Journeys in America (1881-2)

Chapter XI

Journeys in America (1881-2)

When I started from Galveston for California the Southern Pacific Railway had only been opened a week. The train was robbed the day before, and I asked the conductor of the Pullman if he went armed. “Oh, yes,” he said carelessly; “my gun is in that cupboard down there.”

“I suppose, said I, “you would fight if the train was attacked?” “Well, no,” he drawled; “this Company don’t pay me enough to fight!” At home prospective prowess would have been bragged of, yet his parents were Irish, he told me later!

The train passed through prairies where the bones of animals had been collected in heaps near each “depot.”

I wrote my father:

Fort Worth,

Texas,

8th January, 1882.

“Having a five or six days’ ride before me I scribble in the train.

This nation is built up with Irish blood. I enjoyed my Southern trip. It is as warm as June, and the new route to California avoids the snow block of the Union Pacific Line. It is only open a week, and I am one of the first passengers.

We are now running over a very desolate region, with no inhabitants but prairie-dogs. The water is so full of alkali that it is dangerous to drink. “It would go through you like quicksilver,” observed the conductor. But we have Pullman sleeping-cars, and are as comfortable, and more so, than first-class passengers at home. For a mile we shall, I am told, run into Mexican territory.

I have got passes through Texas, a State bigger than France and England together, and am riding on a pass to El Paso del Norte. Most of Texas is a splendid country, and it is here, and not to frozen Minnesota, that emigrants should come. I was offered 320 acres by an Irishman in Galveston to induce me “not to go home to jail.”

In sooth, one might do worse than start cotton-growing instead of wool-gathering! Most of the land is rich, but fetches only ten dollars an acre. The railway companies own millions of acres, and in another generation it will be fairly settled by their efforts. Some of the best towns were not in existence ten years ago; and the talk about lawlessness is rubbish - except perhaps amongst the cowboy class, but they are mostly in the saddle among their cattle.

One of the ranchment in San Antonio wanted to give me a hundred dollars “for myself.” I told him to give it to the Land League, but I don’t think he will!

It is hard work getting round so quickly, and if I came here again I would take my time. The country is so vast that you never get through it. Father Sheehy is ill and had to stop speaking. I could not have stood it myself much longer, and am glad of this long laze in the train. I will probably get off and see the “Big Trees” and Yosemite valley - 700 miles south of San Francisco. T. P. O’Connor and I will meet at ‘Frisco. I shall probably leave New York on the 7th February, whether via Havre, or direct depends on the political outlook.

I have, since the 10th November, lectured in 37 towns, netting about £1,700 for the League, apart from the Chicago Convention collection. In some places the lowest admission was a dollar and never less than “quarter.”

T. P. O’Connor probably will have earned three or four times as much, as he went to the larger towns, and was a month longer at work. Sometimes the meeting is free, and they make a collection. £170 was raised after my speech in Joliet, a little quarrymen’s town in Illinois, in a hall that wouldn’t hold three hundred. I am wretched at that work.

Oratory and debating are very different things. I am glad it is nearly over, though I have never been at the pains to write out a note or phrase. If I had the patience to do so I might spout well enough.

I am struck with an infinite pity for the actors we meet in trains who jolt round the world ministering to its amusement, repeating the selfsame phrases. A man might bear to repeat Shakespeare sometimes, and explode, but fancy “Healy” the thirty-seventh time deglutinizing his peroration and retaining his self-respect!

Adios, little Father. The train is passing a squad of antelopes.”

Your vagrant but affectionate son,

Tim.

On the trip through Texas a cowboy took a seat near me with a revolver in his belt. I enquired of the conductor was he well enough off to ride on the Pullman. The smiling answer came, “Well, it’s a privilege we allow them.”

The throwing open of the Indian territory (now Oklahoma, State with a University and Professors of Greek) was much agitated in those days. I asked the cowboy, “Have you fought Indians

“No,” he rippled; “but I’ve run from ‘em.”

This led me to inquire had he any plan for dealing with Indians. “Well,” he mused, “I’d gather them all into one place ---- ” and as I visioned schools and colleges to be erected, he finished, “And when I had got them all in one place then I’d shoot ‘em!”

