The Sun.
London, England, 1863-11-21 00:00:00

IRELAND.

DUBLIN, Nov. 20.

THE EXODUS.

The following letter has been addressed by the
Archb' .shop of 'Tam to the Right Hon. W, Glad-
stone) Chancellor of the Exchequer

St. Jarlath's, Tuam, Nov. 16.
3jr,__Having usually addressed the Prime
Minister., as the most responsible organ of the Go-
vernment, I deem it now right to address the Chan-
cellor of the Exchequer, who, next to the other,
exercises the greatest influence for good or evil over
the d.estinies of Ireland. Leaving Messrs. Dillon
and Fisher to enlighten the lovers of equity and
just;ca on the unequal fiscal burdens which the
Union has imposed on the two countries—burdens
which are becoming daily more intolerable to the
weaker one, by reason of their increasing pressure
—I will confine myself on the present occasion to
that fearful exodus which is sweeping away our
population, and, with a force more tremendous than
that which once flung the warriors of Europe on
the shores of Asia, threatens to cast the entire of
the young chivalry of Ireland on the welcome coasts
of America. The hereditary enemies of the Irish
people are at length alarmed at their own misdeeds.
"By the sure operation of the unerring laws .of
justice vengeance is recoiling upon those by whom
it has been so long and so cruelly exercised ; and
the systematic work of agrarian evictions, artificial
famines, and forced emigration, has now reached
such a crisis as to terrify the British officials by
whom it has been projected, as well as their Irish
agents, by whom it has been so zealously carried
on. By the persevering efforts to weaken and sub-
due the formidable enemy which, from the con-
sciousness of continual ill treatment, the English
Government never ceased to conjure up, Ireland is
at length brought to a state of debility ; but the
anxiety now felt and manifested, is not how to
prostrate her more, but how to apply restoratives
sufficiently seasonable and vigorous to arrest her
utter dissolution. Such is the fatal result of that
false proFiperity cry that has been artfully sent
round tb rough the country those some years past,
and sw' ,filed into a chorus by a corrupt and inconsi
derate press, while those who set agoing the gross
delusion have been successfully despoiling their
hat'Jd victim.

" Such is now the position of our country, as at-
tested by the joint confession of her heart-boken
children and those who have reduced her to that
state, the one flying from her as no longer being
able to afford them support or safety, and the other
•adjuring them not to go, and obtesting, however,
that the grinding machinery of tenantry at will
and perpetual notices to quit, and the annual rais-
ing of rents, and the ejectments of the tenants, and
the demolition of their houses, were only intended
its a civilising process for a lazy and unruly people,
:buc never meant for the annihilation of their en-
tire race, or for turning their country into a wil-
derness. Those flattering counsels not to quit the
country, coming now so late, are found to be in-
effectual, and chiefly because they are not accom-
panied with any hope or assurance that the causes
which have given such a frightful impulse to the
exodus would stiffer any abatement. The alarm that
has seized the Government and the landlords
springs not, it is manifest, from a concern for the

tenant class, but from a consciousness of the socia

calamities which the flight of its stalwart inhabi-
tants is bringing on the country in which their own
interests are so seriously involved. And yet we
hear not, on the part of the landlord class, any re•
pentant .declaration that they will strive, by grant-
ing leases on equitable terms, to remedy the evils
which now appals them, nor any indication on the
pin of the Government that they will connect the
interests of the landlord and ttnant by making
the franchise depend on the condition of

a certain profitable and secure tenure o:

house or farm ; nor is there, finally, any
hope held forth that those detested prisons, the
workhouses, shall be abolished, which are the most
effectual instruments in driving the people from
Ireland, any foreign land, with freedom and the
reward of industry, being preferable to such penal
incarcerations. Nor is the axe yet laid to the root
of that hideous evil, the Protestant Church Esta-
blishment, so long acknowledged, deplored, and
stigmatised as the standing scandal of our land and
the shame of its Government.

