THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES K ^di Priests aijd Irisl) Raii> FRANK HUGH O'DONNELL -NET S3O6 8 LONDON P. S. KING & SON ORCHARD HOUSE, WESTMINSTER POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN: PARAGUAY ON SHANNON UP TO DATE POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN: PARAGUAY ON SHANNON UP TO DATE BY F. HUGH O'DONNELL, M.A. AUTHOR OF "THE RUIN OF EDUCATION IN IRELAND," "THE HISTORY OF THE IRISH PARLIAMENTARY PARTY" ETC. LONDON: P. S. KING & SON ORCHARD HOUSE, WESTMINSTER IQIO NOTE Vj THE province of Paraguay, in South America, became celebrated in the eighteenth century for the absolutist system of government or established by the Jesuit fathers over the Indian tribes. The a; ? Jesuits are credited, however, with promoting the material prosperity Q of their servile subjects. No such extenuation can be urged on ** behalf of the political priesthood in Ireland. In Ireland material o ruin has accompanied clerical despotism. The political priesthood have pauperised as well as demoralised. 395976 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN i PARAGUAY ON SHANNON UP TO DATE THE BOARD THAT FAILED The Congested Districts Board has tried for twenty years to develop new industries, and has failed. Statement of Lord Dudley, Chairman of Congested Districts Commission. The Congested Districts Board, having been working for fourteen or fifteen years, have only touched the fringe of the question. Statement of Sir Antony MacDonnell, Under- Secretary ; ex- Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab, etc. etc. ; member of Congested Districts Board and Commission, DEPOPULATION UNDER THE BOARD, 1891-1901 Donegal lost 12,000 inhabitants; Sligo, 14,000; Kerry, 14,000; Mayo, 19,000; Galway, 23,000. Commission Reports, i. 227. THE BOARD THE LAND LEAGUE LOVES Speaking on behalf of the United Irish League, I tell the Commission that it is the strong view of the League that the Congested Districts Board should be preserved. Evidence of A fr. John FitzGibbon, delegate fom the Central Council of the United Irish League. WHY THE LAND LEAGUE LOVES THE BOARD Take the constitution of the Board. Take Father Denis O'Hara and the Most Rev. Dr. O'Donnell. These two men in themselves, with the assistance they would get from men in the country, would in themselves be able to settle the entire question. Evidence of Mr. John FitzGibbon, as above. INTRODUCTION A WHITE HOTTENTOT MISSION CASTLE CLERICAL- ISMJACOBIN CLERGY BLACK-HOLE SCHOOLS AND RICH CATHEDRALS I advise a boycott rigorous and complete. Mr. Conor O 1 Kelly , M,P., member of Commission. Join us in overthrowing the ascendancy of the classes. Most Rev. Bishop O'Donnell, member of Commission. RELIGIOUS reasons or pretexts are intruded into most matters which have any relation to . Ireland ; and certain personages, who feel themselves set in unwelcome light, will be sure to accuse me of currying favour in some quarter by reprehensible accusations against the religious dogmas or the religious priests of my Church. Nothing can be more unfounded. I believe in that Church in every point, and accept her teaching from Nicaea to Trent, and from Trent to the Vatican. I revere the religious priests of Catholicism. I write exclusively against the domination of a political sacerdotalism, that perpetual curse of Christendom, nowhere more a curse than in Ireland, and never more a curse than now. The political priest- hood sold the high kings to the Norman, and the Parliament to the Castle. The political priesthood can utilise the needs of the body almost as well as the aspirations of the soul. It can manipulate charity as adroitly as faith. While sincere and stainless ministers of religion shudder at the political desecration of the sanctuary, a score of petty Hildebrands parade with ostentation their profitable alliance with the mendaciousness of platforms and the trickery of Cabinets. The rude honesty of a popular tribune has voiced before now what many think, but few dare to utter. In the words of Mr. Michael Davitt : " A conscientious regard for religion, indeed ! No, it is not that. It is the eternal hungering after secular influence and temporal power, the assumption of authority to dictate to laymen what they shall think and do in the affairs of the nation." The vast structure of ascendancy which the hierocrats have been helped by politicians to erect on a basis of poor assistance is almost as notorious as their masterpiece, the organisation of ignorance. They are as supreme on the Board of Subsidies as on the Commission x INTRODUCTION of Investigation, in the Relief Committee as in the Ribbon Lodge. Although a similar incubus has been shaken off by every Catholic nation of universal civilisation, by every Catholic land that was determined not to die, the priestly tyrants of Ireland not only teach to their starveling flocks the dogma of sacerdotal omnipotence, but they believe it themselves. Yet Irish Catholics could convince them of the immensity of their error but for that creature of sinister influence and example, the accommodating Protestant. It is Dublin Castle which has fortified the political sacristy, the edifice of ill from which Ireland sees but two exits, the pauper graveyard and the emigrant quay. Both are congested districts, and the only ones in the country. In other countries Catholic Churchmen are conservative of order and property. From end to end of the Continent they are nowhere to be found inciting " the toiling multitudes to overthrow the ascendancy of the classes," or proclaiming that landed estate is incompatible with human sympathies. In Ireland alone they are the firebrands of the populace ; frustrating every reform by more and more exaggerated demands; glorying in intimidation; stimulating the boycott and the cattle-drive ; applauding the repudiation of contracts; recruiting and directing lawless confederations, excom- municate of Christendom, bound by secret passwords and sectarian oaths, ripe for outrage in the present, and sprung from a past red with ten thousand assassinations. Yet to such hands has English political faction abandoned the distribution of public bounties, the exercise of public authority, the development of national mendi- cancy, and the perpetuation of national decay. I might have continued to admire in silence the wonderful ways of Clericalised Government or Governmentalised Clericalism in Ireland without taking the trouble to put my admiration on paper especially in view of the very effective discouragement of corrobor- atory evidence if there had not occurred the surprising farce of the Royal Commission to inquire into the working of the Congested Districts Board. Royal Commissions of Investigation in Ireland are a comfort and joy to the laughing philosopher. They investigate only what is intended to be made known ; and Mr. Sam Weller's " double-hextry magnifying glasses " could not get them to see anything they were instructed to ignore. The Congested Districts Board has long been notorious as the special domain of the blessed alliance between Priests and Politics in Ireland. Originally established with some intention of aiding distress, it had long since become a Board for Clerical Bounties at the expense of the Tax- payer. It was now to be the subject of a Royal Commission which was to recommend vastly increased powers of dealing with landlord estates and greatly increased concessions of public money. This is how it was to be "investigated" quite impartially, of course. There were ten members of the Commission. Five of the ten were members of the Governing Body of the Board itself, who had now INTRODUCTION xi the pleasure of reporting with proper appreciation upon themselves. Two were Government officials from over the water, who would possibly follow the Irish officials to whom they owed their appoint- ment. Two more were ultra-agrarian M.Ps. and would-be M.Ps. There was a single member of acknowledged independence. Of course, this Royal Commission recommended by an overwhelming majority that the Congestion Board was to carry out the Clerical policy as before, and to receive increased powers of confiscation and increased grants of public money without control or responsibility of any real effect. There never was such a family party. Commissioners volunteered evidence for themselves and their Board. Witnesses were chosen to support the Political Priests, and were ignored or evaded if suspected of impartiality. One Commissioner denounced from his place on the Commission the " audacity " of introducing a reform of the existing Board. Another Commissioner was a notorious and unrepentant Boycotter. Here is an extract from one of his incendiary speeches delivered only a couple of months before he was made a " Royal Commissioner " : There is only one programme that you can observe with any hope or chance of success. ... I say to you, caring not what may result boycott, absolute, rigorous, complete, and exhaustive. . . . There is many a way of killing a cat without choking it with butter. ... I do not care what the results may be ; I advise a boycott rigorous and complete. Another Commissioner thundered at a witness who presumed to blame one of the Clerico-Government Boards in which the Commissioner was interested : " I do not think much of your opinion." Another Commissioner, a clergyman, had called on "the toiling masses of Great Britain to join us in overthrowing the ascendancy of the classes." When witnesses gave testimony to the way in which the apportionment of the Public Subsidies is carried out by 160 local committees presided over by the parish priests, members of the Commission hastened to chip in with declarations that "the Board is indebted to you in the matter." Just imagine hundreds of thousands of pounds of the money of the taxpayers being distributed in England by uncontrolled committees managed by rectors and curates of the Church of England ! What would the Free Church Council say ? And all those enthusiastic witnesses and Royal Commissioners had to admit that Emigration continued to rage worse under their ministrations than anywhere else, that all their clerical favouritism failed to keep the people in the country, that even the few persons whom they had taught a useful trade hastened to carry the accomplishment to America ! As the reader will abundantly perceive in the course of the follow- ing chapters, the very admissions of this Clericalised Commission convicted the whole system of the usual failures which dog clerical usurpation in every country and every period of history. xii INTRODUCTION But I have one word to say in these prefatory notes, a word on drink and education in a congested district ; and this will indicate some more of the moral factors ignored by the clerico-Jacobin charlatans. The scene is that district of Annagry, in the vicinity of Burtonport, where the Duke of Abercorn brought , 10,000 yearly of London money to the fishermen of West Donegal. Here is a piece of evidence before the Congested Commission : SIR JOHN COLOMB How many public-houses are there in Annagry ? VERY REV. MGR. WALKER Five, I suppose. SIR JOHN COLOMB I asked yesterday, and I was told there were eleven. VERY REV. MGR. WALKER There are not so many. There are four there right at the bridge. Four, five, or eleven, there are enough public-houses for a popula- tion of 3000 semi-paupers, as they are said to be. Of the neighbouring island of Arranmore, containing 1400 semi-paupers, we get the following compendium of the drink facilities : SIR JOHN COLOMB Are there any licensed houses in Arranmore? VERY REV. MGR. WALKER There are a number. SIR JOHN COLOMB Can you offer any idea of how many there are ? VERY REV. MGR. WALKER I am almost ashamed to tell you there are seven. SIR JOHN COLOMB Then on Arran Island there was no doctor and seven public-houses ? VERY REV. MGR. WALKER Yes, that is it, and no nurse. It will be admitted that drink facilities were ample, notwith- standing that " influence for good " exercised by the clergy over their flocks. Let us see what were the education facilities. Mr. Walker, an industrial inspector and advisor under the Board, will give us an Annagry specimen : SIR ANTONY MACDONNELL I understood Mr. Sutherland to say that the schools that he saw were inadequate to the average attendance. When the average attendance is exceeded, what becomes of the children ? MR. WALKER They are simply crowded. SIR A. MACDONNELL Is not that insanitary? MR. WALKER The sanitary condition of a great number of these schools is very bad. I have been in a school in Annagry 13 ft. 3 in. by 23 ft. 6 in., and there were eighty children there. SIR A. MACDONNELL How many? MR. WALKER Eighty. SIR A. MACDONNELL And one may expect that children like that will carry away the seeds of disease ? MR. WALKER Yes ; and then there was a rough floor, and you could hardly say which was the roof and which was the wall. The Commissioners, some of them, were horrified at this awful state of affairs, and further questions ensued : MR. BRYCE For eighty children, that is four and a half square feet per INTRODUCTION xiii child. Is there any regulation in Ireland with regard to the space provided for each child in a national school ? MR. WALKER Yes. MR. BRYCE What is the regulation in Ireland with regard to the square foot space per child 3 MR. WALKER I am not quite sure. SIR JOHN COLOMB I think it is ten square feet. SIR A. MACDONNELL There is no definite space in Ireland. All these "national schools," be it not forgotten, are priest- managed. The results of the Congested Board mentality are amazing. On the one hand, there is that miserable hovelful of stunted school children, stifling in their four and a half square feet of floor space eighty Irish Catholic children, we are told. On the other hand, while those piteous youngsters were sickening in that stench- ful air, there was being built, " for the greater glory of God," a vast and lavish new cathedral in the petty townlet of Letterkenny, cost- ing scores of thousands of pounds, surrounded by other architec- tural exhibitions of the clerical spirit, all erected on the very borders of extreme congestion, for whose relief the collecting tambourine was being rattled at all ears of the taxpaying public; but not a single thousand-pound note was divertible from all that stone and mortar, and stained glass, and statuary, for the children's dens of Annagry and scores of other seats of moral management in faithful Donegal ! This, I believe, is what is known in clerical Parliament- arianism as " guarding the souls of Ireland's youth." Nor is it the clerical mentality alone which is amazing in the congested districts. The laity whom those clerics have trained for generations are not unworthy of their spiritual guides. Always ready to receive, they will do absolutely nothing themselves for the common good. Applications were made to the Commissioners at Burtonport for public funds to start a couple of young coopers in what was described as a certain occasion of profit. " Only ^30 would suffice," it was pleaded. But the Commissioners were beginning to know their men ; and Sir John Colomb put this question to a pleader, which goes to the bottom of the cadging, unhelpful, uncivic frame of soul developed by the mendicancy of the congestion policy : SIR JOHN COLOMB Do you mean to say that in a district like this, with something like 10,000 a year coming in for fish do you mean to say that, though that much money is coming in here, 30 cannot be raised to start a paying business that would employ these young coopers ? And do not those well-trained congesters understand how to make the taxpayer pay for the lands required for the enlargement of uneconomic holdings? They have profited by nearly twenty years of the Congested Board and its tax-paid beneficence. Here is an answer which a Commissioner got from the Marquis of xiv INTRODUCTION Conyngham's agent as to the legitimate expectations of those intel- ligent persons : SIR JOHN COLOMB I want to know the initial expense the Congested Board would have to face if they made up their mind to acquire that land for the purpose of enlarging adjoining holdings. MR. POMBROY It would have to be fifty or sixty years' purchase, no doubt. Decidedly the peasant disciples of the Congested Board do not favour confiscation as applied to themselves. They may be said to appreciate fully the value of individual ownership. 1 Still, perhaps, the most shocking illustration of the mentality which has been engendered in Donegal and similar districts is the juxtaposition of such school-dens as the "Black Holes" of Annagry ; the Burtonport fishing community, which does nothing for the children, though it has gained probably ; 100,000 by the improved market initiated by the Duke of Abercorn in 1895 ; and that Letterkenny new cathedral which has absorbed ; 100,000 in stone and decoration, while the children of Donegal have those dens for school-houses ! But enough in the way of preface. More complete details must be left to the body of the book. F. HUGH O'DONNELL. 1 A very amusing instance of a Donegal priest's appreciation in his own case of the value of ownership came before the Commissioners. Colonel Irvine, one of the land agents who are denounced so furiously for declining to sell land at prairie value, gave this specimen of the prairie value set upon his own land by one of the most magnificent of the clerical advocates of a short way with the landlords : COLONEL IRVINE There is one holding I would like to draw attention to. It consists of four acres ; the rent was 155. 9d. There were no improvements whatever, and it was sold for ^115 to a tenant by the Rev. Mr. M'Fadden himself that is, for one hundred and forty-six ytars^ purchase ! ! ! TABLE OF CONTENTS PART I PARTLY HISTORICAL PAGE UNSUCCESSFUL STATE SOCIALISM NOT CONGESTION BUT UNEMPLOY- MENT 2 ON THE HISTORY OF THE SHAM CONGESTION MOVEMENT ... 4 Foreign Competition Policy of Undercultivation The Butt Party Board Failures. THE FATAL CHANGE IN IRISH TILLAGE IO From Tillage for Subsistence to Tillage for Sale From Native Food to Foreign Imports. PART II HIRUDO HIERATICA THE HUGE AND INSATIABLE EXACTIONS OF THE POLITICAL CHURCH 17 A BLOATED CHURCH ESTABLISHMENT THE EXAGGERATED EPISCO- PATE CONVENTUAL LEECHES l8 Comparison with Foreign Catholic Establishments Palatial Churches and Pauper Flocks Convent Begging-Letter Writers Why the Money goes Abroad Church Decoration and Clerical Commissions. THE UNIVERSALITY OF THE CLERICAL GRAB 27 Technical and Industrial Schools Dirt and Hunger in the Schools Grabbing the Local Boards. THE MYSTERY OF LOUGHGLYNN HOUSE 37 How the Taxpayers lost .8900 in order to plant a Foreign Convent in Roscommon. THE CLERICAL COMBINATION AGAINST PROPERTY NOT CONFINED TO THE CONGESTED DISTRICTS ....... 4$ An Example from Tipperary Cattle-Driving Churchmen and their Magistrates. THE CONGESTED BOARD AND THE RIBBON LODGE THE ROBESPIERRES OF THE SACRISTY 49 xvi CONTENTS PART ill LEADING CAUSES OF POVERTY AND DEPOPULATION PACK SUMMARY OF LEADING CAUSES OF POVERTY AND DEPOPULATION . 6l AGRARIAN LEGISLATION AND AGITATION: HOW THEY IMPOVERISH AND DEPOPULATE 64 The Land Court Farce The Farmers expel the Labourers Witness- Baiting again The Tablet on Undercultivation A Bishop's Protest. THE GOMBEEN GROCER AND HIS SPIRITUAL AND JUDICIAL ALLIES . 71 Gombeenism and Bad Food Whisky and Holy Water Gombeen Magistrates The Publican's Till and the Collection Plate Sir H. Plunkett's Removal. THE PEASANT PROPRIETARY NOSTRUM FREQUENT FAILURES AND DANGERS 78 Anglo-Indian Faddists Where Peasant Proprietors Succeed Unknown in Ireland The Coming of the Jew The Irish- American Lesson. " LIBERTY OF TESTATION " THE DEATHBED GRAB .... 83 French Law Protects the Deathbed No Protection in Ireland The Consequence to the Family and the Nation. PAUPERISING DEFECTS OF CHARACTER PRODUCED BY THE DOMINANT SYSTEM 88 HOME AND CONVENT SWEATING Q2 Home Sweating and Tuberculosis Serf-like Convent Labour Killing Lay Industries Lacemaking Slave-Drivers The Freeman's Avowals Starvation Wages and Blinded Eyes. PART IV THE KEY OF THE IRISH REVOLUTION THE POLITICAL SACRISTY AND THE RIBBON LODGE . . . . IOI The Price of the Priest Priests of the First Land League The Con- gested Board Clergy on the Ribbon Lodge Platform Why Ireland is a Foreign Mission. THE LODGE, THE BISHOP, THE BOARD, AND THE COMMISSION . . IO7 Excommunicated in Scotland Blessed in Ireland Mr. William O'Brien against Ribbonism The Bishop of the Board welcomes the Ribbon President. CONTENTS xvii PART V CONCLUSIONS PAGE TYPES OF THE ARRANGED COMMISSION 117 Still the Dark Ages Clerical Mentality Sham Work and Deliberate Waste Congested M.P. Making The Board's Lazzaroni. HOW NOT TO SEE 126 Drunkenness and Subsidies Avoiding Evidence An Irish Journal on a Congested Steeple The Filthiness of a Thousand Priest- Managed Schools Mr. John Dillon's Electors. THE RESULTS OF BLINDFOLDING LONDON AND ROME THE DEAD HAND FOR EVER ! 13! List of Non-Inquiries What Ireland might be Lord Castletown's Experiment The Secret Service of the Sacristy Dublin Castle and the Dead Hand. APPENDIX TO-DAY THE IRISH BEG AND STARVE ; THEIR FATHERS GREW AND FED 143 INSTRUCTIVE FACTS AND AVOWALS 145 THE WORST EVILS OF IRELAND 145 REVELATIONS OF MEDICAL SERVICE IN IRELAND 146 CLERICAL SCHOOL FRAUD AND RUIN OF CHILDREN .... 147 SPECIAL DANGER OF CONVENT FACTORIES 148 THE BOARD AND LABOUR SWEATING 149 GOVERNMENT PLACES FOR CLERICO-JACOBIN PRESS . . . .150 APOSTLES OF ANARCHY 151 IRELAND A NATURAL TIMBER COUNTRY 152 PART I PARTLY HISTORICAL There has been a gradual decline since 1898 in the number of vessels, men, and boys, despite the special efforts made by the Congested Districts Board. Irish Fisheries Report. The Congested Districts Board has been trying to create new industries for twenty years, and has failed in them all. Lord Dudley as Chairman of Commission. Parliament passes Acts "for the benefit of Ireland," and then, discovering Ireland worse than before, sets Royal Commissions to find out why, though knowing why already, and knowing also that the Royal Commissions will not find it out ; and the Royal Commissions sit at Ireland's expense, not daring to ask for the truth of witnesses who dare not tell it, but reporting on the "evidence" in piles of unreadable books, to prepare for more Acts and more Commissions, while the Irish disappear as a race in the most progressive of the ages. Nothing is harder to find out than what everybody knows and nobody dares mention. . . . The Royal Commission on Congestion, who have just finished sitting, illustrate the thing well. They were commissioned to find out why the Congested Districts Board could not cure congestion, and the chief interests represented by them were theology, agitation, landlordism, and agrarian greed. There are priests' men, agitators' men, landlords' men, and tenants' men, also a few really trying to find the truth about congestion, in so far as the others let them ; but the others are there, openly preventing the truth, unless it suits their purpose. Mr. P. Kenny, author 0/" Economics for Irishmen, witness before the Commission. UNSUCCESSFUL STATE SOCIALISM. NOT CONGESTION BUT UNEMPLOYMENT To define my position and to prevent possible misrepresentation, I wish to say two things : first, that I should be happy if everybody in Ireland who wanted ten acres or fifty acres could get them ; and secondly, that I am absolutely convinced that the whole of the unemployment and depopulation problem could be solved in Ireland by Irishmen without any resort to almsgiving boards or individuals either at home or aboard. But nothing but permanent injury can result to the country from the system of the so-called Congested Districts Board, which is merely a pseudo-paternal and pseudo-theocratic variety of unsuccessful State socialism, worked by intolerant political partisans with the collusion of a politico- sectarian ring in Dublin Castle, at the expense of the general taxpayers, who do not share its bounties, and who are excluded from its secrets. It is, in fact, an attempt to create a sort of Paraguay on Shannon, an Irish copy of the South American experiment in the maintenance of "tame Indians," colonies of Indios mansos, lay pauper settlements ruled by clerical directors ; and it may be said to combine the spirit of Holy Obedience with the spirit of poof relief on the models of the Poplar Union. The supreme object of the supreme promoters of this system in Ireland is to effect the redistribution of Irish property among the acolytes and retainers of the reverend and political Fathers, together with all the profits and advantages, social and financial, which must accrue in Ireland to the leaders of such a revolution. Provided that the clerical managers profit for themselves and their superiors, it is for them a matter of entire indifference that the con- sequences have been, and must continue to be, ruinous to the nation, destructive of self-help, integrity, and independence, and at once productive of class hatred and public mendicancy and depopulation. There are no congested districts in Ireland. The name is a lie intended to open a whole procession of subsidiary falsehoods. There is only too much room for everybody. It is not congestion of the population, but unemployment of the population, which is the matter with Ireland, largely the result of hindrances, almost amounting to prohibition, of employment, thrown by agitators, mainly clerical, in the way of the employing class, and creative of POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 3 widespread disinclination to labour with honesty and efficiency on the part of a large proportion of the unemployed. Instead of remedying these evils, the sham Congestion Board aggravates them by socialist and semi-socialist devices for the expenditure of other people's money on the one hand, and by direct and indirect pauperisation on the other. You can never elevate a population which learns from your policy that begging is more profitable, as well as more indolent, than the exertion of manliness and energy in the struggle for life. When, into the bargain, the socialist distribution of money and money's worth becomes the privilege of a political priesthood skilled in the over- throw of all rival classes of society, you produce a national situation that is almost incurable. ON THE HISTORY OF THE SHAM CONGESTION MOVEMENT FOREIGN COMPETITION POLICY OF UNDERCULTIVATION THE BUTT PARTY BOARD FAILURES I WAS present at the genesis of the sham congestion policy, and have followed its development to the present day. As member for Gal way and Dungarvan in the Parliaments of 1874 and 1880, as member of the Council of the Irish Home Rule League under Mr. Butt, and Vice-President and Hon. Secretary of the Irish Home Rule Confederation in Great Britain, I was personally cognizant of all the circumstances in which the sham Congestion Board had its origin. I was aware that the Board was founded with no approval of the Irish parliamentary representatives. I claim to have made a special study of the economic questions involved at home and on the Continent I repeatedly visited Ireland for the purpose of observing the working of the agrarian legislation and agitation, including the operations in the so-called congested districts. As I have said before, there are no congested districts. It is the want of employment and want of industry which are in question, and not over-population. Population is far more con- gested in a large number of town areas in Dublin, Cork, Waterford, Limerick, etc., and is certainly not less miserable. Why should the money of the general taxpayer be taken to improve the position of the labouring family in Mayo or Donegal, and why should nothing be done for labouring families cooped up in infinitely less space, with less air and less sanitation, in the poor streets of Dublin or Limerick? Why should the taxpayer in Dublin or Limerick have his contributions expended upon far less poverty in Donegal and Mayo, when the utmost extremity of human misery is to be found in repulsive abundance at his own doors ? The fundamental objection to the Congested Districts Board is that it is an absolute falsehood ; and this falsehood has coloured and aggravated with related inveracities the whole course of its being and influence. Even as regards the agricultural districts, the difficulty is, above all, an employment and labour difficulty. " Agricultural congested districts " are only the slum areas to which the labouring population has drifted, and, for want of remunerative POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 5 employment, has sunk into a condition hardly better than the worst cases of unemployment and destitution in the poorest of town districts. No doubt there is a reason for this growth of agricultural pauperism. There was huge political disfranchisement l at Catholic " Emancipation," naturally involving legislative neglect, for the disfranchised can seldom influence legislatures in which they are not represented. Indeed, legislative measures, such as the reckless promotion of foreign competition against products of the soil, have had a directly baneful effect here, as everywhere in Ireland. The foreign competition, supported by O'Connell, which discouraged home agriculture, at the same time discouraged the employment of agricultural labour. The evil was made worse when measures like the Gladstone Land Acts crippled the landed proprietors, who were such large employers of labour, and simultaneously stimulated the tenant class to curtail their employment of farm workers in connection with the Land League policy of farm deterioration. The tenant farmer who hoped to get his rent reduced 50 per cent, in the land courts by showing with copious inveracity that his farm had become 50 per cent, less valuable, was certainly not in a frame of mind to encourage the employment of additional spademen and ploughmen, but rather the direct contrary. The thriving farm, kept in good heart and fertility by a dozen labourers, might scarcely appeal to the compassion of any land court whatever ; but the same farm covered with weeds, and baffling the scanty efforts of a couple of inefficient and dispirited workers, was precisely the object which, as a thousand idiotic decisions proved, unfailingly moved the Land Commissioner to issue his ridiculous, but omnipotent, mandate of rent reduction. Between Free Trade, the impoverishment of landowners, and the deliberate under-cultivation and impoverish- ment of land, there.could not fail to be a vast addition to unemploy- ment in Ireland. But congested districts there were nowhere. There was general poverty of the labouring class, and that can only be permanently met by a restored demand for labour. There are scores of thousands of half-worked or quarter-worked farms in Ireland to-day capable of employing not only all the ragged listless loafers of the so-called congested districts, but a far greater number, if they could be forthcoming to meet the demand of energetic and scientific agriculture, and if the energetic and scientific agriculture could itself be brought into existence to employ the agricultural labour. The general and increasing diminution of agricultural employ- ment is the constant and increasing obstacle to any real betterment of what is called the congested districts problem. What on earth 1 The disfranchisement of the Catholic popular electorate in 1829 was enormous. Out of 200,000 electors enfranchised in 1793 by the Irish Protest- ant Parliament, 175,000, or seven-eighths, were disfranchised by the "Catholic Relief" fraud of O'Connell thirty-six years afterwards. 6 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN is the national use of planting five hundred or a thousand " Con- gested Board tenants" at a vast expenditure of what is really public almsgiving, when ten times or thirty times that population drifts from the same districts across the Atlantic ? Let us imagine that some bishop of the " Ancient Hibernian Order " has secured the planting of a thousand Congested Board tenants, at the cost of half a million pounds sterling of public money. Where is the profit to country or exchequer when, from precisely the same districts, thirty thousand of the rural population has at the same time drifted to Americal A great many of the congested districts tenants also, as soon as they have saved or begged the price of their passage money, are perfectly certain to become emigrants as well. The policy of the Congested Districts Board is really a modern version of the tub of the Danaidae, which, as fast as it was filled from the top, flowed away in holes and fissures in every quarter. The object of the directors of the Congested Districts Commission is to procure an ever larger supply of public money from the top. On the questions with which the Congested Districts Board professes to deal I may justly call myself a representative of the economic policy of the Irish national party of 1870-1880, the only open and free national party which in a century has sought to represent all Ireland Butt, King-Harman, Colthurst, John Martin, Joseph Ronayne, etc. and their economic policy emphatically repudiated the very possibility of a particular result of general evils being curable by local remedies alone. The Butt party, in fact, had found a sort of local Congestion Board in existence, which administered a so-called Irish reproductive fund for the special benefit of a dozen counties, just as to-day ; and straightway brought in a resolution, proposed by Mr. Synan, M.P. for Limerick, for the encouragement of fisheries on all the coasts of Ireland, at the same time demanding the creation of a general reproductive loan fund for the encouragement of industries generally throughout all Ireland, The want of employment, which misgovernment perpetuated in so many local industries, was felt to be merely a subdivision of a general evil ; and the Butt party proposed to deal with it through general remedies above all. If a more intensive agriculture flourished, there would be a greater demand for farm hands. Fishing, weaving, a hundred handicrafts, required a national demand, and not local coddling. The Butt party depended essenti- ally for its success on the growth of goodwill among Irishmen, and the constant co-operation of classes, and the promotion of mutual welfare. So practical and non-romantic a politician as Mr. M'Carthy Downing, M.P. for county Cork, was able to plan, with the cordial approval of landowners like King-Harman and O'Conor Don, great schemes of voluntary migration in which local landlords would indicate farms, and local farmers would offer employment, to POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 7 industrious settlers from distant parishes or counties. Unfortunately, after the time of Butt a supreme object of legislation and agitation has been to encourage illwill, to drive class against class, and to make even the farmer dismiss his labourer in order that a deteriorated soil might claim a diminished rent from the Land Commission. The existing Reproductive Loan Fund, already far too limited and small for its actual objects, was by the Reproductive Loan P'und Act, 1874, made to be applicable also to the Irish fisheries! Not an additional penny was granted for industries of any kind ! The fiction of a local congested district in Ireland seems to have been invented at this time to excuse the refusal of the Government to con- sider the general wants of the country. Local influences naturally supported a theory which promised local profits, and these local influences triumphed in the well-meaning Balfour policy of 1888- 1890. More properly speaking, the triumph was not in, but over, the policy of Mr. Balfour. Mr. Balfour, during his Chief Secretary- ship in Ireland, saw the expediency of a light railway system in the west, which might both grant transport facilities of the utmost necessity, and provide employment during their construction. Being naturally a man of warm human sympathies, sometimes disguised under a rather elaborate air of detachment and aloofness, Mr. Balfour was led or pushed somewhat beyond the light railway scheme, though never approaching the system of general disturbance, under the pretext of general helpfulness, which has since connoted the activities of the Congested Fiction Board. It is difficult to narrate briefly the steps by which an undertaking that was meant to remove distress without provoking subversive cupidities became the agent and the instrument for unsettling society and confiscating property, into which it has developed in the hands of the clerico-Jacobin ascendancy. To the English Liberal party is really due the inception of this movement towards State socialism. Before the return of Mr. Balfour's party to power, in the Sessions of 1883-1884, what may be called the definite step towards combining Irish distress legislation with party politics was inaugurated by the Gladstone Ministry. The full efficacy of the Congested Districts Board did not commence until Mr. John Morley's nomination of the Patron of the Ancient Hibernians and one of his most landlord-hating priests as members, and practically the dominant members, of the Board. I throw no doubt upon the convictions or sincerity of these reverend gentlemen ; but, as will be seen, it was a ruinous measure to place the supreme distribution of public money, together with indefinite, which meant infinite, opportunities of social disturbance, in the power of partisans so potent in themselves, and so immeasurably more potent through their connection, under holy obedience, with the whole scheme of the Propaganda priesthood for establishing the 8 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN domination of Churchmen upon the ruin or subjugation of every other class in the community. Mr. T. M. Healy, M.P., in his most instructive pamphlet, " Why Ireland is not Free," published in 1898, explicitly states, as already mentioned, that the addition of this element to the Board was part of a vast plan of campaign imposed upon the complicity or credulity of Mr. John Morley, Chief Secretary for Ireland during the year 1894. After mentioning a long list of "Mr. Dillon's principal lieutenants in the plan of campaign " who were then made salaried magistrates and resident magistrates, clerks of the Crown, and county court judges, Mr. Healy, M.P., proceeds to state : " As to honorary appointments, the Most Rev. Dr. O'Donnell was made a member of the Congested Districts Board. The Rev. Denis O'Hara, P.P., Mr. Dillon's chief supporter in the west, was also appointed one of its members." These reverend gentlemen are still members, and dominant members, of the Congested Districts Board. Father Denis O'Hara is entrusted with the special functions on the Board of " representative of agriculture " ! The most reverend prelate himself, chief manager of Government distress relief as well as Patron of the Ancient Hibernians, Royal Com- missioner on the Congested Districts Commission, treasurer of the League Parliamentary party, had been Chairman of the ominous League "Convention of the Irish Race" in 1896. At that con- vention the most reverend Chairman, supreme manager of the Congested Districts Board, etc., etc., proposed the resolution which pledged this convention, " representing the Irish people, to give its financial support to the Irish party." So intimate was the connec- tion between an intolerant political party in Ireland and Mr. John Morley's nominee to the Congested Districts Board ! Nobody questions the most reverend treasurer, etc., etc., as. to his perfect right to convey the dollars of Mr. Patrick Ford into the war-chest of Mr. John Redmond ; but where is the impartiality ? Of course, there has been some return, or apparent return, for the vast amount of money which, during the last fifteen years, has been transferred from the taxpayers to the protege's of the Con- gested Board. Houses have been built or rebuilt, thatched or slated ; estates have been bought with or without pressure, and have been divided among old or new tenants; various branches of industry have been subsidised ; the whole coast from Kerry to Donegal has been explored for possible fishing or yachting stations ; quasi-fishing industries have been started, some to flourish and most to perish ; l railways have been built or extended, some with profit 1 The following summary of the last Irish Fisheries Report shows how complete is the failure of the Board in this domain also. Having omitted to notice the fact that, so long as the Irish arc led to prefer alcohol and tannin tea to nourishing food, there is little use catching fish, the congested fictionists are proud to get threepence return from every shilling of outlay. If the Irish wanted POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 9 to the neighbourhood, and some, it is said, for the more special convenience of the reverend clergy. There can be no doubt of the high intelligence and philanthropic zeal of many of the Board officials, even though they do not conceal their virtues in their courteous estimates of one another's efficiency. But the main fact remains, huge, startling, not to be dissimulated. Since the Board was sent upon its mission of politics and benevolence, the popula- tion of Ireland has dropped by another three-quarters of a million, the half of ivhich depopulation is to be traced to the areas operated by the Board. In other words, the policy of local beneficence, without any intelligent regard to the general situation, has broken down as completely as could ever have been anticipated, even without counting the national losses of every kind involved in the policy of partisanship, favouritism, and class discrimination, to use no harsher word, which has accompanied the action of its most influential managers. I shall return to the consideration of several sub-questions oi the gravest order which belong to the consideration of this matter ; but here I have to put on record above all a renewed protest against the miserable and short-sighted theory that you can deal locally with the evils called by the deceptive name of " congestion," and that Donegal or Kerry is likely to increase in wealth and numbers while the general population of the country is passing uninterruptedly from poverty to exile. The Irish party under Mr. Butt never looked on any local remedies as more than palliatives of the situation, and considered that the misery in the waste places of Ireland was above all only a symptom of a universal malady. Without the union of classes they believed it impossible to heal that malady, and in the absence of that union and co-operation the most energetic of local nostrums must remain a fiasco. to eat fish, and knew how to cook it, there would be no failure of fisheries, and no need to subsidise them. "The Government report on the sea and inland fisheries of Ireland shows that last year three of the four chief fishing seasons were disappointing, the total catch (exclusive of shellfish) being only 753,471 cwt., as against 998,206 cwt. in the previous year. The falling off was, save as regards haddock and unspecified fish, general, but was most serious in the case of mackerel. As regards the number of vessels, men, and boys engaged in fishing on the Irish coast, there has been a gradual decline since 1898, despite the special efforts made by the Congested Districts Board to develop the fisheries." THE FATAL CHANGE IN IRISH TILLAGE FROM TILLAGE FOR SUBSISTENCE TO TILLAGE FOR SALE FROM NATIVE FOOD TO FOREIGN IMPORTS HERE I must touch, at least, that cause of diminished employment and diminished subsistence of the most wide-reaching kind, which has revolutionised, not for the better, the whole problem of living in Ireland, but which is practically ignored by almost all who deal with that problem. By this is meant the Vital and Fatal Change which has substituted indirect subsistence for direct subsistence as the object of agricultural industry during the past century in Ireland. By Direct Subsistence is meant where the object of the tiller or cultivator is to raise food and other necessaries from his holding with the object of directly consuming such products on the holding by himself and by his dependants ; by Indirect Subsistence is meant where the object of the cultivator is not to produce things for direct consumption on the holding, but things which must be sold in near or distant markets in order to obtain money to purchase the articles of consumption which have become customary on the holding. In the former case, let us say, a farmer by himself and his male and female labourers raises on the farm the principal articles of diet and clothing, the corn, the potatoes, the bacon, the wool and flax for garments, the milk, butter, and cheese, which clothe and feed, with little recourse to foreigners, the entire farmstead from year to year. Such a holding can be self-sufficing, no matter what the range of prices in near or distant markets. The object of the farmer is not Sale, but Subsistence. Under the other system, that of indirect subsistence, the cultivator looks to his holding, not to feed and clothe directly him and his, but to produce something which, when sold in the foreign market, can obtain money with which the farmer can then buy mostly in foreign markets the com- modities, meat, bread, tea, manufactured cloths, etc., requisite for his family. In the case of direct subsistence native products are applied directly to native wants. Under indirect subsistence native products must first be exchanged in the foreign markets, at prices affected by the competition of all the world, for the money required to buy, at similar competitive prices, the products of foreign industry to supply domestic consumption. POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN u It is literally impossible to exaggerate the influence of this economic revolution on the population, employment, self-support, and stability of comfort in Ireland, as in all countries in which a similar change, amounting to a practical subversion of economic life, has been introduced and has supplanted the ancient system. A century ago there were innumerable farms in Ireland upon which almost every article of food and clothing was produced on the spot, prepared for use on the spot or in the neighbourhood, and, being intended for home consumption instead of outside sale, was practic- ally unaffected by the range of prices and the influence of foreign markets. It is absolutely impossible to exaggerate the contrast between such a farm of the olden time and a farm of the later days. The milk, corn, potatoes, the bacon, the wool, and flannel, went directly to supply the wants of the men and women who grew and tended them. It was hardly necessary to send a five-pound note in the year out of the neighbourhood and out of the farm. The farmer had neither to pay his money to the tea-planters of Assam for tea, nor to the millers of Minneapolis for flour, nor to the spinners and weavers of Bradford for cloth. It was a matter of indifference to him whether the product of his farm was worth a hundred pounds on the London market or only twenty-five pounds. He had no need to send it to the London market. It was con- sumed at home, where it was wanted. With good husbandry and intelligent government, such a land could defy famine as it defied foreign competition. The sack of potatoes and the bushel of wheat had exactly the same nutritive power for the support of the farmer and his helpers whether the price of the one and the other had gone up or had gone down 100 per cent, on Stock Exchanges a thousand miles away. I am intimately acquainted with the history of an old-time farm in Connaught during a hundred years. At the outset of that period the farm was cultivated for direct subsistence. The farmer em- ployed many labourers and many female servants on his farm of two hundred acres. There was labour in abundance, and every inch of the two hundred acres was cultivated in one way or another. The corn and oats that were consumed in bread and cakes were grown upon the farm. So were the potatoes and the cabbages ; so were the bacon and the eggs. Half the farm was under pastur- age ; and the cows and sheep supplied milk and butter, and wool and hides, for use, and not for commerce. There was no diminution of employment in winter, for in winter indoor work, both the work of women and the work of men, proceeded without interruption. It was a merry as well as an industrious scene in the huge room where stood the kitchen hearth. Twenty or thirty men and women labourers plied their tasks, which were lightened by story-telling and songs. When the big table was spread for meals, the farmer and his family had a white cloth laid at their end. It was almost the 12 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN only distinction between the master and the servants. The wool that was spun was woven in the neighbourhood or in the house. Flannel and frieze were produced at home or in the neighbourhood from the farmer's wool. The hides were sent to a tannery in the neighbouring town, and they or their equivalents came back in boots and shoes. There was the growing of flax and scutching of it, and the making of linen. At regular seasons travelling tailors and shirt-makers came round the farms and clad the inmates from the stuffs which the inmates had grown. There was little money paid in wages; but the wage in lodging and board, and clothing, and healthy, industry, and friendly companion- ship was high according to every intelligent standard. The farmer and his family got only some clothes of superior cloth from distant markets at rare intervals for wear at church and testival. The farmer brought home from the county town an occasional newspaper which told of the fall of Napoleon or the rise of O'Connell. There was not much difference between his children and his servants. Old William, the head labourer, had buried the farmer's father, and hoped to be buried by his son. A million of such homesteads, if they had not been destroyed by what is called progress, could have defied for ever depopulation and emigration. To-day upon that farm everything is changed. There is not one- tenth of the old employment for labour. The house is almost empty. The farmer gets everything he wears and everything he eats and drinks from the shops in the town, which in turn get their commodities from Leeds and Chicago and Assam. Everything that the farmer grows he has first to sell for what price he can get before he can pay to the Englishman and the American and the Anglo-Indian the cost of clothes, shirts, and flannels, and hosiery, and tinned meats, and poisonous tea, which his father never wanted, or produced at home. Where twenty human beings lived healthy lives, their three or four successors must pinch and pine to make ends barely meet. Farming for direct subsistence nourished a populous Ireland, even though skill was rude and ignorance was manifold ; farming to produce something which can be sold abroad to obtain what might be better produced at home has left Ireland bare of her inhabitants and a pauper before the world. A witness, Mr. Thomas Swan, miller and grain merchant, nominated to give evidence before the Congested Commission by the Moderator of the General Assembly, gave most significant evidence on the disastrous consequences to the population of Inishowen of the change of diet from the native food grown on the land to the imported food, if it can be called food, which has taken its place, very much as I have mentioned above. At the same time this intelligent witness indicates the public-house and POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 13 what is called "home industry" as combining with bad food to produce depopulation and disease : A public-house should not be run in a congested area ; but, if there at all, it would tend for the bettering of the condition of the people to have it run as a separate business, and in an entirely different house from any other business. Regarding food, the people should be encouraged to return in some measure to the oatmeal and wheaten porridge, eggs, and milk, raised in their own farms. These nourishing and cheap foods have been largely abandoned, and in a lesser degree their own poultry and potatoes, in favour of Indian meal, fine flour, tea, and tinned manna from Packingtown. The result is apparent, and unless stopped soon the Inishowen man of the next generation will be half a foot shorter in stature, and have no teeth to speak of. For the shirt and like industries I advocate small factories through the districts for about forty or fifty workers each as a stibstitute for work taken home, A cheap building with one supervisor of work would suffice, and money might be lent to fit up such factories. The small country factory system develops fine healthy girls, t/ie home work of this class weak and sickly ones. Not long ago I saw a sight of disgust and horror which illustrated all the difference between that cultivation for Direct Subsistence under which the labourer wore the wool shorn from the sheep of the farm, and woven in the house on the farm, and the modern system in which the labourers must often clothe themselves, according to the laws of price and purchase, from the fcetid shelves of a rag fair. An Irish doctor in the East End of London led me one day to see a storehouse of clothing for the Irish. In a filthy little square or yard, surrounded by overcrowded and decaying houses, a couple of merchants in that line of business had set up their enterprise. They bought the second-hand, the cast-off, clothes of the working classes. It was pence as often as shillings which represented the monetary value of the indescribable fabrics that were handed across the broad and dirty counters. The piles of abominable garments were in some cases subjected to a very summary process of much-needed fumigation, which could not, however, effect any considerable regeneration. Then they were made up in tight bundles packed in suitable receptacles, and sent over to Ireland to be sold to the farm labourer and the town artisan, instead of the clean strong suits of home-making which used to be grown, and woven, and cut, and sewn upon the farm, and by the hands of the farm occupants, in days before progress and before depopulation. Meantime in Irish huts and houses the girls brought up at the convent schools have learned to read the penny novel; they have forgotten knitting, and spinning, and stitching, and cutting, and fitting. When they are tired of moping away their lives in Ireland, they cross the ocean to work alongside of negroes in America. These vital and fatal changes were possibly beneath the con- sideration of a Royal Commission appointed, in the intention of its authors, to transfer the lands of existing owners to the followers of the patrons of the Ribbon lodge. More probably those authors 14 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN knew, or felt instinctively, that the trail would lead direct from the untaught, dependent peasants who are the product of the priest- managed schools right to that omnipotent triad of the popular existence : the publican, the politician, and the priest. The publican, in his various incarnations of spirit-grocer, loan-grocer, credit-grocer, credit-grocer-and-draper ; the politician, mostly chosen from the ranks or the counters of the tea-and-whisky men ; the priest, filling his collection plates with the dirty coin of the publican, nominating and electing the ignorant servility of the politician. Here is the inseparable combination which inculcates on the peasant what he shall buy, and eat, and drink, and pay. Were the Irish farmers to return again to growing on their own fields what they eat and wear, if the Irish farmers even began to learn once more that they ought to live on, and from, their land instead of paying ruinous credit-prices for the foreign stuff which fills the shelves of the gombeen-man ; where would be the gains of the credit-shop ? Where would be the salary of the agitator ? Where would be the collections of the politician-priest the cathedral-building, convent- building, villa-building, shareholding politician-priest ? Sir Horace Plunkett, as we shall briefly have to notice, has been made to suffer the penalty of trying to teach the Irish farmer to feed himself and his family without paying that ruinous toll, that rumous usury, to the ally and paymaster of the politician and the priest. Sir Horace Plunkett has been dismissed for trying to stop the thieving of the gombeen-men, and his dismissal has been the work of the British Government in order to conciliate the votes of the Parliamentary nominees of gombeen-man and priest. Session after session Mr. John Dillon had demanded his head, and Mr. John Dillon is M.P. for the Congested Board ; M.P. for the favoured electors of East Mayo who have had spent upon them Five Hundred Thousands Sterling of the money of the general tax-payers. Mr. John Dillon has a safe seat under the segis of that munificent poor-box, under the ?egis of " his principal supporters in the West." Is there an English constituency where "the principal supporters " of the sitting member are authorised to spend Five Hundred Thousands Sterling of public money among his electors ? POSTSCRIPT If we are to credit the statement of that luminary of the cattle drivers, Mr. Stephen Gwynn, M.P. for the Galway Sacristies, Mr. John Dillon is not only the protege" of the Congested Board in East Mayo, but the author of Mr. Birrell's expected Bill for placing the University education of the Irish Catholic laity under the heel of the venerable congeners of Mr. Dillon's " chief supporters in the West." In the course of a violent assault of oratory upon the Irish Judge who checked Mr. GinnelPs cattle - driving by temporary seclusion, Mr. Ginnell's admiring colleague revealed the identity of POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 15 Mr. Birrell's teacher. I quote from the public Press of January 14: Yesterday, Mr. Stephen Gwynn, M.P., was the principal speaker at a Nationalist meeting which was held at Nenagh, county Tipperary. Speaking of the Irish University question, Mr. Gwynn said that at the present moment, so far as they knew, the scheme which Mr. Bryce and Sir Antony MacDonnell had proposed was being dropped, and instead there was being taken tip a scheme which was in the first instance proposed by Mr. John Dillon. What are Mr. John Dillon's qualifications? Doubtless the same which obtain him the support of Father Denis O'Hara and the Bishop of the Board. PART II HIRUDO HIERATICA THE HUGE AND INSATIABLE EXACTIONS OF THE POLITICAL CHURCH 'Mid the village, poor and sordid, 'Mid the flock, unfed, unlettered, Rose and fane, more Goth than Gothic, Fettered taste, and waste unfettered. Foreign art and Irish money, Tens of thousands, golden pieces ; 'Mid the wreck of folk and country, Pauper flocks have fertile fleeces. The splendid newly-built Catholic church, the well-built convent, now and then the Bishop's palace, rise among the wretched cabins of some of the poorest people in the world. British Medical Journal ', March 26, 1904. Nothing is more firmly fixed in the minds of many shopkeepers and their peasant customers, than that the prosperity or destruction of their business is at the will of the priest. ... A priest says in a " sermon " about the Christmas collection : "If I find any one who does not pay, I'll take care he is exposed." . . . When a person in the family has money, and grows old, the priest often becomes lawyer to him as well as spiritual adviser. ... I know even wealthy families whose ordinary affairs of business are directed every day by priests against their own will and judgment, so complete is the organised terror. The Irish Catholic atithor 0/" Economics lor Irishmen. IT must not be thought that Donegal and Kerry are exceptional in the boast of congestion cathedrals. The expensive megalomania of the clergy shows everywhere. In the wretched village of Ros- common, capital of cattle-driving, they have built a pompous church for ^80,000, blazing with gold and mosaic ^80,000 for less than 2000 parishioners ! A recent correspondent of the Standard has noticed its cruel contrast with surrounding misery and ignorance : The morning rose fine on Roscommon, and I saw an ugly church, that lately cost 80,000, looking down on decay and dirt, with the old church, much less ugly, standing useless in the middle of the miserable town. The population is 1891 ! Much of the Irish money for these gaudy edifices goes to Italian and German purveyors of " ecclesiastical art," supported by the spiritual authorities at Rome. A BLOATED CHURCH ESTABLISHMENT THE EXAGGERATED EPISCOPATE CONVENTUAL LEECHES COMPARISON WITH FOREIGN CATHOLIC ESTABLISHMENTS PALATIAL CHURCHES AND PAUPER FLOCKS CONVENT BEGGING- LETTER WRITERS WHY THE MONEY GOES ABROAD CHURCH DECORA- TION AND CLERICAL COMMISSIONS THERE is a source of Irish poverty and pauperisation which is probably the main source of all, but which, as a matter of course, the Royal Commissioners have been led by their directors and guides to avoid with more care and anxiety than any other cause of the public misfortune. I refer to the overgrown, the prodigious, the astounding and intolerable extent and increase of the Catholic ecclesiastical establishment, which, especially in recent years, has out-Heroded beyond all comparison any evils which were imputed to the Protestant Church previous to its disestablishment and dis- endowment. While the general population of Ireland has been going down by leaps and bounds towards the abyss, the clerical population has been mounting by cent, per cent, within the same period. The public opinion of other countries at least makes no secret of these facts of the Irish clerical situation. They have got into foreign parliaments, and have figured in the replies of responsible Ministers. A short time ago, when an Austrian Cabinet was being heckled by some anti-clerical opponents upon its alleged encourage- ment of an excessive number of clerical persons in Austria, the Minister replied : " If you want to know what an excessive number of the clergy is like, go to Ireland. In proportion to their popula- tion the Irish have got ten priests and nuns to the one who exists in Austria. I do not prejudge the question. They may be wanted in Ireland. But let not honourable members talk about over-clericalism in Austria until they have studied the clerical statistics of Ireland." A Jesuit visitor to Ireland, on returning to his English acquaintances and being asked how did he find the priests in Ireland, replied : " The priests in Ireland ! There is nobody but priests in Ireland. Over there they are treading upon one another's heels." While the population of Ireland has 18 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 19 diminished one-half, the population of the presbyteries and convents has multiplied threefold or more. If we compare the Catholic Church establishment in Ireland even the permanent system and framework with such establish- ments in other Catholic countries, the results will be amazing to the average Irishman. There are in Ireland some 3,000,000 Catholics, and at the present rate of emigration and decay there will be soon far less. P'or this small handful there are no less than four archbishops, says the Statesman's Year-Book, and twenty-three bishops, besides a bishop auxiliary. If we cross the water to Belgium, we find a population of 7,000,000 Catholics, that is to say, far more than double the Catholic population of Ireland. For these 7,000,000, however, there are in Belgium only one archbishop and five bishops. If Belgium were staffed with prelates in proportion to its Catholic population on the Irish scale, it should have nine or ten arch- bishops and some sixty bishops. Alongside of Belgium lies the German Empire, with 21,000,000 Catholics, or seven times the Catholic population of Ireland. In the whole of Germany there are five Catholic archbishops and twenty bishops. If the German Catholics were to have archbishops and bishops on the scale of Ireland, they would have twenty-eight of the former and a hundred and sixty-eight of the latter, instead of the total of twenty-five archbishops and bishops who form the total episcopate of the great German Catholic Church. If we take a particular German state which is Catholic as Ireland is Catholic, Bavaria is a satisfactory example. It has a population of nearly 5,000,000 Catholics, or nearly two-thirds more than Ireland ; but Bavaria has only two archbishops and six bishops. If the Bavarian episcopate were staffed on the scale of Ireland, it should have six archbishops and forty bishops. I shall conclude with the great Catholic empire of Austria- Hungary, with a Catholic population of over 36,000,000. There are eleven archbishops in Austria-Hungary and forty bishops. I take my figures from the Annuario Ecclesiastico. If rich and powerful Austria-Hungary was staffed with prelates on the magnifi- cent scale of ruined Ireland, it should have forty-eight archbishops and two hundred and eighty-eight bishops. Belgium, Germany, and Austria - Hungary are great, rich, flourishing, and progressive Catholic countries ; Ireland is a disappearing community, depopu- lated and pauperised, and is burdened with a Church establishment from four to eight times above the ratio in those successful and improving countries. This enormous population of Churchmen, far beyond the necessities and even the luxuries of religious worship and service, would be a heavy tax upon the resources of great and wealthy lands. What must it be for Ireland to have to supply the episcopal 20 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN villas, and new cathedrals, and handsome presbyteries, and hand- some incomes of this enormous and increasing host of reverend gentlemen, who, as regards five-sixths of their number, contribute neither to the spiritual nor temporal felicity of the island ? Here is the reason why the ranks of the political priesthood are so populous in Ireland ; here is the reason why that priesthood in Ireland seeks to monopolise every post and profession in public and private life to which an emolument is attached and from which a layman can be excluded. They are the despotic managers of all primary schools, and can exact what homage they choose from the poor serf-teachers whom they nominate, and whom they keep eternally under their thumb. They absolutely own and control all the secondary schools, with all their private profits and all their Government grants. 1 In the university what they do not dominate they mutilate. Every appointment, from dispensary doctors to members of Parliament, must acknowledge their ownership and pay toll to their despotism. The county councils must contribute patronage according to their indications ; the parish committees of the congested districts supplement their pocket-money. They have annexed the revenues of the industrial schools. They are engaged in transforming the universal proprietary of Ireland in order to add material for their exactions from the living and the moribund. Of course the Royal Ribbon Commission has not inquired into this vast source of aggravation of Irish poverty. Yet I am told that not less than ^5, 000,000 sterling are lifted from the Irish people every year by the innumerable agencies of clerical suction which are at work upon all parts of the Irish body politic and social. Nor can it be forgotten that the material loss is only a portion of the injury. The browbeaten and intimidated condition of the popular action and intelligence, which is necessary to this state of things, necessarily communicates its want of will and energy to every department and every function of the com- munity. I have referred to the instructive spectacle presented by that enormous pile of ecclesiastical buildings in the little hamlet of Letterkenny, in Donegal, the cathedral worthy of a metropolis, the huge ecclesiastical college. Much the larger part of ^100,000 sterling has been expended upon those costly edifices on the very brink and edge of the congested districts of a pauperised and depopulated county, whose pauperisation and depopulation are increasing from year to year. The Most Rev. Dr. O'Donnell, the Bishop of the Congested Board, is the chief pastor and chief everything else in Donegal. Since he became chief dispenser of the public funds in Donegal he has been enabled to construct 1 Mr. Birrell, the Chief Secretary, recently declared that " the system " in these Clerical Schools "is repulsive," consisting, "not in educating their pupils but in turning them into paying machines " for the Clerical School proprietors. In other words, a gigantic and criminal fraud. POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 21 that palatial pile of clerical structures. I do not presume to blame the Bishop of the Board for accepting from the people the contributions which raised that metropolitan cathedral in that petty town. With his ideas, his training, and his sense of duty to his ecclesiastical superiors, it has never seemed even incongruous to him that the population to whom he is a sort of Government providence, scattering the public wealth, should repay him for his generosity by aiding him to erect those costly structures of episcopal ostentation. It seems to him most natural. I am sure that he feels as entirely justified by his conscience in accepting that voluntary tithe from the beneficiaries of the Congested Fund, as the most zealous priest or monk who takes from a dying man rich legacies for pious uses. But I have not to deal with the devout conscience of the Bishop of the Board. Looking at the matter merely from the economic point of view, what an addition it is to the burdens of those impoverished districts that a popula- tion which almost lives on the pauper grants from public bounty should be led to contribute to their Church establishment the huge sums involved in the erection of Letterkenny Cathedral and its annexes ! But there is nothing unusual or irregular whatever, from the Irish clerical point of view, in expending enormous sums of the people's contribution in edifices and constructions whose magni- ficence is so painfully out of keeping with those thousands of insanitary hovels and those school buildings, ill built and ill kept, where the starving children acquire ignorance and tuberculosis. A centre of pauperism, a congested district, to use official fiction, not much less miserable than Donegal, is the county of Kerry. Yet in Kerry, as in Donegal, the local Bishop has no hesitation about appealing for subscriptions to a cathedral at Killarney which the zealous prelate declares to be, or to promise to be, "one of the most beautiful cathedrals built in modern times in the United Kingdom, and perhaps the greatest work of the greatest architect of the nineteenth century." Here again the inflated scale of the Church establishment in Ireland, even in the centre of pauperised regions scheduled by the Congested Board, comes into the same painful prominence as in Donegal. The Kerry Bishop I quote from the Tablet ok the iyth August 1907 states that he has appealed to the people of Killarney, and that " their response was liberal, if possible, beyond their means." The Bishop next turns to the people of Tralee, a town which is surrounded by misery, and similarly urges the population of Tralee to complete the cathedral according to the noble ideals of the great architect who designed it. Far be it from me to undervalue the importance of a sufficient staff of ministers of the Gospel in any country, or to undervalue the necessity of adequate and becoming structures for public 'worship. But there is a distinction between abundance and reck- 22 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN less extravagance, between dignity and megalomania. The poorest country in Europe has from four to ten times as many prelates as are to be found in the regions of the greatest wealth and prosperity ; and Irish counties, so miserable as to be on the chronic lists of public charity for the last quarter of a century, might surely be allowed to worship God in edifices less magnificent and ostenta- tious than "the most beautiful cathedrals built in modern times in the United Kingdom, and perhaps the greatest work of the greatest architect of the nineteenth century." The people asked for bread, and the priests gave them mountains of cut stones. Let it be always borne in mind that the priests and prelates who exact such huge sums for the construc- tion of these pompous buildings never have any hesitation about appealing at the same time to Government, to the Congested Board, to public and private charity, for sums of money, a constant stream of money, " to save the people from starvation," in the very districts which are the theatre of this lamentable extravagance. It is a side issue, but a side issue full of serious instruction, that the excellent Kerry Bishop his name is Most Rev. Dr. Mangan, I believe announced that for his cathedral he had also "appealed to the priests of the diocese, and I am pleased to say that my appeal received a response generous and far away from my most sanguine expectations." In other words, the needy population of congested Kerry were called upon to pay twice over for the same clerical object. They have first to pay in response to the direct appeal of the Bishop addressed to the laity in every newspaper and from every pulpit in Kerry; but they have also to pay indirectly through the priests of the parish, as the Bishop requires contribu- tions from the priests, and the purse of the priests is only filled by depleting the purse of the laity. As I wrote in a public letter to the Ulster Press : " If clerical competition hits the poorest poor, clerical begging and extortion are the terror of all who have made a little money. To support the Church, and to support it well, is the just pride of every Catholic. But these interminable extortions, on every pretext or without pretext at all, the perpetual collections, the meanly simoniacal fees for almost every sacrament, the battening on the grief of the bereaved, the wresting of the last shilling before the priest will accord the decencies of the burial rite these are grievances which are fiercely denounced wherever half a dozen laymen meet together, but which are not mentioned by intending members of Parliament. And then there is the terror of every family that, when the head of the house lies at death's border, the solemn adjuration of the ghostly comforter, the solemn advice of the spiritual adviser, in the last awful hour of tottering reason, may whisk away from child and relative a larger and larger portion of the family patrimony. "There is no account ever rendered for the enormous sums POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 23 annually extorted from the Irish laity, but they form an appeciable aggravation of the struggle for existence. Who ever hears of public benefactors among the Catholic Irish? What funds for public education, what endowments of poor scholars, what grants for free libraries, what openings of social institutions, can ever be set to the credit of the wealthy Irishman in his dying hour? "There is an omnipotent adviser at the swooning creature's pillow, and the service of man is never allowed to thwart the clutch of the hidden hand. Go into any Irish town. Question the local gossips on the rich people who died for the last score of years. 'And what did they do for the old town?' 'Begorra, they built three convents, and they'll soon finish the fine houses for the clergy, and they gave a power of money to the bishop.' But not a penny for the promotion of lay industry, for the uplifting of the bright young lads and lassies who might be the wealth of Ireland, but who must emigrate if they are ever to be anything." Yet the cost, the enormous cost, of the Irish clerical establish- ment to the Irish nation is not allowed to enter into the scope of inquiry of a Royal Commission for inquiry into the poverty of Ireland 1 ! I think I ought to give a specimen of the begging letters which issue in hundreds of thousands every year, in millions more pro- bably, from the clerical and conventual establishments from one end of the country to the other. Here is a copy of an ordinary begging letter, one of hundreds which have come to me from convents and presbyteries in Ireland. It is well worth most careful perusal and reflection, explaining as it does how deeply rooted must be the habits of mendicancy which such examples spread throughout the population. I merely omit here the name of the particular convent, while preserving the original letter : CONVENT OF MERCY, , IRELAND. DEAR SIR, May I ask as a great favour if you would be so very good and kind as to send us a donation in aid of our convent and good works ? Owing to the enormous expense of a new addition to our convent, for which we are in debt, we are greatly in need of aid in our many very pressing wants. Knowing how very, very good you are, dear Sir, I thought of writing, feeling you will not refuse us an alms in the name of the Lord Jesus for His little ones and poor, whose fervent prayers, with those of our Sisters, will be many times daily offered for God s choicest blessings for you and yours, and on all your under- takings. With many apologies for troubling you, dear Sir, but our pending need obliges me, and your noble mind and kind, generous heart are my encourage- ment and assttrance it will not be in vain, especially as it is my first and last time to trespass thus, most earnestly requesting a favourable reply, I remain, dear Sir, very sincerely yours in our Lord, SISTER M. MAGDALEN. P.S. May I again most earnestly request you will not refuse, dear Sir, and may Jesus, for whose love I ask, and to whom you give, reward you, as I know 24 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN He assuredly will. No matter how small anything you may be so very good and kind as to send, it will be a help, and meet with our deepest gratitude. Please do not disappoint us now, dear Sir, and many are the prayers that will ascend daily to the great white throne for God's choicest blessings for you. We are in such exceeding need of aid, that an early reply, if not inconvenient, would greatly enchance the value of your kind gift. Our good and generous Lord and Master, to whom you only lend, will Himself recompense you even before (Ae end of the month. When we reflect that in every convent in the country there is a roomful of young women, novices and others, engaged in writing, under holy obedience, cadging appeals of this description from morning till night all the year round, and when we remember that it is these convents which educate, with few exceptions, the whole of the young girls of Ireland, it will be acknowledged that we are paying a heavy price for the exaggeration of our Church establish- ment. No professional beggar known to the Charity Organisation Society could produce a more abject epistle. " Knowing how very, very good you are, dear Sir," is written wholesale to thousands and tens of thousands. And what can exceed the gross irreverence of the concluding promise that if you send the very smallest donation " our good and generous Lord and Master will Himself recompense you even before the end of the month " ? When such are the excesses of whining pertinacity which are the mark of our educational institutions, how can the sentiments of independence, industry, and decent pride survive in the pupils of such teachers ? Let us not blame too severely either the individual writers or their immediate superiors. They are only set the task by higher authorities. Just as the financial screw is turned upon the local priest to force him to become, even though unwillingly, the ex- tortioner of his congregation, so all those begging and whining convents must send a heavy commission on their gains to religious authorities outside of the country. There is no limit to the extor- tion under such a system, except the limit of human endurance and life itself. The existence of an Irish layman or laywoman under the exactions of these harpies resembles that of the inhabitants in Eastern despotisms, whose only protection against exorbitant de- mands is to hide the possession of everything of value. Ireland is still " a country before the Reformation " ; and the abuses which have been sternly checked by the Catholic Governments of Catholic lands, flourish without restraint, as in the England or the Italy of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Might I commend the epistolary style of the foregoing communication to the parish committees and similar leeches of the Congested Districts Board? A few years ago the protest made by a young priest, Father O'Donovan, at a meeting of what we may call the Maynooth Old Boys' Union, excited widespread attention. It was directed against the preposterous extravagance of the millions expended by the church-building clergy upon the foreign purchase of "decorations" for the edifices in construction. The sting of the complaint lay in POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 25 payment of such vast sums to all sorts of foreign contractors for all kinds of ecclesiastical gewgaws in so-called statuary and painting, stained glass, frescoes, stuccoes, brass, and gildings. I may quote the Dublin Evening Herald of the 8th July 1901, as an indication of Irish public sentiment : " As for Father O'Donovan's address, it is too soon to say that the seed has fallen on barren places. If the wisest men are those who judge the future by the past, then to be wise is to predict that all is barren from Cloyne to Armagh. Fearless was this young priest's indictment of his superiors, ab- solutely fearless. Nothing did he say that has not been said over and over again in this and other Dublin newspapers ; but the truth was brought to the doorstep at Maynooth, and there was no excuse not to hear and not to heed. The employment given to workers in various departments of art and manufacture through church- building and decoration could and should mean an annual turn- over of nearly a million of money. How much of this sum goes away in drafts to foreign countries? Every penny subscribed to funds for erecting churches, building towers and steeples, putting up stained glass and marble pillars, is subscribed by a faithful but poor people. To foster and develop continental industries with these funds is as bad as well, as Father O'Donovan makes out." When the Congested Commissioners were looking all round Ireland for a means to encourage industry, and were listening to all those political priests and monsignors who wanted "only a little more" of the public money in order to raise new Birminghams under every parish committee, it did not occur to any of those reverend witnesses to speak, it certainly did not happen to the Commissioners to inquire, about what fine employers the Irish clerical patriots are in foreign parts far from Ireland. I remember a successful fancy fair of a particularly pious character which was said to have netted some .^30,000, and which was followed by loads of Italian marble and companies of Italian workmen. It was like that other bishop who relieved Irish distress by getting places as " teachers under the Board " for two dozen. Whom ? Poor Irish governesses ? Certainly not. German and Belgian nuns ! It may be added, if hundreds of thousands of pounds of Irish money went to all kinds of ecclesiastical furnishing companies in Italy and Bavaria, it has never been doubted that the successful, and frequently Semite, contractors beyond the Rhine and Po had abundantly greased the palms of prominent clergymen who had in their disposal the "placing of the orders." An Irish architect, who had built many churches, was accustomed to say that he had to pay heavier " commissions " on such clerical orders than in any other branch of his business. 1 There is no public super- 1 Of course the Commission, the arranged, hoodwinked, blind-folded, nose-led Commission was not brought into contact with such realities of Irish clerical life. The priests on the Commission had never heard of them ; the priests outside the Commission felt it was no business of theirs to spoil sport. The air of the Com- 26 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN intendence, no rendering of accounts to the laity, upon all those hundreds of thousands and all those millions of pounds. But the political priests still want money, money, private money, public money, " for the encouragement of Irish industry," to be encouraged, of course, by their own special, peculiar, particular, and patented " Parish Committees and Company." mission was not exactly healthy for independent testimony. As the author of Economics for Irishmen writes of a man who offered independent testimony, " Bishop O'Donnell wants to know, ' Why does not Mr. Jordan come here before the Commission himself?' When we consider the treatment of myself by the Commission, and of Mr. Jordan by his neighbours under clerical influence, is it any wonder that people are afraid to ' come here before the Commission ' and tell the truth ? " As I say, it could not occur to the Commission to ask for a return of all the millions sterling spent upon ecclesiastical industry for Ireland during the last twenty years alone, but not spent in Ireland. The Commissioners were, perhaps, too deeply absorbed in fresh schemes for founding convent factories by immi- grant Belgians, Germans, French, Italians, etc., where the young Irish lace- makers can lose their sight for six shillings a week. THE UNIVERSALITY OF THE CLERICAL GRAB TECHNICAL AND INDUSTRIAL SCHOOLS DIRT AND HUNGER IN THE SCHOOLS GRABBING THE LOCAL BOARDS MORE than a generation ago the Imperial Parliament granted nearly ,2 00,000 a year for the industrial, technical, and agricultural training of the poorest and most helpless class of Irish children, all the homeless waifs, all the poor little mendicants, of street and lane ^200,000 a year ! On every imaginable pretext, charitable communities, native or imported, set themselves to the task of grabbing that money. Clerical Dotheboys Halls and Dothegirls Halls spread themselves over the land. The Catholic laity were, of course, elbowefl aside and frowned aside. They were not even fit to teach tailoring or gardening to a rescued street arab. There was really to be little tailoring or gardening, or anything else useful for the poor children. But there was a State grant for their education and maintenance, and that must be grabbed by the clerical order. Where deserted children and mendicant children were not easily obtained, they were manufactured. Clerical managers paid a commission to male and female recruiters for Dotheboys. Clerical agents tempted little ones with a penny for sweets, and then by the complacency of obliging parents and obliging magistrates were allowed to swear unblushingly that they had found the children "abandoned and begging " in the streets ! Off went the little ones to the clerical hive of " industry " under these clerical chevaliers of industry ; and by judicious starvation in many, many cases, by the neglect of technical education, by the neglect of cleanliness, half the Govern- ment grant for each little helpless one went to pay the clerical order and the " interest " on convent buildings ! Read the descriptions in the reports of the Government inspectors of "a condition of things that can be better imagined than de- scribed" the excessive mortality, the miserable feeding, the dirt, the neglect to train the hapless victims for any livelihood. Said Sir Rowland Blennerhassett in his report a few years ago : The beds and the sleeping arrangements in some of these schools were most objectionable. . . . Most of the rooms bore evidence of the general careless- ness and want of order, and I invariably found the same characteristics stamped on the manager and his assistants. 28 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN sancta simplicitas I Growing boys received three days a week nothing but bread and cocoa. After ten years in these State- endowed schools of clericalism, boys were still unable to read or write. In two large schools the Government inspector found classes of thirty and forty boys engaged in knitting stockings. A lad of thirteen years had been seven years an inmate, and had never done anything but knit stockings. In common fairness it must be added, as Sir Rowland Blennerhassett observed, that the clerical teachers were sometimes quite as dirty as their miserable charges. An official could not see any advantage to be got from bathing. lie had never had a bath in his life. In some of the schools the boys bathe only every four or five weeks, sometimes not so often. As many as four use the same bathwater. O sancta simplicitas ! The mortality is only twice or three times as high as among children who have never been submitted to this high and holy care. A separate and lengthy chapter will be required to describe the manner in which the Board and the Government generally use their patronage and their subsidies in furtherance of clerical rather than lay undertakings, even of a mercantile order. I have no wish to repeat my observations upon the ruinous effects on lay industry of conventual mercantilism. But I would ask, as many Irishmen have asked, Why did the Government grant ^i 0,000 to the Foxford convent and make no similar present to lay manufacturers ? x The profits of a lay industry are genuine profits ; the profits of a conventual industry are inextricably mixed with the fruits of begging letters and quasi-religious appeals of all sorts. Besides, there can be no genuine competition and no promotion of labour to the position of employer in such a system. A semi-commercial semi-mendicant factory can never raise the tone of public life in any locality, and will never be endured by any work people with the spirit and the money to quit such a land. The Commission can easily learn the situation of the manor- house which was sold by the Board to the bishop of a congested diocese, who at once made use of his cheap acquisition to establish in it twenty-five Belgian and German nuns. The zealous prelate, probably acting under superiors, explained that he had brought over the strangers to teach various industries to the Irish. Without presuming to censure, I venture to think that within the Irish world plenty of lay teachers could have been 1 I was interested to observe among the estate purchases of the Board that it had paid the respectable sum of nearly .22,000 to the convent of Loughrea, county Galway, for estates to the amount of some 1400 acres. I hope that the sale was remunerative to the Loughrea convent. In these hard times in Ireland it is consoling to note that even in a congested district the vow of poverty is still worth .22,000. Many an ordinary pauper might gladly aspire to penury like this. POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 29 found or formed for the work of instruction. The spectacle of these strangers getting such valuable employment by the aid of the Congested Board and its reverend leaders, while hundreds of poor Irish governesses are starving all over England and the Continent, is not edifying for the Irishman or the Christian. But the simple fact is, that the Board and its branches are nothing but a vast organisation to extend at the expense of the taxpayers an intolerant and extortionate clerical power. It was this same imported community of clerical foreigners which figured in the following appeal to the visitors at a recent sale of Irish products in London : AN IRISH IRELAND FACTORY IN A MANSION LOUGHGLYNN, COUNTY ROSCOMMON. With the object of stopping the emigration among the tenants of the Dillon estate, the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary have established in the old mansion of the above landlord a school of agriculture and industries. There the girls of the district are taught, besides domestic economy, farming, butter and cheese making, gardening, and different home industries, which will bring more comfort in the peasant families and brighten the life in one of the poorest districts in the west of Ireland. The friends of the Irish movement will find at Loughglynn School hand- some hand-made carpets, church and fancy embroidery, lace, etc. This is exactly a specimen of the way in which such convents, when they have once slipped into occupation as schools, develop into factories, and from teachers for improvement become employers for profit. It is falsifying the whole idea on which this Loughglynn establishment was founded by the Congested Board in the old mansion of the Dillon estate. It exhibits the pretext on which these Belgian and German nuns were smuggled into Ireland, and were given the work which Irish laywomen could very soon have been found to perform. Laywomen in the employment of the Board would not have been allowed to turn a public school into a private factory ; but clerical women can do just as profit- hunting suggests, and the priest-ridden Board merely winks and smiles. It cannot be too clearly understood that the Loughglynn School was supported by the Board at first, entirely on the plea of its being a school of domestic industry. In the Gaelic phrase, used to attract the confidence of neighbouring families, it was a Bean-an-Tighe school a housewifery school. Now we have it cadging for customers as " an Irish Ireland Factory in a mansion," an Irish Ireland from Flanders and Westphalia ! The lay officials of the Board early recognised the danger inherent in this class of enterprises, the most pernicious danger, namely, of the school, which was founded and subsidised to impart domestic knowledge useful for the housekeeping of girls and young women of the agricultural class, being perverted into an industrial establishment 30 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN for the conventual gain of the superiors of the good nuns from Belgium and the Rhine. Instead of the housewifery school which would fit the young girls of Loughglynn to be the useful wives and mothers of thriving Irish farmers, the danger was, that the marriage-despising and convent-adoring ladies from foreign parts would, quite honestly from their standpoint, turn the scholars into employees, and, instead of training good helpmates for young Irishmen, would utilise poor workwomen for a conventual factory. In reply to Sir John Colomb, the able and statesmanlike Professor Campbell clearly expressed his sense of this peril, which attends all conventual undertakings among utilisable populations. I quote the evidence : PROFESSOR CAMPBELL The primary aim of these schools at Loughglynn and Westport is to provide a class of instruction in practical operations, such as gardening, milking, the rearing and feeding of poultry, calves, and pigs, and similar work, which is usually performed by the women of the house, and which is included in the term "farmyard lore." . . . We want the school to be directed to the home life. We don't want to teach the making of fancy garments, and so on. . . . But this we must not forget, that there is a strong tendency at this school, and there will be at all schools of a like kind, to devote too much time to industries. I myself like to see schools of this kind carried on without industries altogether. They are maintained out of the fund for the improvement of agriculture. I should like to see that fund devoted as much as possible to that object. You will always find in these schools and this is a case in point, but I do not urge it against the ladies of this establishment that they devote too much time to that particular branch of the school. SIR JOHN COLOMB Whom do you mean when you say they are inclined to devote too much time ? PROFESSOR CAMPBELL The teachers in charge, the nuns of the convent. Of course, the nuns of the convent naturally and innocently wanted to teach the Irish girls not to be helpful wives for Irishmen, but model workwomen for the Germano-Belgic order. Professor Campbell expressed his dissatisfaction as courteously as possible; but the murder was out The shadow of a shade of censure was hinted at a convent which was merely enlarging its trust, and improving the uses of the fund for the improvement of agriculture ; and at once the zealous Bishop of the Board, as a Royal Commissioner, proceeded to jump down the throat of the witness. The monstrous impropriety of not being satisfied with any innocent liberties taken by such devoted ladies ! MOST REV. DR. O'DONNELL It is a great advantage to have these intelligent ladies taking an interest in the project? PROFESSOR CAMPBELL Yes. MOST REV. DR. O'DONNELL Don't you appreciate at Loughglynn the very great advantage of having the devoted services of skilful ladies carrying on the work ? PROFESSOR CAMPBELL Oh, we appreciate that. POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 31 / Of course, as I have said a dozen times out of regard for the bedrock truth as well as the law of libel, I do not blame either the Bishop of the Board or all the conventuals from Kenmare to Kamtschatka who may be settled in Ireland to live on the tax- payer, and the ratepayer, and the tithepayer. They act according to the clerical conscience. They have got their mission, and they have got holy obedience. I am quite sure that the Bishop of the Board is entirely convinced that the nuns are right; and I am quite sure that the nuns would think it dreadfully sinful if they did not turn a profitable penny for the Order by thinking less of young girls being wives and more of converting them into work- women for the convent. If those sweet Irish girls drift away, unmarried and wasted, to a factory in Rhode Island or Massa- chusetts, what serious matter? The Congested Board will get other Irish girls to go to Loughglynn for schooling in housewifery, and by a holy and blessed accident they will be made profit- earners for the convent; and Heaven be merciful to the Board official who does not "appreciate the very great advantage of such devoted services of such skilful ladies " ! I wonder how far the Commission was unaware of the extent to which the power of the political Churchmen is exercised in the appointment to public offices in the congested area, as it is called. In the congested district of Claremorris, for example, when the district council met on the 24th October, 1906, to appoint a new clerk in the usual way, they were confronted by a peremptory letter from a parish priest, stating that at a meeting of the Roman Catholic clergy of the rural deanery of Claremorris the following resolution was adopted : At a meeting of the clergy of the deanery of Claremorris held on the 3rd inst., the Very Rev. Archdeacon Kilkenny in the chair, it was proposed and unanimously adopted that as the condition of the union, financial and moral, is essentially connected with the selection of a worthy clerk of the union in succession to the late lamented Mr. Shanley, we request the district councillors to refuse their support to any candidate who will not produce a letter of character from the priests of his parish. A fitting comment on this letter was made by one of the councillors : " It would be as good for you to put in the advertise- ment, 'no Protestants need apply.'" The clerical mandate was also meant to exclude every candidate who was not a member of that boycotting League of which the leader of the Congested Board is the treasurer and the ex-chairman. I have no doubt that a visit of the Commission would have been welcomed by crowds of congested admirers in the rural deanery of Claremorris. The extraordinary increase in the popular subservience and helplessness which may be observed in the west of Ireland during the past twenty years is mainly due, I am convinced, and is often directly traceable, to the direct influence of potentates whom the authority and subsidies of the Board have made 32 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN appear the arbiters of the people's fortunes. I take an instance from the heart of the scheduled districts of Donegal. In the poor law union of Glenties, in the poorest and most Irish-speaking district of Donegal, the local guardians had to elect a master for the workhouse. Seeing the Irish-speaking character of the population, the Glenties guardians had passed a resolution binding themselves to prefer Irish-speaking applicants. Nobody, indeed, who does not understand Gaelic can speak with the majority of the poor inmates of the workhouse. Of four candidates for the post only one could speak Irish. Being a respectable man with good recommendations, was he appointed master? A higher authority than consistency with policy, or care for the language of the poor, intervened in the matter. The following letter was addressed to the guardians by a representative of the Supreme Domination. At the same time the Supreme Domination took measures for the disposal of another salaried office in the theoretical and legal appointment of the board of guardians. DEAR MR. , I shall feel exceedingly grateful to you if you will support the candidate of my choice for the mastership of the Glenties workhouse, Mr. Bernard Quigley. He is highly qualified for the position, having been trained for some time as clerk in the office of the county council. On the score of family connections, being nephew of the noble Bishop of the diocese, he stands high. His character, too, is blameless and irreproachable. On the matter of the medical officership I hope you will have the kindness to hold yourself free until all the candidates are in the field, and that you will decide to support the man whom, after full and serious consideration, I shall regard best deserving of your vote. On this matter of medical officer I hope to address you again further on. I remain, your always truly, JAMES MACFADDEN, P.P. Without an instant's hesitation the resolution in favour of Gaelic- speaking applicants was thrown overboard, and " the nephew of the noble Bishop" got the job. When the time came the medical officership could be filled on the same principle. I trust the Commission will remember that Glenties is one of the districts which have had, and expect to have, a large share of the public money dispensed by the Congested Board, and that such appeals as the above from leading clergy of the chief member of the Board must have the effect of almost irresistible commands on all who expect everything from its clerical generosity. When complaint is made in Ulster or England as to the appointments to Irish situa- tions, here we see how the subordinates of the Congested Board dispose of an office of profit and public service. It is simply over again the ukase of the rural deanery of Claremorris, that pearl of congested districts, ordaining the duties of district councils. This Glenties case, occurring, like the Claremorris resolution, in the very heart of the congested preserves of the Board, deserves some special consideration in view of the Board's pretended mission of redemption and elevation. We have the Bishop of the Board, the POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 33 fiery advocate on the Commission of the Board's continuance and extension, brought as prominently as possible upon the stage. We have the parish priest of the pauperised Glenties district, a monsignor of the diocese, if I am not mistaken, taking the leading part in the distribution of public appointments. And we may have the perfect conviction that neither bishop nor parish priest had the slightest consciousness that they were doing anything dictatorial, or unfair, or ruinous to honest competition, or disabling and corrupting to the public, or detrimental and degrading to the public service and efficiency. It is an essential part of the grave, unspeakably grave, situation, that these potent ecclesiastics act in the full sense of their right and their duty : the right of pastors to rule in the spirit of a pope of the Dark Ages, and the duty of a pastor to see that the nominees of the clergy alone shall enjoy public office and emolument in a region for which the clergy hold themselves responsible to their pastoral profession. I use the names of Bishop O'Donnell and Father MacFadden because they are in the facts. I should make the same comments if they were Bishop X and Father Y. I am really not concerned about individuals, but the system. I have all through been prepared to grant that Bishop O'Donnell and his priests, like all other bishops and priests engaged in the system, are inspired by what is to them supreme and incontrovertible reason. That crowns the seriousness of Ireland's catastrophe, as well as the seriousness of placing personages imbued with such ideas in regard of the lay nation in positions of civil authority over any portion of the nation. Mark that there are two public appointments, one urgent and the other proximate, the mastership of the local workhouse and the medical officership of the Poor Law union. As the district is Gaelic-speaking, the Board of Guardians have made a knowledge of Irish a condition of the appointment in the case of the work- house. A good candidate with a knowledge of Irish as well as the other qualifications is in the field. But Father MacFadden, the local parish priest, wants the post for " a nephew of the noble Bishop," namely Bishop O'Donnell of the Board and commission ; and he gets it. Possibly the nephew had got a clerkship under the county council for the same reason. All we know is, that a sister of Bishop O'Donnell married a Mr. Quigley, and that a male offispring of that respectable union has been made, on that express ground, master of the Glenties workhouse. Did the Bishop of the Board protest against this use of his relationship with the youthful Quigley? Did he repudiate it? Let us say that Bishop Some- body Else is " the noble Bishop." Did Bishop Somebody Else protest against Father MacFadden's interference against less aristocratic competitors? Did Bishop Somebody Else repudiate the job on behalf of his " noble nephew " ? Did Bishop Somebody Else write to the Glenties Board of Guardians to urge them to elect the best master for the workhouse without regard to the sacrosanct 34 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN episcopal blood in a candidate's veins ? Yet Bishop Somebody Else is to expend the money of the taxpayers in Glenties Union, and in all the unions of Ireland, if he can get the scope of the Board extended by an arranged commission from Dublin Castle. Is this the way to promote manliness, intelligence, self-help, the conscien- tious discharge of public office, the conscientious encouragement of public capacity and fair play, in a demoralised population or in any population? Let us not forget that Father MacFadden, as a parish priest, is the regular chief and the supreme constituent of the Parish Committee, which irrigates the locality with the generous stream of public bounty at the expense of the taxpayers. But there was not only the actual mastership of the workhouse at stake, but the expected medical officership of Glenties Union. Here again the parish priest was equal to the occasion : On the matter of the medical officership I hope you will decide to support the man whom, after full.and serious consideration, I shall regard as best deserving of your vote. There is Home Rule for you after the model of a parish committee president of the Congested Districts Board ! From university chancellors to members of Parliament, from members of Parliament to workhouse masters and medical officers, there is but one kingmaker within the dominions of Dublin Castle, and he is the parochial or prelatical Poohbah of political clericalism. When we see that the medical officers of congested Donegal are manufactered in this fashion and by this agency, we may not be entirely unprepared for the sanitary inspection of the orthodox hovels of priest-ridden Donegal being at once a farce and a disgrace. So much was extracted from Father O'Hara, " member for agriculture " on the Congested Board, when under examination by the Com- mission. He had been denouncing landlords, whether absentee or resident, as being good for nothing, and had been praising the parish committees, according to the clerical cue, when he was reminded by Sir John Colomb that there was a large sum spent in Donegal on the salaries of sanitary officers who ought to have done what the parish committees pretended to do. SIR JOHN COIOMB Would you be surprised to hear that in Donegal the amount spent for salaries for doing this very work is ^1000 a year? FATHER O'HARA I think the sanitary officers and sub-sanitary officers get their salaries for doing nothing. . . . The boards of guardians attach little importance to it. If able and independent medical officers are repelled from public offices under the Donegal unions by the shameless favouritism and dictation rampart in the country, it looks very much as if there are influential potentates who really discourage efficiency in order to have an excuse for fresh demands on the taxpayers to subsidise the parish committees that are practically identical with the priests. POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 35 The political priesthood have certainly a fine time in the districts of congestion. Oh, that blessed word "congestion"! In the first place, there are the regular public appointments, the medical officerships, the workhouse masterships, etc., etc., which are filled by the clerical masters of such patronage on the " nephew of the noble Bishop " principle more or less ; and, in the second place, there are the good things and pickings of the Congested Board, the parish committeeships, and so forth, which are arranged by the clerics on the simple principle that they are the Board. Let us freely grant that all is done with the noblest intentions and the most self-sacrificial motives. We have, all the same, a double stream of public subsidies absolutely at the disposal of the priests and reserved for the enjoyment of their creatures, parasites, acolytes, and " nephews." Why not also their " cousins and their aunts " ? Yet we talk of the urgency of teaching the demoralised Irish peasantry manliness and independence of character and the capacity for strenuous competition in the race of life what hypocrites we are ! when a medical man with the best diplomas from Dublin and London, with recommendations by the most competent judges, is not allowed to get even within sight of the appointed body because the appointing body must do the behest of the political priest I To do the behest of the political priesthood, that is the un- dignified mission of the Congested Districts Board. And as the Board expected, the arranged Commission recommended the exten- sion of its powers to the whole of Ireland ! The Congested Districts Board is not only pursuing the path of the national workshops at Paris in 1848, but its equivalents for those economic undertakings are, into the bargain, at the disposal of sacerdotal autocrats pledged to a programme of political and social subversion which agitates Ireland to the very foundations. I have said that the members and agents of a body disposing of public money with the lavish hand of the Congested Board should at least not belong to any profession which derives its emolu- ments from the very people who are recipients of the Board's benefactions. It is no reflection upon any class to remember that human nature is human nature. If a priest or a bishop of any denomination spends ^"1000 of public money in a district which yields him pecuniary support, it is quite impossible to blame the grateful people, expectant also of favours to come, for remembering such benefactions on the payment of their dues and offerings. We have seen the keenness of those personages in securing every sort of profitable situation for their friends and nominees. Can we wonder that they do not feel called upon to refuse the enhanced dues and subscriptions of every kind which attest the " congested " recognition of their flocks? It would be contrary to human nature if the potentates who distribute, and are expected to dis- tribute, thousands sterling of public money, fail to perceive the 36 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN nfluence of their generosity when they ask for a share of the prosperity of their people. If the Commissioners looked round them on visiting the country village of Letterkenny, in Donegal a poor little place of a couple of thousand inhabitants they could see a vast cathedral and other ecclesiastical buildings which have been erected since the estab- lishment of the Congested Board at an expense not far short of ; 1 00,000. I venture to say that, outside of a congested district scheduled for appalling pauperism, you could hardly find in England or Ireland such a palatial structure erected by a grateful people in a poor village of 2000 souls. Human nature is human nature ; and if the public moneys lavished by the Congested Board appeal to certain aspects of it, the fault must lie in the creators and continuators of such a pauperising institution. Certainly, I cannot be expected to blame either priests or people who have succumbed to such pressure of circumstances. The Commission sought to prevent pauperism in Ireland ; the clerical masters of the Board are spreading pauperism through every quarter of the country. 