Part 13
Nearly every one of the peers who has sold his estates in Ireland under the land act has taken the cash and has gone to London to live, and if home rule is ever granted to the Irish people there will be little room left for those who remain. Most of the Irish peers spend the greater part of their time in London. Some of them never come to Ireland at all except for the shooting season or horse show. Several prominent English peers have estates in Ireland inherited from ancestors who have intermarried with the Irish nobility. The Duke of Devonshire, for example, owns one of the largest and finest estates in the kingdom at Lismore, a few miles north of Cork. The late duke, who died in 1907, took a great interest in the property and spent a great deal of time there.
Forcible evictions are things of the past. Several years ago the demands for "The Three Fs"--free sale, fair rent, and fixed tenure--were complied with, and to-day the farms in Ireland are subject to what is called "a dual ownership," peculiar to this country. No landlord can rob a tenant any longer. Disputes concerning rent are now settled by a tribunal which takes all the circumstances into consideration and decides upon the equities rather than the technicalities of the case. This has revolutionized the land system of Ireland, and by a succession of acts of parliament during the past few years the government has gone a great way toward equalizing ownership and creating a nation of peasant proprietors, which, according to their ideas over here, is the ideal condition.
During the last quarter of a century from six thousand to eight thousand farmers have been evicted from farms in Ireland because they refused or were unable or neglected to pay their rent. Some of them have remained in the neighborhood and have squatted where they could, and waited their chance to recover their holdings; others have emigrated to America; others have gone into different parts of Ireland; others have engaged in business of various sorts. Between five thousand and six thousand have already applied for restoration under the Act of 1907, most of them through the agency of the United Irish League. Of these, 1,595 families had been restored up to July, 1908, most of them to the actual farms from which they were expelled, not as tenants, however, for they will never be asked to pay any more rent, but as the owners of the property and improvements, purchased for them by the government, with money to be repaid, not by them unless they choose to do so, but by their posterity in the year 1975, or thereabouts. The only financial obligation imposed upon them is to pay an interest of 3-1/2; per cent upon the purchase money, which has been borrowed by the government upon bonds running for sixty-eight years, at 3 per cent interest. The additional one-half per cent goes into a sinking fund to pay the bonds at maturity.
About 75 per cent of the claims that have been filed under the Evicted Tenants Act have been genuine; the remainder are apparently fraudulent or in doubt, and some of those that have been already allowed are questionable. I heard of a case in which a tenant who was evicted in 1889 for refusal to pay his rent was restored to his old home under rather peculiar circumstances. His misfortunes were voluntary, and due to political reasons rather than from the lack of means, and when he was thrown off his farm he went into business as a cattle broker and became rich. But, in common with his former neighbors, he filed his claims under the act, was restored to his old home, and the generous agents of the estates commission bought a couple of cows, a few sheep, and hogs from his own pastures, paid him for them, and then gave them to him. He is now occupying the place and cultivating it by hired labor, and will be asked to refund the money the government has advanced for him in the year 1975.
In the application of the provisions of the act no distinction is made between those who were evicted because of their poverty and those for political reasons. About one thousand evictions were the result of what is known as the "Plan of Campaign" adopted in 1887, when the National League determined to force the issue and organized a general strike among the farmers against the payment of rent upon certain estates selected because their landlords were habitual absentees, who spent the revenues they derived from their estates outside of Ireland and were oppressive to their tenants and generally offensive. As a rule, the tenants paid half a year's rent to the agents of the league for a war fund, so far as they were able. Most of them were able to pay, although there was a great deal of suffering and privation among about a thousand families who were thrown out of their homes during one land war which lasted for two or three years. Practically all of them have already been restored to their former farms.
In 1901 another land war was inaugurated, under the direction of Dennis Johnston and John Fitzgibbons of the United Irish League, in Roscommon and neighboring counties, and a large number of tenants who had voluntarily agreed not to pay their rents were thrown off their farms as voluntary martyrs in a campaign which finally resulted in the enactment of the act of 1907, which was prepared and introduced into parliament by George Wyndham, chief secretary for Ireland under the late conservative government. This act authorizes the estates commission having in charge the administration of the Land Act of 1903 to acquire by force if necessary eighty thousand acres of land wherever they consider it expedient, to be sold under mortgages of sixty-eight years at 3-1/2; per cent interest to families who have been evicted from their former homes. The commissioners are required to investigate the claims of those who have been evicted, through their staff of inspectors, and if found genuine to serve notice upon the owner to vacate the farms from which they were evicted within a certain time. The landlord has the right of appeal, but every one of the owners of lands from which tenants were evicted has voluntarily consented to their restoration except the Marquess of Clanricarde, and a Mrs. Lewis who has a large estate in County Galway and has been one of the most vindictive and oppressive of all the landlords. She is a woman of very determined character, and will not even answer letters addressed to her by the officials of the government.
