Ireland Under Coercion Volume Ii Part 15

"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 partic.i.p.ate in the prosperity of her two daughters, who were living "like leddies"

at * * in Ma.s.sachusetts.

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 s.h.i.+p'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 s.h.i.+p 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 G.o.d! it's a mercy that I was drownded! glory be to G.o.d! 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 G.o.d!"

On our way back to * * we pa.s.sed 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, _Sat.u.r.day, 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 astonis.h.i.+ng 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 Gloucesters.h.i.+re 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 300, 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-fis.h.i.+ng 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 fas.h.i.+on.

He held certain lands at a rental of 23, 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 63, 12s., in addition to a sum of 150 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 213, 12s. he positively refused to pay one penny. Proceedings were accordingly taken against him, and he was evicted. By this eviction his t.i.tle 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 150 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 a.s.sociation at a cost of 1 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 a.s.sociation 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 pa.s.sing of the Land Act of 1881, and valuations made by the landlord's valuer, with their full a.s.sent. 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 18 a year. The valuer reduced this to 14, 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 ent.i.tled 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 2, 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 pa.s.sing 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 a.s.sures 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 pa.s.sed, 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 s.h.i.+llings 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.

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 7, 10s. They declared they could only pay 3, 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 50 a year for a gra.s.s farm, and about 12 for meadows, as well as 30 a year more for a gra.s.s farm to an adjoining landlord.

Another tenant who held a farm at 13, 5s. a year declared he could only pay 6, 12s. 6d., or a half-year's rent, if he got an abatement of 1, 6s. 6d. A very short time before, this tenant had taken a gra.s.s 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 300 sterling, in order to prove his solvency! The same tenant has since written a letter to Mr. Richardson offering 50 a year for a gra.s.s farm!

All these campaigners, Mr. Richardson says, "with one n.o.ble 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 a.s.sured 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 n.o.body 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 ill.u.s.trating 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.