Instead of opening with the letters, as the country expected, the accusers began by rearing a prodigious accumulation of material, first for the Irish or agrarian branch of their case, and then for the American branch. The government helped them to find their witnesses, and so varied a host was never seen in London before. There was the peasant from Kerry in his frieze swallow-tail and knee-breeches, and the woman in her scarlet petticoat who runs barefoot over the bog in Galway. The convicted member of a murder club was brought up in custody from Mountjoy prison or Maryborough. One of the most popular of the Irish representatives had been fetched from his dungeon, and was to be seen wandering through the lobbies in search of his warders. Men who had been shot by moonlighters limped into the box, and poor women in their blue-hooded cloaks told pitiful tales of midnight horror. The sharp spy was there, who disclosed sinister secrets from cities across the Atlantic, and the uncouth informer who betrayed or invented the history of rude and ferocious plots hatched at the country cross-roads [pg 403]
Proceedings In Court
or over the peat fire in desolate cabins in western Ireland. Divisional commissioners with their ledgers of agrarian offences, agents with bags full of figures and documents, landlords, priests, prelates, magistrates, detectives, smart members of that famous constabulary force which is the arm, eye, and ear of the Irish government—all the characters of the Irish melodrama were crowded into the corridors, and in their turn brought out upon the stage of this surprising theatre.
The proceedings speedily settled down into the most wearisome drone that was ever heard in a court of law. The object of the accusers was to show the complicity of the accused with crime by tracing crime to the league, and making every member of the league constructively liable for every act of which the league was constructively guilty. Witnesses were produced in a series that seemed interminable, to tell the story of five-and-twenty outrages in Mayo, of as many in Cork, of forty-two in Galway, of sixty-five in Kerry, one after another, and all with immeasurable detail. Some of the witnesses spoke no English, and the English of others was hardly more intelligible than Erse. Long extracts were read out from four hundred and forty speeches. The counsel on one side produced a passage that made against the speaker, and then the counsel on the other side found and read some qualifying passage that made as strongly for him. The three judges groaned. They had already, they said plaintively, ploughed through the speeches in the solitude of their own rooms. Could they not be taken as read? No, said the prosecuting counsel; we are building up an argument, and it cannot be built up in a silent manner. In truth it was designed for the public outside the court,[254] and not a touch could be spared that might deepen the odium. Week after week the ugly tale went on—a squalid ogre let loose among a population demoralised by ages of wicked neglect, misery, and oppression. One side strove to show that the ogre had been wantonly raised by the land league for political objects of their own; the other, that it was the progeny of distress and wrong, that [pg 404] the league had rather controlled than kindled its ferocity, and that crime and outrage were due to local animosities for which neither league nor parliamentary leaders were answerable.
On the forty-fourth day (February 5) came a lurid glimpse from across the Atlantic. The Irish emigration had carried with it to America the deadly passion for the secret society. A spy was produced, not an Irishman this time for a wonder, but an Englishman. He had been for eight-and-twenty years in the United States, and for more than twenty of them he had been in the pay of Scotland Yard, a military spy, as he put it, in the service of his country. There is no charge against him that he belonged to that foul species who provoke others to crime and then for a bribe betray them. He swore an oath of secrecy to his confederates in the camps of the Clan-na-Gael, and then he broke his oath by nearly every post that went from New York to London. It is not a nice trade, but then the dynamiter's is not a nice trade either.[255] The man had risen high in the secret brotherhood. Such an existence demanded nerves of steel; a moment of forgetfulness, an accident with a letter, the slip of a phrase in the two parts that he was playing, would have doomed him in the twinkling of an eye. He now stood a rigorous cross-examination like iron. There is no reason to think that he told lies. He was perhaps a good deal less trusted than he thought, for he does not appear on any occasion to have forewarned the police at home of any of the dynamite attempts that four or five years earlier had startled the English capital. The pith of his week's evidence was his account of an interview between himself and Mr. Parnell in the corridors of the House of Commons in April 1881. In this interview, Mr. Parnell, he said, expressed his desire to bring the Fenians in Ireland into line with his own constitutional movement, and to that end requested the spy to invite a notorious leader of the physical force party in America to come over to Ireland, to arrange a harmonious understanding. Mr. Parnell had no recollection of the interview, [pg 405]
The Letters Reached
though he thought it very possible that an interview might have taken place. It was undoubtedly odd that the spy having once got his line over so big a fish, should never afterwards have made any attempt to draw him on. The judges, however, found upon a review of “the probabilities of the case,” that the conversation in the corridor really took place, that the spy's account was correct, and that it was not impossible that in conversation with a supposed revolutionist, Mr. Parnell may have used such language as to leave the impression that he agreed with his interlocutor. Perhaps a more exact way of putting it would be that the spy talked the Fenian doctrine of physical force, and that Mr. Parnell listened.
IV
At last, on the fiftieth day (February 14, 1889), and not before, the court reached the business that had led to its own creation. Three batches of letters had been produced by the newspaper. The manager of the newspaper told his story, and then the immediate purveyor of the letters told his. Marvellous stories they were.
The manager was convinced from the beginning, as he ingenuously said, quite independently of handwriting, that the letters were genuine. Why? he was asked. Because he felt they were the sort of letters that Mr. Parnell would be likely to write. He counted, not wholly without some reason, on the public sharing this inspiration of his own indwelling light. The day was approaching for the division on the Coercion bill. Every journalist, said the manager, must choose his moment. He now thought the moment suitable for making the public acquainted with the character of the Irishmen. So, with no better evidence of authority than his firm faith that it was the sort of letter that Mr. Parnell would be likely to write, on the morning of the second reading of the Coercion bill, he launched the fac-simile letter. In the early part of 1888 he received from the same hand a second batch of letters, and a third batch a few days later. His total payments amounted to over two thousand five hundred pounds. He still asked no questions as to the source of these expensive documents. On the contrary he [pg 406] particularly avoided the subject. So much for the cautious and experienced man of business.