In the spring and summer of 1881, the power of the League was at its height; in its organisation and working it bore a strong resemblance to the Jacobin societies of the Revolution in France. It was directed by a council from a central office in Dublin; its orders were sent thence to the bodies connected with it; these, scattered over many parts of the country, enforced its decrees through ‘boycotting’ crime, and terror. ‘Obnoxious’ persons, landlords, agents, ‘land-grabbers,’ and tenants who had paid their rents, were denounced and exposed to the League’s vengeance; officers of the law and of justice were especially banned; even those thought to be ‘luke-warm’ in the cause were declared ‘suspected.’ In some districts the regular government was practically superseded by the government of the league, described by Mr. Gladstone as ‘a scheme of anarchic oppression;’ in these a Reign of Terror was really supreme. It will never be known to what extent the League made use of Whiteboyism and its secret conclaves in order to carry out its purposes; the central body, controlled by Parnell, probably did not, but the affiliated bodies certainly did; it is impossible to account otherwise for the enormous increase of agrarian crime; the branches of the League, it is generally supposed, overshadowed, so to speak, the Whiteboy societies; these were active agents in the atrocious deeds that were done. It is scarcely necessary to refer to what the condition of social life was wherever the influence of the League was great; despair settled on the hearts of thousands, who felt themselves exposed to unseen perils, and existed, as it were, in an atmosphere of crime; and it must be borne in mind that for one member of the better class, fifty probably of the humbler, who had transgressed the law of the League, were kept in a state of moral dread and torture. By this time the Fenian League in the United States, formed by Parnell, but ruled by the Clan na Gael, had completely joined hands with the League at home; its emissaries were found in many parts of Ireland; its organ, the Irish World, ‘spread what it called the light,’ the teaching of treason, murder, and dynamite; and it supplied the parent League with, probably, nine-tenths of its funds, for it is a significant fact, deserving special notice, that the contributions of the peasantry to the League were, from first to last, small. Large parts of Ireland were thus in a deplorable state; but it is a complete mistake to suppose, as has been asserted, that the authority of the League was general throughout the whole island. Protestant Ulster, with a true instinct of what the conspiracy was, a movement against British rule in Ireland, kept aloof from the League, in angry contempt; and though its influence was more widely diffused, it was confined, I have said, to comparatively few counties if regarded as a dangerous and formidable power. It is also absolutely untrue that the movement was the uprising of an injured peasantry against oppressive landlords. There was little distress in 1880 and 1881, when the League was rapidly growing in strength, for the harvests of those years were above the average; and the Commission lately appointed by Mr. Gladstone had reported that over-renting in Ireland was not common, though instances of over-renting were of course to be found.[73]
The centre of disturbance formed by the Land League was, I have said, comparatively small; and it was, for the most part, limited to backward and poor districts; its wicked and sordid teaching did not command the sympathies of the more intelligent and better parts of Ireland. Its influence, however, spread, in different degrees of strength, over nearly the whole of Catholic Ireland, and it was more or less supported by the Catholic priesthood, in many instances yielding to the pressure of their flocks. Within the bounds where it did not create a Reign of Terror, it was joined by thousands who thought it a constitutional movement, especially by peasants only seeking an improved tenure; and it is not pretended that even a majority of those who took part in it had treasonable or rebellious objects in view. But it was not the less a conspiracy hatched abroad, and aiming at the subversion of British power in Ireland; this was the policy its leaders avowed; and a conspiracy must be judged by the acts and words of those who direct it. The state of anarchy in Ireland had become such, in the spring of 1881, that the Government was compelled to try to put it down; a prosecution against Parnell and his chief lieutenants had failed; a Bill, resisted by obstruction, more persistent than had been ever known before, passed through Parliament with the object of repressing the Land League. The measure, however, was not well designed; minor agents of the League, ‘village ruffians,’ ‘Parnell’s police,’ and the like, were imprisoned in large numbers, no real punishment; but the chiefs of the conspiracy were not brought within the law; the funds of the League were removed to Paris; the movement went on in its destructive course. ‘Coercion,’ nevertheless, was beginning to produce its effects, as it has always done in Irish disorders, when Mr. Gladstone made a sudden change in his policy, never made before by a Minister at the head of the State. He had denounced the conspiracy in passionate language; he had partly at least seen what its objects were; ‘it aimed at dismemberment through rapine;’ but always a man of phrases and not of action, he had shrunk in every passage of his career from facing difficulties where popular feelings were involved; and while Ireland was still in a terrible state, he resolved to make a great concession to the League, and to effect a complete revolution in the Irish land. It was a surrender akin to that of Majuba, made with little information, and without mature reflection; whether its author believed, as I have remarked, that the conspiracy was most dangerous on its agrarian side, or was willing to propitiate Parnell, at the expense of the Irish landed gentry, he inaugurated the legislation, ever since pursued, which has resulted in destroying the property of the Irish landlord, without gaining the sympathy of the occupier of the Irish soil, has reduced the land system of Ireland to a ruinous chaos, and has, in essential respects, been an absolute failure.
