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Moral and Physical Force: The Language of Violence in Irish Nationalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

L. Perry Curtis Jr.
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Extract

In recent years Irish historians have begun to look more closely into the strategies and tactics of nineteenth-century nationalism, exposing some of the disunities and inconsistencies in a movement long considered monolithic by generations of patriots and ideologues. Although we may rightly claim to know a good deal more than our predecessors about the contours and contents of Irish nationalism, there are still a number of ambiguities and unknowns about its nature, not to mention its significance. Indeed, if K. T. Hoppen is to be believed, most historians have erred by concentrating on the nationalist campaigns of the O'Connellites, Fenians, and Parnellites while neglecting altogether the arena of local politics. Stressing the “deep and constant” importance of “the parish pump,” Hoppen insists that the Repeal and Home Rule agitations were simply “unusual superimpositions upon the deeply pervasive and enduring localist traditions of Irish political life.” Irish voters, then, especially those in the boroughs, lived by and for local issues, personalities, and parties, and many were willing to sell their votes to the highest bidder or the biggest spender.

Such a strong dose of historical revisionism may have its uses, but Hoppen's book, for all its massive documentation, verve, and erudition, does not provide any explanation for the huge outpouring of support given to O'Connell, Parnell, and other advocates of “national” as well as “nationalist” issues. Only an incisive and far-ranging study of political propaganda, ideology, and the mobilization of voters and nonvoters alike in nineteenth-century Ireland can hope to resolve this controversy over the priorities of local and national as well as nationalist issues.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 27 , Issue 2 , April 1988 , pp. 150 - 189
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1988

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References

1 Hoppen, K. Theodore, Elections, Politics, and Society in Ireland 1832–1885 (Oxford, 1984), pp. viii, 436Google Scholar.

2 An election poem of 1832 (quoted in ibid., p. 75) captures some of the flavor of Hoppen's argument:

Oh 'tis cash, 'tis cash, 'tis cash,

That makes the world go round,

And with the cash, the cash, the cash,

Doth our candidate abound.

3 MacDonagh, Oliver, States of Mind (London, 1983), p. 65Google Scholar.

4 See the two chapters in ibid., “Politics Pacific” and “Politics Bellicose,” pp. 52–89.

5 Moody, T. W., “Fenianism, Home Rule and the Land War,” in The Course of Irish History, ed. Moody, T. W. and Martin, F. X. (Cork, 1967), p. 275Google Scholar.

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7 Farrell, Brian, ed., The Irish Parliamentary Tradition (Dublin and New York, 1973), p. 13Google Scholar. Appropriately enough, most of the essays in this volume were first broadcast over Radio Telefis Eireann in 1972 as part of the well-known Thomas Davis Lecture series.

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12 Townshend, Charles, Political Violence in Ireland: Government and Resistance since 1848 (Oxford, 1983)Google Scholar. See esp. the preface, chaps. 1, 2, and the epilogue.

13 By discourse I mean essentially “a domain of language-use, a particular way of talking (and writing and thinking)—informed by or situated within ideology.” See Belsey, Catherine, Critical Practice (London and New York, 1980), p. 5Google Scholar.

14 Quoted in MacDonagh (n. 3 above), p. 54.

15 James Connolly, who lived and died by the logic of this formula, had capitalism as well as imperialism in his sights: “The governing power must be wrested from the hands of the rich—peaceably if possible, forcibly if necessary” (from Socialism Made Easy, quoted in James Connolly: Selected Political Writings, ed. Edwards, Owen Dudley and Ransom, Bernard [London, 1973], p. 251)Google Scholar.

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18 See esp. chap. 5, “Violence and Its Modes,” in Hoppen, (n. 1 above), pp. 341–435Google Scholar. Hoppen concludes here: “And just as violence and outrage as a whole at once mirrored and moulded the fabric of contemporary Irish society, so electoral violence in particular—a microcosm of this greater unrest—at once reflected and influenced the conduct of politics and the identity of each place” (p. 435).

19 See, e.g., Malek Alloula's argument to this effect in her study of revealing French postcards made in colonial North Africa for the delectation of metropolitan Frenchmen (The Colonial Harem [Minneapolis, 1986], p. 21Google Scholar).

20 For a discussion of how and why the United Irishmen gradually abandoned their commitment to constitutional agitation between 1792 and 1795, see Elliott, Marianne, Partners in Revolution: The United Irishmen and France (New Haven, Conn., 1982), esp. pp. 20–50Google Scholar. In 1848, John Mitchel, who had commenced his political career as a Repealer, arrived at the conclusion: “Our moral force is only humbug, our physical force but our naked hands” (quoted in Ryan, Desmond, The Phoenix Flame [London, 1937], p. 29Google Scholar).

21 Blanche M. Touhill alludes briefly to the Young Ireland phase of this Anglo-Irish “hero” in her political biography, William Smith O'Brien (Columbia, Mo., 1981), pp. 1–10Google Scholar. See also Weir, Hugh, O'Brien People and Places (Whitegate, county Clare, 1983), pp. 40–42Google Scholar.

22 This essay appeared in Hannah Arendt's anthology, Crises of the Republic (Harmondsworth, 1973), p. 87Google Scholar, and is quoted in Townshend (n. 12 above), pp. 406–7.

23 Gurr, Ted R., Why Men Rebel (Princeton, N.J., 1970), p. 11Google Scholar. For a book devoted primarily to political violence, it is rather strange that the author does not come any closer to defining this key word than the following passage: “In this study political violence refers to all collective attacks within a political community against the political regime, its actors—including competing political groups as well as incumbents—or its policies. The concept represents a set of events, a common property of which is the actual or threatened use of violence, but the explanation is not limited to that property. … Political violence is in turn subsumed under ‘force,’ the use or threat of violence by any party or institution to attain ends within or outside the political order” (pp. 3–4).

24 In their quantitative analysis of European social and political protest, the Tillys found very few contentious gatherings that were intrinsically violent. When violence occurred, it was usually the result of interventions by police and the military (Tilly, Charles, Tilly, Louise, and Tilly, Richard, The Rebellious Century, 1830–1930 [Cambridge, Mass., 1975], pp. 50–55, 248–54, 284–85)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 “The exercise of physical force so as to inflict injury on or damage to persons or property; action or conduct characterized by this” (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 3d ed. [Oxford, 1959], s.v. “violence”), p. 2359Google Scholar.

26 The notion of violent speech or rhetoric usually appears in dictionary entries under the word “violence.” For example, Random House Dictionary (New York, 1968), s.v. “violence,” p. 1469Google Scholar, includes not only “swift and intense force” but also “rough or immoderate vehemence, as of feeling or language” in its definition of violence. Shorter OED also provides the following meaning: “5. Vehemence of personal feeling or action; great, excessive, or extreme ardour or fervour; also, violent or passionate conduct or language; passion, fury” (p. 2359).

27 See the complementary arguments of Kemnitz, Thomas M., “Approaches to the Chartist Movement: Feargus O'Connor and Chartist Strategy,” Albion 5, no. 1 (Spring 1973): 67–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Maehl, William H., “The Dynamics of Violence in Chartism,” Albion 7, no. 2 (Summer 1975): esp. 102–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar. According to Maehl, the various forms of violence used by Chartists in northeastern England belonged to “a continuum of options whose attractiveness varied with the strength of opposition from established authorities. Violence, whether by mass action or secretive conspiracy, should be seen as part of a range which includes many types of political pressure” (p. 102).

28 See Farrell, ed. (n. 7 above), p. 19. Pearse's actual words were: “Davis's principles, then, were Tone's; and as to methods, [sic] That Davis would have achieved Irish nationhood by peaceful means if he could, is undoubted. Let it not be a reproach against Davis. Obviously, if a nation can attain its freedom without bloodshed, it is its duty so to obtain it. Davis was ready to fight. No one knew better than he that England would yield only to force or the threat of force; and that England, having once yielded, could be held to her bargain only by force” (Pearse, , “The Spiritual Nation,” in Collected Works of Padraic H. Pearse: Political Writings and Speeches [Dublin, n.d.], pp. 323–24Google Scholar).

29 Quoted in Farrell, ed., p. 19.

30 Quoted in Brooke, Stopford A. and Rolleston, T. W., eds., A Treasury of Irish Poetry (New York and London, 1900), p. 125Google Scholar.

31 Davis, Thomas, Collected Poems (New York, 1857), p. 170Google Scholar.

32 Ibid.

33 Hoppen (n. 1 above), p. 427, contends that Young Ireland's “genteel warblings” had an “indirect neutering” effect on Irish public opinion. But this kind of judgment is more easily pronounced than proved.

34 Some of Mitchel's bitterness about the failure of Young Ireland's conciliatory policies spilled over into a letter he wrote to James Fintan Lalor on January 4, 1843, bemoaning the eroding faith in nationalism of so many people: “The Nation, I fear, has fallen into the merest old-womanly drivelling and snivelling, and the people are without a friend at the press.” Hoping to launch a revolutionary newspaper and to expose the folly of compromise, he declared: “It is better to reduce the island to a cinder than let it rot into an obscure quagmire peopled with reptiles” (quoted in Fogarty, L., James Fintan Lalor, Patriot and Political Essayist [Dublin, 1919], pp. 120–23)Google Scholar. For Pearse's tribute to Davis and Mitchel, see Edwards, Ruth Dudley, Patrick Pearse: The Triumph of Failure (London, 1977), p. 227Google Scholar.

35 In sharp contrast to the Liberator, Peel seemed somewhat less reluctant to shed blood if necessary: “Deprecating as I do all war, but above all, civil war, yet there is no alternative which I do not think preferable to the dismemberment of this empire” (quoted in Moody and Martin, eds. [n. 5 above], p. 260). This kind of thinking prefigured Lord Cranborne's remark about keeping Ireland under British rule, cited in MacDonagh (n. 14 above).

36 Quoted in Davis, Richard, “The Violence of Poetry: O'Connell, Davis and Moore” (paper delivered at the American Committee of Irish Studies meeting at Boston College, May 10, 1986), pp. 7–8Google Scholar.

37 Quoted in O'Rourke, Canon John, The Centenary Life of O'Connell (Dublin, 1908), p. 271Google Scholar.

38 Quoted in MacManus, Seamus, The Story of the Irish Race (New York, 1967), p. 579Google Scholar. O'Connell's charisma inspired all kinds of folk stories and poems, some of which inevitably depicted him as a great warrior, modeled on Fionn and Cuchulainn, who would some day lead his legions of Irish freedom fighters into battle carrying “a bloodsword in his hand for slaughter,” as the poet Tomas Rua 6 Suilleabhain phrased it. These attributions of martial intent formed an important part of the cult of the liberator during his lifetime, as Diarmuid 6 Muirithe makes clear in his essay, “O'Connell in Irish Folk Tradition,” in Daniel O'Connell: Portrait of a Radical, ed. Nowlan, Kevin B. and O'Connell, Maurice R. (Belfast, 1984), esp. pp. 60–64Google Scholar.

39 Comerford, R. V. make s this point convincingly in his book, The Fenians in Context: Irish Politics and Society, 1848–82 (Dublin, 1985), pp. 14–19, 40–41, 58–59Google Scholar.

40 Quoted in Sullivan, T. D., Recollections of Troubled Times in Irish Politics (Dublin, 1905), pp. 17–18Google Scholar.

41 Quoted in Dodds, John W., The Age of Paradox (London, 1953), pp. 274–75, 332–33Google Scholar. Before the fiasco of the 1848 rebellion Mitchel also wrote a weekly letter of abuse in his newspaper, United Irishmen, which he addressed to the viceroy, Lord Clarendon, “Her Majesty's Executioner General and Butcher-General of Ireland.”

