834 abuse on the Irish gentry; for among them are many of the prime men of the earth. But such was the system pursued; and it long flourished to their great emolument -and the prodigious advance of their rental. On Poor's Laws, and their Introduction into Ireland. But a new light-and we believe a better-broke over the land; and the land-owners being, to a certain extent, men of science, saw that the time for accumulating was gone by, and that the time had come for clearing tenantry; and they set about that new business, which should have been dealt with "gently, and with a hand of healing," with a cruel alacrity-if not blind, worse-improvident of the certain suffering about to be spread far and wide;-a cruel alacrity, which in a few years reduced millions-ay, millions-for the plague of poverty runs fast as wildfire to irremediable misery. By the wretches thus driven to wander whithersoever they willed, had they who expelled them from the soil been supported all their lives, in comfort or in splendour,-at home or abroad. Here then was atrocious wickedness-if ever there was wickedness on this earth-coldblooded, scientific, and systematized ingratitude of the blackest grain -most devilish. Mr Sadler has been accused of writing intemperately of the men guilty of such atrocities; we say, his eloquence is lighted up with the flashes of indignant virtue. "Clearings!" "Drivings!" What shocking words to apply to human beings in a Christian land! Be consistent, and call them at once "cattle." "The infection of cruel selfishness," he truly says, "is to be traced to absenteeism ; and once introduced, such, alas! is our nature, whenever interest is concerned, we are predisposed to take the contagion, which has spread like a leprosy through a whole country, and fills it with suffering, and sorrow, and destitution." Who can read the following passage without feeling its justice? << [May, unemployed; that ignorance which Leaving, then, wholly out of our consideration the more apparent and constantly operating evils of this pest of Ireland; that mass of poverty which is created, that distress which is unrelieved; that idleness which is bed did I say!-from the scanty straw which spread the cold ground in many a temporary shed; in such as which, were the pampered beast of many a proud absentee put for a single night, he would probably make the air ring with his reproofs; but which were crowded with patient and grateful sufferers, with the infected, the dying, and the dead: from scenes like these, I say, there came a voice as audible as if it had been pealed forth in thunder: 'I-I, whose labour has supplied all your wants, and supported your grandeur; contenting myself with the refuse, in order to satisfy your exactions, till even that failed me, and I sank-I was sick and ye-DESERTED ME!'" Is there no restraint on such conduct? No. Statute after statute has been enacted within a few years expressly to increase the power of Irish landlords over their tenants; the Civil Bill Ejectment Act; the Joint Tenancy Act; the Absconding Tenant Act; and the Subletting Act. Such has been the conspiracy of the rich against the poor, of the powerful against the weak; these are the things of law," where are the 66 things of love?" Nothing is there to prevent-all facilities are there to enable any individual-let us use the words of Mr Scrope-" any individual residing, perhaps, at a distance, out of sight and hearing of the agonies he may inflict, from passing a sentence of death upon hundreds who have been encouraged to breed and multiply on his estate, up to the moment when he became aware, from the lessons of Political Economists, the change of general opinion, or caprice, that it was against his ad the col ary shed. не рапреля absenter uld probar his rep ded with Ters, with nd the dead say, there tical En eral op tails off the cattle of the proprietor 1833.] Look then again at the MENDICANCY 66 "Rev. M. O'SULLIVAN, Q. 6257.Do you know what becomes of the tenantry at present ejected from estates in Ireland?—I fear very many of them perish." "R. SMITH, Esq. Q. 2930.-What becomes of the dispossessed tenants? -I cannot inform the Committee what becomes of them; but in one of the cases, to which I now allude, I was informed that upwards of twenty families were turned out, and in the other case more than thirty; the consequence was, that the persons so dispossessed did not submit quietly, and, in revenge, cut the "Dr DOYLE, Q. 4364.-It would be impossible for language to convey an idea of the state of distress to which the ejected tenantry have been reduced, or of the disease and misery, and even vice, which they have propagated in the towns wherein they have settled; so that not only they who have been ejected have been rendered miserable, but they have carried with them and propagated that misery. They have increased the stock of labour; they have rendered the habitations of those who received them more crowded; they have given occasion to the dissemination of disease; they have been obliged to resort to theft, and to all manner of vice and iniquity, to procure subsistence; but what is, perhaps, the most painful of all, a vast number of them have perished from want. "Q. What is the change which takes place with the ejected tenants ?-In some cases, they wander about without a fixed residence. The young people, in some instances, endeavour to emigrate to America. If the family have a little furniture, or a cow, or a horse, they sell it, and come into the small towns, where very often they get a license to sell beer and After a short time, their whisky. little capital is expended, and they become dependent upon the charities of the town. They next give up their house, and take a room; but, at present, many of them are obliged to take, not a room, but what they call a corner in some house. It may be necessary to state to the Committee that in all the suburbs of our towns, there are cabins, having no loft, of suppose twenty feet long by twelve feet wide, with a partition in the centre. I have not, myself, seen so many as seven families in one of these cabins; but I have been assured by the officiating clergyman of the town, that there are many instances of it. Then their beds are merely a little straw, strewed at night upon the floor, and by day wrapped up in, or covered by, a quilt or blanket. They are obliged to do it up in