Mr. Gladstone’s position was difficult when he introduced his new Irish Land Bill; his speech in the House of Commons, lucid as regards details, was apologetic, ambiguous, often beside the subject. He went out of his way to praise Irish landlords, ‘acquitted,’ he declared, by the late Commission; he deeply regretted a new experiment on the Irish land. He retained his admiration for the Act of 1870, but insinuated that it had been injured in the House of Lords; had this not been the case, it would have settled the Irish land question. He passed over his solemn pledges, on the faith of which millions had been lent on Irish estates, that the legislation of eleven years before was final; here he took refuge in appeals to ‘Divine Justice,’ in the ‘light of which’ a statesman must walk, as if Divine Justice was an excuse for a gross breach of faith. He then unfolded his plan of reform; he endeavoured, with an ingenuity all his own, to distinguish it from the schemes he had emphatically condemned in 1870; but in this respect mystification was at fault; the measure was a clumsy imitation of the ‘Three F’s,’ and where it differed, it differed greatly for the worse. Anticipating objections certain to be made, the orator dismissed ‘political economy to Saturn’ with a confident gesture; for some untold reason the philosophy of Adam Smith could not possibly apply to the order of things in Ireland. But by many degrees the most important part of the speech, in view of events which have since happened, was that in which Mr. Gladstone announced that should the measure really injure the Irish landlord, the State was bound to provide an indemnity. He denied, indeed, that the Bill could have any such effect; it would be a boon, he gravely said, to the Irish landed gentry; but should the contrary be the case, ‘compensation’ would be clearly their right. ‘I do not hesitate to say’—these were his very words spoken after the Bill had made much progress—‘that if it can be shown, on clear and definite experience, at the present time, that there is a probability, or if after experience shall prove that, in fact, ruin and heavy loss has been brought on any class in Ireland by the direct effect of this legislation, that is a question which we ought to look very directly in the face.’ The same meaning was even more clearly expressed: ‘I should certainly be very slow to deny that where confiscation could be proved, compensation ought to follow,’ and several of Mr. Gladstone’s lieutenants spoke in the same sense.[74]
The Bill, I have said, applied the principle of the ‘Three F’s’ to the relation of landlord and tenant in by far the greatest part of Ireland. As in the case of the Land Act of 1870, it excluded certain classes of lands from its scope, demesnes, residential holdings, town parks, and large pastoral farms; it extended also only to tenants at will, that is, subject to a notice to quit; it left tenants under leases outside its purview. It was confined, too, to ‘present tenants in occupation,’ at or near the existing time; it had no reference to ‘future tenants,’ that is, to tenants holding by contracts made after the Bill should pass, or a few months afterwards. Subject, however, to these exceptions, on the whole not large, the measure placed tenancies in Ireland under the ‘Three F’s,’ but with conditions of tenure peculiar to itself, and hitherto unknown in Ireland, or in any part of Europe. ‘Fair Rent,’ which, under the Ulster Custom, was settled by a bargain between landlord and tenant, was to be adjusted through the intervention of the State, legislation akin to the mediæval statutes regulating the price of bread, and the wages of labour. ‘Fixity of Tenure’ was not to be a perpetuity in name; Mr. Gladstone feared that the speeches would be thrown in his teeth, in which he had declaimed against the idea; it was to be a lease for fifteen years, but capable of being renewed for ever, as a rule, through a periodical and costly lawsuit. ‘Free Sale’ was to be conceded under somewhat strict conditions; and the landlord was to be afforded a right of pre-emption in the case of such sales, in accordance with the analogy of the Ulster Custom. An estate virtually perpetual, at a State-settled rent, was thus to be carved out of the landlord’s fee, and given to tenants actually in possession of the land; it was created in absolute derogation from the landlord’s rights; it was a large if partial expropriation, in no doubtful sense. As to the interest of landlords in what was left of their property, they were to retain what are usually known as ‘royalties’—timber, minerals, mines, and privileges