From the county of Clare statements arrived in London, if possible, more appalling. Early in April pestilence manifested itself in various places, and the county of Tipperary was disturbed by famine riots, independent of the normal disturbances which subjected that county to such misery, and earned for it so terrible a reputation. At Clonmel food riots assumed a formidable appearance, and the military had to guard the flour mills. The Roman Catholic clergy exerted themselves successfully to soothe the minds of the peasantry, and prevent that increase of their sufferings, which would result from the plunder of private property. The peasantry of Ireland were not addicted to robbery, and whatever outrages fanaticism, political and religious, might goad them to commit, the necessities of their famishing wives and children alone could cause them to resort to plunder. Thus, at a large and peaceable meeting of the peasantry in the county of Galway, at the end of April, they made this declaration:—“If employment be not immediately given, we can no longer stand the distress under which we are suffering.” Of course it was necessary to put down tumult and protect property, and very painful were the duties which in consequence devolved upon the civil and military power. Ex uno disce omnes. At Kilsheelan, between the counties of Tipperary and Waterford, an occurrence took place, which was described in the language of one of the leading journals of the south of Ireland in the following terms:—“On Thursday morning, in consequence of information received by the magistrates, they very prudently had cars stationed in the barracks for the prompt conveyance of the troops in case of necessity; and subsequent proceedings will show how very judicious and prudent their arrangements were. In a short time an express arrived in town stating that an immense mob was plundering the boats at Kilsheelan, within four miles of Clonmel, and forthwith a party of the 33rd got on the cars and proceeded to the scene of outrage, together with a party of the 1st Royal Dragoons, under the command of Major Galloway. Mr. J. Bagwell, Mr. W. Riall, Major Shaw, and Sub-inspector Fosberry accompanied them, and when within a short distance of the scene of plunder, word reached them that the robbery going on was most extensive. Mr. Fosberry and a mounted policeman immediately galloped on, and when they reached the spot, the scene which met their view is more easily imagined than described. An immense multitude were plundering the boats; a vast quantity of Indian corn, the property of Mr. Going, of Caher, was destroyed or made off with, and a quantity of wheat, the property of Mr. T. Hughes, was also stolen and destroyed. The military quickly came up, and a regular engagement took place. Stones were firing in all directions—several soldiers were struck; Mr. Fosberry received a blow of a stone in the leg, and it was not until some time had elapsed that this lawless rabble were subdued, and thirteen of them taken prisoners and brought into our gaol. Nothing could exceed the coolness of our magistrates, officers, and soldiers during this rencontre, and we are happy to say that a portion of the wheat was retaken.”
Such was the state of Ireland up to the harvest time of 1846, when, unhappily, all the fears of men, such as have been quoted, and the predictions of Sir Robert Peel, were fulfilled. There was another failure of the harvest; the crops of potatoes and oats suffered to such an extent as to increase, many fold, all the miseries previously experienced, and the dangers previously apprehended. Five millions, five hundred thousand tons of potatoes, and five millions two hundred thousand quarters of oats, below the average, was produced that harvest. The estimated loss in money, from the deficient produce of the year, was sixteen millions pounds sterling!
The efforts to mitigate these evils were manifold. Subscriptions were raised in every part of the British Isles, and, indeed, in every part of the British empire. From various places on the continent, especially France, donations were transmitted in either money or food. The Sultan of Turkey sent a generous contribution to the common stock of relief. From the United States of America supplies also came. The world might be represented as laid under contribution to relieve the miseries of Ireland. The government also made great exertions. Sir Robert Peel’s administration made secret and extensive purchases of Indian corn, which were sold, or distributed gratuitously, according to circumstances. By donations for public works, and “general presentments,” Sir Robert Peel also prepared for the coming disaster. He had expended in this way more than eight hundred thousand pounds, a little more than the half of which had been repaid by rates levied in Ireland under the powers intrusted to the grand juries. Lord John Russell, soon after he passed his sugar duties bill, made proposals to parliament calculated to meet the distress as it then existed, and in some measure to anticipate the relief which he foresaw would be required. He proposed to empower the lord-lieutenant to summon sessions of counties and of baronies, to consider the propriety of making public works for the relief of the poor, and to give to those sessions, under certain circumstances, authority to determine upon what works were desirable or necessary, which the board ot works would upon such decision execute. The imperial treasury was to make advances for carrying on these works, to be repaid in ten years at three and a half per cent, interest. Grants of £50,000 each would be made to certain poor districts which would be unable to repay advances. His lordship moved resolutions embodying these proposals, which were carried, and a bill founded upon them passed through both houses with the utmost rapidity. The introduction of these measures seemed to produce a good effect on Ireland, for crime and outrage abated. The ministers took advantage of this circumstance to claim great merit for their administration, and, on the 28th of August, when parliament was prorogued by commission, the speech delivered ascribed to her majesty great satisfaction in the relief so cordially provided by parliament for the Irish poor, and the beneficial effects produced. These tokens of returning peace were as the morning dew, which soon passes away, and the measures of parliament, notwithstanding their magnitude, were soon proved to be inadequate. The government acted, however, with generosity and courage, although their wisdom and administrative aptitude were not equally conspicuous. During a portion of the interval of the reassembling of parliament, in January, 1847, the government, unauthorised by parliament, expended a million sterling per month. The cabinet felt assured that parliament would indemnify and England approve. Immense supplies of Indian corn and other articles of food were carried by government steamers to such points of the coast as were convenient for their prompt dispersion to the interior. The labourers on the public works were paid from one shilling to one shilling and sixpence per day. In the county of Mayo, where the distress was peculiarly aggravated, nearly half a million sterling was expended in public works, in districts the Ordnance valuation of which was little more than half that amount. These works were unproductive, and baronies were pledged to their whole value, some for a year, and others for several years, in repayment of the grants, although the plan of repayment to the government was, that only half the amount advanced should be refunded. Many private individuals, both in Ireland and in Great Britain, exhibited a noble generosity; and the heroic self-sacrifice of clergymen, medical men, and others, in the midst of the famine and plague-stricken people, cannot be too much commended. The liberality and exertions of the Irish residents in England and Scotland was much to their own honour and to the reputation of their country. Notwithstanding all these exertions, the aid of the government and of private individuals was abused, and the annals of the world do not contain any narrative of ingratitude and selfishness more base than those which record the transactions of certain classes of the Irish people during that terrible crisis. Many of the landed gentry took occasion to have their own fences and private roads repaired at the public expense, and there were few parts of the country where “public works” did not mean improvements of the domains, and the creation of roads to the mansions of the gentry. The Roman Catholic chapels, and the ways of access to them, were also treated as “public works.” The conduct of “the Board of Works” was far from unimpeachable, and men distinguished in her majesty’s service cut a poor figure in connection with the inquiries and discussions to which the modes of managing the public relief ultimately led. The moral effect of the charity was most injurious to the country, whatever its material advantage in the urgency of the occasion. This was exemplified in many ways. The peasantry were unwilling to bestow a fair amount of labour upon works of acknowledged utility, although paid nearly double the ordinary rates of wages; they lazily preferred public works, so that there was a scarcity of hands to gather in the imperfect harvest until the government partially withdrew its competition from the labour market. Considerable numbers of farmers, some of whom held as many as sixty acres of land, applied for tickets from the relief committees, and were placed upon the public works, thus drawing off the money from the legitimate objects of aid. Small farmers in numbers received gratuities of Indian corn and other food, whose means were such as ought in common decency and common honesty to have prevented such an application. The local committees acted with partiality and injustice, and numbers of the peasantry perished of starvation, while the greedy, who were not necessitous, preyed upon the public charity. In the county Clare, five thousand persons were struck off the lists of those who were employed by the labour rate, and who, it is scarcely necessary to add, rendered no return for the money they had received, for the ostensible labour was in these cases a sham. The most scandalous of all the exhibitions of want of probity which the crisis developed was the revival of efforts to procure arms. The peasantry, farmers, town-population—all of every rank—sought to possess themselves of weapons of war, especially firearms. The demand for powder and percussion-caps was as eager as for weapons. Birmingham was kept busy; every hand in the gun-making trades there was employed; Sheffield was also labouring at sword cutlery, and in the manufacture of daggers and bayonets; while the smithies of Ireland were extensively engaged in the manufacture of pike heads. The money expended by benevolent persons and by the government on the vast scale which the emergency and a noble compassion dictated, was employed to procure arms which those who purchased them intended to turn upon the hands that fed them as soon as opportunity allowed. Whatever thanks might be felt by the peasantry towards those who on the spot gave of their private store to mitigate the pangs of the sufferers, no gratitude was entertained to the British public or to the government. Starving Ireland armed to strike down her benefactors with weapons procured by the misuse of the boon which these benefactors had extended. However painful it may be to relate the story of such turpitude, truth constrains it: the Irish peasant begged, that he might arm against the charitable hand that succoured him. Persons actually perished leaving some, money, with which surviving relatives, in the depths of their misery, purchased arms. It was thought that no other opportunity so favourable would arise to turn the gold of the Saxon into steel, which might be pointed against his own breast. The object most at heart with the famishing crowds was the ascendancy of their religion, to be accomplished by the subjugation of British authority; for this they famished and bought muskets and horse-pistols, powder and percussion caps, old swords and bayonets. To such an extent was this carried that in Clonmel, a town of about 18,000 inhabitants, and where the people rioted for food, as already recorded, nearly twelve hundred stand of arms were sold in a few days. These were purchased by the silver which the government Board of Works had paid in the charitable employment of the people on non-productive labour.
