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Title: Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888)
Author: William Henry Hurlbert
Release Date: December 29, 2004 [EBook #14510]
Language: English
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[Illustration: MAP TO ILLUSTRATE DIARY OF AN AMERICAN.]
IRELAND UNDER COERCION
THE DIARY OF AN AMERICAN
BY
WILLIAM HENRY HURLBERT
VOL. I.
_SECOND EDITION_.
1888
"Upon the future of Ireland hangs the future of the British Empire."
CARDINAL MANNING TO EARL GREY, 1868
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.
Although barely a month has elapsed since the publication of these
volumes, events of more or less general notoriety have so far confirmed
the views taken in them of the actual state and outlook of affairs in
Ireland, that I gladly comply with the request of my publisher for a
Preface to this Second Edition.
Upon one most important point--the progressive demoralisation of the
Irish people by the methods of the so-called political combinations,
which are doing the work of the Agrarian and Anti-Social Revolution in
Ireland, some passages, from a remarkable sermon delivered in August in
the Cathedral of Waterford by the Catholic bishop of that diocese, will
be found to echo almost to the letter the statement given to me in June
by a strong Protestant Home Ruler, that "the Nationalists are stripping
Irishmen as bare of moral sense as the bushmen of South Africa."
Speaking of what he had personally witnessed in one of the lanes of
Waterford, the Bishop says, in the report which I have seen of his
sermon, "the most barbarous tribes of Africa would justly feel ashamed
if they were guilty of what I saw, or approached to the guilt I
witnessed, on that occasion." As a faithful shepherd of his people, he
is not content with general denunciations of their misconduct, but goes
on to analyse the influences which are thus reducing a Christian people
to a level below that of the savages whom Cardinal Lavigerie is now
organising a great missionary crusade to rescue from their degradation.
He agrees with Archbishop Croke in attributing much of this
demoralisation to the excessive and increasing use of strong drink,
striking evidences of which came under my own observation at more than
one point of my Irish journeys. But I fear Archbishop Croke would
scarcely agree with the Bishop of Waterford in his diagnosis of the
effects upon the popular character of what has now come to pass current
in many parts of Ireland as "patriotism."
The Bishop says, "The women as well as the men were fighting, and when
we sought to bring them to order, one man threatened to take up a weapon
and drive bishop, priests, and police from the place! On the Quay, I
understand, it was one scene of riot and disorder, and what made matters
worse was that when the police went to discharge their duty for the
protection of the people, the moment they interfered the people turned
on them and maltreated them in a shocking way. I understand that some
police who were in coloured clothes were picked out for the worst
treatment--knocked down and kicked brutally. One police officer, I
learn, had his fingers broken. This is a state of things that nothing at
all would justify. It is not to be justified or excused on any principle
of reason or religion. What is still worse, sympathy was shown for those
who had obstructed and attacked the police. The only excuse I could find
that was urged for this shameful misconduct was that it was dignified
with the name of 'patriotism'! All I can say is, that if rowdyism like
this be an indication of the patriotism of the people, as far as I am
concerned, I say, better our poor country were for ever in political
slavery than attain to liberty by such means."
This is the language of a good Catholic, of a good Irishman, and of a
faithful Bishop. Were it more often heard from the lips of the Irish
Episcopate the true friends of Ireland might look forward to her future
with more hope and confidence than many of the best and ablest of them
are now able to feel. As things actually are, not even the Papal Decree
has yet sufficed to restrain ecclesiastics, not always of the lowest
degree, from encouraging by their words and their conduct "patriotism"
of the type commemorated by the late Colonel Prentiss of Louisville, in
a story which he used to tell of a tipsy giant in butternut garments,
armed with a long rifle, who came upon him in his office on a certain
Fourth of July demanding the loan of a dollar on the ground that he felt
"so confoundedly patriotic!"
The Colonel judiciously handed the man a dollar, and then asked, "Pray,
how do you feel when you feel confoundedly patriotic?"
"I feel," responded the man gravely, "as if I should like to kill
somebody or steal something."
It is "patriotism" of this sort which the Papal Decree was issued to
expel from within the pale of the Catholic Church. And it is really, in
the last analysis of the facts of the case, to the suppression of
"patriotism" of this sort that many well-intentioned, but certainly not
well-informed, "sympathisers" with what they suppose to be the cause of
Ireland, object, in my own country and in Great Britain, when they
denounce as "Coercion" the imprisonment of members of Parliament and
other rhetorical persons who go about encouraging or compelling ignorant
people to support "boycotting" and the "Plan of Campaign."
Yet it would seem to be sufficiently obvious that "patriotism" of this
sort, once full-blown and flourishing on the soil of Ireland, must tend
to propagate itself far beyond the confines of that island, and to
diversify with its blood-red flowers and its explosive fruits the social
order of countries in which it has not yet been found necessary for the
Head of the Catholic Church to reaffirm the fundamental principles of
Law and of Liberty.
Since these volumes were published, too, the Agrarian Revolution in
Ireland has been brought into open and defiant collision with the
Catholic Church by its leader, Mr. Davitt, the founder of the Land
League. In the face of Mr. Davitt's contemptuous and angry repudiation
of any binding force in the Papal Decree, it will be difficult even for
the Cardinal-Archbishop of Sydney to devise an understanding between the
Church and any organisation fashioned or led by him. It may be inferred
from Mr. Davitt's contemporaneous and not less angry intimation, that
the methods of the Parnellite party are inadequate to the liberation of
Ireland from the curse of landlordism, that he is prepared to go further
than Mr. George, who still clings in America to the shadowy countenance
given him by the Cardinal-Archbishop of Baltimore, and that the
Nationalisation of the Land will ere long be urged both in Ireland and
in Great Britain by organisations frankly Anti-Catholic as well as
Anti-Social.
This is to be desired on many accounts. It will bring the clergy in
Ireland face to face with the situation, which will be a good thing
both for them and for the people; and it should result in making an end
of the pernicious influence upon the popular mind of such extraordinary
theological outgivings; for example, as the circular issued in 1881 to
the clergy and laity of Meath by the Bishop of that diocese, in which it
was laid down that "the land of every country is the common property of
the people of that country, because its real owner, the Creator who made
it, has transferred it as a voluntary gift to them."
Language of this sort addressed to ignorant multitudes must do harm of
course whenever and by whomsoever used. It must tend to evil if
addressed by demagogues to the Congress of a Trade Union. But it must do
much more harm when uttered with the seeming sanction of the Church by a
mitred bishop to congregations already solicited to greed, cunning, and
dishonesty, by an unscrupulous and well-organised "agitation."
Not less instructive than Mr. Davitt's outburst from the Church is his
almost furious denunciation of the Irish tenants who obeyed an instinct,
thought honourable to mankind in most ages and countries, by agreeing
together to present to their landlord, Earl Fitzwilliam, a token of
their respect and regard on the celebration of his golden wedding day.
These tenants are denounced, not because they were paying homage to a
tyrannical or an unworthy landlord, though Mr. Davitt was so transported
beyond his ordinary and cooler self with rage at their action that he
actually stooped to something like an insinuation of disbelief in the
excellence of Lord Fitzwilliam's character. The true and avowed burden
of his diatribe was that no landlord could possibly deserve well of his
tenants. The better he is as a man, the more they ought to hate him as a
landlord.
The ownership of land, in other words, is of itself in the eyes of Mr.
Davitt what the ownership of a slave was in the eyes of the earlier
Abolitionists--crime so monstrous as to be beyond pardon or endurance.
If this be true of Great Britain and Ireland, where no allodial tenure
exists, how much more true must it be of New York? And if true of the
man who owns a thousand acres, it must be equally true of the man who
owns an acre. There could not be a better illustration than Mr. Davitt
has given in his attack on the Fitzwilliam tenants of the precise
accuracy of what I have had occasion to say in these volumes of the
"irrepressible conflict" between his schemes and the establishment of a
peasant proprietorship in Ireland. It is more than this. It is a
distinct warning served upon the smallest tenants as well as upon the
greatest landlords in the United Kingdom that fixity of any form of
individual tenure is irreconcilable with the Agrarian agitations.
I anticipated this demonstration, but I did not anticipate that it would
come so fully or so soon.
I anticipated also abundant proof from my own side of the water of the
accuracy of my impressions as to the drift of the American-Irish towards
Protection and Republicanism in American politics. This, too, has come
earlier and not less fully than I had expected. Mr. Patrick Ford, the
most influential leader of the American-Irish, issued early in August a
statement of his views as to the impending Presidential election. "The
issue to-day," he says, "is the Tariff. It is the American system
_versus_ the British Colonial system. The Irish are instinctively
Protectionists." And why? Mr. Ford goes on to explain. "The fact," he
observes, "that the Lion and the Unicorn have taken the stump for
Cleveland and Thurnan is not calculated to hurt Harrison and Morton in
the estimation of the Irish, who will, I promise, give a good account of
themselves in the coming Presidential election." Hatred of England, in
other words, is an axiom in their Political Economy!
Mr. Davitt's menacing allusion to Parnell as a landlord, and Mr.
O'Leary's scornful treatment in a letter to me of the small-fry English
Radicals,[1] when taken together, distinctly prefigure an imminent
rupture between the Parnellite party and the two wings--Agrarian and
Fenian--of the real revolutionary movement in Ireland. It is clear that
clerical agitators, high and low, must soon elect between following Mr.
George, Dr. M'Glynn, and Mr. Davitt, and obeying fully the Papal Decree.
It is a most curious feature of the situation in Ireland that much more
discontent with the actual conditions of life in that country seems to
be felt by people who do not than by people who do live in Ireland. It
is the Irish in America and Australia, who neither sow nor reap in
Ireland, pay no taxes there, and bear no burdens, who find the alien
oppression most intolerable. This explains the extreme bitterness with
which Mr. Davitt in some recent speeches and letters denounces the
tameness of the Irish people, and rather amusingly berates the British
allies of his Parnellite associates for their failure to develop any
striking and sensational resistance to the administration of law in
Ireland. I have printed in this edition[2] an instructive account,
furnished to me by Mr. Tener, of some recent evictions on the
Clanricarde property in Galway, which shows how hard it is for the most
determined "agitators" to keep the Irish tenants up to that high concert
pitch of resistance to the law which alone would meet the wishes of the
true agrarian leaders; and how comparatively easy it is for a just and
resolute man, armed with the power of the law resolutely enforced, to
break up an illegal combination even in some of the most disturbed
regions of Ireland.[3] While this is encouraging to the friends of law
and order in Ireland, it must not be forgotten that it involves also a
certain peril for them. The more successfully the law is enforced in
Ireland, the greater perhaps is the danger that the British
constituencies, upon which, of course, the administrators of the law
depend for their authority, may lose sight and sense of the
Revolutionary forces at work there. History shows that this has more
than once happened in the past. Englishmen and Scotchmen will be better
able than I am to judge how far it is unlikely that it should happen
again in the future.
As to one matter of great moment--the effect of Lord Ashbourne's Act--a
correspondent sends me a statement, which I reproduce here, as it gives
a very satisfactory account of the automatic financial machinery upon
which that Act must depend for success:--
"Out of £90,630 of instalments due last May, less than £4000 is
unpaid at the present moment, on transactions extending over three
years with all classes of tenants. The total amount which accrued,
due to the Land Commission in respect of instalments since the
passing of the Act to the 1st November 1887, was £50,910. Of this
there is only now unpaid £731, 17s. 9d. There accrued a further
amount to the 1st May 1888 of £39,720, in respect of which only
£4071, 16s. 11d. is now unpaid, making in all only £4803, 14s. 8d.
unpaid, out of a total sum of £90,630 due up to last gale day, some
of which by this time has been paid off."
This would seem to be worth considering in connection with the objection
made to any serious extension of Lord Ashbourne's Act by Mr. Chamberlain
in his extremely clear and able preface to a programme of "Unionist
Policy for Ireland" just issued by the "National Radical Union."
LONDON, _21st Sept_. 1888.
CONTENTS OF VOL. I.
CLUE MAP _Frontispiece_
PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION v
PROLOGUE xxi-lxvii
CHAPTER I.
London to Dublin, Jan. 20, 1888, 1
Irish Jacobite, 1
Proposed Mass in memory of Charles Edward, 2
Cardinal Manning, 3
President Cleveland's Jubilee Gift to Leo XIII, 4
Arrival at Kingstown, 5
Admirable Mail Service, 5
"Davy," the newsvendor, 6
Mr. Davitt, 7
Coercion in America and Ireland, 8
Montgomery Blair's maxim, 8
Irish cars, 9
Maple's Hotel, 9
Father Burke of Tallaght, 10, 11
Peculiarities of Post-offices, 12, 13
National League Office, 13
The Dublin National Reception, 14
Mr. T.D. Sullivan, M.P., 14
Dublin Castle, 15
Mr. O'Brien, Attorney-General, 16
The Chief-Secretary, Mr. Balfour, 17-24
Fathers M'Fadden and M'Glynn, 18
Come-outers of New England, 18
Mr. Wilfrid Blunt, 19, 20
Sir West Ridgway, 24
Divisional Magistrates, 24
Colonel Turner, 25
The Castle Service, 25-29
Visit of the Prince of Wales, 27
Lord Chief-Justice Morris, 29-37
An Irish Catholic on Mr. Parnell, 31-33
Mr. Justice Murphy, 36
Lord Ashbourne, 37, 38
Unionist meeting, 39
Old Middle State type of American-Irish Protestant, 39
Protestantism and Roman Catholicism in America, 41
Difficulties of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, 43
Dr. Jellett, 43
Dinner at the Attorney-General's, 43-46
Sir Bernard Burke, 46-49
Irish Landlords at Kildare Street Club, 49-52
The people and the procession, 53-55
Ripon and Morley, 54, 55
CHAPTER II.
Dublin to Sion, Feb 3, 56
Poor of the city, 57
Strabane, 58-60
Sion flax-mills, 60-62
Dr. Webb, 63-65
Gweedore, Feb 4, 65
A good day's work, 65
Strabane, 66
Names of the people, 66
Bad weather judges, 67
Letterkenny, p 67, 68
Picturesque cottages, 67
Communicative gentleman, 68
Donegal Highlands, 68-70
Glen Veagh, 71
Errigal, 72
Dunlewy and the Clady, 72
Gweedore, Feb 5, 73
Lord George Hill, 74
Gweedore 1838 to 1879, 75-81
Gweedore 1879 to 1888, 81-91
Father M'Fadden, 83-104
A Galway man's opinions, 84-89
Value of tenant-right, 83
Condition of tenantry, 84
Woollen stuffs, 87, 88
Distress in Gweedore, 88,
Do. in Connemara, 88
Mr Burke, 90
Plan of Campaign, 93
Emigration, 94, 95
Settlement with Captain Hill, 94
Landlord and tenant, 96-98
Land Nationalisation, 98
Father M'Fadden's plan, 98
Gweedore, Feb 6, 104
On the Bunbeg road, 104-110
Falcarragh, 111-123
Ballyconnell House, 112-123
Townland and Rundale, 118
Use and abuse of tea, 119
Lord Leitrim, 121
A "Queen of France," 121
The Rosses, 123
CHAPTER III.
Dungloe, Feb. 7, 124
From Gweedore, 124
Irish "jaunting car," 125
"It will fatten four, feed five, and starve six," 125
Natural wealth of the country, 125
Isle of Arran and Anticosti, p 12
The Gombeen man, 126-130
Dungloe, 126-131
Burtonport, 129
Lough Meela, 128
Attractions of the Donegal coast, 128
Compared with Isles of Shoals and Appledore, 129
Wonderful granite formations, 129
Material for a new industry, 129
Father Walker, 131
Migratory labourers, 133
Granite quarries, 133
Stipends of the Roman Catholic clergy, 134-137
Herring Fisheries, 137
Arranmore, 137
Dungloe woollen work, 138
Baron's Court, Feb 8, 139
Dungloe to Letterkenny, 139-141
Doocharry Red Granite, 140
Fair at Letterkenny, 142
Feb 9, 143
On Clare and Kerry, 143
A Priest's opinion on Moonlighters, 143
The Lixnaw murder, 143
Baron's Court, 144
James I.'s three castles, 145
Ulster Settlement, 146
Descendants of the old Celtic stock, 146
The park at Baron's Court, 146
A nonogenarian O'Kane, 148
Irish "Covenanters," 150
Shenandoah Valley people, 151
The murderers of Munterlony, 151
A relic of 1689, 152
Woollen industry, 152-155
Londonderry Orange symposium, 156
February 11, 157
Sergeant Mahony on Father M'Fadden, 157-163
CHAPTER IV.
Abbeyleix, Feb. 12, 164
Newtown-Stewart, 164
An absentee landlord, 164
"The hill of the seven murders," 165
Newry, Dublin, Maple's Hotel, Maryborough, 165
"Hurrah for Gilhooly," 166
Abbeyleix town, chapel, and church, 168
Embroidery and lace work, 169
Wood-carving, 170
General Grant, 171
Kilkenny, 172
Kilkenny Castle, 173
Muniment-room, 174
Table and Expense Books, 176
Dublin once the most noted wine-mart of Britain, 177, 178
Cathedral of St. Canice, 178
The Waterford cloak, 179
The College, 180
Irish and Scotch whisky, 180
Duke of Ormonde's grants, 181
The Plan of Campaign, 182-186
Ulster tenant-right, 186, 187
CHAPTER V.
Dublin, Feb. 14, 188
The Irish National Gallery, 188-191
Feb. 15, 192
London: Mr. Davitt, 192
Irish Woollen Company, 193
Mr. Davitt and Mr. Blunt, 193
Mr. Davitt's character and position, 192-199
CHAPTER VI.
Ennis, Feb. 18, 200
Return to Ireland, 200
Irish Nationalists, 200, 201
Home Rule and Protection, 202
Luggacurren and Mr. O'Brien, 204
Dublin to Limerick and Ennis, 204, 205
Colonel Turner, 205
Architecture of Ennis Courthouse--Resemblance
to White House, Washington, 206
Number of public-houses in Ennis, and in Ireland, 207, 208
Innkeepers of Milltown Malbay, 208,209
Father White (see Note E), 209
Sir Francis Head, 210, 211
Different opinions in Ennis, 212, 213
State of trade in Ennis, 213, 214
Edenvale, Heronry, 215 _seq._
Feb. 19, 215
The men of Ennis at Edenvale, 216
Killone Abbey, 218-221
Stephen J. Meany, 220
"Holy Well" of St. John, 221
Superstition as to rabbits, 222
Religious practices under Penal Laws, 222
Experiences under National League, 223, 224
Case of George Pilkington, 224-226
Trees at Edenvale, 227
Moonlighters, a reproduction of Whiteboys, 227, 228
Difficulty in getting men to work, 228
A testimonial to Mr. Austen Mackay, 229-232
Effect of testimonials, 232
Feb. 20, 232
The case of Mrs. Connell at Milltown Malbay, 232 _seq._
Estate accounts and prices, 240
A rent-warner, 245
Mr. Redmond, M.P., 245
Father White's Sermon, 246
A photograph, 246
APPENDIX.
NOTES--
A. Mr. Gladstone and the American War (Prologue xxix), 249
B. Mr. Parnell and the Dynamiters (Prologue xxxiii), 251
C. The American "Suspects" of 1881 (Prologue xlvii), 255
D. The Parnellites and the English Parties (Prologue l.), 262
E. The "Boycott" at Miltown-Malbay (p. 209) 264
PROLOGUE.
I.
This book is a record of things seen, and of conversations had, during a
series of visits to Ireland between January and June 1888.
These visits were made in quest of light, not so much upon the
proceedings and the purposes of the Irish "Nationalists,"--with which,
on both sides of the Atlantic, I have been tolerably familiar for many
years past--as upon the social and economical results in Ireland of the
processes of political vivisection to which that country has been so
long subjected.
As these results primarily concern Great Britain and British subjects,
and as a well-founded and reasonable jealousy exists in Great Britain of
American intromission in the affairs of Ireland, it is proper for me to
say at the outset, that the condition of Ireland interests me not
because I believe, with Cardinal Manning, that upon the future of
Ireland hangs the future of the British Empire, but because I know that
America is largely responsible for the actual condition of Ireland, and
because the future condition of Ireland, and of the British Empire,
must gravely influence the future of my own country.
In common with the vast majority of my countrymen, who come with me of
what may now not improperly be called the old American stock--by which I
mean the three millions of English-speaking dwellers in the New World,
who righteously resented, and successfully resisted, a hundred years
ago, the attempt--not of the Crown under which the Colonies held their
lands, but of the British Parliament in which they were
unrepresented--to take their property without their consent, and apply
it to purposes not passed upon by them, I have always felt that the
claim of the Irish people to a proper control of matters exclusively
Irish was essentially just and reasonable. The measure of that proper
control is now, as it always has been, a question not for Americans, but
for the people of Great Britain and of Ireland. If Lord Edward
Fitzgerald and his associates had succeeded in expelling British
authority from Ireland, and in founding an Irish Republic, we should
probably have recognised that Republic. Yet an American minister at the
Court of St. James's saw no impropriety in advising our Government to
refuse a refuge in the United States to the defeated Irish exiles of
'98.
It is undoubtedly the opinion of every Irish American who possesses any
real influence with the people of his own race in my country, that the
rights and liberties of Ireland can only be effectually secured by a
complete political separation from Great Britain. Nor can the right of
Irish American citizens, holding this opinion, to express their sympathy
with Irishmen striving in Ireland to bring about such a result, and with
Englishmen or Scotchmen contributing to it in Great Britain, be
questioned, any more than the right of Polish citizens of the French
Republic to express their sympathy with Poles labouring in Poland for
the restoration of Polish nationality. It is perhaps even less open to
question than the right of Americans not of Irish race, and of Frenchmen
not of Polish race, to express such sympathies; and certainly less open
to question than the right of Englishmen or Americans to express their
sympathy with Cubans bent on sundering the last link which binds Cuba to
Spain, or with Greeks bent on overthrowing the authority of the Sultan
in Crete.
But for all American citizens of whatever race, the expression of such
sympathies ceases to be legitimate when it assumes the shape of action
transcending the limits set by local or by international law. It is of
the essence of American constitutionalism that one community shall not
lay hands upon the domestic affairs of another; and it is an undeniable
fact that the sympathy of the great body of the American people with
Irish efforts for self-government has been diminished, not increased,
since 1848, by the gradual transfer of the head-quarters and machinery
of those efforts from Ireland to the United States. The recent refusal
of the Mayor of New York, Mr. Hewitt, to allow what is called the "Irish
National flag" to be raised over the City Hall of New York is vastly
more significant of the true drift of American feeling on this subject
than any number of sympathetic resolutions adopted at party conventions
or in State legislatures by party managers, bent on harpooning Irish
voters. If Ireland had really made herself a "nation," with or without
the consent of Great Britain, a refusal to hoist the Irish flag on the
occasion of an Irish holiday would be not only churlish but foolish. But
thousands of Americans, who might view with equanimity the disruption of
the British Empire and the establishment of an Irish republic, regard,
not only with disapprobation, but with resentment, the growing
disposition of Irish agitators in and out of the British Parliament to
thrash out on American soil their schemes for bringing about these
results with the help of Irishmen who have assumed the duties by
acquiring the rights of American citizenship. It is not in accordance
with the American doctrine of "Home Rule" that "Home Rule" of any sort
for Ireland should be organised in New York or in Chicago by
expatriated Irishmen.
No man had a keener or more accurate sense of this than the most
eloquent and illustrious Irishman whose voice was ever heard in America.
In the autumn of 1871 Father Burke of Tallaght and San Clemente, with
whom I had formed at Rome in early manhood a friendship which ended only
with his life, came to America as the commissioned Visitor of the
Dominican Order. His mission there will live for ever in the Catholic
annals of the New World. But of one episode of that mission no man
living perhaps knows so much as I, and I make no excuse for this
allusion to it here, as it illustrates perfectly the limits between the
lawful and the unlawful in the agitation of Irish questions upon
American soil.
While Father Burke was in New York Mr. Froude came there, having been
invited to deliver before a Protestant Literary Association a series of
lectures upon the history of Ireland. My personal relations with Mr.
Froude, I should say here, and my esteem for his rare abilities, go back
to the days of the _Nemesis of Faith_, and I did not affect to disguise
from him the regret with which I learned his errand to the New World.
That his lectures would be brilliant, impressive, and interesting, was
quite certain; but it was equally certain, I thought, that they would
do a world of mischief, by stirring up ancient issues of strife between
the Protestant and the Catholic populations of the United States.
That they would be answered angrily, indiscreetly, and in a fashion to
aggravate prejudices which ought to be appeased on both sides of the
questions involved, was much more than probable. All this accordingly I
urged upon Father Burke, begging him to find or make time in the midst
of his engrossing duties for a systematic course of lectures in reply.
What other men would surely say in heat and with virulence would be said
by him, I knew, temperately, loftily, and wisely. Three strenuous
objections he made. One was that his work as a Catholic missionary
demanded all his thought and all his time; another that he was not
historically equipped to deal with so formidable an antagonist; and a
third that America ought not to be a battle-ground of Irish contentions.
It was upon the last that he dwelt most tenaciously; nor did he give way
until he had satisfied himself, after consulting with the highest
authorities of his Church, and with two or three of the coolest and most
judicious Irish citizens of New York, that I was right in believing that
his appearance in the arena as the champion of Ireland, would lift an
inevitable controversy high above the atmosphere of unworthy passion,
and put it beyond the reach of political mischief-makers.
How nobly he did his work when he had become convinced that he ought to
do it, is now matter of history. But it is a hundredfold more needful
now than it was in 1871 and 1872, that the spirit in which he did it
should be known and published abroad. In the interval between the
delivery of two of his replies to Mr. Froude, Mr. Froude went to Boston.
A letter from Boston informed me that upon Mr. Froude's arrival there,
all the Irish servants of the friend with whom he was to stay had
suddenly left the house, refusing to their employer the right to invite
under his roof a guest not agreeable to them. I handed this letter,
without a word, to Father Burke a few hours before he was to speak in
the Academy of Music. He read it with a kind of humorous wrath; and when
the evening came, he prefaced his lecture with a few strong and stirring
words, in which he castigated with equal sense and severity the
misconduct of his country-people, anticipating thus by many a year the
spirit in which the supreme authority of his Church has just now dealt
with the social plague of "boycotting," whereof the strike of the
servant girls at Boston sixteen years ago was a precursory symptom.
Father Burke understood that American citizenship imposes duties where
it confers rights. Nobody expects the European emigrant who abjures his
foreign allegiance to divest himself of his native sympathies or
antipathies. But American law, and the conditions of American liberty,
require him to divest himself of the notion that he retains any right
actively to interfere in the domestic affairs of the country of his
birth. For public and political purposes, the Irishman who becomes an
American ceases to be an Irishman. When Mr. Gladstone's Government in
1881 seized and locked up indefinitely, on "suspicion" of what they
might be about to do, American citizens of Irish birth, these "suspects"
clamoured, and had a right to clamour, for the intervention of the
American Government to protect them against being dealt with as if they
were Irishmen and British subjects. But by the abjuration of British
allegiance which gave them this right to clamour for American
protection, they had voluntarily made themselves absolute foreigners to
Ireland, with no more legal or moral right to interfere in the affairs
of that country than so many Chinamen or Peruvians.
Having said this, I ought, in justice to my fellow-citizens of Irish
birth, to say that these elementary truths have too often been obscured
for them by the conduct of public bodies in America, and of American
public men.
No American public man of reputation, holding an executive office in the
Federal Government, has ever thrust himself, it is true, so inexcusably
into the domestic affairs of Great Britain and Ireland as did Mr.
Gladstone into the domestic affairs of the United States when, speaking
at Newcastle in the very crisis of our great civil war, he gave all the
weight of his position as a Cabinet Minister to the assertion that Mr.
Jefferson Davis had created not only an army and a navy, but a nation,
and thereby compelled the Prime Minister of Great Britain to break the
effect of this declaration by insisting that another Cabinet Minister,
Sir George Cornewall Lewis, should instantly make a speech countering
it, and covering the neutrality of the British Government.[4]
Nor has either House of the Congress of the United States ever been
guilty of the impertinence of adopting resolutions of sympathy with the
Home Rule, or any other movement affecting directly the domestic affairs
of the British Empire, though, within my own knowledge, very strong
pressure has been more than once put upon the Foreign Affairs Committees
of both Houses to bring this about.
But such resolutions have been repeatedly adopted by State Legislatures,
and individual members, both of the Federal Senate and of the Federal
Lower House, have discredited themselves, and brought such discredit as
they could upon the Congress, by effusions of the same sort. The bad
citizenship of Irish-American citizens, however, is not the less bad
citizenship because they may have been led into it by the recklessness
of State Legislatures--which have no responsibility for our foreign
relations--or the sycophancy of public men. If it were proved to
demonstration that Home Rule would be the salvation of Ireland, no
American citizen would have any more right to take an active part in
furthering it than to take an active part in dethroning the Czar of all
the Russias. The lesson which Washington administered to Citizen Genet,
when that meddlesome minister of the French Republic undertook to "boom"
the rights of men by issuing letters of marque at Charleston, has
governed the foreign relations of the United States ever since, and it
is as binding upon every private citizen as upon every public servant of
the Republic.
I must ask my readers, therefore, to bear it constantly in mind that all
my observations and comments have been made from an American, not from a
British or an Irish point of view. How or by whom Ireland shall be
governed concerns me only in so far as the government of Ireland may
affect the character and the tendencies of the Irish people, and
thereby, through the close, intimate, and increasing connection between
the Irish people and the people of the United States, may tend to affect
the future of my country. This being my point of view, it will be
apparent, I think, that I have at least laboured under no temptation to
see things otherwise than as they were, or to state things otherwise
than as I saw them.
With Arthur Young, who more clearly than any other man of his time saw
the end from the beginning of the fatuous and featherheaded French
Revolution of 1789, I have always been inclined to think "the
application of theory to methods of government a surprising imbecility
in the human mind:" and it will be found that in this book I have done
little more than set down, as fully and clearly as I could, what I
actually saw and heard in Ireland. My method has been as simple as my
object. During each day as occasion served, and always at night, I made
stenographic notes of whatever had attracted my attention or engaged my
interest. As I had no case to make for or against any political party or
any theory of government in Ireland, I took things great and small, and
people high and low, as they came, putting myself in contact by
preference, wherever I could, with those classes of the Irish people of
whom we see least in America, and concerning myself, as to my notes,
only that they should be made under the vivid immediate impress of
whatever they were to record. These notes I have subsequently written
out in the spirit in which I made them, in all cases taking what pains
I could to verify statements of facts, and in many cases, where it
seemed desirable or necessary, submitting the proofs of the pages as
finally printed to the persons whom, after myself, they most concerned.
I have been more annoyed by the delay than by the trouble thus entailed
upon me; but I shall be satisfied if those who may take the pains to
read the book shall as nearly as possible see what I saw, and hear what
I heard.
I have no wish to impress my own conclusions upon others who may be
better able than I am accurately to interpret the facts from which these
conclusions have been drawn. Such as they are, I have put them into a
few pages at the end of the book.
It will be found that I have touched only incidentally upon the subject
of Home Rule for Ireland. Until it shall be ascertained what "Home Rule
for Ireland" means, that subject seems to me to lie quite outside the
domain of my inquiries. "Home Rule for Ireland" is not now a plan--nor
so much as a proposition. It is merely a polemical phrase, of little
importance to persons really interested in the condition of Ireland,
however invaluable it may be to the makers of party platforms in my own
country, or to Parliamentary candidates on this side of the Atlantic. It
may mean anything or nothing, from Mr. Chamberlain's imperialist scheme
of four Provincial Councils--which recalls the outlines of a system
once established with success in New Zealand--to that absolute and
complete separation in all particulars of the government of Ireland from
the government of Great Britain, which has unquestionably been the aim
of every active Irish organisation in the United States for the last
twenty years, and which the accredited leader of the "Home Rule" party
in the British Parliament, Mr. Parnell, is understood in America to have
pledged himself that he will do anything to further and nothing to
impede. On this point, what I took to be conclusive documentary evidence
was submitted to me in New York several years ago by Mr. Sheridan, at a
time when the fever-heat of British indignation excited by those murders
in the Phoenix Park, for which I believe it is now admitted by the best
informed authorities that Mr. Sheridan had no responsibility, was
driving Mr. Parnell and his Parliamentary associates into disavowals of
the extreme men of their connection, which, but for Mr. Sheridan's
coolness and consciousness of his well-assured domination over them,
might have led to extremely inconvenient consequences to all
concerned.[5] But whatever "Home Rule" may or may not mean, I went to
Ireland, not to find some achromatic meaning for a prismatic phrase,
which is flashed at you fifty times in England or America where you
encounter it once in Ireland, but to learn what I could of the social
and economical condition of the Irish people as affected by the
revolutionary forces which are now at work in that country.
I have watched the development of these forces too long and too closely
to be under any illusion as to the real importance relatively with them
of the so-called "Parliamentary" action of the Irish Nationalists.
II.
The visits to Ireland, of which this book is a record, were made on my
return from a sojourn in Rome during the celebration of the Jubilee of
His Holiness Leo XIII. What I then and there learned convinced me that
the Vatican was on the eve of grappling in Ireland with issues
substantially identical with those which were forced, in my own country,
two years ago, upon a most courageous and gifted member of the American
Catholic hierarchy, the Archbishop of New York, by the open adhesion of
an eminent Irish American ecclesiastic, the Rev. Dr. M'Glynn, to the
social revolution of which Mr. Henry George is the best-equipped and
most indefatigable apostle. Entertaining this conviction (which events
have since shown to have been well-founded), I was anxious to survey on
the spot the conditions under which the conflict so vigorously
encountered by the Archbishop in New York must be waged by the Vatican
in Ireland.
To suppose that the Vatican, in dealing with this conflict, either in
Ireland or in America, is troubling itself about the balancing of
political acrobats, British or American, upon the tight-rope of "Home
Rule," is as absurd as it would have been to suppose that in 1885 the
Vatican concerned itself with the subterranean intrigues which there is
reason to believe the Irish Nationalists then sought to carry on with
the wire-pullers of the two great British political parties. To get a
correct perspective of the observations which I came from Rome this year
to make in Ireland, my readers, as I have already said, must allow me to
take them across the Atlantic, and must put aside as accessory and
incidental the forensic and polemic phenomena of Irish politics, with
which they are perhaps only too familiar.
It is as easy to go too far back as it is not to go back far enough in
the study of such a revolutionary movement as that of which Ireland is
just now the arena.
Many and sore are the historical grievances of the Irish people. That
they are historical and not actual grievances would seem to be admitted
by so sympathetic and minutely well-informed a writer as Dr. Sigerson,
when he gives it as his opinion, that after the passage of the Land Act
of 1870, "the concession in principle of the demands of the cultivators
as tenants" had "abolished the class war waged between landlords and
their tenantry."
The class war between the tenantry and their landlords, therefore, which
is now undoubtedly waging in Ireland cannot be attributed to the
historical grievances of the Irish people. The tradition and the memory
of these historical grievances may indeed be used by designing or
hysterical traders in agitation to inflame the present war. But the war
itself is not the old war, nor can it be explained by recurring to the
causes of the old war. It has the characteristics no longer of a
defensive war, nor yet of a war of revenge absolutely, but of an
aggressive war, and of a war of conquest. In his able work on "The Land
Tenure and the Land Classes of Ireland," Dr. Sigerson, writing in 1871,
looked forward to the peaceful co-existence in Ireland of two systems of
land-holding, "whereby the country might enjoy the advantage of what is
good in the 'landlord,' or single middleman system, and in the peasant
proprietary or direct system."
What we now see in Ireland, after nearly twenty years of legislation,
steadily tending to the triumph of equal rights, is an agitation
threatening not only the "co-existence" of these two systems, but the
very existence of each of these systems.
To get at the origin and the meaning of this agitation we must be
content, I believe, to go no further back than ten years, and to look
for them, not in Ireland, but in America, not to Mr. Parnell and Mr.
Gladstone primarily, but to Mr. Davitt and Mr. Henry George.
III.
In a very remarkable letter written to Earl Grey in 1868, after the
Clerkenwell explosions had brought the disestablishment of the Irish
Protestant Church into Mr. Gladstone's scheme of "practical politics,"
the Archbishop of Westminster, not then a Cardinal, called the attention
of Englishmen to the fact, not yet I fear adequately apprehended by
them, that "the assimilating power of America upon the Irish people, if
seven days slower than that of England in reaching Ireland, is sevenfold
more penetrating and powerful upon the whole population." By this the
Archbishop meant, what was unquestionably true, that even in 1868, only
twenty years after the great Irish exodus to America began, the social
and political ideas of America were exerting a seven-fold stronger
influence upon the character and the tendencies of the Irish people than
the social and political ideas of England. Thanks to the development of
the cables and the telegraph since 1868, and to the enormous progress
of America since that time in wealth and population, this "assimilating
power" reaches Ireland much more rapidly, and exerts upon the Irish
people a very much more drastic influence than in 1868. This
establishes, of course, a return current westward, which is as necessary
to he watched, and is as much neglected by American as the original
eastward current is by British public men.
In this letter of 1868 to Earl Grey, the Archbishop of Westminster
desiring, as an Englishman, to counteract, if possible, this influence
which was drawing Ireland away from the British monarchy, and towards
the American Republic, maintained that by two things the "heart of
Ireland" might be won, and her affections enlisted with her interests in
the support of the unity, solidity, and prosperity of the British
Empire. One of these two things was "perfect religious equality between
the Catholics and the Protestants of Ireland." The other was that the
Imperial Legislature should by statute make it impossible for any
landlord in Ireland to commit three wrongs,--"first, the wrong of
abusing his rights by arbitrary eviction; secondly, by exacting an
exorbitant rent; thirdly, by appropriating to his own use the
improvements effected by the industry of his tenants."
Perfect religious equality has since been established between the
Catholics and the Protestants of Ireland. The three wrongs which the
Archbishop called upon the Imperial Legislature to make impossible to
Irish landlords have since been made impossible by Statute.
Yet it is on all hands admitted that the "unity, solidity, and
prosperity" of the British Empire have never been so seriously
threatened in Ireland as during the last ten years. Was the Archbishop
wrong, therefore, in his estimate of the situation in 1868? Or has the
centripetal influence of remedial British legislation since 1868 failed
to check a centrifugal advance "by leaps and bounds," in the
"assimilating power" of America upon Ireland?
IV.
Just ten years ago, in 1878, Mr. Michael Davitt and Mr. John Devoy (the
latter of whom had been commissioned in 1865 by the Fenian leader
Stephens, as "chief organiser of the Irish Republican Brotherhood in the
British army"), being then together in America, promulgated, Mr. Davitt
in a speech at Boston, and Mr. Devoy in a letter sent to the _Freeman's
Journal_ in Dublin, the outlines of a scheme for overthrowing British
rule in Ireland by revolutionising the ownership of land in that
country.
The basis of this scheme had been laid thirty years before, in 1848, by
Finton Lalor, John Mitchel, and the present Archbishop of Cashel, then a
simple curate.
It was thus stated by Lalor in his paper, the _Irish Felon_:--
"The entire ownership of Ireland, moral and material, up to the sun and
down to the centre of the earth, is vested, as of right, in the people
of Ireland. The soil of the country belongs as of right to the entire
people of the country, not to any one class, but to the nation."
This was a distinct denial of the right of private property in land. If
true of Ireland and the Irish people this proposition was true of all
lands and of all peoples. Lalor, though more of a patriot than of a
philosopher, saw this plainly; and in one of the three numbers of his
paper which appeared before it was suppressed by the British Government,
he said "the principle I propose goes to the foundations of Europe, and
sooner or later will cause Europe to uprise." Michael Davitt saw this as
clearly in 1878 as Finton Lalor thirty years before. He had matured his
plans in connection with this principle during the weary but not wasted
years of his imprisonment as a Fenian at Dartmoor, a place, the name of
which is connected in America with many odious memories of the second
war between England and the United States; and going out to America
almost immediately after his release on a ticket of leave, he there
found the ideas of Finton Lalor and his associates of 1848, ripened and
harvested in the mind of an American student of sociology, Henry George.
Nowhere in the world has what a shrewd English traveller calls "the
illegitimate development of private wealth" attained such proportions in
modern times as in America, and especially in California. Nowhere, too,
in the world is the ostentatious waste of the results of labour upon the
antics of a frivolous plutocracy a more crying peril of our times than
in America. Henry George, an American of the Eastern States, who went to
the Pacific coast as a lad, had grown up with and watched the progress
of this social disease in California; and when Davitt reached America in
1878, Henry George was preparing to publish his revolutionary book on
_Progress and Poverty_, which appeared in 1879. Dates are important from
this point, as they will trace for the reader the formation of the
strongest forces which, as I believe, are to-day at work to shape the
future of Ireland, and, if Cardinal Manning is right, with the future of
Ireland, the future of the British Empire.
The year 1878 saw the "Home Rule" movement in Irish politics brought to
an almost ludicrous halt by the success of Mr. Parnell, then a young
member of Parliament for Meath, in unhorsing the leader of that
movement, Mr. Butt. As the Irish members then had no coherent purpose or
policy, Mr. Parnell had, without much trouble, dominated and brigaded
them to follow him blindly into a system of parliamentary obstruction,
which there is reason to suppose was suggested to him by a friend who
had studied the Congressional proceedings of the United States, the
native country of his mother, and especially the tactics which had
enabled Mr. Randall of Pennsylvania, the leader of the Democratic
minority in the House of Representatives, to check the so-called "Civil
Rights Bill," sent down by the Senate to that House, during a continuous
session of forty-six hours and a half, with no fewer than seventy-seven
calls of the house, in the month of January 1875, some time before Mr.
Parnell first took his seat in the House of Commons.
When Mr. Parnell, early in 1878, thanks to this system, had ousted Mr.
Butt, and got himself elected as President of the Irish "Home Rule
Confederation," he found himself, as an Irish friend of mine wrote to me
at the time, in an awkward position. He had command of the "Home Rule"
members at Westminster, but he had no notion what to do with them, and
neither they nor he could see anyway open to securing a permanent hold
upon the Irish voters. Three bad harvests in succession had thrown the
Irish tenants into a state which disinclined them to make sacrifices
for any sentimental policy, but prepared them to lend their ears eagerly
to Michael Davitt, when, on his return from the United States in the
early spring of 1879, he proclaimed anew, at Irishtown in his native
county of Mayo, the gospel of 1848 giving the land of Ireland to the
people of Ireland. Clearly Mr. Davitt held the winning card. As he
frankly put the case to a special correspondent, whom I sent to see him,
and whose report I published in New York, he saw that "the only issue
upon which Home Rulers, Nationalists, Obstructionists, and each and
every shade of opinion existing in Ireland could be united was the Land
Question," and of that question he took control. Naturally enough, Mr.
Parnell, himself a landowner under the English settlement, shrank at
first from committing himself and his fortunes to the leadership of Mr.
Davitt. But no choice was really left him, and there is reason to
believe that a decision was made easier to him by a then inchoate
undertaking that he should be personally protected against the financial
consequences to himself of the new departure, by a testimonial fund,
such as was in fact raised and presented to him in 1883. In June 1879 he
accepted the inevitable, and in a speech at Westport put himself with
his parliamentary following and machinery at the service of the founder
of the Irish Land League, uttering the keynote of Mr. Davitt's "new
departure" in his celebrated appeal to the Irish tenants to "keep a firm
grip of their homesteads." In the middle of October 1879, Mr. Davitt
formally organised the Irish National Land League, "to reduce rack-rents
and facilitate the obtaining of the ownership of the land of Ireland by
the occupiers," and Mr. Parnell was made its first President. He was
sent out to America in that capacity, at the end of the year to explain
to the Irish-American leaders the importance of supplying the new
organisation with funds sufficient to enable it to take and keep the
field at Westminster with a force of paid members not dependent for
their support upon the Irish constituencies. It was obviously impossible
either to guarantee any considerable number of Irishmen holding property
against loss by a policy aimed at the foundations of property, or to
count upon finding for every Irish seat a member of local weight and
stake, imbued with the spirit of martyrdom.
Mr. Parnell landed at New York on the 1st of January 1880. An interview
with him, written out on board of the steamer which took him to America
by a correspondent detailed for that purpose, was published on the
morning after his arrival. It made on the whole an unfavourable
impression in America, which was not improved by an injudicious quarrel
into which he drifted with a portion of the American press, and which
was distinctly deepened by his inexcusable misrepresentations of the
conduct of Queen Victoria during the famine of 1847, and by his foolish
attacks upon the management and objects of the Duchess of Marlborough's
fund for the relief of Irish distress. The friends of Mr. Davitt in
America, however, and the leaders of the most active Irish organisations
there, came to the rescue, and as the two American parties were
preparing their lines of battle for the Presidential conflict of 1880,
Mr. Parnell was not only "put through" the usual course of "receptions"
by Mayors and State legislatures, but invited on an "off-day" to address
the House of Representatives at Washington. His tour, however, on the
whole, harmed more than it helped the new Irish movement on my side of
the Atlantic, and when he was called back to take his part in the
electoral contest precipitated by Lord Beaconsfield's dissolution of
Parliament at Easter 1880, Mr. Davitt went out to America himself to do
what his Parliamentary associate had not succeeded in doing. During this
visit of Mr. Davitt to the United States, Mr. Henry George finally
transferred his residence from San Francisco to New York, and made his
arrangements to visit England and Ireland, and bring about a practical
combination between the advocates of "the land for the people" on both
sides of the ocean. These arrangements he carried out in 1881-82,
publishing in 1881, in America, his treatise on the Irish Land question,
while Mr. Davitt, who had been arrested after his return to Europe by
Mr. Gladstone's Government in February 1881, on a revocation of his
ticket-of-leave, lay a prisoner at Portland. Mr. George himself, while
travelling in Ireland with an academical English friend, came under
"suspicion" in the eyes of one of Mr. Forster's officers, and was
arrested, but at once released. During the protracted confinement of Mr.
Davitt at Portland, the utter incapacity of Mr. Parnell and his
Parliamentary associates to manage the social revolution initiated by
the founder of the Land League became fully apparent, not only to
impartial, but even to sympathetic observers in America, long before it
was demonstrated by the incarceration of Mr. Parnell in Kilmainham, the
disavowal, under pressure, of the no-rent manifesto by Archbishop Croke,
and the suppression of the Land League. In sequestrating Mr. Davitt, Mr.
Forster, as was shown by the extraordinary scenes which in the House of
Commons followed his arrest, had struck at the core of the revolution,
and had the Irish Secretary not been deserted by Mr. Gladstone, under
influences which originated at Kilmainham, and were reinforced by the
pressure of the United States Government in the spring of 1882, history
might have had a very different tale to tell of the last six years in
Ireland and in Great Britain.[6]
V.
It was after the return of Mr. George from Ireland to New York in 1882
that the first black point appeared on the horizon, of the conflict,
inevitable in the nature of things, between the social revolution and
the Catholic Church, which assumed such serious proportions two years
ago in America, and which is now developing itself in Ireland. Among the
ablest and the most earnest converts in America to the doctrine of the
new social revolution was the Rev. Dr. M'Glynn, a Catholic priest,
standing in the front rank of his order in New York, in point alike of
eloquence in the pulpit, and of influence in private life. Finding, like
Michael Davitt, in the doctrine of Henry George an outcome and a
confirmation of the principle laid down in 1848 for the liberation of
Ireland by Finton Lalor, Dr. M'Glynn threw himself ardently into the
advocacy of that doctrine,--so ardently that in August 1882 the Prefect
of the Propaganda, Cardinal Simeoni, found it necessary to invite the
attention of Cardinal M'Closkey, then Archbishop of New York, to
speeches of Dr. M'Glynn, reported in the _Irish World_ of New York, as
"containing propositions openly opposed to the teachings of the Catholic
Church."
It did not concern the Propaganda that these propositions ran on
all-fours with the policy of the Irish Land League established by Mr.
Davitt, and accepted by Mr. Parnell. What concerned the Propaganda in
the propositions of Dr. M'Glynn at New York in 1882 was precisely what
concerns the Propaganda in the programme of Mr. Davitt as mismanaged by
Mr. Dillon in Ireland in 1888--the incompatibility of these
propositions, and of that programme, with the teachings of the Church.
Upon receiving the instructions of the Propaganda in August 1882,
Cardinal M'Closkey sent for Dr. M'Glynn, and set the matter plainly
before him. Dr. M'Glynn professed regret for his errors, promised to
abstain in future from political meetings, and begged the Cardinal to
inform the authorities at Home of his intention to walk more
circumspectly. The submission of Dr. M'Glynn was approved at Rome, but
it was gently intimated to him that it needed to be crowned by public
reparation for the scandal he had caused. He disregarded this pastoral
hint, and when the Archbishop Coadjutor of New York, Dr. Corrigan, went
to Rome in 1883 to represent the Cardinal, who was unequal to the
journey, he found the Propaganda by no means satisfied with the attitude
of Dr. M'Glynn. Two years after this, in October 1885, Cardinal
M'Closkey died, and Dr. Corrigan succeeded him as Archbishop of New
York.
Between the first admonition given to the sacerdotal ally of Mr. George
in 1882 and this event much had come to pass in Ireland. The Land League
suppressed by Mr. Forster had been suffered to reappear as the National
League by Earl Spencer and Mr. Trevelyan. Sir William Harcourt's
stringent and sweeping "Coercion Act" of July 11th, 1882, passed under
the stress of the murders in the Phoenix Park, expiring by its own terms
in July 1885, Mr. Gladstone found himself forced either to alienate a
number of his Radical supporters by proposing a renewal of that Act, or
to invite a catastrophe in Ireland by attempting to rule that country
under "the ordinary law."
He elected to escape from the dilemma by inviting a defeat in Parliament
on a secondary question of the Budget. He went out of power on the 9th
of June 1885, leaving Lord Salisbury to send the Earl of Carnarvon as
Viceroy to Ireland, and the Irish party in Parliament to darken the air
on both sides of the Atlantic with portentous intimations of a
mysterious compact, under which they were to secure Home Rule for
Ireland by establishing the Conservatives in their places at the general
election in November.[7]
What came of all this I may briefly rehearse. Going out to America in
November 1885, and returning to England in January 1886, I remained in
London long enough to assure myself, and to publish in America my
conviction of the utter hopelessness of Mr. Gladstone's "Home Rule"
measure, the success of which would have made his government the ally
and the instrument of Mr. Parnell in carrying out the plans of Mr.
Davitt, Mr. Henry George, and the active Irish organisations of the
United States. All this is matter of history.
The effect of Mr. Gladstone's speech of April 8, 1886, introducing his
Home Rule Bill, upon the Irish in America was simply intoxicating. They
saw him, as in a vision, repeating for the benefit of Ireland at Dublin,
on a grander scale, the impressive scene of his surrender in 1858 at
Corfu of the Protectorate of the Ionian Islands to Greece.
Upon thousands also of Americans, interested more or less intelligently
in British affairs, but neither familiar, nor caring to be, with the
details of the political situation in Great Britain, this appearance of
the British Premier, as the champion of Home Rule for Ireland,
denouncing the "baseness and blackguardism" of Pitt and his
accomplices, the framers of the Union of 1800, naturally produced a very
profound impression. What might be almost called a "tidal wave" of
sympathy with the Irish National League, and with him as its ally, made
itself felt throughout the United States. Had I witnessed the drama from
the far-off auditorium in New York, I might doubtless have shared the
conviction of so many of my countrymen that we were about to behold the
consummation tunefully anticipated so many years ago by John Quincy
Adams, and--
"Proud of herself, victorious over fate,
See Erin rise, an independent state."
The moment seemed propitious for a resolute forward move in America of
Mr. Henry George, and the other American believers in the doctrine of
"the land for the people." It would have been more propitious had not
the political managers of the Irish party, misapprehending to the last
moment the drift of things in the British Parliament, and counting
firmly upon a victory for Mr. Gladstone, either at Westminster or at the
polls, insisted upon holding a great convention of the Irish in America
at Chicago in August 1886. A proposition to do this had been made in the
spring of 1885, and put off, in judicious deference to the disgust which
many independent Americans of both parties then felt at the course
pursued by Mr. Parnell's friends, Mr. Egan and Mr. Sullivan in 1884,
when these leaders openly led the Irish with drums beating and green
flags flying out of the Democratic into the Republican camp.
As it was, however, Mr. Gladstone having gone out of power a second
time, on the second day of June in 1886, the non-parliamentary and real
leader in Ireland of the Irish revolutionary movement, Mr. Davitt, came
overtly to the front, and crossed the Atlantic to ride the whirlwind and
direct the storm at the Convention appointed to be held in Chicago on
the 18th of August.
In New York he found Mr. Henry George quietly preparing to put the
emotions of the moment to profit at the municipal election which was to
occur in that city in November, and Dr. M'Glynn more enamoured than ever
of the doctrine of "the land for the people," and more defiant than ever
of the Propaganda and of his ecclesiastical superiors. It was resolved
that Mr. George should come forward as a candidate for the mayoralty in
November, and Dr. M'Glynn determined to take the field in support of
him.
VI.
We now come to close quarters.
Dr. Corrigan, as I have said, had become the Archbishop of New York in
October 1885. The Irish-American Convention met at Chicago, Mr. Davitt
dominating its proceedings by his courageous and outspoken support of
his defeated Parliamentary allies in England. The candidacy of Mr. Henry
George had not yet been announced in New York. But Dr. M'Glynn resumed
his practice of addressing public meetings in support of the doctrines
of Mr. Davitt and of Henry George. The Archbishop's duty was plain. It
was not pleasant. A Catholic prelate of Irish blood living in New York
might have been pardoned for avoiding, if he could, an open intervention
at such a moment, to prevent an able and popular priest from disobeying
his ecclesiastical superiors in his zeal for a doctrine hostile to
"landlordism," and cordially approved by the most influential of the
Irish leaders.
But on the 21st August 1886, while all the Irishmen in New York were
wild with excitement over the proceedings at Chicago, Archbishop
Corrigan did his duty, and admonished Dr. M'Glynn to restrain his
political ardour. The admonition was thrown away. A month later, the
canvass of Mr. Henry George being then fully opened, Dr. M'Glynn sent
Mr. George himself to wait upon the Archbishop with a note of
introduction as his "very dear and valued friend," in the hope of
inducing the Archbishop to withdraw his inhibition and allow him to
speak at a great meeting, then about to be held, of the supporters of
Mr. George.
The Archbishop replied in a firm but friendly note, forbidding Dr.
M'Glynn "in the most positive manner" to attend the meeting referred to,
or "any other political meeting whatever."
Dr. M'Glynn deliberately disobeyed this order, attended the meeting, and
threw himself with ever increasing heat into the war against
landlordism. On the 2d of October 1886, therefore, he was formally
"suspended" from his priestly functions--nor has he ever since been
permitted to resume them. Another priest presides over the great church
of St. Stephen, of which he was the rector. More than once the door of
repentance and return has been opened to him; but, I believe, he is
still waging war in his own way, and beyond the precincts of the
priesthood, both upon the right of private property in land and upon the
Pope.
He is a man of vigorous intellect; and he has defined the issue between
himself and the Church in language so terse and clear that I reproduce
it here. It defines also the real issue of to-day between the Church
speaking through the Papal Decree of April 20, 1888, and the National
League of Ireland acting through the "Plan of Campaign."
No heed having been paid by Dr. M'Glynn to several successive
intimations summoning him to go to Rome and explain his attitude, he
finally, on the 20th of December 1886, wrote a letter in which, with a
single skilful turn of his wrist, he took out the core of Henry George's
doctrine as to land, which really is the core also of the Irish Plan of
Campaign, and thus laid it before the Archbishop of New York:--
"My doctrine about land has been made clear in speeches, in reports of
interviews, and in published articles, and I repeat it here. I have
taught, and I shall continue to teach in speeches and writings, as long
as I live, that land is rightfully the property of the people in common,
and that private ownership of land is against natural justice, no matter
by what civil or ecclesiastical laws it may be sanctioned; and I would
bring about instantly, if I could, such change of laws all over the
world as would confiscate private property in land without one penny of
compensation to the miscalled owners."
There is no shuffling here. With logical precision Dr. M'Glynn strips
Mr. George's doctrine of its technical disguise as a form of taxation,
and presents it to the world as a simple Confiscation of Rents. Many
acute critics of _Progress and Poverty_ have failed to see that when
Mr. George calls upon the State to take over to itself, and to its own
uses, the whole annual rental value of the bare land of a country, the
land, that is, irrespectively of improvements put upon it by man, he
proposes not "a single tax upon land" at all, but an actual confiscation
of the rental of the land--which for practical purposes is the land--to
the uses of the State, without a levy, and without compensation to "the
miscalled owners."
When a tax is levied, the need by the State levying it of a certain sum
of money must first be ascertained by competent authority, legislative
or executive, as the case may be, and the law-making power must then,
according to a prescribed form, enact that to raise such a sum a certain
tax shall be levied on designated property or occupations. If the
exigencies of the State are held to require it, a tax may be levied upon
property of more than its value, as in the case, for example, of the
customs duty which was imposed in one of our "tariff revisions" upon
plate glass imported into the United States by way of "protecting" a
single plate-glass factory then existing in the United States. This was
an abominable abuse of a constitutional power, but it was not
"confiscation." What Henry George proposes is confiscation, as Dr.
M'Glynn plainly sees and courageously says. What he proposes is that
the State shall compel the annual rental value of all land to be paid
into the public treasury, without regard to the question whether the
State does or does not need such a sum of money. That is confiscation
pure and simple, the State, in the assumed interest of the State,
proceeding against the private owners of land, or the "miscalled
owners," to use Dr. M'Glynn's significant phrase, precisely as under the
feudal system the State proceeded against the private property of rebels
and traitors. No good reason can be shown why the process should not be
applied to personalty and to debts as well as to land.
This was the doctrine indorsed at the polls in New York in November 1886
by 68,000 voters. Nor can there be much doubt that it would have been
indorsed by the few thousand more votes needed to defeat Mr. Hewitt, the
actual Mayor of New York, and to put Mr. Henry George into the Chief
Magistracy of the first city of the New World, had not its teachers and
preachers been confronted by the quiet, cool, and determined prelate who
met it as plainly as it was put. "Your letter," said the Archbishop,
"has brought the painful intelligence that you decline to go to Rome,
and that you have taught, and will continue to teach, the injustice of
private ownership of land, no matter by what laws of Church or State it
may be sanctioned. In view of such declarations, to permit you to
exercise the holy ministry would be manifestly wrong."
In these few words of the Archbishop of New York, we have plainly
affirmed in 1886 the principle underlying the Papal Decree of 1888
against the Plan of Campaign and Boycotting in Ireland. There is no
question of parties or of politics in the one case or in the other. When
Dr. M'Glynn talked about the private ownership of land in New York as
"against natural justice," he flung himself not only against the Eighth
Commandment and the teachings of the Catholic Church, touching the
rights of property, but against the constitutions of the State of New
York and of the United States. That "private property shall not be taken
for public uses without just compensation" is a fundamental provision of
the Constitution of the United States, which is itself a part of the
Constitution of every State of the Union; and the right of private
ownership in land is defined and protected beyond doubt or cavil in New
York under the State Constitution. An Act passed in 1830 provides and
declares that all lands within the State "are allodial, so that, subject
only to the liability to escheat, the entire and absolute property is
vested in the owners according to the nature of their respective
estates."
By this Act "all feudal tenures of every description, with all their
incidents," were "abolished." Most of the "feudal incidents" of the
socage tenure had been previously abolished by an Act passed in 1787,
under the first Constitution of the State, adopted at Kingston in 1777,
a year after the Declaration of American Independence; and socage tenure
by fixed and determinate service, not military or variable by the lord
at his will, had been adopted long before by an Act of the first
Assembly of the Province of New York held in 1691 under the first Royal
Governor, after the reconquest of the province from Holland, and in the
reign of William and Mary. This Act provided that all lands should "be
held in free and common socage according to the tenure of East Greenwich
in England." It is an interesting circumstance that the right of private
ownership in land, thus rooted in our history, should have been defended
against a threatening revolutionary movement in New York by the courage
and loyalty to the Constitution of his country as well as to his Church
of a Catholic Archbishop. For this same Assembly of the Province of New
York in 1693, in an Act "to maintain Protestant ministers and churches,"
enacted that "every Jesuit and popish priest" found in the Province
after a certain day named, should be put into "perpetual imprisonment,"
with the proviso that if he escaped and was retaken he should suffer
death. And even in the Constitution of 1777 the Protestantism of New
York expressed its hostility to the Catholic Church by exacting
subjection "in all matters ecclesiastical as well as civil."
The position of the Archbishop, both as a churchman and as a citizen,
was impregnable. When Dr. M'Glynn advocated the plan of Henry George, he
advocated at one and the same time the immoral seizure and confiscation
of the whole income of many persons within the protection of the
Constitution of New York, and the overthrow of the Constitution of that
State and of the United States. It may be within the competency of the
British Parliament to enact such a confiscation of rent without a
revolution, there being not only no allodial tenure of land in Great
Britain, but, it would appear, no limit to the power of a British
Parliament over the lives, liberties, and property of British subjects,
but the will of its members. But it is not within the competency of the
Congress of the United States, or of the Assembly of New York, to do
such a thing, the powers of these bodies being controlled and denned by
written Constitutions, which can only be altered or amended in a
prescribed manner and through prescribed and elaborate forms.
VII.
By the middle of October 1886 it became clear that Mr. George, whose
candidacy had at first been regarded with indifference by the party
managers, both Democratic and Republican, in New York, would command a
vote certainly larger than that of one of these parties, and possibly
larger than that of either of them. To put him at the head of a poll of
three parties would elect him. This was so apparent that he and his
friends, including Dr. M'Glynn and Mr. Davitt, were warranted in
expecting a victory.
It was hardly therefore by a mere coincidence that this precise time was
selected for opening the war in Ireland against Rent. It is quite
possible that if Mr. Dillon and his Parliamentary friends had been in
less of a hurry to open this war before the return of Mr. Davitt from
America, it might have been opened in a manner less "politically
stupid," if not less "morally wrong." But, of course, if Mr. Henry
George had been elected Mayor of New York, as he came so near to being
in November 1886, and Mr. Davitt had returned to Ireland with the
prestige of contributing to place him in the municipal chair of the most
important city in the New World, Mr. Dillon and his Parliamentary
friends would probably have found it necessary to accept a much less
conspicuous part in the conduct of the campaign.
It was on the 17th of October 1886 that Mr. John Dillon, M.P., first
promulgated the "Plan of Campaign" at Portumna, in a speech which was
promptly flashed under the Atlantic to New York, there to feed the
flame, already fanned by the eloquence of Dr. M'Glynn, into a blaze of
enthusiasm for the apostle of the New Gospel of Confiscation.
Had the "Plan of Campaign" then been met by the highest local authority
of the Catholic Church in Ireland, as Henry George's doctrine of
Confiscation was met in New York by Archbishop Corrigan, it might never
have been necessary to issue the Papal Decree of April 1888. But while
the Bishop of Limerick unhesitatingly denounced the "Plan of Campaign"
as "politically stupid and morally wrong," the Archbishop of Dublin
bestowed upon it what may be called a left-handed benediction. Admitting
that it empowered one of the parties to a contract to "fix the terms on
which that contract should continue in force," the Archbishop actually
condoned the claim of this immoral power by the tenant, on the ground
that the same immoral power had been theretofore exercised by the
landlord! Peter having robbed Paul from January to July, that is, Paul
should be encouraged by his spiritual guides to rob Peter from July to
January!
That the Catholic Church should even seem for a time to speak with two
voices on such a point as the moral quality of political machinery, or
that speaking with one voice upon such a point in America, it should
even seem to speak with another voice in Ireland, would clearly be a
disaster to the Church and to civilisation. From the moment therefore,
in 1886, when the issue between Dr. M'Glynn and the Archbishop of New
York was defined, as I have shown, and the Irish National League, with a
quasi-indorsement from the Archbishop of Dublin, had arrayed itself
practically and openly on the side of Dr. M'Glynn and against the
Archbishop of New York, interests far transcending those of any
political party in Ireland, in Great Britain, or in the United States,
were involved. Unfortunately for the immediate and decisive settlement
by Rome of the issue between Dr. M'Glynn and the Archbishop of New York,
a certain vague but therefore more vexatious measure of countenance had
been given, before that issue was raised, to the theories of Mr. Henry
George by another American prelate, the Cardinal Archbishop of
Baltimore, and by more than one eminent ecclesiastic in Europe. Of
course this would have been impossible had these ecclesiastics
penetrated, like Dr. M'Glynn, to the heart of Mr. George's contention,
or discerned with the acumen of the Archbishop of New York the
fundamental difference between any imaginable exercise of the power of
taxation by a Constitutional Government, and Mr. George's doctrine of
the Confiscation of Rent. But this having occurred, it was inevitable
that Rome, which has to deal with a world-wide and complex system of the
most varied and delicate human affairs, should proceed in the matter
with infinite patience and care. In January 1887 the Propaganda
accordingly cabled thus to the Archbishop of New York,--Dr. M'Glynn
persisting in his refusal to go to Rome--"for prudential reasons
Propaganda has heretofore postponed action in the case of Dr. M'Glynn.
The Sovereign Pontiff has now taken the matter into his own hands."
In the hands of his Holiness the matter was safe; and in the Papal
Decree of April 20, 1888, we have at once the most conclusive
vindication of the wisdom and courage shown by the Archbishop of New
York in 1886, and the most emphatic condemnation of the attitude assumed
in 1886 by the Archbishop of Dublin.
VIII.
It must not be assumed that Mr. George has been finally defeated in
America. On the contrary, he was never more active. A legacy left to
him by an Irish-American for the propagation of his doctrines has just
been declared by the Vice-Chancellor of New Jersey, to be invalid on the
ground that George's doctrines are "in opposition to the laws"; and this
decision has bred an uproar in the press which is reviving popular
attention all over the country to the doctrines and to their author. He
is astute, persevering, as much in earnest as Mr. Davitt, and as
familiar with the weak points in the political machinery of the United
States as is Mr. Davitt with the weak points in the political machinery
of Great Britain. This is a Presidential year. The election of 1888 will
be decided, as was the election of 1884, in New York. The Democratic
party go into the contest with a New York candidate, President
Cleveland, who was presented to the Convention at St. Louis for
nomination, not by an Irishman from New York, but by an Irishman from
the hopelessly Republican State of Pennsylvania, and whose renomination,
distasteful to the Democratic Governor of the State, was also openly
opposed by the Democratic Mayor of the city of New York, Mr. Hewitt, Mr.
George's successful competitor in the Municipal election of 1886.
Leaving Dr. M'Glynn to uphold the Confiscation of Land against the Pope
in New York, as Mr. Davitt, Mr. Dillon, and a certain number of Irish
priests uphold the Plan of Campaign and Boycotting against the Pope in
Ireland, Mr. George supports President Cleveland, and in so doing
cleverly makes a flank movement towards his "exclusive taxation of
land," by promoting, under the cover of "Revenue Reform," an attack on
the indirect taxation from which the Federal Revenues are now mainly
derived. Meanwhile the Cardinal Archbishop of Baltimore, who is also a
political supporter of President Cleveland, has not yet been confronted
by the supreme authority at Rome with such a final sentence upon the
true nature of Mr. George's "exclusive taxation of land," as the
clear-sighted Archbishop of New York is said to be seeking to obtain
from the Holy Office. What the end will be I have little doubt. But for
the moment, it will be seen, the situation in America is only less
confused and troublesome than the situation in Ireland. It is confused
and troubled too, as I have tried in this prologue to show, by forces
identical in character with those which confuse and trouble the
situation in Ireland.
Of the social conditions amid and against which those forces are working
in America, I believe myself to have some knowledge.
To get an actual touch and living sense of the social conditions amid
and against which they are working in Ireland was my object, I repeat,
in making the visits, of which this book is a record. More than this I
could not hope, in the time at my disposal, to do. With very much less
than this, it appears to me, many persons, whose views of Irish affairs
I had been inclined, before making these visits, to regard with respect,
must have found it possible to rest content.
CHAPTER I.
DUBLIN, _Monday, Jan. 30, 1888._--I left London last night. The train
was full of people going to attend levees and drawing-rooms about to be
held at Dublin Castle.
Near Watford we lost half an hour by the breaking of a connecting-rod:
but the London and North-Western is a model railway, and we ran
alongside the pier at Holyhead exactly "on time." There is no such
railway travelling in America, excepting on the Pennsylvania Central;
and the North-Western sleeping-carriages, if less monumental and
elaborate than ours, are better ventilated, and certainly not less
comfortable.
I had expected to come upon unusual things and people in Ireland, but I
had not expected to travel thither in company with an Irish Jacobite.
Two of my fellow-passengers, chatting as they smoked their cigarettes
in the little vestibule between the cabins of the carriage, had much to
say about Lord Ashburnham, and the "Order of the White Rose," and the
Grand Mass to be celebrated to-morrow morning at the Church of the
Carmelites in London, in memory of Charles Edward Stuart, who died at
Rome in 1788, and now lies buried as Charles III., King of Great Britain
and Ireland, in the vaults of the Vatican, together with his father
"James III.," and his brother "Henry IX." One of the two was as hot and
earnest about the "Divine Right of Kings" as the parson who, less than
forty years ago, preached a sermon to prove that the great cholera
visitation of 1849 was a direct chastisement of the impiety of the Royal
Mint in dropping the letters D.G. from the first florins of Queen
Victoria issued in that year. He bewailed his sad fate in being called
over to Ireland by family affairs at such a moment, and evidently did
not know that the Mass in question had been countermanded by the
Cardinal Archbishop.
The incident, odd enough in itself, interested me the more that
yesterday, as it happens, the Cardinal had spoken with me of this
curious affair.
He heard of it for the first time on Saturday, and, sending at once for
the priest in charge of the Carmelite Church, forbade the celebration.
Later on in the evening, two strangers came to the Archbishop's house,
and in great agitation besought him to allow the arrangements for the
Mass to go on. He declined to do this, and sent them away impaled on a
dilemma. "What you propose," said the Cardinal, "is either a piece of
theatrical tomfoolery, in which case it is unfit to be performed in a
church, or it is flat treason, in which case you should be sent to the
Tower!"
They went away, like the Senatus of Augsburg from the presence of
Napoleon--"_très mortifiés et peu contents_." After they had gone, the
Cardinal remembered that for some time past queer documents had reached
him through the post-office, setting forth the doctrine of Divine Right,
and the story of the Stuarts. One of these, which with the rest he had
thrown into the fire, was an elaborate genealogical chart, designed to
show that the crowns of Great Britain and Ireland ought rightfully to be
worn by a certain princess in Bavaria!
If there is anything more in all this than a new variety of the "blue
China craze," may it not be taken as a symptom of that vague but clearly
growing dissatisfaction with the nineteenth century doctrine of
government by mere majorities, which is by no means confined to Europe?
This feeling underlies the "National Association" for getting a preamble
put into the Constitution of the United States, "recognising Almighty
God as the source of all authority and power in Civil Government." There
was such a recognition in the Articles of Confederation of 1781.
Archbishop Ryan of Philadelphia should have mentioned to His Holiness
the existence of this Association, when he presented to Leo XIII., the
other day at Rome, President Cleveland's curious Jubilee gift of an
emblazoned copy of what a Monsignore of my acquaintance calls "the
godless American Constitution."[8]
We made a quick quiet passage to Kingstown. These boats--certainly the
best appointed of their sort afloat--are owned, I find, in Dublin, and
managed exclusively by their Irish owners, to whom the credit therefore
belongs of making the mail service between Holyhead and Kingstown as
admirable, in all respects, as the mail services between Dover and the
Continental ports are not.
I landed at Kingstown with Lord Ernest Hamilton, M.P. for North Tyrone,
with whom I have arranged an expedition to Gweedore in Donegal, one of
the most ill-famed of the "congested districts" of Ireland, and just now
made a point of special interest by the arrest of Father M'Fadden, the
parish priest of the place, for "criminally conspiring to compel and
induce certain tenants not to fulfil their legal obligations."
I could understand such a prosecution as this in America, where the
Constitution makes it impossible even for Congress to pass laws
"impairing the validity of contracts." But as the British Parliament has
been passing such laws for Ireland ever since Mr. Butt in 1870 raised
the standard of Irish Land Reform under the name of Home Rule, it seems
a little absurd, not to say Hibernian, of the British authorities to
prosecute Father M'Fadden merely for bettering their own instruction in
his own way. I could better understand a prosecution of Father M'Fadden
on such grounds by the authorities of his own Church.
A step from the boat at Kingstown puts you into the train for Dublin.
Before we got into motion, a weird shape as of one just escaped from
the Wild West show of Buffalo Bill peered in at the window, inviting us
to buy the morning papers, or a copy of "the greatest book ever
published, 'Paddy at Home!'" This proved to be a translation of M. de
Mandat Grancey's lively volume, _Chez Paddy_. The vendor, "Davy," is one
of the "chartered libertines" of Dublin. He is supposed to be, and I
dare say is, a warm Nationalist, but he has a keen eye to business, and
alertly suits his cries to his customers. Recognising the Conservative
member for North Tyrone, he promptly recommended us to buy the _Irish
Times_ and the _Express_ as "the two best papers in all Ireland." But he
smiled approval when I asked for the _Freeman's Journal_ also, in which
I found a report of a speech delivered yesterday by Mr. Davitt at
Rathkeale, chiefly remarkable for a sensible protest against the
ridiculous and rantipole abuse lavished upon Mr. Balfour by the
Nationalist orators and newspapers. I am not surprised to see this. Mr.
Davitt has the stuff in him of a serious revolutionary leader, and no
such man can stomach the frothy and foolish vituperation to which
parliamentary agitators are addicted, not in Ireland only. Unlike Mr.
Parnell, who is forced to have one voice for New York and Cincinnati,
and another voice for Westminster, Mr. Davitt is free to be always
avowedly bent on bringing about a thorough Democratic revolution in
Ireland. I believe him to be too able a man to imagine, as some of the
Irish agitators do, that this can be done without the consent of
Democratic England, and he has lived too much in England, and knows the
English democracy too well, I suspect, not to know that to abuse an
executive officer for determination and vigour is the surest way to make
him popular. Calling Mr. Forster "Buckshot" Forster did him no harm. On
the contrary, the epithet might have helped him to success had not Mr.
Gladstone given way behind him at the most critical moment of his
grapple with the revolutionary organisation in Ireland. We hear a great
deal about resistance to tyrants being obedience to God, but I fear that
obedience to God is not the strongest natural passion of the human
heart, and I doubt whether resistance to tyrants can often be promoted
by putting about a general conviction that the tyrant has a thumping big
stick in his hand, and may be relied upon to use it. Even Tom Paine had
the wit to see that it was his "good heart" which brought Louis XVI. to
the scaffold.
Nobody who had not learned from the speeches made in England, and the
cable despatches sent to America, that freedom of speech and of the
press has been brutally trampled under foot in Ireland by a "Coercion"
Government would ever suspect it from reading the Dublin papers which I
this morning bought.
As a Democratic journalist I had some practical knowledge of a true
"Coercion" government in America a quarter of a century ago. The
American editor who had ventured in 1862 to publish in a New York or
Philadelphia newspaper a letter from Washington, speaking of the
Unionist Government by President Lincoln, as the letter from London
published to-day in the _Freeman's Journal_ speaks of the Unionist
Government of Lord Salisbury, would have found himself in one of the
casemates of Fort Lafayette within twenty-four hours. Our Republican
rulers acted upon the maxim laid down by Mr. Tilden's friend, Montgomery
Blair,[9] that "to await the results of slow judicial prosecution is to
allow crime to be consummated, with the expectation of subsequent
punishment, instead of preventing its accomplishment by prompt and
direct interference." Perhaps Americans take their Government more
seriously than Englishmen do. Certainly we stand by it more sternly in
bad weather. Even so good a Constitutionalist as Professor Parsons at
Harvard, I remember, when a student asked him if he would not suspend
the _Habeas Corpus_ in the case of a man caught hauling down the
American flag, promptly replied, "I would not suspend the _Habeas
Corpus_; I would suspend the _Corpus_."
We found no "hansoms" at the Dublin Station, only "outside cars," and
cabs much neater than the London four-wheelers. One of these brought us
at a good pace to Maple's Hotel in Kildare Street, a large,
old-fashioned but clean and comfortable house. My windows look down upon
a stately edifice of stone erecting on Kildare Street for all sorts of
educational and "exhibitional" purposes, with the help of an Imperial
grant, I am told, and to be called the Leinster Hall. The style is
decidedly composite, with colonnades and loggie and domes and porticos,
and recalls the ancient Roman buildings depicted in that fresco of a
belated slave-girl knocking at her mistress's door which with its
companion pieces is fast fading away upon the walls of the "House of
Livia" on the Palatine.
At one end of this street is the fashionable and hospitable Kildare
Street Club; at the other the Shelburne Hotel, known to all Americans.
This seems to have been "furbished-up" since I last saw it. There, for
the last time as it proved, I saw and had speech of my friend of many
years, the prince of all preachers in our time, Father Burke of Tallaght
and of San Clemente.
I had telegraphed to him from London that I should halt in Dublin for a
day, on my way to America, to see him. He came betimes, to find me
almost as badly-off as St. Lawrence upon his gridiron. The surgeon whom
the hotel people had hastily summoned to relieve me from a sudden attack
of that endemic Irish ecstasy, the lumbago, had applied what he called
the "heroic treatment" on my telling him that I had no time to be ill,
but must spend that day with Father Burke, dine that night with Mr.
Irving and Mr. Toole, and go on the next day to America.
"What has this Inquisitor done to you?" queried Father Tom.
"Cauterised me with chloroform."
"Oh! that's a modern improvement! Let me see--" and, scrutinising the
results, he said, with a merry twinkle in his deep, dark eyes--"I see
how it is! They brought you a veterinary!"
This was in 1878. On that too brief, delightful morning, we talked of
all things--supralunar, lunar, and sublunary. Much of Wales, I remember,
where he had been making a visit. "A glorious country," he said, "and
the Welsh would have been Irish, only they lost the faith." Full of love
for Ireland as he was, he was beginning then to be troubled by symptoms
in the Nationalist movement, which could not be regarded with composure
by one who, in his youth at Rome, had seen, with me, the devil of
extremes drive Italy down a steep place into the sea.
Five years afterwards I landed at Queenstown, in July 1883, intending to
visit him at Tallaght. But when the letter which I sent to announce my
coming reached the monastery, the staunchest Soldier of the Church in
Ireland lay there literally "dead on the field of honour." Chatham, in
the House of Lords, John Quincy Adams, in the House of Representatives,
fell in harness, but neither death so speaks to the heart as the simple
and sublime self-sacrifice of the great Dominican, dragging himself from
his dying bed into Dublin to spend the last splendour of his genius and
his life for the starving children of the poor in Donegal.
What would I not give for an hour with him now!
After breakfast I went out to find Mr. Davitt, hoping he might suggest
some way of seeing the Nationalist meeting on Wednesday night without
undergoing the dismal penance of sitting out all the speeches. I wished
also to ask him why at Rathkeale he talked about the Dunravens as
"absentees." He was born in Lord Lucan's country, and may know little of
Limerick, but he surely ought to know that Adare Manor was built of
Irish materials, and by Irish workmen, under the eye of Lord Dunraven,
all the finest ornamental work, both in wood and in stone, of the
mansion, being done by local mechanics; and also that the present owners
of Adare spend a large part of every year in the country, and are
deservedly popular. He was not to be found at the National League
headquarters, nor yet at the Imperial Hotel, which is his usual resort,
as Morrison's is the resort of Mr. Parnell. So I sent him a note through
the Post-Office.
"You had better seal it with wax," said a friend, in whose chambers I
wrote it.
"Pray, why?"
"Oh! all the letters to well-known people that are not opened by the
police are opened by the Nationalist clerks in the Post-Offices. 'Tis a
way we've always had with us in Ireland!"
I had some difficulty in finding the local habitation of the "National
League." I had been told it was in O'Connell Street, and sharing the
usual and foolish aversion of my sex to asking questions on the highway,
I perambulated a good many streets and squares before I discovered that
it has pleased the local authorities to unbaptize Sackville Street, "the
finest thoroughfare in Europe," and convert it into "O'Connell Street."
But they have failed so ignominiously that the National League finds
itself obliged to put up a huge sign over its doorways, notifying all
the world that the offices are not where they appear to be in Upper
Sackville Street at all, but in "O'Connell Street." The effect is as
ludicrous as it is instructive. Oddly enough, they have not attempted to
change the name of another thoroughfare which keeps green the "pious and
immortal memory" of William III., dear to all who in England or America
go in fear and horror of the scarlet woman that sitteth upon the seven
hills! There is a fashion, too, in Dublin of putting images of little
white horses into the fanlights over the doorways, which seems to smack
of an undue reverence for the Protestant Succession and the House of
Hanover.
What you expect is the thing you never find in Ireland. I had rather
thoughtlessly taken it for granted the city would be agog with the great
Morley reception which is to come off on Wednesday night. There is a
good deal about it in the _Freeman's Journal_ to-day, but chiefly
touching a sixpenny quarrel which has sprung up between the Reception
Committee and the Trades Council over the alleged making of contracts by
the Committee with "houses not employing members of the regular trades."
For this the typos and others propose to "boycott" the Committee and the
Reception and the Liberators from over the sea. From casual
conversations I gather that there is much more popular interest in the
release, on Wednesday, of Mr. T.D. Sullivan, ex-Lord Mayor, champion
swimmer, M.P., poet, and patriot. A Nationalist acquaintance of mine
tells me that in Tullamore Mr. Sullivan has been most prolific of
poetry. He has composed a song which I am afraid will hardly please my
Irish Nationalist friends in America:
"We are sons of Sister Isles,
Englishmen and Irishmen,
On our friendship Heaven smiles;
Tyrant's schemes and Tory wiles
Ne'er shall make us foes again."
There is to be a Drawing-Room, too, at the Castle on Wednesday night.
One would not unnaturally gather from the "tall talk" in Parliament and
the press that this conjuncture of a great popular demonstration in
favour of Irish nationality, with a display of Dublin fashion doing
homage to the alien despot, might be ominous of "bloody noses and
cracked crowns." Not a bit of it! I asked my jarvey, for instance, on an
outside car this afternoon, whether he expected a row to result from
these counter currents of the classes and the masses. "A row!" he
replied, looking around at me in amazement. "A row is it? and what for
would there be? Shure they'll be through with the procession in time to
see the carriages!"
Obviously he saw nothing in either show to offend anybody; though he
could clearly understand that an intelligent citizen might be vexed if
he found himself obliged to sacrifice one of them in order to fully
enjoy the other.
Lady Londonderry, it seems, is not yet well enough to cross the Channel;
but the Duchess of Marlborough, who is staying here with her nephew the
Lord-Lieutenant, has volunteered to assist him in holding the
Drawing-Room, whereupon a grave question has arisen in Court circles as
to whether the full meed of honours due to a Vice-Queen regnant ought to
be paid also to an ex-Vice-Queen. This is debated by the Dublin dames as
hotly as official women in Washington fight over the eternal question of
the relative precedence due to the wives of Senators and "Cabinet
Ministers." It will be a dark day for the democracy when women get the
suffrage--and use it.
At luncheon to-day I met the Attorney-General, Mr. O'Brien, who, with
prompt Irish hospitality, asked me to dine with him to-morrow night, and
Mr. Wilson of the London _Times_, an able writer on Irish questions from
the English point of view. Mr. Balfour, who was expected, did not
appear, being detained by guests at his own residence in the Park.
I went to see him in the afternoon at the Castle, and found him in
excellent spirits; certainly the mildest-mannered and most sensible
despot who ever trampled in the dust the liberties of a free people. He
was quite delightful about the abuse which is now daily heaped upon him
in speeches and in the press, and talked about it in a casual dreamy way
which reminded me irresistibly of President Lincoln, whom, if in nothing
else, he resembles alike in longanimity and in length of limb. He had
seen Davitt's _caveat_, filed at Rathkeale, against the foolishness of
trying to frighten him out of his line of country by calling him bad
names. "Davitt is quite right," he said, "the thing must be getting to
be a bore to the people, who are not such fools as the speakers take
them to be. One of the stenographers told me the other day that they had
to invent a special sign for the phrase 'bloody and brutal Balfour,' it
is used so often in the speeches." About the prosecution of Father
M'Fadden of Gweedore, he knew nothing beyond the evidence on which it
had been ordered. This he showed me. If the first duty of a government
is to govern, which is the American if not the English way of looking at
it, Father M'Fadden must have meant to get himself into trouble when he
used such language as this to his people: "I am the law in Gweedore; I
despise the recent Coercion Act; if I got a summons to-morrow, I would
not obey it." From language like this to the attitude of Father M'Glynn
in New York, openly flouting the authority of the Holy See itself, is
but an easy and an inevitable step.
Neither "Home Rule" nor any other "Rule" can exist in a country in which
men whose words carry any weight are suffered to take up such an
attitude. It is just the attitude of the "Comeouters" in New England
during my college days at Harvard, when Parker Pillsbury and Stephen
Foster used to saw wood and blow horns on the steps of the
meeting-houses during service, in order to free their consciences "and
protest against the Sabbatarian laws."
To see a Catholic priest assume this attitude is almost as amazing as to
see an educated Englishman like Mr. Wilfrid Blunt trying to persuade
Irishmen that Mr. Balfour made him the confidant of a grisly scheme for
doing sundry Irish leaders to death by maltreating them in prison.
I see with pleasure that the masculine instincts of Mr. Davitt led him
to allude to this nonsense yesterday at Rathkeale in a half
contemptuous way. Mr. Balfour spoke of it to-day with generosity and
good feeling. "When I first heard of it," he said, "I resented it, of
course, as an outrageous imputation on Mr. Blunt's character, and
denounced it accordingly. What I have since learned leads me to fear
that he really may have said something capable of being construed in
this absurd sense, but if he did, it must have been under the
exasperation produced by finding himself locked up."
I heard the story of Mr. Balfour's meeting with Mr. Blunt very plainly
and vigorously told, while I was staying the other day at Knoyle House,
in the immediate neighbourhood of Clouds, where the two were guests
under conditions which should be at least as sacred in the eyes of
Britons as of Bedouins. In Wiltshire nobody seemed for a moment to
suppose it possible that Mr. Blunt can have really deceived himself as
to the true nature of any conversation he may have had with Mr. Balfour.
This is paying a compliment to Mr. Blunt's common sense at the expense
of his imagination. In any view of the case, to lie in wait at the lips
of a fellow guest in the house of a common friend, for the counts of a
political indictment against him, is certainly a proceeding, as Davitt
said yesterday of Mr. Blunts tale of horror, quite "open to question."
But, as Mr. Blunt himself has sung, "'Tis conscience makes us sinners,
not our sin," and I have no doubt the author of the _Poems of Proteus_
really persuaded himself that he was playing lawn tennis and smoking
cigarettes in Wiltshire with a modern Alva, cynically vain of his own
dark and bloody designs. Now that he finds himself struck down by the
iron hand of this remorseless tyrant, why should he not cry aloud and
warn, not Ireland alone, but humanity, against the appalling crimes
meditated, not this time in the name of "Liberty," but in the name of
Order?
What especially struck me in talking with Mr. Balfour to-day was his
obviously unaffected interest in Ireland as a country rather than in
Ireland as a cock-pit. It is the condition of Ireland, and not the
gabble of parties at Westminster about the condition of Ireland, which
is uppermost in his thoughts. This, I should say, is the best guarantee
of his eventual success.
The weakest point of the modern English system of government by Cabinets
surely is the evanescent tenure by which every Minister holds his
place. Not only has the Cabinet itself no fixed term of office, being in
truth but a Committee of the Legislature clothed with executive
authority, but any member of the Cabinet may be forced by events or by
intrigues to leave it. In this way Mr. Forster, when he filled the place
now held by Mr. Balfour, found himself driven into resigning it by Mr.
Gladstone's indisposition or inability to resist the peremptory pressure
put upon the British Premier at a critical moment by our own Government
in the spring of 1882. Mr. Balfour is in no such peril, perhaps. He is
more sure, I take it, of the support of Lord Salisbury and his
colleagues than Mr. Forster ever was of the support of Mr. Gladstone;
and the "Coercion" law which it is his duty to administer contains no
such sweeping and despotic clause as that provision in Mr. Gladstone's
"Coercion Act" of 1881, under which persons claiming American
citizenship were arrested and indefinitely locked up on "suspicion,"
until it became necessary for our Government, even at the risk of war,
to demand their trial or release.
But if Mr. Balfour were Chief Secretary for Ireland "on the American
plan"; if he held his office, that is, for a fixed term of years, and
cared nothing for a renewal of the lease, he could not be more
pre-occupied than he seems to be with simply getting his executive duty
done, or less pre-occupied than he seems to be with what may be thought
of his way of getting it done. If all executive officers were of this
strain, Parliamentary government might stand in the dock into which
Prince Albert put it with more composure, and await the verdict with
more confidence. Surely if Ireland is ever to govern herself, she must
learn precisely the lesson which Mr. Balfour, I believe, is trying to
teach her--that the duty of executive officers to execute the laws is
not a thing debateable, like the laws themselves, nor yet determinable,
like the enactment of laws, by taking the yeas and the nays. How well
this lesson shall be taught must depend, of course, very much upon the
quality of the men who make up the machine of Government in Ireland.
That the Irish have almost as great a passion for office-holding as the
Spanish, we long ago learned in New York, where the percentage of Irish
office-holders considerably exceeds the percentage of Irish citizens.
And as all the witnesses agree that the Irish Government has for years
been to an inordinate degree a Government by patronage, there must
doubtless be some reasonable ground for the very general impression that
"the Castle" needs overhauling. It is not true, however, I find,
although I have often heard it asserted in England, that the Irish
Government is officered by Englishmen and Scotchmen exclusively. The
murdered Mr. Burke certainly was not an Englishman; and there is an
apparent predominance of Irishmen in the places of trust and power. That
things at the Castle cannot be nearly so bad, moreover, as we in America
are asked to believe, would seem to be demonstrated by the affectionate
admiration with which Lord Spencer is now regarded by men like Mr.
O'Brien, M.P., who only the other day seemed to regard him as an unfit
survival of the Cities of the Plain. If what these men then said of him,
and of the Castle generally, was even very partially true--or if being
wholly false, these men believed it to be true--every man of them who
now touches Lord Spencer's hand is defiled, or defiles him.
But that concerns them. Their present attitude makes Lord Spencer a good
witness when he declares that the Civil servants of the Crown in
Ireland, called "the Castle," are "diligent, desire to do their duty
with impartiality, and to hold an even balance between opposing
interests in Ireland," and maintains that they "will act with
impartiality and vigour if led by men who know their own minds, and
desire to be firm in the Government of the country." All this being
true, Mr. Balfour ought to make his Government a success.
Mr. Balfour introduced me to Sir West Ridgway, the successor of Sir
Redvers Buller, who has been rewarded for the great services he did his
country in Asia, by being flung into this seething Irish stew. He takes
it very composedly, though the climate does not suit him, he says; and
has a quiet workmanlike way with him, which impresses one favourably at
once.
All the disorderly part of Ireland (for disorder is far from being
universal in Ireland) comes under his direct administration, being
divided into five divisions on the lines originally laid down in 1881 by
Mr. Forster. Over each of these divisions presides a functionary styled
a "Divisional Magistrate." The title is not happily chosen, the powers
of these officers being rather like those confided to a French Prefect
than like those which are associated in England and America with the
title of a "magistrate." They have no judicial power, and nothing to do
with the trial of offenders. Their business is to protect life and
property, and to detect and bring to justice offenders against the law.
They can only be called Magistrates as the Executive of the United
States is sometimes called the "Chief Magistrate."
One of the most conspicuous and trusted of these Divisional Magistrates,
I find, is Colonel Turner, who was Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant,
under Lord Aberdeen. He is now denounced by the Irish Nationalists as a
ruthless tyrant. He was then denounced by the Irish Tories as a
sympathiser with Home Rule. It is probable, therefore, that he must be a
conscientious and loyal executive officer, who understands and acts upon
the plain lines of his executive duty.
I dined to-night at the Castle, not in the great hall or banqueting-room
of St. Patrick, which was designed by that connoisseur in magnificence,
the famous Lord Chesterfield, during his Viceroyalty, but in a very
handsome room of more moderate dimensions. Much of the semi-regal state
observed at the Castle in the days of the Georges has been put down with
the Battle-Axe Guards of the Lord-Lieutenant, and with the
basset-tables of the "Lady-Lieutenant," as the Vice-queen used to be
called. At dinner the Viceroy no longer drinks to the pious and immortal
memory of William III., or to the "1st of July 1690." No more does the
band play "Lillibullero," and no longer is the pleasant custom
maintained, after a dinner to the city authorities of Dublin, of a
"loving cup" passed around the table, into which each guest, as it
passed, dropped a gold piece for the good of the household. Only so much
ceremonial is now observed as suffices to distinguish the residence of
the Queen's personal representative from that of a great officer of
State, or an opulent subject of high rank.
Dublin Castle indeed is no more of a palace than it is of a castle. Its
claim to the latter title rests mainly on the fine old "Bermingham"
tower of the time of King John; its claim to the former on the Throne
Room, the Council Chamber, and the Hall of St. Patrick already
mentioned. This last is a very stately and sumptuous apartment. Just
twenty years ago the most brilliant banquet modern Dublin has seen was
given in this hall by the late Duke of Abercorn to the Prince and
Princess of Wales, to celebrate the installation of the Prince as a
Knight of St. Patrick. It is a significant fact, testified to by all
the most candid Irishmen I have ever known, that upon the occasion of
this visit to Ireland in 1868 the Prince and Princess were received with
unbounded enthusiasm by the people of all classes. Yet only the year
before, in 1867, the explosion of some gunpowder at Clerkenwell by a
band of desperadoes, to the death and wounding of many innocent people,
had brought the question of the disestablishment of the Irish Church, in
the mind of Mr. Gladstone, within the domain of "practical politics"! By
parity of reasoning, one would think, the reception of the heir-apparent
and his wife in Ireland ought to have taken that question out of the
domain of "practical politics."
The Prince of Wales, it is known, brought away from this visit an
impression that the establishment of a prince of the blood in Ireland,
or a series of royal visits to Ireland, would go far towards pacifying
the relations between the two Islands. Mr. Gladstone thought his
Disestablishment would quite do the work. Events have shown that Mr.
Gladstone made a sad mistake as to the effect of his measure. The pains
which, I am told, were taken by Mr. Deasy, M.P., and others to organise
hostile demonstrations at one or two points in the south of Ireland,
during a subsequent visit of the Prince and Princess, would seem to show
that in the opinion of the Nationalists themselves, the impression of
the Prince was more accurate than were the inferences of the Premier.
There is nothing froward or formidable in the aspect of Dublin Castle.
It has neither a portcullis nor a drawbridge. People go in and out of it
as freely as through the City Hall in New York. There is a show of
sentries at the main entrance, and in one of the courts this morning the
picturesque band of a Scotch regiment was playing to the delectation of
a small but select audience of urchins and little girls. A Dublin mob,
never so little in earnest and led by a dozen really determined men,
ought to be able to make as short work of it as the hordes of the
Faubourgs in Paris made of the Bastille, with its handful of invalids,
on that memorable 14th of July, about which so many lies have passed
into history, and so much effervescent nonsense is still annually talked
and printed.
The greater part of the Castle as it existed when the Irish Parliaments
sat there under Elizabeth, and just before the last Catholic Viceroy
made Protestantism penal, and planned the transformation of Ireland
into a French province, was burned in the time of James II. The Earl of
Arran then reported to his father that "the king had lost nothing but
six barrels of gunpowder, and the worst castle in the worst situation in
Christendom."
Here, as at Ottawa, a viceregal dinner-table is set off by the neat
uniforms and skyblue facings of the aides-de-camp and secretaries. For
some mysterious reason Lord Spencer put these officers into chocolate
coats with white facings. But the new order soon gave place to the old
again.
At the dinner to-night was Lord Ormonde, who is returning to London, but
kindly promised to make arrangements for showing me at Kilkenny Castle
the muniment room of the Butlers, which contains one of the most
valuable private collections of charters and State papers in the realm.
_Tuesday, Jan. 31._--I lunched to-day with Sir Michael Morris, the Lord
Chief Justice of Ireland, whom I had last seen in Rome at the Jubilee
Mass of His Holiness. Sir Michael is one of the recognised lights of
social life and of the law in Dublin. While he was in Rome some one
highly commended him in the presence of that staunch Nationalist the
Archbishop of Dublin, who assented so far as to say, "Yes, yes, there
are worse fellows in Dublin than that Morris!" It would be hard to find
a more typical Irishman of the better sort than Sir Michael, a man more
sure, in the words of Sheridan, to "carry his honour and his brogue
unstained to the grave."
The brogue of Sir Michael, it is said, made his fortune in the House of
Commons. It has hardly the glow which made the brogue of Father Burke a
memory as of music in the ears of all who heard it, and differs from
that miraculous gift of the tongue as a ripe wine of Bordeaux differs
from a ripe wine of Burgundy. But to the ordinary brogue of the street
and the stage, it is as is a Brane Mouton Rothschild of 1868 to the
casual Médoc of a Parisian restaurant. "Do you know Father Healy?" said
one of the company to whom I spoke of it; "he was at a wedding with Sir
Michael. As the happy pair drove off under the usual shower of rice and
old slippers, Sir Michael said to the Father, 'How I wish I had
something to throw after her!' 'Ah, throw your brogue after her,'
replied the Father."
This brogue comes to Sir Michael lawfully enough. He belongs to one of
the fourteen tribes of Galway. His father, Mr. Martin Morris, was High
Sheriff of the County of Galway City in 1841, being the first Catholic
who had served that office since the time of Tyrconnel. His mother was a
Blake of Galway, and the family seat, Spiddal, came to them through a
Fitzpatrick. "Remember these things," said one of the guests to me, a
Catholic from the south of Ireland, "and remember that Sir Michael, like
myself, and, so far as I know, like every Irish Catholic in this room
to-day, is a thoroughgoing Unionist, who would think it midsummer
madness to hand Ireland over to the 'Home Rule' of the 'uncrowned king,'
Mr. Parnell, who hasn't a drop, I believe, of Irish blood in his veins,
and who, whatever else he may be, is certainly not a Catholic. Didn't
Parnell vote at first against religion and in favour of Bradlaugh? and
didn't he do this to force the bargain for the clerical franchise at the
Parliamentary conventions?"
"But there are some good Catholics, are there not," I answered, "and
some good Christians, and of Irish blood too, among the associates of
Mr. Parnell?"
"Associates!" he exclaimed; "if you know anything of Mr. Parnell, you
must know that he has no associates. He has followers, and he has
instruments, but he has no associates. The only Irishmen whom he has
really taken counsel with, or treated, I was about to say, with ordinary
civility, were Egan and Brennan. His manner with them was always
conspicuously different from his cold and almost contemptuous bearing
towards the men whom he commands in Parliament, and Egan, who directs
his forces in your country, rewards him by calling him 'the great and
gifted leader of _our_ race!' 'Our race' indeed! Parnell comes of the
conquering race in Ireland, and he never forgets it, or lets his
subordinates forget it. I was in Galway when he came over there suddenly
to quell the revolt organised by Healy. The rebels were at white-heat
before he came. But he strode in among them like a huntsman among the
hounds--marched Healy off into a little room, and brought him out again
in ten minutes, cowed and submissive, but filled, as anybody can see,
ever since, with a dull smouldering hate which will break out one of
these days, if a good and safe opportunity offers."
"How do you account, then," I asked, "for the support which all these
men give Mr. Parnell?"
"For the support which they give him!" exclaimed my new acquaintance,
"for the support they give him! Bless your heart, my dear sir, it is he
gives them the support! Barring Biggar, who, to do him justice, is as
free with his pocket as he is with his tongue--and no man can say more
for anybody than that--barring Biggar and M'Kenna and M'Carthy, and
perhaps a dozen more, all these men are nominated by Mr. Parnell, and
draw salaries from the body he controls; they are paid members, like the
working-men members. Support indeed!"
"But the constituencies," I urged, "surely the voters must know and care
something about their representatives?"
The gentleman from the south of Ireland laughed aloud. "Very clear it
is," he said, "that you have made your acquaintance with my dear
countrymen in America, or in England perhaps--not in Ireland. Look at
Thurles, in January '85! The voters selected O'Ryan; Parnell ordered him
off, and made them take O'Connor! The voters take their members to-day
from the League--that is, from Mr. Parnell, just as they used to take
them from the landlords. What Lord Clanricarde said in Galway, when he
made all those fagot votes by cutting up his farms, that he could return
his grey mare to Parliament if he liked, Mr. Parnell can say with just
as much truth to-day of any Nationalist seat in the country. I tell
you, the secret of his power is that he understands the Irish people,
and how to ride them. He is a Protestant-ascendency man by blood, and he
is fighting the unlucky devils of landlords to-day by the old 'landlord'
methods that came to him with his mother's milk--that is rightly
speaking, I should say, with his father's," and here he burst out
laughing at his own bull--"for his mother, poor lady, she was an
American."
"Thank you," I said.
"Oh, no harm at all! But did you ever know her? An odd woman she was,
and is."
"Her father," I replied, "was a gallant American sailor of Scottish
blood."
"Oh yes, and is it true that he got a great hatred of England from being
captured in the _Chesapeake_ by the English Captain Broke? I always
heard that."
I explained that there were historical difficulties in the way of
accepting this legend, and that Commodore Stewart's experiences, during
the war of 1812, had been those of a captor, not of a captive.
"Well, a clever woman she is, only very odd. She was a great terror, I
remember, to a worthy Protestant parson, near Avondale; she used to come
at him quite unexpectedly with such a power of theological discussion,
and put him beside himself with questions he couldn't answer."
"Very likely," I replied, "but she has transferred her interest to
politics now; and she had the good sense, at the Chicago Convention in
1886, to warn the physical-force men against showing their hand too
plainly in support of her son."
A curious conversation, as showing the personal bitterness of politics
here. It reminded me of Dr. Duche's description in his famous letter to
Washington of the party which carried the Declaration of Independence
through the Continental Congress. But it had a special interest for me
as confirming the inferences I have often drawn as to Mr. Parnell's
relations with his party, from his singular and complete isolation among
them. I remember the profound astonishment of my young friend Mr. D----,
of New York, who, as the son of, perhaps, the most conspicuous and
influential American advocate of Home Rule, had confidently counted upon
seeing Mr. Parnell in London, when he found that the most important
member of the Irish Parliamentary party, in point of position, was
utterly unable to get at Mr. Parnell for him, or even to ascertain where
Mr. Parnell could be reached by letter.
Though a staunch Unionist, Sir Michael is no blind admirer of things as
they are, nor even a thick-and-thin partisan of English rule in Ireland.
"If you will have the Irish difficulty in a nutshell," he is reported to
have said to a prosy British politician, "here it is: It is simply a
very dull people trying to govern a very bright people."
He has quick and wide intellectual sympathies, or, as he put it to a
lawyer who was kindly enlightening him about some matters of scientific
notoriety, "I don't live in a cupboard myself." His own terse summing up
of the Irish difficulty could hardly be better illustrated than by the
current story of the discomfiture of an English Treasury official, who
came into his official chambers to complain of the expenditure for fuel
in the Court over which he presides. The Lord Chief-Justice looked at
him quietly while he set forth his errand, and then, ringing a bell on
his table, said to the servant who responded: "Tell Mary the man has
come about the coals."
At Sir Michael's I had some conversation also with Mr. Justice Murphy,
who won a great reputation in connection with those murders in the
Phoenix Park, which went near to breaking the heart and hope of poor
Father Burke, and with Lord and Lady Ashbourne, whom I had not seen
since I met them some years ago under the hospitable roof of Lord
Houghton. Lord Ashbourne was then Mr. Gibson, Q.C. He is now the Lord
Chancellor of Ireland, and the author of the Land Purchase Act of 1885,
which many well-informed and sensible men regard as the Magna Charta of
peace in Ireland, while others of equal authority assure me that by
reversing the principle of the Bright clauses in the Act of 1871 it has
encouraged the tenants to expect an eventual concession of the
land-ownership to them on merely nominal terms.
Naturally enough, he is carped at and reviled almost as much by his
political friends as by his political foes. In the time of Sir Michael
Hicks Beach I remember hearing Lord Ashbourne denounced most bitterly by
a leading Tory light as "a Home Ruler in disguise, who had bedevilled
the Irish Question by undertaking to placate the country if it could be
left to be managed by him and by Lord Carnarvon."
The disguise appears to me quite impenetrable, and after my talk with
him, I remembered a characteristic remark about him made to me by Lord
Houghton after he had gone away: "A very clever man with a very clever
wife. He ought to be on our side, but he has everything the Tories lack,
so they have stolen him, and will make much of him, and keep him. But
one of these days he will do them some great service, and then they'll
never forgive him!"
Lord Ashbourne went off early to look up some fine old wooden
mantelpieces and wainscotings in the "slums" of Dublin. A brisk trade it
seems has for some time been driven in such relics of the departed
splendour of the Irish capital. In the last century, when Dublin was
further from London than London now is from New York, the Irish
landlords were more fond of living in Dublin than a good many of the
Irish Nationalists I know now are. In this way the Iron Duke came to be
born in Dublin, where his father and mother had a handsome town house,
whereas when they went up to London they used to lodge, according to old
Lady Cork, "over a pastry-cook's in Oxford Street." In those days there
must have been a good many fine solidly built and well decorated
mansions in Dublin, of a type not unlike that of the ample rather
stately and periwigged houses, all British brick without, and all Santo
Domingo mahogany within, which, in my schoolboy days, used to give such
a dignified old-world air to Third and Fourth Streets in Philadelphia.
It is among such of these as are still standing, and have come to vile
uses, that the foragers from London now find their harvest.
From the Chief-Justice's I went with Lord Ernest Hamilton to a meeting
of the Irish Unionists. Admission was by tickets, and the meeting
evidently "meant business." I suppose Presbyterian Ulster was largely
represented: but Mr. Smith Barry of Fota Island, near Cork, one of the
kindest and fairest, as well as one of the most determined and resolute,
of the southern Irish landlords, was there, and the most interesting
speech I heard was made by a Catholic lawyer of Dublin, Mr. Quill, Q.C.,
who grappled with the question of distress among the Irish tenants, and
produced some startling evidence to show that this distress is by no
means so great or so general as it is commonly assumed to be.[10] Able
speeches were also made by Mr. T.W. Russell, M.P. for Tyrone, and by
Colonel Saunderson, the champion of Ulster at Westminster. Both of these
members, and especially Colonel Saunderson, "went for" their
Nationalist colleagues with an unparliamentary plainness of speech which
commanded the cordial sympathy of their audience. "Is it possible,"
asked Colonel Saunderson, "that you should ever consent, on any terms,
to be governed by such--, well, by such wretches as these?" to which the
audience gave back an unanimous "Never," neither thundered nor shouted,
but growled, like Browning's "growl at the gates of Ghent,"--a low deep
growl like the final notice served by a bull-dog, which I had not heard
since the meetings which, at the North, followed the first serious
fighting of the Civil War. I was much struck, too, by the prevalence
among the audience of what may be called the Old Middle State type of
American face and head. A majority of these men might have come straight
from those slopes of the Alleghany which, from Pennsylvania down to the
Carolinas, were planted so largely by the only considerable Irish
emigrations known to our history, before the great year of famine, 1847,
the Irish emigrations which followed the wars against the woollen
industries in the seventeenth century, and the linen industries in the
eighteenth. A staunch, doggedly Protestant people, loving the New
England Puritans and the Anglicans of Eastern Virginia little better
than the Maryland Catholics, but contributing more than their full share
of traditional antipathy to that extreme dislike and dread of the Roman
Church which showed itself half-a-century ago in the burning of
convents, and thirty years ago gave life and fire to the Know-Nothing
movement. Even so late as at the time of Father Burke's grand and most
successful mission to America, I remember how much astonished and
impressed he was by the vigour and the virulence of these feelings. One
of the bishops, he told me, in a great diocese tried (though of course
in vain) to dissuade him on this account from wearing his Dominican
dress. These anti-Catholic passions are much stronger in America to-day
than it always suits our politicians to remember, though to forget it
may some day be found very dangerous. Even now two of the ablest
prelates of the most liberal of the Protestant American bodies, Bishop
Cleveland Coxe of Western New York, and Bishop Beckwith of Georgia, the
latter of whom I met the other day in Rome on his return from Palestine,
are promoting what looks very much like a crusade against the plan for
establishing a Catholic University at Washington. Bishop Cleveland
Coxe's denunciations of what he calls "the alien Church," point straight
to a revival of the "Native American" movement; and I fear that
President Cleveland's gift of a copy of the Constitution to Leo XIII.
will hardly make American Catholics forget either the hereditary
anti-Catholic feeling which led him, when Governor of New York, to
imperil the success of the Democratic party by his dogged resistance to
the Catholic demand for the endowment of Catholic schools and
protectories, or the scandalous persecution (it can be called by no
other name) of Catholics in Alaska, which was carried on in the name and
under the patronage of his sister, Miss Cleveland, by a local missionary
of the Presbyterian Church, to the point of the removal by the President
of a Federal judge, who dared to award a Catholic native woman from
Vancouver the custody of her own child.
It is hard to imagine a greater misfortune for the Church in Ireland,
and for both the Church and the Irish race in America, than the
identification of the Home Rule movement with the Church, and its
triumph, after being so identified, and with the help of British
sympathisers and professional politicians, over the resistance of
Protestant Ireland. This dilemma of the Church in Ireland, plainly seen
at Rome, as I know, to-day, was forcibly presented in the speech of
Colonel Saunderson.
The chair at this Loyalist meeting was filled by the Provost of Trinity,
Dr. Jellett, a man of winning and venerable aspect, a kind of "angelic
doctor," indeed, whose musical and slightly tremulous voice gave a
singular pathos and interest to his brief but very earnest speech.[11]
To-night I dined with the Attorney-General, Mr. O'Brien. Among the
company were the Chief-Baron Palles, whose appointment dates back to Mr.
Gladstone's Administration of 1873, but who is now an outspoken opponent
of Home Rule; Judge O'Brien, an extremely able man, with the face of an
eagle; Mr. Carson, Q.C.; and other notabilities of the bench and bar. My
neighbours at table were a charming and agreeable bencher of the King's
Inn, Mr. Atkinson, Q.C., a leader of the Irish bar, and Mr. T.W.
Russell, M.P., who told me some amusing things of one of his colleagues,
an ideal Orangeman, who writes blood-curdling romances in the vein of La
Tosca, and goes in fear of the re-establishment of the Holy Office in
Dublin and London. In view of the clamours about the severity of the
bench in Ireland, it was edifying to find an Irish Judge astonished by
the drastic decisions of our Courts in regard to the anarchists who were
hanged at Chicago, after a thorough and protracted review of the law in
their cases. He thought no Court in Great Britain or Ireland could have
dealt with them thus stringently, it being understood that the charge of
murder against them rested on their connection, solely as provocative
instigators to violence, with the actual throwing of the bombs among the
police.
Some good stories were told by the lawyers; one of a descendant of the
Irish Kings, a lawyer more remarkable for his mental gifts than for his
physical graces.
A peasant looking him carefully over at Cork whispered to a neighbour,
"And is he really of the ould blood of the Irish kings now, indeed?"
"He is indeed!"
"Well, then, I don't wonder the Saxons conquered the Island!"
Of the Home Rule movement one of the lawyers said to me, "The whole
thing is a business operation mainly--a business operation with the
people who see in it the hope of appeasing their land hunger--and a
business operation for the agitators who live by it. Its main strength,
outside of the priests, who for one reason or another countenance or
foment it, is in the small country solicitors. The five hundred thousand
odd Irish tenants are the most litigious creatures alive. They are
always after the local lawyer with half-a-crown to fight this, that, or
the other question with some neighbour or kinsman, usually a kinsman. So
the solicitors know the whole country."
"When the League has chosen a spot in which to work the 'Plan of
Campaign,' the local attorney whips up the tenants to join it. The
poorer tenants are the most easily pushed into the plan, having least to
lose by it. But the lawyer takes the well-to-do tenants in hand, and
promises them that if they yield to the patriotic pressure of the
League, and come to grief by so doing, the landlord will at all events
have to pay the costs of the proceedings. It is this promise which
finally brings down most of them. To enjoy the luxury of a litigation
without paying for it tempts them almost as strongly as the prospect of
getting the land without paying for it. You will find that the League
always insists, when things come to a settlement, that the landlord
shall pay the costs. If the landlord through poverty of spirit or of
purse succumbs to this demand, the League scores a victory. If the
landlord resists, it is a bad job for the League. The local lawyer is
discredited in the eyes of his clients, and if he is to get any fees he
must come down upon his clients for them. Naturally his clients resent
this. If Mr. Balfour keys up the landlords to stand out manfully against
paying for all the trouble and loss they are continually put to, he will
take the life of the League so far as Ireland is concerned. As things
now stand, it is almost the only thriving industry in Ireland!"
_Wednesday, Feb. 1._--This morning I called with Lord Ernest Hamilton
upon Sir Bernard Burke, the Ulster King-at-Arms, and the editor or
author of many other well-known publications, and especially of the
"Peerage," sometimes irreverently spoken of as the "British Bible."
Sir Bernard's offices are in the picturesque old "Bermingham" tower of
the castle. There we found him wearing his years and his lore as lightly
as a flower, and busy in an ancient chamber, converted by him into a
most cosy modern study. He received us with the most cordial courtesy,
and was good enough to conduct us personally through his domain.
Many of the State papers formerly kept here have been removed to the
Four Courts building. But Sir Bernard's tower is still filled with
documents of the greatest historical interest, all admirably docketed
and arranged on the system adopted at the Hôtel Soubise, now the Palace
of the Archives in Paris.
These documents, like the tower itself, take us back to the early days
when Dublin was the stronghold of the Englishry in Ireland, and its
citizens went in constant peril of an attack from the wild and "mere
Irish" in the hills. The masonry of the tower is most interesting. The
circular stone floors made up of slabs held together without cement,
like the courses in the towers of Sillustani, by their exact adjustment,
are particularly noteworthy. High up in the tower Sir Bernard showed us
a most uncomfortable sort of cupboard fashioned in the huge wall of the
tower, and with a loophole for a window. In this cell the Red Hugh
O'Donnell of Tyrconnel was kept as a prisoner for several years under
Elizabeth. He was young and lithe, however, and after his friends had
tried in vain to buy him out, a happy thought one day struck him. He
squeezed himself through the loophole, and, dropping unhurt to the
ground, escaped to the mountains. There for a long time he made head
against the English power. In 1597 he drove Sir Conyers Clifford from
before the castle of Ballyshannon, with great loss to the English, and
when he could no longer keep the field, he sought refuge in Spain. He
was with the Spanish, as Prince of Tyrconnel, at the crushing defeat of
Kinsale in 1601. Escaping again, he died, poisoned, at Simancas the next
year.
Sir Bernard showed us, among other curious manuscripts, a correspondence
between one Higgins, a trained informer, and the Castle authorities in
1798. This correspondence shows that the revolutionary plans of the
Nationalists of 1798 were systematically laid before the Government.
When one thinks how very much abler were the leaders of the Irish
rebellion in 1798 than are the present heads of the Irish party in
Parliament, how much greater the provocations to rebellion given the
Irish people then were than they are now even alleged to be--how little
the Irish people in general have now to gain by rebellion, and how much
to lose, it is hard to resist a suspicion that it must be even easier
now than it was in 1798 for the Government to tap the secrets of the
organisations opposed to it.
Sir Bernard showed us also a curious letter written by Henry Grattan to
the founder of the great Guinness breweries, which have carried the fame
of Dublin porter into the uttermost parts of the earth. The Guinnesses
are now among the wealthiest people of the kingdom, and Ireland
certainly owes a great deal to them as "captains of industry," but they
are not Home Rulers.
At the Kildare Street Club in the afternoon I talked with two Irish
landlords from the north of Ireland, who had come up to take their
womenkind to the Drawing-Room.
I was struck by their indifference to the political excitements of the
day. One of them had forgotten that the Ripon and Morley reception was
to take place to-night. The other called it "the love-feast of Voltaire
and the Vatican." Both were much more fluent about hunting and farming.
I asked if the hunting still went on in their part of the island.
"It has never stopped for a moment," he replied.
"No," added the other, "nor ever a dog poisoned. They were poisoned,
whole packs of them, in the papers, but not a dog really. The stories
were printed just to keep up the agitation, and the farmers winked at it
so as not to be 'bothered.'"
Both averred that they got their rents "fairly well," but both also said
that they farmed much of their own land. One, a wiry, energetic, elderly
man, of a brisk presence and ruddy complexion, said he constantly went
over to the markets in England. "I go to Norwich," he said, "not to
Liverpool. Liverpool is only a meat-market, and overdone at that.
Norwich is better for meat and for stores." Both agreed this was a great
year for the potatoes, and said Ireland was actually exporting potatoes
to America. One mentioned a case of two cargoes of potatoes just taken
from Dundrum for America, the vessel which took them having brought over
six hundred tons of hay from America.
They were breezy, out-of-door men, both of them. One amused us with a
tale of espying, the other day, two hounds, a collie dog, a terrier, and
eighteen cats all amicably running together across a farmyard, with
their tails erect, after a dairymaid who was to feed them. The other
capped this with a story of a pig on his own place, which follows one of
his farm lads about like a dog,--"the only pig," he said, "I ever saw
show any human feeling!" The gentleman who goes to Norwich thought the
English landlords were in many cases worse off than the Irish. "Ah, no!"
interfered the other, "not quite; for if the English can't get their
rents, at least they keep their land, but we can neither get our rents
nor keep our land!" They both admitted that there had been much bad
management of the land in Ireland, and that the agents had done the
owners as well as the tenants a great deal of harm in the past, but they
both maintained stoutly that the legislation of late years had been
one-sided and short-sighted. "The tenants haven't got real good from
it," said one, "because the claims of the landlord no longer check their
extravagance, and they run more in debt than ever to the shopkeepers and
traders, who show them little mercy." Both also strenuously insisted on
the gross injustice of leaving the landlords unrelieved of any of the
charges fixed upon their estates, while their means of meeting those
charges were cut down by legislation.
"You have no landlords in America," said one, "but if you had, how would
you like to be saddled with heavy tithe charges for a Disestablished
Church at the same time that your tenants were relieved of their dues
to you?"
I explained to him that so far from our having no landlords in America,
the tenant-farmer class is increasing rapidly in the United States,
while it is decreasing in the Old World, while the land laws, especially
in some of our older Western States, give the landlords such absolute
control of their tenants that there is a serious battle brewing at this
moment in Illinois[12] between a small army of tenants and their
absentee landlord, an alien and an Irishman, who holds nearly a hundred
thousand acres in the heart of the State, lives in England, and grants
no leases, except on the condition that he shall receive from his
tenants, in addition to the rent, the full amount of all taxes and
levies whatsoever made upon the lands they occupy.
"God bless my soul!" exclaimed the gentleman who goes to Norwich, "if
that is the kind of laws your American Irish will give us with Home
Rule, I'll go in for it to-morrow with all my heart!"
After an early dinner, I set out with Lord Ernest to see the
Morley-Ripon procession. It was a good night for a torchlight
parade--the weather not too chill, and the night dark. The streets were
well filled, but there was no crowding--no misconduct, and not much
excitement. The people obviously were out for a holiday, not for a
"demonstration." It was Paris swarming out to the Grand Prix, not Paris
on the eve of the barricades; very much such a crowd as one sees in the
streets and squares of New York on a Fourth of July night, when the city
fathers celebrate that auspicious anniversary with fireworks at the City
Hall, and not in the least such a crowd as I saw in the streets of New
York on the 12th of July 1871, when, thanks to General Shaler and the
redoubtable Colonel "Jim Fiske," a great Orange demonstration led to
something very like a massacre by chance medley.
Small boys went about making night hideous with tom-toms, extemporised
out of empty fig-drums, and tooting terribly upon tin trumpets. There
was no general illumination, but here and there houses were bright with
garlands of lamps, and rockets ever and anon went up from the
house-tops.
We made our way to the front of a mass of people near one of the great
bridges, over which the procession was to pass on its long march from
Kingstown to the house of Mr. Walker, Q.C., in Rutland Square, where the
distinguished visitors were to meet the liberated Lord Mayor, with Mr.
Dwyer Gray, and other local celebrities. A friendly citizen let us perch
on his outside car.
The procession presently came in sight, and a grand show it made--not of
the strictly popular and political sort, for it was made up of guilds
and other organised bodies on foot and on horseback, marching in
companies--but imposing by reason of its numbers, and of the flaring
torches. Of these there were not so many as there should have been to do
justice to the procession. The crowd cheered from time to time, with
that curious Irish cheer which it is often difficult to distinguish from
groaning, but the only explosive and uproarious greeting given to the
visitors in our neighbourhood came from a member of "the devout female
sex," a young lady who stood up between two friends on the top of a car
very near us, and imperilled both her equilibrium and theirs by wildly
waving her hand-kerchief in the air, and crying out at the top of a
somewhat husky voice, "Three cheers for Mecklenburg Street! Three
cheers for Mecklenburg Street!"
This made the crowd very hilarious, but as Lord Ernest's local knowledge
did not enable him to enlighten me as to the connection between
Mecklenburg Street and the liberation of Ireland, I must leave the
mystery of their mirth unsolved till a more convenient season.
At Rutland Square the crowd was tightly packed, but perfectly
well-behaved, and the guests were enthusiastically cheered. But even
before they had entered the house of Mr. Walker it began to break up,
and long files of people wended their way to see "the carriages"
hastening with their lovely freight to the Castle. Thither Lord Ernest
has just gone, arrayed in a captivating Court costume of black velvet,
with cut-steel buttons, sword, and buckles--just the dress in which
Washington used to receive his guests at the White House, and in which
Senator Seward, I remember, insisted in 1860 on getting himself
presented by Mr. Dallas to Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace.
CHAPTER II.
SION HOUSE, COUNTY TYRONE, _Feb. 3d._--Hearing nothing from Mr. Davitt
yesterday, I gave up the idea of attending the Ripon-Morley meeting last
night. As I have come to Ireland to hear what people living in Ireland
have to say about Irish affairs, I see no particular advantage in
listening to imported eloquence on the subject, even from so clever a
man as his books prove Mr. Morley to be, and from so conscientious a man
as an acquaintance, going back to the days when he sat with Kingsley at
the feet of Maurice, makes me believe Lord Ripon to be. How much either
of them knows about Ireland is another matter. A sarcastic Nationalist
acquaintance of mine, with whom I conversed about the visitors
yesterday, assured me it had been arranged that Lord Ripon should wear
the Star of the Garter, "so the people might know him from Morley." When
I observed that Dublin must have a short memory to forget so soon the
face of a Chief Secretary, he replied: "Forget his face? Why, they never
saw his face! It's little enough he was here, and indoors he kept when
here he was. He shook hands last night with more Irishmen than ever he
spoke to while he was Chief Secretary; for he used to say then, I am
told, in the Reform Club, that the only way to get along with the Irish
was to have nothing to do with them!"
There was a sharp discussion, I was told, in the private councils of the
Committee yesterday as to whether the Queen should be "boycotted," and
the loyal sentiments usual in connection with her Majesty's name dropped
from the proceedings. I believe it was finally settled that this might
put the guests into an awkward position, both of them having worn her
Majesty's uniform of State as public servants of the Crown.
During the day I walked through many of the worst quarters of Dublin. I
met fewer beggars in proportion than one encounters in such parts of
London as South Kensington and other residential regions not
over-frequented by the perambulating policemen; but I was struck by the
number of persons--and particularly of women--who wore that most
pathetic of all the liveries of distress, "the look of having seen
better days." In the most wretched streets I traversed there was more
squalor than suffering--the dirtiest and most ragged people in them
showing no signs of starvation, or even of insufficient rations; and
certainly in the most dismal alleys and by-streets, I came upon nothing
so revolting as the hives of crowded misery which make certain of the
tenement house quarters of New York more gruesome than the Cour des
Miracles itself used to be.
This morning at 7.25 A.M. I left Dublin with Lord Ernest Hamilton for
Strabane. My attention was distracted from the reports of the great
meeting by the varied and picturesque beauty of the landscape, through
which we ran at a very respectable rate in a very comfortable carriage.
We passed Dundalk, where Edward Bruce got himself crowned king of
Ireland, after his brother Robert had won a throne in Scotland.
These masterful Normans, all over Europe from Apulia to Britain, worked
out the problem of "satisfied nationalities" much more successfully and
simply than Napoleon III. in our own day. If Edward Bruce broke down
where Robert succeeded, the causes of his failure may perhaps be worth
considering even now by people who have set themselves the task in our
times of establishing "an Irish nationality." Leaving out the
Cromwellian English of Tipperary and the South, and the Scotch who have
done for Ulster, what he aimed at for all Ireland, they have very much
the same materials to deal with as those which he dismally failed to
fashion.
Drogheda stands beautifully in a deep valley through which flows the
Boyne Water, spanned by one of the finest viaducts in Europe. Here, two
years after the discovery of America, Poyning's Parliament enacted that
all laws passed in Ireland must be subject to approval by the English
Privy Council. I wonder nobody has proposed a modification of this form
of Home Rule for Ireland now. Earl Grey's recent suggestion that
Parliamentary government be suspended for ten years in Ireland, which I
heard warmly applauded by some able lawyers and business men in Dublin,
involves like this an elimination of the Westminster debates from the
problem of government in Ireland. As we passed Drogheda, Father Burke's
magnificent presence and thrilling voice came back to me out of the
mist of years, describing with an indignant pathos, never to be
forgotten, the fearful scenes which followed the surrender of Sir Arthur
Ashton's garrison, when "for the glory of God," and "to prevent the
further effusion of blood," Oliver ordered all the officers to be
knocked on the head, and every tenth man of the soldiers killed, and the
rest shipped as slaves to the Barbadoes. But how different was the
spirit in which the great Dominican recalled these events from that in
which the "popular orators," scattering firebrands and death, delight to
dwell upon them!
At Strabane station we found a handsome outside car waiting on us, and
drove off briskly for this charming place, the home of one of the most
active and prosperous manufacturers in Ireland. A little more than half
way between the station and Sion House, Mr. Herdman met us afoot. We
jumped off and walked up with him. Sion House, built for him by his
brother, an accomplished architect, is a handsome Queen Anne mansion. It
stands on a fine knoll, commanding lovely views on all sides. Below it,
and beyond a little stream, rise the extensive flax-mills which are the
life of the place, under the eye and within touch of the hand of the
master. These works were established here by Mr. Herdman's father, after
he had made a vain attempt to establish them at Ballyshannon in Donegal,
half a century ago. As all salmon fishers know, the water-power is
admirable at Ballyshannon, where the Erne pours in torrents down a
thirty feet fall. But the ignorance and indolence of the people made
Ballyshannon quite impossible, with this result, that while the Erne
still flows unvexed to the sea, and the people of Ballyshannon live very
much as they lived in 1835, here at Sion the Mourne enables 1100 Irish
operatives to work up £90,000 worth of Irish flax every year into yarn
for the Continent, and to divide among themselves some £20,000 a year in
wages.
