statement that the squaws were in a condition of compulsory
cleanliness the like of which seems never to be attained by the ladies
of the Galway Road, Tuam. The meeting is called a "monster" meeting.
How many people does the Tuam Town Hall hold? The fact is that the
Town Hall of Tuam, with the entire population of Tuam thrown in, could
be put into the Town Hall of Birmingham. Do the Tuamites deny that Mr.
Strachan, one of their most worthy citizens, is unable to walk the
streets of the town wherein live the people he has benefited, without
a guard of policemen to protect him from the cut-throat emissaries of
the Land League? So it was when I visited Tuam, Mr. Strachan's crimes
being the purchase of a farm in the Land Court and his Protestant
creed. Do they deny the scenes of persecution I described as having
taken place in former days? All this I had from a source more reliable
than the whole Papist hierarchy. The Tuamites can deny nothing of what
I have written. The tumbledown town is there, the filthy cabins and
degraded squaws of the Galway Road are still festering in their own
putridity, and probably the police are still preserving Strachan from
the fate of the poor fellow so brutally murdered near Tuam a few weeks
ago. The priests called a town meeting to protest against insult to
the Church. Great is Diana of the Ephesians! When the tenants refused
to pay their lawful dues the priests called no meeting. When the
country from end to end echoed with the lamentations of widows and the
wailing of helpless children whose natural protectors had been
murdered by the Land League, the Tuamites suppressed their
indignation, the Tuam priests made no protest. When scores of men were
butchered at their own firesides, shot in their beds, battered to
pieces at their own thresholds, these virtuous sacerdotalists never
said a word, called no town's meeting, used no bad language, spoke not
of "hirelings," "calumniators," "blackguards," and "liars." Two of the
speakers threatened personal injury should I again visit the town.
That is their usual form,--kicking, bludgeoning, outraging, or
shooting from behind a wall. When they do not shoot they come on in
herds, like wild buffaloes, to trample on and mutilate their victim.
From the strong or armed they run like hares. Their fleetness of foot
is astonishing. The _Tuam News_, owned and edited by the brother of a
priest, exhibits the intellectual status of the Tuam people. Let us
quote it once again:--
TO THE EDITOR OF THE "TUAM NEWS."
Sir--Permit me a little space in the next issue of the _Tuam
News_, relative to my father being killed by the fairies which
appeared in the _Tuam News_ of the 8th of April last. I beg to say
that he was not killed by the fairies, but I say he was killed by
some person or persons unknown as yet. Hoping very soon that the
perpetrators of this dastardly outrage will be soon brought to
light, I am, Mr. Editor, yours obediently,
DAVID REDINGTON.
Kilcreevanty, May 8th, '93.
After this I need add nothing to what I have said except a
pronouncement of Father Curran, who said that "Tuam could boast as
fine schools as Birmingham, and that he would then and there throw
out a challenge that they boast more intelligence in Tuam than
Birmingham could afford." Poor Father Curran! Poor Tuam! Poor Tuamites
with their rags, pigs, filth, priests, fairies, and Intelligence! I
shall visit them once more. A few photographs from the Galway Road
would settle the dispute, and render null and void all future Town's
meetings. They have sworn to slay me, but in visiting their town I
fear nothing but vermin and typhoid fever. Their threats affect me
not. As one of their own townsmen remarked,--
"You cannot believe a word they say. They never speak the truth except
when they call each other liars. And when they are in fear, although
too lazy to work, they are never too lazy to run. They have no
independence of thought or action. Their religion crushes all manhood
out of them. They are the obedient servants of the priests, and no man
dare say his soul's his own. Any one who did not attend that meeting
would be a marked man, but if it had been limited to people who know
the use of soap it would necessarily have been small, even for the
Tuam Town Hall."
Everywhere in Connaught I hear the people saying, "When you want to
roast an Irishman you can always find another Irishman to turn the
spit."
Thrue for ye, ma bouchal!
Ballina, June 10th.
No. 34.--WHY IRELAND DOES NOT PROSPER.