1 Did the Commission know that a struggling farmer can be charged ^25 for the marriage of his daughter ? One of the most respected Irish merchants of London related to me a short time ago that his own brother, a hard-working farmer, had to pay ^25 because he was giving ^500 to his daughter. The plundered man threatened marriage before the registrar. "Do," was the mocking response, "and no decent woman in Ireland will speak to your daughter." The money had to be paid. The robber could not be punished. At a funeral in a congested district the pecuniary collection extorted by the Churchman from the friends of the deceased, "on the coffin lid," amounted to ^193, not a friendly contribution to the wants of the bereaved family, but tribute to an influence potent with the Congested Board. 1 It should be noted with regard to all those Government Convent Factories which the Board and its congeners are establishing in Ireland with public money, the manufacturing Orders take full advantage of local poverty to give low wages. Thus, of the Foxford Convent Factory, noticed later, we get from a clerical layman, Mr. O'Conor Don, the following suggestive evidence : " Mostly women are employed. . . . The wages are not good . . . but I forget what they are." The apparent indifference of this witness to the wages paid in a clerical factory is also instructive. THE MYSTERY OF LOUGHGLYNN HOUSE HOW THE TAXPAYERS LOST ^8900 IN ORDER TO PLANT A FOREIGN CONVENT IN ROSCOMMON A PRECIOUS instance of the unbusinesslike methods of the Board, which the Commission of Inquiry failed as usual to inquire into, is afforded by the notorious case of the planting of a convent of Belgo-German nuns at Loughglynn House, in Roscommon, "in order to check the decay of Ireland." There is so much latent in this unexplored transaction that I must confine myself to pointing out the need of explanation of the unexplained features, citing the defective evidence itself. The general history of the affair seems to be this : 1. Loughglynn House, the mansion of the Dillon Estate, comes into possession of the Board. 2. An offer of i 1,000 is made by a layman for the mansion, demesne, and sporting rights over estate. 3. The tenantry are satisfied and consent. 4. A mysterious agitation against selling the sporting rights is engineered, and the offer of i 1,000 falls through. 5. Loughglynn House, together with one hundred acres of the demesne, becomes the property of a community of nuns, imported from Belgium at a price of only ^'2100, being an immediate loss of ^8900 to the taxpayers ! 6. Some of the local agitators soon afterwards themselves purchased sporting rights from consenting tenants, which disposes of any theory of real hostility to the sale of sporting rights. The question, among others, remains : How was the Board brought to reject ^11,000 which also meant the residence of a family of wealthy laymen, consumers and employers in favour of ^2100 for importing a convent of foreign nuns, who could not be generous employers or customers ? N.B. These nuns were also subsidised as teachers of domestic industry by the Board, but have developed "an Irish Ireland Factory " in spite of the remonstrances of the Board inspector, who was quite unsupported, of course, by the Cleric-Ridden Board. As I have said all through, I impute no improper motives to any persons immediately engaged in these curious transactions. The wires of such intrigues may have been, and must have been, 37 395976 38 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN worked hundreds of miles from Roscommon. And now for the evidence : HOW THE CONSENT OF TENANTS WAS COUNTERACTED In the official memorandum presented to the Commission on behalf of the Board (Evidence, vol. i. p. 233) it is expressly admitted that the sporting rights on the Dillon Estate were " a valuable asset" which rendered easy the profitable sale of the Loughglynn mansion and demesne : In June, 1900, the Congested District Board, having in view the letting of the sporting 'rights on the Dillon Estate, for the sole benefit of the tenants, decided to reserve these rights when celling the holdings to the tenants. The Board were of opinion that these rights -were a valuable asset. ... A consider- able number of tenants had expressed their willingness to purchase their holdings subject to this reservation. . . . The Board had received an offer of .11,000 for the sporting rights on the entire estate with Loughglynn House and demesne. . . . The Board has since sold the house with one hundred acres immediately surrounding it for ^2100, and the sporting rights, which are now the property of the individual tenants, are of very little pecuniary value. As fishy a transaction as ever occurred under Russian Tchinovniks ! Who or what procured for it the official sanction of the Board? We have from Mr. Doran, Chief Land Inspector of the Board, some curious evidence which brings us, at any rate, to a point where the Commission of Inquiry ought to have in- quired most closely and resolutely, but where they skipped with agility and silence to less clerical proceedings. Evidence, vol. i. pp. 150-1. MR. DORAN If the sporting rights were preserved all over the estate they would become a valuable asset. . . . Many of the tenants thought this a very good idea and took it up quite cordially. But another view was then put before them that it was not a proper thing for the Board to attempt to have any burthen upon the fee simple of the holdings. . . . The Board consequently gave way on the matter. Here the Chief Land Inspector of the Board fully confirms the valuable character of the asset, the cordial consent of the tenants, the subsequent engineering to get the ^11,000 of the lay purchasers rejected in favour of the ^2100 offered by the patrons of the nunnery from Belgium ; and the significant conclusion : " The Board consequently gave way on the matter." But the Chief Land Inspector of the Board also went further. He gave formal and direct evidence : i . That the tenants, when let alone, cordially welcome purchasers of sporting rights, and have actually sold to such purchasers sporting rights on the Dillon Estate ; 2. That the Board is in the habit of reserving sporting rights for separate disposal ; and 3. That a " local politician " is known to have been one of the wire-pullers who engineered the agitation, though perfectly ready himself to rent sporting rights from the POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 39 tenantry. Yet, even though it was proved that the Board had departed from its usual practice, the Commission of Inquiry did not presume to push the inquiry. Was it because the patrons of the convent from Belgium blocked the way? But here is the evidence in question : MR. DORAN Since the sale of the holdings without reservation the tenants have actually let the sporting on one section of the estate for ^50 a year to a club. SIR ANTONY MACDONNELL Do they preserve? MR. DORAN Every man is a gamekeeper. When people come to shoot, some of the tenants act as beaters, and enjoy the sport. So much for the lying pretence put forward by the plotters against the lay purchasers, that the interests of the tenants must suffer. But Mr. Doran proceeded to explain that the Board habitually reserved sporting rights when they were valuable assets ! This information seemed to astound even Sir Antony MacDonnell, after seeing what had happened at Loughglynn Mansion Convent Factory. SIR JOHN COLOMB I would like to know do the Board in their arrange- ments and procedure recognise the importance, not in reference to landlord and tenant or any special class, but generally of game and fishing as a great national Irish asset ? MR. DORAN They do. . . . The Board do not convey to the tenants valuable fishery or sporting rights. The Board bought the estate as a whole, and in fixing the price at which it would resell to the tenants it took into account the value of these game and sporting rights they were to retain, and in that way separated the value of the sporting rights from the land! Did Sir Antony MacDonnell, in spite of his official predilections, suspect that there was something excessively fishy somewhere ? At any rate, he interposed with some valuable questions which elicited valuable answers from the Chief Land Inspector to the Board. SIR ANTONY MACDONNELL What will happen in regard to these fisheries when the tenants are vested with the proprietary rights in the holdings ? MR. DORAN They will remain as they are now, with the sporting rights over their holdings reserved. SIR ANTONY MACDONNELL In the possession of the Board? MR. DORAN Or sold by the Board to a sporting tenant (!). The tenants will benefit by the arrangement, because some of them will be employed as gillies, and others will be paid a price per head for birds shot on the lands (!). SIR ANTONY MACDONNELL You recognise that the sporting rights and fishery rights need not necessarily be sold to the tenants ? MR. DORAN No. In these cases where they have a substantial value the tenants are in agreement with what the Board have done. SIR ANTONY MACDONNELL That is to say, the tenants do not claim? MR. DORAN No, they do not claim, and they are as a rule most courteous to the persons renting the sporting rights. Why were all these principles and practices and rules of the Board abandoned and violated at Loughglynn House and demesne, in order to reject the ^n,ooo of a lay purchaser and to accept the ^2100 of the Superiors of a convent of Belgo-German nuns? Who are the parties behind the scenes who were able to swindle the taxpayers out of ^8900 and to swindle the Dillon Estate out of the valuable presence and occupation of wealthy lay owners, who could make the Loughglynn demesne an example of fruitful agri- culture, and Loughglynn House a seat of hospitality; who could offer healthy and instructive domestic service in kitchen and parlour to young girls of Loughglynn seeking a livelihood ; who could employ the sons of the tenantry as gillies and beaters ; and whose custom and whose guests could bring good money into the country- side? Who swindled Ireland out of that? What was the power behind the scenes which brought a company of foreign religious women from Gueldres or Brabant instead of all that? I have said above that the wires which pulled the puppets at Loughglynn may have worked from hundreds of miles away. It is clear that they must have -worked from a distance of hundreds of miles. That Belgo-German convent did not move from the Scheldt or Meuse to the Shannon quite of its own accord ; nor was its transplantation a casual accident. The Superiors of the Franciscan Conventual Order do not reside in Roscommon nor even in Dublin Castle. Those plain Flemish or Westphalian peasant women who had taken the Franciscan vows somewhere between Ostend and Paderborn, and had vowed to consecrate their knowledge of butter- making and lace-making to the service of their Superiors, had no means of knowing of themselves that a fair mansion and broad acres were waiting somewhere among the English heretics to be attached to the gown of their Superioress or Mother Guardian. Mother Guardian herself neither wanted, nor was able to move herself and her pious flock so far, far from the land of the Vlaamsch and the Plaat. When she got her orders, she must go under Holy Obedience to the Shannon or the Vistula or the Ganges. Who pro- cured from Rome the marching orders for those pious peasant women ? What local agents advised Propaganda that far away in the " Mission District," formerly called an Irish Church, there were useful, good, kind friends who would throw away ^11,000 of public money and denationalise one hundred Irish acres, in order to board and lodge a company of Propaganda's Belgian or German servants and workwomen? I have not patience to- discuss the miserable pretext that the Board must go to some town or village on the Continent in order to find some dozens of foreign women to teach housewifery to the young girls of West Ireland. There are dozens and hundreds of intelligent Irish women and girls who could be thoroughly trained in England, if necessary, for the post of teachers o f dairy work, housewifery, etc., for a fraction of that ^8900 whic h the Board threw away in order to plant foreign conventuals on the Dillon ruL,rri(jAL, riujsars AIMIJ IKISM IV.UIJN 41 Estate. In a similar way the technical schools are staffed with clerics to the exclusion of Irish laymen ; and the whole secondary education of the country is secured by British legislation to the cram-cram academies of all sorts of male and female conventuals ; while thousands of Irish men and girls are driven, far from native land, to beg for teacherships and governess-situations from Paris to San Francisco. It is a mean and cruel trickery this policy of the British Government in Ireland. It is hardly a credit to the Protestant name. And, of course, the Belgian conventuals at Loughglynn snapped their pious ringers at the efforts of honest inspectors, like Professor J. R. Campbell, to keep them from turning the " Housewife School " into one of the usual sort of convent factories which the French could endure no longer. It would be wrong to blame the foreign nuns at Loughglynn. They are under Holy Obedience, and if they get an order from their Superior in Italy or Belgium to make money for the Order by turning the " Housewife School " into a lace factory or an embroidery factory, they will obey the Superior. What was the use of Professor Campbell blaming " the strong tendency of the nuns at Loughglynn to devote too much time to industries " ? What can foreign nuns care about making young Irish girls capable housewives to be fit for life-helpmates of young Irish farmers ? They think very poorly of marriage at all ; while making the young Irish girls expert lace-workers for the convent factory both stops marriages and makes profit for good works. And they know very well that the Bishop of the Board will jump upon the rash inspectors, as he did upon the Professor, with an indignant reproach : " Don't you appreciate at Loughglynn the very great advantage of having the devoted services of skilled ladies carrying on the work ? " Not that Bishop O'Donnell is to blame any more than the foreign nuns. He was as much under Holy Obedience as any of them ; doubly so, if possible ; for Ireland was a " District " not a "Church"; "a District of the Foreign Missions" at Rome; and in a "Mission District" there is simply no room for hesitation on the part of priest or prelate. If Bishop O'Donnell has been instructed to favour the introduction of Chinese nuns into every village of Ireland, he will do it. And I praise him for his Holy Obedience. But civil society is condemned to ruin, as in Ireland, when posts of lay trust and secular duty are placed, by political bargainers, in the hands of men bound to postpone every patriotic and civil consideration to the instructions of foreign Ecclesiastical authority. The Commission of Inquiry kept a respectful distance from inquiry into the shameless job which repelled a lay family and ^11,000 from Loughglynn House and demesne. Let us cheerfully assume that no member of the Board was behind the scenes of that 42 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN transaction. So much the more need for inquiry. Who could have engineered that transplantation of foreign religious to the home of Irish gentry bought with public money ? And, of course, the Commission of Non-inquiry did not inquire into the case of the convent factory at Foxford, in Mayo. Here again was a female convent which practically received as a gift nearly ^10,000 of public money to start a woollen factory, besides getting several thousands of pounds as loans in addition. There are many, many Irish firms of laymen which could undertake such a work for a loan of ^10,000, and which would present to the employees advantages that the very nature of a conventual institu- tion forbids for ever to offer under any conditions whatever. In a lay factory the best of the lay employees may rise to the highest posts, to partnership itself. The generous spirit of independence and emulation can inspire the humblest endeavours. The very nature of the conventual factory forbids any hopes of the kind. The convent is perpetual, and the outsider is perpetually excluded from its direction, except by that " death to the world " which is death to home and family ties. Even the workwoman who is admitted to the sisterhood will never be more than the passive instrument, divested of will and personality, of the convent superiors. Religiously, the nun may be an angel ; economically, she is a slave. I revere her in religion, but in the factory I ask her to depart to her prayers. The employees of a convent factory can only be the sub-slaves of pious instruments. And it is the most profound mistake to imagine that the Irish, or any Catholic people, like to be the employees of nuns or priests in secular work. On the contrary, they loathe it, and they quit it for America when they get the chance. How can the lay supervision be exercised over convent factories ? It is not possible. Let a Government Inspector dare to blame the management, the finance, the hygiene, of a convent factory. Let a member of Parliament dare to criticise the accounts or the products. Maynooth will protest with elaborate sanctity. The Freeman's Journal will have a fit. The populace will be mysteriously inspired to submit the critics to the ordeal by water, or the ordeal by fire, to the ordeal by bludgeon and pavingstone, at the least. What Government has dared to inspect the condition of health even of the poor girls who toil from morning to night over the monotonous washtubs of the convent laundries ? There is money in the laundries for the convents. So here is about all that the Non-inquiry Commission of Inquiry got to know of the convent factory at Foxford. The Board Inspector of Industries told the bare and curtailed story : Mr. W. J. D. WALKER Foxford got a grant of .8333, and in connec- tion with the mill race ^1164. ... In addition to that there was a loan repay- able by instalments. . . . The initial expenditure was in connection with the buildings. POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 43 In another place (Evidence, V., 53) I find the Chairman of the Commission giving expression to his cheerful contentment with the Foxford convent factory : LORD DUDLEY Foxford is run by the nuns with assistance from the Con- gested Districts Board, and employs local labour. And that is about all the Commission of Inquiry cared or dared to inquire ! Not a word about sanitary inspection even. The Commission just hears the witnesses whom the arrangers of the evidence have provided. And that is Maynooth-cum-Castle Inquiry. I may at this point remark that the whole business of sanitary inspection of home industries in particular is totally neglected or suppressed within the special domain or dominion of the Congested Board. I have before me the last Report on Factories and Workshops, and under table 8, relating to the administration by local authorities in 1905 of the homework provisions of the Factory and Workshop Act, 1901, there appears to be no administration of the Act what- ever in Donegal, Sligo, Mayo, and Roscommon. There is no inspection of homeworkers, no supervision of the giving out of work in unwholesome premises, no notification of infectious diseases among homeworkers in Donegal, Sligo, Mayo, and Ros- common. Yet we know that tuberculosis is rife and rampant in West Ireland. Even in the counties in which there are reports from the sanitary inspectors, the condition of the workers appears to be often abominably bad, which does not look encouraging for the Congested Board's special counties, where there is no in- spection at all. It may seem to the general public, if not to the Non-inquiry Commission of Inquiry, that the ^8900, which was sacrificed by the Board for the pious delight of planting a foreign convent in Roscommon, could have been better used in a good many ways throughout West Ireland. In the diocese of Raphoe, in Donegal, for instance, there might have been some aid given to the semi- starving medical officers, who are expected by the abominable meanness of the local councils to discharge their professional responsibilities amid villages and towns of indescribable squalor on the almost inhuman average of 100 a year! In the Glenties union, for example, there are only seven medical men for a territory of 400 square miles, and their pittance is ;ioo a year ! Education would produce sanitation, and the political Churchmen block both. Let the reader note that the ^11,000 wasted at Loughglynn and the ; 1 0,000 donated at Foxford make over twenty thousand founds given to two convent factories at the expense of lay interests. By the way, we should remark that Dublin Castle is spreading the Belgo-Germanic conventuals of Loughglynn over Ireland, and evidence was placed before the Commission, who of course skipped to another subject. A Father Clery, C.C., "nominated to give 44 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN evidence by the Bishop of Elphin," as Lord Dudley announced with becoming reverence, stated that nuns from Loughglynn were ready to do anything needful to elevate the Irish of Sligo as well as Roscommon for " encouragement," which means s. d. The Bishop of the Board volunteered to mention the result : LORD DUDLEY To whom did they make this "offer " ? REV. FATHER CLERY To the Bishop. LORD DUDLEY Did they get any direct financial aid from the Board ? MOST REV. DR. O'DONNELL Rather, my Lord, it has been the Depart- ment. The Bishop, Dr. Clancy, has made an arrangement with the Department of Agriculture, and what the details are I do not know. And the Non-inquiry Commission did not want to know. Government was founding convents. That was well. Convents which " do not pay good wages," as Mr. O'Conor Don admits. THE CLERICAL COMBINATION AGAINST PRO- PERTY NOT CONFINED TO THE CONGESTED DISTRICTS AN EXAMPLE FROM TIPPERARY CATTLE-DRIVING CHURCHMEN AND THEIR MAGISTRATES IT cannot be too clearly understood that the Ribbon conspiracy of the political clergy is in no way confined to the congested districts. This clear understanding is necessary to the just comprehension of the claim for an extension of the parish com- mittee system to the whole of Ireland. Bishop O'Donnell merely means, in the innocence of his heart, " to overthrow the ascendancy of the classes," just like Mr. Victor Grayson, M.P., and Mr. Pete Curran, M.P. The extension of the parish committee system to the whole of Ireland, dealing out subsidies from the public funds, licensing the *?riests as the authorised centres of taxpaid bene- factions, woUiu simply make the political priesthood outside as well as inside the congested area the official masters of the discontented and the official disturbers of the social constitution. Is the political priesthood outside the congested area in any respect a better guardian of individual liberty and property than within that region ? It is easy to arrive at certainty upon the question. The Leinster Leader of the 5th October last published the statement made in public meeting, without contradiction or qualification, by a cattle-raiding panegyrist, Mr. Patrick White, M.P., that " they fear no foe so long as their actions meet, as they do meet, with the sanction of their clergy." This is fairly intelligible. " As they do meet." And it must be added that the parliamentarian cattle- driver can, in the first place, point to the fact that neither priests nor Bishops, with a very few exceptions, have opposed cattle- driving. When anybody proposes an improvement in public education, there is no silence on the part of the priest and prelate. The denuncia- tion of the godless innovation rolls from pulpit to pulpit, and overflows the columns of the newspaper press. But I can select from scores of instances the illustration of the contrary attitude of the political clergy towards private property and public honesty outside also the congested area of episcopal Ribbonmen and parish committees. 46 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN I find in the Freeman's Journal, that organ of the political Church, an account of proceedings in the Borrisokane Petty Sessions on the nth September 1907 which might cause the envy of all the reverend crusaders of cattle-raiding between Letterkenny and Tralee. If the political priests of Tipperary are not yet congested parish committeemen, they possess all the qualifications. The short story of the affair before the persons called magistrates at Borrisokane is this: (i) the cattle raid; (2) the packing of the Bench with Land League magistrates ; (3) the trial and liberation of the raiders; (4) the public meeting of congratulation to the raiders, chairmaned by a parish priest, supported by three parish priests and a dozen of their reverend curates. All those cattle-raiding pastors would be chairmen of parish committees when the operations of the Congested Board are extended to all Ireland. I give the summary of events from the Freeman's Journal. THE RAID AND THE RAIDERS To leave no doubt of the character of the crime and the criminals, I quote the report : To-day at Borrisokane Petty Sessions, before a Bench consisting of eighteen magistrates, a number of summonses were heard, at the suit of District Inspector Madden, against a number of men who were charged with unlawful assembly in connection with the driving of cattle off grazing lands in the neighbourhood. There were, in all, twenty-seven defendants against whom summonses were issued. Fifteen of these had been before the court at the last petty sessions, when the Bench was equally divided, and the case was adjourned. In this case the defendants were charged with unlawful assembly at Lisnagower on the 28th June, 1907, with intent to compel Henry Davis Kenny to surrender the grazing lands at Ballymona and Lisnagower. THE CRIMINALS GLORY IN THE CRIME There was no attempt even to deny that the prisoners had broken into the property of Mr. Kenny and had driven his cattle off the land. On the contrary, the counsel for the prisoners frankly declared that, as Mr. Kenny had rented the lands for grazing purposes without heeding the opposition of the Land League class in the neighbourhood, the accused were entirely justified in assailing his property with open violence. Here are the ipsissima verba of Mr. Harbinson, the counsel for the criminals : Mr. Kenny, as a tenant under the eleven months system, was a foe to public peace and public order, and, that being so, public opinion said that this man, being objectionable from the social standpoint, should be obliged to disgorge that which in reality was not his. THE PRIEST WHO PRESSED MR. KENNY A curious feature, curious and significant, though common, was that a priest had tried to persuade Mr. Kenny to surrender to the POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 47 League previous to the actual raid. I quote from Mr. Harbinson's cross-examination of the owner of the cattle : At one time you promised Father Gilligan to give up the land? Yes. You gave that promise because you thought it was your duty? I didn't think it was my duty. I thought it would keep the people quiet. THE MAGISTERIAL MAJORITY SUPPORTS CRIME After various insults had been showered upon Mr. Kenny, the majority of " magistrates " declared that freedom and liberation were the least recognition they could pay to the public and private virtues of the raiders : The magistrates then retired to consider their verdict, and after a short absence returned, and Major Dease announced that the majority of the magistrates refused informations in these cases. The decision was received with cheers in the court, which were taken up by the crowd outside the courthouse. PRIESTS HEAD THE CONGRATULATORY DEMONSTRATION After this open and avowed triumph of rascality, it only remained to the political priesthood to lead the chorus of approval and joy. A meeting was organised. The Freeman narrates in brief the sacerdotal exhortation to the observance of the shortened Decalogue regarding landed estates in Ireland. The holy men announced again that in such cases the two commandments against stealing and coveting were dropped out : When the defendants came out from the courthouse they were received with enthusiastic cheering by the crowd. A procession was formed, and paraded the streets, the bands playing national airs. Later on a meeting was held, and speeches delivered from a wagonette. The Rev. J. Maher, P.P., Borrisokane, who presided, congratulated the people on the result of that day's proceedings. He was delighted to see such^ a large gathering present, for it showed that the people were alive to the needs of the hour. They recognised that agriculture was now the principal industry of this country. Our industries, our mills, and our tanneries had been taken from us by alien laws. We had been robbed of everything except the land by an alien Government, and we would be robbed of the land too if it could be taken over to England (cheers). However, they were determined to have Ireland for the Irish and tho land for the people. He appealed to them all to concentrate on the effort to obtain Home Rule. The Rev. J. Gilligan, P.P., Shinrone, said that in the thirties of the last century their fathers had buried the tithes at the Devil's Bit, and that day they had struck a blow against the grazing system. If they continued like that, before twelve months were over the grazing system would be a thing of the past (cheers). THE NAMES OF THE PRIESTS It only remains to give the names of the assistant clergy. It may be seen that they were quite a miniature oecumenical council of the cattle-raiding Church in Tipperary : Amongst the clergymen present during the day were Rev. J. Maher, P.P., Borrisokane; Rev. J. Costigan, P.P., Cloughjordan ; Rev. J. Gilligan, P.P., 48 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN Shinrone ; Rev. J. Maher, C.C, Borrisokane ; Rev. H. Moloney, Borrisokane ; Rev. W. Scanlan, C.C., Shinrone; Rev. P. Smythe, Puckan ; Rev. M. O'Connor, C.C., Cloughjordan ; Rev. P. Hogan, C.C., Toomevara ; Rev. A. M'Namara, C.C., Toomevara; Rev. T. Meehan, C.C., Inagh ; Rev. M. J. Hoolihan, C.C., Lorrha ; Rev. D. Murphy, C.C., Dunkerrin ; and Rev. Father Clery, Toomevara. Let us admit that these priests are themselves the victims of their system. Educated and trained as they are, led by a discipline of iron as they are, I carefully abstain from personal accusations of such servants and tools ; but could you find such another spectacle throughout Christian civilisation, a body of ministers of religion openly applauding and inciting open brigandage and terrorism by the mob, open violation of justice by the magisterial accomplices, proclaiming that coercion and dishonesty were " the need of the hour," that intimidation and violence were needed and wanted " to strike a blow " at the property of fellow citizens and countrymen ? And all the while there are hundreds of thousands of under- cultivated farms in Ireland calling for tillage and employment of labour ; and all intelligent observers, even Catholic bishops, have to record that Ireland would bloom like a garden, "if the people only worked as the English and Scotch do." And unquestionably the Irish people would work like the English and Scotch, if they were as free as the English and Scotch from the counsels and incitements, fortified by every kind of appeal to cupidity, to sloth, and to superstitition, of a political priesthood intent upon consolidating the edifice of their rapacious hierocracy above the ruins of every social and intellectual superiority in the country. These men prate of loyalty ! What they understand by loyalty is, indeed, something profoundly unnational, Ireland governed by priestly satraps under the aegis of the British crown. They will accept in words the supremacy of the crown of Britain or the crown of China, if that supremacy only means their own. Such are the rulers of the parochial committees that the Congested Board leaders want to rule the whole of Ireland. And why not? Have they not already, " under the British crown," all the schools of the country ? and the ignorance and enslavement of the Irish intelligence are the work of their hands. THE CONGESTION BOARD AND THE RIBBON LODGE THE ROBESPIERRES OF THE SACRISTY I REFERRED to the continued outflow of population during the reign of the congested fiction as an absolute proof that the efficacy of the Board is as microscopic as its pretentions are vast. Take even Donegal, for instance. Where is the success, taken as a whole, of developing some industry in the Rosses, or in facilitating the railway service with the new extravagant cathedral at Letterkenny, when forty or fifty thousand Donegal peasants and fishermen have vanished utterly out of the county since the congested charlatanism began its operations? But there is another proof which I would have commended to the most earnest consideration of the Com- mission. I allude to the growing demand of the leaders and patrons of the congested fiction for the expropriation of Irish landowners as the next thing necessary for the congested policy of peace and goodwill. Nothing can show more clearly how barely and merely the congested pseudo-philanthropy has touched the skirts of misery in Ireland, than this demand of the congested agitators for the policy of Robespierre or the Russian terrorists in place of the milder methods of the Right Hon. Mr. George Wyndham. In this con- nection I respectfully invite attention to the accompanying letter recently written on a public occasion by a venerable colleague in the pastorate of the chief member of the Congested Board. In a public letter dated Loughrea, the i8th January of the year 1907, the most reverend Bishop of Clonfert addresses himself as follows to the urgent necessity of employing " legal compulsion " in order to force Irish owners and occupiers to furnish "the amount of land required for a systematic redistribution among those in need." LETTER FROM THE BISHOP OF CLONFERT ST. BRENDAN'S, LOUGHREA, Jan. \&ih, 1907. DEAR MR. COGAVIN, I should be glad to offer a tribute of respect to the memory of Matt Harris by assisting at your celebration on Sunday next. I find, however, that it is impossible for me to be present. It would also be a very sincere pleasure to join in your welcomes to Mr. John Dillon. No man in Ireland has, I think, shown more unselfishness, consistency, or strenuous earnest- ness in public life than he has. It is right that in present circumstances this confidence in Mr. Dillon, as in the other leaders of the Irish party and in 4 50 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN parliamentary methods, should find unmistakable expression before the country. The land question is still the most pressing in Ireland, especially in the west. Further observation has strengthened the conviction formed some time since, that this question cannot be satisfactorily settled without employing legal compulsion. In my opinion, owners and occupiers will not sell freely the amount of land required for a systematic redistribution among those in need, and compulsion by law is the only form of compulsion which a civilised and Catholic nation should seek to employ. For this and other reasons I am strongly in favour of a limited power of expropriation, to be vested in a tribunal which could be trusted to deal impartially with all parties. This power should not be applicable till friendly negotiations had failed, and should be exercised gradually, according as the funds required for compensation could be economically raised. Priority should be given to cases of urgency, and, therefore, to the whole of Connaught. The very existence of this power would oil the wheels of negotiation, and cut off a very real temptation to use methods forbidden by the law of God, and grievously detrimental to the character of the people. THOMAS O'DEA. What a grim satire upon the inutility of the Congested Board is this cool proposal of a Christian prelate to drive the requisite number of Irish owners and occupiers out of their estates by means of the "compulsion by law which is the only form of compulsion that a civilised and Catholic nation should seek to employ " ! I am not aware that the zealous Bishop of Clonfert as readily accepts "compulsion by law" applied to the French Church as he does the proposal to expropriate the whole of the gentry and large farmers of Connaught. I would also very earnestly direct attention to the most grave declaration by this important prelate who was lately President of Maynooth College that the power of expropriating owners and occupiers "would cut off a very real temptation to use methods forbidden by the law of God, and greviously detrimental to the character of the people." This public profession by the prelate illuminates with a light which cannot be obscured the whole of the domestic situation and the congested fiction in Ireland. Mark the statement, the authoriative statement, that the existence of an unexpropriated class of owners and occupiers in Connaught consti- tutes "a very real temptation to use methods forbidden by the law of God " ! All the requisite land in Ireland " systematically redistributed " among the needy clients of the venerable prelate and his colleagues, and then the whole of the redistributed territory paying the death-bed toll and tax to the venerable authors of the redistribution here indeed is a goal for Christian endeavour in the congested area ! How is it possiblt to expect that the congested Board or any other board, in Ireland or any other country, can find a population really ready to work with all its capacity and energy for gradual improvement, when that same population is being told by its most authoritative leaders that all the land which it desires ought to be obtained by " compulsory expropriation " from the original owners ? The diocese of Clonfert may be called a congested district. It is surrounded by congested districts. POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 51 Yet the compulsory redistribution of Connaught among the poorer tenantry is the doctrine of its chief pastor, and is notoriously shared by members of the Congested Board, as well as by hundreds or thousands of its reverend agents in the Parish Com- mittees. If the compulsory expropriation of owners is the true goal of the Congested Board, then, for goodness' sake, let it stop wasting the public money on voluntary purchases and sales, which it can shortly effect at a nominal cost under "legal compulsion." Robbery is cheap, except to the robbed. A certain Mr. White, M.P., one of the League nominees of the lodges and sacristies which take the place of constituencies in Ireland, declared, as quoted at a former page, that, " so long as our holy pastors approve of our actions, that is good enough for us." Will the doctrine of the Clonfert bishop that the " want of a power of compulsory expropriation" constitutes in itself "a very real temptation to the use of methods contrary to the law of God " be regarded by the Clonfert boycotters and outrage organisers as a serious disavowal by the "holy pastors" of cattle raiding? The most reverend Bishop of Clonfert may have acted with entire innocence, or he may have been simply carrying out the orders of superiors whom he was unable to disobey ; but it is instructive to observe that the local adherents of the League in his own diocese of Clonfert seem to have no doubt whatever as to the legitimacy of employing the black list, with its well-known conse- quences, against all who decline to submit to the organisation. The Connaught Leader of the 3rd August of the year 1898 reports that at a meeting of the committee of the Clonfert branch of the United Irish League it was resolved : To give a fortnight's time to those who did not yet 'join the branch and who ought to join. After that time the names will be published, and such as do not join will be left to themselves. The phrase " to be left to themselves " has no esoteric or un- known meaning for the affiliates of the Congested Districts League. As the Connaught Leader of the 27th July of the year 1898 reported, the parish priest who presided over the branch of the United Irish League at Kilchreest on the 2ist July volunteered the following ecclesiastical commentary upon the methods which would be " nothing illegal " in dealing with objectionable characters : Let no one touch the grazier at the fairs ; let no one drive his cattle, shear his sheep, or make his hay. If they did their duty, they would make county Galway as hot as the lower regions for any man who was the enemy of the people. This is not an extract from the late Citizen Marat at a meeting of the Jacobin Club during the Terror. It is the moral exhortation of a Christian cleric in the responsible position of pastor of a parish in the Island of Saints. If I mistake not, the reverend orator belongs to the archdiocese of the Most Rev. Dr. Healy, lately a 52 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN Royal Commissioner on university education in Ireland, appointed by Government to oppose the existence of an unsectarian university in the country. Here we have an example of education which was certainly not unsectarian. One of the most abominable results of the alliance between the political sacristies and the organisers of intimidation and outrage is the use of the edifices of worship for the promulgation and dis- semination of the menaces and black lists of the League. A couple of extracts from the Western People of July and August of this year 1908 will illustrate this abuse. In order to force the population of Knock More to contribute to the membership and funds of the League, the local branch passed the following resolution, which clearly shows by its routine character how habitual is this desecration of the places of public worship : That a list of all parties in the different townlands who have not joined the League be handed in and read this day month outside the chapel gates. All committee members are requested to have correct lists, and we hope the missing names will be very few in the parish, as one shilling will not make them rich or poor. In a similar manner at Glen Corrib at the August meeting of the local branch of the United Irish League, the parish priest being in the chair, just as Bishop O'Donnell, of the Congested Board, is in the treasurership of the League parliamentarians, the following resolution was adopted in the same routine way to utilise the place of public worship for the promulgation of the black lists of the intimidation conspiracy : That any eligible householders in this side of the parish who refuse to pay the annual subscription shall have their names posted on the chapel gate, published in the Western People, and read at the public meeting, so that the people may distinguish the black sheep and hold them up for a public criticism. In what sense can the charitable precepts of Christianity be understood in those districts of League flocks and pastors when even the edifices of Christian prayer and praise themselves are habitually used for the holding up of " black sheep " denounced by the League agitators to the menace of the boycott and the bludgeon? I am perfectly certain that there are a hundred millions of Catholics on the continent of Europe to-day who would be utterly unable to recognise the perpetrators of such sacrilegious intolerance as participants in the same religion and morality. To bring home completely to non-Irish readers the full signifi- cance of the League black list in Ireland, I quote this extract from the report of the Athenry branch in the Connaught Champion of the ist June of the same year : Several of the traders present asked that a list should be given to each shop- keeper, so that all would be made aware of who were to be supplied and who were not. POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 53 We must not suppose that this eagerness of the traders present ought to be interpreted as an indication of any excessive cruelty on their part. In most cases it merely meant that for their own protection from the boycotting League beloved of the Congested Districts Board the wretched traders of Athenry wanted to know exactly whom they were to join in starving, so that at any rate they should not make any unnecessary victims. I have not heard that any of the prelates or pastors of the Congested Board have em- ployed the fulminations of the Church against such outrage on humanity. A still graver use of the black list, for the purpose, viz., of intimidating what is called the Bench of Justice in Ireland, may be appended in this place. On the i2th June 1907 fifteen cattle raiders were charged at Liscarrow Petty Sessions, county Roscommon, and as the magistrates actually on the Bench were divided in opinion, the case was adjourned to the next court day. There was intense indignation among the local leaders at the absence of a number of Land League magistrates, whose plain duty was unhesitatingly assumed to require the instant acquittal of the culprits. As a result of this indignation, the Roscommon Herald^ an organ of the League, published three days afterwards a black list of the guilty magistrates who had dared to be absent from their supreme judicial duty of absolving Land League criminals. Here are the terms of the denunciation : The'chief comment at the termination of the proceedings was the absence of Mr. Hubert Martin, J.P., Mr. Connell, J.P., Mr. T. A. P. Mapother, D.L., Chairman Roscommon District Council, and Mr. John Fitzgibbon, Chairman of the County Council, any of whom, had they attended, could have set the defend- ants at liberty. There is no qualification of a Government institution fulfilling the functions of the Congested Districts Board more absolutely essential than to be fair to all political parties and to be free from the influence of all party agitators, especially of such as are active and virulent in carrying out their agitation. Now, in this respect it is to be profoundly regretted that the leading officials and the vast majority of the most active and influential agents of this Board, which distributes such large sums of public money among electors and non-electors in Ireland, form a vast machine of party politics, and that, from its leading members down to the most subordinate, its agents and officials are for the most part the emissaries and firebrands of a violent political and social combination directed against large classes of other Irishmen. If the chief of the Board were Grand Master of the Orange society and order, if the vast majority of the agents whose advice and selection directed the patronage of the Board were Orange chaplains and clergymen, it is needless to dwell upon the storm of discontent and indignation which would be excited throughout the country. Even if all those Orange leaders and agents meant to act with the most scrupulous 54 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN fairness and equity, the fact would remain that the whole influence and prestige of this great taxation-spending organisation would be felt to be on the Orange side and in the Orange interest. I express no party preferences, but I maintain it is simply unen- durable and scandalous that the chief members of such a public board should be the most active and most influential leaders of a social and political confederacy directed against the action and opinion of other Irishmen. How can you have, with any semblance of fair- ness, at the head of such a board an ex-chairman of convention of the United Irish League and co-treasurer of the United Irish parlia- mentary party? There is no question about the sincerity and earnestness of this partisan leader. In the constituencies under his control he opposes every candidate who does not accept the mandates of the League, even such universally respected characters as T. D. Sullivan, the amiable poet, and Mr. Arthur O'Connor, long a deputy chairman of the House of Commons, and a most distinguished member of the Home Rule party. But the con- stituencies from which these respected Irishmen were chased are precisely among those in which this thorough partisan is associated with the distribution of thousands of pounds of public money in connection with the Board under investigation. Nor is this all. It is really no wonder that the Congested Districts Board merits the name of " The Chief Branch of the United Irish League." Practically the whole of the vast body of political clergymen who are the chief agents and counsellors in the distribution and allot- ment of the Board subsidies are active and often violent advocates of the methods of the party of boycott and "redistribution of property," to quote the benign words of the episcopal document I have already submitted to the reader. To give a few more illustrations, which might be multiplied by hundreds, the Sligo Champion of the 3rd November, 1906, reports that a meeting of the Drumlease branch of the United Irish League was presided over by a clergyman in passing a vote of thanks to " the manly action " of certain merchants who refused to supply boycotted men. The Connaught Leader of the 2Qth September, 1906, reports a meeting of the Woodford branch, presided over by a clergyman, at which a member of Parliament called upon the people to hunt certain boycotted men and to make "it as warm for them as it could be. made." At a League meeting in North Glenties, in the very heart of the so-called congested districts of Donegal, held on the 2ist October, reverend