DUBLIN, Thursday, March 1.—This has been a crowded day. I left Portumna very early on a car with Mr. Tener, intending to visit the scene of his latest collision with the “National” government of Ireland, on my way to Loughrea. It was a bright spring morning, more like April in Italy than like March in America, and the country is full of natural beauty. We made our first halt at the derelict house of Martin Kenny, one of the “victims” of the famous “Woodford evictions,” so called, as I have said, because Woodford is the nearest town.13 The eviction here took place October 21st, 1887. The house has been dismantled by the neighbours since that time, each man carrying off a door, or a shutter, or whatever best suited him. One of the constables who followed us as Mr. Tener’s body-guard had been present at the eviction. He came into the house with us, and very graphically described the performance. The house was still full of heavy stones taken into it, partly to block the entrances, and partly as ammunition; and trunks of trees used as chevaux defrise still protruded through the door and the window. These trees had been cut down by the garrison in the woodlands here and there all over the property. I asked if the law in Ireland punished depredations of this sort, and was informed that trees planted by tenants, if registered by them within a certain time, are the property of the tenants. This would astonish our landlords in America, where the tenant who sticks so much as a sunflower into his garden-patch makes a present of it to his landlord.14
I asked if the place made a long defence. Mr. Tener and the constable both laughed, and the former told me that when the storming party arrived shortly after daybreak, they found the house garrisoned only by some small boys, who had been left there to keep watch. The men were fast asleep at some other place. The small boys ran away as fast as possible to give the alarm, but the police went in, and in a jiffey pulled to pieces the elaborate defences prepared to repel them. Father Coen, the constable said, got to Kenny’s house an hour after it was all over, with a mob of people howling and groaning. But the work had been done, and other work also at the Castle of Cloondadauv, to which we next drove.
This place takes its truly awe-inspiring name from a ruined Norman tower standing on a picturesque promontory of no great height, which juts out into the lovely lake here made by the Shannon. At no great expense this tower might be so restored as to make an ideal fishing-box. It now simply adorns the holding formerly occupied by Mr. John Stanislaus Burke, a former tenant of Lord Clanricarde. The story of its capture on the 17th of September is worth telling.
Some days before the evictions were to come off, a meeting was held at Woodford or Loughrea, at which one of the speakers, the patriotic Dr. Tully, rather incautiously and exultingly told his hearers that the defence in 1886 of the tenant’s house known as “Fort Saunders” had been a grand and gallant affair indeed, but that next time “the exterminators would have to storm a castle”!
This put Mr. Tener at once on the alert, and as Mr. Burke of Cloondadauv was set down for eviction, it didn’t require much cogitation to fix upon the fortress destined to be “stormed.” So he set about the campaign. The County Inspector of the constabulary, who had made a secret reconnaissance, reported that he found the place too strong to be taken if defended, except “by artillery.” So it was determined to take it by surprise.
When the previous evictions were made, the agent and the public forces had marched from Portumna by the highway to Woodford, so that, of course, their advent was announced by the scouts and sentinels of the League from hill to hill long before they reached the scene of action, and abundant time was given to the agitators for organising a “reception.” Mr. Tener profited by the experience of his predecessors. He contrived to get his force of constabulary through the town of Portumna without attracting any popular attention. And as early rising is not a popular virtue here, he resolved to steal a march on the defenders of Cloondadauv.
He had brought up certain large boats to Portumna, and put them on the lake. Rousing his men before dawn, he soon had them all embarked, and on their way swiftly and silently by the river and the lake to Cloondadauv. They reached the promontory by daybreak, and as soon as the hour of legal action had arrived they were landed, and surrounded the “castle.” The ancient portal was found to be blocked with heavy stones and trunks of trees, nor did any adit appear to be available, till a young gentleman who had accompanied the party as a volunteer, discovered in one wall of the tower, at some little height from the ground, the vent of one of those conduits not infrequently found running down through the walls of old castles, which were used sometimes as waste-ways for rubbish from above, and sometimes to receive water-pipes from below. Looking up into this vent, he saw a rope hanging free within it. Upon this he hauled resolutely, and finding it firmly attached above, came to the conclusion that it must have been fixed there by the garrison as a means of access to the interior.
Like an adventurous young tar, he bade his comrades stand by, and nimbly “swarmed” up the rope, without thought or care of what might await him at the top. In a few moments his shouts from above proclaimed the capture of the stronghold. It was absolutely deserted; the garrison, confident that no attack would that day be made, had gone off to the nearest village. The interior of the castle was found filled with munitions of war, in the shape of huge beams and piles of stones laboriously carried up the winding stairs, and heaped on all the landing-places in readiness for use. On the flat roof of the castle was established a sort of furnace for heating water or oil, to be poured down upon the besiegers; and crowbars lay there in readiness to loosen out and dislodge the battlements, and topple them over upon the assailants.
The officers soon made their way all over the building, and thence proceeded to the residence of Mr. Burke near by, a large and very commodious house. All the formalities were gone through with, a detachment of policemen was put in charge, and the rest of the forces set out on their return to Portumna, before the organised “defenders” of Cloondadauv, hastily called out of their comfortable beds or from their breakfast-tables had realised the situation, and got the populace into motion. A mass meeting was held in the neighbourhood, and many speeches were made. But the castle and the farm-house and the holding all remain in the hands of a cool, quiet, determined-looking young Ulsterman, who tells me that he is getting on very well, and feels quite able with his police-guard to protect himself. “Once in a while,” he said, “they come here from Loughrea with English Parliament-men, and stand outside of the gate, and call me ‘Clanricarde’s dog,’ and make like speeches at me; but I don’t mind them, and they see it, and go away again.”
Of Mr. Burke, the evicted tenant here, Mr. Crawford, the Protestant clergyman at Portumna, told me that he was abundantly able to pay his rent. The whole debt for which Burke was evicted was £115; and Mr. Crawford said he had himself offered Burke £300 for the holding. Burke would have gladly taken this, but “the League wouldn’t let him.” When his right was put up for sale at Galway for £5, he did not dare to buy it in, and he is now living with his wife and children on the League funds. Lord Clanricarde’s agent offered to take him back and restore his right if he would pay what he owed; but he dared not accept. This farm comprises over one hundred and ten English acres, which Burke held at a rent—fixed by the Land Court—of £77, the valuation for taxes being £83.
