I remarked that this third F is against the free operation of trade; that everything should be sold at its value in the market. “No one puts such restrictions upon trade as you Americans,” he replied.
When I arrived at Dublin I lodged at two different temperance houses. In one I met a plain man from the county Galway, in the west. He kept a shop, and was a dealer in hides. He traded from town to town. He said that his priest and bishop were good men, and that young boys and girls were signing the pledge. Of the farmers of Galway he estimated that seventy per cent. are unable to pay their rent unless they sell horse, cow, and calves; and even then they would be left in debt to the shopkeeper. He complained greatly of the recent coercion act, under which, he says, worthy citizens are apprehended or are in danger.
One fellow-lodger was a Methodist minister from the county Fermanagh, in the north. He had been attending the Cork Conference. He complained of the increase of luxury among farmers in buying tea and bread and in the clothing of their daughters, and spoke of their spending two days a week at market, and five or six shillings each time in treating each other.
“But your congregations are not of this class?” I said.
“Indeed they are,” he answered. “There are plenty in my congregation who come home tipsy every market night.”
He afterward took out change and called for a bottle of ale. They sent out and got it for him.
I was much interested in the conversation of two men who were dining at the house. One of them, a young man, said that the three F’s would not satisfy the Land-Leaguers. They wanted the extermination of the landlords and the possession of the land. The other did not agree with him. He said, “It would be a nice thing for you to be paying two pounds and ten shillings for land, and a Land-Leaguer over the fence be getting it for half the money. I am an Orangeman,” he added, “and the son of an Orangeman, and the grandson of an Orangeman, yet I am greatly in sympathy with the poor, suffering tenantry of this country.”
He said of himself that he had been in the army nine years; that he was a landlord in a small way, five or six hundred pounds a year; and that he was now lying out of rents. Rather than disturb tenants he had paid as high as ten per cent. for money, and “glad to get it at that.” He was originally from the county Cavan, northwest of Dublin. He said that the average size of farms there is about twelve acres. Some have thirty. About twenty per cent. of the farmers own horses. Many keep donkeys, but these are unfit for farming. They put out manure with jennets, which are not fit for ploughing. The poor farmer must wait until the richer one has done ploughing so as to hire horses, and then the land is ploughed shallow and injured. Both speakers were agreed on the trouble of hiring horses. You must pay ten shillings a day for a pair, feed them and the ploughman, and give him several glasses of whiskey, added one. If you have cash in hand, you can get horses when you will; but the small farmer cannot pay until he has harvested his crop. He generally pays labor in exchange for horses.
A suggestion that the British government should buy the lands of Ireland, rent them for the space of thirty years, and that the people should then become possessors, met with some favor. The Irish politician whom I met in London found two objections to this plan: First, that it would take from the country the cultivated class; and, second, that for thirty years it would drain the country of money.