the Irish peasant proclaimed that it must go. It went. Still more
fundamental was the existence of the Protestant Established Church. To
touch it was to lay hands on the Ark. Orange orators threatened civil
war; two hundred thousand Ulstermen were to shoulder their Minie
Rifles, and not merely slaughter the Catholics but even depose Queen
Victoria.

Ireland said that the Establishment too must go; and, with the echoed
menace of Fenianism ringing in his ears, Mr Gladstone hauled down the
official blazon of Ascendancy. "Ulster" did not fight. But the fierce
struggle for the land affords the crucial test. Landlordism of that most
savage type which held for its whole gospel that a man may do what he
likes with his own was conceived to be the very corner-stone of British
rule in Ireland. It controlled Parliament, the judiciary, the schools,
the Press, and possessed in the Royal Irish Constabulary an incomparable
watch-dog. It had resisted the criticism and attack loosened against it
by the scandal of the Great Famine. Then suddenly Ireland took the
business in hand. On a certain day in October 1879, some thirty men met
in a small hotel in Dublin and, under the inspiration of Michael Davitt,
founded the Land League. To the programme then formulated, the
expropriation of the landlords at twenty years' purchase of their rents,
England as usual said No! The proposal was thundered against as
confiscation, communism, naked and shameful. To any student, with
patience sufficient for the task, the contemporary files of such
journals as the _Times_ will furnish an exquisite chapter in the
literature of obtuseness. England sustained her No! with batons,
bullets, plank-beds, Coercion courts, and an occasional halter; Ireland
her Yes! with "agitation." Is it necessary to ask who won? Is it
necessary to trace step by step the complete surrender of the last
ditchers of those days? The fantastic and wicked dreams of the agitators