To call the eviction of such a tenant in such circumstances from such a holding a “sentence of death,” is making ducks and drakes of the English language. Mr. Crawford’s opinion, founded upon a thorough personal knowledge of the region, is that there is no exceptional distress in this part of Ireland, and that over-renting has nothing to do with such distress as does exist here. The case of a man named Egan, one of the “victims” of the Woodford evictions of 1886, certainly bears out this view of the matter. Egan, who was a tenant, not at all of Lord Clanricarde, but of a certain Mrs. Lewis, had occupied for twenty years a holding of about sixteen Irish acres, or more than twenty English acres. This he held at a yearly rental of £8, 15s., being 9d. over the valuation.
In August 1886 he was evicted for refusing to pay one year’s rent then due. At that time the crops standing on the land were valued by him at £60, 13s. He also owned six beasts. In other words, this man, when he was called upon to pay a debt of £8, 15s. had in his own possession, beside the valuable tenant-right of his holding, more than a hundred pounds sterling of merchantable assets. He refused to pay, and he was evicted.
This was in August 1886. But such are the ideas now current in Ireland as to the relations of landlord and tenant, that immediately after his eviction Egan sent his daughter to gather some cabbages off the farm as if nothing had happened. The Emergency men in charge actually objected, and sent the damsel away. Thereupon Egan, on the 6th of September, served a legal notice on Mrs. Lewis, his landlady, requiring her either to let him take all the crops on the farm, or to pay him their value, estimated by him, as I have said, at £60, 13s. Two days after this, on the 8th of September, more than a hundred men came to the place by night and removed the greater portion of the crops. Not wishing a return of these visitors, Mrs. Lewis, on the 16th of September, sent word to Egan to come and take away what was left of the crops; one of the horses employed in the nocturnal harvest of September 8th having been seized by the police and identified as belonging to Egan. Egan did not respond; but in July 1887 he brought an action against his landlady to recover £100 sterling for her “detention of his goods,” and her “conversion of the same to her own use ”!
The case was heard by the Recorder at Kilmainham, and the facts which I have briefly recited were established by the evidence. The daughter of this extraordinary “victim” Egan appeared as a witness, so “fashionably dressed” as to attract a remark on the subject from the defendant’s counsel. To this she replied that “her brothers in America sent her money.”
“If your brothers in America sent you money for such purposes,” not unnaturally observed the Recorder, “why did they allow your father to sacrifice crops worth £60 for the non-payment of £8, 15s.?”
“They were tired of that,” said the young lady airily; “the land wasn’t worth the rent!”
That is to say, a farm which yielded a crop of £60, and pastured several head of cattle, was not worth £8, 15s. a year. Certainly it was not worth £8, 15s. a year if the tenant under the operation of the existing or the impending laws of Great Britain in Ireland could get, or hope to get it for the half of that rent, or for no rent at all.
But this being thus, on what grounds are the rest of mankind invited to regard this excellent man as a “victim” worthy of sympathy and of material aid? How had he come to be in arrears of a year in August 1886? The proceedings at Kilmainham tell us this.
In November 1885 he had demanded, with other tenants of Mrs. Lewis, a reduction of 50 per cent. This would have given him his holding at a rental of £4, 7s. 6d. Mrs. Lewis refused the concession, and a month afterwards an attempt was made to blow up her son’s house with dynamite. Between that time and August 1886, all the efforts of her son, who was also her agent, to collect her dues by seizing beasts, were defeated by the driving away of the cattle, so that no remedy but an eviction was left to her. I take it for granted that Mrs. Lewis had a family to maintain, and debts of one sort and another to pay, as well as Mr. Egan—but I observe this material difference between her position and his during the whole of this period of “strained relations” between herself and her tenant, that whereas she lay completely out of the enjoyment of the rent due her, being the interest on her capital, represented in her title to the land, Mr. Egan remained in the complete enjoyment and use of the land. Clearly the tenant was in a better position than the landlord, and as we are dealing not with the history of Ireland in the past, but with the condition of Ireland at present, it appears to me to be quite beside the purpose to ask my sympathies for Mr. Egan on the ground that a century or half a century ago the ancestors of Mr. Egan may have been at the mercy of the ancestors of Mrs. Lewis. However that may have been, Mr. Egan seems to me now to have had legally much the advantage of Mrs. Lewis. Not only this. Both legally and materially Mr. Egan, the tenant-farmer at Woodford, seems to me to have had much the advantage of thousands of his countrymen living and earning their livelihood by their daily labour in such a typical American commonwealth, for example, as Massachusetts. I have here with me the Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Statistics of Massachusetts. From this I learn that in 1876 the average yearly wages earned by workmen in Massachusetts were $482.72, or in round numbers something over £96. Out of this amount the Massachusetts workman had to feed, clothe, and house himself, and those dependent on him.
His outlay for rent alone was on the average $109.07, or in round numbers rather less than £22, making 22-1/2 per cent, of his earnings.
How was it with Mr. Egan? Out of his labour on his holding he got merchantable crops worth £60 sterling, or in round numbers $300, besides producing in the shape of vegetables and dairy stuff, pigs and poultry, certainly a very large proportion of the food necessary for his household, and raising and fattening beasts, worth at a low estimate £20 or $100 more. And while thus engaged, his outlay for rent, which included not only the house in which he lived, but the land out of which he got the returns of his labour expended upon it, was £8, 15s., or considerably less than one-half the outlay of the Massachusetts workman upon the rent of nothing more than a roof to shelter himself and his family. Furthermore, the money thus paid out by the Massachusetts workman for rent was simply a tribute paid for accommodation had and enjoyed, while out of every pound sterling paid as rent by the Irish tenant there reverted to his credit, so long as he continued to fulfil his legal obligations, a certain proportion, calculable, valuable, and saleable, in the form of his tenant-right.
I am not surprised to learn that the Recorder dismissed the suit brought by Mr. Egan, and gave costs against him. But the mere fact that in such circumstances it was possible for Egan to bring such a suit, and get a hearing for it, makes it quite clear that Americans of a sympathetic turn of mind can very easily find much more meritorious objects of sympathy than the Irish tenant-farmers of Galway without crossing the Atlantic in quest of them.
