The Irish Race in the Past and the Present Part 38

Province of York, 353,892 15,525 1,978

Totals 2,477,254 108,676 13,856

It is known also that, under George III., the number of Catholics in the whole of Great Britain did not exceed sixty thousand, so thorough had been the separation of England from the true Church.

To return to the ostracism of a whole nation from its political rights. No individual really belonging to it could take the slightest share in the administration of its affairs. They were all left to the control of aliens, whose boast it was that they were English; and whose chief object was to secure English ascendency, and subject every thing Irish to the rule of force.

Yet all this while a new era was dawning on the world; a mult.i.tude of voices were proclaiming new social and political doctrines; all were to be free, to possess privileges that might not be intrenched upon--to wit, a voice in the affairs of the nation, trial by their peers, no taxation without due representation, and the like--while a whole nation by the unanimous consent of the loudest of these freedom-mongers was excluded from every benefit of the new ideas, was literally placed in bondage, and left without the possibility of being heard and admitted to the enjoyment of the common rights, because the one voice which would have declared in their favor, which in former times had so often and so loudly spoken, when so to speak was to offend the powers of this world, was deprived of the right of being heard. The doctrine that the Papal supremacy was a usurpation, and the Pope himself an enemy of freedom, was laid down as a cardinal principle. After such public renunciation of former doctrines, all these new and so-called liberal theories were a mere delusion and a snare. There was no possibility of effectually securing freedom, in spite of so much promised to all and granted to some; no possibility of really protecting the rights of all. The public right newly proclaimed ended finally in might. Majorities ruled despotically over the minorities, and, as the despotism of the mult.i.tude is ever harsher and more universal than that of any monarch, the reign of cruel injustice was let in upon Ireland. And in her case the injustice was peculiarly aggravated, inasmuch as it was a small alien minority which trampled under foot the rights of a great native majority.

But, although the deprivation of political rights is perhaps more fatal to a nation than that of any other, on account of what follows in its train, particularly in the framing of the laws, nevertheless the deprivation of civil rights is generally more acutely felt, because the grievances resulting from it meet man at every turn, at every moment of his life, in his household and domestic circle. In fact, the penal laws stripped Catholics of every civil right which modern society can conceive, and it was chiefly there that the ingenuity of their oppressors labored during the greater part of a century to make a total wreck of Irish welfare.

Those rights may be cla.s.sified generally as the right of possessing and holding landed property, the right of earning an honorable living by profession or trade, the right of protection against injustice by equal laws, the right of fair trial before condemnation: such are the chief. It is doubtful if there is any thing of importance left of which a citizen can be deprived, unless indeed he be openly and unjustly deprived of life.

It has been already indicated how the policy of England, with regard to Ireland, from that first invasion, in the time of Henry II., was prompted by the desire of gaining possession of the soil, and how after seven hundred years of struggle it succeeded in attaining its object; so that the whole island had been confiscated, and in some instances two or three times over.

The object of the penal laws, therefore, could not be to deprive the Irish of the land which they no longer possessed, but to prevent them acquiring any land in any quant.i.ty whatever, and from reentering into possession, by purchase or otherwise, of any portion of their own soil and of the estates which belonged to their ancestors. So harsh and cunning a design, we doubt not, never entered the minds of any former legislators, even in pagan antiquity.

The great stimulus to exertion in civil society consists of the acquisition of property, chiefly of land. In feudal times seignorial estates could be purchased by none but those of n.o.ble blood; but with allodial estates it was different all through Europe. Yet just at the time when feudal laws were pa.s.sing into disuse the Irish were prevented, by carefully-drawn enactments, from purchasing even a rood of their native soil. "The prohibition had been already extended to the whole nation by the Commonwealth government, and when the lands forfeited by the wars of 1690 came to be sold at Chichester House in 1703, the Irish were declared by the English Parliament incapable of purchasing at the auction, or of taking a lease of more than two acres."--(Prendergast.)

The same author adds in a note: "But it was when the estate was made the property of the first Protestant discoverer, that animation was put into this law. Discoverers then became like hounds upon the scent after lands secretly purchased by the Irish. Gentlemen fearing to lose their lands, found it now necessary to conform--namely, to abjure Catholicism. Between 1703 and 1709 there were only thirty-six conformers in Ireland; in the next ten years (after the Discovery Act), the conformists were one hundred and fifty."

