William O'Connor Morris

THE QUESTION OF THE IRISH LAND—SKETCH OF THE HISTORY OF THE LAND SYSTEM OF IRELAND TO THE YEAR 1870

Great importance in the history of Ireland of the conditions of land tenure—The ancient Celtic land system and its characteristics—The Norman conquest of Ireland—Norman feudalism in the Irish land—The policy of Henry VII., and especially of Henry VIII.—The era of the conquest and confiscation of the Irish land—The possessions of the O’Connors of Offaly wrested from them—Forfeiture of the domains of Shane O’Neill, and of the Earl of Desmond—Attempts at colonisation—All Ireland made shire land—The extinction of the old Celtic land system—The Plantation of Ulster—Progress of confiscation during the reigns of the two first Stuarts—The Civil War—Immense confiscations made by Cromwell—His scheme of colonisation a failure—The era of confiscation closes after the battle of the Boyne and the fall of Limerick—The Penal Code of Ireland—Its fatal effects on the Irish land—Dismal period in Irish landed relations—Gradual improvement—The period described by Arthur Young—Evil traces of the past remain—Whiteboyism and agrarian disorder—State of Irish landed relations up to the rebellion of 1798, and after the Union—Over-population and the results—Distress after the Peace—State of Irish landed relations up to 1844—The Report of the Devon Commission—The Famine and its effects on the Irish land—The Encumbered Estates Acts—State of Irish landed relations from 1848 to 1868.

The fortunes of many communities, it has truly been said, have been decisively affected by the conditions of the ownership and the occupation of the soil. The social, even the political, life of modern Europe has been, in a great measure, moulded by the land tenures that have grown out of the feudal system; I need only refer to the history of England, of France, and of Germany. This remark, however, especially applies to the events that make up the annals of Ireland; that long and unhappy tale of misfortunes and errors is intimately associated, all through, with the land, and with the relations connected with it. Modern research has shown how grotesque and mischievous was the ignorance of the Tudor lawyers and statesmen, who described the ancient organisation of the Irish land as a medley of barbarian and pernicious usages; it was an archaic and imperfect specimen of the feudal system, with differences indeed, but marked with its essential features. Norman feudalism, lawless and ill-ordered, was for centuries, after the first Conquest, placed beside this primitive form of society, in parts of a country not half subdued; the results were seen in incessant strife and discord, and in social anarchy, which prevented civilisation growing up. The Irishry had well-nigh driven the Englishry into the sea, when Henry VII. tried to make his authority felt in Ireland; his successor, partly a Celt in blood, and a real statesman, devised a noble scheme for bringing an ill-governed dependency within the domain of order and law, by planting an Anglo-Norman and native aristocracy in the soil, subject to a strong monarchy that would have protected the community as a whole. Most unfortunately the policy of Henry VIII. was not carried out; in the great conflict of the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, Ireland was drawn into a long struggle with England, and was repeatedly made a place of arms for her foes; an era of savage conquest, accomplished piecemeal, with ruthless confiscation following in its train, was protracted during nearly a century and a half; and at the close of the reign of William III., nine-tenths probably of the land of Ireland had been wrested from its former possessors, and the old Celtic land system had been destroyed by the sword and by law. Race and religion made this position of affairs much worse; the age of Protestant ascendency in Ireland began; in infinitely the greatest part of the island the land was parcelled out among a caste of owners distinct in blood and faith from the children of the soil, and lording it over an oppressed peasantry; and the system was propped up by a code of cruel laws, which maintained and, so to speak, stereotyped these evil divisions. The lines of the land system of Ireland were thus finally laid down; a variety of economic and social causes increased and deepened their extreme harshness; and though they have gradually been softened, and are now all but effaced, their traces and the results are still to be seen. The last thirty years have witnessed repeated attempts to effect radical changes in the modes of the ownership and the occupation of the land in Ireland; they have wrought a revolution in Irish landed relations, and have well-nigh turned them upside down; but the consequences have assuredly not been fortunate. The land system of Ireland has been made a chaos of economic disorder, of dissensions of class, of legalised wrong, absolutely incompatible with social progress and the general welfare.

I must glance, for an instant, at the distinctive features of the land system of Ireland in the Celtic age, for despite the effects of confiscation and conquest, faint traces of it may still be seen, and have a kind of influence.[36] As was the case in all communities of the Aryan stem, the land originally was largely held in collective ownership; but agriculture developed individual ownership by degrees, though less so in Ireland than in more progressive countries. The people were settled on the soil in tribes, clans, and septs, these being the larger and the smaller units; the modes of the tenure of the land, misinterpreted by Elizabethan sages, differed widely from each other, but revealed the traditions of old patriarchal usage and power, especially in their canons of descent and succession. The feudalisation of the land, as it has been significantly called, a process which took place in nearly the whole of Europe, was also witnessed in Ireland, to a certain extent; but this was not so complete and strongly marked as in France and England. The land, nevertheless, was, throughout the island, held ultimately from a supreme monarch; it was divided, under him, among families of princely chiefs, who ruled vast tracts with scarcely controlled authority; inferior chiefs were subject to these; the organisation of the land had much in common with the organisation of the Anglo-Norman manor, and with the position of the Lord Paramount of every manor, the head of the English State. The Irish kings and chiefs had lands in demesne; they had a landed and a personal noblesse; the territories they ruled were held by classes strongly resembling the free tenants, the villeins, and the serfs of the feudal system. All this, however, was not as perfectly defined as it was in lands feudalised to a higher degree; and though the Davieses and Spensers were wholly in error in representing the dependents of the Irish kings and chiefs as little better than a horde of fighting men and slaves, Ireland never fully possessed the liberties feudalism secured. The Ceile of substance, who had lands of his own, seems to have been in an inferior position to the English freeholder; the Saer stock and Daer stock tenants held their lands by a tenure like that of the metayers of France; the Fuidhirs were kept in complete subjection, and had not even the rights of the villein. The land, too, was still largely held in collective ownership; in its occupation this is even now seen in backward and poor districts; and, curiously enough, distinctions were drawn between what was a ‘fair’ and a ‘rack rent,’ words still common in the mouth of the Irish peasant, and to which recent legislation has given its sanction.

As in the case of most lands where anything resembling feudalism prevailed, with the single exception of England, under her strong Monarchy, Ireland in these circumstances was torn by continual discord, increased by the recurring struggles with the Dane. The Celtic kings and chiefs, nevertheless, were beloved by their people; the land system fell in with Celtic tribal ideas and sentiments. I pass over the incidents of the first Norman Conquest; in the course of time, an Anglo-Norman colony was established, within a Pale ever-varying in extent, and held parts of the country under feudal conditions, the remaining, and by far the greatest, parts being left in the possession of the Celtic kings and princes. Anglo-Norman feudalism, however, was completely different, in Ireland, from what it was in England; it was not subject to vigorous kingly rule; it was confined within comparatively small limits. In these circumstances the Pale fell into the hands of a few leading and great families; these, as had been largely the case in Scotland, formed a domineering and oppressive noblesse, continually engaged in quarrels between themselves, and in petty wars with the Celtic chiefs, and completely superior to the royal power in England. The Geraldines, the Butlers, the De Burghs, and other great houses, had no law but their own wills in their vast lordships; their exactions and tyranny became a byword; their lives were spent in savage feudal strife, and in ‘hostings against the Irish enemy.’ Strange to say, too, these scions of a mighty conquering race fell under the spell of the Celtic genius, and, as it was said, ‘became more Irish than the Irish themselves; they were at least largely assimilated to a Celtic model, and they adopted many of the usages of the Celt. It was not much otherwise in the Celtic region outside the Pale; the Irish chiefs often blended in marriage with the Anglo-Norman settlers; but they were continually at war with them, and with each other. Under these conditions, feudalism, in its best aspects, could take no root, in the land, in Ireland; and there is much reason to believe that the archaic Irish land system was gradually changed and almost broken up, the power of the kings and chiefs being greatly increased, and the position of their dependents being made essentially worse. It is obvious that in a land, a scene of such disorder and misrule, civilisation and all that the word implies could not exist; Ireland was probably more barbarous at the close of the fifteenth century than she had been when she first saw Henry of Anjou. The Pale had been restricted within ever-narrowing bounds; generations of colonising ‘Englishry’ had entered the country, and had left it in angry despair; the ‘Irishry’ had encroached on their conqueror’s domain; the work of Strongbow and Fitzstephen appeared to be undone. Especially it was observed that nothing like a middle class, even then the best element in the social life of England, had been able to develop itself in Ireland, and that the humbler classes were always in a state of wretchedness, ground down by exaction, and exposed to incessant wrongs of all kinds. ‘What common folk of all the world’—these were the words of a State paper of the age—‘is so poor, so feeble, so evil be seen in town and field, so greatly oppressed and trodden underfoot, fares so evil, with so great misery, and with so wretched a life, as the common folk of Ireland?’

Henry VII. strengthened the authority of the Crown in Ireland; the Viceroyalty of Poynings marks an epoch in her chequered annals; but the conduct of the king was shifting and weak; the land fell under the control of the great House of Kildare; the Irishry were driven back, but in no sense subdued. Surrey, the victor of Flodden, intreated Henry VIII. to make the country his own by sheer force of arms; but his master refused in striking language; and proposed a scheme for bringing Ireland under the control of the Monarchy, for encouraging civilisation and promoting order, the wisest that has ever suggested itself to a British statesman. He made several of ‘the degenerate’ Norman noblesse peers; he extended the same dignity to several Irish chiefs; he assembled representatives of Ireland in a Parliament composed of both races; he appointed commissioners to go through the country and to punish crime; above all—and this deserves special notice—he tried to conciliate the Celtic community by bringing their usages within the cognisance of the law, and giving them effectual legal sanction; and he condemned the attempts being already made to force laws on them peculiar to England. Had this enlightened policy been steadily pursued, the history of Ireland would have run a wholly different course; but destiny, that has played so sinister a part in Irish affairs, interfered to thwart the admirable designs of the king. The great Geraldine rebellion broke out, supported by irregular Celtic risings; from this time forward, during five generations of man, the era of cruel but intermittent conquest, accompanied by wholesale confiscation, set in. The powerful tribe of the O’Connors of Offaly, closely associated with the fallen House of Kildare, was the first to feel the weight of the arm of England; its territories were forcibly overrun and annexed, given the name of the King’s and the Queen’s Counties, and peopled with a colony of settlers from England. Celtic Ireland ere long was brought into the conflict between Elizabeth and Philip II., the representatives of the faiths that were dividing Christendom; the princely chief, Shane O’Neill, fell a victim to the English conquerors, though their quarrel with him was not wholly one of seeking the assistance of a foreign enemy; his vast domains were, also, in part forfeited, in part handed over to a puppet of English power. The frightful Desmond rebellion followed; it was directly encouraged by the Pope and by Spain; after a protracted struggle approaching a real civil war, the immense lordships of the great Geraldine House were confiscated, and granted to a colony of English blood. Tyrone, the real successor of his kinsman, Shane O’Neill, a soldier and statesman of no ordinary parts, seeing, as he bitterly said, that his ‘lands were marked down by the spoiler,’ endeavoured, not without partial success, to combine a great Irish League against England; he entered into an alliance with Spain; a Spanish army landed on the southern coast of Munster; after a long and sanguinary contest, Tyrone yielded, but his resistance had been so formidable that he was allowed to retain his possessions.

The subjugation of a large part of Ireland, in the Elizabethan wars, was marked by incidents of a most atrocious character. The Government had no regular army to act in the field; it was compelled largely to rely on armed levies of the Englishry, and on bodies of the Irishry attached to the conqueror’s standards; for in this, as in nearly all instances throughout their history, the Irish Celts were at feud with each other; Celtic Ireland was a house divided against itself. The queen, it has been written, ‘ruled over blood and ashes,’ when Mountjoy sheathed his victorious sword; the memory of this period still lives in Irish tradition. A season of exhaustion and repose ensued after James I. had ascended the throne; but the time, in the phrase of Tacitus, had an evil aspect in peace itself. The Pale had long before this been effaced; conquest and confiscation had spread over nearly the whole island; the domination of England was felt almost everywhere. As the result, the whole of Ireland was made shire land; the old Celtic land system, which still widely prevailed, was swept away by decisions of the Anglican Courts of Justice; it was declared to be ‘a lewd and not law-worthy thing;’ all the Irish land was subjected to English modes of tenure; they were imposed on a people which detested these gifts of the stranger; innumerable tribal rights were destroyed. Ere long the work of confiscation began again; the domains of Tyrone and of his kinsman O’Donnell were pronounced forfeited for reasons that have never been ascertained; the Crown was placed in possession of nearly six counties of Ulster. Up to this time the settlements of English colonists, which had been made in Ireland by Tudor conquest, had failed; the colonists had been almost lost in the midst of the Irishry, who hemmed them around. This immense confiscation was, however, in part successful; it was carried out on comparatively enlightened principles; it has produced the famous Plantation of Ulster; and this, with other settlements in the counties of Antrim and Down, has established, in a large part of the northern province of Ireland, a hardy and thriving community, in the main, of Scottish blood. Confiscation, nevertheless, did not stop here; ‘the ravages of war,’ in Burke’s language, were ‘carried on amidst seeming peace;’ enormous tracts were torn from their former owners on pretexts usually of the flimsiest kind, and were flung to Court favourites, to jobbing speculators, to greedy adventurers of the baser sort. By this time three-fourths probably of the soil of Ireland had passed into the hands of a new race of possessors; the descendants of Anglo-Norman nobles and of the Celtic princes had been sufferers well-nigh in the same proportion. At last Strafford marked out the whole province of Connaught, for what has been called ‘his majestic rapine;’ this and other innumerable acts of spoliation and wrong unquestionably were the paramount cause of the great Celtic rising of 1641. Another and soon to be a most potent element of evils and troubles had already begun to make its sinister presence felt in Ireland. In the great religious schism of the sixteenth century, England had become Protestant, Ireland had remained Catholic, and each had taken opposite sides in the conflict that followed; though the Elizabethan wars were rather struggles of race than of faith. But as conquest and confiscation progressed in Ireland, the Anglican Church, a scion of the Norman Church of the Pale, was erected on the ruins of its Celtic Catholic rival; the land more and more became possessed by settlers alien in creed from the old owners, and from the vanquished children of the soil; and harsh laws had begun to deepen the distinctions between them. Nevertheless, though its signs had in some measure appeared, the era of Protestant ascendency and Catholic subjection had not been developed in Ireland, as yet, in its worst aspects.

The wild Celtic rising of 1641 was followed by a rising of the old Englishry of the Pale—the descendants of the first Anglo-Norman settlers; both movements were probably encouraged from France; though widely different, they ran into each other. The great Civil War was now running its course in England; Ireland, for the most part, took the side of the king; the majority of Englishmen were certainly on the side of the Parliament. I cannot retrace the scenes of the contest in Ireland; after a fierce and protracted struggle, in which an envoy of the Pope became the representative of an ill-united Irish League; in which Preston and Ormond led the forces of the Pale, and Owen Roe O’Neill was at the head of the Irish Celts,—the whole island was subjugated by the sword of Cromwell, as it never had been subjugated before. Drogheda and Wexford are names of woe in the annals of Ireland; but the conquest of the Protector, ruthless as it was, was not so cruel as that of the Elizabethan soldiers; if deeply stained with blood, it was rapid and completely decisive. The colony in Ulster had begun to flourish; Cromwell designed a scheme for the colonisation of the vanquished country more thorough and extensive than any which had been designed before. Three-fourths of Ireland had been in arms against the Parliament; that assembly had made grants by anticipation of Irish forfeited lands to ‘adventurers’ who had advanced it moneys; an opportunity for immense confiscations had arisen; the Protector was not slow to take advantage of it; his Puritan fanaticism, his hatred of the Irish people, especially of its ‘idolatrous Papists,’ his strong English and religious sympathies, united to confirm him in his purpose. The forfeited lands in four of the Irish counties were appropriated to the Commonwealth and its uses; those in eighteen were to be granted to the ‘adventurers’ and the soldiery of the late conquest; those in seven were to be allotted to the army in England. The grants were to be either free, or to be purchased at nominal prices; the owners, who had lost their lands, were to be deported to Connaught—‘Hell’ was the alternative, the tradition runs—and ‘Courts of Claims,’ as they were called, were to be set up, to adjudicate on the conduct of those who were to be dispossessed—they were to be subjected to a test which scarcely one could satisfy—and practically to measure confiscation out under the pretence of law. By these means Cromwell calculated that some forty thousand colonists, of English blood and of the Puritan faith, would be poured into the millions of acres which the sword had placed in the hands of his Government; these would form a prosperous settlement loyal to England; would keep rebellion in Ireland for ever down; and would regenerate a land taken from a race akin to the Amalekites of old. As a foretaste of the new and glorious order of things, Sir William Petty, a very able man, remarkably skilful in feathering his own nest, made a cadastral survey of Ireland, which still remains.

Cromwell’s scheme of confiscation was thoroughly carried out, spite of much angry wrangling between the Puritan warriors. The remains of the defeated Irish armies went, in thousands, into exile in foreign lands; they were the heralds of the renowned soldiery who, for a century and a half, were deadly, but honourable foes of the British name. The rule of the Protector in Ireland was stern but enforced peace; Ireland was prostrate in the exhaustion of despair; there is much proof that, under the Cromwellian settlement, the country made a kind of material progress. But Cromwell’s great scheme of colonisation failed, as such schemes had failed in many instances before; a large majority of the ‘adventurers’ and the soldiers sold their possessions, usually for a mere nothing: many ‘degenerated’ like the old Norman families, and, won over by the spells ‘of the daughters of Heth,’ had, in one or two generations, become ‘mere Irish.’ The ultimate result of the Cromwellian conquest was to establish in Ireland three or four thousand owners of the soil, of English blood and Puritan leanings, without the support of inferior dependents, in the midst of a vanquished population hostile in race and faith; the sentiments thus engendered have never died out; to this day ‘a Cromwellian landlord’ is a name of reproach in Catholic Ireland. At the Restoration hope for a moment revived in the hearts of the ruined owners, who had been dispossessed by Cromwell, and of whom hundreds had fought for the Crown; but this was dashed by the perfidy of Charles II. and his courtiers; the Cromwellian forfeitures were, in the main, confirmed; large tracts were given back to favourites of the Stuarts, but thousands of beggared families lost their estates for ever through a policy of cruel baseness and wrong. Ireland remained quiescent for nearly thirty years; she even prospered under the wise rule of Ormond—one of the noblest figures in her unhappy history; but the bitter memories of the past lived in the conquered people, though, as has repeatedly been seen in a Celtic race, they were treasured in silence, and caused little apparent trouble. James II. ascended the throne in 1685; he had a great opportunity to mitigate many of the wrongs of Ireland; he might have removed some of the evils of the Cromwellian conquest, and have effected changes in the settlement of the land, which, at least, would have done partial justice. But the unfortunate king was a bigot, and, in no sense, a statesman; like his father he tried the desperate policy of making use of Ireland in his designs against English liberties; he sent Tyrconnell to Dublin, and, in a few months, revolution had broken out through the country; English and Protestant Ireland was well-nigh trampled underfoot; Catholic and Celtic Ireland rose up in a wild hope of revenge. I cannot even glance at the stirring events that followed; the descendants of ruined barons of the Pale and of Celtic princes driven from their lands and their homes, joined in a great effort to raise a large armed force; the rising almost assumed a national aspect; but after the Boyne and the fall of Limerick, it was finally quelled by William III. The process of confiscation was once more renewed; thousands of acres were taken forcibly from those who had resisted in the field, and were handed over to a new race of colonists belonging to the blood and the creed of the victors; and the shameful violation of a solemn Treaty made all that was cruel in spoliation worse.

The era of conquest in Ireland and of confiscation by force—an agony prolonged for a century and a half—was brought to an end in the reign of William III. This is not the place to examine the question on which side, as between England and Ireland, the balance of the wrongs that were done inclines; but if much that is cruel and shameful is to be laid to the charge of England, Ireland, it cannot be forgotten, crossed her path repeatedly in an age of grave national perils and troubles, and, moreover, wrecked her own cause by her wretched dissensions. The Irish land had now nearly all fallen into the hands of a caste of owners, of English and Scottish descent, and in faith Protestant, divided from a people of Catholic occupiers for the most part of the Irish race; wide lines of demarcation had been drawn between them; and there was no middle class to bridge over the gulf. In a part of Ulster alone where the proprietors and the holders of the soil were largely of the same religion and blood, was there the promise of a more auspicious order of things; even here causes of disunion were not wanting. Nor were these the only vices and dangers of a land system which has scarcely had a parallel. Enormous tracts had been bestowed on owners who never saw their estates; absenteeism existed to an immense extent; their lands, too, had, in thousands of instances, been underlet to a class of intermediate owners, who were to form a body of most oppressive landlords. In addition, the representatives of numbers of ruined families still vegetated on the domains which had been their own; the few families which had escaped from the spoilers, were held in reverence by the peasantry around; elements of disorder and trouble continued to fester. The destruction, too, of the old Celtic modes of land tenure, and the substitution of the English system, had unjustly annihilated tribal rights wholesale; the free, and other dependents of the Irish chiefs, had sunk into the position of mere tenants at will, that is, at the mercy of foreign and often unknown masters. One of the worst, if not the most apparent evil, of the gigantic confiscations which had taken place, and on which the land system had, so to speak, been founded, was that the respect which attaches to the ancient ownership of land, and which forms, perhaps, its surest support, could hardly exist in any part of Ireland; the disastrous consequences may be traced to the present hour. Landlords, with titles of yesterday, won by the sword, could not feel the interest in their estates and in the inhabitants on them, naturally felt by owners of gentle and ancient descent; the land which, as has been said, had been flung like a fox to ravening hounds, could not attract to it happy and peaceful memories; the very Government had learned to think it could deal with the land as it pleased, and treated the rights gained by confiscation with contempt. Prescription, the strongest cement of property, had no place in this ill-compacted land system.[37]

The era of Protestant ascendency bringing Catholic subjection with it, had now set in for many years in Ireland; its evils were aggravated by harsh divisions of race, and by more than a century of bitter memories; its effects were more conspicuous in the land than in other social relations. This unnatural and calamitous position of affairs might, however, have been replaced ere long by a better order of things, had it not been artificially maintained and made enduring by legislation unexampled for its far-reaching cruelty. I cannot attempt to describe the Penal Code of Ireland; in the emphatic words of Burke, ‘it was a complete system, full of coherence and consistency; well digested and well composed in all its parts; it was a machine of wise and elaborate contrivance; and as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment, and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man.’[38] The objects of these execrable laws were threefold: to exclude the Irish Catholic whether of Anglo-Irish or Celtic descent—misfortune had well-nigh effaced the distinction—from every office of trust in the State, from every profession, almost from every walk of life; to persecute and proscribe the Catholic Church of Ireland, and to place its priesthood under a humiliating ban, and finally to ruin and degrade the few remaining Catholic owners of the soil; to prevent the Irish Catholic from acquiring any real interest in it; and, above all, to keep the Catholic peasantry in a condition of thraldom.[39] The Code was only too successful in compassing its ends; I pass from its operation as regards the two first, to point out how it sought to attain the third, and how its provisions affected the Irish land and the manifold relations connected with it. The estate of the Irish Catholic owner was not to follow the ordinary courses of descent; it was ‘to gavel,’ and to be divided among many persons; this was for the avowed purpose of making ‘the landed property of Papists crumble away, and disappear.’ The Irish Catholic owner was subjected to cruel enactments that literally set his household against him; his wife and children were bribed to become his foes; law sate at his hearth to make his existence wretched. The Irish Catholic, too, was forbidden to acquire land by purchase or even to possess an incumbrance on it; as far as possible the ownership of land was strictly confined to the Protestant caste. But the wrong that, in its consequences at least, was perhaps the worst, was that the Catholic occupier of the Irish soil could not obtain anything like an advantageous tenure; he could not have a lease for a period beyond thirty-one years, and this, too, at an excessive rent; and, in the great mass of instances, he was a serf holding merely at will.

The forty years that succeeded the death of William III. are certainly the most mournful period in Irish history. The memories of conquest and confiscation were still fresh; the Penal Code kept Catholic Ireland in its chains; society was fashioned on the type of the domination of a class, separated from a whole community in race and faith. Nothing was left undone to perpetuate this evil order of things; the Irish Parliament was a mere oligarchy of the sons of the colonists of Elizabeth, Cromwell, and William, apart from a few leading men in Ulster; its legislation for the vanquished race was barbarous; Lords-Lieutenant spoke of the Irish Catholics as of ‘the common enemy;’ a ‘Papist was presumed not to exist’ in the Irish Courts of Justice. Meanwhile the penal laws were relentlessly carried out for years; the Irish Catholic was placed under a universal ban; the Catholic Church of Ireland lay, as it were, in the valley of the shadow of death. But the direst consequences appeared in the land, and in the social life of the landed classes; these were most calamitous and have still left their traces. Many of the few Catholic owners abandoned their estates, and carried their swords into foreign lands, where some rose to well-deserved eminence; a small number conformed to the dominant faith in order to exist in comparative peace at home; the majority clung to their lands and bowed their heads to oppression. The Protestant lords of the soil were what their antecedents and the law had made them; they were long a harsh and exacting order of men, filled with bigotry and the pride of a conquering race; they regarded the inferiors they ruled as pariahs and helots. But, as usually happens, when society is in an unnatural state, they did not prosper amidst the ruins around them; their lands were kept on a kind of pernicious mortmain, as they could not mortgage or sell them freely; absenteeism with all its mischiefs greatly increased; and middleman tenures largely multiplied, subjecting the peasantry to a detestable breed of landlords, Protestants and of English descent, like their superiors, but much worse tyrants. As for the mass of the Catholic occupiers of the soil, they were kept down in the lowest state of serfdom; but multitudes found their way into foreign armies; ‘the wild geese,’ as they were pathetically called, flew to Austria and, above all, to France, where, in the ranks of the celebrated Irish Brigade—‘ever and everywhere’ true to the Bourbon lilies—they won renown at Dettingen, Fontenoy, and other fields of fame. The aspect of Ireland bore too faithful witness to the misery engendered in this evil order of things. The country was still covered with the wrecks of the late wars; the habitations, even of the Protestant gentry, were squalid and mean; the towns were, in many instances, sinking into decay; the peasantry were huddled together into villages of huts; the traveller roamed through vast wastes of unfenced pasturage, evidences of a land almost left in a state of nature. Hideous famines were of repeated occurrence; one, that of 1739-41, swept the population away in tens of thousands; the Irish Parliament characteristically did nothing to help the sufferers; it met the emergency by strengthening the means to enforce the payment of rent. The miserable condition of Ireland was made worse by the legislation of the British Parliament, which treated the country as a conquered colony; and, true to the principles of the mercantile system, impeded or prevented the growth of several Irish industries. This was, of course, most injurious to the Protestant settlers; but these were held down by the ruling power; as was finely said, ‘they knelt to England on the necks of their countrymen.’ The state of things in the colonised parts of Ulster was somewhat better; but the Scottish and Presbyterian population of this corner of Ireland had not a few causes of serious complaint.[40]

In the next generation a great but gradual change passed over the state of the Irish community. The Penal Code was not in letter relaxed; but the evil spirit which had conceived it lost much of its force. The men who had fought at the Boyne and at Aghrim had passed away; the human conscience, moved by the influences of the eighteenth century, revolted from the barbarous legislation of a half-fanatical age. The Irish Catholics slowly began to make themselves felt in the State; many amassed large fortunes in foreign commerce; shut out as they still were by law from almost every profession and office, they made their way into the medical calling, and especially at the Bar, where their disabilities were evaded or ignored. The Catholic Church was no longer proscribed; its worship, indeed, was still carried on under degrading conditions; but its priesthood were permitted to perform their sacred functions in peace; its dignitaries were even countenanced by the men in power at the Castle. This great social change was conspicuously seen in the land; landed relations were markedly improved, and partly transformed. The Catholic owners were permitted to hold their estates free from the cruel vexations of the past; they began to live on terms of friendship with the Protestant caste; legal fictions annulled the laws which had made their lives wretched; their lands were, in many instances, held by the Protestant gentry on secret trusts; and these, though contrary to law, were, as a rule, most honourably fulfilled. The principal, however, and most decisive change appeared in the position and the sentiments of the Protestant lords of the soil. As time rolled on, and threw its kindly growths over the settlement of confiscation and the sword, these men began to feel that Ireland was their country and home; they became, to a certain extent, Irishmen; they felt sympathy, by degrees, with the conquered serfs in their midst. This feeling was strengthened by the tyrannous selfishness of the British Parliament, which treated Ireland as if she were its footstool, and of the official class, nearly all Englishmen, who lorded it over the land they despised; an ‘Irish interest’ grew up in the Parliament at College Green, composed very largely of the Protestant landlords; this became patriotic, in a certain sense, and a protector of the scanty rights of Ireland. As social order, too, was seldom disturbed, the wealth of the country had considerably increased; the gentry acquired a greater interest in their estates, and became more and more attached to them; absenteeism, as the result, perceptibly lessened; and middleman tenures, though still prevalent, diminished remarkably in the more progressive counties. The deep lines of demarcation which kept apart the owners and the occupiers of the soil were thus to a certain extent bridged over; the Irish landlord, especially if resident, became a kindlier superior than his fathers had been; the Irish peasant became less a stranger to him.The evidences of this better order of things became manifest on the face of the country. Agriculture, though still backward, made real progress; the breeds of farming animals greatly improved; the huge breadths of pasturage had a less deserted aspect. The country towns had generally advanced; the land had been opened by good roads; the means of locomotion had been largely multiplied. The rental of Ireland had doubled within living memory; in some counties, indeed, it was nearly as high as it is now; the land was at a price of more years’ purchase than it is at the close of the nineteenth century. It was at this period that the great country houses of Ireland were built, and their vast demesnes laid out; the wages of labour were low, but had distinctly risen; the peasant hind, Arthur Young tells us, in point of food and clothing, was as well off as his fellow in England. The land was largely parcelled out into considerable farms; but small holdings were on the increase; and the cottar system, in the course of time to become a source of manifold evils, was not yet a cause of much mischief; the pressure of population on the soil was not severely felt. Many of the great landlords, too, were excellent men; they ruled the country well, and greatly improved their estates; in numberless instances they had won the hearts of dependents, who regarded them as kind masters. Yet the picture was not without a dark side; this land system still had evil, nay, repulsive, features. Except in the best part of Ulster the deep divisions of race and faith continued to be profoundly marked; the Penal Code had made these, to a great extent, indelible. There was still much oppression and exaction in landed relations; the class of small landlords and the class of middlemen were too generally tyrannical and harsh; complaints of over-renting were not infrequent; and if the great landlords, as a rule, were not severe superiors, many were extravagant, addicted to excess, and reckless duellists; they bore a strong resemblance to the seigneurie of the old French Monarchy. The peasantry, too, remained serfs, illiterate, ignorant, and superstitious; the good feelings they often had for their lords had too much of the submissiveness of the slave; and virtuous as their women ordinarily were, they too generally yielded to the lusts of their masters. The habitations, besides, of this population were still wretched; if their lot had assuredly become better, it was often hard, above all, degraded. They had begun to feel more acutely the ills they suffered; in many counties they had banded themselves together into lawless leagues, to protect themselves and to resist authority. These associations, known by the general name of Whiteboys—perhaps taken from the Camisards of the Cevennes—had as their objects the preservation of rights of commonage, the extinction of tithes, and the reduction of rents; they may be traced back to the great confiscations of the past; they were held together by secret leaders and passwords; and they often kept whole districts in a state of terror. A Draconic Code was directed against them; though often put down they have risen to life again; Ireland has never since been completely free from them; their influence still is distinctly apparent. Associations of somewhat a similar kind, known as Steelboys and Oakboys, were formed even in the good parts of Ulster; but they were much less dangerous and were not permanent. It is a characteristic of Whiteboyism, as it has ever since been called, that it has always had a political side, and lends itself to revolutionary movements against government itself.[41]

Though Protestant ascendency was still supreme at this period, the confiscations of the past had not been forgotten; they were treasured in the minds of the descendants of the old Catholic families, and of the population among which they lived. The extinction, too, of the tribal Irish tenures, had, we have seen, been a cause of grievous wrongs; this was a tradition, also, handed down from father to son, and was still fresh in the remembrance of a whole race. The land system, though to outward seeming secure, nevertheless rested on unstable foundations, as was to appear in the course of time; another element of disturbance was being formed, which ultimately was to have immense force. Under the modes of land tenure, which prevailed in England, since the system of small holdings had been broken up, the land had generally been laid out in large farms; partly from this circumstance, and partly owing to custom, the charge of making permanent improvements of the land had almost everywhere devolved on the owner of the soil; a tenant, who rented a farm, took it, so to speak, equipped with the buildings and other things of the kind that were suitable to it. But in Ireland, partly because small farms were numerous, and partly because the custom had never grown up—the history of the past fully accounts for this—the permanent improvements were very seldom made by the landlord; the tenant, who held land, had to add, as it were, its plant to it; he had to do much that gave it any real value. As the inevitable result, the Irish occupier of the soil felt that he had acquired a concurrent right in it; this, if the improvements were solid and lasting, might almost amount to a partial joint-ownership, at least give him, in equity, a real hold on the land. But a right of this kind was not recognised by the law, founded as this was upon notions of English tenure; it was liable to be destroyed should the tenant be dispossessed; and as the tenure of the immense majority of the occupiers of the soil in Ireland was either at will, or for a short term at a high rent, this right, essentially of a quasi-proprietary kind, was made precarious, and had no legal protection. With the prescience of genius, Burke perceived the evils that might grow out of this state of things, though, as yet, these were not much felt; he saw that it discouraged improvement of almost every kind; especially he saw that the denial of legal sanction to the rights in the land a tenant might have, and the fact that his tenure was short and uncertain, might become a source of grave wrong, and of far-reaching discontent. In a word, he detected an economic vice in the land system of Ireland which, in the long run, was to do great mischief; and curiously enough he indicated the remedies that ought to be applied, and pointed out the true principles of a reform of Irish land tenure. It would have been well had British statesmen adopted these; his simple, just, and statesmanlike plan puts to shame the ill-designed and unsuccessful attempts that have been made to recast the Irish land system of late years, and the false, reckless, and socialistic theories at present current on this important subject.[42]

I must pass over even the main events of the history of Ireland, after this period, up to the close of the eighteenth century. The ‘Irish interest,’ mainly composed of the great landed gentry, and turning to account the American War, compelled the Parliament at Westminster to relax many of the commercial restraints on Ireland, and to concede her a partial free trade; under the guidance of the illustrious Grattan it obtained legislative independence for the Irish Parliament. At the same time the Penal Code was largely repealed; the Irish Catholic was permitted to acquire the ownership of the soil; before long he received the electoral franchise, though he was still excluded from the Irish Houses of Lords and Commons. In these circumstances, Ireland made real material and social progress; the wealth of the country rapidly increased; the Protestant and Catholic upper classes began to unite in marriage; a commercial middle class, if still very weak, grew up. Ireland seemed about to enter a happier era; yet there were drawbacks to this partial welfare, especially as regards the land system. Middleman tenures were becoming much less frequent; absenteeism was markedly on the decline; but partly owing to their contact with the Parliament in College Green, and to the brilliant social life it created in Dublin, the landed gentry became more extravagant than their fathers had been; they began to raise their rents and to encumber their estates; over-renting became more common than before; Whiteboy movements and agrarian disorder prevailed in many districts. Ireland, however, probably would have made a great advance but for the evil passions which the French Revolution engendered in the frame of a society still deeply diseased. I cannot dwell on the unhappy years that followed, leading to the Rebellion of 1798; I must confine myself to their influence on the Irish land system. The object of Tone and of the United Irish leaders was to combine Scottish and Presbyterian Ulster, and the great mass of the Irish Catholics, into a league against British rule and for ‘Irish freedom;’ unhappily, they were but too successful. They appealed, not in vain, to thousands of farmers and traders in the Northern Province, who had long had solid grounds of discontent, and had been deeply stirred by the Revolution in France; they laid hold on the elements of disorder and of division of race and faith, abounding in Catholic Ireland, but largely concealed, and called on the peasantry to overthrow their Protestant tyrants, and to strike a decisive blow in ‘the cause of Ireland.’ Evil incentives were recklessly employed to arouse popular passions; maps of the old confiscated lands were made; and active emissaries went through the country, reviving dangerous traditions of the past, and stimulating the worst sentiments of hatred, greed, and revenge. As the result, sedition ran riot in Ulster; in the Southern Provinces there was a great outburst of Whiteboy crime, and a widespread rising against the payment of rent; and thousands of the occupiers of the soil were swept into the United Irish ranks, scarcely conscious of the perils to which they were exposed. How the movement led to the bloody rebellion of 1798, and how this was put down after a desperate struggle, it is unnecessary to consider here; the consequences in Irish landed relations were most unfortunate. It is untrue that the large majority of the owners of the Irish soil were guilty of the crimes that have been laid to their charge; but they bitterly resented the allusions to the confiscations of a bygone past; they became more estranged from their inferiors than they had been for years.[43]

This terrible outbreak shook society in Ireland to its base, revived the old divisions of race and faith which had been disappearing to a considerable extent, and left memories behind which have not been forgotten. Its inevitable result was to lead to the Union, a measure long in the contemplation of British statesmen, and especially of Pitt, and perhaps necessary in the most critical circumstances of the time. I cannot even refer to the events attending this great constitutional change; a large majority of the leading Irish landlords disliked it at heart; but a minority, alarmed for their possessions, gave it support; how strong this feeling was may be seen in a famous speech of Lord Clare, who described the whole order of men as ‘the heirs of confiscation hemmed in by enemies brooding on their wrongs.’ The Union greatly weakened the influence of the Irish landed gentry, which had been very powerful in the defunct Parliament; the ‘Irish interest,’ for many years a real force, was almost subverted; English officials became again supreme at the Castle; a bureaucracy gradually began to supplant the aristocracy of landlords in every sphere of government. As respects the land and landed relations, the class of Catholic owners slowly augmented; but the consequences were trivial and not marked; middleman tenures continued steadily to disappear; but absenteeism certainly increased, though absentee estates were usually better managed than before. Meanwhile causes of grave importance, tending to momentous social results, were profoundly affecting the whole land system, and the position of the classes dependent on it. Partly owing to the corn laws of the Irish Parliament, partly to the extension of the Parliamentary franchise, in 1793, to the great mass of the Catholic peasantry, but principally to the effects of the long war with France, Ireland, it may be said, was well-nigh changed from a pastoral to an agricultural country; large farms were generally replaced by small; the land in most districts was divided into little tillage holdings; the cottar system multiplied apace; the population, about three millions of souls in the day of Arthur Young, increased to more than six millions at the Peace of 1815; and this population becoming every year more dense, for the most part eked existence out on a precarious root. The economic and social consequences were very great, and continued in operation during a long series of years. The competition for the possession of land became intensely keen; rents were unnaturally forced up in thousands of cases; the value of landed property enormously rose; all this encouraged extravagance among the landed gentry, and especially induced them largely to encumber their estates. At the same time the wages of labour distinctly declined; the condition of the Irish labouring peasant, when Edward Wakefield, a very industrious and able observer, wrote on the state of Ireland in 1812, was markedly worse than it had been in the time of Arthur Young. Yet these were not the most serious, at least, the most lasting, effects of the revolution taking place in landed relations. As the large farm system was being broken up, as the small farm system had come in its stead, and as population had rapidly grown, the occupiers of the soil had more and more made the permanent additions to their holdings; they had built, fenced, and reclaimed land, more and more; and in the general eagerness to obtain the possession of land, considerable sums were often paid for farms on their transfer. The concurrent rights of the tenant classes in Ireland had thus become enormously increased; they often amounted, equitably, to a real joint-ownership; yet these rights were without the support of law, and were liable to be extinguished often at the mere will of the landlord. In Ulster alone, in its Presbyterian and Scottish parts, where the landed classes had been less disunited than in the South, a custom, now of considerable strength, had for a long time made the tenure of the peasant comparatively secure; yet even this was not under the Ægis of law.[44]

Made wise, after the event, we now clearly perceive what ought to have been done for Ireland in this position of affairs. There never had been an Irish poor law; Protestant property was not to be charged for Catholic want; but the population was fast increasing; a mass of wretched poverty was being formed; this should have been supported, and yet checked, by a poor law. At the same time legislation, as Burke had contended, should have vindicated the moral rights of the occupier of the soil, should have made what really was his property his own, should have rendered his tenure profitable and secure. Nothing of the kind, however, came into the minds of British statesmen, or even, it must be said, of the best Irishmen of the day—the age was one of Toryism harsh and unfeeling; the abuses of the poor law in England were great; it was not contemplated to apply it to Ireland; above all, the equitable claims of the Irish tenant were not understood or deemed worthy of notice; English tenure, utterly unfitted to his true position, was good enough for him. The land system, nevertheless, was not much disturbed while the high prices of the war prevailed; there was a good deal indeed of disorder connected with the land, but society was not deeply affected. And it is only just to observe that the landlords, as a class, did respect the concurrent rights of their tenants in the soil; the conclusive proof is that these could not have grown up had they been generally, or even largely, set at nought. But a great and calamitous change passed over Ireland when the comparative wealth caused by the war collapsed, and when the return to cash payments made the effects worse. Rents suddenly fell greatly, and even disappeared; the wages of labour, which had usually been paid through what may be called a wretched truck system, were reduced to a remarkable degree; hundreds of thousands of the cottar peasantry sank to the lowest depths of indigence. A great social convulsion, in a word, took place; this culminated in famine in several counties; a miserable population was deprived of the means of subsistence. In these circumstances the owners of the soil acted as a class would ordinarily act; many, impoverished themselves, let things drift; many made themselves conspicuous for good works of charity; a minority had recourse to severe measures, like the English landlords of the sixteenth century, to get rid of a mass of poverty clinging in despair to the land. The old divisions of race and faith unquestionably aggravated this state of things; but the Government of the day showed little forethought, and, in fact, was infinitely the most to blame; it met the emergency, not by wise and healing measures, but by legislation, which made the eviction of the peasant from his holding easy and cheap, and by having recourse to repression unjust and severe in the extreme. In too many instances, ‘clearances’ of estates, an evil word, were witnessed; hundreds of families were driven from their homes and cast on the world; as the necessary result, in numberless cases, the equitable rights of the Irish tenant were ruthlessly destroyed. As a matter of course, Whiteboyism, never completely suppressed, broke out in formidable agrarian disorder; the peasantry, deprived of the protection of law, leagued themselves together to enforce a law of their own; crime multiplied to an immense extent; all the machinery of coercion could not wholly keep it under.[45]

I must pass rapidly over the next twenty years, though a very important period in Irish history. Catholic emancipation was wrung by O’Connell, from a reluctant Ministry, through violent agitation, which distracted Ireland for years; the Irish Catholic was admitted into Parliament at last. This great event was followed by the savage Tithe War, a movement against the Anglican Church in Ireland stained with detestable deeds of blood; the representation of Ireland passed largely into O’Connell’s hands, the head of what was called ‘his Catholic Tail.’ Protestant ascendency in Ireland received a mortal blow; the influence of the Irish landed gentry still further declined; that of the bureaucracy at the Castle increased. From this time forward the Irish landlord began to feel his position really insecure; it is remarkable how few large mansions and demesnes have ever since been designed or completed by this order of men. After the disastrous period which came to an end about 1826, the wealth of Ireland perceptibly grew; a kind of prosperity existed in many parts of the country. The age, too, had become more liberal and humane; the middleman was got rid of in not a few districts; the absentee landlords devoted more attention to their estates than they had ever devoted before. The process of eviction, moreover, became much less frequent, though too frequent for social order and peace; a considerable number of Irish landlords expended large sums in improving their lands; farms were consolidated, with good results, in many parts of the country. But the essential features of the land system were not much changed; its economic conditions became, in important respects, worse. The landed gentry, if much less extravagant than their fathers had been, were, nevertheless, as a class, much involved in debt; and, as usually has been seen in cases of the kind, they became less really prosperous, as their authority declined. Meanwhile, the population had continued rapidly to increase; by the close of this period it exceeded eight millions of souls, a total far too great for the resources of the land. The phenomena, already critical, became more sinister; rents were again forced up as the wealth of the country augmented, and reached the highest level they have ever attained; the wages of labour did not fall, indeed, they could hardly fall lower; but the cottar population had become more than ever dense; the competition for the possession of the soil grew fierce; as necessarily followed, the quasi-proprietary rights of the tenant in his holding had been enlarged, and yet these were still outside the pale of the law. A Report, made in 1837-38, disclosed the appalling fact that two millions and a half of the Irish community were for months in every year on the verge of starvation, and always in a condition of extreme misery. Though Ireland had made, in a sense, progress, her economic state had thus become dangerous, and very bad; and a poor law, enacted at last in 1838, was utterly unable to cope with the evil. Whiteboy crime and disorders continued to abound; in 1844, an average year, there were more than a thousand instances of offences in landed relations.

The year 1843 was that of the great Repeal movement, of which O’Connell was the master spirit. Peel had been Prime Minister for two years; his attention had been already turned to the vices and the perils of the Irish land system. He had been Chief Secretary for Ireland from 1812 to 1818; but he had been identified with the Tory misrule of that time; and though, like Chesterfield in another age, he had been too sagacious not to see that poverty made the social ills of Ireland more acute and worse, he had been the ablest opponent of the Catholic cause, had supported Protestant ascendency in many ways; and had not been in any sense an Irish reformer. A strong Conservative of the great middle class in England, he looked on Ireland as an almost foreign land, and had scarcely any knowledge of her real needs; and though his severe administration at the Castle had been wise and just, he carried out coercion with a steady hand, and is supposed to have been the author of the code of cheap ejectment, a cause of a great deal of evil and wrong. But his mind, if slow in moving, was moved at last; he saw that Ireland largely required the amending hand; the conduct of O’Connell, no doubt, had quickened his purpose. I cannot dwell on Peel’s other Irish measures; at the close of 1843 he appointed a Commission charged to inquire into the state of Irish landed relations; had he continued long at the head of the State, he would probably have done much to improve the Irish land system. The Commission had, as President, the chief of the great House of Courtenay; it was almost wholly composed of Englishmen, more or less associated with land in England; it was, therefore, ill constituted to deal with what may be called the Irish Land Question. But it investigated the subject it treated with most praiseworthy care; entering into every detail of Irish landed relations, their history in the past, the state of land tenure, the condition of the different classes seated on the land, the working of the law with respect to tenant’s improvements, the means of diminishing the wretched millions squatting on the soil, agrarian crime and all that it involved; the mass of evidence it collected is still of the greatest value. The Report it made, if somewhat over-cautious and timid, was very instructive in many respects; especially it showed how the Irish land system grew out of the conquests and confiscations of the past, and still bore the marks of its ill-omened origin, notably in the lines drawn between the owners and the occupiers of the soil marked by a profound division of race and faith; and many of the suggestions it made were wise, nay, excellent. But on the capital subject of land tenure, by many degrees the most important, the Report only too clearly revealed the ignorance of Englishmen as regards Ireland, and, above all, as regards her landed relations. The Commission ought to have fully recognised the concurrent rights in the soil, which the Irish occupier had acquired in tens of thousands of instances, rights often equivalent to more or less joint-ownership; it ought to have insisted that the Tenant Right, as it was now called, of the Ulster Custom, and the claims arising from improvements, the work of the tenant, and from sums paid on the transfer of farms, should be made law-worthy, and effectually secured. With a want of insight which would have made Burke gnash his teeth, it took exactly an opposite course; it warned the Irish landlord that these concurrent rights were creating against him ‘an embryo copyhold,’ and eating away his freehold ownership; it plainly hinted that he would do well to get rid of them. It even refused to acknowledge that the tenant had a claim to any improvements if made in the past; but it proposed a scheme for compensating him for improvements made in the future, so limited and fenced round with restrictions, that it was quite illusory, and indeed deceptive. The Report caused intense indignation in Ulster, and was not well received in any part of Ireland.[46]

Bills, founded on the Report of the Devon Commission, as it was called, were brought into Parliament, but never became law. Within a few months Ireland was in the throes of an agony, the most terrible, perhaps, that has befallen any land in the nineteenth century. In the autumn of 1845, the potato, which formed the only food of the indigent multitudes fastened on the land, failed, to a considerable extent, in many districts; in the following year the crop was all but completely destroyed. Famine, far more general and appalling than that of twenty-five years before, had soon held a wretched population in its grasp; the results may almost be compared to those of the Black Death, and of the famines of the Middle Ages. The land system went to wreck in whole counties, especially in the west and along the seaboard; hundreds of the landed gentry were involved in ruin; thousands of farmers of the better class became bankrupt; the dense cottar multitudes were literally lifted up from the soil, and cast adrift, the waifs and strays of a far-reaching tempest. This is not the place to review the measures adopted to meet the dread visitation; if not free from errors, inevitable in a situation of the kind, they were, essentially, and, in the main, successful. Peel was still in office in 1845; well knowing what poverty in Ireland was, he introduced supplies of food into the remote and backward districts, which the energies of commerce could hardly reach; this wise policy saved tens of thousands of lives; as is notorious, he repealed the corn laws in the interest of the afflicted country. The Government of Lord John Russell had succeeded him in 1846; it had to confront an emergency infinitely worse; it followed, in many respects, the example of Peel, who had established ‘relief works’ in many counties; but it did not assist the most impoverished parts of Ireland with food through the agency of the State; this possibly was a real mistake. Nevertheless, it manfully and humanely met the tremendous crisis; it is easy to censure some of its acts, for instance, the wasteful and useless public works it set on foot, and the gigantic outdoor relief it was compelled to lavish; but millions in starvation were thrown on its hands; and the poor law, only lately in operation, could not cope with universal distress. On the whole, the statesmen in power did their duty wisely and well; thousands of unhappy victims succumbed, indeed, to famine, and to dire diseases following in its train; but Ireland as a people was saved; assuredly she could not have saved herself. A word, too, must be said on the magnificent charity which flowed in from many lands into the community in its woe. England had turned in sympathy towards Ireland in the season of distress which had followed the Peace; she bestowed great sums on her, in 1845-46, through private subscription. The United States, France, Germany, and Italy joined in the good work; even the Ottoman Empire was not behindhand.

I must dwell for a moment on the conduct and the position of the classes connected with the land during this appalling trial. The attitude of the landed gentry was much the same as it had been at an infinitely less disastrous crisis; but, on the whole, it was marked by nobler and more attractive features. The charity of the great landlords of Ireland was most praiseworthy; many devoted large sums for the support of the poor on their lands by instituting fine works of enclosure and drainage; some, I know, even mortgaged their estates for this very purpose. Hundreds of the lesser gentry, stricken down as they were, imitated their superiors as well as they could; old divisions were forgotten in the common misfortune; spite of the interested lies of a calumnious faction, as an order of men they acted extremely well. One of their bitterest enemies, who wrote at the time, has placed it on record, ‘that the resident landlords and their families did, in many cases, devote themselves to the task of saving these 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.’[47] Many, however, of the Irish landlords, as was to be expected, looked hopelessly on at the misery around them; this was the case with feeble and incapable men, and the sight has always been seen in grave social crises; it was but in conformity with our frail and imperfect nature. A certain number, moreover, of the class had recourse to severe measures to remove from their lands the masses of wretchedness crowded upon them; the process of eviction became too frequent; hundreds of families were in this way dispossessed of their holdings. These acts of harshness were certainly to be deplored; but it was almost universally believed that the cottar in Ireland could not live from the land after the failure of almost his only means of subsistence; it must be added that, in this very matter, the conduct of Parliament and the Government was by many degrees more severe. A strict test of destitution had to be applied; a law was passed that, as a condition of obtaining relief, no person possessing more than a quarter of an acre of land should be entitled to support from the State; thousands of families abandoned their homes, through the effects of this measure; for one evicted by a landlord, fifty perhaps were practically evicted by this stern policy. The law was possibly required in the terrible circumstances of the time; but it was condemned by the Lord-Lieutenant, Lord Bessborough, a great Irish peer, and an able man; at all events, it justified, to a considerable extent, all that could be laid to the charge of a few Irish landlords whose acts were most unfairly denounced by many writers, and were falsely described as common to the great body of the class. For the rest, as I have said, the land system was broken up in many districts; and not only the owners but the occupiers of the soil suffered cruelly from the highest to the lowest grade.

After the first months of the famine, the immense exodus of the Irish race, as it has fitly been called, began. The population fled from the country in hundreds of thousands; some found a home in England and in our Australian colonies; nine-tenths, probably, in the great Republic of the West. The sufferings of numbers of the emigrants were terribly severe; huddled together in the ill-found vessels of the time, hundreds perished before they beheld the lands they were seeking; that some check was not placed on the greed of the merchants, who subjected these victims to horrors like those of the Middle Passage, was certainly the worst mistake of the Government of the day. During the agony of the famine there was comparatively little crime; the minds of men were engrossed by a dire calamity; but in a few months Whiteboyism had been again aroused; there was a widespread outbreak of agrarian disorder followed by the abortive rising of 1848. The time was now ripe, in the judgment of even leading statesmen, for making another of the great experiments on the Irish land, which had been their policy since the age of the Tudors. Many of the Irish landed gentry had been ruined; the estates of many were heavily charged with debt, in part caused by extravagance in the past, but chiefly by large provisions made for their families in more prosperous times, especially during the period of the high prices of the war.[48] The object of the Government—and Peel concurred—was to make a clean sweep of the embarrassed owners, and to transfer their lands to a new order of men; ‘English and Scottish capital was to be attracted to the Irish soil;’ the Irish landlord was to be ‘sold out cheap;’ his successor was to be a person fit ‘to discharge the duties of property;’ the ‘regeneration of Ireland’ was to be the magnificent result.[49] The sale of encumbered estates in Ireland had from various causes been a slow and a costly process, an Act was run through Parliament with scarcely an expression of dissent,[50] making the process as rapid and inexpensive as the wit of man could devise; a Commission was appointed to carry the law into effect; and intending purchasers were to be given an indefeasible title to any lands they might acquire. This was a strong measure, but it was not nearly all; the concurrent rights of the tenants in the estates to be sold were absolutely ignored, and left without protection; the new possessors were empowered to destroy them if they pleased. The results were such as might have been looked for when lands were forced into the market wholesale, when Ireland was still reeling from the strokes of a terrible famine, and agricultural ruin was seen everywhere. The Commission acted as such tribunals invariably act when skilfully selected to carry out a policy; it addressed itself to its task of ‘selling land cheap;’ it was egged on by the Lord-Lieutenant of the day; and it sacrificed estates, in scores of instances, at less than half their value. This iniquitous proceeding went on for years, until the market for land in Ireland righted itself at last; but the Encumbered Estates Act was often renewed; about a sixth part of the lands of Ireland has been transferred by these means. As the result many of the Irish gentry, who might have tided over the crisis, were beggared and cast on the world penniless; and confiscation from above had its counterpart in confiscation from below; the partial joint-ownership of thousands of the occupiers of the soil was ruthlessly annihilated in numbers of cases. And what were the consequences of this scheme of spoliation and wrong, which English politicians would never have thought of but for their traditional contempt of the rights of property in land in Ireland? English and Scottish capital, indeed, reached the Irish soil; but it reached it in the form of large mortgages, a heavy drain on the country’s resources; the English and Scottish purchasers of the Irish land were a mere handful of men. The estates, in fact, transferred under the Encumbered Estates Acts, as a rule, passed into the ownership of jobbers, speculators, and mortgagees, people without the associations old possession ensures; they have formed, as a class, harsh and exacting landlords, the true successors of the almost defunct middleman; they are responsible for much that is bad in Irish landed relations of late years. A huge confiscation, in a word, failed, as those of Elizabeth and Cromwell failed before; the fact ought to be a warning to public men, who have been parading theories about the Irish land—strewn as this has been with monuments of misdeeds and errors—as false and more dangerous than those which produced the Encumbered Estates Acts.[51]

The exodus had, by 1851, reduced the population of Ireland by nearly two millions of souls; this decline has continued ever since; the population which, in 1846, was considerably more than eight millions, is now, we have seen, only about four and a half millions. In 1852 an agitation sprang up, which might have wrought a great change in Irish landed relations, had it not been brought by mere accident to an untimely end. The Report of the Devon Commission, I have said, had troubled Ulster; the Famine had driven peasants, in tens of thousands, from their homes; the operation of the Encumbered Estates Act was destroying their concurrent rights in their holdings. At the General Election of 1852 Ireland returned a large party of representatives to the House of Commons pledged to vindicate the claims of the tenant farmers; these were expressed in a demand that has been called the ‘Three F’s,’ ‘Fair Rent,’ ‘Fixity of Tenure,’ and ‘Free Sale,’ a mode of occupation which had been largely secured by the Custom of Ulster, and to which O’Connell had given his sanction. The Government of Lord Derby was now in office; it had brought in measures which, in some degree, would have legalised the rights of the Irish tenant; but the Ministry was defeated, partly through an intrigue;[52] the cause of the Irish farmer was baffled and kept in suspense for years, largely owing to dissensions and treachery on the part of some of the Irish members. By this time the country had begun to revive, and to throw off the worst effects of the Famine; vast depopulated tracts had been opened to new husbandry; the land had been set free, over an immense area, from the incubus of a mass of wretchedness which had preyed on it, and had completely disorganised the land system, unnaturally forcing up rent and cutting down wages. Under these conditions the statesmen in power, already expecting great things from the Encumbered Estates Act, believed that the Irish land system would right itself, and that it was unnecessary to consider or to protect the rights of the tenant classes; these would either disappear, or would be fairly adjusted in the improved landed relations that were being formed. At all events, there was no legislation to secure these claims; the scanty legislation, that dealt with the Irish land, was unfavourable, in many ways, to these, and endeavoured to assimilate Irish to English tenures, as Tudor lawyers had done three centuries before; and Lord Palmerston, for a long time the head of the State, discouraged Irish tenant right, in more than one speech, and declared that it only meant landlord wrong, unwise utterances that showed he did not understand the subject. At the same time, the policy of clearing the land for cultivators of a capitalist class, able to occupy and do justice to large farms, was generally advocated in high places; more than one Lord-Lieutenant announced that nature had made Ireland a great grazing tract, and that her petty occupiers were little better than a social nuisance.[53]

For some time it seemed as though the forecasts made by the great majority of our statesmen would prove correct. The immense emigration from Ireland to the United States had important results, unfortunate in many respects; but the uplifting of redundant millions from the soil greatly contributed to the country’s welfare. Holdings were consolidated over very large areas, a beneficent process, if humanely carried out; a certain number of Englishmen and Scotsmen rented large farms; the progress of husbandry of all kinds was distinct; a vast field for agriculture, really worthy of the name, was opened. A new standard for the management of land was, in fact, set up; at the same time a few purchasers, under the Encumbered Estates Acts, laid out considerable sums in improving their estates; the Treasury made large advances to many Irish landlords; these did much in works of enclosure, draining, planting, and the like. Ireland began to wear a new aspect in several counties, especially in the more thriving parts of the southern provinces; the ruins made by the Famine, indeed, caused hideous eyesores, in wrecks of villages and the remains of peasant dwellings; but the mud hovels of the cottar population had largely disappeared, and the habitations of farmers of the better class very markedly improved. The economic conditions of landed relations became more conducive to prosperity than they had ever been before; rents fell considerably during a series of years, as the intense competition for land diminished; though they gradually rose in the course of time, they never reached the excessive rates of 1840-45; and the wages of labour greatly increased, and attained a level that, happily, has since been preserved. Many circumstances concurred to quicken and augment this unquestionable social and material progress. Agricultural prices were high from about 1852 onward; Free Trade was as yet adding to the wealth of Ireland; and there was a long succession of good harvests, the most important element in her general welfare. The railway system, too, introduced of late years, opened a number of new markets to her products, and greatly facilitated their access to British markets. At the same time the turnip replaced the potato over hundreds of thousands of acres; farm machinery greatly improved in Ireland; the importation of the best stock from England and Scotland had excellent results, and almost transformed the old breeds of Irish farming animals. An era of prosperity, in a word, had seemed to dawn on Ireland; and though agrarian disorder had not disappeared, the Whiteboy secret societies were greatly broken up, and political agitation well-nigh ceased.

In these circumstances, it was a common belief in England that ‘the Irish difficulty,’ as it was called, was passing away, and that the ‘Hibernia Pacata’ had at last become a happy reality. Yet the progress and tranquillity of this brief period were largely superficial and even deceptive; fires were still alive beneath the smouldering ashes. The partial prosperity of Ireland mainly depended on good harvests and high prices; it was interrupted, even in these years, by two or three seasons of distress. Notwithstanding the widespread consolidation of farms, and the removal from the soil of indigent millions, the land still, for the most part, remained in the possession of a mere peasantry; very few of the English and Scottish capitalist farmers settled in Ireland, and really throve; the great majority left the country, like the ‘Englishry’ of a bygone age. And though things wore a serene aspect, the inherent vices of the land system continued to exist; in some respects they increased, or were more painfully felt. The old divisions of race and faith between the owners and the occupiers of the soil remained; they had but little changed and even had perhaps widened; much had happened to keep the landed classes more apart than before. The new purchasers, under the Encumbered Estates Acts, were, we have seen, often hard-fisted and grasping landlords; they raised their rents, without scruple, in too many instances; standing on the letter of the law, they too often ignored the partial joint-ownership in their farms of their tenants; they had sometimes recourse to unjust and severe evictions. The old landlords, too, never recovered from the effects of the Famine; they were overshadowed by the bureaucracy of the Castle, which, for many years, had been growing in power; they thus became an order of men with privileges, but without authority, in the midst of inferiors, who had little sympathy with them, a dangerous position like that of the French seigneurie in the later years of the eighteenth century—a position described by Tocqueville in very striking language. At the same time the peasantry stood aloof from them more than in the days of their fathers; and though they remained quiescent for years, as has often happened in Irish history, there were causes for this increasing estrangement. They were no longer the grossly ignorant multitude of fifty years before; education had made some way among them, though in this respect they were still backward; they felt more acutely all that was hard in their lot, like the French peasantry before the great Revolution of 1789-94. This sentiment, however, owed its principal force to sentiments engendered in far distant lands. The thousands of the exodus had left their country with memories embittered against some Irish landlords, and, notably, against the British Government; a new Ireland was rising across the Atlantic; the emigrants and their sons were in constant communication with the old Ireland once their home; socialistic ideas as regards the land, blending with dislike of the superiors and the rulers, under whom they lived, were gradually diffused among the Irish peasantry. The economic conditions, too, of landed relations by degrees made these feelings more general and intense. Rents were rising as the wealth of the country increased, though, except in the cases of the new landlords, and of a very few surviving middlemen, they were, as a rule, by no means excessive. Simultaneously a concurrence of causes had extinguished leasehold tenures in most parts of Ireland, and had reduced the status of the Irish farmer to that of a mere tenant at will, liable to be dispossessed by a notice to quit, at the mercy, in fact, of the lord of the soil. And, meanwhile, the equitable rights of the occupiers as a class, due to improvements, and to sums paid for the goodwill of farms, had been increasing to an immense extent; and yet a grievous wrong—they were not even recognised by law. Law and fact had long been sharply clashing in landed relations; there was much that was essentially bad in the land system; and agrarian trouble and crime was on the increase.

The mind of England had turned away from Ireland after the petty outbreak of 1848; it charged the Irish community with ungrateful folly, as it recollected the charity lavished during the Famine. This sentiment was replaced by what was worse, indifference; throughout this period—from 1850 to 1868—Parliament gave little attention to the affairs of Ireland. British statesmen continued to pin their faith to their policy; they disregarded ominous symptoms on the increase; Ireland was rapidly becoming more prosperous; the claims of the Irish tenant farmer were a delusion, or worse. This apathy was augmented by the state of the representation of Ireland in these years; this was in a feeble, even a degraded condition; and largely owing to the authority of Cardinal Cullen, who prohibited the Irish priesthood from taking any part in politics, agitation, I have said, had become a mere tradition of the past. Yet the causes I have glanced at were silently at work, which ultimately were to lead to grave social troubles. The first sign of disturbance was seen in a little outbreak, the result of a conspiracy hatched by one of the rebels of 1848, and supported to some extent from America: but the ‘Phoenix plot,’ as it was called, almost at once collapsed; the Government thought it hardly worthy of notice. Another and much more formidable conspiracy was matured in 1864-65; and though it was put down with little difficulty in time, it showed that there was much that was peccant in the state of Ireland; and it deeply affected the minds of Englishmen, aroused as it were out of a fool’s paradise. The millions of the Irish race in the Far West were passionately appealed to by leaders, not without parts, to assist in a crusade against ‘landlordism,’ and British rule in Ireland; they gave the movement very general support; they found numerous allies in thousands of Irishmen disbanded after the great conflict between the North and the South. The Fenian conspiracy was launched on its course; its directors made skilful attempts to debauch whole regiments, and to stir up the passions of the mob in many of the towns of Ireland; and they especially turned their attention to the mass of the peasantry. Here, however, their policy was injudicious and ill-conceived; they promised the Irish land as a spoil to those who would join the ranks of the ‘patriot Irish army;’ but all this alarmed the occupiers of the soil, whose only object was to acquire a better mode of tenure for their farms, and who rightly thought the Fenian movement made their possessions insecure, a belief generally encouraged by the Catholic priesthood. A short-lived rising, conducted by a few American soldiers, and backed by the rabble of a few villages and towns, found no real support in Ireland, and was finally quelled in 1867; but in England there was a spurt of Fenian disorder, and this, though easily quenched, made a profound impression. It was generally felt in England and Scotland that, notwithstanding the optimism of a generation of public men, there was still much that was rotten in the state of Ireland, and that this should be removed by large and searching reforms. The chief sign of this change in British opinion was seen in the result of the General Election of 1868; Mr. Gladstone, who, hitherto, had taken comparatively little part in Irish affairs, but who, with his keen instinct of every turn in the public mind, had been vehemently enlarging on the wrongs of Ireland, was placed in power with a great majority, and at once addressed himself to the task of Irish reform.[54]