Some historical and global examples of tax resistance →
Ireland →
Land League
American anarchist Benjamin Ricketson Tucker was, briefly, a poll tax resister.
In he was imprisoned for failure to pay, and, in an outcome similar to that of Thoreau’s tax refusal, a friend eventually paid his fine and ended his experiment.
Tucker became dissatisfied with this tactic, and restricted himself thereafter to symbolic tax resistance — paying “under protest” and such.
Here’s something he wrote for his magazine, Liberty, about tax resistance in particular as part of a longer bit about the superiority of nonviolent resistance over violent resistance as a means to gain worthwhile ends:
“Edgeworth” makes appeal to me through Lucifer to know how I propose to “starve out Uncle Sam.”
Light on this subject he would “rather have than roast beef and plum pudding for dinner in sæculâ sæculorum.”
It puzzles him to know whether by the clause “resistance to taxation” on the “sphynx head of Liberty on ‘God and the State’ ” I mean that “true Anarchists should advertise their principles by allowing property to be seized by the sheriff and sold at auction, in order by such personal sacrifices to become known to each other as men and women of a common faith, true to that faith in the teeth of their interests and trustworthy for combined action.”
If I do mean this, he ventures to “doubt the policy of a test which depletes, not that enormous vampire, Uncle Sam, but our own little purses, so needful for our propaganda of ideas, several times a year, distrainment by the sheriff being in many parts of the country practically equivalent to tenfold taxes.”
If, on the other hand, I have in view a minority capable of “successfully withdrawing the supplies from Uncle Sam’s treasury,” he would like to inquire “how any minority, however respectable in numbers and intelligence, is to withstand the sheriff backed by the army, and to withhold tribute to the State.”
Fair and pertinent questions these, which I take pleasure in answering.
In the first place, then, the policy to be pursued by individual and isolated Anarchists is dependent upon circumstances.
I, no more than “Edgeworth,” believe in any foolish waste of needed material.
It is not wise warfare to throw your ammunition to the enemy unless you throw it from the cannon’s mouth.
But if you can compel the enemy to waste his ammunition by drawing his fire on some thoroughly protected spot; if you can, by annoying and goading and harassing him in all possible ways, drive him to the last resort of stripping bare his tyrannous and invasive purposes and put him in the attitude of a designing villain assailing honest men for purposes of plunder — there is no better strategy.
Let no Anarchist, then, place his property within reach of the sheriff’s clutch.
But some year, when he feels exceptionally strong and independent, when his conduct can impair no serious personal obligations, when on the whole he would a little rather go to jail than not, and when his property is in such shape that he can successfully conceal it, let him declare to the assessor property of a certain value, and then defy the collector to collect.
Or, if he have no property, let him decline to pay his poll tax.
The State will then be put to its trumps.
Of two things one — either it will let him alone, and then he will tell his neighbors all about it, resulting the next year in an alarming disposition on their part to keep their own money in their own pockets; or else it will imprison him, and then by the requisite legal processes he will demand and secure all the rights of a civil prisoner and live thus a decently comfortable life until the State shall get tired of supporting him and the increasing number of persons who will follow his example.
Unless, indeed, the State, in desperation, shall see fit to make its laws regarding imprisonment for taxes more rigorous, and then, if our Anarchist be a determined man, we shall find out how far a republican government, “deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed,” is ready to go to procure that “consent,” — whether it will stop at solitary confinement in a dark cell or join with the Czar of Russia in administering torture by electricity.
The farther it shall go the better it will be for Anarchy, as every student of the history of reform well knows.
Who can estimate the power for propagandism of a few cases of this kind, backed by a well-organized force of agitators without the prison walls?
So much, then, for individual resistance.
But, if individuals can do so much, what shall be said of the enormous and utterly irresistible power of a large and intelligent minority, comprising say one-fifth of the population in any given locality?
I conceive that on this point I need do no more than call “Edgeworth’s” attention to the wonderfully instructive history of the Land League movement in Ireland, the most potent and instantly effective revolutionary force the world has ever known so long as it stood by its original policy of “Pay No Rent,” and which lost nearly all its strength the day it abandoned that policy.
“Oh, but it did abandon it?”
“Edgeworth” will exclaim.
Yes, but why?
Because there the peasantry, instead of being an intelligent minority following the lead of principles, were an ignorant, though enthusiastic and earnest, body of men following blindly the lead of unscrupulous politicians like Parnell, who really wanted anything but the abolition of rent, but were willing to temporarily exploit any sentiment or policy that would float them into power and influence.
But it was pursued far enough to show that the British government was utterly powerless before it; and it is scarcely too much to say, in my opinion, that, had it been persisted in, there would not today be a landlord in Ireland.
It is easier to resist taxes in this country than it is to resist rent in Ireland; and such a policy would be as much more potent here than there as the intelligence of the people is greater, providing always that you can enlist in it a sufficient number of earnest and determined men and women.
If one-fifth of the people were to resist taxation, it would cost more to collect their taxes, or try to collect them, than the other four-fifths would consent to pay into the treasury.
The force needed for this bloodless fight Liberty is slowly but surely recruiting, and sooner or later it will organize for action.
Then, Tyranny and Monopoly, down goes your house!
This brought to my attention that I’ve pretty much ignored the topic of rent strikes here at The Picket Line.
I haven’t given this much thought, but it seems to me that there is probably a class of rent strike that is essentially a variety of tax resistance.
For instance, a case in which the powers-that-be have granted legal ownership of land to well-connected people, without regard for the people currently occupying the land.
Isn’t this just a variety of taxation — that is, a government authorizing some people to regularly rob others under cover of law?
This article, which was reprinted in the Plattsburgh Sentinel () trumpets the rent strike called in Ireland against the English landlords:
The Land League have issued a manifesto declaring that only one constitutional weapon now remains in the hands of the League.
It is the strongest, swiftest and most irresistible of all.
We hesitate to advise our fellow countrymen to employ it until the savage lawlessness of the English government has provoked a crisis in which we must either consent to see the Irish tenant farmers disarmed of their organization and laid once more prostrate at the feet of the landlords, and every murmur of Irish public opinion suppressed with an armed hand, or appeal to our countrymen to at once resort to the only means left in their hands of bringing this false and brutal government to its senses.
Fellow countrymen, the hour to try your souls and redeem your pledges has arrived.
The executive committee of the National Land League is forced to abandon its policy of testing the land act, and feels bound to advise the tenant farmers in Ireland from this day forth to pay no rents under any circumstances to their landlords until the government relinquishes the present system of terrorism, and restores the constitutional rights of the people.
Do not be daunted by the removal of your leaders.
Do not let yourselves be intimidated by threats of military violence.
It is as lawful to refuse to pay rents as it is to receive them.
Against the passive resistance of the entire population the military power has no weapon.
The funds will be poured out unstintedly to all who may endure eviction in the course of the struggle.
Our exiled brothers in America may be relied on to contribute, if necessary, as many millions in money as they have thousands, to starve out the landlords and bring the English tenantry to its knees.
You have only to show you are not unworthy of their boundless sacrifices; one more crowning struggle for your land, your homes, your lives, a struggle in which you have all the memories of your race, all the hopes of your kindred, and all the sacrifices of your imprisoned brothers.
American anarchist Benjamin Ricketson Tucker praised this strike in an article for Liberty, saying that the Land League was “the most potent and instantly effective revolutionary force the world has ever known so long as it stood by its original policy of ‘Pay No Rent,’ and which lost nearly all its strength the day it abandoned that policy.”
A while back, I started looking for examples of ways tax resisters have organized mutual aid pacts to help diffuse the effects of government retaliation.
In the course of doing the research, though, I started collecting examples instead of a larger variety of collective projects resisters and their sympathizers have used in support of tax resistance.
Here are some of the examples I found:
Tax resister “insurance”
For instance, the Breton Association in
France, which organized to “form a common stock or fund… to indemnify the
subscribers for any expense they may be put to by their refusal to pay any
illegal contributions imposed upon the public.”
Another example was the Association
of Real Estate Taxpayers in
Chicago, which formed a cooperative legal fund to fight an offensive legal
battle against the tax.
American war tax resisters today can use the War Tax Resisters Penalty
Fund to defray penalties and interest seized by the
IRS.
The fund is raised as-needed by asking subscribers to contribute an equal
amount.
The oath of the Regulator tax resistance movement in the North Carolina
colony bound its signers to “bear an equal share in paying and making up
[the] loss” if “any of our company be put to expense or under any
confinement.”
Communes, collectives, and co-housing projects.
Some tax resisters have formed mutual support communities.
Whiteway Colony
was founded to try to live up to Tolstoyan ideals. The members of the
Bijou and
Agape communities live below a taxable
income so as to avoid paying taxes.
Supporting resisters as an employer
Some members of the Restored Israel of
Yahweh ran a construction business and agreed not to withhold federal
taxes from the wages of those employees who were fellow-members and who were
resisting taxes.
Vivien Kellems refused to withhold
taxes from her employees’ wages, saying: “They are all free American
citizens, thoroughly capable of performing all of the duties and
responsibilities of citizenship for themselves. And so, from this day, I am
not collecting nor paying their income taxes for them.”
Charles Kanjama recently urged Kenyans
to begin a tax resistance campaign, and said that to foil pay-as-you-earn
withholding, “participating employers and employees can enter into a
voluntary contract to convert monthly employment into quarterly or
half-yearly employment, thus effectively delaying tax liability for several
months.”
British nonconformists and women’s suffrage activists a century ago also
used this tactic. Auctions became rallies, with speeches and banners and
crowds that could number in the thousands. Supporters would pack the auction
house and refuse to leave their seats. On some occasions, violence broke
out. In some cases, auctioneers refused to handle goods that had been seized
for tax refusal.
Simply boycotting the auctions and refusing to buy seized goods is one way
communities offer support. It was part of the Quaker “Discipline” to refuse
to buy seized goods. When Valentine Byler’s horse was seized for non-payment
of the social security tax, “no Amish came to bid on the horses and, due to
a lack of bidders, they went for a good price, with the harnesses ‘thrown
in’ by the auctioneer.”
Pay cash so as not to leave a paper trail
Jessica Ramer and a
Claire
Files contributor brought this idea up. If you pay in cash
whenever you can, you give the recipient the opportunity to decide whether
or not to declare the income.
Cash tips are easy to under-report. I asked about that recently and was
told that most people pay with credit card/debit card and that the
government now uses a percentage method for tips. They look at the charged
meals, look at the number of total meals served, and then look at the
charged tips to figure out how much cash tips you received.
(100 meals served. 50 paid with card, tipping 15%. the government
calculates 15% from 100 meals even if cash tips are only 10%)
You can help out by tipping more when paying with cash or better yet, when
you pay with card, put 1% tip on it and put the rest out as cash. I even
leave a note for the server saying “this is your money, don’t
tell your boss, or the government. share it with the buss boy if that is
the policy.” This will help lower the average tip figures, but
still give the nice server what they have earned.
Use barter to avoid taxable/seizable transactions
Karl Hess found people willing to barter with him as he was dodging
IRS
seizures:
The other day I welded up a fish-smoking rack for a family in Washington,
D.C. It will earn me a year’s supply
of smoked fish. At about the same time, I helped a friend dig a foundation.
He’ll help me lay the concrete blocks for a workshop. Part of my pay for a
lecture at a New England college was the use of the school’s welding shop,
to make some metal sculptures. Three such sculptures have paid my
attorney’s fees in maintaining the tax resistance which is the reason
barter has become such an integral part of my life.
Manufacture and sell goods as alternatives to taxed products
Before the American Revolution, colonists who opposed Britain’s economic
control boycotted British products and began to produce homespun cloth,
alternatives to tea, and so forth. Gandhi’s independence campaign in India
made the wearing and production of homespun cloth central to the opposition,
and the Salt March was focused on the illegal production of untaxed,
non-foreign-monopoly salt.
An example today is home-brewed beer (which beats the excise tax on
alcoholic beverages).
Buycotts and boycotts that favor resisting businesses
One report from World War Ⅰ-era America noted that this was a technique used
by those who opposed the “Liberty Bonds”:
Efforts to prevent banks from handling the bonds have centered chiefly in
Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Missouri and
Oklahoma. The President of a Wisconsin bank has advised the Treasury that
his depositors, mostly Germans, or of German parentage, have withdrawn
many thousands of dollars from his bank because he aided the First Liberty
Loan.
These depositors, he added, had taken their accounts to two rival banks on
the understanding that those banks would not aid the second Liberty Loan.
The two banks, he reported, were not aiding the loan in any way.
Many banks have felt the pressure of German influence in this propaganda,
reports indicate. So pronounced was the movement that the States of
Minnesota, North and South Dakota, and Montana recently decided that they
would withdraw State funds from any bank which did not support the loan.
Social boycotts / shunning / noncooperation with tax collectors
Adolf Hausrath writes of Roman-occupied Judaea,
The people knew how to torment these officials of the Roman customs with
the petty cruelty which ordinary people develop with irreconcilable
persistency, whenever they believe this persistency to be due to their
moral indignation. In consequence of the theocratic scruples about the
duty of paying taxes, the tax-gatherers were declared to be unclean and
half Gentile.… among the Jews the words
“tax-gatherersand sinners,”“tax-gatherers and Gentiles,”“tax-gatherers and harlots,”
“tax-gatherers, murderers and robbers,” and similar insulting
combinations, were not only ready on the tongue and familiar, but were
accepted as theocratically identical in meaning. Thrust out from all
social intercourse, the tax-gatherers became more and more the pariahs of
the Jewish world. With holy horror did the Pharisee sweep past the lost
son of Israel who had sold himself to the Gentile for the vilest purpose,
and avoid the places which his sinful breath contaminated. Their
testimony was not accepted by Jewish tribunals. It was forbidden to sit
at table with them or eat of their bread. But their money-chests
especially were the summary of all uncleanness and the chief object of
pious horror, since their contents consisted of none but unlawful
receipts, and every single coin betokened a breach of some theocratic
regulation. To exchange their money or receive alms from them might
easily put a whole house in the condition of being unclean, and
necessitate many purifications. From these relations of the tax-officials
to the rest of the population, it can be readily understood that only the
refuse of Judaism undertook the office.
A social boycott of tax collectors was practiced in the years before
the American revolution. John Adams wrote:
At Philadelphia, the Heart-and-Hand Fire Company has expelled Mr. Hughes,
the stamp man for that colony. The freemen of Talbot county, in Maryland,
have erected a gibbet before the door of the court-house, twenty feet
high, and have hanged on it the effigies of a stamp informer in chains,
in terrorem till the Stamp Act shall be repealed; and
have resolved, unanimously, to hold in utter contempt and abhorrence
every stamp officer, and every favorer of the Stamp Act, and to
“have no communication with any such person, not even to speak to
him, unless to upbraid him with his baseness.” So triumphant is the
spirit of liberty everywhere.
Harassment of tax collectors was a signature action of the Whiskey
Rebellion. An early published resolution of the rebels read in part:
[W]hereas some men may be found amongst us, so far lost to every sense of
virtue and feeling for the distresses of this country, as to accept
offices for the collection of the duty:
Resolved, therefore, That in future we will consider such persons as
unworthy of our friendship; have no intercourse or dealings with them;
withdraw from them every assistance, and withhold all the comforts of life
which depend upon those duties that as men and fellow citizens we owe to
each other; and upon all occasions treat them with that contempt they
deserve; and that it be, and it is hereby most earnestly recommended to
the people at large to follow the same line of conduct towards them.
Tax collectors were tarred-and-feathered in America, both before and after
the revolution — the violent expulsion of tax collectors was a frequent
technique of the Whiskey rebels. Tax collectors have been the targets of
violent reprisal at many times and in many places. Because of this,
governments have often had to pay high salaries — or, frequently,
percentages of the take — to convince collectors to take on the job, which
only increases the resentment of those being collected from.
During the French Revolution and its aftermath, customs houses were burned
by mobs, tax rolls were destroyed, excise collectors were made to renounce
their jobs and then were run out of town — or in some cases killed.
The first Boer War was triggered when an armed group of Boers seized a
wagon that was being auctioned after it was distrained for resisted taxes.
The Whiskey rebels threatened to destroy the stills of those distillers
who complied in paying the excise tax.
Boycotts / social boycotts of non-resisters
If a tax resisting movement is large enough, it may be able to dissuade
people from paying taxes through boycotts or social boycotts of people
who are tax compliant. In Massachusetts, a group enforced a boycott of
taxed British imports by declaring that
…we further promise and engage, that we will not purchase any goods
of any persons who, preferring their own interest to that of the public,
shall import merchandise from Great Britain, until a general importation
takes place; or of any trader who purchases his goods of such importer:
and that we will hold no intercourse, or connection, or correspondence,
with any person who shall purchase goods of such importer, or retailer;
and we will hold him dishonored, an enemy to the liberties of his country,
and infamous, who shall break this agreement.
Maintain solidarity in the face of divide-and-conquer tactics
In
Germany, the government attempted to break a tax resistance movement by
offering to moderate its enforcement efforts against people who could show
that they had limited means. Karl Marx, who was promoting the resistance at
the time, saw this as a divide-and-conquer tactic:
The intention of the Ministry is only too clear. It wants to divide the
democrats; it wants to make the peasants and workers count themselves as
non-payers owing to lack of means to pay, in order to split them from
those not paying out of regard for legality, and thereby deprive the latter
of the support of the former. But this plan will fail; the people realizes
that it is responsible for solidarity in the refusal to pay taxes, just as
previously it was responsible for solidarity in payment of them.
Keep a record of the “sufferings” of resisters
The Quakers responded to persecution by keeping careful records of
individuals who had suffered thereby. In the archives of Quaker meetings,
you can find lists of people who had resisted militia taxes or tithes for
establishment church ministers, and what property was distrained by which
tax collector.
Sign petitions and public advertisements, engage in public protests
When the American Amish were trying to resist compulsory enrollment in the
social security system, 14,000 of them signed a petition to Congress.
During the Vietnam War, public advertisements were taken out by tax
resisters. In , for instance,
448 writers and editors put a full-page ad in the New
York Post declaring their intention to refuse to pay taxes for the
Vietnam War. The signatories included James Baldwin, Noam Chomsky, Philip K.
Dick, Betty Friedan, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Goodman, Paul Krassner, Norman
Mailer, Henry Miller, Tillie Olsen, Grace Paley, Thomas Pynchon, Susan
Sontag, Benjamin Spock, Gloria Steinem, Norman Thomas, Hunter S. Thompson,
Kurt Vonnegut, and Howard Zinn.
Protests, rallies, pickets, and the like have been a part of many
large-scale tax resistance campaigns.
Hold resisters’ property as an informal trustee
Some resisters who are vulnerable to property seizure find sympathetic
friends who are willing to hold the resisters’ property in their
names as a way of foiling seizure. Some war tax resister
alternative funds function
partially as “warehouse banks” that hold deposits of war tax resisters.
When a frustrated tax collector seized Ammon Hennacy’s protest signs
as he was picketing the
IRS
office — claiming that he planned to auction them off to pay Hennacy’s tax
debt — a friend of Hennacy helped him make new signs, each one marked “this
sign is the personal property of Joseph Craigmyle.”
Keep in contact with resisters and express support
After the press reported that Valentine Byler’s horse had been seized by the
IRS
as he was plowing his field, he got letters of support from all across
the country.
Form groups for mutual support & coordinated decision-making
Here there are too many examples to list.
Give financial aid to evicted rent strikers
When the Irish Land League launched its rent strike, it claimed that
“The funds will be poured out unstintedly to all who may endure
eviction in the course of the struggle. Our exiled brothers in America may
be relied on to contribute, if necessary, as many millions in money as they
have thousands, to starve out the landlords and bring the English tenantry
to its knees.”
Comfort and aid imprisoned resisters
The trick to supporting imprisoned tax resisters is to respect their real
needs and desires. When “someone interfered,” as Thoreau put
it, and paid his taxes in order to spring him from his night in jail, they
thought wrongly that they were doing Thoreau a favor, “for they
thought that my chief desire was to stand the other side of that stone wall.”
Juanita Nelson tells of the support she received in jail, where she had
been taken in her bathrobe from her home. Her supporters took the time to
learn how to support her in a way that was appropriate to her resistance:
Two fellow pacifists, one of them also a tax refuser, had been permitted
to come to me, since I would not go to them. I asked them what was
uppermost in my mind, what they’d do about getting properly dressed?
They said that this was something I would have to settle for myself. I
sensed that they thought it the better part of wisdom and modesty for me
to be dressed for my appearance in court. They were more concerned about
the public relations aspect of getting across the witness than I was. They
were also genuinely concerned, I knew, about making their actions truly
nonviolent, cognizant of the other person’s feelings, attitudes and
readiness. I was shaken enough to concede that I would like to have my
clothes at hand, in case I decided I would feel more at ease in them. The
older visitor, a dignified man with white hair, agreed to go for the
clothes in a taxicab.
They left, and on their heels came another visitor. She had been told that
in permitting her to come up, the officials were treating me with more
courtesy than I was according them. It was her assessment that the chief
deputy was hopeful that someone would be able to hammer some sense into me
and was willing to make concessions in that hope. But he had misjudged
the reliance he might place in her — she was not as critical as the
men. She did not know what she would do, but she thought she might wish to
have the strength and the audacity to carry through in the vein in which I
had started.
And she said. “You know, you look like a female Gandhi in that robe.
You look, well, dignified.”
