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

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Some excellent stories were told in the picturesque smoking-room after
dinner, one of a clever and humorous, sensible and non-political priest,
who, being taken to task by some of his brethren for giving the cold
shoulder to the Nationalist movement, excused himself by saying, "I
should like to be a patriot; but I can't be. It's all along of the
rheumatism which prevents me from lying out at nights in a ditch with a
rifle." The same priest being reproached by others of the cloth with a
fondness for the company of some of the resident landlords in his
neighbourhood, replied, "It's in the blood, you see. My poor mother, God
rest her soul! she always had a liking for the quality. As for my dear
father, he was just a blundering peasant like the rest of ye!"

GWEEDORE, _Saturday, 4th Feb._--A good day's work to-day!

We left our hospitable friends at Sion House early in the morning. The
sun was shining brightly; the air so soft and bland that the thrushes
were singing like mad creatures in the trees and the shrubbery; and the
sky was more blue than Italy. "A foine day it is, sorr," said our jarvey
as we took our seats on the car. There is some point in the old Irish
sarcasm that English travellers in Ireland only see one side of the
country, because they travel through it on the outside car. But to make
this point tell, four people must travel on the car. In that case they
must sit two on a side, each pair facing one side only of the landscape.
It is a very different business when you travel on an outside car alone,
with the driver sitting on one side of it, or with one companion only,
when the driver occupies the little perch in front between the sides of
the car. When you travel thus, the outside car is the best thing in the
world, after a good roadster, for taking you rapidly over a country, and
enabling you to command all points of the horizon. Double up one leg on
the seat, let the other dangle freely, using the step as a stirrup, and
you go rattling along almost as if you were on horseback.

We drove through a long suburb of Strabane into the busiest quarter of
the busy little place. The names on the shops were predominantly
Scotch--Maxwells, Stewarts, Hamiltons, Elliotts. I saw but one Celtic
name, M'Ilhenny, and one German, Straub. I changed gold for enormous
Bank of Ireland notes at a neat local bank, and the cheery landlord of
the Abercorn Arms gave us a fresh car to take us on to Letterkenny, a
drive of some twenty miles.

The car came up like a small blizzard, flying about at the heels of an
uncanny little grey mare. Lord Ernest knew the beast well, and said she
was twenty-five years old. She behaved like an unbroken filly at first,
but soon striking her pace, turned out a capital goer, and took us on
without turning a hair till her work was done. The weather continued to
be good, but clouds rolled up around the horizon.

"It'll always be bad weather," said our saturnine jarvey, "when the
Judges come to hold court, and never be good again till they rise."

Here is a consequence of alien rule in Ireland, never, so far as I know,
brought to the notice of Parliament.

"Why is this?" I asked; "is it because of the time of the year they
select?"

"The time of year, sorr?" he replied, glancing compassionately at me.
"No, not at all; it's because of the oaths!"

We reached Letterkenny in time for a very good luncheon at "Hegarty's,"
one of the neatest little inns I have ever found in a place of the size.
It stands on the long main street which is really the town. At one end
of this street is a very pretty row of picturesque ivy-clad brick
cottages, built by a landlord whose property and handsome park bound
the town on the west; and the street winds alongside the slope of a hill
rising from the bank of the Swilly river. A fair was going on. The
little market-place was alive with bustling, chattering, and chaffering
country-folk. Smartly-dressed young damsels tripped in and out of the
neat well-filled shops, and in front of a row of semidetached villas,
like a suburban London terrace, on the hill opposite "Hegarty's," a
German band smote the air with discordant fury. Decidedly a lively,
prosperous little town is Letterkenny, nor was I surprised to learn from
a communicative gentleman, nursing his cane near the inn-door, that
advantage would be taken of the presence of the Hussars sent to keep
order at Dunfanaghy, to "give a ball."

"But I thought all the country was in arms about the trials at
Dunfanaghy," I said.

"In arms about the trials at Dunfanaghy? Oh no; they'll never be locked
up, Father M'Fadden and Mr. Blane. And the people here at Letterkenny,
they've more sinse than at Dunfanaghy. Have you heard of the champagne?"

