.

The "Land League" died officially in Philadelphia on April 25, 1883.[1] Ironically its demise came at the end of probably the largest convention of Land Leaguers ever held in America.[2] The event appeared in the Philadelphia Press., not with the obituaries, but on page one, column one, under the headline, "Land League Day" with the sub-head, "The Old Body Dissolved After Thirteen Hours Discussion."[3]

The League's end was an anti-climax, a sort of necessary formality. It had had its glorious inception following the huge mass protest meeting at Irishtown in County Mayo, its meteoric rise with active, militant branches springing up in all parts of the far-flung, English-speaking world, and its rather inglorious decline following the "Kilmainham Treaty"[4] in which Parnell entered into a deal with Gladstone to suppress the League and its activities. As a dynamic, driving force it had enjoyed its brief, magnificent day, but by late 1882 it had run its course in Ireland, and by early 1883, in America. The Land League, per se, was dead.

Michael Davitt, the acknowledged "Father of the Land League" was not in Philadelphia for the rites. It is hard to say whether he would have been except for the fact that he was then serving one of the several jail sentences he was awarded by the British government for his activities on behalf of Ireland, this time a six months term in Richmond-Bridewell. Less than a year before he had drawn a tremendously enthusiastic crowd to the Academy of Music in Philadelphia[5] when he had appeared there as a part of a whirlwind two-week speaking tour of the United States, a tour on which, according to the New York Times, he had "collected between $15,000 and $20,000 for the organization."[6]

Davitt had, of course, spoken in Philadelphia before, at least twice. While visiting his mother in Manayunk on his first trip to the United States in 1878 he had delivered in Philadelphia, "The Present Condition of Ireland From a Political Standpoint,"[7] one of his first speeches in America, and one of his first anywhere expositing the "New Departure."[8] He had been there again in 1880 when, with John Dillon, he had made a grand tour of all of the principal cities of the United States establishing branches of the League and collecting contributions, which by June of 1881 had totalled up to more than twelve hundred branches and over one hundred thousand pounds in contributions.[9] In fact it might have been the grand Land League activity of 1880 that moved a group of the more militant physical force men ill whose "prime mover" was reputed to have been O'Donovan Rossa, sometimes referred to in the newspapers as "O'Dynamite Rossa," to assemble in Philadelphia and establish an organization of their own, "The United Irishmen of America."[10]

At any rate Davitt had been in Philadelphia in '78, '80, and '82, He was not there in '83.

Charles Stewart Parnell, the acknowledged "leader" of the Land League, as distinguished from its "father," was not there either. He had somewhat tardily accepted the leadership when it had become quite apparent that the League was going somewhere with or without him, and had subsequently led the movement not to the pinnacle of success that probably was inherently within it, but to this quiet denouement. Perhaps there was no better way. As late as 1916 men who thought there was, men like Sir Roger Casement, Patrick Pearse, and Donnelly, paid with their lives for the thought. Parnell was for a time, until the great Kitty O'Shea scandal and trial that would wreck him and scandalize the nation, back in the British House of Commons doing what he did best, hammering out the best available compromise for Ireland by levying organized parliamentary obstruction against all other legislation necessary to England.

Parnell had spoken in Philadelphia too, in 1880, just eight days after his arrival in New York for the highly successful speaking tour of 62 cities with John Dillon that preceded Davitt's effort, launched the Land League in America, and collected the fantastic sum of 40,000 pounds in just sixty-seven days.[11] His terse diary entry for the day is a paragon of understatement:

Philadelphia, January 10th - Meeting held in Academy of Music - largest theatre in the world, La Scala of Milan alone excepted. Afterwards accompanied Governor Curtin, General Patterson, and Colonel McClure to a reception at the Saturday Club.[12]

