[Illustration: MAP TO ILLUSTRATE DIARY OF AN AMERICAN.]
IRELAND UNDER COERCION
THE DIARY OF AN AMERICAN
BY
WILLIAM HENRY HURLBERT
VOL. I.
_SECOND EDITION_.
1888
"Upon the future of Ireland hangs the future of the British Empire."
CARDINAL MANNING TO EARL GREY, 1868
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.
Although barely a month has elapsed since the publication of these
volumes, events of more or less general notoriety have so far confirmed
the views taken in them of the actual state and outlook of affairs in
Ireland, that I gladly comply with the request of my publisher for a
Preface to this Second Edition.
Upon one most important point--the progressive demoralisation of the
Irish people by the methods of the so-called political combinations,
which are doing the work of the Agrarian and Anti-Social Revolution in
Ireland, some passages, from a remarkable sermon delivered in August in
the Cathedral of Waterford by the Catholic bishop of that diocese, will
be found to echo almost to the letter the statement given to me in June
by a strong Protestant Home Ruler, that "the Nationalists are stripping
Irishmen as bare of moral sense as the bushmen of South Africa."
Speaking of what he had personally witnessed in one of the lanes of
Waterford, the Bishop says, in the report which I have seen of his
sermon, "the most barbarous tribes of Africa would justly feel ashamed
if they were guilty of what I saw, or approached to the guilt I
witnessed, on that occasion." As a faithful shepherd of his people, he
is not content with general denunciations of their misconduct, but goes
on to analyse the influences which are thus reducing a Christian people
to a level below that of the savages whom Cardinal Lavigerie is now
organising a great missionary crusade to rescue from their degradation.
He agrees with Archbishop Croke in attributing much of this
demoralisation to the excessive and increasing use of strong drink,
striking evidences of which came under my own observation at more than
one point of my Irish journeys. But I fear Archbishop Croke would
scarcely agree with the Bishop of Waterford in his diagnosis of the
effects upon the popular character of what has now come to pass current
in many parts of Ireland as "patriotism."
The Bishop says, "The women as well as the men were fighting, and when
we sought to bring them to order, one man threatened to take up a weapon
and drive bishop, priests, and police from the place! On the Quay, I
understand, it was one scene of riot and disorder, and what made matters
worse was that when the police went to discharge their duty for the
protection of the people, the moment they interfered the people turned
on them and maltreated them in a shocking way. I understand that some
police who were in coloured clothes were picked out for the worst
treatment--knocked down and kicked brutally. One police officer, I
learn, had his fingers broken. This is a state of things that nothing at
all would justify. It is not to be justified or excused on any principle
of reason or religion. What is still worse, sympathy was shown for those
who had obstructed and attacked the police. The only excuse I could find
that was urged for this shameful misconduct was that it was dignified
with the name of 'patriotism'! All I can say is, that if rowdyism like
this be an indication of the patriotism of the people, as far as I am
concerned, I say, better our poor country were for ever in political
slavery than attain to liberty by such means."
This is the language of a good Catholic, of a good Irishman, and of a
faithful Bishop. Were it more often heard from the lips of the Irish
Episcopate the true friends of Ireland might look forward to her future
with more hope and confidence than many of the best and ablest of them
are now able to feel. As things actually are, not even the Papal Decree
has yet sufficed to restrain ecclesiastics, not always of the lowest
degree, from encouraging by their words and their conduct "patriotism"
of the type commemorated by the late Colonel Prentiss of Louisville, in
a story which he used to tell of a tipsy giant in butternut garments,
armed with a long rifle, who came upon him in his office on a certain
Fourth of July demanding the loan of a dollar on the ground that he felt
"so confoundedly patriotic!"
The Colonel judiciously handed the man a dollar, and then asked, "Pray,
how do you feel when you feel confoundedly patriotic?"
"I feel," responded the man gravely, "as if I should like to kill
somebody or steal something."
It is "patriotism" of this sort which the Papal Decree was issued to
expel from within the pale of the Catholic Church. And it is really, in
the last analysis of the facts of the case, to the suppression of
"patriotism" of this sort that many well-intentioned, but certainly not
well-informed, "sympathisers" with what they suppose to be the cause of
Ireland, object, in my own country and in Great Britain, when they
denounce as "Coercion" the imprisonment of members of Parliament and
other rhetorical persons who go about encouraging or compelling ignorant
people to support "boycotting" and the "Plan of Campaign."
Yet it would seem to be sufficiently obvious that "patriotism" of this
sort, once full-blown and flourishing on the soil of Ireland, must tend
to propagate itself far beyond the confines of that island, and to
diversify with its blood-red flowers and its explosive fruits the social
order of countries in which it has not yet been found necessary for the
Head of the Catholic Church to reaffirm the fundamental principles of
Law and of Liberty.
Since these volumes were published, too, the Agrarian Revolution in
Ireland has been brought into open and defiant collision with the
Catholic Church by its leader, Mr. Davitt, the founder of the Land
League. In the face of Mr. Davitt's contemptuous and angry repudiation
of any binding force in the Papal Decree, it will be difficult even for
the Cardinal-Archbishop of Sydney to devise an understanding between the
Church and any organisation fashioned or led by him. It may be inferred
from Mr. Davitt's contemporaneous and not less angry intimation, that
the methods of the Parnellite party are inadequate to the liberation of
Ireland from the curse of landlordism, that he is prepared to go further
than Mr. George, who still clings in America to the shadowy countenance
given him by the Cardinal-Archbishop of Baltimore, and that the
Nationalisation of the Land will ere long be urged both in Ireland and
in Great Britain by organisations frankly Anti-Catholic as well as
Anti-Social.
This is to be desired on many accounts. It will bring the clergy in
Ireland face to face with the situation, which will be a good thing
both for them and for the people; and it should result in making an end
of the pernicious influence upon the popular mind of such extraordinary
theological outgivings; for example, as the circular issued in 1881 to
the clergy and laity of Meath by the Bishop of that diocese, in which it
was laid down that "the land of every country is the common property of
the people of that country, because its real owner, the Creator who made
it, has transferred it as a voluntary gift to them."
Language of this sort addressed to ignorant multitudes must do harm of
course whenever and by whomsoever used. It must tend to evil if
addressed by demagogues to the Congress of a Trade Union. But it must do
much more harm when uttered with the seeming sanction of the Church by a
mitred bishop to congregations already solicited to greed, cunning, and
dishonesty, by an unscrupulous and well-organised "agitation."
Not less instructive than Mr. Davitt's outburst from the Church is his
almost furious denunciation of the Irish tenants who obeyed an instinct,
thought honourable to mankind in most ages and countries, by agreeing
together to present to their landlord, Earl Fitzwilliam, a token of
their respect and regard on the celebration of his golden wedding day.
These tenants are denounced, not because they were paying homage to a
tyrannical or an unworthy landlord, though Mr. Davitt was so transported
beyond his ordinary and cooler self with rage at their action that he
actually stooped to something like an insinuation of disbelief in the
excellence of Lord Fitzwilliam's character. The true and avowed burden
of his diatribe was that no landlord could possibly deserve well of his
tenants. The better he is as a man, the more they ought to hate him as a
landlord.
The ownership of land, in other words, is of itself in the eyes of Mr.
Davitt what the ownership of a slave was in the eyes of the earlier
Abolitionists--crime so monstrous as to be beyond pardon or endurance.
If this be true of Great Britain and Ireland, where no allodial tenure
exists, how much more true must it be of New York? And if true of the
man who owns a thousand acres, it must be equally true of the man who
owns an acre. There could not be a better illustration than Mr. Davitt
has given in his attack on the Fitzwilliam tenants of the precise
accuracy of what I have had occasion to say in these volumes of the
"irrepressible conflict" between his schemes and the establishment of a
peasant proprietorship in Ireland. It is more than this. It is a
distinct warning served upon the smallest tenants as well as upon the
greatest landlords in the United Kingdom that fixity of any form of
individual tenure is irreconcilable with the Agrarian agitations.
I anticipated this demonstration, but I did not anticipate that it would
come so fully or so soon.
I anticipated also abundant proof from my own side of the water of the
accuracy of my impressions as to the drift of the American-Irish towards
Protection and Republicanism in American politics. This, too, has come
earlier and not less fully than I had expected. Mr. Patrick Ford, the
most influential leader of the American-Irish, issued early in August a
statement of his views as to the impending Presidential election. "The
issue to-day," he says, "is the Tariff. It is the American system
_versus_ the British Colonial system. The Irish are instinctively
Protectionists." And why? Mr. Ford goes on to explain. "The fact," he
observes, "that the Lion and the Unicorn have taken the stump for
Cleveland and Thurnan is not calculated to hurt Harrison and Morton in
the estimation of the Irish, who will, I promise, give a good account of
themselves in the coming Presidential election." Hatred of England, in
other words, is an axiom in their Political Economy!
Mr. Davitt's menacing allusion to Parnell as a landlord, and Mr.
O'Leary's scornful treatment in a letter to me of the small-fry English
Radicals,[1] when taken together, distinctly prefigure an imminent
rupture between the Parnellite party and the two wings--Agrarian and
Fenian--of the real revolutionary movement in Ireland. It is clear that
clerical agitators, high and low, must soon elect between following Mr.
George, Dr. M'Glynn, and Mr. Davitt, and obeying fully the Papal Decree.
It is a most curious feature of the situation in Ireland that much more
discontent with the actual conditions of life in that country seems to
be felt by people who do not than by people who do live in Ireland. It
is the Irish in America and Australia, who neither sow nor reap in
Ireland, pay no taxes there, and bear no burdens, who find the alien
oppression most intolerable. This explains the extreme bitterness with
which Mr. Davitt in some recent speeches and letters denounces the
tameness of the Irish people, and rather amusingly berates the British
allies of his Parnellite associates for their failure to develop any
striking and sensational resistance to the administration of law in
Ireland. I have printed in this edition[2] an instructive account,
furnished to me by Mr. Tener, of some recent evictions on the
Clanricarde property in Galway, which shows how hard it is for the most
determined "agitators" to keep the Irish tenants up to that high concert
pitch of resistance to the law which alone would meet the wishes of the
true agrarian leaders; and how comparatively easy it is for a just and
resolute man, armed with the power of the law resolutely enforced, to
break up an illegal combination even in some of the most disturbed
regions of Ireland.[3] While this is encouraging to the friends of law
and order in Ireland, it must not be forgotten that it involves also a
certain peril for them. The more successfully the law is enforced in
Ireland, the greater perhaps is the danger that the British
constituencies, upon which, of course, the administrators of the law
depend for their authority, may lose sight and sense of the
Revolutionary forces at work there. History shows that this has more
than once happened in the past. Englishmen and Scotchmen will be better
able than I am to judge how far it is unlikely that it should happen
again in the future.
As to one matter of great moment--the effect of Lord Ashbourne's Act--a
correspondent sends me a statement, which I reproduce here, as it gives
a very satisfactory account of the automatic financial machinery upon
which that Act must depend for success:--
"Out of £90,630 of instalments due last May, less than £4000 is
unpaid at the present moment, on transactions extending over three
years with all classes of tenants. The total amount which accrued,
due to the Land Commission in respect of instalments since the
passing of the Act to the 1st November 1887, was £50,910. Of this
there is only now unpaid £731, 17s. 9d. There accrued a further
amount to the 1st May 1888 of £39,720, in respect of which only
£4071, 16s. 11d. is now unpaid, making in all only £4803, 14s. 8d.
unpaid, out of a total sum of £90,630 due up to last gale day, some
of which by this time has been paid off."
This would seem to be worth considering in connection with the objection
made to any serious extension of Lord Ashbourne's Act by Mr. Chamberlain
in his extremely clear and able preface to a programme of "Unionist
Policy for Ireland" just issued by the "National Radical Union."
LONDON, _21st Sept_. 1888.
CONTENTS OF VOL. I.
CLUE MAP _Frontispiece_
PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION v
PROLOGUE xxi-lxvii
CHAPTER I.
London to Dublin, Jan. 20, 1888, 1
Irish Jacobite, 1
Proposed Mass in memory of Charles Edward, 2
Cardinal Manning, 3
President Cleveland's Jubilee Gift to Leo XIII, 4
Arrival at Kingstown, 5
Admirable Mail Service, 5
"Davy," the newsvendor, 6
Mr. Davitt, 7
Coercion in America and Ireland, 8
Montgomery Blair's maxim, 8
Irish cars, 9
Maple's Hotel, 9
Father Burke of Tallaght, 10, 11
Peculiarities of Post-offices, 12, 13
National League Office, 13
The Dublin National Reception, 14
Mr. T.D. Sullivan, M.P., 14
Dublin Castle, 15
Mr. O'Brien, Attorney-General, 16
The Chief-Secretary, Mr. Balfour, 17-24
Fathers M'Fadden and M'Glynn, 18
Come-outers of New England, 18
Mr. Wilfrid Blunt, 19, 20
Sir West Ridgway, 24
Divisional Magistrates, 24
Colonel Turner, 25
The Castle Service, 25-29
Visit of the Prince of Wales, 27
Lord Chief-Justice Morris, 29-37
An Irish Catholic on Mr. Parnell, 31-33
Mr. Justice Murphy, 36
Lord Ashbourne, 37, 38
Unionist meeting, 39
Old Middle State type of American-Irish Protestant, 39
Protestantism and Roman Catholicism in America, 41
Difficulties of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, 43
Dr. Jellett, 43
Dinner at the Attorney-General's, 43-46
Sir Bernard Burke, 46-49
Irish Landlords at Kildare Street Club, 49-52
The people and the procession, 53-55
Ripon and Morley, 54, 55
CHAPTER II.
Dublin to Sion, Feb 3, 56
Poor of the city, 57
Strabane, 58-60
Sion flax-mills, 60-62
Dr. Webb, 63-65
Gweedore, Feb 4, 65
A good day's work, 65
Strabane, 66
Names of the people, 66
Bad weather judges, 67
Letterkenny, p 67, 68
Picturesque cottages, 67
Communicative gentleman, 68
Donegal Highlands, 68-70
Glen Veagh, 71
Errigal, 72
Dunlewy and the Clady, 72
Gweedore, Feb 5, 73
Lord George Hill, 74
Gweedore 1838 to 1879, 75-81
Gweedore 1879 to 1888, 81-91
Father M'Fadden, 83-104
A Galway man's opinions, 84-89
Value of tenant-right, 83
Condition of tenantry, 84
Woollen stuffs, 87, 88
Distress in Gweedore, 88,
Do. in Connemara, 88
Mr Burke, 90
Plan of Campaign, 93
Emigration, 94, 95
Settlement with Captain Hill, 94
Landlord and tenant, 96-98
Land Nationalisation, 98
Father M'Fadden's plan, 98
Gweedore, Feb 6, 104
On the Bunbeg road, 104-110
Falcarragh, 111-123
Ballyconnell House, 112-123
Townland and Rundale, 118
Use and abuse of tea, 119
Lord Leitrim, 121
A "Queen of France," 121
The Rosses, 123
CHAPTER III.
