Ireland as It Is Part 23

Misther MacCormack said the English people would know there was "not a wurrud of thruth in these miserable lies." The report of the _Tuam Herald_ reads like a faction fight in a whiskey-shop. You can hear the trailing of coats, the crack of s.h.i.+llelaghs on thick Irish skulls, the yells of hurroosh, whirroo, and O'Donnell aboo! Towards the end your high-wrought imagination can almost smell the sticking plaister, so vivid is the picture. "The bare-faced slanders of this hireling scribe from the slums of Birmingham" were hotly denounced, but n.o.body said what they were. The clergy and their serfs were equally silent on this point. I steadfastly adhere to every syllable of my Tuam letter. I challenge the clergy and laity combined to put their fingers on a single a.s.sertion which is untrue, or even overstated. Let them point out a single inaccuracy, if they can. To make sweeping statements, to say that this "gutter-snipe," this "hireling calumniator," this "blackguard Birmingham man" has made a series of "reckless calumnies,"

"devoid of one particle of truth," is not sufficiently precise. I stand by every word I have uttered; I am prepared to hold my ground on every single point. Most of my information was obtained from Catholics who are heart-weary of priestly tyranny and priestly intimidation; who are sufficiently enlightened to see that priestly power is based on the ignorance of priestly dupes, that priestly influence is the real slavery of Ireland, the abject condition of the poor is its unmistakable result, and that where there are priests in Ireland there are ignorance and dirt in exact proportion. They have compared the clean cottages of the North with the filthy hovels of the South, and they have drawn their own conclusions. But to descend to detail. What do the Tuamites deny? "Not a particle of truth in the whole letter!"

Father Humphreys said my Tipperary letter was "a pure invention,"

without a syllable of truth. Since then Father Humphreys has been compelled to admit, in writing, that all I said was true, and that he "could not have believed it possible." That was his apology.

Turning to the Tuam letter, I find these words--

"The educated Catholics are excellent people--none better anywhere, none more tolerant." This is construed into "a gross insult on our holy priests, and particularly on our Archbishop," who, by the way, was not mentioned or made the subject of any allusion, however remote.

Do the Tuamites deny that "many of the streets are wretchedly built,"

and "the Galway road shows how easily the Catholic poor are satisfied?" Do they deny that the cabins in this district are "aboriginal in build, and also indescribably filthy," and that "the condition of the inmates is not one whit higher than that obtaining in the wigwams of the native Americans?" Do they deny that "the hooded women, barefooted, bronzed, and tanned by constant exposure, are wonderfully like the squaws brought from the Far West by Buffalo Bill?"

All this I reiterate and firmly maintain, with the addition of the statement that the squaws were in a condition of compulsory cleanliness the like of which seems never to be attained by the ladies of the Galway Road, Tuam. The meeting is called a "monster" meeting.

How many people does the Tuam Town Hall hold? The fact is that the Town Hall of Tuam, with the entire population of Tuam thrown in, could be put into the Town Hall of Birmingham. Do the Tuamites deny that Mr.

Strachan, one of their most worthy citizens, is unable to walk the streets of the town wherein live the people he has benefited, without a guard of policemen to protect him from the cut-throat emissaries of the Land League? So it was when I visited Tuam, Mr. Strachan's crimes being the purchase of a farm in the Land Court and his Protestant creed. Do they deny the scenes of persecution I described as having taken place in former days? All this I had from a source more reliable than the whole Papist hierarchy. The Tuamites can deny nothing of what I have written. The tumbledown town is there, the filthy cabins and degraded squaws of the Galway Road are still festering in their own putridity, and probably the police are still preserving Strachan from the fate of the poor fellow so brutally murdered near Tuam a few weeks ago. The priests called a town meeting to protest against insult to the Church. Great is Diana of the Ephesians! When the tenants refused to pay their lawful dues the priests called no meeting. When the country from end to end echoed with the lamentations of widows and the wailing of helpless children whose natural protectors had been murdered by the Land League, the Tuamites suppressed their indignation, the Tuam priests made no protest. When scores of men were butchered at their own firesides, shot in their beds, battered to pieces at their own thresholds, these virtuous sacerdotalists never said a word, called no town's meeting, used no bad language, spoke not of "hirelings," "calumniators," "blackguards," and "liars." Two of the speakers threatened personal injury should I again visit the town.

That is their usual form,--kicking, bludgeoning, outraging, or shooting from behind a wall. When they do not shoot they come on in herds, like wild buffaloes, to trample on and mutilate their victim.

From the strong or armed they run like hares. Their fleetness of foot is astonis.h.i.+ng. The _Tuam News_, owned and edited by the brother of a priest, exhibits the intellectual status of the Tuam people. Let us quote it once again:--

TO THE EDITOR OF THE "TUAM NEWS."

Sir--Permit me a little s.p.a.ce in the next issue of the _Tuam News_, relative to my father being killed by the fairies which appeared in the _Tuam News_ of the 8th of April last. I beg to say that he was not killed by the fairies, but I say he was killed by some person or persons unknown as yet. Hoping very soon that the perpetrators of this dastardly outrage will be soon brought to light, I am, Mr. Editor, yours obediently,

DAVID REDINGTON.

Kilcreevanty, May 8th, '93.

After this I need add nothing to what I have said except a p.r.o.nouncement of Father Curran, who said that "Tuam could boast as fine schools as Birmingham, and that he would then and there throw out a challenge that they boast more intelligence in Tuam than Birmingham could afford." Poor Father Curran! Poor Tuam! Poor Tuamites with their rags, pigs, filth, priests, fairies, and Intelligence! I shall visit them once more. A few photographs from the Galway Road would settle the dispute, and render null and void all future Town's meetings. They have sworn to slay me, but in visiting their town I fear nothing but vermin and typhoid fever. Their threats affect me not. As one of their own townsmen remarked,--

"You cannot believe a word they say. They never speak the truth except when they call each other liars. And when they are in fear, although too lazy to work, they are never too lazy to run. They have no independence of thought or action. Their religion crushes all manhood out of them. They are the obedient servants of the priests, and no man dare say his soul's his own. Any one who did not attend that meeting would be a marked man, but if it had been limited to people who know the use of soap it would necessarily have been small, even for the Tuam Town Hall."

Everywhere in Connaught I hear the people saying, "When you want to roast an Irishman you can always find another Irishman to turn the spit."

Thrue for ye, ma bouchal!

Ballina, June 10th.

No. 34.--WHY IRELAND DOES NOT PROSPER.

A community of small farmers with a sprinkling of resident gentry. All sorts of land within a small compa.s.s, rock, bog, tillage, and excellent grazing. The churchyard is a striking feature. A ruined oratory covered with ivy is surrounded by tombstones and other mortuary memorials strange to the Saxon eye. The graves are dug east and west on a rugged mound hardly deserving to be called a hill, although here and there steep enough. Huge ma.s.ses of sterile mountain form the background, and from the ruin the Atlantic is seen, gleaming in the sun. Patches of bog with diggers of turf, are close by the untouched portions covered with white bog-bean blooms, which at a short distance look like a snowfall. On a neighbouring hill is a fine old Danish earthwork, a fort, called by the natives "The Rath," fifty yards in diameter, the gra.s.sy walls, some ten feet high and four yards thick, reared in a perfect circle, on which grow gorse and brambles.

The graveyard is sadly neglected. Costly Irish crosses with elaborate carving stand in a wilderness of nettles and long gra.s.s. Not a semblance of a path anywhere. To walk about is positively dangerous.

Ruined tombstones, and broken slabs which appear to cover family vaults, trip you up at every step. Every yard of progress is made with difficulty, and you move nervously among the tall rank nettles in momentary fear of dislocating your ankle, or of being suddenly precipitated into the reeking charnel house of some defunct Mayo family. The Connaught dead seem to be very exclusive. Most of the ground is enclosed in small squares, each having a low stone wall, half-a-yard thick, with what looks like the gable-end of a stone cottage at the west end. Seen from a distance the churchyard looks like a ruined village. At first sight you think the place a relic of some former age, tenanted by the long-forgotten dead, but a closer inspection proves interments almost up to date. Weird memorials of the olden time stand cheek by jowl with modern monuments of marble; and two of suspiciously Black Country physiognomy are of cast-iron, with I.H.S. and a crucifix all correctly moulded, the outlines painted vermilion, with an invitation to pray for the souls of the dead in the same effective colour. The graveyard shows no end of prayer, but absolutely no work. No tidiness, order, reverence, decency, or convenience. Nothing but ruin, neglect, disorder, untidiness, irreverence, and inconvenience. _Ora et labora_ is an excellent proverb which the Irish people have not yet mastered in its entirety.

