Mr. Balfour replied that Mr. Gladstone's apology for boy- cotting
and intimidation is equally sound in logic for the assassinations by which the power of the League was first
established, though, of course, Mr. Gladstone would shrink from saying so. It was as true that reductions of rent had been obtained by assassinations and the fear of assassinations, as that they had been produced by boycotting and intimidation. or what Mr. Gladstone now called "exclusive dealing?' He quoted case after case, and only stopped because to go on would have wearied the House, of the intimidation of which, though the Cowper Commission had exposed and condemned it, the advocates of the League now demand detailed evidence. He quoted a case in which a tenant, described as a "land- grabber," had been ordered by the League to give up his farm after eighteen years' occupation ; another in which the tenant had actually been thus ordered to give up his farm forty-one years after the eviction on which the statement that he was a " land-grabber " was grounded ; and another in which the reverend chairman of a National League meeting declared openly that there was " no excuse at all" for working for a boycotted man to be found in the fact that by no other means could the necessaries of life be earned. Indeed, Mr. Bal- four's speech was crammed with evidence, and had the patience of the House been able to endure it, might have been crammed with evidence a hundred times as plentiful, that the society of Ireland is honeycombed with intimidation, and that even in connection with matters not relating to land, the ramifications of this tyranny are to be felt in every corner of the country.
