The Sun.
London, England, 1847-03-13 00:00:00

SPIRIT of the PUBLIC JOURNALS.

TRO't TIIP MORNING PAPERS OF ts D.Y.
TIMES.—Lord John Russcli does 11l

'estate ti

difficulty a his path when he says that and darkne,
rest over Ireland, and legislation is beset with perils. Often
and often as statesmen may have thought that they had come
to the bottom of Irish distress, no one can deny that a worse
than.all has arrived, and, moreover, that a worsestill remains.

The half of a populous island, usually verging on famine, now
actually suffers that dreadful extremity; nor is there any
appearance of early relief The usual food of the people has
perished, and threatens not to return for a period far beyond
the calculations of man. The only storehouse to which the

public purveyor can look for relief is that natural magazine
crested by the industry of the people, over and above their
own simple wants, and usually reserved for the payment of
rent and other outgoings; and the supplies providentially
arriving from distant shores. The former of these is that
which common sense and economy would teach us most to
depend upon. But here is the difficulty. To arrest that
nourishing and fertilising stream on its course, to de-
tain it on the spot, to convert it into the relief of distress, the
wages of labour, and the material of reproduction, is at least
an apparent and possible loss to those who have hitherto
exacted, wasted, or alienated this store. Hence a serious
striiggle between the rights of the many and the rights of
the few—between starving peasants and straitened pro-
prietors—between famine and pestilence on the one hand,
and decay of fortune and position on the other. Such are
the perilous alternatives before the House. Such the clouds
and darkness over Irish affairs. For our own part, we do
not hesitate to avow, as we have ever avowed on similar
occasions, that at such a crisis the few must give way to
the many,the part to the whole. While we most thoroughly,
and at the same time most gladly, believe that the pro-
prietors exaggerate the sacrifices demanded at their hands,
we assert with all boldness that land was created for man,
and not man for land ; that landlords are made fur the
people, and their peculiar interests are only ministerial and
subordinate to the good of the whole. A general in the field
must lay hold of the stores that he finds, and devote them in
the first instance to that purpose which he is bound to con-
sider a paramount object—the maintenance of his army.
The compensation he- may think proper to afford to
the owners is another and a secondary question. What is
Lord John Russell but our commander-m-chief in an unex-
ampled campaign ; Ireland the field, famine the foe, and the
army a vast population, without magazines, order, material,
or, in a word, any other resource than the boldness and skill
of their chief ? The necessity of the crisis admits not the
usages, or, rather, the abuses of peace. If an evil custom has
deprived the labourer of his hire, this is just the time to
found a more equitable system. Labour and wages, popula-
tion and wealth, have suffered a long divorce, and must now
be reconciled. Grant that the change is great, and what a
man would not willingly undertake ; it is forced on the Legis-
lature. Society is reconstructed in disaster; each new birth
is in throes, and institutions are the monuments of wrong.
In "clouds and darkness" it is necessary to take a short and
simple rule, the guieance of great moral truth. The first
law of nature, that the people must be fed, and that more
particularly from the work of their hands, is the clue of this
labyrinth. In the public weal an enlightened statemen will
discern the cloud by day and the pillar by night through
this terrible wilderness ; and public weal is an empty
name, unless it includes- the relief of those who are
ready to perish, and the employment of those who are able to
work, but have not the opportunity. The Minister takes an
unassailable position when he rests the new Irish Relief Bill
on the new facts of the case. He is entitled to call it the
child of necessity. It is contrary to the theories of his less
experienced age, and less fearful times. Ireland has under-
gone a virtual revolution. The food of independent poverty
has failed. The spontaneous charity of the lower classes has
been cal: eusted. The armies of mendicancy have been
destroyed or disbanded. All that miserable system which
was rather an apology for society than a civilized society
itself, has fallen to the ground. Politicians held it up as
long as they could. Secretaries of State found it convenient,
and eulogized the noble and trustworthy custom of a per-
petual and inbreeding beggary. The right of preying on
the infant resources of rising enterprise, and blighting the
first bloom of prosperity, was cried up as a sacred
