Part 10

Iowa and Illinois had not then got a-going; the cable was to come, and the heart of Christian England was unpricked by public opinion. And all the time while famine was in progress, sheep, pigs and cattle were being shipped across the Channel to England. It was the famine of Eighteen Hundred Forty-six that started the immense tide of Irish immigration to America. And England fanned and favored this exodus, for it was very certain that there were too many mouths to feed in Ireland--half the number would not so jeopardize the beer and skittles of the landlords.

Parnell's father was a landed proprietor living in Ireland, but whose ancestors had originally come from England. The Parnell estate was not large, comparatively, but it was managed so as to give a very comfortable living for the landlord and his various tenants. The mother of young Parnell was Delia Stewart, an American girl, daughter of Admiral Stewart of the United States Navy.

In that dread year of Eighteen Hundred Forty-six, when the potato crop failed, the Parnells took no rent from their tenants; and Mrs. Parnell rode hundreds of miles in a jaunting-car, distributing food and clothing among the needy. Doubtless there were a great many other landlords and agents just as generous as the Parnells, filled with the same humane spirit; but the absentee landlords were for the most part heedless, ignorant, and indifferent to the true state of affairs.

Charles Parnell grew up a fine, studious, thoughtful boy. He prepared for college and took a turn of two years at Cambridge. He then returned to Ireland, because his help was needed in looking after the estate--hence he never secured his degree. But he had the fine, eager, receptive mind that gathers gear as it goes. His mother was an educated woman, and educated mothers have educated children.

That is a very wise scheme of child-education, the education of the mother, a plan which is indeed not yet fully accepted by civilization; but which will be as soon as we become enlightened.

From his mother's lips Charles learned the story of America's fight for independence, and the rights of man was a subject ingrained in his character.

* * * * *

Ireland is a country that has a climate as nearly perfect as we can imagine, and topographically, it is beautiful beyond compare. Yet here, among physical conditions which are most entrancing, existed a form of slavery not far removed from that which existed in the Southern States in Eighteen Hundred Sixty. It was a system inaugurated by men long dead, and which had become ossified upon both tenant and landlord (slave and slave-owner) by years of precedent, so neither party had the power to break the bonds.

In some ways it was worse than African slavery, for the material wants of the blacks were usually fairly well looked after. To be sure, the Irish could run away and not be brought back in chains; but in Eighteen Hundred Seventy-six, a bill was introduced in Parliament restricting Irish immigration, and forbidding any tenant who was in debt to a landlord leaving the country without the landlord's consent.

Had this bill not been bitterly opposed, the Irish people would have been subject to peonage equal to absolute slavery. As young Parnell grew he was filled with but one theme: how to better the condition of his people.

In arousing public sentiment against the bill, young Parnell found his oratorical wings.

Shortly after this he was elected to Parliament from County Meath. He was then twenty-seven years old. He had never shaved, and his full brown beard and serious, earnest, dignified manner, coupled with his six-foot-two physique, attracted instant attention. He wore a suit of gray, Irish homespun, but the requirements of Parliament demanded black with a chimney-pot hat--the hat being always religiously worn in session, except when the member addressed the Chair--and to these Piccadilly requirements Parnell gracefully adjusted himself.

Parnell seemed filled with the idea, from the days of his youth, that he had a mission--he was to lead his people out of captivity. This oneness of purpose made itself felt in the House of Commons from his first entrance. All parliamentary bodies are swayed by a few persons--the working members are the exception. The horse-racing and cockfighting contingent in the House of Commons is well represented; the blear eyes, the poddy pudge, the bulbous beak--all these are in evidence. If one man out of ten knows what is going on, it is well; and this is equally true of Washington, for our representatives do not always represent us.

Parnell, although a fledgling in years when he entered the House of Commons, quickly took the measure of the members, and conceived for them a fine scorn, which some say he exhibited in italics and upper case. This was charged up against him to be paid for later at usurious interest.

Precedent provided that he should not open his Irish mouth during the entire first session; but he made his presence felt from the first day he entered the House.

By a curious chance a Coercion Bill was up for discussion, there being always a few in stock. Some of the tenantry had refused to either pay or depart, and a move was on foot to use the English soldiery to evict the malcontents in a wholesale way.

Joseph Biggar had the floor and declared the bill was really a move to steal Irish children and sell them into perpetual peonage. Biggar was talking against time, and the House groaned. Biggar was a rich merchant from Ulster, and he was a big man, although without oratorical ability or literary gifts. His heart was right, but he lacked mental synthesis. He knew little of history, nothing of political economy, despised precedents, had a beautiful disdain for all rules, and for all things English he held the views of Fuzzy-Wuzzy, whose home is in the Sudan. However, Biggar was shrewd and practical, and had a business sense that most of the members absolutely lacked. And moreover he was entirely without fear. Usually his face was wreathed in cherubic smiles. He had the sweetly paternal look of Horace Greeley, in disposition was just as stubborn, and, like Horace, chewed tobacco.

