Irish Books and Irish People :: THE IRISH GENTRY.

THE IRISH GENTRY.

At the height on the struggle over the Home Rule Bill, there was published a book interesting as the biography of a remarkable individual, but no less interesting as depicting the crucial moment in the history of an aristocracy. Colonel Moore wisely entitles the life of his father simply An Irish Gentleman. Versatile, eloquent, quick-tempered and lovable, excessive in generosity, excessive in courage and self-confidence, with the racecourse for his ruling passion and horsemanship for his supreme achievement, George Henry Moore was the paragon of his class. He displayed in the highest degree those qualities on which the Irish gentry prided themselves and which they most admired: he shared the prestige and power of Irish landlords when prestige and power were at their height; and he confronted the decisive hour when he, and men like him, had to choose between the interest of their country and the interest of their class. There he separated himself from his fellows; he parted from all to whom he was bound by ties of immediate advantage, of pleasure, of association, of affection, and he threw in his lot with Ireland. He saw first the moral bankruptcy of his own class, then their widespread financial ruin; and though he helped to break their political power, and in so doing earned the general love of his countrymen, yet the troubles which beset the landlord class did not spare him, and he died, broken-hearted, forty-three years ago, at the beginning of a struggle which is not ended yet. It is well worth while to consider the circumstances of that stormy career.

First a brilliant schoolboy, then an idle law student, George Henry Moore was driven to travel by the complications of a passionate love affair, and he travelled adventurously, being a pioneer of exploration in the Caucasus and Syria. Sketches reproduced in the book show that he could draw no less well than he wrote. Returning to Ireland at the age of twenty-seven, he devoted himself entirely to hunting and racing, and few men were better known on the turf, nor were there even in the West of Ireland more desperate riders than his brother and himself. George Henry was carried off the field at Cahir in 1843 to all appearance dead; he was alive enough to hear discussion as to his burial. Augustus, less lucky, died of a fall he took riding Mickey Free in the Grand National two years later. The brothers were closely bound to each other in affection, and this was a heavy blow to the survivor; but George Moore continued to race, and in 1846 made the coup of his life, winning £10,000 on "Coranna" for the Chester Cup. He sent £1,000 of it home for distribution among his tenants, and there was soon sore need of the money, for that year saw the second and disastrous failure of the potato crop. The Irish Famine made the turning-point in Moore's history, as in that of his class. The catastrophe which brought him into public life and into the service of his country demonstrated, cruelly enough—though this was the least of its cruelties—the futility of the Irish gentry as a whole.

By the shock of his brother's death in 1845 Moore's mind had been turned to serious thoughts. Matter was not lacking. The report of the Devon Commission upon Irish land, joined to the first failure of the potato crop—with its accompaniment of distress and widespread agrarian crime—gave any Irish landlord food for reflection, and in March, 1846, when a vacancy occurred in the representation of Mayo, Moore came forward as a Whig candidate. The whole landlord interest was at his back, but a Repealer opposed him, and O'Connell's influence carried the day. There were fierce encounters, the landlords marching their tenants to the poll under guards of soldiers, the popular side falling upon these escorts and sometimes carrying off the voters—or enabling them to escape. One of Moore's friends, Mr. Browne, afterwards Lord Oranmore, wrote: "I now see we owe our lives to the priests, as they can excite the whole people against us whenever they like. Whatever may be the cause, Ireland needs reconquering."

That was a typical expression of the gentry's view. Plainly Ireland was in rebellion when landlords could no longer carry their tenants to the polls to vote as the landlord directed. Moore however differed from the generality of Irish landlords in one important respect. He was not divided by religion from the people over whom he ruled, and he can never have had Mr. Browne's feeling of aloofness from Ireland as a country which might need reconquering to re-establish the ascendancy of the "English garrison"; nor was it natural to him to distrust the priests as leaders of a separate and subject race.

In the autumn of 1846, when the threat of famine had become a certainty, Moore came home to Mayo, where there was grim business to be done. His tenants, on an estate running up into the wild Partry mountains, numbered five thousand souls. For their benefit he utilised far more of his winnings on "Coranna" than the tithe which he had originally ear-marked; and not one of all these his dependants died of want in that outlandish region, though in places far less remote death was ravenous. He was chairman of the Relief Board for the whole county, and slaved at his task—not harder than other landlords in other parts of Ireland. But his methods were more drastic, his view of the situation clearer. Folk must have rubbed their eyes and perhaps stopped to think twice when the owner of "Wolfdog," of "Anonymous," and a score of other famous horses, wrote, in answer to a request for his annual subscription to the local races, that he thought the county of Mayo "as little fit to be the scene of such festivities as he to contribute to their celebration."

But Moore did not content himself with mere administration of relief. He saw that the English Government was apathetic and incompetent to face so terrible an affliction, and he took in hand to create within his own class an organised force of Irish opinion to bind together the ruling Irishmen for the good of Ireland. In company with his friend and kinsman, Lord Sligo, he "travelled through twenty-seven counties and personally conferred with most of the leading men in Ireland on the urgent necessity of a united effort to save the sinking people." The result was that between sixty and seventy members of Parliament and some forty peers pledged themselves to endeavour to secure united action upon measures regarding Ireland in the new session. On the 14th of January, 1847, the Irish landlord class held such a muster as had not been seen since the Union. "Nearly twenty peers, more than thirty members of Parliament, and at least six hundred gentlemen of name and station took part in it. The meeting called on Government to prohibit export of food stuffs and to sacrifice any sum that might be required to save the lives of the people." It passed thirty resolutions without dissension; and then some one asked what was to be done if the Government refused to adopt any of their suggestions. Would Irish members then unite to vote against the Government? To this, Irish members refused to pledge themselves, and Moore, as he said afterwards, "saw at a glance that the confederacy had broken down."

That was the end of the revolt of the Irish gentry. It was really the decisive moment of their failure; disorganised and futile, they went down by scores in the ruin of the Encumbered Estates Court, while their tenants were marking with their bones a road across the Atlantic. As for the landlords who were popular leaders, within a few months after that great assembly, Daniel O'Connell, who had proposed the first resolution, died in Rome, heart-broken. A few months more and Smith O'Brien, the mover of another resolution, headed a rebellion in sheer despair.

Smith O'Brien had twenty years of parliamentary life behind him when he was driven to the wild protest of insurrection. Twenty years of the same experience were to bring Moore to a very similar attitude; but in 1847 Moore was hopeful of building up in Parliament the nucleus of an Independent Irish Party. When the dissolution came, in 1847, he stood for a second time, but as an Independent, and his work in the famine times carried at least its recognition. Every single elector who went to the poll gave one of his two votes to the Independent. He went to Westminster and denounced with equal energy the agrarian murders, which were then rife in Ireland, and those organs of publicity in England which sought to magnify these outrages into an indictment against the Irish nation. The ferment of indignation against English methods had not yet died out in the hearts of Irish landlords. Lord Sligo, writing to Moore concerning the controversy which followed, used these words: "I believe that The Times did much to cause the feeling which resulted in landlord and parson shooting; it will end by turning us all into Repealers." If only it had! But Moore got no help from the landlord class, and the well-to-do Catholic professional men with whom he was principally allied proved themselves unable to resist the temptations of office and of personal interest. In the days of Sadleir and Keogh he fought a desperate fight against Whig place-seekers; his reward was to be finally unseated (in 1857) on an election petition, the charge being that spiritual intimidation had been exercised on his behalf by the priests. As Colonel Moore observes, if a landlord threatened his tenants with disfavour, which meant eviction, that was "only a legitimate exercise of their rights of property"; but if a priest told his flock that a man would imperil his soul by selling his vote or prostituting it to the use of a despot, the candidate whom that priest supported would lose his seat and be disqualified for re-election.

From this time onward George Henry Moore found himself heading the same way as Smith O'Brien had gone. In 1861 he told the Irish people that if they desired freedom they must take a lesson from Italy; they must "become dangerous"; and he advocated the formation of a new Irish volunteer force to emulate that of 1782. Nothing came of this; but after the American war a new movement grew up, not this time among the landlords or the professional men, nor countenanced by the priests, but nursed in the fierce heart of the people. Ireland had become dangerous. Colonel Moore recognises rightly the difference between the Fenian organisation and the Young Ireland movement which had preceded it. Both were idealistic, but the idealism of 1848 was "the inspiration of a few literary gentlemen, poets, and writers." Smith O'Brien, its titular head, was influenced profoundly by the aristocratic conception of his rightful place as representing the Kings of Thomond. Fenianism was democratic; it was officered largely by men who had themselves fought in the most stubborn of modern wars and who had seen what Irish regiments could do in the citizen levies of Federals and Confederates. It was spontaneous, and it was strong; the measure of its strength is given not by the few flickering outbreaks easily suppressed, but by the terror which it inspired, and by the change which it wrought in the spirit of the people. Moore when he took the step, extraordinary for a man in his position, of enrolling himself in that sworn and secret conspiracy can hardly have failed to foresee the collapse of Fenianism as a fighting force; but he recognised that (in his son's words) "the old complacent toleration of schemers and dishonest politicians had vanished and a sturdy independence had taken its place."

