CHAPTER XII.
GREENANE HOUSE, THOMASTOWN, March 5th.—The breakfast-room at Borris this morning was gay with pink coats. A meet was to come off at a place between Borris and Thomastown, and bidding fare-well to my cordial host and hostess, I set out at 11 o’clock for a flying visit to this quaint and charming house of Mr. Seigne, one of the best known and most highly esteemed agents in this part of Ireland.
My jarvey from Borris had an unusually neat and well-balanced car. When I praised it he told me it was “built by an American,” not an Irish American, I understood him to say, but a genuine Yankee, who, for some mysterious reason, has established himself in this region, where he has prospered as a cart and car builder ever since. “Just the best cars in all Ireland he builds, your honour!” Why don’t he naturalise them in America?
All the way was charming, the day very bright, and even warm, and the hill scenery picturesque at every turn. We looked out sharply for the hunt, but in vain. My jarvey, who knew the whole country, said they must have broken cover somewhere on the upper road, and we should miss them entirely. And so we did.
The silting up of the river Nore has reduced Thomastown or Ballymacanton, which was its Irish name, from its former importance as an emporium for the country about Kilkenny. The river now is not navigable above Inistiogue. But two martial square towers, one at either end of a fine bridge which spans the stream here, speak of the good old times when the masters of Thomastown took toll and tribute of traders and travellers. The lands about the place then belonged to the great monastery of Jerpoint, the ruins of which are still the most interesting of their kind in this part of Ireland. They have long made a part of the estate of the Butlers. We rattled rapidly through the quiet little town, and whisking out of a small public square into a sort of wynd between two houses, suddenly found ourselves in the precincts of Grenane House. The house takes its name from the old castle of Grenane, an Irish fortress established here by some native despot long before Thomas Fitz-Anthony the Norman came into the land. The ruins of this castle still stand some half a mile away. “We call the place Candahar,” said Mr. Seigne, as he came up with two ladies from the meadows below the house, “because you come into it so suddenly, just as you do into that Oriental town.” But what a charming occidental place it is! It stands well above the river, the slope adorned with many fine old trees, some of which grow, and grow prosperously, in the queerest and most improbable forms, bent double, twisted, but still most green and vigorous. They have no business under any known theory of arboriculture to be beautiful, but beautiful they are. The views of the bridge, of the towers, and of the river, from this slope would make the fortune of the place in a land of peace and order.
A most original and delightful lady of the country lunched with us,—such a character as Miss Edgeworth or Miss Austen might have drawn. Shrewd, humorous, sensible, fearless, and ready with impartial hand to box the ears alike of Trojan and of Tyrian. She not only sees both sides of the question in Ireland as between the landlords and the tenants, but takes both sides of the question. She holds lands by inheritance, which make her keenly alive to the wrongs of the landlords, and she holds farms as a tenant, which make her implacably critical as to their claims. She mercilessly demolished in one capacity whatever she advanced in the other, and all with the most perfect nonchalance and good faith. This curiously dual attitude reminded me of the confederate General, Braxton Bragg, of whom his comrades in the old army of the United States used to say that he once had a very sharp official correspondence with himself. He happened to hold a staff appointment, being also a line officer. So in his quality of a staff officer, he found fault with himself in his capacity as a line officer, reprimanded himself sharply, replied defiantly to the reprimand, and eventually reported himself to himself for discipline at head-quarters. She told an excellent story of a near kinsman of hers who, holding a very good living in the Protestant Irish Church, came rather unexpectedly by inheritance into a baronetcy, upon which his women-folk insisted that it would be derogatory to a baronet to be a parson. “Would you believe it, the poor man was silly enough to listen to their cackle, and resign seven hundred a year!”
“That didn’t clear him,” I said, “of the cloth, did it?”
“ Not a bit, of course, poor foolish man. He was just as much a parson as ever, only without a parsonage. Men are fools enough of themselves, don’t you think, without needing to listen to women?”
Mr. Seigne comes of a French Protestant stock long ago planted in Ireland, and his Gallic blood doubtless helps him to handle the practical problems daily submitted in these days to an Irish land-agent—problems very different, as he thinks, from those with which an Irish agent had to deal in the days before 1870. The Irish tenant has a vantage-ground now in his relations with his landlord which he never had in the olden time, and this makes it more important than it ever was that the agent should have what may be called a diplomatic taste for treating with individuals, finding out the bent of mind of this man and of that, and negotiating over particulars, instead of insisting, in the English fashion, on general rules, without regard to special cases. I have met no one who has seemed to me so cool and precise as Mr. Seigne in his study of the phenomena of the present situation. I asked him whether he could now say, as Mr. Senior did a quarter of century ago, that the Irish tenants were less improvident, and more averse from running into debt than the English.
“I think not,” he replied; “on the contrary, in some parts of Ireland now the shopkeepers are kept on the verge of bankruptcy by the recklessness with which the tenants incurred debts immediately after the passing of the Land Act of 1870—a time when shopkeepers, and bankers also, almost forced credit upon the farmers, and made thereby ‘bad debts’ innumerable. Farmers rarely keep anything like an account of their receipts and expenses. I know only one tenant-farmer in this neighbourhood who keeps what can be called an account, showing what he takes from his labour and spends on his living.”20 “They save a great deal of money often,” he says, “but almost never in any systematic way. They spend much less on clothes and furniture, and the outward show of things, than English people of the same condition do, and they do not stint themselves in meat and drink as the French peasants do. In fact, under the operation of existing circumstances, they are getting into the way of improving their condition, not so much by sacrifices and savings, as by an insistence on rent being fixed low enough to leave full margin for improved living.”
“I had a very frank statement on this point,” said Mr. Seigne, “not long ago from a Tipperary man. When I tried to show him that his father had paid a good many years ago the very same rent which he declares himself unable to pay now, he admitted this at once. But it was a confession and avoidance. ‘My father could pay the rent, and did pay the rent,’ he said, ‘because he was content to live so that he could pay it. He sat on a boss of straw, and ate out of a bowl. He lived in a way in which I don’t intend to live, and so he could pay the rent. Now, I must have, and I mean to have, out of the land, before I pay the rent, the means of living as I wish to live; and if I can’t have it, I’ll sell out and go away; but I’ll be—if I don’t fight before I do that same!’”
“What could you reply to that?” I asked.
