MURDER, OUTRAGE AND CRIME
Once launched upon memories of those horrible perpetrations by so-called
Christians, which disgraced alike my native country and all Christendom
(because the criminals nominally worshipped the same God, and professed
reverence to Him), I could enumerate instances until I had filled a
volume.
You know how the Ghost told Hamlet that he could a tale unfold, whose
lightest word would harrow up his soul. Why, I could tell five score,
and still not have exhausted the roll of crime.
As my experience is mainly connected with Kerry, it is
characteristically Irish for me to start with an example from County
Cork. The outrage was on the Rathcole estate of Sir George Colthurst.
The rental was £1500, and the landlord had expended £10,000 on
improvements, so that it was not to be wondered that the labourers
should meet to celebrate their employer's marriage.
Nor to any one knowing Ireland was it surprising that the Land League
should have despatched one of their well-armed bands to fire on them for
so doing.
This was apparently a challenge to Kerry not to be outdone in barbarity
by Cork, her neighbour and rival.
Kerry was quite equal to current demands on her inhumanity.
A labourer of the M'Gillycuddys was visited by another Land League
detachment and had his ear, _à la_ Bulgaria, cut clean off to the bone,
because he worked on a farm from which a tenant had been evicted.
The next night a small Protestant farmer near Tralee found his best cow
tortured and killed because he had sold milk to the police.
On the same night a farmer's house was sacked because he had bought some
'boycotted' hay.
Still on the same night, at Millstreet, another Land League gang
attacked a house, one of the Land League police being killed, and one of
the Crown police wounded.
In fact, all law save Land League law was for a time at an end in
Munster.
At one Kerry Assize, a criminal caught by four policemen in the very act
of breaking into a house, was acquitted, and at the Cork Assize the
Crown Prosecutor, after half a dozen acquittals, announced he would not
continue the farce of putting criminals on their trial.
I mentioned boycotting just now, but I am tempted to pause, because a
new generation that knows not Parnellism, nor the extent of crime in
that unhappy period, may not be aware of the origin of the term.
Captain Boycott was agent for Lord Erne's Mayo estates, and laid out the
whole of his capital £6000, in improving and stocking his own property.
Because, in the course of his duty, he served some ejectment notices, he
was denounced by the Land League, his farm servants were terrorised into
leaving his employment, and when he imported fifty labourers from the
north of Ireland to save his crops, the Government had to despatch a
small army corps of troops and constabulary to protect them. So great
was the power of the League, that even in Dublin the landlord of a hotel
declined to let him stop more than twenty-four hours in the house, as he
was threatened if he ventured to harbour him. For the protection of his
life and no more, the unfortunate gentleman had to leave the country.
Baron Dowse said in charging the Grand Jury of the Connaught Western
Assize, that this case had 'excited the wonder and amazement of a great
part of the United Kingdom and the sorrow of a considerable portion of
Ireland.' Very soon the name of Boycott was given to the approved method
of actively sending a man to Coventry, or threatening his life and
property as well as refusing to permit him to be supplied with even the
bare necessities of existence.
Baron Dowse, a man who had no fear of unmanly criminals, justly styled
this a reign of terror.
Kerry is divided into six Poor Law Unions, three of them--Kenmare,
Cahirciveen and Dingle--are very poor districts; but there was
practically not an outrage in them. Killarney, Tralee and Listowel are
rich by comparison, Tralee being the richest of the three, and
Castleisland the wealthiest portion of the district. There were nearly
as many outrages there as in the whole of the rest of the country, which
shows that poverty was not the cause.
I was in and out of Castleisland, but though I had a sheaf of
threatening letters, I never met with any insults or received a threat
to my face.
Only once did I overhear any hostile mutterings. This was when I was
driving out of Tralee, and my coachman stopped to give a message in the
dusk at a house on the outskirts of the town.
Suddenly two or three men came up, and one said:--
'Now's the time to settle old Hussey.'
