The Land-War In Ireland (1870) Part 22

The Master of the Rolls thus characterised the law which justifies the robbery of the tenants by unscrupulous and vindictive landlords:--

'Even if the Rev. Dr. O'Fay had no claim except as tenant from year to year, I have no hesitation in stating that, although in point of law on the authorities I have referred to, and particularly the case of Felling _v._ Armitage, the pet.i.tioner's suit could not be sustained, _yet noticing can be more repugnant to the principles of natural justice than that a landlord should look on at a great expenditure carried on by a tenant from year to year, without warning the tenant of his intention to turn him out of possession_. The defendant's offer to allow Dr. O'Fay to remove the buildings was a mockery. _I have no jurisdiction to administer equity in the natural sense of that term, or I should have no difficulty whatever in making a decree against the defendant._ I am bound to administer an artificial system, established by the decisions of eminent judges, such as Lord Eldon and Sir William Grant, and _being so bound, I regret much that I must administer injustice in this case, and dismiss the pet.i.tion_, but I shall dismiss it without costs. _I should be very glad for the sake of justice that my decision should be reversed by the Court of Appeal._'

Lest it might be supposed that this was the opinion of a single judge, we find in the Court of Appeal equally strong views stated:--It was thrown out that it was a case for amicable settlement, but the respondent's counsel a.s.sured the Court that his client 'had resolved to spend his fortune, if necessary, in resisting the claim of the Rev. Dr. O'Fay.' Lord Justice Blackburne p.r.o.nounced this to be a very irrational determination, although he had to decide that the claim could not be sustained in law or equity.

Lord Chancellor Napier, in concluding his judgment, said:--

'I think I am not overstepping my duty in suggesting to the respondent, that, under all the circ.u.mstances of this case, he will best maintain the character and honour of a British officer, satisfy the exigencies of justice, and uphold the rights of property, by making _such an arrangement_ with Dr. O'Fay, as to the possession of this farm, _as may leave him the full benefit of an expenditure made in good faith, and with the reasonable expectation of having the full benefit of it sufficiently secured by an undisturbed possession_.'

It is a favourite theory with the new school of agents and improving landlords, that long leases cause bad cultivation; in other words, that industry prospers best where there is no security that you can reap what you have sown, except the honour of a man whose interest it is to appropriate the fruits of your labours, which he can _legally_ do. Now, in every cla.s.s and profession, there are failures,--persons that are good for nothing, indolent, improvident, and thriftless. If such a man has a long lease at a low rent, he may be overwhelmed in debt, and leave his land in very bad condition. Others may imitate their aristocratic superiors in their contempt for labour and their habits of expenditure, and so get into a state of hopeless poverty on a good estate. If there are cases where industrious sober men are the worse for having an old lease, it should be remembered that the most insecure of all tenures is a lease dependent on a single bad life, which may drop at any hour. But there are other causes of the facts urged against long tenures, for which the legislature is responsible, not the unimproving tenant. Dr. Hanc.o.c.k explains this point very satisfactorily:--

'Instances of bad cultivation and neglect of improvements, where long leases exist, are sometimes brought forward to show the inutility of tenure as a security for capital, and the strange economic theory is propounded that a precarious interest is more favourable to the investment of capital than a secure one. As well might the state of landed property in Ireland before the Inc.u.mbered Estates Court was established be adduced as an argument against property in land. The remedy, however, which the legislature applied to inc.u.mbered estates of large proprietors was not to destroy property in land, but simply to secure its prompt, cheap, and effectual transfer to solvent hands.

'For tenants' interests under leases where the value is small, and where the interests have become complicated, the Landed Estates Court is too expensive, and so these interests remain often for years untransferred, in the hands of some one who has a very limited and often uncertain interest in them. Such a leaseholder is deterred from making improvements by the state of the law which deprives him of the entire value of his improvements if anyone should disturb him under a prior charge or claim, however obscure or unknown, affecting his interest. The remedy is to be found in an extension of the principle of the Record of t.i.tle Act to the local registry of small leasehold interests, and in the providing for the local sale of such interests in a cheap manner, with an absolute t.i.tle.'

