they believed to be their rights! "They were going up to their own house!" A jury found them guilty, and the judge allowed them out! Yes, allowed them out-men caught redhanded in an act of daring lawlessness, boldly trying to brazen it out as justifiable, with no suggestion of repentance, no sign of contrition, found guilty and allowed out. Was it unreasonable to expect that they would go home and keep up the fight? The day after the house attack the agitation took another turn. The boycotting engine began to race at top speed. Three emissaries of the League in the most open way made a tour of the shops in Thurles, warning the traders against having any dealings with Clarke. His cousin, whose only offence was that he bore the same name, found the butcher's door closed against him. Shopkeepers, with whom Mr Clarke had been dealing for years, and who were proud of his custom, as they well might be, wrote regretting they were unable to supply him any longer. Why? They had been warned! That was enough. And in twenty-four hours all the shopkeepers in the town, with one exception, and that a woman, had surrendered their independence to a handful of miscreants, and were following them as sheep follow a bellwether. A more pitiable tale than that of the Thurles traders has rarely been unfolded in a court of justice. One after another they testified, and testified eloquently, to Mr Clarke's good qualities, to their anxiety to retain his custom. "He was a good mark," said one, "and just the sort of customer that a business man would like to have. On the morning of 19th November an order came from Mr Clarke with a cheque. Witness returned the letter with the cheque. . . . Two young fellows called on him." "Mr Clarke," said another witness, "was a customer of his firm, and a good one. His account ran into hundreds of pounds in the year. Witness's relations with him were perfectly friendly, and he never had any complaint against him personally. A deputation of three men came into the shop. One of them was P. Dwyer. "As a result of that interview you gave up supplying Mr Clarke?" "Yes." "You did that with regret?" "Yes." "If you had been free to deal with him you would have continued to do so?" "Yes." And so on, all down the listthe butcher, the baker, the hardware merchant, the harness-maker, the coal merchant, the owner of the threshingmachine, the farrier. Most pitiable of all in this sad company was the poor baker, William Coady. He had nearly rivalled his Egyptian prototype and lost his head, under the wheels of the boycotting Juggernaut. Himself haud ignarus mali, he dare not succour another wretched victim of the League. of the League. "I was just recovering from a boycott myself, and did not want to get a into another. I did not want a little of the courage that was to touch Clarke. My windows shown by Mr Clarke, because were broken, and I got no pro- if two or three of them had tection." And so the man stood out and said, 'No dictawho was sending 100 to 150 tion for us,' this boycott would loaves of bread in the week for probably not have lasted the Clarke establishment, who month." They appeared to be was living by bread, had to a respectable body of men. drop his best customer, the There is just the pity of it. man who always "sent his Pace the learned judge, we recheque with the order," at the peat the question: Why had dictation of a few blackguards. not these respectable men some The Thurles shopkeepers are a moral courage? The absence type. Coady is a type. There of it is the besetting weakness are hundreds of such men in of Ireland to-day. Ireland, we similar positions all over the know, is a wonderful country country, willing, when a warn- for leagues, federations, associing note is sounded, to sur- ations of all kinds. There is render all their rights of no difficulty in organising a citizenship. The judge who conspiracy to boycott or to tried the conspiracy com- drive cattle. Why should not mented on the evidence of men 66 the Thurles shopkeepers as follows: "It was said, 'Why had not these shopkeepers the moral courage to say, "We won't yield to this lawless intimidation and interference with our rights; we are living by our shops "?" It was very fine for those in this court, who nearly all lived in the county of Dublin, where these agrarian conspiracies had no place, and where it was very easy for them to get protection, to talk of these men in the town of Thurles as cowards. But what would have happened to them if they had not yielded?" We confess the remarks of the Solicitor-General on the same point commend themselves more to us: "It was to be regretted that the traders in the town of Thurles, who appeared to be a respectable body of men, did not show conspire, confederate, and agree" to put down blackguardism? The great majority of Irishmen wish to live respectably, decently, quietly, to be let alone. Why don't they conspire to assert their respectability, their citizenship, their manhood! Of what avail would an "Ireland for the Irish" be if they are ready to forfeit their simplest rights at the nod of every selfish trickster! Why will they so readily allow themselves to be identified with methods and measures which in their hearts they dislike and condemn ? "When disorder is let loose in a country," said the judge, "no one can tell where it will stop." One of the plainest lessons to be learned from the Holycross case is that at the stroke of a pen from an inflammatory scribe in a local print, at the mere mouthing of a professional politician, a whole countryside can be set ablaze, and "the leading men of the parish" will be found encouraging and endorsing the wildest acts of lawlessness. In November 1908, when real war broke out at Holycross, the malcontents for a time established a reign of terror. Their mobs and bands invaded the neighbouring towns, wrecking shops and stoning the police and creating tumult. Was the conduct of the mob in these towns condemned? By no means. These rowdy ruffians were everywhere hailed as popular heroes. When a number of them were brought to justice and returned for trial, defence funds were started to which "the leading men of the parish" and the "respectable shopkeepers" contributed; and when, on their trial, they were convicted, and escaped without punishment, they received such an ovation as soldiers get returning from the war. When the storm was at its height, a monster demonstration was held in the heart of the Holycross district, at which Members of Parliament