Since the troubles here alluded to (which originating in the Courtenay estate in the county of Limerick, spread over that and other adjoining counties, and lasted for several years), there have been the disturbances of the Terry Alts in the counties of Limerick and Clare, in the spring of 1831; and at a later period, the serious outrages which prevailed chiefly in the county of Kilkenny, and the King's and Queen's Counties, and which gave rise to the Coercion Act passed in 1833; renewed, with some alterations, in 1834, and finally reduced to a milder measure in 1835 (5 and 6 Wm. IV., c. 48).

45

CHAPTER II.

THE Irish House of Commons resolutely abstained from instituting any inquiry into the causes of the tumults among the peasantry in the last forty years before the Union *; nor was it till the year 1824 that the local disturbances in Ireland were made the subject of a systematic parliamentary inquiry. Select Committees of both Houses of Parliament were appointed in that year to inquire into the nature of the Irish disturbances; and having continued their labours in the following session, they collected a great mass of valuable evidence, on this and other questions connected with the state of Ireland. A Committee of the House of Commons in 1832, to whom a petition from the King's County, praying for a renewal of the Insurrection Act, was referred, likewise made an extensive inquiry into the causes and character of the disturbances in question. The investigations of these three Committees (together with the Papers on the state of Ireland laid on the table of both Houses of Parliament in 1834) have almost exhausted the subject; and little now remains to be done, except to arrange and comment upon the evidence which has been thus obtained. In undertaking this task, I propose to consider the question under two general heads; viz., 1st, the causes of Irish

* See 7th Irish Debates, pp. 37-8. The House even went so far in 1764 as to suppress a Report on the late insurrections in the North, which had been actually prepared, and which the Chairman of the Committee had begun to read. Irish Debates in 1763 and 1764, vol. ii. pp. 663-6.

disturbances; and 2nd, their character and objects, the means used for accomplishing these objects, and the effects produced by them; and lastly, to inquire what measures are likely to prevent their recurrence.

CAUSES OF DISTURBANCES IN IRELAND.

In order to ascertain the causes of the local disturbances which have now prevailed in Ireland to a greater or less extent for more than seventy years, it is necessary to consider the state of the occupying tenantry and the labouring classes in that country, at the time when these disturbances began.

The treatment of the native Irish, as an incurably barbarous race, before the Reformation, and the various civil wars and confiscations which took place after the Reformation, had, at the period of the Revolution, when King William's power was finally established in Ireland, so completely broken up the framework of society, and so loosened men's notions as to the obligations of law and morality, that it would have been a difficult task for the wisest and most beneficient government to raise the mass of the Irish people to the general level of European civilization. Instead, however, of attempting a course of policy which, if it did not effect everything, was at least sure of partial success, the Government, alarmed at the strength of the Pretender's party, and acting on the persecuting maxims which were then still current in Europe, introduced the penal code against the Catholics, and treated the majority of the Irish people as outlaws. According to this system (which has to a greater or less extent been acted on nearly up to the present day) every Irish Catholic was presumed to be disaffected to the

State, and was treated as an open or concealed rebel: the entire government was carried on by the Protestants and for their benefit*; and the Protestants were considered as the only link between England and Ireland. The English thought it for their interest that Ireland should belong to them, and they supported the Irish Protestants in oppressing the Irish Catholics †, who, it was assumed, without that oppression would throw themselves into the arms of France. At the same time that a wide and impassable line was drawn by the law between the two religions in Ireland, and the one persuasion was made a privileged, the other an inferior class, the whole of Ireland was treated as a province or colony, whose interests were to be sacrificed to those of the mother-country. Hence arose the restrictions on Irish commerce, on the exportation of corn, cattle, and woollen goods,-avowedly for the benefit of Englandt. A system of government administered in this

* See the passages from Berkeley's Querist, cited in Mackintosh's Dissertation on the Progress of Ethical Philosophy, p. 211, 8vo. ed.

"It seems (says Mr. Hallam, in his able sketch of the History of Ireland) as if the connexion of the two islands, and the whole system of constitutional laws in the lesser, subsisted only for the sake of securing the privileges and emoluments of a small number of ecclesiastics, frequently strangers, who performed no duties, and rendered no sort of return for their enormous monopoly." Constitut. Hist. of England, c. 18. Such was doubtless the effect of the system; but such was not the object of the English Government in establishing it. They looked only to their own interests, and imagined that the subjection of Ireland to England could only be maintained by giving a monopoly of power to the Protestants of the Established Church.

An amusing instance of the feeling that Ireland was to be sacrificed to England is mentioned by the author of the Commercial Restraints of Ireland, p. 125. In 1698 two petitions were presented to the English House of Commons from the fishermen of Folkstone and Aldborough, stating that they were injured "by the Irish catching herrings at Waterford and Wexford, and sending them to the Straits, and thereby forestalling and ruining petitioners' markets."

spirit, and in a country where the people were already in a state of great rudeness and disorder, necessarily led to the degradation and demoralizing of the bulk of the population.

The relation between landlord and tenant was affected in two ways by the treatment which Ireland had experienced from England. In the first place, the large grants of land which the Government had, at different times, made to Englishmen, naturally led to the nonresidence of many of the chief landed proprietors; inasmuch as Englishmen, who had also large estates in England, naturally preferred living in the land of their birth, which, moreover, was nearer the seat of Government, was in a more civilized and better cultivated state, and was, in general, a more agreeable place of residence. These persons were forced to manage their Irish estates by agents; or, more frequently, they were tempted to let them in large portions to middlemen, who then divided the land into small holdings, and sub-let it to the occupying tenantry*. In the second

* There is a close analogy between the letting of absentee property in Ireland to middlemen, and the management of the government by undertakers. Certain persons made a bargain with the Government, that they would be answerable for a majority in both houses, and for the coercion of the people, if a certain number of appointments were placed at their disposal. The Government, by this proceeding, secured the submission of Ireland, but lost the advantage of a large part of its own patronage, and moreover was occasionally compelled to be a quiet spectator of the most frightful injustice. (See Lord Chesterfield's Miscellaneous Works, vol. ii. pp. 499–500. Compare p. 512.) In like manner an absentee landed proprietor, unable to manage his own estate, and unwilling to trust an agent, let it to a middleman at a rate which left him the power of making a large profit rent; and who, having no permanent interest in the estate, oppressed the miserable cottier tenants without mercy. In this manner the landlord secured a man who undertook for the property; but he lost the difference between the rent paid by the occupying tenants and the rent paid by the middleman; and he prevented the possibility of a respectable tenantry being ever formed on his property.