While the famine was in progress, the Liberal party came into office, and found themselves with a majority independent of Irish support. Characteristically enough, the Irish voters in England, in helping to produce this result by throwing their weight into the scale against the party in power, totally neglected the very easy and obvious way, open to them at the time of the General Election, of strengthening the position of their country by punishing those members of English constituencies who had secured their votes in the election of 1874 by promising to vote for Home Rule, and had afterwards broken their pledges. These gentlemen should certainly have been taught that the memory of an Irish voter is long enough to last six years, by finding the whole strength of the Irish vote turned against them, instead of being rewarded for their duplicity and treachery by having the whole of it exerted in their favour.
The effect of a right course in this respect could not have been sufficient to prevent the Liberal party coming into power, if it was thought essential by the heads of the Irish organisation in England that this party should get office, while a diminution of the size of the English government majority could only have been favourable to Ireland. The craving to take kicks lying down, which seems to assert itself occasionally with such tremendous force in the Irish breast, would seem to be the only explanation of the action, or inaction, displayed by the Irish electorate in Great Britain at this juncture. Mr Gladstone was now free to do as he pleased, and what he would please, it was very certain, would be extremely bad for Ireland. For him it was but the work of a moment to drop all his expositions of Irish woes and prepare himself for a campaign of persecution against the people over whose sorrows he had been grieving so loudly.
But the other ‘Friends of Ireland’ who had been assisting him in his mourning, needed a little more time to save, and to change their faces, The government began by interfering with meetings, a proceeding which, whatever its intention might have been, does not seem to me anything to be regretted on our account. Whether mass meetings ever are any use in Ireland or not, it is quite certain that they are a great deal overdone there. They are called ‘demonstrations’, and they certainly do demonstrate that the Irish like mass meetings. This should not be a fact needing much demonstrating to any body who knows the terrible dullness of Irish country life. Life in English country places is dull enough, but it is a giddy round of excitement compared to the corresponding life in Ireland.
The number of persons brought together at these meetings is too large to permit the explanations or discussions which might further the attainment of a common policy, and much time, money and energy must be expended in this way which might be turned to better account. The best kind of meetings were those which were brought about by the practice of attending evictions, which put the government in the position of calling the meetings itself. The first definite and serious act of war did not take place till the autumn. It came in the shape of a state prosecution for ‘conspiracy’, and the persons charged were a large number of the Land League officials and speakers. In the meantime, however ,the Irish landlords had recovered from their first stupefaction, caused by the unexpected nature of the proceedings they had had to encounter, as well as by the small encouragement to evict they had latterly received from the displaced government, and recognising in the new government a body which would enjoy nothing better than helping them to evict, proceeded to make up for lost time in recovering withheld rents, and turning out such of their tenants as had nothing to withhold.
