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THE LIBRARY 
 
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 JANE K. SATHER 
 
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Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 
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ENGLISH MISRULE 
 
 AHD 
 
 IRISH MISDEEDS. 
 
 FOUR LETTERS FROM IRELAND, 
 
 ADDRESSED TO 
 
 AN ENGLISH MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT. 
 
 AUBREY DE VERE. 
 
 SECOND EDITION. 
 
 LONDON : 
 JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET. 
 
 1848. 
 
LOAN STACK 
 
 30^9 r 
 
 " I know that the interests of the two countries must be taken to- 
 gether, and that a man cannot speak as a true Englishman unless he 
 speaks as a true Irishman, nor as a true Irishman unless he speaks as a 
 true Englishman." — Mr. Pitt's Speech on the Union. 
 
 " As an Englishman, I owe reparation to Ireland for the wrongs of 
 centuries." — Mb. Wilbeefokce. 
 
 Koii/a yap (piKav axr) 
 Koiva d'ei tl TreiaeTai 
 abe ya 
 
 EuRiP. Phoeniss. 
 
CONTENTS. fiAi{\l 
 
 LETTER I. 
 
 Paqb 
 
 Two Englands. — One of these always adverse to Ireland. — 
 Subjects treated in this Work. — The Labour Rate Act 
 as it worked. — A different Mode of Relief suggested. — 
 Progressive Symptoms of English Discontent with Ire- 
 land. — Attempts to discover its Cause. — Necessity for 
 moderating the Expression of it. — Probable Effects in 
 Ireland of recent English Detraction. — Its worse Effect 
 in England. — Its incompatibility with Justice and Truth 1 
 
 LETTER IL 
 
 The Faults of the Irish. — The continued Existence of So- 
 ciety in Ireland accounted for. — The Connection between 
 Irish Faults and past Misgovemment. — Brief Sketch of 
 Events in Ireland. — Variations of English Policy ac- 
 cording to Change of Circumstances.' — Outlawry, Legal 
 Tyranny, Corruption.— The Irish Constitution. — The 
 Union. — Catholic Emancipation. ■— Agitation. — The 
 Penal Laws still operate in Ireland. — English Intoler- 
 ance still finds a Mode of expressing itself. — National 
 Debt of England to Ireland. — Amendment the Test of 
 Repentance. — Imperial Legislation during Forty-seven 
 Years. — A Poor Law. — ^Neither the Responsibilities nor 
 the Rights of Property asserted in Time. — The Problem 
 of to-day the same as that at the Time of the Union . 48 
 
 LETTER III. 
 
 Ireland's Prosperity the only safety for England. — The 
 Consequence to England of Irish Ruin. — The Irish 
 Revenue and Expenditure. — Irish Property spent by 
 
 801 
 
IV CONTENTS. 
 
 Page 
 
 Englishmen or in England. — Irish and English Trade. — 
 English Charges on Irish Property. — The Rich the 
 losers. — Invasion of England by Irish Labourers. — Eng- 
 lish Plagiarisms of Irish Faults. ■ — An exaggerated 
 Charge which might be brought against England. — 
 Slight Suggestions as to Principles of Legislation for 
 Ireland. — Good Measures only good if applied in Time. 
 — Remedial Measures. — Security to Life and Property. 
 — Colonization, Agricultural Education. — Amendment 
 of the Poor Law. — Useful Public Works and Waste 
 Lands.— The Tenure of Land. — Provisions for enforcing 
 the Rights as well as Duties of Property. — Simplifica- 
 tion of the Law. — Sale of encumbered Estates. — Sana- 
 tory Improvements in Towns. — Schools for the Children 
 of the higher Orders 117 
 
 LETTER IV. 
 
 Necessity of acting on a large Principle. — A Cure worth 
 its Cost. — Self-love one Cause of English Dislike to Ire- 
 land. — England has her Blemishes as well as Ireland. — 
 Mining Districts. — Manufacturing System. — False Civil- 
 ization. — Alienation of Classes. — India. — The Colonies. 
 — English Pauperism. — No Popery. — Covetousness. — 
 Verbal Truth compatible with HoUowness and Pretence. 
 — Some Characteristics of the Irish Peasant. — Position 
 of an Irish Proprietor. — ^Dangers that lie before Eng- 
 land. — Their connection with her present Policy towards 
 Ireland. — Both Countries now on their Trial. — Safety 
 only in a true Union. — Two Destinies lie before Eng- 
 land, each connected with her present Course. — The 
 Bankruptcy of a great National Company. — The possible 
 Greatness of a united Empire founded on Virtue and on 
 Trade. — Practical Hints as to Principles of Irish'Tolicy. 
 — What has been effected by an approach to Union. . 185 
 
ENGLISH MISRULE 
 
 AND 
 
 IRISH MISDEEDS 
 
 LETTER I. 
 
 Two Englands. — One of these always adverse to Ireland. — Subjects 
 treated in this Work. — The Labour Rate Act as it worked. — A dif- 
 ferent Mode of Relief suggested. — Progressive Symptoms of English 
 Discontent with Ireland. — Attempts to discover its Cause. — Necessity 
 for moderating the Expression of it. — Probable Effects in Ireland of 
 recent English Detraction. — Its worse Effect in England. — Its incom- 
 patibility with Justice and Tnith. 
 
 Sir, 
 The great dissatisfaction and distress occasioned 
 of late years to England by the noise of Irish 
 misery, and its yet more formidable infection, blown 
 over to you frequently in the westerly winds, not 
 so much by our fault as by reason of the con- 
 tiguity of the two islands, is a matter which ought 
 long since to have touched us with some remorse, 
 had we not been selfishly preoccupied with our own 
 troubles. In former times, when the political con- 
 dition of Ireland was lower than it is now, though the 
 pressure of distress was less urgent, you appear to 
 
 B 
 
2 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. I. 
 
 have suffered little from this annoyance, perhaps be- 
 cause men complain less loudly of bondage than of 
 starvation. It is a hard thing, Sir, to be assailed by 
 the immediate breath of, some person whom we have 
 injured, and who is loathsome to us ; — hard to look 
 upon the scar which we had inflicted long ago, and 
 intended to forget. Within the last two years the 
 distress of England on this score appears to have 
 been increasing ; and it has been expressed in a tone 
 of acrimony rising through the gradations of ani- 
 mosity up to abhorrence and a sort of contempt, or 
 assumed contempt, at which for some time it has been 
 stationary. This anger has, however, been subject 
 to laws, by a careful induction from which we are 
 enabled to calculate its intensity and foretell its 
 amount at any given period. The more you have 
 had to pay for Ireland, the more you have disliked 
 her. Had it not been for prejudice and antipathy, 
 England would have been conciliated toward Ireland 
 by the endeavour to serve her. 
 
 Before proceeding further. Sir, there is one statement 
 which I desire to make, not so much for your sake as 
 for my own, and because there are many countrymen- 
 of yours to whom I would not willingly give pain, and 
 whose censure I would not wantonly incur. The 
 class to which I allude are, I hope, neither so unjust 
 nor so unwise as to resent the fact that I do not think 
 the faults of their country past cure, or their country 
 so far enfeebled and degenerate, that she cannot 
 
LET. I.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 3 
 
 afford (as sometimes happens to individual men who 
 have no part in true greatness) to dispense with her 
 faults. I have sometimes been tempted to think that, 
 as the mythologists make mention of three Jupiters, 
 so there must be at least two Englands. In her 
 past history, I have observed indications of a com- 
 pound nature as diverse as her twofold language ; 
 and in recent times they seem to contend for the 
 mastery. It is with one only that I have to do at 
 present. 
 
 I have to entreat that this plain introductory state- 
 ment may be kept in mind by any one who chooses 
 to read these observations. If he thinks that there 
 exists a certain England, noble, wise, and strong, 
 against which such charges as I make must be as 
 unjust as the charges which I repel, I think the 
 same ; and I believe that this better England not 
 only exists, but has existed for the last thousand 
 years, and has wrought after its kind. It has also, I 
 believe, slept at times, and not known what was done 
 in its name by that more sordid England with which 
 it is strangely bound up. The distinction to which 
 I refer is not one of classes or orders : each of these 
 two Englands is composed of clergy and laity, rich 
 and poor, aristocrats and democrats, agriculturists 
 and manufacturers, Whigs and Tories ; and, a sad and 
 singular fact, the two have occasionally concurred 
 in the same course, influenced by the most opposite 
 motives indeed, but by a common delusion. My 
 
 B 2 
 
4 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. I. 
 
 sentiments with regard to my better England, I shall 
 state, before I conclude, with as much sincerity as 
 I state my convictions in the first place concerning 
 your England, which we believe also to exist by 
 reason of the wounds which we bear ; as, however, 
 books are not always read to the end, especially the 
 dull or the hostile, I have given this warning in time, 
 in order that any person who applies to the whole of 
 his country, what I have said of its baser element, 
 may have only his own inattention to blame. For 
 six centuries the bad England generally kept vigil 
 for Ireland, while for the rest of the world it ge- 
 nerally slept. This fact is attested by the just award 
 of European opinion, which reveres your history 
 at large, but regards the Irish part of it with a 
 sentiment of resentment, wonder, and scorn. It is 
 not for me to determine how this mysterious duality 
 exists ; all I know is, that England is not one, but 
 two ; and that while the loftier influence reigns in her 
 brain, and looks forth from her eye, the more earthly 
 spirit occasionally masters her hand, and miserably 
 simulates her voice. It is the latter England, that 
 is to say, your England, with which I have at present' 
 to converse ; and if you think my words too harsh, I 
 beg to express my belief that nations are not called 
 upon, like private persons, when smitten on one 
 cheek to turn the other, and that a course of con- 
 tumelious injury, justified by those who inflict it, and 
 fatal alike to the maligner and the maligned, is less 
 
LET. l] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 5 
 
 fitly replied to by a gentle justice than by a just 
 severity. 
 
