Chapter XV: 25 (1)

* * * *--Mrs. Kavanagh was quite right when she told me at Borris in March that this country should be seen in June! The drive to this lovely place this morning was one long enchantment of verdure and hawthorn blossoms and fragrance.

I came over from London to bring to a head some inquiries which have too long delayed the publication of this diary. My intention had been to go directly to Thurles, but a telegram which I received from the Archbishop of Cashel just before I left telling me that he could not be at home for the last three days of the week, I came directly here. Nothing can be more utterly unlike the popular notions of Ireland and of Irish life than the aspect of this most smiling and beautiful region: nothing more thoroughly Irish than its people.

* * * who is one of the most active and energetic of Irish landlords, lives part of the year abroad, but keeps up his Irish property with care, at the expense, I suspect, of his estates elsewhere.

From a noble avenue of trees, making the highway like the main road of a private park, we turned into a literal paradise of gardens. The air was balmy with their wealth of odours. "Oh! yes, sir," said the coachman, with an air of sympathetic pride, "our lady is just the greatest lady in all this land for flowers!"

And for ivy, he might have added. We drove between green walls of ivy up to a house which seemed itself to be built of ivy, like that wonderful old mansion of Castle Leod in Scotland. Here, plainly, is another centre of "sweetness and light," the abolition of which must make, not this region alone, but Ireland poorer in that precise form of wealth, which, as Laboulaye has shown in one of the best of his lectures, is absolutely identical with civilisation. It is such places as this, which, in the interest of the people, justify the exemption from redistribution and resettlement, made in one of a series of remarkable articles on Ireland recently published in the _Birmingham Post_, of lands, the "breaking up of which would interfere with the amenity of a residence."

* * * relations with all classes of the people here are so cordial and straightforward that he has been easily able to give me to-day, what I have sought in vain elsewhere in Ireland, an opportunity of conversing frankly and freely with several labouring men. For obvious reasons these men, as a rule, shrink from any expression of their real feelings. Their position is apparently one of absolute dependence either upon the farmers or the landlords, there being no other local market for their labour, which is their only stock-in-trade. As one of them said to me to-day, "The farmers will work a man just as long as they can't help it, and then they throw him away."

I asked if there were no regular farm-labourers hired at fixed rates by the year?

"Oh! very few--less now than ever; and there'll be fewer before there'll be more. The farmers don't want to pay the labourers or to pay the landlords; they want the land and the work for nothing, sir,--they do indeed!"

"What does a farm-hand get," I asked, "if he is hired for a long time?"

"Well, permanent men, they'll get 6s. a week with breakfast and dinner, or 7s. maybe, with one meal; and a servant-boy, sir, he'll get 2s. a week or may be 3s. with his board; but it's seldom he gets it."

"And what has he for his board?"

"Oh, stirabout; and then twice a week coorse Russian or American meat, what they call the 'kitchen,' and they like it better than good meat, sir, because it feeds the pot more."

By this I found he meant that the "coorse meat" gave out more "unctuosity" in the boiling--the meat being always served up boiled in a pot with vegetables, like the "bacon and greens" of the "crackers" in the South.

"And nothing else?"

"Yes; buttermilk and potatoes."

"And these wages are the highest?"

"Oh, I know a boy got 5s., but by living in his father's house, and working out it was he got it. And then they go over to England to work."

"What wages do they get there?"

"Oh, it differs, but they do well; 9s. a week, I think, and their board, and straw to sleep on in the stables."

"But doesn't it cost them a good deal to go and come?"

"Oh no; they get cheap rates. They send them from Galway to Dublin like cattle, at £2, 5s. a car, and that makes about 1s. 6d. a head; and then they are taken over on the steamers very cheap. Often the graziers that do large business with the companies, will have a right to send over a number of men free; and they stowaway too; and then on the railways in England they get passes free often from cattle-dealers, specially when they are coming back, and the dealers don't want their passes. They do very well. They'll bring back £7 and £10. I was on a boat once, and there was a man; he was drunk; he was from Galway somewhere, and they took away and kept for him £18, all in good golden sovereigns; that was the most I ever saw. And he was drunk, or who'd ever have known he had it?"

"Do the farmers build houses for the labourers?"

"Build houses, is it! Glory be to God! who ever heard of such a thing? The farmers are a poor proud lot. They'd let a labourer die in the ditch!"

All that this poor man said was corroborated by another man of a higher class, very familiar with the conditions of life and labour here, and indeed one of the most interesting men I have met in Ireland. Born the son of a labouring man, he was educated by a priest and educated himself, till he fitted himself for the charge of a small school, which he kept to such good purpose that in eighteen years he saved £1100, with which capital he resolved to begin life as a small farmer and shopkeeper. He had studied all the agricultural works he could get, and before he went fairly into the business, he travelled on the Continent, looking carefully into the methods of culture and manner of life of the people, especially in Italy and in Belgium. The Belgian farming gave him new ideas of what might be done in Ireland, and those ideas he has put into practice, with the best results.

