The descendants of the Norman adventurers who got a footing here in the twelfth century; English and Scotch planters; officials and undertakers who, from time to time, had been induced to settle in Ireland by grants of land and sinecures, were, by a legal fiction, styled The Nation, although they were never more than a small fraction of it. For a great number of years every writer, every public man, every Act of Parliament, assumed that the English colony in Ireland was the Irish nation. Denunciations of Papists, the "common enemy"—gross falsehoods about their principles and acts—fears real or pretended, of their wicked, bloodthirsty plots, thickly strewn in our path as we journey through this dismal period of our history—reveal to us, as it were by accident, that there was another people in this island, besides those whom the law regarded as the nation; but they had no rights, they were outlaws—"the Irish enemy." One hundred and fifty years ago Primate Boulter expressed his belief that those outlaws made four-fifths of the population, and the English colony only one-fifth; but the colonists held the rich lands; the bulk of the people, who formed the real nation, were in the bogs, the lonely glens, and on the sterile mountains, where agriculture was all but impossible, except to the great capitalist. Capital they had none, and they were forced to subsist, as best they could, on little patches of tillage among the rocks, whose debris made the land around them in some sort susceptible of cultivation. By degrees those outlaws discovered that the potato, coming from the high moist soil of Quito, found in the half-barren wilds of Ireland, if not a climate, a soil at least congenial to its nature. It was palatable food, as it became acclimatized; it grew where no other plant fit for human food would grow; it was a great fertilizer; it was prolific: no wonder the poor Celt of our bogs and mountains, in time, made the potato more associated with the name of Ireland than it ever was with its native country, Virginia.
Before 1729 we have no record of the potato having suffered from blight or frost, or anything else. But this is not to be wondered at; even though such things occurred, the outlaws, who were its chief cultivators, excited neither interest nor pity in the hearts of the ruling minority. They were watched and feared; they were known to be numerous; and many were the plans set on foot to reduce their numbers, and cause them to become extinct, like the red deer of their native hills. Surely, then, a potato blight, followed by a famine, would not be regarded as a calamity, unless it affected the English colony. The Celtic nation in Ireland could have no record of such a visitation, unless in the fugitive ballad of some hedge schoolmaster.[39] Anyhow, the Celt, forced to live for the most part, in barren wilds, where it was all but impossible to raise sufficient food, found the potato his best friend, and his race increased and multiplied upon it, in spite of that bloody code which ignored his existence, and with regard to which Lord Clare, no friend to Ireland, thus expresses his views in his speech on the Union: "The Parliament of England seem to have considered the permanent debility of Ireland as the best security of the British crown, and the Irish Parliament to have rested the security of the colony upon maintaining a perpetual and impossible barrier against the ancient inhabitants of the country."[40]
Another cause for the increased cultivation of the potato may be found in the poverty of the English colony itself. Whilst the people of whom that colony was composed, through the Parliament that represented them, pursued the Catholic natives with unmitigated persecution, they were themselves the object of jealous surveillance, both by the Parliament and the commercial classes of England. Long before the times of which I am writing, the English always showed uneasiness at the least appearance of amalgamation between the descendants of the Norman invaders and the natives, although their fears on this head were to a great extent set at rest by the change of religion in England, which change extended in a very considerable degree to the English colony in Ireland. After the Reformation there was not much danger of a union between the Catholic Celt and the Protestant Norman. Still another jealousy remained—a commercial jealousy. The colonization of Ireland meant, in the English mind, the complete extirpation of the natives, and the peopling of this island by the adventurers and their descendants; but it is a strange fact, that even had this actually happened, we can, from what we know of the history of the period, assert with truth, that still their commercial prosperity and progress would be watched, and checked, and legislated against, whenever they would even seem to clash, or when there was a possibility of their clashing, with the commercial supremacy of Great Britain. Not to go into all the commercial restraints imposed on Irish manufactures by the English Parliament, let us take what, perhaps, was the most important one—that imposed on the woollen manufacture. For a long period this branch of industry had flourished in Ireland. We not only manufactured what we required for ourselves, but our exports of woollens were very considerable. This manufacture existed in England also, and the Englishmen engaged in it were determined to have the foreign markets to themselves. After many previous efforts, they at length induced both Houses of the English Parliament to address William the Third on what they were pleased to consider a grievance—the grievance of having foreign markets open to Irish woollens equally with their own. To those addresses the King replied that he would do all in his power to "discourage" the woollen trade in Ireland, to encourage the linen trade, and to promote the trade of England.[41] Accordingly, a duty equal to a prohibition was imposed upon the exportation of Irish woollens, except, indeed, to England and Wales, where they were not required—England at the time manufacturing more woollens than were necessary for her home consumption. About forty thousand people in Ireland were thrown out of bread by this law, nearly every one of whom were Protestants; for that trade was almost entirely in their hands, so that neither Palesman nor Protestant was spared when their interests seemed opposed to those of England. William's declaration on this occasion about encouraging the linen manufacture in Ireland was regarded as a compact, yet it was violated at a later period by the imposition of duties.[42] The jealousy and unkindness of the prohibitory duty on the export of woollens is exposed by the able author of the "Groans of Ireland," who says: "It is certain that on the coasts of Spain, and Portugal, and the Mediterranean, in the stuffs, etc., which we send them, we, under all the difficulties of a clandestine trade, undersell the French eight per cent., and it is as certain that the French undersell the English as much—it has been said—eleven per cent."[43] So that although the English manufacturer was unable to compete with the Frenchman abroad, his narrow selfishness would not permit Ireland to do so, although she was in a position to do it with advantage to herself.
