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

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"Are the labourers," I asked, "Nationalists?"

"They don't know what they are," he answered. "They hate the farmers,
but they love Ireland, and they all stand together for the counthry!"

"How is it with the Plan of Campaign and the Boycotting?"

"Now what use have the labourers got for the Plan of Campaign? No more
than for the moon! And for the Boycotting, I never liked it--but I was
never afraid of it--and there's not been much of it here."

"Will the Papal Decree put a stop to what there is of it?"

"I wouldn't mind the Pope's Decree no more than that door!" he exclaimed
indignantly. "Hasn't he enough, sure, to mind in Rome? Why didn't he
defend his own country, not bothering about Ireland!"

"Are you not a Catholic, then?" I asked.

"Oh yes, I'm a Catholic, but I wouldn't mind the Decree. Only remember,"
he added, after a pause, "just this: it don't trouble me, for I've
nothing to do with the Plan of Campaign--only I don't want the Pope to
be meddlin' in matters that don't concern him."

"It's out of respect, then, for the Pope that you wouldn't mind the
Decree?"

"Just that, intirely! It was some of them Englishmen wheedled it out of
him, you may be sure, sir."

"I am told you went out to America once."

"Yes, I went there in '48, and I came back in '51."

"What made you go?" I asked.

"Is it what made me go?" he replied, with a sudden fierceness in his
voice. "It was the evictions made me go; that we was put out of the good
holding my father had, and his father before him; and I can never
forgive it, never! But I came back; and it was * * * father that was the
good man to me and to mine, else where would I be?"

I afterwards learned from * * * * that the evictions of which the old
man spoke with so much bitterness were made in carrying out important
improvements, and that it was quite true that his father had greatly
befriended the emigrant when he got enough of the New World and came
home.

It was curious to see the old grudge fresh and fierce in the old man's
heart, but side by side with it the lion lying down with the lamb--a
warm and genuine recognition of the kindness and help bestowed on
himself. His resentment against the landlord's action in one generation
did not in the least interfere with his recognition of the landlord's
usefulness and liberality in the next generation.

"You didn't like America?" I said. "Where did you live there?"

"I lived at North Brookfield in Massachusetts, a year or two," he
replied, "with Governor Amasa Walker. Did you know him? He was a good
man; he was fond of the people, but he thought too much of the nagurs."

"Yes," I answered; "I know all about him, and he was, as you say, a very
good man, even if he was an abolitionist. But why didn't you stay in
North Brookfield?"

"Oh, it was a poor country indeed! A blast of wind would blow all the
ground away there was! It does no good to the people, going to America,"
he said; "they come back worse than they went!"

He is at work now in some quarries here.

"The quarrymen get six shillings a week," he said, "with bread and tea
and butter and meat three times a week. With nine shillings a week and
board, a man'll make himself bigger than * * *!"

"Was the country quiet now?"

"This country here? Oh! it's very quiet; with potatoes at 3s. 6d. a
barrel, it's a good year for the people. They're a very quiet
people,"--in corroboration apparently of which statement he told me a
story of a coroner's jury called to sit on the body of a man found on
the highway shot through the head, which returned an unanimous verdict
of "Died by the visitation of God."

