Part 4

What was the result? That those poor tenants, who but for our action--but for the action of John Mandeville and myself--would have been beggared and homeless men, were able to take advantage of the Land Act, such as it was, while we were in prison. A Land Sub-Commission, carefully chosen, was sent down to the Mitchelstown estate to prophesy against us, and to prove the guilt and the dishonesty of the Plan of Campaign. But they could not do it. These picked Tory officials, two of them convicted rack-renters, were obliged to declare that these poor tenants were entitled to remain in their homes, and on lower terms and at a lower rent than had been demanded. (_Loud cheers._) What has happened since? The landlord has actually taken refuge from the judgment of even a Tory Land Commission in the moderation of the Plan of Campaign. Three days ago my honorable friend and collegue, the member for South Tipperary, signed, sealed, and delivered a treaty which secures these poor people safely to their homes. This is the transaction as to which Lord Salisbury is not ashamed to say that I "recommended that the men who were employed by the Crown in the recovery of just debts should be met with violence, and that in consequence, some were maltreated and scalded and brought to death's door." (_Opposition, cries of "Shame."_) The fact is, that not a single act of violence took place in any way on the estate after my speech. But justice was secured to those people and their children in their homes. (_Cheers._)

If there is anybody who has reason to blush at the name of Mitchelstown, and to remember Mitchelstown apart from the blood that was shed there, I should think it is not I, but her Majesty's Government. They had neither the humanity to forbid these evictions, nor the courage to persevere with them. They superintended and sanctioned them as long as there was any prospect of resistance; they had the cowardice to abandou them the moment they threatened to become inconvenient to a Tory candidate, and they had the incredible meanness, while my hands were bound in prison, to present a story to the English people, in a false and untruthful guise, in order to reconcile Englishmen to having me treated worse than a thief or a cutthroat, for saving my own constituents from the fate which now the Land Commissioners and everybody on this earth acknowledge would have been a most unmerited and a most awful calamity. I won't weary the House by going into all the miserable circumstances, all the foul play, and the violence and the indecencies that were resorted to against us. Unfortunately they are common-place and every-day occurrences in Ireland, through the infamous tribunals you have set up. I certainly am not going to enter into any recital of the miserable little prison torments and iniquities that were employed to give us pain and humiliation, and to besmirch the character of the Irish representatives in the eyes of the people of England and Ireland. I think we can afford to pass these things by. I believe that our opponents are not all so lost to generous and manly sentiments as not to feel ashamed rather than exultant about the Chief Secretary's exploits.

There is another class of opponents. I am sorry to think that men who are capable of inflicting pain of this description are quite capable of deriving a still keener pleasure in knowing that the torments have told, and that their victims smart under their wounds. I cannot gratify them, for the simple reason that I do not feel wounded. I do not feel in the least degraded. I rather suspect that the right honorable gentleman, under his jaunty bearing, has his conscience not quite so easy as mine. I confess that I did feel keenly when in prison a letter which the right honorable gentleman published to a Mr. Armitage, not making any honest charge against me, but conveying a stealthy and loathsome insinuation that I sheltered myself under the plea of illness from being forced to wear prison dress. I challenge the right honorable gentleman to refer to any one of the three official doctors who examined me, for one tittle, I will not say of foundation, but even of countenance, for such an assertion. (_Loud cheers._) Here we are now face to face. (_Great cheering from the Opposition._) I challenge him in defence of his own character, for it is his own character that is at stake (_cheers_), to appeal to any one of those three officials to give him the slightest countenance. ("_Hear, hear._")

I have said I was angry about it when in prison, but since reading the letter over fully, I am angry no longer; I confess it would be an ample vengeance, if I were a much more vindictive man than I am, for a statesman who had any reputation to lose, to pen such a letter. (_Cheers._) The letter conveyed a hideous and cowardly imputation against a man whose mouth was shut. (_Cheers._) That letter breathed in every sentence of it the temper of a beaten and an angry man (_cheers_),--I was going to say, of an angry woman (_laughter and cheers_), but I don't want to say it, because it would be a gross libel on a gentle and tender sex. ("_Hear, hear._") From all I have been able to learn in England since, I feel that it is no longer necessary for us to defend ourselves to the English people. (_Cheers._) I feel there is not a Tory of the fifth or sixth magnitude, who really in his heart believes for one instant that Irish members are such poor creatures as to cry out against the appearance of a prison. (_Cheers._)

