When Mr O"Brien retired in 1903 the majority of the members of the Party scarcely knew what to make of it, and I have to confess myself among those who were lost in wonder and amazement at the suddenness of the event and the reasons that caused it. This knowledge came later, but until I got to a comprehension of the entire facts I refused to mix myself up with either side. When, however, Mr O"Brien returned to public life in 1904, I saw my way clear to a.s.sociate myself with his policy and to give it such humble and independent support as I could.
It will be remembered that one of Mr O"Brien"s proposals for testing the Purchase Act was to select suitable estates, parish by parish, where for one reason or another the landlords could be induced to agree to a reasonable number of years" purchase and thus to set up a standard which, with the strength of the National organisation to back it up, could be enforced all over the country. The "determined campaigners" defeated this plan but failed to provide any machinery of their own to protect the tenant purchasers or to a.s.sist them in their negotiations. On Mr O"Brien"s re-election he took immediate steps to form an Advisory Committee composed of delegates from the eight divisional executives of the city and county of Cork. This Committee adopted as its watchword, "Conciliation plus Business," and as its honorary secretary I can vouch for it that when the methods of Conciliation failed we were not slow about putting into operation the business side of our programme. Thus the landlord who could not be induced to listen to reason around a table was compelled to come to terms by an agitation which was none the less forceful and effective because it was directed and controlled by men of conciliatory temper whom circ.u.mstances obliged to resort to extreme action.
The fruits of the work of the Advisory Committee, ranging over a number of years, are blazoned in the official statistics. They make it clear that if only a similar policy had been working elsewhere the tenant purchasers all over Ireland would have got infinitely better terms than they did. The bare fact is that in County Cork, where we had proportionately the largest number of tenant purchasers (in Mid-Cork, I am glad to say, there was scarcely a tenant who did not purchase, and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred through my intervention), the prices are, roughly, two years" purchase lower than the average all over the rest of Ireland.
In Cork, where Mr O"Brien"s policy prevailed, we had, outside the Congested Districts, from 1st November 1903 to 31st March 1909, a total of 16,159 tenant purchasers, and the amount of the purchase money was 7,994,591; whilst in Mayo, one of whose divisions Mr Dillon represented in Parliament, and where his doctrines held sway, the number of tenant purchasers in the same period was 774, and the amount of the purchase money only 181,256. And be it noted what these unfortunate and misguided Mayo men have to be grateful for: that they have remained for all these years, since the Act of 1903 was placed on the Statute Book, under the old inexorable rent-paying conditions, whilst down in Cork the tenants are almost to a man the proprietors of their own holdings, owning their own improvements, knowing that every year that pa.s.ses brings the time nearer when their land will be free of annuities, and having all that sweet content and satisfaction that flow from personal ownership. Up in Mayo, in a famous speech delivered at Swinford, 12th September 1906, three years after the Land Purchase Act was pa.s.sed, Mr Dillon declared:
"Attempts have been made to throw the blame on Michael Davitt, _The Freeman"s Journal_ and myself, and it has been said that we have delayed the reinstatement of the evicted tenants and obstructed the smooth working of the Act more than we have done. It has worked too smoothly--far too smoothly, to my mind. Some men have complained within the past year that the Land Act was not working smooth enough.
For my part I look upon it as working a great deal too fast. Its pace has been ruinous to the people."
There, in a nutsh.e.l.l and sufficiently stated, are the two policies. Mr O"Brien wanted to expedite land purchase by every means in his power, but he wished that the tenants should have proper advisers and should act under the skilled guidance of their own organisation, so that they may make no bad bargains. Mr Dillon, on his part, sought to kill land purchase outright, but why he should have had this mad infatuation against the most beneficent Act that was pa.s.sed for Ireland in our generation, I am at a loss to know, if it is not that he allowed his personal feeling against Mr O"Brien to cloud the operations of his intellect. It is a curious commentary, however, on the good faith of the Party leaders, that whilst Mr Dillon was making the speech I have quoted to his const.i.tuents at Swinford, his bosom friend and confidant, Mr T.P. O"Connor, who was seeking the shekels in New York, was telling his audience that "the Irish landlords were on the run, and, if they continued to yield, in fifteen years the very name of landlordism would be unknown. I say to the British power:--after seven centuries we have beaten you; the land belongs now to the Irish; the land is going back to the old race."
