Ireland Under Coercion: The Diary of an American (1 of 2) / (2nd ed.) (1888)

by William Henry Hurlbert

But if Mr. Balfour were Chief Secretary for Ire land “on the American plan”; if he held his office, that is, for a fixed term of years, and cared nothing for a renewal of the lease, he could not be more pre-occupied than he seems to be with simply getting his executive duty done, or less pre-occupied than he seems to be with what may be thought of his way of getting it done. If all executive officers were of this strain, Parliamentary government might stand in the dock into which Prince Albert put it with more composure, and await the verdict with more confidence. Surely if Ireland is ever to govern herself, she must learn precisely the lesson which Mr. Balfour, I believe, is trying to teach her—that the duty of executive officers to execute the laws is not a thing debateable, like the laws themselves, nor yet determinable, like the enactment of laws, by taking the yeas and the nays. How well this lesson shall be taught must depend, of course, very much upon the quality of the men who make up the machine of Government in Ireland. That the Irish have almost as great a passion for office-holding as the Spanish, we long ago learned in New York, where the percentage of Irish office-holders considerably exceeds the percentage of Irish citizens. And as all the witnesses agree that the Irish Government has for years been to an inordinate degree a Government by patronage, there must doubtless be some reasonable ground for the very general impression that “the Castle” needs overhauling. It is not true, however, I find, although I have often heard it asserted in England, that the Irish Government is officered by Englishmen and Scotchmen exclusively. The murdered Mr. Burke certainly was not an Englishman; and there is an apparent predominance of Irishmen in the places of trust and power. That things at the Castle cannot be nearly so bad, moreover, as we in America are asked to believe, would seem to be demonstrated by the affectionate admiration with which Lord Spencer is now regarded by men like Mr. O’Brien, M.P., who only the other day seemed to regard him as an unfit survival of the Cities of the Plain. If what these men then said of him, and of the Castle generally, was even very partially true—or if being wholly false, these men believed it to be true—every man of them who now touches Lord Spencer’s hand is defiled, or defiles him.

But that concerns them. Their present attitude makes Lord Spencer a good witness when he declares that the Civil servants of the Crown in Ireland, called “the Castle,” are “diligent, desire to do their duty with impartiality, and to hold an even balance between opposing interests in Ireland,” and maintains that they “will act with impartiality and vigour if led by men who know their own minds, and desire to be firm in the Government of the country.” All this being true, Mr. Balfour ought to make his Government a success.

Mr. Balfour introduced me to Sir West Ridgway, the successor of Sir Redvers Buller, who has been rewarded for the great services he did his country in Asia, by being flung into this seething Irish stew. He takes it very composedly, though the climate does not suit him, he says; and has a quiet workmanlike way with him, which impresses one favourably at once.

All the disorderly part of Ireland (for disorder is far from being universal in Ireland) comes under his direct administration, being divided into five divisions on the lines originally laid down in 1881 by Mr. Forster. Over each of these divisions presides a functionary styled a “Divisional Magistrate.” The title is not happily chosen, the powers of these officers being rather like those confided to a French Prefect than like those which are associated in England and America with the title of a “magistrate.” They have no judicial power, and nothing to do with the trial of offenders. Their business is to protect life and property, and to detect and bring to justice offenders against the law. They can only be called Magistrates as the Executive of the United States is sometimes called the “Chief Magistrate.”

One of the most conspicuous and trusted of these Divisional Magistrates, I find, is Colonel Turner, who was Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant, under Lord Aberdeen. He is now denounced by the Irish Nationalists as a ruthless tyrant. He was then denounced by the Irish Tories as a sympathiser with Home Rule. It is probable, therefore, that he must be a conscientious and loyal executive officer, who understands and acts upon the plain lines of his executive duty.

I dined to-night at the Castle, not in the great hall or banqueting-room of St. Patrick, which was designed by that connoisseur in magnificence, the famous Lord Chesterfield, during his Viceroyalty, but in a very handsome room of more moderate dimensions. Much of the semi-regal state observed at the Castle in the days of the Georges has been put down with the Battle-Axe Guards of the Lord- Lieutenant, and with the basset-tables of the “Lady-Lieutenant,” as the Vice-queen used to be called. At dinner the Viceroy no longer drinks to the pious and immortal memory of William III., or to the “1st of July 1690.” No more does the band play “Lillibullero,” and no longer is the pleasant custom maintained, after a dinner to the city authorities of Dublin, of a “loving cup” passed around the table, into which each guest, as it passed, dropped a gold piece for the good of the household. Only so much ceremonial is now observed as suffices to distinguish the residence of the Queen’s personal representative from that of a great officer of State, or an opulent subject of high rank.

Dublin Castle indeed is no more of a palace than it is of a castle. Its claim to the latter title rests mainly on the fine old “Bermingham” tower of the time of King John; its claim to the former on the Throne Room, the Council Chamber, and the Hall of St. Patrick already mentioned. This last is a very stately and sumptuous apartment. Just twenty years ago the most brilliant banquet modern Dublin has seen was given in this hall by the late Duke of Abercorn to the Prince and Princess of Wales, to celebrate the installation of the Prince as a Knight of St. Patrick. It is a significant fact, testified to by all the most candid Irishmen I have ever known, that upon the occasion of this visit to Ireland in 1868 the Prince and Princess were received with unbounded enthusiasm by the people of all classes. Yet only the year before, in 1867, the explosion of some gunpowder at Clerkenwell by a band of desperadoes, to the death and wounding of many innocent people, had brought the question of the disestablishment of the Irish Church, in the mind of Mr. Gladstone, within the domain of “practical politics”! By parity of reasoning, one would think, the reception of the heir-apparent and his wife in Ireland ought to have taken that question out of the domain of “practical politics.”

The Prince of Wales, it is known, brought away from this visit an impression that the establishment of a prince of the blood in Ireland, or a series of royal visits to Ireland, would go far towards pacifying the relations between the two Islands. Mr. Gladstone thought his Disestablishment would quite do the work. Events have shown that Mr. Gladstone made a sad mistake as to the effect of his measure. The pains which, I am told, were taken by Mr. Deasy, M.P., and others to organise hostile demonstrations at one or two points in the south of Ireland, during a subsequent visit of the Prince and Princess, would seem to show that in the opinion of the Nationalists themselves, the impression of the Prince was more accurate than were the inferences of the Premier.

There is nothing froward or formidable in the aspect of Dublin Castle. It has neither a portcullis nor a drawbridge. People go in and out of it as freely as through the City Hall in New York. There is a show of sentries at the main entrance, and in one of the courts this morning the picturesque band of a Scotch regiment was playing to the delectation of a small but select audience of urchins and little girls. A Dublin mob, never so little in earnest and led by a dozen really determined men, ought to be able to make as short work of it as the hordes of the Faubourgs in Paris made of the Bastille, with its handful of invalids, on that memorable 14th of July, about which so many lies have passed into history, and so much effervescent nonsense is still annually talked and printed.

The greater part of the Castle as it existed when the Irish Parliaments sat there under Elizabeth, and just before the last Catholic Viceroy made Protestantism penal, and planned the transformation of Ireland into a French province, was burned in the time of James II. The Earl of Arran then reported to his father that “the king had lost nothing but six barrels of gunpowder, and the worst castle in the worst situation in Christendom.”