The honorable member for Tyrone (Mr. T. W. Russell) said that we attempted to set up a distinction between members of Parliament and the peasants, our comrades and friends who are convicted under the act. There is not a shadow or a tittle of foundation for that statement. ("_Hear, hear._") We have claimed nothing for ourselves as members of Parliament that we don't claim equally for every man convicted under the summary clauses of the act; for if he is a criminal, there is no reason why he should not be tried before the ordinary tribunal. ("_Hear, hear._") We do not ask poor men to make a hard fight harder by resistance to prison rules; but if we win, they shall win as well as ourselves. ("_Hear, hear._") Our position simply this: You are perfectly welcome to treat us to all the punishments that your courts of law prescribe for the very vilest miscreant in society,--the plank bed, or bread-and-water diet-solitary chnfinement, or deprivation of books and writing materials; you are perfectly welcome to heap every physical degradation on us, if that is your generous and chivalrous treatment of political prisoners, and you will never hear a word of complaint from us if you stick to that; but if you not only do that, but go further, and try and subject us to moral torture, from which criminals are altogether exempt, when you ask us to make a voluntary acknowledgement of our equality with criminals, then we say, "No; we will die first (_cheers from Irish members_), and you will have to learn the distinction between your criminal classes and Irish political prisoners, even if it should take a coroner's jury and their verdict to make the distinction." (_Loud cheers._) I can only say that if any one has reason to blush, it is not we. ("_Hear, hear._") I hope I am not detaining the House. (_Cheers._)

The only thing I can plead is, that I shall not have an opportunity very soon of claiming your attention; but I should like to ask, "Where is all this to end?" What object has it accomplished? and if it is to go on for ever and for ever, what object can it ever possibly accomplish, except misery to a weak people and eternal worry and shame to yourselves? (_Cheers._) Is it the object of the right honorable gentleman to convert the Irish people, or to dragoon them out of the aspirations which are as deeply lodged in the breasts of millions of men as the blood in their hearts? Does the right honorable gentleman in his wildest hour imagine that he has made one single genuine convert through the length and breadth of Ireland? (_Cheers._) Even to take it on the lower and meaner sphere of brute force, I ask the right honorable gentleman to name one single village club that he has effectually stamped out. (_Cheers._) Can he produce a single man from our ranks that he has really frightened, as the result of all the terrific power that he has been wielding in Ireland?

I ask honorable gentlemen opposite to remember with what a shout of exultation they passed the Crimes Act last session, and how they triumphed over us. I can well remember the shouts and peals of delight with which they welcomed the declaration of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, I think, when he said this was to be a duel to the death between the National League and the Government, and that they accepted the challenge. Well, are they satisfied with the results? (_Cheers and laughter._) I ask honorable gentlemen whether they would have yelled so loudly last autumn if they could have foreseen the results of the most terrible Coercion Act ever passsd, giving the most unchecked powers that ever a despot was armed with, would be so miserable and ignominious and mean? (_Cheers._) Did you or did you not expect that the act would crush the National League? Honorable gentlemen are silent. (_Cheers._) I remember the shout of derision which came from the other side of the House when I ventnred to intimate a doubt whether the act, terrific as it looked, would succeed in crushing the Plan of Campaign. Has it been crushed, or even crippled? (_Cheers._) Ask the deputation of Irish landlords (_laughter and cheers_) who waited on Lord Salisbury the other day with a begging letter,--ask them how many of them would be willing to try a fall with the Plan of Campaign in the morning. (_Cheers and laughter._) It has never had so uniform and unbroken a course of victories as it has had this winter.

The greater number of the important struggles in which we were engaged when this act was passed has been brought to a victorious conclusion under the mouths of the right honorable gentleman's guns. (_Cheers._) And upon what terms? I could speak for an hour, giving you instances of the results; but the one thing that applies to them all is, that in every single instance at least the original demands of the tenants have been acceded to. ("_Hear, hear._") Every evicted tenant has been reinstated (_cheers_), and every shilling of law costs incurred in the struggle has been borne as an indemnity by the landlords. (_Cheers, and "No."_) You could have got as good a result as that without the act. On Lord de Freyne's estate, when the act was passing, the agent, Mr. M'Dougal, wrote this letter: "Spot the men in your district who are able to pay and won't; we will see, now that the Coercion Act is about to become law, whether we won't make them honest men." It turned out that the dishonest men beat Mr. M'Dougal and his master. They had confidence in the Crimes Bill and the right honorable gentleman last autumn. Where is Mr. M'Dougal to-day? He is gone, dismissed, and everything that the tenants were then demanding has been conceded.

The very day after I came out of prison, I learned that the new agent had had an interview with two of the most prominent of the campaigners on the estate, and he not only agreed to the tenants' terms, but he agreed to refund the sum of over £1,700, which Mr. M'Dougal had dishonestly extorted from the tenants before the Plan of Campaign. (_Cheers._) This money was wrung from the tenants by terror, by serving one hundred and fifty writs of ejectment before they had the protection of the Plan of Campaign.