What is one to say of the manhood or honour of the men who spent their days denouncing the policy of Conciliation in Ireland, but who, when they went across the Atlantic, and wanted to coax the money out of the exiles" pockets, spoke the sort of stuff that Mr O"Connor so soothingly "slithered" out at New York?
I say it with full and perfect knowledge of the facts, that it was the dishonest policy of Mr Dillon, Mr T.P. O"Connor and the men who, blindly and weakly, and with an abominable lack of moral courage, followed their leadership, which has kept one hundred thousand tenants still under the heel of landlordism in Ireland. These men, in driving a nail into the policy of Conciliation, drove a nail far more deeply into their own coffin. In burying the Land Act of 1903 they were only opening graves for themselves, but, in the words of Mr Redmond, they were "so short-sighted and unwise" they could not see the inevitable result of their malicious side-stepping.
I know of no greater glory that any man, or Party, or organisation could aspire to than to be, in any way, however humble, a.s.sociated with the policy which made three hundred thousand of the farmers of Ireland the owners of their own hearths and fields. Where the Land Purchase Act operated it gave birth to a new race of peasant owners, who were frugal, industrious, thrifty, and a.s.siduous in the cultivation and improvement of the soil. In a few years the face of the country was transformed. A new life and energy were springing into being. The old tumble-down farm-houses and out-offices began to be replaced by substantial, comfortable, and commodious buildings.
Personal indebtedness became almost a thing of the past, and the gombeen man--one of Ireland"s national curses--was fast fading out of sight. The tenant purchasers, against whose solvency the "determined campaigners" issued every form of threat, took a pride in paying their purchase instalments as they fell due. The banks began to swell out into a plethoric affluence on their deposits. And who can estimate the social sweetness that followed on land purchase--the sense of peace and security that it gave to the tenant and his family, the falling from him of the numbing shadows of unrest and discontent? Also with the disappearance of agrarian troubles and the unsettlement that attended them there has been a notable decline in the consumption of alcohol. To reverse an old saying: "Ireland sober is Ireland free"--it may be said that "Ireland free (of landlordism) is Ireland sober." And then the happiness of being the master of one"s own homestead! No race in the world clings so lovingly to the soil as the Irish. We have the clan feeling of a personal love and affection for the spot of earth where we were born, and when the shadows of evening begin to fall athwart our lives, do we not wish to lay ourselves down in that hallowed spot where the bones of our forefathers mingle with the dust of ages? Truly we love the land of our birth--every stone of it, every blade of gra.s.s that grows in it, its lakes, its valleys, and its streams, each mountain that in rugged grandeur stands sentinel over it, each rivulet that whispers its beautiful story to us--and because we would yet own it for our very own, we grudge not the sacrifices that its final deliverance demands, for it will be all the dearer in that its liberty was dearly purchased with the tears and the blood of our best!
The settlement of the Evicted Tenants Question was another of the vital issues salved from the wreckage. There were from eight to ten thousand evicted tenants--"the wounded soldiers of the Land War" as they were termed--to whom the Irish Party and the National Organisation were pledged by every tie of honour that could bind all but the basest. The Land Conference Report made an equitable settlement of the Evicted Tenants problem an essential portion of their treaty of peace. But the revival of an evil spirit amongst the worst landlords and the interpretations of hostile law officers reduced the Evicted Tenants clause in the Act of 1903 almost to a nullity. In this extremity the Cork evicted tenants requested the Land Conference to rea.s.semble and specify in precise language the settlement which they regarded as essential. All the representatives of the landlords and of the tenants on the Conference accepted the invitation, with the single exception of Mr Redmond. Eventually, despite these and other discouragements, the Conference met in Dublin in October 1906, sat for three days, and agreed upon lines of settlement which were given effect to in legislation by Mr Bryce the following year. True, the restoration of these unhappy men did not proceed as rapidly as their sacrifices or interests demanded. They were also the victims of the malign opposition extended to the policy of Conciliation, even when it embraced a deed so essentially charitable as the relief of the families who had borne the burden and the heat of the day in the fierce agrarian wars. Lamentable to relate, Mr Dillon tried to intimidate Mr T.W. Russell and Mr Harrington from joining the Conference, and when he failed, publicly denounced their Report. And if there are still some of them "on the roadside," as I regret to think they are, the blame does not lie with the Conciliationists, but with those who persistently opposed their labours.
In the settlement of the University Question Cork also took the lead when its prospects were in a very bad way. This had been for over a century a vexed and perplexing problem. I have dealt cursorily with primary education, which is even still in a deplorably backward state in Ireland. Secondary education has not yet been placed on a scientific basis, and is not that natural stepping-stone between the primary school and the university that it ought to be. There is no intelligent co-ordination of studies in Ireland and we suffer as no other country from ignorantly imposed "systems" which have had for their object, not the development of Irish brains but the Anglicisation of Irish youth, who were drenched with the mire of "foreign" learning when they should have been bathed in the pure stream of Irish thought and culture.
It would require a volume in itself to deal with all the evils, not only intellectual and educational, but social, economic and political, which Ireland has suffered owing to the absence of a higher education directed to the development of her special psychological and material needs. It took eighty years of agitation before anything like educational equality in the higher realms of study was established.
The Protestants had in Trinity College a university with a n.o.ble tradition and a great historic past. The Catholics had only University College and a Royal University, which conferred degrees without compulsion of residence. In hounding Mr Wyndham from office and killing him (in the political sense, though one would be sorely tempted to add, also in the physical sense), the Irish Party also destroyed, amongst other things, the prospects of a University settlement in 1904. A University Bill had, as a matter of fact, been promised as the princ.i.p.al business for that session. The question was in a practically quiescent state, n.o.body taking any particular interest in it, when the Catholic laity of Cork, supported by the ma.s.s of the Protestant laity as well (as was now become the custom on all great questions in the leading Irish county), came together in a mighty and most representative gathering, which instantly impressed statesmen that this educational disability on religious grounds could no longer be tolerated. Mr Birrell, who failed in most other things during his ill-starred Irish administration, was admirably energetic and suave in getting his University proposals through. And it was by employing wisely the methods of conciliation and winning over to his side men of opposite political views, like Mr Balfour, Mr Wyndham, Sir Edward Carson, and Professor Butcher that he piloted the Bill safely through its various Parliamentary stages.
With the success of Land Purchase, with the introduction and pa.s.sage of the Labourers and University Acts, with the settlement of the Evicted Tenants Question, and with the offering of any resistance to the effort made to remove the embargo on Canadian cattle, which would seriously have affected the prospects of the farmers, the Irish Party had exercised no initiative and could not legitimately claim one atom of credit in respect of them. Yet when their Parliamentary prestige began to shake and show unmistakable signs of an approaching collapse, it was ever their habit to group these among their achievements in the same way that they appropriated the fruits of Parnell"s genius--it was "the Party" that did everything, and so they demanded that the people should sing eternal Hosannas to its glory.
In justice to the Party, or, more correctly, to Mr J.J. Clancy, M.P., who stood sponsor for the measures and watched over their progress with paternal care, they did get inscribed on the Statute Book two Acts of considerable importance--the Town Tenants Act and the Housing of the Working Cla.s.ses Act, but beyond these the less said of their Parliamentary conquests from 1903 onward the better. Their achievements were rather of the destructive and mischievous than the constructive and beneficent.
CHAPTER XVI
REUNION AND TREACHERY
It may be said that whilst all these things were going on in Ireland and the Party marching with steady purpose to its irretrievable doom, the British people were in the most profound state of ignorance as to what was actually happening. And the same may be said of the Irish in America, Australia, and all the other distant lands to which the missionary Celts have betaken themselves. They were all fed with the same newspaper pap. The various London Correspondents took their cue from Mr T.P. O"Connor and the _Freeman_. These and the Whips kept them supplied with the t.i.t-bits that were in due course served up to their several readers. And thus it never got to be known that it was Mr William O"Brien and his friends who were the true repositories of Party loyalty and discipline, the only men who were faithful to the pledge, who had never departed from the policy of Conference, Conciliation and Consent, upon which the great Land Act of 1903 was based and to which the Party, the United Irish League, and Nationalist opinion stood committed in the most solemn manner.
When the General Election of 1906 took place those of us in County Cork and elsewhere who had taken our stand by Mr O"Brien were marked out for opposition by the Party chiefs. But a truce was arranged through the intervention of Mr George Crosbie, editor of _The Cork Examiner_, who generously sought to avert a fight between brother Nationalists, which, whatever its effects at home, would be bound to have grave results abroad, where the only thing that would be strikingly apparent was that brother Nationalists were at one another"s throats. So we all came back, if not exactly a happy family at least outwardly in a certain state of grace.
This state of things was not, however, to last. Without rhyme or reason, without cause stated or charge alleged, with no intimation of any sort or kind that I was acting contrary to any of the Party tenets, I was, so to speak, quietly dropped overboard from the Party ship in November 1906. I did not get any official intimation that I was dismissed the Party or that I had in any way violated my pledge to sit, act and vote with it. I was simply cut off from the Party Whips and the Parliamentary allowance and, without a word spoken or written, thus politely, as it were, told to go about my business. The matter seemed inconceivable and I wrote a firm letter of remonstrance to Mr Redmond. It drew from him merely a formal acknowledgment--an adding of insult to injury. To test the matter I immediately resigned my seat for Mid-Cork, placed the whole facts before my const.i.tuents, published my letter and Mr Redmond"s acknowledgment and challenged the Party to fight me on the issue they had themselves deliberately raised--namely, as to whether in supporting the policy of Conciliation I was in any way faithless to my pledge. Wise in their generation, the men who were courageous enough to expel me from the Party, to which I belonged by as good a t.i.tle as they, were not brave enough to meet me in the open in a fair fight and, where there could be no shirking a plain issue, and accordingly I had a bloodless victory. It was satisfactory to know I had the practically unanimous support and confidence of the electors of Mid-Cork. It would have been more satisfactory still if we had the policy of Conciliation affirmed, as we undoubtedly would have, by an overwhelming vote in a genuine trial of strength. There were at this time outside of the Party, besides myself, Mr William O"Brien, Mr T.
M. Healy, M.P. for North Louth (who had not been readmitted after 1900), Sir Thomas Esmonde, M.P. for North Wexford, Mr John O"Donnell, M.P. for South Mayo, Mr Charles Dolan, M.P. for South Leitrim, and Mr Augustine Roche (Mr O"Brien"s colleague in the representation of Cork).
The Party were now in a rather parlous state. The country was disgusted with their mismanagement of the Irish Council Bill. Branches of the United Irish League had ceased to subscribe to the Party funds and it was evident that a temper distinctly hostile to the Party managers was widely springing up. Furthermore, an irresistible movement of popular opinion set in, demanding that there should be a reunion of all the Nationalist forces and "Unity" demonstrations of huge dimensions were held in Kerry, Limerick, Cork, Clare and Wexford.
There was no denying the intensity of the demand that there should be an end of those differences which divided brother Nationalists and dissipated their strength. Finally, at Ballycullane, in Mr Redmond"s native const.i.tuency, Mr O"Brien formulated proposals for reunion, the first of which is so notable as a declaration of Nationalist principle that I quote it fully:
"No man or party has authority to circ.u.mscribe the inalienable right of Ireland to the largest measure of national self-government it may be in her power to obtain."
Further conditions declared that it was the duty of Nationalist representatives to devote themselves honestly to working for every measure of practical amelioration which it may be possible to obtain from "either English Party, or from both," and that the co-operation of Irishmen of all creeds and cla.s.ses willing to aid in the attainment of any or all of those objects should be cordially welcomed. Within a week Mr Redmond conveyed to Mr O"Brien his desire for a Conference on unity. It was duly held. Mr O"Brien"s proposals were substantially agreed to. It will be observed that they were a solemn reiteration of the principles of Conference and Conciliation, which was the bed-rock basis of the Party policy in its most useful and memorable year, 1903.
