was
moreover instructed that personal violence was preached against by the
Land League priests, and opposed by all lay leaders. The crimes
alluded to were the accidents of a great upheaval of the people, who
could attain their objects perfectly well without violence.

To the objection that without occasional violence the terrorism now
existing would lose all its strength, that threats never carried out
would become ridiculous, that when violence ceased, tenants as well as
landlords would set the Land League law aside and, do as they pleased,
it was replied that the great agrarian movement had passed through the
period of terrorism as nations pass through the early stage of
baronial rights, especially that of private war. The present condition
of the anti-landlord party was not that of a revolt, but of a strike,
which whether it was wise and according to the laws of political
economy or not, was clearly lawful. There was no constitutional right
in any one man to compel another to work for him, and a strike was
therefore clearly permissible. It was nonsense to cry out against
combination. It was the only possible method of the weak making good
their case against the strong, and the landlords might combine, and
welcome, if they thought it would do them any good. Nobody wanted to
shoot them any more, for they were "Quite, quite down." The present
strike was of an unprecedented character. Strikes of workpeople were
sometimes met and defeated by combinations of masters, because the
masters held the property and plant, and the men had nothing but their
heads and hands, and perhaps a little money in savings banks. So the
masters lasted the longest and won, except when their number included
a large proportion of needy, speculative manufacturers, who durst not
stop their mills, and thus became the indirect and unwilling allies of
the artisan. But where the masters were few and wealthy, the artisans
had no chance against them.

It was far otherwise with the Irish farmers and cottiers, who not only
"held the harvest," or rather its monetary result, but held the land
and were "not going to give it up." The people, the speaker opined,
had really won the battle already, and it was for them to exercise the
power they had suddenly become aware of wisely and mercifully. There
was no further need for violence or threats of violence, but what was
called the law should not be carried out until the claims of the Irish
people were fully ad