That was my first encouragement. Everyone else had tended to make me feel
like a fool of the first water, had confirmed fears I already had on that
score. My respect and admiration for Gandhi, though not uncritical, was
deep. And if I in any way resembled him in appearance I was prepared to
try to emulate a more becoming state of mind. I reminded myself, too, that
I had on considerably more than the loincloth in which Gandhi was able to
greet kings and statesmen with ease. I need not be unduly perturbed about
wearing a robe into the presence of his honor.
Support the families of imprisoned resisters
When Gandhi was preparing the groundwork for a tax refusal campaign in
India, he noted that the Indian National Congress “should undertake
to feed the wives and families of those who may be imprisoned.”
Study the law, give legal support
When Elizabeth Cady Stanton was contemplating a tax resistance campaign for
women’s suffrage in the United States, she noted, “One thing is
certain, this course will necessarily involve a good deal of litigation,
and we shall need lawyers of our own sex whose intellects, sharpened by
their interests, shall be quick to discover the loopholes of retreat.”
Combine redirected taxes for dramatic charity giveaways
Larry Rosenwald wrote, of this technique, “To sit on the Grants and
Loans Committee of New England War Tax Resistance, and to dispense the
interest on refused taxes to a youth group in Chelsea, a video for cable
television on United States involvement in Central America, and a
people’s garden in Roxbury is to be reminded of the ideal community,
however blurred and fragmented, that war tax resistance is done on behalf
of, in the hope of helping to make it clear and whole.”
Can you think of any I’ve missed?
On , Thomas Condon, an Irish member of parliament, gave a speech in Mitchelstown advocating tax resistance.
This was in the wake of the “Mitchelstown Massacre” in which police fired on a meeting of the Irish Land League, which had been organizing rent strikes (a variety of tax resistance also) against absentee English landlords.
He was subsequently arrested and imprisoned for one month for inciting tax resistance.
Here’s what got him in trouble:
You have heard from Mr. O’Brien and Mr. Healy that a tax of £1,000 is being levied off the barony for his unconstitutional conduct in being the first to lead the baton party that broke through your meeting on .
I hope the men of the barony of Condons and Clongibbons will do in the future as they have done in the past — namely, organize themselves to make the collection of that tax as difficult and expensive for these landlords and for the taxgatherers.
All this may be illegal.
I do not know whether it is or not, and, furthermore, do not care.
It is quite possible that you will have policemen out in a day or two, but I will ask you to feed yourselves and your families before you part with this money for Constable Leahy.
It is one of the most infamous acts that was over perpetrated by a Grand Jury.
It was not out of love for Leahy, but it was poor revenge for the triumph that you had over them and their class on the Kingston property; not that one shilling will come out of their own pockets.
If you contrast their action in the Grand Jury room in Cork with their action in the country you can see the motive that actuates the Grand Jury of the County of Cork in levying this infamous tax.
I hope that you will send back a message to the Grand Jury of Cork that by the time this tax is collected it will cost them ten times more than the original tax levied.
I have not the slightest doubt but that you will make the collection of this tax impossible, and that before a few months they will have reason to remember it.
This is no time to be mealy-mouthed in speaking on these subjects.
Edward Gibson, the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, explained:
It was an offence so obvious and so patent that the laws of no country could exist if words recommending that taxes and rates should not be paid were allowed to pass without notice, and if such language was not to be punishable the laws of no country would be able to keep civil society together.
The advice of Mr. Condon had, unfortunately, been taken, and efforts were being made to make the collection of that tax, as Mr. Condon had advised, as difficult as possible.
He would not refer to that matter further than to say that if noble Lords looked at the Irish Press they would at once see that the advice was being acted on.
Placards had been posted within the last few days actually quoting portions of the speech just read, showing the danger of using such language and the necessity of bringing those persons who employed it to the test of legal examination before properly constituted tribunals like those which existed in the present case.
In , The North American Review carried an article by Charles Stewart Parnell in which he explained the situation in Ireland to American readers.
In the course of this, he covered the rent strike tactic.
Excerpts:
…I have as yet seen no reason to believe that the Irish are incapable of gaining eventually all the reforms they desire, even the last and noblest one of all, the restoration of their national autonomy.
Parnell says that English “absentee landlords and corporations” had been trying to run the Irish off their land, and indeed out of Ireland, in an attempt to make Ireland the livestock-grazing pasture of England (a project of diminishing returns, as America was flooding the market with cheaper meat).
He says emigration of the suffering Irish is not the solution to their troubles, but that they should stay and fight for their rights.
He then goes on to explain the theory and actions of the Land League:
The objects of the League, as announced at the public meeting at which it was first formed, are: 1. To promote organization among the tenant farmers; 2. To defend those threatened with eviction for refusing to pay extortionate rents; 3. To facilitate the working of the Bright clauses of the Land Act; 4. To obtain such a reform of the laws relating to land as will enable every tenant to become the owner of his holding, by paying a fair rent for a limited number of years.
“It only remains, then“ says O’Connor Power, in his article on the “Land Agitation,” in the “Nineteenth Century,” for , “to push forward with the utmost energy those minor reforms framed to mitigate the evils of the existing system, such as the abolition of all artificial restrictions on the sale and transfer of land, the abolition of the laws of primogeniture and entail, the more efficient working of the Bright clauses of the Land Act, and the reclamation and distribution of the waste lands, while keeping steadily in view the main object of emancipating the entire agricultural population from the power of landlordism.”
Parnell said this “main object” would make tenants into farm owners by fiat, by breaking up the landholdings of the landlords in a manner similar to that in which the King of Prussia emancipated the Prussian serf/peasantry in .
I have said thus much to show the direction of the objects and ideas of the Land-Leaguers.
I must now add that the cause which most immediately gave birth to the Land League, as it at present stands, was the refusal of the majority of Irish landlords to reduce their rents, [in] spite of the rapidly approaching famine.
The English landlords, always less grasping than Irish landlords, had quietly reduced their rents in England all round, months before, thus avoiding any complications with their tenants.
Not so the Irish landlords.
They saw, of course, as well as the English ones did, that the harvest would be a failure, but, having always been accustomed to take the last pound of flesh, they thought they could do it again.
This time, however, thanks to the manly attitude taken by the tenants, they have been disappointed.
Undoubtedly if [the landlords] had been left to work their own sweet will, if the tenant-farmers had not been organized for the purpose of self-preservation, their programme — their foolish, short-sighted programme, looking at it merely from the point of view of their own interests — would have been carried out.
On the part of the people, there would have been a resort to assassination; some landlords, agents, and bailiffs would probably have been shot; the Irish would have been overwhelmed with torrents of denunciation, and an immense tide of emigration would have already set in, sweeping away all the best and most vigorous of our people; while the scenes of starvation in Ireland itself, bad as they are, would have been intensified a hundred-fold.
If these disasters have been in a great measure averted, we think we can claim that it has been owing, directly and indirectly, to the Land League.
This body has, from the beginning, taken up the position that, with the certain prospect of famine before him, the duty of the tenant was first to preserve the lives of himself and his family.
It was, therefore, necessary for him to keep as much money as would support him and his family till the next harvest, and only to pay to the landlord, as rent, what he had left after doing so.
After teaching the tenant that he must save his own life and the lives of his children, the next object of the Land League was to show him how to do this.
Its advice to the farmer, “Keep a firm grip on your homestead,” has become proverbial.
How did it propose that the farmer should obey?
The League calculated on the landlords at last perceiving that their best chances lay in keeping their tenants, even at half rents, rather than in evicting them, and going into the unprofitable business of grazing; for, not being able to get any tenants to fill the places of those evicted, that was the only resource left them.
The action of such a large majority of landlords, in reducing their rents, after the League had been formed, and the system of passive resistance fairly established, shows that they did finally recognize the situation, and that they determined to make the best of it.
Parnell says that even though turning tenanted land into livestock-grazing pasture is no longer profitable the way it used to be, landlords are still encouraging Irish emigration as a way of reducing the relative political power of the Irish.
[But t]he Land League saw through this design, and defeated it by their advice to the people to resist being compelled to emigrate.
It told them to refuse to pay extortionate rents — that is, rents they could not pay and at the same time feed their families; it told them to refuse to leave their homes unless forcibly ejected, so that winter might not find them without a shelter to their heads; and it told them to refuse to rent farms from which other tenants had been evicted.
By compliance with this advice twelve millions of dollars have been kept in the pockets of the tenantry, and the famine has been diminished by that amount.
The simple piece of advice, “Keep a good grip on your homesteads,” has thus done more in staving off the famine than all the relief funds put together.
It has also saved the lives of landlords and agents; it has roused the people to a true sense of the power they can wield by comparatively peaceable means; it has brought many landlords to their senses; it will end, we believe, by bringing them all to their senses.
Finally, it has brought the two greatest statesmen of England, Gladstone and John Bright, to a perception of how much yet remains to be done to Ireland.
And not only these two, but innumerable minor thinkers now acknowledge that an immense deal must yet be done before Ireland can be satisfied.
It is useless to say that telling the tenants to pay no rents in a famine year, unless they get a sufficient reduction to enable them to live, is communistic and revolutionary.
It is no more communistic than to compel the owner of a private hoard of provisions on board a wreck to share it with his starving companions.
The preservation of property is secondary to the preservation of life.
Where a whole community is in danger from the selfish action of a small minority, this axiom applies with full force.
Parnell then recounts the case of Prince Edward Island, which had until recently been, like Ireland, under British law.
In , the Island’s legislature broke up the Island’s landholdings (which had largely been arbitrarily awarded by the Crown) and compelled their sale to the tenants.
Parnell quotes a commentator:
“Frequently, as in Ireland to-day, the people forcibly resisted the collection of rents; and on one occasion troops were transported to the island to suppress the disturbance.
Thus, for a century almost, did the struggling people protest against the wrongs under which they were suffering, …the landlords frustrated every attempt at redress… But the end came” — the compulsory land-purchase act of .
A New York World dispatch from concerning “the condition of Ireland” included this note:
It seems that under an old law the clergy of the Established Church are entitled to what are called “extraordinary tithes,” which are collected upon the hop crop.
The hop-growers, feeling these tithes to be an imposition, have lately been resisting them; have refused to pay them and have, when their property has been distrained by law to satisfy them, held meetings at which the law has been denounced in no measured terms.
Every one I spoke to upon the subject, while in some cases not agreeing that the hop-growers were in the right, conceded at once that they had gone to work in the right and constitutional way to bring about an inquiry.
Now, when an Englishman can get a Parliamentary inquiry he is satisfied that he has taken a great step in the direction of right, and in this belief he is correct because if there be an abuse and the attention of Parliament be called to it it is generally righted.
It will probably strike you, as it did me, that the action of the hop growers in this case in holding meetings and in refusing to pay the tithes was precisely similar to that of the Irish in holding meetings and refusing to pay rents.