The Parnells were not totally unrepresented. Mother Parnell was present. She was the guest of honor.[13] Brother John was there, but he seems to have been a very minor figure, and beyond the brief note in the Press article that he had arrived, nothing more seems to have been said or needs to be.[14] Fannie Parnell, Charles Stewart's sister who had founded the "Ladies' Land League" in America,[15] was not there. She had died rather unexpectedly the year before at "Ironsides," the family home a little distance out of Philadelphia in Bordentown, New Jersey, and her loss was sorely felt. Nor was the other active sister present, Annie Parnell, who had enthusiastically picked up the idea of the Ladies' Land League, founded one in the Emerald Isle itself, and seen it through magnificently while all of the male League leaders, including brother Charles, were in prison16 Sister Theodosia was not there, but after she had packed off to Paris in the middle of the fuss with England in 1880 to marry a British naval officer,[17] no one really expected her to be.

Henry George, out of whose vast mind and little pamphlet, "The Irish Land Question," had come probably the clearest and best statement of what the whole land crisis and agitation was all about, was not in Philadelphia either. He was not out of the country, as he was most likely to be in those days that represented the heyday of his land-reform lecturing career, nor was he even out of the East. He was, in fact, less than two hours away, over in New York City where he was then living. But, always in the forefront, the focus of George's attention had by 1883 shifted from Ireland to Scotland and England. He was writing a series of articles for Leslies Magazine that would become another very popular and influential book, Social Problems, and beginning to prepare for another lecture tour of Scotland and England in the fall of '83."[18]

George's connections with Ireland were somewhat intricate, but at the same time quite direct. He was married to a girl whose parents had migrated to Australia from Ireland. Under the tutelage of an Irishman named McClatchy he wrote in California his first columns and articles dealing with the developing Irish famine and crisis of the late seventies. The long standing California land problem, compounded by the railroad "Robber Barons," impinged upon by the Irish land crisis, set off a chain of thought in George that he developed first into a column for his newspaper, then into an expanded article, then into the hundred page pamphlet, "The Irish Land Question," and finally, in a great burst of concentrated energy and labor into the book, Progress and Poverty, his most significant written work. Upon returning to the East after some twenty years in California he had come into contact with a number of Irishmen and Irish-Americans connected with the budding land reform agitation including Michael Davitt. He had lectured some in the East and Canada on behalf of the Irish movement, had become an overseas correspondent to cover the Irish situation for Patrick Ford's Irish World, and had shortly thereafter gained worldwide renown both as an author and a land reform lecturer.

George's connections with Philadelphia were more direct. He had been born there. What little formal education he possessed he had picked up there. It was in Philadelphia that he had received the initial stimulation of his intellectual curiosity and his capacity for analytical thinking, which were considerable, and his training as a printer. The latter was of incalculable importance in the development of the magnificent style and command of the language that made him a "best seller" both as a writer and as a public speaker some twenty years later.

George's position on policy for the Land League, when he fully unfolded it, was the most radical of the "big three," Parnell, George, and Davitt. Because of his peculiar position he could afford it to be, and could even capitalize on the situation. The book containing his analysis, theory, and solution had been conceived and written far away from Ireland and England and before the crisis of the late seventies had come to the critical point. He had sprung into international prominence and had become, in a sense, "international," almost overnight. Thus, when George spoke out for the abolition of private ownership in land with "no compensation" for the landlords, he was not attacking the English absentee landlords of the Irish soil especially, nor was he attacking a particular landlord directly as was the case, with the local agitators in the first great protest rally at Canon Burke's holdings in County Mayo. He was advancing his program as desirable policy for all land in all the lands whatever, everywhere in the world. Hence he was somewhat "immunized" from the kind of treatment he would probably have had if he had been a local agitator promulgating a similar proposal in his own home town, or even, in the earlier stages of his oratorical career, in his own home land had there been a nationwide land crisis there at the time.

When the English police in Ireland did seize George's person, search his luggage, and detain him and an English correspondent with whom he was travelling at the time, the newspapers by and large treated the matter as something of a joke while warning their readers not to take this gentleman and his proposals too lightly.[19] When he was released the papers derided the "authorities" with considerable "light" comment. The authorities perhaps took heed, for apparently George was never again arrested anywhere in the world for anything. The chief advocate of the most far-reaching land proposal of them all was the least molested.

