Yet, amidst such disadvantages, Ireland, in the two or three years before the famine, presented a moral and political spectacle such as the modern world had never witnessed. O’Connell, the greatest political leader of this century, led the millions of Irish people in their demand for justice to Ireland. He claimed the restoration of the legislative independence of Ireland as it existed from 1782 to 1801, or a repeal of the Act of Union. His efforts towards that object, the millions who rose to support him, and the moral, intellectual, and national sympathy that his demand elicited, are perfectly well known. The famine appeared in 1845 and blasted the whole agitation, while O’Connell died at Genoa, May 15, 1847, when the country that he wildly, passionately loved was in the throes of the famine, the horrors of which O’Connell vainly endeavored to avert by appeals for substantial relief to the British government. The present prime minister of England, the Earl of Beaconsfield, declared in the House of Commons, in reference to Ireland, on the opening of the famine, that for a country with an absentee proprietary, an alien established church, and a population starving or fleeing the country, most Englishmen can see but one remedy, and that revolution.
The great Irish famine, contrary to popular opinion, was exceeded by many visitations of the kind in India and elsewhere, and perhaps equalled by some that had occurred even in Ireland, so far as extent of mortality is concerned; but, measured by the aggregate of its social and economic effects, no such disaster is recorded in history. The mortality was considerably less than was supposed—that is, of deaths caused directly by starvation, suffering, and sickness arising out of the famine. Dysentery, diarrhœa, fever, cholera—all supervened. Workhouse accommodation failed, notwithstanding the utilization, as auxiliary houses, of nearly all the idle and abandoned stores in cities and towns, and of large numbers of rural mansions deserted by the country gentry. All the habits, feelings, and traditions of the Irish nation were opposed to a poor-law. Passed in 1838, although a poor-law had been in operation in England from 1601, it was only in 1847, the third year of the famine, that the last of the 131 Irish workhouses was opened, in Clifden, Connemara, and then by mandamus of the Queen’s Bench. In 1844, the year before the appearance of the potato blight, there were only 113 workhouses open, with an aggregate of 105,358 paupers relieved that year at an expense of $1,085,336. In 1847 the number relieved in the workhouses, auxiliaries included, was 417,139, or nearly fourfold, while the expenditure was $3,214,744, or threefold. The entire Poor-Law Act and the workhouse system utterly broke down under pressure of the mass of destitution. That act was administered from Somerset House, London, under an English commission, from 1838 to 1847. All the leading officers, assistant commissioners, and others were sent from England to carry out a law amongst a people of whose feelings and social circumstances they were thoroughly ignorant, and to their race and faith were totally opposed. That act expressly denied out-door relief, in any form or towards any destitution, how acute soever, in Ireland; while out-door relief was the general and normal form of poor relief in England for centuries, and continues so at present. The law was framed so as to throw the whole influence of its administration into the hands of the landlords and magistracy, or their agents, the vast majority of whom were planters and Cromwellians, hostile in faith and feeling to the destitute classes. A temporary Poor Relief Extension Act, passed June 8, 1847, was necessitated, or the destitute classes must have seized in self-defence the cattle, corn, and other edibles abounding in the country to prevent starvation. Out-door relief was permitted, but should be administered solely in food; while the able-bodied recipients were subjected to severe tests of stone-breaking or other unproductive labor. The tenth section of this act was the infamous quarter-acre clause, which declared that,
“If any person so occupying more than the quarter of a statute acre (less than thirty-five yards square) shall apply for relief, or if any person on his behalf shall apply for relief, it shall not be lawful for any Board of Guardians to grant such relief, within or without the workhouse, to any such person.”
This horrible clause gave the alternative of death or the surrender of their cabins, cottages, and small farms to the tens, the hundreds of thousands who occupied the humbler allotments and homesteads in Ireland. If they refused to surrender possession to the landlord, they perished, relief being denied them; while if they yielded, the crowded workhouse, with a weekly mortality of twenty-five in every one thousand inmates, precipitated them from the trap-coffin, often unshrived and always unshrouded, into the common fosse without a semblance of Christian burial. As an adjunct to the quarter-acre clause, and further to effect the clearance of the mass of the laboring and industrious classes, urban as well as rural, occupiers rated at under twenty-five dollars who surrendered their holdings, whether held on lease or otherwise, to their landlords, were, with their families, assisted to emigrate, two-thirds of the expenses of the same to be borne on the rates of the electoral division, the other third by the landlord. And to complete and give effect to these provisions for the death or the extermination of the population, the landlords were secured, by a radical change in the act of 1838, a monopoly in the whole administration of relief. Under that act each Board of Guardians consisted of three-fourths elected members and one-fourth ex-officio members, being magistrates resident in the union; whereas, by an amendment introduced into the act of 1847 the proportion of ex-officio members is doubled, being increased from one-fourth to one-half the whole strength of the board. With a full moiety of the members of the landlord class, the territorial influence through the multiple vote, which gives rated property from one to six votes, and also voting by proxy, the land magnates are always able to command, if not a majority, at least a large number, of seats amongst the elected guardians, and thus secure dominance in the administration of the whole poor-law.
Under the original act of 1838 the incidence of the poor’s rate was divided equally between the occupier and the owner, while occupiers whose tenements were below twenty-five dollars annual valuation were exempt, the rate being charged to the landlord; and, moreover, a clause declared that any contract made between owner and occupier which would release the former from liability to a moiety of the poor’s rate was null and void. The landlord added, of course, the rates to the rent, save in the case of the small number of tenants holding under lease, so that the whole cost of relief fell on the occupier; while a clause in the Poor-Law Amendment Act passed in 1849 repealed the annulling provision of the act of 1838, and legalized the enabling power of the tenant to contract himself, under compulsion, out of the protection secured to him that property should bear a moiety of the cost of poor relief. We may mention that the savage quarter-acre clause continued in operation from 1847 until partially repealed in 1862, a period of fifteen years, during which it quenched many a hearth, dismantled thousands of roof-trees, and sent more than a million of the Irish race to the grave or as scattered exiles over the face of the globe. In 1862, its fell purpose fulfilled, it was partially repealed, to the extent that destitute persons, although occupiers of a quarter of an acre of land, may be relieved, but in the workhouse only; so that still a cotter with forty perches of a garden, or a small farmer, suffering under temporary distress from failure of crop, sickness, or accident, must either surrender his little holding and enter the workhouse, or starve under the scheme of legal charity devised to extirpate the Irish from the soil of which their ancestors had been robbed through ages.
We write fact and law, and repudiate all but sober statement in our attempt to illustrate the present position of the Irish people. In the most acute throes of the famine, July 22, 1847, an act was passed for the punishment of vagrants and persons offending against the laws in force for the relief of the poor in Ireland—an act worthy of the worst days of Nero or Diocletian. Let us inquire what was the condition of the country when this act was passed. At the end of February that year there were 116,321 inmates in receipt of relief in the workhouses, and in July there were 10,000 cases of fever, apart from other terrible diseases, in those institutions, the mortality being enormous. Under the Temporary Relief Act there were issued, July 3, rations equal to the support of 3,020,712 persons. Yet the Vagrant Act inflicted imprisonment in a common jail and hard labor for a month upon any person “placing himself in any public place, street, highway, court, or passage to beg or gather alms,” with the same punishment for removing from one poor-law union, or even one electoral division, to another for the purpose of relief. More than half the population were then in receipt of relief, a vast portion of them being engaged upon relief works, which necessitated the migration to considerable distances of the male heads of families. Yet a clause in this act imposed imprisonment for three months, with hard labor, for desertion or wilful neglect of a family by its head—desertion that might have arisen from removal for some miles to another union or electoral division, in order to provide food for them.
Ireland was one uncovered lazar-house in 1847. We write from vivid and painful remembrance of personal travel of 5,000 to 10,000 miles yearly, in an official capacity, over the most afflicted of the famine-stricken districts, from Waterford round to Sligo, during that and subsequent years up to 1858. We visited every workhouse, every auxiliary, every fever hospital, every relief depot, every soup-kitchen, every centre of public works, by way of relief, every missionary station for proselytizing purposes, every ragged-school, every jail, and made a minute personal survey of the most distressed localities in the south and west of Ireland in 1847 and throughout the famine. Holding an important commission from the government, we had access to and command of sources of reliable information open to few, while we had personal communication with the chief officers of several public departments that enabled us to understand thoroughly the precise condition of the suffering classes throughout the whole period of acute distress in Ireland. Charged, unsolicited, by the government with a special inquiry connected with the condition of the destitute and criminal classes which embraced the whole kingdom, owing to experience acquired during the famine period, we visited officially every county, every diocese, every poor-law union, every parish in Ireland, and willingly place the results of that experience before the readers of The Catholic World. The history of the famine is yet to be written, and, if not soon prepared, the records of personal experience will be lost, and a reliable account of it rendered impossible. When political factions in the United States traduce the Irish race, and when factions in the several British colonies do likewise, as regards Irish immigrants, they do so ignorant, it is to be hoped, of the precise circumstances under which these immigrants reached those countries during pressure of the famine. We have treated the amount of decline of population in Ireland, and the social quality of that decline, in this article. The decrease of population directly through the famine is, as we have said, exaggerated. The census commissioners of 1851 set down the deaths from extraordinary causes, between 1841 and 1851, or rather from 1845, as follows:
| Deaths from fever | 222,029 |
| Deaths from dissentery and diarrhœa | 134,355 |
| Deaths from cholera | 35,989 |
| Deaths from starvation | 21,770 |
| ——— | |
| Total | 414,143 |
These figures, sad and enormous as they are, we are prepared to show are an entire understatement of the true facts of the case. The whole condition of society below the middle classes was disorganized and demoralized. Panic and paralysis seized the entire population. The dependent perished at home or in the workhouses, while those with means to emigrate fled the country. Flying from famine, fever, and pestilence, these reluctant emigrants, numbers of whom perished before settlement, have helped to lay the foundation of the prosperity of the United States and of the British colonies. The author of the Record of the O’Connell Centenary, describing the character of the early Irish emigrants, says, with great truth and force:
“Snatched from rough rural labor, little skilled in handicraft, a very large number wholly illiterate, and many unable to speak any tongue save the native Gaelic; nearly half of them females, without that cultured training in domestic service required by other countries; a heavy, helpless juvenile element hanging on them; intensely clannish, yet removed from those tribal and religious standards of morality and social life which powerfully influence the Irish at home; memory saddened with the recollection of the roofless cabin and the loved little ancestral farm lost for ever, the dead who had been starved at home or fell in fever, the dear relatives who sought the shelter of the workhouse, but through whose trap-coffin they were precipitated into the famine fosse without shroud or requiem; and the uncertainty of despair as to the living remnant of the family left behind—agonized by such feelings, the millions were hastily deported on the shores of America, Australia, and New Zealand, objects of sympathy and affection to the generous, of pity to the benevolent, of alarm and horror to the timid, of contempt to the misanthropic, and of scorn and hatred to the enemies of the race and faith of the Irish nation. Never before was spectacle so sad, so gigantic, so appalling submitted to the contemplation of humanity; the history of Ireland was dramatized throughout Christendom, and its tragic story personated on every hospitable shore on both hemispheres, when Moore’s prediction was literally and amply fulfilled: