Part 21

I cannot substitute a name for that of my next witness. It is too well known, having been mentioned in Parliament. John Coppithorne is a Methodist. In politics, a Conservative. He says that if poor Beaconsfield were in there would not be any of these disturbances. He has a shop. He is a dyer, coloring frieze for country-folks. He rents several acres of land, and, finally, unfortunately for him, he lets “cars,” or keeps a small posting establishment. It is on account of letting vehicles to the police that he is boycotted. He has lived for fifty-two years in the town of Skibbereen, in the southwest, near Cape Clear. Skibbereen is the terminus of the railroad, but beyond lies Skull, the residence of Father Murphy. Father Murphy is a quiet Catholic priest. One day a police-officer went into his house to get him to use his influence with the people. But Father Sheehy was already in jail, and the people, seeing the policeman, flew to the idea that Father Murphy was to be apprehended. A riot impended, and a message was sent to Skibbereen for a reinforcement of police. Not many police-officers were there, but they sent as many as they thought they could spare, and unfortunate John Coppithorne let them have cars to convey them, having no idea that the people would break out as they did. Mrs. Coppithorne was extremely alarmed when the mob attacked their house. They began about nine P.M., and continued at intervals until daylight, or about half-past two. It was not alone the breaking of windows, doors, and shutters which was alarming, but the accompanying sounds. The women were dreadful, howling and laughing. They brought stones in their aprons and encouraged the men. Horns were blown all night on the surrounding hills,—conch-shells and cows’ horns. The military arrived by special train at three A.M., “and their arrival was as grateful as at Lucknow,” said Mrs. Coppithorne.

At an early hour of the night some of the mob suggested to the priest that if the armed police were withdrawn they themselves would disperse. The stipendiary magistrate agreed to the proposition. The stipendiary, or paid magistrate, commands the armed forces, soldiers and police, in case of riot. So the police withdrew to barracks, and the mob took the priest on their shoulders and carried him home. The magistrate retired to his hotel, and then the mob came back in double force. Having before confined their efforts to the upper windows, they now attacked the doors and shutters below, and plundered the shop.

After all it was a false alarm, as Father Murphy was not apprehended. Tears came into Coppithorne’s eyes when I asked him the amount of his losses. I hear that he claims damages to the extent of eight hundred pounds. He says that his business, worth perhaps two hundred pounds a year, is almost entirely ruined. Sometimes the people will come creeping in, perhaps with a permit to get frieze left to be dyed before the riot. There was a man in the shop while I was there, who wanted some frieze which some one had left for a petticoat. He had lost the ticket. The clerk declined to let him have it. “Only that the book was torn,” he said, “I could let you have it.” So the inconvenience of tearing books is not all on one side.

John Coppithorne is familiar with the pecuniary condition of the farmer. We could hardly expect him to be prejudiced in the farmers’ favor. It is therefore remarkable that he confirms the report of the desperate condition of many of them. Of working farmers around him, he estimates that ten per cent. have barns. About fifty per cent. sell their hay. Then horses and cows are fed in the winter on the young shoots of the furze, chopped up for the purpose. (It is like donkeys eating thistles.) Fifty per cent. of the farmers sell their straw, and buy guano and phosphates. These are the small, unthrifty farmers. The large ones buy these, and use barn-yard manure also. But about fifty per cent. are never forehanded enough to be able to make manure in the winter sufficient to keep their land up to the standard. Poor creatures that have only a few acres can be seen going security for each other in the spring to buy guano for their potato ground. They live on potatoes, fish, milk, and Indian meal gruel.

About the same percentage sell all their grain to meet their rent and pressing demands, and then buy, often on credit, to feed themselves and animals. They buy their seed grain on credit at a high rate, paying, if they pay at all, after the next harvest. Legal process is not infrequently used to oblige them to pay. If money had not been sent into Ireland, and relief afforded by benevolent persons, half of the farmers would not have had seed potatoes in the spring of 1880.

Others at Skibbereen said that the competition is too great when farms are to be rented, and some farms are entirely too small to support a family, even if they had them rent free. Near the sea-coast an existence can be eked out by fishing, but there are many in Ireland cultivating five acres or less.

During my visit to Skibbereen I saw a funeral. The corpse was followed by wailing women, for this old custom still prevails. They buried the body at the graveyard of the abbey, an old ruin, where the dead were buried coffinless during the famine. It was so desperate that these people, who have so great a regard for funeral observances, would bury their dead, in some cases, in fields near the houses, and the parish cart went round and took up dead bodies that were buried in trenches. This great famine was caused by the potato-rot. A gentleman told me that at that time nineteen-twentieths of the people rarely ate bread.

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But whether Ireland has not long been subject to famines is to me a question. Within two or three years we have seen one averted by liberal contributions, and there was one in 1822, or twenty-five years before the great potato famine just mentioned.

