Star.
London, England, 1831-06-21 00:00:00

TROUBLES IN IRELAND.

We abstract the following from the second
number of the Metropolitan, and earnestly re-
commend it to the serious perusual of every M. P,
before he presumes to speak or vote on Irish
affairs :

The history of the primary causes of the out-
rages in Clare is briefly this : So far back m the
year 1822, when great distress prevailed generally
in the south and west of Ireland, it appears from
the Returns presented to the Select Committee of
the House of Commons that, during the scarcity,
there were in Clare alone 116,000 persons (con-
siderably more than half the population of the whole
county) dependent upon charitable assistance for
their daily food. The soil of Clare, where it is not
mosontainous and barren, is a dry, shallow lime-
stone, light and easily thausted, anti generally
used for grazing sheep, except the alluvial lands
along the banks of the Shannon and the Fergus,
which are appropriated chiefly to the fattening of
black cattle. Hence it is obvious that the nature
and occupation of the land is ill adapted to the
support of a dense population. But many
improvident landlords, seeking only present gain,
or a numerical increase of votes to strengthen their
election influence, had permitted their estates to be
parcelled out in strips, for which a rack-rent was
eagerly offered, and a pauper population was thus
increased to a fearful extent. The peculiar nature
of the successive political contests in Clare, begin-
ning with the return of Mr. O'Connell to Parliament
before the Catholic bill bad passed, for the most
part destroyed any little sympathy that may have
before subsisted there between the landlord and his
tenantry. Then came the operation of the Sub-
letting Act, and the disfranchisement of the forty-
shilling freeholders, followed by the wholesale evic-
tion of the smallholders upon the expiration of their
tenures or their inability to pay the covenanted
rent.

" It would be impossible," sass a very compe-
tent witness, Dr. Doyle, the Roman Catholic bi-
shop, in his evidence last !year before the Com-
mittee of the House of Commons—" it would be
impossible for language to convey an idea of the
state of distress to which the ejected tenantry have
been reduced, or of the disease, misery, and even
vice, which they have propagated in the towns
wherein they have settled ; so that not only they
who have been ejected have been rendered miser-
able, but they have carried with them and propa-
gated that misery. They have increased the stock,
of labour, they have rendered the habitations of
those who received them more crowded, they have
given occasion to the dissemination of disease, they
have been obliged to resort to theft and all manner
ilof vice and iniquity to procure subsistence,—but
what is perhaps the most painful of all, a vast num-
ber of them have perished of want." Is it to be
wondered at, that persons in this situation literally
" took to the hill-side, and became broken men ?"

Thousands whom the same suffering, the same
fear, and the same desire have united, conspire
together and swear oaths of secrecy and mutual
co-operation. They look upon the fields and mea-
down of the neighbouring gentlemen and graziers
with an envious and evil eye. They complain to one
another that sheep and bullocks are enjoying the
rich pastures, while they who are Christian men
cannot get a nook of land let to them, to raise a
bit of bread-or a potato to perserve their miser-
able children from dying of hunger. They as-
semble in large bodies by night, latterly they stalk
forth also in the day-time ; they enter the obnoxious
grass-lands. turn up the sod in all direction, so as
to render the surface completely unfit for any other
crop than potatoes or corn. Then they dig a deep
grave in some conspicuous place of the field, and
serve the owner of the hold►ng with a star-light
notice that he shall be speedily buried in the same,
unless he lets the ground to the poor, at a stipu.
lated price, for planting potatoes. We have often
beard this turning up of the surface of grass-soils
spoken of as a mere wanton outrage br the destruc-
t/ea of like the horsing of the corn ricks by
Swing in England—this is all a mistake ; it is done to
procure a spec►fc and most important advantage to

the perpetrators of the offence, or those with whom
they are sworn to act ; namely, to enforce by ne-
cessity the letting of the land in small quantities
for raising human food. The same conspirators
likewise assault the persons and burn the dwellings
of such as-either take the farms from which some of
their number have been expelled, or herd the cattle
and the flocks of the graziers ; of coarse they re-
gard the law only as an enemy and avenger,
murder its officers whenever they can, and corn-
mitall sorts of horrible enormities and atrocities.

