PARAGUAY ON SHANNON 
 
 THE PRICE OF A POUTICAL PRIESTHOOD 
 
Paraguay on Shannon 
 
 THE PRICE OF A POLITICAL 
 PRIESTHOOD 
 
 REMARKS ON POLICY AND PROCEED- 
 INGS OF A RIBBONMAN BOARD AND 
 A ROYAL ARRANGED COMMISSION 
 
 By 
 
 R HUGH O^DONNELU M.A. 
 
 Author of "The Ruin of Education in Ireland," etc. 
 
 LONDON: 
 
 P. S. KING & SON 
 
 ORCHARD HOUSE, WESTMINSTER 
 
 DUBLIN: HODGES, FIGGIS & CO^ LTD. 
 
 Publishers to the University 
 1908 
 

 NOTE. 
 
 The province of Paraguay, in South America, 
 became celebrated in the eighteenth century for 
 the absolutist system of government established by 
 the Jesuit fathers over the Indian tribes. The 
 Jesuits are credited, however, with promoting the 
 material prosperity of their servile subjects. No 
 such extenuation can be urged on behalf of the 
 political priesthood in Ireland. In Ireland material 
 ruin has accompanied clerical despotism. The 
 political priesthood have pauperised as well as 
 demoralised. Their ascendency has been almost 
 synonymous with ignorance, indigence, inveracity, 
 mendicancy, dishonesty, slavery, and sloth. What 
 they did not steal they spoiled. They have traded 
 on social revolution ; they have sapped the bases 
 of nationhood. 
 
 3413 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON: 
 
 THE PRICE OF A POLITICAL PRIESTHOOD. 
 
 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 Repoits, /., 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 Mr. John FitzGibbon, delegate from 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 CLERI- 
 CALISM — JACOBIN CLERGY — FISHERY 
 REVIVED BY DUKE OF ABERCORN— BLACK- 
 HOLE SCHOOLS AND RICH CATHEDRALS. 
 
 " I advise a boycott rigorous and complete." 
 
 Mr. Conor O'Kelly, M.P., member of Commission. 
 
 "Join us in overthrowing the ascendency 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 Nicasa 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 ol 
 Christendom, nowhere more a curse than in Ireland, 
 and never more a curse than now. The political 
 priesthood sold the high kings to the Norman, and 
 the Parliament to the Castle. Its nation-killing greed 
 for pelf and power has become neither less sordid nor 
 less hurtful since a misguided papacy,* following the 
 
 * By abolishing the ancient status and reducing the Irish Catholic 
 Church to a " mission district " three-quarters of a century ago, the 
 Pope placed Irish Catholics, priests and laymen, under the arbitrary 
 absolutism of the Propaganda Congregation, just like Mongolia or 
 Borneo. I shall make some detailed reference to this matter in the 
 course of the following pages. Like a good Catholic, I recognise 
 
X INTRODUCTION. 
 
 inspiration of anti-Irish politicians, degraded the 
 canonical Church of Catholic Ireland into a servile 
 province of a Foreign Missions Board, and made the 
 pious heirs of Patrick and Columba something like 
 White Hottentots among the Catholic peoples of 
 Europe. 
 
 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 ascendency which the hierocrats 
 
 the validity of the revolution, and, like a good Catholic, I deplore it. 
 Of course, I cannot explain to the Sacristy Parliamentarians and the 
 Ribbon Lodges that a good Catholic can condemn the historical acts of 
 popes ; but perhaps an illustration from those good Catholics, the 
 reverend fathers of the Jesuit Society — so orthodox in dogma and so 
 pernicious in politics — may help Sir Christopher Nixon or Baron 
 Palles. In the well-known Jesuit periodical The Month, in its 
 November issue, p^ge 547, we can read the following condemnation 
 of the Pope who started the great schism of the West, Urban VI. : " It 
 is clear from the documents that we have that the opposition cardinals 
 would never have varied from their original choice had it not been 
 that Urban VI. behaved, it must be acknowledged, simply like a 
 lunatic, and made them fear for their lives and careers under his 
 despotic rule." Shall I say that the degradation of the ancient 
 Church of the West to the class of coolie and negro missions was also 
 a piece of " despotism " worthy of " a lunatic " ? So meanly did 
 the advisers of the Vatican estimate the religious priesthood of 
 Ireland. 
 
INTRODUCTION, xi 
 
 have been helped by politicians to erect on a basis of 
 poor assistance is almost as notorious as their master- 
 piece, the organisation of ignorance. They are as 
 supreme on the Board of Subsidies as on the Commis- 
 sion of Investigation, in the Relief Committee as in 
 the Ribbon Lodge. Last century it used to be said of 
 a certain Under-Secretary at Dublin Castle that 
 Ireland was ruled "by Larcom and the police." 
 To-day we say, " by Sir Antony and the blessed 
 clergy." 
 
 Nor let us forget that the Irish political priesthood 
 has come to be entirely convinced of the legitimacy of 
 its usurpation, of the sanctity of its domination. 
 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 con- 
 servative of order and property. From end to end 
 of the Continent they are nowhere to be found inciting 
 " the toiling multitudes to overthrow the ascendency 
 of the classes," or proclaiming that landed estate is 
 incompatible with human sympathies. In Ireland 
 alone they are the firebrands of the populace ; frus- 
 trating every reform by more and more exaggerated 
 demands ; glorying in intimidation ; stimulating the 
 boycott and the cattle-drive ; applauding the repudia- 
 tion of contracts ; recruiting and directing lawless 
 
xii INTRODUCTION. 
 
 confederations, excommunicate 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 EngHsh poHtical faction abandoned the distribu- 
 tion of public bounties, the exercise of pubHc authority, 
 the development of national mendicancy, and the 
 perpetuation of national decay. 
 
 The Congested Districts organisation, that mis- 
 leading name, has been used to promote popular 
 dependence upon the hierocrats and to envenom 
 popular passions against the Irish gentry. " The 
 landlords have never done anything for Ireland." 
 That is the parrot-cry of half the pulpiteers. Con- 
 sidering that the incendiary clerics have been sowing 
 hate between owners and occupiers for nearly a 
 century, it may be acknowledged that they have often 
 made impossible both benejfits and co-operation. 
 But thousands of Irish landlords exhausted their last 
 shilling to feed their tenantry in the famine years, 
 though their only reward from English political 
 intelligence was to be the Encumbered Estates Acts. 
 Even to-day the only great success of the Congested 
 Districts Board, as claimed by itself, the boasted 
 fishery in the Gweedore and Glenties district, owes 
 its success in finding a market to an Irish landlord 
 who, culmination of wickedness, is also a peer and a 
 duke, assisted by a London fish merchant ! I quote 
 from the evidence before the Commission of Mr. 
 J. F. O'Donnell, county councillor of Donegal, who 
 bears this testimony to the immense benefit from 
 this co-operation : — 
 
 " I am pleased to say that the fishmarket on the coast of the 
 county has much improved for the past ten years, which is principally 
 due to Mr. John L. Sayer, of London. In 1895 the price paid at 
 Burtonport was very small. The following year His Grace the Duke 
 of Abercorn visited the district. He witnessed not less than seventy 
 boats lying at the Burtonport Pier, all having good catches, but no 
 market for the fish. He immediately telegraphed to Mr. John L. 
 
INTRODUCTION. xiii 
 
 Sayer, of Billingsgate, London, requesting him to appoint a repre- 
 sentative, who would take the fish from the boats, and have them for- 
 warded without delay. Mr. Sayer took the matter up at once ; sent 
 his representative, Mr. John Guthrie, who went to work, and expended 
 over ;^3,ooo on the erection of fish-curing stations and kippering 
 houses. Mr. Sayer then formed a company which is known as the 
 Donegal Fishing Company. This company had nets working this 
 year value for ^2,000, boats value ^5,000, stock value ^3,000, and 
 the amount of cash paid out by them for lobsters alone from 
 I St May to 30th September exceeds ^^900. The total amount of 
 cash paid for fish, wages, and incidental expenses by this company 
 in the last two and a half years is ^^27,360." 
 
 Is not this good work by an Irish landlord and an 
 English merchant ? Yet the clerics of the Congested 
 Board want to rouse " the toiling masses " against 
 such, and teach their ignorant people that " a land- 
 lord is incapable of human feeling." By the way, 
 might not these reverend politicians reflect that, 
 instead of ;f 100,000 and ;;f5o,ooo new cathedrals in 
 distressed districts, spacious and seemly churches for 
 God's service might be better built for ^10,000 and 
 ;f 5,000, and the balance devoted to such work as that 
 of the Duke of Abercorn and Mr. John L. Sayer, of 
 London ? 
 
 The same county councillor for Donegal gave 
 testimony that, whereas the cartage of provisions by 
 road from Londonderry used to cost the poor people 
 of West Donegal an addition of £2 105. per ton 
 carriage, 
 
 " Mr. William Hammond, agent for the Marquis Conyngham in 
 the Rosses, purchased, in the year 1887, a small steamer, which he 
 ran between Londonderry and Killybegs, serving all the ports on the 
 coast of the county of Donegal, resulting in a reduction of the 
 carriage from £2 loj. to lOi-. per ton." 
 
 Then the witness added the name of another Irish 
 landlord to the foregoing : — 
 
 " Later on the late John Herdman, Deputy Lieutenant, came to 
 Mr. Hammond's assistance, thus leaving us a regular sea service ever 
 since." 
 
xiv INTRODUCTION. 
 
 A duke, a marquis's land agent, and a deputy 
 lieutenant — here are three specimens in a single 
 district in a single Irish county of that class " which 
 never does anything for Ireland " ; and yet they are 
 incidentally mentioned by a single witness as being 
 the means of earning and saving far more than 
 ;;f 10,000 a year for the very people who are taught to 
 curse them. I ought not to omit another piece of 
 this witness's evidence upon the possibility of valuable 
 reclamation of soil that is waste, and upon its actual 
 reclamation, not by a board spending the money of 
 the taxpayers, but by the private enterprise of a land 
 agent. As I shall devote some space to the subject 
 of Ireland's ample capacity to support a comfortable 
 population, if only the element of enterprise and 
 industry be forthcoming, I ask attention for this 
 evidence in the present introduction : — 
 
 " The reclamation of moorland is a matter of great importance, 
 as migration could be adopted, if even upon a small scale. Moor- 
 land drained, limed, and properly tilled gives good crops. In the 
 townland of Cronashallog Mr. Hammond reclaimed a field of moor- 
 land of the rawest materials. I have known him to grow eighty tons 
 of good potatoes in one year off this field, and a magnificent crop of 
 oats the following year. . . . There are thousands of acres of this 
 unreclaimed moorland within a distance of nine miles from here." 
 
 If, instead of the gospel of mendicancy, servility, 
 and land robbery, the Jacobin clergy would preach 
 industry, education, and honesty, Ireland, which is 
 far more fertile than Belgium, would feed in comfort 
 twice its population. It is not material, but moral, 
 causes which are the curse of the country. 
 
 When we remember that the vital facts just quoted 
 occurred in the most casual way in the evidence of a 
 single witness, we can understand how complete would 
 be the exculpation of thousands of the maligned class 
 of Irish gentry, if the list of witnesses had not been 
 carefully selected, " arranged for," in the interest of 
 clerical demagogues and monopolisers. The Irish 
 
INTRODUCTION. xv 
 
 gentry, their agricultural skill and enterprise, their 
 considerable wealth, their intense patriotism and 
 devotion to their native land, which only a fool or a 
 knave would deny, their immense capacities for giving 
 employment of every kind — all these qualities and 
 qualifications make of them a magnificent asset of 
 Ireland's wealth, material and intellectual. This is 
 why English political genius wants them to take them- 
 selves and ;^i5o,ooo,ooo of Irish capital out of the 
 country, for investment in English enterprise perhaps, 
 while their wretched ex-tenantry, loaded with debt, 
 are left to the tender mercies of worthless demagogues, 
 lay and clerical, during life, and legacy-hunting priests 
 in the article of death. 
 
 But I have one word more 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 charla- 
 tans. The scene is that district of Annagry, in the 
 vicinity of Burtonport, where the Duke of Abercorn 
 brought ;£'io,ooo 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 population of 3,000 semi-paupers, as they are 
 said to be. Of the neighbouring island of Arranmore, 
 containing 1,400 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? 
 
xvi INTRODUCTION. 
 
 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, 
 notwithstanding 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 adviser under the Board, will give us 
 an Annagry specimen. Mr. Walker will later speak 
 of lacemaking under the Board and in the ordinary 
 schools. Lace is an ill-paid embellishment of the 
 rich, often exacted from the starvation, blindness, and 
 tuberculosis of the poor, which drives the wretched 
 work-girl out of Ireland to risk all in the slums of New 
 York. It is a favourite specialty of convent factories. 
 
 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 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 ? 
 
INTRODUCTION. xvii 
 
 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 ; and neither Sir Antony MacDonnell 
 nor any other representative of Dublin Castle will 
 ever venture to insist upon " floor space " or breathing 
 space for the children blessed by such celestial adminis- 
 tration. What does the reader think of drink and 
 education facilities in a congested district of the Con- 
 gested Board, sanctified by all the moral influence 
 of a political priesthood since generations and 
 generations ? 
 
 And this inspector and adviser appointed by the 
 Board, paid by the taxpayer, "is not quite sure " what 
 space to stand and breathe is required or requirable 
 for the poor little children who are to be the future 
 men and women of Ireland. Do we wonder at every- 
 body trying to emigrate from such a country ? Again 
 a bit of evidence : — 
 
 Mr. Sutherland — But the people go out of the country that you 
 are at the expense of training ? 
 
 Mr. Walker — You cannot prevent it. 
 
 So the taxpayer is paying the Congested Districts 
 Board, its favourites, nominees, and inspectors, for 
 that net result. 
 
 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 
 stenchful air, there was being built, " for the greater 
 glory of God," a vast and lavish new cathedral in 
 the petty townlet of Letterkenny, costing 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 
 
 b 
 
xviii INTRODUCTION. 
 
 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 Parliamen- 
 tarianism 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 £^o would suffice," 
 it was pleaded. But the Commissioners were begin- 
 ning 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, wM something like ;^i 0,000 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 taxpaid beneficence. Here is an answer 
 which a Commissioner got from the Marquis of 
 Conyngham's agent as to the legitimate expectations 
 of those intelligent 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. 
 
INTRODUCTION. xix 
 
 Mr. Pomeroy — // 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 them- 
 selves. They may be said to appreciate fully the 
 value of individual ownership.* 
 
 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 chil- 
 dren, though it has gained probably ;;f 100,000 by the 
 improved market initiated by the Duke of Abercorn in 
 1895 ; and that Letterkenny new cathedral which has 
 absorbed ;;f 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. 
 
 * A very amusing instance of a Donegal priest's appreciation in 
 his own case of the value of ownership came before the Commis- 
 sioners. 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 15^. gd. 
 There were no improvements whatever, and it was sold for 
 £iiS to a tenant by the Rev. Mr. McFadden himself — that is, 
 for one hundred and forty-six years' purchase ! ! I 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 PART I. 
 
 THE COOKING OF EVIDENCE AND THE 
 COOKING OF COMMISSIONS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 WHY I TENDERED EVIDENCE BEFORE THE COMMISSION . 3 
 
 THE commission's HOSTILITY TO UNSELECTED EVIDENCE . 8 
 
 The Broken Promise — Land League Evidence Preferred 
 — I take Warning. 
 
 THE CONGESTED BOARD AND INDEPENDENT EVIDENCE . I3 
 
 The Fate of a Witness — The Priests and Migration — 
 The Specific Instance — The Wrath of a Commissioner. 
 
 OFFICIAL JACOBINISM 20 
 
 THE COMPOSITION OF THE COMMISSION AND THE NUCLEUS 
 
 POLICY 23 
 
 What is the Nucleus — The Bishop of the Board — A Boy- 
 cotting Commission — Punjab Pohteness — Selection of 
 Evidence. 
 
 REVOLUTIONARY CLERICS: HOW THE BOARD HAS AGRICUL- 
 TURE REPRESENTED ....... 37 
 
 Mr. Healy's Revelation — Down with Ownership ! — Down 
 with the Classes ! 
 
 THE PARISH PRIEST COMMITTEES AND THEIR TWO THOUSAND 
 
 AGENTS 47 
 
 The Priest is the Committee — Paying Insanitation — 
 Priests and Cattle Drivers — The Board's Bishop Mr. 
 Redmond's Treasurer. 
 
 PART II. 
 PARTLY HISTORICAL 
 
 UNSUCCESSFUL STATE SOCIALISM — NOT CONGESTION BUT 
 
 UNEMPLOYMENT . 59 
 
xxii TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 ON THE HISTORY OF THE SHAM CONGESTION MOVEMENT . 6l 
 
 Foreign Competition — Policy of Undercultivation — The 
 Butt Party — Why Parnell stole an Amendment — 
 Board Failures. 
 
 THE FATAL CHANGE IN IRISH TILLAGE .... 73 
 
 From Tillage for Subsistence to Tillage for Sale — From 
 Native Food to Foreign Imports. 
 
 • PART III. 
 
 HIRUDO HIERATICA. 
 
 THE HUGE AND INSATIABLE EXACTIONS OF THE POLITICAL 
 
 CHURCH 85 
 
 A BLOATED CHURCH ESTABLISHMENT — THE EXAGGERATED 
 
 EPISCOPATE CONVENTUAL LEECHES .... 87 
 
 Comparison with Foreign Catholic EstabHshments — 
 Palatial Churches and Pauper Flocks — Convent 
 Begging Letterwriters — Why the Money goes Abroad 
 — Church Decoration and Clerical Commissions. 
 
 THE UNIVERSALITY OF THE CLERICAL GRAB .... lOI 
 
 Technical and Industrial Schools — Dirt and Hunger in 
 the Schools — Grabbing the Local Boards. 
 
 THE MYSTERY OF LOUGHGLYNN HOUSE . . . • H? 
 
 How the Taxpayers lost ;^8,900 in order to plant a 
 Foreign Convent in Roscommon. 
 
 THE CLERICAL COMBINATION AGAINST PROPERTY NOT CON- 
 FINED TO THE CONGESTED DISTRICTS . . . I28 
 
 An Example from Tipperary — Cattle Driving Churchmen 
 and their Magistrates. 
 
 THE CONGESTED BOARD AND THE RIBBON LODGE THE 
 
 ROBESPIERRES OF THE SACRISTY .... I34 
 
 PART IV. 
 
 LEADING CAUSES OF POVERTY AND 
 DEPOPULATION. 
 
 SUMMARY OF LEADING CAUSES OF POVERTY AND DEPOPULA- 
 TION .......... 149 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS. xxiii 
 
 AGRARIAN LEGISLATION AND AGITATION : HOW THEY 
 
 IMPOVERISH AND DEPOPULATE I55 
 
 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 167 
 
 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 I78 
 
 Anglo-Indian Faddists — Where Peasant Proprietors Suc- 
 ceed — Unknown in Ireland — The Coming of the Jew 
 — The Irish-American Lesson. 
 
 "LIBERTY OF TESTATION" THE DEATHBED GRAB . . 187 
 
 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 I97 
 
 HOME AND CONVENT SWEATING 205 
 
 Home Sweating and Tuberculosis — Serf-like Convent 
 Labour — Killing Lay Industries — Lacemaking Slave- 
 drivers — The Freeman's Avowals — Starvation Wages 
 and Blinded Eyes. 
 
 PART V. 
 THE KEY OF THE IRISH REVOLUTION. 
 
 THE POLITICAL SACRISTY AND THE RIBBON LODGE . . 217 
 
 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 LODGE, THE BISHOP, THE BOARD, AND THE COMMISSION 233 
 
 Excommunicated in Scotland — Blessed in Ireland — Mr. 
 William O'Brien against Ribbonism — The Bishop of 
 the Board welcomes the Ribbon President. 
 
XXIV 
 
 TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 PART VI. 
 
 CONCLUSIONS. 
 
 TYPES OF THE ARRANGED COMMISSION 
 
 Still the Dark Ages— Clerical Mentality — Lord Dudley 
 as Jean Jacques Rousseau — An Electioneering Com- 
 missioner — Congested M.P.-making — The Board's 
 Lazzaroni. 
 
 HOW NOT TO SEE 
 
 251 
 
 267 
 
 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 ! 275 
 
 List of Non-Inquiries — What Ireland might be — Lord 
 Castletown's Experiment — The Secret Service of the 
 Sacristy — The Coolie Mission — Dublin Castle and the 
 Dead Hand. 
 
 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 THE CONGESTED BOARD AND THE LAND LEAGUE . 
 
 TO-DAY THE IRISH BEG AND STARVE ; THEIR FATHERS 
 AND FED 
 
 GREW 
 
 INSTRUCTIVE FACTS AND AVOWALS 
 
 THE WORST EVILS OF IRELAND .... 
 
 REVELATIONS OF MEDICAL SERVICE IN IRELAND . 
 
 CLERICAL SCHOOL FRAUD AND RUIN OF CHILDREN 
 
 SPECIAL DANGER OF CONVENT FACTORIES 
 
 THE BOARD AND LABOUR SWEATING 
 
 GOVERNMENT PLACES FOR CLERICO-JACOBIN PRESS 
 
 APOSTLES OF ANARCHY 
 
 IRELAND A N.^TURAL TIMBER COUNTRY. 
 
 35 
 
 81 
 
 153 
 165 
 185 
 
 195 
 203 
 
 215 
 231 
 
 247 
 275 
 
PART I. 
 
 THE COOKING OF EVIDENCE AND 
 THE COOKING OF COMMISSIONS. 
 
 " When I appeared before the Commissioners I was struck by 
 their ability in avoiding to ask me any question that would help to 
 get out what they knew I had to say, but there was no lack of 
 bullying cross-examination to discredit me." 
 
 Testimony of Mr. P. Kenny, author of '■^Economics 
 for Irishmen " / witness before the Comtnission. 
 
 VOICES FROM CONGESTIA. 
 
 " I do not care what the results may be ; I advise a boycott 
 rigorous and complete." 
 
 Speech of Mr. Conor 0' Kelly, M. P. , ?nember of the 
 Comf/iissioii. 
 
 " The fact of a man becoming a landlord makes him heartless." 
 
 Evidence of Father O'Hara, member of Congestion 
 Board. 
 
 " The toiling masses of Great Britain have good reasons of their 
 own to join us in overthrowing the ascendency of the classes.' 
 
 Manifesto of Bishop O'Donnell, tnember of the 
 Commission and the Board ; Treasurer of League 
 Parliamentary Fund. 
 
 P.S. 
 
WHY I TENDERED EVIDENCE BEFORE 
 THE COMMISSION. 
 
 " Royal Commissions sit, at Ireland's expense, not daring to ask 
 for the truth of witnesses who dare not tell it. . . . The Royal Com- 
 mission on Congestion illustrates the thing well." 
 
 The Author of " Tht Sorrows of Ireland." 
 
 The reason why I tendered evidence before the 
 Royal Commission which purported to inquire into 
 the working of the Congested Districts Board in 
 Ireland can be told very simply. I knew from personal 
 observation and much well-informed testimony that 
 an influential section of the so-called Congested Dis- 
 tricts Board has been working for many years in 
 conscious or unconscious collusion with the clerico- 
 Jacobin party in Ireland for the purpose of exciting 
 agrarian discontent and promoting a movement lor 
 the confiscation of property. I had the proofs that 
 the Royal Commission of Inquiry had been so con- 
 stituted as not to inquire into the real sources of the 
 poverty which exists, and especially not to inquire 
 into the policy of the so-called Congested Board. I 
 more than suspected that any attempt to present 
 independent evidence would be resisted with all the 
 resources of chicane habitual to the managers of these 
 matters at Dublin Castle, and I wished to acquire the 
 certainty that there would be special objection to the 
 evidence of a man accustomed to treat public ques- 
 tions, a trained writer on political and economic 
 subjects, a former member of Parliament, and lifelong 
 member of the Irish Nationalist party. Things 
 turned out to be exactly as I was led to anticipate. 
 The Royal Commission of Inquiry included as its 
 most prominent and influential member the most 
 
 B i 
 
4 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 prominent and influential member of the very Board 
 into which it was supposed to inquire ; and along- 
 side of him was an open advocate and agent as well 
 as several less avowed supporters of the compulsory 
 expropriation of the Irish landlord class. There was 
 the usual fringe of impartial and impressionable mem- 
 bers, whose judgment would be mainly affected by the 
 evidence brought before them, and who were accord- 
 ingly more or less at the mercy of the selectors of the 
 evidence that was permitted to reach the Commis- 
 sion. There was in addition, of course, a certain 
 number of official members, who, as in the case 
 of the Chief Secretary and Under-Secretary and 
 ex-Lord Lieutenant, were entirely dependent on 
 the evidence supplied to them, as they had 
 little or no practical experience of Ireland outside 
 of their official functions. It was accordingly appa- 
 rent that the selection of evidence was calculated to 
 be the decisive factor, in an especial degree for the 
 impartial and impressionable outsiders who had been 
 appended to the Church party and the Castle party, 
 and were consequently to be protected as much as 
 possible from all evidence likely to contradict the 
 clerico-official theories. In this way there was a 
 pleasing probability that the verdict of the whole 
 Commission would be practically unanimous in sup- 
 port of the pre-established arrangements. As more 
 than one of the official members was understood to be 
 on the best of terms with the clerico-Jacobin party, 
 and as independent members of the non-official laity 
 had been almost excluded from the Royal Commis- 
 sion, the conspirators, or shall we say the coadjutors, 
 ought to be able to look forward with some confidence 
 to a foregone conclusion. 
 
 Immediately on the early sittings of the Commis- 
 sion enabling me to recognise the nature of the tactics 
 which had been adopted, and the plans of the per- 
 sonage« who had been appointed, I resolved to apply 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 5 
 
 for admission as a witness, in the safe and certain 
 expectation that I should not be allowed to prove an 
 exception to the rule against independent testimony. 
 
 Having the fear of the law of libel as well as the 
 great commandment of charity before my eyes, I bring 
 no charge of evil intentions or conscious dishonesty 
 against the most dependent and prejudiced witnesses, 
 Commissioners, or Board members. The worst ser- 
 vants of the public are often men who mean well 
 according to their lights, but whose ideas and training 
 render them the instruments of designs fatal to the 
 State and nation. A prairie rent bishop ; a Parlia- 
 mentary Ribbonman ; a monk who believes that, for 
 their souls' sake, men cannot be too poor nor the 
 Church too rich ; the eminent ecclesiastic who pre- 
 dicted to me in i8go, " Within ten years the Church 
 will be supreme in Ireland " ; all these fanatics can be 
 allowed to be honest to the core. But they make bad 
 administrators, bad witnesses, bad judges in matters 
 of general civic right and secular property and well- 
 being. The Congested Fiction Board has been a vast 
 organisation of political corruption, of agrarian social- 
 ism, of national pauperisation, of priestly favouritism, 
 of financial waste, of sham philanthropy, of mental 
 and moral demoralisation. The Congested Fiction 
 Commission is its whitewashing machine. Let us 
 assume all the good intentions in the world. I con- 
 demn not individuals, but the system. 
 
 It was the packing of the Royal University Commis- 
 sion five years ago which first directed my attention 
 seriously to the manner in which Royal Commissions 
 are used and abused at Dublin Castle. Of course, I 
 was not without a suspicion that the dice were often- 
 times cogged and the cards sometimes prearranged 
 — that is part of the experience of all public men in 
 Ireland — but I had not been called upon to investigate 
 the matter with any particular care or closeness of 
 examination. Fuller enlightenment only came when 
 
6 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 I saw that on the Royal University Commission there 
 had been secured a sufficient number of places to the 
 nominees of clerical monopoly ; that representative 
 authorities on the side of unmuzzled education were 
 conspicuous by their absence ; that, in addition to the 
 official spokesmen of clericalism, there was a number 
 of impressionable gentlemen who might be trusted to 
 go quite as far as politeness suggested with their 
 pious colleagues ; and that the remainder of the 
 Commission was made up of men of high character 
 indeed, of much learning indeed, but who, coming 
 from England and Scotland, were imperfectly 
 acquainted with the realities of the educational 
 situation in Ireland, and were left to the guidance 
 of their skilful coadjutors. 
 
