CHAPTER III

THE QUESTION OF THE IRISH LAND--SKETCH OF THE HISTORY OF THE LAND SYSTEM

OF IRELAND TO THE YEAR 1870

Great importance in the history of Ireland of the conditions of land

tenure--The ancient Celtic land system and its characteristics--The

Norman conquest of Ireland--Norman feudalism in the Irish land--The

policy of Henry VII., and especially of Henry VIII.--The era of the

conquest and confiscation of the Irish land--The possessions of the

O'Connors of Offaly wrested from them--Forfeiture of the domains of

Shane O'Neill, and of the Earl of Desmond--Attempts at

colonisation--All Ireland made shire land--The extinction of the old

Celtic land system--The Plantation of Ulster--Progress of confiscation

during the reigns of the two first Stuarts--The Civil War--Immense

confiscations made by Cromwell--His scheme of colonisation a

failure--The era of confiscation closes after the battle of the Boyne

and the fall of Limerick--The Penal Code of Ireland--Its fatal effects

on the Irish land--Dismal period in Irish landed relations--Gradual

improvement--The period described by Arthur Young--Evil traces of the

past remain--Whiteboyism and agrarian disorder--State of Irish landed

relations up to the rebellion of 1798, and after the

Union--Over-population and the results--Distress after the

Peace--State of Irish landed relations up to 1844--The Report of the

Devon Commission--The Famine and its effects on the Irish land--The

Encumbered Estates Acts--State of Irish landed relations from 1848 to

1868.

The fortunes of many communities, it has truly been said, have been

decisively affected by the conditions of the ownership and the occupation

of the soil. The social, even the political, life of modern Europe has

been, in a great measure, moulded by the land tenures that have grown out

of the feudal system; I need only refer to the history of England, of

France, and of Germany. This remark, however, especially applies to the

events that make up the annals of Ireland; that long and unhappy tale of

misfortunes and errors is intimately associated, all through, with the

land, and with the relations connected with it. Modern research has shown

how grotesque and mischievous was the ignorance of the Tudor lawyers and

statesmen, who described the ancient organisation of the Irish land as a

medley of barbarian and pernicious usages; it was an archaic and imperfect

specimen of the feudal system, with differences indeed, but marked with

its essential features. Norman feudalism, lawless and ill-ordered, was for

centuries, after the first Conquest, placed beside this primitive form of

society, in parts of a country not half subdued; the results were seen in

incessant strife and discord, and in social anarchy, which prevented

civilisation growing up. The Irishry had well-nigh driven the Englishry

into the sea, when Henry VII. tried to make his authority felt in Ireland;

his successor, partly a Celt in blood, and a real statesman, devised a

noble scheme for bringing an ill-governed dependency within the domain of

order and law, by planting an Anglo-Norman and native aristocracy in the

soil, subject to a strong monarchy that would have protected the community

as a whole. Most unfortunately the policy of Henry VIII. was not carried

out; in the great conflict of the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries,

Ireland was drawn into a long struggle with England, and was repeatedly

made a place of arms for her foes; an era of savage conquest, accomplished

piecemeal, with ruthless confiscation following in its train, was

protracted during nearly a century and a half; and at the close of the

reign of William III., nine-tenths probably of the land of Ireland had

been wrested from its former possessors, and the old Celtic land system

had been destroyed by the sword and by law. Race and religion made this

position of affairs much worse; the age of Protestant ascendency in

Ireland began; in infinitely the greatest part of the island the land was

parcelled out among a caste of owners distinct in blood and faith from the

children of the soil, and lording it over an oppressed peasantry; and the

system was propped up by a code of cruel laws, which maintained and, so to

speak, stereotyped these evil divisions. The lines of the land system of

Ireland were thus finally laid down; a variety of economic and social

causes increased and deepened their extreme harshness; and though they

have gradually been softened, and are now all but effaced, their traces

and the results are still to be seen. The last thirty years have witnessed

repeated attempts to effect radical changes in the modes of the ownership

and the occupation of the land in Ireland; they have wrought a revolution

in Irish landed relations, and have well-nigh turned them upside down; but

the consequences have assuredly not been fortunate. The land system of

Ireland has been made a chaos of economic disorder, of dissensions of

class, of legalised wrong, absolutely incompatible with social progress

and the general welfare.

I must glance, for an instant, at the distinctive features of the land

system of Ireland in the Celtic age, for despite the effects of

confiscation and conquest, faint traces of it may still be seen, and have

a kind of influence.[36] As was the case in all communities of the Aryan

stem, the land originally was largely held in collective ownership; but

agriculture developed individual ownership by degrees, though less so in

Ireland than in more progressive countries. The people were settled on the

soil in tribes, clans, and septs, these being the larger and the smaller

units; the modes of the tenure of the land, misinterpreted by Elizabethan

sages, differed widely from each other, but revealed the traditions of old

patriarchal usage and power, especially in their canons of descent and

succession. The feudalisation of the land, as it has been significantly

called, a process which took place in nearly the whole of Europe, was also

witnessed in Ireland, to a certain extent; but this was not so complete

and strongly marked as in France and England. The land, nevertheless, was,

throughout the island, held ultimately from a supreme monarch; it was

divided, under him, among families of princely chiefs, who ruled vast

tracts with scarcely controlled authority; inferior chiefs were subject to

these; the organisation of the land had much in common with the

organisation of the Anglo-Norman manor, and with the position of the Lord

Paramount of every manor, the head of the English State. The Irish kings

and chiefs had lands in demesne; they had a landed and a personal

_noblesse_; the territories they ruled were held by classes strongly

resembling the free tenants, the villeins, and the serfs of the feudal

system. All this, however, was not as perfectly defined as it was in lands

feudalised to a higher degree; and though the Davieses and Spensers were

wholly in error in representing the dependents of the Irish kings and

chiefs as little better than a horde of fighting men and slaves, Ireland

never fully possessed the liberties feudalism secured. The Ceile of

substance, who had lands of his own, seems to have been in an inferior

position to the English freeholder; the Saer stock and Daer stock tenants

held their lands by a tenure like that of the metayers of France; the

Fuidhirs were kept in complete subjection, and had not even the rights of

the villein. The land, too, was still largely held in collective

ownership; in its occupation this is even now seen in backward and poor

districts; and, curiously enough, distinctions were drawn between what was

a 'fair' and a 'rack rent,' words still common in the mouth of the Irish

peasant, and to which recent legislation has given its sanction.

As in the case of most lands where anything resembling feudalism

prevailed, with the single exception of England, under her strong

Monarchy, Ireland in these circumstances was torn by continual discord,

increased by the recurring struggles with the Dane. The Celtic kings and

chiefs, nevertheless, were beloved by their people; the land system fell

in with Celtic tribal ideas and sentiments. I pass over the incidents of

the first Norman Conquest; in the course of time, an Anglo-Norman colony

was established, within a Pale ever-varying in extent, and held parts of

the country under feudal conditions, the remaining, and by far the

greatest, parts being left in the possession of the Celtic kings and

princes. Anglo-Norman feudalism, however, was completely different, in

Ireland, from what it was in England; it was not subject to vigorous

kingly rule; it was confined within comparatively small limits. In these

circumstances the Pale fell into the hands of a few leading and great

families; these, as had been largely the case in Scotland, formed a

domineering and oppressive _noblesse_, continually engaged in quarrels

between themselves, and in petty wars with the Celtic chiefs, and

completely superior to the royal power in England. The Geraldines, the

Butlers, the De Burghs, and other great houses, had no law but their own

wills in their vast lordships; their exactions and tyranny became a

byword; their lives were spent in savage feudal strife, and in 'hostings

against the Irish enemy.' Strange to say, too, these scions of a mighty

conquering race fell under the spell of the Celtic genius, and, as it was

said, 'became more Irish than the Irish themselves; they were at least

largely assimilated to a Celtic model, and they adopted many of the usages

of the Celt. It was not much otherwise in the Celtic region outside the

Pale; the Irish chiefs often blended in marriage with the Anglo-Norman

settlers; but they were continually at war with them, and with each

other. Under these conditions, feudalism, in its best aspects, could take

no root, in the land, in Ireland; and there is much reason to believe that

the archaic Irish land system was gradually changed and almost broken up,

the power of the kings and chiefs being greatly increased, and the

position of their dependents being made essentially worse. It is obvious

that in a land, a scene of such disorder and misrule, civilisation and all

that the word implies could not exist; Ireland was probably more barbarous

at the close of the fifteenth century than she had been when she first saw

Henry of Anjou. The Pale had been restricted within ever-narrowing bounds;

generations of colonising 'Englishry' had entered the country, and had

left it in angry despair; the 'Irishry' had encroached on their

conqueror's domain; the work of Strongbow and Fitzstephen appeared to be

undone. Especially it was observed that nothing like a middle class, even

then the best element in the social life of England, had been able to

develop itself in Ireland, and that the humbler classes were always in a

state of wretchedness, ground down by exaction, and exposed to incessant

wrongs of all kinds. 'What common folk of all the world'--these were the

words of a State paper of the age--'is so poor, so feeble, so evil be seen

in town and field, so greatly oppressed and trodden underfoot, fares so

evil, with so great misery, and with so wretched a life, as the common

folk of Ireland?'

Henry VII. strengthened the authority of the Crown in Ireland; the

Viceroyalty of Poynings marks an epoch in her chequered annals; but the

conduct of the king was shifting and weak; the land fell under the control

of the great House of Kildare; the Irishry were driven back, but in no

sense subdued. Surrey, the victor of Flodden, intreated Henry VIII. to

make the country his own by sheer force of arms; but his master refused in

striking language; and proposed a scheme for bringing Ireland under the

control of the Monarchy, for encouraging civilisation and promoting order,

the wisest that has ever suggested itself to a British statesman. He made

several of 'the degenerate' Norman _noblesse_ peers; he extended the same

dignity to several Irish chiefs; he assembled representatives of Ireland

in a Parliament composed of both races; he appointed commissioners to go

through the country and to punish crime; above all--and this deserves

special notice--he tried to conciliate the Celtic community by bringing

their usages within the cognisance of the law, and giving them effectual

legal sanction; and he condemned the attempts being already made to force

laws on them peculiar to England. Had this enlightened policy been

steadily pursued, the history of Ireland would have run a wholly different

course; but destiny, that has played so sinister a part in Irish affairs,

interfered to thwart the admirable designs of the king. The great

Geraldine rebellion broke out, supported by irregular Celtic risings; from

this time forward, during five generations of man, the era of cruel but

intermittent conquest, accompanied by wholesale confiscation, set in. The

powerful tribe of the O'Connors of Offaly, closely associated with the

fallen House of Kildare, was the first to feel the weight of the arm of

England; its territories were forcibly overrun and annexed, given the name

of the King's and the Queen's Counties, and peopled with a colony of

settlers from England. Celtic Ireland ere long was brought into the

conflict between Elizabeth and Philip II., the representatives of the

faiths that were dividing Christendom; the princely chief, Shane O'Neill,

fell a victim to the English conquerors, though their quarrel with him was

not wholly one of seeking the assistance of a foreign enemy; his vast

domains were, also, in part forfeited, in part handed over to a puppet of

English power. The frightful Desmond rebellion followed; it was directly

encouraged by the Pope and by Spain; after a protracted struggle

approaching a real civil war, the immense lordships of the great Geraldine

House were confiscated, and granted to a colony of English blood. Tyrone,

the real successor of his kinsman, Shane O'Neill, a soldier and statesman

of no ordinary parts, seeing, as he bitterly said, that his 'lands were

marked down by the spoiler,' endeavoured, not without partial success, to

combine a great Irish League against England; he entered into an alliance

with Spain; a Spanish army landed on the southern coast of Munster; after

a long and sanguinary contest, Tyrone yielded, but his resistance had been

so formidable that he was allowed to retain his possessions.

The subjugation of a large part of Ireland, in the Elizabethan wars, was

marked by incidents of a most atrocious character. The Government had no

regular army to act in the field; it was compelled largely to rely on

armed levies of the Englishry, and on bodies of the Irishry attached to

the conqueror's standards; for in this, as in nearly all instances

throughout their history, the Irish Celts were at feud with each other;

Celtic Ireland was a house divided against itself. The queen, it has been

written, 'ruled over blood and ashes,' when Mountjoy sheathed his

victorious sword; the memory of this period still lives in Irish

tradition. A season of exhaustion and repose ensued after James I. had

ascended the throne; but the time, in the phrase of Tacitus, had an evil

aspect in peace itself. The Pale had long before this been effaced;

conquest and confiscation had spread over nearly the whole island; the

domination of England was felt almost everywhere. As the result, the whole

of Ireland was made shire land; the old Celtic land system, which still

widely prevailed, was swept away by decisions of the Anglican Courts of

Justice; it was declared to be 'a lewd and not law-worthy thing;' all the

Irish land was subjected to English modes of tenure; they were imposed on

a people which detested these gifts of the stranger; innumerable tribal

rights were destroyed. Ere long the work of confiscation began again; the

domains of Tyrone and of his kinsman O'Donnell were pronounced forfeited

for reasons that have never been ascertained; the Crown was placed in

possession of nearly six counties of Ulster. Up to this time the

settlements of English colonists, which had been made in Ireland by Tudor

conquest, had failed; the colonists had been almost lost in the midst of

the Irishry, who hemmed them around. This immense confiscation was,

however, in part successful; it was carried out on comparatively

enlightened principles; it has produced the famous Plantation of Ulster;

and this, with other settlements in the counties of Antrim and Down, has

established, in a large part of the northern province of Ireland, a hardy

and thriving community, in the main, of Scottish blood. Confiscation,

nevertheless, did not stop here; 'the ravages of war,' in Burke's

language, were 'carried on amidst seeming peace;' enormous tracts were

torn from their former owners on pretexts usually of the flimsiest kind,

and were flung to Court favourites, to jobbing speculators, to greedy

adventurers of the baser sort. By this time three-fourths probably of the

soil of Ireland had passed into the hands of a new race of possessors; the

descendants of Anglo-Norman nobles and of the Celtic princes had been

sufferers well-nigh in the same proportion. At last Strafford marked out

the whole province of Connaught, for what has been called 'his majestic

rapine;' this and other innumerable acts of spoliation and wrong

unquestionably were the paramount cause of the great Celtic rising of

1641. Another and soon to be a most potent element of evils and troubles

had already begun to make its sinister presence felt in Ireland. In the

great religious schism of the sixteenth century, England had become

Protestant, Ireland had remained Catholic, and each had taken opposite

sides in the conflict that followed; though the Elizabethan wars were

rather struggles of race than of faith. But as conquest and confiscation

progressed in Ireland, the Anglican Church, a scion of the Norman Church

of the Pale, was erected on the ruins of its Celtic Catholic rival; the

land more and more became possessed by settlers alien in creed from the

old owners, and from the vanquished children of the soil; and harsh laws

had begun to deepen the distinctions between them. Nevertheless, though

its signs had in some measure appeared, the era of Protestant ascendency

and Catholic subjection had not been developed in Ireland, as yet, in its

worst aspects.

The wild Celtic rising of 1641 was followed by a rising of the old

Englishry of the Pale--the descendants of the first Anglo-Norman settlers;

both movements were probably encouraged from France; though widely

different, they ran into each other. The great Civil War was now running

its course in England; Ireland, for the most part, took the side of the

king; the majority of Englishmen were certainly on the side of the

Parliament. I cannot retrace the scenes of the contest in Ireland; after a

fierce and protracted struggle, in which an envoy of the Pope became the

representative of an ill-united Irish League; in which Preston and Ormond

led the forces of the Pale, and Owen Roe O'Neill was at the head of the

Irish Celts,--the whole island was subjugated by the sword of Cromwell, as

it never had been subjugated before. Drogheda and Wexford are names of woe

in the annals of Ireland; but the conquest of the Protector, ruthless as

it was, was not so cruel as that of the Elizabethan soldiers; if deeply

stained with blood, it was rapid and completely decisive. The colony in

Ulster had begun to flourish; Cromwell designed a scheme for the

colonisation of the vanquished country more thorough and extensive than

any which had been designed before. Three-fourths of Ireland had been in

arms against the Parliament; that assembly had made grants by

anticipation of Irish forfeited lands to 'adventurers' who had advanced it

moneys; an opportunity for immense confiscations had arisen; the Protector

was not slow to take advantage of it; his Puritan fanaticism, his hatred

of the Irish people, especially of its 'idolatrous Papists,' his strong

English and religious sympathies, united to confirm him in his purpose.

The forfeited lands in four of the Irish counties were appropriated to the

Commonwealth and its uses; those in eighteen were to be granted to the

'adventurers' and the soldiery of the late conquest; those in seven were

to be allotted to the army in England. The grants were to be either free,

or to be purchased at nominal prices; the owners, who had lost their

lands, were to be deported to Connaught--'Hell' was the alternative, the

tradition runs--and 'Courts of Claims,' as they were called, were to be

set up, to adjudicate on the conduct of those who were to be

dispossessed--they were to be subjected to a test which scarcely one could

satisfy--and practically to measure confiscation out under the pretence of

law. By these means Cromwell calculated that some forty thousand

colonists, of English blood and of the Puritan faith, would be poured into

the millions of acres which the sword had placed in the hands of his

Government; these would form a prosperous settlement loyal to England;

would keep rebellion in Ireland for ever down; and would regenerate a land

taken from a race akin to the Amalekites of old. As a foretaste of the new

and glorious order of things, Sir William Petty, a very able man,

remarkably skilful in feathering his own nest, made a cadastral survey of

Ireland, which still remains.

