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

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A most original and delightful lady of the country lunched with
us,--such a character as Miss Edgeworth or Miss Austen might have drawn.
Shrewd, humorous, sensible, fearless, and ready with impartial hand to
box the ears alike of Trojan and of Tyrian. She not only sees both sides
of the question in Ireland as between the landlords and the tenants, but
takes both sides of the question. She holds lands by inheritance, which
make her keenly alive to the wrongs of the landlords, and she holds
farms as a tenant, which make her implacably critical as to their
claims. She mercilessly demolished in one capacity whatever she advanced
in the other, and all with the most perfect nonchalance and good faith.
This curiously dual attitude reminded me of the confederate General,
Braxton Bragg, of whom his comrades in the old army of the United States
used to say that he once had a very sharp official correspondence with
himself. He happened to hold a staff appointment, being also a line
officer. So in his quality of a staff officer, he found fault with
himself in his capacity as a line officer, reprimanded himself sharply,
replied defiantly to the reprimand, and eventually reported himself to
himself for discipline at head-quarters. She told an excellent story of
a near kinsman of hers who, holding a very good living in the Protestant
Irish Church, came rather unexpectedly by inheritance into a baronetcy,
upon which his women-folk insisted that it would be derogatory to a
baronet to be a parson. "Would you believe it, the poor man was silly
enough to listen to their cackle, and resign seven hundred a year!"

"That didn't clear him," I said, "of the cloth, did it?"

"Not a bit, of course, poor foolish man. He was just as much a parson as
ever, only without a parsonage. Men are fools enough of themselves,
don't you think, without needing to listen to women?"

Mr. Seigne comes of a French Protestant stock long ago planted in
Ireland, and his Gallic blood doubtless helps him to handle the
practical problems daily submitted in these days to an Irish
land-agent--problems very different, as he thinks, from those with which
an Irish agent had to deal in the days before 1870. The Irish tenant has
a vantage-ground now in his relations with his landlord which he never
had in the olden time, and this makes it more important than it ever was
that the agent should have what may be called a diplomatic taste for
treating with individuals, finding out the bent of mind of this man and
of that, and negotiating over particulars, instead of insisting, in the
English fashion, on general rules, without regard to special cases. I
have met no one who has seemed to me so cool and precise as Mr. Seigne
in his study of the phenomena of the present situation. I asked him
whether he could now say, as Mr. Senior did a quarter of century ago,
that the Irish tenants were less improvident, and more averse from
running into debt than the English.

"I think not," he replied; "on the contrary, in some parts of Ireland
now the shopkeepers are kept on the verge of bankruptcy by the
recklessness with which the tenants incurred debts immediately after the
passing of the Land Act of 1870--a time when shopkeepers, and bankers
also, almost forced credit upon the farmers, and made thereby 'bad
debts' innumerable. Farmers rarely keep anything like an account of
their receipts and expenses. I know only one tenant-farmer in this
neighbourhood who keeps what can be called an account, showing what he
takes from his labour and spends on his living."[20] "They save a great
deal of money often," he says, "but almost never in any systematic way.
They spend much less on clothes and furniture, and the outward show of
things, than English people of the same condition do, and they do not
stint themselves in meat and drink as the French peasants do. In fact,
under the operation of existing circumstances, they are getting into the
way of improving their condition, not so much by sacrifices and savings,
as by an insistence on rent being fixed low enough to leave full margin
for improved living."

"I had a very frank statement on this point," said Mr. Seigne, "not long
ago from a Tipperary man. When I tried to show him that his father had
paid a good many years ago the very same rent which he declares himself
unable to pay now, he admitted this at once. But it was a confession and
avoidance. 'My father could pay the rent, and did pay the rent,' he
said, 'because he was content to live so that he could pay it. He sat on
a boss of straw, and ate out of a bowl. He lived in a way in which I
don't intend to live, and so he could pay the rent. Now, I must have,
and I mean to have, out of the land, before I pay the rent, the means of
living as I wish to live; and if I can't have it, I'll sell out and go
away; but I'll be--if I don't fight before I do that same!'"

"What could you reply to that?" I asked.

"Oh," I said, "'that's square and straightforward. Only just let me know
the point at which you mean to fight, and then we'll see if we can agree
about something.'"