42 Quoted in Comerford, , The Fenians in Context, pp. 89–90Google Scholar.

43 Neither Kemnitz nor Maehl, e.g., took note of the strong resemblance between Chartist and Repeal tactics or modes of articulating their protests. See their articles cited in note 27 above. Dorothy Thompson is one of the few historians of Chartism who has addressed its connections with Irish questions and Irish immigrants in Britain during these years. See her chapter, “Ireland and the Irish in English Radicalism before 1850,” in The Chartist Experience, ed. Epstein, James and Thompson, Dorothy (London, 1982), pp. 120–51Google Scholar. There is also a brief discussion of Irish perspectives during the revolutionary year 1848 in her book, The Chartists: Popular Politics in the Industrial Revolution (New York, 1984), pp. 313–16Google Scholar.

44 The pike was one of the favorite weapons of the United Irishmen during the rising of 1798, as Thomas Pakenham has made clear in his spirited account, The Year of Liberty (London, 1969), esp. pp. 109–12, 116–22, 150–53, 175–77, 198–213, 227–31, and 245–47Google Scholar. It is curious that so many Chartists seem to have cherished this obsolete weapon as late as 1848, when its utility had vanished before the firepower of muskets, rifles, and cannon.

45 Published in the Northern Star (February 8, 1840) and quoted in An Anthology of Chartist Literature, ed. Kovalev, Y. V. (Moscow, 1956), p. 35Google Scholar. “Sparrow-grasses” refers, of course, to asparagus.

46 Northern Star (September 9, 1843); quoted in An Anthology of Chartist Literature, p. 41.

47 Northern Star (August 1, 1846); quoted in An Anthology of Chartist Literature, pp. 138–39.

48 Published in the Labourer (1848) and quoted in An Anthology of Chartist Literature, p. 160.

49 This address appeare d in 1839 in The London Democrat,no. 2, and ended with the words “EQUALITY OR DEATH” (quoted in An Anthology of Chartist Literature, p. 133).

50 In one of his more opaque pronouncements about force, Lalor distinguished “moral” from “true military” insurrection on the ground that this was equivalent to “the difference between the defensive and the aggressive use of physical force— a difference, however, which is often important, whethe r as regards moral right or mechanical efficacy” (Lalor letter no. 2 to the Irish Felon [January 25, 1847]; quoted in Fogarty [n. 34 above], pp. 74–76).

51 Quoted in Saville, John, Ernest Jones: Chartist (London, 1952), pp. 27–28Google Scholar (my italics). In the same speech Jones referred to the possibility of a rising in famine-ridden Ireland: “The Irish understand this well, they are stirring nobly at last. I hope they may conquer; and were I an Irishman I would march in their ranks.”

52 Thompson, Dorothy discusses the Newport “rising” in The Chartists (n. 43 above), pp. 77–87Google Scholar. Her account raises significant questions about who fired the first shots and whether John Frost and other radical Chartists had planned to turn the procession of angry, alienated workers from a demonstration into an insurrection.

53 Quoted in Belchem, John, “1848: Feargus O'Connor and the Collapse of the Mass Platform,” in Epstein, and Thompson, , eds. (n. 43 above), pp. 272–73Google Scholar. Jones gave this speech on January 11, 1848.

54 See Comerford, R. V., “Patriotism as Pastime: The Appeal of Fenianism in the mid–1860s,” Irish Historical Studies 22, no. 87 (March 1981): 239–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55 Comerford, , Fenians in Context (n. 39 above), p. 8Google Scholar. This work is laden with examples of the overlapping jurisdictions of moral and physical force. Comerford also stresses the nonideological content of Fenianism, which represented, he argues, more (or less) than physical force separatism. Many supporters were obscure young men who felt alienated from the established orders of Irish Catholic society and enjoyed developing their political and social skills through the agency of this association (pp. 65, 211).

56 For a useful discussion of the Irish People's origins, contents, and significance, see Bourke, Marcus, John O'Leary: A Study in Irish Separatism (Tralee, 1967), pp. 50–84Google Scholar.

57 Published in the Irish People (May 28, 1864), and quoted in Brown, Malcolm, “Fenianism and Irish Poetry,” in Fenians and Fenianism, ed. Harmon, Maurice (Dublin, 1968), p. 53Google Scholar.

58 Quoted in ibid., p. 55. Kickham's, Charles J. most famous novel, Knocknagow, Or The Homes of Tipperary (Dublin, 1873)Google Scholar, dealt with the trials and tribulations of tenant farmers and their families. Kickham spent several years in prison (1866–69) for his Fenian convictions.

59 Quoted in Brooke and Rolleston, eds. (n. 30 above), p. 211.

60 Ibid., p. 213.

61 Despite the superior performance of dynamite, Rossa preferred to make his bombs with gunpowder. See Townshend (n. 12 above), pp. 160–61. Historians of Fenianism need to explain why only a few thousand stalwarts answered the call to arms in 1867. This turnout represented a tiny fraction of the much vaunted number of 80,000 members mentioned by Stephens and other prominent Fenians. John Devoy cited this number when discussing the Fenian army in Britain and Ireland around 1865. See Bourke, p. 47. Kevin B. Nowlan also mentions this figure, adding that it did not include Fenian converts among Irish soldiers serving in the British army, not to mention the tens of thousands of Irish-American Fenians. See his “The Fenian Rising of 1867,” in The Fenian Movement, ed. Moody, T. W. (Cork, 1968), p. 23Google Scholar.

62 Hyde (1868–1949) was, of course, a founding father of the Gaelic League. In his later years he served as Ireland's first president (1938–45). For Hyde's background in county Roscommon and his early years, see Daly, Dominic, The Young Douglas Hyde (Dublin, 1974), pp. xiv–xix, 1–82Google Scholar.

63 Hyde composed this poem in March 1877 (ibid., pp. 22–23).

64 The best account to date of the New Departure may be found in Moody, T. W., Davitt and Irish Revolution, 1846–82 (Oxford, 1981), pp. 122–26, 250–58, 261–66, 325–26Google Scholar.

65 Louden made this remark long after the events in question—while testifying before the Special Commission on Parnellism and Crime on July 5, 1889. See Special Commission Act, 1888, Proceedings (London, 1890), 3 vols. (cited hereafter as Special Commission), 3:642Google Scholar.

66 Quoted in Moody, , Davitt and Irish Revolution, 1846–82, p. 304Google Scholar.

67 In the absence of any “definitive” study of the agrarian battles fought in the early 1880s over land tenure or landlordism, the following monographs deserve careful reading: Bew, Paul, Land and the National Question in Ireland, 1858–82 (Dublin, 1978), esp. pp. 74–201Google Scholar; Clark, Samuel, Social Origins of the Irish Land War (Princeton, N.J., 1979)Google Scholar; Lyons, F. S. L., John Dillon (London, 1968), pp. 28–60Google Scholar; and Moody, , Davitt and Irish Revolution, 1846–82, esp. pp. 271–327Google Scholar.

68 For a good account of the fanfare and speechmaking associated with a League rally, see the report in the Freeman's Journal (Dublin, October 6, 1881)Google Scholar of the county convention of the Land League held in Dungarvan, county Waterford. In addition to “triumphal arches,” flags, and green branches tied to the masts of the boats in the harbor, the League organizers decided to honor Parnell's arrival by hauling an imitation yacht on wheels around town with the inscription on its sails: “Assisted emigration for Irish landlords and their industrious families to the Cape of Good Hope, Canada, and the West Indies, by the good ship Land League.”

69 Arguing against the more orthodox view of “what is literature,” Richard Bauman insists that speech acts or stories, and even jokes, should be treated (with respect) as “oral literature” or “verbal art.” His insights into storytelling, jokes, “expressive lying,” and other forms of oral performance may be found in his Verbal Art as Performance (Prospect Heights, Ill., 1984)Google Scholar and Story, Performance and Event, Contextual Studies of Oral Narrative (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 2–9, 21, 33–35, 54–55, 112–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Irish protest meetings (not to mention those in other countries) would make excellent objects of study by historians equipped with Bauman's ethnographic mode of analysis.

