The fire of nationality burned low during the Melbourne Administration; but rekindled by O'Connell in 1842, and fanned into flame by “Young Ireland,” it was not put out by the misfortunes and disasters in which the first forty-eight years of the Union closed.
V
I have said that land was the staple industry of Ireland. Yet Government after Government failed to realize that the enactment of laws for the protection of the tenant—the protection of his improvements from confiscation by the landlords, protection of himself from [pg 320] rack-rents and arbitrary eviction—were necessary for the prosperity and peace of the country. In 1836 Mr. Sharman Crawford introduced a Bill proposing that the tenant should be entitled, on eviction, to compensation for improvements of a permanent nature made with the landlord's consent; or without his consent, provided that such improvements were, according to the Chairman of Quarter Sessions, necessary for the actual wants of the tenant. This moderate Bill, strongly opposed by the landlords, was read a first time, but it never reached another stage. Parliament having refused to protect the tenants—refused indeed to take the slightest heed of their complaints and grievances—the tenants continued to protect themselves by forming secret societies whose operations struck terror in the land. In 1838 the Under-Secretary, Thomas Drummond, boldly told the Tipperary Magistrates, who cried out for coercion, that landlordism was the cause of agrarian crime, and that remedial legislation, not coercion, was the remedy. He said, in memorable words:
“The Government has been at all times ready to afford the utmost aid in its power to suppress disturbance and crime, and its efforts have been successful so far as regards open violations of the law.... But there are certain classes of crime, originating in other causes which are much more difficult of repression. The utmost exertion of vigilance and precaution cannot always effectually guard against them, and it becomes of importance to consider the causes which have led to a state of society so much to be deplored, with a view to ascertain whether any corrective means are in the immediate power of the Government or the Legislature. When,” he continues, “the character of the great majority of serious outrages occurring in many parts of Ireland, though unhappily most frequent in Tipperary, is considered, it is impossible to doubt that the causes from which they mainly spring are connected with the tenure and occupation of land.
“Property,” he adds, “has its duties as well as its rights; to [pg 321] the neglect of those duties in times past is mainly to be ascribed to that diseased state of society in which such crimes take their rise; and it is not in the enactment or enforcement of statutes of extraordinary severity, but chiefly in the better and more faithful performance of those duties, and the more enlightened and humane exercise of those rights that a permanent remedy for such disorders is to be sought.”
Another fierce outburst of agrarianism in 1842 startled English public opinion, and drew from The Times a memorable condemnation of landlordism. The great English journal wrote:
“With feelings of mingled pain we have witnessed the reappearance of that frightful system of murder and outrage which has so long infested the south of Ireland, and in particular the unhappy County of Tipperary.... The evil has arisen in the general system upon which the occupation of land has been based and conducted, and in the treatment of the occupier by the landlord.... A landlord is not a tradesman; he stands to his tenantry, or he ought to do so, in loco parentis; he is there as well for their good as his own; they are not mere contractors with him, to hold his land as capital, and pay him the full interest, or incur a forfeiture; they are rather agents placed in his hands, and under his care and protection, for the purpose of working the land, and whose natural relation with him cannot be determined except by negligence or ill-conduct.
“If the land be treated as money, and tenantry as borrowers, people may be sure that the landlord will be an usurer. This is generally true, but in Ireland the tenant who is thus treated as though he had been an unfettered party to the original agreement, has not the shadow of the character of a voluntary contractor. It is with him, either to continue in the quarter of an acre which he occupies, or to starve. There is no other alternative. Rack-rent may be misery, but ejectment is ruin.”
At length in 1843 Sir Robert Peel appointed the famous Devon Commission to enquire into the occupation and tenure of land in Ireland. In 1845 the Commission reported that:
“(1) All the improvements in the soil were made by the tenants.