Page images
PDF
EPUB

CHAPTER XXIV.

CONTRASTS IN IRELAND.

RELAND is essentially a country of contrasts,

IREL

as the character of the people is full of contradictions. The difficulty in either understanding or dealing with it is, that it is absolutely impossible to generalise, and consequently to come to definite or comprehensive conclusions. The material and social conditions of one county may be absolutely different from those in the counties adjoining; nay, even parishes and townlands. are sharply divided by signs that are conspicuous to the most careless observer. One parish may be poverty-stricken; the ragged people have the sullen aspect of hopeless debtors; they are several terms behindhand with impossible rents ; the starving beasts are trying to get a mouthful of grass by the roadsides, or tugging at the rotten thatch of the wretched cabins. You cross a stream or go through the "Gap" in a dividing range of low hills, to find yourself suddenly in

There are sub

all the evidences of comfort. stantial steadings and well-fenced fields; there is good store of stacks in the rickyards; flocks of fat geese are waddling about in the drainage from valuable manure-heaps; the fertilisers have been spread freely over the kindly land; sleek and tolerably well-bred beasts are grazing in the meadows. Nowadays, Irish prosperity must be very much a matter of soil and climate, though perhaps still more of temperament, blood, and tradition. The landlord's hands are tied, and the tenant is left to himself. If the landlord has now no inducement to help, he must be content with the "fair" rent problematically paid,-nor can he ever again put a price on the tenant's improvements. Legislation has left the tenant master of his lot. But then the soil and the climate differ so widely. The climate ranges from that of northern Ulster, with its biting blasts and its chilly sea-fogs, to the warm raindrip of Kerry and southern Cork, where the maiden-hair fern flourishes in clefts on the seashore, where there are half-natural copses of crimson fuchsias, and the hillsides are covered with thickets of the arbutus. As for the soil, you may have the rich grazings in the golden vale of Tipperary, or the well-sheltered winter pasturages among the limestone rocks of Clare; or you may be landed in the very abomination

of desolation among the rocks and bogs of northwestern Donegal. As for the influences of race and temperament, there are districts where the farmers have faced difficulties triumphantly; there are districts where men have found things made so smooth for them, that they have lazily let themselves drift; there are districts where they have struggled more or less energetically, with varying success; and there are districts. where the small crofters must necessarily have starved, had it not been for help, charity, or foreign labour. Ireland has only too good reason to complain of the manner in which her industries were discouraged. But, after all, her industries must in most cases be somewhat artificial, and it is always by her agriculture that she must live or thrive.

For centuries untold, and from time immemorial, all things seem to have conspired to impoverish the country. Being agricultural, and with no manufactures to speak of, the only capitalists were the landowners. The great landowners, to a man, were either absentees, generally regarding their tenants as sponges to be squeezed, or, if resident on the estates, they squeezed all the same, being madly extravagant and hopelessly in debt. Whether generous or grasping, or one and the other by turns, they were the worst of masters. If they were gener

ous, they ruined themselves the more quickly; and once ruined, they had no resource but to grind the tenants, either through their agents or the receivers. A people naturally improvident was made more improvident by perpetual distress; and the general state of the country was that of a population living by credit and the universal backing of accommodation bills. The landlord made the most of his land. When he

kept the leasing of it in his own hands, he was perpetually grappling with great arrears of debt; and sometimes, after a long period of careless indulgence, he had summarily to sell up his people for what they would fetch. To save himself trouble, or make sure of a certain fixed income, he generally preferred to farm out the property to middlemen. The middlemen proceeded to sublet at greatly increased advances, and the subtenants again subdivided their small holdings among the married sons, who kennelled themselves in miserable mud hovels. For the most amiable virtues of the Irish race have always conspired to aggravate their misery. Though the Irish love a fair, a frolic, and a free fight, as a London gentleman goes out to his club and his rubber, they are nevertheless essentially domestic. They marry young, and they multiply marvellously, for the potato and the "yallow male" are the emblems of fertility.

Some of the most poverty-stricken islanders of the archipelagoes of Mayo and Galway, for example, are for the most part parents before they are twenty, and count hopefully on having a new baby in the cradle every year. Then they have an intense affection for their native soil, and a fond attachment to the old familiar associations, so that nothing short of stern necessity could have encouraged the American emigration. Before that actual necessity arose, and before emigration on an extensive scale had been made possible by establishing cheap steamers, they swarmed like the rabbits in the sandhills in the warrens where they had been bred. And as the rabbits burrow for choice in arid sand or hungry gravel, so the poor Irish multiplied the most in the localities where it was most difficult to find a maintenance. The reason was obvious. They were left free to squat and increase upon land which no one thought it worth while to dispute; while the more fertile farms were eagerly secured by men with money who would now be denounced as land-grabbers. The natural tendency to that multiplication of paupers was bad enough, but political and selfish considerations came in to aggravate it. When there was a native Parliament, each man of many acres was always on the outlook for a profitable political job. The landlords went smelling round

« PreviousContinue »