Near to Stoneybatter lies a group of huge gloomy edifices—an hospital, a penitentiary, a madhouse, and a poorhouse. I visited the latter of these, the North Dublin Union-house, an enormous establishment, which accommodates two thousand beggars. Like all the public institutions of the country, it seems to be well conducted, and is a vast, orderly, and cleanly place, wherein the prisoners are better clothed, better fed, and better housed than they can hope to be when at liberty. We were taken into all the wards in due order—the schools and nursery for the children; the dining-rooms, day-rooms, etc., of the men and women. Each division is so accommodated, as also with a large court or ground to walk and exercise in.
Among the men, there are very few able-bodied; the most of them, the keeper said, having gone out for the harvest-time, or as soon as the potatoes came in. If they go out, they cannot return before the expiration of a month: the guardians have been obliged to establish this prohibition, lest the persons requiring relief should go in and out too frequently. The old men were assembled in considerable numbers in a long day-room that is comfortable and warm. Some of them were picking oakum by way of employment, but most of them were past work; all such inmates of the house as are able-bodied being occupied upon the premises. Their hall was airy and as clean as brush and water could make it: the men equally clean, and their grey jackets and Scotch caps stout and warm. Thence we were led, with a sort of satisfaction, by the guardian, to the kitchen—a large room, at the end of which might be seen certain coppers, emitting, it must be owned, a very faint inhospitable smell. It was Friday, and rice-milk is the food on that day, each man being served with a pint-canful, of which cans a great number stood smoking upon stretchers—the platters were laid, each with its portion of salt, in the large clean dining-room hard by. ‘Look at that rice,’ said the keeper, taking up a bit; ‘try it, sir, it’s delicious.’ I’m sure I hope it is.
The old women’s room was crowded with, I should think, at least four hundred old ladies—neat and nice, in white clothes and caps—sitting demurely on benches, doing nothing for the most part; but some employed, like the old men, in fiddling with the oakum. ‘There’s tobacco here,’ says the guardian, in a loud voice; ‘who’s smoking tobacco?’ ‘Fait, and I wish dere was some tabacky here,’ says one old lady, ‘and my service to you, Mr. Leary, and I hope one of the gentlemen has a snuff-box, and a pinch for a poor old woman.’ But we had no boxes; and if any person who reads this visit, goes to a poorhouse or lunatic asylum, let him carry a box, if for that day only—a pinch is like Dives’s drop of water to those poor limboed souls. Some of the poor old creatures began to stand up as we came in—I can’t say how painful such an honour seemed to me.
There was a separate room for the able-bodied females; and the place and courts were full of stout, red-cheeked, bouncing women. If the old ladies looked respectable, I cannot say the young ones were particularly good-looking; there were some Hogarthian faces amongst them—sly, leering, and hideous. I fancied I could see only too well what these girls had been. Is it charitable or not to hope that such bad faces could only belong to bad women?
‘Here, sir, is the nursery,’ said the guide, flinging open the door of a long room. There may have been eighty babies in it, with as many nurses and mothers. Close to the door sat one with as beautiful a face as I almost ever saw: she had at her breast a very sickly and puny child, and looked up, as we entered, with a pair of angelical eyes, and a face that Mr. Eastlake could paint—a face that had been angelical that is; for there was the snow still, as it were, but with the footmark on it. I asked her how old she was—she did not know. She could not have been more than fifteen years, the poor child. She said she had been a servant—and there was no need of asking anything more about her story. I saw her grinning at one of her comrades as we went out of the room; her face did not look angelical then. Ah, young master or old, young or old villain, who did this!—have you not enough wickedness of your own to answer for, that you must take another’s sins upon your shoulders; and be this wretched child’s sponsor in crime?...
But this chapter must be made as short as possible; and so I will not say how much prouder Mr. Leary, the keeper, was of his fat pigs than of his paupers—how he pointed us out the burial-ground of the family of the poor—their coffins were quite visible through the niggardly mould; and the children might peep at their fathers over the burial-ground-playground wall—nor how we went to see the Linen Hall of Dublin—that huge, useless, lonely, decayed place, in the vast windy solitudes of which stands the simpering statue of George IV., pointing to some bales of shirting, over which he is supposed to extend his august protection.
The cheers of the rabble hailing the new Lord Mayor were the last sounds that I heard in Dublin: and I quitted the kind friends I had made there with the sincerest regret. As for forming ‘an opinion of Ireland,’ such as is occasionally asked from a traveller on his return—that is as difficult an opinion to form as to express; and the puzzle which has perplexed the gravest and wisest, may be confessed by a humble writer of light literature, whose aim it only was to look at the manners and the scenery of the country, and who does not venture to meddle with questions of more serious import.
To have ‘an opinion about Ireland,’ one must begin by getting the truth; and where is it to be had in the country? Or rather, there are two truths, the Catholic truth and the Protestant truth. The two parties do not see things with the same eyes. I recollect, for instance, a Catholic gentleman telling me that the Primate had forty-three thousand five hundred a year; a Protestant clergyman gave me, chapter and verse, the history of a shameful perjury and malversation of money on the part of a Catholic priest; nor was one tale more true than the other. But belief is made a party business; and the receiving of the archbishop’s income would probably not convince the Catholic, any more than the clearest evidence to the contrary altered the Protestant’s opinion. Ask about an estate, you may be sure almost that people will make misstatements, or volunteer them if not asked. Ask a cottager about his rent, or his landlord: you cannot trust him. I shall never forget the glee with which a gentleman in Munster told me how he had sent off MM. Tocqueville and Beaumont ‘with such a set of stories.’ Inglis was seized, as I am told, and mystified in the same way. In the midst of all these truths, attested with ‘I give ye my sacred honour and word,’ which is the stranger to select? And how are we to trust philosophers who make theories upon such data?
Meanwhile it is satisfactory to know, upon testimony so general as to be equivalent almost to fact, that, wretched as it is, the country is steadily advancing, nor nearly so wretched now as it was a score of years since; and let us hope that the middle class, which this increase of prosperity must generate (and of which our laws have hitherto forbidden the existence in Ireland, making there a population of Protestant aristocracy and Catholic peasantry), will exercise the greatest and most beneficial influence over the country. Too independent to be bullied by priest or squire—having their interest in quiet, and alike indisposed to servility or to rebellion; may not as much be hoped from the gradual formation of such a class, as from any legislative meddling? It is the want of the middle class that has rendered the squire so arrogant, and the clerical or political demagogue so powerful; and I think Mr. O’Connell himself would say that the existence of such a body would do more for the steady acquirement of orderly freedom, than the occasional outbreak of any crowd, influenced by any eloquence from altar or tribune.
THE END
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