Chapter VI: Introduction (6)

“But though neither the true source of our _Knowledge_ of Moral
Distinctions nor yet the right _Motive_ why we are to choose the Good,
this Moral Sense of Pleasure in Virtue, and Pain in Vice, is a
psychological fact demanding the investigation of the Moralist.
Moreover, the error of allowing our moral choice to be decided by a
regard to the pure joy of Virtue or awful pangs of self-condemnation,
is an error so venial in comparison of other moral heresies, and so
easily to be confounded with a truer principle of Morals, that it is
particularly necessary to warn generous natures against it. ‘It is
quite beyond the grasp of human thought,’ says Kant, ‘to explain how
reason can be practical; how the mere Morality of the law,
independently of every object man can be interested in, can itself
beget an interest which is purely Ethical; how a naked thought,
containing in it nothing of the sensory, can bring forth an emotion of
pleasure or pain.’

“Unconsciously this Sense of Pleasure in a Virtuous Act, the thought
of the peace of conscience which will follow it, or the dread of
remorse for its neglect, must mingle with our motives. But we can
never be permitted, consciously to exhibit them to ourselves as the
ground of our resolution to obey the Law. That Law is not valid for
man because it interests him, but it interests him because it has
validity for him—because it springs from his true being, his proper
self. The interest he feels is an Effect, not a Cause; a Contingency,
not a Necessity. Were he to obey the Law merely from this Interest, it
would not be free Self-legislation (autonomy), but (heteronomy)
subservience of the Pure Will to a lower faculty—a Sense of Pleasure.
And, practically, we may perceive that all manner of mischiefs and
absurdities must arise if a man set forth Moral Pleasure as the
determinator of his Will....

“Thus, the maxim of Euthumism, ‘_Be virtuous for the sake of the Moral
Pleasure of Virtue_,’ may be pronounced false.

“2nd. Public Eudaimonism sets forth, both as the ground of our
knowledge of Virtue and the motive for our practice of it, ‘_The
Greatest Happiness of the Greatest Number_.’ This Happiness, as Paley
understood it, is composed of Pleasures to be estimated only by their
Intensity and Duration; or, as Bentham added, by their Certainty,
Propinquity, Fecundity, and Purity (or freedom from admixture of
evil).

“Let it be granted for argument’s sake, that the calculable Happiness
resulting from actions can determine their Virtue (although all
experience teaches that resulting Happiness is not calculable, and
that the Virtue must at least be one of the items determining the
resulting Happiness). On the Utilitarian’s own assumption, what sort
of motive for Virtue can be his end of ‘_The Greatest Happiness of the
Greatest Number_?’

“No sooner had Paley laid down the grand principle of his system,
‘_Whatever is Expedient is Right_,’ than he proceeds (as he thinks) to
guard against its malapplication by arguing that nothing is expedient
which produces, along with _particular_ good consequences, _general_
bad ones, and that this is done by the violation of any general rule.
‘You cannot,’ says he, ‘permit one action, and forbid another without
showing a difference between them. Consequently the same sort of
actions must be generally permitted or generally forbidden. Where
therefore, the general permission of them would be pernicious, it
becomes necessary to lay down and support the rule which generally
forbids them.’

“Now, let the number of experienced consequences of actions be ever so
great, it must be admitted that the Inductions we draw therefrom can,
at the utmost, be only provisional, and subject to revision should new
facts be brought in to bear in an opposite scale....

“Further, the rules induced by experience must be not only
provisional, but partial. The lax term ‘general’ misleads us. A Moral
Rule must be either universal and open to no exception, or, properly
speaking, no _rule_ at all. Each case of Morals stands alone.

“Thus, the Experimentalist’s conclusion, for example, that ‘Lying does
more harm than good,’ may be quite remodelled by the fortunate
discovery of so prudent a kind of falsification as shall obviate the
mischief and leave the advantage. No doubt can remain on the mind of
any student of Paley, that this would have been his own line of
argument: ‘If we can only prove that a lie be expedient, then it
becomes a duty to lie.’ As he says himself of the rule (which if any
rule may do so may surely claim to be general) ‘Do not do evil that
good may come,’ that it is ‘salutary, for the most part, the advantage
seldom compensating for the violation of the rule.’ So to do evil is
sometimes salutary, and does now and then compensate for disregarding
even the Eudaimonist’s last resource—a General Rule!

“2nd. Private Eudaimonism. There are several formulas, in which this
system, (the lowest, but the most logical, of Moral heresies) is
embodied. Rutherford puts it thus: ‘Every man’s Happiness is the
ultimate end which Reason teaches him to pursue, and the constant and
uniform practice of Virtue towards all mankind becomes our duty, when
Revelation has informed us that God will make us finally happy in a
life after this.’ Paley (who properly belongs to this school, but
endeavours frequently to seat himself on the corners of the stools of
Euthumism and Public Eudaimonism), Paley, the standard Moralist of
England,[11] defines Virtue thus: ‘_Virtue is the doing good to
mankind in obedience to the will of God, and for the sake of
Everlasting Happiness_. According to which definition, the good of
mankind is the subject; the will of God the rule; and Everlasting
Happiness the motive of Virtue.’

