Evening Memories

New Zealand Tablet, Volume L, Issue 32, 16 August 1923, Page 7

Evening Memories

(By William O’Brien.)

■CHAPTER XXVI “REALISING THE IDEAL” ;y (1889-1890) ■ , : It was now a race i for time between Ireland and her | enemies. •<:• If a General Election could be precipitated, feub j believed the QpercionisV" Government would survive it. If the Government' could put it off to the last hour of their lease under the Septennial Act, perhaps all—would depend upon whether Mr. Balfour could make r a complete :: conquest of Irish disaffection in the meantime. The course „ °.f Jl ie .. hy-elections—the resounding Home Rule victory at ,_l J 9XdllJitvtke-vm\v-o««,s of. tho-conspiracy "against' Parnell—.J 4 the weatherwise politicians in;-, no doubt that an ap- “'• pealed the country must restore Gladstone to power with ■ -majority no further .to' be gainsaid. x But •; now .that’, ’ the precipitant supplied by the collapse of the Times case for ,the -Forgeries 1 was thrown' away, * there sketched before us 1 J3J period of• three years during which the Septennial, Act ■ made^tffie- Unionist’ r tenure: of office impregnable. It was., ft 1 ’ the Purpose; of .utilising this, period -of grace for a final ..endeavor to wipe put the .resistance^f-Ireland-that^Mtr # Balfour -now- bent - all his ’ energies. The odds in his favor were immeasurably greater than appeared on the, surface. No doubt, on both wings of his I Irish policy—his war u P on the Plan of Campaign and his scheme-of prison degradations— was a beaten man, while he i\ as. viewed,,by the Party . Whips as 'the prime loser of by-elections in Britain. The spectacle of his gaols filled^ "ith the first citizens of the countryfifteen members of; Parliament, five -Mayors of u Irish ', cities, the flower of thd ;, Irish priesthood, and some five thousand in all of Ireland’s i foremost ;) men, to. whose .’ Integrity ‘of character the very . judges who,., sentenced them paid :shamefaced homage; with; no other result than that imprisonment ; became the most coveted of public honors and his proclamations of the League were made the Sunday sport of the country—sup-7 plied theSillustration of all others we-could have wished to; preach to liberty-loving men of the ; hatefulness of govern-.-incut without the consent of the governed. vgT 5 ,On the other hand, in what had now . become a time "race; bur very successes in forcing him to pass Parnell’s ejected Reduction of Rent Bill into law and to shuffle out', ~ of Ins programme of prison; barbarities gave him a curious 15 advantage in singling, out,, for- vengeance the comparatively , small bodies of tenants and their leaders who had put': these humiliating defeats upon. him. It- became his boast 111 . the . House of -Commons that there - were^no- Evictions going on in Ireland except upon Plan of Campaign es-7 --fates. Ihe fact was, in truth, 'of the essence of his misrule in Ireland: it was the succe?s,of the Plan of Campaign.; which had saved the rest ? of 1 4he‘'country from 'wholesale! eviction, and it was “to make examples of” the Cam -5 paigners for that very, success, that the,. Government and 1 ! the landlords now refused them,, all quarter and let loosed the horrors of eviction against the Campaign estates until; their rooftrees. should be .given to ; the ! *flames' and their ; fields as bare of population as the Palatinate, under the" hoofs of Lduvois’-dragoons. Stung by Mr. 1 Balfour’s taunt 1; that “if he were an Irish landlord he would rather beg his ,; bread than yield ,to the Plan of ( Campaign,’’' a Syndicate.: of Irish landlords, supported by wealthy English financiers, was formed for the, virtual extermination .of the only twenty' bodies of Campaign tenants who had not already succeeded j in obtaining a settlement. , In accordance with a {fatal' tradition which has justly made‘. the best Irish' landlords responsible for the crimes of the worst, a great landowner, who was- unimpeachable in the ' management of v his own private property—Mr. Smitlf-Barry, who possessed exten--1;-sive ~ estates .in the Counties of s Tipperary and i? Cork—was chosen as the head of the, confederacy,. The new design first came to a head on the,; Poiisonby estate' in the County ; of Cork. ~ The substantial justice of the tenants’ demands was never disputed. The venerable clergyman (Dean Kellet) "ho p ut, hiinself. at - the. head of his parishioners, was , received with honor and enthusiasm in the great towns of J England when he explained them. Had pot the Handset '• 'bf 1887 wilfully debarred these tenants from its relief, ! the trouble would long ago have been peacefully ,composed in the Land Courts. Even now negotiations were in progress a* difference of 10 per cent, between landlord'aifef

