novelists. She was the daughter of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, an Irish
literary man, and was born Jan. 1, 1767, in Berkshire, England, where
her family was stopping temporarily. She made her reputation in 1801 by
the publication of a novel called "Castle Rackrent," which was followed
by "Belinda," "Leonora," and other novels at the rate of one a year
until she closed her labors in 1834 with a charming story for children
called "Orlandino," and died at Edgeworthstown, the family seat, which
they still occupy, in 1849. Miss Edgeworth never married, although she
is said to have been very attractive, and was an admired and courted
favorite at the court at Windsor as well as among the peasants of
Ireland. Her writings are noted for the simplicity and beauty of her
style, originality of expression, truthfulness to nature, and the
ingenuity of her situations.
Rathra, near Frenchport, County Roscommon, is the residence of Douglas
Hyde, the organizer and president of the Gaelic League, which is
intended to revive and restore to common use the ancient language and
the ancient customs of Ireland. Dr. Hyde is the son of a Protestant
clergyman, a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, a professional
literary man, author of several books, and a lecturer and teacher at
different times. Although he originated the Gaelic League movement, it
was inspired by Prof. Hugo Meyer, a celebrated German linguist, who is
familiar with forty languages, and in his studies, conceived a profound
admiration for the Gaelic. He came to Ireland as a lecturer at the
university, and there made the acquaintance of Douglas Hyde, who became
his disciple, and by his advice and with his assistance inaugurated the
movement which has since been so successful.
Dr. Hyde visited the United States in 1908, dined at the White House,
spent two or three evenings with the President and made a disciple of
him. He is a man of slender stature, delicate health, and intense
nervous emotional nature. He has the faculty of hypnotizing the people
he talks with, and his fascinating personality has been very effective
in his crusade.
Irish ideals, traits, customs, and superstitions were fast disappearing;
English sports, games, literature, and customs were being adopted. The
legends and folklore of Ireland were being forgotten, and native ballads
and melodies became obsolete with the harp, and, although a hundred
years ago Gaelic was spoken by everybody up to the very gates of Dublin
and Belfast, it has been practically forgotten by the people. The census
of 1901 showed that 638,000 people could speak the language, but most of
those could not read it, and knew only a few phrases and words they had
learned from their grandmothers. It was ignored in the schools and in
the printing houses. No Gaelic books had been published for generations.
Since the time of Daniel O'Connell the Irish peasantry have been anxious
to learn English so as to read his speeches.
This was the situation when Hugo Meyer and Douglas Hyde undertook to
revive an interest in the native language, literature, and customs, and
in 1893 they organized what was called the Gaelic League, a
nonpolitical, nonsectarian society, which has now more than nine hundred
local branches with two hundred thousand members, sending delegates to
the annual _ard-fheis_ or annual assembly. Since 1898 a weekly
newspaper and a monthly magazine have been published in the Irish
language, and both have become self-supporting; and the daily and weekly
newspapers throughout Ireland, almost without exception, have a Gaelic
department conducted in that language. The names of the streets are now
posted in Gaelic in nearly all the towns and cities, and the English
directions upon the signboards on the country roads are duplicated in
that language.
Gaelic is taught for an hour a day in all the national schools, although
a fee is charged for it, which the league is now trying to abolish. In
1907 there were 33,741 children in the primary schools and 2,479 in the
secondary schools receiving paid instruction in Gaelic, an increase from
24,918 primary and 2,029 secondary pupils in 1906. It is confidently
expected that the fee will be abolished during the coming year. The
commissioners of education have recommended it. Gaelic is taught in all
of the normal schools and is required in the examinations for teachers.
The league maintains fourteen organizers and lecturers who go about
organizing classes similar to the Chautauqua circles in the United
States, and more than two hundred thousand adults are studying Gaelic in
that way.