From Cloondadauv to Loughrea we had a long but very interesting drive, passing on the way, and at no great distance from each other, Father Coen’s neat, prosperous-looking presbytery of Ballinakill, and the shop and house of a local boat-builder named Tully, who is pleasantly known in the neighbourhood as “Dr. Tully,” by reason of his recommendation of a very particular sort of “pills for landlords.” The presbytery is now occupied by Father Coen, who finds it becoming his position as the moral teacher and guide of his people to be in arrears of two and a half years with the rent of his holding, and who is said to have entertained Mr. Blunt and other sympathising statesmen very handsomely on their visit to Loughrea and Woodford,15 “Dr.” Tully being one of the guests invited to meet them.16 Not far from this presbytery, Mr. Tener showed me the scene of one of the most cowardly murders which have disgraced this region. Of Loughrea, the objective of our drive this morning, Sir George Trevelyan, I am told, during his brief rule in Ireland, found it necessary to say that murder had there become an institution. Woodford, previously a dull and law-abiding spot, was illuminated by a lurid light of modern progress about three years ago, upon the transfer thither in the summer of 1885 of a priest from Loughrea, familiarly known as “the firebrand priest.”
In November of that year, as I have already related, Mr. Egan and other tenants of Mrs. Lewis of Woodford made their demand for a 50 per cent. reduction of their rents, upon the refusal of which an attempt was made with dynamite on the 18th December to blow up the house of Mrs. Lewis’s son and agent. All the bailiffs in the region round about were warned to give up serving processes, and many of them were cowed into doing so. One man, however, was not cowed. This was a gallant Irish soldier, discharged with honour after the Crimean war, and known in the country as “Balaklava,” because he was one of the “noble six hundred,” who there rode “into the jaws of death, into the valley of hell.” His name was Finlay, and he was a Catholic. At a meeting in Woodford, Father Coen (the priest now in arrears), it is said, looked significantly at Finlay, and said, “no process-server will be got to serve processes for Sir Henry Burke of Marble Hill.” The words and the look were thrown away on the veteran who had faced the roar and the crash of the Russian guns, and later on, in December 1885, Finlay did his duty, and served the processes given to him. From that moment he and his wife were “boycotted.” His own kinsfolk dared not speak to him. His house was attacked by night. He was a doomed man. On the 3d March 1886, about 2 o’clock P.M., he left his house—which Mr. Tener pointed out to me—to cut fuel in a wood belonging to Sir Henry Burke, at no great distance. Twice he made the journey between his house and the wood. The third time he went and returned no more. His wife growing uneasy at his prolonged absence went out to look for him. She found his body riddled with bullets lying lifeless in the highway. The police who went into Woodford with the tale report the people as laughing and jeering at the agony of the widowed woman. She was with them, and, maddened by the savage conduct of these wretched creatures, she knelt down over-against the house of Father Egan, and called down the curse of God upon him.
On the next day things were worse. No one could be found to supply a coffin for the murdered man.17 When the police called upon the priests to exert their influence and enforce some semblance at least of Christian and Catholic decency upon the people confided to their charge, the priests not only refused to do their duty, but floutingly referred the police to Lady Mary Burke. “He did her work,” they said, “let her send a hearse now to bury him.” The lady thus insolently spoken of is one of the best of the Catholic women of Ireland. At her summons Father Burke, a few years only before his death, I remember, made a long winter journey, though in very bad health, from Dublin to Marble Hill to soothe the last hours and attend the death-bed of her husband.
No one who knew and loved him can wish him to have lived to hear from her lips such a tale of the degradation of Catholic priests in his own land of Galway.
Mr. Tener pointed out to me, at another place on the road, near Ballinagar, the deserted burying-ground in which, after much trouble, a grave was found for the brave old soldier who had escaped the Russian cannon-balls to be so foully done to death by felons of his own race. There the last rites were performed by Father Callaghy, a priest who was himself “boycotted” for resigning the presidency of the League in his parish, and for the still graver offence of paying his rent. For weeks it was necessary to guard the grave!18
From that day to this no one has been brought to justice for this crime, committed in broad daylight, and within sight of the highway. Mr. Place, whom I saw at Portumna, told me that he believed the police had no moral doubt as to the murderer of Finlay, but that it was useless to think of getting legal evidence to convict him.
Mr. Tener tells me that when Mr. Wilfrid Blunt came to Woodford he went with Father Egan, and accompanied by the police, to see the widow of this murdered man, heard from her own lips the sickening story, and took notes of it. But when Mr. Rowlands, M.P., an English “friend of Home Rule,” was examined the other day during the trial of Mr. Blunt, he was obliged to confess that though he had visited Woodford more than once, and conversed freely with Mr. Blunt about it, he had “never heard of the murder of Finlay.”
Such an incident is apparently of little interest to politicians at Westminster. Fortunately for Ireland, it is of a nature to command more attention at the Vatican.
Nature has sketched the scenery of this part of Ireland with a free, bold hand. It is not so grand or so wild as the scenery of Western Donegal, but it has both a wildness and a grandeur of its own. Sir Henry Burke’s seat of Marble Hill, as seen in the distance from the road, stands superbly, high up on a lofty range of wooded hills, from which it commands the country for miles. And no town I have seen in Ireland is more picturesquely placed than Loughrea. It has an almost Italian aspect as you approach it from Woodford. But no lake in Lombardy or Piedmont is so peculiarly and exquisitely tinted as the lough on which it stands. The delicate grey-green of the sparkling waters reminded me of the singular and well-defined belts and stretches of chrysoprase upon which you sometimes come in sailing through the dark azure of the Southern Seas. I have never before seen precisely such a hue in any body of fresh water. The lake is incorrectly described, Mr. Tener tells me, in the guide-books, as being one of the many curious developments of the Lower Shannon. It is fed by springs, but if, like the river-lakes, it was formed by a solution of the limestone, this fact may have some chemical relation with its very peculiar colour. It contains three picturesque islands. No stream flows into it, but two streams issue from it. The town of Loughrea is an ancient holding of the De Burghs, and the estate-office of Lord Clanricarde is here in one wing of a great barrack, standing, as I understood Mr. Tener to say, on the site of a former fortress of the family. Lord Clanricarde’s property here is put down by Mr. Hussey de Burgh at 49,025 acres in County Galway, valued at £19,634, and at 3576 acres in the county of the City of Galway, valued at £1202. These, I believe, are statute acres, and in estimating the relation of Irish rentals to Irish land this fact must be always ascertained. Of the so-called “Woodford” property the present rental is no more than £1900, payable by 260 tenants. The Poor-Law valuation for taxes is £2400. There was a revision of the whole Galway property made by the father of the present Marquis. Of the 260 Woodford holdings only twelve were increased, in no case more than 6-1/4 per cent, over the valuation. In 1882 six of these twelve tenants applied to the Land Court. The rents were in no case restored to the figures before 1872, but about 7 per cent. was taken off the increased rental. The assertion repeatedly made that in 1882 rents were reduced by the Land Court 50 per cent. on the Clanricarde estates, Mr. Tener tells me, is absolutely false. In the first year of the Court no reduction went beyond 10 per cent., and in later years, even under the panic of low prices, the average has not exceeded 20 per cent.
