David Ross Locke

IT is 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.

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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.

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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.”

TENANT FARMER, COUNTY MEATH.

What can Pat do? Nothing. He can’t get off the land, for the merciless exactions of My Lord, who is living in Paris and London, have left him nothing; he cannot get away; he has no title to possession a minute; he can be evicted from his holding at any time, for any one of a thousand causes; there are no courts he can appeal to, as in America, for the magistrates are all landlords. And so he bows his head, and meekly goes on and reclaims more land, only to have the rent raised for every acre made valuable by the labor of his own hands; until, finally, it comes to a point where he has reclaimed the entire holding, and My Lord’s agent comes to the conclusion that it is better for him and My Lord—their interests are identical—to convert the farm into a sheep-walk, and Pat is evicted—which is to say, he is thrown out upon the roadside to starve, with his wife and children; and the cabin he has built is torn down.

Does he get anything for the making of the land? Not a halfpenny. All the labor bestowed upon that land, originally his, goes to My Lord, whose mistresses in London and Paris need it. They must have their silks and velvets, they must have their wines and carriages, and horses and servants—and Pat must pay for it.

It must be understood that there is no such thing as leases in the South and West of Ireland—the landlord dictates the terms, and the tenant must accept them. He has no alternative. He cannot get away; he has nothing to get away with. As to the difference between the farmer of the North and South of Ireland, it is not true that the farmer of the North is a wonderfully prosperous man, but it is true that he is better off than the farmer of the South. Why? Because there is not one law governing the whole country. The “custom” that governs one section does not govern the other.

Now, please, get this infamy in your mind, and try to comprehend it. The British government actually drove the Irish, which is to say the native owners of the soil, out of the North of Ireland into the South. The phrase “To hell or Connaught” had its origin in this. It was to Connaught that these people were condemned to go, the alternative being death.

Of course no American can understand why anybody should go to any place that he does not want to go, America being a free country. But the American must understand that England is not a free country; that the corrupt and vicious nobility of England wanted ground upon which they could commit piracy, and that they had the entire power of the British government behind it. The English bayonet is a rare persuader, especially when it has the stolid cruelty and the iron will of a Cromwell behind it. Let a man like Oliver Cromwell breathe upon a bayonet, and you may reasonably expect to see a baby impaled upon it in a minute. To have satisfied his ambition, and what he, in a mistaken way, considered his duty, he would have burned his mother.

It was considered necessary to have an English garrison in the land. To accomplish this the Irish were driven out of the North of Ireland, and when I say driven out, I mean driven out. They were forced to go, man, woman and child, into the wilds of Connaught.

Then the land vacated by this exodus, at the end of a bayonet—British rule always means bayonet, British statesmanship begins and ends with a bayonet, that being the only thing in the world that does not think—this land was divided up among the dissolute villains who infested the British Court, and for whom, they being the alleged sons of nobles, something must be done.

But a condition was attached to these grants of stolen lands. No native Irishman was to have a holding there. It was considered necessary that there should be in Ireland a garrison of what they chose to call “loyal” citizens, to hold the robbed and outraged Irish who had been driven into the South in check. Therefore the North of Ireland was given to the dissolute younger sons of dissolute English Lords, upon condition that their tenants should be English or Scotch, and in all cases Protestants.

To get English or Scotch farmers to join in this wholesale brigandage, there had to be some inducement held out. They were not compelled to come upon the ground, and they made their bargain with the Lords. They insisted upon fixity of tenure, a low rent and free sale, which is to say they would not enter upon these stolen lands except upon a low rent, and if they made improvements they should have the benefit thereof, and if they chose to quit the lands they should have the right to sell the improvements they had made, and that the improvements should be a part of the value of the lands, and their interest therein should be an interest in law and equity.

This was agreed to, and on these conditions the North of Ireland was settled by English and Scotch Protestants; the “custom” known as “Ulster custom” was established, and is law to-day.

But “Ulster custom” does not extend over the entire island. While the farmer in Ulster has fair rent, fixity of tenure and free sale, the farmer of Cork and Tipperary has nothing of the kind. He is a simple tenant at will. He holds a farm at the will of his landlord; his life is in the hands of a dissolute scoundrel who has no brains, backed by a dissolute scoundrel in the form of an agent who has brains, and both of these scoundrels are backed by the bayonets of the most infamous government on the face of the earth.

“Ulster custom” gives the tenant some rights. “Cork custom” is quite another thing. “Ulster custom” was a bribe. “Cork custom” is robbery. It is a system of wholesale confiscation of labor, of body and soul.