“Oh,” I said, “‘that’s square and straightforward. Only just let me know the point at which you mean to fight, and then we’ll see if we can agree about something.’”
“The truth is,” said Mr. Seigne, “that there is a pressure upward now from below. The labourers don’t want to live any longer as the farmers have always made them live; and so the farmers, having to consider the growing demands of the labourers, and meaning to live better themselves, push up against the landlord, and insist that the means of the improvement shall come out of him.”
He then told me an instructive story of his calling upon a tenant-farmer, at whose place he found the labourers sitting about their meal of pork and green vegetables. The farmer asked him into another room, where he saw the farmer’s family making their meal of stirabout and milk and potatoes.
“I asked you in here,” said the farmer, “because we keep in here to ourselves. I don’t want those fellows to see that we can’t afford to give ourselves what we have to give them,”—this with strong language indicating that he must himself be given a way to advance equally with the progressive labourer, or he would know the reason why!
This afternoon Mr. Seigne drove me over through a beautiful country to Woodstock, near Inistiogue, the seat of the late Colonel Tighe, the head of the family of which the authoress of “Psyche” was an ornament.
It is the finest place in this part of Ireland, and one of the finest I have seen in the three kingdoms, a much more picturesque and more nobly planted place indeed than its namesake in England. The mansion has no architectural pretensions, being simply a very large and, I should think, extremely comfortable house of the beginning of this century. The library is very rich, and there are some good pictures, as well as certain statues in the vestibule, which would have no interest for the Weissnichtwo professor of Sartor Resartus, but are regarded with some awe by the good people of Inistiogue.
The park would do no discredit to a palace, and if the vague project of establishing a royal residence in Ireland for one of the British Princes should ever take shape, it would not be easy, I should say, to find a demesne more befitting the home of a prince than this of the Tighes. At present it serves the State at least as usefully, being the “pleasaunce” of the people for miles around, who come here freely to walk and drive.
It stretches for miles along the Nore, and is crowned by a gloriously wooded hill nearly a thousand feet in height. The late Colonel Tighe, a most accomplished man, and a passionate lover of trees, made it a kind of private Kew Gardens. He planted long avenues of the rarest and finest trees, araucarias, Scotch firs, oaks, beeches, cedars of Lebanon; laid out miles of the most varied and delightful drives, and built the most extensive conservatories in Ireland.
The turfed and terraced walks among those conservatories are indescribably lovely, and the whole place to-day was vocal with innumerable birds. Picturesque little cottages and arbours are to be found in unexpected nooks all through the woodlands, each commanding some green vista of forest aisles, or some wide view of hill and champaign, enlivened by the winding river. From one of those to-day we looked out over a landscape to which Turner alone or Claude could have done justice, the river, spanned by a fine bridge, in the middle distance, and all the region wooded as in the days of which Edmund Spenser sings, when Ireland
“Flourished in fame,
Of wealth and goodnesse far above the rest
Of all that bears the British Islands’ name.”
Over the whole place broods an indefinable charm. You feel that this was the home at once and the work of a refined and thoughtful spirit. And so indeed it was. Here for the greater part of the current century the owner lived, making the development of the estate and of this demesne his constant care and chief pleasure. And here still lives his widow, with whom we took tea in a stately quiet drawing-room. Lady Louisa Tighe was in Brussels with her mother, the Duchess of Richmond, on the eve of Waterloo. She was a child then of ten years old, and her mother bade them bring her down into the historic ball-room before the Duke of Wellington left it. The duke took up his sword. “Let Louisa buckle it for you,” said her mother, and when the little girl had girded it on, the great captain stooped, took her up in his arms, and kissed her. “One never knows what may happen, child,” he said good-naturedly; and taking his small gold watch out of his fob, he bade her keep it for him.
She keeps it still. For more than sixty years it has measured out in this beautiful Irish home the hours of a life given to good works and gracious usefulness. To-day, with all the vivacity of interest in the people and the place which one might look for in a woman of twenty, this charming old lady of eighty-three, showing barely threescore years in her carriage, her countenance, and her voice, entertained us with minute and most interesting accounts of the local industries which flourish here mainly through her sympathetic and intelligent supervision. We seemed to be in another world from the Ireland of Chicago or Westminster!
Mr. Seigne drove me back here by a most picturesque road leading along the banks of the Nore, quite overhung with trees, which in places dip their branches almost into the swift deep stream. “This is the favourite drive of all the lovers hereabouts,” he said, “and there is a spice of danger in it which makes it more romantic. Once, not very long ago, a couple of young people, too absorbed in their love-making to watch their horse, drove off the bank. Luckily for them they fell into the branches of one of these overhanging trees, while the horse and car went plunging into the water. There they swung, holding each other hand in hand, making a pretty and pathetic tableau, till their cries brought some anglers in a boat on the river to the rescue.”
We spoke of Lady Louisa, and of the watch of Waterloo. “That watch had a wonderful escape a few years ago,” said Mr. Seigne.
Lady Louisa, it seems, had a confidential butler whom she most implicitly trusted. One day it was found that a burglary had apparently been committed at Woodstock, and that with a quantity of jewelry the priceless watch had vanished. The butler was very active about the matter, and as no trace could be found leading out of the house, he intimated a suspicion that the affair might possibly have some connection with a guest not long before at the house. This angered Lady Louisa, who thereupon consulted the agent, who employed a capable detective from Dublin. The detective came down to Inistiogue as a commercial traveller, wandered about, made the acquaintance of Lady Louisa’s maid, of the butler, and of other people about the house, and formed his own conclusions. Two or three days after his arrival he walked into the shop of a small jeweller in a neighbouring town, and affecting a confidential manner, told the jeweller he wanted to buy “some of those things from Woodstock.” The man was taken by surprise, and going into a backshop produced one very fine diamond, and a number of pieces of silver plate, of the disappearance of which the butler had said nothing to his mistress. This led to the arrest of the butler, and to the discovery that for a long time he had been purloining property from the house and selling it. Many cases of excellent claret had found their way in this fashion to a public-house which had acquired quite a reputation for its Bordeaux with the officers quartered in its neighbourhood. The wine-bins at Woodstock were found full of bottles of water. Much of the capital port left by Colonel Tighe had gone—but the hock was untouched. “Probably the butler didn’t care for hock,” said Mr. Seigne. The Waterloo watch was recovered from a very decent fellow, a travelling dealer, to whom it had been sold: and many pieces of jewelry were traced up to London. But Lady Louisa could not be induced to go up to London to identify them or testify.
