Chapter 14

DUBLIN, _Thursday, March 1._--This has been a crowded day. I left Portumna very early on a car with Mr. Tener, intending to visit the scene of his latest collision with the "National" government of Ireland, on my way to Loughrea. It was a bright spring morning, more like April in Italy than like March in America, and the country is full of natural beauty. We made our first halt at the derelict house of Martin Kenny, one of the "victims" of the famous "Woodford evictions," so called, as I have said, because Woodford is the nearest town.[13] The eviction here took place October 21st, 1887. The house has been dismantled by the neighbours since that time, each man carrying off a door, or a shutter, or whatever best suited him. One of the constables who followed us as Mr. Tener's body-guard had been present at the eviction. He came into the house with us, and very graphically described the performance. The house was still full of heavy stones taken into it, partly to block the entrances, and partly as ammunition; and trunks of trees used as _chevaux defrise_ still protruded through the door and the window. These trees had been cut down by the garrison in the woodlands here and there all over the property. I asked if the law in Ireland punished depredations of this sort, and was informed that trees planted by tenants, if registered by them within a certain time, are the property of the tenants. This would astonish our landlords in America, where the tenant who sticks so much as a sunflower into his garden-patch makes a present of it to his landlord.[14]

I asked if the place made a long defence. Mr. Tener and the constable both laughed, and the former told me that when the storming party arrived shortly after daybreak, they found the house garrisoned only by some small boys, who had been left there to keep watch. The men were fast asleep at some other place. The small boys ran away as fast as possible to give the alarm, but the police went in, and in a jiffey pulled to pieces the elaborate defences prepared to repel them. Father Coen, the constable said, got to Kenny's house an hour after it was all over, with a mob of people howling and groaning. But the work had been done, and other work also at the Castle of Cloondadauv, to which we next drove.

This place takes its truly awe-inspiring name from a ruined Norman tower standing on a picturesque promontory of no great height, which juts out into the lovely lake here made by the Shannon. At no great expense this tower might be so restored as to make an ideal fishing-box. It now simply adorns the holding formerly occupied by Mr. John Stanislaus Burke, a former tenant of Lord Clanricarde. The story of its capture on the 17th of September is worth telling.

Some days before the evictions were to come off, a meeting was held at Woodford or Loughrea, at which one of the speakers, the patriotic Dr. Tully, rather incautiously and exultingly told his hearers that the defence in 1886 of the tenant's house known as "Fort Saunders" had been a grand and gallant affair indeed, but that next time "the exterminators would have to storm a castle"!

This put Mr. Tener at once on the alert, and as Mr. Burke of Cloondadauv was set down for eviction, it didn't require much cogitation to fix upon the fortress destined to be "stormed." So he set about the campaign. The County Inspector of the constabulary, who had made a secret reconnaissance, reported that he found the place too strong to be taken if defended, except "by artillery." So it was determined to take it by surprise.

When the previous evictions were made, the agent and the public forces had marched from Portumna by the highway to Woodford, so that, of course, their advent was announced by the scouts and sentinels of the League from hill to hill long before they reached the scene of action, and abundant time was given to the agitators for organising a "reception." Mr. Tener profited by the experience of his predecessors. He contrived to get his force of constabulary through the town of Portumna without attracting any popular attention. And as early rising is not a popular virtue here, he resolved to steal a march on the defenders of Cloondadauv.

He had brought up certain large boats to Portumna, and put them on the lake. Rousing his men before dawn, he soon had them all embarked, and on their way swiftly and silently by the river and the lake to Cloondadauv. They reached the promontory by daybreak, and as soon as the hour of legal action had arrived they were landed, and surrounded the "castle." The ancient portal was found to be blocked with heavy stones and trunks of trees, nor did any adit appear to be available, till a young gentleman who had accompanied the party as a volunteer, discovered in one wall of the tower, at some little height from the ground, the vent of one of those conduits not infrequently found running down through the walls of old castles, which were used sometimes as waste-ways for rubbish from above, and sometimes to receive water-pipes from below. Looking up into this vent, he saw a rope hanging free within it. Upon this he hauled resolutely, and finding it firmly attached above, came to the conclusion that it must have been fixed there by the garrison as a means of access to the interior.

