V - Rent at the Point of the Bayonet
The effect of the decision that rent must be paid by those who were able to pay it, after all possible delays, accompanied generally by a great accumulation of costs, was to nullify at once the solitary factor which held out a hope of success for the Land League. The poverty of the landlords was prevented from operating as a help to victory They could not wait for money long, but they could wait long enough for the government to send an armed force to protect the bailiff who collected the rent, since they were assured of receiving it ultimately, if it could by any means be scraped together.
The Land League was now pitting its purse, not against the landlords’ purses, but against the purses of the government, then the richest in the world. Through this procedure of the Land League, those who could not get the rent were evicted, and received grants from the Land League, which often enabled them to pay the rent and redeem their holdings before the ‘six months redemption’ had expired. Under the circumstances this was really the only course open to them. When all who could pay did, as it was not reasonable to expect those who could not to refrain from offering such means as they might acquire after eviction, in order to obtain reinstatement in their homes. How much of the Land League money really went into the landlords’ pockets it is unpleasant to think of.
The policy was also quite inconsistent with many of the public injunctions constantly given by the responsible Land League leaders. They told the tenants to refuse all reductions which did not include all the tenants on the same estate, and to refuse them even then, unless those who could pay nothing were included in the settlement. But there was evidently no use in one tenant, or any number of tenants rejecting arrangements satisfactory to themselves when it only meant that they would at last have to pay the whole rent, and the other tenants would be better off for their self-denial. If anything, the insolvent tenant would be a little worse off, for the landlord, would have a little more money to employ in evicting him.
In the same way the oft-repeated instructions to insist on reductions that would be sufficient, and allow them to pay their debts to the shopkeepers, not accepting any terms from the landlord which were not perfectly satisfactory, became meaningless, when refusing a reduction, however small, simply meant paying the debt without any reduction later on. Moreover, the owners of stock were deprived of adequate motive for taking trouble in preventing its seizure since whether they did so or not, it would all come to the same thing in the end — the rent would have to be paid.
In the cases where the farms were put up for sale in the county courts and bought in by the tenants, the programme showed most farcically. The costs were large and the time taken by the process extremely small, while the trouble or expense to either landlord or government was merely nominal. It is impossible to tell what induced the Land League to adopt such a plan. If they thought at all, perhaps they thought the government would not be able to send a military force to collect the rents all over Ireland. But no particular difficulty existed to prevent them sending one to every farm in the country, had that been necessary, which, of course, it would not have been. Considering the importance of the matter to them, involving as it did in some measure the very holding of Ireland, the trouble and expense would have been immaterial, and the Land League would have needed to go on paying all the legal costs of the proceedings for years, if the struggle had really been fought out on these lines. Even the ridiculous aspect of these military expeditions was minimised by the excessive noise, uproar, and violent language which marked the Land League from the beginning.
A second possible reason might have been the fact that O’Connell had adopted a similar method during the resistance to tithes’ successfully carried out towards the middle of the nineteenth century, The government then had been forced to confess its inability to collect the tithes, as it had undertaken to do. But tithes and rent stood on different leases. Distraint was the only means by which the payment of tithes could be enforced, and I havé shown distraint to be necessarily troublesome, expensive, and ineffective. The government of that day was unable to employ further means because the landlords were behind the parsons and were by far the most important body of the two. Extremities to enforce payment of the latter’s claims would have jeopardised the interests of the landlords, and so the hands of the government were in a sense tied. The penalty of eviction had to be kept sacred for the landlords’ use.
The Duke of Wellington, in explaining his reasons for yielding on the tithe question, seemed to think, indeed, that a prolongation of the struggle alone, without any change of method, might act injuriously to the landlords, simply by bringing about a strike against rent, as well as against tithes. The Duke, however, plainly contemplated a real strike against rents, and not the kind the Land League conducted, for he spoke of distraint as the only means for obtaining payment, and asked, ‘How distrain against so many?’ A third reason which may have influenced the Land League executive was that the tenants themselves, before the formation of the Land League, had often, of their own accord, resorted to the expedient of delaying the payment of rent and obstructing its collection, until the last moment, compatible with retaining their interest in their holdings and avoiding eviction. The costs incurred by these proceedings had either been paid by the tenants or contributed from local sources.
