Ireland Under Coercion Volume Ii Part 8

The house is stately and commodious, and more ancient than it appears to be,--so many additions have been made to it at different times. It has pa.s.sed through more than one siege, and in the '98 Mr. Kavanagh tells me the townspeople of Borris came up here and sought refuge. There are vast caverns under the house and grounds, doubtless made by taking out from the hill the stone used in building this house, and the fortresses which stood here before it. In these all sorts of stores were kept, and many of the people found shelter.

I need not say that there is a banshee at Borris--though no living witness, I believe, has heard its warning wail. But as we sat in the beautiful library, and watched the dying light of day, a lady present told us a tale more gruesome than many of those in which the "psychical"

inquirers delight. She was sitting, she said, in an upper room of an ancient mansion here in Carlow, in which she lives, when, from the lawn below, there came up to her a low, sad, shrill cry--the croon of a woman, such as one hears from the mourners sitting among the turbaned tombstones of the hill of Eyoub at Constantinople. It startled her, and she held her breath and listened. She was alone, as she knew, in that part of the house, and the hall door below was unlocked, as is the fashion still in Ireland, despite all the troubles and turmoils. Again the sound came, and this time nearer to the house. Could it be the banshee? Again and again it rose and died away, each time nearer and nearer. Then, as she listened, all her nerves strung to the keenest sensibility, it came again, and now, beyond a doubt, within the hall below.

With an effort she rose from her chair, opened a door leading into a corridor running aside from the main stairway, and fled at full speed towards the wing in which she knew that she would find some of the maids. As she sped along she heard the cry again and again far behind her, as from a creature slowly and steadily mounting the grand stairway towards the room which she had just quitted.

She found the maids, who fell into a terrible fright when she told her story and dared not budge. So the bells were violently rung till the butler and footman appeared. To the first she said simply, "There is a mad woman in this house--go and find her!"

"The man looked at me," she said, "as I spoke with a curious expression in his face as of one who thought, 'yes, there is a mad woman in the house, and she is not far to seek!'"

But the lady insisted, and the men finally went off on their quest. In the course of half an hour it was rewarded. The mad woman--a dangerous creature--who had wandered away from an asylum in the neighbourhood, was found curled up and fast asleep in the lady's own bed!

Fancy a delicate woman going alone into her bedroom at midnight to be suddenly confronted by an apparition of that sort!

BORRIS, _March 3d._--After a stroll on the lawn this morning, the wide and glorious prospect bathed in the light of a really soft spring day, I had a conversation with Mr. Kavanagh about the Land Corporation, of which he is the guiding spirit. This is a defensive organisation of the Irish landlords against the Land League. When a landlord has been driven into evicting his tenants, the next step, in the "war against landlordism," is to prevent other tenants from taking the vacated lands and cultivating them. This is accomplished by "boycotting" any man who does this as a "land-grabber."

The ultimate sanction of the "boycott" being "murder," derelict farms increased under this system very rapidly; and the Eleventh Commandment of the League, "Thou shalt not pay the rent which thy neighbour hath refused to pay," was in a fair way to dethrone the Ten Commandments of Sinai throughout Ireland, even before the formal adoption in 1886 of the "Plan of Campaign."

Mr. Gladstone would perhaps have hit the facts more accurately, if, instead of calling an eviction in Ireland a "sentence of death," he had called the taking of a tenancy a sentence of death. Mr. Hussey at Lixnaw had two tenants, Edmond and James Fitzmaurice. Edmond Fitzmaurice was "evicted" in May 1887; but he was taken into the house of a neighbour, made very comfortable, and still lives. James Fitzmaurice took, for the sake of the family, the land from which Edmond was evicted, and for this he was denounced as a "land-grabber," boycotted, and finally shot dead in the presence of his daughter.

At a meeting in Dublin in the autumn of 1885, a parish priest, the Rev.

Mr. Cantwell, described it as a "cardinal virtue" that "no one should take a farm from which another had been evicted," and called upon the people who heard him to "pa.s.s any such man by unnoticed, and treat him as an enemy in their midst." Public opinion and the law, if not the authorities of his church would make short work of any priest who talked in this fashion in New York. But in Ireland, and under the British Government, it seems they order things differently. So it occurred one day to the landlords thus a.s.sailed, as it did to the sea-lions of the Cape of Good Hope when the French sailors attacked them, that they might defend themselves.

To this end the Land Corporation was inst.i.tuted, with a considerable capital at its back, and Mr. Kavanagh at its head. The "plan of campaign" of this Corporation is to take over from the landlords derelict lands and cultivate them, stocking them where that is necessary.

It is in this way that the derelict lands on the Ponsonby property at Youghal are now worked. But Mr. Kavanagh tells me that the men employed by the Corporation, of whom Father Keller spoke as a set of desperadoes or "_enfants perdus_," are really a body of resolute and capable working men farmers. Many, but by no means all of them, are Protestants and Ulstermen; and that they are up to their work would seem to be shown by the fact stated to me, that in no case so far have any of them been deterred and driven off from the holdings confided to them. A great part of the Luggacurren property of Lord Lansdowne is now worked by the Corporation; and Mr. Kavanagh was kind enough to let me see the accounts, which indicate a good business result for the current year on that property. This is all very interesting. But what a picture it presents of social demoralisation! And what is to be the end of it all?

Can a country be called civilised in which a farmer with a family to maintain, having the capital and the experience necessary to manage successfully a small farm, is absolutely forbidden, on pain of social ostracism, and eventually on pain of death, by a conspiracy of his neighbours, to take that farm of its lawful owner at what he considers to be a fair rent? And how long can any civilisation of our complex modern type endure in a country in which such a state of things tolerated by the alleged Government of that country has to be met, and more or less partially mitigated, by deviating to the cultivation of farms rendered in this way derelict large amounts of capital which might be, and ought to be, far more profitably employed in other ways?

Mr. Kavanagh, after serving the office of High Sheriff thirty years ago, first for Kilkenny, and then for Carlow, sat in Parliament for fourteen years, from 1866 to 1880, as an Irish county member. He has a very large property here in Carlow, and property also in Wexford, and in Kilkenny, and was sworn into the Privy Council two years ago. If the personal interests and the family traditions of any man alive can be said to be rooted in the Irish soil, this is certainly true of his interests and his traditions. How can the peace and prosperity of Ireland be served by a state of things which condemns an Irishman of such ties and such training to expend his energies and his ability in defending the elementary right of Paddy O'Rourke to take stock and work a ten-acre farm on terms that suit himself and his landlord?

In the afternoon we took a delightful walk through the woods, Mr.

Kavanagh going with us on horseback. Every hill and clump of trees on this large domain he knows, and he led us like a master of woodcraft through all manner of leafy byways to the finest points of view. The Barrow flows past Borris, making pictures at every turn, and the banks on both sides are densely and beautifully wooded. We came in one place upon a sawmill at work in the forest, and Mr. Kavanagh showed us with pride the piles of excellent timber which he turns out here. But he took a greater pride in a group, sacred from the axe, of really magnificent Scotch firs, such as I had certainly not expected to find in Ireland.

Nearer the mansion are some remarkable Irish yews. The gardens are of all sorts and very extensive, but we found the head-gardener bitterly lamenting the destruction by a fire in one of the conservatories of more than six thousand plants just prepared for setting out.

There are many curious old books and papers here, and a student of early Irish history might find matter to keep him well employed for a long time in this region. It was from this region and the race which ruled it, of which race Mr. Kavanagh is the actual representative, that the initiative came of the first Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland. Strongbow made what, from the Anglo-Norman point of view, was a perfectly legitimate bargain, with a dispossessed prince to help him to the recovery of his rights on the understanding that these rights, when recovered, should pa.s.s in succession to himself through the only daughter of the prince, whom he proposed to marry. It does not appear that Strongbow knew, or that Dermot MacMorrogh cared to tell him, how utterly unlike the rights of an Anglo-Norman prince were those of the elective life-tenant of an Irish princ.i.p.ality. FitzStephen, the son by her second marriage of Nesta, the Welsh royal mistress of Henry Beauclerk, and his cousin, Maurice Fitzgerald, the leaders into Ireland of the Geraldines, were no more clear in their minds about this than Strongbow, and it is to the original muddle thus created that Professor Richey doubtless rightly refers the worst and most troublesome complications of the land question in Ireland. The distinction between the King's lieges and the "mere Irish," for example, is unquestionably a legal distinction, though it is continually and most mischievously used as if it were a proof of the race-hatred borne by the Normans and Saxons in Ireland from the first against the Celts. The O'Briens, the O'Neills, the O'Mullaghlins, the O'Connors, and the M'Morroghs, "the five bloods,"

as they are called, were certainly Celts, but whether in virtue of their being, or claiming to be, the royal races respectively of Minister, of Ulster, of Meath, of Connaught, and of Leinster, or from whatever other reason, these races were "within the king's law," and were never "mere Irish" from the first planting of the Anglo-Norman power in Ireland. The case of a priest, Shan O'Kerry, "an Irish enemy of the king," presented "contrary to the form of statute" to the vicarage of Lusk, in the reign of Edward IV. (1465), ill.u.s.trates this. An Act of Parliament was pa.s.sed to declare the aforesaid "Shan O'Kerry," or "John of Kevernon," to be "English born, and of English nation," and that he might "hold and enjoy the said benefice."

