His outlay for rent alone was on the average $109.07, or in round numbers rather less than L22, 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 L60 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 L20 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 L8, 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 L19,634, and at 3576 acres in the county of the City of Galway, valued at L1202. 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 L1900, payable by 260 tenants. The Poor-Law valuation for taxes is L2400. 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."



CHAPTER XI.

BORRIS, Friday, March 2d.—This is the land of the Kavanaghs, and a lovely, picturesque, richly-wooded land it is. I left Dublin with Mr. Gyles by an afternoon train; the weather almost like June. We ran from the County of Dublin into Kildare, and from Kildare into Carlow, through hills; rural scenery quite unlike anything I have hitherto seen in Ireland. At Bagnalstown, a very pretty place, with a spire which takes the eye, our host joined us, and came on with us to this still more attractive spot. Borris has been the seat of his family for many centuries. The MacMorroghs of Leinster, whom the Kavanaghs lineally represent, dwelt here long before Dermot MacMorrogh, finding his elective throne in Leinster too hot to hold him, went off into Aquitaine, to get that famous "letter of marque" from Henry II. of England, with the help of which this king without a kingdom induced Richard de Clare, an earl without an earldom, to lend him a hand and bring the Normans into Ireland. Many of this race lie buried in the ruins of St. Mullen's Abbey, on the Barrow, in this county. But none of them, I opine, ever did such credit to the name as its present representative, Arthur MacMorrogh Kavanagh.

I had some correspondence with Mr. Kavanagh several years ago, when he sent me, through my correspondent for publication in New York, a very striking statement of his views on the then condition of Irish affairs—views since abundantly vindicated; and like most people who have paid any attention to the recent history of Ireland, I knew how wonderful an illustration his whole career has been of what philosophers call the superiority of man to his accidents, and plain people the power of the will. But I knew this only imperfectly. His servant brought him up to the carriage and placed him in it. This it was impossible not to see. But I had not talked with him for five minutes before it quite passed out of my mind. Never was there such a justification of the paradoxical title which Wilkinson gave to his once famous book, The Human Body, and its Connexion with Man,—never such a living refutation of the theory that it is the thumb which differentiates man from the lower animals. Twenty times this evening I have been reminded of the retort I heard made the other day at Cork by a lawyer, who knows Mr. Kavanagh well, to a priest of "Nationalist" proclivities, who knows him not at all. Some allusion having been made to Borris, the lawyer said to me, "You will see at Borris the best and ablest Irishman alive." On this the priest testily and tartly broke in, "Do you mean the man without hands or feet?"

"I mean," replied the lawyer, very quietly, "the man in whom all that has gone in you or me to arms and legs has gone to heart and head!"

Borris House stands high in the heart of an extensive and nobly wooded park, and commands one of the finest landscapes I have seen in Ireland. As we stood and gazed upon it from the hall door, the distant hills were touched with a soft purple light such as transfigures the Apennines at sunset.

"You should see this view in June," said Mrs, Kavanagh, "we are all brown and bare now."

Brown and bare, like most other terms, are relative. To the eye of an American this whole region now seems a sea of verdure, less clear and fresh, I can easily suppose, than it may be in the early summer, but verdure still. And one must get into the Adirondacks, or up among the mountains of Western Virginia, to find on our Atlantic slope such trees as I have this evening seen. One grand ilex near the house could hardly be matched in the Villa d'Este.

The house is stately and commodious, and more ancient than it appears to be,—so many additions have been made to it at different times. It has passed through more than one siege, and in the '98 Mr. Kavanagh tells me the townspeople of Borris came up here and sought refuge. There are vast caverns under the house and grounds, doubtless made by taking out from the hill the stone used in building this house, and the fortresses which stood here before it. In these all sorts of stores were kept, and many of the people found shelter.

I need not say that there is a banshee at Borris—though no living witness, I believe, has heard its warning wail. But as we sat in the beautiful library, and watched the dying light of day, a lady present told us a tale more gruesome than many of those in which the "psychical" inquirers delight. She was sitting, she said, in an upper room of an ancient mansion here in Carlow, in which she lives, when, from the lawn below, there came up to her a low, sad, shrill cry—the croon of a woman, such as one hears from the mourners sitting among the turbaned tombstones of the hill of Eyoub at Constantinople. It startled her, and she held her breath and listened. She was alone, as she knew, in that part of the house, and the hall door below was unlocked, as is the fashion still in Ireland, despite all the troubles and turmoils. Again the sound came, and this time nearer to the house. Could it be the banshee? Again and again it rose and died away, each time nearer and nearer. Then, as she listened, all her nerves strung to the keenest sensibility, it came again, and now, beyond a doubt, within the hall below.

With an effort she rose from her chair, opened a door leading into a corridor running aside from the main stairway, and fled at full speed towards the wing in which she knew that she would find some of the maids. As she sped along she heard the cry again and again far behind her, as from a creature slowly and steadily mounting the grand stairway towards the room which she had just quitted.

She found the maids, who fell into a terrible fright when she told her story and dared not budge. So the bells were violently rung till the butler and footman appeared. To the first she said simply, "There is a mad woman in this house—go and find her!"

"The man looked at me," she said, "as I spoke with a curious expression in his face as of one who thought, 'yes, there is a mad woman in the house, and she is not far to seek!'"

But the lady insisted, and the men finally went off on their quest. In the course of half an hour it was rewarded. The mad woman—a dangerous creature—who had wandered away from an asylum in the neighbourhood, was found curled up and fast asleep in the lady's own bed!

Fancy a delicate woman going alone into her bedroom at midnight to be suddenly confronted by an apparition of that sort!

BORRIS, March 3d.—After a stroll on the lawn this morning, the wide and glorious prospect bathed in the light of a really soft spring day, I had a conversation with Mr. Kavanagh about the Land Corporation, of which he is the guiding spirit. This is a defensive organisation of the Irish landlords against the Land League. When a landlord has been driven into evicting his tenants, the next step, in the "war against landlordism," is to prevent other tenants from taking the vacated lands and cultivating them. This is accomplished by "boycotting" any man who does this as a "land-grabber."

The ultimate sanction of the "boycott" being "murder," derelict farms increased under this system very rapidly; and the Eleventh Commandment of the League, "Thou shalt not pay the rent which thy neighbour hath refused to pay," was in a fair way to dethrone the Ten Commandments of Sinai throughout Ireland, even before the formal adoption in 1886 of the "Plan of Campaign."

Mr. Gladstone would perhaps have hit the facts more accurately, if, instead of calling an eviction in Ireland a "sentence of death," he had called the taking of a tenancy a sentence of death. Mr. Hussey at Lixnaw had two tenants, Edmond and James Fitzmaurice. Edmond Fitzmaurice was "evicted" in May 1887; but he was taken into the house of a neighbour, made very comfortable, and still lives. James Fitzmaurice took, for the sake of the family, the land from which Edmond was evicted, and for this he was denounced as a "land-grabber," boycotted, and finally shot dead in the presence of his daughter.

At a meeting in Dublin in the autumn of 1885, a parish priest, the Rev. Mr. Cantwell, described it as a "cardinal virtue" that "no one should take a farm from which another had been evicted," and called upon the people who heard him to "pass any such man by unnoticed, and treat him as an enemy in their midst." Public opinion and the law, if not the authorities of his church would make short work of any priest who talked in this fashion in New York. But in Ireland, and under the British Government, it seems they order things differently. So it occurred one day to the landlords thus assailed, as it did to the sea-lions of the Cape of Good Hope when the French sailors attacked them, that they might defend themselves.

