Ireland as It Is, and as It Would Be Under Home Rule

"For my part, and I can speak for all my friends, we have the greatest confidence in the English people's commonsense, and in the long run we know it will not fail. The Scotsmen, who are honest politicians and keen, are throwing over Mr. Gladstone and all his works, although he was for so long their greatest pride. And we are sure that the few Englishmen who at the last election followed in his wake will see their error, and that they will joyfully seize the first opportunity of repairing their mistake. What would happen if the bill became law? Nothing but evil. The Methodists would leave these parts in a body. We could not remain with a Catholic Parliament in Dublin. We should not be safe but for the English shield that covers us. The people, as a whole, are quiet enough – when left alone. But they are very excitable. Kind and civil as they may seem, they turn round in a moment. They will believe anything they are told, their credulity is wonderful, and their clergy have them entirely in their hands. The people might be tolerant, but the clergy never. And Irish priests are very bitter and very prejudiced. They say that we have bartered eternity for time, and that, although we all thrive and do well, we have sold our souls for earthly prosperity. My mind is made up. Once that bill becomes law you must find room for me in England. We shall be able to live in peace on the other side of the Channel."

Another Methodist believed that the poverty of the people was somehow due to their religion. He knew not precisely why this was the case, but his observations left him no other conclusion. He instanced Strabane, the Scots settlement over the border, and although in Tyrone, yet only divided from Donegal by the river Mourne. "They have at Strabane an annual agricultural and horticultural exhibition, which does a great amount of good in educating the people. Last week they distributed eight hundred pounds in prizes, and there were two thousand two hundred entries. We have talked about a similar show in Donegal, but we never do more than talk. We shall never have a show until we get a sufficient number of Scotsmen to organise it and work it up. The necessary energy for such a big affair seems to be the private property of people holding the Protestant faith, for when we see an energetic Romanist we look upon it as something so remarkable as to merit investigation, and in nearly every case we find the person in question is, although Catholic, either Saxon or half-breed. Nearly all the Papists are Kelts. Is their want of energy due to breed, to religion, or to both? We hardly know. But I know a man's religion a mile off, so to speak. Only let me see him at work in a field. His religion comes out in his action. A Papist never works hard. He seems to be always doing as little as ever he can. Then he's very much surprised to find himself so poor, when the hard-working Protestant is getting on. Presently the Black-mouth gets a farm, while the other remains a labourer. Then the agitator comes round and says, 'Look how heretic England favours Protestants. You are the children of the soil, but who has the farms?' 'Begorra,' says Michael, 'an' that's thrue, bedad it is now,' and thenceforward he cherishes a secret animosity against the successful man, instead of blaming his own want of industry. That's human nature. So he votes for Home Rule, for anything that promises the land to himself, as the son of the soil. He looks on the other man as an interloper, and his priest encourages that view. That is their feeling, as they themselves express it every day, and are we to believe against the evidence of our senses that when they have the power to injure us, to drive us out of the country, by making it too hot to hold us – are we to believe that they will not exert their power, but on the contrary, will treat us considerably better than before? That is what English Home Rulers ask us to believe. That is what Irish Nationalist speakers say in England: they would be laughed at here. Do not trust these men. They are what the Scripture calls 'movers of sedition' – and nothing better."

After some search I found a fine young Parnellite, who roundly denounced the clergy of his own faith as enemies of their country. He said: – "I was a Home Ruler, but although I hold the same opinion in theory, I would not at this juncture put it into practice. I am convinced that it would be bad for us. We are not ripe for self-government. We want years of training before we could govern ourselves with advantage. The South Meath election petition finally convinced me. When I saw how ignorance was used by the clergy for the furtherance of their own ends, I decided that we were not yet sufficiently educated to be entrusted with power; and if Home Rule were now offered to us, and the Home Rule that we ourselves have advocated, I for one would dread to accept it. We must serve an apprenticeship to the art of self-government. We must have a Local Government Bill, and see how we get on. Then it can from time to time be made larger and more liberal, entrusting us as we grow stronger with heavier tasks. Give us Home Rule at this moment and you ruin us. We should have several factions, more intent on getting power and in damaging each other, than on solving all or any of the very complicated and difficult questions which would come before them. There would be no spirit of mutual accommodation such as prevails in English assemblies. And our troubles would be your troubles. Keep it back for a few years, and lead us up to Home Rule by easy gradations.

"My anti-Parnellite friends say they will not return the members now representing them. I believe they will. And if not, then they will send others of no better social standing, and with no Parliamentary training at all. They will send worse men, extreme men, men who have not pledged themselves to the British Government. The pledges of Dillon and Davitt – what are they worth? Surely nobody is so foolish as to rely on such 'safeguards' as these.

"I am sure that three-fourths of the educated Catholics of Ireland are at this moment opposed to Home Rule in any shape or form, but – they dare not say so. Ireland is a land of tyranny, clerical tyranny. Ireland will not be free until the clergy withdraw their influence from politics. If they continue in their present course, there will be a reaction as education advances, and their last state will be worse than the first. I know that some of them would gladly drop politics, but they have to look to their bishops."

A Nationalist tradesman said: – "The Protestants are favoured in every way. Statistics recently given in the Freeman show that the money annually paid to the favoured few, who hold appointments which ought to be open to all, amount to five pounds a head for every Protestant man, woman, and child in the country. The same favouritism runs through everything. If a Catholic bids for a field of grass a Protestant bid is taken, even if lower. I saw it done yesterday."

My friend lost his temper when I asked him to say why the heretic farmers were thriving while those of the true faith were starving, why the heretics were clean while the others were dirty. He at last said that the British Government subsidised all Soupers out of the secret service money, and making a contemptuous grimace, to express his opinion of such miscreants, curled up his hand and passed it behind his back, thus dramatically indicating the underhand way in which the money is conveyed to the favoured recipients.

These people will believe anything. But who tells them this? And why do not the clergy undeceive them?

A final Black-mouth must be quoted. He said that the seller of the standing grass preferred the heretical bid, although lower, "because he felt more sure of the money," and pointing across the triangular square, yclept the Diamond, said: – "All those corner-men are Home Rulers. You never see a Unionist idling the day away at street-corners. We have no Protestant corner-boys in Donegal, nor anywhere else, so far as I know." The townsfolk are fairly industrious, that is, when compared with the people of Southern Irish towns, but there is a residuum – a Home Rule residuum. It sometimes happens that jaded men, worn out with overwork, are recommended to go to some quiet place and to do absolutely nothing. They can't do nothing, they don't know how to begin. They should go to Donegal. The place is silent as the tomb, and if they would learn to do nothing they will there find many eminent professors of the science, who, having devoted to it the study of a lifetime, have attained a virtuoso proficiency.

Donegal, August 3rd.

No. 57. – BAREFOOTED AND DILATORY

The Ballyshannon foundered on the coast of Cariboo, And down in fathoms many went the captain and his crew. Down went the owners, greedy men whom hope of gain allured. O, dry the starting tear, for they were heavily insured."

And thereby hangs a tale.

Professor Crawford, of Trinity College, Dublin, says that when walking down Regent Street, London, with William Allingham, then editor of Fraser's Magazine, and a native of this Donegal town, the pair met Charles Dickens, who advanced with beaming countenance, and taking both Allingham's hands in his own, said in a hearty voice:

"Well done, Ballyshannon!"

This was in allusion to a recent article written by the Fraser editor, who among his intimate friends and brother litterateurs was playfully named after his birthplace. W.S. Gilbert was especially fond of the sonorous appellation, and in the above-quoted Bab Ballad, his gem of gems, named the ship Ballyshannon in remembrance of Allingham.

