The 19th-Century Irish Farmer
"I met a lady the other day who became very sorrowful over the condition of living into which the Irish farmer has now fallen. She recalled the days of her…
From: 1909 C.E. To: 1909 C.E.
Location: Ireland
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
From Home Life in Ireland by Robert Lynd, 1909.
I met a lady the other day who became very sorrowful over the condition of living into which the Irish farmer has now fallen. She recalled the days of her girlhood, when the house of the large farmer was a centre of hospitality and of a certain kind of culture. In those days it was not a surprising thing to see a new book (even a good book) on a farmer's table. Nowadays, one is astonished to see any new written matter there, except "The Freeman's Journal" or "The Northern Whig," or one of those useless series of volumes on religion or history, of which book-pedlars contrive to get rid on the instalment system.
This lady's lamentation, I believe, had a heart of truth in it. It was not merely the regret of one who saw the past in rose-colour and the present through a grey rain of dullness. If you go into an old farm-house, the books that you see stored away in some shabby case, and the prints that you see hanging on the walls, tell you that a generation of men once lived here, who, if not supermen of taste, were at least giants in this respect compared with those who have come after them.
The Irish farmer, indeed, the respectable son of the ragged soldier of the land wars, is a failure in the matter of fine living. When, instead of being the respectable son, he is the respectable transmogrification of the ragged land soldier, his case is little better. I used the word "ragged," let me say, in praise of good fighting, and not in any belittling sense, for, like most of the talking sort of people, I prefer rags to selfish respectability. And selfish respectability is the danger which at the present moment more than any other threatens the delightfulness and human richness of Irish country life.
Of course, it is impossible to make a true generalisation that will cover all the farmers of Ireland. For an Irish farmer may be anything from a private gentleman on a small scale to a labouring man on a large one. Farmers and farmers' families make up the greater part of the varied population of Ireland. There are in the country nearly 600,000 farm holdings of all shapes and sizes, and it has been estimated by a writer who takes the average family as consisting of five persons, that about 75 percent of the population are directly dependent upon the soil. Consequently, it will be seen that, if the country life of Ireland is decadent and dull, the entire life of the nation is in peril of decadence and dullness.
Personally, I believe that it is the better-off farmers who are most in danger of losing the colour out of their lives. Suddenly finding themselves in possession of their own land, or at least with good prospect of possessing their own land, after a struggle of many generations, they are like men who have come upon a fortune, and are in dread that some neighbor should hear of it, and cast an envious eye on it. They feel now that their crops are their own, that their cattle are their own, that their money is their own, in a way that was never so before.
They have arrived in the Utopia toward which their fathers strove as, outside Heaven, the chief end of man, and they wish to rest for a while and enjoy the sweets of it. Like the farmers in Mr. Shaw's play, "John Bull's Other Island," they just want things to be left as they are, without change, without disturbance.
I was talking to a County Mayo farmer some time ago, who declared in a whirl of not very sensible language: "I was always an extreme man, but I don't believe in going to extremities." It was the protest of one of the contented "haves" against the boycotting and cattle-driving practices of some of the discontented "have-nots."
He affirmed that men of property had now no say in the management of the country, that public life was in the hands of a "lot of lads and tramps." He said that he would like to see the return of the old system under which country government was in the hands of the grand juries instead of, as at present, the County Councils. He pointed to the road outside his house, and declared that, under the old grand jury, this used to cost £14 a year for maintenance.£14, if I remember, for six or eight miles, but that now under the County Council it was, how much?
I guessed twenty pounds, then thirty. "Fifty-five," he declared, fixing his disgusted withered face on me; "fifty-fifty pounds." I said that, perhaps, the road was better, but the suggestion made him twist his neck as though he were choking. As I looked at the little hedge of white beard that wandered round his throat, and his figure knotted in the chair, and his peevish old eyes, I seemed to see in him the tragedy of a revolutionary; a revolutionary who had aimed too low and got even a little more than he desired. He was like a once-starving man, who, being suddenly well-fed, thought it irrational that anybody else should go on complaining of starvation.
Robert Lynd, Home Life in Ireland (London: Mills, & Boon, 1909), 10-14.
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