After luncheon we walked with Mr. Herdman through the mills and the
model village which has grown up around them. Everywhere we found order,
neatness, and thrift. The operatives are almost all people of the
country, Catholics and Protestants in almost equal numbers. "I find it
wise," said Mr. Herdman, "to give neither religion a preponderance, and
to hold my people of both religions to a common standard of fidelity and
efficiency." The greatest difficulty he has had to contend with is the
ineradicable objection of some of the peasantry to continuous industry.
He told us of a strapping lass of eighteen who came to the mills, but
very soon gave up and went back to the parental shebeen in the mountains
rather than get up early in the morning to earn fourteen shillings a
week.
Three weeks of her work would have paid the year's rent of the paternal
holding.
In the village, which is regularly laid out, is a reading-room for the
workpeople. There are cricket clubs, and one of the mill buildings (just
now crammed with bales of flax) has been fitted up by Mr. Herdman as a
theatre. There is a drop-curtain representing the Lake of Como, and the
flies are flanked by life-size copies in plaster of the Apollo Belvidere
and the Medicean Venus. This is a development I had hardly looked to see
in Ulster.
After we had gone over the works thoroughly, Mr. Herdman took us back,
on a transparent pretext of enlightened curiosity touching certain
qualities of spun flax, to give us a glimpse of the "beauty of Sion"--a
well-grown graceful girl of fifteen or sixteen summers. She
concentrated her attention, as soon as we appeared, upon certain
mysterious bobbins and spindles, with an exaggerated determination which
proved how completely she saw through our futile and frivolous devices.
Mr. Herdman told us, as we came away discomfited, a droll story of the
ugliest girl ever employed here--a girl so preternaturally ugly that one
of his best blacksmiths having been entrapped into offering to marry
her, lost heart of grace on the eve of the sacrifice, and, taking ship
at Derry for America, fled from Sion for ever.
In the evening came, with other guests, Dr. Webb, Q.C., Regius Professor
of Laws and Public Orator of Trinity at Dublin, well known both as a
Grecian capable of composing "skits" as clever as the verses yclept
Homerstotle--in which the _Saturday Review_ served up the Donnelly
nonsense about Bacon and Shakespeare--and as a translator of _Faust_. He
was abused by the Loyalists at Dublin, in 1884, for his defence of P.N.
Fitzgerald, the leader who beat Parnell and Archbishop Croke so badly at
Thurles the other day; and he is in a fair way now to be denounced with
equal fervour by the Nationalists as a County Court judge in Donegal.
He finds this post no sinecure. "I do as much work in five days," he
said to-night, "as the Superior Judges do in five weeks."
He is a staunch Unionist, and laughs at the notion that the Irish people
care one straw for a Parliament in Dublin. "Why should they?" he said.
"What did any Parliament in Dublin ever do to gratify the one real
passion of the Irish peasant--his hunger for a bit of land? So far as
the Irish people are concerned, Home Rule means simply agrarian reform.
Would they get that from a Parliament in Dublin? If the British
Parliament evicts the landlords and makes the tenants lords of the land,
they will be face to face with Davitt's demand for the nationalising of
the land. Do you suppose they will like to see the lawyers and the
politicians organising a labour agitation against the 'strong farmers'?
The last thing they want is a Parliament in Dublin. Lord Ashbourne's Act
carries in its principle the death-warrant of the 'National League.'"
Some excellent stories were told in the picturesque smoking-room after
dinner, one of a clever and humorous, sensible and non-political priest,
who, being taken to task by some of his brethren for giving the cold
shoulder to the Nationalist movement, excused himself by saying, "I
should like to be a patriot; but I can't be. It's all along of the
rheumatism which prevents me from lying out at nights in a ditch with a
rifle." The same priest being reproached by others of the cloth with a
fondness for the company of some of the resident landlords in his
neighbourhood, replied, "It's in the blood, you see. My poor mother, God
rest her soul! she always had a liking for the quality. As for my dear
father, he was just a blundering peasant like the rest of ye!"
GWEEDORE, _Saturday, 4th Feb._--A good day's work to-day!
We left our hospitable friends at Sion House early in the morning. The
sun was shining brightly; the air so soft and bland that the thrushes
were singing like mad creatures in the trees and the shrubbery; and the
sky was more blue than Italy. "A foine day it is, sorr," said our jarvey
as we took our seats on the car. There is some point in the old Irish
sarcasm that English travellers in Ireland only see one side of the
country, because they travel through it on the outside car. But to make
this point tell, four people must travel on the car. In that case they
must sit two on a side, each pair facing one side only of the landscape.
It is a very different business when you travel on an outside car alone,
with the driver sitting on one side of it, or with one companion only,
when the driver occupies the little perch in front between the sides of
the car. When you travel thus, the outside car is the best thing in the
world, after a good roadster, for taking you rapidly over a country, and
enabling you to command all points of the horizon. Double up one leg on
the seat, let the other dangle freely, using the step as a stirrup, and
you go rattling along almost as if you were on horseback.
We drove through a long suburb of Strabane into the busiest quarter of
the busy little place. The names on the shops were predominantly
Scotch--Maxwells, Stewarts, Hamiltons, Elliotts. I saw but one Celtic
name, M'Ilhenny, and one German, Straub. I changed gold for enormous
Bank of Ireland notes at a neat local bank, and the cheery landlord of
the Abercorn Arms gave us a fresh car to take us on to Letterkenny, a
drive of some twenty miles.
The car came up like a small blizzard, flying about at the heels of an
uncanny little grey mare. Lord Ernest knew the beast well, and said she
was twenty-five years old. She behaved like an unbroken filly at first,
but soon striking her pace, turned out a capital goer, and took us on
without turning a hair till her work was done. The weather continued to
be good, but clouds rolled up around the horizon.
"It'll always be bad weather," said our saturnine jarvey, "when the
Judges come to hold court, and never be good again till they rise."
Here is a consequence of alien rule in Ireland, never, so far as I know,
brought to the notice of Parliament.
"Why is this?" I asked; "is it because of the time of the year they
select?"
"The time of year, sorr?" he replied, glancing compassionately at me.
"No, not at all; it's because of the oaths!"
We reached Letterkenny in time for a very good luncheon at "Hegarty's,"
one of the neatest little inns I have ever found in a place of the size.
It stands on the long main street which is really the town. At one end
of this street is a very pretty row of picturesque ivy-clad brick
cottages, built by a landlord whose property and handsome park bound
the town on the west; and the street winds alongside the slope of a hill
rising from the bank of the Swilly river. A fair was going on. The
little market-place was alive with bustling, chattering, and chaffering
country-folk. Smartly-dressed young damsels tripped in and out of the
neat well-filled shops, and in front of a row of semidetached villas,
like a suburban London terrace, on the hill opposite "Hegarty's," a
German band smote the air with discordant fury. Decidedly a lively,
prosperous little town is Letterkenny, nor was I surprised to learn from
a communicative gentleman, nursing his cane near the inn-door, that
advantage would be taken of the presence of the Hussars sent to keep
order at Dunfanaghy, to "give a ball."
"But I thought all the country was in arms about the trials at
Dunfanaghy," I said.
"In arms about the trials at Dunfanaghy? Oh no; they'll never be locked
up, Father M'Fadden and Mr. Blane. And the people here at Letterkenny,
they've more sinse than at Dunfanaghy. Have you heard of the champagne?"
Upon this he proceeded to tell me, as a grand joke, that Father
M'Fadden and Mr. Blane, M.P., having declined to accept the tea offered
them by the authorities during their detention, they had been permitted
to order what they liked from the local hotel-keeper. After the trial
was over, and they were released on bail to prosecute their appeal, the
hotel-keeper demanded of the authorities payment of his bill, including
two bottles of champagne ordered to refresh the member for Armagh!
A conspicuous, smart, spick-and-span house on the main street, built of
brick and wood, with a verandah, and picked out in bright colours, was
pointed out to me by this amiable citizen as the residence of a
"returned American." This was a man, he said, who had made some money in
America, but got tired of living there, and had come back to end his
days in his native place He was a good man, my informant added, "only he
puts on too many airs."
A remarkably handsome, rosy-faced young groom, a model of manhood in
vigour and grace, presently brought us up a wagonette with a pair of
stout nags, and a driver in a suit of dark-brown frieze, whose head
seemed to have been driven down between his shoulders. He never lifted
it up all the way to Gweedore, but he proved to be a capital jarvey
notwithstanding, and knew the country as well as his horses.
Not long after leaving the town by a road which passes the huge County
Asylum (now literally crammed, I am told, with lunatics), we passed a
ruined church on the banks of a stream. Here the country people, it
seems, halt and wash their feet before entering Letterkenny, failing
which ceremony they may expect a quarrel with somebody before they get
back to their homes. This wholesome superstition doubtless was
established ages ago by some good priest, when priests thought it their
duty to be the preachers and makers of peace.
We soon left the wooded country of the Swilly and began to climb into
the grand and melancholy Highlands of Donegal. The road was as fine as
any in the Scottish Highlands, and despite the keen chill wind, the
glorious and ever-changing panoramas of mountain and strath through
which we drove were a constant delight, until, just as we came within
full range of Muckish, the giant of Donegal, the weather finally broke
down into driving mists and blinding rain.
We pulled up near a picturesque little shebeen, to water the horses and
get our Highland wraps well about us. Out came a hardy, cheery old
farmer. He swept the heavens with the eye of a mountaineer, and
exclaimed:--"Ah! it's a coorse day intirely, it is." "A coorse day
intirely" from that moment it continued to be.
Happily the curtain had not fallen before we caught a grand passing
glimpse of the romantic gorge of Glen Veagh, closed and commanded in the
shadowy distance by the modern castle of Glenveagh, the mountain home of
my charming country-woman, Mrs. Adair.
Thanks to its irregular serpentine outline, and to the desolate majesty
of the hills which environ it, Lough Veagh, though not a large sheet of
water, may well be what it is reputed to be, a rival of the finest lochs
in Scotland. No traces are now discernible on its shores of the too
celebrated evictions of Glen Veagh. But from the wild and rugged aspect
of the surrounding country it is probable enough that these evictions
were to the evicted a blessing in disguise, and that their descendants
are now enjoying, beyond the Atlantic, a measure of prosperity and of
happiness which neither their own labour nor the most liberal
legislation could ever have won for them here. We caught sight, as we
drove through Mrs. Adair's wide and rocky domain, of wire fences, and I
believe it is her intention to create here a small deer forest. This
ought to be as good a stalking country as the Scottish Highlands,
provided the people can be got to like "stalking" stags better than
landlords and agents.
Long before we reached Glen Veagh we had bidden farewell, not only to
the hedges and walls of Tyrone and Eastern Donegal, but to the
"ditches," which anywhere but in Ireland would be called "embankments,"
and entered upon great stone-strewn wastes of land seemingly unreclaimed
and irreclaimable. Huge boulders lay tossed and tumbled about as if they
had been whirled through the air by the cyclones of some prehistoric
age, and dropped at random when the wild winds wearied of the fun. The
last landmark we made out through the gathering storm was the pinnacled
crest of Errigal. Of Dunlewy, esteemed the loveliest of the Donegal
lakes, we could see little or nothing as we hurried along the highway,
which follows its course down to the Clady, the river of Gweedore; and
we blessed the memory of Lord George Hill when suddenly turning from
the wind and the rain into what seemed to be a mediaeval courtyard
flanked by trees, we pulled up in the bright warm light of an open
doorway, shook ourselves like Newfoundland dogs, and were welcomed by a
frank, good-looking Scottish host to a glowing peat fire in this really
comfortable little hotel, the central pivot of a most interesting
experiment in civilisation.
GWEEDORE, _Sunday, Feb. 5th._--A morning as soft and bright almost as
April succeeded the stormy night. Errigal lifted his bold irregular
outlines royally against an azure sky. The sunshine glinted merrily on
the swift waters of the Clady, which flows almost beneath our windows
from Dunlewy Lough to the sea. The birds were singing in the trees,
which all about our hotel make what in the West would be called an
"opening" in the wide and woodless expanse of hill and bog.
This hotel was for many years the home of Lord George Hill, who built it
in the hope of making Gweedore, what in England or Scotland it would
long ago have become, a prosperous watering-place. Now that a
battle-royal is going on between Lord George's son and heir and the
tenants on the estate, organised by Father M'Fadden under the "Plan of
Campaign," it is important to know something of the history of the
place.
Is this a case of the sons of the soil expropriated by an alien and
confiscating Government to enrich a ruthless invader? I was told by a
Nationalist acquaintance in Dublin that the owner of Gweedore is a near
kinsman of the Marquis of Londonderry, and that the property came to him
by inheritance under an ancient confiscation of the estates of the
O'Dounels of Tyrconnel. All of this I find is embroidery.
The "Carlisle" room, which our landlord has assigned to us, contains a
number of books, the property of the late Lord George, and ample
materials are here for making out the annals of Gweedore. Lord George,
it seems, was a posthumous son of the fourth Marquis of Downshire, and a
nephew of that Marchioness of Salisbury who was burned to death with the
west wing of Hatfield House half a century ago. He inherited nothing in
Donegal, nor was any provision made for him under his father's will. His
elder brothers made up and settled upon him a sum of twenty thousand
pounds. He entered the Army, and being quartered for a time at
Letterkenny, shot and fished all about Donegal. He found the people here
kindly and friendly, but in a deplorable state of ignorance and of
destitution. Their holdings under sundry small proprietors were entirely
unimproved, and as their families increased, these holdings were cut up
by themselves into even smaller strips under the system known as
"rundale,"--each son as he grew up taking off a slice of the paternal
holding, putting up a hut with mud, and scratching the soil after his
own rude fashion. This custom, necessarily fatal to civilisation,
doubtless came down from the traditional times when the lands of a sept
were held in common by the sept, before the native chieftains had
converted themselves into landlords, and defeated Sir John Davies's
attempt to convert their tribal kinsmen into peasant proprietors.
Whatever its origin, it had reduced Gweedore, or "Tullaghobegly," fifty
years ago to barbarism. Nearly nine thousand people then dwelt here with
never a landlord among them. There was no "Coercion" in Gweedore,
neither was there a coach nor a car to be found in the whole district.
The nominal owners of the small properties into which the district was
divided knew little and cared less about them. The rents were usually
"made by the tenants,"--a step in advance, it will be seen, of the
system which the collective wisdom of Great Britain has for the last
twenty years been trying to establish in Ireland. But they were only
paid when it was convenient. An agent of one of these properties who
travelled fourteen miles one day to collect some rents gave it up and
drove back again, because the "day was too bad" for him to wander about
in the mountains on the chance of finding the tenants at home and
disposed to give him a trifle on account. On most of the properties
there were arrears of eight, ten, and twenty years' standing.
There was one priest in the district, and one National School, the
schoolmaster, with a family of nine persons, receiving the munificent
stipend of eight pounds a year. These nine thousand people, depending
absolutely upon tillage and pasture, owned among them all one cart and
one plough, eight saddles, two pillions, eleven bridles, and thirty-two
rakes! They had no means of harrowing their lands but with meadow rakes,
and the farms were so small that from four to ten farms could be
harrowed in a day with one rake.
Their beds were of straw, mountain grass, or green and dried rushes.
Among the nine thousand people there were but two feather-beds, and but
eight beds stuffed with chaff. There were but two stables and six
cow-houses in the whole district. None of the women owned more than one
shift, nor was there a single bonnet among them all, nor a looking-glass
costing more than threepence.
The climate and the scenery took the fancy of Lord George. He made up
his mind to see what could be done with this forgotten corner of the
world, and to that end bought up as he could the small and scattered
properties, till he had invested the greater part of his small fortune,
and acquired about twenty thousand acres of land. Of this, little was
fit for cultivation, even with the help of capital and civilised
management. There was not a road in the district, nor a drain.
Lord George came and established himself here. He went to work
systematically to improve the country, reclaiming bog-lands, building
roads, and laying out the property into regular farms. He went about
among the people himself, trying to get their confidence, and to let
them know what he wanted to do for them, and with their help.
For a long time they wouldn't believe him to be a lord at all, "because
he spoke Irish"; and the breaking up of the rundale system, under which
they had lived in higgledy-piggledy laziness, exasperated them greatly.
Of the first man who took a fenced and well-defined farm from Lord
George, and went to work on it, the others observed that he would come
to no good by it, because he would "have to keep a maid just to talk to
his wife." Men could not be got for any wages to work at draining, or at
making the "ditches" or embankments to delineate the new holdings; and
when Lord George found adventurous "tramps" willing to earn a few
shillings by honest work of the kind, conspiracies were formed to undo
by night what was done by day. However, Lord George persevered.
There was not a shop, nor a dispensary, nor a doctor, nor a warehouse,
nor a quay for landing goods in this whole populous and sea-washed
region. He put up storehouses, built a little harbour at Bunbeg,
established a dispensary, got a doctor to settle in the district, and
finally put up the hotel in which we are. He advanced money to tenants
disposed to improve their holdings. Finding the women, as usual, more
thrifty and industrious than the men, and gifted with a natural aptitude
for the loom and the spindle, he introduced the weaving of woollen yarn
into stout frieze stuffs and foot-gear for both sexes. This was in 1840,
and in 1854 Gweedore hand-knit socks and stockings were sold to the
amount of £500, being just about the annual estimated rents of all the
properties bought by Lord George at the time when he bought them in
1838! But with this difference: The owners from whom Lord George bought
the properties got their £500 very irregularly, when they got it at all;
whereas the wives and daughters of the tenants, who made the socks and
stockings, were paid their £500 in cash.
Clearly in Gweedore I have a case not of the children of the soil
despoiled and trampled upon by the stranger, but of the honest
investment of alien capital in Irish land, and of the administration by
the proprietor himself of the Irish property so acquired for the benefit
alike of the owner and of the occupiers of the land.
That the deplorable state in which he found the people was mainly due to
their own improvidence and gregarious incapacity is also tolerably
clear. On the west coast of Norway, dear to the heart of the
salmon-fisher, you find people living under conditions certainly no more
favourable than here exist. North of the Hardanger Fjord, the spring
opens only in June. The farmers grow only oats and barley; but they have
no market except for the barley, and live chiefly by the pasturage. It
is as rocky a region as Donegal. But the Norsemen never try to make the
land do more than it is capable of doing. With them the oldest son takes
the farm and works it. The juniors are welcome to work on the farm if
they like for their brother, but they are not allowed to cut it up.
There is no rundale in Norway; and when the cadets see that there is no
room for them they quietly "pull up stakes," and go forth to seek a new
home, no matter where.
For fourteen years Lord George Hill spent on Gweedore all the rents he
received from it, and a great deal more. During that time the relations
between the people and their new landlord seem to have been, in the
main, most friendly, notwithstanding his constant efforts to break up
their old habits, or, to use their own language, to "bother them." But
there were no "evictions"; rents were not raised even where the tenants
were visibly able to pay better rents; prizes were given annually for
the best and neatest cottages, for the best crops of turnips (neither
turnips, parsnips, nor carrots were there at Gweedore when Lord George
bought the estate), for the best pigs (there was not a pig in Gweedore
in 1838!), for calves and colts, for the best fences, the best ordered
tillage farms, the best labourers' cottages, the best beds and bedding,
the best butter, the best woollen goods made on the estate. The old
rundale plan of dividing up the land among the children was put a stop
to, and every tenant was encouraged not to make his holding smaller, but
to add to and enlarge it. A corn-mill, saw-mill, and flax-mill were
established. In 1838 there was not a baker within ten miles. In 1852 the
local baker was driving a good business in good bread. The tenant's
wife, for whom in 1838 a single shift was a social superiority, in 1852
went shopping at Bunbeg for the latest fashions from Derry or Dublin.
Whatever "landlordism" may mean elsewhere in Ireland, it is plain enough
that in the history of Gweedore it has meant the difference between
savage squalor and civilisation.
Lord George Hill died in 1879, the year in which the Land League began
its operations. He bequeathed this property to his son, Captain Hill, by
whom the management of it has been left to agents. After Lord George's
death two tracts of mountain pasture, reserved by him to feed imported
sheep, were let to the tenants, who by that time had come to own quite a
considerable number, some thousands, of live stock, cattle, horses, and
sheep.
Concurrently with this concession to the tenants the provisions made by
Lord George against the subdivision of holdings began to give way.
Father M'Fadden, combining the position of President of the National
League with that of parish priest, seems to have favoured this tendency,
and to have encouraged the putting up of new houses on reduced holdings
to accommodate an increasing population. A flood which in August 1880
damaged the chapel and caused the death of five persons gave him an
opportunity of bringing before the British public the condition of the
people in a letter to the London _Times_, which elicited a very generous
response, several hundred pounds, it is said, having been sent to him
from London alone. Large contributions of relief were also made to
Gweedore from the Duchess of Marlborough's Fund, and Gweedore became a
standing butt of British benevolence. Two results seem to have followed,
naturally enough,--a growing indisposition on the part of the tenants to
pay rent, and a rapid rise in the value of tenant rights. With the
National League standing between them and the landlord, with the British
Parliament legislating year after year in favour of the Irish tenant and
against the Irish landlord, and with the philanthropic public ready to
respond to any appeal for help made on their behalf, the tenants at
Gweedore naturally became a privileged class. In no other way at least
can I explain the extraordinary fact that tenant rights at Gweedore have
been sold, according to Lord Cowper's Blue-book of 1886, during the
period of the greatest alleged distress and congestion in this district,
at prices representing from forty to a hundred-and-thirty years'
purchase of the landlord's rent!
In this Blue-book the Rev. Father M'Fadden appears as receiving no less
than £115 sterling for the tenant-right sold by him of ground, the head
rent of which is £1, 2s. 6d. a year. The worst enemy of Father M'Fadden
will hardly suspect him, I hope, of taking such a sum as this from a
tenant farmer for the right to starve to death by inches.[13]
A shrewd Galway man, now here, who seems to know the region well, and
likes both the scenery and the people, tells me that the troubles which
have now culminated in the arrest of Father M'Fadden have been
aggravated by the vacillation of Captain Hill, and by the foibles of his
agent, Colonel Dopping, who not long ago brought down Mr. Gladstone with
his unloaded rifle. That the tenants as a body have been, or now are,
unable to pay their rent he does not believe. On the contrary, he thinks
them, as a body, rather well off. Certainly I have seen and spoken with
none of them about the roads to-day who were not hearty-looking men, and
in very good case. Colonel Dopping, according to my Galwegian, is not an
Englishman, but a Longford Irishman of good family, who got his
training in India as an official of the Woods and Forests in Bengal. "He
is not a bad-hearted man, nor unkind," said my Galwegian, "but he is
too much of a Bengal tiger in his manner. He went into the cottages
personally and lectured the people, and that they never will stand. They
don't require or expect you to believe what they say--in fact they have
little respect for you if you do--but they like to have the agent
pretend that he believes them, and then go on and show that he don't.
But he must never lose his temper about it. Colonel Dopping, I have
heard, argued with an old woman one day who was telling him more yarns
than were ever spun into cloth in Gweedore, till she picked up her cup
of tea and threw it in his face. He flounced out of the cottage, and
ordered the police to arrest her. That did him more harm than if he had
shot a dozen boys." "What with the temper of Colonel Dopping and the
vacillation of Captain Hill, who is always of the mind of the last man
that speaks to him, Father M'Fadden has had it all his own way. Captain
Hill's claim was for £1800 of arrears, long arrears too, and £400 of
costs. How much the people paid in under the Plan of Campaign nobody
knows but Father M'Fadden. But he is a clever _padre_, and he played
Captain Hill till he finally gave up the costs, and settled for £1450."
"And this sum represents what?"
"It represents in round numbers about two years' income from an estate
in which Captain Hill's father must have invested, first and last, more
nearly £40,000 than £20,000 of money that never came out of it."
"That doesn't sound like a very good operation. But isn't the question,
Whether the tenants have earned this sum, such as it is, out of the land
let to them by Captain Hill?"
"No, not exactly, I think. You must remember there are some twelve
hundred families living here on land bought with Lord George's money,
and enjoying all the advantages which the place owes to his investment
and his management, much more than to any labour or skill of theirs. You
must look at their rents as accommodation rents. Suppose they earn the
rent in Scotland, or England, or Tyrone, or wherever you like, the
question is, What do they get for it from Captain Hill? They get a
holding with land enough to grow potatoes on, and with as much free fuel
as ever they like, and with free pasture for their beasts, and all this
they get on the average, mind you, for no more than ten shillings a
year! Why, there was a time, I can assure you, when the women here
earned the value of all the Hill rents by knitting stockings and making
woollen stuffs. You see the stuffs lying here in this window that they
make even now, and good stuffs too. But before the League boycotted the
agency here, the agency ten years ago used to pay out £900 in a year,
where it pays less than £100 to the women for their work."
"Why did the League do this?"
"Why? Why, because it wanted to control the work itself, and to know
just what it brings into the place. You must remember Father M'Fadden is
the President of the League, and the people will do anything for him. I
have heard of one old woman who sat up of nights last year knitting
socks to send up to London, to pay the Christmas dues to the
Father,--six shillings' worth."
"And are these stuffs here in the hotel made for the agency you speak
of?"
"Oh no; these are just made by women that know the hotel, and Mr.
Robinson here, he kindly takes in the stuffs. You see the name of every
woman on every one of them that made it, and the price. If a stranger
buys some, he pays the money to Mr. Robinson, and so it goes to the
women, and no commission charged."
The "stuffs" are certainly excellent, very evenly woven; and the
patterns, all devised, I am told, by the women themselves, very simple
and tasteful. The only dyes used are got by the women also from the
sea-weeds and the kelp, which must be counted among the resources of the
place. The browns and ochres thus produced are both soft and vivid;
while nothing can be better than a peculiar warm grey, produced by a
skilful mingling of the undyed wools.
"What, then, causes the distress for which the name of Gweedore is a
synonym?" I asked.
"It doesn't exist," responded my Galwegian; "that is, there is no such
distress in Gweedore as you find in Connemara, for instance;[14] but
what distress there is in Gweedore is due much more to the habits the
people have been getting into of late years, and to the idleness of
them, than to any pressure of the rents you hear about, or even to the
poverty of the soil. Go down to the store at Bunbeg, and see what they
buy and go in debt for! You won't find in any such place as Bunbeg in
England such things. And even this don't measure it; for, you see,
two-thirds of them are not free to deal at Bunbeg."
"Why not? Is Bunbeg 'boycotted'?"
"No, not at all. But they are on the books of the 'Gombeen man'--Sweeney
of Dungloe and Burtonport. They're always in debt to him for the meal;
and then he backs the travelling tea-pedlars, and the bakers that carry
around cakes, and all these run up the accounts all the time. Tot up
what these people lay out for tea at four shillings a pound--and they
won't have cheap tea--and what they pay for meal, and what they pay for
interest, and the 'testimonials,'--they paid for the monument here to
O'Donnell, the Donegal man that murdered Carey,--and the dues to the
priest, and you'll find the £700 or so they don't pay the landlord going
in other directions three and four times over."
"Then they are falling back into all the old laziness, the men
sauntering about, or sitting and smoking, while the women do all the
work."
The maid having told us Mass would be performed at noon, I walked with
Lord Ernest a mile or so up the road to Derrybeg, to see the people
thronging down from the hills; the women in their picturesque fashion
wearing their bright shawls drawn over their heads. But the maid had
deceived us. The Mass was fixed for eleven, and I suspect her of being a
Protestant in disguise.
On the way back we met Mr. Burke, the resident magistrate. He has a neat
house here, with a garden, and had come over from Dunfanaghy to see his
wife. He meant to return before dark. The country was quiet enough, he
said; but there were some troublesome fellows about, keeping up the
excitement over the arrest at Father M'Fadden's trial of Father
Stephens--a young priest recently from Liverpool, who has become the
curate of quite another Father M'Fadden--the parish priest of
Falcarragh, and is giving his local superior a great deal of trouble by
his activity in connection with the "Plan of Campaign." Mr. Wybrants
Olphert of Ballyconnell, the chief landlord of Falcarragh, has been
"boycotted," on suspicion of promoting the arrest of the two priests.
Five policemen have been put into his house. At Falcarragh, where six
policemen are usually stationed, there are now forty. Mr. Burke
evidently thinks, though he did not say so, that Father Stephens has
been spoiled of his sleep by the laurels of Father M'Fadden of Gweedore.
He is to be tried at Dunfanaghy on Tuesday, and there are now 150 troops
quartered there--Rifles and Hussars.
"Are they not boycotted?" I asked.
"No. The people rather enjoy the bustle and the show, not to speak of
the money the soldiers spend."
Lord Ernest, who knows Mr. Olphert, sent him over a message by Mr. Burke
that we would drive over to-morrow, and pay our respects to him at
Ballyconnell. From this Mr. Burke tried to dissuade us, but what he told
us naturally increased our wish to go.
After luncheon I ordered a car, and drove to Derrybeg, to call there on
Father M'Fadden, Lord Ernest, who has already seen him, agreeing to call
there for me on his return from a walk. We passed much reclaimed
bogland, mostly now in grass, and looking fairly well; many piles of
turf and clusters of cottages, well-built, but not very neatly kept.
From each, as we passed, the inevitable cur rushed out and barked
himself hoarse. Then came a waste of bog and boulders, and then a long,
neat stone wall, well coped with unhewn stone, which announced the
vicinity of Father M'Fadden's house, quite the best structure in the
place after the chapel and the hotel. It is of stone, with a neat side
porch, in which, as I drove up, I descried Father M'Fadden, in his trim
well-fitting clerical costume, standing and talking with an elderly
lady. I passed through a handsome iron wicket, and introduced myself to
him. He received me with much courtesy, and asked me to walk into his
well-furnished comfortable study, where a lady, his sister, to whom he
presented me, sat reading by the fire.
I told Father M'Fadden I had come to get his view of methods and things
at Gweedore, and he gave it to me with great freedom and fluency. He is
a typical Celt in appearance, a M'Fadden Roe, sanguine by temperament,
with an expression at once shrewd and enthusiastic, a most flexible
persuasive voice. All the trouble at Gweedore, he thought, came of the
agents. "Agents had been the curse both of Ireland and of the landlord.
The custom being to pay them by commissions on the sums collected, and
not a regular salary, the more they can screw either out of the soil, or
out of any other resources of the tenants, the better it is for them. At
Gweedore the people earn what they can, not out of the soil, but out of
their labour exported to Scotland, or England, or America. Only
yesterday," he continued, turning to his neat mahogany desk and taking
up a letter, "I received this with a remittance from America to pay the
rent of one of my people."
"This was in connection," I asked, "with the 'Plan of Campaign' and your
contest here?"
"Yes," he replied; "and a girl of my parish went over to Scotland
herself and got the money due there for another family, and brought it
back to me here. You see they make me a kind of savings-bank, and have
done so for a long time, long before the 'Plan of Campaign' was talked
about as it is now."
This was interesting, as I had heard it said by a Nationalist in Dublin
that the "Plan of Campaign" was originally suggested by Father M'Fadden.
He made no such claim himself, however, and I made no allusion to this
aspect of the matter. "I have been living here for fifteen years, and
they listen to me as to nobody else."
In these affairs with the agents, he had always told his people that
"whenever a settlement came to be made, cash alone in the hand of the
person representing them could make it properly." "Cash I must have," he
said, "and hold the cash ready for the moment. When I had worked out a
settlement with Captain Hill, I had a good part of the money in my hand
ready to pay down. £1450 was the sum total agreed upon, and after the
further collection, necessitated by the settlement, there was a deficit
of about £200. I wrote to Professor Stuart," he added, after a pause,
"that I wanted about £200 of the sum-total. But more has come in since
then. This remittance, from America yesterday, for example."
"Do they send such remittances without being asked for them?" I
inquired.
"Yes; they are now and again sending money, and some of them don't send,
but bring it. Some of them go out to America now as they used to go to
England--just to work and earn some money, and come back.
"If they get on tolerably well they stay for a while, but they find
America is more expensive than Ireland, and if, for any cause, they get
out of work there, they come back to Ireland to spend what they have.
Naturally, you see," said Father M'Fadden, "they find a certain pleasure
to be seen by their old friends in the old place, after borrowing the
four pounds perhaps to take them to America, coming back with the money
jingling in their pockets, and in good clothes, and with a watch and a
chain--and a high hat. And there is in the heart of the Irishman an
eternal longing for his native land constantly luring him back to
Ireland. All do not succeed, though, in your country," he said. "We hear
of two out of ten perhaps who do very well. They take care we hear of
that. The rest disappear, and are never heard of again."
"Then you do not encourage emigration?" I, asked, "even although the
people cannot earn their living from the soil?"
Father M'Fadden hesitated a moment, and then replied, "No, for things
should be so arranged that they may earn their living, not out of the
country, but on the soil at home. It is to that I want to bring the
condition of the district."
At this point Lord Ernest Hamilton came up and knocked at the door. He
was most courteously received by Father M'Fadden. To my query why the
Courts could not intervene to save the priests from taking all this
trouble on themselves between the owners and the occupiers of the land,
Father M'Fadden at first replied that the Courts had no power to
intervene where, as in many cases in Gweedore, the holdings are
subdivided.
"The Courts," he said, "may not be, and I do not think they are, all
that could be desired, though they undoubtedly do supply a more or less
impartial arbitrator between the landlord and the tenant. It is an
improvement on the past when the landlords fixed the rents for
themselves."
I did not remind him of what Lord George Hill tells us, that in the
olden time at Gweedore the tenants fixed their own rents--and then did
not pay them--but I asked him how this could be said when the tenant
clearly must have accepted the rent, no matter who fixed it. "Oh!" said
Father M'Fadden, "that may be so, but the tenant was not free, he was
coerced. With all his life and labour represented in the holding and its
improvements, he could not go and give up his holding. It's a
stand-and-deliver business with him--the landlord puts a pistol to his
head!"
"But is it not true," I said, "that under the new Land Bill the Land
Commissioner's Court has power to fix the rents judicially without
regard to landlord or tenant during fifteen years?"
"Yes, that is so," said Father M'Fadden. "Under Mr. Gladstone's Act of
81, and under the later Act of the present Government, the rents so
fixed from '81 to '86 inclusive are subject to revision for three years;
but the people have no confidence in the constitution of the Courts,
and, as a matter of fact, the improvements of the tenants are
confiscated under the Act of '81, and the reductions allowed under the
Act of '87 are incommensurate with the fall in prices by 100 per cent.
And there still remains the burden of arrears. I feel that I must stand
between my people and obligations which they are unable to meet. To that
end I take their money, and stand ready to use it to relieve them when
the occasion offers. That is my idea of my work under the 'Plan of
Campaign'; and, furthermore, I think that by doing it I have secured
money for the landlord which he couldn't possibly have got in any other
way."
This struck me as a very remarkable statement, nor can I see how it can
be interpreted otherwise than as an admission that if the people had
the money to pay their rents, they couldn't be trusted to use it for
that purpose, unless they put it into the control of the priest or of
some other trustee.
Reverting to what he had said of the necessity for some change in the
conditions of life and labour here, I asked if, in his opinion, the
people could live out of the land if they got the ownership of it.
In existing circumstances he thought they could not.
Was he in favour, then, of Mr. Davitt's plan of Land Nationalisation?
"Well, I have not considered the question of Nationalisation of the
land."
To my further question, What remedies he would himself propose for a
state of things in which it was impossible for the people to live out of
the land either as occupiers or as owners--emigration being barred,
Father M'Fadden, without looking at Lord Ernest, replied, "Oh, I think
abler men who draw up Parliamentary Acts and live in public life ought
to devise remedies, and that is a matter which would be best settled by
a Home Government."
The glove was well delivered, but Lord Ernest did not lift it.
"But, Father M'Fadden," I said, "I am told you are a practical
agriculturist and engineer, and that you have contrived to get excellent
work done by the people here, dividing them off into working squads, and
assigning so many perches to so many--surely then you must understand
better than a dozen members of Parliament what they can be got to do?"
He smiled at this, and finally admitted that he had a plan of his own.
It was that the Government should advance sums for reclaiming the land.
"The people could live on part of their earnings while thus employed,
and invest the surplus in sheep to be fed on the hill pastures. When the
reclamation was effected the families could be scattered out, and the
holdings increased. In this district alone there are 350 holdings of
reclaimable land of 20 acres each, the reclamation of which, according
to a competent surveyor, "would pay well." And the district could be
improved by creating employment on the spot, establishing factories,
developing fisheries, giving technical education, and encouraging
cottage industries, which are so vigorously reviving in this district
owing to the benevolent efforts of the Donegal Industrial Fund."
Father M'Fadden spoke freely and without undue heat of his trial, and
gave us a piquant account of his arrest.
This was effected at Armagh, just as he was getting into an early
morning train. A sergeant of police walked up as the train was about to
start, and asked--
"Are you not Father M'Fadden of Gweedore?"
"What interest have you in my identity?" responded the priest.
"Only this, sir," said the officer, politely exhibiting a warrant.
"I had been in Armagh the previous day," said Father M'Fadden,
"attending the month's memory of the late deceased Primate of All
Ireland, Dr. M'Gettigan, and stayed at a private residence, that of
Surgeon-Major Lavery, not suspecting that while enjoying the genial
hospitality of the Surgeon-Major my steps were dogged by a detective,
and that gentleman's house watched by police."
Of the trial Father M'Fadden spoke with more bitterness. His eyes glowed
as he exclaimed, "Can you imagine that they refused me bail, when bail
had been allowed to such a felon as Arthur Orton? Why should I have
been locked up over two Sundays, for ten days, when I offered to pledge
my honour to appear?" He made no other complaint of the magistrate, and
none of the prosecutor, Mr. Ross. He praised his own lawyer, too, but he
strongly denounced the stenographer who took down his speech, or the
parts of it which I told him I had seen in Dublin.
"Why, just think of it," he exclaimed; "it took the clerk just eight
minutes to read the report given by that stenographer of a speech which
it took me an hour and twenty minutes to deliver! I do not speak from
the lips, I speak from the heart, and consequently rather rapidly; and a
stenographer who can take down 190 words a minute has told me I run
ahead of him!"
I suggested that the report, without pretending even to be a full
summary of his speech, might be accurate as to phrases and sentences
pronounced by him.
"Yes, as to phrases," he answered, "that might be; but the phrases may
be taken out of their true connection, and strung together in an
untruthful, yet telling way. Even my words were not fully set down," he
said, with some heat. "I was made to call a man 'level,' when I said in
the American way that he was 'level-headed.'" _A propos_ of this, I am
told that the American word "spree" has become Hibernian, and is used to
describe meetings of the National League and "other political
entertainments."
When I told Father M'Fadden I had just come from Rome, where, as I had
reason to believe, the Vatican was anxious to get evidence from others
than Archbishop Walsh and Monsignore Kirby, of the Irish College, as to
the attitude of the priests in Ireland towards the laws of the United
Kingdom, he said he knew that "some Italian prelates neither understood
nor approved the 'Plan of Campaign,' nor is the Irish Land question
understood at Rome;" but this did not seem to disturb him much, as he
was quite sure that in the end the "Plan of Campaign" would be legalised
by the British Government. "I think I see plainly," he said, "that Lord
Ernest's government is fast going to pieces, though I can't expect him
to admit it!" Lord Ernest laughed good-naturedly, and said that Father
M'Fadden saw more in Donegal than he (Lord Ernest) was able to see in
Westminster. Upon my asking him whether the "Plan of Campaign" did not
in effect abrogate the moral duty of a man to meet the legal obligations
he had voluntarily incurred, Father M'Fadden advanced his own theory of
the subject, which was that, "if a man can pay a fair year's rent out of
the produce of his holding, he is bound to pay it. But if the rent be a
rack-rent, imposed on the tenant against his will, or if the holding
does not produce the rent, then I don't think that is a strict
obligation in conscience."
In America, the courts, I fear, would make short work of this theory of
Father M'Fadden. If a tenant there cannot pay his first quarter's rent
(they don't let him darken his soul by a year's liabilities) they
promptly and mercilessly put him out.
Interesting as was our conversation with the parish priest of Gweedore,
I felt that we might be trespassing too far upon his kindness and his
time. So we rose to go. He insisted upon our going into the dining-room,
where, as he told us, he had hospitably entertained sundry visiting
statesmen from England, and there offered us a glass of the excellent
wine of the country. He excused himself from joining us as being
"almost a teetotaller."
On our return to the hotel I met the Galwegian strolling about. When I
told him of Father M'Fadden's courteous hospitality, he said, "I am very
glad you took that glass he offered. I really believe his quarrel with
Captain Hill dates back to Hill's declining that same courtesy under
Father M'Fadden's roof."
GWEEDORE, _Monday, Feb. 6._--Another very beautiful morning--as a farmer
said with whom I chatted on my morning stroll, "A grand day, sorr!"
Errigal, which in this mountain atmosphere seems almost to hang over our
hotel, but is in reality three or four miles away, stood out superbly
against a clear azure sky, wreaths of soft luminous mist floating like a
divine girdle half way up his bare volcanic peak.
I walked up to the Bunbeg road with Lord Ernest to call upon some
peasants whom he knows. In one stone cabin, very well built and
plastered, standing sidewise to the road, with doors on either side, we
found the house apparently in charge of a little girl of nine or ten
years, a weird but pretty child with very delicate well-cut features,
who lay couchant upon her doubled-up arm on a low bed in a corner of the
main room, and peered at us over her elbow with sparkling inquisitive
eyes.
By her side sat a man with his cap on, who might have been the "young
Pretender," or the "old Kaiser," so far as his looks went towards
indicating his age. He never rose or welcomed us, being, as we
afterwards found out, only a visitor like ourselves, and a kinsman of
Mrs. M'Donnell, the head of the house. "Mrs. M'Donnell," he said, "is
gone to the store at Bunbeg."
This main room rose perhaps ten feet in height to the open roof. It had
one large and well-glazed window. When Lord George Hill came here there
were not ten square feet of window-glass in the whole parish outside of
the Church, the national school, and the residence of the chief
police-officer.
Windows when there were any were closed with dried sheepskins, through
which the cats ran in and out as freely as through the curious tunnel
which the kindly Master of Blantyre has constructed at Sheba's Cross for
their special benefit.
There were two beds in the main room; rather high than low, one of
rushes, on which lay the child of whom I have spoken, and one of
greater pretensions vacant in another corner.
The door stood wide open, but the cabin was warm and comfortable, and a
peat fire smouldered, sending up, to me, most agreeable odours. An inner
room seemed to be a sort of granary, full of hay and straw. There the
cow is kept at night. "It's handy if you want a drink of milk," said the
visitor. In comparison with the dwellings of small farmers in Eastern
France or in Southern Italy this Donegal cabin was not only clean but
attractive. It was more squalid perhaps, but less dreary than the
extemporised and flimsy dwellings of settlers in the extreme Far West of
the United States, and I should say decidedly a more wholesome
habitation than the hermetically sealed and dismal wooden houses of
hundreds of struggling farmers in the older Eastern States. I am sure my
old friend Mr. Frederick Law Olmsted, who made the only thorough surveys
of agricultural life in the United States before the Civil War, would
have pronounced it in all respects superior, so far as health and
comfort go, to the average home of the average "poor buccra," between
the Chesapeake and the Sabine. I am afraid a great deal of not wholly
innocuous nonsense has been written and spoken about this part of the
United Kingdom by well-meaning philanthropists who have gauged the
condition of the people here by their own standards of comfort and
enjoyment. Most things in this life of ours are relative. I well
remember hearing an American millionaire, who began life in New York as
the patentee of a mouse-trap, express his profound compassion for a
judge of the Supreme Court condemned to live "upon a pittance of eight
thousand dollars a year."
These dwellers in the cabins of Donegal are millionaires, so far as
those essentials of life are concerned, which we call room and air and
freedom to move and breathe, in comparison with hundreds and thousands
of their own race in the slums of New York and Chicago and Liverpool and
London.
Mrs. M'Donnell's cousin, however, took dark views of things. The times
"were no good at all."
The potatoes, I had heard, were doing well this year.
"No! they wouldn't keep the people; indeed, they wouldn't. There would
have to be relief."
"Why not manure the land?"
"Manure? oh yes, the sea-stuff was good manure, but the people couldn't
get it. They had no boats; and it cost eighteenpence a load to haul it
from Bunbeg. No! they couldn't get it off the rocks. At the Rosses they
might; the Rosses were not so badly off as Derrybeg or Gweedore, for all
they might say."
"But Father M'Fadden had urged me," I said, "to see the Rosses, because
the people there were worse off than any of the people."
"Well, Father M'Fadden was a good man; he was a friend of the people;
and they were bad indeed at the Rosses, but they could get the sea-stuff
there, and hadn't to pay for cartage. And indeed, if you put the
sea-stuff on the bogland, the land was better in among the rocks' at the
Rosses than was the bogland, it was indeed: the stuff did no good at all
the first year. The second and the third it gave good crops--but then
you must burn it--and by the fourth year and the fifth it was all ashes,
and no good at all! This was God's truth, it was; and there must be
relief."
"But could the people earn nothing in Scotland or in Tyrone?"
"Oh no, they could earn nothing at all. They could pay no rent."
So he sat there, a Jeremiah among the potsherds, quite contented and
miserable--well and hearty in a ragged frieze coat, with his hat over
his eyes.
While we talked, a tall lusty young beggar-girl wandered in and out
unnoticed. Chickens pecked and fluttered about, and at intervals the
inevitable small dog suddenly barked and yelped.
On our way back we met the elder daughter of Mrs. M'Donnell, a girl of
sixteen, the "beauty of Gweedore." A beauty she certainly is, and of a
type hardly to have been looked for here.
Her lithe graceful figure, her fine, small, chiselled features, her
shapely little head rather defiantly set on her sloping shoulders, her
fair complexion and clear hazel eyes, her brown golden hair gathered up
behind into a kind of tress, all these were Saxon rather than Celtic.
Her trim neat ankles were bare, after the mountain fashion, but she was
prettily dressed in a well-fitting dark blue gown, wore a smartly
trimmed muslin apron, with lace about her throat, and carried over her
arm a new woollen shawl, very tasteful and quiet in colour. She greeted
us with a self-possessed smile.
"No," she had not, been shopping with her mother. The shawl was a
present from one of her cousins. Did we not think it very pretty? She
was only out for a walk, and had no notion where her mother might be. A
stalwart red-bearded man who lounged and loitered behind her on the road
was "only a friend," she said, "not a relation at all!" Nor did she
show, I am sorry to say, any compassion for the evident uneasiness with
which, from a distance, he regarded her long and affable parley with two
strangers.
We asked her whether she expected and wished to live in Gweedore, or
would like to follow elsewhere some calling or trade. "Oh yes," she
unhesitatingly replied, "I should like to be a dress-maker in Deny;
but," she added pensively, "it's no use my thinking about it, for I know
I shouldn't be let!"
"Wouldn't you like Dublin as well?" I asked.
"Perhaps; but I shouldn't be let go to Dublin either!"
Would she like to go to America?
"No!" she didn't think much of "the Americans who came back," and
America must be "a very hard country for work, and very cold in the
winter."
Now this was a widow's daughter, living in such a cabin as I have
described, and upon a small holding in a parish reputed to be the most
"distressful" in Donegal![15]
Returning to the hotel we found our car ready for Falcarragh. Our driver
was a quiet, sensible fellow, who did not seem to care sixpence about
the great Nationality question, though he knew the country very well.
Iron was visible in the rocks as we drove along, and we passed some
abandoned mining works, "lead and silver mines;" he said, "they were
given up long before his time." We got many fine views of the mountains
Errigal, Aghla More, and Muckish. Lough Altan, a wild tarn, lies between
Errigal and Aghla More.
The peasants we met stared at us curiously, but, were very civil, even
at a place bearing the ominous name of Bedlam, against which Mr. Burke
had warned us as the most troublesome on the way. All the countryside
was there attending a fair, and we drove through throngs of red-shawled,
barelegged women, ponies, horses, cattle, and sheep. Of Tory Island,
with its famous tower, dating back to the fabled "Fomorians," we had
some grand glimpses. The white surf, flashing and leaping high in the
air on the nearer islets accented and gave life to the landscape.
In one glorious landlocked bay, we saw not a single boat riding. Our
driver said, "The fishermen all live on Tory Island, and send their fish
to Sligo. The people on the mainland don't like going out in the boats."
Lord Ernest tells me there is a movement to have a telegraph station set
up on Tory Island, to announce the Canadian steamers coming into Moville
for Deny.
We found Falcarragh, or "Cross-Roads," a large clean-looking village,
consisting of one long and broad street, through which horses and cattle
were wandering in numbers, apparently at their own sweet will.
Ballyconnell House, the seat of Mr. Wybrants Olphert, is the manor house
of the place. As we drew near, no signs appeared of the dreadful
"Boycott." The great gates of the park stood hospitably open, and we
drove in unchallenged past a pretty ivy-clad lodge, and through low, but
thickly planted groves. A huge boulder, ruddy with iron ore, bears the
uncanny and unspellable name of the "Clockchinnfhaelaidh," or "Stone of
Kinfaele." Upon this stone, tradition tells us, Balor, a giant of Tory
Island, chopped off the head of an unreasonable person named
Mackinfeale, for complaining that Balor, under some prehistoric "Plan of
Campaign," had driven away his favourite cow, Glasgavlan.
Ballyconnell House, a substantial mansion of the Georgian era, stands
extremely well. Over a fine sloping lawn in front, you have a glorious
view of the sea, and of a very fine headland, known as "the Duke's
Head," from the really remarkable resemblance it bears to the profile of
Wellington. The winds have such power here that there are but few
well-grown trees, and those near the house. About them paraded many
game-hens, spirited birds, looking like pheasants. These, as we learned,
never sleep save in the trees.
The "boycotted" lord of the manor came out to greet us--a handsome,
stalwart man of some seventy years, with a kindly face, and most
charming manners. His family, presumably of Dutch origin, has been
established here since Charles II. He himself holds 18,133 acres here,
valued at £1802 a year; and he is a resident landlord in the fullest
sense of the term. For fifty years he has lived here, during all which
time, as he told us to-day, he has "never slept for a week out of the
country." His furthest excursions of late years have been to Raphoe,
where he has a married daughter. "Absenteeism" clearly has nothing to do
with the quarrel between Mr. Olphert and his tenants, or with the
"boycotting" of Ballyconnell.
The dragoons from Dunfanaghy had just ridden away as we came up. They
had come over in full fig to show themselves, and to encourage the
respectable Catholics of Falcarragh, who side with their parish priest,
Father M'Fadden of Glena, and object to the vehement measures, promoted
by his young curate, Father Stephens, recently of Liverpool. The people
had received them with much satisfaction. "They had never seen the
cavalry before, and were much delighted!"
Before we sat down to luncheon young Mr. Olphert came in. It was curious
to see this quiet, well-bred young gentleman throw down his belt and his
revolver on the hall table, like his gloves and his umbrella. "Quite
like the Far West," I said. "And we are as far in the West as we can
get," he replied laughingly.
Our luncheon was excellent--so good, in fact, that we felt a kind of
remorse as if we had selfishly quartered ourselves upon a beleaguered
garrison. But Mr. Olphert said he had no fear of being starved out.
Personally he was, and always had been, on the best terms with the
people of Falcarragh. The older tenants, even now, if he met them
walking in the fields when no one was in sight, would come up and salute
him, and say how "disgusted" they were with what was going on. It was
the younger generation who were troublesome--more troublesome, he added,
to their own parish priest than they were to him. Three or four years
ago a returned American Irishman, an avowed unbeliever, but an active
Nationalist and one of Mr. Forster's "suspects," had come into the
neighbourhood and done his worst to break up the parish. He used to come
to Falcarragh on a Sunday, and get up on a stone outside the chapel
while Father M'Fadden was saying Mass or preaching, and harangue such
people as would listen to him, and caricature the priest and the sermon
going on within sound of his own voice. "I am myself a Protestant,"
said Mr. Olphert, "but I have a great respect for priests who do their
duty; and the conduct of Father M'Fadden of Gweedore, in countenancing
this man, who tried to overthrow the authority of Father M'Fadden of
Glena, excited my indignation. As to what is going on now," said Mr.
Olphert, "it is to Father M'Fadden of Gweedore, and to Father Stephens
here, that the trouble is chiefly to be charged." This tallies with what
I heard at Gweedore from my Galwegian acquaintance. He thought Mr.
Olphert, and Mr. Hewson, the agent, ought to have made peace on the
terms which Father Stephens said he was willing to accept for the
tenants, these being a reduction of 3s. 4d. in the pound, if Mr. Olphert
would extend the reduction to the whole year. My Galwegian thought this
reasonable, because in this region the rent, it appears, is only
collected once a year. With this impartial temper, my Galwegian still
maintained that but for the two priests--the parish priest of Gweedore
and the curate of Falcarragh--there need have been no trouble at
Falcarragh. There had been no "evictions." When the tenants first went
to Mr. Olphert they asked a reduction of 4s. in the pound on the
non-judicial rents, and this Mr. Olphert at once agreed to give them.
The tenants had regularly paid their rents for ten years before. That
they are not going down in the world would appear from the fact that the
P.O. Savings Banks' deposits at Falcarragh, which stood at £62, 15s.
10d. in 1880, rose in 1887 to £494, 10s. 8d. A small number of them had
gone into Court and had judicial rents fixed; and it was on the
contention promoted by the two priests, through these judicial tenants,
he said, that all the difficulty hinged. Father M'Fadden of Glena, who
thought the quarrel unjustifiable and silly, had an interview with Mr.
Blane, M.P., and with Father Stephens, and tried to arrange it all. He
would have succeeded, my Galwegian thought, had not the agent, Mr.
Hewson, obstinately fought with the obstinate curate, Father Stephens,
over the suggestion made by the latter, that the terms granted on the
fine neighbouring estate of Mr. Stuart of Ards--a man of wealth, who
lives mainly at Brighton, though Ards is one of the loveliest places in
Ireland--should be extended by Mr. Olphert for a whole year to his own
people, who had never asked for anything of the kind!
Mr. Olphert said he knew Gweedore well. He owns a "townland"[16] there,
on which he has thirty-five tenants, none of them on a holding at more
more than £4 a year. Father M'Fadden of Gweedore, he said, finding that
the people on Mr. Olphert's townland were going back to the "Rundale"
practices, tried to induce Mr. Olphert to return all these subdivisions
as "tenancies." This he refused to do. As to the resources of the
peasantry, he thought them greater than they appeared to be. "This comes
to light," said Mr. Olphert, "whenever there is a tenant-right for sale.
There is never any lack of money to buy it, and at a round good price."
The people also, he thinks, spend a great deal on what they regard as
luxuries, and particularly on tea. "A cup of tea could not be got for
love or money in Gweedore, when Lord George Hill came there. You might
as well have asked for a glass of Tokay."
Now they use and abuse it in the most deleterious way imaginable. They
buy the tea at exorbitant rates, often at five shillings a pound, and
usually on credit, paying a part of one bill on running up another, put
it into a saucepan or an iron pot, and boil, or rather stew, it over the
fire, till they brew a kind of hell-broth, which they imbibe at odd
moments all day long! Oddly enough, this is the way in which they
prepare tea in Cashmere and other parts of India, with this essential
difference, though, that the Orientals mitigate the astringency of the
herb with milk and almonds and divers ingredients, tending to make a
sort of "compote" of it. Taken as it is taken here, it must have a
tremendous effect on the nerves. Mr. Olphert thinks it has had much to
do with the increase of lunacy in Ireland of late years. From his
official connection with the asylum at Letterkenny, he knows that while
it used to accommodate the lunatics of three counties, it is now hardly
adequate to the needs of Donegal alone.
Everything about Ballyconnell House is out of key with the actual
military conditions of life here. It is essentially what Tennyson calls
"an ancient home of ordered peace." In the ample hall hang old portraits
and trophies of the chase. The large and handsome library, panelled in
rich dark wood, is filled full of well-bound books. Prints, busts, the
thousand and one things of "bigotry and virtue" which mark the
dwelling-place of educated and thoughtful people are to be seen on every
side. Mr. Olphert showed us a cabinet full of bronzes, picked up on the
strand of the sea. Among these were brooches, pins, clasps, buckles, two
very fine bronze swords, and a pair of bronze links engraved with
distinctly Masonic emblems, such as the level, the square, and the
compasses. When were these things made, and by what people?
So far as I know, Masonry in the British Islands cannot be historically
traced back much, if at all, beyond the Revolution of 1688.
Mr. Olphert and his son walked about the place with us. They have no
fears of an attack, but think it wise to keep a force of police on the
premises. The only demonstration yet made of any kind against the house
was the march from Falcarragh some time ago of a mob of young men, who
promptly withdrew on catching sight of half-a-dozen policemen within the
park gates. As to getting his work done, some of his people had steadily
refused to acknowledge the "boycott," and they were now strengthened by
the attitude of those who had surrendered to the pressure, and were now
sullen and angry with the League which had given them nothing to do, and
no supplies.
At Falcarragh we met a person who knew much about the late Lord Leitrim,
who was murdered in this neighbourhood on the highway some years ago. He
spoke freely of the murderer by name, as if it were matter of common
notoriety. Of the murdered man, he said that he had made himself
extremely unpopular and odious, not so much by certain immoralities
freely alleged at the time of his death, as by vexatious meddling with
the prejudices and whims of his tenants. "He used to go into the houses
and pull down cartoons and placards, if he saw them put up on the
walls." "No! he had no party feeling in the matter; he used to pull down
William III. and the Pope with an equal hand." It seems that in this
region, too, a local legend has grown up of the birth at a place called
Cashelmore of a "Queen of France." The case is worth noting as throwing
light on the genesis and accuracy of local traditions. The "Queen of
France" referred to proves, on inquiry, to have been Miss Patterson, who
married Jerome Bonaparte, brother of the first Emperor, afterwards
created by him King of Westphalia! This Avas the lady so well known in
America as Mrs. Patterson Bonaparte of Baltimore, who died at a great
age only a few years ago. I have no reason to suppose that she was born
at Cashelmore at all or in Ireland. But her father, reputed in the time
of Washington to be the richest man in the United States, who came from
the North of Ireland and settled in Baltimore as a merchant, may very
well have been born there.
To my great regret Father M'Fadden of Glena, or Falcarragh, was absent
from home. As we drove homeward we met on the way a young lady on a
smart jaunting-car, with a servant in livery. This was the daughter, our
driver told us, of Mr. Griffiths, the Protestant clergyman, past whose
residence our road lay. His church stands high upon a commanding cliff,
and is a feature in the landscape. We met the parson himself also,
walking with a friend. The road from Bedlam to Derrybeg goes by a region
of the "Rosses," reputed the most woe-begone part of the Gweedore
district. This is the scene of a curious tale told about Father M'Fadden
of Gweedore, by his ill-wishers in these parts, to the effect that he
advises English Members of Parliament and other "sympathising" visitors
who come here to make a pilgrimage to "the Bosses," where, no matter at
what time of day they appear, they invariably find sundry of the people
sitting in their huts and eating stewed seaweed out of iron pots. I
cannot vouch for this tale, but certainly I have seen no people here of
either sex, or of any age, who look as if they lived on stewed seaweed.
Another person at Falcarragh told us, as an illustration of the
influence exerted by Father M'Fadden of Gweedore, in this parish, over
which he has no proper authority, that, in obedience to an intimation
from him, the persons whose seats in the chapel had been occupied on two
successive Sundays by the policemen now stationed here, yesterday
refused to allow the policemen to occupy them, the only exception being
in the case of a man who had been arrested at the same time with Father
Stephens, and who had been so well treated by the police, that he felt
bound to repay their courtesy by offering one of them his seat.
CHAPTER III.
DUNGLOE, _Tuesday, Feb. 7._--We rose early this morning at Gweedore; the
sun shining so brightly that we were forced to drop the window-shades at
breakfast, while I read my letter from Rome, telling me of the bitter
cold there, and of a slight snow-fall last week. Here the birds were
singing, and the air was as soft and exhilarating as that of an April
morning in the Highlands of Mexico or Costa Rica.
Our host gave us a capital car, with a staunch nag and a wide-awake
jarvey, thanks to all which I found the thirteen miles drive to this
place too short. No doubt it will be a great thing for Donegal when
"light railways" are laid down here. But I pity the traveller of the
future here, if he is never to know the delight of traversing these wild
and picturesque wastes in such weather as we have had to-day, on a car,
well-balanced by a single pleasant companion, drinking, as he goes,
deep draughts of the Atlantic air! Truly on a jaunting-car "two are
company and three are none." You have almost the free companionship of a
South American journey in the saddle, jumping off to walk, when you
like, more freely still.
We drove near the house of the "beauty of Gweedore," but she was not
visible, though we met her mother (by no means a _pulchra mater_) as we
crossed the Clady at Bryan's Bridge.
We soon passed from the bogland into a wilderness of granite. Our
jarvey, however, maintained that there was "better land among the stones
than any bogland could be." He was a shrewd fellow, and summed up the
economical situation, I thought, better than some of his betters, when
he said of the whole region that "it will fatten four, feed five, and
starve six."
It may well fatten six, though, I should say, if the natural wealth of
this vast granite range can be properly turned to account. On every side
of us lay vast blocks of granite of all hues and grades, all absolutely
unworked, but surely not unworkable. We stopped and picked up many
specimens, some of them almost as rich in colour as porphyry. Of lakes
and lakelets supplying water-power the name too, is legion.
Beyond Annagary we caught a glimpse of the Isle of Arran, the scene, a
few years ago, of so much suffering, and that of a kind I should think
as much beyond the control of legislation as the misery and destruction
which have overtaken successive attempts to establish settlements on
Anticosti in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
This town of Dungloe sprawls along the shore of the sea. It is reputed
the most ill-favoured town in Donegal, and it certainly is not a dream
of beauty. But it blooms all over with evidences of the prosperity of
that interesting type of Irish civilisation, the "Gombeen man," of whom
I had heard so much at Gweedore. Over the doorways of most of the shops
appear the names of various members of the family of Sweeney, all of
them, I am told, brought here and established within a few years past by
the head of the sept, who is not only the great "Gombeen man" of the
region, but a leading local member of the National League, and Her
Majesty's Postmaster. The Sweeneys, in fact, commercially speaking,
dominate Dungloe, their, only visible rivals being a returned Irish
American, who has built himself a neat two-story house and shop just at
the entrance of the village, and our own host, Mr. Maurice Boyle, whose
extremely neat little inn just faces a large shop, the stronghold of the
Chief of the Sweeneys. I am sorry to find that this important citizen of
Dungloe is not now here. We went into his chief establishment to make
some purchases, and found it full of customers, chiefly women, neatly
dressed after the Donegal fashion, and busily chaffering with the
shopgirls and shopmen, who had their hands full, exhibiting goods such
as certainly would not be found in any New York or New England village
of this sort. When we secured the attention of the chief shopman, a
nattily dressed, dark-haired young man who would not have discredited
the largest "store" in Grand Street or the Bowery of New York, we asked
him to show us some of the home-made woollen goods of the country.
These, he assured us, had no sale in Dungloe, and he did not keep them.
But he showed us piles of handsome Scottish tweeds at much higher
prices. Now as this is an exclusively agricultural region, it is evident
that the tenants must be able to make it worth a trader's while to keep
on hand such goods as we here found, and therefore that they cannot be
exactly on "the ragged edge" of things.
Mr. Sweeney is also the proprietor of the chief "hotel" of Dungloe; our
host, Mr. Boyle, being in fact supposed to be "boycotted" for
entertaining officers of the police. This "boycott," however, has
entailed no practical inconvenience upon us; and Mr. Boyle's pretty and
plucky daughters, who manage his house for him, laughed scornfully at
the notion of being "bothered" by it.
After luncheon we took a car and drove out to Burtonport, on the Roads
of Arranmore, to visit the parish priest there, Father Walker, and Mr.
Hammond, the agent of the Conyngham estates.
We passed near a large inland lake, Lough Meela, and the seaward views
along the coast were very fine. With peace and order this corner of
Ireland might easily become the chosen site of the most delightful
seaside homes in the United Kingdom. The Recorder of Cork has discovered
this, and passes a great part of the year here. This Donegal coast is no
further from the great centres of British wealth and population than are
Mount Desert and the other summer resorts of Maine and New Hampshire
from New York and Philadelphia; and the islands which break the great
roll of the Atlantic here cannot well be more nearly in "a state of
nature" than were the Isles of Shoals, for example, in my college days,
long after Mr. Lowell first wandered there with the transcendental
Thaxters to celebrate the thunders of the surf at Appledore.
The wonderful granitic formations we had seen on the way from Gweedore
stretch all along the coast to the Roads of Arranmore. At Burtonport
they lie on the very water's edge. At a place called Lickeena, masses of
beautiful salmon-and rose-coloured granite actually trend into the
tidewater, and at Burtonport proper is a promontory of that
richly-mottled granite which I had supposed to be the peculiar heritage
of Peterhead, and which is now largely exported from Scotland to the
United States. Why should not this Irish granite be shipped directly
from Donegal to America, there to be built up into cathedrals, and
shaped into monuments for the Exiles of Erin? All these formations which
we have seen present themselves in great cubical blocks, so jointed that
they may be detached without blasting, with great comparative ease, and
with little of the waste which results from the squaring of shapeless
masses. At the same time, as we saw while coming from Gweedore, the
many lakes of this region offer all the water-power necessary for
polishing-works, columnar lathes, and the general machinery used in
developing such quarries. Without being an expert in granites, I have
seen enough of the granite works at home to feel quite sure that a
moderate and judiciously managed investment here ought to return a
handsome result. If the National League is as well off as it is reputed
to be, it might go into this business open a new and remunerative
industry to the people of a "congested" district, and earn dividends
large enough to enable it to pay the expenses of the war against England
at Westminster, without drawing on the savings of the servant-girls in
America, The only person likely to suffer would be the "Gombeen man," if
the peasantry earned enough to pay off their debts to him, and stop the
flow of interest into his coffers.
At Burtonport we found the "Gombeen man," of Dungloe, represented by a
very large "store." He runs steamers between this place and various
ports on the Scottish and Irish coasts, bringing in goods and taking out
the crops which his debtors turn over to him.
This Burtonport "store" towers high above the modest home of the parish
priest, Father Walker. To our great regret he was absent on parochial
duty, but his niece very kindly welcomed us into his modest study, where
we left a note begging him to honour us with his company at dinner in
Dungloe.
Mr. Hammond, too, was absent, so after paying our respects to his wife,
we drove back to Dungloe, and walked about the village till dark,
chatting with the good-natured, civil people. The local sensation here
they tell us is not the trial of the priests at Dunfanaghy, but a "row"
breeding between the chief of the Sweeneys and one of his brethren over
the possession of Her Majesty's Post-office. It seems there is an
official regulation or custom that the post-office once established in a
particular building shall not be moved thence without positive cause
shown. The head of the Sweeneys, having completed his new and grand
establishment, wishes to move the post-office thither; but the brother
to whom he confided the office in the older building, where he left it
while making the change of his own business, now desires to keep the
office where it is, and, I suppose, to become postmaster himself![17] A
trivial matter enough, but not without edification for students of the
actual situation in this most curious country.
About seven o'clock Father Walker made his appearance--a fine-looking,
dignified, most amiable man. He is a teetotaller, which we esteemed a
stroke of good fortune, a bottle of port wine which we obtained, despite
the "boycott," from the Gombeen shop, proving to be of such a quality
that it might have been concocted in the last century, expressly to
discredit the Methuen treaty.
Father Walker is the President of the National League branch.
Like Father M'Fadden at Gweedore, he speaks of the landlords in this
part of Donegal as really owning, not so much farms as residential
grounds for tenants who export their thews and sinews to Scotland and
other countries, and live by that traffic mainly. It is a common
practice here, he tells me, for the children, who are very sharp and
bright, to be taken by their parents into Tyrone and other parts of the
North, and put out to live with the people there, who prize them, and
pay very good wages. I asked him if he thought the official estimate I
had seen of the proportion of these "migratory labourers" to the whole
population of Ulster, as about one-tenth of one per cent., an
under-statement. He thought it was an under-statement for this part of
the county of Donegal, but to be explained, perhaps, by the fact that so
much of the migration is merely from one county into another, and not
out of the kingdom. He agreed that the practice goes on upon a much more
extensive scale in the County Mayo, where more than thirteen per cent,
of all the adult male population are said to belong to the category of
migratory labourers. The Irish population of England seems to be
recruited at regular seasons in this way, very much as is the Albanian
population of Constantinople.
Father Walker was full of information about the granite quarries, and
much interested in the prospect of their development. He told us that a
practical engineer from Liverpool had, not long ago, been here seeking a
lease of the quarries--or, in other words, of the quarrying rights over
sixty or seventy miles of Donegal--from the agent of Lord Conyngham.
This engineer had come to Donegal on a sporting expedition last year,
and gone back full of the capabilities of the granite region. Father
Walker had been told by him that similar quarries also exist in the
County Mayo at Belmullet, where preparations are now making, he thinks,
to develop them, though on a smaller scale than would be both
practicable and desirable here.
In Mayo, as in Donegal, labour must be plentiful enough, and the
comparatively unskilled labour required in such quarries would be
particularly abundant here. It would be a great thing, Father Walker
thought, to introduce here the custom of a regular pay-day, and with it
gradually habits of exactness and economy, not easily developed without
it.
He gave me also, at my request, some valuable information as to the
stipends of the Catholic clergy, and the sources from which they are
derived. This subject has been agitated in the local press of this part
of Ireland in connection with estimates of Father M'Fadden's income at
Gweedore, which Father M'Fadden declares, I believe, to be greatly
exaggerated. Father Walker has been parish priest at Burtonport for
about nine years. In all that time the highest sum reached in one year
by the stipend has been £560; this sum having to be divided between the
parish priest, who received £280, and two curates receiving £140 each.
The annual stipend, however, has more than once fallen below £480, and
Father Walker thinks £520 a fair average, giving £260 to the parish
priest, and £130 each to his curates. Where there are only two priests
in a parish, as is the case, for example, in each of the parishes of
Gweedore and Falcarragh, the parish priest receives two-thirds, and the
curate one-third of the stipend.
The sources of this stipend are various, and in speaking upon this point
Father Walker desired me to note that he could only speak positively of
the rules of this particular diocese, as they do not cover in their
entirety the usages of other provinces, or even of other dioceses in
this province of Ireland. One general and invariable rule indeed exists
throughout Ireland, which is that every parish priest is bound to offer
the Holy Sacrifice, _pro populo_, for the whole people, without fee or
reward, on all Sundays and Holy Days, making in all some eighty-seven
times a year.
In the diocese of Raphoe, to which Burtonport belongs, there are four
recognised methods by which the revenues of the priests are raised. The
first is an annual fixed stipend of four shillings for each household or
family. "Sometimes," said Father Walker, "but rarely, the better-off
families give more than this; and not unfrequently the poorer families
fail to give anything under this head." The second is a fixed stipend of
one pound upon the occasion of a marriage. "Sometimes, but not often,
this sum is exceeded by generous and prosperous parishioners." The third
is a standard stipend of two shillings for a baptism. "This also
suffers, but on rare occasions," said the good priest, "a favourable
exception. I mention the exceptions as well as the rules," said the good
Father, "in order to make grateful allusion to the donors."
The fourth and last consists of the offerings at interments. "These vary
very much indeed, but they constitute an important, and, I may say, a
necessary item in the incomes of the clergy."
Besides these four forms of stipend, the priests derive a revenue from
"those who ask them to offer the Holy Sacrifice 'for their special
intention.'" In such cases it is customary to offer a sum, usually of
two shillings, but sometimes of half-a-crown, which is intended both as
a remuneration for the priest, and to cover the cost of altar
requisites.
Father Walker estimates the families in his own parish in round numbers
at about thirteen hundred, and in Gweedore and Falcarragh at about nine
hundred each. We had some conversation about the great fisheries, which
one would think ought to exist, but do not exist, on this coast, such
fishing as is done here by the natives being on a very limited scale.
Father Walker tells me that formerly £80,000 worth of herring were taken
on this coast, though he is not sure that Donegal fishermen took them.
But of late years he thinks the herring have deserted these waters. He
admits, however, that the people have no liking for the sea. "Going over
once," he said, "to Arranmore from the mainland in a boat with a priest
of the country, the water was a little rough, and the poor man nearly
pinched a piece out of my arm holding on to me!" Father Walker himself
thought the trip across the "sound" to Tory Island rather a ticklish
piece of business. Yet the natives make it sometimes in their little
corraghs or canvas boats, which would seem to show that some of them
must be capable of seamanship. Most of these islands, notably
Arranmore, Father Walker thought quite incapable of supporting the
people who dwell on them, without constant help from the mainland. Is it
not an open question whether an age which countenances the condemnation
of private property in houses declared unfit for human habitation ought
to hesitate at dealing in the same spirit with nurseries of chronic
penury and intermittent famine? On one of these islands, known as Scull
Island, Father Walker tells me great quantities of human bones are found
in circular graves or trenches, very shallow, and going all around the
island. There are legends of great battles fought on the little island,
and of pestilences, to account for these. But it is likely enough that
the island was simply used as a cemetery by the dwellers on the shore at
some early date. Father Walker when he was last, there had brought away
some of these relics. One he showed us, the beautifully formed jawbone
of a young child, apparently ten or twelve years old, with exquisite
pearly teeth. The chin was not in the least prognathous, but very well
formed. In this district of Dungloe, too, the women weave and knit as
well as at Gweedore; and Father Walker, before he left us for his home,
after a most agreeable evening, promised to send me some specimens of
their handiwork. He is sure that with a proper organisation this
industry might be so developed as to materially relieve the people here
from the pressure of their debts to the dealers of all kinds, a pressure
much more severe than that of the rent. According to the dealers
themselves, no tenant really in debt to them can now expect to work
himself free of the burden under four or five years. It is obvious how
much power, political as well as social, is thus lodged in the hands of
the dealers, and especially of the "Gombeen men."
BARON'S COURT, _Wednesday, Feb. 8._--Since last night I have travelled
from one extreme to the other of Irish life--from the desolation of the
Rosses of Donegal to the grandly wooded, picturesque, and beautiful
demesne of Baron's Court. We made an early start from Dungloe on a
capital car for Letterkenny, where we were to strike the railway for
Strabane and Newtown-Stewart. The morning was clear, but cold. On
leaving Dungloe we drove directly into a region of reclaimed land, where
improvements of various kinds seemed to be going on. All this our
jarvey informed us, with a knowing look, belonged to Mr. Sweeney.
"Was he a squire of this country?" I asked innocently.
"A squire of this country, sorr? He is just Mr. Sweeney, the Gombeen
man; he and his brothers, they all came here from where I don't know."
An energetic man, certainly, Mr. Sweeney, and not likely, I should
think, to allow the National League, to push matters here to the point
of nationalising the land of Donegal, if he can prevent it. In the
highway we met, two or three miles out of Dungloe, a very trim dainty
little lady, in a long, well-fitting London waterproof ulster, with a
natty little umbrella in her hand, walking merrily towards the town. How
weatherwise she was soon appeared, the rain coming up suddenly, and
coming down sharply, in the whirling way it has among the hills
everywhere. The scenery was desolate, but grand. Countless little lochs
give sparkle and life to it. Everywhere the granite. About Doocharry, a
romantic little spot, where Lord Cloncurry has a fishing-box in the
heart of a glorious landscape, masses crop out of a rich red granite,
finer in colour than any we had previously seen. In that neighbourhood
the wastes of Donegal take on an aspect which recalls, though upon quite
a different key in colour, the inimitable beauty of those treeless
North-western highlands of Scotland, upon which Nature has lavished all
the wealth of her palette. Vast spaces of brown and red and gold shimmer
away under the softly luminous mountain atmosphere to the dark blues and
purples of the hills. We passed Glen Veagh again, but from quite a
different point of view, which gave us a beautiful picture of Lough
Veagh in its length, and of the smiling pastoral landscape upon its
further shore.
As we drew near the eastern boundary of Donegal, hedges and civilised
agriculture reappeared. With these we came upon mud cottages, such as I
had not seen in Donegal, being the huts provided for their labourers by
the tenant-farmers, whose comfortable stone-houses and out-buildings
stood well back under the long ranges of the hills.
We passed through much striking scenery, perhaps the finest point being
a magnificent Gap in the hills, guarded and defined by three colossal
headlands, one of them a vast long rampart, the other two gigantic
counterscarps. The immediate approach to Letterkenny, too, from the west
is charming, passing in full view of the extensive and beautiful park
and the large mansion of Colonel Stewart of the Guards, and skirting the
well-kept estate of Mr. Boyd, the owner of the ivy-clad cottages which
so took my fancy the other day.
In the Ulster settlement under King James I. a patent for Letterkenny
was issued to one of the Crawfords. Then, as the records tell us, "Sir
George Marburie dwelt there, and there were forty houses all inhabited
by British tenants. A great market town, and standeth well for the
King's service."
Again we found a fair going on--this time attended by swarms of peddlers
vending old clothes and all sorts of small wares, bread-cartmen, and
tea-vendors. These latter aver that it is easier to sell tea in the
"congested" districts at 4s. 6d. than at 2s. 6d. The people have no test
of its quality but its price!
The town was gay with soldiers and police--whose advent had created such
a demand for bread and meat, a man told us, that all the butchers and
bakers in Letterkenny and Dunfanaghy were at their wits' ends to meet
it. "But they don't complain of that!" We reached Newtown-Stewart by
railway after dark. As we passed Sion the mills were all lighted up,
giving it the look of an English or New England town. A New England
snow-storm, too, awaited us at our journey's end; and, after a wild
drive of several miles through the whirling white mists, it was a
delectable thing to find ourselves welcomed in a hall full of light and
warmth and flowers by merry children and lively dogs, the guard of
honour of the most gracious and charming of hostesses.
BARON'S COURT, _Thursday, Feb. 9._--Among a batch of letters received
this morning I find one from a most estimable and accomplished priest in
the West of Ireland, to whom I wrote from Dublin announcing my intention
of visiting the counties of Clare and Kerry. "I shall be very glad," he
says, "to learn that no evil hath befallen you during your visit to that
solitary plague-spot, where dwell the disgraceful and degraded
'Moonlighters.' Would not 'martial law,' if applied to that particular
spot, suffice to stamp out, these-insensate pests of society?" This
language, strong, but not too strong in view of the hideous murder last
week near Lixnaw of a farmer in the presence of his daughter for the
atrocious crime of taking a farm "boycotted" by the National League,
shows that the open alliance between this organisation and the criminal
classes in certain parts of Ireland is beginning (not a day too soon) to
arouse the better order of priests in Ireland to the peril of playing
with edged tools. For my correspondent is not only a priest, but a
Nationalist. I have sent him in reply a letter received by me, also
to-day, touching the conduct in connection with the Lixnaw murder of a
priest, a curate, I think, comparatively new to the place, who,
standing by the corpse of the murdered man, endeavoured, so my informant
states, to make his unfortunate daughter give up the names of the
murderers, the effect of which would have been to put them on their
guard, and "under the protection of that public conspiracy of silence,
which is the shield of all such criminals in these parts!" Baron's Court
is a very large, stately mansion, lacking elevation perhaps like
Blenheim, but imposing by its mass and the area it covers. It was
rebuilt almost entirely by the late Duke of Abercorn, who also made
immense plantations here which cover the country for miles around. His
grandfather, the handsome Marquis of the days of the Prince Regent,
came here a great deal towards the end of his life, but did little
towards making the mansion worthy of its site. Two very good portraits
of him here show that he deserved his reputation as the finest-looking
man of his day, a reputation attested by a diamond ring, the history of
which is still preserved in the family. A fine though irregular pearl
given by Philip of Spain to his hapless spouse, Mary Tudor, is another
of the heirlooms of Baron's Court; but the ring and the note left by
Mary Stuart to Claud Hamilton, Lord Paisley, mysteriously disappeared
during the long minority of the late Duke under the trusteeship of the
fourth Earl of Aberdeen, and have since, it is said, come into the
possession of the Duke of Hamilton.
Of the three castles given to Lord Claud Hamilton by James I., to enable
him to hold this country, one which stood at Strabaue has disappeared,
the memory of it surviving only in the name of Castle Street in that
town. The ivy-clad ruins of another adorn a height in this beautiful
park. They are "bosomed high in tufted trees," and overlook one of three
most lovely lakes, stretching in a shining chain through the length of
the demesne.
Another ruined tower of the time of King John stands on an island in
one of these lakes. When the Ulster settlement was made, these lands
with all the countryside were held by the O'Kanes. With the other Celtic
and Catholic inhabitants, they were driven by the masterful invaders
into the mountains and bogs. There still remain their descendants, still
Celtic and still Catholic, and still dreaming of the day when they shall
descend into the low country and drive the Protestant Scotch and English
from the "fat lands" which they occupy. In this way the racial and
religious animosities are kept alive, which have died out in Tipperary
and Waterford, for example, where the Cromwellian English have become
more Irish and often more Catholic than the Irish themselves.
I took a long drive and walk with Lord Ernest this afternoon through the
park, which rivals Curraghmore in extent. It is nowhere divided from the
lands of the adjoining tenants, and with great liberality is thrown open
to the people, not only of Newtown-Stewart and Strabane, but of all the
country. Parties, sometimes of seven hundred people, from Belfast come
down to pass the day in these sylvan solitudes, and it is to be recorded
to the praise of Ireland that these visitors always behave with perfect
good sense and good feeling.
The "terrible trippers" of the English midlands, as I once heard an old
verger in a northern Cathedral call them, who chip off relics from
monuments, pull up flowers by the roots, and scatter sandwich papers and
empty gingerbeer bottles broadcast over well-rolled lawns, are not
known, Lord Ernest tells me, in this island. As he neatly puts it, the
Irishman, no matter what his station in life may be, or how great a
blackguard he may really be, always instinctively knows when he ought to
behave like a gentleman, and knows how to do so. In the lakes were
hundreds of wild fowl. The sky was a sky of Constable--silvery-white
clouds, floating athwart a dome of clear Italian blue. The soil here
must be extraordinarily fertile. The woods and groves are dense beyond
belief. Cut down what you like, the growth soon overtakes you, as lush
almost as in the tropics.
There was a great cyclone here a year or two ago, which prostrated in a
night over a hundred thousand trees. You see the dentated gaps left by
this disaster in the great circle of firs and birches on the surrounding
hills, but they make hardly a serious break in the thoroughly sylvan
character of the landscape. We visited the centre of the devastation,
where I found myself in what seemed to be a backwoods clearing in
America. An enterprising Scot, Kirkpatrick by name, has taken a contract
under the Duke, built himself a neat wooden cabin and stables, set up a
small saw-mill driven by steam, and is hard at work turning the fallen
trees into timber, and making a very good thing of it, both for the Duke
and for himself. He has one or two of his own people with him, but
employs the labour of the country, and has no fear of disturbance. He
thinks, however, that he must get "a good wicked dog" to frighten away
the tramps, who sometimes stray into his woodland, and put the
enterprise in peril by smoking and drowsing under haystacks.
Near this clearing is a model village, the houses scrupulously neat,
with trees and flowers, and here we met the Duchess with her devoted dog
walking briskly along to visit one of her people, a wonderful old man,
bearing the ancient name of the O'Kanes, and five years older than the
Kaiser William. Until six months ago this veteran was an active
carpenter, coming and going, about his work at ninety-six like a man in
middle age. Then he went to bed with a bad cold, and will probably
never rise again. In all his life he never has touched meat or soup, and
when they are now offered him rejects them angrily. He has lived, and
preferred to live, entirely on oatmeal in the form of cakes and
porridge, and on potatoes; so I make a present of him as a glorious
example to the vegetarians. As in so many other cases, his memory of
recent events is dim and clouded--of events long past, clear and
photographic: the negatives taken in youth quite perfect, the lenses
which now take, dimmed and fractured.
He perfectly recollects, for example, the assembling here of the
recruits going out to the Continent before the battle of Waterloo, and
can give the names and describe the peculiarities of stalwart lads long
since crumbled into dust around Mont St. Jean. With the curious
unconcern about death which marks his people, this expectant emigrant
into the unknown world chats about his departure as if it were for
Dublin, and his kinsfolk chat with him.
"Ye'll be going soon!"
"Oh yes, I shan't trouble ye more than an hour or two more."
In quite another part of the domain we came upon a Covenanter--a true,
authentic Covenanter, who might have walked out of _Old Mortality_; the
name of him, Keyes. He greeted Lord Ernest cheerily enough, nodded to me
in a not unfriendly way, and at once broke into exhortation: "It's a
very short life we live; man that is born of woman is of few days, and
full of trouble. Well for them that are the children of light--if seeing
the light they sin not against it"; and so on with amazing volubility.
There are eighty-five of these Covenanters here. They touch not nor have
touched the accursed thing. To them all parties and all governments are
alike evil. The Whigs persecuted the Solemn League and Covenant--so did
the Tories. Nationalists and Unionists are to them alike abominable,
sold under sin. Withal they are shrewd, canny, successful farmers--and,
as I inferred from sundry incidents, before Lord Ernest confided the
fact to me, not averse from a "right gude williewaught" now and then.
Mr. Keyes, I thought, was not a blue-ribbon man, nor a ribbon-man of any
kind.
The Duchess told me afterwards she had vainly endeavoured more than once
to get these people to vote at elections.