To pray _and_ work is as yet a little too much for them. They stop at the first word, look round, and think they have done all. This graveyard displays the national character. Heaps of piety, but no exertion. Any amount of talk, but no work. More than any people, the Irish affect respect for their dead. You leave the graveyard of Oughewall smarting with nettle stings, and thankful that you have not broken your neck. The place will doubtless be tidied, the nettles mowed down and pathways made, when the people get Home Rule. They are clearly waiting for something. They wish to be freed from the cruel English yoke. When this operation is happily effected, they will clean their houses, move the dunghills from their doors, wash themselves, and go to work in earnest. The Spanish Queen vowed she would never wash herself till Gibraltar was retaken from the English. Seven hundred years ago the Irish nation must have made a similar vow--and kept it.

A pa.s.sing shower drove me to the shelter of a neighbouring farmhouse, where lived a farmer, his wife, and their son and daughter. The place was poor but tolerable, the wife being far above the Irish average. The living room, about ten feet square, was paved with irregularly-shaped stones of all sizes, not particularly flat, but in places decidedly humpy; the interstices were of earth, the whole swept fairly clean, but certainly not scrubbed. The rafters, of rough wood, were painted black, and a rough ladder-like stair, open at the sides, led to the upper regions. To have an upstairs is to be an aristocrat. The standard of luxury is much lower than in England, for almost any English agricultural labourer would have better furniture than that possessed by this well-to-do but discontented farmer. An oak cupboard like a wardrobe, a round deal table, and four rough rush-bottomed chairs of unstained wood comprised the paraphernalia. The kitchen dresser, that indispensable requisite of English farm kitchens, with its rows of plates and dishes, was nowhere to be seen. The turf fire on the hearth needed no stove nor grate, nor was there any in the house. A second room on the ground floor, used as a bed room, had a boarded floor, and although to English notions bare and bald, having no carpet, pictures, dressing table, or washstand, it was clean and inoffensive. The churning and dairy operations are carried on in the room first described, where also the ducks and hens do feed. The farmer holds fifty acres of good land, for which he pays fifty pounds a year. His father, who died thirty years ago, paid twenty-four pounds, which he thinks a fair rent to-day. Has not made application to the Court, although he _might_ benefit by twenty-five to thirty-five per cent. Is aware that the Judicial Rent is sometimes fixed at a sum above what the tenant had been paying, and admits that this might happen to him. "Yes, the land round the house is very good, very good indeed, but what can be seen from here is by far the best of it. That is always the way in this world, the best at the front."

From this and other remarks of like tendency I gather that the n.o.ble landlord is in the habit of placing all the best land of his estate along the high read, concealing the boggy, rocky portions in the remote interior, fraudulently imposing on the public, and alienating sympathy from the tenant, thereby inflicting another injustice on Ireland.

"The English laws are right enough, as far as they go," said the farmer, "but the English will not do the right thing about the land.

Now we know that an Irish Parliament will settle the matter forth-with. That's why we support Home Rule. We know the opinions of the men who now represent us, and we can trust them in this matter if in no other. The land is the whole of it. If that were once put on an unchangeable bottom I would rather be without Home Rule. Some say that even if our rents are reduced by one-half, the increased taxes we must pay would make us nearly as poor as ever, and that all this bother and disturbance would not really save us a penny piece. And I think this might be true. So that if something could be done by the English Parliament I should prefer it to come that way. And so would we all, a hundred times. For with the English Parliament we know where we are, and what we're doing. I'm not one to believe that the land will be handed over to us without payment. Plenty of them are ignorant enough to believe even that. My view is just this: If the English Parliament would settle the land question, I would prefer to do without an Irish Parliament. That's what all the best farmers say, and nothing else.

No, I wouldn't invest money in Ireland. No, I wouldn't trust the bulk of the present members for Ireland. Yes, I would prefer a more respectable cla.s.s of men who had a stake in the country. But we had to take what we could catch, for people who have a stake in the country are all against Home Rule. What could we do? We had no choice. We sent Home Rulers because an Irish Parliament is pledged to meet our views about the land. We know they will fulfil their pledges, not because they have promised, nor because they wish to benefit us, but because they wish to abolish landlordism and landlords from the country. The landlord interest is English interest, and that they want to get rid of. Their reasons for settling the land question are not the farmers'

reasons, but so long as it _is_ settled the farmer will reap the benefit, and will not care _why_ it was settled. Give us compulsory sale and compulsory purchase, at a fair price, and you will find the farmers nearly all voting against Home Rule. No, the priests would not be able to stir us once we were comfortably settled. Why, we'd all become Conservatives at once. Sure anybody with half-an-eye could see that in a pitch-dark night in a bog-hole."

My friend a.s.sured me that secret societies are unknown in Mayo, or at any rate, in the Westport district. The young men of Clare, he thought, were Fenians to a man. "They are queer, blood-thirsty folks, enemies to Ireland. Why, they object to other Irishmen. They will not allow a poor fellow from another county to work among them as a harvest-man. They would warn him off, and if he would not go, they'd beat him with sticks, and when once they begin, you never know where they'll stop. They should be put down with a strong hand."

But where is the strong hand? Mr. Morley, recently replying to Mr.

Arnold Forster, said that "it was admitted that the police were working as faithfully and as energetically under the present as under the late Government, and added that the authorities concerned were taking all the steps which experience and responsibility suggested."

Mr. Morley is right in attributing faithfulness to the police, and their energy is doubtless all that can be reasonably expected under very discouraging auspices. Mr. Morley speaks more highly of the police than the police speak of Mr. Morley. From Donegal to Bantry Bay, from Dublin to Galway and Westport, north, south, east, west, right, left, and centre, the police of Ireland condemn Mr. Morley's administration as feeble, vacillating, and as likely to encourage crime. They speak of their duties in despondent tones. I have from time to time given their sentiments, which are unvarying. They know not what to do, and complain that while they continue to be held responsible they dare not follow up their duties with the requisite energy. Only yesterday an experienced officer said:--"The men are disheartened because they do not know how their action will be taken, and because they feel that anything in the nature of enterprise is very likely to injure themselves individually. They feel that in the matter of arrests it is better to be on the safe side, and then they know how unavailing all their efforts must be in the disturbed districts of Kerry, Clare, and Limerick, where the arm of the law has been paralysed by Mr. Morley's rescision of the salutary provisions so necessary in those counties. Outrages and shooting are every-day occurrences, for many cases are never reported to the police at all.

If the police caught the criminals in the act there would be no result, for the juries of those three counties would not convict, and the venue cannot now be changed to Cork.

"Some of the Nationalist members were the other day asking in the House whether the Cork magistrates had not been presented with white gloves, and so on, to bring out the fact that there was no crime to punish on a recent occasion; but what does this prove? Merely that Mr.

Balfour's action in changing the venue of three counties to the city of Cork, where moonlighters are tried by a jury of independent traders of Patrick Street was wise and sagacious. The white gloves of Cork were a tribute to Tory administration. The Cork juries convicted their men, and stood by the consequences. They have escaped so far, as all bold men escape. If the Limerick moonlighters must have been tried in Cork there would have been no moonlighting. The police can always catch them, when there is any use in catching them. In country districts the movements of people are pretty well known, and these fellows are always ready to betray each other. Mr. Morley may talk fine, and may mean well, but the people who have been riddled with shot have Mr. Morley to thank. Of course he is under compulsion. He has to please the Irish Separatists. Old women and children are outraged and shot in the legs because of Mr. Morley's political necessities."

I think my friend was right as to the effect of boldness in action.

There is too much truckling to the ruffian element, not only by Mr.

Morley, but by most Unionists resident in Ireland. Opinions on this point vary with varying circ.u.mstances. Several shopkeepers in a Mayo town were utterly ruined for expressing their political opinions, or for being suspected of harbouring opinions contrary to the feeling of the majority. They were boycotted, and had to shut up shop. Others, older-established, or in possession of a monopoly, weathered the storm, but their opinions cost them something. These are the milder cases. Yet shooting or bludgeoning are likely enough to follow overt political action, such as refusing to join a procession or to illuminate.

It was hard to find a Protestant farmer in this district, but I succeeded at last. His notions were strange, very strange indeed. He thought his rent fair enough, and was of opinion that the tenant must be prepared to take the good years with the bad years. "These countrymen of mine, like somebody I've read of, never learn anything and never forget anything. They do not half farm the land. They don't understand any but the most elementary methods. They do not put the land to its best use. When they had prosperous years, and many a one they had, they put nothing by for a rainy day. They are very improvident. I have been in both England and Scotland, and I know the difference in the people. They have more self-reliance, and they are keen after improvements. They are not satisfied to have just enough, to live from hand to mouth. They must have comfort, and they like to be independent. Now, Paddy is content to just sc.r.a.pe along. If he can barely exist he's quite satisfied. He's always on the edge of the nest, but he feels sure that when the worst comes to the worst, somebody or something will step in and save him from starvation.

