FOOTNOTES:
Footnote 1: [(return)]
Vol. ii. p. 376.
Footnote 2: [(return)]
Vol. ii. p. 364-370.
Footnote 3: [(return)]
The exasperation of the local agitators under the cool and determined treatment of Mr. Tener may be measured by the facts stated in the following communication received by me from Mr. Tener on the 20th of September. I leave them to speak for themselves:—
“POLICE BARRACKS, WOODFORD,
17th Sept. 1888.“DEAR MR. HURLBERT,—I enclose you a printed placard found posted up in Woodford district on Sunday morning the 9th inst. It alludes to tenants who had paid me their rent,—and broken the ‘unwritten law of the League.’ All the men named are now in great danger. The police force of the district has been increased—for their protection; but the police are very anxious about their safety!
“I send you also a pencil copy taken from a more perfect placard which the police preserve. John White or Whyte is the tenant whose name I already have given you. He is the tall dark man whom you saw (with an ex-bailiff) at Portumna. He was then an “Evicted Tenant.” He has since been, on payment of his rent, restored to his farm by me. And now, as you see in the placard, he is held up to the vengeance of the “League of Hell,” as P.J. Smyth called it.—Yours, etc.
“ED. TENER.
“P.S.—The evictions were finished on the 1st of September, and on the 9th (after it became known that the men whose names are in the placard had paid) the placard was issued.”
(Placard.)
“IRISHMEN!—Need we say in the face of the desperate Battle the People are making for their Hearths and Homes that the time has come for every HONEST MAN, trader and otherwise, to extend a helping hand to the MEN in the GAP. You may ask, How will that be done? The answer is plain.
“Let those who have become traitors to their neighbours and their Country be shunned as if they were possessed by a devil. Let no man buy from them or sell to them, let no man work for them. Leave them to Tener and his Emergency gang. The following are a few of the greatest traitors and meanest creatures that ever walked—John Whyte, of Dooras; Fahey (of the hill) of Dooras; big Anthony Hackett, of Rossmore; Tom Moran, of Rossmore! Your Country calls on you to treat them as they deserve. Bravo Woodford! Remember Tom Larkin!— ‘GOD SAVE IRELAND’”
Footnote 4: [(return)]
Appendix, [Note A.]
Footnote 5: [(return)]
Appendix, [Note B.]
Footnote 6: [(return)]
Appendix, [Note C.]
Footnote 7: [(return)]
Appendix, [Note D.]
Footnote 8: [(return)]
Since this was written fifteen Catholic bishops in England, headed by the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, have united (April 12, 1888) in a public protest against the Optional Oaths Bill, in which they say: “To efface the recognition of God in our public legislature is an act which will surely bring evil consequences.” Yet how can the recognition of God be more effectually “effaced” than by the unqualified assertion that the will of the people, or of a majority, is the one legitimate source of political authority?
Footnote 9: [(return)]
Mr. Blair was then a member of the Lincoln Cabinet, and its “fighting member.”
Footnote 10: [(return)]
Mr. Quill stated that the Savings-Banks deposits increased in Ireland during 1887 eight per cent. more than in thrifty Scotland, and forty per cent. more than in England and Wales!
Footnote 11: [(return)]
This was the Provost’s last appearance in public. He died rather suddenly a few weeks afterwards.
Footnote 12: [(return)]
In the Census of 1880 it appears that of 255,741 farms in Illinois, 59,624 were held on the métayer system, pronounced by Toubeau the worst of systems, and 20,620 on a money rental.
Footnote 13: [(return)]
I have since learned that Father M‘Fadden sold another holding, rental 6s. 8d., for £80. He has three more holdings from Captain Hill, at 15s., 6s. 8d., and 11s. 2d., for which he was in arrears for two years in April 1887, when ejectment decrees were obtained against him. For his house holding he pays 2s. a year! So he was really fighting his own battle as a tenant in the Plan of Campaign.
Footnote 14: [(return)]
Yet of Connemara, Cardinal Manning, in his letter to the Archbishop of Armagh, August 31, 1873, cites the “trust-worthy” evidence of “an Englishman who had raised himself from the plough’s tail,” and who had gone “to see with his own eyes the material condition of the peasantry in Ireland.” It was to the effect that in abundance and quality of food, in rate of wages, and even if the comfort of their dwellings, the working men of Connemara were better off than the agricultural labourers of certain English counties.
Footnote 15: [(return)]
For this holding, of 10 Irish acres, I have since learned the widow O’Donnell pays 10s. a year. She is in the receipt of outdoor relief, there being fever in the house (May 1888).
Footnote 16: [(return)]
This “townland” is a curious use of a Saxon term to describe a Celtic fact. The territory of an Irish sept seems to have been divided up into “townlands,” each townland consisting of four, or in some cases six, groups of holdings, occupied by as many families of the “sept.” The chief of the “sept” divided up each “townland” periodically among these groups, while the common fields were cut up among the families as they increased and multiplied according to the system—against which Lord George Hill battled at Gweedore—known as “rimdale” or “rundeal,” from the Celtic, “ruindioll,” a “partition” or “man’s share.” This is quite unlike the Russian “mir” or collective village, and not more like the South Slav “zadruga” which makes each family a community, the land belonging to all, as, according to M. Eugene Simon, it does in China. But it is as inconsistent with Henry George’s State ownership of the land or the rents as either of those systems.
Footnote 17: [(return)]
From a question just asked (July 12) in the House of Commons, and answered by the Postmaster-General, I gather that this “local question” has been further complicated by the removal of Mr. Sweeney, the sub-postmaster, under an official regulation.
Footnote 18: [(return)]
The incident occurred in Clare. See p. [45].
Footnote 19: [(return)]
Or they may date back to the Parliament of Grattan, who wrote to Mr. Guinness that he regarded the brewery of Ireland as “the actual nurse of the people, and entitled to every encouragement, favour, and exemption.”
Footnote 20: [(return)]
This refers, I am told, to the murder, in open daylight, in 1881, of an old man, Linnane, who acted as a “caretaker” for Mrs. Moroney. It should gratify Father White to know that, as I am now informed (May 21, 1888), a clue has just been found to the assassins, who appear to have received the same price for doing their work that was paid the murderers of Fitzmaurice.
Footnote 21: [(return)]
Mrs. Moroney, so often referred to here, is the widow of a gentleman formerly High Sheriff and Deputy-Lieutenant for the County Clare, who died in 1870. She lives at Milton House, and has fought the local League steadily and successfully.