canons, monsignors, and parish priests were chairman and speakers. The Connaught Leader of the i5th September, 1906, reported that the reverend president of the Woodford branch threatened to quit the United Irish League, unless it expelled the secretary of the branch for the crime of keeping as a weekly tenant a man who worked for a boycotted firm of sawmill owners, and the secretary was accordingly POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 55 expelled, on the motion of a clergyman ! At a United Irish League meeting held at Swinford on the loth September, 1906, five political parish priests were among the speakers, and a dozen parish priests and curates supported the League by their presence. All through the territories of the Congested Districts Board, from Donegal to Kerry, the United Irish League is predominantly a clerical organisation ; and the priests, who, especially in the Parish Committee organisation, are the advisers and agents of the Board in its distribution of public funds, are everywhere the vigilant followers and emulators of their venerated chief, the chairman of United Irish League conventions and treasurer of the United Irish League Parliamentary Fund. When the Commission visited the west, for the purpose of witnessing the enthusiasm with which the benefactions of the Board are regarded and of receiving the evidence which had been prepared by the clergy, they might have usefully inquired among the Sligo patrons of congestion for the political clergyman who presided over the Glencar branch of the United Irish League on the ist July, 1906, when, as the Sligo Champion reports, the branch and the reverend president devoted their attention to stigmatising " a car owner from Killasnett Branch, who attends the Sligo market on Saturdays, and had Towneymoyle grabbers for the occupants of his car on a recent occasion." This reverend pillar of congestion had actually the courage to support an infamous resolution, passed by the branch, which even threatened a young girl, as follows : "If this gentleman repeats this conduct his name will get full publicity, together with the name of the schoolmistress who accom- panied them on the occasion. The conduct of John M'Loughlin, of Baldy, together with his family, for aiding and assisting the Towney- moyle grabbers, was strongly referred to." I can only presume to suggest that it might have been instructive to visit also the Congested Board clergy and United Irish League Branch at Drumkeeran, in the heart of the scheduled districts of Leitrim, in which, as well as in the neighbouring district of Drumshambo, a merciless refusal to supply the necessaries of life to all under the ban of the League has been enforced on the local shopkeepers by vigilance committees especially chosen " to keep an eye on people dealing or keeping company with obnoxious individuals, and to report all cases to our meetings." In the same district the Com- mission might have remembered, but studiously ignored, that every jury has refused to convict members of a mob of 600 leaguers who, " with wild threats of murder," tore away the food from the Brady boys, though they had walked twenty miles to bring it to their boy- cotted and starving parents. Well might Mr. Justice Kenny wonder "if this could be a Christian country"! Where was the civilising influence of the Congested Board and its reverend patrons? I have no hesitation, on the contrary, in saying that the influence of the Congested Board directly stimulates the popular passions by $6 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN the use of the public funds and by the demands for larger and larger measures of compulsory expropriation. Meantime members of the Board go about contrasting their generous use of other people's money with the conduct of owners and occupiers "who never did anything for the people " ! I have the profoundest reverence for the religious clergyman, but the political clergy simply pursue the objects of the boycotting League of which they are chiefs. More exactly speaking, the Board, like the League itself, is an instrument in the hands of the power which has made the " redistribution " of property in Ireland the very foundation of its expected supremacy. I enter into no criticism of the United Irish League policy. It may or may not be quite right "to redistribute by legal com- pulsion the landed property of owners and occupiers in Ireland." But it cannot be right that the agents and leaders of this social war should be endowed with the prestige and influence which belong necessarily to the distributors of thousands sterling of public taxation. It is freely said that at least thirty members of Parliament are elected in the west of Ireland by the influence of the clergymen, from bishops to curates, affiliated to the Congested Districts Board and the Agrarian League. One of the most clerical of these parliamen- tary persons, when opposing so respected an Irishman as Captain Shaw-Taylor at Galway a short time ago, did not hesitate to describe him, in public meetings adorned by much clerical support, as "a black spawn of the Cromwellian brood," a very suggestive illustra- tion of the spirit in which the redistribution of landed property is to be carried out by the members and supporters of the Board. This particular member of Parliament enjoys the very closest friendship and constant patronage of the most influential members of the Board. How could any political candidate hope to succeed in a poverty-stricken constituency in Galway, Mayo, or Donegal, when opposed by a League nominee supported by the distributors and masters of all the public subsidies as well as all the clerical influence for hundreds of square miles around ? I maintain that, unless an independent and impartial lay organisation is in every case substituted for this clerico-revolutionary Board, a sordid and mendicant social war will continue to rage within its jurisdiction. Whatever may be the legitimate objects of such a board, let them be the business of a lay department, im- partial and unsectarian, in some central Irish administration. The present possessors of such immense powers of corruption and intimidation have no real interest in promoting peace in Ireland, at least until no influential class exists in the country except their own confederacy. The complicity of the political priesthood in agrarian crime is acknowledged to be further illustrated by the cessation of cattle driving, which followed Mr. Birrell's promises of anti-educational legislation in conformity with the demands of the Foreign Mission POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 57 in Ireland. The most experienced Irish correspondents pointed out that the obedience of the cattle burglars to the command of the priestly leaders increases, instead of relieving, the seriousness of the situation. The same hands which now signal " Slow down " can revert to " Full speed ahead." "Of all the signs and portents of this latest crusade of the United Irish League, the sudden cessation is the most disquieting. It is a further proof of the power of the priests. Mr. Birrell has recently visited Cardinal Logue, and it is not unreasonable to suppose that as the result of their deliberations the cattle-drivers were checked in their game. There is a great deal of anxiety in Nationalist circles just now that a " chance " may be given to Mr. Birrell. The respite from the worries of open acts of violence is a concession from the priesthood. They, of course, are greatly interested in the establishment of a Catholic university." What a compliment to the honour of a Dublin Castle administrator to conceive him capable of placing the accomplices of the cow-beaters in the Governing Senate of a University. The cow-beaters themselves pay Mr. Birrell such compliments. At Longford on izth January of the current year, both J. P. Farrell, M.P., and J. Phillips, M.P., said that "to give Mr. Birrell a chance, they should stop cattle-driving at present, but if he neglected his promises (!), the hazel would be used more strongly than ever." PART III LEADING CAUSES OF POVERTY AND DEPOPULATION AGRICULTURAL SLOTH " Irish farmers would say that tillage would not pay ; but that was absolutely untrue. Tillage would pay in Ireland, if they worked as people did in England and Scotland. . . . Neither the climate nor the soil was better than ours. . . . Tillage would pay us also, if we till scientifically, and if we are as industrious as they." Most Rev. Dr. Boy Ian, Bishop of Kilmore. THE CHURCH INCUBUS "Catholic Belgium has one archbishop and five bishops; if it was staffed according to population on the episcopal scale of Ireland, it should have ten archbishops and sixty bishops." CLERICAL DICTATION " We request the district councillors to refuse their support to any candidate who will not produce a letter of character from the priests of his parish." Mandate of the Priests of Claremorris. PEASANT PROPRIETORS AND GOMBEEN MEN ' ' When you have parcelled out all the land in Ireland you will still have failed to make agriculture pay. You will have created a nation of bankrupt peasant proprietors, who, instead of owing rent to rapacious landlords, will be up to the ears in debt to still more rapacious ' gombeen ' men. Then your troubles will begin all over again, only worse than ever." C. E. Hands in " Daily Mail." CLERICAL BOYCOTT OF LAY TEACHING " The convents teach the girls as the colleges teach the boys, and between them the secondary education of Ireland is one huge machine for bringing money into the coffers of the religious orders." Seamus O'Muricaha in London School of Economics Magazine. THE EDUCATIONAL CRIMES OF THE CONVENTUAL ORDERS "The secondary schools system in Ireland is a repulsive system. It does not aim at education, but at turning the boys and girls into money-making machines." Right Hon. Mr. Birrell. THE OMNIVOROUS CONVENT " Monasteries are everywhere. Ireland is fast becoming the home of old men and women and monasteries. And she must maintain it all the regu 1 a 59 60 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN clergy, the secular clergy, the convents and monasteries.'' Seamus 0' Muricaha in London School of Economics Magazine. THE ALLIANCE OF THE PRIEST AND THE ANARCHIST "Join us in overthrowing the ascendancy of the classes." Manifesto of the Bishop of the Board. CHURCH BUILDING AND POPULAR MISERY " At this moment huge sums are being collected for the cathedral at Killarney, while within a stone's throw of the Bishop's Palace there are lanes which might not be tolerated in a West African village." " The Peasant and Irish Ireland,'' December 14, 1907. SUMMARY OF LEADING CAUSES OF POVERTY AND DEPOPULATION I SHALL deal in this Third Part with a number of the leading causes which, operating over the whole of Ireland, mainly produce those results so absurdly and misleadingly described as congestion. 1. The first of these leading causes of which I speak is the in- fluence of agrarian agitation and agrarian legislation in breaking the very springs of industry and diminishing or destroying the demand for industry, with the necessary consequence of increasing unrest and steady depopulation. When we had agrarian agitation alone the interference with industry was serious. If we could have had the agrarian agitation alone, without the Gladstonian legislation, we should undoubtedly have many evils to chronicle. But it was only the union of these two influences, the Land League anarchism and the Gladstonian land courts, which was competent to produce the condition of Ireland as we see it to-day, especially since the anarch- ism of the League has been reinforced by the funds and policy of the Congested Board. 2. A cause of popular ruin and degradation of the gravest character is the existence and extension of the personage known in Ireland as "the gombeen grocer," or money-lending shopkeeper, almost invariably combining the sale of intoxicants with that of less injurious commodities, and who makes use of his own comparative wealth and the poverty and shiftlessness of his customers in order to establish a system of lending at exorbitant interest, either in money or in the cost of goods, which has involved three-fourths of rural Ireland in a net of paralysing usury exceeded in few of the most backward countries in the world. This monstrous evil, which perhaps outpasses in mischief every influence save one other alone, has been practically ignored by legislation and by its creature, the Congested Districts Board. 3. In the special circumstances of Ireland, where there is no legal protection against forms of extortion that are the object of constant solicitude on the continent of Europe, I believe that the establishment of peasant proprietorship will fail to check depopula- tion and will give rise to other evils in excess of those which peasant proprietorship was supposed to remove. % 4. Some defects and evils of Irish character, as that character has been developed by the Political Churchman and the agrarian 61 62 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN agitator, must also be recorded, if for no other reason than that they are systematically ignored by all the panacea-mongers whose instru- ment has been the Congested Districts Board. I refer particularly to the popular training in ignorance ; the development of a sordid and short-sighted selfishness at the expense of children and em- ployees alike ; the work-shy frame of mind and body in what are called the industrial classes; the absence of housekeeping in the Irish home ; the disposition towards sloth and mendicancy produced by the prevalence of clerical begging under all kinds of pretexts ; the prevalence of the drink habit and the drug habit, including in the latter what may be called the poison tea habit; the general existence of uncivilised and insanitary conditions of life, which, commencing in the depressing unhealthiness and dirt of the clerical primary school, seem to increase with increasing growth, until the peasant obstinately refuses to devote an hour to sanitary work, even although he have hundreds of hours absolutely free from all work whatever, etc., etc. 5. A cause of depression and pauperisation of the first class is also afforded by the exaggerated numbers, and consequent expense, already noticed, of the enormous Church establishment, not the Established Church so familiar in the diatribes of political rhetor- icians a couple of generations ago, but the far more real burden and incubus of a bloated growth of clerics far beyond the religious needs of the country, outrageously exceeding the most lavish establishment of such institutions in foreign Catholic countries, detached from all control by public opinion to a degree unknown elsewhere, and ab- solutely insatiable in its absorption of the wealth of the country on every conceivable and inconceivable pretext. All the exactions of absenteeism are exceeded or perpetuated in this vast evil, whether we look to the enormous sums levied for non-productive persons in Ireland, or to the enormous sums which are extracted from Ireland for use or misuse abroad. The functions of religion are sacred and indispensable to national well-being. The minister of religion who is truly a minister of religion is an economic benefactor as well as a spiritual guide. But it is in neither of these aspects that we have to consider the special evil in question in Ireland. 6. An evil which demands the largest and keenest inquiry is, perhaps above all, that most incurable wrong to a nation involved in the systematic action, the conspiracy we may say, of a dominant section in the popular Church of a country to overturn the bases of society with the object of substituting its own control, its domina- tion, and its ownership we might almost say its sovereignty for the lay social classes which have existed for centuries. There are in Ireland, fortunately, hundreds of religious clergymen who are ministers of religion above all things, who are devout, zealous, and unambitious. The further inquiry is pushed, however, the more evident it will become that a formidable section in all ranks of the popular Church in Ireland has aimed, and continues to aim, at POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 63 nothing else than the dissemination of agrarian and social unrest until every class has been destroyed or broken which could check or limit the preponderance of the political Churchman. From the first intimidatory notice issued by a Land League branch to the last benediction on cattle-raiding breathed by a congested districts cleric, the part of the Political Churchman in sowing and spreading the unrest which has depopulated Ireland and enriched the sacristies is clear, evident, and incontrovertible, no matter what may be the denials or the denunciations of the reverend anarchists. 7. Finally, the work of the Congested Districts Board, often even its benevolent work, is intimately connected with, and directed by, the ecclesiastical oligarchy to such an extent, that it has long since become their most efficient instrument in the national un- settlement by which they have profited, and through which they expect to triumph. I shall deal in some detail with these various heads in the sub- sequent pages. I need hardly add that I never expected the Arranged Commission to pay the slightest attention to such views. Their partisanship had long ago discarded all veils. They hardly closed their sittings when their Bishop of the Board ran off to join Mr. Redmond at the abortive conference with Mr. W. O'Brien. Bishop O'Donnell is the real leader of the League. Mr. Redmond is only Mr. John Dillon's echo, and Mr. John Dillon is only the speaking trumpet of Maynooth. Yet, until the Bishop became member of the millions-spending Board, he was a political nobody, as a religious bishop ought to be. AGRARIAN LEGISLATION AND AGITATION : HOW THEY IMPOVERISH AND DEPOPULATE THE LAND COURT FARCE THE FARMERS EXPEL THE LABOURERS WITNESS-BAITING AGAIN THE " TABLET " ON UNDERCULTIVA- TION A BISHOP'S PROTEST WITH regard to that twofold influence of inconsiderate legislation and restless agitation in depressing and depopulating the country, I would call attention, in the first place, to the general effect of the Gladstonian Land Acts. The provision in the Gladstonian land code that all rents were liable to reduction at the end of every period of fifteen years, necessarily resulted in a widespread effort to obtain the reduction by exhibiting the impoverishment of the land. A farmer who kept his land in heart, who manured, and ploughed, and employed labour diligently and extensively, saw himself, as he was easily led to believe, injured by the prospect that no reduction of rent court would ever reduce the rent upon fields so fertile and productive. Of course, it would be argued in normal countries and normal conditions that if the farmer raised larger crops he would be better able to pay the existing rent than perhaps to pay a diminished rent out of diminished crops. But here the influence of anarchist agitation came in to develop the worst evils of the law. "Are you going to kill yourself, Michael Brown, in order to pay the landlord big money? Starve him out, man, and the court will give you the land cheaper, and before long you will have it for nothing. Better a few weeds and thistles for a few years, in order to drive the whole of the landlords out of the country." As a general rule, the Gladstonian land court acted exactly as was desired and predicted by the anarchist agitator. The farmer who could "make a poor mouth," as the rural phrase went, the man who neglected drainage and repairs, and let his land get covered with weeds, almost invariably received the sympathetic attention of the land court judges. " True for you, my poor man ! How can you pay a big rent on such a bad farm ? Mark down Mr. Michael Brown to have his rent reduced 25 per cent." That is a popular translation of tens of thousands of land court judgments in Ireland. The resultant mischiefs were almost endless. Loafing took the place of industry and became a habit. Inferior food and 64 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 65 clothing entered into the part which the Land League farmer was taught to play ; and the inferior food and clothing usually affected his dependants more than himself. He had ways and expedients, often spirituous ones, for filling the gaps of appetite. His children and his workpeople were scarcely cheered by the calculation that " in ten years we will have the land for nothing." They preferred to go to America at once, and they will never come back. Though a Tenant Righter throughout the whole of my political career, I cannot speak too strongly of certain aspects of the land agitation and land legislation of the last quarter of a century in pro- moting disemployment and depopulation in Ireland. I remember very well going through a good deal of Leinster and Munster in the years 1883 and 1884 and listening to the expectations of the people, especially the labouring classes, upon the probable course of events after the Gladstone Land Act. I remember very well, while visiting my venerable friend, Mr. Richard Lalor, M.P. for Queen's County, how some most intelligent labourers expressed their apprehensions of the future. " The farmers are everywhere saying that the only sure way to get the rents reduced every fifteen years is to keep from cultivating the land, and the Land Commissioners will have to lower the rents in consequence of the poorness of the land. This means of course ruin to us. No farmer will keep labourers on his farm if he doesn't want the farm to prosper. He will grow as little as he can in order to starve the landlords out." I heard similar remarks everywhere from most thoughtful and respectable men, and I have no doubt that the plan of " lowering rents by lowering the farm " more or less actively influenced hundreds of thousands of farmers, and that a corresponding loss of employment was the result to vast multitudes of labourers. This no doubt largely explains the loss of a million of inhabitants which has marked the agrarian agitation of the past twenty years. One portion of the emigrants from Ireland during this period, namely the well-to-do classes who were driven from the country by the discomforts of agitation, also contributed to stimulate depopula- tion by the withdrawal of their demand for Irish commodities and labour. I have often spoken with members of the more artistic trades, from coach-builders to jewellers, who always complained that the loss of their old customers left them with no hope of supplying their place. Many of these trades have followed their old employers out of Ireland. I was well acquainted with a county town in Ireland in which there was a respectable barber and hairdresser, who derived a comfortable living from the custom of the more respectable inhabitants, in particular the members of the County Club, which was situated not far from the doors of his establishment. I visited that town and the old hairdresser after a lapse of many years. I found him in a state of extreme poverty and depression approaching despair. I asked him how it was going since the old days, and he 5 66 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN replied that trade was ruined, that he was dependent upon his son for a little living, but that he was sure that as soon as he was under the sod his son would leave Ireland and go to America. The agitation had driven the respectable class away. Nobody ever came to the County Club. The gentry were gone, and the barbers and hairdressers who were employed by the gentry must go also. In the same town I knew a working jeweller and watchmaker, a man of very considerable taste, who was patronised by large numbers of people, not- only in the town, but in the county outside. I called on him, to find him old and broken-hearted, and heard from his lips the same tale. The old shop, he said, hardly ever sees a rich or comfortable customer. " We only do the smallest work for the poorest people. My sons keep the business going simply because they do not like to leave their old father, who is too old to emigrate, but well I know that as soon as I am gone my boys will put up the shutters and go to America." It is the same story in scores of other trades and callings. It is the same story repeated a hundredfold and a thousandfold throughout Ireland. The whole class of servants of better training, accustomed to work for good houses, are similarly being driven out of the country. Butlers, coachmen, housemaids, all have been deprived of service in the houses of the gentry, since the gentry are no longer able to live in the country. All these displaced domestics are now com- petitors for situations on the London labour market or elsewhere. Discouragement of industry, destruction of industry, emigration of industry, depression, and depopulation that is the universal story of the results of the agitation. There are numerous tags and bits of important evidence before the Commissioners upon many causes of the want of employment and the deterioration of the soil in Ireland, and if it had been open to the public to offer evidence freely to the Commission, the volume of facts would have been enormous and convincing. But the managers and selectors of the affair took good care to discourage independent testimony by every means at their disposal, and in Dublin Castle the resources of trickery are manifold. A limited body of representatives of the landowners had to be heard, but their evidence was carefully discounted as the mere defence of accused persons. When men of national sympathies and independent views, like the author of Economics for Irishmen, ventured to insist upon a hearing, then the hostility was furious and unashamed. After putting me off for five months and then making two separate appointments at separate dates, the non-inquiry faction broke both the engagements. Mr. Jordan, who sent the Commission evidence of the hostility of the priests to migration, has not been called as a witness notwithstanding ; and Mr. Kenny testifies that, for daring to lift a corner of the veil, Mr. Jordan " has since then been strictly boycotted, his old associates refusing to speak to him, though POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 67 knowing the truth of his statement ; and I am told that the clergy are at work to get him discharged from his employment as petty sessions clerk." Among the incidental sidelights on the reality of things, which could not be entirely excluded, was the evidence of Mr. Commis- sioner Finucane, of the Estates Commission, upon the practice of certain farmers to deteriorate their holdings with a view to reduction of rent. "The system," said Mr. Finucane, "leads to deterioration of the land, the discouragement of improvements, and to perjury in the courts and demoralisation of the worst character." As I have urged, all this means depopulation, affecting both the agricultural labourers, who are not wanted on the deliberately undercultivated farms, and the larger shopkeepej^, who see their best customers deprived of their means of purchasing commodities and driven across the ocean in increasing numbers. It means what is mendaciously called congestion, or the accumulation of masses of unemployed men in slum areas, who, instead of earning good wages on the rich soil of twenty counties, are made the objects of Congested Board almsgiving and State socialism, and the excuse for Ribbon lodge proposals for the confiscation of more and more Irish landowners. In complete corroboration of Irish observers is the testimony of a leader-writer in the Tablet of the i7th August last. I am careful to quote recent evidence. This sympathetic visitor to Ireland describes what he had actually to see and regret in the most fertile parts of Ireland, the spectacle of magnificent soil being deliberately neglected and wasted by the miserable farmers. Both tillage and cattle breeding were irrationally scarce in the very garden of the pleasant land. I give his picture of fertile Tipperary, at the same time asking the reader to reflect how speedily all the pretended embarrassments of the congestion humbugs would vanish if 50,000 migrant labourers were invited from Mayo and Donegal by the reformed farmers of a score of counties to earn good wages by raising rich crops on tens of thousands of undercultivated acres. The reader will also note the comments of this keen and kindly observer on the idleness of the country girls which follows the misuse of the system of creameries in vogue. Without instruction, without occupation, it is no wonder they drift to America or the convent. "Our girls are good girls," said a leading man in the south of Ireland, "but they are fit for nothing in the world but to scatter roses before a holy procession." Widespread is the complaint of young Irishmen that it is hard to find a girl who knows how to keep a house and help a husband. Again a convent cause of depopulation. The convent pupils are untrained to found Irish homes. A busy farmhouse might be the best domestic school and technical school for the future wives and mothers of the country. But the farmers prefer every idle method of making up 68 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN for undercultivation, while they are taught to hope that more agitation will bring more idleness still. " Sure, we'll soon have all that the landlords have got. It'll be aisy to live when we have the big estates for nothing." But it is time to quote the actual words of the English Catholic writer : As to crops, it is a constant surprise and grief to a visitor to this fertile Tipperary to find that there are none to bless. In a wide district, magnificently fit for wheat, an alluvial plain in which everything prospers in superabundance, in which the trees are giants, the pastures deep, there is not a single cornfield or barley-field ; three fields of oats may be counted in many miles. So rich is the soil that this "fat and well-liking" country might easily feed its leaner brothers. No complexities of political economy can refute the plain fact that bread is wealth. The contentions as *to what other things may or may not be wealth can never confute this. And this country looks thus irrationally poor, in spite of the cattle. These are not few compared with those that graze on English fields, but they are few for this splendid land of streams. Welcome among their green meadows would be the soft bloom of corn, slowly ripening to the colour of a loaf ; but the green is everywhere. What prospers well is that new industry the creamery, as to which the observer's pleasure is mingled with his regret to find that the country girls, who used to work, are looking on idle while the machine works instead, and are spending its earnings on picture hats. As I have repeatedly said, while nothing is more deplorable than the political priesthood in every country, which gives up to factious agitation and pelf-hunting the position and influence received for the Gospel mission, all the more honour is to be paid to the ministers of religion who speak truth and fear not, who preach industry instead of confiscation. In this connection there is a strenuous condemnation of the existing system of undercultivation in an address delivered in the beginning of July last by the Most Rev. Dr. Boylan, Bishop of Kilmore. It is true the good Bishop does not know, or ignores, every cause for the existing neglect of the fertile soil except the want of industry. Want of industry or deliberate waste, the un- cultivated fields mean a depopulated and impoverished Ireland. An industrious Ireland would leave no excuse for the anarchist nostrums of the Congested Board. Here are the words of Bishop Boylan : He urged them also to encourage more agriculture, more tillage, in the country. He knew right well that farmers would say that tillage would not pay ; bvt he knew that was absolutely untrue. Tillage would pay if they worked as people did in England and Scotland. The Redemptorist order had a house in Perth, and behind it was a very high hill. He had been over there recently, and from the top of that hill he saw thousands and tens of thousands of acres of tillage. There was very little grass, but he saw oats, wheat, barley, and all sorts of green crops ; and yet neither the climate nor the soil was better than ours, They had, moreover, to pay much higher wages, and still it paid the Scotch farmers. They would not continue tilling if it did not pay. " It will pay us also," added his Lordship emphatically, "if we till scientifically, and if we are as industrious as they are." Irish tillage would pay if the Irish worked like the Scotch, or POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 69 the English, or the Belgians, or the French, or the Germans. And tillage means that there would be ample employment for every starving labourer between Cork and Donegal who preferred work to cadging and uncivilisation. He would have no need to migrate to English farms or Scotch farms. He could make good money on ten times ten thousand fertile holdings in his own land pro- viding the Irish farmers gave up undercultivation whether he chose to take up his permanent abode south, east, or north, or whether he sent a portion of his wages to the cosy cabin by the sea where he would return in the intervals of sowing and reaping. But the Congested Folly wants the estates of the landowners " to help us to nurse our poor people in habits of industry." And honesty as well? As I have quoted the important evidence of Mr. Commissioner Finucane on the practice of tenants trying to get reductions of rent by cultivating their lands as badly as possible, it may be mentioned, in connection with this witness himself an ultra-agrarian that his expression of a doubt of the competency of the Congested Board upon another grave matter produced a display of discourtesy and brow-beating on the part of a Board partisan on the pretended Commission of Inquiry, which illustrates convincingly the sort of reception reserved for independent testimony. Land League and Congested Board champions like Bishop O'Donnell and Mr. Conor O' Kelly, M.P., should have had" free access to the Com- mission of Inquiry for any evidence they had to produce, but to make them commissioners and judges of inquiry into their own special work was a piece of scandalous dishonesty on the part of the camarilla of Dublin Castle. Mr. Commissioner Finucane, who had been Minister of Agriculture for a long period in India, had expressed a decided opinion against the continuance of the present powers of Bishop O'Donnell's board for dealing with land purchase. His exact words are significant in the highest degree. I extract his testimony from the evidence : MR. COMMISSIONER FINUCANE It being clear that two bodies should not go on purchasing lands simultaneously in the congested counties, the question is which of them should take over the whole of the work. It appears to me that a non-official body such as the Congested Districts Board, sitting periodically in Dublin or elsewhere, would not be a suitable agency for carrying out the scheme suggested. " The Congested Districts Board not a suitable agency " ! Then there were wigs, or rather mitres, on the green. The Bishop of the Board tried to jump down the throat of the witness. 1 He was 1 When the author of Economics for Irishmen gave evidence against the political clergy before the Commission, his treatment seems to have been not dissimilar from the above. He writes: "The Bishop, I regret to say, fell deeper into that state of mind which we would describe as rage had he not been a bishop." It is to be observed that the Bishop of the Board's irritation may not be 70 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN " irrelevant " ; he was " delaying the Commission " ; he was " wandering from the point " ; he was " putting up a house of cards." He had been " very much out of the country," this a polite allusion to Mr. Finucane's long connection with agrarian administration in India, while the Bishop of the Board ought to have been absorbed by the spiritual cares of his huge and illiterate diocese. Mr. Commissioner Finucane bore the storm with firm com- posure, but what a commentary on Dublin Castle's plan of packing commissions of inquiry with partisans who dislike independence ! It is idle to blame the Bishop of the Board. The blame rests with the camarilla which put him where he ought never to have been. unconnected with the numerous traces, even in the arranged and selected witnesses before the Commission, of profound distrust of the Congested Board as it stands at present. Thus when another of the Board champions, the boycotting Com- missioner, Mr. Conor O'Kelly, tried to get an opinion favourable to the Board from Mr. Brennan, the Vice-Chairman of the Sligo County Council, he received a painful shock. MR. CONOR O'KELLY Do you not think it would be better to leave it to the Congested Districts Board ? MR. BRENNAN Well, I have not my heart and soul entirely in the faith of the Congested Districts Board. . . . The authority should be a representative authority. THE GOMBEEN GROCER AND HIS SPIRITUAL AND JUDICIAL ALLIES GOMBEENISM AND BAD FOOD WHISKY AND HOLY WATER GOMBEEN MAGISTRATES THE PUBLICAN'S TILL AND THE COLLECTION PLATE SIR H. PLUNKETT's REMOVAL A MOST potent cause of the waste, the drinking habits, and general helplessness so conspicuous in the pauperised districts, is the personage who is called the gombeen grocer. The gombeen grocer is a shopkeeper who, besides letting his customers have their supplies on a long credit and long prices, also directly lends sums of money, both transactions representing a heavy addition to the burdens of the customer. By these means he obtains a complete mastery over his customers, who dare not offend their creditor by refusing any of the commodities, such as brimstone whisky, coarse tobacco, and rubbish tea, which he recommends for their purchase. The gombeen grocer is a potentate of evil hardly inferior to any other of the influences for ruin which pauperise Ireland. Alcoholism, nicotinism, and the habit of the coarse tea drug, are everywhere part of the work of the gombeen grocer. I am assured that not less than twenty millions sterling annually are paid by the people for their indulgence in these three evils, which are pressed upon them by the usurious grocer whom they dare not refuse, even if they wish to, which is rarely the case. It has been represented to me by persons of the largest experience, that the habitual drinking of the most infamous tea, which they not merely infuse, but stew, for hours, is itself the most insuperable obstacle to overcoming the languor, apathy, and lack of brain power which are the consequences of a stupefying drug entirely unknown to former generations. Taken altogether, the popular wealth con- sumed by these three vices would not only far exceed the largest amounts of subsidies demanded for the congested fiction, but would vastly exceed the total of those rents that unscrupulous agitators describe as the only curse of Ireland, and would raise to competence and bodily and intellectual health the whole of that population whose depressing sorrows are the study of this sympa- thetic Commission. I would ask attention for a single consideration. The success 72 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN of the fishery enterprises subsidised by the Board necessarily depends upon the demand for the products of the fishing. If but a couple of million sterling annually out of the vast total spent on degrading drugs were available for the purchase of cheap and healthy fish, there would be an immediate end of all the pecuniary embarrassments of Irish Fishery Boards and fishermen alike. If the reverend ministers of religion, of whatever denomination, if the energetic ministers of the Crown who are always undertaking to be saviours of society, would only turn their attention from the promotion of social war and the encouragement of national mendi- cancy in order to divert the people from their loathsome drugs, results would be achieved in Ireland which will never be achieved on the present system. Unfortunately, the gombeen grocers, who now number in their ranks the large majority of the sellers of groceries and vendors of spirits in Ireland, are quite aware that it is only with the most extreme reluctance that a large portion of the reverend clergy will ever proceed to serious hostilities against them. The spirituous liquor trade, with its branches and alliances, contains by far the largest section of the wealthy parishioners throughout Ireland ; and these wealthy parishioners, both in life and in death, are the most profitable and generous supporters of the clergy of all ranks and orders. From the large incomes earned by the intoxication of the flock the grocers and spirit merchants pay to the pastors of the flock generous tithes and dues far beyond the contributions of any other class of Irish society. Not only are their offerings to the clergy at the stated seasons of dues and collections the main source of the clerical incomes, but on every related occasion it is the drink money from the publicaris till which supplies the richest contribution to the collecting plate. At charity sermons, when the preacher most in vogue does his utmost to excite the liberality of the faithful for some special object of clerical solicitude, it is the gombeen grocers, their families and friends, who fill the front seats of the temples, and contribute the large share of the pieces of gold and the greasy bank notes which agreeably attest the persuasiveness of the preacher and the devotion of a congregation. In the columns of subscribers towards the foundations of new churches and con- vents that are continually published in the Freeman's Journal and other organs of edification, the gombeen grocer figures in scores and in hundreds. When the faithful make up a purse for the bishop on his triennial visit to Rome, it is the grocer and the spirit merchant who take from the tills of their trade the largest plenish- ing of the episcopal requisition. In the opinion of the venerable donees, "the money does not smell." I know a woman of great wealth who is the owner of a couple of the most flourishing dens of drunkenness and vice in the most debased and crowded quarters of a great Irish city. In virtue of her abominable wealth, she possesses a sumptuous villa in a select POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 73 country district ; and there she is accustomed to be honoured for weeks at a time with the visits, which are in themselves benedic- tions, of a great and popular prelate who is also a great and popular politician of extreme agrarianism and educational monopoly. Nor are the gombeen grocers slow to resent interference with their business by the reverend clergy, who are indebted to them for the best or largest part of the comforts which they do not disdain. A couple of months ago I remember that a mission of zealous priests belonging to one of the poorer and more evangelical orders entered the town of Clare Galway, and for a whole week preached with religious and patriotic indignation against the curse of intoxication : and they denounced the sellers and the drinkers of spirituous liquor. They announced that they would hold a special meeting at which all the men and women of Clare Galway would be invited to take a solemn pledge against the consumption of intoxicating drink. The sermon on the evening of the pledge formed an impressing demonstration of the action of the good missionaries. Men and women in hundreds vowed to avoid for the future the drink and the drink-house. But the scene had an amusing sequel. The holders of licences to sell intoxicating drink met in indignation to protest against this extraordinary interference of ministers of religion with their wealth and livelihood. Nor were they content with expressions of indignation. They passed a resolution to pay no more dues to the clergy until the clergy should cease to interfere with the business of intoxication and pauperisation in the town of Clare Galway. There may be a few indignant missionaries. There may be the demonstrations of temperance societies and Father Mathew societies, for the most part composed of excellent persons who never were tempted to drunkenness in their lives. But it will take a national effort of unprecedented extent and gravity on the part of the popular clergy in Ireland to bring them to oppose seriously their principal paymasters, who are at the same time the principal paymasters of the political agitations which the clergy maintain throughout Ireland. The old jest known to the House of Commons, that Irish parliamentary punch was just " whisky and holy water," corresponds to the gravest and most hopeless incident of the clerico-political situation in every Irish county and town. A gombeen man is the worst sort of usurer. A gombeen publican or a gombeen grocer the two professions are frequently combined has special facilities in Ireland for usury in connection with his trade opportunities. Almost any accident of rural ex- istence may bring the farmer or labourer into the net of the usurious dealer. Popular banks for lending money in an emergency to small customers on credit, based on local knowledge, have been almost unknown in Ireland. Their establishment would have been the greatest work of Christian charity, as well as sound 74 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN economy, which could be inaugurated in any Irish village. But there was literally nowhere for the small man who wanted a loan of two or five or ten pounds except the counter of the whisky trader, whether or not he dealt in tea and sugar, soap and candles, besides. So to the gombeen grocer the wretched borrower went. Of course he had to pay a monstrously usurious interest ; but even with that monstrous interest the loan was seldom repaid in cash, and never only in cash. From the moment that the poor man fell under the yoke of the grocer money-lender he lost the power of choosing what commodities he should buy, or whether or not he should buy commodities at all. " He was expected to buy for the good of the house," the house of the money-lender. And the gombeen grocer was not only willing, but anxious, that the customer should buy goods on credit. Buying goods on credit forced the poor debtor to pay any price which the money- lender might choose to exact for his whisky, tea, and sugar, etc. The worst tea, the strongest in tannin and every other poison, which could be had on the London market for eightpence or tenpence a pound, was debited to the buyer on credit at as. 6d. and 35. a pound. Naturally the gombeen grocer directed the choice of his debtors towards the purchase of the commodities which paid him best, notably whisky and tea. If the debtor did not buy enough of whisky and tea to suit the gombeen grocer's estimate of his circumstances, then the original loan and the subsequent purchases on credit gave the usurious trader ample opportunity for putting on the screw. As a result the poor farmer or labourer could never get out of the debt of the gombeen grocer, and must continue buying usury whisky and usury tea in addition to paying the exorbitant interest on the original loan. Where is the possibility for the higher life in a townland or a number of townlands which have been enmeshed' in interminable obligations to the ring of local usurers? And while the poor debtors stand or kneel in the bleak back parts of the local church on Sunday, they have the pleasure of seeing their blood-suckers walking up to occupy the best places close to the sanctuary and basking in the welcome of the pastors of the church. Every department of local life in Ireland over vast districts is tainted by the gombeen man, the spirit grocer who lends money or credit, and who possesses a following of real bondslaves to do his bidding in social and political affairs. The gombeen grocer shares with priest and bishop the election of parliamentary representatives. 1 1 Quite recently the well-known General Sir William Butler, speaking before an Irish Catholic association, gave this emphatic testimony to the ravages of the drink habit in Ireland : " \Yhat precise sum of money is handed over annually to the British Treasury by the Irish drinking man I do not know, but of this I feel sure, that, whatever that colossal sum may be, its vast total is more than twice paid by Ireland in the loss of labour, of health, strength, virility, and will- power, which that drink bill entails upon the people." Of course the clergymen present received those remarks with appropriate POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 75 He is often as powerful as the priest in staffing the magisterial bench with dispensers of justice of his own kidney. The principal business of justices of the peace, according to these gentry, is to promote the welfare and authority of gombeen grocers. When a seller of whisky gets into trouble with the law, when a would-be seller of whisky wants a licence to open a public-house, he draws upon his bondslaves, and upon the politicians whom he has manufactured, and the priests whom he has endowed out of his vice-filled till, to help him out of the trouble or to send up a brother or cousin or other kinsman as a licensed trafficker in intoxicant poisons. It is very seldom that Catholic prelates in Ireland venture to deal seriously with this formidable evil. " Blood is thicker than water," says the proverb, and not only the priesthood, but the "magistracy" and the publicanhood are usually connected by ties of kinship as well as by mutual con- siderations of profit. Occasionally a voice of protest speaks from the sacerdotal ranks ; and a short time ago such a noble voice was heard from the lips of the late Most Rev. Dr. M'Redmond, Bishop of Killaloe, who took occasion to describe with becoming serious- ness the crimes of perjury, subornation of justice, and degradation of the judgment-seat which are bound up with the alliance of the spirit dealer and the spirit dealer's magistrates. I take from the Irish newspapers of the time the fuller extract, abbreviated in Notes and Illustrations, from an account of the triennial visit of the prelate in question in his diocese of Birr : THE BISHOP OF KILLALOE IN BIRR MAGISTRATES AND DRINK LICENCES Our Birr correspondent writes : " On Thursday his Lordship the Most Rev. Dr. M'Redmond, Lord Bishop of Killaloe, commenced his triennial visit to the united parishes of Birr and Carrag. " On Sunday, after the first Gospel at last Mass, his Lordship, ascending the altar, preached a powerful and deeply impressive sermon before a crowded congregation. . . . Referring to the terrible crime of perjury, his Lordship said that, while travelling in the county towns of North Tipperary and Clare he made it a custom to go into the courts of justice to hear any important cases that from time to time arose. He heard jurymen sworn to try cases according to the evidence before them ; he had heard witnesses invoke God's holy name in the most solemn manner to affirm the truth of their statements ; he had seen magistrates on the Bench men sworn to administer justice to the public and often, too often, indeed, he had seen men in these positons -violate the oaths they had taken in such a solemn manner. Frequently he had to leave these courts a wiser but a sadder man. Again, his duties obliged him to travel a good deal through his diocese, and in the course of his drives he frequently asked what were the names of the people living in the houses that he passed. Often he got applause, which will not prevent them from treating the publican and the spirit grocer as the foremost and most honoured supporters of Church finance in their respective parishes. The priest in the drink-seller's parlour receiving a sub- scription, the congregation in the drink -seller's shop wasting health and money that is the conjunction to which Sir William Butler did not allude. 76 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN the reply, 'That man has been made a magistrate and signs "J.P." after his name.' 