WHAT HAS THE LAW DONE FOR IRELAND?
Lerma V.
TO THE EDITOR OF THE SPECTATOR. Dublin, 5th January 1848. Siat—The pressure of the law upon industry was begun at an early period in Irish history, and there was much variety in the modes of its exercise, as well as in the designs of those who from time to time put it into operation. Sometimes it took the form of a total prohibition of certain industrial pursuits; at others it destroyed branches of trade, even with greater certainty, by the weight of an op- pressive encouragement; and again it indirectly, but surely, broke down the na- Intel relations between labour and wealth, by enactments designed by their au- thors for very different ends. A well-known example of the first class of legal modes of persecuting industry is supplied in the acts for the suppression of woollen manufactures, and for the prohibition of the export of wool from Ireland to any country except England, which were passed by the Legislatures of both kingdoms at the close of the seventeenth century. Coincidently with this direct oppression, another, differently intended though scarcely less unwise interference with the labour-market, was begun in the legislative encouragement of the Irish linen trade; which, like every other instance of the employment of the bounty system, temporarily stimulated that branch of industry into a state of unhealthy activity, with ecarcely any other effect than to insure for it a premature and speedy decay.
It would be useless now to do more than allude to these anesuch like absurd- ities, the policy of which has long since been exploded. It must not, however, be forgotten, that their effects to a greater or lesser extent still remain in operation, and must be taken into account in forming an estimate of the actual state of Ireland. This is also true, in a very remarkable degree, with respect to the in- stance of indirect interference with industry, that I mean to adduce, which, al- though no longer in active existence, has indeed left behind it "a heritage of wo " such as few civilized nations have ever succeeded to. I refer to the act of 1793, whereby the forty-shilling franchise was extended to the Roman Catholics of Ireland, and under the indirect operation of which was bred that separate nation of helpless paupers, whose existence in the bosom of a great empire is at once the evidence and the punishment of a long course of political crime. The immediate consequence of that beginning at the wrong end was the establishment among the owners of land of a standard of value for its human occupiers totally distinct from any estimate of the profitable returns of their labour. Campion in his Historie, tells us of the "meere Irish" lord of ancient times, that "bee ;1st can bring most of his name into the field, base or other, triumpheth exceedingly. For increase of which name, they allow themselves not onely harlots, but also choise and store of harlots." The use made of those hosts by the old chieftains was 4' to robbe and prey their enemies," not to provide for their own wants by their employment in any mode of honest industry: and in a spirit very similar the landlords and middlemen of the generation just past prostituted the law of 1793, in order to raise upon their lands a plentiful following of voters,' as a stock better suited to their purposes of "preying their enemies," and procuring for themselves a shabby aggrandizement, than the ordinary agrarian produce of peaceful herds of cattle or plenteous crops of wheat and oats. The cultivation of the potato greatly favoured those designs; indeed, without the use of that cheapest material of human food, it would scarcely have been possible to maintain the numerous contingents of "free and independ- ent electors" which some of our lords and squires quartered upon their territo- ries and from time to time marshalled at the hustings. The potato produce of one acre, in average years, sufficed to preserve life in twelve human creatures: with the aid of an agent so powerful, voters could be multiplied almost without limit; and accordingly, it was a principal duty of the bailiffs upon many estates to keep careful watch over the adolescence of the electoral broods, in order that no serf should pass the period of his legal majority without being simultaneously entered on the muster-roll of "forty shillings." By the skilful manceuvering of those " free corps," many a peerage, and bishopric, and baronetcy, and commis- sionership, and collect orate, were obtained for their leaders; and the corps were multiplied and strengthened generally in an inverse ratio with the fertility of the soil to which they were bound: bog, and mountain, and sea-coast, capable of pro- ducing nothing else, freely yielded potatoes and freeholders. The profits of this course of cultivation were cut off by the legislation of 1829, but not before the population in many districts had begun to press very closely upon even the potato means of subsistence, and long after the supply of human labour had far exceeded the demands of the local markets; yet the ex-forty-shilling freeholder continued bound to the soil—fettered to his potato-garden by his poverty and his ignorance —as firmly as ever was the villein regardant by the laws and customs of the twelfth century. The increasing numbers of the population, and the fatal facility of the potato culture, then wrought on in a vicious circle ever widening, until its rupture by a providential visitation disclosed within it a starving multitude of two millions of human beings, so stunned by despair and so steeped in ignorance as to be at once unwilling and unable to make a struggle for their preservation. Thus did the political law of 1793 indirectly but certainly and extensively crush Irish industry, by stimulating the production of an inordinate supply of labour, and by binding it in a condition of helpless ignorance to the soil.
The work of the subjugation of industry which the forty-shilling enfranchise- ment of 1793 began, and the famine of 1846 developed, has been finished by the Belief Acts of the last two sessions of Parliament; and will, I greatly fear, be ren- dered permanent by the extended Poor-law, should that measure be suffered to work out as natural course unaided and unchecked by the larger and more states- manlike remedies which the chronic maladies of Ireland require. In anything I may say of these measures, however, let me not be misunderstood as casting blame npon their authors. To do so is very far from my intention. Nothing can be more clear from Lord John Russell's speeches at different times, than that he from the outset fully understood the mischievous tendency of the Relief Acts; and to me it seems plain that it was impossible for him to avoid their introduc- tion, pressed as he was by the example of his predecessor and by the clamours of the entire Irish nation. Upon the conduct of the able man to whom the adminis- tration of Irish affairs is now more immediately intrusted I cannot reflect without feelings of admiration for his talents and firmness, and of gratitude for his hu- mane attention to the wants of my unfortunate countrymen. My object is not to cavil at the acts of those statesmen, or to embarrass their policy; but, on the con- trary, to offer an humble contribution in their aid, by pointing out some of the difficulties of the carats with which they have to deal, and indicating the narrow limits that should bound the public expectations of a useful intervention of the Executive in matters to a great extent removed beyond the reach of governmental control. I can take this course, too, with the clearer conscience, as being we of the very small class of Irishmen belonging to no party, and under no obligation to any Government- Having never "ploughed the Devil's half-acre"• dunng any Viceregal reign, I can bring an unbiassed mind to the discussion of questions between the Castle and the People, whether Whig or Tory be for the
• For the benefit of Enallah readers, it may be well to explain that this phrase indi- cates the upper yard of Dublin Castle—the locality where placehuntera most do con- gregate. time in the ascendant; and, looking on from this independent position, and being fully aware of all the peculiarities of the case, I do not hesitate to say, that the efforts made during the last two years to do what no Government can do—viz, to feed the people—must be classed among the heaviest blows and greatest discon. ragements which Irish industry has ever received at the bands of the law. say, furthermore, it is my firm conviction, that notwithstanding the extraordinary in. terference, the sufferings of the people will, at the winding up, be not less than they would have been had their palliation been intrusted to their own exertions, aided only by that general outpouring of private charity which in its grandeur distinguished the Irish famine of 1846-7 from all similar vieitatiGns of our spa. cies. Were it possible to procure materials for a satisfactory comparison beteees the " relieved " districts and those isolated spots in which the public virtue of the several classes of the inhabitants enabled them to rely successfully upon their own resources, I have no doubt the truth of my latter position would be capable of de- monstration; and to demonstrate it, as a national lesson, would be a work well worthy of any labour the Government could bestow upon it. The materials Be- for such an undertaking are not, however, within my reach; and I must .leisesr:gre content myself with a few illustrations of 'the working of the Relief laws upon Irish industry. The tale of the doings of the Public Works Act is plainly told in a Treasury Minute bearing date the llth March 1847, from which I will take the liberty of extracting a few short sentences. " Employment from the farmers is, at present, offered in vain." " The matter has now become of so grave and critical a nature, that if the number of persons employed on the Relief works is not reduced in time to remove all obstacles to the usual amount of labour being employed in preparing the land for the next harvest, evils must ensue, which, while they would be pain- fully felt throughout the whole kingdom, would in Ireland produce calamities greater even than those which have been hitherto experienced." "All instruc- tions and every other regulation have been found utterly inefficacious to check the inordinate increase of persons upon the Relief works; and a large proportion of the Committees have recommended for employment upon these works, in considerable numbers, persons having no claim whatever to relief." At that time, upwards of 700,000 persons were thus pauperized, at a direct cost per month of about a mil- lion of .pounds sterling; a considerable portion of which could be considered in no other light than as a legal bounty upon idleness. Under the Public Works Act, men were paid more than the wages of the country for not working: under the Relief Act, which succeeded it, the industry of the nation was burthened with the cost of feeding a labouring class, including a million and a quarter of people, in a condition of total idleness. While these heavy blows were inflicted upon industry— while landlord, tradesman, and farmer ashamed to beg, were brought to ruin, signs of the prosperity of idleness were not wanting. During the year 1847, the Public Funds remained about two per cent higher in Dublin than in London; a brisk purchase of small parcels went on; and in the twelve months ending in Oc- tober last, 1,400,0001. worth of stock were imported into Ireland. In the course of this traffic,a stock-broker of my acquaintance one day invested 1051. in Three- and-a-quarter per Cents upon the order of a squalid half-clad countrymen, who, when walking down the steps of the Bank after having accepted the transfer, took off his hat to the broker, and in a piteous tone begged of his honour, "for the love of God to give him a shilling to help him on his way home." This man, no doubt, effected this realization from the profits of his idleness—from his "share," as he would have termed it, of the "Government money "; and, in all probability, his own farm was at the very time unsown and waste.
Nor did the system of feeding merely, without paying idleness, produce, in many instances, a touch less injurious effect. Able-bodied men sat with their families by the meal-pots of the Relief kitchens, and would not accept the seed offered to them for their land; nor mend a fence of their own fields, for the break- ing down of which they had probably been paid while getting their "share" of the profits of some "useless road' project. It may be said that the Relief Com- mittees should have staid the progress of this moral pestilence by a proper dis- crimination of the objects of relief; but I believe the baneful influence of the law was too strong for any committee to resist. "I did my best," I heard a Roman Catholic clergyman say," and so did my curate, to perform our duty to the poor, by keeping those who did not want from taking their places on the lists; and at Christmas and Easter I got my reward: when 'I read out the names of my pa- rishioners as usual from the altar, one answered, I have nothing for you this time, Sir '• and another told me to go look for my dues to them I put on the roads —that the'y could afford to pay me: and so among them I was all but brought to the Relief kitchen myself"
Let no one suppose that there is any. feature peculiarly Irish in these anecdotes. There is nothing of the sort. They simply illustrate the results that must, in obedience to the neutral constitution of man, follow upon an attempt of any go- vernment to feed any nation of people under heaven. When put thus broadly, I never heard any man, in the slightest degree imbued with knowledge, deny this truth : surely it is the bounden duty of every honest Irishman to act upon it, and to do all that in him lies to lessen rather than to increase the pressure of that ob-
ligation to do wrong which the senseless clamour, perhaps not less than the un- precedented calamity of last year, laid so heavily upon the shoulders of the Irish Executive. God knows my heart, and that it is not insensible to the misery which I have had too ample i opportunity of witnessing; but the eternal truth that n ma must live by labour is firmly fixed n my mind. The Irish people cannot sub- sist except upon their own resources; they must, like every other people, eat their daily bread in the sweat of their brow. The Government are, I believe, willing to give what aid they can towards the development of those resources: let them be encouraged to do so; but let no man ask them to do what no government can do- te feed a nation.
This letter has already grown beyond all proper bounds; but I must not Con- clude without mentioning one other trespass of the law against industry, which is at the root of a specious and very dishonest agitation now at work in Ireland: the only colour of justice which that agitation has is furnished by the provision of the law which annexes all fixed improvements to the freehold. It is impossible to deny that this provision is a trammel upon industry; and as such the inun- dation it affords to the "tenant right" and "fixity of tenure" agitations ought to be removed.
In my next communication I will endeavour to address myself to a new pee- tion-" What can the law do for Ireland ?" R. M.
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