version of the peasant from a cottier living by potatoes into a labourer living by wages, would arise from two sources. In the first place, an ejected tenant would not be exposed to the danger of destitution, unless provided for by his landlord: he would have a public place of refuge to fly to in this hour of need. In this manner the landlord would be able to call in the aid of the community for effecting that change which he himself cannot by his unaided means bring about, and by which the community will ultimately profit. Not only, however, would the ejected tenant find an asylum in his misery, but the tenant in possession would feel that ejectment would not to him imply destitution, and other persons of the same class would feel that in general depriving a man of his holding is not equivalent to depriving him of his means of subsistence. Hence that feeling of desperation with which the Irish cottier rivets himself to his cabin and potato-ground would be removed; and the sympathy with the Whiteboy who avenges the cause of the ejected, and protects the occupying tenant, would gradually cease; would the landlord find the feelings of the community arrayed against his own and their permanent interest.

nor

When any vicious system has interwoven itself with the habits and thoughts of a whole population, when men's moral judgments and sympathies have been permanently perverted by the working of a pernicious but overwhelming interest, it is difficult by any legislative measure to effect any sudden change, and in such cases we deplore the inefficiency of laws without the custom of obedience or the disposition to enforce them. But in the case of Ireland, however hopeless it may be toattempt by legislation to produce any immediate and marked improvement in the mass of the poor, yet there

seem to be symptoms that the Whiteboy system might be suddenly checked, and that it would soon fall to pieces under the influence of a protecting government, of a government which supplied the guarantee against destitution which the Whiteboys now seek to create for themselves. It is not possible to make a sudden improvement in the general morality, or the skill, or the knowledge of a whole population; but it is possible suddenly to insure them against the consequences of despair. That the Whiteboy system is the creature of circumstances, not of moral habit, appears from the conduct of the Irish who have migrated to Great Britain. The Irish, who settle in the large towns of Scotland and Ireland, may be said on the whole rather to be deteriorated than improved in their moral character; and yet crimes of combination, in any way resembling those arising from the Whiteboy spirit, are utterly unknown among them. The Irish in England have never hitherto shown more disposition to avenge the cause of a dispossessed tenant than the English themselves. If the change produced in the circumstances of the Irish peasant in England by the change of place should be produced in his circumstances in Ireland by a change of law, there is every reason to expect that similar consequences would ensue. hold it of great importance (says Dr. Chalmers) in estimating the probabilities of any eventual reformation among the people to distinguish between the virtues of direct principle and the virtues of necessity. The former require a change of character, the latter may only require a change of circumstances. To bring about the one, there must either be a process of conversion, which is rare, or a process of education, which is gradual. The other may be wrought almost instan

"We

taneously by the pure force of a legal enactment. . . . There are many habits that may be regarded as the immediate fruit of external circumstances, and that would quickly and necessarily give way when the circumstances were altered; and these are altogether distinct from other habits that essentially depend on the moral or the religious principles of our nature*.' Now the tendency to violent outrage among the Irish peasantry is precisely one of those dispositions which are the creatures of circumstances, and is very far from being one of those habits which are proverbially said to become a second nature. These habits are always agreeable for the present, though their consequences may be injurious; but from what has been above said †, it is obvious that Whiteboyism is, for the parties concerned, an exceedingly troublesome and dangerous system, and that it is only kept up by a great and constant effort. The intimidation practised on the peasantry, in order to compel adherence, is a sufficient proof that the Whiteboy for the most part works with unwilling instruments, however strong the feeling may be among the persons menaced that the system is for their benefit. The individual who commits the outrage does not reap any personal advantage from itt: and in order to commit it, he must bestir himself to get arms, and to hide them; he must procure powder and ball; he must go out at night; he must attack houses and men, and expose himself to resistance, to wounds, to capture, to detection, to conviction, and to punishment. Persons paid by government for per

* Christian and Civic Economy, vol. ii., p. 237, note. Idem, p. 193-203.

Idem, p. 234.

forming such duties as these, are sometimes slack in the discharge of them, and require a constant supervision in order to prevent them from sleeping at their posts. How much more is it to be expected that peasants, who take upon themselves the gratuitous discharge of such onerous and such perilous services, should withdraw themselves from their office when they are no longer urged on by the pressure of an imperious necessity?

If a system of legal relief was at once established in Ireland, which should comprehend all classes of destitute persons, and if that relief was administered to each person at his own house, it is difficult to foresee what would be the ultimate consequence of such a poor-law; but its immediate consequence would be, that the poorrate, if levied upon the land, would swallow up the entire rent and tithe *. It would, in fact, amount to an agrarian law, and that in its worst possible form: as the occupants would remain occupants, but would divide among them the entire surplus produce of the soil, and the landlord would retain the legal title to the land, without deriving any benefit from it. The landlord would, in fact, be merely a trustee in whom the legal estate would be vested, and who would hold the property for the use of his lessees. Far better than such a course as this would it be to adopt F. von Raumer's suggestion, and after the model of Prussia, at once to convert the Irish tenants into proprietors†.

* 66

It has been proposed by some to establish poor-laws in Ireland; but, from the depressed state of the common people, there is little reason to doubt that, on the establishment of such laws, the whole of the landed property would very soon be absorbed, or the system given up in despair." -Malthus on Population, book iv., chap. 8.

England im Jahre 1835, vol. ii., p. 404.

Raumer does not seem

In order to prevent so disastrous an extremity, it would be necessary to guard the administration of legal relief in Ireland, by annexing the condition that it should only be administered in a public establishment into which the party should be received, and to the regulations of which he should submit: in short, that relief in Ireland, as well as in England, should be given only in workhouses.

The objections to this method are sufficiently obvious, and tolerably numerous : but if no plan could be advantageously followed which was not altogether unobjectionable, which had not the unattainable quality of perfection, it is manifest that all human legislation would be impracticable. In the first place it will be said that what is wanted in Ireland is to give employment to the unemployed poor, and that this cannot be done by means of workhouses. To this objection we would answer, that a wise government would never undertake directly so hopeless an object, and one so plainly lying out of the sphere of its proper duties, as that of finding employment for a whole population. The cases where governments have traded on a much smaller scale have so decisively proved their unfitness to perform the part of the capitalist, that a much more signal failure might be anticipated if the Irish government undertook to manage a farm of several million acres. If any advocate of a poor-law for Ireland wishes that relief should take the form of wages, and the relieving-officer should assume the character of a capitalist employer of labourers, he desires it on grounds quite different from those advanced in these pages, and

to be aware that the English and the Irish tenant are, as far as the law is concerned, in precisely the same situation.