"Nearly every man in this county has been in England, many of them twenty times or more, working for months and months in the best farmed districts. Have they got any wrinkles? Divil a one. They have not planted a gooseberry or currant tree, they have no pot-herbs, no carrots or parsnips--nothing at all but potatoes and turnips. The farmers have no system of winter feeding, and they won't learn one.

There is a great and growing demand in England for Irish b.u.t.ter, which, properly put up in a tasty way, would fetch fine figures, but the lack of system in winter feeding and winter calving prevents the supply from being kept up. The farmers will make no change in their habits, and they don't work as if they meant it. They lounge about all day, waiting for the crops to grow and the cattle to get fat, and then they wonder they are so poor. The only hope of the Irish people is their absorption in America. They work well enough when surrounded by new influences. Once get them away from the priests, and away they go; you can't stop them. They have great natural abilities, but somehow they won't bloom in Ireland. If they put forth the same energy in Ireland as in America they would do well. But they never will. Their religion keeps them down, and they can't get out of their old habits."

I observed that the Earl of Sligo had obtained eighty-two decrees of possession against tenants for non-payment of rent, and that the _Mayo News_, while censuring his action, admitted that most of the tenants owed two years' rent at least. My Black Protestant friend might tell me whether the heading "Another Batch of Death Sentences" was a fair description of this legal action, and whether the tenants were, in his opinion, totally unable to pay the rent.

"To call them sentences of death is absurd, The people are not evicted and left homeless, but merely deprived of their rights as tenants. In England, if a man does not pay his rent, he is thrown out, and n.o.body says Nay. In Ireland a man may pay no rent for seven years, and yet, when he is evicted, the people cry Shame on the landlord, who, in most cases, has been patient to the limit of human endurance. The landlord has watched the tenant neglecting the land, and living more expensively on the money he ought to have paid as rent. Now, let me submit a point which never seems to strike the English Unionist speakers. And yet it is plain enough. The Separatists say evictions are cruel and tyrannical because the people cannot pay the awful, exorbitant rents. Now notice my point!

"A rent may be too high, but the land must be worth _something_. Now these people have paid _nothing at all for two years or more_.

"Talk to these defaulters, and they will usually say 'The land is worth just one-half.'

"Why don't they pay that half?

"Then they would be only one year behind, instead of two, and they would get no notice to quit.

"But instead of paying the one-half which they themselves say the land is worth, they pay nothing at all. Does that look honest? Does it look genuine? Don't you think anybody could see that they are taking advantage of the unsettled state of things to avoid any payment whatever? They await Home Rule, which is to give them the land, and they are antic.i.p.ating its advantages.

"They all know Hennessy's brandy, and can tell you the difference between the one-star and the three-star brands.

"In England everybody is at work. In Ireland most are at play. A man who has been taught to work in England feels inclined to follow them up here with a whip, they look so idle even when at work. They move about as if half-dead. They are as lazy as Lambert's dog, that leaned his head against the wall to bark. The young women won't work either.

My sister in Athlone is obliged to give her servants three nights a week off from five to ten, or she could have n.o.body. Then they are always going to ma.s.s or keeping some festival of the Church. Speak a word of reproof and away they go. They are as proud as Lambert's other dog, that took the wall of a muck-cart and got squelched for his pains.

"Home Rule would never do Ireland any good. Quite the contrary. What can do a man good who tries to get his dinner by standing about and saying how hungry he is?

"As to the agitators, they will always agitate. When one source is dried up they'll invent another. They have their living to get, and agitation is their trade. And a paying trade it is. Are they disloyal to England? I believe them Fenians at heart--that is, Fenians in the matter of loyalty. They would use any power they might get to damage England, and if England gives them power she'll bitterly rue the day.

Paddy may be lazy, but put your finger in his mouth and he'll bite.

The English Separatists don't see this, but when I see the fox in the hen-roost I can guess what brought him there. If I put the cat in the dairy I should expect her to taste the cream. Trust the Irish Nationalist members! I'd as soon trust a pack of wolves with my lambs."

My friend is a scientific gardener, and descanted on the wonderful climate of Ireland, where plants that will not grow in England nourish luxuriously. I told him I had seen bamboo growing in the open air at Dundalk, and asked him if the Bonds of Brotherhood (_Humbugis Morleyensis_) or the Union of Hearts (_Gladstonia gammonica gigantica_) would come to perfection in Hibernia. He thought the soil and climate unsuitable, and was sure they would never take root. The _gammonica_ had been tried, but it withered and died. It could not be "budded" for want of an Irish "stock."