There is a genealogy here of the M'Morroghs and Kavanaghs, most gorgeously and elaborately gotten up many years ago for Mr. Kavanagh's grandfather, which shows how soon the Norman and the native strains of blood become commingled. When one remembers how much Norman blood must have gone even into far-off Connaught when King John, in the early part of the thirteenth century, coolly gave away that realm of the O'Connors to the De Burgos, and how continually the English of the Pale fled from the exactions inflicted upon them by their own people, and sought refuge "among the savage and mere Irish," one cannot help thinking that the"

Race Question" has been "worked for at least all it is worth" by philosophers bent on unravelling the 'snarl' of Irish affairs. If this genealogy may be trusted, there was little to choose between the ages which immediately preceded and the ages which followed the Anglo-Norman invasion in the matter of respect for human life. Celtic chiefs and Norman knights "died in their boots" as regularly as frontiersmen in Texas. One personage is designated in the genealogy as "the murderer,"

for the truly Hibernian reason, so far as appears, that he was himself murdered while quite a youth, and before he had had a chance to murder more than three or four of his immediate relatives. It was as if the son of Geoffrey Plantagenet and the Lady Constance should be branded in history as "Arthur, the a.s.sa.s.sin."

BORRIS, _March 4th._--This is a staunch Protestant house, and Mr.

Kavanagh himself reads a Protestant service every morning. But there is little or nothing apparently in this part of Ireland of the bitter feeling about and against the Catholics which exists in the North. A very lively and pleasant Catholic gentleman came in to-day informally and joined the house party at luncheon. We all walked out over the property afterwards, visiting quite a different region from that which we saw yesterday--different but equally beautiful and striking, and this Catholic gentleman cited several cases which had fallen within his own knowledge of priests who begin to feel their moral control of the people slipping away from them through the operation of the "Plan of Campaign."

I told him what I had heard in regard to one such priest from my ecclesiastical friend in Cork. "It does not surprise me at all," he said, "and, indeed, I not very long ago read precisely such another letter from a priest in a somewhat similar position. I read it with pain and shame as a Catholic," he continued, "for it was simply a complete admission that the priest, although entirely convinced that his parishioners were making most unfair demands upon their landlord to whom the letter was addressed, felt himself entirely powerless to bring them to a sense of their misconduct." "Had this priest given in his adhesion to the Plan of Campaign?" I asked. "Yes," was the reply, "and it was this fact which had broken his hold on the people when he tried to bring them to abandon their att.i.tude under the Plan. His letter was really nothing more nor less than an appeal to the landlord, and that landlord a Protestant, to help him to get out of the hole into which he had put himself."

Of the tenants and their relation to the village despots who administer the Plan of Campaign, this gentleman had many stories also to tell of the same tenor with all that I have hitherto heard on this subject.

Everywhere it is the same thing. The well-to-do and well-disposed tenants are coerced by the thriftless and shiftless. "I have the agencies of several properties," he said, "and in some of the best parts of Ireland. I have had little or no trouble on any of them, for I have one uniform method. I treat every tenant as if he were the only man I had to deal with, study his personal ways and character, humour him, and get him on my side against himself. You can always do this with an Irishman if you will take the trouble to do it. Within the past years I have had tenants come and tell me they were in fear the Plan of Campaign would be brought upon them, just as if it were a kind of potato disease, and beg me to agree to take the rent from them in that case, and just not discover on them that they had paid it before it was due!"

This gentleman is a pessimist as to the future. "I am a youngish man still," he said, "and a single man, and I am glad of it. I don't believe the English will ever learn how to govern this country, and I am sure it can never govern itself. Would your people make a State of it?"

To this I replied that with Cuba and Canada and Mexico, all still to be digested and a.s.similated, I thought the deglut.i.tion of Ireland by the great Republic must be remitted to a future much too remote to interest either of us.

"I suppose so," he said in a humorously despondent tone; "and so I see nothing for people who think as I do, but Australia or New Zealand!"

Mr. Kavanagh sees the future, I think, in colouring not quite so dark.

As a public man, familiar for years with the method and ways of British Parliaments, he seems to regard the possible future legislation of Westminster with more anxiety and alarm than the past or present agitations in Ireland. The business of banishing political economy to Jupiter and Saturn, however delightful it may be to the people who make laws, is a dangerous one to the people for whom the laws are made. While he has very positive opinions as to the wisdom of the concession made in the successive Land Acts for Ireland, which have been pa.s.sed since 1870, he is much less disquieted, I think, by those concessions, than by the spirit by which the legislation granting them has been guided. He thinks great good has been already done by Mr. Balfour, and that much more good will be done by him if the Irish people are made to feel that clamorous resistance to the law will no longer be regarded at Westminster as a sufficient reason for changing the law. That is as much as to say that party spirit in Great Britain is the chief peril of Ireland to-day. And how can any Irishman, no matter what his state in his own country may be, or his knowledge of Irish affairs, or his patriotic earnestness and desire for Irish prosperity, hope to control the tides of party spirit in England or Scotland?