'I hope,' his Lordship would say, 'that he attends the court often and distributes justice fairly to the people.' The reply to his remark not infrequently was, ' Oh, he never goes to the court except he is canvassed to support a licence* ! In concluding his sermon the Lord Bishop said that he found only too frequently that some magistrates did not go into court with the sole object of measuring out justice, but simply to please a neighbour, or perhaps they were urged to go by some more sordid motive." Bishop M'Redmond's references to the magistrates whose main judicial function consists in voting for the multiplication of drink licences, point to a graver cause of poverty and pauperism than the payment of rent or even the destruction of Irish export trade by English protectionism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 1 If such are the magistrates, who nominate them and commission them? Their recommendations are invariably backed by influential clergymen and politicians; but after all it is the Government in Dublin Castle, and not any landlord on his estate, who plant these allies of the publican and the spirit grocer from end to end of the country. And how rare are the episcopal or sacerdotal voices which are raised in protest against the alliance of the Bench and the whisky bar, the representatives of justice and the purveyors of crime, degradation, and starvation ! If the Con- gested Fiction Commission could induce the ministers of popular religion to support the boycott of whisky with half as much zeal as the boycott of education, Irishmen might cease to spend on in- toxication nearly double the annual rental of the island. Instead of there being any tendency to check the ravages of the gombeen grocers on the part of Dublin Castle and Maynooth College the Siamese twins of Anglo-Irish administration the credit shopkeeper has just won his greatest triumph in the compulsory resignation of Sir Horace Plunkett, who had made the emancipation of the Irish farmers from the shopkeeping usurers and thieves a main object of his remedial organisation of Irish agriculture. He had lent public money to co-operative societies of farmers for the purpose of teaching them to obtain commodities at something like a just price instead of the monstrous exactions of the loan-grocers and company, but the gombeen men, powerful in the organisation 1 I was glad to see that the papers published the evidence of the Catholic clergyman, thirty-seven years a curate in West Galway, describing the terrible curse which the gombeen grocer is to the whole population, and adding that men of this anti-social and almost anti-human class dominate not only the local boards and administrative councils, but the magisterial bench as well. Naturally, when the electors of a district become indebted to these harpies, all freedom of election is lost, and the gombeen man or his nominee is voted into every position in the gift of popular suffrage. And these drink-sodden boards and councils constitute, along with the congested districts clergy and the League parliamen- tarians, the main organisation for the systematic attacks upon freedom of cultivation and security of property. Possibly the depressing maintenance of an estimable priest in the subordinate position of a mere curate for thirty-seven years is not unconnected with his honourable hostility to evils rampant in Church as well as State. POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 77 of the parliamentarians and in the councils of the clergy, who dip so largely into the publican's till, were able to bring " political pressure " to bear on Dublin Castle, where Sir Horace Plunkett's position had been seriously shaken by his extremely moderate criticisms on political churchmen. Though Sir Horace Plunkett did not hesitate to say that "unless co-operative credit was developed quickly, the new peasant proprietor was doomed," the generous founder of agricultural organization was driven out of office. In a recent address to the body which he had created and directed, the dismissed reformer has revealed the victory of the Gombeen League : As Vice-President of the Department of Agriculture, he had consented to the Organization Society's using public money to teach the principles of combination to bodies of farmers. Mr. Russell also permitted this, but he objected to aiding with public monies societies which went into competition with country traders in tea, sugar, tobacco, and so forth. Sir Horace went on to argue that, if agri- cultural co-operation were really injurious to the interests of traders, the task of proving this lay with chambers of commerce, and not with politicians. The opposition to their movement came, however, from a small section of the trade, which had become abnormally powerful by their use of the political organization of the Nationalist party, a far more powerful machine than any business organiza- tion which they themselves could create. The result was that the political organization of the country, while nominally representing the Irish farmer, was, in fact, only allowed to do for the greatest interest and industry in Ireland just so much as the smallest trader in the Irish country town would permit. This was the whole plot of the tragedy. The Scotch doctrinaire who has been the tool of the cleric and the whisky usurer in preventing the liberation of the farmers, revealed the immensity of his ignorance or his subservience when he talked of his regard for the " country traders in tea, sugar, tobacco, and so forth." He might have added " intoxicants of all descriptions"; but then he is an advertised teetotaller. 1 It is precisely these "country traders" who rivet the farmers in chains of debt to habits of sloth and sottishness, resulting in chronic unthrift and insolvency. When the "new peasant proprietors," namely these besotted serfs of the truck-and-usury men, have entered fully into the ownership of the Irish estates, what a helpless spoil they will present to the foreclosing of the spirit grocer and his spiritual allies ! That is precisely what constitutes the impregna- bility of the gombeen citadels in Ireland. 1 The extraneousness of what is politely called the governing element in Dublin Castle would be less noxious but for its evanescence. Those Welshmen, Scotchmen, Anglo-Indians, Yorkshiremen, etc., who flit across the stage of the Secretaryship, have never the time to make up for outside ignorance. They come as shadows, and as shadows they depart. Mr. Arthur Balfour is the only minister for Ireland who brought a distinct personality to his Irish office, and the succession to the Premiership was quickly fatal to his adventure. Every Secretary treads the the same road and accepts the suggestions of the same environment. THE PEASANT PROPRIETARY NOSTRUM- FREQUENT FAILURE AND DANGERS ANGLO-INDIAN FADDISTS WHERE PEASANT PROPRIETORS SUC- CEED UNKNOWN IN IRELAND THE COMING OF THE JEW THE IRISH-AMERICAN LESSON. THERE are said to be two parties among the promoters of peasant proprietorship on the Congestion Board. One party favours the plan because it destroys the classes which are independent of Churchmen, because it creates a class which is dependent on the Churchmen, and because " the liberty of testation," as practised in Ireland, makes certain that an increasing portion of the peasant property will pass to the Churchmen within a generation or two. The other party mainly consists of quasi-philanthropic theorists, raw Anglo-Indians and others, who are still in the stage when " Stuart Mill on Small Holdings " was accepted as the last word of economic wisdom, and who seem to believe that to secure the prosperity of any country you have only to chop it up into holdings of ten acres. These pundits are not shaken by the fact that India is a country of small holders, and that India presents the most desperate problem of agricultural famine and discontent in the entire world. To such an extent does their fanaticism proceed, that it has come to be understood that their representatives on the Congested Board would not only cut up all the landlord estates in the country, but that they are willing to apply the same surgery to all the larger classes of tenant holdings which considerably exceed the area of their peasant ideal. In other words, we have the clerical aggression, which has pushed beyond the limit of endurance of every country in the world, allied with the bureaucratic faddists, who have probably done as much injury to humanity as any body of avowed despots. I shall deal later with the calculations of the clerical conspiracy. I admit that its calculations are perfectly well founded as Irish laws now stand. It is the whale which has every good right to expect that it will succeed in swallowing the Irish Jonah. But with regard to the Stuart-Mill Brahminee school, whose failure in India has made them oracles in Ireland, different considerations enter into the question. They really believe that when the national land has 7 8 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 79 been chopped into mincemeat the future of the inhabitants must be that of the story-books : "and they lived happily ever after." Let me admit at once that, given the necessary conditions, a nation of peasant proprietors can exist in a certain rude comfort and by a certain stubborn industry for a space of generations or even centuries where the soil and climate are fairly good ; where the custom of peasant proprietary has entered into the traditions and life of the people ; where an intense spirit of local patriotism prevails, enhanced by an intense spirit of local neighbourliness, both making the cultivators reluctant to quit the old spot ; where education in the modern sense of the knowledge of books and newspapers is hardly existent, and where there is consequently neither knowledge of, nor belief in, the superior advantages of other countries ; where emigration is unknown or regarded as almost impious ; and where custom has made it a consecrated pleasure to carry out the hard routine of a small cultivator's life. In such circumstances considerable populations may subsist in rude comfort with few enjoyments, but few wants, and with an absolute abhor- rence of going forth among strangers and enemies. This has been the condition of many communities in Europe and Asia in all those countries and ages where revolutions, invasions, and general insecurity make the small cultivator feel that his best chance for life and property consists in staying quiet in the old home among the old neighbours. But change all this. Let newspaper reading and similar in- fluences bring into every little home the pictures of easily accessible countries in which the same labour gives a hundredfold material results ; where there is moral and intellectual freedom corresponding with the new desires awakened by the new enlightenment ; where there is no danger whatever attaching to the processes of im- migration ; and where, on the contrary, immigrants are welcomed and protected. Couple all this with an increasing desire for less work, better food, more amusement, more intercourse with other people, and there is a state of things which is absolutely certain to bring peasant proprietary very near to its deathbed, even in countries in which it has been a long-descended institution. There never was peasant proprietary in Ireland. It has not existed in recent centuries under the system of landlords, middlemen, and cultivators. It certainly did not exist in Celtic times, under the lordship either of chief or clan. The great holder, the medium holder, the small holder, the free labourer, and the semi-serf existed in Celtic times, but not the peasant proprietary. You can have a flourishing peasant proprietary in Germany alongside of other classes, large farmers, landed proprietors, and, above all, numerous flourishing towns and cities making a constant demand for food supplies upon every class of rural markets. You may have it in Belgium, where, in addition to all the other advantages, you have city life developed to an extraordinary extent, so that the 8o POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN small holder can cultivate his land with the intensity of market gardening, in the certain knowledge of a constant demand for whatever he can sell above the wants of his immediate family. And in all those countries in which peasant proprietary flourishes, there is, in addition to all the favourable circumstances I have mentioned, this further one, which has almost totally disappeared from Ireland, that the peasant proprietor cultivates what he and his family eat and wear, that he tills in the first place for subsist- ence, and that he has not cultivated a taste for exotic products which he must buy with good money before he can satisfy his want of food and clothing. His house bread is home-grown ; it does not come from Chicago. His clothes are home-made, and not from the factories and shops of far-off empires. He prefers butter- milk and home-brewed ale to all the black tea of Assam. How can you make a peasant proprietor out of a man who rejects, or who has never felt, the essential wants and sentiments of every flourishing community of peasant proprietors in the world ? To educate a peasant proprietor's children you must have a peasant proprietor's education. I mean that the sons and daughters of small holders ought in the first place to be brought up to be useful members of a small holder community, if they are brought up to be anything at all, not mere loafers and idlers, ignorant alike of letters and of land, ignorant even of the commonest necessities of decent and healthy life, as is the case with the pupils of the priest-managed schools in Irish rural districts, especially if they are brought up I allude to the females in particular to be a sort of " walking ladies," full of devotions and little else, according to the stereotyped programme of convent schools. It necessarily follows that Irish children are good neither for tilling, nor sowing, nor thatching, nor cooking, nor any other of the fifty daily tasks which enter into the industrious life of small holders who are small holders indeed. Such a thriftless and helpless class easily becomes a permanent horde of semi-mendicants, requiring aid, and en- couraged to require aid, from the public funds of Congested Fiction Boards and similar bodies ; but they can with difficulty become under any circumstances the prosperous population of an agricul- tural land, not to mention that in Ireland such a class is especially subject in mature life also to the depressing influences of that all-pervading priest rule which destroys the very possibility of free- will and free resolution. I would be allowed to mention another danger which has recently come to Ireland, and which promises to affect in the gravest manner the welfare of an agricultural community. The agricultural communities in all countries are liable to the evils of a money-lending class, and I have referred to the evils inherent in Ireland in the native class of gombeen men or shopkeepers usurers of all descriptions. But heie is the place to remind the reader that during the past few years more than 20,000 foreign Jews have POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 81 settled in Ireland, drawn by the opportunities of profit which Irish industrial disintegration affords to a trading which puts its mind in its work. The miserable backwardness of the middle classes in Ireland was enough in itself to stimulate the enterprise and immigration of the foreign Jews, who certainly cannot be blamed for seizing such an opportunity. But the fact remains that the Jews form the most formidable body of money-lenders which the world has ever seen, with natural gifts for the industry unequalled by any other race or class ; that in other countries such as Poland, which has many similarities with Ireland the Jews have become the practical masters of the agricultural community of all ranks ; that they are rapidly increasing in Ireland ; and that both the disastrous legislation and the worthless customs of that country offer them an unrivalled field for their operations. Their itinerant packmen and vendors on credit are already to be met in every country village, and their offers of credit are greedily accepted by an ignorant and unthrifty people, more accustomed to promise than to perform, but who will find it more difficult to cheat the Hebrew money-lender than the native landlord. At one of the sessions of the Limerick County Court I am told the Jews had recently issued six hundred summonses against rural debtors. Does the Com- mission imagine that emigration can be prevented from a country where the social superiorities are to be, soon perhaps, divided between the political priest and the Semitic dealer? However, this particular branch of my subject deals with mischiefs which are as yet only in the hatching. To return to evils which are in full and malignant growth, I shall deal next with the dangers from what is called the " liberty of testation," which have reached colossal proportions in Ireland. Meantime, in view of the panacea of peasant proprietorship in vogue with Board and Commission theorists, I ask the reader carefully to consider the moral of the medical testimony in the page of Notes and Illustrations on the subject. But the Irish-American lesson is most grave and unmistakable. I say elsewhere what the Irish-Americans can attain in civil life, after that merciless process, the survival of the fittest. But the lanes and tenements which show us exactly the poor Irish, as they land on the wharf, direct from the priest-ridden village and the priest-ridden school ; that is the Irish-America which proves beyond misunderstanding the under-preparation of the race for any scheme of agrarian self-help, like peasant proprietorship above all. America is the special field for agrarian proprietorship by cultivators. Millions of Germans, Scandinavians, English, Scotch, have rushed, and still rush, to occupy the limitless acres which invite the farmer and ploughman. If the Irish have sunk into the town slum, even in that bounteous soil of free grants and growing markets, where is the likelihood of a contrary impulse amid all the energy-killing influences at home ? Even allowing for 6 82 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN the baneful pressure of the Tammany societies and similar pseudo- Irish organizations for decoying the immigrants for the sake of their votes to drift and stagnate in the fetid town areas, the inevitable reflection of the thoughtful observer must be : What utter disqualification for agricultural industry is rampant and dominant in Ireland ! No doubt that "the lying or exaggerated letters," as an Irish popular authority justly calls them, which the emigrated Irish write to friends at home often in the pay of American cheap labour agencies play a large part in stimulating the outpouring of the Home Irish to the foreign shores. But why do the fugitives from Ireland never, or rarely, become tillers of the soil in America ? Because they do not know, and do not like, the patient and difficult and monotonous work of agriculture either at home or abroad. The Irish- American slum is the mirror of the Home Irish hate of agriculture. As a trained witness, Professor Campbell, told the Commission, " the operations of the peasants in the West do not deserve the name of agriculture." Give them the lands of Ireland to-morrow, and they will sell them to the priest and the nun for the passage money to America. " LIBERTY OF TESTATION "THE DEATHBED GRAB FRENCH LAW PROTECTS THE DEATHBED NO PROTECTION IN IRELAND THE CONSEQUENCE TO THE FAMILY AND THE NATION WITH regard to the pretended panacea of peasant proprietorship, I have expressed my conviction that it requires a large admixture of great and medium proprietors, or the presence of a large manu- facturing population in the immediate neighbourhood, in order to obtain a successful result. The famous "magic of property" will not turn sand into gold, or even copper, except in the most unusual circumstances, if there be no neighbouring demand for products which will stimulate and reward the cultivation of the sand. Even such material encouragements may not always prevail against the repulsion which the sordid monotony of small peasant life tends to excite, in the peasant born, when once education and a knowledge of the larger world have found a way into the districts of small culture. In France itself, that happy land of the Stuart Mill school, the rural population has sunk immensely, and is continuing to sink, in comparison with the growth of the urban population, and this, too, although France has had the advantage of much protective legislation of a special kind for the benefit of the peasant pro- prietary, protective legislation which is deplorably absent in Ireland. If I may so express myself, the British transformers of agrarian conditions in' Ireland have been so whole-heartedly devoted to the great cause of the transfer of property from one class of the community to another, that they have quite overlooked the most essential safeguards against the transferred property being filched from its new holders by means as well known to the student of European history as they are notorious to the rational observer of Irish conditions, both religious and economic. I would venture accordingly to call the special attention of the saner portion of the Commission, as well as the more numerous public, to a vital difference in the condition of Irish as compared with French peasant proprietors, which absolutely ensures at no distant period the final ruin of the Irish peasantry. I refer to the all-important fact that on a French peasant holding there is never any fear of anything happening in the semi-unconsciousness of the 83 84 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN deathbed to sweep the little estate bare of the capital necessary to its successful working, and never any danger to the peasant heirs of being left with little more than the nuda proprietas of the farms through every franc in the bank and every head of cattle in byre and stable being willed away from the next generation of cultivators of the soil. Nothing more ruinously disheartening, as well as ruinous in operation, can be imagined for the heirs of the peasant holding than to find that, beyond house and land, everything in cash or credit has been swept away by the last will of a dead man who can never repair the destruction he has caused. I say emphatically that unless there be a vast curtailment of the liberty of testation, a curtailment in favour of the natural heirs of the property, not only agrarian, but commercial, a moral terrorism, aiding a boundless avarice and insatiable cupidity, will continue to chase Irish industry, and the industrious population along with it, from all parts of the country, including the fancy areas of the pseudo-congested districts. The facts are notorious. They cry to Heaven for vengeance, and as Providence usually acts by human agencies, they cry to public opinion for denunciation and to legislation for reform, though the remedy may be too late. In every part of Ireland, from Donegal to Waterford, the approach of the death of the merchant or farmer brings black fear and discouragement to the heart of every member of the family who in the natural course of events would be expected to carry on his business with the normal capital for commerce and cultivation. It is not my business to enter into the excellence or the worthlessness of the motives which influence the existing debauch of testation in Ireland. The fact remains that anywhere in Ireland a dying man, even when he spares the lands or the dwellings of his heirs, may will away almost every pound and shilling of the movable wealth of the family to destinations which will be for ever beyond the reach both of the menaces and supplications of the beggared survivors. I have casually noted down a few cases, occurring within the neighbourhood of the pseudo-congested areas, in which the entire movable wealth of humble and middle-class families has thus been irretrievably swept away by a single death- bed. I have the case of a man dying worth ^2000. He left some five hundred pounds' worth of neglected land and buildings to his heirs, while he had been led to sweep away into other hands more than ^1500. Another man died worth ^600, and not a single penny came to his industrious relatives. Another man willed away ^4500, which were put by the stranger legatees into a good business, in which, though priests and bishops, they had shares; but not a penny of the 7 per cent, interest came to the dead man's family. I knew another case of an old man, who had been supported by his nephew for years, meeting with an accident which forced him to enter the hospital of a benevolent and conventual association. He died there; and every penny of ;6oo which POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 85 stood to his name was willed away to the proprietors of the hospital. I knew a case of a wealthy woman dying in the care of such a benevolent association and leaving ^10,000. Though she left a favourite niece and godchild in struggling circumstances, she had been got to will only ,50 to her heir and ; 10,000 to total strangers. If the Commission realised that in a comparatively short time in Ireland it is calculated that almost all the existing estates will be broken up into properties of small holders peculiarly susceptible to such deathbed influences and catastrophes, they would have no doubt of the enormous gains that are going to be secured by the usual beneficiaries of such testation, and of the heartrending discouragement and ruin which will continue to drive the in- dustrious heirs from a land cursed by the Dead Hand to a degree unknown since the Dark Ages. It is in vain that intelligent legis- lators may fancy that they have established a protection against alienation of the inanimate body of a farm, namely the soil and building, if at the same time there be no protection against alienation of the vital forces, the working capital of the estate, the whole of whose mobile wealth can be swept off by a single deathbed. The new peasant proprietary legislation in Ireland offers the most terrible temptation to all the persons who habitually profit by such testamentary alienation, not only to exhaust every means of gainful influence, every kind of mental and moral pressure, amounting to practical hypnotism of the flickering intelligence and the terrified imagination ; but to go still further wide though the ruin be already and to assail and sap the bonds of general citizenship and patriotism in order to facilitate and extend the spoliation of the domestic affections. The Class War becomes the natural sequel and supplement of the deathbed extortion, especially when the class war promises to transfer the wealthiest property of the community from men who cannot be easily influenced by those sinister advisers into hands that in nine cases in ten will obey in trembling their rapacious suggestions. Conversely, it is apparent that the protection of heirs from deathbed spoliation would act automatically to remove the worst of the agrarian unrest. It would remove the most alluring hope and the main calculation of profit from the Real Chiefs of the Social War. When the driving out of the native gentry can no longer be expected to bring a notable portion of their estates into the crucibles and melting-pots of the deathbed dictators, why run the risk of promoting subversive theories and demoralising acts, which are often so dangerous ultimately to the claims of moral and religious dignitaries? To encourage public ruin for no considerations of profit or gain has hitherto been the speciality of the fanatics of idealism alone. It has never been seriously attributed to persons so eminently practical as worshipful divines. Nor need we confine our consideration to the gain in money 86 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN and goods which may tempt at present the clerical revolutionist. At no distant period, in a very few years according to the tenacious patience of Churchmen, it is not merely the personal property of testators, but their land itself, which will be open to disposal by the panic of dying saints or sinners. The statutory restrictions on alienation of peasant estates may not outlast a few generations. Circumstances even may occur to shorten the present interval. It is a prize, a solid prize, of lands and hereditaments to the capital value of some hundred and fifty millions sterling, which is now offered by liberty of testation to the clerical agitators who will have succeeded in finally transfer- ring the entire superficies of Ireland from educated landowners to a faithful peasantry. A far inferior spoil would have allured the rapacity of Alaric and Attila. It should be self-evident that unless you give the heirs of the peasant proprietary of Ireland some of the protection which is secured to the heirs of a French peasant proprietor, there can be no issue but pauperisation and the flight of the population. It is something enormous, the amount of wealth which in ten years alone is subtracted in this manner from Irish industry and conveyed to purposes which, however sanctified, are not in- dustrial. As things are at present, appeal to the courts is simply useless, for no adequate law exists. In nine hundred and ninety- nine cases in a thousand it is sufficient to produce the evidence of the doctor and the attorney as to " the lucid intelligence " of the expiring will-maker, and the doctor and the attorney are practically certain to be aware of the potent presences before whom they must render testimony. It would be instructive, though probably difficult, to inquire into the amount of the public subventions scattered by the Congested Board which have already paid toll to the influences preponderant with dying testators. As for the pauperised heirs who may cling to the denuded farm, I wonder has it been asked where they are likely to obtain a working capital in face of the strict provisions forbidding the raising of loans on mortgage. Such situations have not been unknown in Europe before. If the heir cannot obtain money on legal mortgage, he may well be led to seek for it on terms of non-legal mortgage, which will be at least as binding on his conscience as if they had been engrossed and endorsed on all the parchments of the Four Courts. In how many cases may the money which was taken from him by the will of a testator be returned to him for use at a just percentage, the lenders being, if not the originals, at least the derivatives, of the venerable legacy hunters? From end to end of the country what a future your Peasant Proprietary Act, destitute of the most essential peasant proprietary protection, is preparing for Ireland ! If the Commissioners desired to go to the bottom of the POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 87 pauperisation for which the nostrum of the Board of Doles is pressed upon them, they would learn much by an examination of the cases of contested wills before the law-courts during the last twenty years, in which impoverished heirs endeavoured, usually with entire unsuccess, to break the deathbed arrangements which beggared them. These cases are the merest fraction in com- parison with the multitude of disputed wills which never come before the courts, and in which the heirs have to accept the terrible law of the Dead Hand; yet they will amply suffice to indicate the appalling drain of the industrial capital of Ireland which occurs at 10,000 deathbeds of rich and poor throughout the country. When ;iooo, ^5000, ^10,000, are taken out of industrial employment and out of Ireland, it is a very poor sort of palliation for the Congested Fiction to go about scattering the money of the taxpayers in partial replacement of the purloined savings of the people. And I could remind the Commissioners that even the total of wills is far from representing the disastrous total of these deathbed transfers of property. In order to avoid the publicity of a will, and for other reasons, the transaction often takes the form of a donatio inter vivos. The property is passed by the dying man into the hands of the new owner; and . neither the family nor the courts are exactly informed of the occurrence. As an illustration, I may mention that there came under my own observation a short time ago a most instructive case of the extraordinary pressure and extraordinary inducements which are employed upon these occasions to obtain the immediate cession of the property without even the formalities of probate, A lady was dying who possessed a couple of thousand pounds ; and a reverend visitor to her deathbed urged upon her the propriety of handing the whole of this money over at once into his hands. She promised to leave it as he directed in her will. But he insisted " that it might greatly lengthen her life if she handed over her wealth at once to such a good object," adding that the Order which he represented would guarantee to pay her a high rate per cent, upon her money during all the years she might live. " She would thus have both the benefit of her good work and the full income upon her property at the same time." Unfortunately for this adviser, the medical man in attendance, an Irishman himself, used all his influence against the realisation of the scheme, and the money was rescued for the family of the deceased. PAUPERISING DEFECTS OF CHARACTER PRODUCED BY THE DOMINANT SYSTEM THERE are defects of character which make individual success impossible; and the same defects, when multiplied a millionfold among the individuals who compose a nation, must produce general pauperism and degradation, as surely in the case of the multitude as in the case of the separate persons of which the multitude is composed. If the entire population of a country receives an education which is no education; if the efficiency of the schoolmaster is subordinated to the claim of the ecclesiastic to dominate the temporal as well as the spiritual sphere ; if even the higher schools of a country are run for the profit of Trading Companies of Ecclesiastics instead of for the greatest benefit of the pupils ; if especially the woman- hood of a nation is formed in institutions which regard home and family as the least important considerations ; if the example of successful mendicancy is impressed upon the popular mind in every district by ever-increasing colonies of non-workers, who live in dignity by all the tricks of the begging letter-writer and the lottery promoter; if every attempt at will-power, self- determination, and self-development is suppressed as treason to the clerical autocrat; if social promotion, if promotion in the public administration, and even the opportunity of livelihood, is denied to the man who rejects that despotism ; if, further, the alliance of the un-Irish Government and the un-Irish Prelacy habitually places political patronage at the service of clerical cupidity ; if even the money of the public taxpayers employed by the so-called Congested Board is used in the interest, and distributed by, the agents of the Power whose maxim is, "Let there be no liberty and no light"; if, in a word, the Irish people are denied every faculty and every ambition which make nations prosperous and great, then Ireland must be what it is, weak, ignorant, and pauperised. The doles of the Congested Board, expensive and costly though they are in the aggregate, are ridiculous alleviations of such ruin and such a system. Even if always honestly intended, they are hardly even Mrs. Partington's mop against the Atlantic Ocean. I entirely deny that there is anything in Irish nature or in 88 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 89 the Celtic race to explain the wholesale and enduring failure of Ireland. Millions of the descendants of the men and women who landed on the quays of New York from Ireland, and who had been such hopeless, shiftless, unimproving creatures in their native land, are to-day the most thriving, substantial, wealthy, advancing, and independent citizens of the American republic. There are Irish millionaires in scores between Maine and California; there are wealthy Irishmen by tens of thousands. The engineering, commercial, and legal professions have tens of thousands of their successful members whose names and ancestry attest their descent from the Isle of Paupers. The same story comes from the Dominions of Canada and New Zealand and the Commonwealth of Australia. But it should be obvious to every attentive observer, even to a Royal Commissioner, that there is something quite apart and exceptional in the mental atmosphere as well as in the material conditions to be found everywhere in Ireland along with those cancerous cabins and haughty steeples from Fair Head to Cape Clear. That debasement and debilitation, moral and physical, has its origin in the abominably ignorant, abominably dirty, and abominably managed pseudo-schools, which infect rather than instruct the majority of the population, and which enslave the mind while they incapacitate the body. If the Commissioners would pass from the dirty hovels and thriftless mendicancy that are the pretext for the Congested Fiction, and make themselves acquainted with hundreds of the servile and insanitary schools described in the Board of Education's reports, even they must recognise the main source of the backwardness and destitution of Ireland. But Dublin Castle will introduce no reform into school management so long as it believes that it can purchase the safe and secret service of Clerical Police at the cheap cost of the efficiency of popular education and the ruined future of the wretched children. It is very difficult, in a matter of such complexity as the explana- tion of the state of a whole people, to avoid making what can be called overlapping statements, especially in a brief treatise instead of a library of adequate volumes. There are few departments of the subject which are not touched elsewhere by other considera- tions, from another point of view, and by the action of another influence or motive. But I think I ought to say two things plainly and directly before proceeding further. In the first place, nothing is clearer to me than that, whatever local benefits have been con- ferred on favourite sections of the population by the Congested Board, with its local policy and its Party State within the State, the very best of such an institution would be vastly out-passed and infinitely bettered by an appropriate department of some general body representing all Ireland and acting for all Ireland, and which would be above all things a body for the promotion of Lay 90 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN Interests by Laymen, and by none others whomsoever. In the second place, let me avow my absolute conviction, based on com- parison of the conditions of Ireland and many other countries during thirty years, that it is the moral and mental depression and paralysis of the inhabitants, the lack of energy and of the very desire to be energetic, which have formed the root evil of Irish misery and failure. I feel certain that I do not exaggerate in any appreciable degree when I hold that nine-tenths of the economic evils and miseries which afflict the Irish population would com- pletely disappear, if the Irish population would only work as French, or Belgians, or Germans, or Lombardy peasants work, with energy, with endurance, with thrift, and with skill. There is no fault whatever in the nature of the Irish populations themselves. They labour hard and successfully elsewhere, when they have acquired skill and unlearned the lessons of dirt and untidiness which they brought from the Irish school and its abominable management, and when they have cast off, above all, the depressing influences that stifle independence of mind and character in the ordinary Irish peasant. The whole of the professed aims of the Congested Board would be achieved without mendicancy or undue influence on the day on which the Irish would work as other nations work. Let but the Irish farmers apply to their undercultivated holdings the tillage which they require, and not a surplus labourer would be left west of the Shannon. Let the hovel-dwellers west of the Shannon employ their abundant spare time in rebuilding their homes on principles of rude comfort and healthiness; let them spend in food the half of what they spend in poisonous whisky and poisonous tea ; let them weave their own home-made clothes, like other peasants, in the season of indoor work, instead of importing the filthy rags of English rag fairs. Let them act, in a word, as self-helping, independent-minded men and women. But I am asking the impossible. How can a race which is for- bidden to think ever learn to achieve ? I say most absolutely that the prosperity of a settled and historic nation cannot be promoted by the confiscation and ex- pulsion of its employing classes ; that a policy of levelling kills enterprise and promotes exile even among the classes proposed to be benefited; that the preaching of social war stops every kind of national development ; that lay interests can only be promoted by lay management; that any class which gains by the distribu- tion of public money ought to be excluded from every control of that distribution ; and that the policy of coddling a portion of the country, with no corresponding compensation to the rest of Ireland, is the parent of innumerable evils. I accuse the Congested Districts Fiction of promoting all the evils of which I complain. Has it occurred to many observers of the Congested Board that the fundamental condition itself which brings the Board into operation puts an actual premium on the maintenance of poverty ? POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 91 The Board cannot come into operation in any district which is above a very low poor law valuation. The instant that the district, though still stricken with depression and decay, rises above this extremely low level, the Board, its officials, its salaries, and its benefits to all concerned in its working, vanish automatically out of the region. Farewell the donations, and doles, and rewards, and presentations; the encouragement of merit; the coaxing of stubbornness ; the innumerable little blessings alleged to accompany the use of public money. I can almost sympathise with the excellent man who recently declared that "the people were so low and distressed that the Government ought to support them till they could take care of themselves." To spend millions of public money on raising a helpless people just above the lowest level of misery, and then automatically to have them drop back into it again, is, even according to the theory of the Congested Board, a singularly ridiculous method of business. Wiser, perhaps, to keep the district below the point at which the rain of donations must cease than to cut off that fount of beneficence by an almost imperceptible improvement. On grounds of humanity alone the perpetuation of poverty would seem to be the duty of the Congested Board. It has certainly not acted otherwise as a general rule. Far wiser to ask : What can be more utterly absurd than to spend a couple of millions of public money in land purchases which hardly touch the fringe of distress, though they may serve to stimulate the mendicant impulse * and the cry for expropriation ? If those two millions had been expended on the rebuilding and recasting of the horrible schools of Ireland, some beginnings could be laid for a population with higher ideals of comfort and cleanli- ness. But those two millions have been spent upon land purchases for the temporary benefit of an imperceptible section of a vast mass of equally worthy or unworthy applicants ! 1 The " mendicant impulse " in contemporary Ireland is in no way limited to the Socialist movement against estate ownership. The property of railway shareholders is wanted in precisely the same fashion, and the wildest utopianism is preached by priests in the one case as in the other. A witness before the Irish Railways Commission at Dublin, January 15, 1908, openly wanted dividends to be treated as drastically as rents : Mr. J. P. RAFFERTY "The rents of the Irish landlords had been reduced by law. There was no reason why the dividends of railway shareholders should not be reduced on the same principle." Rev. Father Dowling, C.M., a paid lecturer under the Agriculture Depart- ment the Conventuals now train their priests for Government situations wants gratuitous transit on all railways ! REV. FATHER DOWLING "Railways should be free, should be as common as the roads ! " HOME AND CONVENT SWEATING HOME SWEATING AND TUBERCULOSIS SERF - LIKE CONVENT LABOUR KILLING LAY INDUSTRIES LACEMAKING SLAVE- DRIVERS THE " FREEMAN'S " AVOWALS STARVATION WAGES AND BLINDED EYES AT this point I would introduce in a compulsory parenthesis, for which I cannot well find a better place, some views which were im- pressed upon me as to the actual injuriousness of what are known as home industries, as well as some related proceedings in respect to promoting emigration and impoverishment in Ireland. In the true sense home industries are admirable, that is when they really represent the work, principally of the women, of the peasant family in providing all kinds of domestic articles clothing and the like for the members of the family, especially in the season which is unfitted for outdoor work. As I mentioned in my account of a farm in Connaught, such home industry was once as general as it is now rare. Of quite another kind are the home industries which artificial philanthropy has substituted for the natural proceedings of old days. Home industries in this sense too often turn the cottages and farmhouses into domestic sweaters' dens, in which the more dependent members of the family are kept at labour without public supervision during non-factory hours, to supply at a cheap price the markets for such goods which may exist perhaps in some foreign countries hundreds of miles away. The miserable gain of this year-long toil is too often entirely intercepted by the domestic sweater ; and bad health and a fierce desire to escape to anywhere from the drudgery are too often generated by the boasted home industry. It would astonish, I think, some members of the Commission to know how frequently young men and young women, especially the latter, declare " that they are going to America to get reasonable wages for their labour, instead of having to slave for father and mother for little but a box on the ear." * 1 It is no new discovery that home industries may be the worst slavery. In an English journal for the working classes I have recently seen an extremely strong article on this very question, headed "Little Lace-work Slaves." A short time afterwards a correspondent of the paper, writing from New Zealand to endorse the recommendations of the article against this form of employment, 92 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 93 I am assured by capable and careful observers that the vast increase in the ravages of the poisonous tea drug is intimately connected with the promotion of these home industries practised under the conditions which prevail in Irish slums and Irish cabins. The close sedentary employment, the prolonged hours of work which practically mean anything between dawn and midnight that the domestic sweater chooses to exact the vitiated air, often unspeakably foul, the inferior and often vile nutrition, usually aggravated by the total absence of rational cookery all these debilitating influences unfit the home workers for healthy food. Food seems gross and repulsive to their anaemic frames and feeble digestion. Like the sweated tailoress in the London East End, the over-driven home workwoman craves the stimulus of a drug, and she finds that drug in the strong, coarse tannin tea which is always kept " drawing " on the poor hob. A few bites of bread and the cupfuls of black stewed tea form the typical sustenance in multitudes of seats of such home industry. Intimately connected also with these home industries what a hideous parody of home and industry ! is the terrifying increase of tuberculosis, that special scourge of the Irish race since the opening, curious to remark, of the era of Irish Church disestablish- ment, land legislation, prairie rent leagues, clerico-socialist con- gestion boards, and the rest of the blessings of liberal progress in Ireland. In the year 1864, Ireland could still show the*owest death- rate from tuberculosis in the three kingdoms; to-day the Irish mortality from the infection far exceeds the worst returns for Great Britain. Not distantly related to these unhomelike home industries are a large class of semi-religious and ultra-commercial factories, which have increased in enormous numbers in Ireland in recent years. I refer to the vast class of establishments for carrying on all sorts of industries at cheap labour rates, from dressmaking to shirtmaking and laundry work, in which the employed can never hope to become either free workers or free employers, and on which a number of uneconomic motives such as almsgiving, self-sacrifice, the service of religious superiors, etc., etc. largely take the place of the wages fund, the pursuit of advancement and independence, and similar practical inducements, which hold good in the regular manufacturing establishments of lay business and progress. As I am only studying the economic aspect of these questions, I have nothing to do with appraising the motives of a spiritual kind or the benefits of a spiritual kind which may attend the vast number of establishments in question. But I would have pointed out to the Commission a very good reason for my exclusion while giving every credit to the motives of self-sacrifice, mortification of the flesh, voluntary added the information : " Here in New Zealand home work is absolutely prohibited by law. All work must be executed in the shop or factory and under proper sanitary conditions." 94 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN poverty, and so forth, that when attempted to be applied to civil society and to the lives and prospects of lay people, both men and women, // is the universal experience of civilised nations that lay prosperity is absolutely incompatible with the predominance, half spiritual, wholly mercantile, of such institutions, especially when established on any considerable scale at the expense of lay com- munities. In the Austrian empire no new institution of the kind is allowed to be introduced into any district until the fullest guarantees have been given to the Imperial Government that no lay interest or industry will be injuriously affected by its establishment. We have no such protection for the struggling laity of the poorer classes in Ireland, and there is too much reason to believe that the authorities of the Congested Board who are largely ecclesiastical in reality and sometimes in name give an unfortunate preference to this class of semi-religious and more than semi-commercial undertaking. Let me illustrate by a single example the injurious working of the systems to which I refer. In an Irish town in which I lived for many years there was a firm of lay dressmakers and underwear makers, especially for ladies and children. A couple of highly respected and very efficient lay women owned the establishment, and were assisted by a number of girl apprentices, a score at least. A local establishment of the conventual character I describe, which had never competed with the industrious laity before, imported from Dublin a recent convert to their community, who had been a very skilful dressmaker in a Dublin house. With the aid of this recruit, a dressmaking and shirtmaking industry was set up within the religious establishment. A large number of schoolgirls attending the schools of the institution, and which received public money for their education, were at once employed in the assistant department of the new factory or workshop, receiving little or no wages for their work, which was held by their employers to be only a useful training for their future occupations. The clergymen of the denomination to which the new workshop belonged at once began to use their influence to obtain customers for the pious undertaking. Within three years the firm of lay dressmakers, deserted by most of their former patronesses through no fault of their own, were reduced to dire poverty, while the whole of their girl apprentices had been thrown into the street, a few being so fortunate or unhappy as to escape to America. This sort of thing has taken place, and is taking place, all over Ireland. It took place to such an enormous extent throughout France, displacing the employment of vast numbers of humble trades and callings, that it explains a great portion of the popular wrath against such institutions, as well as the indifference to religion which has followed. If the Commissioners had seen, as I have seen, a poor French blanchisseuse clenching her fist and screaming POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 95 execrations as the conventual laundry cart of one of those flourishing institutions dashed by, it would need few words to prove that interference with the livelihoods of the poor is a reckless game for a religious society. The Irish are still a patient people, but Frenchmen could not speak more bitterly than many Irish men and women of what is going on in a hundred localities to-day. When the Congested Board promotes with complacency the work of institutions in which no lay man or lay woman can ever be more than a most inferior subordinate, it is perhaps unaware that both industry and religion can be injured by its attitude. In this connection it is essential to know what statistics can be obtained as to the eyesight of poor lay girls in lacemaking establish- ments, and how many of them become unfitted for this employment, and return to their homes in injured health and vision, and without any of that domestic training which would fit them to find helpmates in their class. The delicate fabrics wrought by a half-blinded girl may command admiration and profit for devout employers at needlework shows in Kensington and Belgravia ; but a young wife with a good knowledge of house-keeping would be more useful to an Irish farmer and more useful to the Irish land, besides being a happiness to herself, instead of being the pauper cripple of a great sweating establishment. When we remember the number of commercial convents in Ireland which draw a portion of their income from the making and the sale of lace the making by poor girls and the sale for the benefit of the convent the evils of the system must be indeed intolerable to force the Freeman 's Journal to publish its leading article of the end of August last. Dealing first with the question, Does lacemaking pay? the Freeman has to place on record that, after a long and weary apprenticeship of years, the poor Irish lace- maker barely gets a shilling a day from the convent ! So much is said and written upon Irish lace, that people, seeing the artist, are apt to forget the practical side of the industry. Does lacemaking pay? It must be remembered that the lacemakers are skilled workers. It takes from two to five years to learn the art of lacemaking. The higher classes of lace require not merely uncommon manual skill, but a keen artistic sense. The earnings of the lace-worker average a shilling a day, that is for a full day's work ; many workers give only part of the day to lacemaking, and in a good many places there is very often not enough of work to give full employment. Of course, when work is plentiful, a particularly expert worker could earn more, and the week's total sometimes amounts to 73. 