BOOKS.

MR. HURLBERT ON IRELAND UNDER COERCION.*

[SECOND NOTICE.]

Mn. HtraLBERT's book is so full of facts of all kinds bearing on the present state of Ireland,—facts verified by a writer whose own feeling is evidently favourable to some form of Home- rule, and who took the greatest pains to hear both sides of the case,—that it is difficult to select from it the most instructive of his experiences. Nothing strikes us more in it than the evidence which Mr. Hurlbert collected that the Labourers Act is working very badly in Ireland, partly owing to the dislike which the tenant-farmers feel to any policy which raises the status of the labourers, and partly owing to the jobbing of the local authorities. Of the jobbing which goes on under it Mr. Hurlbert gives us the following evidence, which shows the working of the Labourers Act at Tralee and

at Macroom :-

" The Labourers Act, passed by the British Parliament for the benefit of the Irish labourers, who get but scant recognition of their wants and wishes from the tenant-farmers, is not producing the good results expected from it, mainly because it is perverted to all sorts of jobbery. Only last week Colonel Spaight had to hand in to the Local Government Board a report on certain schemes of expenditure under this Act, prepared by the Board of Guardians of Tralee. These schemes contemplated the erection of 196 cottages in 135 electoral divisions of the Union. This meant, of course, so much money of the ratepayers to be turned over to local contractors. Colonel Spaight on inspection found that of the 196 proposed cottages, the erection of 61 had been for- bidden by the sanitary authorities, the notices for the erection of 23 had been wrongly served, 20 were proposed to be erected on sites not adjoining a public road, and no necessity had been shown for erecting 40 of the others. He accordingly recommended that only 32 be allowed to be erected ! For a small town like Tralee this proposition to put up 196 buildings at the public expense where only 32 were needed is not bad. It has the right old Tammany Ring smack, and would have commanded, I am sure, the patronising approval of the late Mr. Tweed. I mentioned it to-night at the County Club, when a gentleman said that this morning at Macroom a serious row ' had occurred between the local Board of Guardians there and a great crowd of labourers. The labourers thronged the Board-room, demanding the half-acre plots of land which had been promised them. The Guardians put them off, promising to attend to them when the regular business of the meeting was over. So the poor fellows were kept waiting for three mortal hours, at the end of which time they espied the elected Nationalist members of the Board subtly filing out of the place. This angered them. They stopped the fugitives, blockaded the Board-room, and forced the Guardians to appoint a committee to act upon their demands. It is certainly a curious fact that, so far, in Ireland I have seen no decent cottages for labourers, excepting those put up at their own expense on their own property by landlords."

Yet there are cases in which the farmers are obliged to give the labourers a better class of food than they can afford them- selves. Mr. Seigne, one of the ablest of the land-agents, told Mr. Hurlbert that on, one occasion he was calling upon a tenant-farmer, when he found the labourers eating a dinner of pork and green vegetables, and that the farmer begged him to go into an inner room, where he found the farmer's family eating their dinner of etirabout, milk, and potatoes, and the farmer said to him,—" I asked you in here because we keep in here to ourselves. I don't want them fellows to see that we can't afford to give ourselves what we have to give them." But he went on to say in strong language that he was de- termined that he and his family should fare as well as their labourers, and that in order to do so their landlord must make further concessions to them. Mr. Hurlbert thinks that a great deal of the inability to pay rents is owing to the determination of the farmers to live in a style quite different from that in which their parents lived, and he illustrates this as follows :-

"In fact, under the operation of existing circumstances, they are getting into the way of improving their condition, not so much by sacrifices and savings, as by an insistence on rent being fixed low enough to leave full margin for improved living. ' I had a very frank statement on this point,5 said Mr. Seigne, ' not long ago from a Tipperary man. When I tried to show him that his father had paid a good many years ago the very same rent which he declares himself unable to pay now, he admitted this at once. But it was a confession and avoidance. " My father could pay the rent, and did pay the rent," he said, " because he was content to live so that he could pay it. He sat on a boss of straw, and ate out of a bowl. He lived in a way in which I don't intend to live, and so he could pay the rent. Now, I must have, and I mean to have, out of the land, before I pay the rent, the means of living as • Ireland under Coercion: the Diary of an American. By William Henry Enribeet. 2 vole. Edinburgh, 'Avid Douglas. I wish to live ; and if I can't have it, I'll sell out and go away ; but I'll be — if I don't fight before I do that same !", —` What could you reply to that ?' I asked.—' Oh !' I said ; that's square and straightforward. Only just let me know the point at which you mean to fight, and then we'll see if we can agree about some- thing: "

As another illustration of the same determination of all classes in Ireland to live a little less uncomfortably or more lnxurioualy at the expense of the landlord, Mr. Hurlbert mentions the case of one of the evicted tenants on Lord Lans- downe's Luggacurren property, who, it is said, spent more money on horse-racing than on housekeeping. and who " entered a horse for the races at the Curragh after he had undergone what Mr. Gladstone calls ' the sentence of death'

of an eviction." (Vol. IL, p. 235.) Of course, eviction is often ruin to an Irish tenant, but in these latter days it has not un- frequently been very much the reverse. " Not long ago a man in Tralee tried to bribe the agent into having him evicted, that he might make a claim on " the Glenbeigh Fund. And Mr. Hurl-

bert received very considerable evidence of the misapplication of

other relief funds. " Colonel Spaight remembers that in Strokes- town Union, Roscommon, when the Guardians there received a.

supply of one hundred tons of seed-potatoes, they distributed eighty tons, and were then completely at a loss what to do with the remaining twenty tons. Mr. Parnell and Mr. O'Kelly,

however, came to Roscommon, and the latter made a speech out of the hotel-window to the people advising them to apply

for more, and take all they could get. With a stroke of the pen,' he said, we'll wipe out the seed-rate.' Whereupon the

application for seed rose to six hundred tons." The following statement as to the growth of the consumption of spirits in Ireland at the cost of remitted rents seems to us quite in- credible, but we give Mr. Hurlbert's statement for those to investigate who have the means of rectifying it :—

" I am assured, too, that the consumption of spirits all through this region has greatly increased of late years. The official reports will show you,' said one gentleman, 'that the annual outlay upon whisky in Ireland equals the sum saved to the tenants by the reductions in rent! This is a proposition so remarkable that I simply record it for future verification, as having been made by a very quiet, cool, and methodical person, whose information on. other points I have found to be correct. He tells me too, as of his own knowledge, that in going over some financial matters with a small farmer in his neighbourhood, he ascertained, beyond a peradventure, that this farmer annually spent in whisky, for the use of his family, consisting of himself, his wife, and three adult children, nearly, or quite, seventy pounds a year ! You won't believe this,' he said to me; 'and if you print the statement nobody else will believe it ; but for all that it is the simple unexaggerated truth.' "

Mr. Hurlbert's account of the O'Grady's difference with his- tenants, of Lord Lansdowne's difference in relation to the Luggacurren property, and of Mr. Brooke's in relation to Cool- greany, is extremely interesting, and appears to be very fair.. In relation to the "Plan of Campaign" on the Brooke estate, for instance, he lets us see both sides of the question, and, indeed, shows us how differently the same fact appears when narrated by the priests who take the side of the tenants, and when narrated by the landlord or agent. Thus, one of the- priests, Dr. Dillon, told Mr. Hurlbert,—" Two of the most respectable of the tenants went to see Mr. Brooke in Dublin, and he wouldn't listen to them. On the contrary, he abso- lutely put them out of his office without hearing a word they

