TOPICS OF THE DAY.
IRELAND.
EVEN truth comes by frequent repetition to look stale, common- place, uninteresting, less like truth. This is the reason why de- bates about Ireland are now heard with listless or impatient apathy ; although the miserable condition of that country, and the danger which it bodes to the empire, are as great and imminent as when "justice to Ireland" was a cry that excited enthusiasm, second only, if indeed second, to that which animated the British masses in the struggle for the Reform Bill. Yes, the danger in which the continuance of the present state of Ireland places the empire, renders the question how it is to be bettered as much our concern as the concern of the Irish people ; and what is more, it is only from an English, or at least from an Imperial Legislature, that the remedy can come. Parties in Ireland are too inveterately hostile to cooperate, unless brought together by the instrumentality of some third and stronger power. And they are more equally matched—more in a condition to wage a protracted strife—than at first sight might appear. If the pre- ponderance of numbers is great on the side of the Popular or Roman Catholic party, it is balanced by the preponderance of practical ability on the side of the Ascendancy. It was a striking confession of this fact when the traversers at the late "monster trial" selected their main array of counsel from the Protestant and Conservative section of the bar. But the confession was scarcely needed; for any one who runs over the list of Popular Irish leaders—undeniable as their talents are—will find scarcely half-a- dozen among them who have any claim to the character of prac- tical men of business. It is only by the Imperial Government and Legislature taking the direction of Irish reform into its own hand, and using native talent as its instrument, without asking to what shade or section of Irish opinion that talent belongs provided it will work in the spirit of its employ er, that Ireland can be made tranquil and prosperous.
Nor is the work, even when undertaken in the best spirit and with the ablest instruments, one that can soon produce tangible results. The evils of Ireland are of too long standing—too deeply and firmly rooted in social and individual character—to be quickly eradicated. The change is not to be effected by " Presto, pass," and the wave of a conjuror's wand. The generous and politic spirit of conciliation in which Lords NORMANDY and FORTES= acted, produced a temporary lull of passion in Ireland : but nothing was done by their colleagues in office to remove the social malefor- mation in which the turbulence and lawlessness of the people origi- nated; and very soon after these noblemen—happy accidents—were removed from the Viceroyalty, matters reverted to their usual unhappy state. This is not to be accounted for by a change of measures, for the present Ministry are taunted with having adopted the measures of their predecessors. Neither is it fairly accounted for by an exclusion of Roman Catholics from office : we see it stated in some of the recent pamphlets, one of which gives the list of appointments under Lord DE GREY, that more Roman Catho- lics have been promoted in the two years of the present than during the first four years of the Whig Administration,—a larger number than, considering the greater amount of official aptitude on the other side, and the refusal of eminent Roman Catholics to com- promise themselves with their party by accepting office under the present Government, could well have been anticipated. The relapse into turbulence would under any Ministry have been unavoidable, for the causes of turbulence had not been removed: it had already begun to manifest itself before the change of Ministers.
The evils of Ireland have become inveterate through long stand- ing. They are intimately intertwined with the whole framework of society; and have had their origin in mistaken legislation, early begun and long persevered in. Though many harshnesses have been softened, and much that is revolting to modern sentiment smoothed off, in the institutions of Ireland, they still retain too much of their old character. The constitution of Irish government was in the beginning nothing more than an organization for holding military possession of the country. The first County Palatines, the later grantees of forfeited lands, the " undertakers" of Ulster, the corporate boroughs—all were nothing more than a feudal militia,
with strongholds scattered over the country to which they could re- treat when a sudden rising of the natives en masse rendered them for a time unable to keep the open country. What was called the Parliament of Ireland was no national legislature, but the mere council of war of this army of occupation. It had little to do com- paratively in the way of legislating; for previous to 1782, the English Parliament took upon it to make laws for Ireland, and down to the present day the bulk of the civil law is the indi- genous law of England introduced into Ireland by decisions from the Bench. The principal business of the Irish Parliament during the greater portion of its existence was to devise measures for coer- cing and controlling the Roman Catholics—that is, the natives; for Protestantism had become a mere sign and password, the badge by which the affiliated Ascendancy party recognized each other. Those times have passed away. The Irish Parliament has been merged in the British Legislature ; the Roman Catholics have been relieved from their disabilities; Orangeism has been discounte- nanced. But the Irish constitution—the laws and institutions framed by the old Legislature, Judges, and English Parliaments— remains essentially the same. Scotland has laws and law-courts, and a church, which grew up by a natural process out of the existing
relations of society, and are adapted to them. Ireland has a church and laws of foreign origin, which, however beneficial they may be in the land where they had their growth, and out of the social ne- cessities of which they sprang, are inapplicable in many respects to the circumstances of society in Ireland, and therefore productive of misery and oppression.
