The Irish Question

In the meantime, besides the prolonged and unforeseen resistance of the Protectionists, there were other and unexpected causes at work which equally, or perhaps even more powerfully tended to the fulfilment of the scheme of delay, which Lord George Bentinck had recommended his friends to adopt and encourage.

In the latter months of the year 1845, there broke out in some of the counties of Ireland one of those series of outrages which have hitherto periodically occurred in districts of that country.  Assassination and crimes of violence were rife:  men on the queen’s highway were shot from behind hedges, or suddenly torn from their horses and beaten to death with clubs; houses were visited in the night by bodies of men, masked and armed ­their owners dragged from their beds, and, in the presence of their wives and children, maimed and mutilated; the administration of unlawful oaths, with circumstances of terror, indicated the existence of secret confederations, whose fell intents, profusely and ostentatiously announced by threatening letters, were frequently and savagely perpetrated.

These barbarous distempers had their origin in the tenure of land in Ireland, and in the modes of its occupation.  A combination of causes, political, social, and economical, had for more than a century unduly stimulated the population of a country which had no considerable resources except in the soil.  That soil had become divided into minute allotments, held by a pauper tenantry, at exorbitant rents, of a class of middlemen, themselves necessitous, and who were mere traders in land.  A fierce competition raged amid the squalid multitude for these strips of earth which were their sole means of existence.  To regulate this fatal rivalry, and restrain this emulation of despair, the peasantry, enrolled in secret societies, found refuge in an inexorable code.  He who supplanted another in the occupation of the soil was doomed by an occult tribunal, from which there was no appeal, to a terrible retribution.  His house was visited in the night by whitefeet and ribbonmen ­his doom was communicated to him, by the post, in letters, signed by Terry Alt, or Molly M’Guire, or he was suddenly shot, like a dog, by the orders of Captain Rock.  Yet even these violent inflictions rather punished than prevented the conduct against which they were directed.  The Irish peasant had to choose between starving and assassination.  If, in deference to an anonymous mandate, he relinquished his holding, he and those who depended on him were outcasts and wanderers; if he retained or accepted it, his life might be the forfeit, but subsistence was secured; and in poor and lawless countries, the means of living are more valued than life.  Those who have treated of the agrarian crimes of Ireland have remarked, that the facility with which these outrages have been committed has only been equalled by the difficulty of punishing them.  A murder, perpetrated at noonday, in the sight of many persons, cannot be proved in a court of justice.  The spectators are never witnesses; and it has been inferred from this, that the outrage is national, and that the heart of the populace is with the criminal.  But though a chief landlord, or a stipendiary magistrate, may occasionally be sacrificed, the great majority of victims are furnished by the humblest class.  Not sympathy, but terror, seals the lip and clouds the eye of the bystander.  And this is proved by the fact that while those who have suffered have almost always publicly declared that they were unable to recognize their assailants, and believed them to be strangers, they have frequently, in confidence, furnished the police with the names of the guilty.

Thus, there is this remarkable characteristic of the agrarian anarchy of Ireland which marks it out from all similar conditions of other countries:  it is a war of the poor against the poor.

Before the rapid increase of population had forced governments to study political economy and to investigate the means of subsisting a people, statesmen had contented themselves by attributing to political causes these predial disturbances, and by recommending for them political remedies.  The course of time, which had aggravated the condition of the Irish peasantry, had increased the numbers, the wealth, and the general importance of those of the middle classes of Ireland who professed the Roman Catholic faith.  Shut out from the political privileges of the constitution, these formed a party of discontent that was a valuable ally to the modern Whigs, too long excluded from that periodical share of power which is the life-blood of a parliamentary government and the safeguard of a constitutional monarchy.  The misgovernment of Ireland became therefore a stock topic of the earlier Opposition of the present century; and advocating the cause of their clients, who wished to become mayors, and magistrates, and members of the legislature, they argued that in the concession of those powers and dignities, and perhaps in the discreet confiscation of the property of the Church, the only cures could be found for threatening notices, robbery of arms, administering of unlawful oaths, burglary, murder, and arson.

Yet if these acts of violence were attributable to defective political institutions, why, as was usually the case, were they partial in their occurrence?  Why were they limited to particular districts?  If political grievances were the cause, the injustice would be as sharp in tranquil Wexford as in turbulent Tipperary.  Yet out of the thirty-two counties of Ireland, the outrages prevailed usually in less than a third.  These outrages were never insurrectionary:  they were not directed against existing authorities; they were stimulated by no public cause or clamour; it was the private individual who was attacked, and for a private reason.  This was their characteristic.

