IRELAND’S DISEASE.

IRELAND’S DISEASE

NOTES AND IMPRESSIONS
BY
PHILIPPE DARYL

THE AUTHOR’S ENGLISH VERSION

LONDON
GEORGE ROUTLEDGE AND SONS
BROADWAY, LUDGATE HILL
GLASGOW AND NEW YORK
1888

LONDON
BRADBURY, AGNEW, & CO., PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.

PREFACE.

These pages were first published in the shape of letters addressed from Ireland to Le Temps, during the summer months of 1886 and 1887.

A few extracts from those letters having found their way to the columns of the leading British papers, they became the occasion of somewhat premature, and, it seemed to the author, somewhat unfair conclusions, as to their general purport and bearing.

A fiery correspondent of a London evening paper, in particular, who boldly signed “J. J. M.” for his name, went so far as to denounce the author as “an ally of the Times, in the congenial task of vilifying the Irish people by grotesque and ridiculous caricatures,” which charge was then summarily met as follows:—

To the Editor of the Pall Mall Gazette.

Sir,—

Let me hope, for the sake of “J. J. M.’s” mental condition, that he never set eyes upon my Irish sketches in Le Temps, about which he volunteers an opinion. If, however, he has actually seen my prose in the flesh, and he still clings to his hobby that I am hostile to the Irish cause or unsympathetic with the Irish race, why then I can only urge upon his friends the advisability of a strait waistcoat, a brace of mad doctors, and an early berth in a lunatic asylum. I never heard in my life of a sadder case of raving delusion.

Yours obediently,

PHILIPPE DARYL.

Paris, September 18, 1887.

Thus ended the controversy. There was no reply.

Allowance should be made, of course, for the natural sensitiveness of Irishmen on everything that relates to their noble and unhappy country. But, what! Do they entertain, for one moment, the idea that everything is right and normal in it? In that case there can be no cause of complaint for them, and things ought to remain as they are. All right-minded people will understand, on the contrary, that the redress of Irish wrongs can only come out of a sincere and assiduous exposure of the real state of affairs, which is not healthy but pathological, and, as such, manifests itself by peculiar symptoms.

However it may be, a natural though perhaps morbid desire of submitting the case to the English-reading public was the consequence of those exceedingly brief and abortive polemics.

The Author was already engaged in the not over-congenial task of putting his own French into English, or what he hoped might do duty as such, when Messrs. George Routledge & Sons, the London publishers of his Public Life in England, kindly proposed to introduce Ireland’s Disease to British society. The offer was heartily accepted, and so it came to pass that the English version is to appear in book form on the same day as the French one.

The special conditions of the case made it, of course, a duty to the author to strictly retain in his text every line that he had written down in the first instance, however little palatable it might prove to some English readers and fatal to his own literary or other prospects in England. That should be his excuse for sticking desperately to words which, like Tauchnitz editions, were not originally intended for circulation in Great Britain.

Ph. D.

Paris, Nov. 10th, 1887.

CONTENTS.

IRELAND’S DISEASE.

INTRODUCTION.

It is indeed a chronic and constitutional disease that Ireland is labouring under. Twice within the last fifteen months it has been my fortune to visit the Sister Isle; first in the summer of 1886, at the apparently decisive hour when the die of her destiny was being cast in the ballot-box, and her children seemed on the point of starting upon a new life; then again, twelve months after, in the summer of 1887, when I found her a prey to the very same local disorders and to the same general anxiety that I had previously observed.

Last year it looked as if the solution was nigh, if Mr. Gladstone’s spirited eloquence was going to carry the English nation along with it. The seasons, however, have followed one another in due course, bringing with them the usual run of unpaid rent, eviction, and reciprocal violence; a new Crimes Act has been added to the long record of similar measures that the British Parliament has scored against Ireland in eighty-seven years of so-called Union; a few cabins have disappeared, have been unroofed or burnt down by the arm of the bailiff; a few more skulls have been broken; some hundred thousand more wretched beings have embarked in emigrant ships for the United States or Queensland; some more hunger-stricken women and children have swollen the list of obscure victims that green Erin annually pays to the Anglo-Saxon Minotaur. But nothing essential is altered. Things are in the same places and passions at the same pitch. The two nations are facing each other with defiance in their eyes, threats in their mouths, revolvers or dynamite in hand. The problem has not advanced one step. Social war is still there, filling the hearts, paralysing the action, poisoning the springs of life. It may be read in the alarmed looks of mothers, in the sullen faces of men; it is lurking behind every hedge.

Before such an unparalleled case of a whole race’s physiological misery, how could one help being seized with an ardent curiosity mingled with pity? Who would not wish to plunge to the bottom of the matter, to make out, if possible, the secret of the evil, to deduce from it a lesson, and, may be, a general law?

That want I have felt most deeply, and I have tried to gratify it by personal observation; looking at things through my own spectacles, without animus or hatred, passion or prejudice, as they came under my gaze; noting down what seemed to be characteristic; above all, avoiding like poison the contact of the professional politician on either side: then drawing my own conclusion.

I need hardly add that for the intelligence of what I saw, I have always availed myself of the printed sources of information, such as the standard works on Irish history, Black’s excellent Guide to Ireland, the Parliamentary Reports, the national literature, and last but not least the graphic accounts of current events published by the English and native press. Of the Pall Mall Gazette, especially, I must state that I have found its files a mine of precise, well digested, and thoroughly reliable information on the subject.

That my studies are above correction, I will not venture to hope. That they are in every case founded on facts, and, to the best of my belief, accurate, I earnestly vouch. As far as possible, I have made a point of giving the names of the persons mentioned. When it might have been inconvenient to them, however, or when delicacy forbade such a liberty, I have either suppressed the name or substituted a fictitious one. It should be understood that what I wanted, as a total stranger in the country, and what my French readers wanted, were not personal but typical instances.

CHAPTER I.
FIRST SENSATIONS.

Dublin.

Hardly have you set foot on the quay at Kingstown, than you feel on an altogether different ground from England. Between Dover and Calais the contrast is not more striking. Kingstown is a pretty little place, whose harbour is used by the steamers from Holyhead, and whither Dublin shopkeepers resort in summer. Half a century back, it was only a fishermen’s village of the most rudimentary description. But George IV., late Prince Regent, having done that promontory the honour to embark there when leaving Ireland, the place became the fashion. In memory of the glorious event, the citizens of Dublin raised on that spot a pyramid which rests on four cannon balls, and bears on its top the royal crown with the names of all the engineers, architects, captains, and harbour officials who had anything to do with the business. Villas soon sprang up round it, and from that time Kingstown went on thriving. A splendid pier bent round upon itself like a forearm on its humerus, makes it the safest harbour in Ireland, and the railway puts it in communication with Dublin in twenty minutes. It is the Portici of a bay that could vie with the Bay of Naples, did it boast its Vesuvius and sun, and did not the shoals which form its bottom get often bare and dry at low tide.

You land then at Kingstown, early in the morning after a four hours’ crossing, having started the evening before by the express from Euston Station. And immediately you feel that you are no longer in England. The language is the same, no doubt, though talked with a peculiar accent or brogue. The custom-house officers are English; so are the policemen and redcoats who air themselves on the quay; but the general type is no longer English, and the manners are still less so. Loud talk, violent gesticulation, jokes and laughter everywhere; brown hair, sparkling dark eyes: you could imagine you are at Bordeaux or at Nantes.

The guard who asks for your ticket, the very train you get in, have something peculiar, undefinable, thoroughly un-English. The old lame newspaper-man who hands you The Irish Times or the Freeman’s Journal at the carriage-door, indulges witticisms while giving you back your change, which not one of Mr. Smith’s well-conducted lads ever permits himself along a British line. As for the passengers they are more un-English than anything else. This lady with the olive complexion and brown hair, may be termed an English subject; but for all that she has not probably one globule of Anglo-Saxon blood in her veins. That gentleman in the grey suit has evidently an English tailor, but the flesh-and-bone lining of his coat is of an altogether different make. As for the little man in black who is curling himself cosily in the corner opposite to you, not only is he unmistakeably a Roman Catholic priest, but you must positively hear him talk, to give up the idea that he is a Breton just out of the Saint Brieux Seminary. High cheek-bones, bilious complexion, small tobacco-coloured eyes, lank hair, nothing is missing from the likeness.

Here is Dublin. The train takes us to the very heart of the town, and there stops between a pretty public garden and the banks of the Liffey. The weather is cool and clear. Inside the station cabs and cars are waiting for travellers and their luggage. Waiting, not contending eagerly for their patronage as they do in London, where any possible customer is quickly surrounded by half-a-dozen rival drivers. “Hansom, sir?... Hansom, sir?” The Dublin cabman is more indolent. He keeps dozing on his seat or leisurely gossiping with his mates. “Why trouble oneself for nothing? The traveller knows how to call for a cab, I suppose!” So speaks the whole attitude of these philosophers in the Billycock hats.

This, however, will not prevent their being as unscrupulous as any of their fellow-drivers in any part of the globe, when it comes to settling the fare. “How much?” “Five bob.” On verification you find that two shillings is all the rogue is entitled to. You give the two shillings, he pockets them and rattles away laughing. The job was a failure; no more.

Dublin is a big city, thickly populated, crossed by wide thoroughfares, provided with fine public gardens and splendid parks, which are here called greens, and adorned with an extraordinary number of statues. Its traffic and industry are important: visibly, this is a capital. More than a capital; the focus of a nationality. Everything in the streets proclaims it: sign-boards, monuments, countenances, manners. Those marble statues you see at every step are the effigies of the patriots who fought for the rights of Ireland. That palace with the noble colonnade, in the heart and finest part of the town, is the very building where the Irish Parliament, abolished in 1800 by the Act of Union, held its assemblies. Now-a-days the Bank directors meet in the room where once met the representatives of the nation. But they seem to have been careful not to change anything in the general arrangement, in case it was wanted to-morrow for some Assemblée Constituante. You may enter it: the door is open for every one. On the right you see what was the House of Lords, a rectangular hall with an open ceiling, historic hangings, and the statue of some royalties. On the left, the House of Commons. Here, mahogany counters stand in place of the members benches, and where sounded once the clash of argument, you hear now the tinkling of gold coins.

Let old times come again; let Westminster give back to the Sister-Isle the autonomy she mourns, and, as a stage machinery, the Bank will vanish before the Parliament. It will be an affair of a night’s work for the upholsterers.

In front of that building, which is the City Hall, it is not the British flag (though perhaps the law should insist upon it) that is hanging aloft. It is the green flag of Erin with the harp and the three towers. Everywhere there are calls on the national feeling. Hibernian House, Hibernian Hotel, Erin Stores, Irish poplins, Irish gloves, Irish whisky. Above all Irish whisky! one could not get comfortably drunk with Scotch whisky, that is evident.

If you visit a museum or picture-gallery you will find Art exiled in the background, and patriotism shining to the fore. Bating a fine Giorgione, a valuable Potter, a Van Steen of large size and extraordinary quality, a rare Cornelius Béga and a few others, the collection is not worth much, and would not fetch its million francs at the Hotel des Ventes, in the Rue Drouot. It is only a pretext for a national collection of portraits where are represented all the glories of Ireland, from Jonathan Swift, Laurence Sterne, Steele, Sheridan, Edmund Burke to Moore, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, the Duke of Wellington, and above all, O’Connell, “the liberator;” and Henry Grattan, esquire, “true representative of the people, father of liberty, author of the emancipation.”

Those things take hold of you as soon as you arrive at Dublin. Like a flash of lightning they bring light upon many things about Home Rule which had remained hazy to your continental heedlessness. A nation with such memories kept up with such jealous care must know what it wants, and will have it in the end. Such signs are the manifestation of a national soul, of a distinct personality in the great human family. When all, from alderman to beggar, have one sole aim, they are bound to reach it sooner or later. Here, if the Town Hall has its green flag, the urchin in the street has his sugarplum, shaped into the effigy of Parnell or Gladstone. Never, since the Venice and the Lombardy of 1859, was there such a passionate outburst of national feeling.

