The agitation, commencing in Meath, was gradually extended, county by county, over a large part of Ireland where the Nationalists are supreme. Other measures were resorted to, in order to carry out their object. Arson, the burning of hayricks, firing into dwelling-houses, spiking meadows, the mutilation of horses and cows, the destruction of turf, the damaging of machinery, and various other forms of lawless violence began to increase and multiply. At the Spring Assizes in 1907, the Chief Justice, when addressing the Grand Jury at Ennis, in commenting on the increasing need for placing law-abiding people under special police protection, said:--
"In a shire in England, if it was found necessary, either by special protection or protection by patrol, to protect from risk of outrage thirty persons, what would be thought?"
And Mr. Justice Kenny at Leitrim, after commenting upon the increased number of specially reported cases, as shown by the official statistics, and alluding to several cases of gross intimidation, said:--
"In these latter cases I regret to say no one has been made amenable; and when there is such a state of things, it justifies the observation made by the learned judge who presided at last Connaught Winter Assizes, that when the chain of terrorism was complete, no witness would give evidence and no jury would convict."
Thereupon Mr. Birrell, who at the beginning of the year had succeeded Mr. Bryce as Chief Secretary, having no doubt studied these and similar reports, said in a speech at Halifax in the following month:--
"You may take my word for this, that Ireland is at this moment in a more peaceful condition than for the last six hundred years."
Soon afterwards, Mr. Justice Ross, who, as Judge of the Land Judge's Court, Chancery Division, was in charge of many estates in Ireland, said:
"He had known from other Receivers about this widespread and audacious conspiracy at present rampant in the West of Ireland ... This was actually a conspiracy which on ordinary moral grounds amounted to highway robbery, to seize on these grass lands, to drive away the stock of the people who had been in the habit of taking it; and then, when the owner had been starved out, the Estates Commissioners were expected to buy up the property and to distribute it amongst the very people who had been urging on the business, and who had been engaged in these outrages."