that the tithe-owners should concede some portion of their revenues in exchange for the better security which they would thus obtain for the residue. Political parties in England were ultimately divided on the detail whether the Church of a minority should retain 70 or 75 per cent. of its tithes. The great Tory party haggled successfully for the odd £5. But details of this kind were of no interest to the Irish people. They desired to rid themselves of Church and tithes. They succeeded in transferring the tithes to their landowners; and every Irishman knew that success had been won from a reluctant Legislature by the resolute conduct of the Irish themselves.

in Ireland.

Thus England for ten years had been busily impressing upon Ireland the value of association. The Irish had been Association taught to believe that they could obtain nothing except by association; they had been simultaneously taught that, with association, they might march from victory to victory. Great, however, as the victories had been which the Irish had gained, the English had on every occasion tacked conditions to their concessions which made them unwelcome as gifts grudgingly bestowed. In 1829 England granted to Ireland Roman Catholic Emancipation, but she accompanied the grant with the wholesale disfranchisement of the Roman Catholic cottiers. In 1838 England Parliament passed a Tithe Bill, but she refused to apply a shilling of the revenues of a detested Church to any purpose unconnected with the Church itself. Two years afterwards she grudgingly granted a measure of municipal reform to Ireland, and she availed herself of the opportunity to deprive all but the very largest towns of the advantages of self-government.

The policy of

towards Ireland.

Conduct like this sufficiently explains the irritation which the Irish still felt towards England. The conduct of the The conduct English to the Irish, moreover, was emphasised by the conduct of the foremost men in England to the foremost Irishman. It is difficult even now to read! unmoved the story of the treatment which O'Connell habitually

of society towards

O'Connell.

received in England. O'Connell was not merely the foremost Irishman alive; he was perhaps the greatest Irishman that Ireland had ever known. He represented Ireland as no one ever represented Ireland before. The issues of peace or war depended on his single voice. From 1835 the life of the Whig Ministry rested on his favour, and he risked offending many of his closest adherents in Ireland by his zealous support of Melbourne and Russell. And yet this man was habitually insulted by the English people and slighted by the English Ministry. The Emancipation Act was accompanied by the pitiable condition that the great victor should not receive the rewards of his victory. His sovereign, "the first gentleman in Europe," chose, in his own house, to turn his back with studied insult on his distinguished subject. The Whigs left their choice club, by scores at a time, because O'Connell became a member of it; and the great Whig houses closed their doors to the first orator of his generation. Distinguished foreigners noticed the strange treatment which the English awarded to the most powerful Irishman; and Guizot could only gain access to the agitator through the courtesy of a Whig lady of Irish birth. The story remains on his pages, to the shame of the Whigs. O'Connell, seeing that the dinner was to be followed by a reception, rose to take his leave. He did not know that a Foreign Minister's wish had converted, for three short hours, the outcast into the hero.

The treatment of Ireland by England was no longer marked by the savage contrivances which disgraced the annals of the seventeenth century. There was no probability in 1840 of any one suggesting that men, women, and even children should be cut down with the horrid justification that, as nits will be lice, Irish children would grow into Irish men and women. There was no probability that a whole population would be ejected from their homes and their property, and

1 Prendergast's Cromwellian Settlement, p. 58. If English gentlemen would only read Mr. Prendergast, they would, perhaps, understand the causes of Irish disaffection more clearly than they do now.

These had been the

There was even no

transplanted into the wilds of Galway. expedients of the seventeenth century. probability of a Protestant seizing a Roman Catholic's estate, or of a Protestant Parliament, or of a Protestant Privy Council, recommending either the branding or the mutilation of Irish priests. These were the expedients of the eighteenth century. A studied determination to maintain the rights of a minority unimpaired; a fixed resolution to yield nothing to the Irish which it was possible to refuse; the habitual accompaniment of every measure of grace with offensive conditions; a constant neglect of Ireland's greatest representative-these were the indignities which Englishmen reserved for their unfortunate fellow-subjects in the enlightened atmosphere of the nineteenth century.2

The political question in Ireland has always been accompanied by an economic question. The people multiplied; and a multiplied people found no work. Driven from their industrious pursuits by English competition, they swarmed upon the land. The potato stood between them and the grave. Their trade was failing, but the potato enabled them to go on multiplying; and the woes which Ireland has since endured may thus be referred to two causes: the absence of coal, and the presence of the potato.

Before the Union in 1801, these truths had not asserted themselves. The movement of trade was only commencing;

1 See Lecky's History of England, vol. i. pp. 296-7; and cf. Hansard, vol. cvii. p. 116.

2 The Melbourne Ministry appointed Sheil, More O'Ferrall, and Wyse, three Irish Roman Catholics, to subordinate appointments in the Administration. Bradshaw, the member for Canterbury, speaking to his constituents, said, “Look at the appointments these men and women have made. There is not one of them that is not a direct insult to the nation. See the Irish Papists promoted to place, to power, and to patronage." Lord Melbourne's "sheet anchor is the body of Irish Papists and Rapparees whom the priests return to the House of Commons. These are the men who represent the bigoted savages, hardly more civilised than the natives of New Zealand, but animated with a fierce, undying hatred of England. I repeat then deliberately that the Papists of Ireland, priest and layman, peer and peasant, are alike our enemies-aliens as they are in blood, language, and religion." These extracts were quoted by Russell in the House of Commons. Hansard, vol. lxxii. p. 700.

the multiplication of freeholds was not completed; and the population had not assumed the proportions which it afterwards acquired. But the inevitable consequences, due to a loss of trade and an increase of the people, became immediately visible after 1801; and the Irish, like many other persons, confusing the propter and the post, ascribed all their misfortunes to the Union itself. There are, indeed, reasons for believing that the Union intensified the evils which would. in any circumstances have arisen. Before the Union Dublin had been the centre of fashionable society in Ireland. After the Union, peers and commoners could plead their parliamentary duties as an excuse for withdrawing to London. The Viceroy without his Parliament looked like a pale moon, reflecting only a borrowed and feeble light. Irish society, shunning the mock satellite, longed to bask in the real sun in London.

Absenteeism, which was already draining the life-blood from Ireland, became a more intolerable evil; and men who had Dublin houses found that their property was re- Absentees. duced to one-third of its value in a dozen years.

Taxation, when its produce is wisely expended, may be compared with the sun, which absorbs the superfluous moisture of the soil in order that it may be returned in fertilising showers. But the taxation imposed by absentee landlords is not attended by this recompense. The wealth is drawn from the poor nation: the fertilising showers fall on the wealthy one.1

By increasing absenteeism the Union had intensified distress. It had withdrawn revenues from the country, which might have 1 Lord Cloncurry, in 1801, sold for £2500 a house in Merrion Square, which cost his father £8000 in 1791. Recollections, p. 9. Arthur Young published in 1772 a list of Irish absentees, whose united incomes amounted to £732,000. Vol. ii. p. 191. He placed the rental of Ireland at £5,293,000. Ibid., p. 86. Absenteeism, therefore, at that time drew one pound out of every seven of Irish rental out of Ireland. Smith O'Brien in 1847 placed the rents of absentee landlords at £4,000,000, or at nearly one-third of the whole rent (Hansard, vol. xci. p. 159), but Cloncurry placed them at £6,000,000. Ibid., vol. lxxiv. p. 889. So far as I know, there is no accurate list of absentees at the present time. The Irishman who compiles one, and suggests some practicable scheme for subjecting them to exceptional taxation, will take a direct step towards remedying the woes of Ireland.

afforded employment to some of the superfluous poor. But the poor themselves bred and multiplied till the subdivided land was almost incapable of further subdivision. Then began the terrible retribution which ever attends upon improvidence. In the good seasons the people grew a supply of potatoes adequate for food. In the bad seasons the supply proved inadequate, and for a portion of each year the peasantry had an insufficient quantity of bad potatoes to live upon. Men, starving for want of food, are not likely to make any serious provision for the future. It was a common practice in Ireland to eat the best of the bad potatoes, and to reserve the worst for seed.1 The cottiers had never heard of the doctrine of heredity, yet there is even heredity in potatoes. Raised from unhealthy tubers, the potatoes became less vigorous; the crops failed more and more frequently. Even skilled writers assume now that the rot, which a few years later on destroyed a whole crop, and involved a nation in famine, came suddenly and without warning. Nature does not work so clumsily. She had given ample warning, to those who had eyes to see, of the famine that was coming.2

The periodical famines which occurred in Ireland 3 between

1 Good potatoes were a luxury; an inferior tuber, the "lumper," had been brought into general use in consequence of the facility with which it could be cultivated on inferior soil. When it was first introduced, it was thought scarcely good enough for swine. In 1838 it constituted the principal food of the labouring peasantry. Parl. Papers, 1837-8, vol. xxxv. p. 535.

2 I have never met any one who knew or recollected that ten years before the potato disease of 1845, the same disease broke out in the United Kingdom (Ann. Reg., 1835, Chron., p. 338), and attracted sufficient attention to become the subject of a paper read at the British Association Meeting in 1836. Ibid., 1836, Chron., p. 123. It had been known for some years in America. Hansard, vol. lxxxviii. p. 769.

3 The term Ireland is used in the text, but all parts of Ireland were not equally poor. The Railway Commissioners, writing in 1837, said that wages in the northern districts averaged is. a day, and that the food of the people consisted of meal, potatoes, and milk; in the southern districts they averaged 8d. a day, and the food of the people consisted of potatoes and milk; in the western districts they averaged only 6d. a day, and potatoes formed the sole food of the people. Parl. Papers, 1837-8, vol. xxxv. pp. 459, 460. The Devon Commission said of the Irish labourers, "In many districts their only food is the potato, their only beverage water; their cabins are seldom a protection against the weather; a bed or a blanket is a rare luxury; their pig and their