After making arrangements for a car to take me on to Woodlawn, where I was to catch the Dublin train, I went out with Mr. Tener to look at the town.
My drive from Loughrea to Woodlawn was delightful. It took me over a long stretch of the best hunting country of Galway, and my jarvey was a Galwegian of the type dear to the heart of Lever. He was a “Nationalist” after his fashion, but he did not hesitate to come rattling up through the town to the Estate Office to take me up; and after we got fairly off upon the highway, he spoke with more freedom than respect of all sorts and conditions of men in and about Loughrea.
“He’s a sharp little man, that Mr. Tener,” he said, “and he gave the boys a most beautiful beating at Burke’s place.”
This was said with genuine gusto, and not at all in the querulous spirit of the delightful member of Parliament who complained at Westminster with unconscious humour that the agent and the police in that case had “dishonourably” stolen a march on the defenders of Cloondadauv!
“But we’ve beaten them entirely,” he said, with equal zest, “at Marble Hill. Sir Henry has agreed to pay all the costs, and the living expenses too, of the poor men that were put out.19 I didn’t ever think we’d get that; but ye see the truth is,” he added confidentially, “he must have the money, Sir Henry—he’s lying out of a deal, and then there’s heavy charges on the property. A fine property it is indeed!”
“In fact,” I said, “you put Sir Henry to the wall. Is that it?”
“Well, it’s like that. But we shan’t get that out of Clanricarde, I’m thinking. He’s got a power o’ money they tell me; and he’s that of the ould Burke blood, he won’t mind fighting just as long as you like!”
As we drove along, he pointed out to me several fine stretches of hunting country, and, to my surprise, informed me that only the other day “there was as fine a meet as ever you saw, more than a hundred ladies and gentlemen—a grand sight it was.”
I asked if the hunting had not been “put down by the League.”
“Oh, now then, sir, who’d be wanting to put down the hunting here in Galway?—and Ballinasloe? Were you ever at Ballinasloe? just the grandest horse fair there is in the whole wide world!”
I insisted that I had always heard a great deal about the opposition of the League to hunting.
“Oh, that’ll be some little lawyer fellow,” he replied, “like that Healy, that can’t sit on a horse! It’s the grandest country in all the world for riding over. What for wouldn’t they ride over it?”
“Were there many went out to America from about Loughrea?”
“Oh, yes; they were always coming and going. But as many came back.”
“Oh, they didn’t like the country. It wasn’t as good a country, was it, as old Ireland? And they had to work too hard; and then some of them got money, and they’d like to spend it in the old place.”
The country about Woodlawn is very picturesque and well wooded, and for a long distance we followed the neatly-kept stone walls of the large and handsome park of Lord Ashtown.
“The most beautiful and biggest trees in all Ireland, sorr,” said the jarvey, “and it’s a great pity, it is, ye can’t stay to let me drive you all over it, for the finest part of the park is just what you can’t see from this road. Oh, her ladyship would never object to any gentleman driving about to see the beauties of the place. She is a very good woman, is her ladyship. She gave work the last Christmas to thirty-two men, and there wasn’t another house in the country there that had work for more than ten or twelve. A very good woman she is, indeed.”
“Yes, that is a very handsome church, it is indeed. It is the Protestant Church. Lord Ashtown built it; he was a very good man too, and did a power of good—building and making roads, and giving work to the people. He was buried there in that Castle, over the station—Trench’s Castle, they called it.”
“All that lumber there by the station?”
“That came out of the Ashtown woods. They were always cutting down the trees; there was so many of them you might be cutting for years—you would never get to the end of them.”
Woodlawn Station is one of the neatest and prettiest railway stations I have seen in Ireland—more like a picturesque stone cottage, green and gay with flowers, than like a station. The station-master’s family of cheery well-dressed lads and lasses went and came about the bright fire in the waiting-room in a friendly unobtrusive fashion, chatting with the policeman and the porter and the passengers. It was hard to believe one’s-self within an easy drive of the “cockpit of Ireland.”
BORRIS, Friday, March 2d.—This is the land of the Kavanaghs, and a lovely, picturesque, richly-wooded land it is. I left Dublin with Mr. Gyles by an afternoon train; the weather almost like June. We ran from the County of Dublin into Kildare, and from Kildare into Carlow, through hills; rural scenery quite unlike anything I have hitherto seen in Ireland. At Bagnalstown, a very pretty place, with a spire which takes the eye, our host joined us, and came on with us to this still more attractive spot. Borris has been the seat of his family for many centuries. The MacMorroghs of Leinster, whom the Kavanaghs lineally represent, dwelt here long before Dermot MacMorrogh, finding his elective throne in Leinster too hot to hold him, went off into Aquitaine, to get that famous “letter of marque” from Henry II. of England, with the help of which this king without a kingdom induced Richard de Clare, an earl without an earldom, to lend him a hand and bring the Normans into Ireland. Many of this race lie buried in the ruins of St. Mullen’s Abbey, on the Barrow, in this county. But none of them, I opine, ever did such credit to the name as its present representative, Arthur MacMorrogh Kavanagh.
I had some correspondence with Mr. Kavanagh several years ago, when he sent me, through my correspondent for publication in New York, a very striking statement of his views on the then condition of Irish affairs—views since abundantly vindicated; and like most people who have paid any attention to the recent history of Ireland, I knew how wonderful an illustration his whole career has been of what philosophers call the superiority of man to his accidents, and plain people the power of the will. But I knew this only imperfectly. His servant brought him up to the carriage and placed him in it. This it was impossible not to see. But I had not talked with him for five minutes before it quite passed out of my mind. Never was there such a justification of the paradoxical title which Wilkinson gave to his once famous book, The Human Body, and its Connexion with Man,—never such a living refutation of the theory that it is the thumb which differentiates man from the lower animals. Twenty times this evening I have been reminded of the retort I heard made the other day at Cork by a lawyer, who knows Mr. Kavanagh well, to a priest of “Nationalist” proclivities, who knows him not at all. Some allusion having been made to Borris, the lawyer said to me, “You will see at Borris the best and ablest Irishman alive.” On this the priest testily and tartly broke in, “Do you mean the man without hands or feet?”
