Ireland Under Coercion: The Diary of an American (1 of 2): (2nd ed.) (1888)Hurlbert, William Henry
History
Ireland Under Coercion: The Diary of an American (1 of 2): (2nd ed.) (1888)
Hurlbert, William Henry
Ireland -- Description and travel; Ireland -- Politics and government -- 1837-1901
There was not a shop, nor a dispensary, nor a doctor, nor a warehouse,
nor a quay for landing goods in this whole populous and sea-washed
region. He put up storehouses, built a little harbour at Bunbeg,
established a dispensary, got a doctor to settle in the district, and
finally put up the hotel in which we are. He advanced money to tenants
disposed to improve their holdings. Finding the women, as usual, more
thrifty and industrious than the men, and gifted with a natural aptitude
for the loom and the spindle, he introduced the weaving of woollen yarn
into stout frieze stuffs and foot-gear for both sexes. This was in 1840,
and in 1854 Gweedore hand-knit socks and stockings were sold to the
amount of £500, being just about the annual estimated rents of all the
properties bought by Lord George at the time when he bought them in
1838! But with this difference: The owners from whom Lord George bought
the properties got their £500 very irregularly, when they got it at all;
whereas the wives and daughters of the tenants, who made the socks and
stockings, were paid their £500 in cash.
Clearly in Gweedore I have a case not of the children of the soil
despoiled and trampled upon by the stranger, but of the honest
investment of alien capital in Irish land, and of the administration by
the proprietor himself of the Irish property so acquired for the benefit
alike of the owner and of the occupiers of the land.
That the deplorable state in which he found the people was mainly due to
their own improvidence and gregarious incapacity is also tolerably
clear. On the west coast of Norway, dear to the heart of the
salmon-fisher, you find people living under conditions certainly no more
favourable than here exist. North of the Hardanger Fjord, the spring
opens only in June. The farmers grow only oats and barley; but they have
no market except for the barley, and live chiefly by the pasturage. It
is as rocky a region as Donegal. But the Norsemen never try to make the
land do more than it is capable of doing. With them the oldest son takes
the farm and works it. The juniors are welcome to work on the farm if
they like for their brother, but they are not allowed to cut it up.
There is no rundale in Norway; and when the cadets see that there is no
room for them they quietly "pull up stakes," and go forth to seek a new
home, no matter where.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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