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

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The house of Mr. Dunne is that of a large gentleman farmer. It is very
well fitted up, but it was plain that the tenants had done little or
nothing to make or keep it a "house beautiful." The walls had never been
papered, and the wood-work showed no recent traces of the brush. "He
spent more money on horse-racing than on housekeeping," said a shrewd
old man who was in the house. In fact, Mr. Dunne, I am told, entered a
horse for the races at the Curragh after he had undergone what Mr.
Gladstone calls "the sentence of death" of an eviction!

Some of the doors bore marks of the crowbar but no great mischief had
been done to them or to the large fine windows. The only serious damage
done during the eviction was the cutting of a hole through the roof. An
upper room had been provisioned to stand a siege, and so scientifically
barricaded with logs and trunks of trees that after several vain
attempts to break through the door the assailants climbed to the roof,
and in twenty minutes cut their way in from without. The dining and
drawing rooms were those of a gentleman's residence, and one of the
party remembered attending here a social festivity got up with much
display.

A large cattle-yard has been established on this place, with an
original, and, as I was assured, most successful weighing-machine by the
Land Corporation. We found it full of very fine-looking cattle, and Mr.
Hutchins seems to think the operation of managing the estate as a kind
of "ranch" decidedly promising. "I am not a bit sorry for Mr. Dunne," he
said, "but I am very sorry for other quiet, good tenants who have been
deluded or driven into giving up valuable holdings to keep him and Mr.
Kilbride company, and give colour to the vapourings of Mr. William
O'Brien."

The cases of some of these tenants were instructive. One poor man,
Knowles, had gone out to America, and regularly sent home money to his
family to pay the rent. They found other uses for it, and when the storm
came he was two years and a half in arrears. In another instance, two
brothers held contiguous holdings, and were in a manner partners. One
was fonder of Athy than of agriculture; the other a steady husbandman.
Four years' arrears had grown up against the one; only a half-year's
gale against the other. Clearly this difference originated outside of
the fall of prices! In a third case, a tenant wrote to Mr. Trench
begging to have something done, as he had the money to pay, and wanted
to pay, but "didn't dare."

From Mr. Dunne's we drove to Mr. Kilbride's, another ample, very
comfortable house--not so thoroughly well fitted up with bathroom and
other modern appurtenances as Mr. Dunne's perhaps--but still a very good
house. It stands on a large green knoll, rather bare of trees, and
commands a fine sweep of landscape.

Mr. Hutchins drove me to the little road which leads up past the "Land
League village" to the house of Father Maher, and there set me down.

I walked up and found the curate at home--a tall, slender, well-made
young priest, with a keen, intelligent face. He received me very
politely, and, when I showed him the card of an eminent dignitary of the
Church, with cordiality.

I found him full of sympathy with the people of his parish, but neither
vehement nor unfair. He did not deny that there were tenants on Lord
Lansdowne's estate who were amply able to pay their rents; but he did
most emphatically assert that there were not a few of them who really
could not pay their rents.

"I assure you," he said, "there are some of them who cannot even pay
their dues to their priest, and when I say that, you will know how
pinched and driven they must indeed be." It was in view of these tenants
that he seemed to justify the course of Mr. Dunne and Mr. Kilbride.
"They must all stand or fall together." He had nothing to say to the
discredit of Lord Lansdowne; but he spoke with some bitterness of the
agent, Mr. Townsend Trench, as having protested against Lord Lansdowne's
making reductions here while he had himself made the same reductions on
the neighbouring estate of Mrs. Adair.

"In truth," he said, "Mr. Trench has made all this trouble worse all
along. He is too much of a Napoleon"--and with a humorous twinkle in his
eye as he spoke--"too much of a Napoleon the Third.

"I was just reading his father's book when you came in. Here it is," and
he handed me a copy of Trench's _Realities of Irish Life_.

"Did you ever read it? This Mr. Trench, the father, was a kind of
Napoleon among agents in his own time, and the son, you see, thinks it
ought to be understood that he is quite as great a man as his father.
Did you never hear how he found a lot of his father's manuscripts once,
and threw them all in the fire, calling out as he did so, 'There goes
some more of my father's vanity?'"

About his people, and with his people, Father Maher said he "felt most
strongly." How could he help it? He was himself the son of an evicted
father.

"Of course, Father Maher," I said, "you will understand that I wish to
get at both sides of this question and of all questions here. Pray tell
me then, where I shall find the story of the Luggacurren property most
fully and fairly set forth in print?"