Upon this he proceeded to tell me, as a grand joke, that Father
M'Fadden and Mr. Blane, M.P., having declined to accept the tea offered
them by the authorities during their detention, they had been permitted
to order what they liked from the local hotel-keeper. After the trial
was over, and they were released on bail to prosecute their appeal, the
hotel-keeper demanded of the authorities payment of his bill, including
two bottles of champagne ordered to refresh the member for Armagh!

A conspicuous, smart, spick-and-span house on the main street, built of
brick and wood, with a verandah, and picked out in bright colours, was
pointed out to me by this amiable citizen as the residence of a
"returned American." This was a man, he said, who had made some money in
America, but got tired of living there, and had come back to end his
days in his native place He was a good man, my informant added, "only he
puts on too many airs."

A remarkably handsome, rosy-faced young groom, a model of manhood in
vigour and grace, presently brought us up a wagonette with a pair of
stout nags, and a driver in a suit of dark-brown frieze, whose head
seemed to have been driven down between his shoulders. He never lifted
it up all the way to Gweedore, but he proved to be a capital jarvey
notwithstanding, and knew the country as well as his horses.

Not long after leaving the town by a road which passes the huge County
Asylum (now literally crammed, I am told, with lunatics), we passed a
ruined church on the banks of a stream. Here the country people, it
seems, halt and wash their feet before entering Letterkenny, failing
which ceremony they may expect a quarrel with somebody before they get
back to their homes. This wholesome superstition doubtless was
established ages ago by some good priest, when priests thought it their
duty to be the preachers and makers of peace.

We soon left the wooded country of the Swilly and began to climb into
the grand and melancholy Highlands of Donegal. The road was as fine as
any in the Scottish Highlands, and despite the keen chill wind, the
glorious and ever-changing panoramas of mountain and strath through
which we drove were a constant delight, until, just as we came within
full range of Muckish, the giant of Donegal, the weather finally broke
down into driving mists and blinding rain.

We pulled up near a picturesque little shebeen, to water the horses and
get our Highland wraps well about us. Out came a hardy, cheery old
farmer. He swept the heavens with the eye of a mountaineer, and
exclaimed:--"Ah! it's a coorse day intirely, it is." "A coorse day
intirely" from that moment it continued to be.

Happily the curtain had not fallen before we caught a grand passing
glimpse of the romantic gorge of Glen Veagh, closed and commanded in the
shadowy distance by the modern castle of Glenveagh, the mountain home of
my charming country-woman, Mrs. Adair.

Thanks to its irregular serpentine outline, and to the desolate majesty
of the hills which environ it, Lough Veagh, though not a large sheet of
water, may well be what it is reputed to be, a rival of the finest lochs
in Scotland. No traces are now discernible on its shores of the too
celebrated evictions of Glen Veagh. But from the wild and rugged aspect
of the surrounding country it is probable enough that these evictions
were to the evicted a blessing in disguise, and that their descendants
are now enjoying, beyond the Atlantic, a measure of prosperity and of
happiness which neither their own labour nor the most liberal
legislation could ever have won for them here. We caught sight, as we
drove through Mrs. Adair's wide and rocky domain, of wire fences, and I
believe it is her intention to create here a small deer forest. This
ought to be as good a stalking country as the Scottish Highlands,
provided the people can be got to like "stalking" stags better than
landlords and agents.

Long before we reached Glen Veagh we had bidden farewell, not only to
the hedges and walls of Tyrone and Eastern Donegal, but to the
"ditches," which anywhere but in Ireland would be called "embankments,"
and entered upon great stone-strewn wastes of land seemingly unreclaimed
and irreclaimable. Huge boulders lay tossed and tumbled about as if they
had been whirled through the air by the cyclones of some prehistoric
age, and dropped at random when the wild winds wearied of the fun. The
last landmark we made out through the gathering storm was the pinnacled
crest of Errigal. Of Dunlewy, esteemed the loveliest of the Donegal
lakes, we could see little or nothing as we hurried along the highway,
which follows its course down to the Clady, the river of Gweedore; and
we blessed the memory of Lord George Hill when suddenly turning from
the wind and the rain into what seemed to be a mediaeval courtyard
flanked by trees, we pulled up in the bright warm light of an open
doorway, shook ourselves like Newfoundland dogs, and were welcomed by a
frank, good-looking Scottish host to a glowing peat fire in this really
comfortable little hotel, the central pivot of a most interesting
experiment in civilisation.