It is possible that if Mr O"Brien"s suggestion for a National Convention to give the new Unity an enthusiastic "send-off" had been agreed to, many things might have been different to-day. But Mr Dillon never wanted, in those days, if he could help it, to appear before a great a.s.semblage of his countrymen in company with Mr O"Brien. He knew his own limitations for popular appeal too well to risk comparison with the most persuasive Irish orator since the days of O"Connell.
The six of us who rejoined the Party under the foregoing peace treaty were sincerely anxious that the reunion should be cordial and thorough.
We saw, however, no manifestations of a similar spirit on the part of Mr Dillon or his special coterie of friends. Mr O"Brien published in his own paper, _The Irish People,_ a _communique_ in which he said:
"I am certain the universal Irish instinct will be, frankly and completely, to drop all disputes as to the past and have no rivalries except as to who shall do most to create good will and a common patriotism among Irishmen of all shades and schools of thought. Let us turn with high hearts from the tragedies of the past to the glorious possibilities of the future."
Our optimism was sadly disappointed when the first occasion came for testing the sincerity of the reunion. A Treasury Report was issued containing proposals for lessening the landlords" bonus under the Purchase Act of 1903 and for increasing the tenants" annuities. (These proposals were later embodied in Mr Birrell"s Land Act of 1909 and practically put an end to land purchase and to the beneficent operations of the Act of 1903.) A meeting of the reunited Party was summoned for the Mansion House, Dublin (29th April 1908), to deal with this grave situation, rendered all the more serious by reason of the fact that the Treasury proposals were openly advocated by _The Freeman"s Journal._ One of the clauses of the articles of reunion declared that the co-operation of Irishmen of all cla.s.ses and creeds willing to aid in the attainment of, among other things, "the completion of the abolition of landlordism" is cordially welcomed.
When Mr O"Brien moved, in order that the demands of the Treasury should be met with a united and resolute Irish front, that the Party was prepared to appoint representatives to confer with representatives of the landlords, Mr Dillon at once showed that on no account would be agree to any Conference, and he proposed an amendment that the whole matter should be referred to a Committee of the Irish Party exclusively. This was a fatal blow at the principle on which the Party had been reunited. Whilst the controversy raged around the Conference idea, Mr Redmond spoke never a word, though he saw that "the short-sighted and unwise policy" was again getting the upper hand. Mr Dillon carried his amendment by 45 votes to 15, and thus the treaty on which the Party was reunited was practically torn to pieces before the ink was scarce dry on it.
One further effort was made to try to preserve the Act of 1903 from being ham-strung by the Treasury. A short time previously a deputation of the foremost landed men and representative bodies of Cork had saved Ireland from the importation of Canadian cattle into Britain. It was decided to organise now a still more powerful deputation from the province of Munster to warn the Government of the fatal effects of the proposed Birrell Bill. I had a great deal to do with the preliminaries of the meeting at which this deputation was selected, and I can say with all certainty that if we had had only the most moderate display of political wisdom from Mr Dillon and his friends we could have the great ma.s.s of the landlords in Ireland agreeing to the full concession of the const.i.tutional demand for Irish liberty. The Cork meeting was beyond all doubt or question the most remarkable held in Ireland for a century. It was summoned by a Joint Committee drawn from the Nationalist and landlord ranks. On its platform were a.s.sembled all the men, either on the landlord or the tenant side, who had been the fiercest antagonists in the agrarian wars of the previous twenty-five years--men who had literally taken their lives in their hands in fighting for their respective causes. It is but the barest truth to say that the evictors and the evicted--the leading actors in the most awful of Ireland"s tragedies--stood for the first time in Irish history side by side to join hands in a n.o.ble effort to obliterate the past and to redeem the future. It was one of the greatest scenes of true emotion and tremendous hope that ever was witnessed in any land or any time. If its brave and joyous spirit could only have been caught up and pa.s.sed along, we would have seen long before now that vision glorious which inspired the deeds and sacrifices of Tone and Emmet and the other magnificent line of martyrs for Irish liberty--we would have witnessed that brotherhood of cla.s.s and creed which is Ireland"s greatest need, and upon which alone can her eventual happiness and liberty rest. And, most striking incident of all, here had met, in a blessed forgetfulness of past rancours and of fierce blows given and received, the two most redoubtable champions of the landlords and the tenants--Lord Barrymore and Mr William O"Brien, the men whose sword blows upon each other"s shields still reverberated in the minds of everyone present. What a study for a painter, or poet, or philosopher! The most dauntless defender of landlordism, in a generous impulse of what I believe to be the most genuine patriotism, stood on a platform with Mr William O"Brien, whom he had fought so resolutely in the Plan of Campaign days, to declare in effect that landlordism could no longer be defended and to agree as to the terms on which it could be ended, with advantage to every section of the Irish nation.
