Ireland Under Coercion Volume Ii Part 16

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 a.s.sociate Luby the charges levelled at them both, without a particle of supporting evidence, by the prosecuting counsel, of aiming at ma.s.sacre and plunder, was its most salient feature. The terrible sentence pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sembled 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 mult.i.tudes 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 Bareres 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 att.i.tude 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 const.i.tutional 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 const.i.tutional agitation simply because it is const.i.tutional. 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."

Dr. Sigerson, who, as a man of science, must necessarily revolt from the coa.r.s.e and clumsy methods of the blunderers who have done so much since 1885 to discredit the cause of Ireland, evidently clings to the hope that something may still be saved from the visible wreck of what has come, even in Ireland, to be called "Parnellism," and he good-naturedly persisted in speaking of our host last night and of his friends as "mugwumps." For the "mugwumps" of my own country I have no particular admiration, being rather inclined, with my friend Senator Conkling (now gone to his rest from the racket of American politics), to regard them as "Madonnas who wish it to be distinctly understood that they might have been Magdalens." But these Irish "mugwumps" seem to me to earn their t.i.tle by simply refusing to believe that two and two, which make four in France or China, can be bullied into making five in Ireland.

"What certain 'Parnellites' object to," said one of the company, "is that we can't be made to go out gathering grapes of thorns or figs of thistles. Some of them expect to found an Irish republic on robbery, and to administer it by falsehood. We don't."[27] This is precisely the spirit in which Mr. Rolleston wrote to me not long before I left England this week. "I have been slowly forced," he wrote, "to the conclusion that the National League is a body which deserves nothing but reprobation from all who wish well to Ireland. It has plunged this country into a state of moral degradation, from which it will take us at least a generation to recover. It is teaching the people that no law of justice, of candour, of honour, or of humanity can be allowed to interfere with the political ends of the moment. It is, in fact, absolutely divorcing morality from politics. The mendacity of some of its leaders is shameless and sickening, and still more sickening is the complete indifference with which this mendacity is regarded in Ireland."

It is the spirit, too, of a letter which I received not long ago from the west of Ireland, in which my correspondent quoted the bearer of one of the most distinguished of Irish names, and a strong "Home Ruler," as saying to him, "These Nationalists are stripping Irishmen as bare of moral sense as the Bushmen of South Africa."

This very day I find in one of the leading Nationalist journals here letters from Mr. Davitt, Mr. O'Leary, and Mr. Taylor himself, which convict that journal of making last week a statement about Mr. Taylor absolutely untrue, and, so far as appears, absolutely without the shadow of a foundation. These letters throw such a curious light on pa.s.sing events here at this moment that I shall preserve them.[28] The statement to which they refer was thus put in the journal which made it: "We have absolute reason to know that when the last Coercion Act was in full swing this pure-souled and disinterested patriot (Mr. John F. Taylor) begged for, received, and accepted a very petty Crown Prosecutorship under a Coercion Government. As was wittily said at the time, He sold his principles, not for a mess of pottage, but for the stick that stirred the mess." This is no a.s.sertion "upon hearsay"--no publication of a rumour or report. It is an a.s.sertion made, not upon belief even, but upon a claim of "absolute knowledge."

Yet to-day, in the same journal, I find Mr. Taylor declaring this statement, made upon a claim of "absolute knowledge," to be "absolutely untrue," and appealing in support of this declaration to Mr. Walker, the host of Lord Riand Mr. Morley, and to The M'Dermot, Q.C., a conspicuous Home Ruler; to which Mr. Davitt adds: "Mr. Taylor, on my advice, declined the Crown Prosecutorship for King's County, a post afterwards applied for by, and granted to, a near relative of one of the most prominent members of the Irish Party,"--meaning Mr. Luke Dillon, a cousin of Mr. John Dillon, M.P.!

We had much interesting conversation last night about the relations of the Irish leaders here with public and party questions in America, as to which I find Mr. O'Leary unusually well and accurately informed.

