Other informal meetings between Sir Antony MacDonnell and the Irish leaders followed, the purpose of Sir Antony being, before he accepted office in the Irish Government, to gather the views of leading Irishmen, especially as to the possibility of a genuine land settlement, which he regarded as the foundation of all else.
Subsequently it transpired that Mr s.e.xton had engaged in some negotiations on his own account with Sir Antony MacDonnell, and it is not improbable that part at least of his quarrel with the Land Conference was that the settlement propounded by it superseded and supplanted his own scheme. Neither Mr O"Brien nor his friends were made aware of these private pourparlers, entered into without any vestige of authority from the Party or its leader, and they only learnt of them casually afterwards. The incident is instructive of how the path of the peacemaker is ever beset with difficulties, even from among his own household.
After surmounting a whole host of obstacles the Land Conference at long last a.s.sembled in the Mansion House, Dublin, on 20th December 1902. Mr Redmond submitted the final selection of the tenants"
representatives to a vote of the Irish Party and, with the exception of one member who declined to vote, the choice fell unanimously upon those named in Captain Shawe-Taylor"s letter. Although their findings were subsequently subjected to much embittered attack, no one had any right to impugn their authority, capacity, judgment or intimate knowledge of the tenants" case.
The landlords" representatives were also fortunately chosen. The Earl of Dunraven was a man of the most statesmanlike comprehension, whose high patriotic purpose in all the intervening years has won for him an enduring and an honourable place in the history of his country. He strove to imbue his own landlord cla.s.s with a new vision of their duty and their destiny, and if only a few of the later converts to the national claim of Ireland had supported him when he came forward first, in favour of the policy of national reconciliation, many chapters of tragedy in our national life would never have been written. With a close knowledge of his labours and his personality I can write this of him--that a man more pa.s.sionately devoted to his country, more sincerely anxious to serve her highest interests, or more intrepid in pursuing the courses and supporting the causes he deems right, does not live. He has been a light in his generation and to his cla.s.s, and he deserves well of all men who admire a moral courage superior to all the shafts of shallow criticism and a patriotism which undoubtedly seeks the best, as he sees it, for the benefit of his country. And more than this cannot be said of the greatest patriot who ever lived. The Earl of Mayo also brought a fine idealism and high patriotism to the Conference Council Board. He had a genuine enthusiasm for the development of Irish industries and was the moving spirit in the Irish Arts and Crafts Exhibitions. Colonel Hutcheson-Poe, a gallant soldier, who had lost a leg in Kitchener"s Soudan Campaign, a gentleman of sound judgment and excellent sense, was one of the moderating elements in the Conference. Finally, Colonel Nugent Everard represented one of the oldest Anglo-Irish families of the Pale and the author of several projects tending to the betterment of the people. The tenants" representatives presented a concise list of their own essential requirements as drafted by Mr O"Brien. It was as follows:--
BASIS.--ABOLITION OF DUAL OWNERSHIP
1. For landlords, net second-term income, less all outgoings.
2. For occupiers, reduction of not less than 20 per cent. in second-term rents or first-term correspondingly reduced. Decennial reductions to be retained.
3. Difference between landlords" terms and occupiers" terms to be made up by State bonus and reduced interest with, in addition, purchase money in cash and increased value for resale of mansion and demesne.
4. Complete settlement of evicted tenants" question an indispensable condition.
5. Special and drastic treatment for all congested districts in the country (as defined by the Bill of 1902).
6. Sales to be between parties or through official commissioners as parties would prefer.
7. Non-judicial and future tenants to be admitted.
8. (Query.) Sporting rights to be a matter of agreement.
I do not propose to go into any detailed account of what transpired at the sittings (six in number) of the Land Conference. All this information is available in Mr O"Brien"s _An Olive Branch in Ireland_. Suffice it to say that seven out of eight of the tenants"
requirements were conceded outright and the eighth was covered by a compromise which would have enabled any tenant in the country, whether non-judicial or future tenants, to become the proprietor of his own holding on reasonable terms. On 4th January 1903 a unanimous report was published. The country scarcely expected this, and its joy at this ever-memorable achievement was correspondingly greater. It was inconceivable that the landlords should have, in solemn treaty, signed their own death warrant as territorialists, yet this was the amazing deed to which they affixed their sign manual when their four representatives signed the Land Conference Report.
