The Southern planter felt a kind of interest in his slaves—they were his property; an Irish landlord felt no interest of any kind in the people by whom he was surrounded. It was important that they should remain slaves, beggars, and outcasts; that the chasm which separated him from them should in no way be diminished; but for the rest he gave no thought whether they starved or murdered one another or were drowned in the deep. He spent most of his time in England, living in luxury, leaving his estates to the care of brutal agents, who pleased him the better the more cruel and grinding their exactions were. English in origin and sympathy, Protestant in religion, there was no bond of union between him
and his people. He cared neither for the country nor its inhabitants. He was unwilling to risk capital even to improve his own lands; for he had no faith in the permanence of a social and political state which was possible only because it outraged the holiest and best instincts of mans nature. When it was proposed to take steps to drain the bogs and bring the waste lands of Ireland under cultivation, the Protestant party strenuously opposed the measure, on the ground that this would be an encouragement to popery. Nothing, therefore, was done either by the government or the landlords to improve the soil or to introduce better methods of tillage. The great proprietors, living in London, spending their time and fortune in a life of pleasure and display, let out their estates to land speculators, who were generally capitalists. These speculators sublet them, in lots of several hundred or a thousand acres, to a class of persons called middlemen, who divided them up into portions of five, ten, or twenty acres, and rented them to the poor Catholics. By neither the proprietors nor the speculators nor the middlemen was any risk of capital made. The peasant was therefore compelled to rent his little plot of ground, bare of everything—he found on it neither dwelling nor stabling, nor implements of any kind. He had nothing himself, and those whose interest it would have been to advance him money were unwilling to risk a penny. All that he could do was to put up a mud-cabin, and to get a wretched spade with which to begin work. If by honest labor he could have looked forward to an improvement in his condition, his lot would not have been altogether comfortless. The
pioneers who in this new world have led the army of civilization from the Atlantic to the Pacific began life almost as poor as an Irish peasant of the seventeenth or the eighteenth century; but for them no law of man reversing nature’s first law made labor sterile. How was the poor Irish Catholic, with but a few acres of ground, and without the necessary means for proper cultivation, to pay the exorbitant rent which was to support the landlord, the speculator, and the middleman?—for upon him alone rested the burden of maintaining all three in a life of ease and luxury. The soil refuses to satisfy the unreasonable demands made upon it; the tenant finds that he is unable to pay his rent; and without the least ceremony he and his wife and children are turned upon the road. England having destroyed the commerce and manufactures of Ireland, he can find nothing to do, and, if he is unwilling to see his wife and children starve, he must beg. And even beggary, with its frightful degradations, affords little relief; for the rich spurn him and the poor have nothing to give. Few words are needed to bring home to us the significance of this state of affairs. We have only to recall the tragedy Which was enacted under our eyes in 1849. In that one year fifty thousand families were turned upon the road to die; two hundred thousand human beings, without shelter, without bread, sent up their piteous moan of hunger and despair to God from the midst of a Christian nation, the richest in the world. The terrible famine of 1847 and 1848, which was only an unusually startling outbreak of an evil that has long been chronic in Ireland, was not caused by excess of population. The country, if its resources were
properly developed, is capable of supporting a far larger number of inhabitants than it has ever had. There were but eight millions of people in Ireland in 1847, and it has been conclusively proven that under favorable circumstances fifteen millions would not be an excessive population. In fact, in the so-called years of scarcity, when the people were dying, by thousands, of starvation, the country produced enough to feed its inhabitants; but they had to sell their wheat, barley, and oats to pay the rent, and, the potato crop having failed, they had nothing to eat. In 1846 and 1847 enormous quantities of grain and live-stock were exported from Ireland to England, and yet the people of Ireland were starving. During the four years of famine Ireland exported four quarters of wheat for every quarter imported. The food was in the country, but it had to be sent to England to pay the rent of the landlords. The people were starving, but that was no concern of these noble gentlemen, so long as their rent was paid. The cry of hunger has rarely been hushed in Ireland. All through the eighteenth century the people died of starvation. In 1727 Boulter, the Protestant Archbishop of Armagh, declared that thousands of families were driven from their homes by hunger; and Dean Swift has given us an account of the condition in his time of even the better class of tenants. “The families,” he says, “of farmers who pay great rents live in filth and nastiness, upon buttermilk and potatoes, without a shoe or stocking to their feet, or a house as convenient as an English hog-sty to receive them.” In 1734 the famous Bishop Berkeley asked this question: “Is there on the face of the
earth any Christian and civilized people so destitute of everything as the mass of the people of Ireland?” In 1741 the cemeteries were too small for the burial of the multitudes who died of hunger.
In 1778, while we were struggling for freedom from English tyranny, Lord Nugent declared, in the House of Commons, that the people of Ireland were suffering all the destitution and misery which it is possible to human nature to endure. Nine-tenths of them earned no more than fourpence a day, and had no nourishment but potatoes and water. In 1817 the fever, brought on by hunger, attacked one million five hundred thousand persons—nearly half of the entire population of the country. In 1825, 1826, 1830, 1832, 1838, 1846 to 1850, and finally in 1860, 1861, and 1862, the melancholy cry of multitudes dying of hunger was heard throughout the land. In 1843 Thackeray, travelling in Ireland, declared that “men were suffering and starving by millions”; and a little later we know from the most accurate statistics that more than a million of the Irish people died of hunger within a period of two years. The history of Ireland is, we are persuaded, the sublimest and the saddest of all histories. It has never been written, and the grandest of themes awaits the creative power that will give it immortal life on the pictured page. It will be written in the English language, and it will link the English name and tongue for all time with the greatest social crime which one people ever committed against another. In another article we hope, by the aid of the faint and glimmering light that shines so fitfully in this blackness, to be able to trace the doubtful and devious way along which this providential
race seems to be slowly rising into the promise of a better day. For the present we shall conclude with a quotation from De Beaumont, whose careful and conscientious studies on the Social, Political, and Religious Condition of Ireland we recommend to all who are interested in this subject.
“I have seen,” he wrote in 1835, “the Indian in his forests and the negro in chains, and I thought, in beholding their pitiable state, that I saw the extreme of human misery; but I did not then know the fate of poor Ireland. Like the Indian, the Irishman is poor and naked; but he lives, unlike the savage, in the midst of a society which revels in luxury, and adores wealth. Like the Indian, he is deprived of every material comfort which human industry and the commerce of nations procure; but, unlike him, he is surrounded by fellow-creatures who are enjoying all that he
is forbidden even to hope for. In the midst of his greatest misery the Indian retains a kind of independence which is not without its charm and its dignity. Destitute as he is, and famishing, he is yet free in his wilderness; and the consciousness of this freedom softens the hardships of life. The Irishman suffers the same destitution without having the same liberty. He is subject to laws, has all kinds of fetters; he dies of hunger, and is under rule; deplorable condition, which combines all the evils of civilization with the horrors known elsewhere only to the savage! Doubtless the Irishman who has shaken off his chains, and still has hope, is less to be pitied than the negro slave. Nevertheless he has to-day neither the liberty of the savage nor the bread of the slave.”[194]
[191] “A View of the State of Ireland,” by Edmund Spenser.