DUBLIN, Tuesday, March 6.—It is a curious fact, which I learned to-day from the Registrar-General, that the deposits in the Post-office Savings Banks have never diminished in Ireland since these banks were established.21 These deposits are chiefly made, I understand, by the small tenants, who are less represented by the deposits in the General Savings Banks than are the shopkeepers and the cattle-drovers. In the General Savings Banks the deposit line fluctuates more; though on the whole there has been a steady increase in these deposits also throughout Ireland.
Of the details of the dealings of the private banks it is very hard to get an accurate account. One gentleman, the manager of a branch of one important bank, tells me that a great deal of money is made by usurers out of the tenants, by backing their small bills. This practice goes back to the first establishment of banks in Ireland. Formerly it was not an uncommon thing for a landlord to offer his tenants a reduction, say, of twenty per cent., on condition of their paying the rent when it fell due. Such were the relations then between landlord and tenants, and so little was punctuality expected in such payments that this might be regarded as a sort of discount arrangement. The tenant who wished to avail himself of such an offer would go to some friendly local usurer and ask for a loan that he might avail himself of it. “One of these usurers, whom I knew very well,” said the manager, “told me long ago that he found these operations very profitable. His method of procedure was to agree to advance the rent to the tenant at ten per cent., payable at a near and certain date. This would reduce the landlord’s reduction at once, of course, for the tenant, to ten per cent., but that was not to be disdained; and so the bargain would be struck. If the money was repaid at the fixed date, it was not a bad thing for the usurer. But it was almost never so repaid; and with repeated renewals the usurer, by his own showing, used to receive eventually twenty, fifty, and, in some cases, nearly a hundred per cent, for his loan.”
It is the opinion of this gentleman that, under the “Plan of Campaign,” a good deal of money-making is done in a quiet way by some of the “trustees,” who turn over at good interest, with the help of friendly financiers, the funds lodged with them, being held to account to the tenants only for the principal. “Of course,” he said, “all this is doubtless at least as legitimate as any other part of the ‘Plan,’ and I daresay it all goes for ‘the good of the cause.’ But neither the tenants nor the landlords get much by it!”
CHAPTER XIII.
DUBLIN, Thursday, March 8.—At eight o’clock this morning I left the Harcourt Street station for Inch, to take a look at the scene of the Coolgreany evictions of last summer. These evictions came of the adoption of the Plan of Campaign, under the direction of Mr. Dillon, M.P., on the Wexford property of Mr. George Brooke of Dublin. The agent of Mr. Brooke’s estate, Captain Hamilton, is the honorary director of the Property Defence Association, so that we have here obviously a grapple between the National League doing the work, consciously or unconsciously, of the agrarian revolutionists, and a combination of landed proprietors fighting for the rights of property as they understand them.
We ran through a beautiful country for the greater part of the way. At Bray, which is a favourite Irish watering-place, the sea broke upon us bright and full of life; and the station itself was more like a considerable English station than any I have seen. Thence we passed into a richly-wooded region, with neat, well-kept hedges, as far as Rathdrum and the “Sweet Vale of Avoca.” The hills about Shillelagh are particularly well forested, though, as the name suggests, they must have been cut for cudgels pretty extensively for now a great many years. We came again on the sea at the fishing port of Arklow, where the stone walls about the station were populous with small ragamuffins, and at the station of Inch I found a car waiting for me with Mr. Holmes, a young English Catholic officer, who had most obligingly offered to show me the place and the people. We had hardly got into the roadway when we overtook a most intelligent-looking, energetic young priest, walking briskly on in the direction of our course. This was Dr. Dillon, the curate of Arklow. We pulled up at once, and Mr. Holmes, introducing me to him, we begged him to take a seat with us. He excused himself as having to join another priest with whom he was going to a function at Inch; but he was good enough to walk a little way with us, and gave me an appointment for 2 P.M. at his own town of Arklow, where I could catch the train back to Dublin. We drove on rapidly and called on Father O’Neill, the parish priest. We found him in full canonicals, as he was to officiate at the function this morning, and with him were Father Dunphy, the parish priest of Arklow, and two or three more robed priests.
Father O’Neill, whose face and manner are those of the higher order of the continental clergy, briefly set forth to me his view of the transactions at Coolgreany. He said that before the Plan of Campaign was adopted by the tenants, Mr. William O’Brien, M.P., had written to him explaining what the effect of the Plan would be, and urging him to take whatever steps he could to obviate the necessity of adopting it, as it might eventually result to the disadvantage of the tenants. “To that end,” said Father O’Neill, “I called upon Captain Hamilton, the agent, with Dr. Dillon of Arklow, but he positively refused to listen to us, and in fact ordered us, not very civilly, to leave his office.”
It was after this he said that he felt bound to let the tenants take their own way. Eighty of them joined in the “Plan of Campaign” and paid the amount of the rent due, less a reduction of 30 per cent., which they demanded of the agent, into the hands of Sir Thomas Esmonde, M.P., Sir Thomas being a resident in the country, and Mr. Mayne, M.P. Writs of ejectment were obtained against them afterwards, and in July last sixty-seven of them were evicted, who are now living in “Laud League huts,” put up on the holdings of three small tenants who were exempted from the Plan of Campaign, and allowed to pay their rents subject to a smaller reduction made by the agent, in order that they might retain their land as a refuge for the rest.
All this Father O’Neill told us very quietly, in a gentle, undemonstrative way, but he was much interested when I told him I had recently come from Rome, where these proceedings, I was sure, were exciting a good deal of serious attention. “Yes,” he said, “and Father Dunphy who is here in the other room, has just got back from Rome, where he had two audiences of the Holy Father.”
“Doubtless, then,” I said, “he will have given his Holiness full particulars of all that took place here.”
“No doubt,” responded Father O’Neill, “and he tells me the Holy Father listened with great attention to all he had to say—though of course, he expressed no opinion about it to Father Dunphy.”
As the time fixed for the function was at hand, we were obliged to leave without seeing Father Dunphy.
From the Presbytery we drove to the scene of the evictions. These evictions were in July. Mr. Holmes witnessed them, and gave me a lively account of the affair. The “battle” was not a very tough one. Mr. Davitt, who was present, stood under a tree very quietly watching it all. “He looked very picturesque,” said Mr. Holmes, “in a light grey suit, with a broad white beaver shading his dark Spanish face; and smoked his cigar very composedly.” After it was over, Dr. Dillon brought up one of the tenants, and presented him to Mr. Davitt as “the man who had resisted this unjust eviction.” Mr. Davitt took his cigar from his lips, and in the hearing of all who stood about sarcastically said, “Well, if he couldn’t make a better resistance than that he ought to go up for six months!” The first house we came upon was derelict—all battered and despoiled, the people in the neighbourhood here, as elsewhere, regarding such houses as free spoil, and carrying off from time to time whatever they happen to fancy. Near this house we met an emergency man, named Bolton, an alert, energetic-looking native of Wicklow. He has four brothers; and is now at work on one of the “evicted” holdings.
I asked if he was “boycotted,” and what his relations were with the people.
He laughed in a shrewd, good-natured way. “Oh, I’m boycotted, of course,” he said; “but I don’t care a button for any of these people, and I’d rather they wouldn’t speak to me. They know I can take care of myself, and they give me a good wide berth. All I have to object to is that they set fire to an outhouse of mine, and cut the ears of one of my heifers, and for that I want damages. Otherwise I’m getting on very well; and I think this will be a good year, if the law is enforced, and these fellows are made to behave themselves.”
Near Bolton’s farm we passed the holding of a tenant named Kavanagh, one of the three who were “allowed” to pay their rents. Several Land League huts are on his place, and the evicted people who occupy them put their cattle with his. He is a quiet, cautious man, and very reticent. But it seemed to me that he was not entirely satisfied with the “squatters” who have been quartered upon him. And it appears that he has taken another holding in Carlow. From his place we drove to Ballyfad, where a large house, at the end of a good avenue of trees, once the mansion of a squire, but now much dilapidated, is occupied as headquarters by the police. Here we found Mr. George Freeman, the bailiff of the Coolgreany property, a strong, sturdy man, much disgusted at finding it necessary to go about protected by two policemen. That this was necessary, however, he admitted, pointing out to us the place where one Kinsella was killed not very long ago. The son of this man Kinsella was formerly one of Mr. Brooke’s gamekeepers, and is now, Mr. Freeman thinks, in concert with another man named Ryan, the chief stay of the League in keeping up its dominion over the evicted tenants.
Many of these tenants, he believes, would gladly pay their rents now, and come back if they dared.
“Every man, sir,” he said, “that has anything to lose, would be glad to come back next Monday if he thought his life would be safe. But all the lazy and thriftless ones are better off now than they ever were; they get from £4 to £6 a month, with nothing to do, and so they’re in clover, and they naturally don’t like to have the industrious, well- to-do tenants spoil their fun by making a general settlement.”
“Besides that,” he added, “that man Kinsella and his comrade Ryan are the terror of the whole of them. Kinsella always was a curious, silent, moody fellow. He knows every inch of the country, going over it all the time by night and day as a gamekeeper, and I am quite sure the Parnellite men and the Land Leaguers are just as much afraid of him and Ryan as the tenants are. He don’t care a bit for them; and they’ve no control of him at all.”
Mr. Freeman said he remembered very well the occasion referred to by Father O’Neill, when Captain Hamilton refused to confer with Dr. Dillon and himself.
“Did Father O’Neill tell you, sir,” he said, “that Captain Hamilton was quite willing to talk with him and Father O’Donel, the parish priests, and with the Coolgreany people, but he would have nothing to say to any one who was not their priest, and had no business to be meddling with the matter at all?”
“No; he did not tell me that.”
“Ah! well, sir, that made all the difference. Father Dunphy, who was there, is a high-tempered man, and he said he had just as much right to represent the tenants as Captain Hamilton to represent the landlord, and that Captain Hamilton wouldn’t allow. It was the outside people made all the trouble. In June of last year there was a conference at my house, and all that time there was a Committee sitting at Coolgreany, and the tenants would not be allowed to do anything without the Committee.”
“And who made the Committee?”
“Oh, they made themselves, I suppose, sir. There was Sir Thomas Esmonde—he was a convert, you know, of Father O’Neill—and Mr. Mayne and Mr. John Dillon. And Dr. Dillon of Arklow, he was as busy as he could be till the evictions were made in July. And then he was in retreat. And I believe, sir, it is quite true that he wanted the Bishop to let him come out of the retreat just to have a hand in the business.”
The police sergeant, a very cool, sensible man, quite agreed with the bailiff as to the influence upon the present situation of the ex-gamekeeper Kinsella, and his friend Eyan. “If they were two Invincibles, sir,” he said, “these member fellows of the League couldn’t be in greater fear of them than they are. They say nothing, and do just as they please. That Kinsella, when Mr. John Dillon was down here, just told him before a lot of people that he ‘wanted no words and no advice from him,’ and he’s just in that surly way with all the people about.”
As to the Brooke estate, I am told here it was bought more than twenty years ago with a Landed Estates Court title from Colonel Forde, by the grandfather of Mr. Brooke. He paid about £75,000 sterling for it. His son died young, and the present owner came into it as a child, Mr. Vesey being then the agent, who, during the minority, spent a great deal on improving the property. Captain Hamilton came in as agent only a few years ago. While the Act of 1881 was impending, an abatement was granted of more than twenty per cent. In 1882 the tenants all paid except eleven, who went into Court and got their rents cut down by the Sub-Commissioners. There were appeals; and in 1885, after Court valuations, the rents cut down by the Sub-Commissioners were restored in several cases. There never was any rack-renting on the estate at all. There are upon it in all more than a hundred tenants, twelve of whom are Protestants, holding a little less in all than one-fourth of the property.
There are fifteen judicial tenants, twenty-one lease-holders, and seventy-seven hold from year to year.
The gross rental is a little over £2000 a year of which one-half goes to Mr. Brooke’s mother. Mr. Brooke himself is a wealthy man, at the head of the most important firm of wine-merchants in Ireland, and he has repeatedly spent on the property more than he took out of it.
The house of Sir Thomas Esmonde, M.P., was pointed out to me from the road. “Sir Thomas is to marry an heiress, sir, isn’t he, in America?” asked an ingenuous inquirer. I avowed my ignorance on this point. “Oh, well, they say so, for anyway the old house is being put in order for now the first time in forty years.”
