Irish History and the Irish Question

by Goldwin Smith

The tide of reform, however, which began to flow in 1830, before it ebbed, brought to Ireland, besides her share in reform of the Parliamentary representation, the opening of the municipal councils, which had been universally close and corrupt, and after Catholic emancipation still excluded Catholics. It brought commutation of tithe, a measure of immense value, far too long delayed, which shifted the burden of payment from the shoulders of the cotter to those of the landlord. It brought a poor law, cruelly needed in the midst of multiplying evictions. Furthermore, it brought in 1831-1833 the momentous gift of public education, national and undenominational, in the inauguration of which the Anglican primate, Archbishop Whateley, reconciling his advanced liberalism with his anomalous position, took a leading part. Ireland thus in national education preceded England by many years. Whateley had fellow-workers in liberal Catholics, ecclesiastical as well as lay, but the weight of Roman authority and influence was, as it always has been, and still is, against free education. The State Church of the minority succeeded in repelling attack; but it underwent some internal reform, including the suppression of ten superfluous bishoprics; a sacrilegious act of the state which helped to give birth to sacerdotal reaction at Oxford. After the abolition of the tithe-proctor, the State Church had become less odious to the people. The Castle administration was growing more liberal. Lords-lieutenant tried to be fair in distribution of patronage. A Liberal secretary, a man of mark, Drummond, warned the Irish landlords that property had its duties as well as its rights. Peel, as Irish secretary, had laid the foundation of the Irish constabulary, that noble force of law and order which combines independent intelligence with the discipline of the regular soldier. Drummond rendered a most important service by completing the institution. The Irish constabulary has naturally in the main been composed of Protestants. But the Catholic policeman in Ireland has in a marked way resisted seditious influence and been true to the government and his duty. The Irishman follows his commander. Attempts to seduce Irish soldiers from fidelity to the colours seem to have generally failed.

O’Connell, with his following, helped to carry the Parliamentary Reform Bill of 1832, which, in fact, could not have been carried without their vote. He lent a general though not hearty or unwavering support to the Whig ministry of Grey, which, though it paid him some deference, was too strong to be under his control. But on the passing of a drastic coercion bill directed against political as well as agrarian disturbance, there was an angry rupture, and the Whigs became “base, bloody, and brutal,” like all others who crossed O’Connell’s will. O’Connell was not handsomely treated. His eminence as a lawyer, combined with his influence in Ireland, entitled him to a high place. But his blustering violence, his unmeasured vituperation, his venomous abuse of England, and the changefulness of his moods made him a dangerous ally for any government. Cobden said, “O’Connell always treated me with friendly attention, but I never shook hands with him or faced his smile without a feeling of insecurity; and as for trusting him on any public question where his vanity or passions might interpose, I should have as soon thought of an alliance with an Ashantee chief.”