To this end the Land Corporation was instituted, with a considerable capital at its back, and Mr. Kavanagh at its head. The "plan of campaign" of this Corporation is to take over from the landlords derelict lands and cultivate them, stocking them where that is necessary.

It is in this way that the derelict lands on the Ponsonby property at Youghal are now worked. But Mr. Kavanagh tells me that the men employed by the Corporation, of whom Father Keller spoke as a set of desperadoes or "enfants perdus," are really a body of resolute and capable working men farmers. Many, but by no means all of them, are Protestants and Ulstermen; and that they are up to their work would seem to be shown by the fact stated to me, that in no case so far have any of them been deterred and driven off from the holdings confided to them. A great part of the Luggacurren property of Lord Lansdowne is now worked by the Corporation; and Mr. Kavanagh was kind enough to let me see the accounts, which indicate a good business result for the current year on that property. This is all very interesting. But what a picture it presents of social demoralisation! And what is to be the end of it all? Can a country be called civilised in which a farmer with a family to maintain, having the capital and the experience necessary to manage successfully a small farm, is absolutely forbidden, on pain of social ostracism, and eventually on pain of death, by a conspiracy of his neighbours, to take that farm of its lawful owner at what he considers to be a fair rent? And how long can any civilisation of our complex modern type endure in a country in which such a state of things tolerated by the alleged Government of that country has to be met, and more or less partially mitigated, by deviating to the cultivation of farms rendered in this way derelict large amounts of capital which might be, and ought to be, far more profitably employed in other ways?

Mr. Kavanagh, after serving the office of High Sheriff thirty years ago, first for Kilkenny, and then for Carlow, sat in Parliament for fourteen years, from 1866 to 1880, as an Irish county member. He has a very large property here in Carlow, and property also in Wexford, and in Kilkenny, and was sworn into the Privy Council two years ago. If the personal interests and the family traditions of any man alive can be said to be rooted in the Irish soil, this is certainly true of his interests and his traditions. How can the peace and prosperity of Ireland be served by a state of things which condemns an Irishman of such ties and such training to expend his energies and his ability in defending the elementary right of Paddy O'Rourke to take stock and work a ten-acre farm on terms that suit himself and his landlord?

In the afternoon we took a delightful walk through the woods, Mr. Kavanagh going with us on horseback. Every hill and clump of trees on this large domain he knows, and he led us like a master of woodcraft through all manner of leafy byways to the finest points of view. The Barrow flows past Borris, making pictures at every turn, and the banks on both sides are densely and beautifully wooded. We came in one place upon a sawmill at work in the forest, and Mr. Kavanagh showed us with pride the piles of excellent timber which he turns out here. But he took a greater pride in a group, sacred from the axe, of really magnificent Scotch firs, such as I had certainly not expected to find in Ireland. Nearer the mansion are some remarkable Irish yews. The gardens are of all sorts and very extensive, but we found the head-gardener bitterly lamenting the destruction by a fire in one of the conservatories of more than six thousand plants just prepared for setting out.

There are many curious old books and papers here, and a student of early Irish history might find matter to keep him well employed for a long time in this region. It was from this region and the race which ruled it, of which race Mr. Kavanagh is the actual representative, that the initiative came of the first Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland. Strongbow made what, from the Anglo-Norman point of view, was a perfectly legitimate bargain, with a dispossessed prince to help him to the recovery of his rights on the understanding that these rights, when recovered, should pass in succession to himself through the only daughter of the prince, whom he proposed to marry. It does not appear that Strongbow knew, or that Dermot MacMorrogh cared to tell him, how utterly unlike the rights of an Anglo-Norman prince were those of the elective life-tenant of an Irish principality. FitzStephen, the son by her second marriage of Nesta, the Welsh royal mistress of Henry Beauclerk, and his cousin, Maurice Fitzgerald, the leaders into Ireland of the Geraldines, were no more clear in their minds about this than Strongbow, and it is to the original muddle thus created that Professor Richey doubtless rightly refers the worst and most troublesome complications of the land question in Ireland. The distinction between the King's lieges and the "mere Irish," for example, is unquestionably a legal distinction, though it is continually and most mischievously used as if it were a proof of the race-hatred borne by the Normans and Saxons in Ireland from the first against the Celts. The O'Briens, the O'Neills, the O'Mullaghlins, the O'Connors, and the M'Morroghs, "the five bloods," as they are called, were certainly Celts, but whether in virtue of their being, or claiming to be, the royal races respectively of Minister, of Ulster, of Meath, of Connaught, and of Leinster, or from whatever other reason, these races were "within the king's law," and were never "mere Irish" from the first planting of the Anglo-Norman power in Ireland. The case of a priest, Shan O'Kerry, "an Irish enemy of the king," presented "contrary to the form of statute" to the vicarage of Lusk, in the reign of Edward IV. (1465), illustrates this. An Act of Parliament was passed to declare the aforesaid "Shan O'Kerry," or "John of Kevernon," to be "English born, and of English nation," and that he might "hold and enjoy the said benefice."

There is a genealogy here of the M'Morroghs and Kavanaghs, most gorgeously and elaborately gotten up many years ago for Mr. Kavanagh's grandfather, which shows how soon the Norman and the native strains of blood become commingled. When one remembers how much Norman blood must have gone even into far-off Connaught when King John, in the early part of the thirteenth century, coolly gave away that realm of the O'Connors to the De Burgos, and how continually the English of the Pale fled from the exactions inflicted upon them by their own people, and sought refuge "among the savage and mere Irish," one cannot help thinking that the" Race Question" has been "worked for at least all it is worth" by philosophers bent on unravelling the 'snarl' of Irish affairs. If this genealogy may be trusted, there was little to choose between the ages which immediately preceded and the ages which followed the Anglo-Norman invasion in the matter of respect for human life. Celtic chiefs and Norman knights "died in their boots" as regularly as frontiersmen in Texas. One personage is designated in the genealogy as "the murderer," for the truly Hibernian reason, so far as appears, that he was himself murdered while quite a youth, and before he had had a chance to murder more than three or four of his immediate relatives. It was as if the son of Geoffrey Plantagenet and the Lady Constance should be branded in history as "Arthur, the Assassin."

BORRIS, March 4th.—This is a staunch Protestant house, and Mr. Kavanagh himself reads a Protestant service every morning. But there is little or nothing apparently in this part of Ireland of the bitter feeling about and against the Catholics which exists in the North. A very lively and pleasant Catholic gentleman came in to-day informally and joined the house party at luncheon. We all walked out over the property afterwards, visiting quite a different region from that which we saw yesterday—different but equally beautiful and striking, and this Catholic gentleman cited several cases which had fallen within his own knowledge of priests who begin to feel their moral control of the people slipping away from them through the operation of the "Plan of Campaign." I told him what I had heard in regard to one such priest from my ecclesiastical friend in Cork. "It does not surprise me at all," he said, "and, indeed, I not very long ago read precisely such another letter from a priest in a somewhat similar position. I read it with pain and shame as a Catholic," he continued, "for it was simply a complete admission that the priest, although entirely convinced that his parishioners were making most unfair demands upon their landlord to whom the letter was addressed, felt himself entirely powerless to bring them to a sense of their misconduct." "Had this priest given in his adhesion to the Plan of Campaign?" I asked. "Yes," was the reply, "and it was this fact which had broken his hold on the people when he tried to bring them to abandon their attitude under the Plan. His letter was really nothing more nor less than an appeal to the landlord, and that landlord a Protestant, to help him to get out of the hole into which he had put himself."

