The fullest publicity should be given to evictions, and every effort made to enlist public sympathy. That the farms thus unjustly evicted will be left severally alone, and everyone who aids the eviction shunned, is scarcely necessary to say. But the man who tries boycotting for a personal purpose is a worse enemy than the evicting landlord, and should be expelled from any branch of the League or combination of tenants. No landlord should get one penny rent on any part of his estates, wherever situated, so long as he has one tenant unjustly evicted. This policy strikes not only at the landlord but the whole ungodly crew of agents, attorneys, and bum-bailiffs. Tenants should be the first to show their sympathy with one another, and prompt publicity should be given to every eviction, that the tenants of the evictor wherever he holds property may show their sympathy.
Such a policy indicates a fight which has no half-heartedness about it, and it is the only fight which will win.
Well may the author of the “Plan of Campaign” wind up his catechism by the appropriate remark that “such a policy indicates a fight which has no half-heartedness about it.” Never before was such a tremendous weapon of social war put in motion. Never before, in the whole course of history, was such a forcible ultimatum drafted for the consideration of the adverse party.
Leaving details aside, and the minute instructions on the true mode of skirmishing with the myrmidons of the law, the idea of using the very rent claimed by the landlord as a provision for feeding the struggle against him is in itself perfection—a real masterpiece of strategy. An artist can only feel the warmest admiration for such a combination of everything that is most pleasant to the heart of the agrarian warrior and most deadly to the landlord’s cause. As an orator of the League (Mr. W. O’Brien) has put it: “We have discovered a weapon against landlordism, the mere threat and terror of which have already brought down rack-renters to their knees. We have discovered a weapon which feudal landlordism can no more resist than a suit of armour of the middle ages can resist modern artillery.” And the country where such an admirable paper has been penned by its political leaders is supposed by its foes to be unable to rule its own affairs! This is unfairness with a vengeance. Let those meet its provisions, since they are so very clever.
The wonder, however, is not that such a policy should have been dreamed of. Similar plans of warfare have more than once been drawn out in the council chamber of parties. The wonder is that this one should have been deemed practicable by the farmers of Ireland; that it should have been unanimously accepted by them; and, what is more, put at once into effect. Another wonder is that it should have been found lawful, on the best legal authority, and that it should have remained unopposed by the “Four Courts” and “the Castle.” The greatest wonder of all is that it should have enlisted the warm and public support not only of the lower ranks of the clergy all over the island, but of the Episcopate itself; not only of the Episcopate but of the Pope, since neither his special envoy in Ireland nor his Holiness personally in any encyclical letter, have spoken one word in condemnation of the “Plan of Campaign.”
It has been in operation now for over one year; it has spread as far as the leaders of the League have deemed it expedient, for thus far they seem to have used it only moderately. “We did not desire,” they say, “and we do not desire now that the ‘Plan of Campaign’ should be adopted anywhere, except where the tenants have a just and moderate and unimpeachable case.” But, none the less, it hangs as a formidable threat over the heads of the doomed landlords. At a moment’s notice it may be extended to the whole island, as it has been already to some hundred estates in twenty-two counties.
An idea of the state of affairs may be gathered from the account given by the Freeman’s Journal (December 3, 1886) of the scene witnessed on Lord de Freyne’s property in county Sligo. His tenants asked for an abatement of 20 per cent., and, being refused, they decided to adopt the “Plan of Campaign.”
There is nothing in the nature of a town or even a village at Kilfree Junction, there being only two or three one-story thatched cottages within sight of it. In one of these, the nearest to the station, the rents were received by Mr. William Redmond, M.P.; the Rev. Canon O’Donoghue, D.D.; Rev. Father Henry, C.C.; and the Rev. Father Filan, C.C. The operations of receiving the rents, entering amounts, and giving receipts to the tenants occupied the greater part of the day, commencing in early morning and continuing far in the afternoon. Although the situation was rather a depressing one for the poor people exposed to all the severity of the elements, they seemed to be one and all animated by the greatest enthusiasm. The interior of the cottage in which the rents were being collected presented a spectacle really unique in its way. The first room, a sort of combination of kitchen, sitting-room, and shop, was crowded almost to suffocation by men and a few women, who were sheltering from the snow which fell in great white flakes without. There was no grate, but a few turf sods burned on the hearth, while above them hung a kettle, suspended from an iron hook fixed from the quaint old chimney. In the centre of the bedroom leading off the apartment was a small table, at which Mr. Redmond, M.P., the clergymen whose names are given above, and one of the leading members of the local branch of the National League were seated receiving the tenants’ rents. The room was densely crowded, but the utmost order and decorum prevailed, and the whole proceedings were conducted in the most punctilious and business-like manner.