Without a moment's hesitation he replied, "By far the best and fairest
account of the whole matter you will get in the Irish correspondence of
the London _Times_."

How the conflict would end he could not say. But he was at a loss to see
how it could pay Lord Lansdowne to maintain it.

He very civilly pressed me to stay and lunch with him, but when I told
him I had already accepted an invitation from Mr. Hutchins, he very
kindly bestirred himself to find my jarvey.

I hastened back to the lodge, where I found a very pleasant little
company. They were all rather astonished, I thought, by the few words I
had to say of Father Maher, and especially by his frank and sensible
recommendation of the reports in the London _Times_ as the best account
I could find of the Luggacurren difficulty. To this they could not
demur, but things have got, or are getting, in Ireland, I fear, to a
point at which candour, on one side or the other of the burning
questions here debated, is regarded with at least as much suspicion as
the most deliberate misrepresentation. As to Mr. Town send Trench, what
Father Maher failed to tell me, I was here told: That down to the time
of the actual evictions he offered to take six months' rent from the
tenants, give them a clean book, and pay all the costs. To refuse this
certainly looks like a "war measure."

But for the loneliness of her life here, Mrs. Hutchins tells me she
would find it delightful. The country is exceedingly lovely in the
summer and autumn months.

When my car came out to take me back to Athy, I found my jarvey in
excellent spirits, and quite friendly even with Mr. Hutchins himself. He
kept up a running fire of lively commentaries upon the residents whose
estates we passed.

"Would you think now, your honour," he said, pointing with his whip to
one large mansion standing well among good trees, "that that's the
snuggest man there is about Athy? But he is; and it's no wonder! Would
you believe it, he never buys a newspaper, but he walks all the way into
Athy, and goes about from the bank to the shops till he finds one, and
picks it up and reads it. He's mighty fond of the news, but he's fonder,
you see, of a penny!

"There now, your honour, just look at that house! It's a magistrate he
is that lives there; and why? Why, just to be called 'your honour,' and
have the people tip their hats to him. Oh! he delights in that, he does.
Why, you might knock a man, or put him in the water, you might, indeed,
but if you came before Mr.----, and you just called him 'your honour'
often enough, and made up to him, you'd be all right! You've just to go
up to him with your hat in your hand, looking up at him, and to say,
'Ah! now, your honour'" (imitating the wheedling tone to perfection),
"and indeed you'd get anything out of him--barring a sixpence, that is,
or a penny!

"Ah! he's a snug one, too!" And with that he launched a sharp thwack of
the whip at the grey mare, and we went rattling on apace.

At the very pretty station of Athy we parted the best of friends. "Wish
you safe home, your honour." The kindly railway porter, also, who had
recommended Kavanagh's Hotel, was anxious to know how I found it, and so
busied himself to get me a good carriage when the train came in, that I
feel bound to exempt Athy from the judgment passed by Sir James
Allport's committee against the "amenities of railway travelling in
Ireland."

DUBLIN, _Saturday, March 10._--I called by appointment to-day upon Mr.
Brooke, the owner of the Coolgreany estate, at his counting-house in
Gardiner's Row. It is one of the spacious old last-century houses of
Dublin; the counting-room is installed with dark, old-fashioned mahogany
fittings, in what once was, and might easily again be made, a
drawing-room. Pictures hang on the walls, and the atmosphere of the
whole place is one of courtesy and culture rather than of mere modern
commerce. One of the portraits here is that of Mr. Brooke's
granduncle--a handsome, full-blooded, rather testy-looking old warrior,
in the close-fitting scarlet uniform of the Prince Regent's time.

"He ought to have been called Lord Baltimore," said Mr. Brooke
good-naturedly; "for he fought against your people for that city at
Bladensburg with Ross."

"That was the battle," I said, "in which, according to a popular
tradition in my country, the Americans took so little interest that they
left the field almost as soon as it began."

Another portrait is of a kinsman who was murdered in the highway here in
Ireland many years ago, under peculiarly atrocious circumstances, and
with no sort of provocation or excuse.

