CHAPTER XXVII.AN IRISH MASS MEETING.

TO MARKET AND BACK FOR SIXPENCE.

SEVERAL DELUSIONS.

The Irish girl is always comely, and, properly clothed and fed, would be beautiful; still she is comely. Irish landlordism has not been sufficient to destroy her beauty, although it has done its best. But she has no gown of woolen stuff—a cotton slip, without underclothing of any kind, makes up her costume. The comfortable stockings and stout shoes, and the red kerchief about her neck, are so many libels upon Irish landlordism. Were My Lord’s agent to see such clothing upon a girl, he would immediately raise the rent upon her father, and confiscate those clothes. And he would keep on raising the rent till he was certain that shoes and stockings would be forever impossible. Neither does she dance Pat down at rustic balls, for a most excellent reason—there are no balls; and, besides,when she has cut and dried a donkey load of peat, and walked beside that donkey, barefooted in the cold mud, twelve miles and back again, and sold that peat for a sixpence, she is not very much in the humor for dancing down any one. On the contrary, she is mighty glad to get into her wretched bed of dried leaves, and pull over her the potato sack which constitutes her sole covering, and, soothed to sleep by the gruntings of the pigs in the wretched cabin, forget landlords and rent, and go off into the land of happiness, which to her is America. She finds in sleep surcease of sorrow, and, besides, it refreshes her to the degree of walking barefooted through the mud twenty-four miles on the morrow, to sell another load of peat for sixpence, that she may pay more money to My Lord Bantry, whose town-house in London, and whose mistresses in Paris, require a great deal of money. Champagne and the delicacies of the season are always expensive; and My Lord’s appetite, and the appetite of his wife and mistresses, and his children, legitimate and illegitimate, are delicate. Clearly, Katy is in no humor for dancing. She has her share to contribute to all these objects. And so she eats her meal of potato or stirabout—she never has both at once—and goes into sleep and dreams.

THE REAL IRISH GIRL.

As to the priest, there never was a wilder delusion than exists in the minds of the American people concerning him. I was at the houses, or rather lodgings, of a great many of them, but one example will suffice.

Half-way between Kenmare and Killarney, in a wild, desolate country, lives one of these parish priests who are supposed to inhabit luxurious houses, and to live gorgeously, and to beperpetually singing the “Cruiskeen Lawn,” with a pipe in one hand and a glass of poteen in the other.

He is a magnificent man. In face and figure he is the exact picture of the lamented Salmon P. Chase, one of the greatest of Americans; and I venture the assertion that had he chosen any other profession, and come to America, where genius and intellect mean something, and where great ability finds great rewards, he would have been one of the most eminent of men. A man of great learning, of wonderful intuitions, of cool and clear judgment, of great nerve and unbounded heart, he would, were he to come to America, and drop his priestly robes be president of a great railroad corporation, or a senator, or anything else he chose to be.

But what is he in Ireland? His apartments consist of a bed-room, just large enough to hold a very poor bed, and a study, in a better class farm-house, and for which he pays rent, the same as everybody else does. His floor is uncarpeted, and the entire furniture of his rooms, leaving out his library, would not invoice ten dollars. His Parish is one of the wildest and bleakest in Ireland, and is twenty-five miles long and eighteen wide.

A SMALL, BUT WELL-TO-DO FARMER—COUNTY CORK.

“I WAS CALLED TO IT.”

Now, understand that this man is the lawyer, the friend, the guide and director in temporal as well as spiritual matters of the entire population of this district. If a husband and wife quarrel it is his duty to hear and decide. If a tenant gets intotrouble with his landlord he is the go-between to arrange it. In short every trouble, great and small, in the Parish is referred to him, and he must act. He is their lawyer as well as their priest. He is their everything. He supplies to them the intelligence that the most infernal Government on earth has denied them.

But this is a small part of his duties. He has to conduct services at all the chapels in this stretch of country. He has to watch over the morals of all the people. But this is not all. No matter at what hour of night, no matter what the condition of the weather, the summons to the bedside of a dying man to administer the last sacraments of the church must be obeyed. It may be that to do this requires a ride on horseback of twenty miles in a blinding storm, but it must be done. Every child must be christened, every death-bed must be soothed, every sorrow mitigated by the only comfort this suffering people have—faith in their church.

