by the O'Donoghue. In 1875, Richard Smyth, member for County Londonderry, introduced a Land Bill, but in vain, and the same year Sharman Crawford, the son of the William Sharman Crawford of earlier and wider fame, brought in a Bill to amend, like Cairns, the Land Act of 1870, with a view to secure its leading principle of the tenant-right custom of free sale which various attempts had been made during the preceding five years to rob of its vitality. Thus by the Land Act of 1870 the onus of proof in the case of disputed tenant-right was thrown upon the tenant, who was obliged to show that upon the particular estate in question the right of sale really existed. This clause in the hands of a bullying landlord was made, as might have been anticipated, a convenient instrument of fraud. Crawford, therefore, proposed that the onus of proof in such a case should be shifted from the shoulders of the tenant to the broader back of the landlord; that is to say, that the right of sale should be presumed to exist until it was proved it did not, and that this presumption should not be destroyed by the fact that the farm had previously been held under a lease. Three other proposals were contained in Crawford's Bill. He suggested that whenever a question arose as to an increase of rent by the landlord, the Land Court judge should decide as to whether the increase was reasonable or no; secondly, that the landlord should not have the option of objecting to an incoming tenant unless the same authority pronounced the objection well founded; and in the third place, that the tenant should have the right of selling his "goodwill" by auction. But the dose was too strong for the sensitive bowels of the anti-reformers, and having run a gauntlet of criticism from the Government in power, the Bill was finally defeated by the large majority of 150.

On the 29th of March in the following year another essay was made to safeguard the tenant against the robber propensities of some of their masters, a Bill being introduced by Butt to amend the Land Act of 1870 in the interests of the tenants of South Ireland. He proposed that the system of the three F's should be finally recognized by the law, that is to say, that every tenant should have the power to claim from the chairman of his county the benefit of his improvements, and that a certificate should thereupon be given him protecting him against eviction; that the landlord and tenant should each select one arbitrator; that the two arbitrators thus appointed should agree upon a third, and that in cases where the landlord did not appear the rent should be assessed by a jury composed of three special and three common jurors. In this manner, he contended, would the principle of fixity of tenure, fair rents, and free sale be legally established. So also thought the anti-reformers; the draught was once more too potent for their debilitated con

stitutions, and, being opposed by both the great parties, the Bill was negatived on the second reading by a majority of 234.1

On June 21, 1876, Crawford once more introduced his rejected proposals, but they again had to be withdrawn, and a Bill brought forward by John Mulholland, a Conservative member for Ireland, shared the fate of all the others. The following year Crawford repeated his attempt, this time adding a clause for the extension of the Ulster Custom to the rest of Ireland, but with the same result, and Butt, who brought in a Bill in 1877 for a similar purpose, likewise failed. With the hereditary persistence running in his veins Crawford brought forward his measure again on the 28th of January, 1878, and was defeated by only nineteen votes. On the 6th of February, the same year, Butt's rejected Bill was introduced by McCarthy Downing, but the temper of its antagonists was unchanged, and he was beaten on the second reading by a majority of 200. Bills were also brought in with a similar purpose that year by Lord Arthur Hill, Macartney, John Martin, and Moore, but they all failed to pass, the savage murder of Lord Leitrim and his two servants in April, while driving near Milford, in County Donegal, leaving the rulers of Ireland still unconvinced of the crying necessity for some reform. On May 14, 1879, William Shaw brought forward Butt's rejected Bill, and was defeated by 263 to 91. On the 2nd of July Crawford's Bill was expounded to the landlords for the last time, and once more had to be dropped, and Bills introduced the same year by Macartney, Lord Arthur Hill, Herbert, Taylor, and Downing shared a similar fate. In 1880 Taylor and Macartney again made attempts to pass their Bills and again failed, and the measures introduced to reform the Irish land system by Litton and John O'Connor Power perished in the same way.

Two other elements now entered the arena, and, fighting on the side of the tenants, drove their opponents into a corner and forced them to terms. The famine of 1879-80 aggravated the growl and intensified the bitterness of Irish discontent, and Charles Stewart Parnell, with his pale face and indomitable courage, stepped upon the stage, the mysterious protagonist in the struggle for Irish freedom. The two years of 1877 and 1 Appendix LXVIII, quotation from Professor Cairnes.

