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

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How was it with Mr. Egan? Out of his labour on his holding he got
merchantable crops worth L60 sterling, or in round numbers $300, besides
producing in the shape of vegetables and dairy stuff, pigs and poultry,
certainly a very large proportion of the food necessary for his
household, and raising and fattening beasts, worth at a low estimate L20
or $100 more. And while thus engaged, his outlay for rent, which
included not only the house in which he lived, but the land out of which
he got the returns of his labour expended upon it, was L8, 15s., or
considerably less than one-half the outlay of the Massachusetts workman
upon the rent of nothing more than a roof to shelter himself and his
family. Furthermore, the money thus paid out by the Massachusetts
workman for rent was simply a tribute paid for accommodation had and
enjoyed, while out of every pound sterling paid as rent by the Irish
tenant there reverted to his credit, so long as he continued to fulfil
his legal obligations, a certain proportion, calculable, valuable, and
saleable, in the form of his tenant-right.

I am not surprised to learn that the Recorder dismissed the suit brought
by Mr. Egan, and gave costs against him. But the mere fact that in such
circumstances it was possible for Egan to bring such a suit, and get a
hearing for it, makes it quite clear that Americans of a sympathetic
turn of mind can very easily find much more meritorious objects of
sympathy than the Irish tenant-farmers of Galway without crossing the
Atlantic in quest of them.

From Cloondadauv to Loughrea we had a long but very interesting drive,
passing on the way, and at no great distance from each other, Father
Coen's neat, prosperous-looking presbytery of Ballinakill, and the shop
and house of a local boat-builder named Tully, who is pleasantly known
in the neighbourhood as "Dr. Tully," by reason of his recommendation of
a very particular sort of "pills for landlords." The presbytery is now
occupied by Father Coen, who finds it becoming his position as the moral
teacher and guide of his people to be in arrears of two and a half years
with the rent of his holding, and who is said to have entertained Mr.
Blunt and other sympathising statesmen very handsomely on their visit to
Loughrea and Woodford,[15] "Dr." Tully being one of the guests invited
to meet them.[16] Not far from this presbytery, Mr. Tener showed me the
scene of one of the most cowardly murders which have disgraced this
region. Of Loughrea, the objective of our drive this morning, Sir George
Trevelyan, I am told, during his brief rule in Ireland, found it
necessary to say that murder had there become an institution. Woodford,
previously a dull and law-abiding spot, was illuminated by a lurid light
of modern progress about three years ago, upon the transfer thither in
the summer of 1885 of a priest from Loughrea, familiarly known as "the
firebrand priest."

In November of that year, as I have already related, Mr. Egan and other
tenants of Mrs. Lewis of Woodford made their demand for a 50 per cent.
reduction of their rents, upon the refusal of which an attempt was made
with dynamite on the 18th December to blow up the house of Mrs. Lewis's
son and agent. All the bailiffs in the region round about were warned to
give up serving processes, and many of them were cowed into doing so.
One man, however, was not cowed. This was a gallant Irish soldier,
discharged with honour after the Crimean war, and known in the country
as "Balaklava," because he was one of the "noble six hundred," who there
rode "into the jaws of death, into the valley of hell." His name was
Finlay, and he was a Catholic. At a meeting in Woodford, Father Coen
(the priest now in arrears), it is said, looked significantly at Finlay,
and said, "no process-server will be got to serve processes for Sir
Henry Burke of Marble Hill." The words and the look were thrown away on
the veteran who had faced the roar and the crash of the Russian guns,
and later on, in December 1885, Finlay did his duty, and served the
processes given to him. From that moment he and his wife were
"boycotted." His own kinsfolk dared not speak to him. His house was
attacked by night. He was a doomed man. On the 3d March 1886, about 2
o'clock P.M., he left his house--which Mr. Tener pointed out to me--to
cut fuel in a wood belonging to Sir Henry Burke, at no great distance.
Twice he made the journey between his house and the wood. The third time
he went and returned no more. His wife growing uneasy at his prolonged
absence went out to look for him. She found his body riddled with
bullets lying lifeless in the highway. The police who went into Woodford
with the tale report the people as laughing and jeering at the agony of
the widowed woman. She was with them, and, maddened by the savage
conduct of these wretched creatures, she knelt down over-against the
house of Father Egan, and called down the curse of God upon him.