A community of small farmers with a sprinkling of resident gentry. All
sorts of land within a small compass, rock, bog, tillage, and
excellent grazing. The churchyard is a striking feature. A ruined
oratory covered with ivy is surrounded by tombstones and other
mortuary memorials strange to the Saxon eye. The graves are dug east
and west on a rugged mound hardly deserving to be called a hill,
although here and there steep enough. Huge masses of sterile mountain
form the background, and from the ruin the Atlantic is seen, gleaming
in the sun. Patches of bog with diggers of turf, are close by the
untouched portions covered with white bog-bean blooms, which at a
short distance look like a snowfall. On a neighbouring hill is a fine
old Danish earthwork, a fort, called by the natives "The Rath," fifty
yards in diameter, the grassy walls, some ten feet high and four yards
thick, reared in a perfect circle, on which grow gorse and brambles.
The graveyard is sadly neglected. Costly Irish crosses with elaborate
carving stand in a wilderness of nettles and long grass. Not a
semblance of a path anywhere. To walk about is positively dangerous.
Ruined tombstones, and broken slabs which appear to cover family
vaults, trip you up at every step. Every yard of progress is made with
difficulty, and you move nervously among the tall rank nettles in
momentary fear of dislocating your ankle, or of being suddenly
precipitated into the reeking charnel house of some defunct Mayo
family. The Connaught dead seem to be very exclusive. Most of the
ground is enclosed in small squares, each having a low stone wall,
half-a-yard thick, with what looks like the gable-end of a stone
cottage at the west end. Seen from a distance the churchyard looks
like a ruined village. At first sight you think the place a relic of
some former age, tenanted by the long-forgotten dead, but a closer
inspection proves interments almost up to date. Weird memorials of the
olden time stand cheek by jowl with modern monuments of marble; and
two of suspiciously Black Country physiognomy are of cast-iron, with
I.H.S. and a crucifix all correctly moulded, the outlines painted
vermilion, with an invitation to pray for the souls of the dead in the
same effective colour. The graveyard shows no end of prayer, but
absolutely no work. No tidiness, order, reverence, decency, or
convenience. Nothing but ruin, neglect, disorder, untidiness,
irreverence, and inconvenience. _Ora et labora_ is an excellent
proverb which the Irish people have not yet mastered in its entirety.
To pray _and_ work is as yet a little too much for them. They stop at
the first word, look round, and think they have done all. This
graveyard displays the national character. Heaps of piety, but no
exertion. Any amount of talk, but no work. More than any people, the
Irish affect respect for their dead. You leave the graveyard of
Oughewall smarting with nettle stings, and thankful that you have not
broken your neck. The place will doubtless be tidied, the nettles
mowed down and pathways made, when the people get Home Rule. They are
clearly waiting for something. They wish to be freed from the cruel
English yoke. When this operation is happily effected, they will clean
their houses, move the dunghills from their doors, wash themselves,
and go to work in earnest. The Spanish Queen vowed she would never
wash herself till Gibraltar was retaken from the English. Seven
hundred years ago the Irish nation must have made a similar vow--and
kept it.
A passing shower drove me to the shelter of a neighbouring farmhouse,
where lived a farmer, his wife, and their son and daughter. The place
was poor but tolerable, the wife being far above the Irish average. The
living room, about ten feet square, was paved with irregularly-shaped
stones of all sizes, not particularly flat, but in places decidedly
humpy; the interstices were of earth, the whole swept fairly clean, but
certainly not scrubbed. The rafters, of rough wood, were painted black,
and a rough ladder-like stair, open at the sides, led to the upper
regions. To have an upstairs is to be an aristocrat. The standard of
luxury is much lower than in England, for almost any English
agricultural labourer would have better furniture than that possessed
by this well-to-do but discontented farmer. An oak cupboard like a
wardrobe, a round deal table, and four rough rush-bottomed chairs of
unstained wood comprised the paraphernalia. The kitchen dresser, that
indispensable requisite of English farm kitchens, with its rows of
plates and dishes, was nowhere to be seen. The turf fire on the hearth
needed no stove nor grate, nor was there any in the house. A second
room on the ground floor, used as a bed room, had a boarded floor, and
although to English notions bare and bald, having no carpet, pictures,
dressing table, or washstand, it was clean and inoffensive. The
churning and dairy operations are carried on in the room first
described, where also the ducks and hens do feed. The farmer holds
fifty acres of good land, for which he pays fifty pounds a year. His
father, who died thirty years ago, paid twenty-four pounds, which he
thinks a fair rent to-day. Has not made application to the Court,
although he _might_ benefit by twenty-five to thirty-five per cent. Is
aware that the Judicial Rent is sometimes fixed at a sum above what the
tenant had been paying, and admits that this might happen to him. "Yes,
the land round the house is very good, very good indeed, but what can
be seen from here is by far the best of it. That is always the way in
this world, the best at the front."
