CHAPTER XXIX.

Ireland, her Condition and Prospects-The Causes of her Misery— The Remedies for the Evils which afflict her.

THE "Irish Question " is environed with peculiar difficulties. An American might shrink from discussing what has puzzled and baffled Irishmen on both sides of the Atlantic.

The poetic, fancy view of Ireland is a mountain nymph, with flowing garments, wavy ringlets, glowing countenance, enrapt eye, and Venus-like fingers, thrilling the strings of a harp. The prosaic, real view is more like a mother, seated on the mud floor of a bog cabin, clad in rags, with disheveled hair, pinched features, eyes too hot and dry for tears, and skinny fingers, dividing a rotten potato amongst a brood of famishing children. Thanks to some of her orators, they have ceased to rave in fine frenzy about "the first flower of the earth, and the first gem of the sea. "9 All friends of Ireland, native and alien, should stop ranting about "flowers," "gems," "Emerald Isles," "Tara's Halls," "St. Patrick," and such rhapsodies, and come down to the things of time and sense. Potatoes, as a standing dish, may grow stale; but to a starving people they are 66 roast beef and two dollars a day," compared with a surfeit of antiquated heroics. And yet, take up the report of a meeting for the relief of Ireland, whether held in Dublin or Washington, and half of it will be filled with such shining scum. Orators and writers addicted to such whims should be indicted for murdering the Queen's Irish.

The prime cause of Ireland's misery is the oppressive rule of England. For centuries she has been governed by and for the alien few, and not by and for the native many. England first wantonly subdued Ireland; then planted there an alien race and a rival church, to hate, worry, and plunder her; then, by the Catholic Penal Code, steeped her in ignorance and debasement; and finally, by bribery, and against the national will, abolished her Parliament, destroyed her nationality, and reduced her to the condition of a dependent province. Since the days of Cromwell, the ruling English have absorbed the wealth of the country, and carried it away to be expended in other lands. They have annually eaten out the substance of the people, and fled, leaving misery and poverty behind, and casting reproach upon the national character, and offering insult to the national spirit.

Since the Union, the legislation of the British Parliament, in respect to Ireland, has been an almost unbroken series of insults and injuries. I will mention two instances; and they are the very two that England always cites as proofs of her liberality. In 1828-9, the people of Ireland demanded Catholic Emancipation. The boon was granted; but it was accompanied by the disfranchisement of the whole body of fortyshilling freeholders; thus, in revenge, striking from the clectoral body two hundred thousand names, which had aided in wringing the gift from the oppressor. Emancipation, granted on such ungracious terms, exasperated rather than appeased the Irish people. And in that other day, when England felt peculiarly liberal, and was ready to "give everything to everybody," she made Ireland an exception. The Reform bill made an odious distinction in the case of Ireland. England and Wales, with a population of about fourteen millions, were allowed 500 members of the House of Commons. Ireland, with a population of about eight millions, was allowed but 105. Bearing the same ratio as England, Ireland should have had 290. Scotland has two millions four hundred thousand in

habitants, and 53 members. In the same proportion, Ireland would have been entitled to 177. Thus, of the two most benign instances of English legislation over Ireland, during this century, one was accompanied by a positive outrage; the other by a most unjust disparagement.

The Established Church of England, planted by force in Ireland, has done little for it, except to unjustly tax and cruelly treat those who dissent from its ritual, and to foment and aggravate religious feuds. Of the eight millions of Ire-, Of the remaining one and

land, six and a half are Catholics. a half million, not half a million belong to the Establishment. And yet, to take care of this half million, the Establishment has had 4 archbishops, 18 bishops, and 2,000 clergy-drawing annually from this potato-eating people £1,500,000; while the income of the clergy of the seven and a half millions of all denominations has not exceeded £500,000. The whole income of the Irish Establishment, from all sources of revenue, is nearly £2,000,000 annually. An attempt was once made to modify this enormous abuse. After four years of contention in Parliament, during which two ministries were turned out, the bill was shorn of its effective features, in order to pacify the Tory peers, and passed, still leaving the revenues to the Church of England, and the people to the Church of Rome.