"The truth is," said Mr. Seigne, "that there is a pressure upward now
from below. The labourers don't want to live any longer as the farmers
have always made them live; and so the farmers, having to consider the
growing demands of the labourers, and meaning to live better themselves,
push up against the landlord, and insist that the means of the
improvement shall come out of him."

He then told me an instructive story of his calling upon a
tenant-farmer, at whose place he found the labourers sitting about their
meal of pork and green vegetables. The farmer asked him into another
room, where he saw the farmer's family making their meal of stirabout
and milk and potatoes.

"I asked you in here," said the farmer, "because we keep in here to
ourselves. I don't want those fellows to see that we can't afford to
give ourselves what we have to give them,"--this with strong language
indicating that he must himself be given a way to advance equally with
the progressive labourer, or he would know the reason why!

This afternoon Mr. Seigne drove me over through a beautiful country to
Woodstock, near Inistiogue, the seat of the late Colonel Tighe, the head
of the family of which the authoress of "Psyche" was an ornament.

It is the finest place in this part of Ireland, and one of the finest I
have seen in the three kingdoms, a much more picturesque and more nobly
planted place indeed than its namesake in England. The mansion has no
architectural pretensions, being simply a very large and, I should
think, extremely comfortable house of the beginning of this century. The
library is very rich, and there are some good pictures, as well as
certain statues in the vestibule, which would have no interest for the
Weissnichtwo professor of _Sartor Resartus_, but are regarded with some
awe by the good people of Inistiogue.

The park would do no discredit to a palace, and if the vague project of
establishing a royal residence in Ireland for one of the British Princes
should ever take shape, it would not be easy, I should say, to find a
demesne more befitting the home of a prince than this of the Tighes. At
present it serves the State at least as usefully, being the "pleasaunce"
of the people for miles around, who come here freely to walk and drive.

It stretches for miles along the Nore, and is crowned by a gloriously
wooded hill nearly a thousand feet in height. The late Colonel Tighe, a
most accomplished man, and a passionate lover of trees, made it a kind
of private Kew Gardens. He planted long avenues of the rarest and finest
trees, araucarias, Scotch firs, oaks, beeches, cedars of Lebanon; laid
out miles of the most varied and delightful drives, and built the most
extensive conservatories in Ireland.

The turfed and terraced walks among those conservatories are
indescribably lovely, and the whole place to-day was vocal with
innumerable birds. Picturesque little cottages and arbours are to be
found in unexpected nooks all through the woodlands, each commanding
some green vista of forest aisles, or some wide view of hill and
champaign, enlivened by the winding river. From one of those to-day we
looked out over a landscape to which Turner alone or Claude could have
done justice, the river, spanned by a fine bridge, in the middle
distance, and all the region wooded as in the days of which Edmund
Spenser sings, when Ireland

"Flourished in fame,
Of wealth and goodnesse far above the rest
Of all that bears the British Islands' name."

Over the whole place broods an indefinable charm. You feel that this was
the home at once and the work of a refined and thoughtful spirit. And so
indeed it was. Here for the greater part of the current century the
owner lived, making the development of the estate and of this demesne
his constant care and chief pleasure. And here still lives his widow,
with whom we took tea in a stately quiet drawing-room. Lady Louisa Tighe
was in Brussels with her mother, the Duchess of Richmond, on the eve of
Waterloo. She was a child then of ten years old, and her mother bade
them bring her down into the historic ball-room before the Duke of
Wellington left it. The duke took up his sword. "Let Louisa buckle it
for you," said her mother, and when the little girl had girded it on,
the great captain stooped, took her up in his arms, and kissed her. "One
never knows what may happen, child," he said good-naturedly; and taking
his small gold watch out of his fob, he bade her keep it for him.

She keeps it still. For more than sixty years it has measured out in
this beautiful Irish home the hours of a life given to good works and
gracious usefulness. To-day, with all the vivacity of interest in the
people and the place which one might look for in a woman of twenty, this
charming old lady of eighty-three, showing barely threescore years in
her carriage, her countenance, and her voice, entertained us with minute
and most interesting accounts of the local industries which flourish
here mainly through her sympathetic and intelligent supervision. We
seemed to be in another world from the Ireland of Chicago or
Westminster!

