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1831.]

POSITION OF MR. O'CONNEll.

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at an end, and though perhaps a man of a severe morality would at once have retired from the dangerous but captivating occupation and pre-eminence of Mr. O'Connell, he would have found the effort painful and difficult for the immediate sacrifice needed was enormous and the sudden change of pursuits and mode of occupation in the highest degree irksome and even laborious. A wise government would have endeavoured to lighten the labour of this task. One part of the sacrifice was an immediate loss of the means of subsistence. Mr. O'Connell had little, perhaps no private fortune, he had foregone the means of making one when he gave up the bar, he could not hope to continue receiving a rent from his grateful countrymen, unless he was constantly before them, as one labouring in their especial service. He had not the courage needed to return to his profession. The government unwisely omitted to find him an assured income, he was therefore compelled to starve or to agitate, and we need not wonder to see him accept the latter of these two painful alternatives. He renewed his business of agitation by starting the question of a repeal of the Union. Instead of taking warning from the past, and reducing Mr. O'Connell to insignificance by making him comfortable, the government set themselves to the work of opposing and forcibly silencing him. This was precisely what he desired. If the government were resolved not to purchase his silence by a place, they should have done the next best thing, and passed him by as utterly

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POSITION OF MR. O'CONNell.

[1831.

insignificant. He had not now the same advantage as heretofore. The Union was not in the opinion of any rational man an injustice or an evil to Ireland; none but the ignorant believed that any advantage could be obtained by repeal, and none but those impelled by a sinister interest pretended to desire it. Neglect under such circumstances would have enforced silence by rendering noisy declamation utterly harmless.1

Mr. O'Connell was, however, a master in his trade of agitation, and the gullibility of his poor countrymen was without bounds. Every summer in Ireland is a time of famine for some portion of her people. The potato, which is the only food of a majority of the labouring population, can seldom be kept in a state fit for human food during twelve months, and many of the poorer families have not, even of this unwholesome provision, sufficient to last the year round. These poor people stint themselves in vain, as they cannot make the scanty crop maintain their families during the whole twelve months that must elapse between the one harvest and the next. If, however,

1 Mr. Hume used this argument to Sir R. Peel in a debate above described. Sir Robert gave the best, and indeed the only answer, by describing the extraordinary power of Mr. O'Connell, and his mischievous use of it. The difficulty was great, whatever course was adopted. To win over Mr. O'Connell by the offer of a lucrative office, seems never to have been thought of by Sir R. Peel or the Duke.

2 An annual famine in Ireland is the immediate consequence of the use of the potato for the subsistence of the

1831.]

STATE OF IRELAND.

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there should come, and there always does come to some extent, a failure of this potato crop, then famine is the necessary consequence. The extent of the misery depends upon the extent of the failure-but no year passes without the existence of famine to some extent in Ireland-and the terrible diseases which famine always brings, are also an annual infliction upon the miserable poor of that unhappy land.

people. There are two circumstances connected with the potato, which make it wholly unfit for the principal food of a nation.

'First, even the best quality becomes unfit for human food in less than twelve months, and consequently a period precedes each crop, during which the population are compelled to use food unwholesome in quality, as well as insufficient in quantity. The old potato begins to decay generally about the end of June, whilst the new crop does not come to maturity till the beginning of September; the length of the time of scarcity depends both on the time that the old crop will keep, and the season at which the new crop comes in.

'The second objection to the potato as the principal food for a people, is its bulkiness and consequent difficulty and expense of conveyance. In Ireland potatoes are often comparatively cheap twenty miles only from a place at which a famine exists. To carry potatoes that distance, even on a good road, enhances their price 50 per cent.

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During the months of June, July, August, and September, the whole of the labouring population suffer the severest privation, few of them having a sufficient quantity even of food which has begun to decay, and many being obliged to stay the cravings of hunger by resorting to the use of weeds in mixture with the half-putrid potato. At this season starvation sometimes occurs in those parts of Ireland in which all are equally necessitous, as in the Connemara district of Galway, in the district of Ennis in Mayo, and in parts of Kerry.'-Evils of the State of Ireland, by JOHN REVANS, p. 40. One of the few works which tell the truth respecting Ireland.

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STATE OF IRELAND.

[1831.

These dispensations of Providence, Mr. O'Connell employed as a means to his own ends; he attributed the misery which afflicted Ireland directly to England, and made the existing government responsible for the inevitable suffering of his country. This species of injustice has been the common means of attack for every demagogue of every age. The satirist and humorist, laughing at this gross and almost transparent fallacy, imputes the common occurrences of every-day life, and the little miseries of our homely existence to the great opponent of a nation, whose very name had become a subject of terror. But when he asked in much solemnity,

Who fills the butchers' shops with large blue flies?

he hardly fancied that his ludicrous questioning would be exceeded in the folly of its imputations by the grave appeal of a legislator in parliament. Mr. O'Gorman Mahon, however, an Irish landed proprietor, thus apostrophised the House of Commons:

'Did hon. members imagine that they could prevent the unfortunate men who were five feet under snow from thinking they could better their condition by a repeal of the Union?' [Great laughter, says the reporter.] It might be said,' continued the excited patriot, that England had not caused the snow, but the people had the snow on them, and they thought that their connexion with England had reduced them to the state in which they now were.' Yet on this man, who could utter this outrageous nonsense, not

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1831.]

STATE OF IRELAND.

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before his own ignorant countrymen, but in the English House of Commons, did Mr. O'Connell rely for assistance, his only assistance, for the repeal of what he called the Algerine Act which oppressed Ireland. 'I tell you,' he exclaimed to his hearers in Dublin, 'that O'Gorman Mahon and I will alone be able to prevent its renewal.' This act was a temporary one by which the lord-lieutenant had power to prevent meetings which he feared might be dangerous. During the latter part of the year, great misery had existed in various parts of the country, as a partial failure of the potato crop had occurred in the west. The consequence was an aggravation of the usual misery; famine and disease were rife; armed bands of peasantry paraded

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' Mr. Dominick Browne, presenting petitions to the House of Commons, on the 16th of February, 1831, says, after stating that there had been a run on the banks, which had aggravated the misery of the people, The immediate cause of this distress I believe to be the failure of the potato crop on the western coast, from, I believe, Donegal to Kerry, forming a zone, I may say, of ten or twelve miles in width. In the interior of the country the people will suffer in a similar degree two months hence; for in consequence of the want that was experienced there during the last summer, the people were obliged to dig up their potatoes earlier than usual, in consequence of which the crop will be out two months before the ordinary time.'-Mirror of Parliament, 1831, p. 273. This very description is a proof of Irish want of thrift. The early digging was destruction of the crop, and itself a mischief. Mr. Browne added, that before March the people would be starving by thousands; and that it was notorious that all along the whole west and south coast there had been an entire failure of the potato crop. The story is always the same from Ireland.

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