6d., and in some cases to IDS., and an earning of 2s. a day has been reached. The Freeman goes on to point out that the mechanical toil of the Nottingham looms is paid infinitely higher than the artistic drudgery of the poor employees of Irish convents. The Nottingham lace operative is a mechanic. His work possesses no individuality. He learns nothing of design, no delicate handiwork, none of the 96 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN variety of stitches or their arrangement for effects of light. His is a mere textile trade. His earnings are not is. per day, but is. 2d. per hour. The women who are engaged in this mechanical work receive lod. to is. per hour. For the sake of placating its priestly masters, I suppose, the Freeman proceeds to state that, after all, the Irish convents pay their drudges a little better than the Belgian nunneries. In fact, while the Irish girl may get a shilling a day, her fellow-slave in Belgium receives only a franc ! The Belgian lace-workers do not earn as much as the Irish lace-workers. The report of the Minister of the Interior gives an average of only 80 centimes per day, and the average earning of four hundred of the best workers near Brussels averages just one franc per day, equivalent to 9^d. English money. The average of the hundred highest is I '25 francs per day ; only one worker earned 3 francs per day. What a grim irony there is in that attempt of the Freeman to shield its convent patrons by that reference to the " better position financially " of the Irish convent drudge ! Still there is some bravery in the further declaration of the Irish clerical organ that the evils of convent lacemaking are not confined to wasted years and miserable pay. The lacemaker who does not want to be dismissed from her employment dare not roughen her hands with any kind of domestic utility. She must remain useless for every faculty of womanhood except drudging for the convent. The convent lacemaker is the most helpless of emigrants ; and loss of sight is a constant danger. In estimating the practical results of lacemaking, other considerations should be taken into account. The lace-workers, at least the good lace-workers, do not engage in house-work. The rough work of the house or the farm spoils the hand for the exceedingly fine needlework required in lacemaking. Even the ordinary needlework of the home is shunned by many lacemakers for that reason. Not only are the ordinary household duties neglected, but, incredible as it may seem, it is not infrequent to find an expert lacemaker who does not know how to darn a stocking or to sew a rent in her dress. Lacemaking does not stop emigration. One of the difficulties of the schools and classes is that after they have trained a girl to do good work she goes off to America. It does not appear that these girls turn their talent as lacemakers to account in foreign lands, and they are more helpless than the other girls for the emigrant's life. Physical infirmities, such as dimness of vision, follow from sedentary life and the close application required in lacemaking. Of course "lacemaking does not stop emigration." As a rule every one of those poor girls stooping over that ceaseless needle- work in all those lace-making convents which dare to brag of their " encouragement of Irish industry " is supported by the dream of a day when years of saving or the gift of a relative may enable her to seek and find a more human life thousands of miles from pious Ireland. Unhappily, in numberless cases the poor tired eyes have given way long before the advent of the means of escape. But what unconscionable cruelty is exercised by those holy women and their holy directors while all those poor Irish girls, POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 97 shut in from nature and life, are first forced to misemploy years of their childhood in the convent "schools," learning a trade which ensures their mental and physical ruin, and are afterwards sweated and starved, in the season of their early womanhood, under all the circumstances of privation and unhealthiness discreetly indicated by the Freeman 's Journal \ Some might ask, Did the members and nominees of the political priesthood on the Royal Congestion Commission direct the special investigation of the Commissioners to the lacemaking dens of Irish clericalism ? I am quite sure that nothing of the kind was attempted. The phrase, " the Good Nuns " or "the Devoted Ladies," is enough to hypnotise an arranged commissioner to any required degree of moral coma. 1 1 It is always difficult to trace any effective supervision of convent sweating in the reports of Government inspectors. I note, however, Mr. Redmond and his merry men recently secured the consent of the British Government to a renewed exemption of convent laundries one of the most exhausting forms of employment from all real control or examination. What does not diminish the suspicions attached to the exemption from public inspection so persistently required by convent laundries in Ireland, is the fact, not at all as well known as it ought to be, that the Government inspectors of related classes of semi-penal instittttions in England and Scotland are very far from expressing confidence or admiration with regard to the prevalent system. In most of these establishments, the labouring inmates are young women, often extremely young, belonging to the class of ruined girls, who are in need of so much sympathy and care, and who get very little of either. The supervising persons, who keep the workwomen to their taskwork in vogue, are, or profess to be, influenced by moral and religious considerations above all. In the case of the Catholic convent laundries, supervisors and directresses are, of course, nuns of various Orders, often the Good Shepherd so deplorably notorious in France, who, in virtue of their vows and training, have ideas on the subject of sexual frailty of the most ascetic character. It is at least arguable that girls who have fallen far from ascetic ideals would often receive more sympathetic treatment from less exquisite perfection. At any rate, even in the ordinary class of female refuges and orphanages, the reports of the lady inspectors are disquieting. They comment upon " the peculiar danger in these places through their isolation from the growth of knowledge and experience outside." One lady inspector states that " in only one home " was she allowed to enter and inspect immediately upon announcing herself, the inference being that she was kept out until certain matters had been arranged for inspection. All the reports speak of " the extreme youth of many of the inmates," as well of the depressing monotony of laundry work, even though "the spells of work are broken with prayers." In one Scotch institution for the Reformation of Penitent Females why should females have to endure penal penitence more than males? there were 100 women, who worked from six in the morning till six in the evening, and who made every year ^3700 for the laundry authorities ! Each girl made, on an average, 37 a year, and had for her reward a penance cell, in which she was locked at night, and the recreation of "prayers" ! The revelations as to the Good Shepherd Convents in France were even worse, far worse, than these reports ; and the criminal consent of His Majesty's Government to the non-inspection of convent laundries in Ireland leaves us no information whatever. I am convinced that it is specially dangerous to humane principles to leave the semi-penal treatment of unfortunate girls to members of their own sex who regard such misfortune as pollution beyond repair. PART V THE KEY OF THE IRISH REVOLUTION THE POLITICAL SACRISTY AND THE RIBBON LODGE THE SINISTER ORDER The sinister part played by the Ancient Order of Hibernians overshadows all other questions in importance. Mr. Devlin is the head of this secret organisa- tion. . . . There is no check upon its operations ; no light is let in upon its proceedings ; its affairs are conducted in privacy and darkness. Mr. William O'Brien, M.P., 22nd June, 1907. CLERICAL ENDORSEMENT OF THE SINISTER ORDER That we tender a hundred thousand welcomes to Brother Devlin on the occasion of his first visit to Donegal as National President of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, and assure him of our loyal support and co-operation. Resolution of bishop, priests, and laity of Donegal at great Ribbon demonstration, Letterkenny, 22nd August, 1907 ; the bishop being the Bishop of the Congested Districts Board. THE ORDER IN IRELAND INVOKES THE ORDER IN AMERICA Is it not time to call on the millions of our Brethren of the Ancient Order in some favoured land to aid and assist us in our fight, by whatever means they think fit ? Speech of Mr. James Boyle, ex-M. P. for Donegal, at great Ribbon demonstration at Letterkenny, as above. 'AGRARIAN AGITATION AND CLERICAL LAND-GRABBING Now the cattle -raiders are bringing down the value of the mortgaged properties, and the mansions are turning into monasteries for a song, while every- body knows that the priests and bishops could stop the cattle-raiding in twenty- four hours. The nearer the mortgage is to the total value of the estate, the sooner will the raiding exhaust the margin and make way for one more nunnery. The amount of property in lands and houses which has gone into ecclesiastical hands on very easy terms through the organised violence of the last thirty years throws an instructive light on the history of that period ; but the Orange landlord goes on beating his big drum for the Government that has delivered him to the priest. The author of Economics for Irishmen. DUBLIN SLUMS REAL CONGESTION While the political clergy invent congestion, which does not exist, as a pretext for confiscating landed estates, they leave without notice a horrible 99 ioo POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN congestion which does exist ; in the crowded rookeries of Dublin, for instance, unfit for human habitation. According to the returns of the Registrar General at the Census of 1900, out of 292,000 persons, the total population of Dublin, 72,000 occupied one room, and not even one room apiece. It was 22,000 families which were so housed; and the number of families of more than four persons inhabiting a single room exceeded 4000. It is matter of just complaint that the Dublin Corporation, when clearing absolutely dangerous slum areas, make no adequate provision for rehousing, though lavishly compensating the slum landlords often represented on the Corporation for interfering with their property ; but the political priesthood is dumb. THE KEY OF THE IRISH REVOLUTION THE POLITICAL SACRISTY AND THE RIBBON LODGE THE PRICE OF THE PRIEST PRIESTS OF THE FIRST LAND LEAGUE THE CONGESTED BOARD CLERGY ON THE RIBBON LODGE PLATFORM WHY IRELAND IS A FOREIGN MISSION THE belief of all Catholics who are Catholics that the priests of their Church throughout the world are in the immense majority earnest and devoted servants of the Divine Master is entirely held by the present writer. Nor do I make an exception as regards, I am persuaded, the great majority of the Irish Catholic clergy. But often in the history of the Church a less evangelical section of ecclesiastics have imposed their policy of temporal ambition on the peaceful majority of devout and humble ministers of the Gospel ; and nine-tenths of the troubles in which the Church and society have been engaged have had precisely this origin. St. Francis of Assisi and St. Francis of Sales have been temporarily effaced in the public mind by clerics of a different type, hard keen brains, and hard grasping hands ; and the consequences were bad for temporal and spiritual interests. Even in the Society of St. Ignatius the sweet presence of Edmund Campions and Frederick von Specs has never failed in the worst days of the directors of kings and the traffickers in provinces. There are always historical antecedents for historical events and occurrences. Ireland exhibits no exception to a rule of experience and reason. To go no further back than the end of the eighteenth century, when Pitt and Castlereagh, actuated by motives of what appeared to them stringent expediency, took steps to hire the support of the Irish Catholic bishops and priests for the destruc- tion of the Irish Parliament, they did far more than obtain an indispensable body of mercenary auxiliaries. They founded the modern tradition of the connection between State and Church in Ireland. And when the State gets connected with the Church for its own purposes, the Churchmen always understand by the combination a means for extending their power and consolidating their influence. "We help you to keep down the Irish; pay us our price." And the British Government has gone on paying the price of the priests. The school was made a sacristy outhouse, the 102 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN schoolmaster a priest's lackey, the schoolchild an ignorant wastrel, all to pay the price of the priest. The democratic Queen's University was first starved and then decapitated. The representa- tion of the people, imperial and local, was left or made for the priest's convenience and domination. And the priest, of course, gave no thanks, but built higher and broader the edifice of his temporal ascendancy. The British Government surrended lay Catholic interests to pay the price of the priest. It rejoiced to see those fine shillelagh- waving Father O'Flynns who cozened the crowds of voters with tremendous outpourings of nationality warranted harmless. It never condesended to reflect that all the sacerdotal loyalism operated to dig deeper and wider the division between the Catholic tenantry and the Protestant gentry ; and that the rebel party, the Davises and Gavan Duffys and Smith O'Briens, were infinitely more solicitous about the Union of Irishmen than sleek, con- stitutional, oath-of-allegiance Maynooth. Perhaps the Union of Irishmen was distasteful to the British Government. In that case the game of the priests was doubly facilitated. They could make Government legislation their tool for uprooting the independent and educated class from that ownership of the land which mainly stood between the priest and universal monopoly. It was all for the tenantry that the priests vowed they were working with a sublime altruism ; and the more the priests succeeded, the more the tenantry emigrated. The priest in the Ribbon lodge and the priest's man in Dublin Castle was not that a dainty dish to set before the K ing ? Here we have the Key to the Irish Revolution, which is meant to be incurable by all remedies, because the priest wants no remedy ; he wants Ireland a State of the Churchmen. Here are the origin and justification of the unsleeping confederation or conspiracy a virtuous and laudable conspiracy if you will which, perfectly unaffected by " reforms of land tenure," aims at the total removal of the propertied classes still existing, and especially the class of Protestant gentry. And the immediate object of the whole enter- prise an enterprise which did not commence either to-day or yesterday is to transfer the ownership of the land of Ireland into the hands and into the disposal of the members, allies, and subjects of an occult power in the popular Church. That is the present move in the game. And in this conspiracy, virtuous and laudable if you will, the Congested Districts Board has been a chief instrument from very shortly after the inception of the Board, or at least from very shortly after Mr. John Morley placed the practical control of the Board in the hands of the Ribbon Society and the latest incarnation of the Land League. Thenceforth the vast powers of the Board really irresistible in the eyes of a multitude of ignorant and mendicant creatures within its special domain were always found, no matter with what benevolence they were POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 103 apparently exerted, to be followed and accompanied by a steady growth of general failure and by a steady increase of agrarian Jacobinism directed against whatever remained of the influence and property of the Irish gentry. I am not discussing the question whether or not it is right to desire the extermination of the gentry. I only note that the more the Congested Board professed to work for the amelioration of distress and the promotion of concord, the more the discontent continued to extend, and the more invincible became the forces of discord. The Priest wants the Land : there- fore the Priest destroys the Landlord. I confess that, so far back as the year 1883, I had begun to suspect that the strange persistence with which the revolutionary passion in Ireland continued to survive conciliatory legislation of every kind must be due to an agency that wanted not conciliation, but embitterment, an agency that was accustomed and able to direct and inflame the popular masses ; and this vast and effective agency could hardly exist outside the popular Church of the country. During the Land League campaigns I had seen much which had gradually, though insensibly, prepared my mind for this conclusion; but in the autumn of 1883 there occurred an incident which came to me as a revelation. I was at breakfast one morning in the breakfast-room of the Imperial Hotel in Sackville Street. The long table at which I sat was fairly crowded, by some dozen of Catholic clergymen among others. They talked with much evidence of intimate knowledge of a number of events in the land war ; but suddenly all were silent while a Catholic curate narrated a story of personal experience and action, which was indeed illuminating. He related with airs of triumph how he had personally arranged the boycotting and intimidation of a man of considerable property in his parish, who was also engaged in business in an English town. The priest was the chief of the local branch of the Land League, and their object was to force their chosen victim to surrender some valuable lands. With this object a boycott has been declared against him and his servants; and as this proved insufficient against his considerable wealth and perseverance, they determined upon intimidation into the bargain. The curate went on to describe the intimidatory letters, the menaces, the skulls and cross-bones which had adorned those epistles. He continued to describe the digging of a grave on the boycotted land, with the funeral inscription of the gentleman in question fixed into the open grave. The listening circle of clergy- men accompanied the narrative with laughter and applause. But the crowning moment of the curate's story came when he related how he had secured the services of the local reporter of the Associ- ated Press, and had sent through him a vivid account of the dangers which threatened the life of Mr. So-and-so. The object of that recourse to the reporter was to secure the dissemination of the ugly 104 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN news in England, and especially in the town in which the victim had commercial connections of importance, and where his credit must be affected by such menaces to his life. Bubbling over with glee at the recollection, the curate cried out in termination : " That just finished him. The Englishmen all sympathised with him, but not one would trust a man who might be shot any day of the month. Within a week he came running to the local branch, pro- mising to give up his lands if they would only make it known in the public press that there was complete peace between him and the Land League." The uproarious laughter of the clerical listeners attested their hearty admiration of their reverend colleague's stroke of statecraft. As for myself, I felt I had enjoyed a vision into the mentality and morality of a portion of the popular Church which helped at any rate to explain a good many things difficult to understand. Only the other day I was conversing with a Catholic clergyman who is a dignitary of the Church. Our conversation turned on the state of Ireland, and I spoke strongly on the injury done by the persistent agitation and the venomous war of classes which was so strangely protracted, and which had stained so many of the loveliest scenes in Ireland with the memory of murder and outrage. The distinguished clergyman turned on me, and said with surprise more than anger, " And if there were people killed, were they not land- lords or agents ? and not one man on earth ought to be grieved at misfortune to either." Here, after a quarter of a century, and after innumerable specimens of the same spirit in the interval, I was to find the same clerical disregard of the precepts of Christianity which had shocked me in that Dublin inn room in 1883. Looking at the power of the Irish Catholic clergy over the ignorant masses of their countrymen, looking at the iron tenacity with which clergymen were found to cherish the same savage sentiment against owners of property, the explanation was at least partially clear why every effort at conciliation and every measure of reform have totally failed to allay or to weaken the rancorous spirit of revolutionary agitation. Where are the clerical influences on the side of peace and fraternity ? If they have occasionally spoken, it was usually in inaudible whispers. What has been said in tones that could be heard have usually been messages of war and hatred ; and those hateful and formidable incitements have never been more loud or potent than in the clerical annexes and agencies of the Con- gested Districts Board. In the preserves of the Congested Board have been held the largest demonstrations of the Ribbon order and the Ribbon lodges. There the Ribbon members of Parliament, the National President of the Ancient Order himself, have been welcomed, applauded, and covered with the benedictions of Board bishop and Board clergymen. The platform of the Ribbon meet- ing has included by the dozen the most influential deans, canons, and monsignori, who dispense the doles and subsidies, paid by the POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 105 taxpayer, but distributed by the avowed missionaries of the redis- tribution of property in Ireland. I confess I attach the slightest possible value to the belated denunciations of some of the worst excesses of the agrarian anarchists, such as the brutalities of the Ginnell crew of cattle-beaters and cattle-burglars. At the same time I give full adherence to the good faith of the semi- Conservative Archbishop of Tuam, for instance, who has condemned so vigorously the perpetration of cruelties which were "an offence against God Almighty and an embarrassment to the good intentions of Mr. Birrell." Archbishop Healy and many like him, besides being humane and kind-hearted men, do not want anything to happen, even perhaps for the real benefit of the never-satisfied tenantry, which is calculated to diminish the chances of a good hearing in England for Mr. Birrell's expected surrender on the university question. Most notorious advocates of the social war recognise the utility of occasional prudence and strategic retreat. But all that does not touch the persistent main- tenance of an atmosphere of hate and animosity, a perpetual threat of something worse in store, calculated to keep all owners of property on the tenterhooks of indefinite alarm, until, weary and despairing, they are driven into the pens of the Estates Com- missioners who are ready to lighten them of half their incomes in the interests of peace and confiscation. Judicious intervals of com- parative repose may enable the victims to meditate without inter- ruption on the necessities of their fate. It is time to go to the very root of the disastrous business which the congested districts fiction is used to cover ; and in these con- cluding pages it will be done. What has taken place in Ireland is this : The influence of the Government and the money of the taxpayers have been applied to carrying out the policy of that per- verted section of the Catholic Church in Ireland which is the patron and the paymaster of the Ribbon lodges or Ancient Order of Hibernians an excommunicated body and to promoting the destruction of the existing order of property and even the very constitution of civil society, the object of these destructions being the substitution of the Rule and Supremacy of the Political Priest, with all the baneful consequences of extortion, monopoly, the plunder of the laity, the enrichment of the clerical class, moral and physical terrorism, and arbitrary power. The political Churchmen merely receive their orders ; sometimes they share the spoil. Rulers, but real serfs, they are the trained janissaries of ecclesiastical pachas and viziers, who can, so to speak, reward them with a red hat or a bowstring. They are an anomaly in the religious, as well as the political, sphere, for the priest's king- dom ought never to be the kingdom of this world. The general reader, from whom such fundamental truths of the Irish situation are carefully veiled, may now commence to understand why the io6 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN political sacristy can be the directory of the Ribbon lodges, and why Maynooth marches against Irish Property as it marched against the Irish Parliament. There is only to add that for a dozen years the public fund entrusted to the partisan hands of the Congested Districts junta has supplied the clerical conspirators with the means of fortifying their ascendancy over the half of Ireland through the immense prestige of dispensing the doles and subsidies of the State ; and has enabled them at once to reward their lodgemen and cattle- raiders, and to levy huge contributions for their undertakings as a just commission on the public benefactions which they distribute among their henchmen. The Congested Districts Fund is a milch cow with a hundred teats, at each of which is sucking an organisa- tion of clerico-Ribbon lazzaroni. 1 J The "congested districts" are organised under " parish committees," which is another word for the local priest and a group of his nominees and dependants, all payable for their services out of the public subsidies received from the Board. These clerical Tammany rings form the "evidence " most in request before the Royal Commission, and the one burden of their whine is " More public money for the parish committee." The able author of Economics for Irishmen, him- self a witness insulted and denounced by clerical members of the Commission, as we have seen, thus describes the working of these gangs of public thieves : " ' More money ! ' was the cry of every priest, . . . and always for the ' parish committee scheme,' under which the priest selects the recipients, who return a large proportion of the money to him in increased contributions to the collections. Those get it who give most to the priest, so that the parish committee scheme is in part an arrangement by which the priest pockets the taxpayer' s money through the Congested Districts Board. ... I have known priests' favourites who have got grants five times, while the really poor cannot get a penny." In extenua- tion of the rapacity of these unworthy priests, it must not be forgotten that they are themselves spiritual helots without defence against the demands of occult superiors. An Irish representative sent to the Times the following example of interfer- ence by one of the revolutionary priests in private situations and employments. A man is ordered to give up his livelihood "after last mass." " DEAR SIR, At a meeting of the Branch of the United Irish League, Rev. Father (president) presiding, I was instructed unanimously to request you to attend our meeting on Sunday next, the 5th inst. , after last mass, in the League room, , to resign your position as bailiff on the estate. (Signed) " , Hon. Sec." The fixing of the meeting of the League tribunal " after last mass " is another instance of the use of the occasions of worship for the clerico-Jacobin intimida- tion. This " Rev. Father President" of the Intimadation Club is also naturally the Chairman of the Parish Committee which distributes the public money of the Board among the rabble of the Ribbon lodges. THE LODGE, THE BISHOP, THE BOARD, AND THE COMMISSION EXCOMMUNICATED IN SCOTLAND BLESSED IN IRELAND MR. WILLIAM O'BRIEN AGAINST RIBBONISM THE BISHOP OF THE BOARD WELCOMES THE RIBBON PRESIDENT IT remains to be seen how the Ribbon lodges or Ancient Hiber- nians do the work of the Reverend Revolution & Co. It is unnecessary to retrace the past history of the Ribbon order, or combination of peasants and others, who usually for agrarian and religious reasons or pretexts filled the rural districts of Ireland with criminal violence on a colossal scale. From the Whiteboys to the Moonlighters, their essential character did not change. Mr. Alexander M. Sullivan, M.P. for Louth, in his work New Ireland one of the most respected Nationalists and Catholics of his generation describes the Ribbon society, or Ancient Order of Hibernians, in terms of scathing indignation : " Vain is all pretence that the Ribbon society did not become, what- ever the original design or intentions of its members may have been, a hideous organisation of outrage and murder" We should assume that it has reformed some of its methods to-day in view of its intimate identification with the political priesthood in Ireland. It remains, at all events, an oath-bound secret organisation, from which non-Catholics are rigorously excluded; and it avows that, like the political priesthood, it pursues the objects of the Parlia- mentary League, including the destruction of the landowning gentry. In Ireland, as will be seen later, it is patronised by the most in- fluential of the political bishops and clergy; and the three allies, the Political Clergy, the New Land League, and the Ribbon Order, form an inseparable and indiscernible combination for common objects and a common intolerance. The Ribbon organisation in Ireland is exceedingly strong to- day. I am informed that its growth coincides with the immense increase of funds in the hands of the priests in consequence of their privileged position as distributors of the public money at the disposal of the Congested Districts Board. Through the parish committees the priests can conduct the stream of benefactions exactly in the directions which approve themselves to the conscience and judgment 107 icS POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN of the distributing authorities. Whole counties in the north and west of Ireland are now in the hands of the Ribbon lodges, just as the Ribbon lodges are in the hands of the political priest. As a necessary result, the clerical grip on the parliamentary represen- tatives has become absolutely irremovable and irresistible. In the councils of the United Irish parliamentary party there is now an inner circle ; and that circle is formed by the union of the Ribbon and Clerical elements, the power of the lodges supplementing the power of the croziers. Mr. William O'Brien, M.P., first had the courage to proclaim that the majority of the Irish party were under the despotism of secret conspirators, of an unknown secret ring, "a secret Ribbon lodge that dictates their policy and their fate." On the 22nd June 1908, in his own journal, The Irish People, Mr. William O'Brien repeated his denunciation of the Parliamentary Ribbon lodge, which he definitely named as the Ancient Order of Hibernians. Mr. Joseph Devlin, M.P., a man of much energy and ability, who rose to his present position from a situation in a Belfast public- house, is the National President of the Irish Ribbonmen ; and Mr. O'Brien does not hesitate to describe without any disguise the part which Mr. Joseph Devlin plays in the domination of the parliamentary party. It is quite in keeping with the traditions of the Hibernian order for it to choose its chief behind the bar of a publican. I should say that a large majority of the Ribbon leaders of the present day are publicans and spirit grocers. I lately spoke to one man who is vice-president of a very large Ribbon organisation ; and the fellow boasted that he owned two public-houses in a large town, from which he derived a net profit of fifty pounds a week. What I said some pages back as to the closeness of the connection between the Drink Interest and the Political Priesthood will not be contradicted by the warm relations between the priests and the Ribbon publicans. We shall shortly see the splendour of the re- ception accorded to the National President of the Irish Ribbonmen by the prelates and priests of the Congested Districts Board ; but for the moment I will allow Mr. William O'Brien, M.P., to continue his denunciation of the dominant part played by the Ribbon lodge in the counsels of the parliamentary party of Mr. Redmond and Bishop O'Donnell. Mr. O'Brien does not scruple to apply the epithet "sinister" to the organisation which is excluded from Church membership in Scotland, and which is the bodyguard of the same Church in Ireland : But the sinister part played by the Ancient Order of Hibernians overshadows all other questions in importance. Mr. Devlin is the head of this secret organisa- tion, and it is evident that he is determined to stuff and swamp and rig con- ventions, to stifle the voice of the people, and to force his confederates down their throats. The dangerous power which has thus been placed in his hands, and the unscrupulous manner in which he is prepared to exercise it, must now POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 109 be apparent to every one. Whether there is an express obligation or not, the members of this organisation are expected to give preference to a brother, and as the organisation has recently been imported into the county and city of Limerick and other places, Mr. Devlin has good reasons for looking upon him- self as the Grand High Elector of Ireland. There is no check upon its operations ; no light is let in upon its proceedings ; its affairs are conducted in privacy and in darkness. Mr. Devlin has only to pull the strings, and his will must be obeyed. Honest, well-meaning Nationalists, who would cut off their right hands rather than do an unworthy act, and who joined the order in the belief that they would advance a sacred cause, have simply constituted themselves Mr. Devlin's tools and instruments, have surrendered their judgment into his hands, and have no option but to do as they are bidden. Our public life was never confronted witji a graver danger than the existence of such a state of things. The Ribbonman President to whom Mr. William O'Brien attributes such a dominant position in the Irish parliamentary party which really looks as if it should be called the Ribbon parliamentary party took a characteristic part in the organisation of the disastrous strikes at Belfast, which created such a saturnalia of terrorism, culminating in bloodshed, in the industrial capital of the north. I have before me a report of Mr. Devlin's activity, contained in the Irish correspondence of the Tablet of the lyth August 1907. A few extracts will suffice to indicate the part played by the Ribbon President : A striking incident of the Belfast troubles was a speech made by Mr. Devlin, M.P., at a meeting of the strike committee in Custom House Square on Saturday evening. Mr. Devlin said :"...! am here first of all to ask, Why has the city been overawed by the presence in its midst of a vast army, hosted in all the streets and lanes of Belfast ? I ask, Who brought them here ? . . . Again I ask, Who or what is this mysterious authority that has insulted the law-abiding people of Belfast? ..." On Monday evening the rioting culminated in the fiercest outbreak that has been known in Belfast for many years. I do not for a moment question the sincerity of Mr. Devlin's convictions. I am sure that he is a true Ribbonman to the core, and that his actions and speeches are the genuine outcome of his Ribbonman training. But if we are to understand the revolutionary situation created by the Congested Districts Board and its sup- porters, it is necessary to realise the position of this Ribbon President, dominating the parliamentary party of which the Con- gested Board Bishop is the treasurer and identifying himself with the strike committee in one of the most lawless outbursts of socialist violence that have ever occurred in Belfast. I suppose in a sense that the Ribbon President is the superior, at least on Ribbon platforms, of the Ribbon Bishop. But he was also the colleague of Mr. Victor Grayson, M.P., in the Belfast strike. What a flood of light it throws upon the objects and policy of the managers of the Congested Districts Conspiracy, to find that the incendiary politician who, from the eminence of the Strike Committee, denounced the most just and moderate employment of military protection to defend peaceful life and property at Belfast, no POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN was straightway welcomed to the episcopal embraces of the leading member of the Congested Board ! No doubt that Bishop O'Donnell acts according to his sense of the moral obligations inculcated upon him by his most venerated Superiors. No doubt Bishop O'Donnell believes, with all the perfervid enthusiasm of the clerical fanatic, that the changes which he and his are contem- plating in the social constitution of the country will result, as the Jesuits say, ad majorem Dei gloriam. His belief, his enthusiasm, his fanaticism, while they may remove him from the tribunal of the moralist, only increase the solicitude of the Statesman. The Ribbon Organisation is the negation of Civilised Society. It is the pretorian guard of the Congested Districts Board, of which the Arranged Commission was the echo and the tool. In Donegal, the premier congested country, the priests of the Board and the officials of the lodges prepared a vast demonstration to show the force of the Ribbon organisation and the intimate union between the lay and clerical wings of the movement. The new congestion cathedral was the headquarters ; and at a Letter- kenny meeting Mr. Devlin and the Ancient Hibernian Order were received with the greatest enthusiasm. Priest and layman com- bined to publish their praise. The priest in the chair declared that " this magnificant demonstration was thoroughly representative of every parish and every townland in Donegal." Another priest moved the resolution " tendering a hundred thousand welcomes to Brother Joseph Devlin on the occasion of his first visit in the capacity of National President of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, thanking him also for the honour he has conferred upon the Hibernians of Donegal to-day, and assuring him of support and loyal co-operation in the discharge of the onerous duties of his office." The National President himself is said in the Freeman's Journal to have "received a tremendous ovation, the multitude cheering again and again. The National President, overcome with great emotions, declared he was proud to see such a splendid meeting of the people of old Tyrconnell in the cathedral town of the illustrious Bishop, whose name and services would ever be re- membered by a grateful nation (cheers)." And he had the satis- faction to know that the illustrious Bishop, the noble Bishop of a former incident, was waiting in person, amid his canons and monsignors, to proclaim the indissoluble patriotism of the lodges, the League, and the party ! In the consecrated phrase of Irish stump oratory, the Ribbon day of Letterkenny was " a great day for Ireland." It will deserve some study in detail. Other Ribbon meetings simultaneously indi- cated the range of the campaign. 1 Fresh from his work in Belfast, 1 Thus at the same date and hour, only a few miles distant, another Ribbon demonstration was being held in the county Tyrone, with a magistrate in the chair, and sixty lodges represented in the gathering. I cite the opening of the POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN m the National President of the Ribbonmen head of the Ribbon Board of Erin, chief organiser of the parliamentary party, etc. etc. is thus seen to have received a royal reception in Donegal from the affiliates of the diocese of Raphoe, assembled under the leader- ship of the Bishop and priests of the Congested Districts Board outside the cathedral of Letterkenny itself, that edifice which has been called " The New Congested Cathedral " from its being built in all its expensive proportions in the episcopal townlet of Letter- kenny, while the Congested Districts Board was distributing scores of thousands of pounds of public money among the grateful diocesans of the Bishop. I have briefly quoted already from the proceedings as I find them published in the freeman's Journal of the 22nd August 1907 a couple of instances, merely to illustrate the closeness of the ties which unite the Bishop of the Con- gested Board to his faithful Ribbonmen. I now quote enough to permit the reader to appreciate and judge clearly and distinctly the significant character of this clerico-Ribbon demonstration. I give the first extract with the triumphant headlines as they appeared in the Freeman's Journal. It will be seen how joyously the editor records the fact that " the policy of the Irish party was approved ' by the ultra-Clerical association which is excommunicated in Scotland. If Mr. William O'Brien be correct in his description of the dictatorship of the Ribbon President over the Irish party, the Ribbon organisation can most appropriately approve of the policy of a party which is little else than its mouthpiece in Parliament and its comrade on the platform, in the boycott and the cattle drive. ANCIENT ORDER OF HIBERNIANS IMPOSING DEMONSTRATION IN LETTERKENNY POLICY OF IRISH PARTY APPROVED Thursday, the 22nd August, one of the most significant and impressive Nationalist demonstrations that have ever been held, even in old Tyrconnell, took place in Letterkenny. The occasion was one of remarkable and exceptional interest : remarkable because, in numbers, it far and away transcended nearly every previous assemblage ; and exceptional because the demonstration of the unity and determination of the Ancient Order of Hibernians , in support of the Irish party, gave to it a special significance. Amongst the districts represented were : Ballyshannon, Carndonagh, Moville, Fahan, Inch, Glenties, Castlefinn, Burtonport, Rossgull, Buncrana, Bundoran, Killybegs, Donegal, Glenswilly, etc. The Feis took place in the Bishop's Field, where a platform was erected, and his Lordship, who was received with extraordinary enthusiasm, welcomed the people, and expressed his deep interest in the Gaelic movement. Amongst the clergyman present were : Right Rev. Dr. M'Glynn, Siranorlar ; the Very Rev. Dean M'Nulty, Patterson, New Jersey ; the Rev. Freeman report : "A monster demonstration was held in Cookstown yesterday, over 6000 people being in attendance, and upwards of sixty divisions of the Ancient Order of Hibernians represented. After parading the town, a meeting was held, Brother Conway, J.P., county delegate, being moved to the chair." ii2 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN Peter Byrne, Australia; Very Rev. Dean M'Ginley, D.D., Maynooth College; Very Rev. Dr. John M'Ginley, Philadelphia ; Rev. Dr. Ml. O'Donnell, D.D. ; Rev. Ml. Hyland, C.S.Sp., Blackrock College; Very Rev. Dr. Maguire, President St. Eunan's College ; Very Rev. Ml. P. Ward, Vice-President ; Rev. P. D. M'Caul, Rev. Fr. M'Devitt, P.P., Raphoe ; Rev. Patrick M'Cafferty, Adm., Inver ; Rev. James C. Cannon, C.C., Letterkenny ; Rev. Thomas Slevin, St. Johnston ; Rev. Dr. Sweeny, Adm., Letterkenny ; Rev. Patrick M'Cafferty, Adm., Inver; Rev. Arthur Friel, C.C., Glencolumbkille ; Rev. C. M'Menamin, C.C., Taraney, Fanad ; Rev. Joseph Sheridan, C.C., Falcarragh ; Rev Father Gillespie, C.C., Convoy; Rev. John Boyle, St. Columbus, Derry ; Rev. Daniel M'Ginley, C.C., Castlemore ; Rev. Bernard Cunningham, C.C., Toland ; Rev. J. G. Brannan, C.C., Churchill; Rev. John Kennedy, Adm., Glenswilly ; Rev. Sharron, C.C., Ballyshannon ; Rev. M'Ginley, C.C., Ballyshannon ; Rev. Ml. O'Sullivan, Mountcharles ; Rev. Patrick Kelly, Westminster ; Rev. A. Logue, Milford ; Rev. Patrick Kelly, London ; Very Rev. Monsignor Walker, P.P., V.F., Burtonport ; Very Rev. James Scanlan, P.P., Upper Rosses, Dunlo. At the great meeting which was held close to the noble cathedral and to the college in the Bishop's Field, on the proposition of Mr. Michael Dunnion, County President of Ancient Order of Hibernians, seconded by Mr. John Sweeny, of Burtonport, the chair was taken amidst loud cheers by the Rev. James C. Cannon, C.C., Letterkenny. Freeman's Journal, 2yd August, 1907. Here we have indeed an imposing array of prelates of Donegal, and professors from Maynooth, and parish priests and curates in scores, all assembled to do honour in Ireland to the organisation which the Catholic bishops of Scotland excommunicated for its evil life and policy. 1 If the ^Freeman's Journal had cared to publish the professions of the leaders and sub-presidents and other officials who conducted the lodges of the diocese of Raphoe to the de- monstration, I have no doubt that we should have had the names of four-fifths of the licensed vendors of gin and whisky within the extensive scope of Bishop O'DonnelFs pastoral charge. I must be content, however, with the names of the clergy, as the reporters failed on this occasion to confer immortality upon the ranks of the publican interest. There is one utterance at the demonstration to which I would ask some attention. It is the oration of Mr. Boyle, who appears to have been the leading layman present from Donegal, as beseemed his dignity as the former representative in Parliament of a Donegal constituency. As such, he must have received the hearty support of Bishop O'Donnell of Raphoe and the Congested Board, and his opinion cannot be considered to be under any sort of episcopal ban or excommunication. In Mr. Boyle's speech I ask the reader to note three things. In the first place, the speaker congratulates his audience on the " great growth " of Ribbonism during recent years in the premier 1 I have italicised in the list of Ribbon dignitaries given by the Freeman the names of a couple of the clerical witnesses who were welcomed to the Congested Commision, while independent testimony was evaded or browbeaten, and also the names of three of the leading clerical seminaries of the Irish Catholic Church. The education of the clergy and the exhortation to "any means they think fit " against property and liberty assuredly form a combination which might occupy such a pen as wrote the Lettres Provinciates. POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 113 county of the Congested Districts Board. This entirely corre- sponds with what the author of Economics for Irishmen has testified as to the distribution of the public money by the Board among the favourites of clergymen, who, as we see from the fore- going enumeration, are supporters of the Ribbon organisation from one end of Donegal to the other. In the second place, we have an emphatic invitation from this ex-member of Parliament, urging the Ribbon order in America " to aid and assist them in their fight by whatever means and methods they might think fit. (Great cheers.)" I pass no hypercritical judgment upon the "means and methods " which Bishop O'Donnell's former representative welcomes so warmly. But it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that Raphoe Ribbonism and political impartiality have nothing in common, and that the means and methods of the Ribbon order in America are scarcely a guarantee of just dealing by the Congested Board towards the landed gentry of Ireland. Finally, the ex-member of Parliament bore his emphatic testimony to the "perfect unity " which joins the Ribbon lodges with the United Irish League, a testimony which certainly goes a long way to corroborate Mr. William O'Brien's description of the part played by the Ribbon order in the councils, and I presume in the agrarian policy, of the parliamentary party. With these preliminary observations, we may allow Mr. Boyle, according to the freeman's Journal report, to mount the platform : Mr. James Boyle, ex -member of Parliament, solicitor, Ballybofey, who was cordially received, said after the magnificent addresses they had just listened to, there would, he must confess, be little for him to say. He could not, however, forgo giving expression to his congratulations on the splendid turn-out of the Ancient Order of Hibernians of county Donegal there that day, on the sterling Catholic and Nationalist spirit manifested by them throughout the proceedings, and on the great growth and spread of the organisation in the county even during the past year. (Cheers.) . . . He would put it to them, should a voice not go forth from that meeting to their brethren in other lands and other climes that, since England would not listen to the voice of reason and justice, since she sweated them of their livelihood, and drew from the exile still the bitter tear, since she would not take her robber hand from their throats, and offered them a stone when they asked for bread, since she would never yield to argument, but only to force, was it not time that they should call on the millions of their brethren of the Ancient Order in some favoured land to aid and assist them in their fight by whatever means and methods they might think Jit to secure equality in the cradle of their race, and for the national independence of their country, and perfect freedom to work out what they still believed to be Ireland's high destiny amongst the nations of the world ? (Cheers.) An unfriendly writer had called the Ancient Order of Hibernians the unknown power behind the United Irish League. It would be their duty to make themselves, in the words of their general secretary, the unknown power, not behind, but with, the United Irish League, and their object, each pulling one oar, acting under their motto of perfect unity, be theirs the aim, after centuries of fight, in their time and in their day to bring the barque of Erin safely and victoriously at last into the port of national independence. We have now accompanied the National President of the 8 ii4 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN Ribbon organisation from the semi-socialist platform of the strike committee of the Belfast riots to the most episcopal platform of the Ribbon prelates, priests, and congestors of Raphoe. We have marked the enthusiasm of his welcome, and the sentiments of his supporters. We have seen how all those most reverend and reverend dignitaries are contributing to the " great growth " of the anti-landlord and anti-Protestant society which has had such a terrible record in the past, which was solemnly excom- municated by the Supreme Pontiff as late as the year 1882 an excommunication which has never been withdrawn, and which has just been promulgated and enforced anew by the Catholic bishops of Scotland. We see the secret lodge, with its oaths and passwords and surreptitious musters and gatherings, at one end of the scale, and the Ribbon clergy of the congested parish committees and the Ribbon members of the Congested Board at the other. We have heard elsewhere from the skilled author of Economics for Irishmen that the working of that Board is a vast network of public waste and clerical extortion. We have heard Mr. William O'Brien, M.P., describing the preponderance of the whole Ribbon conspiracy in the direction of Irish policy as "the gravest danger of the day " in Ireland. We know that the flight and emigration from Ireland are proceeding with redoubled force under the operations of the same Board, which is surrounded by failure and ruin on every side. We have seen that a Royal Commission, ostensibly issued to inquire into the operations of the Board, has been deliberately rendered untrustworthy and useless by being packed with leading representatives of the subject of inquiry. And we can leave the matter where it stands for the present. A useful conclusion to this chapter can be supplied by the following extracts of Ribbon intelligence : MR. REDMOND AND THE RIBBON ORDER Behind the men who are conducting the Constitutional movement on the floor of the House of Commons there is 'a great unknown power. Mr. John Redmond, ALP., Oct. 9, 1906. THE RIBBON CHAPLAIN ON MR. REDMOND At the back of Mr. Parnell's Party the Hibernian Order stood, and just so at the back of the Party led by Mr. John Redmond did they stand to-day. Rev. f other M'Kinley, National Chaplain, Ribbon Order, March 4, 1906. It cannot be denied that the Ribbon Order is perfectly straightforward and consistent with its traditions. But what of those members of Dublin Castle Boards and Commissions, Parish Committee priests financed with Dublin Castle Subsidies ? PART V CONCLUSIONS A PRETENCE OF INQUIRY AND PRETEXT FOR CONFISCATION THE LEAGUE WANTS FREE LAND IT is essential to remember that Mr. FitzGibbon, the representative of the Central Council of the League, demands from the British Treasury the entire cost of placing what he calls "the people" in full proprietorship of the land : This is the task which the Commission should have before it, of re- commending that the British Treasury supply as many millions as will be necessary to bring the people back to the land. ... I do not consider that the tenant farmers of Ireland are under any obligation to contribute to pension- ing off the old English garrison. NOT LAND FOR TILLAGE BUT FOR SLOTH Not only to have land for nothing, but enough of it to be able to live with a minimum of labour, that is the programme. The Irish correspondence of the Standard, in which I recognise the hand and ability of an Irish writer of exceptional clearness of vision, contains, for example, the following evidence of the objects of the agrarian revolution in the notorious neighbourhood of Athenry : "The soil is ideal for husbandry, and absurdly cheap; but it is grass to the horizon, and even the peasant is a grazier. Hence the greed for area. The essential demand is not for land to work and live on, but rather for enough land to avoid work, on terms to make industry unnecessary. Thus, the anti-grazing move- ment is, in reality, an anti-work movement a movement for a diffusion of landlordism, in which the labourer is worse than before, under a stupider master, less capable in capital and in knowledge to make employment pay. The old landlord employed somebody, as a necessity of his position; the new one employs nobody, as a necessity of his unfitness. The land becomes less "5 n6 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN productive, which makes the country poorer, with the League and the Land Acts co-operating to perfect the decay." WHY THE BOARD LAZZARONI PROMOTE EMIGRATION Sentimentalists will be shocked to know that emigration is often promoted by lazy parents, who want to live on American remittances instead of the tillage of the soil. Mr. J. G. Quilty, delegate