as any class would naturally act; a considerable number made remissions of rent; if a large majority, as certainly was the case, insisted upon their legal rights--conduct which must be pronounced unfortunate--it must be recollected that an agitation of extreme violence had been directed against the whole order; and that Mr. Gladstone had declared that, after the Land Act, there were to be no more concessions. The League now acquired new power; its branches spread over large parts of the west; its directors, from members in the House of Commons, to its avowed agents, and to the 'village ruffians,' who carried out its bidding in many places, rioted in atrocious threats against landlords whether good or bad; and a movement against the payment of rent began. The teaching which had been spread abroad during many months, bore the fruits which were to be expected from it; there was a sudden outbreak of agrarian crime, and of Whiteboyism in its worst aspect; it deserves special notice that this was confined to the counties where the League was in real force. The landlords, under these conditions, were often driven to enforce their claims; attempts were made to show that the evictions that followed were the sole causes of this social disorder. But it is absolutely certain that this was not the case; it was the Land League which provoked the evictions, and was responsible for the incidental crime.[69] The spring of 1880 had come; Lord Beaconsfield had been driven from office, in an evil day for the renown of England; Mr. Gladstone had been returned again to power, on the flood of a tide of democratic sympathy. Lord Beaconsfield was not an author of any very large Irish reform, but he understood Ireland much better than his impetuous rival; he had seen from the first the real nature of the Land League movement; in his address to the nation, when he dissolved Parliament, he declared that an 'attempt scarcely less dangerous than famine and pestilence' was being made to separate Ireland from Great Britain, words treated by Mr. Gladstone with scornful ridicule, but words of real truth. The incoming Minister had of late taken little heed of Irish affairs; he had been engaged in his crusade in Midlothian, and in stirring up the multitude on the Eastern question; but he had clung to his optimistic Irish faith; he had solemnly announced that Ireland was 'contented and happy,' when the country was suffering from unquestionable distress; he had even refused to renew a measure for the repression of agrarian crime, when agrarian crime was formidably on the increase, and the Land League was rapidly growing in strength. At last, however, partly opening his eyes to the facts, he appointed a Commission charged to report on Irish land tenure; and he introduced a Bill slightly to amend the Land Act of 1870, showing thus from the outset that he choose to regard a conspiracy against the State on its economic side mainly, and not in its far more grave political aspect.