The English opposed the Irish members, and Biggar reciprocated the sentiment. They opposed everything he did, and it came about that he made it his particular business to block the channel for them.

"Why are you here?" once exclaimed an exasperated member to Joseph Biggar.

"To rub you up, sir, to rub you up!" was the imperturbable reply. He shocked the House and succeeded in getting himself thoroughly hated by his constant reference to absentee landlords as "parasites" and "cannibals." And the fact that there were many absentee landlords in the House only urged him on to say things unseemly, irrelevant and often unprintable.

And so Biggar was making a speech on the first day that Parnell took his seat. Biggar was sparring for time, fighting off a vote on the Coercion Bill. He had spoken for four hours, mostly in a voice inaudible, and had read from the London Directory, the Public Reports and the Blue Book, and had at last fallen back on Doctor Johnson's Dictionary, when Parnell, in his simple honesty, interjected an explanation to dissolve a little of the Biggar mental calculi. Biggar, knowing Parnell, gave way, and Parnell rose to his feet. His finely modulated, low voice searched out the inmost corners of the room, and every sentence he spoke contained an argument. He was talking on the one theme he knew best. Members came in from the cloakrooms and the Chair forgot his mail--a man was speaking.

Gladstone happened to be present, and while not at the time sympathizing with the intent of Parnell, was yet enough attracted to the young man to say, "There is the future Irish leader: the man has a definite policy and a purpose that will be difficult to oppose."

In January, Eighteen Hundred Eighty, at the Academy of Music, Buffalo, New York, I attended the first meeting of the American Branch of the Irish Land League.

I was a cub reporter, with no definite ideas about Parnell or Irish affairs, and as at that time I had not been born again, I had a fine indifference for humanity across the sea. To send such a woolly proposition to report Parnell was the work of a cockney editor, born with a moral squint, within sound of Bow Bells. To him Irish agitators were wearisome persons, who boiled at low temperature, who talked much and long. All the Irish he knew worked on the section or drove drays.

At this meeting the first citizens of Buffalo gave the proceedings absent treatment. The men in evidence were mostly harmless: John J. McBride, Father Cronin, James Mooney, and a liberal mixture of Mc's and O's made up the rest; and as I listened to them I made remarks about "Galways" and men who ate the rind of watermelons and "threw the inside away."

Judge Clinton, of Buffalo, grandson of De Witt Clinton, had been inveigled into acting as chairman of the meeting, and I remember made a very forceful speech. He introduced Michael Davitt, noticeable for his one arm. All orators should have but one arm--the empty sleeve for an earnest orator being most effective. Davitt spoke well: he spoke like an aroused contractor to laborers who were demanding shorter hours and more pay.

Davitt introduced Parnell. I knew Davitt, but did not know Parnell. Before Parnell had spoken six words, I recognized and felt his superiority to any other man on the stage or in the audience. His speech was very deliberate, steady, sure, his voice not loud, but under perfect control. The dress, the action, the face of the man were regal. Afterwards I heard he was called the "Uncrowned King," and I also understood how certain Irish peasants thought of him as a Messiah. His plea was for a clear comprehension of the matter at issue, that it might be effectively dealt with, without heat, or fear, or haste. He carried a superb reserve and used no epithets. He showed how the landlords were born into their environment, just as the Irish peasantry were heirs to theirs. The speech was so full of sympathy and rich in reason, so convincing, so pathetic, so un-Irishlike, so charged with heart, and a heart for all humanity, even blind and stupid Englishmen, that everybody was captured, bound with green withes, by his quiet, convincing eloquence. The audience was melted into a whole, that soon forgot to applaud, but just listened breathlessly.

It was on this occasion that I heard the name of Henry George mentioned for the first time. Parnell quoted these words from "Progress and Poverty":

Man is a land-animal. A land-animal can not live without land. All that man produces comes from the land; all productive labor, in the final analysis, consists in working up land, or materials drawn from land, into such forms as fit them for the satisfaction of human wants and desires. Man's very body is drawn from the land. Children of the soil, we come from the land, and to the land we must return. Take away from man all that belongs to the land, and what have you but a disembodied spirit? Therefore, he who holds the land on which and from which another man must live is that man's master; and the man is his slave. The man who holds the land on which I must live, can command me to life or to death just as absolutely as though I were his chattel. Talk about abolishing slavery! We have not abolished slavery; we have only abolished one rude form of it--chattel slavery. There is a deeper and more insidious form, a more cursed form yet before us to abolish, in this industrial slavery that makes a man a virtual slave, while taunting him and mocking him in the name of freedom.

We hear only a few speeches in a lifetime, possibly a scant half-dozen--if you have heard that many you have done well. Wouldn't you have liked to hear Webster's reply to Hayne, Wendell Phillips at Faneuil Hall, Lincoln answering Douglas, or Ingersoll at the Soldiers' Reunion at Indianapolis?

* * * * *

Captain O'Shea was the son of an Irish landlord, living in England on a goodly allowance. He was a very fair specimen of the absentee. When obscurity belched him forth in the year Eighteen Hundred Eighty, he was a class D politician, who had evolved from soldiering through the ambitious efforts of his wife. He held a petty office in the Colonial Department, where the work was done by faithful clerks, grown gray in the service.

He was a man without either morals or ideals. Careful search fails to reveal a single remark he ever made worthy of record, or a solitary act that is not just as well forgotten.

Every City Hall has dozens of just such men, and all political capitals swarm with them. They are the sons of good families, and have to be taken care of--Remittance-Men, Astute Persons, Clever Nobodies, Good Fellows! They are more to be pitied than slaving peasants. God help the rich--the poor can work!

Work is a solace 'gainst self--a sanctuary and a refuge from the Devil, for Satan still finds mischief for idle hands to do. The Devil lies in wait for the idler; and the Devil is the idler, and every idler is a devil. Saintship consists in getting busy at some useful work.

When Katharine Wood, daughter of Sir Page Wood, became Mrs. O'Shea, she was yet in her teens. Her husband was twenty. Neither knew what they were doing, or where they were going.

Captain O'Shea in his shining uniform was a showy figure, and that his captaincy had been bought and paid for was a matter that troubled nobody. The pair was married, and when once tied by an ecclesiastic knot, they proceeded to get acquainted. A captain in the English Army who has a few good working sergeants is nothing and nobody. If he has enough money he can pay to get the work done, and the only disadvantage is that real soldiers scorn him, for soldiers take the measure of their officers, just as office-boys gauge the quality of the head clerk, or a salesman sizes a floorwalker. Nobody is deceived about anybody except for about an hour at a time.

When the time came for Captain O'Shea to drop out of the military service and become a civilian clerk in the Colonial Office, the army was glad. Non-comps are gleefully sloughed in the army, just as they are in a railroad-office or a department-store.

Yet Captain O'Shea was not such a bad person: had he been born poor and driven a dray, or been understudy to a grocer, he would very likely have evolved into a useful and inoffensive citizen. The tragedy all arose from that bitter joke which the stork is always playing: sending commonplace children to people of power.

And then we foolish mortals try to overawe Nature by a Law of Entail, which supplies the Aristophanes of Heaven and Gabriel many a quiet smile. The stork is certainly a bird that has no sense. Power that is earned is never ridiculous, but power in the hands of one who is strange to it is first funny, then fussy, and soon pathetic. Punk is a useful substance, and only serves as metaphor when it tries to pass for bronze.

So, then, behold Katharine O'Shea--handsome, wistful, winsome, vivacious and intelligent, with a brain as keen as that of Becky Sharp, yet as honest as Amelia--getting her husband transferred from the army to the civil list.

He was an Irishman, and his meager salary in the office had to be helped out with money wrung from Irish peasantry by landlords' agents. Captain O'Shea knew little about his estate, and was beautifully ignorant of its workings; but once he and his wife went over to Ireland, and the woman saw things the man did not and could not.

The Irish agitation was on, and the heart of the English girl went out to her brothers and sisters across the Channel. Marriage had tamed her, sobered her dreams, disillusioned her fancies. In her extremity she turned to humanity, as women turn to religion. In fact, humanity was to her a religion: her one thought was how to relieve and benefit Ireland--Ireland which supplied her that whereby she lived! She felt like a cannibal at the thought of living off the labor of these poor people.

She read and studied the Irish problem, and one day copied this passage from Henry George into her commonplace-book:

Ireland has never yet had a population which the natural resources of the country could not have maintained in ample comfort. At the period of her greatest population (Eighteen Hundred Forty to Eighteen Hundred Forty-five), Ireland contained more than eight millions of people. But a very large proportion of them managed merely to exist--lodging in miserable cabins, clothed in miserable rags, and with potatoes only as their staple food. When the potato-blight came, they died by thousands. But it was not the inability of the soil to support so large a population that compelled so many to live in this miserable way, and exposed them to starvation on the failure of a single root-crop. On the contrary, it was the same remorseless rapacity that robbed the Indian peasant of the fruits of his toil and left him to starve where Nature offered plenty. When her population was at its highest, Ireland was a food-exporting country. Even during the famine, grain, meat, butter and cheese were carted for exportation along roads lined with the starving, and past trenches into which the dead were piled. For these exports of food there was no return. It went not as an exchange, but as a tribute, to pay the rent of absentee landlords--a levy wrung from producers by those who in no wise contributed to the production.

Captain O'Shea was not at all interested. He had the brain of a blackbird, but not enough mind to oppose his wife. He just accepted life, and occasionally growled because more money did not come from this agent in Galway--that was all.

He still nominally belonged to the army, was a member of "The Canteen," a military club, played billiards in Winter and cricket in Summer, and if at long intervals he got plain drunk, it was a matter of patriotism done by way of celebrating a victory of English arms in the Congo, and therefore in the line of duty. Captain O'Shea never beat his wife, even in his cups, and the marriage was regarded as a happy one by the neighboring curate who occasionally looked in, and at times enjoyed a quiet mug with the Captain.

Mrs. O'Shea knew several of the Irish Members of Parliament; in fact, one of them was a cousin of her husband.

This cousin knew John Dillon and William O'Brien. Dillon and O'Brien knew Parnell, and belonged to his "advisory board."

Mrs. O'Shea was a member of Ruskin's Saint George Society, and had outlined a plan to sell the handicraft products made in the Irish homes, it being the desire of Ruskin to turn Irish peasantry gradually from a dependence on agriculture to the handicrafts. Mrs. O'Shea had a parlor sale in her own house, of laces, rugs and baskets made by the Irish cottagers.

John Dillon told Parnell of this. Parnell knew that such things were only palliative, but he sympathized with the effort, and when in June, Eighteen Hundred Eighty, he accepted an invitation to dine at the O'Shea's with half a dozen other notables, it was quite as a matter of course. How could he anticipate that he was making history!

Disappointment in marriage had made lines under the eyes of pretty Kitty O'Shea and strengthened her intellect.

Indifference and stupidity are great educators--they fill one with discontent and drive a person onward and upward to the ideal. A whetstone is dull, but it serves to sharpen Damascus blades.

Mrs. O'Shea's heart was in the Irish cause. Parnell listened at first indulgently--then he grew interested. The woman knew what she was talking about. She was the only woman he had ever seen who did, save his mother, whose house had once been searched by the constabulary for things Fenian. He listened, and then shook himself out of his melancholy.

Parnell was not a society man--he did not know women--all petty small talk was outside of his orbit. He regarded women as chatterers, children, undeveloped men. He looked at Kitty O'Shea and listened. She had coal-black, wavy hair, was small, petite, and full of nervous energy. She was not interested in Parnell; she was interested in his cause. They loved the same things. They looked at each other and talked. And then they sat silent and looked at each other, realizing that people who do not understand each other without talk, never can with. To remain silent in each other's presence is the test. Within a week Parnell called at the O'Shea's, with Dillon, and they drank tea out of tiny cups.

Parnell was thirty-four, and bachelors of thirty-four either do not know women at all, or else know them too well. Had Parnell been an expert specialist in femininity, he would never have gone to see Mrs. O'Shea the second time. She was an honest woman with a religious oneness of aim, and such are not the ladies for predaceous holluschickies.

Parnell went alone to call on Mrs. O'Shea--he wanted to consult with her about the Land League. By explaining his plans to her, he felt that he could get them more clearly impressed on his own mind. For he could trust her, and best of all, she understood--she understood!

* * * * *

About six months after this, London was convulsed with laughter at a joke too good to keep: One Captain O'Shea had challenged Charles Parnell, the Irish Leader, to a duel. Parnell accepted the challenge, but the fight was off, because Thomas Mayne had gone to O'Shea and told him he "would kick him the length of Rotten Row if he tried to harm or even opened his Galway yawp about Parnell."

O'Shea had a valise which he said he had found in his wife's room, and this valise belonged to Parnell! The English members talked of Parnell's aberration and carelessness concerning his luggage; and all hands agreed that O'Shea, whoever he was, was a fool--a hot-headed, egotistical rogue, trying to win fame for himself by challenging greatness.

"Suppose that Parnell kills him, it is no loss to the world; but if O'Shea kills Parnell, the Irish cause is lost," said John Dillon, who went to see O'Shea and told him to go after some pigmy his own size.

Sir Patrick O'Brien said to O'Shea, "You dress very well, Captain O'Shea, but you are not the correct thing."

As for London's upper circles, why, it certainly was a lapse for Parnell to leave his valise in the lady's room. Parnell the Puritan--Parnell the man who used no tobacco or strong drink, and never was known to slip a swear-word: Parnell the Irish Messiah! Ha, ha, ha!