In the one case the action was approved as being constitutional, but in the other the tone of the English press is to the last degree denunciatory.
People will be less reluctant to take risks in a tax resistance campaign if
they know other people are willing to share those risks. One way of providing
this sort of reassurance is for resisters to join together in a mutual
insurance plan, so that if the government takes legal action against a
resister, or retaliates against them in some other way, they won’t have to
bear these consequences alone.
Today I’ll review some examples of how a variety of tax resistance campaigns
have created mutual insurance plans to protect resisters.
War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund
The War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund
reimburses American war tax resisters who have penalties & interest
seized by the
IRS.
The fund is operated by a team of resisters and sympathizers, and has hundreds
of subscribers:
In a core group of 83 people across the
country decided we could easily share $463.14 in penalties and interest
incurred by a few military tax resisters who appealed to the war tax
resistance community for help. The more people we could recruit to shoulder
the penalties and interest of resisters, the lighter the burden for everyone.
With the modest help we could provide, conscientious resisters were able to
keep on keeping on.
The penalty fund had the added benefit of making us all tax resisters, not
just those who withheld all or a portion of their income taxes. The base list
of supporters has been as high as 800 people sharing the weight. In nearly
every appeal, at least 200 people respond, usually more. In all we’ve paid
out about $250,000 to help resisters stay in the struggle.
Resisters who have had money seized by the
IRS
send the fund documentation showing how much of the seizure was the result
of interest and penalties, and then the fund sends out an appeal to its
members to help reimburse the cost:
We divide the total amount for all resisters by the number of active names on
the membership list to arrive at a “share.” We then send out an appeal to
both actives and inactive members. Each contributor pays all of a share or
whatever amount she can afford. Some pay more than a share. If we collect 75
percent of the total we ask for, each resister gets 75 percent of the amount
they requested. We cannot promise that we will collect the total amount
requested; usually, however, we can reimburse between 50% and 80% of each
appeal.
I have personal experience with this mutual insurance plan. In
the
IRS
seized some bank accounts of mine to recover taxes I had refused to pay. This
included $813 in interest and penalties. I applied to the War Tax Resisters
Penalty Fund, which sent me a check for $649 from the amount the subscribers
to the fund pledged.
Irish Land League
When the
National
Land League launched a rent strike targeting English absentee landlords in
Ireland in , it made sure resisters knew
it would have their backs if the landlords tried to evict them. The leaders
of the League issued a rent strike manifesto from Kilmainham Jail that
declared:
If you only act together in the spirit to which within the last two years
you have countless times pledged your vows, they can no more evict a whole
nation than they can imprison them.
The funds of the National Land League will be poured out unstintingly for the
support of all who may endure eviction in the course of the struggle. Our
exiled brothers in America may be relied upon to contribute if necessary as
many millions of money as they have contributed thousands to starve out
landlordism and bring English tyranny to its knees.
One of the ways this played out was for evicted tenants to be temporarily
put up, along with their livestock if any, on the property of unevicted
tenants and sympathetic landowners, in what came to be called “Land League
Villages.” Each family was given a small monthly allowance from the Land
League.
Dublin Water Charge Strike
In , the resistance campaign against the
water charge in Dublin initiated a mutual insurance fund. One of the campaign
leaders recalls:
Obviously the council/government tactic was to try to individualise their
intimidation. By summonsing individuals to court maybe they could bypass the
mass participation that the protests against disconnections had seen. The
campaign immediately took a decision that when any individual was summonsed
to court, we would turn up and contest every case — and that we would turn up
in force. It was at this time that we made a decision which would prove
crucial to the success of the campaign. We decided to initiate a membership
of the campaign at £2 per household. This money would go into a warchest to
pay legal fees so that no individual would be left facing a legal bill. The
idea that the individuals being taken to court were representing all of us
was paramount. Within weeks 2,500 households had paid the £2 membership fee,
and within 12 months there were over 10,000 paid-up households making the
campaign without doubt the biggest to have existed in decades.
Breton Association
When Charles Ⅹ of France attempted to bypass the legislature and enact his own
taxes in , French liberals in the Breton
Association organized tax resistance and created a fund to defray the costs of
any tax resisters who were prosecuted. By the terms of the Association’s
manifesto:
We declare… [t]o subscribe individually for ten francs… This subscription
will form a common stock or fund for all Brittany, destined to indemnify the
subscribers for any expense they may be put to by their refusal to pay any
illegal contributions imposed upon the public…
And this is how the fund was to be administered:
[Elected procurators are to] receive the subscriptions, to afford indemnities
conformably to the [section quoted above], at the request of any subscriber
prosecuted for the payment of illegal contributions; to sue in his name…
for justice against the exactors by all possible means allowed by law…
War of the Regulation
The Regulator movement, a tax resistance rebellion in pre-American Revolution
North Carolina, had an oath that members took that committed each of them to
come to the aid of any others who might be arrested or whose property was
being seized for nonpayment:
I will, with the aid of other sufficient help, go and take, if in my power,
from said officer, and return to the party from whom taken; and in case any
one concerned should be imprisoned, or under arrest, or otherwise confined,
or if his estate, or any part thereof, by reason or means of joining this
company of Regulators, for refusing to comply with the extortionate demands
of unlawful tax gatherers, that I will immediately exert my best endeavors to
raise as many of said subscribers as will be force sufficient, and, if in my
power, I will set the said person at liberty…
The oath also created a mutual insurance pledge:
I do further promise and swear that if, in case this, our scheme, should be
broken or otherwise fail, and should any of our company be put to expense or
under any confinement, that I will bear an equal share in paying and making
up said loss to the sufferer.
Reformed Israel of Yahweh
Members of the small Christian group called the Reformed Israel of Yahweh
were, like its founder, conscientious objectors to military taxation. When
some of the members of the group were convicted on tax evasion charges, the
Reformed Israel of Yahweh organization paid their fines.
Pacific Yearly Meeting
A committee of the collection of American Quaker congregations known as the
Pacific Yearly Meeting administers something it calls “the Fund for Concerns:”
Its purpose is to assist members and attenders of Monthly Meetings to follow
individual leadings arising from peace, social order, or spiritual concerns.
… Up to $100 per fiscal year per person will be available to help with the
interest and penalty expenses of war tax resisters who are members or regular
attenders of a Monthly Meeting. The Monthly Meeting must indicate approval
and provide matching funds.
New York Yearly Meeting
During the Vietnam War, the New York Yearly Meeting advocated war tax
resistance and “promised financial help through special committees if [Quaker
resisters] changed jobs or refused to pay taxes in protest against the war.”
Papuan Courier
In 1919, Papua, which had been a territory occupied and run by the German
Empire until World War Ⅰ when Australia took over, began to agitate against
taxation without representation, and many people refused to pay.
The Papuan Courier, which was sympathetic to the
tax resisters,
…as evidence of its bona fides on the question, has decided, to form a fund
for the defence of any resident who may by victimised, persecuted, or
prosecuted for failure to pay the tax, and to that end we open the list with
a contribution of Five Guineas.
Tithe War
In , Irish Catholics rebelled
against paying government-mandated tithes to the Anglican church. In this
case, the Catholic church itself provided some insurance to the resisters.
The Anglican archbishop Richard Whately complained:
Every possible legal evasion has been resorted to to prevent the incumbent
from obtaining his due. A parish purse has been raised to meet law expenses
for this purpose, and the result has been that in most instances nothing
whatever, in others a very small proportion of the arrears, has been
recovered. … [One Anglican clergyman] instituted a tithe-suit which was
decided in his favour; but, instead of receiving the amount, he was met by an
appeal to the High Court of Delegates, and is informed that a continued
resistance to the utmost extremity of the law is to be supported by a parish
purse.
Addio-Pizzo Movement
In , a number of individuals and businesses
opposed to paying mafia protection money began to use a number of techniques
to interrupt the payments and to support those resisters whom the mafia was
threatening with reprisals. The mayor of Palermo, Diego Cammarata, pledged
€50,000 to assist merchants who had been victims of extortion.
Peacemakers
The group “Peacemakers,” which launched the modern American war tax resistance
movement , had a mutual
insurance component from the beginning:
Peacemakers at the Ohio cell… established the Peacemaker Sharing Fund, a
mutual aid plan designed to insure aid to dependents of imprisoned
Peacemakers and to help finance group projects. During the Vietnam war, the
sharing fund became the main vehicle for donations to meet the needs of war
resisters’ families.
Penalty Sharing Community
The Iowa Peace Network maintains a mailing list of persons who have made a
commitment to the Penalty Sharing Community
to share in the penalties assessed to individuals and families who have
chosen to resist war taxes or have participated in civil disobedience or
non-violent direct action. When a request for assistance is received, a
mailing is sent out which explains the resister’s situation and the amount of
money needed. For example, if the resister was assessed a $300.00 penalty,
each of the persons in the Community would pay an equal portion of the
$300.00. Thus if there were 200 people in the Community, each would pay
$1.50. The Iowa Peace Network will also add into the amount requested its
costs for printing and mailing. Such costs have proven to be minimal.
Pioneer Valley War Tax Resisters
Members of the Pioneer Valley War Tax Resisters redirected their federal taxes
into an “alternative fund” that served partially as an escrow account, and
partially as a way of redirecting some of the money to charitable
organizations. Part of the fund was reserved to help defray any legal costs
incurred by members in the course of their resistance.
“New Rush” Resisters
White miners at the “New Rush” in Kimberly, South Africa, voted in
to form “a Defence League and Protection
Association… not to assail the Government, but to protect individuals if
assailed unrighteously by the Government.” The pledge of the association said
in part:
I shall to the utmost of my power, with purse and person, protect any and
every officer and member of the League against coercion or consequences of
what nature soever arising out of the action necessitated by this pledge.
The pledge had a clause that made it binding when it would be signed by 400
men, whereupon:
The Government will be defied if they dare to touch a single claim for
non-payment of license. The diamond buyers will refuse to pay further license
and will be defended from harm.
Ruhrkampf
When the Ruhr region of Germany began resisting reparation payments to the
victorious nations of World War Ⅰ, France and Belgium occupied the region
to take the payments by force. Germans responded with a campaign of mass
nonviolent resistance, including tax resistance, and were backed up by their
own government.
One of the ways the German government supported the campaign was by paying
the strikers itself, to the tune of 715 million marks. It did this in part by
printing off more currency, which helped fuel the hyperinflation of
(itself a sort of resistance strategy that
made it difficult or impractical to account for reparations payments).
Louisiana Anti-Reconstructionists
During the “Reconstruction” period after the American Civil War, white
supremacists in Louisiana refused their allegiance to a federally-backed,
mixed-race state government, and demonstrated this through tax resistance.
