Chapter 15

After some little consultation the chiefs of the Blackfaces consented to swear Griffin as to the truth of his statement, and while guns were held to his breast and to each side of his head, he swore solemnly that he had obeyed the notice, that he was no longer watching Sullivan's farm, and that he would never offend in such wise again.

When an end was made of swearing him, poor Griffin, more dead than alive, was marched out alone between his guards into the road, where he found himself among a score more of men, all with blackened faces. Then, so far as I could understand Griffin, the leader of the men outside displayed some dissatisfaction at the way in which things had passed off, and expressed his determination that the unhappy caretaker should not go scot free.

"What did we come out for to-night?" growled the chief; "did we come out for nothing?" Muffled groans followed this appeal, and encouraged the spokesman to add, "Shall we go back as we came, boys?" the answer to which was a decided negative. Then the unlucky man, Griffin, saw something glitter in the chief's hand, and while he was kept steady by gun barrels pressing against each side of his head, he felt a sharp pain in his left ear, and the blood running down his neck.

As to what followed he was very incoherent; but it seems that the Blackfaces departed, leaving him with his wife and children nearly frightened to death, and with the top of his ear cut clean off.

I may add, as an indication of the state of Kerry, that a gentleman invited to meet me last night postponed the meeting till daylight, on the ground that night air is not good for landlords. Not a single person directly or indirectly connected with land ventures out unarmed even in broad daylight. It is needless to say that no money would hire a man to watch Sullivan's farm.

XIV.

IN KERRY.

TRALEE, CO. KERRY, _Wednesday, December 8th._

The character of the principal estates in counties Cork and Kerry appears to be like that of their bacon and beef--streaky. There are to be seen some admirable specimens of skilful and liberal management, as well as instances of almost insane blundering on the part of both landlord and tenant. From Blarney to the Blaskets the distance is not that of a couple of counties, but the gap between Kylemore and Rinvyle between civilization and savagery. It would be thought that worse degradation than that on Innisturk and Innisbofin would be difficult to find; but in poverty, misery, and lawlessness the population of those inclement isles is far outdone by the five-and-twenty families now in the position of squatters on the Great Blasket. This is an island some three miles and three-quarters long, lying off the peninsula of Corkaguiny beyond Dunmore Head, on the northern side of Dingle Bay, as Bray Head and the island of Valentia lie on its southern side. Of old the Greater Blasket, which has some good pasturage upon it, was let to a few tenants who made a sort of living on this wild spot. They fed their sheep, they grew potatoes, caught great store of porpoises, which they converted into bacon, and thus kept body and soul together in a rough way. But whatever of rude plenty once existed on Great Blasket has vanished before its increasing population. The island is now asked to maintain some hundred and forty persons, and refuses to respond to the demand.

The tenants can hardly complain of much interference of late years, either from Lord Cork, the head landlord, or from Mr. Hussey, who till just recently leased the island from him; for they have paid no rent for four or five, nor county cess for seven, years. They have never paid any poor-rate, and yet hunger after "relief meal." They are simply attempting the impossible--to live on a place which might perhaps support a score of people, but will not support six times that number.

Blarney, for other reasons than its groves and "the stone there, that whoever kisses he never misses to grow eloquent," is one of the most interesting places in the south of Ireland. It is not only the centre of a rich agricultural country and the abode of an improving landlord, Sir George St. John Colthurst, of Ardrum, but the seat of an important manufacture of woollens, a rare and curious industry in Munster. The Blarney mills make a great "turn over" of tweed, and employ five hundred and fifty men, women, and girls. I had an excellent opportunity of seeing the factory hands, for I went to Blarney on pay-day, and was greatly struck by the difference between their appearance and that of the people engaged in agriculture alone. The number and appearance of the women employed is a good answer to those pessimists who maintain that the curse of the poorer Irish is the filthiness, laziness, and general slatternliness of the women. In dress and general bearing the girls of Blarney would compare favourably with those of many English manufacturing towns; and, inasmuch as Blarney Mills are successful, their work must be well done. One reason of course of the comfortable look of the Blarney folk is that all the family work. Perhaps the husband works at agriculture, and the wife and daughter at the mill. All work, and hence a good income, as at Blackburn and other cotton towns, instead of the starvation which attends a useless woman who, with her string of helpless children, hangs like a millstone round her husband's neck. There are no "useless mouths" at Blarney, where everybody helps to maintain the family roof-tree, and to prove that the Irish of the south, like those of Connemara, are susceptible of being taught, if only pains be taken with them. It must be admitted that Blarney Mills are in the second generation, having been founded by Mr. Mahony, the father of the late "Father Prout" and of the present proprietor. The houses of the workpeople at Blarney are neat and trim, white and clean, and a repose to the eyes of beholders, sick of slouching thatch and bulging mud walls.

