The rejection of this Bill, although not unexpected, was a heavy blow to Mr. Forster and the signal for a fierce accession to the Irish agitation. The Government pocketed the affront which had been offered them and had perforce to content themselves with promising a Land Bill next session. Most disquieting reports continued to come from Ireland. Evictions led to riots; tenants who took the places of evicted occupiers were assaulted, their ricks were burned, their beasts were mutilated; arms were stolen from a vessel in Queenstown Harbour; and rumours of secret brotherhoods and of dynamite conspiracies were rife. So the Parliamentary session came to an end.

The winter of 1880-1 was cruel. In the very beginning, in a speech at Ennis (September 19), Mr. Parnell prescribed the methods of the Land League. ‘Depend upon it,’ he said, ‘the measure of the Land Bill next session will be the measure of your activity and energy this winter.’ He then explained his new invention; ‘better than any 81-ton gun,’ as it was afterwards described by enthusiastic followers. ‘When a man takes a farm from which another has been evicted, you must show him on the roadside when you meet him

The advice was taken. Three days later Lord Erne’s agent, a certain Captain Boycott, served ejectment notices upon a number of tenants. His servants left him. The local shopkeepers refused to serve him. The blacksmith and the laundress declined his orders. His crops remained ungathered on the ground. He was ‘left severely alone.’ The tale of these doings spread to Ulster. One hundred Orangemen offered to march with arms to his relief and to the rescue of his crops. The Government consented. Under protection of infantry, cavalry, and two field guns, and amid the taunts of the cottagers, the harvest was gathered in and the process of ‘boycotting’ was advertised to the whole world. It spread throughout Ireland. Nothing was more unexpected than the precision with which an impulsive and undisciplined peasantry gave effect to this new plan. Whole counties conspired together to make it complete. Every class in the population acquiesced. Public opinion supported the Land League and no moral force sustained the government of the Queen.

Behind and beneath this strange system of excommunication came outrages of various kinds upon property, upon animals, and upon life. There were in 1880 10,457 persons evicted compared with 2,177 in 1877, and 2,590 agrarian crimes compared with 236 in the earlier year. ‘It rained evictions,’ says Mr. Parnell’s biographer; ‘it rained outrages. Cattle were houghed and maimed; tenants who paid unjust rents or who took farms from which others had been evicted were dragged from their beds, assaulted, sometimes forced to their knees while shots were fired over their heads, to make them promise submission to the popular desires in future. Bands of peasants scoured the country, firing into the houses of obnoxious individuals. Graves were dug before the doors of evicting landlords. Murder was committed. A reign of terror had in truth commenced.’[9]

‘I must say,’ wrote General Gordon, who visited the West of Ireland in 1880, ‘that the state of our fellow-countrymen in the parts I have named, is worse than that of any people in the world, let alone Europe. I believe that these people are made as we are; that they are patient beyond belief; loyal, but broken-spirited and desperate; lying on the verge of starvation in places where we would not keep cattle.’

Amid such grim and gloomy surroundings the Lord-Lieutenant and his Chief Secretary passed the winter. As early as October they were asking the Cabinet for special powers. Strong reinforcements of troops were moved into the island. In the first days of November a State prosecution was instituted against Mr. Parnell and other leaders of the Land League. Late in that same month the Viceroy, Lord Cowper, intimated that, unless power was taken to suspend the Habeas Corpus Act, he must resign. In December he reiterated his intention and pressed that Parliament should be called together. National and even international attention were riveted upon Ireland. Cabinets were frequent, protracted, vexatious, and indecisive. The harassed Chief Secretary hurried to and fro between the two capitals.

‘What more lamentable and ridiculous spectacle,’ exclaimed Lord Randolph Churchill at Preston (December 21, 1880), ‘has ever been presented than this great Liberal statesman from Bradford, tossed like a shuttlecock from the Irish Executive on to the English Government, tossed back again contemptuously by the English Government on to the Irish Executive—arriving in Dublin and being immediately seized by that horrid, choking nightmare, Revolution—flying back to London and, finding himself amongst its peaceful citizens and busy streets, fancying that he had been the victim of a bad dream, laughed out of his convictions by his sneering colleagues—and tearing back again to Dublin, only once more to become a prey to hideous realities!’

The two Ministers who were responsible for Ireland united in a demand for the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act and eventually, after struggles which nearly broke up the Cabinet, they procured the assent of their colleagues. The remedy was desperate, unwarranted, and ill-chosen. Shocking as were the outrages, they were the least part of the dangers that threatened the fabric of society. They were, moreover, much exaggerated by the official figures. Only seven persons were actually murdered during the winter. The statistics were swollen by 1,300 outrages which proved on examination to consist merely of threatening letters and notices. Many more were trivial annoyances. What rendered them formidable were the temper of the people and the constant apprehension of some fearful outburst. Boycotting was the weapon of the Land League, and indeed it may be said that its sinister efficiency was in great measure a preventive of worse crime. In one fashion or another evictions were greatly diminished. Landlords did not dare to assert their rights. The unwritten law of the Land League, supported by public opinion, superseded the law of the land, backed as it was only by physical force.

It was not easy in 1880, though the science of Coercion has made some progress since, to discover what remedies Mr. Forster should have chosen. It is certain that the remedy he chose was wrong. He seems to have imagined that the agitation depended for its vitality upon certain local leaders; that a comparatively small number of ‘village ruffians,’ against whom no legal proof existed, but the strongest moral suspicion, were the indispensable and irreplaceable agents of the whole movement. If they were removed, he believed the whole apparatus of terrorism would collapse. If he could obtain power to arrest these men, who were notorious, peace and order would ensue. No greater misreading of the situation was possible. In dealing with a movement which was formidable only because of its almost universal character, he struck at individuals of minor prominence. He encountered profound communistic stirrings, bitter racial hatred, and intense national aspirations by methods which might have been effective against the rowdy larrikins of a slum. In face of widespread lawlessness, principally petty in its character, the head of the Irish Executive fell back on that supreme abrogation of civil law which authorises arrest and imprisonment without trial. Staking his official existence upon a demand for the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, he prevailed upon a shivering and reluctant Cabinet.

Parliament was summoned to meet on January 7. ‘How,’ asked Lord Randolph Churchill (Preston, December 21), in a speech which, from the fact that it was the first of his speeches to be reported verbatim in a Metropolitan newspaper, attracted much attention, ‘will this Government, who have been only eight months in office, meet Parliament; and what will be the message which they will have to announce? They will have to acknowledge the fact that Ireland is in open and successful rebellion; that another government, which knows not the Queen, has supplanted the Government which the English and Scotch people recognise; that this alien government is now, with impunity, directing the destinies of Ireland, issuing its decrees to the Irish people, and has, for six months or more, suspended the liberties, confiscated the property, and imperilled the lives of hundreds and of thousands of the Queen’s subjects. They will have to announce that this alien government has its own revenues, its own executive, its own courts of justice, in which persons are arraigned, tried, and condemned, and that persons who are not provided with the passports of that government and who have not enrolled themselves as its subjects, are unable to obtain the necessaries of life and are cut off root and branch from the society of their fellows. They will have to acknowledge that this alien government is the growth of the brief period during which they have held office; that nothing like it has yet been seen in the history of Ireland; and that, before it, the Government of the Queen recoils paralysed and impotent.’