Through the whole of 1880 Parnell was determinedly organizing the Land League throughout Ireland, and during the winter, doubtless encouraged by the enormous distress that prevailed over the whole country, the force and power of the League grew with a rapidity that surpassed even the expectations of Parnell and his party. All through the vacation Parnell and his followers held meetings in carefully calculated areas of Ireland, and in his speeches Parnell explained the meaning and wide-reaching scope of the League's agitation, i.e. that tenant farmers were to trust in their own combination alone and "should give no faith to the promises of the English Ministers."
During the early session that year Parnell had introduced a Bill called "Suspension of Ejectments Bill," and this first pressed upon the House the necessity of dealing with the Irish landlord troubles. Parnell's party urged this Bill with so united a front that Mr. Gladstone was obliged to consider the main substance of it, and he agreed to insert a clause in the "Relief of Distress Bill" which would deal with impending evictions of Irish tenants. But the Speaker of the House held that the interpolation of such a clause would not be "in order," and the Chief Secretary for Ireland (Mr. Forster) then, by Mr. Gladstone's direction, brought in his "Disturbances Bill," which was to all practical purposes Parnell's Bill under another name.
In the course of the debate on this Bill Mr. Gladstone himself said that "in the circumstances of distress prevalent in Ireland (at that time) a sentence of eviction is the equivalent of a sentence of death." These absolutely true words of Gladstone's were used by Parnell very many times during his Land League tours both in speeches and privately, and many times he added—as so often he did to me at home—bitter comment upon the apathy of the English Government, upon the curious insensibility of the English law-makers, who knew these things to be true in Ireland and yet were content to go on in their policy of drift, unless forced into action by those who saw the appalling reality of the distress among the Irish poor that was so comfortably deplored in London.
In this connexion Parnell used to say that the fundamental failure in the English government of Ireland was: First, the complete inability of the Ministers in power to realize anything that was not before their eyes; and, secondly, their cast-iron conviction that Ireland was the one country of the world that was to be understood and governed by those to whom she was little but a name.
In all this time of trouble and eviction Parnell went backwards and forwards between England (Eltham) and Ireland as occasion required, and so successful were his efforts in spreading the agitation and linking up the League that the Government became uneasy as to the outcome of this new menace to landlordism. Finally Parnell and fourteen of his followers were put on trial, charged with "conspiracy to impoverish landlords." Parnell, of course, went over to Ireland for these "State trials," but he considered the whole thing such a farce, in that it was an impotent effort of the Government to intimidate him, that he could not take it seriously in any way. No jury (in Ireland) would agree to convict him he was well aware, and he attended the trials chiefly, he said, for the "look of the thing," and to give the support of his presence to his colleagues. Incidentally he told me on one occasion that he had considerably hurried the jury when he was very anxious to catch a train in time for the night mail to England (Eltham) by "willing" them to agree (to disagree) without the long discussion of local politics with which all self-respecting Irish jurors beguile the weary ways of law. He observed that here, in the question of how far an unconscious agent can be "willed" into a desired action, he had discovered another and most entrancing study for us when we had more time to go into it thoroughly.
Talking of the Land League's procedure against the interests of the Irish landlords, I may, I think, here pertinently remind those who have, among so many other accusations, brought against Parnell the charge of self-seeking in regard to money matters, that Parnell himself was an Irish landlord and of very considerable estates, and that this land campaign (really, of course, directed against eviction), meant, to all practical purposes, the loss of his rents, and that not only for a time, as in other cases, but, with the very generous interpretation put upon his wishes by the "Chief's" tenants, for all time—or rather for all his lifetime. Captain O'Shea also had certain estates in Ireland, and naturally, not being in sympathy with Parnell's policy, but being at heart a thorough Whig and a strong advocate for Mr. Shaw, the ex-leader of the Irish party, he was furious at the League's anti-landlord work, and refused to have any hand in it. He considered that hapless as was the plight of those who had to pay in rent the money they did not possess, that of the landlord whose rent was his all was but little to be preferred.
During this period the stories of the evictions brought home to me by Parnell himself made my heart sick, and often he sat far into the night at Eltham speaking in that low, broken monotone, that with him always betokened intense feeling strongly held in check, of the terrible cruelty of some of the things done in the name of justice in unhappy Ireland. How old people, and sometimes those sick beyond recovery, women with the children they had borne but a few hours before, little children naked as they had come into the world, all thrust out from the little squalid cabins which were all they had for home, thrust out on the roadside to perish, or to live as they could. I in my English ignorance used to say: "Why did they not go into the workhouse or to neighbours?" and Parnell would look wonderingly at me as he told me that for the most part such places were few and far between in Ireland, and "neighbours," good as they were to each other, were in the same trouble. There were instances where a wife would beg, and with none effect, that the bailiffs and police should wait but the little half-hour that her dying husband drew his last breath; and where a husband carried his wife from her bed to the "shelter" of the rainswept moor that their child might be born out of the sight of the soldiers deputed to guard the officials who had been sent to pull their home about their ears. And, remembering these and so many other tales of some of the 50,000 evictions that he afterwards calculated had taken place in Ireland, I have never wondered at the implacable hatred of England that can never really die out of the Irish heart.
On December 4th, 1880, he wrote to me from Dublin:
I was exceedingly pleased to receive your letters; to say the truth, I have been quite homesick since leaving Eltham, and news from you seems like news from home.