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

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It is hard to imagine a greater misfortune for the Church in Ireland,
and for both the Church and the Irish race in America, than the
identification of the Home Rule movement with the Church, and its
triumph, after being so identified, and with the help of British
sympathisers and professional politicians, over the resistance of
Protestant Ireland. This dilemma of the Church in Ireland, plainly seen
at Rome, as I know, to-day, was forcibly presented in the speech of
Colonel Saunderson.

The chair at this Loyalist meeting was filled by the Provost of Trinity,
Dr. Jellett, a man of winning and venerable aspect, a kind of "angelic
doctor," indeed, whose musical and slightly tremulous voice gave a
singular pathos and interest to his brief but very earnest speech.[11]

To-night I dined with the Attorney-General, Mr. O'Brien. Among the
company were the Chief-Baron Palles, whose appointment dates back to Mr.
Gladstone's Administration of 1873, but who is now an outspoken opponent
of Home Rule; Judge O'Brien, an extremely able man, with the face of an
eagle; Mr. Carson, Q.C.; and other notabilities of the bench and bar. My
neighbours at table were a charming and agreeable bencher of the King's
Inn, Mr. Atkinson, Q.C., a leader of the Irish bar, and Mr. T.W.
Russell, M.P., who told me some amusing things of one of his colleagues,
an ideal Orangeman, who writes blood-curdling romances in the vein of La
Tosca, and goes in fear of the re-establishment of the Holy Office in
Dublin and London. In view of the clamours about the severity of the
bench in Ireland, it was edifying to find an Irish Judge astonished by
the drastic decisions of our Courts in regard to the anarchists who were
hanged at Chicago, after a thorough and protracted review of the law in
their cases. He thought no Court in Great Britain or Ireland could have
dealt with them thus stringently, it being understood that the charge of
murder against them rested on their connection, solely as provocative
instigators to violence, with the actual throwing of the bombs among the
police.

Some good stories were told by the lawyers; one of a descendant of the
Irish Kings, a lawyer more remarkable for his mental gifts than for his
physical graces.

A peasant looking him carefully over at Cork whispered to a neighbour,
"And is he really of the ould blood of the Irish kings now, indeed?"

"He is indeed!"

"Well, then, I don't wonder the Saxons conquered the Island!"

Of the Home Rule movement one of the lawyers said to me, "The whole
thing is a business operation mainly--a business operation with the
people who see in it the hope of appeasing their land hunger--and a
business operation for the agitators who live by it. Its main strength,
outside of the priests, who for one reason or another countenance or
foment it, is in the small country solicitors. The five hundred thousand
odd Irish tenants are the most litigious creatures alive. They are
always after the local lawyer with half-a-crown to fight this, that, or
the other question with some neighbour or kinsman, usually a kinsman. So
the solicitors know the whole country."

"When the League has chosen a spot in which to work the 'Plan of
Campaign,' the local attorney whips up the tenants to join it. The
poorer tenants are the most easily pushed into the plan, having least to
lose by it. But the lawyer takes the well-to-do tenants in hand, and
promises them that if they yield to the patriotic pressure of the
League, and come to grief by so doing, the landlord will at all events
have to pay the costs of the proceedings. It is this promise which
finally brings down most of them. To enjoy the luxury of a litigation
without paying for it tempts them almost as strongly as the prospect of
getting the land without paying for it. You will find that the League
always insists, when things come to a settlement, that the landlord
shall pay the costs. If the landlord through poverty of spirit or of
purse succumbs to this demand, the League scores a victory. If the
landlord resists, it is a bad job for the League. The local lawyer is
discredited in the eyes of his clients, and if he is to get any fees he
must come down upon his clients for them. Naturally his clients resent
this. If Mr. Balfour keys up the landlords to stand out manfully against
paying for all the trouble and loss they are continually put to, he will
take the life of the League so far as Ireland is concerned. As things
now stand, it is almost the only thriving industry in Ireland!"

_Wednesday, Feb. 1._--This morning I called with Lord Ernest Hamilton
upon Sir Bernard Burke, the Ulster King-at-Arms, and the editor or
author of many other well-known publications, and especially of the
"Peerage," sometimes irreverently spoken of as the "British Bible."

Sir Bernard's offices are in the picturesque old "Bermingham" tower of
the castle. There we found him wearing his years and his lore as lightly
as a flower, and busy in an ancient chamber, converted by him into a
most cosy modern study. He received us with the most cordial courtesy,
and was good enough to conduct us personally through his domain.

Many of the State papers formerly kept here have been removed to the
Four Courts building. But Sir Bernard's tower is still filled with
documents of the greatest historical interest, all admirably docketed
and arranged on the system adopted at the Hotel Soubise, now the Palace
of the Archives in Paris.

These documents, like the tower itself, take us back to the early days
when Dublin was the stronghold of the Englishry in Ireland, and its
citizens went in constant peril of an attack from the wild and "mere
Irish" in the hills. The masonry of the tower is most interesting. The
circular stone floors made up of slabs held together without cement,
like the courses in the towers of Sillustani, by their exact adjustment,
are particularly noteworthy. High up in the tower Sir Bernard showed us
a most uncomfortable sort of cupboard fashioned in the huge wall of the
tower, and with a loophole for a window. In this cell the Red Hugh
O'Donnell of Tyrconnel was kept as a prisoner for several years under
Elizabeth. He was young and lithe, however, and after his friends had
tried in vain to buy him out, a happy thought one day struck him. He
squeezed himself through the loophole, and, dropping unhurt to the
ground, escaped to the mountains. There for a long time he made head
against the English power. In 1597 he drove Sir Conyers Clifford from
before the castle of Ballyshannon, with great loss to the English, and
when he could no longer keep the field, he sought refuge in Spain. He
was with the Spanish, as Prince of Tyrconnel, at the crushing defeat of
Kinsale in 1601. Escaping again, he died, poisoned, at Simancas the next
year.

Sir Bernard showed us, among other curious manuscripts, a correspondence
between one Higgins, a trained informer, and the Castle authorities in
1798. This correspondence shows that the revolutionary plans of the
Nationalists of 1798 were systematically laid before the Government.

When one thinks how very much abler were the leaders of the Irish
rebellion in 1798 than are the present heads of the Irish party in
Parliament, how much greater the provocations to rebellion given the
Irish people then were than they are now even alleged to be--how little
the Irish people in general have now to gain by rebellion, and how much
to lose, it is hard to resist a suspicion that it must be even easier
now than it was in 1798 for the Government to tap the secrets of the
organisations opposed to it.

Sir Bernard showed us also a curious letter written by Henry Grattan to
the founder of the great Guinness breweries, which have carried the fame
of Dublin porter into the uttermost parts of the earth. The Guinnesses
are now among the wealthiest people of the kingdom, and Ireland
certainly owes a great deal to them as "captains of industry," but they
are not Home Rulers.

At the Kildare Street Club in the afternoon I talked with two Irish
landlords from the north of Ireland, who had come up to take their
womenkind to the Drawing-Room.

I was struck by their indifference to the political excitements of the
day. One of them had forgotten that the Ripon and Morley reception was
to take place to-night. The other called it "the love-feast of Voltaire
and the Vatican." Both were much more fluent about hunting and farming.
I asked if the hunting still went on in their part of the island.

"It has never stopped for a moment," he replied.

"No," added the other, "nor ever a dog poisoned. They were poisoned,
whole packs of them, in the papers, but not a dog really. The stories
were printed just to keep up the agitation, and the farmers winked at it
so as not to be 'bothered.'"

Both averred that they got their rents "fairly well," but both also said
that they farmed much of their own land. One, a wiry, energetic, elderly
man, of a brisk presence and ruddy complexion, said he constantly went
over to the markets in England. "I go to Norwich," he said, "not to
Liverpool. Liverpool is only a meat-market, and overdone at that.
Norwich is better for meat and for stores." Both agreed this was a great
year for the potatoes, and said Ireland was actually exporting potatoes
to America. One mentioned a case of two cargoes of potatoes just taken
from Dundrum for America, the vessel which took them having brought over
six hundred tons of hay from America.

They were breezy, out-of-door men, both of them. One amused us with a
tale of espying, the other day, two hounds, a collie dog, a terrier, and
eighteen cats all amicably running together across a farmyard, with
their tails erect, after a dairymaid who was to feed them. The other
capped this with a story of a pig on his own place, which follows one of
his farm lads about like a dog,--"the only pig," he said, "I ever saw
show any human feeling!" The gentleman who goes to Norwich thought the
English landlords were in many cases worse off than the Irish. "Ah, no!"
interfered the other, "not quite; for if the English can't get their
rents, at least they keep their land, but we can neither get our rents
nor keep our land!" They both admitted that there had been much bad
management of the land in Ireland, and that the agents had done the
owners as well as the tenants a great deal of harm in the past, but they
both maintained stoutly that the legislation of late years had been
one-sided and short-sighted. "The tenants haven't got real good from
it," said one, "because the claims of the landlord no longer check their
extravagance, and they run more in debt than ever to the shopkeepers and
traders, who show them little mercy." Both also strenuously insisted on
the gross injustice of leaving the landlords unrelieved of any of the
charges fixed upon their estates, while their means of meeting those
charges were cut down by legislation.