Several attorneys issued a statement offering to “engage themselves, without
compensation, and as a matter of public service, to defend professionally all
[tax resisters].” A mass-meeting issued a tax resistance pledge, and resolved:
That a committee of five be appointed to draw up a plan by which the citizens
may co-operate, to employ counsel and mutually assist each other in their
refusal to pay taxes.
Satyagraha in South Africa
Gopal Krishna Gokhale, an officer in the Indian National Congress fighting
for the independence of India, pledged £2,000 a month to support Indian
satyagrahis in South Africa who were engaged in tax resistance and other
tactics under Gandhi’s direction.
Occasionally, tax resisters will join forces to form cooperative housing or business relationships that help to facilitate their resistance.
This is most often found among war tax resisters, for whom resistance is an ongoing commitment rather than a protest or rebellion against a particular government or policy.
Today I’ll summarize some examples of this that I have encountered in my research.
The Bijou community of Colorado Springs, Colorado is a living example of nonviolent community resistance in the “belly of the beast” of right-wing military and Christian extremism.
The members of this community live below a taxable income level so that they don’t pay for war.
In addition to ongoing bannering and civil disobedience at some of the 5 major military institutions in the area, the Bijou community runs services for the mentally-ill, homeless, working poor, incarcerated, and the general community including: a soup kitchen, food banks, a land trust, several homes for transitional and homeless folks, a free bicycle clinic, and a musical theater group.
The Agape Community
The Agape Community was founded in by a group of Catholics who wanted to live closer to the ideal of Christian community they found in the Bible.
Among the founders were tax resisters Brayton & Suzanne Shanley and Emmanuel Charles McCarthy.
They formed the community in such a way that it could support itself with members earning less than a taxable income, for example by being able to grow their own food.
The Shanleys have stayed with the two-house community since its founding, and it has had dozens of more transient residents through the years.
The community hosts speakers and workshops on nonviolence and related topics.
The Whiteway Colony
A group of Tolstoyans made a go of creating a colony based on their interpretation of Tolstoy’s Christian anarchism, which included tax resistance, and was eventually the home to forty people.
The land was operated by a committee headed by noted Tolstoyan (and Tolstoy translator) Aylmer Maude, and this committee held the land in trust, while allowing anyone to settle on and work the land, with the understanding that nobody would own any of it except by virtue of being engaged in occupying and working on it.
(The Whiteway community still exists, but has abandoned the more radical communal-ownership principles — today the land is communally owned, but the homes on it are bought and sold as private property.)
Possibility Alliance
The Possibility Alliance farm is a simple-living showcase guided by the following five principles: radical simplicity, service, social activism, inner work, and gratitude.
It hosts free skills-share classes and a group called the Superheroes who dress up like caped crusaders and bike out to do good deeds here and there.
The founders are war tax resisters who resist by maintaining a very low (sub-poverty line) income.
Joanne Sheehan
When the Hartford Courant profiled war tax resisters Anna Aschenbach and Joanne Sheehan, who have been resisting taxes since the Vietnam War, it noted Sheehan’s participation in cooperative projects as being helpful to her resistance:
Along with her partner, who’s also a tax resister, Sheehan raised two kids with a family income of about $24,000. Now that their children are grown, and can no longer be claimed as deductions, each earns less than about $8,000 a year in order to keep from paying taxes.
They’ve lived in collectives and communes much of the time, sharing living expenses with other resisters.
They practice “radical simplicity” by going “back to basics” — doing things like hanging clothes instead of using a dryer, not going to restaurants or buying pre-packaged foods.
“Land League Villages”
During the rent strike that the National Land League organized against English absentee landlords in Ireland, when landlords were successful in evicting tenants who refused to pay rent, the League would try to find them (and sometimes their livestock) a temporary home on the land of someone who was sympathetic with the resisters.
These might grow to hold several families and were sometimes called “Land League Villages.”
Amish Milk Cooperatives
The cooperatives used by Amish communities to process and package milk turned out to be useful also when the Amish began resisting the then-new social security taxes (they believed the social security program would require them to violate principles of their faith, and after many years of resistance, they won a legal exemption from the program).
The government tried to levy the checks that the cooperative wrote to pay those of its milk suppliers who were resisting the tax, but the responsible officials of the cooperative refused to sign the checks.
Peacemakers attempted to build a decentralized and self-disciplined movement which stressed local initiative and group coordination along the lines of the nonviolent revolutionary movement in India.
Emphasis was put on building intentional communities which practiced communal living.
“Groups or cells are the real basis of the movement,” Peacemakers announced, “for this is not an attempt to organize another pacifist membership organization, which one joins by signing a statement or paying a membership fee.”
Instead, Peacemakers emphasized a living program which included resistance to the draft and war taxes, personal transformation, and group participation in work for political and economic democracy.
Peacemakers at the Ohio cell organized a land trust to remove property from the market place…
Juanita and Wally Nelson, founding members of Peacemakers, and war tax resisters Betsy Corner, Randy Kehler, and Bob Bady were among the organizers of the Valley Community Land Trust.
The trust resisted IRS attempts to seize the Corner/Kehler home for back taxes, and helped to get their home returned to them.
Art Harvey’s farm
Dorothy Day visited Art Harvey’s farm in and described it this way:
He carries on a practical application of Karl Meyer’s tax refusal… by having teams of workers in orchards where they prune trees, harvest apples and later blueberries and work seven months of the year.
They work and live in a style which frees them from the payment of taxes for war.
Perhaps about a hundred are engaged in this way of life, which results usually in some settling in communities of the moshavim variety, each having some small acreage and a house built by themselves.
Considering the New England climate, no small achievement!
It certainly means an emphasis on the ascetic, on sacrifice.
Peter Maurin Farm
Peter Maurin Farm
is a Catholic Worker project — a “hospitality house on the land” near Manhattan that also grows food for the urban hospitality houses.
Many of those involved in the project were conscientious objectors, and appreciated being able to be part of a self-supporting project that required its volunteers to earn little or no taxable income and so enabled them to stay under the tax line.
Collective Impressions
War tax resister Ed Guinan created a business to help facilitate the tax resistance of its employees.
One news profile described it this way:
[I]n Washington, D.C., is another group of tax resisters who have formed a nonprofit cooperative print shop and who refuse to send their taxes to the IRS.
Ed Guinan is a priest and the coordinator of the shop, called Collective Impressions.
A year and a half ago Guinan and his colleagues decided to continue paying social security taxes but to send their withholding taxes to the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.
“Every quarter, when taxes are due, we send a check to the Arms Control Agency,” Guinan says.
“They return it with a polite note saying that they cannot accept it, and we put it into a tax escrow account which cannot be used for normal business expenses.”
Collective Impressions owes only $500 per quarter to the IRS, but Guinan and his coworkers believe they are making an effective protest against U.S. military spending policies.
Restored Israel of Yahweh
Similarly, members of the small religious group called the Restored Israel of Yahweh formed a small construction business and helped those of its employees who were also members of the group to resist their taxes — eventually facing criminal tax evasion convictions for this.
A challenge that many successful tax resistance campaigns have confronted has to do with divisions in the movement.
Sometimes these are deliberate divide-and-conquer tactics by those who oppose the campaign.
Other times, these are just the result of fractures in an unstable coalition, where most of the dividing pressure comes from within the campaign.
It can be important to the success of such a campaign that it maintain and demonstrate solidarity in the face of such challenges.
Here are some examples of how a variety of tax resistance campaigns have tried to cope.
German constitutionalists
In Germany, the government attempted to break a tax resistance movement by offering to moderate its enforcement efforts against people who could show that they had limited means.
Karl Marx, who was promoting the resistance at the time, saw this as a divide-and-conquer tactic and counseled people to disregard it:
The intention of the Ministry is only too clear.
It wants to divide the democrats; it wants to make the peasants and workers count themselves as non-payers owing to lack of means to pay, in order to split them from those not paying out of regard for legality, and thereby deprive the latter of the support of the former.
But this plan will fail; the people realizes that it is responsible for solidarity in the refusal to pay taxes, just as previously it was responsible for solidarity in payment of them.
Rebeccaites
The Rebeccaite movement in Wales was very successful in its bold campaign of destroying toll booths.
But its diffuse, non-hierarchical, anonymous structure made it easy for people to hijack it for their own ends, and it wasn’t long before people and groups calling themselves “Rebecca” began issuing threats and enacting vigilante justice in a variety of causes, or sometimes in what seemed like merely personal grievances.
For example, having come to the help of the farmers by reducing the tolls they were charged when bringing their goods to market, a meeting of Rebeccaites decided they were justified in now demanding that these newly-liberated farmers and merchants lower the prices of their goods.
Butter and beer would now be cheaper in Wales, and the Rebeccaites would make it so by force if necessary.
Things like this made the message of the movement confused, made it less sympathetic to potential supporters, and helped the authorities to recruit spies and people willing to testify against the rioters among those who otherwise might have been their allies.
Irish Land League
The Irish, suffering from famine and under the thumb of government-backed English absentee landlords, began a rent strike under the leadership of the Irish Land League.
The English encouraged the Irish to respond to their sad lot by emigrating to America and elsewhere.
They would have been happy to depopulate the island and make it England’s livestock grazing pasture, and they were eager to diminish by attrition the political power of the native population.
But, as Charles Stewart Parnell put it:
The Land League saw through this design, and defeated it by their advice to the people to resist being compelled to emigrate.
It told them to refuse to pay extortionate rents — that is, rents they could not pay and at the same time feed their families; it told them to refuse to leave their homes unless forcibly ejected, so that winter might not find them without a shelter to their heads; and it told them to refuse to rent farms from which other tenants had been evicted.
British women’s suffrage movement
At the time the Women’s Tax Resistance League and allied organizations were trying to win the vote for women, most men couldn’t vote in Britain either.
The vote at the time was largely restricted to propertied men, though there were ongoing campaigns for universal male suffrage.
By trying to get women to be treated equally as voters under the law, the women’s movement of the time was, thereby, fighting merely for the voting rights of propertied women, not for women in general.
Dora Montefiore reflected on this, and the divisions it threatened to provoke, when she reviewed her time in the movement in her autobiography, From a Victorian to a Modern:
The members of the I.L.P., of which there was a good branch in Hammersmith, were very helpful, both as speakers and organisers during these meetings, but the Members of the Social Democratic Federation, of which I was a member, were very scornful because they said we should have been asking at that moment for Adult Suffrage and not Votes for Women; but although I have always been a staunch adult suffragist, I felt that at that moment the question of the enfranchisement of women was paramount, as we had to educate the public in our demands and in the reasons for our demands, and as we found that with many people the words “Adult Suffrage” connoted only manhood suffrage, our urgent duty was at that moment to gain Press publicity up and down the country and to popularise the idea of the political enfranchisement of women.
I explained in all my speeches and writings that though it looked as if I were only asking for Suffrage for Women on a property qualification, I was doing this because the mass of non-qualified women could not demonstrate in the same way, and I was to that extent their spokeswoman.
