Nothing dies so hard as prejudice, unless it be sentiment. Indeed,
prejudice and sentiment are but different manifestations of the same
principle by which men pronounce on things according to individual
feeling, independent of facts and free from the restraint of positive
knowledge. And on nothing in modern times has so much sentiment been
lavished as on the Irish question; nowhere has so much passionately
generous, but at the same time so much absolutely ignorant,
partisanship been displayed as by English sympathisers with the Irish
peasant. This is scarcely to be wondered at. The picture of a gallant
nation ground under the heel of an iron despotism--of an industrious
and virtuous peasantry rackrented, despoiled, brutalised, and scarce
able to live by their labour that they may supply the vicious wants of
oppressive landlords--of unarmed men, together with women and little
children, ruthlessly bludgeoned by a brutal police, or shot by a
bloodthirsty soldiery for no greater offence than verbal protests
against illegal evictions--of a handful of ardent patriots ready to
undergo imprisonment and contumely in their struggle against one of
the strongest nations in the world for only so much political freedom
as is granted to-day by despots themselves--such a picture as this is
calculated to excite the sympathies of all generous souls. And it has
done so in England, where "Home Rule" and "Justice to Ireland" have
become the rallying cries of one section of the Liberal party, to the
disruption and political suicide of the whole body; and where the less
knowledge imported into the question the more fervid the advocacy and
the louder the demand.
It is worth while to state quite quietly and quite plainly how things
stand at this present moment. There is no need for hysterics on the
one side or the other; and to amend one's views by the testimony of
facts is not a dishonest turning of one's coat--if confession of that
amendment is a little like the white sheet and lighted taper of a
penitent. Things are, or they are not. If they are, as will be set
down, the inference is plain to anyone not hopelessly blinded by
preconceived prejudice. If they are not, let them be authoritatively
contradicted on the basis of fact, not sentiment--demonstration, not
assertion. In any case it is a gain to obtain material for a truer
judgment than heretofore, and thus to be rid of certain mental films
by which colours are blurred and perspective is distorted.
No one wishes to palliate the crimes of which England has been guilty
in Ireland. Her hand has been heavy, her whip one of braided
scorpions, her rule emphatically of blood and iron. But all this is of
the past, and the pendulum, not only of public feeling but of legal
enactment, threatens to swing too far on the other side. What has been
done cannot be undone, but it will not be repeated. We shall never
send over another Cromwell nor yet another Castlereagh; and there is
as little good to be got from chafing over past wrongs as there is in
lamenting past glories. Malachi and his collar of gold--the ancient
kings who led forth the Red Branch Knights--State persecution of the
Catholics--rack-rents and unjust evictions, are all alike swept away
into the limbo of things dead and done with. What Ireland has to deal
with now are the enactments and facts of the day, and to shake off the
incubus of retrospection, as a strong man awaking would get rid of a
nightmare.
Nowhere in Europe, nor yet in the United States, are tenant-farmers so
well protected by law as in Ireland; nor is it the fault of England if
the Acts passed for their benefit have been rendered ineffectual by
the agitators who have preferred fighting to orderly development. So
long ago as 1860 a Bill was passed providing that no tenant should be
evicted for non-payment of rent unless one year's rent in arrear.
(Landlord and Tenant Act, 1860, sec. 52.) Even then, when evicted, he
could recover possession within six months by payment of the amount
due; when the landlord had to pay him the amount of any profit he had
made out of the lands in the interim. The landlord had to pay half the
poor rate of the Government Valuation if a holding was £4 or upward,
and all the poor rate if it was under £4. By the Act of 1870 "a yearly
tenant disturbed in his holding by the act of the landlord, for causes
other than non-payment of rent, and the Government Valuation of whose
holding does not exceed £100 per annum, must be paid by his landlord
not only full compensation for all improvements made by himself or his
predecessors, such as unexhausted manures, permanent buildings, and
reclamation of waste lands, but also as compensation for disturbance,
a sum of money which may amount to seven years' rent." (Land Act of
1870, secs. 1, 2, and 3.) Under the Act of 1881 the landlord's power
of disturbance was practically abolished--but I think I have read
somewhere that even of late years, and with the ballot, certain
landlords in England have threatened their tenants with "disturbance"
without compensation if their votes were not given to the right
colour--while in Ireland, even when evicted for non-payment of rent, a
yearly tenant must be paid by his landlord "compensation for all
improvements, such as unexhausted manures, permanent buildings, and
reclamation of waste land." (Sec. 4.) And when his rent does not
exceed £15 he must be paid in addition "a sum of money which may
amount to seven years' rent if the court decides that the rent is
exorbitant." (Secs. 3 and 9.) (_a_) Until the contrary is proved, the
improvements are presumed to have been made by the tenants. (Sec. 5.)
