Because I have had the privilege of being Irish correspondent for the
Montreal _Witness_ for a time, I think it right to explain to you
the change which travelling through my native country has produced in my
sentiments and the convictions forced upon me.
Brought up in the North of Ireland in a purely Hiberno-Scotch
neighborhood, I drank in with my native air all the ideas which reign in
that part of Ireland. The people with whom I came in contact were
Conservatives of the strongest type; from my youth up, therefore, I had
the cause of Ireland's poverty and misery as an article of belief. I
never dreamed that the tenure of land had anything to do with it.
Landlords were lords and leaders, benefactors and protectors to their
tenants in my imagination.
I changed my opinion while in Ireland, and now I believe that the land
tenure is the main cause of Ireland's miseries.
English history is pretty much a history of struggles against monopolies
of one kind and another. There is no monopoly, it seems to me, which
bears such evil fruit as the monopoly of all the land of a country in
the hands of a few. It is bad for the country, bad for the people, and
bad for the landlords, whether the monopolists are honorable companies,
a landed aristocracy, or an ecclesiastical corporation. God's-law, which
is the law of our faith, shows plainly how the Great Lawgiver regards
the monopoly of land by the care which He took to have a direct interest
in the land of Canaan by personal inheritance for every Jew. To guard
against the might of greed, to prevent the poor of the land, touched by
misfortune or snared by debt, from sinking into farm laborers or serfs
of the soil he instituted the year of jubilee when every man returned to
his inheritance.
I first thought over these things in connection with the land question
in Ireland when travelling there and seeing the evils arising from the
existing tenure of land. I met with testimony everywhere of how often
and how fatally the will of a lord interfered to prevent prosperity.
There might have been a seam of coal opened in Antrim but for one
landlord. In the present depressed state of the linen trade what a boon
that would have been to the country. There might have been ship-building
on the Foyle, to the great benefit of Derry and her people, but for the
absentee landlords, the London companies. Donegal might have had a coal
mine opened, but the landlord would neither open it himself nor let
anyone else do it, and yet the great want of Donegal is employment for
her people.
I did not think for a moment that the landlords of Ireland were, as a
rule, naturally worse than other men, but they have too much power, and
when "self the wavering balance shakes, it's rarely right adjusted."
I blame the system, not the men. There were and are landlords in Ireland
too noble to abuse their power, of which class the Earl of Belmore is an
illustrious example; but these men are noble in spite of the system
which afforded every facility for the enormities of Lord Leitrim.
The evil of the Land Tenure is intensified by the fact that one class
makes laws for another, and that the same class has all the executive of
these laws under their control. There was no power in the law to protect
the inhabitants of Milford when the earnings and savings of their whole
lives, and the private property of their minister were confiscated by
the strong hand, and some were reduced in consequence to beg their
bread. The law, planned expressly to be an expensive luxury, was only
for the rich, and was known to the poor, if they dared to contend with
their landlord, as an engine of oppression. The judge who gave the award
in Mrs. Auldjo's case knew better than anyone else the cost of Irish
law, and that the award he gave her under the Act of 1870 was a
defeating of the intentions of the law, as it was really less than the
law costs. His award added insult to injury to a woman who was a widow,
and wantonly ruined in fortune because she dared to contend with a lord.
The same spirit of partisanship invented the infamous Grand Jury system.
After I left Antrim, while travelling through the wilds of Donegal, the
glens of Leitrim, and all through beautiful and desolate Mayo, I
wondered over the absolute power which was left in the hands of the
landholders and the great gulf which separated them from the land-
tilling class. Public opinion, which they control, seems to have
absolutely no sympathy with the common people when they were behind in
their rents, although they were emerging from a period of agricultural
distress, culminating in absolute famine. I watched the papers, I took
good heed to the conversation that went on around me, and saw or heard
no expression of sympathy when events took place which, I had thought,
impossible under British law.
When Mrs. Whittington, of Malin, was put out in the wild March weather,
with a child three days old in her arms and a flock of six around her, I
looked for some one to raise a voice of protest, but there was not a
whisper. When a landlord's official forced his way past husband, doctor
and nurse, to the bedside of Mrs. Stewart, to order her to get out of
bed to go to the workhouse, bringing on fits that caused the death of
her babe and nearly cost her her life, I watched eagerly for some voice
to say this should not have been done, but there was none. I have heard
of retreating armies stopping and hazarding battle, rather than forsake
a childing woman in her extremity, in countries not boasting of so
enlightened a government as our own. I had so gloried in the British
Constitution, its justice, its mercy! I waited to see what the law would
do in this case. All the facts were admitted in court, yet this man, who
forgot that he, too, was born of a woman, was triumphantly acquitted and
not one word of disapproval appeared in any public print that I saw.
I have often come home after seeing that on the side of the oppressor
was power--the power of bayonets--and that the poor had no helper, until
I could not sleep for pain and could only cry to our Father--theirs and
mine--How long, Lord, how long!
A friend described to me quite gaily a scene at the Castlebar workhouse
during the last famine, when the starving creatures coming for relief
surged round the workhouse gate and pressed and hustled and trampled
down one another, how the police standing ankle deep in mud had to lay
about them with their batons, and the poor creatures were sent home
again, and yet again, until they would learn to keep order--keep order--
and they were starving!
