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

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An article appeared shortly afterwards in a League newspaper, loudly
boasting of the great victory won by Mr. Dillon, M.P., for the starving
and poverty-stricken tenants. Two of these tenants (brothers) were under
a yearly rent of L7, 10s. They declared they could only pay L3, 15s., or
a half-year's rent, and this only if they got an abatement of 15s. Yet
these same tenants were then paying Mr. Richardson L50 a year for a
grass farm, and about L12 for meadows, as well as L30 a year more for a
grass farm to an adjoining landlord.

Another tenant who held a farm at L13, 5s. a year declared he could only
pay L6, 12s. 6d., or a half-year's rent, if he got an abatement of L1,
6s. 6d. A very short time before, this tenant had taken a grass farm
from an adjoining landlord, and he was so anxious to get it that he
showed the landlord a bundle of large notes, amounting to rather more
than L300 sterling, in order to prove his solvency! The same tenant has
since written a letter to Mr. Richardson offering L50 a year for a grass
farm!

All these campaigners, Mr. Richardson says, "with one noble exception,
the wife of a tenant who was ill, declined to pay a penny of rent beyond
November 1st, 1886," stating that they were "absolutely unable" to do
more. So they all left the May 1887 rent unpaid, and the hanging gale to
November 1887, which, however, they were not even asked to pay.

The morning after the settlement many of the tenants who, when they were
all present in a body on the previous evening, had declared their
"inability" to pay the half-year's rent due down to May 1887,
individually came to Mr. Richardson unasked, and paid it, some saying
they had "borrowed the money that night," but others frankly declaring
that they dared not break the rule publicly, having been ordered by the
League only to pay to November 1886, for fear of the consequences. These
would have been injury to their cattle, or the burning of their hay, or
possibly murder.

Of the country about Kilkenny, I am told, as of the country about
Carlow, that nearly or quite seventy per cent, of the labourers are
dependent upon the landlords from November to May for such employment as
they get.

The shopkeepers, too, are in a bad way, being in many cases reduced to
the condition of mere agents of the great wholesale houses elsewhere,
and kept going by these houses mainly in the hope of recovering old
debts. There is a severe pressure of usury, too, upon the farmers. "If a
farmer," said one resident to me, "wants to borrow a small sum of the
Loan Fund Bank, he must have two securities--one of them a substantial
man good for the debt. These two indorsers must be 'treated' by the
borrower whom they back; and he must pay them a weekly sum for the
countenance they have given him, which not seldom amounts, before he
gets through with the matter, to a hundred per cent, on the original
loan."

I am assured too that the consumption of spirits all through this region
has greatly increased of late years. "The official reports will show
you," said one gentleman, "that the annual outlay upon whisky in Ireland
equals the sum saved to the tenants by the reductions in rent." This is
a proposition so remarkable that I simply record it for future
verification, as having been made by a very quiet, cool, and methodical
person, whose information on other points I have found to be correct. He
tells me too, as of his own knowledge, that in going over some financial
matters with a small farmer in his neighbourhood, he ascertained, beyond
a peradventure, that this farmer annually spent in whisky, for the use
of his family, consisting of himself, his wife and three adult children,
nearly, or quite, _seventy pounds a year_! "You won't believe this," he
said to me; "and if you print the statement nobody else will believe it;
but for all that it is the simple unexaggerated truth."

Falstaff's reckoning at Dame Quickly's becomes a moderate score in
comparison with this!

I spent half an hour again in the muniment-room at Kilkenny Castle,
where, in the Expense-Book of the second Duke of Ormond, I found a
supper _menu_ worthy of record, as illustrating what people meant by
"keeping open house" in the great families of the time of Queen
Anne.[Note L.]

Taking a train early in the afternoon, I came on here in time to dine
last night with Mr. Rolleston of Delgany, an uncompromising Protestant
"Home Ruler"--as Protestant and as uncompromising as John Mitchel--whose
recent pamphlet on "Boycotting" has deservedly attracted so much
attention on both sides of the Irish Sea.

I was first led into a correspondence with Mr. Rolleston by a remarkable
article of his published in the _Dublin University Review_ for February
1886, on "The Archbishop in Politics." In that article, Mr. Rolleston,
while avowing himself to be robust enough to digest without much
difficulty the _ex officio_ franchise conferred upon the Catholic clergy
by Mr. Parnell to secure the acceptance of his candidates at
Parliamentary conventions, made a very firm and fearless protest against
the attempt of the Archbishops of Dublin and Cashel to "boycott"
Catholic criticism of the National League and its methods, by declaring
such criticism to be "a public insult" offered, not to the Archbishops
of Cashel and Dublin personally, or as political supporters of the
National League, but to the Archbishops as dignitaries of the Catholic
Church, and to their Archiepiscopal office. The "boycotting," by
clerical machinery, of independent lay opinion in civil matters, is to
the body politic of a Catholic country what the germ of cancer is to the
physical body. And though Mr. Rolleston, in this article, avowed himself
to be a hearty supporter of the "political programme of the National
League," and went so far even as to maintain that the social boycotting,
"which makes the League technically an illegal conspiracy against law
and individual liberty," might be "in many cases justified by the
magnitude of the legalised crime against which it was directed," it was
obvious to me that he could not long remain blind to the true drift of
things in an organisation condemned, by the conditions it has created
for itself, to deal with the thinkers of Ireland as it deals with the
tenants of Ireland. His recent pamphlet on "Boycotting" proves that I
was right. What he said to me the other day in a letter about the
pamphlet may be said as truly of the article. It was "a shaft sunk into
the obscure depths of Irish opinion, to bring to light and turn to
service whatever there may be in those depths of sound and healthy;" and
one of my special objects in this present visit to Ireland was to get a
personal touch of the intellectual movement which is throwing such
thinkers as Mr. Rolleston to the front.

We were five at table, Mr. Rolleston's other guests being Mr. John
O'Leary, whose name is held in honour for his courage and honesty by all
who know anything of the story of Ireland in our times, and who was sent
a quarter of a century ago as a Fenian patriot--not into seclusion with
sherry and bitters, at Kilmainham, like Mr. Gladstone's "suspects" of
1881--but like Michael Davitt, into the stern reality of penal
servitude; Dr. Sigerson, Dean of the Faculty of Science of the Boyal
University, and an authority upon the complicated question of Irish Land
Tenures; and Mr. John F. Taylor, a leading barrister of Dublin, an ally
on the Land Question of Mr. Davitt, and an outspoken Repealer of the
Union of 1800.

I have long wished to meet Mr. O'Leary, who sent me, through a
correspondent of mine, two years ago, one of the most thoughtful and
well-considered papers I have ever read on the possibilities and
impossibilities of Home Rule for Ireland; and it was a great pleasure to
find in the man the elevation of tone, the breadth of view, and the
refined philosophic perception of the strong and weak points in the
Irish case, which had charmed me in. the paper. Now that "Conservative"
Englishmen have come to treat the main points of Chartism almost as
commonplaces in politics, it is surely time for them to recognise the
honesty and integrity of the spirit which revolted in the Ireland of
1848 against the then seemingly hopeless condition of that country. Of
that spirit Mr. O'Leary is a living, earnest, and most interesting
incarnation. He strikes one at once as a much younger man in all that
makes the youth of the intellect and the emotions than any Nationalist
M.P. of half his years whom I have ever met. No Irishman living has
dealt stronger or more open blows than he against the English dominion
in Ireland. Born in Tipperary, where he inherited a small property in
houses, he was sent to Trinity College in Dublin, and while a student
there was drawn into the "Young Ireland" party mainly by the poems of
Thomas Davis. Late in the electrical year of the "battle summer," 1848,
he was arrested on suspicion of being concerned in a plot to rescue
Smith O'Brien and other state prisoners. The suspicion was well founded,
but could not be established, and after a day or two he was liberated.
From Trinity, after this, he went to the Queen's College in Cork, where
he took his degree, and studied medicine. When the Fenian movement
became serious, after the close of our American Civil War, O'Leary threw
himself into it with Stephens, Luby, and Charles Kickham. Stephens
appointed him one of the chief organisers of the I.E.B. with Luby and
Kickham, and he took charge of the _Irish People_--the organ of the
Fenians of 1865. It was as a subordinate contributor to this journal
that Sir William Harcourt's familiar Irish bogy, O'Donovan Rossa[26],
was arrested together with his chief, Mr. O'Leary, and with Kickham in
1865, and found guilty, with them, after a trial before Mr. Justice
Keogh, of treason-felony. The speech then delivered by Mr. O'Leary in
the dock made a profound impression upon the public mind in America. It
was the speech, not of a conspirator, but of a patriot. The indignation
with which he repelled for himself and for his associate Luby the
charges levelled at them both, without a particle of supporting
evidence, by the prosecuting counsel, of aiming at massacre and plunder,
was its most salient feature. The terrible sentence passed upon him, of
penal servitude for twenty years, Mr. O'Leary accepted with a calm
dignity, which I am glad, for the sake of Irish manhood, to find that
his friends here now recall with pride, when their ears are vexed by the
shrill and clamorous complaints of more recent "patriots," under the
comparatively trivial punishments which they invite.

