Evening Memories

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XLIX, Issue 29, 27 July 1922, Page 7

Evening Memories

(By William O'Brien.)

CHAPTER XL—SUCCESS AND UNEXPECTED . DIFFICULTY (1886).

United Ireland was now in the full tide and torrent of its power. It had a steady weekly circulation of 75,000 to 100,000 copies, meaning not far from 500,000 readers, in addition to a circulation for its literary sister publication, The Shamrock, which by this time seldom fell below 50,000. It may be to the discredit of Irish softheartedness that the high-water mark of the sales of United Ireland should be reached with the number that presented a colored portrait of Gladstone (the circulation passed 125,000, and was only stopped by the failure of the litho machines to deliver any more), but the fact is, to my thinking, a much more scathing commentary upon England's incapacity either to gauge Irish feeling or to repay it. To the wonder of all beholders a journal whose every number might be its last and every member of its staff a, prisoner which had no capital except Parnell's signature for an overdraft on tho Hibernian Bank—whose overdraft mounted to £3OOO during tho years while it was wrestling for its life against innumerable suppressions, gaolings, and prosecutions, civil and criminal not only cancelled its indebtedness to tho Bank, but was attaining a commercial prosperity which its founders would have hailed with grisly laughter, had it been foretold to them. In the year wo have now reached, I find that following the Auditor's annual report, I was able to forward a cheque for £2OOO to Parnell for the national funds and to leave a considerable, sum to our credit in the Hibernian Bank.

But it was a prosperity built upon the crust of a volcano. Every number contained ample material for prosecutions for sedition, for libels (all the worse for being well-founded) upon powerful officers of State and great landowners, and open and calculated defiance of all law which was not of the people's making, or at choice for the summary suppression and breaking up of type and machinery with which the Castle never hesitated to visit more defenceless Nationalist journals. We were now faced with a never-ending Coercion code, under which it was calculated that, as the responsible publisher, I incurred penalties expending over 1500 years of imprisonment, had the ■Coercionist-s consistently enforced their own law in all its rigor. Had United Ireland been suppressed , mann militari when it promulgated the Plan, of Campaign, or during the next following months while 1 it was uncompromisingly preaching it to the country, it was not, to be doubted that, a quite legitimately commercial newspaper like the Freeman's Journal must have instantly ceased tp report the meetings and the speeches by which the contftt

gion was spread, and, the history of the next five years might have been one of practically uncontested sway for "firm and resolute government"—uncontested, that is to say, except by a no less "firm and resolute" regime of bullets and dynamite. v

Maybe we were spared because the new Chief Secretary, Sir M. Hicks-Beach, underrated the influence of United Ireland with the country, and believed, as even some of our own disheartened colleagues were whispering that we "were flogging a dead horse"; maybe his Dublin Castle advisers were rather disposed, from gruesome experiences of their own, to give him exaggerated forewarnings against treading again the bitter Calvary of Forster and Spencer. Our hopes of immunity during the incubation of the new movement were, at all events, based upon audacity and ever-increasing audacity in assailing a government bereft of the smallest moral authority or consent from the governed— a fairly well-known recklessness as to personal consequencesand upon the knowledge that the paper spoke with the unconquerable strength of a race both for many thousands of peasants for whose cabins it offered a trustier protection than the blunderbuss of the old agrarian wars, and for the young generation for whom it was for the moment the vanguard and the hottest fire-centre of tho deathless battle against the power of England.

That was not all. The newer generation, with youth's happy gift for imagining themselves the discoverers of America, will not, I hope, be over-shocked to find most of their new world shining in the pages of United Ireland more than a quarter of a century ago. Our opening number contained, as one of its special features, the first of a series of papers on "Irish trade for the Irish towns," by one who has since made his mark in the history of the Irish industrial movement, Mr. T. P. Gill. Peter O'Leary, the forerunner of the prophets of the Irish Laborers in a wilderness where there was then naught but camel's hair and wild honey for their portion, had a column to himself in which to expound those claims of Labor which are now in everybody's mouth. The Gaelic Athletic Association was founded in our pages, and might never have grown to 'maturity under the blight of many foes without the special department which' was placed weekly at the disposal of its founder, Michael Cusack. One of the earliest enthusiasts of the Gaelic Language League was among our constant contributors. Nee deerant epulis rosce. Even in the clash of arms while, like William of Deloraine, Ave had to

