On all these points, and others furnished to me at Dublin touching this estate, much light was thrown by the bailiff, who had not been concerned in the evictions. He told me what he knew, and then very obligingly offered to conduct me to the lodge, where we should find Mr. Hutchins, who has charge now of the properties taken up by Mr. Kavanagh’s Land Corporation. My patriotic jarvey from Athy made no objection to my giving the bailiff a lift, and we drove off to the lodge. On the way the jarvey good-naturedly exclaimed, “Ah! there comes Mr. Lynch,” and even offered to pull up that the magistrate might overtake us.
We found Mr. Hutchins at home, a cool, quiet, energetic, northern man, who seems to be handling the difficult situation here with great firmness and prudence. Mrs. Hutchins, who has lived here now for nearly a year—a life not unlike that of the wife of an American officer on the Far Western frontier—very amicably asked me to lunch, and Mr. Hutchins offered to show me the holdings of Mr. Dunne and Mr. Kilbride. Mr. Lynch proposed that we should all go on my car, but I remembered the protest of the jarvey, and sending him to await me at Father Maher’s, I drove off with Mr. Hutchins. As we drove along, he confirmed the jarvey’s hint as to the difference between the views and conduct of the parish priest and the views and conduct of his more fiery curate. This is a very common state of affairs, I find, all over Ireland.
The house of Mr. Dunne is that of a large gentleman farmer. It is very well fitted up, but it was plain that the tenants had done little or nothing to make or keep it a “house beautiful.” The walls had never been papered, and the wood-work showed no recent traces of the brush. “He spent more money on horse-racing than on housekeeping,” said a shrewd old man who was in the house. In fact, Mr. Dunne, I am told, entered a horse for the races at the Curragh after he had undergone what Mr. Gladstone calls “the sentence of death” of an eviction!
Some of the doors bore marks of the crowbar but no great mischief had been done to them or to the large fine windows. The only serious damage done during the eviction was the cutting of a hole through the roof. An upper room had been provisioned to stand a siege, and so scientifically barricaded with logs and trunks of trees that after several vain attempts to break through the door the assailants climbed to the roof, and in twenty minutes cut their way in from without. The dining and drawing rooms were those of a gentleman’s residence, and one of the party remembered attending here a social festivity got up with much display.
A large cattle-yard has been established on this place, with an original, and, as I was assured, most successful weighing-machine by the Land Corporation. We found it full of very fine-looking cattle, and Mr. Hutchins seems to think the operation of managing the estate as a kind of “ranch” decidedly promising. “I am not a bit sorry for Mr. Dunne,” he said, “but I am very sorry for other quiet, good tenants who have been deluded or driven into giving up valuable holdings to keep him and Mr. Kilbride company, and give colour to the vapourings of Mr. William O’Brien.”
The cases of some of these tenants were instructive. One poor man, Knowles, had gone out to America, and regularly sent home money to his family to pay the rent. They found other uses for it, and when the storm came he was two years and a half in arrears. In another instance, two brothers held contiguous holdings, and were in a manner partners. One was fonder of Athy than of agriculture; the other a steady husbandman. Four years’ arrears had grown up against the one; only a half-year’s gale against the other. Clearly this difference originated outside of the fall of prices! In a third case, a tenant wrote to Mr. Trench begging to have something done, as he had the money to pay, and wanted to pay, but “didn’t dare.”
From Mr. Dunne’s we drove to Mr. Kilbride’s, another ample, very comfortable house—not so thoroughly well fitted up with bathroom and other modern appurtenances as Mr. Dunne’s perhaps—but still a very good house. It stands on a large green knoll, rather bare of trees, and commands a fine sweep of landscape.
Mr. Hutchins drove me to the little road which leads up past the “Land League village” to the house of Father Maher, and there set me down.
I walked up and found the curate at home—a tall, slender, well-made young priest, with a keen, intelligent face. He received me very politely, and, when I showed him the card of an eminent dignitary of the Church, with cordiality.
I found him full of sympathy with the people of his parish, but neither vehement nor unfair. He did not deny that there were tenants on Lord Lansdowne’s estate who were amply able to pay their rents; but he did most emphatically assert that there were not a few of them who really could not pay their rents.