On the next day things were worse. No one could be found to supply a
coffin for the murdered man.[17] When the police called upon the priests
to exert their influence and enforce some semblance at least of
Christian and Catholic decency upon the people confided to their charge,
the priests not only refused to do their duty, but floutingly referred
the police to Lady Mary Burke. "He did her work," they said, "let her
send a hearse now to bury him." The lady thus insolently spoken of is
one of the best of the Catholic women of Ireland. At her summons Father
Burke, a few years only before his death, I remember, made a long winter
journey, though in very bad health, from Dublin to Marble Hill to soothe
the last hours and attend the death-bed of her husband.

No one who knew and loved him can wish him to have lived to hear from
her lips such a tale of the degradation of Catholic priests in his own
land of Galway.

Mr. Tener pointed out to me, at another place on the road, near
Ballinagar, the deserted burying-ground in which, after much trouble, a
grave was found for the brave old soldier who had escaped the Russian
cannon-balls to be so foully done to death by felons of his own race.
There the last rites were performed by Father Callaghy, a priest who was
himself "boycotted" for resigning the presidency of the League in his
parish, and for the still graver offence of paying his rent. For weeks
it was necessary to guard the grave![18]

From that day to this no one has been brought to justice for this crime,
committed in broad daylight, and within sight of the highway. Mr. Place,
whom I saw at Portumna, told me that he believed the police had no moral
doubt as to the murderer of Finlay, but that it was useless to think of
getting legal evidence to convict him.

Mr. Tener tells me that when Mr. Wilfrid Blunt came to Woodford he went
with Father Egan, and accompanied by the police, to see the widow of
this murdered man, heard from her own lips the sickening story, and took
notes of it. But when Mr. Rowlands, M.P., an English "friend of Home
Rule," was examined the other day during the trial of Mr. Blunt, he was
obliged to confess that though he had visited Woodford more than once,
and conversed freely with Mr. Blunt about it, he had "never heard of the
murder of Finlay."

Such an incident is apparently of little interest to politicians at
Westminster. Fortunately for Ireland, it is of a nature to command more
attention at the Vatican.

Nature has sketched the scenery of this part of Ireland with a free,
bold hand. It is not so grand or so wild as the scenery of Western
Donegal, but it has both a wildness and a grandeur of its own. Sir Henry
Burke's seat of Marble Hill, as seen in the distance from the road,
stands superbly, high up on a lofty range of wooded hills, from which it
commands the country for miles. And no town I have seen in Ireland is
more picturesquely placed than Loughrea. It has an almost Italian aspect
as you approach it from Woodford. But no lake in Lombardy or Piedmont is
so peculiarly and exquisitely tinted as the lough on which it stands.
The delicate grey-green of the sparkling waters reminded me of the
singular and well-defined belts and stretches of chrysoprase upon which
you sometimes come in sailing through the dark azure of the Southern
Seas. I have never before seen precisely such a hue in any body of fresh
water. The lake is incorrectly described, Mr. Tener tells me, in the
guide-books, as being one of the many curious developments of the Lower
Shannon. It is fed by springs, but if, like the river-lakes, it was
formed by a solution of the limestone, this fact may have some chemical
relation with its very peculiar colour. It contains three picturesque
islands. No stream flows into it, but two streams issue from it. The
town of Loughrea is an ancient holding of the De Burghs, and the
estate-office of Lord Clanricarde is here in one wing of a great
barrack, standing, as I understood Mr. Tener to say, on the site of a
former fortress of the family. Lord Clanricarde's property here is put
down by Mr. Hussey de Burgh at 49,025 acres in County Galway, valued at
L19,634, and at 3576 acres in the county of the City of Galway, valued
at L1202. These, I believe, are statute acres, and in estimating the
relation of Irish rentals to Irish land this fact must be always
ascertained. Of the so-called "Woodford" property the present rental is
no more than L1900, payable by 260 tenants. The Poor-Law valuation for
taxes is L2400. There was a revision of the whole Galway property made
by the father of the present Marquis. Of the 260 Woodford holdings only
twelve were increased, in no case more than 6-1/4 per cent, over the
valuation. In 1882 six of these twelve tenants applied to the Land
Court. The rents were in no case restored to the figures before 1872,
but about 7 per cent. was taken off the increased rental. The assertion
repeatedly made that in 1882 rents were reduced by the Land Court 50 per
cent. on the Clanricarde estates, Mr. Tener tells me, is absolutely
false. In the first year of the Court no reduction went beyond 10 per
cent., and in later years, even under the panic of low prices, the
average has not exceeded 20 per cent.

