Alice Effie Murray

“ Never had any country a more complete control over the destinies of another than had England over the destinies of Ireland during the greater part of the eighteenth century. The confiscations of Irish land which disorganised all social conditions, the commercial legislation which ruined Ireland's chance of becoming a rich industrial nation, the financial corruption and misapplication of patronage, were all the direct work of the English Parliament or of the English Government. ”

“ But the consequent poverty and backwardness of the country were intensified by glaring financial abuses and political corruption, while the Penal Laws crushed the life out of the people and drove their natural leaders into exile. The whole policy of England, whether commercial, political, or religious, aimed at keeping Ireland poor, divided, and humiliated. The financial policy pursued towards Ireland by England was even more short-sighted than her commercial policy, and it had not the same important reasons to justify it. ”

“ But we have of course to look beyond the actual money raised and into the whole question of Irish administration and expenditure if we wish to see whether Ireland was lightly or heavily taxed. A great part of the Irish revenue went in salaries and pensions to persons who hardly ever set foot in Ireland, while the vicious habit of keeping all remunerative posts in the Government, Church, and Army in the hands of Englishmen, many of whom were absentees, acted like a huge tax on the Irish people. A great part of the money paid by Ireland went to uses which corrupted and degraded the country. ”

“ The Catholic gentry who remained at home became impoverished and disheartened by religious persecution. The Catholics, as a body, suffered more from the Penal Laws than from anything else. The Penal Code educated the Irish into a hatred of England and the law, robbed them of their natural leaders, denied them education, position, and fame, and tried to deny them industrial pursuits and wealth. At the same time these Laws prevented amalgamation with the Protestants, and reduced the bulk of the Irish people to a depth of ignorance and poverty which has seldom been equalled. ”

“ Surely it would be difficult to find in all the annals of history as demoralising a code of laws as this Irish Penal Code. In other European countries religious persecution may have been more ferocious, but in Ireland, where the motive for persecution was, on the whole, rather political than religious, the Penal Laws were more subtly degrading, and more injurious to the national character than the more bloodthirsty enactments of France and Spain against the Protestants. Families were divided against families, brothers against brothers, sons became the enemies of their own fathers. ”

“ Unlike the peasant proprietor or the mediæval serf, the Irish peasant had no permanent interest in the soil and no security of tenure. Unlike the English farmer, he was not a capitalist investing his money in the land. He simply found the land the only thing between him and starvation, and so he would promise any rent. The landlords did nothing to improve the land. The peasants built their own houses, their ditches, and their hedges, and when they had done all this they were liable to be evicted at any moment if the landlord took it into his head to turn his land into pasture. ”

“ An entire Catholic nation was required by an alien power to give up the faith of its forefathers, drive out its ministers of religion, and become hypocrites and liars under pain of perpetual poverty, if not of perpetual imprisonment. Needless to say, no laws which aimed at the coercion of an entire nation could ever be enforced in all their verbal severity; but the prosecution of the laws was severe enough to bring to the forefront the worst qualities of the Irish character, and they made the lives of the Irish people miserable in the extreme. ”

“ It was these laws concerning the education of their children which were resented most bitterly by the Irish Catholics. The laws interfered with the domestic happiness of the people, and they were regarded by them as the most insidious and poisonous form of bribery. In spite of the terrible poverty of the people and the passion for knowledge which has always distinguished them, they preferred as a rule to starve themselves to a still greater extent than to ensure some relief by allowing the State to provide for their children under the conditions offered. ”

“ But, speaking broadly, the mass of the Irish people were dependent on the land, and we can realise clearly what this meant when we reflect that until after 1773 the greater part of cultivated land in Ireland was under pasture. We all know that ghastly piece of irony of Swift on how to utilize the children of poor people so that they would be a benefit rather than a burden to their parents, and poor as Ireland is at the present day, not even the lowest section of her population is sunk in the dreadful misery which prevailed among the Irish poor in Swift's time. ”

“ Once the foreign trade was lost there was little encouragement to make the better kinds of cloth. There was little demand for them in Ireland, and what demand there was could be met by English manufacturers who had easy access to the Irish markets while secure in their own from all Irish industry. So Irish manufacturers devoted themselves to making coarse stuffs such as were used by the majority of the people. Their skill naturally declined, the profits of the manufacturers were small owing to the poverty of the country, and as time went on the quality of Irish wool inevitably deteriorated. ”

“ The present condition of England is the result of centuries of steady progress. Her people have always had leaders to guide them, her laws have generally been in accordance with the moral feeling of the community, in no direction has her material development been checked. But Ireland at the present day is the result of centuries of oppression and neglect. She has been robbed of her natural leaders, for more than a century the law of the land was in direct opposition to the religion of the people, the development of the country has been checked on all sides. ”

“ English statesmen deliberately set themselves to hunt down and persecute all those who professed the religion of their forefathers, mainly because this religion seemed to them fraught with all sorts of political dangers and to be a source of treason and disaffection. As for the Irish Protestants, England felt no particular jealousy towards them, for they were as zealous in their support of the new dynasty and the new order of things as any Englishman in England. ”

