Then as to the estate of Bodyke, where the proceedings last summer horrified England, and for which her Majesty's Government could provide no remedy; what is the result? Last year, Mr. O'Callaghan, one of the hardest rack-renters, refused an offer of £907 for a year and a half's rent of fifty-seven tenants; he has now accepted £1,000 to wipe off two years' rent of seventy-two tenants. (Cheers and laughter.) That is to say, after losing all his money, and after costing the British taxpayer £40,000 for the expenses of his evictions (cheers), he has now come to the conclusion, and he is one of the most desperate of rack-renters, that the Crimes Act is no go, and he has struck his flag to the Plan of Campaign upon worse terms for him by far than he would have got before the passing of the Crimes Act. (Cheers.) Only this very day a letter came to my honorable friend, the member for East Mayo (Mr. Dillon), from the principal man who stood almost between the living and the dead on that estate,—the Rev. Peter Murphy,—in which the writer said: "A thousand thanks for check. You have acted nobly by us, and we have every reason to thank and be grateful to you. What pleases me most of all is, that our victory over Colonel O'Callaghan is complete, and approved by all who understand the matter fully. He did his utmost to get the tenants to purchase. He would have sold on any terms rather than yield to the plan, but we absolutely refused to purchase as long as the rope remained round our necks. (Cheers.) We would not entertain the idea of purchasing at all, until restored to our holdings and free as the mountain air to meet him on equal terms." (Cheers.)
"The next gale," the writer says, "is not to be asked until the end of June. Reductions suited to the different degrees of poverty, of fifteen per cent upwards to twenty-five and thirty per cent are secured." (Cheers.) That is the way the right honorable gentleman is abating the power of the Plan of Campaign. (Renewed cheers.) And remember that these poor tenants have won in spite of him, not merely by adhering to the Plan of Campaign, but also because every man of them who was evicted retook possession of his holding in defiance of the Crimes Act, and has held possession of his holding for the last six months. (Cheers.) And the lesson the right honorable gentleman, this triumphant Cromwell (laughter), has taught them is that, thanks to their own pluck, and not to his mercy, they are more secure in their homes to-day,—well, than the right honorable gentleman was in his tenancy of the Treasury Bench. (Cheers and laughter.)
I am at this moment officially aware of several estates where the struggle is still proceeding. The landlords are placing their hopes, and are opening their negotiations, not with the right honorable gentleman, or with Dublin Castle, but with the man who sits there, my honorable friend, the honorable member for East Mayo (loud cheers), and with other members of this criminal and illegal conspiracy; a conspiracy as to whose dishonesty we have heard so many homilies from honorable gentlemen opposite. Why, I sometimes wonder that the homilies they address to us and to our suffering people upon the violations of the ten commandments do not blister the lips that utter them. ("Hear, hear.") This dishonest conspiracy. No land court that has ever revised their demands has been able to pronounce them to be other than most just and moderate. ("Hear, hear.")
My honorable friend, the member for Cork, mentioned the other night that there were only three really great estates in Ireland on which the landlords are offering any resistance. One of them is the Brooke estate, in the county of Wexford, where the agent, Captain Hamilton, is an emergency man by profession. ("Hear, hear.") The second is Lord Massareene's property, in the county of Louth, where the agents also are emergency men by profession; and the third is the estate of Lord Clanricarde. It must be a proud thing for Englishmen to know that the right honorable gentleman on that estate was exercising one of the most abominable systems of petty persecution that ever was practised, in order to strike down the defenders of those poor people, to smother their voices, and to tie their hands in their struggle with a man who in the Queen's own law courts has been branded as a monster of cruelty and avarice! (Loud cheers.) I wish her Majesty's Government joy of all the credit that they will get out of their holy alliance with Lord Clanricarde ("Hear, hear," and laughter), and I wish him joy of all the rent he will get out of them. (Cheers and laughter.)
The fact is, and there is no use in blinking it, that, instead of overthrowing the Plan of Campaign, the right honorable gentleman has only made it more secure and more irrestible, by driving us to do our business with less publicity. ("Hear, hear.") The machinery of the plan has been now perfected to such a degree that we find that one single campaign on an estate is sufficient to keep the peace of a whole county. (Cheers.) Aye, and to settle the rents of a whole county more satisfactorily and more honestly than an army of land commissioners. ("Hear, hear.") I will tell you why. It is a very simple reason. Because the penalties of such a struggle are so heavy as to intimidate any tenantry from putting forward an unjust demand, and they are also sufficiently great to terrify a landlord from resisting a just demand. ("Hear, hear.") It may be a rough-and-ready method; no doubt it is; but what is the result? That in ninety-nine cases out of one hundred last winter it succeeded without any struggle at all.