In the central part of the town, several streets are really fine with their rows of large houses, their gorgeous shops and numberless statues. The women are generally good-looking; well built, well gloved, well shod. They move gracefully, and with a vivacity which is quite southern. They look gentle and modest, and dress almost as well as Frenchwomen, of whom they have the quiet grace. The youngest ones wear their brown hair floating behind, and that hair, fine in the extreme, made more supple by the moistness of an insular climate, is crossed now and then by a most lovely glimmer of golden light.

Most of the men have acquired the significant habit of carrying large knotty cudgels in place of walking sticks. Other signs show a state of latent crisis, a sort of momentary truce between classes: for instance, the abundance of personal weapons, pneumatic rifles, pocket revolvers, &c., which are to be seen in the armourers’ shop windows.

But what gives the principal streets of Dublin their peculiar character is the perpetual presence at every hour of the day of long rows of loiterers, which only one word could describe, and that is lazzaroni. As in Naples they stop there by hundreds; some in a sitting posture, or stretched at full length on the bare stone, others standing with their backs to the wall, all staring vaguely in front of them, doing nothing, hardly saying more, mesmerised by a sort of passive contemplation, and absorbed in the dull voluptuousness of inaction.

What do they live upon? When do they eat? Where do they sleep? Mystery. They probably accept now and then some occasional job which may bring them a sixpence. At such times they disappear and are mixed among the laborious population; you don’t notice them. But their normal function is to be idle, to hem as a human fringe the public monuments.

Some places they seem to affect particularly; Nelson’s Pillar amongst others. Whenever you pass it you are sure to see four rows of loungers seated on the pedestal, with legs dangling, pressed against each other like sardines.

Numerous tramcars, light and quick, cross Dublin in all directions. Five or six railway stations are the heads of so many iron lines radiating fan-wise over Ireland. All bear their national stamp; but what possesses that character in the highest degree is that airy vehicle called a jaunting-car.

Imagine a pleasure car where the seats, instead of being perpendicular to the shafts, are parallel with them, disposed back to back and perched on two very high wheels. You climb to your place under difficulties; then the driver seated sideways like you (unless the number of travellers obliges him to assume the rational position), lashes his horse, which plunges straightway into a mad career.

This style of locomotion rather startles you at first, not only on account of its novelty, but also by reason of the indifferent equilibrium you are able to maintain. Jostled over the pavement, threatened every moment to see yourself projected into space, at a tangent, you involuntarily grasp the nickel handle which is there for that purpose, just as a tyro horseman instinctively clutches the mane of his steed. But one gets used in time to the Irish car, and even comes to like it. First, it goes at breakneck speed, which is not without its charm; then you have no time to be bored, considering that the care of preserving your neck gives you plenty of occupation; lastly, you have the satisfaction of facing constantly the shop windows and foot paths against which you are likely to be tossed at any moment. Those are serious advantages, which other countries’ cabs do not offer. To be candid, they are unaccompanied by other merits.

In that equipage you go to the Phœnix Park, the Dublin “Bois de Boulogne.” It is a wide timbered expanse of some two thousand acres, full of tame deer, where all that is young in the place may be seen flirting, cricketing, playing all sorts of games, but above all, bicycling. Bicycles seem to be the ruling passion of the Dublin youth. I have seen more than a hundred at a time in a single lane near the Wellington Obelisk. By the way, this was the very avenue where Lord Frederick Cavendish and Mr. Burke were murdered five years ago by the Invincibles. A cross marks the place where the two corpses were discovered.

The Castle, which the two English officials had the imprudence to leave that day, is the Lord-Lieutenant’s official residence. It has not the picturesque majesty of the castles of Edinburgh or Stirling. Instead of rising proudly on some cloud-ascending rock and lording over the town, it seems to hide “its diminished head” under a little hillock in the central quarters. You must literally stumble over its walls to become aware of their existence; and you understand then why the name of Dublin Castle is for the Irish synonymous with despotism and oppression.

This is no Government office of the ordinary type, the dwelling of the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland is a regular stronghold, encircled with ramparts, bristling with towers, shut up with portcullis, draw-bridge and iron bars. In the inner Castle yard are situated the apartments of the pro-consul, the lodgings of his dependants of all degrees, the offices where decrees are engrossed, the pigeon-holes where they are heaped, all forming a sort of separate city entrenched within its fortifications.

A very gem is the Royal Chapel, with its marvellous oak wainscoting, which twenty generations of carvers have concurred to elaborate. The reception-rooms, the hall of the Order of St. Patrick, where drawing-rooms are held, form the kernel of the fortress.

The barracks of the English soldiers and of those giant constables whom you see about the town are also fortified with walls, and form a line of detached forts round the central stronghold.

England is encamped at Dublin, with loaded guns and levelled rifles, even as she is encamped at Gibraltar, in Egypt, and in India.

CHAPTER II.
DUBLIN LIFE.

As there is little aristocracy in Dublin there are few lordly dwellings besides the Vice-regal castle. This is very striking in this country of lords and serfs. The masters of the land, mostly of English origin, do not care at all to live in the capital of Ireland; all the time that they do not spend on their property they prefer to beguile away in London, Paris, Naples or elsewhere. Few of their tradesmen are Irish; and the greatest part of the rents they raise on their lands merely accumulate in the banks of Dublin to be afterwards spent on the foreign markets. Thence this consequence, which explains many things:—The clearest of the nett product of the country’s one industry—agricultural industry,—is poured outside it every year, without having circulated in Ireland, without having strengthened the local commerce or even invigorated agriculture itself, without having contributed to the well-being of a single Irishman. Let us set down this nett product, the Irish aggregate rental, at its lowest estimate, £8,000,000 per annum, a sum much inferior to the nominal one, and admit that one-half of it is sent abroad to absentee landlords. There we have £4,000,000 leaving the island every year without conferring the slightest benefit to any one of its inhabitants. In ten years’ time that represents 40 millions sterling; in fifty years, 200 millions sterling, or five milliards francs, that Ireland has, so to speak, thrown into the sea, for that is to her the precise equivalent of such a continuous deperdition of capital.... And this has lasted for three centuries!...[1] What country would not be worn threadbare by such usage? What nation could resist it? Which individual, submitting to such periodical blood-lettings, would not succumb to anæmia?

This anæmia betrays itself, even in Dublin, by many a symptom. For example, it is not long before one discovers that the finest shops, in the seven or eight principal streets, are a mere empty pretence; great windows displaying all the wares possessed by the merchant and beyond which the stock is nil. Money is so scarce that if you want to exchange a five pound note, in nine cases out of ten you do not get your right amount of change in specie. They give you back a quantity of small Irish banknotes, plus the change in half-crowns and shillings, and that not without having caused you to wait a long time while the important transaction was entered in and brought to a termination, and then only by the united energies of half the neighbourhood.

There is not in all the city one tolerable restaurant or café where a stranger can read the papers or obtain a decent beefsteak. The two or three pretentious taverns that aspire to fulfil that purpose are horrible dens, where, without the civilized accompaniment of napkins, they give you slices of cow, tough as leather, which are charged for at Bignon’s prices.

Necessity compels you to fall back on the hotels, where they pitilessly give you the same fare night after night,—salmon and roast beef. The first day this can be borne, for the Shannon salmon deserves its reputation; the second day one begins to find it indigestible; the third, one would like to see all the salmon of Ireland choking the head waiter. The fourth, one takes the train rather than remain any longer exposed to this implacable fare.... Vain hope! it pursues you everywhere: on the shores of Kingstown or those of Blackrock, in the pretty town of Bray, or at the furthermost end of Wicklow’s lakes. It is impossible to travel in Ireland without taking a dislike to salmon that will last the term of your natural life.

And yet the fresh herrings of the Bay of Dublin are eating fit for the gods, and the good wives sell them in the streets at three a penny. Do not hope to taste them, however, unless you do your own marketing, and insist, with conditional threats, upon having your herrings brought up for breakfast. You will have a fight to sustain; you will run the risk of appearing in the eyes of the waiter as a man of no breeding, one who does not shrink from exhibiting his morbid tastes to the public view. But your pains and your humiliations will be rewarded by such a dish as is not often to be met with in this vale of tears and bad cooking.

Dublin possesses three theatres, not including the future Opera-House, for which a site has already been chosen. The Gaiety, the most elegant of the three, gives musical burlesques that are rather entertaining, though they come straight from London. But they are acted by Irishmen and Irishwomen, with all the dash, the brilliancy, the wit of the Celt. The comic actor of the company neglects nothing to amuse his audience; extravagant costumes, insane grimaces, jigs danced in brogues, impromptu verses on the events of the day,—he has any number of tricks at his command. That gentleman would score a sure success at the Concert des Ambassadeurs, with the ditty that actually delights the hearts of the Dublin public—“That’s all;” it is about as stupid as the general literature of the Champs Elysées. The accomplished and fascinating corps de ballet exhibit tights of such indiscretion as the Lord Chamberlain would assuredly not tolerate in London. Is it that his jurisdiction does not extend to the sister isle; or does the thing which would imperil the virtue of club-loungers in Pall Mall appear to him without danger for those of Kildare Street? The problem would be worth studying. However that be, a boxfull of young officers in H. B. M.’s service seem greatly exhilarated by the display of ankles of the ladies, unless it be by the port wine of the mess.

These officers, in plain clothes as they are always when out of duty, are nevertheless easy to recognise and seem about the only swells visible in the boxes. The rest of the audience manifestly belong to the commercial and working classes.

For it is a fact that there is in Dublin no more upper middle class than there is aristocracy. The upper middle class seem not to exist, or to be only represented by tradespeople, the liberal professions, or the students. But these young men being, after the excellent English custom, lodged at the University, do not count in the pleasure-seeking public. In other words, they spend the evening in their rooms drinking toddy, instead of spending it, as with us, drinking small-beer in brasseries.

The University of Dublin, or rather, to speak more exactly, Trinity College, rises opposite Grattan’s Parliament, in the very heart of the town. It is an agglomeration of buildings of sufficiently good style, separated by spacious courts, and surrounded by about thirty acres of ground planted with ancient trees. Technical museums, lecture-rooms, refectories, rooms for the Fellows and the pupils are all to be found there. There is a Section of Theology, one for Letters and Science, a Musical Section, a School of Medicine, a Law School, an Engineering School. Students and Masters all wear, as in Oxford or Cambridge, the stuff gown and the kind of black Schapska, which is the University head-covering throughout the United Kingdom.

Thinking of this, why is it we see so many Eastern head-dresses in the school of the west? With us the cap of the professors is the same that Russian popes wear. The Anglo-Saxons take theirs from Polish Lancers. That is an anomaly in the history of dress which ought to attract the meditations of academies.

Another anomaly, peculiar to Trinity College, is that the porters (most polite and benevolent of men) are provided with black velvet jockey caps, like the Yeomen of the Queen. They take the visitors through the museums of the place, and show them the plaster cast taken from the dead face of Swift, the harp of Brian Boru, and other relics of a more or less authentic character. The Dining Hall is ornamented with full-length portraits of the local celebrities. The library, one of the finest in the world, is proud of possessing, among many other riches, the manuscript (in the Erse tongue), of the “Seven times fifty Stories,” which the bards of the Second Order of Druids used to recite, on ancient feast days, before the assembled kings and chieftains. Those venerable tales are subdivided into Destructions, Massacres, Battles, Invasions, Sieges, Pillages, Raids of Cattle, Rapes of Women, Loves, Marriages, Exiles, Navigations, Marches, Voyages, Grottoes, Visions, Pomps, and Tragedies. This shows that “documentary literature” was not invented yesterday: all the primitive life of Celtic Ireland is told there.

The undergraduates at Trinity College do not seem, as a rule, like those of Oxford and Cambridge, to belong to the privileged or unoccupied classes. They are embryo doctors, professors, or engineers, who work with all their might to gain one of the numerous scholarships given by competition at the University. These competitions evidently excite an ardent emulation. I chanced to pass before the Examination Hall at the moment when the Rector at the top of the steps proclaimed the name of the candidate who had just won the Fellowship. Five hundred students at least, grouped at the gate, had been waiting for an hour to hear it, and saluted it with frantic cheers.