We reached Arklow in time for luncheon, and drove to the large police barracks there. These were formerly the quarters of the troops. Arklow was one of the earliest settlements of the Anglo-Normans in Ireland under Henry II., and once rejoiced in a castle and a monastery both now obliterated; though a bit of an old tower here is said to have been erected in his time. The town lives by fishing, and by shipping copper and lead ore to South Wales. The houses are rather neat and well kept; but the street was full of little ragged, merry mendicants.
We went into a small branch of the Bank of Ireland, and asked where we should find the hotel. We were very civilly directed to “The Register’s Office over the way.” This seemed odd enough. But reaching it we were further puzzled to see the sign over the doorway of a “coach-builder”! However, we rang the bell, and presently a maid-servant appeared, who assured us that this was really the hotel, and that we could have “whatever we liked” for luncheon. We liked what we found we could get—chops, potatoes, and parsnips; and without too much delay these were neatly served to us in a most remarkable room, ablaze with mural ornaments and decorations, upon which every imaginable pigment of the modern palette seemed to have been lavished, from a Nile-water-green dado to a scarlet and silver frieze. There were five times as many potatoes served to us as two men could possibly eat, and not one of them was half-boiled. But otherwise the meal was well enough, and the service excellent. Beer could be got for us, but the house had no licence, Lord Carysfort, the owner of the property, thinking, so our hostess said, that “there were too many licences in the town already.” Lord Carysfort is probably right; but it is not every owner of a house, or even of a lease in Ireland, I fear, who would take such a view and act on it to the detriment of his own property.
Dr. Dillon lives in the main square of Arklow in a very neat house. He was absent at a funeral in the handsome Catholic church near by when we called, but we were shown into his study, and he presently came in.
His study was that of a man of letters and of politics. Blue-books and statistical works lay about in all directions, and on the table were the March numbers of the Nineteenth Century, and the Contemporary Review.
“You are abreast of the times, I see,” I said to him, pointing to these periodicals.
“Yes,” he replied, “they have just come in; and there is a capital paper by Mr. John Morley in this Nineteenth Century.”
Nothing could be livelier than Dr. Dillon’s interest in all that is going on on both sides of the Atlantic, more positive than his opinions, or more terse and clear than his way of putting them. He agreed entirely with Father O’Neill as to the pressure put upon the Coolgreany tenants, not so much by Mr. Brooke as by the agent, Captain Hamilton; but he thought Mr. Brooke also to blame for his treatment of them.
“Two of the most respectable of them,” said Dr. Dillon, “went to see Mr. Brooke in Dublin, and he wouldn’t listen to them. On the contrary, he absolutely put them out of his office without hearing a word they had to say.”22
I found Dr. Dillon a strong disciple of Mr. Henry George, and a firm believer in the doctrine of the “nationalisation of the land.” “It is certain to come,” he said, “as certain to come in Great Britain as in Ireland, and the sooner the better. The movement about the sewerage rates in London,” he added, “is the first symptom of the land war in London. It is the thin edge of the wedge to break down landlordism in the British metropolis.”
He is watching American politics, too, very closely, and inclines to sympathise with President Cleveland. Archbishop Ryan of Philadelphia, he tells me, in his passage through Ireland the other day, did not hesitate to express his conviction that President Cleveland would be re-elected.
Dr. Dillon was so earnest and so interesting that the time slipped by very fast, until a casual glance at my watch showed me that we must make great haste to catch the Dublin train.
We left therefore rather hurriedly, but before reaching the station we saw the Dublin train go careering by, its white pennon of smoke and vapour curling away along the valley.
I made the best of it, however, and letting Mr. Holmes depart by a train which took him home, I found a smart jarvey with a car, and drove out to Glenart Castle, the beautiful house of the Earl of Carysfort. This is a very handsome modern house, built in a castellated style of a very good whitish grey marble, with extensive and extremely well-kept terraced gardens and conservatories.
It stands very well on one high bank of the river, a residence of the Earl of Wicklow occupying the other bank. My jarvey called my attention to the excellence of the roads, on which he said Lord Carysfort has spent “a deal of money,” as well as upon the gardens of the new Castle. The head-gardener, an Englishman, told me he found the native labourers very intelligent and willing both to learn and to work. Evidently here is another centre of useful and civilising influences, not managed by an “absentee.”23
CHAPTER XIV.
DUBLIN, Friday, March 9th.—At 7.40 this morning I took the train for Athy to visit the Luggacurren estates of Lord Lansdowne. Mr. Lynch, a resident magistrate here, some time ago kindly offered to show me over the place, but I thought it as well to take my chance with the people of Athy who are reported to have been very hot over the whole matter here, and so wrote to Mr. Lynch that I would find him at the Lodge, which is the headquarters of the property.
Athy is a neat, well-built little town, famous of old as a frontier fortress of Kildare. An embattled tower, flanked by small square turrets, guards a picturesque old bridge here over the Barrow, the bridge being known in the country as “Crom-a-boo,” from the old war-cry of the Fitz-Geralds. It is a busy place now; and there was quite a bustle at the very pretty little station. I asked a friendly old porter which was the best hotel in the town. “The best? Ah! there’s only one, and it’s not the best—but there are worse—and it’s Kavanagh’s.” I found it easily enough, and was ushered by a civil man, who emerged from the shop which occupies part of it, into a sort of reading-room with a green table. A rather slatternly but very active girl soon converted this into a neat breakfast-table, and gave me an excellent breakfast. The landlord found me a good car, and off I set for the residence of Father Maher, the curate of whom I had heard as one of the most fiery and intractable of the National League priests in this part of Ireland.
My jarvey was rather taciturn at first, but turned out to be something of a politician. He wanted Home Rule, one of his reasons being that then they “wouldn’t let the Americans come and ruin them altogether, driving out the grain from the markets.” About this he was very clear and positive. “Oh, it doesn’t matter now whether the land is good or bad, America has just ruined the farmers entirely.”
I told him I had always heard this achievement attributed to England. “Oh! that was quite a mistake! What the English did was to punish the men that stood up for Ireland. There was Mr. O’Brien. But for him there wasn’t a man of Lord Lansdowne’s people would have had the heart to stand up. He did it all; and now, what were they doing to him? They were putting him on a cold plank-bed on a stone floor in a damp cell!”
“But the English put all their prisoners in those cells, don’t they?” I asked.
“And what of it, sir?” he retorted. “They’re good enough for most of them, but not for a gentleman like Mr. O’Brien, that would spill the last drop of his heart’s blood for Ireland!”
“But,” I said, “they’re doing just the same thing with Mr. Gilhooly, I hear.”
“And who is Mr. Gilhooly, now? And it’s not for the likes of him to complain and be putting on airs as if he was Mr. O’Brien!”
“Yes, it is a fine country for hunting!”
“Was it ever put down here, the hunting?”
“No, indeed! Sure, the people wouldn’t let it be!”
“Not if Mr. O’Brien told them they must?” I queried.
“Mr. O’Brien; ah, he wouldn’t think of such a thing! It brings money all the time to Athy, and sells the horses.”
As to the troubles at Luggacurren, he was not very clear. “It was a beautiful place, Mr. Dunne’s; we’d see it presently. And Mr. Dunne, he was a good one for sport. It was that, your honour, that got him into the trouble”—
“And Mr. Kilbride?”
“Oh, Mr. Kilbride’s place was a very good place too, but not like Mr. Dunne’s. And he was doing very well, Mr. Kilbride. He was getting a good living from the League, and he was a Member of Parliament. Oh, yes, he wasn’t the only one of the tenants that was doing good to himself. There was more of them that was getting more than ever they made out of the land.”24
“Was the land so bad, then?” I asked.
“No, there was as good land at Luggacurren as any there was in all Ireland; but,” and here he pointed off to the crests of the hills in the distance, “there was a deal of land there of the estate on the hills, and it was very poor land, but the tenants had to pay as much for that as for the good property of Dunne and Kilbride.”
“Do you know Mr. Lynch, the magistrate?” I asked. “If you do, look out for him, as he has promised to join me and show me the place.”
“Oh no, sorr!” the jarvey exclaimed at once; “don’t mind about him. Hell have his own car, and your honour won’t want to take him on ours.”
“Why not?” I persisted, “there’s plenty of room.”
“Oh! but indeed, sir, if it wasn’t that you were going to the priest’s, Father Maher, you wouldn’t get a car at Athy—no, not under ten pounds!”
“Not under ten pounds,” I replied. “Would I get one then for ten pounds?”
“It’s a deal of money, ten pounds, sorr, and you wouldn’t have a poor man throw away ten pounds?”
“Certainly not, nor ten shillings either. Is it a question of principle, or a question of price?”
The man looked around at me with a droll glimmer in his eye: “Ah, to be sure, your honour’s a great lawyer; but he’ll come pounding along with his big horse in his own car, Mr. Lynch; and sure it’ll be quicker for your honour just driving to Father Maher’s.”
There was no resisting this, so I laughed and bade him drive on.
“Whose house is that?” I asked, as we passed a house surrounded with trees.
“Oh! that’s the priest, Father Keogh—a very good man, but not so much for the people as Father Maher, who has everything to look after about them.”
We came presently within sight of a handsome residence, Lansdowne Lodge, the headquarters of the estate. Many fine cattle were grazing in the fields about it.
“They are Lord Lansdowne’s beasts,” said my jarvey; “and it’s the emergency men are looking after them.”
Nearly opposite were the Land League huts erected on the holding of an unevicted tenant—a small village of neat wooden “shanties.” On the roadway in front of these half-a-dozen men were lounging about. They watched us with much curiosity as we drove up, and whispered eagerly together.
“They’re some of the evicted men, your honour,” said my jarvey, with a twinkle in his eye; and then under his breath, “They’ll be thinking your honour’s came down to arrange it all. They think everybody that comes is come about an arrangement.”
“Oh, then, they all want it arranged!”
“No; not all, but many of them do. Some of them like it well enough going about like gentlemen with nothing to do, only their hands in their pockets.”
We turned out of the highway here and passed some very pretty cottages.
“No, they’re not for labourers, your honour,” said my jarvey; “the estate built them for mechanics. It’s the tenants look after the labourers, and little it is they do for them.”
Then, pointing to a ridge of hills beyond us, he said: “It was Kilbride’s father, sir, evicted seventeen tenants on these hills—poor labouring men, with their families, many years ago,—and now he’s evicted himself, and a Member of Parliament!”
Father Maher’s house stands well off from the highway. He was not at home, being “away at a service in the hills,” but would be back before two o’clock. I left my name for him, with a memo randum of my purpose in calling, and we drove on to see the bailiff of the estate, Mr. Hind. On the way we met Father Norris, a curate of the parish, in a smart trap with a good horse, and had a brief colloquy with him. Mr. Hind we found busy afield; a quiet, staunch sort of man. He spoke of the situation very coolly and dispassionately. “The tenants in the main were a good set of men—as they had reason to be, Lord Lansdowne having been not only a fair landlord, but a liberal and enterprising promoter of local improvements.” I had been told in Dublin that Lord Lansdowne had offered a subscription of £200 towards establishing creameries, and providing high-class bulls for this estate. Similar offers had been cordially met by Lord Lansdowne’s tenants in Kerry, and with excellent results. But here they were rejected almost scornfully, though accompanied by offers of abatement on the rents, which, in the case of Mr. Kilbride, for example, amounted to 20 per cent.
“How did this happen, the tenants being good men as you say?” I asked of Mr. Hind.
“Because they were unable to resist the pressure put on them by the two chief tenants, Kilbride and Dunne, with the help of the League. Kilbride and Dunne both lived very well.” My information at Dublin was that Mr. Kilbride had a fine house built by Lord Lansdowne, and a farm of seven hundred acres, at a rent of £760, 10s. Mr. Dunne, who co-operated with him, held four town lands comprising 1304 acres, at a yearly rent of £1348, 15s. Upon this property Lord Lansdowne had expended in drainage and works £1993, 11s. 9d., and in buildings £631, 15s. 4d., or in all very nearly two years’ rental. On Mr. Kilbride’s holdings Lord Lansdowne had expended in drainage works £1931, 6s. 3d., and in buildings £1247, 19s. 5d., or in all more than four years’ rental. Mr. Kilbride held his lands on life leases. Mr. Dunne held his smallest holding of 84 acres on a yearly tenure; his two largest holdings, one on a lease for 31 years from 1874, and the other on a life lease, and his fourth holding of 172 acres on a life lease.
Where does the hardship appear in all this to Mr. Dunne or Mr. Kilbride?
On Mr. Kilbride’s holdings, for instance, Lord Lansdowne expended over £3000, for which he added to the rent £130 a year, or about 4 per cent., while he himself stood to pay 6-1/2 per cent, on the loans he made from the Board of Works for the expenditure. In the same way it was with Mr. Dunne’s farms. They were mostly in grass, and Lord Lansdowne laid out more than £2500 on them, borrowed at the same rate from the Board, for which he added to the rent only £66 a year, or about 2-1/2 per cent. Mr. Kilbride was a Poor-Law Guardian, and Mr. Dunne a Justice of the Peace. The leases in both of these cases, and in those of other large tenants, seem to have been made at the instance of the tenants themselves, and afforded security against any advance in the rental during a time of high agricultural prices. And it would appear that for the last quarter of a century there has been no important advance in the rental. In 1887 the rental was only £300 higher than in 1862, though during the interval the landlord had laid out £20,000 on improvements in the shape of drainage, roads, labourers’ cottages, and other permanent works. Moreover, in fifteen years only one tenant has been evicted for non-payment of rent.
“Was there any ill-feeling towards the Marquis among the tenants?” I asked of Mr. Hind.
“Certainly not, and no reason for any. They were a good set of men, and they would never have gone into this fight, only for a few who were in trouble, and I’m sure that to-day most of them would be thankful if they could settle and get back. The best of them had money enough, and didn’t like the fight at all.”
All the trouble here seems to have originated with the adoption of the Plan of Campaign.
Lord Lansdowne, besides this estate in Queen’s County, owns property in a wild, mountainous part of the county of Kerry. On this property the tenants occupy, for the most part, small holdings, the average rental being about £10, and many of the rentals much lower. They are not capitalist farmers at all, and few of them are able to average the profits of their industry, setting the gains of a good, against the losses of a bad, season. In October 1886, while Mr. Dillon was organising his Plan of Campaign, Lord Lansdowne visited his Kerry property to look into the condition of the people. The local Bank had just failed, and the shopkeepers and money-lenders were refusing credit and calling in loans. The pressure they put upon these small farmers, together with the fall in the price of dairy produce and of young stock at that time, caused real distress, and Lord Lansdowne, after looking into the situation, offered, of his own motion, abatements varying from 25 to 35 per cent, to all of them whose rents had not been judicially fixed under the Act of 1881, for a term of fifteen years.
As to these, Lord Lansdowne wrote a letter on the 21st of October 1886 (four days after the promulgation of the Plan of Campaign at Portumna on the Clanricarde property), to his agent, Mr. Townsend Trench. This letter was published. I have a copy of it given to me in Dublin, and it states the case as between the landlords and the tenants under judicial rents most clearly and temperately.
“It might, I think,” says the Marquis, “be very fairly argued, that the State having imposed the terms of a contract on landlord and tenant, that contract should not be interfered with except by the State.
The punctual payment of the ‘judicial rent’ was the one advantage to which the landlords were desired to look when, in 1881, they were deprived of many of the most valuable attributes of ownership.
“It was distinctly stipulated that the enormous privileges which were suddenly and unexpectedly conferred upon the tenants were to be enjoyed by them conditionally upon the fulfilment on their part of the statutory obligations specified in the Act. Of those, by far the most important was the punctual payment of the rent fixed by the Court for the judicial term.
“This obligation being unfulfilled, the landlord might reasonably claim that he should be free to exercise his own discretion in determining whether any given tenancy should or should not be perpetuated.
“In many cases [such cases are probably not so numerous on my estate as upon many others] the resumption of the holding, and the consolidation of adjoining farms, would be clearly advantageous to the whole community. In the congested districts the consolidation of farms is the only solution that I have seen suggested for meeting a chronic difficulty.
“I have no reason to believe that the Judicial Rents in force on my estate are such that, upon an average of the yield and prices of agricultural produce, my tenants would find it difficult to pay them.”
In spite of all these considerations Lord Lansdowne instructed Mr. Trench to grant to these tenants under judicial leases an abatement of 20 per cent. on the November gale of 1886. This abatement, freely offered, was gladly accepted. There had been no outrages or disturbances on the Kerry properties, and the relations of the landlord with his tenants, before and after this visit of Lord Lansdowne to Kerry, and these reductions which followed it, had been, and continued to be, excellent.
But the tale of Kerry reached Luggacurren; and certain of the tenants on the latter estate were moved by it to demand for the Queen’s County property identical treatment with that accorded to the very differently situated property in Kerry.
The leaders of the Luggacurren movement, I gather from Mr. Hind, never pretended inability to pay their rents. They simply demanded abatements of 35 per cent. on non-judicial, and 25 per cent. on judicial, rents as their due, on the ground that they should be treated like the tenants in Kerry: and the Plan of Campaign being by this time in full operation in more than one part of Ireland, they threatened to resort to it if their demand was refused. Lord Lansdowne at once declared that he would not repeat at Luggacurren his concession made in Kerry as to the rents judicially fixed; but he offered on a fair consideration of the non-judicial rents to make abatements on them ranging from 15 to 25 per cent.
The offer was refused, and the war began. On the 23d of March 1887 Mr. Kilbride was evicted. One week afterwards, on the 29th of March, he got up in the rooms of the National League in Dublin, and openly declared that “the Luggacurren evictions differed from most other evictions in this, that they were able to pay the rent. It was a fight,” he exultingly exclaimed, “of intelligence against intelligence; it was diamond cut diamond!” In other words, it was a struggle, not for justice, but for victory.
On all these points, and others furnished to me at Dublin touching this estate, much light was thrown by the bailiff, who had not been concerned in the evictions. He told me what he knew, and then very obligingly offered to conduct me to the lodge, where we should find Mr. Hutchins, who has charge now of the properties taken up by Mr. Kavanagh’s Land Corporation. My patriotic jarvey from Athy made no objection to my giving the bailiff a lift, and we drove off to the lodge. On the way the jarvey good-naturedly exclaimed, “Ah! there comes Mr. Lynch,” and even offered to pull up that the magistrate might overtake us.
We found Mr. Hutchins at home, a cool, quiet, energetic, northern man, who seems to be handling the difficult situation here with great firmness and prudence. Mrs. Hutchins, who has lived here now for nearly a year—a life not unlike that of the wife of an American officer on the Far Western frontier—very amicably asked me to lunch, and Mr. Hutchins offered to show me the holdings of Mr. Dunne and Mr. Kilbride. Mr. Lynch proposed that we should all go on my car, but I remembered the protest of the jarvey, and sending him to await me at Father Maher’s, I drove off with Mr. Hutchins. As we drove along, he confirmed the jarvey’s hint as to the difference between the views and conduct of the parish priest and the views and conduct of his more fiery curate. This is a very common state of affairs, I find, all over Ireland.