“Yet it seems to me, that if there be any one truth which intuition
does teach us more clearly than another, it is precisely this one—that
Virtue to be Virtue must be disinterested. The moment we picture any
species of reward becoming the bait of our Morality, that moment we
see the holy flame of Virtue annihilated in the noxious gas. A man is
not Virtuous at all who is honest because it is ‘good policy,’
beneficent from love of approbation, pious for the sake of heaven. All
this is prudence not virtue, selfishness not self-sacrifice. If he be
honest for sake of policy, would he be dishonest, if it could be
proved that it were more politic? If he would _not_, then he is not
really honest from policy but from some deeper principle thrust into
the background of his consciousness. If he _would_, then it is idlest
mockery to call that honesty Virtuous which only waits a bribe to
become dishonest.

“But there are many Eudaimonists who will be ready to acknowledge that
a prudent postponement of our happiness in _this_ world cannot
constitute virtue. But wherefore do they say we are to postpone it?
Not for present pleasure or pain, that would be base; but for that
anticipation of future pleasure or pain which we call Hope and Fear.
And this, not for the Hope and Fear of this world, which are still
admitted to be base motives; but for Hope and Fear extended one step
beyond the tomb—the Hope of Heaven and the Fear of Hell.”

After a general glance at the doctrine of Future Rewards and Punishments as held by Christians and heathens, I go on to argue:

“But in truth this doctrine of the Hope of Heaven being the true
Motive of Virtue is (at least in theory) just as destructive of Virtue
as that which makes the rewards of this life—health, wealth, or
reputation—the motive of it. Well says brave Kingsley:

‘Is selfishness for time a sin,
Stretched out into eternity celestial prudence?’

“If to act for a small reward cannot be virtuous, to act for a large
one can certainly merit no more. To be bribed by a guinea is surely no
better than to be bribed by a penny. To be deterred from ruin by fear
of transportation for life, is no more noble than to be deterred by
fear of twenty-four hours in prison. There is no use multiplying
illustrations. He who can think that Virtue is the doing right for
pay, may think himself very judicious to leave his pay in the
savings-bank now and come into a fortune all at once by and by; but he
who thinks that Virtue is the doing right for Right’s own sake, cannot
possibly draw a distinction between small bribes and large ones; a
reward to be given to-day, and a reward to be given in eternity.

“Nevertheless it cannot be denied that the belief in immortal progress
is of incalculable value. Such belief, and that in an ever-present
God, may be called the two wings of human Virtue. I look on the
advantages of a faith in immortality to be two-fold. First, it cuts
the knot of the world, and gives to our apprehension a God whose
providence need no longer perplex us, and whose immeasurable and
never-ending goodness shines ever brighter before our contemplating
souls. Secondly, it gives an importance to personal progress which we
can hardly attribute to it so long as we deem it is to be arrested for
ever by death. The man who does not believe in Immortality may be, and
often actually is, more virtuous than his neighbour; and it is quite
certain that his Virtue is of far purer character than that which
bargains for Heaven as its pay. But his task is a very hard one, a
task without a result; and his road a dreary one, unenlightened even
by the distant dawn of

‘That great world of light which lies
Behind all human destinies.’

We can scarcely do him better service than by leading him to trust
that intuition of Immortality which is written in the heart of the
human race by that Hand which writes no falsehoods.

“But if the attainment of Heaven be no true motive for the pursuit of
Virtue, surely I may be held excused from denouncing that practice of
holding out the fear of Hell wherewith many fill up the measure of
moral degradation? Here it is vain to suppose that the fear is that of
the immortality of sin and banishment from God; as we are sometimes
told the hope of Heaven is that of an immortality of Virtue and union
with Him. The mind which sinks to the debasement of any Fear is
already below the level at which sin and estrangement are terrors. It
is his weakness of will which alone hinders the Prodigal from saying,
‘I will arise and go to my Father,’ and unless we can strengthen that
Will by some different motive, it is idle to threaten him with its own
persistence.

* * * * *

“Returning from the contemplation of the lowness of aim common to all
the forms of Eudaimonism, how magnificent seems the grand and holy
doctrine of true Intuitive Morality? DO RIGHT FOR THE RIGHT’S OWN
SAKE: Love God and Goodness because they are Good! The soul seems to
awake from death at such archangel’s call as this, and mortal man puts
on his rightful immortality. The prodigal grovels no longer, seeking
for Happiness amid the husks of pleasure; but, ‘coming to himself,’ he
arises and goes to his Father, heedless if it be but as the lowest of
His servants he may yet dwell beneath that Father’s smile. Hope and
fear for this life or the next, mercenary bargainings, and labour of
eye-service, all are at end. He is a Freeman, and free shall be the
oblation of his soul and body, the reasonable, holy, and acceptable
sacrifice.

“O Living Soul! wilt thou follow that mighty hand, and obey that
summons of the trumpet? Perchance thou hast reached life’s solemn
noon, and with the bright hues of thy morning have faded away the
beautiful aspirations of thy youth. Doubtless thou hast often
struggled for the Right; but, weary with frequent overthrows, thou
criest, ‘This also is vanity.’ But think again, O Soul, whose sun
shall never set! Have no poor and selfish ambitions mingled with those
struggles and made them vanity? Have no theologic dogmas from which
thy maturer reason revolts, been blended with thy purer principle?
Hast thou nourished no extravagant hope of becoming suddenly sinless,
or of heaping up with an hour’s labour a mountain of benefits on thy
race? Surely some mistake like these lies at the root of all moral
discouragement. But mark:—

“Pure morals forbid all base and selfish motives—all
happiness-seeking, fame-seeking, love-seeking—in this world or the
next, as motives of Virtue. Pure Morals rest not on any traditional
dogma, not on history, on philology, on criticism, but on those
intuitions, clear as the axioms of geometry, which thine own soul
finds in its depths, and knows to be necessary truths, which, short of
madness, it cannot disbelieve.

“Pure Morals offer no panacea to cure in a moment all the diseases of
the human heart, and transform the sinner into the saint. They teach
that the passions, which are the machinery of our moral life, are not
to be miraculously annihilated, but by slow and unwearying endeavour
to be brought into obedience to the Holy Will; while to fall and rise
again many a time in the path of virtue is the inevitable lot of every
pilgrim therein.... Our hearts burn within us when for a moment the
vision rises before our sight of what we might make our life even here
upon earth. Faintly can any words picture that vision!

“A life of Benevolence, in which every word of our lips, every work of
our hands, had been a contribution to human virtue or human happiness;
a life in which, ever wider and warmer through its three score years
and ten had grown our pure, unwavering, Godlike Love, till we had
spread the same philanthropy through a thousand hearts ere we passed
away from earth to love yet better still our brethren in the sky.

“A life of Personal Virtue, in which every evil disposition had been
trampled down, every noble sentiment called forth and strengthened; a
life in which, leaving day by day further behind us the pollutions of
sin, we had also ascended daily to fresh heights of purity, till
self-conquest, unceasingly achieved, became continually more secure
and more complete, and at last—

‘The lordly Will o’er its subject powers
Like a thronèd God prevailed,’

and we could look back upon the great task of earth, and say, ‘It is
finished!’

“A life of Religion, in which the delight in God’s presence, the
reverence for His moral attributes, the desire to obey His Will, and
the consciousness of His everlasting love, had grown continually
clearer and stronger, and of which Prayer, deepest and intensest, had
been the very heart and nucleus, till we had found God drawing ever
nearer to us as we drew near to him, and vouchsafing to us a communion
the bliss of which no human speech may ever tell; the dawning of that
day of adoration which shall grow brighter and brighter still while
all the clusters of the suns fade out and die.

“And turning from our own destiny, from the endless career opened to
our Benevolence, our Personal Virtue, and our Piety, we take in a yet
broader view, and behold the whole universe of God mapped out in one
stupendous Plan of Love. In the abyss of the past eternity we see the
Creator for ever designing and for ever accomplishing the supremest
end at which infinite Justice and Goodness could aim, and absolute
Wisdom and Power bring to pass. For this end, for the Virtue of all
finite Intelligences, we behold Him building up millions of starry
abodes and peopling them with immortal spirits clothed in the garbs of
flesh, and endowed with that moral freedom whose bestowal was the
highest boon of Omnipotence. As ages of millenniums roll away, we see
a double progress working through all the realms of space; a progress
of each race and of each individual. Slowly and securely, though with
many an apparent retrogression, does each world-family become better,
wiser, nobler, happier. Slowly and securely, though with many a
grievous backsliding, each living soul grows up to Virtue. Nor pauses
that awful march for a moment, even in the death of the being or the
cataclysm of the world. Over all Death and Change reigns that Almighty
changeless will which has decreed the holiness and happiness of every
spirit He hath made. Through the gates of the grave, and on the ruins
of worlds, shall those spirits climb, higher and yet higher through
the infinite ages, nearer and yet nearer to Goodness and to God.”

CHAPTER
VI.
_IRELAND IN THE FORTIES._
_THE PEASANTRY._

The prominence which Irish grievances have taken of late years in English politics has caused me often to review with fresh eyes the state of the country as it existed in my childhood and youth, when, of course, both the good and evil of it appeared to me to be part of the order of nature itself.

I will first speak of the condition of the working classes, then of the gentry and clergy.

