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

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

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17

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--"_tres mortifies 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?

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17