Irish gentry

“ There is scarcely a little village in England, however poor, where there is not a committee of ladies, assisted by the neighbouring gentry, who distribute coals, blankets, and clothing in winter; and at all times, where there is distress, give bread, tea, and meat. Well may the poor Irish come home discontented after they have been to work in England, and see how differently the poor are treated there. I admit, and I repeat it again, that there are instances in which the landlord takes an interest in his tenantry, but those instances are exceptions. ”

“ Of all the evil influences which swayed the destinies of Ireland in latter days, none can compare, in extent of importance, with the fatal taste for prodigality that characterized the habits of the gentry. Reckless, wasteful extravagance, in every detail of life, suggested modes of acting and thinking at variance with all individual and, consequently, all national prosperity. Hospitality was pushed to profusion, liberality became a spendthrift habit. The good and the bad qualities of the Irish temperament alike contributed to this passion ”

“ The Irish, naturally acute, lively, generous, and brave, would soon feel themselves, under our excellent constitution, as happy and loyal a people as any in the world, and as much attached to their country, which, for its healthy climate and fertile soil, may match with any other on this globe. One would hope that the native gentry would at length see the very reprehensible injustice of becoming absentees. Landowners in all countries, as well as in Ireland, ought as far as possible to spend their rents where they receive them. Where they do not do so, any country is certain to become poor. ”

“ Driven forth by poverty, Irishmen emigrate in great numbers, and in whatever quarter of the world an Irishman sets his foot, there stands a bitter, an implacable enemy of England. That is one of the results of the wide- spread disaffection that exists in Ireland. There are hundreds of thousands—I suppose there are millions—of the population of the United States of America who are Irish by birth, or by immediate descent; and be it remembered, Irishmen settled in the United States have a large influence in public affairs. ”

“ There are nearly five millions of acres of waste land in the country, capable of the highest cultivation. The soil is inexhaustibly rich, the climate is most delightful, and the natural advantages for agriculture and commerce unprecedented. Still the Irish remain oppressed and poor; enslaved by their priests, and ground down to the earth by exacting landlords and a hostile government. There is no real union between England and Ireland, no sympathy between the different classes, and an implacable animosity between the Protestant and Catholic population. ”

“ The ills of Ireland arise from the inordinate love of the soil in the Irish, and their lower civilization. For instance, an English farmer in renting a farm would consider how much would support his family first, and if the landlord would not accept as rent what was left the bargain would not be struck. The Irish farmer would think first how much he could give the landlord, and would calculate to live somehow, not as any human beings should live, but somehow on the balance. ”

“ It is not the physical environment and comfort of an orderly home that enchain and attract minds still dominated, more or less unconsciously, by the associations and common interests of the primitive clan, but rather the sense of human neighbourhood and kinship which the individual finds in the community. Indeed the Irish peasant scarcely seems to have a home in the sense in which an Englishman understands the word. If he love the place of his habitation he does not endeavour to improve or to adorn it, or indeed to make it in any sense a reflection of his own mind and taste. ”

“ Whether it is or is not the fact, that the landlord by living at home and spending his fortune amongst his people adds to the aggregate wealth of the nation, it is certain that his doing so is a partial and immediate good to the locality in which he resides. Often does the Irish peasant point to the decayed village, and the crumbling mansion, as evidences that the owner of the soil is an Absentee. 4. There is a special reason given by at least one English writer, why Irish landlords ought to be resident, and thus endeavour to gain the confidence of their tenants ”

“ I wish these facts could be given to the world to show the rich what the poor have done for suffering Ireland, and especially that the Irish landlords might be made aware of what their former tenants are doing for their present ones. ”

“ Then, again, it has become a matter of fashion to neglect the soil. Our people prefer to live in the towns rather than on the farms. The Irish are a social race, and, as has been demonstrated by the emigrants to America, they prefer a crowded tenement house to plenty of room on a farm.”
“That the farms of the tenant purchasers have largely improved in all parts of Ireland, as regards cultivation and general conditions, is unquestionable,” said Mr. Bailey. ”

“ The O’Driscolls did own it at one time, and other lands around it, but the English came over to Ireland in strong numbers; they coveted the lands of the Irish; they overran the country with fire and sword; they beat the Irish; they killed many of them; they banished many of them; and they allowed more of them to remain in the land, on the condition that they would pay rent to the English, and acknowledge them as their landlords. That is how the old Irish, on their own lands, all over Ireland to-day are called tenants, and how the English in Ireland are called landlords. ”

“ I approached—removed the barrier: the boy and the animal escaped together, and I found myself alone in the centre of this miserable asylum of human wretchedness—the residence of an Irish peasant. To those who have only contemplated this useful order of society in England, “where every rood of ground maintains its man,” and where the peasant liberally enjoys the comforts as well as the necessaries of life, the wretched picture which the interior of an Irish cabin presents, would be at once an object of compassion and disgust. ”

“ No one can understand the depth of Irish misery who has not lived in Ireland, and taken pains to become acquainted with the habits and manner of life of the lower orders. The tenant who is kept at starvation point to pay his landlord's rent, has no means of providing for his family. He cannot encourage trade; his sons cannot get work to do, if they are taught trades. Emigration or the workhouse is the only resource. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We are face to face in Ireland with this problem, with no crowded and towering cities to disguise the emptiness of the fields. It is not a problem which lends itself to legislative solution. Whether there be fair rents or no rents at all, the child of the peasant, yearning for a fuller life, goes where life is at its fullest. We all desire life, and that we might have it more abundantly,—the peasant as much as the mystic thirsting for infinite being,—and in rural Ireland the needs of life have been neglected. ”