I had considerable opportunities for many years of hearing and seeing all that was going on in our neighbourhood, which was in the district known as “Fingal” (the White Strangers’ land), having been once the territory of the Danes. Fingal extends along the sea-coast between Dublin and Drogheda, and our part lay exactly between Malahide and Rush. My father, and at a later time my eldest brother, were indefatigable as magistrates, Poor law Guardians and landlords, in their efforts to relieve the wants and improve the condition of the people; and it fell on me naturally, as the only active woman of the family, to play the part of Lady Bountiful on a rather large scale. There was my father’s own small village of Donabate in the first place, claiming my attention; and beyond it a larger straggling collection of mud cabins named “Balisk”; the landlord of which, Lord Trimleston, was an absentee, and the village a centre of fever and misery. In Donabate there was never any real distress. In every house there were wage-earners or pensioners enough to keep the wolf from the door. Only when sickness came was there need for extra food, wine, and so on. The wages of a field-labourer were, at that time, about 8s. a week; of course without keep. His diet consisted of oatmeal porridge, wheaten griddle-bread, potatoes and abundance of buttermilk. The potatoes, before the Famine, were delicious tubers. Many of the best kinds disappeared at that time (notably I recall the “Black Bangers”), and the Irish housewife cooked them in a manner which no English or French _Cordon Bleu_ can approach. I remember constantly seeing little girls bringing the mid-day dinners to their fathers, who sat in summer under the trees, and in winter in a comfortable room in our stable-yard, with fire and tables and chairs. The cloth which carried the dinner being removed there appeared a plate of “smiling” potatoes (_i.e._, with cracked and peeling skins) and in the midst a _well_ of about a sixth of a pound of butter. Along with the plate of potatoes was a big jug of milk, and a hunch of griddle-bread. On this food the men worked in summer from six (or earlier, if mowing was to be done) till breakfast, and from thence till one o’clock. After an hour’s dinner the great bell tolled again, and work went on till 6. In winter there was no cessation of work from 8 a.m. till 5 p.m., when it ended. Of course these long hours of labour in the fields, without the modern interruptions, were immensely valuable on the farm. I do not think I err in saying that my father had thirty per cent. more profitable labour from his men for 8s. a week, than is now to be had from labourers at 16s.; at all events where I live here, in Wales. It is fair to note that beside their wages my father’s men, and also the old women whose daughters (eight in number) worked in the shrubberies and other light work all the year round, were allowed each the grazing of a cow on his pastures, and were able to get coal from the ships he chartered every winter from Whitehaven for 11s. a ton, drawn to the village by his horses. At Christmas an ox was divided among them, and generally also a good quantity of frieze for the coats of the men, and for the capes of the eight “Amazons.”

I cannot say what amount of genuine loyalty really existed among our people at that time. Outwardly, it appeared they were happy and contented, though, in talking to the old people, one never failed to hear lamentations for the “good old times” of the past generations. In those times, as we knew very well, nothing like the care we gave to the wants of the working classes was so much as dreamed of by our forefathers. But they kept open house, where all comers were welcome to eat and drink in the servants’ hall when they came up on any pretext; and this kind of hospitality has ever been a supreme merit in Celtic eyes. Some readers will remember that the famous chieftainess, Grana Uaile, invading Howth in one of her piratical expeditions in the “spacious times of great Elizabeth,” found the gates of the ancient castle of the St. Lawrences, closed, _though it was dinner-time_! Indignant at this breach of decency, Grana Uaile kidnapped the heir of the lordly house and carried him to her robbers’ fortress in Connaught, whence she only released him in subsequent years on the solemn engagement of the Lords of Howth always to dine with the doors of Howth Castle wide open. I believe it is not more than 50 years, if so much, since this practice was abolished.

I think the only act of “tyranny” with which I was charged when I kept my father’s house, and which provoked violent recalcitration, was when I gave orders that men coming from our mountains to Newbridge on business with “the Master” should be served with largest platefuls of meat and jugs of beer, but should not be left in the servants’ hall _en tête-à-tête_ with whole rounds and sirloins of beef, of which no account could afterwards be obtained!

Of course, the poor labourer in Ireland at that time after the failure of the potatoes, who had no allowances, and had many young children unable to earn anything for themselves, was cruelly tightly placed. I shall copy here a calculation which I took down in a note-book, still in my possession, after sifting enquiries concerning prices at our village shops, in, or about, the year 1845:—

Wheatmeal costs 2s. 3d. per stone of 14 lbs.
Oatmeal costs 2s. 4d. per stone of 14 lbs.
India meal costs 1s. 8d. per stone of 14 lbs.
14 lbs. of wheatmeal makes 18 lbs. of griddle-bread.
1 lb. of oatmeal makes 3 lbs. of stirabout.

A man will require 4 lbs. food per day 28 lbs. per week.
A woman will require 3 lbs. food per day 21 lbs. per week.
Each child at least 2 lbs. food per day 14 lbs. per week.

A family of 3 will therefore require 63 lbs. of food per week—_e.g._,

_s._ _d._
1 stone wheat— 18 lbs. bread 2 3
1 stone oatmeal— 42 lbs. stirabout 2 4
-- - -
60 lbs. food; cost 4 7

A family of 5 will require—

Man 28 lbs.
Wife 21 lbs.
3 children 42 lbs.
——
91 lbs. food.

_s._ _d._
Say 30 lbs. bread—23 lbs. wheatmeal 3 10
61 lbs. stirabout—20 lbs. oatmeal 3 4
—— — ——
91 lbs. 7 2

Thus, when a man had five children to support, and no potatoes, his weekly wages scarcely covered bare food.

Before the Famine and the great fever, the population of our part of Ireland was exceedingly dense; more than 200 to the square mile. There were an enormous number of mud cabins consisting of one room only, run up at every corner of the roadside and generally allowed to sink into miserable squat, _sottish_-looking hovels with no drainage at all; mud floor; broken thatch, two or three rough boards for a door; and the four panes of the sole window stuffed with rags or an old hat. Just 500,000 of these one-roomed cabins, the Registrar-General, Mr. William Donelly, told me, disappeared between the census before, and the census after the Famine! Nothing was easier than to run them up. Thatch was cheap, and mud abundant, everywhere; and as to the beams (they called them “_bames_”), I remember a man addressing my father coaxingly, “Ah yer Honour will ye plaze spake to the steward to give me a ‘_handful of sprigs_?’” “A handful of _sprigs_? What for?” asked my father; “Why for the roof of me new little house, yer Honour, that I’m building fornenst the ould wan!”