The farmer of Cork and Tipperary has nothing to say about himself, his wife or his children. If the son of the thief who stole his land loses money at bacaret in Paris, he telegraphs the other thief, his agent, that he wants money, and the secondary thief, who has a percentage in the robbery, goes about among the tenants, and raises the rent. And that is all there is about it. The tenant farmer has no lease. He lives upon the land at the pleasure of his landlord, and the measure of the rent he pays is the measure of the landlord’s vices and the agent’s expectations.

Each county has its own “custom,” and the poor, robbed slave lives under that custom. The North of Ireland farmer comes nearer to keeping body and soul together than the South of Ireland farmer, because the villain robbers who expelled the Irish from the North of Ireland had to make a custom more favorable to get the Scotch and English to go there to keep the Catholic Irish in check, and they would not have gone to the country except for some advantage. An English lord will do anything mean for the love of it—the Scotch are altogether too acute to do a mean thing without being paid for it.

An instance, not a very large one, but enough to illustrate the power of the landlord over his victim, the tenant, occurred upon the estate of My Lord Leitrim, who is this minute where I hope never to go if there is a hereafter.

This worthy descendant of a very unworthy race had an industrious tenant, whose farm he had been long coveting. But somehow he did not dare to take it by force, with the feeling there was in the country at the time, and so he sought a legal pretext. An Irish tenant is not permitted by the paternal government, under which he starves and goes naked, to make any improvements without the consent of the landlord. He cannot build an addition to his cabin (this condition is unnecessary, for he couldn’t if he would), he cannot dig a ditch or do anything. This is the law, but it has never been enforced, for in the very nature of things the tenant would not do more than was profitable to himself for the improvement of the land is the enrichment of the landlord, who religiously raises the rent with every improvement made.

This tenant needed a ditch preparatory to the reclamation of a bog farther back, and he had been putting in all his spare time for two years digging it. He did not suppose that My Lord would object to his reclaiming the bog.

One Saturday Mike was working in the ditch up to his knees in water when My Lord came riding by. He saw his opportunity. He knew the law.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Making the drain, sor,” replied Pat, proudly, for it was a big thing he had undertaken.

“Who gave you permission to make a ditch on my land?” demanded My Lord. “My fine fellow, you have that dirt all back by Monday morning, or out you go.”

Mike saw the trap he had fallen into. Before striking a spade he should have gone to My Lord’s agent, and got permission. But he was in for it, for he knew that My Lord had a legal excuse to rob him of his years of labor.

But the next morning he went to the chapel, and interviewed the priest. The priest asked:—

“If you get that earth back by Monday morning, will you hold the land?”

“Unless the ould—that is—My Lord doesn’t kape his worrud.”

“We’ll try whether he does!” said the father.

And so the sermon that morning was a very short one, and mostly devoted to Mike’s case. At its conclusion the father asked every man in the parish to come at once with his spade and put that earth back. They came—thousands of them—and they wrought with a will, and long before Monday morning the drain was filled up as nicely as possible; and when My Lord came riding by again to see the drain, and give orders for the eviction of Mike, he found that his cruel alternative had been fulfilled, as if by fairies.

An Irishman in Corduroy knee-breeches, with a spade in his hand and a short clay pipe in his mouth, would not make a very happy stage fairy, but he was a very serviceable fairy to Mike.

Had Mike not been so assisted he would have been evicted, and there would have been no appeal from it. He couldn’t employ counsel to fight his battle, for he had nothing with which to pay counsel, and the Justice would be a landlord anyhow, who had other Mikes to evict, and so Mike would have never gone into court at all, but would have accepted his fate in silence.

A cheerful state of affairs, surely.

And speaking of the possibility of paying rent, I remember a young man on the Galtees, insufficiently clad (that was nothing new), working for dear life in a soaking rain.

“How many hours do you work?” I asked.

“From daylight to dark, sor,” was his answer, first peering around before speaking, to be sure that no one heard him. In free Britain it is dangerous for him to talk even of so small a matter as wages.

“And what are your wages?”

“Ten pence a day, sor.”

“Are you satisfied to work for so many hours for so little money?”

“Troth, sor, it wuld be betther for my ould mother if I cud get that the year around.”

Ten pence is about nineteen cents; and understand he was not boarded. Out of that pittance he had to furnish his own food and his own bed. And yet he would have been thankful to the man who would have given him steady work at that price.

To know something of what landlordism really is, and how it all came about, read the following little history of the Barony of Farney:

In 1606 Lord Essex, who had “obtained” a grant of the Barony of Farney, leased it to Evar McMahon, at a yearly rent of two hundred and fifty pounds. And this was a mighty comfortable rent, for, understand, under the Crown grants the one receiving it was only charged for arable land, the bog and mountain land adjacent, then esteemed worthless, being thrown in.

McMahon sub-let it to poorer men, and they so improved it that, fourteen years later, the same land was let for one thousand five hundred pounds, and in 1636 thirty-eight tenants were compelled to pay a rental of two thousand and twenty-three pounds.

Under the strong hands of the original owners, the robbed peasantry, who found themselves tenants on their own lands, this piece of property was mounting up in value very rapidly.

The Earl of Essex died in 1636 A.D. “His” estate went to his sisters. There is in English families always somebody to inherit, and in case there should not be, the Crown steps in and takes it, that the proceeds of the robbery may not go out of the race. The two sisters married and had children, of course, and in 1690, when the two came together to divide their plunder, it was found that the rentals had risen to twenty-six hundred and twenty-six pounds. Then the rents began to be put up so as to produce something like.

The two daughters had children to be educated and provided for, marriages were getting to be common in the family, and the debts of the youngsters had to be paid. And so in 1769 this estate, which started so modestly at two hundred and fifty pounds, yielded eight thousand pounds.

How? Easily enough. The land in this stolen estate, as I said, was nine-tenths of it bog and stone, and only the arable land, some twenty-five hundred acres, was set down in the lease, all the bog and mountain adjacent for miles around being thrown in. By judiciously evicting the tenants from the arable land and converting it into cattle and sheep walks, and compelling the tenants to go upon the bog and stone land, which they were compelled to reclaim and drain, the original twenty-five hundred acres of arable land silently grew into twenty-four thousand six hundred acres, and fifty-seven families had multiplied to a population of twenty-three thousand eight hundred!

Can there be any way of making a great estate so delightful as this? It is a pleasant thing to have a government steal land and give it to you, and then protect you with bayonets while you are compelling the original owners to improve it for you.

Bear in mind this fact. The plunderers never put a penny upon this land. They never dug a ditch, dug out a stone, or cut a square foot of bog. The cabins the tenantry lived in they built themselves, and every improvement, great and small, they made themselves.

And this process of swindling, robbing, confiscation, spoliation and plunder went on until this estate, which commenced at two hundred and fifty-nine pounds in 1606, now yields the enormous revenue of sixty thousand pounds, or three hundred thousand dollars per annum!

Which is to say, the laborers on this estate have been yearly robbed of their labor, and starved and frozen, that one family in England may live in wasteful luxury. This is all there is of it.

About the same time that Essex got his grant, Sir Walter Raleigh got a grant of forty-two thousand acres (exclusive of bog and waste) from the plunder of the Earl of Desmond’s estates. There lived in London at the time a young lawyer named Boyle, who was probably the worst man then living. He had been a horse thief, a forger, and murder had been charged to him. Raleigh was in prison and wanted money, and Boyle offered him one thousand five hundred pounds for his grant, which Raleigh accepted. Boyle paid him five hundred pounds on account, and promptly swindled him out of the balance.

Boyle being serviceable to the court (such men always are), was created Earl of Cork, and got from James I. patents for his plunder. Then he proceeded to marry his children into noble English families, the Duke of Devonshire being one of the descendants. One small portion of the estate now yields His Grace an annual income of thirty thousand pounds, being only a part of the land for which his ancestor, the horse-thief, forger and murderer, paid five hundred pounds.

His Grace, the Duke, is not content with the land. Under some clause in the patent given by the pedantic James to the criminal Boyle, he claims the right to the fisheries in the Blackwater, and the Irish Appellate Court, an English landlord’s institution, as are all the courts, sustain the claim, and he levies tribute upon every fish drawn from the waters.

If it were very certain that there is no hereafter, and if a man had no more heart than an exploded bomb shell, it would be a very good thing to be a duke, with a forger and horse-thief for an ancestor. The duke was very judicious in the selection of a father.

The English landlord found after a while that sheep and cattle raising was more profitable than diversified farming, and with that calm, sublime disregard of the rights of the people which is characteristic of the ruling classes in England, eviction became fashionable. The policy pretty much all over Ireland was to clean out the population and consolidate a thousand small farms into one large one.

Between the years 1841 and 1861, twenty years, there were destroyed in Ireland two hundred and seventy thousand cabins, representing a population of one million three hundred thousand, all driven to the workhouse, to exile or death.

The process was a very simple one. A process of eviction was served, the tenant and his family would be pitched out into the road, and the cottage be leveled to the ground. This was originally done with crowbars, but crowbars were too slow. A mechanical genius, who was a landlord and had a great deal of eviction to do, invented a machine to facilitate the process. It was an elaborate arrangement of ropes, and pulleys, and iron dogs, and all that sort of thing, which could be run up beside a cabin and tear the miserable structure down in a few minutes and save a great deal in the way of labor.

This is the only labor-saving machine Irish landlordism has ever produced.

Any system that does not permit the marriage of two persons of sound bodies and minds and of the proper age, is an infamy that should be wiped out at no matter what cost, and no matter what means.

I was walking down a street in Bantry, when I came to a little grocery store, with a ladder projecting over the wretched

sidewalk. My Lord Bantry, who owns, or professes to, every foot of the ground in the village, is not willing to put the sidewalks in good order. His tenants, who pay him ground rent, built their own homes and are expected to build the sidewalks and keep them in order if they want them. Otherwise they may walk in the mud. My Lord Bantry has his carriage, but he never drives through the village. He does not like to see distress.

This grocery was the property of an old lady of seventy, and perched on the ladder was a girl of about seven teen—her grandchild. She was using a paint brush as vigorously, if not as skillfully, as any male painter that ever lived.

We halted a minute and greeted her. Unclosing a pair of very rosy lips and showing a magnificent row of teeth (it might have been a pride in the teeth that made her open her mouth so wide, but, if so, it was pardonable!), she exclaimed:

“I am the firsht faymale painther in Oirland! Have ye a job ye can give me?”

And she laughed a very cheery laugh at the little pleasantry.

There was with us a boatman whom we had employed for a sail on the bay. As we passed, he looked back with a pleased expression.

“Nancy, there, on the ladther, is my gurl.”

We congratulated him on his good fortune, for Nancy was a bright, handsome, buxom, cheery girl, who was just the kind that such a man should marry.

“You are to marry her?”

“Yes, some time.”

“Why not now?”

“Marry her now! What on? She has her grandmudther to care for, I have my fadther and mudther, and there is but little boating to do, and the rint is to pay jist the same. I have lived in Ameriky, and want to get back, but I won’t go widout Nancy, and God knows whin I shall git enough to go wid her.”

“Why don’t you marry her and take the chances.”

“Niver! I’ll niver marry a gurl and bring childher into the world to go through what we have had to. I’ve seen enough of it. My fadther has been upon the place all his life and his fadther afore him. They made the land they wuz born upon, and the rint has bin raised rigularly, lavin us jist what we could git to eat, and now at sixty-five and bad wid the rheumatiz, so that he can’t work half the time, he has nothing. I went away to sea, and got to Ameriky, but I had to kim back to take care of him and my mudther, and it’s all I kin do to keep ’em from bein’ evicted. An Amerikin gev me the boat, which he had built for the season, and if it wuzn’t for wat I make out of it we would all be in the workhouse. I’ll never marry Nancy till I kin find some way to git to Ameriky, and some way there to make a dacint livin'. I will niver marry and settle here, to see Nancy and her childher kim up as I kim up, and me livin’ as my fadther and mudther is livin'.”

“And Nancy?”

“It’s hard on the poor gurl, for there are any quantity uv the byes who wants to marry her, but she, with her grandmudther on her hands, knows all about it, and she has sense enough to wait for something to toorn up. It will come, we hope, some day; but it’s weary waitin'.”

And so the two, who in any other country would be wedded and have a cottage of their own, with plenty to eat, and drink, and wear, two who owe the world by this time at least three chubby urchins, the girls like their mother and the boys like their father, are kept apart by this more than inhuman system of landlordism, which is the bottom, top and sides of Irish misery. Others who never knew what it was to live better, would marry and would add to the eternal roll of paupers that make up the population of Ireland; but a residence in God’s country unfitted this man for that. He discovered that man’s natural inheritance was not rags, and filth and starvation, and he determined not to marry till he could get, somehow, to the country where that crowning achievement of the devil’s most astute prime minister, a landlord, is unknown.

But the poor fellow will have to wait a long time. He is like a bear chained to a post—he can neither fight nor run. My Lord has a mortgage on him, and My Lord’s agent will never let up on him so long as there is a penny to be squeezed out of him. What to My Lord is Nancy and her woes or her hopes? He would be willing she should marry and multiply and replenish the earth, for it would give him more muscle to enslave in time, or rather, the young lord who is riding by on his gaily caparisoned pony, with two flunkies after him, would, when he came into the estate, have the children of the boatman and Nancy to fleece, as the present lord fleeces Nancy and the boatman. But as for his having any care for the welfare of Nancy and the boatman, that is preposterous. The cost of the trappings of the young lord’s pony would make them comfortable, but he would be a bold man who would suggest such a thing to him.