heartily inclined. He saw that "Ireland was his difficulty," and wanted to
treat the problem as liberally as his following of Protestants and squires
would let him. He increased the grant to Maynooth, thereby constraining
Gladstone, by way of satisfaction to his former self, to go through the
form of resignation. He enabled the Catholic Church freely to receive
charitable bequests. Not venturing to throw open the fellowships and
scholarships of Trinity College to the Catholics, he founded for their
special benefit three undenominational colleges at Belfast, Cork, and
Galway, forming together a university with power of granting degrees. This
measure, excellent in its way, was but a partial success. The priesthood
looked with invincible suspicion on free science, while Catholic
professors of science, whom the Church might have trusted, were hardly to
be found. But Peel touched the real root of the evil, and pointed to
effective reform, when, in 1843, he issued a Commission of Inquiry into
land occupancy in Ireland and the condition of the peasant occupants. The
commission reported that the agricultural labourer of Ireland continued to
suffer the greatest privations and hardships; that he was still dependent
upon casual and precarious employment for subsistence; that he was still
badly housed, badly clothed, and badly fed; and that he was undergoing
sufferings greater than those of the people of any other country in
Europe. Some tentative motions followed, but there had scarcely been time
for the report of the commission to work, when the sentence of nature was
pronounced with awful distinctness in the form of a great famine with
pestilence in its train. The population of Ireland at this time was
probably double that which the island could happily bear. A precarious
subsistence was afforded by the potato, which, always treacherous, now
suddenly and completely failed. Peel, warned of impending calamity, at
once opened the ports for the importation of grain, then grasped the
occasion for the repeal of the Corn Laws, on the policy of which his own
mind had been undergoing change. His administrative power and that of his
colleagues would probably have done all that was possible to meet and
mitigate the disaster. But at the critical moment his government was
struck down by a conspiracy of Russell and the Whigs with the ire of the
Corn Law squires and the vengeful ambition of Disraeli. Russell, who took
his place, was far more an adept in party strategy than a master of
practical administration. There ensued a heartrending scene, the climax of
seven centuries of evil accident, maladministration, and Irish woe.
"Famine advances on us with giant strides," wrote an official in the
August of 1846. "Towards the end of August," says Mr. T. P. O'Connor, "the
calamity began to be universal and its symptoms to be seen. Some of the
people rushed into the towns, others wandered along the highroads in the
vague hope of food. They plucked turnips from the fields, were glad to
live for weeks on a single meal of cabbage a day, feasted on the dead
bodies of horses and asses and dogs. There was a story of a mother eating
the limbs of her dead child. Dead bodies were discovered with grass in
their mouths and in their bowels; weeds were sought after with desperate
eagerness; seaweed was greedily devoured; so were diseased cattle and
diseased potatoes. Despair fell on all hearts and faces. The ties of
kindred in some cases failed, parents neglecting their children and
children turning out their aged parents. On the other hand, there were
stories of parents dying of starvation to save a small store for their
children. The workhouses, usually shunned, were overcrowded. In one, three
thousand persons sought relief in a single day. They crowded even into the
jails. Driven from the workhouses, people began to die by the roadside or
alone in their despair within their cabins. Roads and streets were strewn
with corpses. One inspector buried one hundred and forty bodies found on
the highway. The scenes inside the cabins were even more horrible;
husbands lay for a week in the same hovels with the bodies of their wives
and children. The decencies of burial were no longer observed. Then came
the plague, attacking bodies already weakened by hunger." "A terrible
apathy," says an eye-witness, "hangs over the poor of Skibbereen;
starvation has destroyed every generous sympathy; despair has made them
hardened and insensible, and they sullenly await their doom with
indifference and without fear. Death is in every hovel; disease and
famine, its dread precursors, have fastened on the young and the old, the
strong and the feeble, the mother and the infant; whole families lie
together on the damp floor devoured by fever, without a human being to wet
their burning lips or raise their languid heads; the husband dies by the
side of the wife, and she knows not that he is beyond the reach of earthly
suffering; the same rag covers festering remains of mortality and the
skeleton forms of the living, who are unconscious of the horrible
contiguity; rats devour the corpse, and there is no energy among the
living to scare them from their horrid banquet; fathers bury their
children without a sigh, and cover them in shallow graves, round which no
weeping mother, no sympathizing friends are grouped; one scanty funeral is
followed by another and another. Without food or fuel, bed or bedding,
whole families are shut up in naked hovels, dropping one by one into the
arms of death."[3]
All the devices of government by relief work and in other ways to grapple
with the twofold calamity were palliatives and little more. The most
effective measure of relief was a vast emigration to the United States and
Canada, which also had its horrors. Thousands, already weakened by hunger
and suffering, succumbed to the hardships of the passage; another
multitude died on landing. Canada did all she could for the hapless
strangers cast upon her shore. But ship-fever followed the fugitives, and
graveyards were filled with their dead. It was reckoned that more than two
hundred thousand persons died on the voyage or on arrival at their
destination. Few Irishmen, however prejudiced against England, will deny
that the people of Great Britain and Canada showed unbounded sympathy with
Ireland in her affliction, and did their utmost for her relief. O'Connell
himself, while he criticised the measures of the government, allowed that
individual humanity and charity were abundant; that the noblest generosity
was evinced by multitudes of the English; and that if individual
generosity could save a nation, British generosity would do it. He said
that he was afraid of not finding words sufficient to express his strong
and lively sense of English humanity. To charges of English indifference
to Irish suffering, his words are a sufficient answer.
Close upon the famine and pestilence came 1848, the year of European
revolution. Young Ireland, the party of force, did not fail to catch the
flame. Its organ, _The Nation_, cried, "It is a death struggle now between
the murderer and his victim. Strike! Rise, men of Ireland, since
Providence so wills it! Rise in your cities and in your fields, on your
hills, in your valleys, by your dark mountain passes, by your rivers and
lakes and ocean-washed shores! Rise as a nation!" _The Irish Felon_, a
journal still more advanced, was even more openly for war. But neither in
city or field, on mountain or in valley, by pass or shore, did the people
rise at the impassioned call. Young Ireland found at once that it was but
a knot of literary men whose appeals to national feeling, penned as they
were with vigour, might be read with sentimental pleasure but would rouse
nobody to arms. O'Connell's mastery of the people depended on the support
of the priesthood, given in a cause originally religious to that zealous
champion of the Church who, dying, bequeathed his heart to Rome. Young
Ireland was more revolutionary than Catholic, as the priests did not fail
to perceive. The desire of political revolution, apart from agrarianism,
was not strong enough to rouse the peasantry to arms, though they had
learned to hate England as the supposed source of their sufferings. The
people, moreover, had hardly recovered from the depression caused by the
famine. Young Ireland however raised its flag. Smith O'Brien, with a small
party, made a trial trip, appealing to the people of two or three places,
but met with no response. A farcical encounter with the police at the
house of widow Cormack on the bog of Boulagh, followed by the capture of
Smith O'Brien, was the end. The sentence of death passed on the leader of
the revolt was wisely commuted by the government.
