Act respectively, and during its continuance. The Westmeath Act applied retrospectively, and it was managed by inserting into a prodigiously long section of desperately involved language the cunningly devised words, "being or having been either a principal in or an accessory before or after the fact to any felony, or a principal in any misdemeanour, committed, or deemed by the Lord-Lieutenant to be reasonably suspected to have been committed." There was, however, a qualifying clause of a new character, which provided that all arrested under it should be treated, not as convicted, but as untried prisoners.

The Westmeath Act, though not so on the face of it, was a suspension of Habeas Corpus with reference to every person in any proclaimed district who was a ribbonman, or a correspondent or associate of a ribbonman, and every person coming under the description involved in the preceding quotation. There had always been suspicions of secret societies of persons supposed to be known as ribbonmen, and as there was nothing else convenient to ascribe the increase of outrages to, the suspicion of ribbonism, as it was called, was as good an excuse as anything else. Whether such a secret society existed then or at any time of any importance, no one is qualified to say but a ribbonman himself, and if a ribbonman betrays the secret he is quite as likely as not to betray the person who believes what he says on the subject. It seems, therefore, needless to pretend to know what ribbonism really meant then or at any other time. The supposed ribbonism, as well as the Act, died out on the 1st of June, 1873, though the Peace Preservation Act remained in force with the Conservative modifications before remarked upon.

In defiance of, or in consequence of, the Church and Land Acts, and the Coercion Acts, legal outrages in the shape of ejectments, and illegal outrages in various forms of retaliation raged from 1870 and onwards. For the most part, both kinds of outrage were regarded as so much matters of course, that little prominence was given to them in the papers. English people of that time superciliously remarked that Ireland seemed to be getting on about as usual, little appreciating the awful depth and severity of the misery that was being wrought. Only a glimpse of the character of the events going on was occasionally vouchsafed, of which the following is an example.

The papers of April 29th, 1871, contained an account of an illustrative eviction scene in Ireland. An old man named Shea was tenant of a market-house at Dunmamoay, in Cork county. The landlord,

A MURDEROUS EVICTION.

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Captain Shuldham, wished to evict the old man under a decree obtained at the Bandon sessions. Shea was nearly eighty years of age, and both he and his family were exceedingly popular in the district. A first attempt to enforce the decree was abandoned through threats of opposition. A second attempt at eviction being anticipated the market-house was regularly fortified. The lower part presented its usual appearance, but the upper portion was garrisoned by the family and their sympathisers. The weapons of defence consisted of pikes, pitchforks, piles of stones and brickbats, and holes were bored through the floors and ceilings for the purpose of efficient discharges of the missiles. A body of ninety constabulary advanced in three columns to the attack. A crowd tried to prevent their approach, but the police forced their way through with fixed swords. The women of the mob made a strenuous resistance. A "redoubt" in front of the building was held by a group of women under the command of the Miss Sheas, the daughters of the tenant, and while the constabulary were trying to capture this position a pike was being thrust at them by a sentinel stationed at a window overhead. After a brief consultation, the authorities commenced to demolish the woodwork of the internal staircase leading to the loft, and as the heavy blows and crash of timbers resounded through the building, they elicited shouts from the people without. As the work of demolition progressed, the crowd got more and more excited, and the police had some difficulty in holding them back. The pikeman at the upper doorway, under whose feet the assault was being made within, exhibited the utmost composure, calmly smoking his pipe, and nodding assent to the exhortations of the crowd to "pike 'em." Hot work progressing, the fabric falling with loud crashes, the pikeman vanished into the interior amid cries of 66 Bravo, John." The platform at the head of the stairs being smashed with a sledge hammer, pikes, iron bars, and a long knife were thrust down through the holes above. One of the pike-thrusts having slightly wounded a bailiff, orders were given to "Fix swords" and load!" The police then returned the pike-thrusts with their swords, and constable Kilroy made a dash at the pike that wounded the bailiff, and wrenched it from the grasp of its holder. The noise of the struggle increased; the excitement of the crowd was intense, but no attempt at active interference was made from that quarter. Shortly afterwards the entire cordon of police fixed swords, the utmost vigilance being needed to prevent the line being broken. Crash followed

crash from the blows of the sledge hammer, and, in the end, the police succeeded in the eviction.

not appear. Very likely the old Who cared? Who shuddered? people and the journalist with

What became of the evicted does man soon died-possibly in a ditch. The famine had so familiarized the such scenes and such deaths, that they were suffered to pass without much observation. That eviction, of its kind and character, illustrating the resistance of a whole nation to the laws imposed by another nation, was only one amongst hundreds and thousands proceeding between 1870 and 1878, the Land Act having rather stimulated the process than otherwise.

All the time, England slumbered upon the delusion that the Land Act was bringing peace and plenty. The Liberal papers continually said so, for it was their cue so to say. The Conservative papers did not want to disturb the slumber, and so, in common with their contemporaries, kept it all dark. An obscure landlord shot now and then; two or three jumping agents brought down from time to time; gaunt starvation stalking the land, and the grimmest kinds of grim deaths occuring every day ;—what was all that compared to the news from Constantinople and Afghanistan, and other quarters that looked so much more interesting at their greater distances from view?

On the 2nd of April 1878, the monotony of Irish news was broken by the assassination of the Earl of Leitrim. He had resided at Milford in Donegal, and he left his residence, Manor Vaughan, accompanied by a clerk named Meekins, and was driving on an outside car to Derry to meet his solicitor there. About five miles towards Derry was a plantation. The Earl's valet followed in a tax-cart, being about a mile behind, and, on arriving at the plantation found his master and the clerk lying shot dead in the road, and the driver shot dead in his seat. It was supposed that the assassins had concealed themselves in the plantation and had fired from thence, and that they made their escape in a boat across Mulroy Bay.

There was, and is no doubt, the murder arose from agrarian causes. It was committed near a farm, from which a widow named Algoe, a respectable Presbyterian, had recently been evicted. The relations of his lordship and his tenants were always the reverse of friendly; though kind and liberal, according to his lights, he was extremely exacting with his tenants, visiting with unsparing severity any infraction of the arbitrary rules he imposed. Many evictions had recently occurred,

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and eighty more were in process on his estate at the time. He had previously been murderously attacked, but had succeeded in seizing his assailant. He indulged in eccentric forms of resentment, and made himself generally a mark to be shot at. It was a common observation that the wonder was he had not been assassinated years before, and there was really little wonder that he was fatally hit at last. Some persons were arrested by the police, but there was not a particle of tangible evidence to justify their detention, and they were released. That is all that is publicly known as to the discovery of the perpetrators; but the Peace Preservation Act was in force. It did not prevent the murder. It did not assist in the discovery of the murderers. If, in such a flagrant day-light case as that, the Act was so utterly powerless, of what possible use was it at all? It is a striking illustration of the truth that that Act, and all such, so far as the prevention or punishment of crime are concerned, are all sound and fury -especially fury-signifying nothing.

There is another consideration. By that time, the lapsing of the Wesmeath Act had occurred five years previously, without remark or attempt at renewal. This is sufficient acknowledgment that the ribbon societies, if they ever existed in reality at all, had ceased to be influential. The Land League was not in existence till a year afterwards. No one (even the most unscrupulous vituperator), ever ventured to suggest that the Home Rule League had anything to do with that murder. The Fenians were all in America. There was no other knowr. confederacy of any kind upon which the crime could be fastened. There is but one conclusion. The murder was retaliation for a specific injury inflicted by the murdered man, for which the law provided no legitimate redress. There are bounds to endurance in such cases, and the bounds were passed then. Would it were the only case! Had it been a mere servant of his lordship, or some unfortunate understrapper of the law, probably no one in England would ever have heard of the event.

CHAPTER XLVII.

HOME RULE.

WHILE Ribbonism and Fenianism, and other suspected secret

societies were lurking and burrowing amongst the dark places of Irish life, between 1870 and 1880, there arose into the light, parallel therewith, an entirely new movement of a public and openly avowed character, under the designation of Home Rule.

Home Rule was and is, either a new form of the demand for the Repeal of the Union, or first cousin to it. The distinctive point about Home Rule is the manner of its initiation. We have remarked that (omitting the indifferent) the Irish Church Act offended a good many more Irishmen than it pleased. Amongst those who were deeply offended by it was Isaac Butt. It transformed him from a highly respectable and well connected barrister into a political agitator. As a devout Protestant, who presumably knew something of the law and its basis, he perceived that the Church Act really destroyed the fundamental principle of the Union; and, as he and his Protestant friends had therefore nothing more to gain by the Union, and no ground left for adhering to it, they very soon came to a new understanding on the subject.

Butt had been brought up in all the most respectable traditions of the Union. Therefore, it was only by slow degrees that he could adapt himself to the new order of things. The idea of Home Rule was originated by Protestants, most of whom were Conservatives and leading citizens of Dublin. After some preliminary consultations, they held a formal meeting at the Bilton Hotel, Sackville Street, Dublin, on the evening of the 19th of May, 1870. The chair was occupied by Alderman James W. Mackay, more than once Lord Mayor of Dublin. After much discussion it was "6 proposed by Isaac Butt, Q.C.: That it is the opinion of this meeting that the true remedy for the evils of Ireland is the establishment of an Irish Parliament with full control