In the early days of the Land League, the cry throughout Ireland was for compulsory sale of the landlords' interest to the State at twenty years' purchase of the valuation, the occupiers to become tenants of the government for a fixed number of years until their yearly payments had cleared off both the principal and interest of the sum advanced to the landlords. Famine had made its appearance in many parts of the country, and the peasantry would be glad to be rid of the incubus of landlordism at any cost. The landlords scoffed at the proposal, and it was well for the tenants that they did not accept it. Foreign competition was but then in its infancy, and the prices of agricultural produce were not going down by leaps and bounds as they have been in 1884 and 1885. The yearly instalments the tenantry would have to pay to the State could not be met out of the produce of the land at present prices, if twenty years' purchase of Griffith's valuation had been accepted by the landlords. At the present time the majority of tenants in Ireland (and perhaps in England), taking into consideration the depression in agriculture, and the probable higher taxation of land in the near future, would think fifteen years' purchase too much for the fee simple of the land. It is pretty certain that when the land question comes to be finally settled, very few Irish landlords' interests can realize more than fifteen years' purchase on the valuation. In 1880, they were, with few exceptions, blind to the changes going on at their very doors, and struck out for their old rack-rents by threats of eviction and law proceedings. Instead of meeting their tenantry half way, they set the crow-bar brigade to work, and the numbers evicted were so appalling, that Mr. Parnell's party prevailed on the late government to pass through the Commons the Compensation for Disturbance Act, the result of which would be to suspend all evictions until a Land Bill was passed. But the landlords got their friends in the House of Lords to throw out the bill, and kept on impressing on the late government the necessity for coercion. The effect of the action of the Lords was stupefying on the middle classes, who saw that the last chance of a peaceable settlement was gone, and the half-starved peasantry were stung to madness at the thought of the revival of the eviction scenes of 1847 and 1848. Then sprung up a crop of outrages which became systematic where they had been isolated, and the agrarian war was really upon us.
The landlords proceeded with their evictions, and the peasantry retaliated by outrage until the Liberal government, having failed to pass their ameliorative measure, was forced to have recourse to coercion. The first Coercion Act of the Liberals was passed before the Land Bill, and thus Ireland was whipped first and caudled afterwards. Mr. Forster "ran in" his twelve hundred Suspects, and the result was an increased crop of outrages, and that the Invincibles lay in wait twenty times to murder him. The Suspects were generally the more respectable of the middle classes in the villages and towns—men whose interest it was to check outrage—who were marked down by the finger of landlordism as sympathizers with their brethren on the land. Then came the suppression of the Land League (1881), and the retaliating No-Rent Manifesto, which was not generally obeyed—chiefly through the influence of religion. There was suppressed anger and hatred of the ruling class throughout the land, and the people would not assist the police (who attacked their meetings and bludgeoned or stabbed them into submission) in tracking murderers or incendiaries. All this time the landlords kept on evicting, and calling through the English Press for still sterner repression of the right of public meeting, and the result was that secret societies multiplied and flourished. Religious influences could cope with a No-Rent Manifesto, but were almost powerless in grappling with secret societies. If the late Cardinal McCabe denounced them in the Cathedral, a large portion of the congregation rose up ostentatiously and withdrew. The voices of the national leaders who had restrained the people were gagged—Davitt in Portland, Parnell in Kilmainham. Things were going from bad to worse; the tension of public feelings was growing tighter day by day; the landlords were evicting apace and gloating over their victims, and saw not that such a state of siege could not last forever. And it appears Mr. Forster was so infatuated as to believe that it needed only a few months more of his stern rule to break the spirit of the Irish people. A glimmering of the true state of affairs had, however, begun to dawn upon his colleagues, and Mr. Forster succumbed at last to the incessant attacks of the remnant of the Nationalist members, who did not give him a chance of depriving them of their liberty by setting foot in Ireland, and to the vigorous criticism of the Pall Mall Gazette.
