To attribute the pauperism which now seems a part and parcel of the Irish nation while in their own country to the indolence and want of foresight on the part of the natives themselves, as it is a fashion with English writers to do, is wilfully to close the eyes to two very important things: their past history in their own land, and their present history outside of it.
As to their past history in their own land, it is an established fact that pauperism was unknown in the island, until Protestant legislators introduced it by their confiscations and laws with the manifest intent of destroying, rooting out, or driving away the race. What has been previously stated on this point cannot be gainsaid; and it suffices for the vindication of a falsely- accused people. There might be some hope for a speedier and happier solution of the vexed "Irish difficulty" did the grandsons of those who wrought the evil only honestly acknowledge the faults of their ancestors—the least that might be expected of them; and it would not be too much to imagine them honest enough to repair those faults in these days of severe reckoning and self-scrutiny.
As to the present history of the race outside their own land, now that it has been scattered, by these grievous calamities, all over the world, whatever characteristics its children may present, indolence and want of foresight can scarcely be numbered among them, in view of the success which attends their march everywhere. And if these qualities would seem to be rooted in the native soil, they are only "importations" like the men who fastened them there, and due only to the cramped position in which their legislators so carefully confined them. Where should there be energy, when every motive that could urge it has been taken away? How is it possible to improve their condition, when every improvement only imposes an additional burden upon them in the shape of rack-rent or eviction?
In his work on "The Social Condition of the People," Mr. Kay quotes from the Edinburgh Review of January, 1850, the evidence on this point given by English, German, and Polish witnesses before the Committee of Emigration, and the proofs gathered from every source as to the rapid improvement of the Irish emigrant, wherever he goes, are certainly convincing.
As for the foolish (for it is nothing else, unless it be wicked) assertion that those frightful famines referred to are to be attributed to the sufferers themselves, it is only necessary to say in refutation that in the very years when thousands were being swept away daily by their ravages in Ireland—1846 and 1847— the harbors of the island were filled with English vessels, loaded with cargoes of provisions of every kind to be transported to England in order to pay the rents due to absentee landlords: and all these provisions were the product of the famine-stricken land, won by the toil of the famine-stricken nation. This has invariably been the case when famine has swept over the island: the island's riches were in her harbors, stored in the holds of foreign vessels, to be carried away and converted into money that these noble Anglo-Irish landlords might be enabled to "sustain" life
Others have ascribed these periodical visitations to a surplus population; but, without entering into a discussion on the subject, Sir Robert Kane, in his "Industrial Resources of Ireland," shows that, taking the island in her present state and under the existing system of cultivation, she could support with ease eighteen million inhabitants; that, if the best methods of farming were generally adopted, the soil, by double and even triple crops, could feed without difficulty, not only twenty- five million, the figure stated by Mr. Gustave de Beaumont, a French publicist of eminence, but as many as from thirty to thirty-five million inhabitants.
But, as the same judicious writer observes, "the enormous quantity of cattle annually shipped off from Ireland to England would, in that case, be consumed in the country which produces it."
It is clear, therefore, that the pretended surplus population of Ireland is, as Sir Robert Kane says, a piece of pure imagination, perfectly ideal, and that it is its unequal and not its aggregate amount which is to be deplored.
But no one has presented the question more clearly and solved it more precisely than Mr. Gustave de Beaumont in his admirable work on Ireland, from which we note one or two telling passages, as given in Father Perraud's "Ireland under English Rule."
"The celebrated French publicist, who was the first to present to us (in France) a complete picture of the condition of Ireland, examining in 1829 how emigration might or might not do away with all the misery he had witnessed, proposed to himself the following questions: