MR. O'CONNELL AND THE TIMES COMMISSIONER. THE reports of the
" Times Commissioner " on Mr. O'Connell's Kerry estates have made a great impression in this country, and so have Mr. O'Connell's replies : the reports have satisfied Eng- lish readers, that however " goodnatured " a landlord Mr. O'Connell may be, he has done nothing for the material improve- ment of his country, but is on the contrary a conservator of its worst abuses; and his replies have increased the feeling that mere truth, for its own sake, is one of the last things to be re- garded by him. As between the two, however, although the dis- pute has gone thus far, it makes little way. In the latter stages, perhaps both have been too intent on their own personal objects; Mr. O'Connell having at stake that character on which he makes so curious a livelihood; the Commissioner being simply bent upon making good his own words, so coarsely assailed. Another reason for the want of progress is, that there is no agreement between them as to common terms : the Commissioner, looking with Eng- lish eyes and using English words, pronounces all that he sees ne- glected and bad ; Mr. O'Connell declares that the man is a liar, because everything is cherished and good ; but then he uses only his Irish eyes and language. Good and bad are, except in grammar, relative terms ; and in England and Ireland they mean different things. A good lesson on this point is given in a work with which the English Com- missioner is perhaps acquainted, Evenings at Some: a youth is surprised at the " prodigious " size of a butterfly, but he confesses that it would not have been large for an elephant. A certain cabin, with its potato-ground and ill-cultivated field, which if discovered in England would excite horror at its miserable aspect, and would be universally accepted as a specimen of the " bad," would in Ireland pass muster as comporting with the usual style, and might even be called good. In some of the improved and well-managed townships of Ireland, you meet the pig at the breakfast-table, "not as a meat, but as a guest "; whereas in England that single trait would suffice to stamp the abode as one of squalid and demoralized destitution. It is not merely that the standard of excellence differs, but under different orders of society the same particular symptoms do not always indicate the same general state of things. A very neglected aspect of the homestead and grounds may be observed among the peasantry in the North of France to this day, vast as their improvement has been since Arthur Young's tour. In the South of France, and still more in Italy, the critical traveller will see a far more backward style of agricultural implements than he will find in Ireland : he will see spades with long poles for handles, that turn up a handful of earth ; corn-threshing per- formed on a tressle with a bar of wood ; winnowing effected by throwing the corn with a wooden shovel from one end of a large room—probably that used as an orangery in winter—to the other. Nay, those peasantry may be said never to taste animal food ; yet their state is happy, almost enviable. Many features of the Irish description might be paralleled in Switzerland; where some very curious distinctions are observable : you can tell, as you pass the boundary, whether you are in a Protestant or a Catholic canton, by the aspect of the people and the country : in the Protestant, all is neat, and the industry is unceasing, outlasting daylight; in the Catholic, those traits disappear : but the difference in the aspect of the people is in one respect the reverse of what the traveller might suppose—the industrious inhabitants of the Pro- testant cantons are dreary to the last degree ; those of the Ca- tholic cantons are dancers with gayer faces. The value of life, therefore, is not positively determined by the degree of poverty prevalent among a peasantry. It is not the extent of the poverty on Mr. O'Connell's estates that makes the bad impression in England, but several other things. There is no evidence that he has made any attempt to alter the system that grinds the faces of the poor in his country. He boasts that he does not charge high rents—not so high by one or two thirds as Lord Lansdowne; that his lands are an asylum for the poor driven from other estates ; that he has estab- lished a tenant-right; and if certain houses are confessedly very bad even for Ireland, they are going to be rebuilt. Now it is not the money-value of rent that determines, by an inverse ratio, the welfare of the people; or English and Scotch farmers would be immeasurably more wretched than any Irish peasantry. The thing wanted in Ireland certainly is not to collect the poor and suffer them to breed in perpetuated squalidity, under the fostering sufferance of low rents. Mr. O'Connell, however, seems not only to have neglected any attempt to effect a radical change, but, from the boastful language in which he speaks, to be ignorant that a change is wanted, and that Irish landlords are bound to attempt it. Putting together the accounts of the Commissioner and Mr. O'Connell's own self-laudation, it is evident that his estates are a highly characteristic type of Irish agriculture, and that he is a no less characteristic type of the "goodnatured" Irish landlord. He seems to think his lands models—just what they ought to be—examples for the rest of Ireland. He is not in advance of the miserable system, but an undoubting creature of it. Doomed to an eternity of its wretchedness will that country be, if it is to have no better guides than Daniel O'Connell. And if others come to unbare that wretchedness in order to cure, he exhibits all the base pride which distinguishes the most abandoned class of paupers : he wishes merely to be left alone ; he denies the charge of pauperism, and assails those who expose it with Billingsgate language. He does not, of course because he cannot, deny the most pregnant facts described by the reporters of the Times ; but he complains that other facts are not stated, and endeavours to disparage the whole by scattering about the epithets of "liar," "vagabond," and the like. All who contradict the Commissioner are rewarded with fulsome praise ; all who cor- roborate his representations are threatened with exposure to po-
pular odium. The truth and real pregnant meaning of the matter appears to be quite disregarded ; the only obvious question is, whether a statement is "for" or "against" himself—whether "a case" can be made out.
In England, the conclusions to which these appearances lead are—that Mr. O'Connell is not a "bad" landlord in the Irish sense ; that he is " goodnatured," " indulgent," and not purely mercenary in the direct dealings with his tenantry ; but that he is the very worst sort of landlord that Irish peasants can have one who fosters the causes of their degraded condition ; and that he does not really desire the material improvement of the country, such as by modest efforts he could at once help to begin, but some kind of mere political power, which would redound to his own influence and fortune ; that he is still not a patriot, but only an adventurer on a grand scale.
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