The Potato Failure. Ruination of the Gentry.

Chapter XIX.

The Moral of the Tale - Hope for Ireland - Its Foundation - Over-success of the Policy of the Unionists - The Irish Burthen upon England - Expatriation and Corruption of the Irish Gentry - Effects upon the People -Natural Results of the Policy - The Land Difficulty - The Land Inquiry Commission - The “Fixity of Tenure” Movement - The Potato Failure - Final Ruin of the Gentry - The Old Liens on Estates - The New and More Fatal Encumbrance - What can an Irish Gentleman do under existing circumstances? - Old English Party Politics - Decline of their interest in Ireland - The Political Inquiry proper for the Occasion - Determination of the Land Struggle - Mischievous Effects of the Fixity of Tenure Movement on the National Cause - Signs of the Effects of the Removal of the Barriers of Irish Society - Natural and necessary Solution of the Anglo-Irish Question - Conclusion.

The growing bulk of my volume gives warning that it is time to stop my pen, and, for the present at least, to interrupt the stream of recollections that seems to press upon me with an increased strength and fulness, as I have, by degrees, opened a channel for its flow. In drawing to a conclusion, however, I cannot persuade myself to let slip the opportunity of sketching, in a few brief sentences, the present condition of Ireland, as a counterpart to the traits I have drawn of her former state - to point, as it were, the moral of my tale, so far as it relates to the trials, and sufferings, and hopes of my country. Adopting the metaphor of Grattan, I may say that I witnessed the birth of, her constitution, lived through the short period of her existence as a nation, and have survived her death for half a century. During the long and dreary sleep of the grave that has succeeded, I have never ceased to believe in the possibility of her regeneration. Is there yet a hope remaining that the mouldering and corrupt mass shall ever be resuscitated into a new and purer form of national life? With the experience of more than ten lustra of misery and oppression, of domestic broil and debasing protection to damp my ardour, my answer to this question still is, that my faith in the destinies of the, Irish people has not ceased to live. At this, her darkest hour, I look forward with confidence to the internal union, the prosperity and the independence of Ireland.

Where are the foundations of this hope that has grown with my strength and years of manhood, and has lived on through my weakness and age? They seem to me to be discernible even in the fabric of those circumstances that English ministries look to as the last signs of the triumph of the policy that has for its end the denationalisation of this fair kingdom, and the confusion of its identity in the unwieldy and bloated mass of the British empire. When the contrivers of the Legislative Union in 1799 avowed to each other, in their most secret communications *, the great object of their work to be a stoppage of the progress of the growing prosperity of Ireland, they probably did not dream of so complete an attainment of that end as their successors have achieved in 1849. Their high-vaulting ambition has o’erleaped its selle. They have not merely stopped the growing prosperity of Ireland-they have done more; they have reduced the strength of her people-of her peers and of her peasants-to a homogeneous mass of misery, and they have fastened that upon the shoulders of England which already totters under the burthen.

[* Mr. Edward Cooke’s Notes in Favour of the Union. Will a Union make Ireland quiet?

Who can judge *for *the future? Yet, although we cannot command futurity, we are to act as if futurity were in our power. We must argue from moral causes to moral effects. If, then, we are in a disadvantageous situation, we must, of course, look to those causes which have brought us into that situation. What are they?

lst. The local independent acting of the Legislature.

2nd. The general prosperity of the country, which has produced great activity and energy

3rd. The emancipation of the Catholics.

4th. The encouragement given to the reform principles of the Presbyterians.

5th. The want of number in the Protestants.

6th. The uncertainty of counsels as to this great division of the country. Now what is the complaint? That we have not influence in the originating Cabinet. By a Union we should have that influence.

We have no influence in the originating Parliament of the Empire. We should have a great and commanding interest there.

The want of numbers, which is the want of power, would be increased by an accession of all the Protestants of the Empire.

The question of Reform would be settled.

The Catholic question would he settled.

The question then is, Can these moral causes of discontent he taken away with safety without Union?