The Ballyshannon folks are "going to" erect a memorial to Allingham, of whose poems they have often heard. They are "going to" advertise their town, and make its beauties known to the world – some day. They are "going to" charter a steam dredger, and so improve the harbour, which is dangerous. They are "going to" utilise the enormous water-power of the River Erne, which runs to waste from Lough Erne to the sea. They are "going to" run a few tweed and blanket factories when they see their way quite clearly. They are "going to" start a fishery fleet and a number of fish-curing sheds, to give employment to the poor folks of the district. They need almost everything that man can need, and they have especial facilities for supplying needs, but as yet they have lacked time and opportunity. The town is only a thousand years old, and its inhabitants have not yet had time to look about them. A number of English anglers stroll about with long salmon rods, or float their little barks on the broad bosom of the Erne, the population looking dreamily on from the long bridge over the river, which, like the Shannon at Athlone, flows through the heart of the town. Nobody seems to be doing anything, except a few old beggar woman squalid and frowsy as the mendicant hordes of Tuam, Tipperary, Limerick, and Galway. The beggars are pertinacious enough for anything, but theirs is the only enterprise the stranger sees. Compared with that of Donegal the salmon-fishing seems expensive. The landlord of the Arran Hotel in that town offers the Eske at half-a-crown a day, but in Ballyshannon you must pay four pounds a week and give up all the take except two. Salmon are scarce all over Ireland this year. Three English fishers on the Erne shared the universal bad luck, for in three days they had only captured one five-pounder. The unusual drought has made the water low. The weather of the past five months has been finer and dryer than any season for sixty years. Ballyshannon looks dirty and dingy in any weather. It lacks the smartness, the cleanliness, the width of thoroughfare, which mark the heretic towns. It lacks the factories, the large shops, the shipping which would infallibly be to the fore if its inhabitants were mainly of Teuton origin. On the other hand, the Ballyshannon folks are religious. They go to mass regularly, and confess themselves at frequent intervals. The confessional box is their only place to spend a happy day, and the act of confession, with the following penance, their pleasantest mode of passing away the time. They are mostly Home Rulers, and are deferring special effort to better themselves until the Irish Parliament does away with the necessity. That blessed institution once fairly settled at College Green will spare them the pains of enterprise, and will show how large industries can be created and sustained without capital, without business knowledge, without technical skill, and for the sole purpose of affording the shiftless population of Ballyshannon regular wages at the week's end. The gentlemen who lean over the quaint bridge, with its twelve arches and sharply-pointed buttresses, are merely waiting for the factories, which are to spring from the earth fully-equipped at a wave of the enchanter's hand, to be a blessing to the whole world while fulfilling their chief mission of finding employment for the people of Ireland. Meantime the Ballyshannoners are bitterly wroth with England because she has not hurried up with the desired factories long ages ago. They smoke thick twist and expectorate into the river, talking moodily of the selfish Saxon, who instead of looking after them looks after himself, and praising Tim Healy, whose spare cash is invested in a factory in Scotland. Tim knows his countrymen; but, although his cleverness is by them much admired, they do not know how really clever he is. If they could realise the fact that Tim declines to invest in Ireland they might admire him still more. The great drawback to Irish enterprise lies in the fact that Irishmen who have brains enough to make money have brains enough to invest it out of Ireland. They will not trust Irishmen, nor will they rely on Irish industry. Ballyshannon is waiting for the impersonal Somebody or the shadowy Something that is to come forward and put everything right. Galway is so waiting, Limerick is so waiting, Cork is so waiting, Westport, Newport, Donegal are so waiting. It never occurs to them to do something for themselves. When the suggestion is made they become irate, and excitedly ask, What could we do? How are we to begin? Where are we to find the money? Who is to take the first step? They fail to see that the settlement towns have long since answered these queries, and that the capacity to do so marks the difference in the breeds. These hopeless, helpless, Keltic Irishmen are unfit for self-government. They require the india-rubber tube and the feeding-bottle. They want to be spoon-fed and patted on the back when they choke. To instance the Scots settlements is to madden them. These thriving communities are a standing reproach, and cannot be explained away. Saxon Strabane flourishes, while Keltic Donegal declines, the latter having all the advantages of the former with the addition of a harbour and good fishing grounds. "Look at the condition of the country," say the Home Rulers. "Behold the poverty of the peasantry," they continually do cry. The visible nakedness of the land is their chief and most effective argument. The Unionist answer is conclusive, and of itself should be enough to demolish the Nationalists. See the Protestant communities of Ireland, – all, without exception, advancing in prosperity. They have no advantages which are denied to the Nationalists. On the contrary, they live in the comparatively bleak and unfertile North, which by their unceasing industry they have developed to its fullest extent. They have tilled the ground until it resembles a garden, they have deepened the rivers, built harbours, created industries, been in every way successful. And all under precisely the same laws, the same government. The richest spots of Ireland, if inhabited by Keltic Irish, are steeped in poverty. The poorest spots, if inhabited by men of Saxon blood, become fat and well-liking. The fate of men lies mostly in themselves. This comes out forcibly in Ireland. Race, breed, heredity, call it what you will, in Ireland thrusts its influence on you, whether you will or no. Neighbouring towns, neighbouring farms, neighbouring cottages, present a series of striking contrasts, ever in favour of the Saxon, ever against the Kelt. The latter has not yet discovered that the secret word, the open sesame of the difficulty, the charm which only can give permanent comfort, is – Work. Nor has his race the spirit of mechanical invention or industrial enterprise, without which College Green Parliaments may sit in vain. The pure-blooded Kelt is easily discouraged, and no man sooner knows when he is beaten. More than this, he always expects to be beaten, so that he is beaten before he begins. As a talker he is unequalled, and in this long-eared age, when the glibbest gabbler is reckoned the greatest man, his agitators have floated to the front. The Ballyshannon people can talk with the volubility of a Hebrew cheap Jack, but their jaw-power, like their water-power, mostly runs to waste. They have the silly suspicion and the childish credulity of the Donegal rural districts. A fluent politician said, "Why are all the Protestants Unionists? Perfectly simple, that. Because they are all well off. There you are. And being well off, they want no change. That's their selfishness. Now we, who are not Protestants (thank God), are for the most part poor. Our living is precarious. We don't know where to look, nor what to do, to improve our worldly position. We think it likely that an Irish Parliament would do something for us. In what way? Why, in the direction of public works and in the building of factories. Also in the protection of Irish industries. Where would the money come from? Why, from England, to be sure. And if England wouldn't lend it, plenty of other nations would; America, for instance. We shall have heaps of money. Mr. Gladstone has said it, and he is famous as a financier. There you have the reason why we want Home Rule, while the Protestants don't. They are well enough off already.