Cromwell's scheme of confiscation was thoroughly carried out, spite of

much angry wrangling between the Puritan warriors. The remains of the

defeated Irish armies went, in thousands, into exile in foreign lands;

they were the heralds of the renowned soldiery who, for a century and a

half, were deadly, but honourable foes of the British name. The rule of

the Protector in Ireland was stern but enforced peace; Ireland was

prostrate in the exhaustion of despair; there is much proof that, under

the Cromwellian settlement, the country made a kind of material progress.

But Cromwell's great scheme of colonisation failed, as such schemes had

failed in many instances before; a large majority of the 'adventurers' and

the soldiers sold their possessions, usually for a mere nothing: many

'degenerated' like the old Norman families, and, won over by the spells

'of the daughters of Heth,' had, in one or two generations, become 'mere

Irish.' The ultimate result of the Cromwellian conquest was to establish

in Ireland three or four thousand owners of the soil, of English blood and

Puritan leanings, without the support of inferior dependents, in the midst

of a vanquished population hostile in race and faith; the sentiments thus

engendered have never died out; to this day 'a Cromwellian landlord' is a

name of reproach in Catholic Ireland. At the Restoration hope for a moment

revived in the hearts of the ruined owners, who had been dispossessed by

Cromwell, and of whom hundreds had fought for the Crown; but this was

dashed by the perfidy of Charles II. and his courtiers; the Cromwellian

forfeitures were, in the main, confirmed; large tracts were given back to

favourites of the Stuarts, but thousands of beggared families lost their

estates for ever through a policy of cruel baseness and wrong. Ireland

remained quiescent for nearly thirty years; she even prospered under the

wise rule of Ormond--one of the noblest figures in her unhappy history;

but the bitter memories of the past lived in the conquered people, though,

as has repeatedly been seen in a Celtic race, they were treasured in

silence, and caused little apparent trouble. James II. ascended the throne

in 1685; he had a great opportunity to mitigate many of the wrongs of

Ireland; he might have removed some of the evils of the Cromwellian

conquest, and have effected changes in the settlement of the land, which,

at least, would have done partial justice. But the unfortunate king was a

bigot, and, in no sense, a statesman; like his father he tried the

desperate policy of making use of Ireland in his designs against English

liberties; he sent Tyrconnell to Dublin, and, in a few months, revolution

had broken out through the country; English and Protestant Ireland was

well-nigh trampled underfoot; Catholic and Celtic Ireland rose up in a

wild hope of revenge. I cannot even glance at the stirring events that

followed; the descendants of ruined barons of the Pale and of Celtic

princes driven from their lands and their homes, joined in a great effort

to raise a large armed force; the rising almost assumed a national aspect;

but after the Boyne and the fall of Limerick, it was finally quelled by

William III. The process of confiscation was once more renewed; thousands

of acres were taken forcibly from those who had resisted in the field, and

were handed over to a new race of colonists belonging to the blood and the

creed of the victors; and the shameful violation of a solemn Treaty made

all that was cruel in spoliation worse.

The era of conquest in Ireland and of confiscation by force--an agony

prolonged for a century and a half--was brought to an end in the reign of

William III. This is not the place to examine the question on which side,

as between England and Ireland, the balance of the wrongs that were done

inclines; but if much that is cruel and shameful is to be laid to the

charge of England, Ireland, it cannot be forgotten, crossed her path

repeatedly in an age of grave national perils and troubles, and, moreover,

wrecked her own cause by her wretched dissensions. The Irish land had now

nearly all fallen into the hands of a caste of owners, of English and

Scottish descent, and in faith Protestant, divided from a people of

Catholic occupiers for the most part of the Irish race; wide lines of

demarcation had been drawn between them; and there was no middle class to

bridge over the gulf. In a part of Ulster alone where the proprietors and

the holders of the soil were largely of the same religion and blood, was

there the promise of a more auspicious order of things; even here causes

of disunion were not wanting. Nor were these the only vices and dangers of

a land system which has scarcely had a parallel. Enormous tracts had been

bestowed on owners who never saw their estates; absenteeism existed to an

immense extent; their lands, too, had, in thousands of instances, been

underlet to a class of intermediate owners, who were to form a body of

most oppressive landlords. In addition, the representatives of numbers of

ruined families still vegetated on the domains which had been their own;

the few families which had escaped from the spoilers, were held in

reverence by the peasantry around; elements of disorder and trouble

continued to fester. The destruction, too, of the old Celtic modes of land

tenure, and the substitution of the English system, had unjustly

annihilated tribal rights wholesale; the free, and other dependents of the

Irish chiefs, had sunk into the position of mere tenants at will, that is,

at the mercy of foreign and often unknown masters. One of the worst, if

not the most apparent evil, of the gigantic confiscations which had taken

place, and on which the land system had, so to speak, been founded, was

that the respect which attaches to the ancient ownership of land, and

which forms, perhaps, its surest support, could hardly exist in any part

of Ireland; the disastrous consequences may be traced to the present hour.

Landlords, with titles of yesterday, won by the sword, could not feel the

interest in their estates and in the inhabitants on them, naturally felt

by owners of gentle and ancient descent; the land which, as has been said,

had been flung like a fox to ravening hounds, could not attract to it

happy and peaceful memories; the very Government had learned to think it

could deal with the land as it pleased, and treated the rights gained by

confiscation with contempt. Prescription, the strongest cement of

property, had no place in this ill-compacted land system.[37]

The era of Protestant ascendency bringing Catholic subjection with it, had

now set in for many years in Ireland; its evils were aggravated by harsh

divisions of race, and by more than a century of bitter memories; its

effects were more conspicuous in the land than in other social relations.

This unnatural and calamitous position of affairs might, however, have

been replaced ere long by a better order of things, had it not been

artificially maintained and made enduring by legislation unexampled for

its far-reaching cruelty. I cannot attempt to describe the Penal Code of

Ireland; in the emphatic words of Burke, 'it was a complete system, full

of coherence and consistency; well digested and well composed in all its

parts; it was a machine of wise and elaborate contrivance; and as well

fitted for the oppression, impoverishment, and degradation of a people,

and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from

the perverted ingenuity of man.'[38] The objects of these execrable laws

were threefold: to exclude the Irish Catholic whether of Anglo-Irish or

Celtic descent--misfortune had well-nigh effaced the distinction--from

every office of trust in the State, from every profession, almost from

every walk of life; to persecute and proscribe the Catholic Church of

Ireland, and to place its priesthood under a humiliating ban, and finally

to ruin and degrade the few remaining Catholic owners of the soil; to

prevent the Irish Catholic from acquiring any real interest in it; and,

above all, to keep the Catholic peasantry in a condition of thraldom.[39]

The Code was only too successful in compassing its ends; I pass from its

operation as regards the two first, to point out how it sought to attain

the third, and how its provisions affected the Irish land and the manifold

relations connected with it. The estate of the Irish Catholic owner was

not to follow the ordinary courses of descent; it was 'to gavel,' and to

be divided among many persons; this was for the avowed purpose of making

'the landed property of Papists crumble away, and disappear.' The Irish

Catholic owner was subjected to cruel enactments that literally set his

household against him; his wife and children were bribed to become his

foes; law sate at his hearth to make his existence wretched. The Irish

Catholic, too, was forbidden to acquire land by purchase or even to

possess an incumbrance on it; as far as possible the ownership of land was

strictly confined to the Protestant caste. But the wrong that, in its

consequences at least, was perhaps the worst, was that the Catholic

occupier of the Irish soil could not obtain anything like an advantageous

tenure; he could not have a lease for a period beyond thirty-one years,

and this, too, at an excessive rent; and, in the great mass of instances,

he was a serf holding merely at will.