This country is dominated by the Rocky Hills climbing up to Cullenagh,
which divides the Barrow valley from the Nore. We drove this afternoon
to * a most lovely place. The mansion there is now shut up and
dismantled, but the park and the grounds are very beautiful, with a
beauty rather enhanced than diminished by the somewhat unkempt
luxuriance of the vegetation. We passed a now well-grown tree planted by
the Prince of Wales * * * * * * and drove over many miles of excellent
road made by * * * * * * * * employs * * * * * * * * regularly, * * *
men as labourers, cartmen and masons, to whom he pays out annually the
sum of * * Mr. * * who, by the way, rather resented my asking him if he
came of one of the Cromwellian English families so numerous here, and
informed me that his people came over with Strongbow--assures me that
but for these works of * * * * these men under him would be literally
without occupation. In addition to these there are about a dozen more
men employed * * as gamekeepers and plantation-men. At the * * places
belonging to * * * * * * * * * * above eighty men find constant
employment, and receive regular wages amounting to over L4000. Were * *
* * dispossessed or driven out of Ireland, all this outlay would come to
an end, and with what result to these working-men? As things now are,
while * * * working-men receive a regular wage of five shillings, the
same men, as farmers' labourers, would receive, now and then, five
shillings a week, and that without food! I saw enough in the course of
our afternoon's drive to satisfy me that my informant of the morning had
probably not overstated matters when he told me that for at least
seventy per cent. of the work done by the labourers here, from November
to May, they have to look to the landlords. On the property of * * as
well as on the neighbouring properties * * * * * * * the houses have
been generally put up by the landlords. We called in the course of the
afternoon upon a labouring man who lives with his wife in a very neat,
cozy, and quite new house, built recently for him by * *. These good
people have been living on this property for now nearly half a century.
Their new house having been built for them, * * has had an agreement
prepared, under which it may be secured to them. The terms have all been
discussed and found satisfactory, but the old labourer now hesitates
about signing the agreement. He gives, and can be got to give, no reason
for this; but when we drove up he came out to greet us in the most
friendly manner. We went in and found his wife, a shrewd, sharp-eyed,
little old dame, with whom * * * * fell into a confabulation, while I
went into the next room with the labourer himself. The house was neatly
furnished--with little ornaments and photographs on the mantel-shelf,
and nothing of the happy-go-lucky look so common about the houses of the
working people in Ireland, as well as about the houses of the lesser
squires.

I paid him a compliment on the appearance of his house and grounds.
"Yes, sir!" he answered: "it's a very good place it is, and * * * * has
built it just to please us."

"But I am told you want to leave it?"

"Ah, no, that is not so, sir, indeed at all! We've three children you
see, sir, in America--two girls and a boy we have."

"And where are they?"

"Ah, the girls they're not in any factory at all. They're like leddies,
living out in a place they call * * in Massachusetts; and the lad, he
was on a farm there. But we don't know where he is nor his sisters any
more just now. And the wife, she thinks she would like to go out to
America and see the children."

"Do you hear from them regularly?"

"Well, it's only a few pounds they send, but they're doing very well.
Domestics they are, quite like leddies; there's their pictures on the
shelf."

"But what would you do there?"

"Ah! we'd have lodgings, the wife says, sir. But I like the ould place
myself."

"I think you are quite right there," I replied. "And do you get work
here from the farmers as the labourers do in my country?"

"Work from the farmers, sir?" he answered, rather sharply. "What they
can't help we get, but no more! If the farmers in America is like them,
it's not I would be going there! The farmers! For the farmers, a
labourer, sir, is not of the race of Adam! They think any place good
enough for a labourer--any place and any food! Is the farmers that way
in America?"

"Well, I don't know that they are so very much more liberal than your
farmers are," I replied; "but I think they'd have to treat you as being
of the race of Adam! But are not the farmers here, or the Guardians,
obliged to build houses for the labourers? I thought there was an Act of
Parliament about that?"

"And so there is but what's the good of it? It's just to get the
labourers' votes, and then they fool the labourers, just making them
quarrel about where the cottages shall be, what they call the 'sites';
and then there's no cottages built at all, at all. It's the lawyers, you
see, sir, gets in with the farmers--the strongest farmers--and then they
just make fools of the labourers as if there was no Act of Parliament at
all."

"But if the labourers want to go away, to emigrate," I said, "as you
want to do, to America, don't the farmers, or the Government, or the
landlords, help them to get away and make a start?"

"Not a bit of it, sir," he replied; "not a bit of it. I believe,
though," he added after a moment; "I believe they do get some help to go
to Australia. But they're mostly no good that goes that way. The best is
them that go for themselves, or their friends help them. But there's not
so many going this year."

When we drove away I asked * * if he had made any progress towards a
signature of the agreement with the labourer's wife.

"No; she couldn't be got to say yes or no. I asked her," said * * "what
reason they had for imagining that after all these years I would try to
do them an injury? She protested they never thought of such a thing; but
she couldn't be brought to say she wished her husband to sign the paper.
It's very odd, indeed."

I couldn't help suspecting that the _materfamilias_ was at the bottom of
it all, and that she was bent upon going out to America to participate
in the prosperity of her two daughters, who were living "like leddies"
at * * in Massachusetts.

The incident recalled to me something which happened years ago when I
was returning with the Storys from Rome to Boston. Our Cunarder, in the
middle of the night, off the Irish coast, ran down and instantly sank a
small schooner.

