"This poor man evidently believed that every respectable person, everybody possessing means and property, was an enemy to the commonwealth. An ardent Home Ruler asked me if the majority had a right to rule. He thought that was a triumphant, an unanswerable question. I replied that during a long and busy life I had always observed how, in successful enterprises, the majority did not rule. The intelligent minority, the persons who had shown their wisdom, their industry, their sagacity, their integrity, that they were competent and reliable, those, I said, were the people who were entrusted with the management of great affairs, and not the many-headed mob. The management of Irish affairs promises to be a task of tremendous difficulty, and those to whom you propose to entrust this huge and complicated machinery stand convicted of inability to manage with even tolerable success such comparatively simple affairs as the party journal, or the rent collection of new Tipperary. Both these enterprises turned out dead failures owing to the total incapacity of the Irish Parliamentary party. And we are asked to entrust the future of the country to these men, whose only qualifications are a faculty for glib talk and an unreasonable hatred of everything English.
"Mr. Gladstone has shown to demonstration that statesmen are no longer to direct the course of legislation; are no longer to lead the people onward in the paths of progressive improvement. The unthinking, uneducated masses are in future to signify their will, and statesmen are to be the automata to carry out their behests, whatever they may be. The unwashed, unshorn incapables who have nothing, because they lack the brains and industry to acquire property, are nowadays told that they, and they alone, shall decide the fate of empires, shall decide the ownership of property, shall manipulate the fortunes of those who have raised themselves from the dirt by ability, self-denial, and unremitting hard work. Look at the comparative returns of the illiterate electorate. In Scotland 1 in 160, in England 1 in 170, in Ireland 1 in 5. In one quarter of Donegal, a Catholic one, more illiterates than in all Scotland. Not that there is so much difference as these figures would seem to show. But if men who can write declare themselves illiterate, so that the priests and village ruffians may be satisfied as to how they individually voted, is not this still more deplorable? The conduct of the English Gladstonians passes my comprehension. They do not examine for themselves. They say Mr. Gladstone says so-and-so, and for them this is sufficient. Do they say their prayers to the Grand Old Man?"
Another Salthill malcontent said:—"An English visitor sneeringly asked me how it was that the Irish could not trust one another. I said, 'We cannot trust these men, and we can give you what ought to be a satisfactory reason for our distrust. They have been condemned as criminals by a competent tribunal, presided over by three English judges, one of them a Roman Catholic. They have been found guilty of criminal conspiracy, of sympathy with crime, and of having furnished the means for its committal, and that after the fairest trial ever held in the world. By a law passed in 1787 by Grattan's Parliament they would have suffered the punishment of death for this same criminal conspiracy. And, apart from Home Rule, leaving the present agitation altogether out of the question, the respectable classes of Ireland entirely object to be represented by such men, either at Westminster or College Green. Their conduct has done more to ruin Ireland than any other calamity which the country has endured for long ages. They have displayed an ingenuity of torture, and a refinement of cruelty, worthy of the Inquisition. Look at the case of District-inspector Murphy, of Woodford, in this county. Not by any means the worst of the tens of thousands of cases all over the country, but impressive to me because it came under my own observation. At the trial of Wilfrid Blunt, Mr. Murphy deposed upon oath that so severely was he boycotted for the mere performance of his duty, that his children were crying for bread, and that he was unable to give them any. Policemen had to bring milk from miles away. In other cases the pupils of these patriots, the preachers of the Land League, poured human filth into the water supply of their victims, who were in many cases ladies of gentle birth and children of tender years. Go up to Cong, and walk out to the place where Lord Mountmorres was murdered, near Clonbur. His whole income was £150 or £200, a poor allowance for a peer, one of the noble house of De Montmorency. He was shot in broad daylight, a dozen houses within call, and an open uncovered country, save for low stone walls, all around. The people danced in derision on the spot where he fell, and threw soil stained with his life blood in the air. He wanted his due, and, goodness knows, he was poor enough to satisfy oven an Irish agitator. His name was down for the next vacancy among the resident magistrates. The people who were guilty of inciting to those outrages are the most prominent of the Nationalist party. Is this the class of men you wish to set over us as governors?"