(_b_) The tenant can make his claim for compensation immediately on
notice to quit being served, and cannot be evicted until the
compensation is paid. (Secs. 16 and 21.) A yearly tenant when
voluntarily surrendering his farm must either be paid by the landlord
(_a_) compensation for all his improvements, or (_b_) be permitted to
sell his improvements to an incoming tenant. (Sec. 4.) In all new
tenancies the landlord must pay half the county or Grand Jury Cess if
the valuation is £4 or upward and the whole of the same Cess if the
value does not exceed £4. (Secs. 65 and 66.) Thus we have under the
Land Act of 1870 (i) Full payment for all improvements; (2)
Compensation for disturbance.
The famous Land Act of 1881 gave three additional privileges, (1)
Fixity of tenure, by which the tenant remains in possession of the
land for ever, subject to periodic revision of the rent. (Land Act,
1881, sec. 8.) If the tenant has not had a fair rent fixed, and his
landlord proceeds to evict him for non-payment of rent, he can apply
to the court to fix the fair rent, and meantime the eviction
proceedings will be restrained by the court. (Sec. 13.) (2) Fair rent,
by which any yearly tenant may apply to the Land Commission Court (the
judges of which were appointed under Mr. Gladstone's Administration)
to fix the fair rent of his holding. The application is referred to
three persons, one of whom is a lawyer, and the other two inspect and
value the farm. _This rent can never again_ be raised by the landlord.
(Sec. 8.) (3) Free sale, by which every yearly tenant may, whether he
has had a fair rent fixed or not, sell his tenancy to the highest
bidder whenever he desires to leave. (Sec. 1.) (_a_) There is no
practical limit to the price he may sell for, and twenty times the
amount of the annual rent has frequently been obtained in every
province of Ireland. (_b_) Even if a tenant be evicted, he has the
right either to redeem at any time within three months, _or to sell
his tenancy within the same period to a purchaser who can likewise
redeem_ and thus acquire all the privileges of a tenant. (Sec. 13.)
Even more important than this is the Land Purchase Act of 1885,
commonly called Lord Ashbourne's Act, by which the whole land in
Ireland is potentially put into the hands of the farmers, and of the
working of which much will have to be said before these papers end.
This Act, in its sections 2, 3, and 4, sets forth this position,
briefly stated: If a tenant wishes to buy his holding, and arranges
with his landlord as to terms, he can change his position from that of
a perpetual rent-payer into that of the payer of an annuity,
terminable at the end of forty-nine years--the Government supplying
him with the entire purchase-money, to be repaid during those
forty-nine years at 4 per cent. This annual payment of £4 for every
£100 borrowed covers both principal and interest. Thus, if a tenant,
already paying a statutory rent of £50, agrees to buy from his
landlord at twenty years' purchase (or £1,000) the Government will
lend him the money, his rent will at once cease, and he will not pay
£50, but £40, yearly for forty-nine years, and then become the owner
of his holding, free of rent. It is hardly necessary to point out
that, as these forty-nine years of payment roll by, the interest of
the tenant in his holding increases rapidly in value. (Land Purchase
Act, 1885, secs. 2, 3, and 4.)
