VIII - The No Rent Manifesto
The incarceration of the Land League leaders and staff served to save the reputation of the former in two ways. It minimised their responsibility for the Land League’s failure, because that event which they had made as certain as mortals can make anything certain, would now happen after their imprisonment, when the conduct of affairs would have been, at least for a short time, in other hands. This was something; but the second way was of incomparably more importance. It enabled them to escape from the dilemma they had placed themselves in by promising to defray the costs incurred by paying Rent at the Point of the Bayonet, without acknowledging that they had made a mistake in assuming such a responsibility. They had sacrificed everything to keeping up an appearance of resistance to rent as long as they were at liberty, and now they did not want to keep up that appearance any longer.
The No Rent manifesto, which they issued from Kilmainham prison, was ostensibly a measure of retaliation for the practical suppression of the Land League; in reality it was the only cover under which they could withdraw from the impossible position they had created for themselves, and at the same time keep up some semblance of a continuous policy. The manifesto itself was very long. I will therefore leave out the first part, which might be termed recitative, and only give the second, which was instructory:
One constitutional weapon alone now remains in the hands of the Irish National Land League. It is the strongest, the swiftest, the most irresistible of all. We hesitated to advise our fellow-countrymen to employ it until the savage lawlessness of the English government provoked a crisis in which we must either consent to see the Irish tenant farmers disarmed of their organisation and laid once more prostrate at the feet of the landlords, and every murmur of Irish public opinion suppressed with an armed hand, or appeal to our countrymen to at once resort to the only means now left in their hands of bringing this false and brutal government to its senses.
Fellow-countrymen, the hour to try your souls and to redeem your pledges has arrived. The executive of the National Land League, forced to abandon the policy of testing the Land Act, feels bound to advise the tenant farmers of Ireland from this forth to pay no rents under any circumstances to their landlords until the government relinquishes the existing system of terrorism, and restores the constitutional rights of the people. Do not be daunted by the removal of your leaders. Your fathers abolished tithes by the same method without any leaders at all, and with scarcely a shadow of the magnificent organisation which covers every portion of Ireland today.
Do not suffer yourselves to be intimidated by threats of military violence. It is as lawful to refuse to pay rents as it is to receive them. Against the passive resistance of an entire population, military power has no weapons. Do not be wheedled into compromise of any sort by the dread of eviction. If you only act together in the spirit to which within the last two years you countless times solemnly pledged your vows, they can no more evict a whole nation than they can imprison them. The funds of the National Land League will be poured out unstintedly for the support of all who may endure eviction in the course of the struggle. Our exiled brothers in America may be relied on to contribute, if necessary, as many millions of money as they have contributed thousands to starve out landlordism and bring English tyranny to its knees. You have only to show that you are not unworthy of their boundless sacrifices in your cause. No power on earth except faintheartedness on your own part can defeat you. Landlordism is already staggering under the blows which you have dealt it, amidst the applause of the world.
One more crowning struggle for your land, your homes, your lives, a struggle in which you have all the memories of your race, all the hopes of your children, all the sacrifices of your imprisoned brothers, all your cravings for rent-enfranchised land, for happy homes, and national freedom, to inspire you — one more heroic effort to destroy landlordism at the very source and fount of its existence — and the system which was, and is, the curse of your race and of your existence will have disappeared for ever. The world is watching to see whether all your splendid hopes and noble courage will crumble away at the first threat of cowardly tyranny. You have to choose between throwing yourself upon the mercy of England and taking your stand by the organisation which has once before proved too strong for English despotism; you have to choose between all-powerful unity and impotent disorganisation; between the land for the landlords and the land for the people. We cannot doubt your choice. Every tenant farmer of Ireland is today the standard-bearer of the flag unfurled at Irishtown, and can bear it to a glorious victory.
Stand together in the face of the brutal and cowardly enemies of your race; pay no rents under any pretext; stand passively, firmly, fearlessly by while the armies of England may be engaged in their hopeless struggle against a spirit which their weapons cannot touch; act for yourselves if you are deprived of the counsels of those who have shown you how to act; no power of legalised violence can extort one penny from your purses against your will; if you are evicted, you shall not suffer; the landlord who evicts will be a ruined pauper; and the government which supports him with its bayonets will learn in a single winter how powerless is armed force against the will of a united, determined, and self-reliant nation.
(Signed),
Charles Stewart Parnell, President, Kilmainham Jail.
A. J. Kettle, Hon. Secretary, Kilmainham Jail.
Michael Davitt, Hon. Secretary, Portland Prison.
