IRELAND UNDER COERCION

THE DIARY OF AN AMERICAN

BY
WILLIAM HENRY HURLBERT

VOL. II.

SECOND EDITION.

1888

“Upon the future of Ireland hangs the future of the British Empire.”
CARDINAL MANNING TO EARL GREY, 1868

CONTENTS OF VOL. II.

CHAPTER VII.

CHAPTER VIII.

CHAPTER IX.

CHAPTER X.

CHAPTER XI.

CHAPTER XII.

CHAPTER XIII.

CHAPTER XIV.

CHAPTER XV.

CHAPTER XVI.

EPILOGUE, p. [333]-[349]

APPENDIX.
NOTES—

CHAPTER VII.

ROSSBEHY,[1] Feb. 21.—We are here on the eve of battle! An “eviction” is to be made to-morrow on the Glenbehy [1] estate of Mr. Winn, an uncle of Lord Headley, so upon the invitation of Colonel Turner, who has come to see that all is done decently and in order, I left Ennis with him at 7.40 A.M. for Limerick; the “city of the Liberator” for “the city of the Broken Treaty.” There we breakfasted at the Artillery Barracks.

The officers showed us there the new twelve-pounder gun with its elaborately scientific machinery, its Scotch sight, and its four-mile range. I compared notes about the Trafalgar Square riots of February 1886 with an Irish officer who happened to have been on the opposite side of Pall Mall from me at the moment when the mob, getting out of the hand of my socialistic friend Mr. Hyndman, and advancing towards St. James’ Street and Piccadilly was broken by a skilful and very spirited charge of the police. He gave a most humorous account of his own sensations when he first came into contact with the multitude after emerging from St. Paul’s, where, as he put it, he had left the people “all singing away like devils.” But I found he quite agreed with me in thinking that there was a visible nucleus of something like military organisation in the mob of that day, which was overborne and, as it were, smothered by the mere mob element before it came to trying conclusions with the police.

On our way to Limerick, Colonel Turner caught sight, at a station, of Father Little, the parish priest of Six Mile Bridge, in County Clare, and jumping out of the carriage invited him to get in and pursue his journey with us, which he very politely did. Father Little is a tall fine-looking man of a Saxon rather than a Celtic type, and I daresay comes of the Cromwellian stock. He is a staunch and outspoken Nationalist, and has been made rather prominent of late by his championship of certain of his parishioners in their contest with their landlord, Mr. H.V. D’Esterre, who lives chiefly at Bournemouth in England, but owns 2833 acres in County Clare at Rosmanagher, valued at £1625 a year. More than a year ago one of Father Little’s parishioners, Mr. Frost, successfully resisted a large force of the constabulary bent on executing a process of ejectment against him obtained by Mr. D’Esterre.

Frost’s holding was of 33 Irish, or, in round numbers, about 50 English, acres, at a rental of £117, 10s., on which he had asked but had not obtained an abatement. The Poor-Law valuation of the holding was £78, and Frost estimated the value of his and his father’s improvements, including the homestead and the offices, or in other words his tenant-right, at £400. The authorities sent a stronger body of constables and ejected Frost. But as soon as they had left the place Frost came back with his family, on the 28th Jan. 1887, and reoccupied it. Of course proceedings were taken against him immediately, and a small war was waged over the Frost farm until the 5th of September last, when an expedition was sent against it, and it was finally captured, and Frost evicted with his family. Upon this last occasion Father Little (who gave me a very temperate but vigorous account of the whole affair) distinguished himself by a most ingenious and original attempt to “hold the fort.” He chained himself to the main doorway, and stretching the chains right and left secured them to two other doors. It was of this refreshing touch of humour that I heard the other day at Abbeyleix as happening not in Clare but in Kerry.

Since his eviction Frost has been living, Father Little tells me, in a wooden hut put up for him on the lands of a kinsman of the same name, who is also a tenant of Mr. D’Esterre, and who has since been served by his landlord with a notice of ejectment for arrears, although he had paid up six months’ dues two months only before the service. Father Little charged the landlord in this case with prevarication and other evasive proceedings in the course of his negotiations with the tenants; and Colonel Turner did not contest the statements made by him in support of his contention that the Rosmanagher difficulty might have been avoided had the tenants been more fairly and more considerately dealt with. It is strong presumptive evidence against the landlord that a kinsman, Mr. Robert D’Esterre, is one of the subscribers to a fund raised by Father Little in aid of the evicted man Frost. On the other hand, as illustrating the condition of the tenants, it is noteworthy that the Post-Office Savings Bank’s deposits at Six-Mile Bridge rose from £382, 17s. 10d. in 1880 to £934, 13s. 4d. in 1887. After breakfast we took a car and drove rapidly about the city for an hour. With its noble river flowing through the very heart of the place, and broadening soon into an estuary of the Atlantic, Limerick ought long ago to have taken its place in the front rank of British ports dealing with the New World. In the seventeenth century it was the fourth city of Ireland, Boate putting it then next after Dublin, Galway, and Waterford. Belfast at that time, he describes as a place hardly comparable “to a small market-town in England.” To-day Limerick has a population of some forty thousand, and Belfast a population of more than two hundred thousand souls. This change cannot be attributed solely, if at all, to the “Protestant ascendency,” nor yet to the alleged superiority of the Northern over the Southern Irish in energy and thrift, For in the seventeenth century Limerick was more important than Cork, whereas it had so far fallen behind its Southern competitor in the eighteenth century that it contained in 1781 but 3859 houses, while Cork contained 5295. To-day its population is about half as large as that of Cork. It is a very well built city, its main thoroughfare, George Street, being at least a mile in length, and a picturesque city also, thanks to the island site of its most ancient quarter, the English Town, and to the hills of Clare and Killaloe, which close the prospect of the surrounding country. But the streets, though many of them are handsome, have a neglected look, as have also the quays and bridges. One of my companions, to whom I spoke of this, replied, “if they look neglected, it’s because they are neglected. Politics are the death of the place, and the life of its publics.”[2]

As we approached the shores of the Atlantic from Limerick, the scenery became very grand and beautiful. On the right of the railway the country rolled and undulated away towards the Stacks, amid the spurs and slopes of which, in the wood of Clonlish, Sanders, the Nuncio sent over to organise Catholic Ireland against Elizabeth, miserably perished of want and disease six years before the advent of the great Armada. To the south-west rose the grand outlines of the Macgillicuddy’s Reeks, the highest points, I believe, in the South of Ireland. We established ourselves at the County Kerry Club on our arrival in Tralee, which I found to be a brisk prosperous-looking town, and quite well built. A Nationalist member once gave me a gloomy notion of Tralee, by telling me, when I asked him whether he looked forward with longing to a seat in the Parliament of Ireland, that “when he was in Dublin now he always thought of London, just as when he used to be in Tralee he always thought of Dublin.” But he did less than justice to the town upon the Lee. We left it at half-past four in the train for Killorglin. The little station there was full of policemen and soldiers, and knots of country people stood about the platform discussing the morrow. There had been some notion that the car-drivers at Killorglin might “boycott” the authorities. But they were only anxious to turn an honest penny by bringing us on to this lonely but extremely neat and comfortable hostelry in the hills.

We left the Sheriff and the escort to find their way as best they could after us.

Mrs. Shee, the landlady here, ushered us into a very pretty room hung with little landscapes of the country, and made cheery by a roaring fire. Two or three officers of the soldiers sent on here to prevent any serious uproar to-morrow dined with us.

The constabulary are in force, but in great good humour. They have no belief that there will be any trouble, though all sorts of wild tales were flying about Tralee before we left, of English members of Parliament coming down to denounce the “Coercion” law, and of risings in the hills, and I know not what besides. The agent of the Winn property, or of Mr. Head of Reigate in Surrey, the mortgagee of the estate, who holds a power of attorney from Mr. Winn, is here, a quiet, intelligent young man, who has given me the case in a nut-shell.

The tenant to be evicted, James Griffin, is the son and heir of one Mrs. Griffin, who on the 5th of April 1854 took a lease of the lands known as West Lettur from the then Lord Headley and the Hon. R. Winn, at the annual rent of £32, 10s. This rent has since been reduced by a judicial process to £26. In 1883 James Griffin, who was then, as he is now, an active member of the local branch of the National League, and who was imprisoned under Mr. Gladstone’s Act of 1881 as a “suspect,” was evicted, being then several years in arrears. He re-entered unlawfully immediately afterwards, and has remained in West Lettur unlawfully ever since, actively deterring and discouraging other tenants from paying their rents. He took a great part in promoting the refusal to pay which led to the famous evictions of last year. As to these, it seems the tenants had agreed, in 1886, to accept a proposition from Mr. Head, remitting four-fifths of all their arrears upon payment of one year’s rent and costs. Mr. Sheehan, M.P., a hotel-keeper in Killarney, intervened, advising the tenants that the Dublin Parliament would soon be established, and would abolish “landlordism,” whereupon they refused to keep their agreement.[3] Sir Redvers Buller, who then filled the post now held by Sir West Ridgway, seeing this alarming deadlock, urged Mr. Head to go further, and offer to take a half-year’s rent and costs. If the tenants refused this Sir Redvers advised Mr. Head to destroy all houses occupied by mere trespassers, such as Griffin, who, if they could hold a place for twelve years, would acquire a title under the Statute of Limitations. A negotiation conducted by Sir Redvers and Father Quilter, P.P., followed, and Father Quilter, for the tenants, finally, in writing, accepted Mr. Head’s offer, under which, by the payment of £865, they would be rid of a legal liability for £6177. The League again intervened with bribes and threats, and Father Quilter found himself obliged to write to Colonel Turner a letter in which he said, “Only seventeen of the seventy tenants have sent on their rents to Mr. Roe (the agent). Though promising that they would accept the terms, they have withdrawn at the last moment from fulfilment.... I shall never again during my time in Glenbehy interfere between a landlord and his tenants. I have poor slaves who will not keep their word. Now let Mr. Roe or any other agent in future deal with Glenbeighans as he likes.” The farms lie at a distance even from this inn, and very far therefore from Killorglin, and the agent, knowing that the tenants would be encouraged by Griffin and by Mr. Harrington, M.P., and others, to come back into their holdings as soon as the officers withdrew, ordered the woodwork of several cottages to be burned in order to prevent this. This burning of the cottages, which were the lawful property of the mortgagee, made a great figure in the newspaper reports, and “scandalised the civilised world.” The present agent thinks it was impolitic on that account, but he has no doubt it was a good thing financially for the evicted tenants. “You will see the shells of the cottages to-morrow,” he said, “and you will judge for yourself what they were worth.” But the sympathy excited by the illustrations of the cruel conflagration and the heartrending descriptions of the reporters, resulted in a very handsome subscription for the benefit of the tenants of Glenbehy. General Sir William Butler, whose name came so prominently before the public in connection with his failure to appear and give evidence in a recent cause célèbre, and whose brother is a Resident Magistrate in Kerry, was one of the subscribers. The fund thus raised has been since administered by two trustees, Father Quilter, P.P., and Mr. Shee, a son of our brisk little landlady here, who maintain out of it very comfortably the evicted tenants. Not long ago a man in Tralee tried to bribe the agent into having him evicted, that he might make a claim on this fund! At Killorglin the Post-Office Savings Bank deposits, which stood at £282, 15s. 9d. in 1880, rose in 1887 to £1299, 2s. 6d. James Griffin, despite, or because, of the two evictions through which he has passed, is very well off. He owns a very good horse and cart, and seven or eight head of cattle. His arrears now amount to about £240, and on being urged yesterday to make a proposition which might avoid an eviction, he gravely offered to pay £8 of the current half-year’s rent in cash, and the remaining £5 in June, the landlord taking on himself all the costs and giving him a clean receipt! This liberal proposition was declined. The zeal of her son in behalf of the evicted tenants does not seem to affect the amiable anxiety of our trim and energetic hostess to make things agreeable here to the minions of the alien despotism. The officers both of the police and of the military appear to be on the best of terms with the whole household, and everything is going as merrily as marriage bells on this eve of an eviction.

TRALEE, Wednesday evening, Feb. 22.—We rose early at Mrs. Shee’s, made a good breakfast, and set out for the scene of the day’s work. It was a glorious morning for Washington’s birthday, and I could not help imagining the amazement with which that stern old Virginian landlord would have regarded the elaborate preparations thought necessary here in Ireland in the year of our Lord 1888, to eject a tenant who owes two hundred and forty pounds of arrears on a holding at twenty-six pounds a year, and offers to settle the little unpleasantness by paying thirteen pounds in two instalments!

We had a five miles’ march of it through a singularly wild and picturesque region, the hills which lead up to the Macgillicuddy’s Reeks on our left, and on the right the lower hills trending to the salt water of Dingle Bay. Our start had been delayed by the non-appearance of the Sheriff, in aid of whom all this parade of power was made; but it turned out afterwards that he had gone on without stopping to let Colonel Turner know it.

The air was so bracing and the scenery so fine that we walked most of the way. Two or three cars drove past us, the police and the troops making way for them very civilly, though some of the officers thought they were taking some Nationalist leaders and some English “sympathisers” to Glenbehy. One of the officers, when I commented upon this, told me they never had much trouble with the Irish members. “Some of them,” he said, “talk more than is necessary, and flourish about; but they have sense enough to let us go about our work without foolishly trying to bother us. The English are not always like that.” And he then told me a story of a scene in which an English M.P., we will call Mr. Gargoyle, was a conspicuous actor. Mr. Gargoyle being present either at an eviction or a prohibited meeting, I didn’t note which, with two or three Irish members, all of them were politely requested to step on one side and let the police march past. The Irish members touched their hats in return to the salute of the officer, and drew to one side of the road. But Mr. Gargoyle defiantly planted himself in the middle of the road. The police, marching four abreast, hesitated for a moment, and then suddenly dividing into two columns marched on. The right-hand man of the first double file, as he went by, just touched the M.P. with his shoulder, and thereby sent him up against the left-hand man of the corresponding double file, who promptly returned the attention. And in this manner the distinguished visitor went gyrating through the whole length of the column, to emerge at the end of it breathless, hatless, and bewildered, to the intense and ill-suppressed delight of his Irish colleagues.

Our hostess’s son, the trustee of the Eviction Fund, was on one of the cars which passed us, with two or three companions, who proved to be “gentlemen of the Press.” We passed a number of cottages and some larger houses on the way, the inmates of which seemed to be minding their own business and taking but a slight interest in the great event of the day. We made a little detour at one of the finest points on the road to visit “Winn’s Folly,” a modern mediæval castle of considerable size, upon a most enchanting site, with noble views on every side, quite impossible to be seen through its narrow loopholed and latticed windows. The castle is extremely well built, of a fine stone from the neighbourhood, and with a very small expenditure might be made immediately habitable. But no one has ever lived in it. It has only been occupied as a temporary barrack by the police when sent here, and the largest rooms are now littered with straw for the use of the force. At the beginning of the century, and for many years afterwards, Lord and Lady Headley lived on the estate, and kept a liberal house. Their residence was on a fine point running out into the bay, but, I am told, the sea has now invaded it, and eaten it away. In 1809 the acreage of this Glenbehy property was 8915 Irish acres or 14,442 English acres, set down under Bath’s valuation at £2299, 17s. 6d. Between 1830 and 1860 the rental averaged £5000 a year, and between these years £17,898, 14s. 5d. were expended by the landlord in improvements upon the property. This castle, which we visited, must have involved since then an outlay of at least £10,000 in the place.

