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

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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 Medoc 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.

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