Chapter 24

Mr. W.E. Forster, who, above all other Englishmen deserved the gratitude of Ireland for his efforts during this tragic time, has left terrible descriptions of the scenes of which he was himself an eye-witness, especially in the west. "The town of Westport," he tells us in one of his reports, "was itself a strange and fearful sight, like what we read of in beleaguered cities; its streets crowded with gaunt wanderers, sauntering to and fro with hopeless air and hunger-struck look--a mob of starved, almost naked women around the poor-house clamouring for soup-tickets. Our inn, the head-quarters of the road engineer and pay clerks, beset by a crowd of beggars for work." In another place "the survivors," he says, "were like walking skeletons--the men gaunt and haggard, stamped with the livid mark of hunger; the children crying with pain; the women in some of the cabins too weak to stand. When there before I had seen cows at almost every cabin, and there were besides many sheep and pigs owned in the village. But now the sheep were all gone--all the cows, all the poultry killed--only one pig left; the very dogs which had barked at me before had disappeared--no potatoes; no oats."

One more extract more piteous even than the rest: "As we went along our wonder was not that the people died, but that they lived; and I have no doubt whatever that in any other country the mortality would have been far greater; that many lives have been prolonged, perhaps saved, by the long apprenticeship to want in which the Irish peasant had been trained, and by that lovely touching charity which prompts him to share his scanty meal with his starving neighbour."

Of course all this time there was no lack of preventative measures. Large sums had been voted from the Treasury; stores of Indian corn introduced; great relief works set on foot. An unfortunate fatality seemed, however, to clog nearly all these efforts. Either they proved too late to save life, or in some way or other to be unsuitable to the exigencies of the case. Individual charity, too, came out upon the most magnificent scale. All Europe contributed, and English gold was poured forth without stint or stay. Still the famine raged almost unchecked. The relief works established by the Government, with the best intentions possible, too often were devoted to the most curiously useless, sometimes even to actually harmful, objects. To this day "Famine roads" may be met with in the middle of snipe bogs, or skirting precipices where no road was ever wanted or could possibly be used. By the time, too, they were in full working order the people were, in many cases, too enfeebled by want and disease to work. For close upon the heels of the famine followed an epidemic hardly less fatal than itself. In the course of the two years that it raged over two hundred thousand people are said to have perished from this cause alone, and three times the number to have been attacked and permanently enfeebled by it.

In 1849 a Relief Act was passed which established soup kitchens throughout the unions, where food was to be had gratis by all who required it. Long before this similar kitchens had been privately set on foot, and men and women had devoted themselves to the work with untiring energy and the most absolute self-devotedness. Of these self-appointed and unpaid workers a large number shared the fate of those whom they assisted. Indeed, it is one of the most singular features of the time that not only old, or feeble, or specially sensitive people died, but strong men, heads of houses--not regarded as by any means specially soft-hearted--raised, too, by circumstances out of reach of actual hunger, died--just as O'Connell had died--of sheer distress of mind, and the effort to cope with what was beyond the power of any human being to cope with. In the single county of Galway the records of the times show--as may easily be verified--an extraordinary number of deaths of this type, a fact which alone goes far to disprove those accusations of heartlessness and indifference which have in some instances been too lightly flung.

After the famine followed ruin--a ruin which swept high and low alike into its net. When the poor rate rose to twenty and twenty-five shillings in the pound it followed that the distinction between rich and poor vanished, and there were plenty of instances of men, accounted well off, who had subscribed liberally to others at the beginning of the famine, who were themselves seeking relief before the end. The result was a state of things which has left bitterer traces behind it than even the famine itself. The smaller type of landowners, who for the most part had kindly relations with their tenants, were swept away like leaves before the great storm, their properties fell to their creditors, and were sold by order of the newly established Encumbered Estates Courts. No proposing purchaser would have anything to say to estates covered with a crowd of pauper tenants, and the result was a wholesale clearance, carried out usually by orders given by strangers at a distance, and executed too often with a disregard of humanity that it is frightful to read or to think of. Most of the people thus ejected in the end emigrated, and that emigration was under the circumstances their best hope few can reasonably doubt. Even here, however, misfortune pursued them. Sanitary inspection of emigrant ships was at the time all but unheard of, and statistics show that the densely crowded condition of the vessels which took them away produced the most terrible mortality amongst the already enfeebled people who crowded them, a full fifth of the steerage passengers in many cases, it is said, dying upon the voyage, and many more immediately after landing. The result of all this has been that the inevitable horrors of the time have been deepened and intensified by a sense of ill-usage, which has left a terrible legacy behind--one which may prove to be a peril to generations still unborn. Even where those who emigrated have prospered most, and where they or their sons are now rich men, they cling with unhappy persistency to the memory of that wretched past--a memory which the forty years which have intervened, far from softening, seem, in many cases, to have only lashed into a yet more passionate bitterness.

