An important feature of this case is the conduct of Father White, the parish priest of Milltown Malbay. In the open court, Colonel Turner tells me, Father White admitted that he was the moving spirit of all this local “boycott.” While the court was sitting yesterday all the shops in Milltown Malbay were closed, Father White having publicly ordered the people to make the town “as a city of the dead.” After the trial was over, and the eleven who elected to be locked up had left in the train, Father White visited all their houses to encourage the families, which, from his point of view, was no doubt proper enough; but one of the sergeants reports that the Father went by mistake into the house of one of the ten who had signed the guarantee, and immediately reappeared, using rather unclerical language. All this to an American resembles a tempest in a tea-pot. But it is a serious matter to see a priest of the Church assisting laymen to put their fellow-men under a social interdict, which is obviously a parody on one of the gravest steps the Church itself can take to maintain the doctrine and the discipline of the Faith. What Catholics, if honest, must think of this whole business, I saw curiously illustrated by some marginal notes pencilled in a copy of Sir Francis Head’s Fortnight in Ireland, at the hotel in Gweedore. The author of the Bubbles from the Brunnen published this book in 1852. At page 152 he tells a story, apparently on hearsay, of “boycotting” long before Boycott. It is to the effect that, in order to check the proselyting of Catholics by a combination of Protestant missionary zeal with Protestant donations of “meal,” certain priests and sisters in the south of Ireland personally instructed the people to avoid all intercourse of any sort with any Roman Catholic who “listened to a Protestant clergyman or a Scripture Reader”; and Sir Francis cites an instance—still apparently on hearsay—of a “shoemaker at Westport,” who, having seceded from the Church, found that not a single “journeyman dared work for him”; that only “one person would sell him leather”; and, “in short, lost his custom, and rapidly came to a state of starvation.”
On the margin of the pages which record these statements, certain indignant Catholics have pencilled comments, the mildest of which is to the effect that Sir Francis was “a most damnable liar.” It is certainly most unlikely that Catholics should have arrogated to themselves the Church’s function of combating heresy and schism in the fashion described by Sir Francis. But without mooting that question, these expressions are noteworthy as showing how just such proceedings, as are involved in the political “boycottings” of the present day, must be regarded by all honest and clear-headed people who call themselves Catholics; and it is a serious scandal that a parish priest should lay him self open to the imputation of acting in concert with any political body whatever, on any pretext whatever, to encourage such proceedings.
I asked one of the sergeants how the publicans who had signed the guarantee would probably be treated by their townspeople. He replied, there was some talk of their being “boycotted” in their turn by the butchers and bakers. “But it’s all nonsense,” he said, “they are the snuggest (the most prosperous) publicans in this part of the country, and nobody will want to vex them. They have many friends, and the best friend they have is that they can afford to give credit to the country people. There’ll be no trouble with them at all at all!”
Walking about the town, I saw many placards calling for subscriptions in aid of a newsvendor who has been impounded for selling United Ireland. “It’ll be a good thing for him,” said a cynical citizen, to whom I spoke of it, “a good deal better than he’d be by selling the papers.” And, in fact, it is noticeable all over Ireland how small the sales of the papers appear to be. The people about the streets in Ennis, however, seemed to me much more effervescent and hot in tone than the Dublin people are—and this on both sides of the question. One very decent and substantial-looking man, when I told him I was an American, assured me that “if it was not for the soldiers, the people of Ennis would clear the police out of the place.” He told me, too, that not long ago the soldiers of an Irish regiment here cheered for Home Rule in the Court-house, “but they were soon sent away for that same.” On the other hand, a Protestant man of business, of whom I made some inquiries about the transmission of an important paper to the United States in time to catch to-morrow’s steamer from Queenstown, spoke of the Home Rulers almost with ferocity, and thought the “Coercion” Government at Dublin ought to be called the “Concession” Government. He was quite indignant that the Morley and Ripon procession through the streets of Dublin should not have been “forbidden.”
There are some considerable shops in Ennis, but the proprietor of one of the best of them says all this agitation has “killed the trade of the place.” I am not surprised to learn that the farmers and their families are beginning seriously to demand that the “reduction screw” shall be applied to other things besides rent. “A very decent farmer,” he says, “only last week stood up in the shop and said it was ‘a shame the shopkeepers were not made to reduce the tenpence muslin goods to sixpence!’”
This shopkeeper finds some dreary consolation for the present state of things in standing at his deserted shop-door and watching the doors of his brethren. He finds them equally deserted. In his own he has had to dismiss a number of his attendants. “When a man finds he is taking in ten shillings a day, and laying out three pounds ten, what can he do but pull up pretty short?” As with the shopkeepers, so it is with the mechanics. “They are losing custom all the time. You see the tenants are expecting to come into the properties, so they spend nothing now on painting or improvements. The money goes into the bank. It don’t go to the landlords, or to the shopkeepers, or the mechanics; and then we that have been selling on credit, and long credit too, where are we? Formerly, from one place, Dromoland, Lord Inchiquin’s house, we used regularly to make a bill of a hundred pounds at Christmas, for blankets and other things given away. Now the house is shut up and we make nothing!”
It is a short but very pleasant drive from Ennis to Edenvale—and Edenvale itself is not ill-named. The park is a true park, with fine wide spaces and views, and beautiful clumps of trees. A swift river flows beyond the lawn in front of the spacious goodly house—a river alive with wild fowl, and overhung by lofty trees, in which many pairs of herons build. A famous heronry has existed here for many years, and the birds are held now by Mr. and Mrs. Stacpoole as sacred as are the storks in Holland. Where the river widens to a lake, fine terraced gardens and espalier walls, on which nectarines, apricots, and peaches ripen in the sun, stretch along the shore. Deer come down to the further bank to drink, and in every direction the eye is charmed and the mind is soothed by the loveliest imaginable sylvan landscapes.
EDENVALE, Sunday, Feb. 19.—I was awakened at dawn by the clamour of countless wild ducks, to a day of sunshine as brilliant and almost as warm as one sees at this season in the south of France. Mrs. Stacpoole speaks of this place with a kind of passion, and I can quite understand it. Clearly this, again, is not a case of the absentee landlord draining the lifeblood of the land to lavish it upon an alien soil! The demesne is a sylvan sanctuary for the wild creatures of the air and the wood, and they congregate here almost as they did at Walton Hall in the days of that most delightful of naturalists and travellers, whose adventurous gallop on the back of a cayman was the delight of all English-reading children forty years ago, or as they do now at Gosford. Yet the crack of the gun, forbidden in the precincts of Walton Hall, is here by no means unknown—the whole family being noteD as dead shots. I asked Mr. Stacpoole this morning whether the park had been invaded by trespassers since the local Nationalists declared war upon him. He said that his only experience of anything like an attack befell not very long ago, when his people came to the house on a Sunday afternoon and told him that a crowd of men from Ennis, with dogs, were coming towards the park with a loudly proclaimed intent to enter it, and go hunting upon the property.
Upon this Mr. Stacpoole left the house with his brother and another person, and walked down to the park entrance. Presently the men of Ennis made their appearance on the highway. A very brief parley followed. The men of Ennis announced their intention of marching across the park, and occupying it.
“I think not,” the proprietor responded quietly. “I think you will go back the way you came. For you may be sure of one thing: the first man who crosses that park wall, or enters that gate, is a dead man.”