The Melbourne and Russell ministry was weak and fain to lean on O’Connell with his Irish brigade for support and to allow him a voice in appointments, though it suffered greatly in English eyes by the alliance. O’Connell shouted with joy when that government was snatched from death and restored to a feeble existence by the refusal of the queen to change her bed-chamber women on Peel’s demand. But the advent of Peel to power, with a strong government, filled him with rage and despair. The two men had quarrelled in Ireland, a challenge had passed between them, and Peel was the object of O’Connell’s bitterest hatred. In principle the new government was hostile to O’Connell, and its strength placed it wholly beyond his influence. His power was threatened with extinction. His rent, moreover, since there had been a lull in agitation, was rapidly falling off, and he was in pecuniary distress. The last, some think, was not his least urgent motive for embarking in another agitation. This time it was for a repeal of the union, of which he had before only thrown out fitful hints. He now raised the standard of repeal and issued his mandate to the priesthood to call out the peasantry in that cause. The priesthood joyfully obeyed. Monster meetings were held and were addressed by O’Connell in his most violent strain, with ostensible respect for constitutional methods, but with constant appeals to national hatred and suggestions of military force. The priests consecrated the meetings and the sentiments, celebrating Mass on the grounds. It is surely idle to contend that a priesthood acting thus and having its centre in Rome is only a Christian ministry, not a power of political disturbance. An outbreak appeared to be at hand, when the government took direct issue with the agitator by proclaiming a monster meeting which he had appointed to be held at Clontarf; a scene suggestive of military force as it had been the field of the great Irish victory. O’Connell, who, if he was not pacific, was unwarlike, shrank from the conflict and called off the meeting. The government followed up the blow by indicting the agitator for sedition. There was a monster trial at Dublin, in the course of which, to preserve the Irish character of the scene, the attorney-general challenged the counsel on the other side to a duel. O’Connell was found guilty, but the verdict was afterwards quashed on appeal to the House of Lords, for irregularity in the panel, by the judgment of three Whigs against one Tory and the independent Brougham, though it had been upheld by seven of the nine judges to whom the case was referred. O’Connell was set free. But the spell of his ascendancy had been broken. By shrinking from the appeal to force he had forfeited the respect of the fighting section of his party. The Conservative government was invincibly strong. O’Connell’s health and physical force had broken down. Thus ended the great Liberator’s career. He bequeathed his body to Ireland and his heart to Rome. There can be no question about his devotion to either, whatever motives may have mingled with his devotion to Ireland. Whether he did more good to the Irish cause by his patriotism than harm by the passions which he excited and the enmities he created, is a question about which different opinions have been formed. His blind attachment to the Church, had he been victorious, would have put Ireland under the control of a reactionary priesthood.

For some time before his death, O’Connell, by shrinking from force, had been losing the hearts and the adherence of a party of force on his own side called “Young Ireland,” a set of young men, some highly gifted as journalists or poets, whose aim was not repeal but national independence, and who in their organ, The Nation, preached rebellion and revelled in the memory of ’98.

Peel, victorious, graced his victory by concession, to which indeed he was heartily inclined. He saw that “Ireland was his difficulty,” and wanted to treat the problem as liberally as his following of Protestants and squires would let him. He increased the grant to Maynooth, thereby constraining Gladstone, by way of satisfaction to his former self, to go through the form of resignation. He enabled the Catholic Church freely to receive charitable bequests. Not venturing to throw open the fellowships and scholarships of Trinity College to the Catholics, he founded for their special benefit three undenominational colleges at Belfast, Cork, and Galway, forming together a university with power of granting degrees. This measure, excellent in its way, was but a partial success. The priesthood looked with invincible suspicion on free science, while Catholic professors of science, whom the Church might have trusted, were hardly to be found. But Peel touched the real root of the evil, and pointed to effective reform, when, in 1843, he issued a Commission of Inquiry into land occupancy in Ireland and the condition of the peasant occupants. The commission reported that the agricultural labourer of Ireland continued to suffer the greatest privations and hardships; that he was still dependent upon casual and precarious employment for subsistence; that he was still badly housed, badly clothed, and badly fed; and that he was undergoing sufferings greater than those of the people of any other country in Europe. Some tentative motions followed, but there had scarcely been time for the report of the commission to work, when the sentence of nature was pronounced with awful distinctness in the form of a great famine with pestilence in its train. The population of Ireland at this time was probably double that which the island could happily bear. A precarious subsistence was afforded by the potato, which, always treacherous, now suddenly and completely failed. Peel, warned of impending calamity, at once opened the ports for the importation of grain, then grasped the occasion for the repeal of the Corn Laws, on the policy of which his own mind had been undergoing change. His administrative power and that of his colleagues would probably have done all that was possible to meet and mitigate the disaster. But at the critical moment his government was struck down by a conspiracy of Russell and the Whigs with the ire of the Corn Law squires and the vengeful ambition of Disraeli. Russell, who took his place, was far more an adept in party strategy than a master of practical administration. There ensued a heartrending scene, the climax of seven centuries of evil accident, maladministration, and Irish woe.

