III - The Land League 

When the famine of 1879-80 became a certainty, there seemed to be no lack of energy and decision amongst the Irish in choosing their part. One result of the new parliamentary party had been to create some conspicuous figures, or rather to make a number of figures conspicuous, who otherwise would have been almost unknown, and therefore quite unable to conjure up a new national organisation in a hurry, according to the requirements of such an emergency. as famine. Moreover, this conspicuousness was permeated by a flavour of success. Thus the foundation of the Land League was facilitated in October 1879, a date which proved afterwards to have a curious importance, as it marked a novel episode in Irish history. 

For from that time till the present day there have always been two governments in Ireland, one English and the other Irish, in some sense a veritable Home government. The Home Rule League never attempted any of the functions of a government, but the Land League took on itself a good many of them at once, and all the Nationalist societies or leagues that have followed since in an unbroken stream, have taken up the same position, more or less. Both of Ireland's governments, unfortunately, with few exceptions, have legislated against her and for England, which may account for the second edition having done so little good. This, however, takes nothing away from the unique character of the historical spectacle exhibited by the last 26 years. This small, wretched country, so absolutely in the power of her bigger neighbour, the most squalid and miserable under the sun, and the most universally despised, has kept up an independent government on voluntary revenues, receiving tribute from its empire beyond the seas, on which the sun never sets, being, in fact, the only country that has a world-wide empire, proved by the strongest test there can be, the financial test. 

For what other country is there that could levy a voluntary tribute all over the world, or from anywhere? And paid so gladly and unquestioningly for so many years. The first principle of the Land League was that the cultivator was entitled to the first fruits of his labours, while the landlord was entitled to nothing until the farmers’ wants were satisfied. Its ultimate aim was the conversion of the tenants into the owners of their holdings. From platform after platform advice was given to monster-gatherings of tenant farmers to give no more than they could spare to the landlords after paying their other debts and providing for themselves and their families. The tenants of each estate were told to agree with each other as to what they could offer the landlord, and it he refused to accept it as payment in full, to tell him he would get nothing. 

They were also told that no tenant should make a separate settlement for himself, however satisfactory it might be, unless all the others were included, even those who might have nothing to offer, the richer tenants thus protecting the poorer. And lastly, though not leastly, they were enjoined to discourage ‘landgrabbing’ (taking a farm from which another had been evicted) with all their power. This clause in the published principles of the League, was, of course, the most important of all, because it was plain that famine could not be caused by high rents, unless other tenants could be found to take ‘evicted’ farms and pay rent for them. English ‘Statesmen’ almost invariably allude to the fact that whereas an English landlord frequently cannot find a tenant for a vacant farm, an Irish landlord has no lack of applicants eager for the privilege of paying him rent, as a proof that Irish tenants are in a better position than English tenants. 

They might as well say that because ship-wrecked men will fight for a bare plank tossing in ice-cold waters, more fiercely than they will ever fight for a comfortable armchair in a warm room, a man is therefore better off clinging to a bare plank in a storm at sea, than if he were sitting in an armchair at home. Nevertheless, to those who take only superficial views, and so far as Ireland is concerned, that is practically the whole world, the argument seems conclusive. The case of the ship-wrecked men does not occur to them as applicable to Irish tenants, because they know a ship’s crew cannot be kept in a constant state of wreck, and lose sight of the fact that the people of a country in ireland's condition unfortunately can be and are so kept. 

It must be borne in mind, to understand the prevalence of landgrabbing, that while the population diminishes, the means of subsistence for those who remain diminish steadily also. This effect is produced by the drainage caused by excessive rents and taxation, by the drainage through emigration of the strongest part of the population, and by the depression caused by the perpetual petty persecution practised by the government, its agents, and such of the people who are on its side, on the majority of the inhabitants, which results in a further drainage, since it drives out of the country great numbers of those whose public spirit and energy are amongst the most important of the country’s assets; all these things tend to reduce opportunities and openings for making a living, to a minimum which continually grows smaller. 

Thus to get a farm is the only investment for himself or for his money, if he has any, that is left to the average man of the farming class (a very extensive class), though he knows how great the chances are that he may share the fate of his predecessor. His is the gambler’s life, with this difference, that a gambler has the possibility of large gains while the Irish tenant has only the prospect of a bare livelihood as his highest prize. These excuses, however, do not serve for all landgrabbers, and the callousness shown by the tenants themselves, either in their eagerness to take evicted farms or to condone landgrabbing by others, thus aggravating, as they perfectly well know, the evils they are always so clamorous about, is really due to very much the same spirit that makes Irishmen perpetually willing both to work and to fight for England, without any regard whatever for the fashion in which they increase their own miseries by such tactics. 

But at the time of which I write there had been a revolt against his sort of altruism in parliament, and the idea of extending the revolt against the same virtue out of parliament followed naturally enough. The necessity for checking landgrabbing, if anything was to be done for the Irish peasantry, was obvious, since, from whatever cause it might proceed, it would only serve to reproduce and perpetuate the evils that the farmers alleged as its excuse, while it could bring merely temporary advantage to individuals, by increasing the sufferings of the many. It was not surprising that public speakers at Land League meetings often used very strong language on this practice, when they found, as they too often did that the men who appealed so persistently for help, and described their woes so pathetically, were giving all their good will to the practice that made those woes possible. 

Though there might have been found some men able to defy public opinion, landgrabbing could not have flourished as it did unless it really had the approbation of the community, and organised boycotting would not have been required to combat jt. Any persons agreeing to attempt to help tenant farmers, had a clear right to demand that their clients should not neutralise everything they might do, by continuing this evil, and the remedy proposed for it was that of boycotting those who insisted on continuing the fatal custom. The very necessity, however, of insisting on this point, showed that boycotting could only act as a temporary remedy, an aid to bringing about an entirely altered agrarian condition which would abolish the evil by leaving no room for it. Only in case of this being accomplished, could it be expected that landgrabbing, though it might be checked for a time, would not eventually resume its former proportions. 

To recommend withholding rents and forming combinations between all classes of tenants on estates to stand by each other, only for the famine year, would only have meant postponing the famine to some other year. The programme of a permanent resistance until the aim of the League should be attained, was the only logical one. Though the step the Irish leaders took at this time was the only one open to them, if they intended to effect any reform, it was a very serious one, for it amounted in truth to a defiance of English power, and short of actual war, was the most difficult enterprise possible. But in the beginning the Land League was favoured by fortune. The political situation was not one which permitted much strength of action on the part of the existing government. The Conservative government, under Mr Disraeli (Lord Beaconsfield), had been in office since 1874, and was now tottering to its end, being in the most unfavourable position an English government could be in for immediately adopting a strong Policy of Persecution. 

Mr Gladstone and the English Liberals and radicals with him, seeing the imminence of a General Election, were at their usual game of hypocrisy, weeping over the sufferings of the Irish tenantry, the extortions of their landlords, and pretending horror at the wicked oppression and cruelty of the Conservative government for doing what they themselves had always done when in office, and what they intended to do, only far more thoroughly, when they should hold office again. Mr Gladstone was the object of great enthusiasm and exaltation in Ireland at this time. This attitude on the part of the Irish people towards such a man was the first strong indication of the Land League’s probable failure. Only some nine years had elapsed since he had, with a tremendous blare of trumpets, entirely ‘settled’ the Irish land question and abolished every agrarian evil forever that had afflicted Ireland. ‘Cutting down one branch of the Irish Upas Tree’, he called it himself. 

This glorious work had made no difference to the country, and was not intended to make any. But he had passed a Persecution Act which was by no means the wordy nothingness of his Land Act, and left it to Ireland as the legacy of his administration when he lost office. He had worked himself into a pathetic and public state of grief and indignation over the sorrows of political prisoners in Italy, while he had yielded to no one in savage treatment of Fenian prisoners when he was in power. People who will believe in, and receive with acclamation a man possessed of such a record, have small cause to complain of anything they may suffer at his hands afterwards. 

For the moment, however, he and his were embarrassing the existing government, and helping to attract the attention of the European continent and the United States to Irish affairs, thus affording some assistance to the Land League in its efforts to combat the famine. 

I have spoken of the Land League as stepping at once into the position of a government. This they did by their action in view of the approaching famine. In old times the duty of a ruler to protect his subjects from extermination by hunger was taken for granted. When Joseph had interpreted Pharaoh’s dream to him, Pharaoh did not talk about political economy, or disturbing the balance of economic conditions, or of the laws of supply and demand, but passed at once to the question of meeting the evils foreshadowed by Joseph, whose advice he promptly and successfully acted on. That it was only the business of a Pharaoh he was doing he had no doubt. It is rather interesting to compare the ideas of that old Pharaoh and those of Queen Victoria regarding the obligations of Sovereigns. Certainly, Queen Victoria had not Pharaoh’s power, but she took her Sovereignty very seriously, and seemed to believe that she counted for much more than she actually did in her government, evidently taking a personal pride in the long chapter of infamies perpetrated by her country during her reign. 

When O'Connell saw a famine approaching, he ran to the English government for help, something like a sheep appealing to a wolf to protect her lambs. The Young Irelanders wrote poetry. The Land League went neither to the English government nor to the muses, but set about trying to stop the famine themselves. As rulers are those who rule, they became from that moment a government de facto. Had they only continued as they began perhaps now there might be only one government in Ireland, and that one not English. The absolute novelty of the Land League probably also bewildered and frightened the landlords and caused hesitation both amongst them and the government officials. They were face to face with a movement that seemed to be unlike anything they had known of in their lives, and therefore quite unexpected by them. 

The excessive violence, in the way of noise, that marked this movement from the beginning, produced a general impression of earnestness on the part of the people, which was supported by the thoroughness with which they conducted the preliminary measures of resistance to rents and evictions, measures comparatively easy to carry out. By the force of simple numbers, they could prevent the service of writs and ejectment notices. Where 95 per cent of the population were all on the same side, as was the case nearly all over Ireland, bailiffs could not often take their prey by surprise, and the political situation made the simple measures open to combinations of poor and unarmed people effectual for a time. They could leave off going to the rent office with their rents. If the landlord tried to sell their farms, no one would bid for them, and if he succeeded in seizing their stock, he only met with the same result. Only by getting a strong-armed escort could rent be collected or evictions carried out. 

But the government was by no means so eager to encourage these armed expeditions as Mr Gladstone's government afterwards proved itself to be. Moreover, so much inverted had so many ordinary conditions of Irish life become, that the very bailiffs generally employed by the landlords, often did not like to do their usual work in the storm of public opprobrium then prevailing against them. So that an invaluable article, time, was secured by the Land League. Consequently, a great deal of rent was eaten that would otherwise have gone into the landlords’ pockets, and the famine deaths did not begin to occur till months later than in 1846. But the abstention from rent was not enough to prevent a famine. It only served to delay and shorten it. Probably in a great many cases the total refusal of rent would have come too late to accomplish more, because of the great failure of income derived from relations in America, which especially marked this year. 

The loss of fuel, caused by the summer of 1879 having been too wet for turf-drying, was another most distressing feature of this famine, naturally increasing the sickness and disease caused by insufficient food, and being a great deal harder to remedy than mere starvation. The preliminary delay secured by eating rent instead of paying it, was enough to allow the organisation of a relief system that got into working order nearly soon enough to cope with the famine, a work which was accomplished, on the whole, nearly as well as it is possible for such work to be done. Of course, there was much extra mortality from want, and a powerful impetus given to the physical degeneration which is so marked in the Irish people of this day. 

Four relief committees were formed, that of the Land League, the Mansion House committee, which was the chief one, the Duchess of Marlborough’s, and that of the New York Herald. At first sight it might seem as if so large a number of relief organisations must have tended to promote waste and inefficiency, and in other countries it would probably have produced such an effect. But in Ireland one may generally expect apparently opposite results to those following the same causes elsewhere. This is not because laws are anyway peculiar there, but because the circumstances which constitute causes and produce results there are well-nigh impossible for the rest of the world to realise, fortunately for itself. The ravages of the 1846 famine had been practically unchecked because most of the money subscribed for its relief was intercepted by the English government and the friends and allies of that government, 

In 1879 and 1880, although most of the money subscribed actually passed through the hands of persons who had little or no sympathy with those whom they proposed to relieve, the competition of the relief committees, especially that of the Land League, and the presence in the country of the Land League organisation, made evasion of relief work difficult to those who held the purse strings. It is a curious fact that the published returns of the relief committees underestimated the numbers of those in receipt of famine relief, instead of seeking to make the number seem as large as possible, as most bodies of this description generally do, and therefore it is probable that the people of the present day do not understand how serious this particular famine really was. 

For this small, but curiously significant fact my authority was James Redpath, an Englishman who had adopted the United States of America as his country, and has been a keen worker in the struggle for the abolition of slavery there. He asked me one day if I thought the totals published in the press represented the actual numbers of persons suffering from famine. I said that I had never put the figures together, but the gross totals of the central relief committees always seemed to me very small compared to the numbers published by the local bodies. He then told me he had made the addition himself, and found from the Mansion House committee’s own books, that the total number of those in receipt of famine relief from that committee alone was much larger than it represented in its returns, published from time to time. About a fifth of the population, then over five millions, he said, were down as needing relief. 

But the relief of the famine committees did not cover the cases of the unusually large numbers who had been obliged to enter the workhouses, those who had been compelled to seek the relief grudgingly afforded by government of seed potatoes and relief works, or those who were relieved by smaller funds than the four already mentioned. These included all the relief especially confined to the clergy, nuns, and to private individuals. In fact, those suffering from actual famine were probably nearer a fourth than a fifth of the population. There could have been only one motive for the Mansion House committee thus falsifying its returns, and that must have been a desire to please the English by getting a version of the facts more agreeable to them than the true one, accepted as history. 

It must be credited to the Land League and to the Irish people of that time generally, that they did cope with the famine, thereby giving a better account of themselves than the people of the forties had done. Except the victory against personal payment of tithes to the Protestant clergy, in O'Connell's time, their action in this instance is the only redeeming feature in the whole shameful history of the nineteenth century. Having secured one victory, they were now in a better position for winning another. 

Chapter IV - The Working of the Land League