GWEEDORE, _Sunday, Feb. 5th._--A morning as soft and bright almost as
April succeeded the stormy night. Errigal lifted his bold irregular
outlines royally against an azure sky. The sunshine glinted merrily on
the swift waters of the Clady, which flows almost beneath our windows
from Dunlewy Lough to the sea. The birds were singing in the trees,
which all about our hotel make what in the West would be called an
"opening" in the wide and woodless expanse of hill and bog.

This hotel was for many years the home of Lord George Hill, who built it
in the hope of making Gweedore, what in England or Scotland it would
long ago have become, a prosperous watering-place. Now that a
battle-royal is going on between Lord George's son and heir and the
tenants on the estate, organised by Father M'Fadden under the "Plan of
Campaign," it is important to know something of the history of the
place.

Is this a case of the sons of the soil expropriated by an alien and
confiscating Government to enrich a ruthless invader? I was told by a
Nationalist acquaintance in Dublin that the owner of Gweedore is a near
kinsman of the Marquis of Londonderry, and that the property came to him
by inheritance under an ancient confiscation of the estates of the
O'Dounels of Tyrconnel. All of this I find is embroidery.

The "Carlisle" room, which our landlord has assigned to us, contains a
number of books, the property of the late Lord George, and ample
materials are here for making out the annals of Gweedore. Lord George,
it seems, was a posthumous son of the fourth Marquis of Downshire, and a
nephew of that Marchioness of Salisbury who was burned to death with the
west wing of Hatfield House half a century ago. He inherited nothing in
Donegal, nor was any provision made for him under his father's will. His
elder brothers made up and settled upon him a sum of twenty thousand
pounds. He entered the Army, and being quartered for a time at
Letterkenny, shot and fished all about Donegal. He found the people here
kindly and friendly, but in a deplorable state of ignorance and of
destitution. Their holdings under sundry small proprietors were entirely
unimproved, and as their families increased, these holdings were cut up
by themselves into even smaller strips under the system known as
"rundale,"--each son as he grew up taking off a slice of the paternal
holding, putting up a hut with mud, and scratching the soil after his
own rude fashion. This custom, necessarily fatal to civilisation,
doubtless came down from the traditional times when the lands of a sept
were held in common by the sept, before the native chieftains had
converted themselves into landlords, and defeated Sir John Davies's
attempt to convert their tribal kinsmen into peasant proprietors.

Whatever its origin, it had reduced Gweedore, or "Tullaghobegly," fifty
years ago to barbarism. Nearly nine thousand people then dwelt here with
never a landlord among them. There was no "Coercion" in Gweedore,
neither was there a coach nor a car to be found in the whole district.
The nominal owners of the small properties into which the district was
divided knew little and cared less about them. The rents were usually
"made by the tenants,"--a step in advance, it will be seen, of the
system which the collective wisdom of Great Britain has for the last
twenty years been trying to establish in Ireland. But they were only
paid when it was convenient. An agent of one of these properties who
travelled fourteen miles one day to collect some rents gave it up and
drove back again, because the "day was too bad" for him to wander about
in the mountains on the chance of finding the tenants at home and
disposed to give him a trifle on account. On most of the properties
there were arrears of eight, ten, and twenty years' standing.

There was one priest in the district, and one National School, the
schoolmaster, with a family of nine persons, receiving the munificent
stipend of eight pounds a year. These nine thousand people, depending
absolutely upon tillage and pasture, owned among them all one cart and
one plough, eight saddles, two pillions, eleven bridles, and thirty-two
rakes! They had no means of harrowing their lands but with meadow rakes,
and the farms were so small that from four to ten farms could be
harrowed in a day with one rake.

Their beds were of straw, mountain grass, or green and dried rushes.
Among the nine thousand people there were but two feather-beds, and but
eight beds stuffed with chaff. There were but two stables and six
cow-houses in the whole district. None of the women owned more than one
shift, nor was there a single bonnet among them all, nor a looking-glass
costing more than threepence.

The climate and the scenery took the fancy of Lord George. He made up
his mind to see what could be done with this forgotten corner of the
world, and to that end bought up as he could the small and scattered
properties, till he had invested the greater part of his small fortune,
and acquired about twenty thousand acres of land. Of this, little was
fit for cultivation, even with the help of capital and civilised
management. There was not a road in the district, nor a drain.