Mr. Brooke confirmed Dr. Dillon's statement that he had ordered out of
his counting-house two tenants who came into it with a peculiarly brazen
proposition, of which I must presume Dr. Dillon was ignorant when he
cited the fact as a count against the landlord of Coolgreany. I give the
story as Mr Brooke tells it. "The Rent Audit," he says, "at which my
tenants were idiots enough to join the Plan of Campaign occurred about
the 12th December 1886, when, as you know, I refused to accept the terms
which they proposed to me. I heard nothing more from them till about the
middle of February 1887, when coming to my office one day I found two
tenants waiting for me. One was Stephen Maher, a mountain man, and the
other Patrick Kehoe. 'What do you want?' I asked. Whereupon they both
arose, and Pat Kehoe pointed to Maher. Maher fumbled at his clothes, and
rubbed himself softly for a bit, and then produced a scrap of paper.
'It's a bit of paper from the tenants, sir,' he said. A queer bit of
paper it was to look at--ruled paper, with a composition written upon it
which might have been the work of a village schoolmaster. It was neither
signed nor addressed! The pith of it was in these words,--'in
consequence of the manner in which we have been harassed, our cattle
driven throughout the country, and our crops not sown, we shall be
unable to pay the half-year's rent due in March, in addition to the
reduction already claimed!' I own I rather lost my temper at this!
Remember I had already plainly refused to give 'the reduction already
claimed,' and had told them not once, but twenty times, that I would
never surrender to the 'Plan of Campaign'! I am afraid my language was
Pagan rather than Parliamentary--but I told them plainly, at least, that
if they did not break from the Plan of Campaign, and pay their debts,
they might be sure I would turn the whole of them out! I gave them back
their precious bit of paper and sent them packing.

"One of them, I have told you, was a mountain man, Stephen Maher. He is
commonly known among the people as 'the old fox of the mountain,' and he
is very proud of it!

"This old Stephen Maher," said Mr. Brooke, "is renowned in connection
with a trial for murder, at which he was summoned as a witness. When he
was cross-examined by Mr. Molloy, Q.C., he fenced and dodged about with
that distinguished counsellor for a long time, until getting vexed by
the lawyer's persistency, he exclaimed, 'Now thin, Mr. Molloy, I'd have
ye to know that I had a cliverer man nor iver you was, Mr. Molloy, at
me, and I had to shtan' up to him for three hours before the Crowner,
an' he was onable to git the throoth out of me, so he was! so he was!'"

Neither did Dr. Dillon mention the fact that one of the demands made of
Captain Hamilton, Mr. Brooke's agent, in December 1886, was that a
Protestant tenant named Webster should be evicted by Mr. Brooke from a
farm for which he had paid his rent, to make room for the return thither
of a Roman Catholic tenant named Lenahan, previously evicted for
non-payment of his rent.

When Mr. Brooke's grandfather bought the Coolgreany property in 1864, he
adopted a system of betterments, which has been ever since kept up on
the estate. Nearly every tenant's house on the property has been slated,
and otherwise repaired by the landlord, nor has one penny ever been
added on that account to the rents.

In the village of Coolgreany all the houses on one side of the main
street were built in this way by the landlord, and the same thing was
done in the village of Croghan, where twenty tenants have a grazing
right of three sheep for every acre held on the Croghan Mountain,
pronounced by the valuers of the Land Court to be one of the best
grazing mountains in Ireland.

Captain Hamilton became the agent of the property in 1879, on the death
of Mr. Vesey. One of his earliest acts was to advise Mr. Brooke to grant
an abatement of 25 per cent. in June 1881, while the Land Act was
passing. At the same time, he cautioned the tenants that this was only a
temporary reduction, and advised them to get judicial rents fixed.

The League advised them not to do this, but to demand 25 per cent.
reduction again in December 1881. This demand was rejected, and forty
writs were issued. The tenants thereupon in January 1882 came in and
paid the full rent, with the costs.

Eleven tenants after this went into Court, and in 1883 the
Sub-Commissioners cut down their rents. In five cases Mr. Brooke
appealed. What was the result before the Chief Commissioner? The rent of
Mary Green, which had been L43, and had been cut down by the
Sub-Commissioners to L39, was restored to L43; the rent of Mr. Kavanagh,
cut down from L57 to L52, was restored to L55; the rent of Pat Kehoe
(one of the two tenants "ejected" from Mr. Brooke's office as already
stated), cut down from L81 to L70, was restored to L81; the rent of
Graham, cut down from L38 to L32, 10s., was restored to L38. Other
reductions were maintained.

This appears to be the record of "rack-renting" on the Coolgreany
property.