The movement is cordially indorsed by the Roman Catholic Church, by the
Church of Ireland, by the Presbyterian general assembly, and the
Methodist general conference, which is extraordinary. I am told that it
is the only movement except temperance that has ever received the
approval of all the religious sects. That indicates very clearly that
its managers have carefully maintained the nonsectarian attitude which
is one of the chief planks of the platform. And the fact that it has
been kept out of politics is apparent from the indorsement it has
received from the United Irish League and the Irish parliamentary
leaders as well as the anti-home rulers. Dr. Hyde said the other day
that
"For the first time in history, and through the influence of the league,
priest and parson, landlord and tenant, Catholic and Protestant,
Orangeman and nationalist, are working together. It cannot be said that
the league has all parties behind it, but there is no party in Ireland
of which some of the members are not with us, and I expect sooner or
later we will succeed in bringing all conflicting interests in Ireland
together in the movement to restore the language and the customs and the
spirit of our ancestors to modern Ireland.
"In Toomebridge, in the north of Ireland, where for five generations the
Protestant Orangemen and the Catholic nationalists have never met at a
fair or a market without smashing each other and fighting with fist and
stones and shillelah, all parties have come together peaceably at the
assemblies of the league. They held a _feis_ there last year, at which I
was present, and as I looked over the heads of the multitude I could not
say which were the more numerous, the Catholics or Protestants, the
nationalists or Orangemen, and the _feis_ adjourned with the best of
feeling in everybody's heart and without a single angry word having been
exchanged. I am told that this was the first instance where such a thing
has happened, but it has been several times repeated in different parts
of Ireland since."
Dr. Walsh, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, commends the league
in the very highest terms, and takes a great interest in the movement.
He told me it has had a beneficial effect upon the character and the
habits of the people; it has encouraged education, temperance,
self-respect, and has revived an interest in literature, music, oratory,
sports, folklore, and history.
XXXII
WORK OF THE CONGESTED DISTRICTS BOARD
The term "congested districts" is used to describe those wild and rocky
sections on the west coast of Ireland where fertile land is scarce and
insufficient to support the population, who are compelled to eke out a
miserable living by fishing and other employment. The population is not
"congested" as we understand that word, but it is too numerous to be
supported on that kind of soil, and the government is trying to remove a
sufficient number of families to other sections of Ireland, where
fertile farms can be found for them. In the newspapers and public
documents these families are usually referred to as "congests."
As one might naturally infer, the advent of parties of "congests" into
localities where they do not belong is not welcomed by the local
residents. On the contrary, there is a bitter and determined resistance
from that class known as the "landless," which is composed of the sons
of farmers who are ambitious to have farms and homes of their own and
cannot obtain them either because there are none to be bought or they,
unfortunately, lack the price. Instead of dividing up the big estates in
such localities among the "landless," who consider themselves entitled
to them because they are natives of the community and their families
have lived there for generations and their ancestors once owned them,
the government commissioners are giving preference to "congests."
To ignore the claims of the "landless" means a fierce fight over every
attempt at migration. The cattle-driving you read of in the newspapers
is the latest method of persuading the landlords to sell, and the
"landless" class--the young farmers who want farms of their own--is
responsible for these outrages. Anyone who remembers the terrible
passions which have been aroused over the land question in Ireland can
imagine what may happen when "congests" from other portions of the
island are forcibly brought into a community and placed upon farms which
the former owners have been compelled to sell to the government in order
that these aliens may have homes and be able to earn a living.
What is called the Congested Districts Board was created in 1891 to
improve conditions on the west coast, where the standard of living is at
the lowest point and the people are in a chronic state of famine because
of the inferior quality of the soil. This district consists of the
province of Connaught, the counties of Donegal, Kerry, and Clare, and
the districts of Bantry, Castletown, Schull, and Skibbereen in the
County of Cork. The land in those localities is very poor and is
estimated at an average of eighty cents an acre, while farm lands in the
rest of Ireland have an average value of $3.12 an acre. The majority of
the people live on small plots, where they manage to raise a few
potatoes and cabbages and keep a few cows, goats, pigs, and sheep of
worn-out breeds, which they drive wherever they can find pasturage. Most
of them try to earn a little more money by going to other parts of the
kingdom to work as laborers for a portion of the year or by weaving
homespun, fishing, gathering seaweed, and other home industries.
