| ; |
The seventeen years during which Ireland
had possessed its own Parliament had undoubtedly been a time of advance
in trade and industry. Rents rose, the value of property doubled or even
trebled in some parts of the country; and the population increased sixty
per cent, in the twenty years between 1780 and 1800. The increase of tillage
which followed upon Foster's Act is calculated by Newenham in 1805 at
over six times the amount raised in 1785. There was a revival in the woollen
and cotton manufactures and that of linen was making steady progress.
The provision trade expanded, and brewing and distilling were re-established.
The old glass industry took new developments. The removal of several disabilities
in 1781 gave Catholics power to deal with land, and a pamphleteer writing
in 1799 remarks that "our agriculture begins to improve from the
moment that an intermission in the frenzy of our religious prejudice allowed
us to follow our own interests by taking off those restraints which clogged
the industry and damped the spirit of the nation."[1] Even Castlereagh,
the chief mover in the project of the Union, declared that "no power
in Europe has made more rapid strides in wealth and general happiness
in the last fifteen years than Ireland."[2] On all hands, by the
foes as well as by the friends of Irish independence, it was admitted
that activity and energy had followed a period of great depression, and
that there were signs of growing prosperity among the mercantile and industrial
classes. But the poorer classes benefited little, for rents and the price
of provisions rose out of all proportion to the rise in wages. Both in
Dublin and in the agricultural districts the same wretched poverty existed,
and in 1789 Arthur O'Connor thought the poor worse housed, worse clothed,
and worse fed than the people of any nation in Europe.
[1] Quoted in George O'Brian, Economic History of Ireland in the Eighteenth
Century, (1918), p. 37.
[2] Parliamentary History, xxxvi, 1709; Castlereagh Correspondence, iii,
204.
Dublin itself had a short period of splendour, the relics of which still
remain in the handsome and highly adorned Georgian houses which surprise
the visitor in various parts of the city.[3] There had always been fine
mansions in or close to the metropolis, such as Leinster House and Charlemont
House,[4] but now that the gentry came up to Dublin regularly to attend
the sittings of Parliament the whole city took on a new aspect of dignity.
From 1783 onward each year saw some new public building in course of construction.
A National Bank was opened in 1783 and the fine Custom House built. The
Order of St. Patrick was instituted in 1783. New squares added to the
convenience of the citizens. Fine pictures and statuary adorned the houses
of the aristocracy and their beautiful seats were scattered about the
provinces. Carriages and entertainments made Dublin life an imitation
of that of London. On a Sunday the North Circular Road, now so changed,
was a parade for sumptuous equipages, and the populace turned out to watch
the line of carriages which drove by with their postillions, that of the
Chancellor, Lord Clare, being the most conspicuous. The Royal Irish Academy,
founded to encourage Irish and scientific studies, awakened a fresh interest
in the antiquities and history of the country and formed a centre where
men of intelligence could meet. The Dublin Society pursued steadily its
encouragement given to agriculture and the breeding of horses and cattle,
and bestowed bounties and rewards for improvements. But speculation was
rife, and favouritism made away with vast sums of money; in 1784 Irish
finance had changed from a substantial credit account into a public debt
of £2,000,000.
[3] See the publications of the Georgian Society of Dublin.
[4] Leinster House is now the meeting-place of the Dail and Senate. Charlemont
House is being converted into a municipal picture gallery.
This was within two years of the establishment of legislative independence.
But after this plunge into extravagance the country seemed to be recovering
itself. On July 20, 1799, Cornwallis wrote to the Duke of Portland, commenting
on the decrease of rebellion: "Since I last addressed your Grace
the tranquillity of the country has been uninterrupted, and there is every
appearance at present of its continuing so. The late seasonable rains
afford a prospect of an abundant crop, and the people are universally
industrious. There is the greatest activity in all money transactions,
and every species of business is carried on with energy. The accounts
I receive from the North, in respect of the linen trade, are particularly
flattering...The revenue continues to rise and promises to exceed the
produce of 1798 in the same proportion as the produce of 1798 did that
of 1797."[5] This favourable condition of things did not long survive
the Union. The transference of the hundred Members who went to sit in
the English House of Commons did far more to disintegrate the life of
the Irish metropolis than the actual numbers would show. The centre of
attraction changed from Dublin to London, and with the intellectual, political,
and social activities removed to a distance, and the leading gentry drawn
away during the larger part of the year, Dublin ceased to hold its natural
place as the capital of the country.