But as time elapsed, two considerable events occurred:  the Roman Catholic restrictions were repealed, and the Whigs became ministers.  Notwithstanding these great changes, the condition of the Irish peasantry remained the same; the tenure of land was unchanged, the modes of its occupation were unaltered, its possession was equally necessary and equally perilous.  The same circumstances produced the same consequences.  Notwithstanding even that the Irish Church had been remodelled, and its revenues not only commuted but curtailed; notwithstanding that Roman Catholics had not only become members of Parliament but even Parliament had been reformed; Irish outrage became more flagrant and more extensive than at any previous epoch ­and the Whigs were ministers.

Placed in this responsible position, forced to repress the evil, the causes of which they had so often explained, and which with their cooperation had apparently been so effectually removed, the Whig government were obliged to have recourse to the very means which they had so frequently denounced when recommended by their rivals, and that, too, on a scale of unusual magnitude and severity.  They proposed for the adoption of Parliament one of those measures which would suspend the constitution of Ireland, and which are generally known by the name of Coercion Acts.

The main and customary provisions of these Coercion Acts were of severe restraint, and scarcely less violent than the conduct they were constructed to repress.  They invested the lord lieutenant with power to proclaim a district as disturbed, and then to place its inhabitants without the pale of the established law; persons out of their dwellings between sunset and sunrise were liable to transportation; and to secure the due execution of the law, prisoners were tried before military tribunals, and not by their peers, whose verdicts, from sympathy or terror, were usually found to baffle justice.

These Coercion Acts were effectual; they invariably obtained their end, and the proclaimed districts became tranquil.  But they were an affair of police, not of government; essentially temporary, their effect was almost as transient as their sway, and as they were never accompanied with any deep and sincere attempt to cope with the social circumstances which produced disorder, the recurrence of the chronic anarchy was merely an affair of time.  Whether it were that they did not sufficiently apprehend the causes, or that they shrank from a solution which must bring them in contact with the millions of a surplus population, there seems always to have been an understanding between the public men of both parties, that the Irish difficulty should be deemed a purely political, or at the utmost a religious one.  And even so late as 1846, no less a personage than the present chief secretary, put forward by his party to oppose an Irish Coercion Bill which themselves had loudly called for, declared that he could not sanction its penal enactments unless they were accompanied by the remedial measures that were necessary, to wit, an Irish Franchise Bill, and a Bill for the amendment of municipal corporations!

When Sir Robert Peel, in 1841, after a memorable opposition of ten years, acceded to office, sustained by all the sympathies of the country, his Irish policy, not sufficiently noticed amid the vast and urgent questions with which he had immediately to deal, was, however, to the political observer significant and interesting.  As a mere matter of party tactics, it was not for him too much to impute Irish disturbances to political and religious causes, even if the accumulated experience of the last ten years were not developing a conviction in his mind, that the methods hitherto adopted to ensure the tranquillity of that country were superficial and fallacious.  His cabinet immediately recognized a distinction between political and predial sources of disorder.  The first, they resolved into a mere system of agitation, no longer justifiable by the circumstances, and this they determined to put down.  The second, they sought in the conditions under which land was occupied, and these they determined to investigate.  Hence, on the one hand, the O’Connell prosecution:  on the other, the Devon commission.

This was the bold and prudent policy of a minister who felt he had the confidence of the country and was sustained by great parliamentary majorities; and when the summoner of monster meetings was convicted, and the efficient though impartial manner in which the labours of the land commission were simultaneously conducted came to be bruited about, there seemed at last some prospect of the system of political quackery of which Ireland had been so long the victim being at last subverted.  But there is nothing in which the power of circumstances is more evident than in politics.  They baffle the forethought of statesmen, and control even the apparently inflexible laws of national development and decay.

Had the government of 1841 succeeded in its justifiable expectation of terminating the trade of political agitation in Ireland, armed with all the authority and all the information with which the labours of the land commission would have furnished them, they would in all probability have successfully grappled with the real causes of Irish misery and misrule.  They might have thoroughly reformed the modes by which land is holden and occupied; have anticipated the spontaneous emigration that now rages by an administrative enterprise scarcely more costly than the barren loan of ’47, and which would have wafted native energies to imperial shores; have limited under these circumstances the evil of the potato famine, even if the improved culture of the interval might not have altogether prevented that visitation; while the laws which regulated the competition between home and foreign industry in agricultural produce might have been modified with so much prudence, or, if necessary, ultimately repealed with so much precaution, that those rapid and startling vicissitudes that have so shattered the social fabric of Ireland might altogether have been avoided.

But it was decreed that it should be otherwise.  Having achieved the incredible conviction of O’Connell, by an Irish jury, the great culprit baffled the vengeance of the law by a quirk which a lawyer only could have devised.  As regards his Irish policy, Sir Robert Peel never recovered this blow, the severity of which was proportionably increased by its occurrence at a moment of unprecedented success.  Resolute not to recur to his ancient Orangeism, yet desperate after his discomfiture of rallying a moderate party around his ministry, his practical mind, more clear-sighted than foreseeing, was alarmed at the absence of all influences for the government of Ireland.  The tranquillity which might result from a reformed tenure of the soil, must, if attainable, be a distant blessing, and at present he saw only the obstacles to its fulfilment ­prejudiced landlords, and the claims and necessities of pauper millions.  He shrank from a theory which might be an illusion.  He required a policy for the next post and the next division.  There was in his view only one course to take, to outbid his predecessors as successfully in Irish politics as he was doing in taxes and tariffs.  He resolved to appropriate the liberal party of Ireland, and merge it into the great Conservative confederation which was destined to destroy so many things.  He acted with promptitude and energy, for Sir Robert Peel never hesitated when he had made up his mind.  His real character was very different from his public reputation.  Far from being timid and wary, he was audacious and even headstrong.  It was his cold and constrained demeanour that misled the public.  There never was a man who did such rash things in so circumspect a manner.  He had been fortunate in early disembarrassing himself of the Orange counsellors who had conducted his Irish questions when in opposition; vacant judgeships had opportunely satisfied the recognized and respectable claims of Mr. Serjeant Jackson and Mr. Lefroy; and so Sir Robert Peel, without a qualm, suddenly began to govern Ireland by sending it ’messages of peace.’

They took various forms; sometimes a Charitable Bequests Act virtually placed the Roman Catholic hierarchy in friendly equality with the prelates of the Established Church; sometimes a ‘godless college’ called forth a moan from alarmed and irritated Oxford; the endowment of Maynooth struck wider and deeper, and the middle-classes of England, roused from their religious lethargy, called in vain to the rescue of a Protestantism betrayed.  But the minister was unshaken.  Successful and self-sufficient, impressed with a conviction that his government in duration would rival that of a Walpole or a Pitt, and exceed both in lustre, he treated every remonstrance with imperious disdain.  He had even accustomed his mind to contemplate an ecclesiastical adjustment of Ireland which would have allied in that country the Papacy with the State, and have terminated the constitutional supremacy of the Anglican Church, when suddenly, in the very heat of all this arrogant fortune, the mighty fabric of delusion shivered and fell to the ground.

An abused and indignant soil repudiated the ungrateful race that had exhausted and degraded its once exuberant bosom.  The land refused to hold those who would not hold the land on terms of justice and of science.  All the economical palliatives and political pretences of long years seemed only to aggravate the suffering and confusion.  The poor-rate was levied upon a community of paupers, and the ’godless colleges’ were denounced by Rome as well as Oxford.

After a wild dream of famine and fever, imperial loans, rates in aid, jobbing public works, confiscated estates, constituencies self-disfranchised, and St. Peter’s bearding St. James’s in a spirit becoming Christendom rather than Europe, time topped the climax of Irish misgovernment; and by the publication of the census of 1851, proved that the millions with whose evils no statesmen would sincerely deal, but whose condition had been the pretext for so much empiricism, had disappeared, and nature, more powerful than politicians, had settled the ‘great difficulty.’

Ere the publication of that document, the mortal career of Sir Robert Peel had closed, and indeed several of the circumstances to which we have just alluded did not occur in his administration; but the contrast between his policy and its results was nevertheless scarcely less striking.  It was in ’45 that he transmitted his most important ’message of peace’ to Ireland, to be followed by an autumnal visit of her Majesty to that kingdom, painted in complacent and prophetic colours by her prime minister.  The visit was not made.  In the course of that autumn, ten counties of Ireland were in a state of anarchy; and, mainly in that period, there were 136 homicides committed, 138 houses burned, 483 houses attacked, and 138 fired into; there were 544 cases of aggravated assault, and 551 of robbery of arms; there were 89 cases of bands appearing in arms; there were more than 200 cases of administering unlawful oaths; and there were 1,944 cases of sending threatening letters.  By the end of the year, the general crime of Ireland had doubled in amount and enormity compared with the preceding year.