power as regards their own
locality.... To my mind the renewal of exceptional legislation against a
population whom you had treated legislatively to this marked confidence
was so gross in its inconsistency that you could not possibly hope,
during the few remaining months that were at your disposal before the
present Parliament expired, to renew any legislation which expressed on
one side a distrust of what on the other side your former legislation
had so strongly emphasized. The only result of your doing it would have
been, not that you would have passed the Act, but that you would have
promoted by the very inconsistency of the position that you were
occupying--by the untenable character of the arguments that you were
advancing--you would have produced so intense an exasperation amongst
the Irish people, that you would have caused ten times more evil, ten
times more resistance to law than your Crimes Act, even if it had been
renewed, would possibly have been able to check." Lord Salisbury went on
to say that "the effect of the Crimes Act had been very much
exaggerated," and that "boycotting is of that character which
legislation has very great difficulty in reaching." "Boycotting does not
operate through outrage. Boycotting is the act of a large majority of a
community resolving to do a number of things which are themselves legal,
and which are only illegal by the intention with which they are done."

Next to Lord Salisbury the most prominent member of the Conservative
party at that date was Lord Randolph Churchill. On the 3rd of January,
1885, when it was rumoured that Mr. Gladstone's Government, then in
office, intended to renew a few of the clauses of the Crimes Act, Lord
Randolph Churchill made a speech at Bow against any such policy. The
following quotation will suffice as a specimen of his opinion: "It comes
to this, that the policy of the Government in Ireland is to declare on
the one hand, by the passing of the Reform Bill, that the Irish people
are perfectly capable of exercising for the advantage of the Empire the
highest rights and privileges of citizenship; and by the proposal to
renew the Crimes Act they simultaneously declare, on the other hand,
that the Irish people are perfectly incapable of performing for the
advantage of society the lowest and most ordinary duties of
citizenship.... All I can say is that, if such an incoherent, such a
ridiculous, such a dangerously ridiculous combination of acts can be