Like an adventurous young tar, he bade his comrades stand by, and nimbly "swarmed" up the rope, without thought or care of what might await him at the top. In a few moments his shouts from above proclaimed the capture of the stronghold. It was absolutely deserted; the garrison, confident that no attack would that day be made, had gone off to the nearest village. The interior of the castle was found filled with munitions of war, in the shape of huge beams and piles of stones laboriously carried up the winding stairs, and heaped on all the landing-places in readiness for use. On the flat roof of the castle was established a sort of furnace for heating water or oil, to be poured down upon the besiegers; and crowbars lay there in readiness to loosen out and dislodge the battlements, and topple them over upon the assailants.

The officers soon made their way all over the building, and thence proceeded to the residence of Mr. Burke near by, a large and very commodious house. All the formalities were gone through with, a detachment of policemen was put in charge, and the rest of the forces set out on their return to Portumna, before the organised "defenders" of Cloondadauv, hastily called out of their comfortable beds or from their breakfast-tables had realised the situation, and got the populace into motion. A mass meeting was held in the neighbourhood, and many speeches were made. But the castle and the farm-house and the holding all remain in the hands of a cool, quiet, determined-looking young Ulsterman, who tells me that he is getting on very well, and feels quite able with his police-guard to protect himself. "Once in a while," he said, "they come here from Loughrea with English Parliament-men, and stand outside of the gate, and call me 'Clanricarde's dog,' and make like speeches at me; but I don't mind them, and they see it, and go away again."

Of Mr. Burke, the evicted tenant here, Mr. Crawford, the Protestant clergyman at Portumna, told me that he was abundantly able to pay his rent. The whole debt for which Burke was evicted was £115; and Mr. Crawford said he had himself offered Burke £300 for the holding. Burke would have gladly taken this, but "the League wouldn't let him." When his right was put up for sale at Galway for £5, he did not dare to buy it in, and he is now living with his wife and children on the League funds. Lord Clanricarde's agent offered to take him back and restore his right if he would pay what he owed; but he dared not accept. This farm comprises over one hundred and ten English acres, which Burke held at a rent--fixed by the Land Court--of £77, the valuation for taxes being £83.

To call the eviction of such a tenant in such circumstances from such a holding a "sentence of death," is making ducks and drakes of the English language. Mr. Crawford's opinion, founded upon a thorough personal knowledge of the region, is that there is no exceptional distress in this part of Ireland, and that over-renting has nothing to do with such distress as does exist here. The case of a man named Egan, one of the "victims" of the Woodford evictions of 1886, certainly bears out this view of the matter. Egan, who was a tenant, not at all of Lord Clanricarde, but of a certain Mrs. Lewis, had occupied for twenty years a holding of about sixteen Irish acres, or more than twenty English acres. This he held at a yearly rental of £8, 15s., being 9d. over the valuation.

In August 1886 he was evicted for refusing to pay one year's rent then due. At that time the crops standing on the land were valued by him at £60, 13s. He also owned six beasts. In other words, this man, when he was called upon to pay a debt of £8, 15s. had in his own possession, beside the valuable tenant-right of his holding, more than a hundred pounds sterling of merchantable assets. He refused to pay, and he was evicted.

This was in August 1886. But such are the ideas now current in Ireland as to the relations of landlord and tenant, that immediately after his eviction Egan sent his daughter to gather some cabbages off the farm as if nothing had happened. The Emergency men in charge actually objected, and sent the damsel away. Thereupon Egan, on the 6th of September, served a legal notice on Mrs. Lewis, his landlady, requiring her either to let him take all the crops on the farm, or to pay him their value, estimated by him, as I have said, at £60, 13s. Two days after this, on the 8th of September, more than a hundred men came to the place by night and removed the greater portion of the crops. Not wishing a return of these visitors, Mrs. Lewis, on the 16th of September, sent word to Egan to come and take away what was left of the crops; one of the horses employed in the nocturnal harvest of September 8th having been seized by the police and identified as belonging to Egan. Egan did not respond; but in July 1887 he brought an action against his landlady to recover £100 sterling for her "detention of his goods," and her "conversion of the same to her own use "!

