However, the Act was passed; and if Gladstone really imagined that it would satisfy the Nationalist party he must have been grievously disappointed.  During 1881, 4,439 agrarian outrages were recorded.  The Government declared the Land League to be illegal, and lodged some of the leaders in gaol.  Thereupon Ford, carrying out the plan laid down by Lalor in 1848, issued his famous “No Rent” proclamation.  It was not generally acted upon; but his party continued active, and in May 1882 Lord Frederick Cavendish and Mr. Burke (the Chief and Under Secretary) were murdered in the Phoenix Park.  This led to the passing of the Crimes Prevention Act, by which the detectives were enabled to secure evidence against the conspirators, many of whom (as is usual in Irish history) turned Queen’s evidence.  The Act was worked with firmness; and outrages, which had numbered 2,507 during the first half of 1882, fell to 836 in the latter half, to 834 in 1883, and to 774 in 1884.

In the autumn of 1885, Gladstone, expecting to return to power at the ensuing election, besought the electors to give him a majority independent of the Irish vote.  In this he failed; and thereupon took place the “Great Surrender.”  He suddenly discovered that everything he had said and done up to that time had been wrong; that boycotting, under the name of “exclusive dealing,” was perfectly justifiable; that the refusal to pay rent was just the same as a strike of workmen (ignoring the obvious facts that when workmen strike they cease both to give their labour and to receive pay, whereas the gist of the “No Rent” movement was that tenants, whilst ceasing to pay, should retain possession of the farms they have hired; and that a strike arises from a dispute between employers and employed—­usually about rates of pay or length of hours; whereas Ford’s edict that no rent was to be paid was issued not in consequence of anything that individual landlords had done, but because Gladstone had put the leaders of the Land League in gaol); that the men whom he had previously denounced as “marching through rapine to the dismemberment of the Empire” were heroes who deserved to be placed in charge of the government of the country; and introduced his first Home Rule Bill.  Some of his followers went with him; others refused.  His life-long ally, John Bright, said:  “I cannot trust the peace and interests of Ireland, north and south, to the Irish Parliamentary party, to whom the Government now propose to make a general surrender.  My six years’ experience of them, of their language in the House of Commons and their deeds in Ireland, makes it impossible for me to consent to hand over to them the property and the rights of five millions of the Queen’s subjects, our fellow-countrymen, in Ireland.  At least two millions of them are as loyal as the population of your town, and I will be no party to a measure which will thrust them from the generosity and justice of the United and Imperial Parliament.”