It was only magnanimous men--men of fine fibre and a n.o.ble moral courage--who could stretch their hands across the yawning chasm of the bad and bitter years, with all their evil memories of hates and wounds and scars and defy the yelpings of the malicious minds who were only too glad to lead on the pack, to shout afterwards at Mr O"Brien: "Barrymore!" when of a truth, of all the achievements of Mr O"Brien"s crowded life of effort and accomplishment there is not one that should bring more balm to his soul or consolation to his war-worn heart than that he should have induced the enemy of other days to pay this highest of all tributes to his honesty and worth. He had convinced his enemy of his rect.i.tude, and what greater deed than this! I confess it made my ears tingle with shame when I used to hear unthinking scoundrels, egged on by others who should have known better, shout "Barrymore!" at Mr O"Brien in their attempts to hold him up to public odium for an act which might easily have been made the most benign in his life, as it certainly was one of the most n.o.ble.
This memorable meeting of the erstwhile warring hosts agreed absolutely as to the main conditions on which the Land Settlement of 1903 ought to be preserved--viz. that the abolition of landlordism should be completed in the briefest possible time, that the rate of tenant purchasers" annuity should remain undisturbed, and that the State bonus to the landlords should not be altered. If there were to be losses on the notation of land loans the loss should be borne by the Imperial Treasury for the greatest of all Imperial purposes. A deputation of unequalled strength and unrivalled representative character was appointed to submit these views to the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Chief Secretary for Ireland.
But jealous and perverse and, I must add, blindly malignant, influences had been at work, and a deputation which comprised six peers, eleven Members of Parliament, and some of the leading public men in Munster was refused a hearing by Mr Birrell. Though the act was the act of Mr Birrell, all the world knew that the sinister figure in the background was Mr Dillon. And they have both paid the penalty since then of their follies, not to say crimes--though a nation still suffers for them.
CHAPTER XVII
A NEW POWER ARISES IN IRELAND
The Party manipulators had now got their stranglehold on the country.
The people, where they were not chloroformed into insensibility, were doped into a state of corrupt acquiescence. All power was in the hands of the Party. The orthodox daily Press was wholly on their side. The British public and the English newspaper writers were impressed only, as always, by the big battalions. The Irish Party had numbers, and numbers count in Parliament as nothing else does. Whatever information went through to the American Press pa.s.sed through tainted sources. An influential Irish-American priest, Father Eamon Duffy, writing some time since in the great American Catholic magazine, _The Monitor_, said:
"We really never understood the situation in America. Ireland was in the grip of the Party machine and of one great daily paper, and these were our sources of information. It was only the great upheaval that awakened us from our dream and showed us that something had been wrong, and that the Party no longer represented the country."
This is a remarkable admission from an independent and unprejudiced authority. He candidly declares they never understood the situation in America. Neither was it understood in England, and the House of Commons is the last place which tries to understand anything except party or personal interests. There is just about as much freedom of opinion and individual independence in Parliament as there could be in a slave state. In Ireland, as I have said, outside Munster the truth was never allowed to reach the people. Even the great national movement which Mr William O"Brien re-created in the United Irish League had almost ceased to function. It was gradually superseded by a secret sectarian organisation which was the absolute ant.i.thesis of all free development of democratic opinion and the complete negation of liberty and fair play.
Up in the north of Ireland there existed an organisation of a secret and sworn character which was an evil inheritance of an evil generation. From the fact that the Ribbonmen used to meet in a shebeen owned by one Molly Maguire, with the Irish adaptability for attaching nicknames to anything short of what is sacred, they became known as "Molly Maguires," or, for short, "the Mollies." In some ill-omened day branches of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, which had seceded from the American order of that name, began to interest themselves in Ulster in political affairs. They called themselves the Board of Erin, but they were, as I have said, more generally known as "the Mollies."
