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

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"No, not exactly, I think. You must remember there are some twelve
hundred families living here on land bought with Lord George's money,
and enjoying all the advantages which the place owes to his investment
and his management, much more than to any labour or skill of theirs. You
must look at their rents as accommodation rents. Suppose they earn the
rent in Scotland, or England, or Tyrone, or wherever you like, the
question is, What do they get for it from Captain Hill? They get a
holding with land enough to grow potatoes on, and with as much free fuel
as ever they like, and with free pasture for their beasts, and all this
they get on the average, mind you, for no more than ten shillings a
year! Why, there was a time, I can assure you, when the women here
earned the value of all the Hill rents by knitting stockings and making
woollen stuffs. You see the stuffs lying here in this window that they
make even now, and good stuffs too. But before the League boycotted the
agency here, the agency ten years ago used to pay out L900 in a year,
where it pays less than L100 to the women for their work."

"Why did the League do this?"

"Why? Why, because it wanted to control the work itself, and to know
just what it brings into the place. You must remember Father M'Fadden is
the President of the League, and the people will do anything for him. I
have heard of one old woman who sat up of nights last year knitting
socks to send up to London, to pay the Christmas dues to the
Father,--six shillings' worth."

"And are these stuffs here in the hotel made for the agency you speak
of?"

"Oh no; these are just made by women that know the hotel, and Mr.
Robinson here, he kindly takes in the stuffs. You see the name of every
woman on every one of them that made it, and the price. If a stranger
buys some, he pays the money to Mr. Robinson, and so it goes to the
women, and no commission charged."

The "stuffs" are certainly excellent, very evenly woven; and the
patterns, all devised, I am told, by the women themselves, very simple
and tasteful. The only dyes used are got by the women also from the
sea-weeds and the kelp, which must be counted among the resources of the
place. The browns and ochres thus produced are both soft and vivid;
while nothing can be better than a peculiar warm grey, produced by a
skilful mingling of the undyed wools.

"What, then, causes the distress for which the name of Gweedore is a
synonym?" I asked.

"It doesn't exist," responded my Galwegian; "that is, there is no such
distress in Gweedore as you find in Connemara, for instance;[14] but
what distress there is in Gweedore is due much more to the habits the
people have been getting into of late years, and to the idleness of
them, than to any pressure of the rents you hear about, or even to the
poverty of the soil. Go down to the store at Bunbeg, and see what they
buy and go in debt for! You won't find in any such place as Bunbeg in
England such things. And even this don't measure it; for, you see,
two-thirds of them are not free to deal at Bunbeg."

"Why not? Is Bunbeg 'boycotted'?"

"No, not at all. But they are on the books of the 'Gombeen man'--Sweeney
of Dungloe and Burtonport. They're always in debt to him for the meal;
and then he backs the travelling tea-pedlars, and the bakers that carry
around cakes, and all these run up the accounts all the time. Tot up
what these people lay out for tea at four shillings a pound--and they
won't have cheap tea--and what they pay for meal, and what they pay for
interest, and the 'testimonials,'--they paid for the monument here to
O'Donnell, the Donegal man that murdered Carey,--and the dues to the
priest, and you'll find the L700 or so they don't pay the landlord going
in other directions three and four times over."

"Then they are falling back into all the old laziness, the men
sauntering about, or sitting and smoking, while the women do all the
work."

The maid having told us Mass would be performed at noon, I walked with
Lord Ernest a mile or so up the road to Derrybeg, to see the people
thronging down from the hills; the women in their picturesque fashion
wearing their bright shawls drawn over their heads. But the maid had
deceived us. The Mass was fixed for eleven, and I suspect her of being a
Protestant in disguise.

On the way back we met Mr. Burke, the resident magistrate. He has a neat
house here, with a garden, and had come over from Dunfanaghy to see his
wife. He meant to return before dark. The country was quiet enough, he
said; but there were some troublesome fellows about, keeping up the
excitement over the arrest at Father M'Fadden's trial of Father
Stephens--a young priest recently from Liverpool, who has become the
curate of quite another Father M'Fadden--the parish priest of
Falcarragh, and is giving his local superior a great deal of trouble by
his activity in connection with the "Plan of Campaign." Mr. Wybrants
Olphert of Ballyconnell, the chief landlord of Falcarragh, has been
"boycotted," on suspicion of promoting the arrest of the two priests.
Five policemen have been put into his house. At Falcarragh, where six
policemen are usually stationed, there are now forty. Mr. Burke
evidently thinks, though he did not say so, that Father Stephens has
been spoiled of his sleep by the laurels of Father M'Fadden of Gweedore.
He is to be tried at Dunfanaghy on Tuesday, and there are now 150 troops
quartered there--Rifles and Hussars.

"Are they not boycotted?" I asked.

"No. The people rather enjoy the bustle and the show, not to speak of
the money the soldiers spend."

Lord Ernest, who knows Mr. Olphert, sent him over a message by Mr. Burke
that we would drive over to-morrow, and pay our respects to him at
Ballyconnell. From this Mr. Burke tried to dissuade us, but what he told
us naturally increased our wish to go.

After luncheon I ordered a car, and drove to Derrybeg, to call there on
Father M'Fadden, Lord Ernest, who has already seen him, agreeing to call
there for me on his return from a walk. We passed much reclaimed
bogland, mostly now in grass, and looking fairly well; many piles of
turf and clusters of cottages, well-built, but not very neatly kept.
From each, as we passed, the inevitable cur rushed out and barked
himself hoarse. Then came a waste of bog and boulders, and then a long,
neat stone wall, well coped with unhewn stone, which announced the
vicinity of Father M'Fadden's house, quite the best structure in the
place after the chapel and the hotel. It is of stone, with a neat side
porch, in which, as I drove up, I descried Father M'Fadden, in his trim
well-fitting clerical costume, standing and talking with an elderly
lady. I passed through a handsome iron wicket, and introduced myself to
him. He received me with much courtesy, and asked me to walk into his
well-furnished comfortable study, where a lady, his sister, to whom he
presented me, sat reading by the fire.

I told Father M'Fadden I had come to get his view of methods and things
at Gweedore, and he gave it to me with great freedom and fluency. He is
a typical Celt in appearance, a M'Fadden Roe, sanguine by temperament,
with an expression at once shrewd and enthusiastic, a most flexible
persuasive voice. All the trouble at Gweedore, he thought, came of the
agents. "Agents had been the curse both of Ireland and of the landlord.
The custom being to pay them by commissions on the sums collected, and
not a regular salary, the more they can screw either out of the soil, or
out of any other resources of the tenants, the better it is for them. At
Gweedore the people earn what they can, not out of the soil, but out of
their labour exported to Scotland, or England, or America. Only
yesterday," he continued, turning to his neat mahogany desk and taking
up a letter, "I received this with a remittance from America to pay the
rent of one of my people."

"This was in connection," I asked, "with the 'Plan of Campaign' and your
contest here?"

"Yes," he replied; "and a girl of my parish went over to Scotland
herself and got the money due there for another family, and brought it
back to me here. You see they make me a kind of savings-bank, and have
done so for a long time, long before the 'Plan of Campaign' was talked
about as it is now."

This was interesting, as I had heard it said by a Nationalist in Dublin
that the "Plan of Campaign" was originally suggested by Father M'Fadden.
He made no such claim himself, however, and I made no allusion to this
aspect of the matter. "I have been living here for fifteen years, and
they listen to me as to nobody else."

In these affairs with the agents, he had always told his people that
"whenever a settlement came to be made, cash alone in the hand of the
person representing them could make it properly." "Cash I must have," he
said, "and hold the cash ready for the moment. When I had worked out a
settlement with Captain Hill, I had a good part of the money in my hand
ready to pay down. L1450 was the sum total agreed upon, and after the
further collection, necessitated by the settlement, there was a deficit
of about L200. I wrote to Professor Stuart," he added, after a pause,
"that I wanted about L200 of the sum-total. But more has come in since
then. This remittance, from America yesterday, for example."

"Do they send such remittances without being asked for them?" I
inquired.

"Yes; they are now and again sending money, and some of them don't send,
but bring it. Some of them go out to America now as they used to go to
England--just to work and earn some money, and come back.

"If they get on tolerably well they stay for a while, but they find
America is more expensive than Ireland, and if, for any cause, they get
out of work there, they come back to Ireland to spend what they have.
Naturally, you see," said Father M'Fadden, "they find a certain pleasure
to be seen by their old friends in the old place, after borrowing the
four pounds perhaps to take them to America, coming back with the money
jingling in their pockets, and in good clothes, and with a watch and a
chain--and a high hat. And there is in the heart of the Irishman an
eternal longing for his native land constantly luring him back to
Ireland. All do not succeed, though, in your country," he said. "We hear
of two out of ten perhaps who do very well. They take care we hear of
that. The rest disappear, and are never heard of again."