of sport; they were to have the ordinary remedies for enforcing payment of rent; and the statutory leases were to be subject to certain conditions, taken, for the most part, from the Ulster Custom, the violation of which might lead to their forfeiture. A tribunal, called the Land Commission, was to be set up to carry the law into effect, that is, to ‘fix fair rents,’ and to make tenures ‘fixed;’ it was to be assisted by dependent agencies, known as Sub-Commissions, which, Mr. Gladstone intimated, were to be quite subordinate, and from which appeals to the Land Commission were to run; but a sinister feature of an untried revolutionary scheme—the decision of the Land Commission as respects ‘fair rent’—was to be final. Subject to an appeal to the Land Commission, the Irish County Courts were empowered to administer the law; but it was foreseen that they would not do much in this province. The new modes of tenure might be applied to lands, by agreements between landlords and tenants carefully guarded; and Mr. Gladstone believed that this would be the ordinary course of dealing. The Bill, he thought, would not cause litigation to any great extent; it would operate as a self-acting force to lead to friendly contracts.[75]
So much for the scope of the Bill and the classes of tenants to which its benefits were to extend. A most important change was made in the measure, which contained, originally, nothing of the kind; this has been attended with far-reaching results. As we have seen, tenants were to be compensated for their improvements, under the Act of 1870; but the compensation was to be paid only when they were leaving the land; Mr. Healy, one of the ablest of Parnell’s lieutenants, induced Parliament to accept a provision exempting tenants’ improvements from rent, when the adjustment of ‘fair rent’ was to be made. However equitable in principle this might appear to be, it was, in the peculiar state of Irish land tenure, unjust in the extreme to landlords, as I shall endeavour to point out afterwards; and it has been a source of litigation, as mischievous and demoralising as can well be conceived. The Bill, like the Act of 1870, prohibited the subdivision and subletting of farms—an inveterate evil practice of the Irish peasant—under conditions possibly rather too strict; and it made changes, in that statute, which require attention. It added weight, so to speak, to the law, in the tenant’s interest; it increased the amount of compensation in respect of disturbance; it limited the power of ‘contracting out,’ to a smaller class of tenants than had been the case before, in fact, to large capitalist farmers; and it provided that tenants, who had accepted leases excluding them from the benefits of the Act of 1870, through illegitimate conduct on the part of their landlords, should be exonerated from such unfair contracts. It thus greatly amended the original Land Act; but it left many of its defects untouched; it is only right here to add that despite the lying clamour raised by the subsidised Press of Parnell—lying has ever since been part of its stock-in-trade—the instances were exceedingly few in which ‘forced leases,’ as they were called, were set aside by the Courts. A remarkable feature of the Bill has yet to be noticed: Mr. Gladstone, as was the case eleven years before, had still the wish, so characteristic of British statesmen, to assimilate Irish to English land tenure; for this reason, as I said, he deprived ‘future tenants’ of the advantages of the Bill; these were to hold their farms on the footing of pure contract. This was a shortsighted and bad arrangement; it tempted directly ill-conditioned landlords to dispossess tenants, whenever a chance offered, and to create ‘future’ tenants so as to discharge their estates from a burden; it revealed marked ignorance of the affairs of Ireland. The Bill dealt, also, with the land on the side of ownership; it gave additional facilities to tenants to purchase their holdings; the State was empowered to advance three-fourths of the moneys; but the tenants were to find the remaining fourth; the transaction was to be still a purchase, and not in the nature of a gift.[76]
