SION HOUSE, COUNTY TYRONE, _Feb. 3d._--Hearing nothing from Mr. Davitt
yesterday, I gave up the idea of attending the Ripon-Morley meeting last
night. As I have come to Ireland to hear what people living in Ireland
have to say about Irish affairs, I see no particular advantage in
listening to imported eloquence on the subject, even from so clever a
man as his books prove Mr. Morley to be, and from so conscientious a man
as an acquaintance, going back to the days when he sat with Kingsley at
the feet of Maurice, makes me believe Lord Ripon to be. How much either
of them knows about Ireland is another matter. A sarcastic Nationalist
acquaintance of mine, with whom I conversed about the visitors
yesterday, assured me it had been arranged that Lord Ripon should wear
the Star of the Garter, "so the people might know him from Morley." When
I observed that Dublin must have a short memory to forget so soon the
face of a Chief Secretary, he replied: "Forget his face? Why, they never
saw his face! It's little enough he was here, and indoors he kept when
here he was. He shook hands last night with more Irishmen than ever he
spoke to while he was Chief Secretary; for he used to say then, I am
told, in the Reform Club, that the only way to get along with the Irish
was to have nothing to do with them!"
There was a sharp discussion, I was told, in the private councils of the
Committee yesterday as to whether the Queen should be "boycotted," and
the loyal sentiments usual in connection with her Majesty's name dropped
from the proceedings. I believe it was finally settled that this might
put the guests into an awkward position, both of them having worn her
Majesty's uniform of State as public servants of the Crown.
During the day I walked through many of the worst quarters of Dublin. I
met fewer beggars in proportion than one encounters in such parts of
London as South Kensington and other residential regions not
over-frequented by the perambulating policemen; but I was struck by the
number of persons--and particularly of women--who wore that most
pathetic of all the liveries of distress, "the look of having seen
better days." In the most wretched streets I traversed there was more
squalor than suffering--the dirtiest and most ragged people in them
showing no signs of starvation, or even of insufficient rations; and
certainly in the most dismal alleys and by-streets, I came upon nothing
so revolting as the hives of crowded misery which make certain of the
tenement house quarters of New York more gruesome than the Cour des
Miracles itself used to be.
This morning at 7.25 A.M. I left Dublin with Lord Ernest Hamilton for
Strabane. My attention was distracted from the reports of the great
meeting by the varied and picturesque beauty of the landscape, through
which we ran at a very respectable rate in a very comfortable carriage.
We passed Dundalk, where Edward Bruce got himself crowned king of
Ireland, after his brother Robert had won a throne in Scotland.
These masterful Normans, all over Europe from Apulia to Britain, worked
out the problem of "satisfied nationalities" much more successfully and
simply than Napoleon III. in our own day. If Edward Bruce broke down
where Robert succeeded, the causes of his failure may perhaps be worth
considering even now by people who have set themselves the task in our
times of establishing "an Irish nationality." Leaving out the
Cromwellian English of Tipperary and the South, and the Scotch who have
done for Ulster, what he aimed at for all Ireland, they have very much
the same materials to deal with as those which he dismally failed to
fashion.
Drogheda stands beautifully in a deep valley through which flows the
Boyne Water, spanned by one of the finest viaducts in Europe. Here, two
years after the discovery of America, Poyning's Parliament enacted that
all laws passed in Ireland must be subject to approval by the English
Privy Council. I wonder nobody has proposed a modification of this form
of Home Rule for Ireland now. Earl Grey's recent suggestion that
Parliamentary government be suspended for ten years in Ireland, which I
heard warmly applauded by some able lawyers and business men in Dublin,
involves like this an elimination of the Westminster debates from the
problem of government in Ireland. As we passed Drogheda, Father Burke's
magnificent presence and thrilling voice came back to me out of the
mist of years, describing with an indignant pathos, never to be
forgotten, the fearful scenes which followed the surrender of Sir Arthur
Ashton's garrison, when "for the glory of God," and "to prevent the
further effusion of blood," Oliver ordered all the officers to be
knocked on the head, and every tenth man of the soldiers killed, and the
rest shipped as slaves to the Barbadoes. But how different was the
spirit in which the great Dominican recalled these events from that in
which the "popular orators," scattering firebrands and death, delight to
dwell upon them!
At Strabane station we found a handsome outside car waiting on us, and
drove off briskly for this charming place, the home of one of the most
active and prosperous manufacturers in Ireland. A little more than half
way between the station and Sion House, Mr. Herdman met us afoot. We
jumped off and walked up with him. Sion House, built for him by his
brother, an accomplished architect, is a handsome Queen Anne mansion. It
stands on a fine knoll, commanding lovely views on all sides. Below it,
and beyond a little stream, rise the extensive flax-mills which are the
life of the place, under the eye and within touch of the hand of the
master. These works were established here by Mr. Herdman's father, after
he had made a vain attempt to establish them at Ballyshannon in Donegal,
half a century ago. As all salmon fishers know, the water-power is
admirable at Ballyshannon, where the Erne pours in torrents down a
thirty feet fall. But the ignorance and indolence of the people made
Ballyshannon quite impossible, with this result, that while the Erne
still flows unvexed to the sea, and the people of Ballyshannon live very
much as they lived in 1835, here at Sion the Mourne enables 1100 Irish
operatives to work up £90,000 worth of Irish flax every year into yarn
for the Continent, and to divide among themselves some £20,000 a year in
wages.
After luncheon we walked with Mr. Herdman through the mills and the
model village which has grown up around them. Everywhere we found order,
neatness, and thrift. The operatives are almost all people of the
country, Catholics and Protestants in almost equal numbers. "I find it
wise," said Mr. Herdman, "to give neither religion a preponderance, and
to hold my people of both religions to a common standard of fidelity and
efficiency." The greatest difficulty he has had to contend with is the
ineradicable objection of some of the peasantry to continuous industry.
He told us of a strapping lass of eighteen who came to the mills, but
very soon gave up and went back to the parental shebeen in the mountains
rather than get up early in the morning to earn fourteen shillings a
week.
Three weeks of her work would have paid the year's rent of the paternal
holding.
In the village, which is regularly laid out, is a reading-room for the
workpeople. There are cricket clubs, and one of the mill buildings (just
now crammed with bales of flax) has been fitted up by Mr. Herdman as a
theatre. There is a drop-curtain representing the Lake of Como, and the
flies are flanked by life-size copies in plaster of the Apollo Belvidere
and the Medicean Venus. This is a development I had hardly looked to see
in Ulster.
After we had gone over the works thoroughly, Mr. Herdman took us back,
on a transparent pretext of enlightened curiosity touching certain
qualities of spun flax, to give us a glimpse of the "beauty of Sion"--a
well-grown graceful girl of fifteen or sixteen summers. She
concentrated her attention, as soon as we appeared, upon certain
mysterious bobbins and spindles, with an exaggerated determination which
proved how completely she saw through our futile and frivolous devices.
Mr. Herdman told us, as we came away discomfited, a droll story of the
ugliest girl ever employed here--a girl so preternaturally ugly that one
of his best blacksmiths having been entrapped into offering to marry
her, lost heart of grace on the eve of the sacrifice, and, taking ship
at Derry for America, fled from Sion for ever.
In the evening came, with other guests, Dr. Webb, Q.C., Regius Professor
of Laws and Public Orator of Trinity at Dublin, well known both as a
Grecian capable of composing "skits" as clever as the verses yclept
Homerstotle--in which the _Saturday Review_ served up the Donnelly
nonsense about Bacon and Shakespeare--and as a translator of _Faust_. He
was abused by the Loyalists at Dublin, in 1884, for his defence of P.N.
Fitzgerald, the leader who beat Parnell and Archbishop Croke so badly at
Thurles the other day; and he is in a fair way now to be denounced with
equal fervour by the Nationalists as a County Court judge in Donegal.
He finds this post no sinecure. "I do as much work in five days," he
said to-night, "as the Superior Judges do in five weeks."
He is a staunch Unionist, and laughs at the notion that the Irish people
care one straw for a Parliament in Dublin. "Why should they?" he said.
"What did any Parliament in Dublin ever do to gratify the one real
passion of the Irish peasant--his hunger for a bit of land? So far as
the Irish people are concerned, Home Rule means simply agrarian reform.
