_The Irish Question_
IN THE meantime, besides the prolonged and unforeseen resistance of the
Protectionists, there were other and unexpected causes at work which
equally, or perhaps even more powerfully tended to the fulfilment of the
scheme of delay, which Lord George Bentinck had recommended his friends
to adopt and encourage.
In the latter months of the year 1845, there broke out in some of the
counties of Ireland one of those series of outrages which have hitherto
periodically occurred in districts of that country. Assassination and
crimes of violence were rife: men on the queen’s highway were shot from
behind hedges, or suddenly torn from their horses and beaten to death
with clubs; houses were visited in the night by bodies of men, masked
and armed--their owners dragged from their beds, and, in the presence
of their wives and children, maimed and mutilated; the administration of
unlawful oaths, with circumstances of terror, indicated the existence of
secret confederations, whose fell intents, profusely and ostentatiously
announced by threatening letters, were frequently and savagely
perpetrated.
These barbarous distempers had their origin in the tenure of land in
Ireland, and in the modes of its occupation. A combination of causes,
political, social, and economical, had for more than a century unduly
stimulated the population of a country which had no considerable
resources except in the soil. That soil had become divided into minute
allotments, held by a pauper tenantry, at exorbitant rents, of a class
of middlemen, themselves necessitous, and who were mere traders in land.
A fierce competition raged amid the squalid multitude for these strips
of earth which were their sole means of existence. To regulate this
fatal rivalry, and restrain this emulation of despair, the peasantry,
enrolled in secret societies, found refuge in an inexorable code. He who
supplanted another in the occupation of the soil was doomed by an occult
tribunal, from which there was no appeal, to a terrible retribution. His
house was visited in the night by whitefeet and ribbonmen--his doom was
communicated to him, by the post, in letters, signed by Terry Alt, or
Molly M’Guire, or he was suddenly shot, like a dog, by the orders of
Captain Rock. Yet even these violent inflictions rather punished than
prevented the conduct against which they were directed. The Irish
peasant had to choose between starving and assassination. If, in
deference to an anonymous mandate, he relinquished his holding, he and
those who depended on him were outcasts and wanderers; if he retained or
accepted it, his life might be the forfeit, but subsistence was secured;
and in poor and lawless countries, the means of living are more valued
than life. Those who have treated of the agrarian crimes of Ireland
have remarked, that the facility with which these outrages have been
committed has only been equalled by the difficulty of punishing them. A
murder, perpetrated at noonday, in the sight of many persons, cannot be
proved in a court of justice. The spectators are never witnesses; and it
has been inferred from this, that the outrage is national, and that the
heart of the populace is with the criminal. But though a chief landlord,
or a stipendiary magistrate, may occasionally be sacrificed, the great
majority of victims are furnished by the humblest class. Not sympathy,
but terror, seals the lip and clouds the eye of the bystander. And this
is proved by the fact that while those who have suffered have almost
always publicly declared that they were unable to recognize their
assailants, and believed them to be strangers, they have frequently, in
confidence, furnished the police with the names of the guilty.
Thus, there is this remarkable characteristic of the agrarian anarchy
of Ireland which marks it out from all similar conditions of other
countries: it is a war of the poor against the poor.
Before the rapid increase of population had forced governments to study
political economy and to investigate the means of subsisting a people,
statesmen had contented themselves by attributing to political causes
these predial disturbances, and by recommending for them political
remedies. The course of time, which had aggravated the condition of the
Irish peasantry, had increased the numbers, the wealth, and the general
importance of those of the middle classes of Ireland who professed the
Roman Catholic faith. Shut out from the political privileges of the
constitution, these formed a party of discontent that was a valuable
ally to the modern Whigs, too long excluded from that periodical share
of power which is the life-blood of a parliamentary government and the
safeguard of a constitutional monarchy. The misgovernment of Ireland
became therefore a stock topic of the earlier Opposition of the present
century; and advocating the cause of their clients, who wished to become
mayors, and magistrates, and members of the legislature, they argued
that in the concession of those powers and dignities, and perhaps in
the discreet confiscation of the property of the Church, the only cures
could be found for threatening notices, robbery of arms, administering
of unlawful oaths, burglary, murder, and arson.
Yet if these acts of violence were attributable to defective political
institutions, why, as was usually the case, were they partial in their
occurrence? Why were they limited to particular districts? If political
grievances were the cause, the injustice would be as sharp in tranquil
Wexford as in turbulent Tipperary. Yet out of the thirty-two counties
of Ireland, the outrages prevailed usually in less than a third. These
outrages were never insurrectionary: they were not directed against
existing authorities; they were stimulated by no public cause or
clamour; it was the private individual who was attacked, and for a
private reason. This was their characteristic.
But as time elapsed, two considerable events occurred: the Roman
Catholic restrictions were repealed, and the Whigs became ministers.
Notwithstanding these great changes, the condition of the Irish
peasantry remained the same; the tenure of land was unchanged, the modes
of its occupation were unaltered, its possession was equally necessary
and equally perilous. The same circumstances produced the same
consequences. Notwithstanding even that the Irish Church had been
remodelled, and its revenues not only commuted but curtailed;
notwithstanding that Roman Catholics had not only become members of
Parliament but even Parliament had been reformed; Irish outrage became
more flagrant and more extensive than at any previous epoch--and the
Whigs were ministers.
Placed in this responsible position, forced to repress the evil, the
causes of which they had so often explained, and which with their
cooperation had apparently been so effectually removed, the Whig
government were obliged to have recourse to the very means which they
had so frequently denounced when recommended by their rivals, and that,
too, on a scale of unusual magnitude and severity. They proposed for
the adoption of Parliament one of those measures which would suspend the
constitution of Ireland, and which are generally known by the name of
Coercion Acts.
The main and customary provisions of these Coercion Acts were of
severe restraint, and scarcely less violent than the conduct they were
constructed to repress. They invested the lord lieutenant with power
to proclaim a district as disturbed, and then to place its inhabitants
without the pale of the established law; persons out of their dwellings
between sunset and sunrise were liable to transportation; and to secure
the due execution of the law, prisoners were tried before military
tribunals, and not by their peers, whose verdicts, from sympathy or
terror, were usually found to baffle justice.
These Coercion Acts were effectual; they invariably obtained their end,
and the proclaimed districts became tranquil. But they were an affair
of police, not of government; essentially temporary, their effect was
almost as transient as their sway, and as they were never accompanied
with any deep and sincere attempt to cope with the social circumstances
which produced disorder, the recurrence of the chronic anarchy was
merely an affair of time. Whether it were that they did not sufficiently
apprehend the causes, or that they shrank from a solution which must
bring them in contact with the millions of a surplus population, there
seems always to have been an understanding between the public men
of both parties, that the Irish difficulty should be deemed a purely
political, or at the utmost a religious one. And even so late as 1846,
no less a personage than the present chief secretary, put forward by
his party to oppose an Irish Coercion Bill which themselves had loudly
called for, declared that he could not sanction its penal enactments
unless they were accompanied by the remedial measures that were
necessary, to wit, an Irish Franchise Bill, and a Bill for the amendment
of municipal corporations!
When Sir Robert Peel, in 1841, after a memorable opposition of ten
years, acceded to office, sustained by all the sympathies of the
country, his Irish policy, not sufficiently noticed amid the vast and
urgent questions with which he had immediately to deal, was, however, to
the political observer significant and interesting. As a mere matter of
party tactics, it was not for him too much to impute Irish disturbances
to political and religious causes, even if the accumulated experience
of the last ten years were not developing a conviction in his mind, that
the methods hitherto adopted to ensure the tranquillity of that country
were superficial and fallacious. His cabinet immediately recognized
a distinction between political and predial sources of disorder.
The first, they resolved into a mere system of agitation, no longer
justifiable by the circumstances, and this they determined to put down.
The second, they sought in the conditions under which land was occupied,
and these they determined to investigate. Hence, on the one hand, the
O’Connell prosecution: on the other, the Devon commission.
This was the bold and prudent policy of a minister who felt he had
the confidence of the country and was sustained by great parliamentary
majorities; and when the summoner of monster meetings was convicted, and
the efficient though impartial manner in which the labours of the land
commission were simultaneously conducted came to be bruited about, there
seemed at last some prospect of the system of political quackery of
which Ireland had been so long the victim being at last subverted. But
there is nothing in which the power of circumstances is more evident
than in politics. They baffle the forethought of statesmen, and control
even the apparently inflexible laws of national development and decay.
Had the government of 1841 succeeded in its justifiable expectation of
terminating the trade of political agitation in Ireland, armed with all
the authority and all the information with which the labours of the land
commission would have furnished them, they would in all probability have
successfully grappled with the real causes of Irish misery and misrule.
They might have thoroughly reformed the modes by which land is holden
and occupied; have anticipated the spontaneous emigration that now rages
by an administrative enterprise scarcely more costly than the barren
loan of ‘47, and which would have wafted native energies to imperial
shores; have limited under these circumstances the evil of the potato
famine, even if the improved culture of the interval might not have
altogether prevented that visitation; while the laws which regulated the
competition between home and foreign industry in agricultural produce
might have been modified with so much prudence, or, if necessary,
ultimately repealed with so much precaution, that those rapid and
startling vicissitudes that have so shattered the social fabric of
Ireland might altogether have been avoided.
But it was decreed that it should be otherwise. Having achieved the
incredible conviction of O’Connell, by an Irish jury, the great culprit
baffled the vengeance of the law by a quirk which a lawyer only could
have devised. As regards his Irish policy, Sir Robert Peel never
recovered this blow, the severity of which was proportionably increased
by its occurrence at a moment of unprecedented success. Resolute not to
recur to his ancient Orangeism, yet desperate after his discomfiture of
rallying a moderate party around his ministry, his practical mind,
more clear-sighted than foreseeing, was alarmed at the absence of all
influences for the government of Ireland. The tranquillity which might
result from a reformed tenure of the soil, must, if attainable, be
a distant blessing, and at present he saw only the obstacles to its
fulfilment--prejudiced landlords, and the claims and necessities of
pauper millions. He shrank from a theory which might be an illusion. He
required a policy for the next post and the next division. There was
in his view only one course to take, to outbid his predecessors as
successfully in Irish politics as he was doing in taxes and tariffs. He
resolved to appropriate the liberal party of Ireland, and merge it into
the great Conservative confederation which was destined to destroy so
many things. He acted with promptitude and energy, for Sir Robert Peel
never hesitated when he had made up his mind. His real character was
very different from his public reputation. Far from being timid
and wary, he was audacious and even headstrong. It was his cold and
constrained demeanour that misled the public. There never was a man who
did such rash things in so circumspect a manner. He had been fortunate
in early disembarrassing himself of the Orange counsellors who had
conducted his Irish questions when in opposition; vacant judgeships
had opportunely satisfied the recognized and respectable claims of
Mr. Serjeant Jackson and Mr. Lefroy; and so Sir Robert Peel, without
a qualm, suddenly began to govern Ireland by sending it ‘messages of
peace.’
They took various forms; sometimes a Charitable Bequests Act virtually
placed the Roman Catholic hierarchy in friendly equality with the
prelates of the Established Church; sometimes a ‘godless college’
called forth a moan from alarmed and irritated Oxford; the endowment
of Maynooth struck wider and deeper, and the middle-classes of England,
roused from their religious lethargy, called in vain to the rescue of
a Protestantism betrayed. But the minister was unshaken. Successful
and self-sufficient, impressed with a conviction that his government
in duration would rival that of a Walpole or a Pitt, and exceed both
in lustre, he treated every remonstrance with imperious disdain. He had
even accustomed his mind to contemplate an ecclesiastical adjustment
of Ireland which would have allied in that country the Papacy with the
State, and have terminated the constitutional supremacy of the Anglican
Church, when suddenly, in the very heat of all this arrogant fortune,
the mighty fabric of delusion shivered and fell to the ground.
An abused and indignant soil repudiated the ungrateful race that had
exhausted and degraded its once exuberant bosom. The land refused
to hold those who would not hold the land on terms of justice and of
science. All the economical palliatives and political pretences of
long years seemed only to aggravate the suffering and confusion. The
poor-rate was levied upon a community of paupers, and the ‘godless
colleges’ were denounced by Rome as well as Oxford.
After a wild dream of famine and fever, imperial loans, rates in
aid, jobbing public works, confiscated estates, constituencies
self-disfranchised, and St. Peter’s bearding St. James’s in a spirit
becoming Christendom rather than Europe, time topped the climax of Irish
misgovernment; and by the publication of the census of 1851, proved that
the millions with whose evils no statesmen would sincerely deal,
but whose condition had been the pretext for so much empiricism, had
disappeared, and nature, more powerful than politicians, had settled the
‘great difficulty.’
Ere the publication of that document, the mortal career of Sir Robert
Peel had closed, and indeed several of the circumstances to which we
have just alluded did not occur in his administration; but the contrast
between his policy and its results was nevertheless scarcely less
striking. It was in ‘45 that he transmitted his most important ‘message
of peace’ to Ireland, to be followed by an autumnal visit of her Majesty
to that kingdom, painted in complacent and prophetic colours by her
prime minister. The visit was not made. In the course of that autumn,
ten counties of Ireland were in a state of anarchy; and, mainly in
that period, there were 136 homicides committed, 138 houses burned, 483
houses attacked, and 138 fired into; there were 544 cases of aggravated
assault, and 551 of robbery of arms; there were 89 cases of bands
appearing in arms; there were more than 200 cases of administering
unlawful oaths; and there were 1,944 cases of sending threatening
letters. By the end of the year, the general crime of Ireland had
doubled in amount and enormity compared with the preceding year.