"Then you do not encourage emigration?" I, asked, "even although the
people cannot earn their living from the soil?"

Father M'Fadden hesitated a moment, and then replied, "No, for things
should be so arranged that they may earn their living, not out of the
country, but on the soil at home. It is to that I want to bring the
condition of the district."

At this point Lord Ernest Hamilton came up and knocked at the door. He
was most courteously received by Father M'Fadden. To my query why the
Courts could not intervene to save the priests from taking all this
trouble on themselves between the owners and the occupiers of the land,
Father M'Fadden at first replied that the Courts had no power to
intervene where, as in many cases in Gweedore, the holdings are
subdivided.

"The Courts," he said, "may not be, and I do not think they are, all
that could be desired, though they undoubtedly do supply a more or less
impartial arbitrator between the landlord and the tenant. It is an
improvement on the past when the landlords fixed the rents for
themselves."

I did not remind him of what Lord George Hill tells us, that in the
olden time at Gweedore the tenants fixed their own rents--and then did
not pay them--but I asked him how this could be said when the tenant
clearly must have accepted the rent, no matter who fixed it. "Oh!" said
Father M'Fadden, "that may be so, but the tenant was not free, he was
coerced. With all his life and labour represented in the holding and its
improvements, he could not go and give up his holding. It's a
stand-and-deliver business with him--the landlord puts a pistol to his
head!"

"But is it not true," I said, "that under the new Land Bill the Land
Commissioner's Court has power to fix the rents judicially without
regard to landlord or tenant during fifteen years?"

"Yes, that is so," said Father M'Fadden. "Under Mr. Gladstone's Act of
81, and under the later Act of the present Government, the rents so
fixed from '81 to '86 inclusive are subject to revision for three years;
but the people have no confidence in the constitution of the Courts,
and, as a matter of fact, the improvements of the tenants are
confiscated under the Act of '81, and the reductions allowed under the
Act of '87 are incommensurate with the fall in prices by 100 per cent.
And there still remains the burden of arrears. I feel that I must stand
between my people and obligations which they are unable to meet. To that
end I take their money, and stand ready to use it to relieve them when
the occasion offers. That is my idea of my work under the 'Plan of
Campaign'; and, furthermore, I think that by doing it I have secured
money for the landlord which he couldn't possibly have got in any other
way."

This struck me as a very remarkable statement, nor can I see how it can
be interpreted otherwise than as an admission that if the people had
the money to pay their rents, they couldn't be trusted to use it for
that purpose, unless they put it into the control of the priest or of
some other trustee.

Reverting to what he had said of the necessity for some change in the
conditions of life and labour here, I asked if, in his opinion, the
people could live out of the land if they got the ownership of it.

In existing circumstances he thought they could not.

Was he in favour, then, of Mr. Davitt's plan of Land Nationalisation?

"Well, I have not considered the question of Nationalisation of the
land."

To my further question, What remedies he would himself propose for a
state of things in which it was impossible for the people to live out of
the land either as occupiers or as owners--emigration being barred,
Father M'Fadden, without looking at Lord Ernest, replied, "Oh, I think
abler men who draw up Parliamentary Acts and live in public life ought
to devise remedies, and that is a matter which would be best settled by
a Home Government."

The glove was well delivered, but Lord Ernest did not lift it.

"But, Father M'Fadden," I said, "I am told you are a practical
agriculturist and engineer, and that you have contrived to get excellent
work done by the people here, dividing them off into working squads, and
assigning so many perches to so many--surely then you must understand
better than a dozen members of Parliament what they can be got to do?"

He smiled at this, and finally admitted that he had a plan of his own.
It was that the Government should advance sums for reclaiming the land.
"The people could live on part of their earnings while thus employed,
and invest the surplus in sheep to be fed on the hill pastures. When the
reclamation was effected the families could be scattered out, and the
holdings increased. In this district alone there are 350 holdings of
reclaimable land of 20 acres each, the reclamation of which, according
to a competent surveyor, "would pay well." And the district could be
improved by creating employment on the spot, establishing factories,
developing fisheries, giving technical education, and encouraging
cottage industries, which are so vigorously reviving in this district
owing to the benevolent efforts of the Donegal Industrial Fund."