An artist named Hamilton, a Guernsey man, said, "The English people do not understand what stonethrowing means in Ireland. They read of rows, and so long as no shooting is done, they do not think it serious. The men of Connaught are wonderful shots with big stones, and you would be surprised at the force and precision with which they hurl great lumps of rock weighing three or four pounds. Poor Corbett, a man in Lord Ardilaun's employ, was killed outright by one of these missiles, and only the other day I was reading of the Connaught Rangers in Egypt, the old 88th, how they were short of ammunition at the battle of Aboukir, and how they tore down a wall and actually stopped the French, who were advancing with the bayonet."
A Galway merchant said:—"Balfour is the man for Ireland. A Nationalist member told me he was the cleverest man in the House. He said, 'Chamberlain goes in for hard hitting, and he is very effective, but nobody ever answered the Irish members so readily and smartly as Balfour. We thought twice before we framed our questions, and although we of course disapprove of him, we are bound to admire him immensely.' And as a business man I think Balfour was fully up to the mark. He it was who subsidised the Midland and Western Railway to build the light line now being made between Galway and Clifden. No company would have undertaken such a concern. As a mere business transaction it could not pay. But look at the good that is being done. The people were starving for want of employment, and no unskilled labour is imported to the district, so that the Connemara folks get the benefit of the work, and also a permanent advantage by the opening up of the Galway fisheries, which are practically inexhaustible. We have the Atlantic to go at. And the fish out of the deep, strong, running water are twice as big as those just off the coast, on herring-banks and shoals. The fishermen know this, and they call these places the mackerel hospitals and infirmaries. These fishermen always knew it, but they had no boats to go out to the deep seas, no nets, no tackle. They have them now, and they got them from Balfour. They get nothing but Home Rule from Morley and Gladstone, and they find it keeps them free from indigestion, although it puts their livers out of order. Amusing chaps, these fishermen. I was in a little country place on the coast, where the judicial and magisterial proceedings are of a very primitive character, and where most of the people speak Irish as their vernacular. One old chap declined to give evidence in English, and asked for an interpreter. The magistrate, who knew the old wag, said, 'Michael Cahill, you speak English very well,' to which the old man replied, ''Tis not for the likes o' me to conthradict yer honner, but divil resave the word iv it I ondhersthand at all, at all.' There was a great roar from the Court, and the interpreter was trotted forward. Another witness was said to have been drunk, but he claimed to be a temperance man. 'What do you drink,' said the magistrate. 'Wather, yer honner,' said the total abstainer. 'Jist pure wather from the spring there beyant,' and then he looked round the Court, and slyly added, 'Wid jist as much whiskey as will take off the earthy taste, yer honner.' He was like the temperance lecturer who preached round Galway, and was afterwards seen crushing sugar in a stiff glass of the crathur at Oughterard. When he was caught redhanded, as it were, he said, 'To be sure I'm a timprance man, but, bedad, ye can't say that I'm a bigoted one'!
"We want Morley to give us a light railway from Clifden to Westport, and then we'd have the whole coast supplied. But he's a tight-fisted one as regards practical work. We've no chance with him, except in matters of sentiment. He wants to give Home Rule, but we can't eat that. And my impression is that we are fast drifting into the position of the man who has nothing, and from whom shall be taken the little that he hath. As to arguments against Home Rule, I do not think it a case for argument. That the thing is bad is self-evident; and self-evident propositions, whether in Euclid or elsewhere, are always the most difficult to prove. Ask me to prove that two added to two make four, ask me how many beans make five, and I gracefully retire. Ask me to show that Home Rule will be bad for Ireland, and I will make but a slight departure from this formula. I say, on the supporters of Home Rule rests the onus probandi; they are the people who should show cause, let them prove their case in its favour. Here I am, quite satisfied with the laws as they now are. Show me, say I, how I shall benefit by the proposed change. That knocks them speechless. In England they may make a pretence of proving their case, but in this country they are dumb in the presence of Unionists. They cannot argue with enlightened people. They have not a leg to stand upon, and they know it.