We had a sprinkling of such people, and very good people in quiet times
they were, in the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War, to whom
Federals and Confederates were alike anathema.
We wound up our drive to-day just beyond "the Duke's seat," a little
rustic bench put up by the late Duke on a hill range which commands a
magnificent view over the whole domain of hill and forest and lakes, and
far away to the mountains of Munterlony. There, in the bogs and woods
James Hamilton, "lord baron of Strabane," with "other rebels, unknown,
in his company," hid himself till, after the fall of Charlemont in
August 1650, he was captured by a party of the Commonwealth's
men--whereby, as the record here runs, "all and singular his manors,
towns, lands, and so forth were forfeited to the Commonwealth of
England." Under this pressure he sought "protection," and got it a
fortnight later from Cromwell's General, Sir Charles Coote, whose
descendants still nourish in Wicklow. But on the 31st of December 1650
he "broke the said protection, and joined himself with Sir Phelim
O'Neill, being then in rebellion."
Troublous times those, and a "lord baron of Strabane" needed almost the
alacrity in turning his coat of a harlequin or a modern politician! It
is a comfort to know that at last, on the 16th of June 1655, he found
rest, dying at Ballyfathen, "a Roman Catholic and a papist recusant." As
we came back into the gardens and grounds, Lord Ernest showed me,
imbedded in the earth, a huge anchor presented to the present Duke by
the Corporation of Waterford, as having belonged to the French 28-gun
frigate, on which in 1689 James II. and Lord Abercorn sailed away from
Ireland for Prance. I believe that because of its weight the present
First Lord of the Admiralty avers that it is no anchor at all, but a
buoy fixture. It might have been ten times as heavy, and yet not have
availed to keep James from getting to sea at that particular time.
BARON'S COURT, _Friday, Feb. 10._--Here also, in County Tyrone, the
Irish women show their skill in women's work. Mrs. Dixon, the English
wife of the house-steward of Baron's Court, has charge of a woollen
industry founded here, after a discourse on thrift, delivered at a
temperance meeting of the people by the then Marquis of Hamilton, had
stirred the country up to consider whether the peasant women might not
possibly find some better and more profitable way of passing their
winter evenings than in sitting huddled around a peat fire with their
elbows on their knees, gossiping about their neighbours. Lord Hamilton
cited the women of Gweedore as proofs that such a way might by searching
be found.
The Duke and Duchess found the funds, the stewardess invested them in
buying the necessary yarn and knitting-needles, and the Marchioness of
Hamilton acted as corresponding clerk and business agent of the new
industry. The clothing department of the British army lent a listening
ear to the business proposals made to it, and the work began. From that
time on it has been the main substantial resource against suffering and
starvation of the families of some three hundred labourers in the hill
country near Baron's Court.
These labourers work for the small farmers from April to November; and
between the autumn and the spring their wives and daughters knit, and by
the Baron's Court machinery are enabled to dispose of, nearly twenty
thousand pairs of woollen socks. The yarns are brought from Edinburgh to
the store-house at Baron's Court. Thither every Wednesday come the
knitters. Mrs. Dixon weighs the hanks of yarn, and gives them out.
On the following Wednesday the knitters reappear, each with her bale of
stockings or socks. These are again weighed, and the knitters receive
their pay according to the weight, quality, and size of the goods. In
some families there are four, five, or six knitters. All these people,
with four or five exceptions, are small cottars living on wretched
little mountain farms, not on the Duke of Abercorn's property; and but
for this industry they would be absolutely without employment all the
winter through.
Some of them come from a distance of twelve or fourteen miles, and but
for this resource would literally starve. They are nearly all of them
Catholics, and the Protestants here being Unionists, they are probably
Nationalists. About three hundred knitters in all are employed. In the
year 1886-87 the orders given for Baron's Court work enabled Mrs. Dixon
to pay out regularly about five pounds a week, not including casual
private orders. For the current year the orders have been much larger,
and the expenditure proportionally greater. Mrs. Dixon's storehouse was
full of goods to-day. The long knickerbocker stockings which she showed
us were remarkably good, some in "cross-gartered" patterns, handsomer,
I thought, than similar goods in the Scottish Highlands--and all of them
staunch and well-proportioned.
For socks such as are supplied to the volunteers and the troops the War
Office pays 8-3/4d. a pair.
It was pleasant to learn from Mrs. Dixon that these people thoroughly
appreciate the spirit which prompted and still directs this enterprise.
Last spring when the Duchess was thought for a time to be hopelessly
ill, a young girl came down to Baron's Court weeping bitterly. On her
arm was a basket, in which were two young chanticleers crowing lustily.
The poor girl said these were all she had, and she had brought them "to
make soup for the Duchess, for she heard that was what the great people
lived on, and it might save her life."
This afternoon I went over by the railway to Derry with Lord Ernest to
attend a meeting there. The "Maiden City" stands picturesquely on the
Foyle, and has a fine, though not large, cathedral of St. Colomb,
restored only last year, of which it may be noted that the work never
was undertaken while the Protestant Church of Ireland was established by
law, and has been successfully carried out since the disendowment of
that Church. The streets were white with snow, but the meeting in the
old Town Hall was largely attended. It was, in fact, a sort of Orange
symposium--tea being served at long tables, and the platform decorated
with a pianoforte. The Mayor of the city presided, and between the
speeches, songs, mostly in the Pyramus or condoling vein, were sung by a
local tenor of renown. It was very like an American tea-fight in the
country, and the audience were unquestionably enthusiastic. They quite
cheered themselves hoarse when Lord Ernest Hamilton reminded them that
he had made his first political speech in that hall on a "memorable
occasion," when, being an as yet unfledged Parliamentarian, he had taken
a hand in a successful attempt to prevent the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Mr.
Dawson, from making a speech in Derry. One of my neighbours, a merchant
in the city, told me that a project is afoot for tearing down the old
hall in which we met "to enlarge the street," but he added that "the
people of Derry were too proud of their history to allow it!"
I understood him to say it is one of the very few buildings in Derry
which witnessed the famous siege, and the breaking of the boom.
We left the "revel" early, caught a fast train to Newtown-Stewart, and
returned here an hour ago through a driving snowstorm, most dramatically
arranged to enhance the glow and genial charm of our welcome.
BARON'S COURT, _Saturday, Feb. 11th._--All the world was white with snow
this morning. Alas! for the deluded birds we have been listening to for
days past; thrushes, larks, and as, I believe, blackbirds, though there
is a tradition in these parts that no man ever heard the blackbird sing
before the 15th of February. I suspect it grew out of the date of St.
Valentine's Day. We had some lovely music, however, within doors this
morning; and, in spite of the snow and the chill wind, a little fairy of
a girl, with her groom, went off like mad across country on her pony,
"Guinea Pig," to fetch the mails from Newtown-Stewart.
Not long after breakfast came in from Letterkenny Sergeant Mahony of the
constabulary, on whose testimony Father M'Fadden was convicted. We had
heard at Letterkenny that he was now on leave at Belfast, and Lord
Ernest had kindly arranged matters so that he should come here and
tell us his story of Gweedore.
An admirable specimen he is of a most admirable body of men. He is as
thoroughly Celtic in aspect as he is by name--a dark Celt, with a quiet
resolute face, and a wiry well-built frame.
Nothing could be better than his manner and bearing, at once respectful
and self-respectful: that manner of a natural gentleman one so often
sees in the Irish peasant. He is a devout Catholic, but no admirer of
Father M'Fadden.
As to his evidence, he explains very clearly that he was not sent to
report Father M'Fadden's speech at all, but to note and take down and
report language used in the speech of a sort to excite the people
against the law. He was selected for this duty for three reasons: he is
a Donegal man who has lived at Gweedore for sixteen years; he is a fair
stenographer; and he speaks Irish, in which language Father M'Fadden
made his speech.
"I speak Irish quite as well as he does," said the Sergeant quietly,
"and he knows I do. What I did was to put down in English words what I
heard said in Irish. This I had to do because I have no stenographic
signs for the Irish words." He tells me he taught himself stenography.
"As for Father M'Fadden," he said, "he told the people that' he was the
law in Gweedore, and they should heed no other.' He spoke the truth,
too, for he makes himself the law in Gweedore. He dislikes me because I
am a living proof that he is not the only law in Gweedore!" Of the
business shrewdness and ability of Father M'Fadden, Sergeant Mahony
expressed a very high opinion, though hardly in terms which would have
gratified such an ecclesiastic as the late Cardinal Barnabo. Possibly
Cardinal Cullen might have relished them no better. "Certainly he has
the finest house in Gweedore, sir, and what's more he made it the finest
himself."
"Do you mean that he built it?"
"He did, indeed; and did you not notice the beautiful stone fences he is
putting up all about it, and the four farms he has?"
"Then he is certainly a man of substance?"
"And of good substance, sir! The Government, they gave him a hundred
pounds towards the house. But it was the flood that was the blessed
thing for him and made a great man of him!"
"The flood?" I asked, with some natural astonishment; "the flood? What
flood?"
"And did you never hear of the great flood of Gweedore? It was in
August 1880. You will mind the water that comes down behind the chapel?
Well, there was a flood, and it swelled, and it swelled, and it burst
the small pipe there behind the chapel: too small it was entirely for
carrying off' the great water, and nobody took notice of it, or that
there was anything wrong, and so the water was piled up behind the
chapel, and at Mass on the Sunday, while the chapel was full, the walls
gave way, and the water rushed in, and was nine feet deep. There were
five people that couldn't get out in time, and were drowned--two old
people and three children, young people. It was a great flood. And
Father M'Fadden wrote about it--oh, he is a clever priest with the
pen--and they made a great subscription in London for the poor people
and the chapel. I can't rightly say how much, but it was in the papers,
a matter of seven hundred pounds, I have heard say. And it was all sent
to Father M'Fadden."
"And it was spent, of course," I said, "on the repairs of the chapel, or
given to the relatives of the poor people who were drowned."
"Oh, no doubt; very likely it was, sir! But the repairs of the
chapel--there isn't a mason in Donegal but will tell you a hundred
pounds would not be wanted to make the chapel as good as it ever was.
And for the people that were drowned--two of them were old people, as I
said to you, sir, that had no kith or kin to be relieved, and for the
others they were of well-to-do people that would not wish to take
anything from the parish."
"What was done with it, then?"
"Oh! that I can't tell ye. It was spent for the people some way. You
must ask Father M'Fadden. He is the fund in Gweedore, just as he is the
law in Gweedore. Oh! they came from all parts to see the great ruin of
the flood at Gweedore. They did, indeed. And some of them, it was poor
sight they had; they couldn't see the big rift in the walls, when Father
M'Fadden pointed it out to them. 'Whisht! there it is!' he would say,
pointing with his finger. Then they saw it!"
I asked him at what figure he put the income of Father M'Fadden from his
parish. Without a moment's hesitation he answered, "It's over a thousand
pounds a year, sir, and nearer twelve hundred than eleven." I expressed
my surprise at this, the whole rental of Captain Hill, the landlord,
falling, as I had understood, below rather than above £700 a year; and
Gweedore, as Father Walker had told me, containing fewer houses than
Burtonport.
"Fewer houses, mayhap," said the sergeant, "though I'm not sure of that;
but if fewer they pay more. There's but one curate--poor man, he does
all the parish work, barring the high masses, and a good man he is, but
he gets £400 a year, and that is but a third of the income!"
I asked by what special stipends the priest's income at Gweedore could
be thus enhanced. "Oh, it's mainly the funeral-money that helps it up,"
he replied. "You see, sir, since Father M'Fadden came to Gweedore it's
come to be the fashion."
"The fashion?" I said.
"Yes, sir, the fashion. This is the way it is, you see. When a poor
creature comes to be buried--no matter who it is, a pauper, or a tenant,
or any one--the people all go to the chapel; and every man he walks up
and lays his offering for the priest on the coffin; and the others, they
watch him. And, you see, if a man that thinks a good deal of himself
walks up and puts down five shillings, why, another man that thinks less
of him, and more of himself, he'll go up and make it a gold ten-shilling
piece, or perhaps even a sovereign! I've known Father M'Fadden, sir, to
take in as much as £15 in a week in that way."
Sergeant Mahony told us a curious tale, too, of the way in which Father
M'Fadden dealt with the people of the neighbouring parish of Falcarragh.
He would go down to the parish boundary, if he wanted to address the
people of Falcarragh, and stand over the line, with one foot in each
parish!
At our request Sergeant Mahony made some remarks in Irish; very wooing
and winning they were in sound. Before he left Baron's Court he promised
to make out and send me a schedule of the parochial income at Gweedore,
under the separate heads of the sources whence it is derived.
Obviously Sergeant Mahony would make a good "devil's advocate" at the
canonization of Father M'Fadden. But, all allowances made for this, one
thing would seem to be tolerably clear. Of the three personages who take
tribute of the people of Gweedore, the law intervenes in their behalf
with only one--the landlord. The priest and the "Gombeen man" deal with
them on the old principle of "freedom of contract." But it is by no
means so clear which of the three exacts and receives the greatest
tribute.
We leave Baron's Court in an hour for Dublin, whence I go on alone
to-night into Queen's County.
CHAPTER IV.
ABBEYLEIX, _Sunday, Feb. 12._--Newtown-Stewart, through which I drove
yesterday afternoon with Lord Ernest to the train, is a prettily
situated town, with the ruins of a castle in which James II. slept for a
night on his flight to France. He was cordially received, and by way of
showing his satisfaction left the little town in flames when he
departed. Here appears to be a case, not of rack-renting, but of
absenteeism. The town belongs to a landlord who lives in Paris, and
rarely, if ever, comes here. There are no improvements--no
sanitation--but the inhabitants make no complaint. "Absenteeism" has its
compensations as well as its disadvantages. They pay low rents, and are
little troubled; the landlord drawing, perhaps, £400 a year from the
whole place. The houses are small, though neat enough in appearance, but
the town has a sleepy, inert look. On the railway between Dundalk and
Newry, we passed a spot known by the ominous name of "The Hill of the
Seven Murders," seven agents having been murdered there since 1840! I
suppose this must be set down to the force of habit. At Newry a cavalry
officer whom Lord Ernest knew got into our carriage. He was full of
hunting, and mentioned a place to which he was going as a "very fine
country."
"From the point of view of the picturesque?" I asked.
"Oh no! from the point of view of falling off your horse!"
At Maple's Hotel I found a most hospitable telegram, insisting that I
should give up my intention of spending the night at Maryborough, and
come on to this lovely place in my host's carriage, which would be sent
to meet me at that station. I left Kingsbridge Station in Dublin about 7
P.M. We had rather a long train, and I observed a number of people
talking together about one of the carriages before we started; but there
was no crowd at all, and nothing to attract special attention. As we
moved out of the station, some lads at the end of the platform set up a
cheer. We ran on quietly till we reached Kildare. There quite a
gathering awaited our arrival on the platform, and as we slowed up, a
cry went up from among them of, "Hurrah for Mooney! hurrah for Mooney!"
The train stopped just as this cry swelled most loudly, when to my
surprise a tall man in the gathering caught one or two of the people by
the shoulder, shaking them, and called out loudly, "Hurrah for
Gilhooly--you fools, hurrah for Gilhooly!"
This morning I learned that I had the honour, unwittingly, of travelling
from Dublin to Maryborough with Mr. Gilhooly, M.P., who appears to have
been arrested in London on Friday, brought over yesterday by the day
train, and sent on at once from Dublin to his destined dungeon.
An hour's drive through a rolling country, showing white and weird under
its blanket of snow in the night, brought us to this large, rambling,
delightful house, the residence of Viscount de Vesci. Mr. Gladstone came
here from Lord Meath's on his one visit to Ireland some years ago. I
find the house full of agreeable and interesting people; and the chill
of the drive soon vanished under the genial influences of a light
supper, and of pleasant chat in the smoking-room. A good story was told
there, by the way, of Archbishop Walsh, who being rather indiscreetly
importuned to put his autograph on a fan of a certain Conservative lady
well known in London, and not a little addicted to lion-hunting,
peremptorily refused, saying, "no, nor any of the likes of her!" And
another of Father Nolan, a well-known priest, who died at the age of
ninety-seven. When someone remonstrated with him on his association with
an avowed unbeliever in Christianity, like Mr. Morley, Father Nolan
replied, "Oh, faith will come with time!" The same excellent priest,
when he came to call on Mr. Gladstone, here at Abbeyleix, on his arrival
from the Earl of Meath's, pathetically and patriarchally adjured him, on
his next visit to Ireland, "not to go from one lord's house to another,
but to stay with the people." This was better than the Irish journal
which, finding itself obliged to chronicle the fact that Mr. Gladstone,
with his wife and daughter, was visiting Abbeyleix, gracefully observed
that he "had been entrapped into going there!" Some one lamenting the
lack of Irish humour and spirit in the present Nationalist movement, as
compared with the earlier movements, Lord de Vesci cited as a solitary
but refreshing instance of it, the incident which occurred the other day
at an eviction in Kerry,[18] of a patriotic priest who chained himself
to a door, and put it across the entrance of the cabin to keep out the
bailiffs!
It is discouraging to know that this delightful act was bitterly
denounced by some worthy and well-meaning Tory in Parliament as an
"outrage"!
Despite the snow the air this morning, in this beautiful region, is soft
and almost warm, and all the birds are singing again. The park borders
upon and opens into the pretty town of Abbeyleix, the broad and
picturesque main thoroughfare of which, rather a rural road than a
street, is adorned with a fountain and cross, erected in memory of the
late Lord de Vesci. There is a good Catholic chapel here (the ancient
abbey which gave the place its name stood in the grounds of the present
mansion), and a very handsome Protestant Church.
It is a curious fact that two of the men implicated in the Phoenix Park
murders had been employed, one, I believe, as a mason, and one as a
carver, in the construction of this church. Both the chapel and the
church to-day were well attended. I am told there has been little real
trouble here, nor has the Plan of Campaign been adopted here. Sometimes
Lord de Vesci finds threatening images of coffins and guns scratched in
the soil, with portraits indicating his agent or himself; but these mean
little or nothing. Lady de Vesci, who loves her Irish home, and has done
and is doing a good deal for the people here, tells me, as an amusing
illustration of the sort of terrorism formerly established by the local
organisations, that when she met two of the labourers on the place
together, they used to pretend to be very busy and not to see her. But
if she met one alone, he greeted her just as respectfully as ever.
The women here do a great deal of embroidery and lace work, in which she
encourages them, but this industry has suffered what can only be a
temporary check, from the change of fashion in regard to the wearing of
laces. Why the loveliest of all fabrics made for the adornment of women
should ever go "out of fashion" would be amazing if anything in the
vagaries of that occult and omnipotent influence could be. The Irish
ladies ought to circulate Madame de Piavigny's exquisite _Lime
d'Heures_, with its incomparable illustrations by Carot and Meaulle,
drawn from the lace work of all ages and countries, as a tonic against
despair in respect to this industry. In one of the large rooms of her
own house, Lady de Vesci has established and superintends a school of
carving for the children of poor tenants. It has proved a school of
civilisation also. The lads show a remarkable aptitude for the arts of
design, and of their own accord make themselves neat and trim as soon as
they begin to understand what it is they are doing. They are always busy
at home with their drawings and their blocks, and some of them are
already beginning to earn money by their work.
What I have seen at Adare Manor near Limerick, where the late Earl of
Dunraven educated all the workmen employed on that mansion as
stone-cutters and carvers, suffices to show that the people of this
country have not lost the aptitudes of which we see so many proofs in
the relics of early Irish art.
Among the guests in the house is a distinguished officer, Colonel
Talbot, who saw hard service in Egypt, and in the advance on Khartoum,
with camels across the desert--a marvellous piece of military work. I
find that he was in America in 1864-65, with Meade and Hunt and Grant
before Petersburg, being in fact the only foreign officer then present.
He there formed what seem to me very sound and just views as to the
ability of the Federal commanders in that closing campaign of the Civil
War, and spoke of Hunt particularly with much admiration. Of General
Grant he told me a story so illustrative of the simplicity and modesty
which were a keynote in his character that I must note it. The day
before the evacuation of Petersburg by the Con federates, Grant was
urged to order an attack upon the Confederate positions. He refused to
do so. The next day the Confederates were seen hastily abandoning them.
Grant watched them quietly for a while, and then putting down his glass,
said to one of the officers who had urged the assault, "You were right,
and I was wrong. I ought to have attacked them."
It is provoking to know that the notes taken by this British officer at
that time, being sent through the Post Office by him some years ago to
Edinburgh for publication, were lost in the transmission, and have never
been recovered. Curiously enough, however, he thinks he has now and then
discerned indications in articles upon the American War, published in a
newspaper which he named, going to show that his manuscripts are in
existence somewhere.
ABBEYLEIX, _Monday, Feb. 13._--To-day, in company with Lord de Vesci
and a lady, I went over to Kilkenny. We left and arrived in a snowstorm,
but the trip was most interesting. Kilkenny, chiefly known in America, I
fear, as the city of the cats, is a very picturesque place, thanks to
its turrets and towers. It has two cathedrals, a Bound Tower (one of
these in Dublin was demolished in the last century!), a Town Hall with a
belfry, and looming square and high above the town, the Norman keep of
its castle. The snow enlivened rather than diminished the scenic effect
of the place. Bits of old architecture here and there give character to
the otherwise commonplace streets. Notable on the way to the castle is a
bit of mediaeval wall with Gothic windows, and fretted with the
scutcheon in stone of the O'Sheas. The connection of a gentleman of this
family with the secret as well as the public story of the Parnellite
movement may one day make what Horace Greeley used to call "mighty
interestin' reading." A dealer in spirits now occupies what is left of
the old Parliament House of Kilkenny, in which the rival partisans of
Preston and O'Neill outfought the legendary cats, to the final ruin of
the cause of the Irish confederates, and the despair of the loyal
legate of Pope Innocent.
Of Kilkenny Castle, founded by Strongbow, but two or three towers
remain. The great quadrangle was rebuilt in 1825, and much of it again
so late as in 1860. There is little, therefore, to recall the image of
the great Marquis who, if Rinuccini read him aright, played so
resolutely here two centuries and a half ago for the stakes which Edward
Bruce won and lost at Dundalk. The castle of the Butlers is now really a
great modern house.
The town crowds too closely upon it, but the position is superb. The
castle windows look clown upon the Nore, spanned by a narrow ancient
bridge, and command, not only all that is worth seeing in the town, but
a wide and glorious prospect over a region which is even now beautiful,
and in summer must be charming.
Over the ancient bridge the enterprise of a modern brewer last week
brought a huge iron vat, so menacingly ponderous that the authorities
made him insure the bridge for a day.
Within the castle, near the main entrance, are displayed some
tapestries, which are hardly shown to due advantage in that position.
They were made here at Kilkenny in a factory established by Piers
Butler, Earl of Ormonde, in the sixteenth century, and they ought to be
sent to the Irish Exhibition of this year in London, as proving what
Irish art and industry well directed could then achieve. They are
equally bold in design and rich in colour. The blues are especially
fine.
The grand gallery of the castle, the finest in the kingdom, though a
trifle narrow for its length, is hung with pictures and family
portraits. One of the most interesting of these is a portrait of the
black Earl of Ormon'de, a handsome swarthy man, evidently careful of his
person, who was led by that political flirt, Queen Elizabeth, to believe
that she meant to make him a visit in Ireland, and, perhaps, to honour
him with her hand. He went to great expenses thereupon. At a parley with
his kinsman, the Irish chieftain O'Moore of Abbeyleix, this black earl
was traitorously captured, and an ancient drawing representing this
event hangs beneath his portrait.
The muniment room, where, thanks to Lord Ormonde's courtesy, we found
everything prepared to receive us, is a large, airy, and fire-proof
chamber, with well-arranged shelves and tables for consulting the
records. These go back to the early Norrnan days, long before Edward
III. made James Butler Earl of Ormonde, upon his marriage with Alianore
of England, granddaughter of Edward I. The Butlers came into Ireland
with Henry II., and John gave them estates, the charters of some of
which, with the seals annexed, are here preserved. There are fine
specimens of the great seals also of Henry III., and of his sons Edward
I. and Edmund Crouchback, and of the Tudor sovereigns, as well as many
private seals of great interest. The wax of the early seals was
obviously stronger and better than the wax since used. Of Elizabeth, who
came of the Butler blood through her mother, one large seal in yellow
wax, attached to a charter dated Oct. 24, 1565, is remarkable for the
beauty of the die. The Queen sits on the obverse under a canopy; on the
reverse she rides in state on a pacing steed as in her effigy at the
Tower of London. The seals of James I. follow the design of this die.
Two of these are particularly fine. At the Restoration something
disappears of the old stateliness. A seal of Charles II., of 1660, very
large and florid in style, shows the monarch sitting very much at his
ease, with one knee thrown negligently over the other. Many of the
private letters and papers of the seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries, during which Kilkenny, as it had been often before, was a
great centre of Irish politics and intrigues, have been bound up in
volumes, and the collection has been freely drawn upon by historians.
But it would obviously bear and reward a more thorough co-ordination and
examination than it has ever yet received.
There is a curious Table Book here preserved of Charles I. while at
Oxford in 1644, from which it appears that while the colleges were
melting up their plate for the King, his Majesty fared better than might
have been expected. His table was served with sixty pounds of mutton a
day; and he wound up his dinner regularly with "sparaguss" so long as it
lasted, and after it went out with artichokes.
An Expense Book, too, of the great Marquis, after he became the first
Duke of Ormonde, Colonel Blood's Duke, kept at Kilkenny in 1668 throws
some interesting light on the cost of living and the customs of great
houses at that time. The Duke, who was in some respects the greatest
personage in the realm, kept up his state here at a weekly cost of
about £50, a good deal less--allowing for the fall in the power of the
pound sterling--than it would now cost him to live at a fashionable
London hotel. He paid £9, 10s. a week for the keep of nineteen horses,
18 shillings board wages for three laundry-maids, and £1, 17s. 4d. for
seven dozen of tallow-candles. The wines served at the ducal table were
Burgundy, Bordeaux, "Shampane," Canary, "Renish," and Portaport, the
last named at a shilling a bottle, while he paid no more than £3, 18s.
for six dozen bottles of Bordeaux, and £1, 1s. for a dozen and a half of
"Shampane." This of course was not the sparkling beverage which in our
times is the only contribution of Champagne to the wine markets of the
world, for the _Ay Mousseux_ first appears in history at the beginning
of the eighteenth century. It was the red wine of Champagne, which so
long contested the palm with the vintages of Burgundy. St. Evremond, who
with the Comte d'Olonne and the great _gourmets_ of the seventeenth
century thought Champagne the best, as the Faculty of Paris also
pronounced it the most wholesome of wines, doubtless introduced his own
religion on the subject into England--but the entry in the Duke's
Expense Book of 1668 is an interesting proof that the duel of the
vintages was even then going as it finally went in favour of Burgundy.
While the Duke got his Champagne for 1s. 2d. a bottle, he had to pay
twenty shillings a dozen, or 1s. 8d. a bottle, for five dozen of
Burgundy. He got his wines from Dublin, which then, as long before, was
the most noted wine mart of Britain. The English princes drew their best
supplies thence in the time of Richard II.
From the castle we drove through the snow to the Cathedral of St.
Canice, a grand and simple Norman edifice of the twelfth century, now
the Church of the Protestant bishop. An ancient Round Tower of much
earlier date stands beside it like a campanile, nearly a hundred feet in
height.
There is a legend that Rinuccini wanted to buy and carry away one of the
great windows of this Cathedral, in which mass was celebrated while he
was here. The Cathedral contains some interesting monuments of the
Butlers, and there are many curiously channelled burial slabs in the
floor, like some still preserved in the ruins of Abbeyleix. Lord de
Vesci pointed out to me several tombs of families of English origin once
powerful here, but now sunk into the farmer class. On one of these I
think it was that we saw a remarkably well-preserved effigy of a lady,
wearing a plaited cap under a "Waterford cloak"--one of the neatest
varieties of the Irish women's cloak--garment so picturesque at once,
and so well adapted to the climate, that I am not surprised to learn
from Lady de Vesci that it is very fast going out of fashion. This
morning before we left Abbeyleix she showed us two such cloaks, types
from two different provinces, each in its way admirable. Put on and worn
about the room by two singularly stately and graceful ladies, they fell
into lines and folds which recalled the most exquisitely beautiful
statuettes of Tanagra; and all allowance made for the glamour lent them
by these two "daughters of the gods, divinely tall," it was impossible
not to see that no woman could possibly look commonplace and
insignificant in such a garment. Yet Lady de Vesci says that more than
once she has known peasant women, to whom such cloaks had been
presented, cut off the characteristic and useful hood, and trim the
mangled robe with tawdry lace. So it is all over the world! Women who
are models for an artist when they wear some garment indigenous to their
country and appropriate to its conditions, prefer to make guys of
themselves in grotesque travesties of the latest "styles" from London
and Paris and Dublin!
Kilkenny boasts that its streets are paved with marble. It is in fact
limestone, but none the worse for that. The snow did not improve them.
So without going on a pilgrimage to the Kilkenny College, at which
Swift, Congreve, and Farquhar,--an odd concatenation of
celebrities--were more or less educated, we made our way to the Imperial
Hotel for luncheon. The waiter was a delightful Celt. Upon my asking him
whether the house could furnish anything distantly resembling good Irish
whisky, he produced a bottle of alleged Scotch whisky, which he put upon
the table with a decisive air, exclaiming, "And this, yer honour, is the
most excellent whisky in the whole world, or I'm not an Irishman!"
Urged by the cold we tempered it with hot water and tasted it. It shut
us up at once to believe the waiter a Calmuck or a Portuguese--anything,
in short, but an Irishman. It is an extraordinary fact that, so far, the
whisky I have found at Irish hotels has been uniformly quite execrable.
I am almost tempted to think that the priests sequestrate all the good
whisky in order to discourage the public abuse of it, for the "wine of
the country" which they offer one is as uniformly excellent.
Kilkenny ought to be and long was a prosperous town. In 1702, the second
Duke of Ormonde made grants (at almost nominal ground-rents) of the
ground upon which a large portion of the city of Kilkenny was then
standing, or upon which houses have since been built.
These grants have passed from hand to hand, and form the "root of title"
of very many owners of house property in Kilkenny. The city is the
centre of an extensive agricultural region, famous, according to an
ancient ditty, for "fire without smoke, air without fog, water without
mud, and land without bog"; but of late it has been undeniably
declining. For this there are many reasons. The railways and the
parcel-post diminish its importance as a local emporium. The almost
complete disappearance of the woollen manufacture, the agricultural
depression which has made the banks and wholesale houses "come down"
upon the small dealers, and the "agitation," bankrupting or exiling the
local gentry, have all conspired to the same result.
From Abbeyleix station we walked back to the house through the park
under trees beautifully silvered with the snow. At dinner the party was
joined by several residents of the county. One of them gave me his views
of the working of the "Plan of Campaign." It is a plan, he maintains,
not of defence as against unjust and exacting landlords, but of offence
against "landlordism," not really promoted, as it appears to be, in the
interest of the tenants to whose cupidity it appeals, but worked from
Dublin as a battering engine against law and order in Ireland. Every
case in which it is applied needs, he thinks, to be looked into on its
own merits. It will then be found precisely why this or that spot has
bees selected by the League for attack. At Luggacurren, for instance,
the "Plan of Campaign" has been imposed upon the tenants because the
property belongs to the Marquis of Lansdowne, who happens to be
Governor-General of Canada, so that to attack him is to attack the
Government. The rents of the Lansdowne property at Luggacurren, this
gentleman offers to prove to me, are not and never have been excessive;
and Lord Lansdowne has expended very large sums on improving the
property, and for the benefit of the tenants. Two of the largest
tenants having got into difficulties through reckless racing and other
forms of extravagance found it convenient to invite the league into
Luggacurren, and compel other tenants in less embarrassed circumstances
to sacrifice their holdings by refusing to pay rents which they knew to
be fair, and were abundantly able and eager to pay. At Mitchelstown the
"Plan of Campaign" was aimed again, not at the Countess of Kingston, the
owner, but at the Disestablished Protestant Church of Ireland, the
trustees of which hold a mortgage of a quarter of a million sterling on
the estates. On the Clanricarde property in Galway the "Plan of
Campaign" has been introduced, my informant says, because Lord
Clanricarde happens to be personally unpopular. "Go down to Portumna and
Woodford," he said, "and look into the matter for yourself. You will
find that the rents on the Clanricarde estates are in the main
exceptionally fair, and even low. The present Marquis has almost never
visited Ireland, I believe, and he is not much known even in London.
People who dislike him for one reason or another readily believe
anything that is said to his disadvantage as a landlord. Most people who
don't like the cut of Dr. Fell's whiskers, or the way in which he takes
soup, are quite disposed to listen to you if you tell them he beats his
wife or plays cards too well. The campaigners are shrewd fellows, and
they know this, so they start the 'Plan of Campaign' on the Portumna
properties, and get a lot of English windbags to come there and hobnob
with some of the most mischievous and pestilent parish priests in all
Ireland--and then you have the dreadful story of the 'evictions,' and
all the rest of it. Lord Clanricarde, or his agent, or both of them,
getting out of temper, will sit down and do some hasty or crabbed or
injudicious thing, or write a provoking letter, and forthwith it is
enough to say 'Clanricarde,' and all common sense goes out of the
question, to the great damage, not so much of Lord Clanricarde--for he
lives in London, and is a rich man, and, I suppose, don't mind the
row--but of landlords all over Ireland, and therefore, in the long-run,
of the tenants of Ireland as well."
At Luggacurren, this gentleman thinks, the League is beaten. There are
eighty-two tenants there, evicted and living dismally in what is called
the Land League village, a set of huts erected near the roadside, while
their farms are carried on for the owner by the Land Corporation. As
they were most of them unwilling to accept the Plan, and were
intimidated into it for the benefit of the League, and of the two chief
tenants, Mr. Dunn and Mr. Kilbride, men of substance who had squandered
their resources, the majority of the evicted are sore and angry.
"At first each man was allowed £3 a month by the League for himself and
his family. But they found that Mr. Kilbride, who has been put into
Parliament by Mr. Parnell for Kerry, a county with which he has no more
to do than I have with the Isle of Skye, was getting £5 a week, and so
they revolted, and threatened to bolt if their subsidy was not raised to
£4 a month."
"And this they get now? Out of what funds?"
"Out of the League funds, or, in other words, out of their own and other
people's money, foolishly put by the tenants into the keeping of the
League to 'protect' it! They give it the kind of 'protection' that
Oliver gave the liberties of England: once they get hold of it, they
never let go!"
I submitted that at Gweedore Father M'Fadden had paid over to Captain
Hill the funds confided to him.
"No doubt; but there the landlord gave in, and the more fool he!"
With another guest I had an interesting conversation about the Ulster
tenant-right, which got itself more or less enacted into British law
only in 1870, and of which Mr. Froude tells me he sought in vain to
discover the definite origin. "The best lawyers in Ireland" could give
him no light on this point. He could only find that it did not exist
apparently in 1770, but did exist apparently twenty years later. The
gentleman with whom I talked to-night tells me that the custom of Ulster
was really once general throughout Ireland, and is called the "Ulster"
custom, only because it survived there after disappearing elsewhere.
There is a tradition too, he says, in Ulster that the recognition of
this tenant-right as a binding custom there is really due to Lord
Castlereagh. It would be a curious thing, could this be verified, to
find Lord Castlereagh, whose name has been execrated in Ireland for
fourscore years, recommending and securing a century ago that
recognition of the interest of the Irish tenant in his holding, which,
in our time, Mr. Gladstone, just now the object of Irish adulation, was,
with much difficulty and reluctance, brought to accord in the
Compensation for Disturbances clause of his Act of 1870!
Of this clause, too, I am told to-night that the scale of compensation
fixed for the awards of the Court in the third section of it was devised
(though Mr. Gladstone did not know this) by an Irish member in the
interest of the "strong farmers," who wish to root out the small
farmers. There is an apparent confirmation of this story in the fact
that under this section the small farmers, under £10, may be awarded
against the landlord seven years' rent as compensation for disturbance,
while the number of years to be accounted for in the award diminishes as
the rental increases, a discrimination not unlikely to strengthen the
preference of the landlords for the large farm system.
CHAPTER V.
DUBLIN, _Tuesday, Feb. 14th._--I left Abbeyleix this morning for Dublin,
in company with Mr. and Mrs. Henry Doyle. Mr. Doyle, C.B., a brother of
that inimitable master of the pencil, and most delightful of men,
Richard Doyle, is the Director of the Irish National Gallery. He was
kind enough to come and lunch with me at Maple's, after which we went
together to the Gallery. It occupies the upper floors of a stately and
handsome building in Merrion Square, in front of which stands a statue
of the founder, Mr. William Dargan, who defrayed all the expenses of the
Dublin Exhibition in 1853, and declined all the honours offered to him
in recognition of his public spirited liberality, save a visit paid to
his wife by Queen Victoria. The collection now under Mr. Doyle's charge
was begun only in 1864, and the Government makes it an annual grant of
no more than £2500, or about one-half the current price, in these days,
of a fine Gainsborough or Sir Joshua! "They manage these things better
in France," was evidently the impression of a recent French tourist in
Ireland, M. Daryl, whose book I picked up the other day in Paris, for
after mentioning three or four of the pictures, and gravely affirming
that the existence here of a gallery of Irish portraits proves the
passionate devotion of Dublin to Home Rule, he dismisses the collection
with the verdict that "_ce ne vaut pas le diable_." Nevertheless it
already contains more really good pictures than the Musée either of
Lyons or of Marseilles, both of them much larger and wealthier cities
than Dublin. Leaving out the Three Maries of Perugino at Marseilles, and
at Lyons the Ascension, which was once the glory of San Pietro di
Perugia, the Moses of Paul Veronese, and Palma Giovanni's Flagellation,
these two galleries put together cannot match Dublin with its Jan Steen,
most characteristic without being coarse, its Terburg, a life-size
portrait of the painter's favourite model, a young Flemish gentleman,
presented to him as a token of regard, its portrait of a Venetian
personage by Giorgione, with a companion portrait by Gian Bellini, its
beautiful Italian landscape by Jan Both, its flower-wreathed head of a
white bull by Paul Potter, its exquisitely finished "Vocalists" by
Cornells Begyn, its admirable portrait of a Dutch gentleman by Murillo,
and its two excellent Jacob Ruysdaels. A good collection is making, too,
of original drawings, and engravings, and a special room is devoted to
modern Irish art. I wish the Corcoran Gallery (founded, too, by an
Irishman!) were half as worthy of Washington, or the Metropolitan Museum
one-tenth part as worthy of New York!
The National Gallery in London has loaned some pictures to Dublin, and
Mr. Doyle is getting together, from private owners, a most interesting
gallery of portraits of men and women famous in connection with Irish
history. The beautiful Gunnings of the last century, the not less
beautiful and much more brilliant Sheridans of our own, Burke, Grattan,
Tom Moore, Wellington, Curran, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, O'Connell, Peg
Woffington, Canning, and Castlereagh, Dean Swift, Laurence Sterne are
all here--wits and statesmen, soldiers and belles, rebels and royalists,
orators and poets. Two things strike one in this gallery of the "glories
of Ireland." The great majority of the faces are of the Anglo-Irish or
Scoto-Irish type; and the collection owes its existence to an
accomplished public officer, who bears an Irish name, who is a devout
Catholic, and who is also an outspoken opponent of the Home Rule
contention as now carried on.
The gallery is open on liberal conditions to students. Mr. Doyle tells
me that a young sister of Mr. Parnell was at one time an assiduous
student here. He used to stop and chat with her about her work as he
passed through the gallery. One day he met her coming out. "Mr. Doyle,"
she said, "are you a Home Ruler?" "Certainly not," he replied
good-naturedly. Whereupon, with an air of melancholy resignation, the
young lady said, "Then we can never more be friends!" and therewith
flitted forth.
A small room contains some admirable bits of the work of Richard Doyle,
among other things a weird and grotesque, but charming cartoon of an
elfish procession passing through a quaint and picturesque mediaeval
city. It is a _conte fantastique_ in colour--a marvel of affluent fancy
and masterly skill.
I found here this morning letters calling me over to Paris for a short
time, and one also from Mr. Davitt, in London, explaining that my note
to him through the National League had never reached him, and that he
had gone to London on his woollen business. I have written asking him to
meet me to-morrow in London, and I shall cross over to-night.
LONDON, _Wednesday, Feb. 15th._--Mr. Davitt spent an hour with me
to-day, and we had a most interesting conversation. His mind is just now
full of the woollen enterprise he is managing, which promises, he
thinks, in spite of our tariff, to open the American markets to the
excellent woollen goods of Ireland. He has gone into it with all his
usual earnestness and ability. This is not a matter of politics with
him, but of patriotism and of business. He tells me he has already
secured very large orders from the United States. I hope he is not
surprised, as I certainly am not, to find that the Parliamentarian Irish
party give but a half-hearted and lukewarm support to such enterprises
as this. Perhaps he has forgotten, as I have not, the efforts which a
certain member of that party made in 1886 to persuade an Irish gentleman
from St. Louis, who had brought over a considerable sum of money for the
relief of the distress in North-Western Ireland, into turning it over
to the League, on the express ground that the more the people were made
to feel the pinch of the existing order of things, the better it would
be for the revolutionary movement.
The Irish Woollen Company will, nevertheless, be a success, I believe,
and a success of considerably more value to Ireland than the election of
Mr. Wilfrid Blunt as M.P. for Deptford would be.
As to this election, Mr. Davitt seems to feel no great confidence. He
has spoken in support of Mr. Blunt's candidacy, and is hard at work now
to promote it. But he is not sanguine as to the result, as on all
questions, save Home Rule for Ireland, Mr. Blunt's views and ideas, he
thinks, antagonise the record of Mr. Evelyn and the local feeling at
Deptford. I was almost astonished to learn from Mr. Davitt that Mr.
Blunt, by the way, had told him at Ballybrack, long before he was locked
up, how Mr. Balfour meant to lock up and kill four men, the "pivots" of
the Irish movement, to wit, Mr. O'Brien, Mr. Harrington, Mr. Dillon, and
Mr. Davitt himself. But I was not at all astonished to learn that Mr.
Blunt told him all this most seriously, and evidently believed it.
"How did you take it?" I asked.
"Oh, I only laughed," said Mr. Davitt, "and told him it would take more
than Mr. Balfour to kill me, at any rate by putting me in prison. As for
being locked up, I prefer Cuninghame Graham's way of taking it, that he
meant 'to beat the record on oakum!'"
If all the Irish "leaders" were made of the same stuff with Mr. Davitt,
the day of a great Democratic revolution, not in Ireland only, but in
Great Britain, might be a good deal nearer than anything in the signs of
the times now shows it to be. Mr. Parnell and the National League are
really nothing but the mask of Mr. Davitt and the Land League. Mr.
