Chapter IV: Hugh Bronte as a Tenant-Righter

Hugh Bronte worked up to his tenant-right doctrines by a series of assertions, negative and positive, on religious, political, and economic questions. His address, in which he set forth his views on such matters, approximated to the form of a lecture more nearly than any of his other talks, which were generally in the narrative form. The following are the chief points of the discourse, as given to me by my old tutor and friend, and the propositions were never varied, except in the mere wording, although the statement had never been formally written out.

Hugh Bronte always began with a little black Bible in his hand, or on his knee, and his first negative assertion was:

I. "The church is not Christ's."

Laying his hand on the little book he would declare that he found grace in the Bible, but in the church only greed. Once and only once he had appealed to a parson. He was hungry, naked, and bleeding, but the great double-chinned, red-faced man had looked on him as if he were a rat, and, without hearing his story, had him driven off by a grand-looking servant, who cracked a whip over his head and swore at him.

In Hugh Bronte's eyes the parsons got their livings for political services, and not for learning or goodness. Enormous sums were paid them to do work that they did not do. They rarely visited their parishes, and their duties were performed by hungry and ill-paid curates. When they did return occasionally to their livings they were heard of at banquets, where they ate and drank too freely, and at other resorts, where they gambled recklessly. They were seen riding over the country after foxes and hounds, and sitting in judgment on the men whose grain they had trampled down, and sending them to penal servitude for trapping hares in their own gardens. They were said to be ignorant, but they were known to be irreligious, immoral, arrogant, and cruel. They acted as the ministers of the gentry, before whom they were very humble, and they utterly despised the people who paid for their luxuries, and supported their own priests besides.

They gave the sanction of the church to violence, craft, and crime in high places, and they were as far removed as men could be, in origin, position, and practices, from the apostles of the New Testament. And yet, he added, they claimed, in the most haughty manner, that they and they alone were the successors of the apostles, although they showed no signs of apostolic spirituality or apostolic service.

Hugh Bronte declared that he could not submit to the Protestant parson, who despised him because he was poor, and could not aid in his promotion, nor could he yield obedience to the Catholic priest, who demanded utter subjection and prostration of both body and mind, and enforced his church's claims by a stout stick. With these views it is not to be wondered at that Hugh Bronte did not belong to any church.

To us, now, his statements appear exaggerated and too sweeping, but it must be remembered that he spoke of the Irish clergy in the closing decades of the last century. He expressed himself fiercely regarding the parsons, and in return they dubbed him "atheist."

His second negative assertion was:

II. "The world is not God's."

He knew from the Bible that God had made all things very good, and that he loved the world, but he held that a number of people had got in between God and his world, and made it very bad and hateful. They were known as kings and emperors, and they had seized on the world by fraud and force. They lived on the best of everything that the land produced, and when they disagreed among themselves they sent their people to kill each other on their account, while they sat at home in peace and luxury.

These usurpers not only held sway over the possessions and lives of men, but they decreed the exact thoughts men were to entertain concerning God, and the exact words they were to speak concerning God; and when men presumed to obey God rather than men they were tied to stakes and burned to death as blasphemers. For such sentiments as these Hugh Bronte was denounced as a socialist--a very bad and dangerous name at the beginning of the present century.

His third negative proposition was:

III. "Ireland is not the king's."

He understood that King George III. was not a wise man, but that he was a humane man. Ireland was not governed by King George III., but by a gang of rapacious brigands. They constantly invoked the king's name, but only to serve more fully their own selfish ends. By the king's authority they carried out their policy of systematic outrage, until he hated the very name of the king whom he always wished to love.

The chief business of the king's representatives was to plunder his majesty's poorer subjects. For this purpose the country was parcelled out and divided among a number of base and greedy adventurers, in return for odious services. Each of these adventurers became king, or landlord, in his own district, and lived on the wretched natives. Every meskin of butter made on the farm, every pig reared in the cabin, every egg laid by the hens that roosted in the kitchen, went to support the land-king.

The cottages were mud hovels. The land was bog and barren waste. The men and women were in rags. The children were hungry, pinched, and bare-footed. But the landlord carried off everything, except the potato crop, which was barely sufficient to sustain life.

The landlord was a very great man. He lived in London, near the king, in more than royal splendor. Or he passed his time in some of the great cities of Europe, spending as much on gay women as would have clothed and fed all the starving children on his estate. In English society his pleasantries were said to be most entertaining, regarding the poverty, misery, and squalor of his tenants, whom he fleeced; but he took care never to come near them, lest his fine sensibilities should be shocked at their condition. His serious occupation was the making of laws to increase his own power for rapacity, and to take away from the people every vestige of rights that they might have inherited.

"The landlord takes everything and gives nothing," was Hugh Bronte's simple form of the fine modern phrase regarding landlords' privileges and duties.

Hugh Bronte maintained that the landlord was a courteous gentleman, graced with polished manners, and that if he had lived among his people he might in time have developed a heart. At least, he could hardly have kept up a gentlemanly indifference, in the presence of squalor and misery. But he kept quite out of sight of his tenantry, or he would not have made so much merriment about the pig, which was being brought up among the children, to pay for his degrading extravagances. The landlord's place among the people was taken by an agent, an attorney, and a sub-agent. The agent was a local potentate, whose will was law. The attorney's business was to make the law square with the agent's acts. And the under agent was employed to do mean and vile and inhuman acts, that neither the agent nor attorney could conveniently do.

The duty of the three was to find out, by public inspection and by private espionage, the uttermost farthing the tenants could pay, and extract it from them legally. In getting the rent for the landlord each got as much as he could for himself. The key of the situation was the word "eviction."

Then Hugh told the story of his ancestors' farm. The Brontes had occupied a piece of forfeited land, with well-defined obligations to a chief, or landlord. Soon the landlord succeeded in removing all legal restraints which in any way interfered with his absolute control of the place. Remonstrance and entreaty were alike unavailing. The alterations in title were made by the authority of "George III., by the grace of God King of England!"

Hugh's great-grandfather drained the bog and improved the land, at enormous expense. Every improvement was followed by a rise in the rent. His grandfather built a fine house on the land, by money made in dealing, and again the rent was raised, on the increased value given to the place by the tenant's industry. Then, the vilest creature in human form having ingratiated himself with the agent, by vile services, the place was handed over to him, without one farthing of compensation to the heirs of the man whose labor had made the place of value. All these things were done in the name of George III., though the king had no more to do with the nefarious transactions than the child unborn.

From this conclusion Hugh Bronte proceeded to his fourth negative proposition:

IV. "Irish law is not justice."

He expressed regret that he was unable to respect the laws of the country. According to his views, the laws were made by an assembly of landlords, purely and solely to serve their own rapacious desires, and not in accordance with any dictates of right or wrong. As soon might the lambs respect the laws of the wolves as the people of Ireland respect the laws of the landlords.

From this point he naturally arrived at his fifth negative proposition:

V. "Obedience to law is not a duty."

He said it might be prudent to obey a bad law, cruelly administered, because disobedience might entail inconvenient consequences; but there was no moral obligation impelling a man to obey a law which outraged decency, and against which every righteous and generous instinct revolted. Human laws should be the reflection of divine laws; but the landlord-made laws of Ireland had neither the approval of honest men nor the sanction of divine justice.

Hugh's sixth and last negative proposition was:

VI. "Patriotism is not a virtue."

He held that every man should love his country, and that every Irishman did; but he could not do violence to the most sacred instincts of his nature, by any zeal to uphold a system of government which dealt with Ireland as the legitimate prey of plunderers.

In other lands men were patriotic because they loved their country. He loved his country too well to be a patriot. Love of country more than any other passion had prompted to the purest patriotism; but who would do heroic acts to maintain a swarm of harpies to pollute and lacerate his country? Who would have his zeal aglow to maintain the desolators of his native land?

Hugh Bronte gave out his views with a warmth that betrayed _animus_ arising from personal injury. He was therefore declared to be disloyal, and that at a time when there was danger in disloyalty. About the time Hugh Bronte was enunciating these sentiments the rising of the United Irishmen took place, and the pitched battle of Ballynahinch was fought, in 1798. It has always seemed to me strange that he should have passed through those times in peace, for the "Welsh horse" devastated the country far and wide after the battle, and hundreds of innocent people were shot down like dogs. Besides, William, his second son, was a United Irishman, and present at the battle of Ballynahinch. After the battle he was pursued by cavalry, who fired at him repeatedly, but he led them into a bog and escaped.

Hugh Bronte lived in a secluded glen; but the "Welsh horse" visited his house, and after a short parley with his wife, in which neither understood the other, one of the soldiers struck a light into the thatch. Hugh suddenly appeared and spoke to the Welsh soldiers in Irish, which it was supposed they understood, as being akin to their own language, and they joined heartily with him in extinguishing the flames. They joined still more heartily with Hugh in disposing of his stock of whiskey. The inability of Hugh's neighbors to communicate with the Welsh may account for the fact that a man well known for such advanced and disloyal views passed safely through those troublous times.

Having completed his negative assertions, or paradoxes, Hugh Bronte proceeded to state his theories, or positive conclusions. He laid it down as an axiom that justice must be at the root of all good government, and he declared emphatically what O'Connell and Agent Townsend have since maintained, that the Irish were the most justice-loving people in the world. He also held that unjust laws were the fruitful source of all the turbulence and crime in Ireland.

