The present Earl of Cork was the largest landholder in this section except the Duke of Devonshire, but has sold most of his estate under the provisions of the Wyndham Land Act of 1903. The Devonshire estate is still intact, and, as the late duke had no sons, was inherited by Victor Cavendish, his nephew. The late Earl, Richard Edmund St. Lawrence Boyle, was an aid-de-camp to Queen Victoria, with whom he had a warm friendship. He was devoted to her all his life and was her master of horse and master of buckhounds for many years. He married in 1853 a sister of the present Earl of Clanricarde, who is fighting the Wyndham Land Act so bitterly. His eldest son and heir, late the Viscount Dungarvin, was born in 1861, served in the army for several years, and commanded the Twenty-second Battalion of Yeomanry against the Boers in South Africa. The second son of the late earl, Robert John Lascelle, born in 1864, married Josephine Hale, daughter of J.P. Hale of San Francisco, and the son of this American girl is the heir presumptive of the great Cork estate. One sister of the present earl married Francis Henry Baring of the famous London banking house, and another married Walter Long, one of the leaders of the unionist party in parliament. He represents a district of the city of Dublin, although he is an Englishman and never lived there.
“Tipperary is the deadest town in all Ireland,” said a bookseller of that place, of whom we were buying some postcards. “I don’t believe there was ever a deader town than Tip-rar-ry [for that is the way they pronounce it] and everybody is going to America who can get away.” And that seemed to be the prevailing sentiment among the people I talked with. It is the most pessimistic community I found in the country, without even a single good word for their own town. “There’s no business outside of cattle and dairying,” said another merchant. “Trade is so dull that the shopkeepers are loafing half the day.” But the people seem to keep up their interest in politics, and that they have some money left is evident, because at a meeting here, the day before my arrival, £95 was collected in a few minutes for the expense fund of the parliamentary Irish party. Outside, in the streets, there was a good deal of activity. It was market day and the farmers from all the surrounding country were in town to sell their produce and buy a stock of supplies for the ensuing week, but there was no vehicle, not even a jaunting car, at the railway station to take us to the hotel, and evidently nobody was expected. So we had to do the best we could and succeeded in persuading a farmer who was there with an “inside car” to carry us and our luggage, which he managed to do by sitting on the shafts himself. And afterward when we wanted to see the town we couldn’t find a vehicle in the street, although Tipperary is a town of six thousand population, and the hotel proprietor sent out to a livery stable for one.
Tipperary lies in the midst of a lovely country, more level than that we had been traveling through for the past three weeks, but there are only a few patches of timber and a few gentle slopes and no peat bogs so far as we could see from the railway train. The landscape reminded me of the Western Reserve of Ohio, with the exception that the Silievenarmick Hills rise in the background to the height of nine hundred and one thousand feet. The Aherlow River waters the plain and runs through the town. There doesn’t seem to be much cultivated ground in the neighborhood, but there are long stretches of meadow in which the farmers were cutting the hay, and we can perceive the perfume as we pass through them if we stand at the open window of the car. Alternating with the meadows are fine pastures, where large herds of sleek and fat cattle and many yearling colts and foal mares are feeding. There are several large stock farms in the neighborhood, and, as it was the season for county fairs when we were there, the Tipperary farmers are raking in prizes for all kinds of stock. In the town is a creamery which, we were told, is the largest in Ireland. It employs one hundred and twenty hands and its butter is shipped almost entirely to London.
The most interesting feature of Tipperary is the new town lying on the outskirts of the old, which represents an exciting incident in Irish history. During the land war of 1887 the leaders of the Irish party selected several landlords as examples for boycotting for the purpose of attracting attention to the conditions in the country and creating public opinion. This was called “The Plan of Campaign.” Among the places selected as storm centers were the Ponsonby estate near Cork, the Vandaleur estate in County Clare, the Defrayne estate in Roscommon, the Massaure estate in County Louth, and the Smith Barry estate in Tipperary. These estates were selected as battle grounds because the landlords were treating the tenants badly, were very exacting and oppressive, and furnished excellent examples to illustrate the evils of the Irish land and tenantry system. Some of the tenants were behind in their rents and, being unable to pay, were threatened with eviction unless they settled on or before a certain date.