Mr. Seigne drove me back here by a most picturesque road leading along
the banks of the Nore, quite overhung with trees, which in places dip
their branches almost into the swift deep stream. "This is the favourite
drive of all the lovers hereabouts," he said, "and there is a spice of
danger in it which makes it more romantic. Once, not very long ago, a
couple of young people, too absorbed in their love-making to watch their
horse, drove off the bank. Luckily for them they fell into the branches
of one of these overhanging trees, while the horse and car went plunging
into the water. There they swung, holding each other hand in hand,
making a pretty and pathetic tableau, till their cries brought some
anglers in a boat on the river to the rescue."

We spoke of Lady Louisa, and of the watch of Waterloo. "That watch had a
wonderful escape a few years ago," said Mr. Seigne.

Lady Louisa, it seems, had a confidential butler whom she most
implicitly trusted. One day it was found that a burglary had apparently
been committed at Woodstock, and that with a quantity of jewelry the
priceless watch had vanished. The butler was very active about the
matter, and as no trace could be found leading out of the house, he
intimated a suspicion that the affair might possibly have some
connection with a guest not long before at the house. This angered Lady
Louisa, who thereupon consulted the agent, who employed a capable
detective from Dublin. The detective came down to Inistiogue as a
commercial traveller, wandered about, made the acquaintance of Lady
Louisa's maid, of the butler, and of other people about the house, and
formed his own conclusions. Two or three days after his arrival he
walked into the shop of a small jeweller in a neighbouring town, and
affecting a confidential manner, told the jeweller he wanted to buy
"some of those things from Woodstock." The man was taken by surprise,
and going into a backshop produced one very fine diamond, and a number
of pieces of silver plate, of the disappearance of which the butler had
said nothing to his mistress. This led to the arrest of the butler, and
to the discovery that for a long time he had been purloining property
from the house and selling it. Many cases of excellent claret had found
their way in this fashion to a public-house which had acquired quite a
reputation for its Bordeaux with the officers quartered in its
neighbourhood. The wine-bins at Woodstock were found full of bottles of
water. Much of the capital port left by Colonel Tighe had gone--but the
hock was untouched. "Probably the butler didn't care for hock," said Mr.
Seigne. The Waterloo watch was recovered from a very decent fellow, a
travelling dealer, to whom it had been sold: and many pieces of jewelry
were traced up to London. But Lady Louisa could not be induced to go up
to London to identify them or testify.

DUBLIN, _Tuesday, March 6._--It is a curious fact, which I learned
to-day from the Registrar-General, that the deposits in the Post-office
Savings Banks have never diminished in Ireland since these banks were
established.[21] These deposits are chiefly made, I understand, by the
small tenants, who are less represented by the deposits in the General
Savings Banks than are the shopkeepers and the cattle-drovers. In the
General Savings Banks the deposit line fluctuates more; though on the
whole there has been a steady increase in these deposits also throughout
Ireland.

Of the details of the dealings of the private banks it is very hard to
get an accurate account. One gentleman, the manager of a branch of one
important bank, tells me that a great deal of money is made by usurers
out of the tenants, by backing their small bills. This practice goes
back to the first establishment of banks in Ireland. Formerly it was not
an uncommon thing for a landlord to offer his tenants a reduction, say,
of twenty per cent., on condition of their paying the rent when it fell
due. Such were the relations then between landlord and tenants, and so
little was punctuality expected in such payments that this might be
regarded as a sort of discount arrangement. The tenant who wished to
avail himself of such an offer would go to some friendly local usurer
and ask for a loan that he might avail himself of it. "One of these
usurers, whom I knew very well," said the manager, "told me long ago
that he found these operations very profitable. His method of procedure
was to agree to advance the rent to the tenant at ten per cent., payable
at a near and certain date. This would reduce the landlord's reduction
at once, of course, for the tenant, to ten per cent., but that was not
to be disdained; and so the bargain would be struck. If the money was
repaid at the fixed date, it was not a bad thing for the usurer. But it
was almost never so repaid; and with repeated renewals the usurer, by
his own showing, used to receive eventually twenty, fifty, and, in some
cases, nearly a hundred per cent, for his loan."

It is the opinion of this gentleman that, under the "Plan of Campaign,"
a good deal of money-making is done in a quiet way by some of the
"trustees," who turn over at good interest, with the help of friendly
financiers, the funds lodged with them, being held to account to the
tenants only for the principal. "Of course," he said, "all this is
doubtless at least as legitimate as any other part of the 'Plan,' and I
daresay it all goes for 'the good of the cause.' But neither the tenants
nor the landlords get much by it!"