"On the same land with my neighbours," he said, "I double their production. Where they get two tons of hay I get four or four and a half, where they get forty-five barrels of potatoes I get a hundred. Only the other day I got £20 for a bullock I had taken pains with to fatten him up scientifically. Of course I had a small capital to start with: but where did I get that? Not from the Government. I earned and saved it myself; and then I wasn't above learning how best to use it."

He thinks the people here--though by no means what they might be with more thrift and knowledge--much better off than the same class in many other parts of Ireland. There are no "Gombeen men" here, he says, and no usurious shopkeepers. "The people back each other in a friendly way when they need help." Many of the labourers, he says, are in debt to him, but he never presses them, and they are very patient with each other. They would do much better if any pains were taken to teach them. It is his belief that agricultural schools and model farms would do more than almost any measure that could be devised for bringing up the standard of comfort and prosperity here, and making the country quiet.

It is the opinion of this man that the people of this place have been led to regard the Papal Decree as a kind of attack on their liberties, and that they are quite as likely to resist as to obey it. For his own part, he thinks Ireland ought to have her own parliament, and make her own laws. He is not satisfied with the laws actually made, though he admits they are better than the older laws were. "The tenants get their own improvements now," he said, "and in old times the more a man improved the worse it was for him, the agent all the while putting up the rents."

But he does not want Irish independence. "The people that talk that way," he said, "have never travelled. They don't see how idle it is for Ireland to talk about supporting herself. She just can't do it."

Not less interesting was my talk to-day with quite a different person. This was a keen-eyed, hawk-billed, wiry veteran of the '48. As a youth he had been out with "Meagher of the Sword," and his eyes glowed when he found that I had known that champion of Erin. "I was out at Ballinagar," he said; "there were five hundred men with guns, and five hundred pikemen." It struck me he would like to be going "out" again in the same fashion, but he had little respect for the "Nationalists."

"There's too many lawyers among them," he said, "too many lawyers and too many dealers. The lawyers are doing well, thanks to the League. Oh yes!" with a knowing chuckle, and a light of mischief in his eye; "the lawyers are doing very well! There's one little bit of a solicitor not far from here was of no good at all four years ago, and now they tell me he's made four thousand pounds in three years' time, good money, and got it all in hand! And there's another, I hear, has made six thousand. The lawyers that call themselves Nationalists, they just keep mischief agoing to further themselves. What do they care for the labourers? Why, no more than the farmers do--and what would become of the poor men! * * * * here, he is making * * * * * * * and he keeps more poor men going than all the lawyers and all the farmers in the place a good part of the year."

"Are the labourers," I asked, "Nationalists?"

"They don't know what they are," he answered. "They hate the farmers, but they love Ireland, and they all stand together for the counthry!"

"How is it with the Plan of Campaign and the Boycotting?"

"Now what use have the labourers got for the Plan of Campaign? No more than for the moon! And for the Boycotting, I never liked it--but I was never afraid of it--and there's not been much of it here."

"Will the Papal Decree put a stop to what there is of it?"

"I wouldn't mind the Pope's Decree no more than that door!" he exclaimed indignantly. "Hasn't he enough, sure, to mind in Rome? Why didn't he defend his own country, not bothering about Ireland!"

"Are you not a Catholic, then?" I asked.

"Oh yes, I'm a Catholic, but I wouldn't mind the Decree. Only remember," he added, after a pause, "just this: it don't trouble me, for I've nothing to do with the Plan of Campaign--only I don't want the Pope to be meddlin' in matters that don't concern him."

"It's out of respect, then, for the Pope that you wouldn't mind the Decree?"

"Just that, intirely! It was some of them Englishmen wheedled it out of him, you may be sure, sir."

"I am told you went out to America once."

"Yes, I went there in '48, and I came back in '51."

"What made you go?" I asked.

"Is it what made me go?" he replied, with a sudden fierceness in his voice. "It was the evictions made me go; that we was put out of the good holding my father had, and his father before him; and I can never forgive it, never! But I came back; and it was * * * father that was the good man to me and to mine, else where would I be?"

I afterwards learned from * * * * that the evictions of which the old man spoke with so much bitterness were made in carrying out important improvements, and that it was quite true that his father had greatly befriended the emigrant when he got enough of the New World and came home.

It was curious to see the old grudge fresh and fierce in the old man's heart, but side by side with it the lion lying down with the lamb--a warm and genuine recognition of the kindness and help bestowed on himself. His resentment against the landlord's action in one generation did not in the least interfere with his recognition of the landlord's usefulness and liberality in the next generation.

"You didn't like America?" I said. "Where did you live there?"

"I lived at North Brookfield in Massachusetts, a year or two," he replied, "with Governor Amasa Walker. Did you know him? He was a good man; he was fond of the people, but he thought too much of the nagurs."

"Yes," I answered; "I know all about him, and he was, as you say, a very good man, even if he was an abolitionist. But why didn't you stay in North Brookfield?"

"Oh, it was a poor country indeed! A blast of wind would blow all the ground away there was! It does no good to the people, going to America," he said; "they come back worse than they went!"

He is at work now in some quarries here.

"The quarrymen get six shillings a week," he said, "with bread and tea and butter and meat three times a week. With nine shillings a week and board, a man'll make himself bigger than * * *!"

"Was the country quiet now?"

"This country here? Oh! it's very quiet; with potatoes at 3s. 6d. a barrel, it's a good year for the people. They're a very quiet people,"--in corroboration apparently of which statement he told me a story of a coroner's jury called to sit on the body of a man found on the highway shot through the head, which returned an unanimous verdict of "Died by the visitation of God."

This country is dominated by the Rocky Hills climbing up to Cullenagh, which divides the Barrow valley from the Nore. We drove this afternoon to * a most lovely place. The mansion there is now shut up and dismantled, but the park and the grounds are very beautiful, with a beauty rather enhanced than diminished by the somewhat unkempt luxuriance of the vegetation. We passed a now well-grown tree planted by the Prince of Wales * * * * * * and drove over many miles of excellent road made by * * * * * * * * employs * * * * * * * * regularly, * * * men as labourers, cartmen and masons, to whom he pays out annually the sum of * * Mr. * * who, by the way, rather resented my asking him if he came of one of the Cromwellian English families so numerous here, and informed me that his people came over with Strongbow--assures me that but for these works of * * * * these men under him would be literally without occupation. In addition to these there are about a dozen more men employed * * as gamekeepers and plantation-men. At the * * places belonging to * * * * * * * * * * above eighty men find constant employment, and receive regular wages amounting to over £4000. Were * * * * dispossessed or driven out of Ireland, all this outlay would come to an end, and with what result to these working-men? As things now are, while * * * working-men receive a regular wage of five shillings, the same men, as farmers' labourers, would receive, now and then, five shillings a week, and that without food! I saw enough in the course of our afternoon's drive to satisfy me that my informant of the morning had probably not overstated matters when he told me that for at least seventy per cent. of the work done by the labourers here, from November to May, they have to look to the landlords. On the property of * * as well as on the neighbouring properties * * * * * * * the houses have been generally put up by the landlords. We called in the course of the afternoon upon a labouring man who lives with his wife in a very neat, cozy, and quite new house, built recently for him by * *. These good people have been living on this property for now nearly half a century. Their new house having been built for them, * * has had an agreement prepared, under which it may be secured to them. The terms have all been discussed and found satisfactory, but the old labourer now hesitates about signing the agreement. He gives, and can be got to give, no reason for this; but when we drove up he came out to greet us in the most friendly manner. We went in and found his wife, a shrewd, sharp-eyed, little old dame, with whom * * * * fell into a confabulation, while I went into the next room with the labourer himself. The house was neatly furnished--with little ornaments and photographs on the mantel-shelf, and nothing of the happy-go-lucky look so common about the houses of the working people in Ireland, as well as about the houses of the lesser squires.

I paid him a compliment on the appearance of his house and grounds. "Yes, sir!" he answered: "it's a very good place it is, and * * * * has built it just to please us."

"But I am told you want to leave it?"

"Ah, no, that is not so, sir, indeed at all! We've three children you see, sir, in America--two girls and a boy we have."

"And where are they?"

"Ah, the girls they're not in any factory at all. They're like leddies, living out in a place they call * * in Massachusetts; and the lad, he was on a farm there. But we don't know where he is nor his sisters any more just now. And the wife, she thinks she would like to go out to America and see the children."

"Do you hear from them regularly?"

"Well, it's only a few pounds they send, but they're doing very well. Domestics they are, quite like leddies; there's their pictures on the shelf."

"But what would you do there?"

"Ah! we'd have lodgings, the wife says, sir. But I like the ould place myself."

"I think you are quite right there," I replied. "And do you get work here from the farmers as the labourers do in my country?"

"Work from the farmers, sir?" he answered, rather sharply. "What they can't help we get, but no more! If the farmers in America is like them, it's not I would be going there! The farmers! For the farmers, a labourer, sir, is not of the race of Adam! They think any place good enough for a labourer--any place and any food! Is the farmers that way in America?"

"Well, I don't know that they are so very much more liberal than your farmers are," I replied; "but I think they'd have to treat you as being of the race of Adam! But are not the farmers here, or the Guardians, obliged to build houses for the labourers? I thought there was an Act of Parliament about that?"

"And so there is but what's the good of it? It's just to get the labourers' votes, and then they fool the labourers, just making them quarrel about where the cottages shall be, what they call the 'sites'; and then there's no cottages built at all, at all. It's the lawyers, you see, sir, gets in with the farmers--the strongest farmers--and then they just make fools of the labourers as if there was no Act of Parliament at all."

"But if the labourers want to go away, to emigrate," I said, "as you want to do, to America, don't the farmers, or the Government, or the landlords, help them to get away and make a start?"

"Not a bit of it, sir," he replied; "not a bit of it. I believe, though," he added after a moment; "I believe they do get some help to go to Australia. But they're mostly no good that goes that way. The best is them that go for themselves, or their friends help them. But there's not so many going this year."

When we drove away I asked * * if he had made any progress towards a signature of the agreement with the labourer's wife.

"No; she couldn't be got to say yes or no. I asked her," said * * "what reason they had for imagining that after all these years I would try to do them an injury? She protested they never thought of such a thing; but she couldn't be brought to say she wished her husband to sign the paper. It's very odd, indeed."

I couldn't help suspecting that the _materfamilias_ was at the bottom of it all, and that she was bent upon going out to America to participate in the prosperity of her two daughters, who were living "like leddies" at * * in Massachusetts.

The incident recalled to me something which happened years ago when I was returning with the Storys from Rome to Boston. Our Cunarder, in the middle of the night, off the Irish coast, ran down and instantly sank a small schooner.

In a wonderfully short time we had come-to, and a boat's crew had succeeded in picking up and bringing all the poor people on board. Among them was a wizened old woman, upon whom all sorts of kind attentions were naturally lavished by the ship's company. She could not be persuaded to go into a cabin after she had recovered from the shock and the fright of the accident, but, comforted and clothed with new and dry garments, she took refuge under one of the companion-ways, and there, sitting huddled up, with her arms about her knees, she crooned and moaned to herself, "I was near being in a wetter and a warmer place; I was near being in a wetter and a warmer place!" by the half hour together. We found that the poor old soul had been to Liverpool to see her son off on a sailing ship as an emigrant to America. So a subscription was soon made up to send her on our arrival to New York there to await her son. We had some trouble in making her understand what was to be done with her, but when she finally got it fairly into her head, gleams of mingled surprise and delight came over her withered face, and she finally broke out, "Oh, then, glory be to God! it's a mercy that I was drownded! glory be to God! and it's the proud boy Terence will be when he gets out to America to find his poor ould mother waiting for him there that he left behind him in Liverpool, and quite the leddy with all this good gold money in her hand, glory be to God!"

On our way back to * * we passed through * * a very neat prosperous-looking town, which * * tells me is growing up on the heels of * *. * * * was one of the few places at which the "no rent" manifesto, issued by Mr. Parnell and his colleagues from their prison in Kilmainham, during the confinement of Mr. Davitt at Portland, and without concert with him, was taken up by a village curate and commended to the people. He was arrested for it by Mr. Gladstone's Government, and locked up for six weeks.

DUBLIN, _Saturday, June 23d._--I left * * * yesterday morning early on an "outside car," with one of my fellow-guests in that "bower of beauty," who was bent on killing a salmon somewhere in the Nore * * We drove through a most varied and picturesque country, viewing on the way the seats of Mr. Hamilton Stubber and Mr. Robert Staples, both finely situated in well-wooded parks. Mr. Stubber was formerly master of the Queen's County hounds, a famous pack, which, as our jarvey put it, "brought a power of money into the county, and made it aisy for a poor man." But the local agitations wore out his patience, and he put the pack down some years ago. Not far from his house is an astonishing modern "tumulus," or mound of hewn and squared stones. These it seems were quarried and brought here by him, with the intention of building a new and handsome residence. This intention he abandoned under the same annoyance.

"They call it Mr. Stubber's Cairn," said the jarvey; "and a sorrowful sight it is, to think of the work it would have given the people, building the big house that'll never be built now, I'm thinking." If Mr. Stubber should become an "absentee," he can hardly, I think, be blamed for it.

His property marches with that of Mr. Robert Staples, who comes of a Gloucestershire family planted in Ireland under Charles I.

"Mr. Staples is farming his own lands," said our jarvey, when I commented on the fine appearance of some fields as we drove by; "and he'll be doing very well this year. Ah! he comes and goes, but he's here a great deal, and he looks after everything himself; that's the reason the fields is good."

This is a property of some 1500 statute acres. Only last March the landlord took over from one tenant, who was in arrears of two years and a half and owed him some £300, a farm of 90 acres, giving the man fifty pounds to boot, and bidding him go in peace. I wonder whether this proceeding would make the landlord a "land-grabber," and expose him to the pains and penalties of "boycotting"?

On this place, too, it seems that Mr. Staples's grandfather put up many houses for the tenants; a thing worth noting, as one of not a few instances I have come upon to show that it will not do to accept without examination the sweeping statements so familiar to us in America, that improvements have never been made by the landlord upon Irish estates.

My companion had meant to put me down at the railway station of Attanagh, there to catch a good train to Kilkenny.

But we had a capital nag, and reached Attanagh so early that we determined to drive on to Ballyragget.

From Attanagh to Ballyragget the road ran along a plateau which commanded the most beautiful views of the valley of the Nore and of the finely wooded country beyond. Ballyragget itself is a brisk little market town, the American influence showing itself here, as in so many other places, in such trifles as the signs on the shops which describe them as "stores." My salmon-fishing companion put me down at the station and went off to the river, which flows through the town, and is here a swift and not inconsiderable stream.

An hour in the train took me to Kilkenny, where I met by appointment several persons whom I had been unable to see during my previous visit in March.

These gentlemen, experienced agents, gave me a good deal of information as to the effect of the present state of things upon the "_moral_" of the tenantry in different parts of Ireland. On one estate, for example, in the county of Longford, a tenant has been doing battle for the cause of Ireland in the following extraordinary fashion.

He held certain lands at a rental of £23, 4s. Being, to use the picturesque language of the agent, a "little good for tenant," he fell into arrears, and on the 1st of May 1885 owed nearly three years' rent, or £63, 12s., in addition to a sum of £150 which he had borrowed of his amiable landlord three or four years before to enable him to work his farm. Of this total sum of £213, 12s. he positively refused to pay one penny. Proceedings were accordingly taken against him, and he was evicted. By this eviction his title to the tenancy was broken. The landlord nevertheless, for the sake of peace and quiet, offered to allow him to sell, to a man who wished to take the place, any interest he might have had in the holding, and to forgive both the arrears of the rent and the £150 which had been borrowed by him. The ex-tenant flatly refused to accept this offer, became a weekly pensioner upon the National League, and declared war. The landlord was forced to get a caretaker for the place from the Property Defence Association at a cost of £1 per week, to provide a house for a police protection party, and to defray the expenses of that party upon fuel and lights. Nor was this all. The landlord found himself further obliged to employ men from the same Property Defence Association to cut and save the hay-crop on the land, and when this had been done no one could be found to buy the crop. The crop and the lands were "boycotted." It was only in May last that a purchaser could be found for the hay cut and saved two years ago--this purchaser being himself a "boycotted" man on an adjoining property. He bought the hay, paying for it a price which did not quite cover one-half the cost of sowing it!

"No one denies for a moment," said the agent, "that the tenant in all this business has been more than fairly, even generously, treated by the estate; yet no one seems to think it anything but natural and reasonable that he should demand, as he now demands, to be put back into the possession of his forfeited tenancy at a certain rent fixed by himself," which he will obligingly agree to pay, "provided that the hay cut and saved on the property two years ago is accounted for to him by the estate!"

In another case an agent, Mr. Ivough, had to deal with a body of five hundred tenants on a considerable estate. Of these tenants, two hundred settled their rents with the landlord before the passing of the Land Act of 1881, and valuations made by the landlord's valuer, with their full assent. There was no business for the lawyers, so far as they were concerned, and no compulsion of any sort was put on them. Among them was a man who had married the daughter of an old tenant on the estate, and so came into a holding of 12 Irish, or more than 20 statute, acres, at a rental of £18 a year. The valuer reduced this to £14, 10s., which satisfied the tenant, and as the agent agreed to make this reduced valuation retroactive, all went as smoothly as possible for two years, when the tenant began to fall into arrears. When the Sub-Commissioners, between 1885 and 1887, took to making sweeping reductions, the tenants who had settled freely under the recent valuation grumbled bitterly. As one of them tersely put it to the agent, "We were a parcel of bloody fools, and you ought to have told us these Sub-Commissioners were coming!" Mr. Sweeney, the tenant by marriage already mentioned, was not content to express his particular dissatisfaction in idle words, but kept on going into arrears. In May 1888 things came to a crisis. The agent refused to accept a settlement which included the payment by him of the costs of the proceedings forced upon him by his tenant. "You have had a good holding," said the agent, "with plenty of water and good land. In this current year two acres of your wheat will pay the whole rent. You have broken up and sold bit by bit a mill that was on the place; and above all, when Mr. Gladstone made us accept the judicial rents, he told us we might be sure, if we did this, of punctual payment. That was the one consideration held out to us. And we are entitled to that!"

The tenant being out of his holding, the agent wishes to put another tenant into it. But the holding is "boycotted." Several tenants are anxious for it, and would gladly take it, but they dare not The great evicted will neither sell any tenant-right he may have, nor pay his arrears and costs, nor give up the place to another tenant. To put Property Defence men on the holding would cost the landlord £2, 10s. a week, and do him no great good, as the evicted man "holds the fort," being established in a house which he occupies on an adjoining property, and for which presumably he pays his rent. It seems as if Mr. Sweeney were inspired by the example of another tenant, named Barry, who, before the passing of the Land Act of 1881, gave up freely a holding of 20 acres, on a property managed by Mr. Kough; but as he was on such good terms with the agent that he could borrow money of him, he begged the agent to let him retain at a low rent a piece of this surrendered land directly adjoining his house. He asked this in the name of his eight or nine children, and it was granted him. The agent afterwards found that the piece of land in question was by far the best of the surrendered holding. But that is a mere detail. This ingenious tenant Barry, living now on another estate just outside the grasp of the agent, has systematically "boycotted" for the last nine years the land which he gave up, feeding his own cattle upon it freely meanwhile, and keeping all would-be tenants at a distance! "He is now," said the agent, "quite a wealthy man in his way, jobbing cattle at all the great markets!"

"When the eviction of Sweeney took place," said the agent, "I was present in person, as I thought I ought to be, and the result is that I have been held up to the execration of mankind as a monster for putting out a child in a cradle into a storm. As a matter of fact," he said, "there was a cradle in the way, which the sheriff-Officer gently took up, and by direction of the tenant's wife removed. I made no remark about it at all, but a local paper published a lying story, which the publisher had to retract, that I had said 'Throw out the child!'"

"Two priests," he said, "came quite uninvited and certainly without provocation, to see me, and one of them shouted out, 'Ah! we know you'll be making another Coolgreany,' which was as much as to say there 'would be bloodshed.' This was the more intolerable," he added, "that, as I afterwards found, I had already done for the sake of the tenants precisely what these ecclesiastics professed that they had come to ask me to do!

"For thirty years," said this gentleman, "I have lived in the midst of these people--and in all that time I have never had so much as a threatening letter. But after this story was published of my throwing out a cradle with a child in it, I was insulted in the street by a woman whom I had never seen before. Two girls, too, called out at the eviction, 'You've bad pluck; why didn't you tell us you were coming down the day?' and another woman made me laugh by crying after me, 'You've two good-looking daughters, but you're a bad man yourself.'"

Quite as instructive is the story given me on this occasion of the Tyaquin estate in the county of Galway. This estate is managed by an agent, Mr. Eichardson of Castle Coiner, in this county of Kilkenny.

The rents on this Galway estate, as Mr. Richardson assures me, have been unaltered for between thirty and forty years, and some of them for even a longer period. For the last twenty-five years certainty, during which Mr. Richardson has been the agent of the estate, and probably, he thinks, for many years previous, there has never been a case of the non-payment of rent, except in recent years when rents were withheld for a time for political reasons.

Large sums of money have been laid out in various useful improvements. Constant occupation was given to those requiring it, until the agrarian agitation became fully developed. On the demesne and the home farms the best systems of reclaiming waste lands and the best systems of agriculture were practically exhibited, so that the estate was an agricultural free school for all who cared to learn.

When the Land Act of 1881 was passed, almost all the tenants applied, and had judicial rents fixed, many of them by consent of the agent.

In 1887 the tenants were called on as usual to pay these judicial rents. A large minority refused to do so except on certain terms, which were refused. The dispute continued for many months, but as the charges on the estate had to be met, the agent was obliged to give way, and allow an abatement of four shillings in the pound on these judicial rents. Some of these charges, to meet which the agent gave way, were for money borrowed from the Commissioners of Public Works to _improve the holdings of the tenants_. For these improvements thus thrown entirely upon the funds of the estate no increase of rent or charge of any kind had been laid upon the tenants.

When a settlement was agreed on, those of the tenants who had adopted the Plan came in a body to pay their rents on 3d January 1888. They stated that they were unable to pay more than the rent due up to November 1886, and that they would never have adopted the Plan had they not been driven into it by _sheer distress_. After which they handed Mr. Richardson a cheque drawn by John T. Dillon, Esq., M.P., for the amount banked with the National League.

An article appeared shortly afterwards in a League newspaper, loudly boasting of the great victory won by Mr. Dillon, M.P., for the starving and poverty-stricken tenants. Two of these tenants (brothers) were under a yearly rent of £7, 10s. They declared they could only pay £3, 15s., or a half-year's rent, and this only if they got an abatement of 15s. Yet these same tenants were then paying Mr. Richardson £50 a year for a grass farm, and about £12 for meadows, as well as £30 a year more for a grass farm to an adjoining landlord.

Another tenant who held a farm at £13, 5s. a year declared he could only pay £6, 12s. 6d., or a half-year's rent, if he got an abatement of £1, 6s. 6d. A very short time before, this tenant had taken a grass farm from an adjoining landlord, and he was so anxious to get it that he showed the landlord a bundle of large notes, amounting to rather more than £300 sterling, in order to prove his solvency! The same tenant has since written a letter to Mr. Richardson offering £50 a year for a grass farm!

All these campaigners, Mr. Richardson says, "with one noble exception, the wife of a tenant who was ill, declined to pay a penny of rent beyond November 1st, 1886," stating that they were "absolutely unable" to do more. So they all left the May 1887 rent unpaid, and the hanging gale to November 1887, which, however, they were not even asked to pay.

