Father M‘Fadden hesitated a moment, and then replied, “No, for things should be so arranged that they may earn their living, not out of the country, but on the soil at home. It is to that I want to bring the condition of the district.”
At this point Lord Ernest Hamilton came up and knocked at the door. He was most courteously received by Father M‘Fadden. To my query why the Courts could not intervene to save the priests from taking all this trouble on themselves between the owners and the occupiers of the land, Father M‘Fadden at first replied that the Courts had no power to intervene where, as in many cases in Gweedore, the holdings are subdivided.
“The Courts,” he said, “may not be, and I do not think they are, all that could be desired, though they undoubtedly do supply a more or less impartial arbitrator between the landlord and the tenant. It is an improvement on the past when the landlords fixed the rents for themselves.”
I did not remind him of what Lord George Hill tells us, that in the olden time at Gweedore the tenants fixed their own rents—and then did not pay them—but I asked him how this could be said when the tenant clearly must have accepted the rent, no matter who fixed it. “Oh!” said Father M‘Fadden, “that may be so, but the tenant was not free, he was coerced. With all his life and labour represented in the holding and its improvements, he could not go and give up his holding. It’s a stand-and-deliver business with him—the landlord puts a pistol to his head!”
“But is it not true,” I said, “that under the new Land Bill the Land Commissioner’s Court has power to fix the rents judicially without regard to landlord or tenant during fifteen years?”
“Yes, that is so,” said Father M‘Fadden. “Under Mr. Gladstone’s Act of 81, and under the later Act of the present Government, the rents so fixed from ’81 to ’86 inclusive are subject to revision for three years; but the people have no confidence in the constitution of the Courts, and, as a matter of fact, the improvements of the tenants are confiscated under the Act of ’81, and the reductions allowed under the Act of ’87 are incommensurate with the fall in prices by 100 per cent. And there still remains the burden of arrears. I feel that I must stand between my people and obligations which they are unable to meet. To that end I take their money, and stand ready to use it to relieve them when the occasion offers. That is my idea of my work under the ‘Plan of Campaign’; and, furthermore, I think that by doing it I have secured money for the landlord which he couldn’t possibly have got in any other way.”
This struck me as a very remarkable statement, nor can I see how it can be interpreted otherwise than as an admission that if the people had the money to pay their rents, they couldn’t be trusted to use it for that purpose, unless they put it into the control of the priest or of some other trustee.
Reverting to what he had said of the necessity for some change in the conditions of life and labour here, I asked if, in his opinion, the people could live out of the land if they got the ownership of it.
In existing circumstances he thought they could not.
Was he in favour, then, of Mr. Davitt’s plan of Land Nationalisation?