I am sorry that I must get off to-morrow into Mayo to see Lord Lucan's country there, for I should have been particularly pleased to look more closely with Mr. Rolleston into the intellectual revolt against "Parnellism" and its methods, of which his att.i.tude and that of his friends here is an unmistakable symptom. As he tersely puts it, he sees "no hope in Irish politics, except a reformation of the League, a return to the principles of Thomas Davis."

The lines for a reformation or transformation of the League, as it now exists, appear to have been laid down in the original const.i.tution of the body. Under that const.i.tution, it seems, the League was meant to be controlled by a representative committee chosen annually, open to public criticism, and liable to removal by a new election. As things now are, the officers of this alleged democratic organisation are absolutely self-elected, and wield the wide and indefinite power they possess over the people of Ireland in a perfectly unauthorised, irresponsible way. It is a curious ill.u.s.tration of the autocratic or bureaucratic system under which the Irish movement is now conducted, that Mr. Davitt, who does not pretend to be a Parliamentarian, and owes indeed much of his authority to his refusal to enter Parliament and take oaths of allegiance, does not hesitate for a moment to discipline any Irish member of Parliament who incurs his disapprobation. Sir Thomas Esmonde, for example, was severely taken to task by him the other day in the public prints for venturing to put a question, in his place at Westminster, to the Government about a man-of-war stationed in Kingstown harbour. Mr. Davitt very peremptorily ordered Sir Thomas to remember that he is not sent to Westminster to recognise the British Government, or concern himself about British regiments or ships, and Sir Thomas accepts the rebuke in silence. Whom does such a member of Parliament represent--the const.i.tuents who nominally elect him, or the leader who cracks the whip over him so sharply?

I have to-day been looking through a small and beautifully-printed volume of poems just issued here by Gill and Son, Nationalist publishers, I take it, who have the courage of their convictions, since their books bear the imprint of "O'Connell," and not of Sackville Street. This little book of the _Poems and Ballads of Young Ireland _is a symptom too. It is dedicated in a few brief but vigorous stanzas to John O'Leary, as one who

"Hated all things base, And held his country's honour high."

And the spirit of all the poems it contains is the spirit of '48, or of that earlier Ireland of Robert Emmet, celebrated in some charming verses by "Rose Kavanagh" on "St. Michan's Churchyard," where the

"sunbeam went and came Above the stone which waits the name His land must write with freedom's flame."

It interests an American to find among these poems and ballads a striking threnody called "The Exile's Return," signed with the name of "Patrick Henry"; and it is noteworthy, for more reasons than one, that the volume winds up with a "Marching Song of the Gaelic Athletes,"

signed "An Chraoibhin Aoibbinn." These Athletes are numbered now, I am a.s.sured, not by thousands, but by myriads, and their organisation covers all parts of Ireland. If the spirit of '48 and of '98 is really moving among them, I should say they are likely to be at least as troublesome in the end to the "uncrowned king" as to the crowned Queen of Ireland.

As for the literary merit of these _Poems and Ballads of Young Ireland_, it strikes one key with their political quality. One exquisite ballad of "The Stolen Child," by W. B. Yeats, might have been sung in the moonlight on a sylvan lake by the spirit of Heinrich Heine.

I spent an hour or two this morning most agreeably in the libraries of the Law Courts and of Trinity College: the latter one of the stateliest most academic "halls of peace" I have ever seen; and this afternoon I called upon Dr. Sigerson, a most patriotic Irishman, of obviously Danish blood, who has his own ideas as to Clontarf and Brian Boru; and who gave me very kindly a copy of his valuable report on that Irish Crisis of 1879-80, out of which Michael Davitt so skilfully developed the agrarian movement whereof "Parnellism" down to this time has been the not very well adjusted instrument. The report was drawn up after a thorough inspection by Dr. Sigerson and his a.s.sociate, Dr. Kenny, visiting physicians to the North Dublin Union, of some of the most distressed districts of Mayo, Sligo, and Galway; and a more interesting, intelligent, and impressive picture of the worst phases of the social conditions of Ireland ten years ago is not to be found. I have just been reading it over carefully in conjunction with my memoranda made from the Emigration and Seed Potato Fund Reports, which Mr. Tuke gave me some time ago, and it strongly reinforces the evidence imbedded in those reports, which goes to show that agitation for political objects in Ireland has perhaps done as much as all other causes put together to depress the condition of the poor in Ireland, by driving and keeping capital out of the country. The worst districts visited in 1879 by Dr.