The case was heard by the Recorder at Kilmainham, and the facts which I have briefly recited were established by the evidence. The daughter of this extraordinary "victim" Egan appeared as a witness, so "fashionably dressed" as to attract a remark on the subject from the defendant's counsel. To this she replied that "her brothers in America sent her money."

"If your brothers in America sent you money for such purposes," not unnaturally observed the Recorder, "why did they allow your father to sacrifice crops worth £60 for the non-payment of £8, 15s.?"

"They were tired of that," said the young lady airily; "the land wasn't worth the rent!"

That is to say, a farm which yielded a crop of £60, and pastured several head of cattle, was not worth £8, 15s. a year. Certainly it was not worth £8, 15s. a year if the tenant under the operation of the existing or the impending laws of Great Britain in Ireland could get, or hope to get it for the half of that rent, or for no rent at all.

But this being thus, on what grounds are the rest of mankind invited to regard this excellent man as a "victim" worthy of sympathy and of material aid? How had he come to be in arrears of a year in August 1886? The proceedings at Kilmainham tell us this.

In November 1885 he had demanded, with other tenants of Mrs. Lewis, a reduction of 50 per cent. This would have given him his holding at a rental of £4, 7s. 6d. Mrs. Lewis refused the concession, and a month afterwards an attempt was made to blow up her son's house with dynamite. Between that time and August 1886, all the efforts of her son, who was also her agent, to collect her dues by seizing beasts, were defeated by the driving away of the cattle, so that no remedy but an eviction was left to her. I take it for granted that Mrs. Lewis had a family to maintain, and debts of one sort and another to pay, as well as Mr. Egan--but I observe this material difference between her position and his during the whole of this period of "strained relations" between herself and her tenant, that whereas she lay completely out of the enjoyment of the rent due her, being the interest on her capital, represented in her title to the land, Mr. Egan remained in the complete enjoyment and use of the land. Clearly the tenant was in a better position than the landlord, and as we are dealing not with the history of Ireland in the past, but with the condition of Ireland at present, it appears to me to be quite beside the purpose to ask my sympathies for Mr. Egan on the ground that a century or half a century ago the ancestors of Mr. Egan may have been at the mercy of the ancestors of Mrs. Lewis. However that may have been, Mr. Egan seems to me now to have had legally much the advantage of Mrs. Lewis. Not only this. Both legally and materially Mr. Egan, the tenant-farmer at Woodford, seems to me to have had much the advantage of thousands of his countrymen living and earning their livelihood by their daily labour in such a typical American commonwealth, for example, as Massachusetts. I have here with me the Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Statistics of Massachusetts. From this I learn that in 1876 the average yearly wages earned by workmen in Massachusetts were $482.72, or in round numbers something over £96. Out of this amount the Massachusetts workman had to feed, clothe, and house himself, and those dependent on him.

His outlay for rent alone was on the average $109.07, or in round numbers rather less than £22, making 22-1/2 per cent, of his earnings.

How was it with Mr. Egan? Out of his labour on his holding he got merchantable crops worth £60 sterling, or in round numbers $300, besides producing in the shape of vegetables and dairy stuff, pigs and poultry, certainly a very large proportion of the food necessary for his household, and raising and fattening beasts, worth at a low estimate £20 or $100 more. And while thus engaged, his outlay for rent, which included not only the house in which he lived, but the land out of which he got the returns of his labour expended upon it, was £8, 15s., or considerably less than one-half the outlay of the Massachusetts workman upon the rent of nothing more than a roof to shelter himself and his family. Furthermore, the money thus paid out by the Massachusetts workman for rent was simply a tribute paid for accommodation had and enjoyed, while out of every pound sterling paid as rent by the Irish tenant there reverted to his credit, so long as he continued to fulfil his legal obligations, a certain proportion, calculable, valuable, and saleable, in the form of his tenant-right.

I am not surprised to learn that the Recorder dismissed the suit brought by Mr. Egan, and gave costs against him. But the mere fact that in such circumstances it was possible for Egan to bring such a suit, and get a hearing for it, makes it quite clear that Americans of a sympathetic turn of mind can very easily find much more meritorious objects of sympathy than the Irish tenant-farmers of Galway without crossing the Atlantic in quest of them.

From Cloondadauv to Loughrea we had a long but very interesting drive, passing on the way, and at no great distance from each other, Father Coen's neat, prosperous-looking presbytery of Ballinakill, and the shop and house of a local boat-builder named Tully, who is pleasantly known in the neighbourhood as "Dr. Tully," by reason of his recommendation of a very particular sort of "pills for landlords." The presbytery is now occupied by Father Coen, who finds it becoming his position as the moral teacher and guide of his people to be in arrears of two and a half years with the rent of his holding, and who is said to have entertained Mr. Blunt and other sympathising statesmen very handsomely on their visit to Loughrea and Woodford,[15] "Dr." Tully being one of the guests invited to meet them.[16] Not far from this presbytery, Mr. Tener showed me the scene of one of the most cowardly murders which have disgraced this region. Of Loughrea, the objective of our drive this morning, Sir George Trevelyan, I am told, during his brief rule in Ireland, found it necessary to say that murder had there become an institution. Woodford, previously a dull and law-abiding spot, was illuminated by a lurid light of modern progress about three years ago, upon the transfer thither in the summer of 1885 of a priest from Loughrea, familiarly known as "the firebrand priest."

In November of that year, as I have already related, Mr. Egan and other tenants of Mrs. Lewis of Woodford made their demand for a 50 per cent. reduction of their rents, upon the refusal of which an attempt was made with dynamite on the 18th December to blow up the house of Mrs. Lewis's son and agent. All the bailiffs in the region round about were warned to give up serving processes, and many of them were cowed into doing so. One man, however, was not cowed. This was a gallant Irish soldier, discharged with honour after the Crimean war, and known in the country as "Balaklava," because he was one of the "noble six hundred," who there rode "into the jaws of death, into the valley of hell." His name was Finlay, and he was a Catholic. At a meeting in Woodford, Father Coen (the priest now in arrears), it is said, looked significantly at Finlay, and said, "no process-server will be got to serve processes for Sir Henry Burke of Marble Hill." The words and the look were thrown away on the veteran who had faced the roar and the crash of the Russian guns, and later on, in December 1885, Finlay did his duty, and served the processes given to him. From that moment he and his wife were "boycotted." His own kinsfolk dared not speak to him. His house was attacked by night. He was a doomed man. On the 3d March 1886, about 2 o'clock P.M., he left his house--which Mr. Tener pointed out to me--to cut fuel in a wood belonging to Sir Henry Burke, at no great distance. Twice he made the journey between his house and the wood. The third time he went and returned no more. His wife growing uneasy at his prolonged absence went out to look for him. She found his body riddled with bullets lying lifeless in the highway. The police who went into Woodford with the tale report the people as laughing and jeering at the agony of the widowed woman. She was with them, and, maddened by the savage conduct of these wretched creatures, she knelt down over-against the house of Father Egan, and called down the curse of God upon him.

On the next day things were worse. No one could be found to supply a coffin for the murdered man.[17] When the police called upon the priests to exert their influence and enforce some semblance at least of Christian and Catholic decency upon the people confided to their charge, the priests not only refused to do their duty, but floutingly referred the police to Lady Mary Burke. "He did her work," they said, "let her send a hearse now to bury him." The lady thus insolently spoken of is one of the best of the Catholic women of Ireland. At her summons Father Burke, a few years only before his death, I remember, made a long winter journey, though in very bad health, from Dublin to Marble Hill to soothe the last hours and attend the death-bed of her husband.