It is not within the scope of this work to give the details of the state prosecution, and it is not, I think, material for anyone to know what the score or so of counts in this indictment consisted of. The object of the government must have been more to harass the enemy by forcing a waste of money and time on them by their long, tedious and expensive legal proceedings, than anything else, as far as direct results in Ireland itself went, for they could not expect to get a conviction just then, as the jury laws had been slightly improved since the Fenian times, when the government had had nothing to do at a criminal trial, but to order a conviction and get it. Of course the chronic motives always tending to promote vexatious prosecutions such as the desire to please the English people, and to keep up the fidelity of Irish lawyers by spending plenty of money amongst them, besides forcing their victims to spend it after this fashion also, probably operated as well in bringing about this move, which resulted in a half victory for the government through a disagreement of the jury, two out of the twelve holding out for a conviction. I do not think, however, that an acquittal would have made any difference. They passed a Persecution Act, the main feature of which was a provision enabling the government to imprison anybody without trial for eighteen months, who was ‘reasonably suspected of crime’. An immense number of the imprisonments under this Act must have been illegal, as the ‘crimes’ of which the victims were ‘reasonably suspected’ were set down in the warrants as ‘inciting certain persons to incite other persons not to pay rent’. Not paying rent not being a crime in itself, even in England's statute book it is difficult to see how the mere incitement thereto could be a crime either. In attempting to prove a conspiracy to injure anybody by incitements not to pay rent, the government had broken down. That need not have prevented them from ‘reasonably suspecting’ anybody they liked of conspiracy to injure. They seemed to act illegally simply by choice. Imprisonment under this Act has frequently been described as rather pleasant than otherwise. It could, however, have only been so regarded when compared with penal servitude, imprisonment with or without hard labour, imprisonment in default of bail, for debt, or while awaiting trial. In itself it was not lightly to be regarded, though, as a penalty for taking part in an enterprise from which so much benefit seemed possible, such as a strike against rents, it might appear insignificant. Not counting the losses business men suffered in being taken away from their business for so long, the mere fact of imprisonment, often in a most unhealthy atmosphere and in tiny cells never warmed, without any exercise except in a yard, for the long terms during which men were detained under this Act, was a severe trial, especially for countrymen, and city dwellers can hardly be said to exist in Ireland. In Kilmainham alone, and from the Dublin Land League alone, one man lost an eye in consequence of disease set up by the whitewash, and another contracted typhoid fever through being placed in an underground dungeon, looking into a well, from which source alone light and air were attainable. It is true plenty of those who did the Land League work were glad to get into prison, for the sake of the rest which they could only obtain there, and a good many more who did not get into prison envied those who did for the same reason, but the greater part of those imprisoned were without this motive for liking their fate, and even those who had it probably thought the remedy was continued too long.
After the Persecution Act was passed, Mr Gladstone turned his attention to his Land Act. It is a beautiful example of Mr Gladstone's little ways that he announced his intention of conducting these two Acts ‘pari passu’, the meaning of which words he subsequently explained to be the passing of one first and the other afterwards! There were four ways in which landlords could proceed against non-paying tenants—eviction; sale of the tenants’ interest in the county court, which had to be followed by eviction to be made effective; distraint of goods and stock; and action in the bankruptcy court. The last method was a very expensive one, and all the expenses fell on the landlord if the tenant did not ultimately pay. But even if the tenant did pay he could throw a considerable part of the costs on the creditor by discharging the debt at a certain point in the proceedings.
Under these circumstances the landlords soon abandoned the attempt to recover their rent in this way, which they at first favoured because they believed they could thus fine a tenant most heavily who meant to pay, though first he wished to make as much difficulty about it as he could. The Land League lawyers, however, were able to defeat them on this point. The third way, by distraint, was the only possible one in which the landlords’ position was too strong for the tenants, if the latter really did not want to pay. It is true that the poverty of the Irish came to their help here, for the clothes and household goods were not often worth taking. I have only once heard of a landlord annexing any of a tenant’s furniture; this was a Mayo landlord, named Walter Bourke, who was High Sheriff for the county, and used to do his own evicting by virtue of his office. I was told he had once taken the best of two blankets he found in a tenant’s hovel. This man was eventually shot, together with the soldier who was protecting him. I believe he was the last landlord shot in Ireland.
The Land Act of 1881, if it accomplished nothing else, seems to have put an effectual stop to the shooting of landlords and their agents, by transferring the direct responsibility of the rents exacted, from individuals to a number of persons, in the shape of the land court. This result, however, has quite failed to please the gentlemen affected, who persistently regard this Act and its operation as a totally unmitigated collection of evils and wrongs. Crops could be seized, but to carry them away was expensive, even if they could be sold, which they could not be, except to a bogus buyer, and it was also too expensive to place a guard over them. There remained the livestock. A great deal of impediments could be put in the way of their seizure, such as driving them on to some other person's land when notice was given of the bailiff's approach, or shutting them up in their sheds, sometimes keeping them in their sheds in the daytime and letting them out at night, when they could not be seized.
