toes.' 'Ireland,' continues the same writer, 'would be indeed a rich country, if made the most of, if its trade were not reduced by unnatural restrictions and an Egyptian kind of politics from without, and its agriculture depressed by hard masters from within itself.' 1 This description is amply borne out by other authorities, and it is easy to explain it. The mass of the people became cottiers because in most parts of Ireland it was impossible to gain a livelihood as agricultural labourers or in mechanical pursuits. This impossibility was due to the extreme paucity of circulating capital, and may be chiefly traced to the destruction of Irish manufactures, and to the absence of a considerable class of resident landlords, who would naturally give employment to the poor. The popular remedy in Ireland for the latter evil was an absentee tax, but as most of the absentees lived in England, it was felt by men of sense that such a measure could never obtain the assent of the authorities in that country.2 1 Bush's Hibernia Curiosa, pp. 29-33. Archbishop King, in a letter written in 1719, says: 'The landlords set up their farms to be disposed by cant; and the Papists, who live in a miserable and sordid manner, will always outbid a Protestant. This is that which forces Protestants of all sorts out of this kingdom, since they can have no prospect of living with any comfort in it. I have inquired, and am assured that the peasants in France and Turkey live much better than tenants in Ireland.'-Mant's Hist. of the Irish Church, ii. 332. An able Irish writer gives the following description of the middlemen: A horde of tyrants exists in Ireland in a class of men that are unknown in England, in the multitude of agents to absentees; small proprietors, who are the pure Irish squires; middlemen, who take farms and squeeze out a forced kind of profit by reletting them in small parcels ; lastly, the little farmers themselves, who exercise the same insolence they receive from their superiors on those unfortunate beings who are placed at the extremity of the scale of degradation, the Irish peasantry.'-An Inquiry into the Causes of Popular Discontents in Ireland (1804). 2 In Oct. 1729, at the end of the great famine I have already noticed, Boulter wrote to the Duke of Newcastle: There is a very bad spirit, I fear, artfully spread among all degrees of men The economical evil at the same time was aggravated at every stage by the laws against religion. The facility of selling land, and its value in the market, were unnaturally diminished by the exclusion of all Catholics from competition. Its agricultural condition was enormously impaired by the difficulty of borrowing money on landed security in a poor country, where this form of investment was legally closed against the great majority of the people. All real enterprise and industry among the Catholic tenants was destroyed by the laws which consigned them to utter ignorance, and still more by the law which placed strict bounds to their progress by providing that if their profits ever exceeded a third of their rent, the first Protestant who could prove the fact might take their farm. For reasons which have been often explained, Catholicism is on the whole less favourable to the industrial virtues than Protestantism, but yet the cases of France, of Flanders, and of the northern States of Italy, show that a very high standard of industry may under favourable circumstances be attained in a Catholic country. But in Ireland the debilitating influence of numerous Church holidays, and of a religious encouragement of mendicancy, was felt in a society in which employment was rare, intermittent, and miserably underpaid, and in which Catholic industry was legally deprived of its appropriate rewards. Very naturally, therefore, habits of gross and careless idleness prevailed, amongst us, and the utmost grumbling against England as getting all our money from us, either by trade or otherwise, and this spirit has been heightened by a book lately published here about the absentees. . . . I believe among less intelligent persons they are for taxing the absentees four shillings in the pound; but I am satisfied the men of sense in either House are too wise to make an attempt of that nature, which they know could only exasperate England without even having such a Bill returned to us.'-Boulter's Letters, i. 330. An absentee tax was powerfully advocated by Prior in his List of the Absentees of Ireland. which greatly aggravated the poverty of the nation. At the same time the class of middlemen or large leaseholders was unnaturally encouraged, for while they escaped some of the most serious evils of the landlord, they were guarded by law from all Catholic competition, and accordingly possessed the advantage of monopoly. It was soon discovered that one of the easiest ways for a Protestant to make money was by taking a large tract of country from an absentee landlord at a long lease, and by letting it at rack-rents to Catholic cottiers. The Irish tenant, said a high authority on this subject, speaking of the middleman class,' will not be satisfied unless he has a long lease of lives of forty, fifty, or sixty years, that he may sell it, and 'tis rare to find a tenant in Ireland contented with a farm of moderate size. He pretends he cannot maintain his family with less than 200 acres-nay, if at any distance from town, 200 or 300 acres.' 2 Another influence which aggravated the sufferings of the people was the tendency to turn great tracts of land into pasture, which produced numerous evictions, and greatly restricted the scanty resources of the poor. This tendency is, indeed, not one which can be regarded with unqualified condemnation. It is certain that pasture is the form of agricultural industry which the conditions of soil and climate make most suitable to Ireland. At the time of the wool trade much of the land had taken this form; and even after the English restrictions on Irish wool, want of capital, want of energy, and the profits of the smuggling trade with France, prevented There are a set of people, and these not of inconsiderable figure in the world, who have made it their business to take long leases of farms in abundance in several counties and provinces on purpose to let these out again to underlings.'-Some 13. 2 Ibid. p. 11. any great change.1 Irish beef also was admitted freely to every country except England, and a large and profitable trade was carried on. Besides this, pasture required little skill, and was therefore natural to a country where the people scarcely possessed the rudiments of agricultural knowledge. It required little capital, and was therefore well suited to a country which was extremely poor, in which a great portion of the people were forbidden by law to invest their money in land, and in which, owing to recent confiscations, property was still insecure. It simplified the conditions of property, and therefore had a peculiar attraction to a proprietor who imagined with reason that his tenants were his enemies, and who inherited all the multifarious disadvantages and dangers attached to the position of an Irish landlord. The tendency was artificially strengthened by the very unjust resolution of the Irish House of Commons in 1735, relieving pasture land from the burden of tithes,2 and still more by the penal laws which paralysed the agricultural industry of the Catholics. Their operation in this respect has been well described by Lord Taaffe, a Catholic nobleman, who published in 1766 a valuable pamphlet on the condition of the country. 'No sooner,' he writes, were the Catholics excluded from durable and profitable tenures, than they commenced graziers and laid aside agriculture; they ceased from draining or inclosing their farms and building good houses, as occupations unsuited to the new post assigned them in our national economy. They fell to wasting the lands they were virtually forbid to culti 1 Swift complained very bitterly of this, and added: Ajax was mad when he mistook a flock of sheep for his enemies. But we shall never be sober till we have the same way of thinking.' -Answer to a Memorial of the Poor of Ireland. 2 See p. 201. Crumpe's Essay on the Best Means of Employing the People, p. 245. vate, the business of pasturage being compatible with such a conduct, and requiring also little industry and still less labour in the management. This business also brings quick returns in money, and though its profits be smaller than those arising from agriculture, yet they are more immediate, and much better adapted to the condition of men who are confined to a fugitive property, which can so readily be transferred from one country to another. This pastoral occupation also eludes the vigilance of our present race of informers, as the difficulty of ascertaining a grazier's profits is considerable, and as the proofs of his enjoying more than a third penny profit cannot so easily be made clear in our courts of law. The keeping the lands waste also prevents in a great degree leases in reversion, what Protestants only are qualified to take, and what (by the small temptation to such reversions) gives the present occupant the best title to future renewal. This sort of self-defence in keeping the lands uncultivated had the further consequences of expelling that most useful body of the people called yeomanry in England, and Sculoags in Irelandcommunities of industrious housekeepers who in my own time herded together in large villages and cultivated the lands everywhere, till as leases expired some rich grazier, negotiating privately with a sum of ready money, took their lands over their heads. . . . The Sculoag race, that great nursery of labourers and manufacturers, has been broken and dispersed in every quarter, and we have nothing in lieu but those most miserable wretches on earth, the cottagers-naked slaves who labour without food, and live while they can, without houses or covering, under the lash of merciless and relentless taskmasters.'1 Under these influences the few Catholic landlords 1 Observations on Affairs of Ireland from the Settlement in 1691 to the Present Time, by Viscount Taaffe (Dublin, 1766), pp. 12, 13. See, too, Crawford's Hist. of Ireland, ii. 267. |