We need not inquire how it has happened that no such law for the benefit of the poor has succeeded to the alienation of the church lands from the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, during the long interval that has elapsed between that event and the present time; but, on the contrary, that various laws, securing to the higher ranks the undisturbed possession of their property, and repressing all claims of the lower ranks, have succeeded to that change. It is enough for our purpose to state the fact, and to observe that, consistently with the principles above stated, all the results which have followed were naturally to be expected. That unprofitable but important portion of every social fabric – the poor, as distinguished from the working classes – has been left to precarious and insufficient charity. The consequences have been, a general reduction of the diet, clothing, lodging, and whole habits of the whole lower classes; frequent destitution, and its uniform attendant, a peculiar liability to epidemic diseases; much vagrancy and mendicity; the general prevalence of an irregular, precarious, reckless mode of life; a general failure of the grand preventive check on population; a continually-increasing redundancy; a minute subdivision of the land to support this redundancy, and a ruinous competition for these small portions of land, keeping the cultivators of the soil in a constant dependence on the proprietors; much voluntary emigration; and, both among the emigrants and the lower orders at home – all feeling these miseries, but few of them rightly comprehending the cause – a blind hatred at their rulers, very generally diffused. In thus asserting the powerful operation of this legal neglect of the poor in producing the miseries of Ireland, it is not, of course, intended to deny that various causes have co-operated in different parts of the country —e. g., the ignorance of the people, and the effect of the Roman Catholic religion in checking, rather than encouraging, any habits of thought or reflection; the absence of so many proprietors, and their habitual estrangement from the cultivators of the soil; political excitement, and the bad passions generated by it and religious dissensions: all these have been injurious; but the experience of other nations may show us that they could not have produced this specific effect on population, if they had not been aided by that general predisposing cause of redundancy —neglect of the poor.
This state of things has, however, naturally rendered residence in Ireland much less agreeable to the feelings of the proprietors of the soil, than residence in almost any other country. Those sufferings of their neighbours and dependants, which the laws of other countries would have imposed on them the duty of mitigating at their source, have, in consequence, fallen rarely under their personal observation; while the frauds and falsehoods by which poverty, when taking the form of mendicity, always attempts to arrest attention and procure sympathy, have been constantly obtruded on them. Add to this, that they have continually been told that the peculiarity of their situation, which absolved them from any legal obligation to relieve the wants of their poor – which secured to them the rights of property, and released them from its obligations – was a wise and judicious regulation, and a great advantage to themselves and their country; and without attributing to the Irish proprietors, and particularly to the absentees, more carelessness or selfishness than we must all admit to be a common attribute of human nature, we can easily understand that the general conduct of the Irish proprietors and capitalists must be such as to aggravate, instead of relieving, the miseries resulting from the over-population of their country.
To this state of things we do not pretend to apply a single specific; but we assert with confidence, that experience has sufficiently demonstrated the efficacy and expediency of several powerful remedies, and that, by the combined influence of these, a gradual improvement may be certainly obtained.
The first step has been already taken in the enactment of a law – unfortunately delayed till nearly half a century had elapsed after the union with England, – probably imperfect, and brought first into operation at a time of famine, therefore beginning to act in the most unfavourable circumstances possible, but by which the right to relief, under circumstances of destitution, is granted to every description of the poor. By the gradual operation of this law, correcting the habits of vagrancy and mendicity, it maybe expected that the process of degradation hitherto extending among the Irish poor may be corrected, and the same motives which, in other nations, are found to restrain excessive population, will gradually be introduced. But a more immediate effect of the law is on the views and habits of the proprietors. When the aged poor, the sick poor, the widows and orphans, and the unemployed poor, become immediately a charge on the land and capital of the country, it becomes the obvious and undoubted interest of every proprietor and capitalist, first, to throw all obstacles in his power in the way of early marriages, and excessive reproduction of the species; and, secondly, to exert himself to procure for the existing population as much as possible of remunerative employment. Such employment as he would hardly regard as remunerative, with a view only to his own profits, becomes an object of real importance to him, when the alternative is the maintenance of able-bodied labourers in idleness. That these motives are already operating extensively among the Irish proprietors, appears from their general complaint of the hardship of being obliged to maintain the poor in unremunerating employment, and from their increased anxiety to clear their estates of cottars and small crofters, among whom the most rapid redundancy of population shows itself. If the law is firmly and steadily administered, they will not be allowed to rid themselves of the burden of these poor; and the true question will be, Whether they are to maintain them in idleness, or devise for them reproductive labour? Thus it may be hoped that the resources of the country will be gradually developed, and its power of supporting industry be increased contemporaneously with a diminution of vagrancy and mendicity, and an improvement of the habits of the people.
But it must be observed, that this expectation proceeds on two suppositions —first, That resources not yet developed for the maintenance of industry do exist in the country; and, secondly, That the proprietors have the means and the knowledge necessary to enable them to avail themselves of these. The first of these, we are fully assured, is truly the case; but the latter supposition, although we may expect it to be realised in the course of time, is certainly very far from being an element in the existing condition of the country; nor can it become so within such a time as would be requisite to enable us to reckon on it as a means of meeting a pressing emergency. And although the newly-enacted Irish Poor-Law is equally just as that under which all English proprietors have for centuries held their possessions, yet it must be admitted that, in the present circumstances of Ireland, as to redundancy of population, it must fall with peculiar severity on that country, and that, in some districts, the sacrifice thus required of the proprietors – particularly on such of them as may not comprehend the means which we believe to be in their power, for the improvement of the country – may almost amount to a confiscation of their property.
Now, if the foregoing exposition of the main cause of the redundant population in Ireland is correct, it follows that the legislature of this country, which has so long approved and sanctioned that state of the laws which withhold from the suffering population of Ireland the right of relief, as it has shared the national sin, ought also to share the sacrifices by which the consequences of that sin may be expiated. For a time, therefore, and particularly after the famine which has befallen their country, the proprietors and capitalists in Ireland may reasonably expect a certain amount of aid from the legislature of England (granted, of course, with proper safeguards against abuse or misapplication), to enable them to perform their newly-prescribed duties towards their own poor.
Now, there are two modes of relief, both to the proprietors and the poor in Ireland, which may be afforded by government, or rather which may be aided and directed by government, to a much greater degree than has been yet done – certainly at a much less expense than the relief-works of the year 1846, when several millions, contributed from the British treasury, were expended on the roads in Ireland, with an injurious rather than beneficial effect; – and the results of which, if they are carried into effect with common prudence, may be expected to be so distinctly beneficial, as assuredly to reconcile the British public to the expenditure.
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