Justice, he said, was nothing very grand. It meant simply that every man should have his own by legal right. This definition brought him to his tenant-right theory. In illustration he returned to the story of his ancestral home and the wrongs of his ancestors. He maintained that when his forefathers drained the bog and improved the land they were entitled to every ounce of improvement they had made. The landlord had done nothing for the land. He never went near it, and had never spent one farthing upon it, and he should not have been entitled to confiscate to his own profit the additional value given to it by the labor of another.

He further declared that a just and wise legislature should secure to every man, high and low, the fruits of his own labor, and he maintained that such simple, natural justice would produce confidence in Ireland, and that confidence would beget content and industry, and that a contented and industrious people would soon learn to love both king and country, and make Ireland happy and England strong. Just laws would silence the agitator and the blunderbuss, and range the people on the side of the rulers.

Hugh Bronte preached his revolutionary doctrines of simple justice in the cheerless east wind, but a little seed, carried I know not how, took root in genial soil, and the revolutionary doctrine of "_Every man his own_," at which the political parsons used to cry "Anathema," and the short-sighted politicians used to shout "confiscation," has become one of the commonplaces of the modern reformation programme of fair play. The doctrine of common honesty enunciated by Hugh Bronte has lately received the approval of Liberal and Conservative governments in what is known as "Tenant-Right," or "The Ulster Custom."

And here it is interesting to note that Hugh Bronte was a tenant on the estate of Sharman Crawford, a landlord who first took up the cause of Irish tenant-right, and after spending a long life in its advocacy, bequeathed its defence to his sons and daughters.

Whether Hugh Bronte's doctrines on the relation of landlord and tenant ever came to the ears of the Crawford family, I know not. I think it is exceedingly probable that they heard of the remarkable man on their estate, and of his stories and theories. The Crawfords were never absentee landlords, and, as men of high Christian character, they always took a personal interest in their tenants, and would not, I believe, have failed to note any special intellectual activity among them. It is certain, however, that the Sharman Crawfords, father and son in succession, spent their lives largely in the propagation of Hugh Bronte's views, both in the House of Commons and throughout the country, and it seems to me not only probable and possible, but almost certain, that Bronte's eloquent and passionate arguments, dropped into the justice-loving minds of the Crawfords,[5] _may_ have been the primary seeds of the great agrarian harvest which, with the full sanction of the legislature, is now being reaped by the farmers in Ireland.

[5] In 1833 W. Sharman Crawford published a pamphlet embodying Hugh
Bronte's doctrines, and making suggestions for the good
government of Ireland. The pamphlet was republished by Doctor W.
H. Dodd, Q. C., in 1892. Councillor Dodd is an old pupil of the
Ballynaskeagh school. He received his early education from Mr.
McKee, the friend of the Brontes, and he was acquainted, as a
student, with Charlotte Bronte's uncles. The following is his
summary of the political portion of the pamphlet:

"Mr. Crawford anticipates, as the probable result of refusing
self government to Ireland, the growth of secret societies, the
influence of agitation, and the necessity of resorting to force
in the government of the country. He touches upon the question
of private bill legislation, of a reform of the grand jury
system, of county government. He points out that the creation of
county councils, without having a central body to control them,
is not desirable. And he suggests the creation of a local
legislature for Irish affairs, combined with representation in
the Imperial Parliament, as the true method of preserving the
Union, as the surest bond of the connection between the two
countries, and as essentially necessary to tranquillity in
Ireland.

"He refers, among other measures, to the disestablishment of the
Irish Church, and the reform of the relations between landlord
and tenant, as being pressing.

"The arguments against his views are met and answered. One would
think he had read some of the speeches lately delivered, so apt
is his reply.

"It is curious to note the length of time Ireland has had to
wait for the reforms he thought urgent, and it is sad to reflect
how much suffering has been endured and how much blood has been
shed because the men of his time would not listen to his
words."

Should my surmise be correct, and I have never doubted for forty years that it is so, great results have flowed from the inhuman treatment of a child. Had little Bronte been left in the luxury of his father's home, it is not likely he would ever have been shaken up to original and independent thought; but the iron of cruel wrong had entered into his soul, and he felt that all was not well. He owed no gratitude to the existing order of things, and had no compunction in denouncing it; and having thought out and formulated a new theory, he proclaimed it with the strong conviction of an apostle who sees salvation in his gospel alone.

The daring character of Hugh Bronte's speculations in their paradoxical form, combined with the fierce energy of his manner in making them known, secured for him an audience and an amount of consideration to which, as an uneducated working man, he could have had no claim. Indeed, Hugh Bronte's revolutionary doctrines were known far beyond his own immediate neighborhood, and while many said he was mad, some declared that he only saw a little clearer than his contemporaries.

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