In a wonderfully short time we had come-to, and a boat's crew had
succeeded in picking up and bringing all the poor people on board. Among
them was a wizened old woman, upon whom all sorts of kind attentions
were naturally lavished by the ship's company. She could not be
persuaded to go into a cabin after she had recovered from the shock and
the fright of the accident, but, comforted and clothed with new and dry
garments, she took refuge under one of the companion-ways, and there,
sitting huddled up, with her arms about her knees, she crooned and
moaned to herself, "I was near being in a wetter and a warmer place; I
was near being in a wetter and a warmer place!" by the half hour
together. We found that the poor old soul had been to Liverpool to see
her son off on a sailing ship as an emigrant to America. So a
subscription was soon made up to send her on our arrival to New York
there to await her son. We had some trouble in making her understand
what was to be done with her, but when she finally got it fairly into
her head, gleams of mingled surprise and delight came over her withered
face, and she finally broke out, "Oh, then, glory be to God! it's a
mercy that I was drownded! glory be to God! and it's the proud boy
Terence will be when he gets out to America to find his poor ould mother
waiting for him there that he left behind him in Liverpool, and quite
the leddy with all this good gold money in her hand, glory be to God!"

On our way back to * * we passed through * * a very neat
prosperous-looking town, which * * tells me is growing up on the heels
of * *. * * * was one of the few places at which the "no rent"
manifesto, issued by Mr. Parnell and his colleagues from their prison in
Kilmainham, during the confinement of Mr. Davitt at Portland, and
without concert with him, was taken up by a village curate and commended
to the people. He was arrested for it by Mr. Gladstone's Government, and
locked up for six weeks.

DUBLIN, _Saturday, June 23d._--I left * * * yesterday morning early on
an "outside car," with one of my fellow-guests in that "bower of
beauty," who was bent on killing a salmon somewhere in the Nore * * We
drove through a most varied and picturesque country, viewing on the way
the seats of Mr. Hamilton Stubber and Mr. Robert Staples, both finely
situated in well-wooded parks. Mr. Stubber was formerly master of the
Queen's County hounds, a famous pack, which, as our jarvey put it,
"brought a power of money into the county, and made it aisy for a poor
man." But the local agitations wore out his patience, and he put the
pack down some years ago. Not far from his house is an astonishing
modern "tumulus," or mound of hewn and squared stones. These it seems
were quarried and brought here by him, with the intention of building a
new and handsome residence. This intention he abandoned under the same
annoyance.

"They call it Mr. Stubber's Cairn," said the jarvey; "and a sorrowful
sight it is, to think of the work it would have given the people,
building the big house that'll never be built now, I'm thinking." If Mr.
Stubber should become an "absentee," he can hardly, I think, be blamed
for it.

His property marches with that of Mr. Robert Staples, who comes of a
Gloucestershire family planted in Ireland under Charles I.

"Mr. Staples is farming his own lands," said our jarvey, when I
commented on the fine appearance of some fields as we drove by; "and
he'll be doing very well this year. Ah! he comes and goes, but he's here
a great deal, and he looks after everything himself; that's the reason
the fields is good."

This is a property of some 1500 statute acres. Only last March the
landlord took over from one tenant, who was in arrears of two years and
a half and owed him some L300, a farm of 90 acres, giving the man fifty
pounds to boot, and bidding him go in peace. I wonder whether this
proceeding would make the landlord a "land-grabber," and expose him to
the pains and penalties of "boycotting"?

On this place, too, it seems that Mr. Staples's grandfather put up many
houses for the tenants; a thing worth noting, as one of not a few
instances I have come upon to show that it will not do to accept without
examination the sweeping statements so familiar to us in America, that
improvements have never been made by the landlord upon Irish estates.

My companion had meant to put me down at the railway station of
Attanagh, there to catch a good train to Kilkenny.

But we had a capital nag, and reached Attanagh so early that we
determined to drive on to Ballyragget.

From Attanagh to Ballyragget the road ran along a plateau which
commanded the most beautiful views of the valley of the Nore and of the
finely wooded country beyond. Ballyragget itself is a brisk little
market town, the American influence showing itself here, as in so many
other places, in such trifles as the signs on the shops which describe
them as "stores." My salmon-fishing companion put me down at the station
and went off to the river, which flows through the town, and is here a
swift and not inconsiderable stream.

