Machiavelli was misapplied. The native Irish were not exterminated. Hundreds of thousands of them went to the continent as soldiers, a flight of "wild geese." Some went as slaves to the Barbadoes. A few emigrated to the colonies. But most of them hung on, occupying parts of their old lands at exorbitant rents. Various aspects of their strange history will recur in this book. It is enough now to state that their compulsory occupation was agriculture, for which they were technically untrained, and economically unequipped, and in which the "law" gave them little countenance or security.

Till quite late in the nineteenth century the vast majority of these native Irish remained ignorant and poverty-stricken serfs, subsisting for the most part on milk and potatoes, always living on the brink of starvation, and condemned by what President Wilson calls "economic servitude" to labor not in their own interests but in the interests of the governing class. So prone was their condition that the royal commission of 1836 reported the number of persons out of work and in distress as 585,000, with 1,800,000 dependents, making 2,385,000 in all. The average weekly wage for laborers was from 28 to 2s 6d per week. So dreadful was this distress. that the plutocracy and aristocracy of England, acting through Lord John Russell, sent over a commissioner to Ireland to devise a workhouse in which these serfs could be stored in a "" superior degree of comfort." The commissioner, strange to relate, found that the Irish serf was unwilling to pay this modest punishment for the crime of poverty. "Confinement of any kind is more irksome to an Irishman than it is even to an Englisman," reports

"

the Commissioner, " and hence, although the Irishman may be lodged, fed and clothed in a workhouse better than he could lodge, feed and clothe himself by his own exertions, he will yet never enter the workhouse unless driven there by actual necessity." Lord John Russell's "superior degree of comfort may be judged from the dietary of the two Dublin workhouses in 1841, which was stigmatized by the Commissioner as "too abundant." "too abundant." "There were two meals a day. Breakfast, every day 7 ounces of oatmeal and stirabout; Dinner, on five days of the week, 4 lbs. of potatoes weighed raw, and half pint of butter milk; on two days of the week, 2 lbs. potatoes weighed raw, the potatoes being stewed in broth. That was a style of dietary that was superior to that of the independent laborer outside." Had the aristagogue Bagehot adverted to the vulgar realities of the human stomach, he might have despaired less of the lower orders of mankind. But such a dietary, and such a living wage, naturally resulted in degradation. The common Irish were lazy, on this superb diet. They were dirty, on a soap that was heavily taxed. They were improvident, on 28 6d a week. They were drunken, out of reckless levity. They were suspicious and unreliable, in spite of Lord John Russell's beneficent offer of the poorhouse.

THE FALL OF FEUDALISM

The climax of this situation was the famine of 1845-1849. This famine came after the investigations of numerous experts. It had been foreseen, it had even been reckoned "inevitable." It cost

729,033 lives. "Far more," said John Bright,

"than ever fell by the sword in any war England ever waged." I regret to say that this statement, hard as it was, could not remain perpetually true. The total British killed in the world war up to January 1, 1916, was 128,136, about one-sixth of the peace mortality of the Irish famine, but since then the hideous ingenuity and exaction of a worldwide war has slain (up to May 1, 1918) over one million English, Irish, Scotch, Welsh, Canadians, Australians, South Africans, New Zealanders, Indians, and other defenders of the empire.

The proximate cause of the great famine was the potato blight. The underlying cause was the multiplication of holdings during the prosperity of the Napoleonic wars, enormous subletting, and landlord greed. We learn now, from the research of the Irish quarterly, Studies, that there were 5,702,133 country-people living in mud cabins in 1841, with 2,066,290 living on holdings utterly incapable of supporting them. When the potatoes failed everything was lost, and most of these peasants died either of typhus fever or "the great hunger." An organizer like Mr. Hoover might have saved most of them, if permitted to do so, but during that great hunger the following excellent foods were sold and allowed to leave Ireland: 572,485 head of cattle; 839,118 sheep; 699,021 pigs; 2,532,839 qrs. of oats; 1,821,091 cwts. of oatmeal; 455,256 qrs. of wheat; 1,494,852 cwts. of wheatmeal. These would have prevented famine, but in the absence of self-government an embargo was impossible to Irishmen. Yet the correct English judgment in 1917 still firmly refuses to entertain the property aspect of the famine. I shall quote elsewhere a most

accomplished Oxford professor, Mr. Ernest Barker, to the effect that the culprit was "nature." Or, as one is afraid the Kaiser would say, the will of God.

Yet the economic power of the landlord could scarcely survive this disaster and disgrace. It cost fifty years of agitation and £185,000,000 to clean up landlordism, but the transfer of economic power in this department of Irish life has now been substantially effected. The unfortunate legacies from landlordism will later be examined, but it is best first of all to face the rebuttal to my accusation of landlord greed. That rebuttal I prefer to give you in other words than my own. It is utterly wrong, I have been told, to make it appear " that the English government and English landlords in Ireland had been monsters and that glorious, free America had been the rescue of the Irish. That the law and the system of land tenure in Ireland up to about forty years ago were unsuitable and caused sad tragedies is sure, but they were precisely the same as in America and everywhere else. America was the main cause of the destruction of Ireland, because Ireland could not compete with the fertile sunny climate of America in agriculture, or with the enormous extent of cheap land in America for stock rearing. The constant lowering of prices was disastrous to Ireland. The fault of England was the fault of human nature. We only very slowly and under much pressure came to understand that laws which were suitable in rich England or America were impossible in poverty-stricken Ireland. We did not at first understand the problems, and nor would any other gov

ernment.

"For the most part the landlords were kindly

and well-meaning, and did not press for the collection of their rents, but took what they could get, as was shown by the enormous arrears which were wiped out by the first land law.

"The recent prosperity of Ireland is due much more to the rise of agricultural prices of late years than to modern legislation, though that, too, has had a good effect.

"It is only natural that people who see themselves being gradually ruined, should attribute the evil to a foreign government, which is not sympathetic, and which puts tremendous power into the hands of the creditor. That power should be curtailed all over the world as it has been in Ireland in land questions, and as it should be in all transactions."

THE CASE AGAINST LANDLORDS

This defence falls into four parts, First, the argument of lowered prices and American competition. Lowered prices did undoubtedly drive the landlords from tillage, but instead of reconstruction, the peasants got eviction. The landlords, on the contrary, raised cattle instead of grain, and suffered no prime hardship. Second, the English "did not understand the problems, nor would any other government." The answer to this is clear. The Irish fought, bled and died to be allowed to deal with their own problems and take the consequences. The repeal agitation walked step by step with the approach of famine. The alien government confessedly "did not understand the problems." It failed utterly either to learn those problems or to quit forcing its blunders on Ireland. It is a shocking defence of that policy that “ very slowly and