 My intention is in these letters to search out the 
 causes of your dislike to us, by analysing its symp- 
 toms, and to suggest to you motives for concealing 
 its intensity, if you cannot absolutely control it. I 
 shall next make some inquiry as to the pretexts by 
 you commonly assigned for your sentiments towards 
 us ; and as these are grounded upon your notions of 
 Irish character, I shall suggest a larger conception 
 of that character, and indicate the mode in which 
 its less amiable part was formed. I shall next 
 point out a few reasons which make it the policy 
 of England, though but in self-defence, rather 
 to assist Ireland than to revile her, or at least not to 
 attempt both courses at once ; and shall mention a 
 few strictly practical measures by which such aid 
 may be afforded. I shall then touch upon certain 
 reasons, secret even from yourself, which make this 
 course distasteful to you; and since they rest on 
 an estimate of your own character as erroneous as 
 that which you have formed of ours, I shall lead 
 you to a different point of view from which that 
 character may be contemplated. It is the custom of 
 effeminate men, whether rough or polished in de- 
 portment, to aggravate their own sufferings by 
 supposing them to be peculiar, if not unprece- 
 dented; I shall therefore endeavour to mitigate 
 yours by proving to you that your calamities result 
 from natural laws, which, if you choose to understand 
 
6 ENGLISH MISRULE [lET. I. 
 
 them, you may make your friends. I shall, in con- 
 clusion, describe the reward which may accrue to 
 you if you should adopt a right course in time, and 
 on right motives ; as well as a career which may yet 
 lie before your country more glorious than you have 
 yourself conceived; and grounded on a character 
 substantially nobler than you have ever cared to 
 impute to her. 
 
 I adopt this method of treatment in the belief that it 
 involves the most practical question which can be dis- 
 cussed — I mean that of the temper and spirit in which 
 all secondary questions should be examined. Tem- 
 porary success sometimes attends a selfish policy ; 
 but wisdom accompanies justice ; nor can I doubt 
 that England, if once liberated from the prejudices 
 which enslave her, would exercise towards Ireland 
 that sound judgment which characterizes her above 
 most nations, in the management of her own imme- 
 diate concerns. 
 
 In the spring of 1846 your sentiments towards 
 Ireland were only incidentally expressed in debates 
 on more important matters. " It was a shame," 
 you said, "to make so much of the Irish famine 
 by way of depreciating those laws which protected 
 English agricultural industry." In the autumn of 
 ] 846 you were warned by many a significant voice 
 from this country, that the measures adopted by the 
 Imperial Parliament (hastily, and when honourable 
 members were bent on enjoying a little partridge 
 
LET. I.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 7 
 
 shooting) would prove insufficient for the support of 
 the people, and very injurious to their moral in- 
 terests. The measures to which I refer are the Labour 
 Rate Act, which provided employment for destitute 
 persons by making and mending of roads, and the 
 removal, at a time when the passions of men were 
 most likely to be inflamed, of those restrictions on 
 the possession of arms, previously found necessary 
 in Ireland. The effect of the latter measure has 
 been complete, though unintended *; yet to its merits 
 all classes, even the lowest in Ireland, continued in- 
 sensible until assured that it was intended as a com- 
 pliment due to a high-spirited people who had always 
 had a hking for fire-arms. Pray, Sir, let us have your 
 abuse in future rather than more of such compli- 
 ments. 
 
 As regards your former measure, the remonstrances 
 I have mentioned were listened to at last: but as 
 they came chiefly from persons of the higher orders, 
 your indignation, then more loudly expressed, took 
 the form of invective against Irish landlords; a class 
 whom you do not admire, but with whose services 
 you do not willingly dispense. Month after month 
 passed by, and every day the warnings which had 
 provoked your resentment, instead of rousing you to 
 
 * The following table illustrates this subject in but a slight degree. 
 Cases of robbery of arms. 
 
 1844 159 
 
 1845 551 
 
 1846 611 
 
 Five months of 1847 948 
 
8 ENGLISH MISRULE [lET. I. 
 
 face in time the difficulties which you could not but 
 meet at last, proved themselves to have been just. 
 Every day increased crowds betook themselves to the 
 roads — at the end of every week the imperial disburse- 
 ments became heavier, and your indignation hotter. 
 The invective in which the English press then dealt 
 was divided impartially between the higher and middle 
 classes, who served together on the Relief Committees, 
 and the lower orders who were employed on the 
 roads. The Relief Committees had not, when the 
 fountains of the great deep were broken open, sup- 
 pressed the rising flood of pauperism, or restrained 
 it within the channels laid down on the official 
 charts. This circumstance was amongst those plainly 
 predicted to you. The selection of persons needing 
 employment must at best have been a most diffi- 
 cult, as well as invidious, task. No general rules 
 could be adopted which did not sanction imposi- 
 tion or sentence to starvation. The people saw the 
 public money brought into the market-place ; a very 
 dangerous, though sometimes necessary, exhibition. 
 The amount of destitution was in itself bewilder- 
 ing, and the difficulty of dealing with it was greatly 
 increased by the pressure of panic, a separate trial 
 of which you have had some recent experience in 
 your own financial concerns. Applicants who might 
 have held back a little longer rushed forward, lest, 
 when their need came, their place might be pre- 
 occupied. Every day the prices of food rose — 
 rates impended ; and many of the small farmers who 
 
LET. I.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 9 
 
 expected, even though they escaped the famine, to be 
 ruined by subsequent assessments, were resolved to 
 snatch what they could from an expenditure the re- 
 payment of which was ultimately to fall in part on 
 them. Instances of apparent partiality necessarily 
 were to be found where no rules could be of uni- 
 versal application : such cases excited the rivalry of 
 the less fortunate, or the anger of multitudes who 
 had no lights by which to guide their judgment of 
 right or wrong. It was impossible to discriminate 
 between contending claims except by means of pri- 
 vate information ; and as impossible, in so miscella- 
 neous a body as a Relief Committee, to know what 
 would be kept secret and what be divulged. Lists were 
 to be laboriously scrutinized by men unaccustomed 
 to business, in the midst of crowds whose move- 
 ments could no more be regulated than those of a 
 shipwrecked crew descending into the only boat. 
 Every error became a precedent that could not be 
 recalled. At the Baronial Presentment Sessions the 
 performance of duty was a task harder still. In 
 spite of the great energy and ability of the gentlemen 
 connected with the Board of Works, it was impos- 
 sible to prevent delays and disappointments each of 
 which exposed hundreds to the chance of starvation. 
 The magistrates and ratepayers, exhausted by their 
 previous labours at relief committees, generally found 
 themselves assembled at the sessions after the dis- 
 tress had already become severe. They deliberated 
 
 B 3 
 
10 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. I. 
 
 in the midst of hungry crowds, who filled the court- 
 house, and clustered on each other at darkened 
 windows and doors, watching every movement of the 
 pen, and guessing whether it gave or withheld. The 
 action, almost the countenance, of any single person 
 was sufficient, in that painful tenseness of suspense, 
 to shoot a sympathetic vibration through the mass ; 
 and a single irresponsible will wielded as many arms 
 as were idle in a starving district. A ratepayer, in 
 alarm for himself, had but to fly into a dishonest 
 passion and accuse the rest of delay. A very rapid 
 selection of roads was the consequence, and financial 
 arrangements were calculated in the storm of the 
 battle-field, \a hen the mistake of a figure was certain 
 to produce the delay of a fortnight. On the roads 
 the case was no better. A large proportion of those 
 supplied with work tickets, as the only mode of sup- 
 porting life, were old men or boys ; by their side 
 strong men refused to put forth their strength ; and 
 the check clerks were significantly advised not to 
 measure the tasks too closely. The works were often 
 valueless, and the people had wit enough to distin- 
 guish between useful labour and an arbitrary test of 
 destitution. Above all, it was found impossible to 
 divest labour, which being a universal institute is 
 based on our moral nature, of those moral relations 
 which constitute a bond of mutual good between the 
 employer and the employed. Unelevated by its ordi- 
 nary sanction, the original curse of labour remained 
 
LET. I.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 11 
 
 unmitigated by a service of mutual good-will; and 
 work became unproductive. In a word, the Labour 
 Rate Act failed, and survives only in its conse- 
 quences. 
 