The Marquess of Clanricarde is nearly eighty years old, very eccentric, a miser, dresses very shabbily, lives like a recluse and pays no bills. He has visited his Irish estates but once since he inherited them in 1874, He was in the diplomatic service as a young man during the 'fifties, and at one time was a member of parliament. His name is Hubert George de Burg Canning, Marquess of Clanricarde, Viscount Burke and Baron Dunkellin, and he has several other titles, but has no family--a childless widower.
The Clanricarde estates lie directly west from Dublin in Galway County and were obtained by his ancestor, William FitzAnselm de Burg, the founder of the Burke family, under a grant from Henry I., and he founded the town of Galway. To this day the whole province of Connaught is dotted with the ruined castles of the De Burg family, monuments of four or five centuries of uninterrupted fighting with the O'Neills, the O'Donnells, the O'Flahertys, the O'Connors, and other powerful clans in the early history of Ireland. The battle of Knockdoe, fought in the fourteenth century between an undisciplined horde of native clansmen under the Earl of Clanricarde, was provoked by an insult he offered to his wife. She was the daughter of Gerald Fitzgerald the Great, Earl of Kildare, and her affectionate father in vengeance attacked his son-in-law with a disciplined force loaned him by his neighbors, the lords of the Pale of Dublin. It is said that eight thousand dead bodies were left upon the field. Those were strenuous days, and the earls of Clanricarde have been reckoned among the fiercest fighters from the time they came over from England in the fourteenth century. Sometimes they have been on one side and sometimes on the other, but like most genuine Irishmen, they have usually been "agin the government," whatever, policy it represented. There have been several earnest patriots in the line. An old Irish ballad begins with the line, "Glory guards Clanricarde's grave!" but the present earl is not the one referred to.
The late earl was very popular with his tenants, and so liberal and lenient was he, according to the gossip, that they got into bad habits, and when the present earl came into the property in 1874 he pulled them up very sharply and demanded a prompt and full payment of all their obligations. Being unaccustomed to such stern measures, they were resentful, and a quarrel began which has lasted until now, and Clanricarde, convinced that he has right and justice on his side, has used the mailed hand. There have been more trouble and disturbance upon his estates than upon any other in Ireland. Every one of his tenants has been evicted, and sometimes a succession of them, and their farms have been let to what are called "planters,"--a term used in Ireland to describe families imported from a distance and planted upon land which no person in the neighborhood will rent because the previous tenant has been evicted from it. Every man on the Clanricarde estates is a "planter." After the passage of the act of 1907 the estates commissioners requested him to sell his entire holding under the act of 1903, but he not only rejected the proposition, but has declined even to discuss the subject, and has maintained that uncompromising attitude from the beginning, an embittered, relentless, vindictive old man.
When the commission undertook to apply the compulsory clause of the Evicted Tenants Act and published the notice in the _Dublin Gazette_, the earl filed a protest. Mr. Justice Wiley of the Lower Court sustained the commission, but the Court of Appeals, composed of twelve judges, unanimously reversed the decision and decided that the estates commission has no power to forcibly dispossess any _bona fide_ "planter" from land already under lease.
This decision technically justified the position that the earl has taken, and it applies to the estates of Mrs. Lewis also, so that the commissioners cannot go any farther in their work of restoring the evicted tenants upon those two properties. As soon as the decision was rendered a bill was introduced in parliament confiscating the entire Clanricarde estates. It is not expected to pass, but was intended to advertise the situation and create public opinion. The government, however, took the matter promptly in hand, and the Earl of Crewe introduced a bill authorizing the estates commissioners to take by force, after the usual legal proceedings, any occupied land they may think necessary and proper for the restoration of evicted tenants, provided they can obtain the consent of the occupant. This act was passed, and notice was immediately given in the _Dublin Gazette_ that the estates commissioners intend, under the Evicted Tenants Act, to acquire compulsorily upwards of eighteen hundred acres of land on the estate of Lord Clanricarde in County Galway. This means that the owner of the property is to have nothing to say about the matter, but a _bona fide_ tenant, who in good faith is occupying a farm from which his predecessor has been evicted, cannot be ejected without his consent. We are familiar with the methods of "persuasion" that have been used for years by the United Irish League and other patriotic organizations, and it is entirely probable that they will prove sufficient in all cases that will arise under this new provision. Therefore, as soon as the proposed act is passed, the tenants upon the Clanricarde estates will be looking for trouble.
