I have been exceedingly anxious all day at not receiving your promised telegram to hear how you got home. [1] These letters were really written from London. [2] Sent to Dublin to be posted. [3] Myself. [4] Captain O'Shea. {78} CHAPTER X THE LAND LEAGUE TRIALS "_The surest way to prevent seditions is to take away the matter of them._"--LORD BACON. Through the whole of 1880 Parnell was determinedly organizing the Land League throughout Ireland, and during the winter, doubtless encouraged by the enormous distress that prevailed over the whole country, the force and power of the League grew with a rapidity that surpassed even the expectations of Parnell and his party. All through the vacation Parnell and his followers held meetings in carefully calculated areas of Ireland, and in his speeches Parnell explained the meaning and wide-reaching scope of the League's agitation, i.e. that tenant farmers were to trust in their own combination alone and "should give no faith to the promises of the English Ministers." During the early session that year Parnell had introduced a Bill called "Suspension of Ejectments Bill," and this first pressed upon the House the necessity of dealing with the Irish landlord troubles. Parnell's party urged this Bill with so united a front that Mr. Gladstone was obliged to consider the main substance of it, and he agreed to insert a clause in the "Relief of Distress Bill" which would deal with impending evictions of Irish tenants. But the Speaker of the House held that the interpolation of such a clause would not be "in order," and the Chief Secretary for Ireland (Mr. Forster) then, by Mr. Gladstone's direction, brought in his "Disturbances Bill," {79} which was to all practical purposes Parnell's Bill under another name. In the course of the debate on this Bill Mr. Gladstone himself said that "in the circumstances of distress prevalent in Ireland (at that time) a sentence of eviction is the equivalent of a sentence of death." These absolutely true words of Gladstone's were used by Parnell very many times during his Land League tours both in speeches and privately, and many times he added--as so often he did to me at home--bitter comment upon the apathy of the English Government, upon the curious insensibility of the English law-makers, who knew these things to be true in Ireland and yet were content to go on in their policy of drift, unless forced into action by those who saw the appalling reality of the distress among the Irish poor that was so comfortably deplored in London. In this connexion Parnell used to say that the fundamental failure in the English government of Ireland was: First, the complete inability of the Ministers in power to realize anything that was not before their eyes; and, secondly, their cast-iron conviction that Ireland was the one country of the world that was to be understood and governed by those to whom she was little but a name.