Dublin is full of such streets, lanes, and courts where houses, years ago condemned by the authorities, are still tenanted. These houses are symbolic of the downfall of Ireland. They were built by rich Irishmen for their homes. To-day they are tenements for the poorest Irish people, but they have not been remodeled for this purpose, and that is one reason why them seem so appalling—the poor among the ruins of grandeur.
In one room, perhaps a drawing-room, you find four families, each in its own corner, with sometimes not as much as the tattered curtains for partitions. Above them may be a ceiling of wonderfully modeled and painted figures, a form of decoration the art of which has been lost. At the end of this room is a mantel of purest white marble over an enormous fireplace long ago blocked up, except for a small opening in which a few coals at a time may be burned. The doors of such a room are often made of solid mahogany fifteen feet in height.
The gas company of Dublin refuses to furnish gas above the second floor, and the little fireplaces can never give enough heat, even when fuel is comparatively plentiful. As I write, coal is fifteen dollars a ton, and is costing the poor, who buy in small quantities, from thirty to forty-five per cent. more.
In Dublin there are more than twenty thousand such rooms in which one or more families are living. That epidemics are not more deadly speaks well for the fundamental health of those who live in them, for there are no sanitary arrangements. Water is drawn from a single tap somewhere in the backyard. The only toilet, to be used by all the people in any one of these houses, is also in the backyard or, worse still, in a dark, unventilated basement.
The head of a family in these one-time "mansions," which number several thousand, seldom makes more than four or five dollars a week! Of this amount, if they want the luxury of even a small room to themselves, they must pay about a dollar. Is it any wonder that the word "rent" has a fearful sound to the Irish? After this rent is paid, there is not much left for food and clothes. Starvation, even in time of peace, is always hovering near. Bread and tea for breakfast, but rarely butter; bread and tea, and either herrings or potatoes, sometimes with cabbage, for their midday meal; bread and tea for supper. Two fifths of the inhabitants of Dublin live on this fare the year round. If they have beef or mutton once a week they must eat it boiled or fried, since the fireplaces are too primitive for roasting or baking. Neither will they permit baking of bread or cakes.
Yet Ireland could raise fruit and vegetables and grain for twenty million people! I have seen ships deep laden with food for need of which the Irish are slowly starving—I contend undernourishment is starvation—going in a steady stream to England. The reason was that the English were able to pay better prices than the man at home. Food, since the beginning of the war, has literally been drained out of the country. Ireland to-day is in a state of famishment, if not of famine.
Here in Dublin, though the streets and lanes seem full of children, the death-rate is tremendously high. The population of all Ireland has decreased fifty per cent. in fifty years. In Poland, under the rule of the Russian czar, the population increased. It is one thing to read about Irish "grievances," it is another to be living where they go on year after year.
"Grievance"—that is the way the British sum up our sense of wrong, and with such effect that people the world over fancy our wrongs are not wrongs but imagined grievances. The word itself counts against us in the eyes of those who have never been to Ireland and seen for themselves the conditions under which the great majority of the population must live. To be sure, there are always complaints carried to Parliament and then a "commission of inquiry," followed a little later by a "report upon conditions." But the actual results seem small. It was disgust for this sort of carrying out complaints in a basket and bringing back reports in the very same basket that roused Arthur Griffith to write his pamphlet on Hungary and her rebuilding from within. He felt that the Irish, too, must set about saving themselves without political help from parliamentarians. He even went so far as to say that, since Irishmen who went to Parliament seemed so soon to forget their country except as it served their political advancement, we ought not to send men to Parliament. Ireland, he declared, should concentrate upon the economic and industrial life possible to her—a life that could be developed wonderfully if men set out to win Ireland for the Irish. This propaganda of Griffith's—for it soon became such—stirred all the young men and women who before had been hopeless. "Ireland for the Irish!" The movement quickly became what is called the "Sinn Fein," which is Gaelic for "Ourselves Alone."
That this organization should be considered in America as a sort of "Black Hand," or anarchistic society, is evidence of the impression it made upon the English as a powerful factor to be reckoned with. It had come into being overnight, but its principles were as old as Ireland. It sprang from a love of Ireland and not, as many believe, from hatred of England. It could not have thrived as it did wherever it touched a young heart and brain if it had merely been a protest. It had a national ideal and goal. Every day was dedicated to it. To speak the Irish language; to wear Irish-made clothes of Irish tweed; to think and feel, write, paint, or work for the best interests of Ireland; to make every act, personal or communal, count for the betterment of Ireland—all this was animated by love of our country. The Sinn Fein was constantly inspired by poems and essays which appeared in Arthur Griffith's weekly magazine. That poetry to-day is known throughout civilization as the poetry of the "Celtic Revival."
There was a gospel of "passive resistance," too, which led Irishmen to refuse to pay taxes or take any part in the Anglicizing of Ireland. It was this phase that soon won the disapproval of the party that stood for parliamentary activity, and naturally it aroused dissatisfaction in England.