When the country is poorest these taxes are heaviest. Very few who go into the unions ever get out, excepting children. Said a guardian of the poor, “What causes the immense number of paupers in Ireland is the able-bodied persons going away and leaving the old. All the lower classes here speak of America as their home or final place of settlement. When the people send part of the money for their children, the board of poor-law guardians will sometimes supplement it gratuitously and send the children out. And at their own expense the board sometimes sends out lots of young women that are in the unions.”
The region in which Mr. Loftus lives is a disturbed one. On a recent Sunday a Land-League meeting was to be held in the town. It had been extensively advertised in the newspapers. On the day before the meeting was to be held the lord lieutenant issued a proclamation forbidding it. About two hundred dragoons and infantry and one hundred armed police arrived at the town, bringing with them provisions, as no farmer nor storekeeper would dare to sell any to them. One storekeeper had already been boycotted for not joining the Land League. On the appointed Sunday, after mass, or about one o’clock, some five or six thousand people came together, with bands of music. Five or six Roman Catholic clergymen were among them. The people desired still to hold the meeting by erecting a platform on some other spot. Two stipendiary, or salaried, magistrates were present, and with them the priests entered into an agreement that the soldiers and police should not interfere with the people if they listened to no speeches, but simply formed in an orderly procession and paraded in the town. The affair went off peaceably, and the people went quietly home, although feeling much discontent at the action of the priests. If they had not obeyed the contract, the priests would have retired and left them to the mercy of the armed men.
At dinner, one day, in the course of conversation, Mr. Loftus said, “The country is well enough if it was left alone.”
“But,” said I, “you approve perhaps of one agitator, O’Connell; you like the effects of Catholic emancipation?”
“O’Connell!” he cried; “the best man Ireland ever produced; a clever man. Not such a fellow as this Parnell, that nobody knows where he sprung from; not fit to clane O’Connell’s shoes in cleverness. O’Connell never allowed any quarrelling or disturbance. He kept up the agitation, but the people were kept in order. The repeal collections were kept up, but there was nothing like the burning, wounding, and killing that is going on in these times.”
I asked whether there might not be a home parliament for local affairs, and delegates to a general parliament. He answered that the people are so much given to contention that they could not carry on affairs. “If half a dozen of them,” he added, “come together at a poor-law meeting, they can’t behave themselves.”
After my return to Cork, an acquaintance advised me to visit a town in the southwest, where manners are more primitive. Accordingly I travelled thither, where women in a shop may be heard talking the Irish language. I went third-class. The railway terminated at the town. Falling into conversation with an intelligent fellow-traveller, he said that he had many men constructing a road. He was a steward or overseer. Looking out at the country, I asked, “Why are there no barns?”
“They have nothing to put into barns,” he replied. “They sell their hay in the fields, and thresh their grain and get it quickly into market. They even sell their straw sometimes to meet their rent. Then when spring comes the landlord endorses for them in the bank. This answers for one year. On the next year the farmer must go to a money-lender, to whom he signs a note for twenty-five pounds, receiving only twenty pounds.”