The New Irish Constitution Part 21

"It will probably surprise most of those who study the condition of Ireland, and who have considered how to improve it, to find that a Commission that sat seventy years ago recommended land drainage and reclamation on modern lines, the provision of labourers' cottages and allotments, the bringing of agricultural instruction to the doors of the peasant, the improvement of land tenure, the transfer of fixed powers from grand juries to county boards, the employment of direct labour on roads by such county boards, the sending of vagrants to colonies to be employed there or to penitentiaries in this country; the closing of public-houses on Sundays, and the prevention of the sale of groceries and intoxicating drink in the same house for consumption on the premises. Such were the recommendations of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Condition of the Poorer Cla.s.ses."(150)

For the sick and impotent poor the Royal Commission reported practically that relief ought to be afforded by voluntary a.s.sociations, controlled by State Commissioners, and whose revenues might be strengthened by the imposition of a contributory parochial rate. Emigration, as a temporary expedient, was also recommended in certain cases.

The Report of the Royal Commissioners was laid before Lord John Russell.

Lord John Russell flung the Report into the ministerial waste paper basket, and despatched a young Englishman named Nicholls, a member of the English Poor Law Commission, to report afresh on the subject. Mr. Nicholls paid a roving visit to Ireland. The Royal Commission had taken three years to consider the question. Mr. Nicholls disposed of it in six weeks. He, of course, made the report that was expected of him. He recommended the establishment of workhouses. The Government brought in a Workhouse Bill, which was opposed by the Irish Members in committee, and on the third reading, but was carried, nevertheless, by overwhelming majorities.(151)

In concluding this story let me quote the following brief extracts from the Vice-regal Commission of 1903-6:

"I. The poverty of Ireland cannot be adequately dealt with by any Poor Relief Law, such as that of 1838, but by the development of the country's resources, which is, therefore, most strongly urged.

"III. The present workhouse system should be abolished."

Thus, after the lapse of three-quarters of a century, has the policy of the Irish Commission of 1833 been vindicated, and the policy of the English Parliament condemned.

The Government also took up the question of munic.i.p.al reform. There were at the time sixty-eight munic.i.p.alities in Ireland, all in the hands of the Protestant ascendency. It was the policy of O'Connell to preserve all these munic.i.p.alities and to reform them. The Government tried to carry out his policy, but in vain. Then, in 1836, they carried through the House of Commons, a Bill creating a 10 household suffrage in seven of the largest cities, and a 5 one in the others, but the measure was rejected in the House of Lords which desired the abolition of the Irish munic.i.p.alities altogether. In 1837 the Bill was again pa.s.sed through the Commons, and again rejected by the Lords. Peel then proposed, as a compromise-a 10 rating franchise in twelve of the largest towns, and a similar franchise in the smaller, provided the Lord Lieutenant allowed them to be re-incorporated. Lord John Russell consented to this proposal on conditions that the franchise in the small towns-corporations _in posse_-should be reduced to 5. For two years longer a struggle was carried on between the two parties, mainly over the question of the franchise in the smaller towns (in the event of their being incorporated).

Finally, in 1840, the Government gave way all along the line, pa.s.sing an Act which abolished fifty-eight munic.i.p.alities, and conferred a 10 franchise on the remaining ten.

The Melbourne Ministry fell in 1841. O'Connell had kept the Government in office for five years. During that time they had pa.s.sed useful measures for England; but in their Irish legislation they failed utterly. The t.i.the Act was a sham, the Poor Law, pa.s.sed in the teeth of Irish Opposition, was detested in Ireland, and the Munic.i.p.al Reform Act has well been described by Sir Erskine May "as virtually a scheme of munic.i.p.al disfranchis.e.m.e.nt."

When all was over, O'Connell said:

"The experiment which I have tried has proved that an English Parliament cannot do justice to Ireland, and our only hope now is in the Repeal of the Union."

He then unfurled the banner of repeal, and threw himself heart and soul into the movement.

IV

While the Melbourne Ministry failed utterly in their Irish legislation, the administration of the country by Thomas Drummond (Under-Secretary at Dublin Castle, 1835-1840) was eminently successful. Though there were Coercion Acts on the Statute book they were not enforced. Drummond governed according to the ordinary law, and, by meting out even-handed justice to all, won popular support and confidence. However, on the fall of the Ministry, coercion again soon became the order of the day-thus:

1843-1845. Arms Act.

1847. Crime and Outrage Act.

1848-1849. Habeas Corpus Suspension Act, Crime and Outrage Act, Removal of Aliens Act.

Between 1842 and 1845 Ireland rang with the demand for repeal. Great meetings-monster meetings they were called-were held everywhere; and O'Connell, by a series of the most eloquent and vehement speeches ever addressed to public audiences, re-awakened the spirit of nationality and intensified the popular hatred of England. In the days of the Melbourne Ministry his policy was a policy of peace; but the English people would not accept the olive branch. His policy now was a policy of war. His case for repeal rested on two main propositions:

"(1) Ireland was fit for legislative independence in position, population, and natural advantages. Five independent kingdoms in Europe possessed less territory or people; and her station in the Atlantic, between the old world and the new, designed her to be the _entrepot_ of both, if the watchful jealousy of England had not rendered her natural advantages nugatory.

"(2) She was ent.i.tled to legislative independence; the Parliament of Ireland was as ancient as the Parliament of England, and had not derived its existence from any Charter of the British Crown, but sprang out of the natural rights of freedom. Its independence, long claimed, was finally recognised and confirmed by solemn compact between the two nations in 1782; that compact has since been shamefully violated, indeed, but no statute of limitation ran against the right of a nation."(152)

The Government of Sir Robert Peel put forth its full strength to crush O'Connell, and the repeal movement. In 1844 O'Connell was tried by a packed bench and a packed jury for seditious conspiracy, found guilty, and sent to jail. His trial was one of the most scandalous incidents in the history of British rule in Ireland, during the nineteenth century.

"The most eminent Catholic in the Empire," says Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, "a man whose name was familiar to every Catholic in the world, was placed upon his trial in the Catholic Metropolis of a Catholic country before four judges and twelve jurors, among whom there was not a single Catholic."

It is well known that the condemnation of O'Connell by this tribunal was too much even for the House of Lords, which quashed the conviction and set O'Connell free.

In 1847 O'Connell died, and a terrible famine swept over the land decimating the people. Before the famine the population of Ireland was 8,175,124, three years afterwards it had sunk to 6,574,278. But that was not the end. The "Young Ireland" party had sprung out of the repeal movement. The "Young Irelanders" began as const.i.tutional agitators. Like O'Connell himself they simply demanded the repeal of the Union. But they gradually became more extreme, and, ultimately, under the influence of the wave of revolution, which swept over Europe in 1848, drifted into insurrection. The rising of 1848 was quickly put down, and the "Young Ireland" leaders were banished beyond the seas. All seemed lost. Ireland was in despair. Yet the seed, sown by O'Connell and the "Young Irelanders," took root. The fruit was gathered in our own day. Home Rule sprang out of the one movement, and Fenianism out of the other.

"The spirit of National Independence," says Mr. Froude, "is like a fire, so long as a spark remains a conflagration can be kindled."

The fire of nationality burned low during the Melbourne Administration; but rekindled by O'Connell in 1842, and fanned into flame by "Young Ireland," it was not put out by the misfortunes and disasters in which the first forty-eight years of the Union closed.

V

I have said that land was the staple industry of Ireland. Yet Government after Government failed to realize that the enactment of laws for the protection of the tenant-the protection of his improvements from confiscation by the landlords, protection of himself from rack-rents and arbitrary eviction-were necessary for the prosperity and peace of the country. In 1836 Mr. Sharman Crawford introduced a Bill proposing that the tenant should be ent.i.tled, on eviction, to compensation for improvements of a permanent nature made with the landlord's consent; or without his consent, provided that such improvements were, according to the Chairman of Quarter Sessions, necessary for the actual wants of the tenant. This moderate Bill, strongly opposed by the landlords, was read a first time, but it never reached another stage. Parliament having refused to protect the tenants-refused indeed to take the slightest heed of their complaints and grievances-the tenants continued to protect themselves by forming secret societies whose operations struck terror in the land. In 1838 the Under-Secretary, Thomas Drummond, boldly told the Tipperary Magistrates, who cried out for coercion, that landlordism was the cause of agrarian crime, and that remedial legislation, not coercion, was the remedy. He said, in memorable words:

"The Government has been at all times ready to afford the utmost aid in its power to suppress disturbance and crime, and its efforts have been successful so far as regards open violations of the law.... But there are certain cla.s.ses of crime, originating in other causes which are much more difficult of repression. The utmost exertion of vigilance and precaution cannot always effectually guard against them, and it becomes of importance to consider the causes which have led to a state of society so much to be deplored, with a view to ascertain whether any corrective means are in the immediate power of the Government or the Legislature. When," he continues, "the character of the great majority of serious outrages occurring in many parts of Ireland, though unhappily most frequent in Tipperary, is considered, it is impossible to doubt that the causes from which they mainly spring are connected with the tenure and occupation of land.

"Property," he adds, "has its duties as well as its rights; to the neglect of those duties in times past is mainly to be ascribed to that diseased state of society in which such crimes take their rise; and it is not in the enactment or enforcement of statutes of extraordinary severity, but chiefly in the better and more faithful performance of those duties, and the more enlightened and humane exercise of those rights that a permanent remedy for such disorders is to be sought."

Another fierce outburst of agrarianism in 1842 startled English public opinion, and drew from _The Times_ a memorable condemnation of landlordism. The great English journal wrote:

"With feelings of mingled pain we have witnessed the reappearance of that frightful system of murder and outrage which has so long infested the south of Ireland, and in particular the unhappy County of Tipperary.... The evil has arisen in the general system upon which the occupation of land has been based and conducted, and in the treatment of the occupier by the landlord.... A landlord is not a tradesman; he stands to his tenantry, or he ought to do so, in _loco parentis_; he is there as well for their good as his own; they are not mere contractors with him, to hold his land as capital, and pay him the full interest, or incur a forfeiture; they are rather agents placed in his hands, and under his care and protection, for the purpose of working the land, and whose _natural_ relation with him cannot be determined except by negligence or ill-conduct.

"If the land be treated as money, and tenantry as borrowers, people may be sure that the landlord will be an usurer. This is _generally_ true, but in Ireland the tenant who is thus treated as though he had been an unfettered party to the original agreement, has not the shadow of the character of a voluntary contractor. It is with him, either to continue in the quarter of an acre which he occupies, or to starve. There is no other alternative. Rack-rent may be misery, but ejectment is ruin."

At length in 1843 Sir Robert Peel appointed the famous Devon Commission to enquire into the occupation and tenure of land in Ireland. In 1845 the Commission reported that:

"(1) All the improvements in the soil were made by the tenants.

"(2) That these improvements were subjected to confiscation, and were confiscated by the landlord.

"(3) That the outrage system sprang from the ejectment system; and

"(4) That it was necessary for Parliament to intervene to compel the landlord to recoup the tenant on eviction for his outlay on the land."