The Fellowship gives a right to board and lodging for seven years, with a stipend of some £400. It is a kind of prebend that implies few duties and leaves the titulary free to give himself up to his favourite studies. It has been the fashion in a certain set in France to go into ecstasies over this institution, and to regret that it should not have entered our own customs. The life of a Fellow at Oxford, Cambridge, or Dublin, was fondly represented to us as an ideal existence, freed from material cares, devoted exclusively to the culture of the mind. If we look at things more closely, we shall see that this opinion is wide of the mark. We find some of the prebendaries poorly lodged enough, submitted, by the exigencies of life in a community, to many a puerile rule, imprisoned within the narrow circle of scholastic ideas, and in too many cases buried up to the eyes in the sands of routine, if not in sloth, or drunkenness.

After all, for what strong, manly work is the world indebted to these much-praised Fellows?... The true effort of science or letters was never brought forth in these abbeys of Thelema of pedantry. Indeed it is much sooner born of individual struggle and large contact with the outside world. Even in the English Universities there is now a marked tendency to demand from the Fellow a work of positive utility in exchange for his salary. He must take his part in educating the pupils, help in the examinations, and in elaborating programmes; his life is much the same as that of our Agrégés de Facultés, with a something in it of lesser freedom and a semi-priestly character, if he be a bachelor. But he is free to marry now, and has been for a few years, on condition that he lives outside the college buildings.

The students, fourteen hundred in number, live two by two, in rooms of extreme simplicity, which they are at liberty to decorate according to their taste or means, with carpets, prints, and flowers. The names of the occupants are written over each door. The rooms generally include a small ante-chamber and a closet with glass doors. Women of venerable age and extraordinary ugliness are charged with the care of those young Cenobites’ abode.

Trinity College was founded by Queen Elizabeth when she undertook the task of Anglicizing Ireland, and it has remained to our own day one of the strongholds of the conquering race. It is only since the year 1873 that the chairs and offices of this University have been accessible to Roman Catholics. Up to that time they were exclusively reserved for Anglicans, and Mr. Matthew Arnold would exclaim with good reason that such a state of things was the most scandalous in Europe. In France, he said, Protestant masters occupied all the chairs to which their merits entitled them; in Germany, Catholic professors taught history or philosophy at Bonn and elsewhere; while, in Catholic Ireland, the one University the country possessed remained closed during two centuries to all students that were not of the Protestant persuasion, and for three-quarters of the present century a Catholic could neither attain to a chair or to any degree of influence in it.

It was in the year 1845 that the movement began which was to triumph definitely in 1873, under the initiative of Mr. Gladstone. A certain Mr. Denis Caulfield Heron went up in that year for the competition for a fellowship, and took the first place. When he was, according to custom, invited to sign the Thirty-Nine Articles and to communicate in the University chapel, he opposed an absolute refusal, declaring himself to be a Roman Catholic; whereupon he was disqualified by the University Council. Mr. Heron exposed this judgment before the public, and succeeded in winning opinion to his side. But it proved an impossibility to make the Council recall their decision. The only thing Mr. Heron obtained, after a protracted struggle, was the creation of a new class of fellowships, accessible to Roman Catholics.

Finally, in 1873 the College authorities at last made up their minds to render the offices and emoluments of the University independent of any sectarian denomination; nevertheless the Anglican spirit remains alive within its precincts, and manifests itself in the clearest manner upon occasions.

Intellectual life is alive in Dublin, as many a learned or literary society, a flourishing review, four great daily and several weekly papers, can testify. The daily papers especially are edited with a spirit and humour truly characteristic. It is a well known fact that the Sister Isle contributes a third at least to the recruiting of the Anglo-Saxon press, not only in Great Britain, but in the United States, in Australia, and in the whole of the English speaking world. The Irishman a writer or a soldier born, as the Englishman is a born shopkeeper. The consequence is that the great papers in Dublin, the Freeman’s Journal, the Irish Times, United Ireland, the Express, the Evening Telegraph, are admirably edited each in its own line.

But the same thing can hardly be said of the illustrated and coloured sheets that accompany the weeklies, and which are placarded everywhere. Those prints, bearing upon the political topics of the day, may possess the merit of teaching the crowd the lesson to be drawn from events; but they are lamentably inefficient from an artistic point of view.

Ireland, decidedly, shines no more than does our own Brittany in the plastic arts. Her best painter has been Maclise, and he is by no means a great master. However, her coloured prints delight the hearts of the good people of Dublin. An old newspaper-seller, smoking her pipe at the corner of Leinster Street, holds her sides for very laughter as she contemplates the cartoon given this day by the Weekly News; it represents a mob of Orangemen in the act of pelting the Queen’s police with stones at Belfast. Underneath run the words: “Behold loyal Ulster!”

The quays of the Liffey are lined with book-shops like those of the Seine in Paris, to which they present a certain likeness. Following the quays from the west, one passes the building where sit the four Supreme Courts—Chancery, Exchequer, Queen’s Bench, and Common Pleas. The statues of Faith, Justice, Wisdom, and Piety rise under its Corinthian peristyle, which caused the typical Irish peasant, the Paddy of legend, to exclaim:

“They did well to place them outside, for no one will ever meet them inside!”

The judges, chosen by the Queen’s government, bear the title of Chief Justice or Baron. There are four at each tribunal, each provided with a salary ranging from three to eight thousand pounds a year. They sit in groups of three, bewigged and clad in violet gowns, with peach-coloured facings, at the extremity of a recess screened by red curtains. Before them sit the barristers and clerks in black gowns and horsehair wigs. The writs and briefs of procedure, written out upon awe-inspiring sheets of foolscap paper, are piled up within capacious green bags, such as are only seen with us at the Comédie Française when they play Les Plaideurs. The judges appear to be a prey to overwhelming ennui, so do the barristers. The public, not being paid as highly as they are for remaining in this sleepy atmosphere, keep constantly going in and out. Now and then, however, Irish wit must have its due: some one delivers himself of a spicy remark; everyone wakes up a bit to laugh, after which business quietly resumes its dull course.

CHAPTER III.
THE POOR OF DUBLIN.

Private houses are built in Dublin on the general type adopted throughout the British Isles: a basement opening on the railed area which runs along the pavement, a ground floor, a first floor, sometimes a second one. Above the front door a pane of glass lighted with gas. It is the custom of the country to place there one’s artistic treasures,—a china vase, a bust, or a small plaster horse. The small horse especially is a great favourite. You see it in a thousand copies which all came out of the same cast. In the suburbs you notice pretty often a window decorated with plants that are seen behind the glass panes,—Breton fashion,—and, striking circumstance, in Ireland also it is the uninteresting geranium which is the favourite flower of the poor. Inside the house the accommodation is nearly the same as in England. It is well known that nothing is more like an English house than another English house. But here, to the classical furniture, horse-hair and mahogany armchairs, and oil-cloth floor, is added a mural decoration of coloured prints and Roman Catholic chromolithographs, Saint Patrick, the Pope Leo XIII., the “Good Shepherd giving His life for the sheep,” surrounded by dried branches of holy palm, rosaries and scapularies. An ornament greatly appreciated on the chimney-piece is a glass vessel full of miraculous water in which swims a reduction of the tools of the Passion, the cross, the ladder, the hammer, the nails, and the crown of thorns.

Eighty-seven per cent. of the Dublin population belong to the Roman Catholic religion. The proportion is higher in some other Irish counties: in Connaught it rises to ninety-five per cent.; nowhere, even in Protestant Ulster, does it descend lower than forty-five per cent.

And those Catholics are not so only in name. The greater number follow the services of the Church, observe all the rites, maintain a direct and constant intercourse with the priests. The sincerity of their faith is particularly striking, and is not to be found in the same degree even in Italy or in Spain. For with them the Roman faith is narrowly bound with traditions most dear to their race; it remains one of the external forms of protestation against the conquest, and has been, till quite lately, a stigma of political incapacity. To the glamour of the traditional religion is added the poetry of persecution and the rancour of the vanquished. This religion is the one that is not professed by the hated Englishman: what a reason to love it above all the others! We must remember that in Dublin, amidst a population nine-tenths of which are devout Catholics, and where the remaining tenth is alone Protestant (Episcopalian’ Presbyterian, Methodist, &c.), the cathedral is in the hands of the Anglican minority with all the ancient basilics, whilst the worship of the majority is sheltered in modern and vulgar buildings. The conquering race has invaded Saint Patrick’s Baptistery as well as the Royal Castle, and the Senate of the University. A threefold reason for rancour to these who were thus deprived of the three sanctuaries of faith, public power, and learning.

Such spoliations are those which a vanquished race cannot forget, because they bring constantly their sore under their eyes. Now the Irish have the artless vanity of the chivalrous races, and the wounds inflicted to their self-love are perhaps more cruel than the others.

This vanity is frequently exhibited in a certain taste for show, and in a slight touch of the mountebank. The least apothecary’s shop in Dublin goes by the pompous name of Medical Hall; the smallest free school is an academy; and it is well known that every single Irishman is descended straight from the “ould kings of Oireland.”

There is a great deal of misery in Dublin; 6,036 of her inhabitants are inmates of the workhouse; 4,281 are the recipients of outdoor relief; 19,332 are without a known trade or profession and without means of living. It makes about 30,000 paupers in a town of 250,000 inhabitants. Besides those officially recognised paupers, how many others whose distress is no less terrible for not being classed!

I had the first sight of that misery on the quay of the Liffey. It was a dishevelled woman walking as in a trance, her eyes settled, immoveable. Barefooted, dressed in a yellowish tattered shawl which hardly covered her withered breast, and in a horrible nondescript silk petticoat once black, through which her thighs appeared. She was pale and silent, and she seemed to be lost in some unutterable grief. I spoke to her—she did not answer. I put a piece of money in her hand, she took it without a word, without even looking at it. She went her way.

I thought I had seen the ghost of the Shan Van Vocht, “The Poor Old Woman,” as the Irish sorrowfully call their country. She went with long strides towards the police court—a new building, not far from Richmond Bridge. I went in after her.

In the courtyard, groups of beings with human faces were crouching on the ground—so black, so dirty, so tattered were they, that they made me think of the Australian aborigines and Fuegian savages, of the most unenlightened and degraded tribes of the globe. Most of them bore outwardly the semblance of women. The males were standing with their backs against the wall in that listless attitude of the “unemployed” in Dublin.

An ill-kept staircase leads to the audience room. The walls are whitewashed, the ceiling a skylight, white wooden benches round the room.

In the chair, the police judge; he is a yellow-haired man with a benevolent countenance, dressed in a frock coat. Clerks and counsel are alike gownless and wigless; everything is conducted in a homely manner. The accused follow each other in single file. The witness (nearly always a constable) states what he has seen. The judge asks the delinquent if he has anything to say in his defence, and after a quick colloquy he pronounces his sentence. Generally it is a fine of two or three shillings or a day’s imprisonment for each unpaid shilling.

One of the prisoners has just been condemned to pay a fine of half a crown for obvious drunkenness; he does not possess a farthing, but seems to be endowed with a humorous turn of mind.

“Your honour could as well have said half a sovereign! It would have looked more respectable, and the result would have been the same,” he says, turning his pockets inside out. A guffaw of laughter joined in by the judge himself, who does not think it his duty to be offended by the remark; after which he calls out for number two.

Number two is a boy fifteen or sixteen years old; he has a sweet intelligent countenance in spite of the indescribable rags that cover his body. Tears stand in his eyes and his lips are tremulous. Nothing in him of the habitual offender. The accusation that he is lying under seems to be: “Theft of a pork-chop in an open shop-window.” A single witness is called, a little maid five years old; so small that her head does not even reach the top of the witness-box. They bring her a footstool, on which she climbs to give her evidence.

She has seen the boy, she says, near the shop window, looking wistfully for a long time on the chops and finally pocketing one. However, her account is not very clear. All those people make her shy, and she does not speak out loud, so the clerk takes the trouble to read over to her the evidence she has just given. Does she know how to write? Can she sign her name? Yes. They place a pen in her fingers, and with infinite trouble, bending her small fair head, shooting out her lips, she writes on the legal parchment with her tiny trembling hand her name and surname: Maggie Flanagan.

“Well! prisoner, what have you to say?”

The unfortunate boy stammers that he was hungry, that there was not a penny in the house, and that he had no work.