Impoverished by such legislation, the English colony itself, Protestant and all as it was, had to lower its dietary standard and cultivate the potato, or, at least, promote its cultivation by the use of it.
Another of the alleged causes for the poverty of the country, and the consequent increase of potato culture, was absenteeism. In 1729 a list of absentees was published by Mr. Thomas Prior, which ran through several editions. The list includes the Viceroy himself, then an absentee, which he well might be, at that time and for long afterwards, as Primate Boulter was the ruler of Ireland. Mr. Prior sets down in his pamphlet the incomes of the absentees, and the total amounts to the enormous annual sum of £627,769 sterling, a sum in excess of the entire revenue of the country, which, though increasing year after year, even twenty-nine years afterwards was only £650,763.
Besides the exhausting drain by absentee proprietors, there was another kind of absenteeism, namely, that of Englishmen who, through Court or other influence, obtained places in Ireland, but discharged the duties of them, such as they were, by deputy. Mr. Prior cites the following instance as an example:—"One of those Englishmen who got an appointment in Ireland landed in Dublin on a Saturday evening, went next day to a parish church, received the Sacrament there, went to the Courts on Monday, took the necessary oaths, and sailed for England that very evening! This was certainly expedition, but still coming over at all was troublesome: so those who had obtained appointments in Ireland got an Act quietly passed in the English Parliament dispensing them from visiting Ireland at all, even to take possession of those offices to which they were promoted."[44]
That a large proportion of the owners of the soil of a country should reside out of it, has been always regarded as a great evil, as well as a real loss to that country. Mr. M'Cullagh's elaborate attempt to prove there is no real pecuniary loss inflicted by mere absenteeism convinces no impartial man, least of all does it convince those who experience, daily in their own persons, the evils which inevitably result from absenteeism. It is fallacious with regard to any country, but especially so as regards Ireland, which, in his argument, he assumes to have her proportion of the profit from the manufactured exports of the United Kingdom, whereas she is not a manufacturing country at all, having as exports, only some linen and the food that should be kept at home to be consumed by her people. When taxes are to be levied and battles to be fought, we are always an integral part of the United Kingdom; but when there is a question of encouraging or extending manufactures, we are treated as the rival and the enemy of England.[45]
The avarice and tyranny of landlords, is usually set down as a principal cause of the great poverty and misery of the Irish people, during a long period. If we examine the rents paid one hundred and fifty, or even one hundred years ago, they will appear trifling when compared with the rents of the present day; so that, at first, one is inclined to question the accuracy of those writers who denounce the avarice and rack-renting propensities of the landlords of their time. But when we examine the question more closely, we find so many circumstances to modify and even to change our first views, that by degrees we arrive at the belief, that the complaints made were substantially true. If the rents of those times seem to us very low, we must remember that the land, for the most part, was in a wretched condition; that the majority of farms had much waste upon them, and that the portions tilled were not half tilled; so that whilst the acreage was large, the productive portion of the land was only a percentage of it. Then, agricultural skill was wanting; good implements were wanting; capital was wanting; everything that could improve the soft and make it productive, was wanting. These and many other causes made rents that seem trifling to us, rack-rents to the farmers who paid them. Swift had no doubt at all upon the matter, for he says: "Another great calamity is the exorbitant raising of the rents of lands. Upon the determination of all leases made before the year 1690, a gentleman thinks that he has but indifferently improved his estate if he has only doubled his rent-roll. Farms are screwed up to a rack-rent; leases granted but for a small term of years; tenants tied down to hard conditions, and discouraged from cultivating the lands they occupy to the best advantage by the certainty they have of the rent being raised on the expiration of their lease, proportionably to the improvements they shall make."[46] As to the unlimited power of landlords, and its tyrannical use, Arthur Young, writing in 1779, less than one hundred years ago, says: "The age has improved so much in humanity, that even the poor Irish have experienced its influence, and are every day treated better and better; but still the remnant of the old manners, the abominable distinction of religion, united with the oppressive conduct of the little country gentlemen, or rather vermin, of the kingdom, who were never out of it, altogether bear still very heavy on the poor people, and subject them to situations more mortifying than we ever behold in England. The landlord of an Irish estate, inhabited by Roman Catholics, is a sort of despot, who yields obedience in whatever concerns the poor to no law but that of his will ... A long series of oppressions, aided by very many ill-judged laws, have brought landlords into a habit of exerting a very lofty superiority, and their vassals into that of an almost unlimited submission. Speaking a language that is despised, professing a religion that is abhorred, and being disarmed, the poor find themselves in many cases slaves even in the bosom of written liberty." And again, this enlightened Protestant English gentleman says of the Irish landlord, that "nothing satisfies him but an unlimited submission."[47]
Forty years later, some of their more obvious, not to say essential duties, were brought under the notice of Irish landlords, but in vain. The writer quoted above on the Famine of 1822 says: "It is therefore a duty incumbent on all those who possess property, and consequently have an interest in the prosperity of this country, to prevent a recurrence of this awful calamity [the Famine], and to provide for those persons over whom fortune has placed them, and whom they should consider as entrusted to their care, and entitled to their protection; and this can only be successfully carried into execution by their procuring and substituting other articles of food, so as to leave the poor only partially dependant on the potato crop, for their support."[48]
Some Acts of Parliament, without perhaps intending it, gave a further impulse to potato cultivation in Ireland. As if the violation of the treaty of Limerick by William the Third; the exterminating code of Anne; its continuance and intensification, under the first and second George were not a sufficient persecution of the native race, statutes continued to be enacted against them, during the first twenty-five years of George the Third's reign—that is, up to 1785, But although this was the case, the necessity of making some concessions to them began to be felt by their rulers, from the time the revolt of the American colonies assumed a dangerous aspect. So that, whilst, on the one hand, the enactment of persecuting laws was not wholly abandoned, on the other, there sprang up a spirit, if not of kindness, at least of recognition, and perhaps of fear. "It was in the year 1744," says Sir Henry Parnell, "that the Irish Legislature passed the first Act towards conciliating the Catholics."[49] And a very curious concession it was. It was entitled—"An Act to enable His Majesty's subjects, of whatever persuasion, to testify their allegiance to him."[50] Previously, the Catholics dared not to approach the foot of the throne even to swear, that they were ready to die in defence of it. But, two years before this an Act was passed of no apparent political significance, which was of much more practical value to the Catholics. It was "An Act to encourage the reclaiming of unprofitable bogs."[51] This Act made it lawful "for every Papist, or person professing the Popish religion," to lease fifty acres, plantation measure, of such bog, and one half acre of arable land thereunto adjoining, "as a site for a house, or for the purpose of delving for gravel or limestone for manure." Certain immunities were granted, and certain restrictions imposed. The immunities were, that, for the first seven years after the bog was reclaimed, the tenant should be free from all tithes, cesses, or applotment; the restrictions were: (1) that no bog should be deemed unprofitable, unless it were at least four feet from the surface to the bottom of it, when reclaimed—the Act having been especially passed for the reclaiming of unprofitable bogs; (2) that no person should be entitled to the benefit of the Act, unless he reclaimed ten plantation acres; (3) that half whatever quantity was leased, should be reclaimed in twenty-one years; (4) that such bog should be at least one mile from any city or market-town. Alas, how utterly prostrate the Catholics must have been, when this was regarded as a concession to them! Yet it was, and one of such importance, that "in times of less liberality it had been repeatedly thrown out of Parliament, as tending to encourage Popery, to the detriment of the Protestant religion;" and to counter-balance it, the pension allotted to apostate priests in Anne's reign was, in the very same Session of Parliament, raised from £30 to £40 per annum, by the Viceroy, Lord Townsend.[52] The wretched serfs were of course glad to get any hold upon the soil, even though it was unprofitable bog, and largely availed themselves of the provisions of the Act. Ten or twelve years later, we find Arthur Young speaking with much approval of the many efforts that were being made, in various parts of Ireland, to reclaim the bogs—efforts resulting, no doubt, in a great measure, from this Bill. In the process of reclaiming the bogs, the potato was an essential auxiliary.