tenants alone remained to be compromised, when the new Landlords’ Syndicate stepped in to break off all hopes of i peace and subsidised the landlord to undertake the eviction A of every man, woman, and child on his property. The announcement was made while I was still in London after release from Holloway gaol, and there was nothing for it but 'to put to Parnell straight the question whether the perpetration of this enormous crime was to go unresisted? The difficulty could only have arisen owing j to the loyalty with which we had restricted the Plan of f Campaign to the small number of estates he and I had originally agreed upon. None had since been added except a certain number of other interdependent estates which no exertions of ours could have dissuaded from making common cause with them. The very completeness of our success in the great majority of these struggles enabled the Chief Secretary and the Landlords’ Syndicate to concentrate all their strength for the ruin of a handful of isolated bodies of tenants. The country was exhausted by years of savage coercion which was every day carrying off to captivity the stoutest of her representative men, and the flower of her youth, and was disheartened-by the indefinite postponement of the relief promised by a General Election; and the masses of the tenantry, yielding to a human infirmity as old as the resignation of his Greek countrymen to the immolation of Sinou, were too busy harvesting the reductions of rent showered upon them by the new Act to be always mindful to whom they owed the reductions and the Act. To make matters worse, Mr. Dillon had left the country for Australia, in poor health, early in the year, partly to avoid giving evidence before the Parnell Commission, but still more owing to the necessity for replenishing a dangerously depleted Campaign Fund, and \ his departure threw an unendurable weight of responsibility upon my own shoulders. To all this, Parnell yielded a ready and generous assent. Whatever had been his own misgivings when the Plan of Campaign was launched, he owned they had been answered by its success in compelling the Government to reduce the judicial rents and free the leaseholders, in , utterly baffling and shaming Coercion, and capturing the A sympathy and imagination of the British electorate. Now, the eleventh hour, to allow Mr. Balfour and the landlords to recover any show of victory in Ireland before the General Election might be to sacrifice Ireland’s last chance for Gladstone’s lifetime and for our own. But what did I propose to do? The answer was to meet the new landlords’ combination by a counter-combination embracing the entire strength of the Irish people and their representatives. Mr. Smith-Barry was the owner of a vast estate in the richest plains of Tipperary, populated by a giant breed of men who, by grim methods of their own. had in a previous generation conquered peace for themselves, and consequently had no occasion to disquiet their landlord while the rest of the country was working in the throes of the Land League revolution. If the head of the new Syndicate was within his rights in trading upon the peacefulness of his Tipperary tenantry in order, for class interests of his own, to compass the destruction of thousands of people in a neighboring county who had never done him any wrong, who could challenge the right of their brothertenants in Tipperary to forbid the crime on pain of compelling their landlord to grapple with the class-war he had ■ little counted upon at his own doors? But- if the prosperous men of Tipperary were to be stirred to action, it could only be, and' ought only to be, with the knowledge that they would be obeying the unequivocal appeal of the Irish Parliamentary Party, and of their leader, above all, in an enterprise of supreme national urgency, and would be supported with all the resources of their race. In a word, the attempt could only be made if Parnell would consent to come over himself to preside at a Tipperary kg' Convention, and start a National Defence Fund upon the Ik ' single issue of the right of the Irish tenantry to meet A the cruel and vindictive campaign of depopulation planned by the new Landlords’ Syndicate by a defensive class-con- ” federacy of their own. One visit and one speech was all A, that was stipulated for. His personal responsibility would fc, be still carefully guarded. It would be no longer a question ■ /jlljKpf propagating the Plan of. Campaign but of thwarting an yfe ' inhuman scheme of vengeance upon men who had again and

again offered to submit the justice of their claims to arbitration. At the same time the encouragement to eviction which the landlords derived from the struggle being restricted to a few isolated estates, in accordance with Parnell’s original request, would be at an end, and the evictors would find themselves confronted with a combination as wide as the Irish race, with the unmistakable sanction of the Irish Leader, and upon an issue on which the whole trade union strength of Britain and every honest instinct of .humanity "would be with us. (To be continued.) 7