Land Leaguers also made their mark. The stationmaster sued somebody
for travelling without a ticket. He was shot dead in the street
immediately afterwards. Miss Croughan did not meet popular opinion in
the matter of farm management. She was shot as she walked to church
one fine Sunday morning. Patrick Farrelly took land which somebody
else wanted. Shot as he walked home from work. Mr. Dolan, of a flour
mill in the neighbourhood, had some misunderstanding with his workmen.
Shot, on the chance that his successor would take warning, and
accommodate himself to the public sentiment. Miss Ann Murphy, who with
her two brothers lives at a small farm a mile or two away, supplied a
jug of milk, and said that things were quiet for the moment, but there
was no telling what might happen. The house was roofed with corrugated
iron. "Ah," said Miss Murphy, "we were nearly burned to death, myself
an' my two brothers. An' this was the way iv it. Tramps and ruffians
would call here at nightfall, an' would ask for a shelter an' a lie
down, an' I would lay a few bags or something on the flure over
beyant, an' they would sthretch themselves out till mornin', an' often
and often I would wash their cheeks an' heads where they had been
fightin', an' would be all cut an' hacked. One fellow was often here,
an' my brothers had reason to refuse him free lodgin's, an' so the
next mornin' we found the gate lifted off the hinges an' carried away
down the lane. My brothers spoke to the police-sergeant about this,
an' the very next thing was to try to burn us alive in our beds. Some
ruffian came in the night an' put a match in the thatch, an' I woke
almost suffocated. I ran out, an' there was the house on fire, and the
cow-house, with a beautiful, lovely cow, all a solid piece of blazin'
flames, till ye could see nothin' else. We saved the four walls an'
some of the furniture, an' we got L50 from the County. That's the sort
of people the Land League brought out all over the country."
A sturdy farmer living near said:--"An' that's what we'll have to
suffer again, once ye let Home Rulers have the upper hand. The only
way ye can manage these scamps is to make them feel the lash. No good
tomfooling with these murdherin' ruffians. With Home Rule they expect
to do as they like. If I go into a whiskey shop on a market day, what
do I hear? Ever an' always the same things. There is to be no
landlords, no policemen, no means of enforcing the law. There ye have
it, now. The respectable people who work and make money will be a mark
for every robber in the country. An' in Ireland ye can rob and murther
widout fear of consequences. See that hill there? Mrs. Smith had her
brains blown out as she drove by the foot of it. They meant the shot
for her husband, who was with her. They don't make many mistakes. They
bide their time, avoid hurry, and do the work both nately an'
complately. They track down their victims like sleuth hounds, an'
there's one thing they never go in for,--that's executions. Mrs.
Smith, Farrelly, Dolan, Miss Croughan, and the stationmaster, were all
comfortably shot without anyone incurring evil consequences. It's
devilish hard to catch an Irishman, an' when ye've caught him it's
harder still to convict him. They're improvin' in their plannin', but
they are not so sure o' their shootin' as they used to be. They fired
at Moloney from both sides of the road at once. That was a good idea.
But they failed to kill him, and seven of them are arrested. Of
course, we'll have no convictions, but it looks better to arrest them,
an' it ensures the man that's arrested a brass band an' a collection.
So everybody's pleased an' nobody hurt. An' what would ye ask for
more?"
On Thursday last, at eleven in the morning, Mr. Weldon C. Moloney,
solicitor, of Dublin, was driving near Milltown, on the Bodyke
property, when he was wounded from the ankle to the thigh by several
simultaneous shots from both sides of the road, and the horse so badly
injured that it must probably be destroyed. Mr. Moloney believes that
he will be able to identify his assailants, and the police are sure
they have the right men. Nothing, therefore, is now wanting to the
formalities accompanying the Morley administration of Justice but the
march to Court, the cheers of the crowd, the twelve good men and
true--who, having sworn to return a verdict in accordance with the
evidence, will assuredly say Not Guilty--and the brass band to
accompany the marksmen home. If the heroes of this adventure be
liberated in the evening a torchlight procession will make the thing
complete, and will be handy for burning the haystacks of anyone who
may not have joined the promenade.
