CHAPTER IX

THE ENCUMBERED ESTATES ACT, 1849

"It is an axiom in politics that the great majority of people never rise into insurrection, or become rebels, without sufficient reason; the disaffected few possess not the power to increase political hatred to such a degree as to cause a general movement in opposition to the government; this effect can only be produced by a government itself, and this circumstance is the best apology for the people, if not their justification. We natives of England ought to be very circumspect in our condemnation of the principle of resistance to oppression, for of all nations upon earth we have most benefited by the exercise of such right.

"The reader will discover, throughout the preceding pages (on Ireland) such various gradations of misery as he could not have supposed possible to exist, even amongst the most barbarous nations. Man is exhibited to his view as oppressed and insulted; he will perceive the hand of tyranny pressing upon him heavily and unsparingly, and find an accumulation of human beings, without any other use than for the accumulation of human wretchedness. He will find him hunted from the vale to the mountain top, to shelter in the rude caverns and rocks, from his brother Christian, the politically orthodox believer in the humble Author of their common faith. Yet amongst all the evils he will still recognize the genius of the people, like a bright star in a tempestuous and gloomy horizon. A nation never commits felo de se. A whole people cannot causelessly be compelled to brave the mouth of the cannon, or rush upon the bayonet against their rulers; and when such events do take place, and when the voice of complaint does arise from a whole people, let their governors attend to the awful warning, and remember that it will not be necessary to seek a heavenly-gifted interpreter to expound this Handwriting upon the Wall."-EDWARD WAKEFIELD in 1814.

PROLOGUE TO CHAPTER IX

AN ungenerous tone has, even in the recollection of many persons still living, been from time to time adopted towards John Bull in respect of his methods of governing the Irish people. No man can, and perhaps few wise men, if they could, would wish to be absolutely perfect. No man can do better than his best, or use other talents than those with which it has pleased his Creator to endow him, and it must not be forgotten amid all the scathing commentaries heaped on John Bull in regard to his treatment of Ireland, that whatever his deficiencies in other ways may be, and God knows there are some, he is a real good fellow at bottom, one of the very best, and immensely fond of cricket and football. We take it that the first consideration of a humane ruler should be to display a healthful, cheery aspect before those whom he may have to govern, so that they may derive some substantial comfort in their own less fortunate position by the appearance of enormous contentment elsewhere. This is only human nature, for a beggar is reckoned to feel a pleasant tickling sensation when a smart

carriage and pair rolls by. It is also said that starving sailors adrift upon an alien sea have gloated over the names of dishes on a choice bill of fare, and that the perusal of so much exquisite luxury deadens their pain and almost tempts them to believe that the feast is spread before them and that they are the guests who are bidden to the banquet. Other examples might be given to illustrate this law of nature, which is very gratifying to reflect upon seeing what loathsome poverty and misery there are abroad at the present day, and how the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer. Now it cannot be denied except by an unusually contumacious reasoner that the rulers of Ireland have carried out this system of consolation towards their ragged dependency as consistently as lay in their power. Vicarious indulgence has been the kernel of their policy. John Bull, with his fine round belly and ruddy countenance, has been a godsend to the Irish people, for what greater solace can there be for a poor, hungry, Irish peasant than this beaming beacon of success? It freshens him, it makes his mouth water, it is like the dew of heaven to him; it increases his faith in the milk of human kindness to see his dear rulers delight themselves in fatness when starvation stares him in the face. He is almost inclined to forget his misery when the hearty voice of honest John Bull shouts in his ear. Will any one, who has a little prudence, deny that this is very considerate on the part of the rulers of Ireland? There are many men, well-fed and foul livers, who think only of their own appetites. There are many fewer, equally round and foul, who commiserate their less fortunate brethren but have not the leisure to help them in distress; but what shall we say of John Bull, with his broad, shining face, who lives like these, not for his own enjoyment, however, not for his own gross pleasure, but out of the goodness of his heart for the sake of others? John Bull is incomparable; there is no one in the least like him. His virtues are quite different from other men's, and this is what makes him the envy and despair of foreigners of taste and learning. John Bull is not destined to oblivion for lack of description. His portrait will be handed down for the admiration of future ages, and he will be recorded in the history of nations as a beautiful example of a Christian gentleman, and it will surely be a sad day for Ireland when he relinquishes that delicate sense of the fitness of things, which is all his own, and no longer holds that the mere aspect of his own prosperity is the best cure for Irish ills.