Much difficulty arose, in the distribution of gratuitous supplies of food, from the routine of the public offices. So complex were the details which the under-officials were obliged to observe, that men actually perished while a useless routine correspondence was being conducted. It was satirically said by an English observer, “the delivery of a few quarters of English corn to those who want it requires as much correspondence and documentary forms as a chancery suit.”
The refusal of grand juries to “present” was another obstacle to the prompt relief of the people. They were unwilling to carry into force the presentment act, because the money advanced should be one-half repaid, and, while held as a loan, be chargeable with interest. These bodies, which refused presentments on grounds that it was not desirable or necessary to make them, were amongst the most clamorous in the kingdom for their share of patronage in dispensing the money and food for which no repayment was to be made.
POLITICAL AGITATION.—YOUNG IRELAND.
During the progress of all this misery and turbulence, and while the government required to put forth all its energies to mitigate the one and suppress the other, Ireland was torn by political factions, and the voice of party was never for a moment silent. On previous pages the reader will find the state of Irish parties depicted as they stood in 1845. Throughout the year 1846 some new phases of the political spirit of the people were presented. O’Connell still declared that the only remedy for Ireland was the repeal of the union; and that while he gave a modified support to a whig government, so long as it sincerely attempted the melioration of Irish circumstances, he merely did so to prove that he was not a partisan, and in the hope of eventually bringing all men to believe that no effectual redress for the wrongs of Ireland was to be expected from the imperial legislature—that Ireland’s only hope lay in “a native parliament.” This the great agitator declared he would obtain by moral force only, if the people of Ireland abstained from rebellion, and preserved the moral attitude of a united demand for the repeal of the legislative union between Great Britain and Ireland. Gradually there arose in “the Repeal Association” a more spirited section, which went by the designation of “Young Ireland.” These men laughed at O’Connell’s moral force doctrines, or denounced them with disdain. At first they professed unbounded respect for himself, and an approval of his aims, but an irreconcileable antipathy to his measures. They maintained the right of all men to use arms in defence or in the assertion of liberty; proclaimed that Ireland was too noble a country, and the Irish too fine a race, to be subjected to a provincial status. “Ireland a nation—not a province,” so often proclaimed by O’Connell, became in earnest the watchword of this new and vigorous party. They derided the time-serving and place-hunting of O’Connell’s partisans, and declared that, by asking places from the English government for his followers, O’Connell had corrupted and dishonoured his country. They also opposed “the rent,” which O’Connell received as a tribute from the people, and a means of enabling him to employ various agencies for the prosecution of his labours. He had given up the practice of his profession, to him most lucrative, in order to devote himself wholly to what he believed to be the good of his country, and, accordingly, the people contributed liberally to enable him, as the leader of the Roman Catholics of Ireland, to hold his place without indignity in the face of the parliament and people of England. In theory this contribution was at all events creditable to the generosity and zeal of the Irish people, and no discredit to O’Connell himself. Nor can it be alleged with truth that he accepted it from mercenary motives, or used it selfishly. His fortune was small; his position required large expenditure; and it is notorious that the money he received was not hoarded, nor used to enrich his family, but employed for political and often charitable purposes which had the entire approbation of the donors. The Young Irelanders, however, at first furtively and anonymously, afterwards more or less openly, and, finally, in the columns of the newspaper press, and in the Repeal Association itself, stigmatised the rent as mercenary. This new party divided influence with “the Liberator” upon the boards of the Corn Exchange, and in public meetings generally, and was the cause of great distraction in the councils and operations of the Repeal Association. At first they treated O’Connell as conscientiously wrong-headed on the subjects of moral and physical force; but they gradually widened their ground of attack, and suggested that he was actuated by corrupt motives, not for his own advantage, but in order to obtain places for a host of needy adventurers who constituted what was termed his “tail.” Finally, they denounced him as a coward, and the abettor therefore of a cowardly policy: that being afraid to place himself at the head of his armed countrymen, he affected to abhor bloodshed, and held out a hope which he knew to be delusive—that Ireland could conquer the restoration of her legislature by moral, in contradistinction to physical force.
Before noticing further the effect of these differences upon O’Connell and the Irish repeal party, it is desirable to glance at the character and talents of the leading Young Irelanders, as these men will occupy much prominence in the history of succeeding years. Thomas Davis was generally alleged to be the founder of this section of the repeal party. He was only a student in Trinity College, Dublin, when he first entered upon political life. He imbibed early in youth a passionate love of country, and retained it until his death, which, to the general regret, occurred in a few years after he had entered upon political life. Mr. Davis was a poet, although not of a high order; several specimens of good ballad composition are amongst his remains. He cultivated classic literature with success; as an antiquary and an historian acquired reputation; wrote energetically and fluently; spoke in public with earnestness and force, but had none of the graces of the finished orator, and he despised all “rhetorical artifices.” In conversation he was persuasive, but in public debate deficient in this quality; and while he possessed courage to confront mobs, or dictators, as he did also to meet an armed host in his country’s service, he was not characterised by that presence of mind in public discussion, so necessary for effective repartee and popular power. He was in religion a Protestant, and a member of the Established Church; but it is obvious, from his various papers in connection with Irish affairs, that he was not a very earnest Protestant, and was entirely unacquainted with theological studies. His letters and speeches also show that he was not conversant with political economy, and that his social views were unsound. He was a man of many excellences, a true friend, an amiable companion, an honest and brave patriot, a gentleman, a scholar, and a litterateur.
The next most notable person among the leaders of the Young Irelanders was William Smith O’Brien. Like Thomas Davis, his integrity was indisputable. A member, and the representative of probably the oldest family in Europe, descended from the celebrated Brien Boroighome, who was monarch of Ireland in the twelfth century, he was proudly jealous of the honour of his lineage and of his name, and never did man bear a proud name with more unsullied honour than O’Brien. He mourned over the sufferings of his country with a tender and compassionate heart, and he ascribed these sufferings to bad government. It was his desire to remove all grievances by constitutional means, but his experience as a member of the imperial parliament led him to believe that Ireland never could receive proper legislative consideration until the union was repealed. Perceiving that O’Connell’s agitation was never likely to effect that object, despising the mean and corrupt practices by which that agitation was attended, and being filled with horror at the occurrence of so much agrarian crime, he came to the conclusion that an armed attempt to sever Ireland from Great Britain was the duty of Irishmen, and the only hope left for her political or social redemption. Mr. O’Brien was a member of the Church of England, and his sympathies were with the evangelical section. He was well acquainted with the great fundamental differences between the church of Rome and Protestant communions, and was conscientiously and firmly a Protestant, while his mental habits and religious principles alike made him the consistent friend of religious liberty. It was generally supposed that his views of government were monarchical; and as he was the undoubted representative of the Irish monarchy, it was also believed that he had sufficient ambition to look forward to the time when independent Ireland would restore to him his family honours. The personal and moral influence of Mr. O’Brien were such as to qualify him to be a leader. He was much loved, and deserved to be so. As a man he was amiable, as a gentleman courteous, as a friend true. Intellectually, he was not fit to conduct a powerful party through great dangers. Scholarly and accomplished, he was yet not profoundly read, nor did he possess any great power as a writer or speaker. He could not shake the senate like Grattan, Flood, or Curran, nor could he move the popular will by his pen, like Moore or Davis. Whatever he undertook for Ireland was in the spirit of a patriot, and his courage was as unquestionable as his truth. He had studied too little the character of his countrymen, and the political influence of their religious predilections, or he probably would never have embarked upon the stormy sea of the repeal agitation. Had he pondered deeply the philosophy of Irish character, and of the Protestant and Roman Catholic religions, by which the people were so extensively and sincerely influenced, he must have foreseen that the Irish Roman Catholic population would never enter upon any political enterprise to which their priests were opposed; that the priests would never favour any political scheme that did not comprise the ascendancy of Rome; and that the Irish Protestants, deeply and thoroughly convinced of that fact, would not extensively join any confederacy for political purposes where the priesthood could possibly exercise any authority. All these things William Smith O’Brien, from his position as an Irish Protestant gentleman, ought to have known; knowing these things, he never could have plunged into the raging surge of an Irish popular insurrection. He meant honestly, failed signally, and suffered himself to be involved in a hapless enterprise, because he had not sufficiently studied the people among whom he lived, nor the religious influences to which they were subjected.