Athlone is well built and beautifully situated. The Shannon winds
round the town, and also cuts it in two, so that one-half is in County
Westmeath, province of Leinster, the other in County Roscommon,
province of Connaught. The people are fairly well clad, but dirt and
squalor such as can hardly be conceived are plentiful enough. The
Shannon Saw Mills, which for twenty years have given employment to two
hundred men, will shortly be removed to Liverpool, and the Athloners
are sad at heart and refuse to be comforted. The concern belongs to
Wilson, of Todmorden, Lancashire; and the manager, Mr. Lewis Jones,
says that all the timber within reasonable distance is used up,
besides which the place is not well fixed for business purposes. The
workpeople are manageable enough, but somewhat uncertain in their
attendance. They require a half-hour extra at breakfast time every now
and then, perhaps twenty times a year or more, that they may attend
mass, on the saints' days and such like occasions.
This reminded me of my first entrance to Galway. All the bridges and
other lounging places were covered with men who looked as if they
ought to be at work. It was Ascension Day, and nobody struck a stroke.
My invasion of Athlone afforded a similar experience. There were
sixty-five able-bodied men lounging on the Shannon bridge at three in
the afternoon--all deeply anxious to know whence I came and whither I
was going, all with an intense desire to learn my particular business.
Other pauper factories were in full swing, and at the first blush it
seemed that the Athloners lived by looking at the river and discussing
the affairs of other people. It was Corpus Christi Day, and none but
heathen would work. The brutal Saxon with his ding-dong persistency
may be making money, but how about his future interests? When the last
trump shall sound and the dead shall be raised, where will be the
workers on saints' days? Among the goats. But the men who spend these
holy seasons in smoking thick twist, with the Shannon for a spittoon,
will reap the reward of their self-denial.
Mr. Lewis Jones has always taken a strong interest in politics, and
his present opinion is remarkable. "I came to Ireland a Gladstonian, a
Home Ruler, and, what is more, a bigoted Home Ruler. How the change to
my present opinion was brought about I hardly know. It was not
revolution, but rather evolution. No-one can remain a Home Ruler when
he understands the subject. The change in myself came about through
much travelling all over the country and mixing with the people. I do
not blame the English Home Rulers a bit. How can I do so, when I
myself was just as ignorant? Had I remained in Liverpool I should have
remained a Home Ruler. I am certain of that. Unless you actually live
in the country you cannot gauge its feeling, and the Irish people are
very difficult to understand. I have always got along with them
famously, and I shall take ninety per cent. of our workmen with me to
England. No, Home Rule has nothing to do with the removal of the
works.
"My cousin and I worked like horses to get in Mr. Neville for the
Exchange Division of Liverpool. We actually won, for by a piece of
adroit management we polled a number of votes which would certainly
have remained unpolled, and we polled them all for our man, who won by
a very small majority, eleven, I think. I would willingly go to
Liverpool to undo that work, as I now see how completely I was
mistaken in my views of the Irish question. I was always a great
Radical, and such I shall always remain; but as a Radical I am bound
to support what is best for the masses of the people, and I am
convinced that Home Rule would reduce the country to beggary.
Bankruptcy must and will ensue, and with the flight of the landowners
and the destruction of confidence, employment will be unobtainable.
Who will embark capital in Ireland under present circumstances?"
A financial authority told me that poor Ireland has thirty-six
millions of uninvested money lying idle in the banks. The Irish not
only lack enterprise, but they will not trust each other. Great
opportunities are lying thickly around, but they seem unable to avail
themselves of the finest openings. Mr. Smith, of Athlone, makes twelve
and a half miles of Irish tweed every week, and sells it rather faster
than he can make it. He commenced with two shillings a week wages, and
now he owns a factory and employs five hundred people. A Black
Protestant, of course. Mr. Samuel Heaton, of Bradford, is about to go
and do likewise. I went over his place an hour ago, and this is what
he said:--"This was a flour mill which cost L10,000 to build. The
machinery would cost L10,000 more, I should think. It did well for
many years, and then it was left to three brothers, who disputed about
it until the concern was ruined as a paying business, and the place
was allowed to lie derelict. The water power alone cost them L100 a
year, and goodness knows what these splendid buildings would be worth.