But the full object was not only to prevent the Irish from becoming even moderately rich in land; they were to be reduced to actual pauperism. Hence the prohibitory laws did not stop at this first outrage; almost impossible occurrences were supposed and provided for, lest there might be a chance of their realization at some time. It was actually provided that, if the produce of their farms brought a greater profit to the Irish than was expected, notwithstanding all these measures against the possible occurrence of such an evil, the lease was void, and the "discoverer" should receive the amount.

There was no loop-hole by which the people might escape from this degradation. But there was still the chance left of engaging in trade, acquiring personal property by its practice, and becoming the owners of a sum of money in bank, or of a dwelling-house in the city. The English law of succession was understood to be a law for all, and consequently, in some out-of- the-way cases, a stray Irish family might be found in course of time with an elder branch possessed of a fair amount of property, and able to emerge from the dead level of the common misery.

Such a possibility could not of course be permitted by the English colonists who ruled the land. So the law of gavelkind, to which the Irish had at one time been so attached, was now to be forced upon them, and upon them alone of all the British subjects. It was decreed that, upon the death of every Irishman, whatever of personal property he left behind him was to be divided equally among all his children, who, being generally numerous, would each receive but a trifle, and so perpetrate the pauperism of the race.

Where the surprise, then, in finding the whole nation reduced since that time to a state of the most abject poverty? It was the will of the rulers that so it should be, and their scheme, guarded and enforced by so many legislative acts, could not fail to succeed in producing the effect intended. Granting even the smallest amount of truth in what is so often flung at the Irish as a reproach--their carelessness and want of foresight--how could it be otherwise, to what cause can such failings, even if they exist, be a.s.signed, save to the utter impossibility of succeeding in any effort which they chose to make?

The true origin of the state in which the Irish at home now appear to the eyes of foreign travellers, is the deliberate intention, sternly acted upon for more than a century, to make the island one vast poorhouse.

The wretched situation in which they have ever since remained, confessed by all to be without parallel on earth, is certainly not to be laid at the door of the present population of England, nor even to the colony still intrenched on Irish soil; but with what right can it be brought forward as a reproach against the Irish themselves, when its real cause is so evident, and when history speaks so plainly on the subject?

All sensible Englishmen of our days will readily acknowledge that, without indulging in mutual recrimination, the duty of all is to repair the injuries of the past, and to do away with the last remnants of its sad consequences. Wounds so deep and many in a nation cannot be healed by half measures; and it is only a thorough change of system, and a complete reversal of legislation, that can leave the English of to-day without reproach.

Pauperism, then, is the necessary misfortune, not the crime of Ireland; we may even go further, and a.s.sert that, if millions of Irishmen have lived and died paupers, owing to the barbarous laws enacted for that special purpose, few indeed among them have been reduced even by hard necessity and the extreme of misery to manifest a pauper spirit and a miserly bent.

There is no doubt that the almost invariable result of suffering and want is to create selfishness in the sufferer, and cause him to cling desperately to the little he may possess. Self preservation and self-indulgence, in such a case, form the law of human nature, and no one even expects to find a really poor man generous, when he can scarcely meet his bare necessities and the imperious wants of his family. It is the peculiarity of the Irish to know how to combine generosity with the deprivation almost of the common necessaries of life. When masters of their own soil, a large hospitality and a free-handed "bestowing of gifts"--such, we believe, was the Irish expression--was universal among them; the poorest clansman would have been ashamed not to imitate, in his degree, the liberal spirit of his prince. They often gave all they had, regardless of the future; and, when their chieftains demanded of the clansmen what the Book of Rights imposed upon them, their exclamation was, "Spend me but defend me."

Though the people of Erin have been reduced to the sad necessity of forgetting that old proverb of the nation, the spirit which gave rise to it lives in their hearts and is proved by their deeds. What other nation, even the richest and most prosperous, could have accomplished what the world has seen them bring to- pa.s.s during this century? The laws which, so long ago, forbade them to be generous, and prohibited them from providing openly for the worship of their G.o.d, for the education of their children, for the help of the sick and needy among them, have at last been made inoperative by their oppressors. But, when they were at length left free to follow the freedom and generosity of their hearts, they found--what? In their once beautiful and Christian country, a universal desolation; the blackened ruins of what had been their abbeys, churches, hospitals, and asylums; the very ground on which they stood stolen away from them, and the Protestant establishment in full enjoyment of the revenues of the Catholics. They found every thing in the same state that they had known for centuries. Nothing was restored to them. They were at liberty to spend what they did not possess, since they were as poor as men could be. Every thing had to be done by them toward the reestablishing of their churches, schools, and various asylums, and they had nothing wherewith to do it.