The main source of' misgovernment in Ireland has been the Cockney spirit of English legislation, which could not imagine any good in laws or institutions not of the exact English cut. Mr. O'CONNELL has been unwise in raking up the old feuds between the English and the native Irish. He has been unjust, or wanting in discrimination, in attributing all the wrong, the devastation, and suffering, which marked the progress of these feuds, to had inten- tion on the part of the English. They are on both sides nothing more than a repetition of the struggles which have always ensued when two proud and excitable races, each imbued with a narrow- minded, bigoted attachment to its own ways, have come into col- lision. The Englishman imagined that the Irishman would be happier and better if metamorphosed into an Englishman, (" civi- lized" is the current phrase on such occasions,) and, with the best intentions in the world, he set to work to Anglify him, as the Spaniards set to work to Christianize the Mexicans, or, to use a homelier simile, as unwise parents set themselves to make their children good and comfortable by snubbing and beating them.
The present generation of Englishmen has not got much wiser in this respect than its ancestors. It is still the current belief that Irish evils are to be remedied by the introduction of English in- stitutions. The homely proverb is forgot, that "one man's meat is another man's poison." The forty-shilling franchise was given to Ireland because the Whigs were of opinion that the free institu- tions of England had mainly contributed to the prosperity and high character of its population ; but the forty-shilling franchise in Ire- land only increased the number of small tenants constantly on the brink of starvation, in order that the poor wretches might be deci- mated by ejections when the abolition of the forty-shilling fran- chise rendered them no longer subservient to the landlord's am- bition, and mere cumberers of his ground. Again—small farms have, by a natural process, entirely disappeared from Scotland, and society is the better for it : it was inferred that the conversion of small holdings into sizeable farms in Ireland must produce the same effects ; but the " clearings " instituted for this purpose occa- sioned incalculable misery and wild and terrible revenge. And in a like spirit the Poor-law of England was introduced—applicable to a country where there is a pauper class, but not to a country where that class is as yet undistinguishable from the mass of the peasantry—where every one below the proprietary rank may be alternately labourer and pauper without loss of caste.
The circumstances of Irish society are essentially different from those of English society, and cannot be improved by the same means that might better the condition of England. It is true that although the population of Ireland presses hard on the means of subsistence, better management, improved methods of husbandry, and the extension of manufactures, would enable a much larger population to live comfortably in the island. But improved me- thods of husbandry and manufactures presuppose the command of combined labour; of which the elements, a capitalist class and a class of labourers relying upon wages alone for subsistence, do not exist in Ireland. The peasantry of Ireland do not and cannot be brought to rely upon wages alone as their means of subsistence. They get a bit of land, to produce so much ; and work so many days for a farmer or landlord, to gain so much more ; and perhaps, at certain seasons of the year, the husband migrates to another district in search of employment, while his wife and children, it may be, set out to try their luck in begging. The Irish peasant's labour is precarious and intermitting: he does not learn to value time, for he has much unemployed time on his hands ; he does his work slovenly and imperfectly—it is not habitual to him. Hence the anomaly, that in Ireland, with a superabundance of labourers, and a nominally low rate of wages, labour is in reality both scarce and dear. A capitalist could not obtain such farm-labourers or such artisans as in England or Scotland, and capitalists such as are to be found in Great Britain there are almost none. The infant manufactures of Ireland were crushed by English legislation in the beginning of last century : a manufacturing capitalist class could not grow up in Ireland. The only persons who make money are the traders in the towns, and the land-agents, tithe-proctors, and middlemen, in the rural districts. From the absence of manufac- tures, the only means of realizing savings is by investing them in land. But to this, entails, the expensive forms of the trans- fer of landed property, and the state of the law of mortgage, interpose obstacles. The savings of the money-making class are either invested in the British Funds and Joint-Stock Companies, or secured upon land by cumbrous and complicated processes fertile in litigation. Partly from improvident habits— partly from family settlements, changes in the currency, and other crises—most of the Irish landowners are drowned in debt. The class which has mcney and skill to turn it to account cannot ob- tain land ; and the nominal proprietors of land are too frequently mere "factors and proctors for another's gain." Agriculture is the only branch of industry at present possible in Ireland; and even though labourers capable of continuous and combined indus- try were to be found there, a capitalist class to set them in motion and direct them is wanting. In such ci cumstances, to speak of removing the poverty of Ireland by the investment of British ca- pital in land or manufactures, in the first instance, is to delude. During the last half-century a great deal of capital has been