From this and other remarks of like tendency I gather that the noble
landlord is in the habit of placing all the best land of his estate
along the high read, concealing the boggy, rocky portions in the
remote interior, fraudulently imposing on the public, and alienating
sympathy from the tenant, thereby inflicting another injustice on
Ireland.
"The English laws are right enough, as far as they go," said the
farmer, "but the English will not do the right thing about the land.
Now we know that an Irish Parliament will settle the matter
forth-with. That's why we support Home Rule. We know the opinions of
the men who now represent us, and we can trust them in this matter if
in no other. The land is the whole of it. If that were once put on an
unchangeable bottom I would rather be without Home Rule. Some say that
even if our rents are reduced by one-half, the increased taxes we must
pay would make us nearly as poor as ever, and that all this bother and
disturbance would not really save us a penny piece. And I think this
might be true. So that if something could be done by the English
Parliament I should prefer it to come that way. And so would we all, a
hundred times. For with the English Parliament we know where we are,
and what we're doing. I'm not one to believe that the land will be
handed over to us without payment. Plenty of them are ignorant enough
to believe even that. My view is just this: If the English Parliament
would settle the land question, I would prefer to do without an Irish
Parliament. That's what all the best farmers say, and nothing else.
No, I wouldn't invest money in Ireland. No, I wouldn't trust the bulk
of the present members for Ireland. Yes, I would prefer a more
respectable class of men who had a stake in the country. But we had to
take what we could catch, for people who have a stake in the country
are all against Home Rule. What could we do? We had no choice. We sent
Home Rulers because an Irish Parliament is pledged to meet our views
about the land. We know they will fulfil their pledges, not because
they have promised, nor because they wish to benefit us, but because
they wish to abolish landlordism and landlords from the country. The
landlord interest is English interest, and that they want to get rid
of. Their reasons for settling the land question are not the farmers'
reasons, but so long as it _is_ settled the farmer will reap the
benefit, and will not care _why_ it was settled. Give us compulsory
sale and compulsory purchase, at a fair price, and you will find the
farmers nearly all voting against Home Rule. No, the priests would not
be able to stir us once we were comfortably settled. Why, we'd all
become Conservatives at once. Sure anybody with half-an-eye could see
that in a pitch-dark night in a bog-hole."
My friend assured me that secret societies are unknown in Mayo, or at
any rate, in the Westport district. The young men of Clare, he
thought, were Fenians to a man. "They are queer, blood-thirsty folks,
enemies to Ireland. Why, they object to other Irishmen. They will not
allow a poor fellow from another county to work among them as a
harvest-man. They would warn him off, and if he would not go, they'd
beat him with sticks, and when once they begin, you never know where
they'll stop. They should be put down with a strong hand."
But where is the strong hand? Mr. Morley, recently replying to Mr.
Arnold Forster, said that "it was admitted that the police were
working as faithfully and as energetically under the present as under
the late Government, and added that the authorities concerned were
taking all the steps which experience and responsibility suggested."
Mr. Morley is right in attributing faithfulness to the police, and
their energy is doubtless all that can be reasonably expected under
very discouraging auspices. Mr. Morley speaks more highly of the
police than the police speak of Mr. Morley. From Donegal to Bantry
Bay, from Dublin to Galway and Westport, north, south, east, west,
right, left, and centre, the police of Ireland condemn Mr. Morley's
administration as feeble, vacillating, and as likely to encourage
crime. They speak of their duties in despondent tones. I have from
time to time given their sentiments, which are unvarying. They know
not what to do, and complain that while they continue to be held
responsible they dare not follow up their duties with the requisite
energy. Only yesterday an experienced officer said:--"The men are
disheartened because they do not know how their action will be taken,
and because they feel that anything in the nature of enterprise is
very likely to injure themselves individually. They feel that in the
matter of arrests it is better to be on the safe side, and then they
know how unavailing all their efforts must be in the disturbed
districts of Kerry, Clare, and Limerick, where the arm of the law has
been paralysed by Mr. Morley's rescision of the salutary provisions so
necessary in those counties. Outrages and shooting are every-day
occurrences, for many cases are never reported to the police at all.
