which, in view of the reputation of that notorious establishment, could hardly be considered a momentous achievement in the history of Irish poor-law reform. The need for some earnest, practical thinker, a little taller, and broader, and more lightened than the average rulers of Ireland, was never more crying than at that moment.1 Sir Walter Scott wrote in his diary under November 20, 1825

"I was in Ireland last summer, and had a most delightful tour. There is much less exaggeration about the Irish than might have been suspected. Their poverty is not exaggerated; it is on the extreme verge of human misery; their cottages would scarce serve for pig-sties, even in Scotland-and their rags seem the very refuse of a rag-shop, and are disposed on their bodies with such ingenious variety of wretchedness, that you would think nothing but some sort of perverted taste could have assembled so many shreds together. You are constantly fearful that some knot or loop will give, and place the individual before you in all the primitive simplicity of Paradise."

In addition to the other evils which thus pressed upon the land, it must also be remembered that ever since the Union the manufacturing industry of Ireland had been diminishing. This circumstance told severely upon the poorer classes, for less hands were employed in the towns than formerly, and those persons who had made their living out of manufactures were either thrown upon the soil for their subsistence, or forced to seek shelter in other countries.2

According to statistics collected by Isaac Butt, there were, in 1800, in the city of Dublin, 91 master manufacturers engaged in the woollen manufacture, in 1840 there were only 12, and in 1864 but 8. In 1800 there were 4,038 hands employed in the same industry, and in 1841 only 682. In 1800 there were in the town of Roscrea, in Tipperary, 900 persons supported by the woollen manufacture, but in 1867 there was not one. Again, in 1800, the manufacture of flannel employed 1,000 looms in the county of Wicklow, and in 1867 there was not one. In 1800 there were 30 master wool-combers in Dublin, and in 1834 there were only 5. In 1800 a blanket manufactory existed in Kilkenny affording constant employment to 3,000 operatives; in 1841 the number had been reduced to 925. In 1800 there were 1,491 persons employed in the city of Dublin in stuff serge manufacture; in 1834 there were only 131. In 1800, 720 operatives were

1 Appendix XXXV, quotation from J. G. Lockhart.

2 In a speech delivered by Mr. Boyton, at the Irish Conservative Society, on the 3rd of February, he said—

"Formerly we spun all our woollen and worsted yarn. We imported, in 1790, only 2,294 lbs. ; in 1800, 1,180 lbs.; in 1826, 662,750 lbs.—an enormous increase. There were, I understand, upwards of thirty persons engaged in the woollen trade in Dublin, who have become bankrupts since 1821."

employed in the carpet manufacture under 13 masters, and in 1841 there was only one carpet-maker. In 1800 there were in Dublin 2,500 broad looms in the silk manufacture; and in 1840 there were only 250. In Ulster the manufacturing industry did not experience the same decay, and that this was owing to the greater security of the tenant in his holding and the greater prosperity which accrued to him in consequence, no one who has studied the history of Ireland will be inclined to deny.

In 1832 Michael Sadler 1 made certain proposals in Parliament to amend the Irish Poor Laws and give vitality to the system of poor relief; but his endeavours were abortive, his failure to effect a reform being largely owing to O'Connell's opposition, an opposition which was very inconsistent with the whole tenor of the latter's previous declarations. O'Connell's irresolution, however, was probably sincere. He had promised the Irish poor that he would never rest until he had obtained a poor law for them; and this change of front may have been due to the conviction, which he frequently afterwards expressed, that compulsory charity was contrary to the spirit of religion, and tended to sap that free almsgiving which he regarded as one of the duties of a Christian directly enjoined in Scripture. In 1833 Grey appointed a Commission to inquire into the condition of the Irish poor, as well as the whole state of the pauper system in Ireland, and they continued their labours until 1836.