Under the Land Act of 1887, the tenants received the following still
greater and always one-sided privileges, (i) By this Act leases are
allowed to be broken by the tenant, but not by the landlord. All
leaseholders whose leases would expire within ninety-nine years after
the passing of the Act have the option of going into court and getting
their contracts broken and a judicial rent fixed. No equivalent power
is given to the landlords. (Land Act of 1887, secs, 1 and 2.) (2) The
Act varies rent already judicially fixed for fifteen years by the
Land Courts in the years 1881, 1882, 1883, 1884, and 1885. (Sec. 29.)
(3) It stays evictions, and allows rent to be paid by instalments. In
the case of tenants whose valuation does not exceed £50, the court
before which proceedings are being taken for the recovery of _any_
debt due by the tenant is empowered to stay his eviction, and may give
him liberty to pay his creditors by instalments, and can extend the
time for such payment as it thinks proper. (Land Act of 1887, sec.
30.)
By these extracts, which do not exhaust the whole of the privileges
granted to the Irish tenant, it may be seen how exceptionally he has
been favoured. Nowhere else has such wholesale interference with the
obligations of contract, such lavish protection of the tenant, such
practical persecution of the landlord been as yet demanded by the
one-half of the nation; nor, if demanded, would such partiality have
been conceded by the other half. Yet, in the face of these various
Acts, and all they embody, provide for, and deny, our hysterical
journal _par excellence_ is not ashamed to publish a wild letter from
one of those ramping political women who screech like peacocks before
rain, setting forth how Ireland could be redeemed by the manufacture
of blackberry jam, were it not for the infamous landlords who would at
once raise the rent on those tenants who, by industry, had improved
their condition. And a Dublin paper asserts that anything will be
fiction which demonstrates that "Ireland is not the home of
rackrenters, brutal batonmen, and heartless evictors"; while political
agitation is still being carried on by any means that come handiest,
and the eviction of tenants who owe five or six years' rent, and will
not pay even one to clear off old scores, is treated as an act of
brutality for which no quarter should be given. If we were to transfer
the whole method of procedure to our own lands and houses in England,
perhaps the thing would wear a different aspect from that which it
wears now, when surrounded by a halo of false sentiment and convenient
forgetfulness.
The total want of honesty, of desire for the right thing in this
no-rent agitation, is exemplified by the following fact:--When Colonel
Vandeleur's tenants--owing several years' rent, refused to pay
anything, and joined the Plan of Campaign, arbitration was suggested,
and Sir Charles Russell was accepted by the landlord as arbitrator. As
every one knows, Sir Charles is an Irishman, a Catholic, and the
"tenants' friend." His award was, as might have been expected, most
liberal towards them. Here is the result:--"We learn that the
non-fulfilment by a number of the tenants of the terms of the award
made by Sir C. Russell is likely to lead to serious difficulties. They
refuse to carry out the undertaking which was given on their behalf,
having so much bettered the instruction given to them that they insist
upon holding a grip of the rent, and not yielding to even the advice
of their friends. About thirty of them have not paid the year's rent,
which all the Plan of Campaign tenants were to have paid when the
award was made known to them. This is the most conspicuous instance in
which arbitration has been tried, and the result is not encouraging,
although landlords have been denounced for not at once accepting it
instead of seeking to enforce their legal rights by the tribunal
appointed by the Legislature."
With a legal machinery of relief so comprehensive and so favourable to
the tenant, it would seem that the Plan of Campaign, with its cruel
and murderous accompaniments, was scarcely needed. If anyone was
aggrieved, the courts were open to him; and we have only to read the
list of reduced rents to see how those courts protected the tenant and
bore heavily on the landlord. Also, it would seem to persons of
ordinary morality that it would have been more manly and more honest
to pay the rents due to the proprietor than to cast the money into the
chest of the Plan of Campaign--that _boite à Pierrette_ which, like
the sieve of the Danaïdes, can never be filled. The Home Rule
agitators have known how to make it appear that they, and they alone,
stand between the people and oppression. They have ignored all this
orderly legal machinery; and their English sympathisers have not
remembered it. Nor have those English sympathisers considered the
significant fact that this agitation is literally the bread of life to
those who have created and still maintain it. Many of the Home Rule
Irish Members of Parliament have risen from the lowest ranks of
society--from the barefooted peasantry, where their nearest relations
are still to be found--into the outward condition of gentlemen living
in comparative affluence. It is not being uncharitable, nor going
behind motives, to ask, _Cui bono?_ For whose advantage is a certain
movement carried on?--especially for whose advantage is this anti-rent
movement in Ireland? For the good of the tenants who, under the
pressure put on them by those whom they have agreed to follow, refuse
to pay even a fraction of rent hitherto paid to the full, and who are,
in consequence, evicted from their farms and deprived of their means
of subsistence?--or is it for the good of a handful of men who live by
and on the agitation they created and still keep up? Do the leaders of
any movement whatsoever give a thought to the individual lives
sacrificed to the success of the cause? As little as the general
regrets the individuals of the rank and file in the battalions he
hurls against the enemy. The ruined homes and blighted lives of the
thousands who have listened, believed, been coerced to their own
despair, have been no more than the numbers of the rank and file to
the general who hoped to gain the day by his battalions.[B] The good
in this no-rent movement is reaped by the agitators alone; and for
them alone have the chestnuts been pulled out of the fire.
Furthermore, whose hands among the prominent leaders are free from the
reflected stain of blood-money? These leaders have counselled a course
of action which has been marked all along the line by outrage and
murder; and they have lived well and amassed wealth by the course they
have counselled.
From proletariats in their own persons they have become men of
substance and property. These assertions are facts to which names and
amounts can be given; and that question, _Cui bono_? answers itself.
The inference to be drawn is too grave to be set aside; and to plead
"charitable judgment" is to plead imbecility.
The plain and simple truth is--the protective legislation that was so
sorely needed for the peasantry is fast degenerating into injustice
and oppression against the landlords. Thousands of the smaller
landowners have been absolutely beggared; the larger holders have been
as ruthlessly ruined. For, while the rents were lowered, the charges
on the land, made on the larger basis, were kept to their same value;
and the fate of the landlord was sealed. Between the hammer and the
anvil as he was and is placed, his times have not been pleasant.
Families who have bought their estates on the faith of Government
sales and Government contracts, and families who have owned theirs for
centuries and lived on them, winter and summer--who have been neither
absentees nor rack-renters, but have been friendly, hospitable,
open-handed after their kind, always ready to give comforts and
medicine to the sick and a good-natured measure of relief to the hard
pressed--they have now been brought to the ground; and between our own
fluid and unstable legislation and the reckless cruelty of the Plan of
Campaign their destruction has been complete. Wherever one goes one
finds great houses shut up or let for a few summer months to strangers
who care nothing for the place and less than nothing for the people.
One cannot call this a gain, look at it as one will. Nor do the
tenantry themselves feel it to be a gain. Get their confidence and you
will find that they all regret the loss of their own--those jovial,
frank, and kindly proprietors who did the best they knew, though
perhaps, judged by present scientific knowledge that best was not very
good, but who at least knew more than themselves. Carrying the thing
home to England, we should scarcely say that our country places would
be the better for the exodus of all the educated and refined and
well-to-do families, with the peasantry and an unmarried clergyman
left sole masters of the situation.
In the desire of Parliament to do justice to the Irish peasant, whose
condition did once so loudly demand amelioration, justice to the
landlord has gone by the board. For we cannot call it justice to make
him alone suffer. His rents have been reduced from 25 to 30 per cent.
and over, but all the rent charges, mortgages, debts and dues have
been retained at their full value. The scheme of reduction does not
pass beyond the tiller of the soil, and the landlord is the sole
loser.[C]
Beyond this he suffers from the want of finality in legislation.
Nothing is left to prove itself, and the tinkering never ends. A
fifteen years' bargain under the first Land Act is broken up under the
next as if Governmental pledges were lovers' vows. When, on the faith
of those pledges, a landlord borrowed money from the Board of Works
for the improvement of his estate, for stone cottages for his
tenantry, for fences, drainage, and the like, suddenly his income is
still further reduced; but the interest he has to pay for the loan
contracted on the broader basis remains the same. Which is a kind of
thing on all fours with the plan of locking up a debtor so that he
cannot work at his trade, while ordering him to pay so much weekly
from earnings which the law itself prevents his making.