If the police caught the criminals in the act there would be no
result, for the juries of those three counties would not convict, and
the venue cannot now be changed to Cork.
"Some of the Nationalist members were the other day asking in the
House whether the Cork magistrates had not been presented with white
gloves, and so on, to bring out the fact that there was no crime to
punish on a recent occasion; but what does this prove? Merely that Mr.
Balfour's action in changing the venue of three counties to the city
of Cork, where moonlighters are tried by a jury of independent traders
of Patrick Street was wise and sagacious. The white gloves of Cork
were a tribute to Tory administration. The Cork juries convicted their
men, and stood by the consequences. They have escaped so far, as all
bold men escape. If the Limerick moonlighters must have been tried in
Cork there would have been no moonlighting. The police can always
catch them, when there is any use in catching them. In country
districts the movements of people are pretty well known, and these
fellows are always ready to betray each other. Mr. Morley may talk
fine, and may mean well, but the people who have been riddled with
shot have Mr. Morley to thank. Of course he is under compulsion. He
has to please the Irish Separatists. Old women and children are
outraged and shot in the legs because of Mr. Morley's political
necessities."
I think my friend was right as to the effect of boldness in action.
There is too much truckling to the ruffian element, not only by Mr.
Morley, but by most Unionists resident in Ireland. Opinions on this
point vary with varying circumstances. Several shopkeepers in a Mayo
town were utterly ruined for expressing their political opinions, or
for being suspected of harbouring opinions contrary to the feeling of
the majority. They were boycotted, and had to shut up shop. Others,
older-established, or in possession of a monopoly, weathered the
storm, but their opinions cost them something. These are the milder
cases. Yet shooting or bludgeoning are likely enough to follow overt
political action, such as refusing to join a procession or to
illuminate.
It was hard to find a Protestant farmer in this district, but I
succeeded at last. His notions were strange, very strange indeed. He
thought his rent fair enough, and was of opinion that the tenant must
be prepared to take the good years with the bad years. "These
countrymen of mine, like somebody I've read of, never learn anything
and never forget anything. They do not half farm the land. They don't
understand any but the most elementary methods. They do not put the
land to its best use. When they had prosperous years, and many a one
they had, they put nothing by for a rainy day. They are very
improvident. I have been in both England and Scotland, and I know the
difference in the people. They have more self-reliance, and they are
keen after improvements. They are not satisfied to have just enough,
to live from hand to mouth. They must have comfort, and they like to
be independent. Now, Paddy is content to just scrape along. If he can
barely exist he's quite satisfied. He's always on the edge of the
nest, but he feels sure that when the worst comes to the worst,
somebody or something will step in and save him from starvation.
"Nearly every man in this county has been in England, many of them
twenty times or more, working for months and months in the best farmed
districts. Have they got any wrinkles? Divil a one. They have not
planted a gooseberry or currant tree, they have no pot-herbs, no
carrots or parsnips--nothing at all but potatoes and turnips. The
farmers have no system of winter feeding, and they won't learn one.
There is a great and growing demand in England for Irish butter,
which, properly put up in a tasty way, would fetch fine figures, but
the lack of system in winter feeding and winter calving prevents the
supply from being kept up. The farmers will make no change in their
habits, and they don't work as if they meant it. They lounge about all
day, waiting for the crops to grow and the cattle to get fat, and then
they wonder they are so poor. The only hope of the Irish people is
their absorption in America. They work well enough when surrounded by
new influences. Once get them away from the priests, and away they go;
you can't stop them. They have great natural abilities, but somehow
they won't bloom in Ireland. If they put forth the same energy in
Ireland as in America they would do well. But they never will. Their
religion keeps them down, and they can't get out of their old habits."
