held by nearly an equal number of squalid and destitute CHAP. cultivators.* XX. 1822. 10. effects of In these peculiar and extraordinary circumstances, the introduction of the POTATO, which has in general Pernicious proved so great a blessing to the working classes, became the potato. the greatest curse, for it furnished subsistence for a vast increase of destitute cultivators, while it led them to trust entirely for that subsistence to the most precarious of all crops. Three times the number of persons can be fed on an acre of potatoes, who can be maintained on an acre of wheat in ordinary seasons; but, on the other hand, the potato crop is liable to occasional failure, or rather total ruin, to a degree unknown in any cereal crop. It is hard to say which peculiarity of this valuable root, which has now come to form so large a portion of the food of .the working classes in all countries, and in Ireland composed the whole, was attended, in the circumstances of that island, with most peril to the community; for the first afforded almost boundless room for multiplication to a squalid peasantry, who were content to live on potatoes alone; while the last exposed them to the risk of famine, whenever any of the periodical seasons of failure of that crop came round. This was what happened with the potato crop of 1822, and occasioned the dreadful distress of that year, which was relieved only by the magnificent exertion of British charity; and the same disaster recurred on a still greater scale, and with circumstances of unexampled horror, in the famine of 1846. Potatoes form a most valuable addition to the food of the people, when the staple of their consumption is of other things; when * These little freeholds were thus composed in 1846, before the famine:Under £4, . From £4 to £5, 500,387 79,614 XX. CHAP. they become their sole, or even chief subsistence, it may with safety be concluded that the social system is in a diseased state, and that unbounded calamities are at hand. 1822. 11. Want of poor-laws. Last, though not least, in the catalogue of Irish grievances at this period, must be placed the entire absence of any legal provision for the poor. The island at this period was overrun by above two millions of beggars, being nearly a fourth of the entire population; and yet there was no provision either for their succour in sickness or old age, or their employment in health, or their emigration from the country. Their only resource was to get possession of bits of land, of two or three acres each, which they planted with potatoes, and in the interval between the planting and raising of that crop they were in total idleness, or picked up for a few weeks a precarious em-. ployment by working on the public roads, or migrating for a season to reap the harvests of Great Britain. It is true, a considerable sum, amounting to above £600,000 a-year, was levied by the grand juries, under legal authority, for county rates; but that sum was chiefly expended on roads and bridges, which were the only things in the country which were in general in an admirable state, and the work on which, of course, could only be done by the able-bodied. To the old, the infirm, the sick, the orphans, the desolate children, these afforded no sort of relief. They fell as a burden almost entirely on the peasantry, whose pittance was, in a truly Christian spirit, always open to them, and the sums levied annually by the poor on the poor was computed, as already stated, at £1,500,000 a-year. The effect of this state of things, prejudicial in every way, was in an especial manner so in the matter of population. By keeping so large a portion of the inhabitants in a state of constant destitution, the sight of poverty in its most extreme form was constantly before the eyes of the people; and then, like death to soldiers in a bloody campaign, it lost all its terrors, and XX. 1822. the principle of increase became unlimited in its operations. CHAP. Experience has abundantly proved that of all epidemic disorders there is none so contagious as the recklessness produced by extreme poverty, and that no remedy can be relied on for its prevention but the removal of the destitute into situations where their immediate necessities are supplied, and the demoralising effect of their example is taken away. As a great duty of the affluent is to relieve the indigent, so this duty can never be neglected without its punishment speedily falling on the heads of the parties in fault; and never did this retribution descend more swiftly and heavily than in the case of the Irish landholders. 