Would they get that from a Parliament in Dublin? If the British
Parliament evicts the landlords and makes the tenants lords of the land,
they will be face to face with Davitt's demand for the nationalising of
the land. Do you suppose they will like to see the lawyers and the
politicians organising a labour agitation against the 'strong farmers'?
The last thing they want is a Parliament in Dublin. Lord Ashbourne's Act
carries in its principle the death-warrant of the 'National League.'"
Some excellent stories were told in the picturesque smoking-room after
dinner, one of a clever and humorous, sensible and non-political priest,
who, being taken to task by some of his brethren for giving the cold
shoulder to the Nationalist movement, excused himself by saying, "I
should like to be a patriot; but I can't be. It's all along of the
rheumatism which prevents me from lying out at nights in a ditch with a
rifle." The same priest being reproached by others of the cloth with a
fondness for the company of some of the resident landlords in his
neighbourhood, replied, "It's in the blood, you see. My poor mother, God
rest her soul! she always had a liking for the quality. As for my dear
father, he was just a blundering peasant like the rest of ye!"
GWEEDORE, _Saturday, 4th Feb._--A good day's work to-day!
We left our hospitable friends at Sion House early in the morning. The
sun was shining brightly; the air so soft and bland that the thrushes
were singing like mad creatures in the trees and the shrubbery; and the
sky was more blue than Italy. "A foine day it is, sorr," said our jarvey
as we took our seats on the car. There is some point in the old Irish
sarcasm that English travellers in Ireland only see one side of the
country, because they travel through it on the outside car. But to make
this point tell, four people must travel on the car. In that case they
must sit two on a side, each pair facing one side only of the landscape.
It is a very different business when you travel on an outside car alone,
with the driver sitting on one side of it, or with one companion only,
when the driver occupies the little perch in front between the sides of
the car. When you travel thus, the outside car is the best thing in the
world, after a good roadster, for taking you rapidly over a country, and
enabling you to command all points of the horizon. Double up one leg on
the seat, let the other dangle freely, using the step as a stirrup, and
you go rattling along almost as if you were on horseback.
We drove through a long suburb of Strabane into the busiest quarter of
the busy little place. The names on the shops were predominantly
Scotch--Maxwells, Stewarts, Hamiltons, Elliotts. I saw but one Celtic
name, M'Ilhenny, and one German, Straub. I changed gold for enormous
Bank of Ireland notes at a neat local bank, and the cheery landlord of
the Abercorn Arms gave us a fresh car to take us on to Letterkenny, a
drive of some twenty miles.
The car came up like a small blizzard, flying about at the heels of an
uncanny little grey mare. Lord Ernest knew the beast well, and said she
was twenty-five years old. She behaved like an unbroken filly at first,
but soon striking her pace, turned out a capital goer, and took us on
without turning a hair till her work was done. The weather continued to
be good, but clouds rolled up around the horizon.
"It'll always be bad weather," said our saturnine jarvey, "when the
Judges come to hold court, and never be good again till they rise."
Here is a consequence of alien rule in Ireland, never, so far as I know,
brought to the notice of Parliament.
"Why is this?" I asked; "is it because of the time of the year they
select?"
"The time of year, sorr?" he replied, glancing compassionately at me.
"No, not at all; it's because of the oaths!"
We reached Letterkenny in time for a very good luncheon at "Hegarty's,"
one of the neatest little inns I have ever found in a place of the size.
It stands on the long main street which is really the town. At one end
of this street is a very pretty row of picturesque ivy-clad brick
cottages, built by a landlord whose property and handsome park bound
the town on the west; and the street winds alongside the slope of a hill
rising from the bank of the Swilly river. A fair was going on. The
little market-place was alive with bustling, chattering, and chaffering
country-folk. Smartly-dressed young damsels tripped in and out of the
neat well-filled shops, and in front of a row of semidetached villas,
like a suburban London terrace, on the hill opposite "Hegarty's," a
German band smote the air with discordant fury. Decidedly a lively,
prosperous little town is Letterkenny, nor was I surprised to learn from
a communicative gentleman, nursing his cane near the inn-door, that
advantage would be taken of the presence of the Hussars sent to keep
order at Dunfanaghy, to "give a ball."
"But I thought all the country was in arms about the trials at
Dunfanaghy," I said.
"In arms about the trials at Dunfanaghy? Oh no; they'll never be locked
up, Father M'Fadden and Mr. Blane. And the people here at Letterkenny,
they've more sinse than at Dunfanaghy. Have you heard of the champagne?"
Upon this he proceeded to tell me, as a grand joke, that Father
M'Fadden and Mr. Blane, M.P., having declined to accept the tea offered
them by the authorities during their detention, they had been permitted
to order what they liked from the local hotel-keeper. After the trial
was over, and they were released on bail to prosecute their appeal, the
hotel-keeper demanded of the authorities payment of his bill, including
two bottles of champagne ordered to refresh the member for Armagh!
A conspicuous, smart, spick-and-span house on the main street, built of
brick and wood, with a verandah, and picked out in bright colours, was
pointed out to me by this amiable citizen as the residence of a
"returned American." This was a man, he said, who had made some money in
America, but got tired of living there, and had come back to end his
days in his native place He was a good man, my informant added, "only he
puts on too many airs."
A remarkably handsome, rosy-faced young groom, a model of manhood in
vigour and grace, presently brought us up a wagonette with a pair of
stout nags, and a driver in a suit of dark-brown frieze, whose head
seemed to have been driven down between his shoulders. He never lifted
it up all the way to Gweedore, but he proved to be a capital jarvey
notwithstanding, and knew the country as well as his horses.
Not long after leaving the town by a road which passes the huge County
Asylum (now literally crammed, I am told, with lunatics), we passed a
ruined church on the banks of a stream. Here the country people, it
seems, halt and wash their feet before entering Letterkenny, failing
which ceremony they may expect a quarrel with somebody before they get
back to their homes. This wholesome superstition doubtless was
established ages ago by some good priest, when priests thought it their
duty to be the preachers and makers of peace.
We soon left the wooded country of the Swilly and began to climb into
the grand and melancholy Highlands of Donegal. The road was as fine as
any in the Scottish Highlands, and despite the keen chill wind, the
glorious and ever-changing panoramas of mountain and strath through
which we drove were a constant delight, until, just as we came within
full range of Muckish, the giant of Donegal, the weather finally broke
down into driving mists and blinding rain.
We pulled up near a picturesque little shebeen, to water the horses and
get our Highland wraps well about us. Out came a hardy, cheery old
farmer. He swept the heavens with the eye of a mountaineer, and
exclaimed:--"Ah! it's a coorse day intirely, it is." "A coorse day
intirely" from that moment it continued to be.
Happily the curtain had not fallen before we caught a grand passing
glimpse of the romantic gorge of Glen Veagh, closed and commanded in the
shadowy distance by the modern castle of Glenveagh, the mountain home of
my charming country-woman, Mrs. Adair.
Thanks to its irregular serpentine outline, and to the desolate majesty
of the hills which environ it, Lough Veagh, though not a large sheet of
water, may well be what it is reputed to be, a rival of the finest lochs
in Scotland. No traces are now discernible on its shores of the too
celebrated evictions of Glen Veagh. But from the wild and rugged aspect
of the surrounding country it is probable enough that these evictions
were to the evicted a blessing in disguise, and that their descendants
are now enjoying, beyond the Atlantic, a measure of prosperity and of
happiness which neither their own labour nor the most liberal
legislation could ever have won for them here. We caught sight, as we
drove through Mrs. Adair's wide and rocky domain, of wire fences, and I
believe it is her intention to create here a small deer forest. This
ought to be as good a stalking country as the Scottish Highlands,
provided the people can be got to like "stalking" stags better than
landlords and agents.
Long before we reached Glen Veagh we had bidden farewell, not only to
the hedges and walls of Tyrone and Eastern Donegal, but to the
"ditches," which anywhere but in Ireland would be called "embankments,"
and entered upon great stone-strewn wastes of land seemingly unreclaimed
and irreclaimable. Huge boulders lay tossed and tumbled about as if they
had been whirled through the air by the cyclones of some prehistoric
age, and dropped at random when the wild winds wearied of the fun. The
last landmark we made out through the gathering storm was the pinnacled
crest of Errigal. Of Dunlewy, esteemed the loveliest of the Donegal
lakes, we could see little or nothing as we hurried along the highway,
which follows its course down to the Clady, the river of Gweedore; and
we blessed the memory of Lord George Hill when suddenly turning from
the wind and the rain into what seemed to be a mediaeval courtyard
flanked by trees, we pulled up in the bright warm light of an open
doorway, shook ourselves like Newfoundland dogs, and were welcomed by a
frank, good-looking Scottish host to a glowing peat fire in this really
comfortable little hotel, the central pivot of a most interesting
experiment in civilisation.