"Carve at the meal with gloves of steel And drink the red wine through the helmet) barr'd,"

the dainty charms of literature were not altogether tinworshipped. A series of exquisite Irish historical cameos which might well he disinterred for the students of a happier day, was contributed by young Justin Huntly McCarthy. Our nest of singing birds and romancists contained not a few of those who were the pride of an older day, or are the joy of a later springtime—Charles Kickham, "Finola," T. C. Irwin, Frank Fahy, Rose Kavanagh, Ethna Carbery, Katherine Tynan, Una Taylor (daughter of the famous author of Philip van Artcvelde), P. J. McCall, Charlotte O'Brien, Dora Sigerson, John Augustus O'Shea, Edmund Leamy, and many another of the bright company of etoilcs qui filent.

Thus fortified with all that could impart the benediction of a nation, United Ireland acted with a boldness which no newspaper, except John Mitchel's, ever approached before or since, openly and of set purpose, on the principle that the only way of obtaining good laws for Ireland was by breaking bad ones. We did not hesitate to exhort juries, and with entire success, to "make true deliverance" between the Crown and its victims in the spirit in which the London jurors acquitted the Seven Bishops, rather than with any regard for the technicalities of venal Crown Prosecutors; hay, we instigated the Royal Irish Constabulary themselves to imitate General Buller's 'dispensing power' 'in their own department by throwing down their rifles if called upon to assist in iniquitous evictions— doubtless, punishable. whenever the Government chose, with any v penalty from penal servitude to the sharp services of a firing platoon: And still the firm and resolute Chief Secretary made no sign, but- like/ all the

Chief Secretaries, began with a. speech balmily undertaking "to wipe, out the very recollection of Gladstone's Homo Rule or of Parnell's Suspension of Evictions Bill from tho Irish mind."

; The first of the "Low-Bent Offices" was held by Mr. Dillon and myself at Portumna early in November, and it was a portent the'amazing character of which those of a later generation can little realise, "The November rentoffice" of my first experiences in the West was for the Irish peasant a tribunal as full of dread as was the torture chamber of the Three Inquisitors for the prisoners of the Venetian Pozzi. The famished wretches stood shivering for hours in the winter blast, waiting their turn to bo admitted one by one to the place of agony, where the agent sat awaiting them at his table with a, loaded revolver beside him, and "the rent-warner's" sinister figure, more menacing than the revolver, loomed up Abhorson-like out of the gloom. There was not the mere question of rent to be settled, but the tenant's soul to be laid bare and subjected; to unimaginable torments and humiliations. Even if he could wring out of the twisted handkerchief which answered him for a purse the last crown of a rackrent which the law courts have since pronounced to be the meanest form of thievery, he had still to answer the crossexamination of the rent-warner as to how much he had received for the little yearling at the last fair, how many bonhams had come with the last litter, bow much the first out-crop of the reclaimed strip of mountain had fetched, in order to decide whether an increase of rent might not be judiciously clapped on. Did he contemplate marriage, he had to petition for the consent of the agent by a trembling disclosure of the name of the girl of his choice, the amount of her "fortune," the value, of the beds or household furniture she would bring to the cabin. Was it his son he was going to settle down, the inquisitors were more merciless still in cutting off the most precious pound of flesh for the profit of the estate in the transaction. Had he forgotten the rent-warner's "duty" goose at Michaelmas, or awakened his greed for the reclaimed patch of land, or had his son ruffled the august man's dignity by a saucy answer to some insolent order for "duty-work" (that is to say, unpaid slave labor), or was it a widow who hesitated at the order to send her fair-haired child out to service at "the big house"—the rent-warner's power of life and death was no less deadly effective than the agent's. A scowl on tho brow of the one or the other might mean a doubled rent, or a six months' ejectment notice, at tho expiration of which, even without a farthing of rent unpaid, a man might bo evicted from tho home of his fathers and of his children, the fields his own labor and money had fertilised torn from him to become the prey of some landgrabber or "big bullock-man," and he and his swept out of sight into the workhouse or tho hold of an emigrant ship. They toiled, they starved, they cringed, with as little thought of resistance as their asses had of holding out for tlio principles of the French Revolution. How often have I seen every act of the tragedy with aching eyes! And how lightly the free children of such bondsmen now estimate the revolution which has struck off their chains!

(To bo continued.)

The "Sing Germ" is the only germ that "NO-RUB-BING" Laundry Help will allow to live in the wash-house. —J. Anderson.