The act empowers the board to aid migration to other parts of Ireland,
to assist in the improvement of live stock and the breeding of horses,
cattle, sheep, donkeys, and swine, to encourage poultry farms,
bee-keeping, basket-making, lace-making, knitting, and the manufacture
of carpets, rugs, and other things that can be made at home, and to
encourage the fishing industry by constructing piers and harbors and
furnishing boats and gear.
[Illustration: BARNE'S GAP, COUNTY DONEGAL.]
Mr. James Bryce, British Ambassador to Washington, is the author of the
act of parliament which authorized a loan of $22,500,000 to build
laborers' cottages in Ireland, and under it, according to the latest
official returns, 22,500 comfortable new homes have been provided in
different parts of the island, and are now occupied by families of farm
laborers and other workingmen in the rural districts. Each cottage has
from an acre to an acre and one-half of land for a garden. Some of them
have barns and other outhouses. They are built of stone and brick of the
most substantial character, with roofs of slate or tiles. Most of them
have four rooms, two rooms upstairs and two downstairs, with large
windows furnishing plenty of light and plenty of ventilation. The cost
varies from $750 to $1,000 for a cottage, and is paid by the government
with funds derived from the loan mentioned. The tenants pay an average
rental of £4 17_s._ 6_d._ a year, which is equivalent to about
twenty-four dollars in American money or two dollars per month, which
covers the interest upon the cost of the cottage, and an installment
which will cancel the indebtedness at the end of sixty-eight years. If
the tenant owner for whom the cottage is built desires to pay for the
property and get a fee simple, he is at liberty to do so at any time,
but I did not hear of any such case. Most of the tenants are willing to
let their indebtedness run along indefinitely. They can sell, lease, or
dispose of the property in any way at any time. The incumbrance goes
with the property and not with the man, and is assumed by the purchaser.
It is difficult to overestimate the vast amount of good this movement
has accomplished. It is gradually changing the standard of life among
the laboring classes throughout Ireland. It has not only furnished
comfortable and decent homes for more than twenty-three thousand
families, who have been living in miserable, filthy cabins for
generations, but it has done much to improve their health. It will
strengthen the physical constitutions of the coming generations by
placing them in sanitary homes and clean surroundings.
Mr. John Redmond, in a speech in the House of Commons, said that "the
agricultural laborers of Ireland had been living under conditions which
were absolutely fatal to health and the habits of cleanliness, and
which, in almost any other country in the world, would have proved fatal
to religion and morality as well. But the Irish agricultural laborers
are a remarkable race of men, highly intelligent, keen and brave,
patriotic, and self-sacrificing in their patriotism. They have preserved
through poverty and squalor a deep religious, spiritual feeling, and the
highest possible standard of morality."
The Congested Districts Board devotes its attention entirely to the
people living in the bleak mountain lands on the west coast of Ireland,
and its agencies are established at different points from the extreme
south to the extreme north of the island. The poverty, the privation,
the suffering, are chiefly found within a few miles from the coast,
where the territory is divided into vast estates of almost worthless
land, and where it is very difficult for any person to earn a living.
The same conditions have existed for ages. The west coast of Ireland has
never been prosperous, the soil has never been fertile, the people have
never had any more comforts than they have to-day, but they have
continued to live there, century after century, clinging to the rocks
and suffering from the weather and the lack of food, which has been
their inheritance, refusing to leave their wretched hovels for a more
favorable climate and better opportunities of making a living.
It cannot be said that they remain there in ignorance, because thirty
thousand or forty thousand men from the congested districts leave their
cabins, their wives, and their families for several months every year
and go to England and Scotland to supply the demand for labor in those
countries. The migratory labor system has been going on for generations,
and many of the men have gone to the same jobs generation after
generation, spending half their time earning good wages in England and
the other half looking after their little gardens and cattle and goats
in Connaught Province, in Clare, Kerry, Galway, Sligo, and Donegal
counties. It is one of the strangest phenomena in human life that they
should cling as they do to their desolate, comfortless, filthy stone
huts in these bleak mountains; but, be it ever so humble, be it ever so
comfortless, there is no place like home.
