VI - The Ladies’ Land League
In January, 1881, the Land League decided to create a female branch of the League, which was afterwards known as ‘the Ladies’ Land League’. I cannot tell what reasons or motives led to this step, as the only notification I ever had of it, beforehand, was in a letter from the President of the Land League informing me of the decision and asking me to take charge of the new body's office in Dublin. That the women might carry on the work after the men were imprisoned, was the only reason given in that letter, and was the only one I ever heard. Though no one could suppose the English government too chivalrous to imprison women, it was probable that they would not imprison them so soon as the men, and thus an extension of time, which ought to have been a valuable asset, might be secured.
But the Land League had ensured that, as far as agrarian matters were concerned, there would be nothing to carry on after their own sequestration. Their system was calculated to keep up an appearance of resistance to rent for a short time, at an enormous cost. Even had the Ladies been willing to follow in the footsteps of their parent, they would not have been allowed to do so, and when the occasion actually did arrive which was supposed to be thus provided for, instead of carrying on the work the Land League had done, the Ladies had to undo, or try to undo, the greater part of it, and to substitute something very different and almost its exact opposite. So, what the Ladies’ Land League was really wanted for is one of the many things that will never be known.
However, at the time of which I am speaking, I, and I believe all who constituted the central body of the new League, were completely ignorant of the ‘policy’ I have described in the preceding chapter. I had been living in Ireland since the previous summer and reading all there was about the Land League in the newspapers with great attention, so that it may seem strange that I should have been in such entire darkness as to what the Land League was actually doing all the while. But the fact that some rent would have to be paid, as I have shown, when stock was seized, and the knowledge that a good many tenants must be expected to weaken when their determination came to be tested, even though the most hopeful anticipations possible as to their staunchness might be realised, prevented me from understanding the meaning of the frequent reports I read of rent and cost paying at sheriffs’ sales and evictions.
Some things that I noticed from time to time made me uneasy, but my nearest approach to a perception of the truth lay in an uncomfortable feeling that the Land League did not seem to be making adequate preparations for a successful resistance to rent. To myself I explained this appearance in every possible way except the right one. It never occurred to me that the reason why they were not making preparations for doing a certain thing was simply that they did not intend to do it. If the faintest suspicion of this fact had crossed my mind, I would have had nothing to say to the Land League, first or last. I did not think its programme was so easy of accomplishment as to stand any chance of success under such circumstances. But as it was, I consented to take charge of the Dublin office and the next thing I heard about it was an announcement one morning that the new League was to be formed that day, accompanied by a summons to Dublin to assist in the ceremony. When I reached Dublin, however, this had already taken place and the Ladies’ Land League had come into being.
No programme was laid down for us; from the beginning, we were thrown on our own devices as to what we should do; but this, in our innocence, we then thought to be a very simple matter. It did not take us long to find out that there must be a loose screw somewhere in the institution to which such a large portion of the Irish world had been looking for nearly eighteen months, for the regeneration of their country or the country of their fathers; though how gigantic that screw was we were still far from guessing. The resolution requesting the women of Ireland to form a Land League was passed unanimously at the usual weekly meeting of the Central League, and the first thing that happened to the women who complied with the request was to find themselves condemned wholesale for having done so by members of the Land League executive. Yet even they seemed to have some indistinct perception of the unsoundness of their position, as they accounted for it by saying the resolution had been ‘sprung’ on them, though they did not say why anybody was obliged to vote for it on that account,
Certainly, if their rules allowed such resolutions to be proposed without notice, they must have had very queer ones and they, not we, were to blame for the result, though they were evidently of the contrary opinion. This was our first discovery; it was swiftly followed by a second. We were supposed to be instructed in our work by the Land League, but their assistance confined itself to showing us the minute book in which they kept an account of their meetings, and allowing us access to their branch book, where the names and addresses of the principal local officials were written and — lastly but not leastly — finding fault with everything we did. This last form of guidance, unfortunately, was quite useless, as each member of the executive recognised his own corporate authority, but not his corporate responsibility. What one allowed or enjoined, another objected to, each one did not even always agree with himself at different times as to the nature of our duties. The upshot of these divided counsels, naturally, was that the only course left us was to do what we thought best ourselves, though it was some time before we left off trying, more or less, to please everybody, when the fact was that we could please nobody.