“What is your father’s trade?”

“He is gone to Australia, your honour. Mother has been left with four children. I am the eldest. We had eaten nothing for two days.”

One feels he is speaking the truth. Every heart is moved.

Suddenly a shrill voice bursts out from the lower end of the room, wailing: “Oh, your honour, don’t send him to jail!...”

It is the woman I saw on the quay; the one that I followed to that Purgatory. The mother of the culprit very likely.

“I am obliged to remand you for a week in order to examine the circumstances of the case,” the judge says, in a manner that shows he is anxious to arrange the affair with kindness.

The prisoner goes out of the dock following the warder, and disappears through a small side door.

The mother has gone away without waiting, and I hurry to follow her. But she walks so fast that I can hardly keep pace with her.

She passes again on the bridge, walks along the quay, plunges in a by-street, goes up towards the south-western quarters of Dublin, called the liberties of the town. Suddenly I lose sight of her at the corner of a narrow lane, and after winding round and round I am obliged to renounce coming up with her. There is a way of course to come to the relief of those poor creatures, by sending one’s subscription to the judge according to the British fashion. But I wanted to see them at home in their den, wallowing in their squalor, to see whether men or destiny bear the responsibility for such dark distress.

Alas! examples are not wanting, and I have only to cross the first door that opens before me. Along these lanes yawn dark alleys from which hundreds of half-naked children are swarming out. All ages are represented; they are in the most fantastical and unexpected attire. One has got on breeches fastened under the shoulders by a piece of cord in lieu of braces; the same is full of holes large enough for his head to go through. Another has no shirt, and trails in the gutter the jagged skirt of a coat slashed like a doublet, and with only one sleeve left. They are all of them so extravagantly slovenly that it seems to be a competition for rags.

A baby two or three years old strikes me particularly. It is absolutely naked, and so very, very dirty that dirt has formed a sort of bronzed skin over his little body, and he is like a juvenile nigger. As he came into the world so he has remained. Neither soap nor water ever moistened his skin. He has not even undergone the washing that the mother-cat applies so industriously with her tongue on her newborn kittens.

Yet his mother loves him, squalid and black as he is. Just now a cart passed, and the baby was running under the wheels; the mother sprang out of her lair with the roar of a tigress, and pounced upon her child, which she jealously carried away.

Never in London did I hear such accents. Far from me to hint that English mothers do not love their babies: but they love them after their own fashion, without showers of kisses or demonstrative ways.

And this is the distinctive feature which divides the Irish pariahs from those of the London East-End. They love each other, and they know how to put that love into words. Their distress, perhaps deeper than English poverty, bears not the same hard, selfish character—tenderness and love are not unknown to them. They try to help and comfort one another in their misery. Thackeray has remarked it long ago: let an Irishman be as poor as you like; he will always contrive to find another Irishman poorer still, whom he will serve and oblige, and make the partaker of his good or bad luck. And it is absolutely true. That fraternal instinct, so unknown to the Anglo-Saxon, nay, so contrary to his nature, shows itself here at every step.

But the misery is none the less terrible here; indeed, there are no adequate words in the dictionary to express it. No description can give an idea of those nameless dens, sordid, dilapidated stairs, miserable pieces of furniture, nondescript utensils invariably diverted from their original destination. And in that lamentable frame, those swarming families squatting in their filth; the starved look of the mothers under the tattered shawl that ever covers their heads, the hungry little faces of their whelps....

A sickening smell, recalling that of ill-ventilated hospitals, comes out of those lairs and suffocating you, almost throws you back. But it is too late. You have been caught sight of. From all sides visions of horror are emerging to light, spectres are starting up; old hags that would have surprised Shakespeare himself, swarm round you, holding out their hand for a copper. The younger women don’t generally come to the front, not that their wants be less, but they know that coppers are not inexhaustible, and that the old ones must have the precedence. So they remain sadly in the background, and then, when you have emptied your pockets, there is a roar of benedictions fit to rend one’s heart with shame. They are so fearfully sincere! And how many times do we not throw to the winds of our caprice what would be sufficient to quench at least for one moment, the thirst which is raging in that hell! You fly from that den of horror, wondering whether the most horrible deserts would not be more merciful to those destitute creatures than the liberties of the city of Dublin.

In your flight you fatally fall upon Nicholas Street, where all those dark alleys open. This is the way to the cathedral, and the great commercial artery of this side of the town. If any doubt remained in you after the insight you had of the houses of the poor in Dublin, about the way they live, that street alone would give you sufficient information.

From end to end it is lined with a row of disgusting shops or stalls, where the refuse of the new and the ancient world seems to have come for an exhibition. Imagine the most hideous, ragged, repulsive rubbish in the dust-bins of two capitals, and you will get an idea of that shop-window display; rank bacon, rotten fish, festering bones, potatoes in full germination, wormy fruit, dusty crusts, sheep’s hearts, sausages which remind you of the Siege of Paris, and perhaps come from it; all that running in garlands or festoons in front of the stalls, or made into indescribable heaps, is doled out to the customers in diminutive half-pence morsels. At every turning of the street a public-house with its dim glass and sticky glutinous door. Now and then a pawnbroker with the three symbolic brass balls, and every twenty yards a rag and bone shop.

The rag and bone trade is extremely active in Dublin, which numbers no less than 400 shops of that description, according to statistics. And that is not too many for a population which from times immemorial never wore a garment that was not second-hand. To a man Ireland dresses on the reach-me-down system, and wears out the cast-off garments which have passed on the backs of ten or twelve successive owners. Battered hats, dilapidated gowns, threadbare coats arrive here by shiploads. When the whole world has had enough of them, when the Papoo savages and Guinea niggers have discarded their finery, and declared it to be no longer serviceable, there are still amateurs to be found for it in Dublin. Hence the most extraordinary variety, and the wildest incoherence of costume. Knee-breeches, tail coats, white gowns, cocked hats,—Paddy and his spouse are ready for anything. So destitute are they of personal property, that they do not even possess an outline of their own. Their normal get-up resembles a travesty, and their distress a carnival.

The main point for them is to have a garment of any description to put on, since it is a thing understood that one cannot go about naked; and it does not very much matter after all what is the state of that garment, as it is so soon to leave their backs to go to the pawnbroker’s. This is a prominent figure in the daily drama of their wretched existence, the regulator of their humble exchequer through the coming and going of the necessaries of life, which they are obliged to part with periodically.

“You see that pair of hob-nailed shoes?” one of them tells me, “For the last six months it has come here every Monday regularly and gone every Saturday. The possessor uses them only on Sundays; on week days he prefers enjoying his capital....”

His capital!—one shilling and sixpence, for which he has to pay an interest of one penny a week; i.e., three hundred per cent. a year!

Usury under all its forms blooms spontaneously on that dung-hill. By the side of the pawnbroker a money office is almost always to be seen. It is an English institution, natural in a nation which is bursting with money, and consequently finds it difficult to make it render 3 or 4 per cent. What is England if not a colossal bank, which advances money upon any three given signatures as a security, if they come from people with a settled dwelling and a regular profession? Well, who would believe it? Paddy himself is admitted to partake of the onerous benefits of that credit, provided he work ever so little and be not too hopelessly worn out. For these small banking houses form a union and let each other know the state of their accounts. Upon the poor man’s signature accompanied by those of two of his fellows, five and seven pounds sterling will be lent to him, to be reimbursed by weekly instalments. But that resource, which is a powerful help for the strong energetic man, is almost invariably a cause of distress and ruin to the weak. The borrowed money ebbs out in worthless expenditure, in the buying of some articles of apparel or furniture, which soon takes the road to the pawnbroker’s; and the debt alone remains weighing with all its weight on poor Paddy. It is the last straw on the camel’s back, and he ends by falling down irremediably under it.

CHAPTER IV.
THE EMERALD ISLE.

Nothing can be easier than to go from one end to the other of Ireland. Though her network of railways is not yet complete, great arteries radiate from Dublin in all directions and allow the island to be traversed from end to end, whether southward, westward, or northward, in less than seven or eight hours. The journey from south to north, following the great axis, is longer and more complicated, for it is necessary to change lines several times. The circular journey along the coasts is facilitated by excellent services of open coaches, that go through the regions not yet penetrated by railways. Lastly, one can, by following the Shannon, enter by steamboat almost to the very heart of the country.

When one has gone through those various excursions, completed by riding and walking tours, and seen the island under its various aspects, one perceives that it presents in a general manner the appearance of a cup, with brims rising towards the sea; in other words, it consists in a vast central plain, protected on all its circumference by groups of hills and mountains, preventing the inroad of the ocean. Those mountains are in no part very high; the finest, those of Kerry, do not rise above 1800 feet. But their very position on the brink of the Atlantic, the erosions undermining their base, the deep bays they delineate, the innumerable lakes hidden away in their bosoms, lend them a majesty far above their altitude. Bland and smiling in Wicklow, they are in Kerry of an unequalled serenity, while in Connemara they preserve unbroken the rude chaos of primeval cataclysms, and display on the north of Antrim’s table-land, towards the Giant’s Causeway, the most stupendous basaltic formations.

Yet the normal, the truest aspect of Ireland, is represented by the central plain—a large, unbroken surface of green undulating waves, ever bathed in a damp and fresh atmosphere, shut in on the horizon by dark blue mountains.

This aspect is of infinite sweetness; no land possesses it in a similar degree. It takes possession of you, it penetrates you like a caress and a harmony. One understands, when submitted to that entirely physical influence, the passionate tenderness that Irishmen feel for their country, and that is best illustrated by Moore’s poetry. The sky seems to have endeavoured to find the true chord in response to the earth, in order to give to all things those deliciously blended tones. The stars are nearly always seen through a light haze, and the sun itself shines but through a veil of vapours, into which it seems eager to disappear again. The shadows are not hard and well defined; they melt into each other by insensible gradations of tint. All is green, even the stones, clothed in moss; the walls, covered with ivy; the waters, hidden under a mantle of reeds and water-lilies. In other climes the fields, after a spring shower, take unto themselves the bravery that here is seen in all seasons. In the full heat of July the corn, the barley, the oats still keep their April dress. Do they ever ripen? They say they do, towards the end of October; but surely they never can get yellow. Yellow is not an Irish colour, nor is white. Ireland is indeed green Erin, the Emerald Isle. Never was name more truly given.

One could consider Ireland as a prodigious grass plot of some twenty million acres, constantly watered by rain. Water is everywhere: in the clouds that the winds of the Atlantic drive over her, and that the highlands of Scotland and Norway stop in their course; on the soil, where all hollows, great or small, become lakes; under the ground even, where the roots of vegetables, saturated and swollen like sponges, slowly change into peat. Ireland is the most liberally watered country in Europe, and yet, thanks to the constancy of the winds over her, one can scarcely say it is a damp country. The fall of water is on an average of 926 millimetres in a year—a little over three feet. The ground, naturally of admirable fruitfulness, is still further favoured by the mildness and equableness of the climate on the shores.

The flora almost recalls that of the Mediterranean coasts. The fauna presents the remarkable peculiarity of not possessing a single dangerous or even repulsive species—not one toad, not one reptile, except the most innocent among them all, the “friend of man,” the lizard. Legends say that St. Patrick, the Christian apostle of the isle, coming from Brittany in the 6th century, threw all the serpents into the sea, and all the toads after them; indeed, he is habitually represented in popular imagery as engaged in performing that miracle.

An island possessing no backbone, and presenting generally the appearance of a cup, cannot have great rivers. In fact, almost all the rivers of Ireland, born within her girdle of mountains, soon lose themselves in the sea, forming at their mouth an estuary that takes the name of Lough, as do the lakes proper. One only creates an exception by the length of its course and the volume of its waters—the Shannon, rising in the central table-land, imprisoned, so to speak, at the bottom of the circular well, and whose course, impeded above Limerick by a barrier of rocks, form fine rapids, under which the waters flow in a majestic stream. With the tide, vessels of the heaviest tonnage can go up the river to Foynes.

Indeed, the country lacks no harbours on those deeply indented shores. North, west, east, and south, Ireland counts no less than fourteen natural harbours, large enough to shelter whole fleets.