No one who knew and loved him can wish him to have lived to hear from her lips such a tale of the degradation of Catholic priests in his own land of Galway.

Mr. Tener pointed out to me, at another place on the road, near Ballinagar, the deserted burying-ground in which, after much trouble, a grave was found for the brave old soldier who had escaped the Russian cannon-balls to be so foully done to death by felons of his own race. There the last rites were performed by Father Callaghy, a priest who was himself "boycotted" for resigning the presidency of the League in his parish, and for the still graver offence of paying his rent. For weeks it was necessary to guard the grave![18]

From that day to this no one has been brought to justice for this crime, committed in broad daylight, and within sight of the highway. Mr. Place, whom I saw at Portumna, told me that he believed the police had no moral doubt as to the murderer of Finlay, but that it was useless to think of getting legal evidence to convict him.

Mr. Tener tells me that when Mr. Wilfrid Blunt came to Woodford he went with Father Egan, and accompanied by the police, to see the widow of this murdered man, heard from her own lips the sickening story, and took notes of it. But when Mr. Rowlands, M.P., an English "friend of Home Rule," was examined the other day during the trial of Mr. Blunt, he was obliged to confess that though he had visited Woodford more than once, and conversed freely with Mr. Blunt about it, he had "never heard of the murder of Finlay."

Such an incident is apparently of little interest to politicians at Westminster. Fortunately for Ireland, it is of a nature to command more attention at the Vatican.

Nature has sketched the scenery of this part of Ireland with a free, bold hand. It is not so grand or so wild as the scenery of Western Donegal, but it has both a wildness and a grandeur of its own. Sir Henry Burke's seat of Marble Hill, as seen in the distance from the road, stands superbly, high up on a lofty range of wooded hills, from which it commands the country for miles. And no town I have seen in Ireland is more picturesquely placed than Loughrea. It has an almost Italian aspect as you approach it from Woodford. But no lake in Lombardy or Piedmont is so peculiarly and exquisitely tinted as the lough on which it stands. The delicate grey-green of the sparkling waters reminded me of the singular and well-defined belts and stretches of chrysoprase upon which you sometimes come in sailing through the dark azure of the Southern Seas. I have never before seen precisely such a hue in any body of fresh water. The lake is incorrectly described, Mr. Tener tells me, in the guide-books, as being one of the many curious developments of the Lower Shannon. It is fed by springs, but if, like the river-lakes, it was formed by a solution of the limestone, this fact may have some chemical relation with its very peculiar colour. It contains three picturesque islands. No stream flows into it, but two streams issue from it. The town of Loughrea is an ancient holding of the De Burghs, and the estate-office of Lord Clanricarde is here in one wing of a great barrack, standing, as I understood Mr. Tener to say, on the site of a former fortress of the family. Lord Clanricarde's property here is put down by Mr. Hussey de Burgh at 49,025 acres in County Galway, valued at £19,634, and at 3576 acres in the county of the City of Galway, valued at £1202. These, I believe, are statute acres, and in estimating the relation of Irish rentals to Irish land this fact must be always ascertained. Of the so-called "Woodford" property the present rental is no more than £1900, payable by 260 tenants. The Poor-Law valuation for taxes is £2400. There was a revision of the whole Galway property made by the father of the present Marquis. Of the 260 Woodford holdings only twelve were increased, in no case more than 6-1/4 per cent, over the valuation. In 1882 six of these twelve tenants applied to the Land Court. The rents were in no case restored to the figures before 1872, but about 7 per cent. was taken off the increased rental. The assertion repeatedly made that in 1882 rents were reduced by the Land Court 50 per cent. on the Clanricarde estates, Mr. Tener tells me, is absolutely false. In the first year of the Court no reduction went beyond 10 per cent., and in later years, even under the panic of low prices, the average has not exceeded 20 per cent.