The Board of Works had got hold of it, and it was understood that
anybody might have it a bargain, but nobody came forward. I offered
them L30 a year for the whole of the buildings, the waterpower, and
the dwelling house hard by, also that other immense building yonder,
which might prove handy for a store-house; and my offer was accepted.
I took all at that rent for sixty years, with six months' free tenancy
to start with, and I was also to have a free gift of all machinery and
fittings in the place. Here we are going nicely, only in a small way,
but we shall do. We make blankets, tweeds for men's suits and ladies'
dresses. When the Athlone people saw us knocking about they were
surprised they had never thought of it before. There are hundreds of
derelict flour mills going to ruin all over the country, and the
owners would gladly let anyone have them and grand water power for
nothing for two or three years, just to get a chance of obtaining rent
at some future day. We work from morning till night, and neither I nor
my sons have ever tasted a spot of intoxicating liquor. Now there are
many small mills going in the country, the proprietors of which go on
the spree three days a week. If they can do, we can do. This is going
to be a big thing. The only difficulty I have is to turn out the
stuff. Irish tweeds have such a reputation that we simply cannot meet
the demand. Mills and water power may be had for next to nothing, but
the Irish have no enterprise, and the English are afraid to put any
money in the country under present circumstances."
The Lock Mills above mentioned are three or four stories high, with
perhaps a hundred yards of front elevation, a grandly built series of
stone buildings close to the Shannon, which is here about a hundred
and twenty yards wide, and carries tolerably large steamers and
lighters. Six months' occupancy for nothing, the old machinery a free
gift, water power and buildings for sixty years at L30 a year. I have
previously mentioned the twelve big mills abandoned on the Boyne.
Twelve openings for small capitalists--but Irishmen put their money in
stockings, under the flure, in the thatch. _They_ will not trust
Irishmen, although they have no objection to John Bull's doing so. A
bank manager of this district said:--
"Poor Connaught, as they call the province, is a great hoarder. And
when Irishmen invest they invest outside Ireland. Seventy-eight
thousand pounds in the Post Office savings bank in Mayo, the most
poverty-stricken district--as they will tell you. There is Connaught
money in Australia, in America, in England, and in all kinds of
foreign bonds. Irishmen want to keep their hoardings secret. They like
to walk about barefoot and have money in their stocking. An old woman
who puts on and takes off her shoes outside the town has three sons
high up in the Civil Service, and could lend you eight hundred pounds.
You would take her for a beggar and might offer her a penny, and she'd
take it. Have you noticed the appalling mendicancy of Ireland? Have
you reflected on the 'high spirit' of the Irish people? Have you
remembered their pride, their repugnance to the Saxon? And have you
noticed the everlastingly outstretched hands which meet you at every
corner? Beggary, lying, dirt, and laziness invariably accompany
priestly rule, and are never seen in Ireland in conjunction with
Protestantism? I wish somebody would explain this. The Irish masses
are the dirtiest and laziest in the world, but there are no dirty,
lazy Protestants. Nobody ever heard of such a thing. And yet because
there are more dirty, lazy Catholics than clean, industrious
Protestants Mr. Gladstone would give the Catholic party the mastery,
and England in future would be ruled from Rome.
"Mr. Gladstone is not responsible for his actions. The Civil Service
will not employ a man after sixty-five. The British Government forbids
a man to work in its service after that time. The consensus of
scientific opinion has fixed sixty-five as the limit at which the
control of an office or the execution of routine office work should
cease. Slips of memory occur, and the brain has lost its keen edge,
its firm grip, its rapid grasp of detail. At sixty-five you are not
good enough for the Civil Service, but at eighty-four, when you are
nineteen years older, you may govern a vast empire. It is an anomaly.
Even the Nationalists think Mr. Gladstone past his work."
This statement was fully borne out by a strong anti-Parnellite of
Athlone. He said:--"The bill is a hoax, but it is better than nothing.
