Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) by William Henry Hurlbert

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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 L90,630 of instalments due last May, less than L4000 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 L50,910. Of this
there is only now unpaid L731, 17s. 9d. There accrued a further
amount to the 1st May 1888 of L39,720, in respect of which only
L4071, 16s. 11d. is now unpaid, making in all only L4803, 14s. 8d.
unpaid, out of a total sum of L90,630 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.

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