Some historical and global examples of tax resistance →
Ireland →
Land League →
Charles Stewart Parnell
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 .
Mr. Parnell’s new policy, that the farmers of Ireland refuse to pay the police tax imposed under the Crimes act, is receiving fervent practical approval in Ireland.
The corporations of Limerick and Cork lead the way in opposing the tax.
Limerick declines to submit to a mandamus directing the payment of the extra police quartered there by the former magistrate, Mr. Clifford Lloyd, and Cork refuses money for Capt. Plunkett’s reinforcements.
The United Ireland, of which Mr. William O’Brien, member of Parliament, is editor, in an article indicating the line of resistance, says: “If the authorities at the Castle want blood money or a police tax let them send policemen to lift it.
Then, if the people take advice from Cobden and Mr. Bright, they will enter upon a fiscal revolt and show England the impolicy of punishing thousands of innocent people for the sins of the few guilty.”
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.
One way a tax resistance campaign can claim victory is by convincing the government to either formally rescind the tax, or to recognize the legal validity of tax resistance.
Charles Ⅰ went around Parliament to create a new property tax, and John Hampden famously said “no” in .
He lost his court case, but the next Parliament legalized his resistance by voiding the “ship-writs” tax and declaring the court judgment against him invalid.
American Amish, after a long campaign of lobbying, lawsuits, civil disobedience, and public relations, successfully won an exemption to the U.S. social security system, including its tax, and also canceled the outstanding social security tax bills of 15,000 Amish resisters.
A number of pacifist groups, frequently including war tax resisters, have been trying to get their governments to recognize or legally formalize a right to conscientious objection to military spending that would permit conscientious objectors to pay their taxes in a way that would not pay for the military portion of the government’s budget: a “Peace Tax” as it were.
So far, none of these long-standing efforts — which have included legal challenges using a variety of arguments, lobbying, and appeals to international legal bodies — have borne much fruit.
Governments seem universally hostile to the idea, and those international legal bodies with any clout have been unwilling to push the point.
Besides this, it is difficult to separate a government’s military budget from the rest of its budget in a way that would make a separate “Peace Tax” plausible.
The American version of the “Peace Tax” legislation, for instance, would ironically result in more taxpayer money going to military projects.
Italy has an otto per mille tax, which people can designate either for their church or for “humanitarian and cultural projects” of the government’s choosing — this resembles the sort of plan the “Peace Tax” promoters have in mind, but Italy’s government cunningly declared its participation in the Iraq War a “humanitarian and cultural” project and siphoned the funds off that way.
A tax resister who was opposed to the death penalty came to an agreement with the state of Delaware in which the state permitted him to pay his state taxes into a fund designated for paying state tax refunds of other taxpayers, rather than into the general fund that funded the prison system and executions.
American Quaker war tax resister Joshua Evans was so persistent that eventually the tax collector gave up.
“I was told it was concluded that as I gave myself up very much to the service of Truth, it was not proper I should be troubled on account of military demands; and I understood my name was erased, or taken from their list.”
Occasionally something similar happens today, when because a war tax resister has so few assets, or those assets would take too much trouble to discover, the IRS formally lists the resister’s file as “uncollectible” and gives up the attempt to force payment.
After ten years, a delinquent income tax payment hits a statute of limitations and the U.S. government is generally forbidden to pursue the matter further.
American suffragist activist Sarah E. Wall resisted her taxes for 25 years, when finally, according to Susan B. Anthony, “I do not know exactly how it is now, but the assessor has left her name off the tax-list, and passed her by rather than have a lawsuit with her.”
Something similar happened to English suffragist tax resister Charlotte Despard and some others: “[T]he Government rather than go to the trouble of selling up the recalcitrant ‘debtor,’ and attracting attention to the principle involved, had quietly dropped the matter in several instances.
Mrs. Despard had had no application for taxes since she had been sold up last year.”
Ellen C. Sargent patiently pursued legal challenges in California to try to promote women’s suffrage with a “no taxation without representation” argument.
She began by petitioning the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for a refund of her property taxes, and then filed a lawsuit when this petition was denied (the lawsuit also failed).
When farmers in drought-ravaged regions of Argentina threatened a tax strike in , the government responded with a clever bit of ju-jitsu — it declared an agricultural emergency in the area which exempted those farmers from paying taxes.
Utah governor J. Bracken Lee stopped paying his federal income taxes in the hopes of prompting a Supreme Court test case that would invalidate what he considered to be extraconstitutional federal spending.
(The court declined to take his case.)
A group referred to as “the Texas housewives” resisted paying the social security tax on the salaries of their household help, and pursued a two-year parallel legal challenge to have the tax invalidated, before finally being turned down by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Property tax resisters in Depression-era Chicago won a court case that found property assessments in the city to have been performed incorrectly — with $15 billion in property held by wealthy, well-connected Chicagoans somehow left off the rolls — thus effectively legalizing the resistance.
“As the matter stands,” a newspaper account put it, “citizens howled about their taxes, refused to pay them and a court upheld them.
They are in revolt with legal sanction.”
During the Land League’s rent strike in Ireland, Charles Stewart Parnell reported that “a large majority of landlords” reduced the rents on their properties, “[which] shows that they did finally recognize the situation, and that they determined to make the best of it.”
When the Prussian quasi-autocracy tried to ignore the legislature and govern on its own, the legislature formally declared tax resistance to be legal, and said that the autocrats had no authority to raise or spend money.
Something similar happened in Russia half a century later, when the Czar dissolved the legislature, which then reconvened in Vyborg and called on the citizens to refuse to pay any more taxes to the Czar.
According to a book on war tax resistance: “In Russia became the first country to establish legislation exempting pacifists from paying war taxes.
Thirty British citizens were invited by Czar Alexander Ⅰ to establish a cotton mill.
Because some of the employees were Quakers, a petition was submitted to the Czar from the employees asking for freedom of conscience and an exemption from military service, church taxes for war, etc. The Czar issued a certificate which read ‘His Imperial Majesty has given his gracious assent to this petition … all … shall be exempted from all civil and military taxes … the sect of Quakers may now and in future be freed from war taxes for the support of the Military…’ Two English Quakers visiting Russia in found these provisions still in effect.”
The Great Confederated Anti-Dray and Land Tax League of South Australia began as a tax resistance and mutual insurance group, but was soon successful in convincing the government to rescind the offensive tax.
But history is also full of lessons about the foolishness of trusting the government when it responds to your tax resistance campaign by insisting that it’s on your side and wants to help.
For example:
When tax resistance leader Wat Tyler was assassinated while negotiating with the King in , the king boldly went out to the enraged crowd and told it that he would be their leader and would press for their demands.
Instead, he waited for the fuss to die down, then executed some of the other leaders of the rebellion.
When the Whigs were whisked into power in the wake of the Reform Act agitation around , the tax resistance movement celebrated its victory… only to find that the Whigs could be just as tyrannical about prosecuting those who promoted tax resistance as their Tory cousins.
The recent American TEA Party was quickly coöpted by the Republican Party, which learned how to lead it by the nose with witless rhetoric, but conceded nothing on the tax-and-spend big government front.
During the Annuity Tax strike in Edinburgh, the government passed something called the “Edinburgh Annuity Tax Abolition Act.”
Despite its name, that act did not abolish the annuity tax, but merely concealed it with an aim to making it more difficult to resist.
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.