Whether these sporadic operations did any good it is not possible to say. It was natural that men at their wits ends for some means of defence should try them, and so long as they retained their local character and were paid for from local sources, they may have done some good and could scarcely have done much harm. The people immediately interested could judge best whether the circumstances in each particular case rendered this kind of resistance advisable, and, if they or their near neighbours had to bear all the expenses entailed, they were more likely to see that they got their money's worth in the shape of trouble for the other side. But when these expenses were defrayed from national sources, the obstruction offered to the collection of rent often tended to reduce itself to a mere formality.
The method had one initial vice which could not have been overlooked, even if it had been in itself compatible with success on a large scale; the more generally it was adopted, the easier in proportion it became to combat. Manifestly it would take no longer for the sheriff and his ‘army’ to present themselves at the doors of a large number of tenants all together than of a small number scattered here and there. It had a secondary vice also, in that any effect it might have would be mostly only on the smaller landlords, who were obliged to live in the same neighbourhood as their tenants. Such landlords were not the most likely to have influence either on parliament or the government. The costs of ‘resistance’ to rent paying were often larger than the rent itself, and if such ‘resistance’ had been carried out to the end, I can see no reason why these costs should not have exceeded that total amount of the rental thus ‘withheld’. It must not be lost sight of, either, that if the tenants had not paid the rents, the landlords would have had to pay these costs, and where they would have procured the wherewithal to do it, I do not know. It is only certain that they did not possess it themselves; and would not have been supplied with it either by the government or by the English people.
While securing the certainty of success for all landlords who chose to persevere, the Land Leaguers were careful to stimulate as many as they could to perseverance, by the insults, abuse, and ridicule they heaped on them, thus combining the greatest expenditure with the smallest successes possible within their system. The expense to the tenants and to the country of resisting rent was not confined to the legal costs of collecting the debt. There were other ways in which it had to be paid for, and most of these would have been the same whether the resistance had been real or sham. One source of expense, however, which must have been heavy, would have been unnecessary in the former case. This was the damage done by mere obstruction, such as felling trees and tearing up roads, to hinder the passages of troops. For all this sort of thing the tenants and their neighbours had to pay, and it did not prevent the collection of rent; it only delayed it. Obstruction to rent involved another expense which might or might not have been the same in any case.
Every locality had a certain force of constabulary allotted to it, the upkeep of which was legally a charge on the imperial exchequer, But the force actually was frequently below the legal requirement, and when this happened, any additions to it were called ‘extra police’, and charged to a special rate levied on the locality, though the number of men on duty, including the ‘extras’, might stil] be less than the number whose maintenance was legally required to be defrayed from the enormous sum voted from the exchequer for this outrageous infliction on Ireland, and called ‘imperial expenditure’ on that unhappy country. That the Irish people should have to pay twice over for this infliction in the way I have described is a fair example of how they have not only to suffer from the laws England makes for them, but also from the infraction of those laws by those who administer them. Horrible as the statute book of Ireland has been since it has been ‘made in England’, I do not believe the English have ever found one law of their own making sufficiently oppressive to please them in its working without supplementing it by illegalities. Of course no opportunities were lost by the government of inflicting this imposition on the people.
If ‘withholding rent’ had been bona fide, it might have proved a rather nice question how far it was worthwhile to incur so much expense in merely delaying the operations of legal processes. The worst way of all, however, that was employed to plunder the people, was one that they could not have helped, whatever they had done. This was managed through the law that gave power to levy compensation for malicious damage to property off the district where the damage was done. This compensation was assessed by the grand juries, who had also the power to lay the impost on large or small divisions of the counties. By selecting the smallest divisions they were enabled to choose the very individuals who had to pay the whole tax; that is to say, they could make the persons they happened to dislike pay, while protecting themselves and their friends from having to bear any part of the burden. And as far as I could see, the people thus fined had no chance of defending themselves, owing to the way the adjudications on such claims were made.
Even if the grand juries had wished to act fairly, which of course they did not, the method of their ‘investigations’ would not have permitted them to do so. For there seemed to be no way of disproving the evidence the claimants might choose to invent. Naturally a number of persons have as much right to a public trial before they are cast in damages as an individual. Such a trial, however, even if they could have had it, would not have helped the ratepayers in the cases in question, as the bodies with whom the decision rested would have disregarded any evidence on the defendants’ side. With them, as it is today, with the packed juries supplied to us for criminal trials, the guiding rule was always that contained in the judge's charge in Trial by Jury: ‘And when amid the plaintiff's shrieks, the defendant speaks/Upon the other side,/What he may say you need not mind/For without bias of any kind,/This trial must be tried.’ So if the law permitted any defence for the ratepayers, an attempt to avail themselves of it would only have been useful in furnishing an opportunity. by refuting false evidence, of mitigating the annoyance some people feel at seeing impudent and often ridiculous lies pass entirely unchallenged.