Of the tenants and their relation to the village despots who administer the Plan of Campaign, this gentleman had many stories also to tell of the same tenor with all that I have hitherto heard on this subject. Everywhere it is the same thing. The well-to-do and well-disposed tenants are coerced by the thriftless and shiftless. "I have the agencies of several properties," he said, "and in some of the best parts of Ireland. I have had little or no trouble on any of them, for I have one uniform method. I treat every tenant as if he were the only man I had to deal with, study his personal ways and character, humour him, and get him on my side against himself. You can always do this with an Irishman if you will take the trouble to do it. Within the past years I have had tenants come and tell me they were in fear the Plan of Campaign would be brought upon them, just as if it were a kind of potato disease, and beg me to agree to take the rent from them in that case, and just not discover on them that they had paid it before it was due!"

This gentleman is a pessimist as to the future. "I am a youngish man still," he said, "and a single man, and I am glad of it. I don't believe the English will ever learn how to govern this country, and I am sure it can never govern itself. Would your people make a State of it?"

To this I replied that with Cuba and Canada and Mexico, all still to be digested and assimilated, I thought the deglutition of Ireland by the great Republic must be remitted to a future much too remote to interest either of us.

"I suppose so," he said in a humorously despondent tone; "and so I see nothing for people who think as I do, but Australia or New Zealand!"

Mr. Kavanagh sees the future, I think, in colouring not quite so dark. As a public man, familiar for years with the method and ways of British Parliaments, he seems to regard the possible future legislation of Westminster with more anxiety and alarm than the past or present agitations in Ireland. The business of banishing political economy to Jupiter and Saturn, however delightful it may be to the people who make laws, is a dangerous one to the people for whom the laws are made. While he has very positive opinions as to the wisdom of the concession made in the successive Land Acts for Ireland, which have been passed since 1870, he is much less disquieted, I think, by those concessions, than by the spirit by which the legislation granting them has been guided. He thinks great good has been already done by Mr. Balfour, and that much more good will be done by him if the Irish people are made to feel that clamorous resistance to the law will no longer be regarded at Westminster as a sufficient reason for changing the law. That is as much as to say that party spirit in Great Britain is the chief peril of Ireland to-day. And how can any Irishman, no matter what his state in his own country may be, or his knowledge of Irish affairs, or his patriotic earnestness and desire for Irish prosperity, hope to control the tides of party spirit in England or Scotland?

Of the influence upon the people in Ireland of the spirit of recent legislation for Ireland, the story of the troubles on the O'Grady estate, as Mr. Kavanagh tells it to me, is a most striking illustration. "The O'Grady of Kilballyowen," as his title shows, is the direct representative, not of any Norman invader, but of an ancient Irish race. The O'Gradys were the heads of a sept of the "mere Irish"; and if there be such a thing—past, present, or future—as an "Irish nation," the place of the O'Gradys in that nation ought to be assumed. Mr. Thomas De Courcy O'Grady, who now wears the historic designation, owns and lives on an estate of a little more than 1000 acres, in the Golden Vein of Ireland, at Killmallock, in the county of Limerick. The land is excellent, and for the last half-century certainly it has been let to the tenants at rents which must be considered fair, since they have never been raised. In 1845, two years before the great famine, the rental was L2142. This rental was paid throughout the famine years without difficulty; and in 1881 the rental stood at L2108.

There has never been an eviction on the estate until last year, when six tenants were evicted. All of these lived in good comfortable houses, and were prosperous dairy-farmers. Why were they evicted?

In October 1886, during the candidacy at New York of the Land Reformer, Mr. George, Mr. Dillon, M.P., propounded the "Plan of Campaign" at Portumna in Galway. The March rents being then due on the estate of The O'Grady in Limerick, his agent, Mr. Shine, was directed to continue the abatements of 15 per cent, on the judicial rents, and of 25 per cent, on all other rents, which had been cheerfully accepted in 1885. But there was a priest at Kilballyowen, Father Ryan, who wrought upon the tenants until they demanded a general abatement of 40 per cent. This being refused, they asked for 30 per cent. on the judicial rents, and 40 per cent. on the others. This also being refused, Father Ryan had his way, and the "Plan of Campaign" was adopted. The O'Grady's writs issued against several of the tenants were met by a "Plan of Campaign" auction of cattle at Herbertstown in December 1886, the returns of which were paid into "the Fund." For this, one of the tenants, Thomas Moroney, who held, besides a a farm of 37 Irish acres, a "public," and five small houses, at Herbertstown, and the right to the tolls on cattle at the Herbertstown farm, valued at from L50 to L60 a year, and who held all these at a yearly rent of L85, was proceeded against. Judge Boyd pronounced him a bankrupt.

In the spring of 1887, after The O'Grady had been put to great costs and trouble, the tenants made a move. They offered to accept a general abatement of 17-1/2 per cent., "The O'Grady to pay all the costs."

Here is the same story again of the small solicitors behind the "Plan of Campaign" promoting the strife, and counting on the landlords to defray the charges of battle!

The O'Grady responded with the following circular:—

KlLLBALLYOWEN, BRUFF, CO. LlMERICK,

13th August 1877.

To my Tenants on Kilballyowen and Herbertstown Estate, Co. Limerick.

MY FRIENDS,—Pending the evictions by the Sheriff on my estate, caused by your refusal to pay judicial rents on offers of liberal abatements, I desire to remind you of the following facts:—

I am a resident landlord; my ancestors have dwelt amongst you for over 400 years; every tenant is personally known to me, and the most friendly relations have always existed between us.

I am not aware of there ever having been an eviction by the Sheriff on my estate.

Farming myself over 400 acres, and my late agent (Mr. Shine), a tenant farmer living within four miles of my property, I have every opportunity of realising and knowing your wants.

On the passing of the Land Act of 1881, I desired you to have any benefit it could afford you, and as you nearly all held under lease—which precluded you from going into court—I intimated to you my wish, and offered you to allow your lands to be valued at my expense, or to let you go into court and get your rents fixed by the sub-commissioners.

You elected to have a valuation made, and Mr. Edmond Moroney was agreed on as a land-valuer, possessing the confidence of tenants and landlord.

I may mention, up to then I had not known Mr. Moroney personally.

In 1883 Mr. Moroney valued your holdings, and, as a result, his valuation was accepted (except in three or four cases), and judicial agreements signed by you, at rents ascertained by Mr. Moroney's valuation.

The late Patrick Hogan objected to Mr. Moroney's valuation of his farm, and went into court, and had his rent fixed by the County Court Judge.

Thomas Moroney would not allow Mr. Edmond Moroney to value his holding, nor would he go into court, his reason no doubt being he should disclose the receipts of the amount of the tolls of the fairs.

The rents were subsequently paid on Mr. Moroney's valuation with punctuality.

In 1885, recognising the fall in prices of stock and produce, and at the request of my late agent, Mr. Shine, I directed him to allow you 15 per cent. on all judicial rents, or rents abated on Mr. Moroney's valuation, and 25 per cent. on all other rents, when you paid punctually and with thanks.

In October last, when calling in the March 1886 rents, at the instance of Mr. Shine, I agreed to continue the abatement of 15 per cent, and 25 per cent., which, when intimated to you, were refused, and a meeting held, demanding an all-round abatement of 40 per cent.

This I considered unreasonable and unjust, and I refused to give it.

The Plan of Campaign was then most unjustly adopted on the estate, and you refused to pay your rents.

