BACK PAGES: Boycotting was the most potent weapon in the hands of the Land League, and its successor the National League, in the 1880s but it was a controversial one, even occasionally among members of the league itself, particularly in relation to how far it should go. In 1885, the vice-chairman of the Waterford branch of the National League, an Alderman Smith, was expelled for providing food to the family of a land grabber from Co Kilkenny. The Irish Times, which opposed the league and its tactics, commented on the case in this editorial.
IF IT were not sometimes so very inconvenient boycotting would be infinitely amusing as an illustration of an extreme limit in popular folly. Unfortunately it is a very serious matter to too many.
When it comes to this, that the names are proclaimed by a bell-man through a country town of those who refuse to belong to a party organisation, in order that they may be thus made marked men, the gravity and criminality of the practice call for interference. There is no freedom where such things can be. There is no knowledge of what freedom is or appreciation of its essence.
But rather a different sense is excited, the sense of humour, by the perusal of the report of yesterday’s scene in Waterford. There a trial took place of a nationalist, no less eminent among his brothers than the vice-chairman of the branch, who was indicted for giving food to a “grabber.” He should have established his patriotism and served his country by starving the grabber.
That is what an uncompromising and honest Leaguer would have done, but Alderman Smiths integrity did not reach this elevation, and in a feeble moment he did “supply with provisions” the family, mother and children, of a man who had been “boycotted” – that is, outlawed from the right to eat bread or to have bread to eat, because he “took a farm.”
It was proposed that for this most serious offence as some estimated it Mr Smith should be expelled from the Waterford branch of the National League, and there was a tremendous debate on the point. It will be found in our columns, and the public will perceive with satisfaction that not a few members of the body still possessed of reason resisted such a tyrannous proceeding. They saw that it was coercion of the worst type. “Force is no remedy” was a motto they had been taught to respect(?) when the Crimes Act existed, and there was force in the most objectionable and also ridiculous form, employed as a supposed remedy – a cure for the earth-hunger that even fixity of tenure has not deprived of opportunities to gratify a covetous appetite. The national members fought their battle with energy but in the end Mr Drea prevailed, and Alderman Smith was expelled...
The shabbiest device ever contrived in political warfare is that of boycotting when it goes so far as to deny a mouthful of food, or glass of milk for refreshment, not to the guilty one, supposing the taker of the farm to be such, but to all his relations along with him, his wife and children, his nephews and nieces, his cousins and servants and kinsmen. It is an inhospitality that will disgrace the people wherever imported, and will defeat itself just because their instincts are after all kindly.
“If thine enemy hunger feed him, and if he thirst give him drink” is the law of heaven, which is surely superior to that of the National League, and it is declared that this is the way to put effective rebuke upon an enemy. The men of Waterford have enacted a miserable little drama, and as the central body in Dublin has (?) its disapproval at least of such a sort of boycotting, we hope they will take a thought and . . . restore Alderman Smith to membership, and permit their worst foes to have a bite of bread.
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