and to remember Mitchelstown apart from the blood that was shed there, I
should think it is not I, but her Majesty's Government. They had neither
the humanity to forbid these evictions, nor the courage to persevere
with them. They superintended and sanctioned them as long as there was
any prospect of resistance; they had the cowardice to abandou them the
moment they threatened to become inconvenient to a Tory candidate, and
they had the incredible meanness, while my hands were bound in prison,
to present a story to the English people, in a false and untruthful
guise, in order to reconcile Englishmen to having me treated worse than
a thief or a cutthroat, for saving my own constituents from the fate
which now the Land Commissioners and everybody on this earth acknowledge
would have been a most unmerited and a most awful calamity. I won't
weary the House by going into all the miserable circumstances, all the
foul play, and the violence and the indecencies that were resorted to
against us. Unfortunately they are common-place and every-day
occurrences in Ireland, through the infamous tribunals you have set up.
I certainly am not going to enter into any recital of the miserable
little prison torments and iniquities that were employed to give us pain
and humiliation, and to besmirch the character of the Irish
representatives in the eyes of the people of England and Ireland. I
think we can afford to pass these things by. I believe that our
opponents are not all so lost to generous and manly sentiments as not to
feel ashamed rather than exultant about the Chief Secretary's exploits.
There is another class of opponents. I am sorry to think that men who
are capable of inflicting pain of this description are quite capable of
deriving a still keener pleasure in knowing that the torments have told,
and that their victims smart under their wounds. I cannot gratify them,
for the simple reason that I do not feel wounded. I do not feel in the
least degraded. I rather suspect that the right honorable gentleman,
under his jaunty bearing, has his conscience not quite so easy as mine.
I confess that I did feel keenly when in prison a letter which the right
honorable gentleman published to a Mr. Armitage, not making any honest
charge against me, but conveying a stealthy and loathsome insinuation
that I sheltered myself under the plea of illness from being forced to
wear prison dress. I challenge the right honorable gentleman to refer to
any one of the three official doctors who examined me, for one tittle, I
will not say of foundation, but even of countenance, for such an
assertion. (_Loud cheers._) Here we are now face to face. (_Great
cheering from the Opposition._) I challenge him in defence of his own
character, for it is his own character that is at stake (_cheers_), to
appeal to any one of those three officials to give him the slightest
countenance. ("_Hear, hear._")
I have said I was angry about it when in prison, but since reading the
letter over fully, I am angry no longer; I confess it would be an ample
vengeance, if I were a much more vindictive man than I am, for a
statesman who had any reputation to lose, to pen such a letter.
(_Cheers._) The letter conveyed a hideous and cowardly imputation
against a man whose mouth was shut. (_Cheers._) That letter breathed in
every sentence of it the temper of a beaten and an angry man
(_cheers_),--I was going to say, of an angry woman (_laughter and
cheers_), but I don't want to say it, because it would be a gross libel
on a gentle and tender sex. ("_Hear, hear._") From all I have been able
to learn in England since, I feel that it is no longer necessary for us
to defend ourselves to the English people. (_Cheers._) I feel there is
not a Tory of the fifth or sixth magnitude, who really in his heart
believes for one instant that Irish members are such poor creatures as
to cry out against the appearance of a prison. (_Cheers._)
The honorable member for Tyrone (Mr. T. W. Russell) said that we
attempted to set up a distinction between members of Parliament and the
peasants, our comrades and friends who are convicted under the act.
There is not a shadow or a tittle of foundation for that statement.