"Why are they well off, you ask? Also easy to answer. They have been the spoiled children of fortune. They have been petted and pampered by England for more than two hundred years. And although you will not of course admit it, yet we know, everybody here knows, that they have been secretly subsidised by every Tory Government. If they pay their rents, where do they get the money? From the Tory party. And Tory landlords give the best farms to Protestants, who having the pick of the land, ought to be well off. Wherever you go you will find the Protestants living on good land."

I submitted that authentic records show that Ulster was formerly the most sterile, barren, unpromising part of Ireland, and that the change was entirely due to the two centuries of unremitting labour which the Scots settlers and their descendants had bestowed on the land; but, waiving this point, I asked him why the Unionist, that is, the Protestant, party were so much better educated, and why the heretics were so much cleaner. He had stated that the Black-mouths were subsidised by the Tory Party. Did the British Government also supply them with soap?

At this point my friend's explanations became unintelligible, but his general drift seemed to indicate that the people were too downtrodden, too much oppressed, were groaning too painfully under the cruel British yoke, to have the spirit to look after the duties of the toilet. In other words, the Irish people will wash themselves when they get Home Rule. At the next election Mr. Gladstone will doubtless bring forward this aspect of the case as a sop to the soap-making interest.

Another Ballyshannoner was of a diametrically opposite opinion. "We are poor because we have no notion of making money by modern methods. We have always lived on the land, selling our superfluity to pay the rent, and now that our arrangements are disturbed, we don't know which way to turn. The blame rests with America, whose competition has so lowered the price of produce that the farmer's superfluity, that is, what he does not consume himself, will no longer suffice to pay the rent. That is a general statement only. Landlords are generally reasonable, and meet their tenants fairly enough when the tenants are well-disposed and honest. The tenant-farmers of Ireland have no more to complain of than the tenant-farmers of England – much less in fact – but they have an army of agitators, an ignorant English press, and the G.O.M. on their side. That makes all the difference. We have occasional cases of unfair landlordism, but they are so rare as to be the talk of a county or two.