The Suspects were released and there was joy throughout Ireland. People began to breath freely once more; for the reign of landlord terror and peasant outrage seemed to draw near its close. The Land Act of 1880 had begun to inspire the tenantry with hope, especially as the first decisions of the commissioners gave sweeping reductions off the rents hitherto paid. In May, 1882, things were looking brighter. It seemed as if the Liberals had repented them of coercion, and that conciliation was to be tried in Ireland. But the Invincibles, for whose creation Mr. Forster's regime seems to be especially responsible, were not to be placated so easily. The Phœnix Park butchery had already been planned, and it was carried out with fiendish determination. The civilized world was horror stricken. The cup of peace was dashed from the lips of Ireland, and a cry of rage and despair resounded throughout the country. It was heard from pulpit and platform, and echoed through the Press of every shade of opinion. Many good men thought that now England's opportunity for gaining the affections of the Irish people had come at last; that by trusting to the horror of the Irish race for so dastardly a crime, its perpetrators would be brought to the bar of justice, and the victims avenged. But it was not to be so. In England the general public seemed to believe that the Irish were a demon race, who deserved to be chastised with scorpions, and knowing what was the state of the public mind in Ireland after the Phœnix Park assassinations, it would be hard to blame Englishmen for thinking as they did in the face of such an appalling crime. The blood of Lord Fred. Cavendish called aloud for vengeance, and the government passed the Prevention of Crimes Act, the most severe of all the Coercion Statutes.
It was a mistake to treat Ireland as if she sympathized with the Phœnix Park butchery. Under the Crimes Act we had secret inquisitions, informer manufacture by means of enormous bribes, swearing away of the lives of innocent men by wretches, who were the scum of society, jury packing to a degree unknown since 1848, conviction by drunken juries, and even the starting of secret societies by ruffians who were in the pay of the Executive.
The people quickly lapsed into their old indifference as to aiding an executive which used such base means of governing. It mattered little that Earl Spencer's personal character was above suspicion. Under his rule the lives and liberties of honest men were taken away by juries packed with landlords, or their partisans, on the testimony of hired or terrified wretches, who were generally the most guilty of the gangs that were banded together for unlawful purposes during the land war. Earl Spencer ruled by means which must necessarily have involved innocent men in the punishment of the guilty, and his name is the best hated of all the bad viceroys that ever ruled Ireland.
J. H.
Jim Daly's Repentance.
When the story was told to me, I thought it infinitely sad and pathetic. I wish I could tell it as I heard it, but having scant skill as a narrator, I fear I cannot. I can only set down the facts as they happened, and in my halting words they will read, I fear, but baldly and barely; and if in the reading will be found no trace at all of the tears which awoke in me for this little human tragedy, I am sorry, more sorry than I can say, for my want of skill. Indeed, I would need to write of it with a pen steeped in tears. It is the story of a hard and futile repentance,—futile, in that amends could never be made to those who had been sinned against; but surely, surely not futile, inasmuch as no hour of human pain is ever wasted that is laid before our Lord, but rather is gathered by Him in His pitiful hands, to be given back one day as a harvest of joy.
"Whisht, achora, whisht! sure I know you never meant to hurt me or the child." The woman, childishly young and slight, who spoke was half sitting, half lying in a low rush-bottomed chair, in the poor kitchen of a small Irish farmhouse. Her small, pretty face was marked with premature lines of pain and care, and now it was paler than usual, for across eyebrow and cheek extended a livid, dark bruise, as if from a blow of a heavy fist, and over the pathetic, drooping mouth there was a cruel, jagged cut, this evidently caused by a fall against something with a sharp, projecting point. By her side, in a wattled cradle, lay a puny, small baby, about a year old, with its small blue fingers, claw-like in their leanness, clutched closely, and with such a gray shade over its pinched features that one might have thought it dying. The young husband and father was cast down in an attitude bespeaking utter abasement at his wife's knees, and his face was hidden in her lap; but over the nut-brown hair her thin hands went softly, with caressing tender strokings, and as the great heart-breaking sobs burst from him the tears rolled one after another down her wan little face, while her low, soft voice went on tenderly, "Whisht, alanna machree, whisht! sure it's breakin' my heart ye are! Sure, how can I bear at all, at all, to listen to ye sobbin' like that?"