2 John Mulholland, son of Andrew Mulholland, cotton and linen manufacturer. At this time member for County Down. Raised to the peerage under the title of Baron Dunleath of Ballywalter in 1892.

3 William Shaw (1823-1895). Member for County Cork.

4 Antagonism to England seemed to have its roots deep in Parnell's family. His maternal great-grandfather, Tudor Stewart, fought against the English in the War of Independence. His maternal grandfather, Commodore Charles Stewart, fought against them in 1812. His paternal great-grandfather opposed the Union, and relinquished office on account of it, and William Parnell, his grandfather, consistently advocated the Irish cause against England, as also did the brother of the latter, Sir Henry Parnell.

1878 had been bad, and the one following upon them the worst since the great famine. The landlords, instead of girding up their loins to stem the tide of distress, had opened the sluices for it, proving once more to all the world that property in Ireland had a code of its own, a decalogue more suited to its own interests, and did not recognize "its duties as well as its rights." 1

Evidence of the distress which Ireland was suffering from is afforded by the state of the potato crop during the two or three years preceding 1880. Dr. Grimshaw, the Registrar-General in Ireland, showed in his statistical returns that in 1876 the potato crop was 4,154,784 tons, valued at £12,464,382 sterling. In 1877 the yield fell to 1,757,274 tons, worth £5,271,822; in 1878 it was 2,526,504 tons, worth £7,579,512; and in 1879 it sank to 1,113,676 tons, worth £3,341,028, the value of potatoes being in each case calculated at £3 a ton. That is to say, the difference between the two years 1876 and 1879 was £9,123,534 sterling, or at that time more than three-quarters of the entire agricultural rents of Ireland. The situation was even worse in regard to general crops. In 1876 they were worth thirty-six millions sterling, in 1877 twenty-eight millions, in 1878 thirty-two millions, and in 1879 only twenty-two millions, making a total loss since 1876 of twenty-six millions sterling. Private charity did something to alleviate the misery. The Duchess of Marlborough started a fund, which ultimately reached £135,000, and another fund was collected by the Lord Mayor of Dublin. The Queen sent £500 and the Prince of Wales £250, and the various moneys were administered irrespective of creed or party.

Butt had meanwhile died in 1879 without ever having exercised much influence upon Irish opinion, and the more moderate of his old followers, as well as the Protestants, seceded from his Home Rule movement on its assuming a treasonable aspect. William Shaw of Cork had for a short period succeeded Butt as nominal leader of the Irish party, and then Parnell had stepped forward into indisputable supremacy. The Fenians in England and Ireland were opposed in 1878 to any sort of relation or concerted action with the Parliamentary body, and among those who opposed a united policy was Charles Kickham. In America the Fenian conspiracy still retained some symptoms of life. But the Fenian body was not homogeneous, being divided into two distinct parties, one generally known as that of the "Clan na Gael," and the other bearing a variety of names, of which the "Irish Brotherhood" was the best known. Both these parties aimed at the complete disruption of the Irish Union and

1 Appendix LXIX, quotations from Sir Charles Russell, Mr. Robinson, and Mr. Fox, and Extract from Dr. Roughan's local report to the Irish Local Goverment Board. 2 Charles Joseph Kickham (1826-1882).

3 Appendix LXIXA, attempt to draw Parnell into the Fenian conspiracy.

the severance of all relations between the two countries, but they by no means agreed upon the methods of execution. The chiefs of the "Clan na Gael" were in favour of violent measures and violent men, and had instituted a "Skirmishing Fund" with the sinister designs of intimidation, assassination, and dynamite outrage; whilst the leaders of the other party, among whom was John Devoy, shrank from criminal extremities, and believed that their ends could be more easily and safely accomplished by united action with the Parliamentarians and the inglorious policy of incessant obstruction by Parnell's active Irish party in the House of Commons. Michael Davitt attached himself to this last and less violent section. He was the son of an evicted Mayo tenant, and had lost his arm when a boy in a machine accident in Lancashire. Later on he had joined the Fenian movement, and had been sentenced to fifteen years' penal servitude, but after seven years' duress he had been liberated on ticket of leave, and at once plunging into the difficult problem of his country's regeneration, laboured at the development of the ideas that had crowded upon him during the solitary watches of his confinement.1

Davitt first visited America in 1878, and having returned to Ireland to study the condition of the political atmosphere, speedily came to the conclusion that the best means of effecting the ultimate dissolution of the Irish Union would be the preparation of the ground by an agrarian revolt. The "Irish Brotherhood" were of a like opinion, and a regular compact was concluded between them. Devoy, who visited Ireland and reported to the secret organization in America the state of the Fenian party in Ireland, organized their scattered energies, and with the crowded sail of assurance they set out upon their journey in the "New Departure." The separation of Ireland from Great Britain and the untrammelled independence of the smaller kingdom were always to be kept in view as the grand object of patriot ambition, but Irish landlordism was to be the first point of attack, the object of the earliest blow aimed at the loathed and haughty supremacy of England. A great demonstration was held on April 19, 1879, at Irishtown, at which John O'Connor Power, the member for the county, and other Irish leaders were present, and where the whole landlord system was denounced, a reduction of rents demanded on behalf of the occupiers of Ireland, and a policy of future agitation outlined. This meeting is historically important, as out of it may be said to have grown the Land League movement. The official Fenian body held aloof from the "New Departure," although individual Fenians joined it and were afterwards expelled from the Fenian organization. In 1879 Parnell and Davitt, aware of the identity of their aims, joined hands, and a convention having met on August 16 at Daly's Hotel, 1 Appendix LXX, quotation from Michael Davitt.

Castlebar, to put their declaration of policy into a concrete shape, a central "Land League" was founded in Dublin on the 21st of October of that year with the former for its first president. In order that the movement might wear a purely agrarian aspect, and so the more easily be carried on undisturbed by the law, it was publicly declared that the objects of the National Land League were the reduction of rack-rents and the acquisition of the ownership of the soil by its occupants. The meeting of the 21st of October, 1879, at which the Land League was inaugurated, was held in the Imperial Hotel, Lower Sackville Street, Dublin, with Andrew J. Kettle, Poor Law Guardian, in the chair. The resolutions carried on this occasion were as follow

"That an association be hereby formed, to be named 'The Irish National Land League.'1

"That the objects of the League are, first, to bring about a reduction of rack-rents; second, to facilitate the obtaining of the ownership of the soil by the occupiers of the soil.

"That the objects of the League can be best attained by promoting organization among the tenant-farmers, by defending those who may be threatened with eviction for refusing to pay unjust rents; by facilitating the Bright clauses of the Land Act (that is, the Act of 1870) during the winter, and by obtaining such reform in the laws relating to land as will enable every tenant to become the owner of his holding by paying a fair rent for a limited number of years.

"That Mr. Charles S. Parnell, M.P., be elected President of this League.

"That Mr. A. J. Kettle, Mr. Michael Davitt, and Mr. Thomas Brenan be appointed honorary secretaries of the League.

"That Mr. J. G. Biggar, M.P., Mr. W. H. O'Sullivan, M.P., and Mr. Patrick Egan be appointed treasurers.

"That the President of this League, Mr. Parnell, be requested to proceed to America for the purpose of obtaining assistance from our exiled countrymen and other sympathizers for the objects for which this appeal is issued.

"That none of the funds of this League shall be used for the purchase of any landlord's interest in the land, or for furthering the interests of any Parliamentary candidate" (a resolution which was afterwards modified).

After passing these resolutions the newly-constituted Land League issued an "Appeal to the Irish Race," describing the project they had set themselves to carry out. On the 5th of November, 1879, another address was issued "To the farmers and all interested in the settlement of the Land Question," soliciting

1 The first Australasian branch of the Land League was founded in Gympie, Queensland, in 1880, under the presidency of the Rev. M. Hozan. In 1882 John E. Redmond and W. K. Redmond went out to spur on the agitation, returning via the United States in 1884.

2 Appendix LXXI, appeal to the Irish Race.