1st. Can the Protestants of Ireland, as a separate State, gain an internal accession of strength as Protestants? No.

2nd. Can the Roman Catholic question be altered so as to preclude Reform of Parliament? It cannot.

3rd. Can a Reform of Parliament be made consistent with Protestant security. It cannot.

4th. The Representative body of Ireland will obtain a joint right with the Representative of Great Britain to legislate for the whole Empire. - *Castlereagh Memoirs, *vol. iii., pp. 54, 55.]

Their caricaturists have represented the Celt with his legs of leather clinging around the neck of the sturdy Saxon, and ministers and people made merry at the conceit, thinking not of the moral of the eastern story. Sinbad found not rest by day or by night; his food ceased to nourish him, his sleep brought no refreshment so long as the old man of the island, whose carriage he had voluntarily imposed upon himself, continued to press in dead weight upon his strength, and to consume his resources in ravening idleness. Sinbad found no relief from his misery until he intoxicated his tormenter, and beat out his brains with the fragment of a rock.

There is no prospect of a like relief for the Saxon. He has, indeed, exhausted the vigour of his old man by absentee depletion - he has paralysed his limbs by denying to him opportunities for their exercise; but, intoxicated though he be by a debasing alms-system, he will but hold his seat the more tenaciously for his stupor, and, unless he be charmed off by the assurance of freedom, there will he sit on until, with his bearer, he shall sink down in common helplessness.

The policy of stopping the growth of Irish prosperity has succeeded, so far as the immediate object is concerned. The gentry, attracted to the English metropolis by the business of parliament and the pleasures of the court, have been broken down in spirit and fortune, as completely as were the noblesse of France by the analogous device of Louis XIV. The Grand Monarque, destroyed the influence and corrupted the patriotism of the French nobles, by drawing them to Paris by the force of fashion; the English government dealt in like manner with the Irish gentry by forcing them to follow after their political importance to London.

In the one case and in the other, estates were at once neglected and wasted; local ties were dissolved; the bond of feeling, as well as that of mutual interest between the owners and occupiers of land, was severed-the former were plunged into difficulties by their increased expenditure; the latter galled by the expedients rendered necessary by those difficulties. In France there was a revolution and a re-distribution of property ; in Ireland, a revolt of the forty-shilling freeholders, and a long agrarian war, with all its lamentable concomitants of murder, agitation, and demagogue rule. For a while this state of things jumped well with the English policy.

The division, for the purpose of government, of the Irish people, was facilitated; landlords and agents were shot, and farmers and cottiers were evicted and starved; but still corn and cattle were exported to England, and their price spent in London, and Cheltenham, and Brighton: there were Orange and Ribbon processions and battles, and bloody election fights; but still some scores of venal votes were brought into the imperial political market, and some half-dozens of well-trained gladiators provided for the faction games of Westminster.

Ireland was going on very well for English purposes. To keep matters going, it was only necessary now and then to rob and insult the resident gentry, and, when the tide turned, to shoot and hang the peasants, and all through to keep up a supply of places and pensions for leading factionaries of both colours. With attention to these precautions, all went right: Ireland was divided and governed; her people grew corn, reared cattle and pigs to feed Liverpool, Manchester, and Leeds; supplied the army with horse, foot, and dragoons, and starved without grumbling upon potatoes.

It is true this climax of the English policy could not have been long maintained. The progress of a nation cannot be stopped at the precise point that suits the convenience of her rulers. If the natural tendency to advance be checked, there will surely be a retrograde movement, and that too, in a direct proportion with the strength of the original impulse. In morals, as in physics, action and reaction are equal; and when the unionists, acting upon the principle laid down in Mr. Secretary Cooke’s private memoranda, succeeded in checking the growing prosperity of Ireland, the force they were obliged to exert to stop the machine caused it to move backwards with a rapidity upon which, it is probable, they did not calculate.

