CHAPTER VII.

IRISH SLAVERY.

For centuries the Irish nation has groaned under the yoke of England.

The chain has worn to the bone. The nation has felt its strength

depart. Many of its noblest and fairest children have pined away in

dungeons or starved by the roadside. The tillers of the soil, sweating

from sunrise to sunset for a bare subsistence, have been turned from

their miserable cabins—hovels, yet homes—and those who have been

allowed to remain have had their substance devoured by a government

seemingly never satisfied with the extent of its taxation. They have

suffered unmitigated persecution for daring to have a religion of their

own. Seldom has a conquered people suffered more from the cruelties

and exactions of the conquerors. While Clarkson and Wilberforce were

giving their untiring labours to the cause of emancipating negro slaves

thousands of miles away, they overlooked a hideous system of slavery

at their very doors—the slavery of a people capable of enjoying the

highest degree of civil and religious freedom. Says William Howitt—

[Illustration: IRISH TENANT ABOUT TO EMIGRATE.]

"The great grievance of Ireland—the Monster Grievance—is just

England itself. The curse of Ireland is bad government, and

nothing more. And who is the cause of this? Nobody but England.

Who made Ireland a conquered country? England. Who introduced all

the elements of wrangling, discontent, and injustice? England.

Who set two hostile churches, and two hostile races, Celts and

Saxons, together by the ears in that country? England, of course.

Her massacres, her military plantations, her violent seizure of

ancient estates, her favouritism, her monstrous laws and modes

of government, were the modern emptying of Pandora's box—the

shaking out of a bag-full of Kilkenny cats on the soil of that

devoted country. The consequences are exactly those that we have

before us. Wretched Saxon landlords, who have left one-fourth of

the country uncultivated, and squeezed the population to death

by extortion on the rest. A great useless church maintained on

the property of the ejected Catholics—who do as men are sure to

do, kick at robbery, and feel it daily making their gall doubly

bitter. And then we shake our heads and sagely talk about race.

If the race be bad, why have we not taken pains to improve it?

Why, for scores of years, did we forbid them even to be educated?

Why do we complain of their being idle and improvident, and

helpless, when we have done every thing we could to make them so?

Are our ministers and Parliaments any better? Are they not just

as idle, and improvident, and helpless, as it regards Ireland?

Has not this evil been growing these three hundred years? Have

any remedies been applied but those of Elizabeth, and the Stuarts

and Straffords, the Cromwells, and Dutch William's? Arms and

extermination? We have built barracks instead of schools; we have

sown gunpowder instead of corn—and now we wonder at the people

and the crops. The wisest and best of men have for ages been

crying out for reform and improvement in Ireland, and all that we

have done has been to augment the army and the police."

The condition of the Irish peasantry has long been most miserable.

Untiring toil for the lords of the soil gives the labourers only

such a living as an American slave would despise. Hovels fit for

pig-styes—rags for clothing—potatoes for food—are the fruits of the

labour of these poor wretches. A vast majority of them are attached to

the Roman Catholic Church, yet they are compelled to pay a heavy tax

for the support of the Established Church. This, and other exactions,

eat up their little substance, and prevent them from acquiring any

considerable property. Their poor homes are merely held by the

sufferance of grasping agents for landlords, and they are compelled to

submit to any terms he may prescribe or become wandering beggars, which

alternative is more terrible to many of them than the whip would be.

O'Connell, the indomitable advocate of his oppressed countrymen, used

the following language in his repeal declaration of July 27, 1841:—

"It ought to sink deep into the minds of the English aristocracy,

that no people on the face of the earth pay to another such a

tribute for permission to live, as Ireland pays to England in

absentee rents and surplus revenues. There is no such instance;

there is nothing like it in ancient or modern history. There is

not, and there never was, such an exhausting process applied

to any country as is thus applied to Ireland. It is a solecism

in political economy, inflicted upon Ireland alone, of all the

nations that are or ever were."

Surely it is slavery to pay such a price for a miserable existence. We

cannot so abuse terms as to call a people situated as the Irish are,

free. They are compelled to labour constantly without receiving an

approach to adequate compensation, and they have no means of escape

except by sundering the ties of home, kindred, and country.

The various repulsive features of the Irish system can be illustrated

much more fully than our limits will permit. But we will proceed to a

certain extent, as it is in Ireland that the results of British tyranny

have been most frightfully manifested.

The population of Ireland is chiefly agricultural, yet there are no

agricultural labourers in the sense in which that term is employed in

Great Britain. A peasant living entirely by hire, without land, is

wholly unknown.

The persons who till the ground may be divided into three classes,

which are sometimes distinguished by the names of small farmers,

cottiers, and casual labourers; or, as the last are sometimes called,

"con-acre" men.

The class of small farmers includes those who hold from five to twelve

Irish acres. The cottiers are those who hold about two acres, in return

for which they labour for the farmer of twenty acres or more, or for

the gentry.

Con-acre is ground hired, not by the year, but for a single crop,

usually of potatoes. The tenant of con-acre receives the land in time

to plant potatoes, and surrenders it so soon as the crop has been

secured. The farmer from whom he receives it usually ploughs and

manures the land, and sometimes carts the crop. Con-acre is taken by

tradesmen, small farmers, and cottiers, but chiefly by labourers,

who are, in addition, always ready to work for hire when there is

employment for them. It is usually let in roods, and other small

quantities, rarely exceeding half an acre. These three classes, not

very distinct from each other, form the mass of the Irish population.

"According to the census of 1831," says Mr. Bicheno, "the

population of Ireland was 7,767,401; the 'occupiers employing

labourers' were 95,339; the 'labourers employed in agriculture,'

(who do not exist in Ireland as a class corresponding to that

in England,) and the 'occupiers not employing labourers,'

amounted together to 1,131,715. The two last descriptions pretty

accurately include the cottier tenants and cottier labourers;

and, as these are nearly all heads of families, it may be

inferred from hence how large a portion of the soil of Ireland

is cultivated by a peasant tenantry; and when to these a further

addition is made of a great number of little farmers, a tolerably

accurate opinion may be formed of the insignificant weight and

influence that any middle class in the rural districts can have,

as compared with the peasants. Though many may occupy a greater

extent of land than the 'cottiers,' and, if held immediately

from the proprietor, generally at a more moderate rent, and may

possess some trifling stock, almost all the inferior tenantry of

Ireland belong to one class. The cottier and the little farmer

have the same feelings, the same interests to watch over, and

the same sympathies. Their diet and their clothing are not very

dissimilar, though they may vary in quantity; and the one cannot

be ordinarily distinguished from the other by any external

appearance. Neither does the dress of the children of the little

farmers mark any distinction of rank, as it does in England;

while their wives are singularly deficient in the comforts of

apparel."—_Report of Commissioners of Poor Inquiry._

The whole population, small farmers, cottiers, and labourers, are

equally devoid of capital. The small farmer holds his ten or twelve

acres of land at a nominal rent—a rent determined not by what the

land will yield, but by the intensity of the competition to obtain

it. He takes from his farm a wretched subsistence, and gives over the

remainder to his landlord. This remainder rarely equals the nominal

rent, the growing arrears of which are allowed to accumulate against

him.

The cottier labours constantly for his landlord, (or master, as he

would have been termed of old,) and receives, for his wages as a serf,

land which will afford him but a miserable subsistence. Badly off as

these two classes are, their condition is still somewhat better than

that of the casual labourer, who hires con-acre, and works for wages at

seasons when employment can be had, to get in the first place the means

of paying the rent for his con-acre.

Mr. Bicheno says—

"It appears from the evidence that the average crops of con-acre

produce about as much or a little more, (at the usual price of

potatoes in the autumn,) than the amount of the rent, seed, and

tenant's labour, say 5_s._ or 10_s._ Beyond this the labourer

does not seem to derive any other direct profit from taking

con-acre; but he has the following inducements. In some cases

he contracts to work out a part, or the whole, of his con-acre

rent; and, even when this indulgence is not conceded to him by

previous agreement, he always hopes, and endeavours to prevail on

the farmer to be allowed this privilege, which, in general want

of employment, is almost always so much clear gain to him. By

taking con-acre he also considers that he is _securing_ food to

the extent of the crop for himself and family at the low autumn

price; whereas, if he had to go to market for it, he would be

subject to the loss of time, and sometimes expense of carriage,

to the fluctuations of the market, and to an advance of price in

spring and summer."

Of the intensity of the competition for land, the following extracts

from the evidence may give an idea:—

"_Galway_, F. 35.—'If I now let it be known that I had a farm

of five acres to let, I should have fifty bidders in twenty-four

hours, and all of them would be ready to promise any rent that

might be asked.'—_Mr. Birmingham._ The landlord takes on account

whatever portion of the rent the tenant may be able to offer;

the remainder he does not remit, but allows to remain over. A

remission of a portion of the rent in either plentiful or scarce

seasons is never made as a matter of course; when it does take

place, it is looked upon as a favour.

'The labourer is, from the absence of any other means of

subsisting himself and family, thrown upon the hire of land, and

the land he must hire at any rate; the payment of the promised

rent is an after consideration. He always offers such a rent as

leaves him nothing of the produce for his own use but potatoes,

his corn being entirely for his landlord's claim.'—_Rev. Mr.

Hughes_, P. P., and _Parker_.

"_Leitrim_, F. 36 and 37.—'So great is the competition for small

holdings, that, if a farm of five acres were vacant, I really

believe that nine out of every ten men in the neighbourhood would

bid for it if they thought they had the least chance of getting

it: they would be prepared to outbid each other, _ad infinitum_,

in order to get possession of the land. _The rent which the

people themselves would deem moderate, would not in any case

admit of their making use of any other food than potatoes_; there

are even many instances in this barony where the occupier cannot

feed himself and family off the land he holds. In his anxiety to

grow as much oats (his only marketable produce) as will meet

the various claims upon him, he devotes so small a space to the

cultivation of potatoes, that he is obliged to take a portion of

con-acre, and to pay for it by wages earned at a time when he

would have been better employed on his own account.'—_Rev. T.

Maguire_, P. P."

The land is subdivided into such small portions, that the labourer has

not sufficient to grow more than a very scanty provision for himself

and family. The better individuals of the class manage to secrete some

of its produce from the landlord, to do which it is of course necessary

that they should not employ it on their land: but if land is offered to

be let, persons will be found so eager for it as to make compliments to

some one of the family of the landlord or of his agent.

The exactions of agents and sub-agents are the most frequent causes

of suffering among the peasantry. These agents are a class peculiar

to Ireland. They take a large extent of ground, which they let out in

small portions to the real cultivator. They grant leases sometimes, but

the tenant is still in their power, and they exact personal services,

presents, bribes; and draw from the land as much as they can, without

the least regard for its permanent welfare. That portion of the poor

peasant's substance which escapes the tithes and tax of government is

seized by the remorseless agents, and thus the wretched labourer can

get but a miserable subsistence by the severest toil.

In general the tenant takes land, promising to pay a "nominal rent,"

in other words, a rent he never can pay. This rent falls into arrear,

and the landlord allows the arrear to accumulate against him, in the

hope that if he should chance to have an extraordinary crop, or if he

should obtain it from any unexpected source, the landlord may claim it

for his arrears.

The report of Poor-Law Commissioners states that "Agricultural wages

vary from 6_d._ to 1_s._ a day; that the average of the country in

general is about 8½_d._; and that the earnings of the labourers, on

an average of the whole class, are from 2_s._ to 2_s._ 6_d._ a week, or

thereabout."

"Thus circumstanced, it is impossible for the able-bodied, in

general, to provide against sickness or the temporary absence of

employment, or against old age or the destitution of their widows

and children in the contingent event of their own premature

decease.

"A great portion of them are insufficiently provided at any time

with the commonest necessaries of life. Their habitations are

wretched hovels; several of a family sleep together upon straw

or upon the bare ground, sometimes with a blanket, sometimes not

even so much to cover them; their food commonly consists of dry

potatoes, and with these they are at times so scantily supplied

as to be obliged to stint themselves to one spare meal in the

day. There are even instances of persons being driven by hunger

to seek sustenance in wild herbs. They sometimes get a herring,

or a little milk, but they never get meat, except at Christmas,

Easter, and Shrovetide."

The peasant finds himself obliged to live upon the cheapest food,

_potatoes_, and potatoes of the worst quality, because they yield

most, and are consequently the cheapest. These potatoes are "little

better than turnips." "Lumpers" is the name given to them. They are two

degrees removed from those which come ordinarily to our tables, and

which are termed "apples." Mr. Bicheno says, describing the three sorts

of potatoes—apples, cups, and lumpers—

"The first named are of the best quality, but produce the least

in quantity; the cups are not so good in quality as the apples,

but produce more; and the lumpers are the worst of the three

in quality, but yield the heaviest crop. For these reasons

the apples are generally sent to Dublin and other large towns

for sale. The cups are grown for the consumption of smaller

towns, and are eaten by the larger farmers, and the few of the

small occupiers and labourers who are in better circumstances

than the generality of their class; and the lumpers are grown

by large farmers for stall-feeding cattle, and by most of the

small occupiers and all the labourers (except a few in constant

employment, and having but small families) for their own food.

Though most of the small occupiers and labourers grow apples and

cups, they do not use them themselves, with the few exceptions

mentioned, except as holiday fare, and as a little indulgence

on particular occasions. They can only afford to consume the

lumpers, or coarsest quality, themselves, on account of the much

larger produce and consequent cheapness of that sort. The apples

yield 10 to 15 per cent. less than the cups, and the cups 10 to

15 per cent. less than the lumpers, making a difference of 20

to 30 per cent. between the produce of the best and the worst

qualities. To illustrate the practice and feeling of the country

in this respect, the following occurrence was related by one of

the witnesses:—'A landlord, in passing the door of one of his

tenants, a small occupier, who was in arrears with his rent, saw

one of his daughters washing potatoes at the door, and perceiving

that they were of the apple kind, asked her if they were intended

for their dinner. Upon being answered that they were, he entered

the house, and asked the tenant what he meant by eating _apple_

potatoes when they were fetching so good a price in Dublin, and

while he did not pay him (the landlord) his rent?'"

Lumpers, dry, that is, without milk or any other addition to them, are

the ordinary food of the people. The pig which is seen in most Irish

cabins, and the cow and fowls kept by the small farmers, go to market

to pay the rent; even the eggs are sold. Small farmers, as well as

labourers, rarely have even milk to their potatoes.

The following graphic description of an Irish peasant's home, we quote

from the Pictorial Times, of February 7, 1846. Some districts in

Ireland are crowded with such hovels:—

"_Cabin of J. Donoghue._—The hovel to which the eye is now

directed scarcely exceeds Donoghue's length. He will have almost

as much space when laid in his grave. He can stand up in no part

of his cabin except the centre; and yet he is not an aged man,

who has outlived all his connections, and with a frame just ready

to mingle with its native dust. Nor is he a bachelor, absolutely

impenetrable to female charms, or looking out for some damsel

to whom he may be united, 'for better or for worse.' Donoghue,

the miserable inmate of that hovel, on the contrary, has a wife

and three children; and these, together with a dog, a pig, and

sundry fowls, find in that cabin their common abode. Human beings

and brutes are there huddled together; and the motive to the

occupancy of the former is just the same as that which operates

to the keeping of the latter—what they produce. Did not the

pig and the fowls make money, Donoghue would have none; did not

Donoghue pay his rent, the cabin would quickly have another

tenant. Indeed, his rent is only paid, and he and his family

saved from being turned adrift into the wide world, by his pig

and his fowls.

"But the cabin should be examined more particularly. It has a

hole for a door, it has another for a window, it has a third

through which the smoke may find vent, and nothing more. No

resemblance to the door of an English cottage, however humble,

nor the casement it is never without, nor even the rudest chimney

from which the blue smoke arises, suggesting to the observer many

ideas of comfort for its inmates, can possibly be traced. The

walls, too, are jet black; and that which ought to be a floor is

mud, thick mud, full of holes. The bed of the family is sod. The

very cradle is a sort of swing suspended from the roof, and it is

set in motion by the elbow of the wretched mother of the wretched

child it contains, if she is not disposed to make use of her

hands.

"The question may fairly be proposed—What comfort can a man have

in such circumstances? Can he find some relief from his misery,

as many have found and still find it, by conversing with his

wife? No. To suppose this, is to imagine him standing in a higher

class of beings than the one of which he has always formed a

part. Like himself, too, his wife is oppressed; the growth of her

faculties is stunted; and, it may be, she is hungry, faint, and

sick. Can he talk with his children? No. What can he, who knows

nothing, tell them? What hope can he stimulate who has nothing to

promise? Can he ask in a neighbour? No. He has no hospitality to

offer him, and the cabin is crowded with his own family. Can he

accost a stranger who may travel in the direction of his hovel,

to make himself personally acquainted with his condition and that

of others? No. He speaks a language foreign to an Englishman

or a Scotchman, and which those who hate the 'Saxon,' whatever

compliments they may pay him for their own purposes, use all the

means they possess to maintain. Can he even look at his pig with

the expectation that he will one day eat the pork or the bacon it

will yield? No; not he. He knows that not a bone of the loin or

a rasher will be his. That pig will go, like all the pigs he has

had, to pay his rent. Only one comfort remains, which he has in

common with his pig and his dog, the warmth of his peat fire.

Poor Donoghue! thou belongest to a race often celebrated as 'the

finest peasantry in the world,' but it would be difficult to find

a savage in his native forest who is not better off than thou!"

There is one other comfort besides the peat fire, which Donoghue may

have, and that is an occasional gill of whisky—a temporary comfort,

an ultimate destruction—a new fetter to bind him down in his almost

brutal condition. In Ireland, as in England, intoxication is the Lethe

in which the heart-sick labourers strive to forget their sorrows.

Intemperance prevails most where poverty is most generally felt.

The Pictorial Times thus sketches a cabin of the better class,

belonging to a man named Pat Brennan:—

"We will enter it, and look round with English eyes. We will do

so, too, in connection with the remembrance of an humble dwelling

in England. There we find at least a table, but here there is

none. There we find some chairs, but here there are none. There

we find a cupboard, but here there is none. There we find some

crockery and earthenware, but here there is none. There we find

a clock, but here there is none. There we find a bed, bedstead,

and coverings, but here there are none. There is a brick, or

stone, or boarded floor, but here there is none. What a descent

would an English agricultural labourer have to make if he changed

situations with poor Pat Brennan, who is better off than most

of the tenants of Derrynane Beg, and it may be in the best

condition of them all! Brennan's cabin has one room, in which he

and his family live, of course with the fowls and pigs. One end

is partitioned off in the manner of a loft, the loft being the

potato store. The space underneath, where the fire is kindled,

has side spaces for seats. In some instances, the turf-bed is

on one side and the seats on the other. The other contents of

the dwelling are—a milk-pail, a pot, a wooden bowl or two, a

platter, and a broken ladder. A gaudy picture of the Virgin Mary

may sometimes be seen in such cabins."

The eviction of the wretched peasantry has caused an immense amount of

misery, and crowds of the evicted ones have perished from starvation.

The tillers of the soil are mere tenants at will, and may ejected

from their homes without a moment's notice. A whim of the landlord,

the failure of the potato crop, or of the ordinary resources of the

labourers, by which they are rendered unable to pay their rent for a

short time, usually results in an edict of levelling and extermination.

A recent correspondent of the London Illustrated News, thus describes

the desolation of an Irish village:—

"The village of Killard forms part of the Union of Kilrush, and

possesses an area of 17,022 acres. It had a population, in 1841,

of 6850 souls, and was valued to the poor-rate at £4254. It is

chiefly the property, I understand, of Mr. John McMahon Blackall,

whose healthy residence is admirably situated on the brow of a

hill, protected by another ridge from the storms of the Atlantic.

His roof-tree yet stands there, but the people have disappeared.

The village was mostly inhabited by fishermen, who united with

their occupation on the waters the cultivation of potatoes. When

the latter failed, it might have been expected that the former

should have been pursued with more vigour than ever; but boats

and lines were sold for present subsistence, and to the failure

of the potatoes was added the abandonment of the fisheries. The

rent dwindled to nothing, and then came the leveller and the

exterminator. What has become of the 6850 souls, I know not; but

not ten houses remain of the whole village to inform the wayfarer

where, according to the population returns, they were to be found

in 1841. They were here, but are gone for ever; and all that

remains of their abodes are a few mouldering walls, and piles of

offensive thatch turning into manure. Killard is an epitome of

half Ireland. If the abodes of the people had not been so slight,

that they have mingled, like Babylon, with their original clay,

Ireland would for ages be renowned for its ruins; but, as it is,

the houses are swept away like the people, and not a monument

remains of a multitude, which, in ancient Asia or in the wilds of

America, would numerically constitute a great nation."

The same correspondent mentions a number of other instances of the

landlord's devastation, and states that large tracts of fertile land

over which he passed were lying waste, while the peasantry were

starving by the roadside, or faring miserably in the workhouses. At

Carihaken, in the county of Galway, the levellers had been at work, and

had tumbled down eighteen houses. The correspondent says—

"In one of them dwelt John Killian, who stood by me while I made

a sketch of the remains of his dwelling. He told me that he and

his fathers before him had owned this now ruined cabin for ages,

and that he had paid £4 a year for four acres of ground. He owed

no rent; before it was due, the landlord's drivers cut down his

crops, carried them off, gave him no account of the proceeds,

and then tumbled his house. The hut made against the end wall

of a former habitation was not likely to remain, as a decree

had gone forth entirely to clear the place. The old man also

told me that his son having cut down, on the spot that was once

his own garden, a few sticks to make him a shelter, was taken

up, prosecuted, and sentenced to two months' confinement, for

destroying trees and making waste of the property.

"I must supply you with another sketch of a similar subject,

on the road between Maam and Clifden, in Joyce's County, once

famous for the Patagonian stature of the inhabitants, who are now

starved down to ordinary dimensions. High up on the mountain,

but on the roadside, stands the scalpeen of Keillines. It is

near General Thompson's property. Conceive five human beings

living in such a hole: the father was out, at work; the mother

was getting fuel on the hills, and the children left in the hut

could only say they were hungry. Their appearance confirmed their

words—want was deeply engraved in their faces, and their lank

bodies were almost unprotected by clothing.

"From Clifden to Ouchterade, twenty-one miles, is a dreary drive

over a moor, unrelieved except by a glimpse of Mr. Martin's house

at Ballynahinch, and of the residence of Dean Mahon. Destitute

as this tract is of inhabitants, about Ouchterade some thirty

houses have been recently demolished. A gentleman who witnessed

the scene told me nothing could exceed the heartlessness of

the levellers, if it were not the patient submission of the

sufferers. They wept, indeed; and the children screamed with

agony at seeing their homes destroyed and their parents in tears;

but the latter allowed themselves unresistingly to be deprived of

what is to most people the dearest thing on earth next to their

lives—their only home.

"The public records, my own eyes, a piercing wail of wo

throughout the land—all testify to the vast extent of the

evictions at the present time. Sixteen thousand and odd persons

unhoused in the Union of Kilrush before the month of June in

the present year; seventy-one thousand one hundred and thirty

holdings done away in Ireland, and nearly as many houses

destroyed, in 1848; two hundred and fifty-four thousand holdings

of more than one acre and less than five acres, put an end to

between 1841 and 1848: six-tenths, in fact, of the lowest class

of tenantry driven from their now roofless or annihilated cabins

and houses, makes up the general description of that desolation

of which Tullig and Mooven are examples. The ruin is great and

complete. The blow that effected it was irresistible. It came in

the guise of charity and benevolence; it assumed the character

of the last and best friend of the peasantry, and it has struck

them to the heart. They are prostrate and helpless. The once

frolicksome people—even the saucy beggars—have disappeared,

and given place to wan and haggard objects, who are so resigned

to their doom that they no longer expect relief. One beholds

only shrunken frames, scarcely covered with flesh—crawling

skeletons, who appear to have risen from their graves, and are

ready to return frightened to that abode. They have little other

covering than that nature has bestowed on the human body—a

poor protection against inclement weather; and, now that the

only hand from which they expected help is turned against them,

even hope is departed, and they are filled with despair. Than

the present Earl of Carlisle there is not a more humane nor a

kinder-hearted nobleman in the kingdom; he is of high honour and

unsullied reputation; yet the poor-law he was mainly the means of

establishing for Ireland, with the best intentions, has been one

of the chief causes of the people being at this time turned out

of their homes, and forced to burrow in holes, and share, till

they are discovered, the ditches and the bogs with otters and

snipes.

"The instant the poor-law was passed, and property was made

responsible for poverty, the whole of the land-owners, who

had before been careless about the people, and often allowed

them to plant themselves on untenanted spots, or divide their

tenancies—delighted to get the promise of a little additional

rent—immediately became deeply interested in preventing that,

and in keeping down the number of the people. Before they had

rates to pay, they cared nothing for them; but the law and their

self-interest made them care, and made them extirpators. Nothing

less than some general desire like that of cupidity falling

in with an enactment, and justified by a theory—nothing less

than a passion which works silently in all, and safely under

the sanction of a law—could have effected such wide-spread

destruction. Even humanity was enlisted by the poor-law on the

side of extirpation. As long as there was no legal provision

for the poor, a landlord had some repugnance to drive them

from every shelter; but the instant the law took them under its

protection, and forced the land-owner to pay a rate to provide

for them, repugnance ceased: they had a legal home, however

inefficient, to go to; and eviction began. Even the growth

of toleration seems to have worked to the same end. Till the

Catholics were emancipated, they were all—rich and poor, priests

and peasants—united by a common bond; and Protestant landlords

beginning evictions on a great scale would have roused against

them the whole Catholic nation. It would have been taken up as a

religious question, as well as a question of the poor, prior to

1829. Subsequent to that time—with a Whig administration, with

all offices open to Catholics—no religious feelings could mingle

with the matter: eviction became a pure question of interest; and

while the priests look now, perhaps, as much to the government as

to their flocks for support, Catholic landlords are not behind

Protestant landlords in clearing their estates."