There is no need of going item by item over what they did. The present prosperous state of the Irish Catholic public inst.i.tutioris-- churches, schools, and all--is owing to their poorly-filled pockets. G.o.d alone knows how it all came about. We can only see in them the poor of Christ, rich in all gifts, "even alms-deeds most abundant."

It is only too evident that the degradation which the English wished to fasten upon them forever, could not be accomplished even by the measures best adapted to debase a people. The Celtic nature rose superior to the dark designs of the most ingenious opponents, and continued as ever n.o.ble, generous, and openhearted. Nevertheless, the sufferings of the victims were at times unutterable; and one of the inevitable effects of such tyrannical measures soon made itself fearfully active and destructive in the shape of those periodical famines which have ever since devastated the island.

In the days of her own possession, there was never mention of famine there. The whole island teemed with the grain of her fields, consumed by a healthy population, and was alive with vast herds of cattle and flocks of sheep. What were the heca- tombs of ancient Greece compared with the thousands of kine prescribed annually by the Book of Rights? Who ever heard of people perishing of want in the midst of abundance such as this?

Even during the fiercest wars, waged by clan against clan, we often see the image of death in many shapes, but never that of a large population reduced to roots and gra.s.s for food.

When, later on, the wars of the Reformation transformed Munster into a wilderness, and we read for the first time in Irish history of people actually turning green and blue, according to the color of the unwholesome weeds they were driven to devour in order to support life, at least it was in the wake of a terrible war that famine came. It was reserved for the eighteenth century to disclose to us the woful spectacle of a people perishing of starvation in the midst of the profoundest peace, frequently of the greatest plenty, the food produced in abundance by the labor of the inhabitants being sold and sent off to foreign countries to enrich absentee landlords. Nay, those desolating famines at last grew to be periodical, so that every few years people expected one, and it seemed as though Ireland were too barren to produce the barely sufficient supply of food necessary for her scanty population. The people worked arduously and without intermission; the land was rich, the seasons propitious; yet they almost constantly suffered the pangs of hunger, which spread sometimes to wholesale starvation. This was another result of those laws devised by the English colonists to keep down the native population of the island, and prevent it from becoming troublesome and dangerous. Such was the effect of the humane measures taken to preserve the glory of Protestant ascendency, and secure the rights and liberties of a handful of alien masters.

It is proper to describe some of those awful scourges, which have never ceased since, and at sight of which, in our own days, we have too often sickened. For the Emanc.i.p.ation of 1829 was far from removing all the causes of Irish misery. On the 17th of March, 1727, Boulter, the Protestant Archbishop of Armagh, wrote to the Duke of Newcastle: "Since my arrival in this country, the famine has not ceased among the poor people. The dearness of corn last year was such that thousands of families had to quit their dwellings, to seek means of life elsewhere; many hundred perished."

At the same period Swift wrote: "The families of farmers who pay great rents, live in filth and nastiness, on b.u.t.termilk and potatoes."

The following is a short and simple description of the famine of 1741, given by an eye-witness, and copied by Matthew O'Connor from a pamphlet ent.i.tled "Groans of Ireland," published in the same year:

"Having been absent from this country some years, on my return to it last summer, I found it the most miserable scene of distress that I ever read of in history. Want and misery on every face, the rich unable to relieve the poor, the roads spread with dead and dying bodies; mankind the color of the docks and nettles which they fed on; two or three, sometimes more, on a car, going to the grave for want of bearers to carry them, and many buried only in the fields and ditches where they perished. The universal scarcity was followed by fluxes and malignant fevers, which swept off mult.i.tudes of all sorts, so that whole villages were laid waste. If one for every house in the kingdom died--and that is very probable--the loss must be upward of four hundred thousand souls. If only half, a loss too great for this ill-peopled country to bear, as they are mostly working people. When a stranger travels through this country, and beholds its wide, extended, and fertile plains, its great flocks of sheep and black cattle, and all its natural wealth and conveniences for tillage, manufacture, and trade, he must be astonished that such misery and want should be felt by its inhabitants."