But they were liable to injury through being driven about hurriedly, and only at some parts of the year could they be kept housed during the day, so that some seizures were inevitable, as they could carry themselves. Bona fide sales of them there could not be, but the landlord could keep and would not be obliged to feed them, for the laws of cruelty to animals could not be carried out against the allies of the government. Pressure was, in fact, generally resorted to to hasten the tenants’ payment by the cruelty with which their stock was treated when captured, overstocking of cows being a familiar device to punish their owners. Therefore the tenant often had either to see them sold at a minimal sum to a bogus buyer, or to buy them himself and pay the cost. If a set was made on a particular estate, it might sometimes be worthwhile to get rid of the stock, the Land League compensating the tenants for the temporary loss, but if a whole countryside was under writs, it was impossible for all tenants with stock to sell them, for they could not live without them, and if a large number sold at the same time, of course they could only get a very small price.
Thus it seemed unavoidable for the Land League to pay the costs incurred by delay of payment. Much later on, towards the very end of the Land League, its leaders thought of a plan for getting over this difficulty with the stock, which I think might have proved successful if adopted soon enough. But the Land League Was at an end before I had any opportunity of learning how it worked. The expense of selling the tenant’s interest in the county court was always great, while the process itself was very easy. The holding had only to be put up in the court house, and bought by a bogus bidder. The tenant then ceased to have any right to either house or grounds, and his cattle were trespassers, and his crops did not belong to him. As a matter of fact, however, the tenants in a holding which had been sold did generally manage, with the help of their neighbours, to profit by their holdings as long as they were left in them. If the tenants had really not paid their rents, the expense of selling in the county courts would have been prohibitive for most landlords.
But there were many cases where farms could not be sold, either because the debt was too small, or because the tenure was by lease for the term of some specified person’s life. In these cases eviction was the only means of extorting the rent. After eviction the tenant had still an interval of six months in which he could redeem his holding by paying the debt and costs. This term was called the ‘six months redemption’.
To sustain eviction a moment sooner than it could be helped required a good deal of fortitude on the part of the tenant. To keep the payments of rents properly up, eviction had to be a sentence of death, and any attempt to deprive it of its lethal character was a challenge flung in the face of English power, that power upon whose bloodshedding the sun never sets, whose ferocity and criminality have never been, and never can be surpassed.
Neighbours could not give an evicted tenant shelter, for few of them had room enough for themselves. Their houses were generally only retreats for sleeping, eating, and protection from rain — not dwelling places in any proper sense of the word. The whole tendency of legislation in Ireland, as in other places which are under England’s thumb, is to discourage houses; for houses are an aid to civilization, and to decivilize is England’s aim where she is the conqueror. And there was no other shelter open to the evicted tenant if he were one of many in the same position. For though one evicted family might take refuge in the workhouse, batches of such families could not, as there was no accommodation for them there, the workhouses being mostly maintained by those who were as poor as the evicted families themselves, and only waiting their turn to share their fate.
Even with money enough it was no easy matter to provide shelter for the evicted. The land all belonged to the landlords, with very trifling exceptions, and penalties against erecting dwelling houses were formidable. The landlords, as well as England, looked on civilizing influences in Ireland with no friendly eye, for every comfort, every means of decency, almost every common necessity of life for the tenant, meant so much off their rent to them. And the new Land Act which passed through parliament in 1881 made the tenant forfeit the tenant-right it was supposed to secure him if he erected a dwelling house on his land without the landlord’s permission. Though the excessive competition for land in Ireland, the causes of which I have previously described, is the chief reason for the prevalence of ruinous rents, and consequently, famine, it is only the chief reason in the ultimate sense. There is another which operates more immediately.
Even if all the tenants in Ireland could be mathematically certain of nobody taking their farms if they refused payment of rent, the penalty of eviction would, on the average, lose none of its force, for to know well that the landlord must be ultimately obliged to reinstate him on his own terms would not enable an evicted tenant to live without food and shelter in the meantime. Consequently the very notion of resisting exorbitant rents presupposed that the existence of some body which would be prepared to supply these essentials for a while to any individuals who might be selected to be victims, was absolutely necessary if resistance was to be carried on. And here the really serious question in the whole matter arose. Was it to be expected that the English government would allow such a work to be carried on?
The objection sometimes raised that a strike against rent could not succeed because the government could take the rent by force, was not a serious one. It would have been so if every tenant had had the rent ready, lodged to his banking account, but they had not. The condition of most was a perpetual hand to mouth struggle in which the getting together of the rent was always a matter of difficulty, while none but an Irish tenant could get it at all. All the powers of the British empire would have counted for very little if they had only been brought to bear in this fashion. But though all the might of the empire could not take the rent by force, it might extort it by force by imposing the penalties of torture and death for non-payment. And it was the chance of being able to avert the enforcement of these penalties that anyone who contemplated a combined resistance to rent had to take into consideration.
To get money for this purpose was not easy, but it was comparatively very easy beside the difficulty of applying it to that purpose afterwards. If the difficulties of providing for large numbers of evicted families were overcome, there still remained nothing to prevent the government intervening and preventing the erection of shelter by force, as they, in fact, afterwards did. And if by any chance that measure should not prove sufficiently successful, they still had the whole gamut of oppression at their disposal. In truth the Irish tenants, nominally the free constituents of an enlightened enfranchised and progressive United Kingdom had little more control over their own destinies than the negroes of the American slave states; in some ways they had perhaps less, for the southern states of the American union would not have dared to kill their slaves wholesale by starvation.
Yet for all their feebleness, these tenant farmers were powerful compared to most other classes in Ireland. With their families they comprised a very large proportion of the population and were bound to have some strength even in Ireland, forming as they did, if not actually half the population, at least considerably the largest section united by a common interest and common circumstances.’ They were also in actual possession of the chief part of the country and its resources, which again constitutes a point of importance even in Ireland. If it was possible for any people to ‘stand up’ for themselves, it was for them. Outside their numbers and community of interest there was only one factor in the situation which could be counted on as tending to bring about a successful issue from the struggle to them. That, however, was a very big one, and had its root in the very essence of the whole matter. It consisted of the poverty afflicting Irish landlords as a whole.
These people, the nominal enemies, were as a class about as feeble a body, politically, as it is possible to find, but they were certain of support from all the power of England, because they were England's allies, doing part of the necessary work of keeping Ireland artificially feeble by starvation. Before the year 1879, landlords had always taken it for granted that rents must always tend to increase, as by some fixed law of the universe, and had regarded themselves as having the power to command at any time they liked an increased income by raising their rents. This fancied security of always being in a position to gain and never to lose without even having to work for the gain, had the inevitable consequence of breeding an utterly worthless and helpless set of men. Lord Kimberley, the Lord Lieutenant at the time when the state prosecution of the Fenians began, seemed to have been struck with these salient points in the Irish gentleman’s character, though not with their cause, for he described them with evident surprise.
Did he imagine that if Irish landlords possessed the energy, initiative, and force of character he expected to find in them, they would be forever contented with the position of impoverished gentry in a hopeless country? Like Trooper Peter Halkett, they believed that England would never allow ‘Loyalists’ to suffer, and even when the crash came, did not realise that England could not make rents. It could only squeeze out what actually existed, not create any. Neither could they understand that their own excesses had anything to do with the sudden vanishing of their supplies, that if they had only allowed their tenants a chance to do justice to their holdings, they would have been a great deal more productive. They believed the Land League responsible for the whole thing, and turned a deaf ear to Lord Hartington, though he was verily a man after their own hearts, when he told them afterwards that it was they themselves, and no league or agitators whatever, who had forced the government to bring in and pass the Land Act of 1881.
One natural tendency of weak minds is to imagine the possibility of unlimited powers in any persons or institutions which they believe to be powerful, whether rightly or wrongly. In this case, of course, their belief in the great power of the English government in Ireland was quite justified; it was in assuming that there were no limitations to its powers that they went astray, and also in not perceiving that they were not supported by the government for their own sakes, but for the sake of their assistance in holding Ireland for England. As the chief motive of the one country for holding the other is to rob it, it followed that the landlords could not expect support from England at its own expense, but only at the expense of Ireland, and there was absolutely no more to be squeezed out of that source for them then. Unable, by reason of their very limited intelligence, to comprehend the simple laws which regulated their own and the rest of the country’s relations with the British empire, it was a rude awakening for them to find that all the powers of that machine either could not or would not any longer help them to raise their rents, and might not even continue to procure their payment as they were.
Thus a class of persons who always lived from hand to mouth, and were about as helpless in themselves as able bodied people can be, owing to their never having been obliged to think for themselves, since the English government was, as they fancied, always ready to provide for them by the easy expedient of slaughtering compatriots, they now found themselves facing a prospect which is trying to much wiser heads and stronger characters than theirs, that of having their incomes unexpectedly reduced, and of being threatened, moreover, with no incomes, if they did not allow their tenants to settle the amount of rent reduction they would have to submit to. If the Land League both could and would put its threats into execution, they knew only too well that the landlords were not the sort who could afford to wait.
The natural conclusion to be deduced from this state of affairs was that if the tenants proved themselves staunch enough, the landlords would be obliged, in their turn, to ask the government to settle the land question for them. On the face of it, it was plain that the settlement which would be capable of securing most for the landlords would be that of expropriation, by enabling the tenants to buy their own farms from the landlords, since the condition of ownership is one which allows the occupier to extract the most value from the land. At that time England’s credit was so good that her government could have borrowed money very cheaply for this purpose, and it even improved as time went on, standing higher in the 1890s [1880s?] than it had stood in the 1880s [1890s?], until the Boer War made the beginning of the great change, of which no one living will see the end.
It is hardly possible to doubt that the government would have yielded to a demand from their own allies in Ireland for converting the Irish farmers into proprietors. They could not afford to have the whole country against them at that time. Thus it will be seen that the design of the Land League was not, as it is generally taken for granted to have been, in truth, hostile to the interests of the landlords as a class, in spite of the excited rhetoric sometimes used by Land League speakers. It was very much the contrary. Had the programme I have described been carried out successfully, an enormous number of this class, including the holders of mortgages on land and all others interested in the solvency of landed property, would have been saved, who have now been ruined.
As a matter of fact the Land League leaders did point out to them that they were taking a course, in endeavouring to preserve the existing condition of land tenure intact, and resisting a settlement satisfactory to the tenants, which was the most likely of all others to bring about their own destruction on a large scale. Whatever may be thought of the acts of the Land League leaders, there is no doubt that much of what they said showed considerable shrewdness and prescience. But the persons warned were not of the intellectual calibre needed for an understanding of their own position. If they were to be saved, it would have to be done for them against their will, and their consent would have to be extorted by force. They appealed to the government for help to ruin themselves, and that body responded heartily. The more ruined people there are in Ireland the stronger its own hold on the country is.
The strong point in the tenants’ position was, that although the anti-rent combination had all the might of a powerful and unscrupulous country to contend against, this enemy itself was in the position of having to fight behind a weak ally, in whom it was obliged to maintain the delusion that the fight was for the ally’s own interests. That the English would stick at nothing to gain the victory was certain, with one exception. They would not back up the landlords with their own money. In the anti-tithe struggle of O’Connell’s time, the government of the day made itself responsible for the tithes to the Protestant clergy, but this precedent would certainly not have been followed in the case of the landlords. English farmers, it must be remembered, had also suffered through the fall in agricultural prices, and though their rents had not been previously screwed up to the highest point, as Irish rents had been, English landlords were obliged to make larger abatements, relatively, than Irish tenants asked for.
This alone would have made it impossible for any government to assist Irish landlords with money. And this, had the Land League taken a different course from the one it did take, might eventually have brought about a change of attitude on the part of English landlords towards Irish resistance to rent. In time they might have come to ask themselves why the whole energy of parliament should be employed in keeping up the incomes of landlords in Ireland, while those in England were expected to reduce theirs voluntarily, and make no fuss about it. After this they might have gone a step further, and emancipated themselves from the control of certain big landlords, with seats in the House of Lords, who had land in both countries, and might naturally be anxious to make their Irish tenants pay for the losses they had to sustain in England. Letting themselves be led by this class of people has spread ruin amongst Irish landlords; I think it has most likely done a good deal of damage to the English Squirearchy as well. And a Land League in earnest might have done good service to the same class in both countries, simply by bringing them over to its side.
At that time it always seemed taken for granted in Ireland that the only English help to be had was that of the radicals and Socialists. in truth, I think, it was just as likely to come from the opposite quarter. The government might have used the Church Surplus to relieve the landlords — they did apply a portion of it afterwards to the payment of rent — but further than this they would not have gone. If the landlords had not been able to get their money from the tenants, they would have had to go without money. They were the last people in the world to do that. It is quite possible, that if the first serious attack on the tenants had been met by a show of determination on their part, the whole landlord class might have been seized with panic and caved in which might, and most likely would, have brought about a bloodless victory in a few months.
There were also a few minor sources of strength, which might have begun to operate after a time, if the tenants had shown the requisite stiffness. I will take this opportunity of answering a question which was sometimes asked at that time and which some people may feel inclined to ask now. What reason is there to suppose, if every Irish tenant had been converted into the owner of his holding then and there, with no rent to pay, that either the tenants or the rest of the country would have been any better off for it? So long as the country belonged to England what would there be to prevent England from extorting, by taxation or some other means, all the profits of her labour from the new owner, and applying the same to her own purposes, one of which would necessarily be the oppression and impoverishment of the said owner himself and the rest of his compatriots as well?
It has often been taken for granted that those who advocated the Land League doctrines looked on England as having only one method for perpetuating famine and every other evil in Ireland, though I do not think that the Land League leaders ever said anything to justify such an assumption. If they said that the establishment of a peasant proprietary would at once raise Ireland onto such an improved plane that the realisation of nationality would become much easier, it did not follow that they necessarily meant such an event would automatically produce such a consequence at any time and under any circumstances, or that such a consequence would leave nothing to be done and nothing to be fought for or against afterwards.
Had the Land League secured the most complete victory conceivable, if the Irish people had made no better use of it than they have made of other changes in English law, which they have generally regarded as victories, such as Catholic Emancipation, then undoubtedly, in course of time England would have found some way of neutralising all the good of that victory, and in any case she would certainly have tried to neutralise it. But even she could not have done this instantaneously, and it would have been the business of the Irish people to see that she did not do it at all, while their power to prevent her doing it would have increased more and more every day during the maintenance of their advantage.
The sort of victory I have indicated would have been much greater in kind than Catholic Emancipation, even including the removal of the tithe nuisance and the disestablishment of the Irish Protestant Church as part of the ‘Emancipation’. The completest Catholic Emancipation could accomplish no more than placing Catholics and Protestants on the same level, whereas a satisfactory instalment of the land occupiers as proprietors would at once have raised about half the population to a higher condition of material well being. And this improvement could not take place without entailing some improvement in the lot of that section which is in a still worse position than the tenant farmers.
There is no victory which cannot be made barren. If Ireland were a free country tomorrow, and her people behaved in the same fashion as they did during the famine of 1847, during the Land League, and over the question of the split in the Irish parliamentary party in the nineties, the odds would be very much in favour of a speedy extinction of her independence again. Catholic Emancipation ought to have made it easier to resist the two factors which seem to have been principally operative in maintaining the misery of Ireland between 1845 and 1875, the decimation of the people by famine and the great increase in taxation imposed on the country afterwards. Why it gave no power to do either I do not know, as these things took place before my time.