 It was when I realised these facts that I was led to 
 give to that Commission the critical care and attention 
 which resulted in my book upon the subject. 
 
 There can be no doubt that when a Commission is 
 astutely selected, or packed with even a few able 
 adherents of one side, and when the other side is 
 carefully deprived of efficient representation, it is no 
 safeguard whatever to fill the remaining seats upon 
 the Commission with men of even the highest distinc- 
 tion, who are dependent upon the selected evidence 
 which will be placed before them for the whole of 
 their knowledge on the subject. The selection of a 
 trustworthy Nucleus, pledged to one particular line of 
 thought and action, necessarily carries with it the 
 power of selecting the evidence in the manner most 
 advantageous to the views of the dominant party. 
 When I heard that a similar practice would be 
 followed in the case of the inquiry into the congested 
 districts, I resolved that some steps should be taken 
 to bring the arrangement to a test. 
 
 And what makes all this caballing and manoeuvring, 
 this corruption and this cant, this mendicancy and 
 this mendacity, at once so loathsome and so ludicrous, 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 7 
 
 is the miserable farce and failure of it all. The 
 Congested Districts Board fills up its record of waste 
 and pretence " in order to check depopulation " ! 
 And all the while the population is rushing faster 
 than ever out of the country. 
 
 I take the following paragraph from the Dublin 
 correspondence of a semi-religious newspaper largely 
 supported by Irish priests and people. The continued 
 progress of depopulation, the total failure of the 
 Congested Fiction Board to stop it in the slightest 
 degree, are writ large in this communication : — 
 
 THE TIDE OF EMIGRATION. 
 
 The Under-Secretary for Ireland, who embarked at Queenstown on 
 Friday for America, where he is to spend a brief holiday, was an 
 interested spectator of sad scenes as hundreds of young Irish men and 
 women who were about to travel by the steamer bade sorrowful farewell 
 to their relatives who had come to see them off. Notwithstanding the 
 efforts of many to check it, the tide of emigration keeps swelling 
 ever, and this year's drain will undoubtedly be larger than last year's. 
 For the nine months that have already elapsed a considerable 
 increase has taken place in the number of emigrants as compared 
 with the corresponding period of last year, the figures being 51,598 
 and 43,394 respectively, a sad commentary on the way in which 
 Ireland is ruled. 
 
 Of course the concluding lament of the clerical 
 journal on the results of "the way in which Ireland 
 is ruled " is not intended to convey any reflection 
 upon the rule of the political priest. Give still more 
 money and still more power to the political priest, 
 and the Congested Fiction Board will continue to 
 flourish, and the population will continue to 
 disappear. 
 
THE COMMISSION'S HOSTILITY TO 
 UNSELECTED EVIDENCE. 
 
 THE BROKEN PROMISE LEAGUE EVIDENCE PREFERRED 
 
 I TAKE WARNING. 
 
 During the last months of igo6 I wrote several 
 letters to the Secretary of the Commission"^'' expressing 
 my desire to give evidence, especially as I was 
 personally acquainted with the policy of the Home 
 Rule party in the seventies and eighties with regard 
 to what is called Congestion in Ireland. I added that 
 I had carefully studied the working of the Board since 
 its foundation ; and that my experience of allied 
 questions on the Continent had, I thought, enabled 
 me to get nearer the bottom of the Irish distress 
 problem. I have not all the replies of the Secretary 
 at this period under my hands ; but I distinctly 
 recollect that I was informed that the Commission 
 discountenanced volunteer evidence, and was indis- 
 posed to hear any witnesses not invited by itself. I was 
 not told who performed the function of selection, but 
 from many other sources I had no personal doubt 
 that the evidence, like the Commission, had b^en 
 arranged by the parties in Dublin Castle favourable 
 to the extension of what is called the relief of conges- 
 tion at the expense of the public purse, but under the 
 direction of the political clergy. Notwithstanding the 
 secretarial cautions, I find I have a letter, dated the 
 i6th November, 1907, in which the Secretary 
 " acknowledges receipt of your letter of the 14th 
 
 * Wherever "Commission," "Board," or "Evidence" is men- 
 tioned, it will refer, unless otherwise stated, to the " Congested 
 Districts " respectively. 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 9 
 
 instant," which he would submit to the Commission, 
 and already warning me that "the list of witnesses is 
 already very full, but it might be possible to take you 
 in London in February next. In any case it will be 
 necessary for you to send me a precis of the evidence 
 which you propose to offer, for the information of the 
 Commission, so that they can judge whether it will be 
 necessary to call you." 
 
 I have five letters from the Secretary of the Com- 
 mission at various dates between the 7th January and 
 the 25th March, 1907, which are eloquent both of my 
 persistence in forcing independent testimony upon the 
 reluctant Inquiry, and of the fixed purpose of the 
 Inquiry to avoid or evade the independent evi- 
 dence. Thus on the 7th January I received this dis- 
 couraging message, which was a complete programme 
 of hostility : — 
 
 It is not easy to say when you can be examined, as each 
 day of the sittings, which are to be held in London from the 
 14th to the 23rd day of February and 12th to the 23rd day of 
 March, seems to be fully occupied, and as it is not the present 
 intention of the Commission to hold any other sittings, except 
 in the congested districts for the reception of local evidence. 
 
 I wrote again repeating the expression of my desire 
 to give evidence, and not concealing what I called my 
 surprise at the reluctance of the Commission to hear any 
 evidence which had not been selected by the selectors. 
 On the 15th February, that is five weeks after the 
 previous official communication, I received the follow- 
 ing reply from the Secretary, confirming the reluctance 
 of the Commission to listen, even when they were 
 sitting in London, to the evidence of a would-be 
 witness in London whose name had not been selected, 
 " arranged for " as far back as the November of the 
 previous year ! Here are the exact words of the 
 renewed declaration of evasion : — 
 
 The Commission only met yesterday, and will not meet in 
 private, for the purpose of considering, inter alia, your desire 
 
10 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 to give evidence, until next week ; therefore it is impossible to 
 give you any further reply at present. I have circulated your 
 memorandum of evidence amongst the Commissioners. You 
 will remember, as I have already told you, that the witnesses to 
 be heard during February and March were arranged for as long 
 ago as last November ; and therefore the only chance of the 
 Commission being able to take you now is if some of the witnesses 
 prove shorter than was originally expected. 
 
 I remember that I wrote a very strong protest in 
 reply to this obstinate attitude of evasion and 
 avoidance, and informed the Commission, in fairly 
 forcible terms, that I would take steps to publish 
 my evidence with a preface narrating their proceed- 
 ings in the matter. I got at length the following 
 definite promise on the 23rd February, 1907, that the 
 Commission would call me as witness on their next 
 visit to London during the month of March : — 
 
 I submitted your request to the Commission at their private 
 meeting yesterday, and they have directed me to inform you 
 that they will be pleased to take your evidence during their 
 March sittings in London. I cannot tell you the exact 
 date at present, but it will be some time about Monday, the 
 25th March. 
 
 The promise of the Commission proved to be no 
 guarantee whatever against their settled policy of 
 dislike to independent testimony. It was in fact a 
 misleading misstatement. The March sitting of the 
 Commission in London took place ; and it had nearly 
 come to an end, without the promised hearing of my 
 evidence, when, in reply to my telegram of inquiry, I 
 received the following formal statement that the 
 promise was not intended to be kept : — 
 
 The Commission have just been considering the possibility 
 of hearing all the witnesses whom it was arranged to take during 
 the present sittings. Owing to the unexpectedly long time taken 
 examining the representatives of the Irish Landowners' Con- 
 vention and the United Irish League, all the arrangements have 
 been upset. The Commission have extended their sittings up 
 till Thursday night. Owing to the fact of the next day being 
 Good Friday, and to the Easter holidays coming on, it is 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. ii 
 
 impossible further to exterid the present session. Therefore 
 the Commission have been forced, much to their regret, to 
 postpone to a subsequent date some witnesses whose evidence 
 it was hoped to take this week. The Chairman desires me to 
 express his regret at having to postpone the taking of your 
 evidence, and to say that you will be heard either in London 
 or Dublin before the Commission conclude their deliberations. 
 It does not seem possible at present to give any indication of 
 the date, as during the next few months the Commission will 
 be sitting in the congested districts for the purpose of hearing 
 local evidence and m.aking local investigations. I shall, of 
 course, communicate with you as soon as anything can be 
 settled. 
 
 In this manner, after some five months of persistent 
 tender of my testimony, and in spite of the tardy 
 promise to receive it, the Commission of Inquiry had 
 most courteously found means, really for the second 
 time, of evading their engagement, and of continuing 
 their hostility to independent witnesses. The 
 information now afforded me, that my place had 
 been taken by " witnesses from the United Irish 
 League," was at once droll and unblushing. The 
 Commission would, of course, hear League witnesses by 
 the dozen and the score in Ireland, everyone selected 
 — "arranged for" — to support the League demand 
 for the increased distribution of public money among 
 the League adherents, and for the compulsory expro- 
 priation of all landlords who declined to part with 
 their estates upon the League terms. The allegation 
 of any need of substituting League for independent 
 testimony in London was in these circumstances dis- 
 tinctly humorous. As for the further information 
 that the Commission or its managers would not 
 receive my testimony in any event until after it had 
 completed the taking of local evidence in Irelandy that 
 was precisely what I knew to be the policy, though I 
 had not quite expected such an ingenuous avowal by 
 the Board. 
 
 But I had wanted specially to be called before the 
 Board commenced its local investigations, as one of the 
 
12 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 special reasons which made me so persistent in my 
 appHcation was the desire to supply the less partisan 
 members of the Commission with indications which 
 might open their eyes to the real state of affairs in 
 the local districts before they should come to hear 
 the selected evidence of local witnesses. It was clear 
 that the managers of the Commission suspected that 
 some such intention was mine ; and, in order to 
 preserve the non-partisan members of the Com- 
 mission from unofficial illumination of a disturbing 
 character, the illumination was to be postponed until 
 too late to throw any light whatever upon the selected 
 suggestions of local testimony. 
 
 As I was bound to leave Europe at the end oi the 
 month, and as I had met with nothing but hostility 
 and evasion during my applications to the Com- 
 mission over a period of five or six months ; as, 
 furthermore, I was now satisfied that I might be 
 met with bullying and insult, I informed the courteous 
 Secretary that I would lay my evidence before the 
 public instead, in order to save my views from being 
 burked or vilified by the managers of the comedy. 
 
THE CONGESTED BOARD AND INDEPEN- 
 DENT EVIDENCE. 
 
 THE FATE OF A WITNESS THE PRIESTS AND MIGRATION 
 
 THE SPECIFIC INSTANCE THE WRATH OF A 
 
 COMMISSIONER. 
 
 The treatment which was meted out to me also 
 came within the experience of another member of the 
 independent lay public, who had quixotically assumed 
 that it was his right, as an Irishman of culture and 
 experience, to give evidence on public questions of 
 deep importance before what purported to be a public 
 board for the investigation of facts. Mr. P. Kenny is 
 well known under the signature of " Pat " as a most 
 able and carefully informed writer on the Irish 
 situation. The series of articles which he recently 
 contributed to the Saturday Review were followed by 
 a large circle of readers with deep attention ; and it 
 is well known that Ministers and ex-Ministers of the 
 Crown have perused with marked attention his revela- 
 tions. His previous work " Economics for Irishmen " 
 was a most luminous survey of the deplorable condi- 
 tion of affairs in Ireland, coupled with the most fear- 
 less criticism of the worst causes of the evil which 
 has been published in recent times ; and its state- 
 ments have been studied by thinking men who take 
 an interest in Ireland not only within these kingdoms, 
 but in America and Australia. If the Congested 
 Districts Commission had been much else than a 
 shield for clerical extortion and domination, and, as I 
 call it, a Royal Ribbon Commission, the evidence of 
 such a skilled authority on the questions at issue 
 would have been invited from the very outset of any 
 
14 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 investigation which was intended to be an investiga- 
 tion, and not a deception. 
 
 Of course, however, as could be foreseen by all who 
 know the unscrupulous meannesses which govern the 
 Anglo-Roman Concordat faction at Dublin Castle, 
 this distinguished Irishman found his proffer of testi- 
 mony received with the utmost hostility ; and it was 
 only his threat to make the public acquainted with 
 the coyness of this curious Commission which at length 
 forced the " arrangers of evidence " to admit him, at 
 least nominally, as a witness before them. Here are 
 his own words, as written by him to the Standard 
 newspaper of London, narrating both the resistance 
 of the Commission to hearing him at all, and their 
 tardy and apparent submission before his threat of 
 appeal to the public : — 
 
 Many of my readers and friends had pressed me to give evidence, 
 and I waited a long time, preferring that somebody else gave the 
 facts I meant to give ; but no one else gave these facts, and when at 
 length I offered them there was great uneasiness, which developed 
 into alarm when, after they had definitely refused to hear me, I 
 persisted in giving them through the Press if they persisted in 
 refusing. 
 
 One of the most significant features of the general 
 failure of the Congested Districts Board is the difficulty, 
 said to amount to an impossibility, of inducing the 
 inhabitants of even the most miserable townlands to 
 shift, or to allow themselves to be shifted, to better 
 quarters at a distance. As I shall further indicate, 
 very little of this congested misery, which is so loudly 
 advertised, would exist in Ireland if the people, who 
 can labour and do not, could be got to go where there 
 is work to be done and nobody to do it. On the 
 criminally under-cultivated lands of the Irish farmers 
 — leaving the Irish landlords out of the question alto- 
 gether — there is work for hundreds of thousands of 
 additional labourers, supposing of course that the 
 Irish farmers will begin to cultivate their land up to 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 15 
 
 its capacity. Without waiting for the farmers, the 
 Congested Districts Board is offering to buy land, and 
 to supply good holdings to all sorts of miserable 
 peasants ; and professes to be immensely surprised 
 and pained at the refusal of the peasants to quit their 
 misery for a fresh start on good soil and under favour- 
 able conditions. What can be the reason ? Now 
 everybody who knows v/hat is going on in Ireland 
 knows that the priests are at the bottom of the reluc- 
 tance of the congested district population to migrate 
 to better farms. The priests in the congested districts 
 are making a golden profit out of their possession of 
 a tract of congested peasants. The golden rain of 
 the Congested Board falls upon the parishes which can 
 show plenty of dirt and misery ; and the golden rain 
 has sometimes a trick of enriching the faithful pastors 
 even when leaving the faithful people as they were. 
 Like those Italian padroni who make an income out 
 of the exhibition of starving children begging in the 
 streets of London, the Irish padres — that is to say, 
 the non-religious section of them — cherish the misery 
 of their flock as the surest signpost for the benefactions 
 of the Board. 
 
 The author of " Economics for Irishmen," knowing 
 these circumstances as an economist should, made 
 bold to tell the facts to the Commission at Castlebar. 
 He was at once met with an indignant demand from 
 the Church Militant on the Board to produce a specific 
 instance of the abuse. It is notoriously difficult to 
 produce specific instances of the misconduct of Irish 
 priests towards Irish flocks. In the present state of 
 law and order in Ireland the flock is much too prudent, 
 for good reasons, to bear evidence against the pastor. 
 Any inquirer who wants evidence against the Irish 
 clergy can get more of it than he can use on condition 
 that he does not quote his informant ; but as informations 
 without informants are rightly scouted by royal com- 
 missions of inquiry, or non-inquiry, you see there is a 
 
i6 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 difficulty. And so Mr. Kenny was to find the question, 
 "Where is your specific instance ? " thundered at him 
 by righteously indignant Commissioners. " Give us a 
 specific instance." Here is his experience : — 
 
 When I appeared before the Commissioners at Castlebar, I was 
 struck with their abiHty in avoiding to ask me any question that 
 would help to get out what they knew I had to say ; but there was no 
 lack of bullying cross-examination to discredit me, and the Bishop 
 kept this up until it brought himself down to the level of attributing 
 bad motives to me, when I promptly stopped his Lordship. . . , 
 
 There was something like consternation when, a few days later, 
 I followed them to Swinford with the " specific instance " which his 
 Lordship was so anxious to have. They would hear me " if there was 
 time after all the others had been heard,'' quite in the manner of 
 their London negotiating ; but that was not enough for me, and I 
 sent another ultimatum, whereupon they again decided to listen to 
 the truth as the least of their evils. The remarkable document that 
 follows was not part of my evidence, but volunteered to me to support 
 it at Swinford, after the Bishop had led in discrediting it at 
 Castlebar : — 
 
 " On the estate of Lady Larpent, at Waterdale, in the parish of 
 Clare Galway, the Waterdale tenants are some of the poorest and 
 most highly rented I have known. When I was preparing this estate 
 for sale the parish priest, Father Commons, stated to me that he was 
 opposed to the Congested Districts Board having anything to do with 
 the purchase of this estate, and that he would not consent to the 
 migration of any of his parishioners. 
 
 (Signed) E. S. Jordan. 
 
 Kiltimagh, August 31st, 1907." 
 
 It would be droll, if it were not detestable, all this 
 fencing against facts and the effort of a commission 
 of inquiry to dodge the results of inquiry. What was 
 especially annoying to the rulers of the Commission 
 was, that the witness who supplied this specific 
 instance is a man of acknowledged position and 
 character, actually engaged in Government service. 
 The idea of a Government servant letting in the light 
 upon political priests who are the special partners of 
 Dublin Castle appeared to members of the Commis- 
 sion to be little short of impiety. The hostility of the 
 political pastors, who benefit by the grants of the 
 Congested Board, to the migration of the poor creatures 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 17 
 
 who draw those benefactions to the " Parish Com- 
 mittee," was finally reflected in the further proceedings 
 of the Board towards Mr. Kenny. Members of the Com- 
 mission accused him of un-Irish conduct, denounced 
 him to the mob, impugned his motives, and might have 
 endangered his life. But let him speak for himself: — 
 
 The consternation was succeeded by rage, and one of the Com- 
 missioners made speeches from the bench to the mob against me, 
 repeating the untruth that " on a certain occasion " I had alleged 
 perjury against " my fellow-counthrymin." . . . 
 
 The facts in my evidence are common knowledge, however 
 innocent of them the Bishop may be ; they are vouched by the Board's 
 own officials from direct experience ; yet I am the only man in 
 Ireland who dares to present them and to show how the clergy make 
 the Congested Districts Board useless to the purpose for which it 
 was chartered and financed, so complete is the moral terror that 
 makes it impossible for the people to benefit by things done for 
 them. 
 
 THREATS OF VIOLENCE TO THE WITNESS. 
 
 Of course no members of the Commission would 
 participate in the next phase of the movement got up 
 against the independent witness. But when he had 
 been denounced to the ignorant and dependent mob, 
 full of the old Ribbon taint which had infected so 
 many generations of Irish history, when he had been 
 described as an insulter of his countrymen, who would 
 take the bread of the Congested Board out of their 
 mouths into the bargain, the result was natural. 
 Personal danger was in the air. In the words of Mr. 
 Kenny : — 
 
 Now they say I am to he murdered, and I have had several 
 warnings. If I must be murdered, I should rather have it due to a 
 bishop than to a priest, and I hope that the Most Rev. Dr O'Donnell, 
 wdth his irrelevant story about perjury, will examine his conscience in 
 relation to the matter in accordance with the moral obligations of 
 which he is a distinguished exponent. The threats may be merely to 
 frighten me out of Ireland, but I am not going. We have quite 
 enough Irishmen who dare say what they think only outside their own 
 P.S. C 
 
i8 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 country, and let us have at least one inside. If I must die, it will be 
 with the knowledge that I have done work for Ireland which cannot 
 be murdered. 
 
 So now the public who read these pages have before 
 them two examples of how this Commission of Inquiry 
 received independent evidence. When I found that 
 time after time the Commission had broken its engage- 
 ment to hear me, on one pretext after another, I felt 
 that I might only expose myself to contumely and 
 insult, if I persisted in forcing my knowledge of 
 what was in the course of transaction upon inquirers 
 who wanted to ignore it altogether. The author of 
 " Economics for Irishmen " found himself opposed by 
 similar chicane and procrastination, and, with less 
 love for his personal comfort than animated me, 
 persisted in forcing the unwelcome truth upon those 
 strange investigators, but drew upon himself all that 
 I foresaw would be the result of any obstinate effort 
 at enlightening the voluntary blind and deaf : irrelevant 
 questioning ; dodging the issue ; demands for con- 
 firmation, which was known to be difficult ; misrepre- 
 sentation and denunciation when the undesirable 
 confirmation was forthcoming ; and then the threats 
 of personal violence from the besotted creatures 
 who have been taught to defend every stronghold of 
 the political priesthood as the veritable sanctuary of 
 God. 
 
 How does the reader like the working of these 
 arrangements between the clerical politicians and the 
 political clergy ? I shall make further use of the 
 experience of this able and independent writer in 
 support of my own testimony. There are scores of 
 other Irishmen of position and education whom the 
 Commission ought to have called, whom it did not 
 call, and who, if they had forced themselves on the 
 unwilling attention of the Black Band which controls 
 investigation and reform in Ireland, would have been 
 subject to similar hostility and intimidation. For 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 19 
 
 many years past a most dangerous class of what may 
 be called blackmail mendicants has been fostered by 
 the rulers of the Congested Board, and the misappro- 
 priation of the money and influence of the system has 
 become too valued a spoil of the malefactors to be 
 surrendered without a desperate resistance. 
 
 It cannot be noted too seriously that the long con- 
 nection of the political priesthood in Ireland with 
 dishonesty and crime has produced grave results for 
 religion and its observances among increasing 
 sections of the population. Men guilty of atrocious 
 acts will exhibit an intense devotion, and at once 
 manifest their regard for the Church and their con- 
 tempt for its commandments. James Carey, the 
 arch-assassin and arch-traitor of the Phoenix Park 
 murders, was a habitual communicant in his parish 
 place of worship. It is on church doors and at 
 church gates that the most cruel edicts of the boycott 
 are proclaimed. I know a member of the party in 
 Parliament who chose after Mass and outside the 
 village chapel to lead a gang of fellow-scoundrels to 
 pelt with mud and stones the wife and daughters of 
 a boycotted farmer. For this cowardly crime he 
 received two months' imprisonment, and was imme- 
 diately elected to Parliament on coming out of gaol. 
 Yet he had attended the Divine Office along with his 
 victims ! Such habits must end in total irreligion, 
 which will be more honest at least. The political 
 priest is undermining all religious belief. There is 
 less reason to wonder that three Irishmen out of five 
 who land in America drop the faith of their fathers. 
 The seed of that apostacy was sown by the political 
 sacristy. 
 
 c 2 
 
OFFICIAL JACOBINISM. 
 
 It is quite notorious in Ireland that all owners of 
 landed property regard with the gravest suspicion 
 both the Estates Commissioners and the Congested 
 Board. Both are believed to work in the interest of 
 an agrarian Jacobinism, conducted by lay and clerical 
 agitators. Mr. St. George Robinson, member of one 
 of the oldest firms of land agents, openly declared to 
 the Congestion Commission : — 
 
 In no instance should the fixing of the price of estates be left in 
 the hands either of the Estates Commissioners or the Congested 
 Districts Board. 
 
 Mr. Robinson added that the rumours of confisca- 
 tion or compulsory sale which accompanied the 
 creation of the Congestion Commission itself had 
 revived violent agitation throughout the country. 
 
 The tenants told me in plain English they were going to get the 
 land by compulsion, and going to force our hands. ... It was one 
 of the quietest districts in the country up to the appointment of the 
 Commission, but now it is very much disturbed. 
 
 THE CHAIRMAN OF THE COMMISSION ? 
 
 Lord Dudley, the Chairman of the Commission, 
 seems desirous of championing projects in Ireland 
 which he might dislike to see realised on the Dudley 
 estates in England. I quote from the Freemmi's 
 JournaVs account of the Connemara visit of the 
 Commission : — 
 
 Mrs. Blake, of Renvyle, was examined, and presented a number 
 of figures to show that the officially-supplied list of non-resident 
 graziers was incorrect. 
 
 Lord Dudley (chairman) — What is all this to prove ^ 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 21 
 
 Witness — That the information given in by the clerk of the 
 union is not accurate as to the acreage held by the graziers whom it is 
 proposed to deprive of their holdings. 
 
 Lord Dudley — Vou have a good deal 0/ untenanted land in your 
 possession P 
 
 Witness — I have a certain amount. 
 
 Lord Dudley — Afid there are a number of small poor holdings 
 adJoint7ig ? 
 
 Witness — Yes ; and if you want to add any land to them, I don't 
 see why you should take any of mine. I don't see why you should 
 do injustice to any decent Irish man or woman for the benefit of 
 another. 
 
 Lord Dudley — You think these poor people with three acres do 
 not want any more ? 
 
 Witness — I say they are doing very well. 
 
 Lord Dudley — You think it is right for one person to hold three 
 hundred or four hundred acres while a number of poor people are 
 obliged to struggle on on three or four acres } 
 
 What more could Mr. Ginnell or Mr. Hyndman 
 say ? 
 
 A BOARD SECRETARY. 
 
 One of the most important spokesmen of the Con- 
 gested Board, Mr. Lawson Micks, first secretary of 
 Board, 1891 — 1898, and member of Local Govern- 
 ment Board, gratified the Commission managers by 
 the astounding claim for State-Socialist Supremacy 
 and Endowment of the Congested Board, which is to 
 be found in the Evidence^ vol. I., pages 3, 4 : — 
 
 Mr. Lawson Micks — I am a member of the Local Government 
 Board, and was first secretary of the Congested Districts Board. . . . 
 I would give the Congested Districts Board power to declare any 
 place congested, no matter what its size, throughout Ireland. . . . 
 I would give the Board that power all over Ireland, including towns. 
 ... I would leave all the operations and expenditure of the Board 
 to its own deliberate judgment, ivithout test or limitation. ... I 
 would give the Congested Districts Board power to start industries, 
 all sorts of industries, and to subsidize them. I would not say 
 "subsidize," but "develop the country." The Board requires 
 compulsory powers, and at least ;^i, 000,000 a year. 
 
 It will be admitted that the efforts of the most 
 generous landlord must sink into insignificance in 
 
22 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 comparison with an omnipotent socialist bureaucracy, 
 flinging about ;if 1,000,000 a year of the money of the 
 taxpayers, without test or limitation ! 
 
 This is some of the folly with which the clerico- 
 official Jacobins have corrupted the moral sense, and 
 paralysed the very desire to work, among millions of 
 the population. The political Church will soon be 
 able to buy for a song, or hymn, half the land of 
 Ireland. 
 
THE COMPOSITION OF THE COMMISSION 
 AND THE NUCLEUS POLICY. 
 
 WHAT IS THE NUCLEUS ? THE BISHOP OF THE BOARD 
 
 A BOYCOTTING COMMISSIONER PUNJAB POLITE- 
 NESS — SELECTION OF EVIDENCE. 
 
 The composition of the Royal Commission was 
 quite respectable and imposing. Dublin Castle is a 
 past master in the construction of royal commissions, 
 and its products can usually bear ordinary or current 
 inspection. The permanent problem in this sort of 
 undertaking is to avoid public suspicion while working to 
 a foregone conclusion ; and it may be said without 
 hesitation that the general course pursued by the 
 constructors of commissions is practically always 
 substantially the same. A Dublin Castle commission 
 always subdivides itself into these three parts : (i) the 
 micleus ; (2) the official and semi-official assistants ; and 
 (3) the train, or circumference, of impartial and 
 impressionable members, known for their sympathy 
 with what they believe to be the wishes of Ireland, 
 and believed to be incapable of seriously opposing, 
 much less suspecting, their initiated colleagues. 
 
 The nucleus is the decisive feature of such commis- 
 sions. By this is meant the man or small group of 
 men who know precisely what the Commission has been 
 constructed to effect, and the means to effect it, and 
 who are the practical managers as well as the pre- 
 dominant partners. The scope for the investigation, 
 the nature of the evidence, and at all events the 
 nature of the witnesses, are the special sphere of the 
 directing activity of the nucleus. The official and 
 semi-official members, representing the Government 
 
24 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 which has ratified the nucleus, are always understood 
 to protect the nucleus from rude exploring hands. 
 The train or fringe of impartial and impression- 
 able outsiders endeavour to do their duty in the 
 station to which the Under-Secretary has called 
 them. 
 