Thomas Moroney was elected as a test case to try the legality of the sale and removal of your property to avoid payment of your rent. His tenancy was a mixed holding of house property in the village of Herbertstown, the tolls of the fairs, and 37 acres of land, at a rent of L85, and a Poor-Law valuation of L73, 5s., made as follows:—

Land valued at L42 5 0 Tolls of fair at 17 0 0 Public house and yard at 11 0 0 Five small houses and forge at 3 0 0 ———— L73 5 0

I always was led to believe the tolls of the fair averaged from L50 to L60 a year, there being four fairs in the year; and I believe his reason for refusing to allow Mr. E. Moroney to value his holding, or to go into court, was that he should disclose the amount of the tolls, and in consequence I never considered he was entitled to any abatement; but still I gave it to him, and was prepared to do so. The result of his case was that his conduct in making away with his property was unjustifiable, and his farm and holding was sold out for the benefit of his creditors, and he is no longer a tenant on the estate.

I subsequently took proceedings against six other tenants, who refused payment of rent, and removed their cattle off the land to avoid payment, and having got judgment against them, the Sheriff sold out four of their farms, and writs of possession on the title were taken out against them, and are now lodged with the Sheriff for execution. I have also got judgments for possession against two other tenants for non-payment of rent, also lodged with the Sheriff. One the widow of Patrick Hogan, who got his rent fixed in the County Court, and the other Mrs. Denis Ryan, whose farm on her marriage I assented to be put in settlement for her protection, Mr. Shine, my agent, consenting to act as one of her trustees, whose name, with his co-trustee, Mr. Thomas FitzGerald, appear as defendants, they having signed her judicial agreement.

The following are the names of the above tenants, the extent of their holdings, the rent, the Poor-Law valuation, and the average rent per Irish acre:—

+ + + -+ -+ -+ Acreage in Judicial Rent TENANT. Irish Rent Less 20 per Poor Law Measure. per cent. acre[A] Valuation + + + -+ -+ -+ A. R. P. L s. d. L s. d. John Carroll, 87 3 38 132 4 0 30/- 127 10 0 Honora Crimmins, 35 0 27 64 5 6 36/6 52 15 0 James Baggott, 18 0 0 37 16 10 42/- 22 5 0 Margaret Moloney, 23 2 9 46 2 8 39/2 44 15 0 Mrs. Denis Ryan, 66 2 3 93 2 5 28/- 96 0 0 Maryanne Hogan, 53 2 33 112 0 0 41/8 117 15 0 + + -+ -+ -+ 294 3 30 485 11 5 ... 461 0 0 + + + -+ -+ -+

[A] Rent per Irish acre after abatement of 20 per cent.

This represents an average of 34s. the Irish acre, for some of the best land in Ireland, and shows a difference of only L24, 11s. 5d. between the rent, less 20 per cent. now offered, and Poor-Law valuation.

After putting me to the cost of these proceedings, and giving me every opposition and annoyance, amongst such, compelling my agent (by threats of boycotting) to resign, boycotting myself and household, preventing my servants from attending chapel, and driving my labourers away, negotiations for a settlement were opened, and you offered to accept an all-round abatement of 17-1/2 per cent. and to pay up one year's rent, provided I paid all costs, including the costs in Moroney's case; this of course I refused, but with a desire to aid you in coming to a settlement, and to prevent the loss to the tenants of the farms under eviction on the Title, I offered to allow the 17-1/2 per cent. all round on payment of one year's rent and costs, and to give time for payment of the costs as stated in my Solicitor's letter of the 2d June 1887 to Canon Scully.

This offer was refused, and the writs for possession have been lodged with the Sheriff.

I never commenced these proceedings in a vindictive spirit, or with any desire to punish any of you for your ungracious conduct, but simply to protect my property from unjust and unreasonable demands.

You will owe two years' rent next month (September), and I now write you this circular letter to point out to each, individually, the position of the tenants under eviction, and even at this late hour to give them an opportunity of saving their holdings, to enable them to do so, and with a view to settlement, I am now prepared to allow 20 per cent. all round, on payment of a year's rent and costs.

Under no circumstance will I forego payment of costs, as they must be paid in full.

If this money be paid forthwith, I will arrange with my brother, the purchaser, to restore the four holdings purchased by him at sheriff's sale to the late tenants.

After this offer I disclaim any responsibility for the result of the evictions, and the loss attendant thereon, as it now remains with you to avert same.

All the evictions have since been carried out, and the Land Corporation men are at work upon the estate! Whom has all this advantaged? The tenants?—Certainly not. The O'Grady?—Certainly not. The peace and order of Ireland?—Certainly not. But it has given the National League another appeal to the intelligent "sympathies" of England and America. It has strengthened the revolutionary element in Irish society. It has "driven another nail into the coffin" of Irish landlordism and of the private ownership of land throughout Great Britain.

Such at least is the opinion of Mr. Kavanagh. If I were an Englishman or a Scotchman, I should be strongly inclined to take very serious account of this opinion in forecasting the future of landed property in England or Scotland.



CHAPTER XII.

GREENANE HOUSE, THOMASTOWN, March 5th.—The breakfast-room at Borris this morning was gay with pink coats. A meet was to come off at a place between Borris and Thomastown, and bidding fare-well to my cordial host and hostess, I set out at 11 o'clock for a flying visit to this quaint and charming house of Mr. Seigne, one of the best known and most highly esteemed agents in this part of Ireland.

My jarvey from Borris had an unusually neat and well-balanced car. When I praised it he told me it was "built by an American," not an Irish American, I understood him to say, but a genuine Yankee, who, for some mysterious reason, has established himself in this region, where he has prospered as a cart and car builder ever since. "Just the best cars in all Ireland he builds, your honour!" Why don't he naturalise them in America?

All the way was charming, the day very bright, and even warm, and the hill scenery picturesque at every turn. We looked out sharply for the hunt, but in vain. My jarvey, who knew the whole country, said they must have broken cover somewhere on the upper road, and we should miss them entirely. And so we did.

The silting up of the river Nore has reduced Thomastown or Ballymacanton, which was its Irish name, from its former importance as an emporium for the country about Kilkenny. The river now is not navigable above Inistiogue. But two martial square towers, one at either end of a fine bridge which spans the stream here, speak of the good old times when the masters of Thomastown took toll and tribute of traders and travellers. The lands about the place then belonged to the great monastery of Jerpoint, the ruins of which are still the most interesting of their kind in this part of Ireland. They have long made a part of the estate of the Butlers. We rattled rapidly through the quiet little town, and whisking out of a small public square into a sort of wynd between two houses, suddenly found ourselves in the precincts of Grenane House. The house takes its name from the old castle of Grenane, an Irish fortress established here by some native despot long before Thomas Fitz-Anthony the Norman came into the land. The ruins of this castle still stand some half a mile away. "We call the place Candahar," said Mr. Seigne, as he came up with two ladies from the meadows below the house, "because you come into it so suddenly, just as you do into that Oriental town." But what a charming occidental place it is! It stands well above the river, the slope adorned with many fine old trees, some of which grow, and grow prosperously, in the queerest and most improbable forms, bent double, twisted, but still most green and vigorous. They have no business under any known theory of arboriculture to be beautiful, but beautiful they are. The views of the bridge, of the towers, and of the river, from this slope would make the fortune of the place in a land of peace and order.