I have described myself as having sometimes felt uneasy about the conduct of the Land League. My uneasiness now deepened into dismay. Seeing all these grown-up men, who did not, apparently, know enough to understand that they were all individually responsible for the acts of the executive so long as they remained members of it, or even to understand that they were bound by the public resolutions passed at their own meetings, and who could find no better use for us than to quarrel with us, though the Land League staff was undoubtedly always overworked, was enough to make the stoutest heart quail. For it was on these men that the success of an undertaking that has scarcely ever been surpassed in difficulty was depending.
As time went on the hostility manifested towards the Ladies by the authors of their being, increased instead of diminishing. I think now that, added to their natural resentment at our having done what they asked us to do, they soon acquired a much stronger ground for their annoyance tn the discovery that we were taking the Land League seriously, and thought that not paying rent was intended to mean not paying it. Though I was just as far as ever from grasping how our respective views diverged on this point, I did perceive that we could not expect to do any good with such relations prevailing between the two Leagues, and suggested that we should dissolve as the best way out of the difficulty.
The proposal was received with something like fury. Notwithstanding our unhappy inability to please them, the Land League always clung to us as Pharaoh clung to the children of Israel, and in the end, when the Land League and rent resisting alike were all over and done with, it still required a great deal of diplomacy on our part to sever our connection with our creators without an open quarrel. I know now that it would have been the best thing for everybody and everything if we had had the courage and resolution to dissolve at that time, when it would have been easier than at any other. But it would not have seemed right. One penalty for those who make an initial blunder of great magnitude in any matter of importance, always is that nothing done by them thereafter ever seems right. And no blunder could have surpassed the one we had made in our estimate of the Land League and the action we had taken on the strength of that estimate.
So we stayed where we were, and the long squabble went on and the process of our enlightenment went on too. For myself the next step took the shape of a great perplexity caused by the applications for relief which came from evicted tenants all over the country. I soon noticed that they all seemed to come from persons who had been totally unable to pay their rent. Their eviction was in no way due to any Land League policy. I was expecting to find that these cases of eviction, which afterwards came to be described as ‘poverty cases’, had become rare and that the majority of the tenants had sustained eviction through having followed the advice of the Land League in refusing to pay, because their landlord had not accepted their terms. But there were no such cases whatever.
I could not understand how the poverty cases of eviction could occur at all, under the great majority of landlords, if the tenants who could pay withheld their rents, (as they were bound to do under the Land League rules so long as one of their number was threatened with eviction), for the simple reason that the landlords would not then have the money to pay for the evictions. If the tenants on an estate were ‘holding out’, obviously the landlord would not select the poorest to proceed against, but the richest. So, at the least, from the numbers of applications which came in, the tenants all over the country must be disregarding the Land League injunctions wholesale, so far as standing by their insolvent brethren was concerned, and the League could not be making the progress represented by the newspapers and the speakers at Land League meetings. Yet no word was ever said by the local secretaries who sent in the applications, about a spirit of weakness or defection being abroad.
On the contrary, the applications seemed to come from the places where the Land League was most flourishing and public spirit in the most satisfactory condition. Moreover, if there was any resistance to rent in the country, even the least that might be compatible with any Land League progress whatever, or sufficient to justify the continued existence of the League, there would certainly be some evictions of solvent tenants; the landlords were not too weak for that. But there did not seem to be any. And the members of the Land League executive, whenever they said anything on the subject to us, always spoke of anything being done for evicted tenants as being pure ‘charity’, without any connection with Land League aims. One objected to ‘the money being frittered away in grants’, another said, ‘We burnt our fingers with relief last year’, alluding to the famine relief of 1880, just as if there was absolutely no distinction whatever between the two cases. Once I asked how tenants could be expected not to pay their rents if they were not provided for afterwards, and received the astonishing answer that there was ‘not a single tenant in Ireland who would not pay the rent if he could’.
Then what was the Land League for? And what were we all supposed to be doing? And how was it that the Land League was still going on? In short, what did it all mean? However, the last assertion, that no one who could pay would refrain from doing it, we soon found was not true; we found that there did exist places in Ireland where the tenants were capable of a real resistance to rent, and the only conclusion we could come to was that
the Land League had discovered no such places simply because they had not tried to. Thus, some eighteen months after the brave counsel had first been issued to the Irish tenantry to save themselves by not paying their rents unless they were satisfied with the amount themselves, a tiny beginning was made of acting on it, through the exertions of a small and very weak body.
That we found any tenants to listen to us, at this date and under the circumstances, which we were still far from understanding, was sufficiently remarkable to indicate a strong probability that the Land League if it had not run away from its own public platform, might have achieved a great success, which would have changed the whole history of Ireland from 1880. One estate that was not paying rent, but going into Land League houses when the evicting ‘army’ arrived, would have constituted a much more alarming object lesson to landlords than 50 estates paying Rent at the Point of the Bayonet, at first. If we had understood that we were simply trying to reverse the solemn and deliberate policy of the Land League, and starting a forlorn hope at a time that must of necessity be very near the end of the struggle, I do not suppose we should have acted as we did, but should have found the courage to dissolve.
Failing that step, there would have been another alternative open to the majority of the Ladies’ Land League. They might frankly have taken up the position of an eleemosynary society, distributing alms to a grievously afflicted class of persons, who might at the same time only be assisted in the most parsimonious manner consistent with assisting them at all — one that would seem a mere mockery of help — because the minutest superfluity would certainly be applied by them to the payment of rent: in other words, to the aggravation of the evils which had caused their affliction. I could not have taken part in such a society myself, because both before and after the formation of the Ladies’ Land League, I had always taken up the position that the Land League funds were for the purpose of aiding tenants not to pay their rents, once the famine was over, so that to acquiesce in the Policy adopted by the Land League would also have been acquiescing in what I regarded as a misappropriation of money
I had tried to assist in collecting.
But most of my colleagues were not in this case, and it would have been open to them to adopt a programme revised to suit the real, instead of the supposed operations of the Land League, if they had understood what those operations were, and if they had thought it worth their while, which it certainly would not have been. But understanding was still to come. My own next step towards it was the discovery that the Land League paid some of the costs, for ‘evictions’ and sheriffs’ sales; the next one after that was that it made this a practice; but some time still passed before 1 learned that this cost-paying was not merely tentative in its nature, that it applied to every case of whatever sort, and was the sole means by which landlords were to be brought to their knees. Even then I hardly realised that the executive had actually issued directions to every branch in Ireland, that all unsatisfied tenants should refrain from paying ‘until the last’, accompanied by a promise to pay all costs incurred through this dilatoriness. I can only account for this slowness of comprehension on my part by the fact that the Land League policy, when I did know what it was, did not appear consistent with sanity to me, and does not look so to me now.
Comprehension, when it was at length forced on me, came as a great shock, for I saw how this action of the Land League bore within itself the seeds of all the disasters that have happened since. What form those disasters might take, of course I could not tell; I could only know that a long course of disasters must ensue, unless, at the eleventh hour, the chosen course could be successfully changed. And if that were accomplished, it would be little short of a miracle. When we were in full possession of the truth, we had to consider our own policy by the new light thrown on it. The unwisdom of not having dissolved at an earlier stage was now made manifest, for to dissolve now was not so easy. We had incurred obligations of our own now towards the tenants who had adopted the system of not paying rent, instead of only delaying it, and for us to dissolve now would be to throw them back to the mercy of the landlords. On the other hand, one fact stood out very clearly, as a hard rock of certainty amongst much confusion and many doubts.
The Land League policy could only last a short time; it must be changed, and changed soon, by reason of the rapidly increasing drain of money it involved. And when it happened, either resistance to rent on a national basis must cease, or it must be turned into a genuine resistance. Should the latter method become the official one, whatever chance of success it might have would be enhanced by previous preparation, which we had already unconsciously begun. So to remain and try to prepare ourselves for the inevitable moment when paying Rent at the Point of the Bayonet must cease, was what we actually decided on doing, rightly or wrongly. The smallness of our means, however, made adequate preparation impossible, chiefly because we could not have anything like enough travellers to go about the country and acquire some knowledge of the different districts, leagues and estates we had to do with. Whatever knowledge the Land League organisers might have was not available for us, and if it had been, could scarcely have been of much use to us, the aims of the two Leagues being so very different.
Poor as we were, we were obliged, moreover, to be liberal with grants to evicted tenants, though they were nearly all poverty cases, for it was obvious that when the time for which we were waiting came, no tenant would like eviction any better for having observed an excessively sparing system adopted towards other tenants. That these grants to poverty cases were frequently, or mostly, subventions to rent, and that we were thus doing the very opposite of the thing we had intended to do — assisting in paying rent instead of preventing it — was intensely disagreeable; but it is a common situation for those who take service under weak heads to find themselves in; namely, fighting for the enemy instead of against him. And this rule is good for warfare in literal, as well as in a metaphorical sense.