The house of Mr. Dunne is that of a large gentleman farmer. It is very well fitted up, but it was plain that the tenants had done little or nothing to make or keep it a “house beautiful.” The walls had never been papered, and the wood-work showed no recent traces of the brush. “He spent more money on horse-racing than on housekeeping,” said a shrewd old man who was in the house. In fact, Mr. Dunne, I am told, entered a horse for the races at the Curragh after he had undergone what Mr. Gladstone calls “the sentence of death” of an eviction!
Some of the doors bore marks of the crowbar but no great mischief had been done to them or to the large fine windows. The only serious damage done during the eviction was the cutting of a hole through the roof. An upper room had been provisioned to stand a siege, and so scientifically barricaded with logs and trunks of trees that after several vain attempts to break through the door the assailants climbed to the roof, and in twenty minutes cut their way in from without. The dining and drawing rooms were those of a gentleman’s residence, and one of the party remembered attending here a social festivity got up with much display.
A large cattle-yard has been established on this place, with an original, and, as I was assured, most successful weighing-machine by the Land Corporation. We found it full of very fine-looking cattle, and Mr. Hutchins seems to think the operation of managing the estate as a kind of “ranch” decidedly promising. “I am not a bit sorry for Mr. Dunne,” he said, “but I am very sorry for other quiet, good tenants who have been deluded or driven into giving up valuable holdings to keep him and Mr. Kilbride company, and give colour to the vapourings of Mr. William O’Brien.”
The cases of some of these tenants were instructive. One poor man, Knowles, had gone out to America, and regularly sent home money to his family to pay the rent. They found other uses for it, and when the storm came he was two years and a half in arrears. In another instance, two brothers held contiguous holdings, and were in a manner partners. One was fonder of Athy than of agriculture; the other a steady husbandman. Four years’ arrears had grown up against the one; only a half-year’s gale against the other. Clearly this difference originated outside of the fall of prices! In a third case, a tenant wrote to Mr. Trench begging to have something done, as he had the money to pay, and wanted to pay, but “didn’t dare.”
From Mr. Dunne’s we drove to Mr. Kilbride’s, another ample, very comfortable house—not so thoroughly well fitted up with bathroom and other modern appurtenances as Mr. Dunne’s perhaps—but still a very good house. It stands on a large green knoll, rather bare of trees, and commands a fine sweep of landscape.
Mr. Hutchins drove me to the little road which leads up past the “Land League village” to the house of Father Maher, and there set me down.
I walked up and found the curate at home—a tall, slender, well-made young priest, with a keen, intelligent face. He received me very politely, and, when I showed him the card of an eminent dignitary of the Church, with cordiality.
I found him full of sympathy with the people of his parish, but neither vehement nor unfair. He did not deny that there were tenants on Lord Lansdowne’s estate who were amply able to pay their rents; but he did most emphatically assert that there were not a few of them who really could not pay their rents.
“I assure you,” he said, “there are some of them who cannot even pay their dues to their priest, and when I say that, you will know how pinched and driven they must indeed be.” It was in view of these tenants that he seemed to justify the course of Mr. Dunne and Mr. Kilbride. “They must all stand or fall together.” He had nothing to say to the discredit of Lord Lansdowne; but he spoke with some bitterness of the agent, Mr. Townsend Trench, as having protested against Lord Lansdowne’s mak ing reductions here while he had himself made the same reductions on the neighbouring estate of Mrs. Adair.
“In truth,” he said, “Mr. Trench has made all this trouble worse all along. He is too much of a Napoleon”—and with a humorous twinkle in his eye as he spoke—“too much of a Napoleon the Third.
“I was just reading his father’s book when you came in. Here it is,” and he handed me a copy of Trench’s Realities of Irish Life.
“Did you ever read it? This Mr. Trench, the father, was a kind of Napoleon among agents in his own time, and the son, you see, thinks it ought to be understood that he is quite as great a man as his father. Did you never hear how he found a lot of his father’s manuscripts once, and threw them all in the fire, calling out as he did so, ‘There goes some more of my father’s vanity?’”
About his people, and with his people, Father Maher said he “felt most strongly.” How could he help it? He was himself the son of an evicted father.
“Of course, Father Maher,” I said, “you will understand that I wish to get at both sides of this question and of all questions here. Pray tell me then, where I shall find the story of the Luggacurren property most fully and fairly set forth in print?”
Without a moment’s hesitation he replied, “By far the best and fairest account of the whole matter you will get in the Irish correspondence of the London Times.”
How the conflict would end he could not say. But he was at a loss to see how it could pay Lord Lansdowne to maintain it.
He very civilly pressed me to stay and lunch with him, but when I told him I had already accepted an invitation from Mr. Hutchins, he very kindly bestirred himself to find my jarvey.
I hastened back to the lodge, where I found a very pleasant little company. They were all rather astonished, I thought, by the few words I had to say of Father Maher, and especially by his frank and sensible recommendation of the reports in the London Times as the best account I could find of the Luggacurren difficulty. To this they could not demur, but things have got, or are getting, in Ireland, I fear, to a point at which candour, on one side or the other of the burning questions here debated, is regarded with at least as much suspicion as the most deliberate misrepresentation. As to Mr. Town send Trench, what Father Maher failed to tell me, I was here told: That down to the time of the actual evictions he offered to take six months’ rent from the tenants, give them a clean book, and pay all the costs. To refuse this certainly looks like a “war measure.”
But for the loneliness of her life here, Mrs. Hutchins tells me she would find it delightful. The country is exceedingly lovely in the summer and autumn months.
When my car came out to take me back to Athy, I found my jarvey in excellent spirits, and quite friendly even with Mr. Hutchins himself. He kept up a running fire of lively commentaries upon the residents whose estates we passed.
“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 passed by Sir James Allport’s committee against the “amenities of railway travelling in Ireland.”
DUBLIN, Saturday, 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 spacious old last-century houses of Dublin; the counting-room is installed with dark, old-fashioned 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 mur dered in the highway here in Ireland many years ago, under peculiarly atrocious circumstances, 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 scrap 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 harassed, 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, pronounced by the valuers of the Land Court to be one of the best grazing mountains in Ireland.