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Letter XII
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From all this you may begin to appreciate the feeling that then prevailed in the two islands - in Ireland a vague and dim sense that they were somehow robbed - in England a still more vague and blundering idea that an impudent beggar was demanding their money with a scowl in his eye and a threat upon his tongue.
In truth, only a few either in England or in Ireland, fully understood the bloody game on the board. The two cardinal principles of the British policy in this business seem to have been these two:- first, strict adherence to the principles of “political economy” - and, second, making the whole administration of the Famine a government concern. “Political Economy,” became about the time of the Repeal of the Corn Laws a favourite study, or rather, indeed, the creed and gospel of England. Women and young boys were learned in its saving doctrines; one of the most fundamental of which was - “there must be no interference with the natural course of trade.” It was seen that this maxim would ensure the transfer of the Irish wheat and beef to England; for that was what they called the natural course of trade. Moreover this maxim would forbid the government, or relief committees, to sell provisions in Ireland any lower than the market price, - for this is an interference with the enterprize of private speculators; it would forbid the employment of government ships, - for this troubles individual ship owners; and further, and lastly, it was found, (this invaluable maxim) to require that the public works to be executed by labourers employed with borrowed public money, should be unproductive works; that is works which would create no fund to pay their own expenses. There were many railroad companies at that time in Ireland that had got their charters; their roads have been made since; but it was in vain they asked then for government advances, which they could have well secured and soon paid off; the thing could not be done. Lending money to Irish railroad companies would be a discrimination against English companies - flat interference with private enterprize.
The other great leading idea completed Sir Robert’s policy. It was to make the Famine a strictly government concern. The Famine was to be administered strictly through officers of the government, from High Comissioners, down to policemen. Even the Irish General Relief Committee, and other local Committees of charitable persons who were exerting themselves to raise funds to give employment, were either induced to act in subordination to a Government Relief Committee which sat in Dublin Castle - or else were deterred from importation of food by the announcement in Parliament that the Government had given orders somewhere for the purchase of foreign corn. For instance, the Mayor of Cork and some principal inhabitants of that city, hurried to Dublin and waited on the Lord Lieutenant, representing that the local committee had applied for some portion of the parliamentary loans, but were refused assistance on some points of official form - that the people of that county were already famishing, and both food and labour were urgently needed. Lord Heytesbury simply recommended that they should communicate at once with the Government Relief Committee - as for the rest, that they should consult the Board of Works. Thus every possible delay and official difficulty was interposed against the efforts of local bodies - Government was to do all. These things, together with the new measure for an increase in the police force (who were their main administrative agents throughout the country) led many persons to the conclusion that the enemy had resolved to avail themselves of the famine in order to increase governmental supervision and espionage; so that every man, woman, and child in Ireland, with all their goings out and earnings in, might be thoroughly known and registered - that when the mass of the people began to starve, their sole resource might be the police-barracks - that Government might be all in all; omnipotent to give food or to withhold it, to relieve or to starve, according to their own ideas of policy and of good behaviour in the people.
It is needless to point out that Government patronage also was much extended by this system; and by the middle of the next year, 1847, there were 10,000 men salaried out of the Parliamentary loans and grants for relief of the poor - as Commissioners, Inspectors, Clerks, and so forth; and some of them with salaries equal to an American Secretary of State. So many of the middle classes had been dragged down almost to insolvency by the ruin of the country, that they began to be eager for the smaller places as Clerks and Inspectors; for those 10,000 offices, then, it was estimated there were 100,000 applicants and canvassers - so much clear gain from “Repeal.”
The Repeal Association continued its regular meetings, and never ceased to represent that the one remedies for Irish Famine were Tenant-Right - the stoppage of export - and Repeal of the Union; - and as those were really the true and only remedies, it was clear they were the only expedient which an English parliament would not try. The Repeal members gained a kind of parliamentary victory, however, this spring:- they caused the defeat of the Coercion Bill with the aid of the Whigs. Sir Robert Peel had very cunningly, as he thought, made this Bill precede the Corn Law Repeal Bill; and as the English Public was all now most eager for the cheapening of bread, he believed that all parties would make haste to pass his favourite measure first. The Irish members went to London, and knowing they could not influence legislation otherwise, organized a sort of mere mechanical resistance against the Coercion Bill: that is, they opposed first reading, second reading, third reading, opposed its being referred to Committee, moved endless amendments, made endless speeches, and insisted upon dividing the house on every clause. In vain it was represented to them that this was only delaying the Corn Law Repeal, which would “cheapen bread.” O’Brien replied that it would only cheapen bread to Englishmen, and enable them to devour more and more of the Irish bread and give less for it. In vain ministers told them they were stopping public business - they answered that English business was no business of theirs. In vain their courtesy was invoked. They could not afford to be courteous in such a case, and their sole errand in London was to resist an atrocious and torturing tyranny threatened against their poor countrymen.