Father M'Fadden spoke freely and without undue heat of his trial, and
gave us a piquant account of his arrest.

This was effected at Armagh, just as he was getting into an early
morning train. A sergeant of police walked up as the train was about to
start, and asked--

"Are you not Father M'Fadden of Gweedore?"

"What interest have you in my identity?" responded the priest.

"Only this, sir," said the officer, politely exhibiting a warrant.

"I had been in Armagh the previous day," said Father M'Fadden,
"attending the month's memory of the late deceased Primate of All
Ireland, Dr. M'Gettigan, and stayed at a private residence, that of
Surgeon-Major Lavery, not suspecting that while enjoying the genial
hospitality of the Surgeon-Major my steps were dogged by a detective,
and that gentleman's house watched by police."

Of the trial Father M'Fadden spoke with more bitterness. His eyes glowed
as he exclaimed, "Can you imagine that they refused me bail, when bail
had been allowed to such a felon as Arthur Orton? Why should I have
been locked up over two Sundays, for ten days, when I offered to pledge
my honour to appear?" He made no other complaint of the magistrate, and
none of the prosecutor, Mr. Ross. He praised his own lawyer, too, but he
strongly denounced the stenographer who took down his speech, or the
parts of it which I told him I had seen in Dublin.

"Why, just think of it," he exclaimed; "it took the clerk just eight
minutes to read the report given by that stenographer of a speech which
it took me an hour and twenty minutes to deliver! I do not speak from
the lips, I speak from the heart, and consequently rather rapidly; and a
stenographer who can take down 190 words a minute has told me I run
ahead of him!"

I suggested that the report, without pretending even to be a full
summary of his speech, might be accurate as to phrases and sentences
pronounced by him.

"Yes, as to phrases," he answered, "that might be; but the phrases may
be taken out of their true connection, and strung together in an
untruthful, yet telling way. Even my words were not fully set down," he
said, with some heat. "I was made to call a man 'level,' when I said in
the American way that he was 'level-headed.'" _A propos_ of this, I am
told that the American word "spree" has become Hibernian, and is used to
describe meetings of the National League and "other political
entertainments."

When I told Father M'Fadden I had just come from Rome, where, as I had
reason to believe, the Vatican was anxious to get evidence from others
than Archbishop Walsh and Monsignore Kirby, of the Irish College, as to
the attitude of the priests in Ireland towards the laws of the United
Kingdom, he said he knew that "some Italian prelates neither understood
nor approved the 'Plan of Campaign,' nor is the Irish Land question
understood at Rome;" but this did not seem to disturb him much, as he
was quite sure that in the end the "Plan of Campaign" would be legalised
by the British Government. "I think I see plainly," he said, "that Lord
Ernest's government is fast going to pieces, though I can't expect him
to admit it!" Lord Ernest laughed good-naturedly, and said that Father
M'Fadden saw more in Donegal than he (Lord Ernest) was able to see in
Westminster. Upon my asking him whether the "Plan of Campaign" did not
in effect abrogate the moral duty of a man to meet the legal obligations
he had voluntarily incurred, Father M'Fadden advanced his own theory of
the subject, which was that, "if a man can pay a fair year's rent out of
the produce of his holding, he is bound to pay it. But if the rent be a
rack-rent, imposed on the tenant against his will, or if the holding
does not produce the rent, then I don't think that is a strict
obligation in conscience."

In America, the courts, I fear, would make short work of this theory of
Father M'Fadden. If a tenant there cannot pay his first quarter's rent
(they don't let him darken his soul by a year's liabilities) they
promptly and mercilessly put him out.

Interesting as was our conversation with the parish priest of Gweedore,
I felt that we might be trespassing too far upon his kindness and his
time. So we rose to go. He insisted upon our going into the dining-room,
where, as he told us, he had hospitably entertained sundry visiting
statesmen from England, and there offered us a glass of the excellent
wine of the country. He excused himself from joining us as being
"almost a teetotaller."

On our return to the hotel I met the Galwegian strolling about. When I
told him of Father M'Fadden's courteous hospitality, he said, "I am very
glad you took that glass he offered. I really believe his quarrel with
Captain Hill dates back to Hill's declining that same courtesy under
Father M'Fadden's roof."

GWEEDORE, _Monday, Feb. 6._--Another very beautiful morning--as a farmer
said with whom I chatted on my morning stroll, "A grand day, sorr!"
Errigal, which in this mountain atmosphere seems almost to hang over our
hotel, but is in reality three or four miles away, stood out superbly
against a clear azure sky, wreaths of soft luminous mist floating like a
divine girdle half way up his bare volcanic peak.

I walked up to the Bunbeg road with Lord Ernest to call upon some
peasants whom he knows. In one stone cabin, very well built and
plastered, standing sidewise to the road, with doors on either side, we
found the house apparently in charge of a little girl of nine or ten
years, a weird but pretty child with very delicate well-cut features,
who lay couchant upon her doubled-up arm on a low bed in a corner of the
main room, and peered at us over her elbow with sparkling inquisitive
eyes.

By her side sat a man with his cap on, who might have been the "young
Pretender," or the "old Kaiser," so far as his looks went towards
indicating his age. He never rose or welcomed us, being, as we
afterwards found out, only a visitor like ourselves, and a kinsman of
Mrs. M'Donnell, the head of the house. "Mrs. M'Donnell," he said, "is
gone to the store at Bunbeg."

This main room rose perhaps ten feet in height to the open roof. It had
one large and well-glazed window. When Lord George Hill came here there
were not ten square feet of window-glass in the whole parish outside of
the Church, the national school, and the residence of the chief
police-officer.

Windows when there were any were closed with dried sheepskins, through
which the cats ran in and out as freely as through the curious tunnel
which the kindly Master of Blantyre has constructed at Sheba's Cross for
their special benefit.

There were two beds in the main room; rather high than low, one of
rushes, on which lay the child of whom I have spoken, and one of
greater pretensions vacant in another corner.

The door stood wide open, but the cabin was warm and comfortable, and a
peat fire smouldered, sending up, to me, most agreeable odours. An inner
room seemed to be a sort of granary, full of hay and straw. There the
cow is kept at night. "It's handy if you want a drink of milk," said the
visitor. In comparison with the dwellings of small farmers in Eastern
France or in Southern Italy this Donegal cabin was not only clean but
attractive. It was more squalid perhaps, but less dreary than the
extemporised and flimsy dwellings of settlers in the extreme Far West of
the United States, and I should say decidedly a more wholesome
habitation than the hermetically sealed and dismal wooden houses of
hundreds of struggling farmers in the older Eastern States. I am sure my
old friend Mr. Frederick Law Olmsted, who made the only thorough surveys
of agricultural life in the United States before the Civil War, would
have pronounced it in all respects superior, so far as health and
comfort go, to the average home of the average "poor buccra," between
the Chesapeake and the Sabine. I am afraid a great deal of not wholly
innocuous nonsense has been written and spoken about this part of the
United Kingdom by well-meaning philanthropists who have gauged the
condition of the people here by their own standards of comfort and
enjoyment. Most things in this life of ours are relative. I well
remember hearing an American millionaire, who began life in New York as
the patentee of a mouse-trap, express his profound compassion for a
judge of the Supreme Court condemned to live "upon a pittance of eight
thousand dollars a year."

These dwellers in the cabins of Donegal are millionaires, so far as
those essentials of life are concerned, which we call room and air and
freedom to move and breathe, in comparison with hundreds and thousands
of their own race in the slums of New York and Chicago and Liverpool and
London.

Mrs. M'Donnell's cousin, however, took dark views of things. The times
"were no good at all."

The potatoes, I had heard, were doing well this year.

"No! they wouldn't keep the people; indeed, they wouldn't. There would
have to be relief."

"Why not manure the land?"

"Manure? oh yes, the sea-stuff was good manure, but the people couldn't
get it. They had no boats; and it cost eighteenpence a load to haul it
from Bunbeg. No! they couldn't get it off the rocks. At the Rosses they
might; the Rosses were not so badly off as Derrybeg or Gweedore, for all
they might say."

"But Father M'Fadden had urged me," I said, "to see the Rosses, because
the people there were worse off than any of the people."

"Well, Father M'Fadden was a good man; he was a friend of the people;
and they were bad indeed at the Rosses, but they could get the sea-stuff
there, and hadn't to pay for cartage. And indeed, if you put the
sea-stuff on the bogland, the land was better in among the rocks' at the
Rosses than was the bogland, it was indeed: the stuff did no good at all
the first year. The second and the third it gave good crops--but then
you must burn it--and by the fourth year and the fifth it was all ashes,
and no good at all! This was God's truth, it was; and there must be
relief."

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