The Letters of "Norah" on Her Tour Through Ireland

by Norah

I first thought over these things in connection with the land question in Ireland when travelling there and seeing the evils arising from the existing tenure of land. I met with testimony everywhere of how often and how fatally the will of a lord interfered to prevent prosperity. There might have been a seam of coal opened in Antrim but for one landlord. In the present depressed state of the linen trade what a boon that would have been to the country. There might have been ship-building on the Foyle, to the great benefit of Derry and her people, but for the absentee landlords, the London companies. Donegal might have had a coal mine opened, but the landlord would neither open it himself nor let anyone else do it, and yet the great want of Donegal is employment for her people.

I did not think for a moment that the landlords of Ireland were, as a rule, naturally worse than other men, but they have too much power, and when "self the wavering balance shakes, it's rarely right adjusted."

I blame the system, not the men. There were and are landlords in Ireland too noble to abuse their power, of which class the Earl of Belmore is an illustrious example; but these men are noble in spite of the system which afforded every facility for the enormities of Lord Leitrim.

The evil of the Land Tenure is intensified by the fact that one class makes laws for another, and that the same class has all the executive of these laws under their control. There was no power in the law to protect the inhabitants of Milford when the earnings and savings of their whole lives, and the private property of their minister were confiscated by the strong hand, and some were reduced in consequence to beg their bread. The law, planned expressly to be an expensive luxury, was only for the rich, and was known to the poor, if they dared to contend with their landlord, as an engine of oppression. The judge who gave the award in Mrs. Auldjo's case knew better than anyone else the cost of Irish law, and that the award he gave her under the Act of 1870 was a defeating of the intentions of the law, as it was really less than the law costs. His award added insult to injury to a woman who was a widow, and wantonly ruined in fortune because she dared to contend with a lord. The same spirit of partisanship invented the infamous Grand Jury system.

After I left Antrim, while travelling through the wilds of Donegal, the glens of Leitrim, and all through beautiful and desolate Mayo, I wondered over the absolute power which was left in the hands of the landholders and the great gulf which separated them from the land- tilling class. Public opinion, which they control, seems to have absolutely no sympathy with the common people when they were behind in their rents, although they were emerging from a period of agricultural distress, culminating in absolute famine. I watched the papers, I took good heed to the conversation that went on around me, and saw or heard no expression of sympathy when events took place which, I had thought, impossible under British law.

When Mrs. Whittington, of Malin, was put out in the wild March weather, with a child three days old in her arms and a flock of six around her, I looked for some one to raise a voice of protest, but there was not a whisper. When a landlord's official forced his way past husband, doctor and nurse, to the bedside of Mrs. Stewart, to order her to get out of bed to go to the workhouse, bringing on fits that caused the death of her babe and nearly cost her her life, I watched eagerly for some voice to say this should not have been done, but there was none. I have heard of retreating armies stopping and hazarding battle, rather than forsake a childing woman in her extremity, in countries not boasting of so enlightened a government as our own. I had so gloried in the British Constitution, its justice, its mercy! I waited to see what the law would do in this case. All the facts were admitted in court, yet this man, who forgot that he, too, was born of a woman, was triumphantly acquitted and not one word of disapproval appeared in any public print that I saw.

I have often come home after seeing that on the side of the oppressor was power—the power of bayonets—and that the poor had no helper, until I could not sleep for pain and could only cry to our Father—theirs and mine—How long, Lord, how long!

A friend described to me quite gaily a scene at the Castlebar workhouse during the last famine, when the starving creatures coming for relief surged round the workhouse gate and pressed and hustled and trampled down one another, how the police standing ankle deep in mud had to lay about them with their batons, and the poor creatures were sent home again, and yet again, until they would learn to keep order—keep order— and they were starving!

A lady in Clones, who was talking to me on Sabbath School work and missionary enterprise in a highly edifying manner, could only express her surprise about the poor of her own people who were doomed to the poor house, that they did not go in at once without struggle or fuss. And yet she had been a mother, and must have known what parting with children meant to a mother's heart. For my part I sympathized with that mother of whom I read in the papers, who was taken before a magistrate and sentenced for making a disturbance in the workhouse when she heard the master beating her child.

I wondered much at a noble and high-minded Irish gentleman who feels strong sympathy with the Oka Indians, who, in speaking to me of a man caught in company with another fishing by night, thereby transgressing the law, and was deliberately shot down by the agent of the property, expressed his regret that the other had not been also shot. Hardening the heart I hold to be one of the very apparent effects of the land system.