forty years. 405. free. holders. 1815 and 1830 made Irish proprietors doubt the wisdom of the policy which they had been pursuing for nearly Irish famine. For political purposes they had encouraged the multiplication of the people, and Ireland, in consequence, had become a great lazar-house. The policy, moreover, failed. The sword broke in the hands of the men who had fabricated it. The forty shilling freeholders, The disfran rebelling against their landowners, threw out a Beres- ch sement of ford for Waterford, and returned O'Connell for Clare. Peel, seeing that no reliance could be placed on the peasants' votes, determined on their disfranchisement; and the miserable cottiers, who had been created for political objects, remained, like a swarm of locusts, eating up the soil. Freeholds had been multiplied by one generation of landlords in their own interests. The cottiers were evicted by another generation in the interests of the estate. Properties were cleared of superfluous people with as little pity as if the peasantry had been either rabbits or weeds. The ejected tenantry, finding no employers for their labour, crowded into the towns. It would have been almost as practicable for them to go to Jupiter as to have gone to Canada. Flocking into the towns they increased the evils which already existed. quences. They rendered the habitations of those who received them more crowded; they disseminated disease; they resorted to theft and all manner of vice and iniquity to procure subsistence; a vast number of them perished from want.1 Its conse. It may, perhaps, be thought that Irish landlords, in clearing their estates, were only doing what English landlords would have done in like circumstances. But it should be re manure heap constitute their only property." Parl. Papers, 1845, vol. xix. p. 35. The census of 1841 showed that of the whole rural population of Ireland 46 per cent. lived in a single room for each family. Hansard, vol. lxxxiii. p. 1051. The Devon Commission reported that of the Irish, and of the Irish in Connaught, lived in rooms unfit for human habitation. Ibid., vol. civ. P. 93. 1 Parl. Papers, 1845, vol. xix. p. 19. It was incidentally stated by O'Connell in 1846 that 150,000 persons had been subjected to eviction processes from 1839 to 1843. Hansard, vol. lxxxv. p. 520. In this place, as in other places, I have endeavoured to weave the actual language of my authorities into the text. collected that there was a broad distinction between the two countries. In England the support of the poor was thrown upon the land. An able-bodied man with no means of subsistence had legal rights to relief. The landlord might eject his cottager, but he could be compelled to support him. In Ireland, on the contrary, the able-bodied poor had no legal right to relief. The ejected cottier, deprived of his only means of subsistence, had nowhere to apply for food. He could not obtain relief unless he was not merely starving but diseased. Ejectment in Ireland was, therefore, literally a sentence of death. The landlords who cleared their estates— and there were landlords who pulled down whole villages— destroyed their tenants' lives as effectually as if they had shot them at once.1 One generation of Irish landlords had multiplied freeholds and produced famine; another generation of Irish landlords evicted their tenantry, and produced a land question. From its very nature the land question soon took the lead of all other Irish questions. The Irish cottier could at any rate live under the supremacy of a detested Church, or beneath the shadow of an unreformed municipality. But the Irish cottier could not even live if he were divorced from the soil which gave him his precarious food. Centuries before a question not wholly dissimilar had arisen in England, and had been settled by the good sense of the people and the moderation of the great feudal proprietors of the soil. The villeins, holding under their lord, at their lord's discretion, had been turned into copyholders. Their arbitrary payments. had been commuted into quit-rents; and a whole people had been quietly conceded fixity of tenure. If the Irish cottiers could have been granted a similar boon, Ireland might have been pacified forty years ago. The boon was denied by the English nation, and Ireland refused to be contented with the doles of relief which were grudgingly meted out to her. 1 The expression is Poulett Scrope's, in Hansard, vol. lxxxvii. p. 392. I refrain from giving the names of the landlords whom Poulett Scrope quoted as razing villages, "400 souls turned out upon the highway, not even allowed to rest in the roadside ditches." And throughout this time, while cottiers were being evicted by the score in every Irish county; while the ejected tenantry were dying by the score in the overcrowded towns; while the cry of a whole people was rising heavenwards; while the question of vengeance, "What mean ye, that ye beat my people to pieces, and grind the faces of the poor?"-old as Isaiah, eternal as truth-was being repeated upon earth, Whigs and Tories were busily contending whether the land should be charged with 70 or 75 per cent. of the tithe; whether £8 or £10 householders should elect the governing bodies of a dozen Irish towns. The agita tion for the repeal of the Union. In the meanwhile the reluctance or inability of the British Legislature to address itself to the vexed questions which were agitating Ireland, was inducing some Irishmen to conclude that redress was not obtainable from England. In consequence a desire gradually arose for a restoration of the Irish Parliament. Such a desire was not unnatural. The Union had followed the terrible cruelties which had attended the suppression of an Irish rebellion; it had been purchased by corrupting the representatives of a people; it had been followed by the reckless disregard of the promise which had been given by Pitt and Castlereagh. The wishes of five millions of persons had been sacrificed for the sake of satisfying the scruples of one old man whom birth had placed on a throne. Such conduct as this, from its very nature, could not be lightly forgotten or forgiven by the Irish. A minister who spends millions in corrupting a Legislature, and who sacrifices a people for the sake of a sovereign, entails endless evils on future ages. The Englishman who expresses surprise that the Irish should be desirous of Home Rule, should study the shameful page of his history which describes the manner in which the Union was effected in 1800. Ever since 1800 the Irish had looked regretfully at the old constitution of which they had been thus deprived. But the repeal of the Union was only authoritatively demanded after the emancipation of the Roman Catholics in 1829. The folly, which deprived O'Connell of the advantages which the Relief Act secured to future Roman Catholics, forced him to appeal again to his Irish constituents, and almost compelled him to commence a new agitation. Making one great triumphal progress through a rejoicing country, he undertook to repeal the Union. The British Ministry, in settling one great Irish question, had originated a new one. Yet the new movement which O'Connell thus originated languished for many years in obscurity. O'Connell advocated. Home Rule before small audiences on the Corn The agitation lan guishes from Exchange at Dublin. But his audiences did not 1834 to 1841. grow; they displayed no enthusiasm; the proceedings hardly attracted attention; and even the permanent officials of the Government saw without alarm the origin of the new movement. The dissolution of 1841 apparently pronounced its doom. Ireland, which at the General Election of 1834 had sent forty representatives to Westminster, pledged to repeal, scarcely chose a dozen Repealers in 1841. O'Connell himself was defeated at Dublin; one of his sons was beaten at Carlow; and the Irish boroughs generally preferred moderate supporters of the ministry to the nominees of the great Irish agitator.1 The agita in 1842. For more than a year after the dissolution of 1841, Ireland remained unexcited and undisturbed. Even the change of Government, and the transfer of power to Peel, did not rouse the people to a fresh agitation; and in the tion revives session of 1842 English Chartism attracted more attention than Irish Home Rule. In the autumn of 1842, however, a few young and obscure Irishmen determined to found a new newspaper. They called it the Nation. A love of the Irish nation was its motive, Irish nationality its object. A young man, who had already made his mark as a journalist, Charles Gavan Duffy, was the editor of the new paper. Another young man, Thomas Davis, was Duffy's principal assistant. Davis and Duffy were both impressed with a belief in Ireland's wrongs, and in the capacity of the Irish, if they were only true to themselves, to remedy them. 1 Duffy's Young Ireland, pp. 34-43. These doctrines they enforced week after week in the columns of the Nation, both in poetry and prose. "The work that should to-day be wrought, defer not till to-morrow, The help that should within be sought scorn from without to borrow. Appeals, made in such language as this, stir the blood forty years after they were written. Repeated week after week, they made a vivid impression on an excitable people. The heat which O'Connell had been unable to kindle at the Corn Exchange, was fanned by the writers of the Nation. O'Connell, who had only hitherto half believed in the cause which he had originated, found himself forced forwards by younger Irishmen. The Repeal Rent, as the revenue of the Association was called, rose from £60 to £300 a week; the Dublin Corporation resolved, after a great debate, to petition for Home Rule; and O'Connell, encouraged by the universal enthusiasm, and over-confident in his own powers, openly declared that 1843 should be the Repeal year. The universal enthusiasm justified his confidence. Peers and prelates, Protestants and Presbyterians, joined an associa tion which had hitherto consisted of priests, tradesmen, and peasants. The Nation had vindicated its title, and combined the heterogeneous elements of Ireland into a consistent whole. The Repeal Rent, which had already risen from £60 to £300, rose to £680 in May 1843. A hundred thousand people assembled at Mullingar to listen to O'Connell. But this great meeting was soon exceeded. Half a million of persons was supposed to be present at Mallow in June. The Repeal Rent, which had already risen to £680, rose to £2200. A demand, 2 1 This, perhaps, the finest of the many fine songs in "The Spirit of the Nation," is by the writer who took as a nom de plume the name Sliabh Cuillin, and who was also the author of the grand denunciatory stanzas, “ The Union.” 2 Duffy's Young Ireland, p. 191. Graham afterwards read an account of the Repeal meetings held in 1840 and 1841, to show that the movement had not originated "Consule" Peel. Hansard, vol. lxxii. p. 764. But the account in the text is substantially accurate. The rent never reached £200, and did not average £100 a week during the Melbourne Ministry. |