Ireland Since Parnell | Page 3

of the lord, in the shape of the landlord, was heavy

upon it. After a season of unexampled agricultural prosperity the lean
years had come to the Irish farmer and he was ripe for agitation and
resistance. Butt had the Irish gentry on his side. With the sure instinct
of the born leader Parnell set out to fight them. He had popular feeling
with him. It was no difficult matter to rouse the democracy of the
country against a class at whose doors they laid the blame for all their
woes and troubles and manifold miseries. Butt was likewise too old for
his generation. He was a constitutional statesman who made noble
appeal to the honesty and honour of British statesmen. Parnell, too,
claimed to be a constitutional leader, but of another type. With the help
of men like Michael Davitt and John Devoy he was able to muster the
full strength of the revolutionary forces behind him and he adopted
other methods in Parliament than lackadaisical appeals to the British
sense of right and justice.
The time came when the older statesman had perforce to make way for
the younger leader. The man with a noble genius for statesman-like
design--and this must be conceded to Isaac Butt--had to yield place and
power to the men whose genius consisted in making themselves
amazingly disagreeable to the British Government, both in Ireland and
at Westminster. "The Policy of Exasperation" was the epithet applied
by Butt to the purpose of Parnell, in the belief that he was uttering the
weightiest reproach in his power against it. But this was the description
of all others which recommended it to the Irish race--for it was, in truth,
the only policy which could compel British statesmen to give ear to the
wretched story of Ireland's grievances and to legislate in regard to them.
It is sad to have to write it of Butt, as of so many other Irish leaders,
that he died of a broken heart. Those who would labour for "Dark
Rosaleen" have a rough and thorny road to travel, and they are happy if
the end of their journey is not to be found in despair, disappointment
and bitter tragedy.
Parnell, once firmly seated in the saddle, lost no time in asserting his
power and authority. Mr William O'Brien, who writes with a quite
unique personal authority on the events of this time, tells us that there is
some doubt whether "Joe" Biggar, as he was familiarly known from
one end of Ireland to the other, was not the actual inventor of

Parliamentary obstruction. His own opinion is that it was Biggar who
first discovered it but it was Parnell who perceived that the new
weapon was capable of dislocating the entire machinery of Government
at will and consequently gave to a disarmed Ireland a more formidable
power against her enemies than if she could have risen in armed
insurrection, so that a Parliament which wanted to hear nothing of
Ireland heard of practically nothing else every night of their lives.
Let it be, however, clearly understood that there was an Irish Party
before Parnell's advent on the scene. It was never a very effective
instrument of popular right, but after Butt's death it became a decrepit
old thing--without cohesion, purpose or, except in rare instances, any
genuine personal patriotism. It viewed the rise of Parnell and his
limited body of supporters with disgust and dismay. It had no sympathy
with his pertinacious campaign against all the cherished forms and
traditions of "The House," and it gave him no support. Rather it
virulently opposed him and his small group, who were without money
and even without any organisation at their back. Parnell had also to
contend with the principal Nationalist newspaper of the time--_The
Freeman's Journal_--as well as such remnants as remained of Butt's
Home Rule League.
About this time, however, a movement--not for the first or the last
time--came out of the West. A meeting had been held at Irishtown,
County Mayo, which made history. It was here that the demand of "The
Land for the People" first took concrete form. Previously Mr Parnell
and his lieutenants had been addressing meetings in many parts of the
country, at which they advocated peasant proprietorship in substitution
for landlordism, but now instead of sporadic speeches they had to their
hand an organisation which supplied them with a tremendous dynamic
force and gave a new edge to their Parliamentary performances. And
not the least value of the new movement was that it immediately won
over to active co-operation in its work the most powerful men in the
old revolutionary organisation. I remember being present, as a very
little lad indeed, at a Land League meeting at Kiskeam, Cork County,
where scrolls spanned the village street bearing