and 'bad' landlords, and might grant the aid of the police for the
collection of reasonable, though refusing it for the collection of
excessive rents, and might at last magnanimously recognise the virtues
of Mr. Smith-Barry, whilst passing a practical sentence of outlawry on
Lord Clanricarde. Is there anything absurd or unreasonable in the
supposition that a Ministry of Land Leaguers chosen by a Parliament of
Nationalists should attempt to enforce the unwritten law of the Land
League? A Gladstonian who answers this question in the affirmative
entertains a far lower opinion than can any candid Unionist of Mr.
Gladstone's Irish allies. It would be the grossest unfairness to suggest
that every man convicted of conspiracy by the Special Commission added
to criminality and recklessness a monstrous form of hypocrisy, and that,
whilst urging Irish peasants to boycott evictors and land-grabbers, he
felt no genuine moral abhorrence of evictions and land-grabbing. But if,
as is certainly the case, the founders of the Land League really
detested the existing system of land tenure, and considered a landlord
who exacted rent a criminal, and a tenant who paid it a caitiff, it is
as certain as anything can be that they will be under the greatest
temptation, not to say, in their own eyes, under a stringent moral
obligation, to strain the power of an Irish Executive for the purpose of
abolishing the payment of rent. Nothing, at any rate, will seem to an
Irish Ministry more desirable than that within three years[60] from the
passing of the Bill landlords and tenants should come to an arrangement,
and nothing is more likely to produce this result than the withdrawal
from the landlords of the aid, if not the protection, of the law. My
argument, however, at the present point does not require the assertion
or the belief that an Irish Ministry will be guilty of every act of
oppression which it can legally commit. All that I insist upon is that
an Irish Ministry will exercise immense power, and that without
violating a letter of the constitution, and without passing a single act