Forster knew what he was about when he proclaimed the Land League in
October 1881, six months or more after he had arrested and locked up Mr.
Davitt in Portland prison. This was shown by the foolish No-Rent
manifesto which Mr. Parnell and his associates issued from Kilmainham
shortly after their incarceration, and without the counsel or consent at
that time of Mr. Davitt--a manifesto which the Archbishop of Cashel,
despite his early sympathies and connection with the agrarian agitation
of 1848, found it expedient promptly to disavow. It would have been
still more clearly shown had not Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Forster parted
company under the restiveness of Mr. Gladstone's Radical followers, and
the pressure of the United States Government in the spring of 1882. But
after the withdrawal of Mr. Forster, and the release of Mr. Davitt, the
English lawyers and politicians who led Lord Spencer and Sir George
Trevelyan into allowing the Land League to be revived under the
transparent alias of the National League, gave Mr. Davitt an
opportunity, of which he promptly availed himself, to regain the ground
lost by the blundering of the men of Kilmainham. From that time forth I
have always regarded him as the soul of the Irish agitation, of the war
against "landlordism" (which is incidentally, of course, a war against
the English influence in Ireland), and of the movement towards Irish
independence. Whether the agitation, the war, and the movement have gone
entirely in accordance with his views and wishes is quite another
matter.
I have too good an opinion of his capacity to believe that they have;
and when the secret history of the Chicago Convention comes to be
written, I expect to find such confirmation therein of my notions on
this subject as I could neither ask nor, if I asked, could expect to get
from him.
Meanwhile the manliness and courage of the man must always command for
him the respect, not to say the admiration, even of those who most
sternly condemn his course and oppose his policy.
Born the child of an evicted tenant, in the times when an eviction meant
such misery and suffering as are seldom, if ever, now caused by the
process--bred and maimed for life in an English factory--captured when
hardly more than a lad in Captain M'Cafferty's daring attempt to seize
Chester Castle, and sent for fifteen years by Lord Chief-Justice
Cockburn into penal servitude of the most rigorous kind, Michael Davitt
might have been expected to be an apostle of hate not against the
English Government of Ireland alone, but against England and the English
people. The truculent talk of too many of his countrymen presents
Ireland to the minds of thoughtful men as a flagrant illustration of the
truth so admirably put by Aubrey de Vere that "worse than wasted weal is
wasted woe." But woe has not been wasted upon Michael Davitt, in this,
that, so far as I know (and I have watched his course now with lively
personal interest ever since I made his acquaintance on his first visit
to America), he has never made revenge and retaliation upon England
either the inspiration or the aim of his revolutionary policy. I have
never heard him utter, and never heard of his uttering, in America, such
malignant misrepresentations of the conduct of the English people and
their sovereign during the great famine of 1847, for example, as those
which earned for Mr. Parnell in 1880 the pretty unanimous condemnation
of the American press. How far he went with Mr. Parnell on the lines of
that speech at New Ross, in which murder was delicately mentioned as "an
unnecessary and prejudicial measure of procedure" in certain
circumstances, I do not know. But he can hardly have gone further than
certain persons calling themselves English Liberals went when the
assassins of Napoleon III. escaped to England. And he has a capacity of
being just to opponents, which certainly all his associates do not
possess. I was much struck to-day by the candour and respect with which
he spoke of John Bright, whose name came incidentally into our
conversation. He seemed to feel personally annoyed and hurt as an
Irishman, that Irishmen should permit themselves to revile and abuse Mr.
Bright because he will not go with them on the question of Home Rule, in
utter oblivion of the great services rendered by him to the cause of
the Irish people "years before many of those whose tongues now wag
against him had tongues to wag." I was tempted to remind him that not
with Irishmen only is gratitude a lively sense of favours to come.
I find Mr. Davitt quite awake to the great importance of the granite
quarries of Donegal. He is bestirring himself in connection with some
men of Manchester, in behalf of the quarries at Belmullet in Mayo,
which, if I am not mistaken, is his native county. This bent of his mind
towards the material improvement of the condition of the Irish people,
and the development of the resources of Ireland, is not only a mark of
his superiority to the rank and file of the Irish politicians--it goes
far to explain the stronger hold which he undoubtedly has on the people
in Ireland. "Home Rule," as now urged by the Irish politicians,
certainly excites much more attention and emotion in America and England
than it seems to do in Ireland. It seems so simple and elementary to
John Bull and Brother Jonathan that people should be suffered to manage
their own affairs! Yet the North would not suffer the South to do
this--and what would become of India if England turned it over in
fragments to the native races? The Land Question, on the contrary,
touches the "business and bosom" of every Irishman in Ireland, while it
is so complicated with historical conditions and incidents as to be
troublesome and therefore uninteresting to people not immediately
affected by it. If I am right in my impressions the collapse of the
National League will hardly weaken the hold of Mr. Davitt on the Irish
people in Ireland, and it may even strengthen his hold on the agrarian
movement in Wales, England, and Scotland, unless he identifies himself
too completely in that collapse with his Parliamentary instruments. On
the other hand, the triumph of the National League on its present lines
of action would diminish the value for good or evil of any man's hold
upon the Irish people, for the obvious reason that by driving out of
Ireland, and ruining, the class of "landlords" and capitalists, it would
leave the country reduced to a dead level of peasant-holdings, saddled
with a system of poor-rates beyond the ability of the peasant-holders to
carry, and at the mercy, therefore, of the first bad year. The "war
against the landlords," as conducted by the National League, would end
where the Irish difficulty began, in a general surrender of the people
to "poverty and potatoes."
CHAPTER VI.
ENNIS, _Saturday, Feb. 18._--I found it unnecessary to go on to Paris,
and so returned to Ireland on Thursday night; we had a passage as over a
lake. In the train I met a lively Nationalist friend, whose acquaintance
I made in America. He is a man of substance, but not overburdened with
respect for the public men, either of his own party or of the Unionist
side. When I asked him whether he still thought it would be safe to turn
over Ireland to a Parliament made up of the Westminster members, of whom
he gave me such an amusing but by no means complimentary account, he
looked at me with astonishment:--
"Do you suppose for a moment we would send these fellows to a Parliament
in Dublin?"
He told me some very entertaining tales of the methods used by certain
well-meaning occupants of the Castle in former days to capture Irish
popularity, as, for example, one of a Vice-Queen who gave a fancy dress
ball for the children of the local Dublin people of importance, and had
a beautiful supper of tea and comfits, and cakes served to them, after
which she made her appearance, followed by servants bearing huge bowls
of steaming hot Irish potatoes, which she pressed upon the horrified and
overstuffed infants as "the true food of the country," setting them
herself the example of eating one with much apparent gusto, and a pinch
of salt!
"Now, fancy that!" he exclaimed; "for the Dublin aristocracy who think
the praties only fit for the peasants!"
Of a well-known and popular personage in politics, he told me that he
once went with him on a canvassing tour. It was in a county the
candidate had never before visited. "When we came to a place, and the
people were all out crying and cheering, he would whisper to me, 'Now
what is the name of this confounded hole?' And I would whisper back,
'Ballylahnich,' or whatever it was. Then he would draw himself up to the
height of a round tower, and begin, 'Men of Ballylahnich, I rejoice to
meet you! Often has the great Liberator said to me, with tears in his
voice, 'Oh would I might find myself face to face with the noble men of
Ballylahnich!"
"A great man he is, a great man!
"Did you ever hear how he courted the heiress? He walked up and down in
front of her house, and threatened to fight every man that came to call,
till he drove them all away!"
A good story of more recent date, I must also note, of a well-known
priest in Dublin, who being asked by Mr. Balfour one day whether the
people under his charge took for gospel all the rawhead and bloody-bones
tales about himself, replied, "Indeed, I wish they only feared and hated
the devil half as much as they do you!"
In a more serious vein my Nationalist friend explained to me that for
him "Home Rule" really meant an opportunity of developing the resources
of Ireland under "the American system of Protection." About this he was
quite in earnest, and recalled to me the impassioned protests made by
the then Mayor of Chicago, Mr. Carter Harrison, against the Revenue
Reform doctrines which I had thought it right to set forth at the great
meeting of the Iroquois Club in that city in 1883. "Of course," he
said, "you know that Mr. Harrison was then speaking not only for
himself, but for the whole Irish vote of Chicago which was solidly
behind him? And not of Chicago only! All our people on your side of the
water moved against your party in 1884, and will move against it again,
only much more generally, this year, because they know that the real
hope of Ireland lies in our shaking ourselves free of the British Free
Trade that has been fastened upon us, and is taking our life." I could
only say that this was a more respectable, if not a more reasonable,
explanation of Mr. Alexander Sullivan's devotion to Mr. Blaine and the
Republicans, and of the Irish defection from the Democratic party than
had ever been given to me in America, but I firmly refused to spend the
night between London and Dublin in debating the question whether Meath
could be made as prosperous as Massachusetts by levying forty per cent.
duties on Manchester goods imported into Ireland.
He had seen the reception of Mr. Sullivan, M.P., in London. "I believe,
on my soul," he said, "the people were angry with him because he didn't
come in a Lord Mayor's coach!"
When I told him I meant to visit Luggacurren, he said, a little to my
surprise, "That is a bad job for us, and all because of William
O'Brien's foolishness! He always thinks everybody takes note of whatever
he says, and that ruins any man! He made a silly threat at Luggacurren,
that he would go and take Lansdowne by the throat in Canada, and then he
was weak enough to suppose that he was bound to carry it out. He
couldn't be prevented! And what was the upshot of it? But for the
Orangemen in Canada, that were bigger fools than he is, he would have
been just ruined completely! It was the Orangemen saved him!"
I left Dublin this morning at 7.40 A.M. The day was fine, and the
railway journey most interesting. Before reaching Limerick we passed
through so much really beautiful country that I could not help
expressing my admiration of it to my only fellow-traveller, a most
courteous and lively gentleman, who, but for a very positive brogue,
might have been taken for an English guardsman.
"Yes, it is a beautiful country," he said, "or would be if they would
let it alone!"
I asked him what he specially objected to in the recent action of
Parliament as respects Ireland?
"Object?" he responded; "I object to everything. The only thing that
will do Ireland any good will be to shut up that talking-mill at
Westminster for a good long while!"
This, I told him, was the remedy proposed by Earl Grey in his recent
volume on Ireland.
"Is it indeed? I shall read the book. But what's the use? 'For judgment
it is fled to brutish beasts, and men have lost their reason.'"
This he said most cheerily, as if it really didn't matter much; and,
bidding me good-bye, disappeared at Limerick, where several friends met
him. In his place came a good-natured optimistic squire, who thinks
"things are settling down." There is a rise in the price of cattle.
"Beasts I gave £8 for three mouths ago," he said, "I have just sold for
£12. I call that a healthy state of things." And with this he also left
me at Ardsollus, the station nearest the famous old monastery of Quin.
At Ennis I was met by Colonel Turner, to whom I had written, enclosing a
note of introduction to him. With him were Mr. Roche, one of the local
magistrates, and Mr. Richard Stacpoole, a gentleman of position and
estate near Ennis, about whom, through no provocation of his, a great
deal has been said and written of late years. Mr. Stacpoole at once
insisted that I should let him take me out to stay at his house at
Edenvale, which is, so to speak, at the gates of Ennis. Certainly the
fame of Irish hospitality is well-founded! Meanwhile my traps were
deposited at the County Club, and I went about the town. I walked up to
the Court-house with. Mr. Roche, in the hope of hearing a case set down
for trial to-day, in which a publican named Harding, at Ennis--an
Englishman, by the way--is prosecuted for boycotting. The parties were
in Court; and the defendant's counsel, a keen-looking Irish lawyer, Mr.
Leamy, once a Nationalist member, was ready for action; but for some
technical reason the hearing was postponed. There were few people in
Court, and little interest seemed to be felt in the matter. The
Court-house is a good building, not unlike the White House at Washington
in style. This is natural enough, the White House having been built, I
believe, by an Irish architect, who must have had the Duke of Leinster's
house of Carton, in Kildare, in his mind when he planned it. Carton was
thought a model mansion at the beginning of this century; and Mr.
Whetstone, a local architect of repute, built the Ennis Court-house some
fifty years ago. It is of white limestone from quarries belonging to
Mr. Stacpoole, and cost when built about £12,000. To build it now would
cost nearly three times as much. In fact, a recent and smaller
Court-house at Carlow has actually cost £36,000 within the last few
years.
I was struck by the extraordinary number of public-houses in Ennis. A
sergeant of police said to me, "It is so all over the country." Mr.
Roche sent for the statistics, from which it appears that Ennis, with a
population of 6307, rejoices in no fewer than 100 "publics"; Ennistymon,
with a population of 1331, has 25; and Milltown Malbay, with a
population of 1400, has 36. At Castle Island the proportion is still
more astounding--51 public-houses in a population of 800. In Kiltimagh
every second house is a public-house! These houses are perhaps a legacy
of the old days of political jobbery.[19] No matter when or why granted,
the licence appears to be regarded as a hereditary "right" not lightly
to be tampered with; and of course the publicans are persons of
consequence in their neighbourhood, no matter how wretched it may be,
or how trifling their legitimate business. Three police convictions are
required to make the resident magistrates refuse the usual yearly
renewal of a licence; and if an application is made against such a
renewal, cause must be shown. The "publics" are naturally centres of
local agitation, and the publicans are sharp enough to see the advantage
to them of this. The sergeant told me of a publican here in Ennis, into
whose public came three Nationalists, bent not upon drinking, but upon
talking. The publican said nothing for a while, but finally, in a
careless way, mentioned "a letter he had just received from Mr. Parnell
on a very private matter." Instantly the politicians were eager to see
it. The publican hesitated. The politicians immediately called for
drinks, which were served, and after this operation had been three times
repeated, the publican produced the letter, began with a line or two,
and then said, "Ah, no! it can't be done. It would be a betrayal of
confidence; and you know you wouldn't have that! But it's a very
important letter you have seen!" So they went away tipsy and happy.
Only yesterday no fewer than twenty-three of these publicans from
Milltown Malbay appeared at Ennis here to be tried for "boycotting" the
police. One of them was acquitted; another, a woman, was discharged. Ten
of them signed, in open court, a guarantee not further to conspire, and
were thereupon discharged upon their own recognisances, after having
been sentenced with their companions to a month's imprisonment with hard
labour. The magistrate tells me that when the ten who signed (and who
were the most prosperous of the publicans) were preparing to sign, the
only representative of the press who was present, a reporter for _United
Ireland_, approached them in a threatening manner, with such an obvious
purpose of intimidation, that he was ordered out of the court-room by
the police. The eleven who refused to sign the guarantee (and who were
the poorest of the publicans, with least to lose) were sent to gaol.
An important feature of this case is the conduct of Father White, the
parish priest of Milltown Malbay. In the open court, Colonel Turner
tells me, Father White admitted that he was the moving spirit of all
this local "boycott." While the court was sitting yesterday all the
shops in Milltown Malbay were closed, Father White having publicly
ordered the people to make the town "as a city of the dead." After the
trial was over, and the eleven who elected to be locked up had left in
the train, Father White visited all their houses to encourage the
families, which, from his point of view, was no doubt proper enough; but
one of the sergeants reports that the Father went by mistake into the
house of one of the ten who had signed the guarantee, and immediately
reappeared, using rather unclerical language. All this to an American
resembles a tempest in a tea-pot. But it is a serious matter to see a
priest of the Church assisting laymen to put their fellow-men under a
social interdict, which is obviously a parody on one of the gravest
steps the Church itself can take to maintain the doctrine and the
discipline of the Faith. What Catholics, if honest, must think of this
whole business, I saw curiously illustrated by some marginal notes
pencilled in a copy of Sir Francis Head's _Fortnight in Ireland_, at the
hotel in Gweedore. The author of the _Bubbles from the Brunnen_
published this book in 1852. At page 152 he tells a story, apparently on
hearsay, of "boycotting" long before Boycott. It is to the effect that,
in order to check the proselyting of Catholics by a combination of
Protestant missionary zeal with Protestant donations of "meal," certain
priests and sisters in the south of Ireland personally instructed the
people to avoid all intercourse of any sort with any Roman Catholic who
"listened to a Protestant clergyman or a Scripture Reader"; and Sir
Francis cites an instance--still apparently on hearsay--of a "shoemaker
at Westport," who, having seceded from the Church, found that not a
single "journeyman dared work for him"; that only "one person would sell
him leather"; and, "in short, lost his custom, and rapidly came to a
state of starvation."
On the margin of the pages which record these statements, certain
indignant Catholics have pencilled comments, the mildest of which is to
the effect that Sir Francis was "a most damnable liar." It is certainly
most unlikely that Catholics should have arrogated to themselves the
Church's function of combating heresy and schism in the fashion
described by Sir Francis. But without mooting that question, these
expressions are noteworthy as showing how just such proceedings, as are
involved in the political "boycottings" of the present day, must be
regarded by all honest and clear-headed people who call themselves
Catholics; and it is a serious scandal that a parish priest should lay
himself open to the imputation of acting in concert with any political
body whatever, on any pretext whatever, to encourage such proceedings.
I asked one of the sergeants how the publicans who had signed the
guarantee would probably be treated by their townspeople. He replied,
there was some talk of their being "boycotted" in their turn by the
butchers and bakers. "But it's all nonsense," he said, "they are the
snuggest (the most prosperous) publicans in this part of the country,
and nobody will want to vex them. They have many friends, and the best
friend they have is that they can afford to give credit to the country
people. There'll be no trouble with them at all at all!"
Walking about the town, I saw many placards calling for subscriptions in
aid of a newsvendor who has been impounded for selling _United Ireland_.
"It'll be a good thing for him," said a cynical citizen, to whom I spoke
of it, "a good deal better than he'd be by selling the papers." And, in
fact, it is noticeable all over Ireland how small the sales of the
papers appear to be. The people about the streets in Ennis, however,
seemed to me much more effervescent and hot in tone than the Dublin
people are--and this on both sides of the question. One very decent and
substantial-looking man, when I told him I was an American, assured me
that "if it was not for the soldiers, the people of Ennis would clear
the police out of the place." He told me, too, that not long ago the
soldiers of an Irish regiment here cheered for Home Rule in the
Court-house, "but they were soon sent away for that same." On the other
hand, a Protestant man of business, of whom I made some inquiries about
the transmission of an important paper to the United States in time to
catch to-morrow's steamer from Queenstown, spoke of the Home Rulers
almost with ferocity, and thought the "Coercion" Government at Dublin
ought to be called the "Concession" Government. He was quite indignant
that the Morley and Ripon procession through the streets of Dublin
should not have been "forbidden."
There are some considerable shops in Ennis, but the proprietor of one of
the best of them says all this agitation has "killed the trade of the
place." I am not surprised to learn that the farmers and their families
are beginning seriously to demand that the "reduction screw" shall be
applied to other things besides rent. "A very decent farmer," he says,
"only last week stood up in the shop and said it was 'a shame the
shopkeepers were not made to reduce the tenpence muslin goods to
sixpence!'"
This shopkeeper finds some dreary consolation for the present state of
things in standing at his deserted shop-door and watching the doors of
his brethren. He finds them equally deserted. In his own he has had to
dismiss a number of his attendants. "When a man finds he is taking in
ten shillings a day, and laying out three pounds ten, what can he do but
pull up pretty short?" As with the shopkeepers, so it is with the
mechanics. "They are losing custom all the time. You see the tenants are
expecting to come into the properties, so they spend nothing now on
painting or improvements. The money goes into the bank. It don't go to
the landlords, or to the shopkeepers, or the mechanics; and then we that
have been selling on credit, and long credit too, where are we?
Formerly, from one place, Dromoland, Lord Inchiquin's house, we used
regularly to make a bill of a hundred pounds at Christmas, for blankets
and other things given away. Now the house is shut up and we make
nothing!"
It is a short but very pleasant drive from Ennis to Edenvale--and
Edenvale itself is not ill-named. The park is a true park, with fine
wide spaces and views, and beautiful clumps of trees. A swift river
flows beyond the lawn in front of the spacious goodly house--a river
alive with wild fowl, and overhung by lofty trees, in which many pairs
of herons build. A famous heronry has existed here for many years, and
the birds are held now by Mr. and Mrs. Stacpoole as sacred as are the
storks in Holland. Where the river widens to a lake, fine terraced
gardens and espalier walls, on which nectarines, apricots, and peaches
ripen in the sun, stretch along the shore. Deer come down to the further
bank to drink, and in every direction the eye is charmed and the mind is
soothed by the loveliest imaginable sylvan landscapes.
EDENVALE, _Sunday, Feb. 19._--I was awakened at dawn by the clamour of
countless wild ducks, to a day of sunshine as brilliant and almost as
warm as one sees at this season in the south of France. Mrs. Stacpoole
speaks of this place with a kind of passion, and I can quite understand
it. Clearly this, again, is not a case of the absentee landlord draining
the lifeblood of the land to lavish it upon an alien soil! The demesne
is a sylvan sanctuary for the wild creatures of the air and the wood,
and they congregate here almost as they did at Walton Hall in the days
of that most delightful of naturalists and travellers, whose adventurous
gallop on the back of a cayman was the delight of all English-reading
children forty years ago, or as they do now at Gosford. Yet the crack of
the gun, forbidden in the precincts of Walton Hall, is here by no means
unknown--the whole family being noted as dead shots. I asked Mr.
Stacpoole this morning whether the park had been invaded by trespassers
since the local Nationalists declared war upon him. He said that his
only experience of anything like an attack befell not very long ago,
when his people came to the house on a Sunday afternoon and told him
that a crowd of men from Ennis, with dogs, were coming towards the park
with a loudly proclaimed intent to enter it, and go hunting upon the
property.
Upon this Mr. Stacpoole left the house with his brother and another
person, and walked down to the park entrance. Presently the men of Ennis
made their appearance on the highway. A very brief parley followed. The
men of Ennis announced their intention of marching across the park, and
occupying it.
"I think not," the proprietor responded quietly. "I think you will go
back the way you came. For you may be sure of one thing: the first man
who crosses that park wall, or enters that gate, is a dead man."
There was no show of weapons, but the revolvers were there, and this the
men of Ennis knew. They also knew that it rested with themselves to
create the right and the occasion to use the revolvers, and that if the
revolvers were used they would be used to some purpose. To their credit,
be it said, as men of sense, they suddenly experienced an almost
Caledonian respect for the "Sabbath-day," and after expressing their
discontent with Mr. Stacpoole's inhospitable reception, turned about and
went back whence they had come.
This morning an orderly from Ennis brought out news of the arrest
yesterday, at the Clare Road, of Mr. Lloyd, a Labour delegate from
London, on his return from an agitation meeting at Kildysart. Harding,
the Englishman I saw awaiting his trial yesterday, became bail for
Lloyd.
In the afternoon we took a delightful walk to Killone Abbey, a pile of
monastic ruins on a lovely site near a very picturesque lake. The ruins
have been used as a quarry by all the country, and are now by no means
extensive. But the precincts are used as a graveyard, not only by the
people of Ennis, but by the farmers and villagers for many miles around.
Nothing can be imagined more painful than the appearance of these
precincts. The graves are, for the most part, shallow, and closely
huddled together. The cemetery, in truth, is a ghastly slum, a
"tenement-house" of the dead. The dead of to-day literally elbow the
dead of yesterday out of their resting-places, to be in their turn
displaced by the dead of to-morrow. Instead of the crosses and the fresh
garlands, and the inscriptions full of loving thoughtfulness, which lend
a pathetic charm to the German "courts of peace"--instead of the
carefully tended hillocks and flower-studded turf which make the
churchyard of a typical old English village beautiful,--all here is
confusion, squalor, and neglect. Fragments of coffins and bones lie
scattered among the sunken and shattered stones. We picked up a skull
lying quite apart in a corner of the enclosure. A clean round bullet
hole in the very centre of the frontal bone was dumbly and grimly
eloquent. Was it the skull of a patriot or of a policeman? of a
"White-boy" or of a "landlord"?
One thing only was apparent from the conformation of the grisly relic.
It was the skull of a Celt. Probably, therefore, not of a land agent,
shot to repress his fiduciary zeal, but perhaps of some peasant
selfishly and recklessly bent on paying his rent.
While we wandered amid the ruins we came suddenly upon a woman wearing a
long Irish cloak, and accompanied by two well-dressed men. One of the
men started upon catching sight of Colonel Turner, who was of our party,
grew quite red for a moment, and then very civilly exchanged salutations
with him. The party walked quietly away on a lower road leading to
Ennis. When they had gone Colonel Turner told us that the man who had
spoken to him was a local Nationalist of repute and influence in Ennis.
"He would never have ventured to be civil to me in the town," he said. A
discussion arose as to the probable object of the party in visiting
these ruins. A gentleman who was with us half-laughingly suggested that
they might have been putting away dynamite bombs for an attack on
Edenvale. Colonel Turner's more practical and probable theory was that
they were looking about for a site for the grave of the Fenian veteran,
Stephen J. Meany, who died in America not long ago. He was a native, I
believe, of Ennis, and his remains are now on their way across the
Atlantic for interment in his birth-place. "Would a processional funeral
be allowed for him?" I asked. Colonel Turner could see no reason why it
should not be.
One exception I noted to the general slovenliness of the graves. A new
and handsome monument had just been set up by a man of Ennis, living in
Australia, to the memory of his father and mother, buried here twenty
years ago. But this touching symbol of a heart untravelled, fondly
turning to its home, had been so placed, either by accident or by
design, as to block the entrance way to the vault of a family living, or
rather owning property, in this neighbourhood. Until within a year or
two past this family had occupied a very handsome mansion in a park
adjoining the park of Edenvale. But the heir, worn out with local
hostilities, and reduced in fortune by the pressure of the times and of
the League, has now thrown up the sponge. His ancestral acres have been
turned over for cultivation to Mr. Stacpoole. His house, a large fine
building, apparently of the time of James II., containing, I am told,
some good pictures and old furniture, is shut up, as are the model
stables, ample enough for a great stud; and so another centre of local
industry and activity is made sterile.
Near the ruins of Killone is a curious ancient shrine of St. John,
beside a spring known as the Holy Well. All about the rude little altar
in the open air simple votive offerings were displayed, and Mrs.
Stacpoole tells me pilgrims come here from Galway and Connemara to climb
the hill upon their knees, and drink of the water. Last year for the
first time within the memory of man the well went dry. Such was the
distress caused in Ennis by this news, that on the eve of St. John
certain pious persons came out from the town, drew water from the lake,
and poured it into the well!
As we walked away one of the party pointed to a rabbit fleeing swiftly
into a hole in one of the graves. "I was on this hill," he said, "one
day not very long ago when a funeral train came out from Ennis. As it
entered the precincts a rabbit ran rapidly across the grounds. Instantly
the procession broke up; the coffin was literally dropped to the
ground, and the bearers, the mourners, and the whole company united in a
hot and general chase of bunny. Of course, I need not say," he added,
"that there was no priest with them. The fixed charge of the priest for
a burial is twenty shillings, but there is usually no service at the
grave whatever."
This may possibly be a trace of the practices which grew up under the
Penal Laws against Catholics. When Rinuccini came to Ireland in the time
of the Civil War, he found the observances of the Church all fallen into
degradation through these laws. The Holy Sacrifice was celebrated in the
cabins, and not unfrequently on tables which had been covered
half-an-hour before with the remains of the last night's supper, and
would be cleared half-an-hour afterwards for the midday meal, and
perhaps for a game of cards.
Several guests joined us at dinner. One gentleman, a magistrate familiar
with Gweedore, told me he believed the statements of Sergeant Mahony as
to the income of Father M'Fadden to fall within the truth. While he
believes that many people in that region live, as he put it, "constantly
within a hair's-breadth of famine," he thinks that the great body of
the peasants there are in a position, "with industry and thrift, not
only to make both ends meet, but to make them overlap."
Mr. Stacpoole told us some of his own experiences nearer home. Not long
ago he was informed that the National League had ordered some decent
people, who hold the demesne lands of his neighbour, Mr. Macdonald
(already alluded to) at a very low rental, to make a demand for a
reduction, which would have left Mr. Macdonald without a penny of
income. To counter this Mr. Stacpoole offered to take the lands over for
pasture at the existing rental, whereupon the tenants promptly made up
their minds to keep their holdings in defiance of the League.
Last year a man, whom Mr. Stacpoole had regarded as a "good" tenant,
came to him, bringing the money to pay his rent. "I have the rint,
sorr," the man said, "but it is God's truth I dare not pay it to ye!"
Other tenants were waiting outside. "Are you such a coward that you
don't dare be honest?" said Mr. Stacpoole. The man turned rather red,
went and looked out of all the windows, one after another, lifted up the
heavy cloth of the large table in the room, and peeped under it
nervously, and finally walked up to Mr. Stacpoole and paid the money.
The receipt being handed to him, he put it back with his hand, eyed it
askance as if it were a bomb, and finally took it, and carefully put it
into the lining of his hat, after which, opening the door with a great
noise, he exclaimed as he went out, "I'm very, very sorry, master, that
I can't meet you about it!" This man is now as loud in protestation of
his "inability" to pay his rent as any of the "Campaigners." Mr.
Stacpoole thinks one great danger of the actual situation is that men
who were originally "coerced" by intimidation into dishonestly refusing
to pay just rents, which they were abundantly able to pay, are beginning
now to think that they will be, and ought to be, relieved by the law of
the land from any obligation to pay these rents.
It seems to be his impression that things look better, however, of late
for law and order. On Monday of last week at Ennis an example was made
of a local official, which, he thinks, will do good. This was a Poor-Law
Guardian named Grogan. He was bound over on Monday last to keep the
peace for twelve months towards one George Pilkington. Pilkington, it
appears, in contempt of the League, took and occupied, in 1886, a
certain farm in Tarmon West. For this he was "boycotted" from that time
forth. In December last he was summoned, with others, before the Board
of Guardians at Kilrush, to fix the rents of certain labourers'
cottages. While he sat in the room awaiting the action of the Board,
Grogan, one of its members, rose up, and, looking at Pilkington, said in
a loud voice, "There's an obnoxious person here present that should not
be here, a land-grabber named Pilkington." There was a stir in the room,
and Pilkington, standing up, said, "I am here because I have had notice
from the Guardians. If I am asked to leave the place, I shall not come
back." The Chairman of the Board upon this declared that "while the
ordinary business of the Board was transacting, Mr. Pilkington would be
there only by the courtesy of the Board;" and treating the allusions of
Grogan to Pilkington as a part of the business of the Board, he said, "A
motion is before the Board, does any one second it?" Another guardian,
Collins, got up, and said "I do." Thereupon the Chairman put it to the
vote whether Pilkington should be requested to leave. The ayes had it,
and the Chairman of the Board thereupon invited Pilkington to leave the
meeting which the Board had invited him to attend!
Grogan has now been prosecuted for the offence of "wrongfully, and
without legal authority, using violence and intimidation to and towards
George Pilkington of Tarmon West, with a view to cause the said
Pilkington to abstain from doing an act which he had a legal right to
do, namely, to hold, occupy, and work on a certain farm of land at
Tarmon West."
Plainly this case is one of a grapple between the two Governments which
have been and are now contending for the control of Ireland: the
Government of the Queen of Ireland, which authorises Pilkington to take
and farm a piece of land, and the Government of the National League,
which forbids him to do this. Is it possible to doubt which of the two
is the government of Liberty, as well as the government of Law?
It illustrates the demoralising influence upon society in Ireland of the
protracted toleration of such a contest as has been waging between the
authority of the Law and the authority of the League, that, when this
case came up for consideration ten days ago, an official here actually
thought it ought to be put off. Colonel Turner insisted it should be
dealt with at once; and so Mr. Grogan was proceeded against, with the
result I have stated.
The trees on this demesne are the finest I have so far seen in Ireland,
beautiful and vigorous pencil-cedars, ilexes, Scotch firs, and Irish
yews. There is one noble cedar of Lebanon here worth a special trip to
see. In conversation about the country to-night, Mr. Stacpoole mentioned
that tobacco was grown here, strong and of good quality, and he was much
interested, as I remember were also the charming châtelaine of Newtown
Anner and Mr. Le Poer of Gurteen four or five years ago, to learn how
immensely successful has been the tobacco-culture introduced into
Pennsylvania only a quarter of a century ago, as a consequence of the
Civil War. The climatic conditions here are certainly not more
unfavourable to such an experiment in agriculture than they were at
first supposed to be in the Pennsylvanian counties of York and
Lancaster. Of course the Imperial excise would deal with it as harshly
as it is now dealing with a similar experiment in England. But the Irish
tobacco-growers would not now have to fear such hostile legislation as
ruined the Irish linen industries in the last century. The
"Moonlighters" of 1888 lineally represent, if they do not simply
reproduce, the "Whiteboys" of 1760; and the domination of the "uncrowned
king" constantly reminds one of Froude's vivid and vigorous sketch of
the sway wielded by "Captain Dwyer" and "Joanna Maskell" from Mallow to
Westmeath, between the years 1762 and 1765. On that side of the quarrel
there seems to be nothing very new under the sun in Ireland. But the
spirit and the forms of the Imperial authority over the country have
unquestionably undergone a great change for the better, not only since
the last century, but since the accession of Queen Victoria.
Upon the question of land improvements, Mr. Stacpoole told me, to-night,
that he borrowed £1000 of the Government for drainage improvements on
his property here, the object of which was to better the holdings of
tenants. Of this sum he had to leave £400 undrawn, as he could not get
the men to work at the improvements, even for their own good. They all
wanted to be gangers or chiefs. It reminded me of Berlioz's reply to the
bourgeois who wanted his son to be made a "great composer." "Let him go
into the army," said Berlioz, "and join the only regiment he is fit
for." "What regiment is that?" "The regiment of colonels."
In the course of the evening a report was brought out from Ennis to
Colonel Turner. He read it, and then handed it to me, with an
accompanying document. The latter, at my request, he allowed me to keep,
and I must reproduce it here. It tells its own tale.
A peasant came to the authorities and complained that he was "tormented"
to make a subscription to a "testimonial" for one Austen Mackay of
Kilshanny, in the County Clare, producing at the same time a copy of the
circular which had been sent about to the people. It is a
cheaply-printed leaflet, not unlike a penny ballad in appearance, and
thus it runs:--
"_Testimonial to_ Mr. AUSTEN MACKAY, _Kilshanny_, _County Clare_.
"We, the Nationalists and friends of Mr. Austen Mackay, at a meeting
held in March 1887, agreed and resolved on presenting the long-tried and
trusted friend--the persecuted widow's son--with a testimonial worthy of
the fearless hero who on several occasions had to hide his head in the
caves and caverns of the mountains, with a price set on his body. First,
for firing at and wounding a spy in his neighbourhood, as was alleged
in '65, for which he had to stand his trial at Clare Assizes. Again, for
firing at and wounding his mother's agent and under-strapper while in
the act of evicting his widowed mother in the broad daylight of Heaven,
thus saved his mother's home from being wrecked by the robber agent, the
shock of which saved other hearths from being quenched; but the noble
widow's son was chased to the mountains, where he had to seek shelter
from a thousand bloodhounds.
"The same true widow's son nobly guarded his mother's homestead and that
of others from the foul hands of the exterminators. This is the same
widow's son who bravely reinstated the evicted, and helped to rebuild
the levelled houses of many; for this he was persecuted and convicted at
Cork Assizes, and flung into prison to sleep on the cold plank beds of
Cork and Limerick gaols. Many other manly and noble services did he
which cannot be made known to the public. At that meeting you were
appointed collector with other Nationalists of Clare at home and abroad.
This is the widow's son, Austen Mackay, whom we, the Committee to this
testimonial, hope and trust every Irishman in Clare will cheerfully
subscribe, that he may be enabled in his present state of health to get
into some business under the protection of the Stars and Stripes, where
he is a citizen of."
"Subscriptions to be sent to Henry Higgins, Ennis.
"Treasurers: Daniel O'Loghlen, Lisdoonvarna; James Kennedy, Ennistymon."
Then follow, with the name of the Society, the names of the committee.
In behalf of the Stars and Stripes, "where he is a citizen of," I thanked
Colonel Turner for this interesting contribution to the possible future
history of my country, there being nothing to prevent the election of
any heir of this illustrious "widow's son," born to him in America, to
the Presidency of the Republic. The use of this phrase, the "widow's
son," by the way, gives a semi-masonic character to this curious
circular.
One officer says in his report upon this Committee: "All the persons
named are well known to their respective local police, and, except one,
have little or no following or influence in their respective localities.
They are all members of the National League." The same officer subjoins
this instructive observation: "I beg to add that I find no matter how
popular a man may be in Clare, start a testimonial for him, and from
that time forth his influence is gone."
Can it be possible that the "testimonial," which, as the papers tell me,
is getting up all over Ireland for Mr. Wilfrid Blunt, can have been
"started" with a sinister eye to this effect, by local patriots jealous
of any alien intrusion into their bailiwick? I am almost tempted to
suspect this, remembering that a Nationalist with whom I talked about
Mr. Blunt in Dublin, after lavishing much praise upon his disinterested
devotion to the cause of Ireland, moodily remarked, "For all that, I
don't believe he will do us any good, for he comes of the blood of
Mountjoy, I am told!"
EDENVALE, _Monday, Feb. 20._--This morning Colonel Turner called my
attention to the report in the papers of a colloquy between the Chief
Secretary for Ireland and Mr. J. Redmond, M.P., in the House, on the
subject of last week's trials at Ennis. In speaking of the boycotting at
Milltown Malbay of a certain Mrs. Connell, Mr. Balfour described the
case as one of barbarous inhumanity shown to a helpless old woman. Mr.
Redmond denying this, asserted that he had seen the woman Connell a
fortnight ago in Court, and that so far from her being a decrepit old
woman, she was only fifty years of age, hale and hearty, but
disreputable and given to drink; he also said she was drunk at the
trial, so drunk that the Crown prosecutor, Mr. Otter, was obliged to
order her down from the table.
"What are the facts?" I asked. "Mr. Balfour speaks from report and
belief, Mr. Redmond asserts that he speaks from actual observation."
"The facts," said Colonel Turner quietly, "are that Mr. Balfour's
statement is accurate, and that Mr. Redmond, speaking from actual
observation, asserts the thing that is not."
"Where is this old woman?" I asked. "Would it be possible for me to see
her?"
"Certainly; she is at no great distance, and I will with pleasure send a
car with an officer to bring her here this afternoon!"
"Meanwhile, how came the old woman into Court? and what is her
connection with the cases of boycotting last week tried?"
"Those cases arose out of her case," said Colonel Turner; "the publicans
last week arraigned, 'boycotted' a fortnight ago the police and
soldiers who were called in to keep the peace during the trial of the
dealers who 'boycotted' her.
"Her case was first publicly made known by a letter which appeared in
the Dublin _Express_ on the 28th of January. That day a line was sent to
me from Dublin ordering an inquiry into it. I endorsed upon the order,
'Please report. I imagine this is greatly exaggerated.' This was on
January 30th. The next day, January 31st, I received a full report from
Milltown Malbay. Here it is,"--taking a document from a portfolio and
handing it to me--"and you may make what use you like of it."
It is worth giving at length:--
"James Connell, ex-soldier, and his mother, Hannah Connell, of
Fintamore, in this sub-district are boycotted, and have been since
July last. James Connell held a farm and a garden from one Michael
Carroll, a farmer, who was evicted from his holding for non-payment
of three years' rent, July 14, 1886. After the period of redemption,
six months, had passed, the agent made Connell a tenant for his
house and garden, giving him in addition about half an acre (Irish)
of the evicted farm which adjoins his house. In consequence Connell
was regarded by the National League here as a 'land-grabber.' About
the same time the agent also appointed him a rent-warner.
"On the 22d June last Connell received a letter through the
Post-Office threatening him if he did not give up his place as a
rent-warner. I have no doubt the letter was written by (here a
resident was named). On the 10th, and again on the 17th, of July,
Connell was brought before indoor meetings of the National League
here for having taken the half acre of land, when he through fear
declared he had not done it.
"At the first meeting the Rev. J.S. White, P.P., suggested that in
order to test whether Connell had taken the land, Carroll, the
evicted tenant, should go and cut the meadowing on it, which he did,
when Connell interfered and prevented him. At the next meeting
Carroll brought this under notice, and Connell was thereupon
boycotted. Immediately afterwards the men who had been engaged
fishing for Connell refused to fish, saying that if they fished for
him the sale of the fish would be boycotted, which was true.
"Since then Connell has been deprived of his means of livelihood,
and no one dare employ him. He, however, through his mother, was
able to procure the necessaries of life until about the 22d of
November last, when his mother was refused goods by the tradesmen
with whom she had dealt, owing to a resolution passed at a meeting
of the 'suppressed' branch of the League here, to the effect that
any person supplying her would be boycotted. December 23d she came
into Milltown Malbay for goods, and was refused. The police
accompanied her, but no person would supply her. On the 2d of
January she came again, when one trader supplied her with some
bread, but refused groceries. The police accompanied her to several
traders, who all refused. Ultimately she was supplied by the
post-mistress. On the 7th of January she came, and the police
accompanied her to several traders, all of whom refused her even
bread. Believing she wanted it badly, we, the police, supplied her
with some. On these three occasions she was followed by large
numbers of young people about the street, evidently to frighten and
intimidate her, and their demeanour was so hostile that we were
obliged to disperse them and protect her home. On a subsequent
occasion she stated that stones were thrown at her. Since then she
has not come here for goods, and, in my opinion, it would not be
safe for her to do so without protection. She and her son are now
getting goods from Mrs. Moroney's shop at Spanish Point, which she
opened a few years ago to supply boycotted persons.
"The Connells find it hard to get turf, and are obliged to bring it
a distance in bags so that it may not be observed. As for milk, the
person who did supply them privately for a considerable time
declined some weeks ago to do so any longer. They are now really
destitute, as any little money Connell had saved is spent, and,
although willing and anxious to work, no person will employ him.
Summonses have been issued against the tradesmen for refusing to
supply Hannah Connell on the occasions already referred to. I have
only to add that I have from time to time reported fully the
foregoing facts with regard to the persecution of this poor man and
his aged mother; and I regret to say that boycotting and
intimidation never prevailed to a greater extent here than at
present. Connell's safety is being looked after by patrols from this
and Spanish Point station."
Three things seem to me specially noteworthy in this tale of cowardly
and malignant tyranny. The victims of this vulgar Vehmgericht are
neither landlords nor agents. They are a poor Irish labourer and his
aged mother. The "crime" for which these poor creatures are thus
persecuted is simply that one of them--the man--chose to obey the law of
the land in which he lives, and to work for his livelihood and that of
his mother. And the priest of the parish, instead of sheltering and
protecting these hunted creatures, is presented as joining in the hunt,
and actually devising a trap to catch the poor frightened man in a
falsehood.
Upon this third point, a correspondence which passed between Father
White and Colonel Turner, after the conviction of the boycotters of Mrs.
Connell, and copies of which the latter has handed to me at my request,
throws an instructive light.
When the report of January 31st reached him, Colonel Turner ordered the
tradespeople implicated in the persecution to be proceeded against. Six
of them were put on their trials on the 3d and 4th of February. All the
shops in Milltown Malbay were closed, by order of the local League,
during the trial, and the police and the soldiers called in were refused
all supplies.
On the 4th, one of the persons arraigned was bound over for
intimidation, and the five others were sentenced to three months'
imprisonment with hard labour.
A week later, February 11th, Colonel Turner addressed the following
letter to Father White, twenty-six publicans of Milltown Malbay having
meanwhile been prosecuted for boycotting the police and the soldiers:--
"DEAR SIR,--I write to you as a clergyman who possesses great
influence with the people in your part of the country, to put it to
you whether it would not be better for the interests of all
concerned if the contemptible system of petty persecution, called
boycotting, were put an end to in and about Milltown Malbay, which
would enable me to drop prosecutions. If it is not put a stop to, I
am determined to stamp it out, and restore to all the ordinary
rights of citizenship.
"But I should very greatly prefer that the people should stop it
themselves, and save me from taking strong measures, which I should
deplore. The story of a number of men combining to persecute a poor
old woman is one of the most pitiful I ever heard.--I am, sir, yours
truly,
ALFRED TURNER."
As the cost of the extra policemen sent to Milltown Malbay at this time
falls upon the people there, this letter in effect offered the priest an
opportunity to relieve his parish of a burden as well as to redeem its
character.
The next day Father White replied:--
"DEAR SIR,--No one living is more anxious for peace in this district
than I. During very exciting times I have done my best to keep it
free from outrage, and with success, except in one mysterious
instance.[20] There is but one obstacle to it now. If ever you can
advise Mrs. Moroney to restore the evicted tenant, whose rent you
admitted was as high as Colonel O'Callaghan's, I can guarantee on
the part of the people the return of good feelings; or, failing
that, if she and her employees are content with the goods which she
has of all kinds in her own shop, there need be no further trouble.
"I have a promise from the people that the police will be supplied
for the future. This being so, if you will kindly have prosecutions
withdrawn, or even postponed for say a month, it will very much
strengthen me in the effort I am making to calm down the feeling.
Regarding Mrs. Connell, the head-constable was told by me that she
was to get goods, and she did get bread, till the police went round
with her. This upset my arrangements, as I had induced the people to
give her what she might really want. In fact she was a convenience
to Mrs. Moroney for obvious reasons, and her son is now in her
employment in place of Kelly, who has been dismissed since his very
inconvenient evidence. It is, and was, well known they were not
starving as they said, they having a full supply of their accustomed
food.--Thanking you for your great courtesy, I am, dear sir, truly
yours,
"J. White."
On the 14th Colonel Turner replied:--
"My dear Sir,--We cannot adjourn the cases. But if those who are
prosecuted are prepared to make reparation by promising future good
conduct in Court, I can then see my way to interfere, and to prevent
them from suffering imprisonment.
"These cases have nothing whatever to do with Mrs. Moroney.[21] They
are simply between the defendants and the police and other
officials, who were at Milltown Malbay that day. I am greatly
pleased at your evident wish to co-operate with me in calming down
the ill-feeling which unfortunately exists, and I am satisfied that
success will attend our efforts."
On Thursday and Friday last, as I have recorded, the cases came on of
the twenty-six publicans charged. Between February 4th, when the
offences were committed, and the 17th of February, one of these
publicans had died, one had fled to America, and there proved to be an
informality in the summons issued against a third. Twenty-three only
were put upon their trial. As I have stated, one was acquitted and the
others were found guilty, and sentenced to be imprisoned. In accordance
with his promise made to Father White, Colonel Turner offered to relieve
them all of the imprisonment if they would sign an undertaking in Court
not to repeat the offence. Ten, the most prosperous and substantial of
the accused, accepted this offer and signed, as has been already stated.
One, a woman, was discharged without being required to sign the
guarantee, the other eleven refused to sign, and were sent to prison.
Father White, whose own evidence given at the trial, as his letter to
Colonel Turner would lead one to expect, had gone far to prove the
existence of the conspiracy, encouraged the eleven in their attitude.
This was his way of "co-operating" with Colonel Turner to "calm down the
ill-feeling which exists"!
During the morning Mrs. Stacpoole sent for the clerk and manager of the
estate, and asked him to show me the books. He is a native of these
parts, by name Considine, and has lived at Edenvale for eighteen years.
In his youth he went out to America, but there found out that he had a
"liver," an unpleasant discovery, which led him to return to the land of
his birth, and to the service of Mr. Stacpoole. He is perfectly familiar
with the condition of the country here, and as the accounts of this
estate are kept minutely and carefully from week to week, he was able
this morning to show me the current prices of all kinds of farm produce
and of supplies in and about Ennis--not estimated prices, but prices
actually paid or received in actual transactions during the last ten
years. I am surprised to see how narrow has been the range of local
variations during that time; and I find Mr. Considine inclined to think
that the farmers here have suffered very little, if at all, from these
fluctuations, making up from time to time on their reduced expenses what
they have lost through lessened receipts. The expenses of the landlord
have however increased, while his receipts have fallen off. In 1881
Edenvale paid out for labour £466, 0s. 1-1/2d., in 1887 £560, 6s.
3-1/2d., though less labour was employed in 1887 than in 1881. The wages
of servants, where any change appears, have risen. In 1881 a gardener
received £14 a year, in 1888 he receives 15s. a week, or at the rate of
£39 a year. A housemaid receiving £12 a year in 1881, receives now £17 a
year. A butler receiving in 1881 £26 a year, now receives £40 a year. A
kitchen maid receiving in 1881 £6, now receives £10, 10s. a year.
Meanwhile, the Sub-Commissioners are at this moment cutting down the
Edenvale rents again by £190, 3s. 2d., after a walk over the property in
the winter. Yet in July 1883 Mr. Reeves, for the Sub-Commission,
"thought it right to say there was no estate in the County Clare so
fairly rented, to their knowledge, or where the tenants had less cause
for complaint." In but one case was a reduction of any magnitude made by
the Commission of 1883, and in one case that Commission actually
increased the rent from £11, 10s. to £16. In January 1883 the rental of
this property was £4065, 5s. 1d. The net reduction made by the
Commissioners in July 1883 was £296, 14s. 0-1/2d.
After luncheon a car came up to the mansion, bringing a stalwart,
good-natured-looking sergeant of police, and with him the boycotted old
woman Mrs. Connell and her son. The sergeant helped the old woman down
very tenderly, and supported her into the house. She came in with some
trepidation and uneasiness, glancing furtively all about her, with the
look of a hunted creature in her eyes. Her son, who followed her, was
more at his ease, but he also had a worried and careworn look. Both were
warmly but very poorly clad, and both worn and weatherbeaten of aspect.
The old woman might have passed anywhere for a witch, so wizened and
weird she was, of small stature, and bent nearly double by years and
rheumatism. Her small hands were withered away into claws, and her head
was covered with a thick and tangled mat of hair, half dark, half grey,
which gave her the look almost of the Fuegian savages who come off from
the shore in their flat rafts and clamour to you for "rum" in the
Straits of Magellan. Her eyes were intensely bright, and shone like hot
coals in her dusky, wrinkled face. It was a raw day, and she came in
shivering with the cold. It was pathetic to see how she positively
gloated with extended palms over the bright warm, fire in the
drawing-room, and clutched at the cup of hot tea which my kind hostess
instantly ordered in for her.
This was the woman of whom Mr. Redmond wrote to Mr. Parnell that she was
"an active strong dame of about fifty." When Mr. Balfour, in Parliament,
described her truly as a "decrepit old woman of eighty," Mr. Redmond
contradicted him, and accused her of being "the worse for liquor" in a
public court.
"How old is your mother?" I asked her son.
"I am not rightly sure, sir," he replied, "but she is more than eighty."
"The man himself is about fifty," said the sergeant; "he volunteered to
go to the Crimean War, and that was more than thirty years ago!"
"I did indeed, sir," broke in the man, "and it was from Cork I went. And
I'd be a corpse now if it wasn't for the mercy of God and the
protection. God bless the police, sir, that protected my old mother,
sir, and me. That Mr. Redmond, sir, they read me what he said, and sure
he should be ashamed of his shadow, to get up there in Parliament, and
tell those lies, sir, about my old mother!" I questioned Connell as to
his relations with Carroll, the man who brought him before the League.
He was a labourer holding a bit of ground under Carroll. Carroll refused
to pay his own rent to the landlord. But he compelled Connell to pay
rent to him. When Carroll was evicted, the landlord offered to let
Connell have half an acre more of land. He took it to better himself,
and "how did he injure Carroll by taking it?" How indeed, poor man! Was
he a rent-warner? Yes; he earned something that way two or three times
a year; and for that he had to ask the protection of the police--"they
would kill him else." What with worry and fright, and the loss of his
livelihood, this unfortunate labourer has evidently been broken down
morally and physically. It is impossible to come into contact with such
living proofs of the ineffable cowardice and brutality of this business
of "boycotting" without indignation and disgust.
While Connell was telling his pitiful tale a happy thought occurred to
the charming daughter of the house. Mrs. Stacpoole is a clever amateur
in photography. "Why not photograph this 'hale and hearty woman of
fifty,' with her son of fifty-three?" Mrs. Stacpoole clapped her hands
at the idea, and went off at once to prepare her apparatus.
While she was gone the sergeant gave me an account of the trial, which
Mr. Redmond, M.P., witnessed. He was painfully explicit. "Mr. Redmond
knew the woman was sober," he said; "she was lifted up on the table at
Mr. Redmond's express request, because she was so small and old, and
spoke in such a low voice that he could not hear what she said. Connell
had always been a decent, industrious fellow--a fisherman. But for the
lady, Mrs. Moroney, he and his mother would have starved, and would
starve now. As for the priest, Father White, Connell went to him to ask
his intercession and help, but he could get neither."
The sergeant had heard Father White preach yesterday. "It was a curious
sermon. He counselled peace and forbearance to the people, because they
might be sure the wicked Tory Government would very soon fall!"
Presently the sun came out with golden glow, and with the sun came out
Mrs. Stacpoole. It was a job to "pose" the subjects, the old woman
evidently suspecting some surgical or legal significance in the
machinery displayed, and her son finding some trouble in making her
understand what it meant. But finally we got the tall, personable
sergeant, with his frank, shrewd, sensible face, to put himself between
the two, in the attitude as of a guardian angel; the camera was nimbly
adjusted, and lo! the thing was done.
Mrs. Stacpoole thinks the operation promises a success. I suppose it
would hardly be civil to send a finished proof of the group to Mr. J.
Redmond, M.P.
APPENDIX.
NOTE A.
MR. GLADSTONE AND THE AMERICAN WAR. (Prologue, p. xxix.)
This statement as to the action of Lord Palmerston in connection with
Mr. Gladstone's Newcastle speech of October 7th, 1862, made upon the
authority of a British public man whose years and position entitle him
to speak with confidence on such a subject, appeared to me of so much
interest, that after sending it to the printer I caused search to be
made for the speech referred to as made by Sir George Cornewall Lewis.
My informant's statement was that Lord Palmerston insisted that Sir
George Lewis should find or make an immediate opportunity of covering
what Mr. Gladstone had said at Newcastle. He was angry about it, and his
anger was increased by an article which Mr. Delane printed in the
_Times_, intimating that Mr. Gladstone's speech was considered by many
people to be a betrayal of Cabinet secrets. Sir George Lewis was far
from well (he died the next spring), and reluctant to do what his chief
wished; but he did it on the 17th of October 1862 in a speech at
Hereford. Mr. Milner-Gibson was also put forward to the same end, and
after Parliament met, in February 1863, Mr. Disraeli gave the
Government a sharp lashing for sending one or two Ministers into the
country in the recess to announce that the Southern States would be
recognised, and then putting forward the President of the Board of Trade
(Milner-Gibson) to attack the Southern States and the pestilent
institution of slavery. Mr. Gladstone's speech at Newcastle, coming as
it did from the Chancellor of the Exchequer, after the close of a
session during which everybody knew that the Emperor of the French had
been urging upon England the recognition of the Confederate States, and
that Mr. Mason had been in active correspondence on that subject with
Lord Russell, was taken at Newcastle, and throughout the country, to
mean that the recognition was imminent. Mr. Gladstone even went so far
as to say he rather rejoiced that the Confederates had not been able to
hold Maryland, as that might have made them aggressive, and so made a
settlement more difficult, it being, he said, as certain as anything in
the future could be that the South must succeed in separating itself
from the Union. This remark about Maryland distinctly indicated
consultation as to what limits and boundaries between the South and the
North should be recognised in the recognition, and on that account, it
seems, was particularly resented by Earl Russell as well as by Lord
Palmerston.
Sir George Cornewall Lewis's speech of October 17, 1862, was a most
skilful and masterly attempt to protect the Cabinet against the
consequences of what the _Times_, on the 9th of October, had treated as
the "indiscretion or treason" of his colleague. But it did not save the
Government from the scourge of Mr. Disraeli, or much mitigate the effect
in America of Mr. Gladstone's performance at Newcastle, which was a much
more serious matter from the American point of view than any of the
speeches recently delivered about "Home Rule" in the American Senate
can be fairly said to be from the British point of view.
NOTE B.
MR. PARNELL AND THE DYNAMITERS. (Prologue, p. xxxiii.)
The relation of Mr. Parnell and his Parliamentary associates to what is
called the extreme and "criminal" section of the Irish American
Revolutionary Party can only be understood by those who understand that
it is the ultimate object of this party not to effect reforms in the
administration of Ireland as an integral part of the British Empire, but
to sever absolutely the political connection between Ireland and the
British Empire. Loyal British subjects necessarily consider this object
a "criminal" object, just as loyal Austrian subjects considered the
object of the Italian Revolutionists of 1848 to be a "criminal" object.
But the Italian Revolutionists of 1848 did not accept this view of their
object. On the contrary, they held their end to be so high and holy that
it more or less sanctified even assassination when planned as a means to
that end. Why should the Italian Revolutionists of 1848 be judged by one
standard and the Irish Revolutionists of 1888 by another?
If Mr. Parnell and his Parliamentary associates were to declare in
unequivocal terms their absolute loyalty to the British Crown, and their
determination to maintain in all circumstances the political connection
between Great Britain and Ireland, they might or might not retain their
hold upon Mr. Davitt and upon their constituents in Ireland, but they
would certainly put themselves beyond the pale of support by the great
Irish American organisations. Nor do I believe they could retain the
confidence of those organisations if it were supposed that they really
regarded the most extreme and violent of the Irish Revolutionists, the
"Invincibles" and the "dynamiters" as "criminals," in the sense in which
the "Invincibles" and the "dynamiters" are so regarded by the rest of
the civilised world. Can it, for example, be doubted that any English or
Scottish public man who co-operates with Mr. Parnell and his
Parliamentary associates would instantly hand over to the police any
"Invincible" or "dynamiter" who might come within his reach? And can it
for a moment be believed that Mr. Parnell, or any one of his
Parliamentary associates, would do this? There are thousands of Irish
citizens in the United States who felt all the horror and indignation
expressed by Mr. Parnell at the murders in the Phoenix Park, but I
should be very much surprised to learn that any one of them all ever
did, or ever would do, anything likely to bring any one of the authors
of these murders to the bar of justice. Mr. Parnell and his
Parliamentary associates are held and bound by the essential conditions
of their political existence to treat with complaisance the most extreme
and violent men of their party. Nor is this true of them alone.
There is no more respectable body of men in the United States than the
Hibernian Society of Philadelphia. This society was instituted in 1771,
five years before the declaration of American Independence. It is a
charitable and social organisation only, with no political object or
colour. It is made up of men of character and substance. Its custom has
always been to celebrate St. Patrick's Day by a banquet, to which the
most distinguished men of the country have repeatedly been bidden.
Immediately after the inauguration of Mr. Cleveland as President, on
the 4th of March 1885, Mr. Bayard, the new Secretary of State of the
United States, was invited by this Society to attend its one hundred and
fourteenth banquet. It will be remembered that, on the 30th of May 1884,
London had been startled and shocked by an explosion of dynamite in St.
James's Square, which shattered many houses and inflicted cruel injuries
upon several innocent people. It was not so fatal to life as that
explosion at the Salford Barracks, which Mr. Parnell treated as a
"practical joke." But it excited lively indignation on both sides of the
Atlantic, and Mr. Bayard, who at that time was a Senator of the United
States, sternly denounced it and its authors on the floor of the
American Senate. What he had said as a Senator he thought it right to
repeat as the Foreign Secretary of the United States in his reply to the
invitation of the Hibernian Society in March 1885. This reply ran as
follows:--
"WASHINGTON, D.C., _March_ 9, 1885.
"NICHOLAS J. GRIFFIN, Esq., _Secretary of the Hibernian Society of
Philadelphia._
"Dear Sir,--I have your personal note accompanying the card of
invitation to dine with your ancient and honourable Society on their
one hundred and fourteenth anniversary, St. Patrick's Day, and I
sincerely regret that I cannot accept it. The obvious and many
duties of my public office here speak for themselves, and to none
with more force than to American citizens of Irish blood or birth
who are honestly endeavouring to secure liberty by maintaining a
government of laws, and who realise the constant attention that is
needful.
"In the midst of anarchical demonstrations which we witness in other
lands, and the echoes of which we can detect even here in our own
free country, where base and silly individuals seek to stain the
name of Ireland by associating the honest struggle for just
government with senseless and wicked crimes, there are none of our
citizens from whom honest reprobation can be more confidently
expected than from such as compose your respected and benevolent
Society. Those who worthily celebrate the birthday[22] of St.
Patrick will not forget that he drove out of Ireland the reptiles
that creep and sting.
"The Hibernian Society can contain no member who will not resent the
implication that sympathy with assassins can dwell in a genuine
Irish heart, which will ever be opposed to cruelty and cowardice,
whatever form either may take.
"Present to your Society my thanks for the kind remembrance, and
assure them of the good-will and respect with which I am--Your
obedient servant,
T.F. BAYARD."
What was the response of this Society, representing all the best
elements of the Irish American population of the United States, to this
letter of the Secretary of State, the highest executive officer of the
American Government after the President, upon whom under an existing law
the succession of the chief magistracy now devolves in the event of the
death or disability of the President and the Vice-President?
_The letter was not read at the banquet._
But it was given to the press by the officers of the Society, and the
most influential Irish American newspaper in the United States did not
hesitate to describe it as an "insulting letter," going to show that its
author was "an Englishman in spirit who will not allow any opportunity
to go by, however slight, without testifying his sympathy with the
British Empire and his antipathy for its foes."
This was capped by an American political journal which used the
following language: "Lord Granville himself would hardly strike a more
violent attitude against the dynamite section of the Irish people. When
Lord Wolseley, whom it is proposed to make Governor-General of the
Soudan, is offering a reward for the head of Ollivier Pain, it is hardly
in good taste for an American Secretary of State to condemn so bitterly
a class of Irishmen which, while it includes bad men no doubt, also
includes men who are moved by as worthy motives as Lord Wolseley."
In the face of this testimony to the "solidarity" of all branches of the
Irish revolutionary movement in America, how can Mr. Parnell, or any
other Parliamentary Irishman who depends upon Irish American support, be
expected by men of sense to condemn in earnest "the dynamite section of
the Irish people"?
NOTE C.
THE AMERICAN "SUSPECTS" OF 1881. (Prologue, p. xlvii.)
In his recently published and very interesting _Life of Mr. Forster_,
Mr. Wemyss Reid alludes to some action taken by the United States
Government in the spring of 1882 as one of the determining forces which
brought about the abandonment at that time by Mr. Gladstone of Mr.
Forster's policy in Ireland. Without pretending to concern myself here
with what is an essentially British question as between Mr. Forster and
Mr. Gladstone, it may be both proper and useful for me to throw some
light, not, perhaps, in the possession of Mr. Reid, upon the part taken
in this matter by the American Government. Sir William Harcourt's
"Coercion Bill" was passed on the 2d of March 1881, two days before the
inauguration of General Garfield as President of the United States. Mr.
Blaine, who was appointed by the new President to take charge of the
Foreign Relations of the American Government, received, on the 10th of
March, at Washington, a despatch written by Mr. Lowell, the American
Minister in London, on the 26th of February, being the day after the
third reading in the Commons of the "Coercion Bill." In this despatch
Mr. Lowell called the attention of the American State Department to a
letter from Mr. Parnell to the Irish National Land League, dated at
Paris, February 13, 1881, in which Mr. Parnell attempted to make what
Mr. Lowell accurately enough described as an "extraordinary" distinction
between "the American people" and "the Irish nation in America."
"This double nationality," said Mr. Lowell, "is likely to be of great
practical inconvenience whenever the 'Coercion Bill' becomes law." By
"this double nationality" in this passage, the American Minister, of
course, meant "this claim of a double nationality;" for neither by Great
Britain nor by the United States is any man permitted to consider
himself at one and the same time a citizen of the American republic and
a subject of the British monarchy. Nor was he quite right in
anticipating "great practical inconvenience" from this "claim," upon
which neither the British nor the American Government for a moment
bestowed, or could bestow, the slightest attention.
The "great practical inconvenience" which, first to the American
Legation in England, then to the United States Government at Washington,
and finally to the Cabinet of Mr. Gladstone, did, however, arise from
the application of Sir William Harcourt's Coercion Act of 1881 to
American citizens in Ireland, had its origin not in Mr. Parnell's
preposterous idea of an Irish nationality existing in the United States,
but in the failure of the authorities of the United States to deal
promptly and firmly with the situation created for American citizens in
Ireland by the administration of Sir William Harcourt's Act.
As I have said, Sir William Harcourt's Act became law on the 2d of
March 1881, two days before the inauguration of President Garfield at
Washington. Without touching the question of the relations between Great
Britain and Ireland, and between the British Parliament and the Irish
National Land League, it was clearly incumbent upon the Secretary of
State of the United States, who entered upon his duties three days after
Sir William Harcourt's Bill went into force in Ireland, to inform
himself minutely and exactly as to the possible effects of that Bill
upon the rights and interests of American citizens travelling or
sojourning in that country. This was due not only to his own Government
and to its citizens, but to the relations which ought to exist between
his own Government and the Government of Great Britain. It was no affair
of an American Secretary of State either to impede or to further the
execution of "Coercion Acts" in Ireland against British subjects. But it
was his affair to ascertain without delay the nature and the measure of
any new and unusual perils, or "inconveniences," to which American
citizens in Ireland might be exposed in the execution there by the
British authorities of such Acts.
And it is on record, under his own hand, in a despatch to the American
Minister in London, dated May 26, 1881, that Mr. Blaine had not so much
as seen a copy of Sir William Harcourt's Coercion Act at that date,
three months after it had gone into effect; three months after many
persons claiming American citizenship had been arrested and imprisoned
under it; and two months after his own official attention had been
called by the American Minister in London, in an elaborate despatch, to
the arrest under it of one such person, a man of Irish birth, who based
his claim of American citizenship upon allegations of military service
during the Civil War, of residence and citizenship in New York, and of
the granting to him, by an American Secretary of State, of a citizen's
passport. And when he did finally take the trouble to look at this Act,
Mr. Elaine seems to have examined it so cursorily, and with such slight
attention, that he overlooked a provision made in it, under which, had
its true force and meaning been perceived by him, the State Department
of the United States might, in the early summer of 1881, have secured
for American citizens in Ireland the consideration due to them as the
citizens of a friendly State. A curious despatch from Mr. Sackville
West, the British Minister at Washington, to Earl Granville, published
in a British Blue-book now in my possession, plainly intimates that in
the summer of 1881 the American Secretary of State had given the British
Minister to understand that no representations made to him or to his
Government by the Government of the United States touching
American-Irish "suspects" need be taken at all seriously. The whole
diplomatic correspondence on this subject which went on between the two
Governments while Mr. Blaine was Secretary of State, from the 4th of
March 1881 to the 20th of December 1881, was of a sort to lull the
British Government into the belief that "suspects" might be freely and
safely arrested and locked up all over Ireland, with no more question of
their nationality than of any evidence to establish their guilt or their
innocence. During the whole of that time the State Department at
Washington seems to have substantially remained content with the
declaration of Earl Granville, in a letter sent to the American Legation
on the 8th of July 1881, four months after the Coercion Act went into
effect, that "no distinction could be made in the circumstances between
foreigners and British subjects, and that in the case of British
subjects the only information given was that contained in the warrant."
No fault can be found with the British Government for standing by this
declaration so long as it thus seemed to command the assent of the
Government of the United States.
But when Mr. Frelinghuysen was called into the State Department by
President Arthur in December 1881, to overhaul the condition into which
our foreign relations had been brought by his predecessor, he found that
in no single instance had Mr. Blaine succeeded in inducing the British
Government, either to release any American citizen arrested under a
general warrant without specific charges of criminal conduct, and on
"suspicion" in Ireland, or to order the examination of any such citizen.
The one case in which an American citizen arrested under the Coercion
Act in Ireland during Mr. Blaine's tenure of office had been liberated
when Mr. Frelinghuysen took charge of the State Department, was that of
Mr. Joseph B. Walsh, arrested at Castlebar, in Mayo, March 8, 1881, and
discharged by order of the Lord-Lieutenant, October 21, 1881, not
because he was an American citizen, nor after any examination, but
expressly and solely on the ground of ill-health.
When Mr. Frelinghuysen became Secretary of State in December 1881 the
Congress of the United States was in session. So numerous were the
American "suspects" then lying in prison in Ireland, some of whom had
been so confined for many months, that the doors of Congress were soon
besieged by angry demands for an inquiry into the subject. A resolution
in this sense was adopted by the House of Representatives, and
forwarded, through the American Legation in London, to the British
Foreign Office. Memorials touching particular cases were laid before
both Houses of the American Congress. On the 10th of February 1882, Mr.
Bancroft Davis, the Assistant-Secretary of State, instructed the
American Minister at London to take action concerning one such case, and
to report upon it. The Minister not moving more rapidly than he had been
accustomed to do under Mr. Blaine, Mr. Davis grew impatient, and on the
2d of March 1882 (being the anniversary of the adoption of the Coercion
Act in England) the American Secretary of State cabled to the Minister
in London significantly enough, "Use all diligence in regard to the late
cases, especially of Hart and M'Sweeney, and report by cable."
Mr. Lowell replied the next day, giving the views in regard to Hart of
the American Vice-Consul, and of the British Inspector of Police at
Queenstown, and adding an expression of his own opinion that neither
Hart nor M'Sweeney was "more innocent than the majority of those under
arrest."
This was an unfortunate despatch. It roused the American Secretary of
State into responding instantly by cable in the following explicit and
emphatic terms: "Referring to the cases of O'Connor, Hart, M'Sweeney,
M'Enery, and D'Alton, American citizens imprisoned in Ireland, say to
Lord Granville that, without discussing whether the provisions of the
Force Act can be applied to American citizens, the President hopes that
the Lord-Lieutenant will be instructed to exercise the powers intrusted
to him by the first section to order early trials in these and all other
cases in which Americans may be arrested."
There was no mistaking the tone of this despatch. It was instantly
transmitted to the British Foreign Secretary, who replied the same day
that "the matter would receive the immediate attention of Her Majesty's
Government."
The reference made to the Coercion Act by Mr. Frelinghuysen touched a
plain and precise provision, that persons detained under the Act
"should not be discharged or tried by any court without the direction of
the Lord-Lieutenant." Had the Coercion Act received from Mr. Blaine in
March 1881 the attention bestowed upon it in March 1882 by Mr.
Frelinghuysen, this provision might have been used to obviate the
dangerous accumulation of injustice to individuals, and of international
irritation, resulting from the application to possibly innocent foreign
citizens in Ireland of the despotic powers conferred by that Act upon
Mr. Gladstone's Government, powers as nearly as possible analogous with
those which Mr. Gladstone himself, years before, had denounced in
unmeasured terms when they were claimed and exercised by the Government
of Naples in dealing with its own subjects.
After the consideration by Her Majesty's Government of this despatch of
the United States Government, it is understood in America that Mr.
Forster, as Chief Secretary for Ireland, was invited to communicate with
the Lord-Lieutenant, and request him to exercise his discretion in the
sense desired, and that Mr. Forster positively refused to do this.
How this may be I do not pretend to say. But as no satisfactory reply
was made to the American despatch, and as public feeling in the United
States grew daily more and more determined that a stop should be put to
the unexplained arrest and the indefinite detention of American citizens
in Ireland, the American Secretary of State made up his mind towards the
end of the month of March to repeat his despatch of March 3d in a more
terse and peremptory form. As a final preliminary to this step, however,
Mr. Frelinghuysen was induced to avail himself of the unusual and
officious intervention of his most distinguished living predecessor in
the State Department, Mr. Hamilton Fish. After measuring the gravity of
the situation, Mr. Fish at the end of March sent a despatch to an
eminent public man, well known on both sides of the Atlantic, and now
resident in London, with authority to show it personally to Mr.
Gladstone, to the effect that if any further delay occurred in complying
with the moderate and reasonable demand of the American Government for
the immediate release or the immediate trial of the American "suspects,"
the relations between Great Britain and the United States would be very
seriously "strained."
This despatch was at once communicated to Mr. Gladstone. Within the
week, the liberation was announced of six American "suspects." Within a
fortnight, Mr. Parnell, Mr. O'Kelly, and Mr. Dillon, it is understood,
imprisoned members of Parliament, were offered their liberty if they
would consent to a sham exile on the Continent for a few weeks, or even
days; and within a month Mr. Forster, in his place in Parliament, was
imputing to his late chief and Premier the negotiation of that
celebrated "Treaty of Kilmainham," which was repudiated with equal
warmth by the three Irish members already named, and by Mr. Gladstone.
NOTE D.
THE PARNELLITES AND THE ENGLISH PARTIES.
(Prologue, p. 1.)
As I am not writing a history of English parties, I need not discuss
here the truth or falsehood of this contention. But I cannot let it pass
without a word as to two cases which came under my own observation, and
which aggravate the inherent improbability of the tale. In November 1885
I went to America, and on my way passed through Stockport, where my
friend, Mr. Jennings, long my correspondent in England, was then
standing as a Conservative candidate. I attended one of his meetings and
heard him make an effective speech, much applauded, which turned
exclusively upon imperial and financial issues. That he had no
understanding whatever with the "managers" of the Irish vote in
Stockport, I have the best reason to believe. But he was assured by them
that the Irish intended to vote for him; and at a subsequent time he was
rashly assailed in the House of Commons by an Irish member with the
charge that he had broken faith with the Irish who elected him. It was
an unlucky assault for the assailant, as it gave Mr. Jennings an
opportunity, which he promptly improved, to show that he owed nothing to
the Irish voters of Stockport. Whether they voted for him in any number
in 1885 was more than doubtful; while in 1886 they voted solidly against
him, with the result of swelling his majority from 369 to 518 votes.
In January 1886 I returned to Europe, and going on a visit into
Yorkshire, there met a prominent Irish Nationalist, who told me that he
had come into the north of England expressly to regiment the Irish
voters, and throw their votes for the Conservative candidates, on the
ground that it was necessary to make the Liberals fully understand their
power. He had fully expected in this way to elect a Conservative member
for the city of York. Great was his chagrin, therefore, when he found
the Liberal candidate returned. Upon investigation he discovered, as he
told me, that the catastrophe was due to the activity of a local Irish
priest, _who was a devoted Fenian_, utterly opposed to the Parliamentary
programme, and who had exerted his authority over the local Irish to
bring them to the polls for the Liberal candidate.
Sir Frederick Milner, Bart., the defeated Conservative candidate for
York, afterwards told me that the local priest referred to here was a
most excellent man, and that so far from playing the part thus ascribed
to him, he took the trouble, as a matter of fair dealing, to see his
parishioners on the morning of the election and warn them against
believing a pamphlet which was sedulously circulated among the Irish
voters on the night before the polling, with a message to the effect
that Sir Frederick despised the Irish, and wanted nothing to do with
them or their votes. Sir Frederick has no doubt, from his knowledge of
what occurred during the canvass, that direct instructions were sent by
Mr. Parnell or his agents to the Irish voters in York to throw their
votes against the Radical candidates. These latter brought down a Home
Rule lecturer to counteract the effect of these instructions, and the
pamphlet above referred to was an eleventh-hour blow in the same
interest. It was successful; the Irish votes, some 500 in number, being
polled early in the morning under the impression produced by it. The
moral of this incident would seem to be, not that there was any real
understanding in 1885 between the Parnellites and the English
Conservatives at all, but simply that the English Radical wirepullers
are more alert and active than either the Irish Parnellites or the
English Conservatives. It is interesting, too, as it illustrates the
deep dread and distrust of the "Fenians" in which the Parnellites
habitually go.
NOTE E.
THE "BOYCOTT" AT MILTOWN-MALBAY.
(Vol. i. p. 209.)
Father White of Miltown-Malbay, taking exception to the statement made
by me, upon the authority of Colonel Turner, that he was "the moving
spirit" of the local "boycott" of policemen and soldiers at that place,
addressed a note to Colonel Turner on the 5th of September, in which he
desired to know whether Colonel Turner, had given me grounds for making
this statement. To this note Colonel Turner tells me he returned at once
the following reply, which he kindly forwards to me for publication:--
"ENNIS, _6th September_ 1888.
"REV. SIR,--I am in receipt of your letter of yesterday, and in
reply thereto beg to state that I informed Mr. Hurlbert that you
said 'in open court' that you had directed (I believe from the
altar) that the town was to be 'made as a city of the dead' during
the trials of 23 publicans who were charged for conspiracy in
boycotting the forces of the Crown who had been employed in
preserving the peace on the occasion of a former trial--this you
said you did in the interests of peace. The magistrates, however,
took a different view, viz., that it was done with the object of
preventing the military and police from obtaining any supplies,
which they were unable to do; and that their view was the correct
one was proved by the fact that half of the accused pleaded guilty
to the offence, and on promise of future good behaviour were allowed
out on their own recognisances. That the people followed your
instructions on that day, coupled with the fact that in your letter
to the _Freeman's Journal_, dated 17th March of this year, you
stated that you offered me peace all round on certain conditions,
thereby showing that at least you consider yourself possessed of
authority to bring about a state of peace or otherwise, probably led
Mr. Hurlbert, to whom I showed a copy of this letter, to infer that
you admitted that you were the moving spirit of all this 'local
boycott,' while you only did so in the particular case above
mentioned. Whether Mr. Hurlbert is correct in drawing the inference
he does as to your being the moving spirit, and as to your conduct,
may perhaps be gathered from the numerous numbers of _United
Ireland_ and other papers which he saw giving reports of illegal
meetings of the suppressed branch of the Miltown-Malbay National
League, at which you were stated to have presided, and at some of
which condemnatory resolutions were passed, and also from the fact
that you are reported to have presided at a meeting on Sunday, April
8, which was held at Miltown-Malbay in defiance of Government
proclamation.--I am, dear Sir, yours faithfully,
ALFRED E. TURNER.
"Rev. P. White, P.P., Miltown-Malbay."
On further investigation of his records, Colonel Turner found it
necessary to follow up this letter with another, a copy of which,
through his courtesy, I subjoin:--
"ENNIS, _10th September_ 1888.
"REV. SIR,--A slight inaccuracy has been pointed out to me in my
letter to you of the 6th inst., which I hasten to correct. It
occurred in transcribing my letter from the original draft. I should
have said that I told Mr. Hurlbert that you stated in open court, at
the trial of 23 publicans charged with boycotting the forces of the
Crown on the occasion of a former trial, that you had told the
people (I believe from the altar) that the town was to be made as a
city of the dead during the former trial; and that in consequence
the soldiers and police could get nothing to eat or drink in Miltown
that day.
"I also told him that this boycotting of the police was by no means
new, since on the 13th March 1887, at a meeting of the
Miltown-Malbay branch of the League at which you are reported to
have presided, in _United Ireland_ of 19/3/87, the following
resolution was unanimously adopted:--
"'That from this day any person who supplies the police while
engaged in work which is opposed to the wishes of the people with
drink, food, or cars, be censured by this branch, and that no
further intercourse be held with them.'
"I regret that through inadvertence I have had to trouble you with a
second letter.--I am, Rev. Sir, yours faithfully,
"ALFRED E. TURNER.
"Rev. P. White, P.P."
[1] Vol. ii. p. 376.
[2] Vol. ii. p. 364-370.
[3] The exasperation of the local agitators under the cool and
determined treatment of Mr. Tener may be measured by the facts stated in
the following communication received by me from Mr. Tener on the 20th of
September. I leave them to speak for themselves:--
"POLICE BARRACKS, WOODFORD, _17th Sept._ 1888.
"DEAR MR. HURLBERT,--I enclose you _a printed_ placard found posted
up in Woodford district on Sunday morning the 9th inst. It alludes
to _tenants_ who had paid me their rent,--and broken the 'unwritten
law of the League.' All the men named are now in great danger. The
police force of the district has been increased--for their
protection; but the police are very anxious about their safety!
"I send you also a _pencil_ copy taken from a more _perfect_ placard
which the police preserve. John White or Whyte is the tenant whose
name I already have given you. He is the tall dark man whom you saw
(with an ex-bailiff) at Portumna. He was then an "Evicted Tenant."
He has since been, on payment of his rent, restored to his farm by
me. And now, as you see in the placard, he is held up to the
vengeance of the "League of Hell," as P.J. Smyth called it.--Yours,
etc.
"ED. TENER.
"_P.S._--The evictions were finished on the 1st of September, and on
the 9th (_after_ it became known that the men whose names are in the
placard had paid) the placard was issued."
_(Placard.)_
"IRISHMEN!--Need we say in the face of the desperate Battle the
People are making for their Hearths and Homes that the time has come
for every HONEST MAN, trader and otherwise, to extend a helping hand
to the MEN in the GAP. You may ask, How will that be done? The
answer is plain.
"Let those who have become traitors to their neighbours and their
Country be shunned as if they were possessed by a devil. Let no man
buy from them or sell to them, let no man work for them. Leave them
to Tener and his Emergency gang. The following are a few of the
greatest traitors and meanest creatures that ever walked--John
Whyte, of Dooras; Fahey (of the hill) of Dooras; big Anthony
Hackett, of Rossmore; Tom Moran, of Rossmore! Your Country calls on
you to treat them as they deserve. Bravo Woodford! Remember Tom
Larkin!--'GOD SAVE IRELAND!'"
[4] Appendix, Note A.
[5] Appendix, Note B.
[6] Appendix, Note C.
[7] Appendix, Note D.
[8] Since this was written fifteen Catholic bishops in England,
headed by the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, have united (April 12,
1888) in a public protest against the Optional Oaths Bill, in which they
say: "To efface the recognition of God in our public legislature is an
act which will surely bring evil consequences." Yet how can the
recognition of God be more effectually "effaced" than by the unqualified
assertion that the will of the people, or of a majority, is the one
legitimate source of political authority?
[9] Mr. Blair was then a member of the Lincoln Cabinet, and its
"fighting member."
[10] Mr. Quill stated that the Savings-Banks deposits increased
in Ireland during 1887 eight per cent. more than in thrifty Scotland,
and _forty per cent._ more than in England and Wales!
[11] This was the Provost's last appearance in public. He died
rather suddenly a few weeks afterwards.
[12] In the Census of 1880 it appears that of 255,741 farms in
Illinois, 59,624 were held on the métayer system, pronounced by Toubeau
the worst of systems, and 20,620 on a money rental.
[13] I have since learned that Father M'Fadden sold another
holding, rental 6s. 8d., for £80. He has three more holdings from
Captain Hill, at 15s., 6s. 8d., and 11s. 2d., for which he was in
arrears for two years in April 1887, when ejectment decrees were
obtained against him. For his house holding he pays 2s. a year! So he
was really fighting his own battle as a tenant in the Plan of Campaign.
[14] Yet of Connemara, Cardinal Manning, in his letter to the
Archbishop of Armagh, August 31, 1873, cites the "trust-worthy" evidence
of "an Englishman who had raised himself from the plough's tail," and
who had gone "to see with his own eyes the material condition of the
peasantry in Ireland." It was to the effect that in abundance and
quality of food, in rate of wages, and even if the comfort of their
dwellings, the working men of Connemara were better off than the
agricultural labourers of certain English counties.
[15] For this holding, of 10 Irish acres, I have since learned
the widow O'Donnell pays 10s. a year. She is in the receipt of outdoor
relief, there being fever in the house (May 1888).
[16] This "townland" is a curious use of a Saxon term to
describe a Celtic fact. The territory of an Irish sept seems to have
been divided up into "townlands," each townland consisting of four, or
in some cases six, groups of holdings, occupied by as many families of
the "sept." The chief of the "sept" divided up each "townland"
periodically among these groups, while the common fields were cut up
among the families as they increased and multiplied according to the
system--against which Lord George Hill battled at Gweedore--known as
"rimdale" or "rundeal," from the Celtic, "ruindioll," a "partition" or
"man's share." This is quite unlike the Russian "mir" or collective
village, and not more like the South Slav "zadruga" which makes each
family a community, the land belonging to all, as, according to M.
Eugene Simon, it does in China. But it is as inconsistent with Henry
George's State ownership of the land or the rents as either of those
systems.
[17] From a question just asked (July 12) in the House of
Commons, and answered by the Postmaster-General, I gather that this
"local question" has been further complicated by the removal of Mr.
Sweeney, the sub-postmaster, under an official regulation.
[18] The incident occurred in Clare. See p. 45.
[19] Or they may date back to the Parliament of Grattan, who
wrote to Mr. Guinness that he regarded the brewery of Ireland as "the
actual nurse of the people, and entitled to every encouragement, favour,
and exemption."
[20] This refers, I am told, to the murder, in open daylight,
in 1881, of an old man, Linnane, who acted as a "caretaker" for Mrs.
Moroney. It should gratify Father White to know that, as I am now
informed (May 21, 1888), a clue has just been found to the assassins,
who appear to have received the same price for doing their work that was
paid the murderers of Fitzmaurice.
[21] Mrs. Moroney, so often referred to here, is the widow of a
gentleman formerly High Sheriff and Deputy-Lieutenant for the County
Clare, who died in 1870. She lives at Milton House, and has fought the
local League steadily and successfully.
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