What do you suppose this magnificent man gets for all this? The largest income he ever received in his life was one hundred pounds, which, reduced to American money, amounts to exactly four hundred and eighty-one dollars. And out of this he has to pay his rent, his food, his clothing, the keeping of his horse, and all that remained goes in charity to the suffering sick—every cent of it.

When the father dies his nephews and nieces will not find good picking from what is left, I assure you.

“Why do you,” I asked, “a man capable of doing so much in the world, stay and do this enormous work, for nothing?”

“I was called to it,” was the answer, “what would these poor people do without me?”

That was all. Here is a man capable of anything, who deliberately sacrifices a career, sacrifices comfort, sacrifices the life he was fitted for, sinks his identity, foregoes fame, reputation, everything, for the sake of a suffering people!

“I was called to it—what would these poor people do without me!”

I am a very vigorous Protestant, and have no especial love for the Catholic Church, but I shall esteem myself especially fortunate if I can make a record in this world that will giveme a place in the next within gun shot of where this man will be placed. I am not capable of making the sacrifices for my fellows that he is doing—I wish to Heaven I was. I found by actual demonstration why the Irish so love their priests. They would be in a still worse way, if possible, without them.

Ignorance of the real condition of the farming Irish is almost as common among the better class of Irishmen, I mean the dwellers in the cities, as it is among Americans. At one of the fine hotels in Glengariff, a watering place, I made the acquaintance of an Irish lady, a resident of Cork. Her husband is a wealthy citizen, a thorough Irishman, a Land Leaguer and all that, and she is a more ardent Land Leaguer than her husband. She is a more than usually intelligent lady, with a warm heart, and she realized, she thought, the wrongs Ireland was suffering, and was doing, she supposed, all she could to aid the oppressed people.

Now in Glengariff suffering is not permitted to be seen. The hotels are magnificent, the servants well-clothed and well fed, and it is so arranged that the people in rags are seldom seen in that vicinity.

But two miles across the bay and you may see all the misery you can endure. I had been over there and had gone through a dozen or more cabins, and on my return I expressed myself to the lady in as strong terms as my command of language permitted.

“Are you not exaggerating?” asked she. “I have never seen such misery as you describe. It cannot be.”

“Because you have never sought it out. But it is there. Fifteen minutes in a boat will take you to it. Will you go over now, and see for yourself if I have exaggerated?”

She went. It was a lovely morning; the waters were smiling, and the Glengariff shore, with its beautiful buildings, its long hedges of fuchsias along the winding street, the background a mountain of flowers, was a fairy scene. From this side the mountains on the opposite in the delicate brown of Autumn, were beautiful. Distance showed you only the beauties of Nature; it mercifully hid the squalid poverty the mountains contained.

THE CONVERSION OF AN IRISH LADY.

We landed and began the ascent. The land was, as everywhere,bog and rock, with here and there a spot reclaimed, which smiled in green. We approached one of the regular hovels.

“How far have we to go before we come to one of the houses you spoke of?”

“We are at one now.”

The woman stood petrified.

“Do people live in such places?”

“Madam, that cabin holds a man, his wife, six children, the wife’s father and brother, pigs, calves and poultry. But you must see for yourself that I did not exaggerate. Come in with me.”

The lady entered, wading pluckily through the slush and mud that surrounded the cabin, and saw all and more than I had told her. There was the cold earth floor, wet and slippery, the two wretched beds on which these people slept, the pigs, the calves and the poultry, which must be sheltered and grown and fattened, not for their eating, but that My Lord may have his rent. There was the flat stone in one corner, with the smoky peat fire, no chimney to carry away the smoke; there were the half-ragged men, the half-naked women and children, shoeless, stockingless, skirtless, less everything; in short, there were all the horrors of absolute destitution, without one single redeeming feature.

“Take me out of this place,” she gasped.

It was not a pleasant sight for a lady delicately nurtured and daintily kept, whose hands had never been in cold water and upon whose face cold wind had never blown. These people were of her own blood, her own race, almost her own kin. She said never a word on the way back, but that afternoon she left Glengariff for Cork. But before she went, a boat went over the bay, and a dozen families had at least one square meal, and more money than they had ever seen before.

It is to be hoped that they ate the provisions, but the money—that went to My Lord’s agent for rent, beyond a doubt. And if My Lord’s agent was certain that he could depend upon the lady from Cork as a permanent almoner, he would ascertain to a penny just how much she intended to give, and raise the rent to that amount.

My Lord’s agent is as ravenous and insatiable as a grave-yard—he takes all that comes.

The lady from Cork is spending her entire time and a great deal of money in the interest of her people. It requires actual sight to understand the condition of the Irish.

SKETCHES IN GALWAY.

MR. CHARLESSTEWARTPARNELL, lately in Kilmainhaim Jail for the crime of lifting up his voice in behalf of an oppressed people, represents Cork in the British Parliament, and his constituents determined to give him a reception.

In Catholic countries political demonstrations take place on Sunday, always, the Catholic having attended services in the morning, devoting the rest of the day to recreation and public business. And besides this reason for Sunday demonstrations in any country under British rule, the citizen does not have time enough on any other day to make any demonstrations, political or otherwise. He has to earn his two meals of potatoes a day, and his landlord has a mortgage upon the remainder of his time. Sunday is his only day, and it is a blessed thing for him that the Church of England stands between him and his landlord. Were not labor on the Sabbath illegal, My Lord would raise his rent to the point of making Sunday labor necessary.

I had always supposed that America was the country for demonstrations of a public nature, and indeed we do get up some monsters in this way, but the Irish, in 1881, did things, compared with which our largest are but pigmies.

Early in the morning the city began filling with people. They came singly and in pairs, and in processions. They came from down the river, from up the river, from the east, west, north and south; they came in steamboats, by rail, on horses and donkeys, in wagons and donkey carts, and on foot. By nine o’clock Cork was swarming with people, literally swarming.

Then came the most wonderful procession I ever saw or ever expect to see. The trades and occupations of the city were in bodies with emblems, flags and banners; the Land Leagues of the entire south of Ireland were there with appropriate banners, and then came a swarming, seething, boiling mass of humanity, without order, without form or coherence. There were men, women and children, on foot, and in all sorts and descriptions of vehicles, and bestriding every animal that permits its back to be crossed. There were women with children in their arms, men carrying their boys to save them from being crushed in the press; there were old men, young men and boys, maids and matrons of all ages, all sorts and conditions of people, in all sorts of garments; men and women shod, men and women barefooted, and all in one inextricable jam.

If there was an idea in the way of a banner that was not in that procession it escaped my notice; and if there was a form or manner of decoration that was not in the seemingly endless mass of humanity that I did not notice, it was because there was so much of it that one pair of eyes could not take it all in.

The procession was fully ten miles long, and there were in it not less than one hundred thousand people. I know that mass meetings are always exaggerated, but there were actually that number in that monster procession on that Sunday.

A very great deal is said about the intemperance of the Irish people. In all this vast throng, this hive of human beings, there were but three drunken men. Also, much is said about their tendency to brawls. There was not a single fight. The procession was wild in enthusiasm, wild in cheering and handkerchief-shaking, but there was not a blackened eye nor a broken head. I never saw one-fourth the number of Americans together that did not eventuate in a score or two of fights. Ireland certainly behaved herself remarkably well on that occasion.

“COME DOWN.”

There was one curious scene. A young man in Cork in the early days of the Land League had been suspected of playing into the hands of the government, for gain. Since the movement became overwhelmingly popular, he shifted hiscourse and tried to curry favor with the Leaguers, but without success. They did not trust him. A carriage was set apart for the use of the prominent Americans then in the city, and he, by sheer impudence, forced himself upon them. He managed to get himself seated upon the box of the carriage, making himself exceedingly conspicuous.

