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.

His youth was passed chiefly in a manufacturing town in Lancashire, and he became involved in the Fenian movement, which was being actively propagated amongst the Irish workmen there. Arrested in 1870 on a charge of buying and distributing arms to be used for illegal purposes, he was tried, convicted and sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment. In 1878, however, he obtained his liberty on a ” ticket-of-leave ” and at once returned to Ireland.
This year was one of sore distress amongst the agricultural population of Ireland. In the later ‘Sixties, and the early ‘Seventies, the harvests had been remarkably good, and the country was, in con¬sequence, prosperous. Rents, even when unreasonably high, were generally punctually paid, and landlords profited by the prevailing ” l*n« hunger ” to raise them, whenever an opportunity for doing so presented itself. In 1876 the upward movement was checked ; in 1877 the decline began. The crops that year, and especially the potato crop, still the most important in all Ireland, were extremely poor.The savings of the previous period were used by the tenants in the payment of rent for lands which, in countless cases, had scarcely yield sufficient that season to cover the bare expenses of their cultivation. This resource being exhausted, the poor farmers waited with anyone to see what the harvest crop of 1878 would bring.

It seemed as if the famine times were about to return.It was at this juncture that Michael Davitt returned to Ireland. In his prison cell he had reflected long on Irish problems, and had come to the conclusion that an agrarian system, bad in itself and wholly unsuited to the circumstances of the country, was the source of most of the troubles of Ireland, and that there would be neither peace nor quiet till landlordism was abolished there.

At Irishtown, in Mayo, a meeting was called together in the / pril of 1879, to protest against the action of a local landlord, Canon Burke, who had refused to reduce his excessive rents. The resolutions passed had been drawn up by Davitt, and indicated the boldness of his views. From the Irishtown meeting the beginning of the Land War dates, though it was some months later (October, 1879) when who had at first held aloof, had been persuaded to come into the new movement, that the Land League was officially founded. The avowed object of the organisation was to reduce rack-rents, and ” to facilitate the obtaining of the ownership of the soil by the occupiers.” Parnell’s adherence practically involved that of the Home Rule Party, and Parnell himself was elected president of the League.