The workhouse means the parting with wife and children.
These things must be taken into consideration, to understand the
exasperation of mind which is seething through the whole country.
I do not think the people here, generally speaking, have any idea of the
amount or intensity of hidden feeling. I confess it frightens me. I
stayed in a country place for a week. I boarded with a family who were
much better off than their neighbors. They were favorites at the office
of the landlord, and paid him their rent punctually. I often sat at the
kitchen hearth as neighbor after neighbor came in in the evening and
told in Irish the tale of some hard occurrence that had taken place. I
understood enough to guess the drift of the story. I understood well the
language of eye and clinched hand with which my host listened. The
people who suffered were his people; their woe was his; he felt for them
a sympathy of which the landlord never dreamed; but he never said a
word. I thought as I sat there - silent too - that I would not like to be
that landlord and, in any time of upheaval, lie at the mercy of this
favorite tenant of his.
They talk of agitators moving the people! Agitators could not move them
were it not that they gave voice to what is in the universal heart of
the tenantry.
A gentleman connected with the press said to me to-day: "The fact is
that any outrage, no matter how heart-rending, committed by a landlord
upon his tenantry is taken little notice of - none by Government - but
when a tenant commits an outrage, no matter how great the provocation,
then the whole power of the Government is up to punish."
One great trouble among the people is, they cannot read much, and they
feel intensely; reading matter is too dear, and they are too poor to
educate themselves by reading. What they read is passed from hand to
hand; it is all one-sided, and "who peppers the highest is surest to
please."
The ignorance of one class, consequent upon their poverty, the
insensibility of another class, are the two most dangerous elements that
I notice. It is easy to see how public sympathy runs, in the most
educated classes. There is great sympathy, publicly expressed, for
Captain Boycott and his potatoes; for Miss Bence-Jones, driven to the
degrading necessity of milking the cows; but I have watched the papers
in vain for one word of sympathy with that pale mother of a family, with
her new-born infant in her arms, set upon the roadside the day I was at
Carndonagh. Policemen have been known to shed tears executing the law;
bailiffs have been known to refuse to do their duty, because the
mother's milk was too strong in them; but the public prints express no
word of sympathy.
In the papers where sympathy with the people is conspicuous by its
absence, there will be paragraph after paragraph about prevention of
cruelty to animals. I had the honor of a conversation with a lady of
high birth and long descent, and, as I happen to know, of great kindness
of heart, a landlady much beloved by a grateful and cared-for tenantry.
I remarked to her that justice seemed to me to be rather one-sided:
"There is much difference unavoidably between one class and another, but
there are three places where all classes should stand on an equality -
on a school room floor, in a court of justice, in the house of God." "I
would agree with you so far," said the lady, "that they should be on a
level when they come before God." I am sure there would be no agitation
nor need of coercion if all the landladies and landlords were like this
kind-hearted lady in practice.
Another instance of kindly thought on the part of another landlady. The
famine left many a poor tenant without any stock at all; every creature
was sacrificed to keep in life. This lady bought cows for her tenants
who were in this sad plight. She left the cows with them until a calf
grew up into a milking cow; then the cow was sold to pay the landlady
the money invested. If the cow sold for more than was paid for it the
balance was the tenant's, and he had the cow besides. "Thus," said the
lady to me, "I benefitted them materially at no expense of money, only a
little." This lady, who claims and receives the homage of her tenants
for the ould blood and the ould name, has by these acts of inexpensive
kindness, chained her tenants to her by their hearts. "It's easy to
see," said one to me, "that the ould kindly blood is in her."
There have been many humble petitions for reduction of rent; many have
been granted, more have been refused. The reasons given in one case
were, a ground-rent, a heavy mortgage, an annuity, and legacies. The
question whether one set of tenants was able to meet all these burdens,
not laid on by themselves mind, and live, never was taken into
consideration for a moment.
When I arrived in Ireland, I met with an English gentleman who took a
lively interest in the purpose for which I crossed the sea, namely, to
see what I could see for myself and to hear what I could hear for myself
on the Land Question. He volunteered a piece of advice. "There are two
different parties connected with the Land Question, the landlords and
the tenants. They are widely separated, you cannot pass from one to the
other and receive confidence from both.
