was IIO. For 1880 and 1881 the average of cattle outrages was 128; in 1882 alone the number was 144; whilst from 1883 to 1887 the average was 61. For 1880 and 1881 the average for threatening letters was 1,764; in 1882 alone the number was 2,009; whilst the average from 1883 to 1887 was 3898. For 1880 and 1881 the average of cases of firing into dwellings was 105; for 1882 the number was 117; whilst the average for the five years 1883 to 1887 was 296. Thus, taking these crimes. together, they averaged for the years 1880 and 1881 2,338; in 1882 alone they reached a total of 2,635; whilst for the five years 1883 to 1887 they showed an average of only 607. Even the argument that the decrease of crime was consequent upon the Coercion Act, passed at the same time as the Arrears Bill of 1882, does not hold good. For under the Coercion Act, which was in existence in 1881 and 1882, crime had not only not diminished, but during the time that Land Leaguers were being imprisoned had, as we have seen, considerably increased.

The same year that the Supplemental Bill was carried a Committee was appointed by the House of Lords to inquire into the working of the Land Act of 1881. The Irish landlords were kicking against the pricks; the new collar of 1881 was chafing them, and they thought that if, perchance, any flaw could be found in the administration of the Act, they might be able to ease their necks and shift their responsibilities. But nothing came of their action except the exposure of the motives which had led to it, and a resolution which was passed in the Lower House-"That Parliamentary inquiry at the present time into the working of the Irish Land Act tends to defeat the operation of that Act and must be injurious to the interests of good government in Ireland.”1

1 Appendix LXXXI, Land Courts.

CHAPTER XVI

FROM THE LAND ACT OF 1881 TO THE REJECTION OF THE FIRST HOME RULE BILL, 1886

"It is always a most difficult task which a people assumes when it attempts to govern, either in the way of incorporation or as a dependency, another people very unlike itself. But whoever reflects on the constitution of society in these two countries, with any sufficient knowledge of the states of society which exist elsewhere, will be driven, however unwillingly, to the conclusion that there is probably no other nation of the civilized world which, if the task of governing Ireland had happened to devolve on it, would not have shown itself more capable of that work than England has hitherto done. The reasons are these: First, there is no other civilized nation which is so conceited of its own institutions, and of all its modes of public action, as England is; and secondly, there is no other civilized nation which is so far apart from Ireland in the character of its history, or so unlike it in the whole constitution of its social economy; and none, therefore, which if it applies to Ireland the modes of thinking and maxims of government which have grown up within itself, is so certain to go wrong."-JOHN STUART MILL (England and Ireland).

ON August 29, 1881, after Gladstone had carried his Land Bill through Parliament, a meeting was held at Newcastle-onTyne to protest against the coercive policy of the Executive, at which Joseph Cowen spoke very bitterly of the system of police government and the inefficiency of the recent Land Act for any purpose of lasting reform. The meeting was succeeded by a further one in the Dublin Rotunda in which delegates from all the branches of the Land League in Ireland took part. Parnell was one of the speakers. He had lately purchased Richard Pigott's papers, and formed the "Irish National Newspaper and Publishing Company, Limited." He had abandoned the Shamrock, converted the Flag of Ireland into United Ireland, and continued the Irishman, William O'Brien being appointed editor of the two last, which now became the Land League organs. Parnell's policy towards the Land Act had been skilful. By opposing it and treating it with suspicion, and by keeping up the agitation he had succeeded in obtaining larger reductions under the Bill than if the farmers had had immediate recourse to the Courts. Whilst ostensibly looking askance at the measure, he had taken care to secure the best administration of it possible in the interests of the tenants. At the meeting in the Rotunda he proposed, with a view to save the individual tenants expense in the matter, that a trial should be made of the Act by average test cases selected from various parts of Ireland. He declared

that the condition of labourers in Ireland was grievous, and that their complaints, which were justified by their circumstances, were now formally recognized by the League which was henceforward to be a Land and Labour League. As a result of this speech the Land League advised the tenant farmers to postpone the submission of their cases to the newly constituted Land Courts until the test cases of the League had been decided, a scheme which, however, was never carried out. Not long afterwards Gladstone entered upon what was known as his Leeds campaign, -a political excursion against Parnell in particular and the Irish Parliamentary party in general. In September, Forster paid a visit to Hawarden and warned Gladstone of the words used by Parnell to the effect that the latter intended to present cases which the Commission would have to refuse, and then to treat the refusal as showing that the Commission could not be trusted and that the Bill had failed. Gladstone now became alarmed, and on October 7, 1881, delivered a speech at Leeds in which he attacked Parnell in the bitterest language, hurling the accusation against him of attempting to plunge his country into disorder so that he might wreck the efficacy of the Land Act.1

