From The United Irishman, July 1st, 1899.
‘The kindly old neighbours, they’re going, still going;
The passionate wave still is ocean-ward flowing;
Oh! that something would happen to shield them for aye.
From the cold-hearted tyrants who drive them away!’—KICKHAM.
How many thousands of Irish hearts have echoed this wish of the gentle thinker of Sliabhnam-ban can scarcely be gauged; for the great wave which swept off two millions in the early Fifties has not yet ceased. Recent statisticians, with the callousness of their tribe, have attempted to prove that the drain has ceased because some few thousands less than during the preceding ten years had left Ireland between 1888-98, and argued that the country must be growing in prosperity. One needs but to go into the homesteads of any part of Ireland to see the falseness of their figures and sophistries. Go into the schools and you will see the little children gay-hearted and innocent by the score; go to the chapels on Sundays and you will see many of the same youngsters and a few middle-aged men and women, with here and there an old, white-haired and stooped man or woman; but very, very few young men or maidens, prepared to begin the world for themselves and take up the places left vacant by the hand of the great reaper. All, or nearly all, have gone beyond the waters, and if you would take ken of them you must step into some of the little cabins, look on the women whom sorrow and mourning have prematurely aged, and watch the tears stand in their eyes while some of the youngsters, still at school, read in a halting voice the American letter, which has brought with it a little money order from Shawneen or Maire, toiling amid the whirl of New York or Chicago. ‘The passionate wave’ moves still westward, and if Ireland is to be for the Irish we must stop it.
But how? We look around and we see foreign competition and free trade at every turn hampering the agriculturist and the manufacturer. Russia and the United States have all but entirely destroyed wheat growing; Denmark, Canada, France, and even Australia, have entered the lists long looked upon as peculiarly Irish. Bacon, butter, and eggs—once more sources of revenue to the farmer—are daily being jeopardised. Government subsidies for the foreigner; high freights, and no encouragement for the home-producer. This is not merely a question for the farmer or his labourers, but for the whole people of Ireland. We send the primest of our goods abroad; take second or third place to the Dane or the Belgian, and feed ourselves on the rankest and coarsest produce of Chicago, not even imported direct into Ireland, but sent through Liverpool. We shear our sheep and skin our cattle; export the wool and hides to England; pay heavy railway rates and shipping dues, and import the manufactured article made from our own materials, paying the Englishman for the production and the cost of a second trip across the Irish Sea. We cut down our timber, export it sawn, and import it again sawn into planks, or turned into bannister rails, shafts, spokes, felloes, etc., bearing, of course, the cost of carriage both ways, all the while having idle mills of all sorts standing, skeleton-like, in every barony of the land, with the moss creeping over their wheels, and rank growths choking their stagnant reservoirs. Our little towns and villages are silent as the grave, save of a market or fair day, when the trifling bustle of a few hours only serves to make the silence of the other days more strikingly oppressive. Our shops are stocked with the worst rubbish of Birmingham, Leeds, and Manchester, gaudy wrappers and prize coupons bribe the scant penny or halfpenny out of the people’s pockets; blazing colours blind them to the worthlessness of the articles they purchase, the cheap gauds deceive them; and they attire themselves in the things the Britisher will not wear, and which, despised by him, are packed off by the British merchant to meet the demands of the subject peoples of Ireland, India, and Africa.
Now, I do not blame the poor man for trying to clothe himself or meet his household necessities as cheaply as he can, but the fact brings us face to face with a grimmer fact—that this state of things is gradually, but surely, eating the vitals out of Ireland and must eventually wipe out the Irishman, and prove true the boast of the London Times. I do not seek to hold any particular Irish policy responsible for the horrible chaos which is visible everywhere in Ireland in all things, but I do wish certainly to direct attention to the fact that while the Irish Catholic was proscribed from education and civil rights, while his woollen-trade was banned by the British Parliament, while he held neither stock nor land—he not only did not emigrate in such wholesale fashion but maintained a trade in manufactured articles with the Continent, clothed himself in the wool of his own sheep, wore the leather of his own cows, prepared by his own hand, exported and imported what he pleased, without any regard to English Excise or Customs, and increased in numbers without at all losing in determination or courage. Swift’s great work scarcely influenced him, for he never wore anything but native manufacture; but it served him, for it turned the English colonists in Ireland into Irishmen, and, for the first time in Irish history made every man born in Ireland proud of being an Irishman. Swift did not attempt to bring Irish goods into fashion by securing the patronage of a British duchess or a British Viceroy. He appealed to the people, he burned into their souls the truth that they were slaves to wear anything from abroad while they could produce as good, or better, at home. He challenged them to choose between being the principals or the middlemen in the clothing and feeding of themselves, and the success which crowned his efforts shows how just was his conception of the National mind, and how favourable it is to the right thing if a man with a man’s heart and a man’s determination comes to direct it.