Thomas Brennan, Hon. Secretary, Kilmainham Jail.
John Dillon, Head Organiser, Kilmainham Jail.
Thomas Sexton, Head Organiser, Kilmainham Jail.
Patrick Egan, Treasurer, Paris. 18th October, 1881.
In considering this document, it is necessary to remember that one of the signatures must have been appended by proxy, and most likely two of them were. The rest of the signers probably were not able to go over it in company, situated as they were, so that as far as the evidence goes, they can only be held, altogether, responsible for the general principle to which they subscribed, and not for the actual language used. Of that, it seems quite obvious, there was too much, even supposing its quality had left nothing to be desired. The substantial portion of that which I have omitted was contained in the declaration that the League was obliged to abandon its attitude towards the Land Act because it had no staff left to carry on the test cases with.
What the constitutional rights were which had to be ‘restored’, would have puzzled anyone to say, but probably most people understood what was meant. The allusion to the tithe resistance, which it contained, should not have been there, for the two cases, as I have already pointed out, were too dissimilar. To pay no rent under any circumstances was impossible, according to our experience hitherto, as I have shown, unless the Irish tenantry, generally speaking, had been very wealthy indeed. Those phrases which spoke of the all-powerfulness of the Irish people and the powerlessness of the English, under the circumstances suggested by the manifesto, were couched in much too exaggerated language; language that is always more likely than not to defeat the end which it is, presumably, intended to serve.
For the absurdity of speaking as if a small, weak, unarmed country had nothing to fear from a larger, immensely stronger, and well-armed country that is also holding the smaller country in between its finger and thumb, is so patent that the author of it is apt to be classed amongst those who only mean anything they say, if they mean it in any sense, in some highly metaphorical and unpractical way; and, by some sort of sequence in ideas, those who merely try to encourage the weak to use the powers they have, by pointing out that there are loopholes in the strongest armour, and that there is no power without limits, are liable to find themselves only rewarded for their pains, by being promptly placed in exactly the same category, should their words chance to come before the words of the others have had time to be forgotten.
The most injudicious feature in the whole thing, however, was the manner in which the financial aspect of the matter was treated. The sentence, ‘Our exiled brothers in America may be relied on to contribute, if necessary, as many millions of money as they have contributed thousands’, reads to me like nothing but the language of lunatics. Certainly, with the saving proviso, ‘If necessary’; they were quite safe in promising any number of millions, for not paying rent would not have needed those millions; it was Rent at the Point of the Bayonet for which they would have been necessary. It was not needful to talk of funds being poured out unstintedly; to say the evicted would be supported would have been quite enough; the language used was directly calculated to cause extra trouble for those who had to administer the funds so light-heartedly spoken of, and they were certain to have trouble enough without anyone increasing the supply.
The sentence, ‘If you are evicted, you shall not suffer’: was another case of promising too much. Only by adopting the system of providing a certain amount of shelter where evictions were expected before they took place, from the beginning, would it have been possible to prevent the evicted suffering in a country destitute of houseroom; and this time was not the beginning, but the end. It was even more inexact in intention than in fact, for the authors of it did not know the advances we had been making on our own account in the knowledge requisite to deal with the housing question. No doubt they did not realise the mischievous nature of their allusions to money and housing, especially the latter, for they probably thought, as most people do, that anything they have never tried to do themselves is very easy. At the same time, I do not think that their realising their power to increase our difficulties would have served as a deterrent to their doing it. It did not matter to them that they had incited the tenantry, as far as they could, by words, never to be satisfied with anything we could do for them.
Mr Patrick Egan, the Treasurer of the Land League, who had been moved to Paris along with the funds, issued a manifesto of his own.
TO THE PEOPLE OF IRELAND
The government of England has declared war on the Irish people. The organisation that protected them against the ravages of landlordism has been declared ‘unlawful and criminal’. A reign of terror has commenced. Meet the action of the English government with a determined passive resistance. The No Rent banner has been raised, and it remains with the people now to prove themselves dastards or men.
PAY NO RENT
AVOID THE LAND COURT
Such is the programme now before the country. Adopt it, and it will lead you to free land and happy homes. Reject it, and slavery and degradation will be your portion.
PAY NO RENT
The person who does should be visited with the severest sentence of social ostracism.
AVOID THE LAND COURT
Cast out the person who enters it as a renegade to his country and to the cause of his fellow-men.