His gun was the only one I saw in four months in U.S.A. When I got to Merced for the “Big Trees” I was laughingly told to come back in three months, when the snow had cleared! A Chinese waiter in the hotel shook hands before laying breakfast, and took me afterwards to the Chinese temple. Its interior was gruesome, for the walls were covered with canvases of dragons. On each side of the “altar,” however, were two flowers like lilies growing in glass vessels filled with water, having nothing save white pebbles at the bottom to maintain them. This seemed against nature, but my guide did not know enough English to explain.

From Merced I went to San Francisco. Our meeting there netted £1,000, thanks to T. P. O’Connor. He had a winsome way of coaxing subscriptions from the audience.

At a dinner given to us there the speeches were so anti-English that an old man who, I was told, was the Fenian “centre” for Sacramento, rose to offer a rebuke. He said, “I’m a ‘forty-niner,’ and came to this coast via Panama, after my father’s eviction in Ireland. I didn’t love the British flag any more than you, but we were on a ‘greaser’ ship, and the captain marooned us, and landed us at some town far away from our destination. For the first time in my life I remembered I was a British subject, and that there were things called British Consuls hanging round foreign parts. I looked one of them up, and told how we were swindled. ‘Oh,’ said he, ‘I’ll put you straight. ‘We’ll have a warship after that fellow inside 24 hours.’

“We had to sleep in the streets, and at daybreak our bunch trudged to a headland to scan the horizon. With no love for the Union Jack, didn’t we cheer when we saw it on the man-of-war coming round, with the other fellow alongside, caught and convoyed!

“The British captain got us aboard the marooner, and followed him all the way to see we were not left a second time. That’s what I have to say about the British. I like their flag no more than you, but some day you may be glad, like me, to see it once in a while.”

T. P. O’Connor was fond of telling of an encounter between myself and Carney, the agitator of the “sandlots” who got the constitution of California altered and made it penal for a railway to give a pass to a member of the Legislature.

This formidable person came to our hotel to denounce men who held large properties in the State, and gave their names. “Why,” I exclaimed, “the names are Irish! ” “Yes,” he retorted, “that’s the worst of it.”

T.P. quoted my answer as, “I’m damn glad!” So Carney retired.

I left San Francisco for New York, and at Ogden the train was boarded by an Indian Chief with his interpreter, en route for Washington to interview the “Great Father.” A finer built man than this Indian I never saw. In the dining-room a negro waiter brought in a meal - then 75 cents. At the first course, the Chief, thinking him the host, rose from his chair with great dignity and shook the darkey’s hand. The negro’s smile remains a delightful memory, and the “car” too was inclined to cheer his tactful reception of the Indian’s politeness.

Chicago,

2nd February, 1882.

“I leave here to-morrow for Philadelphia, where I speak on Sunday, then go to New York to speak there.

If when I return they arrest me on board ship it might be a question whether that portion of the Atlantic Ocean where the arrest took place was “proclaimed” by the proclamation, referring to the County or Riding of Cork!

I hardly think they would care to haul a man off the steamer to run him into jail when he was on his way to Parliament, in view of the standing order prescribing egress and regress.

Should you come to Queenstown, be sure to have newspapers, as I shall be gasping for news.”

On reaching New York I heard from home. My sweetheart (afterwards my wife) and my brother wrote. Maurice preserved my reply, but I burnt the letters to my wife early after our marriage lest they should be seized by the police when carrying out my arrest in 1883.

Fifth Avenue Hotel, New York,

7th February, 1882.

“Your letter of the 11th January to hand. I shall be detained by the hope of earning £1,000 next Sunday for the Cause by something a woman in Worcester (Mass.) is getting up, so you will understand my cable as cancelling the letter from Chicago.

I have, however, definitely taken passage by the Arizona next Tuesday, 14th February, and should be glad if you would come to Queenstown, although may be only for a moment, as you could give me news - not to speak of my being glad to see you.

I wouldn’t care if a warrant was handed me, as I could put in a comfortable summer’s work in Kilmainham Jail.”

Of America in those days Sir Henry Tyler, M.P., a British Board of Trade Railway Inspector (author of the saying that “the railways will own the State unless the State owns the railways”), told a good story. He attended a Colorado State “fair” at Leadville, where its industries were represented in a garish procession. The banners of the miners bore on its front an allegory of the wealth of Colorado - its gold, silver, copper, and lead. On the obverse flared the legend, “Modesty is a great virtue, but we get on better without it.”

I bade good-bye to America on 14th February, 1882, and when the ship reached Ireland was met at Queenstown by my relatives, but was not arrested. The suspects, including Parnell, were still in prison, but Forster’s position had been undermined.

The Liberal Party vaguely began to recognize that arrests would not pacify Ireland. They remembered that John Bright at Birmingham in 1880 declared “Force is no remedy,” and though Bright left the Cabinet on the bombardment of Alexandria in 1882, Chamberlain held on, and continued to oppose Forster.

The antagonism between these men had begun with Forster’s Education Act of 1872. The Nonconformists for a decade kept up an agitation against the “twenty-fifth” Clause of that Act, and made it a burning question.

Hence, apart from Ireland, there was an acid hostility between them. Chamberlain also resented Forster’s return for Bradford as a minority member in 1880. He disliked Disraeli’s plan under the Act of 1867 which created three-cornered constituencies and gave the electors only two votes. He defeated that system in Birmingham by drilling the electors to vote in areas for the two persons specified by his Caucus.

By this time the Land Act of 1881 was having its effect on Ireland. Despite Parnell’s appeal to the farmers to keep out of court, thousands of ‘Ulster tenants now had fair rents fixed. The Courts, however, gutted the “Healy Clause.” The question of amending the Act and the appointment by Lord Salisbury of a “watching” Committee of the House of Lords to scan fair rent decisions therefore became urgent.

The discipline of the Irish Party at this date was perfect. Every one spoke or moved “according to plan.” Justin MacCarthy was a genial substitute for Parnell. After the Chief was set free Justin often said to me, “Do you remember how united and happy we were when Parnell was in Kilmainham?” MacCarthy never neglected his post, although much occupied on the London Press.

John Redmond, by luck in the ballot, won first place for a Bill to amend the Land Act, and Parnell asked my brother to draw it up. The Act of 1881 not only excluded leaseholders, but, marred by many other imperfections.

To repair them Maurice framed a Bill of 14 clauses and visited Kilmainham with a draft.

Parnell, however, thought one of them so extreme that it would never be entertained by Gladstone. He therefore ran his pen through it.

Argument in his cell went on, until finally he questioned Maurice, “Does that reduce the Bill to 13 clauses?” The answer was, “Yes, but what of that?”

“Oh,” Parnell protested, “what luck could a Bill of 13 clauses have? Can’t you draft a new one? “There’s no time,” replied my brother. “The draft has to be posted to London this evening in order to be printed for the debate on Wednesday, and post hour is near.” Quoth the Chief, “Then your damn clause must stay in, for a 13-clause Bill would be fatal.”

The draft was posted that night, and a few years later the “damn clause” became the law of the land. It related to tenants’ improvements.

The night before the debate on the Bill, 25th April, 1882, Captain O’Shea accosted me in the lobby, and alleging that he spoke on Parnell’s behalf, begged me to go with him to Chamberlain’s room.

The birth of a daughter to O’Shea had been announced in The Times that morning. Of this gentleman a few lines should be written. He became M.P. for Co. Clare in April, 1880. Dean White, P.P. of Miltown Malbay, sadly owned that his piety in saying the Rosary every evening during his canvass imposed on him.

I had sent O’Kelly to Clare to oppose O’Shea at the Convention in Easter Week. Thete, O’Gorman Mahon, the sitting member, appealed as a veteran to the delegates to select a candidate who would pay his expenses-he didn’t care whom! O’Kelly would not undertake this obligation. Had he agreed he would have been chosen, but he had less adroitness and more scruples than O’Shea, who promised to pay.

Mrs. O’Shea records: “The failures of my husband’s racing stable had left our finances much embarrassed. My husband and the O’Gorman Mahon had been returned together, but nearly all the expenses of the election had fallen to poor Willie’s share. The O’Gorman Mahon was almost penniless, and Willie, with more zeal than discretion, had guaranteed the expenses for both, and where the whole amount (which they found totalled £2,000) was to come from, they didn’t know.”

The hue and cry by the Freeman’s Journal on Good Friday against Parnell’s nominees also helped to carry O’Shea.

I gave O’Kelly £300 from the National Funds to stand for Clare, and more would have been forthcoming if necessary. After his rejection he sent me a despairing telegram and I wired him to catch the next train to Roscommon. There he defeated the O’Conor Don, who had sat in Parliament for 30 years. O’Shea, instead of ranking with the Nationalists in opposition to the Government, sat on the Liberal side. Yet as a supposed member of the Irish Party, he attended its first meeting in 1880, and voted for Parnell against Shaw.

He had been put into the Hussars by his father, a Limerick pawnbroker designated by an unsavoury Gaelic nickname. He married a sister of Sir Evelyn Wood, V.C. That lady was supposed to have been endowed by a banker named Christopher Weguelin, once M.P. for Youghal. When Sir Evelyn proposed the match to his subaltern, O’Shea at first pleaded that he was too poor to marry, but was assured that Miss Wood possessed £30,000.

In the divorce case of 1890 “Christopher’s” name appeared in a letter which Mrs. O’Shea wrote her husband: “You did not object to Christopher,” she remonstrated. O’Shea’s reply was: “Christopher is dead, Parnell is not.”

On 25th April, 1882, when O’Shea approached me to see Chamberlain, I told him my plan was never to refuse to transact business with an opponent when Ireland might be helped. Therefore, believing Parnell wished it, I consented to go with him to Chamberlain. Years later I suspected (for reasons which will be stated -afterwards) that O’Shea was not authorized by either Parnell or Chamberlain to make this overture, and that he told Chamberlain the lie that I desired to see him on Parnell’s behalf.

In a downstairs room of the House of Commons I met the Birmingham magnate immersed in a cigar. We first talked arrests and then he asked what our attitude would be if farmers’ arrears were remitted. He defended Gladstone’s policy warmly, but my replies were stiff, although the Land Bill to be proposed by Redmond next day was in jeopardy. I parted with him feeling that he was an honest man thrust into a thorny situation. In next day’s debate Gladstone was considerate and admitted there was a case for wiping out arrears. He therefore agreed that the Government would bring in a measure by which landlords who forgave a year’s rent should receive a grant from the Treasury of equal amount. Of this plan, Chief Secretary Forster declared his approval.

Arrears had accumulated in the bad times before the Act of 1881 enabled tenants to fix a fair rent, and for such arrears they were liable to be evicted. I inferred from the conciliatory spirit shown by Gladstone and Chamberlain that Parnell was about to give in.

On Tuesday, 2nd May, 1882, Parnell, Dillon and O’Kelly were released from Kilmainham Jail, and Gladstone announced the resignation of Chief Secretary Forster and the Lord-Lieutenant Cowper. Chamberlain came to me next day and asked me to go to the smoke-room. No other room in the House of Commons was then provided where members could confer with one another on equal terms.

Three or four smoke-rooms have since been added. The “lower” smoke-room, as it was called, opened on the Terrace, and around its stove Bright, Chamberlain, Labouchere, Sexton, Lord Randolph Churchill and Parnell often chatted in 1880-1.

I assumed from Chamberlain’s conversation that he was to be Chief Secretary in lieu of Forster. The day was one of bright sunshine, but gloom at Parnell’s surrender filled our hearts.

Chamberlain was frank and winning, and I felt sorry at having to hold him at arm’s length as I realized he was sincere.

After some talk he asked if I could get Sexton and Arthur O’Connor to join us. I did so, and in our further conversation conceived a high respect for his character. I felt that a straight-forward and truthful man of business confronted us.

Sexton and Arthur O’Connor dwelt chiefly on the question of police, whose harshness was excessive. Chamberlain said: “I’ll write to Lord Spencer about that,” showing that he knew Spencer was to be Lord-Lieutenant, and believed he himself would be Irish Secretary.

We parted that afternoon in the hope that hope that he would take Forster’s place. Gladstone, however, kept his intentions secret, and “made pie” of these plans.

Next day, Lord Richard Grosvenor, Chief Liberal Whip, moved a new writ for the West Riding of Yorkshire in the room of Lord Frederick Cavendish, who had accepted the office of Chief Secretary for Ireland.

Chamberlain’s face paled, and his frame grew rigid, as Lord Richard moved. I divined disaster from this, yet not so great as befell.

A permanent estrangement now began with Gladstone, who wanted to rivet to his side the Marquis of Hartington (brother of the new Chief Secretary). Perhaps, too, Lord Spencer preferred an aristocrat to a commoner in the post, but the letting down of Chamberlain meant misfortune to Ireland.

Had he become Irish Secretary a new chapter would have opened for both countries. He was not merely a Radical, but an economist and mathematician. He saw that grievances between Irish landlords and tenants could be accommodated by a scheme such as Wyndham adopted 22 years later. His subsequent antagonism to Ireland was not unnatural, and it partook of nothing ignoble. He had vision, but he and Gladstone were cast in different moulds, and bred in different schools.

Gladstone was masterful by right of genius, and never forgot that Chamberiain had been the “Republican Mayor” of Birmingham. The Spectator’s thanks for his courtesy to the Prince of Wales (afterwards Edward VII) when the Prince visited that city in 1870 showed that his Republicanism was not ingrained.

High as is my esteem for Gladstone, I feel he was too dominating to consider Chamberlain’s point of view from 1880 to 1885.

I used to haunt the Nation office, Dublin, as a lad, and learn from the Sullivans their opinions. One was that the Nation or Weekly News should never attack Dilke or Chamberlain unless religion came in question.

On the 4th May, 1882, I wrote my brother:

“Some acknowledgment should be made of the way in which you have drafted “Redmond’s” Land Bill which has been so successful. You will have read Gladstone’s tribute to the drafting.”

On the day this letter was written Parnell entered the House of Commons after his release, striding to his place as if nothing had happened.

The suspicion which surrounded his enlargement subdued any manifestation of enthusiasm by his colleagues. His sister Anna, who took charge of the Ladies’ Land League, with a woman’s instinct had scented surrender when her brother accepted parole a few weeks earlier. She knew that this foreboded mischief.

Hers was an unyielding and courageous soul. She was at the head of a formidable band of women whom Cardinal McCabe condemned as the Ladies’ Land League. Yet a politician so moderate as A. M. Sullivan, M.P., challenged His Eminence, and declared he was proud that his wife was one of its members. The ladies’ organization, however, in the opinion of Parnell, spent too much money, and after his release he determined to end unthrift. He asked me to criticize it in the Boston Republic, of which I was then correspondent.

Anna flamed up at what I wrote, and called at my lodgings shortly after my marriage in 1882, to know who inspired my statements. I gave her no information and she was very cross, but accepted a cup of tea from my wife.

The following year she braved the military escort of the Lord-Lieutenant (Earl Spencer) as he rode through the streets of Dublin. Seizing the reins of his horse, she reproached him with preventing the erection of huts for evicted tenants. Her life was thereby imperilled, but she held her ground. Earl Spencer treated her chivalrously, and no prosecution followed.

Twenty-three years after Parnell died, Mrs. O’Shea compiled a book “dedicated to love” which disclosed letters of his that would seem incredible, only that she prints the facsimile of his well-known handwriting.

In one of them, written from Kilmainham Jail, he offered to desert his colleagues and the Irish Cause for her at the crisis of the struggle.

It is the strangest State Paper in Irish history:

14th December, 1881.

My Darling Queenie, -

“Your second letter reached me all right, and I can read them perfectly. But, my darling, you frighten me dreadfully when you tell me that I am ‘surely killing’ you and our child.

“I am quite well again now, my own, and was out to-day for short time, and will take much better care of myself for the future. It was not the food, but a chill after over-heating myself at ball. But I do not intend to go back to prison fare, even nominally, again, as the announcement that we were on it has served the pose of stimulating the subscription.

“Rather than my beautiful wife should run any risk, I will resign my seat, leave politics, and go away somewhere with my own Queenie, as soon as she wishes Will she come? Let me know, darling, in your next about this, whether it is safe for you that I should be kept here any longer.

“Your own husband.

“P.S. There can be no doubt we shall be released at opening of Parliament, but I think not sooner. “Dr. Kenny was allowed to be with me at night while I was ill, and we are not to be changed from our rooms.""

Thus the leader of a movement mightier than O’Connell’s proposed to forsake his comrades in the most critical hour, and abandon at a woman’s whim Ireland’s “magnificent and awful cause.”

Mrs. O’Shea does not publish her reply.

Parnell got keys of the prison counterfeited so that he could walk free any night. O’Kelly kept them as a souvenir and showed them to me after their release.

Justin MacCarthy’s account of Parnell’s first meeting with Mrs. O’Shea differs from her own. He says that he was present at a dinner where Parnell was first introduced to her.

In 1885 O’Shea put out that Chamberlain promised him the Under-Secretaryship for Ireland, and he went to Dublin to see over the Under-Secretary’s Lodge, which, in 1927, became the American Legation. He was so pleased with it that he wrote his wife that it was a most suitable residence for the family.

Mrs. O’Shea’s allegation that her letters were opened by (unspecified) colleagues of Parnell is unfounded. A telegram (as will appear later) was mistakenly opened by Small, M.P.

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