"A Mrs. Hazlitt holds, with her farm, about twenty or thirty acres of slobland reclaimed from the Atlantic. Slobland is land reclaimed from the sea. This piece is on Donegal Bay. It was protected by a great dyke after the Dutch style. But the Atlantic is sometimes angry, and then he becomes unmanageable. He was ill-tempered one night (being troubled with wind), and he just washed down the dyke and inundated the reclaimed meadows, upon, which I have seen the most beautiful crops. The landlord, the Reverend James Hamilton, a Protestant rector, insists on rent being paid for this washed-away land. He does not rebuild the dyke, and the land lies waste – the widow paying rent for acres of useless salt marsh. That is pointed to by all the malcontents in Donegal as a specimen of landlordism, and Protestant landlordism, and more especially reverend Protestant landlordism. Nobody but a parson would exact the rent. These isolated examples are cited to bring discredit on Protestant landlords in general.

"This town is asleep, and it will not awake till the last Judgment. In 1885 we had a manufacturer from Belfast looking about for the best place for a big cloth mill on the river. The town was in a ferment of excitement, and everybody began to wonder what he would do with his additional income. The shop-keepers expected that their customers would have twice the money to spend in future, and the working folks began to be cocky with their employers, saying that they would get much better wages at the great factory. Then Mr. Gladstone brought out his '86 bill, and the Belfast man drew in his horns. He told me that he would not risk a farthing in any speculative venture while the threat of Home Rule was held over us. He was quite right. The Ballyshannon men were relieved from the trouble of deciding how they would spend their surplus money, and they ranged themselves on the bridge or at their usual corners, where you may now see them, propping up the old houses with their lazy backs, and discussing the wrongs of Ireland. What they would do without their supposed, wrongs nobody knows. In English hands this would be a money-making place. We have enormous advantages of situation, and the water power is almost unequalled in Ireland. Yet from here to Belleek, a distance of four miles, there is nothing whatever being done with it.

"The backwardness of the Irish and their poverty are, in my opinion, due to their inferiority as a race of men. Wherever there is a factory, you will find all the foremen Protestants – that is, Saxons. And Irishmen expect it. They will not work under Irish foremen, if they can help it. The Catholic labourer will work for the Protestant farmer, for choice, every time. The Catholic housekeeper goes to the Protestant shop, by preference. Where their own personal and earthly interests are concerned, the Papist population always prefer the guidance of the cursed heretic. And yet they express for the Black-mouths the greatest contempt and aversion, and would willingly put them out of the country to-morrow. That is because they wish to possess our goods. They vote for Home Rule in the belief that they are paving the way for a dismissal of Protestants, and the division of their property. They do not know the name of the man who represents them, the title of the Parliamentary division for which he sits, or even, in many cases, the name of the county in which they themselves reside. To talk reason to such people would be absurd. Trained from their infancy to regard England as an enemy, they would not listen to anyone speaking on her behalf. They declare that they are barefoot because England wears their shoes, that they are starving that England may be over-fed. The how, the why, the wherefore are not within their ken, but they are sure of the facts. They had them from Father Dick, Tom, or Harry, and the holy man would not tell a lie. Stupid people over the Channel, listening to this iterated complaint, are acting as though it were true. Gladstone took it up, and his followers followed. No doubt it was all that most of them could do. Result, – tumult, disturbance, confusion worse confounded. Home Rule means that the country will be deluged with blood, that civilisation will receive a shock which will send back the island for a century. The causes of Ireland's poverty are laziness and lack of enterprise, the latter accentuated by everlasting disturbance. Before the Nationalists we had the Fenians, the Whiteboys, the Ribbon-men, the United Irishmen, the Defenders, the goodness-knows-what, running back in continuous line up to the dawn of history. No wonder we are poor. Cannot Gladstonians read the records? If they did so, and if they were acquainted with the character of the Irish when in their native land, they would agree with my cook, herself a Kelt of Kelts, who says that Irishmen are leather, good leather, but fit only for the sole, and not for the uppers.