had to say." Here is Mr. Brooke's account of that little transaction, supplemented by Mr. Hurlbert's history of Mr. Brooke's treatment of the property generally:— "Mr. Brooke confirmed Dr. Dillon's statement that he had ordered out of his counting-house two tenants who came into it with a peculiarly brazen proposition, of which I must presume Dr. Dillon was ignorant when he cited the fact as a count against the landlord of Coolgreany.. I give the story as Mr. Brooke tells. it. The Rent Audit,' he says, at which my tenants were idiots enough to join the "Plan of Campaign "occurred about December 12th, 1886, when, as you know, I refused to accept the terms which they proposed to me. I heard nothing more from them till about the middle of February, 1887, when coming to my office one day I found two tenants waiting for me. One was Stephen Maher, a mountain man, and the other Patrick Kehoe. " What do you want ?" I asked. Whereupon they both arose, and Pat Kehoe• pointed to Maher. Maher fumbled at his clothes, and rubbed himself softly for a bit, and then produced a scrap of paper. "It's a bit of paper from the tenants, sir," he said. A queer bit of paper it was to look at—ruled paper, with a composition written. upon it which might have been the work of a village schoolmaster.. It was neither signed nor addressed ! The pith of it was in these words,—" In consequence of the manner in which we have been harassed, our cattle driven throughout the country, and our crops not sown, we shall be unable to pay the half-year's rent due in MA in addition to the reduction already claimed !" I own I rather lost my temper at this ! Remember I had already plainly refused to give " the reduction already claimed," and had told them not once, but twenty times, that I would never surrender to the " Plan of Campaign "1 I am afraid my language was Pagan rather than Parliamentary—but I told them plainly, at least, that if they did not break from the " Plan of Campaign," and pay their debts, they might be sure I would turn the whole of them out ! I gave them back their precious bit of paper and sent them packing. One of them, I have told you, was a mountain man, Stephen Maher. He is commonly known among the people as " the old fox of the moun- tain," and he is very proud of it ! This old Stephen Maher,' said Mr. Brooke, is renowned in connection with a trial for murder, at which he was summoned as a witness. When he was cross-examined by Mr. Molloy, Q.C., he fenced and dodged about with that distinguished counsellor for a long time, until getting vexed by the lawyer's persistency, he exclaimed, " Now thin, Mr. Molloy, I'd have ye to know that I had a cliverer man nor iver you was,.Mr. Molloy, at me, and I had to shtan' up to him for three hours before the Crowner, an' he was onable to git the throoth out of me, so he was ! so he was !" ' Neither did Dr. Dillon mention the fact that one of the demands made of Captain Hamilton, Mr. Brooke's agent, in December, 1886, was that a Protestant tenant named Webster should be evicted by Mr. Brooke from a farm for which he had paid his rent, to make room for the return thither of a Roman Catholic tenant named Lenahan, previously evicted for non-payment of his rent. When Mr. Brooke's grandfather bought the Coolgreany property in 1864, he adopted a system of betterments, which has been ever since kept up on the estate. Nearly every tenant's house on the property has been slated, and otherwise repaired by the landlord, nor has one penny ever been added on that account to the rents. In the village of Coolgreany all the houses on one side of the main street were built in this way by the landlord, and the same thing was done in the village of Croghan, where twenty tenants have a grazing right of three sheep for every acre held on the Croghan Mountain, pronounced by the valuers of the Land Court to be one of the best grazing mountains in Ireland. Captain Hamilton became the agent of the property in 1879, on the death of Mr. Vesey. One of his earliest acts was to advise Mr. Brooke to grant an abatement of 25 per cent. in June, 1881, while the Land Act was passing. At the same time, he cautioned the tenants that this was only a temporary reduction, and advised them to get judicial rents fixed. The League advised them not to do this, but to demand 25 per cent. reduction again in December, 1881. This demand was rejected, and forty writs were issued. The tenants thereupon in January, 1882, came in and paid the full rent, with the costs. Eleven tenants after this went into Court, and in 1883 the Sub-Commissioners cut down their rents. In five cases Mr. Brooke appealed. What was the result before the Chief Commissioner ? The rent of Mary Green, which had been £43, and had been cut down by the Sub-Commissioners to £39, was restored to £48 ; the rent of Mr. Kavanagh, cut down from £57 to £52, was restored to .255 ; the rent of Pat Kehoe (one of the two tenants ' ejected' from Mr. Brooke's office as already stated), cut down from £81 to £70, was restored to £31 ; the rent of Graham, cut down from £38 to £32 10s., was restored to £38. Other reductions were maintained. This appears to be the record of rack-renting' on the Coolgreany property. There are 114 tenants, of whom 15 hold under judicial rents ; 22 are leaseholders, and 77 are non-judicial yearly tenants. There are 12 Protestants, holding in all a little more than 1,200 acres. All the rest are Catholics, 14 of these being cottier tenants. The estate consists of 5,165 acres. The average is about £24, and the average rental about £26 10s. The gross rental is £2,614, of which £1,000 go to the jointure of Mr. Brooke's mother, and MOO are absorbed by the tithe charges, half poor-rates and other taxes. During the year 1886, in which this war was declared against him, Mr. Brooke spent £714 in improvements upon the property : so in that year his income from Coolgreany was practically nil."