We own we think the fault lies generally much
more in the conduct of the landlord than of the
petulant. The indolence and inattention of the
Irish proprietary in general, and their neglect
of personal superintendence of their tenantry
and estates, whether arising from the causes just
enumerated or from perpetual absence, 'are great
and crying evils. In Ireland land seems to be re-
garded merely as a mercantile property, from which
the utmost amount of ready money is to he drawn,
Without the least thought of moral responsibility or
even permanent self-interest. Instead of fencing
and draining his farms, putting up gates, construct-
ing all requisite buildings, requiring a regular course
of cropping from his tenant, and securing to him a
due and reasonable share of the profits of his labour,
the sole effort on the part of the land-owner in Ire-
land
is to obtain the highest penny be can procure
in the shape of rent, and not to lay a farthing out
upon his property in return. In fact, the general
scheme of Irish land-letting is a nefarious combina-
tion of short-sighted, grinding avarice on the one
hand, and barefaced falsehood or reckless gambling
on the other, which diseases and demoralises the
whole social system. Of course we speak not of
the creditable exceptions, which shine forth the
more conspicuously for their very rareness; but
the ordinary way is to receive proposals for a farm
from all who choose to offer for it, and accept the
highest bidder, with small regard auto what may be
his character, his capital, or the mode in which he
proposes to crop the land. The number of compe-
titors for every vaeantspot of ground is so grest,that
land of anyqualitywili inset with premiers of almost
any rent the owner chooses to name. Is fact, the
peasant has no alternative; be must have apiece of
land, or he may quench the fire on his hearth, and
go walk the world an outcast and a beggar. He
therefore promises any price for a farm the owner
thinks fit to demand, assured that whilst in actual
occupation of the land he will have potatoes from
It, and that the landlord can only take the surplus ;
satisfied if, in the meanwhile, he and his children
get food and fire, and a rod over their heads.
The mere operative farmers can do nothing, be-
cause they have no capital. Their own straitened
circumstances, and the difficulties under which
they usually labour to meat the payment of their
rents, sometimes at the sacrifice of their farming-
stock and implements, preclude the possibility of
their expending money on objects of prospective
and perhaps remote advantage • the very effecting
of which, too, would cause the rent to be raised
upon them at the expiration of their tenure. The
unsettled state of the country opposes a complete
barrier to all extrinsic aid from private capital i
practical experience shows that English capitalists
prefer the expenditure of their money on the wild-
est speculations in any other quarter of the globe,
to hazarding it in Ireland.
The writer of this paper does not happen to be-
long to the school of modern economists, sad never
could perceive the via conseriesstie of the famous
argument in favour of absentees • but he does hap-
pen to be tolerably well acquainted with the statis-
tical circumstances of both Ireland and Scotland,
and be therefore hesitates not to affirm that they
are so exceedingly dissimilar, that no argument by
analogy, from one to the other, is worth a pin. Do
that for Ireland which was done for Scotland before
her estated men became so generally absentees, and
the Irish gentry also may emigrate with compara-
tive harmlessness.

But it would seem as if the extent of human suf-
fering in Ireland, instead of stimulating individual
proprietors to proportionate exertion, astounded
them by its prodigious magnitude, and paralysed
tueir exertions altogether, as if an evil of such im-
mensity defied the possibility of any sensible di-
minution. Long and habitual familiarity with
scenes of misery and degradation, of famine
and disease, seem to have blunted their sym-
pathies and hardened their hearts ; and they pass
with utter insensibility, or only with a pas-
sing momentary sorrow, by thronging crowds,
whom want of land and employment have
forced to become houseless vagrants, subsisting for
the most part in wretchedness and.sufferings un-
speakable, not upon the contributionsof the weal-
thy, but the bounty of the poor ; not upon offer-
ings which rich men cast into the treasury, but on
the potatoe and the cup of water freely bestowed
on them for GOD'S sake by those who scarcely
know bow they themselves are to procure their
next meal. In jruth, the charities of the poor
towards the poor in Ireland transcend all praise,
and cover, as they have need to do, a multitude of
sins.