HOLD THE HARVEST
js the watchword. To do that effectually you should, as far as possible, turn it into money. Sell your stock when such a course will not entail a loss. Make a friendly arrangement with your creditors about your interests in your farm. A short and sharp struggle now, and the vilest oppression that ever-afflicted humanity will be wiped away.
NO RENT
Your brethren in America have risen to the crisis, and are ready to supply you with unlimited funds, provided you maintain your attitude of passive resistance and
PAY NO RENT
There followed three quotations. One of them was from Nassau William Senior, Professor Political Economy, Oxford, to the effect that he believed if the Irish chose to pay no rents, the landlords would not be able to combat their policy, and ‘it would lead to one of the greatest revolutions that Ireland has ever known’. The second was from a representation made by the Duke of Wellington to the King in which he said that the law could not be enforced if the tenants chose to refuse rent and tithes, and asking, ‘How can they distrain for rent or tithes upon millions of tenants?’ The Duke proved a true prophet as to the tithes. During the Land League there were not millions of tenants, even if they existed in the Duke’s time, which seems doubtful, but no one could distrain on a quarter of a million either, with a satisfactory financial result.
I wonder what Nassau William and the Duke of Wellington would have said to the Point of the Bayonet? To claim the penalty of ‘social ostracism’, otherwise boycotting, for paying rent and going into the land court, seems a serious mistake. Boycotting should have been reserved for crimes, such as landgrabbing and assisting in evictions. Its injustice here is emphasized by the fact that up to the moment the No Rent manifesto was issued, the Land League had been persistently recommending the payment of rent. However, as no one minded Mr Egan's manifesto any more than the other, this mistake did no harm. On the other hand, he recognised the impediment the stock presented to paying no rent, which the other manifesters had not done. The cases where selling stock would have entailed no loss must certainly have been very few.
Like them he talked injudiciously about finances. ‘Unlimited funds’ from anywhere is not only an impossibility, but the words implied that the Irish abroad were going to bear the expenses of paying no rent. Surely it would have been better — more conducive to a right spirit — to tell the Irish tenants that they would have money of their own if they paid no rent, and would not be obliged to ask so much from their countrymen abroad. Though the money sent to the Land League was very little for what the League was supposed to be trying to do, it was enormous considering that there was never the least success to show for it, once the famine was over. The government made the No Rent manifesto a pretext for proclaiming the Land League an illegal society; but this was undoubtedly only a pretext; they intended to do the same thing under any circumstances.
The Land League, however, did not cease to exist after its suppression. Where there were any men in the branches, not in prison, who wished to do it, they continued to transact their business in private, while a secret executive was appointed in Dublin, to whom such of the Land League organisers as were still at large reported, and who appointed fresh organisers when needful. These organisers, however, could do very little. They could not go about among the farmers without being imprisoned, and were obliged to confine themselves to anything they could accomplish while passing as commercial travellers or reporters. It is doubtful whether most of them were not more harmful than anything else; they had been trained in the palmy days of the Land League, when the performances it demanded were attractively easy, and its promises proportionately large, though not equally easy of fulfilment. At any rate, it did not surprise me to hear complaints from the travelling members of the Ladies’ Land League that it was very difficult to do anything where ‘a man’ had been shortly before, because they (‘the men’) were so extravagantly liberal with promises.
By a notice in the Freeman's Journal tenants who had claims for costs already incurred, were directed to apply to the Land League solicitor for payment. But this only referred to costs actually incurred at the time of the No Rent manifesto; all promises to pay other costs were supposed to be cancelled from this moment. If tenants who had been defying their landlords, according to ‘the counsels of those’ who had ‘shown’ them ‘how to act’, were not now satisfied to be evicted, and lose their legal title to their holdings, rather than pay any rent at all, no matter what tempting reductions might be offered them, then they were supposed to avoid further costs by going straight to the rent office and paying the rent due, unless they wished to pay their own costs. Not paying rent was now to begin, when the Land League was in its third year. Two years is an enormous time for any political work of importance, for the benefit of Ireland, to be permitted there, and the beginning here had been left to where the end should have been, and soon was to be.
Our position now was that which we had foreseen since our discovery of the Land League policy, with the additional nuisance of the No Rent manifesto to carry out. For though at first sight a No Rent policy might seem more efficient than a Fair Rent policy, a little experience in the conduct of rent-resisting soon shows that the former must make any resistance to rent more unworkable, whether it be acted on by the tenants or not; and in this case it was not acted on. The only exception to this rule might be if rent resistance had already been carried very far indeed, instead of having been scarcely begun. No men could well have been in a more unfit state to receive the No Rent commandment than the Land League tenant farmers, when the bare idea of not paying rent in reality had only been presented to a few of them, and only to those since a short time.
