Yearly, also, some of the home Irish crossed St. George's Channel into England, and by work here earned enough to pay for the right to live in their own land. Rent as paid in Ireland was in no sense economic rent; rent was paid for land which produced no rent, and the landowners lived on tribute levied by force from the peasantry and provided by their own or by their relatives' toil in other lands. Still rents rose, and ever all succor sent home by successful emigrants went to swell the absentee landlords' bankers' accounts. At last the Irish both at home and abroad grew weary of the continual drain, and those abroad more especially began to question whether they might not utilise their hard-earned money better by helping their friends at home to resist the landlords' exactions than by continually filling the pockets of Ireland's worst enemies. The struggle in Ireland against unjust rents began, and the American Irish contributions began to swell the receipts of the Land League instead of the rent-roll of the landlords. At once they were assailed with every slander, with every term of abuse, which the landlords and a landlord-loving press could devise. Outrages wrought in despairing anger against intolerable oppression were laid at their door; and the wild talk of a few, maddened by a remembrance of wrongs suffered at England's hands, was ascribed to the whole body of American Irish. The funds for the Parliamentary and Land League agitations were provided chiefly by the successful Irish emigrants, and a compact body of members was built up in Parliament, to carry on there the struggle which was being also waged in Ireland itself. Some grievances were got rid of; the Irish Establishment fell; improvements in the Land Laws were made. But still the landlord pressure continued, and, weighing on a people who for the first time had been touched by Hope, it was borne with ever increasing impatience. In 1880 Gladstone sought, by a short Bill, to check evictions during the approaching winter of 1880–81, but the landlords' House gaily threw out a Bill pressed on it by the Prime Minister of England on the plea that it was necessary to prevent civil war in Ireland.
The civil war broke out. Not open warfare; for that Ireland was too weak. But underground warfare, dangerous as smothered combustion, and waged by underground means. Most unhappily, Gladstone met it by coercion, coercion that I am free to blame to-day, as I denounced it when it was before Parliament in 1881. Hundreds of men were imprisoned, many a gross act of
