Chapter VII: Irish Slavery (4)

"At Duxmoor the shop has passed into other hands. The
ex-shopkeeper has bought and rebuilt the manor-house. He is the
squire, now, wealthier than ever he dreamed; on one estate a
mine has been found; a railway has crossed and doubled the value
of another; but his son is dead; his daughter has left him,
and lives, he knows not where, a life of shame. Childless and
friendless, the future is, to him, cheerless and without hope."

Poor-law guardians are characters held in very low esteem by the Irish serfs, who are not backward in expressing their contempt. The feeling is a natural one, as will appear from considering who those guardians generally are, and how they perform their duties:—

"At the introduction of the poor-law into Ireland, the workhouses
were built by means of loans advanced by the Government on the
security of the rates. Constructed generally in that style of
architecture called 'Elizabethan,' they were the most imposing
in the country in elevation and frequency, and, placed usually
in the wretched suburbs of towns and villages, formed among the
crumbling and moss-grown cottages, a pleasing contrast in the
eye of the tourist. They were calculated to accommodate from
five hundred to two thousand inmates, according to the area and
population of the annexed district; but some of them remained for
years altogether closed, or, if open, nearly unoccupied, owing
to the ingenious shifts of the 'Guardians,' under the advice
of the 'Solicitor of the Board,' Their object was to economize
the resources of the Union, to keep the rates down, and in some
instances they evaded the making of any rate for years after the
support of the destitute was made nominally imperative by the law
of the land.

"As there was a good deal of patronage in a small way placed at
the disposal of the 'Guardians,' great anxiety was manifested
by those eligible to the office. Most justices of the peace
were, indeed, _ipso facto_, Guardians, but a considerable
number had to be elected by the rate-payers, and an active
canvass preceded every election. A great deal of activity and
conviviality, if not gayety, was the result, and more apparently
important affairs were neglected by many a farmer, shopkeeper,
and professional man, to insure his being elected a 'Guardian,'
while the unsuccessful took pains to prove their indifference, or
to vent their ill-humour in various ways, sometimes causing less
innocuous effects than the following sally:—

"At a certain court of quarter sessions, during the dog-day heat
of one of these contests, a burly fellow was arraigned before
'their worships' and the jury, charged with some petty theft; and
as he perceived that the proofs were incontestably clear against
him, he fell into a very violent trepidation. An attorney of the
court, not overburdened with business, and fond of occupying his
idle time in playing off practical jokes, perceiving how the case
stood, addressed the prisoner in a whisper over the side of the
dock, with a very ominous and commiserating shake of his head:

"'Ah, you unfortunate man, ye'll be found guilty; and as sure
as ye are, ye'll get worse than hangin' or thransportation. As
sure as ever the barristher takes a pinch of snuff, that's his
intention; ye'll see him put on the black cap immaydiately. Plaid
guilty at once, and I'll tell ye what ye'll say to him afther.'

"The acute practitioner knew his man; the poor half-witted
culprit fell into the snare; and after a short and serious
whispering between them, which was unobserved in the bustle of
the court-house usual on such occasions, the prisoner cried out,
just as the issue-paper was going up to the jury, 'Me lord, me
lord, I plaid guilty; I beg your wortchip's an' their honours'
pardon.

"'Very well,' said the assistant barrister, whose duty it was to
advise upon the law of each case, and preside at the bench in
judicial costume; 'very well, sir. Crier, call silence.'

"Several voices immediately called energetically for silence,
impressing the culprit with grave ideas at once of his worship's
great importance, and the serious nature of the coming sentence.

"'Withdraw the plea of not guilty, and take one of guilty to the
felony,' continued the assistant barrister, taking a pinch of
snuff and turning round to consult his brother magistrates as to
the term of intended incarceration.

"'Don't lose yer time, ye omodhaun!' said the attorney, with an
angry look at the prisoner.

"'Will I be allowed to spake one word, yer wortchips?' said the
unfortunate culprit.

"'What has he to say?' said the assistant barrister with
considerable dignity.

"'Go on, ye fool ye,' urged the attorney.

"'My lord, yer wortchips, and gintlemin av the jury,' exclaimed
the culprit, 'sind me out o' the counthry, or into jail, or
breakin' stones, or walkin' on the threadmill, or any thing else
in the coorse o' nature, as yer wortchips playses; but for the
love o' the Virgin Mary, _don't make me a Poor-Law Gargin_.'"[95]

The most recent legislation of the British government in regard to Ireland, the enactment of the Poor-law and the Encumbered Estates Act, has had but one grand tendency—that of diminishing the number of the population, which is, indeed, a strange way to improve the condition of the nation. The country was not too thickly populated; far from it: great tracts of land were entirely uninhabited. The exterminating acts were, therefore, only measures of renewed tyranny. To enslave a people is a crime of sufficient enormity; but to drive them from the homes of their ancestors to seek a refuge in distant and unknown lands, is such an action as only the most monstrous of governments would dare to perform.

We have thus shown that Ireland has long endured, and still endures, a cruel system of slavery, for which we may seek in vain for a parallel. It matters not that the Irish serf may leave his country; while he remains he is a slave to a master who will not call him property, chiefly because it would create the necessity of careful and expensive ownership. If the Irish master took his labourer for his slave in the American sense, he would be compelled to provide for him, work or not work, in sickness and in old age. Thus the master reaps the benefits, and escapes the penalties of slave-holding. He takes the fruits of the labourer's toil without providing for him as the negro slaves of America are provided for; nay, very often he refuses the poor wretch a home at any price. In no other country does the slaveholder seem so utterly reckless in regard to human life as in Ireland. After draining all possible profit from his labourer's service he turns him forth as a pauper, to get scant food if workhouse officials choose to give it, and if not, to starve by the wayside. The last great famine was the direct result of this accursed system of slavery. It was oppression of the worst kind that reduced the mass of the people to depend for their subsistence upon the success or failure of the potato crop; and the horrors that followed the failure of the crop were as much the results of misgovernment as the crimes of the French Revolution were the consequences of feudal tyranny, too long endured. Can England ever accomplish sufficient penance for her savage treatment of Ireland?

Some English writers admit that the degradation of the Irish and the wretched condition of the country can scarcely be overdrawn, but seek for the causes of this state of things in the character of the people. But why does the Irishman work, prosper, and achieve wealth and position under every other government but that of Ireland? This would not hbe the case if there was any thing radically wrong in the Irish nature. In the following extract from an article in the Edinburgh Review, we have a forcible sketch of the condition of Ireland, coloured somewhat to suit English views:—

"It is obvious that the insecurity of a community in which the
bulk of the population form a conspiracy against the law, must
prevent the importation of capital; must occasion much of what is
accumulated there to be exported; and must diminish the motives
and means of accumulation. Who will send his property to a place
where he cannot rely on its being protected? Who will voluntarily
establish himself in a country which to-morrow may be in a state
of disturbance? A state in which, to use the words of Chief
Justice Bushe, 'houses and barns and granaries are levelled,
crops are laid waste, pasture-lands are ploughed, plantations are
torn up, meadows are thrown open to cattle, cattle are maimed,
tortured, killed; persons are visited by parties of banditti,
who inflict cruel torture, mutilate their limbs, or beat them
almost to death. Men who have in any way become obnoxious to the
insurgents, or opposed their system, or refused to participate
in their outrages, are deliberately assassinated in the open
day; and sometimes the unoffending family are indiscriminately
murdered by burning the habitation.'[96] A state in which even
those best able to protect themselves, the gentry, are forced to
build up all their lower windows with stone and mortar; to admit
light only into one sitting-room, and not into all the windows
of that room; to fortify every other inlet by bullet-proof
barricades; to station sentinels around during all the night
and the greater part of the day, and to keep firearms in all
the bedrooms, and even on the side-table at breakfast and
dinner-time.[97] Well might Bishop Doyle exclaim, 'I do not blame
the absentees; I would be an absentee myself if I could.'