Ever since the first Anglo-Norman set foot in Ireland and began to despoil the ancient clans of their land there has been trouble in connection with the Irish Land Question. The new race of landlords regarded their Irish land purely as a speculation, not as a home; they were in great part absentees, having no aim in Ireland beyond drawing their rents. They had no duties to their tenants in the sense that English landlords have. They had no natural ties with the country and they regarded themselves as free from all the duties or obligations of ownership. They never advanced capital for the improvement of the land or the erection of buildings, and never put a farthing into the cultivation of the soil. The tenant had to do everything out of his own sweat and blood--build his home and out-offices, clean and drain the land, make the fences, lay down the roads and, when he had done all this and made the property more valuable, his rent was raised on him, even beyond the value of the improvements he had effected. Woe to the industrious man, for he was taxed upon his industry! And yet who is not familiar with the foolish and the ignorant tribe of scribblers who, with no knowledge of the facts, prate about "the lazy Irish"? And if they were lazy--which I entirely deny--who made them so? Had they no justification for their "laziness"? Why should they wear their lives out so that a rapacious landlord whom they never saw should live in riotousness and debauchery in the h.e.l.ls of London or the Continent?
"One could count on one"s fingers," said the Cowper Commission in 1887, "the number of Irish estates on which the improvements have been made by the landlord." The Irish landlord cla.s.s never did a thing for Ireland except to drain her of her life-blood--to rob and depopulate and destroy, to make exaction after exaction upon the industry of her peasants, until their wrongs cried aloud for redress, if not for vengeance. In England it was estimated in 1897 that the landlord cla.s.s had spent in investments in landlord property a sum estimated at 700,000,000. These can justly claim some right in the land. In Ireland the landlord was simply the owner of "the raw earth"--the bare proprietor of the soil, a dead weight upon the industry and honest toil of the tenant, receiving a rent upon the values that the labour and the energy of generations of members of a particular family had created. The Irish landlord and his horde of hangers-on--his agents, his bailiffs, his process-servers, his bog-rangers, his rent-warners--created a system built upon corruption, maintained in tyranny, and enforced with all the ruthless severities of foreign laws enacted solely for the benefit of England"s garrison. "I can imagine no fault," said Mr Arthur Balfour, speaking as Prime Minister in the House of Commons, 4th May 1903, "attaching to any land system which does not attach to the Irish system." Evictions in Ireland came to be known as "sentences of death," so cruel and numerous were they until the popular agitation was strong enough to check them.
Even the Gladstonian legislation of 1881, though it admittedly did something substantial towards redressing the balance between landlord and tenant by securing to the tenants what were known as "the three F."s "--viz. Fixity of Tenure, Fair Rent, and Free Sale--yet left the question in a wholly unsettled state. The fixing of fair rents, no doubt, acted as a curb on landlord rapacity, but from the tenants"
point of view it was a wholly vicious, indeterminate and unsatisfactory system. It was incentive to indifferent farming, since the commissioners who had the fixing of rents, and the inspectors who examined the farms, made their valuations upon the farms as they saw them. True, the tenant could claim for his improvements, but in practice this was no real safeguard. The more industrious the tenant the higher the rent--the less industrious and the less capable the lower the figure to be paid.
Hence, after the failure of countless Acts of Parliament, it was borne in upon all earnest land-reformers that there could be only one final and satisfactory solution: that was the abolition of dual ownership--in other words, the buying out of the landlord and the establishment of the tenant in the single and undisputed ownership of the soil on fair and equitable terms. A tentative start had been made in land purchase by the Land Purchase Act of 1885--called, after its author, the Ashbourne Act. This experiment had proved an immense success, for in six years the ten millions sterling a.s.signed for its operations were exhausted and 25,867 tenants had been turned into owners of their farms.
It became clear that a scheme of purchase which would, within a definite period, root out the last vestige of landlordism was the one only real and true solution for the land problem. And now, blessed day, and glory to the eyes that had lived to see it, and undying honour to the men whose genius and sacrifices had made it possible, the decree had gone forth that end there must be to landlordism. And, wonder of wonders, the landlords themselves had agreed to the fiat decreeing their own extinction as a ruling caste. It was with heartfelt hope and relief, and with the sense of a great victory achieved, that the country received the wondrous news of the success of the Land Conference. The dawn of a glorious promise had broken through the long night of Ireland"s suffering, but the mischief-makers were already at work to see that the noonday sun of happiness did not shine too strongly or too steadily.