Dungloe, Feb. 7, 124
From Gweedore, 124
Irish "jaunting car," 125
"It will fatten four, feed five, and starve six," 125
Natural wealth of the country, 125
Isle of Arran and Anticosti, p 12
The Gombeen man, 126-130
Dungloe, 126-131
Burtonport, 129
Lough Meela, 128
Attractions of the Donegal coast, 128
Compared with Isles of Shoals and Appledore, 129
Wonderful granite formations, 129
Material for a new industry, 129
Father Walker, 131
Migratory labourers, 133
Granite quarries, 133
Stipends of the Roman Catholic clergy, 134-137
Herring Fisheries, 137
Arranmore, 137
Dungloe woollen work, 138
Baron's Court, Feb 8, 139
Dungloe to Letterkenny, 139-141
Doocharry Red Granite, 140
Fair at Letterkenny, 142
Feb 9, 143
On Clare and Kerry, 143
A Priest's opinion on Moonlighters, 143
The Lixnaw murder, 143
Baron's Court, 144
James I.'s three castles, 145
Ulster Settlement, 146
Descendants of the old Celtic stock, 146
The park at Baron's Court, 146
A nonogenarian O'Kane, 148
Irish "Covenanters," 150
Shenandoah Valley people, 151
The murderers of Munterlony, 151
A relic of 1689, 152
Woollen industry, 152-155
Londonderry Orange symposium, 156
February 11, 157
Sergeant Mahony on Father M'Fadden, 157-163
CHAPTER IV.
Abbeyleix, Feb. 12, 164
Newtown-Stewart, 164
An absentee landlord, 164
"The hill of the seven murders," 165
Newry, Dublin, Maple's Hotel, Maryborough, 165
"Hurrah for Gilhooly," 166
Abbeyleix town, chapel, and church, 168
Embroidery and lace work, 169
Wood-carving, 170
General Grant, 171
Kilkenny, 172
Kilkenny Castle, 173
Muniment-room, 174
Table and Expense Books, 176
Dublin once the most noted wine-mart of Britain, 177, 178
Cathedral of St. Canice, 178
The Waterford cloak, 179
The College, 180
Irish and Scotch whisky, 180
Duke of Ormonde's grants, 181
The Plan of Campaign, 182-186
Ulster tenant-right, 186, 187
CHAPTER V.
Dublin, Feb. 14, 188
The Irish National Gallery, 188-191
Feb. 15, 192
London: Mr. Davitt, 192
Irish Woollen Company, 193
Mr. Davitt and Mr. Blunt, 193
Mr. Davitt's character and position, 192-199
CHAPTER VI.
Ennis, Feb. 18, 200
Return to Ireland, 200
Irish Nationalists, 200, 201
Home Rule and Protection, 202
Luggacurren and Mr. O'Brien, 204
Dublin to Limerick and Ennis, 204, 205
Colonel Turner, 205
Architecture of Ennis Courthouse--Resemblance
to White House, Washington, 206
Number of public-houses in Ennis, and in Ireland, 207, 208
Innkeepers of Milltown Malbay, 208,209
Father White (see Note E), 209
Sir Francis Head, 210, 211
Different opinions in Ennis, 212, 213
State of trade in Ennis, 213, 214
Edenvale, Heronry, 215 _seq._
Feb. 19, 215
The men of Ennis at Edenvale, 216
Killone Abbey, 218-221
Stephen J. Meany, 220
"Holy Well" of St. John, 221
Superstition as to rabbits, 222
Religious practices under Penal Laws, 222
Experiences under National League, 223, 224
Case of George Pilkington, 224-226
Trees at Edenvale, 227
Moonlighters, a reproduction of Whiteboys, 227, 228
Difficulty in getting men to work, 228
A testimonial to Mr. Austen Mackay, 229-232
Effect of testimonials, 232
Feb. 20, 232
The case of Mrs. Connell at Milltown Malbay, 232 _seq._
Estate accounts and prices, 240
A rent-warner, 245
Mr. Redmond, M.P., 245
Father White's Sermon, 246
A photograph, 246
APPENDIX.
NOTES--
A. Mr. Gladstone and the American War (Prologue xxix), 249
B. Mr. Parnell and the Dynamiters (Prologue xxxiii), 251
C. The American "Suspects" of 1881 (Prologue xlvii), 255
D. The Parnellites and the English Parties (Prologue l.), 262
E. The "Boycott" at Miltown-Malbay (p. 209) 264
PROLOGUE.
I.
This book is a record of things seen, and of conversations had, during a
series of visits to Ireland between January and June 1888.
These visits were made in quest of light, not so much upon the
proceedings and the purposes of the Irish "Nationalists,"--with which,
on both sides of the Atlantic, I have been tolerably familiar for many
years past--as upon the social and economical results in Ireland of the
processes of political vivisection to which that country has been so
long subjected.
As these results primarily concern Great Britain and British subjects,
and as a well-founded and reasonable jealousy exists in Great Britain of
American intromission in the affairs of Ireland, it is proper for me to
say at the outset, that the condition of Ireland interests me not
because I believe, with Cardinal Manning, that upon the future of
Ireland hangs the future of the British Empire, but because I know that
America is largely responsible for the actual condition of Ireland, and
because the future condition of Ireland, and of the British Empire,
must gravely influence the future of my own country.
In common with the vast majority of my countrymen, who come with me of
what may now not improperly be called the old American stock--by which I
mean the three millions of English-speaking dwellers in the New World,
who righteously resented, and successfully resisted, a hundred years
ago, the attempt--not of the Crown under which the Colonies held their
lands, but of the British Parliament in which they were
unrepresented--to take their property without their consent, and apply
it to purposes not passed upon by them, I have always felt that the
claim of the Irish people to a proper control of matters exclusively
Irish was essentially just and reasonable. The measure of that proper
control is now, as it always has been, a question not for Americans, but
for the people of Great Britain and of Ireland. If Lord Edward
Fitzgerald and his associates had succeeded in expelling British
authority from Ireland, and in founding an Irish Republic, we should
probably have recognised that Republic. Yet an American minister at the
Court of St. James's saw no impropriety in advising our Government to
refuse a refuge in the United States to the defeated Irish exiles of
'98.
It is undoubtedly the opinion of every Irish American who possesses any
real influence with the people of his own race in my country, that the
rights and liberties of Ireland can only be effectually secured by a
complete political separation from Great Britain. Nor can the right of
Irish American citizens, holding this opinion, to express their sympathy
with Irishmen striving in Ireland to bring about such a result, and with
Englishmen or Scotchmen contributing to it in Great Britain, be
questioned, any more than the right of Polish citizens of the French
Republic to express their sympathy with Poles labouring in Poland for
the restoration of Polish nationality. It is perhaps even less open to
question than the right of Americans not of Irish race, and of Frenchmen
not of Polish race, to express such sympathies; and certainly less open
to question than the right of Englishmen or Americans to express their
sympathy with Cubans bent on sundering the last link which binds Cuba to
Spain, or with Greeks bent on overthrowing the authority of the Sultan
in Crete.
But for all American citizens of whatever race, the expression of such
sympathies ceases to be legitimate when it assumes the shape of action
transcending the limits set by local or by international law. It is of
the essence of American constitutionalism that one community shall not
lay hands upon the domestic affairs of another; and it is an undeniable
fact that the sympathy of the great body of the American people with
Irish efforts for self-government has been diminished, not increased,
since 1848, by the gradual transfer of the head-quarters and machinery
of those efforts from Ireland to the United States. The recent refusal
of the Mayor of New York, Mr. Hewitt, to allow what is called the "Irish
National flag" to be raised over the City Hall of New York is vastly
more significant of the true drift of American feeling on this subject
than any number of sympathetic resolutions adopted at party conventions
or in State legislatures by party managers, bent on harpooning Irish
voters. If Ireland had really made herself a "nation," with or without
the consent of Great Britain, a refusal to hoist the Irish flag on the
occasion of an Irish holiday would be not only churlish but foolish. But
thousands of Americans, who might view with equanimity the disruption of
the British Empire and the establishment of an Irish republic, regard,
not only with disapprobation, but with resentment, the growing
disposition of Irish agitators in and out of the British Parliament to
thrash out on American soil their schemes for bringing about these
results with the help of Irishmen who have assumed the duties by
acquiring the rights of American citizenship. It is not in accordance
with the American doctrine of "Home Rule" that "Home Rule" of any sort
for Ireland should be organised in New York or in Chicago by
expatriated Irishmen.
No man had a keener or more accurate sense of this than the most
eloquent and illustrious Irishman whose voice was ever heard in America.
In the autumn of 1871 Father Burke of Tallaght and San Clemente, with
whom I had formed at Rome in early manhood a friendship which ended only
with his life, came to America as the commissioned Visitor of the
Dominican Order. His mission there will live for ever in the Catholic
annals of the New World. But of one episode of that mission no man
living perhaps knows so much as I, and I make no excuse for this
allusion to it here, as it illustrates perfectly the limits between the
lawful and the unlawful in the agitation of Irish questions upon
American soil.
While Father Burke was in New York Mr. Froude came there, having been
invited to deliver before a Protestant Literary Association a series of
lectures upon the history of Ireland. My personal relations with Mr.
Froude, I should say here, and my esteem for his rare abilities, go back
to the days of the _Nemesis of Faith_, and I did not affect to disguise
from him the regret with which I learned his errand to the New World.
That his lectures would be brilliant, impressive, and interesting, was
quite certain; but it was equally certain, I thought, that they would
do a world of mischief, by stirring up ancient issues of strife between
the Protestant and the Catholic populations of the United States.
That they would be answered angrily, indiscreetly, and in a fashion to
aggravate prejudices which ought to be appeased on both sides of the
questions involved, was much more than probable. All this accordingly I
urged upon Father Burke, begging him to find or make time in the midst
of his engrossing duties for a systematic course of lectures in reply.
What other men would surely say in heat and with virulence would be said
by him, I knew, temperately, loftily, and wisely. Three strenuous
objections he made. One was that his work as a Catholic missionary
demanded all his thought and all his time; another that he was not
historically equipped to deal with so formidable an antagonist; and a
third that America ought not to be a battle-ground of Irish contentions.
It was upon the last that he dwelt most tenaciously; nor did he give way
until he had satisfied himself, after consulting with the highest
authorities of his Church, and with two or three of the coolest and most
judicious Irish citizens of New York, that I was right in believing that
his appearance in the arena as the champion of Ireland, would lift an
inevitable controversy high above the atmosphere of unworthy passion,
and put it beyond the reach of political mischief-makers.
How nobly he did his work when he had become convinced that he ought to
do it, is now matter of history. But it is a hundredfold more needful
now than it was in 1871 and 1872, that the spirit in which he did it
should be known and published abroad. In the interval between the
delivery of two of his replies to Mr. Froude, Mr. Froude went to Boston.
A letter from Boston informed me that upon Mr. Froude's arrival there,
all the Irish servants of the friend with whom he was to stay had
suddenly left the house, refusing to their employer the right to invite
under his roof a guest not agreeable to them. I handed this letter,
without a word, to Father Burke a few hours before he was to speak in
the Academy of Music. He read it with a kind of humorous wrath; and when
the evening came, he prefaced his lecture with a few strong and stirring
words, in which he castigated with equal sense and severity the
misconduct of his country-people, anticipating thus by many a year the
spirit in which the supreme authority of his Church has just now dealt
with the social plague of "boycotting," whereof the strike of the
servant girls at Boston sixteen years ago was a precursory symptom.
Father Burke understood that American citizenship imposes duties where
it confers rights. Nobody expects the European emigrant who abjures his
foreign allegiance to divest himself of his native sympathies or
antipathies. But American law, and the conditions of American liberty,
require him to divest himself of the notion that he retains any right
actively to interfere in the domestic affairs of the country of his
birth. For public and political purposes, the Irishman who becomes an
American ceases to be an Irishman. When Mr. Gladstone's Government in
1881 seized and locked up indefinitely, on "suspicion" of what they
might be about to do, American citizens of Irish birth, these "suspects"
clamoured, and had a right to clamour, for the intervention of the
American Government to protect them against being dealt with as if they
were Irishmen and British subjects. But by the abjuration of British
allegiance which gave them this right to clamour for American
protection, they had voluntarily made themselves absolute foreigners to
Ireland, with no more legal or moral right to interfere in the affairs
of that country than so many Chinamen or Peruvians.
Having said this, I ought, in justice to my fellow-citizens of Irish
birth, to say that these elementary truths have too often been obscured
for them by the conduct of public bodies in America, and of American
public men.
No American public man of reputation, holding an executive office in the
Federal Government, has ever thrust himself, it is true, so inexcusably
into the domestic affairs of Great Britain and Ireland as did Mr.
Gladstone into the domestic affairs of the United States when, speaking
at Newcastle in the very crisis of our great civil war, he gave all the
weight of his position as a Cabinet Minister to the assertion that Mr.
Jefferson Davis had created not only an army and a navy, but a nation,
and thereby compelled the Prime Minister of Great Britain to break the
effect of this declaration by insisting that another Cabinet Minister,
Sir George Cornewall Lewis, should instantly make a speech countering
it, and covering the neutrality of the British Government.[4]
Nor has either House of the Congress of the United States ever been
guilty of the impertinence of adopting resolutions of sympathy with the
Home Rule, or any other movement affecting directly the domestic affairs
of the British Empire, though, within my own knowledge, very strong
pressure has been more than once put upon the Foreign Affairs Committees
of both Houses to bring this about.
But such resolutions have been repeatedly adopted by State Legislatures,
and individual members, both of the Federal Senate and of the Federal
Lower House, have discredited themselves, and brought such discredit as
they could upon the Congress, by effusions of the same sort. The bad
citizenship of Irish-American citizens, however, is not the less bad
citizenship because they may have been led into it by the recklessness
of State Legislatures--which have no responsibility for our foreign
relations--or the sycophancy of public men. If it were proved to
demonstration that Home Rule would be the salvation of Ireland, no
American citizen would have any more right to take an active part in
furthering it than to take an active part in dethroning the Czar of all
the Russias. The lesson which Washington administered to Citizen Genet,
when that meddlesome minister of the French Republic undertook to "boom"
the rights of men by issuing letters of marque at Charleston, has
governed the foreign relations of the United States ever since, and it
is as binding upon every private citizen as upon every public servant of
the Republic.
I must ask my readers, therefore, to bear it constantly in mind that all
my observations and comments have been made from an American, not from a
British or an Irish point of view. How or by whom Ireland shall be
governed concerns me only in so far as the government of Ireland may
affect the character and the tendencies of the Irish people, and
thereby, through the close, intimate, and increasing connection between
the Irish people and the people of the United States, may tend to affect
the future of my country. This being my point of view, it will be
apparent, I think, that I have at least laboured under no temptation to
see things otherwise than as they were, or to state things otherwise
than as I saw them.
With Arthur Young, who more clearly than any other man of his time saw
the end from the beginning of the fatuous and featherheaded French
Revolution of 1789, I have always been inclined to think "the
application of theory to methods of government a surprising imbecility
in the human mind:" and it will be found that in this book I have done
little more than set down, as fully and clearly as I could, what I
actually saw and heard in Ireland. My method has been as simple as my
object. During each day as occasion served, and always at night, I made
stenographic notes of whatever had attracted my attention or engaged my
interest. As I had no case to make for or against any political party or
any theory of government in Ireland, I took things great and small, and
people high and low, as they came, putting myself in contact by
preference, wherever I could, with those classes of the Irish people of
whom we see least in America, and concerning myself, as to my notes,
only that they should be made under the vivid immediate impress of
whatever they were to record. These notes I have subsequently written
out in the spirit in which I made them, in all cases taking what pains
I could to verify statements of facts, and in many cases, where it
seemed desirable or necessary, submitting the proofs of the pages as
finally printed to the persons whom, after myself, they most concerned.
I have been more annoyed by the delay than by the trouble thus entailed
upon me; but I shall be satisfied if those who may take the pains to
read the book shall as nearly as possible see what I saw, and hear what
I heard.
I have no wish to impress my own conclusions upon others who may be
better able than I am accurately to interpret the facts from which these
conclusions have been drawn. Such as they are, I have put them into a
few pages at the end of the book.
It will be found that I have touched only incidentally upon the subject
of Home Rule for Ireland. Until it shall be ascertained what "Home Rule
for Ireland" means, that subject seems to me to lie quite outside the
domain of my inquiries. "Home Rule for Ireland" is not now a plan--nor
so much as a proposition. It is merely a polemical phrase, of little
importance to persons really interested in the condition of Ireland,
however invaluable it may be to the makers of party platforms in my own
country, or to Parliamentary candidates on this side of the Atlantic. It
may mean anything or nothing, from Mr. Chamberlain's imperialist scheme
of four Provincial Councils--which recalls the outlines of a system
once established with success in New Zealand--to that absolute and
complete separation in all particulars of the government of Ireland from
the government of Great Britain, which has unquestionably been the aim
of every active Irish organisation in the United States for the last
twenty years, and which the accredited leader of the "Home Rule" party
in the British Parliament, Mr. Parnell, is understood in America to have
pledged himself that he will do anything to further and nothing to
impede. On this point, what I took to be conclusive documentary evidence
was submitted to me in New York several years ago by Mr. Sheridan, at a
time when the fever-heat of British indignation excited by those murders
in the Phoenix Park, for which I believe it is now admitted by the best
informed authorities that Mr. Sheridan had no responsibility, was
driving Mr. Parnell and his Parliamentary associates into disavowals of
the extreme men of their connection, which, but for Mr. Sheridan's
coolness and consciousness of his well-assured domination over them,
might have led to extremely inconvenient consequences to all
concerned.[5] But whatever "Home Rule" may or may not mean, I went to
Ireland, not to find some achromatic meaning for a prismatic phrase,
which is flashed at you fifty times in England or America where you
encounter it once in Ireland, but to learn what I could of the social
and economical condition of the Irish people as affected by the
revolutionary forces which are now at work in that country.
I have watched the development of these forces too long and too closely
to be under any illusion as to the real importance relatively with them
of the so-called "Parliamentary" action of the Irish Nationalists.
II.
The visits to Ireland, of which this book is a record, were made on my
return from a sojourn in Rome during the celebration of the Jubilee of
His Holiness Leo XIII. What I then and there learned convinced me that
the Vatican was on the eve of grappling in Ireland with issues
substantially identical with those which were forced, in my own country,
two years ago, upon a most courageous and gifted member of the American
Catholic hierarchy, the Archbishop of New York, by the open adhesion of
an eminent Irish American ecclesiastic, the Rev. Dr. M'Glynn, to the
social revolution of which Mr. Henry George is the best-equipped and
most indefatigable apostle. Entertaining this conviction (which events
have since shown to have been well-founded), I was anxious to survey on
the spot the conditions under which the conflict so vigorously
encountered by the Archbishop in New York must be waged by the Vatican
in Ireland.
To suppose that the Vatican, in dealing with this conflict, either in
Ireland or in America, is troubling itself about the balancing of
political acrobats, British or American, upon the tight-rope of "Home
Rule," is as absurd as it would have been to suppose that in 1885 the
Vatican concerned itself with the subterranean intrigues which there is
reason to believe the Irish Nationalists then sought to carry on with
the wire-pullers of the two great British political parties. To get a
correct perspective of the observations which I came from Rome this year
to make in Ireland, my readers, as I have already said, must allow me to
take them across the Atlantic, and must put aside as accessory and
incidental the forensic and polemic phenomena of Irish politics, with
which they are perhaps only too familiar.
It is as easy to go too far back as it is not to go back far enough in
the study of such a revolutionary movement as that of which Ireland is
just now the arena.
Many and sore are the historical grievances of the Irish people. That
they are historical and not actual grievances would seem to be admitted
by so sympathetic and minutely well-informed a writer as Dr. Sigerson,
when he gives it as his opinion, that after the passage of the Land Act
of 1870, "the concession in principle of the demands of the cultivators
as tenants" had "abolished the class war waged between landlords and
their tenantry."
The class war between the tenantry and their landlords, therefore, which
is now undoubtedly waging in Ireland cannot be attributed to the
historical grievances of the Irish people. The tradition and the memory
of these historical grievances may indeed be used by designing or
hysterical traders in agitation to inflame the present war. But the war
itself is not the old war, nor can it be explained by recurring to the
causes of the old war. It has the characteristics no longer of a
defensive war, nor yet of a war of revenge absolutely, but of an
aggressive war, and of a war of conquest. In his able work on "The Land
Tenure and the Land Classes of Ireland," Dr. Sigerson, writing in 1871,
looked forward to the peaceful co-existence in Ireland of two systems of
land-holding, "whereby the country might enjoy the advantage of what is
good in the 'landlord,' or single middleman system, and in the peasant
proprietary or direct system."
What we now see in Ireland, after nearly twenty years of legislation,
steadily tending to the triumph of equal rights, is an agitation
threatening not only the "co-existence" of these two systems, but the
very existence of each of these systems.
To get at the origin and the meaning of this agitation we must be
content, I believe, to go no further back than ten years, and to look
for them, not in Ireland, but in America, not to Mr. Parnell and Mr.
Gladstone primarily, but to Mr. Davitt and Mr. Henry George.
III.
In a very remarkable letter written to Earl Grey in 1868, after the
Clerkenwell explosions had brought the disestablishment of the Irish
Protestant Church into Mr. Gladstone's scheme of "practical politics,"
the Archbishop of Westminster, not then a Cardinal, called the attention
of Englishmen to the fact, not yet I fear adequately apprehended by
them, that "the assimilating power of America upon the Irish people, if
seven days slower than that of England in reaching Ireland, is sevenfold
more penetrating and powerful upon the whole population." By this the
Archbishop meant, what was unquestionably true, that even in 1868, only
twenty years after the great Irish exodus to America began, the social
and political ideas of America were exerting a seven-fold stronger
influence upon the character and the tendencies of the Irish people than
the social and political ideas of England. Thanks to the development of
the cables and the telegraph since 1868, and to the enormous progress
of America since that time in wealth and population, this "assimilating
power" reaches Ireland much more rapidly, and exerts upon the Irish
people a very much more drastic influence than in 1868. This
establishes, of course, a return current westward, which is as necessary
to he watched, and is as much neglected by American as the original
eastward current is by British public men.
In this letter of 1868 to Earl Grey, the Archbishop of Westminster
desiring, as an Englishman, to counteract, if possible, this influence
which was drawing Ireland away from the British monarchy, and towards
the American Republic, maintained that by two things the "heart of
Ireland" might be won, and her affections enlisted with her interests in
the support of the unity, solidity, and prosperity of the British
Empire. One of these two things was "perfect religious equality between
the Catholics and the Protestants of Ireland." The other was that the
Imperial Legislature should by statute make it impossible for any
landlord in Ireland to commit three wrongs,--"first, the wrong of
abusing his rights by arbitrary eviction; secondly, by exacting an
exorbitant rent; thirdly, by appropriating to his own use the
improvements effected by the industry of his tenants."
Perfect religious equality has since been established between the
Catholics and the Protestants of Ireland. The three wrongs which the
Archbishop called upon the Imperial Legislature to make impossible to
Irish landlords have since been made impossible by Statute.
Yet it is on all hands admitted that the "unity, solidity, and
prosperity" of the British Empire have never been so seriously
threatened in Ireland as during the last ten years. Was the Archbishop
wrong, therefore, in his estimate of the situation in 1868? Or has the
centripetal influence of remedial British legislation since 1868 failed
to check a centrifugal advance "by leaps and bounds," in the
"assimilating power" of America upon Ireland?
IV.
Just ten years ago, in 1878, Mr. Michael Davitt and Mr. John Devoy (the
latter of whom had been commissioned in 1865 by the Fenian leader
Stephens, as "chief organiser of the Irish Republican Brotherhood in the
British army"), being then together in America, promulgated, Mr. Davitt
in a speech at Boston, and Mr. Devoy in a letter sent to the _Freeman's
Journal_ in Dublin, the outlines of a scheme for overthrowing British
rule in Ireland by revolutionising the ownership of land in that
country.
The basis of this scheme had been laid thirty years before, in 1848, by
Finton Lalor, John Mitchel, and the present Archbishop of Cashel, then a
simple curate.
It was thus stated by Lalor in his paper, the _Irish Felon_:--
"The entire ownership of Ireland, moral and material, up to the sun and
down to the centre of the earth, is vested, as of right, in the people
of Ireland. The soil of the country belongs as of right to the entire
people of the country, not to any one class, but to the nation."
This was a distinct denial of the right of private property in land. If
true of Ireland and the Irish people this proposition was true of all
lands and of all peoples. Lalor, though more of a patriot than of a
philosopher, saw this plainly; and in one of the three numbers of his
paper which appeared before it was suppressed by the British Government,
he said "the principle I propose goes to the foundations of Europe, and
sooner or later will cause Europe to uprise." Michael Davitt saw this as
clearly in 1878 as Finton Lalor thirty years before. He had matured his
plans in connection with this principle during the weary but not wasted
years of his imprisonment as a Fenian at Dartmoor, a place, the name of
which is connected in America with many odious memories of the second
war between England and the United States; and going out to America
almost immediately after his release on a ticket of leave, he there
found the ideas of Finton Lalor and his associates of 1848, ripened and
harvested in the mind of an American student of sociology, Henry George.
Nowhere in the world has what a shrewd English traveller calls "the
illegitimate development of private wealth" attained such proportions in
modern times as in America, and especially in California. Nowhere, too,
in the world is the ostentatious waste of the results of labour upon the
antics of a frivolous plutocracy a more crying peril of our times than
in America. Henry George, an American of the Eastern States, who went to
the Pacific coast as a lad, had grown up with and watched the progress
of this social disease in California; and when Davitt reached America in
1878, Henry George was preparing to publish his revolutionary book on
_Progress and Poverty_, which appeared in 1879. Dates are important from
this point, as they will trace for the reader the formation of the
strongest forces which, as I believe, are to-day at work to shape the
future of Ireland, and, if Cardinal Manning is right, with the future of
Ireland, the future of the British Empire.
The year 1878 saw the "Home Rule" movement in Irish politics brought to
an almost ludicrous halt by the success of Mr. Parnell, then a young
member of Parliament for Meath, in unhorsing the leader of that
movement, Mr. Butt. As the Irish members then had no coherent purpose or
policy, Mr. Parnell had, without much trouble, dominated and brigaded
them to follow him blindly into a system of parliamentary obstruction,
which there is reason to suppose was suggested to him by a friend who
had studied the Congressional proceedings of the United States, the
native country of his mother, and especially the tactics which had
enabled Mr. Randall of Pennsylvania, the leader of the Democratic
minority in the House of Representatives, to check the so-called "Civil
Rights Bill," sent down by the Senate to that House, during a continuous
session of forty-six hours and a half, with no fewer than seventy-seven
calls of the house, in the month of January 1875, some time before Mr.
Parnell first took his seat in the House of Commons.
When Mr. Parnell, early in 1878, thanks to this system, had ousted Mr.
Butt, and got himself elected as President of the Irish "Home Rule
Confederation," he found himself, as an Irish friend of mine wrote to me
at the time, in an awkward position. He had command of the "Home Rule"
members at Westminster, but he had no notion what to do with them, and
neither they nor he could see anyway open to securing a permanent hold
upon the Irish voters. Three bad harvests in succession had thrown the
Irish tenants into a state which disinclined them to make sacrifices
for any sentimental policy, but prepared them to lend their ears eagerly
to Michael Davitt, when, on his return from the United States in the
early spring of 1879, he proclaimed anew, at Irishtown in his native
county of Mayo, the gospel of 1848 giving the land of Ireland to the
people of Ireland. Clearly Mr. Davitt held the winning card. As he
frankly put the case to a special correspondent, whom I sent to see him,
and whose report I published in New York, he saw that "the only issue
upon which Home Rulers, Nationalists, Obstructionists, and each and
every shade of opinion existing in Ireland could be united was the Land
Question," and of that question he took control. Naturally enough, Mr.
Parnell, himself a landowner under the English settlement, shrank at
first from committing himself and his fortunes to the leadership of Mr.
Davitt. But no choice was really left him, and there is reason to
believe that a decision was made easier to him by a then inchoate
undertaking that he should be personally protected against the financial
consequences to himself of the new departure, by a testimonial fund,
such as was in fact raised and presented to him in 1883. In June 1879 he
accepted the inevitable, and in a speech at Westport put himself with
his parliamentary following and machinery at the service of the founder
of the Irish Land League, uttering the keynote of Mr. Davitt's "new
departure" in his celebrated appeal to the Irish tenants to "keep a firm
grip of their homesteads." In the middle of October 1879, Mr. Davitt
formally organised the Irish National Land League, "to reduce rack-rents
and facilitate the obtaining of the ownership of the land of Ireland by
the occupiers," and Mr. Parnell was made its first President. He was
sent out to America in that capacity, at the end of the year to explain
to the Irish-American leaders the importance of supplying the new
organisation with funds sufficient to enable it to take and keep the
field at Westminster with a force of paid members not dependent for
their support upon the Irish constituencies. It was obviously impossible
either to guarantee any considerable number of Irishmen holding property
against loss by a policy aimed at the foundations of property, or to
count upon finding for every Irish seat a member of local weight and
stake, imbued with the spirit of martyrdom.
Mr. Parnell landed at New York on the 1st of January 1880. An interview
with him, written out on board of the steamer which took him to America
by a correspondent detailed for that purpose, was published on the
morning after his arrival. It made on the whole an unfavourable
impression in America, which was not improved by an injudicious quarrel
into which he drifted with a portion of the American press, and which
was distinctly deepened by his inexcusable misrepresentations of the
conduct of Queen Victoria during the famine of 1847, and by his foolish
attacks upon the management and objects of the Duchess of Marlborough's
fund for the relief of Irish distress. The friends of Mr. Davitt in
America, however, and the leaders of the most active Irish organisations
there, came to the rescue, and as the two American parties were
preparing their lines of battle for the Presidential conflict of 1880,
Mr. Parnell was not only "put through" the usual course of "receptions"
by Mayors and State legislatures, but invited on an "off-day" to address
the House of Representatives at Washington. His tour, however, on the
whole, harmed more than it helped the new Irish movement on my side of
the Atlantic, and when he was called back to take his part in the
electoral contest precipitated by Lord Beaconsfield's dissolution of
Parliament at Easter 1880, Mr. Davitt went out to America himself to do
what his Parliamentary associate had not succeeded in doing. During this
visit of Mr. Davitt to the United States, Mr. Henry George finally
transferred his residence from San Francisco to New York, and made his
arrangements to visit England and Ireland, and bring about a practical
combination between the advocates of "the land for the people" on both
sides of the ocean. These arrangements he carried out in 1881-82,
publishing in 1881, in America, his treatise on the Irish Land question,
while Mr. Davitt, who had been arrested after his return to Europe by
Mr. Gladstone's Government in February 1881, on a revocation of his
ticket-of-leave, lay a prisoner at Portland. Mr. George himself, while
travelling in Ireland with an academical English friend, came under
"suspicion" in the eyes of one of Mr. Forster's officers, and was
arrested, but at once released. During the protracted confinement of Mr.
Davitt at Portland, the utter incapacity of Mr. Parnell and his
Parliamentary associates to manage the social revolution initiated by
the founder of the Land League became fully apparent, not only to
impartial, but even to sympathetic observers in America, long before it
was demonstrated by the incarceration of Mr. Parnell in Kilmainham, the
disavowal, under pressure, of the no-rent manifesto by Archbishop Croke,
and the suppression of the Land League. In sequestrating Mr. Davitt, Mr.
Forster, as was shown by the extraordinary scenes which in the House of
Commons followed his arrest, had struck at the core of the revolution,
and had the Irish Secretary not been deserted by Mr. Gladstone, under
influences which originated at Kilmainham, and were reinforced by the
pressure of the United States Government in the spring of 1882, history
might have had a very different tale to tell of the last six years in
Ireland and in Great Britain.[6]
V.
It was after the return of Mr. George from Ireland to New York in 1882
that the first black point appeared on the horizon, of the conflict,
inevitable in the nature of things, between the social revolution and
the Catholic Church, which assumed such serious proportions two years
ago in America, and which is now developing itself in Ireland. Among the
ablest and the most earnest converts in America to the doctrine of the
new social revolution was the Rev. Dr. M'Glynn, a Catholic priest,
standing in the front rank of his order in New York, in point alike of
eloquence in the pulpit, and of influence in private life. Finding, like
Michael Davitt, in the doctrine of Henry George an outcome and a
confirmation of the principle laid down in 1848 for the liberation of
Ireland by Finton Lalor, Dr. M'Glynn threw himself ardently into the
advocacy of that doctrine,--so ardently that in August 1882 the Prefect
of the Propaganda, Cardinal Simeoni, found it necessary to invite the
attention of Cardinal M'Closkey, then Archbishop of New York, to
speeches of Dr. M'Glynn, reported in the _Irish World_ of New York, as
"containing propositions openly opposed to the teachings of the Catholic
Church."
It did not concern the Propaganda that these propositions ran on
all-fours with the policy of the Irish Land League established by Mr.
Davitt, and accepted by Mr. Parnell. What concerned the Propaganda in
the propositions of Dr. M'Glynn at New York in 1882 was precisely what
concerns the Propaganda in the programme of Mr. Davitt as mismanaged by
Mr. Dillon in Ireland in 1888--the incompatibility of these
propositions, and of that programme, with the teachings of the Church.
Upon receiving the instructions of the Propaganda in August 1882,
Cardinal M'Closkey sent for Dr. M'Glynn, and set the matter plainly
before him. Dr. M'Glynn professed regret for his errors, promised to
abstain in future from political meetings, and begged the Cardinal to
inform the authorities at Home of his intention to walk more
circumspectly. The submission of Dr. M'Glynn was approved at Rome, but
it was gently intimated to him that it needed to be crowned by public
reparation for the scandal he had caused. He disregarded this pastoral
hint, and when the Archbishop Coadjutor of New York, Dr. Corrigan, went
to Rome in 1883 to represent the Cardinal, who was unequal to the
journey, he found the Propaganda by no means satisfied with the attitude
of Dr. M'Glynn. Two years after this, in October 1885, Cardinal
M'Closkey died, and Dr. Corrigan succeeded him as Archbishop of New
York.
Between the first admonition given to the sacerdotal ally of Mr. George
in 1882 and this event much had come to pass in Ireland. The Land League
suppressed by Mr. Forster had been suffered to reappear as the National
League by Earl Spencer and Mr. Trevelyan. Sir William Harcourt's
stringent and sweeping "Coercion Act" of July 11th, 1882, passed under
the stress of the murders in the Phoenix Park, expiring by its own terms
in July 1885, Mr. Gladstone found himself forced either to alienate a
number of his Radical supporters by proposing a renewal of that Act, or
to invite a catastrophe in Ireland by attempting to rule that country
under "the ordinary law."
He elected to escape from the dilemma by inviting a defeat in Parliament
on a secondary question of the Budget. He went out of power on the 9th
of June 1885, leaving Lord Salisbury to send the Earl of Carnarvon as
Viceroy to Ireland, and the Irish party in Parliament to darken the air
on both sides of the Atlantic with portentous intimations of a
mysterious compact, under which they were to secure Home Rule for
Ireland by establishing the Conservatives in their places at the general
election in November.[7]
What came of all this I may briefly rehearse. Going out to America in
November 1885, and returning to England in January 1886, I remained in
London long enough to assure myself, and to publish in America my
conviction of the utter hopelessness of Mr. Gladstone's "Home Rule"
measure, the success of which would have made his government the ally
and the instrument of Mr. Parnell in carrying out the plans of Mr.
Davitt, Mr. Henry George, and the active Irish organisations of the
United States. All this is matter of history.
The effect of Mr. Gladstone's speech of April 8, 1886, introducing his
Home Rule Bill, upon the Irish in America was simply intoxicating. They
saw him, as in a vision, repeating for the benefit of Ireland at Dublin,
on a grander scale, the impressive scene of his surrender in 1858 at
Corfu of the Protectorate of the Ionian Islands to Greece.
Upon thousands also of Americans, interested more or less intelligently
in British affairs, but neither familiar, nor caring to be, with the
details of the political situation in Great Britain, this appearance of
the British Premier, as the champion of Home Rule for Ireland,
denouncing the "baseness and blackguardism" of Pitt and his
accomplices, the framers of the Union of 1800, naturally produced a very
profound impression. What might be almost called a "tidal wave" of
sympathy with the Irish National League, and with him as its ally, made
itself felt throughout the United States. Had I witnessed the drama from
the far-off auditorium in New York, I might doubtless have shared the
conviction of so many of my countrymen that we were about to behold the
consummation tunefully anticipated so many years ago by John Quincy
Adams, and--
"Proud of herself, victorious over fate,
See Erin rise, an independent state."
The moment seemed propitious for a resolute forward move in America of
Mr. Henry George, and the other American believers in the doctrine of
"the land for the people." It would have been more propitious had not
the political managers of the Irish party, misapprehending to the last
moment the drift of things in the British Parliament, and counting
firmly upon a victory for Mr. Gladstone, either at Westminster or at the
polls, insisted upon holding a great convention of the Irish in America
at Chicago in August 1886. A proposition to do this had been made in the
spring of 1885, and put off, in judicious deference to the disgust which
many independent Americans of both parties then felt at the course
pursued by Mr. Parnell's friends, Mr. Egan and Mr. Sullivan in 1884,
when these leaders openly led the Irish with drums beating and green
flags flying out of the Democratic into the Republican camp.
As it was, however, Mr. Gladstone having gone out of power a second
time, on the second day of June in 1886, the non-parliamentary and real
leader in Ireland of the Irish revolutionary movement, Mr. Davitt, came
overtly to the front, and crossed the Atlantic to ride the whirlwind and
direct the storm at the Convention appointed to be held in Chicago on
the 18th of August.
In New York he found Mr. Henry George quietly preparing to put the
emotions of the moment to profit at the municipal election which was to
occur in that city in November, and Dr. M'Glynn more enamoured than ever
of the doctrine of "the land for the people," and more defiant than ever
of the Propaganda and of his ecclesiastical superiors. It was resolved
that Mr. George should come forward as a candidate for the mayoralty in
November, and Dr. M'Glynn determined to take the field in support of
him.
VI.
We now come to close quarters.
Dr. Corrigan, as I have said, had become the Archbishop of New York in
October 1885. The Irish-American Convention met at Chicago, Mr. Davitt
dominating its proceedings by his courageous and outspoken support of
his defeated Parliamentary allies in England. The candidacy of Mr. Henry
George had not yet been announced in New York. But Dr. M'Glynn resumed
his practice of addressing public meetings in support of the doctrines
of Mr. Davitt and of Henry George. The Archbishop's duty was plain. It
was not pleasant. A Catholic prelate of Irish blood living in New York
might have been pardoned for avoiding, if he could, an open intervention
at such a moment, to prevent an able and popular priest from disobeying
his ecclesiastical superiors in his zeal for a doctrine hostile to
"landlordism," and cordially approved by the most influential of the
Irish leaders.
But on the 21st August 1886, while all the Irishmen in New York were
wild with excitement over the proceedings at Chicago, Archbishop
Corrigan did his duty, and admonished Dr. M'Glynn to restrain his
political ardour. The admonition was thrown away. A month later, the
canvass of Mr. Henry George being then fully opened, Dr. M'Glynn sent
Mr. George himself to wait upon the Archbishop with a note of
introduction as his "very dear and valued friend," in the hope of
inducing the Archbishop to withdraw his inhibition and allow him to
speak at a great meeting, then about to be held, of the supporters of
Mr. George.
The Archbishop replied in a firm but friendly note, forbidding Dr.
M'Glynn "in the most positive manner" to attend the meeting referred to,
or "any other political meeting whatever."
Dr. M'Glynn deliberately disobeyed this order, attended the meeting, and
threw himself with ever increasing heat into the war against
landlordism. On the 2d of October 1886, therefore, he was formally
"suspended" from his priestly functions--nor has he ever since been
permitted to resume them. Another priest presides over the great church
of St. Stephen, of which he was the rector. More than once the door of
repentance and return has been opened to him; but, I believe, he is
still waging war in his own way, and beyond the precincts of the
priesthood, both upon the right of private property in land and upon the
Pope.
He is a man of vigorous intellect; and he has defined the issue between
himself and the Church in language so terse and clear that I reproduce
it here. It defines also the real issue of to-day between the Church
speaking through the Papal Decree of April 20, 1888, and the National
League of Ireland acting through the "Plan of Campaign."
No heed having been paid by Dr. M'Glynn to several successive
intimations summoning him to go to Rome and explain his attitude, he
finally, on the 20th of December 1886, wrote a letter in which, with a
single skilful turn of his wrist, he took out the core of Henry George's
doctrine as to land, which really is the core also of the Irish Plan of
Campaign, and thus laid it before the Archbishop of New York:--
"My doctrine about land has been made clear in speeches, in reports of
interviews, and in published articles, and I repeat it here. I have
taught, and I shall continue to teach in speeches and writings, as long
as I live, that land is rightfully the property of the people in common,
and that private ownership of land is against natural justice, no matter
by what civil or ecclesiastical laws it may be sanctioned; and I would
bring about instantly, if I could, such change of laws all over the
world as would confiscate private property in land without one penny of
compensation to the miscalled owners."
There is no shuffling here. With logical precision Dr. M'Glynn strips
Mr. George's doctrine of its technical disguise as a form of taxation,
and presents it to the world as a simple Confiscation of Rents. Many
acute critics of _Progress and Poverty_ have failed to see that when
Mr. George calls upon the State to take over to itself, and to its own
uses, the whole annual rental value of the bare land of a country, the
land, that is, irrespectively of improvements put upon it by man, he
proposes not "a single tax upon land" at all, but an actual confiscation
of the rental of the land--which for practical purposes is the land--to
the uses of the State, without a levy, and without compensation to "the
miscalled owners."
When a tax is levied, the need by the State levying it of a certain sum
of money must first be ascertained by competent authority, legislative
or executive, as the case may be, and the law-making power must then,
according to a prescribed form, enact that to raise such a sum a certain
tax shall be levied on designated property or occupations. If the
exigencies of the State are held to require it, a tax may be levied upon
property of more than its value, as in the case, for example, of the
customs duty which was imposed in one of our "tariff revisions" upon
plate glass imported into the United States by way of "protecting" a
single plate-glass factory then existing in the United States. This was
an abominable abuse of a constitutional power, but it was not
"confiscation." What Henry George proposes is confiscation, as Dr.
M'Glynn plainly sees and courageously says. What he proposes is that
the State shall compel the annual rental value of all land to be paid
into the public treasury, without regard to the question whether the
State does or does not need such a sum of money. That is confiscation
pure and simple, the State, in the assumed interest of the State,
proceeding against the private owners of land, or the "miscalled
owners," to use Dr. M'Glynn's significant phrase, precisely as under the
feudal system the State proceeded against the private property of rebels
and traitors. No good reason can be shown why the process should not be
applied to personalty and to debts as well as to land.
This was the doctrine indorsed at the polls in New York in November 1886
by 68,000 voters. Nor can there be much doubt that it would have been
indorsed by the few thousand more votes needed to defeat Mr. Hewitt, the
actual Mayor of New York, and to put Mr. Henry George into the Chief
Magistracy of the first city of the New World, had not its teachers and
preachers been confronted by the quiet, cool, and determined prelate who
met it as plainly as it was put. "Your letter," said the Archbishop,
"has brought the painful intelligence that you decline to go to Rome,
and that you have taught, and will continue to teach, the injustice of
private ownership of land, no matter by what laws of Church or State it
may be sanctioned. In view of such declarations, to permit you to
exercise the holy ministry would be manifestly wrong."
In these few words of the Archbishop of New York, we have plainly
affirmed in 1886 the principle underlying the Papal Decree of 1888
against the Plan of Campaign and Boycotting in Ireland. There is no
question of parties or of politics in the one case or in the other. When
Dr. M'Glynn talked about the private ownership of land in New York as
"against natural justice," he flung himself not only against the Eighth
Commandment and the teachings of the Catholic Church, touching the
rights of property, but against the constitutions of the State of New
York and of the United States. That "private property shall not be taken
for public uses without just compensation" is a fundamental provision of
the Constitution of the United States, which is itself a part of the
Constitution of every State of the Union; and the right of private
ownership in land is defined and protected beyond doubt or cavil in New
York under the State Constitution. An Act passed in 1830 provides and
declares that all lands within the State "are allodial, so that, subject
only to the liability to escheat, the entire and absolute property is
vested in the owners according to the nature of their respective
estates."
By this Act "all feudal tenures of every description, with all their
incidents," were "abolished." Most of the "feudal incidents" of the
socage tenure had been previously abolished by an Act passed in 1787,
under the first Constitution of the State, adopted at Kingston in 1777,
a year after the Declaration of American Independence; and socage tenure
by fixed and determinate service, not military or variable by the lord
at his will, had been adopted long before by an Act of the first
Assembly of the Province of New York held in 1691 under the first Royal
Governor, after the reconquest of the province from Holland, and in the
reign of William and Mary. This Act provided that all lands should "be
held in free and common socage according to the tenure of East Greenwich
in England." It is an interesting circumstance that the right of private
ownership in land, thus rooted in our history, should have been defended
against a threatening revolutionary movement in New York by the courage
and loyalty to the Constitution of his country as well as to his Church
of a Catholic Archbishop. For this same Assembly of the Province of New
York in 1693, in an Act "to maintain Protestant ministers and churches,"
enacted that "every Jesuit and popish priest" found in the Province
after a certain day named, should be put into "perpetual imprisonment,"
with the proviso that if he escaped and was retaken he should suffer
death. And even in the Constitution of 1777 the Protestantism of New
York expressed its hostility to the Catholic Church by exacting
subjection "in all matters ecclesiastical as well as civil."
The position of the Archbishop, both as a churchman and as a citizen,
was impregnable. When Dr. M'Glynn advocated the plan of Henry George, he
advocated at one and the same time the immoral seizure and confiscation
of the whole income of many persons within the protection of the
Constitution of New York, and the overthrow of the Constitution of that
State and of the United States. It may be within the competency of the
British Parliament to enact such a confiscation of rent without a
revolution, there being not only no allodial tenure of land in Great
Britain, but, it would appear, no limit to the power of a British
Parliament over the lives, liberties, and property of British subjects,
but the will of its members. But it is not within the competency of the
Congress of the United States, or of the Assembly of New York, to do
such a thing, the powers of these bodies being controlled and denned by
written Constitutions, which can only be altered or amended in a
prescribed manner and through prescribed and elaborate forms.
VII.
By the middle of October 1886 it became clear that Mr. George, whose
candidacy had at first been regarded with indifference by the party
managers, both Democratic and Republican, in New York, would command a
vote certainly larger than that of one of these parties, and possibly
larger than that of either of them. To put him at the head of a poll of
three parties would elect him. This was so apparent that he and his
friends, including Dr. M'Glynn and Mr. Davitt, were warranted in
expecting a victory.
It was hardly therefore by a mere coincidence that this precise time was
selected for opening the war in Ireland against Rent. It is quite
possible that if Mr. Dillon and his Parliamentary friends had been in
less of a hurry to open this war before the return of Mr. Davitt from
America, it might have been opened in a manner less "politically
stupid," if not less "morally wrong." But, of course, if Mr. Henry
George had been elected Mayor of New York, as he came so near to being
in November 1886, and Mr. Davitt had returned to Ireland with the
prestige of contributing to place him in the municipal chair of the most
important city in the New World, Mr. Dillon and his Parliamentary
friends would probably have found it necessary to accept a much less
conspicuous part in the conduct of the campaign.
It was on the 17th of October 1886 that Mr. John Dillon, M.P., first
promulgated the "Plan of Campaign" at Portumna, in a speech which was
promptly flashed under the Atlantic to New York, there to feed the
flame, already fanned by the eloquence of Dr. M'Glynn, into a blaze of
enthusiasm for the apostle of the New Gospel of Confiscation.
Had the "Plan of Campaign" then been met by the highest local authority
of the Catholic Church in Ireland, as Henry George's doctrine of
Confiscation was met in New York by Archbishop Corrigan, it might never
have been necessary to issue the Papal Decree of April 1888. But while
the Bishop of Limerick unhesitatingly denounced the "Plan of Campaign"
as "politically stupid and morally wrong," the Archbishop of Dublin
bestowed upon it what may be called a left-handed benediction. Admitting
that it empowered one of the parties to a contract to "fix the terms on
which that contract should continue in force," the Archbishop actually
condoned the claim of this immoral power by the tenant, on the ground
that the same immoral power had been theretofore exercised by the
landlord! Peter having robbed Paul from January to July, that is, Paul
should be encouraged by his spiritual guides to rob Peter from July to
January!
That the Catholic Church should even seem for a time to speak with two
voices on such a point as the moral quality of political machinery, or
that speaking with one voice upon such a point in America, it should
even seem to speak with another voice in Ireland, would clearly be a
disaster to the Church and to civilisation. From the moment therefore,
in 1886, when the issue between Dr. M'Glynn and the Archbishop of New
York was defined, as I have shown, and the Irish National League, with a
quasi-indorsement from the Archbishop of Dublin, had arrayed itself
practically and openly on the side of Dr. M'Glynn and against the
Archbishop of New York, interests far transcending those of any
political party in Ireland, in Great Britain, or in the United States,
were involved. Unfortunately for the immediate and decisive settlement
by Rome of the issue between Dr. M'Glynn and the Archbishop of New York,
a certain vague but therefore more vexatious measure of countenance had
been given, before that issue was raised, to the theories of Mr. Henry
George by another American prelate, the Cardinal Archbishop of
Baltimore, and by more than one eminent ecclesiastic in Europe. Of
course this would have been impossible had these ecclesiastics
penetrated, like Dr. M'Glynn, to the heart of Mr. George's contention,
or discerned with the acumen of the Archbishop of New York the
fundamental difference between any imaginable exercise of the power of
taxation by a Constitutional Government, and Mr. George's doctrine of
the Confiscation of Rent. But this having occurred, it was inevitable
that Rome, which has to deal with a world-wide and complex system of the
most varied and delicate human affairs, should proceed in the matter
with infinite patience and care. In January 1887 the Propaganda
accordingly cabled thus to the Archbishop of New York,--Dr. M'Glynn
persisting in his refusal to go to Rome--"for prudential reasons
Propaganda has heretofore postponed action in the case of Dr. M'Glynn.
The Sovereign Pontiff has now taken the matter into his own hands."
In the hands of his Holiness the matter was safe; and in the Papal
Decree of April 20, 1888, we have at once the most conclusive
vindication of the wisdom and courage shown by the Archbishop of New
York in 1886, and the most emphatic condemnation of the attitude assumed
in 1886 by the Archbishop of Dublin.
VIII.
It must not be assumed that Mr. George has been finally defeated in
America. On the contrary, he was never more active. A legacy left to
him by an Irish-American for the propagation of his doctrines has just
been declared by the Vice-Chancellor of New Jersey, to be invalid on the
ground that George's doctrines are "in opposition to the laws"; and this
decision has bred an uproar in the press which is reviving popular
attention all over the country to the doctrines and to their author. He
is astute, persevering, as much in earnest as Mr. Davitt, and as
familiar with the weak points in the political machinery of the United
States as is Mr. Davitt with the weak points in the political machinery
of Great Britain. This is a Presidential year. The election of 1888 will
be decided, as was the election of 1884, in New York. The Democratic
party go into the contest with a New York candidate, President
Cleveland, who was presented to the Convention at St. Louis for
nomination, not by an Irishman from New York, but by an Irishman from
the hopelessly Republican State of Pennsylvania, and whose renomination,
distasteful to the Democratic Governor of the State, was also openly
opposed by the Democratic Mayor of the city of New York, Mr. Hewitt, Mr.
George's successful competitor in the Municipal election of 1886.
Leaving Dr. M'Glynn to uphold the Confiscation of Land against the Pope
in New York, as Mr. Davitt, Mr. Dillon, and a certain number of Irish
priests uphold the Plan of Campaign and Boycotting against the Pope in
Ireland, Mr. George supports President Cleveland, and in so doing
cleverly makes a flank movement towards his "exclusive taxation of
land," by promoting, under the cover of "Revenue Reform," an attack on
the indirect taxation from which the Federal Revenues are now mainly
derived. Meanwhile the Cardinal Archbishop of Baltimore, who is also a
political supporter of President Cleveland, has not yet been confronted
by the supreme authority at Rome with such a final sentence upon the
true nature of Mr. George's "exclusive taxation of land," as the
clear-sighted Archbishop of New York is said to be seeking to obtain
from the Holy Office. What the end will be I have little doubt. But for
the moment, it will be seen, the situation in America is only less
confused and troublesome than the situation in Ireland. It is confused
and troubled too, as I have tried in this prologue to show, by forces
identical in character with those which confuse and trouble the
situation in Ireland.
Of the social conditions amid and against which those forces are working
in America, I believe myself to have some knowledge.
To get an actual touch and living sense of the social conditions amid
and against which they are working in Ireland was my object, I repeat,
in making the visits, of which this book is a record. More than this I
could not hope, in the time at my disposal, to do. With very much less
than this, it appears to me, many persons, whose views of Irish affairs
I had been inclined, before making these visits, to regard with respect,
must have found it possible to rest content.
CHAPTER I.
DUBLIN, _Monday, Jan. 30, 1888._--I left London last night. The train
was full of people going to attend levees and drawing-rooms about to be
held at Dublin Castle.
Near Watford we lost half an hour by the breaking of a connecting-rod:
but the London and North-Western is a model railway, and we ran
alongside the pier at Holyhead exactly "on time." There is no such
railway travelling in America, excepting on the Pennsylvania Central;
and the North-Western sleeping-carriages, if less monumental and
elaborate than ours, are better ventilated, and certainly not less
comfortable.
I had expected to come upon unusual things and people in Ireland, but I
had not expected to travel thither in company with an Irish Jacobite.
Two of my fellow-passengers, chatting as they smoked their cigarettes
in the little vestibule between the cabins of the carriage, had much to
say about Lord Ashburnham, and the "Order of the White Rose," and the
Grand Mass to be celebrated to-morrow morning at the Church of the
Carmelites in London, in memory of Charles Edward Stuart, who died at
Rome in 1788, and now lies buried as Charles III., King of Great Britain
and Ireland, in the vaults of the Vatican, together with his father
"James III.," and his brother "Henry IX." One of the two was as hot and
earnest about the "Divine Right of Kings" as the parson who, less than
forty years ago, preached a sermon to prove that the great cholera
visitation of 1849 was a direct chastisement of the impiety of the Royal
Mint in dropping the letters D.G. from the first florins of Queen
Victoria issued in that year. He bewailed his sad fate in being called
over to Ireland by family affairs at such a moment, and evidently did
not know that the Mass in question had been countermanded by the
Cardinal Archbishop.
The incident, odd enough in itself, interested me the more that
yesterday, as it happens, the Cardinal had spoken with me of this
curious affair.
He heard of it for the first time on Saturday, and, sending at once for
the priest in charge of the Carmelite Church, forbade the celebration.
Later on in the evening, two strangers came to the Archbishop's house,
and in great agitation besought him to allow the arrangements for the
Mass to go on. He declined to do this, and sent them away impaled on a
dilemma. "What you propose," said the Cardinal, "is either a piece of
theatrical tomfoolery, in which case it is unfit to be performed in a
church, or it is flat treason, in which case you should be sent to the
Tower!"
They went away, like the Senatus of Augsburg from the presence of
Napoleon--"_très mortifiés et peu contents_." After they had gone, the
Cardinal remembered that for some time past queer documents had reached
him through the post-office, setting forth the doctrine of Divine Right,
and the story of the Stuarts. One of these, which with the rest he had
thrown into the fire, was an elaborate genealogical chart, designed to
show that the crowns of Great Britain and Ireland ought rightfully to be
worn by a certain princess in Bavaria!
If there is anything more in all this than a new variety of the "blue
China craze," may it not be taken as a symptom of that vague but clearly
growing dissatisfaction with the nineteenth century doctrine of
government by mere majorities, which is by no means confined to Europe?
This feeling underlies the "National Association" for getting a preamble
put into the Constitution of the United States, "recognising Almighty
God as the source of all authority and power in Civil Government." There
was such a recognition in the Articles of Confederation of 1781.
Archbishop Ryan of Philadelphia should have mentioned to His Holiness
the existence of this Association, when he presented to Leo XIII., the
other day at Rome, President Cleveland's curious Jubilee gift of an
emblazoned copy of what a Monsignore of my acquaintance calls "the
godless American Constitution."[8]
We made a quick quiet passage to Kingstown. These boats--certainly the
best appointed of their sort afloat--are owned, I find, in Dublin, and
managed exclusively by their Irish owners, to whom the credit therefore
belongs of making the mail service between Holyhead and Kingstown as
admirable, in all respects, as the mail services between Dover and the
Continental ports are not.
I landed at Kingstown with Lord Ernest Hamilton, M.P. for North Tyrone,
with whom I have arranged an expedition to Gweedore in Donegal, one of
the most ill-famed of the "congested districts" of Ireland, and just now
made a point of special interest by the arrest of Father M'Fadden, the
parish priest of the place, for "criminally conspiring to compel and
induce certain tenants not to fulfil their legal obligations."
I could understand such a prosecution as this in America, where the
Constitution makes it impossible even for Congress to pass laws
"impairing the validity of contracts." But as the British Parliament has
been passing such laws for Ireland ever since Mr. Butt in 1870 raised
the standard of Irish Land Reform under the name of Home Rule, it seems
a little absurd, not to say Hibernian, of the British authorities to
prosecute Father M'Fadden merely for bettering their own instruction in
his own way. I could better understand a prosecution of Father M'Fadden
on such grounds by the authorities of his own Church.
A step from the boat at Kingstown puts you into the train for Dublin.
Before we got into motion, a weird shape as of one just escaped from
the Wild West show of Buffalo Bill peered in at the window, inviting us
to buy the morning papers, or a copy of "the greatest book ever
published, 'Paddy at Home!'" This proved to be a translation of M. de
Mandat Grancey's lively volume, _Chez Paddy_. The vendor, "Davy," is one
of the "chartered libertines" of Dublin. He is supposed to be, and I
dare say is, a warm Nationalist, but he has a keen eye to business, and
alertly suits his cries to his customers. Recognising the Conservative
member for North Tyrone, he promptly recommended us to buy the _Irish
Times_ and the _Express_ as "the two best papers in all Ireland." But he
smiled approval when I asked for the _Freeman's Journal_ also, in which
I found a report of a speech delivered yesterday by Mr. Davitt at
Rathkeale, chiefly remarkable for a sensible protest against the
ridiculous and rantipole abuse lavished upon Mr. Balfour by the
Nationalist orators and newspapers. I am not surprised to see this. Mr.
Davitt has the stuff in him of a serious revolutionary leader, and no
such man can stomach the frothy and foolish vituperation to which
parliamentary agitators are addicted, not in Ireland only. Unlike Mr.
Parnell, who is forced to have one voice for New York and Cincinnati,
and another voice for Westminster, Mr. Davitt is free to be always
avowedly bent on bringing about a thorough Democratic revolution in
Ireland. I believe him to be too able a man to imagine, as some of the
Irish agitators do, that this can be done without the consent of
Democratic England, and he has lived too much in England, and knows the
English democracy too well, I suspect, not to know that to abuse an
executive officer for determination and vigour is the surest way to make
him popular. Calling Mr. Forster "Buckshot" Forster did him no harm. On
the contrary, the epithet might have helped him to success had not Mr.
Gladstone given way behind him at the most critical moment of his
grapple with the revolutionary organisation in Ireland. We hear a great
deal about resistance to tyrants being obedience to God, but I fear that
obedience to God is not the strongest natural passion of the human
heart, and I doubt whether resistance to tyrants can often be promoted
by putting about a general conviction that the tyrant has a thumping big
stick in his hand, and may be relied upon to use it. Even Tom Paine had
the wit to see that it was his "good heart" which brought Louis XVI. to
the scaffold.
Nobody who had not learned from the speeches made in England, and the
cable despatches sent to America, that freedom of speech and of the
press has been brutally trampled under foot in Ireland by a "Coercion"
Government would ever suspect it from reading the Dublin papers which I
this morning bought.
As a Democratic journalist I had some practical knowledge of a true
"Coercion" government in America a quarter of a century ago. The
American editor who had ventured in 1862 to publish in a New York or
Philadelphia newspaper a letter from Washington, speaking of the
Unionist Government by President Lincoln, as the letter from London
published to-day in the _Freeman's Journal_ speaks of the Unionist
Government of Lord Salisbury, would have found himself in one of the
casemates of Fort Lafayette within twenty-four hours. Our Republican
rulers acted upon the maxim laid down by Mr. Tilden's friend, Montgomery
Blair,[9] that "to await the results of slow judicial prosecution is to
allow crime to be consummated, with the expectation of subsequent
punishment, instead of preventing its accomplishment by prompt and
direct interference." Perhaps Americans take their Government more
seriously than Englishmen do. Certainly we stand by it more sternly in
bad weather. Even so good a Constitutionalist as Professor Parsons at
Harvard, I remember, when a student asked him if he would not suspend
the _Habeas Corpus_ in the case of a man caught hauling down the
American flag, promptly replied, "I would not suspend the _Habeas
Corpus_; I would suspend the _Corpus_."
We found no "hansoms" at the Dublin Station, only "outside cars," and
cabs much neater than the London four-wheelers. One of these brought us
at a good pace to Maple's Hotel in Kildare Street, a large,
old-fashioned but clean and comfortable house. My windows look down upon
a stately edifice of stone erecting on Kildare Street for all sorts of
educational and "exhibitional" purposes, with the help of an Imperial
grant, I am told, and to be called the Leinster Hall. The style is
decidedly composite, with colonnades and loggie and domes and porticos,
and recalls the ancient Roman buildings depicted in that fresco of a
belated slave-girl knocking at her mistress's door which with its
companion pieces is fast fading away upon the walls of the "House of
Livia" on the Palatine.
At one end of this street is the fashionable and hospitable Kildare
Street Club; at the other the Shelburne Hotel, known to all Americans.
This seems to have been "furbished-up" since I last saw it. There, for
the last time as it proved, I saw and had speech of my friend of many
years, the prince of all preachers in our time, Father Burke of Tallaght
and of San Clemente.
I had telegraphed to him from London that I should halt in Dublin for a
day, on my way to America, to see him. He came betimes, to find me
almost as badly-off as St. Lawrence upon his gridiron. The surgeon whom
the hotel people had hastily summoned to relieve me from a sudden attack
of that endemic Irish ecstasy, the lumbago, had applied what he called
the "heroic treatment" on my telling him that I had no time to be ill,
but must spend that day with Father Burke, dine that night with Mr.
Irving and Mr. Toole, and go on the next day to America.
"What has this Inquisitor done to you?" queried Father Tom.
"Cauterised me with chloroform."
"Oh! that's a modern improvement! Let me see--" and, scrutinising the
results, he said, with a merry twinkle in his deep, dark eyes--"I see
how it is! They brought you a veterinary!"
This was in 1878. On that too brief, delightful morning, we talked of
all things--supralunar, lunar, and sublunary. Much of Wales, I remember,
where he had been making a visit. "A glorious country," he said, "and
the Welsh would have been Irish, only they lost the faith." Full of love
for Ireland as he was, he was beginning then to be troubled by symptoms
in the Nationalist movement, which could not be regarded with composure
by one who, in his youth at Rome, had seen, with me, the devil of
extremes drive Italy down a steep place into the sea.
Five years afterwards I landed at Queenstown, in July 1883, intending to
visit him at Tallaght. But when the letter which I sent to announce my
coming reached the monastery, the staunchest Soldier of the Church in
Ireland lay there literally "dead on the field of honour." Chatham, in
the House of Lords, John Quincy Adams, in the House of Representatives,
fell in harness, but neither death so speaks to the heart as the simple
and sublime self-sacrifice of the great Dominican, dragging himself from
his dying bed into Dublin to spend the last splendour of his genius and
his life for the starving children of the poor in Donegal.
What would I not give for an hour with him now!
After breakfast I went out to find Mr. Davitt, hoping he might suggest
some way of seeing the Nationalist meeting on Wednesday night without
undergoing the dismal penance of sitting out all the speeches. I wished
also to ask him why at Rathkeale he talked about the Dunravens as
"absentees." He was born in Lord Lucan's country, and may know little of
Limerick, but he surely ought to know that Adare Manor was built of
Irish materials, and by Irish workmen, under the eye of Lord Dunraven,
all the finest ornamental work, both in wood and in stone, of the
mansion, being done by local mechanics; and also that the present owners
of Adare spend a large part of every year in the country, and are
deservedly popular. He was not to be found at the National League
headquarters, nor yet at the Imperial Hotel, which is his usual resort,
as Morrison's is the resort of Mr. Parnell. So I sent him a note through
the Post-Office.
"You had better seal it with wax," said a friend, in whose chambers I
wrote it.
"Pray, why?"
"Oh! all the letters to well-known people that are not opened by the
police are opened by the Nationalist clerks in the Post-Offices. 'Tis a
way we've always had with us in Ireland!"
I had some difficulty in finding the local habitation of the "National
League." I had been told it was in O'Connell Street, and sharing the
usual and foolish aversion of my sex to asking questions on the highway,
I perambulated a good many streets and squares before I discovered that
it has pleased the local authorities to unbaptize Sackville Street, "the
finest thoroughfare in Europe," and convert it into "O'Connell Street."
But they have failed so ignominiously that the National League finds
itself obliged to put up a huge sign over its doorways, notifying all
the world that the offices are not where they appear to be in Upper
Sackville Street at all, but in "O'Connell Street." The effect is as
ludicrous as it is instructive. Oddly enough, they have not attempted to
change the name of another thoroughfare which keeps green the "pious and
immortal memory" of William III., dear to all who in England or America
go in fear and horror of the scarlet woman that sitteth upon the seven
hills! There is a fashion, too, in Dublin of putting images of little
white horses into the fanlights over the doorways, which seems to smack
of an undue reverence for the Protestant Succession and the House of
Hanover.
What you expect is the thing you never find in Ireland. I had rather
thoughtlessly taken it for granted the city would be agog with the great
Morley reception which is to come off on Wednesday night. There is a
good deal about it in the _Freeman's Journal_ to-day, but chiefly
touching a sixpenny quarrel which has sprung up between the Reception
Committee and the Trades Council over the alleged making of contracts by
the Committee with "houses not employing members of the regular trades."
For this the typos and others propose to "boycott" the Committee and the
Reception and the Liberators from over the sea. From casual
conversations I gather that there is much more popular interest in the
release, on Wednesday, of Mr. T.D. Sullivan, ex-Lord Mayor, champion
swimmer, M.P., poet, and patriot. A Nationalist acquaintance of mine
tells me that in Tullamore Mr. Sullivan has been most prolific of
poetry. He has composed a song which I am afraid will hardly please my
Irish Nationalist friends in America:
"We are sons of Sister Isles,
Englishmen and Irishmen,
On our friendship Heaven smiles;
Tyrant's schemes and Tory wiles
Ne'er shall make us foes again."
There is to be a Drawing-Room, too, at the Castle on Wednesday night.
One would not unnaturally gather from the "tall talk" in Parliament and
the press that this conjuncture of a great popular demonstration in
favour of Irish nationality, with a display of Dublin fashion doing
homage to the alien despot, might be ominous of "bloody noses and
cracked crowns." Not a bit of it! I asked my jarvey, for instance, on an
outside car this afternoon, whether he expected a row to result from
these counter currents of the classes and the masses. "A row!" he
replied, looking around at me in amazement. "A row is it? and what for
would there be? Shure they'll be through with the procession in time to
see the carriages!"
Obviously he saw nothing in either show to offend anybody; though he
could clearly understand that an intelligent citizen might be vexed if
he found himself obliged to sacrifice one of them in order to fully
enjoy the other.
Lady Londonderry, it seems, is not yet well enough to cross the Channel;
but the Duchess of Marlborough, who is staying here with her nephew the
Lord-Lieutenant, has volunteered to assist him in holding the
Drawing-Room, whereupon a grave question has arisen in Court circles as
to whether the full meed of honours due to a Vice-Queen regnant ought to
be paid also to an ex-Vice-Queen. This is debated by the Dublin dames as
hotly as official women in Washington fight over the eternal question of
the relative precedence due to the wives of Senators and "Cabinet
Ministers." It will be a dark day for the democracy when women get the
suffrage--and use it.
At luncheon to-day I met the Attorney-General, Mr. O'Brien, who, with
prompt Irish hospitality, asked me to dine with him to-morrow night, and
Mr. Wilson of the London _Times_, an able writer on Irish questions from
the English point of view. Mr. Balfour, who was expected, did not
appear, being detained by guests at his own residence in the Park.
I went to see him in the afternoon at the Castle, and found him in
excellent spirits; certainly the mildest-mannered and most sensible
despot who ever trampled in the dust the liberties of a free people. He
was quite delightful about the abuse which is now daily heaped upon him
in speeches and in the press, and talked about it in a casual dreamy way
which reminded me irresistibly of President Lincoln, whom, if in nothing
else, he resembles alike in longanimity and in length of limb. He had
seen Davitt's _caveat_, filed at Rathkeale, against the foolishness of
trying to frighten him out of his line of country by calling him bad
names. "Davitt is quite right," he said, "the thing must be getting to
be a bore to the people, who are not such fools as the speakers take
them to be. One of the stenographers told me the other day that they had
to invent a special sign for the phrase 'bloody and brutal Balfour,' it
is used so often in the speeches." About the prosecution of Father
M'Fadden of Gweedore, he knew nothing beyond the evidence on which it
had been ordered. This he showed me. If the first duty of a government
is to govern, which is the American if not the English way of looking at
it, Father M'Fadden must have meant to get himself into trouble when he
used such language as this to his people: "I am the law in Gweedore; I
despise the recent Coercion Act; if I got a summons to-morrow, I would
not obey it." From language like this to the attitude of Father M'Glynn
in New York, openly flouting the authority of the Holy See itself, is
but an easy and an inevitable step.
Neither "Home Rule" nor any other "Rule" can exist in a country in which
men whose words carry any weight are suffered to take up such an
attitude. It is just the attitude of the "Comeouters" in New England
during my college days at Harvard, when Parker Pillsbury and Stephen
Foster used to saw wood and blow horns on the steps of the
meeting-houses during service, in order to free their consciences "and
protest against the Sabbatarian laws."
To see a Catholic priest assume this attitude is almost as amazing as to
see an educated Englishman like Mr. Wilfrid Blunt trying to persuade
Irishmen that Mr. Balfour made him the confidant of a grisly scheme for
doing sundry Irish leaders to death by maltreating them in prison.
I see with pleasure that the masculine instincts of Mr. Davitt led him
to allude to this nonsense yesterday at Rathkeale in a half
contemptuous way. Mr. Balfour spoke of it to-day with generosity and
good feeling. "When I first heard of it," he said, "I resented it, of
course, as an outrageous imputation on Mr. Blunt's character, and
denounced it accordingly. What I have since learned leads me to fear
that he really may have said something capable of being construed in
this absurd sense, but if he did, it must have been under the
exasperation produced by finding himself locked up."
I heard the story of Mr. Balfour's meeting with Mr. Blunt very plainly
and vigorously told, while I was staying the other day at Knoyle House,
in the immediate neighbourhood of Clouds, where the two were guests
under conditions which should be at least as sacred in the eyes of
Britons as of Bedouins. In Wiltshire nobody seemed for a moment to
suppose it possible that Mr. Blunt can have really deceived himself as
to the true nature of any conversation he may have had with Mr. Balfour.
This is paying a compliment to Mr. Blunt's common sense at the expense
of his imagination. In any view of the case, to lie in wait at the lips
of a fellow guest in the house of a common friend, for the counts of a
political indictment against him, is certainly a proceeding, as Davitt
said yesterday of Mr. Blunts tale of horror, quite "open to question."
But, as Mr. Blunt himself has sung, "'Tis conscience makes us sinners,
not our sin," and I have no doubt the author of the _Poems of Proteus_
really persuaded himself that he was playing lawn tennis and smoking
cigarettes in Wiltshire with a modern Alva, cynically vain of his own
dark and bloody designs. Now that he finds himself struck down by the
iron hand of this remorseless tyrant, why should he not cry aloud and
warn, not Ireland alone, but humanity, against the appalling crimes
meditated, not this time in the name of "Liberty," but in the name of
Order?
What especially struck me in talking with Mr. Balfour to-day was his
obviously unaffected interest in Ireland as a country rather than in
Ireland as a cock-pit. It is the condition of Ireland, and not the
gabble of parties at Westminster about the condition of Ireland, which
is uppermost in his thoughts. This, I should say, is the best guarantee
of his eventual success.
The weakest point of the modern English system of government by Cabinets
surely is the evanescent tenure by which every Minister holds his
place. Not only has the Cabinet itself no fixed term of office, being in
truth but a Committee of the Legislature clothed with executive
authority, but any member of the Cabinet may be forced by events or by
intrigues to leave it. In this way Mr. Forster, when he filled the place
now held by Mr. Balfour, found himself driven into resigning it by Mr.
Gladstone's indisposition or inability to resist the peremptory pressure
put upon the British Premier at a critical moment by our own Government
in the spring of 1882. Mr. Balfour is in no such peril, perhaps. He is
more sure, I take it, of the support of Lord Salisbury and his
colleagues than Mr. Forster ever was of the support of Mr. Gladstone;
and the "Coercion" law which it is his duty to administer contains no
such sweeping and despotic clause as that provision in Mr. Gladstone's
"Coercion Act" of 1881, under which persons claiming American
citizenship were arrested and indefinitely locked up on "suspicion,"
until it became necessary for our Government, even at the risk of war,
to demand their trial or release.
But if Mr. Balfour were Chief Secretary for Ireland "on the American
plan"; if he held his office, that is, for a fixed term of years, and
cared nothing for a renewal of the lease, he could not be more
pre-occupied than he seems to be with simply getting his executive duty
done, or less pre-occupied than he seems to be with what may be thought
of his way of getting it done. If all executive officers were of this
strain, Parliamentary government might stand in the dock into which
Prince Albert put it with more composure, and await the verdict with
more confidence. Surely if Ireland is ever to govern herself, she must
learn precisely the lesson which Mr. Balfour, I believe, is trying to
teach her--that the duty of executive officers to execute the laws is
not a thing debateable, like the laws themselves, nor yet determinable,
like the enactment of laws, by taking the yeas and the nays. How well
this lesson shall be taught must depend, of course, very much upon the
quality of the men who make up the machine of Government in Ireland.
That the Irish have almost as great a passion for office-holding as the
Spanish, we long ago learned in New York, where the percentage of Irish
office-holders considerably exceeds the percentage of Irish citizens.
And as all the witnesses agree that the Irish Government has for years
been to an inordinate degree a Government by patronage, there must
doubtless be some reasonable ground for the very general impression that
"the Castle" needs overhauling. It is not true, however, I find,
although I have often heard it asserted in England, that the Irish
Government is officered by Englishmen and Scotchmen exclusively. The
murdered Mr. Burke certainly was not an Englishman; and there is an
apparent predominance of Irishmen in the places of trust and power. That
things at the Castle cannot be nearly so bad, moreover, as we in America
are asked to believe, would seem to be demonstrated by the affectionate
admiration with which Lord Spencer is now regarded by men like Mr.
O'Brien, M.P., who only the other day seemed to regard him as an unfit
survival of the Cities of the Plain. If what these men then said of him,
and of the Castle generally, was even very partially true--or if being
wholly false, these men believed it to be true--every man of them who
now touches Lord Spencer's hand is defiled, or defiles him.
But that concerns them. Their present attitude makes Lord Spencer a good
witness when he declares that the Civil servants of the Crown in
Ireland, called "the Castle," are "diligent, desire to do their duty
with impartiality, and to hold an even balance between opposing
interests in Ireland," and maintains that they "will act with
impartiality and vigour if led by men who know their own minds, and
desire to be firm in the Government of the country." All this being
true, Mr. Balfour ought to make his Government a success.
Mr. Balfour introduced me to Sir West Ridgway, the successor of Sir
Redvers Buller, who has been rewarded for the great services he did his
country in Asia, by being flung into this seething Irish stew. He takes
it very composedly, though the climate does not suit him, he says; and
has a quiet workmanlike way with him, which impresses one favourably at
once.
All the disorderly part of Ireland (for disorder is far from being
universal in Ireland) comes under his direct administration, being
divided into five divisions on the lines originally laid down in 1881 by
Mr. Forster. Over each of these divisions presides a functionary styled
a "Divisional Magistrate." The title is not happily chosen, the powers
of these officers being rather like those confided to a French Prefect
than like those which are associated in England and America with the
title of a "magistrate." They have no judicial power, and nothing to do
with the trial of offenders. Their business is to protect life and
property, and to detect and bring to justice offenders against the law.
They can only be called Magistrates as the Executive of the United
States is sometimes called the "Chief Magistrate."
One of the most conspicuous and trusted of these Divisional Magistrates,
I find, is Colonel Turner, who was Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant,
under Lord Aberdeen. He is now denounced by the Irish Nationalists as a
ruthless tyrant. He was then denounced by the Irish Tories as a
sympathiser with Home Rule. It is probable, therefore, that he must be a
conscientious and loyal executive officer, who understands and acts upon
the plain lines of his executive duty.
I dined to-night at the Castle, not in the great hall or banqueting-room
of St. Patrick, which was designed by that connoisseur in magnificence,
the famous Lord Chesterfield, during his Viceroyalty, but in a very
handsome room of more moderate dimensions. Much of the semi-regal state
observed at the Castle in the days of the Georges has been put down with
the Battle-Axe Guards of the Lord-Lieutenant, and with the
basset-tables of the "Lady-Lieutenant," as the Vice-queen used to be
called. At dinner the Viceroy no longer drinks to the pious and immortal
memory of William III., or to the "1st of July 1690." No more does the
band play "Lillibullero," and no longer is the pleasant custom
maintained, after a dinner to the city authorities of Dublin, of a
"loving cup" passed around the table, into which each guest, as it
passed, dropped a gold piece for the good of the household. Only so much
ceremonial is now observed as suffices to distinguish the residence of
the Queen's personal representative from that of a great officer of
State, or an opulent subject of high rank.
Dublin Castle indeed is no more of a palace than it is of a castle. Its
claim to the latter title rests mainly on the fine old "Bermingham"
tower of the time of King John; its claim to the former on the Throne
Room, the Council Chamber, and the Hall of St. Patrick already
mentioned. This last is a very stately and sumptuous apartment. Just
twenty years ago the most brilliant banquet modern Dublin has seen was
given in this hall by the late Duke of Abercorn to the Prince and
Princess of Wales, to celebrate the installation of the Prince as a
Knight of St. Patrick. It is a significant fact, testified to by all
the most candid Irishmen I have ever known, that upon the occasion of
this visit to Ireland in 1868 the Prince and Princess were received with
unbounded enthusiasm by the people of all classes. Yet only the year
before, in 1867, the explosion of some gunpowder at Clerkenwell by a
band of desperadoes, to the death and wounding of many innocent people,
had brought the question of the disestablishment of the Irish Church, in
the mind of Mr. Gladstone, within the domain of "practical politics"! By
parity of reasoning, one would think, the reception of the heir-apparent
and his wife in Ireland ought to have taken that question out of the
domain of "practical politics."
The Prince of Wales, it is known, brought away from this visit an
impression that the establishment of a prince of the blood in Ireland,
or a series of royal visits to Ireland, would go far towards pacifying
the relations between the two Islands. Mr. Gladstone thought his
Disestablishment would quite do the work. Events have shown that Mr.
Gladstone made a sad mistake as to the effect of his measure. The pains
which, I am told, were taken by Mr. Deasy, M.P., and others to organise
hostile demonstrations at one or two points in the south of Ireland,
during a subsequent visit of the Prince and Princess, would seem to show
that in the opinion of the Nationalists themselves, the impression of
the Prince was more accurate than were the inferences of the Premier.
There is nothing froward or formidable in the aspect of Dublin Castle.
It has neither a portcullis nor a drawbridge. People go in and out of it
as freely as through the City Hall in New York. There is a show of
sentries at the main entrance, and in one of the courts this morning the
picturesque band of a Scotch regiment was playing to the delectation of
a small but select audience of urchins and little girls. A Dublin mob,
never so little in earnest and led by a dozen really determined men,
ought to be able to make as short work of it as the hordes of the
Faubourgs in Paris made of the Bastille, with its handful of invalids,
on that memorable 14th of July, about which so many lies have passed
into history, and so much effervescent nonsense is still annually talked
and printed.
The greater part of the Castle as it existed when the Irish Parliaments
sat there under Elizabeth, and just before the last Catholic Viceroy
made Protestantism penal, and planned the transformation of Ireland
into a French province, was burned in the time of James II. The Earl of
Arran then reported to his father that "the king had lost nothing but
six barrels of gunpowder, and the worst castle in the worst situation in
Christendom."
Here, as at Ottawa, a viceregal dinner-table is set off by the neat
uniforms and skyblue facings of the aides-de-camp and secretaries. For
some mysterious reason Lord Spencer put these officers into chocolate
coats with white facings. But the new order soon gave place to the old
again.
At the dinner to-night was Lord Ormonde, who is returning to London, but
kindly promised to make arrangements for showing me at Kilkenny Castle
the muniment room of the Butlers, which contains one of the most
valuable private collections of charters and State papers in the realm.
_Tuesday, Jan. 31._--I lunched to-day with Sir Michael Morris, the Lord
Chief Justice of Ireland, whom I had last seen in Rome at the Jubilee
Mass of His Holiness. Sir Michael is one of the recognised lights of
social life and of the law in Dublin. While he was in Rome some one
highly commended him in the presence of that staunch Nationalist the
Archbishop of Dublin, who assented so far as to say, "Yes, yes, there
are worse fellows in Dublin than that Morris!" It would be hard to find
a more typical Irishman of the better sort than Sir Michael, a man more
sure, in the words of Sheridan, to "carry his honour and his brogue
unstained to the grave."
The brogue of Sir Michael, it is said, made his fortune in the House of
Commons. It has hardly the glow which made the brogue of Father Burke a
memory as of music in the ears of all who heard it, and differs from
that miraculous gift of the tongue as a ripe wine of Bordeaux differs
from a ripe wine of Burgundy. But to the ordinary brogue of the street
and the stage, it is as is a Brane Mouton Rothschild of 1868 to the
casual Médoc of a Parisian restaurant. "Do you know Father Healy?" said
one of the company to whom I spoke of it; "he was at a wedding with Sir
Michael. As the happy pair drove off under the usual shower of rice and
old slippers, Sir Michael said to the Father, 'How I wish I had
something to throw after her!' 'Ah, throw your brogue after her,'
replied the Father."
This brogue comes to Sir Michael lawfully enough. He belongs to one of
the fourteen tribes of Galway. His father, Mr. Martin Morris, was High
Sheriff of the County of Galway City in 1841, being the first Catholic
who had served that office since the time of Tyrconnel. His mother was a
Blake of Galway, and the family seat, Spiddal, came to them through a
Fitzpatrick. "Remember these things," said one of the guests to me, a
Catholic from the south of Ireland, "and remember that Sir Michael, like
myself, and, so far as I know, like every Irish Catholic in this room
to-day, is a thoroughgoing Unionist, who would think it midsummer
madness to hand Ireland over to the 'Home Rule' of the 'uncrowned king,'
Mr. Parnell, who hasn't a drop, I believe, of Irish blood in his veins,
and who, whatever else he may be, is certainly not a Catholic. Didn't
Parnell vote at first against religion and in favour of Bradlaugh? and
didn't he do this to force the bargain for the clerical franchise at the
Parliamentary conventions?"
"But there are some good Catholics, are there not," I answered, "and
some good Christians, and of Irish blood too, among the associates of
Mr. Parnell?"
"Associates!" he exclaimed; "if you know anything of Mr. Parnell, you
must know that he has no associates. He has followers, and he has
instruments, but he has no associates. The only Irishmen whom he has
really taken counsel with, or treated, I was about to say, with ordinary
civility, were Egan and Brennan. His manner with them was always
conspicuously different from his cold and almost contemptuous bearing
towards the men whom he commands in Parliament, and Egan, who directs
his forces in your country, rewards him by calling him 'the great and
gifted leader of _our_ race!' 'Our race' indeed! Parnell comes of the
conquering race in Ireland, and he never forgets it, or lets his
subordinates forget it. I was in Galway when he came over there suddenly
to quell the revolt organised by Healy. The rebels were at white-heat
before he came. But he strode in among them like a huntsman among the
hounds--marched Healy off into a little room, and brought him out again
in ten minutes, cowed and submissive, but filled, as anybody can see,
ever since, with a dull smouldering hate which will break out one of
these days, if a good and safe opportunity offers."
"How do you account, then," I asked, "for the support which all these
men give Mr. Parnell?"
"For the support which they give him!" exclaimed my new acquaintance,
"for the support they give him! Bless your heart, my dear sir, it is he
gives them the support! Barring Biggar, who, to do him justice, is as
free with his pocket as he is with his tongue--and no man can say more
for anybody than that--barring Biggar and M'Kenna and M'Carthy, and
perhaps a dozen more, all these men are nominated by Mr. Parnell, and
draw salaries from the body he controls; they are paid members, like the
working-men members. Support indeed!"
"But the constituencies," I urged, "surely the voters must know and care
something about their representatives?"
The gentleman from the south of Ireland laughed aloud. "Very clear it
is," he said, "that you have made your acquaintance with my dear
countrymen in America, or in England perhaps--not in Ireland. Look at
Thurles, in January '85! The voters selected O'Ryan; Parnell ordered him
off, and made them take O'Connor! The voters take their members to-day
from the League--that is, from Mr. Parnell, just as they used to take
them from the landlords. What Lord Clanricarde said in Galway, when he
made all those fagot votes by cutting up his farms, that he could return
his grey mare to Parliament if he liked, Mr. Parnell can say with just
as much truth to-day of any Nationalist seat in the country. I tell
you, the secret of his power is that he understands the Irish people,
and how to ride them. He is a Protestant-ascendency man by blood, and he
is fighting the unlucky devils of landlords to-day by the old 'landlord'
methods that came to him with his mother's milk--that is rightly
speaking, I should say, with his father's," and here he burst out
laughing at his own bull--"for his mother, poor lady, she was an
American."
"Thank you," I said.
"Oh, no harm at all! But did you ever know her? An odd woman she was,
and is."
"Her father," I replied, "was a gallant American sailor of Scottish
blood."
"Oh yes, and is it true that he got a great hatred of England from being
captured in the _Chesapeake_ by the English Captain Broke? I always
heard that."
I explained that there were historical difficulties in the way of
accepting this legend, and that Commodore Stewart's experiences, during
the war of 1812, had been those of a captor, not of a captive.
"Well, a clever woman she is, only very odd. She was a great terror, I
remember, to a worthy Protestant parson, near Avondale; she used to come
at him quite unexpectedly with such a power of theological discussion,
and put him beside himself with questions he couldn't answer."
"Very likely," I replied, "but she has transferred her interest to
politics now; and she had the good sense, at the Chicago Convention in
1886, to warn the physical-force men against showing their hand too
plainly in support of her son."
A curious conversation, as showing the personal bitterness of politics
here. It reminded me of Dr. Duche's description in his famous letter to
Washington of the party which carried the Declaration of Independence
through the Continental Congress. But it had a special interest for me
as confirming the inferences I have often drawn as to Mr. Parnell's
relations with his party, from his singular and complete isolation among
them. I remember the profound astonishment of my young friend Mr. D----,
of New York, who, as the son of, perhaps, the most conspicuous and
influential American advocate of Home Rule, had confidently counted upon
seeing Mr. Parnell in London, when he found that the most important
member of the Irish Parliamentary party, in point of position, was
utterly unable to get at Mr. Parnell for him, or even to ascertain where
Mr. Parnell could be reached by letter.
Though a staunch Unionist, Sir Michael is no blind admirer of things as
they are, nor even a thick-and-thin partisan of English rule in Ireland.
"If you will have the Irish difficulty in a nutshell," he is reported to
have said to a prosy British politician, "here it is: It is simply a
very dull people trying to govern a very bright people."
He has quick and wide intellectual sympathies, or, as he put it to a
lawyer who was kindly enlightening him about some matters of scientific
notoriety, "I don't live in a cupboard myself." His own terse summing up
of the Irish difficulty could hardly be better illustrated than by the
current story of the discomfiture of an English Treasury official, who
came into his official chambers to complain of the expenditure for fuel
in the Court over which he presides. The Lord Chief-Justice looked at
him quietly while he set forth his errand, and then, ringing a bell on
his table, said to the servant who responded: "Tell Mary the man has
come about the coals."
At Sir Michael's I had some conversation also with Mr. Justice Murphy,
who won a great reputation in connection with those murders in the
Phoenix Park, which went near to breaking the heart and hope of poor
Father Burke, and with Lord and Lady Ashbourne, whom I had not seen
since I met them some years ago under the hospitable roof of Lord
Houghton. Lord Ashbourne was then Mr. Gibson, Q.C. He is now the Lord
Chancellor of Ireland, and the author of the Land Purchase Act of 1885,
which many well-informed and sensible men regard as the Magna Charta of
peace in Ireland, while others of equal authority assure me that by
reversing the principle of the Bright clauses in the Act of 1871 it has
encouraged the tenants to expect an eventual concession of the
land-ownership to them on merely nominal terms.
Naturally enough, he is carped at and reviled almost as much by his
political friends as by his political foes. In the time of Sir Michael
Hicks Beach I remember hearing Lord Ashbourne denounced most bitterly by
a leading Tory light as "a Home Ruler in disguise, who had bedevilled
the Irish Question by undertaking to placate the country if it could be
left to be managed by him and by Lord Carnarvon."
The disguise appears to me quite impenetrable, and after my talk with
him, I remembered a characteristic remark about him made to me by Lord
Houghton after he had gone away: "A very clever man with a very clever
wife. He ought to be on our side, but he has everything the Tories lack,
so they have stolen him, and will make much of him, and keep him. But
one of these days he will do them some great service, and then they'll
never forgive him!"
Lord Ashbourne went off early to look up some fine old wooden
mantelpieces and wainscotings in the "slums" of Dublin. A brisk trade it
seems has for some time been driven in such relics of the departed
splendour of the Irish capital. In the last century, when Dublin was
further from London than London now is from New York, the Irish
landlords were more fond of living in Dublin than a good many of the
Irish Nationalists I know now are. In this way the Iron Duke came to be
born in Dublin, where his father and mother had a handsome town house,
whereas when they went up to London they used to lodge, according to old
Lady Cork, "over a pastry-cook's in Oxford Street." In those days there
must have been a good many fine solidly built and well decorated
mansions in Dublin, of a type not unlike that of the ample rather
stately and periwigged houses, all British brick without, and all Santo
Domingo mahogany within, which, in my schoolboy days, used to give such
a dignified old-world air to Third and Fourth Streets in Philadelphia.
It is among such of these as are still standing, and have come to vile
uses, that the foragers from London now find their harvest.
