“So I thought; but Flanagan has not only been routing out some poor creatures from a barn of one of Tracey’s tenants, but has taken upon him to declare that they must remove themselves out of the district, as they would be harboured neither by you nor any of the proprietors in it.”
“What business has the fellow to answer for anybody but himself?” said Mr. Rosso. “However, the poor people know more of the matter than he does. They know that I am harbouring many,—as many, alas! as I can afford to relieve. Would this were all over, boys! Every case I hear of seems a harder one than the last; and it breaks one’s heart to leave them to take their chance. See, from this very point, what melancholy groups of them:—aged parents, or helpless children, or weakly women in each, to be a burden upon the spirit-broken cottager!”
“Where will they go? What will become of them, father?”
“The greater part will crowd into the towns, and herd by hundreds under the same roof, till the fever sweeps half of them away. Others will stroll the country as beggars; and others will live by plunder. The most fortunate of them will be those who will beg enough in crossing the island to pay their way over the sea in search of English wages. The noblest in their natures, the brave and high-spirited, will become whiteboys, and die amidst acts of outrage, or on the gibbet. So much for that policy of landlords, by which they first increase the numbers of their tenantry, in order, by force of competition, to let their land high; and then, finding that they have gone too far, take a fit of consolidation, and make no provision for the crowd they called up around them, and now deprive of the means of subsistence. What think you of such policy, Henry?”
“I was just thinking, Sir, that it is rather surprising to me that you lift up your voice, on all occasions, against establishing poor-laws in Ireland, while you have such scenes as these before your eyes.”
“While that question is pending, Sir,” said Alexander,—“and it is a question which will not be speedily settled, and which, if settled in the affirmative, will bring tedious arrangements after it,—in the meanwhile, is not Tracey bound, by every merciful consideration, to give his ejected tenants dwellings elsewhere? Ought not each one of them now to have a slip of land on yonder mountain-side, and wherewith to build himself a cabin?”
“That would afford no present relief,” observed Henry. “Besides having to build their cabins, the people must drain and manure their ground by a process of many months, before it will yield them the food they are this day in want of.”
“Even supposing these new lots to be prepared before the ejectment was served,” said Mr. Rosso, “the plan would be a bad one. It would secure a future repetition of precisely the same evils we are deploring to-day. Bad cultivation and over-population, through the too extensive subdivision of land, are our grievances; and to remedy them, Alexander, you would begin afresh to divide and subdivide, and encourage the increase of numbers as before. This seems to me scarcely reasonable.”
“But the poor-laws we were talking of, Sir,” interrupted Henry; “do tell me how you can resist pleading for them. Tell me, if you please, that these poor people have been idle and improvident—tell me that they have brought families into the world without a prospect of maintaining them; but tell me whether such destitution as theirs is not a dreadful punishment for what are, after all, more faults than crimes. Look, too, at the number of innocent persons that suffer: the old, who lie down to die by the wayside after a life of toil; the infants, who expire of hunger on their mothers’ breasts; the sickly, who, instead of being tended by careful hands, are shrinking and shivering in the wet and cold;—look at these wretches, in contrast with Tracey, living in luxury abroad, on funds wrung from the misery of his tenantry....”
“Tracey is a benevolent man,” interrupted Alexander; “he may be mistaken in the way in which he sets about improving the condition of his tenantry, and he may have chosen his agent badly; but he is far from being a hard-hearted man.”