Then as to the estate of Bodyke, where the proceedings last summer horrified England, and for which her Majesty's Government could provide no remedy; what is the result? Last year, Mr. O'Callaghan, one of the hardest rack-renters, refused an offer of £907 for a year and a half's rent of fifty-seven tenants; he has now accepted £1,000 to wipe off two years' rent of seventy-two tenants. (_Cheers and laughter._) That is to say, after losing all his money, and after costing the British taxpayer £40,000 for the expenses of his evictions (_cheers_), he has now come to the conclusion, and he is one of the most desperate of rack-renters, that the Crimes Act is no go, and he has struck his flag to the Plan of Campaign upon worse terms for him by far than he would have got before the passing of the Crimes Act. (_Cheers._) Only this very day a letter came to my honorable friend, the member for East Mayo (Mr. Dillon), from the principal man who stood almost between the living and the dead on that estate,--the Rev. Peter Murphy,--in which the writer said: "A thousand thanks for check. You have acted nobly by us, and we have every reason to thank and be grateful to you. What pleases me most of all is, that our victory over Colonel O'Callaghan is complete, and approved by all who understand the matter fully. He did his utmost to get the tenants to purchase. He would have sold on any terms rather than yield to the plan, but we absolutely refused to purchase as long as the rope remained round our necks. (_Cheers._) We would not entertain the idea of purchasing at all, until restored to our holdings and free as the mountain air to meet him on equal terms." (_Cheers._)

"The next gale," the writer says, "is not to be asked until the end of June. Reductions suited to the different degrees of poverty, of fifteen per cent upwards to twenty-five and thirty per cent are secured." (_Cheers._) That is the way the right honorable gentleman is abating the power of the Plan of Campaign. (_Renewed cheers._) And remember that these poor tenants have won in spite of him, not merely by adhering to the Plan of Campaign, but also because every man of them who was evicted retook possession of his holding in defiance of the Crimes Act, and has held possession of his holding for the last six months. (_Cheers._) And the lesson the right honorable gentleman, this triumphant Cromwell (_laughter_), has taught them is that, thanks to their own pluck, and not to his mercy, they are more secure in their homes to-day,--well, than the right honorable gentleman was in his tenancy of the Treasury Bench. (_Cheers and laughter._)

I am at this moment officially aware of several estates where the struggle is still proceeding. The landlords are placing their hopes, and are opening their negotiations, not with the right honorable gentleman, or with Dublin Castle, but with the man who sits there, my honorable friend, the honorable member for East Mayo (_loud cheers_), and with other members of this criminal and illegal conspiracy; a conspiracy as to whose dishonesty we have heard so many homilies from honorable gentlemen opposite. Why, I sometimes wonder that the homilies they address to us and to our suffering people upon the violations of the ten commandments do not blister the lips that utter them. ("_Hear, hear._") This dishonest conspiracy. No land court that has ever revised their demands has been able to pronounce them to be other than most just and moderate. ("_Hear, hear._")

My honorable friend, the member for Cork, mentioned the other night that there were only three really great estates in Ireland on which the landlords are offering any resistance. One of them is the Brooke estate, in the county of Wexford, where the agent, Captain Hamilton, is an emergency man by profession. ("_Hear, hear._") The second is Lord Massareene's property, in the county of Louth, where the agents also are emergency men by profession; and the third is the estate of Lord Clanricarde. It must be a proud thing for Englishmen to know that the right honorable gentleman on that estate was exercising one of the most abominable systems of petty persecution that ever was practised, in order to strike down the defenders of those poor people, to smother their voices, and to tie their hands in their struggle with a man who in the Queen's own law courts has been branded as a monster of cruelty and avarice! (_Loud cheers._) I wish her Majesty's Government joy of all the credit that they will get out of their holy alliance with Lord Clanricarde (_"Hear, hear," and laughter_), and I wish him joy of all the rent he will get out of them. (_Cheers and laughter._)

The fact is, and there is no use in blinking it, that, instead of overthrowing the Plan of Campaign, the right honorable gentleman has only made it more secure and more irrestible, by driving us to do our business with less publicity. ("_Hear, hear._") The machinery of the plan has been now perfected to such a degree that we find that one single campaign on an estate is sufficient to keep the peace of a whole county. (_Cheers._) Aye, and to settle the rents of a whole county more satisfactorily and more honestly than an army of land commissioners. ("_Hear, hear._") I will tell you why. It is a very simple reason. Because the penalties of such a struggle are so heavy as to intimidate any tenantry from putting forward an unjust demand, and they are also sufficiently great to terrify a landlord from resisting a just demand. ("_Hear, hear._") It may be a rough-and-ready method; no doubt it is; but what is the result? That in ninety-nine cases out of one hundred last winter it succeeded without any struggle at all.