From the Chief-Justice's I went with Lord Ernest Hamilton to a meeting
of the Irish Unionists. Admission was by tickets, and the meeting
evidently "meant business." I suppose Presbyterian Ulster was largely
represented: but Mr. Smith Barry of Fota Island, near Cork, one of the
kindest and fairest, as well as one of the most determined and resolute,
of the southern Irish landlords, was there, and the most interesting
speech I heard was made by a Catholic lawyer of Dublin, Mr. Quill, Q.C.,
who grappled with the question of distress among the Irish tenants, and
produced some startling evidence to show that this distress is by no
means so great or so general as it is commonly assumed to be.[10] Able
speeches were also made by Mr. T.W. Russell, M.P. for Tyrone, and by
Colonel Saunderson, the champion of Ulster at Westminster. Both of these
members, and especially Colonel Saunderson, "went for" their
Nationalist colleagues with an unparliamentary plainness of speech which
commanded the cordial sympathy of their audience. "Is it possible,"
asked Colonel Saunderson, "that you should ever consent, on any terms,
to be governed by such--, well, by such wretches as these?" to which the
audience gave back an unanimous "Never," neither thundered nor shouted,
but growled, like Browning's "growl at the gates of Ghent,"--a low deep
growl like the final notice served by a bull-dog, which I had not heard
since the meetings which, at the North, followed the first serious
fighting of the Civil War. I was much struck, too, by the prevalence
among the audience of what may be called the Old Middle State type of
American face and head. A majority of these men might have come straight
from those slopes of the Alleghany which, from Pennsylvania down to the
Carolinas, were planted so largely by the only considerable Irish
emigrations known to our history, before the great year of famine, 1847,
the Irish emigrations which followed the wars against the woollen
industries in the seventeenth century, and the linen industries in the
eighteenth. A staunch, doggedly Protestant people, loving the New
England Puritans and the Anglicans of Eastern Virginia little better
than the Maryland Catholics, but contributing more than their full share
of traditional antipathy to that extreme dislike and dread of the Roman
Church which showed itself half-a-century ago in the burning of
convents, and thirty years ago gave life and fire to the Know-Nothing
movement. Even so late as at the time of Father Burke's grand and most
successful mission to America, I remember how much astonished and
impressed he was by the vigour and the virulence of these feelings. One
of the bishops, he told me, in a great diocese tried (though of course
in vain) to dissuade him on this account from wearing his Dominican
dress. These anti-Catholic passions are much stronger in America to-day
than it always suits our politicians to remember, though to forget it
may some day be found very dangerous. Even now two of the ablest
prelates of the most liberal of the Protestant American bodies, Bishop
Cleveland Coxe of Western New York, and Bishop Beckwith of Georgia, the
latter of whom I met the other day in Rome on his return from Palestine,
are promoting what looks very much like a crusade against the plan for
establishing a Catholic University at Washington. Bishop Cleveland
Coxe's denunciations of what he calls "the alien Church," point straight
to a revival of the "Native American" movement; and I fear that
President Cleveland's gift of a copy of the Constitution to Leo XIII.
will hardly make American Catholics forget either the hereditary
anti-Catholic feeling which led him, when Governor of New York, to
imperil the success of the Democratic party by his dogged resistance to
the Catholic demand for the endowment of Catholic schools and
protectories, or the scandalous persecution (it can be called by no
other name) of Catholics in Alaska, which was carried on in the name and
under the patronage of his sister, Miss Cleveland, by a local missionary
of the Presbyterian Church, to the point of the removal by the President
of a Federal judge, who dared to award a Catholic native woman from
Vancouver the custody of her own child.
It is hard to imagine a greater misfortune for the Church in Ireland,
and for both the Church and the Irish race in America, than the
identification of the Home Rule movement with the Church, and its
triumph, after being so identified, and with the help of British
sympathisers and professional politicians, over the resistance of
Protestant Ireland. This dilemma of the Church in Ireland, plainly seen
at Rome, as I know, to-day, was forcibly presented in the speech of
Colonel Saunderson.
The chair at this Loyalist meeting was filled by the Provost of Trinity,
Dr. Jellett, a man of winning and venerable aspect, a kind of "angelic
doctor," indeed, whose musical and slightly tremulous voice gave a
singular pathos and interest to his brief but very earnest speech.[11]
To-night I dined with the Attorney-General, Mr. O'Brien. Among the
company were the Chief-Baron Palles, whose appointment dates back to Mr.
Gladstone's Administration of 1873, but who is now an outspoken opponent
of Home Rule; Judge O'Brien, an extremely able man, with the face of an
eagle; Mr. Carson, Q.C.; and other notabilities of the bench and bar. My
neighbours at table were a charming and agreeable bencher of the King's
Inn, Mr. Atkinson, Q.C., a leader of the Irish bar, and Mr. T.W.
Russell, M.P., who told me some amusing things of one of his colleagues,
an ideal Orangeman, who writes blood-curdling romances in the vein of La
Tosca, and goes in fear of the re-establishment of the Holy Office in
Dublin and London. In view of the clamours about the severity of the
bench in Ireland, it was edifying to find an Irish Judge astonished by
the drastic decisions of our Courts in regard to the anarchists who were
hanged at Chicago, after a thorough and protracted review of the law in
their cases. He thought no Court in Great Britain or Ireland could have
dealt with them thus stringently, it being understood that the charge of
murder against them rested on their connection, solely as provocative
instigators to violence, with the actual throwing of the bombs among the
police.
Some good stories were told by the lawyers; one of a descendant of the
Irish Kings, a lawyer more remarkable for his mental gifts than for his
physical graces.
A peasant looking him carefully over at Cork whispered to a neighbour,
"And is he really of the ould blood of the Irish kings now, indeed?"
"He is indeed!"
"Well, then, I don't wonder the Saxons conquered the Island!"
Of the Home Rule movement one of the lawyers said to me, "The whole
thing is a business operation mainly--a business operation with the
people who see in it the hope of appeasing their land hunger--and a
business operation for the agitators who live by it. Its main strength,
outside of the priests, who for one reason or another countenance or
foment it, is in the small country solicitors. The five hundred thousand
odd Irish tenants are the most litigious creatures alive. They are
always after the local lawyer with half-a-crown to fight this, that, or
the other question with some neighbour or kinsman, usually a kinsman. So
the solicitors know the whole country."
"When the League has chosen a spot in which to work the 'Plan of
Campaign,' the local attorney whips up the tenants to join it. The
poorer tenants are the most easily pushed into the plan, having least to
lose by it. But the lawyer takes the well-to-do tenants in hand, and
promises them that if they yield to the patriotic pressure of the
League, and come to grief by so doing, the landlord will at all events
have to pay the costs of the proceedings. It is this promise which
finally brings down most of them. To enjoy the luxury of a litigation
without paying for it tempts them almost as strongly as the prospect of
getting the land without paying for it. You will find that the League
always insists, when things come to a settlement, that the landlord
shall pay the costs. If the landlord through poverty of spirit or of
purse succumbs to this demand, the League scores a victory. If the
landlord resists, it is a bad job for the League. The local lawyer is
discredited in the eyes of his clients, and if he is to get any fees he
must come down upon his clients for them. Naturally his clients resent
this. If Mr. Balfour keys up the landlords to stand out manfully against
paying for all the trouble and loss they are continually put to, he will
take the life of the League so far as Ireland is concerned. As things
now stand, it is almost the only thriving industry in Ireland!"
_Wednesday, Feb. 1._--This morning I called with Lord Ernest Hamilton
upon Sir Bernard Burke, the Ulster King-at-Arms, and the editor or
author of many other well-known publications, and especially of the
"Peerage," sometimes irreverently spoken of as the "British Bible."
Sir Bernard's offices are in the picturesque old "Bermingham" tower of
the castle. There we found him wearing his years and his lore as lightly
as a flower, and busy in an ancient chamber, converted by him into a
most cosy modern study. He received us with the most cordial courtesy,
and was good enough to conduct us personally through his domain.
Many of the State papers formerly kept here have been removed to the
Four Courts building. But Sir Bernard's tower is still filled with
documents of the greatest historical interest, all admirably docketed
and arranged on the system adopted at the Hôtel Soubise, now the Palace
of the Archives in Paris.
These documents, like the tower itself, take us back to the early days
when Dublin was the stronghold of the Englishry in Ireland, and its
citizens went in constant peril of an attack from the wild and "mere
Irish" in the hills. The masonry of the tower is most interesting. The
circular stone floors made up of slabs held together without cement,
like the courses in the towers of Sillustani, by their exact adjustment,
are particularly noteworthy. High up in the tower Sir Bernard showed us
a most uncomfortable sort of cupboard fashioned in the huge wall of the
tower, and with a loophole for a window. In this cell the Red Hugh
O'Donnell of Tyrconnel was kept as a prisoner for several years under
Elizabeth. He was young and lithe, however, and after his friends had
tried in vain to buy him out, a happy thought one day struck him. He
squeezed himself through the loophole, and, dropping unhurt to the
ground, escaped to the mountains. There for a long time he made head
against the English power. In 1597 he drove Sir Conyers Clifford from
before the castle of Ballyshannon, with great loss to the English, and
when he could no longer keep the field, he sought refuge in Spain. He
was with the Spanish, as Prince of Tyrconnel, at the crushing defeat of
Kinsale in 1601. Escaping again, he died, poisoned, at Simancas the next
year.
Sir Bernard showed us, among other curious manuscripts, a correspondence
between one Higgins, a trained informer, and the Castle authorities in
1798. This correspondence shows that the revolutionary plans of the
Nationalists of 1798 were systematically laid before the Government.
When one thinks how very much abler were the leaders of the Irish
rebellion in 1798 than are the present heads of the Irish party in
Parliament, how much greater the provocations to rebellion given the
Irish people then were than they are now even alleged to be--how little
the Irish people in general have now to gain by rebellion, and how much
to lose, it is hard to resist a suspicion that it must be even easier
now than it was in 1798 for the Government to tap the secrets of the
organisations opposed to it.
Sir Bernard showed us also a curious letter written by Henry Grattan to
the founder of the great Guinness breweries, which have carried the fame
of Dublin porter into the uttermost parts of the earth. The Guinnesses
are now among the wealthiest people of the kingdom, and Ireland
certainly owes a great deal to them as "captains of industry," but they
are not Home Rulers.
At the Kildare Street Club in the afternoon I talked with two Irish
landlords from the north of Ireland, who had come up to take their
womenkind to the Drawing-Room.
I was struck by their indifference to the political excitements of the
day. One of them had forgotten that the Ripon and Morley reception was
to take place to-night. The other called it "the love-feast of Voltaire
and the Vatican." Both were much more fluent about hunting and farming.
I asked if the hunting still went on in their part of the island.
"It has never stopped for a moment," he replied.
"No," added the other, "nor ever a dog poisoned. They were poisoned,
whole packs of them, in the papers, but not a dog really. The stories
were printed just to keep up the agitation, and the farmers winked at it
so as not to be 'bothered.'"
Both averred that they got their rents "fairly well," but both also said
that they farmed much of their own land. One, a wiry, energetic, elderly
man, of a brisk presence and ruddy complexion, said he constantly went
over to the markets in England. "I go to Norwich," he said, "not to
Liverpool. Liverpool is only a meat-market, and overdone at that.
Norwich is better for meat and for stores." Both agreed this was a great
year for the potatoes, and said Ireland was actually exporting potatoes
to America. One mentioned a case of two cargoes of potatoes just taken
from Dundrum for America, the vessel which took them having brought over
six hundred tons of hay from America.
They were breezy, out-of-door men, both of them. One amused us with a
tale of espying, the other day, two hounds, a collie dog, a terrier, and
eighteen cats all amicably running together across a farmyard, with
their tails erect, after a dairymaid who was to feed them. The other
capped this with a story of a pig on his own place, which follows one of
his farm lads about like a dog,--"the only pig," he said, "I ever saw
show any human feeling!" The gentleman who goes to Norwich thought the
English landlords were in many cases worse off than the Irish. "Ah, no!"
interfered the other, "not quite; for if the English can't get their
rents, at least they keep their land, but we can neither get our rents
nor keep our land!" They both admitted that there had been much bad
management of the land in Ireland, and that the agents had done the
owners as well as the tenants a great deal of harm in the past, but they
both maintained stoutly that the legislation of late years had been
one-sided and short-sighted. "The tenants haven't got real good from
it," said one, "because the claims of the landlord no longer check their
extravagance, and they run more in debt than ever to the shopkeepers and
traders, who show them little mercy." Both also strenuously insisted on
the gross injustice of leaving the landlords unrelieved of any of the
charges fixed upon their estates, while their means of meeting those
charges were cut down by legislation.
"You have no landlords in America," said one, "but if you had, how would
you like to be saddled with heavy tithe charges for a Disestablished
Church at the same time that your tenants were relieved of their dues
to you?"
I explained to him that so far from our having no landlords in America,
the tenant-farmer class is increasing rapidly in the United States,
while it is decreasing in the Old World, while the land laws, especially
in some of our older Western States, give the landlords such absolute
control of their tenants that there is a serious battle brewing at this
moment in Illinois[12] between a small army of tenants and their
absentee landlord, an alien and an Irishman, who holds nearly a hundred
thousand acres in the heart of the State, lives in England, and grants
no leases, except on the condition that he shall receive from his
tenants, in addition to the rent, the full amount of all taxes and
levies whatsoever made upon the lands they occupy.
"God bless my soul!" exclaimed the gentleman who goes to Norwich, "if
that is the kind of laws your American Irish will give us with Home
Rule, I'll go in for it to-morrow with all my heart!"
After an early dinner, I set out with Lord Ernest to see the
Morley-Ripon procession. It was a good night for a torchlight
parade--the weather not too chill, and the night dark. The streets were
well filled, but there was no crowding--no misconduct, and not much
excitement. The people obviously were out for a holiday, not for a
"demonstration." It was Paris swarming out to the Grand Prix, not Paris
on the eve of the barricades; very much such a crowd as one sees in the
streets and squares of New York on a Fourth of July night, when the city
fathers celebrate that auspicious anniversary with fireworks at the City
Hall, and not in the least such a crowd as I saw in the streets of New
York on the 12th of July 1871, when, thanks to General Shaler and the
redoubtable Colonel "Jim Fiske," a great Orange demonstration led to
something very like a massacre by chance medley.
Small boys went about making night hideous with tom-toms, extemporised
out of empty fig-drums, and tooting terribly upon tin trumpets. There
was no general illumination, but here and there houses were bright with
garlands of lamps, and rockets ever and anon went up from the
house-tops.
We made our way to the front of a mass of people near one of the great
bridges, over which the procession was to pass on its long march from
Kingstown to the house of Mr. Walker, Q.C., in Rutland Square, where the
distinguished visitors were to meet the liberated Lord Mayor, with Mr.
Dwyer Gray, and other local celebrities. A friendly citizen let us perch
on his outside car.
The procession presently came in sight, and a grand show it made--not of
the strictly popular and political sort, for it was made up of guilds
and other organised bodies on foot and on horseback, marching in
companies--but imposing by reason of its numbers, and of the flaring
torches. Of these there were not so many as there should have been to do
justice to the procession. The crowd cheered from time to time, with
that curious Irish cheer which it is often difficult to distinguish from
groaning, but the only explosive and uproarious greeting given to the
visitors in our neighbourhood came from a member of "the devout female
sex," a young lady who stood up between two friends on the top of a car
very near us, and imperilled both her equilibrium and theirs by wildly
waving her hand-kerchief in the air, and crying out at the top of a
somewhat husky voice, "Three cheers for Mecklenburg Street! Three
cheers for Mecklenburg Street!"
This made the crowd very hilarious, but as Lord Ernest's local knowledge
did not enable him to enlighten me as to the connection between
Mecklenburg Street and the liberation of Ireland, I must leave the
mystery of their mirth unsolved till a more convenient season.
At Rutland Square the crowd was tightly packed, but perfectly
well-behaved, and the guests were enthusiastically cheered. But even
before they had entered the house of Mr. Walker it began to break up,
and long files of people wended their way to see "the carriages"
hastening with their lovely freight to the Castle. Thither Lord Ernest
has just gone, arrayed in a captivating Court costume of black velvet,
with cut-steel buttons, sword, and buckles--just the dress in which
Washington used to receive his guests at the White House, and in which
Senator Seward, I remember, insisted in 1860 on getting himself
presented by Mr. Dallas to Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace.