THE LADIES' LAND LEAGUE.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume X, Issue 498, 27 October 1882, Page 13

THE LADIES' LAND LEAGUE.

The report of the meeting of the Ladies' Land League which appears in our present issue will attract more than usual attention. It con* tains an announcement that the League — or, rather, the central executive of that association-ws about to be immediately dissolved. The reasons for the dissolution are plainly stated by the ladies themselves. The Leagae was established to supply the physical wants of two classes of persons — viz.. first, those arrested under the Coercion Act of the benevolent Mr. Forster, together with their families ; and, secondly, such evicted tenants and their families as might happen to be destitute. As to the former of those two classes there ia no longer any need for the existence of an elaborate organisation to render them relief. The number of persons now imprisoned as suspects ia comparatively small, and six weeks hence the odious measure under which they are confined will expire. It will be equally unnecessary, though for a different reason, for the ladies to continue the work of providing for the wants of the victims of landlord greed and oppression. An* •other organisation to. be presently founded is to undertake that important business, and to that organisation, we feel conn lent, the sole responsibility in this matter may well be left. The Ladies' Land League, therefore, as we have said, dissolves. The event, though under the circumstances one that will cause no surprise, cannot be allowed to pass without comment. The Ladies' Irish National Land League will live in history. Its story will reflect unfading lustre on the generation in which it was established, and will for ever act as a stimulus to patriotic action on the part of all future generations of Irishwomen. For what is that story ? At a time when a British Government by brute force put djwn the legal and constitutional organisation of men which had been rstablished for the protection of the Irish tenantry against their ruthless and hereditary oppressors, and when it waa a crime for a man even to furnish the means of living to starving people in Ireland, some patriotic Irish ladies stepped into the breach, took up the work which had been interrupted by the imprisonment of their brothers, and, in the face of both governmental terrorism, on tbe one hand, and, on the other, of denunciations from some who might have been expected rather to applaud tbem. carried on that work unflinchingly to the end. Some of them actually suffered the penalty of imprisonment for pnr* suing their charitahle mission, but that fact, too, was powerless to check their operations. How many tragedies might have been enacted throughout the land had Ireland possessed no such heroic daughters at such a crisis, no one but the Almighty Ruler of the Universe alone knows. It is certain, however, that, in the contingency referred to, thousands would have died of starvation. Miss Anna Parnell, in short, and her colleagues of the Ladies' Land League, went to the rescue <f a large portion of the Irish tenantry when, but for their action— distinguished, as it waa, at once by courage and true womanly devotion — the tenants in question would inevitably have perished. Such services the Irish nation, while it lives, cannot forget. They were invaluable, and their record is imperishable. — Nation.