With the advent of that spirit the power of the Irish landlords was doomed. They had made their choice; when they might have made common cause with the whole people of Ireland they had refused to rise beyond their immediate personal advantage and the interests of their class. Moore, who was of themselves, who shared all their pleasures, who loved them, was forced to take a hand in their overthrow. From 1858 onward he had been almost entirely out of politics, living the life of a popular country gentleman, racing and hunting more successfully than ever; his most famous horse, "Croagh Patrick," ran in the 'sixties. But in 1868 he flung all this aside, sold his horses, and undertook to fight the alliance of Whig and Tory which had dominated County Mayo in the landlord interest for ten years.

I shall have the question settled (he said) whether one lord shall drive a hundred human souls to the hustings, another fifty, another a score; whether this or that squire shall call twenty, or ten, or five as good men as himself "his voters" and send them up with his brand on their backs to vote for an omadhaun at his bidding.

He did settle it. Mayo beat the landlords then, and Mayo became the cradle of popular movements ever after. This most typical of Irish land-owning gentlemen had been forced to sever himself from his class and even to injure his class, and it was not by advocacy of self-government that he estranged so close a friend as Lord Sligo. Fintan Lalor's policy, rejected by the Young Irelanders in 1846, was beginning to take hold in 1868; the movement for self-government was becoming linked on to the driving force of land-hunger. In the eyes of Lord Sligo and all his class Tenant Right meant Landlord Wrong, and Moore himself was not exempt from that feeling. He suffered indeed, for rents that he had reduced to a figure fixed by the tenants' own arbitrators were withheld from him. Yet he knew clearly that it was necessary for the country, and not more necessary than just, to secure the tenants in their holdings. No one disputes now that he was right. But the last thing he desired was to abolish the landlords. If they did not like the leadership of the priests "they have," he said, "a remedy left; let them make themselves more popular than the priests. If the landlords will make common cause with the people, the people will make common cause with them." There was never a truer word spoken, but it fell on closed ears.

Moore himself broke the landlords' power at the polls; their infinitely greater power, proceeding from control of the land, was broken by another Mayo man, Michael Davitt, the evicted peasant from Straide, close by Moore Hall. That fight was bound to come when Moore's warning and the warning of men like him was set at nought. What a change it has made! and what has been lost to Ireland!

Moore died in 1870. His last year of life saw a hope that Presbyterian farmers of the North, interested in Tenant Right, who had been temporarily allied to Catholics in the struggle for Disestablishment, might unite solidly with the Nationalists. Even the Protestant gentry afforded numerous supporters to Butt's Home Rule policy at its outset. But of this nothing serious came. The Land Act of 1870 was ineffective, and it seemed that, in spite of Fenianism, all would go on as before. Throughout the 'seventies the landlord class was in undisturbed supremacy. Country gentlemen still talked in good set phrase about "the robbery of the Church"; in actual fact they were very complacently and competently helping to administer its new constitution. Agriculture was prosperous and rents went high, though the harsh and overbearing landlord was condemned by his fellows. This, however, was poor consolation to the tenants. In the county where I was brought up, one landlord was a name of terror, and there was no redress from his tyranny, until at last the peasantry found it for themselves. The grim old man died fighting hard before his brains were dashed out on the roadside, and two innocent people were killed along with him; but no sane person could fail to perceive that, within five years of his taking off, the whole district was improved out of knowledge. The moral to be drawn was only too obvious; yet none of the landlords drew it; the established interest of a class is too strong a thing for that class to shake themselves out of its influence.