I never saw in an Irish cottage any of the fine old oak settles, dressers and armchairs and coffers to be found usually in Welsh ones. A good unpainted deal dresser and table, a wooden bedstead, a couple of wooden chairs, and two or three straw “bosses” (stools) made like beehives, completed the furniture of a well-to-do cabin, with a range of white or willow-pattern plates on the dresser, and two or three frightfully coloured woodcuts pasted on the walls for adornment. Flowers in the gardens or against the walls were never to be seen. Enormous chimney corners, with wooden stools or straw “bosses” under the projecting walls, were the most noticeable feature. Nothing seems to be more absurd and unhistorical than the common idea that the Celt is a beauty-loving creature, æsthetically far above the Saxon. If he be so, it is surprising that his home, his furniture, his dress, his garden never show the smallest token of his taste! When the young girls from the villages, even from very respectable families, were introduced into our houses, it was a severe tax on the housekeepers’ supervision to prevent them from resorting to the most outrageous shifts and misuse of utensils of all sorts. I can recall, for example, one beautiful young creature with the lovely Irish grey eyes and long lashes, and with features so fine that we privately called her “Madonna.” For about two years she acted as housemaid to my second brother, who, as I have mentioned, had taken a place in Donegal, and whose excellent London cook, carefully trained “Madonna” into what were (outwardly) ways of pleasantness for her master. At last, and when apparently perfectly “domesticated”—as English advertisers describe themselves,—Madonna married the cowman; and my brother took pleasure in setting up the young couple in a particularly neat and rather lonely cottage with new deal furniture. After six months they emigrated; and when my brother visited their deserted house he found it in a state of which it will suffice to record one item. The pig had slept all the time under the bedstead; and no attempt had been made to remove the resulting heap of manure!

My father had as strong a sense as any modern sanitary reformer of the importance of good and healthy cottages; and having found his estate covered with mud and thatched cabins, he (and my brother after him) laboured incessantly, year by year, to replace them by mortared stone and slated cottages, among which were five schoolhouses supported by himself. As it was my frequent duty to draw for him the plans and elevations of these cottages, farmhouses and village shops, with calculations of the cost of each, it may be guessed how truly absurd it seems to me to read exclusively, as I do so often now, of “tenants’ improvements” in Ireland. It is true that my father occasionally let, on long leases and without fines, large farms (of the finest wheat-land in Ireland, within ten miles of Dublin market), at the price of £2 per Irish acre, with the express stipulation that the tenant should undertake the re-building of the house or farm-buildings as the case might be. But these were, of course, perfectly just bargains, made with well-to-do farmers, who made excellent profits. I have already narrated in an earlier chapter, how he sold the best pictures among his heirlooms—one by Hobbema now in Dorchester House and one by Gaspar Poussin,—to rebuild some eighty cottages on his mountains. These cottages had each a small farm attached to it, which was generally held at will, but often continued to the tenants’ family for generations. The rent was, in some cases I think, as low as thirty or forty shillings a year; and the tenants contrived to make a fair living with sheep and potatoes; cutting their own turf on the bog, and very often earning a good deal by storing ice in the winter from the river Dodder, and selling it in Dublin in summer. I remember one of them who had been allowed to fall into arrears of rent to the extent of £3, which he loudly protested he could not pay, coming to my father to ask his help as a magistrate to recover _forty pounds_, which an ill-conditioned member of his family had stolen from him out of the usual Irish private hiding-place “under the thatch.”

But outside my father’s property, when we passed into the next villages on either side, Swords or Rush or Balisk, the state of things was bad enough. I will give a detailed description of the latter village, some of which was written when the memory of the scene and people was less remote, than now. It is the most complete picture of Irish poverty, fifty years ago, which I can offer.

Balisk was certainly _not_ the “loveliest village of the plain.” Situated partly on the edge of an old common, partly on the skirts of the domain of a nobleman who had not visited his estate for thirty years, it enjoyed all the advantages of freedom from restraint upon the architectual genius of its builders. The result was a long crooked, straggling street, with mud cabins turned to it, and from it, in every possible angle of incidence: some face to face, some back to back, some sideways, some a little retired so as to admit of a larger than ordinary heap of manure between the door and the road. Such is the ground-plan of Balisk. The cabins were all of mud, with mud floors and thatched roofs; some containing one room only, others two, and, perhaps, half-a-dozen, three rooms: all, very literally, on the ground; that is on the bare earth. Furniture, of course, was of the usual Irish description: a bed (sometimes having a bedstead, oftener consisting of a heap of straw on the floor), a table, a griddle, a kettle, a stool or two and a boss of straw, with occasionally a grand adjunct of a settle; a window whose normal condition was being stuffed with an old hat; a door, over and under and around which all the winds and rains of heaven found their way; a population consisting of six small children, a bedridden grandmother, a husband and wife, a cock and three hens, a pig, a dog, and a cat. Lastly, a decoration of coloured prints, including the Virgin with seven swords in her heart, St. Joseph, the story of Dives and Lazarus, and a caricature of a man tossed by a bull, and a fat woman getting over a stile.