In 1870, Mr. O'Leary and his companions were released and pardoned on
condition of remaining beyond the British dominions until the expiration
of their sentences. Mr. O'Leary fixed his residence for a time in Paris,
and thence went to America, where he and Kickham were regarded as the
leaders of the American branch of the I. R. B. He returned to Ireland in
1885, his term of sentence having then expired, and it was shortly after
his return that he gave to my correspondent the letter upon Irish
affairs to which I have already referred. He had been chosen President
of the "Young Ireland Society" of Dublin before he returned, and in that
capacity delivered at the Rotunda, in the Irish capital, before a vast
crowd assembled to welcome him back, an address which showed how
thoughtfully and calmly he had devoted himself during his long years of
imprisonment and exile to the cause of Ireland. Mr. William O'Brien,
M.P., and Mr. Redmond, M.P., took part in this reception, but their
subsequent course shows that they can hardly have relished Mr. O'Leary's
fearless and outspoken protests against the intolerance and injustice of
the agrarian organisation which controls their action. In England, as
well as well as in Ireland, Mr. O'Leary spoke to great multitudes of his
countrymen, and always in the same sense. Mr. Rolleston tells me that
Mr. O'Leary's denunciations of "the dynamite section of the Irish
people," to use the euphemism of an American journal, "are the only ones
ever uttered by an Irish leader, lay or clerical." The day must come, if
it be not already close at hand, when the Irish leader of whom this can
be truly said, must be felt by his own people to be the one man worthy
of their trust. The thing that has been shall be, and there is nothing
new under the sun. The Marats and the Robespierres, the Bareres and the
Collots, are the pallbearers, not the standard-bearers of liberty.

Towards the National League, as at present administered on the lines of
the agrarian agitation, Mr. O'Leary has so far preserved an attitude of
neutrality, though he has never for a moment hesitated either in public
or in private most vehemently to condemn such sworn Fenians as have
accepted seats in the British Parliament, speaking his mind freely and
firmly of them as "double-oathed men" playing a constitutional part with
one hand, and a treasonable part with the other.

Yet he is not at one with the extreme and fanatical Fenians who oppose
constitutional agitation simply because it is constitutional. His
objection to the existing Nationalism was exactly put, Mr. Rolleston
tells me, by a clever writer in the Dublin _Mail_, who said that
O'Connell having tried "moral force" and failed, and the Fenians having
tried "physical force" and failed, the Leaguers were now trying to
succeed by the use of "immoral force."

Dr. Sigerson, who, as a man of science, must necessarily revolt from the
coarse and clumsy methods of the blunderers who have done so much since
1885 to discredit the cause of Ireland, evidently clings to the hope
that something may still be saved from the visible wreck of what has
come, even in Ireland, to be called "Parnellism," and he good-naturedly
persisted in speaking of our host last night and of his friends as
"mugwumps." For the "mugwumps" of my own country I have no particular
admiration, being rather inclined, with my friend Senator Conkling (now
gone to his rest from the racket of American politics), to regard them
as "Madonnas who wish it to be distinctly understood that they might
have been Magdalens." But these Irish "mugwumps" seem to me to earn
their title by simply refusing to believe that two and two, which make
four in France or China, can be bullied into making five in Ireland.
"What certain 'Parnellites' object to," said one of the company, "is
that we can't be made to go out gathering grapes of thorns or figs of
thistles. Some of them expect to found an Irish republic on robbery, and
to administer it by falsehood. We don't."[27] This is precisely the
spirit in which Mr. Rolleston wrote to me not long before I left England
this week. "I have been slowly forced," he wrote, "to the conclusion
that the National League is a body which deserves nothing but
reprobation from all who wish well to Ireland. It has plunged this
country into a state of moral degradation, from which it will take us at
least a generation to recover. It is teaching the people that no law of
justice, of candour, of honour, or of humanity can be allowed to
interfere with the political ends of the moment. It is, in fact,
absolutely divorcing morality from politics. The mendacity of some of
its leaders is shameless and sickening, and still more sickening is the
complete indifference with which this mendacity is regarded in Ireland."

It is the spirit, too, of a letter which I received not long ago from
the west of Ireland, in which my correspondent quoted the bearer of one
of the most distinguished of Irish names, and a strong "Home Ruler," as
saying to him, "These Nationalists are stripping Irishmen as bare of
moral sense as the Bushmen of South Africa."

This very day I find in one of the leading Nationalist journals here
letters from Mr. Davitt, Mr. O'Leary, and Mr. Taylor himself, which
convict that journal of making last week a statement about Mr. Taylor
absolutely untrue, and, so far as appears, absolutely without the shadow
of a foundation. These letters throw such a curious light on passing
events here at this moment that I shall preserve them.[28] The statement
to which they refer was thus put in the journal which made it: "We have
absolute reason to know that when the last Coercion Act was in full
swing this pure-souled and disinterested patriot (Mr. John F. Taylor)
begged for, received, and accepted a very petty Crown Prosecutorship
under a Coercion Government. As was wittily said at the time, He sold
his principles, not for a mess of pottage, but for the stick that
stirred the mess." This is no assertion "upon hearsay"--no publication of
a rumour or report. It is an assertion made, not upon belief even, but
upon a claim of "absolute knowledge."

Yet to-day, in the same journal, I find Mr. Taylor declaring this
statement, made upon a claim of "absolute knowledge," to be "absolutely
untrue," and appealing in support of this declaration to Mr. Walker, the
host of Lord Riand Mr. Morley, and to The M'Dermot, Q.C., a conspicuous
Home Ruler; to which Mr. Davitt adds: "Mr. Taylor, on my advice,
declined the Crown Prosecutorship for King's County, a post afterwards
applied for by, and granted to, a near relative of one of the most
prominent members of the Irish Party,"--meaning Mr. Luke Dillon, a
cousin of Mr. John Dillon, M.P.!

We had much interesting conversation last night about the relations of
the Irish leaders here with public and party questions in America, as to
which I find Mr. O'Leary unusually well and accurately informed.

I am sorry that I must get off to-morrow into Mayo to see Lord Lucan's
country there, for I should have been particularly pleased to look more
closely with Mr. Rolleston into the intellectual revolt against
"Parnellism" and its methods, of which his attitude and that of his
friends here is an unmistakable symptom. As he tersely puts it, he sees
"no hope in Irish politics, except a reformation of the League, a return
to the principles of Thomas Davis."

The lines for a reformation or transformation of the League, as it now
exists, appear to have been laid down in the original constitution of
the body. Under that constitution, it seems, the League was meant to be
controlled by a representative committee chosen annually, open to public
criticism, and liable to removal by a new election. As things now are,
the officers of this alleged democratic organisation are absolutely
self-elected, and wield the wide and indefinite power they possess over
the people of Ireland in a perfectly unauthorised, irresponsible way. It
is a curious illustration of the autocratic or bureaucratic system under
which the Irish movement is now conducted, that Mr. Davitt, who does not
pretend to be a Parliamentarian, and owes indeed much of his authority
to his refusal to enter Parliament and take oaths of allegiance, does
not hesitate for a moment to discipline any Irish member of Parliament
who incurs his disapprobation. Sir Thomas Esmonde, for example, was
severely taken to task by him the other day in the public prints for
venturing to put a question, in his place at Westminster, to the
Government about a man-of-war stationed in Kingstown harbour. Mr. Davitt
very peremptorily ordered Sir Thomas to remember that he is not sent to
Westminster to recognise the British Government, or concern himself
about British regiments or ships, and Sir Thomas accepts the rebuke in
silence. Whom does such a member of Parliament represent--the
constituents who nominally elect him, or the leader who cracks the whip
over him so sharply?

I have to-day been looking through a small and beautifully-printed
volume of poems just issued here by Gill and Son, Nationalist
publishers, I take it, who have the courage of their convictions, since
their books bear the imprint of "O'Connell," and not of Sackville
Street. This little book of the _Poems and Ballads of Young Ireland _is
a symptom too. It is dedicated in a few brief but vigorous stanzas to
John O'Leary, as one who

"Hated all things base,
And held his country's honour high."

And the spirit of all the poems it contains is the spirit of '48, or of
that earlier Ireland of Robert Emmet, celebrated in some charming verses
by "Rose Kavanagh" on "St. Michan's Churchyard," where the

"sunbeam went and came
Above the stone which waits the name
His land must write with freedom's flame."

It interests an American to find among these poems and ballads a
striking threnody called "The Exile's Return," signed with the name of
"Patrick Henry"; and it is noteworthy, for more reasons than one, that
the volume winds up with a "Marching Song of the Gaelic Athletes,"
signed "An Chraoibhin Aoibbinn." These Athletes are numbered now, I am
assured, not by thousands, but by myriads, and their organisation covers
all parts of Ireland. If the spirit of '48 and of '98 is really moving
among them, I should say they are likely to be at least as troublesome
in the end to the "uncrowned king" as to the crowned Queen of Ireland.