The Bill became law, with very little change; the House of Lords, though fully alive to its evils, did not amend it in any important respect; the Peers had in mind, perhaps too much, what had followed the rejection of the Bill of the year before. Mr. Gladstone and his followers maintained at the time, and the statement has been ever since repeated, that the Land Act of 1881, its popular title, was but a natural development of the original Act of 1870; but this assertion is not only untrue, but absolutely contrary to the truth. The Act of 1870, no doubt, considered as a whole, annexed a large tenant right to the estate of the landlord, and to that extent placed a burden on it; but it preserved for the landlord the ownership of the land; it did not interfere with his rent, his first proprietary right; above all, it was, in the main, in accord with fact, and just. The Act of 1881 was almost the exact opposite; it deprived the landlord of the ownership of his land, and nearly converted him into a mere rent-charger; it created against him a perpetuity at a State-settled rent; it really all but made the tenant the owner of the land; it was, in short, inconsistent with fact, and essentially unjust. The Act of 1881, too, established a principle, never heard of before in civilised countries, that tribunals of the State were to fix the rate of rent; this not only annihilated the most important of landed contracts, entirely to the landlord’s detriment, it inevitably tended to cut down rents wholesale, as Judge Longfield had predicted would be the case. ‘It is probable,’ wrote that great authority, ‘that the value of land, as fixed by any tenant-right measure, would be less than half the rent, which a solvent tenant would be willing to pay;’[77] the prediction has been too well verified. The Act of 1870, in a word, was a remedial law, fairly adjusting the rights of landlord and tenant; the Act of 1881 was a socialistic law, despoiling the landlord of his property wholesale, and handing it over to a dependent who had no claim to it; it was sheer confiscation hardly disguised; and it should be added that the exemption of tenants’ improvements from rent, as affairs stood in Ireland, was a grave wrong to the landlord. The Act of 1881, to speak plainly, transformed the Irish land system iniquitously for the benefit of a single class; and it directly promoted litigation of the very worst kind, on an enormous scale, embittering, and still further dividing, the classes connected with the land. The evils of this legislation, a monument of reckless unwisdom, were at once manifest to well-informed persons; the Duke of Argyll and Lord Lansdowne resigned office rather than take part in a measure of the kind; Lord Ashbourne, the present holder of the Great Seal in Ireland, caustically remarked that Parliament would do much better should it deprive Irish landlords of a fourth part of their rents on the spot. The verdict of enlightened and impartial opinion in Ireland was very much the same.
I shall comment on the administration of this law in another chapter; enough to say here that what was bad was made, by many degrees, worse. The conduct of Parnell, as regards the measure, was characteristic; he assumed an attitude of moderation, and proposed to make ‘a trial of the Act by test cases;’ he wrote to his Fenian friends in the Far West that the Act was a mockery; he allowed the Land League to riot in lawlessness as before. Mr. Gladstone, always incensed when his will was crossed, shut him up in prison under the recent statute, with several prominent leaders of the League; the reply was a manifesto against the payment of any rent, unhappily obeyed in some districts, though every symptom of exceptional distress had passed away. A brief but violent struggle was the result; the peasantry refused to pay a shilling in several counties; and as the principal agents of the League were within four walls, flights of viragoes, like those of the French Revolution, were let loose to preach, far and near, the evangel of ‘no rent.’ This conflict, however, was not lasting; agrarian crime and disorder, indeed, still continued frequent; but the Government was too strong for the ‘Ladies’ Land League;’ by the spring of 1882 its triumph appeared to be certain. But Mr. Gladstone, ‘unstable as water’ in view of what he deemed popular movements, would not steadily persist in vindicating the law; the imprisonment of the chiefs of the conspiracy and their subordinates, in large numbers, seems to have made him feel sore if unworthy misgivings; he surrendered to the enemies of the State, for the second time, and entered with Parnell into the famous ‘Kilmainham Treaty,’ as shameful as the Glamorgan Treaty which cost Charles I. his head. The ‘Suspects,’ as they were called, were set free in scores; the Lord-Lieutenant and the Chief Secretary indignantly left their posts; a new Government for Ireland was formed, charged to carry ‘conciliation,’ as the phrase was, out, that is, to make fresh concessions to Parnell and his creatures. But the auspicious prospect was suddenly darkened by the frightful assassinations of the Phœnix Park; these cannot be justly laid to the charge of the League, indeed were against Parnell’s interest, for it was generally expected he would obtain high office; but two agents of the League were implicated in the crime; and the Press of the League began soon to plead for the murderers. The mind of England was now thoroughly roused; Mr. Gladstone, bowing at once to England’s will, carried through Parliament the severest repressive measure that has ever, perhaps, been applied to Ireland. The battle with the League was soon brought to a close; the conspiracy indeed resisted for a time, and crime, as always, was attendant on it; and the Clan na Gael gave it all the assistance it could, in large subsidies which had never ceased, in the dissemination in Ireland of its incendiary journals, and especially by ‘carrying the war into England,’ and fulfilling its threats to attack her chief towns by fire and dynamite, outrages, however, that really came to nothing. But ‘coercion,’ as has been invariably the case in Ireland, produced its effects; agrarian crimes, which, in 1882, if less than those of the year before, were, nevertheless, three thousand four hundred and thirty-two in number, had fallen to eight hundred and seventy in 1883.[78]
The Land League was paralysed, if not destroyed; its organisation was, in name, suppressed by its framers. It reappeared, however, at once, in a new form; the skill of Parnell in masking a conspiracy was never more fully displayed. He felt that the Land League could not cope with the law; that the crimes of violence and blood, which attended its course, gave the Government opportunities to put it down; that its openly avowed purposes were a danger to it. He set up, therefore, the ‘National League’ in its stead; the professed object of the association was to promote ‘Home Rule,’ while it upheld the rights of the occupiers of the Irish soil, and kept the Irish land, so to speak, in view; it was thus apparently a mere centre of a constitutional movement. Through these means, and under these pretences, the astute and able plotter swept into his net thousands who had held aloof from the Land League; many of the middle classes joined the National League, notably hundreds of the clergy of the Catholic Church in Ireland; the peasantry gave it increased support; its influence spread beyond its predecessor’s limits. The National League, however, was only the Land League under another name;[79] its leaders and officials were the same men; its ‘branches’ were those of the League it replaced; its real objects were exactly the same, the overthrow of British rule in Ireland, and the annihilation of the Irish landed gentry. But the methods it employed to work out its ends were, to a great extent, different; open agitation was kept down; public meetings, likely to be violent, were not held; the perpetration of agrarian crime was not encouraged. The movement, in a word, was comparatively secret and below the surface; but it was essentially the successor of the Land League in its aims; we may say of it, with a slight change, in the words of the poet—
‘Facies non una sororum,
Nec diversa tamen.’
‘Boycotting’ was now made the chief weapon of the reformed conspiracy; ‘National League Courts’ were held regularly in many districts, at which this barbarous interdict was systematically pronounced on persons violating ‘the unwritten law’ of the old League; the persecution against landlords, agents, ‘land-grabbing’ peasants who were ‘disloyal and traitors,’ and traders suspected of dealing with ‘rotten sheep,’ was carried on with a pertinacity and ingenuity hardly known before; the number of derelict farms augmented; and the Government found it far from easy to deal with these crimes. At the same time, ‘the Nationalist Press,’ as it had been named, fully revealed the purpose of the conspirators; trusting to impunity, under the law of libel, which depended upon the will of juries, it was even more treasonable and seditious than before; and it gave infamous license to defamation of personages in high places, worthy of the abominations of the Père Duchesne.[80] Ireland, however, remained in comparative peace while the recent measure of repression continued in force; but this was injudiciously allowed to expire in 1885—a strange act on the part of a Conservative Ministry; and in a short time agrarian disorder broke out afresh. Crimes of this class had fallen, in 1884, to seven hundred and sixty-two in number; they were one thousand and fifty-six in 1886; and ‘boycotting’ had increased fourfold.[81]