The famine had at least one good effect. It drew attention to the main
source of the evil in Ireland, which was agrarian and social, not
political and religious. But now it was supposed that the mischief lay in
the inability of the landlords, overwhelmed with debt, burdened with
family settlements, and crushed by the demands of the Poor Law, to perform
their duty to their tenants. To remedy this evil was created the
Encumbered Estates Court, with power to order the sale of encumbered
property on the petition of the creditors and give a clear title to the
purchaser. The policy seemed sound, yet the result was not good. The court
cleared out the old proprietors who lacked means to do their duty; it put
in their place a new class of proprietors who, having been induced to buy
the land on pure speculation, felt that they had no duty to do, and who,
unlike their predecessors, had no kindly tie to the people. The new owners
naturally proceeded to make the most of their purchase; and the way to
make the most of their purchase clearly was to sweep out the cotter
tenants and throw the land into large holdings. This some of them
proceeded to do, and the consequence was a period of evictions almost
vying in cruelty with the famine. Whole districts were cleared and relet
in large holdings. Cabins were being thrown down in all directions. A
thousand of them were levelled in one union within a few months, and the
inmates were cast out helpless, half-naked, starving, to go to the union
or perish. The cabins were burned that the people might not return to
them. The suffering and misery, says a reporter, attendant upon these
wholesale evictions, is indescribable. The number of houseless paupers in
one union is beyond his calculation. Those evicted crowd neighbouring
cabins and villages, and disease is necessarily generated. In April he
calculates that six thousand houses have been levelled since November, and
he expects five hundred more by July. Wretched hovels had been pulled
down, the inmates of which in a helpless state of fever and nakedness were
left by the roadside for days. While inspecting a stone-breaking depot,
the reporter observes one of the men take off his remnant of a pair of
shoes and start across the fields. He follows him with his eye, and at a
distance sees the blaze of a fire in the bog. He sends to inquire the
cause of it and of the man's running from his work, and is told that the
man's house had been levelled the day before, that he had erected a
temporary hut, and that while his wife and children were gathering
shell-fish on the beach and he was stone-breaking the bailiff fired it.
This incident was one of several which made a deep impression on Peel, who
would probably have moved with effect had he remained in power. Pages are
filled with pictures of this kind. Civilized Europe could show nothing
like it. It was almost enough to break forever the spirit of the nation,
certainly to implant the bitterest memories, and here the main cause was
misgovernment and bad law.
Relief works were no cure, nor were they in themselves very rational,
since the people, unfed, half-clothed, and living in pestilential
mud-holes, were really too weak to work. Parliament so far interfered as
to pass an act requiring forty-eight hours' notice of eviction to the
relieving officers, prohibiting evictions two hours before sunset or
sunrise, and on Christmas Day and Good Friday, and prohibiting the
demolition of the house of a tenant about to be evicted. But this rather
throws a lurid light on the state of things than effects a cure. The
public even might have some reason to complain of the land-owner who
recklessly cast upon the poor rates or upon public charity the human
encumbrances of his land.
Apart from overpopulation and its effects, the Irish land-law
unquestionably needed reform. The people, struggling with each other for
their sole means of subsistence, undertook to pay exorbitant rents, and
their improvements, if they made any, became without compensation the
property of the landlord. In Ulster, always exceptional, there prevailed a
certain measure of tenant-right, something like the English copyhold. In
Ireland the demand for tenant-right now began to be loudly heard. An
English Radical, Sharman Crawford, brought forward a measure in
Parliament, but without effect. For some years nothing effectual was done
in the way of reform. Palmerston, to whom power passed, though in foreign
policy he dallied with revolution, was conservative, especially on social
subjects, at home. "Tenant's right is landlord's wrong" was his judgment
on the agrarian question. On the Irish side there was no leader of worth
or force. Patriotism was in a trance, and the chronicler of the
Nationalist party indignantly proclaims that the cause was betrayed by a
series of low adventurers who embraced it as the way to preferment. "The
most common type of Irish politician," he says in his anguish, "in these
days was the man who entered Parliamentary life solely for the purpose of
selling himself for place and salary." "This," he adds, "was the golden
season, when every Irishman who could scrape as much money together as
would pay his election expenses was able after a while to obtain a
governorship or some other of the many substantial rewards which English
party leaders were able to give to their followers." The constituencies,
it seems, political feeling being at a low ebb, were ready to elect the
man who could bring them public pelf. Of the adventurers, the worst was
Sadleir, who, with his set, attempted to intrigue with the Peelites, and
who, being a financial swindler as well as a political schemer, became
bankrupt and committed suicide. So the cause of the Three F's--Fixity of
tenure, Free sale, and Fair rents--made no way. English Radicals in
Parliament stood all the time ready to move with the Irish on this
question or for Disestablishment; but the Irish members were taken up with
intriguing for places for themselves, for appointments of the sons of
their constituents to clerkships in Somerset House, or for a government
subsidy to the Galway Packet contract. Irish writers are bound to remember
that Englishmen were not responsible for the choice or character of Irish
members. They are bound also to remember the impression which the members
chosen by the Irish could not fail to make on English minds. The British
Parliament could not justly be said to be "deaf, blind, and insolently
ignorant," though it was not on the right track. It might be excused for
being a little deaf and blind to the appeals of "a motley gang of as
disreputable and needy adventurers as ever trafficked in the blood and
tears of a nation."