Arthur Hugh Smith Barry, the landlord who was selected as an awful example at Tipperary, is descended from the Earl of Barrymore, whose title expired when the direct male line became extinct forty or fifty years ago. He came into possession by inheritance of a large tract of land near Cork and another tract covering between eight and nine thousand acres in this vicinity, which paid him an annual revenue of £7,368. His first wife was a sister of the present Lord Dunraven. His second and present wife was Elizabeth Wadsworth Post, a sister of former Congressman James Wadsworth of Geneseo, N.Y., and was the widow of a Mr. Post at the time of her marriage with Mr. Barry in 1889. They have a beautiful home at Fota on Fota Island, in Cork Harbor, near Queenstown, and a town residence in Berkeley Square, London. Mr. Barry has been a member of parliament and has served the government in different capacities with great credit to himself and usefulness to his country. For that reason the old title of his family was revived in 1902 and he was elevated to the peerage as Lord Barrymore.
The courage and determination he exhibited during the fight that was made upon him by the Land League was one of the reasons for giving him the honor. The boycott was managed on behalf of the Land League by William O’Brien, then, as now, member of parliament for that district. Under the latter’s direction between five and six hundred tenants of Mr. Barry stopped paying rent. Some were actually too poor to do so; others were perfectly able, but they all went in together and made a common cause and boycotted their landlord, who promptly took steps to evict them. Mr. O’Brien and other leaders of the Land League appealed to patriotic Irishmen all over the world and raised between £40,000 and £50,000—nearly $250,000—in America, Australia, Ireland, and elsewhere, with which they started to build a new town upon land belonging to Stafford O’Brien, who, by the way, is no relation of the member of parliament of the same name. Several blocks of tenement-houses were built of substantial materials and attractive appearance, and are models in their way. But when Mr. Barry got the machinery of the law in motion and wholesale evictions commenced, the managers put up cheap barracks of wood as rapidly as possible to accommodate those who were turned out of their homes.
There was a general and generous response to the appeal to the patriotism of Ireland, and people in this country who had no money gave material and labor to help the cause. Carpenters and stone masons, bricklayers, and other mechanics came to Tipperary from all parts of Ireland to work on the buildings, without wages, and within a short time all of the evicted tenants of the Barry estate were comfortably housed, free of rent, while his revenues ceased entirely and the boycott was complete. It was a significant illustration of the unity of purpose of the common people of Ireland; but, unfortunately, the leaders of the party quarreled before the demonstration was complete. The death of Charles S. Parnell in 1891, about eighteen months after the boycott was undertaken on the Barry estate, caused a split in the Irish party which continued until a few years ago. The effect of this division was to demoralize their followers at Tipperary, and the tenants of the Barry estate began gradually to slip back to their old homes and resume paying their rents. The houses at New Tipperary which were built at that time now belong very largely to Stafford O’Brien, who furnished the land upon which they were built. Others are still the property of the Land League, and the rent, which is collected by a committee, goes into the parliamentary fund.
Many people at Tipperary now declare that the “kick-up,” as they call the quarrel between the leaders of the Land League, ruined the town, because it broke the boycott and compelled the tenants to surrender to the landlords, who have had them under their heels ever since. Several people told me that the “kick-up” ruined the butter business, but I could not get anyone to explain why. At any rate, Tipperary lost a great deal of its prosperity as well as its commercial importance immediately after that trouble, especially because it was followed by a large exodus to the United States. As many of the Barry tenants as could raise the money emigrated when the support of the Land League was withdrawn from them. They refused to stay and surrender to the landlords. All the young people in the county caught the emigration fever and left for the United States as fast as they could get money enough to buy steamship tickets. I was told that several of them had come back, bringing a good deal of money with them, and had bought farms in the neighborhood, but they soon became discontented. The experience of a few years in the United States unfits people for the primitive methods and the monotony of life in Ireland; and the eagerness of everybody to get to the United States is very significant. The jaunting car drivers, the hotel porters, the dining-room waiters, the chambermaids at the hotels, and everybody of the working class that a traveler comes in contact with, always ask questions about the expense of the journey, the probabilities of securing employment in the United States, and express their determination to emigrate as soon as they can.
Tipperary also claims the authorship of that ancient and beautiful old air, “The Wearing of the Green.” It is one of the oldest of Irish melodies, but only modern words are sung to it now, and there are several versions. That which Henry Grattan Curran, who is an excellent authority, claims to be the original, was written at Tipperary and runs as follows:
“I met with Napper Tandy,