Hussey, Lord Kenmare's agent, left Kerry a short time ago, and the
Lord Chamberlain himself left Killarney House yesterday morning, not
in a paroxysm of indignant "landlordism," but "more in sorrow than in
anger." Lord Kenmare, who is a downright resident Irish landlord,
_s'il en fust oncques_, confessedly leaves Ireland with great regret,
and bade his people "Good-bye, for a long time" with no feigned grief.
But he finds the country uninhabitable, while indignation meetings are
held almost at his gates, and the very labourers whom he has done so
much to employ make common cause with the farmers against him in
paying no rent. The improvements going on here for some time past are
stopped, and about 200l. a week of wages lost to the neighbourhood.
The causes which led to Lord Kenmare's departure have but recently
sprung into existence. The _jacquerie_ only reached Kerry the other
day, and already the county is revolutionised. Thanks to The
O'Donoghue and other Land Leaguers, Kerry is now in as unsettled a
condition as Mayo, Galway, Clare, and Limerick. The flame was long in
reaching this remote region; but when it came it fell among
inflammable stuff, as will be gathered from the almost ridiculous
circumstance of farmers and labourers combining together against a
supposed common enemy. Farmers who a fortnight ago talked scornfully
of those who "held the harvest" have, to my certain knowledge,
subscribed to the Land League within the last few days, and I am
informed that those who have hitherto held out will be members before
another week is gone. It is true that additional allurements are held
out to them. The three "F's" no longer satisfy the more advanced
spirits who emulate Mr. Parnell's magnificent vagueness, and declare
it quite impossible that any measure likely to pass the Houses of
Parliament as at present constituted will satisfy the people of
Ireland. Meanwhile terrorism is upheld as a legitimate weapon of
reform. If it were possible to be surprised at anything taking place
in Ireland at the present moment, I should have been surprised at a
farmer to whom I was talking a couple of days ago, and who farms
between two and three hundred acres under an "improving" landlord. The
farmer, who was evidently a local luminary on the land question, is
only a recent convert to Land League principles; but he was
nevertheless prepared to defend the cowardly kind of general strike
against an individual, known as "Boycotting." He also talked a great
deal about fair rents and the compulsion that farmers are under to pay
anything that their landlords choose to ask. Yet this very man was,
not long since, offered the profitable farm he now occupies in the
place of smaller and less convenient holdings. Asked by his landlord
what he thought he ought to pay, he offered two and a half times
Griffith's valuation, and on the landlord asking him three times that
rate, agreed with him to "split the difference," and was, or appeared
to be, satisfied. But at that moment he had not been made conscious of
his wrongs, and of his down-trodden, serf-like condition. He is fully
aware of them now, and, in plain English, is prepared to make the best
of the present opportunity.
As the possible peasant proprietor of the future is a personage much
discussed among landlords and others just how, I thought it well to
consult the farmer as well as the legal and proprietorial minds on
this important subject. I was at once struck by the "so far and no
farther" tone, so to speak, of the larger farmers. According to many
of those I consulted, no greater disaster could occur to Ireland than
the creation of peasant proprietors. I will endeavour to give, as
nearly as possible, the exact words of farmers whose ideas concerning
the claims of their own class are of the most advanced I have heard.
The instant I asked a question concerning the peasant-proprietor
problem and the future of the "poor devil" cottiers, whose sufferings
have made an excellent stalking-horse for the farmers, properly
so-called, I was met with a well-formulated objection to any scheme of
peasant proprietorship. The cottier _pauvre diable_ appears, I
apprehend, to the farmers as a labourer, and they therefore look with
anything but favour upon a scheme for raising the poor peasants above
the necessity of working for them, by giving the poor a real stake in
the country. The farmers hold that, unless some stringent regulations
against subdividing or subletting be adopted and firmly enforced, the
creation of peasant proprietors on an extensive scale will be the
greatest misfortune that ever befell Ireland; as in the course of time
it will create a nation of beggars, which cannot be maintained on the
land. The farmer mind fails to perceive how any Act of Parliament can
prevent an owner or peasant proprietor from selling his entire
interest in his holding. This, they argue, will lead to the creation
of a race of landlords who will bring more misery and ruin upon the
country than anything that the present generation is acquainted with;
as necessarily the class of landlords thus formed will be more
exacting and severe upon their tenants than the present large
territorial proprietors.
Thus far the farmer, who so far as the evils of subdivision or
subletting are concerned is at one with the great landed proprietor,
who, thanks to the recklessness of his predecessors, sees his efforts
to improve his property paralysed, and his own personal honour and
reputation endangered by the acts of the leaseholders or fee-farm,
renters over whom he has no power whatever. Many large holdings are
leased to middlemen who have sublet them at extravagant rents, but
cannot be dispossessed. This is the system which now exists, yet the
great landholders I have consulted describe it as the result which
will be brought about by giving the fee-simple of holdings to cottier
tenants. "And," I am asked on all sides, "is fixity of tenure to
signify the fixture of little tenants in their present holdings, on
which they cannot possibly lead a reasonably human existence? Is it
intended to stereotype disaster, to perpetuate the blundering of the
past? Or is it intended to give them at great expense to the country,
larger holdings on partially reclaimed waste lands on the system
commended by Mr. Mitchell Henry, and perhaps applicable to Connemara,
if not to other places? And is it intended that when Mike, and Thady,
and Tim are settled on their new clearings they are to do as they like
on them, to subdivide, to sublet, to conacre, to settle their numerous
children and their children's children on the original forty-acre
farm? And are they, after they have taken possession of it, partly
reclaimed and brought under plough, to be allowed to cultivate it or
not cultivate it as they like--to let it all go back first to pasture
then to sedge, and finally to bog?"
Mainly with a view to elicit further expression of opinion, I hinted
to the last and most accomplished person who put these queries to me,
that it would be absurd to give the cottier absolute control over his
land, and that he should have a conditional lease from the
Government, the four cardinal conditions being--that he should not
subdivide; that he should not sublet; that he should not take in a
partner; that he should cultivate some portion of the land according
to a prescribed system. I saw the fine Irish "oi" of my friend gleam
with triumph. "A second Daniel," he almost shouted; "a second Daniel
come from England. But are you aware, my friend, that you have evolved
from your own unaided consciousness one of 'Lord Leitrim's
leases'--the leases, which cost him his life? Bating the fines which
he injudiciously levied you have exactly the programme for enforcing
which he was shot, as you would probably be if you attempted anything
of the kind. It is not at the signing of the leases that any
difficulty would arise, but in carrying their letter and spirit into
effect."
In view of the conflicting opinions held by able residents in the
western and south-western counties, I thought it well to inspect a few
estates, great and small, and to record such visible and otherwise
well ascertained facts as might bear on the questions now at issue. My
first visit in Kerry was to Clashatlea on the hill-side, opposite the
station of Gortatlea on the railway line to Tralee. This townland is
the property of Mr. Arthur Blennerhasset, of Ballyseedy, and it has
fallen into an awful condition through no fault of its present
proprietor.
Years ago the land was let for electioneering purposes, akin to the
creation of faggot votes, and a vast number of small holders became
fixed upon land from which it is impossible to evict them. The
approach to the small holdings lies along a cross road now in the
course of construction from the lower road to the mountain road into
Tralee. The cross road is in its present wet and unfinished condition
a sore trial to man and beast; but it has a history nevertheless.
Years ago it was a matter of complaint by the cottiers of Clashatlea
that to obtain turf they were obliged to make a great detour involving
the climbing of a severe hill. An attempt was made to lay a road on
the lines now in progress; but it never grew into more than "the name
of a road." So the little peasant cultivators whose land abutted on
the abortive road gradually absorbed it into their possessions, each
peasant taking his section in turn; a system exactly like that
followed in bygone days by English landholders, and now attempted by
the riparian proprietors of the Thames Valley. So far these poor
people imitated the method of their social superiors; but they were
not so fortunate as some of these in retaining their plunder. The new
road was decreed, and Mike, and Thady, and Tim were obliged to
withdraw within their ancient limits. Along the new road we went,
bumping and jolting, at the imminent risk of the guns and revolvers in
the car going off, until we reached the upper road by the glen. In
parts the wretched houses were separated by a perceptible distance;
but here and there they had been built side by side to accommodate the
increasing population on the holdings.
How minute the subdivision has been may be gathered from the fact that
335 English acres, whereof some 250 are good for anything in their
present condition, are divided among 40 tenant families, whose numbers
may be safely put down at 200 souls. The land is therefore divided at
the rate of one and a quarter English acres per head, and when it is
mentioned that the most important tenant pays a rent of 17l. 10s., it
will be seen that some of the holdings are ridiculously small. Many
range from 4l. to 5l. per annum and are absolutely incapable of
providing food for a family. It has been found impossible to reduce
the number of tenants to any sensible degree without incurring the
hatred of the country side, and the old and infirm whose children are
dead or have emigrated, still cling to the miserable cabins in which
their lives have been passed.