The Earl of Clanricarde cannot expect to live a great while longer. He is already an infirm old man and his heir, Lord Sligo of Westport, a nephew, is almost as old as he. Lord Sligo is one of the largest land holders in Ireland. He owns 114,000 acres in the north, which is mostly grazing land, and his tenants are miserably poor, living in squalid hovels scattered over the estate. He does nothing for them, and exacts the last halfpenny of his rent. His heir, who will soon come into both the Clanricarde and Sligo estates, is his son, Lord Henry Ulick Browne, of whom very little is known. He is fifty-eight years of age and lives at Westport Castle, Westport, Ireland. As he has had the management of much of his father's property for many years, it is generally believed that he is responsible for the harsh policy that has been followed toward the tenants, and that they can expect no better treatment when he becomes their lawful lord.
The British Parliament has published a return (No. Cd. 4093) covering all the proceedings under the Act of April, 1907, to restore evicted tenants in Ireland; giving particulars in each case in which an evicted tenant, or a person nominated by the estates commissioners to be a personal representative of the deceased evicted tenant, has with the assistance of the commission been reinstated, either by the landlord or by the estates commissioners, or provided with a new parcel of land under the Land Purchase Act.
It is a quarto pamphlet of forty-seven pages, and gives in fine type the names of all the farmers in Ireland who have been evicted since 1876, with the dates of the evictions, the area they formerly occupied, the rent they formerly paid, the arrears of rent due at the time of the eviction, the value of the property, the name of the landlord, the name of the estate, the name of the town and the county, the date of restoration, the price paid by the estates commissioners for each tract, the valuation of the buildings and other improvements on the property, and the compensation given to outgoing tenants who surrender their holdings under the law, to those who were formerly evicted from them.
This report shows that forty tenants have been restored to the Blacker-Douglass estates in Armagh, thirty-two have been restored on the Charlemont estates in the same county; forty-four of those evicted from 1887 to 1889 by Lord Massareene in County Meath have been restored, and thirty-nine on the estate of the Marquess of Lansdowne in Queen's County. On the estates of Sir G. Brooke, in Waterford, seventy-eight families, evicted in 1887 and 1888, have been restored; twenty-six on the estate of A.L. Tottenham, Leitrim; thirty-four on the Vandaleur estates in Leitrim; thirty on the estates of C.W. Warden in County Kerry; thirty-three on the estates of the Earl of Listowel, and similar numbers elsewhere.
So far as is known, every family in Ireland that has been evicted from a farm during the last fifty years for non-payment of rent, or for political reasons, has been restored wherever they are living, and, if the head of the family at the time of the eviction is dead, his heirs have been placed in possession of the place. And all this has been done by the government at the expense of the taxpayers as a vindication of the policy of the Irish Land League, the United Irish League, and other organizations which have conducted the land wars.
The restoration of the evicted tenants was not voluntary on the part of the British government. It was forced upon the parliament by the Irish agitators. In a debate on this act in the House of Lords, the Marquess of Lansdowne, who had evicted a large number of tenants from his estates, admitted that he and other landlords accepted the proposition with great reluctance, and "only because the government had represented to them very earnestly, indeed, that the measure formed an integral part of a policy of pacification which they desired to bring about in Ireland, and if the landlords took the responsibility of rejecting this particular item, the entire programme was destined to failure. It is on the strength of these representations," said the Marquess of Lansdowne, "that we ask the House of Lords to agree to the restoration of all Irish tenants who have been evicted at any time for political reasons as well as for failure to pay their rents."
