William Henry Hurlbert

“ It was thus stated by Lalor in his paper, the Irish Felon:—
“The entire ownership of Ireland, moral and material, up to the sun and down to the centre of the earth, is vested, as of right, in the people of Ireland. The soil of the country belongs as of right to the entire people of the country, not to any one class, but to the nation.” ”

“ As I had no case to make for or against any political party or any theory of government in Ireland, I took things great and small, and people high and low, as they came, putting myself in contact by preference, wherever I could, with those classes of the Irish people of whom we see least in America, and concerning myself, as to my notes, only that they should be made under the vivid immediate impress of whatever they were to record. ”

“ Hewitt, to allow what is called the “Irish National flag” to be raised over the City Hall of New York is vastly more significant of the true drift of American feeling on this subject than any number of sympathetic resolutions adopted at party conventions or in State legislatures by party managers, bent on harpooning Irish voters. If Ireland had really made herself a “nation,” with or without the consent of Great Britain, a refusal to hoist the Irish flag on the occasion of an Irish holiday would be not only churlish but foolish. ”

“ Most things in this life of ours are relative. I well remember hearing an American millionaire, who began life in New York as the patentee of a mouse-trap, express his profound compassion for a judge of the Supreme Court condemned to live “upon a pittance of eight thousand dollars a year.”
These dwellers in the cabins of Donegal are millionaires, so far as those essentials of life are concerned, which we call room and air and freedom to move and breathe, in comparison with hundreds and thousands of their own race in the slums of New York and Chicago and Liverpool and London. ”

“ Naturally, you see,” said Father M‘Fadden, “they find a certain pleasure to be seen by their old friends in the old place, after borrowing the four pounds perhaps to take them to America, coming back with the money jingling in their pockets, and in good clothes, and with a watch and a chain—and a high hat. And there is in the heart of the Irishman an eternal longing for his native land constantly luring him back to Ireland. All do not succeed, though, in your country,” he said. “We hear of two out of ten perhaps who do very well. ”

“ To get a correct perspective of the observations which I came from Rome this year to make in Ireland, my readers, as I have already said, must allow me to take them across the Atlantic, and must put aside as accessory and incidental the forensic and polemic phenomena of Irish politics, with which they are perhaps only too familiar.
It is as easy to go too far back as it is not to go back far enough in the study of such a revolutionary movement as that of which Ireland is just now the arena. ”

“ What did any Parliament in Dublin ever do to gratify the one real passion of the Irish peasant—his hunger for a bit of land? So far as the Irish people are concerned, Home Rule means simply agrarian reform. Would they get that from a Parliament in Dublin? If the British Parliament evicts the landlords and makes the tenants lords of the land, they will be face to face with Davitt’s demand for the nationalising of the land. Do you suppose they will like to see the lawyers and the politicians organising a labour agitation against the ‘strong farmers’? ”

“ On the other hand, the triumph of the National League on its present lines of action would diminish the value for good or evil of any man’s hold upon the Irish people, for the obvious reason that by driving out of Ireland, and ruining, the class of “landlords” and capitalists, it would leave the country reduced to a dead level of peasant-holdings, saddled with a system of poor-rates beyond the ability of the peasant-holders to carry, and at the mercy, therefore, of the first bad year. ”

“ No doubt it will be a great thing for Donegal when “light railways” are laid down here. But I pity the traveller of the future here, if he is never to know the delight of traversing these wild and picturesque wastes in such weather as we have had to-day, on a car, well-balanced by a single [pg 125] pleasant companion, drinking, as he goes, deep draughts of the Atlantic air! Truly on a jaunting-car “two are company and three are none.” You have almost the free companionship of a South American journey in the saddle, jumping off to walk, when you like, more freely still. ”

“ I must ask my readers, therefore, to bear it constantly in mind that all my observations and comments have been made from an American, not from a British or an Irish point of view. How or by whom Ireland shall be governed concerns me only in so far as the government of Ireland may affect the character and the tendencies of the Irish people, and thereby, through the close, intimate, and increasing connection between the Irish people and the people of the United States, may tend to affect the future of my country. ”

“ Davitt is free to be always avowedly bent on bringing about a thorough Democratic revolution in Ireland. I believe him to be too able a man to imagine, as some of the Irish agitators do, that this can be done without the consent of Democratic England, and he has lived too much in England, and knows the English democracy too well, I suspect, not to know that to abuse an executive officer for determination and vigour is the surest way to make him popular. ”

“ The “terrible trippers” of the English midlands, as I once heard an old verger in a northern Cathedral call them, who chip off relics from monuments, pull up flowers by the roots, and scatter sandwich papers and empty gingerbeer bottles broadcast over well-rolled lawns, are not known, Lord Ernest tells me, in this island. As he neatly puts it, the Irishman, no matter what his station in life may be, or how great a blackguard he may really be, always instinctively knows when he ought to behave like a gentleman, and knows how to do so. In the lakes were hundreds of wild fowl. ”

“ Irish-American citizens, however, is not the less bad citizenship because they may have been led into it by the recklessness of State Legislatures—which have no responsibility for our foreign relations—or the sycophancy of public men. If it were proved to demonstration that Home Rule would be the salvation of Ireland, no American citizen would have any more right to take an active part in furthering it than to take an active part in dethroning the Czar of all the Russias. ”

“ That the Catholic Church should even seem for a time to speak with two voices on such a point as the moral quality of political machinery, or that speaking with one voice upon such a point in America, it should even seem to speak with another voice in Ireland, would clearly be a disaster to the Church and to civilisation. ”

“ Davitt quite awake to the great importance of the granite quarries of Donegal. He is bestirring himself in connection with some men of Manchester, in behalf of the quarries at Belmullet in Mayo, which, if I am not mistaken, is his native county. This bent of his mind towards the material improvement of the condition of the Irish people, and the development of the resources of Ireland, is not only a mark of his superiority to the rank and file of the Irish politicians—it goes far to explain the stronger hold which he undoubtedly has on the people in Ireland. ”

“ It is not in accordance with the American doctrine of “Home Rule” that “Home Rule” of any sort for [pg xxv] Ireland should be organised in New York or in Chicago by expatriated Irishmen.
No man had a keener or more accurate sense of this than the most eloquent and illustrious Irishman whose voice was ever heard in America.
In the autumn of 1871 Father Burke of Tallaght and San Clemente, with whom I had formed at Rome in early manhood a friendship which ended only with his life, came to America as the commissioned Visitor of the Dominican Order. ”

“ In a very remarkable letter written to Earl Grey in 1868, after the Clerkenwell explosions had brought the disestablishment of the Irish Protestant Church into Mr. Gladstone’s scheme of “practical politics,” the Archbishop of Westminster, not then a Cardinal, called the attention of Englishmen to the fact, not yet I fear adequately apprehended by them, that “the assimilating power of America upon the Irish people, if seven days slower than that of England in reaching Ireland, is sevenfold more penetrating and powerful upon the whole population.” ”

“ When a poor creature comes to be buried—no matter who it is, a pauper, or a tenant, or any one—the people all go to the chapel; and every man he walks up and lays his offering for the priest on the coffin; and the others, they watch him. And, you see, if a man that thinks a good deal of himself walks up and puts down five shillings, why, another man that thinks less of him, and more of himself, he’ll go up and make it a gold ten-shilling piece, or perhaps even a sovereign! ”

“ A shrewd Galway man, now here, who seems to know the region well, and likes both the scenery and the people, tells me that the troubles which have now culminated in the arrest of Father M‘Fadden have been aggravated by the vacillation of Captain Hill, and by the foibles of his agent, Colonel Dopping, who not long ago brought down Mr. Gladstone with his unloaded rifle. That the tenants as a body have been, or now are, unable to pay their rent he does not believe. On the contrary, he thinks them, as a body, rather well off. ”

“ There is no more respectable body of men in the United States than the Hibernian Society of Philadelphia. This society was instituted in 1771, five years before the declaration of American Independence. It is a charitable and social organisation only, with no political object or colour. It is made up of men of character and substance. Its custom has always been to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day by a banquet, to which the most distinguished men of the country have repeatedly been bidden. ”

“ The gentleman who goes to Norwich thought the English landlords were in many cases worse off than the Irish. “Ah, no!” interfered the other, “not quite; for if the English can’t get their rents, at least they keep their land, but we can neither get our rents nor keep our land!” They both admitted that there had been much bad management of the land in Ireland, and that the agents had done the owners as well as the tenants a great deal of harm in the past, but they both maintained stoutly that the legislation of late years had been one-sided and short-sighted. ”

“ From language like this to the attitude of Father M‘Glynn in New York, openly flouting the authority of the Holy See itself, is but an easy and an inevitable step.
Neither “Home Rule” nor any other “Rule” can exist in a country in which men whose words carry any weight are suffered to take up such an attitude. ”

“ The obvious and many duties of my public office here speak for themselves, and to none with more force than to American citizens of Irish blood or birth who are honestly endeavouring to secure liberty by maintaining a government of laws, and who realise the constant attention that is needful. ”

“ A Dublin mob, never so little in earnest and led by a dozen really determined men, ought to be able to make as short work of it as the hordes of the Faubourgs in Paris made of the Bastille, with its handful of invalids, on that memorable 14th of July, about which so many lies have passed into history, and so much effervescent nonsense is still annually talked and printed. ”

“ I took a long drive and walk with Lord Ernest this afternoon through the park, which rivals Curraghmore in extent. It is nowhere divided from the lands of the adjoining tenants, and with great liberality is thrown open to the people, not only of Newtown-Stewart and Strabane, but of all the country. Parties, sometimes of seven hundred people, from Belfast come down to pass the day in these sylvan solitudes, and it is to be recorded to [pg 147] the praise of Ireland that these visitors always behave with perfect good sense and good feeling. ”

“ All this to an American resembles a tempest in a tea-pot. But it is a serious matter to see a priest of the Church assisting laymen to put their fellow-men under a social interdict, which is obviously a parody on one of the gravest steps the Church itself can take to maintain the doctrine and the discipline of the Faith. What Catholics, if honest, must think of this whole business, I saw curiously illustrated by some marginal notes pencilled in a copy of Sir Francis Head’s Fortnight in Ireland, at the hotel in Gweedore. ”

“ There is some point in the old Irish sarcasm that English travellers in Ireland only see one side of the country, because they travel through it on the outside car. But to make this point tell, [pg 66] four people must travel on the car. In that case they must sit two on a side, each pair facing one side only of the landscape. It is a very different business when you travel on an outside car alone, with the driver sitting on one side of it, or with one companion only, when the driver occupies the little perch in front between the sides of the car. ”

“ Surely if Ireland is ever to govern herself, she must learn precisely the lesson which Mr. Balfour, I believe, is trying to teach her—that the duty of executive officers to execute the laws is not a thing debateable, like the laws themselves, nor yet determinable, like the enactment of laws, by taking the yeas and the nays. ”

“ Upon thousands also of Americans, interested more or less intelligently in British affairs, but neither familiar, nor caring to be, with the details of the political situation in Great Britain, this appearance of the British Premier, as the champion of Home Rule for Ireland, denouncing the “base [pg li] ness and blackguardism” of Pitt and his accomplices, the framers of the Union of 1800, naturally produced a very profound impression. What might be almost called a “tidal wave” of sympathy with the Irish National League, and with him as its ally, made itself felt throughout the United States. ”

“ There is nothing froward or formidable in the aspect of Dublin Castle. It has neither a portcullis nor a drawbridge. People go in and out of it as freely as through the City Hall in New York. There is a show of sentries at the main entrance, and in one of the courts this morning the picturesque band of a Scotch regiment was playing to the delectation of a small but select audience of urchins and little girls. ”

“ Nowhere, too, in the world is the ostentatious waste of the results of labour upon the antics of a frivolous plutocracy a more crying peril of our times than in America. Henry George, an American of the Eastern States, who went to the Pacific coast as a lad, had grown up with and watched the progress of this social disease in California; and when Davitt reached America in 1878, Henry George was preparing to publish his revolutionary book on Progress and Poverty, which appeared in 1879. ”

“ It is undoubtedly the opinion of every Irish [pg xxiii] American who possesses any real influence with the people of his own race in my country, that the rights and liberties of Ireland can only be effectually secured by a complete political separation from Great Britain. ”