CHAPTER X
LAND PURCHASE AND A DETERMINED CAMPAIGN TO KILL IT
I can only rapidly sketch the events that followed the publication of the Land Conference Report. Mr s.e.xton made it his business in _The Freeman"s Journal_ to decry its findings on the sinister ground that they offered too much to the landlords and were not sufficiently favourable to the tenants, sneering at the proposal for a bonus, hinting that no Government would find money for this purpose. Mr Davitt, who was an earnest disciple of Henry George"s ideal of Land Nationalisation, naturally enough found nothing to like in the proposals for land purchase, which would set up a race of peasant-proprietors who would never consent to surrender their ownership to the State and would consequently make the application of the principles of Land Nationalisation for ever impossible in Ireland.
Besides, Michael Davitt had cause for personal hatred of landlordism, which exiled his parents after eviction, and incidentally meant the loss of an arm to himself, and a violence of language which would be excusable in him would not be justifiable or allowable in the cases of men who had not suffered similarly, such as Messrs Dillon and s.e.xton.
Yet the fault was not theirs if the Land Conference did not end in wreckage and such a glorious chance of national reconciliation and appeas.e.m.e.nt was not lost to Ireland.
In the meantime Sir Antony MacDonnell, greatly daring and, I would likewise say, greatly patriotic, accepted the offer of the Irish Under-Secretaryship in a spirit of self-abnegation beyond praise. Mr Redmond and Mr O"Brien had, at his request, met him, early in February, 1903, to discuss the provisions of the contemplated Purchase Bill. It may be remarked that Messrs Dillon and Davitt were invited to meet Sir Antony on the same occasion, but they declined. They apparently desired the position of greater freedom and less responsibility, from which they could deliver their attacks upon their friends. They received little support from the country in their guerrilla warfare on the Land Conference findings. The Standing Committee of the Catholic Hierarchy left no room for doubt as to their views. They declared the holding of the Land Conference "to be an event of the best augury for the future welfare of both cla.s.ses"
(landlords and tenants), and they expressed the hope that its unanimity would result in legislation which would settle the Land Question once for all "and give the Irish people of every cla.s.s a fair opportunity to live and serve their native land." The Irish Party and the National Directory of the United Irish League, the two bodies invested with sovereign authority to declare the national policy, unanimously, at specially convened meetings, approved the findings of the Land Conference and accepted them as the basis of a satisfactory settlement of the Land Question. Neither Mr Dillon nor Mr Davitt attended either of these meetings. Indeed, Mr Dillon ostentatiously took his departure from Dublin on the morning the meetings were held, but strangely enough he attended an adjourned meeting of the Party at Westminster the following day and opposed a proposal to raise the question of the Land Conference Report on the Address. Mr Redmond entered a dignified protest against Mr Dillon"s conduct, pointing out that the previous day was Mr Dillon"s proper opportunity for submitting any objections of his to his colleagues of the Party and of the National Directory. Mr Dillon did not find a single supporter for his att.i.tude, and he was obliged to disclaim, with some heat, that he had any grievance in reference to the Conference. Next day he went abroad for the benefit of his health.
The debate on the Amendment to the Address had the most gratifying results. Mr Wyndham accepted, in principle, the Land Conference Agreement and announced that the Government would smooth the operations of Land Purchase by a bonus of twelve millions sterling as a free grant to Ireland. The debate accomplished another striking success, that it elicited from all the men of light and leading in the Liberal Party--from Mr Morley, Sir H. Campbell-Bannerman, Sir E. Grey, Mr Haldane and Mr John Burns--expressions of cordial adhesion to the policy of pacification outlined by the Chief Secretary, thus effecting the obliteration of all English Party distinctions for the first time where one of Ireland"s supreme interests was concerned. It required only the continuance of this spirit to give certain a.s.surance of Ireland"s early deliverance from all her woes and troubles. But an adverse fate, in the form of certain perverse politicians, ordained it otherwise.
On 25th March 1903 Mr Wyndham introduced his Bill. It adopted fully the fundamental principles of the Land Conference and undertook to find Imperial funds for the complete extinction of landlordism in Ireland within a period which Mr Wyndham estimated at fifteen years.
Furthermore the tenants were to obtain the loans on cheaper terms than had ever been known before--viz. an interest of 2-3/4 per cent. and a sinking fund of 1/2 per cent., being a reduction in the tenants"
annuity from 4 to 3, 5s. as compared with the best of the previous Acts. In addition a State grant-in-aid to the extent of 12,000,000--roughly equivalent to three years" purchase--was produced to bridge the gap between what the tenants could afford to pay and the landlords to accept. The Bill fell short of the requirements of the Land Conference in certain respects, notably in that it proposed to withhold one-eighth of the freehold from the tenants as an a.s.sertion of State right in the land, and that the clauses dealing with the Evicted Tenants and Congested questions were vague and inadequate.
Other minor defects there also were, but nothing that might not be remedied in Committee by conciliatory adjustments. A National Convention was summoned for 16th April to consider whether the Bill should be accepted or otherwise. Previously there was much subterranean communication between Messrs Dillon, Davitt, s.e.xton and T.P. O"Connor, all with calculated intent to damage or destroy the Bill. And it is also clear that certain members of the Irish Party (Messrs Dillon and T.P. O"Connor), who were pledge-bound to support majority rule "in or out of Parliament," were carrying on official negotiations of their own with the Minister in charge of the Bill and were using the organ of the Party to discredit principles and proposals to which the Party had given its unanimous a.s.sent. It would not, in the circ.u.mstances, be unjust to stigmatise this conduct as disloyalty, if not exactly treachery, to the recorded decisions of the Party. At any rate it was the source and origin of incredible mischief and the most deplorable consequences to Ireland. The opponents of the Bill made a concerted effort to stampede the National Convention from arriving at any decision regarding the Bill. They wanted it to postpone judgment. But the Convention, in every sense magnificently representative of all that was sound and sincere in the const.i.tutional movement, was too much alive to all the glorious possibilities of the policy of national reconciliation which was taking shape and form before their eyes to brook any of the ill-advised counsels of those who had determined insidiously on the wreck of this policy.
In all the great Convention there were only two voices raised in support of the rejection of the Bill. And when Mr Davitt moved the motion, concerted between Mr T.P. O"Connor, Mr s.e.xton and himself, that the Convention should suspend judgment until it was brought in its amended Third Reading Form before an adjourned sitting of the Convention, he was so impressed by the enthusiastic unanimity of the delegates that he offered, after some parley, to withdraw his motion, and thus this great and authoritative a.s.sembly pledged the faith of the Irish nation to the policy of national reconciliation and gave its loyal adhesion to the authors of that policy.
But this decision of the people, const.i.tutionally and legitimately expressed, was not long to remain unchallenged. Immediately after the Convention Mr Davitt waited upon Mr Redmond, at the Gresham Hotel, Dublin, and blandly told him: "I have had a wire from Dillon to-day from the Piraeus, to say he is starting by the first boat for home and from this day forth O"Brien and yourself will have Dillon, T.P. and myself on your track." Thus was set on foot what, with engaging candour, Mr Davitt himself later described in an article he contributed to _The Independent Review_ as "a determined campaign" against the national policy which had been authoritatively endorsed and approved by every organisation in the country ent.i.tled to speak on the subject. The country has had to pay much in misery, in the postponement of its most cherished hopes and in the holding up of land purchase over great areas owing to the folly, the madness and the treachery of this "determined campaign." Mr Dillon, at a later stage, with a certain Machiavellian cunning, raised the cry of "Unity" from every platform in the country against those who had never acted a disloyal part in all their lives, whilst his own political conscience never seemed to trouble him when he was flagrantly and foully defying that very principle of unity which he had pledged himself to maintain and uphold "in or out of Parliament."
The National Convention was followed by an event which might easily have been made a turning point in Ireland"s good fortune had it been properly availed of. Lord Dunraven and his landlord Conciliation Committee met the day after the Land Convention and resolved to support sixteen out of the seventeen Nationalist amendments. They furthermore sent a message to Mr Redmond offering to co-operate actively with the members of the Irish Party throughout the Committee stage of the Wyndham Bill. Every consideration of national policy and prudence would seem to urge the acceptance of this generous offer. It would, if accepted, be the outward and visible sign of that new spirit of grace that had entered into Irish relations with the foregathering of the Land Conference. But fear of what Mr Dillon and the _Freeman_ might do if this open a.s.sociation with a landlord--even if a friendly landlord--interest took place apparently operated on Mr Redmond"s judgment. Although urged by Mr O"Brien, who made the utmost allowance for the leader"s difficulties, to accept the offer of Lord Dunraven and his friends for continued co-operation, Mr Redmond temporised, and the opportunity pa.s.sed into the limbo of golden possibilities gone wrong.