The history of Ireland during the nineteenth century is a record of the struggle between landlord and tenant; and since the Encumbered Estates Act of 1849 was the foremost legislative

effort to solve the Irish land question during the first fifty years. of the period, it forms, from its prominent position at the end of that half-century, a noticeable landmark in the calendar of Irish misrule. The system of land tenure in Ireland was up to comparatively recent times wholly indefensible. The governing idea in the landlord's mind was to make his starving dependents sow, while he reaped; and when at length the truth was disagreeably brought home to him that the just rights of property were one thing and tyranny another, the shock was so great that he felt, not that justice was finally to be set upon her pedestal, but that robbery and confiscation were being made to usurp the place of law. No greater indictment can be brought against the policy of the rulers of Ireland than in regard to the Irish land question, and the author has loaded the Appendices to his present argument with quotations from many authoritative sources, so that he may be thought not to drag in by the head and shoulders, but to usher in with all the formality of which it is worthy, the disastrous policy pursued by the Ascendency, and the consequent misery entailed upon the Irish peasantry, the memory of which has not yet died out.

In 1806 Whiteboyism, which had slumbered during the six years following the Union, once more broke out, and continued without intermission until 1824 to damp the courage and perplex the counsels of Irish landlords. The Threshers, who resembled the Whiteboys, rose in open insurrection in 1807 in the western counties and committed the vilest outrages upon person and property. To silence this expostulation of serfdom against tyranny, an Insurrection Act was introduced in the House of Commons on July 9, 1807, by Sir Arthur Wellesley, with a special view to the disturbances in Limerick. It was a renewal, with certain slight modifications, of the Act of 1796, one of the differences being that the power to transport was transferred from the magistrates to quarter sessions, and it authorized the Lord-Lieutenant to suspend trial by jury, should the necessity for such procedure appear to him to be necessary, and rendered persons out of doors between sunset and sunrise liable to transportation. It was repealed in 1810, but re-enacted in 1814, and continued in force for the three following years. An Arms Bill for Ireland, which, unlike the Insurrection Act, was to come into operation universally and at once, and not merely to be contingent upon the proclamation of the Lord-Lieutenant, was also introduced by Wellesley, and passed in 1807, the duration of the Act being limited to two years. It required the registration of arms, and authorized any person on the authority of a magistrate

1 The author is indebted to B. Barry O'Brien's Fifty Years of Concessions to Ireland, and to William O'Connor Morris' Present Irish Questions and Ireland from '98 to '98, for various details leading up to this and later land legislation for Ireland.