 Before quitting this part of my subject, I wish to 
 acknowledge that I do not think this relief system 
 was made the best of in Ireland: but no eflforts 
 could have made it work well. At the expense of a 
 digression, I will here make a few practical sugges- 
 tions with regard to a relief system which would pro- 
 bably unite more of good with less of evil. When 
 you have next a famine to deal with in Ireland, or 
 elsewhere, lay your foundations, in the first place, by 
 instituting a large system of mere vulgar alms, given 
 in kind. Political economy does not, I believe, in- 
 clude any canon against calling things by their names ; 
 and if men live upon public charity, why should 
 they not know themselves by the name of paupers ? 
 As the general basis of your operations, support 
 on rations those whom you must needs support : 
 make the district thus relieved pay at once, and by 
 rate, whatever proportionate part of the expense it 
 can possibly pay, in order to guard against a lavish 
 expenditure : let the gift of the state be called by 
 the name of gift; and be very cautious how you 
 lend money to public bodies, unless they borrow it 
 by a voluntary act, and unless they profess to have 
 the means of repaying it. In the second place, 
 do all that can be done to encourage private em- 
 ployment. Labour becomes pauperised where la- 
 
12 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. I. 
 
 hour is the only resource of starving millions ; but 
 from the moment you have established a cheap and 
 severe system of charity, you render possible a 
 system of free and productive labour. Proprietors 
 and farmers will then be able to make their own re- 
 sources available ; and should those resources be 
 insufficient, it will be the interest of the State to 
 lend to them on their individual responsibility, be- 
 cause the money thus lent will be usefully laid out and 
 honestly repaid. Public works really useful ought, 
 also, to be undertaken in those districts, if possible; 
 but the usefulness of the work should be its obvious 
 sanction, and the relief afforded should be only an 
 incident. None but the able-bodied should be em- 
 ployed ; and those who worked ill should be at once 
 discharged, an easy matter where the alternative is 
 not starvation. In public as in private works, it might 
 be useful to require, in the case of young men without 
 families, that a portion of the wages earned should be 
 reserved as a fund to assist emigration at the con- 
 clusion of the work. In the third place, where the 
 pressure from without is great, and you find labour, 
 however unproductive, necessary, as the only test of 
 destitution, call it by the name of a test, and give to 
 those who demand it simply the necessaries of life in 
 proportion to the size of their family. The old man 
 will thus continue to sit in his chimney comer, in- 
 stead of breaking stones in the blasts of February, and 
 dying before March : the man who has ten in family 
 will get his ten rations: the farmer's servant boy 
 
LET. I.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 13 
 
 will discover that by deserting his master he can 
 earn no more than twopence a day: the smallest 
 possible number of applications for employment will 
 be made: the largest possible amount of private 
 employment will be given : charity will be of the 
 cheapest and least disturbing sort, and labour will 
 be productive. 
 
 To return from this digression, the Labour Rate 
 Act, as I have stated, failed. Irritated by this dis- 
 appointment, and not willing to account for it on 
 grounds common to human nature, which would have 
 condemned your own legislation, you attributed it to 
 the depravity of Irish nature. Parliament at last 
 met, and it was found expedient to change the whole 
 system of Irish relief. Several other laws were 
 passed, as a compliance with the more innocent of 
 our prejudices. I allude to the suspension of the 
 Navigation Laws, and the measures permitting the 
 free importation of com, and the use of sugar in the 
 distilleries. The effect of those enactments was such 
 as to prove that if Parliament had been summoned 
 to meet in autumn, as we had ventured to hope it 
 might have been, for the purpose of both passing 
 such measures, and amending the Labour Rate Act, 
 the supply of food would have been greater than it 
 was, the prices lower, and many thousands of lives 
 might have been spared. The sum of ^600,000 
 was subsequently voted as a loan to two or three 
 Irish Railway Companies, and £500,000 under the 
 
14 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. I. 
 
 " Land Improvement Act " to Irish proprietors. As 
 the latter loan has frequently been estimated at a 
 million and a half, it is necessary to mention that the 
 portion of it to which I have not referred, viz. 
 £1,000,000, was voted on separate grounds, at the 
 conclusion of the preceding session, together with 
 £-2,000,000 lent to English and Scotch proprietors. 
 In consequence of some blunders in the wording of 
 the Act (for blunders are not confined to this side of 
 the water) the portion of this loan intended for Irish 
 proprietors was not to be had when most wanted ; 
 and those who had applied for loans under the 
 various drainage Acts had found the proceedings too 
 slow to supply so urgent a need. One-half of the 
 money spent upon the roads was then charged upon 
 the imperial purse, instead of upon the lands cut up 
 by them, and in many cases damaged rather than 
 improved ; the Minister of the Crown admitting 
 that so vast a disaster as the potato failure was an 
 imperial calamity, and consequently that the whole 
 of the money spent in mitigation of it could not 
 with justice be charged on those districts which, 
 independent of any charge, had felt the visitation 
 most severely. It was, at the same time, intimated 
 to us that from the beginning the calamity had 
 been regarded as an imperial one, and that there 
 had been a latent intention to meet it in that 
 manner which would have been deemed just had it 
 fallen on Yorkshire or Cornwall; but that it was 
 
LET. I.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 15 
 
 thought no more than discreet to hide this project 
 from the Irish people, lest, puffed up with exagge- 
 rated expectations, they might abuse, to their own 
 ruin, what was intended for their good. But, Sir, you 
 must have perceived that in the ordinary business of 
 life this sort of proceeding is unsuccessful : and, in- 
 deed, even on trivial occasions, what has been pro- 
 jected as a pleasant surprise often turns out to have 
 been in bad taste or unseasonable. In Ireland the 
 surprise was anticipated; the justice as well as 
 necessity of the measure had been for some time a 
 matter of notoriety ; and your own intentions were 
 prophetically announced to you at a time when your 
 modesty would have concealed them from the world, 
 and even from yourselves. In the meantime, as our 
 assurances on this subject were confidently denied, 
 we considered that the existing law was to this 
 country a great injustice ; which circumstance, as 
 well as our grave disapprobation of unproductive 
 labour, on a colossal scale and at the beginning of 
 a famine, and of a very expensive test of destitution 
 which acted as a premium to paupers instead of as a 
 test of pauperism, must, I fear, have damped the 
 ardour of several Relief Committees, infecting some 
 members with a spirit of recklessness, and in others 
 fostering that easy good-nature and dislike to martyr- 
 dom, of which you justly complain. I mention this 
 circumstance to account in part for the fact, which 
 ought not to be concealed, that while some Relief 
 
16 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. I. 
 
 Committees struggled to the utmost against the diffi- 
 culties that beset them, there were also instances of 
 weakness and neglect of duty. In justice also to the 
 relief system, we are bound to remember that at the 
 time when it was passed through Parliament the 
 extent of the subsequent distress could not be fully 
 known ; and that, if that distress had been less, the 
 bad results of a system vicious in principle, must 
 have been proportionally diminished, and, indeed, 
 more than proportionally. 
 
 The laws of last session, to which I have alluded, 
 were all of them considered in this country well 
 intended, and, in a measure, useful laws : but in 
 England they did not fail to increase the popular 
 indignation. Many prognostications were disproved 
 by them : and much English money, that is to say 
 imperial money, was thrown away, that is to say, 
 bestowed upon the Irish part of the children of the 
 empire ; your England not being able to tolerate the 
 gift which another England bestowed, and which, 
 munificent as it was, would probably have been 
 made ampler still if the pecuniary need had been 
 greater. Day after day new invectives against the 
 Irish were poured out by the English press : a 
 Thersites never wants subject-matter for his spleen : 
 and in this instance the process of defamation was 
 not a difficult one. It was easy to pick up a par- 
 ticular instance of oppression, or neglect of duty, 
 such as are to be found in every country, and to 
 
LET. I.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 17 
 
 generalise from it, making the exception serve as 
 the rule. It was easy to copy out and comment 
 upon a statement in some Irish Repeal newspaper 
 detailing the circumstantial horrors of the last 
 " eviction of sixty families," — easy to do this without 
 inquiring whether the number was really sixty or 
 six, or whether the " wretches evicted " might not 
 happen to be a few comfortable farmers selected 
 from among the number of those who took advan- 
 tage of the confusion of the time to head a repudia- 
 tion of rent, which repudiation, if successful, would 
 have deprived the landlord of the power of meeting 
 his own engagements, and of course of paying either 
 wages or rates. It is easy. Sir, when surrounded by 
 persons whose passions or interests move them to 
 place confidence in men not always listened to with 
 respect, to adventure upon the most extravagant 
 calumnies, — asserting, for example, or more safely 
 implying, that Irish landlords are more willing to 
 feed their hounds than their paupers ; it is easy thus 
 to hound on the rabble of a legislative assembly 
 against defenceless men engaged in succouring the 
 defenceless, or devote them to such tender mercies 
 at home as were experienced by the Gallician 
 nobles. For more expert practitioners in the art 
 of calumny, and those less urgently pressed by 
 electioneering necessities, it is easy to assume a 
 tone of candour, to make plausible allowances for 
 enormities that do not exist, to take what is called 
 
Id ENGLISH MISRULE [lET. I. 
 
 a large view of the subject, to wrap up a falsehood 
 and drop it into the hollow of a rounded sentence. 
 All this was easy. More than this was done. Such 
 a course could not surprise those who are aware 
 that men often, by an unconscious but salutary 
 necessity, express sentiments of which they are not 
 the originators, but the exponents. In a delibera- 
 tive assembly, such men as Sir Robert Peel and 
 Lord John Russell — to whom the first place as to 
 ability is assigned, and who may be supposed to unite 
 with the higher intellect and responsibility more 
 than the average of purity and patriotism — represent 
 what may be called the mind and moral sense of 
 the nation, and not their own constituencies or their 
 own opinions alone. Another and very different 
 class is necessary also : nor can its interference, 
 whether expressed in venomous speech or in merely 
 animal cries, be considered without its use, if the 
 passions, the malice, or the folly which is always to 
 be found in a large community, muttering or yelling 
 through these mouth-pieces, should give a timely 
 warning of what fatuity may intend, and what 
 wisdom has to guard against. 
 
 The Prime Minister and the leaders of opposition 
 gave no sanction to the course adopted. The 
 former made mention, as truth demanded, of oc- 
 casional abuses for which parties in Ireland were 
 justly chargeable ; but he acknowledged also the 
 zeal and self-sacrifice which had been at least in 
 
LET. I.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 19 
 
 an equal degree exhibited, and he touched with a 
 decent forbearance upon those exceptional failures, 
 which, in our opinion, at least, were the natural 
 result of the impracticable relief measures adopted. 
 Some of the less important followers of the Govern- 
 ment had not, if I remember right, the self-command 
 to follow his example, and, in their indifferent 
 flippancies, reminded us of that proverbial sauciness 
 of servants, from which the Servants' Hall of Down- 
 ing Street is not exempt. 
 
 In a word, it was suggested to us on all occasions, 
 in Parliament, in society, and by the press, that we 
 were a race whom it behoved the wise no longer to 
 encourage ; that we had been beggars from the 
 beginning, but that henceforward we must knock 
 at the wall, not the door ; that we had been bullies, 
 but had now extorted the last penny ; that we had 
 been impostors, but were now impostors found out. 
 
 Hard words, Sir, are not agreeable even when 
 accompanied by benevolent deeds. The mercenary 
 will accept abuse if paid for it ; but men conscious 
 of no unworthy aim when, trusting to the first law 
 of nature and to the second of rehgion, they demand 
 assistance in emergency, expect that it should be 
 given, or withholden, with decorum. Those amongst 
 you, however, who had entertained us with their 
 remonstrances, were resolved not to dismiss us 
 without a blessing ; and accordingly they bade us 
 extend our hand on parting, and dropped into it 
 
20 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. I. 
 
 an amended Poor Law. Of that measure, I shall 
 only remark, at present, that I am one of those 
 who believe the principle of a Poor Law to be a 
 sound one in a highly populated country, notwith- 
 standing the great dangers that attend its practical 
 application. Nevertheless, I heartily concur in the 
 objections then raised to the amended measure, in 
 so far as the alterations dispensed, wherever pauper- 
 ism was excessive, with all tests of destitution, and 
 made no provision for reducing the preposterous size 
 of our unions, and electoral divisions, and increasing 
 the number of our workhouses. On these grounds 
 chiefly the measure was opposed by several Irish 
 members of both Houses, and by such English 
 members as retained their belief in political economy, 
 or their remembrance of the past. On this occasion, 
 again, an increased animosity against us was dis- 
 covered. No modification of the bill was to be heard 
 of. You assured us, with a vehemence peculiarly 
 your own, that the bill, the whole bill, and nothing 
 but the bill, was our portion, and that it was the last of 
 the boons with which you intended to enrich us. You 
 carried the day, and enacted your panacea for Irish 
 ills. Ha\dng succeeded, however the measure might 
 work eventually, whether it was to " bury your dead 
 out of your sight," or to involve us and you in 
 aggravated calamities — in either case, it was to have 
 been expected that for the time your uneasiness 
 would have been mitigated. Our hopes deceived 
 
LET. I.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 21 
 
 US. Too soon it became apparent, that though you 
 had passed your amended poor law, and vowed a 
 vow never again to throw millions into the bottom- 
 less pit of Irish destitution, you were still dissatis- 
 fied with us. 
 
 No sooner did you carry your great measure than 
 doubts seem to have stolen upon your mind with 
 respect to its complete success. I was in England 
 at that time, and I remember being asked by 
 several intelligent English gentlemen favourable 
 to the amended law, how the people were to live 
 in those districts in which, supposing the potato 
 not to return, no sufficient rate could be raised 
 though no rent were demanded ? I replied that I 
 did not feel convinced that they were to live, 
 unless something else beside the Poor Law were 
 provided for them. Becoming a questioner in my 
 turn, I asked " What is to be the end ? " On this 
 subject opinions were vague, but impressions were 
 strong ; and I was informed that the end would pro- 
 bably be this: that many of the landlords would 
 break, many of the farmers emigrate, and many 
 of the labourers die ; a conclusion which appeared 
 to me unsatisfactory, just as flinging millions into 
 a bottomless pit appears to you. On the whole, 
 however, I was assured that the measure would 
 work well ; and in this fashion — that rents would 
 be lowered in proportion as rates were increased, 
 and that the money heretofore paid to the landlord 
 
22 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. I. 
 
 would in future become the poor man's estate. 
 There is a treatise, Sir, by Edmund Burke, entitled 
 " Thoughts on Scarcity," of which a cheap edition 
 was printed last year for the benefit of Irish 
 country gentlemen who did not possess in their 
 libraries the works of their illustrious countryman, 
 or who, assenting probably to his principles, wished 
 to render them practically useful by applying 
 them in a manner different from that which sug- 
 gested itself to their indulgent instructors. He 
 remarks in it that despite of prejudices, which 
 he attributes only to the lower orders, if all the 
 rich men in England were to be deprived of their 
 possessions, the property thus confiscated would 
 not add a meal of bread and cheese to the portion 
 of the poor. How did it happen that this passage 
 was passed over so carelessly, or how can you be 
 sure but that this philosophy may apply to Ireland 
 as well as to England ? You will observe that in 
 many respects the same laws of nature prevail in 
 the one country as in the other. Why, then, should 
 you doubt that the same general laws of political phi- 
 losophy will produce the same results ? Be assured. 
 Sir, that this is one of the matters which you will 
 have to reconsider. If you were to confiscate the 
 whole labour fund of Ireland to the gratuitous 
 support of the poor, the result would not be that 
 a new labour fund would immediately spring into 
 existence to reward good nature, and justify "fast" 
 
LET. I.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 23 
 
 legislation. If you were to abolish utterly, and by 
 law, that security for property which has long been 
 so imperfect by reason of the weakness of law, the 
 effect would not be that every Irish proprietor and 
 farmer would. devote himself with redoubled ardour 
 to improvement ; while the English capitalist would 
 meet yet additional obstacles to the investment of 
 his money. You ought not to dislike us on this 
 account ; neither should you resent our coldness 
 towards your plagiarised scheme for robbing the 
 rich in order to give to the poor. But so it is. 
 Passion and prejudice blind even the wisest ; you 
 would rather knock your head against a flint than 
 believe that Irish flints are hard : you fancy that 
 you can keep wages on the public works twopence 
 a day under the market price : with this impression 
 you toss up the whole labour market on your 
 shoulder, and walk off" with it. What wonder, then, 
 that rather than believe that Irish grievances can 
 proceed from any but Irish folly, you should cease 
 to believe in political economy .? — that rather than 
 govern Ireland as you have found it necessary to 
 govern England, you should govern her by the 
 laws of Robin Hood } Let me observe, however, 
 that as our opinions against out-door relief for the 
 able-bodied were chiefly drawn from your own 
 history, and the philosophy of your political writers, 
 they can hardly afford a full justification of that in- 
 creased resentment of which I seek in vain the cause. 
 
24 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. I. 
 
 Let me make one other attempt to discover the 
 cause of your resentment. I have already alluded 
 to the probable end of our present difficulties as 
 contemplated by some intelligent persons in Eng- 
 land. The theory was compendious, distinct, and 
 coherent, as might be expected from practical men ; 
 and on more than one occasion, during the debates 
 on the Irish Poor Law, it was expressed with a 
 frankness, not without value because a little un- 
 ceremonious. The landlords are to become bank- 
 rupts, and the lands are to become the property 
 of persons possessed of greater capital. The ad- 
 vocates of this theory (which may be referred to the 
 class called speculative) abstained from adding that, 
 the more rapidly matters were pushed to a conclusion, 
 the greater would be the quantity of land forced at 
 once upon the market, the lower would be the rate 
 of purchase, and consequently the larger that pro- 
 portion of capital which would remain to be spent 
 upon its improvement, and indeed on that of all 
 classes in Ireland. It was significantly said in Par- 
 liament and in the press, " If bankrupt landlords 
 cannot pay their rates and improve their lands at 
 the same time, let them break like bankrupt shop- 
 keepers : if their places know them no more, they 
 will know other and better men." It is but fair to 
 add that those who spoke were probably not, in their 
 own opinion, speaking for themselves. A large in- 
 vestment of English capital in Irish land would have 
 
LET. I.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 25 
 
 been thought advisable by them on those ordinary 
 principles of business which would turn all commo- 
 dities to the best account, and care little for personal 
 rights or sentiments, not understanding the great 
 public interests interwoven with these. Such an 
 investment could not but have proved indirectly 
 beneficial to the class that promoted it; but I do 
 not venture to affirm that the individuals to whose 
 clamours I have alluded had either the courage or 
 inclination to take the lead in the enterprise. And 
 your sagacity will not fail to suggest to you what I 
 would wish earnestly to impress upon the attention 
 of all English gentlemen, a class not likely to concur 
 in such courses, that in this country an inference 
 may be drawn from such a method of viewing a 
 great question, as to the principles upon which 
 English legislation is conducted. A mercantile 
 nation is tempted to seek its principles in the 
 counting-house. As a mere matter of policy this 
 counting-house speculation was not without its showy 
 side. The confiscation would have been the least 
 bloody that ever took place in Ireland. The new 
 undertakers would, before the lapse of half a cen- 
 tury, have acquired a knowledge of the country, 
 sufficient, at least, for their own protection ; and 
 English agriculturists would have known how to 
 drain our clay lands. The proposed confiscation 
 has however not yet taken place. Can this have 
 roused your spleen ? A new calamity, the existing 
 
 c 
 
26 ENGLISH MISRULE [lET. I. 
 
 monetary convulsion, has been added to that of the 
 potato failure ; but it has fallen first upon you, not 
 on us. The Irish proprietors will, very probably, 
 follow in their turn ; but ruin turns first upon a 
 nobler prey. Do not be incensed against us. Sir, 
 upon this account; for it is not we, but nature, 
 that will have her way. The lords of land strike 
 root and have something more like fixity of tenure 
 than the lords of water, or the lords of air. Trees, 
 though with thunder too long acquainted, will some- 
 times fling their imperfect shadows over the graves 
 of ten generations of prophets. High-pressure 
 engines will sometimes burst. This is no fault of 
 ours. If your merchants and bankers have over- 
 speculated ; if they have preserved too little of their 
 capital "floating," and, therefore, have sunk them- 
 selves, they have themselves to blame. Far from 
 exulting in their calamity, we share in it, and shall 
 suffer yet more from it by and by. In the mean- 
 time, Sir, you, the representative of that lower 
 England of which I speak, must have patience. The 
 transference of Irish estates must be postponed for 
 awhile. You will be ready for your dinner by 
 the time it is dressed. Annuitants die at last, 
 though they live proverbially long: and all Irish 
 proprietors are your annuitants; for, though they 
 will not give up what they cannot use, yet their 
 estates belong, de jure, to those who have the 
 capital necessary for their "improvement." You 
 
LET. I ] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 27 
 
 may indulge a hope that the longer they hold out 
 the more sudden will be their fall : and if all 
 their estates should thus be thrown at once upon 
 the market, they will probably sell for five years* 
 purchase. 
 
 Lest, as often happens, I should be guilty of the 
 injustice which I condemn, I must stop to observe 
 that your utmost indignation and invective availed 
 not (though perseveringly directed to that end) to 
 repress that private generosity which visited this 
 island with a good-will that astonished us, though 
 not inexperienced before in the munificence of 
 English charity. Nothing can prove more incon- 
 testably the separate existence of your England and 
 a better England, than the fact that while thousands, 
 who never gave Ireland a farthing, were lavishing 
 abuse, without measure, upon her; thousands, in- 
 cluding many of the class not rich, were denying 
 themselves habitual comforts to minister to the neces- 
 sities of men whom perhaps they had never heard 
 spoken of, save with scorn. On this subject I will not 
 enlarge, for my praise could add nothing to actions 
 which speak for themselves, in spite of the modesty 
 of our benefactors, many of whom chose to remain 
 anonymous. You will, perhaps, ask me why you 
 have heard less of our gratitude for these favours 
 than of invective and clamour from the anti-English 
 section of Ireland. I regret you should ever have 
 heard what can truly be called clamour. I have 
 
 c 2 
 
28 ENGLISH MISRULE [lET. 1. 
 
 always observed that a voice, though not loud, if 
 pitched at the right key, and distinctly articulated, 
 is heard as far, and remembered as long, as a wise 
 speaker would desire. If you ask me why you have 
 heard less of our thanks, I answer that the low mur- 
 murs of gratitude, like the sighs of ajSliction, do not 
 penetrate so far as the war shouts of defiance. If you 
 had sat in the gloom and chill of an Irish hovel, 
 which had never seemed gloomy or cold to its occu- 
 pant till the last potato was gone, perhaps you 
 might have heard, as I have often done, a touching, 
 though low-toned tribute of gratitude bestowed on 
 those friends, unknown and invisible as the minis- 
 tering angels of God, but whose presence in the 
 spirit was ardently realised by the affections of the 
 sufferers, and who received from them neither praise 
 nor thanks unaccompanied by a benediction. On 
 many public occasions ample acknowledgments have 
 been made for the private charity of England ; but 
 the full gratitude of a people, whose gi-atitude (not- 
 withstanding occasional instances to the contrary) 
 too often reminds us mournfully of the short-com- 
 ings of our best endeavours, can, of course, be 
 known only by those who leave the market-place 
 and go to the hovel. 
 
 Again this autumn a Queen's letter has been 
 
 issued, stirring up her people to charitable deeds ; 
 
 and in justification of such charity two most impres- 
 
 . sive reports have been published by Sir John Bur- 
 
LET. I.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 29 
 
 goyne and Mr. Trevelyan, both of whom had already 
 contributed to Ireland far more than any amount 
 of money. Again a vigilant opposition has been 
 organized by the press. It is to be hoped that no 
 Englishman will bestow on the Irish the money 
 which cannot be spared by those who have a more 
 immediate claim on him than persons at a greater 
 distance, even though in greater distress. It is also 
 to be hoped that no man will allow himself to be de- 
 frauded of one of his chief privdleges by the of- 
 ficious interference of some anonymous meddler 
 who has not his client's true interest at heart. 
 
 Some letters, professing to be written by clergy- 
 men, have attracted an undesirable notoriety on this 
 occasion. One reverend gentleman states that, as 
 the Archbishop has commanded it, he will, of course, 
 move his congregation to charity ; but that he will 
 advise them to give grudgingly, and that he and his 
 curate are prepared to give grudgingly, the one five 
 shillings and the other half-a-crown. Another says 
 that he will of course preach his charity sermon, in 
 favour of the Irish; but that he will take occasion 
 to record in it all that he has ever heard against that 
 wicked and ungrateful people. Another clergyman 
 has resolved to bring his charitable flock to a stand- 
 still by means of two charity-boxes, one for the 
 English, the other for the Irish poor, placed at an 
 exactly equal distance, but at opposite sides. An- 
 other says, " I own that, instead of feeling any com- 
 
30 ENGLISH MISRULE [lET. I. 
 
 miseration for, or any disposition to assist, the people 
 of Ireland, I would rather help them to another 
 Cromwell, who might rule them in the only way 
 they deserve to be ruled, viz., with a rod of iron. 
 Besides, we have poor enough at home." A mere 
 layman admonishes us not " to thwart the Provi- 
 dence of God." On clerical aberrations I desire to 
 make no comment. We partake the shame of those 
 whom we ought to revere. The picture is a sad 
 one, and presents us at best with but contracted 
 views of Christian charity and an indifferent notion 
 of church discipline. Let it be passed and forgotten, 
 and let nothing be remembered but that ample, and 
 often self-denying generosity, which, on a former 
 occasion, refused to be limited within restriction of 
 nation or of church. If any well-disposed person 
 should, on this occasion, have withheld his contri- 
 bution, neither on account of poverty nor insensi- 
 bility, but from misrepresentation, his error is a 
 venial one. For the private charity received from 
 England, the Irish feel an unqualified, for the 
 charity of the State, a qualified gratitude. The 
 latter they believe to have been an aid which it was 
 the duty of the empire to extend to a particular 
 part of the empire suffering under a sudden visita- 
 tion. They believe, also, that a great act of duty, 
 well done, deserves gratitude ; and that by no state 
 has such an act ever been carried out on so munifi- 
 cent a scale as recently by the British. In the 
 
LET. I.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS, ^l 
 
 meantime, do not imagine that, until we are really 
 as degraded as you would represent us, we shall 
 ever, while you choose to rain a mingled shower of 
 halfpence and calumnies upon us, stoop our heads 
 with unmingled humility to pick up the common 
 treasure out of the dirt. If you intended your 
 charity for a bribe, you should have told us so. 
 
 I am resolved, Sir, to proceed no further in my 
 inquiry into the causes of your dislike to us, since I 
 have hitherto been so unsucessful ; but shall commit 
 myself at once to fortune, and try what a guess may 
 effect. What, if you have in reality not so much a 
 reasoned objection to us as a resolute distaste r 
 What, if the cause of that distaste be our poverty ? 
 In that case, I have nothing to say. I have a dog who 
 cannot abide beggars ; in other respects he is well 
 behaved. This is an antipathy. Ireland is certainly 
 very unlike England. Perhaps we cannot approve 
 our own opposites without being untrue to ourselves ; 
 and, amongst your class, truth to ourselves is a form 
 which truth is singularly apt to take. Perhaps you 
 have disagreeable recollections connected with the 
 causes of our poverty ; perhaps you have disagree- 
 able anticipations of its consequences : in either case 
 perhaps you are not far astray. But, without too 
 curious inquiries, let me console you as well as I 
 can by assuring you that the loss you have sus- 
 tained from Ireland during this last year is much 
 less than you imagine. 
 
32 ENGLISH MISRULE [lET 1. 
 
 Day after day clever newspaper articles appear on 
 the subject of the present monetary pressure in 
 England ; the result, it is said, of her gift to Ireland 
 of ^10,000,000. The loan of £600,000 to Irish 
 railroads is also paraded before your eyes the more 
 to bewilder and incense you. I would not diminish 
 the dignity of a man who " hath had losses," but I 
 must inform you that this statement is an instance 
 of that common form of "Irish exaggeration," of 
 which the meaning is, exaggeration about Ireland. 
 The empire, not you, gave us about £4,000,000, 
 not ten, and lent us something like the same sum, of 
 which £2,000,000 ren;iain unspent. The last report 
 of the Relief Commissioners states that, during the 
 five months preceding the harvest, the sum they had 
 expended in rations was about £1,400,000. If Parlia- 
 ment had deliberated longer in 1846, or met again 
 sooner, and adopted in time that very imperfect but 
 very much improved relief system to which at last 
 it was driven, my belief is that not much more 
 than half the sum spent would have been found suffi- 
 cient for the emergency. If you had not blundered 
 in your drainage Bill, it is not too much to suppose 
 that £1,000,000 would have been applied through 
 the proprietors to the relief of the people, and the 
 improvement of the land, on which all classes must 
 ultimately depend. Another portion of the money 
 spent might have been rendered reproductive if some 
 really useful public works had been undertaken, and 
 
?.ET. I.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. S3 
 
 a moderate number only of able-bodied labourers 
 ■employed on them. On the whole, then, my belief 
 is, that an expenditure of £4,000,000, consisting of 
 a free gift of £ J, 000,000, together with the loans to 
 proprietors now successfully made, and loans for 
 public improvements, each class amounting to 
 £1,500,000, would have carried us through the ten 
 months of our past distress. Still there is a differ- 
 ence between a gift of £4,000,000 and £10,000,000. 
 Instead, then, of repeating, on all occasions — in the 
 Houses of Parliament, in the market-place, and at 
 church — that one deplorable wail about the money 
 you have lost by us, remember, I beseech you, that 
 if your vows were at once crowned, and your 
 " daughter (or sister) lay dead at your feet, with the 
 ducats in her ear," it is four millions only you could 
 expect to find there, and not ten. You were for a 
 long time spending almost a million a week on your 
 own railroads. Between the years 1840 and 1847, 
 no smaller sum than £'257,800,000 was sanctioned 
 by Parliament for railroad purposes, of which 
 £91,380,000 has already been spent. Of the former 
 sum not less than £124,500,000 was sanctioned in 
 1846, the year of the Irish potato failure and the 
 Labour Rate Act. That expenditure, be assured, 
 together with the deficient supply of cotton, has 
 some connection with the present pressure on the 
 money market. I would not have you. Sir, despair 
 about these £4,000,000, or be incensed with French 
 
 c 3 
 
'34 ENGLISH MISRULE [lET. I. 
 
 newspapers because, after their frivolous fashion, 
 they affirm that your position as regards Ireland is 
 not, as you would make out, a tragic one, but, on 
 the contrary, a comic one, or, at most, a tragi-comic 
 one. I have seen a calculation made by an eminent 
 political economist, which demonstrated (and his 
 treatise was written many years since) that your 
 whole property, agricultural, commercial, and manu- 
 facturing, including all your capital invested, your 
 machinery, &c., could not then have been worth 
 less than seven hundred thousand millions; — in 
 other words, England would sell for that sum if she 
 chose at any time to call an auction. Now £4,000,000 
 is only the hundred and seventy-five thousandth part 
 of seven hundred thousand millions, being about the 
 one hundred and eighty-fourth part of a farthing in 
 the pound on this sum. Can even your England 
 grudge us this fraction of the widow's mite ? If she 
 be troubled by such a loss (which, in spite of your 
 assertion, I doubt), there is a better England which 
 is troubled only by not knowing how to spend money 
 in Ireland without doing harm as well as good there. 
 Try if you cannot belong to this other England. 
 
 Any man who ruminates too much on the past 
 becomes of a dreary countenance, so that mankind 
 immediately suppose that his internal being (I do not 
 mean his stomach, but his pocket) must needs be so 
 as it ought not to be (I forbear to speak plainly), 
 whereby his credit fails on 'Change. I therefore 
 
LET. I.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 36 
 
 advise you, Sir, to take comfort, especially from two 
 principal considerations, which are these, viz., that 
 one-half of the £8,000,000 has only been lent, so 
 that you may one day behold it when you least 
 expect it; and again, that the other half, being 
 utterly given away, may be accounted amongst the 
 things for which no man sorrows, because tears 
 must be in vain. David rose up and wept no more 
 when his child was dead. You have the like con- 
 solation, for your £4,000,000 are dead and gone 
 also ; but with this difference in your case, which I 
 admit is to your disadvantage, viz., that as your trea- 
 sure can never come to you again, so neither can 
 you ever go to it, for it is gone into the bellies of all 
 the beggars in Ireland. 
 
 Having thus endeavoured, however unsuccessfully, 
 to discover the cause of your uneasiness, I will now, 
 according to my promise, suggest to you some reasons, 
 founded on justice and expediency, which should in- 
 duce you to conceal the extent of the disorder. 
 
 To dispose first of the least important considera- 
 tion, I would suggest, that it is not for the interest 
 of England that those feelings of animosity which 
 have for a long time existed towards Ireland, which 
 have increased of late, and which have found so un- 
 scrupulous an utterance in the English Press, should 
 longer continue to embarrass the mutual relations of 
 the two countries. It is impossible that the east 
 wind of your invective, fanged and venomed with 
 
^ ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. I. 
 
 the extremes of cold and bitterness, should blow- 
 thus perseveringly upon the bleeding carcase of this 
 land, without exasperating certain old wounds, a few 
 of which have been skinned over, but none of which 
 have had time to heal. My countrymen have many 
 peculiarities, and amongst others this one, that 
 the more you revile them, the less they like you. 
 You may lead an Irishman, but you cannot drive him. 
 They are often very wrong-headed: and if you re- 
 solved that every alternate law passed with respect 
 to Ireland should have her good for its object, and 
 every alternate one might work as it liked, they would 
 very probably make the two classes of measures 
 produce, respectively, results exactly the opposite of 
 those which you had anticipated. If you sentence 
 them to poverty, they will stifle you with their rags. 
 Consider the effect of passive resistance alone 
 amongst a people so savage or so saintly that if you 
 give them but a pipe to smoke they have the impu- 
 dence to be happy, with nothing to make them so but 
 a digestion the better from never being overloaded, 
 an oriental conviction that "what will be, will be," and 
 an Epicurean Platonism, with a dash of the Cynic in 
 it, which enables them to find comfort in the warmth 
 of the wet straw on which they lie in the sunshine, 
 and in some visions of a future world, different both 
 from England and Ireland, which float before the 
 half-closed eye. They will not better their condi- 
 tion merely to please you, and in your way. If the 
 
LET. I.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 37 
 
 whole nation were to lie down and die, you would be 
 delivered from a great trouble ; but if it were only 
 to lie down, and not die, your best intended legisla- 
 tion would be turned a good deal out of its course. 
 