If the sum of misery remains constant in Ireland, its distribution has
changed hands. The small deposits in the savings-banks have increased
to an enormous extent, and in many places where the tenants have for
some years refused to pay their rents, but have still kept the land,
the women have learned to dress. But the owners of the land--say that
they are ladies with no man in the family--have wanted bread, and have
been kept from starvation only by surreptitious supplies delivered in
the dead darkness of the night. These supplies have of necessity been
rare and scanty, for the most honest tenant dared not face the
vengeance of the League by openly paying his just due. Did not Mr.
Dillon, on August 23rd, 1887, say, "If there is a man in Ireland base
enough to back down, to turn his back on the fight now that Coercion
has passed, I pledge myself in the face of this meeting, that I will
denounce him from public platform by name, and I pledge myself to the
Government that, let that man be whom he may, his life will not be a
happy one, either in Ireland or across the seas." With such a
formidable organisation as this, what individual would have the
courage to stand out for abstract justice to a landlord? It would have
been, and it has been, standing out for his own destruction. Hence,
for no fault, no rack-renting, have proprietors--and especially
ladies--been treated as mortal enemies by those whom they had always
befriended--for no reason whatever but that it was an easy victory for
the Campaigners to obtain. Women, with never a man to defend them,
could be more easily manipulated than if they were so many stalwart
young fellows, handy in their turn with guns and revolvers, and man
for man a match even for Captain Moonlight. If these ladies dared to
evict their non-paying tenants they would be either boycotted or
"visited," or perhaps both. Besides, who would venture to take the
vacant land? And how could a couple of delicate ladies, say, till the
ground with their own hands? The old fable of the dog in the manger
holds good with these Campaigners. Those who will not pay prevent
others who would; and the hated "landgrabber," denounced from altar
and platform alike, is simply an honest and industrious worker, who
would make his own living and the landlord's rent out of a bit of land
which is lying idle and going to waste.
All through the disturbed districts we come upon facts like this--upon
the ruin and humiliation of kindly and delicately-nurtured ladies, of
which the English public knows nothing; and while it hysterically
pities the poor down-trodden peasant and goes in for Home Rule as the
panacea, the wife of a tenant owing five years' rent and refusing to
pay one, dresses in costly attire--and the lady proprietor knows
penury and hunger; not to speak of the agonies of personal terror
endured for months at a stretch. Let us, who live in a well-ordered
country, realize for a moment the mental condition of those who dwell
in the shadow of assassination--women to whom every unusual noise is
as the sentence of death, and whose days are days of trembling, and
their nights of anguish for the fear of death that encompasses them.
Is this according to the law of elemental justice? Are our sympathies
to be confined wholly to one class, and are the sorrows and the wrongs
done to another not to count? Surely it is time for some of the
sentimental fog in which so many of us have been living to be
dispelled in favour of the light of truth!
Here is an instructive little bit on which we would do well to
ponder:--
A certain authority gives the following anecdote:--He says that he
"has just had a long conversation with one of the leading Galway
merchants. 'A farmer of this county,' said he, 'told me yesterday that
he had let his meadowing at £8 an acre. I bought all his barley, and
he confessed that on this crop too he had made £8 an acre. Now the
judicial rent of this man's holding is 10s. the acre. He said, "I have
nothing to complain of."' This man was a tenant of Lord Clanricarde;
one of those people who decline to pay a farthing in the way of rent
to the lawful owner of the soil. The case we have cited may be an
extreme one, but it is generally admitted by those who are acquainted
with the facts, and who speak the truth that the rents on the
Clanricarde property, speaking generally, are low rents, and yet not
only is it impossible to collect these rents, but the agent who
represents Lord Clanricarde, and whose only fault is that he tries to
do his duty to his employer without unnecessary harshness to the
tenantry, dare not go outside his house without an escort of police,
and every time he leaves his house, he risks his life. Referring to
this agent, Mr. Tener, the correspondent says:--
"No one would think from looking at him that he literally carries his
life in his hand, and that if he were not guarded as closely as he is
he would be shot in twenty-four hours. He never goes outside the walls
of the Portumna demesne without an escort of seven policemen--two
mounted men in front, two behind, and three upon his car. He, too, as
well as the driver, is armed, so the would-be assassins must reckon
with nine armed men. In the opinion of those who know the
neighbourhood his escort is barely strong enough. He was fired at a
few weeks ago, and the horse which he was driving shot dead. The
police who were with him on the car were rolled out upon the road, and
before they could recover themselves and pursue the Moonlighters had
escaped.' And this is supposed to be a civilised country, and is a
part of the United Kingdom!
"Whereas it seems to us Lord Clanricarde is to blame is in not living,
at any rate for some part of the year, upon his Irish property. This
nobleman represents one of the most ancient families in Ireland. He is
the representative of the Clanricarde Burkes, who have been settled
upon this property for 700 years. He draws, or rather drew, a very
large income from it, and there can be little question that his
presence would encourage and sustain smaller proprietors who are
fighting a losing battle in defence of their rights. These proprietors
may fairly claim that the leading men of their order should stand by
them in the time of trial. Unfortunately, this assistance has not been
invariably, or even as a rule, rendered by the great Irish landowners.
It is, indeed, largely because they have failed in their duty that the
present troubles have come upon Irish landlords as a body. If only in
the past the great landowners had lived in Ireland and spent at least
a portion of the incomes they derived from Ireland upon their estates,
the present agitation against landlordism would never have reached the
point at which it has arrived. The absence of the landlords, and in
many cases their refusal to recognise the legitimate claims of their
districts upon them, has made it possible for the agitators who have
now the ear of the people to bring about that severance of classes,
and that embittered feeling of class against class, which is doing
Ireland more injury at the present time than all the rack-renters put
together."
Those who plead for the landlords who have been so cruelly robbed and
ruined are weak-voiced and reticent compared to the loudly crying
advocates for the peasantry. English tourists run over for a fortnight
to Ireland, talk to the jarvies, listen to the peasants themselves,
forbear to go near any educated or responsible person with knowledge
of the facts and a character to lose, and accept as gospel everything
they hear. There is no check and no verification. Pat and Tim and Mike
give their accounts of this and that, bedad! and tell their piteous
tales of want and oppression. The English tourist swallows it all
whole as it comes to him, and writes his account to the sympathetic
Press, which publishes as gospel stories which have not one word of
truth in them. In fact, the term "English tourist" has come to mean
the same as _gobemouche_ in France; and clever Pat knows well enough
that there is not a fly in the whole region of fable which is too
large for the brutal Saxon to swallow. Abject poverty without shoes to
its feet, with only a few rags to cover its unwashed nakedness, and an
unfurnished mud cabin shared with the pigs and poultry for its sole
dwelling-place--abject poverty begs a copper from "his honour" for the
love of God and the glory of the Blessed Virgin, telling meantime a
heartrending story of privation and oppression. Abject poverty points
to all the outward signs and circumstances of its woe; but it forgets
the good stone house in which live the son and the son's wife--the
dozen or more of cattle grazing free on the mountain side--that bit of
fertile land where the very weeds grow into beauty by their
luxuriance--and those quiet hundreds hidden away for the sole pleasure
of hoarding. And the English tourist takes it all in, and blazes out
into wrath against the tyrannous landlord who has reduced an honest
citizen to this fearful state of misery; knowing nothing of the craft
which is known to all the residents round about, and not willing to
believe it were he even told. For the dramatic instinct is strong in
human nature, and in these later days there is an ebullient surplusage
of sympathy which only desires to find an object. Across the Bristol
Channel, the English tourist finds these objects ready-made to his
hand; and the question is still further embroiled, and the light of
truth still more obscured, that a few impulsive, credulous, and
non-judicially-minded young people may find something whereon to
excite their emotions, and give vent to them in letters to the
newspapers when excited.