Lord George came and established himself here. He went to work
systematically to improve the country, reclaiming bog-lands, building
roads, and laying out the property into regular farms. He went about
among the people himself, trying to get their confidence, and to let
them know what he wanted to do for them, and with their help.

For a long time they wouldn't believe him to be a lord at all, "because
he spoke Irish"; and the breaking up of the rundale system, under which
they had lived in higgledy-piggledy laziness, exasperated them greatly.
Of the first man who took a fenced and well-defined farm from Lord
George, and went to work on it, the others observed that he would come
to no good by it, because he would "have to keep a maid just to talk to
his wife." Men could not be got for any wages to work at draining, or at
making the "ditches" or embankments to delineate the new holdings; and
when Lord George found adventurous "tramps" willing to earn a few
shillings by honest work of the kind, conspiracies were formed to undo
by night what was done by day. However, Lord George persevered.

There was not a shop, nor a dispensary, nor a doctor, nor a warehouse,
nor a quay for landing goods in this whole populous and sea-washed
region. He put up storehouses, built a little harbour at Bunbeg,
established a dispensary, got a doctor to settle in the district, and
finally put up the hotel in which we are. He advanced money to tenants
disposed to improve their holdings. Finding the women, as usual, more
thrifty and industrious than the men, and gifted with a natural aptitude
for the loom and the spindle, he introduced the weaving of woollen yarn
into stout frieze stuffs and foot-gear for both sexes. This was in 1840,
and in 1854 Gweedore hand-knit socks and stockings were sold to the
amount of L500, being just about the annual estimated rents of all the
properties bought by Lord George at the time when he bought them in
1838! But with this difference: The owners from whom Lord George bought
the properties got their L500 very irregularly, when they got it at all;
whereas the wives and daughters of the tenants, who made the socks and
stockings, were paid their L500 in cash.

Clearly in Gweedore I have a case not of the children of the soil
despoiled and trampled upon by the stranger, but of the honest
investment of alien capital in Irish land, and of the administration by
the proprietor himself of the Irish property so acquired for the benefit
alike of the owner and of the occupiers of the land.

That the deplorable state in which he found the people was mainly due to
their own improvidence and gregarious incapacity is also tolerably
clear. On the west coast of Norway, dear to the heart of the
salmon-fisher, you find people living under conditions certainly no more
favourable than here exist. North of the Hardanger Fjord, the spring
opens only in June. The farmers grow only oats and barley; but they have
no market except for the barley, and live chiefly by the pasturage. It
is as rocky a region as Donegal. But the Norsemen never try to make the
land do more than it is capable of doing. With them the oldest son takes
the farm and works it. The juniors are welcome to work on the farm if
they like for their brother, but they are not allowed to cut it up.
There is no rundale in Norway; and when the cadets see that there is no
room for them they quietly "pull up stakes," and go forth to seek a new
home, no matter where.

For fourteen years Lord George Hill spent on Gweedore all the rents he
received from it, and a great deal more. During that time the relations
between the people and their new landlord seem to have been, in the
main, most friendly, notwithstanding his constant efforts to break up
their old habits, or, to use their own language, to "bother them." But
there were no "evictions"; rents were not raised even where the tenants
were visibly able to pay better rents; prizes were given annually for
the best and neatest cottages, for the best crops of turnips (neither
turnips, parsnips, nor carrots were there at Gweedore when Lord George
bought the estate), for the best pigs (there was not a pig in Gweedore
in 1838!), for calves and colts, for the best fences, the best ordered
tillage farms, the best labourers' cottages, the best beds and bedding,
the best butter, the best woollen goods made on the estate. The old
rundale plan of dividing up the land among the children was put a stop
to, and every tenant was encouraged not to make his holding smaller, but
to add to and enlarge it. A corn-mill, saw-mill, and flax-mill were
established. In 1838 there was not a baker within ten miles. In 1852 the
local baker was driving a good business in good bread. The tenant's
wife, for whom in 1838 a single shift was a social superiority, in 1852
went shopping at Bunbeg for the latest fashions from Derry or Dublin.

Whatever "landlordism" may mean elsewhere in Ireland, it is plain enough
that in the history of Gweedore it has meant the difference between
savage squalor and civilisation.