GWEEDORE, _Sunday, Feb. 5th._--A morning as soft and bright almost as
April succeeded the stormy night. Errigal lifted his bold irregular
outlines royally against an azure sky. The sunshine glinted merrily on
the swift waters of the Clady, which flows almost beneath our windows
from Dunlewy Lough to the sea. The birds were singing in the trees,
which all about our hotel make what in the West would be called an
"opening" in the wide and woodless expanse of hill and bog.
This hotel was for many years the home of Lord George Hill, who built it
in the hope of making Gweedore, what in England or Scotland it would
long ago have become, a prosperous watering-place. Now that a
battle-royal is going on between Lord George's son and heir and the
tenants on the estate, organised by Father M'Fadden under the "Plan of
Campaign," it is important to know something of the history of the
place.
Is this a case of the sons of the soil expropriated by an alien and
confiscating Government to enrich a ruthless invader? I was told by a
Nationalist acquaintance in Dublin that the owner of Gweedore is a near
kinsman of the Marquis of Londonderry, and that the property came to him
by inheritance under an ancient confiscation of the estates of the
O'Dounels of Tyrconnel. All of this I find is embroidery.
The "Carlisle" room, which our landlord has assigned to us, contains a
number of books, the property of the late Lord George, and ample
materials are here for making out the annals of Gweedore. Lord George,
it seems, was a posthumous son of the fourth Marquis of Downshire, and a
nephew of that Marchioness of Salisbury who was burned to death with the
west wing of Hatfield House half a century ago. He inherited nothing in
Donegal, nor was any provision made for him under his father's will. His
elder brothers made up and settled upon him a sum of twenty thousand
pounds. He entered the Army, and being quartered for a time at
Letterkenny, shot and fished all about Donegal. He found the people here
kindly and friendly, but in a deplorable state of ignorance and of
destitution. Their holdings under sundry small proprietors were entirely
unimproved, and as their families increased, these holdings were cut up
by themselves into even smaller strips under the system known as
"rundale,"--each son as he grew up taking off a slice of the paternal
holding, putting up a hut with mud, and scratching the soil after his
own rude fashion. This custom, necessarily fatal to civilisation,
doubtless came down from the traditional times when the lands of a sept
were held in common by the sept, before the native chieftains had
converted themselves into landlords, and defeated Sir John Davies's
attempt to convert their tribal kinsmen into peasant proprietors.
Whatever its origin, it had reduced Gweedore, or "Tullaghobegly," fifty
years ago to barbarism. Nearly nine thousand people then dwelt here with
never a landlord among them. There was no "Coercion" in Gweedore,
neither was there a coach nor a car to be found in the whole district.
The nominal owners of the small properties into which the district was
divided knew little and cared less about them. The rents were usually
"made by the tenants,"--a step in advance, it will be seen, of the
system which the collective wisdom of Great Britain has for the last
twenty years been trying to establish in Ireland. But they were only
paid when it was convenient. An agent of one of these properties who
travelled fourteen miles one day to collect some rents gave it up and
drove back again, because the "day was too bad" for him to wander about
in the mountains on the chance of finding the tenants at home and
disposed to give him a trifle on account. On most of the properties
there were arrears of eight, ten, and twenty years' standing.
There was one priest in the district, and one National School, the
schoolmaster, with a family of nine persons, receiving the munificent
stipend of eight pounds a year. These nine thousand people, depending
absolutely upon tillage and pasture, owned among them all one cart and
one plough, eight saddles, two pillions, eleven bridles, and thirty-two
rakes! They had no means of harrowing their lands but with meadow rakes,
and the farms were so small that from four to ten farms could be
harrowed in a day with one rake.
Their beds were of straw, mountain grass, or green and dried rushes.
Among the nine thousand people there were but two feather-beds, and but
eight beds stuffed with chaff. There were but two stables and six
cow-houses in the whole district. None of the women owned more than one
shift, nor was there a single bonnet among them all, nor a looking-glass
costing more than threepence.
The climate and the scenery took the fancy of Lord George. He made up
his mind to see what could be done with this forgotten corner of the
world, and to that end bought up as he could the small and scattered
properties, till he had invested the greater part of his small fortune,
and acquired about twenty thousand acres of land. Of this, little was
fit for cultivation, even with the help of capital and civilised
management. There was not a road in the district, nor a drain.
Lord George came and established himself here. He went to work
systematically to improve the country, reclaiming bog-lands, building
roads, and laying out the property into regular farms. He went about
among the people himself, trying to get their confidence, and to let
them know what he wanted to do for them, and with their help.
For a long time they wouldn't believe him to be a lord at all, "because
he spoke Irish"; and the breaking up of the rundale system, under which
they had lived in higgledy-piggledy laziness, exasperated them greatly.
Of the first man who took a fenced and well-defined farm from Lord
George, and went to work on it, the others observed that he would come
to no good by it, because he would "have to keep a maid just to talk to
his wife." Men could not be got for any wages to work at draining, or at
making the "ditches" or embankments to delineate the new holdings; and
when Lord George found adventurous "tramps" willing to earn a few
shillings by honest work of the kind, conspiracies were formed to undo
by night what was done by day. However, Lord George persevered.
There was not a shop, nor a dispensary, nor a doctor, nor a warehouse,
nor a quay for landing goods in this whole populous and sea-washed
region. He put up storehouses, built a little harbour at Bunbeg,
established a dispensary, got a doctor to settle in the district, and
finally put up the hotel in which we are. He advanced money to tenants
disposed to improve their holdings. Finding the women, as usual, more
thrifty and industrious than the men, and gifted with a natural aptitude
for the loom and the spindle, he introduced the weaving of woollen yarn
into stout frieze stuffs and foot-gear for both sexes. This was in 1840,
and in 1854 Gweedore hand-knit socks and stockings were sold to the
amount of £500, being just about the annual estimated rents of all the
properties bought by Lord George at the time when he bought them in
1838! But with this difference: The owners from whom Lord George bought
the properties got their £500 very irregularly, when they got it at all;
whereas the wives and daughters of the tenants, who made the socks and
stockings, were paid their £500 in cash.
Clearly in Gweedore I have a case not of the children of the soil
despoiled and trampled upon by the stranger, but of the honest
investment of alien capital in Irish land, and of the administration by
the proprietor himself of the Irish property so acquired for the benefit
alike of the owner and of the occupiers of the land.
That the deplorable state in which he found the people was mainly due to
their own improvidence and gregarious incapacity is also tolerably
clear. On the west coast of Norway, dear to the heart of the
salmon-fisher, you find people living under conditions certainly no more
favourable than here exist. North of the Hardanger Fjord, the spring
opens only in June. The farmers grow only oats and barley; but they have
no market except for the barley, and live chiefly by the pasturage. It
is as rocky a region as Donegal. But the Norsemen never try to make the
land do more than it is capable of doing. With them the oldest son takes
the farm and works it. The juniors are welcome to work on the farm if
they like for their brother, but they are not allowed to cut it up.
There is no rundale in Norway; and when the cadets see that there is no
room for them they quietly "pull up stakes," and go forth to seek a new
home, no matter where.
For fourteen years Lord George Hill spent on Gweedore all the rents he
received from it, and a great deal more. During that time the relations
between the people and their new landlord seem to have been, in the
main, most friendly, notwithstanding his constant efforts to break up
their old habits, or, to use their own language, to "bother them." But
there were no "evictions"; rents were not raised even where the tenants
were visibly able to pay better rents; prizes were given annually for
the best and neatest cottages, for the best crops of turnips (neither
turnips, parsnips, nor carrots were there at Gweedore when Lord George
bought the estate), for the best pigs (there was not a pig in Gweedore
in 1838!), for calves and colts, for the best fences, the best ordered
tillage farms, the best labourers' cottages, the best beds and bedding,
the best butter, the best woollen goods made on the estate. The old
rundale plan of dividing up the land among the children was put a stop
to, and every tenant was encouraged not to make his holding smaller, but
to add to and enlarge it. A corn-mill, saw-mill, and flax-mill were
established. In 1838 there was not a baker within ten miles. In 1852 the
local baker was driving a good business in good bread. The tenant's
wife, for whom in 1838 a single shift was a social superiority, in 1852
went shopping at Bunbeg for the latest fashions from Derry or Dublin.