"You have no landlords in America," said one, "but if you had, how would
you like to be saddled with heavy tithe charges for a Disestablished
Church at the same time that your tenants were relieved of their dues
to you?"

I explained to him that so far from our having no landlords in America,
the tenant-farmer class is increasing rapidly in the United States,
while it is decreasing in the Old World, while the land laws, especially
in some of our older Western States, give the landlords such absolute
control of their tenants that there is a serious battle brewing at this
moment in Illinois[12] between a small army of tenants and their
absentee landlord, an alien and an Irishman, who holds nearly a hundred
thousand acres in the heart of the State, lives in England, and grants
no leases, except on the condition that he shall receive from his
tenants, in addition to the rent, the full amount of all taxes and
levies whatsoever made upon the lands they occupy.

"God bless my soul!" exclaimed the gentleman who goes to Norwich, "if
that is the kind of laws your American Irish will give us with Home
Rule, I'll go in for it to-morrow with all my heart!"

After an early dinner, I set out with Lord Ernest to see the
Morley-Ripon procession. It was a good night for a torchlight
parade--the weather not too chill, and the night dark. The streets were
well filled, but there was no crowding--no misconduct, and not much
excitement. The people obviously were out for a holiday, not for a
"demonstration." It was Paris swarming out to the Grand Prix, not Paris
on the eve of the barricades; very much such a crowd as one sees in the
streets and squares of New York on a Fourth of July night, when the city
fathers celebrate that auspicious anniversary with fireworks at the City
Hall, and not in the least such a crowd as I saw in the streets of New
York on the 12th of July 1871, when, thanks to General Shaler and the
redoubtable Colonel "Jim Fiske," a great Orange demonstration led to
something very like a massacre by chance medley.

Small boys went about making night hideous with tom-toms, extemporised
out of empty fig-drums, and tooting terribly upon tin trumpets. There
was no general illumination, but here and there houses were bright with
garlands of lamps, and rockets ever and anon went up from the
house-tops.

We made our way to the front of a mass of people near one of the great
bridges, over which the procession was to pass on its long march from
Kingstown to the house of Mr. Walker, Q.C., in Rutland Square, where the
distinguished visitors were to meet the liberated Lord Mayor, with Mr.
Dwyer Gray, and other local celebrities. A friendly citizen let us perch
on his outside car.

The procession presently came in sight, and a grand show it made--not of
the strictly popular and political sort, for it was made up of guilds
and other organised bodies on foot and on horseback, marching in
companies--but imposing by reason of its numbers, and of the flaring
torches. Of these there were not so many as there should have been to do
justice to the procession. The crowd cheered from time to time, with
that curious Irish cheer which it is often difficult to distinguish from
groaning, but the only explosive and uproarious greeting given to the
visitors in our neighbourhood came from a member of "the devout female
sex," a young lady who stood up between two friends on the top of a car
very near us, and imperilled both her equilibrium and theirs by wildly
waving her hand-kerchief in the air, and crying out at the top of a
somewhat husky voice, "Three cheers for Mecklenburg Street! Three
cheers for Mecklenburg Street!"

This made the crowd very hilarious, but as Lord Ernest's local knowledge
did not enable him to enlighten me as to the connection between
Mecklenburg Street and the liberation of Ireland, I must leave the
mystery of their mirth unsolved till a more convenient season.

At Rutland Square the crowd was tightly packed, but perfectly
well-behaved, and the guests were enthusiastically cheered. But even
before they had entered the house of Mr. Walker it began to break up,
and long files of people wended their way to see "the carriages"
hastening with their lovely freight to the Castle. Thither Lord Ernest
has just gone, arrayed in a captivating Court costume of black velvet,
with cut-steel buttons, sword, and buckles--just the dress in which
Washington used to receive his guests at the White House, and in which
Senator Seward, I remember, insisted in 1860 on getting himself
presented by Mr. Dallas to Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace.

