* * * *--Mrs. Kavanagh was quite right when she told me at Borris in
March that this country should be seen in June! The drive to this lovely
place this morning was one long enchantment of verdure and hawthorn
blossoms and fragrance.
I came over from London to bring to a head some inquiries which have too
long delayed the publication of this diary. My intention had been to go
directly to Thurles, but a telegram which I received from the Archbishop
of Cashel just before I left telling me that he could not be at home for
the last three days of the week, I came directly here. Nothing can be
more utterly unlike the popular notions of Ireland and of Irish life
than the aspect of this most smiling and beautiful region: nothing more
thoroughly Irish than its people.
* * * who is one of the most active and energetic of Irish landlords,
lives part of the year abroad, but keeps up his Irish property with
care, at the expense, I suspect, of his estates elsewhere.
From a noble avenue of trees, making the highway like the main road of a
private park, we turned into a literal paradise of gardens. The air was
balmy with their wealth of odours. "Oh! yes, sir," said the coachman,
with an air of sympathetic pride, "our lady is just the greatest lady in
all this land for flowers!"
And for ivy, he might have added. We drove between green walls of ivy up
to a house which seemed itself to be built of ivy, like that wonderful
old mansion of Castle Leod in Scotland. Here, plainly, is another centre
of "sweetness and light," the abolition of which must make, not this
region alone, but Ireland poorer in that precise form of wealth, which,
as Laboulaye has shown in one of the best of his lectures, is absolutely
identical with civilisation. It is such places as this, which, in the
interest of the people, justify the exemption from redistribution and
resettlement, made in one of a series of remarkable articles on Ireland
recently published in the _Birmingham Post_, of lands, the "breaking up
of which would interfere with the amenity of a residence."
* * * relations with all classes of the people here are so cordial and
straightforward that he has been easily able to give me to-day, what I
have sought in vain elsewhere in Ireland, an opportunity of conversing
frankly and freely with several labouring men. For obvious reasons these
men, as a rule, shrink from any expression of their real feelings. Their
position is apparently one of absolute dependence either upon the
farmers or the landlords, there being no other local market for their
labour, which is their only stock-in-trade. As one of them said to me
to-day, "The farmers will work a man just as long as they can't help it,
and then they throw him away."
I asked if there were no regular farm-labourers hired at fixed rates by
the year?
"Oh! very few--less now than ever; and there'll be fewer before there'll
be more. The farmers don't want to pay the labourers or to pay the
landlords; they want the land and the work for nothing, sir,--they do
indeed!"
"What does a farm-hand get," I asked, "if he is hired for a long time?"
"Well, permanent men, they'll get 6s. a week with breakfast and dinner,
or 7s. maybe, with one meal; and a servant-boy, sir, he'll get 2s. a
week or may be 3s. with his board; but it's seldom he gets it."
"And what has he for his board?"
"Oh, stirabout; and then twice a week coorse Russian or American meat,
what they call the 'kitchen,' and they like it better than good meat,
sir, because it feeds the pot more."
By this I found he meant that the "coorse meat" gave out more
"unctuosity" in the boiling--the meat being always served up boiled in a
pot with vegetables, like the "bacon and greens" of the "crackers" in
the South.
"And nothing else?"
"Yes; buttermilk and potatoes."
"And these wages are the highest?"
"Oh, I know a boy got 5s., but by living in his father's house, and
working out it was he got it. And then they go over to England to work."
"What wages do they get there?"
"Oh, it differs, but they do well; 9s. a week, I think, and their board,
and straw to sleep on in the stables."
"But doesn't it cost them a good deal to go and come?"
"Oh no; they get cheap rates. They send them from Galway to Dublin like
cattle, at £2, 5s. a car, and that makes about 1s. 6d. a head; and then
they are taken over on the steamers very cheap. Often the graziers that
do large business with the companies, will have a right to send over a
number of men free; and they stowaway too; and then on the railways in
England they get passes free often from cattle-dealers, specially when
they are coming back, and the dealers don't want their passes. They do
very well. They'll bring back £7 and £10. I was on a boat once, and
there was a man; he was drunk; he was from Galway somewhere, and they
took away and kept for him £18, all in good golden sovereigns; that was
the most I ever saw. And he was drunk, or who'd ever have known he had
it?"
"Do the farmers build houses for the labourers?"
"Build houses, is it! Glory be to God! who ever heard of such a thing?
The farmers are a poor proud lot. They'd let a labourer die in the
ditch!"
All that this poor man said was corroborated by another man of a higher
class, very familiar with the conditions of life and labour here, and
indeed one of the most interesting men I have met in Ireland. Born the
son of a labouring man, he was educated by a priest and educated
himself, till he fitted himself for the charge of a small school, which
he kept to such good purpose that in eighteen years he saved £1100, with
which capital he resolved to begin life as a small farmer and
shopkeeper. He had studied all the agricultural works he could get, and
before he went fairly into the business, he travelled on the Continent,
looking carefully into the methods of culture and manner of life of the
people, especially in Italy and in Belgium. The Belgian farming gave him
new ideas of what might be done in Ireland, and those ideas he has put
into practice, with the best results.
"On the same land with my neighbours," he said, "I double their
production. Where they get two tons of hay I get four or four and a
half, where they get forty-five barrels of potatoes I get a hundred.
Only the other day I got £20 for a bullock I had taken pains with to
fatten him up scientifically. Of course I had a small capital to start
with: but where did I get that? Not from the Government. I earned and
saved it myself; and then I wasn't above learning how best to use it."
He thinks the people here--though by no means what they might be with
more thrift and knowledge--much better off than the same class in many
other parts of Ireland. There are no "Gombeen men" here, he says, and no
usurious shopkeepers. "The people back each other in a friendly way when
they need help." Many of the labourers, he says, are in debt to him, but
he never presses them, and they are very patient with each other. They
would do much better if any pains were taken to teach them. It is his
belief that agricultural schools and model farms would do more than
almost any measure that could be devised for bringing up the standard of
comfort and prosperity here, and making the country quiet.
It is the opinion of this man that the people of this place have been
led to regard the Papal Decree as a kind of attack on their liberties,
and that they are quite as likely to resist as to obey it. For his own
part, he thinks Ireland ought to have her own parliament, and make her
own laws. He is not satisfied with the laws actually made, though he
admits they are better than the older laws were. "The tenants get their
own improvements now," he said, "and in old times the more a man
improved the worse it was for him, the agent all the while putting up
the rents."
But he does not want Irish independence. "The people that talk that
way," he said, "have never travelled. They don't see how idle it is for
Ireland to talk about supporting herself. She just can't do it."
Not less interesting was my talk to-day with quite a different person.
This was a keen-eyed, hawk-billed, wiry veteran of the '48. As a youth
he had been out with "Meagher of the Sword," and his eyes glowed when he
found that I had known that champion of Erin. "I was out at Ballinagar,"
he said; "there were five hundred men with guns, and five hundred
pikemen." It struck me he would like to be going "out" again in the same
fashion, but he had little respect for the "Nationalists."
"There's too many lawyers among them," he said, "too many lawyers and
too many dealers. The lawyers are doing well, thanks to the League. Oh
yes!" with a knowing chuckle, and a light of mischief in his eye; "the
lawyers are doing very well! There's one little bit of a solicitor not
far from here was of no good at all four years ago, and now they tell me
he's made four thousand pounds in three years' time, good money, and got
it all in hand! And there's another, I hear, has made six thousand. The
lawyers that call themselves Nationalists, they just keep mischief
agoing to further themselves. What do they care for the labourers? Why,
no more than the farmers do--and what would become of the poor men! * *
* * here, he is making * * * * * * * and he keeps more poor men going
than all the lawyers and all the farmers in the place a good part of the
year."
"Are the labourers," I asked, "Nationalists?"
"They don't know what they are," he answered. "They hate the farmers,
but they love Ireland, and they all stand together for the counthry!"
"How is it with the Plan of Campaign and the Boycotting?"