thrown into Ireland, in various forms—compensation for boroughs disfranchised at the Union, advances for canals, roads, banks, &c.; but, for want of capitalists and labourers who could use and com- mand it, it has been absorbed without any return, all the same as if The solid gold had been thrown into the bog of Allen. To begin
the amendment of the economical condition of Ireland, you must simplify the tenures and facilitate the transfer of land, thus allowing it to pass into the bands of the class possessing and capable of using capital; who will in time train a class of labourers and artisans. This, too, is the only remedy for the wretchedness of the tenant class; whose ill-treatment is owing more to the poverty of the land- lords, compelling them to be harsh, than to an oppressive dispo- sition.
There are exceptions to this account of the proprietors and peasants of Ireland. Ulster—at least the Northern and Eastern districts—is more Scotch than Irish in its character. In Water- rd, Wexford, part of Limerick, and some other districts, improved methods of husbandry have been introduced, (most frequently, we believe, by proprietors who have estates on this side of the Channel, Which enable them to lay out more on their Irish property,) with manifest advantage to the social condition of all ranks. But our description is sufficiently general in its application to account for the prevalence of destitution in Ireland. It is a source of moral as well as of material evil. The Irish peasant, though untrained to continuous labour, is neither unintelligent nor as far as reading and writing go uneducated. His semi-industrious habits and lively temperament lead him alternately to work bard and waste time in gossip and speechifying. Such habits and an excitable disposition fit him eminently for a tool of traders in political agitation ; and the precarious and distressed condition of the classes immediately above him render them a perfect hotbed of political intriguers or dema- gogues. Both leaders and followers waste in factious pursuits time and energies which might be turned to profitable account. The low state of education among the gentry, in many districts, (for much less provision has been made for their education than for that of the peasantry,) and their embarrassed circumstances, have de- veloped the Castle Rackrent morality, of the habitual duellist and habitual defier of the law and its officers. The poverty of the landlord and the exactions of his creditors often plunge the peasant from poverty into utter destitution ; and the example of his "betters" predisposes him to respect the law as little as they do. It must be added, that the laws against Roman Catholics, by con- centrating property in the hands of Protestants, have encouraged a domineering spirit in all belonging to that sect. To the limiting of the range of choice of local Justices by this means, is owing a state of administration of the law which almost justifies the con- tempt in which it is held. And the same cause, it may be remarked, enables the aspirants to political or other office—the only parties really aggrieved by religious exclusion—to make the peasantry sympathize with them and become tools in their bands.
These moral and material evils may be distinctly traced to the egotistical and erroneous system of legislation for Ireland adopted and persevered in by England. And the master-evil, the attempt to force upon the Irish an alien church—to invest an essentially missionary church with the power, privileges, and emoluments of a national establishment—may still more distinctly be traced to the narrow and bigoted spirit of English legislation. The harsh and oppressive measures adopted to uphold the Established Church, forced all the heterogeneous and conflicting elements of the anar- chical society of Catholic Ireland to combine against it. The gen- tleman of ancient lineage, whose family possessions had been cur- tailed or taken away for his adherence to the old faith, was its enemy. The hard-headed plebeian of the Catholic communion, who by industry of any kind had raised himself above his original condition and found his further ascent impeded, was its enemy. The man ambitious of distinction in the Law Courts or the Senate, found his progress thwarted by it, and became its enemy. The priest of the trampled religion was of course its enemy. All the high spirits of Catholic Ireland—all its financial, legal, theological, and literary talent—were forced to make common cause against this usurping church, and enter into alliance with the restless and unscrupulous dabblers in politics, already described as bred between want and indolence. The alliance was not of love between these heterogeneous coadjutors, but of hatred towards one common ob- ject, and could not raise or ennoble their character. And on the other hand, the narrow and persecuting spirit of the dominant fac- tion, forced in self-defence to recruit its ranks by mercenary rene- gades, opposed a still more degrading rancour to the spirit of ha- tred which animated its assailants. Party-spirit has inevitably something mean and repulsive about it ; but nowhere are its hideous features more exaggerated than in Ireland.