On the opposite side of Tralee I witnessed a spectacle of a widely
different character. A smart drive from Tralee northwards through a
blinding rain landed me at Ardfert, the village in the centre of Mr.
W. Crosbie's wonderfully improved estate. Going about his work quietly
and unostentatiously, the proprietor has, in the course of forty-two
years, completely altered the conditions of existence on his land.
When it came into his possession in 1838, it was, as many Irish
estates are now, suffering from local congestion of population. Mr.
Crosbie's father had inherited from the Earl of Glendore, who had
given leases under the old penal laws. At the time only Protestants
were allowed to hold leases, and in consequence of the small number of
Protestants compared with the demand for lessees, the leases were
obtained upon very advantageous terms--a long period, a low rent, and
few conditions. The result was that the penal law, like other clumsy
devices of the kind, defeated itself; for there was nothing to prevent
the lessee from subletting the land. This had been done to an enormous
extent when Mr. Crosbie came into possession, and the lowland part of
the estate was greatly over-populated. The upper part was greatly
under-populated, and in the words of the proprietor, nothing could be
worse than the way in which the tenants held the land. "No one knew
from year to year which farm he had to till, and they used to divide
every field and divide the crops every year." Mr. Crosbie was not
deterred by the difficulty of the task before him, and undertook the
redistribution of his tenantry, on the anti-rundale system, and by
degrees succeeded in planting the surplus population of the lowlands
upon the higher ground. Moreover he anticipated the ideas of Mr.
Mitchell Henry and Canon Griffin by putting his tenants under the
direct control of a skilled agriculturist, under his own supervision.
Having thus redistributed his people on the land and taught them the
elements of agricultural science, he commenced the work of building
them suitable houses and farm buildings.
Mr. Crosbie's estate in Kerry is of 9,913 acres valued by Government
at 4,638l., with a present rent roll of 8,500l., thanks to the
expenditure of 40,000l. since 1839. As one approaches Ardfert the
cabin common in Kerry vanishes to make room for houses well and
substantially built of concrete, with whale-back roofs also of
concrete. The merit of originally introducing concrete as a building
material into this part of Ireland belongs, I believe, to Mr. Mahony,
of Dromore, who has employed it largely on his own estate; but Mr.
Crosbie was, at least, one of the first to perceive the advantage of
using it. With Portland cement and the sand and pebbles of the
adjacent sea-shore he has made a concrete village, and given his
farmers houses of a kind previously unknown in his neighbourhood.
Concrete has several advantages keenly appreciated in Kerry. It is
dry--an immense advantage in a humid climate, and floors, ceilings,
partition walls, and roofs, are all made of it, as well as the
external walls. It also requires very little skilled work, and can be
built up by ordinary labourers under proper supervision. Another great
advantage is that it can be moulded to any shape and thickness, and is
therefore most useful for barns, cowhouses, and feeding stalls.
The houses and farm buildings I have seen certainly seem perfect, and
have, I am informed, been constructed at about the same price as
corrugated iron. Those fond of tracing the genius of a nation in its
constructive faculty will probably be amused at finding that the
latest work of structural genius in Kerry is a development of that
mud-hut order of architecture which has existed here from pre-historic
times. But concrete well employed is a very different thing from the
dirt-pie or mud-hut idea at the other end of the evolutionary chain.
Mr. Chute, of Chute Hall, is also an improver and architectural
reformer, his efforts being directed towards the abolition of thatch
in favour of slate, an idea which has proved more fortunate in his
case than in that of the great-grandfather of the present Lord
Kenmare. The great estates of the Lord Chamberlain have curiously
enough been equally damaged by the care and carelessness of his
ancestors. His great-grandfather was disgusted at the condition of the
town of Killarney, and offered any tenant who would build a decent
house with a slate roof a perpetual lease of the land it stood upon
and the adjoining garden for a nominal rent of four shillings and
fourpence per annum, without other important conditions. The result
has been that Killarney can boast of as filthy lanes as any in London
or Liverpool. The ordinary process, the same as that which formed the
hideous slums between Drury-lane and Great Wild-street, now happily
demolished, has gone on in Killarney. Tenants under no restrictions
gradually converted their gardens into lanes of hovels, and made money
thereby, and the result is a concentration in Killarney of filth which
would be better distributed on the side of a mountain, and which is
under the nose of a landlord who is powerless to apply a remedy.
