MR. RUSSELL, Q.C., M.P., ON IRELAND.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume VII, Issue 412, 4 March 1881, Page 3

MR. RUSSELL, Q.C., M.P., ON IRELAND.

The following is the letter which appeared in the London Times and Dublin Freeman, created so great a sensation in England and the Continent, and sadly scared the Marquis of Lansdowne. Mr. Russell, it may be understood, is a Whig and nothing more :— To the Editor of the Freeman.

Sir, — As you drive along the main road of the Lansdowne property, in the neighbourhood of Kenmare, the appearance of the dwellings presents a marked improvement upon those in neighbouring estates— for example, of Lord Ventry, Lord Bantry, and of Trinity College. One of your contemporaries, the Bta/tidarA, by its Commissioner, writing in autumn last, however, described these houses as " whited sepulchres." I will not endorse the strength of this language, but I do say that in point of the social comfort of their lives there is little, if any, difference between the state of the Lansdowne tenants and the others -whom I visited. For many reasons I was anxiou? to see Lord Lansdowne's tenantry. I wanted to see how a nobleman with ample means and largs views regarded his tenantry, and how his tenantry regarded him. I expected to find proof that a high-minded landlord could elevate his tenantry morally and socially, evea under what I considered a faulty system. I had noticed, too, accounts widely different in the public Press of the management of this estate. In the Laxly Telegraph, for instance, on the occasion of his leaving the Government, it was written : —

"In Lord Lansdowne the Ministry have lost a statesman of promise, whose secession is all the more important on account of its cause. For generations the Lansdowne estates have had a high fame as models of management ; the liberality and justice of the noble owners having succeeded in producing what may be called English comfort on Irish soil."

In your own columns, ou^tbe'other hand, of about the same date I read :—: —

"To ordinary Englishmen the Marquis of Lansdowne only presents the spectacle of a great Whig inaugurate who has deserted his party. Irishmen better understand the motives of a man who has inherited the traditions of the most cruelly managed estate in all this afflicted land."

I cannot adopt either of these statements "but I must admit that I failed to see any signs of " English comfort," and so far as the sentiment of the country is concerned the language of the Freeman's Journal is certainly more accurate. For other reasons this estate was interesting. Its history is typical of many estates in Ireland. la September, 1654, Dr. Petty came to Ireland as Physician-Gennral to the English army. Until June, 1659, his salary was 20s a day, and he had private practice in his profession. Within a few years he was the owner of about 50,000 acres in Kerry, and, as he stated in his will (a remarkable and interesting document) he had in Ireland, " without the county of Kerry, in land reversions and remainders, about £3100 more." He was a strong-minded, able man, the author, amongst others, of the history of the Down Surrey and of the Political Anatomy. In his will he quaintly announces that he dies "in the practice of such religious worship as I find established by the law of my country." This was tbe founder of the Lansdowne estates in Kerry. I quote from the history of the Kingdom of Kerry, by Miss M. F. Ousack, widely known as the Nun of Konmare.

The management of these large estates is in the hands of Mr. Townsend Trench, son of the late Mr. W. Stewart Trench, to whom he succeeded. It is difficult to say how far the judgment of the community, over whom their powers as land agents are exercised is just or reliable. Unquestionably father and son were spoken of almost universally with bitterness, fear, and dislike, to use no stronger language. It was painful to notice the moral dread of agent and bailiff in which many oF these tenants live I noticed nothing like it elsewhere in Kerry. Tlieir conduct raav be misjudged, but assuredly no kindly recollection <.f the late Mr. Trench seems to survive, and no kindly feeling towards his son, the present agent, exists. Lord Lansdowne, although he resides a portion of the year at Derreen, near Kenmare, does not seem to be generally knowu to his tenants. Those on tbe Iveragh portion of his property have never seen him since his visit there on the occasion of his attaining his majority. More than once when (some harsh case being cited to me) I suggested to the tenants to appeal to Lord Lansdowne, the answer was always the same, " Oh, he leaves it all to Trench." Even plans suggested, and, I believe kindly suggested, by landlord or agent (of emigration, for instance), are looked upon with distrust. Nor is this remarkable, for in tne years of the great famine this estate was not only the scene of some of the most awful miseries of that awful time, but it was also the place from which a large emigration took place under the auspices of the late Mr. Trench, which has left to this day bitter memoiies behind it. In his so-called " Realities of Irish Life " Mr. Stewart Trench describes in a painfully graphic way the state of things in the Kenmare Union. He writes :—: —

" At least 5000 people must have died of starvation within the Union of Kenmare. They died on the roads and they died on the fields ; they died on the mountains and they died in the glens ; they died at the relief works and they died in their houses. So that whole streets or villages were left almost without an inhabitant, and at last some few, despairing of help from the country, crawled into the towns and died at the doors of the residents and outside the union walls."

It was at this time that the author, then succeeding to the management of these estates, set on foot his scheme of emigration, and, aa he pithily puts it : —

" In little more than a year 3500 paupers had left Kenmare for America, all free emigrants, without any ejectment having to be brought against them to enforce it or the slightest pressure put upon them to go. Matters now began to right themselves. Only some BO or 60 paupers remained in the houses chargeable to tKe property of which I had the care, and Lord Lansdowne's estates at length breathed freely."