Sigerson and Dr. Kenny do not appear to have been so completely cut off from civilisation as was the region about Gweedore before the purchase of his property there by Lord George Hill, and the remedies suggested by Dr. Sigerson for the suffering in these districts are all in the direction of the remedies applied by Lord George Hill to the condition in which he found Gweedore. After giving full value to the stock explanations of Irish distress in the congested districts, such as excessive rents, penal laws, born of religious or "racial" animosity, and a defective system of land tenure, it seems to be clear that the main difficulties have arisen from the isolation of these districts, and from the lack of varied industries. Political agitation has checked any flow of capital into these districts, and a flow of capital into them would surely have given them better communications and more varied industries. Dr. Sigerson states that some of the worst of these regions in the west of Ireland are as well adapted to flax-culture as Ulster, and Napoleon III. showed what could be done for such wastes as La Sologne and the desert of the Landes by the intelligent study of a country and the judicious development of such values as are inherent in it. The loss of population in Ireland is not unprecedented. The State of New Hampshire, in America, one of the original thirteen colonies which established the American Union, has twice shown an actual loss in population during the past century. The population of the State declined during the decade between 1810 and 1820, and again during the decade between 1860 and 1870. This phenomenon, unique in American history, is to be explained only by three causes, all active in the case of congested Ireland,--a decaying agriculture, lack of communications, and the absence of varied industries. During the decade from 1860 to 1870 the great Civil War was fought out. Yet, despite the terrible waste of life and capital in that war, especially at the South, the Northern State of New Hampshire, peopled by the energetic English adventurers who founded New England, was actually the only State which came out of the contest with a positive decline in population. Virginia (including West Virginia, which seceded from that Commonwealth in 1861) rose from 1,596,318 inhabitants in 1860 to 1,667,177 in 1870. South Carolina, which was ravaged by the war more severely than any State except Virginia, and upon which the Republican majority at Washington pressed with such revengeful hostility after the downfall of the Confederacy, showed in 1870 a positive increase in population, as compared with 1860, from 703,708 to 705,606. But New Hampshire, lying hundreds of miles beyond the area of the conflict, showed a positive decrease from 326,073 to 318,300. During my college days at Cambridge the mountain regions of New Hampshire were favourite "stamping grounds" in the vacations, and I exaggerate nothing when I say that in the secluded nooks and corners of the State, the people cut off from communication with the rest of New England, and scratching out of a rocky land an inadequate subsistence, were not much, if at all, in advance of the least prosperous dwellers in the most remote parts of Ireland which I have visited. They furnished their full contingent to that strange American exodus, which, about a quarter of a century ago, was led out of New England by one Adams to the Holy Land, in antic.i.p.ation of the Second Advent, a real modern crusade of superst.i.tious land speculators, there to perish, for the most part, miserably about Jaffa--leaving houses and allotments to pa.s.s into the control of a more practical colony of Teutons, which I found establishing itself there in 1869.

Since 1870 a change has come over New Hampshire. The population has risen to 346,984. In places waste and fallen twenty years ago brisk and smiling villages have sprung up along lines of communication established to carry on the business of thriving factories.

What reason can there be in the nature of things to prevent the development of a.n.a.logous results, through the application of a.n.a.logous forces, in the case of "congested" Ireland? A Nationalist friend, to whom I put this question this afternoon, answers it by alleging that so long as fiscal laws for Ireland are made at Westminster, British capital invested in Great Britain will prevent the application of these a.n.a.logous forces to "congested" Ireland. His notion is that were Ireland as independent of Great Britain, for example, in fiscal matters as is Canada, Ireland might seek and secure a fiscal union with the United States, such as was partially secured to Canada under the Reciprocity Treaty denounced by Mr. Seward.

