80 CHAPTER III. SECTION VIII. Seventh Class of Irish Absentees." If Irishmen appointed to offices in Ireland cannot be justified in abandoning that country, so on the principle of justice, such Englishmen as are appointed officers in Ireland are bound to reside there, as the proper sphere of their exertions. No just or economical government would allow such men deputies, or agents, to do their business, while the officers immediately appointed utterly abandon it. A public officer may be well allowed to have others under him to enable him to discharge his duties, when they are too laborious or too numerous; but paying men from £1000 to £2000 a year for doing nothing, is a gross libel on the sense of mankind, and a robbery, however it may be legalized, of the people's money, that might be otherwise beneficially expended. The brave people of America, as in most other things manage their business under this head, with due discretion: "No man, or set of men, are entitled to exclusive or separate public emolument or privileges from the community, but in consideration of public services, which are not descendable; neither ought the offices of magistrate, legislator, or judge, or any other public officer, to be hereditary." Declaration of Rights, art. IV. CHAPTER III. SECTION IX. Eighth Class of Irish Absentees. This class of absentees was produced by the act of legislative union. If it could be shown, that by their legislating in a foreign land they have done, during the last thirty years, more service to Ireland than the injury their absence has entailed upon her, or than the miseries which they were not able or willing to prevent, we should not have much reason to find fault with this class of necessary absentees. In their individual capacity, the fault may not be theirs; under present circumstances they may be blameless, parti cularly if they do their duty really to their country, and limit the period of their absence to the time of these duties; but as a body, it may not be an incorrect opinion to think, that this class of absentees have been and are the most injurious to Ireland. The one hundred commoners who are forced to leave Ireland for five or six months in the year, without being able even to legislate properly for their country, are generally men so connected with the community, that their presence is of most importance to the trade or manufacture of this country. The expenses attending their election under the corrupt and corrupting system are so monstrous, that they either become bankrupts, or seek for places under government, at the sacrifice of their country, "in order to remunerate themselves!" Those who know anything of Irish affairs, since the union, are aware, that hundreds of instances of this species of apostacy have taken place. Men who, in former days, swore eternal fidelity to Ireland, now show that no act of despotism is too bad for their unfortunate country, only because they have been elevated to high places under government, and placed above those who would never have tarnished the honor of their name, much less the glory of their country, by such acts of vile treachery! Some of these men may have been for a long time honest; they might have been always honest in their native soil; but, the pestiferous breath of the designing and deceitful statesman, who wished to sacrifice Ireland to England, corrupted them, and thus took from the people the last hopes of returning freedom, and increased the already overgrown influence of corrupt power, by giving the people the melancholy intelligence, that the men in whom they confided, sought their confidence only to render them with more effect the slaves of tyrants and despots. Thus, whether the Irish commoners be honest or dishonest, the Irish people must still suffer. If they be honest, not being able to do anything effectual out of their country, towards what they could do in it, their absence is a positive loss to themselves, and rarely any good to the Irish people. And, if they be not honest, they have a golden opportunity of getting eufficient wages for betraying the interests of Ireland! "But, alas! for his country-her pride is gone by, MOORE. CHAPTER IV. Have the bad Effects of Absenteeism been diminished or increased by the Union? "But vain her voice, till better days Dawn on those yet remembered rays."-BYRON. Whilst every candid man must admit, that we do not now hear of those atrocious invasions, confiscations, and forfeitures, which disgraced the first ages of England's misrule in Ireland-yet will the most violent advocate of the legislative union say, that absenteeism has not increased to an alarming extent, since that measure was carried? Franklin says that the following things diminish a nation : 1st, being conquered, 2nd, loss of territory, 3rd, loss of trade, 4th, loss of food, 5th, introduction of slavery, 6th, bad government, or loss of good government, which he considers the greatest loss of all! To inquire how many of these losses Irishmen and Ireland have now to sustain, shall be more immediately the object of our inquiries in the second part of this Essay-but we ask the economists who advocate absenteeism, has not Ireland been diminished more and more every day, by the unnatural effects which it has produced? "Previously to the act of union, (says Lady Morgan), absenteeism, though encouraged by the geographical position of the county, and promoted by some inveterate habits derived from ancient abuse, was principally confined among the native Irish, to a few individuals, whose ill, un derstood vanity tempted them to seek for a consequence abroad, which is ever denied to the unconnected stranger, a consequence which no extravagant expense can purchase. With few exceptions, therefore, the malady was confined to the great English proprietors of forfeited estates, whose numbers must, in the progress of events, have beeu dimi nished by the dissipations inseparable from unbounded wealth, and the growth of commercial and manufactural fortunes. It might in some cases indeed be both a vice and a ridicule in the absent; but had the nation in other respects been well used and well governed, it would have been of no serious evil to those who remained at home; but the act of union, whatever may be its other operations, meritorious or vicious, at once converted a local disease into a national pestilence. The centre of business and of pleasure, the mart of promotion, and the fountain of favor, were by this one fatal act at once removed into a foreign land; ambition, avarice, dissipation, and refinement, all combined to seduce the upper classes into a desertion of their homes and country; and as each succeeding ornament of the Irish capital abandoned his hotel, as each influential landlord quitted his castle in the country, or his house in the city, a new race of vulgar upstarts, of uneducated and capricious despots, usurped their place, spreading a barbarous moregu over the once elegant society of the metropolis, and banishing peace and security from the mountain and the plain.” 66 Many whom temptation could not hitherto seduce from home, were now forced by fear to fly; and every passion, every motive combined to drive from the happy land, all those who were possessed of the means of flight. It is in vain, that patriotism struggles, and conscience arrests the departing step of those who yet linger behind in painful vacillation. Self-preservation must and will in the end prevail-whatever is educated, whatever is tasteful, whatever is liberal will too probably fly a land where the insolence of official rank supplies the amenity of an admitted aristocracy, and where vulgar wealth, acquired by political subserviency, and too frequently unaccompanied by knowledge, holds talent at arms length, and rejects wit from its coteries as dangerous to its own dull supremacy, and hostile to the repose of its own "fat contented ignorance." Philanthropists, disgusted with the perpetual spectacle of hopeless wretchedness and irremediable despair, will seek relief by flying the misery they cannot mitigate; the enlightened and the liberal will turn with horror from the country, where laws of exception have been adopted into the permanent code, and where the necessitated violence is only met by judicial severity and legal murder. The landlord, wearied by his contests with the clergy, and intimidated by the armed and masked opposition of his tenantry, will be contented to purchase repose by abandoning at once the soil and its produce to the proctors, the police and their chiefs. The sbirri |