and icfallible refuge, which it would have been im-
pious to supplant with the coarse expedient of a poor's-
rate. All that is passed. Providence, not man, has put an
end to that folly. The cottier remains without a crop; the
beggar without a dole. A physical revolution has over-
thrown the reign of mendicancy and conacre. There is no
possible, no conceiveable alternative, but to create another
system on the ruins, or, rather, in the place of the old. Time
is the greatest innovator, and we only submit to his laws
when we erect a new system on a new foundation—that is,
the present facts of the case. Without a real poor-law, offer-
ing relief to the destitute and employment to the idle, how
are we to meet the phenomenon of a people in the midst of
comparative abundance, but deprived of their wonted food;
paying rent, but without a maintenance; depending on a
root that will not thrive, or on neighbours that cannot give?
A great crisis justifies and demands " a great experi-
ment." The dictates of nature are interpreted by the
voice of the people ; and from all sides are returned
"innumerable echoes " to the Ministerial decision.
In vain does Mr. Shaw invoke that jealousy of
popular interference, and that reaction against an out-door
pressure, which Legislatures are so apt to experience. For
our own humble selves, we can truly reply that Mr. Shaw
ascribes to us an influence which we neither possess nor de-
sire. The people of this island, who are now imperiously de-
manding that Ireland shall no " longer be without a good
poor-law, would be as little disposed to ascribe that unani-
mous wish to our simple suggestion, as the House of Com-
mons itself. What would our words have been worth had
we not known that we appealed to a national sentiment, and
to the simple facts of the case? We have no strength but
truth, and we claim no credit but for having stripped the
question of all prejudice and disguise.
CHRONICLE.—The last of the Irish confiscations is at
hand. History records four great ones, which were all, so to
speak, in the same direction. The fifth will be something
like a reversal of three of those ancient injustices. Eliza-
beth, the first James, Cromwell, and William created, by
successive batches, the greater portion of the landed proprie-
tary of Ireland. The plantation of James in the north still
stanis secure. It can bear an English poor-law almost as
well as England. But the descendants of the Elizabethan
adventurers, and of the Cromwellian and Williamite soldiery,
had their doom pronounced last night by Lord John Russell.
The Noble Lord spoke with the tone of a man whose mind is
made up. He is navigating in a fog, but he has at least de-
termined upon one thine to be done, and we scarcely expect
to see him waver until he feels that the ship is aground.
Let us not, however, be supposed capable of doing injustice
to a man for whom difference of opinion cannot abate our
respect. In applying an extended poor-law to Ireland, we
have no shadow of doubt that Lord John Russell acts
from a strong conviction that it will improve the condition
of the people of that country. His sanguine anticipations,
the bright colours in which he paints the future, the touch-
ing warmth of language and manner in"which he appeals to
every noble feeling in the Irish breast, and the generous
confidence in which he imagines priest, peasant, and pro-
prietor combining to work a poor-law, without a taint of
selfish passion to give rise to abuse, would convince us, if
we did not already know as much from the character of the
Noble Lord, that he has full faith in the soundness of his
own policy. No Minister, we believe, has ever dealt with
this painful and oppressive Irish question in a more honest
and earnest spirit. We can only lament that facts the
broadest and mast palpable fail to make their due impression
upodehis mind, that in employing means to attain useful
ends -he should seem insensible to all breaks and chasms in
the reasonings by which he connects causes and effects to-
gether, and that he should waste unrivalled opportunities
and resources in reliance upon a delusion which must connect
the memory of his Administration with the discredit of
signal failure. The statement of last night had reference,
first, to the extraordinary relief works, upon which nearly
three millions and a half of the Irish population are now de-
pendent for support ; and, secondly, to the Bill for a perma-
nent extension of the Irish poor-law. With reference to the
first point, we shall simply repeat, as bearing upon the second,
the amount of expense, and the fact of the existence of
grievous abuses. The expenditure upon the public works
has increased thus :
September and October ... £54,000
November ... ... 208,000
December ... ... 545,000
January 736,000
February ... ... 944,000
