Sir George Nicholls

“ In short, every man whom I conversed with, who had any experience of the habits of the people, declared that the peasantry are perfectly tractable, and never think of opposing authority, unless stimulated by drink, or urged on by that species of combination for securing the occupancy of land, which has become so common in certain districts. Neither of these influences will interfere with the establishment of a workhouse, or the regulation of its inmates, all of whom will have sought refuge in it voluntarily, and may quit it at any moment. ”

“ The workhouse of Amsterdam is a vast building, capable of containing upwards of 1,500 inmates. The imposing character of its exterior, the elegance of its entrance-hall, and the decorations of the rooms appropriated to public business, were in marked contrast with the aspect of the several wards. The inmates chiefly consisted of the lowest and least moral part of the population of the great cities, who had sought refuge in the workhouse because they had forfeited their claim to regular employment, and the vigilance of the police did not permit them to subsist by mendicancy. ”

“ A poor-law seems also to be necessary, as a first step towards bringing about improvement in the habits and social condition of the people. Without such improvement, peace, good order, and security cannot exist in Ireland; and without these, it is in vain to look for that accumulation of wealth, and influx of capital, which are necessary for developing its resources, agricultural and commercial, and for providing profitable employment for the population. Ireland is now suffering under a circle of evils, producing and reproducing one another. ”

“ One of the circumstances that first arrests attention on visiting Ireland, is the prevalence of mendicancy. It is not perhaps the actual amount of misery existing amongst the mendicant class, great as that may be, which is most to be deprecated; but the falsehood and fraud which form a part of their profession, and spread by their example. Mendicancy appeals to our sympathies on behalf of vice, as well as want; and encouragement is often afforded to the one, by the relief intended for the other. ”

“ How far the workhouse, if established, may be relied upon as a test of destitution and a measure of the relief to be afforded; how far it will be effectual for the prevention of pauperism, and for stimulating the people to exertion for their own support;—how far, in short, the workhouse system, which has been safely and effectually applied to dispauperise England, may be applied with safety and efficiency to prevent pauperism in Ireland, now remains for inquiry. ”

“ There can, it is observed, be few situations more painful than that of a board of guardians in the present condition of Ireland, surrounded by an appalling extent of destitution, yet without the means of relieving the sufferers. “Possessed of a workhouse capable of holding a few hundred inmates, the guardians are looked to with hope by thousands of famishing persons, and are called on to exercise the mournful task of selection from the distressed objects who present themselves for admission as their last refuge from death.” ”

“ At the end of their last Report, the commissioners adverted to the great efforts which were made to restore the potato to its former position of the staple crop of Ireland, as being a circumstance at once hopeful and alarming. The policy of a people’s relying for subsistence on a crop so uncertain in its produce, and which so soon decays, is no doubt a question of momentous importance. ”

“ The object of a poor-law is to relieve the destitute—that is, to relieve those individuals who from sickness, accident, mental or bodily infirmity, failure of employment, or other cause, may be unable to obtain the necessaries of life by their own exertions. Under such circumstances, the destitute individual, if not relieved, might be driven to beg or to steal; and a poor-law, by providing for the relief of destitution, prevents the necessity or the excuse for resorting to either. This is the legitimate object of a poor-law, and to this its operations are limited in the bill of last session. ”

“ To aim directly at effecting an increase of employment in Ireland, is beyond the powers if it be not foreign to the province of a poor-law, the immediate object of which is to provide for the relief of the destitute. Now destitution may be caused by an excess of labourers, or by a deficiency of employment, which are in truth convertible terms. If an able-bodied labourer becomes destitute through want of employment, he must be relieved at the common charge, like any individual reduced to a state of destitution by age or infirmity. ”

“ But with adequate powers, and with such modifications as are before described, the principle of union which has been established in England by the Poor Law Amendment Act, may I think be advantageously extended to Ireland; and as it has been shown that no insurmountable difficulty exists to prevent the introduction of the workhouse as a test of destitution—so neither will there be any insurmountable difficulty in establishing an adequate machinery for the government of the unions when formed. ”

“ The occupation of a plot of land has now gotten to be considered, by a great portion of the Irish people, as conferring an almost interminable right of possession. This seems to have arisen in great measure out of the circumstances in which they have been placed; for there being no legal provision for the destitute, and the subdivision of the land into small holdings having destroyed the regular demand for labour, the only protection against actual want, the only means by which a man could procure food for his family, was by getting and retaining possession of a portion of land ”

“ There was no employment for the young, nor relief for the aged, nor means nor opportunity for removing their surplus numbers to some more eligible spot. They could only therefore live on, ‘hoping,’ as they said, ‘that times might mend, and that their landlords would sooner or later do something for them.’ To improve the condition of such a people would increase the productive powers of the country, a point well deserving the attention of the great landowners, with whom it mainly rests. ”

“ Arthur Young declares, that—to be ignorant of the condition of the labouring classes and the poor generally, is to be wanting in the first rudiments of political knowledge, and he states that he made every endeavour to obtain the best information on the subject, from persons in every class of life. According to some, the poor were all starving. According to others, they were in a very tolerable state of comfort.—Whilst a third party, who looked with a jaundiced eye on British administration, pointed at their poverty and rags as proofs of the cruel treatment of their country. ”

“ The boys were taught tailoring, shoemaking, carpentering, and some were set to work in the garden: but the various employments to which boys reared in the workhouse are likely in after life to betake themselves, hardly admit of their being specifically trained for them, and little more can be done in the way of preparation than to send them forth imbued with habits of industry, their frames strengthened and inured to labour, their tempers and mental faculties duly cultivated, and above all with their minds duly impressed with a sense of their moral and religious duties. ”

“ There are countervailing circumstances in Ireland however, which more than balance this drawback, even if it were greater than it really is. The Irish are naturally, or by habit, a migratory people, fond of change, hopeful, sanguine, eager for experiment. They have never been practically limited to one spot by a law of settlement, as has been the case with the English peasantry. They have never been enervated by a misapplied system of parish relief. ”

“ After all the assistance that can be extended to Ireland by good laws, and every encouragement afforded to the poor by temporary employment of a public nature, and every assistance that emigration and other modes of relief can yield, her real improvement must spring from herself, her own inhabitants, and her own indigenous institutions, irrespective of legislation, and English interference. ”

“ At present there is no test of destitution in Ireland. The mendicant, whether his distress be real or fictitious, claims and receives his share of the produce of the soil in the shape of charity, before the landlord can receive his portion in the shape of rent, and before the tenant has ascertained whether he is a gainer or a loser by his labours and his risks. The mendicant’s claim has now precedence over every other. If the whole property of Ireland was rated to the relief of the poor, it would be no more ”

“ Agriculture is the chief staple of Ireland, on which the welfare, and it may be said the very existence of its inhabitants depended. Yet agriculture was, with few exceptions, confessedly in a very backward state; and it appeared to me likely that this backwardness might to some extent be remedied by the establishment of union agricultural societies—that is, associations for promoting improvements in agriculture within the limits of the respective unions ”

“ This is now the state of Ireland. On the most moderate computation the amount of spontaneous alms given, chiefly by the smaller farmers and cottars, is from one to two millions sterling annually; but being given without system or without inquiry to the good and to the bad, the really destitute and the pretenders to destitution receive alike their maintenance out of the earnings of the industrious, to their great impoverishment, and to the great injury of the morals and good order of the kingdom. ”

“ But this practice of mendicancy, which raises so vast a sum, is not like a well-constituted poor-law, which affords relief to the really indigent—that which seems to afford relief to the distressed, also promotes and keeps up imposture, and in Ireland where mendicancy is so general, and relief so freely given, the number of impostors must be enormous. ”

“ The present state of Ireland however, and the habits and feelings of the Irish people, throw considerable difficulty in the way of an immediate suppression of mendicancy. The number of mendicants is very great, and they are therefore of some importance as a class, and support and keep each other in countenance whilst following, what they consider, no disreputable vocation. They enter the cottages of the peasantry as supplicants, it is true, but still with a certain sense of right; and the cottager would be held to be a bold, if not a bad man, who resisted their appeal. ”

“ In some districts where the potato failed, but where the population were engaged in the linen-trade, no individual so employed is said to have had occasion for relief; and the committee come to the conclusion that the late distress had chiefly arisen from the circumstance that the peasantry depended for subsistence upon the food raised by themselves. When the potato fails, they have not the means to purchase other food, and the potato is not only uncertain as a crop but it soon decays, so that the surplus of one year cannot be preserved to supply the deficiency in another. ”

“ I need scarcely say that this view is essentially different from the workhouse system established in England, and as it is proposed to establish it in Ireland. Experience has proved that pauper labour can never be profitable. The workhouse is here used merely as a medium of relief; and in order that the destitute only may partake of it, the relief is administered in such a way, and on such conditions, that none but the destitute will accept it. ”

“ A landowner who looks only to receiving the rents of his estate, may be regardless of the numbers in his neighbourhood who are in a state of destitution, or who follow mendicancy and are ready to commit crime; but if he is compelled to furnish means for the subsistence of persons so destitute, it then becomes his interest to see that those around him have the means of living, and are not in actual want. ”

“ The most pleasing circumstance connected with the workhouse is the state of the pauper children, who are there educated and trained up in habits of order cleanliness and industry, instead of being left as outcasts, with every likelihood of their becoming a burthen, and possibly a bane to the community. ”

“ If it be asked how this accords with the misery and destitution apparent among a large portion of the people, the answer is obvious—The capital of the country has increased, but the increase of the population has been still greater; and it therefore does not follow that there is an increase of capital or comfort in the possession of each individual, or even of the majority. The reverse is unhappily the fact—Towns, exhibiting every sign of increased wealth, are encircled by suburbs composed of miserable hovels, sheltering a wretched population of mendicants. ”

“ Rather than bear the restrictions of a workhouse, the Irishman, if in possession of health and strength, would wander the world over to obtain a living. All the opinions I have collected from persons most conversant with the Irish character, agree in this. Confinement of any kind is even more irksome to an Irishman than to an Englishman. Hence, although he might be lodged, fed, and clothed, in a workhouse, better than he could lodge, feed, and clothe himself—he will yet, like the Englishman, never enter the workhouse, unless driven thither by actual necessity ”

“ The governing principle of the workhouse system is this:—that the support which is afforded at the public charge in the workhouse, shall on the whole be less desirable than the support obtained by independent exertion. To carry out this principle, it might seem to be necessary that the inmates of a workhouse should be in all respects worse situated—worse clothed, worse lodged, and worse fed, than the independent labourers of the district. ”