Whatever "landlordism" may mean elsewhere in Ireland, it is plain enough
that in the history of Gweedore it has meant the difference between
savage squalor and civilisation.
Lord George Hill died in 1879, the year in which the Land League began
its operations. He bequeathed this property to his son, Captain Hill, by
whom the management of it has been left to agents. After Lord George's
death two tracts of mountain pasture, reserved by him to feed imported
sheep, were let to the tenants, who by that time had come to own quite a
considerable number, some thousands, of live stock, cattle, horses, and
sheep.
Concurrently with this concession to the tenants the provisions made by
Lord George against the subdivision of holdings began to give way.
Father M'Fadden, combining the position of President of the National
League with that of parish priest, seems to have favoured this tendency,
and to have encouraged the putting up of new houses on reduced holdings
to accommodate an increasing population. A flood which in August 1880
damaged the chapel and caused the death of five persons gave him an
opportunity of bringing before the British public the condition of the
people in a letter to the London _Times_, which elicited a very generous
response, several hundred pounds, it is said, having been sent to him
from London alone. Large contributions of relief were also made to
Gweedore from the Duchess of Marlborough's Fund, and Gweedore became a
standing butt of British benevolence. Two results seem to have followed,
naturally enough,--a growing indisposition on the part of the tenants to
pay rent, and a rapid rise in the value of tenant rights. With the
National League standing between them and the landlord, with the British
Parliament legislating year after year in favour of the Irish tenant and
against the Irish landlord, and with the philanthropic public ready to
respond to any appeal for help made on their behalf, the tenants at
Gweedore naturally became a privileged class. In no other way at least
can I explain the extraordinary fact that tenant rights at Gweedore have
been sold, according to Lord Cowper's Blue-book of 1886, during the
period of the greatest alleged distress and congestion in this district,
at prices representing from forty to a hundred-and-thirty years'
purchase of the landlord's rent!
In this Blue-book the Rev. Father M'Fadden appears as receiving no less
than £115 sterling for the tenant-right sold by him of ground, the head
rent of which is £1, 2s. 6d. a year. The worst enemy of Father M'Fadden
will hardly suspect him, I hope, of taking such a sum as this from a
tenant farmer for the right to starve to death by inches.[13]
A shrewd Galway man, now here, who seems to know the region well, and
likes both the scenery and the people, tells me that the troubles which
have now culminated in the arrest of Father M'Fadden have been
aggravated by the vacillation of Captain Hill, and by the foibles of his
agent, Colonel Dopping, who not long ago brought down Mr. Gladstone with
his unloaded rifle. That the tenants as a body have been, or now are,
unable to pay their rent he does not believe. On the contrary, he thinks
them, as a body, rather well off. Certainly I have seen and spoken with
none of them about the roads to-day who were not hearty-looking men, and
in very good case. Colonel Dopping, according to my Galwegian, is not an
Englishman, but a Longford Irishman of good family, who got his
training in India as an official of the Woods and Forests in Bengal. "He
is not a bad-hearted man, nor unkind," said my Galwegian, "but he is
too much of a Bengal tiger in his manner. He went into the cottages
personally and lectured the people, and that they never will stand. They
don't require or expect you to believe what they say--in fact they have
little respect for you if you do--but they like to have the agent
pretend that he believes them, and then go on and show that he don't.
But he must never lose his temper about it. Colonel Dopping, I have
heard, argued with an old woman one day who was telling him more yarns
than were ever spun into cloth in Gweedore, till she picked up her cup
of tea and threw it in his face. He flounced out of the cottage, and
ordered the police to arrest her. That did him more harm than if he had
shot a dozen boys." "What with the temper of Colonel Dopping and the
vacillation of Captain Hill, who is always of the mind of the last man
that speaks to him, Father M'Fadden has had it all his own way. Captain
Hill's claim was for £1800 of arrears, long arrears too, and £400 of
costs. How much the people paid in under the Plan of Campaign nobody
knows but Father M'Fadden. But he is a clever _padre_, and he played
Captain Hill till he finally gave up the costs, and settled for £1450."
"And this sum represents what?"
"It represents in round numbers about two years' income from an estate
in which Captain Hill's father must have invested, first and last, more
nearly £40,000 than £20,000 of money that never came out of it."
"That doesn't sound like a very good operation. But isn't the question,
Whether the tenants have earned this sum, such as it is, out of the land
let to them by Captain Hill?"
"No, not exactly, I think. You must remember there are some twelve
hundred families living here on land bought with Lord George's money,
and enjoying all the advantages which the place owes to his investment
and his management, much more than to any labour or skill of theirs. You
must look at their rents as accommodation rents. Suppose they earn the
rent in Scotland, or England, or Tyrone, or wherever you like, the
question is, What do they get for it from Captain Hill? They get a
holding with land enough to grow potatoes on, and with as much free fuel
as ever they like, and with free pasture for their beasts, and all this
they get on the average, mind you, for no more than ten shillings a
year! Why, there was a time, I can assure you, when the women here
earned the value of all the Hill rents by knitting stockings and making
woollen stuffs. You see the stuffs lying here in this window that they
make even now, and good stuffs too. But before the League boycotted the
agency here, the agency ten years ago used to pay out £900 in a year,
where it pays less than £100 to the women for their work."
"Why did the League do this?"
"Why? Why, because it wanted to control the work itself, and to know
just what it brings into the place. You must remember Father M'Fadden is
the President of the League, and the people will do anything for him. I
have heard of one old woman who sat up of nights last year knitting
socks to send up to London, to pay the Christmas dues to the
Father,--six shillings' worth."
"And are these stuffs here in the hotel made for the agency you speak
of?"
"Oh no; these are just made by women that know the hotel, and Mr.
Robinson here, he kindly takes in the stuffs. You see the name of every
woman on every one of them that made it, and the price. If a stranger
buys some, he pays the money to Mr. Robinson, and so it goes to the
women, and no commission charged."
The "stuffs" are certainly excellent, very evenly woven; and the
patterns, all devised, I am told, by the women themselves, very simple
and tasteful. The only dyes used are got by the women also from the
sea-weeds and the kelp, which must be counted among the resources of the
place. The browns and ochres thus produced are both soft and vivid;
while nothing can be better than a peculiar warm grey, produced by a
skilful mingling of the undyed wools.
"What, then, causes the distress for which the name of Gweedore is a
synonym?" I asked.
"It doesn't exist," responded my Galwegian; "that is, there is no such
distress in Gweedore as you find in Connemara, for instance;[14] but
what distress there is in Gweedore is due much more to the habits the
people have been getting into of late years, and to the idleness of
them, than to any pressure of the rents you hear about, or even to the
poverty of the soil. Go down to the store at Bunbeg, and see what they
buy and go in debt for! You won't find in any such place as Bunbeg in
England such things. And even this don't measure it; for, you see,
two-thirds of them are not free to deal at Bunbeg."
"Why not? Is Bunbeg 'boycotted'?"
"No, not at all. But they are on the books of the 'Gombeen man'--Sweeney
of Dungloe and Burtonport. They're always in debt to him for the meal;
and then he backs the travelling tea-pedlars, and the bakers that carry
around cakes, and all these run up the accounts all the time. Tot up
what these people lay out for tea at four shillings a pound--and they
won't have cheap tea--and what they pay for meal, and what they pay for
interest, and the 'testimonials,'--they paid for the monument here to
O'Donnell, the Donegal man that murdered Carey,--and the dues to the
priest, and you'll find the £700 or so they don't pay the landlord going
in other directions three and four times over."
"Then they are falling back into all the old laziness, the men
sauntering about, or sitting and smoking, while the women do all the
work."
The maid having told us Mass would be performed at noon, I walked with
Lord Ernest a mile or so up the road to Derrybeg, to see the people
thronging down from the hills; the women in their picturesque fashion
wearing their bright shawls drawn over their heads. But the maid had
deceived us. The Mass was fixed for eleven, and I suspect her of being a
Protestant in disguise.