Perhaps, however, the spot of all others in which the sharpest contrast occurs between the old life of Ireland and that brought about by "improving" landlords and tenants is the hamlet of Millstreet, situate on the line of railway between this place and Mallow, once a kind of Irish Tunbridge Wells, and famous for the "Rakes of Mallow," whose virtues are immortalised in verse. When Mallow was the farthest south-western outpost of civilization it is possible that the "rakes" who converged upon that pretty spot from the surrounding country "ranted," "roared," and "drank" to the extent that the poet has credited them withal. But they are gone now, these rakes, and Mallow appears to get on very well without them.

It is remarkable for its pretty villas, and for a comfortable hotel, kept by a self-made man, who has risen from the ranks into prosperity by sheer industry and foresight. Millstreet is a very different kind of place from Mallow. The latter has the beautiful Blackwater river to give it beauty; but Millstreet is chiefly remarkable as the _locale_ of the mill which gives it a name; as the habitation of the Rev. Canon Griffin, a Roman Catholic of high culture, who, unlike some of the priesthood, abjures the Land League and all its works; and as the spot on which "Ould Ireland" and New Ireland meet face to face.

The hamlet is mainly divided between two proprietors. That part known as the McCarthy O'Leary property is mainly composed of filthy hovels of the worst Irish type--is, in fact, rather a gigantic piggery than a dwelling-place for human beings. The houses are not so small as the mountain cabins of Mayo or the seaside dens of Connemara, but they are small enough, crowded with inhabitants, and filthy beyond the belief of those who know not the western half of Ireland. It is hardly possible, nor would it be worth while, to inquire into the causes which have made one half of Millstreet an opprobrium and the other half a model hamlet. I simply record what I see--filth and swinishness on the left hand, order, neatness, and cleanliness on the right.

The white houses, the trim streets of the townlet, are on the Wallace property, which is at present, and will be for some little time to come, in the hands of the Court of Chancery. Skilfully administered for several years past, the Wallace property is very well known in these parts for the success with which its management has been attended. One of the principal tenants of this thriving estate is Mr. Jeremiah Hegarty, whose peculiar position towards his landlords affords a curious instance of the working of the present land laws of Ireland. To begin with Mr. Hegarty holds about eight hundred acres as a tenant farmer, without a lease or any guarantee against his being turned off by his landlords at any time, except the natural goodwill and joint interest of landlord and tenant. He has of course the Act of 1870 in his favour, but inasmuch as his "improvements" have extended over a long term of years, it is almost certain that if a series of deaths should bring the property into needy or unscrupulous hands Mr. Hegarty might be removed from his farm, or rather farms, at great loss to himself, despite the compensation that would be awarded him, and on which the landlord would assuredly make a great profit. It may be thought hardly likely that any landlord would be mad enough to disestablish a tenant of eight hundred acres of land who pays his rent with commendable punctuality; but as such things, and things even more foolish, have been done during the present year, it is not agreeable to think of the risks run by an improving tenant in county Cork, and an improving tenant Mr. Hegarty assuredly is.

It is a curious illustration of that difference between English and Irish farming which makes the agrarian question so difficult for Englishmen to understand, that Mr. Hegarty, who may be accepted as a type of the Irish farmer, possessed by advanced ideas, conducts his operations successfully and profitably by almost exactly reversing the proportions of tillage and pasture existing on Mr. Clare Read's famous farm at Honingham Thorpe. On the particular farm of Mr. Read's here referred to, the quantity of pasture is about one eighth or ninth of the whole. On Mr. Hegarty's farms, for he has more than one to make up his total of eight hundred acres, there is exactly one-ninth under tillage to eight-ninths of pasture.

This will not at first strike the English eye as any great thing in the way of reclamation; but it must be recollected that in this part of Ireland it is no small matter to obtain good pasture. One of the first sights the eye becomes accustomed to is the long bent or sedge, shooting rankly up among the sweeter grass, and telling surely of land overcharged with water. There is no escape from the fact that Ireland as a country is cursed with defective natural drainage. The fall of the greater rivers is so slight that they meander hither and thither in "S's," as they say here, and only require a little surplus on the average rainfall to overflow the more valuable land. And it is astonishing how quickly good land left untilled reverts to its primeval condition, or, in the expressive language of the country, "goes back to bog." This has been shown in many cases.