"Give us this," he said, "and take us into your system of American free-trade as between the different States of your American Union, and no end of capital will soon be coming into Ireland, not only from your enormously rich and growing Republic, but from Great Britain too. Give us the American market, putting Great Britain on a less-favoured footing, just as Mr. Blake and his party wish to do in the case of Canada, and between India doing her own manufacturing on the one side, and Ireland becoming a manufacturing centre on the other, and a mart in Europe for American goods, we'll get our revenge on Elizabeth and Cromwell in a fashion John Bull has never dreamt of in these times, though he used to be in a mortal funk of it a hundred years ago, when there wasn't nearly as much danger of it!"

DUBLIN, _Sunday, June 24._--"Put not your faith in porters!" I had expected to pa.s.s this day at Castlebar, on the estate of Lord Lucan, and I exchanged telegrams to that effect yesterday with Mr. Harding, the Earl's grandson, who, in the absence of his wonderfully energetic grandsire, is administering there what Lord Lucan, with pardonable pride, declares to be the finest and most successful dairy-farm in all Ireland. I asked the porter to find the earliest morning train; and after a careful search he a.s.sured me that by leaving Dublin just after 7 A.M. I could reach Castlebar a little after noon.

Upon this I determined to dine with Mr. Colomb, and spend the night in Dublin. But when I reached the station a couple of hours ago, it was to discover that my excellent porter had confounded 7 A.M. with 7 P.M.

There is no morning train to Castlebar! So here I am with no recourse, my time being short, but to give up the glimpse I had promised myself of Mayo, and go on this afternoon to Belfast on my way back to London.

At dinner last night Mr. Colomb gave me further and very interesting light upon the events of 1867, of which he had already spoken with me at Cork, as well as upon the critical period of Mr. Gladstone's experiments of 1881-82 at "Coercion" in Ireland.

Mr. Colomb lives in a remarkably bright and pleasant suburb of Dublin, which not only is called a "park," as suburbs are apt to be, but really is a park, as suburbs are less apt to be. His house is set near some very fine old trees, shading a beautiful expanse of turf. He is an amateur artist of much more than ordinary skill. His walls are gay, and his portfolios filled, with charming water-colours, sketches, and studies made from Nature all over the United Kingdom. The grand coast-scenery of Cornwall and of Western Ireland, the lovely lake landscapes of Killarney, sylvan homes and storied towers, all have been laid under contribution by an eye quick to seize and a hand prompt to reproduce these most subtle and transient atmospheric effects of light and colour which are the legitimate domain of the true water-colourist.

With all these pictures about us--and with Mr. Colomb's workshop fitted up with Armstrong lathes and all manner of tools wherein he varies the routine of official life by making all manner of instruments, and wreaking his ingenuity upon all kinds of inventions--and with the pleasant company of Mr. Davies, the agreeable and accomplished official secretary of Sir West Ridgway, the evening wore quickly away. In the course of conversation the question of the average income of the Irish priests arose, and I mentioned the fact that Lord Lucan, whose knowledge of the smallest details of Irish life is amazingly thorough, puts it down at about ten shillings a year per house in the average Irish parish.

He rated Father M'Fadden and his curate of Gweedore, for example, without a moment's hesitation, at a thousand pounds a year in the whole, or very nearly the amount stated to me by Sergeant Mahony at Baron's Court. This brought from Mr. Davies a curious account of the proceedings in a recent case of a contested will before Judge Warren here in Dublin.

The will in question was made by the late Father M'Garvey of Milford, a little village near Mulroy Bay in Donegal, notable chiefly as the scene of the murder of the late Earl of Leitrim. Father M'Garvey, who died in March last, left by this will to religious and charitable uses the whole of his property, save 800 bequeathed in it to his niece, Mrs. O'Connor.

It was found that he died possessed not only of a farm at Ardara, but of cash on deposit in the Northern Bank to the very respectable amount of 23,711. Mrs. O'Connor contested the will. The Archbishop of Armagh, and Father Sheridan, C.C. of Letterkenny, inst.i.tuted an action against her to establish the will. Father M'Fadden of Gweedore, lying in Londonderry jail as a first-cla.s.s misdemeanant, was brought from Londonderry as a witness for the niece. But on the trial of the case it appeared that there was actually no evidence to sustain the plea of the niece that "undue influence" had been exerted upon her uncle by the Archbishop, who at the time of the making of the will was Bishop of Raphoe, or by anybody else; so the judge instructed the jury to find on all the issues for the plaintiffs, which was done. The judge declared the conduct of the defendant in advancing a charge of "undue influence" in such circ.u.mstances against ecclesiastics to be most reprehensible; but the Archbishop very graciously intimated through his lawyer his intention of paying the costs of the niece who had given him all this trouble, because she was a poor woman who had been led into her course by disappointment at receiving so small a part of so large an inheritance.

Had the priest's property come to him in any other way than through his office as a priest her claim might have been more worthy of consideration, but Mr. M'Dermot, Q.C., who represented the Archbishop, took pains to make it clear that as an ecclesiastic his client, who had nothing to do with the making of the will, was bound to regard it "as proper and in accordance with the fitness of things that what had been received from the poor should be given back to the poor."

I see no adequate answer to this contention of the Archbishop. But it certainly goes to confirm the estimates given me by Sergeant Mahony of Father M'Fadden's receipts at Gweedore, and the opinion expressed to me by Lord Lucan as to the average returns of an average Catholic parish, that the priest of Milford, a place hardly so considerable as Gweedore, should have acquired so handsome a property in the exercise there of his parochial functions.

One form in which the priests in many parts of Ireland collect dues is certainly unknown to the practice of the Church elsewhere, I believe, and it must tend to swell the incomes of the priests at the expense, perhaps, of their legitimate influence. This is the custom of personal collections by the priests. In many parishes the priest stands by the church-door, or walks about the church--not with a bag in his hand, as is sometimes done in France on great occasions when a _quele_ is made by the _cure_ for some special object,--but with an open plate in which the people put their offerings. I have heard of parishes in which the priest sits by a table near the church-door, takes the offerings from the parishioners as they pa.s.s, and comments freely upon the ratio of the gift to the known or presumed financial ability of the giver.

We had some curious stories, too, from a gentleman present of the relation of the priests in wild, out-of-the-way corners of Ireland to the people, stories which take one back to days long before Lever. One, for example, of a delightful and stalwart old parish priest of eighty, upon whom an airy young patriot called to propose that he should accept the presidency of a local Land League. The veteran, whose only idea of the Land League was that it had used bad language about Cardinal Cullen, no sooner caught the drift of the youth than he s.n.a.t.c.hed up a huge blackthorn, fell upon him, and "boycotted" him head-foremost out of a window. Luckily it was on the ground floor.

Another strenuous spiritual shepherd came down during the distribution of potato-seed to the little port in which it was going on, and took up his station on board of the distributing ship. One of his parishioners, having received his due quota, made his way back again un.o.bserved on board of the ship. As he came up to receive a second dole, the good father spied him, and staying not "to parley or dissemble," simply fetched him a whack over the sconce with a stick, which tumbled him out of the ship, head-foremost, into the hooker riding beside her! Quite of another drift was a much more astonishing tale of certain proceedings had here in February last before the Lord Chief-Justice. These took place in connection with a motion to quash the verdict of a coroner's jury, held in August 1887, on the body of a child named Ellen Gaffney, at Philipstown, in King's County, which preserves the memory of the Spanish sovereign of England, as Maryborough in Queen's preserves the memory of his Tudor consort. Cervantes never imagined an Alcalde of the quality of the "Crowner"' who figures in this story. Were it not that his antics cost a poor woman her liberty from August 1887 till December of that year, when the happy chance of a winter a.s.sizes set her free, and might have cost her her life, the story of this ideal magistrate would be extremely diverting.

A child was born to Mrs. Gaffney at Philipstown on the 23d of July, and died there on the 25th of August 1887, Mrs. Gaffney being the wife of a "boycotted" man.