"No, nor amid the inglorious scramble for place,
that no ,% occupies the few who are tempted by the
cheating hope, are there found in the present crisis
of 'she fate of Ireland any who seem to bestow a
F erioui thought o❑ the protection of that too faith-
!al people by whose heavy and repeated sacrifices
'those ungrateful men were placed in a position to
dare to hope for those trifling honours and emolu•
meats, to which the safety of the great mass of the
Irish nation is continued to be so unscrupulously
sacrificed.

"And yet the tragic farce that Ireland's destina-
tion is to b© a feeder of cattle is not yet ended. In
vain has the sad conviction been tardily forced on
the country that with the contraction of the area
for agriculture its flocks and herds have been dimi-
m ished in the same proportion. It never occurred,
it seems, to those philsophical graziers that tame and
d ,
domestic animals so dependent on domestic care and
keeping must be diminished, or disappear, with the
Crainution disappearance'
tlie_ ,
and or of the hands that tend
ov:: y that the next step in this system of besti-
Z,
emustr be the expulsion of the weaker animals
or
ti:teesattoration of the fierce and stronger lords
seem that I; To this primitive state it would now
the desolati'n land is now fast drifting, untaught by
pursued derfueffects of the policy that has been
" Instead ors those latter years,
assemblies that
eiose magnificent and deliberative
to
att. for the benefit of the common
weal, either
assert the restoration of their
native Legislature
party to awe thee, mioiQatinaugurate a Parliamentary
constitutional opposition, by an independent and
meetings country has been
doomed to witness
racter. Those meeting; itjtseq a far different cha-
racter. of being exclusively
composed of men breathing
are e ing the language of freemen,hts and speak-
Lot mixed elements
the fashion of the times, made Ile now, according to
is ieatnarrower differ-
-men and beasts—at which
ence of the national species
larged and liberal sympathy With then a more en.
ree rnelodi.
and the shrieks of the unfortunate people kind,
driven from their lands are drowned ijteh who are
ous lowings of the quadrupeds that
Such are the aggregate meetings -with piece 1 i them.
country is now familiar—cattle-shows in the lot
ing, while their congenial owners crown the even-
inggiving expression to a novel aott
with banquets,
of eloquence, which could find no favour beyond the
precincts of the bucolical school—boasting of the
peace which they call the solitude they have created
and boasting, too, of a still more extraordinary
triumph—that they have reversed the sacred ordi-
nances promulgated at the morning of creation, and
that man is now obliged to yield dominion to the
beasts of the field.
" It is no wonder if men of spirit, and
possessing
the means, should fly from a conflict so degrading
and a doom so disastrous. They are flying, and, in
despite of all dissuasions from whatever quarter,
they will continue to fly in such numbers and with
such rapidity as remind one of the melancholy
figures of our bards, comparing them to the flight of
birds, after the capitulation of Limerick. They know
the terrors of war, es well as of the deep which they
have to encounter .
ounter ; but nthther war nor the deep has
for
them
anya terrors compared to the insecure, pre-
carious,
t
which the y fugitive and savage mode of life to
laws have doomed them, aggravated by
the treachery of broken promises and violated cove-
they are resolver of
unfaithful men, in which
then that landlords, to confide. It is in vain
beseech their tenantry now changing their tone,
to stay—it is in vain that the
obsequious scribes of a Gov!rntnent which so long
treated them with cruelty implore of them not to
go,
Their resolve, however to be regretted, appears
-
determined, as long as their just
lessly unheeded. And heneetne e cool and stern in
a ete land that has
claims are so merci
difference with which they
character
lost for them the endearing leave
and with it all the sacred attractions andof a parent,
of home.—Your faithful servant, security
ii t JOHN, Archbishop of Twin:, s
At Galway the Claddagh men have ceased
t
oppose the trawlers, and the Government have pro°
mised an inquiry into their disputes, with a view a
a satisfactory arrar3gerlent.