There is, for instance, a not small portion of Lord Inchiquin's and Lord Kenmare's land, which has been allowed by the tenants to gradually go back to sedge, if not to bog, for the want of keeping drains clear and putting on lime. A curious instance of the effect of not liming the land is supplied on one of the fields newly reclaimed by Mr. Hegarty. Owing either to the supply of lime running short, for the moment, or to the carelessness of his men, a patch of recently drained land was left without lime which was liberally bestowed on the rest of the field. The forgotten patch can be seen from afar by the tufts of sedge sprouting from it.

Mr. Hegarty's eight hundred acres are, saving one or two little lots, divided between the Millstreet farm and the mountain farm of Lackadota, for the goodwill whereof the incoming paid the outgoing tenants 560l. before he began the work of thorough reclamation. His success on this hill-side has been remarkable. This season he has taken out potatoes from eight acres at the rate of 20l. per acre, and the triumph of his method has been equally great in other crops--to wit, oats, mangolds, and turnips.

It is needless to remind agricultural readers that the artificial feeding of cattle is still in its infancy in the west and south-west of Ireland. The various kinds of cake--oil, cotton, and nut--and cattle "spices," made up of fenugreek seed and other condiments, are, if not unknown, quite unused by all but a few gentlemen farmers, of whom I shall in another letter have more to say. The old-fashioned notion was to rear cattle, turn them loose on the mountain, and sell them to be finished in the Meaths or elsewhere. On the Millstreet farm, however, root-crops are largely used for feeding, and the beasts are kept more under cover than is common here. All this means, of course, large outlay, and the farmer has expended not less than six thousand pounds in building, and in draining and liming four hundred acres of the eight hundred he occupies. He was, like Canon Griffin, one of the first to recognise the necessity for changing the potato seed, and imported "champions" before other people thought of it, and while they were growing potatoes not much bigger than marbles, and hardly fit to feed pigs upon, he was getting crops of fine tubers. In draining the portion of his farm near the river, he has found himself obliged to employ stone drains, the attempts previously made with tile drains having failed signally; and it may be added that his attempts, now shown to be successful, to drain the flat land near the river Oughbane were derided by neighbouring agriculturists, who could not see that if the land do not slope sufficiently towards the natural drainage the artificial drains may be made to do so. His farm-buildings, machinery for threshing, &c., are an agreeable sight. In building, concrete has been largely used, especially in the cow-houses and feeding stalls, and the general effect of this large farm in county Cork is that of a well-managed business, every detail of which is familiar to its head.

It can hardly be thought extraordinary that farmers like Mr. Hegarty, even on a smaller scale, are anxious for a good, sound Land Bill. They, with all good feeling toward their present landlords, cannot avoid recognising that as the law stands the work of their lives may be taken from them by any accident of succession. Despite the Land Bill of 1870, they are harassed by a sense of insecurity. Monetary payment for the work of their best years would not compensate them for the loss of the holdings, the value of which has been created by their own intelligent work. In England farmers of this type would assuredly have a lease, and their Irish brethren hold that schemes for the gradual acquirement of land by tenants should be accompanied by the "Three F's," and extended over fifty instead of thirty-five years. The latter plan would, they think, be of little use to the present tenant, as it would practically raise his rent too far, and thus prevent him from doing his best by the land. Great force is given to these opinions by evidence in my possession, that, although a great deal of land has been reclaimed within the last fifty years, a large proportion is running barren for want of means on the farmers' part to cultivate it properly.

The panic among all classes connected with "landlordism" is on the increase. All who can conveniently leave county Kerry are doing so. If I go for a drive with one of those proscribed by the grogshop-keepers of Castleisland the muzzle of a double-barrelled carbine peeps ominously from the "well" of the car. Meanwhile all enterprise and development of the country is arrested. The North Kerry Railway, connecting this town with Limerick, will, I believe, be opened next week, "despite of foes," but other undertakings are for the moment paralysed. This is the more to be regretted, as Tralee is a rising place. After a desperate struggle against the inertness of Western Ireland on the subject of pure water, the uncongenial element has been introduced so skilfully and with so much fall that a jet can be thrown over any house in Tralee. The last new idea is a railway to Fenit Without, six miles down the bay. Up to the present time vessels have been brought to Tralee by a ship canal, but it is now sought to construct a railway running on to a pier, the elbow of which should be formed by Great Camphire Island. The cost of the railway will be 45,000l., of which 30,000l. is guaranteed by the county, and a large part of the balance taken up by the town. The pier is a far more serious business, depending on the Board of Works; but all attention is diverted from this and other important subjects by the terrorism which has, only just recently, extended to the county of Kerry.

KILLARNEY, CO. KERRY, _Thursday, Dec. 9th._

The eviction--of landlords and land-agents--is going on bravely. Mr. Hussey, Lord Kenmare's agent, left Kerry a short time ago, and the Lord Chamberlain himself left Killarney House yesterday morning, not in a paroxysm of indignant "landlordism," but "more in sorrow than in anger." Lord Kenmare, who is a downright resident Irish landlord, _s'il en fust oncques_, confessedly leaves Ireland with great regret, and bade his people "Good-bye, for a long time" with no feigned grief. But he finds the country uninhabitable, while indignation meetings are held almost at his gates, and the very labourers whom he has done so much to employ make common cause with the farmers against him in paying no rent. The improvements going on here for some time past are stopped, and about 200l. a week of wages lost to the neighbourhood. The causes which led to Lord Kenmare's departure have but recently sprung into existence. The _jacquerie_ only reached Kerry the other day, and already the county is revolutionised. Thanks to The O'Donoghue and other Land Leaguers, Kerry is now in as unsettled a condition as Mayo, Galway, Clare, and Limerick. The flame was long in reaching this remote region; but when it came it fell among inflammable stuff, as will be gathered from the almost ridiculous circumstance of farmers and labourers combining together against a supposed common enemy. Farmers who a fortnight ago talked scornfully of those who "held the harvest" have, to my certain knowledge, subscribed to the Land League within the last few days, and I am informed that those who have hitherto held out will be members before another week is gone. It is true that additional allurements are held out to them. The three "F's" no longer satisfy the more advanced spirits who emulate Mr. Parnell's magnificent vagueness, and declare it quite impossible that any measure likely to pass the Houses of Parliament as at present constituted will satisfy the people of Ireland. Meanwhile terrorism is upheld as a legitimate weapon of reform. If it were possible to be surprised at anything taking place in Ireland at the present moment, I should have been surprised at a farmer to whom I was talking a couple of days ago, and who farms between two and three hundred acres under an "improving" landlord. The farmer, who was evidently a local luminary on the land question, is only a recent convert to Land League principles; but he was nevertheless prepared to defend the cowardly kind of general strike against an individual, known as "Boycotting." He also talked a great deal about fair rents and the compulsion that farmers are under to pay anything that their landlords choose to ask. Yet this very man was, not long since, offered the profitable farm he now occupies in the place of smaller and less convenient holdings. Asked by his landlord what he thought he ought to pay, he offered two and a half times Griffith's valuation, and on the landlord asking him three times that rate, agreed with him to "split the difference," and was, or appeared to be, satisfied. But at that moment he had not been made conscious of his wrongs, and of his down-trodden, serf-like condition. He is fully aware of them now, and, in plain English, is prepared to make the best of the present opportunity.

As the possible peasant proprietor of the future is a personage much discussed among landlords and others just how, I thought it well to consult the farmer as well as the legal and proprietorial minds on this important subject. I was at once struck by the "so far and no farther" tone, so to speak, of the larger farmers. According to many of those I consulted, no greater disaster could occur to Ireland than the creation of peasant proprietors. I will endeavour to give, as nearly as possible, the exact words of farmers whose ideas concerning the claims of their own class are of the most advanced I have heard.

The instant I asked a question concerning the peasant-proprietor problem and the future of the "poor devil" cottiers, whose sufferings have made an excellent stalking-horse for the farmers, properly so-called, I was met with a well-formulated objection to any scheme of peasant proprietorship. The cottier _pauvre diable_ appears, I apprehend, to the farmers as a labourer, and they therefore look with anything but favour upon a scheme for raising the poor peasants above the necessity of working for them, by giving the poor a real stake in the country. The farmers hold that, unless some stringent regulations against subdividing or subletting be adopted and firmly enforced, the creation of peasant proprietors on an extensive scale will be the greatest misfortune that ever befell Ireland; as in the course of time it will create a nation of beggars, which cannot be maintained on the land. The farmer mind fails to perceive how any Act of Parliament can prevent an owner or peasant proprietor from selling his entire interest in his holding. This, they argue, will lead to the creation of a race of landlords who will bring more misery and ruin upon the country than anything that the present generation is acquainted with; as necessarily the class of landlords thus formed will be more exacting and severe upon their tenants than the present large territorial proprietors.