Irish Books and Irish People

by Stephen Lucius Gwynn

In the autumn of 1846, when the threat of famine had become a certainty, Moore came home to Mayo, where there was grim business to be done. His tenants, on an estate running up into the wild Partry mountains, numbered five thousand souls. For their benefit he utilised far more of his winnings on "Coranna" than the tithe which he had originally ear-marked; and not one of all these his dependants died of want in that outlandish region, though in places far less remote death was ravenous. He was chairman of the Relief Board for the whole county, and slaved at his task—not harder than other landlords in other parts of Ireland. But his methods were more drastic, his view of the situation clearer. Folk must have rubbed their eyes and perhaps stopped to think twice when the owner of "Wolfdog," of "Anonymous," and a score of other famous horses, wrote, in answer to a request for his annual subscription to the local races, that he thought the county of Mayo "as little fit to be the scene of such festivities as he to contribute to their celebration."

But Moore did not content himself with mere administration of relief. He saw that the English Government was apathetic and incompetent to face so terrible an affliction, and he took in hand to create within his own class an organised force of Irish opinion to bind together the ruling Irishmen for the good of Ireland. In company with his friend and kinsman, Lord Sligo, he "travelled through twenty-seven counties and personally conferred with most of the leading men in Ireland on the urgent necessity of a united effort to save the sinking people." The result was that between sixty and seventy members of Parliament and some forty peers pledged themselves to endeavour to secure united action upon measures regarding Ireland in the new session. On the 14th of January, 1847, the Irish landlord class held such a muster as had not been seen since the Union. "Nearly twenty peers, more than thirty members of Parliament, and at least six hundred gentlemen of name and station took part in it. The meeting called on Government to prohibit export of food stuffs and to sacrifice any sum that might be required to save the lives of the people." It passed thirty resolutions without dissension; and then some one asked what was to be done if the Government refused to adopt any of their suggestions. Would Irish members then unite to vote against the Government? To this, Irish members refused to pledge themselves, and Moore, as he said afterwards, "saw at a glance that the confederacy had broken down."

That was the end of the revolt of the Irish gentry. It was really the decisive moment of their failure; disorganised and futile, they went down by scores in the ruin of the Encumbered Estates Court, while their tenants were marking with their bones a road across the Atlantic. As for the landlords who were popular leaders, within a few months after that great assembly, Daniel O'Connell, who had proposed the first resolution, died in Rome, heart-broken. A few months more and Smith O'Brien, the mover of another resolution, headed a rebellion in sheer despair.

Smith O'Brien had twenty years of parliamentary life behind him when he was driven to the wild protest of insurrection. Twenty years of the same experience were to bring Moore to a very similar attitude; but in 1847 Moore was hopeful of building up in Parliament the nucleus of an Independent Irish Party. When the dissolution came, in 1847, he stood for a second time, but as an Independent, and his work in the famine times carried at least its recognition. Every single elector who went to the poll gave one of his two votes to the Independent. He went to Westminster and denounced with equal energy the agrarian murders, which were then rife in Ireland, and those organs of publicity in England which sought to magnify these outrages into an indictment against the Irish nation. The ferment of indignation against English methods had not yet died out in the hearts of Irish landlords. Lord Sligo, writing to Moore concerning the controversy which followed, used these words: "I believe that The Times did much to cause the feeling which resulted in landlord and parson shooting; it will end by turning us all into Repealers." If only it had! But Moore got no help from the landlord class, and the well-to-do Catholic professional men with whom he was principally allied proved themselves unable to resist the temptations of office and of personal interest. In the days of Sadleir and Keogh he fought a desperate fight against Whig place-seekers; his reward was to be finally unseated (in 1857) on an election petition, the charge being that spiritual intimidation had been exercised on his behalf by the priests. As Colonel Moore observes, if a landlord threatened his tenants with disfavour, which meant eviction, that was "only a legitimate exercise of their rights of property"; but if a priest told his flock that a man would imperil his soul by selling his vote or prostituting it to the use of a despot, the candidate whom that priest supported would lose his seat and be disqualified for re-election.