An hour in the train took me to Kilkenny, where I met by appointment
several persons whom I had been unable to see during my previous visit
in March.

These gentlemen, experienced agents, gave me a good deal of information
as to the effect of the present state of things upon the "_moral_" of
the tenantry in different parts of Ireland. On one estate, for example,
in the county of Longford, a tenant has been doing battle for the cause
of Ireland in the following extraordinary fashion.

He held certain lands at a rental of L23, 4s. Being, to use the
picturesque language of the agent, a "little good for tenant," he fell
into arrears, and on the 1st of May 1885 owed nearly three years' rent,
or L63, 12s., in addition to a sum of L150 which he had borrowed of his
amiable landlord three or four years before to enable him to work his
farm. Of this total sum of L213, 12s. he positively refused to pay one
penny. Proceedings were accordingly taken against him, and he was
evicted. By this eviction his title to the tenancy was broken. The
landlord nevertheless, for the sake of peace and quiet, offered to allow
him to sell, to a man who wished to take the place, any interest he
might have had in the holding, and to forgive both the arrears of the
rent and the L150 which had been borrowed by him. The ex-tenant flatly
refused to accept this offer, became a weekly pensioner upon the
National League, and declared war. The landlord was forced to get a
caretaker for the place from the Property Defence Association at a cost
of L1 per week, to provide a house for a police protection party, and to
defray the expenses of that party upon fuel and lights. Nor was this
all. The landlord found himself further obliged to employ men from the
same Property Defence Association to cut and save the hay-crop on the
land, and when this had been done no one could be found to buy the crop.
The crop and the lands were "boycotted." It was only in May last that a
purchaser could be found for the hay cut and saved two years ago--this
purchaser being himself a "boycotted" man on an adjoining property. He
bought the hay, paying for it a price which did not quite cover one-half
the cost of sowing it!

"No one denies for a moment," said the agent, "that the tenant in all
this business has been more than fairly, even generously, treated by the
estate; yet no one seems to think it anything but natural and reasonable
that he should demand, as he now demands, to be put back into the
possession of his forfeited tenancy at a certain rent fixed by himself,"
which he will obligingly agree to pay, "provided that the hay cut and
saved on the property two years ago is accounted for to him by the
estate!"

In another case an agent, Mr. Ivough, had to deal with a body of five
hundred tenants on a considerable estate. Of these tenants, two hundred
settled their rents with the landlord before the passing of the Land Act
of 1881, and valuations made by the landlord's valuer, with their full
assent. There was no business for the lawyers, so far as they were
concerned, and no compulsion of any sort was put on them. Among them was
a man who had married the daughter of an old tenant on the estate, and
so came into a holding of 12 Irish, or more than 20 statute, acres, at a
rental of L18 a year. The valuer reduced this to L14, 10s., which
satisfied the tenant, and as the agent agreed to make this reduced
valuation retroactive, all went as smoothly as possible for two years,
when the tenant began to fall into arrears. When the Sub-Commissioners,
between 1885 and 1887, took to making sweeping reductions, the tenants
who had settled freely under the recent valuation grumbled bitterly. As
one of them tersely put it to the agent, "We were a parcel of bloody
fools, and you ought to have told us these Sub-Commissioners were
coming!" Mr. Sweeney, the tenant by marriage already mentioned, was not
content to express his particular dissatisfaction in idle words, but
kept on going into arrears. In May 1888 things came to a crisis. The
agent refused to accept a settlement which included the payment by him
of the costs of the proceedings forced upon him by his tenant. "You have
had a good holding," said the agent, "with plenty of water and good
land. In this current year two acres of your wheat will pay the whole
rent. You have broken up and sold bit by bit a mill that was on the
place; and above all, when Mr. Gladstone made us accept the judicial
rents, he told us we might be sure, if we did this, of punctual payment.
That was the one consideration held out to us. And we are entitled to
that!"

The tenant being out of his holding, the agent wishes to put another
tenant into it. But the holding is "boycotted." Several tenants are
anxious for it, and would gladly take it, but they dare not The great
evicted will neither sell any tenant-right he may have, nor pay his
arrears and costs, nor give up the place to another tenant. To put
Property Defence men on the holding would cost the landlord L2, 10s. a
week, and do him no great good, as the evicted man "holds the fort,"
being established in a house which he occupies on an adjoining property,
and for which presumably he pays his rent. It seems as if Mr. Sweeney
were inspired by the example of another tenant, named Barry, who, before
the passing of the Land Act of 1881, gave up freely a holding of 20
acres, on a property managed by Mr. Kough; but as he was on such good
terms with the agent that he could borrow money of him, he begged the
agent to let him retain at a low rent a piece of this surrendered land
directly adjoining his house. He asked this in the name of his eight or
nine children, and it was granted him. The agent afterwards found that
the piece of land in question was by far the best of the surrendered
holding. But that is a mere detail. This ingenious tenant Barry, living
now on another estate just outside the grasp of the agent, has
systematically "boycotted" for the last nine years the land which he
gave up, feeding his own cattle upon it freely meanwhile, and keeping
all would-be tenants at a distance! "He is now," said the agent, "quite
a wealthy man in his way, jobbing cattle at all the great markets!"

"When the eviction of Sweeney took place," said the agent, "I was
present in person, as I thought I ought to be, and the result is that I
have been held up to the execration of mankind as a monster for putting
out a child in a cradle into a storm. As a matter of fact," he said,
"there was a cradle in the way, which the sheriff-Officer gently took
up, and by direction of the tenant's wife removed. I made no remark
about it at all, but a local paper published a lying story, which the
publisher had to retract, that I had said 'Throw out the child!'"

"Two priests," he said, "came quite uninvited and certainly without
provocation, to see me, and one of them shouted out, 'Ah! we know you'll
be making another Coolgreany,' which was as much as to say there 'would
be bloodshed.' This was the more intolerable," he added, "that, as I
afterwards found, I had already done for the sake of the tenants
precisely what these ecclesiastics professed that they had come to ask
me to do!

"For thirty years," said this gentleman, "I have lived in the midst of
these people--and in all that time I have never had so much as a
threatening letter. But after this story was published of my throwing
out a cradle with a child in it, I was insulted in the street by a woman
whom I had never seen before. Two girls, too, called out at the
eviction, 'You've bad pluck; why didn't you tell us you were coming down
the day?' and another woman made me laugh by crying after me, 'You've
two good-looking daughters, but you're a bad man yourself.'"

Quite as instructive is the story given me on this occasion of the
Tyaquin estate in the county of Galway. This estate is managed by an
agent, Mr. Eichardson of Castle Coiner, in this county of Kilkenny.

The rents on this Galway estate, as Mr. Richardson assures me, have been
unaltered for between thirty and forty years, and some of them for even
a longer period. For the last twenty-five years certainty, during which
Mr. Richardson has been the agent of the estate, and probably, he
thinks, for many years previous, there has never been a case of the
non-payment of rent, except in recent years when rents were withheld for
a time for political reasons.

Large sums of money have been laid out in various useful improvements.
Constant occupation was given to those requiring it, until the agrarian
agitation became fully developed. On the demesne and the home farms the
best systems of reclaiming waste lands and the best systems of
agriculture were practically exhibited, so that the estate was an
agricultural free school for all who cared to learn.

When the Land Act of 1881 was passed, almost all the tenants applied,
and had judicial rents fixed, many of them by consent of the agent.

In 1887 the tenants were called on as usual to pay these judicial rents.
A large minority refused to do so except on certain terms, which were
refused. The dispute continued for many months, but as the charges on
the estate had to be met, the agent was obliged to give way, and allow
an abatement of four shillings in the pound on these judicial rents.
Some of these charges, to meet which the agent gave way, were for money
borrowed from the Commissioners of Public Works to _improve the holdings
of the tenants_. For these improvements thus thrown entirely upon the
funds of the estate no increase of rent or charge of any kind had been
laid upon the tenants.

When a settlement was agreed on, those of the tenants who had adopted
the Plan came in a body to pay their rents on 3d January 1888. They
stated that they were unable to pay more than the rent due up to
November 1886, and that they would never have adopted the Plan had they
not been driven into it by _sheer distress_. After which they handed Mr.
Richardson a cheque drawn by John T. Dillon, Esq., M.P., for the amount
banked with the National League.

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