 It must be observed that it is no trifling recom- 
 mendation of this arrangement that it does not do 
 violence to the principles or good faith of any of its 
 agents. From the nucleus to the fringe, every 
 member may be supposed to act according to his 
 principles, and has in fact been selected for that very 
 purpose. There is thus no personal reflection on 
 any of the members of the Royal Commission of 
 Inquiry into questions of so-called congestion in 
 Ireland ; and I am pleased to state they seem to have 
 acted, as they were selected to act, according to the 
 views which they personally entertain. From the 
 nucleus to the fringe, every man does as he feels he 
 ought to do, and has done as he felt he ought to 
 have done. From the Lord Bishop of Raphoe 
 to the humblest member of the Commission — I do 
 not say which is the humblest — there is absolutely 
 no ground for impugning the conscientious devotion 
 of each and all to the previous ideas of each and 
 all. 
 
 The official scope of the Commission is to inquire 
 into the problem of what is called congestion in 
 Ireland ; but as the phrase " the problem of conges- 
 tion" is only the official way of referring to everything 
 relating to agriculture, manufactures, and fisheries 
 throughout Ireland — ''congestion" being only an 
 unintelligible name for a half-understood reality — it 
 follows that the scope of the Commission embraces 
 everything which the Commission have a desire to 
 include in it, and which the selection of evidence 
 enables them to include. On the present occasion, 
 the nucleus, or directing element, being passionately 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 25 
 
 engaged on behalf of the expropriation of Irish 
 landlordism, it follows that, especially by means of 
 the selection of evidence, all the other members of the 
 inquiry are led almost irresistibly to consider that 
 desirable object from the nucleus point of view. It is 
 evident that, if the evidence producible before the 
 inquiry were not subject to a prudent process of 
 rejection and elimination, the appointers of the 
 nucleus would run the most imminent risk of seeing 
 the policy of the nucleus rejected by the other 
 members of the Commission. The due selection of 
 the evidence imposes itself, accordingly, as the funda- 
 mental necessity in all prearranged inquiries of this 
 description. 
 
 I shall now divide members of the Congestion 
 Commission as they fall under the headings of nucleus, 
 or directing element; officials and semi-officials; and 
 general members, or train. In a couple of cases pro- 
 bably members should be placed in more than one 
 division, but it will suffice to describe them as above. 
 Bearing in mind then that the primary object in view 
 with the appointers of the Commission was to obtain 
 recommendations in support of (i) increased supplies 
 or increased subventions of public money for distribu- 
 tion by the clerico-Jacobin agencies of the Board 
 among their actual and expected clients, and (2) the 
 division among the clients of the Board of the estates 
 .of owners of property, not by voluntary agreement, 
 but upon compulsory terms, it can be understood that 
 this is also a precedent. If compulsory confiscation 
 can be established within the actual sphere of the 
 Congestion Board's operations, its extension to the 
 rest of Ireland will only be a logical development ; 
 and the Church and the peasantry will be substantially 
 the only remaining factors in a simplified situation. 
 As will be seen further on, there is absolutely no 
 foundation in fact for the use of the word " conges- 
 tion." It is an inveracity naked and unashamed. I 
 
26 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 only use it in conformity with official use and under 
 protest. 
 
 ROYAL COMMISSION ON CONGESTION. 
 
 Nucleus Members. 
 
 Most Rev. Dr. Patrick O'Donnell, Bishop of Raphoe ; 
 Chief Director of the Congested Districts Board ; Treasurer 
 of the Land League Parliamentary Fund; ex-Chairman of 
 Freevians Journal Shareholders ; Patron of the Ancient 
 Order of Hibernians or Ribbon Society, etc., etc. 
 
 Mr. Conor O'Kelly, M.P., Land League representative and 
 representative of the county Mayo, one of the principal 
 scenes of the agitation and subsidies of the Congested 
 Districts Board ; a warm supporter of landlord expropriation 
 and boycotting, etc. 
 
 Official and Semi-official Members. 
 
 Sir Antony MacDonnell, Under-Secretary forlreland; ex-Indian 
 civil servant; absent from Ireland 1864 — 1902: probably 
 entitled to be classed with the nucleus members. 
 
 The Earl of Dudley, ex-Lord Lieutenant of Ireland ; a 
 sentimental Englishman ; a hope of Maynooth. 
 
 Mr. J. Bryck or Mr. Birrell, Cabinet figures. 
 
 Angus Sutherland, Esq., Chairman of Scottish Fishery Board. 
 
 Sir Francis Mo watt, ex- Permanent Secretary to Treasury ; 
 member of royal commissions since 1851. 
 
 General Members, or Train. 
 
 Sir John Colomb, authority on marine artillery, navy, army, 
 militia, and volunteers, imperial strategy, colonial defence, 
 supply in time of war, etc., etc., in other words an all-round 
 critic and acute observer. 
 Walter Kavanagh, Esq., Barrister-at-law, 
 John Annan Bryce, Esq., M.P., a Scottish representative. 
 
 It will thus be seen that practically the members of 
 this Royal Commission of Inquiry into the doings of the 
 Congested Districts Board possessing local knowledge 
 of the subject are the two nucleus members most 
 deeply committed to the maintenance and extension 
 of the policy of the Board, both on the lines of public 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 27 
 
 subvention or State socialism and of expropriation of 
 the owners of property. Bishop Patrick O'Donnell 
 has quite recently published a stirring appeal to the 
 Irish constituencies to support the militant policy of 
 Mr. John Redmond, whose identification with the 
 cattle raiders is too well known to require explana- 
 tion. On the occasion of the great demonstration by 
 the Ancient Order of Hibernians, or Ribbon Secret 
 Society, at Letterkenny on the 24th August to welcome 
 Mr, Joseph Devlin, M. P., Mr. Redmond's lieutenant, as 
 National Presidentof the" Ancient Order," not only did 
 Bishop Patrick O'Donnell afford the demonstration 
 the use of the Bishop's field adjoining the new cathe- 
 dral, but he attended in person the meeting, "where," 
 in the words of the Freeman's Journal^ " 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." 
 A couple of score of the Bishop's dignitaries and 
 clergymen accompanied their pastor, and the chair 
 was taken by one of the resident clergymen of the 
 cathedral. As chief dispenser of the benefactions of 
 the Congested Districts Board, Bishop Patrick 
 O'Donnell commands an irresistible influence in the 
 congested districts. He rejects and returns members 
 of Parliament at his will. The expediency of appoint- 
 ing this eminent functionary of the Board to inquire 
 into his own proceedings is quite obvious accordingly. 
 The impartiality of this Commissioner's appoint- 
 ment as an "inquirer" into his own working of the 
 Congested Board, the justice and propriety of his 
 appointment from every public point of view, can be 
 read at a glance in the following question and answer, 
 the question by the Most Rev. Dr. O'Donnell and the 
 answer by Sir Horace Plunkett, in the course of the 
 latter's evidence before the Commission : — 
 
 Bishop O'Donnell — Here is the Congested Districts Board, with 
 its successful fisheries and most useful parish committees. And now 
 
28 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 do you think it would be unreasonable on the part of the members 
 of the Congested Districts Board to consider it a little audacious on 
 the part of any other body in Ireland to ask for a transfer of those 
 duties from the Congested Districts Board while the Congested Dis- 
 tricts Board had not finished its work? 
 
 Sir Horace Plunkett — I should hope that the Congested 
 Districts Board would discuss the matters strictly on their merits, 
 and that the question of audacity would not come in unless they 
 suspected the motives of the persons who made the suggestion. . . . 
 On the other hand, I think it is really a question that should be looked 
 at, not from the point of view of the feelings of the bodies engaged, 
 but from the point of view of the real interests of the persons 
 concerned — that is, the population of these poor districts. 
 
 A specimen investigator indeed ! What possibly can 
 be more absurd or a more patent fraud on the pubHc 
 than to appoint a reverend gentleman to inquire into 
 the workings of a board of which he is himself the 
 leading member, and the whole working of which fills 
 him with such self-satisfaction, that he denounces as 
 "audacity" any proposal to alter its control and 
 transfer its authority ? 
 
 Sir Horace Plunkett's lack of approval of the irate 
 Bishop was possibly not ignored by the Bishop's poli- 
 tical patrons when they drove Sir Horace Plunkett 
 from public employment. 
 
 Mr. Conor O'Kelly, parliamentary representative 
 from the congested districts, can also be described as 
 an equally judicial inquirer into the proceedings of 
 his patrons. Mr. Conor O'Kelly is a colleague of 
 Mr. John Dillon in the parliamentary representation 
 of Mayo, and, like his colleague, is full of the choicest 
 spirit of the Congested Board. He is locally cele- 
 brated for the purity of his principles and his martyr- 
 doms in their defence or exemplification. The 
 journals of his party narrate with pride that he was 
 removed from the magisterial bench when chairman 
 of the county council, and that the county council 
 under him was suspended by the Local Government 
 Board for financial mismanagement. But he still 
 stands erect in the breach, and at the Ardagh meeting 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 29 
 
 of the United Irish League on the 7th July last he is 
 reported in the Mayo News of the 13th July to have 
 proclaimed the gospel of the League in these impres- 
 sive terms : — 
 
 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. 
 
 It is pleasing to find that this fine fellow has been 
 chosen by Chief Secretary and Under-Secretary a critic 
 and judge between class and class in Ireland as a 
 Royal Commissioner of Inquiry, etc. 
 
 This Commissioner, who was also referred to by 
 Mr. P. Kenny as attempting to excite the opinion of 
 the mob against his evidence, appears to have directed 
 his exuberant observations against all witnesses who 
 had not been " arranged " by the nucleus. Thus, 
 when Sir Horace Plunkett declined to introduce 
 politics into an economic question, Mr. Conor 
 0' Kelly, M.P., after several preliminary sneers, 
 culminated in this broad insult, which provoked a 
 dignified protest from Sir Horace Plunkett : — 
 
 Mr. O'Kelly — I am afraid there is considerable conflict in your 
 case between the theory and the practice. 
 
 Sir Horace Plunkett — That is a matter of opinion, but I don't 
 think it is a proper thing for you to say. 
 
 Mr. Conor O'Kelly is perfectly smcere in the 
 violence of his opinions. Not he, but the nominators 
 of the Commission, must be held responsible for his 
 appearance in a capacity for which he was perfectly 
 unfitted. 
 
 With regard to the Under-Secretary's position upon 
 the Commission, he no doubt represents with charac- 
 teristic stubbornness the influence which brought 
 him into the Irish administration from the sphere of 
 Asiatic employment to which he was confined for 
 
30 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 nearly forty years. Like Bishop O'Donnell, he is an 
 inquirer into the poHcy of a board of which he is 
 himself a member, and only second in influence to 
 the patron of the Ancient Hibernians himself. He is 
 believed to have been affiliated from his childhood to 
 an order of ideas w^hich class Irish Orangemen and 
 Irish landlords not much above the creatures of chase. 
 Accustomed to the irresponsible authority of paternal 
 despotism in Oriental dependencies, he finds it difficult 
 to realise the principles of Western constitutionalism, 
 and he has no hesitation in adopting a demeanour 
 towards critics or opponents more at home perhaps 
 at Lucknow and Lahore. At a meeting of the Com- 
 mission on the 24th September the manner in which the 
 ex-Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab literally flew 
 at a witness, who ventured to condemn the proceed- 
 ings of one of the official boards with which Sir 
 Antony MacDonnell is concerned, affords a very in- 
 structive illustration of that ex-Lieutenant Governor's 
 capacity for judicial bearing and opinion. I quote a 
 record of the scene from the daily Press of the 
 date : — 
 
 At the sitting of the Royal Commission on Congestion in Ireland 
 at Spiddal, county Galway, yesterday, the Rev. M. Hosty, parish 
 priest of Knock, gave evidence regarding the dealings of the Estates 
 Commissioners with the Comyn estate, county Galway, and said 
 that the Commissioners had offered a price so low that no court 
 could accept it. 
 
 Sir Antony MacDonnell asked the witness if he meant that the 
 Estates Commissioners had deliberately offered a price that could 
 only be accepted to the detriment of the owner, and which they 
 knew would be refused. The witness replied that such was his 
 opinion. 
 
 Sir Antony MacDonnell — You are the first clergyman who has 
 imputed such conduct to the Estates Commissioners. Not only are 
 you the first clergyman, but you are the first man. / do not think 
 much of your opinion. 
 
 The Witness — You are quite welcome ! 
 
 Here, indeed, we have an instance of that ''bully- 
 ing cross-examination " of which the author of 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 31 
 
 " Economics for Irishmen " speaks in describing his 
 experiences before this strange Commission. It is 
 quite the style of the zuberdust official in India, the 
 high-handed little bureaucrat who has made British 
 rule the popular thing it is. A respected witness 
 presumes to give evidence that the Estates Com- 
 missioners, of whom the Under-Secretary is one, do 
 not offer fair value for estates ; and at once the Under- 
 Secretary, sitting as a Royal Commissioner of 
 Inquiry, shouts at him : " I do not think much of 
 your opinion " ! 
 
 There is nothing in the past or the present of the 
 non-official members effectually to counterbalance 
 the plain intention of the foregoing nominations. 
 Scotchmen are not likely to be^better acquainted than 
 Anglo-Indians with the inner working and develop- 
 ment of the clerico-Jacobinical confederacy in Ireland 
 during the past quarter of a century. A Royal Com- 
 missioner who was a Royal Commissioner nearly 
 sixty years ago can scarcely be accused of the desire or 
 the capacity for too laborious investigation. Generally 
 speaking, in his case, as in the case of most of his 
 colleagues, the judicious selection of the evidence is 
 necessarily calculated to direct the formation of the 
 verdict. The disinclination of the Commission 
 managers to allow any independent witness to give 
 evidence previous to the Commissioners being called 
 upon to hear the selected evidence in the various localities 
 of Ireland can be very well understood from these 
 preliminaries. 
 
 As the nucleus members and the official members 
 are usually more clearly *' arranged " or related than 
 may appear, the gist of the whole business mostly 
 Hes in bringing the general members, or train, to '' toe 
 the mark" without unseemly hesitation. In some of 
 these Dublin Castle commissions there is quite a 
 
32 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 great effort made to have a troop of general members 
 which may impress the pubHc and the Parhament. 
 The order, as well as selection, of the evidence is 
 specially designed to impress in the desired manner 
 these useful auxiliaries. The order of procedure is 
 commonly as follows : First, there is a long array 
 of witnesses officially connected with the subject of 
 investigation, whether it be university colleges or 
 experiments in State socialism. These professional 
 gentlemen may be relied upon to give a mass 
 of details in a dignified way, and, even when 
 they differ, to say nothing which will injure the 
 undertaking in which they are all alike concerned. 
 Heaven help the poor devils if they dared ! If 
 there are any avowed opponents of the scheme 
 which is favoured by the nucleus and the officials, 
 their testimony is introduced after the closing of the 
 official evidence. This both gives the idea of fair 
 play, and places the opponents very much in the 
 position of accused persons who are on their defence. 
 The representatives of the Landowners' Convention, 
 for instance, played this part before the Congested 
 Commission. Then comes the real business of the 
 selectors. Uninitiated members, under the careful 
 guidance of the Nucleus and Company, are literally 
 overwhelmed with evidence on behalf of the favoured 
 scheme. In the present case they are taken down 
 to innumerable localities in the congested districts 
 where innumerable deputations and delegates, and 
 local authorities and local clergymen, all interested for 
 one reason or another in the uninterrupted flow of public 
 money ^ swarm into the witness-box and draw sensa- 
 tional picture after sensational picture of the inde- 
 scribable blessings of the Board's activity and the 
 necessity of greatly increasing the power and the 
 money at the disposal of such a beneficent institution 
 in the future. In the whole of the process the 
 nucleus watches jealously against the intrusion of 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 33 
 
 the independent witness.* Thus primed and thus 
 instructed, the uninitiated members proceed to the 
 formation of their report ; and generally the result 
 can be as safely predicted as in any other card game 
 in which the winning players have marked the cards. 
 Of course there is nothing new about this policy. 
 Every commission which was ever issued from Dublin 
 Castle has been packed, and its course has been pre- 
 scribed, not with a view to eliciting truth, but to eliciting 
 what could be passed off as truth for the purposes of the 
 originators and managers of the Commission. When 
 I applied for a hearing by the present Commission, 
 and when I gave them clearly to understand, in the 
 synopsis of evidence submitted to them, that I was 
 not taken in by the pretexts under which State 
 socialism is manipulated in Ireland, that I had 
 seen through the mendacious farce of *' congestion," 
 and that I was prepared to state what really are the 
 causes which have pauperised Ireland, I was fully 
 prepared to meet the treatment which I have met. 
 With this preface, it only remains for me to lay before 
 the public what I asked to lay before the Commission, 
 adding that detail and explanation which I should 
 
 * As this book is even more an indictment of Dublin Castle than 
 of the political clergy which it has tempted and hired, paying Secret 
 Service with licence to extort and oppress, an illustration of its 
 methods in another matter of present interest, the University question, 
 is germane to the discussion. 
 
 When the Packed University Commission was sitting a few years 
 ago, one witness, though a Vice-President of the Graduates Associa- 
 tion of the Royal University, was refused examination " because he 
 had written a book on University Education " against sectarianism. 
 Two petitions, signed by a hundred Catholic laymen, including 
 graduates and students, against a sectarian scheme, were left without 
 notice. Another petition in the opposite sense, signed by two 
 Catholic laymen, at once obtained an invitation to be witnesses. 
 
 When Mr. Birrell visited Belfast the other day, and was inter- 
 viewing representatives of sectarianism, he refused to receive a 
 deputation from the Education Reform Association, which supports 
 undenominational views in education. 
 
 P.S. D 
 
34 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 have endeavoured to give in the witness chair, adding 
 also some citations from the pubHshed evidence which 
 illustrate leading points in my statement, together 
 with the other developments which are required in 
 the writing of a book. 
 
Notes and Illustrations.] 
 
 THE CONGESTED BOARD AND THE 
 LAND LEAGUE, 
 
 CLERICAL REVOLUTIONISTS. 
 
 ''The reforms we shall receive are precisely those we can exact. . . . 
 Our people are to-day the masters of Ireland. . . . The toiling 
 masses of Great Britain have good reasons of their own to join us 
 in overthrowing the ascendency of the classes.'' 
 
 Manifesto of Most Rev. Bishop O'Donnell, member 
 of Congested Districts Board and Commission. 
 
 " My view is this, that the fact of ownership makes a man heartless 
 and unsympathetic." 
 
 Sir a. MacDonnell — Where the landlord is compulsorily 
 expropriated, do you not think he is entitled to compensation for 
 disturbance .? 
 
 Rev. Denis O'Hara, P.P. — Yes, to some extent. 
 
 Lord Dudley — You are contemplating compulsory purchase. Do 
 you suggest that the landlord should be compelled to sell where he 
 is going to lose income by it ? 
 
 Rev. Denis O'Hara, P.P. — Well, I do not know that there would 
 be anything wrong even in suggesting that. 
 
 Evidence of Rev. Father O'Hara, member of Congested 
 Districts Board. 
 
 THE LAND LEAGUE POLICY WANTS BISHOP O'DONNELL 
 AND FATHER O'HARA. 
 
 Lord Dudley — We understand you represent the United Irish 
 League .? 
 
 Mr. John Fitzgibbon — I am a member of the United Irish 
 League, and occupy a seat on the Central Council. I was deputed 
 by that body to give evidence before you. 
 
 Lord Dudley — Do you say that the agrarian policy of the United 
 Irish League is similar to that of the Land League } 
 
 Mr. John Fitzgibbon — I will show you it is. The wording of 
 the constitution of the United Irish League, so far as it relates to 
 the land, runs : " The abolition of landlordism in Ireland by means 
 of a universal and compulsory system of sales of the landlord's 
 
 D 2 
 
36 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 interest." I ask the Commission, if there is to be a terrible row 
 over these lands, whether it would not be much better to have that 
 row now. We want the land. 
 
 Mr. Conor O'Kelly, M.P. — Speaking for the United Irish 
 League, you tell the Commission that it is the strong view of that 
 body that the Congested Districts Board should be preserved .? 
 
 Mr. John Fitzgibbon — Yes, decidedly. Take the constitution of 
 the Board. Take Father Denis O'Hara and 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 on behalf of the 
 League Central Council, 
 
 MORE LIGHT ON THE CLERICAL REVOLUTION. 
 
 It is important to note that the foregoing Delegate 
 of the League, besides proclaiming the Clerical 
 Members of the Board to be the special choice of the 
 League, is an open advocate of cattle driving and 
 '' keeping your powder dry." It is always the same 
 conjunction of Political Sacerdocy and Social War. 
 I quote from the Press of January 14th : — 
 
 At a Nationalist demonstration on Sunday at Hill Street, County 
 Roscommon, Mr. John Fitzgibbon, Chairman of the Roscommon 
 County Council, asked the people to suspend /or a short time any 
 further drives, as Mr. Birrell was going himself to have a cattle drive 
 by splitting up the waste lands, putting back the people, and doing 
 in a legal manner what the tenantry was being prosecuted for. 
 Accordingly, for the present the people should hang up their arms 
 but should keep their ranks unbroken and their powder dry. Then 
 if the promised legislation were not what they were led to expect, 
 and if England were once more going to break her promises, they 
 could use their powder and finish the work begun by Parnell. 
 
REVOLUTIONARY CLERICS: HOW THE 
 BOARD HAS AGRICULTURE REPRE- 
 SENTED. 
 
 MR. HEALY's revelation DOWN WITH OWNERSHIP ! 
 
 DOWN WITH THE CLASSES ! 
 
 As the Congested Fiction Board professes to develop 
 the leading industries of Ireland, and as agriculture 
 is the leading industry in a special sense, the Con- 
 gested Fiction Board must have one agricultural 
 member at least. The Right Hon. Frederick Wrench 
 had been appointed accordingly in i8gi, on the 
 formation of the Congested Fiction Board, an official 
 member specially to represent agriculture. Mr. 
 Wrench had very good qualifications for the part. 
 He had been a practical farmer and estate manager all 
 his life. He is said to have done most efficient work 
 in those early days when the Board devoted itself to 
 carrying out its original function of assisting industry 
 without revolutionising land. But his time was to be 
 short. Within two years after his first appointment 
 the Agricultural Commissioner was removed to another 
 department and another sphere. His place was 
 shortly to be taken by the Rev. Father Denis O'Hara. 
 Father Denis O'Hara is a parish priest of East Mayo, 
 and I have seen a laudatory account of the reverend 
 gentleman in a Dublin paper which described him as 
 the creator of an "oasis in a desert," through the 
 Board's expenditure of ;f 500,000 in East Mayo, the 
 constituency that elects Mr. John Dillon. In fact, I 
 remember seeing a number of complaints from clergy- 
 men to the effect that they had no chance whatever of 
 creating oases with public money, as they did not 
 
38 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 happen to be members of the Board. I am sure that 
 Father Denis O'Hara has acted entirely according to 
 his conscientious views of his rights and his duties in 
 the circumstances. I do not impugn the conscientious- 
 ness of anybody in the course of these remarks. But 
 a great many men can act according to their con- 
 sciences, and the pubhc loss and detriment may be 
 enormous in consequence. This is precisely the case 
 with the Congested Board. 
 
 It is not, however, sufficient to know that Father 
 Denis O'Hara took the place of the original Com- 
 missioner for Agriculture, who had been allowed to 
 keep his post on the Board for only two years. Who 
 was Father Denis O'Hara ? Why was he put on the 
 Board ? Was he really a representative of skilled 
 agriculture or of party politics ? That keen and 
 experienced politician Mr. T. M. Healy, M.P., will 
 relate to us the genesis of Father Denis O'Hara's 
 appointment. In his mordant treatise on the causes 
 which wrecked Home Rule published by the Nation 
 office six or seven years ago, the member for North 
 Louth relates, under the year 1893, the wholesale 
 appointments to all kinds of paid situations in Ireland 
 of the nominees of the Dillon faction in the Parlia- 
 mentary party which took place under the rule of 
 Chief Secretary John Morley. Here we have in five 
 lines the history of the introduction of the partisan 
 priest into the Congested Board : — 
 
 As to honorary appointments, the Most Rev. Dr. O'Donnell, 
 who presided over the Freeman shareholders' committee, was made 
 a member of the Congested Districts Board. The Very Rev. 
 Denis O'Hara, P.P., Mr. Dillon's chief supporter in the west, was 
 also appointed one of the members. 
 
 Coincidentally with the appearance of Bishop 
 O'Donnell and Father O'Hara on the Board, under 
 these circumstances, came the transformation of the 
 Board into a great land-purchasing and land-dis- 
 tributing agency, which, by its free use of public 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 39 
 
 money and the distribution of farms at cheap rates, 
 was to play such a revolutionary part in inflaming 
 the indignation of the peasantry against private land- 
 lords who could draw on no public funds to confer 
 similar benefactions. The appointment of these two 
 clergymen was in intimate connection with the 
 ascendency of the clerical spokesman-in-chief, Mr. 
 John Dillon, M.P., an ascendency which has never 
 weakened, though it has been more disguised in the 
 present day. We can now recognise that the reverend 
 functionaries had a political mission which they have 
 conscientiously endeavoured to fulfil, and we should 
 never underestimate their deep sincerity. There is a 
 decidedly amusing passage in the examination of 
 Mr. Wrench before the Commission, a very funny 
 passage indeed, which shows us Lord Dudley and 
 Sir Francis Mowatt, on the one hand, trying to get 
 at the fundamental humbug of Father O'Hara's 
 agricultural qualification, and Bishop O'Donnell and 
 Sir Antony MacDonnell, on the other hand — supported 
 by the congenial Mr. Conor O'Kelly, M.P. — trying 
 as stoutly to prove that a parish priest must be the 
 very pink of a scientific agriculturist " because he 
 knows all the farms in his parish." I am quite sure 
 he does, and the reasonable capacity of every farmer 
 for paying him dues and collections, which is a totally 
 different matter from being agricultural adviser for 
 half Ireland. But here is the passage from Mr. 
 Wrench's examination, with poor Mr. Wrench 
 endeavouring to satisfy the whole of his questioners: — 
 
 Sir Francis Mowatt — Agriculture, industries, and special circum- 
 stances — was each man appointed for all those three ? Was Father 
 O'Hara appointed for agriculture, for industries, and for special 
 circumstances ? 
 
 Most Rev. Dr. O'Donnell — Chiefly for agriculture. Mr. Green 
 was temporary member in respect of fisheries. The other temporary 
 member was Mr. Balfour, who was not in respect of anything specially 
 except that he was the founder of the Board. 
 
 The Chairman — Apparently Father O'Hara was appointed in 1895 
 
40 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 to succeed Colonel Peacocke. Colonel Peacocke was appointed a 
 temporary member ? 
 
 Mr. Wrench — Yes. 
 
 Colonel Peacocke was an original member .-' 
 
 Yes. 
 
 And Father O'Hara succeeded him in 1895 ? 
 
 Yes. 
 
 If Father O'Hara is not the representative of agriculture on the 
 Board, then, I take it that there is no representative of agriculture on 
 the Board. Is that so ? 
 
 If Father O'Hara is not, there is no special representative now. 
 
 But, supposing he is, I should want to ask this : what experience 
 has Father O Hara got of agriculture ? 
 
 1 think Father O'Hara knows a great deal about agriculture. 
 
 Has he special knowledge of agriculture, and seeds, and things of 
 that kind ? 
 
 Well, agriculture prevails in the district in which he lives. 
 
 As a resident. Has he ever had, as you have had, for instance, 
 personal experience of the management of agricultural proceedings ? 
 
 That I cannot say. 
 
 Sir Antony MacDonnell — As an observer, a keen observer, I 
 do not suppose Father O'Hara, like any other priest, enters largely 
 into farm work, but he is a most acute and keen observer of what is 
 going on in his neighbourhood. 
 
 The Chairman — But then Mr. Wrench has had practical experience 
 in these things himself. It cannot be said that Father O'Hara has 
 had the same kind of experience, at any rate. 
 
 Mr. O'Kelly, M.P. — What kind of experience have you had ? 
 
 The Chairman — That question was asked before you came in. 
 
 Mr. Wrench — I will repeat it if you like. I have farmed land in five 
 different counties, and managed for a good many people, besides. 
 
 Most Rev. Dr. U'Donnell — Do you say that for the purposes of 
 the Board in respect to agriculture the knowledge possessed by Father 
 O'Hara was exceedingly useful ? 
 
 Certainly, because he knew a great deal about the local conditions. 
 
 Did he know all the farms there ? 
 
 Yes; I used to discuss questions with him. 
 
 This delightful extract from the evidence is worth 
 the study. We have the Bishop cutting in, not only 
 as a questioner, but as a witness to the agricultural 
 qualifications of " Mr. Dillon's chief supporter in the 
 west," the versatile pastor of East Mayo. Then there 
 is the Chairman, Lord Dudley, most sensibly trying to 
 find out what real qualifications, if any, for the post of 
 agricultural member are possessed by Father O'Hara, 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 41 
 
 finally getting at the luminous fact that Father O'Hara 
 is an agriculturist because " agriculture prevails in the 
 district in which he lives," then the zealous Sir Antony 
 MacDonnell pleading that not only Father O'Hara, 
 but " any other priest," is qualified to be an agri- 
 cultural member, or command the Channel Fleet, or 
 anything else which happens to be handy, then the 
 final effort of the Bishop to whitewash the priest 
 by declaiming on " the exceeding utility for the 
 purposes of the Board " of " the knowledge possessed 
 by Father O'Hara." Quite correct, most reverend 
 Bishop ! " For the purposes of the Board " the pastor 
 of Kiltimagh, being ecclesiastically commissioned to 
 sow the good seed of religion, is consequently the 
 right man in the right place as the special representative 
 of Irish agriculture on a public department which 
 spends millions of public money " in connection with 
 agriculture " from one end of Ireland to the other. 
 Because he is a pastor, he is similarly qualified to 
 be special representative of sheep-raising and sheep- 
 shearing. 
 
 Lord Dudley neatly summarised the net result to 
 be, " If Father O'Hara is not the representative of 
 agriculture on the Board, then there is no representa- 
 tive of agriculture on the Board." 
 
 When the Rev. Father O'Hara himself came to be 
 examined, he at once, and very frankly, gave the 
 measure of his qualifications as scientific agricul- 
 turist : — " I have lived all my life in congested districts ; 
 I have lived in them as curate, as administrator, and 
 as parish priest." If living in a congested district is 
 a qualification for membership of the Board, it would 
 seem that Father O'Hara has several hundred 
 thousand living rivals. It is true that all these are 
 not equally recommended by the Dillon faction of the 
 Parliamentary party. Father O'Hara, already in his 
 third answer to questions put by the Commission, 
 placed on record the character of his impartiality, 
 
42 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 where impartiality is so necessary upon a board 
 which interferes so profoundly with agrarian questions. 
 He blurted out this denunciation of the hated gentry: 
 " The landlords as a class are heartless and 
 unsympathetic." Again, said Father O'Hara, " I 
 mean landlordism — that the fact of a man becoming 
 a landlord makes him heartless." Sir John Colomb, 
 one of the Commissioners, tried to get the redoubtable 
 Father to modify the vigour of his denunciation even 
 a little bit :— 
 
 " I want to ask you just this question : Do you think that some of 
 the words you used lo describe a particular class of Irishmen very 
 strong ? " 
 
 " Not a bit stronger than they deserve," said Father O'Hara. 
 
 " Now that I have pointed out to you that it is a very strong 
 statement as regards the class of Irishmen, you do not wish to 
 modify it ? " 
 
 " Not in the least, because my experience in all my life is that I 
 never knew a landlord to care very much how his tenants lived if he 
 got his rent." 
 
 There is an impartial Board member for you ! 
 
 Next Sir Antony MacDonnell tried his hand in a 
 politic effort to limit the sweep of Father O'Hara's 
 anathema : — 
 
 Sir Antony MacDonnell — Your remarks do not apply to 
 landlords in general, but to your own particular observation .-' 
 
 Father O'Hara — I have no acquaintance with landlords elsewhere, 
 but I say that if in going round Connaught you will find a landlord 
 that did anything for his people, I think the people would look 
 astonished at your discovery. 
 
 Sir John Colomb returned to the charge in a final 
 and despairing effort to mollify '* Mr. Dillon's chief 
 supporter in the west," as Mr. T. M. Healy calls him. 
 But Sir John got more than he bargained for. 
 
 Sir John Colomb — Then am I right in taking your view to 
 be this, that the fact of ownership makes a man heartless and 
 unsympathetic ? 
 
 Father O Hara — That is viy view. 
 
 That ownership in a moral sense is a bad thing } 
 
 Well, as it has worked out in Ireland, at any rate. 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 43 
 
 I do not think that it is necessary further to 
 multiply quotations. The least suspicious member of 
 the Irish gentry can hardly be blamed for regarding 
 with distrust a Congested Fiction Board which is 
 dominated by such a standard of judicial impartiality 
 as this. Neither need we wonder at the closeness of 
 the connection between the Ancient Order of Ribbon- 
 men and the leaders of the Board. All landlords are 
 to be driven out of Ireland. The mere fact of being 
 a landlord excludes a man from the sympathies of 
 human nature. It is to promote these views that the 
 Congested Fiction is glutted with public funds, while 
 education is starved and degraded from one end of 
 Ireland to the other. And there is no doubt, either, 
 as to the popular belief in Father O'Hara's power.* 
 
 Father Denis O'Hara is evidently convinced of the 
 rectitude of his fanaticism ; but fanatics are not more 
 wholesome to a country because they are troubled by 
 few misgivings. Is it not simply too absurd for a panto- 
 mime to have a public board, whose advertised mission 
 is the application of benevolence and beneficence to 
 landed estates, staffed with zealots not reluctant to 
 avow their belief that " the fact of ownership makes 
 a man heartless and unsympathetic " ? The Con- 
 gested Fiction Board of Ireland has certainly some 
 claims to be accepted as one of the natural heirs of 
 Karl Marx. 
 
 It is not uninstructive to note that Bishop O'Don- 
 nell is not only an agrarian reformer of the robust 
 type of Father O'Hara, but that he professes political 
 views in keeping with the doctrines of Mr. John 
 
 * Referring to the intimidation and boycotting practised against 
 a Mr. Jordan, a Government servant, who had supplied informa- 
 tion of the doings of the Congested Board clergy which the clergy 
 did not approve, the author of " Economics for Irishmen " observes : 
 " I am told now the clergy are at work to get him discharged from 
 his employment. . . . It is assumed at Kiltimagh that Father 
 O'Hara can get any one he likes into the Government service or 
 out of it." Of course, this is only popular belief. 
 
44 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 Redmond in their most subversive pose. Thus, for 
 instance, I find in the Tablet of the 31st August last 
 a perfectly characteristic outburst of the Most Rev. 
 Dr. O'Donnell in support of Mr. John Redmond's 
 demand for " a great and menacing agitation." 
 Laying down the maxim — which is the canonisation 
 of force — that " the reforms we shall receive are 
 precisely those we can exact ^' — is this the mission of the 
 Christian ministry? — the Bishop of the Board solemnly 
 informs his readers that " there are no limits to what 
 a thoroughly efficient Irish party can achieve when 
 backed by a united and determined people." What, 
 "no limits " ! Next we have a fierce appeal to the 
 semi-socialist allies among the English population. 
 The good Bishop extols " the toiling masses of Great 
 Britain who have good reasons of their own to join us in 
 overthrowing the ascendency of the classes.'" Are these 
 the sentiments which qualify for membership of the 
 public Board that has to deal impartially with class 
 and class in Ireland? Next, the Bishop remarks that 
 " an unreformed House of Lords will be slow to 
 dispute the people's will when clearly expressed." 
 And he finally appeals to a " united Ireland to show 
 that it is for the advantage of England to be rid of our 
 trouble." 
 
 All which certainly will not prevent the Board from 
 helping the Parish Committees to as much of the taxa- 
 tion of the public, including the abused landlords, as 
 the lay friends in Dublin Castle may enable prelate 
 and priest to employ " in overthrowing the ascendency 
 of the classes." We can hardly get a five-pound 
 note for education ; but there is any amount of public 
 money at the disposal of the clerical agitator and the 
 socialist demagogue. 
 
 Bishop O'Donnell and Father O'Hara are the 
 choice and the hope of the new Land League. They 
 are the men who have endeared the Congested Board 
 to the warmest sympathies of the Central Council of 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 45 
 
 the United Irish League. They have used the money of 
 the taxpayers and the authority of the Government in 
 such a manner as to make the working of the Board, 
 its continuance, and its extension, the one thing 
 supremely adequate for the entire reahsation of that 
 Land League paradise which is to replace the " ascen- 
 dency of the classes," and on which the Bishop of the 
 Board bestows his specially reserved benediction. 
 That characteristic selection of the selectors of the 
 Royal Commissionof Inquiry, Mr. Conor 0'Kelly,M. P., 
 himself no mean judge of anarchical methods, from 
 the boycott to the cattle drive, has the merit of 
 eliciting from the special delegate of the new Land 
 League before the Commission, Mr. John Fitzgibbon, 
 the enthusiastic declaration that "it is the strong 
 view of the United Irish League that the Congested 
 Districts Board should decidedly be preserved." It 
 is the voice of the simplest gratitude. The Congested 
 Districts Board has done more with the money of the 
 taxpayers to sap the remaining foundations of civil 
 order and national progress in Ireland than was ever 
 accomplished by all the dollars of the American 
 dynamiters. In the worst times the worst of " moon- 
 lighters " could not at all events quite persuade himself 
 that Mr. Pat Ford and Mr. Pat Egan were exactly 
 canonical authorities upon matters of meum and hcum. 
 It is since consecrated lips have been openly heard to 
 advocate '' the overthrow of the classes " and "the 
 compulsory loss of a landlord's income " that the 
 perfect orthodoxy of "menacing agitation" has 
 become encircled with a halo. 
 
 I do not dispute the entire conscientiousness of the 
 most reverend and reverend ecclesiastics. I need not even 
 question their interpretation of the sacerdotal mission. 
 But on a public department, expending public money, 
 what is the responsibility of the Government which 
 appointed and maintained, in functions of the highest 
 impartiality and the most judicial trust, the arch- 
 
46 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 fanatics of civil discord and private confiscation ? 
 The country has been flooded with mendicancy and 
 unmanHness, with idleness and sloth, with cruelty to 
 dumb animals in every cattle drive, with heartless- 
 ness to untaught children, with cynical dishonesty, 
 with brutal menace. It was the Government which 
 gave the Congested Districts Board all its position 
 and all its briberv.* 
 
 * Speaking of bribery, though I make no personal charge, still 
 the injustice of leaving enormous sums of public money in the hands 
 of an Unrepresentative Board must produce scandals ; and the con- 
 nexion between Mr. John Dillon, M.P., the Bishop of the Board, and 
 Father O'Hara — both of whom are said by Mr. Healy, M.P., to have 
 been appointed by Mr. John Dillon's influence — make any appear- 
 ance of favouritism on behalf of Mr. John Dillon's constituents all 
 the more conspicuous. 
 
 Now we have a Leitrim clergyman, Rev. Father Meehan, C.C., 
 who made complaint to the Commission {Evidence VI., ii8 — 20) 
 of the neglect with which Leitrim is treated by the Congested 
 Board : — 
 
 " I refer to the neglect of this county by the Congested Districts 
 Board. . . . The amount spent on acquiring estates by the Board 
 is ;^5 57,847. . . . All that has been done in County Leitrim in this 
 direction is the purchase of a single estate for ;^850. . . . In 
 Swineford alone ;^375,ooo has been spent in estate purchase. . . . 
 The Parish Committees of Swineford Union have got ;^7,855. . . . 
 The Parish Committees for the whole County of Leitrim have only 
 got /"729." 
 
 Swineford Union is in East Mayo. Mr. John Dillon is M.P. for 
 East Mayo. It follows that, since Mr. John Dillon got Father 
 O'Hara made member of the Board, Mr. Dillon's constituents have 
 had enormous sums of public money spent among them by the 
 Board. As will be mentioned later. Father O'Hara nominated 
 Mr. John Dillon in 1906 for re-election by the constituency which 
 had received these enormous sums. Mr. Dillon was re-elected. 
 
THE PARISH PRIEST COMMITTEES AND 
 THEIR TWO THOUSAND AGENTS. 
 
 THE PRIEST IS THE COMMITTEE PAYING INSANITATION 
 
 . PRIESTS AND CATTLE - DRIVERS THE BOARD'S 
 
 BISHOP MR. Redmond's treasurer. 
 
 In dwelling upon the Land League partisanship of 
 Bishop O'Donnell and Father O'Hara — and be it 
 always understood that I fully accept the sincerity of 
 that partisanship — I have had also in mind the fact 
 that these Board potentates, though themselves 
 subject to superiors, are practically the generals- 
 in-chief of the vast organisation of the Parish 
 Committees, or parish priest committees, as they 
 deserve to be called. These are a network of sub- 
 organisations, some i6o in number, spread over the 
 whole of the vast space irrigated by the funds of the 
 Board, and practically consisting of the parish priests 
 and their nominees. These committees are considered 
 to be specially concerned with the allocation of grants 
 and rewards of public money to induce the pious 
 inhabitants to practise some sanitation, to provide 
 sheds for their animals outside the dwelling-house, 
 etc. In practice, the priests and the priests' nominees 
 direct the beneficence of the Board in all the allocations 
 of public funds ; and their recommendations of jobs 
 to be undertaken, relief to be granted, or employment 
 to be conferred, form the main guidance of the Board, 
 upon which the main direction of the priestly organi- 
 sation is so vigilantly represented by Bishop O'Don- 
 nell and Father O'Hara. Taking the number of 
 committeemen on each Parish Committee as being 
 the priest and a dozen nominees, we have the 
 
48 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 formidable organisation of 2,000 clerical agents, 
 generally corresponding to the type of political zealot 
 represented by the clerical members of the Board, 
 and extending the vast influence of the sacerdotal 
 reputation and the sacerdotal command of public 
 money over the entire west of Ireland. Clearly, 
 whether the object of the clerical authorities were to 
 spread a boycott or to bless a cattle drive, to agitate 
 for land redistribution or to return parliamentary 
 representatives of the Sheehy and Ginnell stamp, 
 there is here, from board to committee, a graduated 
 agency with which no landlord and no private can- 
 didate could possibly contend. The men who distri- 
 bute public funds among the population to-day may 
 to-morrow invite them to join the Ribbonmen, or to 
 " make the country hotter than hell for the grabber," 
 or to oppose university emancipation, or to elect 
 Mr. Dillon or Mr. Conor O'Kelly, or to do anything 
 else which can tend to tighten the grip of the political 
 priest upon Ireland. 
 
 Of course, the excuse of the clerical allies in Dublin 
 Castle for all this priestly ascendency in the distribu- 
 tion of public funds is, that the priest is wanted to 
 make the people clean themselves, or exert them- 
 selves, or improve themselves at all. Now this is 
 simply twaddle, and impudently dishonest twaddle. 
 If there has been any improvement, it is due to the 
 public money of the Board and the co-operation of 
 the skilled instructors, skilled fishermen, skilled 
 artisans, employed by the Board. The influence of the 
 priest was in full bloom since generations, and the people 
 remained insanitary, slothful, and unimproved. So far 
 from the political priest being any assistance to the 
 useful work of the Board, he has been a danger, a 
 hurt, and an encumbrance. The least evil of his 
 presence has been the general belief of his benighted 
 flock that his success in "getting Government money 
 for the parish " entitled him to a share on collection 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 49 
 
 day and when he was church-building or convent- 
 building. Of course, it entitled him to select the 
 local and parliamentary representatives. The parish 
 priest committees are reported to decide the election 
 of thirty members of Parliament and to influence as 
 many more. All this will be more fully understood 
 when the reader has studied some details of the 
 politico-Jacobin activity of these clerical agitators. 
 
 By the way, there is some amusing fencing in the 
 minutes of evidence, when clerical witnesses try to 
 mitigate, may I say, the sacerdotal complexion of 
 the organisation. They love to talk of " ministers of 
 all religious denominations," as if the sparse non- 
 priestly ministers of religion would interfere between 
 pastor and flock. Thus the extraction of information 
 from Father O'Hara takes this course : — 
 
 Mr. Sutherland — You said you had i6o committees? 
 
 Father O'Hara — Yes. 
 
 Mr. Sutherland — What is the average number of members ? 
 
 Father O'Hara— The average number is six, first elected. Then 
 the clergymen of all denominations are members. The landlords 
 and agents don't attend very often, but they are members. You 
 might put down twelve as the average number of each committee. 
 
 Mr. Sutherland — That is practically an organisation of 2,000 
 members you have located all over Ireland ? 
 
 Father O'Hara — Yes. 
 
 Then the useful Sir Antony MacDonnell chips in : — 
 
 Sir Antony MacDonnell — Yougavethis subject special attention 
 yourself ? 
 
 Father O'Hara — I did. 
 
 Sir Antony MacDonnell — The Board is indebted to you and 
 Dr. O'Domiell in the matter. In/act, it is your work. 
 
 So we have the Under-Secretary committed before- 
 hand to the most gushing gratitude for all this 
 precious network of the clerical parish committees. 
 " Better be friends with the judge than with the 
 law." Sir Antony MacDonnell, it must be remem- 
 bered, is, like Bishop O'Donnell and Father O'Hara, 
 member of the Board under inquiry, as well as, like 
 
 P.S. E 
 
50 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 Bishop O'Donnell, member of the Commission of 
 Inquiry. What a farce and what a family party ! 
 
 The Chairman got an instructive reply from this 
 reverend witness as to the position of " ministers of 
 all denominations " on the committees : — 
 
 Lord Dudley — I suppose the parish priest is the chairman ? 
 Father O'Hara — As a rule, he is. 
 
 Bishop O'Donnell got almost wroth with another 
 witness who blurted out that the parish priest was 
 sometimes the whole committee : — 
 
 Bishop O'Donnell — The members are men in the locality ? 
 Mr. Mitchell — Yes. In some parishes there is no one but the 
 parish priest. 
 
 Bishop O'Donnell — Please do not give us extreme cases. 
 
 The political priest is the Board ; the political 
 priest is the Committee ; the political priest is the 
 Commission ; the political priest is the parliamen- 
 tary representation ; the political priest is the 
 boycotting League ; the political priest is the 
 Ribbon organisation ; the political priest makes the 
 agitation ; the political priest controls the cash. 
 
 There is indeed a grim comicality about the theory 
 advanced in support of these priest committees and 
 their control of Board subsidies out of public funds. 
 In Donegal, for instance, it appears that the coddling 
 of the pseudo-congested population in the matter even 
 of the toleration of domestic filthiness and insanitation 
 has reached such a pitch under the beneficent sway of 
 the Board that the rate-paid sanitary officers avoid 
 doing any sanitary inspection, lest it should shock the 
 finer feelings of the inhabitants who prefer the pig in 
 the room and the muck heap at the door. So the 
 parish committee steps in and says to the clerical 
 muck-lover: "My dear, high-spirited, fine fellow, 
 you do quite right to object to moving your cherished 
 manure heap under the rude compulsion of sanitary 
 officers. But do, if you please, what we respectfully 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 51 
 
 suggest. As you know, we have a lot of public funds 
 from the taxes of common taxpayers all over the 
 kingdom who have to keep clean or go to gaol. Now 
 if you will most kindly build a little shed for your pig, 
 and put him to sleep there, and if you will condescend 
 to shift the dung heap a few yards from the door of 
 your house, we will give you thirty shillings or 
 maybe a couple of pounds. Now won't you, 
 please ? " 
 
 I say nothing for the moment of the utter impudence 
 of this way of spending the money of the taxpayer ; but 
 just consider the boasted results of all that " bene- 
 ficent influence of the saintly pastors of the people " 
 which has produced a population so degraded as not 
 to perform the commonest offices of sanitation unless 
 bribed out of the taxes ! " The first condition of the 
 grant is that the man removes the cows from the 
 dwelling-house, and the manure heap from the kitchen 
 door." Build a shed for your cattle, instead of having 
 their dung on the house floor ; clear off that mass of 
 foul-smelling filth which is poisoning your little chil- 
 dren. And the pious peasant of bishop-ridden 
 Ireland answers back : " Shan't ! Not unless you 
 pay me well." sancta simplicitas I 
 
 Yet consider that here at last the Board has founded 
 a new industry. Even the long-suffering Chairman 
 of the Commission, Lord Dudley, was driven to 
 exclaim : " The Congested Districts Board has been 
 trying to create new industries for twenty years, and 
 has failed in them all." There is to be no failure here. 
 The faithful peasant who got so much coin of the 
 realm a few months ago for indispensable sanitation 
 can come back smiling and bargain as follows : — 
 
 Congested Peasant — Yez gev me jC2 a while ago for putting the 
 muck pit away from the children. 
 
 Congested Committee — We did. Well ? 
 
 Congested Peasant — Well, it's this well. It's too much 
 thrubble entirely. Me back's bruk carrying the muck ten yards 
 or more. I'll put it at the dure agin, if I don't gel somethin' for 
 
 £ 2 
 
52 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 my labour. Shure, it's Government money, and ye needn't be 
 close-fisted. 
 
 Congested Committee — Of course, of course, my fine fellow. 
 The Government owes us hundreds of millions for those plantations 
 by Cromwell, and why should you clean for nothing while there's 
 money in the Bank of England ? Here's another £2 for you. 
 
 Congested Peasant — God bless yer honours ! And, shure, I'll 
 vote for yer Parlimint man whin the election comes round. Hurrah 
 for our ginerous clargy, and no forrin edication ! 
 
 What can be more natural or creditable ? It is the 
 very quintessence of the policy of the pseudo-Con- 
 gested Board, its Ribbonman allies, and its Parish 
 Committees. Without money down no personal or 
 domestic cleanliness in congested Donegal. Though 
 rainwater is plentiful, it is a shilling a man for 
 washing his face. That is how we make Ireland a 
 nation. 
 
 As we know, the most reverend Bishop of the Con- 
 gested Board, along with his other political engage- 
 ments, is treasurer for Mr. Redmond's parliamentary 
 party. The most reverend Bishop wants " the toiling 
 masses of Great Britain " to aid the Irish in the war 
 against the classes. Here is a specimen of his 
 protegee Mr. Redmond's agrarian war in Ireland. 
 The speech from which the extract was taken was 
 delivered in the neighbourhood of Lord Clanricarde's 
 estate at Portumna on the 6th October last, and was 
 directed against the new tenants occupying the place 
 of those who refused to pay their rent in conformity 
 with the Land League plan of campaign a quarter of 
 a century ago. There can be no mistaking the 
 meaning of this clerico-agrarian firebrand's call for 
 the continuance of the land war and his denunciation 
 of peace as a '' dishonour to the district and Ireland." 
 Mr. Redmond is singularly blind and deaf if he does 
 not know that "the land war" means cruelty and 
 murder : — 
 
 I am sure the majority of the planters will agree to go, but whether 
 they agree or dont agree, they have got to go. And if they don't go, 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 53 
 
 it would be absurd for any man to hope that peace could be main- 
 tained in this district. If they refuse to go, here, at any rate, the 
 land war will go on, and, indeed, I have no hesitation in saying that 
 under these circumstances if there is refusal on their part peace in 
 this district would be a dishonour to this district and to Ireland. 
 
 Unless the threatened men yield to threats of 
 violence, then the threats must become acts. This 
 is the plain meaning which every moonlighter and 
 boycotter may place on the counsels of the politician 
 for whom the Bishop of the Board is the purse-bearer 
 and collector. I trust that the Most Rev. Bishop 
 O'Donnell will excuse me if I conclude that when the 
 clergy abstain from condemning such criminal incite- 
 ments, and when they remain in official connection 
 of the closest kind with criminal agitators, they must 
 be held to participate in the responsibility. 
 
 As a fact, the clergy do not confine themselves to 
 passive approval and assistance. At a meeting held 
 by Mr. Ginnell, M.P., the cattle-driving organiser, in 
 the town of Mullingar, in county Westmeath, on the 
 3rd November last, the following characteristic letter 
 was read from one of those innumerable priestly 
 zealots who have prevented all possibility of the 
 coming of peace in Ireland for the last quarter of a 
 century. The writer was the Rev. James Murphy, 
 parish priest of Multifarnham, and his pretended 
 refusal to discuss "the moral aspects of cattle-driving," 
 coupled with the grotesque ferocity of his attack on the 
 landowning classes, is only too exact a reproduction 
 of the incitations, both public and private, which 
 have been directed to the rural population by unworthy 
 spiritual guides for generations. A dominant section 
 of the popular clergy are, as they have been, con- 
 stantly engaged in a piratical and lawless war without 
 quarter upon the Irish gentry ; and the Congested 
 Board is only one of the weapons : — 
 
 I wish the meeting every success in its efforts to again repeople 
 the country. Without venturing any opinion on the moral aspects 
 
54 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 of "cattle-driving," I may state that the "clawss" who have such 
 holy horror of the proceedings nowadays had not in themselves or 
 their predecessors sixty or seventy years ago such righteous indignation 
 when the " human being drivings " were in vogue. The beings made 
 after God's image and likeness — but they were " Hirish " ; what 
 matter ? — could be driven out of their homes to starve and die by the 
 wayside or in workhouses and coffin ships, and no hand or voice 
 raised to denounce such inhumanity, whilst the brute beast nowadays 
 cannot be moved uninjured and unharmed without the cry of 
 " intimidation," "robbery," " confiscation," " danger to the Empire," 
 etc., being raised by the carrion Press and crew that still dominate 
 the country. . . . But individuals must yield when the good of the 
 community is at stake ; so let all " eleven months' men" put" finis " 
 to their transactions when " a bold peasantry, their country's pride," 
 shall again inhabit the lands that God and nature intended for 
 them. 
 
 You could not find much to exceed this sacerdotal 
 product in harangues of anarchists and nihilists.* 
 Every historian knows that the Irish gentry lost their 
 estates in thousands by the same famine and free trade 
 which drove the tenantry to ruin, and the Encumbered 
 Estates Acts were the " coffin ships " of hundreds of 
 landlords who had spent their last shilling on their 
 starving tenantry. When such horrible appeals to 
 
 * This priest's impudent description of the cruel practice of cattle- 
 driving as only " the moving of brute beasts uninjured and unharmed," 
 a description openly intended to absolve the consciences, if such 
 exist, of the criminals, may be usefully compared with the advice 
 given by Ginnell himself in a speech on the 3rd October last. After 
 preliminary inquiries as to " whether no hazel grew there, and no ash- 
 poles," this member of Parliament for the United Irish League of 
 priests and people in North Westmeath went on to direct his hearers 
 to "move" the hunted cattle with scrupulous gentleness : "He did 
 not approve of any heavier blow than such a gentle touch of the hazel 
 as would make the bullocks run about five miles awayT 
 
 It is certainly regrettable that Mr. Ginnell, M.P., has not experienced 
 in his own person " such a gentle touch of the hazel " as would keep 
 him warm for a run of, say, only two miles and a half. It might 
 teach him a little fellow-feeling for the gentler " brute beasts " driven 
 without food or water, frightened and terrified through the night, by 
 the mobs of excited savages hunting the tortured herds along the 
 hard roads, with heavy blows, ten and fifteen miles from their 
 grazing grounds. 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 55 
 
 class hate can be used by a parish priest in a Mission 
 Country, in which the reHgious authorities are armed 
 with absolute and extraordinary powers for the 
 maintenance of discipline, it needs no lengthy 
 commentary to enable impartial observers to realise 
 the deliberate policy of those ecclesiastical superiors. 
 Priest, prelate, and politician are carrying out a 
 policy of practical identity, the policy of the Com- 
 pulsory Expropriation Board, and there is no room 
 for surprise at the continuance of that Board being, 
 as we can see, an object of the warmest aspirations 
 of the Confiscation League. 
 