But the English Church is only a blotch. The great sore is the Irish landlord system. The misgovernment of the country has conspired with landlordism to drive out capital, and destroy commerce, trade, mining, fishing, and manufacturing, thus throwing the mass of the population upon the land for subsistence. This has increased competition for the hire of the soil to an extent unknown in any other country, and has stimulated a grinding scale of rents, which has descended from the landlords to the middlemen, and from them to the small farmers, and from them to the poor laborers, growing more extortionate as it goes down, till the soil has been cut into minute pieces, which are held by short and uncertain tenures, precluding permanent im

provements, driving the mass of the people to the raising of potatoes, because they are cheap in the cultivation, and prolific in the crop, and yearly turning thousands out to beg, starve, rob, die of disease, or shoot their lessors at the expiration of their terms. One-third of the people of Ireland live (if they live at all) on potatoes, and the addition of a sprinkling of salt is a rare luxury. Two and a half millions are beggars, and Mr. O'Connell estimated the paupers in 1846-7 (the years of famine) at four millions. The main reliance of nearly half the nation, for food, is potatoes. God have mercy on them when that source fails!

With many noble exceptions, the large landed proprietors of Ireland are heartless, reckless, thriftless men. Nearly onethird of the country is a bog, three-fourths of which might be drained. Nearly five millions of acres, capable of cultivation, lie waste. An acre of potato land rents for from £5 to £10 per annum. Labor is abundant at the lowest rates. Yet these landlords have done little toward draining these bogs, enclosing these wastes, and improving their estates. Grant that for the four or five past years of pinching famine, attended with loss of rents, they have been unable to make improvements. It was just so before these years came, and has been so time out of mind. These landlords are generally absentee proprietors, who feel no abiding interest in the prosperity of a soil which they forage but do not inhabit, which they own but do not occupy. Half of the very money voted to them in 1846-7, by Parliament, for the improvement of Ireland, they spent the next scason at Paris, Florence, and Baden-Baden, there to swell the pomp of British aristocracy, while millions at home, whom it was intended to assist, ate garbage that an English pig would hardly nose over, or starved in hovels that the royal staghounds would not skulk into from a pelting storm.

The energies of the masses in Ireland being absorbed in a hand-to-mouth struggle for existence, they have neither time nor means to stimulate the industry of the country by estab

lishing manufactories, opening mines, carrying on fisheries, increasing trade, laying out roads, &c., nor to elevate and expand the national mind by founding common schools and seminaries of learning. The wealthy landlords and capitalists-the Besboroughs, the Lansdownes, the Devons, the Fitzwilliams, the Hertfords-who might do all this, will not; but, looking on from afar, cry to their stewards and agents, "Give! Give!

Give !"

The result of this complicated system of bad government and bad management is painfully obvious. Ireland is nigh unto death of a chronic disease of famine, pestilence, agitation, despair, and insurrection.

And what is England's remedial process for this disease in one of her members? As a panacea for the miseries that she herself has to a great extent inflicted, England, at stated periods, administers to her victim-patient coercion bills and cold steel, blotching her surface with police stations and military camps. Sending her tax-gatherers instead of schoolmasters, dotting her soil with cathedrals instead of workshops, sowing her fields with gunpowder instead of grain, England affects to wonder that the crop should be famine and faction, misery and murder, improvidence and insurrection; and when the harvest. is dead ripe, she sends over police and soldiery, armed with coercion bills and cannon balls, to cut and gather it in.

Sometimes England varies the prescription, or makes different applications to various parts of the body politic. Sir Robert Peel, for instance, prescribes bullets for Repealers, and guineas to a cloister of priests at Maynooth, to stop the mouths of the latter and the wind of the former, and the clamor of both. Then comes Lord John Russell with the Whig nostrum -money to carry the landlords to Baden, and a steamer to transport Mitchell to Bermuda-projects of railways to furnish hard work for laborers and fat jobs for contractors-a patch or two on a worn-out and inefficient poor-law, and packed juries for O'Brien and Meagher. So these Tory and Whig quacks