Old Hussey--to use their accurate nomenclature--popped his head out of
the window, and also his right hand which held a most serviceable
revolver and invited them to come on.
They did not. In fact they scattered with a rapidity which proved they
had not imbibed enough whisky to affect their legs or give them courage.
This will show that my business--to collect what was due to the
landlords I represented--was not always agreeable work or always easy.
But my duty was to get in rents, and so I got them, whenever I could.
The tenants did not all pay direct, for many were far too frightened.
Quite a number, even of the Roman Catholics, used to send the money
through the Protestant clergy.
How they settled this in the confessional I do not know, possibly it was
a trifle they did not consider worth troubling the priest with.
Three tenants on Lord Kenmare's estate came into my office on one
occasion, and said they would like to pay their rent, but were afraid of
the Land League.
I treated their fears as arrant nonsense, but told them to come and
argue it out with me in my own room.
So soon as they could not be seen by any one they paid up.
Within a few days an armed party went to their houses and shot the three
in their legs.
One man's life was despaired of for some time, but finally they all
recovered.
This outrage was a rather late one, because the Land League latterly
decided to shoot objectionable characters only in the legs, because
though a fuss was made at the time, if a man was killed it was soon
forgotten afterwards, whereas a lame man was a lifelong testimony to
their power.
There is a man hobbling about Castleisland to this day, who was peppered
in this comparatively humanitarian way. I am quite sure he would say
such a comparison had proved odious.
Judge Barry very truly said that a thatched cabin on a mountain-side was
not much of a place of defence, and if the tenant was supposed to have
paid his rent, he would be told to run out with probably three men
standing at the door to shoot him. That was terrorism as inculcated by
the so-called friends of Ireland.
Mr. Forster in his plucky speech to the crowd at Tullamore, said:--
'I went when I was at Tulla to the workhouse, and there saw a poor
fellow lying in bed, the doctors around him, with a blue light over his
face that made me feel that the doctors were not right, when they told
me he might get over it. I felt sure that he must die, and I see this
morning that he has died. But why did that man die? He was a poor lone
farmer. I believe he had paid his rent--I believe he had committed that
crime. He thought it his duty to pay. Fifteen or sixteen men broke into
his house in the middle of the night, pulled him out of his bed and told
him they would punish him. He himself, lying in his death agony as it
were, told me the story. He said, "My wife went down on her knees and
said, 'Here are five helpless children, will you kill their father?'"
They took him out, they discharged a gun filled with shot into his leg,
so closely that they shattered his leg.'
Now there were dozens of instances of that kind of thing in Kerry.
Mr. Parnell started the whole vile crusade, when at Ennis he gave the
advice to shun any man who had bid for a farm from which a tenant had
been evicted.
'Shun him in the street, in the shop, in the marketplace, even in the
place of worship, as if he were a leper of old.'
His words were implicitly obeyed, and outrage followed mere boycotting
till the rapid succession of crimes prevented each one having its full
effect in horrifying civilised Europe.
A very bad case occurred in Millstreet.
Jeremiah Haggerty was a large farmer and shopkeeper. There was no
objection to him, except that he declined to join the Land League, for
which his shop was boycotted, which he told me meant the loss of a
thousand a year to him, but the League failed to boycott his farm,
because he was too good an employer.
He was fired at coming into Millstreet, and the outrage had been so
openly planned, that it was talked of on the preceding evening in every
whisky store.
On another occasion he was leaving Millstreet station, about a mile from
the town, and when about twenty yards from the station he was fired at
and forty grains of shot lodged in the back of his head, neck, and body.
As it was twilight, a railway porter obligingly held up his lantern to
give the miscreants a better view of their victim.
He was a man of most honourable and upright character, who had worked
his way up, and he has now regained his popularity. He started as a
clerk in quite a small way, and must now be worth a very large sum of
money. I was instrumental in getting him made a magistrate, and I have
the greatest respect for him.
I regard this as a decidedly serious example, because of the popularity
of the victim, and also because he had offended no one by word or deed.
Still, there were, of course, many instances which were even more
outrageous.
A farmer, name of Brown, was shot at Castleisland. Two men were arrested
for the murder, and were twice tried before Cork juries. The first
disagreed, but the second found them guilty.
A subscription was made up for the families of the two murderers, to
which contributions were made by the leading shopkeepers of several
neighbouring towns. For several years afterwards, Mrs. Brown could not
get a man to dig her potatoes, nor a woman to milk her cows, although
she had tendered no evidence at the trial, and it was clearly proved
that Brown had given no cause of offence.
But, as a Land Leaguer said to me, it was suspected that he might be in
a position to do so.
Red Indians, or any other barbarians you can think of, would not have
been guilty of wreaking vengeance on the widow of an innocent murdered
man, nor of endowing the wives of his assassins.
Here is another murder story.
A caretaker on an evicted farm on the property of Lord Cork, near
Kanturk, was murdered for taking charge of it.
The evicted tenant had owed eleven years' rent.
Lord Cork had agreed to accept one year's rent in full acquittal, and so
good a landlord was he, that the neighbours of the debtor offered to
make up the amount to that sum.
The tenant firmly declined to pay, because he said another year would
bring him within the statute of limitations.
So then he had to be evicted.
Two men were clearly identified as having perpetrated the unprovoked
crime of assassinating the temporary occupant of the property, and were
arrested.
The Gladstonian Attorney-General, in order to curry popularity, declined
to challenge the jury, when the first man was put on his trial.
Consequently three cousins of the prisoner were impanelled, the jury
disagreed, and the wretch bolted to America that same night.
The second man, though less guilty, was duly tried before a challenged
jury, and not only sentenced but hanged.
He was the organiser of outrages for Cork, and his brother held the
similar delectable office for Kerry. A good deal of the impunity with
which crime was committed was due to the change in the jury laws, by
which so low a class of man was summoned into the box, that criminals
began to consider conviction impossible. To my mind it was quite worth
the consideration of the Cabinet of the time, whether trial by jury
ought not to be abolished in Ireland--indeed, even to-day, I can see few
reasons for its retention and many for its abolition.
Anyhow in the bad times I am now dealing with, to send persons for trial
before a jury was but to advertise the weakness of the law.
Two men at Tralee were suspected of having paid their rent to me, and in
spite of their assurances that they were quite innocent and had not paid
a farthing for two years, it was necessary for the police to escort them
after nightfall to their homes about four miles away, and to advise them
not to venture into the town for a long while after.
One of the worst features, however, of all this terrible period was that
helpless girls and women were victims as well as men, I know of a case
where some ruffians entered the house of a family at night, went into
the bedroom of one of the girls, seized her violently, forced her on her
knees, and held her in that position while one of the gang cut off her
hair with shears, and then poured a quantity of hot tar on her head
before entering the bedroom of her sister to do the same.
A similar fate befell two girls named Murphy merely because they were
suspected of speaking to a policeman.
A man named Finlay was boycotted and then shot dead, and the neighbours
jeered and laughed at his wife, when in her agony she was wringing her
hands in grief.
The poor woman went into the street and knelt down crying:--
'The curse of God rest upon Father ---- for being the cause of my
husband's murder.'
The priest had denounced him from the altar on the previous Sunday.
'Carding' has always been a favourite Irish form of physically
insinuating to a man that he is not exactly popular. It consists of a
wooden board with nails in it being drawn down the naked flesh of a
man's face and body. This foul torture was often heard of, and it has
been whispered that women and even girls have been the victims of this
atrocity.
The merciful man is proverbially merciful to his beast, and those who
showed mercy to neither man nor woman had none on the dumb animals owned
by their victims.
A valuable Spanish ass belonging to Mr. M'Cowan of Tralee was saturated
with paraffin, set on fire, and horribly burned.
A farmer named Lambert found the shoulder of a heifer had been smashed
by some blunt instrument like a hammer. I myself had a couple of cows
killed and salted.
Indeed cattle outrages became incidents of nightly occurrence. Tenants
in all disturbed counties, besides having their houses burnt, saw their
cattle so horribly mutilated that the poor dumb creatures had to be
killed to put them out of their misery. The Society for the Prevention
of Cruelty to Animals would have no chance of obtaining general support
among the lower classes in Kerry, where beasts belonging to your enemy
are simply regarded as so many goods and chattels, to be as badly
damaged as possible.
It is a curious thing that the Irish and the Italian are the two most
poetic and most sensitive races of Europe, and also are the two which
exhibit the greatest indifference to the sufferings of dumb animals.
The distress in Kerry, of course, in the winter of 1879 had been as
great as in the more famous famine, and I have heard the theory advanced
in a London drawing-room that physical suffering renders uneducated
people indifferent to any torture endured by animals. Personally, I
should have thought a fellow feeling made us wondrous kind.
Reverting to matters with which I had more personal connection, an
interesting episode occurred in June 1881, when The O'Donoghue moved the
adjournment of the House of Commons to force a debate upon the subject
of Lord Kenmare's estate, and I wrote a letter in the _Times_ in reply,
from which may be condensed the following facts:--
On the Cork estate, from 1878 to 1881, the evictions did not average one
for each year for every two hundred tenants.
On the Limerick estate for five years there have been no evictions.
On the Kerry estate, since he succeeded (in 1871), Lord Kenmare has
expended £67,115 on drainage, road-making, and building cottages. The
evictions have been about one in five hundred in every half year. The
abatements, allowances, and expenditure in 1878, '79, '80, and '81,
exclusive of what was spent on the house and demesne, were, £33,645, and
I am under the mark when I say that, altogether, for these years of
distress, Lord Kenmare spent more on his Kerry estates than he received
out of it; yet for this, Land League meetings were held on his estate,
and he was denounced in Parliament. The week that the Land League
compelled Lord Kenmare to discontinue his employment to labourers, the
weekly labour bill was £460.
There is no need to trouble readers with any further correspondence on a
topic on which no one could answer me except by abuse, which is no
argument; nor will I inflict any of the letters in which Mr. Sexton was
clearly proved in the wrong when he misrepresented the case of Pat
Murphy of Rath.
As an example of the state of affairs, in Millstreet--a mere
village--there were thirty cases of nocturnal raid in the month of
August 1881, even while it was engaging the attention of Mr. T.O.
Plunkett, R.M., Mr. French, chief of the detective department, two
sub-inspectors, thirty-five constabulary, and fifty men of the 80th
Regiment.
In the _Daily Telegraph_, with reference to the murder of Gallivan, near
Castleisland, this remark appeared in a leader:--
'Horror-stricken humanity demands that an example be speedily made of
the truculent and merciless ruffian who perpetrated this outrage.'
I quoted this in a letter the editor published, adding:--
'A few weeks after that occasion an old man named Flynn was shot within
two miles of the place, because he paid his rent. His leg has since been
amputated.'
Then I gave the following horrible case:--
On Sunday night the Land League police went to the house of a man named
Dan Dooling, who lived within a mile of Gallivan's house, and within one
mile of Castleisland, and because he paid his rent on getting a
reduction of thirty per cent., he was taken out and shot in the thigh.
His wife, who was only three days after her confinement, pleaded for
mercy on this account, but these lynch law authorities were deaf to the
appeal for mercy, and she did not recover the shock of the entry of
these 'moonlight' Thugs. This man could have identified his assailants,
but he did not dare.
A good fellow called M'Auliffe, whose arm was shot off, could have done
the same. The poor chap could be seen walking about with one arm,
deprived of the means of earning his bread, and no doubt moralising over
the state of the law, which would compensate him for the loss of his
cow, if he had one, but gave him nothing for the loss of his arm.
On Friday, November 18, 1881, two tenants, named Cronin and one O'Keefe,
holding land from Lord Kenmare, came into my office in Killarney.
O'Keefe, an old man of seventy, was the spokesman, and said:--
'If you plase, sorr, we have the rint in our pocket, and would be glad
to pay it if it were not for the fear that we have of being shot.'
To my lasting regret, I replied:--
'There is no danger. You must pay.'
They did, and on the Sunday week following, a band of marauders, headed
by fife and drum, went to the houses of these men, and shot them in the
presence of their families. All the flesh on the lower part of O'Keefe's
legs was shot away, one of the Cronins was shot in the knee, but the
other in the body.
Everybody in the neighbourhood knew the perpetrators of this ghastly
outrage, but said:--
'What use would there be in our telling, as the jury would acquit them,
and we should be shot?'
Then came this announcement, which caused great excitement in
Killarney:--
'In consequence of the difficulty of getting his rents, the Earl of
Kenmare has decided to leave the country for the present. All the
labourers employed on the estate are discharged, as well as some of the
gamekeepers.'
My own opinion was that he showed great wisdom in abandoning the
ungrateful locality where only man, debased by the Land League, was
vile.
Outside my own folk, I found the people stiffer and less affable than
formerly; but at no time had I any difficulty in obtaining or keeping
domestic servants, though my wife got the majority from the
neighbourhood of Edenburn.
I used to sit, on and off, on the bench as regularly as most of the
other magistrates, whenever, indeed, my business permitted me to do so,
and to my face no one ventured to abuse me.
Quite late in the bad times when I wanted a decree of ejectment against
a fellow, the chairman, desiring to make peace, explained that his
hesitation was entirely on my account, to save me from danger.
I replied that I had not quailed all those years, and I was too old to
begin; so I had my decree, and that fellow's threats were as
contemptuously treated as all the rest.
The Bank had a decree against a tenant of mine, and, having sold him
out, entered into possession and put in a caretaker.
He was in occupation about eight hours, when he grew so frightened that
he ran away. The tenant then went back into possession as a caretaker,
whom nobody dared dislodge, and he promptly went to the Tralee Board of
Guardians to obtain a pound a week as an evicted tenant.
At that time two-thirds of the poor-rate was paid by the landlord. When
the tenancy was over £4 a year, they had to allow each tenant half the
rate he paid; when it was under this sum, they had to pay the whole of
it, and, of course, all the rates for land in their own occupation.
Thus the Board of Guardians were utilising the money of the landlords in
order to remunerate the men who were robbing them of their property.
If a tenant--who generally had some money--was evicted, a notice was
served on the relieving officer to provide him with a conveyance, in
which he was taken to the poorhouse; but if a farmer evicted a
labourer--who had, perhaps, nothing but the suit of clothes in which he
stood up--he was allowed to walk to the poorhouse as best he might, and,
when he got there, he obtained no special relief.
It is true that the passing of the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act offered
another opportunity to the Government for striking a severe blow, but it
was frittered away, although, before it became law, many of the leaders
of disorder left the country, dreading its provisions.
Instead, the isolated arrests revealed that the criminals were provided
with special accommodation and superior fare.
A district officer, asked by Lord Spencer for his views on the Coercion
Act, replied:--
'The only coercion I can perceive, your Excellency, is that people
accustomed to live on potatoes and milk are forced to feed on salmon and
wine.'
The last outrage I intend to mention in this chapter was a very
remarkable one.
There was a contest for the chairmanship of the Tralee Board of
Guardians. The Land League put forward a candidate who was at the time
an inmate of Kilmainham gaol. The landlords, who at this earlier stage
still had some power, conceived that the residence of the Home Ruler
would not facilitate his control over the Board, and chose a candidate
whose abode was not only more adjacent, but whose movements were
unfettered.
The voting was even, until Mr. A.E. Herbert came into the room and gave
his casting vote against the involuntary tenant of the Kilmainham
hostelry. For this he was murdered three days later, and by the crime
they hoped to ensure that on the next occasion the landlords would
abstain from voting at all.
That murder of Mr. Arthur Herbert on his return from Petty Sessions at
Castleisland was one of the worst, and as an exhibition of infernal
hatred and vengeance it transcended the murders of Lord Mountmorres and
Lord Leitrim. It cannot be denied that Mr. Herbert committed acts of a
harsh and overbearing character. He was a turbulent, headstrong man,
brave to rashness and foolhardiness, and too fond of proclaiming his
contempt for the people by whom he was surrounded. As a magistrate,
sitting at Brosna Petty Sessions, he expressed his regret that he was
not in command of a force when a riot occurred in that village, when he
would have 'skivered the people with buckshot,' language brought under
the notice of the Lord Chancellor and the House of Commons.
He was the son of a clergyman, and lived at Killeentierna House with his
mother, a venerable old lady over eighty, he being himself forty-five.
His income was estimated at about four hundred a year, and as his
relations with tenantry were not harmonious, he never went out without a
six-chambered revolver in his pocket. Physically he was very
robust--over five feet ten in height, and very corpulent. In his own
neighbourhood he always was known as 'Mr. Arthur.'
Leaving Castleisland about five in the afternoon, he was accompanied for
about a mile by the head constable, who then turned back. Mr. Herbert
had not proceeded a quarter of a mile further when he was felled by the
assassins. The spot chosen was singularly open, no shelter being visible
for some distance. Several shots were heard by a labourer at work in a
quarry, and when he came up he found Mr. Herbert lying on his face in
the road, quite dead, the earth about him being covered with pools of
blood. The body was almost riddled with shot and bullets.
That night a further illustration of the vindictive ferocity of the
outrage was given. The lawn in front of Killeentierna was patrolled
regularly by some of the large body of police which at once occupied the
house. On this lawn eleven lambs were grazing. At half-past two these
were seen by the police to be all right. At daybreak the eleven were
found stabbed with pitchforks--nine of them killed outright, and two
wounded to death. This act, as wretched as it was daring, added a new
horror to the crime.
Mr. Herbert's murder was received with such exuberant delight in Kerry
that my steward said to me:--
'You would think, sir, that rent was abolished and the duty taken off
whisky.'
Constabulary had for a long while to be told off to prevent his grave
being desecrated.
That is a pretty tough outrage for optimistic philanthropists to
consider when they are addicted to announcing how far our generations
have progressed from barbarism.
The price of blood in Kerry was not high. For example, the men that
murdered FitzMaurice were paid £5 for the job, and they had never seen
him before. His family had to be under police protection for five years,
and I managed to get £1000 subscribed for them in England, Mr. Froude
taking an enthusiastic and generous interest in a very sad case. The
victim left two daughters, who both married policemen.
One young and cheery Kerry landlord was very proud, about 1886, at the
price of forty shillings being offered for his life by the Land League,
whereas nearly all the others were only valued at half a sovereign
apiece.
As a matter of fact, almost any one could have been shot at Castleisland
if a sovereign were offered, for they cared no more for human life than
for that of a rat. Parnell himself would have been shot by any one of a
couple of dozen fellows willing to earn a dishonest living if a
five-pound note had been locally put upon his head. A patriotic
philanthropist, destitute of the bowels of compassion and of every
dictate of humanity, might have saved a great deal of undeserved
suffering if he had made this donation towards his 'removal'--a pretty
euphemism of Land League coinage.
Most of that generation are dead, in gaol, or have emigrated. It would
take the deuce of a big sum to tempt any Castleislander to-day to commit
murder, except under provocation, and the same improvement is observable
all over Ireland. I believe a hundred pounds might be put on the head of
the least popular agent or landlord, and he might walk unscathed without
police protection.
All that has been set forth in this chapter might be regarded as a heavy
indictment of crime and disorder, but I cannot avoid adding one
confirmatory piece of evidence, as eloquent as it is accurate. This is
the fearful description of the state of Kerry which appears in Judge
O'Brien's charge to the Grand Jury at the Assizes, founded, of course,
on the report of outrages submitted to him. It is impossible to guess in
what stronger words his opinions would have been expressed if the total
number of outrages committed had been laid before him; but it is well
known that only a few of those committed were reported, as, if the
criminals were taken up and identified, the victims would be likely to
be shot in revenge, while the guilty persons, tried by a sympathising
jury, would obtain acquittal and popular advertisement.
The charge was as follows:--
'COLONEL CROSBIE AND GENTLEMEN OF THE GRAND JURY OF KERRY--I requested
your permission to defer any observations I was about to make to you, in
order that I might have an opportunity of examining certain returns
which had been made to me containing materials for forming a judgment
upon the state of things in this county of which I was put in possession
upon my arrival, and I was desirous of being afforded an opportunity of
examining these materials to try if I could discern whether, in the
considerable lapse of time that has happened since the last Assizes, I
could see any reason to conclude that an improvement had taken place in
the state of things that has now so long existed in the County of Kerry,
and other counties in the south of Ireland, to try if I could discern
whether lapse of time itself, the weariness of that state of things, if
the law and influences that lead persons to avoid violations of the law,
or to follow the pursuits of industry, had led in the end to any
favourable change in the state of things; but I grieve to say that it is
not in my power, unfortunately, to announce that any change has taken
place. On the contrary, all the means of information that I possess lead
to the unhappy conclusion that there is no improvement, but that, on the
contrary, there exists, even at this moment, a most extraordinary state
of things--a state of things of an unprecedented description--nothing
short, in fact, of a state of open war with all forms of authority, and
even, I may say without exaggeration, with the necessary institutions of
civilised life.
'These returns present a picture of the County Kerry such as can hardly
be found in any country that has passed the confines of natural society
and entered upon the duties and relations, and acknowledged the
obligations, of civilised life. The law is defeated--perhaps I should
rather say, has ceased to exist! Houses are attacked by night and day,
even the midnight terror yielding to the noonday anxiety of crime!
Person and life are assailed! The terrified inmates are wholly unable to
do anything to protect themselves, and a state of terror and lawlessness
prevails everywhere. Even some persons who possess means of information
that are not open to me, profess to discern in the signs of public
feeling, in the views of some hope and some fear, the expectation of
something about to happen, something reaching far beyond partial, or
local, or even agrarian, disturbance, and calculated to create a greater
degree of alarm than anything we have witnessed, or anything that has
happened.
'When I come to compare the official returns of crime with those of the
preceding period, I find that the total number of offences in this
county since the last Assizes is somewhat less in number, even
considerably less in number, than in the corresponding or the preceding
period of the former years. But the diminution of number affords no
assurance or ground of improvement at all, because I find that the
diminution is accounted for entirely in the class of offences that
acknowledges to some extent the power and influence of the law, namely,
in threatening letters and notices, while the amount of open and actual
crime is greater than it was in the former period, showing that there is
an increased confidence in impunity, and that menace has given place to
the deed. Within not more than ten days from the time that I am now
speaking, not less than four examples of midnight invasion of houses in
this county have occurred, accompanied with all the usual incidents of
disguises and arms, and the firing of shots, and violence threatened or
committed; in one instance the outrage having been committed upon the
residence of a magistrate of this county, a man living with his family
in his home, in the supposed delusive security of domestic life, of law,
and respect for social station; and in another instance committed upon a
humble man, and encountered, I am glad to say, in that instance, with a
brave resistance, giving an example of courage which, if it were widely
imitated, many of the evils that this country suffers from would no
longer exist.
'I need not dwell upon the most aggravated instance of all which this
calendar of crime presents--one that is quite recent, and within the
memory of you all--the murder of Cornelius Murphy, a humble man, but one
enjoying apparently the confidence and respect of all his neighbours,
who had done no harm to any person, who was not conscious of any
offence, whose house was invaded at a still early hour of the evening,
and before the daylight had departed, by a band of men that is shown to
have traversed a considerable distance of country, giving opportunities
of recognition to many, and with hardly the pretext of an offence on his
part, and in reality with the object of private plunder or private
hostility--one of those motives that always take advantage of a state of
disturbance in order to gratify private ends--slain in his own house in
the presence of his own family. Certain persons, it would appear, have
been arrested on a charge of complicity with this crime, and it may be
that this cruel and wicked crime may be the means of discovering other
crimes, and of leading in the end to the detection, if not to the
conviction, of persons who have been connected in them, and those who
rest in the supposed confidence of impunity may find the spell broken,
may find the light of information to reach them, and may find in the end
that the law will be able to prevail; because it must be in the
experience of many of you that it is unhappily in the power of a few
persons who engage in this system of nightly invasion of houses to
multiply themselves, apparently by means of terror and intimidation,
although at the same time there can be no doubt that, on account of
interval of distances, and for many such reasons, there must be many
such combinations in this country, acting entirely independent of each
other.
'No person can be at a loss to understand the misery and suffering that
arises from a state of crime; but perhaps all persons in the community
do not equally understand one form of consequence to material prosperity
that results from it. I have before me a document that contains most
terribly significant evidence of mischief, alike to all classes of the
community, that results from crime and a state of social disturbance. I
have a return of malicious injuries which form the subject of
presentment at these Assizes, in number, I understand, exceeding all
former precedent. There are no less than eighty-six presentments,
representing all forms of wicked outrage upon property, a tempest--I
might say without exaggeration, a tempest--of violence and crime that
has swept over a considerable portion of this county. The claims amount
to £2700, with the result that the Grand Jury had presented upon a
certain part of this county £1250, exercising apparently the greatest
care and discrimination in reducing the amount of the claims, and this
£1250 was not put upon the whole county, but on certain parts of the
county, and the amount at the very least aggravated in a most serious
degree the weight of taxation that falls upon the ratepayers of the
County Kerry, deepening the difficulties that all classes alike must
experience from the depression of the times, and from the other burdens
they have to meet in providing against the demands that are made upon
them.
'But, of course, you can easily understand that these things do not at
all give you any idea of other forms of material injury that arise from
crime and disturbance, in the loss of employment and the discouragement
of capital, the injury to trade, and the multiplied consequences of all
kinds detrimental to the community that arise from insecurity to
personal property and life. And to all those evils we have to add
another, and perhaps the worst of all--that of which you are all
conscious, of which experience and observation reaches you every day in
all the forms of social life--a system of unseen terrorism, a system of
terror and tyranny that the well-disposed class of the community ought
to detest and abhor, and in reference to which, on all sides, I have
heard, in this county and other counties, one universal expression of
desire--that some means should be found to put an end to it.
'I possess no power myself to effect this state of things, and I cannot
say that in the relation to the law which you fill as members of the
Grand Jury, or in any other relation to the law, you possess the means
to effect it. The duty of providing against so great an evil existing in
the community--the duty and the obligation rests with others. My duty is
simply confined to representing to you the state of things that exists,
and, indeed, in that respect I know that I am doing what is entirely
unnecessary, for the state of the County Kerry now, and for a period of
five or six years, in all its essential features, is known far beyond
the limits of the county, to every single person in the country. I will
merely make use of one general observation--that I by no means share in
the opinion that has been expressed as to the inability to deal with
this state of things. On the contrary, I entertain the most perfect
confidence that it is in the power of those who are intrusted with the
duty of maintaining the public peace to re-establish order and law and
peace in this county. And as my duty is confined to representing that
state of things, that duty does not carry me to indicate to those on
whom the responsibility rests the means to attain that object.'