CHAPTER XXIV.

THE LAND SYSTEM AND THE WORKING CLa.s.sES.

We have been told over and over again that the business of Ireland, and all its improvements, requiring education and integrity, are carried on 'by the Protestants, by whose intelligence, and labour, mental and bodily, its prosperity, such as it is, has been produced.'

This a.s.sertion has been made with great confidence, by many writers and speakers. It is a gross exaggeration, and absurd as it is gross. I say nothing of the unseemly egotism of a dominant caste, thus parading its own merits, flaunting its plumes, strutting and crowing over the common folk--of this pharisaic spirit of the ascendant Protestant, standing close to the altar, reciting to G.o.d and the world the number of his resplendent virtues, and scornfully contrasting his excellent moral condition with the degraded Catholic--the vile publican and sinner, overwhelmed with enormous guilt. These monopolising Pharisees, who laboured at such a rate to a.s.sert their natural superiority, as the favourites of Heaven, and members of the Sovereign's church, over a race which England enabled them to subjugate and impoverish, have found no trumpeter so loud as Master Fitzgibbon, a chancery judge. In the same spirit the last census has been a.n.a.lysed by one of the ablest defenders of the Irish establishment, the Rev. Dr. Hume, of Liverpool, in order to prove that everything good in Ireland has been done by the Protestants, and everything bad by the Catholics. But he does not state fairly the conditions of the race. He does not state that one of the compet.i.tors had been master for centuries, well-fed, well-trained, possessed of all advantages which give strength, skill, courage, and confidence, while the other was ill-fed, untrained, enfeebled, and _over-weighted_, having to work out of himself the slavish spirit which oppression had produced, and to gain, by extra efforts, the skill which the law had forbidden him to acquire. Nevertheless the Catholics have acquired skill, and the extent to which the empire is dependent on their knowledge of the industrial arts is much greater than many people suppose. Of the farming cla.s.s in Ireland, 76 per cent. are Roman Catholics. But we are indebted to the obnoxious race in other respects than as producers of food.

From the cla.s.sification of occupations and professions, we learn that the Roman Catholics bear the following proportions to the Protestants of all denominations.

Persons employed in the manufacture of: Roman Catholics.

Skin clothing .77 per cent.

Woollen do. .88 "

Flax do. .43 "

Cotton do. .53 "

Straw do. .66 "

Silk do. .66 "

Miscellaneous do. .67 "

In producing furniture .84 "

In uncla.s.sed industrial employments .84 "

In amus.e.m.e.nts .80 "

In architecture .78 "

In making machinery .76 "

In conveyance and travelling .73 "

In literature and education .56 "

In charity and benevolence .52 "

In health .50 "

In science and art .47 "

In justice and government .46 "

In banking and agency .40 "

There are other suggestive figures in the census, bearing on this question. While three-fourths of the farmers are Catholics, three-fourths of the land-agents are Protestants, who, as a rule, have an unconquerable antipathy to the Catholic clergy, as the only obstacle to their absolute power over the tenants, with whom they find it hard to sympathise. Of farm labourers and domestic servants, nine out of ten belong to the race supposed by some to be incapable of virtue and loyalty. Again, of the whole British army of all ranks, 37 per cent. are Irishmen, and of these Irish soldiers, 67 per cent. are Catholics. More than three-fourths of the magistrates are Protestants; and they bear about the same proportion on the grand juries. According to the theory and practice of the const.i.tution, all power, legislative and administrative, must be based on the ownership of land. The rate-payers have a voice indeed, but it is generally nothing but an echo of the landlord's voice; what else can it be when they are tenants-at-will, depending on the mercy of the proprietor for the means of existence? In county offices, the Protestants have an overwhelming majority. It is the same in all the offices filled by government patronage, except the judges of the superior courts. There Catholics are in the majority, because they had obtained seats in the House of Commons.