In Ireland itself the permanent effects of the disaster differed of course in different places and with different people, but in one respect it may be said to have been the same everywhere. Between the Ireland of the past and the Ireland of the present the Famine lies like a black stream, all but entirely blotting out and effacing the past. Whole phases of life, whole types of character, whole modes of existence and ways of thought passed away then and have never been renewed. The entire fabric of the country was torn to pieces and has never reformed itself upon the same lines again. After a while everyday life began again of course, as it does everywhere all over the world, and in some respects the struggle for existence has never since been quite so severe or so prolonged. The lesson of those two terrible years has certainly not been lost, but like all such lessons it has left deep scars which can never be healed. Men and women, still alive who remember the famine, look back across it as we all look back across some personal grief, some catastrophe which has shattered our lives and made havoc of everything we cared for. We, too, go on again after a while as if nothing had happened, yet we know perfectly well all the while that matters are not the least as they were before; that on the contrary they never can or will be.

LVIII.

THE LATEST DEVELOPMENT.

The story of the last forty years must be compressed into a nutshell. The famine was over at last, but its effects remained. Nearly a million of people had emigrated, yet the condition of life for those remaining was far from satisfactory. The Encumbered Estates Act, which had completed the ruin of many of the older proprietors, pressed, in some respects, even more severely upon the tenants, a large number of whom found themselves confronted with new purchasers, who, having invested in Irish land merely as a speculation, had little other interest in it. In 1850 an attempt at a union of North and South was made, and a Tenant League Conference assembled in Dublin. Of this league the remnants of the "Young Ireland" party formed the nucleus, but were supplemented by others with widely different aims and intentions. Of these others the two Sadleirs, John and James, Mr. Edmund O'Flaherty, and Mr. William Keogh, afterwards Judge Keogh, were the most prominent. These with their adherents constituted the once famous "Brass Band" which for several years filled Parliament with its noisy declamations, and which posed as the specially appointed champion of Catholicism. In 1853 several of its members took office under Lord Aberdeen, but their course was not a long one. A bank kept in Ireland by the two Sadleirs broke, ruining an enormous number of people, and on investigation was found to have been fraudulently conducted from the very beginning. John Sadleir thereupon killed himself; his brother James was expelled from the House of Commons, and he and several others implicated in the swindle fled the country and never reappeared, and so the "Brass Band" broke up, amid the well-deserved contempt of men of every shade of political opinion.

After this succeeded a prolonged lull. Secret agitations, however, were still working underground, and as early as 1850 one known as the Phoenix organization began to collect recruits, although for a long time its proceedings attracted little or no attention.

In 1859 several of its members were arrested, and it seemed then to die down and disappear, but some years later it sprang up again with a new name, and the years 1866 and 1867 were signalized by the Fenian rising, or to put it with less dignity, the Fenian scare. With the close of the American War a steady backward stream of Americanized Irishmen had set in, and a belief that war between England and America was rapidly approaching had become an article of fervent faith with a large majority in Ireland. The Fenian plan of operation was a two-headed one. There was to be a rising in Ireland, and there was to be a raid into Canada across the American frontier. Little formidable as either project seems now, at the time they looked serious enough, and had the strained relations then existing between England and America turned out differently, no one can say but what they might have become so. The Fenian organization, which grew out of the earlier Phoenix one, was managed from centres, a man called Stephens being the person who came most prominently before the world in the capacity of Head centre. In 1865 Stephens was arrested in Dublin, but managed to escape not long afterwards from Richmond prison by the aid of two confederates within its walls. The following May, 1866, a small body of Fenians crossed the Niagara river, but the United States authorities rigidly enforced the neutrality of the American frontier, and so the attempt perished. The same spring a rising broke out in Ireland, but it also was stamped with failure from its onset, and the famous snowstorm of that year finished the discomfiture of its adherents.

Two other Fenian demonstrations, not to mention an abortive project to seize Chester Castle, were shortly afterwards made in England. In 1867, some Fenian prisoners were rescued in Manchester, while on their way to gaol, and in the attempt to burst the lock of the van in which they were being conveyed a police officer named Brett, who was in charge of it, was accidentally shot. Five men were found guilty for this offence. One Macquire was proved to have been arrested by mistake, another Conder had the sentence commuted, but three--Allen, Larkin, and O'Brien--were hung.