The present Lord Headley, only a year or two ago, went through the Bankruptcy Court, and the Hon. Rowland Winn, his uncle, the titular owner of Glenbehy, is set down among the Irish landlords as owning 13,932 Irish acres at a rental of £1382.

After we passed the castle we began to hear the blowing of rude horns from time to time on the distant hills. These were signals to the people of our approach, and gave quite the air of an invasion to our expedition. We passed the burned cottages of last year just before reaching Mr. Griffin’s house at West Lettur. They were certainly not large cottages, and I saw but three of them. We found the Sheriff at West Lettur. The police and the soldiers drew a cordon around the place, within which no admittance was to be had except on business; and the myrmidons of the law going into the house with the agent held a final conference with the tenant, of which nothing came but a renewal of his previous offer. Then the work of eviction began. There was no attempt at a resistance, and but for the martial aspect of the forces, and an occasional blast of a horn from the hills, or the curious noises made from time to time by a small concourse of people, chiefly women, assembled on the slope of an adjoining tenancy, the proceedings were as dull as a parish meeting. What most struck me about the affair was the patience and good-nature of the officers. In the two hours and a half which we spent at West Lettur a New York Sheriff’s deputies would have put fifty tenants with all their bags and baggage out of as many houses into the street. In fact it is very likely that at least that number of New York tenants were actually so ousted from their houses during this very time.

The evicted Mr. Griffin was a stout, stalwart man of middle age, comfortably dressed, with the air rather of a citizen than of a farmer, who took the whole thing most coolly, as did also his women-kind. All of them were well dressed, and they superintended the removal and piling up of their household goods as composedly as if they were simply moving out of one house into another. The house itself was a large comfortable house of the country, and it was amply furnished.

I commented on Griffin’s indifference to the bailiff, a quiet, good-natured man.

“Oh, he’s quite familiar,” was the reply; “it’s the third time he’s been evicted! I believe’s going to America.”

“Oh! he will do very well,” said a gentleman who had joined the expedition like myself to see the scene. “He is a shrewd chap, and not troubled by bashfulness. He sat on a Board of Guardians with a man I knew four years ago, and one day he read out his own name, ‘James Griffin,’ among a list of applicants for relief at Cahirciveen. The chairman looked up, and said, ‘Surely that is not your name you are reading, is it?’ ‘It is, indeed,’ replied Griffin, ‘and I am as much in need of relief as any one!’ Perhaps you’ll be surprised to hear he didn’t get it. This is a good holding he had, and he used to do pretty well with it—not in his mother’s time only of the flush prices, but in his own. It was the going to Kilmainham that spoiled him.”

“How did that spoil him?”

“Oh, it made a great man of him, being locked up. He was too well treated there. He got a liking for sherry and bitters, and he’s never been able to make his dinner since without a nip of them. Mrs. Shee knows that well.”

To make an eviction complete and legal here, everything belonging to the tenant, and every live creature must be taken out of the house. A cat may save a house as a cat may save a derelict ship. Then the Sheriff must “walk” over the whole holding. All this takes time. There was an unobtrusive search for arms too going on all the time. Three ramrods were found hidden in a straw-bed—two of which showed signs of recent use. But the guns had vanished. An officer told me that not long ago two revolvers were found in a corner of the thatch of a house; but the cartridges for them were only some time afterwards discovered neatly packed away in the top of a bedroom wall. It is not the ownership of these arms, it is the careful concealment of them which indicates sinister intent. One of the constables brought out three “Moonlighters’ swords” found hidden away in the house. One of these Colonel Turner showed me. It was a reversal of the Scriptural injunction, being a ploughshare beaten into a weapon, and a very nasty weapon of offence, one end of it sharpened for an ugly thrust, the other fashioned into quite a fair grip. While I was examining this trophy there was a stir, and presently two of the gentlemen who had passed us on Mr. Shee’s car came rather suddenly out of the house in company with two or three constables.

They were representatives, they said, of the Press, and as such desired to be allowed to remain. Colonel Turner replied that this could not be, and, in fact, no one had been suffered to enter the house except the law-officers, the agent, and the constables. So the representatives of the Press were obliged to pass outside of the lines, one of the constables declaring that they had got into the house through a hole in the back wall!

Shortly after this incident there arose a considerable noise of groaning and shouting from the hill-side beyond the highway, and presently a number of people, women and children predominating, appeared coming down towards the precincts of the house. They were following a person in a clerical dress, who proved to be Father Quilter, the parish priest, who had denounced his people to Colonel Turner as “poor slaves” of the League! A colloquy followed between Father Quilter and the policemen of the cordon. This was brought to a close by Mr. Roche, the resident magistrate, who went forward, and finding that Father Quilter wished to pass the cordon, politely but firmly informed him that this could not be done. “Not if I am the bearer of a telegram for the lawyer?” asked Father Quilter, in a loud and not entirely amiable tone. “Not on any terms whatever,” responded the magistrate. Father Quilter still maintaining his ground, the women crowded in around and behind him, the men bringing up the rear at a respectable distance, and the small boys shouting loudly. For a moment faint hopes arose within me that I was about to witness one of the .exciting scenes of which I have more than once read. But only for a moment. The magistrate ordered the police to advance. As they drew near the wall with an evident intention of going over it into the highway, Father Quilter and the women fell back, the boys and men retreated up the opposite hill, and the brief battle of Glenbehy was over.

A small messenger bearing a telegram then emerged from the crowd, and showing his telegram, was permitted to pass. Father Quilter, in a loud voice, commented upon this, crying out, “See now your consistency! You said no one should pass, and you let the messenger come in!” To this sally no reply was returned. After a little the priest, followed by most of the people, went up the hill to the holding of another tenant, and there, as the police came in and reported, held a meeting. From time to time cries were heard in the distance, and ever and anon the blast of a horn came from some outlying hill.

But no notice was taken of these things by the police, and when the tedious formalities of the law had all been gone through with, a squad of men were put in charge of the house and the holding, the rest of the army re-formed for the march back, our cars came up, and we left West Lettur. Seeing a number of men come down the hill, as the column prepared to move, Mr. Roche, making his voice tremendous, after the fashion of a Greek chorus, commanded the police to arrest and handcuff any riotous person making provocative noises. This had the desired effect, and the march back began in silence. When the column was fairly in the road, “boos” and groans went up from knots of men higher up the hill, but no heed was taken of these, and no further incident occurred. I shall be curious to see whether the story of this affair can possibly be worked up into a thrilling narrative.

We lunched at Mrs. Shee’s, where no sort of curiosity was manifested about the proceedings at West Lettur, and I came back here with Colonel Turner by another road, which led us past one of the loveliest lakes I have ever seen—Lough Caragh. Less known to fame than the much larger Lake of Killarney, it is in its way quite worthy of comparison with any of the lesser lakes of Europe. It is not indeed set in a coronal of mountains like Orta, but its shores are well wooded, picturesque, and enlivened by charming seats—now, for the most part, alas!--abandoned by their owners. We had a pleasant club dinner here this evening, after which came in to see me Mr. Hussey, to whom I had sent a letter from Mr. Froude. Few men, I imagine, know this whole region better than Mr. Hussey. Some gentlemen of the country joined in the conversation, and curious stories were told of the difficulty of getting evidence in criminal cases. What Froude says of the effect of the prohibitive and protection policy in Ireland upon the morals of the people as to smuggling must be said, I fear, of the effect of the Penal Laws against Catholics upon their morals as to perjury. It is not surprising that the peasants should have been educated into the state of mind of the Irishman in the old American story, who, being solicited to promise his vote when he landed in New York, asked whether the party which sought it was for the Government or against it. Against it, he was told, “Then begorra you shall have my vote, for I’m agin the Government whatever it is.” One shocking case was told of a notorious and terrible murder here in Kerry. An old man and his son, so poor that they lay naked in their beds, were taken out and shot by a party of Moonlighters for breaking a boycott. They were left for dead, and their bodies thrown upon a dunghill. The boy, however, was still alive when they were found, and it was thought he might recover. The magistrates questioned him as to his knowledge of the murderers. The boy’s mother stood behind the magistrate, and when the question was put, held up her finger in a warning manner at the poor lad. She didn’t wish him to “peach,” as, if he lived, the friends of the murderers would make it impossible for them to keep their holding and live on it. The lad lied, and died with the lie on his lips. Who shall sit in judgment on that wretched mother and her son? But what rule can possibly be too stern to crush out the terrorism which makes such things possible?

And what right have Englishmen to expect their dominion to stand in Ireland when their party leaders for party ends shake hands with men who wink at and use this terrorism? It has so wrought upon the population here, that in another case, in which the truth needed by justice and the fears of a poor family trembling for their substance and their lives came thus into collision, an Irish Judge did not hesitate to warn the jury against allowing themselves to be influenced by “the usual family lie”!

A magistrate told us a curious story, which recalls a case noted by Sir Walter Scott, about the detection of a murderer, who lay long in wait for a certain police sergeant, obnoxious to the “Moonlighters,” and finally shot him dead in the public street of Loughrea, after dark on a rainy night, as he was returning from the Post-Office on one side of the street to the Police Barracks on the other. The town and the neighbouring country were all agog about the matter, but no trace could be got until the Dublin detectives came down three days after the murder. It had rained more or less every one of these days, and the pools of water were still standing in the street, as on the night of the murder. One of the Dublin officers closely examining the highway saw a heavy footprint in the coarse mud at the bottom of one of these pools. He had the water drawn off, and made out clearly, from the print in the mud, that the brogan worn by the foot which made it had a broken sole-piece turned over under the foot. By this the murderer was eventually traced, captured, tried, and found guilty.

Mr. Morphy, I find, is coming down from Dublin to conduct the prosecution in the case of the Crown against the murderers of Fitzmaurice, the old man, so brutally slain the other day near Lixnaw, in the presence of his daughter, for taking and farming a farm given up by his thriftless brother. “He will find,” said one of the company, “the mischief done in this instance also by prematurely pressing for evidence. The girl Honora, who saw her father murdered, never ought to have been subjected to any inquiry at first by any one, least of all by the local priest. Her first thought inevitably was that if she intimated who the men were, they would be screened, and she would suffer. Now she is recovering her self-possession and coming round, and she will tell the truth.”

“Meanwhile,” said a magistrate, “the girl and her family are all ‘boycotted,’ and that, mark you, by the priest, as well as by the people. The girl’s life would be in peril were not these scoundrels cowards as well as bullies. Two staunch policemen—Irishmen and Catholics both of them—are in constant attendance, with orders to prevent any one from trying to intimidate or to tamper with her. A police hut is putting up close to the Fitzmaurice house. The Nationalist papers haven’t a word to say for this poor girl or her murdered father. But they are always putting in some sly word in behalf of Moriarty and Hayes, the men accused of the murder.”

“Furthermore,” said another guest, “these two men are regularly supplied while in prison with special meals by Mrs. Tangney. Who foots the bills? That is what she won’t tell, nor has the Head-Constable so far been able accurately to ascertain. All we know is that the friends of the prisoners haven’t the money to do it.”

Late in the evening came in a tall fine-looking Kerry squire, who told us, à propos of the Fitzmaurice murder, that only a day or two ago a very decent tenant of his, who had taken over a holding from a disreputable kinsman, intending to manage it for the benefit of this kinsman’s family, came to him and said he must give it up, as the Moonlighters had threatened him if he continued to hold it.

A man of substance in Tralee gave me some startling facts as to the local administration here. In Tralee Union, he said, there were in 1879 eighty-seven persons receiving outdoor relief, at a cost to the Union of £30, 17s. 11d., being an average per head of 7s. 1d., and 1879 was a very bad year, the worst since the great famine year, 1847. A Nationalist Board was elected in 1880, and a Nationalist chairman in 1884. 1884 was a very good year, but in that year no fewer than 3434 persons received outdoor relief, at a cost of £2534, 13s. 10d., making an average per head of 14s. 9d.! And at the present time £5000 nominal worth of dishonoured cheques of the authorities were flying all over the county!

“On whom,” I asked, “does the burden fall of these levies and extravagances?”

“On the landlords, not on the tenants,” he promptly replied. “The landlord pays the whole of the rates on all holdings of less than £4 a year, and on all land which is either really or technically in his own possession. He also pays one-half of the rates on all the rest of his property.”

“Then, in a case like that of Griffin’s, evicted at Glenbehy, with arrears going back to 1883, who would pay the rates?”

“The landlord of course!”[4]

CHAPTER VIII.

CORK, Thursday, Feb. 23d.—We left Tralee this morning. It was difficult to recognise the events yesterday witnessed by us at Glenbehy in the accounts which we read of them to-day when we got the newspapers.

As these accounts are obviously intended to be read, not in Ireland, where nobody seems to take the least interest in Irish affairs beyond his own bailiwick, but in England and America, it is only natural, I suppose, that they should be coloured to suit the taste of the market for which they are destined. It is astonishing how little interest the people generally show in the newspapers. The Irish make good journalists as they make good soldiers; but most of the journalists who now represent Irish constituencies at Westminster find their chief field of activity, I am told, not in Irish but in British or in American journals. Mr. Roche, R.M., who travelled with us as far as Castle Island, where we left him, was much less moved by the grotesque accounts given in the local journals of his conduct yesterday than by Mr. Gladstone’s “retractation” of the extraordinary attack which he made the other day upon Mr. Roche himself, and four other magistrates by name.

“The retractation aggravates the attack,” he said.

When one sees what a magistrate now represents in Ireland, it certainly is not easy to reconcile an inconsiderate attack upon the character and conduct of such an officer with the most elementary ideas of good citizenship.

After Mr. Roche left us, a gentleman in the carriage, who is interested in some Castle Island property, told us that nothing could be worse than the state of that region. Open defiance of the moral authority of the clergy is as rife there, he says, as open defiance of the civil authorities. The church was not long ago broken into, and the sacred vestments were defiled; and, but the other day, a young girl of the place came to a magistrate and asked him to give her a summons against the parish priest “for assaulting her.” The magistrate, a Protestant, but a personal friend of the priest, esteeming him for his fidelity to his duties, asked the girl what on earth she meant. She proceeded with perfect coolness to say that the priest had impertinently interfered with her, “assaulted her,” and told her to “go home,” when he found her sitting in a lonely part of the road with her young man, rather late at night! For this, the girl, professing to be a Catholic, actually wanted the Protestant magistrate to have her parish priest brought into his court! He told the girl plainly what he thought of her conduct, whereupon she went away, very angry, and vowing vengeance both against the priest and against him.

This same gentleman said that at the Bodyke evictions, of which so much has been heard, the girls and women swarmed about the police using language so revoltingly obscene that the policemen blushed—such language, he said, as was never heard from decent Irishwomen in the days of his youth.

Of this business of evictions, he said, the greatest imaginable misrepresentations are made in the press and by public speakers. “You have just seen one eviction yourself,” he said, “and you can judge for yourself whether that can be truly described in Mr. Gladstone’s language as a ‘sentence of death.’ The people that were put out of these burned houses you saw, houses that never would have needed to be burned, had Harrington and the other Leaguers allowed the people to keep their pledges given Sir Redvers Buller, those very people are better off now than they were before they were evicted, in so far as this, that they get their food and drink and shelter without working for it, and I’m sorry to say that the Government and the League, between them, have been soliciting half of Ireland for the last six or eight years to think that sort of thing a heaven upon earth. An eviction in Ireland in these days generally means just this, that the fight between a landlord and the League has come to a head. If the tenant wants to be rid of his holding, or if he is more afraid of the League than of the law, why, out he goes, and then he is a victim of heartless oppression; but if he is well-to-do, and if he thinks he will be protected, he takes the eviction proceedings just for a notice to stop palavering and make a settlement, and a settlement is made. The ordinary Irish tenant don’t think anything more of an eviction than Irish gentlemen used to think of a duel; but you can never get English people to understand the one any more than the other!”

The fine broad streets which Cork owes to the filling up and bridging over of the canals which in the last century made her a kind of Irish Venice, give the city a comely and even stately aspect. But they are not much better kept and looked after than the streets of New York. And they are certainly less busy and animated than when I last was here, five years ago. All the canals, however, are not filled up or bridged over. From my windows, in a neat comfortable little private hotel on Morrison’s Quay, I look down upon the deck of a small barque, moored well up among the houses. The hospitable and dignified County Club is within two minutes’ walk of my hostelry, and the equally hospitable and more bustling City Club, but a little farther off, at the end of the South Mall. At luncheon to-day a gentleman who was at Kilkenny with Mr. Gladstone on the occasion of his visit to that city told me a story too good to be lost. The party were eight in number, and on their return to Abbeyleix they naturally looked out for an empty railway carriage. The train was rather full, but in one compartment my informant descried a dignitary, whom he knew, of the Protestant Church of Ireland, its only occupant. He went up and saluted the Dean, and, pointing to his companions, asked if he would object to changing his place in the train, which would give them a compartment to themselves. The Dean courteously, and indeed briskly, assented, when he saw that Mr. Gladstone was one of the party.

After the train moved off, Mr. Gladstone said, “Was not that gentleman who so kindly vacated his place for us a clergyman?”

“Yes.” “I hope he won’t think I have disestablished him again!”

At the next station, my informant getting out for a moment to thank the Dean again for his civility, and chat with him, repeated Mr. Gladstone’s remark.

“Oh!” said the Dean; “you may tell him I don’t mind his disestablishing me again; for he didn’t disendow me; he didn’t confiscate my ticket!”

With this gentleman was another from Kerry, who tells me there is a distinct change for the better already visible in that county, which he attributes to the steady action of the Dublin authorities in enforcing the law.

“The League Courts,” he said, “are ceasing to be the terror they used to be.”

I asked what he meant by the “League Courts,” when he expressed his astonishment at my not knowing that it was the practice of the League to hold regular Courts, before which the tenants are summoned, as if by a process of the law, to explain their conduct, when they are charged with paying their rents without the permission of the Local League. In his part of Kerry, he tells me, these Courts used not very long ago to sit regularly every Sunday. The idea, he says, is as old as the time of the United Irishmen, who used to terrorise the country just in the same way. A man whom he named, a blacksmith, acted as a kind of “Law Lord,” and to him the chairmen of the different local “Courts” used to refer cases heard before them![5]

All this was testified to openly two years ago, before Lord Cowper’s Commission, but no decisive action has ever been taken by the Government to put a stop to the scandal, and relieve the tenants from this open tyranny. These Courts enforced, and still enforce, their decrees by various forms of outrage, ranging “from the boycott,” in its simplest forms up to direct outrages upon property and the person.

“This dual Government business,” he said, “can only end in a duel between the two Governments, and it must be a duel to the death of one or the other.”

To-night at dinner I had a most interesting conversation with Mr. Colomb, Assistant Inspector-General of the Constabulary, who is here engaged with Mr. Cameron of Belfast, and Colonel Turner, in investigating the affair at Mitchelstown. Mr. Colomb was at Killarney at the time of the Fenian rising under “General O’Connor” in 1867—a rising which was undoubtedly an indirect consequence of our own Civil War in America. Warning came to two magistrates, of impending trouble from Cahirciveen. Upon this Mr. Colomb immediately ordered the arrest of all passengers to arrive that day at Killarney by the “stage-car” from that place. When the car came in at night, it brought only one person—“an awful-looking ruffian he was,” said Mr. Colomb, “whom, by his square-toed shoes, we knew to be just arrived from your side of the water.”

He was examined, and said he was a commercial traveller, and that he had only one letter about him, a business letter, addressed to “J. D. Sheehan.”

“Have you any objection to show us that letter?”

“Certainly not,” he replied very coolly, and, taking it out of his pocket, he walked toward a table on which stood a candle, as if to read it. A gentleman who was closely watching him, caught him by the wrist, just as he was putting the letter to the flame, and saved it. It was addressed to J. D. Sheehan, Esq., Killarney [Present], and ran as follows:

“Feb. 12th, Morning.

“MY DEAR SHEEHAN,—I have the honour to introduce to you Captain Mortimer Moriarty. He will be of great assistance to you, and I have told him all that is to be done until I get to your place. The Private Spys are very active this morning. Unless they smell a rat all will be done without any trouble.

“Success to you. Hoping to meet soon,—Yours as ever.

“(Signed) JOHN J. O’CONNOR.”[6]

Despatches were at once sent off to the authorities at different points. They were all transmitted, except to Cahirciveen, the wires to which place were found to have been cut. Mr. Colomb—who had a force of but seventeen men in the town of Killarney—saw the uselessness of trying to communicate with the officer at Cahirciveen, but was so strongly urged by the magistrates that he unwillingly consented to endeavour to do so, and a mounted orderly was sent. Just after this unfortunate officer had passed Glenbehy (the scene of the eviction I have just witnessed) he was shot by some of O’Connor’s party, whom he tried to pass in the dark, and who were marching on Killarney, and fell from his horse, which galloped off. He managed to crawl to a neighbouring cottage, where he was not long after found by ”General O’Connor“ and some of his followers. The wounded man was kindly treated by O’Connor, who had him examined for despatches, but prevented one of his men from shooting him dead, as he lay on the ground, and had his wounds as well attended to as was possible. There was no response in the country to the Kerry rising, such as it was, because the intended seizure of Chester Castle by the Fenians failed, but O’Connor was not captured, though great efforts were made to seize him. How he escaped is not known to this day.

At that time, as always in emergencies, Mr. Colomh says the Constabulary behaved with exemplary coolness, courage, and fidelity. His position gives him a very thorough knowledge of the force, which is almost entirely recruited from the body of the Irish people. Of late years not a few men of family, reduced in fortune, have taken service in it. Among these has been mentioned to me a young Irishman of title, and of an ancient race, who is a sergeant in the force, and who recently declined to accept a commission, as his increased expenses would make it harder for him to support his two sisters. Another constable in the ranks represents a family illustrious in the annals of England four centuries ago.

As to the morale of the force, he cites one eloquent fact. Out of a total of more than 13,000 men, the cases of drunkenness, proved or admitted, average no more than fourteen a week! On many days absolutely no such cases occur. This is really amazing when one thinks how many of the men are isolated on lonely posts all over the island, exposed to all sorts of weather, and cut off from the ordinary resources and amusements of social life.

CORK, Friday, Feb. 24th.—This morning after breakfast I met in the South Mall a charming ecclesiastic, whose acquaintance I made in Rome while I was attending the great celebration there in 1867 of St. Peter’s Day. Father Burke introduced me to him after the Pontifical Mass at San Paolo fuori le Mure; and we had a delightful symposium that afternoon. I walked with him to his lodgings, talking over those ”days long vanished,“ and the friend whose genius made them, like the suppers of Plato, ”a joy for ever.“ He is sorely troubled now by the attitude of a portion of the clergy in his part of Ireland, which is one almost of open hostility, he says, to the moral authority of the Church, and indicates the development of a class of priests moving in the direction of the ”conventional priests,“ by whom the Church was disgraced during the darkest days of the French Revolution of 1793.

Almost more mischievous than these men, he thinks, who must eventually go the way of their kind in times past, are the timid priests, for the most part parish priests, who go in fear of their violent curates, and of the politicians who tyrannise their flocks. He showed me a letter written to him last week by one of these, whose parish is just now in a tempest over the Plan of Campaign. Certainly a most remarkable letter. In it the writer frankly says, ”There is no justification for the Plan of Campaign on this property.

“I assented to putting it in force here,” he goes on, “because I did not at the time know the facts of the case, and took them on trust from persons who, I find, have practised upon my confidence. What am I to do? I am made to appear as a consenting party now, and, indeed, an assisting agent in action, which I certainly was led to believe right and necessary, but which upon the facts I now see involves much injustice to —— (naming the landlord), and I fear positive ruin to worthy men and families of my people. I shall be grateful and glad of your counsel in these most distressing circumstances.”

“What can any one do to help such a man?” said my friend. “The rebellious and unruly in the Church, be they priests or laymen, can only in the end damage themselves. Tu es Petrus; and revolt, like schism, is a devil which only carries away those of whom it gets possession out of the Church and into the sea. But a weak sentinel on the wall or at the gate who drops his musket to wipe his eyes, that is a thing for tears!”

He asked me to come and see him if possible in his own county, and he has promised to send me letters to-day for priests who will he glad to tell me what they know only too well of the pressure put upon the better sort of the people by the organised idlers and mischief-makers in Clare and Kerry.

To-day at the City Club, I made the acquaintance of the Town-Clerk of Cork, Mr. Alexander M‘Carthy, a staunch Nationalist and Home Ruler, who holds his office almost by a sort of hereditary tenure, having been appointed to it in 1859 in succession to his father. He gave me many interesting particulars as to the municipal history and administration of Cork, and showed me some of the responses he is receiving to a kind of circular letter sent by the municipality to the town governments of England, touching the recent proceedings against the Mayor. So far these responses have not been very sympathetic. He invited me to lunch here with him to-morrow, and visit some of the most interesting points in and around the city. Here, too, I met Colonel Spaight, Inspector of the Local Government Board, who gives me a startling account of the increase of the public burdens. Twenty years ago there were no persons whatever seeking outdoor relief in Cork. This year, out of a total population of 145,216, there are 3775 persons here receiving indoor relief, and 4337 receiving outdoor relief, making in all 8112, or nearly 6 per cent. of the inhabitants. This proportion is swelled by the influx of people from other regions seeking occupation here, which they do not find, or simply coming here because they are sure of relief. This state of things illustrates not so much the decay of industry in Cork as the development of a spirit of mendicancy throughout Ireland. In the opinion of many thoughtful people, this began with the Duchess of Marlborough’s Fund, and with the Mansion House Fund. Colonel Spaight remembers that in Strokestown Union, Roscommon, when the guardians there received a supply of one hundred tons of seed potatoes, they distributed eighty tons, and were then completely at a loss what to do with the remaining twenty tons. Mr. Parnell and Mr. O’Kelly, however, came to Roscommon, and the latter made a speech out of the hotel window to the people, advising them to apply for more, and take all they could get. “With a stroke of a pen,” he said, “we’ll wipe out the seed rate!” Whereupon the applications for seed rose to six hundred tons!

The Labourers Act, passed by the British Parliament for the benefit of the Irish labourers, who get but scant recognition of their wants and wishes from the tenant farmers, is not producing the good results expected from it, mainly because it is perverted to all sorts of jobbery. Only last week Colonel Spaight had to hand in to the Local Government Board a report on certain schemes of expenditure under this Act, prepared by the Board of Guardians of Tralee. These schemes contemplated the erection of 196 cottages in 135 electoral divisions of the Union. This meant, of course, so much money of the ratepayers to be turned over to local contractors. Colonel Spaight on inspection found that of the 196 proposed cottages, the erection of 61 had been forbidden by the sanitary authorities, the notices for the erection of 23 had been wrongly served, 20 were proposed to be erected on sites not adjoining a public road, and no necessity had been shown for erecting 40 of the others. He accordingly recommended that only 32 be allowed to be erected! For a small town like Tralee this proposition to put up 196 buildings at the public expense where only 32 were needed is not bad. It has the right old Tammany Ring smack, and would have commanded, I am sure, the patronising approval of the late Mr. Tweed.

I mentioned it to-night at the County Club, when a gentleman said that this morning at Macroom a serious “row” had occurred between the local Board of Guardians there and a great crowd of labourers. The labourers thronged the Board-room, demanding the half-acre plots of land which had been promised them. The Guardians put them off, promising to attend to them when the regular business of the meeting was over. So the poor fellows were kept waiting for three mortal hours, at the end of which time they espied the elected Nationalist members of the Board subtly filing out of the place. This angered them. They stopped the fugitives, blockaded the Board-room, and forced the Guardians to appoint a committee to act upon their demands.

It is certainly a curious fact that, so far, in Ireland I have seen no decent cottages for labourers, excepting those put up at their own expense on their own property by landlords.

I dined to-night at the County Club with Captain Plunkett, a most energetic, spirited, and well-informed resident magistrate, a brother of the late Lord Louth,—still remembered, I dare say, at the New York Hotel as the only Briton who ever really mastered the mystery of concocting a “cocktail,”—and an uncle of the present peer. We had a very cheery dinner, and a very clever lawyer, Mr. Shannon, gave us an irresistible reproduction of a charge delivered by an Irish judge famous for shooting over the heads of juries, who sent twelve worthy citizens of Galway out of their minds by bidding them remember, in a case of larceny, that they could not find the prisoner guilty unless they were quite sure “as to the animus furandi and the asportavit.”

Saturday, Feb. 25.—I had an interesting talk this morning at the County Club with a gentleman from Limerick on the subject of “boycotting.” I told him what I had seen at Edenvale of the practice as applied to a forlorn and helpless old woman, for the crime of standing by her “boycotted” son. “You think this an extreme case,” he said, “but you are quite mistaken. It is a typical case certainly, but it gives you only an inadequate idea of the scope given to this infernal machinery. The ‘boycott’ is now used in Ireland as the Inquisition was used in Spain,—to stifle freedom of thought and action. It is to-day the chief reliance of the National League for keeping up its membership, and squeezing subscriptions out of the people. If you want proof of this,” he added, “ask any Nationalist you know whether members of the League in the country allow farmers who are not members to associate with them in any way. I can cite you a case at Ballingarry, in my county, where last summer a resolution of the League was published and put on the Chapel door, that members of the National League were thenceforth to have no dealings or communication with any person not a member. This I saw with my own eyes, and it was matter of public notoriety.”

I lunched at the City Club with Mr. M‘Carthy. Sir Daniel O’Sullivan, formerly Mayor of Cork, whose views of Home Rule seem to differ widely from those of his successor, now incarcerated here, was one of the company. In the course of an animated but perfectly good-natured discussion of the Land Law question between two other gentlemen present, one of them, a strong Nationalist, smote his Unionist opponent very neatly under the fifth rib. The latter contending that it was monstrous to interfere by law with the principle of freedom of contract, the Nationalist responded, “That cannot be; it must be right and legitimate to do it, for the Imperial Parliament has done it four times within seventeen years!”

I walked with Mr. M‘Carthy to his apartments, where he showed me many curious papers and volumes bearing on municipal law and municipal history in Ireland. Among these, two most elaborate and interesting volumes, being the Council Books of Cork, Youghal, and Kinsale, from 1610 to 1659, 1666 to 1687, and 1690 to 1800. The records for the years not enumerated have perished, that is, for the first five or six years after the Restoration, and for the years just preceding and just following the fall of James II. These volumes take one back to the condition of Southern Ireland immediately after English greed and intrigue had sapped the foundations of the peace which followed the submission of the great Earl of Tyrone, and brought about the flight to the Continent of that chieftain, and of his friend and ally, the Earl of Tyrconnell.