CHAPTER XIII.

DUBLIN, _Thursday, March 8._--At eight o'clock this morning I left the
Harcourt Street station for Inch, to take a look at the scene of the
Coolgreany evictions of last summer. These evictions came of the
adoption of the Plan of Campaign, under the direction of Mr. Dillon,
M.P., on the Wexford property of Mr. George Brooke of Dublin. The agent
of Mr. Brooke's estate, Captain Hamilton, is the honorary director of
the Property Defence Association, so that we have here obviously a
grapple between the National League doing the work, consciously or
unconsciously, of the agrarian revolutionists, and a combination of
landed proprietors fighting for the rights of property as they
understand them.

We ran through a beautiful country for the greater part of the way. At
Bray, which is a favourite Irish watering-place, the sea broke upon us
bright and full of life; and the station itself was more like a
considerable English station than any I have seen. Thence we passed into
a richly-wooded region, with neat, well-kept hedges, as far as Rathdrum
and the "Sweet Vale of Avoca." The hills about Shillelagh are
particularly well forested, though, as the name suggests, they must have
been cut for cudgels pretty extensively for now a great many years. We
came again on the sea at the fishing port of Arklow, where the stone
walls about the station were populous with small ragamuffins, and at the
station of Inch I found a car waiting for me with Mr. Holmes, a young
English Catholic officer, who had most obligingly offered to show me the
place and the people. We had hardly got into the roadway when we
overtook a most intelligent-looking, energetic young priest, walking
briskly on in the direction of our course. This was Dr. Dillon, the
curate of Arklow. We pulled up at once, and Mr. Holmes, introducing me
to him, we begged him to take a seat with us. He excused himself as
having to join another priest with whom he was going to a function at
Inch; but he was good enough to walk a little way with us, and gave me
an appointment for 2 P.M. at his own town of Arklow, where I could catch
the train back to Dublin. We drove on rapidly and called on Father
O'Neill, the parish priest. We found him in full canonicals, as he was
to officiate at the function this morning, and with him were Father
Dunphy, the parish priest of Arklow, and two or three more robed
priests.

Father O'Neill, whose face and manner are those of the higher order of
the continental clergy, briefly set forth to me his view of the
transactions at Coolgreany. He said that before the Plan of Campaign was
adopted by the tenants, Mr. William O'Brien, M.P., had written to him
explaining what the effect of the Plan would be, and urging him to take
whatever steps he could to obviate the necessity of adopting it, as it
might eventually result to the disadvantage of the tenants. "To that
end," said Father O'Neill, "I called upon Captain Hamilton, the agent,
with Dr. Dillon of Arklow, but he positively refused to listen to us,
and in fact ordered us, not very civilly, to leave his office."

It was after this he said that he felt bound to let the tenants take
their own way. Eighty of them joined in the "Plan of Campaign" and paid
the amount of the rent due, less a reduction of 30 per cent., which they
demanded of the agent, into the hands of Sir Thomas Esmonde, M.P., Sir
Thomas being a resident in the country, and Mr. Mayne, M.P. Writs of
ejectment were obtained against them afterwards, and in July last
sixty-seven of them were evicted, who are now living in "Laud League
huts," put up on the holdings of three small tenants who were exempted
from the Plan of Campaign, and allowed to pay their rents subject to a
smaller reduction made by the agent, in order that they might retain
their land as a refuge for the rest.

All this Father O'Neill told us very quietly, in a gentle,
undemonstrative way, but he was much interested when I told him I had
recently come from Rome, where these proceedings, I was sure, were
exciting a good deal of serious attention. "Yes," he said, "and Father
Dunphy who is here in the other room, has just got back from Rome, where
he had two audiences of the Holy Father."

"Doubtless, then," I said, "he will have given his Holiness full
particulars of all that took place here."

"No doubt," responded Father O'Neill, "and he tells me the Holy Father
listened with great attention to all he had to say--though of course, he
expressed no opinion about it to Father Dunphy."

As the time fixed for the function was at hand, we were obliged to leave
without seeing Father Dunphy.