12. In the first instance, however, the effect of this flood of extreme poverty, which overspread the land, Absentee appeared in a form which aggravated in a most serious proprietors. degree the distresses of the country. Unable to endure the sight of a mass of poverty, which they could neither relieve nor prevent, a large portion of the landed proprietors nearly the whole who could afford to do soleft the country, spent their incomes in London, Paris, or Italy, lost in consequence all interest in their estates, and were known to their tenantry only by the periodical and unwelcome visits of their bailiffs to collect the rents. Thence arose an entire estrangement between the peasantry and their natural protectors, and a ceaseless state of hostility between the landlords and the cultivators of their lands. The former, eager to close such a state of things, and to introduce a better mode of culture and a more substantial body of tenantry on their estates, endeavoured in many instances to bring over Scotch or English farmers, possessed of some capital, to take their farms; but this attempt had for long very little success. The peasantry considered it as a prelude to ejecting them from their possessions, and throwing them to starve upon the highway. It was a struggle of life or death to them, and, animated alike by hatred at the Saxon and XX. 1822. 13. and secret societies. terror at being dispossessed, they engaged generally in secret societies, the object of which was to murder every new-comer, and every landlord or factor who was instrumental in introducing them. Thence the association of RIBBONMEN, who were Ribbonmen bound together by the most terrible oaths to work out this nefarious system, and who furnished the assassins, who were at all times ready for a trifling sum to execute the mandates of the lodges in fire-raising or murder. This is the real secret of the long continuance and general prevalence of agrarian outrages in Ireland, and explains the fact, so different from what is experienced elsewhere, that the counties were more disturbed than the towns, and that crime was nowhere so prevalent as in the purely agricultural districts. Philosophy came to the aid of party politics in the consideration of this question, and the extraordinary doctrine was broached, and seriously maintained by eminent men, and in celebrated journals, that the absentee proprietors were no evil to Ireland, because the demand for labour, arising from the expenditure of the landed proprietors, was as great if the money was spent in London or Paris as on their own estates;-a paradox very convenient for those who wished to represent Catholic emancipation as the sovereign remedy for all the evils of the country, and about as true as if it were to be maintained that an excessive drought or famine in one country is no evil to its inhabitants, because, as the average moisture that falls on the produce which is raised from the whole earth is the same, or nearly so, in one year as another, the deficiency of one district will be compensated by the excess of another. 14. Lodges. Finding themselves in a small minority amidst a mass Orange of hostile and almost insurgent Roman Catholics, the Protestants, in self-defence, organised themselves in an opposite association, which, under the name of ORANGE LODGES, had in like manner secret signs, obeyed unknown. authority, and too often engaged in revengeful and bloody XX. 1822. deeds. These two opposite associations were soon involved CHAP. in fierce and irreconcilable hostility with each other; and as nearly the whole peasantry of the country belonged to one or other of the associations, or at all events obeyed the mandates of their leaders, the entire inhabitants were, in some districts, arrayed under opposite banners, obeyed opposite commands, and were always ready for mutual hostility. Thus, in addition to all other causes of discord, the landholders and peasantry of Ireland became arrayed in opposite and nearly equally dangerous secret associations; for the chief proprietors were office-bearers in the Orange lodges, and the great body of the Catholics were members of the Ribbon lodges, or belonged to the Catholic Association, which came to play so important a part in the annals of that unhappy country. 15. and uncer administra For a people so situated, the first necessity, and greatest of all blessings, would have been a strict and even rigo- Irregularity rous administration of justice-such an administration tainty in the as, without being stained with unnecessary severity, should tion of jushave taken away the chief temptation to crime, by remov- tice. ing its rewards, or rendering certain its punishment. Unfortunately, however, in this matter, the British connection, which it might naturally be supposed would have been attended with the most salutary effects, was, from the opposite character of the people in the two countries, followed by the most disastrous. The English, according to their usual and not unnatural custom, thought they could not do anything so good for Ireland as transplanting wholesale their own institutions into it; and the popular party in Ireland, seeing that all these institutions tended to augment the influence of the democratic leaders, warmly supported the same system. Thus they both concurred in doing what, in the circumstances of the country, was of all things the most ruinous to the cause of tranquillity and order, and the lasting interests of its inhabitants. They gave grand juries to a people so divided that no proceeding of the higher orders was ever set down |