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1822.

CHAP. grants of the British Government in the year 1818 XX. amounted to £171,000.* The police of the country, an admirable force, of the greatest use in preserving tranquillity, were supported almost entirely at the expense of Great Britain; no less than £530,000 a-year for their maintenance was paid by the Consolidated Fund of England, and only £29,000 by the counties and towns. of Ireland. Scotland never got one farthing for this purpose; its whole police is assessed on its own inhabitants, Add to this that Ireland never, before 1852, paid any property or income tax; and that the assessed taxes, such as they were, were repealed in 1823, and have never since been reimposed. Ireland, prior to 1838, never paid poor-rates, in consequence of which its poor swarmed over, and were thrown as a burden on the inhabitants of Great Britain. Above a million of these unwelcome visitors settled in England and Scotland in the first half of the nineteenth century; and more than one parliamentary committee have reported, that but for them there would never have been any serious distress among the labouring poor of Great Britain.

6.

taneous increase of

While these unequivocal symptoms of public suffering Great simul- were prevailing in Ireland, the statistical returns of exports and imports exhibited a very great and most gratiindustry and fying increase; and the Secretary for Ireland, when in Ireland. twitted with the general distress, was always able to meet the complaints with a formidable array of figures, which seemed to indicate the very highest state of industrial

productions

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1822.

prosperity. The exports and imports of the island had CHAP. doubled since the beginning of the century; the latter had now come to exceed £8,000,000 sterling. By far the greater part of this was agricultural, and five-sixths of the whole was sent to Great Britain. This great increase in the ascertained productions of industry, when coexisting with an equally established spread of misery and wretchedness, is a rare combination; but it is by no means impossible, and several examples of it have occurred in later times. The returns of exports and imports exhibit a fair measure of a considerable part of the production and consumption of the country; but they tell nothing of the proportion in which they are divided among the inhabitants. When it is very unequal, a great increase of productive labour may take place, and some classes may be enriched, and add to their consumption of foreign luxuries, while the bulk of the people are daily sinking deeper into the abyss of wretchedness.

7.

wretched

Many causes, doubtless, have conspired to produce these results, but the principal appear to be the follow- Causes of the ing:-The first place must, without doubt, be assigned situation of to the character of the great bulk of the population. Brave, ardent, and generous, highly gifted in genius, and with many estimable and amiable qualities in private

* EXPORTS AND IMPORTS FROM IRELAND IN UNDER-MENTIONED YEARS :

Of which Exports to
Great Britain.

Ireland.

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£4,039,581

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-Annual Register, 1824, p. 262; M'CULLOCH's Commercial Dictionary, vol. ii.

p. 9; and Edinburgh Encyclopædia, Sup. v., p. 106.

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1822.

CHAP. life, the Celtic populations have none of the dispositions. which qualify them either for attaining temporal superiority in life, or for constructing, without external direction, the fabric of general social happiness. Gay, volatile, and inconsiderate, the Irish enjoy the present without a thought of the future, and are incapable of the foresight or self-control which are essential to success in this world. Above all, they are entirely destitute of the power of self-direction and self-government, which is the foundation of the entire structure of a free constitution. Thence it is that, the greater the privileges which have been conceded to them, the more wretched has their condition become; until at length, when their political rights had been in all respects put on a level with those of the English, their destitution became so excessive that two millions of human beings disappeared in eight years, and the annual emigration came to exceed two hundred thousand a-year. In the next place, a prominent place must be assigned to the circumstance of the conquest of Ireland by the English, and the atrocious system of confiscation which, in conformity with the feudal usages, the victors introduced on occasion of every rebellion against their authority. Without doubt this conquest itself is to be traced to the instability of the Irish character; for why did they not keep out the English invaders, as the Scotch, with half their number and not a quarter of their material resources, effectually did?* But admitting this, as every candid mind must do, there can be no doubt that the conquest of the country, and consequent

#

Scotland possesses in round numbers 5,000,000 arable acres and 12,000,000 of mountain wastes; Ireland, 12,000,000 of arable acres and 5,000,000 of mountain wastes: the former country, in 1825, had 2,300,000 souls, the latter above 7,000,000. Yet was Ireland conquered by Henry II. with 1000 menat-arms and 2000 archers; while Scotland, though in the same island as England, and so accessible by a land force, without the intervention of that mighty barrier the sea, hurled 80,000 English soldiers with disgrace out of the realm.

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1822.

confiscation of the estates, has been an evil of the very CHAP. first magnitude to Ireland. Thence have flowed the bestowing of the forfeited estates on English nobles and companies, the middlemen who were to collect their rents and remit them to this country, and the fatal imposition of a host of persons between the owner of the soil and the actual cultivators, all of whom lived on their labour, and wrung the last shilling out of their earnings.

the Roman

The third cause which has aggravated the miseries of 8. Ireland, and hitherto rendered abortive all attempts to Effects of ameliorate the condition of its inhabitants, is the unfor- Catholic tunate circumstance of the Roman Catholic religion being religion. that of the majority of the working classes, while the Protestant was that of nearly the whole of the persons upon whom the forfeited estates had been bestowed. It is an unhappy state of things in any country when the landed proprietors profess a different faith from their tenantry, when the weekly bond of union arising from meeting in the same place of worship and joining in the same prayers is awanting, and when that which should ever be the bond of peace becomes the source of bitterIt became doubly so when the landowners were the persons who had dispossessed seven-eighths of the original proprietors, and the heirs of the attainted persons were working as day-labourers on the estates of their fathers. But in addition to all this there was a circumstance of peculiarly injurious tendency, that in Ireland the tithes belonged to one set of clergy and the peasantry adhered to another. The cultivators became exposed to a double set of exactions: they were compelled to uphold two separate ecclesiastical establishments, one of which enforced its rights by the arm of the temporal law, and the other by the still more formidable engine of spiritual power. And the clergy of the latter, having no source of income but what they could derive

ness.

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CHAP. from the free gifts of their parishioners, which were chiefly composed of large fees on occasion of marriages, births, and burials, came in this way to have a decided interest in the augmentation of population, and were led to exert their great influence to further rather than restrain the tendency to increase among their flocks.

9.

farms for

political

purposes.

This tendency to increase, so strongly fostered among the Splitting of peasantry, from interested motives, by the spiritual militia, was equally promoted by their temporal landlords. The Act of 1793, which extended the right of voting for members of Parliament to forty-shilling freeholders in Ireland as in England, was attended in the former country with the most disastrous results, and was another of the innumerable instances of the extreme danger of transplanting institutions from one country to another. when the circumstances of the two are not exactly parallel. The Irish landlords, sharing for the most part to the very full in the indolent and insouciant character of the Celts, had no resource for the establishment of their sons in life but in Government employment, and experience soon taught them that for the acquisition of this nothing was to be relied on but political influence. To secure this, they favoured to the utmost of their power the multiplication of liferent possessions, which constituted freeholds, and the division of farms, to which the peasantry, from their general want of capital, were already so much inclined. Thus everything conspired to augment the tendency to increase, to which, from the absence of artificial wants, the people were already so prone; for the priests encouraged it from a desire to multiply marriages lucrative to them, and the landlords to secure influence in the Castle of Dublin for needy and idle sons. To such a length did these causes operate, that by a parliamentary survey, taken in 1846, it appeared there were no less than 1,016,338 separate landed possessions in Ireland,1 of which one-half were below the value of £4,

1 Parl. Papers, April 7, 1850.

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