The organisation of society set a-going under the constitution of ‘82, and which was proceeding during the next 18 years, in spite of the English ministerial impediments of a close parliament and a religious persecution, was, after the melancholy epoch of 1800, speedily dissolved, and replaced by that chaos of faction and corruption, which, growing darker and more confused from year to year, seemed, about the years 1843-44, to be on the point of passing into a state of social dissolution.

The 50,000 bayonets and sabres with which the English government thought it necessary to hedge its divinity inspired no awe. The people saw them through the light of their victory of ‘29, and the impressions of their own superior force communicated by that and subsequent similar events, were continued and strengthened by the ill-concealed tremblings and delusive concessions of the ministers. Messages of peace were laughed at, when they were known to be framed under the shadow of clouds in the far west.

Commissions to inquire into questions that lay in a nutshell, were looked at either as tedious and expensive contrivances for evasion, or as direct stimulants to the pressure from without. The instance of the Land Inquiry Commission will serve as a specimen of the whole policy, and of its effects. The land difficulty rested on the surface. The owners, made absentees by the English policy, were at one stroke deprived of their local influence, and impoverished. Their poverty obliged them to exact, with rigour, rents which their personal neglect of the public business of their districts, as well as of their own private affairs, rendered burthensome. The decline of their local influence added at once to the difficulty of collecting those rents, and to the bitterness that accompanied their violent exaction.

A state of fierce hostility sprung up where there should naturally have been the peaceful relation of commercial dealers, if not the more friendly union of landlord and tenant. The occupier of the land then fell into arrear, and his stock was seized: the owner evicted, and if increasing poverty drove him homewards, was shot. This was the exact state of matters, and it was clearly one that direct legislation could not cure. To invest an absentee landlord with more legal power to enforce his rights would not render him more observant of his duties. To fence round the dishonesty of an irritated tenant with additional chicaneries of law, would not calm his vexation, or teach him correct principles of dealing. Sir Robert Peel knew these truths: one can scarcely doubt, too, that he was aware of the moral impossibility of a society existing in a wholesome state, while some of its essential elements are deficient yet this minister did not meet the land difficulty by measures for the restoration of its abstracted parts to the Irish community, but tried to evade it by the issue of the Land Inquiry Commission.

In its contrivance, and in its working, the landowners saw a shabby, paltering, half-confessed scheme for putting their evil day a very little farther off; while the land occupiers hailed it as an encouragement to the more ardent pursuit of their own plans. The former fell in with the policy of evasion, and set about patching up laws to confuse the already tangled relation of landlord and tenant; the latter advanced boldly to the assertion of an indefeasible right in property, irrespective of the covenants under which they had obtained its temporary occupation. Thus arose, from this very foolish or very wicked trickery of Sir Robert reel, that fierce agitation for a new distribution of the soil which raged in 1843-4, and 5, under the name of the “fixity of tenure,” or “tenant-right” movement and which would most certainly have brought to a common and not remote end, order and civilisation, and the English system of government in Ireland, had not the will of Providence otherwise determined and overruled at once, as I trust the event will prove, the approximating extremes of the policy of our unionist and our anarchist enemies.

The failure of the potato crop, begun in 1845, and continued up to the present year, has, among its other consequences, been attended by two remarkable results. It has completed the breaking down of the spirit and fortunes of the Irish gentry; and it has put an end to that death-struggle for land which gave its peculiar character and danger to the revolutionary movement. The unphilosophical and barbarous experiments wherewith the government met the famine have not only eaten up the available means of the proprietors, but have burthened their lands with debt and obligation for poor-rate and useless works-rate and ineffectual drainage-rate, to an amount so great that, in a large portion of the kingdom, it must be absolutely vain to contend against it.

There has been much talk about the family liens and encumbrances of Irish estates; but however mischievous these may have been in themselves to the landlord, the tenant, and the community, they did not in their essential nature preclude a possibility of the soil being employed for the public advantage. To the evil of encumbrances there was, indeed, added another and a greater evil in the incubus of law and lawyers, whose pressure, no doubt, operated to nullify the most vigorous and honest efforts, both of debtor and creditor, to escape from the difficulties of their position. But even this cruel oppression it was possible to contend against.

