The best authority in Achil said:—"The hat is always going round for the islanders, who are much better off than the poor of great English cities. They have the reputation of being in a state of chronic famine. This has no foundation in fact. They all have land, one, two, or three cows, and the sea to draw upon. For their land and houses they pay nothing, or next to nothing; for good land in some cases is to be had for a shilling an acre. The lakes also abound with fish. They glory in their poverty, and hail a partial failure of crops with delight. They know they will be cared for, and that provisions will be showered upon them from all sides. They say, 'Please God, we'll have a famine this year,' and when the contributions pour in they laugh and sing, and say, 'The distress for ever! Long live the famine!' The word goes round at stated intervals that they are to 'have a famine.' They jump at the suggestion, act well together, and carry out the idea perfectly. The Protestants never have any distress which calls for charitable aid. They live on the same soil, under the same laws, but they never beg. They pay their rents, too, much more regularly than the others, who of late years can hardly be got to pay either rent or anything else. The Protestants are all strong Unionists. The Catholics are all strong Home Rulers. Their notions of Home Rule are as follows:—No rent, no police, a poteen still at every door, and possession of the land now held by Protestants, which is so much better than their own because so much more labour has been expended on it, and for no other reason. Who tells them to 'have a famine'? Why, the same people who arouse and keep alive their enmity to the Protestants; the same people who tell them lies about the early history of the Colony—lies which the tellers know to be lies, such as the stories of oppression, spoliation, and of how the mission took the property of the islanders with the strong hand, aided by England, the home of robbery, tyranny, and heresy. The people would be friendly enough but for their priests. Yet they have marched in procession before our houses, blowing defiance by means of a drum and fife band, because we would not join one or other of their dishonest and illegal combinations. They opened a man's head with a stone, producing a dreadful scalp wound, and when Doctor Croly, the greatest favourite in the whole island, went to dress the wound, five or six of them stopped his horse, with the object of giving him a 'bating,' which would have ended nobody knows how. The doctor produced a revolver, and the heroes vanished like smoke."
The good doctor is himself a Unionist, but more of a philanthropist than a politician. He is the parish doctor, with eight thousand people to look after, the whole being scattered over an immense area. I accompanied him on a twenty-mile drive to see a girl down with influenza, much of the road being almost impracticable. Some of his experiences, coming out incidentally, were strange and startling. He told me of a night when the storm was so wild that a man seeking him approached the surgery on all-fours, and once housed, would not again stir out, though the patient was his own wife. The doctor went alone and in the storm and blackness narrowly escaped drowning, emerging from the Jawun, usually called the Jordan, after an hour's struggle with the flood, to sit up all night in his wet clothes, tending the patient. On another occasion a mountain sheep frightened his horse just as the doctor was filling his pipe. The next passer-by found him insensible. Nobody might have passed for a month. A similar misadventure resulted in a broken leg. Then on a pitchy night he walked over the cliffs, and was caught near the brink by two rocks which held him wedged tightly until someone found him and pulled him up, with the bag of instruments, which he thinks had saved him. And it was as well to pause in his flight, for the Menawn Cliffs, with their thousand feet of clean drop, might have given the doctor an ugly fall. Two girls, whose male relations had gone to England, had not been seen for three days. Nobody would go near the house. The doctor found them both on the floor insensible, down with typhus fever, shut up with the pigs and cows, the room and its odour defying description. The neighbours kept strictly aloof. Dr. Croly swept and garnished, made fires, and pulled the patients through. "Sure, you couldn't expect us to go near whin 'twas the faver," said the neighbourly Achilese. Mr. Salt, the Brum-born mission agent, was obliged to remain all night on one of the neighbouring islands—islands are a drug hereabouts—and next morning he found an egg in his hat. Fowls are in nearly all the houses. Sometimes they have a roost on the ceiling, but they mostly perch on the family bed, when that full-flavoured Elysium is not on the floor. I saw an interior which contained one black cow, one black calf, some hens, some ducks, two black-and-white pigs, a mother, and eleven children. Where they all slept was a puzzle, as only one bed was visible. The hens went whir-r-r-up, and perched on the bedstead, when the lady smiled and wished me Good Evening. She looked strong and in good going order. The Achilese say Good Evening all day long. A young girl was grinning in the next doorway, a child of fourteen or fifteen she seemed. "Ye wouldn't think that was a married woman, would ye now," said a neighbour, with pardonable pride. "Aye, but she is, though, an' a foin lump iv a son ye have, haven't ye, Maureen." Mr. Peter Griffin, once a land commissioner, told me that a boy having applied for the fixing of a judicial rent, the commissioners expressed their surprise upon learning that he was married. "Arrah, now," said the applicant, "sure 'tis not for the sake of the bit that the crathur would ate that a boy need be widout one o' thim!"
In Achil, as elsewhere, the better people are certain that the Home Rule Bill will never become law. From their point of view, the thing seems too absurd to be possible. They are face to face with a class of Irishmen, among whom civilisation seems to have made no perceptible progress for centuries, who scorn every improvement, and are so tied and bound down by aboriginal ignorance and superstition as to be insensible to everything but their ancient prejudices. It cannot be possible, they argue, that Ireland should be given over to the dominion of these people, who, after all, are in the matter of advancement and enlightenment fairly representative of the bulk of the voters for Home Rule all over the country. The civilised community of Achil are unable to realise the possibility of such a surrender. They do not discuss the measure, but rather laugh at it. An able business man said:—
"We get the daily papers a little old, no doubt, but we follow them very closely, and we concur in believing that Mr. Gladstone will in the long run drop the bill. We think he will turn round and say, 'There now. That's all I can do. Haven't I done my best? Haven't I kept my promise? Now, you can't blame me. The Irishmen see it coming, and they will get out of it as much dramatic effect as possible. The party organs are already urging them to open rupture with the Government. Compulsion is their game, and no doubt, with Gladstone, it is the most likely game to pay. But he might rebel. He might grow tired of eating Irish dirt; he might pluck up spirit enough to tell these bullies who are jockeying him, and through him the British Empire, to go to the Divil. Then we'd have a fine flare-up. Virtuous indignation and patriotic virtue to the fore! The Irish members will rush over to Ireland, and great demonstrations will be the order of the day. The Irish love demonstrations, or indeed anything else which gives a further excuse for laziness. The priests will orate, the members will prate, the ruffians elate will shoot or otherwise murder a few people, who will have Mr. Gladstone to thank for their death. For what we wanted was twenty years of resolute government, just as Lord Salisbury said, and if Mr. Balfour had been left to carry it out Ireland would have come her nearest possible to prosperity and contentment. But with steady rule one day, and vacillation, wobbling, and surrender the next, what can you expect? The Irish are very smart, cute people, and they soon know where they can take advantage of weakness. The way these poor Achil folks, those who have been to England, can reckon up Mr. Gladstone! They call him a traitor now. And yet he promises to let the Irish members arrange their own finance! 'Here, my boys,' says he, 'take five millions and spend it your own way.' Will John Bull stand that? Will he pay for the rope that is to hang himself? Will he buy the razor to cut his own throat? Where are his wits? Why does he stand by to witness this unending farce, when he ought to be minding serious business? This Irish idiocy is stopping the progress of the Empire. Why does not Bull put his foot on it at once? He must do so in the end. Where are the working men of England? Surely they know enough to perceive that their own personal interests are involved.
"In Achil we have practically peasant proprietary and nothing else. Eleven hundred men and women are at this moment in England and Scotland from Achil alone. They will return in October, each bringing back ten, fifteen, or twenty pounds, on which they will live till next season. The Irish Legislature would begin by establishing peasant proprietary all over Ireland. The large farmers would disappear, and men without capital, unable to employ labour, would take their place. Instead of Mayo, you would have the unemployed of the whole thirty-two counties upon you. Ireland would be pauperised from end to end, for everybody who could leave it would do so—that is, every person of means—and as for capital and enterprise, what little we have would leave us. Which of the Irish Nationalist party would start factories, and what would they make? Can anybody tell me that?"
I submitted that Mr. William O'Brien, the member for Cork, might open a concern for the making of breeches, or that Mr. Timothy Healy, the member for Louth, who was reared in a tripe shop, might embark his untold gold in the cowheel and trotter business, or might even prove a keen competitor with Walsall in the manufacture of horsewhips, a product of industry of which he has had an altogether exceptional experience. "Is not this true?" I enquired.
My friend admitted the fact, but declined to believe in the factory.
Dugort (Achil Island), June 22nd.