On the way back we met Mr. Burke, the resident magistrate. He has a neat
house here, with a garden, and had come over from Dunfanaghy to see his
wife. He meant to return before dark. The country was quiet enough, he
said; but there were some troublesome fellows about, keeping up the
excitement over the arrest at Father M'Fadden's trial of Father
Stephens--a young priest recently from Liverpool, who has become the
curate of quite another Father M'Fadden--the parish priest of
Falcarragh, and is giving his local superior a great deal of trouble by
his activity in connection with the "Plan of Campaign." Mr. Wybrants
Olphert of Ballyconnell, the chief landlord of Falcarragh, has been
"boycotted," on suspicion of promoting the arrest of the two priests.
Five policemen have been put into his house. At Falcarragh, where six
policemen are usually stationed, there are now forty. Mr. Burke
evidently thinks, though he did not say so, that Father Stephens has
been spoiled of his sleep by the laurels of Father M'Fadden of Gweedore.
He is to be tried at Dunfanaghy on Tuesday, and there are now 150 troops
quartered there--Rifles and Hussars.
"Are they not boycotted?" I asked.
"No. The people rather enjoy the bustle and the show, not to speak of
the money the soldiers spend."
Lord Ernest, who knows Mr. Olphert, sent him over a message by Mr. Burke
that we would drive over to-morrow, and pay our respects to him at
Ballyconnell. From this Mr. Burke tried to dissuade us, but what he told
us naturally increased our wish to go.
After luncheon I ordered a car, and drove to Derrybeg, to call there on
Father M'Fadden, Lord Ernest, who has already seen him, agreeing to call
there for me on his return from a walk. We passed much reclaimed
bogland, mostly now in grass, and looking fairly well; many piles of
turf and clusters of cottages, well-built, but not very neatly kept.
From each, as we passed, the inevitable cur rushed out and barked
himself hoarse. Then came a waste of bog and boulders, and then a long,
neat stone wall, well coped with unhewn stone, which announced the
vicinity of Father M'Fadden's house, quite the best structure in the
place after the chapel and the hotel. It is of stone, with a neat side
porch, in which, as I drove up, I descried Father M'Fadden, in his trim
well-fitting clerical costume, standing and talking with an elderly
lady. I passed through a handsome iron wicket, and introduced myself to
him. He received me with much courtesy, and asked me to walk into his
well-furnished comfortable study, where a lady, his sister, to whom he
presented me, sat reading by the fire.
I told Father M'Fadden I had come to get his view of methods and things
at Gweedore, and he gave it to me with great freedom and fluency. He is
a typical Celt in appearance, a M'Fadden Roe, sanguine by temperament,
with an expression at once shrewd and enthusiastic, a most flexible
persuasive voice. All the trouble at Gweedore, he thought, came of the
agents. "Agents had been the curse both of Ireland and of the landlord.
The custom being to pay them by commissions on the sums collected, and
not a regular salary, the more they can screw either out of the soil, or
out of any other resources of the tenants, the better it is for them. At
Gweedore the people earn what they can, not out of the soil, but out of
their labour exported to Scotland, or England, or America. Only
yesterday," he continued, turning to his neat mahogany desk and taking
up a letter, "I received this with a remittance from America to pay the
rent of one of my people."
"This was in connection," I asked, "with the 'Plan of Campaign' and your
contest here?"
"Yes," he replied; "and a girl of my parish went over to Scotland
herself and got the money due there for another family, and brought it
back to me here. You see they make me a kind of savings-bank, and have
done so for a long time, long before the 'Plan of Campaign' was talked
about as it is now."
This was interesting, as I had heard it said by a Nationalist in Dublin
that the "Plan of Campaign" was originally suggested by Father M'Fadden.
He made no such claim himself, however, and I made no allusion to this
aspect of the matter. "I have been living here for fifteen years, and
they listen to me as to nobody else."
In these affairs with the agents, he had always told his people that
"whenever a settlement came to be made, cash alone in the hand of the
person representing them could make it properly." "Cash I must have," he
said, "and hold the cash ready for the moment. When I had worked out a
settlement with Captain Hill, I had a good part of the money in my hand
ready to pay down. £1450 was the sum total agreed upon, and after the
further collection, necessitated by the settlement, there was a deficit
of about £200. I wrote to Professor Stuart," he added, after a pause,
"that I wanted about £200 of the sum-total. But more has come in since
then. This remittance, from America yesterday, for example."
"Do they send such remittances without being asked for them?" I
inquired.
"Yes; they are now and again sending money, and some of them don't send,
but bring it. Some of them go out to America now as they used to go to
England--just to work and earn some money, and come back.
"If they get on tolerably well they stay for a while, but they find
America is more expensive than Ireland, and if, for any cause, they get
out of work there, they come back to Ireland to spend what they have.
Naturally, you see," said Father M'Fadden, "they find a certain pleasure
to be seen by their old friends in the old place, after borrowing the
four pounds perhaps to take them to America, coming back with the money
jingling in their pockets, and in good clothes, and with a watch and a
chain--and a high hat. And there is in the heart of the Irishman an
eternal longing for his native land constantly luring him back to
Ireland. All do not succeed, though, in your country," he said. "We hear
of two out of ten perhaps who do very well. They take care we hear of
that. The rest disappear, and are never heard of again."
"Then you do not encourage emigration?" I, asked, "even although the
people cannot earn their living from the soil?"
Father M'Fadden hesitated a moment, and then replied, "No, for things
should be so arranged that they may earn their living, not out of the
country, but on the soil at home. It is to that I want to bring the
condition of the district."
At this point Lord Ernest Hamilton came up and knocked at the door. He
was most courteously received by Father M'Fadden. To my query why the
Courts could not intervene to save the priests from taking all this
trouble on themselves between the owners and the occupiers of the land,
Father M'Fadden at first replied that the Courts had no power to
intervene where, as in many cases in Gweedore, the holdings are
subdivided.
"The Courts," he said, "may not be, and I do not think they are, all
that could be desired, though they undoubtedly do supply a more or less
impartial arbitrator between the landlord and the tenant. It is an
improvement on the past when the landlords fixed the rents for
themselves."
I did not remind him of what Lord George Hill tells us, that in the
olden time at Gweedore the tenants fixed their own rents--and then did
not pay them--but I asked him how this could be said when the tenant
clearly must have accepted the rent, no matter who fixed it. "Oh!" said
Father M'Fadden, "that may be so, but the tenant was not free, he was
coerced. With all his life and labour represented in the holding and its
improvements, he could not go and give up his holding. It's a
stand-and-deliver business with him--the landlord puts a pistol to his
head!"
"But is it not true," I said, "that under the new Land Bill the Land
Commissioner's Court has power to fix the rents judicially without
regard to landlord or tenant during fifteen years?"
"Yes, that is so," said Father M'Fadden. "Under Mr. Gladstone's Act of
81, and under the later Act of the present Government, the rents so
fixed from '81 to '86 inclusive are subject to revision for three years;
but the people have no confidence in the constitution of the Courts,
and, as a matter of fact, the improvements of the tenants are
confiscated under the Act of '81, and the reductions allowed under the
Act of '87 are incommensurate with the fall in prices by 100 per cent.
And there still remains the burden of arrears. I feel that I must stand
between my people and obligations which they are unable to meet. To that
end I take their money, and stand ready to use it to relieve them when
the occasion offers. That is my idea of my work under the 'Plan of
Campaign'; and, furthermore, I think that by doing it I have secured
money for the landlord which he couldn't possibly have got in any other
way."
This struck me as a very remarkable statement, nor can I see how it can
be interpreted otherwise than as an admission that if the people had
the money to pay their rents, they couldn't be trusted to use it for
that purpose, unless they put it into the control of the priest or of
some other trustee.
Reverting to what he had said of the necessity for some change in the
conditions of life and labour here, I asked if, in his opinion, the
people could live out of the land if they got the ownership of it.
In existing circumstances he thought they could not.
Was he in favour, then, of Mr. Davitt's plan of Land Nationalisation?
"Well, I have not considered the question of Nationalisation of the
land."