Pending the final report of the Poor Law Commissioners, a resolution was moved by William Smith O'Brien on the 19th of March, 1835, to the effect that it was expedient to make some provision for the aged, infirm, and helpless poor in Ireland by assessment upon property in that country. He therefore proposed that every parish in Ireland should assess itself for the relief of the helpless and impotent poor; the maximum of assessment to be fixed at a shilling in the pound, two-thirds being contributed by the landlords, and the remainder by the tenants; and he also suggested that an absentee-tax should be imposed on the landlords, and a committee appointed annually to administer the law. Ultimately, however, he withdrew the resolution, satisfied that the question had been stirred and discussed upon its merits. On the 8th of July, 1835, Sir Richard Musgrave moved the second reading of a Bill for the employment of the able-bodied and the relief of the infirm poor of Ireland. He proposed that public works should be undertaken by the State with a view to the former object, and that for the latter committees should be formed in every city and parish in the country to make accurate lists of the aged and infirm poor and fix a rate for their relief, three-fourths of which should be borne by the landlords, and the

1 Michael Thomas Sadler (1780-1835). The last few pages of his Ireland; its Evils, and their Remedies, might have been written yesterday.

rest by the occupying tenants. The Bill, however, was eventually dropped. Another attempt was made on the 13th of February, 1836, by Poulett Scrope,1 who introduced a Bill for the establishment of a Central Board in Dublin to regulate the union of parishes and of particular districts, the poor being relieved by a rate on each union. He also proposed that schemes of public. works and emigration should be devised and carried out under the Board for the benefit of the able-bodied poor, and his Bill was read a first time without opposition. On the 3rd of March of the same year Smith O'Brien likewise brought forward certain proposals of a similar texture, but they never got beyond the first reading.

The Grey Commission appointed in 1833 now issued their report. The social state of Ireland was discovered to be worse than had even been suspected by the most ardent of her sympathizers. Until 1835 the law had not recognized a marriage celebrated by a Roman Catholic priest, and as the Irish poor were always married by their own pastors, all their children born before 1835 were technically illegitimate; and the parish, up to the date of the new Poor Law in 1834, was liable for the support of illegitimate children. The Commission found that the proportion of paupers to the rest of society was twice as large in Ireland as in England. England, they said, contained thirty-four and a quarter million acres of cultivated soil, tilled by 1,055,982 labourers, who on an average received 8s. to 10s. a week in wages, and who produced food of the estimated value of one hundred and fifty millions. Ireland contained 14,600,000 cultivated acres, tilled by 1,131,715 labourers, who received 2s. to 2s. 6d. a week in wages and who only produced food worth thirty-six millions. But the majority of the Irish could not command even these miserable wages. Nearly one-third of the entire population, or 2,385,000 souls, were dependent on the produce of the little plots of land which surrounded their wretched hovels. The potatoes which they wrung from the exhausted soil rarely lasted throughout the year, and for thirty weeks in every twelve months the hunger-bitten cottiers and their families could not even obtain an adequate supply of diseased potatoes for their subsistence.2

The Irish poor consequently crowded into England, and in order to keep body and soul together were glad to take any wage offered to them by any kind of employer, so that the English labourer was often ousted by this unnatural competition from earning his own bread. The rent of Irish land according to the computation of the Commissioners amounted to ten millions sterling a year, four millions of which was absorbed by encumbrances on property, which thus left the Irish landlords a net income of only six millions. But the support of 2,385,000 1 George Julius Poulett Scrope (1797–1876).

" Appendix XXXVI, Commissioners' third Report.

paupers for thirty weeks would require a rate of at least five millions, and thus swallow five-sixths of the income of the Irish landlords. The Commissioners therefore deprecated a Poor Law for Ireland on the ground that its tendency would be to pauperize the landlords without affording adequate relief to the tenants.

