The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent Part 41

However, the police were not to be tricked, and soon the fellows, having grown apprehensive, or having exhausted all their ammunition, were heard driving _off_. Signs of blood were found on the road towards Beaufort next morning, so the attacking force suffered some inconvenience in return for giving us a bad night.

Lord Morris, among a group of acquaintances in Dublin, pointing to me, said:--

'That's the Jack Snipe who provided winter shooting for the whole of Kerry, and not one of them could wing him.'

'Mighty poor sport they got out of it,' I answered, 'and I have an even worse opinion of their capacity for accurate aiming than I have of their benevolent intentions.'

Other people know more of oneself than one does, and I was much interested to hear that, in this year of grace, the editor of the _Daily Telegraph_ said of me:--

'Sam Hussey, yes, that's the famous Irishman they used to call "Woodc.o.c.k" Hussey, because he was never hit, though often shot at.'

I always thought 'Woodc.o.c.k' Carden had the monopoly of the epithet, but am proud to find I infringed his patent.

I was benevolently commended by a vituperative ink-slinger, Daniel O'Shea, in his letter to the _Sunday Democrat_ in 1886, but none of those he blackguarded were in the least inconvenienced by 'the roll of his tongue,' as the saying is:--

'A vast number of the Irish have been heartlessly persecuted by the most despotic landlords of Ireland, such as Lord Kenmare, Herbert, Headley, Hussey, Winn, and the Marquis of Lansdowne, all of whom are Englishmen by birth, and consequently aliens in heart, despots by instinct, absentees by inclination, and always in direct opposition to the cause of Ireland. Poor-rate, town-rate, income-tax, are nothing less than wholesale robbery, and is it any wonder that some of the people who are thus oppressed should be driven to desperation? It is deplorable to learn that they should have had any cause to commit what are called "agrarian" crimes. Why not turn their attention to these landlords, the police, the travelling coercion magistrates, not forgetting the emergency men? These are the people to whom I would direct the attention of the men of Kerry.'

I have given a number of examples of how I have been genially appreciated in the hostile Press, but my family are of opinion that it would not be fair, considering how many kind things were published in loyal journals, not to render some tribute to them too. I was sincerely obliged when I received a good word, but, frankly, the bad ones amused me much more. However, I am not ungrateful, and I have specially prized one able description of my att.i.tude which appeared in the _Globe_, the manly strain of the writing of which is in healthy contrast to the hysterical effusions tainted with adjectival mania of those who wanted me shot, but were too cowardly to fire at me themselves:--

'Mr. Hussey is admittedly fair and just in his dealings with his own tenants. But he is only just and fair, which, in the ethics of Irish agrarianism, is equivalent to being a rack-renter and a tyrant. He refuses to let his own land at whatever the tenants think well to pay for it. He persists, with exasperating obstinacy, in refusing to sacrifice the interests of the landlords for whom he acts. In short, Mr.

Hussey is one of the most determined and formidable obstacles to the success of the Land League. While such men have the courage to face the agrarian conspiracy, that grand consummation of patriotic effort--the rooting out of landlordism--must be a somewhat tough and tedious business. He has lived in the midst of enemies, who would have murdered him if only they had the opportunity. His life, it may be safely said, has had no stronger security than his own ability to protect it.'

And yet some one ventured to call Irish land agents 'popularity-hunting scoundrels.'

'Popularity and getting in money were never on the same bush,' as I told Lord Kenmare, and if I had stopped to think how I should make myself popular, I should have bothered my head about what I did not care twopence for, and provided an even more easy target for firing at at short range.

Drifting from a man who paid no heed to scoundrels, I am led to allude to the att.i.tude of a profession, the members of which profited by their amenities--I, of course, mean solicitors--because some one put a question to me on the subject only the other day.

My answer is, that none of the solicitors were in the Land League, and they did not instigate outrages; but they drew comfortable fees for defending the perpetrators.

Swindlers and murderers never agree, for they practise distinct professions.

We were fighting a Land War, and though I have kept back land questions as much as I can, in order not to weary the reader with what never wearies me, I have one or two examples to give which cannot be omitted if I am to portray the true facts.

My firm was agent for an estate in Castleisland, the rent of which, in 1841, was 2300. I exhibited the rental, showing only three quarters in arrear. By 1886 it was cut down by the Commissioners to 1800, and the landlord sold it for 30,000, for which the tenants used to pay four per cent, for forty-nine years, to cover princ.i.p.al and interest.

There was a tenant on that estate named Dennis Coffey. He took a farm at 105 a year; the Commissioners reduced that rent to 80. He purchased it for 1440--eighteen years' purchase, for which his son has 42 a year for forty-nine years. The father had purchased a farm for fee-simple of equal value for 3000, which he left to two others of his sons. So that one son, by paying half what he had covenanted to pay, and which he could pay, gets a farm equal in value to what his father paid 3000 in hard cash for. The man who is paying rent has his farm well stocked; the others are paupers, and one died in the poorhouse.

That may belong to to-day, and not to the period of outrage with which I have been dealing; but it duly points the moral, and is the outcome of those times.

