CONTINUED DISTRESS IN IRELAND—CRIME AND OUTRAGE—POLITICAL AGITATIONS EFFORTS OF GOVERNMENT TO MEET THE EXIGENCIES OF THE COUNTRY.
The state of Ireland during this year was a continuation of the want, misery, criminality, and sedition which made up its history for so many previous years. The causes already noticed so fully in previous chapters operated in producing famine and its attendants, disease and social discontent. Notwithstanding all the efforts of government by parliamentary aid, and of the people of Great Britain by their generous subscriptions, the poor in Ireland continued to die of starvation, and where death did not immediately happen from that cause, it arose from it mediately, through the instrumentality of famine, fever, cholera, dysentery, or gradual decay. The efforts of the government were still, to a great extent, rendered abortive by the frauds committed upon the funds devoted to Irish relief, not only in Ireland, but in England; much that was supposed to be applied for the relief of the Irish famishing poor never reached Ireland, and much more that did arrive in that country never found its way to the objects for whom it was intended. The failure of the potatoe crop had so impoverished the people, that, during the spring of 1849, the destitution in some parts of the country equalled that which had been known even during the three previous years. The queen, in her speech at the opening of the session, referred to the failure of the potatoe crop, and recommended her parliament to make further provision to relieve the destitution which prevailed. In pursuance of this recommendation, parliament voted £50,000 for the relief of distressed unions, a sum utterly disproportioned to the necessities of the case. A bill was brought in for levying “a rate in aid,” as it was termed, the object of which waa to levy a rate upon solvent parishes to aid insolvent parishes. This was both inequitable in its conception and application, and was one of those make-shifts of the government which, while it raised opposition, failed in accomplishing the object contemplated. A vote of £100,000, in anticipation of “the rate in aid,” was proposed and carried, but this also waa inadequate to the purpose for which it was designed. Some idea of the magnitude of the miseries of Ireland at this juncture may be formed from the fact that the poor-law guardians of Kilrush expended £1000 per week in support of the paupers of that union. Kilrush is a remote and not particularly populous district, and was a specimen of the general expenditure to which the distressed unions were exposed.
The terrible distress prevailing brought on a state of social calamity and discord such as has seldom been witnessed in the history of the world. As the year went on, the prospects of an abundant harvest inspired hopes that peace and plenty would at last smile upon unhappy Ireland, but these hopes were doomed to disappointment. The growing crops became objects of contention between the miserable tenant, and, in many cases, almost equally miserable landlord. The tenants sought to cut and remove the crops clandestinely. Suddenly the corn would be cut over a vast area of land, and carried away, as if by magic, beyond the bounds to which any existing legal process on the part of the landlord might be applicable. Rents were refused. Many of the farmers were unable to pay, many were unwilling from dishonesty, and many considered that the tenants had as good a right to the land as those from whom they rented it. They talked of themselves as descended from the old families, the natural lords of the soil, and of those who then claimed the rents as the seed of the invader and the spoiler, whom it was just to deprive of what he had no right to, unless conquest and force could confer the right,—a doctrine that did not suit the popular interests. The landlords, on the other hand, sternly evicted the tenantry; whole town-lands were depopulated, the expelled tenants died of starvation on the public roads, or crowded the workhouses, where they were supported by rates levied on the industrious occupier. The poor-law was continued upon a plan which protected the property of the rich English absentee, and threw the burden upon the resident landlords who cultivated their own land, and upon the farmer who rented land. The agents of these absentees exacted the rents with bitter severity, and often the dwelling of the wretched occupier was pulled down about his sick and starving children, who frequently perished within the roofless walls. It was civil war, without any of the redeeming manhood which strips even that of its aspects of misery and horror. Frequently the police, armed as regular cavalry and infantry, were called out to seize the corn in process of clandestine removal, or to execute an eviction. On these occasions, sometimes, the unarmed peasantry, maddened by despair, would resist, and a conflict ensue in which victory did not always determine on the side of arms and discipline. The military were often in requisition to seize carts of corn under process of removal, or to enforce the expulsion of some tattered, hungry, sick, woe-stricken family from their miserable holding into the “wide wide world,” houseless and hopeless. Frequently the parish allowed an outcast of this description at the rate of seven-eighths of a penny per day to sustain existence. An English periodical writer truly and compassionately remarked, “nothing like Irish misery exists under the sun.” Whatever the disturbances generally prevailing, a very great number of the people offered no resistance to the law; they obeyed and died. Mr. P. Scrope* truly observed that the people bore these hardships “with a patience and resignation which it is heart-breaking to witness, and which one scarcely knows whether to praise or to blame.”
* “Notes of a tour in England, Scotland, and Ireland, with a view to inquire whether our labouring population be really redundant.”
Yet Mr. Crope, while he denounced the state of the law in Ireland as affecting landlord and tenant, in terms which attracted the attention of the country, and of foreign lands, described the difficulties of landlords in a way just to the class and to his subject. “A moment’s consideration,” he says, “will show the futility of expecting any mercy to be shown to these poor people by those whom the law at present arms with the power of destroying them. It sounds very well to English ears to preach forbearance and generosity to the landowners. But it should be remembered that few of them have it in their power to be merciful or generous to their poor tenantry. They act under compulsion, usually of the severest kind. They are themselves engaged in a life and death struggle with their creditors. Moreover the greater number of the depopulators are mere agents for absent landlords or for the law-receivers under the courts acting for creditors, and bound by the established rules and avowed practice of the Court of Chancery itself (the fountain and head of justice) to make the utmost of the property entrusted to them, without regard to any other consideration than the pecuniary interest of the parties, which is committed to their care. Those landlords who have yet some voice in the management of their estates, seeing the highest court of judicature in the realm sanction this principle of action, think themselves justified—most of them, indeed, are compelled by the overwhelming pressure of their own difficulties—to follow the example. It is vain to expect mercy to be shown under such circumstances. All is done in the sacred name of the law. The sheriff, the representative of the majesty of the law, is the actual exterminator. The officers of the law execute the process. The constabulary, acting under the orders of the magistracy, stand by to prevent resistance; and if any is expected, the queen’s troops are brought to the spot, to quell with all the power of the throne what would amount to an act of rebellion. It is absurd, then, to cast the blame of these foul deeds, and their horrible results, upon a few reckless, bankrupt, wretched landlords. It is to the law, or rather to the government and legislature which uphold it, and refuse to mitigate its ferocity, that the crime rightly attaches; and they will be held responsible for it by history, by posterity—ay, and perhaps before long, by the retributive justice of God, and the vengeance of a people infuriated by barbarous oppression, and brought at last to bay by their destroyers.” It is difficult to read such statements and wonder that agrarian outrage prevailed extensively in Ireland, and that all over the land murder stained the soil with blood.
It is impossible to write the history of Ireland in any given year without having to record assassinations springing from religious discord, and 1849 was no exception.
Political disturbance was only kept down by the arm of the law. Early in the session, Earl Grey moved in the house of lords for a renewal of the “suspension of the Habeas Corpus act,” and in doing so he stated that although there was no reason to fear an insurrection, yet disaffection existed extensively, and especially in the districts which had been the scenes of insurgency in the previous year. His lordship never knew much of Ireland in any respect—her people, the philosophy of her turbulence, or the policy which ought to be pursued towards her; had he formed acquaintance with such subjects he would hardly have spoken of disaffection existing in certain districts, for it is chronic in Ireland. The masses of the people have been disaffected since the English first obtained the ascendancy in Ireland; but independent of any hostility of race or nationality, a deep-rooted religious animosity towards the creed of England rankles in the hearts of all in Ireland who differ from that creed.
The Young Ireland party was not extirpated by the events of 1848, although as a public organized body, suppressed. Its writers continued to write, although there was little public speaking. Charles Gavan Duffy, more fortunate than his fellows, was enabled to escape the legal penalties attached to his undoubted treason; juries would not convict, notwithstanding the plainest evidence. The Roman Catholics in the juries were obstinate in refusing a conviction. This circumstance deepened the general distrust existing among Protestants in the fidelity of Roman Catholic jurors on any question in which they took a political or ecclesiastical interest. There is no reason, however, to suppose that this spirit of inequitable partizanship was confined to Roman Catholics. Such incidents never justified the government in refusing them alterations in the jury laws, popularly demanded, and in exercising so sternly the right of challenge which belonged to the crown in such prosecutions. Mr. Duffy resumed his place at the office of the Nation newspaper, affecting to believe that there was no hope of achieving what he called Irish independence by political agitation; that the country needed material improvement in the first instance, and that in proportion as it increased in wealth would it be likely to obtain a national existence. Mitchell, in his exile, denounced this doctrine; and when he afterwards escaped to the United States, he impugned these opinions of Mr. Duffy as dangerous to freedom, and as a cover to his retreat from the patriotic advocacy of Irish nationality. The recriminations of these two champions of Young Irelandism showed what little prospect there ever had been of any harmony existing in an Irish provisional government, if success had attended the efforts of these men. Mr. Duffy, while for a time persisting in his new course, and making his paper more an organ of the ultramontane priesthood, took every opportunity of inciting the people to treason, at first covertly, but gradually in a more open manner. This the government permitted, to the disparagement of the loyal, and the injury of peace and improvement in Ireland. The Old Ireland party continued to agitate, but their agitation assumed still more of a sectarian character. Yet the name of O’Connell had lost much of its spell, and at an auction of his library in Dublin, his books, even with his autograph, barely fetched the prices which the same volumes would have brought at any other public auction if the property of an unknown person.
The winter of 1849 smote Ireland with fresh accumulations of suffering. Gaunt famine stalked abroad; pestilence lurked in the hovels of the country, and the cellars and garrets of the great towns; cholera ravaged as fiercely in some places as if no other destroyer visited the unhappy realm; crime lurked by the wayside, and sedition and bigotry muttered their curses everywhere. It seemed as if a wide-wasting ruin covered all.
The queen’s visit to Ireland made this year memorable in her history. An account of this will appear in the narrative of the court in another page.