The White Slaves of England

by John C. Cobden

"I must supply you with another sketch of a similar subject, on the road between Maam and Clifden, in Joyce's County, once famous for the Patagonian stature of the inhabitants, who are now starved down to ordinary dimensions. High up on the mountain, but on the roadside, stands the scalpeen of Keillines. It is near General Thompson's property. Conceive five human beings living in such a hole: the father was out, at work; the mother was getting fuel on the hills, and the children left in the hut could only say they were hungry. Their appearance confirmed their words—want was deeply engraved in their faces, and their lank bodies were almost unprotected by clothing.

"From Clifden to Ouchterade, twenty-one miles, is a dreary drive over a moor, unrelieved except by a glimpse of Mr. Martin's house at Ballynahinch, and of the residence of Dean Mahon. Destitute as this tract is of inhabitants, about Ouchterade some thirty houses have been recently demolished. A gentleman who witnessed the scene told me nothing could exceed the heartlessness of the levellers, if it were not the patient submission of the sufferers. They wept, indeed; and the children screamed with agony at seeing their homes destroyed and their parents in tears; but the latter allowed themselves unresistingly to be deprived of what is to most people the dearest thing on earth next to their lives—their only home.

"The public records, my own eyes, a piercing wail of wo throughout the land—all testify to the vast extent of the evictions at the present time. Sixteen thousand and odd persons unhoused in the Union of Kilrush before the month of June in the present year; seventy-one thousand one hundred and thirty holdings done away in Ireland, and nearly as many houses destroyed, in 1848; two hundred and fifty-four thousand holdings of more than one acre and less than five acres, put an end to between 1841 and 1848: six-tenths, in fact, of the lowest class of tenantry driven from their now roofless or annihilated cabins and houses, makes up the general description of that desolation of which Tullig and Mooven are examples. The ruin is great and complete. The blow that effected it was irresistible. It came in the guise of charity and benevolence; it assumed the character of the last and best friend of the peasantry, and it has struck them to the heart. They are prostrate and helpless. The once frolicksome people—even the saucy beggars—have disappeared, and given place to wan and haggard objects, who are so resigned to their doom that they no longer expect relief. One beholds only shrunken frames, scarcely covered with flesh—crawling skeletons, who appear to have risen from their graves, and are ready to return frightened to that abode. They have little other covering than that nature has bestowed on the human body—a poor protection against inclement weather; and, now that the only hand from which they expected help is turned against them, even hope is departed, and they are filled with despair. Than the present Earl of Carlisle there is not a more humane nor a kinder-hearted nobleman in the kingdom; he is of high honour and unsullied reputation; yet the poor-law he was mainly the means of establishing for Ireland, with the best intentions, has been one of the chief causes of the people being at this time turned out of their homes, and forced to burrow in holes, and share, till they are discovered, the ditches and the bogs with otters and snipes.

"The instant the poor-law was passed, and property was made responsible for poverty, the whole of the land-owners, who had before been careless about the people, and often allowed them to plant themselves on untenanted spots, or divide their tenancies—delighted to get the promise of a little additional rent—immediately became deeply interested in preventing that, and in keeping down the number of the people. Before they had rates to pay, they cared nothing for them; but the law and their self-interest made them care, and made them extirpators. Nothing less than some general desire like that of cupidity falling in with an enactment, and justified by a theory—nothing less than a passion which works silently in all, and safely under the sanction of a law—could have effected such wide-spread destruction. Even humanity was enlisted by the poor-law on the side of extirpation. As long as there was no legal provision for the poor, a landlord had some repugnance to drive them from every shelter; but the instant the law took them under its protection, and forced the land-owner to pay a rate to provide for them, repugnance ceased: they had a legal home, however inefficient, to go to; and eviction began. Even the growth of toleration seems to have worked to the same end. Till the Catholics were emancipated, they were all—rich and poor, priests and peasants—united by a common bond; and Protestant landlords beginning evictions on a great scale would have roused against them the whole Catholic nation. It would have been taken up as a religious question, as well as a question of the poor, prior to 1829. Subsequent to that time—with a Whig administration, with all offices open to Catholics—no religious feelings could mingle with the matter: eviction became a pure question of interest; and while the priests look now, perhaps, as much to the government as to their flocks for support, Catholic landlords are not behind Protestant landlords in clearing their estates."

The person from whom we make the above quotation visited Ireland after the famine consequent upon the failure of the potato crop had done its worst—in the latter part of 1849. But famine seems to prevail, to a certain extent, at all times, in that unhappy land—and thus it is clear that the accidental failure of a crop has less to do with the misery of the people than radical misgovernment.

"To the Irish, such desolation is nothing new. They have long been accustomed to this kind of skinning. Their history, ever since it was written, teems with accounts of land forcibly taken from one set of owners and given to another; of clearings and plantings exactly similar in principle to that which is now going on; of driving men from Leinster to Munster, from Munster to Connaught, and from Connaught into the sea. Without going back to ancient proscriptions and confiscations—all the land having been, between the reign of Henry II. and William III. confiscated, it is affirmed, three times over—we must mention that the clearing so conspicuous in 1848 has now been going on for several years. The total number of holdings in 1841, of above one acre, and not exceeding five acres each, was 310,375; and, in 1847, they had been diminished to 125,926. In that single class of holdings, therefore, 184,449, between 1841 and 1847 inclusive, had been done away with, and 24,147 were extinguished in 1848. Within that period, the number of farms of five acres and upward, particularly of farms of thirty acres and upward, was increased 210,229, the latter class having increased by 108,474. Little or no fresh land was broken up; and they, therefore, could only have been formed by amassing in these larger farms numerous small holdings. Before the year 1847, therefore, before 1846, when the potato rot worked so much mischief, even before 1845, the process of clearing the land, of putting down homesteads and consolidating farms, had been carried to a great extent; before any provision had been made by a poor-law for the evicted families, before the turned-out labourers and little farmers had even the workhouse for a refuge, multitudes had been continually driven from their homes to a great extent, as in 1848. The very process, therefore, on which government now relies for the present relief and the future improvement of Ireland, was begun and was carried to a great extent several years before the extremity of distress fell upon it in 1846. We are far from saying that the potato rot was caused by the clearing system; but, by disheartening the people, by depriving them of security, by contributing to their recklessness, by paralyzing their exertions, by promoting outrages, that system undoubtedly aggravated all the evils of that extraordinary visitation."—Illustrated News, October 13, 1849.

The correspondent of the News saw from one hundred and fifty to one hundred and eighty funerals of victims to the want of food, the whole number attended by not more than fifty persons. So hardened were the men regularly employed in the removal of the dead from the workhouse, that they would drive to the churchyard sitting upon the coffins, and smoking with apparent enjoyment. These men had evidently "supped full of horrors." A funeral was no solemnity to them. They had seen the wretched peasants in the madness of starvation, and death had come as a soothing angel. Why should the quieted sufferers be lamented?

MULLIN'S HUT AT SCULL.