They give us no picture, unfortunately, of the closing years of Elizabeth’s long struggle to establish the English power, or of the occupation of Kinsale by the Spanish in the name of the Pope. But there is abundant evidence in them of the theological hatred which so embittered the conflict of races in Ireland during the seventeenth century.

It was a relief to turn from these to a solemn controversy waged in our own times between Cork and Limerick over a question of municipal precedence, in which Mr. M‘Carthy did battle for the City of the Galley and the Towers[7] against the City of the Gateway and Cathedral dome. The truth seems to be that King John gave charters to both cities, but to Cork twelve years earlier than to Limerick. Speaking of this contest, by the way, with a loyalist of Cork to-night, I observed that it was almost as odd to find such a question hotly disputed between two Nationalist cities as to see the champions of Irish independence marching under the banner of the harp, which was invented for Ireland by Henry VIII.

“I don’t know why you call Cork a Nationalist city,” he replied, “for Parnell and Maurice Healy were returned for it by a clear minority of the voters. If all the voters had gone to the polls, they would both have been beaten.”

A curious statement certainly, and worth looking into. Mr. M‘Carthy gave me also much information as to the working of the municipal system here, and a copy of the rules which govern the debates of the Town Council. One of these might be adopted with advantage in other assemblies, to wit, “that no member be permitted to occupy the time of the Council for more than ten minutes.”

There is an important difference between the parliamentary and the municipal constituencies of Cork. The former constituency comprises all residents within the borough boundaries occupying premises of the rateable value of £10 a year. The municipal constituency consists of no more than 1800 voters, divided among the seven wards which make up the city under the “3d and 4th Victoria,” and which contain about 13,000 of the 15,116 Parliamentary voters of the borough. The same thing is true in the main of nine out of the eleven municipal boroughs of Ireland including Dublin. The 3d and 4th Victoria was amended for Dublin in 1849, so as to give that city the municipal franchise then existing in England, but no move in that direction was made for Cork, Waterford, Limerick, or any other municipal borough. The Nationalists have taken no interest in the question. Perhaps they have good reason for this, as in Belfast, where the municipal franchise has been widely extended since the present Government came into power, the democratic electorate has put the whole municipal government into the hands of the Unionists. The day being cool, though fine, Mr. M‘Carthy got an “inside car,” and we went off for a drive about the city. The environs of Cork are very attractive. We visited the new cemetery grounds which are very neatly and tastefully laid out. There was a conflict over them, the owners of family vaults staunchly standing out against the “levelling” tendency of a harmonious city of the dead. But all is well that ends well, and now two handsome stone chapels, one Catholic and one Protestant, keep watch and ward over the silent sleepers, standing face to face near the grand entrance, and exactly alike in their architecture. A very pretty drive took us to the water-works, which are extensive, well planned, and exceedingly well kept. They are awaiting now the arrival from America of some great turbine wheels, but the engines are of English make. In the city we visited the new Protestant cathedral of St. Finbar, a very fine church, which advantageously replaces a “spacious structure of the Doric order,” built here in the reign of George II., with the proceeds of a parliamentary tax on coals. Despite his name, I imagine that admirable prelate, Dr. England, the first Catholic bishop of my native city in America, must have been a Corkonian, for he it was, I believe, who put the cathedral of Charleston under the invocation of St. Finbar, the first bishop of Cork. The church stands charmingly amid fine trees on a southern branch of the river Lea. We visited also two fine Catholic churches, one of St. Vincent de Paul, and the other the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul, a grandly proportioned and imposing edifice.

It was at vespers that we entered it, and found it filled with the kneeling people. This noble church is rather ignobly hidden away behind crowded houses and shops, and the contrast was very striking when we emerged from its dim religious space and silence into the thronged and rather noisy streets. There is a statue here of Father Mathew; but what I have seen to-night makes me doubt whether the present generation of Corkonians would have erected it.

At dinner a gentleman gave us a most interesting account of the picturesque home which a man of taste, and a lover of natural history, has made for himself at the remote seaside village of Belmullet, in Mayo, the seat of the Mayo quarries, in which Mr. Davitt takes so much interest. The sea brings in there all sorts of wreckage, and the house is beautifully finished with mahogany and other rare woods, just as I remember finding in a noble mansion in South Wales, near a dangerous head-land, some magnificent doors and wainscotings made of that most beautiful of the Central American woods, nogarote, which I never saw in the United States, excepting in a superb specimen of it sent home by myself from Corinto. This colonist of Mayo employs all the people he can get in the fisheries there, which are very rich; and the ducks and wild geese are so numerous that he sometimes sends as far as to Wicklow for men to capture and sell them for him. He was once fortunate enough to trap a pair of the snow geese of the Arctic region, but Belmullet, in other respects a primeval paradise, is cursed with the small boy of civilisation; and one of these pests of society slew the goose with a stone. The widowed gander consoled himself by contracting family ties with the common domestic goose of the parish, and all his progeny, in other particulars indistinguishable from that familiar bird, bear the black marks distinctive of the Arctic tribe.

Belmullet, this gentleman tells me, boasts a very good little inn, kept by a Mrs. Deehan, which was honoured by a visit from Lord Carnarvon with his wife and daughters during the Earl’s Viceroyalty. This was in the course of a private and personal, not official tour, during which, Lord Carnarvon says, he was everywhere received with the greatest courtesy by all sorts and conditions of the people. It is an interesting illustration of the temper in which certain priests in Ireland deal with matters of State, that when Lord Carnarvon politely invited the parish priest of Belmullet to come to see him, that functionary declined to do so. Upon this the placable Viceroy sent to know whether the priest would receive the visit he refused to pay. The priest replied that he never declined to receive any gentleman who wished to see him; and the Vice roy accordingly called upon him, to the edification of the people, who afterwards listened very respectfully to a little speech which His Excellency made to them from a car. It is rather surprising that these incidents have never been adduced in proof of Lord Carnarvon’s determination to take the Home Rule wind out of the sails of the Liberals!

CORK, Sunday, Feb. 26.—I went out to-day with Mr. Cameron to see Blarney Castle and St. Anne’s Hill. Nothing can be lovelier than the country around Cork and the valley of the Lea. A “light railway,” of the sort authorised by the Act of 1883, takes you out quickly enough to Blarney, and the train was well filled. The construction of these railways is found fault with as aggravating instead of relieving those defects in the organisation and management of the Irish railways, which are so thoroughly and intelligently exposed in the Public Works Report of Sir James Allport and his fellow-commissioners. A morning paper to-day points this out sharply.

In the days of King William III. Blarney Castle must have been a magnificent stronghold. It stands very finely on a well-wooded height, and dominates the land for miles around. But it held out against the victor of the Boyne so long that, when he captured it, he thought it best, in the expressive phrase of the Commonwealth, to “slight” it, little now remaining of it but the gigantic keep, the walls of which are some six yards thick, and a range of ruined outworks stretching along and above a line of caverns, probably the work of the quarrymen who got out the stone for the Castle ages ago. The legend of the Blarney Stone does not seem to be a hundred years old, but the stone itself is one of the front battlements of the grand old tower, which has more than once fallen to the ground from the giddy height at which it was originally set. It is now made fast there by iron clamps, in such a position that to kiss it one should be a Japanese acrobat, or a volunteer rifleman shooting for the championship of the world. There are many and very fine trees in the grounds about the Castle, and there is a charming garden, now closed against the casual tourist, as it has been leased with the modern house to a tenant who lives here. In the leafy summer the place must be a dream of beauty. An avenue of stately trees quite overarching the highway leads from Blarney to St. Anne’s Hill, the site of which, at least, is that of an ideal sanatorium. We walked thither over hill and dale. The panorama commanded by the buildings of the sanatorium is one of the widest and finest imaginable, worthy to be compared with the prospect from the Star and Garter at Richmond, or with that from the terrace at St. Germain.

Several handsome lodges or cottages have been built about the extensive grounds. These are comfortably furnished and leased to people who prefer to bring their households here rather than take up their abode in the hotel, which, however, seems to be a very well kept and comfortable sort of place, with billiard and music rooms, a small theatre, and all kinds of contrivances for making the country almost as tedious as the town. The establishment is directed now by a German resident physician, but belongs to an Irish gentleman, Mr. Barter, who lives here himself, and here manages what I am told is one of the finest dairy farms and dairies in Ireland. Our return trip to Cork on the “light railway,” with a warm red sunset lighting up the river Lea, and throwing its glamour over the varied and picturesque scenery through which we ran, was not the least delightful part of a very delightful excursion.

After we got back I spent half-an-hour with a gentleman who knows the country about Youghal, which I propose to visit to-morrow, and who saw something of the recent troubles there arising out of the Plan of Campaign, as put into effect on the Ponsonby property.

He is of the opinion that the Nationalists were misled into this contest by bad information as to Mr. Ponsonby’s resources and relations. They expected to drive him to the wall, but they will fail to do this, and failing to do this they will be left in the vocative. He showed me a curious souvenir of the day of the evictions, in the shape of a quatrain, written by the young wife of an evicted tenant. This young woman, Mrs. Mahoney, was observed by one of the officers, as the eviction went on, to go apart to a window, where she stood for a while apparently writing something on a wooden panel of the shutter. After the eviction was over the officer remembered this, and going up to the window found these lines pencilled upon the panel:—

“We are evicted from this house,
Me and my loving man;
We’re homeless now upon the world!
May the divil take ‘the Plan’!”

CORK, Monday, Feb. 27.—A most interesting day. I left alone and early by the train for Youghal, having sent before me a letter of introduction to Canon Keller, the parish priest, who has recently become a conspicuous person through his refusal to give evidence about matters, his knowledge of which he conceives to be “privileged,” as acquired in his capacity as a priest.

I had many fine views of the shore and the sea as we ran along, and the site of Youghal itself is very fine. It is an old seaport town, and once was a place of considerable trade, especially in wool.

Oliver dwelt here for a while, and from Youghal he embarked on his victorious return to England. He seems to have done his work while he was here “not negligently,” like Harrison at Naseby Field, for when he departed he left Youghal a citadel of Protestant intolerance. Even under Charles II they maintained an ordinance forbidding “any Papist to buy or barter anything in the public markets,” which may be taken as a piece of cold-blooded and statutory “boycotting.” Then there was no parish priest in Youghal; now it may almost be said there is nobody in Youghal but the parish priest! So does “the whirligig of time bring in his revenges”!

At Youghal station a very civil young man came up, calling me by name, and said Father Keller had sent him with a car to meet me. We drove up past some beautiful grounds into the main street. A picturesque waterside town, little lanes and narrow streets leading out of the main artery down to the bay, and a savour of the sea in the place, grateful doubtless to the souls of Raleigh and the west country folk he brought over here when he became lord of the land, just three hundred years ago. Edmund Spenser came here in those days to see him, and talk over the events of that senseless rising of the Desmonds, which gave the poet of the “Faerie Queen” his awful pictures of the desolation of Ireland, and made the planter of Virginia master of more than forty thousand acres of Irish land.

We turned suddenly into a little narrow wynd, and pulled up, the driver saying, “There is the Father, yer honour!” In a moment up came a tall, very fine-looking ecclesiastic, quite the best dressed and most distinguished-looking priest I have yet seen in Ireland, with features of a fine Teutonic type, and the erect bearing of a soldier. I jumped down to greet him, and he proposed that we should walk together to his house near by. An extremely good house I found it to be, well placed in the most interesting quarter of the town. Having it in my mind to drive on from Youghal to Lismore, there to make an early dinner, see the castle of the Duke of Devonshire, and return to Cork by an evening train, I had to decline Father Keller’s cordial hospitalities, but he gave me a most interesting hour with him in his comfortable study. Father Keller stands firmly by the position which earned for him a sentence of imprisonment last year, when he refused to testify before a court of justice in a bankruptcy case, on the ground that it might “drift him into answers which would disclose secrets he was bound in honour not to disclose.” He does not accept the view taken of his conduct, however, by Lord Selborne, that, in the circumstances, his refusal is to be regarded as the act of his ecclesiastical superiors rather than his own. He maintains it as his own view of the sworn duty of a priest, and not unnaturally therefore he looks upon his sentence as a blow levelled at the clergy; nor, as I understood him, has he abandoned his original contention, that the Court had no right to summon him as a witness. It was impossible to listen to him on this subject, and doubt his entire good faith, nor do I see that he ought to be held responsible for the interpretation put by Mr. Lane, M.P., and others upon his attitude as a priest, in a sense going to make him merely a “martyr” of Home Rule. I did not gather from what he said that, in his mind, the question of his relations with the Nationalists or the Plan of Campaign entered into that affair at all, but simply that he believed the right and the duty of a priest to protect, no matter at what cost to himself, secrets confided to him as a priest, was really involved in his consent or refusal to answer, when he was asked whether he was or was not on a certain day at the “Mall House” in Youghal. Of course from the connection of this refusal in this particular case with the Nationalist movement, Nationalists would easily glide into the idea that he refused to testify in order to serve their cause.

As to the troubles on the Ponsonby estate, Father Keller spoke very freely. He divided the responsibility for them between the untractableness of the agent, and the absenteeism of the owner. It was only since the troubles began, he said, that he had ever seen Mr. Ponsonby, who lived in Hampshire, and was therefore out of touch with the condition and the feelings of the people here. In a personal interview with him he had found Mr. Ponsonby a kindly disposed Englishman, but the estate is heavily encumbered, and the agent who has had complete control of it forced the tenants, by his hard and fast refusal of a reasonable reduction more than two years ago, into an initial combination to defend themselves by “clubbing” their rents. That was before Mr. Dillon announced the Plan of Campaign at all.

“It was not till the autumn of 1886,” said Father Keller, “that any question arose of the Plan of Campaign here,[8] and it was by the tenants themselves that the determination was taken to adopt it. My part has been that of a peace-maker throughout, and we should have had peace if Mr. Ponsonby would have listened to me; we should have had peace, and he would have received a reasonable rental for his property. Instead of this, look at the law costs arising out of bankruptcy proceedings and sheriff’s sales and writs and processes, and the whole district thrown into disorder and confusion, and the industrious people now put out of their holdings, and forced into idleness.”

As to the recent evictions which had taken place, Father Keller said they had taken him as well as the people by surprise, and had thus led to greater agitation and excitement. “But the unfortunate incident of the loss of Hanlon’s life,” he said, “would never have occurred had I been duly apprised of what was going on in the town. I had come home into my house, having quieted the people, and left all in order, as I thought, when that charge of the police, for which there was no occasion, and which led to the killing of Hanlon, was ordered. I made my way rapidly to the people, and when I appeared they were brought to patience and to good order with astonishing ease, despite all that had occurred.”

As to the present outlook, it was his opinion that Mr. Ponsonby, even with the Cork Defence Union behind him, could not hold out. “The Land Corporation were taking over some parts of the estate, and putting Emergency men on them—a set of desperate men, a kind of enfants perdus,” he said, “to work and manage the land;” but he did not believe the operation could be successfully carried out. Meanwhile he confidently counted upon seeing “the present Tory Government give way, and go out, when it would become necessary for the landlords to do justice to the rack-rented people. Pray understand,” said Father Keller, “that I do not say all landlords stand at all where Mr. Ponsonby has been put by his agent, for that is not the case; but the action of many landlords in the county Cork in sustaining Mr. Ponsonby, whose estate is and has been as badly rack-rented an estate as can be found, is, in my judgment, most unwise, and threatening to the peace and happiness of Ireland.”[9]

I asked whether, in his opinion, it would be possible for the Ponsonby tenants to live and prosper here on this estate, could they become peasant proprietors of it under Lord Ashbourne’s Act, provided they increased in numbers, as in that event might be expected. This he thought very doubtful so far as a few of the tenants are concerned.

“Would you seek a remedy, then,” I asked, “in emigration?”

“No, not in emigration,” he replied, “but in migration.”

I begged him to explain the difference.

“What I mean,” he said, “is, that the people should migrate, not out of Ireland, but from those parts of Ireland which cannot support them into parts of Ireland which can support them. There is room in Meath, for example, for the people of many congested districts.”

“You would, then, turn the great cattle farms of Meath,” I said, “into peasant holdings?”

“Certainly.”

“But would not that involve the expropriation of many people now established in Meath, and the disturbance or destruction of a great cattle industry for which Ireland has especial advantages?”

To this Father Keller replied that he did not wish to see Ireland exporting her cattle, any more than to see Ireland exporting her sons and daughters. “I mean,” he said, quite earnestly, “when they are forced to export them to pay exorbitant rents, and thus deprive themselves of their capital or of a fair share of the comforts of life. I should be glad to see the Irish people sufficient to themselves by the domestic exchange of their own industries and products.” At the same time he begged me to understand that he had no wish to see this development attended by any estrangement or hostile feeling between Ireland and Great Britain. “On the contrary,” he said, “I have seen with the greatest satisfaction the growth of such good feeling towards England as I never expected to witness, as the result of the visits here of English public men, sympathising with the Irish tenants. I believe their visits are opening the way to a real union of the Democracies of the two countries, and to an alliance between them against the aristocratic classes which depress both peoples.” This alliance Father Keller believed would be a sufficient guarantee against any religious contest between the Catholics of Ireland and the Protestants of Great Britain.

“I was much astounded,” he said, “the other day, to hear from an English gentleman that he had met a Protestant clergyman who told him he really believed that a persecution of the Protestants would follow the establishment of Home Rule in Ireland. I begged him to consider that Mr. Parnell was a Protestant, and I assured him Protestants would have absolutely nothing to fear from Home Rule.”

Reverting to his idea of re-distributing the Irish population through Ireland, under changed conditions, social and economical, I asked him how in Meath, for example, he would meet the difficulty of stocking with cattle the peasant holdings of a new set of proprietors not owning stock. He thought it would be easily met by advances of money from the Treasury to the peasant proprietors, these advances to be repaid, with interest, as in the case of Lady Burdett Coutts, and the advances made by her to the fishermen now under the direction of Father Davis at Baltimore.

I was struck by the resemblance of these views to the Irish policy sketched for me by my Nationalist fellow-traveller of the other night from London. “The evil that men do lives after them”—and when one remembers how only a hundred years ago, and just after the establishment of American Independence ought to have taught England a lesson, the Irish House of Commons had to deal with the persistent determination of the English manufacturers to fight the bogey of Irish competition by protective duties in England against imports from Ireland, it is not surprising that Irishmen who allow sentiment to get the upper hand of sense should now think of playing a return game. England went in fear then not only of Irish beasts and Irish butter, but of Irish woollens, Irish cottons, Irish leather, Irish glass. Nay, absurd as it may now seem, English ironmasters no longer ago than in 1785 testified before a Parliamentary Committee that unless a duty was clapped on Irish manufactures of iron, the Irish ironmasters had such advantages through cheaper labour and through the discrimination in their favour under the then existing relations with the new Republic of the United States that they would “ruin the ironmasters of England.”

In Ireland, as in America, the benign spirit of Free Trade is thwarted and intercepted at every turn by the abominable ghost of British Protection. What a blessing it would have been if the meddlesome palaverers of the Cobden Club, American as well as English, could ever have been made to understand the essentially insular character of Protection and the essentially continental character of Free Trade!

It should never be forgotten, and it is almost never remembered, that when the Treaty of Versailles was making in 1783 the American Commissioners offered complete free trade between the United States and all parts of the British Dominions save the territories of the East India Company. The British Commissioner, David Hartley, saw the value of this proposition, and submitted it at London. But King George III. would not entertain it.

When I rose to leave him Father Keller courteously insisted on showing me the “lions” of Youghal. A most accomplished cicerone he proved to be. As we left his house we met in the street two or three of the “evicted” tenants, whom he introduced to me. One of these, Mr. Loughlin, was the holder of farms representing a rental of £94. A stalwart, hearty, rotund, and rubicund farmer he was, and in reply to my query how long the holdings he had lost had been in his family, he answered, “not far from two hundred years.” Certainly some one must have blundered as badly as at Balaklava to make it necessary for a tenant with such a past behind him to go out of his holdings on arrears of a twelvemonth. Father Keller gave me, as we left Mr. Loughlin and his friend, a leaflet in which he has printed the story of “the struggle for life on the Ponsonby estate,” as he understands it.

A minute’s walk brought us to Sir Walter Raleigh’s house, now the property of Sir John Pope Hennessey. It was probably built by Sir Walter while he lived here in 1588-89, during the time of the great Armada; for it is a typical Elizabethan house, quaintly gabled, with charming Tudor windows, and delightfully wainscoted with richly carved black oak. A chimney-piece in the library where Sir John’s aged mother received us most kindly and hospitably is a marvel of Elizabethan woodwork. The shelves are filled with a quaint and miscellaneous collection of old and rare books. I opened at random one fine old quarto, and found it to contain, among other curious tracts, models of typography, a Latin critical disquisition by Raphael Regini on the first edition of Plutarch’s Life of Cicero, “nuper inventâ diu desideraiâ ”—a disquisition quite aglow with the cinquecento delight in discovery and adventure. In the grounds of this charming house stand four very fine Irish yews forming a little hollow square, within which, according to a local legend, Sir Walter sat enjoying the first pipe of tobacco ever lighted in Ireland, when his terrified serving-maid espying the smoke that curled about her master’s head hastily ran up and emptied a pail of water over him. In the garden here, too, we are told, was first planted the esculent which better deserves to be called the Curse of Ireland than does the Nine of Diamonds to be known as the Curse of Scotland. The Irish yew must have been indigenous here, for the name of Youghal, Father Keller tells me, in Irish signifies “the wood of yew-trees.” A subterranean passage is said to lead from Sir Walter’s dining-room into the church, but we preferred the light of day.

The precincts of the church adjoin the grounds and garden, and with these make up a most fascinating poem in architecture. The churches of St. Mary of Youghal and St. Nicholas of Galway have always been cited to me as the two most interesting churches in Ireland. Certainly this church of St. Mary, as now restored, is worth a journey to see. Its massive tower, with walls eight feet thick, its battlemented chancel, the pointed arches of its nave and aisles, a curious and, so far as I know, unique arch in the north transept, drawn at an obtuse angle and demarcating a quaint little side-chapel, and the interesting monuments it contains, all were pointed out to me with as much zest and intelligent delight by Father Keller as if the edifice were still dedicated to the faith which originally called it into existence. It contains a fine Jacobean tomb of Richard, the “great Earl of Cork,” who died here in September 1643. On this monument, which is in admirable condition, the effigy of the earl appears between those of his two wives, while below them kneel his five sons and seven daughters, their names and those of their partners in marriage inscribed upon the marble. It was of this earl that Oliver said: “Had there been an Earl of Cork in every province, there had been no rebellion in Ireland.” Several Earls of Desmond are also buried here, including the founder of the church, and under a monumental effigy in one of the transepts lies the wonderful old Countess of Desmond, who having danced in her youth with Richard III. lived through the Tudor dynasty “to the age of a hundred and ten,” and, as the old distich tells us, “died by a fall from a cherry-tree then.”

In the churchyard is a hillock, bare of grass, about a tomb. There lies buried, according to tradition, a public functionary who attested a statement by exclaiming, “If I speak falsely, may grass never grow on my grave.” One of his descendants is doubtless now an M.P. Mr. Cameron had kindly written from Cork to the officer in charge of the constabulary here asking him to get me a good car for Lismore. So Father Keller very kindly walked with me through the town to the “Devonshire Arms,” a very neat and considerable hotel, in quest of him. On the way he pointed out to me what remains of a house which is supposed to have served as the headquarters of Cromwell while he was here, and a small chapel also in which the Protector worshipped after his sort. Off the main street is a lane called Windmill Lane, where probably stood the windmill from which in 1580 a Franciscan friar, Father David O’Neilan, was hung by the feet and shot to death by the soldiers of Elizabeth because he refused to acknowledge the spiritual supremacy of the Queen. He had been dragged through the main street at the tail of a horse to the place of execution. His name is one of many names of confessors of that time about to be submitted at Rome for canonisation. We could not find the officer I sought at the hotel, but Father Keller took me to a livery-man in the main street, who very promptly got out a car with “his best horse,” and a jarvey who would “surely take me over to Lismore inside of two hours and a half.” He was as good as his master’s word, and a delightful drive it was, following the course of Spenser’s river, the Awniduffe, “which by the Englishman is called Blackwater.” Nobody now calls it anything else. The view of Youghal Harbour, as we made a great circuit by the bridge on leaving the town, was exceedingly fine. Lying as it does within easy reach of Cork, this might be made a very pleasant summer halting-place for Americans landing at Queenstown, who now go further and probably fare worse. One Western wanderer, with his family, Father Keller told me, did last year establish himself here, a Catholic from Boston, to whom a son was born, and who begged the Father to give the lad a local name in baptism, “the oldest he could think of.”

I should have thought St. Declan would have been “old” enough, or St. Nessan of “Ireland’s Eye,” or Saint Cartagh, who made Lismore a holy city, “into the half of which no woman durst enter,” sufficiently “local,” but Father Keller found in the Calendar a more satisfactory saint still in St. Goran or “Curran,” known also as St. Mochicaroen de Nona, from a change he made in the recitation of that part of the Holy Office.

The drive from Youghal to Lismore along the Blackwater, begins, continues, and ends in beauty. In the summer a steamer makes the trip by the river, and it must be as charming in its way as the ascent of the Dart from Dartmouth to Totness, or of the Eance from Dinard to St. Suliac. My jarvey was rather a taciturn fellow, but by no means insensible to the charms of his native region. About the Ponsonby estate and its troubles he said very little, but that little was not entirely in keeping with what I had heard at Youghal. “It was an old place, and there was no grand house on it. But the landlord was a kind-man.” “Father Keller was a good man too. It was a great pity the people couldn’t be on their farms; and there was land that was taken on the hills. It was a great pity. The people came from all parts to see the Blackwater and Lismore; and there was money going.” “Yes, he would be glad to see it all quiet again. Ah yes! that was a most beautiful place there just running out into the Blackwater. It was a gentleman owned it; he lived there a good deal, and he fished. Ah! there’s no such river in the whole world for salmon as the Blackwater; indeed, there is not! Everything was better when he was a lad. There was more money going, and less talking. Father Keller was a very good man; but he was a new man, and came to Youghal from Queenstown.”

We passed on our way the ruins of Dromaneen Castle, the birthplace of the lively old Countess of Desmond, who lies buried at Youghal. Here, too, according to a local tradition, she met her death, having climbed too high into a famous cherry-tree at Affane, near Dromaneen, planted there by Sir Walter Raleigh, who first introduced this fruit, as well as the tobacco plant and the potato, into Ireland. At Cappoquin, which stands beautifully on the river, I should have been glad to halt for the night, in order to visit the Trappist Monastery there, an offshoot of La Meilleraye, planted, I think, by some monks from Santa Susanna, of Lulworth, after Charles X. took refuge in the secluded and beautiful home of the Welds. The schools of this monastery have been a benediction to all this part of Ireland for more than half a century.

Lismore has nothing now to show of its ancient importance save its castle and its cathedral, both of them absolutely modern! A hundred years ago the castle was simply a ruin overhanging the river. It then belonged to the fifth Duke of Devonshire, who had inherited it from his mother, the only child and heiress of the friend of Pope, Richard, fourth Earl of Cork, and third Earl of Burlington. It had come into the hands of the Boyles by purchase from Sir Walter Ealeigh, to whom Elizabeth had granted it, with all its appendages and appurtenances. The fifth Duke of Devonshire, who was the husband of Coleridge’s “lady nursed in pomp and pleasure,” did little or nothing, I believe, to restore the vanished glories of Lismore; and the castle, as it now exists, is the creation of his son, the artistic bachelor Duke, to whom England owes the Crystal Palace and all the other outcomes of Sir Joseph Paxton’s industry and enterprise. His kinsman and successor, the present Duke, used to visit Lismore regularly down to the time of the atrocious murder of Lord Frederick Cavendish, and many of the beautiful walks and groves which make the place lovely are due, I believe, to his taste and his appreciation of the natural charms of Lismore. I dismissed my car at the “Devonshire Arms,” an admirable little hotel near the river, and having ordered my dinner there, walked down to the castle, almost within the grounds of which the hotel stands. It is impossible to imagine a more picturesque site for a great inland mansion. The views up and down the Blackwater from the drawing-room windows are simply the perfection of river landscape. The grounds are beautifully laid out, one secluded garden-walk, in particular, taking you back to the inimitable Italian garden-walks of the seventeenth century. In the vestibule is the sword of state of the Corporation of Youghal, a carved wooden cradle for which still stands in the church at that place, and over the great gateway are the arms of the great Earl of Cork, but these are almost the only outward and visible signs of the historic past about the castle. Seen from the graceful stone bridge which spans the river, its grey towers and turrets quite excuse the youthful enthusiasm with which the Duke of Connaught, who made a visit here when he was Prince Arthur, is said to have written to his mother, that Lismore was “a beautiful place, very like Windsor Castle, only much finer.”

Lismore Cathedral was almost entirely rebuilt by the second Earl of Cork three or four years after the Restoration, and has a handsome marble spire, but there is little in it to recall the Catholic times in which Lismore was a city of churches and a centre of Irish devotion.

The hostess of the “Devonshire Arms” gave me some excellent salmon, fresh from the river, and a very good dinner. She bewailed the evil days on which she has fallen, and the loss to Lismore of all that the Castle used to mean to the people. Lady Edward Cavendish had spent a short time here some little time ago, she said, and the people were delighted to have her come there. “It would be a great thing for the country if all the uproar and quarrelling could be put an end to. It did nobody any good, least of all the poor people.”

From Lismore I came back by the railway through Fermoy.

CHAPTER IX.

PORTUMNA, GALWAY, Feb. 28.—I left Cork by an early train to-day, and passing through the counties of Cork, Limerick, Tipperary, Queen’s, and King’s, reached this place after dark on a car from Parsonstown. The day was delightfully cool and bright. I had the carriage to myself almost all the way, and gave up all the time I could snatch from the constantly varying and often very beautiful scenery to reading a curious pamphlet which I picked up in Dublin entitled Pour I’Irlande. It purports to have been written by a “Canadian priest” living at Lurgan in Ireland, and to be a reply to M. de Mandat Grancey’s volume, Chez Paddy. It is adorned with a frontispiece representing a monster of the Cerberus type on a monument, with three heads and three collars labelled respectively “Flattery,” “Famine,” and “Coercion.” On the pedestal is the inscription—“1800 to 1887. Erected by the grateful Irish to the English Government.” The text is in keeping with the frontispiece. In a passage devoted to the “atrocious evictions” of Glenbehy in 1887, the agent of the property is represented as “setting fire with petroleum” to the houses of two helpless men, and turning out “eighteen human beings into the highway in the depth of winter.” Not a word is said of the agent’s flat denial of these charges, nor a word of the advice given to the agent by Sir Redvers Buller that the mortgagee ought to level the cottages occupied by trespassers, nor a word about Father Quilter’s letter to Colonel Turner, branding his flock as “poor slaves” of the League, and turning them over to “Mr. Roe or any other agent” to do as he liked with them, since they could not, or would not, keep their plighted faith given through their own priest.