In no part of Ireland I visited did I ever find any sign that anyone had previously so much as even thought of such a thing. In spite of the tragical nature of the subject, it was hard to help laughing at the consternation caused to the founders, leaders and preachers of the Land League by the discovery that there could be anybody in existence capable of thinking they had meant what they had said, The tenants were now expected to understand without further explanation, that the No Rent policy was incompatible with paying Rent at the Point of the Bayonet, because the landlords no longer had any motive for yielding and coming to a settlement with the tenants. But this they did not understand. And though the distinction between the landlords’ motive for giving reductions under the past system and no motive might seem considerable in theory, in practice it was so exceedingly fine that an inability to see it was quite pardonable.
The language of the No Rent manifesto also helped, in some places to render its meaning doubtful. ‘If you only act together in the spirit to which within the last two years you countless times pledged your vows, they can no more evict a whole nation than they can imprison them’, seems to suggest that they should continue to act m the spirit they had been acting in previously; what that spirit was we know. It is true that this sentence is an obscure one, but the interpretation I have suggested seems borne out by the concluding portion. For if they acted in the spirit they were wont to act in, it would necessarily be impossible to evict a whole nation, for the majority would then protect itself against eviction by paying its rent. At this time outsiders began to favour me with the information that we could not succeed, giving reasons for this belief on their part which were horribly ridiculous in their smallness beside the reason I knew, and they did not.
An American reporter, a southerner, once explained to me why we could not succeed, after this fashion. ‘We could not succeed, although we had cotton, and you have not got that.’ He was referring to the Civil War in the United States in the 1860s, and the argument silenced me at first by its sheer amazingness, seeing how different the two cases were. But I recovered, and was just going to point out that people cannot eat cotton, when the recollection of the real reason why we could not succeed made me too heart-sick to speak. How much I wished I knew no better reason why we could not succeed than the non-possession of cotton! This obstacle I had never considered, and even now I cannot see what cotton had to do with the Land League. The other reasons brought to my notice I had taken into my calculation, long before I had anything to do with the Land League, and decided they were not insuperable however formidable.
Under the circumstances, the No Rent manifesto had many adherents at first. Estate after estate adopted it eagerly, on paper. It was just as easy to say they would pay no rent as to say they would pay only so much, when in both cases they meant to pay the whole. But the No Rent manifesto was not our greatest difficulty. The smallness of the acquaintance we had been able to make with the country, owing to our not having money to employ enough travellers, placed us a good deal in the dark. If the Land League had any records that might have been of service, they were not available for us. A Branch Book, not properly written up, was all we succeeded in securing when the Land League documents were removed from the office immediately on the suppression of the League.
We now had money for our expenses from the Land League, but it was too late. We found a difficulty in getting travellers, their friends being generally unwilling to let young women engage in such work in the existing state of affairs, an unwillingness which it must be admitted had ample justification. And they had to be young, on account of the physical strain the work involved. It was also too late for those we could get to be properly trained. The work they had to do was of a sort that needed practice, besides a combination of qualities not easily found. The mere technical knowledge needed, especially in the case of those who were not used to farming, took a little learning. So did the perpetual legal problems that were always presenting themselves for solution, while tact, firmness, common sense, the precious instinct which can distinguish between lies and truth, powers of observation and natural aptitude for judging character were all indispensable.
In addition to all this, considerable physical strength and endurance were demanded by the nature of the work, and would have been under the most favourable circumstances imaginable, on account of the long distances to be traversed, the inevitable exposure to weather, and the very poor accommodation for travellers afforded in most parts of Ireland. And the circumstances now were not favourable at all, but about as trying as imagination can well conceive. Except in the few places where we had already established an influence, the emissaries of the Ladies’ Land League were following in the footsteps of others who had gone before, for the purpose of undoing, in a month or two, what those others had been doing for as many years. People of the sort we stood in need of do not grow on hedges like blackberries. Nevertheless, we could have got them if we could have set about looking for them at the right time.
A mistake that Mr Forster led us into helped to diminish the utility of the insufficient travelling staff we had. He selected some districts for special notice saying, as well as I can recollect, that they were in an especially dangerous, or criminal condition, and placed them under some special system of persecution, the details of which I cannot now remember. This led us to suppose that these districts were going in for not paying rent more than other places, and we thought, in consequence, that they ought to receive especial attention from us. So, an unduly large proportion of our staff were sent to these places. The discovery we made as a result of this step was that these places were precisely those which should have had least, instead of the most, of our attention. As a rule, there was simply no idea whatever in these districts of not paying rent.