One of the functions of the Congested Districts Board is to remove as
many as possible of these families to localities where they can make a
living with less labor and find more of the comforts and happiness of
life; but the most pitiful and difficult part of its task is to persuade
them to go. Mr. O'Connor, the solicitor of the board, told me of a
wizen-faced old peasant who occupied a leaky stone hut on the mountain
side, without the slightest comfort within or attraction without. He had
a few acres of sterile soil, on which, with the greatest difficulty, he
was able to produce enough cabbages and potatoes to keep his family from
starvation, and a small herd of goats, lean and gaunt, that were trying
to find sustenance in the heather and the mosses on the rocks; and yet,
even in this condition, the old man stubbornly refused to move. No
inducement could persuade him to abandon the worthless, filthy
habitation, because it was his home. With the pride of a prince he
defied the inspectors of the board, charging them with some malicious
intent of depriving him of property that had been the home of his
family, he declared, for nine hundred years. And nothing could induce
him to leave it for a comfortable cottage and a productive farm fifty
miles in the interior.
They told me, too, of a girl about eighteen years old, who, being
injured by an automobile, was picked up and carried to the nearest
hospital, which happened to be twenty miles or more from the place where
she lived and the scene of the accident. She was being tenderly cared
for in a neat, sunshiny ward, in a comfortable bed, with sheets and
pillow cases of linen, with a nurse to attend her and every delicacy
that could be furnished to eat, and yet she moaned and cried and begged
to be taken home. Finally the Americans who had been in the automobile
at the time of the accident, and had left a deposit of money to pay for
every comfort and surgical attention that the girl could possibly need,
consented to her removal, because the doctor said she was fretting
herself into a fever. So they brought the automobile to the hospital,
placed her carefully in a bed of pillows in the tonneau, and carried
her back into the mountains to her "home," a one-room cabin of the most
repulsive and wretched sort, which, as my friend told me, he wouldn't
have kept his horse in. The walls were of rude stone piled one on
another without mortar and the roof was made of straw. There was no
floor but the earth, no furniture but a hard wooden bench, a table, and
a three-legged stool. There was no window, and the only light that there
was came through the door, which opened into a loathsome barnyard, where
the filth was ankle deep and the stench almost insufferable. And yet
when they laid the poor creature on the earthen floor she gave a long
sigh of relief and satisfaction and thanked them for bringing her
"home." It is true the world over that people prize things that are
worthless if they happen to be all they possess. The less we have the
more valuable it becomes; the more we have the less we value it. This
trait may be found in the mountains of Switzerland, in Lapland, in
Norway, and other countries where people enjoy the least blessings and
comforts and where living is a constant struggle.
The Congested Districts Board consists of Sir Antony MacDonnell, under
secretary for Ireland, who has recently been elevated to the peerage as
Lord MacDonnell of Swineford; Sir Horace Plunkett, a well known
agriculturalist; Rev. Dennis O'Hara, a Catholic priest of County Clare;
Henry Dorran, the chief inspector and executive officer in actual charge
of the work, and Mr. O'Connor, the solicitor in charge of the office
work. The board is constituted by an act of parliament and has a large
staff of agents and officials in the field.
[Illustration: AN IRISH CABIN IN COUNTY DONEGAL.]
The work of the board may be classified as follows:
1. The purchase and division of estates into small farms and placing
thereon families who are unable to earn a decent living in their present
surroundings.
2. The enlargement of holdings by the purchase of neighboring property
for those who cannot be moved.
3. The construction of decent and comfortable cottages for the poor, in
the place of the wretched cabins they now occupy, and the repair of
their present homes as far as possible.
4. The construction of public works, road building, the draining of
swampy lands, and other undertakings that will furnish work and wages to
the poor.