“ I have had occasion more than once to press upon the attention of those who have the disposal of land in Ireland, the great benefits which would result to our poor if they would act upon the principle which actuates this benevolent society; and strange though it be, the fact is, that some landlords possessing estates both in England and Ireland are at pains to secure to the English labourer advantages which they take no trouble to provide for the labourer on the soil of Ireland. ”

“ The tradition of absolute landlord power still lives in the Irish country-side, when girls were told the price at which they might save their family from being driven out of the home held by their ancestors for hundreds of years, and left to die on the roadside of hunger, or in the coffin-ship of plague. With security of tenure for the Irish poor such ordeals have passed into history. As [30] for reports of English tourists, they resemble the travellers’ tales which everywhere and at all times various countries have heard on the manners of their neighbours. ”

“ At the time of my visit to Kylemore the hay crops were down and partly carried on the reclaimed bog-land above described. The contrast of its luxuriance with the dark and dreary desolation of the many estates I had seen during three summers’ wanderings through Ireland added further proof of the infamy of the majority of Irish landlords, by showing what Ireland would have been had they done their duty. ”

“ Yet these peasants were all papists, and their landlords all protestants:—religion, indeed, was never thought of in the matter. If the landlords had continued the same, the tenantry would not have altered. But under the present system, the populace of Ireland will never long remain tranquil, whilst at the same time it is increasing in number—an increase that cannot be got rid of:—hang, shoot, and exile five hundred thousand Irish, the number will scarcely be missed, and in two years the country will be as full as ever again. ”

“ A continuous stream of emigration of Protestant dissenters from Ulster went on during the early part of the 18th century, and the Irish Government of the day was much concerned at losing so many of their most loyal citizens. ”

“ The landlords of Ireland are the lords of Ireland. England makes them landlords first, and then, to put the brand of her marauding nobility on them, she makes them English lords. And they do lord it over the Irish people, and ride rough-shod over every natural and acquired right belonging to them. Whether born in England or Ireland, they must be English, and anti-Irish in spirit, in action and in religion. Some of my readers may say that some of the lords and the landlords in Ireland at the present day are Catholics. ”

“ And so the two, who in any other country would be wedded and have a cottage of their own, with plenty to eat, and drink, and wear, two who owe the world by this time at least three chubby urchins, the girls like their mother and the boys like their father, are kept apart by this more than inhuman system of landlordism, which is the bottom, top and sides of Irish misery. Others who never knew what it was to live better, would marry and would add to the eternal roll of paupers that make up the population of Ireland; but a residence in God’s country unfitted this man for that. ”

“ I have no intention of discussing whether the landlords of Ireland, as a class, are good men or bad men, kind or cruel. In all probability they are as selfish, as interested, and as unscrupulous as any other collection of human beings possessing the same amount of education and intelligence. ”

“ The Irish land and tenant problem is one which cannot be ignored, and has given great concern to those responsible for Ireland’s welfare.
It is impossible, and it would not be meet, to attempt to deal, even superficially, with the question here; but it cannot be overlooked by one who knows anything of Ireland and the present-day aspect and conditions of life there; nor can it by even the “butterfly” tourist, who does the round of Killarney’s fair lakes in a personally conducted party. ”

“ Spontaneous emigration, chiefly to the United States, and irrespective of aid from the poor-rates, was exceedingly active from all parts of Ireland at this time, the natural love of country having been deadened by the pressure of want and disease. ”

“ If Ireland (as it was once remarked to me) could be stretched out like a piece of india-rubber, the peasantry would be as tranquil and contented as that of England. But as this is impossible, we must strive to do what is possible. As we cannot make more land to the inhabitants, we must make fewer inhabitants to the land,"—Sir G. C. Lewis on Irish Disturbances, p. 332.
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The Effect of Emigration on Population in Ireland. ”

“ The largest wave of Irish immigrants came in the late 1840s, when the Great Famine ravaging Ireland caused 2 million people to emigrate, mostly to American soil. These immigrants transformed our largest cities and helped to build them into dynamic centers of commerce and industry, and their contributions to our smaller cities and towns are evident today in the cultural, economic, and spiritual makeup of the communities. ”

“ It is amusing to find Dublin fearful of the encroachment of the French, as we, in our turn, dread the advance of the Irish. We must make a jest of our own alarms, and even smile—since we cannot help ourselves—at the spiritual desolation occasioned by the settlement of an Irish family in one of our suburban neighborhoods. The householders view with fear and jealousy the erection of any dwelling of less than a stated cost, as portending a possible advent of Irish; and when the calamitous race actually appears, a mortal pang strikes to the bottom of every pocket. ”

“ Granted; but you do not mean, I suppose, to interpret the poor into professional beggars? I am not much interested in Ireland or the Irish; most persons would call me, and call me truly, an unobservant man; yet there are things passing every day before me to which I cannot shut my eyes; which you, Grace, would see as plainly as I if you did not wilfully shut 193your eyes. First of all, I behold a number of landlords who reside principally out of Ireland, for the very good reason that they prefer living in London, or Paris, or Florence, or Vienna, wherein they show their discrimination. ”