While in the county Cork I met another person well qualified to speak of the condition of farmers. Michael McBride’s occupations were multifarious. He kept a shop, and a public-house distinct from it. He farmed many acres of land in different tracts. He sold his cattle at the fair. A public-house is a drinking-place, but McBride said that he drank no liquor himself. He was not a member of the Land League. He turned out a tenant and suffered by the League. While we talked in a retired corner of his “public,” he occasionally spoke in a loud voice, as though for others to hear, in this manner: “England is getting sixteen million pounds a year out of this unfortunate country, and plunging people into jail under the coercion act for saying nothing but the truth.”

McBride appointed an hour for me to call again. In the evening he had to go out and raise contributions for the poor of the parish. “A very wild summer, thank God,” he said, meaning a cold summer, unfavorable to agriculture. (“We thank God for everything,” said my landlady; “good, bad, or indifferent. One of my English cousins could not believe that there was any reality in thanking God for bad things.”) McBride said that he held much land.

“Of course you employ some one to work it for you?” I asked.

“Oh, bedad, yes,” he replied.

He said that there are men who sell their clover green when in want of money, and who will even take off two or three crops in the year and sell them green.

The poor farmer sells his hay, straw, and turnips to pay his rent, and therefore cannot make barn-yard manure in the winter. Guano was selling at thirteen pounds the ton. “It is a great evil to rely on,” said McBride. “The poor farmer may sell his oats at the glut of the market at five pounds a ton, and afterward buy Indian meal at seven pounds to feed his animals and himself.”

In February, McBride paid seven pounds per ton for hay, but in the preceding summer at harvest the same quality was less than two pounds per ton. He showed me a note which he had signed to prevent a small farmer or poor man from being turned out. Such must have two endorsers; but McBride’s signature was enough, because he was a man of means. At first he refused. The man cried, for he was to be served with a writ if he did not pay that day. The note runs in this manner:

“16th of June, 1881.

“On demand we jointly and severally, or any two of us, promise to pay Messrs. Kelly & Co., limited, Patrick Street, Cork, or order, the sum of £10, for value received.

“DAVID SMITH. “MICHAEL MCBRIDE.”

McBride added that he supposed that he signed “a thousand a year,” and lost as “often as I have hairs on my head.” On the above note for ten pounds the borrower was to pay ten shillings interest and sixpence other charges for the use of the money for three months, which is over twenty per cent. annually.

He said that of private bankers and money-lenders at exorbitant rates there are twenty in Cork, some of them pawnbrokers. In various towns there are many poor people who pawn their clothing on Monday and redeem it on Saturday.

McBride said that the great cause of the present embarrassment is the three bad years of 1877, 1878, and 1879. Oats, wheat, barley, and potatoes were bad. Some oat-fields were never cut. McBride said that seventy per cent. of the farmers around Cork are unable to pay their debts, and would be bankrupt if forced to do so. They would need three good harvests to bring them up. “They will never pay the same rents again. Their condition is owing to high rents, bad harvests, and American competition.”

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After leaving the county Cork I spent a few days in Dublin. From persons on the train thither and in that city I obtained information concerning other portions of Ireland. To this I add the testimony of an Irish gentleman well known in politics, whom I met in London.

A young man from the county of Limerick said that that county is all pasture. Not more than forty per cent. of the farmers in his neighborhood could afford to save hay and straw and feed cattle in winter for manure. Farms average from forty to fifty acres, some being as small as ten. He knew one man who farmed over three hundred acres, and paid three pounds and five shillings per acre therefor. He had two or three acres in potatoes, and the same in oats, but all the rest in pasture.

“Can he make money?” I asked.

“Not these late years,” he replied. “He is served with an ejectment because he can’t pay his rent.”

None of our farmers will be surprised that a man cannot make money on grass-land at a rent of about sixteen dollars per acre.

Another passenger, who was from Tipperary, said that, with few exceptions, the farmers of that county can keep cattle in winter and keep up their farms. Take the whole of Ireland, however, and farm-lands are deteriorating in value. In Tipperary and Limerick lies “the Golden Vale,” celebrated for its fertility. I had an impression that Tipperary was wild and riotous. In London I spoke to the political gentleman above alluded to, who knew the county well. In politics he is not in unity with Parnell, and is opposed to the Land League; but not, if we may judge by his conversation, to sanguinary measures.

“Tipperary,” said he, “has not of late suffered so much as some other districts. Thirty or forty years ago the farmers were entirely at the mercy of their landlords. They took the law into their own hands and fought for their farms, shooting down the landlords or their agents. Many of them were hanged or transported. The land bill of 1870,” he continued, “extended to all Ireland, restrains the landlord from evicting tenants without leases, unless paying them for their improvements.” He says that the present trouble is caused mainly by landlords demanding increased rents.