At the Boyle Board of Guardians in 1887, upon a discussion over the Kilronan threatened evictions, Mr. Stuart said:--

'There was one of these men arrested by the police. His rent was 4, 12s. 6d., and, when arrested, a deposit-receipt for 220 was found in his pocket.'

This case had been freely cited at home and in America as a typical instance of the ruthless tyranny of Irish landlords.

My friend and neighbour, Mr. Arthur Blennerha.s.sett, addressed the following letter to Mr. W.E. Gladstone, then Prime Minister:--

'Sir--I beg respectfully to call your attention to the following statement. In 1866, Judge Longfield conveyed to my uncle, under what was called an indefeasible t.i.tle, the lands of Inch East, Ardroe and Inch Island, and previous to the sale, Judge Longfield caused them to be valued by Messrs. Gadstone and Ellis, and in the face of the rental, he certified that the fair letting value of Inch East and Ardroe was 230, and that the fair letting value of Inch Island was 75, now in hand. On the strength of will, my uncle purchased the lands valued at 305 for 6200, and your sub-Commissioners have just reduced the rental of Inch East and Ardroe at the rate of from 230 to 170 a year.

I therefore request you will be pleased to take some steps to recoup me for the 60 a year I have lost by the action of the Government, and I may say this can be partially done by abandoning the quit rent and t.i.the rent charge, amounting to 34, 5s. 4d., which I am now forced by the Government to pay without any reduction.

A. BLENNERHa.s.sETT.'

The Right Honourable W.E. Gladstone.

The oracle of Hawarden was as dumb to this as to my effusion to a similar purport already mentioned. Not even the proverbial postcard was sent to Tralee, so the verbosity of Mr. Gladstone was strangely checked when he found himself pinned down to facts by Irish landlords.

Whilst landlords and their families were literally starving, and agents were collecting what they could at the peril of their lives, the real land-grabbers, the no-renters, were acc.u.mulating money, and investing it in land.

I sent the following series of sales to the _Times_ to show the real value of land:--

(1) The interest on Lord Granard's estate, the valuation of which was five guineas, was sold for 280, and the fee-simple subsequently bought for 80.

(2) On one of his own farms for which the tenant paid 65 annual rent, the tenant's interest fetched 750 and auction fees.

(3) A farm at Curraghila, near Tralee, annual rent 70, Poor Law valuation, 51, 10s., area stat. 73 acres. The tenant's interest was sold for 700.

(4) Tenant's interest on a farm in County Tipperary, on Lord Normanton's estate, at yearly rent of 30, was sold for 600, and the fee-simple purchased for 450.

(5) Tenant's interest at Breaing, near Castleisland, held at the annual rent of 51, 10s., was sold for 550.

(6) At Abbeyfeale, County Kerry, tenant of a small farm, at annual rent of twenty-four s.h.i.+llings, sold his interest for 55.

All the sales, save the Tipperary one, were in a district in which, prior to the Land Act of 1881, tenant-right was unknown.

Poetry is always congenial to an Irishman, probably because it has licences almost as great as he likes to take, and has a vague, irresponsible way of putting things, much akin to his own methods.

Here are some lines from the 'Irish Tenant's Song' which express a good deal of the popular emotion:--

Oh, Parnell, dear, and did you hear the news that's going round?

The landlords are forbid by law to live on Irish ground.

No more their rent-days they may keep, nor agents harsh distrain, The widow need no longer weep, for over is their reign.

I met with mighty Gladstone, and he took me by the hand, And he said, 'Hurrah for Ireland! 'tis now the happy land.

'Tis a most delightful country that I for you have made--You may shoot the landlord through the head who asks that rent be paid.'

We care not for the agent, nor do we care for those Who come upon us to distrain--we pay them back in blows.

And when hopeless, helpless, ruined, these landlords vile shall roam, We'll hunt and hound them from the roofs they've held so long as home.

I don't say that was sung in Castleisland, but it might have been the local hymn and verbal companion to the brutal misdeeds of the benighted inhabitants.

As if matters were not bad enough, that Apostle of outrage Mr. Michael Davitt came to Castleisland on February 21, 1886, and in a pestilential speech, inciting to crime, he showed that, at all events, he appreciated that for sheer blackness and turpitude Kerry was bad to beat. He said:--

'For some time past Kerry has attracted more attention for the occurrences which have been taking place here, than the whole remainder of Ireland put together. I am not without hope that henceforth, until the battle with landlordism and Dublin Castle is triumphantly over, the people of Kerry will be towers of strength to the national cause. The hope of Irish landlordism is now centred in Kerry. Elsewhere it has none, it is a social rinderpest, since the National League was started 1600 families have been turned out in this one county.'

Captain M'Calmont in the House of Commons, three weeks afterwards, called attention to Mr. Baron Dowse's address to the Grand Jury of the County of Kerry in which he stated:--

'That this county is in a very much worse state than it has been for years: that there are no less than three hundred offences specially reported to the constabulary since the a.s.sizes of 1885, consisting of two cases of murder, eighteen cases of letters threatening to murder, thirty-nine cases of cattle, horse, and sheep stealing, eleven cases of arson, eighteen cases of maiming cattle, fifty-two cases of seizing arms, seventy-four cases of sending threatening letters, and twenty-four cases of intimidation.'