CHAPTER II.

SION HOUSE, COUNTY TYRONE, _Feb. 3d._--Hearing nothing from Mr. Davitt
yesterday, I gave up the idea of attending the Ripon-Morley meeting last
night. As I have come to Ireland to hear what people living in Ireland
have to say about Irish affairs, I see no particular advantage in
listening to imported eloquence on the subject, even from so clever a
man as his books prove Mr. Morley to be, and from so conscientious a man
as an acquaintance, going back to the days when he sat with Kingsley at
the feet of Maurice, makes me believe Lord Ripon to be. How much either
of them knows about Ireland is another matter. A sarcastic Nationalist
acquaintance of mine, with whom I conversed about the visitors
yesterday, assured me it had been arranged that Lord Ripon should wear
the Star of the Garter, "so the people might know him from Morley." When
I observed that Dublin must have a short memory to forget so soon the
face of a Chief Secretary, he replied: "Forget his face? Why, they never
saw his face! It's little enough he was here, and indoors he kept when
here he was. He shook hands last night with more Irishmen than ever he
spoke to while he was Chief Secretary; for he used to say then, I am
told, in the Reform Club, that the only way to get along with the Irish
was to have nothing to do with them!"

There was a sharp discussion, I was told, in the private councils of the
Committee yesterday as to whether the Queen should be "boycotted," and
the loyal sentiments usual in connection with her Majesty's name dropped
from the proceedings. I believe it was finally settled that this might
put the guests into an awkward position, both of them having worn her
Majesty's uniform of State as public servants of the Crown.

During the day I walked through many of the worst quarters of Dublin. I
met fewer beggars in proportion than one encounters in such parts of
London as South Kensington and other residential regions not
over-frequented by the perambulating policemen; but I was struck by the
number of persons--and particularly of women--who wore that most
pathetic of all the liveries of distress, "the look of having seen
better days." In the most wretched streets I traversed there was more
squalor than suffering--the dirtiest and most ragged people in them
showing no signs of starvation, or even of insufficient rations; and
certainly in the most dismal alleys and by-streets, I came upon nothing
so revolting as the hives of crowded misery which make certain of the
tenement house quarters of New York more gruesome than the Cour des
Miracles itself used to be.

This morning at 7.25 A.M. I left Dublin with Lord Ernest Hamilton for
Strabane. My attention was distracted from the reports of the great
meeting by the varied and picturesque beauty of the landscape, through
which we ran at a very respectable rate in a very comfortable carriage.
We passed Dundalk, where Edward Bruce got himself crowned king of
Ireland, after his brother Robert had won a throne in Scotland.

These masterful Normans, all over Europe from Apulia to Britain, worked
out the problem of "satisfied nationalities" much more successfully and
simply than Napoleon III. in our own day. If Edward Bruce broke down
where Robert succeeded, the causes of his failure may perhaps be worth
considering even now by people who have set themselves the task in our
times of establishing "an Irish nationality." Leaving out the
Cromwellian English of Tipperary and the South, and the Scotch who have
done for Ulster, what he aimed at for all Ireland, they have very much
the same materials to deal with as those which he dismally failed to
fashion.

Drogheda stands beautifully in a deep valley through which flows the
Boyne Water, spanned by one of the finest viaducts in Europe. Here, two
years after the discovery of America, Poyning's Parliament enacted that
all laws passed in Ireland must be subject to approval by the English
Privy Council. I wonder nobody has proposed a modification of this form
of Home Rule for Ireland now. Earl Grey's recent suggestion that
Parliamentary government be suspended for ten years in Ireland, which I
heard warmly applauded by some able lawyers and business men in Dublin,
involves like this an elimination of the Westminster debates from the
problem of government in Ireland. As we passed Drogheda, Father Burke's
magnificent presence and thrilling voice came back to me out of the
mist of years, describing with an indignant pathos, never to be
forgotten, the fearful scenes which followed the surrender of Sir Arthur
Ashton's garrison, when "for the glory of God," and "to prevent the
further effusion of blood," Oliver ordered all the officers to be
knocked on the head, and every tenth man of the soldiers killed, and the
rest shipped as slaves to the Barbadoes. But how different was the
spirit in which the great Dominican recalled these events from that in
which the "popular orators," scattering firebrands and death, delight to
dwell upon them!