The forty years that succeeded the death of William III. are certainly the

most mournful period in Irish history. The memories of conquest and

confiscation were still fresh; the Penal Code kept Catholic Ireland in its

chains; society was fashioned on the type of the domination of a class,

separated from a whole community in race and faith. Nothing was left

undone to perpetuate this evil order of things; the Irish Parliament was a

mere oligarchy of the sons of the colonists of Elizabeth, Cromwell, and

William, apart from a few leading men in Ulster; its legislation for the

vanquished race was barbarous; Lords-Lieutenant spoke of the Irish

Catholics as of 'the common enemy;' a 'Papist was presumed not to exist'

in the Irish Courts of Justice. Meanwhile the penal laws were relentlessly

carried out for years; the Irish Catholic was placed under a universal

ban; the Catholic Church of Ireland lay, as it were, in the valley of the

shadow of death. But the direst consequences appeared in the land, and in

the social life of the landed classes; these were most calamitous and have

still left their traces. Many of the few Catholic owners abandoned their

estates, and carried their swords into foreign lands, where some rose to

well-deserved eminence; a small number conformed to the dominant faith in

order to exist in comparative peace at home; the majority clung to their

lands and bowed their heads to oppression. The Protestant lords of the

soil were what their antecedents and the law had made them; they were long

a harsh and exacting order of men, filled with bigotry and the pride of a

conquering race; they regarded the inferiors they ruled as pariahs and

helots. But, as usually happens, when society is in an unnatural state,

they did not prosper amidst the ruins around them; their lands were kept

on a kind of pernicious mortmain, as they could not mortgage or sell them

freely; absenteeism with all its mischiefs greatly increased; and

middleman tenures largely multiplied, subjecting the peasantry to a

detestable breed of landlords, Protestants and of English descent, like

their superiors, but much worse tyrants. As for the mass of the Catholic

occupiers of the soil, they were kept down in the lowest state of serfdom;

but multitudes found their way into foreign armies; 'the wild geese,' as

they were pathetically called, flew to Austria and, above all, to France,

where, in the ranks of the celebrated Irish Brigade--'ever and everywhere'

true to the Bourbon lilies--they won renown at Dettingen, Fontenoy, and

other fields of fame. The aspect of Ireland bore too faithful witness to

the misery engendered in this evil order of things. The country was still

covered with the wrecks of the late wars; the habitations, even of the

Protestant gentry, were squalid and mean; the towns were, in many

instances, sinking into decay; the peasantry were huddled together into

villages of huts; the traveller roamed through vast wastes of unfenced

pasturage, evidences of a land almost left in a state of nature. Hideous

famines were of repeated occurrence; one, that of 1739-41, swept the

population away in tens of thousands; the Irish Parliament

characteristically did nothing to help the sufferers; it met the emergency

by strengthening the means to enforce the payment of rent. The miserable

condition of Ireland was made worse by the legislation of the British

Parliament, which treated the country as a conquered colony; and, true to

the principles of the mercantile system, impeded or prevented the growth

of several Irish industries. This was, of course, most injurious to the

Protestant settlers; but these were held down by the ruling power; as was

finely said, 'they knelt to England on the necks of their countrymen.' The

state of things in the colonised parts of Ulster was somewhat better; but

the Scottish and Presbyterian population of this corner of Ireland had not

a few causes of serious complaint.[40]

In the next generation a great but gradual change passed over the state of

the Irish community. The Penal Code was not in letter relaxed; but the

evil spirit which had conceived it lost much of its force. The men who had

fought at the Boyne and at Aghrim had passed away; the human conscience,

moved by the influences of the eighteenth century, revolted from the

barbarous legislation of a half-fanatical age. The Irish Catholics slowly

began to make themselves felt in the State; many amassed large fortunes in

foreign commerce; shut out as they still were by law from almost every

profession and office, they made their way into the medical calling, and

especially at the Bar, where their disabilities were evaded or ignored.

The Catholic Church was no longer proscribed; its worship, indeed, was

still carried on under degrading conditions; but its priesthood were

permitted to perform their sacred functions in peace; its dignitaries were

even countenanced by the men in power at the Castle. This great social

change was conspicuously seen in the land; landed relations were markedly

improved, and partly transformed. The Catholic owners were permitted to

hold their estates free from the cruel vexations of the past; they began

to live on terms of friendship with the Protestant caste; legal fictions

annulled the laws which had made their lives wretched; their lands were,

in many instances, held by the Protestant gentry on secret trusts; and

these, though contrary to law, were, as a rule, most honourably fulfilled.

The principal, however, and most decisive change appeared in the position

and the sentiments of the Protestant lords of the soil. As time rolled on,

and threw its kindly growths over the settlement of confiscation and the

sword, these men began to feel that Ireland was their country and home;

they became, to a certain extent, Irishmen; they felt sympathy, by

degrees, with the conquered serfs in their midst. This feeling was

strengthened by the tyrannous selfishness of the British Parliament, which

treated Ireland as if she were its footstool, and of the official class,

nearly all Englishmen, who lorded it over the land they despised; an

'Irish interest' grew up in the Parliament at College Green, composed very

largely of the Protestant landlords; this became patriotic, in a certain

sense, and a protector of the scanty rights of Ireland. As social order,

too, was seldom disturbed, the wealth of the country had considerably

increased; the gentry acquired a greater interest in their estates, and

became more and more attached to them; absenteeism, as the result,

perceptibly lessened; and middleman tenures, though still prevalent,

diminished remarkably in the more progressive counties. The deep lines of

demarcation which kept apart the owners and the occupiers of the soil were

thus to a certain extent bridged over; the Irish landlord, especially if

resident, became a kindlier superior than his fathers had been; the Irish

peasant became less a stranger to him.

The evidences of this better order of things became manifest on the face

of the country. Agriculture, though still backward, made real progress;

the breeds of farming animals greatly improved; the huge breadths of

pasturage had a less deserted aspect. The country towns had generally

advanced; the land had been opened by good roads; the means of locomotion

had been largely multiplied. The rental of Ireland had doubled within

living memory; in some counties, indeed, it was nearly as high as it is

now; the land was at a price of more years' purchase than it is at the

close of the nineteenth century. It was at this period that the great

country houses of Ireland were built, and their vast demesnes laid out;

the wages of labour were low, but had distinctly risen; the peasant hind,

Arthur Young tells us, in point of food and clothing, was as well off as

his fellow in England. The land was largely parcelled out into

considerable farms; but small holdings were on the increase; and the

cottar system, in the course of time to become a source of manifold evils,

was not yet a cause of much mischief; the pressure of population on the

soil was not severely felt. Many of the great landlords, too, were

excellent men; they ruled the country well, and greatly improved their

estates; in numberless instances they had won the hearts of dependents,

who regarded them as kind masters. Yet the picture was not without a dark

side; this land system still had evil, nay, repulsive, features. Except in

the best part of Ulster the deep divisions of race and faith continued to

be profoundly marked; the Penal Code had made these, to a great extent,

indelible. There was still much oppression and exaction in landed

relations; the class of small landlords and the class of middlemen were

too generally tyrannical and harsh; complaints of over-renting were not

infrequent; and if the great landlords, as a rule, were not severe

superiors, many were extravagant, addicted to excess, and reckless

duellists; they bore a strong resemblance to the seigneurie of the old

French Monarchy. The peasantry, too, remained serfs, illiterate,

ignorant, and superstitious; the good feelings they often had for their

lords had too much of the submissiveness of the slave; and virtuous as

their women ordinarily were, they too generally yielded to the lusts of

their masters. The habitations, besides, of this population were still

wretched; if their lot had assuredly become better, it was often hard,

above all, degraded. They had begun to feel more acutely the ills they

suffered; in many counties they had banded themselves together into

lawless leagues, to protect themselves and to resist authority. These

associations, known by the general name of Whiteboys--perhaps taken from

the Camisards of the Cevennes--had as their objects the preservation of

rights of commonage, the extinction of tithes, and the reduction of rents;

they may be traced back to the great confiscations of the past; they were

held together by secret leaders and passwords; and they often kept whole

districts in a state of terror. A Draconic Code was directed against them;

though often put down they have risen to life again; Ireland has never

since been completely free from them; their influence still is distinctly

apparent. Associations of somewhat a similar kind, known as Steelboys and

Oakboys, were formed even in the good parts of Ulster; but they were much

less dangerous and were not permanent. It is a characteristic of

Whiteboyism, as it has ever since been called, that it has always had a

political side, and lends itself to revolutionary movements against

government itself.[41]

Though Protestant ascendency was still supreme at this period, the

confiscations of the past had not been forgotten; they were treasured in

the minds of the descendants of the old Catholic families, and of the

population among which they lived. The extinction, too, of the tribal

Irish tenures, had, we have seen, been a cause of grievous wrongs; this

was a tradition, also, handed down from father to son, and was still fresh

in the remembrance of a whole race. The land system, though to outward

seeming secure, nevertheless rested on unstable foundations, as was to

appear in the course of time; another element of disturbance was being

formed, which ultimately was to have immense force. Under the modes of

land tenure, which prevailed in England, since the system of small

holdings had been broken up, the land had generally been laid out in large

farms; partly from this circumstance, and partly owing to custom, the

charge of making permanent improvements of the land had almost everywhere

devolved on the owner of the soil; a tenant, who rented a farm, took it,

so to speak, equipped with the buildings and other things of the kind that

were suitable to it. But in Ireland, partly because small farms were

numerous, and partly because the custom had never grown up--the history of

the past fully accounts for this--the permanent improvements were very

seldom made by the landlord; the tenant, who held land, had to add, as it

were, its plant to it; he had to do much that gave it any real value. As

the inevitable result, the Irish occupier of the soil felt that he had

acquired a concurrent right in it; this, if the improvements were solid

and lasting, might almost amount to a partial joint-ownership, at least

give him, in equity, a real hold on the land. But a right of this kind was

not recognised by the law, founded as this was upon notions of English

tenure; it was liable to be destroyed should the tenant be dispossessed;

and as the tenure of the immense majority of the occupiers of the soil in

Ireland was either at will, or for a short term at a high rent, this

right, essentially of a quasi-proprietary kind, was made precarious, and

had no legal protection. With the prescience of genius, Burke perceived

the evils that might grow out of this state of things, though, as yet,

these were not much felt; he saw that it discouraged improvement of almost

every kind; especially he saw that the denial of legal sanction to the

rights in the land a tenant might have, and the fact that his tenure was

short and uncertain, might become a source of grave wrong, and of

far-reaching discontent. In a word, he detected an economic vice in the

land system of Ireland which, in the long run, was to do great mischief;

and curiously enough he indicated the remedies that ought to be applied,

and pointed out the true principles of a reform of Irish land tenure. It

would have been well had British statesmen adopted these; his simple,

just, and statesmanlike plan puts to shame the ill-designed and

unsuccessful attempts that have been made to recast the Irish land system

of late years, and the false, reckless, and socialistic theories at

present current on this important subject.[42]

