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

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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 L8 for three mouths ago," he said, "I have just sold for
L12. 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 L12,000. To build it now would
cost nearly three times as much. In fact, a recent and smaller
Court-house at Carlow has actually cost L36,000 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.

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