After making arrangements for a car to take me on to Woodlawn, where I
was to catch the Dublin train, I went out with Mr. Tener to look at the
town.

My drive from Loughrea to Woodlawn was delightful. It took me over a
long stretch of the best hunting country of Galway, and my jarvey was a
Galwegian of the type dear to the heart of Lever. He was a "Nationalist"
after his fashion, but he did not hesitate to come rattling up through
the town to the Estate Office to take me up; and after we got fairly off
upon the highway, he spoke with more freedom than respect of all sorts
and conditions of men in and about Loughrea.

"He's a sharp little man, that Mr. Tener," he said, "and he gave the
boys a most beautiful beating at Burke's place."

This was said with genuine gusto, and not at all in the querulous spirit
of the delightful member of Parliament who complained at Westminster
with unconscious humour that the agent and the police in that case had
"dishonourably" stolen a march on the defenders of Cloondadauv!

"But we've beaten them entirely," he said, with equal zest, "at Marble
Hill. Sir Henry has agreed to pay all the costs, and the living expenses
too, of the poor men that were put out.[19] I didn't ever think we'd get
that; but ye see the truth is," he added confidentially, "he must have
the money, Sir Henry--he's lying out of a deal, and then there's heavy
charges on the property. A fine property it is indeed!"

"In fact," I said, "you put Sir Henry to the wall. Is that it?"

"Well, it's like that. But we shan't get that out of Clanricarde, I'm
thinking. He's got a power o' money they tell me; and he's that of the
ould Burke blood, he won't mind fighting just as long as you like!"

As we drove along, he pointed out to me several fine stretches of
hunting country, and, to my surprise, informed me that only the other
day "there was as fine a meet as ever you saw, more than a hundred
ladies and gentlemen--a grand sight it was."

I asked if the hunting had not been "put down by the League."

"Oh, now then, sir, who'd be wanting to put down the hunting here in
Galway?--and Ballinasloe? Were you ever at Ballinasloe? just the
grandest horse fair there is in the whole wide world!"

I insisted that I had always heard a great deal about the opposition of
the League to hunting.

"Oh, that'll be some little lawyer fellow," he replied, "like that
Healy, that can't sit on a horse! It's the grandest country in all the
world for riding over. What for wouldn't they ride over it?"

"Were there many went out to America from about Loughrea?"

"Oh, yes; they were always coming and going. But as many came back."

"Why?"

"Oh, they didn't like the country. It wasn't as good a country, was it,
as old Ireland? And they had to work too hard; and then some of them got
money, and they'd like to spend it in the old place."

The country about Woodlawn is very picturesque and well wooded, and for
a long distance we followed the neatly-kept stone walls of the large and
handsome park of Lord Ashtown.

"The most beautiful and biggest trees in all Ireland, sorr," said the
jarvey, "and it's a great pity, it is, ye can't stay to let me drive you
all over it, for the finest part of the park is just what you can't see
from this road. Oh, her ladyship would never object to any gentleman
driving about to see the beauties of the place. She is a very good
woman, is her ladyship. She gave work the last Christmas to thirty-two
men, and there wasn't another house in the country there that had work
for more than ten or twelve. A very good woman she is, indeed."

"Yes, that is a very handsome church, it is indeed. It is the Protestant
Church. Lord Ashtown built it; he was a very good man too, and did a
power of good--building and making roads, and giving work to the people.
He was buried there in that Castle, over the station--Trench's Castle,
they called it."

"All that lumber there by the station?"

"That came out of the Ashtown woods. They were always cutting down the
trees; there was so many of them you might be cutting for years--you
would never get to the end of them."

Woodlawn Station is one of the neatest and prettiest railway stations I
have seen in Ireland--more like a picturesque stone cottage, green and
gay with flowers, than like a station. The station-master's family of
cheery well-dressed lads and lasses went and came about the bright fire
in the waiting-room in a friendly unobtrusive fashion, chatting with the
policeman and the porter and the passengers. It was hard to believe
one's-self within an easy drive of the "cockpit of Ireland."

CHAPTER XI.