The morning after the settlement many of the tenants who, when they were all present in a body on the previous evening, had declared their "inability" to pay the half-year's rent due down to May 1887, individually came to Mr. Richardson unasked, and paid it, some saying they had "borrowed the money that night," but others frankly declaring that they dared not break the rule publicly, having been ordered by the League only to pay to November 1886, for fear of the consequences. These would have been injury to their cattle, or the burning of their hay, or possibly murder.

Of the country about Kilkenny, I am told, as of the country about Carlow, that nearly or quite seventy per cent, of the labourers are dependent upon the landlords from November to May for such employment as they get.

The shopkeepers, too, are in a bad way, being in many cases reduced to the condition of mere agents of the great wholesale houses elsewhere, and kept going by these houses mainly in the hope of recovering old debts. There is a severe pressure of usury, too, upon the farmers. "If a farmer," said one resident to me, "wants to borrow a small sum of the Loan Fund Bank, he must have two securities--one of them a substantial man good for the debt. These two indorsers must be 'treated' by the borrower whom they back; and he must pay them a weekly sum for the countenance they have given him, which not seldom amounts, before he gets through with the matter, to a hundred per cent, on the original loan."

I am assured too that the consumption of spirits all through this region has greatly increased of late years. "The official reports will show you," said one gentleman, "that the annual outlay upon whisky in Ireland equals the sum saved to the tenants by the reductions in rent." This is a proposition so remarkable that I simply record it for future verification, as having been made by a very quiet, cool, and methodical person, whose information on other points I have found to be correct. He tells me too, as of his own knowledge, that in going over some financial matters with a small farmer in his neighbourhood, he ascertained, beyond a peradventure, that this farmer annually spent in whisky, for the use of his family, consisting of himself, his wife and three adult children, nearly, or quite, _seventy pounds a year_! "You won't believe this," he said to me; "and if you print the statement nobody else will believe it; but for all that it is the simple unexaggerated truth."

Falstaff's reckoning at Dame Quickly's becomes a moderate score in comparison with this!

I spent half an hour again in the muniment-room at Kilkenny Castle, where, in the Expense-Book of the second Duke of Ormond, I found a supper _menu_ worthy of record, as illustrating what people meant by "keeping open house" in the great families of the time of Queen Anne.[Note L.]

Taking a train early in the afternoon, I came on here in time to dine last night with Mr. Rolleston of Delgany, an uncompromising Protestant "Home Ruler"--as Protestant and as uncompromising as John Mitchel--whose recent pamphlet on "Boycotting" has deservedly attracted so much attention on both sides of the Irish Sea.

I was first led into a correspondence with Mr. Rolleston by a remarkable article of his published in the _Dublin University Review_ for February 1886, on "The Archbishop in Politics." In that article, Mr. Rolleston, while avowing himself to be robust enough to digest without much difficulty the _ex officio_ franchise conferred upon the Catholic clergy by Mr. Parnell to secure the acceptance of his candidates at Parliamentary conventions, made a very firm and fearless protest against the attempt of the Archbishops of Dublin and Cashel to "boycott" Catholic criticism of the National League and its methods, by declaring such criticism to be "a public insult" offered, not to the Archbishops of Cashel and Dublin personally, or as political supporters of the National League, but to the Archbishops as dignitaries of the Catholic Church, and to their Archiepiscopal office. The "boycotting," by clerical machinery, of independent lay opinion in civil matters, is to the body politic of a Catholic country what the germ of cancer is to the physical body. And though Mr. Rolleston, in this article, avowed himself to be a hearty supporter of the "political programme of the National League," and went so far even as to maintain that the social boycotting, "which makes the League technically an illegal conspiracy against law and individual liberty," might be "in many cases justified by the magnitude of the legalised crime against which it was directed," it was obvious to me that he could not long remain blind to the true drift of things in an organisation condemned, by the conditions it has created for itself, to deal with the thinkers of Ireland as it deals with the tenants of Ireland. His recent pamphlet on "Boycotting" proves that I was right. What he said to me the other day in a letter about the pamphlet may be said as truly of the article. It was "a shaft sunk into the obscure depths of Irish opinion, to bring to light and turn to service whatever there may be in those depths of sound and healthy;" and one of my special objects in this present visit to Ireland was to get a personal touch of the intellectual movement which is throwing such thinkers as Mr. Rolleston to the front.

We were five at table, Mr. Rolleston's other guests being Mr. John O'Leary, whose name is held in honour for his courage and honesty by all who know anything of the story of Ireland in our times, and who was sent a quarter of a century ago as a Fenian patriot--not into seclusion with sherry and bitters, at Kilmainham, like Mr. Gladstone's "suspects" of 1881--but like Michael Davitt, into the stern reality of penal servitude; Dr. Sigerson, Dean of the Faculty of Science of the Boyal University, and an authority upon the complicated question of Irish Land Tenures; and Mr. John F. Taylor, a leading barrister of Dublin, an ally on the Land Question of Mr. Davitt, and an outspoken Repealer of the Union of 1800.

I have long wished to meet Mr. O'Leary, who sent me, through a correspondent of mine, two years ago, one of the most thoughtful and well-considered papers I have ever read on the possibilities and impossibilities of Home Rule for Ireland; and it was a great pleasure to find in the man the elevation of tone, the breadth of view, and the refined philosophic perception of the strong and weak points in the Irish case, which had charmed me in. the paper. Now that "Conservative" Englishmen have come to treat the main points of Chartism almost as commonplaces in politics, it is surely time for them to recognise the honesty and integrity of the spirit which revolted in the Ireland of 1848 against the then seemingly hopeless condition of that country. Of that spirit Mr. O'Leary is a living, earnest, and most interesting incarnation. He strikes one at once as a much younger man in all that makes the youth of the intellect and the emotions than any Nationalist M.P. of half his years whom I have ever met. No Irishman living has dealt stronger or more open blows than he against the English dominion in Ireland. Born in Tipperary, where he inherited a small property in houses, he was sent to Trinity College in Dublin, and while a student there was drawn into the "Young Ireland" party mainly by the poems of Thomas Davis. Late in the electrical year of the "battle summer," 1848, he was arrested on suspicion of being concerned in a plot to rescue Smith O'Brien and other state prisoners. The suspicion was well founded, but could not be established, and after a day or two he was liberated. From Trinity, after this, he went to the Queen's College in Cork, where he took his degree, and studied medicine. When the Fenian movement became serious, after the close of our American Civil War, O'Leary threw himself into it with Stephens, Luby, and Charles Kickham. Stephens appointed him one of the chief organisers of the I.E.B. with Luby and Kickham, and he took charge of the _Irish People_--the organ of the Fenians of 1865. It was as a subordinate contributor to this journal that Sir William Harcourt's familiar Irish bogy, O'Donovan Rossa[26], was arrested together with his chief, Mr. O'Leary, and with Kickham in 1865, and found guilty, with them, after a trial before Mr. Justice Keogh, of treason-felony. The speech then delivered by Mr. O'Leary in the dock made a profound impression upon the public mind in America. It was the speech, not of a conspirator, but of a patriot. The indignation with which he repelled for himself and for his associate Luby the charges levelled at them both, without a particle of supporting evidence, by the prosecuting counsel, of aiming at massacre and plunder, was its most salient feature. The terrible sentence passed upon him, of penal servitude for twenty years, Mr. O'Leary accepted with a calm dignity, which I am glad, for the sake of Irish manhood, to find that his friends here now recall with pride, when their ears are vexed by the shrill and clamorous complaints of more recent "patriots," under the comparatively trivial punishments which they invite.

In 1870, Mr. O'Leary and his companions were released and pardoned on condition of remaining beyond the British dominions until the expiration of their sentences. Mr. O'Leary fixed his residence for a time in Paris, and thence went to America, where he and Kickham were regarded as the leaders of the American branch of the I. R. B. He returned to Ireland in 1885, his term of sentence having then expired, and it was shortly after his return that he gave to my correspondent the letter upon Irish affairs to which I have already referred. He had been chosen President of the "Young Ireland Society" of Dublin before he returned, and in that capacity delivered at the Rotunda, in the Irish capital, before a vast crowd assembled to welcome him back, an address which showed how thoughtfully and calmly he had devoted himself during his long years of imprisonment and exile to the cause of Ireland. Mr. William O'Brien, M.P., and Mr. Redmond, M.P., took part in this reception, but their subsequent course shows that they can hardly have relished Mr. O'Leary's fearless and outspoken protests against the intolerance and injustice of the agrarian organisation which controls their action. In England, as well as well as in Ireland, Mr. O'Leary spoke to great multitudes of his countrymen, and always in the same sense. Mr. Rolleston tells me that Mr. O'Leary's denunciations of "the dynamite section of the Irish people," to use the euphemism of an American journal, "are the only ones ever uttered by an Irish leader, lay or clerical." The day must come, if it be not already close at hand, when the Irish leader of whom this can be truly said, must be felt by his own people to be the one man worthy of their trust. The thing that has been shall be, and there is nothing new under the sun. The Marats and the Robespierres, the Barères and the Collots, are the pallbearers, not the standard-bearers of liberty.

Towards the National League, as at present administered on the lines of the agrarian agitation, Mr. O'Leary has so far preserved an attitude of neutrality, though he has never for a moment hesitated either in public or in private most vehemently to condemn such sworn Fenians as have accepted seats in the British Parliament, speaking his mind freely and firmly of them as "double-oathed men" playing a constitutional part with one hand, and a treasonable part with the other.

Yet he is not at one with the extreme and fanatical Fenians who oppose constitutional agitation simply because it is constitutional. His objection to the existing Nationalism was exactly put, Mr. Rolleston tells me, by a clever writer in the Dublin _Mail_, who said that O'Connell having tried "moral force" and failed, and the Fenians having tried "physical force" and failed, the Leaguers were now trying to succeed by the use of "immoral force."