He adds, in another place, that the rates of transportation of these emigrants would amount to a sum less than it would cost to support them in the workhouse for a single year. That is one point of view of the question. I do not doubt that this was a scheme approved of by the then Lord Lansdowne from humane motives ; its execution was grossly faulty. Its history is still told, and the hill sides of Kerry, and the traditions of the place kept alive the story of the Lansdowne ward in New York Hospital, where many of these illBtarred emigrants fell victims to disease and death.

It is curious that the present agent seems to have denied strenuously the existence of distress on the Lansdowne estate in 1879-80, and to have refused to act upon any of the relief committees established in the neighbourhood. To Dr. Fox, the Government Inspector; to Mr. Fletcher, a member of the Duchess of Marlborough,s Relief Committee ; and to the Rev. Canon Bagot, representing the Mansion House Committee, he is reported to have given emphatic denials of the existence of any distress in the district ; indeed, so far as has been ascertained, the first occasion on which he admitted its existence was in April, 1880, when he applied to the Mansion House Committee for funds to promote a new emigration scheme. I mention with pain one fact. The Nun of Kenmare, to whom I have already alluded, one of the Sisters in the convent of Poor Clares, in Kenmare, a lady not less known for her active benevolence than for her literary work, in her printed expression of thanks to America for the funds entrusted to her for relieving the distressed tenantry, says, under the date of Easter week, 1879 : —

One land agent said to me that when he saw the distress coming he told his noble master that it would be the best thing that had ever happened for the landlord ; they would have their tenants at their mercy.

He adds :—

These same land agents were the principal cause of the distress being denied, for clearly if the distresi were admitted to demand rents and rack rents from the starving people would have been too gross an act of inhumanity.

It can hardly be doubted to whom this language refers. I hope it may be shown to be the result of some grave misapprehension. The lady by her public appeals collected a sum of about £15,000, which was in great part expended in South Kerry. Bhe assured me that many tenants of Lard Lansdowne had been recipients of blankets, of meal, of seed potatoes, and that as to three national schools, attended principally by the children on Lord Lansdowne's estate— namely those of Laragb, Lehud, and Copperas, one of them being placed outside the entrance gate of Derreen House, she had to supply clothes to cover the children. She had done so in consequence of the statements made to her by the schoolmistress that, for the sake of decency, they could not otherwise allow the children to attend the schools, even if their parents were willing to permit them to do so. One gentleman also, conversant with the action of the relief committees in the town, informed us that fully half of the relief which passed through his hands had been given to Lord Lansdowne's tenants. He said —

The people came crying to me for it ; in fact, on his estate there were tenants who called on me personally between the dates of the meetings of the committee asking me for God's sake, to give them supplemental orders for meal.

He added that of these tenants many were living upon the produce of the seed potatoes supplied by charity. He added further that Lord Lansdowne had brought some forty tons of potatoes to Kenmare, which had been sold for cash at something below the market price ; that these were wholly insufficient to sow the land ; and he finally added —

My belief is that were it not for the Telief given by our committees a great number of the Lansdowne tenants would have died.

This emphatic testimony certainly received corroboration in several other quarters. Compared with other estates which I visited, the rents, tested by Griffiths' valuation, are not the highest. Indeed, taking some dozen cases or more, I found that the rent did not exceed the valuation by more than about 35 to 40 per cent., and yet I believe the cases to be exceedingly few in which the tenants could out of the land pay the existing rent if they reserved to themselves a sufficiency of food and of clothing for decent maintenance. The normal food of the tenants is as I have described it to be elsewhere. It is a noticeahle fact that in one house, and in one house only, and on this estate, did I see a piece of bacon hanging up in the kitchen. I was struck with this, and with the otherwise greater comfort of the dwelling. 1 complimented the tenant upon what I presumed was his greater industry or his better management. His answer was pithy and to the point. He said, " I never could afford that, or to live anyway decent out of the land." "How then do you afford it?" I asked. His answer was satisfactory. He was an ex-policeman, with a pension of £44 a year. In one case, and that of a tenant, who seemed much better off than the rest, we took the trouble of ascertaining as accurately as we could a profit and loss account. This was the case of a widow whose story illustrated another subject much complained of by the tenants — namely, rent raisings on the occasion of the tenants marrying. Her son wanted to get married, and thereupon, with her consent, to get the land transferred into his own name, he went to the office for permission, which was promised conditionally upon the rent being raised. This he declined, and married without permission, bis mother's name remaining on the books as tenant. The rent was about £23, the valuation about £17 ; the holding contained grass tor ten cows. He estimated his profits thus — 12 firkins of butter, which would fetch about £40. Owing, he said, to the bareness of the land he would not get the highest price. His profits from rearing and selling young stock cattle, would be about £6, and from the keeping of a few sheep about £5. He grew only enough potatoes and oats for home consumption — none for sale. In addition to the potatoes raised he reckoned that he expended on Indian meal close on £17 ; on flour, groceries, clothes, and like luxuries, about £25 ; and in wages of servants, indoor and out, about £18 ; showing, after the support of his family, a loss of some £30 a year. Pressed to explain this, and how, notwithstanding, he managed to live, he •aid he married a fortune of £100, all of which was gone, and he

owed in the town nearly £100 more. He said that be had been getting out of debt ia the good years, but was now- sunk again, and another bad year would ruin him altogether His family consisted of eight persons in all, including servants. I reserve the | further consideration of Lord Lansdowne's Kenmare estate for another letter. — I am, sir .jf t>ur obedient servant, Chaelks Russell.