RESULTS OF MISRULE AND OPPRESSION.

333

In his Short View of the State of Ireland in 1727,' the same accurate observer and able writer says:

As to the first cause of a nation's riches being the fertility of the soil, as well as the temperature of the climate, we have no reason to complain.

In the second, which is the industry of the people, our misfortune is not altogether owing to our own fault, but to a million of discourage

ments.

The conveniency of ports and havens, which Nature has bestowed so liberally on this kingdom, is of no more use to us than a beautiful prospect to a man shut up in a dungeon.

As to shipping of its own, Ireland is so utterly unprovided, that of all the excellent timber cut down within these fifty or sixty years it can hardly be said that the nation has received the benefit of one valuable house to dwell in, or one ship to trade in.

Ireland is the only kingdom I ever heard or read of, either in ancient or modern story, which was denied the liberty of exporting their native commodities and manufactures whenever they pleased, except to countries at war with their own prince or state: yet this privilege, by the superiority of mere power, is refused us in the most momentous parts of commerce; besides an Act of Navigation, to which we never consented, pinned down upon us, and rigorously executed; and a thousand other unexampled circumstances, as grievous as they are invidious to mention.

It is too well known that we are forced to obey some laws we never consented to. Thus we are in the condition of patients who have physic sent them by doctors at a distance, strangers to their constitution and the nature of their disease; and thus we are forced to pay 500 per cent. to decide our properties: in all which we have likewise the honour to be distinguished from the whole race of mankind.

As to the improvement of land, those few who attempt that or planting, through covetousness or want of skill, generally leave things worse than they were, neither succeeding in trees nor hedges, and, by running into the fancy of grazing, after the manner of the Scythians, are every day depopulating the country.

We are so far from having a king to reside among us that even the viceroy is generally absent four-fifths of his time in the govern

ment.

The Appeal to the British House of Peers.' 6th George I. c. 5, enacted

in 1719.

No strangers from other countries make this a part of their travels, where they can expect to see nothing but scenes of misery and desolation. Those who have the misfortune to be born here have the least title to any considerable employment, to which they are seldom preferred but upon a political consideration.

One-third part of the rents of Ireland is spent in England; which, with the profit of employments, pensions, appeals, journeys of pleasure or health, education at the inns of court and both universities, remittances at pleasure, the pay of all superior officers in the army, and other incidents, will amount to a full half of the income of the whole kingdom, all clear profit to England.

Further on he adds :

A stranger visiting Ireland would be apt to think himself travelling in Lapland or Ysland, rather than in a country so favoured by Nature as ours, both in fruitfulness of soil and temperature of climate. The miserable dress and diet, and dwelling of the people; the general desolation in most parts of the kingdom; the old seats of the nobility and gentry all in ruins, and no new ones in their stead; the families of farmers, who pay great rents, living in filth and nastiness upon buttermilk and potatoes, without a shoe or stocking to their feet, or a house so convenient as an English hog-sty to receive them. There is not one argument used to prove the riches of Ireland, which is not a logical demonstration of its poverty. The rise of our rents is squeezed out of the very blood, and vitals, and clothes, and dwellings of the tenants, who live worse than English beggars. The lowness of interest, in all other countries a sign of wealth, is in us a proof of misery; there being no trade to employ any borrower.2

What a great deal of this have we not seen in our own timethe tillers of the soil serfs to the proprietors; the farmer's industry checked by the fact that he felt he was not working for himself; great tracts of land laid down in grass which might have been much better used as tillage; the persistent absence of the sovereign from this part of the royal dominions; the considerable employments of the country systematically conferred on English and Scotch-not Irishmen; one-third part of the rental of Ireland spent out of the country by absentees; the lowness of

1 Swift's Works, vol. vii. pp. 115 to 117.

* Ibid. 118.

LAND-LETTING SYSTEM OF LAST CENTURY.

335

interest,' or, in other words, the money of the farmers, instead of being invested in the land, lent by them to the banks at 1 per cent. and transmitted to England to be employed as capital there; the miserable dress and diet of the people, their wretched dwellings, their want of employment, their chronic condition of famine and fever, all of which have made travellers visiting Ireland again and again describe it as a land of misery; and, though last not least, that which is naturally omitted from the Dean's catalogue, the church of a small minority, enjoying all the power and wealth and patronage, imposed on a reluctant nation!

Happily, all this has now begun to pass away-happily for Ireland, but still more so for the empire, of which Ireland is an integral part.

CHAPTER LXXI.