This sort of ostrich fury is common enough among the regular drumbeaters of the Irish agitation. But it is not creditable to a “Canadian priest.” Still less creditable is his direct arraignment of M. de Mandat Grancey’s good faith and veracity upon the strength of what he describes as M. de Mandat Grancey’s amplification and distortion of a story told by himself. This was a tale of a priest called out to confess one of his parishioners. The penitent accused himself of killing one man, and trying to kill several others. The priest, as the dreadful tale went on, made a tally on his sleeve, with chalk, of the crimes recited. “Good heavens! my son,” he cried at last, “what had all these men done to you that you tried to send them all into eternity? Who were they?”

“Oh, Father, they were all bailiffs or tax-collectors!”

“You idiot!” exclaimed the confessor, angrily rubbing at his sleeve, “why didn’t ye tell me that before instead of letting me spoil my best cassock?”

As I happened to have the book of M. de Mandat Grancey in my despatch-box, I compared it with the attack made upon it. The results were edifying. In the first place, M. de Mandat Grancey does not indicate the Canadian priest as his authority. He says that he heard the story, apparently at a dinner-table in France, from a curé Irlandais, who was endeavouring to impress upon his hearers “the sympathy of the clergy with the Land League.” The “Canadian priest” now comes forward and makes it a count in his indictment against M. de Mandat Grancey that he is described as an “Irish curate,” when he is in fact neither an Irishman nor a curate. What was more natural than that an ecclesiastic, claiming to live in Ireland, and telling stories in France about the sympathy of the Irish clergy with the Land League, should be taken by one of his auditors to be an Irish curé, particularly as the French curé is, I believe, the equivalent of the Irish “parish priest”?

In the next place, the “Canadian priest” declares that the story “is as old as the Round Towers of Ireland,” and that M. de Mandat Grancey represents him as making himself the hero of the tale. As a matter of fact, M. de Mandat Grancey does nothing of the kind. On the contrary, he expressly says that the curé Irlandais, who told the story, gave it to his hearers as having occurred not to himself at all, but “to one of his colleagues.” Furthermore he is at the pains to add (Chez Paddy, p. [43]) that the story, which was not to the taste of some of the French ecclesiastics who heard it, was related “as a simple pleasantry.” “But,” he adds, and this I suspect is the sting which has so exasperated the “Canadian priest,” “he gave us to understand at the same time that this pleasantry struck the keynote of the state of mind of many Irish priests, and, he said, that he was himself the President of the League in his district.”

In connection with Colonel Turner’s statements as to the conduct of Father White at Milltown Malbay, and with the accounts given me of the conduct of Father Sheehan at Lixnaw, this side-light upon the relations of a certain class of the Irish clergy with the most violent henchmen of the League, is certainly noteworthy. I happen to have had some correspondence with friends of mine in Paris, who are friends also of M. de Mandat Grarncey, about his visit to Ireland before he made it, and I am quite certain that he went there, to put the case mildly, with no prejudices in favour of the English Government or against the Nationalists. Perhaps the extreme bitterness shown in the pamphlet of the “Canadian priest” may have been born of his disgust at finding that the sympathy of French Catholics with Catholic Ireland draws the line at priests who regard the assassination of “bailiffs and tax-collectors” as a pardonable, if not positively amusing, excess of patriotic zeal.

It was late when I reached Parsonstown, known of old in Irish story as Birr, from St. Brendan’s Abbey of Biorra, and now a clean prosperous place, carefully looked after by the chief landlord of the region, the Earl of Rosse, who, while he inherits the astronomical tastes and the mathematical ability of his father, is not so absorbed in star-gazing as to be indifferent to his terrestrial duties and obligations. I have heard nothing but good of him, and of his management of his estates, from men of the most diverse political views. But I think it more important to get a look at the Clanricarde property, about which I have heard little but evil from anybody. The strongest point I have heard made in favour of the owner is, that he is habitually described by that dumb organ of a down-trodden people, United Ireland, as “the most vile Clanricarde.”

I found a good car at the railway station, and set off at once for Portumna. Parsonstown was called by Sir William Petty, in his Survey of Ireland, the umbilicus Hiberniæ. It is the centre of Ireland, as a point near Newnham Paddox is of England, and the famous or infamous “Bog of Allan” stretches hence to Athlone. Our way fortunately took us westward. A light railway was laid down some years ago from Parsonstown to Portumna, but it did not pay, and it has now been abandoned.

“What has become of the road?” I asked my jarvey.

“Oh! they just take up the rails when they like, the people do.”

“And what do they do with them?”

“Is it what they do with them? Oh; they make fences of them for the beasts.”

He was a dry, shrewd old fellow, not very amiably disposed, I was sorry to find, towards my own country.

“Ah! it’s America, sorr, that’s been the ruin of us entirely.”

“Pray, how is that?”

“It’s the storms they send; and then the grain; and now they tell me it’s the American beasts that’s spoiling the market altogether for Ireland.”

“Is that what your member tells you?”

“The member, sorr? which member?”

“The member of Parliament for your district, I mean. What is his name?”

“His name? Well, I’m not sure; and I don’t know that I know the man at all. But I believe his name is Mulloy.”

“Does he live in Portumna?”

“Oh no, not at all. I don’t know at all where he lives, but I believe it’s in Tullamore. But what would he know about America? Sure, any one can see it’s the storms and the grain that is the death of us in Ireland.”

“But I thought it was the landlords and the rents?”

“Oh, that’s in Woodford and Loughrea; not here at all. There’ll be no good till we get a war.”

“Get a war? with whom? What do you want a war for?”

“Ah! it was the good time when we had the Crimean war—with the wheat all about Portumna. I’ll show you the great store there was built. It’s no use now. But we’ll have a war. My son, he’s a soldier now. He went out to America. But he didn’t like it.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Oh, he didn’t like it. He could get no work, but to be a porter, and it was too hard. So he came back in three months’ time, and then he ’listed for a soldier. He’s over in England now. He likes it very well. He’s getting very good pay. They pay the soldiers well. There’s a troop of Hussars here now. They bring a power of money to the place.”

“What do they do with the wheat lands now?”

“Oh, they’re for sheep; they do very well. Were you ever in Australia, sorr?” pointing to a place we were passing. “There was a man came here from Australia with a pot of money, and he bought that place; but he thought he was a bigger man than he was, and now he’s found himself out. I think he would have done as well to stay in Australia where he was.”

In quite a different vein he spoke of the landlord of another large seat, and of the way in which the people, some of them, had misbehaved—breaking open the graves of the family on the place, “and tossing the coffins and the bones about, and all for what?”

The view as we crossed the long and very fine bridge over the Shannon after dusk was very striking. It was not too dark to make out the course of the broad gleaming river, and the lights of the town made it seem larger, I daresay, than it really is. As we drove up the main street I told my jarvey to take me to the Castle.

“To the Castle, is it?” he replied, looking around at me with an astonished air.

“Yes,” I said, “I am going to see Mr. Tener, the agent, who lives there, doesn’t he?”

“Oh, the new agent? Oh yes; I believe he’s a very good man.”

“ You don’t expect to be ‘boycotted’ for going to the Castle, do you?”

“And why should I be? But I haven’t been inside of the Castle gates for twenty years. And—here they are!” he cried out suddenly, pulling up his horse just in time to avoid driving him up against a pair of iron gates inhospitably closed. It was by this time pitch dark. Not a light could we see within the enclosure. But presently a couple of shadowy forms appeared behind the iron gates; the iron gates creaked on their hinges, a masculine voice bade us drive in, and a policeman with a lantern advanced from a thicket of trees. All this had a fine martial and adventurous aspect, and my jarvey seemed to enjoy it as much as I.

We got directions from the friendly policeman as to the roads and the landmarks, and after once nearly running into a clump of trees found ourselves at last in an open courtyard, where men appeared and took charge of the car, the horse, and my luggage. We were in a quadrangle of the out-buildings attached to the old residence of the Clanricardes, which had escaped the fire of 1826. The late Marquis for a long time hesitated whether to reconstruct the castle on the old site (the walls are still standing), or to build an entirely new house on another site. He finally chose the latter alternative, chiefly, I am told, under the advice of his oldest son, the late Lord Dunkellin, one of the most charming and deservedly popular men of his time. He was a great friend and admirer of Father Burke, whom he used to claim as a Galway cousin, and with whom I met him in Rome not long before his death in the summer of 1867. His brother, the present Marquis, I have never met, but Mr. Tener, his present agent here, who passed some time in America several years ago, learning from him that I wished to see this place, very courteously wrote to me asking me to make his house my headquarters. I found my way through queer passages to a cheery little hall where my host met me, and taking me into a pleasant little parlour, enlivened by flowers, and a merrily blazing fire, presented me to Mrs. Tener.

Mr. Tener is an Ulster man from the County Cavan. He went with his wife on their bridal trip to America, and what he there saw of the peremptory fashion in which the authorities deal with conspiracies to resist the law seems not unnaturally to have made him a little impatient of the dilatory, not to say dawdling, processes of the law in his own country. He gave me a very interesting account after dinner this evening of the situation in which he found affairs on this property, an account very different from those which I have seen in print. He is himself the owner of a small landed property in Cavan, and he has had a good deal of experience as an agent for other properties. “I have a very simple rule,” he said to me, “in dealing with Irish tenants, and that is neither to do an injustice nor to submit to one.” It was only, he said, after convincing himself that the Clanricarde tenants had no legitimate ground of complaint against the management of the estate, not removable upon a fair and candid discussion of all the issues involved between them and himself, that he consented to take charge of the property. That to do this was to run a certain personal risk, in the present state of the country, he was quite aware.

But he takes this part of the contract very coolly, telling me that the only real danger, he thinks, is incurred when he makes a journey of which he has to send a notice by telegraph—a remark which recalled to me the curious advice given me in Dublin to seal my letters, as a protection against “the Nationalist clerks in the post-offices.” The park of Portumua Castle, which is very extensive, is patrolled by armed policemen, and whenever Mr. Tener drives out he is followed by a police car carrying two armed men.

“Against whom are all these precautions necessary?” I asked. “Against the evicted tenants, or against the local agents of the League?”

“Not at all against the tenants,” he replied, “as you can satisfy yourself by talking with them. The trouble comes not from the tenants at all, nor from the people here at Portumna, but from mischievous and dangerous persons at Loughrea and Woodford. Woodford, mind you, not being Lord Clanricarde’s place at all, though all the country has been roused about the cruel Clanricarde and his wicked Woodford evictions. Woodford was simply the headquarters of the agitation against Lord Clanricarde and my predecessor, Mr. Joyce, and it has got the name of the ‘cockpit of Ireland,’ because it was there that Mr. Dillon, in October 1886, opened the ‘war against the landlords’ with the ‘Plan of Campaign.’ It is an odd circumstance, by the way, worth noting, that when these apostles of Irish agitation went to Lord Clanricarde’s property nearer the city of Gralway, and tried to stir the people up, they failed dismally, because the people there could understand no English, and the Irish agitators could speak no Irish! Nobody has ever had the face to pretend that the Clanricarde estates were ‘rack-rented.’ There have been many personal attacks made upon Mr. Joyce and upon Lord Clanricarde, and Mr. Joyce has brought that well-known action against the Marquis for libel, and all this answers with the general public as an argument to show that the tenants on the Clanricarde property must have had great grievances, and must have been cruelly ground down and unable to pay their way. I will introduce you, if you will allow me, to the Catholic Bishop here, and to the resident Protestant clergyman, and to the manager of the bank, and they can help you to form your own judgment as to the state of the tenants. You will find that whatever quarrels they may have had with their landlord or his agent, they are now, and always have been, quite able to pay their rents, and I need not tell you that it is no longer in the power of a landlord or an agent to say what these rents shall be.”[10]

“Mr. Dillon in that speech of his at Woodford (I have it here as published in United Ireland), you will see, openly advised, or rather ordered, the tenants here to club their rents, or, in plain English, the money due to their landlord, with the deliberate intent to confiscate to their own use, or, in their own jargon, ‘grab,’ the money of any one of their number who, after going into this dishonest combination, might find it working badly and wish to get out of it. Here is his own language:”—

I took the speech as reported in the United Ireland of October 23rd, 1886, and therein found Mr. Dillon, M.P., using these words:—“If you mean to fight really, you must put the money aside for two reasons—first of all because you want the means to support the men who are hit first; and, secondly, because you want to prohibit traitors going behind your back. There is no way to deal with a traitor except to get his money under lock and key, and if you find that he pays his rent, and betrays the organisation, what will you do with him? I will tell you what to do with him. Close upon his money, and use it for the organisation. I have always opposed outrages. This is a legal plan, and it is ten times more effective.”

Not a word here as to the morality of the proceeding thus recommended; but almost in the same breath in which he bade his ignorant hearers regard his plan as “legal,” Mr. Dillon said to them, “this must be done privately, and you must not inform the public where the money is placed!”

Why not, if the plan was “legal”? Mr. Dillon, I believe, is not a lawyer, but he can hardly have deluded himself into thinking his plan of campaign “legal” in the face of the particular pains taken by his leader, Mr. Parnell, to disclaim all participation in any such plans. A year before Mr. Dillon made this curious speech, Mr. Parnell, I remember, on the 11th of October 1885, speaking at Kildare, declared that he had “in no case during the last few years advised any combination among tenants against even rack-rents,” and insisted that any combination of the sort which might exist should be regarded as an “isolated” combination, “confined to the tenants of individual estates, who, of their own accord, without any incitement from us, on the contrary, kept back by us, without any urging on our part, without any advice on our part, but stung by necessity, and the terrible realities of their position, may have formed such a combination among themselves to secure such a reduction of rent as will enable them to live in their own homes.” From this language of Mr. Parnell in October 1885 to Mr. Dillon’s speech in October 1886, urging and advising the tenants to organise, exact contributions from every member of the organisation, and put these contributions under the control of third parties determined to confiscate the money subscribed by any member who might not find the organisation working to his advantage, is a rather long step! It covers all the distance between a cunning defensive evasion of the law, and an open aggressive violation of the law—not of the land only, but of common honesty. One of two things is clear: either these combinations are voluntary and “isolated,” and intended, as Mr. Parnell asserts, to secure such a reduction of rents as will enable the tenants, and each of them, to live peacefully and comfortably at home, and in that case any member of the combination who finds that he can attain his object better by leaving it has an absolute right to do this, and to demand the return of his money; or they are part of a system imposed upon the tenants by a moral coercion inconsistent with the most elementary ideas of private right and personal freedom. This makes the importance of Mr. Dillon’s speech, that by his denunciation of any member who wishes to withdraw from this “voluntary” combination as a “traitor,” and by his order to “close upon the money” of any such member, “and use it for the organisation,” he brands the “organisation” as a subterranean despotism of a very cheap and nasty kind. The Government which tolerates the creation of such a Houndsditch tyranny as this within its dominions richly deserves to be overthrown. As for the people who submit themselves to it, I do not wonder that in his more lucid moments a Catholic priest like Father Quilter feels himself moved to denounce them as “poor slaves.” Of course with a benevolent neutral like myself, the question always recurs, Who trained them to submit to this sort of thing? But I really am at a loss to see why a parcel of conspirators should be encouraged in the nineteenth century to bully Irish farmers out of their manhood and their money, because in the seventeenth century it pleased the stupid rulers of England, as the great Duke of Ormond indignantly said, to “put so general a discountenance upon the improvement of Ireland, as if it were resolved that to keep it low is to keep it safe.”

On going back to the little drawing-room after dinner we found Mrs. Tener among her flowers, busy with some literary work. It is not a gay life here, she admits, her nearest visiting acquaintance living some seven or eight miles away—but she takes long walks with a couple of stalwart dogs in her company, and has little fear of being molested. “The tenants are in more danger,” she thinks, “than the landlords or the agents”—nor do I see any reason to doubt this, remembering the Connells whom I saw at Edenvale, and the story of the “boycotted” Fitzmaurice brutally murdered in the presence of his daughter at Lixnaw on the 31st of January, as if by way of welcome to Lord Ripon and Mr. Morley on their arrival at Dublin.

PORTUMNA, Feb. 29th.—Early this morning two of the “evicted” tenants, and an ex-bailiff of the property here, came by appointment to discuss the situation with Mr. Tener. He asked me to attend the conference, and upon learning that I was an American, they expressed their perfect willingness that I should do so. The tenants were quiet, sturdy, intelligent-looking men. I asked one of them if he objected to telling me whether he thought the rent he had refused to pay excessive, or whether he was simply unable to pay it.

“I had the money, sir, to pay the rent,” he replied, “and I wanted to pay the rent—only I wouldn’t be let.”

“Who wouldn’t let you?” I asked.

“The people that were in with the League.”

“Was your holding worth anything to you?” I asked.

“It was indeed. Two or three years ago I could have sold my right for a matter of three hundred pounds.”

“Yes!” interrupted the other tenant, “and a bit before that for six hundred pounds.”

“Is it not worth three hundred pounds to you now?”

“No,” said Mr. Tener, “for he has lost it by refusing the settlement I offered to make, and driving us into proceedings against him, and allowing his six months’ equity of redemption to lapse.”

“And sure, if we had it, no one would be let to buy it now, sir,” said the tenant. “But it’s we that hope Mr. Tener here will let us come back on the holdings—that is, if we’d be protected coming back.”

“Now, do you see,” said Mr. Tener, “what it is you ask me to do? You ask me to make you a present outright of the property you chose foolishly to throw away, and to do this after you have put the estate to endless trouble and expense; don’t you think that is asking me to do a good deal?”

The tenants looked at one another, at Mr. Tener, and at me, and the ex-bailiff smiled.

“You must see this,” said Mr. Tener, “but I am perfectly willing now to say to you, in the presence of this gentleman, that in spite of all, I am quite willing to do what you ask, and to let you come back into the titles you have forfeited, for I would rather have you back on the property than strangers—”

“And, indeed, we’re sure you would.”

“But understand, you must pay down a year’s rent and the costs you have put us to.”

“Ah! sure you wouldn’t have us to pay the costs?”

“But indeed I will,” responded Mr. Tener; “you mustn’t for a moment suppose I will have any question about that. You brought all this trouble on yourselves, and on us; and while I am ready and willing to deal more than fairly, to deal liberally with you about the arrears—and to give you time—the costs you must pay.”

“And what would they be, the costs?” queried one of the tenants anxiously.

“Oh, that I can’t tell you, for I don’t know,” said Mr. Tener, “but they shall not be anything beyond the strict necessary costs.”

“And if we come back would we be protected?”

“Of course you will have protection. But why do you want protection? Here you are, a couple of strong grown men, with men-folk of your families. See here! why don’t you go to such an one, and such an one,” naming other tenants; “you know them well. Go to them quietly and sound them to see if they will come back on the same terms with you; form a combination to be honest and to stand by your rights, and defy and break up the other dishonest combination you go in fear of! Is it not a shame for men like you to lie down and let those fellows walk over you, and drive you out of your livelihood and your homes?”

The tenants looked at each other, and at the rest of us. “I think,” said one of them at last, “I think —— and ——,” naming two men, “would come with us. Of course,” turning to Mr. Tener, “you wouldn’t discover on us, sir.”

“Discover on you! Certainly not,” said Mr. Tener. “But why don’t you make up your minds to be men, and ‘discover’ on yourselves, and defy these fellows?”

“And the cattle, sir? would we get protection for the cattle? They’d be murdered else entirely.”

“Of course,” said Mr. Tener, “the police would endeavour to protect the cattle.”

Then, turning to me, he said, “That is a very reasonable question. These scoundrels, when they are afraid to tackle the men put under their ban, go about at night, and mutilate and torture and kill the poor beasts. I remember a case,” he went on, “in Roscommon, where several head of cattle mysteriously disappeared. They could be found nowhere. No trace of them could be got. But long weeks after they vanished, some lads in a field several miles away saw numbers of crows hovering over a particular point. They went there, and there at the bottom of an abandoned coal-shaft lay the shattered remains of these lost cattle. The poor beasts had been driven blindfold over the fields and down into this pit, where, with broken limbs, and maimed, they all miserably died of hunger.”

“Yes,” said one of the tenants, “and our cattle’d be driven into the Shannon, and drownded, and washed away.”

“You must understand,” interposed Mr. Tener “that when cattle are thus maliciously destroyed the owners can recover nothing unless the remains of the poor beasts are found and identified within three days.”

The disgust which I felt and expressed at these revelations seemed to encourage the tenants. One of them said that before the evictions came off certain of the National Leaguers visited him, and told him he must resist the officers. “I consulted my sister,” he said, “and she said, ‘Don’t you be such a fool as to be doing that; we’ll all be ruined entirely by those rascals and rogues of the League.’ And I didn’t resist. But only the other day I went to a priest in the trouble we are in, and what do you think he said to me? He said, ‘Why didn’t you do as you were bid? then you would be helped,’ and he would do nothing for us! Would you think that right, sir, in your country?”

“I should think in my country,” I replied, “that a priest who behaved in that way ought to be unfrocked.”

“Did you pay over all your rent into the hands of the trustees of the League?” I asked of one of these tenants.

“I paid over money to them, sir,” he replied.

“Yes,” I said, “but did you pay over all the amount of the rent, or how much of it?”

“Oh! I paid as much as I thought they would think I ought to pay!” he responded, with that sly twinkle of the peasant’s eye one sees so often in rural France.

“Oh! I understand,” I said, laughing. “But if you come to terms now with Mr. Tener here, will you get that money back again?”

“Divil a penny of it!” he replied, with much emphasis.

Finally they got up together to take their leave, after a long whispered conversation together.

“And if we made it half the costs?”

“No!” said Mr. Tener good-naturedly but firmly; “not a penny off the costs.”

“Well, we’ll see the men, sir, just quietly, and we’ll let you know what can be done”; and with that they wished us, most civilly, good-morning, and went their way.

We walked in the park for some time, and a wild, beautiful park it is, not the less beautiful for being given up, as it is, very much to the Dryads to deal with it as they list. It is as unlike a trim English park as possible; but it contains many very fine trees, and grand open sweeps of landscape. In a tangled copse are the ruins of an ancient Franciscan abbey, in one corner of which lie buried together, under a monumental mound of brickwork, the late Marquis of Clanricarde and his wife. The walls of the Castle, burned in 1826, are still standing, and so perfect that the building might easily enough have been restored. A keen-eyed, wiry old household servant, still here, told us the house was burned in the afternoon of January 6, 1826. There were three women-servants in the house—“Anna and Mary Meehan, and Mrs. Underwood, the housekeeper”; and they were getting the Castle ready for his Lordship’s arrival, so little of an “absentee” was the late Lord Clanricarde, then only one year married to the daughter of George Canning. The fires were laid on in the upper rooms, and Mrs. Underwood went off upon an errand. When she came back all was in flames.

The deer-park is full of deer, now become quite wild. We heard them crashing through the undergrowth on all sides. There must be capital fishing, too, in the lake, and in the river of which it is an expansion.

While they were getting the cars ready for a drive, came up another son of the soil. This man I found had only a small interest in the battle on the Clanricarde estates, holding his homestead of another landlord. But he admitted he had gone in a manner into the “combination,” in that he had paid a certain, not very large, sum, which he named, to the trustees, “just for peace and quiet.” He considered it gone, past recovery; and he named another man with a small holding, but doing a considerable business in other ways, who had “paid £10 or more just not to be bothered.” Upon this Mr. Tener told me of a shopkeeper at Loughrea in a large way of business, a man with seven or eight thousand pounds, who, finding his goods about to be seized after the agent had turned a sharp strategic corner on him, and unexpectedly got into his shop, was about to own up to his defeat, and make a fair settlement, when the secretary of the League appeared, and requested a private talk with him. In a quarter of an hour the tradesman reappeared looking rather sullen and crestfallen. He said he couldn’t pay, and must let the goods be taken. So taken they were, and duly put up under the process and sold. He bought them in himself, paying all the costs.

Presently two cars appeared. We got upon one, Mr. Tener driving a spirited nag, and taking on the seat with him a loaded carbine-rifle. Two armed policeman followed us upon the other, keeping at such a distance as would enable them easily to cover any one approaching from either side of the roadway. It quite took me back to the delightful days of 1866 in Mexico, when we used to ride out to picnics at the Rincon at Orizaba armed to the teeth, and ready at a moment’s notice to throw the four-in-hand mule-wagons into a hollow square, and prepare to receive cavalry. As it seems to be perfectly well understood that the regular price paid for shooting a designated person (they call it “knocking” him in these parts) is the ridiculously small sum of four pounds, and that two persons who divide this sum are always detailed by the organisers of outrage to “knock” an objectionable individual, it is obvious that too much care can hardly be taken by prudent people in coming and going through such a country. Fortunately for the people most directly concerned to avoid these unpleasantnesses a systematic leakage seems to exist in the machinery of mischief. The places where the oaths of this local “Mafia” are admin istered, for instance, are well known. A roadside near a chapel is frequently selected—and this for two or three obvious reasons. The sanctity of the spot may be supposed to impress the neophyte; and if the police or any other undesirable people should suddenly come upon the officiating adepts and the expectant acolyte, a group on the roadside is not necessarily a criminal gathering—though I do not see why, in such times, our old American college definition of a “group” as a gathering of “three or more persons” should not be adopted by the authorities, and held to make such a gathering liable to dispersion by the police, as our “groups” used to be subject to proctorial punishment. Mills are another favourite resort of the law-breakers. Mr. Tener tells me that a large mill between this place and Loughrea is a great centre of trouble, not wholly to the disadvantage of the astute miller, who finds it not only brings grist to his mill, but takes away grist from another mill belonging to a couple of worthy ladies, and once quite prosperous. It is no uncommon thing, it appears, for the same person to be put through the ceremony of swearing fidelity more than once, and at more than one place, with the not unnatural result, however, of diminishing the pressure of the oath upon his conscience or his fears, and also of alienating his affections, as he is expected to pay down two shillings on each occasion. Once a member, he contributes a penny a week to the general fund. It seems also to be an open secret who the disbursing treasurers are of this fund, from whom the members, detailed to do the dark bidding of the “organisation,” receive their wage. “A stout gentleman with sandy hair and wearing glasses” was the description given to me of one such functionary. When so much is known of the methods and the men, why is it that so many crimes are committed with virtual impunity? For two sufficient reasons. Witnesses cannot be got to testify, or trusted, if they do testify, to speak the truth; and it is idle to expect juries of the vicinage in nine cases out of ten will do their duty. Political cowardice having made it impossible to transfer the venue in cases of Irish crime, as to which all the authorities were agreed about these points, from Ireland into Great Britain, it is found that even to transfer the trial of “Moonlighters” from Clare or Kerry into Wicklow, for example, has a most instructive effect, opening the eyes of the people of Wicklow to a state of things in their own island, of which happily for themselves they were previously as ignorant as the people of Surrey or of Middlesex. This explains the indignant wish expressed to me some time ago in a letter from a priest in another part of Ireland, that “martial law” might be proclaimed in Clare and Kerry to “stamp out the Moonlighters, those pests of society.” That in Clare and Kerry priests should be found not only disposed to wink at and condone the proceedings of these “pests of society,” but openly to co-operate with them under the pretext of a “national” movement, is surely a thing equally intolerable by the Church and dangerous to the cause of Irish autonomy. This I am glad to say is strongly felt, and has been on more than one occasion very vigorously stated by one of the most eminent and estimable of Irish ecclesiastics, the Bishop-Coadjutor of Clonfert, upon whom I called this morning. Dr. Healy, who is a senator of the Royal University of Ireland, and a member of the Royal Irish Academy, presides over that part of the diocese of Clonfort which includes Portumna and Woodford. He lives in a handsome and commodious, but simple and unpretentious house, set in ample grounds well-planted, and commanding a wide view of a most agreeable country. We were ushered into a well-furnished study, and the bishop came in at once to greet us with the most cordial courtesy. He is a frank, dignified, unaffected man, and in his becoming episcopal purple, with the gold chain and cross, looked every inch a bishop. I was particularly anxious to see Dr. Healy, as a type of the high-minded and courageous ecclesiastics who, in Ireland, have resolutely refused to subordinate their duties and their authority as ecclesiastics to the convenience and the policy of an organisation absolutely controlled by Mr. Parnell, who not only is not a Catholic, but who is an open ally and associate of the bitterest enemies of the Catholic Church in France and in England. Protestant historians affirm that Pope Innocent was one of the financial backers of William of Orange when he set sail from Holland to crush the Catholic faith in Great Britain and Ireland, and drive the Catholic house of Stuart into exile. But it was reserved for the nineteenth century to witness the strange spectacle of men, calling themselves Irishmen and Catholics, deliberately slandering and assailing in concord with a non-Catholic political leader the consecrated pastors and masters of the Church in Ireland. When in order to explain what they themselves concede to be “the absence from the popular ranks of the best of the priesthood,” Nationalist writers find it necessary to denounce Cardinal Cullen and Cardinal M‘Cabe as “anti-Irish ”; and to sneer at men like Dr. Healy as “Castle Bishops,” it is impossible not to be reminded of the three “patriotic” tailors of Tooley Street.

Bishop Healy looks upon the systematic development of a substantial peasant proprietary throughout Ireland as the economic hope of the country, and he regards therefore the actual “campaigning” of the self-styled “Nationalists” as essentially anti-national, inasmuch as its methods are demoralising the people of Ireland, and destroying that respect for law and for private rights which lies at the foundation of civil order and of property. In his opinion, “Home Rule,” to the people in general, means simply ownership of the land which they are to live on, and to live by. How that ownership shall be brought about peaceably, fairly, and without wrong or outrage to any man or class of men is a problem of politics to be worked out by politicians, and by public men. That men, calling themselves Catholics, should be led on to attempt to bring this or any other object about by immoral and criminal means is quite another matter, and a matter falling within the domain, not of the State primarily, but of the Church.

As to this, Bishop Healy, who was in Rome not very long ago, and who, while in Rome, had more than one audience of His Holiness by command, has no doubt whatever that the Vatican will insist upon the abandonment and repudiation by Catholics of boycotting, and “plans of campaign,” and all such devices of evil. Nor has the Bishop any doubt that whenever the Holy Father speaks the priests and the people of Ireland will obey.

To say this, of course, is only to say that the Bishop believes the priests of Ireland to be honest priests, and the people of Ireland to be good Catholics.

If he is mistaken in this it will be a doleful thing, not for the Church, but for the Irish priests, and for the Irish people. No Irishman who witnessed the magnificent display made at Rome this year, of the scope and power of the Catholic Church, can labour under any delusions on that point.

From the Bishop’s residence we went to call upon the Protestant rector of Portumna, Mr. Crawford. The handsome Anglican church stands within an angle of the park, and the parsonage is a very substantial mansion. Mr. Crawford, the present rector, who is a man of substance, holds a fine farm of the Clanricarde estate, at a peppercorn rent, and he is tenant also of another holding at £118 a year, as to which he has brought the agent into Court, with the object, as he avers, of setting an example to the other tenants, and inducing them, like himself, to fight under the law instead of against it. He is not, however, in arrears, and in that respect sets a better example, I am sorry to say, than the Catholic priest, Father Coen, who made himself so conspicuous here on the occasion of the much bewritten Woodford evictions. The case of Father Coen is most instructive, and most unpleasant. He occupies an excellent house on a holding of twenty-three acres of good laud, with a garden—in short, a handsome country residence, which was provided by the late Lord Clanricarde, expressly for the accommodation of whoever might be the Catholic priest in that part of his estate. For all this the rent is fixed at the absurd and nominal sum of two guineas a year! Yet Father Coen, who now enjoys the mansion, and has a substantial income from the parish, is actually two years and a half in arrears with this rent! This fact Mr. Tener mentioned to the Bishop, whose countenance naturally darkened. “What am I to do in such a case, my lord?” asked Mr. Tener. “Do?” said the Bishop, “do your plain duty, and proceed against him according to law.” But suppose he were proceeded against and evicted, as in America he certainly would be, who can doubt that he would instantly be paraded, before the world, on both sides of the Atlantic as a “martyr,” suffering for the holy cause of an oppressed and down-trodden people, at the hands of a “most vile” Marquis, and of a remorse-less and blood-thirsty agent?[11] Mr. Crawford, a tall, fine-looking man, talked very fully and freely about the situation here. He came to Portumna about eight years ago; one of his reasons for accepting the position here offered him being that he wished to take over a piece of property near Woodford from his brother-in-law, who found he could not manage it. As a practical farmer, and a straightforward capable man of business, he has gradually acquired the general confidence of the tenants here. That they are, as a rule, quite able to pay the rents which they have been “coerced” into refusing to pay, he fully believes. He told me of cases in which Catholic tenants of Lord Clanricarde came to him when the agitation began about the Plan of Campaign, and begged him privately to take the money for their rents, and hold it for them till the time should come for a settlement.

The reason for this was that they did not wish to be obliged to give over the money into the “Trust” created by the Campaigners, and wanted it to be safely put beyond the reach of these obliging “friends.” One very shrewd tenant came to him and begged him to buy some beasts, in order that he might pay his rent out of the proceeds. The man owed £15 to the Clanricarde property. Mr. Crawford did not particularly want to buy his beasts, but eventually agreed to do so, and gave him £50 for them. The man went off with the money, but he never paid the rent! Mr. Crawford discovering this called him to account, and refused to grant him some further favour which he asked. The result is that the “distressed tenant” now cuts Mr. Crawford when he meets him, and is the prosperous owner of quite a small herd of cattle.

Mr. Crawford’s opinion of the mischief done by the methods and spirit of the National League in this place is quite in accord with the opinions of the Bishop-Coadjutor. Power without responsibility, which made the Cæesars madmen, easily turns the heads of village tyrants, and there is something positively grotesque in the excesses of this subterranean “Home Rule.” Mr. Crawford told me of a case here, in which a tenant farmer, whom he named, came to him in great wrath, not unmingled with terror, to say that the League had ordered him, on pain of being boycotted, to give up his holding to the heirs of a woman from whom, twenty years ago, he had bought, for £100 in cash, the tenant-right of her deceased husband! There was no question of refunding the £100. He was merely to consider himself a “land-grabber,” and evict himself for the benefit of those heirs who had never done a stroke of work on the property for twenty years, and who had no shadow of a legal or moral claim on it, except that the oldest of them was an active member of the local League!

Nor was this unique.

In another case, the children of a tenant, who died forty years ago, came forward and called upon the League to boycott an old man who had been in possession of the holding during nearly half a century. In a third case, a tenant-farmer, some ten years ago, had in his employ as herd a man who fell ill and died. He put into the vacant place an honest, capable young fellow, who still holds it, and has faithfully and efficiently served him. Only the other day this tenant-farmer was warned by the League to expect trouble, unless he dismissed this herd, and put into his place the son, now grown to man’s estate, of the herd who died ten years ago!

It is amusing, if not instructive, to find the hereditary principle, just now threatened in its application to the British Senate, cropping out afresh as an element in the regeneration of Irish agriculture and the land tenure of Ireland!

On our way back to the Castle we called on Mr. Place, the manager of the Portumna Branch of the Hibernian Bank, who lives in the town. He was amusing himself, after the labour of the day in the bank, with some amateur work as a carpenter, but received us very cordially. He said there was no doubt that the deposits in the bank had increased considerably since the adoption of the Plan of Campaign on the Clanricarde property. Money was paid into the bank continually by persons who wished the fact of their payments kept secret; and he knew of more than one case in which tenants, whose stock had been seized by the agent for the rents, were much delighted at the seizure, since it had paid off their rents, and so enabled them to retain their holdings and keep out of the grasp of the League, even though to do this they had undergone a forced sale and been muleted in costs.

It was his opinion that the tenants on the Clanricarde property, who are not in arrears, would gladly accept a twenty-five per cent. reduction, and do very well by accepting it. But they are constrained into a hostile attitude by the tenants who are in arrears, some of them for several years (as, for example, Father Coen), although I find, to my astonishment, that in Ireland the landlord has no power to distrain for more than a twelvemonth’s rent, no matter how far back the arrears may run.

Mr. Place seems to think it would be well to put all the creditors of the tenants on one footing with the landlords. The shopkeepers and other creditors, he thinks, in that event would see many things in quite a new light.

What is called the new Castle of Portumna is a large and handsome building of the Mansard type, standing on an eminence in the park, at some distance from the original seat. The building was finished not long before the death of his father, the late Marquis. It has never been occupied, save by a large force of police quartered in it not very long ago by Mr. Tener in readiness for an expedition against the Castle of Cloondadauv, to the scene of which he promises to drive me to-morrow on my way back to Dublin. It is thoroughly well built, and might easily be made a most delightful residence. The views which it commands of the Shannon are magnificent, and there are many fine trees about it.

The old man who has charge of it is a typical Galway retainer of the old school. The “boys,” he says, once tried to “boycott” him because he was the pound-master; but he showed fight, and they let him alone. He pointed out to me from the top of the house, in the distance, the residences of Colonel Hickie, and of the young Lord Avonmore, who lately succeeded on the death of his brother in the recent Egyptian expedition. The place is now shut up, and the owners live in France.

We visited too the Portumna Union before driving home. The buildings of this Union are extensive for the place, and well built, and it seems to be well-ordered and neatly kept—thanks, in no small degree, I suspect, to the influence of the Sisters who have charge of the hospital, but whose benign spirit shows itself not only in the flower-garden which they have called into being, but in many details of the administration beyond their special control.

The contrast was very striking between the atmosphere of this unpretending refuge of the helpless and that of certain of the “laicised” hospitals of France, which I not long ago visited, from which the devoted nuns have been expelled to make way for hired nurses. I made a remark to this effect to the clerk of the Union, Mr. Lavan, whom we found in his office.

“Oh, yes,” he said, “I have no doubt of that. We owe more than I can say to the Sisters, but I don’t know how long we should have them here if the local guardians could have their way.”

In explanation of this, he went on to tell me that these local guardians, who are elected, are hostile to the whole administration, because of its relations with the Local Government Board at Dublin, which controls their generous tendency to expend the money of the ratepayers. By way of expressing their feelings, therefore, they have been trying to cut down, not only the salary of the clerk, but that of the Catholic chaplain of the Union; and as there is a good deal of irreligious feeling among the agitators here, it is his impression that they would make things disagreeable for the Sisters also were they in any way to get the management into their own hands. That there cannot be much real distress in this neighbourhood appears from two facts. There are now but 130 inmates of this Union, out of a population of 12,900, and the outlay for out-of-door relief averages between eight and ten pounds a week.

In the quiet, neat chapel two or three of the inmates were kneeling at prayers; and others whom we saw in the kitchen and about the offices had nothing of the “workhouse” look which is so painful in the ordinary inmates of an English or American almshouse.

“The trouble with the place,” said Mr. Lavan, “is that they like it too well. It takes an eviction almost to get them out of it.”

We sat down with Mr. Lavan in his office, and had an interesting talk with him.

He is the agent of Mr. Mathews, who lives between Woodford and Portumna. Mr. Mathews is a resident landlord, he says, who has constantly employed and has lived on friendly terms with his tenants, numbering twenty, who hold now under judicial rents. On these judicial rents two years ago they were allowed a further reduction of 15 per cent. Last year they were allowed 20 per cent. This year he offered them a reduction of 25 per cent., which they rejected, demanding 35 per cent.

This demand Mr. Lavan considers to be unreasonable in the extreme, and he attributes it to the influence of the National Leaguers here, whose representatives among the local guardians constantly vote away the money of the ratepayers in “relief to evicted tenants who have ample means and can in no respect be called destitute.” In his opinion the effect of the Nationalist agitation here has been to upset all ideas of right and wrong in the minds of the people where any question arises between tenants and landlords. He told a story, confirmed by Mr. Tener, of a bailiff, whom he named, on the Clanricarde property here, who was compelled two years ago to resign his place in order to prevent the “boycotting” of his mother who keeps a shop on the farm. He was familiar, too, with the details of a story told me by one of the Clanricarde tenants, a farmer near Loughrea who holds a farm at £90 a year. This man was forced to subscribe to the Plan of Campaign. The agent proceeded against him for the rent due, and he incurred costs of £10. His sheep and crop were then seized.

He begged the local leaders to “permit” him to pay his rent, as he was able to do it without drawing out the funds in their hands! They refused, and so compelled him to allow his property to be publicly sold, and to incur further costs of £10. “His farm lies so near the town that he did not dare to risk the vengeance of the local ruffians.”

Mr. Lavan gave me the name also of another man who is now actually under a “boycott,” because he has ventured to resist the modest demand made by the son of a man whose tenant-right he bought, paying him £100 for it, twenty years ago, that he shall give up his farm without being reimbursed for his outlay made to purchase it! In other words, after twenty years’ peaceable possession of a piece of property, bought and paid for, this tenant-farmer is treated as a “land-grabber” by the self-installed “Nationalist” government of Ireland, because he will not submit to be robbed both of the money which he paid for his tenant-right, and of his tenant-right!

Obviously in such a case as this the “war against landlordism” is simply a war against property and against private rights. Priests of the Catholic Church who not only countenance but aid and abet such proceedings certainly go even beyond Dr. M‘Glynn. Dr. M‘Glynn, so far as I know, stops at the confiscation of all private property in rent by the State for the State. But here is simply a confiscation of the property of A for the benefit of B, such as might happen if B, being armed and meeting A unarmed in a forest, should confiscate the watch and chain of A, bought by A of B’s lamented but unthrifty father twenty years before!

After dinner to-night Mr. Tener gave me some interesting and edifying accounts of his experience in other parts of Ireland.

Some time ago, before the Plan of Campaign was adopted, one of his tenants in Cavan came to him with a doleful story of the bad times and the low prices, and wound up by saying he could pay no more than half a year’s rent.

“Now his rent had been reduced under the Land Act,” said Mr, Tener, “and I had voluntarily thrown off a lot of arrears, so I looked at him quietly and said, ‘Mickey, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. You have been very well treated, and you can perfectly well pay your rent. Your wife would be ashamed of you if she knew you were trying to get out of it.’”

“Ah no, your honour!” he briskly replied; “indade she would approve it. If you won’t discover on me, I’ll tell you the truth. It was the wife herself, she’s a great schollard, and reads the papers, that tould me not to pay you more than half the rent—for she says there’s a new Act coming to wipe it all out. Will you take the half-year?”

“No, I will not. Don’t be afraid of your wife, but pay what you owe, like a man. You’ve got the money there in your pocket.”

This was a good shot. Mickey couldn’t resist it, and his countenance broke into a broad smile.

“Ah no! I’ve got it in two pockets. Begorra, it was the wife herself made up the money in two parcels, and she put one into each pocket, to be sure—and I wasn’t to give your honour but one, if you would take it. But there’s the money, and I daresay it’s all for the best.”

On another occasion, when he was collecting the rents of a property in the county of Longford, one tenant came forward as the spokesman of the rest, admitted that the rents had been accepted fairly after a reduction under the Land Act, expressed the general wish of the tenants to meet their obligations, and wound up by asking a further abatement, “the times were so bad, and the money couldn’t be got, it couldn’t indeed!”

Mr. Tener listened patiently—to listen patiently is the most essential quality of an agent in Ireland—and finally said:—

“Very well, if you haven’t got the money to pay in full, pay three-quarters of it, and I’ll give you time for the rest.”

“Thank your honour!” said Pat, “and that’ll be thirty pounds—and here it is in one pound notes, and hard enough to get they are, these times!”

So Mr. Tener took the money, counted the notes twice over, and then, writing out a receipt, handed it to the tenant.

“All right, Pat, there’s your receipt for thirty-nine pounds, and I’m glad to see ten-pound notes going about the country in these hard times!”

By mistake the “distressful” orator had put one ten-pound note into his parcel! He took his receipt, and went off without a word. But the combination to get an “abatement” broke down then and there, and the other tenants came forward and put down their money.

These incidents occurred to Mr. Tener himself. Not less amusing and instructive was a similar mistake on a larger scale made by an over-crafty tenant in dealing with one of Mr. Tener’s friends a few years ago in the county of Leitrim. This tenant, whom we will call Denis, was the fugleman also of a combination. He was a cattle dealer as well as a farmer, and having spent a couple of hours in idly eloquent attempts to bring about a general abatement of the rents, he lost his patience.

“Ah, well, your honour!” he said, “I can’t stay here all day talking like these men, I must go to the fair at Boyle. Will you take a deposit-receipt of the bank for ten pounds and give me the pound change? that’ll just be the nine pounds for the half-year’s rent. But all the same, yer honour, those men are all farmers, and it’s not out of the farm at all I made the ten pounds, it’s out of the dealing!”

“But you couldn’t deal without a farm, Denis, for the stock,” said the agent, as he glanced at the receipt. He hastily turned it over, and went on, “Just indorse the receipt, and I’ll consider your proposition.”

The receipt was indorsed, and at once taken off by the agent’s clerk to the bank to bring back pound-notes for it, while the agent quietly proceeded to fill out the regular form of receipt for a full year’s rent, eighteen pounds. Denis noted what he supposed of course to be the agent’s blunder, but like an astute person held his peace. The clerk came back with the notes. Denis took up his receipt, and the agent quietly began handing him note after note across the table.

“But, your honour!” exclaimed Denis, “what on earth are ye giving me all this money for?”

“It’s your change,” said the agent, quite imperturbably. “You gave me a bank receipt for one hundred pounds. I have given you a receipt for your full year’s rent, and here are eighty-two pounds in notes, and with it eighteen shillings in silver—that’s five per cent. reduction. I would have made it ten per cent., only you were so very sharp, first about not having the money, and then about the full receipt!”

In an instant all eyes were fastened upon Denis. Ichabod! the glory had departed. The chorus went up from his disenchanted followers:—

“Ah, glory be to God, you were not bright enough for the agent, Denis!”