Lord George Hill died in 1879, the year in which the Land League began
its operations. He bequeathed this property to his son, Captain Hill, by
whom the management of it has been left to agents. After Lord George's
death two tracts of mountain pasture, reserved by him to feed imported
sheep, were let to the tenants, who by that time had come to own quite a
considerable number, some thousands, of live stock, cattle, horses, and
sheep.

Concurrently with this concession to the tenants the provisions made by
Lord George against the subdivision of holdings began to give way.
Father M'Fadden, combining the position of President of the National
League with that of parish priest, seems to have favoured this tendency,
and to have encouraged the putting up of new houses on reduced holdings
to accommodate an increasing population. A flood which in August 1880
damaged the chapel and caused the death of five persons gave him an
opportunity of bringing before the British public the condition of the
people in a letter to the London _Times_, which elicited a very generous
response, several hundred pounds, it is said, having been sent to him
from London alone. Large contributions of relief were also made to
Gweedore from the Duchess of Marlborough's Fund, and Gweedore became a
standing butt of British benevolence. Two results seem to have followed,
naturally enough,--a growing indisposition on the part of the tenants to
pay rent, and a rapid rise in the value of tenant rights. With the
National League standing between them and the landlord, with the British
Parliament legislating year after year in favour of the Irish tenant and
against the Irish landlord, and with the philanthropic public ready to
respond to any appeal for help made on their behalf, the tenants at
Gweedore naturally became a privileged class. In no other way at least
can I explain the extraordinary fact that tenant rights at Gweedore have
been sold, according to Lord Cowper's Blue-book of 1886, during the
period of the greatest alleged distress and congestion in this district,
at prices representing from forty to a hundred-and-thirty years'
purchase of the landlord's rent!

In this Blue-book the Rev. Father M'Fadden appears as receiving no less
than L115 sterling for the tenant-right sold by him of ground, the head
rent of which is L1, 2s. 6d. a year. The worst enemy of Father M'Fadden
will hardly suspect him, I hope, of taking such a sum as this from a
tenant farmer for the right to starve to death by inches.[13]

A shrewd Galway man, now here, who seems to know the region well, and
likes both the scenery and the people, tells me that the troubles which
have now culminated in the arrest of Father M'Fadden have been
aggravated by the vacillation of Captain Hill, and by the foibles of his
agent, Colonel Dopping, who not long ago brought down Mr. Gladstone with
his unloaded rifle. That the tenants as a body have been, or now are,
unable to pay their rent he does not believe. On the contrary, he thinks
them, as a body, rather well off. Certainly I have seen and spoken with
none of them about the roads to-day who were not hearty-looking men, and
in very good case. Colonel Dopping, according to my Galwegian, is not an
Englishman, but a Longford Irishman of good family, who got his
training in India as an official of the Woods and Forests in Bengal. "He
is not a bad-hearted man, nor unkind," said my Galwegian, "but he is
too much of a Bengal tiger in his manner. He went into the cottages
personally and lectured the people, and that they never will stand. They
don't require or expect you to believe what they say--in fact they have
little respect for you if you do--but they like to have the agent
pretend that he believes them, and then go on and show that he don't.
But he must never lose his temper about it. Colonel Dopping, I have
heard, argued with an old woman one day who was telling him more yarns
than were ever spun into cloth in Gweedore, till she picked up her cup
of tea and threw it in his face. He flounced out of the cottage, and
ordered the police to arrest her. That did him more harm than if he had
shot a dozen boys." "What with the temper of Colonel Dopping and the
vacillation of Captain Hill, who is always of the mind of the last man
that speaks to him, Father M'Fadden has had it all his own way. Captain
Hill's claim was for L1800 of arrears, long arrears too, and L400 of
costs. How much the people paid in under the Plan of Campaign nobody
knows but Father M'Fadden. But he is a clever _padre_, and he played
Captain Hill till he finally gave up the costs, and settled for L1450."

"And this sum represents what?"

"It represents in round numbers about two years' income from an estate
in which Captain Hill's father must have invested, first and last, more
nearly L40,000 than L20,000 of money that never came out of it."

"That doesn't sound like a very good operation. But isn't the question,
Whether the tenants have earned this sum, such as it is, out of the land
let to them by Captain Hill?"

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