At the time these lines were written, the astonishment was sincere, and the answer to the question "How can this be?"

seemed impossible; the phenomenon utterly inexplicable. In our own days, when this same picture of woe has been so often presented in the island, the reasons for it are well known; and what seems inexplicable is that, the cause being so clear, and the remedy so simple, the remedy has not yet been thoroughly applied.

In 1756 and 1757, the same scenes were repeated, with the same frightful results. Charles O'Connor, at that time the champion of his much- abused countrymen, wrote thus, in his letter to Dr.

Curry, May 21, 1756:

"Two-thirds of the inhabitants are perishing for want of bread; meal is come to eighteen-pence a stone, and, if the poor had money, it would exceed by--I believe--double that sum. Every place is crowded with beggars, who were all house-keepers a fortnight ago, and this is the condition of a country which boasts of its const.i.tution, its laws, and the wisdom of its legislature."

These words, although sweeping enough, and universally applicable, are far from conveying to our minds, to-day, the real picture of the state of the country. When the writer speaks of "meal," it must be understood to mean rye, oats, and, barley; and even this coa.r.s.e and heavy food being, as he remarks, inaccessible to the poor, potatoes had become the only bread of the country, and the inhabitants were perishing for the want of it.

For the first time in the history of the two nations, the English Government thought of relieving the distress of the people, and to this purpose applied the magnificent sum of twenty thousand pounds. Such was the generous amount granted by a wealthy and prosperous country to procure food for the inhabitants of an island as large as Ireland is known to be. As to effecting any change in the laws, which were really the cause of this unutterable misery, such an idea never entered into the heads of the legislators. Hence it is not surprising to hear that "the distress in the interior of the country revived the frightful image of the miseries of 1741, nor did the calamity cease, until the equilibrium between the population and the means of subsistence was restored by the acc.u.mulated waste of famine and pestilence;" that is to say, until all those had been destroyed whom the laws of the time could, as they had been designed to do, destroy.

These details appear calculated only to shock the feelings of the reader, already sufficiently acquainted with the lot of the Irish cottier and laborer, from the beginning of the last century. Nevertheless, we cannot close this part of our subject without giving publicity to the following description of the ma.s.s of the Irish population in 1762, by Matthew O'Connor:

"The popery laws had, in the course of half a century, consummated the ruin of the lower orders. Their habitations, visages, dress, and despondency, exhibited the deep distress of a people ruled with the iron sceptre of conquest. The lot of the negro slave, compared with that of the Irish helot, was happiness itself. Both were subject to the capricious cruelty of mercenary task-masters and unfeeling proprietors; but the negro slave was well-fed, well clothed, and comfortably lodged. The Irish peasant was half starved, half naked, and half housed; the canopy of heaven being often the only roof to the mud-built walls of his cabin. The fewness of negroes gave the West India proprietor an interest in the preservation of his slave; a superabundance of helots superseded all interest in the comfort or preservation of an Irish cottier. The code had eradicated every feeling of humanity, and avarice sought to stifle every sense of justice. That avarice was generated by prodigality, the hereditary vice of the Irish gentry, and manifested itself in exorbitant rack-rents wrung from their tenantry, and in the low wages paid for their labor. Since the days of King William, the price of the necessaries of life had trebled, and the day's hire- -fourpence-- had continued stationary. The oppression of t.i.thes was little inferior to the tyranny of rack-rents; while the great landholder was nearly exempt from this pressure, a tenth of the produce of the cottier's labor was exacted for the purpose of a religious establishment from which he derived no benefit. . . . The peasant had no resource: not trade or manufactures--they were discouraged; not emigration to France-- the vigilance of government precluded foreign enlistment; not emigration to America --his poverty precluded the means. Ireland, the land of his birth, became his prison, where he counted the days of his misery in the deepest despondency."

Is it to be wondered at that conspiracies, secret a.s.sociations, and insurrections, were the result; or should the wonder be that such commotions were less universal and prolonged?

The craving of hunger is perpetual in Ireland. Mult.i.tudes of details from a mult.i.tude of different and independent sources might be brought forward to show this.

Duvergier de Hauranne, a Frenchman who visited the island in 1826, writes: "Ireland is the land of anomalies; the most deplorable dest.i.tution on the richest of soils. . . . Nowhere does man live in such wretchedness. The Irish peasant is born, suffers, and dies--such is life for him."

In 1836, Dr. Doyle, Bishop of Kildare, being asked what was the state of the population, wrote: "What it has always been; people are perishing as usual."

In 1843, Mr. Thackeray, as little a friend to Ireland as he was a foe to his own country, recounting what he saw in his travels, said that, in the south and west of the island, the traveller had before him the spectacle of a people dying of hunger, and that by millions, in the very richest counties.

There is no need of repeating what has been written of the fearful scourge that swept over the country in 1846 and 1847.

The details are too harrowing. At last even the London Times had to acknowledge the cause of these calamities: "The ulcer of Ireland drains the resources of the empire. It was to be expected that it should be so. The people of England have most culpably and foolishly connived at a national iniquity. Without going back beyond the Union (in 1800), and only within the last half-century, it has been notorious all that time that Ireland was the victim of an unexampled social crime. The landlords exercise their rights there with a hand of iron, and deny their duty with a brow of bra.s.s. Age, infirmity, sickness, every weakness, is there condemned to death. The whole Irish people is debased by the spectacle and contact of beggars and of those who notoriously die of hunger; and England stupidly winked at this tyranny. We begin now to expiate a long curse of neglect. Such is the law of justice. If we are asked why we have to support half the population of Ireland, the answer lies in the question itself; it is that we have deliberately allowed them to be crushed into a nation of beggars!"

The writers of the Times laid the true cause of that appalling misfortune at the door of the landlords. They would not trace back the origin of the evil beyond 1800: they could not or would not appreciate the Christian heroism displayed by the nation while under the infliction of such a fatal scourge. But it must not be forgotten by all admirers of virtue that, in the midst of a distress which baffles description, many of the victims of famine were at the same time martyrs to honesty and faith. "Come here and let us die together," said a wife to her husband, "rather than touch what belongs to another."

The civil right of acquiring land and enjoying its products has so far been the only one considered by us; and the subject has been entered upon at some length, as agriculture has at all times formed the chief occupation of the Irish people. But the penal laws embraced many other objects; and, as their intent was evidently to debase the people and reduce it to a state of actual slavery and want, other civil rights were equally invaded by their tyrannical provisions.

A portion of the population in all countries devotes itself to the intellectual pursuits necessary for the life of every cultivated nation. Whoever chooses must have the right of devoting his life to the professions of medicine and law, of entering the Church or the army, if his tastes run in any one of those directions. Not so in Catholic Ireland. The oath to be taken by every barrister prevented the Catholic Irishman from devoting his powers to such a purpose. There was only one Church for him, and that one proscribed. In the army not only could he not attain to any rank, but he was not allowed to enter it even as a private, the holding of a musket being prohibited to him.

So that, through mere fanatical hatred of every thing Catholic, England deprived herself for a whole century of the services of a people, forming to-day more than half of her army and navy, whose efforts have helped to cover her flag with honor, and whose memorable absence from the English ranks at Fontenoy wrung that bitter expression from the heart of George II. when the victorious tide of the English battle was rolled back by the Irish brigade, "Cursed be the laws which deprive me of such subjects!"

These few words are enough to show that the penal laws were in reality a decree of outlawry against the Irish--stamping them, not as true subjects, but as mere slaves and helots, fit only to be hewers of wood and drawers of water at the bidding of their lords and masters.

But there are mere human rights, inalienable in man, and sacred among all nations, which were trampled upon in that desolated land together with all inferior rights. Such are the rights of worshipping G.o.d, of properly educating children, of preserving a just subordination in the family and promoting harmony and happiness among its members. These natural rights were more openly and shamelessly violated, if that were possible, than all others; and this in itself would have made the eighteenth century one of gloom and woe for Irishmen.

It was for their religion chiefly that the Irish had undergone all the calamities and scourges which have been described. Had they only, at the very beginning of the Reformation, bowed to the new dogma of the spiritual supremacy of the English kings; had they a little later accepted the Thirty-nine Articles of Queen Elizabeth; had they, at a subsequent epoch, opined in chorus with the Scotch Presbyterians, and given the Bible as their authority for all kinds of absurdities and atrocities, mental and moral; had they, in a word, as they remarked to Suss.e.x, changed their religion four times in twelve years, they would have escaped the wrath of Henry VIII., the crafty and cruel policy of Elizabeth, the shifty expediency of the Stuarts, the barbarity of the Cromwellian era, and finally the ingenious atrocities of the penal laws.