County.143 The eight delegates now awaited only the Christmas recess to get down to business.
VII
In Ireland, the dance of repression and conciliation continued. Shortly after MacDonnell’s appointment, Willie Redmond was arrested at Kingstown on 4 November and given a six-month sentence in default of bail for incitement in Wexford. As the preparations for the Land Conference were made, the law took its course with the imprisonment of two other MPs and a newspaper editor.144
The four tenant representatives invited by Shawe-Taylor gathered with the four elected landlord delegates at the Mansion House on 20 December for the conference whose very coming together Redmond would soon describe as ‘the most remarkable event in the lifetime of any of us’.145 On O’Brien’s advice, Redmond proposed that the chair be taken by Lord Dunraven. The conference met over six days and issued its report on 4 January 1903. There was agreement on eighteen recommendations, eight of which O’Brien considered vital from the tenants’ point of view. There would be no compulsion, but a package of incentives to voluntary purchase based on the provision of state loans to the tenants. The guiding principles were that the price to be paid to landlords, when invested, should give them an income equivalent to that from their net second-term rents, that the repayment annuities payable by the tenants should be significantly lower than their second-term rents, and that the state should provide a bonus to make up the difference between the sums paid by the tenant and to the landlord. In addition, there should be special measures to restore the remaining evicted tenants, to provide land in the Western congested districts and to build houses for agricultural labourers.146
On 3 February, coercion was revoked for almost all of the country, and most of the imprisoned MPs were released. Local bodies reflected public opinion in praising the report. O’Brien advised an attitude of ‘cheerful expectancy… [but] armed expectancy’. Dillon, who had been sceptical of the conference idea in the autumn but had not opposed the party’s welcome for it, was still in the US when the Land Conference met. Taken ill at Chicago and forced to abandon the tour with Davitt and Blake, he returned home on 7 January in ill health and maintained a public silence on the report.147 It was Davitt who opened up a fierce attack on the Conference terms in a series of eight long letters to the Freeman beginning on 12 January. He had concluded from his own calculations and the statements of others that: ‘The cardinal fault of the report is that it gives altogether too high a price to the landlords, and thereby offers too little to the tenants to induce them to purchase.’ His chief claim was that the landlords were to be paid about thirty-three years’ purchase (the annual rent multiplied by the number of years), some twelve years’ purchase more than what he claimed was the market value of the land. They showed ‘a wolfish greed worthy of their record… of a grasping, sordid kind worthy of a Shylock….’148 Davitt was soon joined by Archbishop Walsh, fresh from his reprimand of the party a few months earlier, who launched an equally fierce series of broadsides on 12 February, writing of the tenants as having been ‘first blindfolded, and then misinformed by their self-constituted representatives as to the direction they were being marched in’; the seventeen or eighteen years’ purchase mentioned in the report as the price to be paid by the tenants he called a ‘ridiculous fable’.149
Apart from these two, the most trenchant critic was the Freeman itself, which had welcomed the conference but, from the day of the report’s issue, maintained an almost daily and increasingly overt editorial attack. O’Brien later wrote of his amazement on discovering that Thomas Sexton, the paper’s managing director, had written the critical leader on that first morning; in fact, he had taken personal charge of all editorials on the land issue from then onwards, and would use them to undermine both the report and the subsequent Land Act.150
Redmond responded with two speeches in Britain: one at Edinburgh on 17 January, in which he explained and defended the conference terms; the other at Lincoln’s Inn Fields two weeks later, in which he claimed that Irish opinion on the matter was ‘for all practical purposes a unit’ and that almost all the criticism was based on ‘an entire misrepresentation of [the report’s] terms and meaning’. Answering the archbishop, he said that no objections had been voiced in the party to any of the four names proposed as tenant representatives: ‘I say that Mr O’Brien, Mr Harrington and I went into that Conference as the authorized delegated representatives of the Irish Party….’151
Privately, he was not unduly perturbed by the criticisms, confiding to O’Brien on 14 January that Davitt’s first letter had not come as a surprise and would ‘do no harm’. However, he wondered nervously about Dillon’s views: ‘he hasn’t said a word to me about the conference’. He hoped there was ‘no danger of Dillon chiming in with Davitt’. The criticism was to be expected, but need not worry them ‘if we can keep the organization free from hostile declarations’. In a public letter to the Limerick county council chairman on 26 January, he called the thirty-three years’ purchase claim ‘an absurd mistake’.152 He might have been more concerned at Dillon’s possible attitude had he seen his handwritten comments on a copy of the December circular sent to MPs by Redmond asking their opinion of the four names originally suggested. Dillon’s note reads: ‘Copy of circular sent out by R – no copy ever reached me. JD 7 Feb. 1903… And the first I heard of this was R’s speech last Sunday [at Lincoln’s Inn Fields]… Note members are not asked whether or not they approve of meeting Dunraven and Co. at all.’153
On 11 February, after a week in which he made three journeys to Ireland and back, Redmond wrote that he did not think that Davitt could do any more harm: ‘If the Directory and the party speak out, the country will have made its opinion clear’.154 The two bodies did just that, giving the report resounding endorsements on 16 February in Dublin, although Dillon and Davitt were absent from both meetings. The following day, the party met at Westminster before the opening of Parliament and agreed almost unanimously that Redmond should move an amendment to the Address urging the Government to take action ‘by giving the fullest and most generous effect to the Land Conference Report’. The dissentient was Dillon, who wanted no reference made to the conference, effectively asking the party to reverse its endorsement. According to O’Brien’s record of the meeting, Redmond was roused into ‘prompt and dignified protest’, lamenting that Dillon had been in America when the Conference had met, as otherwise they would have insisted on his being a delegate.155 On 28 February, a party statement expressed concern at the effect in Britain of the newspaper controversy, and appealed to public men to abstain from further argument pending the introduction of the Land Bill. Dillon, still in ill health, had already told Redmond that he would leave soon for Egypt to recuperate and would not return before May.156
Wyndham introduced his great Land Bill on 25 March 1903. Taking its ambitious scope from the conference report, it went far beyond all previous land-purchase legislation. The tenants would repay the purchase money over 68.5 years at an interest rate of 3.25 per cent. To the purchase sum the state would add a 12 per cent bonus from a fund of £12 million, taken from Irish revenues, to be paid to the landlords as an inducement to sell. The Land Bill set upper and lower limits, called ‘zones’, on the reductions represented by the tenants’ annuities on their current rents. These reductions (40 per cent to 20 per cent in the case of