Acting on Blake’s advice, Redmond established eleven different committees covering the main issues of concern: land, Home Rule, local government, education, Anglo– Irish financial relations, British affairs and foreign affairs, involving as many members as possible. Party discipline was tightened: pairing was forbidden, and absences were to be notified to the whips.42
III
With progress on Home Rule blocked for the time being, the party’s 1901 parliamentary campaign began with amendments by Redmond and Dillon on the land question and the war respectively, presented in the debate on the Address. The UIL had resolved to reinvigorate the policy of land purchase and the creation of a peasant proprietary first adopted by the Land League under Parnell’s leadership twenty years earlier. As the latter had found, this was a policy more congenial to Conservative than to Liberal Governments. The first Tory legislation to facilitate land purchase was that of Lord Ashbourne in 1885. This was followed by less effective measures under Arthur Balfour in 1891 and his brother Gerald in 1896. As the historian Philip Bull has remarked, ‘the cumulative effects of purchase under these acts confirmed it as the way forward in the minds both of landlords and tenants’.43 Government and League were thus agreed on the objective; where they differed, crucially, was on the means to attain it. The Tories favoured the use of voluntary financial incentives, but had so far failed to create a sufficiently effective scheme to encourage the majority of landlords and tenants to bargain. The UIL campaigned for compulsory sale by landlords, and a parallel campaign among the Presbyterian tenants of Ulster raised the same demand.44
Redmond advanced the UIL policy as the Irish national demand when he presented his amendment to the Address on 21 February. He first criticized Gladstone’s great reforming Land Act of 1881, under which tenants could apply for judicial revision of rents every fifteen years, arguing that the dual-ownership system it set up should now be abolished.45 Downward rent revisions and associated legal expenses in the land courts would soon squeeze the majority of smaller landlords out of existence, while failing to protect tenants against the fall in agricultural prices. The fault in the Tory purchase acts, on the other hand, was that their operation was so slow – about 50,000 sales, less than one tenth of the total of farms, had been effected in fifteen years – that it would take another 150 years to settle the land question. The financial terms had been inadequate, but no voluntary system, he argued, could provide adequate incentives to both sides. The only solution was:
… a great, bold, and statesmanlike scheme… for the general compulsory sale of the land by the landlords to the tenants upon terms which will not only be just to the tenants, but which, so far as we are concerned, will be absolutely just to the Irish landlords.
Redmond, like Parnell before him, differed from almost all of his party colleagues in his vision of what lay beyond land purchase. While the abolition of landlordism meant for the majority, at least rhetorically, the disappearance of a hated British ‘garrison’, Parnell had hoped that a generous scheme of compensation would encourage landlords as individuals to take up leading roles in national life and even in the Home Rule movement. A united ‘patriotic union of classes’ under such a stabilizing influence would present an unanswerable case for self-government.46 Redmond had voiced similar sentiments as Parnellite leader; now, striking a note at variance with the ingrained anti-landlord sentiments of many of his party colleagues, he returned to his own conciliationist rhetoric of the 1890s:
We do not desire to exterminate any class of our countrymen, no matter what the history of their forefathers may have been… my own belief and hope [is] that, if a great scheme… is carried into effect, a very large proportion indeed of the Irish landlords who have been expropriated will be glad to retain their houses and homes and continue to live in the country and bear their share in promoting its prosperity in the future.47
He hailed the Ulster tenants’ campaign for compulsory purchase led by the Liberal Unionist MP, T.W. Russell, who had braved taunts from fellow unionists of ‘trafficking with traitors’ to second his amendment, as:
… that great movement which has sprung up in the province of Ulster, and which is led with such courage and ability by the honourable Member for South Tyrone… We present [our demand] to you here tonight with the authority of a united Ireland….48
Redmond’s presentation of his case was hailed on all sides as a tour de force, but the defeat of the land amendment was a foregone conclusion. There would be no legislation on the land issue in the 1901 session.49 However, a high level of participation by Irish Party members, who made eighty-four speeches in the first three weeks of the session, ensured that Irish affairs dominated debate on the other amendments also.50
By 1 March, The Times was complaining that ‘the multiplication of questions to Ministers which is part of the harassing tactics the Irish Nationalists have revived’ had become a great nuisance.51 The Tory Standard wrote at the Easter recess that the Irish Party had succeeded in seriously delaying work, and once or twice had brought it close to shipwreck.52 On 5 March, things were ‘made hot’ in the House in exactly the way O’Callaghan had suggested. The Government attempted, after only one night’s discussion, to close the debate on a key financial measure: the Vote on Supply. Some Irish Party MPs protested against this by refusing to take part in the division, and were named and suspended from the House. What followed recalled Redmond’s first day in Parliament in 1881: the suspended Members refused to leave the House, resisted the Sergeant-at-Arms and made it necessary to call in the police, while the Irish members sang ‘God Save Ireland’ amidst the uproar. Two nights later, Redmond, who had been absent during the disruption, denounced Conservative leader A.J. Balfour’s proposal to punish resistance to the Speaker’s directions with suspension for the rest of the session. His speech built to an impassioned calling into question of the very presence of the Irish representatives at Westminster under the Union:
I know a number of Members whose attendance in this House means for them practically ruin in their professions, and who come here simply from a sense of public duty, and who would not suffer in the slightest degree if you suspended them for the remainder of the session… the passing of every such rule as this… discloses to the world the fact that, with all your constitutional forms, you hold one portion of the so-called United Kingdom simply by brute force….53
Reaction in Ireland was enthusiastic, while the Irish Independent’s London correspondent wrote:
In the lobby last evening it was universally conceded that Mr Redmond’s speech in which he impugned the arbitrary action of Mr Balfour on Wednesday morning was one of the greatest oratorical triumphs witnessed in the House of Commons in recent years… even stereotyped Conservatives were forced to acknowledge that the speech was a marvellous display of eloquence and vigour.54
Balfour agreed that Redmond was perhaps the most gifted speaker in Parliament, though he lamented the ‘sad debasement of a noble gift of oratory’.55 In fact, his oratory in general balanced