 In less conspicuous activity are to be found those 
 priests who devote themselves to the diplomatic 
 service of the leagues and lodges. These strange 
 ministers of religion apply themselves to obtaining 
 " without scandal " the submission of the victims. 
 " I am sorry to say, Mr. Hurley, that the branch is 
 very indignant at your keeping the grazing, or the 
 farm, when you know very well that public opinion is 
 against you. Just let me tell them that you have 
 thought over the matter, and that you see the friend- 
 ship of the people is worth more than a few acres or 
 a herd of bullocks. This will be much better, Mr. 
 Hurley, than bringing trouble on yourself and your 
 family." 
 
 We have a specimen of this activity in the recent 
 case of the boycotting of the Ormond Hunt in Tip- 
 perary. Because the Hunt would not exclude a 
 couple of its members the Hunt itself was boycotted 
 as well. The members pluckily preferred to end the 
 Hunt rather than yield. But " the local priest" tried 
 to arrange a surrender to the League in the usual 
 way. A newspaper paragraph mentions the fact : 
 
 "As the result of the interference of the Shinrone branch of the 
 United Irish League, the Ormond Hunt has now been finally dissolved. 
 A suggestion was viade by the local priest that an agreement might 
 be arrived at if public guarantee were given by certain members of 
 
56 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 the Hunt to surrender the grazing lands they hold at the expiry of 
 one term of eleven months, but the Hunt could not entertain the 
 proposal. The pack, consisting of forty couples of hounds, has been 
 sold for £200, and the hunt horses have also been disposed of." 
 
 To inaugurate morality in the New Year, there 
 appears in The Catholic Young Man, just to give the 
 right tone to Irish youth, an article by Rev. Professor 
 MacDonald, D.D., belonging to the Maynooth Pro- 
 fessoriate, which is a dithyrambic glorification of the 
 Religion of the Hazel. He compares the innocence 
 of cattle driving with such deeds of the " Hypocrite 
 English " as cutting off the head of King Charles L, 
 and twits the Liberals with " objecting to the use in 
 Ireland of the hazel switch ! " 
 
 But it is needless here to multiply quotations. The 
 Maynooth clergy in Ireland are thoroughly saturated 
 with agrarian dishonesty, and the people know it too 
 well to over-estimate the well-worn ruse of putting 
 up a couple of bishops to give a show of temporary 
 condemnation for the benefit of Mr. Birrell. As Mr. 
 Stephen Gwynn, the accommodating Protestant 
 M.P. for the Galway Sacristies, recently said : " It will 
 serve you perhaps better to lay the hazel by until 
 after Christmas, and perhaps a few months beyond 
 that." 
 
PART 11. 
 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 ; aJid the Royal Commissions 
 sit at Ireland'' s expefise not daring to ask /or 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. 
 Nothina; is harder to find out than what everybody knows and nobody 
 dares mention. . . . 
 
 " The Royal Commission 07i Congestion, who have just finished 
 sitting, illustrate the thing ivell. 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 Iris/itnen " 
 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 abroad. 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 poor 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 
 
6o PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 profit for themselves and their superiors, it is for them 
 a matter of entire indifference that the consequences 
 have been, and must continue to be, ruinous to the 
 nation, destructive of self-help, integrity, and indepen- 
 dence, 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 v^hole procession of 
 subsidiary falsehoods. There is only too much room 
 for everybody. It is not congestion of the population, 
 but unemployment of the population, vv^hich 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 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 Conges- 
 tion 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 overthrow 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 WHY PARNELL STOLE AN 
 
 AMENDMENT BOARD FAILURES. 
 
 I WAS present at the genesis of the sham congestion 
 poHcy, and have followed its development to the 
 present day. As member for Galway 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 cognisant 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 tor 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 congested 
 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, 
 
62 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 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 Dis- 
 tricts Board is that it is an absolute falsehood ; and 
 this falsehood has coloured and aggravated with re- 
 lated 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 employ- 
 ment, 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 agri- 
 cultural pauperism. There was huge political dis- 
 franchisement* 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 competi- 
 tion, supported by O'Connell, which discouraged home 
 agriculture, at the same time discouraged the employ- 
 ment 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 disfranchisement of the Catholic popular electorate in 1829 
 was enormous. Out of 200,000 electors enfranchised in 1793 by the 
 Irish Protestant Parliament, 175,000, or seven-eighths, were dis- 
 franchised by the " Catholic Relief " fraud of O'Connell 36 years 
 afterwards. 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 63 
 
 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 what- 
 ever ; but the same farm covered with weeds, and 
 bajfling 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 impoverishment of 
 land there could not fail to be a vast addition to 
 unemployment 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 con- 
 gested 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 exist- 
 ence to employ the agricultural labour. 
 
 The general and increasing diminution of agricul- 
 tural employment is the constant and increasing 
 obstacle to any real betterment of what is called the 
 congested districts problem. What on earth is the 
 national use of planting five hundred or a thousand 
 " Congested Poard tenants " at a vast expenditure of 
 
64 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 what is really public almsgiving, when ten times or 
 thirty times that population drifts from the same dis- 
 tricts 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 
 America? 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 Con- 
 gested Districts Board is really a modern version of 
 the tub of the Danaidse, 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. 
 
 Probably the most injurious error contained in the 
 phrase " congested districts " is the connected sugges- 
 tion of '' a local problem demanding a local solution." 
 The difficulty is not local at all, but only a local effect 
 of general or national causes which are moral and 
 intellectual far more than material. A policy of 
 habitual neglect, with spasmodic intervals of legisla- 
 tion by rush at Westminster, a programme of jobbery, 
 ignorance, and inertia at Dublin, is not only driving 
 into non-employment labourers of every kind, but has 
 swollen the ranks of general misery by fresh multi- 
 tudes of men deprived of previous occupations, too 
 poor to emigrate, too destitute of political importance 
 to attract the attention of statesmen in quest of a 
 reputation. Of course there are local wants and local 
 causes also. But dwarfing everything else, and over- 
 shadowing everything else, the want of employment in 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 65 
 
 its most general expression is the root of the evil which is 
 most erroneously nicknamed congestion. A board which 
 fancies that congestion is the enemy may provide 
 some stepping-stones to America, but will never stem 
 the tide of depopulation by more than a few isolated 
 and disappearing units. 
 
 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 mis- 
 government 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 in- 
 tensive 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 
 essentially 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. McCarthy Downing, 
 
 p.s. F 
 
66 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 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 
 industrious settlers from distant parishes or counties. 
 Unfortunately, after the time of Butt a supreme 
 object of legislation and agitation has been to en- 
 courage 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. 
 
 It is curiously instructive upon English govern- 
 ment of Ireland to note how the Irish party thirty 
 years ago obtained the passing of their resolution 
 for a fisheries loan fund for all Ireland. The exist- 
 ing Government had of course resolved to reject 
 the measure, because it purported to be a reform. 
 On the night in question a hundred Government 
 followers were dining in St. Stephen's Club, con- 
 nected by wire with the Whips' office, and only two 
 minutes' run from the division lobby. But a quick- 
 witted Irish member, Mr. Philip Callan, representa- 
 tive of Louth, had meditated on the situation, and was 
 prepared to turn it to account. Passing the word 
 round the Irish party to be ready to take the division 
 immediately, he deftly nipped the connecting wire 
 with the bulk of the Government party. The division 
 bell rang. The Whips looked in vain for the 
 battalion from St. Stephen's Club. The resolution 
 of the Irish party was passed by a narrow majority. 
 Mr. Callan's ready ruse had prevailed. 
 
 It is said that the Government was preparing to 
 ignore completely the resolution, when Mr. James 
 Lowther and a band of good-humoured colleagues 
 intervened on behalf of the Irishmen. " Callan," he 
 declared, ** had made a fair sporting move and neatly 
 won the trick, and he should not be deprived of his 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 67 
 
 winnings." But the Government concession was 
 merely nominal. The existing Reproductive Loan 
 Fund, already far too limited and small for its actual 
 objects, was by the Reproductive Loan Fund 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 consider 
 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 — i8go. More 
 properly speaking, the triumph was not in, but over, 
 the policy of Mr. Balfour. Mr. Balfour, during his 
 Chief Secretaryship 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, some- 
 times 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 dis- 
 turbance, under the pretext of general helpfulness, 
 which has since connoted the activities of the Con- 
 gested 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 ascendency. 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 
 
 F 2 
 
68 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 with party politics was inaugurated by the Gladstone 
 Ministry. 
 
 It was on the occasion of a Bill granting certain 
 transport facilities in Ireland that Mr. O'Connor 
 Power, M.P., saw the opportunity for giving notice of 
 an amendment by which the moneys under the Bill 
 might be partly applied to the establishment of 
 colonies of migrated settlers, the assumption being 
 that all distress in Ireland is due to scarcity of land 
 instead of scarcity of industry. It was rather a twist 
 in the scope of the Bill to introduce a migration 
 question at all, and Mr. O'Connor Power's suggestion 
 was about to be summarily disregarded, when a 
 masterly idea struck some members of the Gladstone 
 Government. '' Why not accept the migration amend- 
 ment, but give the credit of it to Parnell ? If 
 O'Connor Power gets the credit of such a popular 
 move, it will do us no good whatever ; if we give the 
 credit to Parnell, it will be a brilliant feather in his 
 cap in Ireland, and every consolidation of his authority 
 will help us in the long run, as he stands pledged to 
 us." Mr. Parnell, accordingly, received a communica- 
 tion from the Treasury Bench informing him that, if 
 he broti'ght in the amendment, it would be accepted by 
 the Government ; but if Mr. O'Connor Power did so, 
 the Government would oppose it. " But how can I 
 propose the amendment ? " replied Mr. Parnell. '* It 
 is O'Connor Power's amendment. It is on the paper 
 as such, and I cannot take it up." " Oh yes, you 
 can," answered the Treasury Bench. " Put down the 
 same amendment a line or a word earlier in the Bill. 
 That will give you precedence ; and we shall accept 
 the amendment coming from you." On these exact 
 terms the trick was played, to the furious indignation 
 of Mr. O'Connor Power. His amendment was moved 
 by Mr. Parnell a couple of lines earlier in the Bill ; and 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 69 
 
 the Government accepted " Mr. Parnell's " states- 
 manlike suggestion for having "fifty thousand pounds 
 devoted to an experiment in migration in Ireland." 
 Mr. Parnell was encouraged to form a board, to which 
 various Catholic bishops were parties, and the noto- 
 rious Bodkin estate purchase — that expensive failure 
 — was the result. This is really the initiation of what 
 have come to be known as Congested Board pur- 
 chases of estates for resettlement. 
 
 The Bodkin estate purchase was a dishonest, as 
 well as a farcical, failure. Some of the Congested 
 Board imitations have been much the same ; but the 
 most promising of them may be more fairly described 
 as disastrous successes. They have largely been, as 
 they were intended to be, experiments in social 
 disturbance and in the maintenance and extension of the 
 clerico -Jacobin agitation against owners of landed estates. 
 
 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 practi- 
 cally 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 ot 
 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 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 
 
70 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 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. We have 
 seen already that Father Denis O'Hara is entrusted 
 with the special functions on the Board of " repre- 
 sentative of agriculture " ! The most reverend 
 prelate himself, chief manager of Government distress 
 relief as well as Patron of the Ancient Hibernians, 
 Royal Commissioner 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 
 convention 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 
 connection 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 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 71 
 
 last fifteen years, has been transferred from the tax- 
 payers to the protegees of the Congested 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* ; railways have been built 
 or extended, some with profit 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 
 population of Ireland has dropped by another three- 
 quarters of a million, the half of which depoptUation is 
 to be traced to the areas operated by the Board. In other 
 words, the policy of local beneficence, without any 
 
 * 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 are 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 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 cwts., as against 998,206 cwts. 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 i8g8, 
 despite the special efforts made by the Congested Districcs Board to 
 develop the fisheries." 
 
72 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 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 ofseveral sub-ques- 
 tions of the gravest order which belong to the considera- 
 tion 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. 
 
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 
 
74 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 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 commodi- 
 ties, 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 com- 
 petition of all the world, for the money required to buy, 
 at similar competitive prices, the products of foreign 
 industry to supply domestic consumption. 
 
 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 practically 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 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 75 
 
 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 consumed at home, where it was wanted. With 
 good husbandry and intelhgent 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 employed 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 
 pasturage ; 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 weie 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 only 
 distinction between the master and the servants. The 
 wool that was spun was woven in the neighbourhood 
 
76 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 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 
 companionship 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 festival. 
 
 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 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 77 
 
 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 
 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 abando?ted, 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 substitute 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, the home ivork 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 culti- 
 vation for Direct Subsistence under which the labourer 
 
78 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 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 them- 
 selves, according to the laws of price and purchase, 
 from the foetid 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 recep- 
 tacles, 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 consideration 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 knew, 
 or felt instinctively, that the trail would lead direct 
 from the untaught, dependent peasants — who are the 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 79 
 
 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-whiskey 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 ruinous 
 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 Con- 
 gested 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 
 
8o PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 aegis of that munificent poor-box, under the aegis of 
 "his principal supporters in the West." Is there 
 an English constituency where "the principal sup- 
 porters " 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 
 protegee 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. Ginnell's cattle driving by 
 temporary seclusion, Mr. Ginnell's admiring colleague 
 revealed the identity of 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 NationaHst 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 ivas being taken 
 up a scheme which was in the first instance proposed by 
 Mr. Johji Dillon^ 
 
 What are Mr. John Dillon's qualifications ? Doubt- 
 less the same which obtain him the support of Father 
 Denis O'Hara and the Bishop of the Board. 
 
Notes and Illustrations.] 
 
 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 hirn 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 faviily was ?)iade 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 perfectly satisfied with plain, good clothes that they 
 were able to make themselves. Not only that, but every bit of 
 food that was consur/ied 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 wholesome 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. 
 P.S. G 
 
82 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 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 suchlike idiocies, 
 bawled and bellowed : " The landlords are ruining 
 me." 
 
 EVIDENCE OF A RATHLTN PRIEST. 
 
 A most conclusive corroboration of the same fact 
 came, quite unwittingly, from a witness before the 
 Commission, Rev. Father McGowan, 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 for 
 themselves like their own fathers! Evidence, VII. 43. 
 
 Rev. Father McGowan — The population of Rathlin Island 
 in 1841 was 1,010; 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 i2 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 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 83 
 
 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 ot 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, milkpans, etc., were manufactured 
 here. Doormats 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 manu- 
 factured 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 of 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 ^d. 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 6,000 or 7,000 visitors who are in 
 Kilkee in July, August, and September. 
 
 G 2 
 
84 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 But the climax is reached when the Bishop of the 
 Board himself in questioning a witness, Mr. Peter 
 McCullagh, from Tyrone, quite admits that he is 
 aware that exotic food is worse as well as dearer for 
 the farmer : — 
 
 Mr. p. McCullagh — 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 ! 
 
PART III. 
 HIRUDO HIERATICA. 
 
 THE HUGE AND INSATIABLE EXACTIONS 
 OF THE POLITICAL CHURCH. 
 
 " 'Mid the village, poor and sordid, 
 'Mid the flock, unfed, unlettered, 
 Rose the 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 zbth, igo//.. 
 
 " Nothing is more firmly fixed in the minds of many shop- 
 keepers 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 : ' J/ 
 I find anyone 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."' 
 
 TAe Irish Catholic author of " Economics jor 
 Irishmen,'''' 
 
 It must not be thought that Donegal and Kerry are 
 exceptional in the boast of congestion cathedrals. 
 
86 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 The expensive megalomania of the clergy shows 
 everywhere. In the wretched village of Roscommon, 
 capital of cattle-driving, they have built a pompous 
 church for ;^8o,ooo, blazing with gold and mosaic — 
 ;;f 80,000 for less than 2,000 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, //laf 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 1,891 ! 
 
 Much of the Irish money for these gaudy edifices 
 goes to Italian and German purveyors of " ecclesi- 
 astical art," supported by the spiritual authorities at 
 Rome. 
 
A BLOATED CHURCH ESTABLISHMENT — 
 THE EXAGGERATED EPISCOPATE — 
 CONVENTUAL LEECHES. 
 
 COMPARISON WITH FOREIGN CATHOLIC ESTABLISH- 
 MENTS PALATIAL CHURCHES AND PAUPER FLOCKS 
 
 — CONVENT BEGGING LETTERWRITERS WHY THE 
 
 MONEY GOES ABROAD CHURCH DECORATION 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 disestablish- 
 ment and disendowment. 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 
 encouragement of an excessive number of clerical 
 persons in Austria, the Minister replied : " If you 
 want to know what an excessive number of the clergy 
 
88 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 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 diminished one-half, the population of the presby- 
 teries and convents has multiplied threefold or more. 
 
 If we compare the Catholic Church establishment 
 in Ireland — even the permanent system and frame- 
 work — with such establishments 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. For this small handful there 
 are no less than four archbishops, says the " States- 
 man's Year-book," and twenty-three bishops, besides 
 a bishop auxiliary. 
 
 If we cross the water to Belgium, we find a popu- 
 lation 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 archbishops 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 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 89 
 
 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 episco- 
 pate 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 magnificent 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 com-? 
 munity, depopulated 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 villas, and new cathedrals, and handsome 
 presbyteries, and handsome 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 ? 
 
go PARx\GUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 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.* 
 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 ^f 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 
 
 * 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. 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. gi 
 
 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 ^f 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 Con- 
 gested 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 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 con- 
 science 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 popu- 
 lation which almost lives on the pauper grants from 
 
92 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 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 magnificence 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 establish- 
 ment 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 of the 
 17th August last — 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 reckless 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 93 
 
 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 ostentatious 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 construction 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 news- 
 paper and from every pulpit in Kerry ; but they have 
 also to pay indirectly through the priests of the parish, 
 as the Bishop requires contributions from the priests, 
 and the purse of the priests is only filled by depleting 
 the purse of the laity. 
 
 The arbitrary position of Ireland, as a region under 
 
94 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 the Foreign Missions Congregation and outside of 
 the canon law, makes an appeal of a bishop to his 
 priests far more irresistible and crushing than in any 
 national Church which has traditional and historic 
 rights. The jurisdiction and power of a bishop over 
 his priests in a mission country, like Ireland or 
 Zululand, are practically boundless and absolutely 
 appalling. " Thus a bishop has power to suspend 
 any priest, and even a parish priest, without giving 
 any reason for the suspension." If the reader wishes 
 to know what this sentence of suspension implies, he 
 can learn it from the following regulations made by the 
 Congregation of Propaganda on the 20th October, 1884, 
 which laid down — '* (i) that suspension prevents an 
 ecclesiastic from the exercise of his ecclesiastical 
 order, rank, or dignity ; (2) that no judicial forms 
 need be observed in the infliction of this penalty, nor 
 need canonical warnings precede it ; (3) no tribunal 
 may entertain any appeal against this suspension." 
 In other words, the Irish priest whom an Irish bishop 
 has seen cause to suspend — a cause which need be 
 visible to his own eyes alone — can be handed over to 
 absolute ruin in case his submission is not deemed 
 to be sufficiently complete, and he need not even be 
 told for what he has to make submission ! 
 
 Were an Irish priest to be insufficiently active in 
 turning the financial screw upon his congregation 
 when a demand for money comes from his bishop — 
 and the bishop may be a mere instrument also — what 
 a terrible future may be before him ! On every public 
 question the procedure can be the same. From the 
 highest to the lowest the Foreign Mission Church in 
 Ireland can be the most ruthless machine of extortion 
 and intimidation which has ever been contrived in the 
 most iron rules of ecclesiastical organisations. And 
 the bishops themselves are as subject to their foreign 
 masters in the Propaganda as the priests of a mission 
 district are to their bishops and vicars apostolic. 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 95 
 
 When, in addition to all the demands which come 
 from abroad, the Church in Ireland itself is overstaffed 
 with such an unnecessary multitude of persons 
 requiring a superior scale of raiment, food, and 
 housing, then we have at once an explanation of the 
 clerical quest of money, bleeding Ireland white, which 
 is such a potent cause of public and private destitution 
 and impoverishment. 
 
 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 annually extorted from the Irish laity, but they 
 form an appreciable 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 ? 
 
96 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 " 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 lasses 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 
 establishment 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 ! ! 
 
 4£. 44. M, .AA, .Af. 
 
 "TV* 'Tv "TV" -TV- TT 
 
 I think I ought to give a specimen of the begging 
 letters which issue in hundreds of thousands every 
 year, in millions more probably, 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 mendi- 
 cancy 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 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 97 
 
 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 undertakings. 
 
 With many apologies for troubling you, dear Sir, but our pending 
 need obliges me, and your Jiohle mind and kind, getieroiis heart 
 are my encouragemeni and assurance it will not be in vain, especially 
 as it ismyyfrj/and /aj/time to trespass thus, most earnestly VQ(\ViQSi\ng 
 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 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 daily ascend 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 incon- 
 venient, would greatly enhance the value of your kind gift. Our 
 good and generous Lord and Master, to whom you only lend, will 
 Himself recompense you even before the 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 
 
 P.S. H 
 
98 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 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 unwilling, the extortioner of his 
 congregation, so all those begging and whining con- 
 vents must send a heavy commission on their gains 
 to religious authorities outside of the country. There 
 is no limit to the extortion 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 pro- 
 tection against exorbitant demands 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 four- 
 teenth 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 pur- 
 chase of " decorations " for the edifices in construc- 
 tion. The sting of the complaint lay in payment of 
 such vast sums to all sorts of foreign contractors for 
 all kinds of ecclesiastical gewgaws in so-called statu- 
 ary and painting, stained glass, frescoes, stuccoes, 
 brass, and gildings. I may quote the Dublin Evening 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. gg 
 
 Herald of the 8th July, igoi,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, absolutely 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 manu- 
 facture 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 sub- 
 scribed 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 cha- 
 racter which was said to have netted some ;f 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 
 
 H 2 
 
100 . PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 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 ecclesi- 
 astical 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.* There is 
 no public superintendence, 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." 
 
 * 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 Commission 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, iuf not spent in Irela7td. 
 The Commissioners were, perhaps, too deeply absorbed in fresh 
 schemes for founding convent factories by immigrant Belgians, 
 Germans, French, Italians, etc., where the young Irish lacemakers 
 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. 
 
 I REFERRED in a fomier chapter to the wholesale 
 campaign that is now being carried on, with the 
 ignorant connivance of the miserable administrators 
 of the new local government, for the purpose of 
 seizing all the technical education funds for clerical 
 communities of one variety or another. Just as in 
 ordinary schools, the lay element is almost boycotted. 
 But it must not be forgotten that the immense, the 
 enormous, industrial school grab preceded long ago 
 this latest development of clerical acquisitiveness. 
 
 More than a generation ago the Imperial Parlia- 
 ment granted nearly ;£'200,ooo a year for the indus- 
 trial, 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 — ;;r20o,ooo a year ! 
 
 On every imaginable pretext charitable commu- 
 nities, 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, elbowed 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 main- 
 tenance, and that must be grabbed by the clerical 
 
102 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 order. Where deserted children and mendicant 
 children were not easily obtained, they were manu- 
 factured. 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 ot obliging parents and 
 obliging magistrates were allowed to swear unblush- 
 ingly 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 educa- 
 tion, 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 Govern- 
 ment inspectors of " a condition of things that can be 
 better imagined than described " — 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 carelessness and want of order, and I invariably found 
 the same characteristics stamped on the manager and his assistants. 
 
 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 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 103 
 
 were sometimes quite as dirty as their miserable 
 charges. 
 
 An official could not see any advantage to be got from bathing. 
 He 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 sanda simplicitas I 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 ;;rio,ooo to the Foxford 
 convent and make no similar present to lay 
 manufacturers ? * 
 
 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 
 
 * 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 
 1,400 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 ^^2 2,000. 
 Many an ordinary pauper might gladly aspire to penury like this. 
 
104 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 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 estabhsh 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 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 extor- 
 tionate clerical power. 
 
 It was this same imported community of clerical 
 foreigners which figured in the following appeal to the 
 visitors at a retent 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 estab- 
 hshed in the old mansion of the above landlord a school of agricul- 
 ture 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 handsome 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 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 105 
 
 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 Con- 
 gested 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 sub- 
 sidised to impart domestic knowledge useful for the 
 housekeeping of girls and young women of the 
 agricultural class, being perverted into an industrial 
 establishment 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 
 
io6 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 for young Irishmen, would utilise poor workwomen for 
 a conventual factory. 
 
 In reply to Sir John Colomb,the able and states- 
 manlike 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 dont want to teach the makmg 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 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 107 
 
 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. 
 
 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 Kamschatka 
 who may be settled in Ireland to live on the taxpayer, 
 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 workwomen for the convent. If 
 those sweet Irish girls drift away, unmarried and 
 wasted, to a factory in Rhode Island or Massachusetts, 
 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 advantages 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 Church- 
 men is exercised in the appointment to public offices 
 in the congestion area, as it is called. In the 
 congested district of Claremorris, for example, when 
 the district council met on the 24th October, igo6, to 
 
io8 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 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 
 ivill 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 advertisement, ' 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 sub- 
 servience 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 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 work- 
 house. Seeing the Irish-speaking character of the 
 population, the Glenties guardians had passed a 
 resolution binding themselves to prefer Irish-speaking 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 109 
 
 applicants. Nobody, indeed, who does not under- 
 stand 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 repre- 
 sentative 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 irre- 
 proachable. 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, yours 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 
 
no PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 clerical generosity. When complaint is made in 
 Ulster or England as to the appointments to Irish 
 situations, 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 con- 
 gested districts, ordaining the duties of district 
 councils. 
 
 This Glenties case, occurring, like the Claremorris 
 resolution, in the very heart of the congested pre- 
 serves of the Board, deserves some special considera- 
 tion in view of the Board's pretended mission of 
 redemption and elevation. We have the Bishop of 
 the Board, the 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 con- 
 viction 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 detri- 
 mental and degrading to the public service and 
 efficiency. It is an essential part of the grave, 
 unspeakably grave, situation that these potent ecclesi- 
 astics 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 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. iii 
 
 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 workhouse. 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 
 offspring of that respectable union has been made, on 
 that express ground, master of the Glenties work- 
 house. 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 Some- 
 body Else write to the Glenties Board of Guardians 
 to urge them to elect the best master for the work- 
 house without regard to the sacrosanct episcopal blood 
 in a candidate's veins ? Yet Bishop Somebody Else 
 is to expend the money of the taxpayers in Glenties 
 
112 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 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 con- 
 scientious discharge of public office, the conscien- 
 tious 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 officer- 
 ship 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 work- 
 house 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 manufactured 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, " mem- 
 ber for agriculture " on the Congested Board, when 
 under examination by the Commission. He had been 
 denouncing landlords, whether absentee or resident, 
 as being good or nothing, and had been praising thft 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 113 
 
 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 Colomb — Would you be surprised to hear that in 
 Donegal the amount spent for salaries for doing this very work is 
 ;^i,ooo 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 rampant 
 in the country, it looks very much as if there are in- 
 fluential 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. 
 
 The political priesthood have certainly a line 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 
 
 P.S. I 
 
114 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 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 
 appointing body because the appointing body must do 
 the behest of the political priest ! 
 
 To do the behest of the political priesthood, that 
 is the undignified mission of the Congested Districts 
 Board. And now the Board expects the arranged 
 Commission to recommend the extension 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 pro- 
 fession which derives its emoluments 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 ;;f 1,000 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 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 115 
 
 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 sterHng of pubhc money, fail to 
 perceive the influence of their generosity when they 
 ask for a share of the prosperity of their people. 
 
 If the Commissioners look around them on visiting 
 the country village of Letterkenny, in Donegal — a 
 poor little place of a couple of thousand inhabitants — 
 they will see a vast cathedral and other ecclesiastical 
 buildings which have been erected since the establish- 
 ment of the Congested Board at an expense not far 
 short of ;,rioo,ooo. 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 2,000 souls. Human nature is human 
 nature ; and if the public moneys lavished by the Con- 
 gested Board appeal to certain aspects of it, the fault 
 must lie in the creators and conti;iuators of such a 
 pauperising institution. Certainly, I cannot be 
 expected to blame either priests or people who have 
 succumbed to such pressure of circumstances. 
 
