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It has been often remarked, that one of the chief evils of slavery is that it corrupts the master as well as the slave. The Irish landlord, during the rigour of the anti-catholic code, was subjected to all the temptations arising from the possession of irresponsible power. Not only did he become harsh and tyrannical to his inferiors, but reckless and sensual in his habits of living, profuse in his expenditure, violent in his quarrels, intolerant in the assertion of his religious opinions, corrupt and partial in the exercise of his official authority. Hence, likewise, he did not scruple to employ his tenants and dependants, when it suited his inclination, for any purpose, however mischievous, which he might wish to accomplish. We do not imagine that Irish history offers a second instance of a landlord employing and instructing his tenants to commit a cool and premeditated murder; but it may be questioned whether the records of any civilized European nation, during the last century, would present an authentic picture of such a state of society as is disclosed by the trial of Mr. George Robert Fitzgerald.

The labouring classes, on the other hand, suffered most of the evils of slavery, without enjoying any of its advantages. Deprived of all self-respect by the opera

perty, who has in a high degree that natural affability and politeness which marks the Irish; who gives his tenants plenty of leisure to pay. their rents; who is the father of a little army of labourers, that he keeps in constant employment; whose house is a kind of hospital, where all the sick in the neighbourhood send for medicines and wine; in his courtyard the poor of the parish and the wandering beggar assemble without ceremony, and find in the remnants of his hospitable kitchen more broken victuals than is supplied by any English nobleman's house; this essentially amiable and kind-hearted man prefaces a rebuke to a labourer with 'You villain; you! I'll blow your bloody soul in a blaze of gunpowder to hell!'" P. 31-2.

tion of the penal statutes; prevented from rising in the world, or from bettering their condition, by legal disabilities and the legalized oppression of their landlords; without education; excluded from a public participation in the rites of their own religion; they endured all, and more than the evils which belonged to the lot of a serf, without looking forward to the interested protection and relief which a master would afford to his bondman. Having neither the means of accumulating a little capital, nor the foresight necessary for making a good use of it when accumulated, the agricultural labourers and cottier tenants were for the most part in a state of extreme destitution, ill-fed, ill-clad, and illlodged *. If at the present day, when the commercial restraints of Ireland have been removed, and so great a reduction has taken place in the price of manufactured goods, and when there has been so vast an improvement in the system of Irish government and the administration of the law, we see in how deep destitution the Irish peasant is plunged, we may judge what was his physical condition in the middle of the last century †.

The poorer classes in Ireland seem moreover at the same time to have been in that precise state which is the most favourable to the growth of population; namely, where the moral checks on increase scarcely operate at all, and the physical checks operate but feebly. Not living like slaves in a state of promiscuous concubinage unfavourable to propagation, but

* See O'Conor's History of the Irish Catholics, part i. p. 285. + See note A at the end.

See Malthus on Population, vol. i. p. 469, 6th ed. and compare Clinton's Fasti Hellenici, vol. ii. p. 383.

marrying early, dwelling in separate houses, and satisfied with the scantiest and poorest food, they had sufficient regard for their children to make every effort to rear them, but were indifferent about everything except their mere existence. Far removed from the brutality of those half-civilized nations, which have practised the exposure of new-born infants, they nevertheless performed only the animal, and none of the moral duties of parents; nor did they feel any scruple in raising up children to whom they had nothing to bequeath but a sad legacy of poverty and wretchedness *. Fever and other epidemic diseases, the consequences of bad or insufficient food, of close and damp dwellings, and of the want of other comforts and necessaries, doubtless then, as now, thinned the ranks of the lower classes in Ireland: but on the other hand, the country was never devastated by any invading army, or

*A. Young, enumerating the causes favourable to the growth of population in Ireland, says :-" Marriage is certainly more general in Ireland than in England: I scarce ever found an unmarried farmer or cottar; but it is seen more in other classes, which, with us, do not marry at all; such as servants; the generality of footmen and maids in gentlemen's families are married, a circumstance we very rarely see in England. Another point of importance is their children not being burdensome. In all the inquiries I made into the state of the poor, I found their happiness and ease generally relative to the number of their children, and nothing considered as such a misfortune as having none." Part ii. p. 61. A. Young forgot to add that the Irish poor did not find a large family burdensome, only because they omitted to perform those duties which a parent in restricted circumstances finds it difficult to perform. Another circumstance mentioned by Arthur Young as assisting the growth of population in Ireland is the absence of poor-laws; so that he added to the testimonies adduced by Mr. McCulloch before the Committee on the State of the Irish Poor, No. 6458, to show that the English poor-law before 1798 operated as a check to population. On the frequency of marriage in Ireland, see also Newenham's Inquiry into the Population of Ireland, p. 18.

may

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subjected to those influences which had laid waste whole tracts of land after the rebellion of 1641.

We need not therefore wonder that the population of Ireland should have increased more rapidly during the eighteenth century than that of any other country in Europe*, notwithstanding occasional drains of emigration to America and Great Britain. It is moreover to be observed, that this great increase was doubtless confined exclusively to the poorer classes, and especially to the country population. There is no reason to suppose that, in the upper ranks, and in the inhabitants of towns, the rate of increase was different from that which prevailed at the same time in Great Britain.

Under these circumstances, the labouring peasantry, loaded with large families, and unprotected by a poorlaw, were forced to submit to any rent which the landowner, or his middleman, chose to exact from them. For, as accumulation of capital among the agricultural tenantry had been made impossible by the system of government, the whole country was divided in small portions, among a set of occupiers almost equally poor; so that each man was in general able, with the assistance of his family, to cultivate his own ground, and thus there was little or no agricultural employment to be obtained for hire: even those persons who employed labourers were in the habit of paying them in land, or (what comes to the same) setting off their rent against their wages. Hence it was the first ambition of every man to obtain a small holding of land, on which he could erect a mud hovel, and raise enough potatoes for the subsistence of himself and his family; and to keep

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* See Malthus on Population, book ii. c. 10, ad fin. Vol. i. 470,

possession of his holding, when he had once obtained it, at any sacrifice of rent which he was able to make, after reserving, from the proceeds of his land and labour, just enough to support life.

When the peasantry who lived in this manner were thinly scattered over the country, they had more facility of turning cattle, or sheep, or pigs on waste land, and their distance from each other prevented communication, and made detection more easy: but when the rapid increase of population brought them nearer to one another, they had more difficulty in finding a subsistence among so many competitors, and their greater numbers gave confidence, security, and means of easy intercourse. Accordingly we find that when the Catholic part of Ireland began to be thickly peopled, then, and not till then, local disturbances broke out, occasioned, in the first instance, by the inclosure of waste lands, and the dispossession of tenants.

The causes of the original Whiteboy insurrection in 1761 appear sufficiently from the testimonies already cited. The following statement of them by Lord Charlemont, in a paper preserved by his biographer, may, however, be here inserted.

"As the insurgents were all of the Catholic religion, an almost universal idea was entertained among the more zealous Protestants, and encouraged by interested men, that French gold and French intrigue were at the bottom of this insurrection; the real causes were indeed not difficult to be ascertained. Exorbitant rents, low wages, want of employment in a country destitute of manufactures, where desolation and famine were the effects of fertility; where the rich gifts of a bountiful mother were destructive to her children, and served only to tantalize them; where oxen supplied the place of men, and by leaving little room for cultivation, while they enriched

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