As for the literary merit of these _Poems and Ballads of Young Ireland_,
it strikes one key with their political quality. One exquisite ballad of
"The Stolen Child," by W. B. Yeats, might have been sung in the
moonlight on a sylvan lake by the spirit of Heinrich Heine.

I spent an hour or two this morning most agreeably in the libraries of
the Law Courts and of Trinity College: the latter one of the stateliest
most academic "halls of peace" I have ever seen; and this afternoon I
called upon Dr. Sigerson, a most patriotic Irishman, of obviously Danish
blood, who has his own ideas as to Clontarf and Brian Boru; and who gave
me very kindly a copy of his valuable report on that Irish Crisis of
1879-80, out of which Michael Davitt so skilfully developed the agrarian
movement whereof "Parnellism" down to this time has been the not very
well adjusted instrument. The report was drawn up after a thorough
inspection by Dr. Sigerson and his associate, Dr. Kenny, visiting
physicians to the North Dublin Union, of some of the most distressed
districts of Mayo, Sligo, and Galway; and a more interesting,
intelligent, and impressive picture of the worst phases of the social
conditions of Ireland ten years ago is not to be found. I have just been
reading it over carefully in conjunction with my memoranda made from the
Emigration and Seed Potato Fund Reports, which Mr. Tuke gave me some
time ago, and it strongly reinforces the evidence imbedded in those
reports, which goes to show that agitation for political objects in
Ireland has perhaps done as much as all other causes put together to
depress the condition of the poor in Ireland, by driving and keeping
capital out of the country. The worst districts visited in 1879 by Dr.
Sigerson and Dr. Kenny do not appear to have been so completely cut off
from civilisation as was the region about Gweedore before the purchase
of his property there by Lord George Hill, and the remedies suggested by
Dr. Sigerson for the suffering in these districts are all in the
direction of the remedies applied by Lord George Hill to the condition
in which he found Gweedore. After giving full value to the stock
explanations of Irish distress in the congested districts, such as
excessive rents, penal laws, born of religious or "racial" animosity,
and a defective system of land tenure, it seems to be clear that the
main difficulties have arisen from the isolation of these districts, and
from the lack of varied industries. Political agitation has checked any
flow of capital into these districts, and a flow of capital into them
would surely have given them better communications and more varied
industries. Dr. Sigerson states that some of the worst of these regions
in the west of Ireland are as well adapted to flax-culture as Ulster,
and Napoleon III. showed what could be done for such wastes as La
Sologne and the desert of the Landes by the intelligent study of a
country and the judicious development of such values as are inherent in
it. The loss of population in Ireland is not unprecedented. The State of
New Hampshire, in America, one of the original thirteen colonies which
established the American Union, has twice shown an actual loss in
population during the past century. The population of the State declined
during the decade between 1810 and 1820, and again during the decade
between 1860 and 1870. This phenomenon, unique in American history, is
to be explained only by three causes, all active in the case of
congested Ireland,--a decaying agriculture, lack of communications, and
the absence of varied industries. During the decade from 1860 to 1870
the great Civil War was fought out. Yet, despite the terrible waste of
life and capital in that war, especially at the South, the Northern
State of New Hampshire, peopled by the energetic English adventurers who
founded New England, was actually the only State which came out of the
contest with a positive decline in population. Virginia (including West
Virginia, which seceded from that Commonwealth in 1861) rose from
1,596,318 inhabitants in 1860 to 1,667,177 in 1870. South Carolina,
which was ravaged by the war more severely than any State except
Virginia, and upon which the Republican majority at Washington pressed
with such revengeful hostility after the downfall of the Confederacy,
showed in 1870 a positive increase in population, as compared with 1860,
from 703,708 to 705,606. But New Hampshire, lying hundreds of miles
beyond the area of the conflict, showed a positive decrease from 326,073
to 318,300. During my college days at Cambridge the mountain regions of
New Hampshire were favourite "stamping grounds" in the vacations, and I
exaggerate nothing when I say that in the secluded nooks and corners of
the State, the people cut off from communication with the rest of New
England, and scratching out of a rocky land an inadequate subsistence,
were not much, if at all, in advance of the least prosperous dwellers in
the most remote parts of Ireland which I have visited. They furnished
their full contingent to that strange American exodus, which, about a
quarter of a century ago, was led out of New England by one Adams to the
Holy Land, in anticipation of the Second Advent, a real modern crusade
of superstitious land speculators, there to perish, for the most part,
miserably about Jaffa--leaving houses and allotments to pass into the
control of a more practical colony of Teutons, which I found
establishing itself there in 1869.

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