[5] Castlereagh Correspondence, ii, 352; and cf. the letter of James
Dawson to the same effect, ibid., 375.
The fine houses were vacated and fell into decay; many whole streets of
what were the fashionable quarters of the city slowly degenerated into
tenements of the lowest class, and money which might have been spent in
Dublin was expended in London. The attention of the upper classes was
no longer concentrated on their own country, and education, culture, and
wealth alike tended to become thoroughly English in outlook and ambition.
It became increasingly difficult to find men of position to take posts
in their own country. Even in 1880 Bright, speaking in the House of Commons,
quoted the complaint of a magistrate in one of the central towns in Ireland
as to the difficulty of getting suitable men to put on the Bench. He said:
"If a man has a few thousands a year he resides in London; if he
has a thousand a year, he lives in Dublin."[6] Absenteeism was one
of the oldest ills of Ireland, but the Union did more than any other single
event to stimulate it. The general unrest, the land and tithe wars, the
want of social and intellectual intercourse, and the gap in ordinary life
between the interests of the different classes, all helped to increase
the numbers who made England their home for a considerable part of each
year.
[6] Daily Telegraph, August 17, 1880, quoted by R. Barry O'Brien, The
Parliamentary History of the Irish Land Question (1880), p. 13n.
The main trouble of this period was the long and bitter land war, arising
out of conditions of old standing between owners and tenants. The system
of land tenure was so different over the larger part of the country from
that in force in England that it was found difficult to make it understood
in the House of Commons. In England the landlords were accustomed to erect
buildings on their properties, to fence and drain, and generally to help
the farmer to improve his land, besides giving some compensation for the
farmer's improvements at the end of a lease. There was also a disposition,
if a farmer had been successful in his farm, to renew the lease to him
if he required it, in preference to seeking a new tenant elsewhere.
In Ulster, also, under the "Ulster custom" introduced by the
Scottish settlers, reasonable arrangements prevailed; a tenant who had
paid his rent could not be put out of his farm without due cause, nor
could the rent be raised on account of the tenant's own improvements.
It gave permissive fixity of tenure and it enabled the tenant to sell
the goodwill of his farm, if he desired to do so, provided that he obtained
the approbation of his landlord. The arrangement between the two was of
mutual advantage, and as a rule it worked well, land troubles being infrequent
in Ulster. Over the rest of the country, however, no such reasonable terms
of land-tenure prevailed. A most irritating and unsatisfactory system
left the tenant at the mercy of his landlord, discouraged industry in
the holder of land, and prevented any sense of security such as would
encourage the improvement of the farm by the tenant. "The landlords
never erect buildings on their property or expend anything in repairs."[7]
The landlord was not a partner in the production of his land; he was simply
a receiver of rent. Six months' credit was usually given for rent in arrears,
after which, if the rent was not paid, the cattle were distrained and
driven off to the pound, to be sold after a certain number of day's confinement.
The peasants called this "the hanging gale." The agent was often
the real master and the tenants were powerless in his hands. Wakefield
tells us that he had often seen distraint made after the tenant had paid
his rent to the middleman, who had failed to pay it over to the head-landlord;
he ascribes to this "illegal severity, which anyone who has resided
any time in Ireland must have witnessed," the frequent risings of
the people and the atrocities, "shocking to humanity and disgraceful
to the Empire," committed.
[7] Edward Wakefield, An Account of Ireland, statistical and political
(1812), i, 244-245.
The tenant was required to give bodily service free to his landlord at
certain seasons of the year and the rent was often far out of proportion
to that which would have been demanded for similar land in England. An
agent writes: "the tenants are too frightened to make an offer for
land, and they agree to any terms imposed by the middlemen; they will
accede to any conditions rather than quit the land." The length of
the leases differed on different estates and the tenants subdivided the
holding among "an indefinite number of holders," which Wakefield
says is "an old established practice, handed down from father to
son"; each taking "a man's share" of that which originally
belonged to one name in the lease; that is, they "gavelled"
out the land after the manner of their forefathers, the pasture land being
held in common. It seems clear that the owners simply carried on a system
which they found in existence when they settled in the country and which
was much to their advantage.
The loose and indefinite tie between owner and cottier, the part-payment
in kind or labour, the impounding of cattle, the subdivision or "gavelling"
of the farms into small holdings, were all parts of the old native system
which in earlier times subsisted between the Irish chief and his people.
It was a thoroughly bad system, placing in the hands of the owner indefinite
powers of oppression, of which, in frequent cases, he was all too ready
to take advantage. When a man improved his farm at his own expense, so
far was he from receiving compensation or encouragement, that his rent
was often raised because of his own improvements. When his lease came
to an end he had no claim to its renewal. "Many landed proprietors,"
Mr. Townsend tells us, "advertise to let to the highest bidder, without
any consideration for the claim of the occupying tenant."[8] The
tenant's sole means of livelihood being usually his plot of land, rather
than be turned out he would submit to terms which in many cases he was
unable to meet, and thus he lived in hourly terror of eviction. He settled
on a small holding and, having no inducement to improve it, or any animating
hope of its renewal upon reasonable terms, he would usually, as the time
for the expiry of his lease drew near, "rack and impoverish the land
he had so little chance of retaining."[9] It was a condition of things
equally disastrous to the country, to the landlord, and to the cottier;
the latter was, in fact, little better than a serf, disposable at the
will of his owner; it was only the middlemen who reaped a certain profit.
Wakefield shows that the agent frequently had a far larger income than
the proprietor. The owner of Muckross in Wakefield's day gained £7,000
a year from his estate, but his agent possessed himself of £17,000.[10]
[8] Townsend, Statistical Survey of Cork, p. 583.
[9] E. Wakefield, op cit., i, 244.
[10] Ibid., i, 261-262.
The landlords were by no means all rackrenters nor were the absentee owners
always the worst. The conditions varied greatly on different estates.
Some of the Galway estates were miserably grazed, while those of Lord
Fitzwilliam in Wicklow were far better managed "preference being
always given to the old tenants if they were desirous of renewal."
Some of the largest southern properties, again, were badly managed and
cultivated, but on others, like those belonging to Lord Shannon and Colonel
FitzGerald, the tenants were living in a state of comparative affluence.
But, at the worst, as one of the witnesses before the Select Committee
of 1825 stated in his evidence, there was "no check on the landlord's
power;...under cover of law, he may convert that power to any purposes
he pleases. The consequence is that when he wishes he can extract from
the peasant every shilling, beyond bare existence, which can be produced
from the land."[11]
[11] Select Committee of the House of Lords, 1825, minutes of evidence,
pp. 165, 179; and cf. Report of Select Committee on the Irish Poor Laws,
1823.
The evil system percolated downward from class to class. As the owner
or large farmer ground down his tenants so the tenants imposed upon the
cottiers beneath them. In some cases, they charged such high rents to
the wretched cottier that they themselves escaped almost scot-free. "It
is not too much to say," a farmer in Tanderagee reported, "that
for one tenant in a state of misery there are twenty cottiers in destitution."
Besides the heavy rent, the tenant had power to exact a certain number
of days' labour, without pay, usually at the time of year when it was
most needful that the labourer should be at work on his own holding. On
one property in the North of Ireland, where the tenants only paid on an
average £1 2s. 2d. per acre, the cottiers paid £4 16s. 5d.
per acre to the tenants. In other townlands the difference was as much
as £1 6s. 6d. against the labourer's £12 8s. an acre. The
cottier was necessarily always in arrears and had to take advances at
an exorbitant rate of interest. He was completely at the mercy of the
man above him and practically his slave.[12] Thus it was not, in a large
number of cases, the large proprietor who exacted these high rents; he
let on long leases, usually at a moderate rental. It was the class beneath
him, the poor but extravagant gentry and the wealthy farmers, who oppressed
the labourers and reaped the profit. As many as six or seven middlemen
often stood between the owner and the small holder or occupier, all deriving
their profit from the soil, of which the price had been forced up far
beyond its genuine value. If the owner were also an absentee, the hardship
became heavier, for the small holder had no protector, and the money provided
by so much hardship was spent out of the country.
[12] Evidence given before the Devon Commission, Digest, pp. 552-554;
556-557.
The general result of the bad system practised was the absolute demoralization
and degradation of the peasantry. The cottier lived from hand to mouth,
having no property in his holding and therefore no interest in improving
it. The pig, if he had one, was usually sold "to pay the rint,"
not to feed the family; the cow, or bed, or potatoes might be seized and
disposed of if the rent were in arrears. A witness before the Select Committee
of 1825, Mr. Nimmo, adds: "I conceive the peasantry of Ireland to
be, in general, in the lowest possible state of existence. Their cabins
are in a most miserable condition and their food potatoes, with water,
without even salt." Even the potatoes were of the worst sort. The
good potato was being replaced over a large part of the country by an
inferior tuber, used elsewhere only to feed cattle and pigs. The Select
Committees sitting at the time give pitiable accounts of the usual conditions;
they amply explain the terrible toll of human life taken among the underfed
people by the recurrent famines of the nineteenth century, culminating
in the Great Famine of 1846. If the Irish peasant is improvident, idle,
and thriftless, it is to be remembered that the bad customs of centuries
into which he was born and which he had no power to remedy, have helped
to make him so. Yet the man (and there were thousands of these) who lived
upon a miserable plot of often barren ground at home with his family and
who walked annually to the nearest port for Liverpool, often right across
Ireland, in order to lay by sufficient out of an English or Scottish season's
harvesting to pay his landlord's rent and keep his cottage, can hardly
be accused of idleness. He was worthy of some better chance of existence
and of more nourishing food than he ever got. If he were a man of spirit
and tried to improve his holding, the landlord and the tithe-proctor were
both at hand to come down upon him at the end of the quarter for increased
rent; under such circumstances, industry was not a quality to be encouraged.
The tithe was an ever-present and natural source of discontent: the final
pressure which forbade the poor man to rise. When his landlord, his tithe,
and his own church dues were all paid, there was little enough left to
support his family. The tithe-proctor was even more dreaded than the agent,
for his demands were less well defined and his methods more exacting.
Very bad cases sometimes occurred, and with the gradual rise in the status
of the Catholic population, impatience grew more pronounced, while the
years of famine aggravated the evil. Grattan began to debate the matter
in 1787, but for nearly forty years nothing was done to deal satisfactorily
with the problem. Some relief was rendered urgent by the outbreak of the
tithe war, which arose partly from an attempt to force the Catholic priests
to pay tithe as well as the people. Terrible scenes were enacted and sanguinary
contests took place between the military sent down to enforce the law
and the populace; nor did the attempt of the Government to collect the
tithe themselves tend to ameliorate the situation.
During the year 1832 nearly nine thousand agrarian crimes were committed
in Ireland, many of them in Leinster, the chief centre of the tithe war.
Of these two hundred were murders. The improvement in these frightful
conditions will ever be associated with the name of Thomas Drummond, a
Scotsman who came over as Under-Secretary to Lord Morpeth in 1835, and
set himself resolutely to enforce the law impartially on behalf of all
classes alike.[13] The firmness, wisdom, and moderation of the administration
for which he was mainly responsible brought about a short period of quiet
in Ireland without resort to any coercive measures. Drummond put down
lawlessness with a firm hand; he did not hesitate to rebuke the extravagances
of O'Connell on the one side or the violence of the Orangemen on the other.
The creation of the metropolitan police in 1829 and the improvements introduced
in the discipline of the Irish constabulary in Drummond's day did much
to enforce order, but agents of secret societies continued to foster agrarian
crime and to terrorize the country. A chronic state of lawlessness seemed
to have taken hold on the people, and secret societies were joined by
thousands of young men. Whiteboyism revived and Blackfeet, Whitefeet,
Terry Alts, Rockites, and Ribbonmen, all had their troops of followers,
many of whom joined in self-defence. Though ultimately it was misery that
stirred them to violent courses it was not the poorest that usually took
part in them. "There is no danger in poverty," said O'Connell;
"it is the smug, saucy, and venturous youth of the farmer class that
plot and perpetrate all the predial mischief." "Whiteboy acts,"
we hear again, "are for the most part perpetrated by sturdy, lazy
fellows who are unwilling to work."[14] But it must be allowed that
O'Connell's continual agitation and appeal to popular passions played
their part in the work, heartily as he disapproved of the exhibitions
of discontent he had done so much to stir up.
[13] R. Barry O'Brien, Life and Letters of Thomas Drummond (1889).
[14] MacCullagh Torrens, Twenty Years in Parliament (1893), p. 299; Cusack,
Life of O'Connell, i, 456; and cf. Lewis, Irish Disturbances (1831), pp.
89-92.
The condition of the country was such as to alarm the most optimistic
mind. The Irish Poor Law enquiry of 1837 had witnessed to "the painful
certainty that there is in all parts of Ireland much and deep-seated distress."
The lack of industries threw the large majority of the population on the
land for support but with wages averaging about 8 1/2d. a day or, for
all the year round, 2s. or 2s. 6d. a week, it was impossible to support
a decent existence or to attempt to save for sickness or old age. In bad
harvests there was no choice but to starve, for the people had no money
in their hands and no means of livelihood to turn to. During thirty weeks
of each year, it was computed that not less than 585,000 labourers, not
reckoning their families, were out of work, for the planting and cultivation
of potatoes in no way filled a man's time and there was nothing else to
do. The Government attempt to introduce the workhouse system into Ireland,
though undoubtedly it proved a palliative during the famine years, was
disliked even more in Ireland than in England and was denounced especially
by O'Connell. The Report says that "the able-bodied out-of-works
would endure any misery rather than live in a workhouse," and adds
that "we see the labouring class eager for work."[15] The Commissioners
recommended State-aided emigration, drainage, the destruction of unwholesome
cabins, and improvements on the farms, with the founding of agricultural
schools, all which expedients were resorted to on a large scale during
the famine with both good and evil results. One direct benefit from the
establishment of the Poor Law, which was laid on the landlords for part
payment, was an increased interest shown by them in the condition of their
estates. It was better for them to keep their tenants in decency than
that they should go on the rates and have to be maintained largely out
of the landlords' pockets. In many cases they pulled down the insanitary
cabins and assisted the cottiers to emigrate, introducing a better system
on their properties. The one thousand properties held under the Courts
of Chancery and Exchequer were noted for neglect, no attempt to improve
them ever being made. The severity of the famine was the direct result
of the mismanagement of the estates.
[15] Abstract of the Final Report of the Commissioner's of Irish Poor
Law Inquiry, 1837.
Famines were becoming chronic, but those of the years 1846-47 were the
worst ever experienced. The potato disease passed over westwards from
the Continent and was felt in a lesser degree in parts of England and
Scotland. It spread with appalling rapidity. In one week in August the
apparently abundant crop was stricken. Captain Mann of Clare writes: "In
July, I had passed over thirty-two miles thickly studded with potato-fields
in full bloom. The next time the face of the whole country was changed;
the stalk remained a bright green but the leaves were all scorched black.
It was the work of a night. Distress and fear were pictured on every countenance,
and there was a general rush to dig or sell."[16] The accounts by
eye-witnesses of the horrors of the famine are too terrible to repeat.
"It is as if a destroying angel had swept over the country,"
exclaimed a Member in the House of Commons; "the whole population
struck down; the air a pestilence; the fields a solitude; the chapel deserted;
the priest and the pauper famishing together; no inquest, no rites, no
record even of the dead:...death, desolation, despair, reigning through
the land."[17] Before such a calamity the ordinary methods of relief
were helpless. In similar extremities the usual trade regulations had
been occasionally suspended and special means taken to preserve the food
grown in the country for the famishing inhabitants.[18]
[16] Quoted in Sir George Nicholls, History of the Irish Poor Law (1856),
p. 310.
[17] Hansard, 3rd series, cv., p. 609, May 17, 1849; quoted in Bryce,
Two Centuries of Irish History (1888), p. 403.
[18] Sir Robert Peel, Memoirs, ii, 188-89.
The wheat crop in Ireland was hardly up to the average,[19] and the barley
and oats were deficient; yet it is undoubted that if the corn had been
kept in the country a multitude of lives might have been saved. The English
Parliament was at the moment immersed in the struggle for the repeal of
the Corn Laws, and Peel was driven from power to make room for the party
of Lord John Russell just when what Russell truly described as a thirteenth
century famine in a nineteenth century population was at its height. The
case of Ireland was used in debate as an example of the necessity of a
free ingress of corn; but in this instance the prevention of corn leaving
the country would have been a more effective means of preserving life.
But a host of objections from merchants and ship-owners put a stop to
all hope of such direct measures of relief and the removal of impediments
to import took their place. For the moment this made the provision of
outside supplies cheaper and easier, but its permanent effect was to encourage
competition which brought down prices and ruined Ireland as a corn-producing
country with a sure market close at hand. It encouraged the tendency to
turn arable land into pasture, producing cattle for meat instead of wheat
and barley.
[19] Sir George Nicholls, History of the Irish Poor Law (1856), p. 311.
This was one main cause of the wholesale evictions for which the famine
years furnished a plausible excuse, the reversion to pasture requiring
fewer labourers and bringing milling and its kindred trades to an end.
The repeal of the Corn Laws was largely responsible for the very slow
recovery of the country after the famine years. Conditions were changed;
labour was not wanted; and though the population had been reduced through
death and emigration by nearly two million persons between the census
of 1841 and 1851, there were still too many inhabitants for the means
of livelihood.
The tide of emigration, once set in, has never come to an end. The population,
which numbered in 1841 some 8,196,597 persons had been reduced, by the
time the census was taken in 1911, to 4,390,219, hardly more than half
the number. The 1926 Census gives 4,229,124 as the total population, the
decrease being entirely in the Free State. Though Peel's repeal of the
Corn Laws was an indirect cause of this great decrease, at the moment
of carrying the measure he relied on it to bring corn into the harbours
of Ireland to relieve distress. The slow methods of Parliamentary debate
were, however, not suited to such an emergency; on the heels of the famine
typhus and dysentery were treading and immediate aid was called for; even
from the consideration of self-preservation succour was needed, for the
people were pouring over to Lancashire, Lanarkshire, and other places
to seek work, bringing with them the seeds of pestilence and death. The
emigrant vessels to the United States were becoming plague-ships, in which
the victims, closely packed and already weakened by hunger, succumbed
long before they reached the shores of the New World. The efforts to meet
the emergency, inadequate as they proved to be, were on a liberal scale.
Private charity found its way to the sufferers through thousands of channels,
"of the aggregate result of which no estimate can be formed."
England, the States, and Ireland itself formed innumerable associations
for relief, and did voluntary work for the suffering which has perhaps
only been equalled in the recent Great War. The Government suspended the
duties on foreign corn, ordered Indian meal from the United States to
the amount of £100,000, and established all over the country depots
for its distribution on a large scale. But the lack of money to purchase
food among the sufferers showed the necessity for other measures; and
public works were set on foot which employed at one time as many as 97,000
persons.
Unfortunately, like most hurried or panic legislation, these extensive
relief works were planned on no system of permanent benefit to the country.
It was made a stipulation that no private landowner should benefit by
them, a rule which excluded reclamation, drainage, and many other much-needed
plans for the permanent advantage of the country. The £50,000 voted
by Parliament, which was to be supplemented on the spot, was mostly wasted
in entirely unproductive labour. The Knight of Glyn found large numbers
of people engaged in filling up the cutting in a hill with the stuff they
had taken out of it. Thousands were set to dig up good macadamized coach-roads
with spades and turf-cutters.[20]
[20] Mitchel, History of Ireland, ii, 408-409.
An army of twelve thousand overseers superintended these useless works,
absorbing a large proportion of the relief money into their own pockets.
The fisheries were deserted, the fields untilled, shoes and boots went
without mending, because from all over the country men crowded in to get
"the Queen's pay."[21] Universal demoralization set in. The
landlords, already sore beset with the increased poor rates and cess,
were none too well off, as was later to be proved by their efforts to
sell their properties under the Encumbered Estates Act of 1849. Lord Clarendon
wrote to Peel when the Bill was mooted: "The condition of the landlords
generally is deplorable. As a body they are insolvent. Many of them lack
the first necessaries of life."[22] In these circumstances it is
not altogether surprising that many of them took little interest in relief
works which were quite useless to the country or themselves, or that the
labourers did the smallest amount of work compatible with drawing the
wages given. The average number employed was in October 1846 some 114,000
persons, but early in the following year it had risen to 570,000; more
than two million persons altogether were employed on relief works. The
old, the young, and the disabled died; their corpses lay along the roads
or were cast into hasty pits without coffins. Those who had saved money
and could afford the passage fled to America or took low-grade employment
in London, Manchester, and Glasgow, or other towns. The emigration returns
show an increase of from 28,000 in 1840 to 105,955 in 1846. It was the
best and most thrifty of the young people who emigrated to the States
and Canada, many of them respectable agriculturalists and artisans whose
loss to the country was a severe one.
[21] Nicholls, op. cit., p. 315, and see Trevelyan, The Irish Crisis.
[22] See G. O'Brien, The Economic History of Ireland from the Union to
the Famine, p. 136; and the opinion of Sir Samuel Ferguson stated in his
speech at the Protestant Repeal Meeting, May, 1848, in his Life by his
wife (1896), i, 246-254.
The landlords in many cases took full advantage of the inability of their
people to pay their rents to eject them in large numbers and to burn down
their cabins. The obligation to become responsible for the support or
part-support of the famine-stricken of their own townlands led to a general
adoption by needy proprietors of this cheap but heartless method of relieving
themselves of their responsibilities; and the clause introduced into the
Poor Law Act of 1847 which forbade relief to all who occupied more than
a quarter of an acre of land, though intended to limit relief to the most
necessitous, had the effect of inducing large numbers of distressed people
to give up their holdings in order to claim relief. Admission to a workhouse
was only allowed to those who held no land. The universal impoverishment
caused by this clause, coming to reinforce the temptation which the Corn
Law Repeal gave to owners to turn their properties into pasture and get
rid of their tenants greatly changed the face of the country. A Tipperary
priest in 1852 wrote: "Two-thirds of my congregation have departed
to the workhouse or gone to America. I was, God help me, very proud of
my flock seven or eight years ago...I used to point to them as the decentest
and best conducted people in the country. My chapel always overflowed.
There is hardly a third of it occupied at present...There is squalor and
rags, tottering old age and no children."[23] The people were "clad
like beggars, housed like beggars, and fed like beggars."
[23] Quoted in C. Gavan Duffy, League of the North and South (1886),
p. 184.
Famine had become a recurrent phenomenon and in 1850 it was computed that
a hundred persons a week still died of hunger or of the diseases begotten
of hunger. Two-thirds of the farms of from one to five acres which had
existed in 1841 had disappeared. The landlords became known as "Exterminators,"
and when a farm was put up for sale it was a common question whether it
had been "cleared" of small holders. In one small barony (Kilrush)
the dwellings of fifteen thousand persons had been destroyed. In revenge,
all sorts of evasions of rent and of the law became usual among the distressed
occupants. Captain Larcom's Report gives the total number of evictions
in the years 1848-49 as 177,178, which, taking an average of five in a
family, would make 585,890 poor people turned out of their homes into
the roads in two years. It was manifest that no Poor Law provision could
meet the needs of such a mass of misery, crowded and insanitary as the
workhouses were. The sufferings of the emigrants were even worse, and
on their arrival in America thousands of them, thrown out upon the streets
without money, and ignorant of any trade or calling, sank into the purlieus
of the great cities and fed the taverns and the gaols. The Catholic Bishop
of Toronto revealed a condition of things that was truly appalling. In
that city in 1863, out of a total prison population of 1,901, the Irish
numbered 1,168, of whom 703 were women. Other nationalities came over,
the Bishop says, with the means of establishing themselves on farms or
as mechanics, but a large majority of the Irish were penniless. The parish
priest of Montreal gave an even worse account of what had happened in
his city, to which bands of young Irish women were sent out from the degrading
workhouses at home.[24]
[24] See Kirkham's articles in the Irish People, 1863-65; and John O'Leary,
Recollections of Fenians and Fenianism (1896), vol. ii.
Emigration is a benefit only when carefully superintended, and when the
emigrants are chosen with discretion and placed in positions for which
they are fitted, with sufficient means to tide them over the period of
removal and settlement. To cast on American shores multitudes of poverty-stricken,
diseased, and famished people, absolutely ignorant of any trade or of
the knowledge even of reading and writing, was to provoke the utmost misery
and to make the emigrants themselves a source of evil wherever they settled.
The Devon Commission, appointed on February 14, 1845, to inquire into
the land conditions in Ireland had disclosed a condition of things which
pointed to the need for immediate legislation. It was presided over by
the Earl of Devon and was composed entirely of landowners; while out of
the 303 witnesses called 47 were landlords, 47 agents, and 128 farmers.
Yet, though the Commission might be considered one-sided, it made useful
suggestions, recommending that encouragement should be given to tenants
by letting to them on longer leases and that fair compensation should
be offered for improvements. In June of the same year Lord Stanley introduced
a Bill based on the findings of this Commission. He rejected emigration,
the fashionable remedy for all Irish ills, contending that the question
was to be solved by rooting the occupier "not out of, but on the
soil"; and he argued for a system which should induce the tenant
to invest his labour and capital in his land. Stanley's Land Bill and
Sharman Crawford's Tenant Right Bill, a measure formed on similar lines,
were fought with perseverance but again and again rejected. Horseman's
saying that "Ireland has been truly described as one adjourned debate"
was as true of the Land Act as it was to prove later on the question of
Home Rule. Seven years after the Devon Commission had reported, the only
Act passed regarding Irish land was the Encumbered Estates Act, which
relieved the landlords, but did not improve the status of the tenant.
Rather it deprived him of any ownership in his holding and allowed the
head landlord to sell outright over his head. Six months after the passing
of this Act, in 1849, over thirteen million pounds worth of property had
come under the operation of the new law; but none of it was sold to tenants,
nor was any regard paid to claims made by the tenants for improvements.
Meanwhile, suspensions of the Habeas Corpus Act took the place of remedial
measures, and in the fourth year of the famine, with sixty per cent. of
the population receiving relief, nothing permanent had been done.
But the agitation was spreading through Ireland and once more Ulster
held out a hand of resolute assistance to the South. The ruin that had
desolated other provinces was beginning its work of destruction in the
North. William Sharman Crawford, a County Down man, again introduced his
Bill, which from his persistence became known as "Crawford's Craze,"
and on its accustomed defeat the Irish Attorney-General, Joseph Napier,
of Belfast, presented to the House a Government Bill which contained a
clause protecting tenant's improvements and in favour of compensation.
It was not passed, though John Bright, who had been studying the Report
of the Devon Commission, now threw the weight of his powerful advocacy
into the cause of the tenants and Lord Dufferin and Charles Gavan Duffy
ably supported the relief bills. But all efforts up to and including the
elaborate but abortive Bills of 1860 and 1867, failed to effect any real
improvement in the condition of land tenure; [25] they were of so complicated
and unsatisfactory a nature that their abandonment was not to be regretted,
and it was not until Gladstone brought in his Land Bill of February 15,
1870, twenty-five years after the sitting of the Devon Commission, that
a real attempt was made to settle the question. But, in the meantime,
the great annual wave of emigration continued and evictions for non-payment
of rent "fell like snow-flakes" on the unprotected tenants.
It was some time yet before the peasant was to be "rooted in the
soil."
[25] R. Barry O'Brien, The Parliamentary History of the Irish Land Question
(1880), ch. v.
END OF CHAPTER XVIII
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