It was a kind of conspicuosity which the young Irishmen did not like. They remembered his betrayal of the cause a few months before, and they believed his present zeal was for effect and not honest. They would not have him foist himself upon their American friends. There was no violence, no obstreperousness. Ten of them, five upon each side, formed beside the carriage, and they kept step as soldiers do, only instead of the regular “Left!” “Left!” the words were “Come down!” “Come down!” He tried to reason with them; he said all sorts of pretty things to them; he assured them of his entire and utter devotion to the cause; but to every word he uttered there came the one response, “Come down!” “Come down!” He came. He might have resisted force, but the moral suasion in the simple words “Come down!” was too much for him. He descended from the carriage and slunk away in the crowd, and we saw no more of him. Immediately the young men fell into rank, and the procession swept on. It was their way of punishing one who was seeking for himself instead of for the mass.

And that enormous mass of people paraded the streets all day, and in the evening, in the fields outside the city, they waited patiently and listened to speeches from the leaders of the people, every sentence bringing a quick response.

As grand as was the demonstration, it was no mere man worship that was at the bottom of it. It was not so much in honor of their leader; it was a protest of a great people against a system which has already driven out from the country two-thirds of the entire population, and which would drive out the remainder were there means enough left to take them. It was the wail of a starving people, a naked people, a robbed, outraged and oppressed people. It was a protest against bayonet rule, a protest against carbines and ball cartridges, an appeal for the right to live upon the ground upon which they

AFFIXING NOTICE OF EVICTION UNDER PROTECTION OF THE POLICE.

AN EVICTION.

were born. Had they arms probably they would make this protest in another form, and there never was a cause in which arms could be taken up so justly, but unfortunately they have not. The British government allows the Irishman to bear nothing more deadly than the spade, and all the arms that arein Ireland are used to compel him to use that implement for British greed.

EVICTION.

I was present at an eviction near Skibbereen. An eviction is a very simple thing. The landlord desires to possess himself of the land which a tenant holds, having been born upon it, his father and his grandfather for many generations back. When the land passed into the hands of the present alleged owners it was worthless, but several generations have toiled upon it, until it has been “reclaimed,” as they term it, and made into good soil, which will yield crops. The landlord has raised the rent regularly, keeping the tenant and his family down to the potato and stirabout point, until it is impossible for him to pay. There is no question of a desire to pay—paying is a physical impossibility, unless the tenant has a son in America, and even in that case the rent is raised to the point of absorbing the boy’s wages. Just as the crop is ripening the landlord gets out a process of eviction, a bailiff, backed by thirty constabularly, go to the house, the warrant is served, the tenant knows exactly what is to happen, and he goes out without a word. But the mother, not so well versed in English law, does make a protest. As wretched as the cabin is, as poor as are her surroundings, it is the only home she has. In this wretched cabin her children were born, this is her home, and no woman relinquishes that without a protest. But she might as well whistle against the north wind. There is no pity nor mercy in these beasts, to say nothing of justice.

First the poor furniture is pitched out into the road, then the children are thrown out after the furniture, and then the woman is hustled out, the door is nailed up, and the family are by the roadside in the cold or rain. Pat or Mick, as the case may be, is offered another farm, farther up the mountain, a piece of land, bog and rock, which he may go on and convert into smiling fields only to be evicted from that when his landlord sees fit, or he may die by the roadside.

THE EVICTION WE SAW.

In the village of Kenmare, there were thirteen families one cold wet morning, out on the roadside, men, women and children, some of the latter being only two months old, their only protection being blankets made of potato sacks stretched upon four sticks driven into the cold clay, and their only bed, leaves, which were wet with the rain. The mothers were boiling their potatoes, contributed by neighbors almost as poor as themselves, in pots suspended from extemporized tripods, the fuel being leaves and twigs.

WHAT HAPPENS.

EVICTED—SCENE IN GALWAY.

What became of them? I do not know. I presume some of the children died from exposure, but that was nothing to the landlord or his agent. They were too young to work, and really stood in the way of the mother and father paying theirrent. Possibly the father working in the mines in Wales, got money enough before the children were all dead to enable them to get into some kind of a shelter.