70 See the sources cited in n. 67 above. In his pamphlet, Landlords and Tenants in Ireland, 1848–1904 (Dundalgan, 1984)Google Scholar, William E. Vaughan dissents from the conventional view that the land war created a social revolution in the Irish countryside. See esp. pp. 36–41.

71 See Bew, esp. pp. 28, 223; and Comerford, , The Fenians in Context (n. 39 above), pp. 213–15, 228–39Google Scholar. See also A. W. Orridge's article on the participation of agricultural laborers in a movement designed to advance the claims of tenant farmers: “Who Supported the Land War? An Aggregate-Data Analysis of Irish Agrarian Discontent, 1879–1882,” Economic and Social Review 12 (April 1981): 203–33Google Scholar.

72 Quoted in Lyons, F. S. L., Charles Stewart Parnell (London, 1977), p. 134Google Scholar.

73 Parnell used this phrase to a reporter in December 1879, while on board the Scythia en route to New York. This interview was published in the New York Herald on January 2, 1880. See Special Commission, 1:188Google Scholar. On another occasion Parnell insisted that a “true revolutionary movement in Ireland should … partake of both a constitutional and an illegal character. It should be both an open and a secret organization, using the constitution for its own purposes, but also taking advantage of its secret combination.” No doubt his followers, not to mention his enemies, read into these words what they wished to find there. While he defended the Fenians for their resort to physical force at a time when the leaders of the constitutional agitation were using their position for “selfish purposes,” he went out of his way in the spring of 1889 to assure the panel of English judges presiding over the Special Commission inquiring into “Parnellism and Crime” that he would never join “an illegal body” (Special Commission, 1:189–90Google Scholar). For other glimpses of Parnell's ambivalent outlook on moral force, see Lyons's essay in Farrell, , ed., Irish Parliamentary Tradition (n. 7 above), pp. 182–90Google Scholar.

74 Quoted in Bew, p. 58.

75 Curtin gave this speech on June 5, 1881. The evicted tenant was a man named Donoghue (Special Commission [n. 65 above], 1:34Google Scholar).

76 Quoted in ibid., 1:33. Boyton also encouraged his listeners to use their guns to shoot policemen when and if they tried to enter the houses of tenants. See also Bew, pp. 124–27, 237–38.

77 Comerford, , Fenians in Context, pp. 211, 214Google Scholar.

78 Quoted in the Special Commission, 1:25, 3:745–46Google Scholar. See also Bew, pp. 56–60, 102–4, 134–36, 241. Harris's habit of violent metaphors may have been curbed but not cured. He urged an audience at Clifden, county Galway, to punish an evicting landlord who had called his tenants “vermin”—not by shooting him but by following him around and howling at him as the Chinese were said to do to dog butchers (Bew, p. 25).

79 Quoted by Sir Henry James in his speech before the Special Commission, July 16, 1889; Special Commission, 3:741–42Google Scholar.

80 What the police loosely called agrarian outrages rose from 863 in 1879 to 2,585 in 1880 and then soared to 4,439 in 1881. These so-called political crimes made up some 59% of all reported crimes in Ireland during the latter year. Almost half of these agrarian crimes (2,862) consisted of threatening letters and notices. (Moody, , Davitt and Irish Revolution, 1846–82 [n. 62 above], p. 565Google Scholar).