“I mean,” replied the lawyer, very quietly, “the man in whom all that has gone in you or me to arms and legs has gone to heart and head!”
Borris House stands high in the heart of an extensive and nobly wooded park, and commands one of the finest landscapes I have seen in Ireland. As we stood and gazed upon it from the hall door, the distant hills were touched with a soft purple light such as transfigures the Apennines at sunset.
“You should see this view in June,” said Mrs, Kavanagh, “we are all brown and bare now.”
Brown and bare, like most other terms, are relative. To the eye of an American this whole region now seems a sea of verdure, less clear and fresh, I can easily suppose, than it may be in the early summer, but verdure still. And one must get into the Adirondacks, or up among the mountains of Western Virginia, to find on our Atlantic slope such trees as I have this evening seen. One grand ilex near the house could hardly be matched in the Villa d’Este.
The house is stately and commodious, and more ancient than it appears to be,—so many additions have been made to it at different times. It has passed through more than one siege, and in the ’98 Mr. Kavanagh tells me the townspeople of Borris came up here and sought refuge. There are vast caverns under the house and grounds, doubtless made by taking out from the hill the stone used in building this house, and the fortresses which stood here before it. In these all sorts of stores were kept, and many of the people found shelter.
I need not say that there is a banshee at Borris—though no living witness, I believe, has heard its warning wail. But as we sat in the beautiful library, and watched the dying light of day, a lady present told us a tale more gruesome than many of those in which the “psychical” inquirers delight. She was sitting, she said, in an upper room of an ancient mansion here in Carlow, in which she lives, when, from the lawn below, there came up to her a low, sad, shrill cry—the croon of a woman, such as one hears from the mourners sitting among the turbaned tombstones of the hill of Eyoub at Constantinople. It startled her, and she held her breath and listened. She was alone, as she knew, in that part of the house, and the hall door below was unlocked, as is the fashion still in Ireland, despite all the troubles and turmoils. Again the sound came, and this time nearer to the house. Could it be the banshee? Again and again it rose and died away, each time nearer and nearer. Then, as she listened, all her nerves strung to the keenest sensibility, it came again, and now, beyond a doubt, within the hall below.
With an effort she rose from her chair, opened a door leading into a corridor running aside from the main stairway, and fled at full speed towards the wing in which she knew that she would find some of the maids. As she sped along she heard the cry again and again far behind her, as from a creature slowly and steadily mounting the grand stairway towards the room which she had just quitted.
She found the maids, who fell into a terrible fright when she told her story and dared not budge. So the bells were violently rung till the butler and footman appeared. To the first she said simply, “There is a mad woman in this house—go and find her!”
“The man looked at me,” she said, “as I spoke with a curious expression in his face as of one who thought, ‘yes, there is a mad woman in the house, and she is not far to seek!’”
But the lady insisted, and the men finally went off on their quest. In the course of half an hour it was rewarded. The mad woman—a dangerous creature—who had wandered away from an asylum in the neighbourhood, was found curled up and fast asleep in the lady’s own bed!
Fancy a delicate woman going alone into her bedroom at midnight to be suddenly confronted by an apparition of that sort!
BORRIS, March 3d.—After a stroll on the lawn this morning, the wide and glorious prospect bathed in the light of a really soft spring day, I had a conversation with Mr. Kavanagh about the Land Corporation, of which he is the guiding spirit. This is a defensive organisation of the Irish landlords against the Land League. When a landlord has been driven into evicting his tenants, the next step, in the “war against landlordism,” is to prevent other tenants from taking the vacated lands and cultivating them. This is accomplished by “boycotting” any man who does this as a “land-grabber.”
The ultimate sanction of the “boycott” being “murder,” derelict farms increased under this system very rapidly; and the Eleventh Commandment of the League, “Thou shalt not pay the rent which thy neighbour hath refused to pay,” was in a fair way to dethrone the Ten Commandments of Sinai throughout Ireland, even before the formal adoption in 1886 of the “Plan of Campaign.”
Mr. Gladstone would perhaps have hit the facts more accurately, if, instead of calling an eviction in Ireland a “sentence of death,” he had called the taking of a tenancy a sentence of death. Mr. Hussey at Lixnaw had two tenants, Edmond and James Fitzmaurice. Edmond Fitzmaurice was “evicted” in May 1887; but he was taken into the house of a neighbour, made very comfortable, and still lives. James Fitzmaurice took, for the sake of the family, the land from which Edmond was evicted, and for this he was denounced as a “land-grabber,” boycotted, and finally shot dead in the presence of his daughter.
At a meeting in Dublin in the autumn of 1885, a parish priest, the Rev. Mr. Cantwell, described it as a “cardinal virtue” that “no one should take a farm from which another had been evicted,” and called upon the people who heard him to “pass any such man by unnoticed, and treat him as an enemy in their midst.” Public opinion and the law, if not the authorities of his church would make short work of any priest who talked in this fashion in New York. But in Ireland, and under the British Government, it seems they order things differently. So it occurred one day to the landlords thus assailed, as it did to the sea-lions of the Cape of Good Hope when the French sailors attacked them, that they might defend themselves.
To this end the Land Corporation was instituted, with a considerable capital at its back, and Mr. Kavanagh at its head. The “plan of campaign” of this Corporation is to take over from the landlords derelict lands and cultivate them, stocking them where that is necessary.
It is in this way that the derelict lands on the Ponsonby property at Youghal are now worked. But Mr. Kavanagh tells me that the men employed by the Corporation, of whom Father Keller spoke as a set of desperadoes or “enfants perdus,” are really a body of resolute and capable working men farmers. Many, but by no means all of them, are Protestants and Ulstermen; and that they are up to their work would seem to be shown by the fact stated to me, that in no case so far have any of them been deterred and driven off from the holdings confided to them. A great part of the Luggacurren property of Lord Lansdowne is now worked by the Corporation; and Mr. Kavanagh was kind enough to let me see the accounts, which indicate a good business result for the current year on that property. This is all very interesting. But what a picture it presents of social demoralisation! And what is to be the end of it all? Can a country be called civilised in which a farmer with a family to maintain, having the capital and the experience necessary to manage successfully a small farm, is absolutely forbidden, on pain of social ostracism, and eventually on pain of death, by a conspiracy of his neighbours, to take that farm of its lawful owner at what he considers to be a fair rent? And how long can any civilisation of our complex modern type endure in a country in which such a state of things tolerated by the alleged Government of that country has to be met, and more or less partially mitigated, by deviating to the cultivation of farms rendered in this way derelict large amounts of capital which might be, and ought to be, far more profitably employed in other ways?
Mr. Kavanagh, after serving the office of High Sheriff thirty years ago, first for Kilkenny, and then for Carlow, sat in Parliament for fourteen years, from 1866 to 1880, as an Irish county member. He has a very large property here in Carlow, and property also in Wexford, and in Kilkenny, and was sworn into the Privy Council two years ago. If the personal interests and the family traditions of any man alive can be said to be rooted in the Irish soil, this is certainly true of his interests and his traditions. How can the peace and prosperity of Ireland be served by a state of things which condemns an Irishman of such ties and such training to expend his energies and his ability in defending the elementary right of Paddy O’Rourke to take stock and work a ten-acre farm on terms that suit himself and his landlord?
In the afternoon we took a delightful walk through the woods, Mr. Kavanagh going with us on horseback. Every hill and clump of trees on this large domain he knows, and he led us like a master of woodcraft through all manner of leafy byways to the finest points of view. The Barrow flows past Borris, making pictures at every turn, and the banks on both sides are densely and beautifully wooded. We came in one place upon a sawmill at work in the forest, and Mr. Kavanagh showed us with pride the piles of excellent timber which he turns out here. But he took a greater pride in a group, sacred from the axe, of really magnificent Scotch firs, such as I had certainly not expected to find in Ireland. Nearer the mansion are some remarkable Irish yews. The gardens are of all sorts and very extensive, but we found the head-gardener bitterly lamenting the destruction by a fire in one of the conservatories of more than six thousand plants just prepared for setting out.
There are many curious old books and papers here, and a student of early Irish history might find matter to keep him well employed for a long time in this region. It was from this region and the race which ruled it, of which race Mr. Kavanagh is the actual representative, that the initiative came of the first Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland. Strongbow made what, from the Anglo-Norman point of view, was a perfectly legitimate bargain, with a dispossessed prince to help him to the recovery of his rights on the understanding that these rights, when recovered, should pass in succession to himself through the only daughter of the prince, whom he proposed to marry. It does not appear that Strongbow knew, or that Dermot MacMorrogh cared to tell him, how utterly unlike the rights of an Anglo-Norman prince were those of the elective life-tenant of an Irish principality. FitzStephen, the son by her second marriage of Nesta, the Welsh royal mistress of Henry Beauclerk, and his cousin, Maurice Fitzgerald, the leaders into Ireland of the Geraldines, were no more clear in their minds about this than Strongbow, and it is to the original muddle thus created that Professor Richey doubtless rightly refers the worst and most troublesome complications of the land question in Ireland. The distinction between the King’s lieges and the “mere Irish,” for example, is unquestionably a legal distinction, though it is continually and most mischievously used as if it were a proof of the race-hatred borne by the Normans and Saxons in Ireland from the first against the Celts. The O’Briens, the O’Neills, the O’Mullaghlins, the O’Connors, and the M‘Morroghs, “the five bloods,” as they are called, were certainly Celts, but whether in virtue of their being, or claiming to be, the royal races respectively of Minister, of Ulster, of Meath, of Connaught, and of Leinster, or from whatever other reason, these races were “within the king’s law,” and were never “mere Irish” from the first planting of the Anglo-Norman power in Ireland. The case of a priest, Shan O’Kerry, “an Irish enemy of the king,” presented “contrary to the form of statute” to the vicarage of Lusk, in the reign of Edward IV. (1465), illustrates this. An Act of Parliament was passed to declare the aforesaid “Shan O’Kerry,” or “John of Kevernon,” to be “English born, and of English nation,” and that he might “hold and enjoy the said benefice.”
There is a genealogy here of the M‘Morroghs and Kavanaghs, most gorgeously and elaborately gotten up many years ago for Mr. Kavanagh’s grandfather, which shows how soon the Norman and the native strains of blood become commingled. When one remembers how much Norman blood must have gone even into far-off Connaught when King John, in the early part of the thirteenth century, coolly gave away that realm of the O’Connors to the De Burgos, and how continually the English of the Pale fled from the exactions inflicted upon them by their own people, and sought refuge “among the savage and mere Irish,” one cannot help thinking that the“ Race Question” has been “worked for at least all it is worth” by philosophers bent on unravelling the ‘snarl’ of Irish affairs. If this genealogy may be trusted, there was little to choose between the ages which immediately preceded and the ages which followed the Anglo-Norman invasion in the matter of respect for human life. Celtic chiefs and Norman knights “died in their boots” as regularly as frontiersmen in Texas. One personage is designated in the genealogy as “the murderer,” for the truly Hibernian reason, so far as appears, that he was himself murdered while quite a youth, and before he had had a chance to murder more than three or four of his immediate relatives. It was as if the son of Geoffrey Plantagenet and the Lady Constance should be branded in history as “Arthur, the Assassin.”
BORRIS, March 4th.—This is a staunch Protestant house, and Mr. Kavanagh himself reads a Protestant service every morning. But there is little or nothing apparently in this part of Ireland of the bitter feeling about and against the Catholics which exists in the North. A very lively and pleasant Catholic gentleman came in to-day informally and joined the house party at luncheon. We all walked out over the property afterwards, visiting quite a different region from that which we saw yesterday—different but equally beautiful and striking, and this Catholic gentleman cited several cases which had fallen within his own knowledge of priests who begin to feel their moral control of the people slipping away from them through the operation of the “Plan of Campaign.” I told him what I had heard in regard to one such priest from my ecclesiastical friend in Cork. “It does not surprise me at all,” he said, “and, indeed, I not very long ago read precisely such another letter from a priest in a somewhat similar position. I read it with pain and shame as a Catholic,” he continued, “for it was simply a complete admission that the priest, although entirely convinced that his parishioners were making most unfair demands upon their landlord to whom the letter was addressed, felt himself entirely powerless to bring them to a sense of their misconduct.” “Had this priest given in his ad hesion to the Plan of Campaign?” I asked. “Yes,” was the reply, “and it was this fact which had broken his hold on the people when he tried to bring them to abandon their attitude under the Plan. His letter was really nothing more nor less than an appeal to the landlord, and that landlord a Protestant, to help him to get out of the hole into which he had put himself.”
