Ireland, Historic and Picturesque

by Charles Johnston

In 1829 the Catholics were at last freed from the galling burdens which had weighed on them since 1537, when they failed to recognize Henry VIII as the representative of God on earth. They were still, however, under the shadow of a grave injustice, which continued to rest on them for many years. When their church lands were confiscated and their faith proscribed by law under the Tudors, a new clergy was overlaid on the country, a clergy which consented to recognize the Tudors and their successors as their spiritual head. As a reward, these new ministers of religion were allowed to levy a second tax on land, exactly as in England; and this tax they continued to collect until their privilege was finally taken away by Gladstone and the English Liberals. Needless to say that through three centuries and more four-fifths of this tax was levied on the indigenous Catholics, in support of what was to them an alien, and for most of the time a persecuting church.

One heavy disability still lay on the whole land. With its partial removal a principle has emerged of such world-wide importance in the present, and even more in the future, that we may well trace its history in detail.

The Normans, as we saw, paid themselves for conquering the Saxons and Angles by assuming a perpetual right to tax their produce; a right still in full force, and forming the very foundation of the ruling class in England. The land tenure thus created was, under the Tudors and the first Stuarts, bodily transferred to Ireland. In Ireland the land had ever been owned by the people, each tribe, as representing a single family, holding a certain area by communal tenure, and electing a chief to protect its territory from aggression. For this elective chieftainship the English law-courts substituted something wholly different: a tenure modeled on the feudal servitude of England. This new principle made the land of the country the property not of the whole people but of a limited and privileged class: the favorites of the ruling power--"hungry parasites" as the Congress of 1775 called them. This "landed" class continued to hold absolute sway until quite recently, and it was this class which succumbed to bribery in 1800, and passed the Act of Legislative Union with England. The clergy of the Established church were little more than the private chaplains of the "landed" class, the two alien bodies supporting each other.

Folly, however, was the child of injustice; for so shortsighted were these hungry parasites that they developed a system of land-laws so bad as to cause universal poverty, and bring a reaction which is steadily sweeping the "landed" class of Ireland to extinction and oblivion. The fundamental principle of these bad land-laws was this: the tenant was compelled to renew his lease from year to year; and whenever, during the year, he had in any way improved the land in his possession,--by draining marshes, by reclaiming waste areas, by adding farm-buildings, the "owner" of the land could demand an enhanced rent, as the condition of renewing the lease. The tenant had to submit to a continually ascending scale of extortion, sanctioned by law and exacted by armed force; or, as an alternative, he had to give up the fruit of his industry without compensation and without redress.

Anything more certain to destroy energy, to cut at the roots of thrift, to undermine all the best qualities of manhood, it would be impossible to imagine. The slave on the plantation could in time purchase his freedom. The tiller of the soil in Ireland found, on the contrary, that the greater his industry, the greater was the sum he had to pay for the right to exercise it. We saw that there never was any pretence of free contract in the feudal land-tenure of England; that there never was any pretence of an honest bargain between farmer and landlord, for their mutual benefit. The tenant paid the landlord for services rendered, not to him, but to his Norman conqueror. So it was, in an even greater degree, in Ireland. There was no pretence at all that tenant and landlord entered into a free contract for their mutual benefit. Nor did either law, custom, religion or opinion require the landlord to make any return to his tenants for the share of the fruit of their toil he annually carried away.

The tiller of the soil, therefore, labored from year to year, through droughts and rains, through heat and cold, facing bad seasons with good. At the end of the year, after hard toil had gathered in the fruit of the harvest, he saw the best part of that fruit legally confiscated by an alien, who would have been speechless with wonder, had it been suggested to him that anything was due from him in return. Nor was that all. This alien was empowered, and by the force of public opinion incited, to exact the greatest possible share of the tiller's produce, and, as we saw, he was entitled to the whole benefit of whatever improvements the tiller of the soil had made; and could--and constantly did--expel the cultivator who was unable or unwilling to pay a higher tax, as the penalty for improving the land.

It may be said that bad as this all was, it was not without a remedy; that the cultivator had the choice of other occupations, and might let the land lie fallow, while its "owner" starved. But this only brings to mind the fact that during the eighteenth century England had legislated with the deliberate intention of destroying the manufactures and shipping of Ireland, and had legislated with success. It should be added that this one measure affected all residents in Ireland equally, whatever faith or race. There was practically no alternative before the cultivator. He had the choice between robbery and starvation.

It would be more than miraculous if this condition of things had not borne its fruit. The result was this: it ceased to be the interest of the cultivator of the land to till it effectively, or to make any improvement whatever, whether by drainage, reclaiming waste land, or building, or by adopting better agricultural methods. In every case, his increase of labor, of foresight and energy, would have met with but one reward: when the time came to renew the lease, he would have been told that his land had doubled in value during the year, and that he must, therefore, pay twice as much for the privilege of tilling it. If he refused, he at once forfeited every claim to the fruit of his own work, the whole of his improvements becoming the property of the land owner.

The cultivators, as an inevitable consequence, lost every incentive to labor, energy, foresight and the moral qualities which are fostered by honestly rewarded work. They worked as little as possible on their farms, and the standard of cultivation steadily declined, while the mode of living grew perpetually worse. If it were intended to reduce a whole population to hopeless poverty, no better or more certain way could be imagined.