81 Admittedly, there were times when this link seemed rather strong. In October 1880, e.g., Joseph Biggar, the fiery nationalist from Belfast, went to Kerry to promote the League. There he gave a speech attacking Samuel Hussey, the tough and belligerent land agent who managed estates covering almost one-quarter of the county. Shortly after Biggar had called him “a bad man,” Hussey received an anonymous message: “Get police protection or you will be shot.” Being a sensible man, Hussey applied immediately for a bodyguard. No harm came his way until 1884, when, after many more evictions and altercations with tenants, someone planted a bomb that blew out all the windows and one wall of his house. Even so, the connection between words and action is bound to be more than tenuous when economic hardship, the threat or reality of eviction, and suspicion of informers and/or collaborators combine with a long tradition of agrarian secret societies and physical violence, as they did during the 1880s in Ireland. When testifying before the Special Commission in 1889, Hussey predictably blamed Biggar for the subsequent threats on his life (Special Commission, 1:470–71, 479–80Google Scholar). For a description of the eccentric Biggar, see Moody, , Davitt and Irish Revolution, 1846–82, pp. 129–30Google Scholar.

82 See the chapter on Fanny Parnell in Foster, R. F., Charles Stewart Parnell: The Man and His Family (Hassocks, Sussex, 1976), pp. 241–59Google Scholar.

83 Quoted in ibid., pp. 324–25. This poem first appeared in the fall of 1880 and soon became a favorite of Land Leaguers.

84 Lynam added that he opposed cutting off the tails of jackasses but hoped to see the tails of landlords cut off as soon as possible: “Devil a much of a tail the landlords have left.” The Attorney General cited this speech in 1889 as a good example of how League spokesmen incited people to commit agrarian outrages (Special Commission, 1:122Google Scholar). No doubt the ambiguity of the phrase “strong arm” was not lost on an audience accustomed to being told the time was ripe to arm.

85 United Ireland (February 5, 1887), quoted in Townshend, (n. 12 above), p. 198Google Scholar. One might note in passing O'Brien's reference to “your,” not “our,” guns, as though he did not care to use one himself.

86 Davitt actually used this phrase when testifying before the Special Commission in July 1889 (Special Commission, 3:556–57Google Scholar).

87 Davitt (n. 6 above), p. 119.

88 Davitt's own words deserve quoting: “The dynamite theory is the very abnegation of mind, the surrender of reason to rage, of judgment to blind, unthinking recklessness” (Moody, , Davitt and the Irish Revolution, 1846–82, p. 555Google Scholar). Presumably he had O'Donovan Rossa in mind when he condemned dynamitism in this way.

89 As Davitt declared in his polemical history of the New Departure and the land war, The Fall of Feudalism, p. 301.

90 In 1879 Davitt stated that the land war was “destined t o do more for Ireland than all the movements since '98.” (His downgrading of Fenianism here is revealing.) A year later he told an audience in Kansas City: “We have … declared an unceasing war against landlordism—not a war to call on our people to shoulder the rifle and go out in open field and settle the question that is now agitating Ireland.” But he went on to say that he did not oppose an open fight provided there was a “good chance of success” (Special Commission, 3:606, 609Google Scholar).

91 Davitt gave this speech at Claremorris, county Mayo, on July 13, 1879, before an audience of some 20,000. In Moody's view, political realism determined Davitt's choice of strategy: “As a nationalist I approve in principle of the revolutionary movement's commitment to physical force, but as a realist I know that there is no chance of success in a shooting war with Great Britain.” Davitt, in fact, seems to have vacillated between aiding and abetting the procurement of arms for Fenian Land Leaguers in 1880–81 (to be used, no doubt, for “purely defensive” purposes) and a marked distaste for shedding blood. As Moody points out, Davitt never really abandoned his belief in “the legitimacy and the eventual necessity of using physical force in favourable circumstances to achieve national independence.” He had no trouble reconciling his commitment to a “shooting war” sometime in the future with allegiance to his kind of moral force during the land war (Moody, , Davitt and Irish Revolution, 1846–82 ([n. 62 above], pp. 379–80, 412, 440–41Google Scholar).

92 Unlike O'Donovan Rossa's notable electoral victory in November 1869 and Mitchel's successful bid for the same seat in county Tipperary in February 1875, Sinn Fein won not a single seat in the Dail in the general election of February 1987, although 2% of the voters supported the party.