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How do the tidings of such a commission operate upon the ears of Irishmen at large? He is told that under the fear of the Landleague his rent is to be reduced to an extent which is left to his imagination; and then, that he is to be freed altogether from the incubus of a landlord! He is, in fact, made to understand that his cherished Landleague has become all-powerful.
And, indeed, the feeling had become common through the country that all the lawyers and judges in Ireland, the lawyers and judges that is who were opposed to the Landleague, could not secure a conviction of any kind against prisoners whom the Landleague was bound to support.
This was the Irish Landleague view; and though it contained an accusation against the Government for having contrived the murder itself, it was all the better on that account. The English papers simply said that the Galway police must be fast asleep. This man had been murdered when in the very hands of the officers of justice. The judge had seen the shots fired.
He had been spending some hours of the last day in reading the clauses of the Bill under which the sub-commissioners were to show him what mercy they might think right. As he left Cavan the following morning, his curses were more deep against the Government than against the Landleague. Mr. O'Mahony and his daughter got back to Cecil Street in September in a very impecunious state.
The boy had seemed to entertain in his mind certain ideas friendly to the Landleague, and had made promises on behalf of Landleaguers to which he had long adhered. But his father had at last succeeded, and the truth had been forthcoming. His lordship would instruct them how far the boy's deposition could be accepted as evidence, and how far it must fail.
When the Land Bill was passed the Landleague was in full power; boycotting had become the recognised weapon of an illegal association; and the Home-Rulers of the day, the party, that is, who represented the Landleague, were already in such possession of large portions of the country as to prevent the possibility of carrying out the laws.
We all know, alas! in how many cases the sentence has been pronounced and the judgment given, and the punishment executed. Such have been the results of the Land Law passed in 1881. And under the curse so engendered the country is now labouring. It cannot be denied that the promoters of the Land Laws are weak, and that the disciples of the Landleague are strong.
When Kit Mooney had first laid down the law to his father, how he ought to assist in boycotting all the enemies of the Landleague, no one saw his way clearer than did Teddy Mooney. "I wouldn't mind doing without a bit or a sup," he said, when his son explained to him that he might have to suffer a little for the cause. "Not a bit or a sup when the ould counthry wants it."
Jones," who had lost his son, and, worse still, his eighty acres of grass, and he was also "that fellow Jones," that enemy to the Landleague, whom it behoved all patriotic Irishmen to get the better of and to conquer. Florian had been murdered on the 30th of August, which was a Tuesday, and the trial had been postponed until Friday, the 2nd of September.
O'Donnell, who was accustomed to speak of all the Landleague criminals as patriotic lambs, whose lamb-like qualities were exceeded only by their patriotism, did not dare to intimate such a wish any further. But he did urge, with all that benevolence for which he was conspicuous, that the trial should come on at that immediate spring assizes.
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