Sketches of Reforms and Reformers, of Great Britain and Ireland

by Henry B. Stanton

The Established Church of England, planted by force in Ireland, has done little for it, except to unjustly tax and cruelly treat those who dissent from its ritual, and to foment and aggravate religious feuds. Of the eight millions of Ireland, six and a half are Catholics. Of the remaining one and a half million, not half a million belong to the Establishment. And yet, to take care of this half million, the Establishment has had 4 archbishops, 18 bishops, and 2,000 clergy—drawing annually from this potato-eating people £1,500,000; while the income of the clergy of the seven and a half millions of all denominations has not exceeded £500,000. The whole income of the Irish Establishment, from all sources of revenue, is nearly £2,000,000 annually. An attempt was once made to modify this enormous abuse. After four years of contention in Parliament, during which two ministries were turned out, the bill was shorn of its effective features, in order to pacify the Tory peers, and passed, still leaving the revenues to the Church of England, and the people to the Church of Rome.

But the English Church is only a blotch. The great sore is the Irish landlord system. The misgovernment of the country has conspired with landlordism to drive out capital, and destroy commerce, trade, mining, fishing, and manufacturing, thus throwing the mass of the population upon the land for subsistence. This has increased competition for the hire of the soil to an extent unknown in any other country, and has stimulated a grinding scale of rents, which has descended from the landlords to the middlemen, and from them to the small farmers, and from them to the poor laborers, growing more extortionate as it goes down, till the soil has been cut into minute pieces, which are held by short and uncertain tenures, precluding permanent improvements, driving the mass of the people to the raising of potatoes, because they are cheap in the cultivation, and prolific in the crop, and yearly turning thousands out to beg, starve, rob, die of disease, or shoot their lessors at the expiration of their terms. One-third of the people of Ireland live (if they live at all) on potatoes, and the addition of a sprinkling of salt is a rare luxury. Two and a half millions are beggars, and Mr. O'Connell estimated the paupers in 1846-7 (the years of famine) at four millions. The main reliance of nearly half the nation, for food, is potatoes. God have mercy on them when that source fails!

With many noble exceptions, the large landed proprietors of Ireland are heartless, reckless, thriftless men. Nearly one-third of the country is a bog, three-fourths of which might be drained. Nearly five millions of acres, capable of cultivation, lie waste. An acre of potato land rents for from £5 to £10 per annum. Labor is abundant at the lowest rates. Yet these landlords have done little toward draining these bogs, enclosing these wastes, and improving their estates. Grant that for the four or five past years of pinching famine, attended with loss of rents, they have been unable to make improvements. It was just so before these years came, and has been so time out of mind. These landlords are generally absentee proprietors, who feel no abiding interest in the prosperity of a soil which they forage but do not inhabit, which they own but do not occupy. Half of the very money voted to them in 1846-7, by Parliament, for the improvement of Ireland, they spent the next season at Paris, Florence, and Baden-Baden, there to swell the pomp of British aristocracy, while millions at home, whom it was intended to assist, ate garbage that an English pig would hardly nose over, or starved in hovels that the royal stag-hounds would not skulk into from a pelting storm.

The energies of the masses in Ireland being absorbed in a hand-to-mouth struggle for existence, they have neither time nor means to stimulate the industry of the country by establishing manufactories, opening mines, carrying on fisheries, increasing trade, laying out roads, &c., nor to elevate and expand the national mind by founding common schools and seminaries of learning. The wealthy landlords and capitalists—the Besboroughs, the Lansdownes, the Devons, the Fitzwilliams, the Hertfords—who might do all this, will not; but, looking on from afar, cry to their stewards and agents, "Give! Give! Give!"

The result of this complicated system of bad government and bad management is painfully obvious. Ireland is nigh unto death of a chronic disease of famine, pestilence, agitation, despair, and insurrection.

And what is England's remedial process for this disease in one of her members? As a panacea for the miseries that she herself has to a great extent inflicted, England, at stated periods, administers to her victim-patient coercion bills and cold steel, blotching her surface with police stations and military camps. Sending her tax-gatherers instead of schoolmasters, dotting her soil with cathedrals instead of workshops, sowing her fields with gunpowder instead of grain, England affects to wonder that the crop should be famine and faction, misery and murder, improvidence and insurrection; and when the harvest is dead ripe, she sends over police and soldiery, armed with coercion bills and cannon balls, to cut and gather it in.

Sometimes England varies the prescription, or makes different applications to various parts of the body politic. Sir Robert Peel, for instance, prescribes bullets for Repealers, and guineas to a cloister of priests at Maynooth, to stop the mouths of the latter and the wind of the former, and the clamor of both. Then comes Lord John Russell with the Whig nostrum—money to carry the landlords to Baden, and a steamer to transport Mitchell to Bermuda—projects of railways to furnish hard work for laborers and fat jobs for contractors—a patch or two on a worn-out and inefficient poor-law, and packed juries for O'Brien and Meagher. So these Tory and Whig quacks administer—inflicting wounds and doling out palliatives—never probing the ulcer, but striving to skim over its surface—while there stands John Bull, robbing the naked and half-dead patient, at the same time affecting to do penance, by paying the doctors, and giving alms to the victim.

What, then, is the remedy for these evils? Having been very imperfect in detailing their causes, I must be equally imperfect in pointing out remedies. Looking on from afar, it seems to me that some of the things that Ireland needs are these:

And first, as to a few temporary measures. Ireland needs a just and beneficent poor law. The present law is a mockery and a shame. The principle of the law should be, that every man who wishes for work shall have it, or be fed by the poor rates. Government owes bread or work to all its subjects. The rates should be mainly laid on the land, where it is able to pay them, even if it be by sale under the hammer. This done, those landlords who apply to Parliament for money on which to live in improvidence, and in many instances in extravagance, would feel the pressure, awake to a consciousness of their condition, and, knowing that if they did not provide the laboring poor with work, they must furnish them with food, would either abandon their estates, or commence draining and planting the bogs and wastes. In either case, the laborer, for whose use God said, "Let the dry land appear!" would be restored to his inheritance.

The mass cannot wait for the meager relief of poor laws. Tens of thousands must emigrate by their own means or Government aid. The country is too densely populated for the present state of things. America should open wide her gates, to welcome the sons and brothers of those who have fought our battles, dug our canals, and built our railways, and, pointing to the unoccupied plains that stretch from the great lakes to Astoria, from the Rocky Mountains to San Francisco, say, "Go in and possess the land."