 But I would beg the Commission to understand that 
 my inquiries, conducted on both sides of the Atlantic, 
 have left no doubt whatever upon my mind as to the 
 constitution and operations of the Congested Board; its 
 grants and refusals of public money alike ; the policy 
 of social upheaval of which it is the standard-bearer ; 
 the abject submissiveness which it induces or extorts 
 among its beneficiaries ; the unbridled arrogance which 
 it has developed among its directors and the cla ss to 
 which they belong, and which they sedulously 
 aggrandise ; the discouragement or suppression of lay 
 independence of every kind. All these evils, unex- 
 ampled elsewhere in Europe, are driving every man 
 and woman of the least spirit out of the country who 
 
 I 2 
 
ii6 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 possesses a friend to pay the passage money and to 
 help on landing. " Bow the neck, and you will receive 
 a grant of public money," is almost the motto of the 
 Congested Board. " No free man need apply," is cer- 
 tainly the motto of the clerico-political associations in 
 whose hand the Board is but an instrument. The 
 steerages of the passenger steamers are filled with 
 fugitives from that system from every part of Ireland. 
 The Commission seeks to prevent pauperism in 
 Ireland ; the clerical masters of the Board are spread- 
 ing pauperism through every quarter of the country.* 
 Does the Commission know that a struggling farmer 
 can be charged £2,^ 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 £2^ because he 
 was giving £soo 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 ;f 193, not a friendly contribution to the 
 wants of the bereaved family, but tribute to an 
 influence potent with the Congested Board. 
 
 * 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 mantifacturing Orders take full 
 advaritage 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. 
 
 J 
 
THE MYSTERY OF LOUGHGLYNN HOUSE. 
 
 HOW THE TAXPAYERS LOST ;f8,900 IN ORDER TO 
 PLANT A FOREIGN CONVENT IN ROSCOMMON. 
 
 A PRECIOUS instance of the unbusiness-like 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 ;fii,ooo 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 sport- 
 ing rights is engineered, and the offer of ;f 11,000 falls 
 through. 
 
 5. Loughglynn House, together with one hundred 
 acres of the demesne, becomes the property of a com- 
 munity of nuns, imported from Belgium — at a price of 
 only ^Ta, 100, being an immediate loss of ;f 8, 900 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 
 
ii8 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 the Board brought to reject ;,rii,ooo — which also 
 meant the residence of a family of wealthy laymen, 
 consumers and employers, — in favour of ;f2,ioo 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 remon- 
 strances 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, 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 Com- 
 mission on behalf of the Board — [Evidence, Vol. /., 
 page 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 Lough- 
 glynn 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 selling the 
 holdings to the tenants. The Board were of opinion that these rights 
 were a valuable asset. ... A considerable number of tenants had 
 expressed their willingness to purchase their holdings subject to this 
 reservation. . . . The Board had received an offer of ;,^i 1,000 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;^2,ioo, 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 Rus- 
 sian Tchinovniks ! Who or what procured for it the 
 official sanction of the Board ? We have from 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. iig 
 
 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 
 inquired most closely and resolutely, but where they 
 skipped with agility and silence to less clerical pro- 
 ceedings. Evidence, Vol. I., pages i^o — i. 
 
 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 luas then put be/ore 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 cotisequently gave way o?i the viatter. 
 
 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 ^TiijOOO of the lay purchasers 
 rejected in favour of the ;;r2,ioo 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 ; 
 
 1. 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 
 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. 
 
I20 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 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 
 arrangements 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 cotwey to the 
 tenants valuable fishery or sporting rights. The Board bought the 
 estate as a wholej 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 frojn the land ! 
 
 Did Sir Antony MacDonnell, in spite of his official 
 predilections, suspect that there was something exces- 
 sively 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. 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 121 
 
 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 Lough- 
 glynn House and demesne, in order to reject the 
 ^11,000 of a lay purchaser and to accept the ;f2,ioo 
 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 ;;r8,goo 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 Lough- 
 glynn 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 countryside ? 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 hun- 
 dreds 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 Ostende and Paderborn, and had vowed to 
 consecrate their knowledge of butter-making and lace- 
 making to the service of their Superiors, had no 
 
122 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 means of knowing of themselves that a fair mansion 
 and broad acres were waiting somewhere among the 
 EngHsh 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 procured 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 ;fii,ooo 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 of dairy work, housewifery, etc., for 
 a fraction of that ;f 8,goo which the Board threw away 
 in order to plant foreign conventuals on the Dillon 
 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 conven- 
 tuals ; 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. 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 123 
 
 And, of course, the Belgian conventuals at Lough- 
 glynn snapped their pious fingers at the efforts ot 
 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 indus- 
 tries " ? 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 is as much under Holy 
 Obedience as any of them ; doubly so, if possible ; for 
 Ireland is a " District," not a " Church" ; " a District 
 of the Foreign Missions " at Rome ; and in a " Mis- 
 sion 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 
 
124 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 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 ;^ii,ooo from Loughglynn 
 House and demesne. Let us cheerfully assume that 
 no member of the Board was behind the scenes of 
 that 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 ;f 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 ;£'io,ooo, and which would present to the employees 
 advantages that the very nature of a conventual 
 institution forbids for ever to offer under any con 
 ditions whatever. In a lay factory the best of the 
 lay employees may rise to the highest posts, to part- 
 nership itself. The generous spirit of independence 
 and emulation can inspire the humblest endeavours. 
 The very nature of the conventual factory forbids a7iy 
 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 per- 
 sonality, of the convent superiors. Religiously, the nun 
 may be an angel ; economically, she is a slave. I revere 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 125 
 
 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 contary, 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 manage- 
 ment, 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 Com- 
 mission 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 ^8,333, and in 
 connection with the mill race /i, 1 64. ... In addition to that there 
 was a loan repayable by instalments. . . . The initial expenditure 
 was in connection with the buildings. 
 
 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 Congested Districts Board, and employs local labour. 
 
126 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 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 busi- 
 ness 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 adminis- 
 tration by local authorities in 1905 of the homework 
 provisions of the Factory and Workshop Act, igoi, 
 there appears to be no administration of the Act 
 whatever in Donegal, Sligo, Mayo, and Roscommon. 
 There is no inspection of homeworkers, no super- 
 vision 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 w^orkers appears to be often 
 abominably bad, which does not look encouraging 
 for the Congested Board's special counties, where 
 there is no inspection at all. 
 
 It may seem to the general public, if not to the 
 Non-inquiry Commission of Inquiry, that the ;;^8,goo, 
 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 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 127 
 
 on the almost inhuman average of ;rioo 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 £100 a year! Education 
 would produce sanitation, and the political Church- 
 men block both. Let the reader note that the 
 ;f 1 1,000 wasted at Loughglynn and the ;fio,ooo 
 donated at Foxford make ovcj' twenty thousand pounds 
 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 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 
 Department. 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 
 PROPERTY 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 committee system to the 
 whole of Ireland. Bishop O'Donnell merely means, 
 in the innocence of his heart, *' to overthrow the 
 ascendency of the classes," just like Mr. Victor Gray- 
 son, 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 priests as the authorised centres of 
 taxpaid benefactions, would 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 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 129 
 
 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 priest and 
 prelate. The denunciation 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. 
 
 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 last 
 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 
 
 P.S. K 
 
130 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 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 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. 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 131 
 
 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 exhorta- 
 tion 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 (jf that day's proceedings. He was delighted 
 to see such a large gathering present, for it showed that ihe people 
 were alive to the tieeds 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 Govern- 
 ment, 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 the 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 
 
 K 2 
 
132 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 that day they had struck a Mow 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., 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 undercultivated 
 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 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 133 
 
 as free as the English and Scotch from the counsels 
 and incitements, fortified by every kind of appeal to 
 cupidity, to sloth, and to superstition, 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 pretensions 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 fisher- 
 men have vanished utterly out of the county since 
 the congested charlatanism began its operations ? 
 But there is another proof which I would have com- 
 mended to the most earnest consideration of the 
 Commission. 
 
 I allude to the growing demand of the leaders and 
 patrons of the congested fiction for the expropria- 
 tion 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 Robes- 
 pierre or the Russian terrorists in place of the 
 milder methods of the Right Hon. Mr. George 
 Wyndham. In this connection 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 last year, the most reverend Bishop 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 135 
 
 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. \Zth, 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 earnestness 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 
 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 ihis 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 redistributio7i 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 ivhole 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 lavo of God, and 
 grievously detrimental to the character of the people. 
 
 Thomas O'Dea. 
 
 What a grim satire upon the inutility of the Con- 
 gested 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 
 
136 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 " compulsion by law which is the only form of com- 
 pulsion 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 Conn aught. 
 
 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 for- 
 bidden by the law of God, and grievously detrimental 
 to the character of the people." This public profes- 
 sion 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 authoritative statement, that the 
 existence of an unexpropriated class of owners and 
 occupiers in Connaught constitutes " a very real 
 temptation to use methods forbidden by the law of 
 God " ! All the requisite land in Ireland " systemati- 
 cally 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 redistri- 
 bution — here indeed is a goal for Christian endeavour 
 in the congested area ! How is it possible 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. 
 Yet the compulsory redistribution of Connaught 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 137 
 
 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" con- 
 stitutes 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 consequences, against all who decline 
 to submit to the organisation. The Connaught Leader 
 of the 3rd August of the current year 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 lo themselves. 
 
138 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 The phrase "to be left to themselves" has no 
 esoteric or unknown meaning for the affiliates of the 
 Congested Districts League. As the Connaught Leader 
 of the 27th July of the current year reported, the parish 
 priest who presided over the branch of the United 
 Irish League at Kilchreest on the 21st 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 malce 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 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 dissemination of the 
 menaces and black lists of the League. A couple of 
 extracts from the Western People of July and August of 
 the current year 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 no 
 joined the League be handed in and read this day month outside the 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 139 
 
 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 treasurer- 
 ship 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 Chris- 
 tianity 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 utteily unable to recog- 
 nise the perpetrators of such sacrilegious intolerance 
 as participants in the same religion and morality. 
 
 To bring home completely to non-Irish readers the 
 full significance 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 current year : — 
 
 Several of the traders present asked that a list should be given to 
 each shopkeeper, so that all would be made aware of who were to be 
 supplied and who were not. 
 
 We must not suppose that this eagerness of the 
 traders present ought to be interpreted as an indica- 
 tion of any excessive cruelty on their part. In most 
 
140 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 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 employed 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 12th June last 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 defendants 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 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 141 
 
 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 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 unendurable 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 fairness, at the head of such a 
 board an ex-chairman of convention of the United 
 Irish League and co-treasurer of the United Irish 
 parliamentary 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 
 
142 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 Commons, and a most distinguished member of the 
 Home Rule party. But the constituencies 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 mer- 
 chants who refused to supply boycotted men. The 
 Connaught Leader of the 29th September, 1906, 
 reports a meeting of the Woodford branch, presided 
 over by a clergyman, at which a member of Parlia- 
 ment 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 21st October, reverend 
 canons, monsignors, and parish priests were chair- 
 man and speakers. The Connaught ^Leader of the 15th 
 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 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 143 
 
 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 expelled 
 on the motion of a clergyman ! At a United 
 Irish League meeting held at Swinford on the loth 
 September, igo6, 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 Boards 
 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 con- 
 ventions 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 receiv- 
 ing 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 resolu- 
 tion, 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 
 
144 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 M'Loughlin, of Baldy, together with his family, for 
 aiding and assisting the Towneymoyle 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 Drum- 
 shambo, a merciless refusal to supply the neces- 
 saries 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 Commission 
 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 
 Kennv 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 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 an37thing 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 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 145 
 
 Ireland the very foundation of its expected 
 supremacy. 
 
 I enter into no criticism of the United Irish League 
 poHcy. It mayor may not be quite right "to redistri- 
 bute by legal compulsion 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 Dis- 
 tricts Board and the Agrarian League. One of the 
 most clerical of these parliamentary 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 Crom- 
 wellian brood," a very suggestive illustration 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 patron- 
 age 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 sup- 
 ported 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 impar- 
 tial lay organisation is in every case substituted for 
 this clerico-revolutionary Board, a sordid and mendi- 
 cant 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, impartial and unsectarian, in some 
 p.s. L 
 
146 PARAGUAY ON SHANNOlsi. 
 
 central Irish administration. The present possessors 
 of such immense powers of corruption and intimida- 
 tion 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 illus- 
 trated 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 
 in Ireland. The most experienced Irish correspon- 
 dents pointed out that the obedience of the cattle 
 burglars to the command of the priestly leaders 
 increases, instead of relieving, the seriousness oi 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 dis- 
 quieting. 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 
 1 2th 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 IV. 
 
 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." 
 
 Alosi 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."" 
 
 L 2 
 
148 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 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' Aluricaha 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 regular clergy, the secular clergy, the convents and 
 monasteries." 
 
 Seamus G' Aluricaha in Londo7i School of Economics 
 Magazine. 
 
 THE ALLIANCE OF THE PRIEST AND THE 
 ANARCHIST. 
 
 "Join us in overthrowing the ascendency 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 Feasant and Irish Ireland, December 14, 1907. 
 
SUMMARY OF LEADING CAUSES OF 
 POVERTY AND DEPOPULATION. 
 
 I SHALL deal in this Fourth 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. 
 
 (i) The first of these leading causes of which I 
 speak is the influence 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 in- 
 creasing 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 anarchism 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 in- 
 variably 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 
 
150 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 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 agitator, must also be 
 recorded, if for no other reason than that they are 
 systematically ignored by all the panacea-mongers 
 whose instrument 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 
 employees 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 un- 
 civilised and insanitary conditions of life, which, com- 
 mencmg 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 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 151 
 
 first class is also afforded by the exaggerated numbers, 
 and consequent expense, already noticed, of the enor- 
 mous Church establishment, not the Established 
 Church so famiHar in the diatribes of political 
 rhetoricians a couple of generations ago, but the far 
 more real burthen 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 absolutely insatiable 
 in its absorption of the wealth of the country on every 
 conceivable and mconceivable 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 mvolved 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 domination, and its ownership — we might 
 almost say its sovereignty — for the lay social classes 
 which have existed for centuries. There are in Ire- 
 land, 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 
 
152 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 popular Church in Ireland has aimed, and continues 
 to aim, at nothing else than the dissemination of 
 agrarian and social unrest until every class has been 
 destroyed or broken which could check or limit the pre- 
 ponderance 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 
 unsettlement by which they have profited, and through 
 which they expect to triumph. 
 
 I shall deal in some detail with these various heads 
 in the subsequent pages. I need hardly add that I 
 never expected the Arranged Commission to pay the 
 slightest attention to such views. Their partisanship 
 has long since 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. 
 
Notes and Illustrations.] 
 
 INSTRUCTIVE FACTS AND AVOWALS, 
 
 " Join us in overthrowing the ascendency 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 mainte- 
 nance 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 the'"e is beyond question a tendency to 
 leave the land. " 
 
 Evidence of Mr. Fletcher, Assistant Secretary to the 
 Department of Agriculture. 
 
154 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 " 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 he caught. . . . The Arran fishermen used to 
 send their fish by steamer to Galway, but often there was no buyer 
 there." 
 
 Evidence of Rev. Mr. Spottswood 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 ' ' fournal des Debats. " 
 
 "The farmers run up long bills with their traders. . . . Such 
 money-lenders are often publicans. . . . The borrower can hardly do 
 kss 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. 
 
AGRARIAN LEGISLATION AND AGITA- 
 TION: HOW THEY IMPOVERISH AND 
 DEPOPULATE. 
 
 THE LAND COURT FARCE THE FARMERS EXPEL THE 
 
 LABOURERS WITNESS - BAITING AGAIN THE 
 
 " TABLET " ON UNDERCULTIVATION A BISHOP's 
 
 PROTEST. 
 
 With regard to that twofold influence of incon- 
 siderate 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 
 
156 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 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 in- 
 dustry and became a habit. Inferior food and 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 legisla- 
 tion of the last quarter of a century in promoting 
 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 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 157 
 
 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 agita- 
 tion, also contributed to stimulate depopulation 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 hair- 
 dresser who derived a comfortable living from the 
 custom of the more respectable inhabitants, in par- 
 ticular the members of the County Club, which was 
 situated net 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. 
 
158 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 I asked him how it was going since the old days, and 
 he rephed that trade was ruined, that he was depen- 
 dent upon his son for a Httle Hving, but that he was 
 sure that as soon as he was under the sod his son 
 would leave Ireland and go to America. The agita- 
 tion 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 
 competitors 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 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 159 
 
 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 repre- 
 sentatives 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 
 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. Commissioner 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 
 
i6o PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 shopkeepers, 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 17th 
 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 miser- 
 able 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 under- 
 cultivated 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 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. i6i 
 
 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 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 every- 
 thing 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 confuse this. And this country 
 looks thus trratio7ially 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 creamerv, as to which the observer's pleasure 
 is mingled with his rei^^ret to find that the country girls, who used to 
 work, are looking on idle zvhile 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. 
 
 p.s. M 
 
i62 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 In this connection there is a strenuous condemnation 
 of the existing system of undercuUivation in an address 
 dehvered 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 uncultivated 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 ; hut 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 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 — providing 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 inter- 
 vals of sowing and reaping. But the Congested Folly 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 163 
 
 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 oj. 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 com- 
 petency 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 indepen- 
 dent 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 
 Commission 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 ot 
 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 Con- 
 gested 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 
 
 M 2 
 
i64 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 down the throat of the witness."^ He was " irrelevant" ; 
 he was " delaying the Commission " ; he was " wan- 
 dering 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 composure, 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. 
 
 * 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 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 Commissioner, 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. Brexnan — Well, I have not my heart and soul entirely in 
 the faith of the Congested Districts Board. . . . The authority should 
 be a representative authority. 
 
Notes and Illustrations.] 
 
 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 custom to go into the courts of justice. 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 state- 
 ments ; 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 supplemented 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. 
 
166 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 The loan-grocer, who allows or compels the improvi- 
 dent farmers to buy on usurious credit, is known in 
 many degraded countries, but the loan-grocer-magi- 
 strates, "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 Hfe, 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 prese7tce on the Bench is an unmiti- 
 gated 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 laiv. 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 ivorked 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. 
 
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 shop- 
 keeper 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 
 
i86 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 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 con- 
 sequences of a stupefying drug entirely unknown to 
 former generations. Taken altogether, the popular 
 wealth consumed 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 depress- 
 ing sorrows are the study of this sympathetic Com- 
 mission. 
 
 I would ask attention for a single consideration. 
 The success 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 inwiediate 
 end of all the pecuniary efnbarrass^yients 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 mendicancy 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 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. ,169 
 
 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 publican s 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 convents that are continually published 
 in the Freetnan's Journal and other organs of edifica- 
 tion, 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 plenishing 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 drunken- 
 ness 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 country district ; and there she is accustomed 
 
170 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 to be honoured for weeks at a time with the visits, 
 which are in themselves benedictions, 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 inter- 
 ference 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 expres- 
 sions 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 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 171 
 
 gravity on the part of the popular clergy in Ireland to 
 bring them to oppose seriously their principal pay- 
 masters, 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," corre- 
 sponds 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 
 existence 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 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 
 
172 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 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 eight- 
 pence or tenpence a pound, was debited to the buyer 
 on credit at 25. dd. and 3s. 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 gom- 
 been 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.* He is 
 
 * Quite recently the well-known General Sir William Butler, 
 speaking before an Irish Catholic association, gave this emphatic 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 173 
 
 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 set 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 considerations 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 seriousness the 
 crimes of perjury, subornation of justice, and degrada- 
 tion of the judgment seat which are bound up with 
 
 testimony to the ravages of the drink habit in Ireland : " What 
 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 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 subscription, the 
 congregation in the drink-seller's shop wasting health and money — 
 that is the conjunction to which Sir William Butler did not allude. 
 
174 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 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 state- 
 ments ; 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 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 the reply, ' That man has been made 
 a magistrate and signs " J. P." after his name.' ' I hope,' his Lord- 
 ship 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 tor 
 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 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 175 
 
 English protectionism in the seventeenth and eigh- 
 teenth centuries.* 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 Congested 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 intoxication 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 
 
 * I was glad to see that the papers pubUshed the evidence of the 
 Catholic clergyman, thirty-seven years a curate in West Gahvay, 
 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 adminis- 
 trative 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 parliamentarians, the main organisation 
 for the systematic attacks upon freedom of culti\ation 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. 
 
176 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 resignation of Sir Horace Plunket, who had made 
 the emancipation of the Irish farmers from the shop- 
 keeping 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 commodi- 
 ties at something like a just price instead of the 
 monstrous exactions of the loan-grocers and com- 
 pany, but the gombeen men, powerful in the organi- 
 sation 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 Plunket's position 
 had been seriously shaken by his extremely moderate 
 criticisms on political churchmen. Though Sir 
 Horace Plunket did not hesitate to say that " unless 
 co-operative credit was developed quickly, the new 
 peasant proprietor was doomed," the generous founder 
 of agricultural organisation 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 agricultural 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 organization 
 which they themselves could create. The result was that the 
 political organization of the country, while nominally represent- 
 ing 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. 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 177 
 
 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.* 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 impregnability of the gombeen citadels in Ireland. 
 
 *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 same road and accepts the suggestions of 
 the same environment. 
 
 P.S. N 
 
THE PEASANT PROPRIETARY NOSTRUM- 
 FREQUENT FAILURE AND DANGERS. 
 
 ANGLO-INDIAN FADDISTS WHERE PEASANT PROPRIETORS 
 
 SUCCEED UNKNOWN IN IRELAND THE COMING 
 
 OF THE JEW THE IRISH-AMERICAN LESSON. 
 
 There are said to be two parties among the pro- 
 moters of peasant proprietorship on the Congestion 
 Board. One party favours the plan because it 
 destroys the classes which are independent of Church- 
 men, 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 Hold- 
 ings " 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 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 179 
 
 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 per- 
 fectly 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 ques- 
 tion. They really believe that when the national land 
 has 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 abhorrence of going 
 forth among strangers and enemies. This has been 
 the condition of many communities in Europe and 
 
 N 2 
 
i8o PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 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 influences 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 corre- 
 sponding with the new desires awakened by the new 
 enlightenment ; where there is no danger whatever 
 attaching to the processes of immigration ; and where, 
 on the contrary, immigrants are welcomed and pro- 
 tected. Couple all this with an increasing desire for 
 less work, better food, more amusement, more inters 
 course 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 lord- 
 ship 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 small holder can cultivate his land with the 
 intensity of market gardening, in the certain know- 
 ledge of a constant demand for whatever he can sell 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. i8i 
 
 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 subsistence, 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 buttermilk and home-brewed 
 ale to all the black tea of Assam. 
 
 How can you make a peasant proprietorout 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 
 
i82 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 horde of semi-mendicants, requiring aid, and en- 
 couraged to require aid, from the pubUc funds 
 of Congested Fiction Boards and similar bodies ; 
 but they can with difficulty become under any 
 circumstances the prosperous population of an 
 agricultural 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 com- 
 munities 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 
 here is the place to remind the reader that during the 
 / past few years more than 20,000 foreign Jews have 
 /'•^ 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 enter- 
 prise and immigration of the foreign Jews, who cer- 
 tainly cannot be blamed for seizing such an opportu- 
 nity. But the fact remains that the Jews form the 
 most formidable body of money-lenders which the 
 world has ever seen, with natural gilts 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 ol that country offer them an unrivalled field 
 for their operations. Their itinerant packmen and 
 
 / 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 183 
 
 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 Commission 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 testi- 
 mony in next page of Notes and Illustrations. 
 
 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 pro- 
 prietorship 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 
 
i84 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 grants and growing markets, where is the likelihood 
 of a contrary impulse amid all the energy-killing 
 influences at home ? Even allowing for the baneful 
 pressure of the Tammany societies and similar pseudo- 
 Irish organisations 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 disqualifi- 
 cation 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 diflicult and monoto- 
 nous 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. 
 
Notes and Illustrations.] 
 
 REVELATIONS 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 connexion the conscientious reader would 
 find the most serious grounds for reflection, and 
 indeed for dismay, in the Report on the Poor Law 
 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 according to the views of the Board 
 and the Commission. A very few extracts may lead 
 the reader to consult the document itself. 
 
i86 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 THE GROWTH OF SECTARIANISM IN IRISH MEDICAL 
 APPOINTMENTS. 
 
 The peasant took his seat upon the throne of Irish Local Govern- 
 ment 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. . . . Everywhere 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 anpvhere 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 unutter- 
 able 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 hkely markets, as in 
 Belgium, Germany, and France, to stimulate and 
 reward the intensive tillage of the small holding ? 
 
" LIBERTY OF TESTATION "—THE 
 DEATHBED GRAB. 
 
 FRENCH LAW PROTECTS THE DEATHBED NO PROTEC- 
 TION 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 manufacturing 
 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 know- 
 ledge 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 proprietary, 
 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 
 
i88 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 community to another that they have quite over- 
 looked 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 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 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 189 
 
 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 discourage- 
 ment 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 deathbed. I have the case of a 
 man dying worth ;^2,ooo. 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 ;f 1,500. Another man died worth 
 ;f6oo, and not a single penny came to his industrious 
 relatives. Another man willed away ^^4,500, 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 
 
igo PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 ;f 600 which 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 circum- 
 stances, she had been got to will only £^0 to her heir 
 and ;rio,ooo 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 death- 
 bed 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 industrious heirs from 
 a land cursed by the Dead Hand to a degree unknown 
 since the Dark Ages. It is in vain that intelligent 
 legislators 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 extortioUy 
 especially when the class war promises to transfer 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. igi 
 
 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. Con- 
 versely^ 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 con- 
 siderations 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 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 transferring 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. 
 
192 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 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 pauperi- 
 sation 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 v/hich, 
 however sanctified, are not industrial. 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 pre- 
 ponderant 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 
 mort2:ao^e. 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 deri- 
 vatives, of the venerable legacy hunters ? From end 
 to end of the country what a future your Peasant 
 Proprietary Act, destitute of the most essential 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 193 
 
 peasant proprietary protection, is preparing for 
 Ireland ! 
 
 If the Commissioners desired to go to the bottom 
 of the 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 con- 
 tested 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 comparison 
 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 ;f 1,000, ;f5,ooo, ;f 10,000, are taken out of in- 
 dustrial 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 for- 
 malities of probate. A lady was dying who possessed 
 
 P.S. o 
 
194 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 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 Irish- 
 man himself, used all his influence against the 
 realisation of the scheme, and the money was rescued 
 for the family of the deceased. 
 
Notes and Illustrations.] 
 
 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 intelHgence of the people. . . . The money 
 now spent on intermediate education should be spent on 
 improving the character of the schools, upon making them 
 really educational 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 declasses, 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 arc not more honest. They 
 are under Propaganda, and must use Irish money for 
 Propaganda objects. What did they do with the 
 
 O 2 
 
196 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 endowments of Newman's Catholic University ? As 
 Mr. P. J. Kenny stated in a public lecture in the 
 rotunda : — 
 
 A sum estimated at ;^2 50,000 to /"soOjOOo was subscribed 
 by the Catholic laity in very hard times to endow the Catholic 
 University, and the onlv 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 ^T 160,000 a 
 year for the industrial schools, and the Government 
 Inspectors, from Sir Rowland Blennerhasset to 
 Dr. Fagan, tell 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 almost exclusively fed on bread and 
 cocoa. 
 
 The bathing arrangements were ver}' 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. 
 
PAUPERISING DEFECTS OF CHARACTER 
 PRODUCED BY THE DOMINANT SYSTEM. 
 
 There are defects of character which make indivi- 
 dual 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 
 
igS PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 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 the Celtic race to explain the wholesale and 
 enduring failure of Ireland. Millions of the descen- 
 dants 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 Domi- 
 nions of Canada and New Zealand and the Common- 
 wealth 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 
 ph5^sical, 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 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 199 
 
 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 backward- 
 ness 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 explanation of the state of a whole people, to 
 avoid making what can be called overlapping state- 
 ments, especially in a brief treatise instead of a 
 library of adequate volumes. There are few depart- 
 ments of the subject which are not touched elsewhere 
 by other considerations, 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 conferred on favourite sections ol 
 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 
 Interests by Laymen, and by none others whomsoever. 
 In the second place, let me avow my absolute convic- 
 tion, based on comparison of the conditions of 
 Ireland and many other countries during thirty years, 
 that it is the moral and mental depression and para- 
 lysis of the inhabitants, the lack of energy and of the 
 
200 PARAGUAY ON vSHANNON. 
 
 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 population 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 infliience 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 forbidden 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 expulsion of its employing classes ; 
 that a policy of levelling kills enterprise and promotes 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 201 
 
 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 distribution 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 ? 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 
 
202 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 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 
 cleanliness. 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 ! 
 
 * 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 : — 
 
 3Ir. 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, CM., a paid lecturer under the Agriculture 
 
 Department — 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 ! " 
 
Notes and Illustrations.] 
 
 THE SPECIAL DANGER OF CONVENT 
 FACTORIES* 
 
 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 apparitionof 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, subsidized by the Congested 
 Board, to turn their girl-pupils into workwomen 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 em- 
 ployers. 
 
 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. . . . The money which the nuns spend on 
 
204 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 buildings is in great part the earnings of 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. . . . lam 
 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 excep- 
 tion, 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. Turinaz, 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 workwo7nen contribute largely to the support 
 of the Conventual Superiors. 
 
 " It is almost impossible to prevent the nuns from acting un- 
 justly towards persons in their employ for the sake of sending to 
 the authorities of the Mother House — who demand it — an 
 increasing annual contribution." 
 
 7'he Bishop of Grenoble. 
 
 The Congested Districts Board patronizes and 
 subsidizes 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. 
 
HOME AND CONVENT SWEATING. 
 
 HOME SWEATING AND TUBERCULOSIS — SERF - LIKE 
 
 CONVENT LABOUR KILLING LAY INDUSTRIES 
 
 LACEMAKING SLAVEDRIVERS 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 impressed 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 impoverish- 
 ment 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 
 
2o6 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 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." * 
 
 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 mul- 
 titudes of seats of such home industry. 
 
 Intimately connected also with these home industries 
 
 * It is no new discovery tliat 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 correspon- 
 dent of the paper, writing from New Zealand to endorse the recom- 
 mendations of the article against this form of employment, added 
 the information : — " Here in New Zealand home work is absolutely 
 prohibited by law. All work must be executed ia the shop or 
 factory and under proper sanitary conditions." 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 207 
 
 — 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 disestablishment, 
 land legislation, prairie rent leagues, clerico-socialist 
 congestion boards, and the rest of the blessings of 
 liberal progress in Ireland. In the year 1864 Ireland 
 could still show the lowest death-rate from tuber- 
 culosis 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 prac- 
 tical 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 kmd or the 
 benefits of a spiritual kind which may attend the 
 vast number of establishments m 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 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, tt is the universal experience of civilised nations 
 
2o8 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 that lay prosperity is absolutely incompatible with the 
 predominance^ half spiritual^ wholly mercantile, of such 
 institutions, especially when established on any con- 
 siderable scale at the expense of lay communities. 
 
 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 ot 
 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 pre- 
 ference 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 dress- 
 maker 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 vvas held by 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 209 
 
 their employers to be only a useful training for their 
 future occupations. The clergymen of the denomina- 
 tion 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 in- 
 difference to religion which has followed. If the 
 Commissioners had seen, as I have seen, a poor 
 French blanchisseuse clenching her fist and screaming 
 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, bull 
 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 com- 
 placency 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 connexion, it is essential to know what 
 statistics can be obtained as to the eyesight of 
 poor lay girls in lacemaking establishments, and 
 
 p.s. P 
 
2IO PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 how many of them become unfitted for this employ- 
 ment, 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 lace- 
 making 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 js. 6d., and in some cases to los., 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 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 211 
 
 infinitely higher than the artistic drudgery of the poor 
 employees of Irish convents. 
 
 The Nottinf^ham lace operative is a mechanic. His work possesses 
 no individuahty. He learns nothing of design, no delicate handiwork, 
 none of the variety of stitches or their arrangement for effects of light. 
 His is a mere textile trade. His earnings are not i^. per day, but 
 IS. 2d. per hour. The women who are engaged in this mechanical 
 work receive lod. to i^. 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 <)^d. English money. The average of the hundred 
 highest is \'2^ 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 refer- 
 ence 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 employ- 
 ment, dare not roughen her hands with any kind ot 
 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 considera- 
 tions should be taken into account. The lace-workers, at least the 
 good lace-workers, do not engage in house-work. The rough work of 
 
 P 2 
 
212 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 the house or the farm spoils the hand for the exceedingly fine needle- 
 work 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 ihey are more help- 
 less than the other girls for the emigrant's life. Physical infirmi- 
 ties, such as dimness of vision, follow from sedentary life and the 
 close application required in lace-making. 
 
 Of course, " lacemaking does not stop emigration." 
 As a rule every one of those poor girls — stooping 
 over that ceaseless needlework in all those lace-making 
 convents which dare to brag of their " encourage- 
 ment of Irish industry " — is supported by the dream 
 of a day when years of saving or the gift of a rela- 
 tive may enable her to seek and find a more human 
 life thousands of miles from pious Ireland. Un- 
 happily, 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, 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 after- 
 wards 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 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 213 
 
 enough to hypnotise an arranged commissioner to 
 any required degree of moral coma.* 
 
 * 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 institutions 
 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 task- 
 work in vogue, are, or profess to be, mfluenced by moral and religious 
 considerations above all. In the case of the Catholic convent 
 laundries, the 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 per- 
 fection. 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 as 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 ;^3,700 for the laundry authorities ! Each 
 girl made, on an average, £'^'] a year, and had for her reward a 
 penance cell, in which she was locked at night, and the recreation of 
 "prayer*" ! The revelations as to the Good Shepherd Convents in 
 
214 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 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. 
 
Notes and Illustrations.] 
 
 THE BOARD AND LABOUR SWEATING. 
 
 LACE-MAKING GIRL SLAVES. 
 
 The subsidies of the Board represent a weekly wage 
 of less than four shillings to the work girls. Thus : — 
 
 " In fifty-three classes established by the Board for the pro- 
 duction of lace and embroidery, the total earnings paid to 
 workers amounted to ^21,580 during the year. . . . The 
 number of workers among whom this ^^'2 1,580 was distributed 
 would be about 2,000." 
 
 Evidence of Mr. W.J. D. Walker, Industrial Inspector 
 to Congested Board. 
 
 Dividing ^,'2 1,580 among 2,000 workers, we get 
 about £\o annual salary, and ;f 10 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 Idy I'ev. Canon Su'ceny, P.P. 
 
 " In the Donegal carpet factories started by the Board the 
 average earnings of the girls employed do not pass 5^, or ds. 
 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 
 
2i6 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 Board Inspector as to how the girl lace-makers are 
 driven to work ; and the medical evidence elsewhere 
 is overwhelming. The Commission was led care- 
 fully to avoid examining work girls and medical men. 
 
 " If a number of trained workers can earn Ss. or 9^'. a week, 
 then the uncles and aunts who criticize the thing, say, " If 
 Mary Ann so-and-so can earn so much, then why cannot some 
 other girl earn it ? " T/ien the parents get at the 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 ancBfnic 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, igo4. 
 
 " 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 inspection 
 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 tivelve 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. 
 
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 organisation. . . . 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., 2.2nd 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. fo^- Donegal, at 
 great Ribbon demonstration at Letterkenny, as above. 
 
2i8 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON, 
 
 AGRARIAN AGITATION AND CLERICAL LANDGRABBING. 
 
 " Now the cattle-raiders are bringing down the value of the 
 mortgaged properties, and the mansions are turning into monasteries 
 for a song, while everybody 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 Irishvien," 
 
 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 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. // was 22,000 
 families which zvere so housed ; and the nu?nher of families of more 
 than four persons inhabiting a single room exceeded 4,000. 
 
 It is matter of just complaint that the Dublin Corporation, when 
 clearing absolutely dangerous slum areas, make no adequate pro- 
 vision for rehousing, though lavishly compensating the slum land- 
 lords — 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 per- 
 suaded, the great majority of the Irish Catholic 
 clergy. But often in the history of the Church a 
 less evangelical section oi 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 con- 
 sequences 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 farther 
 back than the end of the eighteenth century, when 
 
220 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 Pitt and Castlereagh, actuated by motives of what 
 appeared to them stringent expediency, took steps to 
 hire the support of the Irish CathoUc bishops and 
 priests for the destruction of the Irish ParHament, 
 they did far more than obtain an indispensable body 
 of mercenary auxiliaries. They founded the modern 
 tradition of the connexion 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 influ- 
 ence. " 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 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 representation 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 ascendency. 
 
 The British Government surrendered 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 out- 
 pourings of nationality warranted harmless. It never 
 condescended 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 Irivshmen than sleek, constitutional, 
 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 facili- 
 tated. They could make Government legislation their 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 221 
 
 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 King ? 
 
 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 enterprise — 
 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 incep- 
 tion 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 crea- 
 tures within its special domain — were always found, 
 no matter with what benevolence they were 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 
 
222 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 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 ol 
 the gentry. I only note that the more the Con- 
 gested Board professed to work for the amehoration 
 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 : therefore 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 out- 
 side 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 revela- 
 tion. 
 
 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 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 223 
 
 branch of the Land League, and their object was to 
 force their chosen victim to surrender some valuable 
 lands. With this object a boycott had been declared 
 against him and his servants ; and as this proved 
 insufficient against his considerable wealth and per- 
 severance, 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 con- 
 tinued 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 clergymen 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 Associated 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 news in England, and 
 especially in the town in which the victim had com- 
 mercial 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, promising 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 
 
224 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 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 per- 
 sistent 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 dis- 
 tinguished clergyman turned on me, and said with 
 surprise more than anger, *' And if there were people 
 killed, were they not landlords 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 Congested 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, 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 225 
 
 the National President of the Ancient Order himself, 
 have been welcomed, applauded, and covered with 
 the benedictions of Board bishop and Board clergy- 
 men. The platform of the Ribbon meeting has 
 included by the dozen the most influential deans, 
 canons, and monsignori, who dispense the doles and 
 subsidies, paid by the taxpayer, but distributed by the 
 avowed missionaries of the redistribution 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 maintenance 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 Commissioners who are 
 ready to lighten them of half their incomes in the 
 interests of peace and confiscation. Judicious inter- 
 vals of comparative repose may enable the victims 
 
 P.s. Q 
 
226 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 to meditate without interruption 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 concluding 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 perverted 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 destruc- 
 tion 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. 
 
 I make no charge against the religious priesthood 
 of Ireland, be their numbers hundreds or thousands. 
 But the religious priesthood has been a diminishing 
 factor in the policy of the Irish clergy ever since the 
 papal diplomacy or statecraft inflicted upon their 
 Church the most ofl'ensive and insulting depreciation 
 which could be oftered to a national Church, namely 
 the abolition of its canonical liberties and its subjec- 
 tion, like a mere settlement of negroes or coolies, to 
 the Foreign Missions department at Rome. Domi- 
 neering masters though they are to their lay country- 
 men, even the political priests possess no such sacer- 
 dotal rights as the clergy in the canonical Churches 
 of Catholic Christendom. They are governed by the 
 motu proprio of a Vatican committee. Laws and 
 canons of the ancient Irish Church stand abolished, 
 except so far as they may be incidentally applied at 
 the discretion of the Cardinal Prefect of Propaganda ; 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 227 
 
 and their application to-day has no binding force for 
 to-morrow. 
 
 In the language of such an authorised work as the 
 Right Rev. Monsignor Goddard's "Manual of Ecclesi- 
 astical Law in Practice in Missionary countries," not 
 even bishops in such semi-civilised districts have their 
 ordinary powers ; and priests have none at all which 
 are protected by any established right whatever. 
 ^^ Ireland is a missionary country The appoint- 
 ments of bishops are still called elections. Bnt there 
 is no such thing in a missionary country as a real election 
 of a bishops and consequently the method of election 
 as laid down in canon law may be regarded as 
 obsolete. . . . In missionary countries neither clergy 
 nor laity have any means of eiiforcing any natural rights 
 except by appeal to the Sacred Congregation of Propa- 
 ganda." The religious priests in Ireland can thus have 
 no power to interfere against the intrigues, the usur- 
 pations, the domination, of the political priesthood, 
 who are the agents in missionary countries of an 
 occult power at the Vatican that is above the canon 
 law. This iron system, which leaves the tonsured 
 man in Ireland no more rights than a spiritual puppet, 
 was introduced by a political power which is not 
 Irish. It has its legitimate application in countries 
 which are really missionary, in lands of unchristened 
 savages and persecuting heathen, where the Church 
 militant must live, as it were, under perpetual martial 
 law. The fiction, the offensive fiction, by which Ire- 
 land — which was converted to Christianity fifteen 
 centuries ago, which was a famous national Church 
 twelve centuries ago — is degraded to the level of 
 such regions, was a sordid political manceuvre from 
 the outset. It continues to be a political manoeuvre 
 and a national curse to-day. 
 
 We need not be surprised, accordingly, if the poli- 
 tical organisation which has been thrust upon the 
 ancient Church of Patrick and Columba works for 
 
 Q 2 
 
228 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 power, and temporal aggrandisement, and greed, 
 and monopoly, and uncharitableness, and temporal 
 domination over Catholics and non-Catholics. What- 
 ever reform, whatever instalment of rights, whatever 
 promise of prosperity and enlightenment, comes to 
 Ireland under such a system, is at once confiscated 
 by the political Churchmen for the objects of their 
 insatiable ambition, an ambition which is at the 
 same time an absolute and unresisting servitude to 
 the men who make, and who can unmake them, 
 without check, right, or privilege beyond the uiotu 
 propvio of a camarilla of foreign clerics on the Tiber, 
 bent on administering Ireland as they administer 
 Mongolia and Zanzibar. 
 
 As a Catholic I can recognise the expediency of 
 having such prompt and irresistible machinery, even 
 though capable of unnecessary martinetism and 
 injustice in its proper sphere of Religious Jurisdiction, 
 which is the barbarous and heathen regions where 
 the jurisdiction of the Propaganda applies. But the 
 interference of the Churchman in civil life and ad- 
 ministration becomes singularly incongruous and 
 intolerable when, in addition to the ordinary incom- 
 patibilities of the Spiritual and Temporal domains, 
 we have a sort of Spiritual coercion, in comparison 
 with which the usual restraints of the sacerdotal 
 vocation are unfettered liberty and joyous emancipa- 
 tion. To see Propaganda Clerics, who have not 
 even a canonical right which they can call their own, 
 yet pretending to exercise the privileges of lay citizens, 
 and to parody the motions of free judgments, must be 
 a constant subject of painful meditation and a con- 
 stant provocation to just suspicions. From the 
 Cardinal Archbishop to the mendicant friar, whatever 
 their qualifications for religious virtue, they do not 
 possess one qualification for free citizenship. Mr. 
 Birrell runs to consult the Maynooth Episcopate ! 
 He might as well have imported a phonographic 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 229 
 
 record from the secretariate of the College of 
 Propaganda. 
 
 The political Churchmen merely receive their orders; 
 sometimes they share the spoil. Rulers, but real 
 serfs, the}' 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 kingdom 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 
 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 ascendency 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 organisation of clerico-Ribbon lazzaroni.* 
 
 * The "congested districts" are organised under "parish com- 
 mittees/' 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 Com- 
 mission, and the one burden of their whine is " More public money 
 for the parish committee." The able author of " Economics for 
 Irishmen," himself 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 : " ' ]\Iore money ! ' was the 
 cry of every priest, . . . and always for the ' parish committee 
 
230 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 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 extenuation 
 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 interference 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 intimidation. This " Rev. Father President" of the 
 Intimidation Club is also naturally the Chairman of the Parish Com- 
 mittee which distributes the public money of the Board among the 
 rabble of the Ribbon lodges. 
 
Notes and Illustrations.] 
 
 GOVERNMENT PLACES FOR THE 
 CLERICOJACOBIN PRESS, 
 
 THE " freeman's JOURNAL " THE LADDER TO 
 OFFICE. 
 
 I AM indebted to the rivalry between Irish parties 
 for the following pithy exposition 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 Freejitan, 
 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 
 leaderwriters 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, leaderwriter, Freeman s yoiirnal, appointed 
 County Court Judge of Limerick at ^^1,400 per annum. 
 
 " P. J, Kelly, chief leaderwriter of the Belfast Morning Neivs 
 {Freeman's JournaU Belfast Edition), appointed Removable 
 INIagistrate at ^^Soo per annum. 
 
232 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 "John George MacSweeney, Editor of the Weekly Freeman, 
 appointed Local Government Board Inspector at ;^8oo per 
 annum. 
 
 " Maurice Cosgrove, chief leaderwriter Evening Telegraph, 
 appointed Temporary Local Government Board Inspector at 
 three guineas per day and travelling and maintenance expenses. 
 
 " Matthias MacDonnell Bodkin, chief leaderwriter of the 
 Freeman s Journal, appointed County Court Judge of Clare 
 at £\,ifOO per annum." — Sinn Fein, xdth October, 1907. 
 
 It is interesting to note that Mr. MacDonnell 
 Bodkin, chief leaderwriter of the Freeman^ was only 
 sworn in as County Court Judge in the beginning of 
 October last, being a speaking proof of the admiration 
 of his Majesty's advisers for the Ribbon campaign of 
 the clerico-Jacobin journal against the remaining 
 rights of owners of property in Ireland. It should 
 not be forgotten, perhaps, that Mr. T. M. Healy, M.P., 
 as already mentioned, has given the name of the 
 Bishop of the Board as former Chairman of the 
 Shareholders' Committee of this same Freeman. So 
 endearing are the ties which unite the Ancient Order 
 of Hibernians, the Congested Board, the Chief Secre- 
 tary's office, and the functions of Freeman justice in 
 the County Clare ! 
 
 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 Con- 
 gested Board which they have dominated since i&^5 ; 
 (3) the Congested Board expended some ;f5po,ooo of 
 public money on Mr. John Dillon's pauper constitu- 
 ency in East Mayo ; (4) Mr. John Dillon is the 
 clerical standard-bearer for Sectarian Education and 
 Redistribution of Property. Good business ! 
 
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 Hibernians 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 ail pretence that the Ribbo?i society did not 
 become, whatever 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 Parliamentary League, including the 
 destruction of the landowning gentry. In Ireland, as 
 
234 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 will be seen later, it is patronised by the most 
 influential 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. 
 
 What is remarkable in the highest degree is the 
 fact that, while the Ribbon order basks in the 
 benedictions of Irish Churchmen, from archbishops to 
 curates, in Scotland — only a dozen miles apart — the 
 same order is under the heaviest curse of the Church. 
 I am informed that the reason of this astounding 
 difference in the ecclesiastical treatment of one and 
 the same organisation is simply due to the fact that 
 the Catholic bishops in Scotland have no use for an 
 ultra-revolutionary society which welcomes Mr. 
 O' Donovan Rossa and demands the extirpation of 
 landlords. The Catholic bishops in Scotland prefer 
 to stand well with the gentry, whom they certainly 
 cannot hope to treat as the Irish gentry have been 
 treated. Still it is scarcely complimentary to Bishop 
 O'Donnell, of the Congested Districts Board and 
 Commission, to have his devoted and enthusiastic 
 Ribbonmen simply declared to be excommunicated per- 
 sons in Glasgow, while they are applauded and blessed 
 by prelates and priests in Letterkenny and Raphoe. 
 
 The grim fact is, however, undeniable. I take the 
 following extract from the Parliamentary League's 
 well-known organ, the Freeman's Journal, of the 
 24th August last, which gives voice to the surprise of 
 the redoubtable order at this differential treatment : — 
 
 THE HIERARCHY AND THE ANCIENT ORDER 
 OF HIBERNIANS. 
 
 CATHOLICS REFUSED THE SACRAMENTS. 
 
 (From our own Correspondent.) 
 
 Glasgo7V, Wednesday. 
 The strained feeling brought about by the recent action of 
 the Scotch hierarchy towards the Ancient Order of Hibernians 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 235 
 
 Society continues to grow stronger. That a loud outcry has 
 not been made speaks volumes for the endurance and strength 
 of faith of the Irishmen of Scotland. Irish priests in Scotland 
 — of whom there is a large number — -feel keenly in the matter. 
 They come here to minister in the Scotch Mission because 
 sufficient Scotch priests cannot be found to attend to the spiritual 
 wants of the largely increasing Irish Catholic population, to 
 whom is entirely due the spread of Catholicity in Scotland. And 
 7iotv they have to reftise the sacrame?its to a large body of men 
 in every parish, men who were in very many cases the props and 
 hard workers of the Church. Little wonder is it that the banning 
 of a society purely Catholic and Irish has provoked angry and 
 wounded feelings all over the country, as branches or divisions 
 are in existence in almost every town and village. 
 
 It must certainly be said that it all looks un- 
 commonly fishy. For the Ancient Order of Hiber- 
 nians to become so thoroughly damnable as soon 
 as they cross the strip of water between Ireland and 
 Scotland, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that 
 the worthy Ribbonmen cannot really be very much 
 better than they should be even on the Hibernian side 
 of the Mull of Galloway. At all events there is 
 somewhere something to bear in mind for the further 
 consideration of the relations between the Ribbon- 
 men, the Parliamentarian League, and those political 
 bishops and priests who are the connecting link, as 
 well as the vSupreme authority, of the oath-bound 
 secret society, the cattle-driving parliamentarian, and 
 the royal eleemosynary board for distributing millions 
 of the public moneys to the " parish committees " of 
 half the kingdom. 
 
 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 com^nittees the priests can condtict the stream of 
 benefactions exactly in the directions which approve them- 
 selves to the conscience and judgment of the distributing 
 
236 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 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 representatives 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., just a year ago, first 
 had the courage to proclaim that the majority of the 
 Irish party were under the despotism of secret con- 
 spirators, of an unknown secret ring, " a secret 
 Ribbon lodge that dictates their policy and their 
 fate." On the 22nd June of the present year 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 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 237 
 
 the connection between the Drink Interest and the 
 PoHtical Priesthood will not be contradicted by 
 the warm relations between the priests and the 
 Ribbon publicans. We shall shortly see the splendour 
 of the reception 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 councils 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 organisation, 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 be 
 apparent to everyone. 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, I\Ir. Devlin has good reasons for looking upon himself 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 con- 
 fronted with a graver danger than the existence of such a state of 
 things. 
 
238 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 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 17th 
 August last. 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 
 ]\Ir. 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 revolu- 
 tionary situation created by the Congested Districts 
 Board and its supporters, it is necessary to realise 
 the position of this Ribbon President, dominating the 
 parliamentary party — of which the Congested Board 
 Bishop is the treasurer — and identifying himself with 
 the strike committee in one of the most lawless out- 
 bursts 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 plat- 
 forms, of the Ribbon Bishop. But he was also the 
 colleague of Mr. Victor Grayson, M.P., in the Belfast 
 strike. 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 239 
 
 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, de- 
 nounced the most just and moderate employment of 
 military protection to defend peaceful life and pro- 
 perty at Belfast, 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 contemplating in 
 the social constitution of the country, will result, as 
 the Jesuits say, ad majorem Dei gloriani. 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 Oro;ani- 
 sation is the negation of Civilised Society. It is the 
 pretorian guard of the Congested Districts Board, of 
 which the Arranged Commission is the echo and the 
 tool. 
 
 In Donegal, the premier congested county, 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 Letterkenny meeting Mr. Devlin and the 
 Ancient Hibernian Order were received with the 
 greatest enthusiasm. Priest and layman combined to 
 publish their praise. The priest in the chair declared 
 that "this magnificent demonstration was thoroughly 
 representative of every parish and every townland in 
 Donegal." Another priest moved the resolution 
 
240 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 " tendering a hundred thousand welcomes to Brother 
 Joseph DevHn 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 Freenians 
 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^ splendid meeting of the people of old 
 Tyrcofinell in the cathedral town of the illustrious Bishop 
 whose name and services would ever be remembered 
 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 indicated the range 
 of the campaign.* Fresh from his work in Belfast, 
 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 
 
 * 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 Freeman report : — "A monster 
 demonstration was held in Cookstown yesterday, over 6,000 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." 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON 241 
 
 the leadership of the Bishop and priests of the Con- 
 gested Districts Board outside the cathedral of Letter- 
 kenny 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 
 Letterkenny, 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 last — a couple of instances, merely to 
 illustrate the closeness of the ties which unite the 
 Bishop of the Congested Board to his faithful Ribbon- 
 men. I now quote enough to permit the reader to 
 appreciate and judge clearly and distinctly the signifi- 
 cant 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 organisa- 
 tion 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 Tyiconnell, took place in Leiieiktnny. Ihe occa- 
 sion was one of remarkable and exceptional interest: lemark- 
 able because, in numbers, it far and away transcended nearly 
 every previous assemblage ; and exceptional because the 
 P.S. R 
 
 i . 
 
242 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 demons traf ion of the unity and determination of the Ancient 
 Order of Hiberiiians, in support of the Irish party, gave to it 
 a special significance. 
 
 Amongst tlie districts represented were — Ballyshannon, Carn- 
 donagh, Moville, Fahan, Inch, Glenties, Castlefinn, Burtonport, 
 Rossgull, Buncrana, Bundoran, Killybegs, Donegal, Glenswilly, 
 etc. The Feis took place in the Bishop's Field, where a plat- 
 form 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 clergymen present were — Right Rev. Dr. 
 M' Glynn, Siranorlar ; the Very Rev, Dean M'Nulty, Patter- 
 son, New Jersey ; the Rev. 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.,^/afy^r<?f/^ College; Very Rev. Dr. Maguire, 
 President St. Eunans 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, 
 CO., 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, Mount- 
 charles; 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 pro- 
 position of Mr. Michael Dunnion, County President of Ancient 
 Order of Hibernians, seconded by Mr. John Sweeny, of Burton- 
 port, the chair was taken amidst loud cheers by the Rev. James 
 C. Cannon, C.C, Letterkenny. 
 
 Freemaris Journal, z^rd 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 excommunicate for its 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 243 
 
 evil life and policy.* 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 demonstration, 
 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'Donnell's pas- 
 toral 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 con- 
 gratulates his audience on the "great growth" of 
 Ribbonism during recent years in the premier country 
 of the Congested Districts Board. This entirely cor- 
 responds with what the author of " Economics for Irish- 
 men " has testified as to the distribution of the public 
 money by the Board among the favourites of clergy- 
 men, who, as we see from the foregoing enumeration, 
 are supporters of the Ribbon organisation from one 
 
 -•'• 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 Commission, 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 whic 
 might occupy such a pen as wrote the " Lettres Provinciales." 
 
 R 2 
 
244 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 end of Donegal to the other. In the second place, we 
 have an emphatic invitation from this ex-member of 
 Parliament, urgingthe 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 represen- 
 tative welcomes so warmly. But it is impossible to 
 avoid the conclusion that Raphoe Ribbonism and 
 political impartiality have nothing in common, and 
 that the memis 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, forego giving expression to his con- 
 gratulations 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 argu- 
 ment, but only to force, was it not time that they should call 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 245 
 
 on the mill LOJis of their brethren of the Ancient Order in some 
 favoured land to aid atid assist them in their fight by whatever 
 means and methods they might think fit 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 unknoxvn poiver, not behind, but with, the 
 United Irish League, and their object, each pulling one oar, 
 acting under their motto of perfect unity, h^ 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 Ribbon organisation from the semi-sociaHst 
 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 excommu- 
 nicated 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 Scot- 
 land. 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 mem- 
 bers 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 
 
246 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 the preponderance of the whole Ribbon conspiracy in 
 the direction of Irish poHcy 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. [ohii Redmond, M.P., 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." 
 
 Fcv. Father McKinley, 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 ? 
 
Notes and Illustrations.] 
 
 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 15th 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 ot 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 Congested 
 Board and its parish committees, headed by the Bishop of the Board'' s oivn Vicar 
 General, Right Rev. Monsignor McGlynn. A letter of sympathy and adhesion came 
 from the Rev. Father Cannon, the Chairman of the Bishop's Ribbon Demonstration 
 at the Lettei-kenny Congested Cathedral, to welcome the Ribbon President, Mr. 
 Devlin, M. P., as related in a preceding chapter. 
 
 PRIESTS OF THE BOARD AND DIRECTORY. 
 
 Right Rev. Monsignor McGlynn, Vicar General, Donegal. 
 Very Rev. Canon McFadden, Donegal. 
 Very Rev. Dr. Maguire, D. D., Donegal. 
 Very Rev. Canon Quinn, Vicar Forane, Annagh. 
 Rev. Father McDonnell, East Mayo. 
 Rev. Father Lowry, Down. 
 Rev. Father McCartan, Antrim. 
 Rev. Father Eagleton, Galway. 
 Rev. Father Flynn, Leilrim. 
 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 McCartan, appropriately proposed Mr. John Redmond as 
 President. League President John Redmond appropriately proposed Ribbon 
 President Devlin as General Secretary, or supreme organiser ; and the priests 
 
248 
 
 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON, 
 
 unanimmacy elected the exalted candidates. The Bishop of the Board's own 
 Vicar General, Monsignor McGlynn, was unanimously co-opted a national direcior 
 along with John Dillon, Stephen Gwynn and other amateurs of the hazel. The 
 Bishop of the Board's own Canon McFadden 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 Piiesthood 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 ;^7,8oo fur distribution in the 
 parishes of East Mayci by the priests who elect Mr. John Dillon to represent them 
 in Parliament and at Dublin Castle ! 
 
PART VI. 
 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 recommending 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 pensioning 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 
 
250 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 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-gvazing 
 movement is, i7i reality, an anti-work movement — a move- 
 ment/or a dijfusion of landlordism, in which the labourer 
 is worse than before, under a stupider master, less 
 capable in capital and in knowledge to make employ- 
 ment pay. The old landlord employed somebody, as a 
 necessity of his position ; the new Ofie employs nobody, 
 as a necessity of his unfitness. The land becomes 
 less 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 emi- 
 gration 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 pro- 
 ducing 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 send- 
 ing over a portion of their earnings. T/ie more children in A inerica 
 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 themy 
 
TYPES OF THE ARRANGED COMMISSION. 
 
 STILL THE DARK AGES CLERICAL MENTALITY LORD 
 
 DUDLEY AS JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU AN ELEC- 
 TIONEERING COMMISSIONER 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 war-cry of the Bishop of the 
 Board to the United League, " Join us in overthrow- 
 ing the ascendency 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 merchan- 
 dise, 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 meantime, and until this revolution had been 
 accomplished, the holy men on-the-make were elo- 
 quent 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 
 
252 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 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 shrewd- 
 ness 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 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 with- 
 out 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 con- 
 demnation 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 raj^ ! but he 
 is so delightfully 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 gra\-ely 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 under- 
 stands any other supremacy. He cares nothing for 
 inconsequences. He is frantic against landlords 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 253 
 
 " 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 sixpence for local labour. When the good Lord 
 created the universe, He made men, devils, and land- 
 lords, the latter the worst of all. This is the special 
 representative of Board agriculture ! 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 philan- 
 thropy 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, hewill admit that there are num- 
 bers 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 
 sound on the anti-landlord platform, he was, is, and 
 must always be the right man in the right place as 
 
254 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 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 oppor- 
 tunities 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. But I cannot avoid 
 adding a few words upon a couple of other gentlemen 
 who have been as artistically selected to sound the 
 view-halloo for hunting down the Intended victims. 
 
 LORD JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU. 
 
 There is the benevolent and sympathetic Chairman 
 of the Commission, the ex-Lord-Lieutenant, who was 
 always so carefully surrounded by the most affectionate 
 attentions of the Clerical Rings of Dublin Castle, who 
 had his statistics so thoughtfully prepared for him, 
 whose conversion to what the priests call " Home 
 Rule " was believed to be an accomplished fact in 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 255 
 
 petto. The extent to which Lord Dudley, in spite of 
 his natural shrewdness, profited by this training 
 was everywhere manifest in the proceedings of the 
 Commission. Lord Dudley generally knew where to 
 stop undesirable inquiry. Sometimes he rose to 
 heights which Father O'Hara or Mr. Conor O'Kelly 
 would not disdain. I do not think it would be easy to 
 surpass the specimen of Lord Dudley's bias, already 
 cited by me from report in the Freeman's Journal of the 
 sittings of the Commission in Connemara. A Galway 
 landowner, a lady, appeared before the Commission, 
 in order to protest against the cooked statistics which 
 the officials of the League-ridden Boards and Unions 
 make ready for such occasions. Lord Dudley, as 
 Chairman, devoted himself to the task of correcting the 
 witness for her attitude of aloofness from the higher 
 altruism which bids the have-nots take from the haves. 
 Lord Jean Jacques Rousseau could not be more 
 unctuously munificent at other people's expense. 
 I copy again the League organ's report : — 
 
 Mrs, Blake, of Renvyle, was examined, and tendered a 
 number of figures to show that the officially-supplied list of 
 non-resident graziers was incorrect. 
 
 The Chairman — What is this all to prove ? — That the 
 information given in by the Clerk of the Union is not accurate as 
 showing the acreage held by the graziers whom it is proposed to 
 deprive of their holdings. 
 
 You have a good deal of untenanted land in your possession ? 
 — I have a certain amount. 
 
 And there are a number of small, poor holdings adjoining? 
 — Yes ; and if you want to add any land to them, I don't see why 
 you should propose to take any of mine (laughter). I don't see why 
 you should do an injustice to any decent Irish man or woman for 
 the benefit of another. 
 
 You think these poor people, with three acres, do not want 
 any more ? — I say they are doing very well. 
 
 You think it is right for one person to hold 300 or 400 acres, 
 whilst a number of persons are obliged to snuggle ofi on three or 
 four acres / (a laugh). 
 
 Witness — I only say there is no land there for distribution, 
 when I want it for myself (laughter). 
 
256 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 When the Ribbon Order holds its next demonstra- 
 tion at the New CongevStion Cathedral of Donegal, 
 could the Bishop of the Board himself devise a finer 
 appeal to the finest feelings of the Ancient Order than 
 that statesmanlike question : — - 
 
 " You think it is right for one person to hold 300 or 400 
 acres whilst a number of poor people are obliged to struggle on 
 on three or four acres ? " 
 
 It is superfluous to inquire if this is the rule in the 
 Dudley Estates Office, or if it be strictly reserved for 
 experimentation on the corpore vili of Irish landed 
 property. 
 
 FROM THE ARRANGED COMMISSION TO THE POLITICAL 
 
 SACRISTY. 
 
 A different sort of interest will be stimulated by the 
 next illustration of the mentality of the Arranged 
 Commissioners, which reaches me as these pages are 
 going to press. From Jean Jacques Rousseau on 
 universal philanthropy we are translated to the poli- 
 tical sacristy, the electioneering Bishop, and the little 
 arrangements which lead from a Royal Commission of 
 Non-inquiry to a League seat in Parliament. 
 
 In my list of the members of the Commission given 
 at an early page, I mentioned the name of Mr. Walter 
 Kavanagh, Barrister-at-law, without any note or 
 commentary. I had been assured, indeed, that the 
 Supreme Management had chosen him in consequence 
 of their just certainty as to his policy. He would be 
 found on the side of the crozier and the hazel. As, 
 however, Mr. Walter Kavanagh's private virtues had 
 as yet received no public endorsement, I was content 
 to pass his name in silence. I am indebted to a 
 Propaganda Bishop and to Mr. Walter Kavanagh 
 himself for the completer light on the attractions of 
 this competitor for favours. I find in the daily Press 
 this illuminating appeal of an Episcopal grand 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 257 
 
 elector to the sacristies of his dominion on behalf of 
 the Commissioner as a worthy colleague of Messrs. 
 Ginnell, Sheehy, Gywnn, etc. : — 
 
 " Dr. Foley, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Kildare 
 and Leighlin, writes to a Nationalist paper in Carlow 
 advocating the candidature of Mr. Walter Kavanagh 
 for the Parliamentary vacancy caused by the death of 
 Mr. Hammond. Mr. Kavanagh, Dr. Foley writes, is 
 the one man of his class in the county who, so far as he 
 is aware, availed himself of the first opportunity that 
 presented itself in making a striking declaration in 
 favour of the higher education of Roman Catholics." 
 The Commissioner backs up the episcopal warranty 
 with a modest note of self-estimation : — 
 
 " Mr. Kavanagh in a letter states that he is not a 
 devolutionist and that he left the Reform Association 
 as soon as he knew their programme. He believes in 
 the party pledge and will sit, act, and vote with the 
 Nationalist party. He is a Home Ruler on the lines 
 of Mr. Gladstone's Bill, and he is in favour of a Roman 
 Catholic University and of the States acquiring the grazing 
 ranches for distribution. "" 
 
 We might at once conclude from the episcopal 
 commendation that the Commissioner was also what 
 is known in Ireland as an Accommodating Protestant 
 or Protestant supporter of Maynoothism in all its 
 pretensions. We know now from Mr. Walter 
 Kavanagh's own effusion that he clasps the Double 
 Policy to his heart of hearts. He wants to plant the 
 lazzaroni of the Board on the grass lands, and the 
 pupils of the seminaries on the university — both at 
 the expense of the taxpayer. 
 
 The Bishop's intermeddling in politics would be 
 mere impertinence in any other country. In that 
 Foreign Mission called Ireland it is the supreme factor 
 of the situation. The Arranged Commissioner 
 becomes M.P. for the Sacristy at Westminster. 
 
 ***** 
 p.s. s 
 
258 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 I am reminded that there is a whole army of 
 employees 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 
 ;f3i,ooo annually absorbed in salaries by these 
 employees, which can help us partially to understand 
 the influence of the patronage exerted by the clergy. 
 In addition to the 2,000 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 employee. In reading in his own evidence 
 the account of his views, one is struck, however, by 
 the continued revelation of the strange sort of mendi- 
 cant 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 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. 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 259 
 
 Mr. Sutherland — What did it cost ? 
 
 Mr. Doran — About ;^i, 600. 
 
 Sir Francis Mowatt — What would wire fencing cost ? 
 
 Mr. Doran — About /"ijOoo. 
 
 That is how this Board wipes out arrears on its 
 failures, wastes the pubHc money, and then bids the 
 Land League peasantry compare the generosity of 
 the poHtical 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. McVEIGH, January, 1906. 
 
 Most Rev. Dr. O'Donnell, Bishop of Raphoe. 
 Rev. Canon Dohertv, P.P. 
 Rev. C. McGlynn, P.P. 
 Rev. E. McDevitt, P.P. 
 Etc., etc., etc. 
 
 Similarly, how possibly could the guardians of 
 Glenties union, inundated with the bounties of the 
 Congested BoRrd, hesitate an instant to elect ''the 
 nephew of our noble Bishop " as master of the 
 
 s 2 
 
26o PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 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. McDonnel, P.P. 
 Rev. M. Henry, P.P. 
 
 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 " representa- 
 tives 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 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 261 
 
 Board Member-of-Parliament. And I am quite certain 
 that neither the great supporter nor the great sup- 
 ported had ever the shghtest doubt as to the perfect 
 orthodoxy of the transaction. ^^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 Benefactions 
 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. It 
 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 condescending 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 circumstances should, barring the climate, trans- 
 port 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 melancholy 
 comment of Lord Dudley. " You have only touched 
 
262 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 the fringe of the question " is the utmost encourage- 
 ment of the Anglo-Indian optimist. " Give us a few 
 milHons 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 II., 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 
 oi the United League, to which the Bishop of the 
 Board is treasurer of the parliamentary fund ; this 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 263 
 
 League leader simply and unblushingly stated that in 
 order to execute the League pohcy 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 kindhearted 
 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 FitzGibbon — This is the task which the Com- 
 mission 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 
 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 
 superlative 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 
 
264 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 agriculture, the committee of technical instruction, 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 illus- 
 trates very plainly how the political priest preoccupies 
 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 chair- 
 man 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 appro- 
 priately 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 chair- 
 man, 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 con- 
 dition. 
 
 What can such teachings and influence produce 
 but a class of selfish and sluggish lazzaroni quite 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 265 
 
 unsurpassed for sluggish selfishness 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 07t two feet square 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 Letter- 
 kenny 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 away 
 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 ! 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 ! Haifa 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 
 
266 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 doors. There are three or four famiUes of them, 
 strong men, in the slack season. In a week or a 
 fortnight they could nearly make the much-needed 
 improvement, 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 the incorrigible sloth of 
 another population in the congested districts. Speak- 
 ing in Church on April 17, igo6. 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 at spring 
 and autumn, and you sleep the rest 0/ 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 1 And 
 
 * A deplorable consequence of the increased influence given to 
 the political clergy by the Government's patronage of their sectarianism 
 in university education and their control of the Congestion Subsidies 
 is the increased bitterness of their hostility towards our Protestant 
 countrymen. Even the Gaelic Language Movement, whose funda- 
 mental claim was to be independent of religious differences among 
 Irishmen, is being seized by the political priests, especially in the 
 Congested Districts — to use the official verbiage — in order to embitter 
 religious strife. The Peasatit, of the 14th December last, mentions 
 the case of a man at Westport " who was excluded from the Gaelic 
 League for having taught the Irish language to Protestants. In 
 various other parts of Connacht the theory that the Gaelic League is 
 open to Irish men and women of all creeds has been abandoned in 
 practice; the Protesiatits are kept out.'' Toleration and the Polidcal 
 Priesthood ! Did the Commission expect figs from thistles or grapes 
 from thorns .? 
 
268 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 when a commission of inquiry comes to investigate 
 their condition and its causes, it has been so care- 
 fully 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 Commissioners 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 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 demonstrations, 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 ? 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 269 
 
 Mr. James Boyle — I think the first and greatest improve- 
 ment 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 Glencolumbkill ; //laf 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 respectable 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 Com- 
 missioner 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, terrestrial 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 
 
270 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 Bishop, the other Commissioners 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 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 complacent 
 Under-Secretary that a grey-haired sergeant of con- 
 stabulary could tell more about the protegees of the 
 parish committees in an hour than the whole 
 Congested Board could explain away in a week. 
 
 The evidence which has been sent to me personally 
 from earnest and religious members of the con- 
 stabulary 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 carefully as possible by the managers of the Com- 
 mission. 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 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 271 
 
 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 browbeating, 
 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 criti- 
 cism, 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 wit- 
 nesses let drop a clue ; avoided investigation, even 
 when the need of investigation ran against 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 conclusions will not 
 be endorsed by the Commission. Compromise is the 
 indicated resource of Dublin Castle. Under com- 
 promise, 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 
 
272 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 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 destruction 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 profession," adding an 
 indignant denunciation of "the i,ooo 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 same 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 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 273 
 
 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 1,000 school-houses 
 " 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 building "out-houses" for the filth-in- 
 doctrinating 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 Com- 
 missions 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 pro- 
 fessional studies they have little superiority over their 
 cattle drivers and gombeen men. Like them, their 
 oracle is the Freeman's Journal. Their political 
 harangues are indistinguishable 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 
 
 p.s T 
 
274 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 friends and political allies, by his proposers and nomi- 
 nators for the parliamentary representation, we should 
 all know what to think of the proceeding. I am 
 sure that not even a suspicion of anything extraordi- 
 nary 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 land- 
 lordism" 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 Bally- 
 haunis. ... 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 Con- 
 gested Board is ready to pay them out of the taxes — 
 another half million sterling ? 
 
Notes and Illustrations.] 
 
 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, whos ereputa- 
 tion 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 circumstanced. . . . Pofen/ial/y 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 :he Congested Cotnmission. 
 
 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. 
 
 T 2 
 
276 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 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 
 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 movement, 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, gom- 
 been 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." 
 
THE RESULTS OF BLINDFOLDING— LON- 
 DON 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 THE COOLIE MISSION 
 
 DUBLIN CASTLE AND THE DEAD HAND. 
 
 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 connec- 
 tion 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 employ- 
 ment with consequent poverty and depopula- 
 tion. 
 
 2. The Commission did not investigate the con- 
 nection 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. 
 
278 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 4. The Commission did not investigate the con- 
 nection between non-industry and the campaign 
 against property and Hberty preached by sup- 
 porters of the Board, Land Leaguers, PoHtical 
 Priests, Boycotters. 
 
 5. The Commission did not investigate the con- 
 nection between non-industry and the six thousand 
 priest-managed schools, with their lessons of ignor- 
 ance, uncleanness, unhealthiness, discouragement and 
 fatalism. 
 
 6. The Commission did not investigate the con- 
 nection between lacemaking, embroidering, 
 laundering, shirtmaking, dressmaking, etc., for 
 the conventual factories and the injury to lay 
 employment and home life. 
 
 7. The Commission did not investigate the con- 
 nection between the clerical monopoly of direc- 
 tion 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 con- 
 nection between the immense burthen of clerical 
 extortions from the laity at all the crises of 
 life and the spread of poverty and unemploy- 
 ment. 
 
 g. The Commission did not investigate the huge 
 drain of Irish capital in legacies and collections, on 
 all kinds of ecclesiastical pretexts ; nor enquire 
 whether the colossal mass of priestly and con- 
 ventual investments was in Irish undertakings or 
 in foreign securities and speculations. 
 
 10. The Commission did not investigate the con- 
 nection between non-employment and the habit 
 of Irish capitalists to hoard their money in 
 banks — the hoard now being ;;r6o,ooo,ooo — 
 instead of financing Irish farming and manufac- 
 tures. What exactions do the capitalists fear in 
 Ireland ? What insecurity ? Whose dishonesty ? 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 279 
 
 11. The Commission did not investigate the con- 
 nection 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 discuss- 
 ing 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 Commission 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 : 
 
 13. 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 impedi- 
 ments thrown in the way of migration to other 
 parts of Ireland ; though, in spite of menace and 
 boycotting, a responsible witness, supported by a 
 
28o PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 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 
 betwee7i 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 connexion with the whole 
 movement for altering the distribution of property 
 and overthrowing "the ascendency of the classes," 
 to use the expression of a representative of the 
 Jacobin class in the ascendant in contemporary 
 Ireland. 
 
 16. There has been no investigation of the rela- 
 tions, the intimate relations, between the Priest- 
 Gombeen supremacy on all kinds of Local Boards 
 and the opposition to every measure of enlighten- 
 ment 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 con- 
 demnations 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. 
 
 I am aware of the tightness of the Reference which 
 limits the investigations of the Commission ; and it is 
 common knowledge that the Reference was intended 
 to direct and force the Commission into the foregone 
 conclusion of ignoring everything but the extension of 
 the powers and the endowments of the Congestion 
 Board. Let it be so. Yet, if we take the clumsy 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 281 
 
 fiction of Congestion in its only true sense of general 
 unemployment and consequent poverty, there is 
 ample warrant for honest and serious inquiry even in 
 the official directions to the Commission " to inquire 
 into and report upon what changes in law or adminis- 
 tration are needed for dealing as a whole with the 
 problem of General Unemployment and Consequent 
 Poverty and generally for bettering the condition of 
 the people in areas of Unemployment and Poverty." 
 There is certainly no obligation in these words to 
 close eyes and ears to every consideration of Ireland's 
 condition except increasing the area and the means 
 of pauperisation and corruption in the hands of 
 clerical revolutionists and their parasites or instru- 
 ments. 
 
 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-cultiva- 
 tion and slothful tillage have disappeared with the 
 suppression 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 unkept bodies 
 which used to make perpetual the degradation of 
 Ireland. From the primary through the secondary 
 and technical schools to the university the youth of 
 the country advance, under their lay teachers of lay 
 
282 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 culture, in the systematic attainment of the prepara- 
 tion for their various objects in Hfe. The clergy 
 receive becoming and ample stipends for the discharge 
 of their spiritual functions, without the need or the 
 temptation to burthen the population with the exac- 
 tions 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 indus- 
 tries 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 Conti- 
 nental 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. 
 
 It is with some justifiable pride that, in face of the 
 present ruin, I can recall that I always protested 
 against the evils which have been its main causes. 
 My nationalist creed in the right of Ireland to be 
 governed again by her King, Lords, and Commons 
 excluded the very possibility of that Jacobin Mob 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 283 
 
 Domination which has been the work of the Sacristy 
 and the League, for the Constitution would have been 
 surrounded by precisely the same safeguards in Ireland 
 as in England. I condemned the Land League from 
 its first misshapen birth. I quitted Parliament rather 
 than subscribe its programme of Class Hate and 
 Confiscation. The Gladstonian Land Acts, which 
 were so exactly to facilitate the work of the Ribbon 
 Lodge, filled me with alarm and repugnance, and my 
 letters to the Times of that day expressed my appre- 
 hensions and distrust. I grant that the Land Acts 
 might have had a better issue, if there had been no 
 Ribbon Lodge and no Political Priesthood. But 
 why were these ignored by the Land Legislation ? I 
 saw at once what the Land League intended, even 
 though it was by degrees that I realised the unscru- 
 pulous criminality which was its core. Both as 
 regards the Agrarian Jacobinism and the Ribbon 
 Priesthood my investigation was sharpened by my 
 Continental experiences; but surely Continental experi- 
 ences were also at the service of the Responsible 
 Ministers. Nearly thirty years after the inception of 
 the Land League, the officials of a Responsible 
 Ministry continued to stuff the Congested Board and 
 Commission with nominees and leaders of the same 
 Agrarianism and the same Priesthood 1 
 
 Unquestionably ignorance, embodied above all in the 
 priest-managed school and the priest-strangled univer- 
 sity, is the foundation and the root of all that the Con- 
 gestion 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 1 
 
284 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 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 trans- 
 ported to lands where property is protected by the 
 most rigid laws and still more rigid opinion, they can 
 display all the virtues of iron industry, and can 
 become the firmest supports of capitalist accumula- 
 tion 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 pros- 
 perous 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 ! Ctun coelo 
 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. 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 285 
 
 Everything which was not evasion, officiaHsm, or 
 cant that appeared 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 ^f 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 provi- 
 dences 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 employment on an immensely increased scale 
 by the indolent farmers of good lands throughout 
 Ireland would solve five-sixths of this pretended 
 problem of incurable poverty, I find valuable con- 
 firmation 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 Castle- 
 town brought forty Mayo men in one troop to work 
 
286 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 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 cultivation of the 
 particular farms ; and ten thousand labourers from 
 the congested districts could quite as easily find 
 kindly and profitable employment, profitable for the 
 land as well as for the labourers, if only the malinger- 
 ing 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 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 Mowatt — Was their work energetic ? 
 
 Lord Castletown — Excellent. First-rate. My steward, who 
 is a Scotchman, 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 upofi having milk for 
 their drink, and they brought their own provender in the shape 
 of ground-up oatmeal and Hour. 
 
 Certainly these details bear on the whole question. 
 Lord Castletown did not go to any Parish Committee 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 287 
 
 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 question 
 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 Commission 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 unwelcome 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. 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 abate- 
 ment. 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 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 bishops will crow on parochial eminences from the 
 pious pubs of Annagry to the pious pubs of Water- 
 ford. 
 
 Imagine asking English citizens to confer on 
 Clerical Committees in England the uncontrolled 
 distribution* 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 layman. 
 
 Perhaps there is a profound reason for these 
 British views. I do not enter into that considera- 
 tion. 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 Govern- 
 ment in Ireland to trust to the Secret Service of the 
 Sacristry instead of any nobler or safer auxiliary. 
 
 * 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 Com- 
 mittee 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. 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 289 
 
 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 blackholes 
 of the intelligence stunted and deformed the education 
 of the common people. The edifices of united learning, 
 the dream of everypatriot, were starved and betrayed at 
 the pretext of an empty excommunication. England 
 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 Commissions. 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 collecting 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 govern- 
 ing 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 
 
 p.s. u 
 
290 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 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 fuglemen 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 Ireland has been to throw to the 
 wolves of the political priesthood the property, the 
 very existence, of that great and distinguished 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, 
 opportunities which were not so much lost as ruined. 
 
 But of all that England has done or misdone in 
 Ireland, the worst beyond all comparison — at least, 
 in the later age — has been her patronage and utilisa- 
 tion of what is worst in the grosser part of the popular 
 Church in that unhappy country. The compact by 
 which England placed her Irish administration at 
 the service of Maynooth, and Maynooth its priestly 
 police at the service of Dublin Castle, is one of the 
 most stupid as well as most base on record. The 
 State might keep faith in such an arrangement, but 
 all history is the witness that the Churchmen would 
 only keep it ** under reservation." They might con- 
 demn a French invasion, when France had shut the 
 
PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 291 
 
 churches. They might denounce a Fenian raid, for 
 a Fenian maxim was, No priests in poHtics. That 
 salved the deHcacy of their conscience in the blacker 
 treason of sapping the foundations of civil welfare 
 and organising from ten thousand pulpits and plat- 
 forms the social war. From the cursing curates who 
 terrorised the voters of Vese}' Fitzgerald at the Clare 
 election to the Ribbon chaplams and prelates of our 
 days, what a procession ! 
 
 To make sure of the devotion of the Irish priests, 
 the Bismarks of Downing Street had gone to the 
 Vatican, and the Vatican had been most obliging. 
 " Have no fear ! We will abolish canonical rights 
 in Ireland. We will make Ireland a province of 
 Propaganda. Then you can be always sure of the 
 nomination of the right sort to the Irish bishoprics." 
 The diplomatic genius of England gurgled its gratitude. 
 The Irish difficulty was solved. 
 
 The device of placing the canonical church of an 
 ancient Christianity under the Foreign Missions 
 Board at Rome, like a nigger kraal or a coolie com- 
 pound, was about equally discreditable from the civil 
 and the religious standpoint. It placed the entire 
 priesthood, the entire episcopate of the nation in the 
 hands of unknown foreigners, on a promise to uphold 
 the British Empire ! It placed every Irish parish and 
 diocese in the control and disposal of total strangers, 
 who were alike alien to the temporal progress of the 
 country and ignorant of what that progress might 
 require. Ireland, which boasted with historic truth 
 that she had sent missionaries of culture and religion 
 to the half of Europe when anarchy and ignorance 
 occupied the precincts of the Lateran, was henceforth 
 to be even as Congoland or Manchuria. A Foreign 
 Missions Board, which was only created in the seven- 
 teenth century, was to be the absolute master of the 
 discrowned Church which had called on Christ in the 
 middle of the fifth. Poor masquerading dictators of 
 
292 PARAGUAY ON SHANNON. 
 
 the Hibernian Sees, who are themselves only pawns 
 in the hands of veiled figures of players somewhere 
 by the banks of an Italian river ! 
 
 " Neither clergy nor laity possess any righ^-s in a 
 mission country." Is the British Government proud 
 of its handiwork ? Is it satisfied with the results ? 
 When Mr. Bryce or Mr. Birrell scurries round from 
 archbishop to cardinal and back again, and fancies 
 that he is ** consulting Irish ecclesiastical opinion," 
 he is only consulting dignified dolls, whose mechanism 
 reels off a phonograph record, set by ingenious Fathers 
 General and Superior who never saw Ireland, except 
 perhaps to inaugurate a congestion cathedral. And 
 woe to the Irish priests who dare to think of Ireland 
 first ! By scores and hundreds they have been chased 
 beyond the Channel, beyond the Atlantic. Their 
 successors have learned to be thoroughly tame. It 
 is the peculiar cruelty and cowardice of British policy 
 in Ireland to have laid this yoke upon totally defence- 
 less people. If we could forget the misery, the 
 desperation, the degradation, we might be satisfied 
 to add that English policy has got its reward. The 
 ruin of the gentry, the flight of the population, the 
 savagery of discontent ! Are not these encouraging 
 reasons for continuing so productive a method and 
 treatment ? Like a parody of old-time clans, the 
 slogan of Castle Universities and Congestion Boards 
 is " The Dead Hand for ever ! " Not unmindful of 
 that policy here were a grant of arms for the promised 
 seminary-in-disguise : — A shield vert quartered with 
 fasces of hazel rods and gags and blinkers all 
 proper ; with a chief of gules bearing a mask sable for 
 the Secret Sectarian Order ; over all an escutcheon 
 of pretence emblazoned with a book chained and 
 padlocked supporting the Mitres of the Board. 
 
 BRADBURY, AGNEW, AND CO. LD., PRINTERS, LONDON AND TONBRIDGE. 
 
Date Due 
 
 ^D ^ 
 
 2 l^OD 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Air. 14 
 
 1990 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 f) 
 
 PRINTED 
 
 IN U. S. A. 
 
 
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