"Pennsylvania Dutch," and other essays

by Phebe Earle Gibbons

“If you were in America we should say that your head is level,” I said; but I had to interpret the slang.

“There has been a change in Ireland,” he added, “within some years. Formerly the wealthy classes and the learned could make jupes of the Irish people, but of late years there has been more education, and the people see things differently. Ireland was a dark country before the Catholic emancipation. Before the passage of that act no Catholic could hold office in this country. Now many places are open to them in the excise and elsewhere.”

Collins intimated that the English are wrong in fearing the Catholic priests, for they counsel the people to peaceful measures, and they are the only persons who have sufficient authority over them to quiet them down. I spoke of Father Murphy and of priests who had presided at Land-League meetings.

“Yes,” said Collins, “when peaceful measures were advised.”

I replied that the government would not trust them because it thought that the people might become excited and burst from the priests’ control, and because they feared that the priests might deceive them. The remark did not please Collins. He said that the people were excited at the report of Father Murphy’s arrest because they are so united to their priests. “One is already in prison,” he said, “Father Sheehey; and many meetings have been held to petition the government to release him and other leaders of the Land-League movement.”

In a disturbed region in another part of the county Cork I was told of a priest who had refused to join the League. The members would not send their children to the national school under his supervision, and the people thus opposed to him did not call him Canon Desmond, but only Desmond. On the other hand, I was told of two influential priests lately sent out of Cork by the bishop for being too active in the Land League. They were placed in country curacies—promotion backward—on account of the influence of a wealthy Catholic clique, which does not in politics hold to the Conservative, late Lord Beaconsfield party, “like the Protestants,” but holds to the Liberal party, which is midway between the Conservatives and Land-Leaguers. It was added that one of these priests had gone to Rome to lay his case before the pope, not having been able to get the archbishop to interfere. The archbishop did not think it prudent to entertain the complaint.

Another of Collins’s remarks may seem unjust to the government. He said that men’s constitutions have changed. They are no longer able to live on potatoes. They must have Indian meal and bread and tea. “I think I would have been dead,” he said, “if I had been kept on potatoes; and when men’s constitutions are altered, any laws the government can make cannot have effect.” But it is free trade in Great Britain and Ireland that makes bread and tea cheap.

The great domestic manufactories of the people demand a word. Collins wore to market one day a gray frieze coat (there pronounced frize). Calling at the house, I found an old woman engaged in spinning wool for the boys’ clothing,—wool that had been beautifully carded at a factory. Collins’s coat seemed to be black and white wool mixed, but the frieze is often dyed blue or red, and is also used for women’s petticoats. The question of the want of manufactures is a great and somewhat puzzling one. At Dublin it was surprising to find that even the matches in my chamber were marked London. The want of coal has been given as one reason of the want of manufactories, but there is great and abundant water-power. The want of capital is also given as a cause of the lack of manufactures, and if we look into this point we come to two of the open sores of Ireland,—absent capitalists and want of national unity. In Guy’s Almanac may be found a list of landholders of one thousand acres and upwards in the county Cork, leaseholders of over ninety years being put down as absolute owners. There are three hundred and seventy-five of these landholders, of whom about two hundred have residences in the county, and the remainder are entirely non-resident,—nearly fifty per cent.! As regards the want of capital, I asked a Protestant banker why they did not combine and form companies to manufacture. He replied, “As soon as eight Irishmen combine to do a thing, nine will combine to oppose them.” The want of unity is owing, at least in part, to their being still two nations, if I may be allowed to say so, the conquerors and the conquered. Methodists and Quakers born in Ireland may be heard speaking contemptuously of the Irish. A woman of Scotch Presbyterian origin remarked, “It’s a common saying, it’s a blessed land and a cursed people.” A Friend in Dublin said to me that the Protestants of the North are as bitter as the Catholics, “and more blamable, as they have the Scriptures.” And I find the statement in my note-book that those who desired to be considered the “upper ten,” and Protestants from country localities, speak very contemptuously of the Land League. Finally, the laws are unequal, the qualification for voters being higher in Ireland than in England.

On manufactures an Irish gentleman said to me, “There are lots of American shoes brought to Cork. Blacksmith’s tools, agricultural implements, and carpenter’s tools are brought to this country from America. There’s a finish and a style about them that they don’t do here.” A Catholic manufacturer attributed the want of manufactures to the lack of skill and knowledge in the people; but does this account for the decline in manufactures? As lately as 1837 there were one hundred thousand hides tanned yearly at Cork. It had seven iron-foundries, five factories of spades and shovels, numerous and extensive paper-mills, and two large houses making flint-glass.[168] But where are most of them now? My sprightly little landlady at Cork, a Catholic, expressed in very simple terms a natural reason for this decline, saying, “We want energy, for there’s not an atom of trade that the English did not spoil. There was a cotton-factory here in Cork, and the English sent their goods in and sold them a half-penny lower. They put their foot upon these things, bless them! They have crushed us out of the market in various ways. There is a little screed of linen manufacture in the North, but I believe that they cannot make it as good in England.”