("_Hear, hear._") We have claimed nothing for ourselves as members of
Parliament that we don't claim equally for every man convicted under the
summary clauses of the act; for if he is a criminal, there is no reason
why he should not be tried before the ordinary tribunal. ("_Hear,
hear._") We do not ask poor men to make a hard fight harder by
resistance to prison rules; but if we win, they shall win as well as
ourselves. ("_Hear, hear._") Our position simply this: You are perfectly
welcome to treat us to all the punishments that your courts of law
prescribe for the very vilest miscreant in society,--the plank bed, or
bread-and-water diet-solitary chnfinement, or deprivation of books and
writing materials; you are perfectly welcome to heap every physical
degradation on us, if that is your generous and chivalrous treatment of
political prisoners, and you will never hear a word of complaint from us
if you stick to that; but if you not only do that, but go further, and
try and subject us to moral torture, from which criminals are altogether
exempt, when you ask us to make a voluntary acknowledgement of our
equality with criminals, then we say, "No; we will die first (_cheers
from Irish members_), and you will have to learn the distinction between
your criminal classes and Irish political prisoners, even if it should
take a coroner's jury and their verdict to make the distinction."
(_Loud cheers._) I can only say that if any one has reason to blush, it
is not we. ("_Hear, hear._") I hope I am not detaining the House.
(_Cheers._)
The only thing I can plead is, that I shall not have an opportunity very
soon of claiming your attention; but I should like to ask, "Where is all
this to end?" What object has it accomplished? and if it is to go on for
ever and for ever, what object can it ever possibly accomplish, except
misery to a weak people and eternal worry and shame to yourselves?
(_Cheers._) Is it the object of the right honorable gentleman to convert
the Irish people, or to dragoon them out of the aspirations which are as
deeply lodged in the breasts of millions of men as the blood in their
hearts? Does the right honorable gentleman in his wildest hour imagine
that he has made one single genuine convert through the length and
breadth of Ireland? (_Cheers._) Even to take it on the lower and meaner
sphere of brute force, I ask the right honorable gentleman to name one
single village club that he has effectually stamped out. (_Cheers._) Can
he produce a single man from our ranks that he has really frightened, as
the result of all the terrific power that he has been wielding in
Ireland?
I ask honorable gentlemen opposite to remember with what a shout of
exultation they passed the Crimes Act last session, and how they
triumphed over us. I can well remember the shouts and peals of delight
with which they welcomed the declaration of the Chancellor of the
Exchequer, I think, when he said this was to be a duel to the death
between the National League and the Government, and that they accepted
the challenge. Well, are they satisfied with the results? (_Cheers and
laughter._) I ask honorable gentlemen whether they would have yelled so
loudly last autumn if they could have foreseen the results of the most
terrible Coercion Act ever passsd, giving the most unchecked powers that
ever a despot was armed with, would be so miserable and ignominious and
mean? (_Cheers._) Did you or did you not expect that the act would crush
the National League? Honorable gentlemen are silent. (_Cheers._) I
remember the shout of derision which came from the other side of the
House when I ventnred to intimate a doubt whether the act, terrific as
it looked, would succeed in crushing the Plan of Campaign. Has it been
crushed, or even crippled? (_Cheers._) Ask the deputation of Irish
landlords (_laughter and cheers_) who waited on Lord Salisbury the other
day with a begging letter,--ask them how many of them would be willing
to try a fall with the Plan of Campaign in the morning. (_Cheers and
laughter._) It has never had so uniform and unbroken a course of
victories as it has had this winter.
The greater number of the important struggles in which we were engaged
when this act was passed has been brought to a victorious conclusion
under the mouths of the right honorable gentleman's guns. (_Cheers._)
And upon what terms? I could speak for an hour, giving you instances of
the results; but the one thing that applies to them all is, that in
every single instance at least the original demands of the tenants have
been acceded to. ("_Hear, hear._") Every evicted tenant has been
reinstated (_cheers_), and every shilling of law costs incurred in the
struggle has been borne as an indemnity by the landlords. (_Cheers, and
"No."_) You could have got as good a result as that without the act. On
Lord de Freyne's estate, when the act was passing, the agent, Mr.
M'Dougal, wrote this letter: "Spot the men in your district who are able
to pay and won't; we will see, now that the Coercion Act is about to
become law, whether we won't make them honest men." It turned out that
the dishonest men beat Mr. M'Dougal and his master. They had confidence
in the Crimes Bill and the right honorable gentleman last autumn. Where
is Mr. M'Dougal to-day? He is gone, dismissed, and everything that the
tenants were then demanding has been conceded.
