Ireland as It Is, and as It Would Be Under Home Rule
TextMr. George William Wood, contractors' agent, said: – "The men work as well as they can, but they do not get over the ground like English navvies. They are very regular, very quiet, very sober, and never give the least trouble. Of course, they had to be taught, and they did not like the big navvy shovels. They were used to the six-foot spades with no cross-bar. Yes, you might think it harder work with such tools, but then the Irish labourer dislikes to bend his back. The long handle lets him keep his back straight, there's the difference. However, we insist on the big, short shovels, and they have taken to them all right. These men are not so strong as they seem, and they are not worth nearly so much as English navvies. They may be willing, but they have not the same stamina. The English navvy eats about two pounds of beef for his dinner and washes it down with about two quarts of ale. These men never see meat from one year's end to another. They live on potatoes, and bits of dry bread and water. At three in the afternoon they are not worth much, clean pumped out – might almost as well go home. No, they don't live in hovels. Those who go home but once a week are housed in good wooden sheds, or corrugated iron buildings, with good beds and bedclothes. There are about forty of them in a hut, with a hut-keeper to look after them and to keep order. For this excellent lodging they are charged sixpence a week, and all their prog is supplied at wholesale prices. We buy largely in Dublin, bring it down, of course, carriage free, and both the men and their wives and families are supplied to any amount. They effect a saving of at least twenty per cent., but probably much more, as village stores are terribly dear. The whole district has found out this advantage, and they flock to the hut-store from all parts. So Balfour is a boon to the country at large."
Next day I went down sixteen miles of line to a spot about a mile from Oughterard. It was pay-day, and I clung to the engine along with the engineer, Mr. Wood, and a pay-clerk, armed with several yards of pay-sheet, and a couple of black tin cash-boxes. A wild and stony country, a range of high mountains on the left, wide, flat plains on the right, through which the Corrib serpentined, with big rocks rising from the channel brilliantly white. "They whitewash the rocks, so that they can be seen by the boats and the Cong steamer. Englishmen would blow them up and have done with them, but Irishmen prefer to whitewash them and sail round them. More exciting I suppose, matter of taste." This from the engineer, a Saxon of the usual type. On through bogs, past nameless lakes, and a chaos of limestone rocks and huge granite boulders, lakes, bogs, rocks, in endless succession, with the long mountain reek beside us, and a still higher range in the purple distance. Now and then a green patch sternly walled in, a few cows grazing, a lonely donkey, a few long-tailed black sheep, or a couple of goats. Here and there acres of white blossom, looking like a snowfall. This was the bog bean, growing on a stem a foot high, a silvery tuft of silky bloom hanging downward, two inches long and the bigness of a finger. Sometimes we dashed past walled enclosures so full of stone that they looked like abandoned graveyards, and the only use of the fences, so far as I could see, was to keep thoughtless cattle out. Very little tillage. Just a few ridges of potatoes, but the people who had planted them seemed to have vanished for ever. At long intervals a diminutive white cot, but nothing else to break the succession of lake, rock, and bog. Moycullen, six miles from Galway, is to have a station; another will be built at Ross, ten miles, a third at Oughterard, sixteen and a half miles. Not a stone laid as yet. At Ross a great excavation. The men had just laid bare a huge boulder of granite, weighing some thirty tons, and Mr. Wood, observing my interest in this relic of the ice-age, gave it to me on the spot. "No granite in situ hereabouts, the living rock is mountain limestone, but no end of granite boulders, which are blasted to the tune of half-a-ton of tonite per week." Ten miles from Galway a cutting was being regularly quarried for building purposes, and most of the sixteen or seventeen miles of line I saw was fenced with a Galway wall of uncemented stone four feet six inches high and eighteen inches thick. "The men build stone walls with great skill," said Mr. Wood, "but half the number of English navvies would do more excavating."