Of the tenants and their relation to the village despots who administer the Plan of Campaign, this gentleman had many stories also to tell of the same tenor with all that I have hitherto heard on this subject. Everywhere it is the same thing. The well-to-do and well-disposed tenants are coerced by the thriftless and shiftless. “I have the agencies of several properties,” he said, “and in some of the best parts of Ireland. I have had little or no trouble on any of them, for I have one uniform method. I treat every tenant as if he were the only man I had to deal with, study his personal ways and character, humour him, and get him on my side against himself. You can always do this with an Irishman if you will take the trouble to do it. Within the past years I have had tenants come and tell me they were in fear the Plan of Campaign would be brought upon them, just as if it were a kind of potato disease, and beg me to agree to take the rent from them in that case, and just not discover on them that they had paid it before it was due!”
This gentleman is a pessimist as to the future. “I am a youngish man still,” he said, “and a single man, and I am glad of it. I don’t believe the English will ever learn how to govern this country, and I am sure it can never govern itself. Would your people make a State of it?”
To this I replied that with Cuba and Canada and Mexico, all still to be digested and assimilated, I thought the deglutition of Ireland by the great Republic must be remitted to a future much too remote to interest either of us.
“I suppose so,” he said in a humorously despondent tone; “and so I see nothing for people who think as I do, but Australia or New Zealand!”
Mr. Kavanagh sees the future, I think, in colouring not quite so dark. As a public man, familiar for years with the method and ways of British Parliaments, he seems to regard the possible future legislation of Westminster with more anxiety and alarm than the past or present agitations in Ireland. The business of banishing political economy to Jupiter and Saturn, however delightful it may be to the people who make laws, is a dangerous one to the people for whom the laws are made. While he has very positive opinions as to the wisdom of the concession made in the successive Land Acts for Ireland, which have been passed since 1870, he is much less disquieted, I think, by those concessions, than by the spirit by which the legislation granting them has been guided. He thinks great good has been already done by Mr. Balfour, and that much more good will be done by him if the Irish people are made to feel that clamorous resistance to the law will no longer be regarded at Westminster as a sufficient reason for changing the law. That is as much as to say that party spirit in Great Britain is the chief peril of Ireland to-day. And how can any Irishman, no matter what his state in his own country may be, or his knowledge of Irish affairs, or his patriotic earnestness and desire for Irish prosperity, hope to control the tides of party spirit in England or Scotland?
Of the influence upon the people in Ireland of the spirit of recent legislation for Ireland, the story of the troubles on the O’Grady estate, as Mr. Kavanagh tells it to me, is a most striking illustration. “The O’Grady of Kilballyowen,” as his title shows, is the direct representative, not of any Norman invader, but of an ancient Irish race. The O’Gradys were the heads of a sept of the “mere Irish”; and if there be such a thing—past, present, or future—as an “Irish nation,” the place of the O’Gradys in that nation ought to be assumed. Mr. Thomas De Courcy O’Grady, who now wears the historic designation, owns and lives on an estate of a little more than 1000 acres, in the Golden Vein of Ireland, at Killmallock, in the county of Limerick. The land is excellent, and for the last half-century certainly it has been let to the tenants at rents which must be considered fair, since they have never been raised. In 1845, two years before the great famine, the rental was £2142. This rental was paid throughout the famine years without difficulty; and in 1881 the rental stood at £2108.
There has never been an eviction on the estate until last year, when six tenants were evicted. All of these lived in good comfortable houses, and were prosperous dairy-farmers. Why were they evicted?
In October 1886, during the candidacy at New York of the Land Reformer, Mr. George, Mr. Dillon, M.P., propounded the “Plan of Campaign” at Portumna in Galway. The March rents being then due on the estate of The O’Grady in Limerick, his agent, Mr. Shine, was directed to continue the abatements of 15 per cent, on the judicial rents, and of 25 per cent, on all other rents, which had been cheerfully accepted in 1885. But there was a priest at Kilballyowen, Father Ryan, who wrought upon the tenants until they demanded a general abatement of 40 per cent. This being refused, they asked for 30 per cent. on the judicial rents, and 40 per cent. on the others. This also being refused, Father Ryan had his way, and the “Plan of Campaign” was adopted. The O’Grady’s writs issued against several of the tenants were met by a “Plan of Campaign” auction of cattle at Herbertstown in December 1886, the returns of which were paid into “the Fund.” For this, one of the tenants, Thomas Moroney, who held, besides a a farm of 37 Irish acres, a “public,” and five small houses, at Herbertstown, and the right to the tolls on cattle at the Herbertstown farm, valued at from £50 to £60 a year, and who held all these at a yearly rent of £85, was proceeded against. Judge Boyd pronounced him a bankrupt.
In the spring of 1887, after The O’Grady had been put to great costs and trouble, the tenants made a move. They offered to accept a general abatement of 17-1/2 per cent., “The O’Grady to pay all the costs.”
Here is the same story again of the small solicitors behind the “Plan of Campaign” promoting the strife, and counting on the landlords to defray the charges of battle!
The O’Grady responded with the following circular:—
KlLLBALLYOWEN, BRUFF, CO. LlMERICK,
13th August 1877.To my Tenants on Kilballyowen and Herbertstown Estate, Co. Limerick.
MY FRIENDS,—Pending the evictions by the Sheriff on my estate, caused by your refusal to pay judicial rents on offers of liberal abatements, I desire to remind you of the following facts:—
I am a resident landlord; my ancestors have dwelt amongst you for over 400 years; every tenant is personally known to me, and the most friendly relations have always existed between us.
I am not aware of there ever having been an eviction by the Sheriff on my estate.
Farming myself over 400 acres, and my late agent (Mr. Shine), a tenant farmer living within four miles of my property, I have every opportunity of realising and knowing your wants.
On the passing of the Land Act of 1881, I desired you to have any benefit it could afford you, and as you nearly all held under lease—which precluded you from going into court—I intimated to you my wish, and offered you to allow your lands to be valued at my expense, or to let you go into court and get your rents fixed by the sub-commissioners.
