Philippe Daryl

“ Is it politic on the part of the landlords to add the horrors of fire to those of eviction? Hardly so, the outsider will think. It adds nothing to the majesty of the law to wage war with inanimate things. The exercise of a right ought never to assume the appearance of an act of revenge. Wrongly or rightly, eviction by itself always bears an odious character; but to see the house you have built with your own hands burnt to the ground will ever seem to cry for vengeance to Heaven. And, after all, who is the gainer by such violence? The League. ”

“ Men look heavy and apathetic. They work as little as they can manage—one or two days out of seven, perhaps—and do not even think of seeking their sustenance from the sea, which is so close to them. The most they can do is to draw from it now and then a cart-load of seaweed to manure their miserable plot of ground. Their existence rolls on dull, idle, devoid of interest. It is the brute life in its most wretched and hideous state. Here is old Ireland as Gustave de Beaumont’s admirable book showed it to us fifty years ago. ”

“ Those mountains are in no part very high; the finest, those of Kerry, do not rise above 1800 feet. But their very position on the brink of the Atlantic, the erosions undermining their base, the deep bays they delineate, the innumerable lakes hidden away in their bosoms, lend them a majesty far above their altitude. Bland and smiling in Wicklow, they are in Kerry of an unequalled serenity, while in Connemara they preserve unbroken the rude chaos of primeval cataclysms, and display on the north of Antrim’s table-land, towards the Giant’s Causeway, the most stupendous basaltic formations. ”

“ The Irish tenant is a bankrupt, because he has paid, for too long a time already, the rent that he could not afford. The land is impoverished for the very same reason. Now, to sell it to a penniless buyer is absurd enough; but to pretend to believe that the penniless buyer shall render it prosperous and make it yield riches, is perhaps more absurd still.
Such illusions ought to be discarded. If England really wants to settle the Irish question, as her honour and her true interest both command her to do, she must manfully accept the idea of a pecuniary sacrifice and a real restitution. ”

“ The rent is no longer paid, and then the difficulties begin. How is one to appraise the improvements introduced in the [167] land by the actual possessor, or by his forefathers? How can one find out what is due to him, even with the best intentions? Is the landlord to give him an indemnity before he evicts him? But then it means ruin to the landlord, who will have to pay precisely because he has not been paid himself. It is the squaring of the circle. When only very small holdings are in question, the difficulty is generally met by remaining in statu quo. ”

“ There was an end to fun, and if there remained here and there some inveterate boon companion who would not give up the good old customs, the Moonlighters soon brought him to reason, poisoning his dogs and hunters, confiscating his arms, and at times mistaking the landlord for the game.
There is no vestige left now of the easy-going ways of old. The large town-houses and country seats are deserted or let to strangers; the cellar is empty, the dining-room silent. A gust of hatred and misery has blown on the isle and left all hearts frozen. ”

“ The land agent naturally resides as a rule in the vicinity of the estate. Therefore he knows everybody by name; knows all about the incumbrances, the resources of every tenant, the length and breadth of every field, the price of produce, the probable value of the harvest; all the threads are in his hands; the landlord counts upon him, approves everything he does, upholds his rigours, and submits to his tolerance. Is he not himself at his mercy? The agent keeps all his deeds of property ”

“ And in truth, if delirious legislators had proposed to themselves the task of inventing a system of landed property that would give neither security to the owner nor peace to the tenant, where could they have succeeded better than with the Irish system? It is at once stupid and ferocious, absurd and monstrous. How true, alas! that human genius, so well able sometimes to profit by natural forces, excels also in sterilizing them, in making them homicides! ”

“ Portrush is a delicious sea-side place, at the mouth of Lough Foyle, on the most wonderful coast in Europe; it is seated on the edge of the Antrim table-land, which is of volcanic origin: probably a dependency of Scotland geologically, rather than belonging properly to Ireland, to which it came and welded itself, at some unknown epoch. The traveller has there the agreeable surprise of a delightful hotel—one should say a perfect one—a regular miracle of comfort; and the still greater surprise of seeing there the only electric railway actually working on this planet. ”

“ Leaving details aside, and the minute instructions on the true mode of skirmishing with the myrmidons of the law, the idea of using the very rent claimed by the landlord as a provision for feeding the struggle against him is in itself perfection—a real masterpiece of strategy. An artist can only feel the warmest admiration for such a combination of everything [267] that is most pleasant to the heart of the agrarian warrior and most deadly to the landlord’s cause. ”

“ But, let its origin be what it may, the fact remains that the Giant’s Causeway, with its neighbour, Portnoffen Bay, the most perfect amphitheatre in the world, with the marvellous colonnade of the Pleaskin, Dunluce Castle, Dunseverick, and the bridge of rope of Carrick-a-Rede, thrown over a chasm that measures a hundred feet above the waters,—constitute one of the grandest, most moving spectacles that the traveller may see. You can go round the world without having such extraordinary sights. Add to it that few of the gems of nature are of so easy an access. ”

“ Wherever it has been liberated from the English yoke, has not, on the contrary, the Irish race displayed abundant energy, activity, genius? Do not the Irish hold the first rank in the United States, in Canada, in Southern America, in Australia, wherever emigration has carried them. In England even are they not at the head of all liberal professions, letters, the daily press, the bar, science? Those who have seen and closely studied that nation, crushed under its secular burden, ground under the heel of the conqueror, cannot but feel surprised at the bare fact that it survives ”