that manner by day, in order to have some vacant space. In these abodes of misery, disease is often produced by extreme want. Disease wastes the people; for they have little food, and no comforts to restore them. They die in a little time. I have known a lane, with a small district adjoining, in the town in which I live, to have been peopled by thirty or forty families who came from the country; and I think that, in the course of twelve months, there were not ten families of the thirty surviving the bulk of them had died." -Q. 4383, 4384. expressed, that the surplus and redundant population of Ireland may be absorbed, as that of Scotland has been during the last century, without poor's laws, by the mere operation of a steady government, and growing demand for labour. A very slight consideration of the difference between the two countries must be sufficient to shew that this expectation is utterly chimerical. In the first place, there is no reason to believe that the surplus population of Scotland, at the close of the 17th century, was by any means so considerable as that of Ireland is at this time. Fletcher of Saltoun, indeed, estimates the Scotch sturdy beggars at 200,000; but there is every reason to believe that his numbers are grossly overrated. It is difficult to see how, in a country situated as Scotland then was, imperfectly cultivated, and without manufactures, so great a body of unproductive labourers could have been maintained. Certain it is, that on no occasion did Scotland, even when hardest pressed, ever assemble 50,000 men in the field; a fact which seems inconsistent with so great an accumulation of unemployed poor as is here supposed. "The children begotten in this state of society become of an inferior caste; the whole character of the people becomes gradually worse and worse; they diminish in stature, they are enervated in mind; the population is gradually deteriorated, till, at length, you have the inhabitants of one of the finest countries in the world reduced to a state of effeminacy which makes them little better than the Lazzaroni of Naples, or the Hindoos on the coast of Malabar. "We have, in short, a disorganized population becoming by their poverty more and more immoral, and less and less capable of providing for themselves: and we have, besides that, the frightful, and awful, and terrific exhibition of human life wasted with a rapidity, and to a degree, such as is not witnessed in any civilized country upon the face of the earth." -Q. 4528, 4529. 66 Did laws for the poor ever work such evils as those which have all been created by laws for the rich? Yet who among the Economists has lifted up his voice against this 'sweaty sway" of oppression? Not one. They all approve of it to a man. And as if those tides of human beings were all but so much ditch-water, they talk coolly of their being all in good time "gradually absorbed!" Ay--they are absorbed -and faster far than many imagine -by the suction of the soil-into thousands on thousands of small pits, vulgarly called graves. An opinion has been frequently In the next place, it is a mistake to suppose that during the last century Scotland has had no poor's rates. On the contrary, for two hundred and fifty years the legal rights of the Scottish poor to maintenance have been nearly as extensive as in England; and at this moment, there is hardly a town of any magnitude in North Britain, where poor's rates have not long been established. By the acts 1579 and 1661, and the Royal Proclamation in 1693, the rights of all the destitute poor to be relieved has been distinctly recognised. The poor's rates of Scotland, indeed, are light in comparison of those of England; but that is merely because their administration being intrusted to the heritors, who pay the assessment, has been more vigilantly looked after than in England, where it was imposed by the church-wardens, and because Scotland is only now beginning to arrive at that complicated state of society where the aid of legal assessment to relieve the poor is indispensable. Wherever manufactures or great towns prevail, poor's rates in this country have been long established. In the third place, Scotland never was overwhelmed with a mass of indigence at all approaching to the mendicity which now exists in Ireland; for this plain reason, that she had not till recent times the means of boundless subsistence of the humblest kind to the labouring classes. For the last half century, the contemporary writers have been full of the grievous evils arising from Irish immigration; but the writers a hundred and thirty years ago contain no similar complaint of the redundance or overflowing habits of the Scotch poor, a clear proof that no great accumulation of indigence was experienced; for wherever it has, the Scotch have never been found backward in emigrating to the other more favoured regions of the globe. From the earliest times, indeed, the annals of other states have been filled with observations on the Scotch settlers; but the complaint always was, that they were too thriving, not that they were a nuisance from their beggarly habits; a certain indication that it was the better and educated classes, not the more indigent poor, who migrated to foreign countries. In the fourth place, the great and crying evils which have long existed in Ireland, and operated as a perpetual stimulus upon the production of an indigent and wretched population, never were known in Scotland. The enormous grievances of absentee proprietors, middlemen, a rebellious Catholic priesthood, and political institutions for which the people were totally unfitted, never existed in this country. Property has been here at all times comparatively protected, industry safe, artificial wants and habits of frugality universal. Never was it found necessary from predial and political disturbances like those of Ireland to suspend the constitution, and establish martial law, as has there become indispensable. It is needless here to enquire to what causes this difference in the history and present habits of the two countries has arisen; suffice it to say that it exists, and that its existence must render altogether chimerical the expectation that the Irish poor can be absorbed by the same means, and in the same manner, as the Scotch have been. If Scotland were to be cursed for ten years with an insurgent peasantry, a Catholic priesthood, an absentee body of proprietors, and a grinding race of middlemen, all the boasted frugality and caution of the Scotch character would disappear, and in its stead, we should soon have the recklessness, redundant increase, and misery of Ireland. In a word, Ireland has arrived at that stage in political disease where all ordinary remedies fail, and the powers of evil are infinitely too strong for the gradual and insulated efforts of individuals. Nothing but the strong hand of Government, both to repress evil, and do good, can now avail the state; and the disor ganization and insecurity of the country is such, that without public works, paid, and relief generally administered by Government, all other remedies will be found to be utterly ineffectual. But the parallel runs straighter between the state of Ireland now, and that of England in the reign of Elizabeth. This has been clearly shown by Nimmo, and Sadler, and Scrope, and Doyle, and many others, from the best authorities and the most certain documents; and as the misery is the same-so must be the remedy -Provision for the Poor by law. The misery was the same-as may be seen in Strype. He speaks of the number of poor that died on the streets of London of cold, and lay sick at the doors, perishing of hunger. And whence came they there? The destruction of tillage, and demolition of cottages, sent them thither from the country where they had neither "work nor harbour.""It is a common custom with covetous landlords, to let their housing to decay, that the farmer shall be fain, for a small regard, or none at all, to give up his lease; that they, taking the grounds into their own hands, may turn all to pasture. So now, old fathers, poor widows, and young children, lie begging in the miry streets." And hear Bernard Gilpin preaching before the King of the "great oppression of landlords towards their tenants, by turning them out of all, to their utter undoing." "Now the robberies, extortions, and open oppressions of covetous cormorants have no end or limits, on banks to keep in their vileness. AS for turning poor men out of their holds, they take it for no offence, but say the land is their own; and so they turn them out of their sheds like mice. Thousands in England, through such, beg now from door to door, who had kept honest homes.""These," he added, "had such quick smelling hounds, that they could live at London and turn men out of their farms and tenements, a hundred, some two hundred miles off." Was this wretchedness let alone to be "gradually absorbed?" No. During half a century acts were passed by the legislature for its relief and cure-but all were ineffectual-till, by the 43d of Elizabeth, all parishes were compelled to relieve their impotent inhabitant, and send to work the unemployed. Then began the natural "absorption;" then came the "golden days of good Queen Bess;" for from her, and the luminaries that shone round her throne, there was an efflux of that noble spirit which has never since altogether left the character and the councils of the rulers of England. But the misery is not only of the same kind now in Ireland that then was in England, but it is far greater; and unless it be speedily remedied, that noble island is lost not only to us, but to itself; and whether there be a "Repeal" or no Repeal, if left much longer, Ireland, without a provision for her starving millions of some sort, (and what other sort is in the sight of any seër but a poor's law?) must be drenched in all the horrors of rebellion and civil war. ANTISM-is under a cloud of displeasure with our rulers; and it would seem as if they had the folly, and the madness to believe, or the weakness and wickedness to act as if they believed, while they knew better, that the involution of crime with misery, at which, in that distracted country, we now gaze aghast, was caused in a great measure by a vestry-cess of some L.30,000 ayear! while the fount, from which almost all the national calamities have in bloody torrents been derived, stands open, and might, if not dried, be sealed up by the law, and the whole land, if not tranquillized, lightened by one enactment. "That this," says Mr Scrope, "is the true source of the horrible outrages which are now in almost daily perpetration in Ireland, is proved beyond a possibility of doubt by an examination of the nature of these offences. Against whom are these sanguinary attacks and threats of attack for the most part levelled? The tithe-owners, or their proctors? The magistrates and gentry? Excisemen, or travellers? No! But against the 6 land-takers' as they are called,the incoming tenants of farms, whose former occupiers have been turned out to make room for them! Against those who, in the desperate competition for the occupation of land, as the only means of existence, outbid the herd of houseless wretches, and excite in them the same rabid jealousy as rouses a pack of gaunt and starving wolves against the one who may get possession of the morsel for which all are contending." Here is to be found the origin of the Whiteboy-system--with its Peepof-day-boys, Thrashers, Whiteboys, Raters, Carders, Shanavests, Caraighats Rockites, Blackhens, Riscavallas, Ribbon-men, Lady-clares, and Terry-alts. What care they for being hanged? Revenge is sweet-if death be bitter. So felt Redmond the murderer on the scaffold. “I was resolved on vengeance, and now that I have taken it, I am content to die." And there have been, and will be, many Redmonds. What though he Died? For his old father had not been ill-used by his landlord -and was himself an unreasonable ruffian. The son was a murderer, it may be said, almost by profession and on principle; and had assisted "Agitation!" There has indeed been enough of it. Recommended to all ranks in Ireland by the Marquis of Anglesea, it has been preached by O'Connell even beyond the desire of the Lord-lieutenant-and we see the fruits. Mr Stanley, too, talked of "extinguishing tithes;" and in Parliament we almost every day hear denunciations of wrath against all Church Establishments, and proposals for making religion a free trade. Down with the Protestant Church in Ireland, is no longer an Irish-it is also an English howl -and who remembers now the Reformation? All that is best and holiest in Ireland and that has been not only her safeguard and her succour, but her salvation-PROTEST |