The White Slaves of England

by John C. Cobden

"Cabin of J. Donoghue.—The hovel to which the eye is now directed scarcely exceeds Donoghue's length. He will have almost as much space when laid in his grave. He can stand up in no part of his cabin except the centre; and yet he is not an aged man, who has outlived all his connections, and with a frame just ready to mingle with its native dust. Nor is he a bachelor, absolutely impenetrable to female charms, or looking out for some damsel to whom he may be united, 'for better or for worse.' Donoghue, the miserable inmate of that hovel, on the contrary, has a wife and three children; and these, together with a dog, a pig, and sundry fowls, find in that cabin their common abode. Human beings and brutes are there huddled together; and the motive to the occupancy of the former is just the same as that which operates to the keeping of the latter—what they produce. Did not the pig and the fowls make money, Donoghue would have none; did not Donoghue pay his rent, the cabin would quickly have another tenant. Indeed, his rent is only paid, and he and his family saved from being turned adrift into the wide world, by his pig and his fowls.

"But the cabin should be examined more particularly. It has a hole for a door, it has another for a window, it has a third through which the smoke may find vent, and nothing more. No resemblance to the door of an English cottage, however humble, nor the casement it is never without, nor even the rudest chimney from which the blue smoke arises, suggesting to the observer many ideas of comfort for its inmates, can possibly be traced. The walls, too, are jet black; and that which ought to be a floor is mud, thick mud, full of holes. The bed of the family is sod. The very cradle is a sort of swing suspended from the roof, and it is set in motion by the elbow of the wretched mother of the wretched child it contains, if she is not disposed to make use of her hands.

"The question may fairly be proposed—What comfort can a man have in such circumstances? Can he find some relief from his misery, as many have found and still find it, by conversing with his wife? No. To suppose this, is to imagine him standing in a higher class of beings than the one of which he has always formed a part. Like himself, too, his wife is oppressed; the growth of her faculties is stunted; and, it may be, she is hungry, faint, and sick. Can he talk with his children? No. What can he, who knows nothing, tell them? What hope can he stimulate who has nothing to promise? Can he ask in a neighbour? No. He has no hospitality to offer him, and the cabin is crowded with his own family. Can he accost a stranger who may travel in the direction of his hovel, to make himself personally acquainted with his condition and that of others? No. He speaks a language foreign to an Englishman or a Scotchman, and which those who hate the 'Saxon,' whatever compliments they may pay him for their own purposes, use all the means they possess to maintain. Can he even look at his pig with the expectation that he will one day eat the pork or the bacon it will yield? No; not he. He knows that not a bone of the loin or a rasher will be his. That pig will go, like all the pigs he has had, to pay his rent. Only one comfort remains, which he has in common with his pig and his dog, the warmth of his peat fire. Poor Donoghue! thou belongest to a race often celebrated as 'the finest peasantry in the world,' but it would be difficult to find a savage in his native forest who is not better off than thou!"

There is one other comfort besides the peat fire, which Donoghue may have, and that is an occasional gill of whisky—a temporary comfort, an ultimate destruction—a new fetter to bind him down in his almost brutal condition. In Ireland, as in England, intoxication is the Lethe in which the heart-sick labourers strive to forget their sorrows. Intemperance prevails most where poverty is most generally felt.

The Pictorial Times thus sketches a cabin of the better class, belonging to a man named Pat Brennan:—

"We will enter it, and look round with English eyes. We will do so, too, in connection with the remembrance of an humble dwelling in England. There we find at least a table, but here there is none. There we find some chairs, but here there are none. There we find a cupboard, but here there is none. There we find some crockery and earthenware, but here there is none. There we find a clock, but here there is none. There we find a bed, bedstead, and coverings, but here there are none. There is a brick, or stone, or boarded floor, but here there is none. What a descent would an English agricultural labourer have to make if he changed situations with poor Pat Brennan, who is better off than most of the tenants of Derrynane Beg, and it may be in the best condition of them all! Brennan's cabin has one room, in which he and his family live, of course with the fowls and pigs. One end is partitioned off in the manner of a loft, the loft being the potato store. The space underneath, where the fire is kindled, has side spaces for seats. In some instances, the turf-bed is on one side and the seats on the other. The other contents of the dwelling are—a milk-pail, a pot, a wooden bowl or two, a platter, and a broken ladder. A gaudy picture of the Virgin Mary may sometimes be seen in such cabins."

The eviction of the wretched peasantry has caused an immense amount of misery, and crowds of the evicted ones have perished from starvation. The tillers of the soil are mere tenants at will, and may ejected from their homes without a moment's notice. A whim of the landlord, the failure of the potato crop, or of the ordinary resources of the labourers, by which they are rendered unable to pay their rent for a short time, usually results in an edict of levelling and extermination. A recent correspondent of the London Illustrated News, thus describes the desolation of an Irish village:—

"The village of Killard forms part of the Union of Kilrush, and possesses an area of 17,022 acres. It had a population, in 1841, of 6850 souls, and was valued to the poor-rate at £4254. It is chiefly the property, I understand, of Mr. John McMahon Blackall, whose healthy residence is admirably situated on the brow of a hill, protected by another ridge from the storms of the Atlantic. His roof-tree yet stands there, but the people have disappeared. The village was mostly inhabited by fishermen, who united with their occupation on the waters the cultivation of potatoes. When the latter failed, it might have been expected that the former should have been pursued with more vigour than ever; but boats and lines were sold for present subsistence, and to the failure of the potatoes was added the abandonment of the fisheries. The rent dwindled to nothing, and then came the leveller and the exterminator. What has become of the 6850 souls, I know not; but not ten houses remain of the whole village to inform the wayfarer where, according to the population returns, they were to be found in 1841. They were here, but are gone for ever; and all that remains of their abodes are a few mouldering walls, and piles of offensive thatch turning into manure. Killard is an epitome of half Ireland. If the abodes of the people had not been so slight, that they have mingled, like Babylon, with their original clay, Ireland would for ages be renowned for its ruins; but, as it is, the houses are swept away like the people, and not a monument remains of a multitude, which, in ancient Asia or in the wilds of America, would numerically constitute a great nation."

The same correspondent mentions a number of other instances of the landlord's devastation, and states that large tracts of fertile land over which he passed were lying waste, while the peasantry were starving by the roadside, or faring miserably in the workhouses. At Carihaken, in the county of Galway, the levellers had been at work, and had tumbled down eighteen houses. The correspondent says—

"In one of them dwelt John Killian, who stood by me while I made a sketch of the remains of his dwelling. He told me that he and his fathers before him had owned this now ruined cabin for ages, and that he had paid £4 a year for four acres of ground. He owed no rent; before it was due, the landlord's drivers cut down his crops, carried them off, gave him no account of the proceeds, and then tumbled his house. The hut made against the end wall of a former habitation was not likely to remain, as a decree had gone forth entirely to clear the place. The old man also told me that his son having cut down, on the spot that was once his own garden, a few sticks to make him a shelter, was taken up, prosecuted, and sentenced to two months' confinement, for destroying trees and making waste of the property.