From the time of the union to this time there had been, and long after
this time continued to be, a series of coercion acts, rendered necessary
by agrarian outrage. There were thirty-two enactments of this kind between
the union and 1844. It would have been almost better, had it been
possible, frankly to suspend the constitution while the true remedy was
being applied.
Liberal leadership now devolved from Palmerston on Gladstone, thus
bringing on the political field a new and immensely powerful motive power.
Gladstone was in opposition. In his mind a natural, and under the party
system legitimate, desire of recovering power for his party and himself
perhaps mingled with a sincere though tardily formed conviction of the
injustice of such an institution as the State Church of a small minority
in Ireland. It was unfortunate that he, like Peel and Wellington, gave
fear of Irish violence as a motive for doing justice. After some
premonitory hints, he, in former days the great champion of state
religion, declared for disestablishment. His case was overwhelmingly
strong. Faint and feeble were the arguments on the other side. The
institution was an anachronism, an anomaly, and a scandal. Its past had
been miserable. It had made no converts; it had made many rebels. By its
tests and its intolerance it had divided the Protestant interest, sending
many a Presbyterian across the sea to fight for the American Revolution.
Its ministry had been jobbed, its character defiled, by unscrupulous
politicians. Of late, however, it had been greatly reforming itself, and
it had got rid of its tithe-proctors by the commutation of tithes. Its
clergy generally were now on friendly terms with the people. Its last hour
was by far its best. Vested interests were respected in the change, and
the unblest establishment glided quietly and safely into its new and
happier life as a purely spiritual church. Through the Commons the measure
passed with ease; through the Lords, like other great measures of change,
it was forced by fear.
XIV
From disestablishment of the Church Gladstone, now in the full swing of
his Liberalism, proceeded next year to reform the land system of Ireland.
Taking his cue from Ulster tenant-right, perhaps also from English
copyhold, he passed an act, the first of a series which, by giving
compensation for improvements and for disturbance, restricting eviction,
regulating rents, and furnishing to the tenant by government loans the
means of purchasing the fee, has gone far towards transferring the
ownership from the landlord to the tenant. Some of these measures have
virtually involved confiscation, notably in the case of purchasers under
the Encumbered Estates Act, to whom full ownership had been morally
guaranteed.
Economically, the tendency, indeed the aim, of the land acts has been to
make Ireland a land of peasant proprietors. The social tendency of such
legislation is to the abolition of the gentry, of the value of whose
leadership to a people eminently in need of leaders, Gladstone,
personally ignorant of Ireland, might not be a competent judge.
Unquestionably, the relations between landlord and tenant called for
reform. The appropriation of the tenant's improvements by the landlord was
in itself plainly unjust, and the sweeping evictions yielded in cruelty
only to the famine. But for overpopulation the immediate remedy was
depletion. Had Gladstone said that the overpopulation was originally the
consequence of misgovernment and repression of industry which, reducing
the people to abject misery, had wrecked their self-respect and
self-restraint, he would have been emphatically right, and the fact cannot
be too constantly kept in mind. Gladstone might also have said with truth
that emigration was a mournful cure, though it transferred the emigrant to
a far happier land and lot. But the overpopulation having taken place,
whatever the cause, the only remedy was depletion. No expansion of
manufacturing industry, commerce, or mining adequate to the absorption of
the surplus population could be expected in time to meet the pressing call
for relief. Irishmen are sensitive on this point, but no disparagement of
the Irish race is implied in the recognition of the facts. Overpopulation
was not the fault of the people, but their misfortune. There has been a
very large migration of the Irish into England and Scotland as well as
into the colonies and the United States.