The person from whom we make the above quotation visited Ireland after

the famine consequent upon the failure of the potato crop had done its

worst—in the latter part of 1849. But famine seems to prevail, to a

certain extent, at all times, in that unhappy land—and thus it is

clear that the accidental failure of a crop has less to do with the

misery of the people than radical misgovernment.

"To the Irish, such desolation is nothing new. They have long

been accustomed to this kind of skinning. Their history, ever

since it was written, teems with accounts of land forcibly taken

from one set of owners and given to another; of clearings and

plantings exactly similar in principle to that which is now

going on; of driving men from Leinster to Munster, from Munster

to Connaught, and from Connaught into the sea. Without going

back to ancient proscriptions and confiscations—all the land

having been, between the reign of Henry II. and William III.

confiscated, it is affirmed, three times over—we must mention

that the clearing so conspicuous in 1848 has now been going on

for several years. The total number of holdings in 1841, of above

one acre, and not exceeding five acres each, was 310,375; and,

in 1847, they had been diminished to 125,926. In that single

class of holdings, therefore, 184,449, between 1841 and 1847

inclusive, had been done away with, and 24,147 were extinguished

in 1848. Within that period, the number of farms of five acres

and upward, particularly of farms of thirty acres and upward, was

increased 210,229, the latter class having increased by 108,474.

Little or no fresh land was broken up; and they, therefore,

could only have been formed by amassing in these larger farms

numerous small holdings. Before the year 1847, therefore,

before 1846, when the potato rot worked so much mischief, even

before 1845, the process of clearing the land, of putting down

homesteads and consolidating farms, had been carried to a great

extent; before any provision had been made by a poor-law for the

evicted families, before the turned-out labourers and little

farmers had even the workhouse for a refuge, multitudes had

been continually driven from their homes to a great extent, as

in 1848. The very process, therefore, on which government now

relies for the present relief and the future improvement of

Ireland, was begun and was carried to a great extent several

years before the extremity of distress fell upon it in 1846.

We are far from saying that the potato rot was caused by the

clearing system; but, by disheartening the people, by depriving

them of security, by contributing to their recklessness, by

paralyzing their exertions, by promoting outrages, that system

undoubtedly aggravated all the evils of that extraordinary

visitation."—_Illustrated News_, October 13, 1849.

The correspondent of the News saw from one hundred and fifty to one

hundred and eighty funerals of victims to the want of food, the whole

number attended by not more than fifty persons. So hardened were the

men regularly employed in the removal of the dead from the workhouse,

that they would drive to the churchyard sitting upon the coffins, and

smoking with apparent enjoyment. These men had evidently "supped full

of horrors." A funeral was no solemnity to them. They had seen the

wretched peasants in the madness of starvation, and death had come as a

soothing angel. Why should the quieted sufferers be lamented?

[Illustration: MULLIN'S HUT AT SCULL.]

A specimen of the in-door horrors of Scull may be seen in the sketch

of a hut of a poor man named Mullins, who lay dying in a corner, upon

a heap of straw supplied by the Relief Committee, while his three

wretched children crouched over a few embers of turf, as if to raise

the last remaining spark of life. This poor man, it appears, had buried

his wife about five days before, and was, in all probability, on the

eve of joining her, when he was found out by the efforts of the vicar,

who, for a few short days, saved him from that which no kindness could

ultimately avert. The dimensions of Mullins's hut did not exceed ten

feet square, and the dirt and filth was ankle-deep upon the floor.

"Commander Caffin, the captain of the steam-sloop _Scourge_, on

the south coast of Ireland, has written a letter to a friend,

dated February 15, 1847, in which he gives a most distressing

and graphic account of the scenes he witnessed in the course of

his duty in discharging a cargo of meal at Scull. After stating

that three-fourths of the inhabitants carry a tale of wo in their

countenances, and are reduced to mere skeletons, he mentions the

result of what he saw while going through the parish with the

rector, Dr. Traill. He says—

"'Famine exists to a fearful degree, with all its horrors. Fever

has sprung up, consequent upon the wretchedness; and swellings

of limbs and body, and diarrhœa, upon the want of nourishment,

are everywhere to be found. Dr. Traill's parish is twenty-one

miles in extent, containing about eighteen thousand souls, with

not more than half a dozen gentlemen in the whole of it. He drove

me about five or six miles; but we commenced our visits before

leaving the village, and in no house that I entered was there not

to be found the dead or dying. In particularizing two or three,

they may be taken as the features of the whole. There was no

picking or choosing, but we took them just as they came.

"'The first which I shall mention was a cabin, rather above the

ordinary ones in appearance and comfort; in it were three young

women, and one young man, and three children, all crouched over

a fire—pictures of misery. Dr. Traill asked after the father,

upon which one of the girls opened a door leading into another

cabin, and there were the father and mother in bed; the father

the most wretched picture of starvation possible to conceive, a

skeleton with life, his power of speech gone; the mother but a

little better—her cries for mercy and food were heart-rending.

It was sheer destitution that had brought them to this. They had

been well to do in the world, with their cow, and few sheep, and

potato-ground. Their crops failed, and their cattle were stolen;

although, anticipating this, they had taken their cow and sheep

into the cabin with them every night, but they were stolen in the

daytime. The son had worked on the road, and earned his 8_d._ a

day, but this would not keep the family, and he, from work and

insufficiency of food, is laid up, and will soon be as bad as his

father. They had nothing to eat in the house, and I could see no

hope for any one of them.

"'In another cabin we went into, a mother and her daughter were

there—the daughter emaciated, and lying against the wall—the

mother naked upon some straw on the ground, with a rug over

her—a most distressing object of misery. She writhed about, and

bared her limbs, in order to show her state of exhaustion. She

had wasted away until nothing but the skin covered the bones—she

cannot have survived to this time.

"'Another that I entered had, indeed, the appearance of

wretchedness without, but its inside was misery! Dr. Traill, on

putting his head inside the hole which answered for a door, said,

'Well, Philis, how is your mother to-day?—he having been with

her the day before—and was replied to, 'Oh, sir, is it you?

Mother is dead!' and there, fearful reality, was the daughter,

a skeleton herself, crouched and crying over the lifeless body

of her mother, which was on the floor, cramped up as she had

died, with her rags and her cloak about her, by the side of a

few embers of peat. In the next cabin were three young children

belonging to the daughter, whose husband had run away from

her, all pictures of death. The poor creature said she did not

know what to do with the corpse—she had no means of getting

it removed, and she was too exhausted to remove it herself:

this cabin was about three miles from the rectory. In another

cabin, the door of which was stopped with dung, was a poor woman

whom we had taken by surprise, as she roused up evidently much

astonished. She burst into tears upon seeing the doctor, and said

she had not been enabled to sleep since the corpse of the woman

had lain in her bed. This was a poor creature who was passing

this miserable cabin, and asked the old woman to allow her to

rest herself for a few moments, when she had laid down, but never

rose up again; she died in an hour or so, from sheer exhaustion.

The body had remained in this hovel of six feet square with the

poor old woman for four days, and she could not get anybody to

remove it.'

"The letter proceeds:—

"'I could in this manner take you through the thirty or more

cottages we visited; but they, without exception, were all

alike—the dead and the dying in each; and I could tell you

more of the truth of the heart-rending scene were I to mention

the lamentations and bitter cryings of each of these poor

creatures on the threshold of death. Never in my life have I

seen such wholesale misery, nor could I have thought it so

complete.'"—_Illustrated News_, February 20, 1847. [At this

period, famine prevailed throughout Ireland.]

At the village of Mienils, a man named Leahey perished during the great

famine, with many circumstances of horror. When too weak, from want of

food, to help himself, he was stretched in his filthy hovel, when his

famished dogs attacked and so mangled him that he expired in intense

agony. Can the history of any other country present such terrible

instances of misery and starvation? The annals of Ireland have been

dark, indeed; and those who have wilfully cast that gloom upon them,

must emancipate Africans, and evangelize the rest of mankind, for a

century, at least, to lay the ghosts of the murdered Irish.