From the Presbytery we drove to the scene of the evictions. These
evictions were in July. Mr. Holmes witnessed them, and gave me a lively
account of the affair. The "battle" was not a very tough one. Mr.
Davitt, who was present, stood under a tree very quietly watching it
all. "He looked very picturesque," said Mr. Holmes, "in a light grey
suit, with a broad white beaver shading his dark Spanish face; and
smoked his cigar very composedly." After it was over, Dr. Dillon brought
up one of the tenants, and presented him to Mr. Davitt as "the man who
had resisted this unjust eviction." Mr. Davitt took his cigar from his
lips, and in the hearing of all who stood about sarcastically said,
"Well, if he couldn't make a better resistance than that he ought to go
up for six months!" The first house we came upon was derelict--all
battered and despoiled, the people in the neighbourhood here, as
elsewhere, regarding such houses as free spoil, and carrying off from
time to time whatever they happen to fancy. Near this house we met an
emergency man, named Bolton, an alert, energetic-looking native of
Wicklow. He has four brothers; and is now at work on one of the
"evicted" holdings.

I asked if he was "boycotted," and what his relations were with the
people.

He laughed in a shrewd, good-natured way. "Oh, I'm boycotted, of
course," he said; "but I don't care a button for any of these people,
and I'd rather they wouldn't speak to me. They know I can take care of
myself, and they give me a good wide berth. All I have to object to is
that they set fire to an outhouse of mine, and cut the ears of one of my
heifers, and for that I want damages. Otherwise I'm getting on very
well; and I think this will be a good year, if the law is enforced, and
these fellows are made to behave themselves."

Near Bolton's farm we passed the holding of a tenant named Kavanagh, one
of the three who were "allowed" to pay their rents. Several Land League
huts are on his place, and the evicted people who occupy them put their
cattle with his. He is a quiet, cautious man, and very reticent. But it
seemed to me that he was not entirely satisfied with the "squatters" who
have been quartered upon him. And it appears that he has taken another
holding in Carlow. From his place we drove to Ballyfad, where a large
house, at the end of a good avenue of trees, once the mansion of a
squire, but now much dilapidated, is occupied as headquarters by the
police. Here we found Mr. George Freeman, the bailiff of the Coolgreany
property, a strong, sturdy man, much disgusted at finding it necessary
to go about protected by two policemen. That this was necessary,
however, he admitted, pointing out to us the place where one Kinsella
was killed not very long ago. The son of this man Kinsella was formerly
one of Mr. Brooke's gamekeepers, and is now, Mr. Freeman thinks, in
concert with another man named Ryan, the chief stay of the League in
keeping up its dominion over the evicted tenants.

Many of these tenants, he believes, would gladly pay their rents now,
and come back if they dared.

"Every man, sir," he said, "that has anything to lose, would be glad to
come back next Monday if he thought his life would be safe. But all the
lazy and thriftless ones are better off now than they ever were; they
get from L4 to L6 a month, with nothing to do, and so they're in clover,
and they naturally don't like to have the industrious, well-to-do
tenants spoil their fun by making a general settlement."

"Besides that," he added, "that man Kinsella and his comrade Ryan are
the terror of the whole of them. Kinsella always was a curious, silent,
moody fellow. He knows every inch of the country, going over it all the
time by night and day as a gamekeeper, and I am quite sure the
Parnellite men and the Land Leaguers are just as much afraid of him and
Ryan as the tenants are. He don't care a bit for them; and they've no
control of him at all."

Mr. Freeman said he remembered very well the occasion referred to by
Father O'Neill, when Captain Hamilton refused to confer with Dr. Dillon
and himself.

"Did Father O'Neill tell you, sir," he said, "that Captain Hamilton was
quite willing to talk with him and Father O'Donel, the parish priests,
and with the Coolgreany people, but he would have nothing to say to any
one who was not their priest, and had no business to be meddling with
the matter at all?"

"No; he did not tell me that."

"Ah! well, sir, that made all the difference. Father Dunphy, who was
there, is a high-tempered man, and he said he had just as much right to
represent the tenants as Captain Hamilton to represent the landlord, and
that Captain Hamilton wouldn't allow. It was the outside people made all
the trouble. In June of last year there was a conference at my house,
and all that time there was a Committee sitting at Coolgreany, and the
tenants would not be allowed to do anything without the Committee."

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