Another Fenian exploit of a somewhat different character followed in December, 1867, when an attempt was made by some desperados belonging to the party to blow up the Clerkenwell House of Detention, in which two Fenian prisoners were then confined. Luckily for them, as it turned out, they were not in that part of the prison at the time, or the result of their would-be liberators' efforts would have simply been to kill them. As it was, twelve other people were either killed on the spot or died from its effects, and over a hundred were more or less badly wounded. For this crime six persons were put upon their trial, but only one was convicted and actually executed.

The next Irish event of any moment stands upon a curiously different platform, though there were not wanting suggestions that the two had an indirect connection as cause and effect. In 1868 the Liberal party came into power after the General Election with Mr. Gladstone as Prime Minister, and the session of 1869 saw the introduction of a Bill for the Disestablishment of the Irish Church. The controversies to which that measure gave rise are already quite out of date, and there is no need therefore to revive them. Few measures so vehemently opposed have produced less startling effects in the end. It neither achieved those great things hoped by its supporters, nor yet brought about the dire disasters so freely threatened by its opponents. To the Roman Catholics of Ireland the grievance of an alien State Church had, since the settlement of the tithe question, lapsed into being little more than a sentimental one, so that practically the measure affected them little. As an institution, however, the position of the Irish State Church was undoubtedly a difficult one to defend, the very same arguments which tell most forcibly for the State Church of England telling most forcibly against its numerically feeble Irish sister. Whatever the abstract rights or wrongs of the case it is pretty clear now that the change must have come sooner or later, and few therefore can seriously regret that it came when it did. The struggle was protracted through the entire session, but in the end passed both Houses of Parliament, and received the royal assent on July 26, 1869.

It was followed early the following year by the Irish Land Act, which was introduced into the House of Commons by Mr. Gladstone on February 15, 1870. This Act has been succinctly described as one obliging all landlords to do what the best landlords did spontaneously, and this perhaps may be accepted as a fairly accurate account of it. Owing to the fact of land being practically the only commodity of value, there has always been in Ireland a tendency to offer far more for it than could reasonably be hoped to be got in the form of return, and this tendency has led, especially in the poorest districts and with the smallest holdings, to a rent being offered and accepted often quite out of proportion to the actual value of the land, though in few instances do the very highest rents attainable seem even in these cases to have been exacted. The Act now proposed was to abolish one passed in 1860 which had reduced all tenant and landlord transactions in Ireland to simple matters of free contract, and to interpose the authority of the State between the two. It legalized what were known as the "Ulster customs;" awarded compensations for all improvements made by the tenant or his predecessors, and in case of eviction for any cause except non-payment of rent a further compensation was to be granted, which might amount to a sum equal to seven years' rent; it also endeavoured to a partial extent to establish peasant proprietorship. That it was a conscientious attempt to deal with a very intricate and perplexing problem may fairly be conceded, at the same time it has been its misfortune that it proved satisfactory to neither of the two classes chiefly concerned, being denounced by the one as the beginning of spoliation, by the other as a mere worthless, and utterly contemptible attempt at dealing with the necessities of the case.

A third measure--the Irish Education Act--was proposed the following session, but as it resulted in failure, was popular with no party, and failed to pass; it need not be entered into even briefly. 1874 saw a dissolution of Parliament and a General Election, which resulted in the defeat of the Liberals, and the return of the Conservatives to office. Before this, a new Irish constitutional party pledged to the principle of Home Government, had grown up in the House of Commons, at first under the leadership of Mr. Butt, afterwards with new aims and widely different tactics under that of Mr. Parnell. In 1879 an agrarian movement was set on foot in Ireland, chiefly through the instrumentality of Mr. Davitt, which has since become so widely known as the Land League. It was almost immediately joined by the more extreme members of the Irish Parliamentary party. Meetings were held in all directions, and an amount of popular enthusiasm aroused which the more purely political question had never succeeded in awakening. Subscriptions poured in from America. A season of great scarcity, and in some districts of partial famine, had produced an unusual amount of distress, and this and the unsettled state of the Land Question all helped to foster the rising excitement. The country grew more and more disturbed. Several murders and a number of agrarian outrages were committed, and the necessity of strengthening the hands of the executive began to be felt by both the chief political parties alike.

In 1880 the Liberal party returned to power after the General Election, and 1881 witnessed the passage through Parliament of two important Irish measures. The first of these was a Protection of Life and Property Bill brought in in January by Mr. Forster, then Chief Secretary of Ireland. As was to be expected, this was vehemently opposed by the Nationalist members, who retarded it by every means in their power, one famous sitting of the House on this occasion lasting for forty-two hours, from five o'clock on the Monday afternoon to nine o'clock on the Wednesday following, and then only being brought to an end by the authority of the Speaker. By March, however, the Bill passed, and in the following month, April 7th, a new Irish Land Act was brought forward by Mr. Gladstone, and was passed after much opposition the following autumn.

The full scope and purport of this Act it is far beyond the limits of these few remaining pages to enter upon. Although, to some extent an outcome of the Act of 1870, it cannot in strictness be called a mere development or completion of it, being in many respects based upon entirely new principles. The most salient of these are what are known as the "three Fs," namely--Fixity of Tenure, Fair Rent, to be decided by a Land Court, and Free Sale. As regards the last two, it has been pointed out with some force that the one practically does away with the other, the only person benefited being the immediate occupier, at whose departure that fierce competitive desire for the land which is the real root of the whole difficulty being allowed freer play than ever. With regard to the first, its effect may be briefly stated as that of reducing the owner to the position of a rent charger or annuitant upon what had before been his own estate, thereby depriving him--even where want of means did not effectually do so--of all desire to expend capital upon what had henceforth ceased to be his property, and over the management of which he had almost wholly lost control. That this is a change of a very large and sweeping character it is needless to say. Henceforward ownership of land in Ireland is no longer ownership in the ordinary sense of the word. It is an ownership of two persons instead of one, and a divided ownership, even where two people work together harmoniously, is as most of us are aware, a very difficult relationship to maintain, and is apt to be followed sooner or later by the effacements of the rights of one or the other. How these diverging rights are finally to be adjusted is at this moment the problem of problems in Ireland, and still imperatively awaits solution.

In October of the same year, 1881, Mr. Parnell, Mr. Davitt, and other principal members of the Land League, were arrested by order of the Government, and lodged in Kilmainhan gaol, an event announced the same evening by Mr. Gladstone at the Guildhall banquet. The following May the Liberal Government resolved however, rather suddenly, to reverse their previous policy, and the Irish leaders were set at liberty. About the same time Lord Cowper and Mr. Forster, the Lord-Lieutenant and Chief Secretary, resigned, and were replaced by Lord Spencer and Lord Frederick Cavendish, who arrived in Ireland avowedly upon a mission of conciliation.

The day of their arrival--May 6, 1882--has been made only too memorable to the whole world by the appalling tragedy which took place the same evening in the Phoenix Park, where Lord Frederick and Mr. Burke, the Under Secretary, while walking together in the clear dusk, were murdered by a party of miscreants, who escaped before any suspicion of what had occurred had been aroused, even in the minds of those who had actually witnessed the struggle from a distance. For many months no clue to the perpetrators of the deed was discoverable, and it seemed to be only too likely to be added to the long list of crimes for which no retribution has ever been exacted. Happily for Irish credit this was not the case, and six months later, in the month of January, 1883, a series of inquiries carried on in Dublin Castle led to the arrest of no less than seventeen men, all of whom were lodged in prison and bail for them refused. Amongst these was a man of somewhat higher social standing than the rest, a tradesman, and member of the Dublin Council, the notorious James Carey, who not long afterwards turned Queen's evidence, and it was mainly through his evidence, supplemented by that of two others, that the rest of the gang were convicted. At the trial it was proved that the murder of Lord Frederick Cavendish had formed no part of the original scheme, and had merely arisen accidentally out of the circumstance of his having joined Mr. Burke, who, upon the resignation of Mr. Forster, the Chief Secretary, had been selected by the Invincibles as their next victim. Conviction was without difficulty obtained against all the prisoners, and five were shortly afterwards hanged, the remainder receiving sentence of penal servitude, either for life or long periods.

Carey's own end was a sufficiently dramatic one. He was kept in prison, as the only way of ensuring his safety until means could be found to get him out of the country, and was finally shipped some months later to the Cape. On his way there he was shot dead by a man called O'Donnell, who appears to have gone out with him for the purpose. His fate could certainly awaken no pity in the most merciful breast. By his own confession not only had he to a great degree planned the murder and helped to draw the others into it, but had actually selected the very weapon by which it was accomplished, so that of all the miscreants engaged in the perpetration he was perhaps the deepest dyed and the most guilty.