“Famine advances on us with giant strides,” wrote an official in the August of 1846. “Towards the end of August,” says Mr. T. P. O’Connor, “the calamity began to be universal and its symptoms to be seen. Some of the people rushed into the towns, others wandered along the highroads in the vague hope of food. They plucked turnips from the fields, were glad to live for weeks on a single meal of cabbage a day, feasted on the dead bodies of horses and asses and dogs. There was a story of a mother eating the limbs of her dead child. Dead bodies were discovered with grass in their mouths and in their bowels; weeds were sought after with desperate eagerness; seaweed was greedily devoured; so were diseased cattle and diseased potatoes. Despair fell on all hearts and faces. The ties of kindred in some cases failed, parents neglecting their children and children turning out their aged parents. On the other hand, there were stories of parents dying of starvation to save a small store for their children. The workhouses, usually shunned, were overcrowded. In one, three thousand persons sought relief in a single day. They crowded even into the jails. Driven from the workhouses, people began to die by the roadside or alone in their despair within their cabins. Roads and streets were strewn with corpses. One inspector buried one hundred and forty bodies found on the highway. The scenes inside the cabins were even more horrible; husbands lay for a week in the same hovels with the bodies of their wives and children. The decencies of burial were no longer observed. Then came the plague, attacking bodies already weakened by hunger.” “A terrible apathy,” says an eye-witness, “hangs over the poor of Skibbereen; starvation has destroyed every generous sympathy; despair has made them hardened and insensible, and they sullenly await their doom with indifference and without fear. Death is in every hovel; disease and famine, its dread precursors, have fastened on the young and the old, the strong and the feeble, the mother and the infant; whole families lie together on the damp floor devoured by fever, without a human being to wet their burning lips or raise their languid heads; the husband dies by the side of the wife, and she knows not that he is beyond the reach of earthly suffering; the same rag covers festering remains of mortality and the skeleton forms of the living, who are unconscious of the horrible contiguity; rats devour the corpse, and there is no energy among the living to scare them from their horrid banquet; fathers bury their children without a sigh, and cover them in shallow graves, round which no weeping mother, no sympathizing friends are grouped; one scanty funeral is followed by another and another. Without food or fuel, bed or bedding, whole families are shut up in naked hovels, dropping one by one into the arms of death.”[3]

All the devices of government by relief work and in other ways to grapple with the twofold calamity were palliatives and little more. The most effective measure of relief was a vast emigration to the United States and Canada, which also had its horrors. Thousands, already weakened by hunger and suffering, succumbed to the hardships of the passage; another multitude died on landing. Canada did all she could for the hapless strangers cast upon her shore. But ship-fever followed the fugitives, and graveyards were filled with their dead. It was reckoned that more than two hundred thousand persons died on the voyage or on arrival at their destination. Few Irishmen, however prejudiced against England, will deny that the people of Great Britain and Canada showed unbounded sympathy with Ireland in her affliction, and did their utmost for her relief. O’Connell himself, while he criticised the measures of the government, allowed that individual humanity and charity were abundant; that the noblest generosity was evinced by multitudes of the English; and that if individual generosity could save a nation, British generosity would do it. He said that he was afraid of not finding words sufficient to express his strong and lively sense of English humanity. To charges of English indifference to Irish suffering, his words are a sufficient answer.

Close upon the famine and pestilence came 1848, the year of European revolution. Young Ireland, the party of force, did not fail to catch the flame. Its organ, The Nation, cried, “It is a death struggle now between the murderer and his victim. Strike! Rise, men of Ireland, since Providence so wills it! Rise in your cities and in your fields, on your hills, in your valleys, by your dark mountain passes, by your rivers and lakes and ocean-washed shores! Rise as a nation!” The Irish Felon, a journal still more advanced, was even more openly for war. But neither in city or field, on mountain or in valley, by pass or shore, did the people rise at the impassioned call. Young Ireland found at once that it was but a knot of literary men whose appeals to national feeling, penned as they were with vigour, might be read with sentimental pleasure but would rouse nobody to arms. O’Connell’s mastery of the people depended on the support of the priesthood, given in a cause originally religious to that zealous champion of the Church who, dying, bequeathed his heart to Rome. Young Ireland was more revolutionary than Catholic, as the priests did not fail to perceive. The desire of political revolution, apart from agrarianism, was not strong enough to rouse the peasantry to arms, though they had learned to hate England as the supposed source of their sufferings. The people, moreover, had hardly recovered from the depression caused by the famine. Young Ireland however raised its flag. Smith O’Brien, with a small party, made a trial trip, appealing to the people of two or three places, but met with no response. A farcical encounter with the police at the house of widow Cormack on the bog of Boulagh, followed by the capture of Smith O’Brien, was the end. The sentence of death passed on the leader of the revolt was wisely commuted by the government.

The famine had at least one good effect. It drew attention to the main source of the evil in Ireland, which was agrarian and social, not political and religious. But now it was supposed that the mischief lay in the inability of the landlords, overwhelmed with debt, burdened with family settlements, and crushed by the demands of the Poor Law, to perform their duty to their tenants. To remedy this evil was created the Encumbered Estates Court, with power to order the sale of encumbered property on the petition of the creditors and give a clear title to the purchaser. The policy seemed sound, yet the result was not good. The court cleared out the old proprietors who lacked means to do their duty; it put in their place a new class of proprietors who, having been induced to buy the land on pure speculation, felt that they had no duty to do, and who, unlike their predecessors, had no kindly tie to the people. The new owners naturally proceeded to make the most of their purchase; and the way to make the most of their purchase clearly was to sweep out the cotter tenants and throw the land into large holdings. This some of them proceeded to do, and the consequence was a period of evictions almost vying in cruelty with the famine. Whole districts were cleared and relet in large holdings. Cabins were being thrown down in all directions. A thousand of them were levelled in one union within a few months, and the inmates were cast out helpless, half-naked, starving, to go to the union or perish. The cabins were burned that the people might not return to them. The suffering and misery, says a reporter, attendant upon these wholesale evictions, is indescribable. The number of houseless paupers in one union is beyond his calculation. Those evicted crowd neighbouring cabins and villages, and disease is necessarily generated. In April he calculates that six thousand houses have been levelled since November, and he expects five hundred more by July. Wretched hovels had been pulled down, the inmates of which in a helpless state of fever and nakedness were left by the roadside for days. While inspecting a stone-breaking depot, the reporter observes one of the men take off his remnant of a pair of shoes and start across the fields. He follows him with his eye, and at a distance sees the blaze of a fire in the bog. He sends to inquire the cause of it and of the man’s running from his work, and is told that the man’s house had been levelled the day before, that he had erected a temporary hut, and that while his wife and children were gathering shell-fish on the beach and he was stone-breaking the bailiff fired it. This incident was one of several which made a deep impression on Peel, who would probably have moved with effect had he remained in power. Pages are filled with pictures of this kind. Civilized Europe could show nothing like it. It was almost enough to break forever the spirit of the nation, certainly to implant the bitterest memories, and here the main cause was misgovernment and bad law.

Relief works were no cure, nor were they in themselves very rational, since the people, unfed, half-clothed, and living in pestilential mud-holes, were really too weak to work. Parliament so far interfered as to pass an act requiring forty-eight hours’ notice of eviction to the relieving officers, prohibiting evictions two hours before sunset or sunrise, and on Christmas Day and Good Friday, and prohibiting the demolition of the house of a tenant about to be evicted. But this rather throws a lurid light on the state of things than effects a cure. The public even might have some reason to complain of the land-owner who recklessly cast upon the poor rates or upon public charity the human encumbrances of his land.