With this act of boyishness he was, of course, taunted in after-life by the Whigs. But his answer was natural and just: it was in substance, that he had been, in 1790, an advocate for Irish reform; and if the Irish parliament had continued under the same circumstances, he would be an advocate for its reform still. But in 1793 a measure had been carried, which made all change perilous: the Popish peasantry had been suffered to obtain the right of voting; and thenceforward he should not aid parliamentary reform.
It is to be observed, that this language was not used under the temptation of office, for he did not possess any share in administration until four years afterwards, in 1797.
The forty-shilling franchise was the monster evil of Ireland. Every measure of corruption, of conspiracy, and of public convulsion, originated in that most mischievous, factious, and false step. It put the whole parliamentary power of the country into the hands of faction; made public counsel the dictation of the populace; turned every thing into a job; and finally, by the pampering of the rabble, inflamed them into civil war, and, by swamping the constituency, rendered the extinction of the parliament a matter of necessity to the existence of the constitution.
To this measure—at once weak and ruinous, at once the triumph of faction and the deathblow of Irish tranquillity; at once paralysing all the powers of the legislature for good, and sinking the peasantry into deeper degradation—we must give a few words.
The original condition of the peasantry in Ireland was serfdom. A few hereditary chiefs, with the power of life and death, ruled the whole lower population, as the master of the herd rules his cattle. English law raised them from this condition, and gave them the rights of Englishmen. But no law of earth could give the Celt the industry, frugality, or perseverance of the Englishman. The result was, that the English artificer, husbandman, and trader, became men of property, while the Celt lingered out life in the idleness of his forefathers. Robbery was easier than work, and he robbed; rebellion was more tempting than loyalty, and he rebelled: the result was the frequent forfeiture of the lands of chiefs, who, prompted by their priests, excited by their passions, and urged by the hope of plunder, were continually rebelling, and necessarily punished for their rebellion. Portions of their lands were distributed as the pay of the soldiery who conquered them; portions were given to English colonists, transplanted for the express purpose of establishing English allegiance, arts, and feelings in Ireland; and portions devolved to the crown. But we are not to imagine that these were transfers of smiling landscapes and propitious harvests—that this was a renewal of the Goth and Vandal, invading flowery shores, and sacking the dwellings of native luxury. Ireland, in the 16th and 17th centuries, was a wilderness; the fertility of the soil wasted in swamps and thickets; no inns, no roads; the few towns, garrisons in the midst of vast solitudes; the native baron, a human brute, wallowing with his followers round a huge fire in the centre of a huge wigwam, passing from intoxication to marauding, and from beaten and broken marauding to intoxication again. A few of those barons had been educated abroad, but even they, on their return, brought back only the love of blood, the habit of political falsehood, and the hatred to the English name, taught in France and Spain. The wars of the League, the government of the Inquisition, the subtlety of the Italian courts, thus added their share of civilised atrocity, to the gross superstitions and rude revenge of Popish Ireland.
We must get rid of the tinsel which has been scattered by poetry over the past ages of Ireland. History shows, under the embroidered cloak, only squalidness. Common sense tells us what must be the condition of a people without arts, commerce, or agriculture; perpetually nurturing a savage prejudice, and exhibiting it in the shape of a savage revenge; ground to the dust by poverty, yet abhorring exertion; suffering under hourly tyranny, yet incapable of enjoying the freedom offered to them; and looking on the vigorous and growing prosperity of the English colonist, with only the feeling of malice, and the determination to ruin him. The insurrection of 1641, in which probably 50,000 Protestant lives were sacrificed, was only one of the broader scenes of a havoc which every age was exemplifying on a more obscure, but not less ferocious scale. The evidence of this indolent misery is given in the narrowness of the population, which, at the beginning of the last century, scarcely reckoned a million of souls: and this, too, in a country of remarkable fertility, free from all habitual disease, with a temperate climate, and a breadth of territory containing at this hour eight millions, and capable of supporting eight millions more.
The existing condition of Ireland, even with all the difficulties of its own creation, is opulence, peace, and security, compared with its wretchedness at the period of the English revolution.
The measure of giving votes for members of parliament to the Popish peasantry was the immediate offspring of faction, and, like all its offspring, exhibited the fallacy of faction. It failed in every form. It had been urged, as a means of raising the character of the peasantry—it instantly made perfidy a profession. It had been urged, as giving the landlord a stronger interest in the comforts and conciliation of his tenantry—it instantly produced the splitting of farms for the multiplication of votes, and, consequently, all the hopeless poverty of struggling to live on patches of tillage inadequate for the decent support of life. It had been urged, as a natural means of attaching the peasantry to the constitution—it instantly exhibited its effects in increased disorder, in nightly drillings and daylight outbreaks; in the assassination of landlords and clergy, and in those more daring designs which grow out of pernicious ignorance, desperate poverty, and irreconcilable superstition. The populace—beginning to believe that concession had been the result of fear; that to receive they had only to terrify; and that they had discovered the secret of power in the pusillanimity of parliament—answered the gift of privilege by the pike; and the "forty-shilling freeholder" exhibited his new sense of right in the insurrection of 1798—an insurrection which the writer of these volumes—from his intelligence and opportunities a competent authority—calculates to have cost 30,000 lives, and not less than three millions sterling!
The forty-shilling franchise has since been abolished. Its practical abominations had become too glaring for the endurance of a rational legislature, and it perished. Yet the "snake was scotched, not killed." The spirit of the measure remained in full action: it was felt in the force which it gave to Irish agitation, and in the insidiousness which it administered to English party. In Ireland it raised mobs; in England it divided cabinets. In Ireland it was felt in the erection of a rabble parliament; in England it was felt in the pernicious principle of "open questions;" until the leaders of the legislature, like all men who suffer themselves to tamper with temptation, gave way; and the second great stage of national hazard was reached, in the shape of the bill of 1829.
If the projected measure of "endowing the popery of Ireland"—in other words, of establishing the worship of images, and bowing down to the spiritual empire of the papacy—shall ever, in the fatuity of British rulers and the evil hour of England, become law; a third great stage will be reached, which may leave the country no farther room for either advance or retrogression.