IRELAND IN 1878.
I.
A history of Ireland still remains to be written; nor has there been even an attempt to collect some of the chief materials for such a work. Ten centuries of almost continuous conflict since the Danish incursions, or seven since the Anglo-Norman settlement and the destruction or dispersion of the national archives, are sufficient to account for the absence of any full, authentic, or valuable Irish history. From Giraldus Cambrensis in the twelfth century to Froude in our day, there have never been wanting subsidized, and even able, writers to defame and revile the native population and laud the English rule in Ireland. Nor, on the other hand, has there been any lack of enthusiasts whose patriotism, more ardent than their erudition is profound or exact, is ever ready to excuse or defend the natives and execrate the Anglo-Norman and Saxon tyrants and despoilers. Even in Ireland it is difficult to obtain reliable information regarding the country; while outside of it such aim is impossible of attainment. The dispersion of the Irish race during the last thirty years has been greater in extent and over a larger area of the globe than any exodus of humanity known to history. These millions have carried the traditions of their country’s wrongs, and the dismal tales of the misgovernment of Ireland, to the uttermost ends of the earth, exaggerating, perhaps, the oppression of their persecutors, and depicting in touching sympathy the glowing virtues of the victims. The largest contingent of this Irish emigration has enriched the United States of America, where partiality has culminated in alternate praise and censure of the Irish race. The circumstances under which most of these people reached the American shores were truly tragic and appalling, and are well-nigh forgotten by the older portion of the generation now passing away.
The estimated population of Ireland in 1845 was 8,295,061, which made it then one of the most densely peopled countries in Europe. In the autumn of that year the potato crop, one of the chief products of the country and the staple food of three-fifths of the people, failed, involving a loss estimated by Mr. Labouchere, the British minister, of eighty million dollars, or sixteen millions sterling. This failure in 1845 was followed by successive blights of the potato-crop in 1846 and subsequent years, causing what is called the Irish famine, and with it the great emigration, which brought an increase of millions of citizens to the United States. There had been an Irish immigration in America from the earliest days of the colony—to Maryland, for example, in the seventeenth century; but the Irish famine of 1845–49 marks the opening of the great influx of Irish into the United States and Canada.
We propose to consider the social and industrial condition and the political and religious prospects of Ireland in 1878, making the eve of the famine, in 1845, the basis of comparison. We write from Ireland, with the amplest knowledge of our subject, and, as we hope, having no object in view save a full and clear statement of the main facts necessary for its elucidation. We have travelled over every province, every county, every parish, every locality of its soil; are intimate with every phase of its history and every section of its population, and feel every throb of its national life. Yet we invite the fullest criticism of our attempt to discuss the present condition of Ireland from a scientific, a truthful, and an impartial stand-point. Nowhere out of Ireland is such discussion more desirable or more difficult than in the United States. The republic contains about the same number of Irish, by birth or by descent, that remain in the old country. The emigrants of the famine period left under dire pressure, the origin of which is not fully understood abroad. In the forty-four years 1801–1845 the population of Ireland increased from 5,216,329 to 8,295,061, or by 3,078,732 persons—an increase of fifty-nine per cent. Emigration was throughout that period inconsiderable; in the decade 1831–41 it was only 403,459, or about 40,000 a year; in the next four years it fell to little over half that average; while in the year 1843, when O’Connell led the great agitation for repeal of the Union, only 13,026 persons left the country, being the lowest on record. Although the potato blight appeared in 1845, it was not until 1847 that the horrors of the famine and of emigration assumed their most awful aspect. In the single year 1847, that of O’Connell’s death, there was a loss of population of 262,574, or three per cent., by the conjoint action of emigration and the excess of deaths over births; while in the next four years the aggregate decrease reached 1,510,801 persons—little short of nineteen per cent. of the whole population. The following table exhibits the estimated population at the middle of the year relating to our inquiry:
| DECREASE | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| YEAR | POPULATION | PERSONS | PER CENT. |
| 1845 | 8,295,061 | —— | —— |
| 1846 | 8,287,848 | 7,213 | 0.09 |
| 1847 | 8,025,274 | 262,574 | 3.1 |
| 1848 | 7,639,800 | 385,474 | 4.3 |
| 1849 | 7,256,314 | 383,486 | 5.0 |
| 1850 | 6,877,549 | 378,765 | 5.1 |
| 1851 | 6,514,473 | 363,076 | 5.1 |
| 1861 | 5,778,415 | 736,058 | 11.3 |
| 1871 | 5,395,007 | 383,408 | 6.6 |
| 1875 | 5,309,494 | 65,513 | 1.0 |
| 1876 | 5,321,618 | —— | —— |
| 1877 | 5,338,906 | —— | —— |
Over the whole period from 1845 to 1875 population decreased, but the rate of decline diminished after 1851. In the thirty years there was a loss of 2,973,443—nearly 100,000 annually, or thirty-six per cent. of the inhabitants. The year 1876 is memorable as the starting-point of reactionary improvement. For the first time during a generation emigration has so diminished that the natural increase of births over deaths added 10,352 to the population in 1876, and 17,288 in 1877. Increase must henceforth be the normal law of population, but it is never again likely to reach the rate it attained in the thirty years 1801–31, when it expanded about fourteen per cent. each decade, or an increase of nearly one in seven every ten years.
We are now to inquire into the main causes of these terrible calamities, strange and conflicting explanations of which are advanced by public writers in the United States and other countries. One flippant, fertile, and accepted theory is the peculiar proneness of the Irish to contention and disunion—a theory generally credited as sound by those ignorant of history or those prejudiced against the Irish race. We shall adduce a few broad and suggestive facts in disproof of this theory. Can any nation exhibit a nobler proof of unity than the Brehon laws, or Seanchus Mor, which prevailed universally in Ireland for centuries before the Christian era, until revised by St. Patrick and the Christian kings, and which continued in force throughout the country, save the small patch called the Pale, until the seventeenth century, while the traditions and principles of that code yet influence the people after a lapse of twenty to five-and-twenty centuries? And so as regards the tenacity with which, for ages, the people have adhered to the use of the Gaelic or native tongue, still spoken by little short of a million of the inhabitants, after the Greeks, the Romans, the French, the Spaniards, the Britons, and the Scotch have mainly abandoned the primitive tongues of their ancestors. All pagan Ireland was converted to Christianity by one man—an example of unity and docility without parallel in the history of the human race. Ireland, like France, England, and other countries, was ravaged by the Danish and Norse invaders, yet the Irish defeated and expelled them in 1014, long before the Gauls or the Saxons had banished or crushed them in Normandy or in England. Towards the close of the twelfth century the Anglo-Normans found partial footing in Ireland, yet for seven hundred years the native race have opposed their rule, and oppose it to-day—an example of unity and persistency unsurpassed in the world. The English, the Scotch, and most of the nations in the north and northwest of Europe abandoned their ancient faith and accepted the Protestant Reformation, at the bidding of their sovereigns, in the sixteenth century; while Catholic Ireland, in defiance of penal laws that plundered property, denied education, reduced the people almost to barbarism, and sent them to the scaffold for adherence to their church, has remained, through centuries of suffering, loyal to conscience, and by unity, fidelity, and perseverance has effected the overthrow of the Protestant Church Establishment of the Tudors. Proud and great memories these for the Irish nation—memories sufficient to disprove the shallow and unfounded charge that to disunion, peculiar to their race, must be attributed the sad and chequered history of the country. While if we turn to all other kingdoms at corresponding periods, even to the present time, we find analogous internal strife and domestic political factions as numerous and as intense as any in Ireland. England, Scotland, the several British colonies, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Holland, and the United States were quite as much torn by internal dissension as Ireland, and are so at the present day; so that this hypothesis is wholly unfounded and quite inadequate to account for the disastrous decadence, or at least want of progress, of Ireland, compared in many respects with other countries.
The causes of Irish discontent and comparative social backwardness are remote, chronic, and cumulative. From the arrival of the Anglo-Normans in 1169 to the defeat of the Irish in the Williamite war, near the close of the seventeenth century, one clear purpose was kept in view by the aliens—the extirpation of the natives from ownership and even occupancy of the soil. Attainders, escheatments, plantations, transplantations, and settlements—all had the same purpose. Penal Laws, the Court of Wards, and dire persecution had driven the Catholic natives from proprietorship, and almost from occupancy, of the soil. Cupidity led many Cromwellian and planter landlords to baffle the Penal Laws and pocket the higher rents offered by popish recusants. Protestants of the humbler classes complained that the protection promised and due to them as of right in the English interest was denied and defeated by the planter and palatine landlords in preferring popish tenants whose lower standard of living and degraded social caste enabled them to pay a higher rent than Protestant tenants, who claimed, by right of class, a better mode of living. Thus robbed and deprived of their estates, denied leases, and rackrented by middlemen and others, the mass of the Irish people before the famine were mere squatters on the soil, neither owners nor, in any true sense, occupiers.
Catholics were emancipated in 1829 and rendered admissible to almost all the offices in the state; they obtained an instalment of educational concession in 1831, and a modification of the grinding oppression of the tithe system and the Protestant Church Establishment a few years afterwards; a Poor Law, directed by a London board, was passed in 1838, and corporate reform was granted in 1840; but these and other remedial measures, in operation for a few years, could effect little towards the elevation of a people impoverished and degraded by centuries of foreign and crushing legislation.