County Clare and County Galway are the districts of the greatest unrest in Ireland; and the largest number of boycotts, cattle drives, and evictions have occurred there of late years because certain large landowners, chief of whom is the Earl of Clanricarde, stubbornly refuse to sell their estates under the Land Act of 1903 or restore the tenants they have evicted or divide up their pastures into farms. The Earl of Clanricarde carried the matter into court, where he was sustained in his refusal to sell, on the ground that the law is not compulsory, and it is probable that parliament will adopt an amendment, now pending and introduced since the decision, requiring every large landowner in Ireland to divide up his estates among his tenants at prices to be fixed by the courts.

The disturbances that are taking place at present are gentle and mild compared with what have occurred during the land wars of the past, and they are confined to a limited area and a small number of estates. The methods of “persuasion” used by the tenants and the “landless” men, as those who are entirely without farms are called, are, however, very much the same as those adopted years ago, but they are not so effective as they used to be. They are severely punished by the courts, and the taxpayers are assessed for all the damages committed. If these assessments could be confined to the particular parish within which the outrages occur it would be very much better, for it is not fair to ask innocent property owners twenty and thirty miles from the scene to pay for the mischief of a few reckless and irresponsible persons over whom they have no control.County Limerick is usually quiet. There has been no trouble there and the best of feelings prevail between the landlords and their tenants, with a few exceptions. There was only one criminal case (of infanticide) at the dockets of the courts in July, 1908, when I was there, two boycotts, and twenty-one complaints of intimidation, which, however, did not all relate to land matters. There were thirty-four evictions in County Limerick that year, most of them being due to poor crops and the lack of remittances from America.

Lough Rea, the seat of the Clanricarde, has been the residence of that family since the year 1300. Althenry, the neighboring town, is also very old, and has belonged to the earls of Clanricarde since 1238. There is a castle, a Dominican monastery, a Franciscan monastery, and several churches, all in ruins, destroyed by Red Hugh O’Donnell in 1596. The Earl of Clanricarde never visits his Irish property. He has never occupied his ancestral home and has been seen in the vicinity but once since he came into the inheritance thirty or forty years ago.

The boycott was invented at the little town of Ballinrobe, a pretty village of about fifteen hundred inhabitants, on Lough Mask, about twenty miles north of Galway. Charles S. Parnell made a speech at Ennis, the capital of County Clare, Sept. 19, 1880, advising the people to punish those who did not sympathize with them by “isolating them from their kind as if they were lepers.” This advice was first applied to Captain Boycott, agent for the estate of Lord Erne, near Ballinrobe, and he was a complete victim of the policy. The police could do nothing. There was no law under which dealers could be compelled to sell him food and drink, and all his supplies had to be shipped to him from Dublin. Nobody would speak to him, nobody would work for him, nobody would accept his money, and, as Parnell suggested, he was treated as if he were a leper. The plan was so successful that it was promptly adopted throughout Ireland, and has since been commonly used elsewhere under the name of the first victim.

But boycotting is growing unpopular in Ireland. It is condemned by the bishops and the clergy generally. They are taking more and more positive grounds, and many refuse the communion to persons who are guilty of either boycotting or cattle driving, because they are contrary to justice and charity and are therefore sinful. I heard one of the bishops preach an impressive sermon on the subject. He condemned all combinations of persons to cause suffering or distress in their neighbors as inhuman, immoral, and unjust. He declared that boycotting was worse than murder, because it caused a greater degree of suffering. When a man was shot he usually died without agony, but when he was boycotted he suffered the worse sort of mental torture, and to cause such sufferings was one of the worst of sins. Father Gilligan, parish priest at Carrick-on-Shannon, preached against boycotting the Sunday we were there. He said, in introducing the subject, that he deeply regretted that many of his parishioners had joined in a boycott for which they imagined they had a good excuse, but nothing would justify a boycott. It was a crime, and those who had engaged in it would not be admitted to communion until they had sincerely repented. Every effort had been made by advice, by intimidation, and even by threats of violence, to keep the people from dealing with some of the most respectable merchants in the town. There were three degrees of boycotting—mild, medium, and savage—and all three had been condemned by the Church. “Have nothing to do with it,” said Father Gilligan, “do not touch it with a pole that would reach New York.”

At present boycotting is applied to landlords and cattle men who are occupying their land that is wanted for farms. The cattle men have no permanent tenancy, they erect no buildings, they make no improvements, and the cattle business is so profitable that they are able to pay twice as much rent as the ordinary farming tenant. For those reasons, and because he has only one man to deal with, a landlord is always glad to rent his lands for grazing, and gradually Ireland is becoming one great pasture.

Cattle driving is another weapon used by the same people for the same purpose, and that is condemned by the bishops and the clergy with equal emphasis. Archbishop Fennely of Tipperary recently preached a sermon in which he expressed the hope that before he closed his eyes in death he would see every acre of land in Ireland owned by the men who tilled it, but he could not sympathize with and he must earnestly condemn every form of violence and every unlawful measure that was used to secure that end. He gave his diocese a solemn warning that cattle driving, boycotting, and similar unlawful practices would not be tolerated by the Church.

This form of argument, it must be admitted, is a great advance over the fierce methods that have been used in the past, when murder and bloodshed were quite common, and other damages that cannot be repaired by money or by the judgment of the court were suffered. It was a habitual jest to speak of the “closed season for landlords.”

The Irish never overlook the humor in a situation, and at a cattle drive which took place in 1908 at Tuam, which is a place of considerable ecclesiastical importance, being the residence of the Most Rev. John Healey, one of the ablest and most influential Roman Catholic bishops in Ireland, the following lines were pinned to the tail of one of the cows:

GOD SAVE IRELAND.

The taxpayers are compelled to pay damages for all cases of cattle driving, for loss of business in boycotting, and for other claims growing out of such outrages. Usually the courts assess one pound per head for cattle where no harm is done, five pounds per head where an animal is injured, and about one-third as much for sheep. Most of the cattle driving and the boycotting is committed by irresponsible young men who are led by mischief-makers with private grudges, and they never reason for themselves. It goes without saying that the love of fighting is one of the most conspicuous traits of the Irish character. The history of Ireland from the foggiest period of the past is a tale of continuous warfare. In the early days fighting was the chief end and aim of men, and women fought beside their fathers and husbands and brothers until St. Patrick forbade them to do so. And they thought very little of the consequences.

The case was well stated in a little poem from an American paper that was shown me by a friend the other day:

But sometimes they won’t be let alone. In the summer of 1908 there was a riot in the town of Thurles and a mob did a lot of damage in order to show its disapproval of legal proceedings that had been taken against a fellow townsman. Richard Burke, who was “licensed to sell spirits not to be consumed on the premises,” was unable to meet his obligations and went into bankruptcy. The sheriff took charge of the establishment under the orders of the court, and the license, good will, and the stock in hand were offered for sale to the highest bidder. But the bids did not come up to the valuation of the court and were all rejected. A few days later a private offer from Mr. Cody, who has been competing with Mr. Burke to quench the thirst of Thurles for several years, to take the entire place for £2,000 was accepted. Mr. Burke, who has been in the habit of consuming too much of his own merchandise for the good of his business, became very indignant because his old enemy was going to step into his place, gathered together a few sympathetic friends, raided his own establishment, smashed the bottles, knocked in the heads of the barrels, and invited the whole town to help themselves, which they did with an energy that would have been commendable in another cause. Then, when almost every citizen of the town, young and old, was drunk, they started up the street smashing their own windows and doors and doing what is estimated at $15,000 worth of damages to their own property, besides $7,000 worth of destruction in Mr. Cody’s place.

Although Cody had signed the papers, he had not paid for Mr. Burke’s former stock, and naturally he now refuses to do so, since it does not exist, so that Mr. Burke and his creditors suffer the entire loss of his own raid and hospitality, and the taxpayers of Thurles have been assessed to pay for the other foolishness.

There are twenty thousand Galway people in the United States, or “across the herring pond,” as a banker there expressed it, who have been in the habit of making remittances to their fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters here in generous amounts, and many families are partly and a large number are wholly dependent upon them. Most of the Galway emigrants are in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and other large cities, earning good wages, but they were out of employment after the recent panic and have had all that they could do to take care of themselves. Hence very little money has been received here from America for nearly a year. The postmaster told me that the American money orders cashed at the Galway post office have averaged £40,000 a year for the last eight or ten years, and in 1908 the total will not reach £15,000. An even larger sum of money has been coming in checks and drafts and the bankers say that the remittances in that form are not more than ten per cent of the usual amount. The merchants complain that their customers are not bringing in any American checks, which have been presented in payment daily for ten or twelve years. Christmas checks were very scarce in 1907, and that is the principal reason for the poverty. Wages are very low in Galway—ten shillings a week, and two shillings a day is the average for ordinary labor. The Allan Line steamers have been touching at Galway since 1881, and have carried to Quebec an enormous number of emigrants for the United States as well as Canada, but the faster boats, touching at Queenstown, have reduced the business considerably. The steerage passage is $27.50 and $30; the average emigrants are chiefly between seventeen and twenty-three years of age, and most of them go to Boston.

Galway is a foreign-looking little town, unlike any other we saw in Ireland, and much of the architecture is Dutch and Spanish, departing from the plain, ugly brick front without cornice or eaves which is so common elsewhere. The streets are irregular and run all sorts of ways; some very narrow and some very wide, and they vary in width at different places, with occasionally an odd-shaped space at the intersection. Everything looks old and shabby and out of repair. It is queer as well as significant to see buildings half in ruins in the principal streets and others with the glass broken out of the windows. There are some smart-looking shops, however, and neatly kept residences, but they are not frequent. Nor is the town well kept. The Common Council evidently lacks a sense of the Æsthetic, because the streets are dirty, the park is scraggly, and the grass and trees are very much neglected. It is altogether the untidiest public park I saw in Ireland. Many of the people we met on the principal streets, particularly the women, are repulsive in their rags and dirty faces and unkempt hair and bare feet. We saw a few barefooted women in Tipperary and Limerick, but in Galway none of the working women wears shoes, although the men seem to be well shod. The women cover their heads with thick shawls that are often greasy and torn, and their faces show evidences of sorrow and privation, and perhaps other causes have left a mark.

The foreign appearance of Galway is accounted for by the fact that many Frenchmen, Spaniards, and Dutchmen were in business there in early times. The town was named from the Gauls, and for centuries an extensive trade was carried on with the Continent by foreign merchants and foreign fleets. Richard de Burgo, founder of the Burke family, was given the country of Connaught by the king, and, having in 1232 crushed the O’Connors, who were formerly kings there, he enlarged the Castle of Galway and made it his residence, calling around him a flourishing foreign colony. But the “tribes of Galway,” as Cromwell called the natives, would not submit to him, and kept up a guerrilla warfare that was very annoying. The English took all the measures they could to protect themselves, and in 1518 a law was passed forbidding the people of the town “to recieve into their housses at Christemas, Easter nor no feaste elles, any of the MacWilliams, Kellies, Joyces, Lynches nor to cepte Elles without permission of the Mayor and Councill; on payn to forfeit £’5 and that no one called O’ nor Mac shalle strutte ne swaggere thro the streetes of Galway.” And the following inscription was formerly to be seen over the west gate to the city:

There are some quaint old houses—one of them on the principal street, known as “the mansion,” being elaborately decorated with carved moldings, drip stones, cornices, balustrades, medallions, crests, coats of arms, and other ornaments in which the lynx and the monkey, which were used upon the family arms, appear frequently. The same story is told to account for the monkey that is used to explain the appearance of that animal upon the escutcheon of the Earl of Desmond—that the heir to the house was rescued by a monkey when it was burning.

The Burkes, the Joyces, and the Lynches were the leading families there. The records show that eighty-four members of the Lynch family have held the office of mayor. A tragic story of James Lynch, the second mayor after the charter of the city was granted by Richard III., is kept in the minds of the people by a tablet imbedded in the wall of a ruined house on one of the principal streets. It bears this inscription:

