political and religious prospects of Ireland in 1878, making the eve of
the famine, in 1845, the basis of comparison. We write from Ireland,
with the amplest knowledge of our subject, and, as we hope, having no
object in view save a full and clear statement of the main facts
necessary for its elucidation. We have travelled over every province,
every county, every parish, every locality of its soil; are intimate
with every phase of its history and every section of its population,
and feel every throb of its national life. Yet we invite the fullest
criticism of our attempt to discuss the present condition of Ireland
from a scientific, a truthful, and an impartial stand-point. Nowhere
out of Ireland is such discussion more desirable or more difficult than
in the United States. The republic contains about the same number of
Irish, by birth or by descent, that remain in the old country. The
emigrants of the famine period left under dire pressure, the origin of
which is not fully understood abroad. In the forty-four years 1801–1845
the population of Ireland increased from 5,216,329 to 8,295,061, or by
3,078,732 persons—an increase of fifty-nine per cent. Emigration was
throughout that period inconsiderable; in the decade 1831–41 it was
only 403,459, or about 40,000 a year; in the next four years it fell to
little over half that average; while in the year 1843, when O’Connell
led the great agitation for repeal of the Union, only 13,026 persons
left the country, being the lowest on record. Although the potato
blight appeared in 1845, it was not until 1847 that the horrors of the
famine and of emigration assumed their most awful aspect. In the single
year 1847, that of O’Connell’s death, there was a loss of population of
262,574, or three per cent., by the conjoint action of emigration and
the excess of deaths over births; while in the next four years the
aggregate decrease reached 1,510,801 persons—little short of nineteen
per cent. of the whole population. The following table exhibits the
estimated population at the middle of the year relating to our inquiry:
─────┬────────────┬───────────────────────
│ │ DECREASE
YEAR│ POPULATION│ PERSONS │ PER CENT.
─────┼────────────┼────────────┼──────────
1845│ 8,295,061│ ——│ ——
1846│ 8,287,848│ 7,213│ 0.09
1847│ 8,025,274│ 262,574│ 3.1
1848│ 7,639,800│ 385,474│ 4.3
1849│ 7,256,314│ 383,486│ 5.0
1850│ 6,877,549│ 378,765│ 5.1
1851│ 6,514,473│ 363,076│ 5.1
1861│ 5,778,415│ 736,058│ 11.3
1871│ 5,395,007│ 383,408│ 6.6
1875│ 5,309,494│ 65,513│ 1.0
1876│ 5,321,618│ ——│ ——
1877│ 5,338,906│ ——│ ——
─────┴────────────┴────────────┴──────────
Over the whole period from 1845 to 1875 population decreased, but the
rate of decline diminished after 1851. In the thirty years there was a
loss of 2,973,443—nearly 100,000 annually, or thirty-six per cent. of
the inhabitants. The year 1876 is memorable as the starting-point of
reactionary improvement. For the first time during a generation
emigration has so diminished that the natural increase of births over
deaths added 10,352 to the population in 1876, and 17,288 in 1877.
Increase must henceforth be the normal law of population, but it is
never again likely to reach the rate it attained in the thirty years
1801–31, when it expanded about fourteen per cent. each decade, or an
increase of nearly one in seven every ten years.
We are now to inquire into the main causes of these terrible
calamities, strange and conflicting explanations of which are advanced
by public writers in the United States and other countries. One
flippant, fertile, and accepted theory is the peculiar proneness of the
Irish to contention and disunion—a theory generally credited as sound
by those ignorant of history or those prejudiced against the Irish
race. We shall adduce a few broad and suggestive facts in disproof of
this theory. Can any nation exhibit a nobler proof of unity than the
Brehon laws, or _Seanchus Mor_, which prevailed universally in Ireland
for centuries before the Christian era, until revised by St. Patrick
and the Christian kings, and which continued in force throughout the
country, save the small patch called the Pale, until the seventeenth
century, while the traditions and principles of that code yet influence
the people after a lapse of twenty to five-and-twenty centuries? And so
as regards the tenacity with which, for ages, the people have adhered
to the use of the Gaelic or native tongue, still spoken by little short
of a million of the inhabitants, after the Greeks, the Romans, the
French, the Spaniards, the Britons, and the Scotch have mainly
abandoned the primitive tongues of their ancestors. All pagan Ireland
was converted to Christianity by one man—an example of unity and
docility without parallel in the history of the human race. Ireland,
like France, England, and other countries, was ravaged by the Danish
and Norse invaders, yet the Irish defeated and expelled them in 1014,
long before the Gauls or the Saxons had banished or crushed them in
Normandy or in England. Towards the close of the twelfth century the
Anglo-Normans found partial footing in Ireland, yet for seven hundred
years the native race have opposed their rule, and oppose it to-day—an
example of unity and persistency unsurpassed in the world. The English,
the Scotch, and most of the nations in the north and northwest of
Europe abandoned their ancient faith and accepted the Protestant
Reformation, at the bidding of their sovereigns, in the sixteenth
century; while Catholic Ireland, in defiance of penal laws that
plundered property, denied education, reduced the people almost to
barbarism, and sent them to the scaffold for adherence to their church,
has remained, through centuries of suffering, loyal to conscience, and
by unity, fidelity, and perseverance has effected the overthrow of the
Protestant Church Establishment of the Tudors. Proud and great memories
these for the Irish nation—memories sufficient to disprove the shallow
and unfounded charge that to disunion, peculiar to their race, must be
attributed the sad and chequered history of the country. While if we
turn to all other kingdoms at corresponding periods, even to the
present time, we find analogous internal strife and domestic political
factions as numerous and as intense as any in Ireland. England,
Scotland, the several British colonies, France, Germany, Italy, Spain,
Holland, and the United States were quite as much torn by internal
dissension as Ireland, and are so at the present day; so that this
hypothesis is wholly unfounded and quite inadequate to account for the
disastrous decadence, or at least want of progress, of Ireland,
compared in many respects with other countries.
The causes of Irish discontent and comparative social backwardness are
remote, chronic, and cumulative. From the arrival of the Anglo-Normans
in 1169 to the defeat of the Irish in the Williamite war, near the
close of the seventeenth century, one clear purpose was kept in view by
the aliens—the extirpation of the natives from ownership and even
occupancy of the soil. Attainders, escheatments, plantations,
transplantations, and settlements—all had the same purpose. Penal Laws,
the Court of Wards, and dire persecution had driven the Catholic
natives from proprietorship, and almost from occupancy, of the soil.
Cupidity led many Cromwellian and planter landlords to baffle the Penal
Laws and pocket the higher rents offered by popish recusants.
Protestants of the humbler classes complained that the protection
promised and due to them as of right in the English interest was denied
and defeated by the planter and palatine landlords in preferring popish
tenants whose lower standard of living and degraded social caste
enabled them to pay a higher rent than Protestant tenants, who claimed,
by right of class, a better mode of living. Thus robbed and deprived of
their estates, denied leases, and rackrented by middlemen and others,
the mass of the Irish people before the famine were mere squatters on
the soil, neither owners nor, in any true sense, occupiers.
Catholics were emancipated in 1829 and rendered admissible to almost
all the offices in the state; they obtained an instalment of
educational concession in 1831, and a modification of the grinding
oppression of the tithe system and the Protestant Church Establishment
a few years afterwards; a Poor Law, directed by a London board, was
passed in 1838, and corporate reform was granted in 1840; but these and
other remedial measures, in operation for a few years, could effect
little towards the elevation of a people impoverished and degraded by
centuries of foreign and crushing legislation.
From an economic and industrial stand-point the condition of Catholics,
in relation to land, was the chief cause of the wretchedness of the
country. The agricultural laborers were in the lowest social state in
Europe, scarcely excepting the Russian serfs. Employment was precarious
and rarely secured a higher average wages than sixpence to eightpence a
day, or scarcely a dollar a week. From Connaught a large number went to
England for some weeks at the hay, corn, and potato harvests, where
they earned what paid the rent of the cabin and the potato-plot; while
many of the cotters and small farmers were little better in position. A
few facts from the census of 1841 and 1851 will suffice to illustrate
the large number and the terrible fate of these classes, as indicated
by the grades of house accommodation before and after the famine:
────────────────────┬───────────────────┬─────────────────
│ 1841. │ 1851.
HOUSE ACCOMMODATION.│ │ PER│ │ PER
│ HOUSES│ CENT.│ HOUSES│ CENT.
────────────────────┼────────────┼──────┼──────────┼──────
First class │ 31,333│ 2.1│ 39,370│ 3.3
Second class │ 241,664│ 16.4│ 292,280│ 24.3
Third class │ 574,386│ 39.0│ 588,440│ 48.9
Fourth (cabin) class│ 625,356│ 42.5│ 284,229│ 23.5
────────────────────┼────────────┼──────┼──────────┼──────
Total│ 1,472,739│ 100.0│ 1,204,319│ 100.0
────────────────────┴────────────┴──────┴──────────┴──────
Here we see that, seemingly in ten but really in five years, no less
than 341,127 fourth-class houses—mud, sod, or stone, thatched cabins
with only a single apartment—were swept away, inhabited by that number
of families, which included about 1,800,000 persons; while the table of
population above given shows that in these years the estimated decrease
was 1,780,588—a striking concurrence between both. Another proof as
regards the class swept away is found in the following table of
agricultural holdings, grouped by extent, in 1841 and 1851:
──────────────────┬──────────┬──────────
HOLDINGS. │ 1841. │ 1851.
──────────────────┼──────────┼──────────
Not exceeding one │Not known.│ 37,728
acre │ │
One to five acres │ 310,436│ 88,083
Five to fifteen │ 252,799│ 191,854
acres │ │
Fifteen to thirty │ 79,342│ 141,311
acres │ │
Above thirty acres│ 48,625│ 149,090
──────────────────┼──────────┼──────────
Total│ 691,202│ 608,066
──────────────────┴──────────┴──────────
Excluding the very large number of holdings under an acre not
ascertained in 1841, we find the disappearance in that decade, or
rather in half of it, of 222,353 tenements between one and five acres,
which represents a diminished population of 1,200,000 persons. The
decrease of 60,945, in the tenements from five to fifteen acres,
representing about 320,000 people, is portion of this same subject. If
we now turn to another head of evidence we find that the population was
thinned from the least educated classes. The census of 1841 returned
fifty-three per cent. of the whole population, aged five years and
upwards, as illiterate, being unable to read or write, while the return
for 1851 showed a decrease to forty-seven per cent.; and turning to the
great decrease in the percentage of the Irish-speaking population
between 1841 and 1851, we find similar results. Lastly, the creed
census demands attention.
The first taken in Ireland was that by the Royal Commission of Public
Instruction in 1834, when, of a population of 7,954,100, it was found
there were 6,436,000, or 80.9 per cent., Catholics; while the followers
of the intruded Anglican Church, established for three centuries,
numbered only 853,160, or 10.7 per cent. The adherents of the Scotch
Presbyterian Church, endowed by the state, though not established,
643,058, or 8.1 per cent.; and all other Protestant dissenters mustered
only 21,822 or 0.3 per cent. Between 1834 and 1845, when the potato
blight first appeared, the population had increased from 7,954,100 to
8,295,061, during which period of eleven years there are ample
evidences to prove that the Catholic element underwent a larger
increase than the Protestant, so that we may fairly assume the whole
population in 1845 to have been thus composed:
PER
CENT.
Catholics 6,760,475 81.5
Protestants 1,534,586 18.5
———— ——
Total 8,295,061 100.
These millions of Catholics, emancipated only sixteen years, were the
descendants of the natives who for over six centuries had battled
against English domination; whose estates and lands had been wrested
from them and given to soldiers and adventurers from England and
Scotland—“the scum of both nations”; whose ancient church had been
despoiled of her property; to whom education was denied and the
profession of their faith made penal; whose manufacturing industries
were suppressed by English laws; who were excluded from all offices,
civil and military, and from all social rank and distinction, and
denied not alone a seat in Parliament for 137 years, 1692 to 1829, but
from 1727 to 1793, a period of 66 years, the right to vote.
Such is a broad outline of the main facts concerning the population of
Ireland in 1845, as to quantity and quality. We must, however,
supplement these by a few particulars.
From one-third to one-half the rental of the kingdom went to absentee
and alien landlords, who spent it in England or on the Continent. The
imperial taxes borne by Ireland were in excess of her capacity and in
violation of the articles of the Act of Union. All the state
departments had their headquarters in London, while Ireland had slender
share either in the appropriating or the enjoyment of those taxes. The
local taxation, through grand jury and other cess, was enormous, but
levied and appropriated by the country gentry, all predominantly
Protestant. The county officers, the grand jury, the jail, the lunatic
asylum, infirmary, and poor-law union boards were almost exclusively
Protestant. The corporations, reformed by statute in 1840, were still
Protestant. One or two Catholic judges had reached the bench, as
O’Loghlen, and many Catholics were pressing to the front at the bar and
in medicine, while in all the professions, in trade, and in commerce
Catholic influence was beginning to be felt. Catholics had, it is true,
only trifling share in the administration of the government and the
laws. They had little representation in the magistracy or on the grand
juries; while jury-packing was the normal condition of the
administration of justice. The Orange system, stimulated by the triumph
of Catholic emancipation, was rampant and aggressive at the prospect of
social equality.
Yet, amidst such disadvantages, Ireland, in the two or three years
before the famine, presented a moral and political spectacle such as
the modern world had never witnessed. O’Connell, the greatest political
leader of this century, led the millions of Irish people in their
demand for justice to Ireland. He claimed the restoration of the
legislative independence of Ireland as it existed from 1782 to 1801, or
a repeal of the Act of Union. His efforts towards that object, the
millions who rose to support him, and the moral, intellectual, and
national sympathy that his demand elicited, are perfectly well known.
The famine appeared in 1845 and blasted the whole agitation, while
O’Connell died at Genoa, May 15, 1847, when the country that he wildly,
passionately loved was in the throes of the famine, the horrors of
which O’Connell vainly endeavored to avert by appeals for substantial
relief to the British government. The present prime minister of
England, the Earl of Beaconsfield, declared in the House of Commons, in
reference to Ireland, on the opening of the famine, that for a country
with an absentee proprietary, an alien established church, and a
population starving or fleeing the country, most Englishmen can see but
one remedy, and that _revolution_.
The great Irish famine, contrary to popular opinion, was exceeded by
many visitations of the kind in India and elsewhere, and perhaps
equalled by some that had occurred even in Ireland, so far as extent of
mortality is concerned; but, measured by the aggregate of its social
and economic effects, no such disaster is recorded in history. The
mortality was considerably less than was supposed—that is, of deaths
caused directly by starvation, suffering, and sickness arising out of
the famine. Dysentery, diarrhœa, fever, cholera—all supervened.
Workhouse accommodation failed, notwithstanding the utilization, as
auxiliary houses, of nearly all the idle and abandoned stores in cities
and towns, and of large numbers of rural mansions deserted by the
country gentry. All the habits, feelings, and traditions of the Irish
nation were opposed to a poor-law. Passed in 1838, although a poor-law
had been in operation in England from 1601, it was only in 1847, the
third year of the famine, that the last of the 131 Irish workhouses was
opened, in Clifden, Connemara, and then by _mandamus_ of the Queen’s
Bench. In 1844, the year before the appearance of the potato blight,
there were only 113 workhouses open, with an aggregate of 105,358
paupers relieved that year at an expense of $1,085,336. In 1847 the
number relieved in the workhouses, auxiliaries included, was 417,139,
or nearly fourfold, while the expenditure was $3,214,744, or threefold.
The entire Poor-Law Act and the workhouse system utterly broke down
under pressure of the mass of destitution. That act was administered
from Somerset House, London, under an English commission, from 1838 to
1847. All the leading officers, assistant commissioners, and others
were sent from England to carry out a law amongst a people of whose
feelings and social circumstances they were thoroughly ignorant, and to
their race and faith were totally opposed. That act expressly denied
out-door relief, in any form or towards any destitution, how acute
soever, in Ireland; while out-door relief was the general and normal
form of poor relief in England for centuries, and continues so at
present. The law was framed so as to throw the whole influence of its
administration into the hands of the landlords and magistracy, or their
agents, the vast majority of whom were planters and Cromwellians,
hostile in faith and feeling to the destitute classes. A temporary Poor
Relief Extension Act, passed June 8, 1847, was necessitated, or the
destitute classes must have seized in self-defence the cattle, corn,
and other edibles abounding in the country to prevent starvation.
Out-door relief was permitted, but should be administered solely in
food; while the able-bodied recipients were subjected to severe tests
of stone-breaking or other unproductive labor. The tenth section of
this act was the infamous quarter-acre clause, which declared that,
“If any person so occupying more than the _quarter of a statute
acre_ (less than thirty-five yards square) shall apply for
relief, or if any person on his behalf shall apply for relief,
_it shall not be lawful for any Board of Guardians to grant
such relief, within or without the workhouse_, to any such
person.”
This horrible clause gave the alternative of death or the surrender of
their cabins, cottages, and small farms to the tens, the hundreds of
thousands who occupied the humbler allotments and homesteads in
Ireland. If they refused to surrender possession to the landlord, they
perished, relief being denied them; while if they yielded, the crowded
workhouse, with a weekly mortality of twenty-five in every one thousand
inmates, precipitated them from the trap-coffin, often unshrived and
always unshrouded, into the common fosse without a semblance of
Christian burial. As an adjunct to the quarter-acre clause, and further
to effect the clearance of the mass of the laboring and industrious
classes, urban as well as rural, occupiers rated at under twenty-five
dollars who surrendered their holdings, whether held on lease or
otherwise, to their landlords, were, with their families, assisted to
emigrate, two-thirds of the expenses of the same to be borne on the
rates of the electoral division, the other third by the landlord. And
to complete and give effect to these provisions for the death or the
extermination of the population, the landlords were secured, by a
radical change in the act of 1838, a monopoly in the whole
administration of relief. Under that act each Board of Guardians
consisted of three-fourths elected members and one-fourth _ex-officio_
members, being magistrates resident in the union; whereas, by an
amendment introduced into the act of 1847 the proportion of
_ex-officio_ members is doubled, being increased from one-fourth to
one-half the whole strength of the board. With a full moiety of the
members of the landlord class, the territorial influence through the
_multiple_ vote, which gives rated property from one to six votes, and
also voting by proxy, the land magnates are always able to command, if
not a majority, at least a large number, of seats amongst the elected
guardians, and thus secure dominance in the administration of the whole
poor-law.
Under the original act of 1838 the incidence of the poor’s rate was
divided equally between the occupier and the owner, while occupiers
whose tenements were below twenty-five dollars annual valuation were
exempt, the rate being charged to the landlord; and, moreover, a clause
declared that any contract made between owner and occupier which would
release the former from liability to a moiety of the poor’s rate was
null and void. The landlord added, of course, the rates to the rent,
save in the case of the small number of tenants holding under lease, so
that the whole cost of relief fell on the occupier; while a clause in
the Poor-Law Amendment Act passed in 1849 repealed the annulling
provision of the act of 1838, and legalized the enabling power of the
tenant to contract himself, under compulsion, out of the protection
secured to him that property should bear a moiety of the cost of poor
relief. We may mention that the savage quarter-acre clause continued in
operation from 1847 until partially repealed in 1862, a period of
fifteen years, during which it quenched many a hearth, dismantled
thousands of roof-trees, and sent more than a million of the Irish race
to the grave or as scattered exiles over the face of the globe. In
1862, its fell purpose fulfilled, it was partially repealed, to the
extent that destitute persons, although occupiers of a quarter of an
acre of land, may be relieved, _but in the workhouse only_; so that
still a cotter with forty perches of a garden, or a small farmer,
suffering under temporary distress from failure of crop, sickness, or
accident, must either surrender his little holding and enter the
workhouse, _or starve_ under the scheme of legal charity devised to
extirpate the Irish from the soil of which their ancestors had been
robbed through ages.