Parnell's position was the least radical, in fact, virtually conservative. Although he did tread some rather dangerous ground in his speeches, did find himself in jail for a short term, and did face a treason trial later on (fortunately successfully), as a result of his Land League activity, he never went so far as to advocate out-and-out abolition of private property in land. The "Three F's"[20] ultimately adopted by Gladstone seem to be as far as Parnell would have progressed under his own initiative. Under the necessity of accepting at first titular and then grasping later the real leadership of the League, the most advanced point he ever seems to have reached was one of advocating a "peasant proprietary." At one time he proposed that the British Government "purchase" the land outright from the landlords at a fixed price equivalent to thirty years rental at the going rate and then sell it to the occupants at the same annual figure over the thirty year period.[21]

By virtue of the peculiar combination of factors operating in Parnell's case, he seems also to have been relatively "immune." As the recognized and long time leader of the Irish Nationalist Party in the British House of Commons and leader of the "moral force" group in Ireland, as one recognized and grudgingly respected by Englishmen as a protestant and a landowner himself, and one who was known to be open to a "deal," perhaps Gladstone's government felt it expedient to let him alone for the time, and let him talk. Perhaps they felt that by allowing his leadership of the movement to become firmly established his tendency toward dampening rather than fanning the fire would be useful. At any rate that is how it turned out. When the League needed either fanning or dampening, he dampened it.

There is a strong feeling among some that if the "no rent policy" had been implemented six months earlier when Davitt wanted it done, it would have worked and culminated in complete success for the Land League. Parnell vetoed it then. Later on when the "No Rent Manifesto"[22] was announced, all of the leaders, including Parnell were in jail, the press of conditions had eased somewhat, and with the exception of the very active "Ladies' Land League," the "steam" had left the movement, and the "no rent" policy did not come off successfully. Following Kilmainham and the unfortunate slaying of two British officials newly arrived in Ireland, the famed "Phoenix Park Murders," the Ladies' Land League was put out of business, the Land League itself was suppressed, and the emphasis and point of focus shifted away from the land question and back again to the broader area of "Home Rule for Ireland," and even though there was some easement of the land problem, the Irish problem remained far from solved, as the unsuccessful one-day "Revolution" of Easter Sunday 1916 attests. The Irish land crisis of 1880 was "weathered" successfully by the British Government, not so successfully by the Land League. For that, Parnell must receive much of the credit, or the condemnation, depending upon the point of view.

Davitt's position was somewhere near the "middle of the road." Probably it had to be. He was in the most vulnerable condition of all with no "immunity" of any kind except that afforded by popular respect and admiration, and he suffered much. He had already spent seven and a half years in prison, much of it in squalor and filth, an uncomfortably memorable portion of it in solitary confinement where he conceived the idea of the "Land League" before getting out to bring it forth as a reality. He was out only on a "ticket of leave," that is, on parole. His original sentence was for fifteen years, and upon arrest for almost anything at all almost any British judge could decide to send him back for the other seven and a half years. In the Land League crisis he was arrested and jailed for one thing or another more often and held for longer than any of the others. And as an ex-prisoner he was barred for a time from taking the seat in the British House of Commons to which he had been duly elected by the Irish people.

There are some who say, in looking back, that Davitt should have retained leadership of the Land League after he conceived and organized it in the first place, but they tend to forget that the very job of bringing together into one functioning unit such diverse forces and philosophies as those of the extremely explosive Fenians on the one hand and the extremely patient, patience-trying Parliamentarians on the other was a very tenuous business that required a lot of mollifying and compromising. As significant as Davitt's oral persuasion undoubtedly was upon the people of Ireland and the world at large, his most significant oral persuasion was probably internal, upon the leaders of the various fractions involved, rather than external.

These people also tend to forget that when differences of opinion on Land League policy serious enough for a split were at hand, it was Davitt's own feeling that the majority of the Irish people would have gone along with Parnell rather than with him. Hence when he came to America in 1882 and in a series of speeches "surrendered" the leadership and his own position, he was surrendering to majority opinion rather than to Parnell, as we are told any good citizen ought to do in a crisis.