My intelligent fellow-traveller from the county Tipperary further said that the provisions of the proposed land bill, by which the tenant is to hold his land as long as he pays his rent, will do away with all abuses. The Three F’s of the land bill are: First, Free sale,—that is, the tenant is to have the privilege of selling his right in the farm; second, Fixity of tenure; and, third, Fair rent, to be determined by a court.

I remarked that this third F is against the free operation of trade; that everything should be sold at its value in the market. “No one puts such restrictions upon trade as you Americans,” he replied.

When I arrived at Dublin I lodged at two different temperance houses. In one I met a plain man from the county Galway, in the west. He kept a shop, and was a dealer in hides. He traded from town to town. He said that his priest and bishop were good men, and that young boys and girls were signing the pledge. Of the farmers of Galway he estimated that seventy per cent. are unable to pay their rent unless they sell horse, cow, and calves; and even then they would be left in debt to the shopkeeper. He complained greatly of the recent coercion act, under which, he says, worthy citizens are apprehended or are in danger.

One fellow-lodger was a Methodist minister from the county Fermanagh, in the north. He had been attending the Cork Conference. He complained of the increase of luxury among farmers in buying tea and bread and in the clothing of their daughters, and spoke of their spending two days a week at market, and five or six shillings each time in treating each other.

“But your congregations are not of this class?” I said.

“Indeed they are,” he answered. “There are plenty in my congregation who come home tipsy every market night.”

He afterward took out change and called for a bottle of ale. They sent out and got it for him.

I was much interested in the conversation of two men who were dining at the house. One of them, a young man, said that the three F’s would not satisfy the Land-Leaguers. They wanted the extermination of the landlords and the possession of the land. The other did not agree with him. He said, “It would be a nice thing for you to be paying two pounds and ten shillings for land, and a Land-Leaguer over the fence be getting it for half the money. I am an Orangeman,” he added, “and the son of an Orangeman, and the grandson of an Orangeman, yet I am greatly in sympathy with the poor, suffering tenantry of this country.”

He said of himself that he had been in the army nine years; that he was a landlord in a small way, five or six hundred pounds a year; and that he was now lying out of rents. Rather than disturb tenants he had paid as high as ten per cent. for money, and “glad to get it at that.” He was originally from the county Cavan, northwest of Dublin. He said that the average size of farms there is about twelve acres. Some have thirty. About twenty per cent. of the farmers own horses. Many keep donkeys, but these are unfit for farming. They put out manure with jennets, which are not fit for ploughing. The poor farmer must wait until the richer one has done ploughing so as to hire horses, and then the land is ploughed shallow and injured. Both speakers were agreed on the trouble of hiring horses. You must pay ten shillings a day for a pair, feed them and the ploughman, and give him several glasses of whiskey, added one. If you have cash in hand, you can get horses when you will; but the small farmer cannot pay until he has harvested his crop. He generally pays labor in exchange for horses.

A suggestion that the British government should buy the lands of Ireland, rent them for the space of thirty years, and that the people should then become possessors, met with some favor. The Irish politician whom I met in London found two objections to this plan: First, that it would take from the country the cultivated class; and, second, that for thirty years it would drain the country of money.

ENGLISH.

I spent a few weeks in England in 1881, and visited three agricultural regions in the east, the north, and the south. An article on the last is to appear in _Harpers’ Magazine_. The following is drawn principally from my visit to the east. Some account of my stay in the north and of a few days in a manufacturing county may appear hereafter.

My authority for the statements in the following article is almost entirely notes taken at the time, assisted in a small degree by recollections. But it cannot be assumed that this essay is without faults.

With regard to another country, I was advised to tell what I saw and how it impressed my mind, and not to endeavor to draw conclusions. But what a traveller sees and hears is greatly influenced by his own opinions. He goes to a foreign land, and if of different religious institutions from his own, he inquires on this point; of a different form of government, he asks political questions. He notices, also, differences in dress, food, and manner of living.

The first family with whom I boarded in Huntingdonshire was that of Mr. Jackson, a carpenter, who, besides working at his trade, rented a few acres. His wife, who was a farmer’s daughter, had a small dairy of three cows. Jackson appeared to have a splendid constitution. He was short and somewhat thick-set. He began his trade at eighteen, and was an apprentice five years and a journeyman three, when, having put by some money, he married at twenty-six. His wife was near thirty. One of them said that they had prospered with the help of the Lord.

Mrs. Jackson also had been able to save something wherewith to furnish a house. She learned a trade, and was also companion or lady’s-maid to sick ladies and those going to Brighton. One of them made her a wedding present of neat china.

Jackson and his wife have four children,—the eldest about six, or as she says, “Four little children, not one of them able to put on a shoe nor a stocking.” She attends to her dairy, boards the apprentice, and has no servant.