On the boards of guardians the ma.s.s of the poor might expect that a majority of guardians would be prompted by national and religious feeling to sympathise with them, so that they would find in the master and matron, the doctor and the relieving officer, something like the natural tenderness which a common kindred and creed inspire. But half the guardians are _ex-officio_ members, as magistrates; nearly all landlords and Protestants. They have in addition 'property votes,' and 'residence votes;' so that, with their influence over the elections, they are generally able to pack the board; and in that case the officials are almost invariably Protestants and conservatives. I know a union in which three-fourths of the rate-payers are Roman Catholics; and yet, with the utmost efforts of the priests, they were not able to elect a single Catholic guardian. To meet the landlord pressure, some of the rate-payers were required to sign their voting papers in presence of their pastors, yet so terrible was that pressure that they afterwards took them to the agent's office, and, to make a.s.surance doubly sure, tore them up before his face. I have been told by a priest, that such is the mortal dread of eviction, or of a permanent fine in the form of increased rent, that he had known tenants who, when produced in the witness-box, denied on oath acts of oppression of which they had been bitterly complaining to himself, and which he well knew to be facts.

Thus the land-war rages at every board of guardians, in every dispensary, in every grand jury room, at every petty sessions, in every county court, in every public inst.i.tution throughout the kingdom. The land-agent is the commanding officer, his office is a garrison, dominating the surrounding district. He is able, in most cases, to defy the confessional and the altar; because he wields an engine of terror generally more powerful over the mind of the peasantry than the terrors of the world to come. Armed with the 'rules of the estate' and with a notice to quit, the agent may have almost anything he demands, short of possession of the farm and the home of the tenant. The notice to quit is like a death warrant to the family.

It makes every member of it tremble and agonise, from the grey-headed grandfather and grandmother, to the bright little children, who read the advent of some impending calamity in the gloomy countenances and bitter words of their parents. The pa.s.sion for the possession of land is the chord on which the agent plays, and at his touch it vibrates with 'the deepest notes of woe.' By the agent of an improving landlord it is generally touched so cunningly, that its most exquisite torture cannot easily be proved to be a grievance. He presents an alternative to the tenant; he does less than the law allows. He could strike a mortal blow, but he lends a helping hand. Resistance entails ruin; compliance secures friendship. Give up the old _status_, and accept a new one: cease to stand upon _right_, consent to hang upon _mercy_, and all may be well.

Pa.s.sing a cottage by the road-side, one of the kindest and best of those agents said to me, 'See with what infatuation these people cling to their old places! There is a man in that dilapidated cabin, with only one acre of ground. It is an eyesore. I have offered him a nice new slated cottage with ten acres, within a short distance, and he obstinately refuses to quit.'

Why did he refuse? I suppose, because the place was _his own_. The house was probably built by his father; it is the house in which he was born, endeared to him, no doubt, by many powerful a.s.sociations, little appreciated by those who never condescend to read the 'simple annals of the poor.' He felt, that if, like his neighbours, he moved into a house built by the landlord, he would cease to be a free man, and would pa.s.s under the yoke of a _master._ I was with some visitors in one of the new cottages. The wife of the cottier with smiles a.s.sented to all that was said as to the neatness and comfort of the place. I thought the smiles were forced. I was last in going out, and I heard her heave a heavy sigh. Perhaps she longed for the old home and its freedom, envying the lot of the st.u.r.dy peasant to whom I have alluded. Poor fellow! he must give way at last. But his proud manhood is the stuff of which Hampdens are made.

I have devoted much time and attention to personal enquiries from town to town, from village to village, and from house to house, seeking corroborative evidence from men of all ranks and professions, on the effect of the _Improved Land System_ on the working cla.s.ses, and I will here faithfully record as briefly as possible the result of my enquiries. I must premise a few words as to the principles of the system which is called 'English.'

1. There is the principle of _contract_, by which alone any tenant is to be permitted to occupy land. There is to be no foothold in the island, from the centre all round to the sea, from the top of the highest mountain to the sh.o.r.e at low-water-mark, for any Irishman in his native land, unless he obtains it by contract from a landlord and pays for it.

2. There is the principle of _compensation_ for unexhausted improvements at the rate of five or six per cent. on the outlay, provided the improvements have been made with the knowledge and consent of the landlord. A certain number of years is held to be sufficient to recoup the tenant for his outlay. If he is removed before that time he is ent.i.tled to the balance of his invested capital; just as if the relation were strictly commercial, and as if he had no further claim than his percentage. If the landlord makes the improvement--which he prefers doing, on the new system--he requires the tenant to pay at the rate of four to six per cent. in the form of rent--a clear gain to the landlord, who can borrow money on much lower terms, and can hardly invest his capital so profitably or so safely elsewhere.

3. _Absenteeism_ is no disadvantage or loss to the country. This principle is in great favour with the agents. There is no theme on which they are so eloquent or so argumentative. In the absence of the landlord the agent is all-powerful. What the Irish lord deputy was to the Tudors and Stuarts, the Irish agent now is to the great absentee proprietor residing in London or Paris. He will undertake to demonstrate that the West-end of London would be just as prosperous if the Queen and her court resided constantly at Balmoral or Killarney; if the parliament met alternately in Edinburgh and Dublin, and if the government offices were all at Liverpool. With the blessing of absenteeism, houses in London would be built as fast, and would bring as high rents; trade would be as brisk, artizans of all sorts as well paid, life as happy, and the Londoners as well content. The Irish, however, have, in their ignorance of political economy, conceived the idea, that if the millions sterling sent annually out of the country to London were spent among those by whose labour the money is made, there would be more employment for all sorts of tradesmen, more business for the shopkeepers, more opportunities of advancement for the farmers' sons, more houses built, more trees planted, more land reclaimed, more factories established, more money stirring, more wealth, more life, more enjoyment, an immense increase of national prosperity. The agents say that this is all a delusion.

4. The next principle of the new agents is this--and to carry it out is the aim of all their improvements--that their mission is to produce the greatest amount of rent from the smallest number of tenants.

5. To reduce the population by _emigration_ or other means until there is barely a sufficient number of labourers to attend the agricultural machines, and herd the cattle.

6. To discourage _marriage_ in every possible way, and to diminish pauperism till there shall be no further use of the workhouses but to serve as lying-in hospitals for the thrifty spinsters, as they do in c.u.mberland and Westmoreland--where the arrangement seems the most natural thing in the world. It is certainly not an unnatural consequence of the practice of men and women sleeping in the same apartment.

Now let us see the working of this new system in Ireland; for it is at work more or less extensively in all the four provinces. The rules of the estate, when rigidly enforced, as they generally are by the improving agents, tend steadily, powerfully, to break down the small farmers. They are disappearing by thousands every year. Some take their chance across the Atlantic. Others fall into the condition of labourers, and may earn 2 s. a day on the estate. This will last for awhile until the land is drained, manured, and turned into permanent pasture. Then their occupation is gone. There is nothing more for them to do. There is no place for them, no room, no support in their native land. The gra.s.s will grow without their labour, and the bullocks will fatten without their care.

