Sir James Stephen, a man of acute discriminations, who has done more justice to the Irish problem than any one else, wrote:—
'The great difficulty the Land League and the National League have had to contend with is that of hindering the neighbouring farmers, peasants, and labourers from frustrating the strike against rent by taking up vacant farms, however they came to be vacant. Boycotting never succeeded unless crime was at its back. The Crimes Act cut the ground from under the feet of the boycotters, not so much by its direct prohibitions of the practice as by making it unsafe to commit outrages in enforcing the law of the League. The Land League and the National League were nothing else but screens for secret societies whose work was to enforce the League decrees by outrage and murder.'
Whenever the 'History of Modern Ireland' comes to be written, that glowing outburst of truth ought to be quoted.
There were some evictions carried out at Farranfore on the estate of Lord Kenmare, by the sub-sheriff, Mr. Harnett, and a force of military and police numbering about one hundred and thirty.
During the eviction of one Daly, horns were blown and the chapel bell set ringing. These appeals drew about three thousand people to the place, who groaned and threw some stones, besides growing so menacing that the Riot Act had to be read, upon which the whole crowd moved off.
This brought a characteristic effusion from United Ireland:—
'We remember the time when Kerry was a county as quiet as the grave, when its member, Henry A. Herbert, in the debate on the Westminster Act of 1871, was able to rise in his place and boast that in purely Celtic counties like his there was no crime, and that agrarian outrages was confined to districts infused with English blood, like Meath and Tipperary. What has changed it? Principally the malpractices of a couple of agents ruling over half its area, whose bloated rentals grow swollen under their hands with the sweat of dumb and hopeless possessors.'
Whatever else he possessed, that writer had not one vestige of truth with which to cover the indecency of his misrepresentations.
He did not mention that Mr. Matthew Harris, a Member for Galway, had publicly observed that if the tenant farmers of Ireland shot down landlords as partridges are shot in the month of September, he would never say a word against them.
It is a fact that the convulsion of horror at the murder of Lord Frederick Cavendish alone prevented an organised campaign for the 'removal' of Irish landlords on a systematic and wholesale scale.