A lady in Clones, who was talking to me on Sabbath School work and
missionary enterprise in a highly edifying manner, could only express
her surprise about the poor of her own people who were doomed to the
poor house, that they did not go in at once without struggle or fuss.
And yet she had been a mother, and must have known what parting with
children meant to a mother's heart. For my part I sympathized with that
mother of whom I read in the papers, who was taken before a magistrate
and sentenced for making a disturbance in the workhouse when she heard
the master beating her child.
I wondered much at a noble and high-minded Irish gentleman who feels
strong sympathy with the Oka Indians, who, in speaking to me of a man
caught in company with another fishing by night, thereby transgressing
the law, and was deliberately shot down by the agent of the property,
expressed his regret that the other had not been also shot. Hardening
the heart I hold to be one of the very apparent effects of the land
system.
Another evil is the encouragement of unutterable meanness; a meanness
that allows rich men to manage to extract under pressure gratuitous work
out of these poor people. No one needs to be told that the Irish peasant
is worse fed, worse clothed, worse housed than any peasant in Europe,
yet gentlemen will take from these gratuitous work, and see so little to
be ashamed of in the transaction as to write about it over their own
signature, as Ernest Cochrane did in the columns of the _Witness_.
I have heard of miles of separating fence being made, in this way, of
walls being built and even of monuments being erected "in memoriam" in
the same way. I was told of a noble lord having brought a gentle
pressure to bear on his Irish tenants to cause them to subscribe over
and above their rents for the benefit of those who were suffering from
an accident in his English collieries.
I have wondered to hear gentlemen, and even clergymen, in Ireland
wishing that the people would rise in rebellion so that there might be
an opportunity of laying the cold steel to them and putting them down
effectually. I have also wondered at the refusal of the authorities to
have the riots in Limerick investigated; surely that does not look like
impartial justice. I have wondered again over the openly avowed purpose
of rooting the people out of the country.
I have looked with great concern and astonishment at the lands already
wasted and almost without inhabitants. I have read with great pain the
Lord Lieutenant's speech at Belfast, aspersing the country as disloyal
and threatening them with greater tyranny. The people are disloyal, to a
system of oppression and absolutism which neither they nor their fathers
were able to bear; but I believe from my heart that they are more loyal
to Her Majesty than their oppressors are, for the system has made them
oppressors. Only notice, from Mr. Smith's evidence at the Land Court
recently, concerning the Enniskillen estate, for which he is agent, it
is proven that even in Protestant Ulster a landlord can abolish the
Ulster custom--the root of Ulster's exceptional prosperity--at the
motion of his own will. In the trials for turbary in the Kiltyclogher
cases a rule made by a landlord in his office overrides even a lease,
and is accepted as _de facto_ law in the court.
These things have convinced me that the exterminating landlords are the
parties who are guilty of high treason against the commonwealth of
England. The loyalty of Irish Catholics to a country that had scant
justice to give them has been proven on every battle field from far
India to the Crimea. No history of England's wars in these later times
can be written truly without acknowledging the Irish blood given like
water for England's honor.
Scotland has been more favored of late years, although the time is not
so far distant when her language, her dress and ancient customs were
also proscribed. Watching this, I have found myself wishing that some
Irish Walter Scott would arise whose pen would make Ireland's lakes and
glens, mountain passes and battlemented rocks, ruined castles and
mouldering abbeys, famous and fashionable as Scotland's brown heath and
shaggy wood, till the Queen would love to have a home there, and the
nobles of the land would follow in her shadow.
I have changed my opinion on this also. The nobles come to covet the
homes of the people. The Highlands of Scotland seem destined to become a
hunting ground. The hardy mountaineers, guilty of no crime, must give up
their hamlets and shielings, the inheritance of their fathers, at the
order of any trader who has coined the sweat of his fellow men
successfully into guineas, or any idle lord who has money. If "a death
grapple of the nations" should ever come to England will she miss the
Connaught Rangers, the glorious 88th who won from stern Picton the
cheer, "Well done 88th," or the Enniskillen dragoons so famed in song
and story, or the North Cork that moved to battle as to a festival? Will
she miss "the torrent of tartan and steel" that charged at the Alma, or
the cry that "the hills of grey Caledon know the shout of McDonald,
McLean and McKay, when they dash at the breast of the foe?" Will she
miss the clansmen of Athol, Breadalbane and Mar? Will the exterminating
lords who must have hunting grounds at all hazards come to the front
with squadrons of deer or battalions of rabbits? Surely it is an aweful
thing to sweep the inhabitants of a country for gain. If Britain ever
has to call on these Varuses for her legions, or to repeat George II.'s
cry at Fontenoy, will the enemy be able to countervail the Queen's
damage?
I would earnestly plead with the authorities, even yet, to try a little
conciliation instead of such strong doses of coercion. History tells how
cheaply the disturbed Highlands were pacified compared with the expense
of coercing them, which was a failure. The tithe of the expense for
bayonets would, I am convinced, make the West of Ireland contented and
make future prosperity possible.