i never had any personal knowledge of claims for damage to property, but when the law had been altered to enable people to recover damages in this way for personal injuries, I remember a man claiming, and of course getting, a large sum for an assault on him, part of whose evidence in support of his case I knew to be false. I had no chance of testifying to this fact, however, because I only learnt it through reading the newspaper report of the application and the immediate grant of the same, on the following day. What may seem a curious feature of this instance, to persons happily instructed as to the way Ireland is run, was that this particular lie was not necessary to the claimant's case, which was as a matter of fact, a justifiable one as far as could be seen There was no doubt about the assault, and every likelihood that the motive for it was political. But the more lies claimants of this kind tell, of the sort that are pleasing to the English public, the more compensation he is likely to receive, and he knows it. Stiil I doubt very much whether this man would have ventured to tell this particular lie if he had not known it would be impossible for me to contradict him in court.
When a man was certain to receive more than the value of the property injured, as anybody was who applied for damages due io popular enmity, a constant temptation was held out to any blackguard to pretend he had sustained such damages. The most repulsive form which this method of oppression took was that of offering strong incentives, in the most barelaced way, to the mutilation of living animals. It will be sufficient to give one example of how this was worked. A horse was found with its ears cut off. The owner asked for £16 compensation, the full value of the animal according to his own estimate, which we may presume, was more rather than less, its market value when uninjured. He was granted £16, and £4 over for his costs, which could scarcely have been more than as many shillings. So the amputation of the horse's ears left him in the position of having the enjoyment of the horse unimpaired; he could work it the same as ever.
Only its selling value was affected. And he had the price, probably, of two more horses as good as the first in his pocket. It is needless to say that any constable who ventured to report an opinion that any claimant to compensation of this kind had done the damage himself would have been dismissed and perhaps have had some criminal charge brought against himself as well. The latter fate would have been almost certain for an independent witness — on the wrong side. However, in a depopulated country like Ireland, the chance of there being any witnesses was small. This is an excellent illustration of the massive armour of hypocrisy wherewith the English always envelop themselves — one that can never be penetrated at any point until the day comes when they themselves will all be found crushed beneath it. While offering what were, in such a poor country as Ireland, enormous rewards for the ill treatment of animals there, they were pretending from the highest to the lowest, to be utterly shocked and amazed at any outrages on them occurring at all.
The only thing to be surprised at was that there were so few. If any class in England were to receive such rewards for mutilating their animals, mighty few animals belonging to that class would escape. England swarms with ‘societies’ for the protection of animals, all of which took great care never to discover there was anything amiss in fomenting crimes against them in Ireland - as good care as they always take not to notice the fiendish usage meted out to its own miserable beasts and to those of the enemy when it can get at them, by the British Empire when it is at war, or the horrors inflicted on animals in what they are pleased to call their ‘Empire building’,
All these money impositions on the Irish people, that I have described, if not paying rent had meant not paying it, might have done good instead of harm, for they might have gone to swell the total to be deducted from the landlords’ rents. They naturally did, in the long run, have the effect of reducing the amount payable in rent; but landlord arithmetic was not capable of understanding subtraction in so complicated a form. Such subtraction, I believe, was the only kind the landlords did have to suffer through the Land League, except the payments they had to make to bogus buyers and tenants. The small amount of rent that was eaten instead of being paid, in the early part of its life, could not have been more than they afterwards received from insolvent tenants who paid either the whole or part of their rents with the League’s grants. On the other hand they gained distinct pecuniary advantages from its existence through the help they received thereby in escaping from the payment of their own debts, and from discharging the obligations imposed on them by custom, though not by law.
It was to the interest of all parties alike in Ireland to exaggerate the loss sustained by the landlords in rents during the Land League. For the government it meant increased cover for its persecution of the people, and the moral advantage of seeming to be engaged in putting down a formidable combination against English power. To the Land League it meant the appearance of accomplishing a great deal; and to the landlords it meant so much more help from the government to screw, by hook or by crook, as much as possible from the tenants, and their friends, as well as the advantage already mentioned.
The landlords were already sufficiently expert at avoiding payment of debts, without any extra help. Now they had the blissful consciousness that the plea of not getting their rents was certain to ensure them the indulgence of every court in Ireland, Irish judges all being mere creatures of the government, bound to affect belief in any theory that government might wish to uphold. Certainly, some of the creditors concerned deserved no sympathy. These were the mortgagees on landed property who had lent money to landlords, knowing perfectly well that such loans involved the raising of rents. The tradesmen creditors stood on a different plane. It is true that no man need give credit unless he likes, but in Ireland a healthy system in commerce is no more possible than in anything else, because of the poisonous shadow under which all things there lie. The reflection, however, is forced on one that a good many of these tradesmen had certainly contributed towards their own discomfiture by their overmuch support of the government which was responsible for their troubles. The third class of creditors that the landlords were assisted to escape from was the only one quite blameless and helpless. This was mostly composed of the landlords’ female relations, who had annuities secured on landed estates. The Irish custom amongst the farming class is the same as with the French: equal division between sons and daughters, though I have heard it has suffered some undermining through the contagion of English ideas. Conquerors frequently communicate their faults to the conquered, but never their virtues, if by chance they have any. The Irish custom amongst the landlord and upper classes generally, is exactly the same as in England — that of giving all, or nearly all, to the sons, and little or nothing to the daughters. But in England there was this difference. English ladies might have only a starvation pittance to live on, but they were not always being threatened with its total extinction, as Irish ladies were, through their male relations destroying the value of the capital on which it was secured by perpetual rent raising.
The fall in rentals in England might deprive the landlord of all or part of his income; it left the pittances of his female relations untouched. Nominally Irish ladies were in the same case of having a claim prior to the landlords’ on whatever rents were paid; but in reality the claim was one they were generally unable to make good. Mostly their incomes were too tiny to permit of their taking any legal steps whatever, and if they did the landlords’ position was too strong from them to have more than the faintest chance of success. Besides the political reason compelling the judges to uphold the theory that the landlord was totally unable to pay, all the evidence on the subject was in his hands. I remember one instance of a lady who was a little better off than most female encumbrances, bringing a suit against her son for the payment of her jointure and being defeated. This was an estate with which I had a good deal to do and soI knew an important part of the affidavit by which the landlord gained the victory was untrue; but his mother had no power to prove this fact, though she probably guessed it.
The landlords who so eagerly seized the plea of no rents to escape paying anything at this time, including their subscriptions to the Protestant Episcopal Church of Ireland and to the various charities that by the unwritten law of custom constitute a tax rightfully due from the owners of property, though the reductions in rent they sustained were the very smallest possible, the Land League policy of making it out of the question for the tenants to hold out for more, made no exception in favour of their own womenkind. They who had never been allowed to share those artificially created fat thes by which the ultimate loss of the very little considered ample for them had so often been rendered a certainty, were made the first to feel the pinch of the lean times.
They were, infact, only a little less the victims of the landlords than the tenants themselves; while on the other hand they were entirely helpless, instead of being, as the tenants were, only partially helpless against the landlords. If the Irish landlords had not deserved extermination for anything else, they would have deserved it for the treatment of their own women. It cannot be said, however, that these women received no compensation for their hard lot now. The commiseration extended to them both in England and Ireland was amazing, seeing that it came from people who had never before minded how much they starved, or objected to the practices that kept starvation forever hanging over them.
A fund was collected for them which is still in existence. It is to be hoped that this fund had proved an exception to many of its kind, which seem mainly devoted to the purpose of enabling rich people to support their poor relations at the expense of the charitable. An accident that happened shortly after the suppression of the Land League threw a light on the nature of the help these Irish ladies were receiving which certainly suggested the suspicion that it was not quite up to the mark one might have expected, considering the violence of the sympathy expressed for them. One day a parcel was delivered at the Land League office containing a lot of old clothes. We did not ask for old clothes, but we accepted them when they were sent, as they sometimes were, unasked. This particular parcel, however, astonished us, For it was nearly all rags and rubbish, and people used not to send us rubbish. The piece of resistance was a black silk skirt which we sold for ten shillings; the total value of the rest was not more than five shillings.
Some time afterwards the mystery was explained, A clerk from a carrying company called to make enquiries about the consignment. It had been intended for the Distressed Irish Ladies committee and owing to an insufficient address had been delivered to the Ladies’ Land League. The garments described were the result of an appeal publicly issued for raiment that might enable impoverished ladies to testily their ‘loyalty’ by attending the drawing rooms at the Castle, and the ladies to whom they should have been delivered were claiming £5 from the company as their value. Of course we told the man the truth about the real value of the goods and offered to give evidence if necessary for the company. We heard afterwards that the company, I suppose for the sake of peace, had paid the claim in full. So the mistake proved a very profitable one for the Distressed Irish Ladies committee.