The very day after I came out of prison, I learned that the new agent
had had an interview with two of the most prominent of the campaigners
on the estate, and he not only agreed to the tenants' terms, but he
agreed to refund the sum of over £1,700, which Mr. M'Dougal had
dishonestly extorted from the tenants before the Plan of Campaign.
(_Cheers._) This money was wrung from the tenants by terror, by serving
one hundred and fifty writs of ejectment before they had the protection
of the Plan of Campaign.
Then as to the estate of Bodyke, where the proceedings last summer
horrified England, and for which her Majesty's Government could provide
no remedy; what is the result? Last year, Mr. O'Callaghan, one of the
hardest rack-renters, refused an offer of £907 for a year and a half's
rent of fifty-seven tenants; he has now accepted £1,000 to wipe off two
years' rent of seventy-two tenants. (_Cheers and laughter._) That is to
say, after losing all his money, and after costing the British taxpayer
£40,000 for the expenses of his evictions (_cheers_), he has now come to
the conclusion, and he is one of the most desperate of rack-renters,
that the Crimes Act is no go, and he has struck his flag to the Plan of
Campaign upon worse terms for him by far than he would have got before
the passing of the Crimes Act. (_Cheers._) Only this very day a letter
came to my honorable friend, the member for East Mayo (Mr. Dillon), from
the principal man who stood almost between the living and the dead on
that estate,--the Rev. Peter Murphy,--in which the writer said: "A
thousand thanks for check. You have acted nobly by us, and we have every
reason to thank and be grateful to you. What pleases me most of all is,
that our victory over Colonel O'Callaghan is complete, and approved by
all who understand the matter fully. He did his utmost to get the
tenants to purchase. He would have sold on any terms rather than yield
to the plan, but we absolutely refused to purchase as long as the rope
remained round our necks. (_Cheers._) We would not entertain the idea of
purchasing at all, until restored to our holdings and free as the
mountain air to meet him on equal terms." (_Cheers._)
"The next gale," the writer says, "is not to be asked until the end of
June. Reductions suited to the different degrees of poverty, of fifteen
per cent upwards to twenty-five and thirty per cent are secured."
(_Cheers._) That is the way the right honorable gentleman is abating the
power of the Plan of Campaign. (_Renewed cheers._) And remember that
these poor tenants have won in spite of him, not merely by adhering to
the Plan of Campaign, but also because every man of them who was evicted
retook possession of his holding in defiance of the Crimes Act, and has
held possession of his holding for the last six months. (_Cheers._) And
the lesson the right honorable gentleman, this triumphant Cromwell
(_laughter_), has taught them is that, thanks to their own pluck, and
not to his mercy, they are more secure in their homes to-day,--well,
than the right honorable gentleman was in his tenancy of the Treasury
Bench. (_Cheers and laughter._)
I am at this moment officially aware of several estates where the
struggle is still proceeding. The landlords are placing their hopes, and
are opening their negotiations, not with the right honorable gentleman,
or with Dublin Castle, but with the man who sits there, my honorable
friend, the honorable member for East Mayo (_loud cheers_), and with
other members of this criminal and illegal conspiracy; a conspiracy as
to whose dishonesty we have heard so many homilies from honorable
gentlemen opposite. Why, I sometimes wonder that the homilies they
address to us and to our suffering people upon the violations of the ten
commandments do not blister the lips that utter them. ("_Hear, hear._")
This dishonest conspiracy. No land court that has ever revised their
demands has been able to pronounce them to be other than most just and
moderate. ("_Hear, hear._")
My honorable friend, the member for Cork, mentioned the other night that
there were only three really great estates in Ireland on which the
landlords are offering any resistance. One of them is the Brooke estate,
in the county of Wexford, where the agent, Captain Hamilton, is an
emergency man by profession. ("_Hear, hear._") The second is Lord
Massareene's property, in the county of Louth, where the agents also are
emergency men by profession; and the third is the estate of Lord
Clanricarde. It must be a proud thing for Englishmen to know that the
right honorable gentleman on that estate was exercising one of the most
abominable systems of petty persecution that ever was practised, in
order to strike down the defenders of those poor people, to smother
their voices, and to tie their hands in their struggle with a man who in
the Queen's own law courts has been branded as a monster of cruelty and
avarice! (_Loud cheers._) I wish her Majesty's Government joy of all the
credit that they will get out of their holy alliance with Lord
Clanricarde (_"Hear, hear," and laughter_), and I wish him joy of all
the rent he will get out of them. (_Cheers and laughter._)
The fact is, and there is no use in blinking it, that, instead of
overthrowing the Plan of Campaign, the right honorable gentleman has
only made it more secure and more irrestible, by driving us to do our
business with less publicity. ("_Hear, hear._") The machinery of the
plan has been now perfected to such a degree that we find that one
single campaign on an estate is sufficient to keep the peace of a whole
county. (_Cheers._) Aye, and to settle the rents of a whole county more
satisfactorily and more honestly than an army of land commissioners.
("_Hear, hear._") I will tell you why. It is a very simple reason.
Because the penalties of such a struggle are so heavy as to intimidate
any tenantry from putting forward an unjust demand, and they are also
sufficiently great to terrify a landlord from resisting a just demand.
("_Hear, hear._") It may be a rough-and-ready method; no doubt it is;
but what is the result? That in ninety-nine cases out of one hundred
last winter it succeeded without any struggle at all.
I challenge honorable gentlemen who speak of the immorality and
dishonesty of the Plan of Campaign,--I challenge the right honorable
gentleman to name any single deed of outrage or of crime that is
traceable to the Plan of Campaign, from end to end of Ireland.
(_Cheers._) I challenge him to name any one case in which the demands we
have put forward have been declared by any land commissioner or judical
tribunal in the country to be dishonest or exorbitant. I challenge him
more than all to adduce to the House to-night one solitary case in which
he has succeeded, with all his powers and his terrors, in breaking up a
combination that was once formed on an estate. (_Cheers._) And remember
always that this Plan of Campaign is the merest segment of the Irish
difficulty. It is a mere rough-and-ready way, which has been found
effective to cure the blunders of your legislation, and to cure your
folly in not closing with the bill of my honorable friend, the member
for Cork. (_Cheers._) My honorable friend and myself and others are the
mere Uhlans and cadets to the army of millions of Irishmen who stand
ranked under the standard of my honorable friend, the member for Cork.
(_Cheers._)
Now, as to the National League, I want to examine the right honorable
gentleman. (_Laughter._) We have heard it stated over and over again in
most portentious accents in this House, that the authority of the
National League and of her Majesty's Government could not co-exist in
Ireland; that either one or the other must pack up and go. What has all
this tall talk come to? ("_Hear, hear._") Is the Leage gone, or does it
show the slightest sign of going? There are eighteen hundred branches of
the National League in Ireland; rather more, I believe now, because the
right honorable gentleman's act has added some more. (_Cheers._) Not
more than two hundred and fifty of those branches have been nominally
grappled with. There are about fifteen hundred branches, or over five
sixths of the whole organization, on which not a finger has been laid.
Why? Is it that the right honorable gentleman has conceived a sudden
affection for the National League? (_Laughter._) Is it that these
branches are declining in power, or is it that they have abated their
principles one jot in terror? No; but because the Government has made
such a disastrous and grotesque mess of their attempt to suppress a
couple of hundred branches that they dared not face the ridicule, the
colossal collapse, that would attend any attempt to grapple with the
whole of this organization. (_Cheers._)
Everybody who knows the so-called suppressed counties of Kerry and Clare
knows that the suppressed branches hold their meetings just as usual,
under the noses of the police. We know it by the figures and by the cash
which comes that the subscriptions, instead of falling off, are
increasing. The resolutions are passed in the usual way, and I can tell
you they are regarded with more sacredness and more efficacy than usual
by the whole community. I will read an extract from a branch report in
_United Ireland_ the week before last ("_Hear, hear_"), one of these
suppressed branches which have, according to the local policeman,
disappeared from view. It says: "A large representative meeting was held
on Monday, Mr. George Pomeroy in the chair." No concealment of names.
"Balloting for officers and committee took place with the following
result, after a most vigorous competition for offices (_Nationalist
cheers_), the only emolument for which will probably be a couple of
months in jail: J. O'Callan, 60 votes; G. Pomeroy, 58; S. O'Keefe, 56;
D. Hanlon, 50; O'Leary, 60; Power, 44; Fitzpatrick, 47"; and so on. "The
first five are elected." (_Nationalist cheers._)
There is no disguising the fact that your whole suppressive machinery,
the whole machinery for effectually suppressing the League, has totally
broken down, and for a very simple reason, because the act was conceived
upon the theory that you were dealing with a people who were only pining
to be delivered from the terrorism of the National League (_cheers_),
whereas you find to your cost you are dealing with a people who are the
League themselves, ready to guard it with their lives, and to undergo
any amount of torture rather than betray it. (_Nationalist cheers._) Why
do you not put the Secret Inquiry clauses in force for the purpose of
suppressing branches of the National League? Why! Because you know you
would have to send thousands of people to jail who would rather go there
than let you wring one tittle of information out of them. Your only
other source is informers, and it is our proudest boast that with an
organization numbering upwards of 500,000 men, up to this time you have
not been able to bring a single informer into the market, though no
doubt the market price of the article was never higher. (_Cheers._)
I want the right honorable gentleman to tell us here to-night what he
has got by all his wild and vicious lunges against the Irish people. I
have no patience with talking of "crime in Ireland," outside Kerry. The
Moonlighters and the Government have had Kerry to themselves for the
last five or six years. Between them be it, and let them divide the
honors. (_Loud Nationalist cheers._) They tell us of a number of persons
partially boycotted. I do not know what the local policeman may be
pleased to call "persons partially boycotted"; but I am pretty sure the
list would go up or down, according to the requirements of the
Government. Let the right honorable gentleman give us a list of new
land-grabbers who have taken farms (_cheers_), or let him give us a
list, and I only wish he would, of the land-grabbers who, since this act
has been put in force, have accepted their neighbors' farms. As to
legitimate boycotting, I shall always hold with the perfect right of the
community to exercise legitimate influence on men who for their own base
and greedy purposes are the pests of society.
I admit that there are two classes of victims at the mercy of the Chief
Secretary,--public speakers and public newspapers Public speeches are
the merest appendages of our organization. And why are public speakers
at his mercy? Simply and solely because we do not choose to be driven
away from our free right of public meeting, but choose to assert it, as
Mr. Blunt chose to assert it in the light of day. (_Cheers._) If we
choose to give our speeches in private, we could run a coach and four
through the provisions of this act with absolute impunity. My friends
here were for months engaged on the Plan of Campaign. We have no secrets
we are afraid to acknowledge. ("_Oh, oh._") None. I only hope the
honorable gentleman who says "Oh"--(_an honorable member: "Rochester"._)
Certainly. They have actually been for months and months on the business
of the Plan of Campaign, even with warrants over their heads.
Talk of me in connection with Mitchelstown. I may be giving the right
honorable gentleman a tip, but I do not object to say that my honorable
friend, the member for South Tipperary (Mr. J. O'Connor), was far and
away a more formidable person than I was in the Plan of Campaign; but
because he happens to be a man of few words, he will be walking in this
lobby to-morrow night instead of reposing on a plank bed, as he would if
he had spoken. (_Cheers._) I do not mind telling it, and he will not
mind it either, for his work, and he is victorious. I might say a good
deal about the meanness of this policy of subjecting journalists to
milk-and-water diet, for the simple fact that they recorded the right
honorable gentleman's failure ("_Hear, hear_"), because that is the
sting of their offence,--because the meetings are held, and held in
spite of the Government. (_Loud Nationalist cheers._) You might as well
issue a proclamation suppressing the sun in the heavens, and then go
about smashing the faces of the sun-dials for recording that the sun is
moving on its way in spite of you. (_Laughter and cheers._) Worse still
is it to attack the humble news venders, and intimidate their wives and
their little children. ("_Hear, hear._")