We are constantly hearing of the immense rise in wages since the famine. Well, they are nominally higher, but in the old times the labourer could get more for 8 d. or 10 d. than he can now get for 1 s. 6 d. or 2 s. Fuel is now three times as dear as it was, because the 'rules of the estate' will not allow the tenants to sell turf even on the verge of extensive bogs. Milk, which was formerly abundant and very cheap, is scarcely to be had at all now in the country towns and villages, because the land is devoted to feeding sheep and 'dry cattle.' Under the old system, the cottiers in the small towns and villages, as well as on the roads in the country, were enabled to keep pigs. The pig paid the rent, and made manure which was put out on the ground of some neighbouring farmer, hired as 'conacre.' The crop of potatoes thus obtained was a great help in the winter months, when employment was rarely to be had. This practice still prevails in Ulster. The farmer puts in the crop for the manure, the cottier paying the farmer's rent--5 s. to 10 s. a rood, or whatever it may be. With this help the family get over the winter, and feed the pig, without which help, they say, it would be impossible to exist, even with constant employment at a shilling a day. But on the estates of improving landlords in the other provinces, the rules forbid the tenant to give the use of any ground for conacre. He must not, on pain of eviction, take manure for such a purpose, though it would help to enrich his land for the ensuing year. The evicted cottiers and small farmers are forced to go to towns and villages, shut up in unwholesome rooms. When they have been thus so far got rid of, the most ingenious devices are resorted to in order to render it impossible for them to live. By the 'rules of the estate,' the supply of necessaries is cut off on every side. Without fuel, without milk, without potatoes, unless bought at a high rate for ready money, how are they to live?

The strong members of the poor man's family emigrate or go to service; the weak ones and the young children pine away in a state of semi-starvation, preferring that to the best fare in the hated workhouse.

The people are fully sensible of the causes of these privations. They know that they have been forced into this condition by the landlords and their improving agents, induced in some cases by the temptation of a few pounds to surrender their little holdings. The lord lieutenant of the King's County has thus cleared an immense district, and has himself become a grazier and a cattle-dealer on a monster scale, attending the markets in person, and driving hard bargains with the farmers and jobbers. By such means the population of that county has been reduced one-third in the last twenty years. The moral aspect of this new system is worthy of consideration. It is thus presented by Archdeacon Redmond of Arklow, one of the most moderate and respected parish-priests in Ireland. When lately presenting an address to Lord Granard from his Wexford tenantry, he said:--

'I have always heard the house of Forbes eulogised for its advocacy of civil and religious liberty, and the name of Grogan Morgan has become a household word through this county as one of the best landlords in Ireland. He never broke down a rooftree during or since the terrible famine. Under his fostering care they have all tided over the calamitous time, and are happy and prosperous in their homes. He did not think his estate overcrowded, nor did he avail himself of the mysterious destruction of the fruits of the earth, to clear off beings made in G.o.d's image, and to drive them to the poorhouse, the fever-shed, or the emigrant ship, to whiten the bottom of the sea with their bones, or to face the moral and physical perils of the transatlantic cities. He did not read his bible, like Satan, backwards, nor did he turn out the Son of G.o.d in the person of His poor. Hence his name is in benediction, and his estates are more prosperous than the estates of those who forget G.o.d in their worldly wisdom, and would seem to have no belief in a judgment to come. What a happiness it is, my Lord and Lady Granard, for you to have such a heritage, and to know that you live in the hearts of your tenantry, who would spill the last drop of their blood to shield you and your dear children from hurt and harm!'

Let it not be supposed that such sentiments are peculiar to the Catholic clergy, or that their causes exist only in the south and west. The Rev. Dr. Drew, a rector in the county Down, an Orange chaplain, a veteran champion of Protestantism and Toryism, but an honourable and humane man, wrote the following letter last autumn:--

If the magnificent lecture of Mr. b.u.t.t had done nothing more than elicit this letter from Dr. Drew, it would have been much. But will not the thoughts of many hearts be revealed in the same manner? What a number of plain-speaking Drews we shall have denouncing tyranny when their consciences are relieved from the incubus of the Establishment!