The operations of the United Irish League hope to keep the people at home, and anyone will, of course, admit that the fat grass lands of the West, are better calculated to support a population than the reedy, rushy slopes of mountains or the fringes of bogs. The success of the agitation will, of course, keep some in Ireland who otherwise would follow in the track of their kin across the Atlantic. We want some scheme which will do more. A farm cannot possibly support all the children which gather round the hearth of the average Irishman. We see what becomes of them to-day—none of them remain in the home of their ancestors; one by one they drift away. One becomes a priest; possibly that would happen, of course, no matter what change took place; but let us figure out the rest. One or two, possibly, join the British Civil Service, one becomes a shopman in a draper’s or a publican’s, another drifts to Dublin and drags out an existence as a clerk, and, with an effort, manages to keep himself respectable, but ever lives from hand to mouth. The family that works out like this is especially fortunate; the majority have either to give their sons to the service of Britain as constabulary men or to let them drift into exile, the latter by far the more preferable. This state of things the conversion of all the grass lands in Ireland would not stop, and, unless it is stopped, the hope of perpetuating Ireland—the Ireland of the past, the Ireland of our dreams, is, to say the least, particularly dubious.
We must have here a population to consume what these farms would produce, and we must have something for that population to do. Stock, in any event, is yearly declining in price, and the question of it lasting as a paying investment is only a question of time. But if Ireland is to revert to tillage, we must find markets for what she can grow, and that market must be at home, for competition and Government subsidy have raised up enormous obstacles against us abroad. If Ireland wore nothing but what was made within her own limits the market would have been found. No one desires to see our villages and towns turned into imitations of Lancashire; no one desires towns of factory chimneys, nor perpetual clouds of smut and smoke; no one longs for colossal establishments making profits for men already rich enough—but some employment must be provided for the muscles and brains of the rising youth of the nation, if we are to preserve it from becoming a wilderness or a West British colony.
An examination of the actual state of affairs will reveal a woeful story. For boots we pay annually £3,500,000, for clothes about three times that figure, for food stuffs about forty millions, and for building materials, etc., about twenty millions on an average. Add to this the cost of maintaining the various unions and corporations, and the total will not be far from one hundred millions sterling. The figures are rough, but they will give an idea of the amount of money that circulates annually in Ireland. All the materials necessary for the support of the nation would, under ordinary circumstances, be produced in the country; anyone can estimate the percentage that really is produced. The Irish Parliament, rotten and restricted as it was, paid for 12,000 British troops, but stipulated that every article they used and consumed should be made in Ireland. We support and pay for 30,000 redcoats; we pay ‘more than our share’ towards the maintenance of the British navy, and nothing worth speaking of used by them is of Irish origin. The Financial Reformers have noted this, but their agitation is too back-boneless to remedy it, and, of course, it is more or less beside the present matter. So far as the present writer sees, the most feasible way of tackling the question would be by the establishment of some industry in, at least, the capital town of each county, which, by degrees, would promote the growth of others, and thus gradually provide occupation for the young men and women whom impending starvation alone drives from Ireland. The men of Ennis came recently together to put such an undertaking on foot, and there is in every town in the country sufficient capital and capacity to start two or three industries. They should, as far as possible, be adapted to the needs of their districts, and would thus be at once a market for the produce of their neighbourhoods, and an opening for the labour and industry of its youth.
Such a possibility can scarcely be reached by the methods employed by Mr. Horace Plunkett, or the promoters of the Irish Industries Association. It will need a great National organisation, embracing all creeds and classes, but never stooping for the patronage of the Castle, or shouting out enthusiastically if some high-titled lady buys a few yards of calico, or wears a dress of Irish tabinet. It is well, of course, that the nimble fingers of our girls should be trained to delicate handicraft, and their eyes taught to appreciate symmetry and artistic design; but such work can only employ a few score, we want something for the hands of the thousands. This is not the place to enter minutely into all the things that might be produced in Ireland; the vital matter is to keep our people at home. Can we do it? If we can, let us see about it at once, for in a few years it may be too late.