The majority of the Irish paupers, so they said, were able-bodied peasants, eager to work honestly for their livelihood, but from no fault of their own destitute of employment. Such men, they declared, would endure any hardship and the pangs of any suffering rather than stagnate in a workhouse, and they urged that the proper mode of dealing with them was to afford them the means of earning their daily bread by honourable means. They therefore proposed that relief should be afforded only to the mentally and physically infirm, to those who were either too old to work or too young or in cases of casual destitution. For the relief of the sick and impotent poor they advocated the establishment of voluntary associations controlled by State Commissioners, and they suggested that the revenues of these bodies might be supplemented by a parochial rate. As for the able-bodied poor, they recommended employment and emigration. For the former purpose, therefore, they proposed that a "Board of Improvement" should be established in Dublin under whose direction public works might be undertaken, Irish bog districts reclaimed, the waste stretches drained and fenced, land in occupation better cultivated, the sordid dwellings of the peasants improved, model agricultural schools opened, and the general welfare of the country attended to. Fiscal Boards were also, as part of the new system, to be established in all the counties, to make presentments for public works instead of the grand juries, and the landlords were to contribute a rate for the improvements made with the sanction of this Board on their estates. These improvements would, the Commissioners imagined, absorb the great majority of the Irish poor, whilst whatever residue might be left could emigrate to other climes. For this latter purpose depots were to be formed in various parts of the country, and requisite facilities afforded to those peasants whom misery drove from their native soil.

This plan, which was a valuable contribution to Irish history in spite of the impracticable nature of some of the Commissioners' remedial suggestions, and by no means the tissue of idiotic dreams such as have inflated the weak imaginations of many would-be reformers since their day, did not commend itself to Ministers, and George Cornewall Lewis, who was at that time quite a young man, was asked by Spring Rice1 to draw up a paper upon it. This he did so completely as to demolish in the

1 Thomas Spring Rice, first Baron Monteagle of Brandon in Kerry (1790-1866). At this time Chancellor of the Exchequer in Melbourne's Second Administration.

eyes of the Government the suggestions of the laborious Commissioners. He attempted to show that their scheme was a proposal for the management of private property by the State, which would lead directly to an extravagant waste of public money, if, indeed, the project was practicable at all. Lewis' paper frightened the Ministers into disregarding the report of the Commissioners, and they sent Mr. (afterwards Sir George) Nicholls, one of the three English Commissioners, to Ireland to report afresh upon the whole subject. Nicholls remained six weeks in Ireland, and scoured the country like an American tourist. But so confident of his statesmanship was this sweating land-trotter and would-be physician of Irish ills, that in six weeks' time he had solved the Irish Poor Law problem. He first rejected the estimates of the Commissioners as mere moonshine, and then proceeded to draw up a report of his own recommending the erection of 80 to 100 workhouses to hold 1,000 persons each, an undertaking which he calculated would cost about £700,000; and the Government, feeling themselves obliged to support their own dependent, approved of his plan, and founded upon it their Poor Law of 1838.1

The Government measure, which was first introduced on the 13th of February, 1837, and suspended by the dissolution of Parliament which followed upon the death of the King, was brought forward once more in 1838. It provided for the establishment of a hundred workhouses, where relief and employment were to be afforded exclusively to the destitute poor, infirm, and able-bodied, no relief outside the workhouses being permissible. The whole country was to be divided for this purpose into about 120 unions, the landlords and tenants of each union being rated in equal shares for the support of the poor within the union. The system was to be administered by local boards of guardians, consisting of elected and ex officio members, the former to be exclusively lay and not to exceed one-third of all the guardians chosen; and the local boards were to be placed under the control of a central authority in Dublin, to consist of Commissioners chosen from the English Board of Poor Law Commissioners. There was to be no law of settlement under the new system. The Bill was read a second time on the 5th of February, 1838, and, on the motion for its committal, O'Connell moved its rejection, but was beaten by a majority of 252. In the shape in which the Bill left the Commons it contained a clause proposing that the whole country should be divided into unions, each union to be rated at large for the maintenance of the poor relieved in the workhouse attached to it. The Duke of Wellington now suggested as an alternative that each union should be subdivided

1 Appendix XXXVII, quotations from Gustave de Beaumont and the report by Thomas Drummond.