The Sun.
London, England, 1833-03-05 00:00:00

It cannot be too often repeated, that if Ministers
be desirous of leaving their friends in the House of
Commons an inch of ground to stand upon, when
supporting the present Bill for the suppression of
outrage in Ireland, they will supply those friends
with some answer to the question—" What relief
is intended for the sufferings of the Irish peasant,
whose crimee, the indirect, but unquestionable, fruit
of his sufferings, are now to be so rigorously
punished ?" The demoralized condition of the
country for which we are legislating has in it
nothing of amiraculous or even mysterious nature.

The mass of the people have ever been oppressed

and certain descriptions of them have of tare
years endured an aggravation of want and wretched-
ness never before experienced. Much of this
misery can be clearly traced, and the whole of
it, however unjustly, is imputed by the multitude
themselves, to bad laws, brutally administered; and
the law being thus regarded, not as a protection, but
a persecutor, every violation of it assumes the i:ha-
racter of a fair incursion upon the common enemy,—

as the sally of a garrison against an hostile army,-
the only means of revenge or rescue left in the hands
of the blockaded and harassed p,eople. Perverse
circumstances, and disastrous ❑sages growing out of
them, hare helped the operation of improvident'
laws. A semibarbarous and distracted country offers
few temptations to voluntary residents. Vast
numbers of Irish landowners have therefore become
absentees, in addition to those who, with properties
in England, naturally prefer to cultivate the re-
lations of landlord and tenant amongst the more
civilized of two communities. But frequent, or
indeed constant, separation, impairs, if not de-
stroys, that sympathy of a gentleman with his
tenants, which would lead him, if not utterly
heartless, to sacrifice part of his own selfish
advantages for their general well-being. The great
Irish absentee landlord, therefore, and after his
example, the resident likewise, sees nothing in 5,000
acres and their inhabitants but the materials and
machinery for providing so much money. The people
are, like negroes, but animals to work the estate.
The highest possible rent is, with such a race of gen-
tlemen, the only object worth a moment's solicitude.
Unhappily, the want of commerce, of manufactures,
of agricultural or other productive enterprise, and
the consequently languid requisition for labour, in a
country thickly stocked with inhabitants, leaves the
latter no means of subsistence but the direct produce
of the soil itself. Land each poor family must have to
exist upon or perish. The competition for land, then,
is the wild phi enzy of hunger. They bid against each
other extravagant prices for the most miserable soils.
The landlord, sensible to no more generous or enlight-
ened consideration than that of snatching the highest
rent he is able, and not feeling it his duty to calculate
what a tenant ought to pay, but only to wring from
him the uttermost farthing that eagerness to outbid
his neighbours will stimulate a starving wretch to
promise,—the landlord, we say, lets his 5, 10, or 15
acres on these disgraceful terms. If the rent can by
any means be scraped together, it is all he need care
for. How minute and pitiful the surplus—how in-
adequate for the maintenance of human beings—how
liable, from bad seasons, or a thousand other causes,
to be reduced to no surplus at all, and the tenant',.
family with it to inevitable death by famine—is no
affair of the Irish landlord. The law of Ireland
compels him not to contribute a single shilling to
the relief or cure of his dying fellow-creatures. One
poor tenant perishes, a successor is promptly found
for him—one of the same caste, at enmity with the
laws, reckless from habitual destitution, credulous of
vague advantage from every experimental crime or
folly proposed to him by artful instigators, his mind
overcharged with fierce and vindictive passions—one
whom fortune has already made invulnerable—who
has no respect for his neighbour's life, nor value
for his own—of such men is composed a large pro.
portion of the Irish tenantry. What interest can
such men feel in peace and order, and law, and pre-
perty, and political liberty, and those other fine
things which we name " blessings ?" What he
wants is bread. Why, a population so situated
must be bad subjects—must be ready for all, the
most flagitious outrages—must be a proper instru-
ment for all insidious plots, and schemes, and ma-
chinations, against constituted power of every de-
scription—since that has never been exercised, at
least successfully, to protect, but invariably to de-
feat, or persecute, or crush him. Then what is the
palpable remedy for this mass or evil which Sir R.
Peel, in his incidental defence of the Irish Church,
glanced at, as the sum of the existing " relations be-
tween landlord and tenant ?" Undoubtedly some
legislative measure, which by its indirect opera-
tion—for directly we know that such a remedy
could not be made applicable—might check the un-
limited growth of rent, by showing the landlord
that he could not pauperize his whole neighbour-
hood with impunity—a measure which would con-
sequently raise the tenant from his present incurable
wretchedness and desperation, would afford him
some sense of interest in the common welfare of the
community, in a general respect for the fruits of
industry, and a reliance on, and obedience to, the
laws. Give every Irish subject, like every British
subject, a legal right to be secured against starva-
tion. We profess no indifference to the vices
of the English poor law system, as it has been
for many years administered. Dreadful abuses
have been interwoven with it, and, short of Con-
demning men to die of hunger, which the want
of a poor law in Ireland does actually accomplish,
there are few mischiefs more serious, than
those ascribed to the modern mismanagement of
our English poor laws. Of that mismanage-
ment, or the greater portion of it, we trust it will
be made evident when the report on the poor law
system appears, that the administration may be pu-
rified ; but at all events it is perfectly monstrous
that absentee Irishmen, and English absentees from
Irish estates, whether in or out of office, should
pester the country with their mystifications upon the
difficulty, and embarrassment, and complexity (and
a deal more such nonsense) of the question of giving
poor laws to Ireland. "It will cut a deep hole in
the property" of these mystifiers forsooth ! We
hope a poor law will be established for Ireland, so
effective towards the relief of the starving poor, and
eventually towards the restraint of landlord rapacity,
as, if requisite, to cut deep into the rents of those
estates which have been unnaturally swollen, to the
grievous cost of the peasantry; and if the rich suffer
for it, have they not well merited this retribution ?
But when men talk of such a national blot and misery
—of that condition of the vast bulk of an entire
people which has manifestly been the principal cause
(we mean their poverty) of whatever is most de-
praved and shocking in their moral conduct, are we
to be told that a bill of pains and penalties is the
cure for such a world of wrong ? What, suppose
by the mixed civil and military machinery, screwed
up as tight as willing hands can make it,—suppose
that lawless outrages be suppressed for a season,
for that brief season during which it is to be pre-
sumed that a reformed Legislature will submit to
have despotism installed in place of the law of Eng-
land,—what shall we have gained by it, if the causes
of the agrarian demoralization be left untouched ?
• One hundred and ninety-six murders, it seems, were
perpetrated in a given time, and within a single
county. Whv, what were the motives to such
a horrible butchery- ? The Irish may be bad
enough, hut do they commit murder for nothing,
or just to keep their hands in ? They are, we
repeat, bad enough, but that would be too