Now, these are the circumstances of six or seven tenants out of ten in the lowlands of Kerry, where they seem to be comparatively well off. If we leave the plains for the higher districts bordering on the sea, the question is simpler still. There is no need of long accounts here. The hour of irretrievable misery has struck long ago, and habitual hunger stares us in the face.
Up in the Mountains.
The mountains of Kerry are the finest in the island. They form its south-western angle, throwing out on the Atlantic the peninsula of Dingle, between the bay of the same name and the Kenmare River. As you leave the plain following the Cahirciveen road towards the coast, you see them develop their parallel ranges, which are divided by deep valleys. Some of these valleys are fertile, being watered by impetuous streams from the mountain side. But the general impression one receives is that of agricultural poverty, as is the case in nearly all mountainous countries in the world. Pastures are thinner, cattle less numerous, homesteads fewer and more miserable than in the plain. Human creatures themselves partake of the general look of wretchedness that prevails. They live on potatoes, milk, and porridge; seldom eat bread, meat never; wine, beer, tea, coffee are to them unknown luxuries. Their ill-shaped cottages are made of soft stone, with a thatched roof maintained by ropes made of straw. There they all sleep on a bed of rushes, which they share with the pig, when there is such a thing, for even the traditional pig has become now a symptom of wealth in a manner. On the beams of the roof roost perhaps half-a-dozen hens and chickens.
Sloth and dirt hold here an undivided sway. Not a woman—and some are pretty—seems to mind the spots and holes in her garments; not one knows the use of soap or needle. They appear to have a rooted dislike for the comb; their hair falls on their back as is the fashion among the Australian aborigines, in nature’s simple disorder.
Men look heavy and apathetic. They work as little as they can manage—one or two days out of seven, perhaps—and do not even think of seeking their sustenance from the sea, which is so close to them. The most they can do is to draw from it now and then a cart-load of seaweed to manure their miserable plot of ground. Their existence rolls on dull, idle, devoid of interest. It is the brute life in its most wretched and hideous state. Here is old Ireland as Gustave de Beaumont’s admirable book showed it to us fifty years ago. Hardly do those wretched products of Anglo-Saxon civilization receive a faint echo of the outer world when the electoral time comes.
The consequence is that the agrarian crisis is reduced here to its simplest expression, i.e., sheer impossibility to pay the rent because of total absence of the £ s. d. wherewith. Elsewhere that impossibility may be half assumed; it is certainly mixed in the plain with bad will, goaded in the peasant’s heart by that dogged desire to possess the land which is so natural in him. In the mountain it is not a political fiction that holds the sway: famine is the king; and it is the spontaneous product of the very nature of things.
For the naturally infertile soil has reached here to such a degree of subdivision that it is no longer sufficient even to feed those it bears. The greater part of those wretched holdings of five or six acres are let at the nominal price of about £4, to which must be added the taxes, poor-rates, and county-cess, increasing it by a quarter or a third. Four, five, six, sometimes ten or twelve beings with human faces squat on that bit of worthless ground and till it in the most primitive manner. Money, tools, intelligence, pluck, all are wanting there. Viewing things in the most optimist light, supposing the year to have been an exceptionally good one, the potato crop to have been plentiful, the cow to have hunted out on the hill-side the necessary grass for the making of a little butter, all that will be sufficient perhaps to prevent starvation. But where will the money be found to pay Queen and landlord?