Irish peasant

“ The Irish peasant loves his bit of land far more than his language, and even more, I think, in the bottom of his heart, than he loves his church, although allegiance to his church is a duty that he puts before any love. A boreen in bogland is not a lonely place to the Irish peasant if he have neighbors of long standing. It is the big city that to him at home seems the lonely place, despite the glamour of its lights, and its shops, and its ceaseless excitements. ”

“ Would those forces be any less irresistible if the whole body of the Irish peasantry stood, as Land Purchase minus Self-Government makes them to stand, directly face to face with the British State? This is a question that our opponents cannot evade, any more than they can evade that other question, which lies unnoticed at the back of all solutions of the problem by way of peasant ownership—Whether it is possible to imagine the land of Ireland handed over to Irishmen, and yet the government of Ireland kept exclusively and directly by Englishmen? ”

“ But the life of the Irish peasant has been so long such a battle for mere existence that it is no wonder that he came to look with contempt on everything that did not administer to his mere animal wants. ”

“ Naturally the mind of the Irish peasant is good, honourable, and grateful—but it has been deteriorated by miseries and neglect; and is being so, more and more daily at home; while, when they go abroad they seem to inherit all their original good qualities.
It is a fact too, known to all who know them, that when they settle in England as labourers, they almost invariably share their earnings with their relations at home. The remittances from London alone to Ireland amount to many thousands yearly. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This merciless system has depopulated the land, and in the enforced emigration the Irish peasant has found no powerful government to aid him in his going; he has paid, to the last farthing, the exactions and robberies of English domination, and then has made his own unassisted way, dogged by an inflicted poverty but with his gallant spirit still unbroken. What has England gained by this conflict of centuries with Ireland? She has sapped her own strength and merited the condemnation of mankind. ”

“ The Irish peasant, also, never, if he can avoid it, answers any question directly: in some districts, if you ask where such a gentleman’s house is, he will point and reply, “Does your honour see that large house there, all amongst the trees, with a green field before it?”—You answer, “Yes.” “Well,” says he, “plaze your honour that’s not it. But do you see the big brick house, with the cow-houses by the side of that same, and a pond of water?—you can’t see the ducks, becaze they are always diving, plaze your honour.” ”

“ There was nothing wrong in the account which I could detect, but I saw with amazement that an Irish peasant who had probably found it hard to retain potatoes enough for daily bread in Ireland had one item in his bank account of £1,500, the price of his wheat, and had more comfort and plenty about him than any ordinary squire at home. Every man here, I observed, had a horse to ride; every farm a team of bullocks, but men and women, content and thankful as they are for the prosperity of the new country, "won't forget old Ireland were it fifty times as fair." ”

“ If one is to believe all that one hears, the Irish peasant is a sort of inferior, inhuman creation. Anything is good enough for him, and, like the dog in the adage, the less you give him and the more you kick him, the better he will like you. One never hears the slackest politician of them all talking or writing about “the English peasant.” It is “the sturdy men of Kent,” “the hardy men of Yorkshire,” and “comrades,” and “fellow-workers,” all the time. These men eat bacon and cheese, and as much beef as they can lay tooth upon ”

“ On our arrival, I was soon recognized and surrounded by numbers of those to whom I had formerly been known, who received and welcomed me with a warmth of kindness and sincerity, which it would be in vain to look for among the peasantry of any other nation. Indeed, I have uniformly observed, that when no religious or political feeling influences the heart and principles of an Irish peasant, he is singularly sincere and faithful in his attachments, and has always a bias to the generous and the disinterested. ”

“ EMBROIDERING.
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a piece of reclaimed peat-bog than the most fertile valley that ever grew the products of the field.
Truth to tell, the genuine Irish peasant hates the cultivation of the soil; he dislikes to dig in the earth, as he does to fish in the sea; but he rejoices in cattle-raising, and, above all, cattle-trading. He likes to drive them to market; he makes a regular holiday of it, and so do the rest of his family, as one who has ever met such a composite caravan on the road well knows.
It is said that twenty thousand Irish go to England every autumn for the harvest. ”

“ And but a scanty living could be got out of the land at this time by the Irish peasant. The great provision trade of the eighteenth century may have enriched individuals, but the peasantry suffered rather than gained by the conditions under which the staple trade of the country was carried on. This provision trade had begun to develop after the Restoration as a result of English commercial legislation, and it continued to flourish partly because pasture farming was particularly suited to Ireland, partly because the English Corn Laws rendered corn growing in Ireland absolutely unprofitable. ”

“ Young as I was and slight as had been the consideration heretofore accorded me, there was that in the lonely desolation of my condition which awakened all their sympathies, and directed all their interests towards me; and in no country are the differences of rank such slight barriers in excluding the feeling of one portion of the community from the sorrows of the others: the Irish peasant, however humble, seems to possess an intuitive tact on this subject, and to minister all the consolations in his power with a gentle delicacy that cannot be surpassed. ”

“ As I have already hinted, the Irish peasant has three reasons for his desire to be "rooted in the soil." One is a traditional reason. He thinks that his forefathers were unjustly ousted by foreign conquerors. His belief rests on an utterly distorted view of history. It is true that eight hundred years ago a few of the ancestors of a few of the existing peasantry might in a sort of sense have been called landowners. But so far as the Gaelic race survives, it would be equally true to say that the ancestors of the existing peasantry had been the serfs or the slaves of barbarous chieftains. ”

“ They are a class apart, retaining all the most brutal characteristics of the Irish peasant at home, but without the redeeming light-heartedness, the tender impulses and strong affections of that most perplexing people. ”

“ The creed of an Irish peasant may be superstitious—where is the peasant whose creed is anything else?—but religion in Ireland has at any rate, in the true spirit of Christianity, found its way to the wretched, the degraded, the despairing: it has refined, comforted, ennobled those whom [Pg 126] external circumstances seemed expressly designed to crush them into absolute brutality. The Irish peasant is never the mere animal that for centuries English legislators tried to make him. ”

“ The great religion and the great national tradition which have persisted for so many centuries in Ireland have encouraged these clean and cutting elements; but they have encouraged many other things which serve to balance them. The Irish peasant has these qualities which are somewhat peculiar to Ireland, a strange purity and a strange pugnacity. But the Irish peasant also has qualities which are common to all peasants, and his nation has qualities that are common to all healthy nations. ”

“ The undeniable blot on the Irish character—agrarian outrage—is not to be accounted for by drink. The true explanation is familiar to all who really know the country. The Irish peasant is very largely dependent on the soil for his support, and believes himself to be wholly so. He also believes himself to have a moral and a historical right to the possession of the soil; a belief which contains a considerable admixture of truth, provided it be stated with the proper limitations. Unluckily, the Irish peasant holds it without any limitation at all ”

“ The sharpest wit, and the shrewdest subtilty, which abound in the character of the Irish peasant, generally lie concealed under the semblance of dullness, or the appearance of simplicity; and his language, replete with the keenest humor, possesses an idiom of equivocation, [642] which never fails successfully to evade a direct answer to an unwelcome question.
4. Inquisitive, artful, and penetrating, the Irish peasant [298] learns mankind without extensive intercourse, and has an instinctive knowledge of the world, without mingling in its societies ”

“ No one needs to be told that the Irish peasant is worse fed, worse clothed, worse housed than any peasant in Europe, yet gentlemen will take from these gratuitous work, and see so little to be ashamed of in the transaction as to write about it over their own signature, as Ernest Cochrane did in the columns of the Witness. ”

“ The Irish peasant had become a landed proprietor, and, although his establishment was only two years old, he owned at that moment five hundred acres of well-cultivated land and five hundred head of cattle, was his own master, and as independent as one can be even in the freest country in the world. ”

“ This great movement, though its dimensions cannot fail strongly to impress the imagination, we can yet see to be a perfectly natural consequence of economic laws acting under the new conditions of human societies. If in former times the Irish peasant squatted from year to year on his poor little patch of land, or toiled on for miserable wages in a state of chronic semi-starvation, when in other countries he and his children might have earned, with no greater effort, a comfortable livelihood, it was not because he wished to remain, but because he was unable to go. ”

“ The restoration of Irish independence—the resumption of forfeited estates—the return of the real nobility of the land to their long-lost-position of eminence and influence, were themes he descanted upon with consummate skill, bringing home each fact to the actual effect such changes would work in the youth's own condition, who, no longer degraded to the rank of a mere peasant, would once again assert his own rightful station, and stand forth at the head of his vast property—the heir of an honoured name and house. ”

“ Convince him by plain and impartial reasoning, that he is wrong; and he withdraws from the judgment-seat, if not with cheerfulness, at least with submission: but, to make him respect the laws, he must be satisfied that they are impartial; and, with that conviction on his mind, the Irish peasant is as perfectly tractable as the native of any other country in the world.
10. An attachment to, and a respect for females, is another characteristic of the Irish peasant. ”

“ Since Father Dunne penned these indignant words, the condition of the Irish peasant has been somewhat improved by remedial legislation, but it is susceptible of further improvement still. Though Irish families may no longer be under the dire necessity of flying for refuge to the most distant part of the world, they have yet many evils to encounter and many trials to endure in the land of their birth. ”

“ Another conclusion drawn from my personal intercourse with the Irish peasant was that nothing is to be got out of him by bullying and everything by gentle means. If you arrive at an inn and proceed, as [110] do the English everywhere, to assume a harsh and arrogant tone, you will experience the greatest difficulties in obtaining even meagre fare in return for your money. They will pretend they have nothing in the house, that they are not in the habit of receiving travellers, and such like stories. ”

“ Yet the hero and heroine start with a peaceful youth in Tipperary as members of the small farmer class. Parents oppose the match, and the hero goes to Dublin, where he falls into the hands of a gang of desperadoes. Then the scene shifts to America, to return to Ireland only for the wedding bells of the close. The Irish peasant at home is appreciatively described, his intense spirit of faith being dwelt on. ”

“ As to the vices [2] of the Irish peasant, a few years since they might have been set down as three—whiskey drinking, cupidity, and combination. The first exists no longer, and if we seek for proof of good intention and desires in the people, this gives it forcibly. Having food of but one kind, and that possessing no stimulating power, nor capability of imparting grateful warmth, such as the "brose" of the Scotch, or the soup of the continental peasant; and the climate being cold and humid to excess, they naturally, it may be said, used the only stimulant they could obtain. ”

“ Eight little studies—vignettes—of Irish peasant types, evidently drawn direct from real life. They are in narrative form, but in most the incident is slight. They give curiously vivid glimpses of the life of the poor, of which the Author has intimate knowledge. The tone is Catholic and “Gaelic.” The Author avoids phonetic renderings of peasant dialect. ”