Of course as Balisk lies in the lowest ground in the neighbourhood and the drains were originally planned to run at “their own sweet will,” the town (as its inhabitants call it) is subject to the inconvenience of being about two feet under water whenever there are any considerable floods of rain. I have known a case of such a flood entering the door and rising into the bed of a poor woman in childbirth, as in Mr. Macdonald’s charming story of Alec Forbes. The woman, whom I knew, however, did not die, but gave to the world that night a very fine little child, whom I subsequently saw scampering along the roads with true Irish hilarity. At other times, when there were no floods, only the usual rains, Balisk presented the spectacle of a filthy green stream slowly oozing down the central street, now and then draining off under the door of any particularly lowly-placed cabin to form a pool in the floor, and finally terminating in a lake of stagnant abomination under the viaduct of a railway. Yes, reader! a railway ran through Balisk, even while the description I have given of it held true in every respect. The only result it seemed to have effected in the village was the formation of the Stygian pool above-mentioned, where, heretofore, the stream had escaped into a ditch.

Let us now consider the people who dwelt amid all this squalor. They were mostly field-labourers, working for the usual wages of seven or eight shillings a week. Many of them held their cabins as freeholds, having built or inherited them from those who had “squatted” unmolested on the common. A few paid rent to the noble landlord before-mentioned. Work was seldom wanting, coals were cheap, excellent schools were open for the children at a penny a week a head. Families which had not more than three or four mouths to fill besides the breadwinners’, were not in absolute want, save when disease, or a heavy snow, or a flood, or some similar calamity arrived. Then, down on the ground, poor souls, literally and metaphorically, they could fall no lower, and a week was enough to bring them to the verge of starvation.

Let me try to recall some of the characters of the inhabitants of Balisk in the Forties.

Here in the first cabin is a comfortable family where there are three sons at work, and mother and three daughters at home. Enter at any hour there is a hearty welcome and bright jest ready. Here is the schoolmaster’s house, a little behind the others, and back to back with them. It has an attempt at a curtain for the window, a knocker for the door. The man is a curious deformed creature, of whom more will be said hereafter. The wife is what is called in Ireland a “Voteen;” a person given to religion, who spends most of her time in the chapel or repeating prayers, and who wears as much semblance of black as her poor means may allow. Balisk, be it said, is altogether Catholic and devout. It is honoured by the possession of what is called “The Holy Griddle.” Perhaps my readers have heard of the Holy Grail, the original sacramental chalice so long sought by the chivalry of the middle ages, and may ask if the Holy Griddle be akin thereto? I cannot trace any likeness. A “griddle,” as all the Irish and Scotch world knows, is a circular iron plate, on which the common unleavened cakes of wheatmeal and oatmeal are baked. The Holy Griddle of Balisk was one of these utensils, which was bequeathed to the village under the following circumstances. Years ago, probably in the last century, a poor, “lone widow” lay on her death-bed. She had none to pray for her after she was gone, for she was childless and altogether desolate; neither had she any money to give to the priest to pray for her soul. Yet the terrors of purgatory were near. How should she escape them? She possessed but one object of any value—a griddle, whereon she was wont to bake the meal of the wheat she gleaned every harvest to help her through the winter. So the widow left her griddle as a legacy to the village for ever, on one condition. It was to pass from hand to hand as each might want it, but every one who used her griddle was to say a prayer for her soul. Years had passed away, but the griddle was still in my time in constant use, as “the best griddle in the town.” The cakes baked on the Holy Griddle were twice as good as any others. May the poor widow who so simply bequeathed it have found long ago “rest for her soul” better than any prayers have asked for her, even the favourite Irish prayer, “May you sit in heaven on a golden chair!”

Here is another house, where an old man lives with his sister. The old woman is the Mrs. Gamp of Balisk. Patrick Russell has a curious story attached to him. Having laboured long and well on my father’s estate, the latter finding him grow rheumatic and helpless, pensioned him with his wages for life, and Paddy retired to the enjoyment of such privacy as Balisk might afford. Growing more and more helpless, he at last for some years hobbled about feebly on crutches, a confirmed cripple. One day, with amazement, I saw him walking without his crutches, and tolerably firmly, up to Newbridge House. My father went to speak to him, and soon returned, saying: “Here is a strange thing. Paddy Russell says he has been to Father Mathew, and Father Mathew has blessed him, and he is cured! He came to tell me he wished to give up his pension, since he returns to work at Smith’s farm next week.” Very naturally, and as might be expected, poor Paddy, three weeks later, was again helpless, and a suppliant for the restoration of his pension, which was of course immediately renewed. But one who had witnessed only the scene of the long-known cripple walking up stoutly to decline his pension (the very best possible proof of his sincere belief in his own recovery) might well be excused for narrating the story as a miracle wrought by a true moral reformer, the Irish “Apostle of Temperance.”

Next door to Paddy Russell’s cabin stood “The Shop,” a cabin a trifle better than the rest, where butter, flour, and dip candles, Ingy-male (Indian meal), and possibly a small quantity of soap, were the chief objects of commerce. Further on came a miserable hovel with the roof broken in, and a pool of filth, _en permanence_, in the middle of the floor. Here dwelt a miserable good-for-nothing old man and equally good-for-nothing daughter; hopeless recipients of anybody’s bounty. Opposite them, in a tidy little cabin, always as clean as whitewash and sweeping could make its poor mud walls and earthen floor, lived an old woman and her daughter. The daughter was deformed, the mother a beautiful old woman, bedridden, but always perfectly clean, and provided by her daughter’s hard labour in the fields and cockle-gathering on the sea-shore, with all she could need. After years of devotion, when Mary was no longer young, the mother died, and the daughter, left quite alone in the world, was absolutely broken-hearted. Night after night she strayed about the chapel-yard where her mother lay buried, hoping, as she told me, to see her ghost.

