Mr. Davitt’s menacing allusion to Parnell as a landlord, and Mr. O’Leary’s scornful treatment in a letter to me of the small-fry English Radicals, [1] when taken together, distinctly prefigure an imminent rupture between the Parnellite party and the two wings—Agrarian and Fenian—of the real revolutionary movement in Ireland. It is clear that clerical agitators, high and low, must soon elect between following Mr. George, Dr. M‘Glynn, and Mr. Davitt, and obeying fully the Papal Decree.
It is a most curious feature of the situation in Ireland that much more discontent with the actual conditions of life in that country seems to be felt by people who do not than by people who do live in Ireland. It is the Irish in America and Australia, who neither sow nor reap in Ireland, pay no taxes there, and bear no burdens, who find the alien oppression most intolerable. This explains the extreme bitterness with which Mr. Davitt in some recent speeches and letters denounces the tameness of the Irish people, and rather amusingly berates the British allies of his Parnellite associates for their failure to develop any striking and sensational resistance to the administration of law in Ireland. I have printed in this edition [2] an instructive account, furnished to me by Mr. Tener, of some recent evictions on the Clanricarde property in Galway, which shows how hard it is for the most determined “agitators” to keep the Irish tenants up to that high concert pitch of resistance to the law which alone would meet the wishes of the true agrarian leaders; and how comparatively easy it is for a just and resolute man, armed with the power of the law resolutely enforced, to break up an illegal combination even in some of the most disturbed regions of Ireland. [3] While this is encouraging to the friends of law and order in Ireland, it must not be forgotten that it involves also a certain peril for them. The more successfully the law is enforced in Ireland, the greater perhaps is the danger that the British constituencies, upon which, of course, the administrators of the law depend for their authority, may lose sight and sense of the Revolutionary forces at work there. History shows that this has more than once happened in the past. Englishmen and Scotchmen will be better able than I am to judge how far it is unlikely that it should happen again in the future. As to one matter of great moment—the effect of Lord Ashbourne’s Act—a correspondent sends me a statement, which I reproduce here, as it gives a very satisfactory account of the automatic financial machinery upon which that Act must depend for success:—
“Out of £90,630 of instalments due last May, less than £4000 is unpaid at the present moment, on transactions extending over three years with all classes of tenants. The total amount which accrued, due to the Land Commission in respect of instalments since the passing of the Act to the 1st November 1887, was £50,910. Of this there is only now unpaid £731, 17s. 9d. There accrued a further amount to the 1st May 1888 of £39,720, in respect of which only £4071, 16s. 11d. is now unpaid, making in all only £4803, 14s. 8d. unpaid, out of a total sum of £90,630 due up to last gale day, some of which by this time has been paid off.”
This would seem to be worth considering in connection with the objection made to any serious extension of Lord Ashbourne’s Act by Mr. Chamberlain in his extremely clear and able preface to a programme of “Unionist Policy for Ireland” just issued by the “National Radical Union.”
LONDON, 21st Sept. 1888.
CONTENTS OF VOL. I.
CLUE MAP Frontispiece
PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION p. [v]
CHAPTER I.