An Irish funeral of later days, with its attendant circumstances of

poverty and gloom, is truly calculated to stir the sensitive heart of a

poet. The obsequies display the meagre results of attempts to bury the

dead with decency. The mourners are few, but their grief is sincere;

and they weep for the lost as they would be wept for when Death, who

is ever walking by their side, lays his cold hand on them. During the

great famine, some poor wretches perished while preparing funerals for

their friends. In the following verses, published in Howitt's Journal,

of the 1st of April, 1847, we have a fine delineation of an Irish

funeral, such as only a poet could give:—

AN IRISH FUNERAL.

BY THE AUTHOR OF "ORION."

"Funerals performed."—_London_ Trades.

"On Wednesday, the remains of a poor woman, who died of hunger,

were carried to their last resting-place by three women, and a

blind man the son-in-law of the deceased. The distance between

the wretched hut of the deceased and the grave-yard was nearly

three miles."—_Tuam Herald._

Heavily plod

Highroad and sod,

With the cold corpse clod

Whose soul is with God!

An old door's the hearse

Of the skeleton corpse,

And three women bear it,

With a blind man to share it:

Over flint, over bog,

They stagger and jog:—

Weary, and hungry, and hopeless, and cold,

They slowly bear onward the bones to the mould.

Heavily plod

Highroad and sod,

With the cold corpse clod,

Whose soul is with God!

Barefoot ye go,

Through the frost, through the snow;

Unsteady and slow,

Your hearts mad with woe;

Bewailing and blessing the poor rigid clod—

The dear dead-and-cold one, whose soul is with God.

Heavily plod

Highroad and sod,

This ruin and rod

Are from man—and not God!

Now out spake her sister,—

"Can we be quite sure

Of the mercy of Heaven,

Or that Death is Life's cure?

A cure for the misery, famine, and pains,

Which our cold rulers view as the end of their gains?"

Heavily plod

Highroad and sod,

With the cold corpse clod,

Whose soul is with God!

"In a land where's plenty,"

The old mother said,—

"But not for poor creatures

Who pawn rags and bed—

There's plenty for rich ones, and those far away,

Who drain off our life-blood, so thoughtless and gay!"

Heavily plod

Highroad and sod,

With the cold corpse clod,

Whose soul is with God!

Then wailed the third woman—

"The darling was worth

The rarest of jewels

That shine upon earth.

When hunger was gnawing her—wasted and wild—

She shared her last morsel with my little child."

Heavily plod

Highroad and sod,

With the cold corpse clod,

Whose soul is with God!

"O Christ!" pray'd the blind man,

"We are not so poor,

Though we bend 'neath the dear weight

That crushes this door;

For we know that the grave is the first step to Heaven,

And a birthright we have in the riches there given."

Heavily plod,

Highroad and sod,

With the cold corpse clod,

Whose soul is with God!

What wonder if the evicted peasants of Ireland, made desperate by the

tyranny of the landlords, sometimes make "a law unto themselves,"

and slay their oppressors! Rebellion proves manhood under such

circumstances. Instances of landlords being murdered by evicted tenants

are numerous. In the following sketch we have a vivid illustration of

this phase of Irish life:—

"The moorland was wide, level, and black; black as night, if you

could suppose night condensed on the surface of the earth, and

that you could tread on solid darkness in the midst of day. The

day itself was fast dropping into night, although it was dreary

and gloomy at the best; for it was a November day. The moor, for

miles around, was treeless and houseless; devoid of vegetation,

except heather, which clad with its gloomy frieze coat the

shivering landscape. At a distance you could discern, through the

misty atmosphere, the outline of mountains apparently as bare

and stony as this wilderness, which they bounded. There were no

fields, no hedgerows, no marks of the hand of man, except the

nakedness itself, which was the work of man in past ages; when,

period after period, he had tramped over the scene with fire

and sword, and left all that could not fly before him, either

ashes to be scattered by the savage winds, or stems of trees,

and carcasses of men trodden into the swampy earth. As the Roman

historians said of other destroyers, 'They created solitude, and

called it peace.' That all this was the work of man, and not of

Nature, any one spot of this huge and howling wilderness could

testify, if you would only turn up its sable surface. In its

bosom lay thousands of ancient oaks and pines, black as ebony;

which told, by their gigantic bulk, that forests must have once

existed on this spot, as rich as the scene was now bleak. Nobler

things than trees lay buried there; but were, for the most part,

resolved into the substance of the inky earth. The dwellings of

men had left few or no traces, for they had been consumed in

flames; and the hearts that had loved, and suffered, and perished

beneath the hand of violence and insult, were no longer human

hearts, but slime. If a man were carried blindfold to that place,

and asked when his eyes were unbandaged where he was, he would

say—'Ireland!'

"He would want no clue to the identity of the place, but the

scene before him. There is no heath like an Irish heath. There

is no desolation like an Irish desolation. Where Nature herself

has spread the expanse of a solitude, it is a cheerful solitude.

The air flows over it lovingly: the flowers nod and dance in

gladness; the soil breathes up a spirit of wild fragrance, which

communicates a buoyant sensation to the heart. You feel that you

tread on ground where the peace of God, and not the 'peace' of

man created in the merciless hurricane of war, has sojourned:

where the sun shone on creatures sporting on ground or on tree,

as the Divine Goodness of the Universe meant them to sport: where

the hunter disturbed alone the enjoyment of the lower animals by

his own boisterous joy: where the traveller sang as he went over

it, because he felt a spring of inexpressible music in his heart:

where the weary wayfarer sat beneath a bush, and blessed God,

though his limbs ached with travel, and his goal was far off.

In God's deserts dwells gladness; in man's deserts, death. A

melancholy smites you as you enter them. There is a darkness from

the past that envelopes your heart, and the moans and sighs of

ten-times perpetrated misery seem still to live in the very winds.

"One shallow and widely spread stream struggled through the

moor; sometimes between masses of gray stone. Sedges and

the white-headed cotton-rush whistled on its margin, and on

island-like expanses that here and there rose above the surface

of its middle course.

"I have said that there was no sign of life; but on one of those

gray stones stood a heron watching for prey. He had remained

straight, rigid, and motionless for hours. Probably his appetite

was appeased by his day's success among the trout of that dark

red-brown stream, which was coloured by the peat from which it

oozed. When he did move, he sprang up at once, stretched his

broad wings, and silent as the scene around him, made a circuit

in the air; rising higher as he went, with slow and solemn

flight. He had been startled by a sound. There was life in the

desert now. Two horsemen came galloping along a highway not far

distant, and the heron, continuing his grave gyrations, surveyed

them as he went. Had they been travellers over a plain of India,

an Austrian waste, or the pampas of South America, they could not

have been grimmer of aspect, or more thoroughly children of the

wild. They were Irish from head to foot.

"They were mounted on two spare but by no means clumsy horses.

The creatures had marks of blood and breed that had been

introduced by the English to the country. They could claim, if

they knew it, lineage of Arabia. The one was a pure bay, the

other and lesser, was black; but both were lean as death, haggard

as famine. They were wet with the speed with which they had been

hurried along. The soil of the damp moorland, or of the field

in which, during the day, they had probably been drawing the

peasant's cart, still smeared their bodies, and their manes flew

as wildly and untrimmed as the sedge or the cotton-rush on the

wastes through which they careered. Their riders, wielding each

a heavy stick instead of a riding-whip, which they applied ever

and anon to the shoulders or flanks of their smoking animals,

were mounted on their bare backs, and guided them by halter

instead of bridle. They were a couple of the short frieze-coated,

knee-breeches and gray-stocking fellows who are as plentiful

on Irish soil as potatoes. From beneath their narrow-brimmed,

old, weather-beaten hats, streamed hair as unkemped as their

horses' manes. The Celtic physiognomy was distinctly marked—the

small and somewhat upturned nose; the black tint of skin; the

eye now looking gray, now black; the freckled cheek, and sandy

hair. Beard and whiskers covered half the face, and the short

square-shouldered bodies were bent forward with eager impatience,

as they thumped and kicked along their horses, muttering curses

as they went.

"The heron, sailing on broad and seemingly slow vans, still kept

them in view. Anon, they reached a part of the moorland where

traces of human labour were visible. Black piles of peat stood on

the solitary ground, ready, after a summer's cutting and drying.

Presently patches of cultivation presented themselves; plots of

ground raised on beds, each a few feet wide, with intervening

trenches to carry off the boggy water, where potatoes had grown,

and small fields where grew more stalks of ragwort than grass,

inclosed by banks cast up and tipped here and there with a brier

or a stone. It was the husbandry of misery and indigence. The

ground had already been freshly manured by sea-weeds, but the

village—where was it? Blotches of burnt ground, scorched heaps

of rubbish, and fragments of blackened walls, alone were visible.

Garden-plots were trodden down, and their few bushes rent up,

or hung with tatters of rags. The two horsemen, as they hurried

by with gloomy visages, uttered no more than a single word:

'Eviction!'

"Further on, the ground heaved itself into a chaotic confusion.

Stony heaps swelled up here and there, naked, black, and barren:

the huge bones of the earth protruded themselves through her

skin. Shattered rocks arose, sprinkled with bushes, and smoke

curled up from what looked like mere heaps of rubbish, but which

were in reality human habitations. Long dry grass hissed and

rustled in the wind on their roofs, (which were sunk by-places,

as if falling in;) and pits of reeking filth seemed placed

exactly to prevent access to some of the low doors; while to

others, a few stepping-stones made that access only possible.

Here the two riders stopped, and hurriedly tying their steeds to

an elder-bush, disappeared in one of the cabins.

"The heron slowly sailed on to the place of its regular roost.

Let us follow it.

"Far different was this scene to those the bird had left. Lofty

trees darkened the steep slopes of a fine river. Rich meadows

lay at the feet of woods and stretched down to the stream. Herds

of cattle lay on them, chewing their cuds after the plentiful

grazing of the day. The white walls of a noble house peeped, in

the dusk of night, through the fertile timber which stood in

proud guardianship of the mansion; and broad winding walks gave

evidence of a place where nature and art had combined to form a

paradise. There were ample pleasure-grounds. Alas! the grounds

around the cabins over which the heron had so lately flown, might

be truly styled pain-grounds.

"Within that home was assembled a happy family. There was the

father, a fine-looking man of forty. Proud you would have deemed

him, as he sate for a moment abstracted in his cushioned chair;

but a moment afterward, as a troop of children came bursting into

the room, his manner was instantly changed into one so pleasant,

so playful, and so overflowing with enjoyment, that you saw him

only as an amiable, glad, domestic man. The mother, a handsome

woman, was seated already at the tea-table; and, in another

minute, sounds of merry voices and childish laughter were mingled

with the jocose tones of the father, and the playful accents of

the mother; addressed, now to one, now to another of the youthful

group.

"In due time the merriment was hushed, and the household

assembled for evening prayer. A numerous train of servants

assumed their accustomed places. The father read. He had

paused once or twice, and glanced with a stern and surprised

expression toward the group of domestics, for he heard sounds

that astonished him from one corner of the room near the door.

He went on—Remember the children of Edom, O Lord, in the day of

judgment, how they said, Down with it, down with it, even to the

ground. O daughter of Babylon, wasted with misery, yea, happy

shall he be who rewardeth thee, as thou hast served us!"

"There was a burst of smothered sobs from the same corner, and

the master's eye flashed with a strange fire as he again darted a

glance toward the offender. The lady looked equally surprised, in

the same direction; then turned a meaning look on her husband—a

warm flush was succeeded by a paleness in her countenance, and

she cast down her eyes. The children wondered, but were still.

Once more the father's sonorous voice continued—'Give us this

day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive

them that trespass against us.' Again the stifled sound was

repeated. The brow of the master darkened again—the mother

looked agitated; the children's wonder increased; the master

closed the book, and the servants, with a constrained silence,

retired from the room.

"'What _can_ be the matter with old Dennis?' exclaimed the lady,

the moment that the door had closed on the household.—'Oh! what

_is_ amiss with poor old Dennis!' exclaimed the children.

"'Some stupid folly or other,' said the father, morosely. 'Come!

away to bed, children. You can learn Dennis's troubles another

time.' The children would have lingered, but again the words,

'Away with you!' in a tone which never needed repetition, were

decisive: they kissed their parents and withdrew. In a few

seconds the father rang the bell. 'Send Dennis Croggan here.'

"The old man appeared. He was a little thin man, of not less

than seventy years of age, with white hair and a dark spare

countenance. He was one of those nondescript servants in a large

Irish house, whose duties are curiously miscellaneous. He had,

however, shown sufficient zeal and fidelity through a long life,

to secure a warm nook in the servants' hall for the remainder of

his days.

"Dennis entered with an humble and timid air, as conscious that

he had deeply offended; and had to dread at least a severe

rebuke. He bowed profoundly to both the master and mistress.

"'What is the meaning of your interruptions during the prayers,

Dennis?' demanded the master abruptly. 'Has any thing happened to

you?'

"'No, sir.'

"'Any thing amiss in your son's family?'

"'No, your honour.'

"The interrogator paused; a storm of passion seemed slowly

gathering within him. Presently he asked in a loud tone, 'What

does this mean? Was there no place to vent your nonsense in, but

in this room, and at prayers?'

"Dennis was silent. He cast an imploring look at the master, then

at the mistress.

"'What is the matter, good Dennis?' asked the lady, in a kind

tone. 'Compose yourself, and tell us. Something strange must have

happened to you.'

"Dennis trembled violently; but he advanced a couple of paces,

seized the back of a chair as if to support him, and, after a

vain gasp or two, declared, as intelligibly as fear would permit,

that the prayer had overcome him.

"'Nonsense, man!' exclaimed the master, with fury in the same

face, which was so lately beaming with joy on the children.

'Nonsense! Speak out without more ado, or you shall rue it.'

"Dennis looked to the mistress as if he would have implored her

intercession; but as she gave no sign of it, he was compelled to

speak; but in a brogue that would have been unintelligible to

English ears. We therefore translate it:

"'I could not help thinking of the poor people at Rathbeg, when

the soldiers and police cried, "Down with them! down with them,

even to the ground!" and then the poor bit cabins came down all

in fire and smoke, amid the howls and cries of the poor creatures.

"'Oh! it was a fearful sight, your honour—it was, indeed—to

see the poor women hugging their babies, and the houses where

they were born burning in the wind. It was dreadful to see the

old bedridden man lie on the wet ground among the few bits of

furniture, and groan to his gracious God above. Oh, your honour!

you never saw such a sight, or—you—sure a—it would never have

been done!'

"Dennis seemed to let the last words out as if they were jerked

from him by a sudden shock.

"The master, whose face had changed during this speech to a livid

hue of passion, his eyes blazing with rage, was in the act of

rushing on old Dennis, when he was held back by his wife, who

exclaimed, 'Oswald! be calm; let us hear what Dennis has to say.

Go on, Dennis, go on.'

"The master stood still, breathing hard to overcome his rage. Old

Dennis, as if seeing only his own thoughts, went on: 'O, bless

your honour, if you had seen that poor frantic woman when the

back of the cabin fell and buried her infant, where she thought

she had laid it safe for a moment while she flew to part her

husband and a soldier who had struck the other children with the

flat of his sword, and bade them to troop off. Oh, your honour,

but it was a killing sight. It was that came over me in the

prayer, and I feared that we might be praying perdition on us

all, when we prayed about our trespasses. If the poor creatures

of Rathbeg should meet us, your honour, at Heaven's gate (I was

thinking) and say—These are the heathens that would not let us

have a poor hearth-stone in poor ould Ireland.—And that was all,

your honour, that made me misbehave so; I was just thinking of

that, and I could not help it.'

"'Begone, you old fool!' exclaimed the master; and Dennis

disappeared with a bow and an alertness that would have done

credit to his earlier years.

"There was a moment's silence after his exit. The lady turned to

her husband, and clasping his arm with her hands and looking into

his darkened countenance with a look of tenderest anxiety, said:—

"'Dearest Oswald, let me, as I have so often done, once more

entreat that these dreadful evictions may cease. Surely there

must be some way to avert them and to set your property right,

without such violent measures.'

"The stern proud man said, 'Then why, in the name of Heaven,

do you not reveal some other remedy? why do you not enlighten

all Ireland? why don't you instruct Government? The unhappy

wretches who have been swept away by force are no people, no

tenants of mine; they squatted themselves down, as a swarm of

locusts fix themselves while a green blade is left; they obstruct

all improvement; they will not till the ground themselves, nor

will they quit it to allow me to provide more industrious and

provident husbandmen to cultivate it. Land that teems with

fertility, and is shut out from hearing and bringing forth food

for man, is accursed. Those who have been evicted not only rob

me, but their more industrious fellows.'

"'They will murder us,' said the wife, 'some day for these

things. They will—'

"Her words were cut short suddenly by her husband starting, and

standing in a listening attitude. 'Wait a moment,' he said, with

a peculiar calmness, as if he had just got a fresh thought; and

his lady, who did not comprehend what was the cause, but hoped

that some better influence was touching him, unloosed her hands

from his arm. 'Wait just a moment,' he repeated, and stepped from

the room, opened the front door, and, without his hat, went out.

"'He is intending to cool down his anger,' thought his wife;

'he feels a longing for the freshness of the air,' But she had

not caught the sound which had startled his quicker, because

more excited ear; she had been too much engrossed by her own

intercession with him; it was a peculiar whine from the mastiff,

which was chained near the lodge-gate, that had arrested his

attention. He stepped out. The black clouds which overhung the

moor had broken, and the moon's light straggled between them.

"The tall and haughty man stood erect in the breeze and listened.

Another moment-there was a shot, and he fell headlong upon the

broad steps on which he stood. His wife sprang with a piercing

shriek from the door and fell on his corpse. A crowd of servants

gathered about them, making wild lamentations and breathing vows

of vengeance. The murdered master and the wife were borne into

the house.

"The heron soared from its lofty perch, and wheeled with

terrified wings through the night air. The servants armed

themselves, and, rushing furiously from the house, traversed the

surrounding masses of trees; fierce dogs were let loose, and

dashed frantically through the thickets: all was, however, too

late. The soaring heron saw gray figures, with blackened faces,

stealing away—often on their hands and knees—down the hollows

of the moorlands toward the village, where the two Irish horsemen

had, in the first dusk of that evening, tied their lean steeds

to the old elder bush.

"Near the mansion no lurking assassin was to be found. Meanwhile

two servants, pistol in hand, on a couple of their master's

horses, scoured hill and dale. The heron, sailing solemnly on the

wind above, saw them halt in a little town. They thundered with

the butt-ends of their pistols on a door in the principal street;

over it there was a coffin-shaped board, displaying a painted

crown and the big-lettered words, 'POLICE STATION.' The mounted

servants shouted with might and main. A night-capped head issued

from a chamber casement with—'What is the matter?'

"'Out with you, police! out with all your strength, and lose not

a moment. Mr. FitzGibbon, of Sporeen, is shot at his own door.'

"The casement was hastily clapped to, and the two horsemen

galloped forward up the long, broad street, now flooded with the

moon's light. Heads full of terror were thrust from upper windows

to inquire the cause of that rapid galloping, but ever too late.

The two men held their course up a steep hill outside of the

town, where stood a vast building overlooking the whole place; it

was the barracks. Here the alarm was also given.

"In less than an hour a mounted troop of police in olive-green

costume, with pistols at holster, sword by side, and carbine

on the arm, were trotting briskly out of town, accompanied

by the two messengers, whom they plied with eager questions.

These answered, and sundry imprecations vented, the whole party

increased their speed, and went on, mile after mile, by hedgerow

and open moorland, talking as they went.

"Before they reached the house of Sporeen, and near the village

where the two Irish horsemen had stopped the evening before,

they halted and formed themselves into more orderly array. A

narrow gully was before them on the road, hemmed in on each

side by rocky steeps, here and there overhung with bushes. The

commandant bade them be on their guard, for there might be danger

there. He was right; for the moment they began to trot through

the pass, the flash and rattle of firearms from the thickets

above saluted them, followed by a wild yell. In a second,

several of their number lay dead or dying in the road. The fire

was returned promptly by the police, but it was at random; for,

although another discharge and another howl announced that the

enemy were still there, no one could be seen. The head of the

police commanded his troops to make a dash through the pass; for

there was no scaling the heights from this side, the assailants

having warily posted themselves there, because at the foot of

the eminence were stretched on either hand impassable bogs. The

troop dashed forward, firing their pistols as they went, but were

met by such deadly discharges of firearms as threw them into

confusion, killed and wounded several of their horses, and made

them hastily retreat.

"There was nothing for it but to await the arrival of the

cavalry; and it was not long before the clatter of horses' hoofs

and the ringing of sabres were heard on the road. On coming

up, the troop of cavalry, firing to the right and left on the

hillsides, dashed forward, and, in the same instant, cleared the

gully in safety, the police having kept their side of the pass.

In fact, not a single shot was returned, the arrival of this

strong force having warned the insurgents to decamp. The cavalry,

in full charge, ascended the hills to their summits. Not a foe

was to be seen, except one or two dying men, who were discovered

by their groans.

"The moon had been for a time quenched in a dense mass of clouds,

which now were blown aside by a keen and cutting wind. The heron,

soaring over the desert, could now see gray-coated men flying

in different directions to the shelter of the neighbouring

hills. The next day he was startled from his dreamy reveries

near the moorland stream, by the shouts and galloping of mingled

police and soldiers, as they gave chase to a couple of haggard,

bare-headed, and panting peasants. These were soon captured, and

at once recognised as belonging to the evicted inhabitants of the

recently deserted village.

"Since then years have rolled on. The heron, who had been

startled from his quiet haunts by these things, was still

dwelling on the lofty tree with his kindred, by the hall of

Sporeen. He had reared family after family in that airy lodgment,

as spring after spring came round; but no family, after that

fatal time, had ever tenanted the mansion. The widow and

children had fled from it so soon as Mr. FitzGibbon had been laid

in the grave. The nettle and dock flourished over the scorched

ruins of the village of Rathbeg; dank moss and wild grass tangled

the proud drives and walks of Sporeen. All the woodland rides and

pleasure-grounds lay obstructed with briers; and young trees in

time grew luxuriantly where once the roller in its rounds could

not crush a weed; the nimble frolics of the squirrel were now the

only merry things where formerly the feet of lovely children had

sprung with elastic joy.

"The curse of Ireland was on the place. Landlord and tenant,

gentleman and peasant, each with the roots and the shoots of many

virtues in their hearts, thrown into a false position by the

mutual injuries of ages, had wreaked on each other the miseries

sown broadcast by their ancestors. Beneath this foul spell men

who would, in any other circumstances, have been the happiest and

the noblest of mankind, became tyrants; and peasants, who would

have glowed with grateful affection toward them, exulted in being

their assassins. As the traveller rode past the decaying hall,

the gloomy woods, and waste black moorlands of Sporeen, he read

the riddle of Ireland's fate, and asked himself when an Œdipus

would arise to solve it."

A large number of the peasantry of Connemara, a rocky and romantic

region, are among the most recent evictions.

"These hardy mountaineers, whose lives, and the lives of their

fathers and great-grandfathers have been spent in reclaiming

the barren hills where their hard lot has been cast, were the

victims of a series of oppressions unparalleled in the annals

of Irish misrule. They were thickly planted over the rocky

surface of Connemara for political purposes. In the days of

the 40_s._ freeholder, they were driven to the hustings like

a flock of sheep, to register not alone one vote, but in many

instances three or four votes each; and it was no uncommon thing

to see those unfortunate serfs evicted from their holdings when

an election had terminated— not that they refused to vote

according to the wish of their landlords, but because they did

not go far enough in the sin of perjury and the diabolical crime

of impersonation. When they ceased to possess any political

importance, they were cast away like broken tools. It was no

uncommon thing, in the wilds of Connemara, to see the peasantry,

after an election, coming before the Catholic Archbishop, when

holding a visitation of his diocese, to proclaim openly the crime

of impersonation which their landlords compelled them to commit,

and implore forgiveness for such. Of this fact we have in the

town of Galway more than one living witness; so that, while every

thing was done, with few exceptions, to demoralize the peasantry

of Connemara, and plant in their souls the germs of that slavery

which is so destructive to the growth of industry, enterprise,

or manly exertion—no compassion for their wants was ever

evinced—no allowance for their poverty and inability to meet the

rack-renting demands of their landlords was ever made."

Perhaps, it requires no Œdipus to tell what will be the future of the

Irish nation, if the present system of slavery is maintained by their

English conquerors. If they do not cease to exist as a people, they

will continue to quaff the dark waters of sorrow, and to pay a price,

terrible to think of, for the mere privilege of existence.

During the famine of 1847, the heartlessness of many Irish landlords

was manifested by their utter indifference to the multitudes starving

around their well-supplied mansions. At that period, the Rev. A. King,

of Cork, wrote to the Southern Reporter as follows:—

"The town and the surrounding country for many miles are

possessed by twenty-six proprietors, whose respective yearly

incomes vary from one hundred pounds, or less, to several

thousands. They had all been respectfully informed of the

miserable condition of the people, and solicited to give relief.

Seventeen of the number had not the politeness to answer the

letters of the committee, four had written to say they would not

contribute, and the remaining five had given a miserable fraction

of what they ought to have contributed. My first donation from

a small portion of a small relief fund, received from English

strangers, exceeded the aggregate contributions of six-and-twenty

landed proprietors, on whose properties human beings were

perishing from famine, filth, and disease, amid circumstances of

wretchedness appalling to humanity and disgraceful to civilized

men! I believe it my sacred duty to gibbet this atrocity in

the press, and to call on benevolent persons to loathe it as a

monster crime. Twenty-one owners of property, on which scores,

nay hundreds, of their fellow-creatures are dying of hunger, give

nothing to save their lives! Are they not virtually guilty of

wholesale murder? I ask not what human law may decide upon their

acts, but in the name of Christianity I arraign them as guilty of

treason against the rights of humanity and the laws of God!"

It is to escape the responsibility mentioned by Mr. King, as well as

to avoid the payment of poor-rates, that the landlords resort to the

desolating process of eviction. To show the destructive nature of the

tyrannical system that has so long prevailed in Ireland, we will take

an abstract of the census of 1841 and 1851.

1841. 1851.

Houses: Inhabited 1,328,839 1,047,935

" Uninhabited, built 52,203 65,159

" " building 3,318 2,113

— —

Total 1,384,360 1,115,207

Families 1,472,287 1,207,002

Persons: Males 4,019,576 3,176,727

" Females 4,155,548 3,339,067

— —

Total 8,175,124 6,515,794

Population in 1841 8,175,124

" 1851 6,515,794

—

Decrease 1,659,330

Or, at the rate of 20 per cent.

Population in 1821 6,801,827

" 1831 7,767,401

" 1841 8,175,124

" 1851 6,515,794

Or, 286,030 souls fewer than in 1821, thirty years ago.

"We shall impress the disastrous importance of the reduction in

the number of the people on our readers, by placing before them a

brief account of the previous progress of the population. There

is good reason to suppose, that, prior to the middle of the last

century, the people continually, though slowly, increased; but

from that time something like authentic but imperfect records

give the following as their numbers at successive periods:—

1754 2,372,634

1767 2,544,276 Increase per cent. 7·2

1777 2,690,556 " 5·7

1785 2,845,932 " 5·8

1805 5,359,456 " 84·0

1813 5,937,858 " 10·8

1821 6,801,829 " 14·6

1831 7,767,401 " 14·9

1841 8,175,124 " 5·3

1851 6,515,794 Decrease 20·0

"Though there are some discrepancies in these figures, and

probably the number assigned to 1785 is too small, and that

assigned to 1805 too large, they testify uniformly to a continual

increase of the people for eighty-seven years, from 1754 to 1841.

Now, for the first time in nearly a century, a complete change

has set in, and the population has decreased in the last ten

years 20 per cent. It is 1,659,330 less than in 1841, and less by

286,033 than in 1821.

"But this is not quite all. The census of 1851 was taken 68

days earlier than the census of 1841; and it is obvious, if the

same rate of decrease continued through those 68 days, as has

prevailed on the average through the ten years, that the whole

amount of decrease would be so much greater. Sixty-eight days is

about the 54th part of ten years—say the 50th part; and the 50th

part of the deficiency is 33,000 odd—say 30,000. We must add

30,000, therefore, to the 1,659,330, making 1,689,330, to get the

true amount of the diminution of the people in ten years.

"Instead of the population increasing in a healthy manner,

implying an increase in marriages, in families, and in all the

affections connected with them, and implying an increase in

general prosperity, as for nearly a century before, and now

amounting, as we might expect, to 8,600,000, it is 2,000,000

less. This is a disastrous change in the life of the Irish. At

this downward rate, decreasing 20 per cent. in ten years, five

such periods would suffice to exterminate the whole population

more effectually than the Indians have been exterminated from

North America. Fifty years of this new career would annihilate

the whole population of Ireland, and turn the land into an

uninhabited waste. This is a terrible reverse in the condition of

a people, and is the more remarkable because in the same period

the population of Great Britain has increased 12 per cent., and

because there is no other example of a similar decay in any part

of Europe in the same time, throughout which the population has

continued to increase, though not everywhere equally, nor so fast

as in Great Britain. Indeed, it may be doubted whether the annals

of mankind can supply, in a season of peace—when no earthquakes

have toppled down cities, no volcanoes have buried them beneath

their ashes, and no inroads of the ocean have occurred—such

wholesale diminution of the population and desolation of the

country.

"The inhabited houses in Ireland have decreased from 1,328,839

in 1841 to 1,047,735 in 1851, or 281,104, (21·2 per cent.,) and

consequently more than the population, who are now worse lodged

and more crowded in relation to houses than they were in 1841.

As the uninhabited houses have increased only 12,951, no less

than 268,153 houses must have been destroyed in the ten years.

That informs us of the extent of the 'clearances' of which we

have heard so much of late; and the 1,659,300 people less in the

country is an index to the number of human beings who inhabited

the houses destroyed. We must remember, too, that within the

period a number of union workhouses have been built in Ireland,

capable of accommodating 308,885 persons, and that, besides the

actual diminution of the number of the people, there has been a

change in their habits, about 300,000 having become denizens of

workhouses, who, prior to 1841, lived in their own separate huts.

With distress and destruction pauperism has also increased.

"The decrease has not been equal for the males and females; the

numbers were as follows.—

1841. 1851.

Males 4,019,576 3,176,124 Decrease 20·9 per cent.

Females 4,155,548 3,336,067 " 29·6 "

"The females now exceed the males by 162,943, or 2 per cent. on

the whole population. It is not, however, that the mortality has

been greater among the males than the females, but that more of

the former than of the latter have escaped from the desolation.

"Another important feature of the returns is the increase of

the town population:—Dublin, 22,124, or 9 per cent.; Belfast,

24,352, or 32 per cent.; Galway, 7422, or 43 per cent.; Cork,

5765, or 7 per cent. Altogether, the town population has

increased 71,928, or nearly 1 per cent., every town except

Londonderry displaying the same feature; and that increase makes

the decrease of the rural population still more striking. The

whole decrease is of the agricultural classes: Mr. O'Connell's

'finest pisantry' are the sufferers."

The London Illustrated News, in an article upon the census, says—

"The causes of the decay of the people, subordinate to

inefficient employment and to wanting commerce and manufactures,

are obviously great mortality, caused by the destruction of the

potatoes and the consequent want of food, the clearance system,

and emigration. From the retarded increase of the population

between 1831 and 1841—only 5·3 per cent., while in the previous

ten years it had been nearly 15 per cent.—it may be inferred

that the growth of the population was coming to a stand-still

before 1841, and that the late calamities only brought it down to

its means of continued subsistence, according to the distribution

of property and the occupations of the people. The potato rot,

in 1846, was a somewhat severer loss of that root than had

before fallen on the Irish, who have suffered occasionally from

famines ever since their history began; and it fell so heavily

on them then, because they were previously very much and very

generally impoverished. Thousands, and even millions, of them

subsisted almost exclusively on lumpers, the very worst kind

of potatoes, and were reduced in health and strength when they

were overtaken by the dearth of 1846. The general smallness of

their consumption, and total abstinence from the use of tax

paying articles, is made painfully apparent by the decrease of

the population of Ireland having had no sensible influence in

reducing the revenue. They were half starved while alive. Another

remarkable fact which we must notice is, that, while the Irish

population have thus been going to decay, the imports and exports

of the empire have increased in a much more rapid ratio than the

population of Great Britain. For them, therefore, exclusively,

is the trade of the empire carried on, and the Irish who have

been swept away, without lessening the imports and exports, have

had no share in our commerce. It is from these facts apparent,

that, while they have gone to decay, the population of Great

Britain have increased their well-being and their enjoyments

much more than their numbers. We need not remind our readers of

the dreadful sufferings of the Irish in the years 1847, 1848,

and 1849; for the accounts we then published of them were too

melancholy to be forgotten. As an illustration, we may observe

that the Irish Poor-law Commissioners, in their fourth report,

dated May 5, 1851, boast that the 'worst evils of the famine,

such as the occurrence of _deaths by the wayside_, a high rate of

mortality in the workhouses, and the prevalence of dangerous and

contagious diseases in or out of the workhouse, have undergone

a very material abatement.' There have been, then, numerous

deaths by the wayside, alarming contagious diseases, and great

mortality in the workhouses."

The Poor-law Commissioners kept a most mysterious silence during the

worst period of the famine; and, it was only when the horrors of that

time were known to the whole civilized world that they reported the

"abatement of the evils." Perhaps, they had become so accustomed to

witnessing misery in Ireland that even the famine years did not startle

them into making a humane appeal to the British government upon behalf

of the sufferers.

The Illustrated News, in the same article we have quoted above, says,

quite sensibly, but with scarcely a due appreciation of the causes of

Ireland's decay—