The members of the National Party in Ireland concede this point cheerfully. They willingly admit that they insisted upon the restoration of all evicted tenants as the first and the most important proposition in the programme of pacification in Ireland, and they agreed with the Marquess of Lansdowne that it would have been a failure otherwise. It should also be stated that all arrears of rent for which families have been evicted from Irish farms have been cancelled, and the restored tenants have become the actual owners of the land, the houses, and all improvements. Instead of paying rent to a landlord, they become the landlords themselves. The purchase money in every case has been advanced by the government, and is to be repaid by the purchaser in sixty-eight years with interest at three and one quarter per cent per annum. This sum represents two and one-half per cent interest upon bonds issued to raise the funds and three-fourths of one per cent for a sinking fund to meet the bonds at maturity.
X
MAYNOOTH COLLEGE AND CARTON HOUSE
Two-thirds and perhaps as many as three-fourths of the Roman Catholic priests in Ireland were educated at the College of Maynooth, which turns out one hundred and fifty or more earnest, zealous, able young clergymen every year, and is the most conspicuous and influential educational institution in Ireland. Comparatively few of the graduates go to the United States. Dr. Hogan, professor of modern languages and literature, explained that nearly all of the Irish priests who emigrated to America were educated at the missionary college of All Hallows, near Dublin, for the United States was until recently counted as a mission field by the holy see and was under the jurisdiction of the prefect of the propaganda of the holy faith at Rome. There are quite a number of Maynooth graduates in America, and during the recent visit of Cardinal Logue they gave a dinner in his honor in New York.
Dr. Hogan took us through the buildings, which are spacious and surround two large quadrangles. They are built of stone, four stories in height, are entirely modern and fitted up with all the conveniences and accessories that belong to an up-to-date institution of learning. The chapel is also modern, built within the present generation and entirely conventional. It is not large enough to accommodate all of the students, and the underclass men attend mass elsewhere.
Beyond the second quadrangle is a campus of seventy acres of lawn and garden and grove, where five hundred young men were engaged in taking their daily supply of fresh air and exercise when we passed through the archway. Almost every kind of game was going on, from croquet to football. There were several cricket contests in progress; others were playing at hockey and basketball; others were on the track running, and the lazy ones were lying stretched out on the velvet grass. There are now five hundred and sixty-two students, nearly all of them theologs, and one hundred and twenty graduated in 1908. They come chiefly from Ireland, a few from Irish families in England, a few more from Australia, but at present there is no representative of the United States. When I asked a group of young men how they got along without any Americans, one of them illustrated the quick wit of his race by replying promptly: "We hope never to have them here, sir; they are altogether too smart for us. If they keep on, the Americans will run the world."
It costs very little to get an education at Maynooth. The fees are small,--$20 for matriculation, $25 for tuition, $150 a year for board, and other small fees for electric light, rent of furniture, etc., which brings the total up to about $225 a year. There are two hundred and seventy scholarships which have been founded by friends of the institution and societies in the different parishes, and they pay an average of $150 a year. There is a fine library with forty thousand volumes, and a gymnasium and everything else that is needed.
The ancient castle of Maynooth, built by the Earl of Kildare in 1427, stands at the gateway of the college, and occupies the site of the original stronghold of the family, built in 1176 by the first Maurice Fitzgerald, who came over with the Strongbow at the time of the Conquest. It has been a ruin since 1647, and a beautiful ruin it is--one of the largest and most picturesque in the kingdom.
Until 1895, when the centenary of Maynooth College was celebrated, six thousand priests and prelates of Irish birth had been educated within the walls of that "mother of love, and of fear and of knowledge, and of holy hope," as her alumni call her. And now the number exceeds seventy-five hundred. Most of them have been, and those now living are still, doing pastoral work in Ireland, and nearly two thousand of the alumni have gone abroad into the United States, England, Scotland, Australia, South Africa, and other English-speaking countries. During the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century and for several hundred years before Catholic education was prohibited in Ireland, but it was not possible for the British authorities to prevent young men from crossing the sea, and during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a number of Irish colleges were founded in the Peninsula, in France, and in Flanders, and there most of the Irish priests of that long period received their education. It has been often asserted that the Catholic faith might have disappeared in Ireland but for the ardent piety and ambition of these young students, who found the preparation they needed for parish work from the Irish faculties of divinity schools on the Continent. In 1795, at the time Maynooth College was founded, about four hundred young Irishmen were attending such institutions, and in 1808 a printed report names twelve colleges with four hundred and seventy-eight Irish students.