The pay-clerk stopped the engine at every gang, and the men came forward for their money. All had the same well-nourished sturdy look, and all seemed well satisfied with their wages. They conversed in Irish, but they mostly understood English, even if they could not speak it themselves. Whole villages were there seemingly of the same name, and strange were the distinctive appellations. There was John Toole and John Toole Pat, John Pat Toole and Pat Toole John. Permutation was the order of the day. There was Tom Joyce Pat and Pat Tom Joyce, Tom Joyce Sally and Tom Joyce boy. Besides this change ringing a little colour was thrown in, and we had Pat Tom Joyce Red and Pat Tom Joyce Black, Red Pat Tom Joyce and Black Tom Joyce Pat. This is called Joyce's country, before Balfour's time depopulating to desolation, now thriving and filling up, re-Joyceing in fact. Nearly seventeen hundred men are at work here and at the other end, and in 1894 the great civiliser will steam from Galway to Clifden, inaugurating (let us hope) a new era of prosperity.
In Oughterard I met an American tourist who said, "I should think Home Rule would about settle Old England. The Irish people show a most unfriendly spirit, and I have come to the conclusion that there is no such word as gratitude in the Irish language. There is some change in this district, and the people seem willing to work, but wherever the agitators have been everything is going to the bad. Nothing but distrust and suspicion. No Irishman would invest in Irish securities. They prefer South Americans! That startled me. I am told that Tim Healy is worth £30,000, all got out of Home Rule, and my informant says that Tim would not risk a penny in his own country. Tim is a blackguardly kind of politician, but he is mighty cute, and shirks Irish securities. Where are the business managers of the Irish nation coming from? That's what I want to know."
I told him of the Galway Harbour Commissioners, who, having been forgiven a Government debt of nearly £10,000, conceived the idea of building a new, grand, splindid, iligant, deep dock, which should increase the trade of the place by allowing ships of great draught to unload in the harbour. Let me repeat the story for the readers of the Gazette.
The Harbour Board consulted an eminent engineer, who said the right thing would cost £80,000. They sent him to the right about, and called in another man. "Now," said they, "we can only raise £30,000 by loans from the Board of Works. Will not that suffice? We give you 5 per cent. on the outlay, &c., &c., &c." The new man said £30,000 was ample, took the job, and the work was commenced. Ultimately they borrowed £40,000, which they spent, along with the £10,000 in hand. Then it was found that big ships could not get to the dock at all! No use in a deep dock unless you can swim up to it. To get the big vessels in you required to hoist them out of the water, carry them a few hundred yards, and drop them into the dock. As the Galway men still groan beneath the cruel English yoke, this operation was found impracticable. During some blasting operations a big rock was tumbled out of the dock in process of manufacture, dropping in front of another dock in full working order. The stone was just in the way of the vessels, but as there was no Parliament in College Green, the Harbour Board had not the heart to fish it up. So it crashed through the bottom of a Henderson collier, the owner of which sued the Harbour Board for damages, and was awarded a thousand pounds. The money never was paid, and never will be. The fortunate winner of the suit will sell his claim for £5 in English gold. He was thought to have done well in winning, and my informant, a typical Irishman, admired the complainant's successful attack on the Harbour Board. "But what good come of it at last," I ventured to put in. "Nay, that I cannot tell," said he, "But 'twas a glorious victory."
The Galway Harbour Board spent £50,000 or so on a deep dock which they have not got, and the harbour is in pawn to the Board of Works, which collects the tolls, and otherwise endeavours to indemnify itself. The Harbour Board meets as usual, but it has no powers, no money, no credit, no anything. This is a fair specimen of the business management which characterises the breed of Irishmen who favour Home Rule. The party paper, once a fine property, has in their hands sunk below zero, and they built New Tipperary on land to which they had no title; so that the money was completely thrown away. Almost every Board of Guardians in the country is insolvent, except in those cases where the Government has kicked out the Poor Law Guardians elected by the Parish, and restored solvency by sending down paid men to run the concern for a couple of years. This has been done in several instances, and in every case the paid men, drawing salaries of several hundred a year, have in two years paid off debts, leaving all in good working order, with a balance in the bank. The inference is obvious. Would the Belfast folks have made such a fiasco of a dock? Would Englishmen have exposed themselves to the ridicule of a story which is curiously remindful of Robinson Crusoe and his big canoe? Would the Galway folks ever have built the railway they wanted so badly; or sans England and Mr. Balfour, would not the Connemara men have proceeded to starve until the end of time? A keen old railway man who had thravelled, and who had done railway work in California, said to me, "Whin we get an Oirish Parlimint the labourers may jist put on their hats and go over to England. Thank God, we'll know something besides farm work now, the whole of us. We can get railroad work in England. There'll be none in Oireland, for every mother's son that has money will cut the country. I could take ye fourteen Oirish miles from Galway, along a road that was spotted wid great jintlemen's houses, an' ivery one of thim's in ruins. The owners that used to live in them, and be a blessin' to the counthry, is all ruined by the land agitation. All are gone, an' their foin, splindid houses tumblin' down, an' the people worse off than iver. If the Bill becomes law the young men will all be off to England and America. There'll be no work, no money in the counthry. Did ye hear what the cyar-dhriver said to Mr. Morley?"