… The working women from the East End came, time and again, to demonstrate in front of my barricaded house and understood this point and never swerved in their allegiance to our organisation
Poll Tax rebellion in the U.K.
In Danny Burns’s reminiscences of the Poll Tax Rebellion, he reflects that there were constant tensions in the campaign between the locally-organized grassroots groups that were the real engine of the revolt, and the professional left/labor radical groups and politicians who kept trying to put themselves at the front of the parade.
When a number of people were arrested in a police riot during an anti Poll Tax demonstration at Trafalgar Square, some of the movement leadership distanced themselves from those who had been arrested in the riot — wanting to distinguish nonviolent tax resisters from those charged with resisting arrest or other such charges, and talking about holding “an internal inquiry” to “root out the troublemakers.”
But when the defendants organized their own collective defense committee, the leaders of the All-Britain Federation tried to usurp them by launching their own defense fund and soliciting donations (the attempt failed).
Anti-war, anti-tax coalition building in U.S.
There have been some attempts at coalition building between the left and right in the United States, where the folks at the top keep the folks at the bottom facing off against each other that way so their pockets face outwards and are easier to pick.
One example of such coalition building in the tax resistance movement was a “tea party” held in by the right-leaning group called the National Taxpayers Union, at which left-libertarians like Murray Rothbard and Karl Hess, and leftish war tax resisters like Bradford Lyttle spoke.
The following year, leftist scholar and war tax resister Noam Chomsky, and conservative publisher Robert Kephart spoke at a National Taxpayers Union event.
On , police fired on rent strikers in Mitchelstown (Ireland), killing three, in what became known as the “Mitchelstown Massacre.”
The authorities went above and beyond the usual whitewash of police brutality by awarding a £1,000 judgment to a constable who was wounded in the course of the massacre, which would be raised by an additional tax on the Irish — one that would come to be called the “Constable Leahy Tax.”
Naturally, the tax didn’t sit well in Ireland.
In , a Thomas Condon, a member of Parliament, appeared at a rally, where he was said to have told the crowd:
“You have heard from Mr. O’Brien and Mr. Healy that a tax of £1,000 is being levied off the barony for his unconstitutional conduct in being the first to lead the baton party that broke through your meeting on .
I hope the men of the barony of Condons and Clongibbons will do in the future as they have done in the past — namely, organize themselves to make the collection of that tax as difficult and expensive for these landlords and for the taxgatherers.
All this may be illegal.
I do not know whether it is or not, and, furthermore, do not care.
It is quite possible that you will have policemen out in a day or two, but I will ask you to feed yourselves and your families before you part with this money for Constable Leahy.… I hope that you will send back a message to the Grand Jury of Cork that by the time this tax is collected it will cost them ten times more than the original tax levied.
I have not the slightest doubt but that you will make the collection of this tax impossible, and that before a few months they will have reason to remember it.
This is no time to be mealy-mouthed in speaking on these subjects.
Condon was prosecuted for giving this speech, which the prosecutor characterized as engaging “in a criminal conspiracy to induce certain persons not to fulfill their legal obligations, to wit, to pay a certain tax” (and that furthermore the meeting he spoke at was itself an unlawful assembly of an illegal organization — the Irish National League).
Edward Gibson, the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, characterized the case this way:
It was an offense so obvious and so patent that the laws of no country could exist if words recommending that taxes and rates should not be paid were allowed to pass without notice, and if such language was not to be punishable the laws of no country would be able to keep civil society together.
The advice of Mr. Condon had, unfortunately, been taken, and efforts were being made to make the collection of that tax, as Mr. Condon had advised, as difficult as possible.… Placards had been posted within the last few days actually quoting portions of the speech… showing the danger of using such language and the necessity of bringing those persons who employed it to the test of legal examination…
I’ve found one or two references to Irish tax resistance that explicitly mention the “Constable Leahy Tax” in old newspaper archives.
At the recent Mitchelstown Petty Sessions decrees were granted against 40 farmers for non-payment of the Leahy tax.
Mr. Eaton, R.M., said that if civil taxes were not collected there was an end to civil government in Ireland.
As the presentment to the murdering constable was granted by a landlord Grand Jury the people see no moral obligation to pay it.
The Mayor visited the political prisoners confined in Cork Gaol on .
Mr. Condon, M.P., who, during the three weeks of his incarceration has been sleeping on the plank bed, has been supplied with a mattress.
In answer to an inquiry from the Mayor, the honorable gentleman stated he had slept well the previous night, and added that during the time he was on the plank bed he did not enjoy, on an average, two hours’ sleep each night.
That column also noted a strategy for evading property seizure in Kerry:
For some time past cattle-seizing for rent on the Kenmare estate has been carried on unceasingly, and the feeling of terror and insecurity which has been created by this spoiliation amongst the unfortunate tenantry can scarcely be realised by people outside the farming circle.
In many districts, whilst the cattle are grazing during the day in the fields, sentinels are posted lest the landlord’s bailiff should pounce upon them unawares, and carry them off, and to such an extent has this feeling of insecurity reached, that if a number of strange men are seen approaching in the distance, the alarm is given by the blowing of a horn, or in some other significant manner, and the cattle are driven off the land, to escape being captured.
Then again at night the same precautions are taken.
The poor people are obliged to keep their cattle in their dwelling-houses until morning and where this can’t be conveniently done, for want of accommodation or otherwise, a close watch is kept on them, lest the dreaded bailiff should come “like a thief in the night” and sweep them off as his prey.
Mr. Therry, and his sub-bailiff Dwane, continue to play the part of Highland caterans all around Fermoy and Mitchelstown, in the endeavour to collect the Leahy impost.
They make forays at unearthly hours of the morning, under the protection of strong bodies of police, and seize the very best stock they can lay their hands on.
The cattle thus taken are subjected to the roughest hurrying and chasing, so that by the time they are bought in at the pound, they must considerably be deteriorated in value.
Removable Eaton continues his mingled policy of bullying and soft-sawder to secure a victory for the blood-stained coercionists.
On , at the Conna Petty Sessions, he delivered another very eloquent homily, on the duty of the subject and the constitutional aspect of the question of resisting such imposts.
He would grant the same heavy costs as he had already granted, he said, but he knew Mr. Therry wouldn’t press for them if the people would only pay the levy.
This he was sure they would willingly do, but for the efforts of the agitators.
It was folly, he added, to think that the tax could be successfully resisted, as the Government would give every assistance towards collecting it.
Mr. Eaton’s memory is bad.
He forgets that Limerick and Derry have successfully resisted taxes which they believed unjust.
The next interesting phase of this contest will arise when it is attempted to levy the tax from the Fermoy Town Commissioners.
This body held its last public meeting on , and while resolving to pay the ordinary county cess to the Grand Jury, it was decided to ignore the Leahy tax altogether.
It was decided that if a claim were furnished for the tax by the Grand Jury the applicants should be told to “furnish again.”
This resolution accurately reflects the sentiment of the immense majority of the people.
A little incident which occurred at Fermoy a few days ago shows their determination.
A farmer drove his cart slowly through the town, displaying on the back of his vehicle, the placard containing the extract from the Daily News, which the police have been so furiously tearing down, and besides it another, stating that the barony of Condons and Clongibbon would follow the example of Clare in resisting the blood-tax.
This daring defiance of police sentiment was perfectly successful, as no attempt to interfere with the farmer or his placards was made.
Mr. James Rice Kent, who has taken an active part in the resistance to the Leahy tax, was, at the Fermoy Petty Sessions, fined 20s., or, in default, a fortnight’s imprisonment, for blowing a horn after the police escort conveying a Leahy tax prisoner to gaol, and shouting “Remember Mltchelstown.”
On the application of the Constabulary a warrant was issued, and the police searched several houses for the accused, who managed to escape.
In there was a flurry of articles in The Spectator about the Irish Land League and its rent strike.
The Spectator’s archives have recently come on-line, so I can share some excerpts here:
On the Irish Land League shot its last bolt, — by the issue of a Circular enjoining on the Irish farmers the absolute refusal of all rent till Mr. Parnell and his colleagues have been liberated.
The circular is exceedingly violent in tone, but not drawn up without a considerable amount of rhetorical ability.
It states that the time has come “to test whether the great organisation built up during years of patient labour and sacrifice, and consecrated by the allegiance of the whole Irish race the world over, is to disappear at the summons of a brutal tyranny.”
The crisis, it goes on, is not of the Land League’s making.
The Government are determined, says the Manifesto, “to strike down the only power which could have extracted any solid benefits for the tenant-farmers of Ireland from that Act, and to leave them once more helplessly at the mercy of a law intended to serve landlordism, and administered by landlord minions;” and so forth.
Wherefore, the only weapon left is to withhold every penny of rent till the Land League is again at work, — a command which is accompanied by a variety of furious attacks on the British Government.
The Irish will not believe Mr. Serjeant O’Hagan, Mr. Litton, and Mr. Vernon to be “landlord minions,” and they will not believe that the new Land Act was passed for the sole benefit of Irish landlords.
The Manifesto professes to be signed by the men in jail, some at least of whose signatures must have been affixed for them, and in Davitt’s case, probably without even his knowledge of the contents of the address.
The great thunderbolt will bury itself impotently in the earth.
The Spectator was (and is) a conservative journal and didn’t have much sympathy for radical Irish rabble-rousers.
As such, its coverage of the strike is often more spin and wishful thinking than news, and even as news is of doubtful reliability, but an occasional data point peeps through now and again.
The manifesto of the League was immediately met by Government with a decree for its suppression.
On the Government announced that the League, by its recent proceedings, had shown itself an “illegal and criminal association, intent on destroying the obligation of contracts and subverting law,” and warning all persons to quit it, and all attendants at meetings in its support that they would be dispersed by force.
The Government, moreover, pledged themselves “to employ all the powers and resources at our command to protect the Queen’s subjects in Ireland in the free exercise of their lawful rights, and the peaceful pursuit of their lawful callings and occupations,” to “enforce the fulfilment of all lawful obligations,” and “to save the process of law from hindrance or obstruction.”
As this proclamation will be followed up by the arrest of all persons continuing to belong to the Land League, that body can only continue to exist as a Secret Society, which may be formidable, but cannot ally itself with respectable classes, or escape the permanent condemnation of Rome.
The garrison of Ireland is being steadily increased, and now numbers, it is believed, 40,000 men, and the police have obviously received orders to defend themselves when attacked.
Indeed, the careful precautions taken by Government form the gravest symptom of the condition of Ireland.
The general tone of the news from Ireland,
disastrous as some incidents have been, is not without some gleams of hope.
The rioting in the cities, though serious, was in a great degree the work of lads, and even the American Irish counsel abstinence from insurrection.
The troops have not yet been compelled to fire, and the danger of local émeutes believed to be subsiding.