I challenge honorable gentlemen who speak of the immorality and dishonesty of the Plan of Campaign,—I challenge the right honorable gentleman to name any single deed of outrage or of crime that is traceable to the Plan of Campaign, from end to end of Ireland. (Cheers.) I challenge him to name any one case in which the demands we have put forward have been declared by any land commissioner or judical tribunal in the country to be dishonest or exorbitant. I challenge him more than all to adduce to the House to-night one solitary case in which he has succeeded, with all his powers and his terrors, in breaking up a combination that was once formed on an estate. (Cheers.) And remember always that this Plan of Campaign is the merest segment of the Irish difficulty. It is a mere rough-and-ready way, which has been found effective to cure the blunders of your legislation, and to cure your folly in not closing with the bill of my honorable friend, the member for Cork. (Cheers.) My honorable friend and myself and others are the mere Uhlans and cadets to the army of millions of Irishmen who stand ranked under the standard of my honorable friend, the member for Cork. (Cheers.)
Now, as to the National League, I want to examine the right honorable gentleman. (Laughter.) We have heard it stated over and over again in most portentious accents in this House, that the authority of the National League and of her Majesty's Government could not co-exist in Ireland; that either one or the other must pack up and go. What has all this tall talk come to? ("Hear, hear.") Is the Leage gone, or does it show the slightest sign of going? There are eighteen hundred branches of the National League in Ireland; rather more, I believe now, because the right honorable gentleman's act has added some more. (Cheers.) Not more than two hundred and fifty of those branches have been nominally grappled with. There are about fifteen hundred branches, or over five sixths of the whole organization, on which not a finger has been laid. Why? Is it that the right honorable gentleman has conceived a sudden affection for the National League? (Laughter.) Is it that these branches are declining in power, or is it that they have abated their principles one jot in terror? No; but because the Government has made such a disastrous and grotesque mess of their attempt to suppress a couple of hundred branches that they dared not face the ridicule, the colossal collapse, that would attend any attempt to grapple with the whole of this organization. (Cheers.)
Everybody who knows the so-called suppressed counties of Kerry and Clare knows that the suppressed branches hold their meetings just as usual, under the noses of the police. We know it by the figures and by the cash which comes that the subscriptions, instead of falling off, are increasing. The resolutions are passed in the usual way, and I can tell you they are regarded with more sacredness and more efficacy than usual by the whole community. I will read an extract from a branch report in United Ireland the week before last ("Hear, hear"), one of these suppressed branches which have, according to the local policeman, disappeared from view. It says: "A large representative meeting was held on Monday, Mr. George Pomeroy in the chair." No concealment of names. "Balloting for officers and committee took place with the following result, after a most vigorous competition for offices (Nationalist cheers), the only emolument for which will probably be a couple of months in jail: J. O'Callan, 60 votes; G. Pomeroy, 58; S. O'Keefe, 56; D. Hanlon, 50; O'Leary, 60; Power, 44; Fitzpatrick, 47"; and so on. "The first five are elected." (Nationalist cheers.)
There is no disguising the fact that your whole suppressive machinery, the whole machinery for effectually suppressing the League, has totally broken down, and for a very simple reason, because the act was conceived upon the theory that you were dealing with a people who were only pining to be delivered from the terrorism of the National League (cheers), whereas you find to your cost you are dealing with a people who are the League themselves, ready to guard it with their lives, and to undergo any amount of torture rather than betray it. (Nationalist cheers.) Why do you not put the Secret Inquiry clauses in force for the purpose of suppressing branches of the National League? Why! Because you know you would have to send thousands of people to jail who would rather go there than let you wring one tittle of information out of them. Your only other source is informers, and it is our proudest boast that with an organization numbering upwards of 500,000 men, up to this time you have not been able to bring a single informer into the market, though no doubt the market price of the article was never higher. (Cheers.)
I want the right honorable gentleman to tell us here to-night what he has got by all his wild and vicious lunges against the Irish people. I have no patience with talking of "crime in Ireland," outside Kerry. The Moonlighters and the Government have had Kerry to themselves for the last five or six years. Between them be it, and let them divide the honors. (Loud Nationalist cheers.) They tell us of a number of persons partially boycotted. I do not know what the local policeman may be pleased to call "persons partially boycotted"; but I am pretty sure the list would go up or down, according to the requirements of the Government. Let the right honorable gentleman give us a list of new land-grabbers who have taken farms (cheers), or let him give us a list, and I only wish he would, of the land-grabbers who, since this act has been put in force, have accepted their neighbors' farms. As to legitimate boycotting, I shall always hold with the perfect right of the community to exercise legitimate influence on men who for their own base and greedy purposes are the pests of society.