"Now what use have the labourers got for the Plan of Campaign? No more
than for the moon! And for the Boycotting, I never liked it--but I was
never afraid of it--and there's not been much of it here."
"Will the Papal Decree put a stop to what there is of it?"
"I wouldn't mind the Pope's Decree no more than that door!" he exclaimed
indignantly. "Hasn't he enough, sure, to mind in Rome? Why didn't he
defend his own country, not bothering about Ireland!"
"Are you not a Catholic, then?" I asked.
"Oh yes, I'm a Catholic, but I wouldn't mind the Decree. Only remember,"
he added, after a pause, "just this: it don't trouble me, for I've
nothing to do with the Plan of Campaign--only I don't want the Pope to
be meddlin' in matters that don't concern him."
"It's out of respect, then, for the Pope that you wouldn't mind the
Decree?"
"Just that, intirely! It was some of them Englishmen wheedled it out of
him, you may be sure, sir."
"I am told you went out to America once."
"Yes, I went there in '48, and I came back in '51."
"What made you go?" I asked.
"Is it what made me go?" he replied, with a sudden fierceness in his
voice. "It was the evictions made me go; that we was put out of the good
holding my father had, and his father before him; and I can never
forgive it, never! But I came back; and it was * * * father that was the
good man to me and to mine, else where would I be?"
I afterwards learned from * * * * that the evictions of which the old
man spoke with so much bitterness were made in carrying out important
improvements, and that it was quite true that his father had greatly
befriended the emigrant when he got enough of the New World and came
home.
It was curious to see the old grudge fresh and fierce in the old man's
heart, but side by side with it the lion lying down with the lamb--a
warm and genuine recognition of the kindness and help bestowed on
himself. His resentment against the landlord's action in one generation
did not in the least interfere with his recognition of the landlord's
usefulness and liberality in the next generation.
"You didn't like America?" I said. "Where did you live there?"
"I lived at North Brookfield in Massachusetts, a year or two," he
replied, "with Governor Amasa Walker. Did you know him? He was a good
man; he was fond of the people, but he thought too much of the nagurs."
"Yes," I answered; "I know all about him, and he was, as you say, a very
good man, even if he was an abolitionist. But why didn't you stay in
North Brookfield?"
"Oh, it was a poor country indeed! A blast of wind would blow all the
ground away there was! It does no good to the people, going to America,"
he said; "they come back worse than they went!"
He is at work now in some quarries here.
"The quarrymen get six shillings a week," he said, "with bread and tea
and butter and meat three times a week. With nine shillings a week and
board, a man'll make himself bigger than * * *!"
"Was the country quiet now?"
"This country here? Oh! it's very quiet; with potatoes at 3s. 6d. a
barrel, it's a good year for the people. They're a very quiet
people,"--in corroboration apparently of which statement he told me a
story of a coroner's jury called to sit on the body of a man found on
the highway shot through the head, which returned an unanimous verdict
of "Died by the visitation of God."
This country is dominated by the Rocky Hills climbing up to Cullenagh,
which divides the Barrow valley from the Nore. We drove this afternoon
to * a most lovely place. The mansion there is now shut up and
dismantled, but the park and the grounds are very beautiful, with a
beauty rather enhanced than diminished by the somewhat unkempt
luxuriance of the vegetation. We passed a now well-grown tree planted by
the Prince of Wales * * * * * * and drove over many miles of excellent
road made by * * * * * * * * employs * * * * * * * * regularly, * * *
men as labourers, cartmen and masons, to whom he pays out annually the
sum of * * Mr. * * who, by the way, rather resented my asking him if he
came of one of the Cromwellian English families so numerous here, and
informed me that his people came over with Strongbow--assures me that
but for these works of * * * * these men under him would be literally
without occupation. In addition to these there are about a dozen more
men employed * * as gamekeepers and plantation-men. At the * * places
belonging to * * * * * * * * * * above eighty men find constant
employment, and receive regular wages amounting to over £4000. Were * *
* * dispossessed or driven out of Ireland, all this outlay would come to
an end, and with what result to these working-men? As things now are,
while * * * working-men receive a regular wage of five shillings, the
same men, as farmers' labourers, would receive, now and then, five
shillings a week, and that without food! I saw enough in the course of
our afternoon's drive to satisfy me that my informant of the morning had
probably not overstated matters when he told me that for at least
seventy per cent. of the work done by the labourers here, from November
to May, they have to look to the landlords. On the property of * * as
well as on the neighbouring properties * * * * * * * the houses have
been generally put up by the landlords. We called in the course of the
afternoon upon a labouring man who lives with his wife in a very neat,
cozy, and quite new house, built recently for him by * *. These good
people have been living on this property for now nearly half a century.
Their new house having been built for them, * * has had an agreement
prepared, under which it may be secured to them. The terms have all been
discussed and found satisfactory, but the old labourer now hesitates
about signing the agreement. He gives, and can be got to give, no reason
for this; but when we drove up he came out to greet us in the most
friendly manner. We went in and found his wife, a shrewd, sharp-eyed,
little old dame, with whom * * * * fell into a confabulation, while I
went into the next room with the labourer himself. The house was neatly
furnished--with little ornaments and photographs on the mantel-shelf,
and nothing of the happy-go-lucky look so common about the houses of the
working people in Ireland, as well as about the houses of the lesser
squires.
I paid him a compliment on the appearance of his house and grounds.
"Yes, sir!" he answered: "it's a very good place it is, and * * * * has
built it just to please us."
"But I am told you want to leave it?"
"Ah, no, that is not so, sir, indeed at all! We've three children you
see, sir, in America--two girls and a boy we have."
"And where are they?"
"Ah, the girls they're not in any factory at all. They're like leddies,
living out in a place they call * * in Massachusetts; and the lad, he
was on a farm there. But we don't know where he is nor his sisters any
more just now. And the wife, she thinks she would like to go out to
America and see the children."
"Do you hear from them regularly?"
"Well, it's only a few pounds they send, but they're doing very well.
Domestics they are, quite like leddies; there's their pictures on the
shelf."
"But what would you do there?"
"Ah! we'd have lodgings, the wife says, sir. But I like the ould place
myself."
"I think you are quite right there," I replied. "And do you get work
here from the farmers as the labourers do in my country?"
"Work from the farmers, sir?" he answered, rather sharply. "What they
can't help we get, but no more! If the farmers in America is like them,
it's not I would be going there! The farmers! For the farmers, a
labourer, sir, is not of the race of Adam! They think any place good
enough for a labourer--any place and any food! Is the farmers that way
in America?"
"Well, I don't know that they are so very much more liberal than your
farmers are," I replied; "but I think they'd have to treat you as being
of the race of Adam! But are not the farmers here, or the Guardians,
obliged to build houses for the labourers? I thought there was an Act of
Parliament about that?"
"And so there is but what's the good of it? It's just to get the
labourers' votes, and then they fool the labourers, just making them
quarrel about where the cottages shall be, what they call the 'sites';
and then there's no cottages built at all, at all. It's the lawyers, you
see, sir, gets in with the farmers--the strongest farmers--and then they
just make fools of the labourers as if there was no Act of Parliament at
all."
"But if the labourers want to go away, to emigrate," I said, "as you
want to do, to America, don't the farmers, or the Government, or the
landlords, help them to get away and make a start?"
"Not a bit of it, sir," he replied; "not a bit of it. I believe,
though," he added after a moment; "I believe they do get some help to go
to Australia. But they're mostly no good that goes that way. The best is
them that go for themselves, or their friends help them. But there's not
so many going this year."
When we drove away I asked * * if he had made any progress towards a
signature of the agreement with the labourer's wife.
"No; she couldn't be got to say yes or no. I asked her," said * * "what
reason they had for imagining that after all these years I would try to
do them an injury? She protested they never thought of such a thing; but
she couldn't be brought to say she wished her husband to sign the paper.
It's very odd, indeed."
I couldn't help suspecting that the _materfamilias_ was at the bottom of
it all, and that she was bent upon going out to America to participate
in the prosperity of her two daughters, who were living "like leddies"
at * * in Massachusetts.
The incident recalled to me something which happened years ago when I
was returning with the Storys from Rome to Boston. Our Cunarder, in the
middle of the night, off the Irish coast, ran down and instantly sank a
small schooner.
In a wonderfully short time we had come-to, and a boat's crew had
succeeded in picking up and bringing all the poor people on board. Among
them was a wizened old woman, upon whom all sorts of kind attentions
were naturally lavished by the ship's company. She could not be
persuaded to go into a cabin after she had recovered from the shock and
the fright of the accident, but, comforted and clothed with new and dry
garments, she took refuge under one of the companion-ways, and there,
sitting huddled up, with her arms about her knees, she crooned and
moaned to herself, "I was near being in a wetter and a warmer place; I
was near being in a wetter and a warmer place!" by the half hour
together. We found that the poor old soul had been to Liverpool to see
her son off on a sailing ship as an emigrant to America. So a
subscription was soon made up to send her on our arrival to New York
there to await her son. We had some trouble in making her understand
what was to be done with her, but when she finally got it fairly into
her head, gleams of mingled surprise and delight came over her withered
face, and she finally broke out, "Oh, then, glory be to God! it's a
mercy that I was drownded! glory be to God! and it's the proud boy
Terence will be when he gets out to America to find his poor ould mother
waiting for him there that he left behind him in Liverpool, and quite
the leddy with all this good gold money in her hand, glory be to God!"
On our way back to * * we passed through * * a very neat
prosperous-looking town, which * * tells me is growing up on the heels
of * *. * * * was one of the few places at which the "no rent"
manifesto, issued by Mr. Parnell and his colleagues from their prison in
Kilmainham, during the confinement of Mr. Davitt at Portland, and
without concert with him, was taken up by a village curate and commended
to the people. He was arrested for it by Mr. Gladstone's Government, and
locked up for six weeks.
DUBLIN, _Saturday, June 23d._--I left * * * yesterday morning early on
an "outside car," with one of my fellow-guests in that "bower of
beauty," who was bent on killing a salmon somewhere in the Nore * * We
drove through a most varied and picturesque country, viewing on the way
the seats of Mr. Hamilton Stubber and Mr. Robert Staples, both finely
situated in well-wooded parks. Mr. Stubber was formerly master of the
Queen's County hounds, a famous pack, which, as our jarvey put it,
"brought a power of money into the county, and made it aisy for a poor
man." But the local agitations wore out his patience, and he put the
pack down some years ago. Not far from his house is an astonishing
modern "tumulus," or mound of hewn and squared stones. These it seems
were quarried and brought here by him, with the intention of building a
new and handsome residence. This intention he abandoned under the same
annoyance.
"They call it Mr. Stubber's Cairn," said the jarvey; "and a sorrowful
sight it is, to think of the work it would have given the people,
building the big house that'll never be built now, I'm thinking." If Mr.
Stubber should become an "absentee," he can hardly, I think, be blamed
for it.
His property marches with that of Mr. Robert Staples, who comes of a
Gloucestershire family planted in Ireland under Charles I.
"Mr. Staples is farming his own lands," said our jarvey, when I
commented on the fine appearance of some fields as we drove by; "and
he'll be doing very well this year. Ah! he comes and goes, but he's here
a great deal, and he looks after everything himself; that's the reason
the fields is good."
This is a property of some 1500 statute acres. Only last March the
landlord took over from one tenant, who was in arrears of two years and
a half and owed him some £300, a farm of 90 acres, giving the man fifty
pounds to boot, and bidding him go in peace. I wonder whether this
proceeding would make the landlord a "land-grabber," and expose him to
the pains and penalties of "boycotting"?
On this place, too, it seems that Mr. Staples's grandfather put up many
houses for the tenants; a thing worth noting, as one of not a few
instances I have come upon to show that it will not do to accept without
examination the sweeping statements so familiar to us in America, that
improvements have never been made by the landlord upon Irish estates.
My companion had meant to put me down at the railway station of
Attanagh, there to catch a good train to Kilkenny.
But we had a capital nag, and reached Attanagh so early that we
determined to drive on to Ballyragget.
From Attanagh to Ballyragget the road ran along a plateau which
commanded the most beautiful views of the valley of the Nore and of the
finely wooded country beyond. Ballyragget itself is a brisk little
market town, the American influence showing itself here, as in so many
other places, in such trifles as the signs on the shops which describe
them as "stores." My salmon-fishing companion put me down at the station
and went off to the river, which flows through the town, and is here a
swift and not inconsiderable stream.
An hour in the train took me to Kilkenny, where I met by appointment
several persons whom I had been unable to see during my previous visit
in March.
These gentlemen, experienced agents, gave me a good deal of information
as to the effect of the present state of things upon the "_moral_" of
the tenantry in different parts of Ireland. On one estate, for example,
in the county of Longford, a tenant has been doing battle for the cause
of Ireland in the following extraordinary fashion.
He held certain lands at a rental of £23, 4s. Being, to use the
picturesque language of the agent, a "little good for tenant," he fell
into arrears, and on the 1st of May 1885 owed nearly three years' rent,
or £63, 12s., in addition to a sum of £150 which he had borrowed of his
amiable landlord three or four years before to enable him to work his
farm. Of this total sum of £213, 12s. he positively refused to pay one
penny. Proceedings were accordingly taken against him, and he was
evicted. By this eviction his title to the tenancy was broken. The
landlord nevertheless, for the sake of peace and quiet, offered to allow
him to sell, to a man who wished to take the place, any interest he
might have had in the holding, and to forgive both the arrears of the
rent and the £150 which had been borrowed by him. The ex-tenant flatly
refused to accept this offer, became a weekly pensioner upon the
National League, and declared war. The landlord was forced to get a
caretaker for the place from the Property Defence Association at a cost
of £1 per week, to provide a house for a police protection party, and to
defray the expenses of that party upon fuel and lights. Nor was this
all. The landlord found himself further obliged to employ men from the
same Property Defence Association to cut and save the hay-crop on the
land, and when this had been done no one could be found to buy the crop.
The crop and the lands were "boycotted." It was only in May last that a
purchaser could be found for the hay cut and saved two years ago--this
purchaser being himself a "boycotted" man on an adjoining property. He
bought the hay, paying for it a price which did not quite cover one-half
the cost of sowing it!
"No one denies for a moment," said the agent, "that the tenant in all
this business has been more than fairly, even generously, treated by the
estate; yet no one seems to think it anything but natural and reasonable
that he should demand, as he now demands, to be put back into the
possession of his forfeited tenancy at a certain rent fixed by himself,"
which he will obligingly agree to pay, "provided that the hay cut and
saved on the property two years ago is accounted for to him by the
estate!"
In another case an agent, Mr. Ivough, had to deal with a body of five
hundred tenants on a considerable estate. Of these tenants, two hundred
settled their rents with the landlord before the passing of the Land Act
of 1881, and valuations made by the landlord's valuer, with their full
assent. There was no business for the lawyers, so far as they were
concerned, and no compulsion of any sort was put on them. Among them was
a man who had married the daughter of an old tenant on the estate, and
so came into a holding of 12 Irish, or more than 20 statute, acres, at a
rental of £18 a year. The valuer reduced this to £14, 10s., which
satisfied the tenant, and as the agent agreed to make this reduced
valuation retroactive, all went as smoothly as possible for two years,
when the tenant began to fall into arrears. When the Sub-Commissioners,
between 1885 and 1887, took to making sweeping reductions, the tenants
who had settled freely under the recent valuation grumbled bitterly. As
one of them tersely put it to the agent, "We were a parcel of bloody
fools, and you ought to have told us these Sub-Commissioners were
coming!" Mr. Sweeney, the tenant by marriage already mentioned, was not
content to express his particular dissatisfaction in idle words, but
kept on going into arrears. In May 1888 things came to a crisis. The
agent refused to accept a settlement which included the payment by him
of the costs of the proceedings forced upon him by his tenant. "You have
had a good holding," said the agent, "with plenty of water and good
land. In this current year two acres of your wheat will pay the whole
rent. You have broken up and sold bit by bit a mill that was on the
place; and above all, when Mr. Gladstone made us accept the judicial
rents, he told us we might be sure, if we did this, of punctual payment.
That was the one consideration held out to us. And we are entitled to
that!"
The tenant being out of his holding, the agent wishes to put another
tenant into it. But the holding is "boycotted." Several tenants are
anxious for it, and would gladly take it, but they dare not The great
evicted will neither sell any tenant-right he may have, nor pay his
arrears and costs, nor give up the place to another tenant. To put
Property Defence men on the holding would cost the landlord £2, 10s. a
week, and do him no great good, as the evicted man "holds the fort,"
being established in a house which he occupies on an adjoining property,
and for which presumably he pays his rent. It seems as if Mr. Sweeney
were inspired by the example of another tenant, named Barry, who, before
the passing of the Land Act of 1881, gave up freely a holding of 20
acres, on a property managed by Mr. Kough; but as he was on such good
terms with the agent that he could borrow money of him, he begged the
agent to let him retain at a low rent a piece of this surrendered land
directly adjoining his house. He asked this in the name of his eight or
nine children, and it was granted him. The agent afterwards found that
the piece of land in question was by far the best of the surrendered
holding. But that is a mere detail. This ingenious tenant Barry, living
now on another estate just outside the grasp of the agent, has
systematically "boycotted" for the last nine years the land which he
gave up, feeding his own cattle upon it freely meanwhile, and keeping
all would-be tenants at a distance! "He is now," said the agent, "quite
a wealthy man in his way, jobbing cattle at all the great markets!"
"When the eviction of Sweeney took place," said the agent, "I was
present in person, as I thought I ought to be, and the result is that I
have been held up to the execration of mankind as a monster for putting
out a child in a cradle into a storm. As a matter of fact," he said,
"there was a cradle in the way, which the sheriff-Officer gently took
up, and by direction of the tenant's wife removed. I made no remark
about it at all, but a local paper published a lying story, which the
publisher had to retract, that I had said 'Throw out the child!'"
"Two priests," he said, "came quite uninvited and certainly without
provocation, to see me, and one of them shouted out, 'Ah! we know you'll
be making another Coolgreany,' which was as much as to say there 'would
be bloodshed.' This was the more intolerable," he added, "that, as I
afterwards found, I had already done for the sake of the tenants
precisely what these ecclesiastics professed that they had come to ask
me to do!
"For thirty years," said this gentleman, "I have lived in the midst of
these people--and in all that time I have never had so much as a
threatening letter. But after this story was published of my throwing
out a cradle with a child in it, I was insulted in the street by a woman
whom I had never seen before. Two girls, too, called out at the
eviction, 'You've bad pluck; why didn't you tell us you were coming down
the day?' and another woman made me laugh by crying after me, 'You've
two good-looking daughters, but you're a bad man yourself.'"
Quite as instructive is the story given me on this occasion of the
Tyaquin estate in the county of Galway. This estate is managed by an
agent, Mr. Eichardson of Castle Coiner, in this county of Kilkenny.
The rents on this Galway estate, as Mr. Richardson assures me, have been
unaltered for between thirty and forty years, and some of them for even
a longer period. For the last twenty-five years certainty, during which
Mr. Richardson has been the agent of the estate, and probably, he
thinks, for many years previous, there has never been a case of the
non-payment of rent, except in recent years when rents were withheld for
a time for political reasons.
Large sums of money have been laid out in various useful improvements.
Constant occupation was given to those requiring it, until the agrarian
agitation became fully developed. On the demesne and the home farms the
best systems of reclaiming waste lands and the best systems of
agriculture were practically exhibited, so that the estate was an
agricultural free school for all who cared to learn.
When the Land Act of 1881 was passed, almost all the tenants applied,
and had judicial rents fixed, many of them by consent of the agent.
In 1887 the tenants were called on as usual to pay these judicial rents.
A large minority refused to do so except on certain terms, which were
refused. The dispute continued for many months, but as the charges on
the estate had to be met, the agent was obliged to give way, and allow
an abatement of four shillings in the pound on these judicial rents.
Some of these charges, to meet which the agent gave way, were for money
borrowed from the Commissioners of Public Works to _improve the holdings
of the tenants_. For these improvements thus thrown entirely upon the
funds of the estate no increase of rent or charge of any kind had been
laid upon the tenants.
When a settlement was agreed on, those of the tenants who had adopted
the Plan came in a body to pay their rents on 3d January 1888. They
stated that they were unable to pay more than the rent due up to
November 1886, and that they would never have adopted the Plan had they
not been driven into it by _sheer distress_. After which they handed Mr.
Richardson a cheque drawn by John T. Dillon, Esq., M.P., for the amount
banked with the National League.
An article appeared shortly afterwards in a League newspaper, loudly
boasting of the great victory won by Mr. Dillon, M.P., for the starving
and poverty-stricken tenants. Two of these tenants (brothers) were under
a yearly rent of £7, 10s. They declared they could only pay £3, 15s., or
a half-year's rent, and this only if they got an abatement of 15s. Yet
these same tenants were then paying Mr. Richardson £50 a year for a
grass farm, and about £12 for meadows, as well as £30 a year more for a
grass farm to an adjoining landlord.
Another tenant who held a farm at £13, 5s. a year declared he could only
pay £6, 12s. 6d., or a half-year's rent, if he got an abatement of £1,
6s. 6d. A very short time before, this tenant had taken a grass farm
from an adjoining landlord, and he was so anxious to get it that he
showed the landlord a bundle of large notes, amounting to rather more
than £300 sterling, in order to prove his solvency! The same tenant has
since written a letter to Mr. Richardson offering £50 a year for a grass
farm!
All these campaigners, Mr. Richardson says, "with one noble exception,
the wife of a tenant who was ill, declined to pay a penny of rent beyond
November 1st, 1886," stating that they were "absolutely unable" to do
more. So they all left the May 1887 rent unpaid, and the hanging gale to
November 1887, which, however, they were not even asked to pay.
The morning after the settlement many of the tenants who, when they were
all present in a body on the previous evening, had declared their
"inability" to pay the half-year's rent due down to May 1887,
individually came to Mr. Richardson unasked, and paid it, some saying
they had "borrowed the money that night," but others frankly declaring
that they dared not break the rule publicly, having been ordered by the
League only to pay to November 1886, for fear of the consequences. These
would have been injury to their cattle, or the burning of their hay, or
possibly murder.
Of the country about Kilkenny, I am told, as of the country about
Carlow, that nearly or quite seventy per cent, of the labourers are
dependent upon the landlords from November to May for such employment as
they get.
The shopkeepers, too, are in a bad way, being in many cases reduced to
the condition of mere agents of the great wholesale houses elsewhere,
and kept going by these houses mainly in the hope of recovering old
debts. There is a severe pressure of usury, too, upon the farmers. "If a
farmer," said one resident to me, "wants to borrow a small sum of the
Loan Fund Bank, he must have two securities--one of them a substantial
man good for the debt. These two indorsers must be 'treated' by the
borrower whom they back; and he must pay them a weekly sum for the
countenance they have given him, which not seldom amounts, before he
gets through with the matter, to a hundred per cent, on the original
loan."
I am assured too that the consumption of spirits all through this region
has greatly increased of late years. "The official reports will show
you," said one gentleman, "that the annual outlay upon whisky in Ireland
equals the sum saved to the tenants by the reductions in rent." This is
a proposition so remarkable that I simply record it for future
verification, as having been made by a very quiet, cool, and methodical
person, whose information on other points I have found to be correct. He
tells me too, as of his own knowledge, that in going over some financial
matters with a small farmer in his neighbourhood, he ascertained, beyond
a peradventure, that this farmer annually spent in whisky, for the use
of his family, consisting of himself, his wife and three adult children,
nearly, or quite, _seventy pounds a year_! "You won't believe this," he
said to me; "and if you print the statement nobody else will believe it;
but for all that it is the simple unexaggerated truth."
Falstaff's reckoning at Dame Quickly's becomes a moderate score in
comparison with this!
I spent half an hour again in the muniment-room at Kilkenny Castle,
where, in the Expense-Book of the second Duke of Ormond, I found a
supper _menu_ worthy of record, as illustrating what people meant by
"keeping open house" in the great families of the time of Queen
Anne.[Note L.]
Taking a train early in the afternoon, I came on here in time to dine
last night with Mr. Rolleston of Delgany, an uncompromising Protestant
"Home Ruler"--as Protestant and as uncompromising as John Mitchel--whose
recent pamphlet on "Boycotting" has deservedly attracted so much
attention on both sides of the Irish Sea.
I was first led into a correspondence with Mr. Rolleston by a remarkable
article of his published in the _Dublin University Review_ for February
1886, on "The Archbishop in Politics." In that article, Mr. Rolleston,
while avowing himself to be robust enough to digest without much
difficulty the _ex officio_ franchise conferred upon the Catholic clergy
by Mr. Parnell to secure the acceptance of his candidates at
Parliamentary conventions, made a very firm and fearless protest against
the attempt of the Archbishops of Dublin and Cashel to "boycott"
Catholic criticism of the National League and its methods, by declaring
such criticism to be "a public insult" offered, not to the Archbishops
of Cashel and Dublin personally, or as political supporters of the
National League, but to the Archbishops as dignitaries of the Catholic
Church, and to their Archiepiscopal office. The "boycotting," by
clerical machinery, of independent lay opinion in civil matters, is to
the body politic of a Catholic country what the germ of cancer is to the
physical body. And though Mr. Rolleston, in this article, avowed himself
to be a hearty supporter of the "political programme of the National
League," and went so far even as to maintain that the social boycotting,
"which makes the League technically an illegal conspiracy against law
and individual liberty," might be "in many cases justified by the
magnitude of the legalised crime against which it was directed," it was
obvious to me that he could not long remain blind to the true drift of
things in an organisation condemned, by the conditions it has created
for itself, to deal with the thinkers of Ireland as it deals with the
tenants of Ireland. His recent pamphlet on "Boycotting" proves that I
was right. What he said to me the other day in a letter about the
pamphlet may be said as truly of the article. It was "a shaft sunk into
the obscure depths of Irish opinion, to bring to light and turn to
service whatever there may be in those depths of sound and healthy;" and
one of my special objects in this present visit to Ireland was to get a
personal touch of the intellectual movement which is throwing such
thinkers as Mr. Rolleston to the front.
We were five at table, Mr. Rolleston's other guests being Mr. John
O'Leary, whose name is held in honour for his courage and honesty by all
who know anything of the story of Ireland in our times, and who was sent
a quarter of a century ago as a Fenian patriot--not into seclusion with
sherry and bitters, at Kilmainham, like Mr. Gladstone's "suspects" of
1881--but like Michael Davitt, into the stern reality of penal
servitude; Dr. Sigerson, Dean of the Faculty of Science of the Boyal
University, and an authority upon the complicated question of Irish Land
Tenures; and Mr. John F. Taylor, a leading barrister of Dublin, an ally
on the Land Question of Mr. Davitt, and an outspoken Repealer of the
Union of 1800.
I have long wished to meet Mr. O'Leary, who sent me, through a
correspondent of mine, two years ago, one of the most thoughtful and
well-considered papers I have ever read on the possibilities and
impossibilities of Home Rule for Ireland; and it was a great pleasure to
find in the man the elevation of tone, the breadth of view, and the
refined philosophic perception of the strong and weak points in the
Irish case, which had charmed me in. the paper. Now that "Conservative"
Englishmen have come to treat the main points of Chartism almost as
commonplaces in politics, it is surely time for them to recognise the
honesty and integrity of the spirit which revolted in the Ireland of
1848 against the then seemingly hopeless condition of that country. Of
that spirit Mr. O'Leary is a living, earnest, and most interesting
incarnation. He strikes one at once as a much younger man in all that
makes the youth of the intellect and the emotions than any Nationalist
M.P. of half his years whom I have ever met. No Irishman living has
dealt stronger or more open blows than he against the English dominion
in Ireland. Born in Tipperary, where he inherited a small property in
houses, he was sent to Trinity College in Dublin, and while a student
there was drawn into the "Young Ireland" party mainly by the poems of
Thomas Davis. Late in the electrical year of the "battle summer," 1848,
he was arrested on suspicion of being concerned in a plot to rescue
Smith O'Brien and other state prisoners. The suspicion was well founded,
but could not be established, and after a day or two he was liberated.
From Trinity, after this, he went to the Queen's College in Cork, where
he took his degree, and studied medicine. When the Fenian movement
became serious, after the close of our American Civil War, O'Leary threw
himself into it with Stephens, Luby, and Charles Kickham. Stephens
appointed him one of the chief organisers of the I.E.B. with Luby and
Kickham, and he took charge of the _Irish People_--the organ of the
Fenians of 1865. It was as a subordinate contributor to this journal
that Sir William Harcourt's familiar Irish bogy, O'Donovan Rossa[26],
was arrested together with his chief, Mr. O'Leary, and with Kickham in
1865, and found guilty, with them, after a trial before Mr. Justice
Keogh, of treason-felony. The speech then delivered by Mr. O'Leary in
the dock made a profound impression upon the public mind in America. It
was the speech, not of a conspirator, but of a patriot. The indignation
with which he repelled for himself and for his associate Luby the
charges levelled at them both, without a particle of supporting
evidence, by the prosecuting counsel, of aiming at massacre and plunder,
was its most salient feature. The terrible sentence passed upon him, of
penal servitude for twenty years, Mr. O'Leary accepted with a calm
dignity, which I am glad, for the sake of Irish manhood, to find that
his friends here now recall with pride, when their ears are vexed by the
shrill and clamorous complaints of more recent "patriots," under the
comparatively trivial punishments which they invite.
In 1870, Mr. O'Leary and his companions were released and pardoned on
condition of remaining beyond the British dominions until the expiration
of their sentences. Mr. O'Leary fixed his residence for a time in Paris,
and thence went to America, where he and Kickham were regarded as the
leaders of the American branch of the I. R. B. He returned to Ireland in
1885, his term of sentence having then expired, and it was shortly after
his return that he gave to my correspondent the letter upon Irish
affairs to which I have already referred. He had been chosen President
of the "Young Ireland Society" of Dublin before he returned, and in that
capacity delivered at the Rotunda, in the Irish capital, before a vast
crowd assembled to welcome him back, an address which showed how
thoughtfully and calmly he had devoted himself during his long years of
imprisonment and exile to the cause of Ireland. Mr. William O'Brien,
M.P., and Mr. Redmond, M.P., took part in this reception, but their
subsequent course shows that they can hardly have relished Mr. O'Leary's
fearless and outspoken protests against the intolerance and injustice of
the agrarian organisation which controls their action. In England, as
well as well as in Ireland, Mr. O'Leary spoke to great multitudes of his
countrymen, and always in the same sense. Mr. Rolleston tells me that
Mr. O'Leary's denunciations of "the dynamite section of the Irish
people," to use the euphemism of an American journal, "are the only ones
ever uttered by an Irish leader, lay or clerical." The day must come, if
it be not already close at hand, when the Irish leader of whom this can
be truly said, must be felt by his own people to be the one man worthy
of their trust. The thing that has been shall be, and there is nothing
new under the sun. The Marats and the Robespierres, the Barères and the
Collots, are the pallbearers, not the standard-bearers of liberty.
Towards the National League, as at present administered on the lines of
the agrarian agitation, Mr. O'Leary has so far preserved an attitude of
neutrality, though he has never for a moment hesitated either in public
or in private most vehemently to condemn such sworn Fenians as have
accepted seats in the British Parliament, speaking his mind freely and
firmly of them as "double-oathed men" playing a constitutional part with
one hand, and a treasonable part with the other.
Yet he is not at one with the extreme and fanatical Fenians who oppose
constitutional agitation simply because it is constitutional. His
objection to the existing Nationalism was exactly put, Mr. Rolleston
tells me, by a clever writer in the Dublin _Mail_, who said that
O'Connell having tried "moral force" and failed, and the Fenians having
tried "physical force" and failed, the Leaguers were now trying to
succeed by the use of "immoral force."
Dr. Sigerson, who, as a man of science, must necessarily revolt from the
coarse and clumsy methods of the blunderers who have done so much since
1885 to discredit the cause of Ireland, evidently clings to the hope
that something may still be saved from the visible wreck of what has
come, even in Ireland, to be called "Parnellism," and he good-naturedly
persisted in speaking of our host last night and of his friends as
"mugwumps." For the "mugwumps" of my own country I have no particular
admiration, being rather inclined, with my friend Senator Conkling (now
gone to his rest from the racket of American politics), to regard them
as "Madonnas who wish it to be distinctly understood that they might
have been Magdalens." But these Irish "mugwumps" seem to me to earn
their title by simply refusing to believe that two and two, which make
four in France or China, can be bullied into making five in Ireland.
"What certain 'Parnellites' object to," said one of the company, "is
that we can't be made to go out gathering grapes of thorns or figs of
thistles. Some of them expect to found an Irish republic on robbery, and
to administer it by falsehood. We don't."[27] This is precisely the
spirit in which Mr. Rolleston wrote to me not long before I left England
this week. "I have been slowly forced," he wrote, "to the conclusion
that the National League is a body which deserves nothing but
reprobation from all who wish well to Ireland. It has plunged this
country into a state of moral degradation, from which it will take us at
least a generation to recover. It is teaching the people that no law of
justice, of candour, of honour, or of humanity can be allowed to
interfere with the political ends of the moment. It is, in fact,
absolutely divorcing morality from politics. The mendacity of some of
its leaders is shameless and sickening, and still more sickening is the
complete indifference with which this mendacity is regarded in Ireland."
It is the spirit, too, of a letter which I received not long ago from
the west of Ireland, in which my correspondent quoted the bearer of one
of the most distinguished of Irish names, and a strong "Home Ruler," as
saying to him, "These Nationalists are stripping Irishmen as bare of
moral sense as the Bushmen of South Africa."
This very day I find in one of the leading Nationalist journals here
letters from Mr. Davitt, Mr. O'Leary, and Mr. Taylor himself, which
convict that journal of making last week a statement about Mr. Taylor
absolutely untrue, and, so far as appears, absolutely without the shadow
of a foundation. These letters throw such a curious light on passing
events here at this moment that I shall preserve them.[28] The statement
to which they refer was thus put in the journal which made it: "We have
absolute reason to know that when the last Coercion Act was in full
swing this pure-souled and disinterested patriot (Mr. John F. Taylor)
begged for, received, and accepted a very petty Crown Prosecutorship
under a Coercion Government. As was wittily said at the time, He sold
his principles, not for a mess of pottage, but for the stick that
stirred the mess." This is no assertion "upon hearsay"--no publication of
a rumour or report. It is an assertion made, not upon belief even, but
upon a claim of "absolute knowledge."
Yet to-day, in the same journal, I find Mr. Taylor declaring this
statement, made upon a claim of "absolute knowledge," to be "absolutely
untrue," and appealing in support of this declaration to Mr. Walker, the
host of Lord Riand Mr. Morley, and to The M'Dermot, Q.C., a conspicuous
Home Ruler; to which Mr. Davitt adds: "Mr. Taylor, on my advice,
declined the Crown Prosecutorship for King's County, a post afterwards
applied for by, and granted to, a near relative of one of the most
prominent members of the Irish Party,"--meaning Mr. Luke Dillon, a
cousin of Mr. John Dillon, M.P.!
We had much interesting conversation last night about the relations of
the Irish leaders here with public and party questions in America, as to
which I find Mr. O'Leary unusually well and accurately informed.
I am sorry that I must get off to-morrow into Mayo to see Lord Lucan's
country there, for I should have been particularly pleased to look more
closely with Mr. Rolleston into the intellectual revolt against
"Parnellism" and its methods, of which his attitude and that of his
friends here is an unmistakable symptom. As he tersely puts it, he sees
"no hope in Irish politics, except a reformation of the League, a return
to the principles of Thomas Davis."
The lines for a reformation or transformation of the League, as it now
exists, appear to have been laid down in the original constitution of
the body. Under that constitution, it seems, the League was meant to be
controlled by a representative committee chosen annually, open to public
criticism, and liable to removal by a new election. As things now are,
the officers of this alleged democratic organisation are absolutely
self-elected, and wield the wide and indefinite power they possess over
the people of Ireland in a perfectly unauthorised, irresponsible way. It
is a curious illustration of the autocratic or bureaucratic system under
which the Irish movement is now conducted, that Mr. Davitt, who does not
pretend to be a Parliamentarian, and owes indeed much of his authority
to his refusal to enter Parliament and take oaths of allegiance, does
not hesitate for a moment to discipline any Irish member of Parliament
who incurs his disapprobation. Sir Thomas Esmonde, for example, was
severely taken to task by him the other day in the public prints for
venturing to put a question, in his place at Westminster, to the
Government about a man-of-war stationed in Kingstown harbour. Mr. Davitt
very peremptorily ordered Sir Thomas to remember that he is not sent to
Westminster to recognise the British Government, or concern himself
about British regiments or ships, and Sir Thomas accepts the rebuke in
silence. Whom does such a member of Parliament represent--the
constituents who nominally elect him, or the leader who cracks the whip
over him so sharply?
I have to-day been looking through a small and beautifully-printed
volume of poems just issued here by Gill and Son, Nationalist
publishers, I take it, who have the courage of their convictions, since
their books bear the imprint of "O'Connell," and not of Sackville
Street. This little book of the _Poems and Ballads of Young Ireland _is
a symptom too. It is dedicated in a few brief but vigorous stanzas to
John O'Leary, as one who
"Hated all things base,
And held his country's honour high."
And the spirit of all the poems it contains is the spirit of '48, or of
that earlier Ireland of Robert Emmet, celebrated in some charming verses
by "Rose Kavanagh" on "St. Michan's Churchyard," where the
"sunbeam went and came
Above the stone which waits the name
His land must write with freedom's flame."
It interests an American to find among these poems and ballads a
striking threnody called "The Exile's Return," signed with the name of
"Patrick Henry"; and it is noteworthy, for more reasons than one, that
the volume winds up with a "Marching Song of the Gaelic Athletes,"
signed "An Chraoibhin Aoibbinn." These Athletes are numbered now, I am
assured, not by thousands, but by myriads, and their organisation covers
all parts of Ireland. If the spirit of '48 and of '98 is really moving
among them, I should say they are likely to be at least as troublesome
in the end to the "uncrowned king" as to the crowned Queen of Ireland.
As for the literary merit of these _Poems and Ballads of Young Ireland_,
it strikes one key with their political quality. One exquisite ballad of
"The Stolen Child," by W. B. Yeats, might have been sung in the
moonlight on a sylvan lake by the spirit of Heinrich Heine.
I spent an hour or two this morning most agreeably in the libraries of
the Law Courts and of Trinity College: the latter one of the stateliest
most academic "halls of peace" I have ever seen; and this afternoon I
called upon Dr. Sigerson, a most patriotic Irishman, of obviously Danish
blood, who has his own ideas as to Clontarf and Brian Boru; and who gave
me very kindly a copy of his valuable report on that Irish Crisis of
1879-80, out of which Michael Davitt so skilfully developed the agrarian
movement whereof "Parnellism" down to this time has been the not very
well adjusted instrument. The report was drawn up after a thorough
inspection by Dr. Sigerson and his associate, Dr. Kenny, visiting
physicians to the North Dublin Union, of some of the most distressed
districts of Mayo, Sligo, and Galway; and a more interesting,
intelligent, and impressive picture of the worst phases of the social
conditions of Ireland ten years ago is not to be found. I have just been
reading it over carefully in conjunction with my memoranda made from the
Emigration and Seed Potato Fund Reports, which Mr. Tuke gave me some
time ago, and it strongly reinforces the evidence imbedded in those
reports, which goes to show that agitation for political objects in
Ireland has perhaps done as much as all other causes put together to
depress the condition of the poor in Ireland, by driving and keeping
capital out of the country. The worst districts visited in 1879 by Dr.
Sigerson and Dr. Kenny do not appear to have been so completely cut off
from civilisation as was the region about Gweedore before the purchase
of his property there by Lord George Hill, and the remedies suggested by
Dr. Sigerson for the suffering in these districts are all in the
direction of the remedies applied by Lord George Hill to the condition
in which he found Gweedore. After giving full value to the stock
explanations of Irish distress in the congested districts, such as
excessive rents, penal laws, born of religious or "racial" animosity,
and a defective system of land tenure, it seems to be clear that the
main difficulties have arisen from the isolation of these districts, and
from the lack of varied industries. Political agitation has checked any
flow of capital into these districts, and a flow of capital into them
would surely have given them better communications and more varied
industries. Dr. Sigerson states that some of the worst of these regions
in the west of Ireland are as well adapted to flax-culture as Ulster,
and Napoleon III. showed what could be done for such wastes as La
Sologne and the desert of the Landes by the intelligent study of a
country and the judicious development of such values as are inherent in
it. The loss of population in Ireland is not unprecedented. The State of
New Hampshire, in America, one of the original thirteen colonies which
established the American Union, has twice shown an actual loss in
population during the past century. The population of the State declined
during the decade between 1810 and 1820, and again during the decade
between 1860 and 1870. This phenomenon, unique in American history, is
to be explained only by three causes, all active in the case of
congested Ireland,--a decaying agriculture, lack of communications, and
the absence of varied industries. During the decade from 1860 to 1870
the great Civil War was fought out. Yet, despite the terrible waste of
life and capital in that war, especially at the South, the Northern
State of New Hampshire, peopled by the energetic English adventurers who
founded New England, was actually the only State which came out of the
contest with a positive decline in population. Virginia (including West
Virginia, which seceded from that Commonwealth in 1861) rose from
1,596,318 inhabitants in 1860 to 1,667,177 in 1870. South Carolina,
which was ravaged by the war more severely than any State except
Virginia, and upon which the Republican majority at Washington pressed
with such revengeful hostility after the downfall of the Confederacy,
showed in 1870 a positive increase in population, as compared with 1860,
from 703,708 to 705,606. But New Hampshire, lying hundreds of miles
beyond the area of the conflict, showed a positive decrease from 326,073
to 318,300. During my college days at Cambridge the mountain regions of
New Hampshire were favourite "stamping grounds" in the vacations, and I
exaggerate nothing when I say that in the secluded nooks and corners of
the State, the people cut off from communication with the rest of New
England, and scratching out of a rocky land an inadequate subsistence,
were not much, if at all, in advance of the least prosperous dwellers in
the most remote parts of Ireland which I have visited. They furnished
their full contingent to that strange American exodus, which, about a
quarter of a century ago, was led out of New England by one Adams to the
Holy Land, in anticipation of the Second Advent, a real modern crusade
of superstitious land speculators, there to perish, for the most part,
miserably about Jaffa--leaving houses and allotments to pass into the
control of a more practical colony of Teutons, which I found
establishing itself there in 1869.
Since 1870 a change has come over New Hampshire. The population has
risen to 346,984. In places waste and fallen twenty years ago brisk and
smiling villages have sprung up along lines of communication established
to carry on the business of thriving factories.
What reason can there be in the nature of things to prevent the
development of analogous results, through the application of analogous
forces, in the case of "congested" Ireland? A Nationalist friend, to
whom I put this question this afternoon, answers it by alleging that so
long as fiscal laws for Ireland are made at Westminster, British capital
invested in Great Britain will prevent the application of these
analogous forces to "congested" Ireland. His notion is that were Ireland
as independent of Great Britain, for example, in fiscal matters as is
Canada, Ireland might seek and secure a fiscal union with the United
States, such as was partially secured to Canada under the Reciprocity
Treaty denounced by Mr. Seward.
"Give us this," he said, "and take us into your system of American
free-trade as between the different States of your American Union, and
no end of capital will soon be coming into Ireland, not only from your
enormously rich and growing Republic, but from Great Britain too. Give
us the American market, putting Great Britain on a less-favoured
footing, just as Mr. Blake and his party wish to do in the case of
Canada, and between India doing her own manufacturing on the one side,
and Ireland becoming a manufacturing centre on the other, and a mart in
Europe for American goods, we'll get our revenge on Elizabeth and
Cromwell in a fashion John Bull has never dreamt of in these times,
though he used to be in a mortal funk of it a hundred years ago, when
there wasn't nearly as much danger of it!"
DUBLIN, _Sunday, June 24._--"Put not your faith in porters!" I had
expected to pass this day at Castlebar, on the estate of Lord Lucan, and
I exchanged telegrams to that effect yesterday with Mr. Harding, the
Earl's grandson, who, in the absence of his wonderfully energetic
grandsire, is administering there what Lord Lucan, with pardonable
pride, declares to be the finest and most successful dairy-farm in all
Ireland. I asked the porter to find the earliest morning train; and
after a careful search he assured me that by leaving Dublin just after 7
A.M. I could reach Castlebar a little after noon.
Upon this I determined to dine with Mr. Colomb, and spend the night in
Dublin. But when I reached the station a couple of hours ago, it was to
discover that my excellent porter had confounded 7 A.M. with 7 P.M.
There is no morning train to Castlebar! So here I am with no recourse,
my time being short, but to give up the glimpse I had promised myself of
Mayo, and go on this afternoon to Belfast on my way back to London.
At dinner last night Mr. Colomb gave me further and very interesting
light upon the events of 1867, of which he had already spoken with me at
Cork, as well as upon the critical period of Mr. Gladstone's experiments
of 1881-82 at "Coercion" in Ireland.
Mr. Colomb lives in a remarkably bright and pleasant suburb of Dublin,
which not only is called a "park," as suburbs are apt to be, but really
is a park, as suburbs are less apt to be. His house is set near some
very fine old trees, shading a beautiful expanse of turf. He is an
amateur artist of much more than ordinary skill. His walls are gay, and
his portfolios filled, with charming water-colours, sketches, and
studies made from Nature all over the United Kingdom. The grand
coast-scenery of Cornwall and of Western Ireland, the lovely lake
landscapes of Killarney, sylvan homes and storied towers, all have been
laid under contribution by an eye quick to seize and a hand prompt to
reproduce these most subtle and transient atmospheric effects of light
and colour which are the legitimate domain of the true water-colourist.
With all these pictures about us--and with Mr. Colomb's workshop fitted
up with Armstrong lathes and all manner of tools wherein he varies the
routine of official life by making all manner of instruments, and
wreaking his ingenuity upon all kinds of inventions--and with the
pleasant company of Mr. Davies, the agreeable and accomplished official
secretary of Sir West Ridgway, the evening wore quickly away. In the
course of conversation the question of the average income of the Irish
priests arose, and I mentioned the fact that Lord Lucan, whose knowledge
of the smallest details of Irish life is amazingly thorough, puts it
down at about ten shillings a year per house in the average Irish
parish.
He rated Father M'Fadden and his curate of Gweedore, for example,
without a moment's hesitation, at a thousand pounds a year in the whole,
or very nearly the amount stated to me by Sergeant Mahony at Baron's
Court. This brought from Mr. Davies a curious account of the proceedings
in a recent case of a contested will before Judge Warren here in Dublin.
The will in question was made by the late Father M'Garvey of Milford, a
little village near Mulroy Bay in Donegal, notable chiefly as the scene
of the murder of the late Earl of Leitrim. Father M'Garvey, who died in
March last, left by this will to religious and charitable uses the whole
of his property, save £800 bequeathed in it to his niece, Mrs. O'Connor.
It was found that he died possessed not only of a farm at Ardara, but of
cash on deposit in the Northern Bank to the very respectable amount of
£23,711. Mrs. O'Connor contested the will. The Archbishop of Armagh, and
Father Sheridan, C.C. of Letterkenny, instituted an action against her
to establish the will. Father M'Fadden of Gweedore, lying in Londonderry
jail as a first-class misdemeanant, was brought from Londonderry as a
witness for the niece. But on the trial of the case it appeared that
there was actually no evidence to sustain the plea of the niece that
"undue influence" had been exerted upon her uncle by the Archbishop, who
at the time of the making of the will was Bishop of Raphoe, or by
anybody else; so the judge instructed the jury to find on all the issues
for the plaintiffs, which was done. The judge declared the conduct of
the defendant in advancing a charge of "undue influence" in such
circumstances against ecclesiastics to be most reprehensible; but the
Archbishop very graciously intimated through his lawyer his intention of
paying the costs of the niece who had given him all this trouble,
because she was a poor woman who had been led into her course by
disappointment at receiving so small a part of so large an inheritance.
Had the priest's property come to him in any other way than through his
office as a priest her claim might have been more worthy of
consideration, but Mr. M'Dermot, Q.C., who represented the Archbishop,
took pains to make it clear that as an ecclesiastic his client, who had
nothing to do with the making of the will, was bound to regard it "as
proper and in accordance with the fitness of things that what had been
received from the poor should be given back to the poor."
I see no adequate answer to this contention of the Archbishop. But it
certainly goes to confirm the estimates given me by Sergeant Mahony of
Father M'Fadden's receipts at Gweedore, and the opinion expressed to me
by Lord Lucan as to the average returns of an average Catholic parish,
that the priest of Milford, a place hardly so considerable as Gweedore,
should have acquired so handsome a property in the exercise there of his
parochial functions.
One form in which the priests in many parts of Ireland collect dues is
certainly unknown to the practice of the Church elsewhere, I believe,
and it must tend to swell the incomes of the priests at the expense,
perhaps, of their legitimate influence. This is the custom of personal
collections by the priests. In many parishes the priest stands by the
church-door, or walks about the church--not with a bag in his hand, as
is sometimes done in France on great occasions when a _quéle_ is made by
the _curé_ for some special object,--but with an open plate in which the
people put their offerings. I have heard of parishes in which the priest
sits by a table near the church-door, takes the offerings from the
parishioners as they pass, and comments freely upon the ratio of the
gift to the known or presumed financial ability of the giver.
We had some curious stories, too, from a gentleman present of the
relation of the priests in wild, out-of-the-way corners of Ireland to
the people, stories which take one back to days long before Lever. One,
for example, of a delightful and stalwart old parish priest of eighty,
upon whom an airy young patriot called to propose that he should accept
the presidency of a local Land League. The veteran, whose only idea of
the Land League was that it had used bad language about Cardinal Cullen,
no sooner caught the drift of the youth than he snatched up a huge
blackthorn, fell upon him, and "boycotted" him head-foremost out of a
window. Luckily it was on the ground floor.
Another strenuous spiritual shepherd came down during the distribution
of potato-seed to the little port in which it was going on, and took up
his station on board of the distributing ship. One of his parishioners,
having received his due quota, made his way back again unobserved on
board of the ship. As he came up to receive a second dole, the good
father spied him, and staying not "to parley or dissemble," simply
fetched him a whack over the sconce with a stick, which tumbled him out
of the ship, head-foremost, into the hooker riding beside her! Quite of
another drift was a much more astonishing tale of certain proceedings
had here in February last before the Lord Chief-Justice. These took
place in connection with a motion to quash the verdict of a coroner's
jury, held in August 1887, on the body of a child named Ellen Gaffney,
at Philipstown, in King's County, which preserves the memory of the
Spanish sovereign of England, as Maryborough in Queen's preserves the
memory of his Tudor consort. Cervantes never imagined an Alcalde of the
quality of the "Crowner"' who figures in this story. Were it not that
his antics cost a poor woman her liberty from August 1887 till December
of that year, when the happy chance of a winter assizes set her free,
and might have cost her her life, the story of this ideal magistrate
would be extremely diverting.
A child was born to Mrs. Gaffney at Philipstown on the 23d of July, and
died there on the 25th of August 1887, Mrs. Gaffney being the wife of a
"boycotted" man.
A local doctor named Clarke came to the police and asked the Sergeant to
inspect the body of the child, and call for an inquest. The sergeant
inspected the body, and saw no reason to doubt that the child had died a
natural death. This did not please the doctor, so the Coroner was sent
for. He came to Philipstown the next day, conferred there with the
doctor, and with a priest, Father Bergin, and proceeded to hold an
inquest on the child in a public-house, "a most appropriate place," said
Sir Michael Morris from the bench, "for the transactions which
subsequently occurred." Strong depositions were afterwards made by the
woman Mrs. Gaffney, by her husband, and by the police authorities, as to
the conduct of this "inquest." She and her husband were arrested on a
verbal order of the Coroner on the day when the inquest was held, August
27th, and the woman was kept in prison from that time till the assizes
in December. The "inquest" was not completed on the 27th of August, and
after the Coroner adjourned it, two priests drove away on a car from the
"public-house" in which it had been held. That night, or the next day, a
man came to a magistrate with a bundle of papers which he had found in
the road near Philipstown. The magistrate examined them, and finding
them to be the depositions taken before the Coroner in the case of Ellen
Gaffney, handed them to the police. How did they come to be in the road?
On the 1st of September the Coroner resumed his inquest, this time in
the Court-House at Philipstown, and one of the police, with the
depositions in his pocket, went to hear the proceedings. Great was his
amazement to see certain papers produced, and calmly read, as being the
very original depositions which at that moment were in his own custody!
He held his peace, and let the inquest go on. A letter was read from the
Coroner, to the effect that he saw no ground for detaining the husband,
Gaffney--but the woman was taken before a justice of the peace, and
committed to prison on this finding by the Coroner's jury: "That Mary
Anne Gaffney came by her death; and that the mother of the child, Ellen
Gaffney, is guilty of wilful neglect by not supplying the necessary food
and care to sustain the life of this child "!
It is scarcely credible, but it is true, that upon this extraordinary
finding the Coroner issued a warrant for "murder" against this poor
woman, on which she was actually locked up for more than three months!
The jury which made this unique finding consisted of nineteen persons,
and it was in evidence that their foreman reported thirteen of the jury
to be for finding one way and six for finding another, whereupon a
certain Mr. Whyte, who came into the case as the representative of
Father Bergin, President of the local branch of the National
League--nobody can quite see on what colourable pretext--was allowed by
the Coroner to write down the finding I have quoted, and hand it to the
Coroner. The Coroner read it over. He and Mr. Whyte then put six of the
jury in one place, and thirteen in another; the Coroner read the finding
aloud to the thirteen, and said to them, "Is that what you agree to?"
and so the inquest was closed, and the warrant issued--for murder--and
the woman, this poor peasant mother sent off to jail with the brand upon
her of infanticide.[29]
Where would that poor woman be now were there no "Coercion" in Ireland
to protect her against "Crowner's quest law" thus administered? And what
is to be thought of educated and responsible public men in England who,
as recent events have shown, are not ashamed to go to "Crowner's quest
Courts" of this sort for weapons of attack, not upon the administration
only of their own Government, but upon the character and the motives of
their political opponents?