The Rev. Mr. Daly has immortalized himself in this simple way, and his character may be judged by the fact that his name appears even more prominently on the tablet than that of the unnatural father whose act he perpetuates. The story goes that Mayor Lynch, being one of the most successful of the shipping merchants in the city, visited Spain in the very year that Columbus discovered America, to make the personal acquaintance of his customers, and, being treated with generous hospitality, invited the son of one of his friends to return with him to Ireland. The young man spent several months in Galway, as the guest of Mayor Lynch, and as the companion of his son, Walter. The latter, a great favorite in the city, was engaged to a young lady of good family, who behaved rather imprudently with the young Spaniard. This excited the jealousy of Walter Lynch, who murdered his playmate, and then, from remorse, gave himself up to justice. He was tried, convicted, and condemned to death by his own father, sitting as judge of the court, and when the sheriff, in obedience to public opinion, refused to carry out the sentence, Judge Lynch hanged his own son with his own hands. As there were other judges and courts in Ireland and as changes of venue were common in those days, as they are now, one cannot sympathize with this Spartan heartlessness.

There is a quaint old church, built in 1320, in honor of St. Fechin, who was born about the year 600, in County Sligo, was the founder of numerous monasteries and churches along the western coast of Ireland, and was the first to bring the gospel to County Galway. Queen’s College, supported by the government, has a fine Gothic building, copied after All Souls of Oxford, with about three hundred students, and there is another college, under the Christian Brothers, which is very prosperous.

The most interesting sight in Galway is the thousands of fat salmon lying motionless on the bottom of the river which carries the water of Lough Corrib—one of the largest fresh-water lakes in the country—into Galway Bay. The river is short and swift and flows through the center of the city. Its banks are walled up with masonry and it is crossed by a series of ancient iron bridges. From the railings of the bridges one can see the salmon through the transparent water lying with their noses up stream so closely that the bottom of the river is hidden; and I am told that when they are running in the spring the stream is black with them. They come in from the sea and go up a ladder that has been built for them over the rapids into Lough Corrib.

The exclusive right of fishing that river was granted in 1221 by King John to one of his favorites, and the monopoly has been recognized ever since. It has been sold many times. The last purchaser was an ancestor of a Mrs. Hallett, who enjoys the privilege at present, and lives in a big stone house on the river banks, surrounded by high walls. A series of traps extends from her garden across the river, covering four-fifths of its width, one-fifth being always kept open by act of parliament, so that the fish can go up and down freely, but as they are all strangers in Galway, and young and reckless, many of them run into the traps instead of the passageway and become the property of Mrs. Hallett. She ships them to London and makes three or four thousand pounds a year by selling them. The fishermen in charge told me that in the spring they often caught as many as two or three hundred a day in each of the traps. Any one who desires to try his luck with a fly can do so by getting a permit from Mrs. Hallett, for which the fee is $2.50 a day or $25 a year.

Near the mouth of the river and at the head of the Bay of Galway is an ancient village called Claddagh, whose inhabitants have been engaged in the herring and salmon fisheries for ten centuries, and have lived apart from the world, having their own municipal organization, their own laws and courts and customs and manner of dress. From the beginning of time they have been ruled by one of their own number, elected by themselves for a term of years, who exercises executive, legislative, and judicial functions, from which there is no appeal. They have no written laws, no records of their judicial proceedings, but when there is a dispute between any of the fishermen they take it to their chosen umpire, who decides it according to the merits of the case. And his decision is always accepted. I am told that no citizen of Claddagh has ever been before a Galway court, either as a plaintiff or defendant. They live in low thatched cottages, grouped in irregular streets on the bank of the river, with a large and very modern-looking church, which they attend regularly. They are remarkable for their piety and their morals. They will not work, nor will they leave their village for any reason, on Sundays or religious holidays. They never allow strangers to live among them, their young men and women never marry outside of the colony, they take care of their own sick and poor, and, although they are only five minutes’ walk from the principal street of Galway, they are as isolated as if they were on an island in the middle of the ocean.

Formerly the Claddagh people wore a distinctive dress, resembling that of the fisher folks of Holland,—a red skirt, a blue waist, elaborate headdress, and bare feet and legs,—but this costume has been discarded by the younger women and is only worn by their grandmothers now. But all the women go barefooted. They never wear shoes or stockings. The men are engaged exclusively in fishing, although they do all of their own masonry, carpentering, and boat building. They pack their fish in the village, but carry a portion of each catch across the river to the fish market of Galway.

There is an attractive resort for city people on the Bay of Galway, with a long promenade, several hotels, and a number of comfortable villas.