Of the influence upon the people in Ireland of the spirit of recent legislation for Ireland, the story of the troubles on the O'Grady estate, as Mr. Kavanagh tells it to me, is a most striking ill.u.s.tration.

"The O'Grady of Kilballyowen," as his t.i.tle shows, is the direct representative, not of any Norman invader, but of an ancient Irish race.

The O'Gradys were the heads of a sept of the "mere Irish"; and if there be such a thing--past, present, or future--as an "Irish nation," the place of the O'Gradys in that nation ought to be a.s.sumed. Mr. Thomas De Courcy O'Grady, who now wears the historic designation, owns and lives on an estate of a little more than 1000 acres, in the Golden Vein of Ireland, at Killmallock, in the county of Limerick. The land is excellent, and for the last half-century certainly it has been let to the tenants at rents which must be considered fair, since they have never been raised. In 1845, two years before the great famine, the rental was 2142. This rental was paid throughout the famine years without difficulty; and in 1881 the rental stood at 2108.

There has never been an eviction on the estate until last year, when six tenants were evicted. All of these lived in good comfortable houses, and were prosperous dairy-farmers. Why were they evicted?

In October 1886, during the candidacy at New York of the Land Reformer, Mr. George, Mr. Dillon, M.P., propounded the "Plan of Campaign" at Portumna in Galway. The March rents being then due on the estate of The O'Grady in Limerick, his agent, Mr. Shine, was directed to continue the abatements of 15 per cent, on the judicial rents, and of 25 per cent, on all other rents, which had been cheerfully accepted in 1885. But there was a priest at Kilballyowen, Father Ryan, who wrought upon the tenants until they demanded a general abatement of 40 per cent. This being refused, they asked for 30 per cent. on the judicial rents, and 40 per cent. on the others. This also being refused, Father Ryan had his way, and the "Plan of Campaign" was adopted. The O'Grady's writs issued against several of the tenants were met by a "Plan of Campaign" auction of cattle at Herbertstown in December 1886, the returns of which were paid into "the Fund." For this, one of the tenants, Thomas Moroney, who held, besides a a farm of 37 Irish acres, a "public," and five small houses, at Herbertstown, and the right to the tolls on cattle at the Herbertstown farm, valued at from 50 to 60 a year, and who held all these at a yearly rent of 85, was proceeded against. Judge Boyd p.r.o.nounced him a bankrupt.

In the spring of 1887, after The O'Grady had been put to great costs and trouble, the tenants made a move. They offered to accept a general abatement of 17-1/2 per cent., "The O'Grady to pay all the costs."

Here is the same story again of the small solicitors behind the "Plan of Campaign" promoting the strife, and counting on the landlords to defray the charges of battle!

The O'Grady responded with the following circular:--

KlLLBALLYOWEN, BRUFF, CO. LlMERICK,

_13th August 1877_.

To my Tenants on Kilballyowen and Herbertstown Estate, Co.

Limerick.

MY FRIENDS,--Pending the evictions by the Sheriff on my estate, caused by your refusal to pay judicial rents on offers of liberal abatements, I desire to remind you of the following facts:--

I am a resident landlord; my ancestors have dwelt amongst you for over 400 years; every tenant is personally known to me, and the most friendly relations have always existed between us.

I am not aware of there ever having been an eviction by the Sheriff on my estate.

Farming myself over 400 acres, and my late agent (Mr. Shine), a tenant farmer living within four miles of my property, I have every opportunity of realising and knowing your wants.

On the pa.s.sing of the Land Act of 1881, I desired you to have any benefit it could afford you, and as you nearly all held under lease--which precluded you from going into court--I intimated to you my wish, and offered you to allow your lands to be valued at my expense, or to let you go into court and get your rents fixed by the sub-commissioners.

You elected to have a valuation made, and Mr. Edmond Moroney was agreed on as a land-valuer, possessing the confidence of tenants and landlord.

I may mention, up to then I had not known Mr. Moroney personally.

In 1883 Mr. Moroney valued your holdings, and, as a result, his valuation was accepted (except in three or four cases), and judicial agreements signed by you, at rents ascertained by Mr.

Moroney's valuation.

The late Patrick Hogan objected to Mr. Moroney's valuation of his farm, and went into court, and had his rent fixed by the County Court Judge.