YATES ON IRELAND. LETTER IV.
TO THE EDITOR OF THE srEcTA.7oR.
Carlow, Oeth October lgag,
SIR—I understand that my letters, which were intended as an answer to your censure of me as an Irish Member, have drawn down the virulent abuse of the Tory journals. I have not an opportunity of seeing their comments ; but as the discussion of the real state of Ireland at the present crisis must serve the cause of humanity and good government, I mart you will make room for these observations. And I hope they will be honoured by the further notice of the Tory press; whereby their fallacy may be exposed, if they are not founded in truth and justice—if they are, they may tend to awaken in the hearts of the English and Scotch, whether Tory or Radical, that feeling for Irish sufferings and wrongs which, I am sorry to say, does not now exist. It is very easy to condemn the people of Ireland as lying and revengeful, as incurably abandoned to rags and roguery, to wildness and whisky, and as the worthy companions of pigs and Popery. They have at last taught the British nation that they can no longer be hunted like wild beasts, as SPENCER the poet informs us they were in his time, for the sport of the English settlers of the Reformation ; nor exterminated, as was attempted by the great soldiers of the Commonwealth ; nor, as is now attempted, compelled by force, fraud. nr inti- midation, to quit the altars of those churches which are daily erected by the pence of the pour, whose priests are taken from the people, and live with them, and partake of their weal and their wo on the footing of equality as regards all worldly enjoyments.
The county of Tipperary, from whence I wrote my last letter, is not the most remarkable in Ireland for the ejection and clearing away of tenants by un- feeling landowners. It contains some of the best landlords in the United King- dom : such as Lord LISMORE, who has always found a comfortable settlement for such tenants as he wished to remove from farms where they had subdivided the lands in successive generations into extremely small holdings ; Baron PL:N.' NEFATHER, who has converted a large tract of poor country and miserable oc- cupiers into as fertile farms and fine and happy a tenantry as are to be found in Great Britain ; Lady OSBORNE, who is not content with making her nume- rous tenants comfortable and happy, but has established four schools amongst them. To these I may add, Lord DUNALLY, Lord STANLEY, Mr. SHELL, Mr. 0. CAVE, Mr. FRENCH, and many other resident landlords, who are looked up to by the poor people around them as blessings to their country. Such persons, therefore, may go to bed in this country of " terrible intimida- tion" without bars or even locks on their doors; for the Irish peasantry "do not break through and steal," although they violently assault those who violate the first principles of justice and humanity. It is not the old gentry who are in general given to wholesale clearances and ejectments: the principal performers in this way are the new men, sprung from agents, bailiffs, drivers, and middlemen, who multiplied tenants, not only in order to squeeze as much money as they could out of the land, but in order to increase the number of forty•shilling freeholders. who contributed so much to swell their power and influence previous to 1829. At that period, the counties of Ireland contained ten times as many voters as they do now under the Reform Act of 1832 ; and although the Catholics at that time sub- mitted quietly to the great political rubbery then committed, for the securing of the Protestant faith, they are now openly apprized by some of the gentry to whom I allude, that if they do nct support the Protestant and Orange ascea- dancy, they shall hold no lands under them. Acting on this principle in the county of Carlow, they have carried on a system of what they intended as conversion, but which has tended rather to extermination, by which above 3000 individuals leave been turned on the lanes to beggary, in the last three or four years. I mentioned in my last letter. how I had seen some of these fellow creatures scooping out shelters in the heath of the mountain ; but the greater part resorted to the outskirts of the small towns, where they sought the corner of a cabin and a potato (all they ever had) from those who are nearly as desti- tute as themselves, and where they now add a few chops more to that vast mass of misery and destitution which signalizes Ireland as the stigma and disgrace of Christian civilization, when under the exclusive guardianship of an all-powerful Establishment.
In the same spirit of civil and religious persecution, the party to whom I allude have generally made their tenants pay up the half. year's at rear of rent which was almost universally allowed and considered by long usage as the tenant's privilege or right : many serve them with ejectment, if the tent is not paid to the day : and some of those who are the most noted fur their religious observances and evangelical professions, have carried their resolution so far as to introduce colonies of Protestants to supplant their ejected tenants of the Catho- lic persuasion. The result of this experiment ought to open the eyes of these Protestant zealots; for I am credibly informed that these Protestant tenants do not and cannot pay the rents, because they will not consent to live on mere potatoes and without bed or board, as those did whom they have supplanted. The same system, I believe, has been and still is acted upon to a great extent in some of the adjoining counties; and the wonder is, not that the people detest those who perpetrate these atrocities, but that they have not exercised upon their persons and properties, and on the tools and instruments whom they employed, that dreadful vengeance which has been aptly termed by Becosr a "wild species of justice," and which has established itself in some other parts of the country where justice has either gone to sleep or constitutional law never been established.
I am anxious, Sir, not to exaggerate in these statements ; and should be most happy I could be convinced they were not substantially true. It appears to me, that if the system which they expose, and the policy which they but feebly illustrate, be not checked by the exertions of the Government, by the operation of the Poor-law, and by the indignation of insulted humanity, a Commission ought to be appointed by authority to investigate the causes, the intent, and the effects of this monstrous evil, with the view of providing a suitable remedy. But I trust the Poor-law just enacted will operate strongly to check its further progress, and that Ministers will, in the next session of Parliament, introduce such a plan of employment on public works of proved and permanent utility as will afford a considerable relief. In the mean time, the Executive has done something, by the remonstrance of Mr. Daum sr o Nn against the demands of the Tipperary Justices for an extraordinary fierce in that county ; that lesson upon the relative duties of landlords and tenants which Lords DoNoucirmonE and GLENuaLL were afraid to make public, the allegations contained in which they have not ventured to rebut, and the whole of which ought to be stamped in living characters on the hearts of every Conservative, whether resident or absentee. Mr. Beees, the Assistant Agricultural Commissioner on the Poor- law Inquiry, has published, after two years' travelling over all parts of the country, two volumes filled with interesting details as to the state of Ireland and the condition of the peasantry : it is aptly entitled, " The Beauties and Miseries of Ireland ;" and though he is a Quaker, he has thus summed up his observa- tions upon the cruel manner in which great numbers have been turned adrift- " nut because they were in arrear of rent—not because they had transgressed the rules of their leases, but simply because they happened to profess a religious or political creed at variance with that of a capricious laudlord. It cannot surely be denied, that, systematically and wickedly oppressed as the Irish labourers are, to rise in self.defence, hoverer frightful may be the results of such resistance, is at least a NATURAL MODE DE PROCEDURE." Natural as it is, the people of the County Carlow have hitherto abstained from it; and why ?—because, as I stated in my last, the calumniated priests have restrained them from a violent resistance of oppression.
I am, Sir, yours respectfully, J. A. YATES. [Mr. YATES, throughout the whole series of his Letters, now happily brought to a close, has cautiously abstained from grappling with the real points on whittle he differs with the Spectator. He has not attempted to prove that the " Irish policy " will keep out the Tories, or that the Tories in power could " revive slavery " in Ireland.—ED.]
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