To say that the Irish are unemployed, not from inclination, but from necessity, is absurd;[35] this may sometimes be the case in the towns where the worst class of agricultural labourers reside—men who will not be employed while others can be had. A stranger meets able-bodied men walking about; he is told, and he sees, that there are no resident gentry in the neighbourhood to afford them work; he compassionates their condition; concocts a paragraph, and imputes the misery he witnesses to absenteeism. Let them accompany the idler to his home, and inspect his farm: he will find, out of a holding of from three to four Irish acres, perhaps an acre on which there was no attempt made at all to raise a crop, independent of untilled headlands, amounting to at least fifth of the ground under cultivation in each field. Why does he not employ himself on this land? If he has a lease, there can be no excuse; but even supposing him but tenant-at-will, it can in this instance be no justification. The land unused is not waste land, requiring an expenditure of labour and money, for which he might afterwards reap no advantage from the cupidity of his landlord. This is no such land: it is good, sound, arable land—perhaps the very best he has; and waste, purely and solely for the want of expending on it the labour necessary to prepare it for crop. He pays for it—yet he won't work it: he complains of want of employment, and he walks about with plenty to engage him beneficially for his own interests at home: he takes con-acre, for which he pays high, while he could raise his food on his own farm, if he only took the trouble of collecting manure, or devoting his time to its improvement.
Adjoining mountains and bogs, where the poorest class of the population generally reside, and where there is abundance of ground attached rent-free to each farm, and capable of being rendered profitable at a very little expense—in fact, without any other outlay than the labour required to open drains, and level it—we see scarcely any efforts made at improvement. A Scotchman, or an Englishman, would consider the possession of the land rent-free for three or five years, according to the difficulty of the undertaking, as a sufficient recompense for his trouble; although his time is much more valuable, on account of the higher rate of wages paid him. But an Irishman will consider a twenty-one years' lease as too short a tenure, to justify him in expending the time which he wastes gossiping with his neighbours, or sunning himself at the backs of the ditches, in the profitable employment of adding to what ought to be, if he had industry, his already too small holding. Here is a case in which we conceive legislation might operate much good. If every man who reclaimed ground which did not before pay rent, was guaranteed its possession by law for ten years after the first crop, at a nominal rent of one shilling the acre, it might be an inducement to the tenant to labour: it could be no loss to the landlord, as, if still left in a state of nature it would be useless to him, and after the expiration of the time guaranteed the tenant as remuneration for his trouble, the benefit would be his exclusively. In the case of a tenant-at-will, an arrangement could easily be effected, by which the tenant, if removed from the farm before the expiration of the stipulated term, might receive a just and reasonable compensation for the improvements which he had effected, or an allowance for the loss of the crops which, had he remained, he would still have been entitled to: and thus, without any government outlay, encouragement would be given for the reclamation of that part of the Irish waste lands which would be worth the trouble or expense of cultivation.
We are gravely told, in well-rounded and high-sounding sentences, that "in Ireland famine urges men to take land at any price—they must have it or die;" and that, "when a piece of ground falls out of lease, it becomes a bone of contention amongst some twenty or thirty miserable competitors, who outbid each other, to the great delight and profit of the ruthless and exulting landlord, and to their own utter ruin." If any one takes time to reflect on what he reads in every day's newspaper, he must at once perceive that this statement can have no foundation in fact; if a landlord remove a tenant for non-payment of rent, he finds it difficult to get another to succeed him, (in the disturbed districts it is almost impossible to get any man to do so.) Such is the dread of taking land, from the occupation of which others have been expelled, even on account of owing the most unreasonable arrears, that farms frequently remain waste for years, without any person daring to bid for them. Now if public opinion, and the dread of the punishment which is sure to follow, operate so powerfully in favour of the really blamable person, as to keep his land untenanted, how much more influence will they possess in restraining any