It is only necessary for me to say that they were there, and there because they could not pay an unmerciful rent unmercifully exacted and relentlessly pursued.

FARMING IN COUNTY MAYO.

BOYCOTTING.

An English landlord’s agent would levy upon a child’s coffin for arrearages of rent, and the British government would give him thirty soldiers to protect the bailiff in serving the process. They wish it distinctly understood that rent must be paid though the heavens fall. Rent is My Lord’s living and the agent’s also. Where mercy is shown to one tenant others might expect it, and so the rule must be inexorable.

“Boycotting” is a system devised by Mr. James Redpath, of America. It is this: The landlord, when he has made up his mind that he wants to rob a tenant of the land he once owned, and which he has, does not evict him in the Spring. He waits till the tenant has dug up the ground, planted it and tended it, and it is ready for the harvest. He wants to steal the crops as well as the land, and so just before harvest he gets out his process, and accompanied by the everlasting thirty constables, armed with carbines, he makes his descent. The process is served, the tenant and his family are pitched out into the street, and the place taken possession of.

Prior to the Land League, the villain had no difficulty in employing labor to secure the crop, thus giving the agent his percentage of the robbery, and enabling My Lord to indulge in fresh extravagances in London or Paris, or wherever he might be. But the Land League steps in now, and My Lord’s agent cannot find a man who will put a sickle into the ground. No matter what price he offers, or how sorely the laborer needs work, or how cheaply he would be glad to work for any one else, he will not work for this man at any price. Consequently the crops rot on the ground, and if the robbed tenant gets no benefit from his labor, My Lord in Paris, and his agent at home, do not.

I was in one cottage over the bay from Glengariff, in a cabin in which three men were sitting listlessly, waiting for work. They had nothing to eat but the everlasting potatoes, and would have given their lives, almost, for something to do that would keep the pot boiling, even though there was nothing but potatoes in it.

Enter My Lord’s agent.

“Come, men. I want you for a few days.”

“Yis, sor, what is it?”

“I want you on Captain ——’s place. I will give you two shillings a day.”

Ten pence a day is good wages.

“Is it on Mickey Doolan’s farrum?”

“Yes.”

“We don’t want wurruk. We’re rich, and are enjoyin’ ourselves.”

Mickey Doolan was the evicted tenant, and had the agent offered them a thousand pounds an hour he could not have got a stroke from one of them.

This is boycotting. The process was first tried upon a Captain Boycott, hence the term. It was an invention of Mr. James Redpath, as I said, and a very clever one it is.

To prevent the evicted tenant from taking another farm, and reclaiming it for the benefit of My Lord and his agent, the Land League makes him the princely allowance of three shillings a week, on which he supports his family, and it finds him some sort of a shelter. My Lord and his agent have the privilege of getting in the crops themselves, else they rot in the field.

There is no violence, no shooting or mobbing—only passive resistance. The British government cannot compel a man to labor, and there is left the Irish the blessed boon of dying from starvation. Possibly the government will make labor compulsory—it would not be worse than most of the laws for the government of the unhappy island now in force. But so far the Irishman need not labor for an unjust landlord unless he chooses to, and that means he need not labor for any of them.

There is no such thing as a just landlord in Ireland. Ireland is a cow to be milked, and just enough potatoes are given her to make the milk.

ONE LANDLORD WHO WAS KILLED.

You hear a great deal in America about shooting landlords. How many landlords have been shot? It is much to the discredit of the Irish race that more have not been; but the melancholy fact is, only a very few have been put out of the way by buck-shot. When I look over the meagre list I blush for the Irish. It is something in the way of an offset to know that they are not permitted to have arms, and it may be plead in extenuation that the police and soldiery are all pervading;but, nevertheless, it does seem as though a few more might be picked off. If they cannot have fire-arms, there are at least pitch-forks and stones. Clearly, the Irish are not so public-spirited as they should be.

MY LORD’S AGENT.

