the population of which have been lifted from a condition of chronic
starvation and enabled to earn their own livelihood by the splendid
organisation of Mr. Balfour for the relief of the congested districts.
Postal and other exigences having compelled a hasty return to the
mainland, I defer a full account of this most interesting visit until
my next letter, when I shall also be in possession of fuller and more
accurate information than is attainable on the island itself.
Meanwhile, let us examine the state of Irish feeling by the sad sea
waves of Galway Bay. Salthill is a plucky little bathing place; that
is, plucky for Ireland. It is easily accessible from Galway town, and
looks over the bay, but it is more like a long natural harbour without
ships. There is a mile or so of promenade with stone seats at
intervals, a shingle dotted with big rocks, a modicum of
slate-coloured sand, like that of Schevening, in Holland, and blue
hills opposite, like those of Carlingford Lough. The promenade is
kerbed by a massive sea wall of limestone, and here and there flights
of stone steps lead to the water's edge. Facing the sea are handsome
villas, with flower gardens, tidy gravelled walks, shrubberies, snowy
window blinds and other appurtenances of a desperately Protestant
appearance. No large hotels, no villas with "Apartments" on a card in
the fanlight, no boatmen plying for hire, no boats even, either ashore
or afloat; no bathing-machines no anything the brutal Saxon mostly
needs, except fresh air and blazing sunshine. The Galway end of this
fashionable resort has a few shady houses, aggressively Anglicised
with names like Wave View House and Elm Tree View, the first looking
at a whitewashed wall, the second at a telegraph post. But although
some of these houses announce "Furnished Lodgings," no English
tourists would "take them on." If you want to bathe you walk into the
sea as you stand, or hand your toga virilis to the bystanders, if any.
The Connaught folks have no false modesty.
A white-haired gentleman descends from a wagonette and promenades for
a while. Then he sits down beside me. The conversation turns on Home
Rule. My friend is impatient, has been spending a few days in Belfast.
The ignorance of the poor people is astonishing. A Roman Catholic of
the Northern city told him that the first act of the Irish Parliament
would be to level Cave Hill, and on the site thereof to build cottages
for the poor. The hill was full of diamonds, which Queen Victoria
would not allow the poor Irish folks to get. The country would be full
of money. Didn't Mr. Gladstone say we'd have too much?--a clear
allusion to the "chronic plethora." The people would have the upper
hand, as they ought to have, and the first thing would be to evict the
evictors. The only question was, would they clear out peaceably, or
would it be necessary to call in the aid of the Irish Army of
Independence?
"This poor man evidently believed that every respectable person,
everybody possessing means and property, was an enemy to the
commonwealth. An ardent Home Ruler asked me if the majority had a
right to rule. He thought that was a triumphant, an unanswerable
question. I replied that during a long and busy life I had always
observed how, in successful enterprises, the majority did not rule.
The intelligent minority, the persons who had shown their wisdom,
their industry, their sagacity, their integrity, that they were
competent and reliable, those, I said, were the people who were
entrusted with the management of great affairs, and not the
many-headed mob. The management of Irish affairs promises to be a task
of tremendous difficulty, and those to whom you propose to entrust
this huge and complicated machinery stand convicted of inability to
manage with even tolerable success such comparatively simple affairs
as the party journal, or the rent collection of new Tipperary. Both
these enterprises turned out dead failures owing to the total
incapacity of the Irish Parliamentary party. And we are asked to
entrust the future of the country to these men, whose only
qualifications are a faculty for glib talk and an unreasonable hatred
of everything English.
"Mr. Gladstone has shown to demonstration that statesmen are no longer
to direct the course of legislation; are no longer to lead the people
onward in the paths of progressive improvement. The unthinking,
uneducated masses are in future to signify their will, and statesmen
are to be the automata to carry out their behests, whatever they may
be. The unwashed, unshorn incapables who have nothing, because they
lack the brains and industry to acquire property, are nowadays told
that they, and they alone, shall decide the fate of empires, shall
decide the ownership of property, shall manipulate the fortunes of
those who have raised themselves from the dirt by ability,
self-denial, and unremitting hard work. Look at the comparative
returns of the illiterate electorate. In Scotland 1 in 160, in England
1 in 170, in Ireland 1 in 5. In one quarter of Donegal, a Catholic
one, more illiterates than in all Scotland. Not that there is so much
difference as these figures would seem to show. But if men who can
write declare themselves illiterate, so that the priests and village
ruffians may be satisfied as to how they individually voted, is not
this still more deplorable? The conduct of the English Gladstonians
passes my comprehension. They do not examine for themselves. They say
Mr. Gladstone says so-and-so, and for them this is sufficient. Do they
say their prayers to the Grand Old Man?"
Another Salthill malcontent said:--"An English visitor sneeringly
asked me how it was that the Irish could not trust one another. I
said, 'We cannot trust these men, and we can give you what ought to be
a satisfactory reason for our distrust. They have been condemned as
criminals by a competent tribunal, presided over by three English
judges, one of them a Roman Catholic. They have been found guilty of
criminal conspiracy, of sympathy with crime, and of having furnished
the means for its committal, and that after the fairest trial ever
held in the world. By a law passed in 1787 by Grattan's Parliament
they would have suffered the punishment of death for this same
criminal conspiracy. And, apart from Home Rule, leaving the present
agitation altogether out of the question, the respectable classes of
Ireland entirely object to be represented by such men, either at
Westminster or College Green. Their conduct has done more to ruin
Ireland than any other calamity which the country has endured for long
ages. They have displayed an ingenuity of torture, and a refinement of
cruelty, worthy of the Inquisition. Look at the case of
District-inspector Murphy, of Woodford, in this county. Not by any
means the worst of the tens of thousands of cases all over the
country, but impressive to me because it came under my own
observation. At the trial of Wilfrid Blunt, Mr. Murphy deposed upon
oath that so severely was he boycotted for the mere performance of his
duty, that his children were crying for bread, and that he was unable
to give them any. Policemen had to bring milk from miles away. In
other cases the pupils of these patriots, the preachers of the Land
League, poured human filth into the water supply of their victims, who
were in many cases ladies of gentle birth and children of tender
years. Go up to Cong, and walk out to the place where Lord Mountmorres
was murdered, near Clonbur. His whole income was L150 or L200, a poor
allowance for a peer, one of the noble house of De Montmorency. He was
shot in broad daylight, a dozen houses within call, and an open
uncovered country, save for low stone walls, all around. The people
danced in derision on the spot where he fell, and threw soil stained
with his life blood in the air. He wanted his due, and, goodness
knows, he was poor enough to satisfy oven an Irish agitator. His name
was down for the next vacancy among the resident magistrates. The
people who were guilty of inciting to those outrages are the most
prominent of the Nationalist party. Is this the class of men you wish
to set over us as governors?"
An artist named Hamilton, a Guernsey man, said, "The English people do
not understand what stonethrowing means in Ireland. They read of rows,
and so long as no shooting is done, they do not think it serious. The
men of Connaught are wonderful shots with big stones, and you would be
surprised at the force and precision with which they hurl great lumps
of rock weighing three or four pounds. Poor Corbett, a man in Lord
Ardilaun's employ, was killed outright by one of these missiles, and
only the other day I was reading of the Connaught Rangers in Egypt,
the old 88th, how they were short of ammunition at the battle of
Aboukir, and how they tore down a wall and actually stopped the
French, who were advancing with the bayonet."
A Galway merchant said:--"Balfour is the man for Ireland. A
Nationalist member told me he was the cleverest man in the House. He
said, 'Chamberlain goes in for hard hitting, and he is very effective,
but nobody ever answered the Irish members so readily and smartly as
Balfour. We thought twice before we framed our questions, and although
we of course disapprove of him, we are bound to admire him immensely.'
And as a business man I think Balfour was fully up to the mark. He it
was who subsidised the Midland and Western Railway to build the light
line now being made between Galway and Clifden. No company would have
undertaken such a concern. As a mere business transaction it could not
pay. But look at the good that is being done. The people were starving
for want of employment, and no unskilled labour is imported to the
district, so that the Connemara folks get the benefit of the work, and
also a permanent advantage by the opening up of the Galway fisheries,
which are practically inexhaustible. We have the Atlantic to go at.
And the fish out of the deep, strong, running water are twice as big
as those just off the coast, on herring-banks and shoals. The
fishermen know this, and they call these places the mackerel hospitals
and infirmaries. These fishermen always knew it, but they had no boats
to go out to the deep seas, no nets, no tackle. They have them now,
and they got them from Balfour. They get nothing but Home Rule from
Morley and Gladstone, and they find it keeps them free from
indigestion, although it puts their livers out of order. Amusing
chaps, these fishermen. I was in a little country place on the coast,
where the judicial and magisterial proceedings are of a very primitive
character, and where most of the people speak Irish as their
vernacular. One old chap declined to give evidence in English, and
asked for an interpreter. The magistrate, who knew the old wag, said,
'Michael Cahill, you speak English very well,' to which the old man
replied, ''Tis not for the likes o' me to conthradict yer honner, but
divil resave the word iv it I ondhersthand at all, at all.' There was
a great roar from the Court, and the interpreter was trotted forward.
Another witness was said to have been drunk, but he claimed to be a
temperance man. 'What do you drink,' said the magistrate. 'Wather, yer
honner,' said the total abstainer. 'Jist pure wather from the spring
there beyant,' and then he looked round the Court, and slyly added,
'Wid jist as much whiskey as will take off the earthy taste, yer
honner.' He was like the temperance lecturer who preached round
Galway, and was afterwards seen crushing sugar in a stiff glass of the
crathur at Oughterard. When he was caught redhanded, as it were, he
said, 'To be sure I'm a timprance man, but, bedad, ye can't say that
I'm a bigoted one'!
"We want Morley to give us a light railway from Clifden to Westport,
and then we'd have the whole coast supplied. But he's a tight-fisted
one as regards practical work. We've no chance with him, except in
matters of sentiment. He wants to give Home Rule, but we can't eat
that. And my impression is that we are fast drifting into the position
of the man who has nothing, and from whom shall be taken the little
that he hath. As to arguments against Home Rule, I do not think it a
case for argument. That the thing is bad is self-evident; and
self-evident propositions, whether in Euclid or elsewhere, are always
the most difficult to prove. Ask me to prove that two added to two
make four, ask me how many beans make five, and I gracefully retire.
Ask me to show that Home Rule will be bad for Ireland, and I will make
but a slight departure from this formula. I say, on the supporters of
Home Rule rests the _onus probandi_; they are the people who should
show cause, let them prove their case in its favour. Here I am, quite
satisfied with the laws as they now are. Show me, say I, how I shall
benefit by the proposed change. That knocks them speechless. In
England they may make a pretence of proving their case, but in this
country they are dumb in the presence of Unionists. They cannot argue
with enlightened people. They have not a leg to stand upon, and they
know it.
"Consider the fulminations of Archbishop Walsh with regard to that
Dublin Freemason Bazaar in aid of orphan children. As you must have
heard, the Sacraments were refused to any Catholic attending this
purely charitable movement. The Church said in effect--Any one who
aids the orphans of freemasons by going to this bazaar, or by
patronising the function, whether directly or indirectly, will be
damned everlastingly. And the Catholics kept away, frightened by this
threat. What would you expect of a people who believe such rubbish? Do
you think that a people powerfully influenced, supremely influenced,
by the word of a priest are fit to govern themselves? Can you depend
on the loyalty of the Catholic priesthood? You surely know better than
that. Suppose you gave Ireland Home Rule, and the Church turned rusty?
With matters in the hands of an Irish Parliament, who would have the
pull in weight of influence, John Bull or the priests? You are
walking into a snare with your eyes open. Soon you will be punching
your own head and calling yourself a fool. And you will be quite
right. England is giving herself away at the bidding of a crowd of
fellows who in Ireland are not received into decent society, and few
of whom could get 'tick' for a week's board or a week's washing. Not
that the latter would be much hardship. Clean linen is a novelty to
the bulk of them. And seventy-one out of eighty of these upstarts must
do the bidding of the priests.
"Poor old Bull! The fine fellow he was. Respected by everybody. Strong
but good-humoured, never hurting a soul. Slapping his breeches pocket
now and then, and looking round the world with an eye that seemed to
say, 'I could buy and sell the lot of ye; look what a fine fellow I
am!' And he was. And he knew it, too. His only fault. Ready to lend a
deserving friend a trifle, and apt to poke his nose into what didn't
concern him, especially when a small country was being put upon. Then
John would come up and say, 'Let him alone, will yer.' A
laughing-stock in his old age. But yesterday he might have stood
before the world: now none so poor to do him reverence,--Shakespeare!
That's what's coming. Poor old Bull! In his dotage making a rod to
whip himself. Well, well."
There are Presbyterians at Salthill. Wherever they are they always
wear good coats, have good houses, well-clad children. To be
comfortably off seems part of their creed. One of them said, "There
never was a more faithful worshipper of the Grand Old Man than
myself,--up to a certain time, I mean. I dropped him before he went
over to Parnell. I gave him up on account of his inconsistency. What
staggered me was a trick he tried to play the Queen's College
arrangements in Ireland. It was a supplemental charter really changing
the whole constitution of the thing, and he tried to carry his point
by a dodge. I did not care much about the matter one way or the other,
but I thought his underhanded trickery unworthy a statesman, or any
other man. I tried not to believe it; that is, I would rather not have
believed it. I had a sort of feeling that it couldn't be. But it was
so. Then his pamphlet about Vaticanism, in which he said no Roman
Catholic could be loyal, after which he appointed the Marquess of
Ripon, a Catholic convert, or pervert, to the Governor-Generalship of
India, the most important office in the gift of the Crown. Again, I
had no objection to the action in itself, but I considered it from Mr.
Gladstone's point of view, and then it dawned on me that he would say
anything. You never know what he'll do next. What he says is no guide
at all nowadays to what he'll do. He was my hero, but a change has
come over him, and now he cannot be trusted. He ought to be looked
after in some public institution where the keepers wouldn't contradict
him. He was a great man before his mind gave way."
A bustling Belfaster of fatiguing vitality told me this little story
which my friends the Catholic clergy may disprove if they can. He
said:--"Mr. McMaster, of the firm of Dunbar, McMaster and Co., of
Gilford, County Down, conceived the idea of aiding his fellow-countrymen
and women who were starving in the congested districts. This was some
time ago, but it is a good illustration of the difficulty you have in
helping people who will not help themselves. He drew up a scheme, well
thought-out and workable, such as a thorough business man might be
expected to concoct, and sent down his agent to the districts of
Gweedore in Donegal and Maam in Galway, with instructions to engage as
many families as possible to work in the mills of the firm, noted all
over the world for thread, yarn, and linen-weaving. An enormous affair,
employing a whole township. The agent was provided with a document
emanating from the priest of the district into which they were invited
to migrate, setting forth that no proselytism was intended, and that
the migrants would be under the care of Catholic clergy. As they had
neither money nor furniture worth moving, it was agreed to pay the cost
of transit, and to provide clean, sweet cottages, ready furnished, and
with every reasonable convenience. The furniture was to be paid for by
instalments, but the cost of removal was to be a gift from Mr.
McMaster, who was desirous of aiding the people without pauperising
them. They were to work the ordinary factory hours, as enacted by
statute, and to be paid the ordinary wages. But they were required to
work regularly. No saints' days, no lounging about on the "pattherns"
(patron saints' days), no in-and-out running, but steady, regular
attendance. People who knew the Keltic Irish laughed at Mr. McMaster,
but he had seen their poverty, their filth, their mud cabins, their
semi-starvation, and he thought he knew. He offered them work, and
everything they seemed to want, out of pure humanity.
"How many people moved to Gilford out of the two counties?"
"Peradventure there might be a hundred found, peradventure there might
be fifty, thirty, twenty, ten."
"Guess again. Give it up? Not a single solitary soul accepted Mr.
McMaster's offer. These are the people who are waiting for Home Rule.
Much good may it do them."
A little Galway man became irate. "'Tis our birthright to hate
England. That's why we want Home Rule that we may tache thim their
place. I'd fight England, an' I'd do more." Here he looked sternly at
the Ulsterman. "I'd do more, I say, I'd fight thim that'd shtand up
for her. D'ye see me now?"
The Belfast man proved an awkward customer. He said, "You're too busy
to fight anybody just now, you Nationalists. Wait till you've settled
your differences, wait till you've cut each other's throats, wait till
you've fought over the plunder, like the Kilkenny cats, till there's
nothing left of you but the tail. Then we'll send down an army of owld
women with besoms to sweep ye into the Atlantic. 'Twill be the first
bath your Army of Independence ever got. 'Twill cool their courage and
clean their hides at the same time."
The small Separatist was about to make an angry reply, when I
interposed with an inquiry as to his estimate of Mr. Gladstone.
"Ah," said the little man, with a pucker of his little nose, and a
grand gesture of contempt, "sure he's not worth as much powdher as
would blow him to hell."
His sentiment lacks novelty, but I quote him for the picturesqueness
of his style.
Salthill, May 18th.
No. 24.--THE ARAN ISLANDS.
The Aran Islanders seem to have passed most of their time in a state
of chronic starvation. The land seems to grow little but rock, and the
burning of seaweed, the kelp trade, does not seem to have helped them
much. True, the Atlantic was all before them, where to choose, but
what Father Mahony would call the teeming treasures of the deep were
practically left untouched. If we accept the plain meaning of the good
priest's speech, we must believe that the Aran Islanders and Irish
fishermen generally preferred to starve rather than to catch fish,
unless an Irish Parliament were fixed on College Green. They had no
objection to accept charitable aid, no matter from what quarter it
came, and the Araners required assistance every other year. They were
not unwilling to catch fish, but they had nothing to catch them with;
and, strange as it may seem, these islanders, who could scarcely move
five yards in any direction without falling into the sea, these
amphibious Irishmen, did not know the art of catching fish! They
tinkered and slopped around the shoals in the vicinity of the island,
but they were never able to catch enough fish to keep themselves from
starvation, much less to supply the Dublin and London markets. Their
boats were the most primitive affairs imaginable, and showed the Irish
spirit of conservatism to perfection. These coraghs are practically
the same boat as the Welsh coracle, but much larger. Those I examined
were from ten to fifteen feet long and three feet wide. Oak ribs, over
which are nailed laths of white deal, two inches wide and half an inch
thick. Cover this slight skeleton with tarred canvas, and the ship is
nearly complete. It only needs two pairs of wooden thole-pins, and two
pairs of oars, long, light, and thin, coming nearly to a point at the
water-end, having a perforated block which works on the thole-pins
before-mentioned. You want no keel, no helm, no mast. Stay! You need a
board or two for seats for the oarsmen. With these frail cockleshells
the Araners adventure themselves twelve miles on the Atlantic, and
mostly come home again. These makeshift canoes are almost useless for
catching fish. Having no helm, it is hard to keep them straight;
having no keel, it is needful to sit still, or at any rate to maintain
a perfect balance, or over you go. A gust of wind spins the canoe
round like a top. These primeval boats are made on the island, thrown
together out of fifteen-pennyworth of wood, a few yards of canvas, and
a pitch-pot. They have some virtues. They are cheap, and they will not
sink. The coraghs always come back, even if bottom up. And when they
reach the shore the two occupants (if any) invert the ship, stick a
head in the stem and another in the stern, and carry her home to tea.
This process is apt to puzzle the uninformed visitor, who sees a
strange and fearful animal, like a huge black-beetle, crawling up the
cliffs. He begins to think of "antres huge and deserts vast, and
anthropophagi, and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders."
He hesitates about landing, but if he be on the Duras, Captain Neal
Delargy, who equally scoffs at big beetles and Home Rule, will
explain, and will accompany him to the tavern on the cliff side, where
they charge ordinary prices for beer and give you bread-and-cheese for
nothing. And yet the Araners profess to be civilised.