After making arrangements for a car to take me on to Woodlawn, where I was to catch the Dublin train, I went out with Mr. Tener to look at the town.

My drive from Loughrea to Woodlawn was delightful. It took me over a long stretch of the best hunting country of Galway, and my jarvey was a Galwegian of the type dear to the heart of Lever. He was a "Nationalist" after his fashion, but he did not hesitate to come rattling up through the town to the Estate Office to take me up; and after we got fairly off upon the highway, he spoke with more freedom than respect of all sorts and conditions of men in and about Loughrea.

"He's a sharp little man, that Mr. Tener," he said, "and he gave the boys a most beautiful beating at Burke's place."

This was said with genuine gusto, and not at all in the querulous spirit of the delightful member of Parliament who complained at Westminster with unconscious humour that the agent and the police in that case had "dishonourably" stolen a march on the defenders of Cloondadauv!

"But we've beaten them entirely," he said, with equal zest, "at Marble Hill. Sir Henry has agreed to pay all the costs, and the living expenses too, of the poor men that were put out.[19] I didn't ever think we'd get that; but ye see the truth is," he added confidentially, "he must have the money, Sir Henry--he's lying out of a deal, and then there's heavy charges on the property. A fine property it is indeed!"

"In fact," I said, "you put Sir Henry to the wall. Is that it?"

"Well, it's like that. But we shan't get that out of Clanricarde, I'm thinking. He's got a power o' money they tell me; and he's that of the ould Burke blood, he won't mind fighting just as long as you like!"

As we drove along, he pointed out to me several fine stretches of hunting country, and, to my surprise, informed me that only the other day "there was as fine a meet as ever you saw, more than a hundred ladies and gentlemen--a grand sight it was."

I asked if the hunting had not been "put down by the League."

"Oh, now then, sir, who'd be wanting to put down the hunting here in Galway?--and Ballinasloe? Were you ever at Ballinasloe? just the grandest horse fair there is in the whole wide world!"

I insisted that I had always heard a great deal about the opposition of the League to hunting.

"Oh, that'll be some little lawyer fellow," he replied, "like that Healy, that can't sit on a horse! It's the grandest country in all the world for riding over. What for wouldn't they ride over it?"

"Were there many went out to America from about Loughrea?"

"Oh, yes; they were always coming and going. But as many came back."

"Why?"

"Oh, they didn't like the country. It wasn't as good a country, was it, as old Ireland? And they had to work too hard; and then some of them got money, and they'd like to spend it in the old place."

The country about Woodlawn is very picturesque and well wooded, and for a long distance we followed the neatly-kept stone walls of the large and handsome park of Lord Ashtown.

"The most beautiful and biggest trees in all Ireland, sorr," said the jarvey, "and it's a great pity, it is, ye can't stay to let me drive you all over it, for the finest part of the park is just what you can't see from this road. Oh, her ladyship would never object to any gentleman driving about to see the beauties of the place. She is a very good woman, is her ladyship. She gave work the last Christmas to thirty-two men, and there wasn't another house in the country there that had work for more than ten or twelve. A very good woman she is, indeed."

"Yes, that is a very handsome church, it is indeed. It is the Protestant Church. Lord Ashtown built it; he was a very good man too, and did a power of good--building and making roads, and giving work to the people. He was buried there in that Castle, over the station--Trench's Castle, they called it."

"All that lumber there by the station?"

"That came out of the Ashtown woods. They were always cutting down the trees; there was so many of them you might be cutting for years--you would never get to the end of them."

Woodlawn Station is one of the neatest and prettiest railway stations I have seen in Ireland--more like a picturesque stone cottage, green and gay with flowers, than like a station. The station-master's family of cheery well-dressed lads and lasses went and came about the bright fire in the waiting-room in a friendly unobtrusive fashion, chatting with the policeman and the porter and the passengers. It was hard to believe one's-self within an easy drive of the "cockpit of Ireland."