, and among all classes, at a time when
the politicians were tearing themselves to pieces and providing a
Roman holiday for their Saxon friends.

CHAPTER VIII

THE BIRTH OF A MOVEMENT AND WHAT IT CAME TO

Whilst Ireland was thus finding her soul and Mr Gerald Balfour
pursuing his beneficent schemes for "killing Home Rule with kindness,"
the country had sickened unto death of the "parties" and their
disgusting vagaries. Mr William O'Brien, although giving loyal support
and, what is more, very material assistance to Mr Dillon and his
friends, was not himself a Member of Parliament, but was doing far
better work as a citizen, studying, from his quiet retreat on the
shores of Clew Bay, the shocking conditions of the Western peasantry,
who were compelled to eke out an existence of starvation and misery
amid the crags and moors and fastnesses of the west, whilst almost
from their very doorsteps there stretched away mile upon mile of the
rich green pastures from which their fathers were evicted during the
clearances that followed the Great Famine of 1847, and which M. Paul
Dubois describes as "the greatest legalised crime that humanity has
ever accomplished against humanity."

"To look over the fence of the famine-stricken village and see the
rich green solitudes, which might yield full and plenty, spread out at
the very doorsteps of the ragged and hungry peasants, was to fill a
stranger with a sacred rage and make it an unshirkable duty to strive
towards undoing the unnatural divorce between the people and the land"
(William O'Brien in an _Olive Branch in Ireland_).

Mr Arthur Balfour had established the Congested Districts Board in
1891 to deal with the Western problem, where "the beasts have eaten up
the men," and when Mr O'Brien settled down at Mallow Cottage he
devoted himself energetically to assisting the Board in various
projects of local development. But his experiences proved that these
minor reforms were at the best only palliatives, "sending men ruffles
who wanted shirts," and that there could be only one really
satisfactory solution--to restore to the people the land that had been
theirs in bygone time, to root out the bullocks and the sheep and to
root in the people into their ancient inheritance. It was only after
years of patient effort that he at last succeeded in persuading the
Congested Districts Board to make its first experiment in land
purchase f