Persons ‘taking up arms’ for Ireland, if their leaders were of the same character as the Land League leaders, would stand an excellent chance of enjoying an experience precisely similar to that of the Ladies’ Land League. Not that I consider the responsibility rested on the leaders alone. Some of the secretaries and presidents of the branches and the farmers themselves, must have understood the nature of what was being done just as well as anybody else, and were not obliged to pretend a belief in its efficacy if they did not feel it. I have alluded to the possibility that the people might have proved in earnest if the leaders had been so; it is no less possible that the leaders might have developed earnestness if the people had wished it. TheLand League policy was invented to please the people and did please them, The head and the tail matched each other.
Neither do I think the Ladies free from any share of responsibility in the matter. Though our error was of a different nature from theirs, it was as serious as any the Land League made. The motives or reasons for mistakes in things political do not affect the result. It is the mistakes themselves that signify, and not why they are made. People with aims so radically different and incompatible as the Land League and the Ladies’ Land League had no business in the same boat. Whether we or they were to blame for our getting there depends on whether the interpretation they put on their own public utterances was the natural one or not. If it was, we were to blame, if it was not, they were. But their being in the wrong did not put us in the right. If they were not sincere, we ought not to have taken it for granted that they were.
Insight into character, and the power to distinguish between shams and realities, between truth and falsehood, are the most necessary parts of equipment for political success, and not the less so because there are no formulae to be laid down whereby they may be acquired. A fraud can do no harm if there is no one to be taken in by it. It would be as ineffective as one half of a bank note without the other. In this case we helped to contribute the second half. When it was too late, I certainly recognised that some things had happened, even in the beginning of the Land League, which ought to have opened my eyes to its true character, or to something very like it. I can only suppose that they failed to accomplish this because I was wilfully shutting my eyes to the logical meaning of the evidence before me, and refusing to see because I did not want to see. It should be borne in mind that an infusion of sincerity into a sham, if it is not sufficient to leaven the whole mass, does not do any good, but rather tends to aggravate the evil, since it conduces to still more misleading and to more wasted exertions. .
If a fraud cannot be converted into a bona fide business, the sooner it exposes itself the better, for by so much sooner can the work of reconstruction be begun, and the harm which it has done be outlived. Anything that lengthens its lease of life is simply mischievous, not to mention the effect it has in discrediting those who have been connected with it, in a degree nearly exactly proportionate to the prominence of the part they had in it, so that it becomes impossible for them to do afterwards such things as they might otherwise have been capable of doing. I hope I shall not be construed here as meaning that no one should assist in any enterprise because what they think, or know, to be the best policy is not being followed. Many enterprises have succeeded that have been conducted on lines that were far away indeed from the best. But compatibility with success cannot be dispensed with in a policy.
The Land League soon found itself compelled to make a small move in the direction we, under the badly mistaken notion that we were carrying out its own policy, had already taken. It had to modify its programme where the sale of a tenant’s interest in his holding was concerned. Even the executive's arithmetic was obliged to see that unless this particular outflow was stopped, something like £20,000 in costs might be incurred in a single day, not to keep landlords without rents, but to defer their receiving them for a little time. And the £20,000 might not even be the worst, for there was a device called a hanging gale, intended to defeat the law which required a tenant to owe six months rent before he could be evicted. He was made to acknowledge himself in debt for an imaginary six months rent, so that a writ could be served on him at any time the landlord chose.
When this hanging gale was in force on an estate, big sums might be paid in costs one day, and the tenants for whom they were paid might be writted next day for precisely the same debt, another six months rent. And when this happened the Land League stood in the position of being pledged to pay the same costs over again at any moment. Now it decided on informing the branches that it would no longer pay costs for tenants buying in their own farms. They might, if they liked, buy them in at their own expense; and if they chose, on the contrary, to let their farms go, rather than pay the rent, they would be supported by the Land League after eviction.
So the principle that rent need not necessarily always be paid if it was possible to pay it, with the accompanying recognition of a claim on the Land League funds for support where such non-payment resulted in eviction, at length received the sanction of the League, nearly two years after its foundation, This change made the League’s position more illogical than it was already, because the whole of the tenants whose holdings could be sold in the county court, were placed in an entirely different category from the rest henceforth. They would have had to make a real resistance or none at all, but only to make a sham one at their own expense. Nevertheless, promises to pay these costs were still frequently issued from the Dublin office, the clerks apparently continuing to make them from force of habit.