I observed that the Earl of Sligo had obtained eighty-two decrees of
possession against tenants for non-payment of rent, and that the _Mayo
News_, while censuring his action, admitted that most of the tenants
owed two years' rent at least. My Black Protestant friend might tell
me whether the heading "Another Batch of Death Sentences" was a fair
description of this legal action, and whether the tenants were, in his
opinion, totally unable to pay the rent.
"To call them sentences of death is absurd, The people are not evicted
and left homeless, but merely deprived of their rights as tenants. In
England, if a man does not pay his rent, he is thrown out, and nobody
says Nay. In Ireland a man may pay no rent for seven years, and yet,
when he is evicted, the people cry Shame on the landlord, who, in most
cases, has been patient to the limit of human endurance. The landlord
has watched the tenant neglecting the land, and living more
expensively on the money he ought to have paid as rent. Now, let me
submit a point which never seems to strike the English Unionist
speakers. And yet it is plain enough. The Separatists say evictions
are cruel and tyrannical because the people cannot pay the awful,
exorbitant rents. Now notice my point!
"A rent may be too high, but the land must be worth _something_. Now
these people have paid _nothing at all for two years or more_.
"Talk to these defaulters, and they will usually say 'The land is
worth just one-half.'
"Why don't they pay that half?
"Then they would be only one year behind, instead of two, and they
would get no notice to quit.
"But instead of paying the one-half which they themselves say the land
is worth, they pay nothing at all. Does that look honest? Does it look
genuine? Don't you think anybody could see that they are taking
advantage of the unsettled state of things to avoid any payment
whatever? They await Home Rule, which is to give them the land, and
they are anticipating its advantages.
"They all know Hennessy's brandy, and can tell you the difference
between the one-star and the three-star brands.
"In England everybody is at work. In Ireland most are at play. A man
who has been taught to work in England feels inclined to follow them
up here with a whip, they look so idle even when at work. They move
about as if half-dead. They are as lazy as Lambert's dog, that leaned
his head against the wall to bark. The young women won't work either.
My sister in Athlone is obliged to give her servants three nights a
week off from five to ten, or she could have nobody. Then they are
always going to mass or keeping some festival of the Church. Speak a
word of reproof and away they go. They are as proud as Lambert's other
dog, that took the wall of a muck-cart and got squelched for his
pains.
"Home Rule would never do Ireland any good. Quite the contrary. What
can do a man good who tries to get his dinner by standing about and
saying how hungry he is?
"As to the agitators, they will always agitate. When one source is
dried up they'll invent another. They have their living to get, and
agitation is their trade. And a paying trade it is. Are they disloyal
to England? I believe them Fenians at heart--that is, Fenians in the
matter of loyalty. They would use any power they might get to damage
England, and if England gives them power she'll bitterly rue the day.
Paddy may be lazy, but put your finger in his mouth and he'll bite.
The English Separatists don't see this, but when I see the fox in the
hen-roost I can guess what brought him there. If I put the cat in the
dairy I should expect her to taste the cream. Trust the Irish
Nationalist members! I'd as soon trust a pack of wolves with my
lambs."
My friend is a scientific gardener, and descanted on the wonderful
climate of Ireland, where plants that will not grow in England nourish
luxuriously. I told him I had seen bamboo growing in the open air at
Dundalk, and asked him if the Bonds of Brotherhood (_Humbugis
Morleyensis_) or the Union of Hearts (_Gladstonia gammonica
gigantica_) would come to perfection in Hibernia. He thought the soil
and climate unsuitable, and was sure they would never take root. The
_gammonica_ had been tried, but it withered and died. It could not be
"budded" for want of an Irish "stock."
A scrap-book, fifty years old, revealed a condition of things so
strangely like that of the present day that I obtained permission to
copy the following skit, which, but for the mention of the old convict
colony, might have been written last week. It is headed "Extract from
the forthcoming history of the Irish Parliament." The Home Rule
project is therefore ancient enough:--
One blow and Ireland sprang from the head of her Saxon
enslaver like a new Minerva!
Proudly and solemnly she then sat down to frame a Republic
worthy of Plato and Pat. Her first