From this time onward George Henry Moore found himself heading the same way as Smith O'Brien had gone. In 1861 he told the Irish people that if they desired freedom they must take a lesson from Italy; they must "become dangerous"; and he advocated the formation of a new Irish volunteer force to emulate that of 1782. Nothing came of this; but after the American war a new movement grew up, not this time among the landlords or the professional men, nor countenanced by the priests, but nursed in the fierce heart of the people. Ireland had become dangerous. Colonel Moore recognises rightly the difference between the Fenian organisation and the Young Ireland movement which had preceded it. Both were idealistic, but the idealism of 1848 was "the inspiration of a few literary gentlemen, poets, and writers." Smith O'Brien, its titular head, was influenced profoundly by the aristocratic conception of his rightful place as representing the Kings of Thomond. Fenianism was democratic; it was officered largely by men who had themselves fought in the most stubborn of modern wars and who had seen what Irish regiments could do in the citizen levies of Federals and Confederates. It was spontaneous, and it was strong; the measure of its strength is given not by the few flickering outbreaks easily suppressed, but by the terror which it inspired, and by the change which it wrought in the spirit of the people. Moore when he took the step, extraordinary for a man in his position, of enrolling himself in that sworn and secret conspiracy can hardly have failed to foresee the collapse of Fenianism as a fighting force; but he recognised that (in his son's words) "the old complacent toleration of schemers and dishonest politicians had vanished and a sturdy independence had taken its place."

With the advent of that spirit the power of the Irish landlords was doomed. They had made their choice; when they might have made common cause with the whole people of Ireland they had refused to rise beyond their immediate personal advantage and the interests of their class. Moore, who was of themselves, who shared all their pleasures, who loved them, was forced to take a hand in their overthrow. From 1858 onward he had been almost entirely out of politics, living the life of a popular country gentleman, racing and hunting more successfully than ever; his most famous horse, "Croagh Patrick," ran in the 'sixties. But in 1868 he flung all this aside, sold his horses, and undertook to fight the alliance of Whig and Tory which had dominated County Mayo in the landlord interest for ten years.

I shall have the question settled (he said) whether one lord shall drive a hundred human souls to the hustings, another fifty, another a score; whether this or that squire shall call twenty, or ten, or five as good men as himself "his voters" and send them up with his brand on their backs to vote for an omadhaun at his bidding.

He did settle it. Mayo beat the landlords then, and Mayo became the cradle of popular movements ever after. This most typical of Irish land-owning gentlemen had been forced to sever himself from his class and even to injure his class, and it was not by advocacy of self-government that he estranged so close a friend as Lord Sligo. Fintan Lalor's policy, rejected by the Young Irelanders in 1846, was beginning to take hold in 1868; the movement for self-government was becoming linked on to the driving force of land-hunger. In the eyes of Lord Sligo and all his class Tenant Right meant Landlord Wrong, and Moore himself was not exempt from that feeling. He suffered indeed, for rents that he had reduced to a figure fixed by the tenants' own arbitrators were withheld from him. Yet he knew clearly that it was necessary for the country, and not more necessary than just, to secure the tenants in their holdings. No one disputes now that he was right. But the last thing he desired was to abolish the landlords. If they did not like the leadership of the priests "they have," he said, "a remedy left; let them make themselves more popular than the priests. If the landlords will make common cause with the people, the people will make common cause with them." There was never a truer word spoken, but it fell on closed ears.

Moore himself broke the landlords' power at the polls; their infinitely greater power, proceeding from control of the land, was broken by another Mayo man, Michael Davitt, the evicted peasant from Straide, close by Moore Hall. That fight was bound to come when Moore's warning and the warning of men like him was set at nought. What a change it has made! and what has been lost to Ireland!

Moore died in 1870. His last year of life saw a hope that Presbyterian farmers of the North, interested in Tenant Right, who had been temporarily allied to Catholics in the struggle for Disestablishment, might unite solidly with the Nationalists. Even the Protestant gentry afforded numerous supporters to Butt's Home Rule policy at its outset. But of this nothing serious came. The Land Act of 1870 was ineffective, and it seemed that, in spite of Fenianism, all would go on as before. Throughout the 'seventies the landlord class was in undisturbed supremacy. Country gentlemen still talked in good set phrase about "the robbery of the Church"; in actual fact they were very complacently and competently helping to administer its new constitution. Agriculture was prosperous and rents went high, though the harsh and overbearing landlord was condemned by his fellows. This, however, was poor consolation to the tenants. In the county where I was brought up, one landlord was a name of terror, and there was no redress from his tyranny, until at last the peasantry found it for themselves. The grim old man died fighting hard before his brains were dashed out on the roadside, and two innocent people were killed along with him; but no sane person could fail to perceive that, within five years of his taking off, the whole district was improved out of knowledge. The moral to be drawn was only too obvious; yet none of the landlords drew it; the established interest of a class is too strong a thing for that class to shake themselves out of its influence.