But this gift, like all the others that Fate has showered on her, seems to have turned against her by bringing the nations of prey within those bays. Thrown as an outwork of Europe in the middle of the ocean, she seemed to be opening her arms to the Phœnicians, to the Scandinavians; later on to the Arabs, the Spaniards, and the English. A gust of wind was enough to reveal her to them; a favourable breeze to bring them back. To understand clearly the perils of such a post, and to see how much more still than the muzzle of Brittany, Ireland is Atlantic land, one must go to Valencia, the small islet on which come to shore the ends of the Transatlantic cables.

More than in any other spot of Europe one feels at the farthest end of the world there. It seems as if, by stretching one’s arm, one would reach the United States. And, in fact, one is near enough as it is—five or six days by steam—almost within speaking distance with the telephone. So fast travel the storms from America that the telegram is hardly able to arrive before them. A sea-gull, borne on the wing of the hurricane, would cross that arm of the sea in a few hours. The breeze that blows in your face may have stirred the hair of a Brooklyn belle in the morning. There one feels how very small is our globe.

Geologically, Ireland differs much from Great Britain. The island appeared much earlier, and its structure is special. Alone, its northern part, or Ulster, which, from a political point of view, forms such a striking contrast with the rest of the island, presents between Donegal Bay and Dundalk Bay, mountainous masses, entirely analogous with those of Scotland, towards which they advance, and of which they appear originally to have formed a part. They are basaltic rocks, or petrified streams of lava, while the mountains in Kerry or Connemara are red sandstone and slate, lying above the carbonaceous strata.

What ought, in fact, to be considered as Ireland proper consists, then, of the eastern province or Leinster, the southern or Munster, and the western or Connaught. Ulster is in reality, as well by the nature of its soil as by the race and habits of the majority of its inhabitants, an annex and dependency of Scotland. The three other provinces, on the contrary, form a whole, as distinct from England or Scotland by the constitution and aspect of the land, as it is different by the race, genius, the traditions and beliefs of the population.

The most striking thing on a first sight of the Irish landscape is the total absence of trees of any kind. They are only seen in private parks. As far as the eye can see the plains spread in gentle undulations, covered with grass and intersected with stone walls; no single oak, elm, or shrub ever comes to break its monotony. The tree has become a lordly ensign. Wherever one sees it one may be certain the landlord’s mansion is not far.

That radical disappearance of the forests, in a country once covered with them, is singular. A great many explanations have been given of this fact,—explanations that went back as far as some geological cataclysm. Such theories are no longer acceptable in these days. The most likely supposition is that all the available timber has gradually been felled down for domestic uses, and that indifference, poverty, incessant war, incertitude as to the present or future, have, from the remotest times, prevented those sad gaps being repaired.

On the lower land the absence of timber is explained of itself by the apparition of deep layers of turf, whose depth is sometimes from forty-five to sixty feet, in which whole oak trees have been discovered in a more or less advanced state of carbonisation. At a certain stage of this transformation the ligneous tissue has become of such flexibility that the Irish cut it into stripes and use it to make straps, fishing nets, bands of all kinds,—not to mention the pious trifles, pipes, small figures carved with a knife, and various souvenirs with which they pester the tourist.

The turf pits are a great source of riches for Ireland, and furnish the only fuel commonly used by the lower classes. In the country one sees everywhere people engaged in extracting peat, cutting it into cakes, erecting these cakes in pyramids to be allowed to dry in the sun, or transporting them from one place to the other. The people working at it are, indeed, almost the only ones visible in the fields. One might think that the extracting and manipulating of the turf were the only industry of the country.

There are two kinds of turf, the red and the black, according to the degree of carbonisation attained by the layers, and the nature of the vegetable matter that formed them. The finest is of such intense and brilliant black, that it might almost be mistaken for coal. Those vast reservoirs of fuel, known in Ireland by the name of bog, are a constant feature of the landscape in the valleys of the mountainous girdle as in the lower parts of the plain. The total depth of these open carbon mines is estimated at no less than sixty million cubic feet; they occupy an area almost equal to the seventh part of the total superficies of the island, and the lakes cover another seventh part.

One other striking peculiarity of the scenery in Ireland is the scarcity of cultivated fields. One can count them, dotted here and there, almost always planted with oats, potatoes, or turnips. The statistics of the Agricultural Society give, in round numbers, for twenty millions of acres of total surface, five millions, or a quarter in cultivated ground; that is, 150,000 acres only in cereals, 350,000 in turnips, one million and a half in potatoes, two million in artificial meadows. Ten million of acres are in natural meadows; the rest are fallow lands, bog or turf, waste land, roads and highways.

Those roads and highways, as well as the bridges and all the public works depending upon the English Government, are admirably kept. It is clear that on that point Dublin Castle is resolved to give no handle to criticism. Those splendid tracks of road, laid across waste and desert land, even produce a curious effect, and one would be tempted to see an affectation about it, did they not, in the majority of cases, lead to some magnificent private property, spreading as far as one can see over hill and dale, always shut in by stone walls eight or ten feet high, enclosing an area of several miles.

As for the conveyances that are seen on these Appian Ways they are of two kinds; either the smart carriage whose cockaded coachman drives magnificent horses, or the diminutive cart drawn by a small donkey, carrying, besides the grand-dame or child that drives it, a sort of conical-shaped utensil held in its place with cords and oftener filled with water than with milk. One must go to Morocco or Spain to see donkeys in such numbers as in Ireland.

One thing surprises in those endless pastures—it is to count so few grazing beasts on them. Not that they are altogether excluded; now and then one perceives on the intense green of the fields reddish or white spots that are cattle or sheep, the rounded haunch of a mare, the awkward frolics of a foal. On the brinks of rivers that one can almost always cross wading, one sometimes sees a few happy cows, their feet in the water, wide-eyed and munching dreamily. Here and there one sees geese, hens escorted by their chicks, pigs fraternally wallowing with children in the muddy ditch. But in a general way the landscape is wanting in animated life, and as poor in domestic animals as in labourers.

As a contrast game is plentiful, as is natural in a land that is three-quarters uncultivated, where it is forbidden to carry arms, and where shooting is the exclusive privilege of a very small minority. Hares and rabbits seem to enjoy their immunity to the utmost, and everywhere their white breeches are seen scudding away in the dewy grass like fireworks.

Villages are rare, and rarer still is farmhouse or homestead. Undulating ridges succeed to undulating ridges and still one sees no trace of any dwellings. One might think that these stone walls radiating over the fields had sprung there of their own accord, and that the hay is doomed to rot standing, after feeding the butterflies. Yet that cannot be—evidently some one must come now and then to cut this grass, make it into stacks and carry it away.... At last, by dint of stretching neck and legs you succeed in discovering far away on the horizon a spire that belongs to a big borough, a market-town rather, where those civic tillers of the soil dwell in houses similar to those of the liberties in Dublin.

As for the mud cabin, generally described as the Irish peasant’s only home, it is now a thing of the past. One would hardly, and after much research, find some specimens of it in the farthest counties, at the end of Kerry or Mayo.

True to say, when found, those specimens leave nothing to be desired for poverty and discomfort; no fire-place, no windows, no furniture; nothing but a roof of turf supported by a few poles on mud walls. The very pig that formerly shared its luxuries with the genus homo and indicated a certain degree of relative comfort in his possessor, the pig himself has disappeared for ever.

But those are exceptions, almost pre-historic cases. As a rule the mud cabin has been blotted out from the Irish soil—perhaps enlightened landlords systematically pursued its eradication; perhaps the peasants, tired of its tutelary protection, emigrated under other skies,—or more simply still, they took advantage of the last famine to die of hunger. Upon which came the rain, and two or three years sufficed to dilute the walls, render the mud house to the common reservoir, and wash out its very remembrance.

The population of Ireland, it must be borne in mind, has been steadily decreasing for half a century. It was of 8,175,124 inhabitants in 1841; of 6,552,385 in 1851; 5,798,584 in 1861; 5,412,377 in 1871; and 5,174,836 in 1881. By all appearances it must now have sunk under five millions. If this fish-eating race was not the most prolific under the sun it would have been blotted out long ago from the face of this planet.

CHAPTER V.
THE RACE.

The essential character of Irish scenery is, besides the green colour and the absence of trees, the frequent ruins that meet the eyes everywhere—one cannot go two steps without seeing them. Ruins of castles, abbeys, churches, or even humble private dwellings. There are quarters of large towns or boroughs, such as for instance the northern one in Galway, that might be taken at night, with their sinister looking rows of houses, roofless and with gaping walls, for a street in Herculaneum or Pompeii. When the ancient stone walls are those of a church or chapel, they generally serve as a setting for the legends of the countryside; there occurred all the terrifying tales of former days, there took place all the local miracles, and there still is the favourite haunt of illustrious spirits, of fairies and banshee.

Almost in every case the graves of a hamlet come to group themselves at the foot of those ivy-clothed old walls, by an instinctive and touching effect of the Irishman’s passionate love for the traditions of his race; and those graves, generally covered with great slabs of stone, scattered among the tall grasses, wild and moss-grown, without cross or emblem of any sort, well accord with the melancholy aspect of the site.

Sometimes near these ruins and graves is still seen, proudly raising its head, one of those monuments peculiar to the country and about which antiquaries are at such variance,—the round towers of Ireland: slender and bold turrets, slightly conical in shape, not unlike minarets 75 or 80 feet high, upon a base 15 to 18 feet broad, and springing from the ground like obelisks. They are built of large stones, sometimes rough, sometimes cut, but always cemented together, a fact which gave rise to the opinion that they must be posterior to the invasion of Great Britain by the Romans. But that is simply begging the question and is justified by nothing; moreover, the absence of any tradition about the origin or use of those towers make such a tale appear in the highest degree improbable. A race was never seen to borrow the technical industry of another race to apply it to the construction of monuments that are essentially their own. Celtic civilization had attained in Ireland, centuries before the Romans, to a degree of perfection witnessed by the Brehon Code, compiled at least five or six centuries before the Christian era, and the first among human laws that substituted arbitrage to brute force. A people capable of submitting to the law of reason and who knew enough of mechanics to erect monoliths of twenty-four thousand cubic feet could well discover alone the art of mixing mortar, and need not borrow it from the Romans, who besides did not set foot in the country. Never was hypothesis more childish or more unfounded. The truth is that nothing is known about the round towers, as is the case with the nurraghs of Sardinia; that all those monuments are anterior to any positive traditions and have been built for uses of which we have no conception. At the most one might suppose from their aspect, which is that of inland lighthouses, that they may have been used as military or astronomical observatories, and, perhaps, bore on their summit a sacred fire visible throughout a whole district. In such a case the only guide to be followed with any certainty is the eternal fitness between organ and function.

Eighty-three of these towers are still standing in Ireland, and their dilapidated condition allows it to be supposed that they may once have been much more numerous. Whatever may have been their origin, they remain so narrowly and so fitly associated in the popular imagination with the Irish idea of nationality that the image of a round tower naturally grew under the chisel of the sculptor, as an emblem of patriotism, on the tomb of O’Connell in the cemetery of Dublin.

Megalithic monuments and dolmen are equally found in great numbers in Ireland. Donegal presents at Raphre a circus of raised stones absolutely similar to that of Stonehenge, while in Derry one sees in the Grianan of Aileach the finest fortified temple that was ever raised in honour of the sun. In many districts all the hills or mountains without exception are crowned with the funeral hillock or Celtic rath. As for the Druidical inscriptions in the Ogham character, consisting of twenty-five combinations of oblique or vertical strokes corresponding to an equal number of sounds, they abound in all the counties. The most curious is that of the Cave of Dunloe, discovered by a labourer, in the vicinity of Killarney, in the year 1838; it may be considered a true Druidical library, of which the books are represented by the stones of the vaulted roof. Those characters have been deciphered now, thanks to bilingual inscriptions posterior to the Roman period.

Lastly, the names of places and the geographical definitions are, in nine cases out of ten, of Celtic origin, according to the tables drawn out by Chalmers. The mountains are called ben, and the chains of hills sliebh, rocks are carricks or cloagh, lakes loughs, an island innis, bogs corks, lands curraghs, hills knocks, rivers anagh.

The Erse tongue, still spoken by a twelfth part of the population, is sister to the Gaelic and the Breton. It denominates a field agh, a ford ath, a village bally, a city cahir, ban what is white or beautiful, deargh what is red, dua what is black, beg what is small, and mor what is big, clar a plain, teach a house, donagh a church, ross a wooded hillside.

As for the type of the Irish race it is undeniably Celtic, or at least essentially different from the Anglo-Saxon. The hair is black or brown, the eyes dark, the complexion pale, the nose short, the forehead bony. The general appearance is vigorous and active, the movements are quick and often graceful; the stature without being low, is nearer to middle height than is generally the case in a British country. The rudest peasant girls often have a sculptural grace of attitude; one sees them in the fields, carrying burdens on their head with that stateliness of Greek canephores which seems as a rule the exclusive attribute of the daughters of the East.

Still more different from the English is the inner man; naturally mirthful and expansive, witty, careless, even giddy, quarrelsome from mere love of noise, prompt to enthusiasm or despondency, imbued with the love of literary form and legal subtleties, he is the Frenchman of the West, as the Pole or the Japanese are Frenchmen of the East. And always there has been an affinity of nature, a harmony of thought, between them and us. At once we feel we are cousins. Their ancestors formerly came in thousands to fight under our flag. Our revolutions were always felt in Ireland. So strong, for nations as well as individuals, is that mysterious tie of a common origin, or even the most remote consanguinity.

Does this mean that the Irishman, thanks to his insular position, has escaped all cross breeding and remained pure Celt? Far from it. No country was oftener or more cruelly invaded than his. The stranger implanted himself in it, begat his children there, introduced in the race elements that are still recognizable; for example, that most peculiar expression of the eyes, the height of the cheek-bones, the outline of the temples and cranium, which are in many cases clearly Scandinavian.

In the origin of history the primitive inhabitants of Erin, the Firbolgs (men with the skin of beasts) were vanquished by the Thuathan-de-Danan, “the fairy people,” who came from the East, and who founded the realm of Innisfallen, or Island of Fate. A Spanish invasion (probably Phenician), that of the Milesians, overthrew that establishment ten or twelve centuries before the Christian era, and three hundred years before the foundation of Rome. After that came an uninterrupted list of one hundred and ninety-seven Milesian kings, who reached to the arrival of the Northmen, in the eighth century of the present era. Under their rule Ireland enjoyed a profound peace. It was during this period of more than a thousand years that flourished and developed in the island of Erin an entirely original civilization, characterised by the Brehon Code, by customs of great gentleness, by institutions of admirable prudence, among others that of a national militia, the Fiana-Erin, or Fenians, who were recruited by voluntary enlistment, defended the country and maintained order therein, while the citizens pursued their various avocations,—agriculture, in which they excelled, fishing and navigation, for which they displayed some ability.

Divided into five or six small independent kingdoms Ireland, without her militia, would have fallen an easy prey to the Britons, the Gauls, or the Caledonians, and later on to the Romans. Thanks to that national force,—a true civic guard, quartered during winter on the inhabitants, and ever popular, which proves that it knew how to preserve intact the tradition of Celtic virtues,—Ireland, alone almost among European nations, escaped a Roman invasion. After twelve hundred years the remembrance of the Fenians has remained so vivid in the hearts of the people that the Irish Republicans of America, when they resumed in our own days the struggle in arms against England, naturally chose the name of the ancient defenders of national independence.

With the fall of the Roman Empire and the dying out of the fear of invasion, the Fenian institution disappeared. The military instincts of the nation then manifested themselves at the exterior by frequent incursions made by Irish adventurers in England, Scotland, or Gaul. It was in one of those incursions off the coast of Brittany that Niall Mor, King of Tara, took prisoner, with several other young Christians, a boy named Sucoth, and whom they called Patricius (Patrick) on account of his noble origin. This was at the end of the fourth century of our era. The prisoner was employed in tending flocks in Ireland, spent seven years there, and at last found an opportunity of escaping to his own country. When back in Brittany, he constantly thought with grief of the dreadful destiny of the Irish, who still remained in ignorance of the true religion, and vegetated in the darkness of Druidism. One night he had a prophetic dream, after which he resolved to dedicate himself to the evangelization of those unhappy heathens. To this effect he went to the town of Tours, where he assumed the religious habit, then on to Rome, where he entered the missionary seminary. In the year 432 he was at the Barefooted Augustines’ Convent, in Auxerre, when he heard of the death of Paladius, fifth apostolic missionary of the Holy See in the island of Erin. Patrick solicited and obtained the honour of succeeding him. He was made Archbishop in partibus infidelium, and set out with twenty other French priests.

A certain number of Christians were already to be found in Ireland; but the bulk of the nation remained attached to its traditional worship, which was that of Chaldea and of Ancient Gaul, the worship of the sun or fire, as the principle of all life and purity.

Yet the sons of Erin were not by any means barbarians; their civilization could rather be regarded as the most flourishing in Europe. They knew the art of weaving stuffs, and of working metals; their laws were wise and just, their customs hardy without ferocity. Patrick knew better than any one that he must think neither of hurrying their conversion nor of imposing it by force. He devoted himself with great adroitness to the task of winning the favour of the chiefs, tenderly handled all the national prejudices, loudly extolled the excellence of the Brehon Code, and succeeded at last in giving baptism to the Princes of Leinster. After this the new religion made such rapid progress that at the end of fifteen years Patrick was obliged to ask for thirty new Bishops from Rome, besides the numerous native priests who had already received ordination at his hands. When he died at the ripe age of one hundred and twenty years, Ireland had become Christian, and was rapidly being Latinised in the innumerable schools attached to the monasteries and churches. She even entered so eagerly in the new path as to deserve the name of “Isle of Saints” throughout the Roman world, and that for a long time it was enough to be Irish or to have visited Erin to become invested with almost a halo of sanctity.

That transformation had been accomplished without violence or effusion of blood. Until the 8th century it was a source of honour and prosperity for Ireland, for the lustre of her own civilization was enhanced by her renown for piety, and all the neighbouring nations sent their sons in flocks to be instructed in her arts and her virtues.

But the very virtues that made her a country of monks and scholars were doomed before long to become the source of all her misfortunes. When the Scandinavian invasions began to pour over the whole of Europe, Ireland, emasculated by an entirely mystical devotion, was found incapable of sustaining the shock of the Northmen. The disappearance of the Fenian Militia had for a long time left her without a national tie, given up to local rivalries, and broken in pieces, as it were, by the clan system. At the very time that she most urgently needed a powerful central authority to struggle against the black and white strangers from Norway and Denmark, she was found defenceless, and it was not her feeble belt of mountains, opening everywhere on deep bays, that could oppose a serious barrier to them, or guard her plains against their invasions.

Pressed by hunger, the Scandinavians left their country in shoals. They threw themselves on the coasts of Great Britain, France, and Spain, as far as the basin of the Mediterranean. In no place were the people of Europe, already enfeebled by habits of comparative luxury, able to resist those giants of the North, who dauntlessly embarked in their otter-skin boats and dared to go up the Seine even to the very walls of Paris. Ireland was a prey marked out for them. If peradventure the invading party were not numerous enough and were beaten back by numbers, they would come back in thousands the following year and sweep all before them. Vainly did the sons of Erin fight with all the courage of despair; one after the other their chieftains were vanquished, and the foe definitely took up a position on the south-east coast, where he founded the cities of Strangford, Carlingford, and Wexford.

Not content with reducing the Irish to bondage, the victors took a cunning and savage delight in humiliating and degrading them, lodging garnisaries under their roofs, interdicting, under pain of death, the exercise of all liberal arts as well as the carrying of arms, destroying schools, burning books to take possession of the gold boxes that protected their precious binding.

Every ten or twelve years a liberator sprang up in the West or North, and tried to shake off the abhorred yoke. But the rebellion only made it weigh more heavily on the neck of the vanquished; and if it happened that a Brian Boru succeeded, after incredible efforts and heroism, in gathering troops numerous enough to inflict on the stranger a bloody defeat, such a day of glory was invariably followed by the most sinister morrow.

After two centuries of slavery, interrupted by massacres, vain struggles, and impotent efforts, Ireland, once so prosperous, gradually sank in the darkest state of barbarism. The intestine dissensions and the rivalries between clans achieved the work of the Northern Conquerors. In the year 1172 she was ripe for new masters, also of Scandinavian race, who were ready to swoop on her with their Anglo-Saxon bands, after passing, to come to her, through the duchy of Normandy and through Great Britain.

Henry the Second of Anjou, King of England, was resolved to add Ireland to his possessions. All he wanted was a pretext. He found it in the state of practical schism and independence into which the insular Church had fallen. The members of its clergy no longer recognized the Roman discipline, did not observe Lent, and married like those of the Greek rite. Henry the Second solicited and obtained from Pope Adrian II. a bull authorizing him to invade the sister isle, in order to “re-establish therein the rule of the Holy See, stop the progress of vice, bring back respect for law and religion, and secure the payment of St. Peter’s pence.” But in spite of this formal authorization he was too much occupied with Aquitaine to be able to entertain seriously the idea of undertaking the conquest of Ireland, when one of his vassals, Strongbow, cut the knot by landing on the island at the head of a Welsh army, to carve himself a kingdom on the south-east coast.

The way was open; Henry II. threw himself in it in his turn, and established himself in the east of the island, where, strong in the countenance of the clergy secured to him by the Papal bull, he received before long the homage of the principal native chieftains.

Limited at first to a territory enclosed within palisades, or Pale, which, during more than four centuries, enlarged or got narrowed, according to the fortune of war and the relative strength of the belligerent parties, the English rule was destined at last to spread over the whole of the island. But, of this seven-century struggle, the last word is not yet said. The wound is ever bleeding. Ireland has never accepted her defeat; she refuses to accept as valid a marriage consummated by a rape. Always she protested, either by direct rebellion, when she found the opportunity for it, as in 1640, in 1798, and in 1848; either by the voice of her poets and orators, by the nocturnal raids of her Whiteboys and Ribbonmen, by the plots of her Fenians, by the votes of her electors, by parliamentary obstruction, by passive resistance, by political or commercial interdict—opposed to the intruder; in a word, by all the means, legal or illegal, that offered to interrupt prescription.

A striking, and, one may say, a unique example in history: after seven centuries of sustained effort on the part of the victor to achieve his conquest, this conquest is less advanced than on the morrow of Henry the Second’s landing at Waterford. An abyss still severs the two races, and time, instead of filling up that abyss, only seems to widen it. This phenomenon is of such exceptional and tragic interest; it beats with such crude light on the special physiology of two races and the general physiology of humanity, that one needs must stop first and try to unravel its tangible causes if one be desirous of comprehending what is taking place in the land of Erin.

CHAPTER VI.
HISTORICAL GRIEVANCES.

The English, it must be admitted, are no amiable masters. Never, in any quarter of the globe, were they able to command the goodwill of the nations submitted to their rule, nor did they fascinate them by those brilliant qualities that often go a long way towards forgiveness of possible injuries. “Take yourself off there, that I may take your place,” seems always to have been the last word of their policy. Pure and simple extermination of autochthon races; such is their surest way to supremacy. One has seen it successively in America, on the Australian continent, in Tasmania, in New Zealand, where the native tribes hardly exist now more than as a memory. On the other hand, if the vanquished races were too numerous or too sturdy and prolific to be easily suppressed, as in India or Ireland, reconciliation never took place; conquest ever remained a doubtful and precarious fact.

In Ireland, the question was made more complex by two elements that visibly took a predominant part in the relations between the conquerors and the conquered. In the first place, the island of Erin, having remained outside the pale of the Roman world and of barbaric invasions, possessed an indigenous and original civilization that made her peculiarly refractory to the establishment of the feudal system. Secondly, her very remoteness and her insular character inclined the immigrants to establish themselves there regretfully, to consider her always as a colony and a place of exile, where they only resided against their will. For the first four hundred years of their occupation they confined themselves to the eastern coast within the inclosed territory (varying with the fortune of war) that they called the Pale or palisade, and outside which the Irish preserved their manners, their laws, and their own customs.