At Strabane station we found a handsome outside car waiting on us, and
drove off briskly for this charming place, the home of one of the most
active and prosperous manufacturers in Ireland. A little more than half
way between the station and Sion House, Mr. Herdman met us afoot. We
jumped off and walked up with him. Sion House, built for him by his
brother, an accomplished architect, is a handsome Queen Anne mansion. It
stands on a fine knoll, commanding lovely views on all sides. Below it,
and beyond a little stream, rise the extensive flax-mills which are the
life of the place, under the eye and within touch of the hand of the
master. These works were established here by Mr. Herdman's father, after
he had made a vain attempt to establish them at Ballyshannon in Donegal,
half a century ago. As all salmon fishers know, the water-power is
admirable at Ballyshannon, where the Erne pours in torrents down a
thirty feet fall. But the ignorance and indolence of the people made
Ballyshannon quite impossible, with this result, that while the Erne
still flows unvexed to the sea, and the people of Ballyshannon live very
much as they lived in 1835, here at Sion the Mourne enables 1100 Irish
operatives to work up L90,000 worth of Irish flax every year into yarn
for the Continent, and to divide among themselves some L20,000 a year in
wages.

After luncheon we walked with Mr. Herdman through the mills and the
model village which has grown up around them. Everywhere we found order,
neatness, and thrift. The operatives are almost all people of the
country, Catholics and Protestants in almost equal numbers. "I find it
wise," said Mr. Herdman, "to give neither religion a preponderance, and
to hold my people of both religions to a common standard of fidelity and
efficiency." The greatest difficulty he has had to contend with is the
ineradicable objection of some of the peasantry to continuous industry.
He told us of a strapping lass of eighteen who came to the mills, but
very soon gave up and went back to the parental shebeen in the mountains
rather than get up early in the morning to earn fourteen shillings a
week.

Three weeks of her work would have paid the year's rent of the paternal
holding.

In the village, which is regularly laid out, is a reading-room for the
workpeople. There are cricket clubs, and one of the mill buildings (just
now crammed with bales of flax) has been fitted up by Mr. Herdman as a
theatre. There is a drop-curtain representing the Lake of Como, and the
flies are flanked by life-size copies in plaster of the Apollo Belvidere
and the Medicean Venus. This is a development I had hardly looked to see
in Ulster.

After we had gone over the works thoroughly, Mr. Herdman took us back,
on a transparent pretext of enlightened curiosity touching certain
qualities of spun flax, to give us a glimpse of the "beauty of Sion"--a
well-grown graceful girl of fifteen or sixteen summers. She
concentrated her attention, as soon as we appeared, upon certain
mysterious bobbins and spindles, with an exaggerated determination which
proved how completely she saw through our futile and frivolous devices.
Mr. Herdman told us, as we came away discomfited, a droll story of the
ugliest girl ever employed here--a girl so preternaturally ugly that one
of his best blacksmiths having been entrapped into offering to marry
her, lost heart of grace on the eve of the sacrifice, and, taking ship
at Derry for America, fled from Sion for ever.

In the evening came, with other guests, Dr. Webb, Q.C., Regius Professor
of Laws and Public Orator of Trinity at Dublin, well known both as a
Grecian capable of composing "skits" as clever as the verses yclept
Homerstotle--in which the _Saturday Review_ served up the Donnelly
nonsense about Bacon and Shakespeare--and as a translator of _Faust_. He
was abused by the Loyalists at Dublin, in 1884, for his defence of P.N.
Fitzgerald, the leader who beat Parnell and Archbishop Croke so badly at
Thurles the other day; and he is in a fair way now to be denounced with
equal fervour by the Nationalists as a County Court judge in Donegal.
He finds this post no sinecure. "I do as much work in five days," he
said to-night, "as the Superior Judges do in five weeks."

He is a staunch Unionist, and laughs at the notion that the Irish people
care one straw for a Parliament in Dublin. "Why should they?" he said.
"What did any Parliament in Dublin ever do to gratify the one real
passion of the Irish peasant--his hunger for a bit of land? So far as
the Irish people are concerned, Home Rule means simply agrarian reform.
Would they get that from a Parliament in Dublin? If the British
Parliament evicts the landlords and makes the tenants lords of the land,
they will be face to face with Davitt's demand for the nationalising of
the land. Do you suppose they will like to see the lawyers and the
politicians organising a labour agitation against the 'strong farmers'?
The last thing they want is a Parliament in Dublin. Lord Ashbourne's Act
carries in its principle the death-warrant of the 'National League.'"

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