Evening Memories

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XLIX, Issue 39, 5 October 1922, Page 7

Evening Memories

(By William O’Brien.)

CHAPTER Xlll.(Continued.) : Mr. Balfour’s first spring was at the combination on the Marquis of Lansdowne’s estate at Luggacurran. The ground was well chosen. The Marquis was a landowner of not illiberal traditions, and was possessed of wealth equal to carrying on a, prolonged campaign. The two tenants first aimed at were graziers paying rents of £750 and £I,OOO respectively, and consequently little likely to appeal to public sympathy either in Ireland or in England. How move the pity of the country for the fate of the first picked out for eviction, Mr. Denis Kilbride, whose homo and life were those of a country gentleman, and who, the charge went, was dishonestly trading .on the poverty of his mud-cabin neighbors? The plea was a plausible but an utterly false one. On the merits of the individual case, if Mr. Kilbride’s rent was the lordly one of £750, the official valuation which was generally accepted as the equivalent for a reasonable rent was only £450 — greatly®more than half the rackrent for which, in a year of desperate depression, he was expelled from his home and despoiled of his means of livelihood. His real offence, of course, was that he threw in his fortunes with those of his poorest co-tenants and thus deprived the rackrenters of their traditional resource of using their few wealthy rent-payers to make an easy prey of their more necessitous neighbors. This unbreakable solidarity between the most favored and the most defenceless, was, indeed, the vitalising principle of the Plan of Campaign, and with its amazing later development of an entire estate in Tipperary submitting to wholesale eviction out of sympathy with their brother-tenants of an estate in the County of Cork whom their landlord had exterminated, constituted the first daring experiment in the invention of that collective sympathetic strike which has since made the newer Trade Unionism irresistible in Britain. But this class solidarity * of the poor and the comparatively affluent seemed at that time a very shocking departure from well-bred righteousness, as we)ll as a capital opening for either breaking or discrediting the Plan of Campaign. Before the eviction army was set in motion negotiations for a friendly settlement, with our hearty concurrence, and, as I have reason to know, with the active spmpathy of Earl Spencer, had all but reached the point of an -agreement based upon an allround abatement substantially the same as was compulsorily decreed all over the district under the Unionists’ own Act of the next Session. It is no less certain that Lord Lansdowne’s agent, Mr. J. Townsend Trench —a man whose ancient family associations with the worst villanies of the Rent Office were now mellowed by the experiences of later years of growing popular powerwent to London with the determination to split, in the familiar phrase, the difference still existing. We shall probably never know what happened there, or how much importance is to be given to Mr. Townsend Trench’s numerous hints that his own counsels of peace had been overborne by the Chief Secretary’s (assurances of the most uncompromising -assistance in the enforcement of the law, and by . his intimation that any pact with the Plan of Campaign, at the outset of his new policy in Ireland, would be nothing short of a betrayal. The Land Agent returned, at -all events, to break off the negotiations and to let slip the dogs of war for -an eviction campaign, beginning with Mr. Kilbride as the tallest of the poppies. The expectation, perhaps, was that at sight of the evicting army he would think better of sacrificing his mansion and his broad acres, and that the enemies of the Plan would , open hostilities with a smashing initial

success. The calculation proved as fatuous as (all the rest. I never beheld a spectacle of finer, although heart-breaking self-sacrifice by the strong for the sake of the weak than that which met v my eyes when the tenant and the ladies of his family stood immovably by while the emergency men and their police coadjutors with ladders, hatchets, and crowbars were battering down their home, ‘ and gave up their last legal title to a property which was valued at £IO,OOO by the Estates . Commissioners, when, after many a year of deadly struggle, the wrong was at long last repaired and the home fires once more relighted. The blow was one to be sternly answered. The evicting landlord was the Governor-General of the free Dominion of Canada, one-third of whose population were of Irish blood. In the mingled pride and anguish of the eviction day, it was resolved that the evicted tenant and myself should carry the war into Canada ,and at Lord Lansdowne’s palace gates challenge him to trial before the free-born democracy under his rule for the wrong done in the distant Irish valley. This novel proof of the length of the arm of Ireland produced a startling effect in the English-speaking world on both sides of the ocean. Speechless was the indignation at the proposal to summon Canada to bring her own Governor-General to -account at the cry of,his pillaged and homeless Irish serfs; but those who were most scandalised at the thought of involving Canadian public opinion in the paltry quarrel of Ireland were mostly those who in after years hailed with transports of enthusiasm the not more altruistic intervention of the Armies of the young Dominion for the liberation of the interesting Tchecho-Slovaque and Yugo-Slav rebels of Austria, pud even of that more abstruse and coffee-colored brother-man, the King of the Hedjaz, As in the case of so many other aids to the power of democracy in the world, Ireland w-as the first to set the evample of calling in the virgin forces of Transatlantic public opinion for the defence of the oppressed in every clime. A much astuter way was taken by our professional defamers to whip up lions in our path. Our visit was cabled across as that of “Fenian assassins ’ for the purpose of instigating the murder of Lord Lansdowne, and before we were yet on the sea announcements that Lord Lansdowne was afraid to leave his palace and was guarded night and day by police and soldiers, lashed the Orange population of Ontario into a perfect blood-frenzy, and the whole Dominion began to ring with the demand that we should be summarily deported, if we landed!. ’ - • |, (To be continued.) . p„