of the League Executive in North Sligo, blurted out this fact about the Sligo parent as emigration agent : MR. QUILTY The principal industry of the tenants is producing milk for the local creamery. . . . The tenants of the Logan estate have already sent twenty-eight children abroad, principally to the United States. . . . They will assist by sending over a portion of their earnings. The more children in America the better. . . . There is practically no land in tillage, and that is why the young people are flying to America. . . . The people here won't till unless you compel them." TYPES OF THE ARRANGED COMMISSION STILL THE DARK AGES CLERICAL MENTALITY SHAM WORK AND DELIBERATE WASTE CONGESTED M.P. MAKING THE BOARD'S LAZZARONI To conclude with a brief summary of the whole policy of the Political Church towards landed estate in Ireland, it cannot be better expressed, by way of introduction, than in that warcry of the Bishop of the Board to the United League, " Join us in over- throwing the ascendancy of the classes." This is the first stage or foundation. The clerical Jacobinism prepares the clerical Absolutism. It is not meant that temporal power and property shall be abolished, but that they shall change hands. In the Dark Ages of Europe the process was familiar. The Churchmen roused the populace to expel the wicked count or baron, and behold ! the count-bishop or the baron-bishop took his place, with all the ancient rights of high and low justice, gibbet and whipping-post, taxes on merchandise, taxes on marriages, taxes on tillage, taxes on cattle, taxes on milling, and malting, and dyeing. The emancipated proletariat who had shaken off Caesar and Caesar's deputies got this change in their condition : if they did not now obey and pay, they were not only chastised in this world, but they were excommunicated unto all damnation in the next. In the mean- time, and until this revolution had been accomplished, the holy men on-the-make were eloquent on the right of humanity and poverty and the wrong of property and authority. It was entirely in the interest of the toiling masses that they were so keen to sit in the seats of the mighty ! In this way new facts have very old faces. It is still the Dark Ages in Ireland. When ages are dark, it must not be supposed that the darkness is confined to the laymen. The mentality of the ecclesiastics, in spite of their greater shrewdness and rapacity even, is often not a whit brighter or better than that of the submissive hinds and boors whom they lead and utilise. It is this consideration that tempers continually, and ought to temper, the sense of indignation at the misconduct of the clerics in Ireland. Those dictators of the ignorant and the helpless are n8 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN themselves often as confused in their notions, as blind in their deductions, as headlong in their prejudices, as if they had never exchanged the parochial school for the diocesan seminary. They sometimes seem to have learned some theology without learning anything else. One is amazed or angry at their nation- killing action ; and yet one cannot but feel that those bishops and priests are furiously, incoherently, savagely, in earnest, and that the condemnation of their system ought not always to include themselves. Take that worthy Father O'Hara, P.P., who was manufactured into special representative of agriculture on the Congested Districts Board, because, as Sir Antony MacDonnell sagely remarked, a priest sees a great deal of many things. He is prejudiced; he is ignorant; he wants the priests on top; he rushes at a landlord like a bull at a red rag ! but he is so delight- fully earnest and serious about it all, that one recognises at once the type of mind that is too free from the laws of thought to be gravely censurable. At the same time, he can be as shrewd in certain things as any village spokesman can be shrewd ; and he is armed with all the power and prestige of the supreme Church in a community which hardly understands any other supremacy. He cares nothing for inconsequences. He is frantic against landlords "who never come near their tenants." He tries to be pathetic over the Dillon tenants " who never saw the face of Lord Dillon." But when you think he really means it. and that he hates absenteeism, and would welcome a resident landlord, he undeceives you with passion. " I don't mind absenteeism. The local men are just as bad." He refuses to admit that they even give employment. He is almost ready to maintain that landlords, resident or absent, are so full of the peculiar devilishness of ownership, that they prefer to wait on themselves and to cultivate their demesnes with their own hands rather than circulate a six- pence for local labour. On the other hand, his cue is to back the tenant. He is asked what he thinks is the fair price for land, and he promptly replies, "The price which the tenant can afford to give." No ABC could be simpler. The fact that a skilful and industrious tenant can afford to pay with abundant profit a rent which the slothful, mendicant, whining product of the Board's philanthropy and coaxing would declare impossible, never seems to influence this agricultural representative's estimate of what a landlord ought to get for his land. Yet, the moment after, he will admit that there are numbers of those Board tenants who " cannot even grow potatoes," who "have to be raised to the level" at which they can understand the use of fruit trees, and who habitually cut down any timber which happens to exist upon a holding they get from the Board. At the same time he is so bound to these worthless louts that he will not even fetter their freedom of destruction by a tree-protecting clause in their leases or contracts of purchase. As long as Father O'Hara, P.P., is POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 119 sound on the anti-landlord platform, he was, is, and must always be the right man in the right place as the Board's own special representative of agriculture for the congested blunderland. To be able to hate the absentee landlord for being an absentee, and to hate the resident landlord because residence is "as bad" as absenteeism, is, indeed, to display that very acumen of intelligent impartiality which justifies the intelligent choice of Dublin Castle. The saints and sages of Pseudo-Congestia are cast in the mould of the patriot orator who in the same breath lamented "our Irish Parliament, that made Ireland great and prosperous," and denounced "the landlord caste that was always the curse of the country," having omitted to know that the Irish Parliament was precisely a parliament of Irish landlords. It is the same vein of grotesque unreasonableness which pervades most of the panaceas of the most prominent of the Board's members and admirers. Nor can it be alleged that the Commission, the Arranged Commission, save a couple of its members, was one whit unworthy of the brightest jewels of the Board. The reader has already had numerous opportunities for forming a judgment upon the patron of Ribbonism and the patron of boycotting ; it matters little whether they be clerical or lay. Such laymen always do the work of the cleric. I am reminded that there is a whole army of employe's under the Board, all practically chosen by the political clergy and all imbued with the theories of the political clergy. " Plenty of public money for distribution by the Board and the parish committees," is the maxim which they iterate with painful sameness. It is the maxim which will secure their employment by the Board. There is a sum of ^31,000 annually absorbed in salaries by these employe's, which can help us partially to understand the influence of the patronage exerted by the clergy. In addition to the 2000 agents of a quasi-voluntary character on the parochial committees, we have, besides, a swarm of needy hangers-on who derive a casual gain from semi - casual employment as local servitors of sorts appointed by the priest and paid by the taxpayer. A very superior member of the official staff, Mr. Doran, Chief Land Inspector of the Board, is a most favourable specimen of the highest type of Board employe. In reading in his own evidence the account of his views, one is struck, however, by the continued revelation of the strange sort of mendicant Ireland which it is the policy of the Board to create and perpetuate. Has land to be fenced? Wire fencing would be both cheaper and better. The Board puts up an inferior article in order to employ the population ! "Ordinary wire fencing would have done better than walls, and would have cost less ; but I suggested that the Board should have a wall erected, and pay the people for making it." And the special excuse for this curious proceeding was that the people were in debt 120 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN to the Board, and so this way was invented, dear and inferior fencing instead of cheap and superior, to enable the people to pay the debt. MR. DORAN The tenants were told that they could earn what they owed by the construction of the wall. MR. SUTHERLAND What did it cost? MR. DORAN About .1600. SIR FRANCIS MOWATT What would wire fencing cost ? MR. DORAN About 1000. That is how this Board wipes out arrears on its failures, wastes the public money, and then bids the Land League peasantry compare the generosity of the political clergy with the miserable heartlessness of the wicked landlords ! It might have been honester to present "the tenants" with ^600 and put up the superior fencing. THE BOARD CLERICS AS M.P. MAKERS It is easy to understand how a political clergy commanding such resources must become absolutely irresistible dispensers of seats in Parliament, etc. If they felt any moral obligation to refrain from political agitation in the districts in which they are masters of the public purse, the case would be less grave. But it is precisely in such districts that they organise Ribbon demonstrations, nominate candidates for Parliament, and so forth. To cite the example of no less significant a personage than the Bishop of the Board himself and his parish committees, here is what we find on the nomination paper of the member for Donegal East elected at the last election : NOMINATORS OF MR. C. M'VEIGH, JANUARY 1906 Most Rev. Dr. O'Donnell, Bishop of Raphoe. Rev. Canon Doherty, P.P. Rev. C. M'Glynn, P.P. Rev. E. M'Devitt, P.P. Etc. etc. etc. Similarly, how possibly could the guardians of Glenties union, inundated with the bounties of the Congested Board, hesitate an instant to elect " the nephew of our noble Bishop " as master of the workhouse at the mandatory appeal of Father M'Fadden, P.P.? Similar revelations of the action of the Congested Board clergy can be gleaned in every constituency from north to south. Let us look for the nominators of Mr. John Dillon, M.P., for instance. No less redoubtable a patron than Father Denis O'Hara, P.P., the Board's own agricultural member, helped to manufacture the membership of Mr. John Dillon. Thus : NOMINATORS OF MR. JOHN DILLON, JANUARY 1906 Rev. Denis O'Hara, P.P. Rev. M. Keaveny, P.P. Rev. J. M'Donnel, P.P. Rev. M. Henry, P.P. POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 121 Surely the very least that should be required from the members of a public organisation engaged in the lavish grant of public money is to leave the nomination to political positions in hands less engaged in the distribution of pecuniary benefactions among the electorate. The man in the moon, that potent influence in electoral corruption, is forbidden to benefit the cause of a candidate by a single shilling; but the priestly manufacturers of what are called " representatives of the people " in Ireland are free to rain a rain of gold upon the constituencies before, during, and after the contest. How many of the indigent electors of Mayo East, for instance, would wish to question Father Denis O'Hara's selection of Mr. John Dillon as a member of Parliament? There is no need to forget that succinct piece of information contributed by Mr. T. M. Healy, M.P., which I have already quoted, and which told us how Mr. John Morley, as Chief Secretary, placed on the Congested Districts Board " Mr. Dillon's chief supporter in the West." Mr. John Dillon gets his great supporter made a member of the Great Benefaction Board, and the great supporter gets the great Mr. Dillon made a Benefaction Board Member of Parliament. And I am quite certain that neither the great supporter nor the great supported had ever the slighest doubt as to the perfect orthodoxy of the transac- tion. ^500,000 for East Mayo ! It is superfluous to speculate upon the electoral hosts of expectant and servile lazzaroni who would hail the extension of the Congested Districts Parochial Committees throughout the whole of Ireland. It can almost be said that the Congested Board Bene- factions are calculated to reach every class of elector in the country. If he be poor, they "nourish" him. If he be fairly off, they " encourage " him. If he is ignorant, the benefaction is to " elevate and enlighten " him. If he is lazy, it is to " stimulate " him. If he is strenuous, it is to " reward " him. If he is progressive, it is to "enlarge his opportunity." One man must be "coaxed" to take the dunghill off the doorstep. Another is "assisted" to start an industry that he will never know, or that he will go to America to practise, as soon as he has learned it. In everything and for everybody the political priests are supreme arbiters and con- descending benefactors, at the taxpayer's expense. Never were the lines of lavish philanthropy laid in such pleasant places. The ateliers nationaux of the France of 1848 had no such gorgeous times. The Neapolitan lazzaroni's appreciation of life under such circum- stances should, barring the climate, transport all Santa Lucia to Mayo and Donegal. Yet in spite of the benefactions, and in spite of the Ribbon lodges, and in spite of the Member-of-Parliament manufacture, drink and destitution, emigration and tuberculosis continue, as they have continued, to dog the Paradise of class- overthrowers and convention-packers, of exported herrings and imported convents. "You have failed in everything," is the 122 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN melancholy comment of Lord Dudley. " You have only touched the fringe of the question," is the utmost encouragement of the Anglo-Indian optimist. " Give us a few millions sterling a year to spend as we like," is the unfaltering panacea of the most political Most Reverends. The show villages of the Congested Board quite resemble nothing in history so much as the show villages which the ingenious Prince Potjemkin built along the road taken by his Imperial mistress, Catherine n., on her journey through Russia a century and a half ago. The Board actually boasts that the valuation of the congested districts over a period of 10 years has actually improved 2 per cent. \ Not 20 per cent, nor 200 per cent, but 2 per cent. Think of that now ! Unfortunately in the same period the population of the same districts diminished 8 per cent. In spite of a microscopic increase in the average value of their holdings, as divided per head of population, of no less than two shillings and fivepence annually, the total population has sunk by 8 per cent. Even the half-crown less one penny which the Board claims to have secured per annum to the happy denizens of Congestia, has failed to keep some 60,000 or 70,000 Irishmen and women from escaping anywhere from so much benefaction and so many political and ghostly fathers ! And still the song of the Board goes on unceasing : " Let us go on extending our experiments, and hang the expense " ! Hang the expense is the dominant, the all-pervading, note in every brazen-faced claim which comes from representatives of the Ribbon and United Leagues. That Mr. John FitzGibbon, whom I have quoted already in consequence of his representative position in the witness chair as delegate of the Central Council of the United League, to which the Bishop of the Board is treasurer of the parlia- mentary fund ; this League leader simply and unblushingly stated that in order to execute the League policy of the total expulsion of the gentry from the country, it was the taxpayers who ought to pay any compensation which an over-fastidious sense of justice might feel to be due to the gentry. Mr. John FitzGibbon is as kind- hearted and intelligent a representative as the League could possibly produce, from all I have heard about him ; but see the crazy communism with which he has been imbued : MR. JOHN FirzGiBBON This is the task which the Commission should have before it, of recommending that the British Treasury supply as many millions as will be necessary to bring the people back to the land. I have not the least objection to the landlords receiving a substantial sum for their services to English rule in Ireland. But I don't consider that the tenant farmers of Ireland are under any obligation to contribute to pensioning off the old English garrison. With such views the League can proceed to cattle-driving with an approving conscience. It is equally evident that it must be regarded as in the highest degree unjust to persist in asking " the tenant farmers of Ireland" even to pay the instalments on the POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 123 purchase of their holdings. Let the taxpayers pay "as many millions as will be necessary." By the way, I find that one of Bishop O'Donnell's highest dignitaries in the diocese, the Right Rev. Monsignor M'Glynn, shares with Mr. John FitzGibbon the highest distinctions of the United League. As an example of the political priest in the super- lative degree, I quote Monsignor M'Glynn's introduction of himself to the Commission : LORD DUDLEY You are a member of the Donegal county committee ? RIGHT REV. MONSIGNOR M'GLYNN Yes. LORD DUDLEY You were asked to appear here by the Stranorlar district council ? RIGHT REV. MONSIGNOR M'GLYNN Yes, and I am also instructed by the national directory of the United Irish League in Dublin. I am a member of the county committee of agriculture, the committee of technical instniction, and a member of the council of agriculture in Dublin, and secretary to the Roman Catholic Board of Education in Donegal. The latter office should be nearly a sinecure ; and certainly agriculture, as the Monsignor understands it, must be a formidable competitor with the pastoral office. Unfortunately the whole enumeration illustrates very plainly how the political priest pre- occupies all sorts of positions which belong to lay life and lay occupation. It is a droll way to train the people in self-government. But the position of representative of the "directory of the League " must rivet attention. We have already the Bishop of the Board as chairman and ex-chairman of League conventions, treasurer of the League parliamentary fund, etc. Here is his chief prelate the official representative of the governing body of the League ! Very appropriately it was to this same potentate that the Bishop of the Board addressed his manifesto about "joining the toiling masses of England against the classes," etc. But what an impartial and non-political agency is this Congested Board ! Another dignitary of Donegal, the Very Rev. Canon M'Fadden, will illustrate equally the League demand for the money of the taxpayer. In examination by Lord Dudley, he bluntly stated that, when the Board purchased a farm for a tenant, it should be "handed over" to the tenant "in condition for occupation at the average rent of the locality, irrespective of what the expenditure was in putting it into that condition." This distinctly staggered the much-enduring chairman, and he begged the Canon to repeat : LORD DUDLEY Oh, irrespective altogether of what it cost? CANON M'FADDEN Irrespective altogether of the expenditure. That is the meaning of relieving congestion. It is a necessary condition. What can such teachings and influence produce but a class of selfish and sluggish lazzaroni quite unsurpassed for sluggish selfish- ness in the entire world ? We can remember that awful school at Annagry, where the miserable children, cooped within the insanitary shed-like den, had to stand imbibing tuberculosis on two feet square 124 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN of floor space per child, though ; 10,000 a year were coming in from the fisheries started by the Duke of Abercorn ; and though the new Congestion cathedral at Letterkenny was raising its pious pride of marble columns and soaring steeples to the tune of scores of thousands of pounds sterling. But even that scandal is in a way companioned by those Donegal peasants who, unoccupied during several months in the year, will not make a road of half a furlong to their own doors, unless they are paid by somebody to do it 1 The student of the evidence is indebted to a Presbyterian clergyman, Rev. Mr. Bewglas, for blurting out this illuminating fact. Again the chairman, Lord Dudley, had to acknowledge himself surprised by those extraordinary claimants for public money. What ! Half a dozen able-bodied men, in want of a short road to the main thoroughfare, and having the land, the stone, and their own strong arms to make this improvement for their own use, refuse to lift a spade ? LORD DUDLEY Cannot they make the road themselves? REV. MR. BEWGLAS It is very difficult to get them to work together without some inducement. LORD DUDLEY When you speak of a group of three or four houses, is it unreasonable that these men during the winter in the slack season should work together in order to make a road up to the houses ? REV. MR. BEWGLAS It is not unreasonable, but it is difficult to get them to do it without some inducement. They will go on as their fathers have done before them. LORD DUDLEY It is quite possible without any expert knowledge to make a road ! They have only to cut the bog and put down the stones ! REV. MR. BEWGLAS That is all. Pity the poor lazzaroni of the Congested Board. They want a couple of hundred yards of road to their doors. There are three or four families of them, strong men, in the slack season. In a week or a fortnight they could nearly make the much-needed im- provement, which is entirely for their own use and profit. Unless they are paid by the taxpayer they will make no road ! They will spend the week smoking and gossiping, instead ; perhaps, going to clerico-Ribbonman meetings for the universal expulsion of " good- for-nothing landlords." What kind of moral training have these unmanly, mendicant louts got for years ? That avowal of the Most Rev. Dr. Boylan of Kilmore comes back on the memory : "We are not industrious, like the people of England and Scotland " ; and we fancy the indignant retort of the lazzaroni of the Board : " Why should we take the trouble to be industrious, when the Board is going to give us all the property of the Protestant gentry for nothing at all ? " POSTSCRIPT My attention has been directed to the testimony of another Catholic prelate, Most Rev. Dr. Healy, Archbishop of Tuam, to POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 125 the incorrigible sloth of another population in the congested districts. Speaking in church on April 17, 1906, Archbishop Healy expressed this candid opinion to his hearers : In no other part of the world is agriculture in such a deplorable condition as in the west of Ireland. . . . You do not cultivate a sufficient acreage, and what you do cultivate gets only an apology for cultivation. . . . You do not deserve to be called farmers. . . . You make a few spasmodic efforts in spring and autumn, and you sleep the rest of the year. And why not ? The poor fellows are expecting the Congested Board to pay them for cultivating their farms, like in Mr. John Dillon's Half-Million Sterling Constituency of East Mayo. HOW NOT TO SEE DRUNKENNESS AND SUBSIDIES AVOIDING EVIDENCE AN IRISH JOURNAL ON A CONGESTED STEEPLE THE FILTHINESS OF A THOUSAND PRIEST - MANAGED SCHOOLS MR. JOHN DILLON'S ELECTORS THE Board's Own Irish Lazzaroni they are a curious and significant product. The anarchist agrarianism has filled them up with crude socialism. The political priest has crushed all the initiative out of them. The priest-managed school, which stunted their minds in youth, has ingrained the lesson of dirt, ignorance, and leave-it-alone. Their most revered leaders, whom they regard with superstitious awe, tell them, Why should you work for Protestant robbers? Their favourite orators are always ready to explain that Irishmen cannot have good roads or a house free from the manure-heap at the door, because the English bad luck to them destroyed the Irish manufactures hundreds of years ago ! And when a commission of inquiry comes to investigate their condition and its causes, it has been so carefully prearranged and packed, that every promising trail is at once stopped or turned aside by the party of judicious obscuration. " It was wonderful," remarked the author of Economics for Irishmen, "how cleverly the Commission avoided asking what I was anxious to tell." This is really the salient feature of the Commission : how they avoided asking what was most important to know ; how they were led away from every promising trail just when it seemed that they really must begin to inquire. Take, for instance, the prevalence of drunkenness in those districts of backwardness and tax-paid benefactions. The Com- missioners were getting hints in all quarters and from all sorts of witnesses. The farmers or the fishermen had to drink because they got credit from the grocer; they had to drink because they had borrowed money from the publican ; they had to drink for this reason, and for that. But the hints were wasted on the Commission. Attention was turned to something else. At last a sturdy witness, a Mr. James Boyle, an intelligent shopkeeper from the country town of Carrick, seems to have made up his mind to force the facts on the shy inquiry. He stated plainly 1*6 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 127 that a lot of the public subsidies were going in whisky, and he wanted the drink -houses closed. He was at once met by the Bishop of the Board with the assurance that he (the Bishop) did not see any of the drunkenness ! When a Bishop is so deeply immersed in politics, Dublin conventions, Ribbonman demonstra- tions, consultations with Sir Antony, he may be pardoned for an inexact vision of his diocese. No man can serve two masters. But let us hear the plain-speaking Mr. Boyle, of Carrick : LORD DUDLEY Is there any particular point you would like to bring before the Commission ? MR. JAMES BOYLE I think the first and greatest improvement in our district, and all over the congested districts, is that the Congested District Board would have power to close all the public-houses in the congested districts compulsory power because a lot of the money that is earned by fishing and other industries goes foolishly in drink. A lot of money is spent this way, and there is no remedy except to close all the public-houses. LORD DUDLEY In your district are there many public-houses ? MR. JAMES BOYLE There are five, I believe, in the village of Carrick, and one in Teelin, a fishing centre, and two in Meenanery, and two in Glencolumb- kill ; that is all in the one parish. . . . There is more money spent in public- houses BISHOP O'DONNELL Do you at all now see a man going along the road taking the two sides of the road ? MR. JAMES BOYLE I do. BISHOP O'DONNELL I must say I don't meet it at alL Do you go outside your own district ? MR. JAMES BOYLE No, except from Carrick to Glenties. BISHOP O'DONNELL In that district do you seriously say that there is not a noticeable improvement in the temperance of the people ? MR. JAMES BOYLE There may be ; but I believe that the very class that are getting State aid are the most liable to lose the money in the way I have suggested. Now I do not think it is unfair to the Bishop of the Board to say that his attitude and his examination were distinctly calculated to belittle and invalidate the very serious evidence of this respect- able witness on a very serious matter for all Ireland. First came the jocular allusion to a drunkard as " a man taking the two sides of the road " ; that was hardly in keeping with the gravity of the issue. Then there was the irrelevant assertion volunteered by this influential Commissioner, that he "does not meet at all" instances of this intoxication. What had Bishop O'Donnell's personal non-experience, moving in his important sphere, terres- trial and celestial, to do with the reeking pothouses of Carrick, Glencolumbkill, etc., except to make the witness understand that the Bishop of the Board was against him ? And from the moment of the intervention of the Bishop, the other Commissoners grew incurious and restrained. No attempt, of course, to examine into the situation at Carrick, not even an inquiry to the local chief of police. Yet the Commission had received the formal declaration of a respectable witness that the 128 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN classes most advantaged by State aid were most addicted to the public-house. I should not forget to mention that the Commission studiously avoided everywhere consulting the police, that well-known mine of local information in Ireland, upon the condition of the country anywhere within their purview. It never occurred to the compla- cent Under-Secretary that a grey-haired sergeant of constabulary could tell more about the prote'ge's of the parish committees in an hour than the whole Congested Board conld explain away in a week. The evidence which has been sent to me personally from earnest and religious members of the constabulary on this very subject of drink-houses and drunkenness in the congested districts, and the masterly inactivity of the political clergy as connected therewith, has left no doubt upon my mind that there is better priestly work to be done in the west of Ireland than benedicting landlord-driving or cattle-driving. But the public-house is the financial prop of the Political Church. It shares with the political sacristy the manufacture of members of Parliament. An arranged Commission does not deal rashly with such sacred interests. The evidence and the verdict had been prearranged as care- fully as possible by the managers of the Commission. Five-sixths of the witnesses were paid by the Board, hoping to be paid by the Board, or were notorious advocates of the Ribbon and Land League programme of estates confiscation and priest rule. A few spokesmen of landlord interests were discounted before their testimony, as advocates of a defeated and unpopular cause. There was a remarkable absence of manufacturers, bankers, employers, political economists. The children of the horse-leech marched at the word of command, and the horse-leech is the Political Church. The offer of evidence from the independent public was resented as an encroachment. When one of the ablest of Irish economic writers, Mr. P. J. Kenny, literally forced himself on the reluctant inquiry, he had to complain of studied discourtesy, attempted brow- beating, appeals to mob violence, threats of assassination. One verdict was pressed upon the Commissioners by every method of organised recommendation and organised exclusion : "The Congested District Board is the saviour of Ireland. It cannot have too many Political Priests. It cannot have too much public money. Let the Priest Managers and the Priest Com- mittees spend, decide, select, reject ; endow convents, expropriate estates ; promote favouritism, prevent criticism, englobe everything." Nothing more simple. For the success of this policy it was necessary that the Commissioners, even selected, should not be over-inquiring. For this reason the Commissioners avoided following clues, when even the selected witnesses let drop a clue ; avoided investigation, even when the need of investigation ran against POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 129 their faces. The Commissioners marched with docility to hear and see what was prepared for their hearing and seeing. Two or three Commissioners often succeeded by sheer ability and acumen in striking sparks of light out of the fog. At the best their con- clusions will not be endorsed by the Commission. Compromise is the indicated resource of Dublin Castle. Under compromise, the nation is sometimes promised a purse, and the Political Church invariably gets the contents. There has just come to my hand a piece of Irish opinion, which is at the same time a corroboration of my protest against the deliberate blindness of the Arranged Commission to every fact of Irish life and misery which the clerical managers are interested in ignoring. It is contained in an article in that able and courageous organ of popular views, the Peasant, which Cardinal Logue succeeded in suppressing for its outspeaking for three weeks, but which has risen from the dead with every sign of vigorous vitality derived from popular support. In contrast with the Bishop of the Board's inability to see a drunken man, perhaps through closing his eyes, the Peasant laments "the drunkenness which is desolating the country " ; upon the clerical domination and destruc- tion of the schools, it states emphatically that the root evil of the educational system is there being " no element of popular control and very little to attract capable young men to the teaching pro- fession," adding an indignant denunciation of "the 1000 school- houses which are without out-offices." But what is most germane of all, perhaps, to the neglected duty of the Commission, is the testimony of the Peasant to the drain of money from the people for the architectural megalomania of the Churchmen even in districts like Kerry, Donegal, etc., where at the time the political clergy are cadging on the taxpayer for huge subsidies to the Congested Board and its Parish Committees, and where, unquestionably, the Irish lazzaroni are steeped in degradation rare in Europe. I quote the statement as it stands ; it is an entire confirmation of my own remarks at a former page : At the present time enormous sums of money are being collected in county Kerry in order to add a steeple to the cathedral in Killarney, while within a stone's-throw of the Bishop's palace in that town there are lanes which probably would not be tolerated in a West African village. If the Commission had wanted evidence there was plenty. Perhaps, if they had done anything so shocking to their masters as to look for it and to listen to it, its effect might have moved them to the most extraordinary behaviour. Perhaps even they might have recommended all those reverend and most reverend managers of 1000 schoolhouses "without out-offices" to devote a part of those " enormous sums of money," not to pseudo-Gothic steeples and pulpits of Carrara marble in filthy villages, but, say, to 9 130 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN building "outhouses" for the filth-indoctrinating and disease- disseminating schools of priest-ridden Ireland. There were Catholic saints, even Popes, who melted the golden vessels of the altar for almsgiving. Will it ever strike Royal Commissions of Inquiry in Ireland that the domineering clerics whom they follow are not exactly patterns of a Christian pastorate ? There is one palliation for the political clergy which, as I have often intimated, is also one of the gravest factors of the situation. Outside their professional studies they have little superiority over their cattle-drivers and gorabeen-men. Like them, their oracle is the Freeman 's Journal. Their political harangues are indistinguish- able from the ruck of the League orators. One deficiency is peculiarly their own. They have no sense of financial responsibility. Never giving an account to their parishioners, it would take a moral earthquake to make them more delicate towards the taxpayer. Take that astounding saturnalia of cant and cadging, the waste of the half-million sterling which has been transferred from the taxpayers to the use of Mr. John Dillon's pauper electorate of East Mayo. In an English or Scotch constituency, if half a million sterling of public money were distributed among the electors of the sitting member by his most intimate friends and political allies, by his proposers and nominators for the parliamentary representation, we should all know what to think of the proceeding. I am sure that not even a suspicion of anything extraordinary has even crossed the mind of Mr. John Dillon. As well expect censure from Mr. Dillon's colleague of the League executive, that Mr. FitzGibbon who wants " the millions of the British Treasury " to put back the people on the land ! Among the lazzaroni of the Board Mr. Dillon's lazzaroni occupy no mean or diffident position. Let the author of Economics for Irishmen relate his observations during a walk in the very heart of that constituency of East Mayo which returns Mr. Dillon to Parliament, to denounce "the drones of landlordism" and to formulate the requirements of higher education : On a fine working day last winter I walked fourteen statute miles in a congested district in Mayo, from Swinford to Ballyhaunis. ... In the whole journey I saw " at work only one man, who had his hands in his pockets. . . . I saw not one acre yet ploughed, and the winter weeds were strengthening their hold on next year's potato fields. . . . The Congested Districts Board had bodies of men, paid wages out of the taxes to do their own work ! Why should Mr. Dillon's electors be expected to work for themselves, when Mr. Dillon's own Congested Board is ready to pay them out of the taxes another half-million sterling ? THE RESULTS OF BLINDFOLDING LONDON AND ROME THE DEAD HAND FOR EVER! LIST OF NON-INQUIRIES WHAT IRELAND MIGHT BE LORD CASTLETOWN'S EXPERIMENT THE SECRET SERVICE OF THE SACRISTY DUBLIN CASTLE AND THE DEAD HAND "THE NATIONAL UNIVERSITY" A CLERICAL JOB IT would be an endless enumeration to say all that the Commission of Inquiry did not inquire into. An abbreviated list of omissions may be illustrative or instructive : 1. The Commission did not investigate the connection between decaying tillage and the political encouragement of under- cultivation for the lowering of land rents and land values, nor the connection between under-cultivation and want of employment with consequent poverty and depopulation. 2. The Commission did not investigate the connection between drink and non-industry, nor the connection between the drink trade and clerical finance. "Sure, the trade has built half the churches in Ireland." 3. The Commission did not investigate that almost universal curse of Irish industry, the money-lender-grocer, or credit- grocer, or gombeen usurer, charging 50 and 100 per cent, on the commodities bought by his debtor, in addition to the usurious rate of interest on the loan, but able, through his clerical and political allies, to drive Sir Horace Plunkett from office for trying to check his thieving. 4. The Commission did not investigate the connection between non-industry and the campaign against property and liberty preached by supporters of the Board, Land Leaguers, Political Priests, Boycotters. 5. The Commission did not investigate the connection between non-industry and the six thousand priest-managed schools, with their lessons of ignorance, uncleanness, unhealthiness, discouragement, and fatalism. 6. The Commission did not investigate the connection between lacemaking, embroidering, laundering, shirtmaking, dress- making, etc., for the conventual factories, and the injury to lay employment and home life. *3 132 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 7. The Commission did not investigate the connection between the clerical monopoly of direction and control of the best- paid positions in technical schools, and the emigration of the pupils of those schools. 8. The Commission did not investigate the connection between the immense burthen of clerical extortions from the laity at all the crises of life, and the spread of poverty and un- employment. 9. The Commission did not investigate the huge drain of Irish capital in legacies and collections, on all kinds of ecclesi- astical pretexts ; nor inquire whether the colossal mass of priestly and conventual investments was in Irish under- takings or in foreign securities and speculations. 10. The Commission did not investigate the connection between non-employment and the habit of Irish capitalists to hoard their money in banks the hoard now being ^60,000,000 instead of financing Irish farming and manufactures. What exactions do the capitalists fear in Ireland ? What insecurity ? Whose dishonesty ? 1 1. The Commission did not investigate the connection between non-industry, due to physical deterioration, leading to poverty and pauperism, and the increasing substitution of unhealthy food, tea, etc., most frequently owing to the influence of the loan-grocer or gombeen-grocer. 12. The Commission did not investigate the avowed waste of public money in reckless experiments in forestry, fisheries, etc., without skilled knowledge or independent control. I do not maintain necessarily that upon all these points the answer, supposing the inquiry had taken place, would have been exactly what I have been led to accept. Neither do I question the sincerity of any members of the Board or Commission from one end of their transactions to the other. I am not discussing the honesty of individuals from their standpoint and belief, but the disadvantage of the system which they represent and apply. Every member of the Board, from Bishop O'Donnell down, can be freely admitted to have acted according to convictions which were to them the highest and the most obligatory. Every member of the Com- mission can receive a similar recognition. But this does not diminish my opposition to the whole system under which they acted, and which selected them for such action. I may add four other inquirable matters of the first importance about which there has also been no inquiry : 1 3. There has been no investigation of the loss of employment through the diminution in the class of employers^ caused by Ireland having been made an unpleasant or unprofitable place for numbers of Irishmen in recent years. 14. There has been no investigation of the impediments thrown in the way of migration to other parts of Ireland ; though, POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 133 in spite of menace and boycotting, a responsible witness, supported by a letter from another witness, described the hostility of the clergy to the removal of any of the show paupers of their interested solicitude. The managers of the Commission are hostile to such exposures, and the Commission was dumb. 15. There has been no investigation of the relations between the Ribbon lodges and the members of the Board, their agents and allies. Yet everybody in Ireland can speak of the intimacy of those relations, and their connection with the whole movement for altering the distribution of property and overthrowing " the ascendancy of the classes," to use the expression of a representative of the Jacobin class in the ascendant in contemporary Ireland. 1 6. There has been no investigation of the relations, the intimate relations, between the Priest-Gombeen supremacy on all kinds of Local Boards, and the opposition to every measure of enlightenment and intellectual improvement which could raise the capacity for rational thought and action in the community. As I write these words, there comes the news, the stereotyped kind of news, that the Navan Rural Council in Meath has rejected a motion to -establish Public Libraries, in consequence of the direct protests and .condemnations addressed to the Council by the parish priests ! Even a former seconder of the motion declared he withdrew his support "in deference to the clergy." These clergy are the Parish Committees of the Congested Board. Let us imagine, for one bright instant of self-delusion, that " the condition of the people has been bettered " in all the respects and matters which now promote unemployment and poverty. Under- cultivation and slothful tillage have disappeared with the sup- pression of the lay and clerical agitators against industry and honesty; and scores of thousands of hardy and skilful labourers have come south and east to earn good wages for snug homes west of the Shannon and north of the Erne. The ravages of the drink shop are no longer promoted by the financial calculations of the sacristy ; and the grocer-usurer and the publican-usurer have lost their victims with the coming of industry and intelligence. In six thousand schools, while the minister of religion is welcome to teach religion, emancipated schoolmasters, sure of their future, educate in knowledge and civilisation hundreds of thousands of happy children, with no resemblance to the stunted minds and unkempt bodies which used to make perpetual the degradation of Ireland. From the primary through the secondary and technical schools to the univer- sity the youth of the country advance, under their lay teachers of lay culture, in the systematic attainment of the preparation for their various objects in life. The clergy receive becoming and ample 134 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN stipends for the discharge of their spiritual functions, without the need or the temptation to burthen the population with the exactions of spoilers rather than pastors; and millions sterling no longer depart every year from the plundered land at the mandate of Foreign Superiors or under the inducement of foreign speculations. The money of the country, sixty millions or more, is no longer hoarded in the strong-rooms of savings banks or devoted to the capitalisation of manufactures and undertakings abroad ; but brings quintuple interest to its owners in sustaining and multiplying the industries which have grown up in Ireland with the new growth of security and civilisation. The pompous waste of ecclesiastical megalomania can no longer rob the orphan and the widow ; nor the calculations of sectarianism divide the patriotism and envenom the division of kindly fellow-countrymen. Mansion and farmhouse are seen to be both agencies of the national agriculture, and neither can replace the other. A stern protest from an Educated Laity has impressed the Vatican with the wisdom, so often imparted by Con- tinental Catholicism, of sternly separating its Irish episcopate and priesthood from the unpriestly turmoil of politics and the indecent quest of social domination. In such an Ireland there would be no room and no pretext for the demoralisation of mendicancy, clerical or lay ; and the Congested Districts Board, false as its title, would be numbered with the degradations and the nightmares of the past. Unquestionably ignorance, embodied above all in the priest- managed school and the priest-strangled university, is the foundation and the root of all that the Congestion Board represents and all that the Congestion Commission was arranged to perpetuate or conceal. Ignorance places a populace of lazzaroni at the feet of a political priesthood ruling by cupidity and fear. Ignorance places the priests themselves under the heel of a foreign mission, accustomed to sacrifice local rights to general designs. The end justifies ! Ignorance divides Irishmen. Ignorance combines in hostility to Ireland many classes and influences which endeavour with clouded vision to see a way to help and emancipation, but which only fling the nation, more tightly bound than ever, beneath the domination of the People of the Horseleech. Ignorance by itself might breed anarchism and sloth, the twin curses of the material condition, even if there were, no clerics to assail every form of property still outside of their clutches, and no agitators to discourage thrift and labour with the promised gains of confiscation. Ireland is poor because Irishmen are unemployed, and Irishmen are unemployed because Irishmen are idle, slovenly, envious of superiority, and unwilling to earn it; untaught to rise by honest effort, but taught to cheat, to menace, and to destroy as the easier road to the socialist paradise. When transported to lands where property is protected by the most rigid laws and still more rigid POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 135 opinion, they can display all the virtues of iron industry, and can become the firmest supports of capitalist accumulation and territorial estate. They drive no cattle from ranches where the cattle-driver is shot on sight. How often have I heard from perspiring and prosperous immigrants : " Faith, a man must work here. It isn't like the old country." And the priest and bishop in America deliver homilies on the sanctity of law and the maintenance of order ! Cum ccelo animum mutant. I heard an Irish- American say of the boys he left behind him : " Over there they can tell you who ought to be Prime Minister of Hungary, but they won't clean the manure from the doorstep." The Irish-American is finding the Irishman out. In America they have the captain of industry, and in Ireland the political priest with all his brood of agitators and mendicants. Everything which was not evasion, officialism, or cant that ap- peared at the Commission confirmed my statement at the outset of these pages, that there would be no poverty and no excuse for clerical socialism in the "congested districts" if one hundred thousand farmers throughout Ireland simply resolved to quit under- cultivation and to employ apiece a couple more labourers on their farms. Add to that a saving of even ^2,000,000 a year out of that annual drink bill of ^14,000,000; add to that a curtailment of the Poison Tea budget; add to that better cooking and better food, plenty of well-cooked fish included. There would then be a home market for double the catch of fish that was ever galvanised into unstable fact by the doles of congested pauperisers. And the occupation and the overlordship of the tax-paid providences in a thousand sacristies would be vanished for ever. No cadging, no clerics ! Point d' argent point de Suisse ! Perhaps no rate-paid situations for the nephews of noble bishops. Perhaps, even, no perjuries in jury-boxes and on magisterial benches. In immediate connection with my belief that the giving employ- ment on an immensely increased scale by the indolent farmers of good lands throughout Ireland would solve five-sixths of this pre- tended problem of incurable poverty, I find valuable confirmation in the most valuable evidence of Lord Castletown. The evidence of Lord Castletown is most instructive also on the vast advantage and great facility of afforestation, which the ignorant peasantry have never been taught to appreciate, and which they hinder, in fact, with a sort of obstinate malice. A Land League farmer seems to hate a tree next to a landlord. But I quote Lord Castletown here for his testimony of the ease with which he recruited a magnificent body of labourers from Mayo, when he had good employment to offer them. Lord Castletown brought forty Mayo men in one troop to work on his land in Queen's County. What he did with forty, a thousand improving farmers could do each with two, four, ten Mayo men, Sligo men, Donegal men, according to the extent and cultiva- tion of the particular farms ; and ten thousand labourers from the 136 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN congested districts could quite as easily find kindly and profitable employment, profitable for the land as well as for the labourers, if only the malingering farmers chose to employ the labour, as Lord Castletown found it easy and profitable to employ it. Do I say ten thousand? There is work for a million more labourers on the fertile Irish soil if the farmers will turn to intensive cultivation, and if the political priest will go back to religion, and if the Land and Ribbon Leagues will go back to the father who begat them. LORD CASTLETOWN I look upon the men and women of the West as the very finest peasantry I know. They would be* of enormous benefit to the rest of the country, and I have already found what a benefit they are if they are helped in the troubles they have at the present time. . . . / had last year a great difficulty in finding labour for some large work in my own county Queen's County. I applied to some friends in Mayo, and forty Mayo men came down. . . . They settled down at my home for one month and a half or two months, and I gave them milk and potatoes. They were a magnificent type of men, both physically and mentally. They did the work and went home again. I asked a good many of them if they would care to settle in my county, and they said yes, if they had a good house or cottage. SIR FRANCIS Mow ATT Was their work energetic? LORD CASTLETOWN Excellent. First-rate. My steward, who is a Scotch- man, said it was the best work he ever had done. A very remarkable fact in connection with them was that they refused to eat the food of the country, which was white bread, with us. Each insisted upon having meal. These details bear on the whole question. They insisted upon having milk for their drink, and they brought their own provender in the shape of ground-up oatmeal and flour. Certainly these details bear on the whole question. Lord Castletown did not go to any Parish Committee for his Mayo men. Possibly he would have been told that Mayo men, even though they might travel to Scotland, would not, could not, should not, migrate to anywhere in Ireland. Sir Francis Mowatt's questions about the " energetic " character of their work is plaintively suggestive. The Commissioner had heard so much about the feeble hothouse plants of Congested Boards that he did not expect energy. But these men had learned energy out of Ireland, in employment on English and Scottish farms, and they were immune from Congestion Mendicity Boards and Committees. And mark how they avoided the bread-and-tea of modern Irish degeneration. They, like their stalwart 'ancestors, felt that strong men cannot do strong men's work on the imported drugs of the gombeen-grocer. The farce, or rather the dishonesty of placing on the Com- mission of Inquiry the chief official and zealot of the very Board under inquiry stamped the character of the whole manoeuvre at the outset. Maynooth reposed again fondly in the arms of the Castle, and officialism's grateful care protected the useful clerics from un- welcome investigation. The Commission, with its mountains of irrelevant assertion, with its molehills of tolerated facts, fills the bulk of a dozen bluebooks. It has made the fog perhaps thicker POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 137 It has served its purpose. Even if the Board and its satellites are merely continued in their powers of waste and demoralisation, it will be enough for an army of parasites. The sacristies and their com- mittees will continue to manufacture paupers and members of Parliament in the future as in the past. The exactions of the horseleech will suffer no abatement. If, on the other hand, the privileges of the School-starvers and the Ribbon-chaplains are extended, as they reasonably expect, the end will merely come a little quicker for Ireland. The kinsmen of the noble bishops will crow on parochial eminences from the pious pubs of Annagry to the pious pubs of Waterford. Imagine asking English citizens to confer on Clerical Com- mittees in England the uncontrolled distribution l of public taxation ! Yet it is reasonably expected that they will again confer it upon Sacerdotal Committees in Ireland. So fond is English confidence in the Irish cleric. So deep is English contempt for the Irish laymen. Perhaps there is a profound reason for these British views. I do not enter into that consideration. My protest raises no question of Nationalism in politics. The most extreme Nationalist might admit that foreign government need not necessarily produce what we see in Ireland. The most extreme Unionist does not claim that Ireland is a credit to any of his convictions. But I am entitled, in face of all the facts, to blame and denounce to public and human indignation the moral and material debasement, the ruin perhaps beyond redemption, of a gifted, a kindly, a generous race and population ; and I have the right to lay the responsibility where it should be laid. It has been the secular policy of the British Government in Ireland to trust to the Secret Service of the Sacristy instead of any nobler or safer auxiliary. And it has not scrupled to pay the price of that loathsome co-operation. Between Whitehall and the Propaganda, between the Castle and Maynooth, the bargain has been hatched and the hire has been accorded. The Irish laity were given over to the cleric to despoil and to dominate. Six thousand black-holes of the intelligence stunted and deformed the education of the common people. The edifices of united learning, the dream of every patriot, were starved and betrayed at the pretext of an empty excommunication. England 1 It is precisely the total absence of control over the expenditure of the Parish Priest Committees which makes them so dear and sacrosanct to the clerical managers. " The favourites of the priest can get grants five times over," as we have already heard. The Priest is often the Committee. How can the Board control him ? A witness before the Commission, Rev. Mr. Orr, rector of Maghery, in Donegal, plainly stated this fact: "The Central Board would have to get their information through the Parish Committee. They would have no means of getting their information except through the Parish Committee or the Parish Priest." Of course. It is mere impudence to pretend anything else. When you have Unrepresentative Clerical Management you cannot have Representative Lay Control. If the lay taxpayer is to rule the Board, you must send the political priest to his Sanctuary, and keep him there. 