“ With us, since the Convention, one can always know by the Survey-Rolls to whom belongs absolutely such or such a piece of land. He who owns it is free to sell it, to give it, to let it as he pleases. His right is absolute; it is the right of “use and abuse,” according to the forcible expression of the Roman code. It passes with this absolute character to sons, grandsons, or legatees.
In Ireland it is feudal law that obtains still; an estate is not a property, it is a fief. The lord of that estate is not the proprietor of it, he is an usufructuary, as it were, a life-tenant on it. ”

“ He was free to stay at home if he liked; to shut himself up in a workhouse and live there at the public expense. Has he not given by his very departure the best proof that he is not a useless member in the social body? What! you incite all that is able and active to go away, keeping only the weak, the old, the useless; to these you dole out what is necessary to keep up a flickering breath of life, and when poverty increases, you are surprised at it! ”

“ What ought, in fact, to be considered as Ireland proper consists, then, of the eastern province or Leinster, the southern or Munster, and the western or Connaught. Ulster is in reality, as well by the nature of its soil as by the race and habits of the majority of its inhabitants, an annex and dependency of Scotland. The three other provinces, on the contrary, form a whole, as distinct from England or Scotland by the constitution and aspect of the land, as it is different by the race, genius, the traditions and beliefs of the population. ”

“ She is offered the most splendid opportunity of doing what no nation has achieved as yet,—atoning, of her own free will, for centuries of injustice, and trying one of the noblest social experiments that can ever be attempted. It would be the beginning of a new era in the history of human societies, and pure glory for those who initiated it. Not only could such results be attained at little cost, but the most obvious, the most pressing interest of England invites her to the enterprise. ”

“ If you follow the road up to Cave Hill, one of the heights on the western side of Belfast, you embrace a vast landscape, where the flying steamers on the Lagan, the smoking factory-chimneys, the innumerable and opulent villas round its shores, all speak of wealth and prosperity.
The population is about equally divided between Protestants and Catholics. The consequence is that party hatred and the struggle for local influence are far more ardent and long-lived here than in places where one of the two elements has an overwhelming majority. ”

“ Yellow is not an Irish colour, nor is white. Ireland is indeed green Erin, the Emerald Isle. Never was name more truly given.
One could consider Ireland as a prodigious grass plot of some twenty million acres, constantly watered by rain. Water is everywhere: in the clouds [49] that the winds of the Atlantic drive over her, and that the highlands of Scotland and Norway stop in their course; on the soil, where all hollows, great or small, become lakes; under the ground even, where the roots of vegetables, saturated and swollen like sponges, slowly change into peat. ”

“ As a consequence, his influence is great, for good as for ill.
The faith of the Irish peasant is entire, unquestioning, absolute as that of a thirteenth century’s serf. One must see on Sundays those churches crowded to overflowing, and too narrow for the congregation who remain, silent and kneeling, on the steps and even outside the doors. One must see those ragged people, forming a chain by holding on to each other’s tatters, one behind the other, at a distance of 50 to 60 feet from the altar, a patch of dim light up there in the darkness of the church ”

“ Jurymen are but men. They prefer sending a ruffian at large to paying with their life a too subtle distinction between crimes of an agrarian character and those of another sort. A lump of lead is the most irresistible of arguments. One may assert that presently law has lost all influence in Kerry. It is rapine that reigns, hardly tempered by the decrees of the National League, which of course means only legitimate resistance to the landlords, and by the fund of righteousness possessed at heart by the nation. ”

“ Everything concurs to shut in that rural world in a vicious circle. Not only does the peasant lack capital to improve his farming, but, assured of seeing his rent raised if he ventured on the least improvement, he is careful to make none. On his side the landlord, for dread of annoying contestations, opposes as much as lies in his power any amendment susceptible of being turned into a title for his tenant. ”

“ It seems as if, by stretching one’s arm, one would reach the United States. And, in fact, one is near enough as it is—five or six days by steam—almost within speaking distance with the telephone. So fast travel the storms from America that the telegram is hardly able to arrive before them. A sea-gull, borne on the wing of the hurricane, would cross that arm of the sea in a few hours. The breeze that blows in your face may have stirred the hair of a Brooklyn belle in the morning. There one feels how very small is our globe.
Geologically, Ireland differs much from Great Britain. ”

“ The League’s aim and watchword were—The land for the peasant! Its means were the union of all the rural forces, the formation of a resistance fund for evicted farmers, the strike of tenants with a view to compelling the landlords to grant a reduction of rent; and incessant agitation in favour of a law for the liquidation of landed property, which would give the land into the hands of the cultivators by means of partial payments made during a certain number of years.
The success of such a programme, seconded by the political leaders of Ireland, was certain. ”

“ And always there has been an affinity of nature, a harmony of thought, between them and us. At once we feel we are cousins. Their ancestors formerly came in thousands to fight under our flag. Our revolutions were always felt in Ireland. So strong, for nations as well as individuals, is that mysterious tie of a common origin, or even the most remote consanguinity. ”