I freely acquit Mr Forster of trying to mislead the Ladies’ Land League wilfully. He probably thought himself that the Land League was in greatest force where it was most conspicuous by its absence. It was what he was likely to think, seeing that what he thought was generally wrong. The mere continuance of the work we had been doing before the suppression of the Land League, was made more difficult for us by the necessity we were under of upholding the No Rent manifesto, it was hard enough to bring the tenants up to the point of holding out for a reduction; now we were obliged to forbid these tenants from even seeking a reduction. However, we knew the imperative reason that had made the No Rent manifesto necessary, and we at least were in a better position for attempting to carry it out than anyone else would have been, since we had never pretended to think paying Rent at the Point of the Bayonet would accomplish anything worth trying for. And though our preparations had been totally inadequate, we had made some, and all that we had done from the commencement of our existence had been on the lines that best fitted us to meet our difficulties at the present juncture.
Of what we had done ourselves we had nothing to undo. The most important advance we had made was in the knowledge already gained by experience about the housing problem. In spite of its wholesale adoption, and the satisfaction it seemed to give everybody except the Ladies’ Land League, the cost paying policy had had no defenders. Its strongest advocates never attempted to answer the question, ‘What good will it do?’ In the Land League offices, it only evoked a statement that every tenant who could, would pay his rent, which, even if it had been strictly true, did not seem a sufficient reason for somebody else paying a quantity of money to lawyers and bailiffs. In the country, the question was oftener met by a counter question of this sort: ‘What are you to do when you are left in a ditch, and no one comes near you for a week?’
Owing to such responses we saw that money alone was useless; the housing question must be dealt with, and dealt with by the Ladies’ Land League, in spite of its very small exchequer. The Land League, I believe, built some houses in the beginning, but did not continue the practice. At starting, amongst other illusions, we were under the impression that houses in Ireland can be built by public enthusiasm, the only other expenditure required being for materials, and refreshment for the enthusiasts who did the work. Under the guidance of this belief, we made our first attempts to get houses erected. We were, however, very quickly disillusioned by the communications we received from our branches. In applying for payment of expenses incurred in erecting one of these houses, the local secretary wrote, ‘It’ (the house) ‘is a splendid monument to the spirit of the people, but quite unfit for human habitation.’ So we learnt that houses have to be built and paid for in Ireland just the same as anywhere else.
As the ordinary stone, mud and mortar houses in which the Irish peasantry live take too long to build to be ready in time for batches of evictions, we turned our attention to wooden houses. We fell in with a builder who offered to erect them for £6 apiece. Probably if he had offered to do it for six shillings, we should have had nearly equal faith in him. As it was, we were quite pleased at the cheap way in which we were going to solve the problem of providing shelter for the evicted. Needless to say, these houses also turned-out failures, without even having the recommendation of testifying to the splendid spirit of the people. Sometimes it was possible to get houses built by local workmen, but generally it was not, and we found we suffered from one of the inconveniences all governments are supposed to be afflicted with, in being charged higher prices than anyone else.
By the time the No Rent manifesto was reached we had seen enough to know that it would be cheaper to send houses from Dublin than attempt to have them made by local builders. Some time after we began sending houses to the country, we received a complaint that the men sent to get them up were advising the payment of rents. When this high matter of state was laid before the builder, he replied by telling us the following story. When the houses ordered were first put in hands, a rumour got about in the yard that they were intended for emergency men. The builder’s men objected to undertake the job if it was for such a purpose, and sent a deputation to him to know if it was true. Happily, he was able to relieve their minds at once. Now these Dublin workmen acted quite spontaneously. No agitators had been interfering with them. Yet in a moment they were ready to take what action they could for the sake of their brethren in the country. If only those brethren had been as willing to take what action they could get for themselves, how different the end might have been.
And what a strange light it shows the Land League in, that more than two years after the advice not to pay rent had been given, the fact of shelters being ordered should only have suggested the idea that they were intended for the people’s enemies. Besides our experience in housing, we were in possession of another distinct advantage in the knowledge we had that whatever we might do, we were equally certain to be blamed for it, an assurance which is a great help to clear and impartial judgements. Should we give the tenants a chance of following the counsels contained in the No Rent manifesto, we should be blamed for wasting money; on the other hand, should we do as I believe the framers of that manifesto wished us to do — save the Land League money for them to spend whenever they might come out of prison, on parliament or otherwise, the failure of the Land League would of course be ascribed to the Ladies’ Land League neglecting the evicted tenants and starving out the spirit of the people. It was quite on the cards, indeed, that we should be blamed on each count at once.
Having nothing to obscure our judgement, we considered it would be better that the tenants should have a chance of saving themselves, whether they chose to avail themselves of it or not. Though we did not expect success, we believed it would be the bést thing for the country in the future. Even from the point of view of those who wished the money that was (in the common sense) wasted on the tenants, to be saved for parliamentary purposes, the straightforward policy was in truth the best, though perhaps they could not understand such a fact. They would have lost, and not gained, if their own wishes had been fulfilled. They would then have found themselves compelled to spend the money so saved on appeasing the wrath of the people when they regained their freedom, instead of in the way they wished to spend it, and their chance of raising the large sums they afterwards did for the maintenance of a parliamentary party, not to mention other purposes, would necessarily have been much smaller. As it turned out, the parliamentary party and the National League (the successor to the Land League) did not fail for want of money but for want of character.
I ought, I think, to explain why I believe the authors of the No Rent manifesto did not wish us to attempt carrying it out, but desired an end put to all rent resisting by indirect means, which they would have been at liberty to disavow afterwards. They forbade us to continue paying costs for such tenants as could not prevent their cattle being seized, and ordered us to tell the farmers to get rid of their stock. But we were more unwilling to put our names to lunatic language than they were. And such an injunction, coupled with the understanding that rent was not to be paid, would have been lunatic language. It would have amounted, practically, to a direction to all tenants who had stock, to pay their rents. And if the tenants who had stock were to pay their rents, it would not have been worthwhile for the remainder to resist. Of course, the Land League executive knew this as well as we did and therefore no conclusion remains to be drawn except that they wished us to stop rent-resisting by a side wind. It would have been much better to do the thing straightforwardly if we had done it at all. So, if we had decided to obey the Land League, we should have been obliged to warn all tenants that we could not advise any to refrain from paying rent, ‘under any circumstances whatever’.
Furthermore, we should have been compelled to publish a manifesto to that effect, as we could only communicate with a portion of the branches by post, because the address book of the Land League branches was too defective. But the responsibility for the tenants who had already begun not to pay rents through our influence, was an insuperable obstacle to our abandoning the attempt to keep up rent-resisting. It was on their account that we had stayed within the Land League gates after we had discovered what that League was. Only for them, there would either have been no Ladies’ Land League now, or one whose personnel would have been a good bit different — perhaps one that would have been to the liking of the Land League — who knows? We had no right to abandon these tenants, to whom we had incurred so much responsibility because we were ignorant of the character of the Land League heads to please those heads when we were no longer ignorant of their character. So we disobeyed. This led to their propounding the plan of evading these costs, which I have already mentioned. It was not one we could have thought of ourselves: it needed either a lawyer, or someone wel] up in ways of avoiding the payment of debts to discover it. I think it was too late then for it to have a proper chance of working.
Before long we were obliged to depart from the No Rent manifesto in another way; we soon perceived that it was too dangerous to advise isolated tenants not to pay rent. The Land Act had, of course, the effect already foreseen of increasing evictions of poverty cases. The evictions of genuine Land League cases increased also, at least in the sense that the tenants concerned were able to pay their rents; but until the six months redemption expired, we never had any clue as to whether they meant to pay or not. There was a clue, indeed, but we were too inexperienced then to recognise it. Where the tenants really did not want to pay their rents, they were much easier to satisfy than where they intended to pay. Unfortunately, the evicted tenants who did intend to pay were the majority. Many demanded and received houses and grants, who paid their rents towards the end of six months, leaving us with the very disagreeable suspicion that the only purpose served by the Land League grants was that of making the rents easier to pay.
At the last we saw that it would be necessary, if there was to be any resistance to rent in the future, to demand some payment in advance from tenants requiring protection after eviction, with the double object of making it more difficult for them to back out of their bargain, and less easy to pay rents with money intended to help them in resisting its payment. Some little time after the enthusiastic acceptance of the No Rent manifesto by so many estates, a doubt seemed to creep into the minds of the tenants as to the nature of the new policy. At first, they had appeared to take it for granted that paying No Rent must mean just the same as paying nothing, but a Fair Rent had meant: but later it occurred to them that it would be wiser to get the promise of ‘all costs paid by the Land League’, definitely repeated, and they began to send emissaries to the office with that intent. A perfectly awful time ensued for the Ladies.
All day we were besieged by all kinds of delegates, entreating, arguing, threatening, imploring, all with a view to extorting the desired promise, so that we literally had not time to attend to our other work. Even the question of paying costs for tenants buying in their farms when put up for sale, which had been already settled by the Land League, was reopened for our benefit. I remember one man coming on behalf of Lord Fitzwilliam’s tenants, who expected to have their farms thus sold in the county court, who represented that it was no use fighting so rich a landlord, and therefore, their costs ought to be paid for buying in their own farms. He seemed to think the extra wealth of the landlord made the case an exceptional one, which, no doubt, it did. If all Irish landlords had been as rich as Lord Fitzwilliam was reputed to be,a strike against rents would hardly have been advisable. But by the very nature of the system the bulk of the Irish landlords were bound to be poor.
We agreed with the ambassador that it would be better for the tenants not to risk eviction if they were satisfied they could not win, but could not agree with him in his conclusion that to incur expense for the sake of pretending they did not mean to pay would be a suitable way out of their difficulties. But the interview did not end there. Like all others of its kind it was long, and very arduous, at least for us. Each party to the dispute found it necessary to say the same things many, many times over again, one side seeming as if it expected to force the promises it wanted out of the other by the mere process of physical exhaustion. After the noisy defiance the local leaders and the tenants had been so long engaged in lavishing on the landlords, to find themselves suddenly called on to climb down from their lofty attitude without the final display of fireworks which they had been used to look to for saving their faces, must have been pretty trying, and I often felt sorry for these disappointed angry men I was compelled to send away, discontented.
Very much sorrier I should have felt, however, only for my conviction that they knew in their hearts, just as well as I did myself, exactly what the cost paying system had really meant. After one of these long tussles with a determined tenant, I used generally to find myself compelled to go home, too done up for any other work, and wishing tenants would only be as determined with the landlords as they were with us. Once it became generally understood that the Point of the Bayonet had been dissolved into nothingness by the No Rent manifesto, a wholesale collapse of all resistance to rent ensued, the poverty cases and those tenants who were holding out for a reduction, and either had fallen under our influence earlier in the day, or intended to pay their own costs, if necessary, being the only ones left to be dealt with. They were quite enough.
In the meantime, the two months’ grace we expected for the Ladies’ Land League, after the suppression of the Land League, expired, and the government was determined to shut us up also under the Persecution Act. All preparations, even to the provision of beds for us had been made, when measles broke out in the prison selected for our accommodation, and caused a stay in the proceedings, the government probably thinking it would be rough on the governor to have both the measles and the Ladies’ Land League on his hands at once. After the delay thus caused it seemed as if the idea had had time to penetrate even into Buckshot Forster’s thick head, that since the Land League must fail, it would be more to his credit for it to fail with the Ladies’ Land League outside the prison than inside.
But most of our travellers were imprisoned wherever they went, so that our sources of information, always inadequate, now became almost extinguished throughout the country. The form of imprisonment now devised for the women was more rigorous than that used for men. The latter were allowed six hours in the 24 out of their cells, during which they could talk and play games while the former were allowed only two hours out of their cells for exercise, which consisted of walking round and round a yard in file, and were not allowed to speak at all. In wet weather they had to spend the whole 24 hours in their cells. Through the whole term, and some were committed for twelve months, they could speak to no one except the prison officials, or a visitor, only one visit of fifteen minutes being allowed in the day. Some men, however, were imprisoned in this way also.
And for us the solitary advantage of imprisonment was left out, for it was not those who were yearning for rest that were imprisoned. With one exception, only new hands were shut up, who had not been long enough at work to acquire an understanding of the delightful aspect a prison may assume under some circumstances. As to the exception, she not unnaturally seized the occasion for lying in bed of mornings, once she had a chance, and the governor was still engaged in an unsuccessful attempt to get her up in proper time when the occurrence of a general gaol delivery spared him further efforts. These imprisonments were procured under a very old statute, empowering magistrates to require bail for good conduct from persons of bad repute, and to commit them to prison in default. They seemed to me, from the wording of the Act, to be all illegal, as no evidence was ever adduced to prove the existence of the bad repute, which was always taken for granted.
They could have given bail; but would then have been of no more use to us, for their bail would have been estreated the next eviction they attended or the next evicted tenant they visited, and we could not afford to make it good. In one or two cases at first bail was given by local officials, and we found it necessary to issue a circular warning our branches of the danger to the bails men entailed by following this course. So, it became not worthwhile for the government to estreat, as too few persons fell into the trap laid for them. Miss Reynolds, the first victim, was imprisoned for a month for advising a tenant not to give up possession of his holding. It was not an ordinary eviction, as there was a question of title involved, and of course the giving up of possession would have destroyed the holder's title. Another girl was imprisoned for merely going to a town, where she had as much right as anyone else. The Constabulary ordered her to leave, and on her refusing, she was sentenced to a month’s imprisonment.
In order to give the government no excuse for interfering with the relief of evicted tenants we gave our agents strict instructions at this time, where there were evictions, to confine themselves entirely to making arrangements for the shelter and support of the evicted, giving no advice about, and interfering in no other matter whatsoever. It is interesting to know that those who acted on these instructions were always imprisoned. Even the workmen employed to erect shelters were imprisoned. In their case there was no reason against giving bail, but the agents of the government put every possible obstruction in the way of those who wanted to furnish bail for them, in order to make them suffer imprisonment for the crime of following their ordinary trade of journeymen carpenters.
We were put to further inconvenience at this time by the necessity we were under of making some preparation for our work being carried on afterwards if the threatened imprisonment of our Dublin staff should take place. For this purpose, and also to prevent their confiscation by the government, we were obliged to conceal our books while we made copies of them, and do our work as best we could, in the interval, without them. If the Land League had been what we had at first supposed it to be, there is no doubt we should have been imprisoned wholesale as the men had been, and the extension of time accorded us would have been no more than enough to allow of our completing arrangements sufficient to make rent-resisting still possible.
Such arrangements ought to have constituted our chief work during these two months, but, as I have shown, the work we had to do, or attempt to do, was very different indeed, and only a very rough sort of provision for the threatened emergency was now possible. Some provision, however, in spite of everything, we did make, and even the imprisonment of the Ladies’ Land League, and all the vagaries of the Land League policy that I have described, need not have prevented Irish tenants from refusing rents if they had chosen to do so. About this time the Land gue newspaper, United Ireland, fell on our already well-laden shoulders. The government began a systematic oppression of this small weekly sheet. They seized the paper in the office and wherever else they could find it, and imprisoned the editorial staff. Notwithstanding these measures, the Ladies were able to get it circulated about the country very much the same as usual.
Then the printers were imprisoned also, and this put a stop to its being issued in Dublin, for printing was not amongst our accomplishments. It would, I have since thought, be a wise precaution for all Irish people who have any wish to benefit Ireland to learn the art of printing if they can; it is the kind of knowledge that is often likely to prove exceedingly convenient. We not having acquired it, United Ireland had at last to be printed out of Ireland, in England and in France. It was sent over and circulated by the Ladies as before. In Dublin the small newspaper boys used to hide it under their uniform of rags, and sometimes got as much as a shilling for it. Oddly enough, the police were amongst the agents who helped to distribute the proscribed journal, for they used to supplement their incomes by selling the copies they were able to seize, as wastepaper.
The editor of United Ireland continued to perform his own functions in prison, for the ‘suspects’ in Kilmainham were able to receive and send out any communications they liked. They had several ways of doing this, and the warders must have connived in it in some cases, and so must have had instructions not to prevent it, if a feint of secrecy was made. We knew the reason the government had for allowing this freedom of intercourse; it was not any desire to make imprisonment pleasant, but because they had in mind the chance that they might wish to bring some criminal charge against men in prison, for things done outside prison while they were inside. To show that the prisoners did communicate secretly with the outside world would naturally be a help to them in carrying out such a project.
Even the very vileness of the English government can often be turned to account, once one understands its motives and methods. This running of United Ireland was the pleasantest part of all the work of the Ladies’ Land League; it was something that could, at any rate be done, and did not seem so painfully like trying to make ropes of sea sand, as so much of our other tasks did. A small incident that occurred in the commencement of this particular skirmish strongly illustrates the confusion of thought that is apt to prevail, even amongst the most cultured classes, on the subject of what different sorts of persons can,.and cannot do.
After having circulated her first 30,000 copies of United Ireland around the country, in spite of a cordon of detectives drawn round the office, Miss Lynch had occasion to interview Mr Gallagher, the editor of The Freeman’s Journal about some part of our business; after this was settled a conversation ensued, in the course of which he remarked: ‘I hear the Ladies’ Land League are going to take over United Ireland, but it is absurd to think a handful of girls can defy the government,’ She might have asked him, when there was no question of defiance being conducted by physical force, why girls couldn’t defy as well as anybody else? But the circumstances made it more prudent not to give him for supposing that she did not quite agree with him.
IX - The End of the Land League