138 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN abandoned property to the organiser of anarchism and liberty to the organiser of oppression, and the name for both is the Political Priest. Though the country is starving, his war-chest is always full. He has the patronage of everything, from the Judicial Bench to the Gombeen Magistrates. He has the selection of Royal Com- missions. He has the simony of the sacraments. His toll is extorted from the joys and the sorrows of humanity. He fleeces the humble dowry of village brides, the frightened incoherence of the death-bed, the grief of the widow and the orphan. His col- lecting-plates are reinforced by the plunder of the schools and the doles of the taxpayer. He has his hand on the throttle valve of intimidation. If he call off his cowbeaters a grateful Cabinet will give him a Clerical University. When the croziers are safely entrenched in the sectarian endowment, the whistle of the hazels can startle anew the lowing herds of Roscommon and Meath. This is what the English call the rule of a governing race, an imperial people. It was English law in 1829 which disfranchised the small tenantry who were usually well disposed to the landlords. It was English law in 1846 which beggared Irish agriculture with alien imports, drove the farmer to emigration, and the owner into bankruptcy. It was English law which set the political priests to make the popular education a school of ignorance and dirt. It was English law which first starved and then destroyed the popular university. It was English law which made under-cultivation the only road to the favours of the land court. It was English law which established the Congested Districts Board as the preserve and the treasury of a priest-led anarchy. It was English law which made the fugleman of the Ribbon Order a Commission of Inquiry into their own proceedings and a Commission of Propaganda for their own designs. Undoubtedly the meanest thing which English faction has done in I/eland has been to throw to the wolves of the political priest- hood the property, the very existence, of that great and distin- guished class of Irishmen, who had been so loyal to England in evil days, who had been so devoted and useful to Ireland until they allowed the malice of sacerdotal conspirators to drive a widening gulf between them and their countrymen. So long as the stately architecture of the Custom-House stands by Dublin quay, so long as the patrician grace of the Parliament House neighbours the studious front of Trinity, so long must Irishmen, who know their country's history, mourn the lost opportunities of the Protestant Irish. Not one of the evils flowing from the unhallowed commerce of Political Intrigue with Sacerdotal Greed has been removed since the first issue of this book. On the contrary, every evil has been maintained ; and without even the temporary purification of the man infested with an unclean spirit, of which the Gospel speaks, POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 139 there have been intruded fresh demons in the sullied abode. All the spending, bribing, pauperising, revolutionising powers of the Clerico-Jacobin Board of sham Congestion have been extended and fortified. The deficiency of lay control and responsibility has become total absence of such control. The dictum of those clerical partisans which proclaimed that landlords had no rights, even to compensation, has become a law of permissive confiscation throughout Connaught and far beyond the borders of Connaught. The population continues to emigrate. The Parish Committees of Priests continue to spend at pleasure the money of the taxpayers. The members of Parliament continue to be nominated by Political Bishops empowered to distribute the bounty of the Treasury among the pauper electors. In other quarters of national administration the domination ot the Political Priest has been extended to a veritable monopoly of the last remains of the Lay University. On the pretext of establish- ing a Teaching institution instead of an Examining one, Mr. Birrell substituted the so-called "National" for the "Royal" University ; and at once the Clerical masters of the new creation admitted all the Clerical students of the Maynooth Seminary to full membership of the " Teaching " University without any partici- pation in its " Teaching " whatever ! A Maynooth seminarist can now obtain all the prizes, emoluments, and degrees of the " National University," without ever quitting the theological class- rooms of his theological college. But no Lay student is to obtain prizes or degrees unless he actually attend the University teaching and classes. The very pretext on which Mr. Birrell, in order to obtain votes in the House of Commons from a party elected by the priests, abolished the Lay University, is cynically repudiated for the benefit of the Clericals alone. To obtain money on false pretences is a common-law offence. To obtain a clericalised university at the public expense and on cynically false pretences, is British statesmanship ! In this pseudo-National University, mark what has happened. In the first place, Mr. Birrell has made the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin its first " University Chancellor." In the name of common decency, Why? This exalted prelate may be an earnest pastor. He has more than enough to occupy every moment of his days in the episcopal charge of one of the most ignorant, pauperised, drunken, miserable, and suffering populations in Europe within the reeking walls of the liberties of Dublin. Where tens of thousands of families pig together, half a dozen human creatures in a single filthy room, the combined virtues of a Cardinal Manning and a St. Francis of Sales would be inadequate to banish vice, to promote cleanliness, to stop drunkenness, to mitigate con- ditions of lower barbarism. The flaring whisky dens which gain wealth and perpetuate degradation in the swarming streets of Archbishop Walsh's diocesan trust are more than enough to occupy 140 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN every moment of a pastor's Christian anxiety. What has he to do with the Chancellorship of a National University ? He was never even a University man. He was a seminarist and nothing else ; a very proper thing to be, if you please, so long as you confine yourself to your seminary profession. What has Moral Theology or Canon Law to do with the government and administration of a Modern University for Irish Laymen ? Of course, an archbishop or a father rector may be the right man in the right place in a University which, though nominally for Irish laymen, is intended to oust Irish laymen from education and learning altogether. This may be a holy object with clerics who feel bound to keep the Tree of Knowledge as far as possible from the fruition and enjoyment of the laity. When a cleric cuckoos a layman out of University distinction, he may be perfectly conscien- tious, moral, honourable, and useful, according to his training and convictions. But the whole of the Catholic nations of civilisation without a single exception and not to mention the non-Catholic nations at all have been obliged, gently or forcibly, to remove the control of the Cleric from the throat of the University, in order to prevent the slow or speedy asphyxiation of the national education. The fact remains that the Cleric has thrust the Layman out of the control of the " National University of Ireland," and that all the encouragement of learned studies, especially in a poor country like Ireland, is systematically removed from the reach of the Irish lay people. If young Irishmen study to be professors, they must understand that they are not wanted, that lay learning is an abomination, that the professorships founded with the money of the taxpayers has become the private emolument of the Regular Clergy and the Secular Clergy. Facta non verba. Proofs, not complaints merely. Where are the proofs that the Clerics are seizing the University Professorships which the Legislature endowed out of the public taxation for the benefit of the Laity of Ireland? And remember that the Legis- lature had already established and endowed for the exclusive benefit of the Clerics the palatial Seminary College of Maynooth ; and, when the disestablishment of the Protestant Church took place forty years ago, the farce of also disestablishing Maynooth was effected by endowing it with a Perpetual Compensation Fund of ^400,000 ! The Clerics have all that ; and they now grab the Lay Professorships of the " National University," as follows (substituting merely alphabetical letters instead of names) : NATIONAL UNIVERSITY A meeting of the Dublin Commissioners appointed by the Irish Universities Act, 1908 (appointed, that is, by Mr. Birrell in consultation with the Bishops) was held in the Senate-Room of the Royal University Buildings, Dublin, on Saturday, October 23, 1909. Present : Most Rev. Archbishop Walsh, Chancel- or of the National University of Ireland, etc. The following were recommended for appointment to Professorships, etc : POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 141 Professorship of Greek Rev. Father A. B., Priest of the Jesuit Society. Professorship of English Language and Philology Rev. Father C. D., Priest of the Jesuit Society. Lectureship in Pure Mathematics Rev. Father E. F., Priest of the Jesuit Society. Professorship of Political Economy Rev. Father G. H., Priest of the Jesuit Society. Professorship of Education Rev. Father I. J., Priest of the Jesuit Society. Professorship of Ethics and Politics Rev. Father K. L., Priest of Holy Cross College, Clonliffe, under the patronage of Most Rev. Archbishop Walsh of Dublin. Professorship of Logic and Metaphysics Rev. Father M. N., Priest of Holy Cross College, Clonliffe, under the patronage of Most Rev. Archbishop Walsh of Dublin. Professorship of Oriental Languages Rev. Father O. P. , Priest of Holy Cross College, Clonliffe, Professor of Old Testament Science in Maynooth College, under the patronage of the Archbishops and Bishops of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland. Dublin Press > October 25, 1909. There were a number of subordinate professorships and lecturerships given to several lay ex-employe's from Clerical Colleges; but here we have practically the whole of the leading chairs in the Faculty of Arts, the University Faculty as dis- tinguished from the Professional Schools like Law, Medicine, Engineering, etc., grabbed by Priests of the Jesuit Order or under the patronage of the Archbishops and Bishops. That is a deadly blow to Irish Lay Learning throughout the kingdom. Ireland is a poor country. Men cannot afford to study the Higher Culture, if the chairs and endowments by which scholars can live are grabbed by Regular and Secular Priests. The clerical grabbing of the National University Chairs means a sentence of compulsory ignorance upon all Irishmen who would have devoted their talents to learning, if the emoluments supplied by the taxpayers for the encouragement and support of Irish Lay Learning had not been grabbed by the priests patronised by the General of the Jesuits and the Board of Maynooth. You may call that procedure by any smooth and glozing name you like. It is a fraud on the public taxation, and a cruel robbery of the lay intelligence of Ireland. Let it be added that for the past twenty-five years the Jesuits have received ^6000 a year out of the Endowment of the Royal University. They have not used that money to train Irish laymen for the highest chairs of the University Faculty of Arts. They have trained their own priests to occupy those lay chairs instead of the laity. They have excluded the representatives of lay scholar- ship. Mr. Birrell and his co-politicians may try to say : " It was not we, it was the Senate, which appointed all these priests instead of laymen." That would be cowardly subterfuge, cowardly and useless. It was Mr. Birrell who stuffed the Senate with prelates, priests, and the dependants of prelates and priests. Mr. Birrell stuffed the Senate with the right sort of Senators, and the right sort 142 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN of Senators have nominated the right sort of Professors. That was the whole secret of this arrangement of the thimble and the pea. Not that any special blame or praise belongs to Mr. Birrell in particular. It is the tradition of all English parties alike to mount the political priest on the neck of the Irish laymen. Still, to establish and endow a university for the laity, to baptize it National, and then to stuff it with clerics, approaches the limit even in Ireland. Let it be added that all representatives of the Convocation of Graduates, including thousands of educated Irish Catholics, are excluded from the Senate of this National University ! What are the services for which the clerics receive such rewards ? Poor Paraguay on Shannon ! APPENDIX TO-DAY THE IRISH BUY AND STARVE; THEIR FATHERS GREW AND FED TESTIMONY OF BISHOP O'DWYER, OF LIMERICK MY conviction that the disastrous revolution in Irish farming, which has substituted tillage for markets in the place of tillage for subsistence, is the cause beyond comparison of Ireland's present agricultural ruin, has just been confirmed by a narrative in a speech by the Most Rev. Dr. O'Dwyer, Bishop of Limerick. Premising that what he was about to relate had been told him a few years ago by a gentleman of position and ability, who lamented the changed habits of farmers since he was a boy, Bishop O'Dwyer proceeded to say : " He told me that when he was a lad, in the house of his father, who was a farmer, every article of clothing worn by members of the family was made under their own roof. They spun and carded their own wool. They got it dyed, and the women did all the manufacturing the tailoring part of the business and supplied the clothes for themselves and for their husbands, and they were per- fectly satisfied with plain, good clothes that they were able to make themselves. Not only that, but every bit of food that was consumed in that house was produced on their own land. They grew their own patch of wheat, and dried it in great large bins at their own kitchen fires. They had it ground in querns by the men, and the housewives baked it and made wholesome bread, infinitely more whole- some than the very fine flour that they were getting from the best mills in England at the present time. They killed their own pigs, made their own bacon, and ate it. They had their own milk and butter, so that nothing went out of the house except the rent. It would be very easy to calculate roughly what was the annual value of all the clothing and food of an average family, and then multiply it by six or seven hundred thousand to see the sum total of millions that were remaining in Ireland, every shilling of which now is flowing away." Unquestionably free alien trade has deprived the Irish farmer of profitable markets, but the market of markets of which he deprived himself was the supply of subsistence and clothing to his own family from the produce of his own farm. No fluctuation of outside prices could touch that. But the Irish farmer, a million Irish farmers, preferred to forget the wants of their own homes in order to try unskilfully and slothfully to supply the wants of foreign homes which got better supplies elsewhere. Then the Irish farmer, supported by Congested Boards and such-like idiocies, bawled and bellowed : " The landlords are ruining me." EVIDENCE OF A RATHLIN PRIEST A most conclusive corroboration of the same fact came, quite unwittingly, from a witness before the Commission, Rev. Father M'Gowan, administrator of Rathlin Island. He wanted the Commission to get his poor people all sorts of things, and let slip that their trouble only came from omitting to work lor themselves like their own fathers ! Evidence^ vii. 43. " REV. FATHER M'GoWAN The population of Rathlin Island in 1841 143 144 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN was 1010 ; now it is only 368. ... I believe that in former times, when the population was three times what it is now, the people provided themselves with every article of clothing, while at present they must buy all these things. Also, in the old days they cultivated every available spot in the island, and to this day you will see traces of cultivation even to the tops of the hills. . . . Now the land has gone largely from tillage to grass. ... In the old times they had many cottage industries, and were able to make their own clothes, and even the shoes that they wore on their feet." There are the fruits of the priest-managed school, and the agrarian agitation, and the general loafing and idling which mark these later days. Instead of growing and eating and wearing the produce of the fertile Irish soil, they must buy the black tea from India, and the white flour from America, and shoes from Northampton and Boston, and the shoddy coats and trousers and skirts and petticoats from Manchester slopshops and the rag fairs of London. Let them bend their backs to the spade and their fingers to the loom, as their fathers and mothers did, as tens of millions of European farmers and peasants do, and there will be little misery in Ireland. BISHOP O'DONNELL'S ADMISSIONS There are many indications through the evidence of the change from home- produced articles to alien importations. The Irish peasant is starved and ill clad because he has ceased to grow what he can eat and wear. The delegate of the League in North Sligo, Mr. Quilty, dropped precious information upon the change in this respect within his own knowledge : "Fifty years ago, garden chairs, cradles, etc., were woven here from the osiers which grow plentifully. The little industry is killed. Earthenware crocks, milk-pans, etc., were manufactured here. Door-mats woven from bent grass were hawked in the streets of Sligo. I never see any now. At the market gate you would see men and women selling large rolls of flannel manufactured by themselves, worth six times the flimsy stuff sold in the shops. They have disappeared." Rev. Father James Clancy, a Clare priest, gave astounding instances o.f the neglect of the Congested Board peasants to grow food either for themselves or for the neighbouring market : " I may mention one instance of a deplorable fact. I know a man in this neighbourhood who sells large quantities of potatoes to farmers ! I think it is an appalling thing that farmers who have land should pay 5d. and 6d. a stone for potatoes when they might have grown potatoes for themselves. ... In Kilkee, a popular watering-place, there is a great market for agricultural produce, potatoes, eggs, butter, and all kinds of table vegetables ; but unfortunately the people around Kilkee do not attend to supplying the wants of the 6000 or 7000 visitors who are in Kilkee in July, August, and September." But the climax is reached when the Bishop of the Board himself, in questioning a witness, Mr. Peter M'Cullagh, from Tyrone, quite admits that he is aware that exotic food is worse as well as dearer for the farmer : "MR. P. M'CuLLAGH The cost of living is more expensive now because they used to use what they raised upon the farm themselves. "MOST REV. DR. O'DONNELL Do you not think that forty years ago the food of the people was as substantial as it is now ; . . . that it was as good for a healthy farmer ; . . . that it was perhaps better ? "WITNESS Yes. . . . The food is more expensive now. ... It takes away the money." The slothful peasants double the cost of living by dear, unhealthy, imported food ; and the Congested Board says the remedy is to rob the landowners and the graziers 1 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 145 INSTRUCTIVE FACTS AND AVOWALS Join us in overthrowing the ascendancy of the classes. Manifesto of the Bishop of the Board. Make the country as hot as hell for the enemies of the people. Speech of Parish Priest, July 21, 1907. The Land League programme is ours. . . . We want the maintenance of the Congested Districts Board. Declaration of Delegate of Central Council of United Irish League to the Commission. The land war must go on. We -must have a menacing agitation. Manifesto of Leader of United Irish League. I, as commissioner, entirely concur that the Board should have purchase powers for the relief of congestion throughout all Ireland. Statement of the Bishop of the Board. The amount of land required for a systematic redistribution can only be settled by legal compulsion. Most Rev. Dr. O'Dea, Bishop of Clonfert. In Ireland as a whole there is not the desire on the part of the young men to work on the farms, even when there is plenty of remunerative work to be done. ... In Great Britain farm labour is considered much more dignified than in Ireland. . . . People have been taught that an improvement of the farm may mean increase of rent. ... It is quite a misuse of the term to call the operations of the ^western peasants agriculture. Evidence of Professor Campbell. In Irish agricultural life there is beyond question a tendency to leave the land. Evidence of Mr. Fletcher, Assistant Secretary to the Department of Agriculture. Relatively to their income, the sum spent by the people of the congested districts on tea and tobacco is enormously large. Evidence of Mr. Lawson Micks, late Secretary to Congested Districts Board. If the Irish people would consume more fish I know no reason why more should not be caught. . . . The Arran fishermen used to send their fish by steamer to Gal way, but often there was no buyer there. Evidence of Rev. Mr. Spoltsvjood Greene, Inspector of Irish Fisheries. Small proprietorship in France and Belgium has been the work of centuries. . . . The worst result of the artificial introduction of the small proprietor into Ireland will be to reduce agrarian pauperism to a system. M. de Molinari in the Journal des Debats. The farmers run up long bills with their traders. . . . Such money- lenders are often publicans. . . . The borrower can hardly do less than drink. . . . Twenty-five per cent, added on for six months' credit was not uncommon. Evidence of Mr. Russell, Supervisor of Agricultural Banks. The system leads to deterioration of the land, the discouragement of improvements, and to perjury in the courts and demoralisation of the worst description. Evidence of Mr. Commissioner Finucane. THE WORST EVILS OF IRELAND SOME EVIDENCE BY RELIGIOUS CLERGY A BISHOP AGAINST THE PERJURIES IN IRISH COURTS OF LAW I take from a sermon preached by the late Bishop of Killaloe, Most Rev. Dr. M'Redmond, as reported in the Freeman 's Journal, this denunciation of the perjuries rife among witnesses, juries, and the so-called Morley magistrates, being the additions to the Bench initiated by Mr. Chief Secretary Morley, for the most part on the nomination of the political clergy : "Referring to the terrible crime of perjury, his Lordship said that while travelling in the county towns of North Tipperary and Clare he made it a 10 146 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN custom to go into the courts of justice. lie heard jurymen sworn to try cases according to the evidence before them ; he had heard witnesses invoke God's holy name in the most solemn manner to affirm the truth of their statements ; he had seen magistrates on the Bench men sworn to administer justice to the public and often, too often, indeed, he had seen men in these positions violate their oaths which they had taken in such a solemn manner." A PRIEST AGAINST LOAN-GROCERS AND DEBASED MAGISTRATES At a sitting of the Congested Commission in Connemara, a priest supple- mented the foregoing denunciation of corrupt magistrates by a complaint of the combined evils of gombeenism and gombeen magistrates, which throws a lurid light upon the social and moral condition in the congested districts. The loan-grocer, who allows or compels the improvident farmers to buy on usurious credit, is known in many degraded countries, but the loan-grocer-magistrates, "who back their own customers" in the cases before the Bench, are a rarer specimen of utter debasement : " REV. FATHER J. FLATLEY, C.C. The doings of the gombeen-man, who is present in every relation of life, result in practical slavery. . . . All retail dealers in provisions should be excluded from district and county councils, but, above all, from the magisterial Bench. Their presence on the Bench is an un- mitigated evil, economic, social, and moral, and their practices tend to destroy all confidence in the law. To extend their business they habitually back their own customers in open defiance of evidence and law. Throughout Connemara the competition to get on the Bench is most keen, and the object is the same in every case. This is an evil that entails misery and suffering far deeper and more extensive than many of which there is much public talk. The power of these people has its most vicious root in the credit system with the debtors on their books. They and their friends must be voted on to every Board, and those bodies are worked entirely in their interest and against the interest of the people. Some means should be adopted to end this, and I know none but the total exclusion of these people from the council and from the Bench. In Connemara the Bench is in a most debased condition." In nine-tenths of the cases these Morley magistrates have been commended to Dublin Castle by the bishops and clergy the Parish Priest Committees beloved of the Congested Board ! Honest Bishop M 'Redmond is dead. What bishops have continued his crusade against judicial perjuries? Contemporary Ireland, the creation of the political priest, is saturated with perjury. Priests, magistrates, and members of Parliament hold public meetings to denounce juries suspected of respect for the sanctity of solemn oaths. The priests go from the meetings to the Parish Committees of the Congested Board to distribute the money of the taxpayers. REVELATONS OF THE MEDICAL SERVICE IN IRELAND MORE THAT THE ARRANGED COMMISSION DID NOT EXAMINE Among the numerous and important classes of society which the Arranged Commission did not consult, but which any real Commission of Inquiry must have consulted, were professors, schoolmasters, doctors, members of Parliament, editors, and journalists, all of whom are naturally conversant with the conditions of poverty or well-being in the community. Among the most important of all sources of information for a Commission inquiring into social and hygienic conditions are unquestionably the medical officers charged with the supervision of the public health. In this connection the conscientious reader would find the most serious grounds for reflection, and indeed for dismay, in the Report on the Poor Law POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 147 Medical Service in Ireland which was published by the British Medical Journal of the 26th of March, 1904. There can be read a record of the mentality as well as the physical condition and habits of the Irish poor, their pastors, and their elective representatives, which illustrates, among other things, the " influence for good " of the reverend persons with whom Ireland begins and ends, accord- ing to the views of the Board and the Commission. A very few extracts may lead the reader to consult the document itself. THE GROWTH OF SECTARIANSIM IN IRISH MEDICAL APPOINTMENTS The peasant took his seat upon the throne of Irish Local Government in 1898. . . . The election of medical officers, thus widened out, has lost all scientific, medical, or professional element. ... To be clever surgeon, or sympathetic physician, or active sanitarian, is never mentioned. . . . Every- where the very idea of science is scouted, and everywhere inefficiency is accepted if the politics be right. . . . Where does Ireland come in in all this struggle, and what of the ultimate Irishman of the hillside, sick unto death with disease ? . . . Any person bringing forward complaints of an incompetent doctor would have to face the attacks of all his political friends. . . . The opposition to sanitation is so great that practically all members of the medical service in Ireland treated the whole of the sanitary duties as a huge joke the saddest of jokes, for the sanitary condition of Irish towns and villages is only on a level with a Chinese village. . . . The Boards of Guardians treat so insultingly the young doctor who asks for more pay that every competent medical man wants to emigrate anywhere out of Ireland. THE FILTH OF THE "CHINESE VILLAGES" OF IRELAND I traversed the wretched slums of the streets of the Irish towns and saw the nameless state of filth of these places. . . . The unutterable sanitary condition of these towns. . . . Loathsome and degrading surroundings. . . . No sanitary public opinion seems to exist. ... If a sanitary officer did his duty and reported, no action followed. . . . Tuberculosis is rife among the peasantry, and typhus, evidence of the very climax of filthiness. . . . The long succession of the low type of public-houses, which everywhere degrade the Irish towns and villages, line the streets in infinite numbers. The splendid newly-built Catholic church rises among the wretched cabins of some of the poorest people in the world. The well-built convent, the modern Christian brother's school, now and then the Bishop's palace, stand forward on the sloping hillside. Is this the preparation for peasant proprietorship, O prelates of the Board and the Commission ? Are these festering towns the likely markets, as in Belgium, Germany, and France, to stimulate and reward the intensive tillage of the small holding ? THE CLERICAL SCHOOLS FRAUD AND THE RUIN OF THE CHILDREN THE COMPLICITY OF DUBLIN CASTLE There can be no doubt that Dublin Castle knows all about the ruinous and dishonest work of the so-called teaching orders in Irish education. Referring to the intermediate schools, which all, both male and female, are in the hands of Conventual Orders, the Chief Secretary, Mr. Birrell, stated : "The present scheme as it exists is repulsive. . . It is a system of cram, cram, cram, divorced from teaching ; a system which murders the intelligence of the people. . . . The money now spent on intermediate education should be spent on improving the character of the schools, upon making them really educa- 148 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN tional and teaching places, and not in turning the little boys and girls of Ireland into money-making machines." But Bishop O'Dwyer, of Limerick, said the same thing, and made the same charge before the University Commission : Nine-tenths of the pupils of the intermediate schools are lost ; they are going to swell the ranks of the declass^s, without an education that is worth a button to them for any useful purpose. According to the Bishop, as well as the Minister, the teaching orders are heartless frauds, getting public money on false pretences. The Maynooth bishops are not more honest. They are under Propaganda, and must use Irish money for Propaganda objects. What did they do with the endowments of Newman's Catholic University ? As Mr. P. J. Kenny stated in a public lecture in the rotunda : "A sum estimated at .250,000 to 300,000 was subscribed by the Catholic laity in very hard times to endow the Catholic University, and the only intelligible account we have ever heard of the money was that the Irish bishops sent it to Rome against the Italian war of unification, and the episcopal defalcation left the institution in Stephen's Green to fall into the hands of the Jesuits." The Catholic University embezzlement matched the intermediate schools embezzlement. And Dublin Castle, we see, knows it all the time. The Conventual Orders grabbed the 160,000 a year for the industrial schools, and the Government Inspectors, from Sir Rowland Blennerhasset to Dr. Fagan, tells us the result : "The children are untaught, ill-fed, and filthy. " We saw a class of forty boys employed in knitting stockings. ' ' Growing boys were always exclusively fed on bread and cocoa. "The bathing arrangments were very filthy. The boys had a bath only once a month. The masters were equally dirty. " One told me that he never had a bath." That is the system of industrial schools to which Dublin Castle, in conformity with its clerical alliances, pays the public money. Only two or three shillings a week spent on the children, the technical training omitted in order to save the cost, the children brought up as unemployables, three-fourths of the Public Endowment secured by the Conventual order ; is that honesty, or is it heartless and inhuman fraud ? The primary and fundamental ideas of Catholics on Conventual Institutions refer to quiet abodes of peace and prayer, loving mercy, and unselfish kindness. The notion of gain, profit, the exploitation of others, is felt to be the direct opposite and opprobrium of the monastic ideal. The apparition of the factory convent, of nuns who are set to make helpless lay women and girls work for the profit of the Conventual authorities, awakens profound suspicion which easily becomes loathing, and as history has often shown open abhorrence. We know already that it is a supreme object of the Female Conventual Orders, subsidised by the Congested Board, to turn their girl-pupils into work- women for the convent factories. The infamous complicity of Dublin Castle and the Irish parliamentarians deprives even the poor workers in the convent laundries of the guarantee of public inspection under the Factory Acts. The factory nuns are not too holy to be employers of other people's labour, but they are too holy to submit to the ordinary obligations of employers. In this connection the standard reference is the condemnation passed by a French Catholic Bishop, ratified by the French Courts of Justice, upon the rapacity and inhumanity of the sweating convents of the Good Shepherd : " The nuns of the Good Shepherd have no other end than pecuniary gain. . . . POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 149 The money which the nuns spend on buildings is in great part the earnings ol these young girls. ... I have said and I repeat that there is not in the whole country an unbelieving employer who thus exploits his workmen and workwomen and treats them as these nuns treat the young girls whom they pretend to receive from charitable motives. ... I am inclined to believe that what is happening here is also happening in a great number of the houses belonging to this Order perhaps in all of them for if this establishment were an exception, its authorities would immediately set things right. If those authorities resist all entreaties, it must be that they approve of the system. "- Memorandum of Mgr. Turtnaz, Bishop of Nancy. The appalling thing about these abuses was that the authorities at Rome absolved the sweating nuns in spite of the complaint of the Bishop of Nancy, who was supported by twenty other Bishops and Archbishops. The reason is the terrible one, that the immense gains made by the factory convents out of their workgirls and work-women contribute largely to the support of the Conventual Superiors. It is almost impossible to prevent the nuns from acting unjustly towards persons in their employ for the sake of sending to the authorities of the Mother House who demand it an increasing annual contribution. The Bishop oj Grenoble, The Congested Districts Board patronises and subsidises convent factories throughout Ireland, which are without public inspection, and which are required by their Mother Houses to send out of Ireland an increasing annual contribution. THE BOARD AND LABOUR SWEATING LACE-MAKING GIRL SLAVES THE subsidies of the Boajd represent a weekly wage of less than four shillings to the work girls. Thus : In fifty-three classes established by the Board for the production of lace and embroidery, the total earnings paid to workers amounted to ,21,580 during the year. . . . The number of workers among whom this ^"21,580 was distributed would be about 2OOO. Evidence of Mr. W. J. D. Walker, Industrial Inspector to Congested Board. Dividing .21,580 among 2000 workers, we get about .10 annual salary, and ;io, divided between fifty-two weeks, gives less than four shillings weekly wages among the lace-makers of the Board! At the Congested Districts lace class in Glencolumbkill, five shillings to seven shillings a week would be the most that is earned by the girls. . . . In the embroidery the wages are very small. Evidence of Very Rev. Canon Sweeny, P.P. In the Donegal carpet factories started by the Board the average earnings of the girls employed do not pass $s. or 6s. a week. They started with 3*. 6d. a week." Evidence of Very. Rev. Monsignor Walker, P.P. In Connemara I see that the Board has had to discharge girls, there being no steady demand. Statement by Lord Dudley, Chairman of Commission. GIRL-DRIVING IN THE BOARD INDUSTRIES The worst forms of home-slavery flourish under the Board. The complaints of the girl-slaves who fly to America is fully borne out by the admissions of the Board Inspector as to how the girl lace-makers are driven to work ; and the medical evidence elsewhere is overwhelming. The Commission was led carefully to avoid examining work girls and medical men. If a number of trained workers can earn 8s. or <)s. a week, then the uncles and aunts who criticise the thing say, "If Mary Ann so-and-so can earn so much, then why cannot some other girl earn it?" Then the parents get at the ISO POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN girl and say, ' ' How is it you do not earn that amount ? " Evidence of Board Inspector Walker as above. BOARD INDUSTRIES TUBERCULOSIS Here in a melancholy troop come the delicate anamic girls -who work for the " sprig work" Cottage Industry, and never stir out of the house the whole day until their health breaks down, and they fade away in consumption. Report on Poor Law Medical System in Ireland in British Medical Journal, March 26, 1904. The splendid newly-built Catholic Church rises amidst the most wretched cabins. The well-built convent stands on the sloping hillside, and now and then the Catholic Bishop's palace. The village streets, foul and dirty, seem never to be cleansed. . . . The doctor enters the poor cabin, where in the corner sits the daughter whom he so often visits, but his medicines are powerless against surroundings so ruinous to health. British Medical Journal as> above. SPECIMEN "HOME INDUSTRY" IN IRELAND The Report on Factories Inspection continues to show no inspection whatever of home workers in the principal seats of the Congested Board's " Home Industries ! " The worst horrors of sweated child labour that occur among those sottish lazzaroni are entirely protected from official notice. Even when inspec- tion takes place elsewhere in Ireland the reports are often painful. Thus, Dr. Agnew, in the Urban District of Lurgan, reports that children "between three and twelve years of age are kept until late bedtime, wearing out their eyes at a stage of handkerchief making, at three farthings per dozen handkerchiefs." Factories Inspection Report , 1906. GOVERNMENT PLACES FOR THE CLERICO- JACOBIN PRESS THE FREEMAN'S JOURNAL THE LADDER TO OFFICE I AM indebted to the rivalry between Irish parties for the following pithy exposi- tion of the salaried favours conferred by Dublin Castle upon the editorial staff of the leading organ of Ribbon rent and priestly rule, the notorious Freeman's Journal. Denounced by that converted revolutionist, Mr. W. O'Brien, M.P., for the insatiable ferocity of its attacks upon the Irish landlords, and universally recognised for the total absence of fair play from its columns, the Freeman, through its clerical patrons and shareholders, usually commands the prompt attention of His Majesty's administration in Ireland. I take from the indignant pages of the Sinn Fein, an organ of another section, the enumeration of some of the golden showers which have descended from the Chief Secretary's office into the bosom of the editorial Danae of the crozier and the league. The organ of the other section publishes the narrative in support of its contention that "five leader-writers of the Freeman's Journal are now in receipt of salaries from the Government : The following is the list of the chief appointments from the Freeman staff made within the last few years by the British Government : Richard Adams, leader-writer, Freeman's Journal, appointed County Court Judge of Limerick at ^1400 per annnm. P. J. Kelly, chief leader-writer of the Belfast Morning News (Freeman's Journal, Belfast edition), appointed Removable Magistrate at .800 per annum. John George MacSweeney, Editor of the Weekly Freeman, appointed Local Government Board Inspector at ;8oo per annum. Maurice Cosgrove, chief leader-writer, Evening Telegraph, appointed POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 151 Temporary Local Government Board Inspector at three guineas per day and travelling and maintenance expenses. Matthias MacDonnell Bodkin, chief leader-writer of the Freeman's journal, appointed County Court Judge of Clare at ^1400 per annum. Sinn Fein, l6th October, 1907. With regard to the Freeman and the Congested Board, one historical sequence of events was this: (i) Bishop O'Donnell helped to clear the opponents of Mr. John Dillon from the Freeman ; (2) Mr. John Dillon got Chief Secretary John Morley to place Bishop O'Donnell and Father O'Hara on the Congested Board, which they have dominated since 1895 ; (3) the Congested Board expended some .500,000 of public money on Mr. John Dillon's pauper constituency in East Mayo ; (4) Mr. John Dillon is the clerical standard-bearer for Sectarian Education and Redistribution of Property. Good business ! APOSTLES OF ANARCHY THE CONGESTED PRIESTS IN THE LEAGUE DIRECTORY The United Irish League, which disunites Ireland, is a Ribbon League. Its objects are Clericalism and Confiscation. On the I5th January it constituted its " National Directory" for the year 1908, and the record of its proceedings is conclusive. The attendance consisted of the Parliamentary representatives of the political sacristies and the Congested Board. I can ignore the rank-and-file of the puppets elected by the sacerdotal conventions or the cowed parishioners marched to the polls by their political priests. The dominant feature was the presence of the leading priests of the Con- gested Board and its parish committees, headed by the Bishop of the Board's own Vicar General, Right Rev. Monsignor M'Glynn. A letter of sympathy and adhesion came from the Rev. Father Cannon, the Chairman of the Bishop's Ribbon Demonstration at the Letterkenny Congested Cathedral, to welcome the Ribbon president, Mr. Devlin, M.P.,as related in a preceding chapter. PRIESTS OF THE BOARD DIRECTORY Right Rev. Monsignor M'Glynn, Vicar-General, Donegal. Very Rev. Canon M'Fadden, Donegal. Very Rev. Dr. Maguire, D.D., Donegal. Very Rev. Canon Quinn, Vicar Forane, Armagh. Rev. Father M'Donnell, East Mayo. Rev. Father Lowry, Down. Rev. Father M'Cartan, Antrim. Rev. Father Eagleton, Galway. Rev. Father Flynn, Leitrim. Rev. Father Power, Limerick. Rev. Father Kennedy, Cork. Rev. Father Brennan, Kilkenny. Many of these potentates of agitation will be recognised as witnesses at the Arranged Commission. MORLEY-DAVITT MAGISTRATES Six Morley-Davitt magistrates, nominated by the clergy, attended to attest the devotion of their class to League justice and equity. CLERICAL NOMINATIONS A priest, Father M'Cartan, appropriately proposed Mr. John Redmond as President. John Redmond appropriately proposed Ribbon President Devlin as General Secretary, or supreme organiser ; and the priests -unanimously elected the exalted candidates. The Bishop of the Board's own Vicar-General, 152 POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN Monsignor M'Glynn, was unanimously co-opted a national director, along with John Dillon, Stephen Gwynn, and other amateurs of the hazel. The Bishop of the Board's own Canon M'Fadden proposed the auditor of the League, who was unanimously elected. CLERICAL RESOLUTIONS Priests proposed and unanimously supported resolutions "endorsing the action" of President Redmond and the Bishop of Board, "pledging support of the organisation to the movement for breaking up the cattle ranches," and "demanding compulsory powers of expropriation for Congested Board and Estates Commission." THE PRIESTS AND MAGISTRATES UNANIMOUSLY PREVENTED CENSURE ON CATTLE DRIVING But what need of more ? The Congested Board Priesthood are the direction as well as the treasury of the Irish Revolution, and they can spend millions sterling of public money in demoralisation and discontent. According to a witness from Leitrim, Rev. Father Meehan, the Board gave ^7800 for distribution in the parishes of East Mayo by the priests who elect Mr. John Dillon to represent them in Parliament and at Dublin Castle ! IRELAND A NATURAL TIMBER COUNTRY OF THE FIRST CLASS The conditions in England and Scotland, but especially in Ireland, are more favourable to the growth of profitable timber than those of most continental forests. Professor Schlich, whose reputation as a forest authority is world-wide, says that as regards climate there is practically nothing better to be desired so far as the production of timber is concerned. . . . Every year a fast-increasing sum, amounting to about 27,000,000, is paid away to other countries for timber and wooden goods which could be equally well produced in Ireland. Evidence of Lord Castletown before Congested Commission. Ireland was formerly well-wooded. ... In comparison with great timber- producing countries, such as Russia and Norway, it is very favourably circum- stanced. . . . Potentially one of the best timber-producing countries, it is now, with the exception of Portugal, the least wooded of Europe." Evidence of Mr. J. L. Pigot, Adviser in Forestry, before the Congested Commission. THE TENANT PURCHASERS DESTROY TIMBER SIR JOHN COLOMB Is it not the case that, generally speaking, in Ireland the people are wholly unsympathetic, if not hostile, to occupying land with trees ? LORD CASTLETOWN I think there is that feeling among them. I do not think they understand the value of them here. Evidence before the Congested Commission. LORD DUDLEY Is it in your knowledge that since the Act of 1903 a great many trees have been cut down ? MR, J. L. PIGOT The Land Act of 1903 has aggravated the position. The working of the Act has led directly to the rapid, reckless, and improvident felling of trees. . . . Taking the whole country, the amount of timber in Ireland is being enormously reduced, and, in many parts of the country the tenant purchasers have cut down timber extensively, and in some parts almost cleared the country of trees. Evidence before the Congested Commission. MORE LIGHT ON SIR HORACE PLUNKETT'S DISMISSAL In an article in the Pall Mall Gazette, Mr. George A. Birmingham, the able Irish Nationalist writer, confirms the account of the dismissal of Sir Horace POLITICAL PRIESTS AND IRISH RUIN 153 Plunkett through the clerico-gombeen influence in Mr. Redmond's party operating on Dublin Castle. The Bishop of the Board is the leading patron, and probably the principal leader perhaps on behalf of Propaganda of Mr. Redmond's party. The truth is that Mr. Redmond and his party dislike the co-operative move- ment, because it is securing prosperity for the Irish farmer, is emancipating him from the control of the local shopkeeper. And the local shopkeeper, publican, usurer, emigration agent, gombeen-man is a great support of "the party." Therefore the dismissal of Sir Horace Plunkett was engineered, and we were treated to the pitifully sordid farce of last May. Mr. T. W. Russell succeeded Sir Horace. The Irish Agricultural Organisation Society, it was supposed, would die a lingering death. Co-operative societies would cease to exist, and everything would return to the condition of the dear dead days when the farmer had to vote at elections as his creditor told him. Of which state of things we have a fine example in the saying of a gombeen-man in a non-co-operative district, which was quoted in a paper the other day : " I've five thousand pounds out on loan through the country, and there isn't a member of the district council but would have to stand on his head in the board-room if I bade him." II Crown 8vo, 6d. net THE PRICE OF HOME RULE By L. COPE GORNFORD AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION MR. ASQUITH'S declaration with regard to Home Rule, made on December loth, 1909, revived an issue which, so far as England is concerned, had lain almost dormant since 1893, although the question never slept in Ireland. The immediate effects of that declaration were two. One was to engage the Irish Roman Catholic vote in this island to the Liberal cause ; the other, to rouse Ulster, which is loyal Ireland, to a sense of her danger. As regards English people, the moral of the situation was, and is, the fact that the Prime Minister deliberately proposed to concede the demands of the Nationalist party in Ireland, in return for their help in abolishing " the veto " (as it is called) of the House of Lords. It therefore behoves the English people, who have partly forgotten the troubles of '86 and '93, to understand something of what is involved in the Home Rule issue. At present, most of them, perhaps, are so tired of the eternal juggling of politicians with the' Irish agitation, that they are inclined to give Ireland Home Rule and be done with it. There are, however, many categorical reasons why the English people should consider the matter anew, before -they leap to any such conclusion. To concede the Nationalist demand no doubt appears to be a short way out of the difficulty. It is even possible, however, that there may be a shorter way. In dealing with the subject of Home Rule, there are three main ques- tions to which it is the duty of every honest citizen to find an answer I. Is there any justificatian for the Home Rule agitation which is worthy of serious consideration ? II. Are there any circumstances which would morally justify making any kind of concession to the demand for Home Rule ? III. Is the condition of the poorer classes in Ireland worse in any respect, owing to the existing constitution of British Rule, than the condition of the same classes in England? It is for the purpose of providing the student with material upon which to base his judgment that these pages are written. They pretend to no merit other than the merit of personal observation on the part of the writer, of the situation as it exists to-day. P. S. KING & SON ORCHARD HOUSE, WESTMINSTER UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY Los Angeles This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. Form L9-25m-9,'47(A5618)444 UN1VEKS1TY OK > -UKUKNiA AT LOS ANGELES LIBRARY 0*Donnell - PoU^ioal priests and 191O Irish DA -960 001 238 557 DA 960 Q261p 1910