If Davitt had grasped the leadership, or grasped for it, when he had his best chance, he might have gone down more gloriously and the League might have gone down somewhat more gloriously too, but he probably would have gone down anyway, and, as he told his audiences, he felt that he and the Irish people would do better to continue forward as a single unit down a path he did not fully approve rather than as two or more disagreeing factions as had generally been the pattern in the generally unsuccessful past.[23]

As a great, and to that point, remarkably successful compromiser, Davitt could hardly have done otherwise. He was, in a sense, trapped by his own role in the dynamic of history. As a consequence we find in his public speeches less consistency than in the others - not so much inconsistency of position as inconsistency of direction. Parnell did not move very far, but he moved in one direction and when he got there, he seems to have stayed there. George moved inexorably forward to his most advanced theoretical position and then worked out refinements and further ramifications of a practical and pragmatic nature consistent with it. In his speeches Davitt seems to have started from a rather vague position calling for the Irish land to "belong" to the Irish people in some way, moved to a position about as far advanced as George's in 1882 and nearly identical with it, and then "backed off" again to a position supporting a peasant proprietary. There does not, however, appear to be any question of a surrender of integrity on his part. Davitt made it clear in his speeches that his own personal position on land policy was more advanced than the one that the League itself and that he as a representative of the League were then supporting.

So when, having flooded and subsided, the League was rather quietly absorbed back into the broader movement of the "National League" for Home Rule for Ireland, none of the big-three patriarchs of the Land League were present. But if the "fathers" were not there in Philadelphia, at least the mothers of the fathers were - all three of them. Henry George's mother was still living in the house at Third and Catherine Streets into which the family had moved from Tenth Street shortly after Henry's birth, and she was to die there within days of his father in just a few months. Davitt's mother was still very much alive in the city of her adoption. Parnell's mother, the daughter of Commodore Stewart of Philadelphia, famed as the commanding officer of "Old Ironsides", sat stalwartly on the platform in Horticultural Hall through all thirteen hours of the last session as guest of honor. In this afternoon she graciously accepted a bouquet of flowers from a group of the delegates.[24] It was a fitting gesture. Philadelphia maintained at least a "maternal" link with the Land League right to the end.

FOOTNOTES

1. There were a number of Land Leagues, Land Reform Leagues, Land Reform Unions, and such. The one here referred to, and the one generally meant when the simple label, "The Land League" is used, is the 'Irish National Land League" founded by Michael Davitt in Ireland in late 1879 and absorbed into the broader "Irish National League" there after the Land League's suppression in late 1882. The rise and fall of the League are covered in detail in Pomfret, J. E., The Struggle for Land in Ireland, Princeton Univ. Press, 1930, The Irish Land League Crisis, by Norman Dunbar Palmer, Yale Univ. Press, 1940, and in the various biographies of Parnell, Henry George, and Davitt, as well as in Davitt's The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland, London, 1904.
2. This was the League's fourth annual, and last, convention in America. The others had been held in New York in 1880, Buffalo in 1881, and Washington in 1882. As reported in the Philadelphia Inquirer of April 25, 1883, p. 8, c. 1, Patrick Egan, treasurer of the League estimated that it would be "nearly double as large as the Washington or Buffalo conventions." John Devoy, in Recollection of an Irish Rebel, p. 450, says, "The two largest of the Land League ^gatherings were those held in Chicago in 1881 and in Philadelphia in 1883.' [Note: The Chicago meeting of 1881 was actually a convention of Irish American Societies in which Land League delegates and those of a number of other societies participated. The Land League convention of that year was held in Buffalo as noted above.
3. April 26, 1883.
4. So called because the deal was consummated between Gladstone and Parnell while the latter was in Kilmainham jail. He was released immediately afterward.
5. Covered in the Philadelphia newspapers for June 27, 1882 as follows: Ledger, p. 1, c. 5; Bulletin, p. 8, c. 2; Inquirer, p. 3, c. 1; Press, p. 1, c. 4.
6. New York Times, July 16, 1882, p. 12, c. 2.
7. Philadelphia Press, September 17, 1878, p. 2, c. 2.
8. This was the name applied to Davitt's idea for bringing together into a single "open" (non-secret) organization members of all of the various secret and non-secret, physical-force and moral-force Irish societies around the world to concentrate their fire upon one of the prime targets of all of them, the abolition of land-lordism in Ireland. The "New Departure" was the idea, the Land League was the instrument.
9. Pomfret, p. 128.
10. Bulletin, June 28, 1880, p. 7, c. 3. According to the Inquirer of June 29, p. 3, c. 1, upon taking the chair at the meeting in the Shires Club at Eighth and Walnut, Judge Brennan of Iowa, the elected chairman, said among other things, "The Land Leaguers hope for liberty through the soft pipings of peace. By no such siren song will the English lion be lulled into a doze. Will a country that has spent millions of treasure, and poured out men's blood like water to hold another land in chains, give up its victims without a struggle? Never! Freedom means force, and we must prepare to fight old England for the independence of our country."
11. For details of Parnell's tour, see Minnick, Wayne C., "Parnell in America," Speech Monographs, March 1953, pp. 39-48, and Colton, Kenneth E., "Parnell's Mission in Iowa," Annals of Iowa, Des Moines, 1940, Ser. 3, July 1939- Apr. 1941, pp. 312-327. Davitt's Fall of Feudalism in Ireland also contains a detailed account.
12. Pomfret, p. 195. The diary and itinerary of the tour also appear in Davitt, The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland.
13. Philadelphia Press, April 25, 1883, p. 1, c. 1.
14. Ibid.
15. Cashman, D. B., Life of Michael Davitt, Glasgow, N.D., p. 234.
16. Sheehy-Skeffington, Francis, Michael Davitt, Boston, 1909, p. 115. Sheehy-Skeffington places a very high value upon this development. He says on p. 116: "It was the most important step taken since the start of the movement; for it was the Ladies Land League that beat down Forster. The Land League was the one national movement that recognized women and availed itself of their services as citizens, instead of shutting them out, like children, from the conduct of political business; and it was precisely to this exceptional attitude towards women that the Land League movement owed its exceptional success."
17. Haslip, Joan, Parnell, N. Y., 1937, p. 113.
18. Barker, Charles Albro, Henry George, Oxford Univ. Press, N. Y., 1955, p. 379.
19. Lawrence, Elwood P., in Henry George in the British Isles, Michigan State Univ. Press, 1957, p. 23, cites an editorial in the London Times in which "Readers are warned not to conclude, from the comic-opera details of George's arrest, that he was, therefore, a figure of fun. On the contrary, 'respectful attention' would be given his views, for 'he is known to represent a party and a political force,' in particular Michael Davitt, his disciple, and Davitt's followers in Ireland and England."
20. Barker, p. 344. These were "Fair Rents, Fixity of Tenure, and Free Sale of whatever improvements they might put upon the land they occupied."
21. The generosity of this offer is perhaps worth noting in passing in that the "going rate" at the time was considered excessively high by the tenants and their friends all over the world, by the Devon Commission that was set up to investigate the "rack rent" situation, and by the "land courts" that were created by the land bill of 1881 to adjudicate such matters.
22. The "No Rent Manifesto" called upon the Irish tenants to withhold rents from the landlords, to use the money and their produce to take care of their own families first, to join together and resist any attempts to evict any for non-payment of rent, and to turn over any surplus to the League to relieve the hardship of other tenants who were worse off or under greater pressure than themselves.
23. See, for example, the full text of Davitt's speech in the Philadelphia Academy of Music of June 26, 1882 as reported in the Press of June 27, p. 1, c. 4. The speech was also rather fully covered on the same day in the Ledger, p. 1, c. 5, the Inquirer, p. 3, c. 2, and the Bulletin, p. 8, c. 2.
24. Philadelphia Press, April 26, 1883, p. 1, c. 1.