One was shot, some years ago, and a great to-do was made about it. In this case, as in most of the others, it was not a question of rent. My Lord had visited his estates to see how much more money could be screwed out of his tenants, and his lecherous eye happened to rest upon a very beautiful girl, the eldest daughter of a widow with seven children. Now, this beautiful girl was betrothed to a nice sort of a boy, who, having been in America, knew a thing or two. My Lord, through his agent, who is always a pimp as well as a brigand, ordered Kitty to come to the castle. Kitty, knowing very well what that meant, refused.

“Very good,” says the agent, “your mother is in arrears for rent, and you had better see My Lord, or I shall be compelled to evict her.”

Kitty knew what that meant, also. It meant that her gray-haired mother, her six helpless brothers and sisters, would be pitched out by the roadside, to die of starvation and exposure; and so Kitty, without saying a word to her mother or any oneelse, went to the castle, and was kept there three days, till My Lord was tired of her, when she was permitted to go.

THE KIND OF A GIRL MY LORD WANTS.

She went to her lover, like an honest girl, and told him she would not marry him, but refused to give any reason.

HOW HE WAS KILLED.

Finally, the truth was wrenched out of her, and Mike went and found a shot-gun that had escaped the watchful eye of theroyal constabulary, and he got powder, and shot, and old nails, and he lay behind a hedge under a tree for several days. Finally, one day My Lord came riding by, all so gay, and that gun went off, and “subsequent events interested him no more.” There was a hole, a blessed hole, clear through him, and he never was so good a man before, because there was less of him.

Then Mike went to Kitty and told her to be of good cheer, and not be cast down; that the little difference between him and My Lord had been happily settled, and that they would be married as soon as possible. And they were married, and I had the pleasure of taking in my hand the very hand that fired the blessed shot, and of seeing the wife to avenge whose cruel wrongs the shot was fired.

“Vengeance is mine!” is written. In these cases it is well to facilitate the vengeance a trifle by means of a shot-gun. I object to keeping such a man as My Lord out of fire and brimstone a minute. Give the devil his due, and never let the note he holds go to protest.

An immense reward was offered for information leading to the conviction of the noble man who fired the shot, but, though every man, woman and child in a radius of twenty miles knew exactly who did it, no one was found base enough to lodge information against him.

You see the Irish all have daughters and they are all comely, and if shooting lords for such crimes comes to be a rule, the lords will turn their lecherous eyes elsewhere. There are worse things in the world than shot-guns. That particular one should be wreathed with flowers, and hung up in the church of that Parish. There is much moral suasion in a shot-gun loaded with rusty nails.

I entered one cabin in the Galtees which rather eclipsed anything in the way of misery that I had seen. It was the smallest and the most wretched of any I had investigated, and there was a refinement of wretchedness about the whole arrangement that to an American would seem impossible. The children were the thinnest that I had ever seen. It was poverty condensed—it was wretchedness boiled down. It was the very essence of misery.

“What rent do you pay for this place?”

“Three pounds a year, sor!”

Then with an inflection in my voice that had something of sarcasm, I suppose, in it, I asked:—

“Is that all?”

“Oh, no sor, I pay a pound a year, poor rate!”

Think of it! To pay a poor rate implies that somebody is poorer than the payer. Here was a family living in a pig style, and paying fifteen dollars a year for the privilege, who, with a starving and almost naked family, was compelled in addition to this monstrous rental to contribute an additional five dollars per year for the support of the poor!

THE WOMAN WHO PAID THE POOR RATE.

This would be humorous were it not ghastly. Had she intended it as a joke it would have been a good one, but unfortunately it was no joke. The British government is not jocular. The wretched woman was actually paying a tax to support the poor! What must be the condition of the poor if such as she were paying to support them?

I was in the postoffice at Cork, when a middle-aged woman came in and received a letter. She opened it and read it, or rather read a few lines. The letter dropped to the floor, and she staggered and would have fallen but for the friendly wall against which she leaned.

“What is the matter?”

“Oh, sor, Patsey is dead—and who’ll pay the rint!”

PATSEY’S DEAD.