When Mr Dillon, in pursuance of his wire to Mr Davitt, returned from his holiday, he proceeded to make good the threat to be "on the track of Redmond and O"Brien." He made himself as troublesome as he could during the Committee stage of the Bill and did his utmost to force its rejection. He sought to commit the Party to a policy which must have meant the defeat or withdrawal of the measure. He made vicious personal attacks upon Lord Dunraven. He did everything in his power to delay and frustrate the pa.s.sage of the Bill in Committee. And the most generous construction that can be placed upon his actions is that he did all this in support of the theory, which he is known to have consistently held, that Home Rule should precede the settlement of the Land Question, or any other Irish question. Notwithstanding Mr Dillon"s criticisms, not then well understood either in the Party or the country, the Bill at length emerged triumphantly from its ordeal, with the good will of all parties in Parliament. It should have created--and it would, if it had only been given a fair chance--a new heaven and a new earth in Ireland. As far as could be prognosticated all the omens were favourable. Even the atmosphere of administration, so important a matter where any Irish Act is concerned, was of the most auspicious kind. The Lord-Lieutenant was Lord Dudley, who was immensely popular in Ireland, and who had made public proclamation of his desire that "Ireland should be governed in accordance with Irish ideas." Two out of the three Estates Commissioners, in whose hands the actual administration of the Act lay, were men of whose absolute impartiality the Nationalist opinion of the country was a.s.sured. Sir Antony MacDonnell was the power in Dublin Castle, and not much likely to be intimidated by the permanent gang there. All that was required was that the Irish Party and the United Irish League should agree upon a broad-based policy for combining the various cla.s.ses affected to extract the best possible advantage from the provisions of the Act. A meeting of the National Directory was summoned to formulate such a policy, but shortly before it was held Mr Dillon went down to Swinford and, from the board-room of the workhouse there, definitely raised the standard of revolt against the new Land Act. Nothing could be said against his action if he had come out from the Party and fulminated against its authority, but to remain a member of the Party and then to indict its conduct of the nation"s business was, to put it mildly, indefensible. He denounced the new spirit of conciliation that had been so fast gaining ground, attacked the landlords, who had proved themselves friendly to a settlement, in rather ferocious language, and spoke in violent terms of those who would "in a moment of weakness mortgage the future of Ireland to an intolerable extent." Clearly Mr Dillon intended carrying out his threat of "taking the field" against Mr Redmond and Mr O"Brien and of d.a.m.ning the consequences. But the country was not yet "rattled" into disaffection by Mr Dillon"s melancholy vaticinations and rather vulgar appeals to the baser pa.s.sions of greed and covetousness which are perhaps more firmly rooted in the peasant than in any other cla.s.s.
The National Directory, unintimidated by Mr Dillon"s p.r.o.nouncement, met and calmly proceeded to formulate plans for the better working of the Purchase Act. A clear and definite plan of campaign was outlined for the testing of the Act. Mr O"Brien was also in favour of handling the disaffection of Mr Dillon and the _Freeman_ in straightforward manner and of pointing out to them their duty of loyally supporting the decisions of the Party and of the League. Mr Redmond shrank from decisive action. It was part of the weakness of his estimable character that he always favoured "the easier way." He thought that when the Directory spoke out the recalcitrant elements would subside. Little did he understand the malignant temper of the powerful group who, with the aid of the supposedly national organ, were determined to kill the operations of the Purchase Act and to destroy the policy of Conciliation which had promised such splendid fruit in other directions. Mr Dillon went to Swinford again and he and his a.s.sociates did everything in their power to stir up a national panic and to spread the impression that the Purchase Act was a public calamity, "a landlord swindle," and that it would lead straight to national bankruptcy.