The truth was that Gladstone was infuriated by the action taken by the Land League to test the virtue of his measure and by the advice given them by Parnell. The latter had persuaded his Fenian friends that the measure was little better than a mockery and had loaded it with ridicule; and as Parnell was a powerful personality, and Gladstone was proud of the legislative offspring of which he had delivered himself with so much trouble, the latter soon found a pretext for placing hostile criticism in chains. Two days after Gladstone had spoken at Leeds, Parnell, seconded by John Dillon, answered him in Wexford, fiercely attacking the policy of coercion and reiterating his former strictures on the Land Act. This gave Gladstone the desired opportunity, and suddenly, on October 13, a descent was made by the police upon all the prominent leaders of the Land League in Dublin. Parnell, as we have seen, was arrested at his hotel on the 13th of October and lodged in Kilmainham Jail, and Thomas Sexton, O'Kelly, John Dillon, O'Brien, and J. P. Quinn, the secretary of the League, were likewise apprehended in rapid succession and sent to join him there. Hereupon a hubbub of expostulation arose in Ireland. Meetings were held and resolutions passed, and the spirit of liberty was conjured on every platform in the country not to abandon the inhabitants of an island that had never known its substance. Every sort of league, some great, some small, sprang on the morrow into existence like mushrooms after a shower, and lived as long. The Ladies' Land League, which had been formed a short time before the 1 Appendix LXXXIA, extract from speech by W. E. Gladstone.

suppression of the Land League, added its parrot voice to the rest, inelegantly swelling the volume of indignant clamour but adding nothing to its sense. A Children's Land League even, and a Political Prisoners' Aid Society also reared their little heads and strove to keep the agitation alive, but the Government paid no heed, and went upon their way to reap what they had sown and gather in the full harvest of their statesmanship.

Catching at any straw to save his Bill from drowning, Gladstone wrote on December 19 a letter to Cardinal Newman, putting the case of the Irish priests before him, and leaving it to his discretion whether it would not be a just course to lay the facts of the situation before the Pope in order that His Holiness might use his influence in favour of order and discourage the priests from their anti-governmental agitation. In 1844, during O'Connell's Repeal campaign, Peel had made a more or less similar appeal to Gregory XVI to discourage agitation in Ireland. But Newman replied that the question was properly a political, not a theological one, and that the Pope could not well take any steps in the matter.

Suddenly in the midst of this agitation the walls of Dublin were placarded with a proclamation calling upon the Irish people to pay no rent as long as their leaders were in prison. This document, known in history as the "No-Rent Manifesto," and published on October 17, 1881, in United Ireland, was signed by Parnell, President of the Land League, A. J. Kettle, Michael Davitt, and Thomas Brennan, honorary secretaries, John Dillon and Thomas Sexton, head organizers, and Patrick Egan, treasurer. But the excitatory virtue of the manifesto exhausted itself with the first surprise it had created. It was the work of the extreme men carried out whilst Parnell was in prison and was condemned by the bishops and priests. It failed to move the mass of the population, and rents continued to be paid as before. Meanwhile a number of women, members of the Ladies' Land League, were thrust into prison in differents parts of the country, among them Miss Hodnett in County Kerry and Miss Hannah Reynolds, whilst United Ireland, the most advanced of the national newspapers, was proscribed and for the time being practically suppressed. By this time a new organization had made its appearance-a fresh symptom of the malady from which Ireland was suffering, one of the secret humours that were forcing their way from the vitals to the surface. This last portent was a league of desperate men under the leadership of a mysterious individual, known as "Captain Moonlight," who scoured the country by night, burning farms, mutilating cattle, and committing every description of abominable crime. In January 1882 two of Lord Ardilaun's bailiffs, an old man and his grandson named Huddy, were sent to collect rents in a part of Conne

mara known as Joyce's country. As they failed to return within the expected time, a search was instituted and their bodies were found at the bottom of Lough Mask, into which they had evidently been flung after being murdered and tied up in sacks weighted with stones. In February an informer of the name of Bernard Bailey was shot dead in Skipper's Alley, Dublin, at a time when the place was crowded with people and patrolled by several constables. On April 2 of the same year Smythe, a large landowner in Westmeath, who had become very unpopular with his tenants, was returning from church in a carriage with his sister-in-law, Mrs. Henry Smythe, and Lady Harriet Monck, when he was fired at by three men with blackened faces. Smythe himself escaped unhurt, but his sister-in-law was struck in the head, and the unfortunate woman was instantly killed. Smythe, distracted by the event, wrote to Gladstone laying at his door the burden of responsibility for the dastardly crime; whereupon the latter sent him a letter in reply omitting to notice the imputation and expressing his poignant grief for the terrible calamity that had befallen his family.

The increasing numbers of the suspected persons imprisoned under the recent Coercion Act had meanwhile alarmed some of the Ministry, and a complete change of policy was suddenly agreed upon. The Government determined to meet Parnell half way and try how far a conciliatory attitude would act as a balm to the Irish sore. Parnell commenced by opening negotiations with Gladstone through an Irish Home Rule member in the shape of Captain O'Shea, and confabulations were held between the latter and Joseph Chamberlain. On April 10 Parnell had a long conversation with Justin McCarthy and another the next day with Captain O'Shea. On the 23rd he saw McCarthy again, and on April 25, 1882, Chamberlain laid the result of the various interviews before the Cabinet. Parnell demanded a Bill to cancel arrears of rent in a certain class of holdings on payment of a sum to the landlord out of the Irish Church surplus fund, and various amendments of the Act of 1881 were asked for. Parnell's views were explained in a letter to O'Shea dated Kilmainham, April 28

"I desire to impress upon you the absolute necessity of a settlement of the arrears question which will leave no recurring sore connected with it behind, and which will enable us to show the smaller tenantry that they have been treated with justice and some generosity.

"The proposal you have described to me as suggested in some quarters of making a loan, over however many years the payment might be spread, should be absolutely rejected, for reasons which I have already fully explained to you. If the arrears question be settled upon the lines indicated by us, I have every confidence-a confidence shared by my colleagues-that the exertions which we should be able to make