The suppression of the League has not been followed by more riots, and the League has forbidden public meetings.
The Land Court has been opened at last, and though the information is not yet conclusive, the indications are that those of the peasantry who are rack-rented will at once resort to it.
The opening scene revealed, indeed, a liking for the Court even among the populace of Dublin.
The manifesto of the Land League prohibiting the payment of rent has elicited from the Catholic Church, through the Archbishop of Cashel, a counter-manifesto, denouncing repudiation, as contrary alike to principle and policy.
Archbishop Croke’s letter is lacking in a feature it ought to have possessed, — a strong statement of Catholic abhorrence, on religious grounds, of such threats; but it derives force from his long and, as we deem, unwise support of the League, in every stage but the last.
The sky is still black, but there are rifts in it.
…this great Manifesto from the Executive of the Land League makes the Land League at last a distinctly illegal organisation, whatever it may have been in the past.
Till it was issued, Mr. Gladstone himself held that the Land League’s proposed objects were not unconstitutional, — that it was quite possible to be a Land Leaguer, and yet not desire to break the law.
This is now possible no longer.
After the Executive of the Land League has required all its constituents to withhold their just debts till such time as it shall please a Government over which their creditors have no control, to set certain prisoners at liberty, every honest Irishman who wishes to see just debts paid must separate himself from that Land League.
“It is as lawful to refuse to pay rents,” says the Manifesto, “as it is to receive them.”
The Land League might just as well say, “It is as lawful to break a deliberate contract as it is to fulfill it.”
It is not lawful to refuse to pay any debt which the creditor knows to be justly due ; nor is it lawful to conspire to get other men to refuse to pay such debts.
Whether the British Government has done well or ill in apprehending Mr. Parnell, the Land League has, at last, adopted an ostentatiously illegal, as well as unjust, policy, and pronounced itself an illegal organisation.…
The Dublin Town Council has rejected the motion
for conferring the freedom of the City of Dublin on Mr. Parnell and Mr. Dillon, by the casting-vote of the Mayor; the Archbishop of Dublin is said to have suspended a priest in his diocese, for refusing to retire from the Land League; the Wicklow farmers and landlords are joining together heartily to discountenance intimidation; and on the whole, the symptoms of the moment in Ireland are not unfavourable for the collapse of the anti-rent agitation.
One very grave incident of the week is the murder, in the county of Clare, of a very active member of the Land League, named Thomas MacMahon, apparently for denouncing other farmers who had paid their rents.
If this be the cause of the murder, it is clear that the tyranny of the Land League is felt as an oppressive yoke in the county of Clare, and that local feeling rebels against it.
It is the great misfortune of Ireland, that no agrarian passion of whatever kind seems to hesitate at murder as its natural mode of expression.
The fear and anger created by the vexatious interference of the Land League express themselves just as the fear and anger against landlords, for which the interference of the Land League was supposed to be the remedy, expressed themselves before the Land Act was passed.
When The Spectator put its archives on-line a while back, I looked through for what I could find about the tax resistance movements of the period.
From there were a number of articles that touched on the activities of the Irish Land League.
I’ve collected here some excerpts of interest.
The Spectator’s tory perspective should be kept in mind.
Much of the articles these excerpts came from consisted of tut-tutting commentary and feel-good predictions that everything is going fine and the riff-raff will soon quiet down.
I’ve left that out, and pulled excerpts that point out some of the facts on the ground that were shaping the conflict.
Take this case of Kanturk, where, as we have said, there is a priest not wrapped in this invincible ignorance himself, but struggling painfully to do his duty to his people and his Church.
He addresses his people one Sunday on the wrongness of introducing a children’s Land League into the parish of Kanturk.
And Canon Dennehy tells us why he objected to this, — not simply on the general ground that the principles of the Land League are dishonest, but because he knew that the children who were to be taught the principles of the Land League were to begin their learning by lessons in the following delightfully Christian and Catholic alphabet:—
A is the army that covers the ground, B is the buckshot we’re getting all round, C is the crowbar of cruellest fame, D is our Devitt, a right glorious name; E is the English, who’ve robbed us of bread, F is the famine they’ve left us instead; G is for Gladstone, whose life is a lie; H is the harvest we’ll hold, or we’ll die; I is the Inspector, who when drunk is bold, J is the jarvey, who’ll not drive him for gold; K is Kilmainham, where our true men abide; L is the Land League, our hope and our pride; M is the magistrate, who makes black of white; N is no rent, which will make our wrongs right; O is Old Ireland, that yet shall be freed; P is the peelers, who’ve sold her for greed; Q is the Queen, whose use is not known; R is the rifles, who keep up her Throne; S is the sheriff, with woe in his train; T is the toil that others may gain; U is the Union, that works bitter harm; V is the villain that grabs up a farm; W is the warrant, for death or for chains; X is the Express, all lies and no brains; Y is “Young Ireland,” spreading the light; Z is the zeal that will win the great fight.
Canon Dennehy does not tell us whether he read this doggrel in his church, but he does intimate that he illustrated from it his objection to the training of infants in such un-Christian and un-Catholic sentiments and principles.
Well, what was the result?
That from thirty to forty of his parishioners left the church in wrath at his protest against such principles as these.
It is obvious from this alphabet, and the passion with which the parishioners left the church when they heard it attacked, that multitudes of the Irish, — and, as we believe, mostly those who are not personally concerned in the withholding of rent, and who would not directly gain by it, — have persuaded themselves that the No-rent agitation is a matter of mere patriotism and politics, altogether unconnected with common morality; that they have persuaded themselves that in this way, and no other, the English may be best ejected from Ireland; and that it becomes the patriot to die rather than not “hold the harvest,” even though he had contracted solemnly to give part of the harvest to the man who let him the land.
The agitators have got into the heads of the Irishmen that the land belongs in justice to the tillers of it…
Nothing is more easy than for political passion so to disguise the character of grossly criminal acts that, while very few commit them, hundreds of thousands apologise for them, and feel utterly indisposed to aid the law in its attempt to punish the offenders.
A gleam of light has appeared in Ireland.
Throughout the present Sessions, Juries have shown some readiness to convict, and this even in agrarian cases.
In one case of intimidation, seven prisoners were found guilty, and in another fourteen.
The Judges, while giving very severe sentences on all convicted, incline, we perceive, to reward a plea of guilty by distinct and large remissions of penalty.
That plea, they say, in the present circumstances of the country, furnishes distinct help to the administration of the law.
That is true, but it will be needful to take care that the remissions are not so large that a suspected man may think the certainty of six months’ imprisonment better than the chance of five years’ penal servitude.
It is believed that the altered tone of the juries is due to impatience of the intimidation practised on farmers, and it is certain that it will have the most direct effect in diminishing outrages.
Even the chance of ten years’ penal servitude for breaking a law adds greatly to the general respect for it.
The Government, at the same time, rather increases than relaxes its energy, having this week seized the Land League organ, United Ireland, and arrested its sub-editor and manager.
The charges against the paper are incitement to pay no rent and sedition.
[Mr. Forster (William Edward I assume) gave a speech] showing… that the Land League had been urged forward by an American threat to refuse supplies, if the rent were not withheld; that Mr. Parnell, at the Tyrone election, had avowed that his intention was “to abolish rent altogether,” and in other places, that any man taking another man’s land should be “boycotted;” and that some of his leading followers had justified intimidation, and expressed openly their hopes for an Irish Republic.
It is in incidents like the attack on young Morony, at Feakle, in Limerick, that we see the deepest ground for alarm.
It seems certain that Morony had been ordered by some illegal combination not to pay his rent, and had paid it, and was consequently visited by an armed party, who charged him with his offence, while one of them “stepped forward, and placing the muzzle of a rifle to Morony’s leg, immediately below the knee, drew the trigger and fired, shattering the bones to pieces.”
The “Moonlighters then left,” the man died of his wounds, and, in the absence of evidence, it was found necessary to arrest seventeen persons under the Coercion Act.
There is something in the self-restraint of these “Moonlighters,” in the careful limitation of their crime, so as to avoid incurring, as they hoped, any risk of the gallows, in the cold-bloodedness and want of passion in their deed, which is utterly horrible, and which in England would produce an outburst of furious detestation.
The Moonlighters would have the whole population for enemies, and all healthy men for police; would be hunted from county to county, and would be as certain of conviction if they were caught as if they had tortured children.
Why is it not so in Ireland?
It is nonsense to talk of defective administration, when in all cases of ordinary crime — theft, for instance, and forgery — punishment is, on the whole, more certain in Limerick than Liverpool.
And it is nonsense, or rather pleonasm, to talk of terrorism, when without popular support no terror could be maintained for a day, the police being anxious and able to arrest, if only evidence were forthcoming, and juries would convict.
There is much want of moral courage in Ireland, but there must be something worse than this, a positive sympathy with any crime having for its object an ultimate increase in the income of tenant-farmers.… We talk of agents of the Land League and their “organisation,” but there is no criminal in Ireland and no organisation that could stand up against the universal popular detestation which makes of a man a leper, and which in Ireland is visited with appalling effect on many crimes.
Mr. Forster [the government’s Chief Secretary of Ireland], who had just arrived from Ireland — where he had been occupied in the double task of making detention easier for the suspects [including some Irish members of Parliament], and preventing the torture of honest tenants suspected of disobeying the "No Rent" manifesto — rose, in a fever of moral indignation, to deliver his soul upon the League and upon Coercion.
He intimated that, as he has always done, and as all England, except Mr. Cowen, does, he held the Land Leaguers morally responsible for the outrages, inasmuch as they had made no persistent effort to repress them; and, quoting Mr. Healy’s remark that an Irishman who received a slap must be expected to return a blow, indignantly denounced the levelling of that blow at innocent and humble tenants, who were killed, or tortured, or maimed for doing their duty; and then, perhaps carried away in part by his recollection of the scenes he had witnessed, admitted that Coercion had not prevented such crimes.
“The Protection Act had not succeeded as Government had hoped.
Honourable Members had been too strong for them.
Remittances from America had been too constant.
Perhaps the Government had underrated the forces opposed to them.”
They “did not think they would have to deal with men of the position and influence of those who had carried on the movement.”
Yet Forster, in his speech, threatened to double-down on increased Coercion powers.
Instead, the government partially caved in — saying that it intended to release some of the Irish Land League leadership — and Forster resigned about a month later.
It is not the prevalence of murder in Ireland which is so amazing, but the acquiescence of the people in the impunity of murderers.
The murders can be accounted for; murder is an incident of every jacquerie, and there is too much reason to believe that in many districts of Ireland the anti-landlord agitation, the incentives to crime supplied from abroad, and the misery of the lowest class, to whom the Land Act promises nothing, have changed an agrarian movement into a true jacquerie.
But then, why do the body of the people in the bad districts acquiesce?
That they do acquiesce is evident, from the difficulty of obtaining evidence, from the astounding reluctance of the injured to come forward, from the timidity of Catholic clergymen known to be horror-struck at the state of their parishes, from the language of the violent Press, which, after all, must be seeking popularity, from the action of the juries; and, above all, from the universal belief, current among the police, the officials, the neighbours, and the murderers, that jurymen will not act.
In Ireland alone, the quiet classes, with an irresistible Government behind them, with soldiers and armed police, whom nobody ever faces, and who do their duty admirably, still acquiesce in crime, make no effort to prevent it, or detect it, or punish it.
They will not organise themselves as constables, or arm as a volunteer guard, or start vigilance committees, or vote, as jurymen, according to their consciences, or even, as witnesses, state the things they know.
What is the explanation of that?
— for that, and not the frequency of murder, distressing and exasperating as that is, is the difficulty of the Government.
We can find but one solution of the problem which in the least fits the facts, and this is, that the body of the people, partly from tradition, partly from political feeling, and partly from social training, so distrust and detest the law, that any defeat of its agents affects them with a feeling of pleasure.
They cannot bring themselves to assist them, even in their own interest, and feel when they are witnesses, or even jurymen, as if they were “informers.”
It is a strange and a terrible condition of opinion, but it must exist, and is the most perplexing and, in certain ways, hopeless of all the conditions of the insoluble Irish problem.
The Catholic clergy of the diocese of Cashel and Emly, in their annual conference at Tipperary on Thursday, passed three sets of resolutions.
By the first, they emphatically denounce Mr. P.J. Smyth, Member for Tipperary, for his recent conduct in Parliament, and call on him to resign his seat.
By the second, they “earnestly and sincerely deprecate” all outrages on person and property, and especially those upon defenceless animals, and pledge themselves strenuously to denounce midnight raids.
By the third, they declare that there can be no peace in Ireland while evictions continue for non-payment of excessive rent, and while the leaders of the Irish people are in prison, and consequently “demand from Government the immediate staying of evictions for arrears, the restoration of our constitutional rights, and the release of our imprisoned patriots.”
These resolutions are signed by 115 priests and curates, and seem to show that the lower clergy in this part of Ireland sympathise much more strongly with the Land League than the Bishops, so many of whom have warned their flocks against believing that good can come either out of outrage or out of secret societies.
The division among the clergy is possibly, in part, apparent only, as only the Bishops are quite free; but it goes deeper than we remember in any recent struggle.
Formerly, the Church acted in Ireland as a whole, or abstained from acting.
were wholly taken up with a very long discussion of the proper way of defining the offence of intimidation or “boycotting,” Mr. Charles Russell wishing to limit it to threats of violence, or attempts to incite other persons to use such threats; while the Government contended that in Ireland intimidation of a most cruel kind is practised by means of boycotting, even when no direct threats of violence are used, as, for instance, when a blacksmith was totally deprived of his custom for not acting with the Land League, and the servants of others were compelled to leave them by the notices they received, often notices which inspired the fear of violence, whether threats of violence were used or not.
On , Mr. Dillon made an elaborate defence of boycotting, distinguishing it from threats of violence, as a mere “sending to Coventry” and exclusive dealing, and this he declared to be quite essential to the sort of agitation which Irish tenant-farmers had been conducting, however regrettable the necessity for putting on such a screw might be.
Among the Liberals who wished the crime of intimidation to be more closely defined, though they did not wish it to be limited, as Mr. Russell proposed, to threats of violence exclusively, or incitements to such threats, was Mr. Bryce, who suggested that conspiracies to exclude a man from the market, or from intercourse with his fellow-men, or to deprive him of his rents, might be made punishable as intimidation, though an individual refusal to have dealings with a man should not be so regarded.
There was a general concurrence that the offence of intimidation needed either closer definition, or, at least, more of negative definition, more careful exclusion of what it did not mean, though Mr. Russell’s attempt to limit it to direct threats of violence met with very little favour.
The debate which had yesterday lasted for three full days on the difficulty of defining Intimidation and Boycotting, though it looks like obstruction, is better justified than any dilatory proceeding of the kind which we can remember during recent years.
The point is really one of the utmost difficulty and of the utmost importance, both to the Government on the one side, and to the Irish party on the other.
We quite hold with the Government that it is impossible to define too closely the offence of intimidation, and that it is necessary to put down that offence.
Even if we were to attempt such a definition, and speak of it as comprising any threat of violence, or any threat involving interference with the livelihood or the means of subsistence of the person threatened, in the hope of preventing him from doing what he has a right to do, or to make him do what he has a right not to do, the definition would be at once too wide and too narrow; it would render punishable some acts which might be perfectly justifiable, and would certainly fail to include some acts which are perfectly unjustifiable.
The statement of a labourer to an employer that without higher wages he would work no more for him, and would try to persuade every other labourer that the wages offered were too low, and were likely to cheapen labour in the market to a disastrous point, is a perfectly legitimate statement, and one that any labourer ought to have the power to make; and yet it is unquestionable that such a declaration might very seriously threaten the livelihood of the employer to whom it was made.
On the other hand, such a definition as we have suggested above would not cover the inclusion of a man’s name in a published “black list” of persons with whom it was considered by a given organisation (say, the Land League), that it was disgraceful to hold any sort of social intercourse; and yet the publication of a man’s name in such a black list, even though it were expressly stated that no violence and no refusal of the ordinary means of subsistence to those included in it was intended or recommended, would probably be an infinitely worse calamity than any attempt to organise a strike against an employer till he raised his rate of wages, could be.
The truth is that the character of intimidation depends so much on the minuter social circumstances of the day, that it is impossible to define it exhaustively, without great danger both of including what ought to be excluded, and of excluding what ought to be included; and we do not, therefore, in the least blame the Government for insisting that they cannot, and will not, supply a definition, though it is their intention to put down the sort of intimidation which has generally gone under the name of “Boycotting,” a form of intimidation which has, no doubt, often involved much more cruelty and terrorism than the milder forms of violence, like stone-throwing or hooting, could have involved.
On the other hand, we cannot in any way reproach the Irish party for objecting that in relation to an offence which is to be judged by such judges as the Resident Magistrates of Ireland, there is a very great danger, indeed, in leaving the character of the offence undefined.
Say what we will, the Resident Magistrates of Ireland belong to a caste who feel very little sympathy with the people; they are not highly-trained lawyers; they are not, as a rule, persons of judicial mind; and they are pretty certain, without intending it, to strain the interpretation of an ill-defined offence in a manner that may prove exceedingly injurious to the right of political combination.
Under these circumstances, we cannot condemn them for resisting tenaciously, and even obstinately, till they secure for the Irish people that right of legitimate combination which was secured for the English artisans by the Act of .
It seems to us that there is probably a way out of the difficulty.
We believe that though it is impossible so to define intimidation as to cover all the offences which the Government wish to put down, it might be easy to define those rights of legitimate combination which it is absolutely necessary for the Irish people to maintain.
Why not, after explaining and illustrating the nature of the offence, add something distinctly explaining what the Act is not intended to forbid or render punishable?
If we suggest words, it is not, of course, that we are prepared to defend them as adequate words, but only that we may make clearer the mode in which we would prevent the Bill from going beyond its true object.
The words might be something of this kind, — “Provided always, and it is hereby expressly declared, that nothing in the foregoing clause shall be taken as declaring illegal, or prohibiting as criminal, any agreement amongst tenants to stand by each other in demanding a reduction of rent, or any effort to persuade others, by fair argument, to demand such a reduction; or any agreement amongst labourers to stand by each other in the demand for a rise of wages, or for more convenient conditions of labour, or any effort to persuade other labourers to second them; or any political combination to co-operate in bringing about a given political object by legitimate moral pressure, so long as that moral pressure is not calculated to excite others, either directly or indirectly, to hold their opponents up to public odium and hatred for resisting the pressure put on them.”
We do not for a moment pretend, of course, that such language as this is scientifically sufficient for its purpose.
But we believe that the difficulty would be better met by explaining distinctly the sort of combinations which it is not intended to discourage or prevent, and which the Act would require the Resident Magistrates of Ireland to consider as perfectly lawful, than by any attempt to define all the forms of intimidation which it is desired to prevent, and which the Act is intended to punish.
With such a class of Judges as the Resident Magistrates of Ireland, it is most important to be perfectly explicit in setting before them what they are not to construe as intimidation.
And in that case, as an appeal is apparently to be allowed from their judgment, they are pretty certain to take care not to punish as intimidation the sort of combinations which the Court of Appeal might declare that the Act was intended expressly to sanction.
Hitherto, as we think, both the Government and the Irish party have been in the right in refusing to give way.
But we believe that if, instead of attempting to define intimidation, the Bill were to attempt to describe what is not to be regarded as intimidation, some approximation between the views of the Government and the views of the moderate Liberals and moderate Irishmen, might really be effected.
Michael Davitt, Mr. Healy, Member for Wexford, and Mr. W. Redmond have recently made violent speeches in Ireland, pointing to a renewal of agitation against rent, Davitt in particular declaring that unless the surplus under the Arrears Act was given to the suffering people of the West, Connemara, Donegal, Kerry, and Cork must “march upon the plains and seize the land.”
He advised all rent to be withheld till the grant was made.
Sir W. Hart-Dyke, on , therefore, asked what the Government intended to do.
Mr. Trevelyan replied that Mr. Redmond’s speech came within the Act, and he would be prosecuted; while Mr. Davitt and Mr. Healy would be bound over to good behaviour in recognizances, or committed to prison in default.
“If such speeches continue to be made, there is no hope for peace and order in Ireland,” and if they were repeated, the Viceroy would prohibit the meetings of the National League [the successor to the banned Land League].
Mr. Healy hereupon remarked defiantly that he should be in Dublin on , whereat the House laughed.
It is most painful to all Liberals to witness these interferences with freedom of speech, but it is still more painful to the Government; and if the latter are convinced that such speeches endanger order, they have practically no option.
We should say, on the whole, that with the West in distress, Dublin full of assassins, and all Ireland hungry for excitement to make the wet winter pass, they do endanger it.
This “extract from a letter received this morning at our office from a
Gentleman of high character and the most unquestionable veracity” comes from
The Morning Post of :
Middleton, . — Rents
have at length been resisted in this county; a few days ago Mr. Spratt, of
Pencil Hill, near Mallow, went to a tenant to receive his rent on an appointed
day, but instead of his money he was told that the men had removed the cattle,
corn, &c.
&c., and
desired him to get what he could, adding, that passive resistance need not be
resorted to, as the people were determined to be no longer oppressed by rents,
tithes, or taxes, and that they knew how to right themselves. There
have been several instances of a similar nature, especially in the barony of
Duhallow, where the above occurred. The Mail often
told with its own powerful voice what the effect of the “passive resistance”
system, so absurdly encouraged by the Whigs, would end in.
