactions. To give a typical instance of
what has occurred in many cases: a tenant held land at a rent of £1.
15s. 0d. per acre; he took the landlord into Court, swore that the
land could not bear such a rent, and had it reduced to £1. 5s. 0d.;
thereupon he sold it for £20 an acre; and so the present occupier had
to pay £1. 5s. 0d. to the nominal landlord, and the interest on the
purchase-money (about £1 per acre) to a mortgagee; in fact, he has
to pay a larger sum annually than any previous tenant did; and this
payment is "rent" in the economic sense though it is paid not to a
resident landlord but to a distant mortgagee. In other words, rent
was increased, and absenteeism became general. Fourthly, it sowed
the seeds for future trouble; for it was the temporary union of two
antagonistic principles. On the one hand it was said that "the man who
tills the land should own it," and therefore rent was an unjust
tax (in fact it was seriously argued that men of English and Scotch
descent who had hired farms in the nineteenth century had a moral
right to keep them for ever rent free because tribal tenure had
prevailed amongst the Celts who occupied the country many hundreds of
years before); on the other it was said that the land belonged to the
people of Ireland as a whole and not to any individuals. If that is
so, what right has one man to a large farm when there are hundreds of
others in a neighbouring town who have no land at all? The passing of
the Land Acts of 1881 and 1887 made it inevitable that sooner or later
a fresh agitation would be commenced by "landless men." And fifthly,
when an excitable, uneducated people realize that lawlessness and
outrages will be rewarded by an Act remitting debts and breaking
contracts, they are not likely in future to limit their operations
to land, but will apply the same maxims to other contracts. The
demoralizing of character is a fact to be taken into consideration.
However, the Act was passed; and if Gladstone really imagined that
it would satisfy the Nationalist party he must have been grievously
disappointed. During 1881, 4,439 agrarian outrages were recorded. The
Government declared the Land League to be illegal, and lodged some of
the leaders in gaol. Thereupon Ford, carrying out the plan laid down
by Lalor in 1848, issued his famous "No Rent" proclamation. It was not
generally acted upon; but his party continued active, and in May 1882
Lord Frederick Cavendish and Mr. Burke (the Chief and Under Secretary)
were murdered in the Phoenix Park. This led to the passing of the
Crimes Prevention Act, by which the detectives were enabled to secure
evidence against the conspirators, many of whom (as is usual in Irish
history) turned Queen's evidence. The Act was worked with firmness;
and outrages, which had numbered 2,507 during the first half of 1882,
fell to 836 in the latter half, to 834 in 1883, and to 774 in 1884.
In the autumn of 1885, Gladstone, expecting to return to power at
the ensuing election, besought the electors to give him a majority
independent of the Irish vote. In this he failed; and thereupon took
place the "Great Surrender." He suddenly discovered that everything
he had said and done up to that time had been wrong; that boycotting,
under the name of "exclusive dealing," was perfectly justifiable;
that the refusal to pay rent was just the same as a strike of workmen
(ignoring the obvious facts that when workmen strike they cease both
to give their labour and to receive pay, whereas the gist of the "No
Rent" movement was that tenants, whilst ceasing to pay, should retain
possession of the farms they have hired; and that a strike arises from
a dispute between employers and employed--usually about rates of pay
or length of hours; whereas Ford's edict that no rent was to be paid
was issued not in consequence of anything that individual landlords
had done, but because Gladstone had put the leaders of the Land League
in gaol); that the men whom he had previously denounced as "marching
through rapine to the dismemberment of the Empire" were heroes who
deserved to be placed in charge of the government of the country; and
introduced his first Home Rule Bill. Some of his followers went with
him; others refused. His life-long ally, John Bright, said: "I cannot
trust the peace and interests of Ireland, north and south, to the
Irish Parliamentary party, to whom the Government now propose to
make a general surrender. My six years' experience of them, of their
language in the House of Commons and their deeds in Ireland, makes it
impossible for me to consent to hand over to them the property and
the rights of five millions of the Queen's subjects, our
fellow-countrymen, in Ireland. At least two millions of them are as
loyal as the population of your town, and I will be no party to a
measure which will thrust them from the generosity and justice of the
United and Imperial Parliament."
The Bill was rejected; at the general election which ensued the people
of England declared against the measure; Gladstone resigned, and Lord
Salisbury became Prime Minister.