"Consider the fulminations of Archbishop Walsh with regard to that Dublin Freemason Bazaar in aid of orphan children. As you must have heard, the Sacraments were refused to any Catholic attending this purely charitable movement. The Church said in effect—Any one who aids the orphans of freemasons by going to this bazaar, or by patronising the function, whether directly or indirectly, will be damned everlastingly. And the Catholics kept away, frightened by this threat. What would you expect of a people who believe such rubbish? Do you think that a people powerfully influenced, supremely influenced, by the word of a priest are fit to govern themselves? Can you depend on the loyalty of the Catholic priesthood? You surely know better than that. Suppose you gave Ireland Home Rule, and the Church turned rusty? With matters in the hands of an Irish Parliament, who would have the pull in weight of influence, John Bull or the priests? You are walking into a snare with your eyes open. Soon you will be punching your own head and calling yourself a fool. And you will be quite right. England is giving herself away at the bidding of a crowd of fellows who in Ireland are not received into decent society, and few of whom could get 'tick' for a week's board or a week's washing. Not that the latter would be much hardship. Clean linen is a novelty to the bulk of them. And seventy-one out of eighty of these upstarts must do the bidding of the priests.
"Poor old Bull! The fine fellow he was. Respected by everybody. Strong but good-humoured, never hurting a soul. Slapping his breeches pocket now and then, and looking round the world with an eye that seemed to say, 'I could buy and sell the lot of ye; look what a fine fellow I am!' And he was. And he knew it, too. His only fault. Ready to lend a deserving friend a trifle, and apt to poke his nose into what didn't concern him, especially when a small country was being put upon. Then John would come up and say, 'Let him alone, will yer.' A laughing-stock in his old age. But yesterday he might have stood before the world: now none so poor to do him reverence,—Shakespeare! That's what's coming. Poor old Bull! In his dotage making a rod to whip himself. Well, well."
There are Presbyterians at Salthill. Wherever they are they always wear good coats, have good houses, well-clad children. To be comfortably off seems part of their creed. One of them said, "There never was a more faithful worshipper of the Grand Old Man than myself,—up to a certain time, I mean. I dropped him before he went over to Parnell. I gave him up on account of his inconsistency. What staggered me was a trick he tried to play the Queen's College arrangements in Ireland. It was a supplemental charter really changing the whole constitution of the thing, and he tried to carry his point by a dodge. I did not care much about the matter one way or the other, but I thought his underhanded trickery unworthy a statesman, or any other man. I tried not to believe it; that is, I would rather not have believed it. I had a sort of feeling that it couldn't be. But it was so. Then his pamphlet about Vaticanism, in which he said no Roman Catholic could be loyal, after which he appointed the Marquess of Ripon, a Catholic convert, or pervert, to the Governor-Generalship of India, the most important office in the gift of the Crown. Again, I had no objection to the action in itself, but I considered it from Mr. Gladstone's point of view, and then it dawned on me that he would say anything. You never know what he'll do next. What he says is no guide at all nowadays to what he'll do. He was my hero, but a change has come over him, and now he cannot be trusted. He ought to be looked after in some public institution where the keepers wouldn't contradict him. He was a great man before his mind gave way."
A bustling Belfaster of fatiguing vitality told me this little story which my friends the Catholic clergy may disprove if they can. He said:—"Mr. McMaster, of the firm of Dunbar, McMaster and Co., of Gilford, County Down, conceived the idea of aiding his fellow-countrymen and women who were starving in the congested districts. This was some time ago, but it is a good illustration of the difficulty you have in helping people who will not help themselves. He drew up a scheme, well thought-out and workable, such as a thorough business man might be expected to concoct, and sent down his agent to the districts of Gweedore in Donegal and Maam in Galway, with instructions to engage as many families as possible to work in the mills of the firm, noted all over the world for thread, yarn, and linen-weaving. An enormous affair, employing a whole township. The agent was provided with a document emanating from the priest of the district into which they were invited to migrate, setting forth that no proselytism was intended, and that the migrants would be under the care of Catholic clergy. As they had neither money nor furniture worth moving, it was agreed to pay the cost of transit, and to provide clean, sweet cottages, ready furnished, and with every reasonable convenience. The furniture was to be paid for by instalments, but the cost of removal was to be a gift from Mr. McMaster, who was desirous of aiding the people without pauperising them. They were to work the ordinary factory hours, as enacted by statute, and to be paid the ordinary wages. But they were required to work regularly. No saints' days, no lounging about on the "pattherns" (patron saints' days), no in-and-out running, but steady, regular attendance. People who knew the Keltic Irish laughed at Mr. McMaster, but he had seen their poverty, their filth, their mud cabins, their semi-starvation, and he thought he knew. He offered them work, and everything they seemed to want, out of pure humanity.