I must pass over even the main events of the history of Ireland, after

this period, up to the close of the eighteenth century. The 'Irish

interest,' mainly composed of the great landed gentry, and turning to

account the American War, compelled the Parliament at Westminster to relax

many of the commercial restraints on Ireland, and to concede her a partial

free trade; under the guidance of the illustrious Grattan it obtained

legislative independence for the Irish Parliament. At the same time the

Penal Code was largely repealed; the Irish Catholic was permitted to

acquire the ownership of the soil; before long he received the electoral

franchise, though he was still excluded from the Irish Houses of Lords and

Commons. In these circumstances, Ireland made real material and social

progress; the wealth of the country rapidly increased; the Protestant and

Catholic upper classes began to unite in marriage; a commercial middle

class, if still very weak, grew up. Ireland seemed about to enter a

happier era; yet there were drawbacks to this partial welfare, especially

as regards the land system. Middleman tenures were becoming much less

frequent; absenteeism was markedly on the decline; but partly owing to

their contact with the Parliament in College Green, and to the brilliant

social life it created in Dublin, the landed gentry became more

extravagant than their fathers had been; they began to raise their rents

and to encumber their estates; over-renting became more common than

before; Whiteboy movements and agrarian disorder prevailed in many

districts. Ireland, however, probably would have made a great advance but

for the evil passions which the French Revolution engendered in the frame

of a society still deeply diseased. I cannot dwell on the unhappy years

that followed, leading to the Rebellion of 1798; I must confine myself to

their influence on the Irish land system. The object of Tone and of the

United Irish leaders was to combine Scottish and Presbyterian Ulster, and

the great mass of the Irish Catholics, into a league against British rule

and for 'Irish freedom;' unhappily, they were but too successful. They

appealed, not in vain, to thousands of farmers and traders in the Northern

Province, who had long had solid grounds of discontent, and had been

deeply stirred by the Revolution in France; they laid hold on the elements

of disorder and of division of race and faith, abounding in Catholic

Ireland, but largely concealed, and called on the peasantry to overthrow

their Protestant tyrants, and to strike a decisive blow in 'the cause of

Ireland.' Evil incentives were recklessly employed to arouse popular

passions; maps of the old confiscated lands were made; and active

emissaries went through the country, reviving dangerous traditions of the

past, and stimulating the worst sentiments of hatred, greed, and revenge.

As the result, sedition ran riot in Ulster; in the Southern Provinces

there was a great outburst of Whiteboy crime, and a widespread rising

against the payment of rent; and thousands of the occupiers of the soil

were swept into the United Irish ranks, scarcely conscious of the perils

to which they were exposed. How the movement led to the bloody rebellion

of 1798, and how this was put down after a desperate struggle, it is

unnecessary to consider here; the consequences in Irish landed relations

were most unfortunate. It is untrue that the large majority of the owners

of the Irish soil were guilty of the crimes that have been laid to their

charge; but they bitterly resented the allusions to the confiscations of a

bygone past; they became more estranged from their inferiors than they had

been for years.[43]

This terrible outbreak shook society in Ireland to its base, revived the

old divisions of race and faith which had been disappearing to a

considerable extent, and left memories behind which have not been

forgotten. Its inevitable result was to lead to the Union, a measure long

in the contemplation of British statesmen, and especially of Pitt, and

perhaps necessary in the most critical circumstances of the time. I cannot

even refer to the events attending this great constitutional change; a

large majority of the leading Irish landlords disliked it at heart; but a

minority, alarmed for their possessions, gave it support; how strong this

feeling was may be seen in a famous speech of Lord Clare, who described

the whole order of men as 'the heirs of confiscation hemmed in by enemies

brooding on their wrongs.' The Union greatly weakened the influence of

the Irish landed gentry, which had been very powerful in the defunct

Parliament; the 'Irish interest,' for many years a real force, was almost

subverted; English officials became again supreme at the Castle; a

bureaucracy gradually began to supplant the aristocracy of landlords in

every sphere of government. As respects the land and landed relations, the

class of Catholic owners slowly augmented; but the consequences were

trivial and not marked; middleman tenures continued steadily to disappear;

but absenteeism certainly increased, though absentee estates were usually

better managed than before. Meanwhile causes of grave importance, tending

to momentous social results, were profoundly affecting the whole land

system, and the position of the classes dependent on it. Partly owing to

the corn laws of the Irish Parliament, partly to the extension of the

Parliamentary franchise, in 1793, to the great mass of the Catholic

peasantry, but principally to the effects of the long war with France,

Ireland, it may be said, was well-nigh changed from a pastoral to an

agricultural country; large farms were generally replaced by small; the

land in most districts was divided into little tillage holdings; the

cottar system multiplied apace; the population, about three millions of

souls in the day of Arthur Young, increased to more than six millions at

the Peace of 1815; and this population becoming every year more dense, for

the most part eked existence out on a precarious root. The economic and

social consequences were very great, and continued in operation during a

long series of years. The competition for the possession of land became

intensely keen; rents were unnaturally forced up in thousands of cases;

the value of landed property enormously rose; all this encouraged

extravagance among the landed gentry, and especially induced them largely

to encumber their estates. At the same time the wages of labour distinctly

declined; the condition of the Irish labouring peasant, when Edward

Wakefield, a very industrious and able observer, wrote on the state of

Ireland in 1812, was markedly worse than it had been in the time of Arthur

Young. Yet these were not the most serious, at least, the most lasting,

effects of the revolution taking place in landed relations. As the large

farm system was being broken up, as the small farm system had come in its

stead, and as population had rapidly grown, the occupiers of the soil had

more and more made the permanent additions to their holdings; they had

built, fenced, and reclaimed land, more and more; and in the general

eagerness to obtain the possession of land, considerable sums were often

paid for farms on their transfer. The concurrent rights of the tenant

classes in Ireland had thus become enormously increased; they often

amounted, equitably, to a real joint-ownership; yet these rights were

without the support of law, and were liable to be extinguished often at

the mere will of the landlord. In Ulster alone, in its Presbyterian and

Scottish parts, where the landed classes had been less disunited than in

the South, a custom, now of considerable strength, had for a long time

made the tenure of the peasant comparatively secure; yet even this was not

under the ægis of law.[44]

Made wise, after the event, we now clearly perceive what ought to have

been done for Ireland in this position of affairs. There never had been an

Irish poor law; Protestant property was not to be charged for Catholic

want; but the population was fast increasing; a mass of wretched poverty

was being formed; this should have been supported, and yet checked, by a

poor law. At the same time legislation, as Burke had contended, should

have vindicated the moral rights of the occupier of the soil, should have

made what really was his property his own, should have rendered his tenure

profitable and secure. Nothing of the kind, however, came into the minds

of British statesmen, or even, it must be said, of the best Irishmen of

the day--the age was one of Toryism harsh and unfeeling; the abuses of the

poor law in England were great; it was not contemplated to apply it to

Ireland; above all, the equitable claims of the Irish tenant were not

understood or deemed worthy of notice; English tenure, utterly unfitted to

his true position, was good enough for him. The land system, nevertheless,

was not much disturbed while the high prices of the war prevailed; there

was a good deal indeed of disorder connected with the land, but society

was not deeply affected. And it is only just to observe that the

landlords, as a class, did respect the concurrent rights of their tenants

in the soil; the conclusive proof is that these could not have grown up

had they been generally, or even largely, set at nought. But a great and

calamitous change passed over Ireland when the comparative wealth caused

by the war collapsed, and when the return to cash payments made the

effects worse. Rents suddenly fell greatly, and even disappeared; the

wages of labour, which had usually been paid through what may be called a

wretched truck system, were reduced to a remarkable degree; hundreds of

thousands of the cottar peasantry sank to the lowest depths of indigence.

A great social convulsion, in a word, took place; this culminated in

famine in several counties; a miserable population was deprived of the

means of subsistence. In these circumstances the owners of the soil acted

as a class would ordinarily act; many, impoverished themselves, let things

drift; many made themselves conspicuous for good works of charity; a

minority had recourse to severe measures, like the English landlords of

the sixteenth century, to get rid of a mass of poverty clinging in despair

to the land. The old divisions of race and faith unquestionably

aggravated this state of things; but the Government of the day showed

little forethought, and, in fact, was infinitely the most to blame; it met

the emergency, not by wise and healing measures, but by legislation, which

made the eviction of the peasant from his holding easy and cheap, and by

having recourse to repression unjust and severe in the extreme. In too

many instances, 'clearances' of estates, an evil word, were witnessed;

hundreds of families were driven from their homes and cast on the world;

as the necessary result, in numberless cases, the equitable rights of the

Irish tenant were ruthlessly destroyed. As a matter of course,

Whiteboyism, never completely suppressed, broke out in formidable agrarian

disorder; the peasantry, deprived of the protection of law, leagued

themselves together to enforce a law of their own; crime multiplied to an

immense extent; all the machinery of coercion could not wholly keep it

under.[45]

I must pass rapidly over the next twenty years, though a very important

period in Irish history. Catholic emancipation was wrung by O'Connell,

from a reluctant Ministry, through violent agitation, which distracted

Ireland for years; the Irish Catholic was admitted into Parliament at

last. This great event was followed by the savage Tithe War, a movement

against the Anglican Church in Ireland stained with detestable deeds of

blood; the representation of Ireland passed largely into O'Connell's

hands, the head of what was called 'his Catholic Tail.' Protestant

ascendency in Ireland received a mortal blow; the influence of the Irish

landed gentry still further declined; that of the bureaucracy at the

Castle increased. From this time forward the Irish landlord began to feel

his position really insecure; it is remarkable how few large mansions and

demesnes have ever since been designed or completed by this order of men.

After the disastrous period which came to an end about 1826, the wealth of

Ireland perceptibly grew; a kind of prosperity existed in many parts of

the country. The age, too, had become more liberal and humane; the

middleman was got rid of in not a few districts; the absentee landlords

devoted more attention to their estates than they had ever devoted before.

The process of eviction, moreover, became much less frequent, though too

frequent for social order and peace; a considerable number of Irish

landlords expended large sums in improving their lands; farms were

consolidated, with good results, in many parts of the country. But the

essential features of the land system were not much changed; its economic

conditions became, in important respects, worse. The landed gentry, if

much less extravagant than their fathers had been, were, nevertheless, as

a class, much involved in debt; and, as usually has been seen in cases of

the kind, they became less really prosperous, as their authority declined.

Meanwhile, the population had continued rapidly to increase; by the close

of this period it exceeded eight millions of souls, a total far too great

for the resources of the land. The phenomena, already critical, became

more sinister; rents were again forced up as the wealth of the country

augmented, and reached the highest level they have ever attained; the

wages of labour did not fall, indeed, they could hardly fall lower; but

the cottar population had become more than ever dense; the competition for

the possession of the soil grew fierce; as necessarily followed, the

quasi-proprietary rights of the tenant in his holding had been enlarged,

and yet these were still outside the pale of the law. A Report, made in

1837-38, disclosed the appalling fact that two millions and a half of the

Irish community were for months in every year on the verge of starvation,

and always in a condition of extreme misery. Though Ireland had made, in a

sense, progress, her economic state had thus become dangerous, and very

bad; and a poor law, enacted at last in 1838, was utterly unable to cope

with the evil. Whiteboy crime and disorders continued to abound; in 1844,

an average year, there were more than a thousand instances of offences in

landed relations.

The year 1843 was that of the great Repeal movement, of which O'Connell

was the master spirit. Peel had been Prime Minister for two years; his

attention had been already turned to the vices and the perils of the Irish

land system. He had been Chief Secretary for Ireland from 1812 to 1818;

but he had been identified with the Tory misrule of that time; and though,

like Chesterfield in another age, he had been too sagacious not to see

that poverty made the social ills of Ireland more acute and worse, he had

been the ablest opponent of the Catholic cause, had supported Protestant

ascendency in many ways; and had not been in any sense an Irish reformer.

A strong Conservative of the great middle class in England, he looked on

Ireland as an almost foreign land, and had scarcely any knowledge of her

real needs; and though his severe administration at the Castle had been

wise and just, he carried out coercion with a steady hand, and is supposed

to have been the author of the code of cheap ejectment, a cause of a great

deal of evil and wrong. But his mind, if slow in moving, was moved at

last; he saw that Ireland largely required the amending hand; the conduct

of O'Connell, no doubt, had quickened his purpose. I cannot dwell on

Peel's other Irish measures; at the close of 1843 he appointed a

Commission charged to inquire into the state of Irish landed relations;

had he continued long at the head of the State, he would probably have

done much to improve the Irish land system. The Commission had, as

President, the chief of the great House of Courtenay; it was almost wholly

composed of Englishmen, more or less associated with land in England; it

was, therefore, ill constituted to deal with what may be called the Irish

Land Question. But it investigated the subject it treated with most

praiseworthy care; entering into every detail of Irish landed relations,

their history in the past, the state of land tenure, the condition of the

different classes seated on the land, the working of the law with respect

to tenant's improvements, the means of diminishing the wretched millions

squatting on the soil, agrarian crime and all that it involved; the mass

of evidence it collected is still of the greatest value. The Report it

made, if somewhat over-cautious and timid, was very instructive in many

respects; especially it showed how the Irish land system grew out of the

conquests and confiscations of the past, and still bore the marks of its

ill-omened origin, notably in the lines drawn between the owners and the

occupiers of the soil marked by a profound division of race and faith; and

many of the suggestions it made were wise, nay, excellent. But on the

capital subject of land tenure, by many degrees the most important, the

Report only too clearly revealed the ignorance of Englishmen as regards

Ireland, and, above all, as regards her landed relations. The Commission

ought to have fully recognised the concurrent rights in the soil, which

the Irish occupier had acquired in tens of thousands of instances, rights

often equivalent to more or less joint-ownership; it ought to have

insisted that the Tenant Right, as it was now called, of the Ulster

Custom, and the claims arising from improvements, the work of the tenant,

and from sums paid on the transfer of farms, should be made law-worthy,

and effectually secured. With a want of insight which would have made

Burke gnash his teeth, it took exactly an opposite course; it warned the

Irish landlord that these concurrent rights were creating against him 'an

embryo copyhold,' and eating away his freehold ownership; it plainly

hinted that he would do well to get rid of them. It even refused to

acknowledge that the tenant had a claim to any improvements if made in the

past; but it proposed a scheme for compensating him for improvements made

in the future, so limited and fenced round with restrictions, that it was

quite illusory, and indeed deceptive. The Report caused intense

indignation in Ulster, and was not well received in any part of

Ireland.[46]

Bills, founded on the Report of the Devon Commission, as it was called,

were brought into Parliament, but never became law. Within a few months

Ireland was in the throes of an agony, the most terrible, perhaps, that

has befallen any land in the nineteenth century. In the autumn of 1845,

the potato, which formed the only food of the indigent multitudes fastened

on the land, failed, to a considerable extent, in many districts; in the

following year the crop was all but completely destroyed. Famine, far more

general and appalling than that of twenty-five years before, had soon held

a wretched population in its grasp; the results may almost be compared to

those of the Black Death, and of the famines of the Middle Ages. The land

system went to wreck in whole counties, especially in the west and along

the seaboard; hundreds of the landed gentry were involved in ruin;

thousands of farmers of the better class became bankrupt; the dense cottar

multitudes were literally lifted up from the soil, and cast adrift, the

waifs and strays of a far-reaching tempest. This is not the place to

review the measures adopted to meet the dread visitation; if not free from

errors, inevitable in a situation of the kind, they were, essentially,

and, in the main, successful. Peel was still in office in 1845; well

knowing what poverty in Ireland was, he introduced supplies of food into

the remote and backward districts, which the energies of commerce could

hardly reach; this wise policy saved tens of thousands of lives; as is

notorious, he repealed the corn laws in the interest of the afflicted

country. The Government of Lord John Russell had succeeded him in 1846; it

had to confront an emergency infinitely worse; it followed, in many

respects, the example of Peel, who had established 'relief works' in many

counties; but it did not assist the most impoverished parts of Ireland

with food through the agency of the State; this possibly was a real

mistake. Nevertheless, it manfully and humanely met the tremendous crisis;

it is easy to censure some of its acts, for instance, the wasteful and

useless public works it set on foot, and the gigantic outdoor relief it

was compelled to lavish; but millions in starvation were thrown on its

hands; and the poor law, only lately in operation, could not cope with

universal distress. On the whole, the statesmen in power did their duty

wisely and well; thousands of unhappy victims succumbed, indeed, to

famine, and to dire diseases following in its train; but Ireland as a

people was saved; assuredly she could not have saved herself. A word, too,

must be said on the magnificent charity which flowed in from many lands

into the community in its woe. England had turned in sympathy towards

Ireland in the season of distress which had followed the Peace; she

bestowed great sums on her, in 1845-46, through private subscription. The

United States, France, Germany, and Italy joined in the good work; even

the Ottoman Empire was not behindhand.

I must dwell for a moment on the conduct and the position of the classes

connected with the land during this appalling trial. The attitude of the

landed gentry was much the same as it had been at an infinitely less

disastrous crisis; but, on the whole, it was marked by nobler and more

attractive features. The charity of the great landlords of Ireland was

most praiseworthy; many devoted large sums for the support of the poor on

their lands by instituting fine works of enclosure and drainage; some, I

know, even mortgaged their estates for this very purpose. Hundreds of the

lesser gentry, stricken down as they were, imitated their superiors as

well as they could; old divisions were forgotten in the common misfortune;

spite of the interested lies of a calumnious faction, as an order of men

they acted extremely well. One of their bitterest enemies, who wrote at

the time, has placed it on record, 'that the resident landlords and their

families did, in many cases, devote themselves to the task of saving these

poor people alive. Many remitted their rents or half their rents; and

ladies kept their servants busy and their kitchens smoking with continual

preparation of food for the poor.'[47] Many, however, of the Irish

landlords, as was to be expected, looked hopelessly on at the misery

around them; this was the case with feeble and incapable men, and the

sight has always been seen in grave social crises; it was but in

conformity with our frail and imperfect nature. A certain number,

moreover, of the class had recourse to severe measures to remove from

their lands the masses of wretchedness crowded upon them; the process of

eviction became too frequent; hundreds of families were in this way

dispossessed of their holdings. These acts of harshness were certainly to

be deplored; but it was almost universally believed that the cottar in

Ireland could not live from the land after the failure of almost his only

means of subsistence; it must be added that, in this very matter, the

conduct of Parliament and the Government was by many degrees more severe.

A strict test of destitution had to be applied; a law was passed that, as

a condition of obtaining relief, no person possessing more than a quarter

of an acre of land should be entitled to support from the State; thousands

of families abandoned their homes, through the effects of this measure;

for one evicted by a landlord, fifty perhaps were practically evicted by

this stern policy. The law was possibly required in the terrible

circumstances of the time; but it was condemned by the Lord-Lieutenant,

Lord Bessborough, a great Irish peer, and an able man; at all events, it

justified, to a considerable extent, all that could be laid to the charge

of a few Irish landlords whose acts were most unfairly denounced by many

writers, and were falsely described as common to the great body of the

class. For the rest, as I have said, the land system was broken up in many

districts; and not only the owners but the occupiers of the soil suffered

cruelly from the highest to the lowest grade.

After the first months of the famine, the immense exodus of the Irish

race, as it has fitly been called, began. The population fled from the

country in hundreds of thousands; some found a home in England and in our

Australian colonies; nine-tenths, probably, in the great Republic of the

West. The sufferings of numbers of the emigrants were terribly severe;

huddled together in the ill-found vessels of the time, hundreds perished

before they beheld the lands they were seeking; that some check was not

placed on the greed of the merchants, who subjected these victims to

horrors like those of the Middle Passage, was certainly the worst mistake

of the Government of the day. During the agony of the famine there was

comparatively little crime; the minds of men were engrossed by a dire

calamity; but in a few months Whiteboyism had been again aroused; there

was a widespread outbreak of agrarian disorder followed by the abortive

rising of 1848. The time was now ripe, in the judgment of even leading

statesmen, for making another of the great experiments on the Irish land,

which had been their policy since the age of the Tudors. Many of the Irish

landed gentry had been ruined; the estates of many were heavily charged

with debt, in part caused by extravagance in the past, but chiefly by

large provisions made for their families in more prosperous times,

especially during the period of the high prices of the war.[48] The

object of the Government--and Peel concurred--was to make a clean sweep of

the embarrassed owners, and to transfer their lands to a new order of men;

'English and Scottish capital was to be attracted to the Irish soil;' the

Irish landlord was to be 'sold out cheap;' his successor was to be a

person fit 'to discharge the duties of property;' the 'regeneration of

Ireland' was to be the magnificent result.[49] The sale of encumbered

estates in Ireland had from various causes been a slow and a costly

process, an Act was run through Parliament with scarcely an expression of

dissent,[50] making the process as rapid and inexpensive as the wit of man

could devise; a Commission was appointed to carry the law into effect; and

intending purchasers were to be given an indefeasible title to any lands

they might acquire. This was a strong measure, but it was not nearly all;

the concurrent rights of the tenants in the estates to be sold were

absolutely ignored, and left without protection; the new possessors were

empowered to destroy them if they pleased. The results were such as might

have been looked for when lands were forced into the market wholesale,

when Ireland was still reeling from the strokes of a terrible famine, and

agricultural ruin was seen everywhere. The Commission acted as such

tribunals invariably act when skilfully selected to carry out a policy; it

addressed itself to its task of 'selling land cheap;' it was egged on by

the Lord-Lieutenant of the day; and it sacrificed estates, in scores of

instances, at less than half their value. This iniquitous proceeding went

on for years, until the market for land in Ireland righted itself at last;

but the Encumbered Estates Act was often renewed; about a sixth part of

the lands of Ireland has been transferred by these means. As the result

many of the Irish gentry, who might have tided over the crisis, were

beggared and cast on the world penniless; and confiscation from above had

its counterpart in confiscation from below; the partial joint-ownership of

thousands of the occupiers of the soil was ruthlessly annihilated in

numbers of cases. And what were the consequences of this scheme of

spoliation and wrong, which English politicians would never have thought

of but for their traditional contempt of the rights of property in land in

Ireland? English and Scottish capital, indeed, reached the Irish soil; but

it reached it in the form of large mortgages, a heavy drain on the

country's resources; the English and Scottish purchasers of the Irish land

were a mere handful of men. The estates, in fact, transferred under the

Encumbered Estates Acts, as a rule, passed into the ownership of jobbers,

speculators, and mortgagees, people without the associations old

possession ensures; they have formed, as a class, harsh and exacting

landlords, the true successors of the almost defunct middleman; they are

responsible for much that is bad in Irish landed relations of late years.

A huge confiscation, in a word, failed, as those of Elizabeth and Cromwell

failed before; the fact ought to be a warning to public men, who have been

parading theories about the Irish land--strewn as this has been with

monuments of misdeeds and errors--as false and more dangerous than those

which produced the Encumbered Estates Acts.[51]

The exodus had, by 1851, reduced the population of Ireland by nearly two

millions of souls; this decline has continued ever since; the population

which, in 1846, was considerably more than eight millions, is now, we

have seen, only about four and a half millions. In 1852 an agitation

sprang up, which might have wrought a great change in Irish landed

relations, had it not been brought by mere accident to an untimely end.

The Report of the Devon Commission, I have said, had troubled Ulster; the

Famine had driven peasants, in tens of thousands, from their homes; the

operation of the Encumbered Estates Act was destroying their concurrent

rights in their holdings. At the General Election of 1852 Ireland returned

a large party of representatives to the House of Commons pledged to

vindicate the claims of the tenant farmers; these were expressed in a

demand that has been called the 'Three F's,' 'Fair Rent,' 'Fixity of

Tenure,' and 'Free Sale,' a mode of occupation which had been largely

secured by the Custom of Ulster, and to which O'Connell had given his

sanction. The Government of Lord Derby was now in office; it had brought

in measures which, in some degree, would have legalised the rights of the

Irish tenant; but the Ministry was defeated, partly through an

intrigue;[52] the cause of the Irish farmer was baffled and kept in

suspense for years, largely owing to dissensions and treachery on the part

of some of the Irish members. By this time the country had begun to

revive, and to throw off the worst effects of the Famine; vast depopulated

tracts had been opened to new husbandry; the land had been set free, over

an immense area, from the incubus of a mass of wretchedness which had

preyed on it, and had completely disorganised the land system, unnaturally

forcing up rent and cutting down wages. Under these conditions the

statesmen in power, already expecting great things from the Encumbered

Estates Act, believed that the Irish land system would right itself, and

that it was unnecessary to consider or to protect the rights of the

tenant classes; these would either disappear, or would be fairly adjusted

in the improved landed relations that were being formed. At all events,

there was no legislation to secure these claims; the scanty legislation,

that dealt with the Irish land, was unfavourable, in many ways, to these,

and endeavoured to assimilate Irish to English tenures, as Tudor lawyers

had done three centuries before; and Lord Palmerston, for a long time the

head of the State, discouraged Irish tenant right, in more than one

speech, and declared that it only meant landlord wrong, unwise utterances

that showed he did not understand the subject. At the same time, the

policy of clearing the land for cultivators of a capitalist class, able to

occupy and do justice to large farms, was generally advocated in high

places; more than one Lord-Lieutenant announced that nature had made

Ireland a great grazing tract, and that her petty occupiers were little

better than a social nuisance.[53]

For some time it seemed as though the forecasts made by the great majority

of our statesmen would prove correct. The immense emigration from Ireland

to the United States had important results, unfortunate in many respects;

but the uplifting of redundant millions from the soil greatly contributed

to the country's welfare. Holdings were consolidated over very large

areas, a beneficent process, if humanely carried out; a certain number of

Englishmen and Scotsmen rented large farms; the progress of husbandry of

all kinds was distinct; a vast field for agriculture, really worthy of the

name, was opened. A new standard for the management of land was, in fact,

set up; at the same time a few purchasers, under the Encumbered Estates

Acts, laid out considerable sums in improving their estates; the Treasury

made large advances to many Irish landlords; these did much in works of

enclosure, draining, planting, and the like. Ireland began to wear a new

aspect in several counties, especially in the more thriving parts of the

southern provinces; the ruins made by the Famine, indeed, caused hideous

eyesores, in wrecks of villages and the remains of peasant dwellings; but

the mud hovels of the cottar population had largely disappeared, and the

habitations of farmers of the better class very markedly improved. The

economic conditions of landed relations became more conducive to

prosperity than they had ever been before; rents fell considerably during

a series of years, as the intense competition for land diminished; though

they gradually rose in the course of time, they never reached the

excessive rates of 1840-45; and the wages of labour greatly increased, and

attained a level that, happily, has since been preserved. Many

circumstances concurred to quicken and augment this unquestionable social

and material progress. Agricultural prices were high from about 1852

onward; Free Trade was as yet adding to the wealth of Ireland; and there

was a long succession of good harvests, the most important element in her

general welfare. The railway system, too, introduced of late years, opened

a number of new markets to her products, and greatly facilitated their

access to British markets. At the same time the turnip replaced the potato

over hundreds of thousands of acres; farm machinery greatly improved in

Ireland; the importation of the best stock from England and Scotland had

excellent results, and almost transformed the old breeds of Irish farming

animals. An era of prosperity, in a word, had seemed to dawn on Ireland;

and though agrarian disorder had not disappeared, the Whiteboy secret

societies were greatly broken up, and political agitation well-nigh

ceased.

In these circumstances, it was a common belief in England that 'the Irish

difficulty,' as it was called, was passing away, and that the 'Hibernia

Pacata' had at last become a happy reality. Yet the progress and

tranquillity of this brief period were largely superficial and even

deceptive; fires were still alive beneath the smouldering ashes. The

partial prosperity of Ireland mainly depended on good harvests and high

prices; it was interrupted, even in these years, by two or three seasons

of distress. Notwithstanding the widespread consolidation of farms, and

the removal from the soil of indigent millions, the land still, for the

most part, remained in the possession of a mere peasantry; very few of the

English and Scottish capitalist farmers settled in Ireland, and really

throve; the great majority left the country, like the 'Englishry' of a

bygone age. And though things wore a serene aspect, the inherent vices of

the land system continued to exist; in some respects they increased, or

were more painfully felt. The old divisions of race and faith between the

owners and the occupiers of the soil remained; they had but little changed

and even had perhaps widened; much had happened to keep the landed classes

more apart than before. The new purchasers, under the Encumbered Estates

Acts, were, we have seen, often hard-fisted and grasping landlords; they

raised their rents, without scruple, in too many instances; standing on

the letter of the law, they too often ignored the partial joint-ownership

in their farms of their tenants; they had sometimes recourse to unjust and

severe evictions. The old landlords, too, never recovered from the effects

of the Famine; they were overshadowed by the bureaucracy of the Castle,

which, for many years, had been growing in power; they thus became an

order of men with privileges, but without authority, in the midst of

inferiors, who had little sympathy with them, a dangerous position like

that of the French seigneurie in the later years of the eighteenth

century--a position described by Tocqueville in very striking language. At

the same time the peasantry stood aloof from them more than in the days of

their fathers; and though they remained quiescent for years, as has often

happened in Irish history, there were causes for this increasing

estrangement. They were no longer the grossly ignorant multitude of fifty

years before; education had made some way among them, though in this

respect they were still backward; they felt more acutely all that was hard

in their lot, like the French peasantry before the great Revolution of

1789-94. This sentiment, however, owed its principal force to sentiments

engendered in far distant lands. The thousands of the exodus had left

their country with memories embittered against some Irish landlords, and,

notably, against the British Government; a new Ireland was rising across

the Atlantic; the emigrants and their sons were in constant communication

with the old Ireland once their home; socialistic ideas as regards the

land, blending with dislike of the superiors and the rulers, under whom

they lived, were gradually diffused among the Irish peasantry. The

economic conditions, too, of landed relations by degrees made these

feelings more general and intense. Rents were rising as the wealth of the

country increased, though, except in the cases of the new landlords, and

of a very few surviving middlemen, they were, as a rule, by no means

excessive. Simultaneously a concurrence of causes had extinguished

leasehold tenures in most parts of Ireland, and had reduced the status of

the Irish farmer to that of a mere tenant at will, liable to be

dispossessed by a notice to quit, at the mercy, in fact, of the lord of

the soil. And, meanwhile, the equitable rights of the occupiers as a

class, due to improvements, and to sums paid for the goodwill of farms,

had been increasing to an immense extent; and yet a grievous wrong--they

were not even recognised by law. Law and fact had long been sharply

clashing in landed relations; there was much that was essentially bad in

the land system; and agrarian trouble and crime was on the increase.

The mind of England had turned away from Ireland after the petty outbreak

of 1848; it charged the Irish community with ungrateful folly, as it

recollected the charity lavished during the Famine. This sentiment was

replaced by what was worse, indifference; throughout this period--from

1850 to 1868--Parliament gave little attention to the affairs of Ireland.

British statesmen continued to pin their faith to their policy; they

disregarded ominous symptoms on the increase; Ireland was rapidly becoming

more prosperous; the claims of the Irish tenant farmer were a delusion, or

worse. This apathy was augmented by the state of the representation of

Ireland in these years; this was in a feeble, even a degraded condition;

and largely owing to the authority of Cardinal Cullen, who prohibited the

Irish priesthood from taking any part in politics, agitation, I have said,

had become a mere tradition of the past. Yet the causes I have glanced at

were silently at work, which ultimately were to lead to grave social

troubles. The first sign of disturbance was seen in a little outbreak, the

result of a conspiracy hatched by one of the rebels of 1848, and supported

to some extent from America: but the 'Phoenix plot,' as it was called,

almost at once collapsed; the Government thought it hardly worthy of

notice. Another and much more formidable conspiracy was matured in

1864-65; and though it was put down with little difficulty in time, it

showed that there was much that was peccant in the state of Ireland; and

it deeply affected the minds of Englishmen, aroused as it were out of a

fool's paradise. The millions of the Irish race in the Far West were

passionately appealed to by leaders, not without parts, to assist in a

crusade against 'landlordism,' and British rule in Ireland; they gave the

movement very general support; they found numerous allies in thousands of

Irishmen disbanded after the great conflict between the North and the

South. The Fenian conspiracy was launched on its course; its directors

made skilful attempts to debauch whole regiments, and to stir up the

passions of the mob in many of the towns of Ireland; and they especially

turned their attention to the mass of the peasantry. Here, however, their

policy was injudicious and ill-conceived; they promised the Irish land as

a spoil to those who would join the ranks of the 'patriot Irish army;' but

all this alarmed the occupiers of the soil, whose only object was to

acquire a better mode of tenure for their farms, and who rightly thought

the Fenian movement made their possessions insecure, a belief generally

encouraged by the Catholic priesthood. A short-lived rising, conducted by

a few American soldiers, and backed by the rabble of a few villages and

towns, found no real support in Ireland, and was finally quelled in 1867;

but in England there was a spurt of Fenian disorder, and this, though

easily quenched, made a profound impression. It was generally felt in

England and Scotland that, notwithstanding the optimism of a generation of

public men, there was still much that was rotten in the state of Ireland,

and that this should be removed by large and searching reforms. The chief

sign of this change in British opinion was seen in the result of the

General Election of 1868; Mr. Gladstone, who, hitherto, had taken

comparatively little part in Irish affairs, but who, with his keen

instinct of every turn in the public mind, had been vehemently enlarging

on the wrongs of Ireland, was placed in power with a great majority, and

at once addressed himself to the task of Irish reform.[54]