"The state of society which has been described may be considered
as a proof of the grossest ignorance; for what can be a greater
proof of ignorance than a systematic opposition to law, carried
on at the constant risk of liberty and of life, and producing
where it is most successful, in the rural districts, one level
of hopeless poverty, and in the towns, weeks of high wages and
months without employment—a system in which tremendous risks
and frightful sufferings are the means, and general misery is
the result? The ignorance, however, which marks the greater
part of the population in Ireland, is not merely ignorance of
the moral and political tendency of their conduct—an ignorance
in which the lower orders of many more advanced communities
participate—but ignorance of the businesses which are their
daily occupations. It is ignorance, not as citizens and subjects,
but as cultivators and labourers. They are ignorant of the proper
rotation of crops, of the preservation and use of manure—in a
word, of the means by which the land, for which they are ready
to sacrifice their neighbours' lives, and to risk their own, is
to be made productive. Their manufactures, such as they are, are
rude and imperfect, and the Irish labourer, whether peasant or
artisan, who emigrates to Great Britain, never possesses skill
sufficient to raise him above the lowest ranks in his trade.

"Indolence—the last of the causes to which we have attributed
the existing misery of Ireland—is not so much an independent
source of evil as the result of the combination of all others.
The Irishman does not belong to the races that are by nature
averse from toil. In England, Scotland, or America he can work
hard. He is said, indeed, to require more overlooking than the
natives of any of these countries, and to be less capable, or, to
speak more correctly, to be less willing to surmount difficulties
by patient intellectual exertion; but no danger deters, no
disagreeableness disgusts, no bodily fatigue discourages him.

"But in his own country he is indolent. All who have compared
the habits of hired artisans or of the agricultural labourers in
Ireland with those of similar classes in England or Scotland,
admit the inferiority of industry of the former. The indolence
of the great mass of the people, the occupiers of land, is
obvious even to the passing traveller. Even in Ulster, the
province in which, as we have already remarked, the peculiarities
of the Irish character are least exhibited, not only are the
cabins, and even the farm-houses, deformed within and without by
accumulations of filth, which the least exertion would remove,
but the land itself is suffered to waste a great portion of its
productive power. We have ourselves seen field after field in
which the weeds covered as much space as the crops. From the time
that his crops are sowed and planted until they are reaped the
peasant and his family are cowering over the fire, or smoking, or
lounging before the door, when an hour or two a day employed in
weeding their potatoes, oats, or flax, would perhaps increase the
produce by one-third.

"The indolence of the Irish artisan is sufficiently accounted for
by the combinations which, by prohibiting piece-work, requiring
all the workmen to be paid by the day and at the same rate,
prohibiting a good workman from exerting himself, have destroyed
the motives to industry. 'I consider it,' says Mr. Murray, 'a
very hard rule among them, that the worst workman that ever took
a tool in his hand, should be paid the same as the best, but that
is the rule and regulation of the society; and that there was
only a certain quantity of work allowed to be done; so that, if
one workman could turn more work out of his hands, he durst not
go on with it. There is no such thing as piece-work; and if a bad
man is not able to get through his work, a good workman dare not
go further than he does.'[98]

"The indolence of the agricultural labourer arises, perhaps,
principally from his labour being almost always day-work, and
in a great measure a mere payment of debt—a mere mode of
working out his rent. That of the occupier may be attributed
to a combination of causes. In the first place, a man must be
master of himself to a degree not common even among the educated
classes, before he can be trusted to be his own task-master. Even
among the British manufacturers, confessedly the most industrious
labourers in Europe, those who work in their own houses are
comparatively idle and irregular, and yet they work under the
stimulus of certain and immediate gain. The Irish occupier,
working for a distant object, dependent in some measure on the
seasons, and with no one to control or even to advise him, puts
off till to-morrow what need not necessarily be done to-day—puts
off till next year what need not necessarily be done this year,
and ultimately leaves much totally undone.

"Again, there is no damper so effectual as liability to taxation
proportioned to the means of payment. It is by this instrument
that the Turkish government has destroyed the industry, the
wealth, and ultimately the population of what were once the most
flourishing portions of Asia—perhaps of the world. It is thus
that the _taille_ ruined the agriculture of the most fertile
portions of France. Now, the Irish occupier has long been subject
to this depressive influence, and from various sources. The
competition for land has raised rents to an amount which can be
paid only under favourable circumstances. Any accident throws
the tenant into an arrear, and the arrear is kept a subsisting
charge, to be enforced if he should appear capable of paying it.
If any of the signs of prosperity are detected in his crop, his
cabin, his clothes, or his food, some old demand may be brought
up against him. Again, in many districts a practice prevails of
letting land to several tenants, each of whom is responsible
for the whole rent. It is not merely the consequence, but the
intention, that those who can afford to pay should pay for those
who cannot. Again, it is from taxation, regulated by apparent
property, that all the revenues of the Irish Catholic Church
are drawn. The half-yearly offerings, the fees on marriages and
christenings, and, what is more important, the contributions
to the priests made on those occasions by the friends of the
parties, are all assessed by public opinion, according to the
supposed means of the payer. An example of the mode in which this
works, occurred a few months ago, within our own knowledge. £300
was wanted by a loan fund, in a Catholic district in the North
of Ireland. In the night, one of the farmers, a man apparently
poor, came to his landlord, the principal proprietor in the
neighbourhood, and offered to lend the money, if the circumstance
could be kept from his priest. His motive for concealment was
asked, and he answered, that, if the priest knew he had £300 at
interest, his dues would be doubled. Secrecy was promised, and a
stocking was brought from its hiding-place in the roof, filled
with notes and coin, which had been accumulating for years until
a secret investment could be found. Again, for many years past a
similar taxation has existed for political purposes. The Catholic
rent, the O'Connell tribute, and the Repeal rent, like every
other tax that is unsanctioned by law, must be exacted, to a
larger or smaller amount, from every _cottier_, or farmer, as he
is supposed to be better or worse able to provide for them.

"Who can wonder that the cultivator, who is exposed to these
influences, should want the industry and economy which give
prosperity to the small farmer in Belgium? What motive has he
for industry and economy? It may be said that he has the same
motive in kind, though not in degree, as the inhabitants of a
happier country; since the new demand to which any increase of
his means would expose him probably would not exhaust the whole
of that increase. The same might be said of the subjects of the
Pasha. There are inequalities of fortune among the cultivators
of Egypt, just as there were inequalities in that part of France
which was under the _taille_. No taxation ever exhausted the
whole surplus income of all its victims. But when a man cannot
calculate the extent to which the exaction may go—when all he
knows is, that the more he appears to have the more will be
demanded—when he knows that every additional comfort which he is
seen to enjoy, and every additional productive instrument which
he is found to possess, may be a pretext for a fresh extortion,
he turns careless or sulky—he yields to the strong temptation of
indolence and of immediate excitement and enjoyment—he becomes
less industrious, and therefore produces less—he becomes less
frugal, and therefore, if he saves at all, saves a smaller
portion of that smaller product."

For the turbulence of the Irish people, the general indolence of the labourers and artisans, and the misery that exists, the writer of the above sketch has causes worthy of the acuteness of Sir James Graham, or some other patent political economist of the aristocracy of England. We need not comment. We have only made the above quotation to show to what a condition Ireland has been reduced, according to the admissions of an aristocratic organ of England, leaving the reader acquainted with the history of English legislation in regard to the unhappy island to make the most natural inferences.

The ecclesiastical system of Ireland has long been denounced as an injury and an insult. As an insult it has no parallel in history. Oppression and robbery in matters connected with religion have been unhappily frequent; but in all other cases the oppressed and robbed have been the minority. That one-tenth of the population of a great country should appropriate to themselves the endowment originally provided for all their countrymen; that, without even condescending to inquire whether there were or were not a congregation of their own persuasion to profit by them, they should seize the revenues of every benefice, should divert them from their previous application, and should hand them over to an incumbent of their own, to be wasted as a sinecure if they were not wanted for the performance of a duty—this is a treatment of which the contumely stings more sharply even than the injustice, enormous as that is.[99]

The tax of a tithe for the support of a church in which they have no faith is a grievance of which Irish Catholics, who compose nine-tenths of the population of Ireland, complain with the greatest reason. Of what benefit to them is a church which they despise? The grand reason for the existence of an established church fails under such circumstances. The episcopal institutions can communicate no religious instruction, because the creed which they sustain is treated with contempt. But where is the use of argument in regard to this point. The Established Church affords many luxurious places for the scions of the aristocracy, and there lies the chief purpose of its existence. The oppressive taxation of Catholics to support a Protestant church will cease with the aristocracy.