Not long ago Lord Kenmare sought to establish what is called here a
Temperance Hall, for the purpose of giving lecturers and entertainers
a chance of amusing the people; but the proprietor of the ground,
after a prolonged negotiation, declined to surrender his property.
Killarney is in the hands of the dwellers therein, and a very poor
place it is.
Conversely Lord Kenmare's property suffers severely from the
recklessness of the ancestor who flourished in the "comet year,"
famous for hock. That spirited nobleman, averse to the nuisance of
dealing directly with tenants, leased a large portion of his property
to middlemen in 1811 for forty-one years or three lives; that is to
say, for a minimum of forty-one years with expansion to three lives.
The effect of this fatal policy of giving away all power of
supervision and management has been made manifest in the past, and is
yet visible on those portions of the estate the three-life leases of
which have not yet fallen in. The gross rental of Lord Kenmare's
estates in Kerry, Cork, and Limerick, amounting altogether to 118,606
acres, is 37,713l., against Griffith's valuation of 34,473l., but the
distribution of this sum is very unequal, especially since the rents
of the yearly tenants were raised in 1876, in some cases to the by no
means unfair extent of 50 per cent. above the poor-rate valuation.
The 3,300 tenants on Lord Kenmare's property have been mainly put upon
the land by middlemen who made a great profit out of their three-life
leases. The lands of Mastergechy, Knockacrea, and Knockacappul are all
let at an immense reduction on Griffith's valuation, but to middlemen,
who realise from 200 to 300 per cent. on their investment. Despite
these drawbacks, Lord Kenmare is an "improving" landlord, and has laid
out in the last ten months some 7,000l. on his property. The pretty
tile-roof cottages outside of Killarney are a reproach to the town
itself, over which Lord Kenmare, after the manner of many other Irish
landlords, has no kind of control.
VALENTIA, CO. KERRY, _Dec. 12th._
In a previous letter I alluded to the length of time it had taken the
Land League agitation to make itself felt in Kerry, and to the
swiftness with which, when once ignited, the far south-west of Ireland
blazed into open disaffection. The causes of this slowness to light
up, immediately followed by a fierce and sudden flame, are by no means
obscure. Kerry has always been the last place to follow a popular
movement, and the last to relinquish it.
As the French Revolution and its effects on Ireland were not heard of
in Kerry till long after the establishment of the Empire, so was Ross
Castle, on the lower lake at Killarney, the last stronghold subdued by
Ludlow; and so also was Kerry the last stronghold of Fenianism.
Moribund in the other parts of Ireland until Nationalists and Land
Leaguers were united, by the prosecution of Mr. Parnell, Fenianism
still lingered and lingers on in Kerry. In the pot-houses of Tralee,
Castle Island, and Cahirciveen the embers of Fenianism have smouldered
since the outbreak of 1867. Slow to learn, Kerry has been slow to
forget, and when once the emissaries of the Land League arrived here
they found ready to their hand the _cadre_ at least of a formidable
organisation, and the reign of terrorism at once commenced.
Up to the present moment I have not heard of houses being blown up by
dynamite after the fashion in Bantry, but the farmers who have already
not paid their rents decline to do so, or pay in full secretly, while
openly subscribing to the Land League and denouncing the mean-spirited
serfs who would pay a farthing above Griffith's valuation.
There is no mistaking the strength of the movement which has at last
reached this remote island, between which and America, as a native
said to me yesterday, "There is not as much as the grass of a goat."
This saying refers to the popular method of measurement, which is not
by acres, but by the grass of so many cows, according to the richness
of the pasture. Up to a month ago there was no talk of the Land League
on Valentia Island. The tenants had for the most part paid their May
rents, and the situation therefore afforded little scope for
agitation; but the subtle spirit which spread instantaneously from
Tralee to Cahirciveen quickly traversed the ferry, and now the
Valentians are as keen on the subject of their grievances as anybody
else in the western half of Ireland. At Cahirciveen anti-landlordism
is as vigorous at this moment as at Tralee, or even at Ennis itself,
albeit violent personal outrages have not been perpetrated in the
immediate neighbourhood.