This is independent of the Commissariat and some other ex-
penses. We are at this moment, then, expending at least
250,000/. per week, out of which, according to the statement
which we published yesterday, ten western and southern
counties must be receiving 160,0001., or at the rate of eight
millions a year, for the relief of their poor. As to abuses, they
were inevitable. The superintendence of the Board of Works
is as perfect as it is in the nature of such a thing to be, but
it cannot secure the honest performance of task work.
It has been necessary to adapt the tack to the powers
of the feeble, who without such merciful consideration would
have starved. But the strong, as might be expected, have
taken advantage of the laxity, and we hear of the able-bodied
coming lazily at eleven o'clock. in the day to do the easy
work of a woman er a child. This has happened, we say in-
evitably happened, even under a vigorous and well-ordered
superintendence. Lord John Russell, however, maintains
that such experience is anything but conclusive against out-
door relief to the able-bodied under a poor -law. The prin-
ciple of giving out-door relief to the able-bodied, we can no
longer doubt, will be legalized in Ireland with a bond fide in-
tention to carry it into effect. In what manner the Govern.:
ment is ultimately to withdraw its hand from the immense
mass of destitution which it now sustains, and to let the
weight down upon the boards of guardians, we do not
yet understand. Orders, indeed, are issued to disband
the army of paupers upon the works by succes-
sive detachments, but as they leave the works they
come upon the soup kitchens. They will still feed out of
the Treasury. Six months will bring the harvest, but
what will the harvest bring? Take those ten counties of
two-thirds of the
n.
Govern-
ment. the south and west, in which 480,000 persons, representing a
whole population
labouringof two
class, millions,are andnow forming
hanging tw•
upon thtirh
ment. Assume that the land will be generally tilled--though
how it is become so, when the dismissal of the workmen is
only to begin on the 20th of March, we cannot see. In the
most favourable event that we can hope for, what will the
thhaervresieht.briTnghe? til luxuriespe a a for
will not be grown. The potato acre will require at least two
cheap Nat potatoes,
datopersOduexcteievilet paotfaewto oafs
acres of grain to replace it. But we can scarcely expect so
much as one. The land which, in the ordinary course would
have grown potatoes in the present year, instead of being so
much added to breadth sown with corn, will
green crop only partially usable as human food,,
or will be
grow some
laid down in pasture. How, then, are the two millions of
paupers in the south and west to be got off the soup kitchens?
Suppose them reduced to- one million, is the one mil-
lion to be handed over to the care of the boards of
guardians? No one who reads Lord John Russell's speech
can avoid feeling that it does not deal with the tremendous
difficulty arising from the mass of destitution in certain dis-
tricts. He expects a poor-law to work in those districts,
without showing any clear conception of the amount of pau-
perism which the machinery of a poor-law can endure with-
out breaking down. What will be the extent of the ordi-
nary pauperism of the ten counties, if our chief reliance for
removing it is to be placed upon a poor-law? Their work-
houses are built to accommodate 40,000 persons. They now
contain 50,000. Let the aged and infirm be removed, and
let the flood of able-bodied poverty roll into the space so va-
cated. Fifty thousand will be housed. One-twentieth of the
million whom we have supposed to remain destitute after
harvest will be off the roll of the soup kitchens. The towns,
which even now for the aged and infirm only are levying 4s.
and 55. rates, will be making assessments of 10s.in the pound,
though with no great prospect of collecting them.
Still we have the nineteen-twentieths, the 950,000 in
these ten counties, en our hands. Are we to transfer
them, or a part Of them, and how many of them, to the
unions as out-door paupers ? The counties in question have
no doubt a rental of five millions to be taxed, but how far
\will it go, and by what kind of measure is it to he made
available ? Lord John Russell thinks the sheet-anchor
upon which he can rely for a safe administration of out-door
relief is the local board, with its strong interest in keeping
down the local rate. Suppose the boards should look so very
sharply after this interest, as to refuse to assess a rate four
times, five times, or tea times the amount of any former one?
restive even upon a matter
Cofasatlaehbialrlinhgas
ibnegtuhne—pobuecnodm.
iiThe local board there is at an
end, and the rate is to be made and levied by paid Govern-
' ment officers. The Ballina board has struck a new rate of