Their children are sweet and clean. Three of them go to the public school in the village. It is called the national school. Mrs. Jackson gave the eldest three pence to pay for their instruction for a week; which is at the rate of about twenty-four cents a quarter for each of them. The penny is a trifle over two cents, the shilling a little under a quarter of a dollar; but in turning sterling money into our own, it will avoid repetition to consider the English penny as two cents, and four shillings as a dollar.

The Jacksons’ house seemed a perfect palace compared to that of any working farmer that I saw in Ireland. Coming freshly from that country, I thought it must be the gem of the village, but I was mistaken. The busy activity of the Jacksons, who have a young family to keep, was more like what I have seen at home than what I saw in Ireland.

The house has a peculiar name placed on the front, something like Hallelujah House. Doubtless it was built by a dissenter. I saw another bearing title Bunyan Lodge.

A lodging-room was assigned to me, and I ate by myself in one of the front rooms below. (Thus to take lodgings is very common in England.) Jackson and his wife ate in the kitchen. When they had finished, she gave the apprentice what she chose. My room had strips of carpet on the floor, neat white curtains at the window, a suitable toilet service, linen sheets and pillow-cases. There stood in it a neat red chest with iron bands at the corners, and a white fringed cloth covering the top. It was locked, expressive of thrifty housekeeping.

Jackson and his wife do not go to the gray Church of England, which, with its spire, overlooks the trees. They attend the brick chapel, being Independents.

After he had taken me to see his calves and pigs, I asked him what proportion of the farmers in the neighborhood belonged to the Church of England.

He answered, “About one-half. I think that is just about the proportion that voted last year.”

This answer amused me much, but I feared that his wife would not understand why I laughed.

“You mean to say,” I said, “that large landed proprietors expect those who rent from them to go to church?”

“Yes,” he said, “or they would not rent to them.”

“Of course,” said I, “it is not put into the leases. But how can they know how they vote now that you have the secret ballot?”

“They go round and ask them, and if they would not promise, they would lose their farms. Many a farmer has been turned out because he would not vote for his landlord’s party.”

On another occasion I spoke to him of the wars which England had lately waged in Asia and South Africa, and Jackson spoke of the deficit in the finances when the Liberals came in. He said that he believed their country has had to smart very severely for unnecessary wars and bloodshed, and added, “Because it was a smart little country, what business had we to go and say to other nations, ‘You shall do as we please’?”

* * * * *

I did not stay many days with the Jacksons. Mrs. J. considered the burden of a dairy and of young children to be enough without taking lodgers. I was recommended to the house of Mr. Benton, the principal farmer in the village, and a friend called with me and introduced me to Mrs. B., who after an interval for deliberation consented to take me as a boarder at their family table.

Benton farmed about seven hundred acres, but not all in one tract. He owned a small part, and rented from various persons. One large farm he had taken at a heavy rent, and he was worried in these hard times. He used to follow the plough when a boy, but he cannot now, having so much to do in walking around and superintending work.

Mr. and Mrs. Benton adhered to the Established Church. He began to attend Sunday-school early, perhaps at two years, and had attended ever since, he being fifty, and a teacher. He was church-warden, and the most considerable parishioner in attendance; but was not on equal visiting terms with the clergyman.

He was more reserved than his wife; he said that the English did not incline to make new friends. He seemed to hold to the same opinions that he cherished in early life; to be of warm and constant attachments, and not free from prejudice. He said that Ireland should be sunk for twenty-four hours and repeopled with English and Scotch; that the reason the poor-rates are so heavy in Ireland is that the people are so lazy. He declined to tell to which political party he held, saying that the ballot is secret. He remarked of ourselves that he wished “the Americans would let our things go in there free, same as we let their things.”

The Bentons had seven children, five of them daughters. The eldest son was twenty-one, and was actively employed attending to farm operations. The girls had taken music lessons, and could play upon the piano. The eldest two were away learning dressmaking, and Mrs. Benton thought that she might be able to get a place as lady’s-maid for one or more of her girls.

Mrs. Benton had a large house, kept in good order. She was tall, fair, good-looking, active, and sprightly. She said that she “would rather have a penny of her own _hearning_ than tuppence that anybody should give her.” She did her housework with the help of the young daughters left at home. She said that, as a general rule, the tenant farmers had brought up their children too high, had hired servants, and now that these hard times had come, they had failed.

But Mrs. Benton’s housework is not like that of the wife of a large farmer in Pennsylvania. She does not board any of the farm hands; the only thing of the kind that they do now is to give them their beer in “’aytime.” She hires a woman to help wash. In summer they wash about once in eight weeks, and in winter more rarely, having plenty of clothes. The washing is done in two days, Saturday and Monday. Mrs. B. and her daughters do the ironing, though sometimes she puts out a frilled petticoat. They iron only the starched things; the others are mangled.