You elected to have a valuation made, and Mr. Edmond Moroney was agreed on as a land-valuer, possessing the confidence of tenants and landlord.
I may mention, up to then I had not known Mr. Moroney personally.
In 1883 Mr. Moroney valued your holdings, and, as a result, his valuation was accepted (except in three or four cases), and judicial agreements signed by you, at rents ascertained by Mr. Moroney’s valuation.
The late Patrick Hogan objected to Mr. Moroney’s valuation of his farm, and went into court, and had his rent fixed by the County Court Judge.
Thomas Moroney would not allow Mr. Edmond Moroney to value his holding, nor would he go into court, his reason no doubt being he should disclose the receipts of the amount of the tolls of the fairs.
The rents were subsequently paid on Mr. Moroney’s valuation with punctuality.
In 1885, recognising the fall in prices of stock and produce, and at the request of my late agent, Mr. Shine, I directed him to allow you 15 per cent. on all judicial rents, or rents abated on Mr. Moroney’s valuation, and 25 per cent. on all other rents, when you paid punctually and with thanks.
In October last, when calling in the March 1886 rents, at the instance of Mr. Shine, I agreed to con tinue the abatement of 15 per cent, and 25 per cent., which, when intimated to you, were refused, and a meeting held, demanding an all-round abatement of 40 per cent.
This I considered unreasonable and unjust, and I refused to give it.
The Plan of Campaign was then most unjustly adopted on the estate, and you refused to pay your rents.
Thomas Moroney was elected as a test case to try the legality of the sale and removal of your property to avoid payment of your rent. His tenancy was a mixed holding of house property in the village of Herbertstown, the tolls of the fairs, and 37 acres of land, at a rent of £85, and a Poor-Law valuation of £73, 5s., made as follows:—
Land valued at £42 5 0 Tolls of fair at 17 0 0 Public house and yard at 11 0 0 Five small houses and forge at 3 0 0 £73 5 0 I always was led to believe the tolls of the fair averaged from £50 to £60 a year, there being four fairs in the year; and I believe his reason for refusing to allow Mr. E. Moroney to value his holding, or to go into court, was that he should disclose the amount of the tolls, and in consequence I never considered he was entitled to any abatement; but still I gave it to him, and was prepared to do so. The result of his case was that his conduct in making away with his property was unjustifiable, and his farm and holding was sold out for the benefit of his creditors, and he is no longer a tenant on the estate.
I subsequently took proceedings against six other tenants, who refused payment of rent, and removed their cattle off the land to avoid payment, and having got judgment against them, the Sheriff sold out four of their farms, and writs of possession on the title were taken out against them, and are now lodged with the Sheriff for execution. I have also got judgments for possession against two other tenants for non-payment of rent, also lodged with the Sheriff. One the widow of Patrick Hogan, who got his rent fixed in the County Court, and the other Mrs. Denis Ryan, whose farm on her marriage I assented to be put in settlement for her protection, Mr. Shine, my agent, consenting to act as one of her trustees, whose name, with his co-trustee, Mr. Thomas FitzGerald, appear as defendants, they having signed her judicial agreement.
The following are the names of the above tenants, the extent of their holdings, the rent, the Poor-Law valuation, and the average rent per Irish acre:—
TENANT. Acreage in Irish Measure. Judicial Rent Less 20 per cent Rent per acre [A] Poor Law Valuation A. R. P. £ s. d. £ s. d. John Carroll 87 3 38 132 4 0 30/- 127 10 0 Honora Crimmins 35 0 27 64 5 6 36/6 52 15 0 James Baggott 18 0 0 37 16 10 42/- 22 5 0 Margaret Moloney 23 2 9 46 2 8 39/2 44 15 0 Mrs. Denis Ryan 66 2 3 93 2 5 28/- 96 0 0 Maryanne Hogan 53 2 33 112 0 0 41/8 117 15 0 294 3 30 485 11 5 ... 461 0 0 [A] Rent per Irish acre after abatement of 20 per cent.
This represents an average of 34s. the Irish acre, for some of the best land in Ireland, and shows a difference of only £24, 11s. 5d. between the rent, less 20 per cent. now offered, and Poor-Law valuation.
After putting me to the cost of these proceedings, and giving me every opposition and annoyance, amongst such, compelling my agent (by threats of boycotting) to resign, boycotting myself and household, preventing my servants from attending chapel, and driving my labourers away, negotiations for a settlement were opened, and you offered to accept an all-round abatement of 17-1/2 per cent. and to pay up one year’s rent, provided I paid all costs, including the costs in Moroney’s case; this of course I refused, but with a desire to aid you in coming to a settlement, and to prevent the loss to the tenants of the farms under eviction on the Title, I offered to allow the 17-1/2 per cent. all round on payment of one year’s rent and costs, and to give time for payment of the costs as stated in my Solicitor’s letter of the 2d June 1887 to Canon Scully.
This offer was refused, and the writs for possession have been lodged with the Sheriff.
I never commenced these proceedings in a vindictive spirit, or with any desire to punish any of you for your ungracious conduct, but simply to protect my property from unjust and unreasonable demands.
You will owe two years’ rent next month (September), and I now write you this circular letter to point out to each, individually, the position of the tenants under eviction, and even at this late hour to give them an opportunity of saving their holdings, to enable them to do so, and with a view to settlement, I am now prepared to allow 20 per cent. all round, on payment of a year’s rent and costs.
Under no circumstance will I forego payment of costs, as they must be paid in full.
If this money be paid forthwith, I will arrange with my brother, the purchaser, to restore the four holdings purchased by him at sheriff’s sale to the late tenants.
After this offer I disclaim any responsibility for the result of the evictions, and the loss attendant thereon, as it now remains with you to avert same.
All the evictions have since been carried out, and the Land Corporation men are at work upon the estate! Whom has all this advantaged? The tenants?—Certainly not. The O’Grady?—Certainly not. The peace and order of Ireland?—Certainly not. But it has given the National League another appeal to the intelligent “sympathies” of England and America. It has strengthened the revolutionary element in Irish society. It has “driven another nail into the coffin” of Irish landlordism and of the private ownership of land throughout Great Britain.
Such at least is the opinion of Mr. Kavanagh. If I were an Englishman or a Scotchman, I should be strongly inclined to take very serious account of this opinion in forecasting the future of landed property in England or Scotland.