These are the causes, of which the ejections of whole clusters of families from their miserable hovels to starve on the bleak moor— the midnight or noonday assassination of landlords, clergymen, bailiffs, or tenants who have taken a few acres of moor-land over the heads of others—the mercenary and factious supporters of power and the no less mercenary traders in public grievances—the partisan and the bully on the bench—are merely the effects. Pallia- tives applied to these effects—such as English Poor-laws, which can neither relieve nor remove the poverty of the people, glebes and manses and seminaries of education for the national priesthood, or some slender diminution of the exactions of the alien Church, while the people have been brought to regard the mere existence of that Church as a State establishment a national insult—will not do. The sources of distress and turbulence in Ireland are interwoven with the characters of individuals and with all social relations. They cannot be eradicated at once ; and yet, as the first great object of those who seek to improve the condition of Ireland ought to be the at- tainment of popular confidence, the tendency of whatever is done must be palpably and beyond the possibility of mistake for good. The late Government had the advantage of having quieted the Irish people by expressions and acts of sympathy ; and measure* would have been received at its hands without suspicion. The present Government has, by the necessities of its position, been obliged to conquer a peace by the strong arm of law ; and ought therefore to be the more careful that the character and tendency of its remedies are obvious and not easily misrepresented. To this end, they ought to be bold, comprehensive, and searching—of such a nature that men cannot fail to perceive they are the commencement of a systematic career of melioration; and they ought to be brought forward in a manner to show that their authors are resolute to carry them out—pledged to stand or fall by them. They ought also to be not mere lenitives to the evils produced by legislation, but the abolition of all laws that cramp or misdirect native energies or en- gender hatred and party-spirit. For example, instead of coaxing the Roman Catholics with small concessions, Government ought firmly to take its stand upon the ground that a State Church is impossible in Ireland, and place all sects on an equality ; instead of patching and pruning a system of land-tenures radically and es- sentially bad, at once to abolish entails and all those complicated fictions of law which render it impossible to say whether a man is tenant or owner.
The great obstacles in the way of such reforms are, the necessity of having them carried by a Government which has the support of a British majority in the Imperial Parliament, and the bigotry of English attachment to English institutions. This ultra-English spirit embarrasses and checks Whig and Tory alike. Compare the catalogue of Ministerial remedies as announced by Sir Jamas GRAHAM with the programme of Lord JOHN RUSSELL, and little difference will be found in the measures they hold out as im- mediately applicable. The only difference is in the admission by one party, that at some future undefined period all sects may be placed on a footing of equality, and in the profession by the other of unalterable allegiance to the ascendancy of the Anglican Church. By the time the first party is ready to realize its liberal theory, the other will have seen the hopelessness of maintaining its illiberal one. The professions of Lord JOHN RUSSELL and Sir James Gamiest are less expressions of their own views than indications of the state of opinion respecting Ireland in this country. Each adapts his professions to what he thinks an English majority in Parliament can be brought to approve of ; and the close ap- proximation of their schemes shows that they are at one as to the predominant opinions of that body. A statesman of commanding character and liberal opinions might draw together an Irish and Scotch majority and English minority, strong enough to carry measures adequate to the exigencies of Ireland ; and if the united Scotch and English Members of this majority were numerous enough to make him so far independent of any one Irish party as to be able to employ native talent wherever he found it,, the nucleus of a real Irish party might be formed, which would in time give the tone to public opinion in Ireland. The people which, under every disadvantage, has produced such men as BERKELEY and SWIFT, BURKE, GRATTAN, and Comex, and which still boasts distin, guished names in politics, law, literature, and general science, must possess materials for such a patriotic party. But where is He who is to make a world out of the present chaos ?
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