Ireland Under Coercion Volume Ii Part 13

"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 pa.s.sed by Sir James Allport's committee against the "amenities of railway travelling in Ireland."

DUBLIN, _Sat.u.r.day, 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 s.p.a.cious old last-century houses of Dublin; the counting-room is installed with dark, old-fas.h.i.+oned 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 sc.r.a.p 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 hara.s.sed, 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, p.r.o.nounced 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 pa.s.sing. 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 43, and had been cut down by the Sub-Commissioners to 39, was restored to 43; the rent of Mr. Kavanagh, cut down from 57 to 52, was restored to 55; the rent of Pat Kehoe (one of the two tenants "ejected" from Mr. Brooke's office as already stated), cut down from 81 to 70, was restored to 81; the rent of Graham, cut down from 38 to 32, 10s., was restored to 38. 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 24, and the average rental about 26, 10s. The gross rental is 2614, of which 1000 go to the jointure of Mr.

Brooke's mother, and 800 are absorbed by the t.i.the charges, half poor-rates and other taxes. During the year 1886, in which this war was declared against him, Mr. Brooke spent 714 in improvements upon the property: so in that year his income from Coolgreany was practically _nil_.

What in these circ.u.mstances 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 3699, 5s. 4d. in 1880 to 5308, 13s. in 1887, showing an increase of 1609, 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 n.o.ble 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 cla.s.ses 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; b.u.t.termilk 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 2, 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 pa.s.ses free often from cattle-dealers, specially when they are coming back, and the dealers don't want their pa.s.ses. They do very well. They'll bring back 7 and 10. 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 18, 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 G.o.d! who ever heard of such a thing?