The Letters of "Norah" on Her Tour Through Ireland Part 26

I speak for myself, and I know I speak the sentiments of all the cabin pa.s.sengers, when I say that nothing could exceed the provisions made for our comfort, or the courtesy and kindness shown by the captain and officers of the "Ontario" to us all, both in saloon and steerage. In conversation on board these sentiments came up often, and with enthusiasm, and captain and crew, and the stout ship met with no measured praise.

Before retiring behind the curtain to shake hands with sea-sickness again, we had a long, fond look at the land we were leaving. Liverpool had receded into a long, low line of twinkling lamps. My thoughts went through the mist to the land of my own people now pa.s.sing through the throes of a great change.

Erin, beloved and beautiful, once more The time of parting comes to thee and me; The sad delight of pilgrimage is o'er, And voices call to me across the sea.

In Canada the magic summer shines, A purple haze upon the mountain broods, The soft warm breeze is whispering through the pines.

And leaping waters thunder through the woods.

September radiance tints the forest grand, The maples are aflame upon the hills; From bursting barns plenty smiles o'er the land, Where the tall farmer owns the soil he tills.

Erin, thy robe of green is dewed with tears, Fields outrage-stained, thy west wind thick with sighs, Thou that hast walked with woe down through the years, Weighted with all the wrongs of centuries.

Erin, beloved with love akin to pain, Through woe and outrage, turbulence and strife, Thou shalt arise and enter once again Into a higher, freer, glorious life.

A LAST WORD--THE CAUSE OF IRELAND'S TROUBLES.

Because I have had the privilege of being Irish correspondent for the Montreal _Witness_ for a time, I think it right to explain to you the change which travelling through my native country has produced in my sentiments and the convictions forced upon me.

Brought up in the North of Ireland in a purely Hiberno-Scotch neighborhood, I drank in with my native air all the ideas which reign in that part of Ireland. The people with whom I came in contact were Conservatives of the strongest type; from my youth up, therefore, I had the cause of Ireland's poverty and misery as an article of belief. I never dreamed that the tenure of land had anything to do with it.

Landlords were lords and leaders, benefactors and protectors to their tenants in my imagination.

I changed my opinion while in Ireland, and now I believe that the land tenure is the main cause of Ireland's miseries.

English history is pretty much a history of struggles against monopolies of one kind and another. There is no monopoly, it seems to me, which bears such evil fruit as the monopoly of all the land of a country in the hands of a few. It is bad for the country, bad for the people, and bad for the landlords, whether the monopolists are honorable companies, a landed aristocracy, or an ecclesiastical corporation. G.o.d's-law, which is the law of our faith, shows plainly how the Great Lawgiver regards the monopoly of land by the care which He took to have a direct interest in the land of Canaan by personal inheritance for every Jew. To guard against the might of greed, to prevent the poor of the land, touched by misfortune or snared by debt, from sinking into farm laborers or serfs of the soil he inst.i.tuted the year of jubilee when every man returned to his inheritance.

I first thought over these things in connection with the land question in Ireland when travelling there and seeing the evils arising from the existing tenure of land. I met with testimony everywhere of how often and how fatally the will of a lord interfered to prevent prosperity.

There might have been a seam of coal opened in Antrim but for one landlord. In the present depressed state of the linen trade what a boon that would have been to the country. There might have been ship-building on the Foyle, to the great benefit of Derry and her people, but for the absentee landlords, the London companies. Donegal might have had a coal mine opened, but the landlord would neither open it himself nor let anyone else do it, and yet the great want of Donegal is employment for her people.

I did not think for a moment that the landlords of Ireland were, as a rule, naturally worse than other men, but they have too much power, and when "self the wavering balance shakes, it's rarely right adjusted."

I blame the system, not the men. There were and are landlords in Ireland too n.o.ble to abuse their power, of which cla.s.s the Earl of Belmore is an ill.u.s.trious example; but these men are n.o.ble in spite of the system which afforded every facility for the enormities of Lord Leitrim.

The evil of the Land Tenure is intensified by the fact that one cla.s.s makes laws for another, and that the same cla.s.s has all the executive of these laws under their control. There was no power in the law to protect the inhabitants of Milford when the earnings and savings of their whole lives, and the private property of their minister were confiscated by the strong hand, and some were reduced in consequence to beg their bread. The law, planned expressly to be an expensive luxury, was only for the rich, and was known to the poor, if they dared to contend with their landlord, as an engine of oppression. The judge who gave the award in Mrs. Auldjo's case knew better than anyone else the cost of Irish law, and that the award he gave her under the Act of 1870 was a defeating of the intentions of the law, as it was really less than the law costs. His award added insult to injury to a woman who was a widow, and wantonly ruined in fortune because she dared to contend with a lord.

The same spirit of partisanship invented the infamous Grand Jury system.

After I left Antrim, while travelling through the wilds of Donegal, the glens of Leitrim, and all through beautiful and desolate Mayo, I wondered over the absolute power which was left in the hands of the landholders and the great gulf which separated them from the land- tilling cla.s.s. Public opinion, which they control, seems to have absolutely no sympathy with the common people when they were behind in their rents, although they were emerging from a period of agricultural distress, culminating in absolute famine. I watched the papers, I took good heed to the conversation that went on around me, and saw or heard no expression of sympathy when events took place which, I had thought, impossible under British law.

When Mrs. Whittington, of Malin, was put out in the wild March weather, with a child three days old in her arms and a flock of six around her, I looked for some one to raise a voice of protest, but there was not a whisper. When a landlord's official forced his way past husband, doctor and nurse, to the bedside of Mrs. Stewart, to order her to get out of bed to go to the workhouse, bringing on fits that caused the death of her babe and nearly cost her her life, I watched eagerly for some voice to say this should not have been done, but there was none. I have heard of retreating armies stopping and hazarding battle, rather than forsake a childing woman in her extremity, in countries not boasting of so enlightened a government as our own. I had so gloried in the British Const.i.tution, its justice, its mercy! I waited to see what the law would do in this case. All the facts were admitted in court, yet this man, who forgot that he, too, was born of a woman, was triumphantly acquitted and not one word of disapproval appeared in any public print that I saw.

I have often come home after seeing that on the side of the oppressor was power--the power of bayonets--and that the poor had no helper, until I could not sleep for pain and could only cry to our Father--theirs and mine--How long, Lord, how long!

A friend described to me quite gaily a scene at the Castlebar workhouse during the last famine, when the starving creatures coming for relief surged round the workhouse gate and pressed and hustled and trampled down one another, how the police standing ankle deep in mud had to lay about them with their batons, and the poor creatures were sent home again, and yet again, until they would learn to keep order--keep order-- and they were starving!

A lady in Clones, who was talking to me on Sabbath School work and missionary enterprise in a highly edifying manner, could only express her surprise about the poor of her own people who were doomed to the poor house, that they did not go in at once without struggle or fuss.

And yet she had been a mother, and must have known what parting with children meant to a mother's heart. For my part I sympathized with that mother of whom I read in the papers, who was taken before a magistrate and sentenced for making a disturbance in the workhouse when she heard the master beating her child.

I wondered much at a n.o.ble and high-minded Irish gentleman who feels strong sympathy with the Oka Indians, who, in speaking to me of a man caught in company with another fishing by night, thereby transgressing the law, and was deliberately shot down by the agent of the property, expressed his regret that the other had not been also shot. Hardening the heart I hold to be one of the very apparent effects of the land system.

Another evil is the encouragement of unutterable meanness; a meanness that allows rich men to manage to extract under pressure gratuitous work out of these poor people. No one needs to be told that the Irish peasant is worse fed, worse clothed, worse housed than any peasant in Europe, yet gentlemen will take from these gratuitous work, and see so little to be ashamed of in the transaction as to write about it over their own signature, as Ernest Cochrane did in the columns of the _Witness_.