When family-debtor, and spendthrift-mortgagor, and orphan, widow, and creditor, were all ruined, and barely sufficient remained to discharge the attorney’s bill, the law commonly relaxed its grasp, and the land was transferred unburthened to new hands, wherein it might become profitable to the community; until the follies of another generation should again mesh it in legal toils. The case is now far different: the possessors and the occupiers of the soil may be changed; the former may be thrust out by the Encumbered Estates Commissioners, with little ceremony and less protracted torture than would formerly have been necessary; the latter may be more summarily cleared off by new processes of eviction, but still the burthen of poor-rate arrears, and the more intolerable burthen of an indefinite prospective rating, will remain to clog the efforts of industry, with a weight the magnitude of which was not, I believe, calculated upon even by the authors of the Union.

It is within my own knowledge that farms let during the past year for the rates only, have been since given up, and the payment of those charges thrown upon a landlord who had already exhausted his revenues in generous endeavours to improve and tend his lands and tenants. I speak of a case within my own know-ledge; but in doing so I but cite an example of a class of cases, with numerous instances of which most men in Ireland are acquainted. Wherever an Irish proprietor shall be found desirous of serving his country, and preserving his property, by actively encouraging local improvement, he will surely have neighbours by whose neglect or absenteeism such an amount of pauperism and poor-rate will be created, as will quickly reduce his own means to a point at which he can neither give employment nor maintain his accustomed state; nay, often not even provide himself with the necessaries of life. Such men, during the last three or four years, have made desperate efforts; they have burthened themselves with drainage loans; they have engaged in attempts, absolutely small, but great for their means, to develop the industrial resources of the country; and with what result? Their drainage loans have been too often dissipated in salaries to government officers, and in unprofitable encumbrances upon their rentless acres; if they sought a fishing company’s charter, or a railway act their little capital was, after a thousand delays and difficulties, eaten up by the officials of a foreign legislature, without whose permission Irishmen must not co-operate in an Irish undertaking.

It is the nature of such difficulties as these to accumulate with rapidity, and whatever of perseverance or individual pecuniary means may be brought to oppose them must in no long time be overwhelmed. What, under such circumstances, can an Irish gentleman do? Must he not remember that nature has endowed his country with a fertility that, were it not for the wilfulness of man, would supply thrice the number of her population with abundant means of subsistence?

[The returns of agricultural produce in Ireland for the year 1848, compiled by that excellent public servant, Major Larcom, have just now fallen under my notice, and so remarkably corroborate the views of the capability of Ireland advanced above, that I will make no apology for quoting from it the following numerical facts:-

Table showing the comparative amount of grain, to each person, in each province of Ireland

  Grain

lbs. per head

Leinster 885

Ulster 696

Munter 380

Connaught 347

 From this it would appear that there was actually grown in Ireland, during the year 1848, an average of 577lbs. of grain for each inhabitant. Taking the common estimate of a quarter (480lbs.) of grain per head, as sufficient for a year’s consumption, it would, therefore, seem that there was a famine in the land coincident with a superabundance of grain, amounting to 971bs. for each man, woman, and child of its people. Yet it is shown by Major Larcom that the produce of 1848 was much below that of the immediately preceding year. The following is his table of averaged results:-

  Wheat

Barrels per acre Oats

Barrels per acre Barley

Barrels per acre Rye

Barrels per acre Beans

Bushels per acre Potatoes

Tons per acre Turnips

Tons per acre

1847 6.6 8.4 8.8 8.2 8.6 57 15

1848 4.5 7.4 8.3 8 8.2 30 14

Must not that remembrance be accompanied by the reflection, that the cause of his misfortunes has been created by a legislature wherein he is unrepresented, and by which his remonstrances are altogether disregarded? He is told by the loaders and factionaries of a political party, that he must attend to his corn and his cattle, and think not of politics, which have been the bane of him and his country. And that they have been so is most true. The politics of English Whigs and Tories have been the bane of Ireland: the politics that, by making her gentry and her legislature absentees, engendered the evils to which I have already referred: the politics that by a series of laws and loans for the encouragement of pauperisation, fatally exasperated those evils. Such politics have done their appointed work upon gentry and people, and they have fixed the politicians in place and power; therefore, say the Whig and Tory placemen (for in the names there is a distinction without a difference) - therefore, let no Irishman counterwork those politics that have produced such happy results in ruining him, and aggrandising us. This is the precise meaning of the ministerial deprecation of politics; and that it is so, would be made manifest enough to-morrow, were the leadership of John Russell to need the support of party clamour. For my own part, however, I fully concur in the propriety of the recommendation to abandon politics in this latter sense. I would not willingly see a single Irishman lift a finger as an English partisan, and it is through my hope, that the wounds the Irish gentry and middle classes have received in that warfare, may have caused them to reflect upon its real nature, and (in relation to themselves) its monstrous wickedness, that I now see a faint glimmering of sunshine.

The gentlemen, farmers, and tradesmen of Ireland have fought long enough under the banners of petty chiefs, retained by one or other of the English factions. The chiefs have been provided for, and fortunately they have left no successors: the disbanded followers have been sent back to their ploughshares and counters weary and penniless. Former animosities are forgotten in an overwhelming sense of present misery. Men who, but a little while since, fought with fanatic fury to carry this or that English leader into Downing-street, now gaze upon the mutual injuries received and inflicted in those insane quarrels, with astonishment and dismay.

I do not think there has been a hundred pounds subscribed for Whig and Tory registrations in the whole of Ireland during the last two years. The Irish people have abandoned party politics, and I cannot believe that they will not turn their naturally acute minds to the consideration of politics of a broader kind. They cannot do better than diligently to attend to their ploughs, and their oxstalls, and their sheep-walks. In doing so, they must abandon placehunting; and as there is now a chance of their seeing objects untinged by the colours of English parties, it seems hard to suppose that they will not inquire into the circumstances that, in Ireland alone of all the world, render corn and cattle the emblems not of prosperity, but of hard and biting poverty. If this inquiry be honestly made, and pushed to its legitimate extent, I entertain no fear for the result. That its institution will probably be an immediate consequence of the levelling of Irish fortunes I believe, and that it may be carried out in a calm and liberal spirit is my earnest prayer.

As the breaking down of the fortunes of the Irish gentry has thus tended to obliterate one cause of our domestic disunion-the spirit of English partisanship so I think the determination of the death-struggle for land, which has also been a result of the potato-famine, has greatly modified another. Minute fragments of land are no longer clung to with the desperate tenacity of former days, when its possession was the sole condition of existence.

The voice of the peasant is therefore no longer available to swell the cry for an agrarian law under the doubtful name of “Fixity of Tenure.” To the raising of that cry, I firmly believe, the total subversion of the Irish national party may be traced, and the remembrance of it will ever be the greatest obstacle in the way of its restoration. Whatever may have been the intentions of those who invented the phrase, it certainly conveyed to the minds of the ignorant no other notion than that of an easy appropriation of the property of others; and to those of persons of reflection, the idea alone of spoliation, not merely of their accumulations vested in land, but of the daily earnings of their industry. That many of the promoters of the movement in question were incapable of entertaining the idea of M. Prudhon - that property is robbery - I am well aware, and I will not argue that it could be legitimately traced in their language; but it was, nevertheless, an easy corollary from their proposition, and as such it was received by the public. Now, the feeling of property is not merely stronger in the human mind than that of nationality, but it is its necessary antecedent. It is impossible that a nation can exist independent of rights of property, both collective and individual. Therefore no man of sense or honour could implicate himself in a movement to attempt the establishment of nationality upon an essentially defective basis.

I have already, I hope, both in this volume and elsewhere, expressed my views upon the subject of the relations between landlord and tenant with sufficient clearness, and have also carried them into practice, to my own great advantage, for too long a period, to permit me to fear that the foregoing remarks will be misunderstood as containing an advocacy of the extreme doctrine of ” doing what one like s with their own.” My understanding of a complete enjoyment of property, on the contrary, is fully expressed by the old maxim of law, which sanctions a man in using his own rights as freely as he can do, without injuring those of another; and for that amount of liberty alone do I contend. So thinking, I look with satisfaction upon the decline of the popular competition for land in Ireland, as the removal of another barrier between the classes, the replacement of which, I earnestly hope, may be rendered impossible by a fair regard on the part of the landowners to the principles of commercial prudence, which I am quite certain will be found to be coincident with those of humanity and justice, in their dealings with the cultivators of their lands.

It is upon these two great points of approximation between the classes that I chiefly rest my hopes for the future unity, prosperity, and legislative independence of Ireland. It is only in this order progress can be made. The barriers of English party politics, and of agrarian agitation, being removed from between Irishmen, it is possible they may unite, prosper, and become free.

That something more than the mere removal of barriers has been already done towards the advancement of this holy work I would fain persuade myself. The mutual sufferings, and kindnesses, and co-operation, during the last three or four years, of men who before never met, and who, in all probability, ignorantly hated and feared each other, must have softened many hearts. There is a growing feebleness manifested from day to day in the convulsive efforts of the demagogues to keep up the old party strife. The government evidently find a difficulty in perpetuating discord. It is plain, from the testimony in reference to the late orange and green fight in the County of Down, that the raising of a finger by the executive would have prevented the lamentable results of a demonstration which was engaged in unwillingly, and under the spur of faithless and cowardly leaders. It has been found impossible to get up a cry even upon the acknowledged and offensive grievance of the Church Establishment. Added to these signs, there is, too, the most important fact that a united education of the people is going on, and being extended upwards in the social scale, under a system, the triumph of which over the bigotry of the two extremes of party, is now accomplished. I see these specks of blue sky upon the horizon, and I hope that the breaking up of the clouds that overhang the destiny of my country may be looked for at no distant day.

But, however or whenever it may arrive, the independence of Ireland is sure to come at last - as sure as that the Roman Empire fell in pieces, or the North American provinces are now free states. England holds no patent of exemption from the common lot of nations. When misfortune shall overtake her, or the lot common to empires as to individuals, can she lay the flattering unction to her soul that she has acted with probity towards Ireland?

At all events, it is certain that a highly-centralised government, and a hired soldier class altogether separate from the citizen, and, as the necessary consequence, a monstrous and growing load of debt, form a political conjunction that, in the history of the world, has not been known to endure long. A metropolis containing nearly two and a-half millions of people, and an insular province ungovernable without the aid of 50,000 bayonets, are materials of a political fabric such as were never at any period found to be congruous. Yet, day after day, London is growing larger and larger, and the administration of the government of Ireland is, with equal steps, becoming less and less domestic. The public works are executed; a monstrous establishment of beggars is maintained, by the agency of hired English officials, who, at their own pleasure, impose a ruinous taxation upon the people, and cause it to be levied by 50,000 English mercenaries, under the apparently civil superintendence of stipendiary magistrates.

Here is a succinct but complete account of the English Government in Ireland. Under it the staff of paid officials now rivals in number those of the Austrian and Russian despotisms, and it is gradually increasing. This cannot last, and the sooner it shall be brought to an end the better for the two countries. It is the interest of both the kingdoms, different and distinct as they are, morally and physically, to be separate and yet united. It is only under such a constitution the British Empire can be sustained in its grandeur, as a rallying point for liberty and progress.

To England, I would say, it is your interest that Ireland should recognise in you her best friend and federated ally under the same imperial crown. To my own countrymen my parting advice is, obey the law, but endeavour to change it: in your internal relations, bear and forbear with each other: *concordia parva crescunt; discordia, maxima dilabuntur: *distracted and divided by civil and religious strife, you will be poor and oppressed: united in industry, you will prosper; and prosperous, you will be free. The God that made Ireland fertile, and placed her on the confines of two hemispheres, designated her before the world as the key of Eastern and Western commerce, and a home of civilisation and freedom.

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