IRELAND’S DISEASE.

IRELAND’S DISEASE

NOTES AND IMPRESSIONS
BY
PHILIPPE DARYL

THE AUTHOR’S ENGLISH VERSION

LONDON
GEORGE ROUTLEDGE AND SONS
BROADWAY, LUDGATE HILL
GLASGOW AND NEW YORK
1888

LONDON
BRADBURY, AGNEW, & CO., PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.

PREFACE.

These pages were first published in the shape of letters addressed from Ireland to Le Temps, during the summer months of 1886 and 1887.

A few extracts from those letters having found their way to the columns of the leading British papers, they became the occasion of somewhat premature, and, it seemed to the author, somewhat unfair conclusions, as to their general purport and bearing.

A fiery correspondent of a London evening paper, in particular, who boldly signed “J. J. M.” for his name, went so far as to denounce the author as “an ally of the Times, in the congenial task of vilifying the Irish people by grotesque and ridiculous caricatures,” which charge was then summarily met as follows:—

To the Editor of the Pall Mall Gazette.

Sir,—

Let me hope, for the sake of “J. J. M.’s” mental condition, that he never set eyes upon my Irish sketches in Le Temps, about which he volunteers an opinion. If, however, he has actually seen my prose in the flesh, and he still clings to his hobby that I am hostile to the Irish cause or unsympathetic with the Irish race, why then I can only urge upon his friends the advisability of a strait waistcoat, a brace of mad doctors, and an early berth in a lunatic asylum. I never heard in my life of a sadder case of raving delusion.

Yours obediently,

PHILIPPE DARYL.

Paris, September 18, 1887.

Thus ended the controversy. There was no reply.

Allowance should be made, of course, for the natural sensitiveness of Irishmen on everything that relates to their noble and unhappy country. But, what! Do they entertain, for one moment, the idea that everything is right and normal in it? In that case there can be no cause of complaint for them, and things ought to remain as they are. All right-minded people will understand, on the contrary, that the redress of Irish wrongs can only come out of a sincere and assiduous exposure of the real state of affairs, which is not healthy but pathological, and, as such, manifests itself by peculiar symptoms.

However it may be, a natural though perhaps morbid desire of submitting the case to the English-reading public was the consequence of those exceedingly brief and abortive polemics.

The Author was already engaged in the not over-congenial task of putting his own French into English, or what he hoped might do duty as such, when Messrs. George Routledge & Sons, the London publishers of his Public Life in England, kindly proposed to introduce Ireland’s Disease to British society. The offer was heartily accepted, and so it came to pass that the English version is to appear in book form on the same day as the French one.

The special conditions of the case made it, of course, a duty to the author to strictly retain in his text every line that he had written down in the first instance, however little palatable it might prove to some English readers and fatal to his own literary or other prospects in England. That should be his excuse for sticking desperately to words which, like Tauchnitz editions, were not originally intended for circulation in Great Britain.

Ph. D.

Paris, Nov. 10th, 1887.

CONTENTS.

PAGE
INTRODUCTION[1]
CHAPTER I.
First Sensations[5]
CHAPTER II.
Dublin Life[17]
CHAPTER III.
The Poor of Dublin[31]
CHAPTER IV.
The Emerald Isle[46]
CHAPTER V.
The Race[60]
CHAPTER VI.
Historical Grievances[76]
CHAPTER VII.
Killarney[96]
CHAPTER VIII.
Through Kerry on Horseback[109]
CHAPTER IX.
A Kerry Farmer’s Budget[139]
CHAPTER X.
Rural Physiology[157]
CHAPTER XI.
Emigration[177]
CHAPTER XII.
The League[197]
CHAPTER XIII.
The Clergy[215]
CHAPTER XIV.
Fort Saunders[234]
CHAPTER XV.
The Plan of Campaign[256]
CHAPTER XVI.
Scottish Ireland[271]
CHAPTER XVII.
Lex Licinia[296]
I.—The Gladstone Scheme[309]
II.—An Outsider’s Suggestion[313]
APPENDIX[331]