I have heard of miles of separating fence being made, in this way, of walls being built and even of monuments being erected "in memoriam" in the same way. I was told of a n.o.ble lord having brought a gentle pressure to bear on his Irish tenants to cause them to subscribe over and above their rents for the benefit of those who were suffering from an accident in his English collieries.

I have wondered to hear gentlemen, and even clergymen, in Ireland wishing that the people would rise in rebellion so that there might be an opportunity of laying the cold steel to them and putting them down effectually. I have also wondered at the refusal of the authorities to have the riots in Limerick investigated; surely that does not look like impartial justice. I have wondered again over the openly avowed purpose of rooting the people out of the country.

I have looked with great concern and astonishment at the lands already wasted and almost without inhabitants. I have read with great pain the Lord Lieutenant's speech at Belfast, aspersing the country as disloyal and threatening them with greater tyranny. The people are disloyal, to a system of oppression and absolutism which neither they nor their fathers were able to bear; but I believe from my heart that they are more loyal to Her Majesty than their oppressors are, for the system has made them oppressors. Only notice, from Mr. Smith's evidence at the Land Court recently, concerning the Enniskillen estate, for which he is agent, it is proven that even in Protestant Ulster a landlord can abolish the Ulster custom--the root of Ulster's exceptional prosperity--at the motion of his own will. In the trials for turbary in the Kiltyclogher cases a rule made by a landlord in his office overrides even a lease, and is accepted as _de facto_ law in the court.

These things have convinced me that the exterminating landlords are the parties who are guilty of high treason against the commonwealth of England. The loyalty of Irish Catholics to a country that had scant justice to give them has been proven on every battle field from far India to the Crimea. No history of England's wars in these later times can be written truly without acknowledging the Irish blood given like water for England's honor.

Scotland has been more favored of late years, although the time is not so far distant when her language, her dress and ancient customs were also proscribed. Watching this, I have found myself wishing that some Irish Walter Scott would arise whose pen would make Ireland's lakes and glens, mountain pa.s.ses and battlemented rocks, ruined castles and mouldering abbeys, famous and fashionable as Scotland's brown heath and s.h.a.ggy wood, till the Queen would love to have a home there, and the n.o.bles of the land would follow in her shadow.

I have changed my opinion on this also. The n.o.bles come to covet the homes of the people. The Highlands of Scotland seem destined to become a hunting ground. The hardy mountaineers, guilty of no crime, must give up their hamlets and shielings, the inheritance of their fathers, at the order of any trader who has coined the sweat of his fellow men successfully into guineas, or any idle lord who has money. If "a death grapple of the nations" should ever come to England will she miss the Connaught Rangers, the glorious 88th who won from stern Picton the cheer, "Well done 88th," or the Enniskillen dragoons so famed in song and story, or the North Cork that moved to battle as to a festival? Will she miss "the torrent of tartan and steel" that charged at the Alma, or the cry that "the hills of grey Caledon know the shout of McDonald, McLean and McKay, when they dash at the breast of the foe?" Will she miss the clansmen of Athol, Breadalbane and Mar? Will the exterminating lords who must have hunting grounds at all hazards come to the front with squadrons of deer or battalions of rabbits? Surely it is an aweful thing to sweep the inhabitants of a country for gain. If Britain ever has to call on these Varuses for her legions, or to repeat George II.'s cry at Fontenoy, will the enemy be able to countervail the Queen's damage?

I would earnestly plead with the authorities, even yet, to try a little conciliation instead of such strong doses of coercion. History tells how cheaply the disturbed Highlands were pacified compared with the expense of coercing them, which was a failure. The t.i.the of the expense for bayonets would, I am convinced, make the West of Ireland contented and make future prosperity possible.

THE END.