_To Isaac b.u.t.t, Esq., LL.D._

'My dear b.u.t.t--If every other man in the world entertained doubts of my sincerity, you, at least, would give me credit for honesty and just intentions. I write to you accordingly, because my mind has been stirred to its inmost depths by the perusal of your address in my native city of Limerick. I do not regard the subject of your address as a political one. It ought to be regarded solely as a question of humanity, justice, common sense, and common honesty. I wish my lot had never been cast in rural places. As a clergyman I hear what neither landlords nor agents ever hear. I see the depression of the people; their sighs and groans are before me. They are brought so low as often to praise and glorify those who, in their secret hearts, are the objects of abhorrence. All this came out gradually before me. Nor did I feel as I ought to feel in their behalf until, in my own person and purse, I became the victim of a system of tyranny which cries from earth to heaven for relief. Were I to narrate my own story it would startle many of the Protestants of Ireland. There are good landlords--never a better than the late Lord Downshire, or the living and beloved Lord Roden. But there are too many of another state of feeling and action. There are estates in the north where the screw is never withdrawn from its circuitous and oppressive work. Tenant-right is an unfortunate and delusive affair, simply because it is almost invariably used to the landlord's advantage. Here we have an election in prospect, and in many counties no farmer will be permitted to think or act for himself. What right any one man has to demand the surrender of another's vote, I never could see. It is an act of sheer felony--a perfect "stand-and-deliver" affair. To hear a man slavishly and timorously say, "I must give my votes as the landlord wishes," is an admission that the legislature, which bestowed the right of voting on the tenant, should not see him robbed of his right, or subsequently scourged or banished from house and land, because he disregarded a landlord's nod, or the menace of a land agent. At no little hazard of losing the friendship of some who are high and good and kind, I write as I now do.--Yours, my dear b.u.t.t, very sincerely,

'THOMAS DREW.

'Dundrum, Clough, County Down, September 7, 1868.'

Some resident landlords employ a considerable number of labourers, to each of whom they give an excellent cottage, an acre of land, and the gra.s.s of a cow, with work all the year round at seven shillings a week. The tenants are most comfortable and most grateful, while the praise of those landlords is in the mouths of the peasantry all round the country. But these considerate landlords are in a minority. As a rule, on the estates where the improvement system is going on, where farms are being consolidated, and grazing supersedes tillage, an iron pressure weighs upon the labouring cla.s.ses, crushing them out of the country. It is a cold, hard, calculating, far-reaching system of inhumanity, which makes the peasant afraid to harbour his own flesh and blood. It compels the grandmother to shut the door in the face of the poor homeless orphan, lest the improving agent should hear of the act of sheltering him from the pitiless storm, not more pitiless than the agent himself. The system of terrorism established by the threats of eviction de-humanizes a people remarkable for their hospitality to the poor. Mr. Thomas Crosbie, of Cork, a gentleman whom I believe to be as truthful and honourable as any agent in Ireland, gives appalling ill.u.s.trations of this in his account of 'The Lansdowne Estates,'

published in 1858. Mr. Trench has given the English public several pretty little romances about these estates; but he omitted some realities that ought to have impressed themselves upon his memory as deeply as any of his adventures. Mr. Crosbie found that the 'rules of the estate,' which were rigidly enforced, forbid tenants to build houses for their labourers, 'the consequence of which was that men and women servants, no matter how great the number, must live under one roof.' The rules forbid marriage without the agent's permission. A young couple got married, and were chased away to America; and 'the two fathers-in-law were not merely warned; they were punished for harbouring their son and daughter, by a fine of a gale of rent.' It was a rule 'that no stranger be lodged or harboured in any house upon the estate, lest he should become sick or idle, or in some way chargeable upon the poor-rates.' 'Several were warned and punished for giving lodging to a brother-in-law, a daughter,' &c. 'A poor widow got her daughter married without the necessary permission; she was served with a notice to quit, which was withdrawn on the payment of three gales of rent.' Mr. Crosbie gives a number of cases of the kind. The following are the most remarkable. A tenant, Timothy Sullivan, of Derrynabrack, occasionally gave lodging to his sister-in-law, whilst her husband was seeking for work. He was afraid to lodge both or either; 'but the poor woman was in low fever, and approaching her confinement. Even under such circ.u.mstances his terror was so great that he removed her to a temporary shed on Jeremiah Sullivan's land, where she gave birth to a child. She remained there for some time.

When "the office" heard of it, Jeremiah Sullivan was sent for and compelled to pay a gale of rent (as fine), and to throw down the shed.