The men of that generation—how well I remember them! most vividly perhaps as they used to come in to church on Sunday morning, when the ladies of their families addressed themselves to devotions kneeling, while the men said their prayers standing, peering mysteriously into their tall hats—a strange ritual, of which traces may be observed at the House of Commons, but nowhere else, I fancy, on earth. On week days they lived an orderly, dignified existence in their big old-fashioned houses, leaving home little, though the more cultivated among them had travelled in their youth and knew thoroughly some foreign country. In their own orbit they had power, leisure, and deference, all of which set a stamp upon them; individuality had great scope to develop, and an able man among them was a man made for government. One such stands out in my memory. Stormy tales were told of his youth, but from himself no one heard a whisper of these far-off exploits; small, exquisitely neat, finely made and finely featured, he was courteous and gentle-spoken with all; but he was of those quiet creatures who breed fear. I cannot imagine the situation of power of responsibility from which he would have shrunk, or to which he would have been unequal; neither can I imagine him anxious in the pursuit of office. That was Parnell's type. Parnell's strength appears to have lain precisely in that self-confidence which was a law to itself and which no prestige of fame or authority could shake or overawe. The men who might have been Ireland's leaders were men extraordinarily suited for the conduct of affairs, but as a class they had been thrown out of their natural relation. Castlereagh, who in his cold efficiency had much in common with Parnell, accomplished a desperate deed when he made the Union through them. He committed their honour to justify for all time that transaction. If those who condemned the Union were not traitors, then the class from whom it was bought with cash and titles stood convicted of infamy; and since the heart of Ireland loathed and detested Castlereagh's work, the whole body of the Irish gentry found themselves inevitably estranged from the heart of Ireland. On one side was the interest of a class—and not merely the material interest but the interest of its honour, which sought a justification in the name of loyalty; on the other was the interest of Ireland; and the landlord who chose the side of Ireland severed himself necessarily, as Moore had to do, from his own friends and kin.

For years now there has been moving through many minds in Ireland the question whether this state of things must permanently endure. Is that estrangement inevitable? I at least think otherwise. Throughout the last two decades of the nineteenth century landlord and tenant were opposed in a struggle for definite material interests; it was a fight not only for free conditions of tenure but for the reduction of rent, if not for its total abolition. A way of peace was found in State-aided land purchase, and in a reconstitution of the whole agricultural order. The landlords, where they have been bought out, have not even the duty of rent collecting. How will this affect their traditional attitude, which calls itself loyalty to the English connexion, but which I interpret rather as a traditional justification of the Union and of the hereditary landlord policy? If self-government is established without dissolution of the Union, is it not reasonable to suppose that there will be a change in men's dispositions?

The question involved is really more serious, though of far less political importance, than that of Ulster. Whatever happens, the industrial community of Belfast and its district is not going to run away. That element will not be lost to Ireland; it is too strong, too well able to assert itself; and it is anchored by its interest. The ex-landlords, now that their occupation is gone, are bound to Ireland only by habit and attachment. At present they fulfil no essential function; and it will be open undoubtedly for the gentry once more to make an error mischievous to Ireland and disastrous to themselves. They may take up the line of unwilling submission, of refusal to co-operate, of cold-shouldering and crying down the new Parliament and the new Ministry. Social pressure may be exercised to keep men from seeking election, and so to perpetuate the existing severance between the leisured and wealthier classes and the main body of the nation. There will be strong tendencies in this direction. But on the other hand I think that among the men who have grown up under the new order there is an increasing willingness to accept the change. One friend of mine—no politician, and, like all non-politicians, a Unionist—said to me lately that he would be rather disappointed if Home Rule did not become law—he was "curious about it"; and he added, "I think a great many like me have the same feeling." Others probably have a more positive outlook, and desire to take an active part in the public life of their country; and there will be a strong desire among Irish Nationalists to bring in at the outset those who wish to come in. On the other hand, no less certainly, there will be the feeling that is natural towards those who wish to reap where they have not sown; and the gentry will need to make allowance for this. If they set out with the notion, as some did when Local Government was established, that places are theirs by right when they condescend to take them—that they are entitled to election because they have more money, more education, because, if you will, they are, in the eye of pure reason, better qualified—nothing but trouble can come of such a disposition. Ireland, which in George Henry Moore's time was the most aristocratically governed part of the British Isles, is now by far more democratic, at all events, than England: the poor man is on a level with the rich, and means to stay there. Those who want to go into Irish politics, under Home Rule as now, must take their chances in the ruck; but if they do, they will find a people ready and even eager to recognise their qualities, and to allot perhaps more consideration than is due to their social position.

With all their practical democracy, the Irish have a great tenderness for "the old stock." In the cases (and there are many hundreds of them) where a landlord or professional man or Protestant clergyman has been for long years a real friend and support and counsellor to his poorer neighbours, as Irish in voice and looks and gesture as they, sharing their tastes and their aversions, their sport and their sorrow, yet divided and cut off from them by a kind of political religion, I believe from my heart that there will be on both sides a willingness to celebrate the end of that old discord in some happy compact. But on both sides there must be generosity and a sympathy with natural hesitations and reluctances. Whatever comes or goes, the old domination of the gentry has disappeared; yet, whatever comes or goes, men of that class may find a sphere of usefulness and even of power in Ireland. But this will be infinitely easier to achieve when the great subject of contention is removed, and when the ex-landlord can seek election, and the ex-tenant can support him, without a sense on either side of turning against the traditional loyalties of a class.

1913.

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