The following pages were originally published in the New Monthly
Magazine. The continued demand for the numbers in which they appeared,
has induced the proprietor to reprint the article, and it is now offered
to the public in a substantive form.
Notwithstanding the intense interest which is felt throughout all
England concerning Ireland and Irish affairs, notwithstanding the
frequent debates in parliament, and more frequent pamphlets and volumes
published on points of Irish politics and œconomy, the prevailing
ignorance on these subjects still operates powerfully in maintaining
prejudices the most unfounded and the most fatal, and in retarding those
measures of wisdom and of justice without which Ireland can never be
happy, or the British Empire secure.
It is this ignorance more especially which enables the party opposed to
the settlement of Ireland to occupy public attention with minor
grievances, behind which the danger and malice of their system are
concealed from a nation too generous to tolerate open and avowed
oppression. No sooner is the question of Catholic Emancipation proposed
in the senate, with some chance of obtaining a favourable consideration,
than one or other of these convenient abuses is thrust forward to
distract attention and to puzzle the will. The absentees, the deficiency
of employment, the potatoe diet, the want of poor laws, or the want of
education, are, from time to time put forth as the paramount evil, the
gushing fountain of every misfortune of Ireland; while the main subject
of complaint, the Catholic disability, is studiously represented as
affecting only a few briefless barristers, or ambitious landlords. The
advantage which is thus obtained in pre-occupying the public mind, and
in affording additional ground for a superstructure of sophisms is
immense.
The British nation has so many and such vast interests to pursue, its
relations with every country in the world are so many and so
complicated, that the most instructed of its subjects can find but
little time and attention to bestow on any one of them, however
important. The public in general is therefore compelled to repose
confidence in those who affect a knowledge of each particular subject;
and to take for granted the propositions they advance. When the men who
should be the guides of public opinion are false to their trust, and
instead of presenting truths in a clear and perspicuous form, studiously
bury them beneath a mass of plausibilities, or entangle them in a
net-work of sophistry, the task of unweaving their web, and detecting
their fallacies, must be again and again undertaken, before a credulous
and a pre-occupied people can be made aware of the deception, and
enabled to judge of the question at issue by its intrinsic merits.
On this account, it cannot but be deemed most unfortunate that the
friends of Ireland unwittingly complicated the recent discussion on the
Catholic Question, by the two bills with which they clogged their main
proposition. It was not sufficient that the public should be dinned and
stupified with the mass of untelligible and absurd theology with which
that very plain question of policy and common morality is too
unfortunately loaded; but it must also be mystified with high sounding
phrases of “disfranchisement,” “oppression of the poor,” and other
similar phantoms. To lead the British public to imagine that the
disqualification of the forty shilling freeholders would affect the
influence either of the catholic or protestant party in Ireland, was, to
say the best of it, a strange mistake: but on the other side, to attempt
making men believe that the franchise is a benefit to its holder, or
that the existing representative system of Ireland, with or without the
forty shilling freeholders, has any the remotest practical utility as an
instrument of liberty or of self-taxation, is a gross and absolute
deception. All the discussion which was raised on this most silly of
disputes (and the enemies of emancipation were not slow to profit by the
advantage) was _de lana caprina_, and so much diversion of the public
mind from the main point at issue; serving only to inflame enemies, and
to divide friends. Though no one will dispute that both the riders were
appended to the Catholic Bill in deference to the opponents of that
measure, and with an honest intention to conciliate and to compromise,
yet in the event, the introduction of extraneous matter has proved
eminently unfavourable to the cause, and will, it is to be hoped, never
again be attempted.
The futility of the arguments derived from a putting forth of secondary
causes of evil in Irish politics, as directed against the entertainment
of the Catholic Question, is the greater, in as much as all the various
subjects which are advanced as matters of complaint, derive immediately
from this one source. Deficient capital, deficient knowledge, deficient
civilization, are all the necessary consequences of bad government,--of
that bad government for whose sake Catholic has been set against
Protestant, and the Irish people divided, in order to prevent the
assertion of their political rights. In England people are governed in
their opinions on the Catholic Question exclusively by their hopes and
fears; and none but the clergy have a corrupt interest in withholding
justice from any religious sect. But in Ireland power and place, the
licence to oppress, and the facility of living on the public purse, are
closely entwined with the permanence of a system, which, while it
tramples the Catholic in the dust, degrades and impoverishes the whole
population, for the exclusive benefit of a few powerful families. It is
bad government, and the destraction and turbulence which bad government
has engendered, that drives industry and capital from the country, and
forces the peasantry to abandon all pretence to luxuries and
refinements, whether moral or physical. It is bad government that
banishes meat from the cotter’s table, and instruction from his mind. It
is bad government that puts a pike in his hand, and hardens his heart
against all the charities of life; it is bad government that makes
property insecure, and life precarious; it is bad government, therefore,
that induces the aristocracy to fly to happier regions, to abandon their
duties to their country and to themselves, and to seek for tranquillity
and safety even at the expense of half their fortunes; and it is, above
all, bad government which renders the absence of a limited aristocracy
an evil of magnitude, either morally, politically, or economically.
The geographical position of Ireland, and its political dependence, (the
necessary consequence of that position,) must always occasion more
absenteeism than usually occurs in other nations. The robbery and
spoilation of the native proprietors to endow the pampered favourites of
a foreign court, which took place in the preceding centuries, afford
another cause for this evil; but by far the greatest number of absentees
are banished by the direct operation of the penal code, or by its
indirect influence in limiting the pursuit of fortune at home. Ireland
has no field for enterprise and industry, it has no market for
merchandize. It has no scope for honest ambition, no promise of
pleasure, no resting place for repose; and yet it is expected that those
who have the means of quitting the land will inhabit it out of respect
for a principle, or regard for an abstraction!
Absenteeism considered in itself is an unnatural ill. There is usually
so much of ease, of happiness, and of personal consequence in living at
home surrounded by friends, relations, and a respectful tenantry,--there
is usually so much mortification and disgust in the condition of a
stranger and a foreigner, that nothing but political causes can drive
the great proprietors of a country to permanently abandon their estates.
Yet so natural is it for men to complain of the evil which strikes the
most powerfully on the senses,--so convenient is it for those, who are
determined in the denial of justice, to make absenteeism the _causa
causans_ of calamities which they want the humanity to relieve, that all
classes of persons, the Protestant and the Catholic, the mere Irish and
the lord of the pale, the oppressor and the oppressed, the Irish
corporator and the English minister have joined in a common cry against
absentees. It is not therefore very surprising that the mere John Bull,
wrapped in his own affairs, and buried in his counting-house, should
believe what every one repeats, and should shut his eyes against the
real causes of that turbulence and that discontent which, though they
have given him so much trouble and uneasiness, are yet too far removed
from his gaze to allow of the formation of an independent judgment. It
is not very wonderful that he should credit the assertion so hardily
made, that Catholic Emancipation is not the one thing needful to
Ireland, the essential preliminary, without which, no practical relief
can be afforded to the economical distresses of the country.
In taking up the subject of absenteeism, the peculiar bent of Lady
Morgan’s mind, and the character of her habitual pursuits, have
inevitably given a picturesque turn to her ideas, and induced her to
view the matter less as an economist than as a poet and a woman. But the
great truth has not escaped her, that absenteeism is less a cause than
an effect: and while in the romance of her imagination she has
delineated what Ireland might be under the fostering protection of an
enlightened and liberal aristocracy, she has not forgotten that under
existing circumstances it must remain for ever the blighted victim of an
oppressive and ignorant _bureaucratie_.