I challenge honorable gentlemen who speak of the immorality and dishonesty of the Plan of Campaign,--I challenge the right honorable gentleman to name any single deed of outrage or of crime that is traceable to the Plan of Campaign, from end to end of Ireland. (_Cheers._) I challenge him to name any one case in which the demands we have put forward have been declared by any land commissioner or judical tribunal in the country to be dishonest or exorbitant. I challenge him more than all to adduce to the House to-night one solitary case in which he has succeeded, with all his powers and his terrors, in breaking up a combination that was once formed on an estate. (_Cheers._) And remember always that this Plan of Campaign is the merest segment of the Irish difficulty. It is a mere rough-and-ready way, which has been found effective to cure the blunders of your legislation, and to cure your folly in not closing with the bill of my honorable friend, the member for Cork. (_Cheers._) My honorable friend and myself and others are the mere Uhlans and cadets to the army of millions of Irishmen who stand ranked under the standard of my honorable friend, the member for Cork. (_Cheers._)

Now, as to the National League, I want to examine the right honorable gentleman. (_Laughter._) We have heard it stated over and over again in most portentious accents in this House, that the authority of the National League and of her Majesty's Government could not co-exist in Ireland; that either one or the other must pack up and go. What has all this tall talk come to? ("_Hear, hear._") Is the Leage gone, or does it show the slightest sign of going? There are eighteen hundred branches of the National League in Ireland; rather more, I believe now, because the right honorable gentleman's act has added some more. (_Cheers._) Not more than two hundred and fifty of those branches have been nominally grappled with. There are about fifteen hundred branches, or over five sixths of the whole organization, on which not a finger has been laid. Why? Is it that the right honorable gentleman has conceived a sudden affection for the National League? (_Laughter._) Is it that these branches are declining in power, or is it that they have abated their principles one jot in terror? No; but because the Government has made such a disastrous and grotesque mess of their attempt to suppress a couple of hundred branches that they dared not face the ridicule, the colossal collapse, that would attend any attempt to grapple with the whole of this organization. (_Cheers._)

Everybody who knows the so-called suppressed counties of Kerry and Clare knows that the suppressed branches hold their meetings just as usual, under the noses of the police. We know it by the figures and by the cash which comes that the subscriptions, instead of falling off, are increasing. The resolutions are passed in the usual way, and I can tell you they are regarded with more sacredness and more efficacy than usual by the whole community. I will read an extract from a branch report in _United Ireland_ the week before last ("_Hear, hear_"), one of these suppressed branches which have, according to the local policeman, disappeared from view. It says: "A large representative meeting was held on Monday, Mr. George Pomeroy in the chair." No concealment of names. "Balloting for officers and committee took place with the following result, after a most vigorous competition for offices (_Nationalist cheers_), the only emolument for which will probably be a couple of months in jail: J. O'Callan, 60 votes; G. Pomeroy, 58; S. O'Keefe, 56; D. Hanlon, 50; O'Leary, 60; Power, 44; Fitzpatrick, 47"; and so on. "The first five are elected." (_Nationalist cheers._)

There is no disguising the fact that your whole suppressive machinery, the whole machinery for effectually suppressing the League, has totally broken down, and for a very simple reason, because the act was conceived upon the theory that you were dealing with a people who were only pining to be delivered from the terrorism of the National League (_cheers_), whereas you find to your cost you are dealing with a people who are the League themselves, ready to guard it with their lives, and to undergo any amount of torture rather than betray it. (_Nationalist cheers._) Why do you not put the Secret Inquiry clauses in force for the purpose of suppressing branches of the National League? Why! Because you know you would have to send thousands of people to jail who would rather go there than let you wring one tittle of information out of them. Your only other source is informers, and it is our proudest boast that with an organization numbering upwards of 500,000 men, up to this time you have not been able to bring a single informer into the market, though no doubt the market price of the article was never higher. (_Cheers._)

I want the right honorable gentleman to tell us here to-night what he has got by all his wild and vicious lunges against the Irish people. I have no patience with talking of "crime in Ireland," outside Kerry. The Moonlighters and the Government have had Kerry to themselves for the last five or six years. Between them be it, and let them divide the honors. (_Loud Nationalist cheers._) They tell us of a number of persons partially boycotted. I do not know what the local policeman may be pleased to call "persons partially boycotted"; but I am pretty sure the list would go up or down, according to the requirements of the Government. Let the right honorable gentleman give us a list of new land-grabbers who have taken farms (_cheers_), or let him give us a list, and I only wish he would, of the land-grabbers who, since this act has been put in force, have accepted their neighbors' farms. As to legitimate boycotting, I shall always hold with the perfect right of the community to exercise legitimate influence on men who for their own base and greedy purposes are the pests of society.