We doubt the fact, that the population of Ire-
land, considered generally throughout the king-
dom, and not in the detail of particular places, is
teeming and redundant. A people who pay millions
a year to absent landlords, and also purshase mil-
lions' worth of foreign luxuries, all by exporting
farm-produce, can scarcely be superabundant. It
is obvious that Ireland can produce, nay that even
under tier present iv retched system of husbandry,
she does produce food enough for nearly twice
tier present number of inhabitants. The people
may- be barbarous, they may be unemployed, they
may be steeped in poverty and destitution to the
very lips ; but all this does not certainly prove that
they are too numerous, if it be certain that they are
deplorably neglected and mismanaged by their na-
tural guides and protectors. The people of Spain,

and Portugal, and Poland, and Prussia, and
Russia, are all very poor, yet these countries will
not probably bo alleged to be too populous.—
Ireland herself was infinitely more poor and
wretched, and the people died by thousand of sheer
famine, when her population did not amount to
nearly one-fourth its present number. So long as
more human food is produced than the population
could possibly consume, and that while double the
I quantity could be raised, if the labour of the unwil
Tingly idle part of the community were skilfully
directed to the proper cultivation of the land, we
shall be very slow to admit the allegation of a re-
dundancy of inhabitants. If the excess of labour-
ers in a country above the means of remunerating
employment furnished them be the proper mea-
sure of redundancy in population, that of Ire-
land is undoubtedly excessive ; but though the
ordinary course of occupation in the pre-
sent unimproving and exhausting routine of
Irish husbandry, (which usually consists of one
unvarying scourge of drastic purges, without the
least relief or advantage ever bestowed upon the
land,) is so exceedingly confined as to be filled at
present even to repletion, still wide and comprehen-
sive channels of profitable employment may easily
be traced out. The land is everywhere but half-
Foductive, simply from want of sufficient culture.
Mountain and moor-land, swamp and bog, lie waste
and useless, though it has been proved, not only
by the evidence of scientific engineers appointed
for the purpose, but also by actual experiment, that
they might be reclaimed at an expense of labour,
which would be fully repaid by three years of
their produce ; that, in fact, several millions of
acres of valuable land could thus be obtained for
about five years' purchase. Even the fine fertile
soil is all undrained, unfenced, unplanted, unma-
nured; a green and yellow melancholy, in the shape
of weeds, sits brooding on the face of the land,
and all between is brown, bare, and spiritless.
We are convinced, after much consideration, and
combating many prejudices that previously existed
in our own minds,that the most equitable and effec-
tual means of accomplishing the desired end is,
first, by the introduction of a well-digested system
of poor-laws, divested as far as possible of the nu-
merous and well-known evils which have crept
into the administration of these laws in England,
but preserving the principle whole and un-
impaired. This would, we are persuaded, se-
cure to Ireland two most important desiderata,
in which she is now so deplorably defi-
cient ; first, that the lords of the soil would
feel a close personal interest in the comfort and in-
dependence of the lower orders; next, that the
lower orders themselves would feel an attachment
to the institutions, and a desire to support the laws
of their country, by whielr They would then feel
themselves so materially benefited. We know that
the very sound of poor-laws is odious to the ears of
many; but what man of candour, that looks at
the poor system of England, growing with the
growth, and strengthening with the strength of
national prosperity, will venture to affirm
that the lattter has in no degree been
owing to the former, though in the magni-
tude of that system many abuses have in the
lapse of year. undoubtedly sprung up We know
of no nation in the world, that is either prosperous
or happy, without a legal provision for the poor.
In America, in Switzerland, in Sweden, and Den-
mark, the poor are provided for by the state. We
very well know that those who own estates look
for the most part with alarm, amounting even
to horror, upon the introduction of poor laws;
we are well aware that for a considerable time such
laws would bear very hard upon them, and eat up a
large per centage of their incomes ; we acknowledge
too that in many cases the innocent would suffer with
the guilty, the benevolent and active for the sins of
the indifferent and selfish. But what then ? Are
millions of people to be plunged deeper and deeper
in misery and nun because it will cause great indi-
vidual sacrifices, and much inconvenience to com-
i fort and relieve them permanently in their muss-
sides ? We think not ; it is a choice of evils, and
we prefer the less. Moreover, a well-devised
system of poor-laws would have a twofold ope-
ration, it would tend to the prevention as well
as to the cure of the evil by making it so
much the personal interest of every proprietor to
manage his estate in such a manner as that it
might produce the smallest possible amount of
poverty. There would no longer be so much
temptation to a landlord to let his land at an extra-
vagant rent, regardless of the miserable plight to
which his tenantry are thus reduced, when he feels
that there must be a eorresponding deduction from
that unreasonable rent to pay for the support of his
so-made poor.