 I will not enlarge. Sir, on a subject which may ex- 
 cite angry passions, but I must tell you plainly that 
 if by an industrious perseverance in contumely you 
 do what you can to excite the hatred of Ireland, you 
 will succeed at last, and that Ireland is quite strong 
 enough in this case to do you a mischief. You will, 
 perhaps, ask whether Irish animosity against Eng- 
 land can become stronger than it has been for some 
 years past. I answer, a great deal stronger. Hitherto 
 it has been entertained by one section of the people 
 only : it has been also, in part, unjust, and expressed 
 with an unbecoming vehemence. It has been neither 
 as grave nor as deep as has been deserved, I will not 
 say by England, but by that England of which you 
 are the representative. There is a gaseous passion, 
 and a solid passion ; a passion chiefly known by its 
 light, and a passion felt by its heat. If you change 
 the seat of Irish resentment from the imagination to 
 the heart, and convert it from a sentiment to a prin- 
 ciple, it will become a more formidable thing than it 
 has heretofore been ; and you will hear proportion- 
 ably less about it. Do not despise little things. A 
 child can carry a pitcher of water on her head ; but a 
 strong and wise man may be reduced to a lamentable 
 state by a single drop of water lodged within a single 
 
S8 ENGLISH MISRULE [lET. I. 
 
 cavity in the brain, merely because that drop is out of 
 its place and not easily got at. Has not experience 
 taught you how national dislikes may impede the 
 commerce which is the breath of your nostrils ? Is 
 there any doubt that the long-desired commercial 
 treaty between England and France would have 
 been carried into effect before now had not the 
 ancient antipathies between the two countries been 
 exasperated and prolonged by late appeals to national 
 prejudices in France ? But I will say no more on 
 this matter, because I hope hereafter to demonstrate 
 that Ireland, if reduced to utter pauperism, must 
 inflict on you greater calamities, not from choice, 
 but from necessity, than you might expect from her 
 most deserved hostility. 
 
 You will, perhaps, Sir, think it a hardship that you 
 should have been so long made the object of Irish 
 invective, and yet not be allowed to abuse Ireland in 
 your turn ; but in this opinion I cannot by any 
 means concur. Professional invective should always 
 be taken in good part, and as it was our duty to 
 put a charitable construction on the expression 
 of a law lord who, some years since, called us 
 " aliens," so should you regard with indulgence those 
 persons (and doubtless in the number of our agi- 
 tators there are such) who abuse England indis- 
 criminately and unjustly, but who, if they did not 
 make this their business, would be exposed to all the 
 temptations of idleness. In good society I have 
 
LET. I ] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 3P 
 
 always heard you spoken of kindly, until quite of 
 late ; and even of late never with rancour. From the 
 pulpit I have never heard so much as an insinuation 
 against you. Moreover, in the matter of injuiy to 
 Ireland, your motto was, till lately, " Deeds, not 
 words." Now that you have changed your system, 
 what could you expect, supposing you had succeeded 
 in convincing us that we are a nation of villains, but 
 that we should act like villains ? Let me add one 
 consideration more. The more the Irish are reviled 
 by England, the more they will flatter themselves, 
 and be flattered, at home ; and it is for their interest 
 that they should know themselves to be just what 
 they are. 
 
 I deem the detraction in which you indulge inex- 
 aedient also, by reason of its effect on yourselves. I 
 fear lest by this vile and vulgar habit of foul-mouthed 
 abuse, which you have contracted, you may vitiate 
 your own judgment to such an extent as to lose the 
 power of distinguishing good from evil. There is 
 great danger that you may end by believing us to be 
 that which you have long called us. Bad words, at 
 first but the expression of a peevish fancy, become 
 insensibly the language of habitual passion, and at 
 last the representatives of opinion, or that which must 
 with you stand in the place of opinion. You cannot 
 for sport see every thing in a false light, and yet re- 
 tain the power of seeing things at will with an unpre- 
 judiced eye ; neither can you run mad about Ireland, 
 
40 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. I. 
 
 and yet remain in your senses on all other subjects. 
 Your ear once formed, and expecting certain sounds, 
 you will think every one who speaks of Ireland in a 
 gentler tone a . designing knave or a good-natured 
 dupe. Moreover, Sir, there already exists a sort of 
 quasi union between the two countries, and notwith- 
 standing the strong Repeal sentiment of many at 
 this side of the water, as well as the not doubtful 
 tendencies of the new English Repealers at your 
 side, who already murmur, " England was glad at 
 their departing, for they were afraid of them," a real" 
 union would be much preferred by me, not only for 
 the consolidation of the empire at large, but to promote 
 the welfare, honour, and power of this country, for 
 which I think there are destinies reserved larger than 
 those yet dreamed of by her friends or foes. Should 
 the kingdoms become one, vitally as well as nomi- 
 nally, it is expedient that England should retain the 
 power of understanding Ireland. I do think. Sir, 
 that it is an error on your part to put out your own 
 eyes. You will yet have to use them. There are two 
 subjects which should be studied by any one who 
 would legislate for Ireland : the one, what is euphu- 
 istically called the history of the country ; the other, 
 the character of the people. You cannot, without a 
 great sacrifice of your self-respect, become acquainted 
 with the former; but you should endeavour to under- 
 stand the Irish character well, both in its good quali- 
 ties and in its bad. You constantly acknowledge your 
 
LET. I.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 41 
 
 ignorance in this matter, expressing yonr astonish- 
 ment at every new trait of Irish character that reaches 
 you, as though you had been reading the last book 
 of travels in New Zealand. Why should not those 
 members of Parliament who are recent from the uni- 
 versities — men who have not yet bound up their opi- 
 nions in fagots, and who therefore would not, in 
 losing one, loosen all — men full of youthful aspira- 
 tions and activities, and ignorant enough to be aware 
 of their ignorance — why should not these senators 
 make up their autumnal shooting-parties in Conne- 
 mara instead of Scotland, and pick up a real know- 
 ledge of the Irish peasant, instead of studying blue 
 books, and learning to swim on dry land ? It is not 
 desirable only, but necessary, that your ignorance of 
 Irish character should cease. To that end the first re- 
 quisite is that you should shake yourselves free from 
 your present conception of it, that grim and por- 
 tentous phantom which sits so heavy on your imagi- 
 nation. I would counsel you, at least, not to nail 
 yourselves, by reiterated statements, to opinions that 
 will not support you at the end. 
 
 A wise man wears his follies like his clothes, not 
 like his skin, knowing that he must change them 
 from time to time. Those persons who are truly 
 disposed to help the Irish nation will not be intole- 
 rant of this caution. Let such ask themselves 
 whether they have ever known a man succeed in 
 aiding those whom he unjustly despised. The thing 
 
42 ENGLISH MISRULE [lET. I. 
 
 does not happen ; whether because the effort is not 
 made sincerely, or because it is not made with dis- 
 cretion (unjust contempt implying a want of self- 
 knowledge and sense) ; or perhaps because the pro- 
 posed recipient of aid refuses to permit that person to 
 become his benefactor whom he deems unworthy 
 of being his friend. 
 