Only the other day a young Irishman who has to do with the land
question was mistaken for a brutal but credulous Saxon by the jarvey
who had him in tow. Consequently, Pat plied his fancied victim with
the wildest stories of this man's wrongs and that lone widow's
sufferings. When he found out his mistake he laughed and said:
"Begorra, I thought your honour was an English tourist!" And at a
certain trial which took place in Cork, the judge put by some absurd
statement by saying, half-indignant, half amused: "Do you take me for
an English tourist?" Nevertheless the race will continue so long as
there are excitable young persons of either sex whose capacity for
swallowing flies is practically unlimited, and an hysterical Press to
which they can betake themselves.
The following authoritative instance of this misplaced sympathy may
suffice. The _Westminster Review_ published a certain article on the
Olphert estate, among other things. Those who have read it know its
sensational character. At Cork the other day the priest concerned had
to confess on oath that only three of the Olphert tenants had received
relief.[D]
In the famous Luggacurren evictions the poor dispossessed dupes lost
their all at the bidding of the Campaigners, on the plea of inability
to pay rents voluntarily offered by Lord Lansdowne to be reduced 20
per cent. After these evictions the lands were let to the "Land
Corporation," which had some short time ago four hundred head of
cattle over and above the full rent paid honestly down; but the former
holders are living on charity doled out to them by the Campaigners,
and in huts built for them by the Campaigners on the edge of the rich
and kindly land which once gave them home and sustenance. How bitterly
they curse the evil counsels which led to their destruction only they
and the few they dare trust know. Take, too, these two authoritative
stories. They are of the things one blindly believes and rages
against--with what justice the dénouement of the sorry farce, best
shows:--
"The correspondents of the _Freeman's Journal_, in response to the
circular some time ago addressed to them continue to supply fictitious
and exaggerated statements of events alleged to have happened 'in the
country,' nearly every day some example is afforded. One of the latest
is a pathetic tale of the 'suicide of a tenant.' It represents that
Andrew Kelly, of Cloonlaugh, 'one of the three tenants against whom
A.W. Sampey, J.P., landlord, obtained ejectments,' became demented
from the fear of eviction, and drowned himself in a bog hole in
consequence. The account is a gross misrepresentation of the facts.
Andrew Kelly was not a tenant of Mr. Sampey's, nor had he been for the
last five years. His son, it is true, is one of the tenants against
whom a decree was obtained, but this did not apparently trouble the
father much, as he had been living away from his son for a long time,
although he had come to see him a few days before he was drowned.
There was no suspicion either of foul play or suicide, and the
coroner's jury returned no such verdict as that given in the
_Freeman_. The veracious correspondent of that journal stated that the
jury found that 'Andrew Kelly came by his death through drowning on
the 22nd October while suffering under temporary insanity brought
about by fear of eviction.' The following is the verdict which the
coroner's jury actually arrived at:--'We find that Andrew Kelly's
death was caused by suffocation; that he was found dead in the
townland of Clooncriur, on the 24th day of October, 1889.' This is the
way in which sensational news is manufactured for the purpose of
promoting an anti-landlord crusade and prejudicing the owners of
property in the eyes of the country."
"Speaking at Newmarch, near Barnsley, last month, Mr. Waddy drew a
heartrending picture of the tyranny practised in Ireland, and
illustrated his theme and moved his audience to the execration of Mr.
Balfour by the artistic recital of a horrible tale. He declared that a
little child had been barbarously sentenced by resident magistrates to
a month's imprisonment for throwing a stone at a policeman. Some
hard-headed or hard-hearted Yorkshireman, however, would not believe
Mr. Waddy offhand, and challenged him to declare names, place, and
date. On the 15th of November, Mr. Waddy gave the following
particulars in writing. He stated that the magistrates who had imposed
the brutal punishment were Mr. Hill and Colonel Bowlby, that the case
was tried at Keenagh on the 23rd of April, 1888, that the child's name
was Thomas Quin, aged nine, and that the charge was throwing stones at
the police.
"The clue thus afforded has been followed up. It is grievous that cool
and calculating investigation should spoil a pretty story, but here is
the truth.
"On the 20th of April, before Colonel Stewart and Colonel Bowlby,
resident magistrates, Thomas Quin, aged 19 years, was convicted of
using intimidation towards William Nutley, in consequence of his
having done an act which he had a legal right to do--viz., to evict a
labourer, Michael Fegan, of Clearis, who refused to work for him.
Thomas Quin was sentenced to one month's imprisonment.
"I am quite sure that Mr. Waddy will publicly acknowledge that he
played upon the feelings of his hearers with a trumped-up tale of woe,
but I wonder whether anything will teach the British political tourist
that a great number of my countrymen unfortunately feel a genuine
delight in hoaxing them.
"Your obedient servant,
"AN IRISH LIBERAL."
As for the assertion of poverty and inability to pay, so invariably
made to excuse defaulting tenants, I will give these two instances to
the contrary.
"Writing on behalf of Mr. Balfour to Mr. E. Bannister, of Hyde,
Cheshire, Mr. George Wyndham, M.P., recounts a somewhat remarkable
circumstance in connection with the position and circumstances of a
tenant on Lord Kenmare's estate who declined to pay his rent on the
plea of poverty:--'Irish Office, Nov. 28, 1889. Dear Sir,--In reply to
your letter of the 22nd inst., I beg to inform you that I have made
careful inquiries into the case of Molloy, a tenant on Lord Kenmare's
estate. I find that so far from exaggerating the scope of this
incident, you somewhat understate the case. The full particulars were
as follow:--The estate bailiffs visited the house of Molloy, a tenant
who owed £30 rent and arrears. They seized his cows, and then called
at his home to ask him if he would redeem them by paying the debt.
Molloy stated that he was willing to pay, but that he had only £7
altogether. He handed seven notes to the bailiff, who found that one
of them was a £5 note, so that the amount was £11 instead of £7. On
being pressed to pay the balance he admitted that he had a small
deposit of £20 in the bank, and produced a document which he said was
the deposit receipt for this sum. On the bailiff examining this
receipt he found it was for £100 and not for £20. On being informed of
his mistake, Molloy took back the £100 receipt and produced another,
which turned out to be for £40. A further search on his part led to
the production of the receipt for £20, with which and £10 in notes he
paid the rent. You will observe that this tenant, refusing to pay £30,
and obliging his landlord to take steps against him, possessed at the
time £171, besides having stock on his land.--Yours faithfully, GEORGE
WYNDHAM.'"
And I have it on the word of honour of one whose word is his bond,
that certain defaulting tenants lately confessed to him that they had
in their pockets as much as the value of three years' rent for the two
they owed, but that they dared not, for their lives, pay it. They
would if they dared, but they dared not. The plea of inability to pay
the reduced scale of rent is for the most part simple moonshine; and
the terrorism imported into this question comes from the Campaigners,
not from the landlords, nor yet from the police. If these paid
political agitators were silenced, and if the laws already passed were
suffered to work by themselves according to their intent, things would
speedily settle. But then the agitators would lose their means of
subsistence, their social status, and their political importance. As
things are these men are ruining the country they affect to defend;
while the worst enemies of the peasant are those who call themselves
his friends, and the blind-eyed sympathisers who bewail the wrongs he
does not suffer and the misery he himself might prevent. All that
Ireland wants now is rest from political agitation, the orderly
development of its resources;--and especially finality in
legislation;[E]--so that the one side may know to what it has to
trust, and the other may be freed from those illusive dreams and
demoralising hopes which destroy the manlier efforts after self-help
in the present for that universal amelioration to be found in the
coming of the cocklicranes in the future.
There is, however, a good work quietly going on which will touch the
evil root of things in time, but not in the sense of the Home Rulers
and Campaigners. This good work will render it unnecessary to follow
the advice of that rough and ready politician who saw no way out of
the wood save to "send to Hell for Oliver Cromwell"; also that of the
facetious Dove who winked as he offered his olive branch:--"Shure the
best way to pacify Oireland is for the Queen to marry Parnell." A more
practicable method than either is silently making headway against the
elements of disorder; and in spite of the upsetters and their
opposition the rough things will be made smooth, and, the troubled
waters will run clear, if only the Government of order may be allowed
time to do its beneficent work of repression and re-establishment
thoroughly and to the roots.