“And do you think,” she asked, fixing her eyes on me, “do you think I shall ever see her again? I asked Father M—— would I see her in heaven? and all he said was, ‘I should see her in the glory of God.’ What does that mean? I don’t understand what it means. Will I see her _herself_—my poor old mother?”

After long years, I found this faithful heart still yearning to be re-united to the “poor old mother,” and patiently labouring on in solitude, waiting till God should call her home out of that little white cabin to one of the “many mansions,” where her mother is waiting for her.

Here is a house where there are many sons and daughters and some sort of prosperity. Here, again, is a house with three rooms and several inmates, and in one room lives a strange, tall old man, with something of dignity in his aspect. He asked me once to come into his room, and showed me the book over which all his spare hours seemed spent; “Thomas à Kempis.”

“Ah, yes, that is a great book; a book full of beautiful things.”

“Do you know it? do Protestants read it?”

“Yes, to be sure; we read all sorts of books.”

“I’m glad of it. It’s a comfort to me to think you read this book.”

Here again is an old woman with hair as white as snow, who deliberately informs me she is ninety-eight years of age, and next time I see her, corrects herself, and “believes it is eighty-nine, but it is all the same, she disremembers numbers.” This poor old soul in some way hurt her foot, and after much suffering was obliged to have half of it amputated. Strange to say, she recovered, but when I congratulated her on the happy event, I shall never forget the outbreak of true feminine sentiment which followed. Stretching out the poor mutilated and blackened limb, and looking at it with woeful compassion, she exclaimed, “Ah, ma’am, but it will never be a _purty_ foot again!” Age, squalor, poverty, and even mutilation, had not sufficed to quench that little spark of vanity which “springs eternal in the (female) breast.”

Here, again, are half-a-dozen cabins, each occupied by widows with one or more daughters; eight of whom form my father’s pet corps of Amazons, always kept working about the shrubberies and pleasure-grounds, or haymaking or any light fieldwork; houses which, though poorest of all, are by no means the most dirty or uncared for. Of course there are dozens of others literally overflowing with children, children in the cradle, children on the floor, children on the threshold, children on the “midden” outside; rosy, bright, merry children, who thrive with the smallest possible share of buttermilk and stirabout, are utterly innocent of shoes and stockings, and learn at school all that is taught to them at least half as fast again as a tribe of little Saxons. Several of them in Balisk are the adopted children of the people who provide for them. First sent down by their parents (generally domestic servants) to be nursed in that salubrious spot, after a year or two it generally happened that the pay ceased, the parent was not heard of, and the foster-mother and father would no more have thought of sending the child to the Poor-house than of sending it to the moon. The Poor-house, indeed, occupied a very small space in the imagination of the people of Balisk. It was beyond Purgatory, and hardly more real. Not that the actual institution was conducted on other than the very mildest principles, but there was a fearful Ordeal by Water—in the shape of a warm bath—to be undergone on entrance; there were large rooms with glaring windows, admitting a most uncomfortable degree of light, and never shaded by any broken hats or petticoats; there were also stated hours and rules thoroughly disgusting to the Celtic mind, and, lastly, for the women, there were caps without borders!

Yes! cruelty had gone so far (masculine guardians, however compassionate, little recking the woe they caused), till at length a wail arose—a clamour—almost a Rebellion! “Would they make them wear caps without borders?” The stern heart of manhood relented, and answered “No!”

But I must return to Balisk. Does any one ask, was nothing done to ameliorate the condition of that wretched place? Certainly; at all events there was much attempted. Mrs. Evans, of Portrane, of whom I shall say more by and by, built and endowed capital schools for both boys and girls, and pensioned some of the poorest of the old people. My father having a wholesome horror of pauperising, tried hard at more complete reforms, by giving regular employment to as many as possible, and aiding all efforts to improve the houses. Not being the landlord of Balisk, however, he could do nothing effectually, nor enforce any kind of sanitary measures; so that while his own villages were neat, trim and healthy, poor Balisk went on year after year deserving the epithet it bore among us, of the Slough of Despond. The failures of endeavours to mend it would form a chapter of themselves. On one occasion my eldest brother undertook the true task for a Hercules; to drain, _not_ the stables of Augeas, but the town of Balisk. The result was that his main drain was found soon afterwards effectually stopped up by the dam of an old beaver bonnet. Again, he attempted to whitewash the entire village, but many inhabitants objected to whitewash. Of course when any flood, or snow, or storm came (and what wintry month did they not come in Ireland?) I went to see the state of affairs at Balisk, and provide what could be provided. And of course when anybody was born, or married, or ill, or dead, or going to America, in or from Balisk, embassies were sent to Newbridge seeking assistance; money for burial or passage; wine, meat, coals, clothes; and (strange to say), in cases of death—always jam! The connection between dying and wanting raspberry jam remained to the last a mystery, but whatever was its nature, it was invariable. “Mary Keogh,” or “Peter Reilly,” as the case might be, “isn’t expected, and would be very thankful for some jam;” was the regular message. Be it remarked that Irish delicacy has suggested the euphuism of “isn’t expected” to signify that a person is likely to die. What it is that he or she “is not expected” to do, is never mentioned. When the supplicant was not supposed to be personally known at Newbridge, or a little extra persuasion was thought needful to cover too frequent demands, it was commonly urged that the petitioner was a “poor orphant,” commonly aged thirty or forty, or else a “desolate widow.” The word desolate, however, being always pronounced “dissolute,” the epithet proved less affecting than it was intended to be. But absurd as their words might sometimes be (and sometimes, on the contrary, they were full of touching pathos and simplicity), the wants of the poor souls were only too real, as we very well knew, and it was not often that a petitioner from Balisk to Newbridge went empty away.

But such help was only of temporary avail. The Famine came and things grew worse. In poor families, that is, families where there was only one man to earn and five or six mouths to feed, the best wages given in the country proved insufficient to buy the barest provision of food; wheatmeal for “griddle” bread, oatmeal for stirabout, turnips to make up for the lost potatoes. Strong men fainted at their work in the fields, having left untasted for their little children the food they needed so sorely. Beggars from the more distressed districts (for Balisk was in one of those which suffered least in Ireland) swarmed through the country, and rarely, at the poorest cabin, asked in vain for bread. Often and often have I seen the master or mistress of some wretched hovel bring out the “griddle cake,” and give half of it to some wanderer, who answered simply with a blessing and passed on. Once I remember passing by the house of a poor widow, who had seven children of her own, and as if that were not enough, had adopted an orphan left by her sister. At her cabin door one day, I saw, propped up against her knees, a miserable “traveller,” a wanderer from what a native of Balisk would call “other nations; a bowzy villiain from other nations,” that is to say, a village eight or ten miles away. The traveller lay senseless, starved to the bone and utterly famine-stricken. The widow tried tenderly to make him swallow a spoonful of bread and water, but he seemed unable to make the exertion. A few drops of whiskey by and by restored him to consciousness. The poor “bowzy” leaned his head on his hands and muttered feebly, “Glory be to God”! The widow looked up, rejoicing, “Glory be to God, he’s saved anyhow.” Of course all the neighbouring gentry joined in extensive soup-kitchens and the like, and by one means or other the hard years of famine were passed over.

Then came the Fever, in many ways a worse scourge than the famine. Of course it fell heavily on such ill-drained places as Balisk. After a little time, as each patient remained ill for many weeks, it often happened that three or four were in the fever in the same cabin, or even all the family at once, huddled in the two or three beds, and with only such attendance as the kindly neighbours, themselves overburdened, could supply. Soon it became universally known that recovery was to be effected only by improved food and wine; not by drugs. Those whose condition was already good, and who caught the fever, invariably died; those who were in a depressed state, if they could be raised, were saved. It became precisely a question of life and death how to supply nourishment to all the sick. As the fever lasted on and on, and re-appeared time after time, the work was difficult, seeing that no stores of any sort could ever be safely intrusted to Irish prudence and frugality.

Then came Smith O’Brien’s rebellion. The country was excited. In every village (Balisk nowise behindhand) certain clubs were formed, popularly called “Cutthroat Clubs,” for the express purpose of purchasing pikes and organising the expected insurrection in combination with leaders in Dublin. Head-Centre of the club of Balisk was the ex-schoolmaster, of whom we have already spoken. How he obtained that honour I know not; possibly because he could write, which most probably was beyond the achievements of any other member of the institution; possibly also because he claimed to be the lawful owner of the adjoining estate of Newbridge. How the schoolmaster’s claim was proved to the satisfaction of himself and his friends is a secret which, if revealed, would probably afford a clue to much of Irish ambition. Nearly every parish in Ireland has thus its lord _de facto_, who dwells in a handsome house in the midst of a park, and another lord who dwells in a mud-cabin in the village and is fully persuaded he is the lord _de jure_. In the endless changes of ownership and confiscation to which Irish land has been subjected, there is always some heir of one or other of the dispossessed families, who, if nothing had happened that did happen, and nobody had been born of a score or two of persons who somehow, unfortunately, were actually born, then he or she might, could, would, or should have inherited the estate. In the present case my ancestor had purchased the estate some 150 years before from another English family who had held it for some generations. When and where the poor Celtic schoolmaster’s forefathers had come upon the field none pretended to know. Anxious, however, to calm the minds of his neighbours, my father thought fit to address them in a paternal manifesto, posted about the different villages, entreating them to forbear from entering the “Cutthroat Clubs,” and pointing the moral of the recent death of the Archbishop of Paris at the barricades. The result of this step was that the newspaper, then published in Dublin under the audacious name of _The Felon_, devoted half a column to exposing my father by name to the hatred of good Clubbists, and pointing him out as “one of the very first for whose benefit the pikes were procured.” Boxes of pikes were accordingly actually sent by the railway before mentioned, and duly delivered to the Club; and still the threat of rebellion rose higher, till even calm people like ourselves began to wonder whether it were a volcano on which we were treading, or the familiar mud of Balisk.