Just before this famous debate there had been very extensive clearing of tenantry in Connaught; and, in particular one case, in which a Mrs. Gerrard had, with the aid of the troops and police, destroyed a whole village, and thrown out two hundred and seventy persons on the high road. The Nation thus improved the circumstance with reference to the “Coercion Bill”:
Some Irish Member, for instance, may point to the two hundred and seventy persons thrown out of house and home the other day in Galway, and in due form of law (for it was all perfectly legal) turned adrift in their desperation upon the wide world - and may ask the Minister, if any of these two hundred and seventy commit a robbery on the highway - if any of them murder the bailiff who (in exercise of his duty) flung out their naked children to perish in the winter’s sleet - if any of them, maddened by wolfish famine, break into a dwelling-house, and forcibly take food to keep body and soul together, or arms for vengeance - what will you do? How will you treat that district? Will you indeed proclaim it? Will you mulct the house-holders (not yet ejected) in a heavy fine to compound for the crimes of those miserable outcasts, to afford food and shelter to whom they wrong their own children in this hard season? Besides sharing with those wretches his last potato, is the poor comer to he told that he is to pay for policemen to watch them day and night - that he is to make atonement in money (though his spade and poor bedding should be auctioned to make it up) for any outrage that may be done in the neighbourhood? - but that these GERRARDS are not to pay one farthing for all this - for, perhaps, their property is encumbered, and, it may be, they find it hard enough to pay their interest, and keep up such establishments in town and country as befit their rank? And will you, indeed, issue your commands that those houseless and famishing two hundred and seventy - after their roof trees were torn down, and the ploughshare run through the foundations of their miserable hovels - are to be at home from sunset to sunrise? - that if found straying, the gaols and the penal colonies are ready for their reception?
It was precisely with a view to meet such cases Bill that the Coercion had been devised; and, were not our representatives well justified, sir, in resisting such a measure courteously or otherwise? The English Whigs, and, at length, the indignant Protectionists, too, joined the Repeaters in this resistance - not to spare Ireland, but to defeat Sir Robert Peel, and get into his place. And they did defeat Sir Robert Peel, and get into his place. Whereupon, it was not long before Lord John
Russell and his Whigs Coercion Bill devised a new and more
murderous Ceorcion for Ireland them
selves.
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Letter XIII
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In the meantime the Famine and the Fever raged: many landlords regained possession without so much as an ejectment, because the tenants died of hunger; and the county coroners, before the end of this year, were beginning to strike work - they were so often called to sit upon famine-slain corpses. The verdict, - “Death by Starvation,” became so familiar that the county newspapers sometimes omitted to record it; and travellers were often appalled when they came upon some lonely village by the western coast, with the people all skeletons upon their own heaths. Irish landlords, sir, are not all monsters, of cruelty. Thousands of them, indeed, kept far away from the scene, collected their rents through agents and bailiffs, and spent them in England or in Paris. But the resident landlords and their families did, in many cases, devote themselves to the task of saving their poor people alive. Many remitted their rents, or half their rents; and ladies kept their servants busy and their kitchens smoking with continual preparation of food for the poor. Local Committees soon purchased all the corn in the government depots (at market price, however,) and distributed it gratuitously. Clergymen, both Protestant and Catholic, I am glad to testify, generally did their duty; except those absentee clergymen, bishops and wealthy rectors, who usually reside in England, their services being not needed in the places from whence they draw their wealth. But many a poor rector and his curate shared their crust with their suffering neighbours; and priests, after going round all day administering extreme unction to whole villages at once, all dying of mere starvation, often themselves went supperless to bed.
The Western and South-Western coast, from Derry round to Cork, is surely the most varied and beautiful coast in all the world. Great harbours, backed by noble ranges of mountains, open all around the Western coast of Munster, till you come to the Shannon mouth; there is a fine navigable river opening up the most bounteously fertile land in the island - Limerick and Tipperary. North of the Shannon, huge cliff-walls, rising eight hundred feet sheer out of deep water, broken by chasms and pierced by sea-caves, “with high embowed roof,” like the choir of a cathedral; then the Bay of Galway, once thronged with Spanish and Irish ships, carrying wine and gold, - but now, it appears, dangerous and fatal (statio male fida carinis) to steam-ships, bound for America. Westward from Galway, and round the circuit of Connaught, the scene becomes savage and wild, with innumerable rocky islands, - deep inlets, narrow and gloomy, like Norwegian fiords, - and grim steep mountains hanging over them. But the most desolate region of all is found in Ulster. As you travel northwards from Killybegs, by way of Ardara, Glenties and Dunglow, you pass for nearly forty miles through the dreariest region of moor and mountain that is to be found within the five ends of Ireland. Wide tracts of quaking bog, interspersed with countless dismal lakes, intersected by rocky ridges, and traversed by mountain rivers roaring in tawny foam to the sea. The two or three wretched villages that lie along this road give to a traveller an impression of even more dreariness and desolation than the intervening country: a cluster of ragged-looking, windowless hovels, whose inhabitants seem to have gathered themselves from, the wastes, and huddled together to keep some life and heat in them; a few patches of oats and potatoes surrounding the huts, and looking such a miserable provision for human beings against hunger in the midst of those great brown moors; hardly a slated building to be seen, save one or two constabulary and revenue police-stations, and a court-house in Glenties, for dealing out “justice,” and close by that a certain new building - the grandest by far that those Rosses people ever saw - rearing its accursed gables and pinnacles of Tudor barbarism, and staring boldly with its detectible [sic] mullioned windows, as if to mock those wretches who still cling to liberty and mud cabins - seeming to them, in their perennial half-starvation, like a Temple arected to the Fates, or like the fortress of Giant Despair, whereinto he draws them one by one and devours them there - the Poorhouse.
This is the estate of a certain Marquis of Conyngham: and for him those desolate people, while health lasts, and they may still keep body and soul together, outside the Poorhouse, are for ever employed in making up a subsidy, called rent; which that district sends half-yearly to be consumed in England, or wherever else it may please their noble proprietor to devour their hearts’ blood and the marrow of their bones.
So it is; and so it was, even before Famine, with almost the whole of that coast region. The landlords were all absentees. All grain and cattle the people could raise were never enough to make up the rent: it all went away, of course; it was all consumed in England; but Ireland received in exchange stamped rent receipts. Of worse there were no improvements, - because they would have only raised the rent; and in ordinary years many thousands of those poor people lived mainly on seaweed some months of every year. But this was trespass and robbery; for the sea-weed belonged to the lord of the manor, who frequently made examples of the depredators. [See note, infra.]
Can you picture in your mind a race of white men reduced to this condition? White men! Yes of the highest and purest blood and breed of men. The very region I have described to you was once - before British civilization overtook us - the abode of the strongest and richest clans in Ireland [....]
After a struggle of six or seven centuries, after many bloody wars and sweeping confiscations, English “civilization” prevailed, - and had brought the clans to the condition I have related. The ultimate idea of English civilization being that “the sole nexus between man and man is cash payment,” - and the “Union” having finally determined the worse and current of that payment, out of Ireland into England, - it had come to pass that the chiefs were exchanged for landlords, and the clansman had sunk into able-bodied paupers.
The details of this frightful famine, as it ravaged those Western districts, I need not narrate; - they are sufficiently known. It is enough to say that in this year, I846, not less than 300,000 perished, either of mere hunger, or of typhus-fever caused by hunger. But as it has ever since been a main object of the British Government to conceal the amount of the carnage (which, indeed, they ought to do if they can) I find that the Census Commissioners, in their report for 1851, admit only 2,041 “registered” deaths by famine alone.
A Whig Ministry, however, was now in power; and the people were led in expect great efforts on the part of government to stay the progress of ruin. And I am bound to say that O’Connell used all
his power to make the people depend upon that expectation. In August it became manifest that the potato-crop of ’46 was also a total failure; but the products otherwise were most abundant, - much more than sufficient to feed all the people. Again, therefore, it became the urgent business of British policy to promise large “relief,” so as to ensure that the splendid harvest should be allowed peacefully to be shipped to England as before; and the first important measure of the Whigs was to propose a renewal of the Disarming Act, and a further increase in the Police-force. Apparently the outcry raised against this had the effect of shaming ministers, for they suddenly dropped the Bill for this time. But the Famine could not be correctly administered without a Coercion Bill of some sort; so the next year they devised a machinery of this kind, the most stringent and destructive that had yet been prescribed for Ireland. In the meantime, for “Relief” of the Famine, - they brought forward their famous Labour-Rate Act.
This was, in few words, an additional poor rate payable by the same persons liable to the other poor rates; the proceeds to be applied to the execution of such public works as the government might choose; the control and superintendance to be entrusted to government officers. Money was to be in the meantime advanced from the Treasury, in order to set the people immediately to work; and that advanced was to be repaid in ten years by means of the increased rate. There was to be an appearance of local control, inasmuch as barony sessions of landlords and justices were to have power to meet, (under the Lord Lieutenant’s order,) and suggest any works they might think needful, provided they were strictly unproductive works; but the control of all was to be in the government alone.
Now the class which suffered most from the potato-blight consisted of those small farmers who were barely able, in ordinary years to keep themselves above starvation after paying their rents. These people, by the Labour-rate Act, had an additional tax laid on them; and not being able to pay it, could but quit their holdings, sink to the class of able-bodied paupers, and enrol themselves in a gang of government navvies, - thus throwing themselves for support upon those who still strove to maintain themselves by their own labour on their own land.
In addition to the proceeds of the new Poor Rate, Parliament appropriated a further sum of £50,000 to be applied in giving work in some absolutely pauper districts, where there was no hope of ever raising rates to repay it. £50,000 was just the sum
which was that
same year voted out of the English and Irish revenue, to improve the buildings of the British Museum.
So there was to be more Poor Law, more Commissioners, (this time under the title of Additional Public Works Commissioners); innumerable officials in the Public Works, Commissariat and constabulary departments; and no end of stationary [sic] and red tape; - all to be paid out of the rates. On the whole, it was hoped that provision was made for stopping the “Irish howl” this one season.
You have already been told that Irishmen of all classes had almost universally condemned the Poor Law at first; so, as they did not like Poor Law, they were to have more Poor Law. Society in Ireland was on be re-constructed on the basis of Poor Rates, and a broad foundation of able-bodied pauperism. It did not occur to the English - and it never will occur to them - that the way to stop Irish destitution is to Repeal the Union, so that Irishmen might make their own laws, use their own resources, regulate their own industry. It was in vain, however, that anybody in Ireland remonstrated. In vain that such journals as were of the popular party condemned the whole scheme.
[...]
It may seem astonishing that the gentry of Ireland did not rouse themselves at this frightful prospect, and universally demand the Repeal of the Union. They were the same class, sons of the same men, who had in 1782 wrested the independence of Ireland from an English Government, and enjoyed the fruits of that independence in honour, wealth, and prosperity, for eighteen years! Why not now? It is because, in 1782 the Catholics of Ireland counted as nothing, now they are numerous, enfranchised, exasperated; and the Irish landlords due not trust themselves in Ireland without British support. They looked on tamely, therefore, and saw this deliberate scheme for the pauperization of a nation. They knew it would injure themselves; but they took the injury, took insult along with it, and submitted to be reproached for begging alms, when they demanded restitution of a part of their own means.
Over the whole island, for the next few months, was a scene of confused and wasteful attempts at relief. bewildered barony sessions striving to understand the voluminous directions, schedules and specifications, under which alone they could vote their own money to relieve the poor at their own doors; but generally making mistakes, for the unassisted human faculties never could comprehend those ten thousand books and fourteen tons of paper; insolent commissioners and inspectors, and clerks snubbing them at every turn, and ordering them to study the documents; efforts on the part of the proprietors to expend some of the rates at least on useful works, reclaiming land or the like, which efforts were always met with flat refusal and a lecture on political economy; (for political economy, it seems, declared that the works must be strictly useless, - as cutting down a road where there was no hill, or building a bridge where there was no water, - until many good roads became impassable on account of pits and trenches;) plenty of jobbing and peculation all this while; and the labourers, having the example of a great public fraud before their eyes, themselves defrauding their fraudulent employers, - quitting agricultural pursuits and crowding to the public works, where they pretended to be cutting down hills and filling up hollows, and with tongue in cheek received half wages for doing nothing. So the labour was wasted; the labourers were demoralized; and the next year’s famine was ensured.
Now began to be a rage for extermination beyond any former time; and many thousands of the peasants who could still scrape up the means fled to the sea, as if pursued by wild beasts, and betook themselves to America. The British army also received numberless recruits this year (for it is sound English policy to keep our people so low that a shilling a day would tempt them to fight for the Devil, not to say the Queen), and insane mothers
began to eat their young children who died of
famine before them, - and still fleets of ships were sailing with every tide, carrying Irish cattle and corn to England. There was also a large importation of grain from England into Ireland, especially of Indian corn; and the speculators and shipowners had a good time. Much of the grain thus brought to Ireland had been previously exported from Ireland, and came back laden with merchants’ profits and double freights and insurance to the helpless people who had sowed and reaped it. This is what Commerce and Free Trade did for Ireland those days.
Two facts, however, are essential to be borne in mind - first, that the nett result of all importation, exportation, and re-importation (though many a ship-load was carried four times across the Irish Sea, as prices “invited” it,) was, that England finally received the harvests to the same amount as before; and second, that she gave Ireland - under free-trade in corn - less for it than ever. In other words, it took more of the Irish produce to buy a piece of cloth from a Leeds manufacturer, or
buy a rent-receipt from an absentee proprietor.
They could do without much of the cloth, but as for the rent-receipts, these they must absolutely buy; for the bailiff, with his police, was usually at the door, even before the fields were reaped; and he, and the Poor-rate Collector, and the Additional Poor-rate Collector, and the County-cess Collector, and the Processor-server with Decrees, were all to be paid out of the first proceeds. If it took the farmer’s whole crop to pay them, which it usually did, he had, at least, a pocketful of receipts, and might see lying in the next harbour the very ship that was to carry his entire harvest and his last cow to England.
What wonder that so many farmers gave up the effort in despair, and sunk to paupers? Many Celts were cleared off this year, and the campaign was, so far, successful.
Letter XIV
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It may seem astonishing that the gentry of Ireland did not rouse themselves at this frightful prospect, and universally demand the Repeal of the Union. They were the same class, sons of the same men, who had in 1782 wrested the independence of Ireland from an English Government, and enjoyed the fruits of that independence in honour, wealth, and prosperity, for eighteen years! Why not now? It is because, in 1782 the Catholics of Ireland counted as nothing, now they are numerous, enfranchised, exasperated; and the Irish landlords due not trust themselves in Ireland without British support. They looked on tamely, therefore, and saw this deliberate scheme for the pauperization of a nation. They knew it would injure themselves; but they took the injury, took insult along with it, and submitted to be reproached for begging alms, when they demanded restitution of a part of their own means. And the people perished more rapidly than ever. The Famine of ’47 was far more terrible and universal than that of the previous year. The Whig Government, bound by political economy, absolutely refused to interfere with market-prices, and the merchants and speculators were, never so busy on both sides of the Channel. In this year it was that the Irish Famine began to be a world’s wonder; and men’s hearts were moved in the uttermost ends of the earth by the recital of its horrors. The London Illustrated News began to be adorned with engravings of tottering, windowless hovels in Skibbereen and elsewhere, with naked wretches dying on a truss of wet straw; and the constant language of English ministers and members in Parliament created the impression abroad that Ireland was in need of alms, and nothing but alms: whereas Irishmen themselves uniformly protested that what they required was Repeal of the Union, so that the English might cease to devour their substance.
It may be interesting to you to knew how the English people were faring all this while; and whether “that portion of the United kingdom,” as it is called, suffered much by the Famine in Ireland and in Europe. Authentic data upon this point are to be found in the financial statement of Sir Charles Wood, Chancellor of the Exchequer, in February, 1847. In that statement he declares - and he tells it, he says, with great satisfaction - that “the English people and working classes” are steadily growing more comfortable, nay, more luxurious in their style of living. He goes into particulars even to show how rapidly a taste for good things spreads amongst English labourers, and bids his hearers “recollect that consumption could not be accounted for by attributing it to the higher and wealthier classes, but must have arisen from the consumption of the large body of the people and the working classes.”
And what do you think constituted the regimen of the “body of the people and working classes” in that pact of the world? And in what proportion had its consumption increased? Why, in the matter of coffee, they had used nearly seven million pounds of it more than they did in 1843; of butter and cheese they devoured double as much within the year as they had done three years before within the same period. “I will next,” says the Chancellor of the Exchequer, “take currants,” (for currants are one of the necessaries of life to an English labourer, who must have his pudding on Sunday at least); and we find that the quantity of currants used by the “body of the people and working classes” had increased in three years from 254,000 cwt. to 359,000 cwt, by the year. Omitting other things, we come to the Chancellor’s statement, that since 1843 the consumption of tea had increased by 5,400,000 lbs. It is unnecessary to say they had as much beef and bacon as they could eat, and bread à discretion, - and as for beer! -
So they live in merry England. [...]
Note
I have defended poor poor devils on charges of trespass by gathering sea-weed below high-water mark, and remember one case in which a large number of farmers near the sea were indicted for robbery, on the charge of taking limestone from a rock uncovered at a low water only - lo, burn it for spreading on their fields.
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