A resolute and influential leader of the people declared to me
yesterday that the spirit now aroused would never be quelled but by a
full and generous recognition of the claims of the cultivators. He
averred that the people are not only awakened to their wrongs and
determined to have them redressed, but that they possess the power of
enforcing their will. I hinted that savage threats and deeds of
violence might produce temporary anarchy, but that the end of all
would be the crushing of the League with a strong hand. The answer was
not argument, but defiance. It was impossible, the speaker asserted,
to crush the combination now existing in Kerry. It could not be
crushed, for the simple reason that it did not transgress the law.
This was startling news, and I at once asked what was to be said of
the dynamite affair at Bantry, the ear-cutting business near Castle
Island, and the shooting of a bailiff in Tyrone? Only one of those
things, I was instantly reminded, had occurred in Kerry, and I was
moreover instructed that personal violence was preached against by the
Land League priests, and opposed by all lay leaders. The crimes
alluded to were the accidents of a great upheaval of the people, who
could attain their objects perfectly well without violence.
To the objection that without occasional violence the terrorism now
existing would lose all its strength, that threats never carried out
would become ridiculous, that when violence ceased, tenants as well as
landlords would set the Land League law aside and, do as they pleased,
it was replied that the great agrarian movement had passed through the
period of terrorism as nations pass through the early stage of
baronial rights, especially that of private war. The present condition
of the anti-landlord party was not that of a revolt, but of a strike,
which whether it was wise and according to the laws of political
economy or not, was clearly lawful. There was no constitutional right
in any one man to compel another to work for him, and a strike was
therefore clearly permissible. It was nonsense to cry out against
combination. It was the only possible method of the weak making good
their case against the strong, and the landlords might combine, and
welcome, if they thought it would do them any good. Nobody wanted to
shoot them any more, for they were "Quite, quite down." The present
strike was of an unprecedented character. Strikes of workpeople were
sometimes met and defeated by combinations of masters, because the
masters held the property and plant, and the men had nothing but their
heads and hands, and perhaps a little money in savings banks. So the
masters lasted the longest and won, except when their number included
a large proportion of needy, speculative manufacturers, who durst not
stop their mills, and thus became the indirect and unwilling allies of
the artisan. But where the masters were few and wealthy, the artisans
had no chance against them.
It was far otherwise with the Irish farmers and cottiers, who not only
"held the harvest," or rather its monetary result, but held the land
and were "not going to give it up." The people, the speaker opined,
had really won the battle already, and it was for them to exercise the
power they had suddenly become aware of wisely and mercifully. There
was no further need for violence or threats of violence, but what was
called the law should not be carried out until the claims of the Irish
people were fully admitted by the English Government.
How then was this gigantic strike to be carried on without violence or
threatening life or limb? Quite easily was the reply--by extending the
process of "Boycotting." This is, it seems, the great constitutional
weapon on which neither horse, foot, nor artillery can be brought to
bear. Those who will not join the _Jacquerie_, and aid and abet those
Irish analogues of Jacques Bonhomme, Mike and Thady and Tim, in their
resistance to "landlordism" shall be "Boycotted"; and all those who
refuse to join in "Boycotting" an offender shall be treated in the
same way.
Already the stoutest hearted are yielding on every side to the dread
of being "Boycotted," a doom which signifies simply that the victim
must surrender or leave the country. It means that nobody will buy or
sell with any member of the family which is declared "taboo"; that the
farmer may drive his cattle and pigs to market, but will not find a
purchaser; that he may reap his grain and pull his potatoes, but that
not a soul in the country will buy them for fear of being "Boycotted"
himself. It means that the baker will refuse him bread, and the
butcher meat; that no draper who knows his wife by sight will sell her
as much as a ribbon; that not a creature will buy her butter and
eggs, chickens and turkeys, geese and ducks; that she will be unable
to buy any article of food or luxury for her children, and that they
will be "sent to Coventry" at school.
There is not an atom of exaggeration in anything here stated. It is
not a fancy picture, but as genuine as that of Mr. Boycott himself;
and there is no doubt that the taste for "Boycotting" is spreading
rapidly, as my informant, who is heartily in favour of it, declares it
is "clean within any law that could be made, let alone carried out."
It is impossible to compel any community to have dealings with a
person whom they dislike, and the anti-landlord party are determined
to carry their point without, as appears on the notices served on
farmers, "hurting one hair of their heads." "Isolation" has, in fact,
been added to the number of the arts which soften manners and forbid
them to be savage. It is the sprig of shillelagh in a velvet sheath.
XV.
THE "BOYCOTTING" OF MR. BENCE JONES.
CORK, _Friday, Dec. 17th._