5. Aiding fishermen along the coast by furnishing boats and equipment
and by securing them a market.
6. Instruction of the women in industries that can be carried on in the
home, such as weaving, lace-making, and knitting.
7. Schools of housewifery for the training of mountain peasant girls for
domestic service.
8. Loans of money to farmers to purchase cattle, sheep, and other means
of self-support.
9. General improvement and repair of homes and the relief of individual
distress through parish committees.
In 1907 the board purchased 121,213 acres for the sum of £161,684, which
it is now cutting up into small farms and moving to them families which
are unable to make a living in the mountain districts. Thus far 544
families have been moved in this way and placed in comfortable homes at
an average cost of $435 per family, not including the price of the land;
1,372 dwelling-houses have been erected, and 1,266 buildings on these
and other farms already occupied have been erected at the expense of the
board. In addition to furnishing a farm and a cottage the board gives
its _protégés_, wherever it is necessary, cows, goats, pigs, and
chickens. All this is paid for by money advanced from the public
treasury, which is reimbursed by the beneficiary at the rate of 3-1/2;
per cent a year. Of this 2-3/4; per cent is interest upon the investment,
and three-fourths of one per cent annually goes into a sinking fund to
redeem at maturity the bonds issued to furnish the money. The average
annual payment by the families which have thus been removed is £17
10_s._ or $87.50 in our money. The people who have been benefited can
sell their new homes or dispose of them by inheritance so long as the
interest is paid promptly, but they cannot divide them.
I have before me a statement showing each transaction, and find that the
following figures represent the number of acres given:
176 acres 15 acres 206 acres
174 acres 438 acres 245 acres
362 acres 177 acres 34 acres
371 acres 76 acres 67 acres
254 acres 271 acres 249 acres
318 acres 311 acres 76 acres
240 acres 90 acres 152 acres
136 acres 66 acres 118 acres
119 acres 111 acres 106 acres
These figures illustrate the size of the farms that are being provided,
and the acreage varies according to the fertility of the land. The board
intends to give each of its _protégés_ what is called "an economic
holding"; that is, sufficient land to support his family and produce a
surplus sufficient to enable him to pay his interest and lay by a little
something for a rainy day.
During 1908 it has moved eighty families from County Galway to County
Roscommon and placed them all upon fertile farms, in comfortable new
cottages of four rooms each, at an average cost of one thousand dollars,
not including the price of the land. In addition to this most of the
families have been granted loans varying from twenty-five to sixty
dollars as working capital, to provide tools, implements, necessary
furniture, and other articles.
In addition to this general work in more than eight hundred parishes in
counties Kerry, Clare, Galway, Mayo, Donegal, and Sligo, local
committees have been appointed consisting of the parish priest, the
Church of Ireland rector, the parish doctor, and one of the magistrates,
who have immediate supervision over local conditions and make
recommendations for the application of small sums of money for the
improvement of the comforts and health of the people. These local
committees are authorized to repair and improve the homes of farmers,
fishermen, and other workingmen where it can be done economically, and
to erect new homes for them whenever it is necessary, upon certain
conditions, which involve a radical change in the habits of most of the
Irish peasants. In order to secure benefits of this kind the family is
required to remove the dunghill from its usual place in front of the
door, to clean up all around the cabin and keep the place in order, to
keep the pig, the cattle, and the chickens out of the house, and to keep
the interior in a state of sanitary cleanliness. Materials are furnished
to cottagers who are willing to make these improvements for themselves.
It is astonishing that so many peasants will fight such improvements and
often resist attempts that are made to clean up their places and make
them more comfortable. The dunghill has always been in front of the door
and the offal and garbage from the house have been dumped upon it for
generations. They are accustomed to the sickening stench and, as one of
the inspectors told me, they find it difficult to get along without it.
"They wouldn't be happy unless there was a bad smell," he remarked. But
in most cases the conditions are cheerfully accepted and the
improvements appreciated. Last year 1,193 cottages were improved in this
manner at a cost of £31,812.