Books: Irish Race in the Past and the Present

A >> Aug. J. Thebaud >> Irish Race in the Past and the Present

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Yet all this while a new era was dawning on the world; a
multitude 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 multitude 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 classified 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 quantity 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 noble
blood; but with allodial estates it was different all through
Europe. Yet just at the time when feudal laws were passing 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 assigned, 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 assert 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-
pass 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 God, 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
institutioris-- churches, schools, and all--is owing to their
poorly-filled pockets. God 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 noble, 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 grass 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 Emancipation 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 buttermilk 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 entitled "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 multitudes 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 constitution, 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 coarse 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 accumulated 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
mass 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 tithes
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 associations,
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. Multitudes of
details from a multitude 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 destitution 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 brass. 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!"