A most original and delightful lady of the country lunched with us,—such a character as Miss Edgeworth or Miss Austen might have drawn. Shrewd, humorous, sensible, fearless, and ready with impartial hand to box the ears alike of Trojan and of Tyrian. She not only sees both sides of the question in Ireland as between the landlords and the tenants, but takes both sides of the question. She holds lands by inheritance, which make her keenly alive to the wrongs of the landlords, and she holds farms as a tenant, which make her implacably critical as to their claims. She mercilessly demolished in one capacity whatever she advanced in the other, and all with the most perfect nonchalance and good faith. This curiously dual attitude reminded me of the confederate General, Braxton Bragg, of whom his comrades in the old army of the United States used to say that he once had a very sharp official correspondence with himself. He happened to hold a staff appointment, being also a line officer. So in his quality of a staff officer, he found fault with himself in his capacity as a line officer, reprimanded himself sharply, replied defiantly to the reprimand, and eventually reported himself to himself for discipline at head-quarters. She told an excellent story of a near kinsman of hers who, holding a very good living in the Protestant Irish Church, came rather unexpectedly by inheritance into a baronetcy, upon which his women-folk insisted that it would be derogatory to a baronet to be a parson. "Would you believe it, the poor man was silly enough to listen to their cackle, and resign seven hundred a year!"

"That didn't clear him," I said, "of the cloth, did it?"

"Not a bit, of course, poor foolish man. He was just as much a parson as ever, only without a parsonage. Men are fools enough of themselves, don't you think, without needing to listen to women?"

Mr. Seigne comes of a French Protestant stock long ago planted in Ireland, and his Gallic blood doubtless helps him to handle the practical problems daily submitted in these days to an Irish land-agent—problems very different, as he thinks, from those with which an Irish agent had to deal in the days before 1870. The Irish tenant has a vantage-ground now in his relations with his landlord which he never had in the olden time, and this makes it more important than it ever was that the agent should have what may be called a diplomatic taste for treating with individuals, finding out the bent of mind of this man and of that, and negotiating over particulars, instead of insisting, in the English fashion, on general rules, without regard to special cases. I have met no one who has seemed to me so cool and precise as Mr. Seigne in his study of the phenomena of the present situation. I asked him whether he could now say, as Mr. Senior did a quarter of century ago, that the Irish tenants were less improvident, and more averse from running into debt than the English.

"I think not," he replied; "on the contrary, in some parts of Ireland now the shopkeepers are kept on the verge of bankruptcy by the recklessness with which the tenants incurred debts immediately after the passing of the Land Act of 1870—a time when shopkeepers, and bankers also, almost forced credit upon the farmers, and made thereby 'bad debts' innumerable. Farmers rarely keep anything like an account of their receipts and expenses. I know only one tenant-farmer in this neighbourhood who keeps what can be called an account, showing what he takes from his labour and spends on his living."[20] "They save a great deal of money often," he says, "but almost never in any systematic way. They spend much less on clothes and furniture, and the outward show of things, than English people of the same condition do, and they do not stint themselves in meat and drink as the French peasants do. In fact, under the operation of existing circumstances, they are getting into the way of improving their condition, not so much by sacrifices and savings, as by an insistence on rent being fixed low enough to leave full margin for improved living."

"I had a very frank statement on this point," said Mr. Seigne, "not long ago from a Tipperary man. When I tried to show him that his father had paid a good many years ago the very same rent which he declares himself unable to pay now, he admitted this at once. But it was a confession and avoidance. 'My father could pay the rent, and did pay the rent,' he said, 'because he was content to live so that he could pay it. He sat on a boss of straw, and ate out of a bowl. He lived in a way in which I don't intend to live, and so he could pay the rent. Now, I must have, and I mean to have, out of the land, before I pay the rent, the means of living as I wish to live; and if I can't have it, I'll sell out and go away; but I'll be—if I don't fight before I do that same!'"

"What could you reply to that?" I asked.

"Oh," I said, "'that's square and straightforward. Only just let me know the point at which you mean to fight, and then we'll see if we can agree about something.'"

"The truth is," said Mr. Seigne, "that there is a pressure upward now from below. The labourers don't want to live any longer as the farmers have always made them live; and so the farmers, having to consider the growing demands of the labourers, and meaning to live better themselves, push up against the landlord, and insist that the means of the improvement shall come out of him."

He then told me an instructive story of his calling upon a tenant-farmer, at whose place he found the labourers sitting about their meal of pork and green vegetables. The farmer asked him into another room, where he saw the farmer's family making their meal of stirabout and milk and potatoes.

"I asked you in here," said the farmer, "because we keep in here to ourselves. I don't want those fellows to see that we can't afford to give ourselves what we have to give them,"—this with strong language indicating that he must himself be given a way to advance equally with the progressive labourer, or he would know the reason why!

This afternoon Mr. Seigne drove me over through a beautiful country to Woodstock, near Inistiogue, the seat of the late Colonel Tighe, the head of the family of which the authoress of "Psyche" was an ornament.

It is the finest place in this part of Ireland, and one of the finest I have seen in the three kingdoms, a much more picturesque and more nobly planted place indeed than its namesake in England. The mansion has no architectural pretensions, being simply a very large and, I should think, extremely comfortable house of the beginning of this century. The library is very rich, and there are some good pictures, as well as certain statues in the vestibule, which would have no interest for the Weissnichtwo professor of Sartor Resartus, but are regarded with some awe by the good people of Inistiogue.

The park would do no discredit to a palace, and if the vague project of establishing a royal residence in Ireland for one of the British Princes should ever take shape, it would not be easy, I should say, to find a demesne more befitting the home of a prince than this of the Tighes. At present it serves the State at least as usefully, being the "pleasaunce" of the people for miles around, who come here freely to walk and drive.

It stretches for miles along the Nore, and is crowned by a gloriously wooded hill nearly a thousand feet in height. The late Colonel Tighe, a most accomplished man, and a passionate lover of trees, made it a kind of private Kew Gardens. He planted long avenues of the rarest and finest trees, araucarias, Scotch firs, oaks, beeches, cedars of Lebanon; laid out miles of the most varied and delightful drives, and built the most extensive conservatories in Ireland.

The turfed and terraced walks among those conservatories are indescribably lovely, and the whole place to-day was vocal with innumerable birds. Picturesque little cottages and arbours are to be found in unexpected nooks all through the woodlands, each commanding some green vista of forest aisles, or some wide view of hill and champaign, enlivened by the winding river. From one of those to-day we looked out over a landscape to which Turner alone or Claude could have done justice, the river, spanned by a fine bridge, in the middle distance, and all the region wooded as in the days of which Edmund Spenser sings, when Ireland

"Flourished in fame, Of wealth and goodnesse far above the rest Of all that bears the British Islands' name."

Over the whole place broods an indefinable charm. You feel that this was the home at once and the work of a refined and thoughtful spirit. And so indeed it was. Here for the greater part of the current century the owner lived, making the development of the estate and of this demesne his constant care and chief pleasure. And here still lives his widow, with whom we took tea in a stately quiet drawing-room. Lady Louisa Tighe was in Brussels with her mother, the Duchess of Richmond, on the eve of Waterloo. She was a child then of ten years old, and her mother bade them bring her down into the historic ball-room before the Duke of Wellington left it. The duke took up his sword. "Let Louisa buckle it for you," said her mother, and when the little girl had girded it on, the great captain stooped, took her up in his arms, and kissed her. "One never knows what may happen, child," he said good-naturedly; and taking his small gold watch out of his fob, he bade her keep it for him.