To my further question, What remedies he would himself propose for a
state of things in which it was impossible for the people to live out of
the land either as occupiers or as owners--emigration being barred,
Father M'Fadden, without looking at Lord Ernest, replied, "Oh, I think
abler men who draw up Parliamentary Acts and live in public life ought
to devise remedies, and that is a matter which would be best settled by
a Home Government."
The glove was well delivered, but Lord Ernest did not lift it.
"But, Father M'Fadden," I said, "I am told you are a practical
agriculturist and engineer, and that you have contrived to get excellent
work done by the people here, dividing them off into working squads, and
assigning so many perches to so many--surely then you must understand
better than a dozen members of Parliament what they can be got to do?"
He smiled at this, and finally admitted that he had a plan of his own.
It was that the Government should advance sums for reclaiming the land.
"The people could live on part of their earnings while thus employed,
and invest the surplus in sheep to be fed on the hill pastures. When the
reclamation was effected the families could be scattered out, and the
holdings increased. In this district alone there are 350 holdings of
reclaimable land of 20 acres each, the reclamation of which, according
to a competent surveyor, "would pay well." And the district could be
improved by creating employment on the spot, establishing factories,
developing fisheries, giving technical education, and encouraging
cottage industries, which are so vigorously reviving in this district
owing to the benevolent efforts of the Donegal Industrial Fund."
Father M'Fadden spoke freely and without undue heat of his trial, and
gave us a piquant account of his arrest.
This was effected at Armagh, just as he was getting into an early
morning train. A sergeant of police walked up as the train was about to
start, and asked--
"Are you not Father M'Fadden of Gweedore?"
"What interest have you in my identity?" responded the priest.
"Only this, sir," said the officer, politely exhibiting a warrant.
"I had been in Armagh the previous day," said Father M'Fadden,
"attending the month's memory of the late deceased Primate of All
Ireland, Dr. M'Gettigan, and stayed at a private residence, that of
Surgeon-Major Lavery, not suspecting that while enjoying the genial
hospitality of the Surgeon-Major my steps were dogged by a detective,
and that gentleman's house watched by police."
Of the trial Father M'Fadden spoke with more bitterness. His eyes glowed
as he exclaimed, "Can you imagine that they refused me bail, when bail
had been allowed to such a felon as Arthur Orton? Why should I have
been locked up over two Sundays, for ten days, when I offered to pledge
my honour to appear?" He made no other complaint of the magistrate, and
none of the prosecutor, Mr. Ross. He praised his own lawyer, too, but he
strongly denounced the stenographer who took down his speech, or the
parts of it which I told him I had seen in Dublin.
"Why, just think of it," he exclaimed; "it took the clerk just eight
minutes to read the report given by that stenographer of a speech which
it took me an hour and twenty minutes to deliver! I do not speak from
the lips, I speak from the heart, and consequently rather rapidly; and a
stenographer who can take down 190 words a minute has told me I run
ahead of him!"
I suggested that the report, without pretending even to be a full
summary of his speech, might be accurate as to phrases and sentences
pronounced by him.
"Yes, as to phrases," he answered, "that might be; but the phrases may
be taken out of their true connection, and strung together in an
untruthful, yet telling way. Even my words were not fully set down," he
said, with some heat. "I was made to call a man 'level,' when I said in
the American way that he was 'level-headed.'" _A propos_ of this, I am
told that the American word "spree" has become Hibernian, and is used to
describe meetings of the National League and "other political
entertainments."
When I told Father M'Fadden I had just come from Rome, where, as I had
reason to believe, the Vatican was anxious to get evidence from others
than Archbishop Walsh and Monsignore Kirby, of the Irish College, as to
the attitude of the priests in Ireland towards the laws of the United
Kingdom, he said he knew that "some Italian prelates neither understood
nor approved the 'Plan of Campaign,' nor is the Irish Land question
understood at Rome;" but this did not seem to disturb him much, as he
was quite sure that in the end the "Plan of Campaign" would be legalised
by the British Government. "I think I see plainly," he said, "that Lord
Ernest's government is fast going to pieces, though I can't expect him
to admit it!" Lord Ernest laughed good-naturedly, and said that Father
M'Fadden saw more in Donegal than he (Lord Ernest) was able to see in
Westminster. Upon my asking him whether the "Plan of Campaign" did not
in effect abrogate the moral duty of a man to meet the legal obligations
he had voluntarily incurred, Father M'Fadden advanced his own theory of
the subject, which was that, "if a man can pay a fair year's rent out of
the produce of his holding, he is bound to pay it. But if the rent be a
rack-rent, imposed on the tenant against his will, or if the holding
does not produce the rent, then I don't think that is a strict
obligation in conscience."
In America, the courts, I fear, would make short work of this theory of
Father M'Fadden. If a tenant there cannot pay his first quarter's rent
(they don't let him darken his soul by a year's liabilities) they
promptly and mercilessly put him out.
Interesting as was our conversation with the parish priest of Gweedore,
I felt that we might be trespassing too far upon his kindness and his
time. So we rose to go. He insisted upon our going into the dining-room,
where, as he told us, he had hospitably entertained sundry visiting
statesmen from England, and there offered us a glass of the excellent
wine of the country. He excused himself from joining us as being
"almost a teetotaller."
On our return to the hotel I met the Galwegian strolling about. When I
told him of Father M'Fadden's courteous hospitality, he said, "I am very
glad you took that glass he offered. I really believe his quarrel with
Captain Hill dates back to Hill's declining that same courtesy under
Father M'Fadden's roof."
GWEEDORE, _Monday, Feb. 6._--Another very beautiful morning--as a farmer
said with whom I chatted on my morning stroll, "A grand day, sorr!"
Errigal, which in this mountain atmosphere seems almost to hang over our
hotel, but is in reality three or four miles away, stood out superbly
against a clear azure sky, wreaths of soft luminous mist floating like a
divine girdle half way up his bare volcanic peak.
I walked up to the Bunbeg road with Lord Ernest to call upon some
peasants whom he knows. In one stone cabin, very well built and
plastered, standing sidewise to the road, with doors on either side, we
found the house apparently in charge of a little girl of nine or ten
years, a weird but pretty child with very delicate well-cut features,
who lay couchant upon her doubled-up arm on a low bed in a corner of the
main room, and peered at us over her elbow with sparkling inquisitive
eyes.
By her side sat a man with his cap on, who might have been the "young
Pretender," or the "old Kaiser," so far as his looks went towards
indicating his age. He never rose or welcomed us, being, as we
afterwards found out, only a visitor like ourselves, and a kinsman of
Mrs. M'Donnell, the head of the house. "Mrs. M'Donnell," he said, "is
gone to the store at Bunbeg."
This main room rose perhaps ten feet in height to the open roof. It had
one large and well-glazed window. When Lord George Hill came here there
were not ten square feet of window-glass in the whole parish outside of
the Church, the national school, and the residence of the chief
police-officer.
Windows when there were any were closed with dried sheepskins, through
which the cats ran in and out as freely as through the curious tunnel
which the kindly Master of Blantyre has constructed at Sheba's Cross for
their special benefit.
There were two beds in the main room; rather high than low, one of
rushes, on which lay the child of whom I have spoken, and one of
greater pretensions vacant in another corner.
The door stood wide open, but the cabin was warm and comfortable, and a
peat fire smouldered, sending up, to me, most agreeable odours. An inner
room seemed to be a sort of granary, full of hay and straw. There the
cow is kept at night. "It's handy if you want a drink of milk," said the
visitor. In comparison with the dwellings of small farmers in Eastern
France or in Southern Italy this Donegal cabin was not only clean but
attractive. It was more squalid perhaps, but less dreary than the
extemporised and flimsy dwellings of settlers in the extreme Far West of
the United States, and I should say decidedly a more wholesome
habitation than the hermetically sealed and dismal wooden houses of
hundreds of struggling farmers in the older Eastern States. I am sure my
old friend Mr. Frederick Law Olmsted, who made the only thorough surveys
of agricultural life in the United States before the Civil War, would
have pronounced it in all respects superior, so far as health and
comfort go, to the average home of the average "poor buccra," between
the Chesapeake and the Sabine. I am afraid a great deal of not wholly
innocuous nonsense has been written and spoken about this part of the
United Kingdom by well-meaning philanthropists who have gauged the
condition of the people here by their own standards of comfort and
enjoyment. Most things in this life of ours are relative. I well
remember hearing an American millionaire, who began life in New York as
the patentee of a mouse-trap, express his profound compassion for a
judge of the Supreme Court condemned to live "upon a pittance of eight
thousand dollars a year."
These dwellers in the cabins of Donegal are millionaires, so far as
those essentials of life are concerned, which we call room and air and
freedom to move and breathe, in comparison with hundreds and thousands
of their own race in the slums of New York and Chicago and Liverpool and
London.
Mrs. M'Donnell's cousin, however, took dark views of things. The times
"were no good at all."
The potatoes, I had heard, were doing well this year.
"No! they wouldn't keep the people; indeed, they wouldn't. There would
have to be relief."
"Why not manure the land?"
"Manure? oh yes, the sea-stuff was good manure, but the people couldn't
get it. They had no boats; and it cost eighteenpence a load to haul it
from Bunbeg. No! they couldn't get it off the rocks. At the Rosses they
might; the Rosses were not so badly off as Derrybeg or Gweedore, for all
they might say."
"But Father M'Fadden had urged me," I said, "to see the Rosses, because
the people there were worse off than any of the people."
"Well, Father M'Fadden was a good man; he was a friend of the people;
and they were bad indeed at the Rosses, but they could get the sea-stuff
there, and hadn't to pay for cartage. And indeed, if you put the
sea-stuff on the bogland, the land was better in among the rocks' at the
Rosses than was the bogland, it was indeed: the stuff did no good at all
the first year. The second and the third it gave good crops--but then
you must burn it--and by the fourth year and the fifth it was all ashes,
and no good at all! This was God's truth, it was; and there must be
relief."
"But could the people earn nothing in Scotland or in Tyrone?"
"Oh no, they could earn nothing at all. They could pay no rent."
So he sat there, a Jeremiah among the potsherds, quite contented and
miserable--well and hearty in a ragged frieze coat, with his hat over
his eyes.
While we talked, a tall lusty young beggar-girl wandered in and out
unnoticed. Chickens pecked and fluttered about, and at intervals the
inevitable small dog suddenly barked and yelped.
On our way back we met the elder daughter of Mrs. M'Donnell, a girl of
sixteen, the "beauty of Gweedore." A beauty she certainly is, and of a
type hardly to have been looked for here.
Her lithe graceful figure, her fine, small, chiselled features, her
shapely little head rather defiantly set on her sloping shoulders, her
fair complexion and clear hazel eyes, her brown golden hair gathered up
behind into a kind of tress, all these were Saxon rather than Celtic.
Her trim neat ankles were bare, after the mountain fashion, but she was
prettily dressed in a well-fitting dark blue gown, wore a smartly
trimmed muslin apron, with lace about her throat, and carried over her
arm a new woollen shawl, very tasteful and quiet in colour. She greeted
us with a self-possessed smile.
"No," she had not, been shopping with her mother. The shawl was a
present from one of her cousins. Did we not think it very pretty? She
was only out for a walk, and had no notion where her mother might be. A
stalwart red-bearded man who lounged and loitered behind her on the road
was "only a friend," she said, "not a relation at all!" Nor did she
show, I am sorry to say, any compassion for the evident uneasiness with
which, from a distance, he regarded her long and affable parley with two
strangers.
We asked her whether she expected and wished to live in Gweedore, or
would like to follow elsewhere some calling or trade. "Oh yes," she
unhesitatingly replied, "I should like to be a dress-maker in Deny;
but," she added pensively, "it's no use my thinking about it, for I know
I shouldn't be let!"
"Wouldn't you like Dublin as well?" I asked.
"Perhaps; but I shouldn't be let go to Dublin either!"
Would she like to go to America?
"No!" she didn't think much of "the Americans who came back," and
America must be "a very hard country for work, and very cold in the
winter."
Now this was a widow's daughter, living in such a cabin as I have
described, and upon a small holding in a parish reputed to be the most
"distressful" in Donegal![15]
Returning to the hotel we found our car ready for Falcarragh. Our driver
was a quiet, sensible fellow, who did not seem to care sixpence about
the great Nationality question, though he knew the country very well.
Iron was visible in the rocks as we drove along, and we passed some
abandoned mining works, "lead and silver mines;" he said, "they were
given up long before his time." We got many fine views of the mountains
Errigal, Aghla More, and Muckish. Lough Altan, a wild tarn, lies between
Errigal and Aghla More.
The peasants we met stared at us curiously, but, were very civil, even
at a place bearing the ominous name of Bedlam, against which Mr. Burke
had warned us as the most troublesome on the way. All the countryside
was there attending a fair, and we drove through throngs of red-shawled,
barelegged women, ponies, horses, cattle, and sheep. Of Tory Island,
with its famous tower, dating back to the fabled "Fomorians," we had
some grand glimpses. The white surf, flashing and leaping high in the
air on the nearer islets accented and gave life to the landscape.
In one glorious landlocked bay, we saw not a single boat riding. Our
driver said, "The fishermen all live on Tory Island, and send their fish
to Sligo. The people on the mainland don't like going out in the boats."
Lord Ernest tells me there is a movement to have a telegraph station set
up on Tory Island, to announce the Canadian steamers coming into Moville
for Deny.
We found Falcarragh, or "Cross-Roads," a large clean-looking village,
consisting of one long and broad street, through which horses and cattle
were wandering in numbers, apparently at their own sweet will.
Ballyconnell House, the seat of Mr. Wybrants Olphert, is the manor house
of the place. As we drew near, no signs appeared of the dreadful
"Boycott." The great gates of the park stood hospitably open, and we
drove in unchallenged past a pretty ivy-clad lodge, and through low, but
thickly planted groves. A huge boulder, ruddy with iron ore, bears the
uncanny and unspellable name of the "Clockchinnfhaelaidh," or "Stone of
Kinfaele." Upon this stone, tradition tells us, Balor, a giant of Tory
Island, chopped off the head of an unreasonable person named
Mackinfeale, for complaining that Balor, under some prehistoric "Plan of
Campaign," had driven away his favourite cow, Glasgavlan.
Ballyconnell House, a substantial mansion of the Georgian era, stands
extremely well. Over a fine sloping lawn in front, you have a glorious
view of the sea, and of a very fine headland, known as "the Duke's
Head," from the really remarkable resemblance it bears to the profile of
Wellington. The winds have such power here that there are but few
well-grown trees, and those near the house. About them paraded many
game-hens, spirited birds, looking like pheasants. These, as we learned,
never sleep save in the trees.
The "boycotted" lord of the manor came out to greet us--a handsome,
stalwart man of some seventy years, with a kindly face, and most
charming manners. His family, presumably of Dutch origin, has been
established here since Charles II. He himself holds 18,133 acres here,
valued at £1802 a year; and he is a resident landlord in the fullest
sense of the term. For fifty years he has lived here, during all which
time, as he told us to-day, he has "never slept for a week out of the
country." His furthest excursions of late years have been to Raphoe,
where he has a married daughter. "Absenteeism" clearly has nothing to do
with the quarrel between Mr. Olphert and his tenants, or with the
"boycotting" of Ballyconnell.
The dragoons from Dunfanaghy had just ridden away as we came up. They
had come over in full fig to show themselves, and to encourage the
respectable Catholics of Falcarragh, who side with their parish priest,
Father M'Fadden of Glena, and object to the vehement measures, promoted
by his young curate, Father Stephens, recently of Liverpool. The people
had received them with much satisfaction. "They had never seen the
cavalry before, and were much delighted!"
Before we sat down to luncheon young Mr. Olphert came in. It was curious
to see this quiet, well-bred young gentleman throw down his belt and his
revolver on the hall table, like his gloves and his umbrella. "Quite
like the Far West," I said. "And we are as far in the West as we can
get," he replied laughingly.
Our luncheon was excellent--so good, in fact, that we felt a kind of
remorse as if we had selfishly quartered ourselves upon a beleaguered
garrison. But Mr. Olphert said he had no fear of being starved out.
Personally he was, and always had been, on the best terms with the
people of Falcarragh. The older tenants, even now, if he met them
walking in the fields when no one was in sight, would come up and salute
him, and say how "disgusted" they were with what was going on. It was
the younger generation who were troublesome--more troublesome, he added,
to their own parish priest than they were to him. Three or four years
ago a returned American Irishman, an avowed unbeliever, but an active
Nationalist and one of Mr. Forster's "suspects," had come into the
neighbourhood and done his worst to break up the parish. He used to come
to Falcarragh on a Sunday, and get up on a stone outside the chapel
while Father M'Fadden was saying Mass or preaching, and harangue such
people as would listen to him, and caricature the priest and the sermon
going on within sound of his own voice. "I am myself a Protestant,"
said Mr. Olphert, "but I have a great respect for priests who do their
duty; and the conduct of Father M'Fadden of Gweedore, in countenancing
this man, who tried to overthrow the authority of Father M'Fadden of
Glena, excited my indignation. As to what is going on now," said Mr.
Olphert, "it is to Father M'Fadden of Gweedore, and to Father Stephens
here, that the trouble is chiefly to be charged." This tallies with what
I heard at Gweedore from my Galwegian acquaintance. He thought Mr.
Olphert, and Mr. Hewson, the agent, ought to have made peace on the
terms which Father Stephens said he was willing to accept for the
tenants, these being a reduction of 3s. 4d. in the pound, if Mr. Olphert
would extend the reduction to the whole year. My Galwegian thought this
reasonable, because in this region the rent, it appears, is only
collected once a year. With this impartial temper, my Galwegian still
maintained that but for the two priests--the parish priest of Gweedore
and the curate of Falcarragh--there need have been no trouble at
Falcarragh. There had been no "evictions." When the tenants first went
to Mr. Olphert they asked a reduction of 4s. in the pound on the
non-judicial rents, and this Mr. Olphert at once agreed to give them.
The tenants had regularly paid their rents for ten years before. That
they are not going down in the world would appear from the fact that the
P.O. Savings Banks' deposits at Falcarragh, which stood at £62, 15s.
10d. in 1880, rose in 1887 to £494, 10s. 8d. A small number of them had
gone into Court and had judicial rents fixed; and it was on the
contention promoted by the two priests, through these judicial tenants,
he said, that all the difficulty hinged. Father M'Fadden of Glena, who
thought the quarrel unjustifiable and silly, had an interview with Mr.
Blane, M.P., and with Father Stephens, and tried to arrange it all. He
would have succeeded, my Galwegian thought, had not the agent, Mr.
Hewson, obstinately fought with the obstinate curate, Father Stephens,
over the suggestion made by the latter, that the terms granted on the
fine neighbouring estate of Mr. Stuart of Ards--a man of wealth, who
lives mainly at Brighton, though Ards is one of the loveliest places in
Ireland--should be extended by Mr. Olphert for a whole year to his own
people, who had never asked for anything of the kind!
Mr. Olphert said he knew Gweedore well. He owns a "townland"[16] there,
on which he has thirty-five tenants, none of them on a holding at more
more than £4 a year. Father M'Fadden of Gweedore, he said, finding that
the people on Mr. Olphert's townland were going back to the "Rundale"
practices, tried to induce Mr. Olphert to return all these subdivisions
as "tenancies." This he refused to do. As to the resources of the
peasantry, he thought them greater than they appeared to be. "This comes
to light," said Mr. Olphert, "whenever there is a tenant-right for sale.
There is never any lack of money to buy it, and at a round good price."
The people also, he thinks, spend a great deal on what they regard as
luxuries, and particularly on tea. "A cup of tea could not be got for
love or money in Gweedore, when Lord George Hill came there. You might
as well have asked for a glass of Tokay."
Now they use and abuse it in the most deleterious way imaginable. They
buy the tea at exorbitant rates, often at five shillings a pound, and
usually on credit, paying a part of one bill on running up another, put
it into a saucepan or an iron pot, and boil, or rather stew, it over the
fire, till they brew a kind of hell-broth, which they imbibe at odd
moments all day long! Oddly enough, this is the way in which they
prepare tea in Cashmere and other parts of India, with this essential
difference, though, that the Orientals mitigate the astringency of the
herb with milk and almonds and divers ingredients, tending to make a
sort of "compote" of it. Taken as it is taken here, it must have a
tremendous effect on the nerves. Mr. Olphert thinks it has had much to
do with the increase of lunacy in Ireland of late years. From his
official connection with the asylum at Letterkenny, he knows that while
it used to accommodate the lunatics of three counties, it is now hardly
adequate to the needs of Donegal alone.
Everything about Ballyconnell House is out of key with the actual
military conditions of life here. It is essentially what Tennyson calls
"an ancient home of ordered peace." In the ample hall hang old portraits
and trophies of the chase. The large and handsome library, panelled in
rich dark wood, is filled full of well-bound books. Prints, busts, the
thousand and one things of "bigotry and virtue" which mark the
dwelling-place of educated and thoughtful people are to be seen on every
side. Mr. Olphert showed us a cabinet full of bronzes, picked up on the
strand of the sea. Among these were brooches, pins, clasps, buckles, two
very fine bronze swords, and a pair of bronze links engraved with
distinctly Masonic emblems, such as the level, the square, and the
compasses. When were these things made, and by what people?
So far as I know, Masonry in the British Islands cannot be historically
traced back much, if at all, beyond the Revolution of 1688.
Mr. Olphert and his son walked about the place with us. They have no
fears of an attack, but think it wise to keep a force of police on the
premises. The only demonstration yet made of any kind against the house
was the march from Falcarragh some time ago of a mob of young men, who
promptly withdrew on catching sight of half-a-dozen policemen within the
park gates. As to getting his work done, some of his people had steadily
refused to acknowledge the "boycott," and they were now strengthened by
the attitude of those who had surrendered to the pressure, and were now
sullen and angry with the League which had given them nothing to do, and
no supplies.
At Falcarragh we met a person who knew much about the late Lord Leitrim,
who was murdered in this neighbourhood on the highway some years ago. He
spoke freely of the murderer by name, as if it were matter of common
notoriety. Of the murdered man, he said that he had made himself
extremely unpopular and odious, not so much by certain immoralities
freely alleged at the time of his death, as by vexatious meddling with
the prejudices and whims of his tenants. "He used to go into the houses
and pull down cartoons and placards, if he saw them put up on the
walls." "No! he had no party feeling in the matter; he used to pull down
William III. and the Pope with an equal hand." It seems that in this
region, too, a local legend has grown up of the birth at a place called
Cashelmore of a "Queen of France." The case is worth noting as throwing
light on the genesis and accuracy of local traditions. The "Queen of
France" referred to proves, on inquiry, to have been Miss Patterson, who
married Jerome Bonaparte, brother of the first Emperor, afterwards
created by him King of Westphalia! This Avas the lady so well known in
America as Mrs. Patterson Bonaparte of Baltimore, who died at a great
age only a few years ago. I have no reason to suppose that she was born
at Cashelmore at all or in Ireland. But her father, reputed in the time
of Washington to be the richest man in the United States, who came from
the North of Ireland and settled in Baltimore as a merchant, may very
well have been born there.
To my great regret Father M'Fadden of Glena, or Falcarragh, was absent
from home. As we drove homeward we met on the way a young lady on a
smart jaunting-car, with a servant in livery. This was the daughter, our
driver told us, of Mr. Griffiths, the Protestant clergyman, past whose
residence our road lay. His church stands high upon a commanding cliff,
and is a feature in the landscape. We met the parson himself also,
walking with a friend. The road from Bedlam to Derrybeg goes by a region
of the "Rosses," reputed the most woe-begone part of the Gweedore
district. This is the scene of a curious tale told about Father M'Fadden
of Gweedore, by his ill-wishers in these parts, to the effect that he
advises English Members of Parliament and other "sympathising" visitors
who come here to make a pilgrimage to "the Bosses," where, no matter at
what time of day they appear, they invariably find sundry of the people
sitting in their huts and eating stewed seaweed out of iron pots. I
cannot vouch for this tale, but certainly I have seen no people here of
either sex, or of any age, who look as if they lived on stewed seaweed.
Another person at Falcarragh told us, as an illustration of the
influence exerted by Father M'Fadden of Gweedore, in this parish, over
which he has no proper authority, that, in obedience to an intimation
from him, the persons whose seats in the chapel had been occupied on two
successive Sundays by the policemen now stationed here, yesterday
refused to allow the policemen to occupy them, the only exception being
in the case of a man who had been arrested at the same time with Father
Stephens, and who had been so well treated by the police, that he felt
bound to repay their courtesy by offering one of them his seat.