They were a narrowly sectarian inst.i.tution and they had the almost blasphemous rule that n.o.body but a Catholic frequenting the Sacraments could remain a member. They had their own ritual and initiation ceremony, founded on the Orange and Masonic precedents, and had their secret signs and pa.s.swords. It is possible that they were at first intended to be a Catholic protection society in Ulster at the end of the eighteenth century to combat the aggressiveness and the fanatical intolerance of the Orange Order, who sought nothing less than the complete extermination of the Catholic tenantry. A Catholic Defence organisation was a necessity in those circ.u.mstances, but when the occasion that gave it justification and sanction had pa.s.sed it would have been better if it were likewise allowed to pa.s.s. Any organisation which fans the flames of sectarianism and feeds the fires of religious bigotry should have no place in a community which claims the sacred right of freedom. It was the endeavour of Mr O"Brien and his friends finally to close this bitter chapter of Irish history by reconciling the ancient differences of the sects and inducing all Irishmen of good intent to meet upon a common platform in which there should be no rivalries except the n.o.ble emulations of men seeking the weal of the whole by the combined effort of all.
Whatever unfortunate circ.u.mstance or combination of circ.u.mstances gave impulse to "the Board of Erin," I know not-whether it arose out of a vainglorious purpose to meet the Orangemen with a weapon of import similar to their own, or whether it was merely the love of young people to have a.s.sociation with the occult, I can merely conjecture--but it was only when Mr Joseph Devlin a.s.sumed the leadership of it that it began to acquire an influence in politics which could have no other ending than a disastrous one.
Never before was the cause of Irish liberty a.s.sociated with sectarianism. Wolfe Tone, Robert Emmet and Thomas Davis are regarded as the most inspired apostles and confessors of Irish nationality. It was a profanation of their memory and an insult to their creed that in the first decade of the twentieth century any man or band of men should have been audacious enough to superimpose upon the structure of the national movement an organisation which in addition to being secret and sectarian was grossly sordid and selfish in its aims.
Stealthily and insidiously "the Board of Erin" got its grip in the United Irish League. It "bossed," by establishing a superiority of numbers, the Standing Committee. Then by "getting hold" of the officers of Divisional Executives and branches it acquired control over the entire machinery of the movement, and thus, in an amazingly short s.p.a.ce of time, it secured an ascendancy of a most deadly and menacing character. Its first overt act of authority was to strangle freedom of speech and to kill land purchase. What Mr John Dillon had been unable to do through his control of the Party and his collusion with _The Freeman"s Journal_ the Board of Erin most effectively accomplished by an energetic use of boxwood batons and, at a later time, weapons of a more lethal character.
A National Convention had been summoned to p.r.o.nounce on the Birrell Land Bill of 1909--a measure which, with incomparable meanness, was designed "to save the Treasury" by ridding it of the honourable obligations imposed by the Wyndham Act of 1903. This Bill, on the ground that the finance of the Act of 1903 had broken down, proposed to increase the rate of interest on land loans from 2-3/4 to 3-1/4 per cent., and to transform the bonus from a free Imperial grant to a Treasury debt against Ireland. Apparently it should require no argument to prove that this was a treacherous repeal of an existing treaty, guaranteed by considered legislative enactment, and that it was a proposal which no Irishman with any sense of the duty he owed his country could for one moment entertain. But it was the unthinkable and the unbelievable thing which happened. Mr Dillon was determined, at all costs--and how heavy these costs were, one hundred thousand unpurchased tenants in Ireland to-day have weighty reason to know--to wreak his spite against the Wyndham Act, which he had over and over again declared was working too smoothly, and prayed that he might have the power to stop it. Mr Redmond I regard in all this wretched business as the unwilling victim of the forces which held him, as a vice in their power. Yet from the sin of a weak compliancy in the unwise decrees of others he cannot be justly acquitted. Although the Party had rejected the proposal for a new Land Conference, and thereby broken the articles of reunion under which Mr O"Brien and his friends re-entered it, we continued to remain within its fold. We could not, for one thing, believe that the country was so steeped in ignorance and blindness that if the facts were once allowed to reach it, or the arguments to be temperately addressed to any free a.s.sembly of Irishmen, they would not see where national interests lay. Accordingly Mr O"Brien and his friends determined to submit, in const.i.tutional fashion, the overwhelming objections to Mr Birrell"s Bill to the judgment of the National Convention which was to consider whether the Bill would expedite or destroy land purchase. It was conveyed to Mr O"Brien beforehand that it was madness on his part to attempt to get a hearing at the Convention, that this was the last thing "the powers that be" would allow, and that as he valued his own safety it would be better for him to remain away.