LAND-LETTING SYSTEM AT THE COMMENCEMENT OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ORIGIN OF MIDDLEMEN-CONACRE-THE MIDDLEMEN DESCRIBED; THEIR FORMER IDLE, EXTRAVAGANT HABITS; THEIR OPPRESSION OF THE TENANTRY-COMMON ERROR ABOUT LONG LEASES AT LOW RENTS IN IRELAND EXPOSED THE GRAZIERS; THEIR LARGE HOLDINGS AT LOW RENTS FORMER PROVISION TRADE OF IRELAND; OF CORK-AGRICULTURAL IMPROVEMENT NEGLECTED.

OWING to the small value of land in Ireland-land lying in a state of nature, under the system just described-and the miserable condition of the country, the new owners of property about the beginning of the eighteenth century, let their lands very extensively, at low rents, on leases for ever, residing themselves chiefly in England. Their lessees became virtually the head landlords, and are generally regarded as such by writers on the land system of Ireland. These men, in their turn, let to middlemen, on leases of three lives, and these last sublet to the working tenants, on leases of twenty-one or thirty-one years, at

excessively high rents, considering the actual value, and wholly unimproved state of the farms.1

But the subletting did not cease here. The working farmers let off, by the year, a considerable portion of their holdings, in small patches, for potato ground to the cottiers, who paid the most exorbitant rents, and had no choice but to pay them; for they must have paid them or starved. This was the commencement of the wretched system of Conacre, which overspread the land with a miserable, half-starved, half-naked population, to whom existence was a desperate struggle, and whose ranks were decimated almost every year by famine and fever. How they managed to subsist, and how they paid their rents, we shall presently see.

As regards the middlemen, they were men of no industry or exertion; they were merely drawers of rent-a class created by the unhappy circumstances of the times; and by those circumstances were their habits and characters formed and moulded for

many generations. Of the dominant creed (for no 'Papist' could hold land for a term of more than thirty-one years, or at a rent of less than two-thirds of the improved annual value at the time of letting,) they lorded it over the peasantry as the West Indian planter ruled his slaves. Idle, dissolute, and extravagant, their embarrassments became such, that it was a matter of absolute necessity with them to extract as much out of the tenantry as they possibly could extract.2

They are thus described by Arthur Young, in 1779:3— Sometimes they are resident on a part of the land, but very often

1 There were sometimes two sets of middlemen. One, holding from the head landlord, let to another at an enhanced rent, and the latter sublet to the working farmer.

"These observations apply to the middlemen of the last century, and of the commencement of this. Doubtless, even then, there were some exceptions. In our days, up to 1847, when the class ceased to exist, there were many excellent men among them. Fut they all were the instruments and victims of a bad system-a system now belonging to the past.

3 Tour in Ireland,' vol. ii. pt. ii. p. 18.

THE MIDDLEMEN.

337 they are not. Dublin, Bath, London, and the country towns of Ireland contain great numbers of them; the merit of this class is surely ascertained in a moment; there cannot be a shadow of a pretence for the intervention of a man whose single concern with an estate is to deduct a portion from the rent of it. They are, however, sometimes resident on a part of the land they hire, where it is natural to suppose they would work some improvements; it is however very rarely the case. I have in different parts of the kingdom seen farms just fallen in after leases of three lives, of the duration of fifty, sixty, and even seventy years, in which the residence of the principal tenant was not to be distinguished from the cottared fields surrounding it. I was at first much surprised at this, but after repeated observation, I found these men very generally were the masters of packs of wretched hounds, with which they wasted their time and money, and it is a notorious fact, that they are the hardest drinkers in Ireland. Indeed the class of the small country gentlemen, chiefly consisting of these profit renters, seem at present to monopolize that drinking spirit, which was, not many years ago, the disgrace of the kingdom at large: this I conjecture to be the reason why those who might improve are so very far from doing it; but there are still greater objections to them.

Living upon the spot, surrounded by their little under-tenants, they prove the most oppressive species of tyrant that ever lent assistance to the destruction of a country. They relet the land, at short tenures, to the occupiers of small farms, and often give no leases at all. Not satisfied with screwing up the rent to the uttermost farthing, they are rapacious and relentless in the collection of it.

But farther the dependance of the occupier on the resident middleman goes to other circumstances: personal service of themselves, their cars and horses, is exacted for leading turf, hay, corn, gravel, &c., insomuch that the poor under-tenants often lose their own crops and turf, from being obliged to obey these calls of their superiors. Nay, I have even heard these jobbers gravely assert that without under-tenants to furnish cars and teams at half or two-thirds the common price of the country, they could carry on no improvements at all; yet taking a merit to themselves for works wrought out of the sweat and ruin of a pack of wretches, assigned to their plunder by the inhumanity of the landholders.

In a word, the case is reducible to a short compass; intermediate tenants work no improvements; if non-resident they cannot, and if resident they do not; but they oppress the occupiers, and render them as incapable as they are themselves unwilling. The kingdom is an aggregate proof of these facts; for if long leases, at low rents, and profit