good
landlords, or decreed in the land-courts. No agrarian movement in Ireland
was ever so unstained by crime.

Some who took part in these affairs made no secret of political motives.
Unlike Mr. Parnell, they deliberately desired to make government
difficult. Others feared that complete inaction would give an opening to
the Fenian extremists. This section had already shown some signs both of
their temper and their influence in certain proceedings of the Gaelic
association at Thurles. But the main spring was undoubtedly agrarian, and
the force of the spring came from mischiefs that ministers had refused to
face in time. "What they call a conspiracy now," said one of the insurgent
leaders, "they will call an Act of parliament next year." So it turned
out.

The Commission felt themselves "constrained to recommend an earlier
revision of judicial rents, on account of the straitened circumstances of
Irish farmers." What the commissioners thus told ministers in the spring
was exactly what the Irish leader had told them in the previous autumn.
They found that there were "real grounds" for some legislation of the kind
that the chief secretary, unconscious of what his cabinet was so rapidly
to come to, had stigmatised as the policy of blackmail.

On the last day of March 1887, the government felt the necessity of
introducing a measure based on facts that they had disputed, and on
principles that they had repudiated. Leaseholders were admitted, some
hundred thousand of them. That is, the more solemn of the forms of
agrarian contract were set aside. Other provisions we may pass over. But
this was not the bill to which the report of the Commission pointed. The
pith of that report was the revision and abatement of judicial rents, and
from the new bill this vital point was omitted. It could hardly have been
otherwise after a curt declaration made by the prime minister in the
previous August. "We do not contemplate any revision of judicial rents,"
he said--immediately, by the way, after appointing a commission to find out
what it was that they ought to contemplate. "We do not think it would be
honest in the first place, and we think it would be exceedingly
inexpedient."(231) He now repeated that to interfere with judicial rents
because prices had fallen, would be to "lay your axe to the root of the
fabric of civilised society."(232) Before the bill was introduced, Mr.
Balfour, who had gone to the Irish office on the retirement of Si