3318. “Is, therefore, not the first step towards improvement in Ireland necessarily to be accomplished by an alteration of the present state of the occupancy of the land?” This was a leading question, but Malthus would not be led. He replied, “I think that such an alteration is of the greatest possible importance, but that the other (the change in the government) should accompany it; it would not have the same force without.” In his answers to later questions he gave his view at greater length on the causes of the difference between English and Irish character.
Answ. to qu. 3411. “At the time of the introduction of the potato into Ireland the Irish people were in a very low and degraded state, and the increased quantity of food was only applied to increase the population. But when our [English] wages of labour in wheat were high in the early part of the last century, it did not appear that they were employed merely in the maintenance of more families, but in improving the condition of the people in their general mode of living.”[[434]]
3413. “You attribute the difference of the character of the people to the difference of food?”—“In a great measure.”
3414. “What circumstance determines the difference of food in the two countries?”—“The circumstances are partly physical and partly moral.[[435]] It will depend in a certain degree upon the soil and climate whether the people live on maize, wheat, oats, potatoes, or meat.”[[436]]
3415. “Is not the selection in some degree dependent on the general state of society?”—“Very much on moral causes, on their being in so respectable a situation that they are in the habit of looking forward, and exercising a certain degree of prudence; and there is no doubt that in different countries this kind of prudence is exercised in very different degrees.”
3416. “Does it depend at all on the government under which they live?”—“Very much on the government, on the strict and equal administration of justice, on the perfect security of property, on civil, religious, and political liberty; for people respect themselves more under favourable circumstances of this kind, and are less inclined to marry, with[out] the prospect of more physical sustenance for their children.”
3417. “On the degree of respect with which they are treated by their superiors?”—“Yes; one of the greatest faults in Ireland is that the labouring classes there are not treated with proper respect by their superiors; they are treated as if they were a degraded people.”
Thereupon he is again asked a leading question of a somewhat cynical character, but he is again cautious in his answer.
3418. “Does not that treatment mainly arise from their existing in such redundancy as to be no object to their superiors?”—“In part it does perhaps; but it appeared to take place before that [redundancy] was the case, to the same degree.”
The questioner, however, begs the question and asks: