Chapter VII: Irish Slavery (1)

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—

"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?

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.