She keeps it still. For more than sixty years it has measured out in this beautiful Irish home the hours of a life given to good works and gracious usefulness. To-day, with all the vivacity of interest in the people and the place which one might look for in a woman of twenty, this charming old lady of eighty-three, showing barely threescore years in her carriage, her countenance, and her voice, entertained us with minute and most interesting accounts of the local industries which flourish here mainly through her sympathetic and intelligent supervision. We seemed to be in another world from the Ireland of Chicago or Westminster!

Mr. Seigne drove me back here by a most picturesque road leading along the banks of the Nore, quite overhung with trees, which in places dip their branches almost into the swift deep stream. "This is the favourite drive of all the lovers hereabouts," he said, "and there is a spice of danger in it which makes it more romantic. Once, not very long ago, a couple of young people, too absorbed in their love-making to watch their horse, drove off the bank. Luckily for them they fell into the branches of one of these overhanging trees, while the horse and car went plunging into the water. There they swung, holding each other hand in hand, making a pretty and pathetic tableau, till their cries brought some anglers in a boat on the river to the rescue."

We spoke of Lady Louisa, and of the watch of Waterloo. "That watch had a wonderful escape a few years ago," said Mr. Seigne.

Lady Louisa, it seems, had a confidential butler whom she most implicitly trusted. One day it was found that a burglary had apparently been committed at Woodstock, and that with a quantity of jewelry the priceless watch had vanished. The butler was very active about the matter, and as no trace could be found leading out of the house, he intimated a suspicion that the affair might possibly have some connection with a guest not long before at the house. This angered Lady Louisa, who thereupon consulted the agent, who employed a capable detective from Dublin. The detective came down to Inistiogue as a commercial traveller, wandered about, made the acquaintance of Lady Louisa's maid, of the butler, and of other people about the house, and formed his own conclusions. Two or three days after his arrival he walked into the shop of a small jeweller in a neighbouring town, and affecting a confidential manner, told the jeweller he wanted to buy "some of those things from Woodstock." The man was taken by surprise, and going into a backshop produced one very fine diamond, and a number of pieces of silver plate, of the disappearance of which the butler had said nothing to his mistress. This led to the arrest of the butler, and to the discovery that for a long time he had been purloining property from the house and selling it. Many cases of excellent claret had found their way in this fashion to a public-house which had acquired quite a reputation for its Bordeaux with the officers quartered in its neighbourhood. The wine-bins at Woodstock were found full of bottles of water. Much of the capital port left by Colonel Tighe had gone—but the hock was untouched. "Probably the butler didn't care for hock," said Mr. Seigne. The Waterloo watch was recovered from a very decent fellow, a travelling dealer, to whom it had been sold: and many pieces of jewelry were traced up to London. But Lady Louisa could not be induced to go up to London to identify them or testify.

DUBLIN, Tuesday, March 6.—It is a curious fact, which I learned to-day from the Registrar-General, that the deposits in the Post-office Savings Banks have never diminished in Ireland since these banks were established.[21] These deposits are chiefly made, I understand, by the small tenants, who are less represented by the deposits in the General Savings Banks than are the shopkeepers and the cattle-drovers. In the General Savings Banks the deposit line fluctuates more; though on the whole there has been a steady increase in these deposits also throughout Ireland.

Of the details of the dealings of the private banks it is very hard to get an accurate account. One gentleman, the manager of a branch of one important bank, tells me that a great deal of money is made by usurers out of the tenants, by backing their small bills. This practice goes back to the first establishment of banks in Ireland. Formerly it was not an uncommon thing for a landlord to offer his tenants a reduction, say, of twenty per cent., on condition of their paying the rent when it fell due. Such were the relations then between landlord and tenants, and so little was punctuality expected in such payments that this might be regarded as a sort of discount arrangement. The tenant who wished to avail himself of such an offer would go to some friendly local usurer and ask for a loan that he might avail himself of it. "One of these usurers, whom I knew very well," said the manager, "told me long ago that he found these operations very profitable. His method of procedure was to agree to advance the rent to the tenant at ten per cent., payable at a near and certain date. This would reduce the landlord's reduction at once, of course, for the tenant, to ten per cent., but that was not to be disdained; and so the bargain would be struck. If the money was repaid at the fixed date, it was not a bad thing for the usurer. But it was almost never so repaid; and with repeated renewals the usurer, by his own showing, used to receive eventually twenty, fifty, and, in some cases, nearly a hundred per cent, for his loan."

It is the opinion of this gentleman that, under the "Plan of Campaign," a good deal of money-making is done in a quiet way by some of the "trustees," who turn over at good interest, with the help of friendly financiers, the funds lodged with them, being held to account to the tenants only for the principal. "Of course," he said, "all this is doubtless at least as legitimate as any other part of the 'Plan,' and I daresay it all goes for 'the good of the cause.' But neither the tenants nor the landlords get much by it!"



CHAPTER XIII.

DUBLIN, Thursday, March 8.—At eight o'clock this morning I left the Harcourt Street station for Inch, to take a look at the scene of the Coolgreany evictions of last summer. These evictions came of the adoption of the Plan of Campaign, under the direction of Mr. Dillon, M.P., on the Wexford property of Mr. George Brooke of Dublin. The agent of Mr. Brooke's estate, Captain Hamilton, is the honorary director of the Property Defence Association, so that we have here obviously a grapple between the National League doing the work, consciously or unconsciously, of the agrarian revolutionists, and a combination of landed proprietors fighting for the rights of property as they understand them.

We ran through a beautiful country for the greater part of the way. At Bray, which is a favourite Irish watering-place, the sea broke upon us bright and full of life; and the station itself was more like a considerable English station than any I have seen. Thence we passed into a richly-wooded region, with neat, well-kept hedges, as far as Rathdrum and the "Sweet Vale of Avoca." The hills about Shillelagh are particularly well forested, though, as the name suggests, they must have been cut for cudgels pretty extensively for now a great many years. We came again on the sea at the fishing port of Arklow, where the stone walls about the station were populous with small ragamuffins, and at the station of Inch I found a car waiting for me with Mr. Holmes, a young English Catholic officer, who had most obligingly offered to show me the place and the people. We had hardly got into the roadway when we overtook a most intelligent-looking, energetic young priest, walking briskly on in the direction of our course. This was Dr. Dillon, the curate of Arklow. We pulled up at once, and Mr. Holmes, introducing me to him, we begged him to take a seat with us. He excused himself as having to join another priest with whom he was going to a function at Inch; but he was good enough to walk a little way with us, and gave me an appointment for 2 P.M. at his own town of Arklow, where I could catch the train back to Dublin. We drove on rapidly and called on Father O'Neill, the parish priest. We found him in full canonicals, as he was to officiate at the function this morning, and with him were Father Dunphy, the parish priest of Arklow, and two or three more robed priests.

Father O'Neill, whose face and manner are those of the higher order of the continental clergy, briefly set forth to me his view of the transactions at Coolgreany. He said that before the Plan of Campaign was adopted by the tenants, Mr. William O'Brien, M.P., had written to him explaining what the effect of the Plan would be, and urging him to take whatever steps he could to obviate the necessity of adopting it, as it might eventually result to the disadvantage of the tenants. "To that end," said Father O'Neill, "I called upon Captain Hamilton, the agent, with Dr. Dillon of Arklow, but he positively refused to listen to us, and in fact ordered us, not very civilly, to leave his office."