There are 114 tenants, of whom 15 hold under judicial rents; 22 are
leaseholders, and 77 are non-judicial yearly tenants. There are 12
Protestants holding in all a little more than 1200 acres. All the rest
are Catholics, 14 of these being cottier tenants. The estate consists of
5165 acres. The average is about L24, and the average rental about L26,
10s. The gross rental is L2614, of which L1000 go to the jointure of Mr.
Brooke's mother, and L800 are absorbed by the tithe charges, half
poor-rates and other taxes. During the year 1886, in which this war was
declared against him, Mr. Brooke spent L714 in improvements upon the
property: so in that year his income from Coolgreany was practically
_nil_.

What in these circumstances would have been the position of this
landlord had he not possessed ample means not invested in this
particular estate? And what has been the result to the tenants of this
conflict into which it seems clear that they were led, less to protect
any direct interest of their own than to jeopardise their homes and
their livelihood for the promotion of a general agrarian agitation? It
is not clear that they are absolutely so far out of pocket, for I find
that the Post-Office Savings Bank deposits at Inch and Gorey rose from
L3699, 5s. 4d. in 1880 to L5308, 13s. in 1887, showing an increase of
L1609, 7s. 8d. But they are out of house and home and work, entered
pupils in that school of idleness and iniquity which has been kept by
one Preceptor from the beginning of time.

CHAPTER XV.[25]

* * * *--Mrs. Kavanagh was quite right when she told me at Borris in
March that this country should be seen in June! The drive to this lovely
place this morning was one long enchantment of verdure and hawthorn
blossoms and fragrance.

I came over from London to bring to a head some inquiries which have too
long delayed the publication of this diary. My intention had been to go
directly to Thurles, but a telegram which I received from the Archbishop
of Cashel just before I left telling me that he could not be at home for
the last three days of the week, I came directly here. Nothing can be
more utterly unlike the popular notions of Ireland and of Irish life
than the aspect of this most smiling and beautiful region: nothing more
thoroughly Irish than its people.

* * * who is one of the most active and energetic of Irish landlords,
lives part of the year abroad, but keeps up his Irish property with
care, at the expense, I suspect, of his estates elsewhere.

From a noble avenue of trees, making the highway like the main road of a
private park, we turned into a literal paradise of gardens. The air was
balmy with their wealth of odours. "Oh! yes, sir," said the coachman,
with an air of sympathetic pride, "our lady is just the greatest lady in
all this land for flowers!"

And for ivy, he might have added. We drove between green walls of ivy up
to a house which seemed itself to be built of ivy, like that wonderful
old mansion of Castle Leod in Scotland. Here, plainly, is another centre
of "sweetness and light," the abolition of which must make, not this
region alone, but Ireland poorer in that precise form of wealth, which,
as Laboulaye has shown in one of the best of his lectures, is absolutely
identical with civilisation. It is such places as this, which, in the
interest of the people, justify the exemption from redistribution and
resettlement, made in one of a series of remarkable articles on Ireland
recently published in the _Birmingham Post_, of lands, the "breaking up
of which would interfere with the amenity of a residence."

* * * relations with all classes of the people here are so cordial and
straightforward that he has been easily able to give me to-day, what I
have sought in vain elsewhere in Ireland, an opportunity of conversing
frankly and freely with several labouring men. For obvious reasons these
men, as a rule, shrink from any expression of their real feelings. Their
position is apparently one of absolute dependence either upon the
farmers or the landlords, there being no other local market for their
labour, which is their only stock-in-trade. As one of them said to me
to-day, "The farmers will work a man just as long as they can't help it,
and then they throw him away."

I asked if there were no regular farm-labourers hired at fixed rates by
the year?

"Oh! very few--less now than ever; and there'll be fewer before there'll
be more. The farmers don't want to pay the labourers or to pay the
landlords; they want the land and the work for nothing, sir,--they do
indeed!"

"What does a farm-hand get," I asked, "if he is hired for a long time?"

"Well, permanent men, they'll get 6s. a week with breakfast and dinner,
or 7s. maybe, with one meal; and a servant-boy, sir, he'll get 2s. a
week or may be 3s. with his board; but it's seldom he gets it."

"And what has he for his board?"

"Oh, stirabout; and then twice a week coorse Russian or American meat,
what they call the 'kitchen,' and they like it better than good meat,
sir, because it feeds the pot more."

By this I found he meant that the "coorse meat" gave out more
"unctuosity" in the boiling--the meat being always served up boiled in a
pot with vegetables, like the "bacon and greens" of the "crackers" in
the South.

"And nothing else?"

"Yes; buttermilk and potatoes."

"And these wages are the highest?"

"Oh, I know a boy got 5s., but by living in his father's house, and
working out it was he got it. And then they go over to England to work."

"What wages do they get there?"

"Oh, it differs, but they do well; 9s. a week, I think, and their board,
and straw to sleep on in the stables."

"But doesn't it cost them a good deal to go and come?"

"Oh no; they get cheap rates. They send them from Galway to Dublin like
cattle, at L2, 5s. a car, and that makes about 1s. 6d. a head; and then
they are taken over on the steamers very cheap. Often the graziers that
do large business with the companies, will have a right to send over a
number of men free; and they stowaway too; and then on the railways in
England they get passes free often from cattle-dealers, specially when
they are coming back, and the dealers don't want their passes. They do
very well. They'll bring back L7 and L10. I was on a boat once, and
there was a man; he was drunk; he was from Galway somewhere, and they
took away and kept for him L18, all in good golden sovereigns; that was
the most I ever saw. And he was drunk, or who'd ever have known he had
it?"

"Do the farmers build houses for the labourers?"

"Build houses, is it! Glory be to God! who ever heard of such a thing?
The farmers are a poor proud lot. They'd let a labourer die in the
ditch!"

All that this poor man said was corroborated by another man of a higher
class, very familiar with the conditions of life and labour here, and
indeed one of the most interesting men I have met in Ireland. Born the
son of a labouring man, he was educated by a priest and educated
himself, till he fitted himself for the charge of a small school, which
he kept to such good purpose that in eighteen years he saved L1100, with
which capital he resolved to begin life as a small farmer and
shopkeeper. He had studied all the agricultural works he could get, and
before he went fairly into the business, he travelled on the Continent,
looking carefully into the methods of culture and manner of life of the
people, especially in Italy and in Belgium. The Belgian farming gave him
new ideas of what might be done in Ireland, and those ideas he has put
into practice, with the best results.

"On the same land with my neighbours," he said, "I double their
production. Where they get two tons of hay I get four or four and a
half, where they get forty-five barrels of potatoes I get a hundred.
Only the other day I got L20 for a bullock I had taken pains with to
fatten him up scientifically. Of course I had a small capital to start
with: but where did I get that? Not from the Government. I earned and
saved it myself; and then I wasn't above learning how best to use it."

He thinks the people here--though by no means what they might be with
more thrift and knowledge--much better off than the same class in many
other parts of Ireland. There are no "Gombeen men" here, he says, and no
usurious shopkeepers. "The people back each other in a friendly way when
they need help." Many of the labourers, he says, are in debt to him, but
he never presses them, and they are very patient with each other. They
would do much better if any pains were taken to teach them. It is his
belief that agricultural schools and model farms would do more than
almost any measure that could be devised for bringing up the standard of
comfort and prosperity here, and making the country quiet.

It is the opinion of this man that the people of this place have been
led to regard the Papal Decree as a kind of attack on their liberties,
and that they are quite as likely to resist as to obey it. For his own
part, he thinks Ireland ought to have her own parliament, and make her
own laws. He is not satisfied with the laws actually made, though he
admits they are better than the older laws were. "The tenants get their
own improvements now," he said, "and in old times the more a man
improved the worse it was for him, the agent all the while putting up
the rents."

But he does not want Irish independence. "The people that talk that
way," he said, "have never travelled. They don't see how idle it is for
Ireland to talk about supporting herself. She just can't do it."

Not less interesting was my talk to-day with quite a different person.
This was a keen-eyed, hawk-billed, wiry veteran of the '48. As a youth
he had been out with "Meagher of the Sword," and his eyes glowed when he
found that I had known that champion of Erin. "I was out at Ballinagar,"
he said; "there were five hundred men with guns, and five hundred
pikemen." It struck me he would like to be going "out" again in the same
fashion, but he had little respect for the "Nationalists."

"There's too many lawyers among them," he said, "too many lawyers and
too many dealers. The lawyers are doing well, thanks to the League. Oh
yes!" with a knowing chuckle, and a light of mischief in his eye; "the
lawyers are doing very well! There's one little bit of a solicitor not
far from here was of no good at all four years ago, and now they tell me
he's made four thousand pounds in three years' time, good money, and got
it all in hand! And there's another, I hear, has made six thousand. The
lawyers that call themselves Nationalists, they just keep mischief
agoing to further themselves. What do they care for the labourers? Why,
no more than the farmers do--and what would become of the poor men! * *
* * here, he is making * * * * * * * and he keeps more poor men going
than all the lawyers and all the farmers in the place a good part of the
year."

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