A local doctor named Clarke came to the police and asked the Sergeant to inspect the body of the child, and call for an inquest. The sergeant inspected the body, and saw no reason to doubt that the child had died a natural death. This did not please the doctor, so the Coroner was sent for. He came to Philipstown the next day, conferred there with the doctor, and with a priest, Father Bergin, and proceeded to hold an inquest on the child in a public-house, "a most appropriate place," said Sir Michael Morris from the bench, "for the transactions which subsequently occurred." Strong depositions were afterwards made by the woman Mrs. Gaffney, by her husband, and by the police authorities, as to the conduct of this "inquest." She and her husband were arrested on a verbal order of the Coroner on the day when the inquest was held, August 27th, and the woman was kept in prison from that time till the a.s.sizes in December. The "inquest" was not completed on the 27th of August, and after the Coroner adjourned it, two priests drove away on a car from the "public-house" in which it had been held. That night, or the next day, a man came to a magistrate with a bundle of papers which he had found in the road near Philipstown. The magistrate examined them, and finding them to be the depositions taken before the Coroner in the case of Ellen Gaffney, handed them to the police. How did they come to be in the road?

On the 1st of September the Coroner resumed his inquest, this time in the Court-House at Philipstown, and one of the police, with the depositions in his pocket, went to hear the proceedings. Great was his amazement to see certain papers produced, and calmly read, as being the very original depositions which at that moment were in his own custody!

He held his peace, and let the inquest go on. A letter was read from the Coroner, to the effect that he saw no ground for detaining the husband, Gaffney--but the woman was taken before a justice of the peace, and committed to prison on this finding by the Coroner's jury: "That Mary Anne Gaffney came by her death; and that the mother of the child, Ellen Gaffney, is guilty of wilful neglect by not supplying the necessary food and care to sustain the life of this child "!

It is scarcely credible, but it is true, that upon this extraordinary finding the Coroner issued a warrant for "murder" against this poor woman, on which she was actually locked up for more than three months!

The jury which made this unique finding consisted of nineteen persons, and it was in evidence that their foreman reported thirteen of the jury to be for finding one way and six for finding another, whereupon a certain Mr. Whyte, who came into the case as the representative of Father Bergin, President of the local branch of the National League--n.o.body can quite see on what colourable pretext--was allowed by the Coroner to write down the finding I have quoted, and hand it to the Coroner. The Coroner read it over. He and Mr. Whyte then put six of the jury in one place, and thirteen in another; the Coroner read the finding aloud to the thirteen, and said to them, "Is that what you agree to?"

and so the inquest was closed, and the warrant issued--for murder--and the woman, this poor peasant mother sent off to jail with the brand upon her of infanticide.[29]

Where would that poor woman be now were there no "Coercion" in Ireland to protect her against "Crowner's quest law" thus administered? And what is to be thought of educated and responsible public men in England who, as recent events have shown, are not ashamed to go to "Crowner's quest Courts" of this sort for weapons of attack, not upon the administration only of their own Government, but upon the character and the motives of their political opponents?

CHAPTER XVI.

BELFAST, _Monday, June 25._--I left Dublin yesterday at 4 P.M., in a train which went off at high pressure as an "express," but came into Belfast panting and dilatory as an "excursion." The day was fine, and the line pa.s.ses through what is reputed to be the most prosperous part of Ireland. In this part of Ireland, too, the fate of the island has been more than once settled by the arbitrament of arms; and if Parliamentary England throws up the sponge in the wrestle with the League, it is probable enough that the old story will come to be told over again here.

At Dundalk the Irish monarchy of the Braces was made and unmade. The plantation of Ulster under James I. clinched the grasp not so much of England as of Scotland upon Ireland, and determined the course of events here through the Great Rebellion. The landing of the Duke of Schomberg at Carrickfergus opened the way for the subjugation of Jacobite Ireland by William of Orange. The successful descent of the French upon the same place in February 1760, after the close of "the Great Year," in which Walpole tells us he came to expect a new victory every morning with the rolls for breakfast, and after Hawke had broken the strength of the great French Armada off Belleisle, and done for England the service which Nelson did for her again off Trafalgar in 1805, shows what might have happened had Thurot commanded the fleet of Conflans. In this same region, too, the rout of Munro by Nugent at Ballinahinch practically ended the insurrection of 1798.