It was after this he said that he felt bound to let the tenants take their own way. Eighty of them joined in the "Plan of Campaign" and paid the amount of the rent due, less a reduction of 30 per cent., which they demanded of the agent, into the hands of Sir Thomas Esmonde, M.P., Sir Thomas being a resident in the country, and Mr. Mayne, M.P. Writs of ejectment were obtained against them afterwards, and in July last sixty-seven of them were evicted, who are now living in "Laud League huts," put up on the holdings of three small tenants who were exempted from the Plan of Campaign, and allowed to pay their rents subject to a smaller reduction made by the agent, in order that they might retain their land as a refuge for the rest.

All this Father O'Neill told us very quietly, in a gentle, undemonstrative way, but he was much interested when I told him I had recently come from Rome, where these proceedings, I was sure, were exciting a good deal of serious attention. "Yes," he said, "and Father Dunphy who is here in the other room, has just got back from Rome, where he had two audiences of the Holy Father."

"Doubtless, then," I said, "he will have given his Holiness full particulars of all that took place here."

"No doubt," responded Father O'Neill, "and he tells me the Holy Father listened with great attention to all he had to say—though of course, he expressed no opinion about it to Father Dunphy."

As the time fixed for the function was at hand, we were obliged to leave without seeing Father Dunphy.

From the Presbytery we drove to the scene of the evictions. These evictions were in July. Mr. Holmes witnessed them, and gave me a lively account of the affair. The "battle" was not a very tough one. Mr. Davitt, who was present, stood under a tree very quietly watching it all. "He looked very picturesque," said Mr. Holmes, "in a light grey suit, with a broad white beaver shading his dark Spanish face; and smoked his cigar very composedly." After it was over, Dr. Dillon brought up one of the tenants, and presented him to Mr. Davitt as "the man who had resisted this unjust eviction." Mr. Davitt took his cigar from his lips, and in the hearing of all who stood about sarcastically said, "Well, if he couldn't make a better resistance than that he ought to go up for six months!" The first house we came upon was derelict—all battered and despoiled, the people in the neighbourhood here, as elsewhere, regarding such houses as free spoil, and carrying off from time to time whatever they happen to fancy. Near this house we met an emergency man, named Bolton, an alert, energetic-looking native of Wicklow. He has four brothers; and is now at work on one of the "evicted" holdings.

I asked if he was "boycotted," and what his relations were with the people.

He laughed in a shrewd, good-natured way. "Oh, I'm boycotted, of course," he said; "but I don't care a button for any of these people, and I'd rather they wouldn't speak to me. They know I can take care of myself, and they give me a good wide berth. All I have to object to is that they set fire to an outhouse of mine, and cut the ears of one of my heifers, and for that I want damages. Otherwise I'm getting on very well; and I think this will be a good year, if the law is enforced, and these fellows are made to behave themselves."

Near Bolton's farm we passed the holding of a tenant named Kavanagh, one of the three who were "allowed" to pay their rents. Several Land League huts are on his place, and the evicted people who occupy them put their cattle with his. He is a quiet, cautious man, and very reticent. But it seemed to me that he was not entirely satisfied with the "squatters" who have been quartered upon him. And it appears that he has taken another holding in Carlow. From his place we drove to Ballyfad, where a large house, at the end of a good avenue of trees, once the mansion of a squire, but now much dilapidated, is occupied as headquarters by the police. Here we found Mr. George Freeman, the bailiff of the Coolgreany property, a strong, sturdy man, much disgusted at finding it necessary to go about protected by two policemen. That this was necessary, however, he admitted, pointing out to us the place where one Kinsella was killed not very long ago. The son of this man Kinsella was formerly one of Mr. Brooke's gamekeepers, and is now, Mr. Freeman thinks, in concert with another man named Ryan, the chief stay of the League in keeping up its dominion over the evicted tenants.

Many of these tenants, he believes, would gladly pay their rents now, and come back if they dared.

"Every man, sir," he said, "that has anything to lose, would be glad to come back next Monday if he thought his life would be safe. But all the lazy and thriftless ones are better off now than they ever were; they get from L4 to L6 a month, with nothing to do, and so they're in clover, and they naturally don't like to have the industrious, well-to-do tenants spoil their fun by making a general settlement."

"Besides that," he added, "that man Kinsella and his comrade Ryan are the terror of the whole of them. Kinsella always was a curious, silent, moody fellow. He knows every inch of the country, going over it all the time by night and day as a gamekeeper, and I am quite sure the Parnellite men and the Land Leaguers are just as much afraid of him and Ryan as the tenants are. He don't care a bit for them; and they've no control of him at all."

Mr. Freeman said he remembered very well the occasion referred to by Father O'Neill, when Captain Hamilton refused to confer with Dr. Dillon and himself.

"Did Father O'Neill tell you, sir," he said, "that Captain Hamilton was quite willing to talk with him and Father O'Donel, the parish priests, and with the Coolgreany people, but he would have nothing to say to any one who was not their priest, and had no business to be meddling with the matter at all?"

"No; he did not tell me that."

"Ah! well, sir, that made all the difference. Father Dunphy, who was there, is a high-tempered man, and he said he had just as much right to represent the tenants as Captain Hamilton to represent the landlord, and that Captain Hamilton wouldn't allow. It was the outside people made all the trouble. In June of last year there was a conference at my house, and all that time there was a Committee sitting at Coolgreany, and the tenants would not be allowed to do anything without the Committee."

"And who made the Committee?"

"Oh, they made themselves, I suppose, sir. There was Sir Thomas Esmonde—he was a convert, you know, of Father O'Neill—and Mr. Mayne and Mr. John Dillon. And Dr. Dillon of Arklow, he was as busy as he could be till the evictions were made in July. And then he was in retreat. And I believe, sir, it is quite true that he wanted the Bishop to let him come out of the retreat just to have a hand in the business."

The police sergeant, a very cool, sensible man, quite agreed with the bailiff as to the influence upon the present situation of the ex-gamekeeper Kinsella, and his friend Eyan. "If they were two Invincibles, sir," he said, "these member fellows of the League couldn't be in greater fear of them than they are. They say nothing, and do just as they please. That Kinsella, when Mr. John Dillon was down here, just told him before a lot of people that he 'wanted no words and no advice from him,' and he's just in that surly way with all the people about."

As to the Brooke estate, I am told here it was bought more than twenty years ago with a Landed Estates Court title from Colonel Forde, by the grandfather of Mr. Brooke. He paid about L75,000 sterling for it. His son died young, and the present owner came into it as a child, Mr. Vesey being then the agent, who, during the minority, spent a great deal on improving the property. Captain Hamilton came in as agent only a few years ago. While the Act of 1881 was impending, an abatement was granted of more than twenty per cent. In 1882 the tenants all paid except eleven, who went into Court and got their rents cut down by the Sub-Commissioners. There were appeals; and in 1885, after Court valuations, the rents cut down by the Sub-Commissioners were restored in several cases. There never was any rack-renting on the estate at all. There are upon it in all more than a hundred tenants, twelve of whom are Protestants, holding a little less in all than one-fourth of the property.

There are fifteen judicial tenants, twenty-one lease-holders, and seventy-seven hold from year to year.

The gross rental is a little over L2000 a year of which one-half goes to Mr. Brooke's mother. Mr. Brooke himself is a wealthy man, at the head of the most important firm of wine-merchants in Ireland, and he has repeatedly spent on the property more than he took out of it.

The house of Sir Thomas Esmonde, M.P., was pointed out to me from the road. "Sir Thomas is to marry an heiress, sir, isn't he, in America?" asked an ingenuous inquirer. I avowed my ignorance on this point. "Oh, well, they say so, for anyway the old house is being put in order for now the first time in forty years."

We reached Arklow in time for luncheon, and drove to the large police barracks there. These were formerly the quarters of the troops. Arklow was one of the earliest settlements of the Anglo-Normans in Ireland under Henry II., and once rejoiced in a castle and a monastery both now obliterated; though a bit of an old tower here is said to have been erected in his time. The town lives by fishing, and by shipping copper and lead ore to South Wales. The houses are rather neat and well kept; but the street was full of little ragged, merry mendicants.

We went into a small branch of the Bank of Ireland, and asked where we should find the hotel. We were very civilly directed to "The Register's Office over the way." This seemed odd enough. But reaching it we were further puzzled to see the sign over the doorway of a "coach-builder"! However, we rang the bell, and presently a maid-servant appeared, who assured us that this was really the hotel, and that we could have "whatever we liked" for luncheon. We liked what we found we could get—chops, potatoes, and parsnips; and without too much delay these were neatly served to us in a most remarkable room, ablaze with mural ornaments and decorations, upon which every imaginable pigment of the modern palette seemed to have been lavished, from a Nile-water-green dado to a scarlet and silver frieze. There were five times as many potatoes served to us as two men could possibly eat, and not one of them was half-boiled. But otherwise the meal was well enough, and the service excellent. Beer could be got for us, but the house had no licence, Lord Carysfort, the owner of the property, thinking, so our hostess said, that "there were too many licences in the town already." Lord Carysfort is probably right; but it is not every owner of a house, or even of a lease in Ireland, I fear, who would take such a view and act on it to the detriment of his own property.

Dr. Dillon lives in the main square of Arklow in a very neat house. He was absent at a funeral in the handsome Catholic church near by when we called, but we were shown into his study, and he presently came in.

His study was that of a man of letters and of politics. Blue-books and statistical works lay about in all directions, and on the table were the March numbers of the Nineteenth Century, and the Contemporary Review.

"You are abreast of the times, I see," I said to him, pointing to these periodicals.

"Yes," he replied, "they have just come in; and there is a capital paper by Mr. John Morley in this Nineteenth Century."

Nothing could be livelier than Dr. Dillon's interest in all that is going on on both sides of the Atlantic, more positive than his opinions, or more terse and clear than his way of putting them. He agreed entirely with Father O'Neill as to the pressure put upon the Coolgreany tenants, not so much by Mr. Brooke as by the agent, Captain Hamilton; but he thought Mr. Brooke also to blame for his treatment of them.

"Two of the most respectable of them," said Dr. Dillon, "went to see Mr. Brooke in Dublin, and he wouldn't listen to them. On the contrary, he absolutely put them out of his office without hearing a word they had to say."[22]

I found Dr. Dillon a strong disciple of Mr. Henry George, and a firm believer in the doctrine of the "nationalisation of the land." "It is certain to come," he said, "as certain to come in Great Britain as in Ireland, and the sooner the better. The movement about the sewerage rates in London," he added, "is the first symptom of the land war in London. It is the thin edge of the wedge to break down landlordism in the British metropolis."

He is watching American politics, too, very closely, and inclines to sympathise with President Cleveland. Archbishop Ryan of Philadelphia, he tells me, in his passage through Ireland the other day, did not hesitate to express his conviction that President Cleveland would be re-elected.

Dr. Dillon was so earnest and so interesting that the time slipped by very fast, until a casual glance at my watch showed me that we must make great haste to catch the Dublin train.

We left therefore rather hurriedly, but before reaching the station we saw the Dublin train go careering by, its white pennon of smoke and vapour curling away along the valley.

I made the best of it, however, and letting Mr. Holmes depart by a train which took him home, I found a smart jarvey with a car, and drove out to Glenart Castle, the beautiful house of the Earl of Carysfort. This is a very handsome modern house, built in a castellated style of a very good whitish grey marble, with extensive and extremely well-kept terraced gardens and conservatories.

It stands very well on one high bank of the river, a residence of the Earl of Wicklow occupying the other bank. My jarvey called my attention to the excellence of the roads, on which he said Lord Carysfort has spent "a deal of money," as well as upon the gardens of the new Castle. The head-gardener, an Englishman, told me he found the native labourers very intelligent and willing both to learn and to work. Evidently here is another centre of useful and civilising influences, not managed by an "absentee."[23]



CHAPTER XIV.

DUBLIN, Friday, March 9th.—At 7.40 this morning I took the train for Athy to visit the Luggacurren estates of Lord Lansdowne. Mr. Lynch, a resident magistrate here, some time ago kindly offered to show me over the place, but I thought it as well to take my chance with the people of Athy who are reported to have been very hot over the whole matter here, and so wrote to Mr. Lynch that I would find him at the Lodge, which is the headquarters of the property.

Athy is a neat, well-built little town, famous of old as a frontier fortress of Kildare. An embattled tower, flanked by small square turrets, guards a picturesque old bridge here over the Barrow, the bridge being known in the country as "Crom-a-boo," from the old war-cry of the Fitz-Geralds. It is a busy place now; and there was quite a bustle at the very pretty little station. I asked a friendly old porter which was the best hotel in the town. "The best? Ah! there's only one, and it's not the best—but there are worse—and it's Kavanagh's." I found it easily enough, and was ushered by a civil man, who emerged from the shop which occupies part of it, into a sort of reading-room with a green table. A rather slatternly but very active girl soon converted this into a neat breakfast-table, and gave me an excellent breakfast. The landlord found me a good car, and off I set for the residence of Father Maher, the curate of whom I had heard as one of the most fiery and intractable of the National League priests in this part of Ireland.

My jarvey was rather taciturn at first, but turned out to be something of a politician. He wanted Home Rule, one of his reasons being that then they "wouldn't let the Americans come and ruin them altogether, driving out the grain from the markets." About this he was very clear and positive. "Oh, it doesn't matter now whether the land is good or bad, America has just ruined the farmers entirely."

I told him I had always heard this achievement attributed to England. "Oh! that was quite a mistake! What the English did was to punish the men that stood up for Ireland. There was Mr. O'Brien. But for him there wasn't a man of Lord Lansdowne's people would have had the heart to stand up. He did it all; and now, what were they doing to him? They were putting him on a cold plank-bed on a stone floor in a damp cell!"

"But the English put all their prisoners in those cells, don't they?" I asked.

"And what of it, sir?" he retorted. "They're good enough for most of them, but not for a gentleman like Mr. O'Brien, that would spill the last drop of his heart's blood for Ireland!"

"But," I said, "they're doing just the same thing with Mr. Gilhooly, I hear."

"And who is Mr. Gilhooly, now? And it's not for the likes of him to complain and be putting on airs as if he was Mr. O'Brien!"

"Yes, it is a fine country for hunting!"

"Was it ever put down here, the hunting?"

"No, indeed! Sure, the people wouldn't let it be!"

"Not if Mr. O'Brien told them they must?" I queried.

"Mr. O'Brien; ah, he wouldn't think of such a thing! It brings money all the time to Athy, and sells the horses."

As to the troubles at Luggacurren, he was not very clear. "It was a beautiful place, Mr. Dunne's; we'd see it presently. And Mr. Dunne, he was a good one for sport. It was that, your honour, that got him into the trouble"—

"And Mr. Kilbride?"

"Oh, Mr. Kilbride's place was a very good place too, but not like Mr. Dunne's. And he was doing very well, Mr. Kilbride. He was getting a good living from the League, and he was a Member of Parliament. Oh, yes, he wasn't the only one of the tenants that was doing good to himself. There was more of them that was getting more than ever they made out of the land."[24]