to search a house for such weapons at any hour of the day or night.1

In 1810 the Shanavests and Caravats appeared in Kilkenny and Tipperary, and for the next few years these two counties, and those of Waterford, Limerick, Westmeath, and Roscommon, as well as King's County, were almost every week the scene of sanguinary tumults. In 1814 the Carders appeared in various districts, who tore the flesh from the bones of those who refused to obey their orders. The authorities at Dublin found it necessary therefore to apply for a further lease of extraordinary powers, and Peel introduced for the purpose two Coercion Bills into Parliament the same year. The first enabled the LordLieutenant to declare a district disturbed, to appoint a superintending magistrate with a salary of £700 a year and a staff of special constables, and to charge the cost upon Ireland. The second, which he brought forward on July 8, three days after the first Bill had been read a third time, revived the Insurrection Act of 1807, which had been allowed to expire in 1810, and was passed without difficulty, in spite of an unsuccessful attempt to limit it to one year. But crime was not one whit abated. Peasant societies under the names of Whitefeet, Blackfeet, Shavanats, Rockites, Terryalts, and Ribbonmen rendered the life of every man insecure who had done anything to offend them; and in 1815 it was found necessary to place Limerick and parts of three other counties under the Insurrection Act. To mention two incidents out of many during the years 1815 and 1816-In 1815 a dispensary in the County Tipperary was taken by the Government for use as a police barrack. Now the police had not always exhibited that regard for justice which is so indispensable in the guardians of the law, and one night a huge mob of peasants attacked the house, drove the constables out, and burned the hated building to the ground. For this outrage thirteen men were hanged; it being thought that the rope and drop might succeed where so much legislation had proved abortive. Again, in 1816, a tenant had taken a farm at a higher rent than the previous occupier could pay, and the buildings were therefore set on fire and destroyed. Mr. Baker, an energetic magistrate, thereupon set to work to hunt down the incendiaries, and succeeded in arresting six of them, but his magisterial vigour, unappreciated by a starving neighbourhood, soon paid the penalty of death, and he was shot.

In view of these disturbances of Whiteboys and others of their kidney, Sir John Newport,2 in the spring of 1816, moved

1 Appendix XLIII, quotations from R. B. Sheridan, Thomas Newenham, Edward Wakefield, John Gough, and the author of An Inquiry into the Causes of Popular Discontent in Ireland, published in 1804.

2 Sir John Newport (1756-1843). Appointed Chancellor of the Irish Exchequer in 1806 in the Ministry of All the Talents; resigned in 1807. Appointed Comptrollergeneral of the Exchequer, 1834.

an address to the Prince Regent to the effect that "the need of keeping a force of 25,000 men in Ireland in time of peace obliges us to consider its state as distressing and dangerous. We have granted repressive powers; we wish deliberate examination of the evils, and of the source whence they originate." Peel very naturally opposed an inquiry so detrimental to his own reputation, and moved an amendment that the Government should lay before the House a statement merely of the disturbances in Ireland and the measures adopted for their suppression, and it was carried by 187 to 104. The next year, in 1817, the Insurrection Act of 1814 was renewed, for it would in the ordinary course have expired in 1817. The Seditious Meetings Act, however, which was passed this year, was expressly made inapplicable to Ireland, and for a very good reason. Political associations of all descriptions came under the Act, and it would therefore have affected the Orange Lodges, where secret oaths were administered. When Sir John Newport moved for its extension to Ireland, Castlereagh assured him that the tranquillity of that country rendered such a step unnecessary, an excuse which was extremely farcical in view of the Insurrection Act, and characteristic of the man, who was borne to his grave amid the savage and exulting shouts of a longpersecuted and at length liberated people. But crime was not diminished a particle. Every corner of the island was a hot-bed for it. The state of the country, of prices, of population, and of rents, was a veritable nursery for the young plant of sedition. The Act of 1793 which had transformed thousands of unfranchised Catholics into voters, and tempted landlords to sub-divide their leased lands, in order to increase their political influence by multiplying the voters on their estates, namely the forty-shilling freeholders, combined with the increased agricultural prosperity consequent upon the high prices created by the great war, had stimulated the growth of the population, which, from being between four and five millions before the Union, had increased to about six and a half millions by 1815. Rents rose in consequence, a fierce competition taking place for the possession of a limited soil, whilst wages, which in accordance with the "cottar system" were generally paid in kind, that is to say in potatoes, simultaneously fell. Then came the peace of 1815. Rents now suddenly subsided. With the decline of prices, wages sank even lower, and as the distracted tenants were unable to pay their way, hundreds of evictions followed as a natural consequence. This treatment was the harsher as tenants had, in many cases, effected improvements on their holdings at their own expense, thus creating a sort of dual ownership or concurrent right in their farms. Agrarian disorder rapidly followed in the train of these grievances. Societies of "Threshers" had been formed to resist the payment