Here it was again! Patsey was her son, a boy of nineteen, who by the aid of an uncle who had fortunately escaped from the clutches of the British government, years ago, had been taken to America. He had found employment and had been regularly sending money to his mother to pay the rent of the miserable cabin she existed in. She had not heard from him for six weeks and had been worried about him. This letter was from his room-mate, and it conveyed the intelligence that he had been sick for six weeks, and that his sickness had terminated in death. Poor Patsey was dead and buried.

What kind of an infamy is it that will not permit a mother to mourn the death of her first born without connecting it with “rint?” This one could not, for as dearly as she loved Patsey, there were six others just as dear to her, to whom Patsey was the life. It was Patsey in America who shielded the others from starvation. What kind of an infernalism is it that grips the hearts of women, that lays its icy iron finger upon the tenderest chords in a mother’s heart?

“Patsey’s dead—who’ll pay the rint!”

Death and rent! A most proper combination. Rentisdeath.

Tibbitts is here, but I am sorry to say that that not altogether exemplary young man is paying a great deal more attention to Irish whisky than he is to Irish troubles.

He came in very much intoxicated last night at twelve o’clock, and I reproved him for the condition he was in.

“It’s my (hic) mother that did it,” he replied. “My mother in Oshkosh.”

“Your mother, you—well, that is too much!”

“True, ’shoor you. She wrote me a long letter, which I got this mornin'. (Hic.) R’ligious letter, and a mighty (hic) good one. (Hic.) Great woman, mother. She said man in state of nature (hic) was wicked as sparks fly upward. Struck me (hic) as true. What was duty? To get out of state of nature. (Hic.) Man full of Irish whisky is not in state (hic) nature—entirely unnatural. Ergo—man drunk not bein’ in state of nature, not sinner. See? Logic. Have too much regard (hic) for mother’s feelings to be in state of nature. Never will be, so long as the old (hic) man comes down.”

I don’t think he ever will be. Clearly, it is my duty to have the young man sent home as soon as possible.

While I am informed that Irish whisky is less destructive of the tissues than English gin or British brandy, or the vile compound they call ale, it will intoxicate, and I do not accept Mr. Tibbitt’s logic. His getting outside of whisky does not enable him to get outside of himself.

Conemara Women.

ITis very difficult to make an American understand the Irish question, for the simple reason we have nothing parallel to it in our own country; for which every American should thank his Heavenly Father, who cast his lines in such pleasant places.

Whenever you speak to an American about the woes and wrongs of Ireland he at once says, “Why does the Irish farmer sign a lease which he knows he cannot live to?” “If he don’t like the country and the laws, why don’t he get out of it?” “Why is it, the country being under one government, that the English farmer and the North of Ireland farmer are prosperous, while the South of Ireland farmer is in a state of discontent?”

The trouble with the man who asks these questions is, he doesn’t know anything about the subject. He measures everybody’s grain in his half-bushel. He supposes that under English government, as in America, there is one law which obtains everywhere, and under which all men are equal.

I shall try to make it plain how a farmer in one part of Ireland may be prosperous, and in another poorer than the pigs he fattens.

To understand this matter it is necessary to go back some hundreds of years. All grievances took root a long way back—the world has got too wise to commence or tolerate any new ones.

Originally Ireland was an independent kingdom; in fact, five independent kingdoms. Under the kings were the clans. The Clan O’Connor, for instance, held a certain amount of land—not each man an owner in fee simple, but in common.That is to say, the ownership of the soil was in the clan as a community, each family of the clan holding its land forever, and that land was distributed among them as the best interests of the clan dictated. The chief of the clan was elected, and he was their general, their counsellor, their judge, their advisor, philosopher, guide and friend. He was the father of the clan.

AT WORK IN THE BOG.

To support the dignity of his position, and to bear the expenses of the post of honor put upon him, a tribute was paid to him, based upon the land held—so much per acre. It was very light, for the chief farmed land, as did the clansmen; and there was, for the time, a fair degree of prosperity in the island—as much as could be expected for that day and generation. At least everybody had all they could eat, drink and wear.

CONQUERING AND DISTRIBUTING.

The English wanted Ireland, and England did with Ireland as it has done with every country it ever desired to possess. She simply measured bayonets, and, finding her bayonet the strongest, took possession. This work was begun by Henry II., but received a great impetus from Henry VIII., the brute who was so handy at decapitating his wives, and it was followed up vigorously by succeeding kings and queens.

The country was conquered, the chieftains were expelled, the land was divided up among the favorites of the English kings, and the people found themselves tenants at will of a foreign proprietary, instead of being actually owners in fee simple of their own land.

England never does an injustice by halves. She is very moderate in the matter of mercy and justice, and things of that nature, but when it comes to robbery and spoliation she knows no middle way. When Elizabeth determined upon occupying Ireland, the orders were to spare neither man, woman nor child.

The chiefs were driven out, and the land of the clans was distributed among the favorites of the English court. Sir Walter Raleigh had forty-two thousand acres given him from the estate of the Munster Geraldines, and a proclamation was made through England, inviting “younger brothers of good families” to undertake the planting of the land from which the Irish—the owners and occupiers of the soil—had been killed or driven off, and the repopulation of the country, “none of the native Irish to be admitted.”

Under this invitation, which the English robbers were not slow to accept, scores of estates were given to the dissolute nobility of England, who were willing enough to take possession of land which they got for nothing, and which would give them means to dodge the primal curse of labor. What they wanted was to live as they wanted, by the sweat of other men’s brows, and British bayonets gave the means.

It is not possible to detail the outrages perpetrated upon this unfortunate people by the kings and queens of England, but let it suffice to say that a wholesale system of spoliation, robbery, and even extirpation, was inaugurated and most relentlessly and rigorously pursued. Man, woman and child,and even the animals that could not be driven off and sold, were destroyed.

There never was, in the history of the world, a record so black with infamy, so red with blood, or so scarlet with injustice.

SOME OF THE DUKE OF LEINSTER’S KILDARE TENANTS.

THE QUESTION OF LEASE.

This is the way England obtained possession of Ireland. This is the title by which My Lord This, and My Lord That,holds the lands he exacts rent for to-day. This is his deed to the property upon which five millions of people are eating two meals of potatoes a day, that he may gamble and keep mistresses in London and Paris.

“Why does he sign a lease, the conditions of which he cannot fulfil?”

There are no leases. It is not as it is in America, where the tenant and the landlord come together, and bargain and wrangle over the terms, and when an agreement is arrived at both are bound by the terms thereof. There is no lease, no writing, no courts, except for the landlord. The tenant is born upon the ground which British brute force, the only principle there is in British government, robbed him of. The new landlord enforced upon him by the pikes of Elizabeth’s banditti, said to him, “The rent of this land will be one shilling an acre.” He could go nowhere else. He knew no other country, and so he bowed his head and built with his own hands a cabin—in the subjugation the old homes were entirely destroyed—and went to work upon land, forty acres of which, in its natural state, would not pasture a goat.

Before it had any value whatever the bog had to be cut off, the stones dug out—in short, the land had to be made. They call it “reclaiming.”

The tenant has no lease. He is purely and simply in the power of the landlord. Whatever rent the landlord chooses to exact, that is the rent he must pay. He is a tenant at will—and the will is the will of his landlord, the English robber who lives in luxury in London and Paris, and permits himself to be fleeced by sharpers, who, differing from the English, use finesse instead of force. In brute force the English cannot be excelled; when it comes to decent robbery, the kind of robbery where the victim has some sort of compensation in the knowing that it was accomplished by superior acumen, the English are babies.

The tenant—the robbed farmer—for his own sake is compelled to go on and reclaim the land; he must raise something, for he has children who must be fed; and so he digs out the rocks, and cuts the bog, and makes good, arable land out of what was a barren and dreary waste.

What happens to him then? Why, My Lord in Paris has a subordinate watching his tenant. There is nothing so mean that there is not something meaner. Cruel as My Lord is, he has a crueller man under him. And that is My Lord’s agent. He comes to the miserable holding, and he notices that Pat has reclaimed an acre more this year. Immediately he says to Pat, “Your rent next year, my fine fellow, will be advanced.”

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