ABSTRACT
In the brief years of his leadership, Parnell had taken upon him to secure for his country the Land for the People and Home Rule for Ireland. Before his death he had gained the one but failed in the other. The peasantry, though they had not yet entered into the Promised land, had been brought to the Pisgah whence they could survey it, and if Parnell was not their only leader, or the first to take up the cause, he was the unquestioned leader, such as seldom comes to an enslaved people. Nothing remained, now that the principle had been accepted, but for successive Land acts to complete the movement begun by a Liberal government in 1870. The great Conservative party, with the House of Lords behind them, themselves accepted Land Purchase, the buying out of the landlords, and smaller ‘concessions’ to Ireland-provided the Union was maintained. But while this aristocratic party abandoned landlordism in Ireland, it was far otherwise with Home Rule, which in their view was ‘marching through rapine and ruin to the dismemberment of the Empire’. So vital did they deem the maintenance of the status quo that, reinforced by the Liberals who had forsaken Gladstone in 1885, they assumed the name of Unionists.1 To all appearance they had triumphed. Gladstonian Home Rule without the ‘Grand Old Man’, seemed unthinkable. As for the Nationalist party, split not merely into two, but into several factions, it was like an army that has lost the leader that created it. The driving force of the Land agitation
diminished, for the 90’s were good years for the farmer compared with the disastrous 80’s and the first decade of the twentieth-century better still. It seemed that only a sudden triumph in the party game at Westminster, or some unexpected event in world-politics, could make Home Rule once more a burning question.