Without Catholic Emancipation there could not well have been an Irish parliamentary party, and this party ought to have been of use. That it has not been of any is due to the character of the people who have elected it. ‘Forcing’, or to speak more correctly, surprising a ‘concession’, or the ‘redress of a grievance’, is obviously much more likely to bear good fruit than when ‘concessions’ and ‘redresses’ are given voluntarily by England, since in the last case it is certain that she is only abandoning a particular weapon of oppression because she finds herself able to do without it. In the former case she might be abandoning one weapon without having a substitute ready, finding herself in a position where this course would seem most expedient, and trusting afterwards to recover the ground temporarily lost, which it would, of course, be the business of the Irish people to see that she never should do.
When we see this idea expressed, which is pretty often, it is generally stated in the phrase that England’s ‘acts of redress’ always come too late. They must, if they are voluntary, since they are not meant to do any good. It may be, that under the conditions at present prevailing between England and Ireland, which make the alliance of the Irish landlords quite useless to England, that England may of her own accord dispossess them, and establish a peasant proprietary; there is nothing unimaginable about such an occurrence, but it is unimaginable that it would be allowed to improve the state of the people, and the fact that it had not done any good, if it did happen, would doubtless hereafter be cited as historical evidence that the Land League programme, or rather, its ostensible programme, was a mistaken one. But such an argument, if time ever puts it into the mouths of those who come after us, will be erroneous.
Naturally, however, to count on a speedy victory, or even a sufficiently stiff front being presented to the government by the tenants to make a speedy victory possible, would have been very unwise. The difficulties in the way of making a sufficiently prolonged stand to bring the landlords to their senses were very great, but they were not insuperable. They need, though, to be taken in time. The preparations for sheltering evicted tenants, the hardest task of all, should, in fact, have been made before evictions, instead of afterwards. There were ways in which shelters for many families could have been provided at an early stage in a quiet and unostentatious way, that would have been extremely cheap compared to those which had to be erected towards the end. It is not advisable to say what those ways were, because a faint possibility still exists of an anti-rent campaign occurring in the future, the promoters of which might be in earnest. If they were, they would discover opportunities for themselves, which would be more advantageous to them for not having been pointed out publicly beforehand.
The certainty that, if the struggle lasted long enough, the government would prevent the provision of shelter for evicted families by force, and drive them out of such refuges as might be already at their disposal, had to be faced, but an interval sufficient to make the position of the landlords very serious indeed could be counted on before this point was reached. The only course then would have been to appeal to foreign countries for an asylum for the evicted tenants, their expenses to be defrayed by the Land League until they could be restored to their homes. The capitulation of the landlords must soon have followed, if the resistance to rent had been maintained long enough for such steps being taken on both sides.
The most essential condition for success in a genuine resistance to rent was that the tenants themselves should wish to resist. If they did not wish it they had the powers of wasting money in a pretended resistance such as no other kind of strikers have. That they did not wish it much is certain. The only question is, might they have come to wish it, if they had been induced to begin it and had perceived the possibilities of success before them. My own opinion is that about the early part of 1880 we were getting nearer to reality in our doings than at any other time in the nineteenth century or the twentieth. And every year that has passed since has strengthened my faith in the probability of success then if the Irish people had tried to succeed. But it can never be known now whether that opinion was right or that faith justified.
The Land League had a short way with all difficulties. It issued private instructions to its branches enjoining the payment of rent, to use its own expression, ‘at the last’, promising to defray all the legal costs incurred by the delay, which the tenants were directed to make as long as possible, by interposing every obstruction they could to the collection of the money they owed the landlords. This practice was dignified by the phrase ‘paying Rent at the Point of the Bayonet’.
V - Rent at the Point of the Bayonet