We'll take what we can get, an' we'll get what we can take--afterwards.
Ye wouldn't be surprised that the people's bitter about the bill. Sure,
'tis no Home Rule it is at all, even if we got it as it first stood.
'Tis an insult to offer such a bill to the Irish nation. We want
complete independence. We have a sort of a yoke on us, an' we'll never
rest till we get it off. Ye say 'This'll happen ye, and That'll happen
ye,' an' ye care the divil an' all about it. We don't care what
happens, once we get rid of that yoke. A friend of mine said yesterday,
'I never see an Englishman but I think I'd like to have him under my
feet, an' meself stickin' somethin' into him.' There's murther in their
hearts, an' ye can't wonder at it. An' owld Gladstone's a madman, no
less. I'm towld he ordhers a dozen top hats at once, an' his wife gets
the shop-keeper to take thim back. An' I'm towld he stales the spoons
whin he goes out to dine wid his frinds, an' that his wife takes thim
back in a little basket nixt mornin'. And I thought that was all
nonsinse till I seen the bill. An' thin I felt I could believe it; for,
bedad, nobody but a madman could have drawn up sich a measure, to
offind everybody, an' plaze nobody. 'Tis what ye'd expect from a
lunatic asylum. But, thin, 'tis Home Rule. 'Tis the principle; an' as
the mimber for Roscommon says, ''Tis ourselves will apply it, an' 'tis
ourselves will explain it. That's where we'll rape the advantage,' says
he."
The Athlone market is "now on," and several hundred cows and calves
are lowing in front of the Royal, Mrs. Haire's excellent caravanserai.
Sheep are bleating, and excited farmers are yelling like pandemonium
or an Irish House of Commons. Athlone is a wonderful place for
donkeys, which swell the nine-fold harmony with incessant cacophonous
braying, so that the town might fairly claim the distinction of being
the chosen home, if not the _fons et origo_, of Nationalist oratory.
Athlone, June 3rd.
No. 31.--THE "UNION OF HEARTS."
Once again the Atlantic stops me. The eighty-three miles of country
between here and Athlone have brought about no great change in the
appearance of the people, who, on the whole, are better clad than the
Galway folks. The difference in customs, dress, language, manners, and
looks between one part of Ireland and another close by is sometimes
very considerable. There is a lack of homogeneity, a want of fusion,
an obvious need of some mixing process. The people do not travel, and
in the rural districts many of them live and die without journeying
five miles from home. The railways now projected or in process of
construction will shortly change all this, and the tourist, with more
convenience, will no longer be able to see the Ireland of centuries
ago. The language is rapidly dying out. Not a word of Irish did I hear
in Athlone, even on market day. The Westporters know nothing about it.
The tongue of the brutal Saxon is everywhere heard. The degenerate
Irish of these latter days cannot speak their own language. They
preach, teach, quarrel, pray, swear, mourn, sing, bargain, bless,
curse, make love in English. They are sufficiently familiar with the
British vernacular to lie with the easy grace of a person speaking his
mother-tongue. They are a gifted people, and a patriotic--at least
they tell us so, and the Irish, they say, is the queen of languages,
the softest, the sweetest, the most poetical, the most sonorous, the
most soul-satisfying. And yet the patriot members speak it not.
William O'Brien is said to know a little, but only as you know a
foreign language. He could not address the people on the woes of
Ireland, could not lash the brutal Saxon, could not express in his
native tongue the withering outpourings of his patriotic soul. He
always speaks in English, of which he thinks foul scorn. He is the
best Gaelic scholar of the rout, and yet he could not give you the
Irish for breeches.
Westport is splendidly situated in a lovely valley watered by a
nameless stream which empties itself into Clew Bay. A grand range of
mountains rises around, the pyramidal form of Croagh Patrick
dominating the quay. It was from the summit of this magnificent height
that Saint Patrick sent forth the command which banished from the
Green Isle the whole of the reptile tribe. "The Wicklow Hills are very
high, An' so's the hill of Howth, Sir; But there's a hill much higher
still, Aye, higher than them both, Sir! 'Twas from the top of this
high hill Saint Patrick preached the sarmint, That drove the frogs out
of the bogs An' bothered all the varmint. The toads went hop, the
frogs went flop, Slap-dash into the water, An' the snakes committed
suicide to save themselves from slaughter." Pity there is no modern
successor of Saint Patrick to extirpate the reptilia of the present
day, the moonlighters and their Parliamentary supporters, to wit.
The Westport people are very pious. As I have previously shown by
quotations from Irish authorities, Ireland has the true Christianity
which England so sadly needs. Unhindered by England, Ireland would
evangelise the world, and that in double-quick time. Every town I
visit is deeply engaged in religious exercises. In Limerick it was a
Triduum with some reference to Saint Monica. In Cork it was something
else, which required much expenditure in blessed candles. In Galway
the Confraternity of the Holy Girdle was making full time, and in
Westport three priests are laying on day and night in a mission. A few
days ago they carried the Corpus Christi round the place, six hundred
children strewing flowers under the sacerdotal feet, and the crowds of
worshippers who flocked into the town necessitated the use of a tent,
from which the money-box was stolen. On Sunday last the bridge
convaynient to the chapel was covered with country folks who could not
get into the building, and a big stall with sacred images in plaster
of Paris and highly-coloured pictures in cheap frames was doing a
roaring trade. Barefooted women were hurrying to chapel to get
pictures blessed, or walking leisurely home with the sanctified
treasure under their shawls. A brace of scoffers on the bridge
explained the surging crowd, and advised instant application, that
evening being the last. "Get inside, wid a candle in yer fist, an' ye
can pray till yer teeth dhrop out iv yer head." This irreverence is
probably one of the accursed fruits of contact with the sacrilegious
Saxon. "The people here are cowardly, knavish, and ignorant," said an
Irishman twenty years resident in Westport. "They believe anything the
priests tell them, and they will do anything the priests may order or
even hint at. They would consider it an honour if the priests told
them to lie down that they might walk over them. Politically they are
entirely in the hands of the Roman Catholic clergy. They are totally
unable to understand or to grasp the meaning of the change now
proposed, which would place the country entirely at the mercy of the
clerical party. We see the result of popular election in the return of
Poor Law Guardians, who spend most of their time in calling each other
beggars and liars. Patronage under the Home Rule Bill would mean the
instalment of the relatives of priests in all the best offices. Once
we have an Irish Parliament, a man of capacity may leave the country
unless he have a priest for his uncle.
"We want a liberal measure of Local Government, and a final settlement
of the land question. The poor people are becoming poorer and poorer
through this eternal agitation which drives away wealth and capital,
and undermines the value of all Irish securities. Poor as we were, we
were much better off before the agitation commenced. The poor
themselves are becoming alive to the fact that continuous agitation
means continuous poverty. We must now have some sort of Home Rule, but
we shall be ruined if we get it from a Liberal Government. If we get
it from a Tory Government, the English will run to lend us money, but
if from a Morley-Gladstone combination they won't advance us a stiver.
The present Irish Parliamentary representatives have the confidence
of no single Irish party. They were well enough for their immediate
purpose, and no better men would come forward. To entrust them with
large powers is the very acme of wild insanity. Admitting their
honesty, which is doubtful, they have had no experience in business
affairs, and their class is demonstratedly devoid of administrative
capacity. The Poor Law Guardians of Cork, Portumna, Ballinasloe,
Swinford, Ballyvaughan, and many other towns and cities, have by their
mismanagement brought their respective districts to insolvency. That
every case was a case of mismanagement is clearly proved by the fact
that the Government having superseded these Boards in each case by two
paid Guardians, a period of two years has sufficed to wipe off all
debts, to reduce expenses, and to leave a balance in hand. They then
begin to drift again into insolvency. And where the guardians have not
been superseded, where they have not yet become bankrupt, they still
have a bank balance against them. You will scarcely hear of a solvent
parish, even if you offer a reward. And that is the class of persons
Mr. Gladstone would entrust with the administration of Irish finance.
The result would be the country's bankruptcy, and England would have
to pay the damage. Serve England right for her stupidity."