attended and promised their audience that as sure as the sun was setting in the west so surely would they have Clarke's broad acres distributed amongst them, and that very speedily. The priest of a neighbouring parish, presiding at a meeting to select delegates for that demonstration, advised every man who attended it to carry a good blackthorn! And shortly after that, when the boycott was in full swing, Mr Dillon went down to Thurles, that turbulent town where for several years rioting and window smashing were the order of the day, a town only a few miles distant from Mr Clarke's demesne, and after a few polite references to the Clarkes, the Cardens, and the Trants (the people of property in the locality), he assured his hearers that, unless so and so happened, they would "cry 'Havoc!' and let slip the dogs of war" (the audience thoroughly understood what that meant), just as his colleague in another county assured his following that unless things turned out to their liking, Land Bills and so on, "there would be hell in Ireland." By such persuasive measures, the persuasion of the blackthorn, the dogs of war, and making hell, are the gentle, the tractable, the 100and 150-acres men, to inherit the land of Ireland. Mansueti possidebunt terram. The Land for the People! Fortunately for himself, and much to the chagrin of the League, Mr Clarke proved equal to every demand that was made on his patience, his courage, his resource. When he could not get a pennyworth of any commodity in Thurles, he set about procuring his supplies from Dublin, a hundred miles off. When the local threshing-machine failed him. he employed one from another county, which came and went under police protection, and which was subsequently boy it. Being a man of means, cotted too for its audacity! Clarke, and many a time durWhen the local blacksmith ing the past three years the refused to shoe his horses he League must have realised sent them ten miles away to his friend Colonel Trant, who had also been through the boycotting mill, and had been obliged to set up a forge for himself. Cattle-dealers used to come to the door to buy Mr Clarke's stock. When they dropped him he sent his cattle to Dublin. No longer able to buy a beast in a local fair or market, he got them by train from distant counties. Not many men could conveniently quarter half a dozen police in their houses. Mr Clarke did it for more than a year. He put up another dozen in different houses on his farm for a shorter period. Finding him still unflinching, the League fetched a wider compass. The boycott which was hitherto confined to Clarke and his relations was now extended to all his staff and dependants. The supplies were suddenly cut off from over 120 people, who but for Mr Clarke's resource would have gone supperless to bed. He promptly established a shop in his yard, where for several months his large staff of labourers bought all their supplies better and probably cheaper than they could in Holycross or Thurles. The only gratifying feature in this remarkable case is that the boycott has failed and the conspirators-at least the ringleaders-have paid the penalty of their misconduct. It was more than a crime-it was a blunder-to attack Mr weapon of constitutional agitation for the redress of grievances! Where was the grievance, or the shadow of a grievance, in the Clarke case, "unless," as the Attorney - General said, "the law is to be laid down in Ireland that any man who sets selfish eyes on the property of another man must be tolerated, even though he had himself a substantial share of the world's goods"? "One of the lamentable features of the case," continued the Attorney-General, "was that a gentleman giving such employment, living on such good terms with his neighbours, and supporting so many persons on his estate, should, without doing any harm, have the whole countryside turned against him. and be refused the necessaries of life." Yes, without doing any harm. But there was a more lamentable feature still. How did the unscrupulous League set to work to smirch his fair record? By a campaign of the grossest misrepresentation, persisted in day after day. Time after time it was insisted on, in press and on platform, that Mr Clarke, or his father or grandfather before him, had evicted practically the whole of the land which he still retained on his hands. The public mind mind was poisoned against him as a relentless landlord, who would not give "these poor people" a few hundred acres of "the lands of the evicted tenants of the past," the lands off which he or his ancestors had cleared a proud and a prosperous peasantry. The local organ published a highly imaginative account of the Clarke ranch and the wholesale evictions. And yet what were the facts? Mr Clarke swore in the witness - box that he had never evicted a tenant off these lands, and that "none of the land that his grandfather had purchased was evicted land." A string of names was put to him on crossexamination, shadows "Like Stephen Sly and old John Naps of Greece, And Peter Turph, and Henry Pimpernel, And twenty more such names and men as these, Which never were, nor no man ever saw." Like the ghosts in "Macbeth," they came as shadows and so departed. as After such a parade of names of alleged "wounded soldiers," was any evidence given of their existence, or attempted to be given? None. Yet these baseless insinuations were good enough to hurl at Mr Clarke, and served their purpose, in the dark days when howling mobs assailed his house and out of tried to drive him the country, good enough to put before the weak-kneed shopkeepers of Thurles grounds for refusing him his daily bread, good enough to be repeated in the House of Commons by the leader who spoke so glibly of "letting slip the dogs of war." What strikes an outsider most about these Irish boycotts is the conspicuous absence of any sense of fairness and decent principle. Any stick is good enough to beat a dog with. Once the League determines to throttle a man, reason is dethroned. We are back to primeval types and primeval instincts. "Dragons of the prime" are mellow music in comparison. "The days of heroism are past," says the good old parish priest of Doonvarragh, Dr Gray. "The people are become a flock of sheep, ready to fly and destroy themselves at the bite of a dog.". "That's just it. That's what I complain of," rejoins his impetuous curate, "that the whole parish should be terrorised by one or two miscreants. What are they afraid of? What can these |