In the same district, another farm gone waste. The tenant did not pay. He was evicted, but had another holding close by, where he encamped, and from that vantage-ground sent the following ultimatum to his ci-devant landlord:—“The hay I have left on my late farm is worth £30. I demand fifteen for allowing you to mow and sell it; you shall not see a shilling of it on any other terms.” Fury of the landlord. Then he cools down, thinks better of it, offers ten pounds. The evicted tenant declines the offer; a whole army would not have brought him round. Meanwhile, the hay got rotten.
By the road-side near Castlemaine, is a row of barracks, where men, women, and children are huddled together. Those are League-huts, that is to say, a temporary shelter which the League offers to ejected tenants, for having, upon its command, declined to pay their rent. The cabins from which the poor wretches have been turned out, although they had, as a rule, built them themselves, are within shooting distance, on the right hand. They bear evident traces of having been fired by the sheriff’s officers in order to make them uninhabitable, and they present the desolate aspect of homesteads adjoining a field of battle. Walls broken by the crowbar, doors ajar, rubbish and ruins everywhere. Is it politic on the part of the landlords to add the horrors of fire to those of eviction? Hardly so, the outsider will think. It adds nothing to the majesty of the law to wage war with inanimate things. The exercise of a right ought never to assume the appearance of an act of revenge. Wrongly or rightly, eviction by itself always bears an odious character; but to see the house you have built with your own hands burnt to the ground will ever seem to cry for vengeance to Heaven. And, after all, who is the gainer by such violence? The League. It takes care to retain the victims of eviction within sight of the scene of their woes, feeds them, harbours them, exhibits them as in an open museum, by the side of their destroyed homes. And it is a permanent, practical lesson for the passer-by, a realistic drama where the landlord appears torch in hand, while the League dries the tears of the afflicted and allows them £2 a week. That is the usual pay for one family.
CHAPTER IX.
A KERRY FARMER’S BUDGET.
“I wonder how landlords can manage to live, under such conditions,” I said to my guide. “Are there any tenants left paying their rent?”
“There are many. First, those who have been able to come to an agreement with their landlord about the reduction of 20, 25, 30 per cent. that they claimed; in such cases the landlord’s income is reduced, but at least he still retains a part of it. Then, there is the tenant’s live stock; he cannot prevent its being seized for rent, in case of execution, and consequently chooses to pay, if possible, or he would have to sell his cattle to avoid distress, which means ruin to the family. Lastly, there are the tenants who pay secretly, although pretending to adhere to the rules of the League—backsliders they are called—a class more numerous than could be supposed at first sight.”
Here MacMahon laughed. He went on:
“I will tell you, Sir, a story I have heard lately, of a man in county Cork, who wanted to pay his landlord but dared not, on account of the other tenants on the estate. Coming across the landlord on a lone road (not improbably after many an unfruitful attempt for such a propitious opportunity) he stood before him in a threatening attitude. ‘Put your hand in my coat’s inside pocket!’ he said gruffly. The landlord did not understand at first what the man meant, and considering his look and address, was far from feeling reassured. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked uneasily. ‘I tell you, sir, put your hand in my coat’s inside pocket, and feel for what you find in it.’ At last the landlord did as he was bidden. He put his hand in the man’s pocket, and extracted from it a bundle of papers, carefully tied up, that looked like banknotes. At once the tenant took to his heels. ‘The devil a penny of rent you can ever say I paid you,’ said he, in the same strange threatening tone of voice, as he ran away. Still, the banknotes in the landlord’s hand were exactly to the amount of the rent due. As a rule, when the tenant is really able to pay his rent, he pays it.”
Such has not been the general case, it seems, for the last three years. In produce, perhaps the Irish farmer might have paid his rent, as the crops have been, on the whole, fairly up to the average. In money, he cannot, because the fall of prices on hay, potatoes, beef, mutton, pork, and butter alike, in 1885, 1886, 1887, has been at least 20 per cent. on the former and average prices, which not only means no margin whatever of profit to the farmer, besides his necessary expenses, but in most cases the sheer impossibility of providing for the forthcoming outlay in seeds, manure, and labour.