Above : Photo Of Young Michael Davitt

Foundation of the Land League.— In 1846, there was born to a small farmer named Davitt in Straide Co. Mayo, a son destined to play a leading part in the history of the Irish Land Agitation during the closing decades of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth. Before he was five, the young Michael saw his parents evicted and cast on the road-side, and the cabin which had been their home, levelled to the ground, owing to the failure of his father to pay the impossible rent which the landlord demanded of him. The scene which he then witnessed engraved itself indelibly on the child’s memory, and translated itself later into a resolve to make the destruction of the system under which such things were possible his lifework.