LAND AND LABOUR
The fortunes of every country, when one comes seriously to reflect on
it, are to a great extent dependent on these two vital factors--Land
and Labour. In a country so circumstanced as Ireland, practically
bereft of industries and manufactures, land and labour--and more
especially the labour which is put into land--are the foundation of
its very being. They mean everything to it--whether its people be well
or ill off, whether its trade is good, its towns prosperous, its
national economy secure.
The history of Ireland, ever since the first Englishman set foot on it
with the eye of conquest, centres to a more or less degree around the
land. We know how the ancient clans tenaciously clung to their
heritage and how ruthlessly they were deprived of it by the
Plantations and the Penal Laws and by a series of confiscations, the
memory of which even still chills the blood. Conquest, confiscation,
eviction, persecution--this was the terrible story of Ireland for
seven centuries--and the past century worst of all. At the
commencement of the nineteenth century Ireland was extensively
cultivated. The land had been parcelled out amongst the people;
holdings were multiplied and tenancies for life increased amazingly
because it meant a larger rent-roll for the landlord and a great
increase in the voting power of his serfs. But there came the Corn
Laws, making cultivation unprofitable, and earlier the law of Catholic
Emancipation, withdrawing the right of voting from the forty-shilling
freeholders, and the crisis was reached when the Great Famine appeared
and was followed by the Great Clearances. The Famine lasted for three
years, the Clearances endured for over thirty. Houses were demolished,
fences levelled, the peasants swept out and the notices to quit kept
falling, as the well-known saying of Gladstone expressed it, as thick
as snowflakes. Between 1849 and 1860, according to Mulhall, 373,000
Irish families were evicted, numbering just about 2,000,000 in all. "I
do not think the records of any country, civilised or barbarian," said
Sir Robert Peel, "ever presented such scenes of horror."
Legislation became necessary to counteract the appalling evils arising
from such a state of things. It went on through the years with varying
fortune, never providing any real solution of the intolerable
relations between landlord and tenant, until the blessed Land
Conference pact was sealed and signed and the country finally
delivered from the haunting terror of landlordism. Now although the
entire population may be said in Ireland to be either directly or
indirectly dependent on the land, two classes were absolutely
dependent on it for their very livelihood--namely, the farmers and the
agricultural labourers. And through all the various agrarian
agitations they made united cause against their common enemy, the
landlord. There was also in the days of my boyhood a far friendlier
relation between the farmers and labourers than unhappily exists at
present. Their joint heritage of suffering and hardship had drawn them
together in bonds of sympathy and friendship. The farmer often shared,
in the bitterness of the winter months, something out of his own stock
of necessities with his less fortunate labourer. And before the
arrival of the Creameries the daily allowance of the gallon of
"skimmed" milk was made to almost every labourer's family in the
country by kind-hearted neighbouring farmers. In addition, in a land
where few were rich, the ancient proverb held good: "The poor always
help one another." And it is true that, in the darkest days of their
suffering, the farmers and labourers shouldered their troubles and
their sorrows in a community of sympathy, which at least lessened
their intensity. It is only with the growth of a greater independence
among either class that the old friendly bonds and relationships have
shown a loosening, and newer and more personal interests have tended
to divide them into distinctive bodies, with separate class interests
and class programmes.
As a very little boy I remember trudging my way to school with
children who knew not what the comfort of boots and stockings was on
the coldest winter's day; who shivered in insufficient rags and whose
gaunt bodies never knew any nourishment save what could be got from
"Indian meal stir-about" (a kind of weak and watery porridge made from
maize). And it was not the children of the labourers alone who endured
this bleak and starved and sunless childhood; the offspring of the
smaller struggling farmers were often as badly off--they were all the
progeny of the poor, kept poor and impoverished by landlordism. This
further bond of blood and even class relationship also bound the
farmers and labourers together--the labourers of to-day were, in
countless cases, the farmers of yesterday, whom the Great Clearances
had reduced to the lowest form of servitude and who dragged out an
existence of appalling wretchedness in sight of their former homes,
now, alas, razed to the ground. My mind carries me back to the time
when the agricultural labourer in Munster was working for four
shillings a week, and trying to rear a family on it! I vowed then that
if God ever gave me the chance to do anything for this woe-stricken
class I would strive for their betterment, according to the measure of
my opportunity. And it happened, in the mysterious workings of
Providence, that I was able to battle and plan and accomplish solid
work for the amelioration of the labourers' lot.
When Mr William O'Brien was labouring for the wretched "congests" in
the West and founding the United Irish League to make the great final
onslaught on the ramparts of landlordism, a few of us in the South
were engaged unpretentiously but earnestly to get houses and
allotments for the agricultural labourers, and to provide them with
work on the roads during the winter months when they could not labour
on the land. Ten years previously we had laid the foundations of what
we hoped would be a widespread national movement for the regeneration
of the working classes. The founder of that movement was the late Mr
P.J. Neilan, of Kanturk, a man of eminent talent and of a great heart
that throbbed with sympathy for the sufferings of the workers. I was
then a schoolboy, with a youthful yearning of my own towards the poor
and the needy, and I joined the new movement. Two others--the one John
D. O'Shea, a local painter, and the other John L. O'Shea, a carman
(the similarity of their names often led to amusing mistakes)--with
some humble town workers, formed the working vanguard of the new
movement, what I might term a sort of apostolate of rural democracy.
Our organisation was first known as the Kanturk Trade and Labour
Association. As we carried our flag, audaciously enough, as it seemed
in those days, to neighbouring villages and towns, we enlarged our
title, and now came to be known as "the Duhallow Trade and Labour
Association." I was then trying some 'prentice flights in journalism
and I managed to get reports of our meetings into the Cork Press, with
the result that demands for our evangelistic services began to flow in
upon us from Kerry and Limerick and Tipperary. But, even as we grew
and waxed stronger we still, with rather jealous exclusiveness, called
ourselves "the parent branch" in Kanturk. We are, by the way, a very
proud people down there, proud of our old town and our old barony,
which has produced some names distinguished in Irish history, such as
John Philpot Curran, Barry Yelverton and the adored _fiancée_ of
Robert Emmet.
In time we interested Michael Davitt in our movement, and we achieved
the glorious summit of our ambitions when we got him to preside at a
great Convention of our Labour branches in Cork, where we formally
launched the movement on a national basis under the title of the Irish
Democratic Trade and Labour Federation. The credit of this achievement
was altogether and entirely due to Mr Neilan, who had founded the
movement, watched over its progress, addressed its meetings, framed
its programme and carried it triumphantly to this stage of success.
Unfortunately, when all seemed favourable for the spread of the
movement, though not in opposition to the National League but as a
sort of auxiliary force, moving in step with it, the disastrous Split
occurred. It spelt ruin for our organisation because I think it will
not be denied that the workers are the most vehement and vital
elements in the national life, and they took sides more violently than
any other section of the population. After trying for a little while
to steer the Democratic Trade and Labour Federation clear of the
shoals of disunion, and having failed, Mr Neilan and his friends gave
up the task in despair. Meanwhile, however, Mr Michael Austin of the
Cork United Trades, who was joint-secretary, with Mr Neilan, of the
Federation, succeeded in getting himself absorbed into the Irish
Party, and, having got the magic letters of M.P. after his name, not
very much was ever heard of him in the Labour movement afterwards.
In the pursuit of journalistic experience I left Ireland for a few
years, and on my return I found that a new Labour movement had been
founded on the ruins of the old, under the title of the Irish Land and
Labour Association. Mr James J. O'Shee, a young Carrick-on-Suir
solicitor, was the secretary and moving spirit in this--a man of
advanced views, of intense sympathy with the labourer's position, and
of a most earnest desire to improve their wretched lot. I obtained an
editorial position in West Cork which left me free to devote my spare
time to the Labour cause, which I again enthusiastically espoused,
having as colleagues in County Cork Mr Cornelius Buckley, of Blarney,
another of exactly the same name in Cork, my old friend Mr John L.
O'Shea, of Kanturk, and Mr William Murphy, of Macroom--men whose names
deserve to be for ever honourably associated with the movement which
did as much in its own way for the emancipation and independence of
the labourers as the National organisations did for the farmers.
It is not my purpose here to recount the fierce opposition that was
given to the labourer's programme. It had at first no friends either
in the Party or in the Press. I verily believe that there were
otherwise good and honest men who thought the labourers had no citizen
rights and that it was the height of conscious daring for anybody to
lift either hand or voice on their behalf. But those of us who had
taken up the labourer's cause were well aware of all the difficulties
and obstacles that would confront us; and we knew that worst of all we
had to battle with the deadly torpor of the labourers themselves, who
were trained to shout all right for "the Land for the People" but who
had possibly no conception of their own divine right to an inheritance
in that selfsame land. Furthermore, since the Land and Labour
Association was an organisation entirely apart from the Trade and
Labour movement of the cities and larger corporate towns we received
little support or assistance from what I may term, without offence,
the aristocracy of labour. We nevertheless simply went our way,
building up our branches, extending knowledge of the labourers'
claims, educating these humble folk into a sense of their civic rights
and citizen responsibilities and making thinking men out of what were
previously little better than soulless serfs. It was all desperately
hard, uphill work, with little to encourage and no reward beyond the
consciousness that one was reaching out a helping hand to the most
neglected, despised, and unregarded class in the community. The
passage of the Local Government Act of 1898 was that which gave power
and importance to our movement. The labourers were granted votes for
the new County and District Councils and Poor Law Guardians as well as
for Members of parliament. They were no longer a people to be kicked
and cuffed and ordered about by the shoneens and squireens of the
district: they became a very worthy class, indeed, to be courted and
flattered at election times and wheedled with all sorts of fair
promises of what would be done for them. The grant of Local Government
enabled the labourers to take a mighty stride in the assertion of
their independent claims to a better social position and more constant
and remunerative employment. The programme that we put forward on
their behalf was a modest one. It was our aim to keep within the
immediately practical and attainable and the plainly justifiable and
reasonable. In the towns and in the country they had to live in hovels
and mud-wall cabins which bred death and disease and all the woeful
miseries of mankind. One would not kennel a dog or house any of the
lower animals in the vile abominations called human dwellings in which
tens of thousands of God's comfortless creatures were huddled together
in indiscriminate wretchedness. Added to that, most of them had not a
"haggart" (a few perches of garden) on which to grow any household
vegetables. They were landless and starving, the last word in pitiful
rags and bare bones. They were in a far greater and more intense
degree than the farmers the victims of capricious harvests, whilst
their winters were recurrent periods of the most awful and
unbelievable distress and hunger and want. The first man to notice
their degraded position was Parnell, who, early in the eighties, got a
Labourers' Act passed for the provision of houses and half-acre
allotments of land. But as the administration of this Act was
entrusted to the Poor Law Boards, as it imposed a tax upon the
ratepayers, and as the labourers had then no votes and could secure no
consideration for their demands, needless to say, very few cottages
were built. With the advent of the Local Government Act and the
extension of the franchise, the labourer was now able to insist on a
speeding-up of building operations. But the Labourers' Act needed many
amendments, a simplification and cheapening of procedure, an extension
of taxing powers, an enlargement of the allotment up to an acre and,
where the existing abode of the labourers was insanitary, an
undeniable claim to a new home. Moderate and just and necessary to the
national welfare as these claims were, it took us years of unwearied
agitation before we were able to get them legislatively recognised.
What we did, however, more promptly achieve was the smashing of the
contract system by which the roads of the country were farmed out to
contractors, mostly drawn from the big farming and grazier classes
who, by devious dodges, known to all, were able to make very
comfortable incomes out of them. We insisted--and after some exemplary
displays of a resolute physical force we carried our point--that in
the case of the main roads, particularly, these should be worked under
the system known as "direct labour"--that is, by the county and deputy
surveyors directly employing the labourers on them and paying them a
decent living wage. In this way we removed at one stroke the black
shadow of want that troubled their winters and made these dark months
a horror for them and their families. But we had still to remove the
mud-wall cabins and the foetid dens in the villages and towns in which
families were huddled together anyhow, and in our effort to bring
about this most necessary of social reforms we received little or no
assistance from public men or popular movements. We were left to our
own unaided resources and our own persistent agitation. As I have
already stated, I was elected Member of Parliament for Mid-Cork on the
death of Dr Tanner in 1901, and Mr O'Shee had been previously elected
for West Waterford, but not strictly on the Land and Labour platform
as I was. Nevertheless, we heartily co-operated in and out of
Parliament in making the Labour organisation a real and vital force,
and our relations for many useful years, as I am happy to think, were
of the most cordial and kindly character.
In the Land Purchase Act of 1903 Mr Wyndham included a few
insignificant clauses bearing on the labourer's grievances, but
dropped them on the suggestion of Mr O'Brien, to whom he gave an
undertaking at the same time to bring in a comprehensive Labourers'
Bill in the succeeding session. When that session came Mr Wyndham had,
however, other fish to fry. The Irish Party and the Orange gang were
howling for his head, and his days of useful service in Ireland were
reduced to nothingness. Meanwhile we kept pressing our demands as
energetically as we could on the public notice, but we were
systematically boycotted in the Press and by the Nationalist leaders
until a happy circumstance changed the whole outlook for us. It was
our custom to invite to all our great Labour demonstrations the
various Nationalist leaders, without any regard to their differences
of opinion on the main national issue. The way we looked at it was
this--that we wanted the support of all parties in Ireland, Unionist
as well as Nationalist, for our programme, which was of a purely
non-partisan character, and we were ready to welcome support from any
quarter whence it came.
Our invitations were, however, sent out in vain until, on Mr O'Brien's
re-election for Cork in October 1904, a delegation from the Land and
Labour Association approached him and requested him to come upon our
platform and to specifically advocate the labourers' claims, now long
overdue. Without any hesitation, nay, even with a readiness which made
his acceptance of our request doubly gracious, Mr O'Brien replied that
now that the tenants' question was on the high road to a settlement he
considered that the labourers had next call on the national energies
and that, for his part, he would hold himself at our disposal.
What followed is so faithfully and impartially related in Mr O'Brien's
book, _An Olive Branch in Ireland,_ that I reproduce it:
"One of our first cares on my return to Cork was to restore vitality
to the labourer's cause, and formulate for the first time a precise
legislative scheme on which they might take their stand as their
charter. This scheme was placed before the country at a memorable
meeting in Macroom on December 10, 1904, and whoever will take the
trouble of reading it will find therein all the main principles and
even details of the great measure subsequently carried into law in
1906. The Irish Land and Labour Association, which was the
organisation of the labourers, unanimously adopted the scheme, and
commissioned their Secretary, Mr J.J. Shee, M.P., in their name, to
solicit the co-operation of the Directory of the United Irish League
in convening a friendly Conference of all Irish parties and sections
for the purpose of securing the enactment of a Labourers' Bill on
these lines as a non-contentious measure. If common ground was to be
found anywhere on which all Irishmen, or at the worst all
Nationalists, might safely grasp hands, and with a most noble aim, it
was surely here. But once more Mr Dillon scented some new plot against
the unity and authority of the Irish Party, and at the Directory
meeting of the secretary of the Land and Labour Association was
induced without any authority from his principals to abandon their
invitation, and thus take the first step to the disruption of his own
association.
"I bowed and held my peace, to see what another year might bring forth
through the efforts of those who had made a national agreement upon the
subject impracticable. Another year dragged along without a Labourers'
Bill, or any effort of the Irish Party to bring it within the domain of
practical politics. The Land and Labour Association determined to rouse
the Government and the country to the urgency of the question by an
agitation of an unmistakable character. Mr Redmond, Mr Dillon and all
their chief supporters were invariably invited to these demonstrations;
but the moment they learned that Mr Harrington, Mr Healy and myself had
been invited as well, a rigorous decree of boycott went forth against
the Labour demonstrations, and as a matter of fact no representative of
the Irish Party figured on the Labourers' platform throughout the
agitation. This, unfortunately, was not the most inexcusable of their
services to the Labourers' cause. When the Land and Labour Association
held their annual Convention, the secretary, who had infringed their
instructions at the Directory meeting, finding himself hopelessly
outnumbered, seceded from the organisation and formed a rival
association of his own; and sad and even shocking though the fact is, it
is beyond dispute that this split in the ranks of the unhappy labourers,
in the very crisis of their cause, was organised with the aid of the
moneys of the National Organisation administered by the men who were at
that very moment deafening the country with their indignation against
dissension-mongers and their zeal for majority rule.
"It was all over again the dog-in-the-manger policy which had already
kept the evicted tenants for years out in the cold. They would neither
stand on a non-contentious platform with myself nor organise a single
Labourers' demonstration of their own. It has been repeatedly stated
by members who were constant attendants at the meetings of the Irish
Party that the subject of the Labourers' grievances was never once
discussed at any meeting of the party until the agitation in Ireland
had first compelled the introduction of Mr Bryce's Bill. Then, indeed,
when the battle was won, and there was only question of the booty, Mr
Redmond made the public boast that he and Mr Dillon "were in almost
daily communications with Mr Bryce upon the subject." The excuse was
as unavailing as his plea that the finally revised terms of sale of
his Wexford estate left him without a penny of profit. What concerned
the country was the first announcement of 24-1/2 years' purchase
authorised under his own hand which had 'given a headline' to every
landlord in the country. In the same way, whatever obsequious
attendance he might dance on Mr Bryce, when the die was cast and the
Bill safe, the ineffaceable facts remain that neither he nor anybody
in his party whom he could influence had stood on a Labour platform,
or touched upon the subject at the party meeting, while the intentions
of the Government were, as we shall see in a moment, undecided in the
extreme, but on the contrary were (it may be hoped unconscious but
none the less indispensable) parties to an organised effort to split
the Labourers' Association asunder while their fate was trembling in
the balance.
"Their war upon the Land and Labour Association was all the more
wanton, because Mr Dillon's persuasion, which gave rise to it that the
Association had been brigaded into my secret service for some
nefarious purpose of my own, was as absurdly astray as all the rest of
his troubled dreams of my Machiavellian ambitions. To avoid giving any
pretext for such a suspicion, I declined to accept any office or
honour or even to become a member of the Land and Labour Association,
attended no meeting to which Mr Redmond and Mr Dillon were not invited
as well as I; and beyond my speeches at those meetings, never in the
remotest degree interfered in the business or counsels of the
Association. A number of men on the governing council of the
Association were to my knowledge, and continued to be, sympathisers
with my critics. Beyond the fact that their president, Mr Sheehan,
M.P., happened to be the most successful practiser of my Land Purchase
plans in the county of Cork, as well as by far the ablest advocate the
Labourers' agitation had called into action, I know of no shadow of
excuse for the extraordinary folly which led responsible Irishmen,
with the cry of 'Unity' on their lips, not only to decline to meet me
on a common platform, but to make tens of thousands of absolutely
unoffending labourers the victims of their differences with me.
"Despite their aloofness and their attempts to divide the Labourers'
body, the agitation swept throughout the south of Ireland with an
intensity which nothing could withstand. Demonstrations of amazing
extent and still more remarkable resoluteness of spirit were addressed
by my friends and myself in Charleville and Macroom, County Cork;
Kilfinane and Drumcolliher, County Limerick; Tralee and Castle Island,
County Kerry; Scariff, County Clare; Goolds Cross, County Tipperary;
and Ballycullane, County Wexford; and by the time they were over, the
field was fought and won. One last difficulty remained; but it was a
formidable difficulty. So far from Mr Redmond's 'almost daily
communications with Mr Bryce' reaching back to the critical days of
the problem, we were already in the first days of summer in the
session of 1906 when a communication was made to me from a high
official quarter that the Irish Government were so deeply immersed in
the Irish Council Bill of the following year that they shrank from the
labour and the financial difficulties of a Labourers' Bill in the
current session, and an appeal was diplomatically hinted as to whether
there was any possibility of slowing down the Labourers' agitation so
as to make a postponement to the following session practicable. My
reply was undiplomatically clear:--that, if the Government wanted to
deprive the Irish Council Bill of all chance of a hearing, they could
not take a better means of making the country too hot for themselves
than by proposing to fob off the labourers for another year, and that
not only would I not, if I could, but could not if I would, moderate
their insistence upon immediate redress.
"A short time afterwards, I met Sir Antony MacDonnell in the House of
Commons, and he asked 'What is your labourers' minimum?' I gave him a
brief outline of the Macroom programme. 'No rational being could
object,' he said, 'but what does it mean in hard cash?' I replied,
'Roughly, four millions.' And the great Irishman--'the worst enemy
that ever came to Ireland' of Mr Dillon's nightmare hours--ended the
interview with these laconic words: 'The thing ought to be done and I
think can be.' At the period of the session at which the Bill was
introduced, the opposition of even half-a-dozen determined men could
have at any stage achieved its ruin. Thanks, however, to the good
feeling the precedent of the Act of 1903 and the admirably
conciliatory temper displayed by the labourers themselves in their
agitation had engendered, the Bill went triumphantly through and has
been crowned with glory in its practical application. I never pass
through any of the southern counties now and feast my eyes on the
labourers' cottages which dot the landscape--prettier than the
farmers' own homes--honeysuckles or jasmines generally trailing around
the portico--an acre of potato ground sufficient to be a sempiternal
insurance against starvation, stretching out behind--the pig and the
poultry--perhaps a plot of snowdrops or daffodils for the English
market, certainly a bunch of roses in the cheeks of the children
clustering about the doorsteps--without thankfully acknowledging that
Cork was right in thinking such conquests were worth a great deal of
evil speech from angry politicians."