Even yet those who sought the wreck and ruin of land purchase might be met with and fought outright if the announcement had not appeared in the _Freeman_ that Mr Redmond had sold his Wexford estate at "24-1/2 years" purchase," or over two years" purchase higher in the case of second-term rents and four and a half years" purchase in the case of first-term rents than the prices which the National Directory had a few weeks previously resolved to fight for, with all the force of the tenants" organisation as a fair standard. True enough Mr Redmond was able to plead later that these were not the terms finally agreed upon between his tenants and himself, and beyond all question he made no profit out of the transaction. Where the mischief lay was in the original publication, which gave a headline to the landlords all over the country and, what was far more regrettable from the purely national standpoint, irretrievably tied the hands of Mr Redmond so far as making any heroic stand against Mr Dillon and his fellow-conspirators was concerned. Thus the country drifted along, bereft of firm leadership or strong guidance. Mr O"Brien had to hold his hand whilst "the determined campaigners" were more boldly and defiantly inveighing against the declared and adopted national policy and trampling upon every principle of Party discipline and loyalty.
The situation might have been saved if Mr Redmond had taken his courage in both his hands, summoned the Party together and received from it an authoritative declaration defining anew the National policy and the danger that attended it from those who had set out recklessly to destroy it; or if he sought an opportunity for publicly recalling the country to its duty and its allegiance to himself and to the Party whose chosen leader he was. Mr Redmond was fully alive to the danger, but he hesitated about taking that bold action which could alone bring the recalcitrants to heel. He was afraid of doing anything which might provoke a fresh "split." Later he delivered himself of the unstatesmanlike and unworthy apophthegm: "Better be united in support of a short-sighted and foolish policy than divided in support of a far-sighted and wise one." This was the fatuous att.i.tude which led him down the steep declivity that ended so tragically for him and his reputation. In those fateful days, when so much was in the balance for the future of Ireland, Mr O"Brien pressed his views earnestly upon Mr Redmond that unless he exercised his authority, and that of the Party and the Directory, it would be impossible for them to persevere in their existing programme, and that the only alternative left for him would be to retire and leave those who had opposed the policy of Conciliation a free stage for any more heroic projects they might contemplate. Mr Redmond still remained indecisive and Mr O"Brien--whether wisely or unwisely will always remain a debatable point with his friends--quietly quitted the stage, resigning his seat in Parliament, withdrawing from the Directory of the United Irish League, and ceasing publication of his weekly newspaper on the ground, as he says himself, that "the authorised national policy having been made unworkable, nothing remained, in order to save the country from dissension, except to leave its wreckers an absolutely free field for any alternative policy of their own."
It is no exaggeration to say that the country was thrown into a state of stupefaction by Mr O"Brien"s retirement. It did not know the reason of it. Very few members of the Party did. I was then a member of it--perhaps a little on the outer fringe, but still an ordinarily intelligent member--and I was not aware of the underground factors and forces which had caused this thunderbolt out of the blue, as it were.
Needless to say, the country was in a state of more abysmal ignorance still, and it is questionable whether outside of Munster, owing to a scandalous Press boycott of Mr O"Brien"s speeches for many years afterwards, the ma.s.ses of the people ever had an understanding of the motives which impelled him "to stand down and out" when he was undoubtedly supreme in the Party and in the United Irish League and when he might easily have overborne "the determined campaigners" if he had only knit the issue with them in a fair and square fight. This, however, was the thing of all others he wished to avoid. Perhaps if he could have foreseen how barren in any alternative policy his sapient critics were to be he might have acted otherwise, but the credit is due to him of making dissension impossible by leaving no second party to the quarrel.
Speaking at Limerick a few days after his retirement, Mr Redmond avowed that Mr O"Brien"s principles were his own, and added these memorable words: "But for Mr William O"Brien there would have been no Land Conference and no Land Act." Every effort was made to induce Mr O"Brien to withdraw his resignation. A delegation of the leading citizens of Cork travelled all the way to Mayo to entreat him to reconsider his decision. To them he said: "There is not the smallest danger of any split either in the Party, or in the League, or in the country. There will be a perfectly free field for the development of any alternative policy; and I will not use my retirement in any way whatever to criticise or obstruct; neither, I am certain, will anybody in the country who has any regard for my wishes."
But having got all they wanted, "the determined campaigners"
mysteriously abandoned their determined campaign. Mr Dillon"s health again required that he should bask "neath the sunny southern skies of Italy, whilst Mr Davitt betook himself to the United States, without either of them making a single speech or publishing a single suggestion to the tenants how they were to guard themselves against the "inflated prices" and the national insolvency they had been threatening them with. Having destroyed the plans of the National Directory for testing the Purchase Act they had no guidance of their own to offer. The tenants were left leaderless, to make their own bargains as best they could, with the inevitable result that the landlords, thanks to "the determined campaigners," were able to force up prices two years above the standard which the Directory of the League had decided to stand out and fight for.
It used to be said of Daniel O"Connell that whenever _The Times_ praised him he subjected himself to an examination of conscience to find out wherein he had offended as against Ireland. Likewise one would have supposed that when Mr Dillon found himself patted on the back by the extreme Orange gang he might have asked himself: "Wherein am I wrong to have earned the plaudits of these people?" For if Mr Dillon was rabid in his opposition to the policy of Conciliation the Ulster Orangemen were ferocious in their denunciation of it, Mr Moore, K.C., referred to it as "the cowardly, rotten, and sickening policy of Conciliation." Small wonder that the Orange extremists should have dreaded this policy, since it had already been the means of creating in the North an Independent Orange Order, who unhesitatingly declared as the first article of their creed that they were "Irishmen first of all," and who had an honest and enthusiastic spokesman in the House of Commons in the person of Mr Thomas Sloane, and an able and, indeed, a brilliant leader in Ireland in Mr Lindsay Crawford. But so it was--every advance towards national reconciliation and mutual understanding was opposed by those two divergent forces as if they had a common interest in defeating it.
Mr O"Brien having retired from Cork, the vacancy should, in the ordinary course, have been filled in the course of a few weeks. But the Nationalists of "the City by the Lee" made it clear that they wanted no other representative than Mr O"Brien, and they forbade the issue of a writ for a new election. And so there was the extraordinary spectacle of a people who voluntarily disfranchised themselves rather than give up the last hope of a policy of National Conciliation in which they descried a Home Rule settlement by Consent as surely as the abolition of landlordism already decreed. As an example of loyalty and personal devotion, as well as of patriotic foresight, it would be difficult to parallel it. Towards the close of the session of 1904 Mr Jasper Tully, a more or less free lance member of the Party, took it upon himself to play them the trick of moving the writ for a new election. And the Nationalists of Cork knew their own business so well that, without a line of communication with Mr O"Brien, they had him nominated and re-elected without anybody dreaming that anything else was humanly possible. There were no conditions attaching to Mr O"Brien"s re-election. He was free to rejoin the Irish Party if it should resume its position of twelve months ago or to remain out of it if a policy of mere destruction were persisted in. He was re-elected because the people of Cork had the most absolute confidence in his integrity, good faith and political judgment, and because they were convinced that his return to public life represented the only hope of the resumption of the great policy in which their confidence never for a moment wavered.
Within a week of Mr O"Brien"s re-election an event took place which once again made it possible for him to take up the threads of his policy where he had surrendered them. The landlords" Conference Committee, to the number of three hundred of the leading Irish n.o.bles and country gentlemen, met in Dublin and resolved themselves into a new a.s.sociation, under Lord Dunraven"s leadership, which was named the Irish Reform a.s.sociation. It immediately issued a manifesto proclaiming "a policy of conciliation, of good will and of reform," by means of "a union of all moderate and progressive opinion irrespective of creed or cla.s.s animosities," with the object of "the devolution to Ireland of a large measure of self-government" without disturbing the Parliamentary Union between Great Britain and Ireland.
Within three days of the publication of the manifesto Mr Redmond, who was on a mission to the States pleading for Irish-American support, cabled: "The announcement [of the Irish Reform a.s.sociation] is of the utmost importance. It is simply a declaration for Home Rule and is quite a wonderful thing. With these men with us Home Rule may come at any moment." It is known that the idea of the Irish Reform a.s.sociation had been talked over between Mr Wyndham, Lord Dunraven and Sir Antony MacDonnell, but it is probable that it would never have emerged into the concrete if the Cork election had not opened up the prospect of a fair and sympathetic national hearing for a project of self-government, now advocated for the first time by a body of Unionist Irishmen. Mr Redmond"s fervid message from America also was as plain a welcome to the new movement for genuine national unity as words could express. But "the fly was in the ointment nevertheless."
CHAPTER XI
THE MOVEMENT FOR DEVOLUTION AND ITS DEFEAT