Just as he had never submitted to intimidation when it was backed by the whole force of the British Government, Mr O"Brien was equally resolved that the arrogance of the new masters of the Irish democracy was not going to compel him to a mood of easy yielding and he properly decided to submit his arguments to a Convention which, though he was well aware it would be "packed" against him, yet he had hopes might be swayed by the invincibility of his arguments. In the ordinary course the stewards for managing and regulating the Convention would be drawn from Dublin Nationalists. On this occasion, however, they came by special train from Belfast and were marched in military order to the Mansion House, where some sackfuls of policemen"s brand-new batons were distributed amongst them. They were the "Special Constables" of the Molly Maguires recruited for the first time by an Irish organisation to kill the right of free speech for which Irishmen had been contending with their lives through the generations. It would be quite a comedy of Irish topsy-turvydom were it not, in fact, such a disastrous tragedy.
The favourite cry of the enemies of Conciliation was that the Purchase Act would bankrupt the Irish ratepayers. By means which it is not necessary to develop or inquire into, the British Treasury was induced on the very eve of the Convention to present to a number of the Irish County Councils claims for thousands of pounds on foot of expenses for the flotation of land loans. A base political trick of this kind is too contemptible for words. It, however, gave Mr Redmond one of the main arguments for impressing the Convention that the Birrell Bill could alone save the ratepayers from the imminence of this burden. It would have been easy to demolish the contention had the reply been allowed to be made. But this was just the one thing "the bosses" were determined not to allow--Mr O"Brien had given notice of an amendment, the justification of which is attested by the facts of the succeeding twelve years. It expressed the view that the Birrell Land Bill would lead to the stoppage of land purchase, that it would impose an intolerable penalty upon the tenant purchasers whose purchase money the Treasury had failed to provide, and that it would postpone for fifty years any complete solution of the problem of the West and of the redistribution of the untenanted gra.s.s lands of the country. The moment Mr O"Brien stood up to move this, at a concerted signal, pandemonium was let loose. I was never the witness of a more disgraceful incident--that an Irishman whose life had been given in so full and generous a fashion to the people should, by secret and subsidised arrangement, be howled down by an imported gang and prevented from presenting his views in rational fashion to men the majority of whom at least were present for honest consideration of arguments. It is a thing not easily forgotten or forgiven for the Irishmen who engineered it, that such a ferocious and foolish display of truculent cowardice should have taken place. For an hour Mr O"Brien manfully faced the obscene chorus of cat-cries and disorder. He describes one of the incidents that occurred in the following words:--
"While I was endeavouring, by the aid of a fairly powerful voice, to dominate the air-splitting clamour around me, Mr Crean, M.P., on the suggestion of Father Clancy, attempted to reach me, in order to urge me to give up the unequal struggle. He was no sooner on his legs than he was pounced upon by a group of brawny Belfast Mollies and dragged back by main force, while Mr Devlin, with a face blazing with pa.s.sion, rushed towards his colleague in the Irish Party, shouting to his lodgemen: "Put the fellow out." At the same time Father Clancy, Mr Sheehan, M.P., and Mr Gilhooly, M.P., having interposed to remonstrate with Mr Crean"s a.s.sailants, found themselves in the midst of a disgraceful melee of curses, blows and uplifted sticks, Mr Sheehan being violently struck in the face, and one of the Molly Maguire batonmen swinging his baton over Mr Gilhooly"s head to a favourite Belfast battle-cry: "I"ll slaughter you if you say another word.""