The refusal of the police for the enforcement of evictions would abolish rent throughout the country.
And the same result might be attained by a more moderate course.

Irish Ministers might in practice draw a distinction between 'good' landlords and 'bad' landlords, and might grant the aid of the police for the collection of reasonable, though refusing it for the collection of excessive rents, and might at last magnanimously recognise the virtues of Mr.Smith-Barry, whilst passing a practical sentence of outlawry on Lord Clanricarde.

Is there anything absurd or unreasonable in the supposition that a Ministry of Land Leaguers chosen by a Parliament of Nationalists should attempt to enforce the unwritten law of the Land League?
A Gladstonian who answers this question in the affirmative entertains a far lower opinion than can any candid Unionist of Mr.
Gladstone's Irish allies.

It would be the grossest unfairness to suggest that every man convicted of conspiracy by the Special Commission added to criminality and recklessness a monstrous form of hypocrisy, and that, whilst urging Irish peasants to boycott evictors and land-grabbers, he felt no genuine moral abhorrence of evictions and land-grabbing.

But if, as is certainly the case, the founders of the Land League really detested the existing system of land tenure, and considered a landlord who exacted rent a criminal, and a tenant who paid it a caitiff, it is as certain as anything can be that they will be under the greatest temptation, not to say, in their own eyes, under a stringent moral obligation, to strain the power of an Irish Executive for the purpose of abolishing the payment of rent.