The White Slaves of England

by John C. Cobden

Some English writers admit that the degradation of the Irish and the wretched condition of the country can scarcely be overdrawn, but seek for the causes of this state of things in the character of the people. But why does the Irishman work, prosper, and achieve wealth and position under every other government but that of Ireland? This would not hbe the case if there was any thing radically wrong in the Irish nature. In the following extract from an article in the Edinburgh Review, we have a forcible sketch of the condition of Ireland, coloured somewhat to suit English views:—

"It is obvious that the insecurity of a community in which the bulk of the population form a conspiracy against the law, must prevent the importation of capital; must occasion much of what is accumulated there to be exported; and must diminish the motives and means of accumulation. Who will send his property to a place where he cannot rely on its being protected? Who will voluntarily establish himself in a country which to-morrow may be in a state of disturbance? A state in which, to use the words of Chief Justice Bushe, 'houses and barns and granaries are levelled, crops are laid waste, pasture-lands are ploughed, plantations are torn up, meadows are thrown open to cattle, cattle are maimed, tortured, killed; persons are visited by parties of banditti, who inflict cruel torture, mutilate their limbs, or beat them almost to death. Men who have in any way become obnoxious to the insurgents, or opposed their system, or refused to participate in their outrages, are deliberately assassinated in the open day; and sometimes the unoffending family are indiscriminately murdered by burning the habitation.' [96] A state in which even those best able to protect themselves, the gentry, are forced to build up all their lower windows with stone and mortar; to admit light only into one sitting-room, and not into all the windows of that room; to fortify every other inlet by bullet-proof barricades; to station sentinels around during all the night and the greater part of the day, and to keep firearms in all the bedrooms, and even on the side-table at breakfast and dinner-time.[97] Well might Bishop Doyle exclaim, 'I do not blame the absentees; I would be an absentee myself if I could.'

"The state of society which has been described may be considered as a proof of the grossest ignorance; for what can be a greater proof of ignorance than a systematic opposition to law, carried on at the constant risk of liberty and of life, and producing where it is most successful, in the rural districts, one level of hopeless poverty, and in the towns, weeks of high wages and months without employment—a system in which tremendous risks and frightful sufferings are the means, and general misery is the result? The ignorance, however, which marks the greater part of the population in Ireland, is not merely ignorance of the moral and political tendency of their conduct—an ignorance in which the lower orders of many more advanced communities participate—but ignorance of the businesses which are their daily occupations. It is ignorance, not as citizens and subjects, but as cultivators and labourers. They are ignorant of the proper rotation of crops, of the preservation and use of manure—in a word, of the means by which the land, for which they are ready to sacrifice their neighbours' lives, and to risk their own, is to be made productive. Their manufactures, such as they are, are rude and imperfect, and the Irish labourer, whether peasant or artisan, who emigrates to Great Britain, never possesses skill sufficient to raise him above the lowest ranks in his trade.

"Indolence—the last of the causes to which we have attributed the existing misery of Ireland—is not so much an independent source of evil as the result of the combination of all others. The Irishman does not belong to the races that are by nature averse from toil. In England, Scotland, or America he can work hard. He is said, indeed, to require more overlooking than the natives of any of these countries, and to be less capable, or, to speak more correctly, to be less willing to surmount difficulties by patient intellectual exertion; but no danger deters, no disagreeableness disgusts, no bodily fatigue discourages him.

"But in his own country he is indolent. All who have compared the habits of hired artisans or of the agricultural labourers in Ireland with those of similar classes in England or Scotland, admit the inferiority of industry of the former. The indolence of the great mass of the people, the occupiers of land, is obvious even to the passing traveller. Even in Ulster, the province in which, as we have already remarked, the peculiarities of the Irish character are least exhibited, not only are the cabins, and even the farm-houses, deformed within and without by accumulations of filth, which the least exertion would remove, but the land itself is suffered to waste a great portion of its productive power. We have ourselves seen field after field in which the weeds covered as much space as the crops. From the time that his crops are sowed and planted until they are reaped the peasant and his family are cowering over the fire, or smoking, or lounging before the door, when an hour or two a day employed in weeding their potatoes, oats, or flax, would perhaps increase the produce by one-third.

"The indolence of the Irish artisan is sufficiently accounted for by the combinations which, by prohibiting piece-work, requiring all the workmen to be paid by the day and at the same rate, prohibiting a good workman from exerting himself, have destroyed the motives to industry. 'I consider it,' says Mr. Murray, 'a very hard rule among them, that the worst workman that ever took a tool in his hand, should be paid the same as the best, but that is the rule and regulation of the society; and that there was only a certain quantity of work allowed to be done; so that, if one workman could turn more work out of his hands, he durst not go on with it. There is no such thing as piece-work; and if a bad man is not able to get through his work, a good workman dare not go further than he does.' [98]

"The indolence of the agricultural labourer arises, perhaps, principally from his labour being almost always day-work, and in a great measure a mere payment of debt—a mere mode of working out his rent. That of the occupier may be attributed to a combination of causes. In the first place, a man must be master of himself to a degree not common even among the educated classes, before he can be trusted to be his own task-master. Even among the British manufacturers, confessedly the most industrious labourers in Europe, those who work in their own houses are comparatively idle and irregular, and yet they work under the stimulus of certain and immediate gain. The Irish occupier, working for a distant object, dependent in some measure on the seasons, and with no one to control or even to advise him, puts off till to-morrow what need not necessarily be done to-day—puts off till next year what need not necessarily be done this year, and ultimately leaves much totally undone.

"Again, there is no damper so effectual as liability to taxation proportioned to the means of payment. It is by this instrument that the Turkish government has destroyed the industry, the wealth, and ultimately the population of what were once the most flourishing portions of Asia—perhaps of the world. It is thus that the taille ruined the agriculture of the most fertile portions of France. Now, the Irish occupier has long been subject to this depressive influence, and from various sources. The competition for land has raised rents to an amount which can be paid only under favourable circumstances. Any accident throws the tenant into an arrear, and the arrear is kept a subsisting charge, to be enforced if he should appear capable of paying it. If any of the signs of prosperity are detected in his crop, his cabin, his clothes, or his food, some old demand may be brought up against him. Again, in many districts a practice prevails of letting land to several tenants, each of whom is responsible for the whole rent. It is not merely the consequence, but the intention, that those who can afford to pay should pay for those who cannot. Again, it is from taxation, regulated by apparent property, that all the revenues of the Irish Catholic Church are drawn. The half-yearly offerings, the fees on marriages and christenings, and, what is more important, the contributions to the priests made on those occasions by the friends of the parties, are all assessed by public opinion, according to the supposed means of the payer. An example of the mode in which this works, occurred a few months ago, within our own knowledge. £300 was wanted by a loan fund, in a Catholic district in the North of Ireland. In the night, one of the farmers, a man apparently poor, came to his landlord, the principal proprietor in the neighbourhood, and offered to lend the money, if the circumstance could be kept from his priest. His motive for concealment was asked, and he answered, that, if the priest knew he had £300 at interest, his dues would be doubled. Secrecy was promised, and a stocking was brought from its hiding-place in the roof, filled with notes and coin, which had been accumulating for years until a secret investment could be found. Again, for many years past a similar taxation has existed for political purposes. The Catholic rent, the O'Connell tribute, and the Repeal rent, like every other tax that is unsanctioned by law, must be exacted, to a larger or smaller amount, from every cottier, or farmer, as he is supposed to be better or worse able to provide for them.

"Who can wonder that the cultivator, who is exposed to these influences, should want the industry and economy which give prosperity to the small farmer in Belgium? What motive has he for industry and economy? It may be said that he has the same motive in kind, though not in degree, as the inhabitants of a happier country; since the new demand to which any increase of his means would expose him probably would not exhaust the whole of that increase. The same might be said of the subjects of the Pasha. There are inequalities of fortune among the cultivators of Egypt, just as there were inequalities in that part of France which was under the taille. No taxation ever exhausted the whole surplus income of all its victims. But when a man cannot calculate the extent to which the exaction may go—when all he knows is, that the more he appears to have the more will be demanded—when he knows that every additional comfort which he is seen to enjoy, and every additional productive instrument which he is found to possess, may be a pretext for a fresh extortion, he turns careless or sulky—he yields to the strong temptation of indolence and of immediate excitement and enjoyment—he becomes less industrious, and therefore produces less—he becomes less frugal, and therefore, if he saves at all, saves a smaller portion of that smaller product."