Page:England's Jubilee Gift to Ireland.pdf/4

 injustice was done, and Ireland remained, of course, as hostile as ever, only learning wisdom in the choice of the weapons she employed. The suppressed Land League rose again as the National League, stronger than ever and more unassailable; and at last Gladstone, not too proud to learn from experience, proposed to give Ireland freedom and to permit her to cure her diseases in her own way. He fell in the attempt to use conciliation instead of force as remedy, and Lords Salisbury and Randolph Churchill reigned in his stead.

With the succession to power of the landlord party came the renewal of the struggle. Lord Randolph Churchill, as Leader of the House of Commons, pledged the whole power of the State to the support of the landlords in their exaction of rents, and the landlords, at once inspirited and revengeful, gave full play to their hatred of the Irish tenantry. Preparations were made for wholesale evictions; landlordism was triumphant at last. Then to meet the threatened evictions and to save the people from outrages that would madden them into reprisals, a wise and gentle man formulated the famous Plan of Campaign. By the adoption of this the whole tenantry on an estate was bound together; the rich tenants made common cause with the poor; a fair rent was always to be tendered to the landlord, and only on his refusal to accept it was to be lodged in the hands of trustees. A few "good landlords" voluntarily made reductions; many bad ones were driven into making them by the fear that if they did not yield some they would lose all; some bad ones held out. Prominent among these was Lord Clanricarde, a typical absentee landlord. Unknown by face to the tenantry on whose labor he lived; harsh and exacting in his demands; taking everything and giving nothing; deaf to every appeal for mercy and for pity; how can such a one be forced into decency save by some such plan as that adopted by his tenants? Under the old method a bullet would have been sent through his agent, and Lord Clanricarde would have been none the worse. Under the new plan not a hair of his agent's head was harmed, but Lord Clanricarde found his money bags unfilled. He was touched in his only vulnerable spot, his trousers pocket, and his tenants did well.

Naturally the landlords, helpless before this new development, cried to their own Government for aid. The first attack on the Plan of Campaign failed ignominiously. And then, as the ordinary law proved impotent to check it,