In spite of this barrier, it happened in the course of time that the English colonists got pervaded by those customs and felt their contagion. At once the British Parliament had recourse to drastic laws in order to open a new abyss between the two races, and keep the mastery they had over the Irish. Such is the special object of an edict of Edward III., known under the name of Edict of Kilkenny, and by which it is reputed high treason for any Englishman established in Ireland to have married an Irish-woman, to have legitimised an Irish child, or have held him in baptism, to have taken an Irish Christian name, to have worn the Irish dress, to have spoken the Erse tongue, to have let his moustache grow, or to have ridden saddleless, as was the Irish fashion; above all, to have submitted to the Brehon Code. Those divers crimes were punished by confiscation of property, and perpetual imprisonment of the offender.

Such laws were a powerful obstacle to fusion, raised by the intruder himself. One sees at once the difference between, for instance, such a system and that established by the Norman invasion in Great Britain.

Here the conqueror found a race made supple by Roman occupation and Danish rule; he established himself, by strength of arm, on the soil, covered it with strongholds, and everywhere substituted himself to the dispossessed masters; he at once implanted within his new dominions the French tongue, the feudal system, the powerful hierarchy that constituted its strength; he remained standing, iron-covered and in arms, over the prostrate bodies of the population in bondage, and repressed with such a high hand any attempt at rebellion, that the very idea of resistance must of necessity die out soon. On the other hand, having transplanted himself, and without any idea of return, in this new sphere, he immediately submitted to its influence; he incorporated himself with the ambient race to such a degree as soon to forget his own origin, and come after two or three generations to consider himself as purely of English breed.

In Ireland, on the contrary, not only was the conqueror reduced by the imperfect state of his conquest to remain on the defensive, confined within the Pale on the eastern shore, within reach, so to say, of the mother country; not only could not he dream for a long time of obliging populations that escaped all action on his part to obey his manners and his laws; not only did he systematically keep those populations at arm’s length and avoided mixing with them; but periodical laws and edicts constantly came to remind them, on pain of terrible punishment, that he belonged to another race, and must guard with jealous care the integrity of its autonomy. Without any intercourse with the more distant tribes, he was at constant war with those of the borders of the Pale.

And war was, at this period even still more than in our own days, mere rapine, raised to the dignity of a system. The English did not scruple to make incursions on their neighbour’s lands, to take away harvest, cattle, and women, after which they returned to their fortified territory.

They did even worse: having heard of the ancient custom by which the Irish formerly accorded fire and candle light to their national militia or Fenians, the English revived it to their own profit; they quartered on the peasantry in their neighbourhood during all the winter, a soldier, who took his seat round the domestic hearth, shared the meals of the family, took possession of the best bed—nay, did not disdain to cast the eye of favour on the wife or daughter—and not the less remained a stranger, a foe, at the same time that he was a forced guest and a spy—for he was forbidden to speak the language, to adopt the dress, to imitate the manners of his victims.... The horror of that burden coming anew every year had once led to the suppression of the Fenian militia. How much more terrible was such servitude, enforced by the enemy! Constant were the rebellions, and always repressed with calculated barbarity—they only served as a pretext for new exactions.

Still, in spite of all, a certain contagion of habits took place between the contiguous races. A few native chiefs insensibly began to imitate the manners of the English. The English were not long in discovering a way to reconcile them—by appealing to their basest impulses.

Until then, the Irish had had no knowledge of individual property. With them land was, like the sky or the air they breathed, the common inheritance of those who occupied it. The members of a clan, indeed, paid the chieftain a tax or annual duty, but they did not conceive it as possible that this leader could look on himself as the master of the social fund to which they, like him, had a hereditary right. At the most they expected their harvest or cattle to be seized, in case of non-payment of the tax. There never had been an eviction of the tenant, as there had been no sale or transfer of the land by him occupied. Individual appropriation, as resulting from the feudal system, was such a new idea to the Irish that they were at first unable to grasp it.

“What interest can you have in making your clan give up their land to the English, since you get it back in return for your homage?” would ask some of the native chieftains of those of their countrymen nearer the pale who had taken for some time to performing that commercial transaction.

The neophytes of feudal law would then explain that in case of extension of the English conquest, their possession of the land would be guaranteed by the fact of the new title. What they took great care should not be discovered by the clan, was that they gave what did not belong to them, and sold the collective property of their followers, to receive it afterwards at the hands of the English as personal property.... This was seen clearly later on, when they began to sell it or raise mortgages on it. But that, the dawn of a gigantic fraud, nobody in Ireland could so much as suspect. The fraudulent origin of individual appropriation is nevertheless, even to our own day, the true root of the desperate resistance that the Irish tenant invariably opposes to eviction. Be it tradition, be it “cellular memory,” he is conscious of his primordial and superior right to that glebe once stolen from his forefathers.

Stolen! if only it had been stolen once for all!... But to repeat Fitzgibbon’s (Lord Clare) saying, there is not in the whole of Ireland one field that has not been at least three times unjustly taken from its legitimate possessors. And that spoliation was always accompanied by the most aggravating circumstances.

It was indeed with Henry VIII. and Elizabeth that the true efforts of England to achieve the conquest of Erin were made, and from that time, to the antagonism of the two races, to the conflict of interests, was added religious hatred. Between puritanical England and Catholic Ireland began a duel to the death, into which each generation in turn has thrown itself for three centuries. Oppression begets rebellion, and rebellion expires drowned in blood. We have no intention of repeating that history in these pages; its details are to be found everywhere. Let us only recall its essential features.

Towards the year 1565, Queen Elizabeth undertook the “plantation” of Ireland on a large scale, and set about it by the elementary process of dispossessing the owners of the soil in order to present Englishmen with their lands. The whole country rose, under the command of John Desmond, who called the Spaniards to his aid. Upon which England sent to Ireland, together with Sydney, Sussex, and Walter Raleigh, armies whose instructions were “the extermination of the Rebels.”

“At Christmas,” wrote one of the English Generals, Sir Nicolas Malby, in the year 1576, “I entered Connaught, and soon finding that by mercy I should only succeed in having my throat cut, I preferred to adopt a different tactic. I therefore threw myself in the mountains with the settled determination of destroying these people by sword and fire, sparing neither the old nor the children. I burnt down all their harvests and all their houses, and I put to the sword all that fell within my hands.... This occurred in the country of Shane Burke. I did the same thing in that of Ullick Burke.”

The other English Generals vied in ardour with this butcher; so much so that at the end of a few years of indiscriminate hangings, massacres, burnings of house and land, the whole of Munster was laid waste like a desert; a few wretches only were left to wander over it like ghosts, and they came voluntarily to offer their throat to the knife of Queen Elizabeth’s soldiers. The Virgin Queen then resolved to repeople that desert; she made proclamation that all the lands of the Desmonds were confiscated (more than 500,000 acres) and she offered them gratuitously to whosoever would “plant” them with the help of English labour. The grantees were to pay no duty to the Crown until six years had passed, and that duty was always to be of the lightest. In spite of these advantages colonization did not make much progress. The English at last understood that they must either give it up, or resign themselves to having the ground cultivated by the despoiled Irish who had survived the massacres. H ow could those wretched people have done otherwise than nourish the hope of revenge?

That revenge was attempted in Ulster at the death of Elizabeth. It ended in new disasters, new tortures, new confiscations. The counties of Tyrone, Derry, Donegal, Armagh, Fermanagh, and Cavan,—in all about three million acres,—were then seized by the Crown and distributed in lots to Scotch settlers.

In the year 1641, under the reign of Charles I., a few Irishmen having emigrated to the continent, and having been initiated to modern military tactics in the ranks of the French army, attempted to liberate their country. They provoked a rising, succeeded in holding in check during eight years all the British forces, and in 1649 compelled the King of England to grant them by formal treaty the conditions they themselves dictated. But a few days later the head of Charles fell on the scaffold, and Cromwell in person, escorted by his son, by Ireton and Ludlow, made it his business to come and annul the treaty of Kilkenny.

“For Jesus!... No quarter!...” Such was the battle-cry he gave to his Roundheads. Drogheda, then Wexford were taken by storm; men, women, and children were exterminated; Galway fell in 1652. The populations, exhausted by a war and famine of ten years’ duration, surrendered themselves to his mercy, and laid down their arms. Cromwell had only now to reap the fruits of his victory by making Ireland pay for it.

His first idea was to complete the extermination of the native race, in order to replace it by English colonists. But even his gloomy soul recoiled before the only means that at once and for ever could put an end to “the Irish gangrene.” He adopted a middle course, of much less radical efficacy. This middle course consisted in transporting, or, as they called it at the time transplanting all the Irish into the region bounded by the Shannon, there to be penned up like men infested with the plague, while all the rest of the territory was allotted to English families.

The enterprise was conducted with truly puritanical method and rigour. Thousands of Irish were shipped as slaves to the West Indies, thousands of others were imprisoned in Connaught, under pain of death for whoever should cross its limits. All the land, carefully parcelled out, was divided by lot between the soldiers of Cromwell, upon agreement that they should consider themselves bound to expend their pay for three years on the improvement of it. But those fields, to yield up their value, had to be cultivated, and the English labourer declined to become a voluntary exile in order to cultivate them. Little by little the native peasantry came back to their old homes with the tenacity peculiar to their class, they founded families and reconstituted the Irish nation under the ten or twelve thousand landlords imposed over them by fraud and violence. Forty years after Cromwell’s death, these landlords had even forgotten how to speak the English language.

Restoration was not destined to heal any of those cruel wounds. Charles II. took little heed of Ireland, which he deemed too far off, and besides he thought it good policy not to disturb the new occupants in their possessions. He barely deemed it necessary to establish in Dublin a Court of Revision that sat only one year, examined no more than seven hundred cases out of a total of above three thousand that were submitted to it, and ordered the restitution of hardly a sixth part of the confiscated land.

After the Revolution of 1688, nevertheless, the Irish only embraced with more ardour the cause of James II. when he landed in Ireland with a handful of men. Even after his defeat at the Boyne, they so successfully resisted William of Orange that he was compelled in 1691 to grant to them, by the treaty of Limerick, the free exercise of their religion and the political privileges that could help them to preserve it. But, like so many other charters, that one was soon to be violated. All the Irish Jacobites were compelled to expatriate themselves (numbers of them took service in France; more than fifty thousand Irishmen died under the fleur-de-lis during the first half of the eighteenth century); four thousand others were evicted from one million of acres that William distributed among his followers. Soon to this already terrible repression were to be added all the rigours of the Penal Code, that code that proclaimed it a duty to spy, and a meritorious act to betray the Irishman at his hearth; that code of which Burke could say: “Never did the ingenious perversity of man put forth a machine more perfect, more thoughtfully elaborated, more calculated to oppress, to impoverish, to degrade a people, to lower in them human nature itself.”

Under the network of that nameless despotism which attacked man in his dearest privileges, the rights of conscience, the sanctity of home,—under the weight of a legislation that in a manner forbade her the use of water and fire, that closed all careers before her, after having wrenched her last furrow from her keeping,—the Irish nation persisted in living and multiplying. Was it any wonder that in the depth of her collective soul she cherished dreams of revenge and justice?

The American Emancipation and the French Revolution appeared to her as the dawn of regeneration. Alas! once again the glorious effort of 1798,—the rebellion in arms, victory itself, were only to end in a complete wreck. As if Fate owed one more stroke of irony to this martyred nation, it was an Irish Parliament that by its own vote in 1800 abdicated the hardly recovered national independence. Pitt bought it wholesale for the price of 1,200,000 guineas.

It was not enough, however, to have taken from the Irishman his blood, his land, his religious faith, and his liberty: they must still prevent his prospering in commerce or industry. Political interest was here in accordance with avarice in giving this advice to the victor.

Charles II. began by forbidding Ireland to export meat, butter, and cheese to England. At that time of slow maritime intercourse, no idea could be entertained of sending them to any other market. The Irish had to fall back on wool, which they exported to France and Spain. That was sufficient to arouse the jealousy of their pitiless masters. The export of wool, be it as raw material or in woven stuffs, was forbidden the Irish on pain of confiscation and fines.

The effect of this harsh measure was two-fold: it prevented the abhorred Irish prospering; it secured to the English merchant the monopoly of Irish wool, which he could henceforth buy at his own price (generally at a quarter of the current price), and sell again at a lesser rate than all his competitors. It only remained for Ireland to make smugglers of all her fishermen; they crammed all the caverns on her coasts with wool, and during the winter, in spite of excisemen, they exchanged it for the wines and spirits of France and Spain. By the same occasion they exported soldiers and imported Catholic priests. Thus did Ireland keep losing her vital strength, by the constant departure of the most vigorous amongst her sons, at the same time that she inoculated in her blood two equally fatal poisons—alcohol and fanaticism.

On the other hand, the Puritan weavers of Ulster were ruined like the wool-farmers. They emigrated to America, and England found no bitterer foes than their sons during the War of Independence.

Some of the Irish tried to fall back on other industries, as the weaving of linen or ship-building. At once England interfered with an iron hand by establishing the most ruinous prohibitive duties on Irish linens, while at the same time her cotton fabrics came pouring over the country. To make doubly sure, England, by a special law, formally interdicted ship-building in Ireland as well as any direct trade with any foreign market whatsoever.

One feels a sort of shame for the human kind in having to record such consistent acts of systematic cruelty. The violence of military retaliation, the sacking of towns or the massacre of vanquished foes, may be explained by the heat of combat, and are found in the annals of all countries. An economical compression exercised during ten or twelve generations on one nation by another nation of Shylocks is, happily, a fact without any parallel in history.

From the beginning of the 18th century all industrial enterprise had thus been unmercifully forbidden to Ireland. All the factories were closed, the working population had been reduced to field labour, emigration or street-begging. This population therefore weighed still more heavily on the soil, still exaggerating its tendencies to subdivision; which tendencies, already a curse for Ireland, were to cause in the future new ferments of hatred and misery. All the attempts that Ireland made to free herself from those iron shackles were pitilessly repressed. She saw herself deprived of her right to commercial activity, as she had been of national conscience, of land, and religious or political freedom. And it is after having thus for centuries systematically trained the Irish to poverty, idleness, and drink, that England, crowning her work with calumny, dares to bring forward their vices as an excuse for herself!

These things are far from us already. But it would be erring greatly to imagine that in the eyes of the Irish they bear an antiquated character. Oral tradition, seconded by an indigenous literature, keeps the wound open and green. Yonder wretched beggar, dying of hunger and want upon the glebe once possessed by his ancestors, knows that they ruled where he now serves, bears their name with a touching pride, and sadly toils for others in a field that he believes to belong to himself. He is not ignorant of the way in which it was taken from him, at what date, and in what manner the event took place. How could he consider its present possessors otherwise than as his most cruel enemies?

Let us imagine the French émigrés brought back violently on the lands taken from them by the nation, and reduced to support their family by tilling their fields with their own hands. Let us suppose them compelled every year to pay an exorbitant rent to the usurper. Let us blot out from history’s page the milliard indemnity given to the émigrés and the amnesty passed over those things by five or six successive revolutions. Let us lastly add to these deadly rancours the weight of a religious persecution of three centuries, of the undisguised contempt of the victor, and of the most shocking political inequality.... Let that émigré, in a word, not only have lost caste, be spoliated and a serf, but also be a pariah, a kind of pestilent member of the community: then we shall gather some idea of the state of mind of the Irish people towards England; we shall understand that in truth the only mistake committed by Cromwell and the others in their system of colonization was to have not carried it to its full length, to have not exterminated all by fire or sword, and to have left a single son of Erin alive.

As a contrast to England and Ireland, let us place a historical fact of the same order, that of France with Corsica. Here also we find an insular race of markedly distinct character, of different language, different manners and traditions, the habit of independence and the clan-spirit,—all that can foster and serve resistance to annexation. But here the conquering nation is France, and she is a kind mother. She does not come, fire and sword in hand, to ravage the harvests of the vanquished, to take his land, to impose on him, together with a new faith, exceptional laws, and a brand of infamy. On the contrary, to them she opens her arms, she offers her wealth and her love. From the first day she admits Corsicans to the provincial parliaments, and twenty years later she receives their deputies in the Assemblée Nationale. From the first hour they feel they are Frenchmen, the equals of those born in the Ile de France. There are for them neither special taxes, nor political inferiority, nor rigours of any sort. Never was an inch of ground taken from them to be given to the continental families. Never were they treated like serfs to be trodden down without mercy. If there be an exception made, it is in their favour; as, for instance, the reduction of one half of all duties on imports; the free trade in tobacco; the enormous proportion of Corsicans admitted to all Government offices.

But what a difference, too, in the results!... In less than a hundred years, the fusion between the two races is so perfect, the assimilation so complete, that one could not find to-day one man in Corsica to wish for a separation. Nay, rather, against such an enterprise, if any one were found to attempt it, all Corsica would rise in arms.

If Great Britain had so willed it, Ireland might easily have become to her what Corsica is to us. Only, for the last seven hundred years, Great Britain has lacked what alone could have made that miracle possible,—a mother’s heart and love.

CHAPTER VII.
KILLARNEY.

I know no place to compare with Killarney: so soft to the eye, so full of unspeakable grace. It is as a compendium of Ireland; all the characteristic features of the country are united there: the elegant “round towers,” drawing on the horizon the airy outline of their conic shafts; the soft moistness of the atmosphere, the tender blue of the sky, the intense green of the meadows, set off by long, black trails of peat, and the white, ochre, and red streaks which the grit-stone and clay-slate draw on the hill-side.

Within the oval circus formed by the mountains of Kerry, the Killarney lakes succeed one another like small Mediterraneans, all dotted with lovely islands, where myrtle and rare ferns grow freely, fostered by a Lusitanian climate. Every one of those islands has its legend, its own saint, buried under some old moss-grown mound; its ruined castle, its ivy-clothed abbey, paved with tombstones and haunted by some banshee. They are like large baskets of flowers floating on the clear, silent waters, whose peace is only broken now and then by the jumping of a fish, or the clucking of some stray teal. All there unite to form a landscape of almost paradoxical beauty. You think you have landed in fairyland, outside the pale of ordinary life.

The most illustrious of them is Innisfallen, where the monks wrote in the seventh century their famous Annals, the pride of the Bodleian Library. In viewing this enchanting island, you involuntarily fall to repeating the beautiful lines of Moore which you used to bungle in your school days, and of which you first realise the profound truth:

“Sweet Innisfallen, fare thee well,

May calm and sunshine long be thine,

How fair thou art, let others tell,

While but to feel how fair be mine, etc.”

Along the shores of that range of lakes, two lordly domains display the noble arrangement of their parks: one is the seat of the Earl of Kenmare, lord-lieutenant of the county, late Lord Chamberlain to the Queen during the Gladstone Ministry. The other belongs to Captain Herbert of Muckross, late Member of Parliament. As far around as you can see the land belongs to either of those two landlords. Just as in the tale, down to the extremity of the valley, up to the very top of the far-away mountain, land and water, beasts and Christians, all belong to the “Marquis de Carabas.”

Some restriction must be made, however. Changes have been introduced lately. Only a few years ago it was a thing understood that of the two members which the borough returned to Parliament one must be the heir presumptive of the house of Kenmare, the other the chief of the house of Muckross. That is over. Now-a-days the Kerry voters send whom Mr. Parnell likes to the House of Commons. But the air of the parks is still the property of the two owners; none may breathe it without their leave. I hasten to say that the permission is most courteously given by Lord Kenmare to all tourists, and as readily (if less liberally) sold on the Muckross grounds to anyone willing to pay one or two shillings, according to his approach walking or on horseback.

The two parks are marvels, almost without other rivals in the world, for their prodigious extent, their admirably kept shrubberies and avenues, and the splendour and variety of the points of view which art has devised on the lakes. Those lakes themselves, with their islands, bays, and toy-peninsulas, their rippling brooks and foaming cascades, are only part of the beauties of the whole. Muckross is proud to possess the old abbey of the same name, and the Torc Cascade. Kenmare boasts Innisfallen, Ross Island, Saint Finian’s Tomb, the legendary ruins of O’Donoghue’s Castle, and a hundred other wonders. It is more regal than lordly, and there are indeed few royal residences which can boast such gardens.

You go away dazzled, enchanted, intoxicated with verdure, ozone, and poetic sights. You come back the day following, you almost wish to take root there for a sort of contemplative life, where you would discard any heavier occupation than catching salmon, smoking endless cigarettes, and reading over your favourite authors. A rich artist, it is said, being pricked with a violent desire of that kind, offered I don’t know how much ready money to Lord Kenmare if he would grant him five hundred square yards of ground on Ross Island. The offer was declined.

There is a reverse side to the picture; and it could scarcely be less brilliant. Killarney is a sorry borough of about four or five thousand inhabitants, more miserable looking than words can express. Except in the great hotels which English enterprise has raised for fleecing the tourists attracted there by the beauty of the lakes, there is not a vestige of ease or prosperity. No busy workman, not one manufacture is to be seen. The miserable shops exhibit a few dusty wares which nobody seems anxious either to buy or to sell. There is a despondent stillness about, and people look tired with doing nothing. The women, all more or less “tattered and torn,” wear a poor rag of a shawl on their heads. Half-naked children, wild-haired, full of vermin, swarm out of all the small alleys which open on the one street of the town. Only the Anglican and Catholic churches rise above the sordid little dwellings with a substantial and well-to-do air.

Go out of the village, follow the long walls which enclose the lordly seats, and after three or four miles you will find again the Irish country such as you have seen it everywhere. Turnip and barley fields, thin pastures, few trees or none at all. On the road-side occasionally is a consumptive cow, or a pig wallowing in mud fraternally with two or three bright-eyed urchins. Here and there a hovel with the traditional dung-hill and three hens. Nothing, in short, calculated to bring a new light on the agrarian crisis.

It is in Kerry, however, that the malady has reached its most acute state, they all tell me. But you could not believe how hard it is to obtain any definite information about those matters. People who really know about it feel a sort of shame to bare their national wounds before a stranger, and besides, the diversity of judgments makes it difficult to draw something positive from them. Every man has his party feeling, and is wishing to enforce it upon you. Provided with a good number of letters of introduction, and everywhere received with perfect cordiality, I have talked already with people of all conditions—landlords, agents, farmers, doctors, priests, and labourers,—without having obtained as yet any but individual views. Home Rulers and Orangemen have made me hear arguments that I know by heart from having heard them repeated these last eight years, ever since the crisis entered its actual phase. This is not the thing we want: we want espèces, as they say in French law; specific illustration, direct symptoms of the Irish disease.

And that is the difficulty. The habit of living among certain deformities so familiarises us with them that we are no longer able to perceive them, and still less to point them out. Moreover, when upon receiving a letter from London, a man is kind enough to ask you to dinner, to introduce you to his wife and daughters, to lend you his horse and trap, and to empty for your benefit his store of ready-made opinions, is it possible decently to ask him more? He has his own affairs, and cannot spend his time running with you through hill and dale in order to help you to unravel a sociological problem.

By a stroke of good luck I met the scout I wanted.

I was returning from an excursion to the Gap of Dunloe when, on the banks of the river which waters the Kenmare estate, near the bridge, I noticed a man of about forty, of middle height, poorly but neatly clad, who was walking in front of me and gave evident signs of wishing to enter into conversation. I had been so harassed lately by the swarm of cicerones and incompetent guides who crowd all ways to the lakes and sights around Killarney, that I had grown suspicious, and pretended not to see the man. But he had his idea and stuck to it. Slackening his pace, he began to whistle La Marseillaise.

That was saying plainly:—

“You are French, and I am a friend of France like all Irishmen. You are welcome here.”

Throughout the world it is the adopted form for such a declaration of love. On board a transatlantic steamer or in the sitting-rooms of a cosmopolite hotel, when a fair-haired or dark-haired new acquaintance seats herself to the piano and begins to play the march of Rouget de l’Isle, the French tourist can see his way: he is looked upon with no unfriendly eye.

There were no dark or fair tresses here, but only a bearded pepper-and-salt quadragenarian, with the patent purpose of hooking me at the rate of half-a-crown an hour: so I remained obdurate. But he, suddenly making up his mind:—

“Well, Sor,” he said to me with a soft voice and the most enticing smile, “how do you loike our country?”