I confessed that the incident escaped my recollection.
"Why the cyar-man was a dacent boy, an Mister Morley axed him how was thrade, an' av he was busy."
"No," says the dhriver, "things is quite, very quite," says he.
"Ye'll be busy when ye get Home Rule," says Mister Morley.
"But that'll only last a week," says the cyar-man.
"An' why so?" says the Irish Secretary, bein' curious an' lookin' round at the dhriver.
"Och," says Pat; "'twill only take a week to dhrive thim to the boats."
"Who d'ye mane, wid yer dhrivin' to the boats?" says owld Morley.
"All the dacent folks that has any money to pay for dhrivin'," says Pat, "for bedad they'll be lavin' the counthry."
"That was a thriminjus rap for owld Morley, but 'twas thrue, an' the Divil himself couldn't deny it."
"An' can ye tell me why the farmers should have all the land an' not the labourers? An' could ye say why them murdherin' Land Leaguers in Parliament wasn't hung up, the rampagious ruffians?"
I could throw no light on these points. My friend had much to say about the Land League M.P.'s, and a score of times asked me why they had not been hanged.
A hard question to answer, when you come to think of it. Does anybody know?
Oughterard (Connemara), May 23rd.
No. 27. – CULTIVATING IRISH INDUSTRY
The city of kings. Pronounced Athen-rye, with a bang on the last syllable. A squalid town, standing amid splendid ruins of a bygone time. "Look what English rule has brought us to," said a village politician, waving his hand from the ivy-covered gateway by which you enter the town to the mean-looking houses around. "That's what we could build when we were left to ourselves, an' this is what we can do afther sivin hundhred years of the Saxon." The ruins in question are the remains of fortifications erected after the Norman Conquest of Ireland by the Normans, a great entrance gate, and a strong, oblong keep. The ruins of the Dominican Friary, founded in 1241 by Meyler, of Birmingham, have a thrilling interest of their own, which has its pendant in the story of a Mayence verger, who holds British visitors to the cathedral of that city in breathless rapture as he tells how it is said that a Mayence bishop of eight hundred years ago was said to be of English extraction, or like the Stratford mulberry tree, which is said to be a cutting of a tree said to have grown on the spot where a tree is said to have stood which is said to have been planted by Shakespeare. Galway abounds in ruined fortalices, tumble-down abbeys, ivied towers and castles, none of which were built by the Irish race. The round towers which dot the country here and there, with a few ruined churches, are all that the native Irish can claim in the way of architecture.
The people here are full of interest. The fair at Athenry is something to remember. A very good time it was, cattle selling higher than of yore. The men were queerly, quaintly dressed, speaking Irish, getting extremely drunk on vilest whiskey, leaving the town in twos and threes, tumbling in groups by the roadside, reeking heaps of imbruted humanity. The women were numerous, tall, decent, and modest. All wore the shawl as a hood, the shawls of strange pattern unknown in England. All tucked up the dress nearly to the waist, showing the invariable red kirtle. All, or nearly all, were shod with serviceable shoes, such as would astonish the Parisian makers of bottines. But these shoes were only for show. The ladies walked painfully about in the unaccustomed leather. They seemed to have innumerable corns, to wrestle with bunions huge and dire, to suffer from unknown pedal infirmities. Outside the town the ladies put on their shoes. Outside the town, after the fair, they took them off again, sitting on the roadside, stripping their shapely feet, bundling the obnoxious, crippling abominations into Isabella-colour handkerchiefs, which they tucked under their arms as they bounded away like deer. It was pleasant to watch their joy, their freedom, their long springy step as their feet once more struck their native heath. They do not spare their shoes by reason of economy, but because they walk better without them. Donned for propriety, doffed for convenience. The young lady who is "on the market" is expected to wear leather on high days and holidays, and she submits – another martyr to fashion. Yet even as the hart panteth for the water-brooks, so longeth her sole after her native turf.
It was at Athenry that I first obtained a precise legal definition of the term Congested District, to the effect that wherever the land valuation amounts to less than 30s. per head of the population the district is held to be congested, and may receive assistance under the Act of 1891. The chief item of the Board's income is the sum of £41,250 a year, being interest at 2¾ per cent. per annum on the sum of £1,500,000 referred to in the Act as the Church Surplus Grant. The Board may, under certain conditions, use the principal, if needful. Two other smaller sums are also available, and the unexpended balance of the Irish Distress Fund has been applied to the completion of the Bealdangan Causeway in Connemara. This was Mr. Balfour's suggestion. There is a widespread idea that only the sea-board is touched, and that only fishermen have reaped the benefit of the Act. This is entirely erroneous. The Board works unceasingly at the development of agriculture, the planting of trees, the breeding of live stock and poultry, the sale of seed potatoes and seed oats, the amalgamation of small holdings, migration, emigration, weaving and spinning, and any other suitable industries, as well as in aid of fishing and fishermen. Besides the innumerable direct and indirect methods by which agriculture and industries are assisted in production, the Board has laboured successfully in the establishment of such means of communication, by railway, steamship, or otherwise, as will enable goods to be imported and exported at rates sufficiently low to make trade possible and profitable to producers and consumers in remote congested districts. Another popular error arises from regarding the work of the Board as merely a means of relief during periods of exceptional distress. Mr. Balfour would be the first to deprecate this notion. His scheme was constructed with a view to bringing about a gradual and lasting improvement in the poor districts of Ireland, by putting the people in a way to help themselves, and not by doling out large sums in charity. The works, which are wrongly called "relief works," are in every instance a well-considered effort to permanently and materially improve the trade and resources of a given area in connection with agriculture and miscellaneous industries. Such was the invariable principle of every action of the Board while under Mr. Balfour's administration. The people have been taught better methods, and helped to carry out the instruction they had received. The Royal Dublin Society has in some instances employed an instructor, whose duty it has been to teach the people the best system of cultivating portions or plots of their holdings, and to encourage them by gifts of seed and by giving prizes to those who were most successful in carrying out the instructions of their teacher. It is conceded that by proper management, by the adoption of modern methods of farming such as are well within the grasp of the smallest landowner, the produce of Irish farms might be increased from one-third to one-half. Consider the effect of this unassailable proposition on the eternal question of rent. The question can hardly be over-estimated. Compare the solidity, the practicability, the substantial usefulness of this kind of help, with the weak pandering to sentiment displayed by the present government. The Board admits that no matter how vigorously and constantly agricultural improvements are inculcated, the tenants of Ireland are tardy in their adoption. The small farmers dislike change, and at the present moment they are rapidly slipping back into their old grooves. They believe that the old system will pay when they have no rent-days to meet. The Balfour Administration encouraged honesty, industry, self-reliance. The Morley Government puts a premium on idleness, unthrift, retrogression, and dishonesty. It is easier to half-till the land, paying small rents or none at all, than to get the utmost out of the land with the object of paying the landlord his due.
The Board is carrying on the afforestation of Ireland, which in many parts is almost without trees. When the potato crop failed in 1890 Mr. Balfour commenced to plant trees on the western sea-board. In 1891 a sum of £1,970 was spent in draining, fencing, and roadmaking, and in planting 90 acres of 960 acquired by the Tory Government for the purpose. In 1892 a further sum of £1,427 was spent in carrying on the work. It is said that a previous Liberal Government had rejected the scheme on the ground that trees would not grow in a situation exposed to the salt gales of the Atlantic, but Mr. Balfour's trees have thriven remarkably well. He tried all sorts, convinced that something should be done, and that an ounce of experiment was worth a pound of theory. Sycamore, ash, elm, beech, birch, poplar, alder, larch, Scotch fir, spruce, silver fir, sea buckthorn, elder, and willow – he gave them all a chance, some as main plantations, some as shelter belts. All proved successful except the silver fir. Besides this, three hundred and fifty holdings have been planted with shelter belts, and about six hundred and fifty more were being planted when Mr. Balfour loosed the reins.
An eminent Irishman, a great authority on this subject, assures me that he could dictate similar facts for a week without stopping to search his memory. Mr. Gladstone proposes to place the poor people of Ireland under a Government utterly inexperienced in the administration of great matters, utterly unreliable where the handling of money is concerned, utterly ignorant of business methods and business routine. The fate of the destitute poor and the fortunes of the well-to-do classes are to be at the mercy of men whose business ventures have been absurdly unsuccessful, who believe that to aid the poor you must rob the rich, and that the No-rent Manifesto, the Plan of Campaign, and the Land League, with its story of outrage and murder, were the perfection of modern statesmanship. The Balfour system teaches men to help themselves. The Morley system teaches men to help themselves to their neighbour's goods.
My friend gave a few more instances of useful assistance rendered by what the poor folks call the Blessed Board. Special arrangements have been made to enable the farmers to improve the breed of horses. The Queen presented an Arabian horse named Tirassan to the County Donegal. Bulls of superior breed have been sold to decent, honest farmers at one-third of their cost, and this small figure was payable in two yearly instalments. About two hundred black-faced Scotch rams and Cheviot rams have been located in Donegal and Galway free of charge, and young boars of the pure Yorkshire breed are sold to certain selected farmers at a nominal charge on certain conditions calculated to prove useful to the neighbourhood. The breeding and rearing of poultry has received a world of attention, and the poor folks who make a little money by the sale of eggs have been supplied with the best information and substantial assistance.
In a former letter I described the Aran sea-fisheries, and before that I adverted to the fact that the Shetland fishermen came to the Irish Coast, caught ling, and brought it back salted to sell to Irish fishermen. The Board has engaged an experienced fish-curer from Norway to show Irishmen how the thing is done, and English and Scotch fish-curers have been sent to several stations to give instruction in mackerel and herring-curing. Fifteen fish-curing stations are now in full swing, and the poor Irish fishermen, instead of buying salt ling at 2d. a pound, are now selling it at £18 to £20 per ton. A big steamer has been chartered to carry the salt, the fish, and for other useful purposes.
Contrast this work and these results with the work of the Irish agitators and with that of Messrs. Gladstone, Morley, and Co. Sentiment and starvation versus salt fish and satiety. A red-faced Yorkshireman who knows all about fish-curing, said: – "When first I came here I'm blest if the men wasn't transparent. You could see through 'em like lookin' through the rungs of a ladder. Now the beggars are growin' double chins. Now they're a-gettin' cheeky. They're like a hoss as has had a feed of corn. They was meek an' mild enough when I come over. Now they're a-gettin' perky, an' a-talkin' politics. They usen't to see no agitators. They never had no meetin's; why? there was no chance of a collection. Sometimes I gets down on 'em proper. 'Tother day I says, 'You chaps, wi' yer Home Rule, I says, reminds me of a character in the Bible, I says.' Bein' Catholics, they don't read the Bible for theirselves. The priests read it for 'em. But one of 'em cocks up his nose, an' he says, 'We're like a character in the Bible, are we? Well,' he says, 'who was he?'
"'You're like the wild ass that sniffed up the wind instead of goin' in for sommat more substantial,' I says. That's what I told 'em. They did look down their noses, I tell you. An' they fell to talkin' i' Irish. They couldn't answer me, do what they would."