man from seeking to obtain the land of another, if that other be unobjectionable in character, solvent in circumstances, and still in possession? Such a thing is never heard of. The landlord, if he were bad enough, might try to induce men to act so; but he could not effect it. If death pursue the man who undertakes to rent unoccupied ground, as in most instances it does, how much more certain would it be to overtake him whose conduct was the means of driving from his home a solvent and industrious person? If a landlord distrain for rent, he can find no bidders for the crops or cattle; how much more difficult will it be for him to obtain bidders for land? We have frequently heard the bad cultivation of the land in Ireland attributed to the constant shifting of the tenantry: we are quite convinced the result of the enquiry now instituted will show how unfounded this supposition is, and that the shifting or removal of the tenants, will be found to be a matter of much more rare occurrence in Ireland than in England. That scarcity and want are periodically experienced in Ireland, is but too true. Those visitations (which, thank God, are not frequent) arise from the failure of the potato crops, and generally occur in those districts most densely populated, and consequently worst tilled; in fact, they are greatly to be attributed to the neglect of the people themselves; who will not take the trouble of using those precautions against rot, which ought always to be adopted on a moist soil or in a mountainous country: but to talk of persons dying in Ireland of starvation is absurd, and bespeaks an utter ignorance of the national character. There are poor-houses; and besides, in Ireland, the hungry man may enter without hesitation, and share without apology in the meal of his more wealthy neighbour; and lodging, humble though it be, is never denied to the houseless or the destitute. Those who accuse Irishmen, of any class or party, of hard-heartedness or inhumanity, had better look at home. In their country we never hear of verdicts of "death from starvation" being returned by coroners' juries; or of the weak and the unfortunate being compelled to seek for shelter in the hollows of decayed trees, or to sleep like brute beasts in the open parks, exposed to the cold and the inclemency of winter. The gentry may neglect their duties in other respects: as regards the performance of charitable acts, they are faultless; the middleman may be exacting—but he is hospitable; and the men who make those groundless charges, would be not a little astonished did they see the multitudes that are still fed (poor-laws notwithstanding) at the big House of the Irish gentleman. We have said that failures of the crops, and scarcity, occur much more frequently in the densely populated parts of the country than in any others, and that those failures arise in a great measure from the neglect of the people themselves. Parts of Mayo, Galway, and Donegal, are the localities most subject to those visitations. In those counties the most miserable class of the peasantry exist; and nothing, we think, can prove more conclusively, that their misfortunes and their wretchedness cannot with justice be attributed to the misconduct of their landlords, but rather to their own, than the undisputed fact, that in those districts in which the people are worst off, the land is set at the lowest rent; and that where the greatest quantity of waste land is unreclaimed, and where that which is under cultivation is worst managed and least attended to, there, invariably, is to be found the greatest amount of unemployed labourers. It may be said they know no better mode of cultivation than what they practise. They do; those are the very men who go, and have from their youth been in the habit of going, to England and Scotland, where they see the benefits arising from a good system of agriculture. They fully appreciate, but won't practise it. The truth is—and this is one of the great sources of Irish misery—that by the constant agitation of which (under one shape or another) he is almost always the victim, the Irish peasant is induced to consider himself as the worst treated of God's creatures; by it he is kept in a continual state of dependence on anticipated events, which leads him to expect the amelioration of his condition by means of political convulsions, rather than by patient and persevering industry.
We need scarcely say how much the sympathy expressed for his situation, and the abuse heaped on his landlord, tend to confirm the Irish peasant in his bad habits. Articles from the English press, and not extracts from the gospel, form the texts of the sermons which are delivered for his instruction: the object of the preacher is not to remove his prejudices, or to eradicate his faults; but to excite his animosities, and to extract his shillings: when peace and mercy are inculcated, it is not because they are commanded, but because they may be expedient.
In those parts in which there are no resident gentry to employ them, to set them an example, and to enforce a respect for the laws, the peasantry indulge in idleness, and engage in politics. They work at home only when it suits their convenience or inclination, and from others they can only procure work (at prices for which they will work) in the harvest and spring. In summer, after they have planted their crops, and made their turf, and set the milk of their cow, (if they have one,) they shut up their houses, send their wives and their families to beg, and betake themselves to England or Scotland to reap the harvest. There, until of late years, they earned the almost incredible sums of £16, sometimes of £20—latterly, competition and other causes have reduced the amount to, on the average, between £4 and £5. Out of this, on their return, they pay the rent of the con-acre which they have taken, while a third of their own holding is waste. With the balance and their oats they pay the landlord, in those cases in which he is so fortunate as to get any rent; and having secured an abundance of potatoes, they sit down to enjoy themselves for the winter. During the night they play cards for geese, turkeys, and herrings; attend dances, where they are enrolled and sworn into secret societies; and devote some hours to the wrecking of the houses, or the castigation of the persons, of those who are obnoxious to them. In the daytime, you find them at the places of public resort or amusement, or lazily and listlessly strolling about those miserable abodes—in whose floors you frequently find stepping-stones to carry you from the entrance to the space occupied by the fire, and before whose doors are those stagnant pools and heaps of filth, so disgusting to every traveller. Could they not remove those? Is it the landlord's fault that they don't? Does he wish their houses to be in such a condition, or encourage them to keep their own persons and those of their children in such a state of dirt and nastiness? Not at all. He does his best to prevail on them to adopt a different system; but his interference in their domestic matters is always looked on as an unjustifiable intrusion; in short, as a sort of minor grievance, and a petty act of oppression. Perhaps it is to be attributed to their poverty? Water, at least, is cheap and abundant in Ireland.
Such is a true and accurate account of the "tenor of those men's lives" and habits; and it is a continuance of this state of things that those who attack the Irish landlords so indiscriminately are, in reality, advocating.
Now, let us suppose that a tract of two thousand acres, set perhaps by the grandfather of the preset owner, and inhabited by a class of tenantry such as we have described, comes on a landlord's hands. It has been let and relet—tied up in settlements—and, until the termination of the lease, there may have been three or four intermediate landlords between the occupant and the proprietor. The present possessor comes to deal with an estate, ruined and almost worthless from mismanagement, over which he could exercise no control, and peopled by a pauper and surplus tenantry, for whose creation he is in noways accountable. This is exactly the condition of those estates, and the position of those landlords, whose treatment and whose acts have been latterly so much commented on. And we will now ask those who blame others so much, candidly to tell us what they would advise to be done—what, if placed in such a situation, they would do themselves. They will, no doubt, at once say, "Remove some, give them the means of going to the colonies, and make the rest comfortable." Why, that is exactly what the landlords have been endeavouring to do, and for which they have been denounced. This is just what Lord Lorton, Colonel Windham, and others, did; and for doing which they were designated "miscreants." If the tenantry were removed, even to better their own condition, the dues of the priest, and the physical force at the command of the agitator, would be lessened—and this would never answer. "Well, then, if this mode of management be not popular, leave all on the land, build them comfortable houses, and insist on a proper mode of cultivation. In Belgium and France men live on smaller portions of land in comfort, why should they not in Ireland? Lay out money in affording them employment, pay them for draining and sewering—the benefit will be ultimately yours." The answer is obvious. It would require more money than the property is worth to build good houses for all; and, if built, they would soon go to ruin from the habits of the people. If they possessed the land in fee, the occupants, from their numbers, could not exist upon it. The landlord cannot make them emulate the Belgian or the Frenchman in industry. The produce of the orchards he may plant will be stolen, and the trees broken and destroyed, to obtain the fruit. They will not exert themselves to raise many things which are sources of profit to the poor man in this and other countries; or if they did, they would have no market—they would obtain no price for them. And why? Because their own misconduct prevents the establishment of any manufactures, or the outlay of any money amongst them. Who will carry his machinery to a country where—though he may be a good master and a kind friend, though he may give occupation to hundreds and diffuse wealth among thousands—his spindles may be stopped at the beck of a priest, and his machinery left to rust at the dictate of Mr O'Connell. Independent men do not wish to lose all self-control—to sacrifice all right of private judgment; and he who dares to assert his own opinions, or to defy the behests of the "Liberator," has no business to betake himself to Ireland. As to giving employment in sewering and draining—which would benefit the estate—it is not every man who can afford to set his land at a cheap rate, and afterwards to expend his income for the immediate benefit of the occupier. But even this has been attempted. Lord Lansdowne tried to accomplish it on his Irish estate; but the steward he sent to superintend the work was noticed to quit, and driven out of the country, by the very persons for whose benefit those improvements were planned—by the very men who were to be paid for their execution. Under such circumstances as we have stated, in many instances the fear of death compels the landlord to abandon all idea of improvement. He must submit to sacrifice his rent, because those in possession can't or won't pay him; and, if he removes them, he can find no one to succeed them: and, in addition to his other consolations, he has the pleasure of seeing himself described as a monster more ruthless than any Russian despot; while some hut, the erection of which he dared not have prevented, is described, perhaps sketched and stuck in a book, as an incontrovertible proof of the miserable condition to which his rapacity and neglect have reduced his unhappy dependents.
No direct legislation can affect the social condition of Ireland; before you can hope to benefit the country, you must establish tranquillity, and inspire the peasantry with a due respect for the law, and a just estimate of the rights of private property. The question is—by what means are those things to be accomplished? You may give land at a lower price than it now brings, but you will not thereby cause any perceptible change in the habits of the people. They may be wealthier, but they will not be cleanlier. Their rents may be better paid, but the peasant will still live on the potato. The filthy cabin will exist, and the cow and the pig will feed at the same board, and occupy the same apartment as the owner, until you elevate the moral and social feelings of the man, and teach him to require as a necessary what he now looks on as a superfluous luxury.
Much of the poverty of the Irish peasantry has been attributed to the con-acre system. But if this system were not found, by the persons who practise it, to be more beneficial, and less laborious, than raising crops from their own land, it would not be persevered in. In those counties in which con-acres are scarce, the cry is, that the people are starved, because they can't have them. Where they are abundant, they are impoverished by the prices they pay for them. The Terryalt system, in the south, originated in the gentlemen farmers refusing to break up their land, and in the people assembling in mobs, digging the ground, thereby rendering it unfit for pasture, and compelling the owners to let it for potatoes. It may be said, how could they avoid doing this? They had no land to raise potatoes on, and they must have them or die. This is not the case. The only persons who could be so circumstanced are the day-labourers; and to them it must, personally, be a matter of indifference what land was, or was not broken: for, by their agreements, those gentlemen and farmers who employ them, are bound to provide them with potato land; consequently they would not risk their lives to procure what was already guaranteed them. Those agrarian disturbances originated with small farmers, whose own farms were not half cultivated; or tradesmen, who would not have been so anxious to procure con-acres, if they did not find them in general a much cheaper mode of procuring their staple commodity than by having recourse to the markets. The first use a servant boy or girl makes of their earnings, is to plant con-acres, not for subsistence, but for sale. Half an acre of potatoes is generally the foundation of the fortune. The rent paid for potato ground has been enormously magnified. Mr Wiggins sets it down at £12 per acre. It may let for this price (the plantation acre) in the immediate vicinity of Dublin, Belfast, or some other large cities; where, from the contiguity of the market, the produce of a good acre will be worth from £40 to £60, according to the rate of prices. But, in the rural districts, such a price is never heard of; and it is only by the prices in those districts that the condition of the people can be affected. From £5 to £7 and £8 will be found the usual prices; and we should be glad to know what English farmer would give upwards of one acre three roods of his best land, well tilled and highly manured, at such a price, the renter only holding it for one crop, and paying no taxes whatever. The average produce per acre of good con-acre will be, at least, twenty tons of eating or marketable potatoes, independent of a large quantity fit for seed, and for the feeding of pigs; the value of those latter will greatly over-pay the expense of seed, planting, and digging. And taking the price at 1s. per 112 lbs., the renter will have £20 worth of potatoes for £8; a clear profit of £12 on the acre. It, of course, occasionally does occur, that from failure of the seed, rot, or other casualties, the crop may not be worth the rent; in this case an abatement, sufficient to satisfy him, is made to the holder, or it is left on the landlord's hands. Potatoes being a perishable crop, and a species of food which cannot be preserved beyond a season, their price fluctuates more than that of any other kind of provisions. Last year the price in this "country of famine" was 4d. for 112 lbs.; in general the prices vary from 1s. (seldom less) to 2s., and sometimes 3s., the 112 lbs.
In Ireland, good con-acres are looked on by the peasantry as a certain source of wealth; here they are considered as a main cause of their poverty. Who are the best judges—the people who use, or those who read about them? But whatever may be the merit or demerit of the con-acre system, (and we are none of its advocates,) it is unjust to charge its practice on the landlords. They have nothing whatever to do with it; it is a mode of dealing between one class of tenantry and another. The assertion in the "Cry from Ireland," that the peasant gives his manure, and pays 18s. an acre besides, is too ridiculous to require confutation.