Part 57 (1/2)
A German Protestant, Dr. Julius Rodenberg, writing in 1861, expressed his astonishment at the sight of Ireland's poverty, as he saw it in the streets of Dublin, although he had doubtless read a great deal about it previously. ”You are in a country,”
he says, ”whence people emigrate by thousands, while fields, of such an extent and power of production as would support them all, lie fallow.”
And with respect to the progress already made, M. de Beaumont had remarked many years before that in Ireland a certain relative progress was quite compatible with the continued existence of pauperism among the lower cla.s.ses. ”One single cause,” he remarks, ”suffices to explain why the agricultural population becomes poorer, while the prosperity of the rich is on the increase: it is that all improvement in the land is profitable solely to the proprietor, who exacts more rent from the farmer in proportion as he works the land into a better state.”
Since M. de Beaumont wrote, the pauperism in the cities has a.s.sumed a more wretched and repulsive form, in consequence of the crowding there of poor peasants who had been evicted from their small farms and fled to the nearest city or town with the hope of finding there at least charity.
”For the last ten years,” wrote Abbe Perraud, in 1864, ”there has been taking place in the large cities an acc.u.mulation of poor as fatal to their health as to their morality. They are mostly country people whom eviction has driven from the country, who have been unable to emigrate, and who were unwilling to shut themselves up immediately in the workhouses. The resources they procure for themselves, by doing odd work, are so completely insufficient, that it is impossible to be surprised at their dest.i.tution.”
Dr. Rodenberg, describing the state of the poor country people crowded in the ”Liberties of Dublin,” says of the rooms in which they live: ”In those holes the most wretched and pitiable laborers imaginable live; they often lie by hundreds together on the bare ground.”
Such citations might be sadly multiplied, but those given are sufficient as descriptive of the state of the poor Irish in the cities. Let us now see how the peasants live in the country in many parts of Ireland:
II. ”The dest.i.tution of the agricultural cla.s.ses,” writes Abbe Perraud, from personal observation, ”in order to be rightly appreciated, must be seen in the boggy and mountainous regions of Munster, of Connaught, and of the western portion of Ulster.
”The ordinary dwelling of the small tenant, of the day-laborer, in that part of Ireland, answers with the utmost precision the description of it twenty years ago given by M. de Beaumont: 'Let the reader picture to himself four walls of dried mud, which the rain easily reduces to its primitive condition; a little thatch or a few cuts of turf form the roof; a rude hole in the roof forms the chimney, and more frequently there is no other issue for the smoke than the door of the dwelling itself. One solitary room holds father, mother, grandfather, and children. No furniture is to be seen; a single litter, usually composed of gra.s.s or straw, serves for the whole family. Five or six half- naked children may be seen crouching over a poor fire. In the midst of them lies a filthy pig, the only inhabitant at its ease, because its element is filth itself.'
”Into how many dwellings of this kind have we not ourselves penetrated--especially in the counties of Kerry, Mayo, and Donegal--more than once obliged to stoop down to the ground, in order to penetrate into these cabins, the entrance to which is so low that they look more like the burrows of beasts than dwellings made for man!
”Upon the road from Kilkenny to Grenaugh, in the vicinity of those beautiful lakes, at the entrance of those parks, to which, for extent and richness, neither England nor Scotland can probably offer any thing equal, we have seen other dwellings. A few branches of trees, interlaced and leaning upon the slope in the road, a few cuts of turf, and a few stones picked up in the fields, compose these wretched huts--less s.p.a.cious, and perhaps less substantial, than that of the American savage.”
At the time of Abbe Perraud's visit, a correspondent of the Dublin Saunders News-Letters, who was commissioned to inquire into the condition of the peasants, gave the following reply, which, as the abbe justly remarks, is but the faithful echo of all the descriptions made within the last half-century:
”The inhabitants of Erris appear to be the most wretched of all human beings. Their cabins, their patched and tattered clothes, their broken-down gait--every thing bears witness to their poverty. Their beds consist of a few bits of wood crossed one upon the other, supported by two heaps of stones, and covered with straw; their whole bedclothes a miserable, worn-out quilt, without any blankets . . . . But there is nothing in Ireland like the habitations which the people of the village of Fallmore have made for themselves, who have been evicted by Mr. Palmer.
They are composed of ma.s.ses of granite, picked up on the sh.o.r.e, and roughly laid one by the other. These cabins are so low that a man cannot stand upright in them; so narrow that they can hardly hold three or four persons.”
After all, F. Lavelle was guilty of no exaggeration in stating that the hut of the Hottentot was better than that of the Irish peasant. But, in the district of Gweedore, northeast of County Donegal, the state of the peasantry is more deplorably wretched still than in any other part of Ireland. At the time of a celebrated parliamentary inquiry in to the matter in 1858, a Londonderry newspaper stated that ”there are in Donegal about four thousand adults, of both s.e.xes, who are obliged to go barefoot during the winter, in the ice and snow--pregnant women and aged people in habitual danger of death from the cold . . . .
It is rare to find a man with a calico s.h.i.+rt; but the distress of the women is still greater, if that be possible. There are many hundreds of families in which five or six grown-up women have among them no more than a single dress to go out in . . . .
There are about five hundred families who have but one bed each-- in which father, mother, and children, without distinction of age or s.e.x, are crowded pell-mell together.”
If from the dwellings and clothing of the peasantry we pa.s.s to their food, there is no need of adding any thing to what was said on this point when describing the periodical famines. One detail, however, not yet mentioned, deserves to be recorded:
”In the district of Gweedore,” says Abbe Perraud, ”our eyes were destined to witness the use of sea-weed. Stepping once into a cabin, in which there was no one but a little girl charged with the care of minding her younger brothers, and getting ready the evening meal, we found upon the fire a pot full of doulamaun ready cooked; we asked to taste it, and some was handed to us on a little platter.
”This weed, when well dressed, produces a kind of viscous juice; it has a brackish taste, and savors strongly of salt water. We were told in the country that the only use of it is to increase, when mixed with potatoes, the ma.s.s of aliment given to the stomach. The longer and more difficult the work of the stomach, the less frequent are its calls. It is a kind of compromise with hunger; the people are able neither to suppress it nor to satisfy it; they endeavor to cheat it. We have also been a.s.sured that this weed cannot be eaten alone; it must be mixed with vegetables, since of itself it has no nutritive properties whatever.”
How long is such a state of things likely to continue? It has already existed long enough to be a disgrace to the much-vaunted benevolence of the nineteenth century. A sure and radical remedy must be found for it; and, as it has been already so long delayed, it should be found the more promptly.
It seems that the tenure of land lies at the bottom of the question, and that respect for what are called ”established rights” offers the main difficulty. Those rights, indeed, were founded on the cruellest wrong and the most flagrant injustice; but as possession is ”nine points of the English law,” and so long a time has pa.s.sed since the land changed hands, prescription must be admitted and let them be called rights; nor can any man in his senses ask for a violent subversion of society for the sake of righting an old wrong.
But it has ever been a maxim of jurisprudence that summum jus, summa injuria; and this axiom finds its full explanation in the present case, when it is considered that the jus is on the side of a comparatively small number of men, for the most part absentee landlords, while the injuria leans to the great ma.s.s of the primitive owners of the soil. The time-honored policy of the English Government, that all the open abuses of landlordism should be watched over and protected with the most jealous care, while, on the other hand, the wretched farmer and cottier is supposed to have no rights to defend and guard, should be abandoned at once and forever, with a firmness that can leave no room for doubt or equivocation, if the restoration of confidence on the part of the Irish is esteemed any thing worth.
But, if for no other motive, at least for the sake of securing peace and order in Ireland, a remedy must be found. There is no reason why the Irish should longer remain a nation of paupers; and, although some may still pretend that the fault and its remedy lie with themselves, unprejudiced men will readily acknowledge that the fault lay first, at least, at England's door --a fact which the London Times has conceded often and proclaimed loudly enough.
Let British statesmen, then, devise proper means for such an end without social commotion, with as little disturbance of private rights as possible; for the object is an imperious necessity. It seems that the latest law enacted with this view is not the measure that was required; is totally inadequate in its provisions, scope, and extent. In such a case it is always open to legislators to introduce a new and more satisfactory measure; and moral force will surely bring this about, provided it is true to itself. We confess to having no scheme of our own to set forth; but Irishmen are free, nay ent.i.tled, to speak, to write on, and discuss the subject; and a serious, steady, but lawful agitation of the question will surely find its true and final solution. The last Galway election, notwithstanding the temporary triumph of Judge Keogh, was a beginning in the right direction.
There is no need here of revolution, of what the French call une jaquerie, of arming the populace for the purpose of violently ejecting the great land-owners. No Irishman has ever stood for so calamitous a remedy. The aid of the Internationalists will certainly never be called in by the true children of Erin for any purpose whatever. It seems that the great and holy Pontiff, Pius IX., made this remark to the Prince of Wales, at their last interview at the Vatican, and, according to the report, the prince fully admitted its truth as far, at least, as he, by any outward sign, could show.
The question is one of pure justice, to be settled within the limits of order and law; and surely, when all admit that the evil is so crying, that a remedy must be found, one will be found, which, while it does no real injury to any person, will bring comfort and relief to the most deserving and suffering race of men--the Irish peasantry. We will soon see how.
But the Irishman is not only physically dest.i.tute; he is also dest.i.tute mentally; and, if the first case calls for a prompt remedy, the second is no less urgent. Pauperism and ignorance were the two terrible engines so long worked by England for the degradation and final destruction of the Irish race. Our readers have seen how persistently was education, of any kind, refused to the natives. The Universities of Dublin and Drogheda in the fourteenth century, the cathedral schools, founded by the Anglo- Normans, in the same age, carefully excluded the Irish from their benefits. And, when the Reformation set in, with its long series of oppressions, no Catholic could share in the new foundations of the Tudors and the Stuarts without first abjuring his religion. Penal statute after penal statute made of all the s.h.i.+fts, to which the Irish were driven in order to educate their children, so many crimes, punishable by death or transportation.