Before leaving the Connemara district I paid a second visit to Oughterard in order that I might see the progress made by Irishmen in the art of railway making. A gang or two were engaged in the comparatively skilled work of rail-laying, and the way they got over the ground was truly surprising. Two trucks stood on the line already laid, one bearing sleepers, the other loaded with steel rails. Four or five couples of men shouldered sleepers and laid them on the track at spots marked by a club-footed Irishman, who swore at everything with a vigour which spoke well for his wind. Several men lifted a thirty feet length of rail, weighing nearly six hundred-weight, and laid it on the sleepers, when it was instantly bolted and secured. The same having been done on the other side, the trucks were pushed along the newly-laid ten yards, and the process was repeated, the Irish ganger above-mentioned swearing till the surrounding bogs seemed to quake. An unhappy Connemaran having dropped his end of the sleeper a few inches from the right spot, was cursed through the entire dictionary, the ganger winding up a solemn declaration that he had not seen anything so Blankly and Double-Blankly and forty times Blankly idiotic since "the owld goat died." An English ganger hard by never spoke at all, but no doubt his men felt lonely. A labourer who had hurt his foot, and was awaiting a friendly truck to take him home, said of the swearer: —
"He manes no harm, an' the Boys doesn't care a rap for his swearin'. These men want no elbowin' on, for they are paid by the piece, so that the harder they work the more they get. All Irish gangers swear like that. An' Irish farm bailiffs is jist the same. Onless they're cussin' an' rippin' an' tearin' they don't think they're doin' the work for which they're paid, an' they don't think their masthers would be contint wid thim. Av an Irish landlord that kept a bailiff didn't hear him swearin' three miles away, he'd discharge him for not workin'. English gangers an' bailiffs says very little, an' ye wouldn't think they wor doin' anythin'. 'Tis quare at first, but ye get used to it in time."
Travelling in any country is always instructive, no matter how much about that country you previously knew. My lame friend may have unconsciously suggested an explanation of the speeches and conduct of the Irish Nationalist Parliamentary contingent. Unless they kept up the cursin' an' swearin', an' rippin' an' tearin', so that they can be heard across the Atlantic, their American paymasters might not be contint wid thim, and might withhold the sinews of war. Once it is understood that the Irish patriots must revile all and sundry to earn their pay, the situation is to some extent explained. Few of them are likely to fail in this supreme requirement. Six pounds a week for abusing the brutal Saxon is far better than the pound or thirty shillings of their pre-political days. They have no inducement to earn an honest living.
The story of the Galway Bag Factory may serve as a pendant to the story of Mr. McMaster's effort to benefit the Catholic peasantry of the counties of Galway and Donegal. The concern had stopped for lack of funds, and Father Peter Dooley went round the town endeavouring to induce people to take shares in the concern, in order that the poor folks of the district might have employment. The mills were reopened, and at first, just at first, the people attended work with tolerable regularity. They then fell off, coming for half a day, coming not at all. The management actually instituted prizes for regularity of attendance. The people, who professed to be dying for employment, had to be bribed to come to work. Even this was ineffectual, and as a certain number of people were required to work a loom, the absence of one or two made the loom and the other workpeople idle, and as, in order to pay expenses, every loom required to be constantly worked, this skulking was not only annoying, but also a ruinous loss. Mr. Miller, the manager, was compelled to get people over from Scotland, after having long placarded the walls of Galway with notices of vacancies which no Galway girls attempted to fill up. Father Peter remonstrated, and pointed out that as he had been instrumental in reopening the factory, he thought Mr. Miller should oblige him by engaging Galway girls. The manager showed him the placards, and said that if Father Peter would bring the people he would find them employment. Father Peter Dooley went into the highways and hedges, but not a soul could he bring in, although Mr. Miller seems to have been so desperately beset that he would have jumped at the blind, the maimed, the halt, and the lame. The good Father was beaten, but then he had a reason – an excellent reason. When things go wrong in Ireland, it is always some other fellow's fault, just as when the French are beaten in battle they always scream Nous sommes trahis! Bad characters had been admitted to the looms. Manager was surprised. Let Father Peter point them out, and away they go – if Father Peter did not hesitate to cast them again on the streets of Galway. Two girls were dismissed. Some of the old workpeople returned to work intermittently, as before. Father Peter wanted the two girls reinstated. The manager declined to see-saw in this way, and sacrilegious Scotsman as he was, dared to say that nothing went well when bossed by priests! From that moment that manager was blighted. His sight grew dim, his hearing became dull, his liver got out of order, his corns grew more numerous and more painful, and a bald spot was seen on his crown. The people worked as before, by fits and starts, but more fitty and starty than ever. The factory was closed, and the manager died. They buried him about a week ago, a sort of human jackdaw of Rheims without the curse taken off. Protestants say the Galway workpeople wore him down, broke his spirit and broke his heart, but Catholics know better. The only wonder was that instead of being instantly consumed by fire from heaven, Miller was permitted to waste away by slow degrees. But that was Father Dooley's good nature.