Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846

by Various

The uncalled-for contest in which the Peel administration have chosen to engage with the agricultural interest of England, has added to the mischief. Their unexampled political tergiversation has deprived them of the support of almost all their former adherents; and now, when they see the evil consequences of the vacillating policy which they have pursued with regard to Ireland, and are desirous of repressing the enormities which they have permitted to accumulate around them, their mouthpiece is obliged to recount a mass of horrors sufficient to curdle the blood of the most unfeeling, without daring to give utterance to one burst of honest indignation, lest by doing so he should deprive his government of the only assistance by means of which they can hope to accomplish their free-trade projects; and with a full knowledge that neither life nor property are secure in Ireland, they are compelled to succumb to the threats of their temporary allies, and virtually to abandon even the emasculated measure which they dared to introduce, by consenting to postponements which must deprive it of all moral weight, and still further encourage vexatious opposition. But can the ministers suppose that the Irish liberals support them for any other purpose than that of attaining their own ends? Whatever may be their ultimate effects upon the condition of this country, it is clear that the repeal of the corn-laws, and the alterations in the tariff, must be most hurtful to Ireland.

No one can entertain a doubt but that pork will be raised, and bacon cured, to such an extent in America, as to deprive the Irish cotter of the assistance he has heretofore derived from his pig, and that foreign butter will supplant his in the English market: and that, in consequence, Irish lands must greatly fall in value, unless they be applied to the rearing and fattening of cattle; and such being the case, what a prospect have both the Irish gentry and the Irish people before them,—ruin, if the small farmers are allowed to continue in occupation; and desolation and insurrection if they be removed. The government express an anxiety to secure the employment of the people on the reclamation of waste lands, and they propose to advance the money to enable the proprietors to pay them; but, at the same moment, by removing protection, they render it certain that such proceedings must be attended with a total loss. Whatever may be said by theorists, the profit to be derived from reclamation of waste lands in Ireland is at least but problematical. The repeal of the corn-laws must render any such attempt ruinous; and, as if it were not enough to expose the Irish farmer to foreign competition, the ministry are now trying, and "they hope with success," to destroy the home market; by substituting Indian corn, which can never be raised in the country, in place of oats and potatoes, which have hitherto constituted the food of the people. Now, putting out of consideration the interest of the gentry, what, we may ask, is to become of the Irish farmer and of the Irish labourer, if the crops which yield profit to the one, and employment to the other, were to be superseded by a species of grain which their climate cannot produce.

The Irish Radicals are quite aware of the misfortunes which the ministerial measures will inflict upon their country; yet they urge the government to their adoption, in the hope of being able to profit by means of the discontent and ruin which they must effect.

But if we are surprised at the conduct of the government in complacently witnessing, for four years, the existence of a state of things in a portion of the United Kingdom itself, which was a "serious disgrace to the age, and to the government, and the country in which we live," without endeavouring, by the enactment of more stringent laws, to correct it, the evasions, by means of which they now seek to palliate their neglect, and the strange want of perspicacity which they display in not being able to discover the real source of mischief, or their timidity in not daring to denounce it, must naturally excite our astonishment. Let any man read the reported speech of the Home Secretary, and from it he would never be able to discover that there existed at this moment, in that portion of the empire, so disgraced by crime and distracted by dissensions, an Association whose whole occupation is to disseminate falsehood and preach sedition—an organized band of men who levy tribute on their dupes, and who, in return for their pence, administer political poison to the minds of their victims—a political body, whose interest it is that acrimony, and ill-will, and civil strife, should prevail; because in the storm of passions which they evoke, they reap the harvest of pelf on which they live—whose acts have been pronounced by the tribunals of their country to be illegal, and whose leaders have been denounced by this individual minister as "convicted conspirators"—an Association whose doctrines, preached by a political priesthood and enforced by a sanguinary mob, have rendered life and property insecure, and the quiet existence of independence and industry impossible.

The ministry admitted the extent of this evil, when they prosecuted "the political martyrs;" yet now, when the power of the Conciliation Hall conspirators is more dangerous, because more time has been given them to consolidate their strength—in laying before Parliament the condition of Ireland, and in referring to the causes by which it has been produced, her Majesty's servants affect an utter ignorance of the existence of a body which they heretofore thought it necessary to arraign, and by their silence tacitly exculpate from all blame those men at whose doors they formerly, and with justice, laid all the blood which has been shed, and all the crime which has been committed in Ireland.

See the quibbles by which the Home Secretary seeks to make the coercion measure which he advocates a sort of collateral support to the corn-law question, which he desires to pass:—"Now, sir, in reference to this measure which I am about to propose, painful as it is, and unconstitutional as I admit it to be, I must say that I, for one, foreseeing some time ago that the necessity for some such measure would shortly arrive, felt that I could not reconcile it to my conscience and sense of duty to be a party to it, when, at the same time, with the great increase of crime, I saw the extreme physical distress of the people of Ireland, arising from a deficiency of that which they had been accustomed to make their principal food. I felt, I say, that it was of vital importance that provision should first be made, by an effort on the part of the government, to relieve the physical wants of the people before this measure should be brought forward; and I resolved that I could not be a party to the measure unless I had the sanction of my colleagues to a bill which would have the effect of opening the corn trade, and placing articles of the first necessity within the reach of the people of Ireland." But this cannot avail the right honourable gentleman; for his own returns show that the amount of crime was infinitely greater up to the month of August 1845, when provisions were most abundant, and the prospects of the new harvest most cheering, than now, when it suits his convenience to notice its existence, or to sustain the potato panic. "When the greatest increase of crime existed," he could not possibly have anticipated "the extreme physical distress of the people," because no such distress was then heard of. But because his object was to make the suppression of crime auxiliary to other measures of the government, he takes no step to accomplish it until he comes backed by the exaggerations of political knaves, and the reports of philosophical quacks, to prove his case, in order that the humanity of his auditory may be excited; and that, before he is called upon to coerce, he may be permitted to repeal the corn-laws, on the pretence of relieving "the physical wants of the people."

We are far from denying that a great loss has been sustained in the potato crop; but that loss does not in reality affect the food of the people so much as would appear at first sight; for the cattle and pigs which used to get sound potatoes in other years, were exclusively fed on diseased ones in this: neither has the rot been attended with pecuniary loss to any considerable extent; for the diseased part being removed, the remainder was as fit to use as the soundest potato; and more pigs were reared and fatted than usual on the rotted portions, and they never fatted better or bore a higher price. But, (and this fact has been studiously suppressed by Sir Robert Peel,) even admitting that the loss has been great, there could be no famine. The crop of oats exceeded by a third any crop known in the memory of man, and the price of oats in October last exceeded the average price at that season for many years past by nearly one-half. Consequently rather more than half the quantity which the tenantry required to sell in other years to make up a given sum, answered the same purpose on this; and even such of the tenantry as paid their rents had an unusual quantity left after disposing of what enabled them to meet their engagements; and this has been converted into meal and stored in their houses, or remains in stack in their haggards. Now, oatmeal always constitutes a principal ingredient in the food of every Irish peasant from this season forward; and yet the ministers never once alluded to the great quantity of oats which they must know to be in the country, nor to the fact that there has been, as the season advanced, a steady and progressive decline in its price. In the Dublin market, on the 18th November 1845, oats brought from fourteen to sixteen and sixpence the barrel; on the 28th of March 1846, it sold from twelve to fifteen shillings; while at the same period in the last year, when no famine was anticipated, it fetched twelve shillings; and there can be no doubt but it will experience a still further fall as the season advances, for potatoes now are, on the whole, lower than they were a month ago; and the holders of meal will soon begin to perceive that they cannot realize the prices which the exaggerations of the government led them to expect, and they will supply the markets more freely.

It is extraordinary to see how people here can be humbugged. Mr O'Connell, some time since, produced in the House a return from a priest, which professed to give the state of his parishioners, as regarded the amount of food each family possessed. In this document it was stated, (and the announcement was received with loud cries of "hear, hear,") that a certain number of families had not a week's provisions; and no doubt this was true; and the same reverend gentleman, or any other in any part of Ireland, might make just the same report at the same period in any year, even when potatoes sold for eightpence the cwt.:—All the class of small cotters have generally used the produce of their con-acres at this season, and they commence to buy—the work which they always have in abundance in the spring enabling them to pay. They purchase weekly; and the fact that a certain number of them had not a week's provisions, at the time this return was made, in their possession, no more implies the presence of famine in that particular locality, than the fact, that the labourers in London have generally no greater supply proves the existence of a scarcity in the metropolis. Both parties purchase weekly, and consequently have never more than a week's provisions by them.

No doubt, there is a deficiency of provisions in particular neighbourhoods; but, take the kingdom all over, there is a sufficiency; and if the government had not, for their own purposes, magnified the danger, the pressure on the people would now be less than it is.

We express surprise that the assertions of Mr O'Connell and the agitators continue to be credited by the people, although they have been a thousand times rejected and belied; but her Majesty's ministers exhibit a still greater extent of gullibility, if they really, as they affect to do, believe in the statements made by the Radical members and their organs of the press, after the repeated instances in which those statements have been proved to be erroneous. On the 20th November, the Mansion-house Committee proclaimed to all the inhabitants of the British empire, and in the presence of an all-seeing Providence, "That in Ireland famine of a most hideous description must be immediate and pressing, and pestilence of the most frightfull kind, and not remote, unless immediately prevented." And on the 17th of December, Mr O'Connell announced, that "Some say the crop will last till April. Even those most sanguine admit that we will have a famine in April—others say the crop will last till March—others that it will not last beyond February—others that a famine will come on before the month of January is over—for my own part, I believe the last;" yet, here we are, thanks to a beneficent Providence, now approaching the 1st of May, neither suffering from famine nor from pestilence, with almost all the crops sown, and with well-supplied and steadily-falling markets; and yet the Premier eagerly grasps at any new exaggeration of those men, for the purpose of supporting his own overdrawn pictures of fresh distress.