Yet this is one of those extreme cases in which, according to Mr. Dillon, it was absolutely necessary to adopt the " Plan of Campaign," in order to prevent the grossest possible oppres- sion of the tenants by the landlord. It appears to us to be one of those cases in which an Irish landlord set a bright example even to the more generous class of English landlords, and where the adoption of the " Plan of Campaign " was not merely, what it always is, wrong, but intentionally pointed at one of the best landlords because he was one of the best. The National League have struck at the worst class of landlords, partly because they are the worst, partly in order to get external sympathy ; and also at the best, because they think that if they can defeat the best landlords in Ireland, they will have no difficulty with all the rank and file.

We must give one passage in which Mr. Hurlbert contrasts the prition of a Massachusetts labourer with that of a tenant evicted near Woodford because he would not pay the rent, which he thought too high :- "Roth legally and materially Mr. Egan, the tenant-farmer at Woodford, seems to me to have had much the advantage of thousands of his countrymen living and earning their livelihood by their daily labour in such a typical American commonwealth, for example, as Massachusetts. I have here with me the Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Statistics of Massachusetts. From this I learn that in 1876 the average yearly wages earned by work- men in Massachusetts were $482.72, or in round numbers something over £96. Out of this amount the Massachusetts workman had to feed, clothe, and house himself, and those dependent on him. His outlay for rent alone was on the average $109.07, or in round numbers rather less than £22, making 224 per cent. of his earnings. How was it with Mr. Egan ? Out of his labour on his holding he got merchantable crops worth £60 sterling, or in round numbers $300, besides producing in the shape of vegetables and dairy stuff, pigs and poultry, certainly a very large proportion of the food necessary for his household, and raising and fattening beasts, worth at a low estimate £20 or $100 more. And while thus engaged, his outlay for rent, which in- cluded not only the house in which he lived, but the land out of which he got the returns of his labour expended upon it, was £8 15s., or considerably less than one-half the outlay of the Massachusetts workman upon the rent of nothing more than a roof to shelter himself and his family. Furthermore, the money thus paid out by the Massachusetts workman for rent was simply a tribute paid for accommodation had and enjoyed, while out of every pound sterling paid as rent by the Irish tenant there reverted to his credit, so long as he continued to fulfil his legal obligations, a certain proportion, calculable, valuable, and saleable, in the form of his tenant-right."

Mr. Huribert's general conclusion is that the coercion under which Ireland suffers, and under which he has studied her condition, is the demoralising coercion of the National League ; but he throws great blame on the weak and wavering legislation of the Imperial Parliament, which has tended so much to throw Ireland into the power of the League. He believes that if Ireland could be polled to-morrow on the issue whether the Irish would adopt Mr. Davitt's agrarian principles which demand the nationalisa- , tion of the land, or the old principles of property and authority as represented by the British Government and the Roman Catholic Church, she would probably vote for the principles of property and authority; and he is quite sure that if Mr.

Davitt could carry the independence of Ireland, and plunder the landlords for the behoof of the tenants, he would be rather further from his end of obtaining the nationalisation of the land than he was before. But then, he sees that it is perfectly impossible to submit such an issue as this clearly to any people, and he has no hope of its being submitted

clearly to the Irish people. Evidently, he is not very hopeful that the authority of sound principles in Ireland will be re-

stored till the revolution has gone further and produced even worse results than it has at present.