“ Even the children in the schools, young as they were, seem to have known how to bear hardship and punishment for the sake of their religion. An eyewitness stated that often on Fridays and fast days children would not take their broth, prepared as it was with meat, and how it had to be poured down their throats against their will. Indeed there was practically no conversion to the Protestant religion among the lower class of Catholics. Persecution only drew the Irish more closely to the Catholic Church; it created close ties between them and their priests. ”

“ But the whole policy of England towards Ireland after 1691 can naturally not be judged from a modern standpoint; it can only be judged in the light of the prevailing theories and ideas of the age. It was a period of intense class and national egotism; it was a time when the interests of the mass of the people were sacrificed as a matter of course to the desires of the ruling class and the interests of subordinate parts of an empire to those of the centre ”

“ Ireland was a country of comparatively small industrial development, and to English statesmen it did not seem particularly harsh to endeavour to direct her trade and industry into those channels in which they could not interfere with the existing industries in the mother country. Industries were being fostered in England to get wealth; this wealth was needed to fight France and the forces of Catholicism. And after all we need only consider the history of Europe during the years directly succeeding the revolution in order to understand this dislike and suspicion of Roman Catholicism. ”

“ Bishop Berkeley asks in his famous queries, "Whether there be upon earth any Christian or civilised people so beggarly, wretched, and destitute as the common Irish?" All contemporaries were agreed that there was only one answer to this question, but as long as the great majority of the landlords were absentees little could be done. The system of middlemen resulted in the people being screwed to death while the landlord got no more rent. There was no such thing as a poor law in the country, and when people were destitute they died of starvation unless they were supported by private charity. ”

“ It is true that towards the end of the period we may see the faint beginnings of a new national spirit, a spirit raised not as in other countries, by common traditions and a common history, but one aroused by the unwise policy of England. But the beginning was faint and could come to nothing until a great leader appeared and until England's difficulties made Ireland's opportunity. ”

“ The Irish brewing industry was also crushed by English legislation. The English exported beer and malt in large quantities to Ireland on payment of the usual small Irish duty of ten per cent., while they prevented the Irish from exporting beer or malt to them by means of import duties equal to a prohibition. In another way, too, England took care that Irish breweries should not compete with British. Hops could not very well be grown in Ireland, for they were too uncertain a crop for the small capitalist who engaged in farming. ”

“ Continued emigration had swept away the flower of the Catholic youth, and in 1739 we are told that not twenty Papists in Ireland possessed £1,000 a year in land, while those possessed of land of a less yearly value were proportionately few. The only prosperous class among the Irish Catholics was a class of merchants and traders in the towns, which had sprung into existence before the middle of the eighteenth century. The action of the Penal Laws in prohibiting Catholics from taking land on long leases or on profitable tenures, encouraged the more enterprising Catholic farmers to take to trade. ”

“ When the Irish were once more allowed, at the end of 1779, to export their woollen manufactures, it was found that Irish wool instead of being equal to English wool, was only capable of being made up into the very coarsest stuffs. In 1780 Ireland found it impossible to start at the point at which she had left off in 1698. Foreign markets did not offer the old advantages; there was little skill among Irish weavers, and little more capital employed in the industry. Like the Dutch two centuries previously, the Irish having once lost their foreign trade, could not regain it. ”

“ It is in the military history of Europe that we get the true history of the Irish Catholic gentry, and that we see those brilliant figures and events which are so conspicuously lacking in the history of the Irish Catholics in their own country. ”

“ This reckless turning of land into pasture led to many years of terrible famine, when the small portion of the country given over to supply, or when conditions in England prevented that country from exporting its usual amount of corn to Ireland. The small supply of corn led to very high prices in those days of localised markets, and gradually the mass of the people began to depend more and more on potatoes as their staple food. When the potato plots failed, as they frequently did, the people died by thousands, as they had nothing upon which to fall back. ”

“ Many of the more well-to-do Catholics took to trade, debarred as they were by the Penal Laws from making any profit out of land, while the rapid and continuous emigration of the Protestants from the North naturally threw the industry of the country more into Catholic hands. Both Protestants and Catholics were in fact injured by English commercial policy, and this policy left in Ireland marks which the lapse of well over a century have not effaced. ”

“ Entire villages were sometimes turned adrift, and we are told that in travelling from Dublin to Dundalk through a country esteemed the most fruitful in the kingdom, a man would see no improvements of any kind, no houses fit for gentlemen, no farmers' houses, few fields of corn, nothing but a bare face of nature with a few wretched cottages scattered about, three or four miles apart. ”

“ English weavers had lately emigrated to Ireland, tempted by the cheapness of living and labour, and had set up improved woollen manufactures. So, not only the coarser Irish stuffs were made, but all sorts of cloth. The industry spread greatly among the Irish Protestants, and to a smaller extent among the Catholics. In 1698 the woollen manufacture gave work to 12,000 Protestant families in Dublin, and 30,000 over the rest of the country, [2] while we know from petitions presented to the Irish Parliament that the Catholics had one third of the industry in their hands. ”