BORRIS, _Friday, March 2d._--This is the land of the Kavanaghs, and a
lovely, picturesque, richly-wooded land it is. I left Dublin with Mr.
Gyles by an afternoon train; the weather almost like June. We ran from
the County of Dublin into Kildare, and from Kildare into Carlow, through
hills; rural scenery quite unlike anything I have hitherto seen in
Ireland. At Bagnalstown, a very pretty place, with a spire which takes
the eye, our host joined us, and came on with us to this still more
attractive spot. Borris has been the seat of his family for many
centuries. The MacMorroghs of Leinster, whom the Kavanaghs lineally
represent, dwelt here long before Dermot MacMorrogh, finding his
elective throne in Leinster too hot to hold him, went off into
Aquitaine, to get that famous "letter of marque" from Henry II. of
England, with the help of which this king without a kingdom induced
Richard de Clare, an earl without an earldom, to lend him a hand and
bring the Normans into Ireland. Many of this race lie buried in the
ruins of St. Mullen's Abbey, on the Barrow, in this county. But none of
them, I opine, ever did such credit to the name as its present
representative, Arthur MacMorrogh Kavanagh.

I had some correspondence with Mr. Kavanagh several years ago, when he
sent me, through my correspondent for publication in New York, a very
striking statement of his views on the then condition of Irish
affairs--views since abundantly vindicated; and like most people who
have paid any attention to the recent history of Ireland, I knew how
wonderful an illustration his whole career has been of what philosophers
call the superiority of man to his accidents, and plain people the power
of the will. But I knew this only imperfectly. His servant brought him
up to the carriage and placed him in it. This it was impossible not to
see. But I had not talked with him for five minutes before it quite
passed out of my mind. Never was there such a justification of the
paradoxical title which Wilkinson gave to his once famous book, _The
Human Body, and its Connexion with Man_,--never such a living refutation
of the theory that it is the thumb which differentiates man from the
lower animals. Twenty times this evening I have been reminded of the
retort I heard made the other day at Cork by a lawyer, who knows Mr.
Kavanagh well, to a priest of "Nationalist" proclivities, who knows him
not at all. Some allusion having been made to Borris, the lawyer said to
me, "You will see at Borris the best and ablest Irishman alive." On this
the priest testily and tartly broke in, "Do you mean the man without
hands or feet?"

"I mean," replied the lawyer, very quietly, "the man in whom all that
has gone in you or me to arms and legs has gone to heart and head!"

Borris House stands high in the heart of an extensive and nobly wooded
park, and commands one of the finest landscapes I have seen in Ireland.
As we stood and gazed upon it from the hall door, the distant hills were
touched with a soft purple light such as transfigures the Apennines at
sunset.

"You should see this view in June," said Mrs, Kavanagh, "we are all
brown and bare now."

Brown and bare, like most other terms, are relative. To the eye of an
American this whole region now seems a sea of verdure, less clear and
fresh, I can easily suppose, than it may be in the early summer, but
verdure still. And one must get into the Adirondacks, or up among the
mountains of Western Virginia, to find on our Atlantic slope such trees
as I have this evening seen. One grand ilex near the house could hardly
be matched in the Villa d'Este.

The house is stately and commodious, and more ancient than it appears to
be,--so many additions have been made to it at different times. It has
passed through more than one siege, and in the '98 Mr. Kavanagh tells me
the townspeople of Borris came up here and sought refuge. There are vast
caverns under the house and grounds, doubtless made by taking out from
the hill the stone used in building this house, and the fortresses which
stood here before it. In these all sorts of stores were kept, and many
of the people found shelter.

I need not say that there is a banshee at Borris--though no living
witness, I believe, has heard its warning wail. But as we sat in the
beautiful library, and watched the dying light of day, a lady present
told us a tale more gruesome than many of those in which the "psychical"
inquirers delight. She was sitting, she said, in an upper room of an
ancient mansion here in Carlow, in which she lives, when, from the lawn
below, there came up to her a low, sad, shrill cry--the croon of a
woman, such as one hears from the mourners sitting among the turbaned
tombstones of the hill of Eyoub at Constantinople. It startled her, and
she held her breath and listened. She was alone, as she knew, in that
part of the house, and the hall door below was unlocked, as is the
fashion still in Ireland, despite all the troubles and turmoils. Again
the sound came, and this time nearer to the house. Could it be the
banshee? Again and again it rose and died away, each time nearer and
nearer. Then, as she listened, all her nerves strung to the keenest
sensibility, it came again, and now, beyond a doubt, within the hall
below.

With an effort she rose from her chair, opened a door leading into a
corridor running aside from the main stairway, and fled at full speed
towards the wing in which she knew that she would find some of the
maids. As she sped along she heard the cry again and again far behind
her, as from a creature slowly and steadily mounting the grand stairway
towards the room which she had just quitted.

She found the maids, who fell into a terrible fright when she told her
story and dared not budge. So the bells were violently rung till the
butler and footman appeared. To the first she said simply, "There is a
mad woman in this house--go and find her!"

"The man looked at me," she said, "as I spoke with a curious expression
in his face as of one who thought, 'yes, there is a mad woman in the
house, and she is not far to seek!'"

But the lady insisted, and the men finally went off on their quest. In
the course of half an hour it was rewarded. The mad woman--a dangerous
creature--who had wandered away from an asylum in the neighbourhood, was
found curled up and fast asleep in the lady's own bed!

Fancy a delicate woman going alone into her bedroom at midnight to be
suddenly confronted by an apparition of that sort!

BORRIS, _March 3d._--After a stroll on the lawn this morning, the wide
and glorious prospect bathed in the light of a really soft spring day, I
had a conversation with Mr. Kavanagh about the Land Corporation, of
which he is the guiding spirit. This is a defensive organisation of the
Irish landlords against the Land League. When a landlord has been driven
into evicting his tenants, the next step, in the "war against
landlordism," is to prevent other tenants from taking the vacated lands
and cultivating them. This is accomplished by "boycotting" any man who
does this as a "land-grabber."

The ultimate sanction of the "boycott" being "murder," derelict farms
increased under this system very rapidly; and the Eleventh Commandment
of the League, "Thou shalt not pay the rent which thy neighbour hath
refused to pay," was in a fair way to dethrone the Ten Commandments of
Sinai throughout Ireland, even before the formal adoption in 1886 of the
"Plan of Campaign."

Mr. Gladstone would perhaps have hit the facts more accurately, if,
instead of calling an eviction in Ireland a "sentence of death," he had
called the taking of a tenancy a sentence of death. Mr. Hussey at Lixnaw
had two tenants, Edmond and James Fitzmaurice. Edmond Fitzmaurice was
"evicted" in May 1887; but he was taken into the house of a neighbour,
made very comfortable, and still lives. James Fitzmaurice took, for the
sake of the family, the land from which Edmond was evicted, and for this
he was denounced as a "land-grabber," boycotted, and finally shot dead
in the presence of his daughter.

At a meeting in Dublin in the autumn of 1885, a parish priest, the Rev.
Mr. Cantwell, described it as a "cardinal virtue" that "no one should
take a farm from which another had been evicted," and called upon the
people who heard him to "pass any such man by unnoticed, and treat him
as an enemy in their midst." Public opinion and the law, if not the
authorities of his church would make short work of any priest who talked
in this fashion in New York. But in Ireland, and under the British
Government, it seems they order things differently. So it occurred one
day to the landlords thus assailed, as it did to the sea-lions of the
Cape of Good Hope when the French sailors attacked them, that they might
defend themselves.

To this end the Land Corporation was instituted, with a considerable
capital at its back, and Mr. Kavanagh at its head. The "plan of
campaign" of this Corporation is to take over from the landlords
derelict lands and cultivate them, stocking them where that is
necessary.

It is in this way that the derelict lands on the Ponsonby property at
Youghal are now worked. But Mr. Kavanagh tells me that the men employed
by the Corporation, of whom Father Keller spoke as a set of desperadoes
or "_enfants perdus_," are really a body of resolute and capable working
men farmers. Many, but by no means all of them, are Protestants and
Ulstermen; and that they are up to their work would seem to be shown by
the fact stated to me, that in no case so far have any of them been
deterred and driven off from the holdings confided to them. A great part
of the Luggacurren property of Lord Lansdowne is now worked by the
Corporation; and Mr. Kavanagh was kind enough to let me see the
accounts, which indicate a good business result for the current year on
that property. This is all very interesting. But what a picture it
presents of social demoralisation! And what is to be the end of it all?
Can a country be called civilised in which a farmer with a family to
maintain, having the capital and the experience necessary to manage
successfully a small farm, is absolutely forbidden, on pain of social
ostracism, and eventually on pain of death, by a conspiracy of his
neighbours, to take that farm of its lawful owner at what he considers
to be a fair rent? And how long can any civilisation of our complex
modern type endure in a country in which such a state of things
tolerated by the alleged Government of that country has to be met, and
more or less partially mitigated, by deviating to the cultivation of
farms rendered in this way derelict large amounts of capital which might
be, and ought to be, far more profitably employed in other ways?

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