 With the impartiality of ignorance you abuse, not 
 only proprietors and peasants, but also our clergy of 
 both churches. The clergy of the Establishment 
 you consider to be drones. I can assure you that 
 these drones have been working hard for some time 
 past, and that many a famishing family is grateful to 
 them for their exertions. I regret to add that many 
 of them will not, I fear, be able in future to receive 
 English travellers with their accustomed hospitality, 
 because there is often a scant supply left in their 
 kitchen, and rather thread-bare covering upon chil- 
 dren who have been as delicately brought up and as 
 carefully instructed as those in any English parson- 
 age. The objection which you have of late brought 
 against the Roman Catholic priests is, that they are 
 either Whiteboys or the instigators of Whiteboys. 
 From this statement we, the Irish gentlemen who 
 live at home and are not at ease, must dissent. In 
 so large a body as the Irish priesthood there must be 
 exceptions ; but if the number of priests were much 
 larger, and more nearly proportioned to the needs of 
 their flocks, the number of Whiteboy offences, as well 
 
LET. I.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 43 
 
 as those of other kinds, would probably diminish. 
 Should you be content with converting the Roman 
 Catholic priests, you will, perhaps, do well to hold your 
 disputations in private ; for those priests are a very 
 "Jesuitical" race, and when you have propounded a 
 question out of your little theological catechism, will 
 give you an answer wholly different from that set 
 down under it in print; and, perhaps, instead of 
 waiting for the next question, ask you one in turn. 
 Should you prefer the Cromwellian method of deal- 
 ing with them, I beg that it may not be in my time. 
 I respect them for their office as well as on account 
 of the solicitude which they feel for the welfare of 
 their flocks, both spiritual and temporal ; but I must 
 own that I have a selfish interest in this matter 
 likewise: I reside in the country, and am of those 
 who think that we could not reside there with com- 
 fort, if you were madly to demolish the chief barrier 
 which at present exists between us and anarchy. 
 
 Having said thus much with reference to expedi- 
 ency, let me now, according to my engagement, 
 consider the matter with reference to justice and 
 truth. I object to the reiteration of your charges 
 against us, because they are for the most part op- 
 posed to truth and to justice. These are qualities 
 with which you cannot dispense. That high Pro- 
 vidence which apportions in various degrees, to 
 the several nations, both physical and moral gifts, 
 has bestowed on England the virtues of justice and 
 
44 ENGLISH MISRULE [lET. I. 
 
 of truth in no ordinary degree. It has also largely 
 rewarded your use of these talents ; and, more merci- 
 ful in judgment than even in bounty, it has visited 
 your occasional neglect of them with summary 
 retribution. Should you think it a just judgment if 
 we were to form our notion of England at large by 
 a generalization from the police reports? Is any 
 one ignorant that the eventful periods of history are 
 those of aggression and suffering ; and that, in the 
 circumstances of a contemporaneous country, the 
 worst part is the noisiest, and the best escapes fame ? 
 The charges made against Ireland, it is true, derive 
 a certain verisimilitude from the stories in circula- 
 tion amongst you ; but you cannot be ignorant that 
 for such tales the supply, according to the ordinary 
 laws of trade, will always be proportionate to the 
 demand. Abate your appetite for them, and you will 
 be deluded by them no more. Believe, if you will, 
 that we are base, cruel, and faithless — men without 
 natural affections and without gratitude, without con- 
 science and without shame — reprobates, idolaters, 
 un-English persons, and beggars. On all these 
 charges but the last I shall say nothing, because, 
 though they were true, we might be prosperous not- 
 withstanding, and the England which you repre- 
 sent might be as well content with us as you could 
 be with the Chinese, if that people, well satiated with 
 opium, were to decorate their sleepy heads with 
 cotton nightcaps of your manufacture. In the second 
 
LET. I.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 45 
 
 place I pass them by, because they are made in too 
 general a form to admit of any but a general denial, 
 and because, as they do not contain that one particle 
 of truth which is necessary to vivify a lie, so I con- 
 clude that those who believe them now must needs 
 believe them still. There are, however, other charges 
 which are true in part, and of which the vice consists 
 in gross exaggerations and in a wilful forgetfulness 
 of all extenuating circumstances. I shall proceed 
 to discuss our real faults without any desire to palliate 
 them. The faults exist, we have therefore to pay 
 the penalty for them, and we shall be the better able 
 to contend with these, as well as our other enemies, 
 their allies, when we look them in the face. 
 
 Before passing on to your graver accusations, I 
 will notice one, put forward sometimes with a drollery 
 that ought not to be a substitute for sense. " There 
 has never been a people so badly treated as the 
 Irish," it is said ; " from the beginning of things it 
 seems to have been England's vocation to trample 
 on Ireland, and Ireland's to be trampled on ; from 
 which surely she ought to infer that this treatment is 
 just what she deserves. Successful people are apt 
 to deserve success*, and blows are honestly come 
 by." This doctrine of " success, a test of merit," 
 never will flourish except on the soil of the op- 
 
 * " And prove the Caesar or the Catiline 
 
 By the true touch-stone of Desert — Success." 
 
 Lord Byron, Doge of Venice. 
 
46 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. I. 
 
 pressor. A certain Egyptian that smote a certain 
 Hebrew believed it ; but he died on account of his 
 error. We have been taught that there exists a test 
 of desert altogether different from success : we are 
 told that on a day, still a long time off, several things 
 wiU be set right which have gone wrong ; and many 
 an epitaph be brought painfully to book. I have 
 myself known a child who lost his arm in conse- 
 quence of a kick from a mule : he has since grown 
 up, he will always feel his loss when any bull} 
 chooses to assail him : but I do not therefore set the 
 mule above the man. 1 do not think this new creeci 
 likely to be generally avowed ; acted upon it wir. 
 always be by some, though not by all to whom a love 
 of paradox may recommend it. You may, if you 
 please, identify greatness with success, and suffering 
 with ignominy ; you may mould the not unnatural 
 prejudice of savage life into a philosophy (and as 
 such it is original) ; you may even elevate it into a re- 
 ligion, if antiquated religions displease you ; but you 
 cannot adopt this new-old doctrine and retain any 
 but the most Platonic love for justice and for truth. 
 
 You will perhaps not be displeased if I postpone 
 to my next letter a consideration of those heavier 
 charges upon which you, I think erroneously, base 
 your dislike to us. I should myself prefer this course, 
 because I hope to be more successful in that part of 
 my subject than in the portion hitherto treated. In 
 this letter 1 have not sought to do more than analyse 
 
LET. I.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 47 
 
 the symptoms of your uneasiness, draw conclusions 
 from them as to its hidden causes, observe on some 
 circumstances connected with the recent relief 
 system which seem to have increased it, and per- 
 suade you, if possible, to mitigate your resentment, 
 or at all events to express it as it is expressed 
 by English gentlemen who share your delusion. 
 In the most important of these objects I fear that 
 I may have failed ; and if so I ought to apologiKse 
 for having given you so much trouble in vain. 
 Should you accompany me farther, we will discuss 
 in a more serious tone the more serious of the im- 
 putations brought against my countrymen. If, with- 
 out palliating our faults, I can show that they are 
 less than you imagine, I hope that you will be well 
 pleased ; and should I prove that, without ceasing 
 to be ours, they are yours also in part, let me trust 
 that you will draw an inference as to what your 
 future policy in Ireland ought to be, and help to 
 amend what you have helped to impair. 
 
48 ENGLISH MISRULE [lET. IT. 
 
 LETTER II. 
 
 The Faults of the Irish. — The continued Existence of Society in Ireland 
 • accounted for. — The Connection between Irish Faults and past Mis- 
 govemment. — Brief Sketch of Events in Ireland. — Variations of 
 English Policy according to Change of Circumstances. — Outlawry, 
 Legal Tyranny, Comiptiou. — The Irish Constitution. — The Union. — 
 Catholic Emancipation. — Agitation. — The Penal Laws still operate in 
 Ireland. — English Intolerance still findsia Mode of expressing itself — 
 National Debt of England to Ireland. — Amendment the Test of 
 Repentance. — Imperial Legislation during Forty-seven Years. — A 
 Poor Law. — Neither the Eesponsibilities nor the Rights of Property 
 asserted in Time. — The Problem of to-day the same as that at the 
 Time of the Union. 
 
 Sir, 
 I PROCEED to discuss the specific charges brought 
 against Ireland. It is not without humiliation that 
 I admit the faults of my countrymen, although I 
 believe that my country can afford those admissions 
 which truth requires. The reluctance with which 
 I make them is, however, mitigated by the con- 
 sideration, that what you imagine to be our 
 complete and final condemnation is by far the 
 strongest part of our case against you. Unhappy 
 the country in. whose mouth even justice becomes 
 a railing accusation ; unhappy that other countrj' 
 whose faults are amongst her weapons of defence, 
 and whose virtues have so often betrayed her ! The 
 
LET. II.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 49 
 
 iu quoque argument is the last to which I would 
 willingly resort ; nor shall I allude in this letter to 
 any defects on your part, except those which are so 
 inextricably interwoven with ours, that to handle one 
 class is to handle both. I would gladly omit all 
 mention of these also were it possible to dispense 
 in argument with that connection which subsists be- 
 tween cause and eflfect. In the mean time, Sir, be 
 assured that this is a practical question. Material 
 improvement will not take place without moral 
 amendment ; and should you be disposed to under- 
 take the latter, you ought to understand that the 
 work on your side of St. George's Channel and the 
 work on our side is one work, and that, to be carried 
 on in either country, it must be carried on simul- 
 taneously in both. 
 
 Among the sins with which you charge us are the 
 following, ranged in the order of their presumed 
 wickedness, viz. : — 
 
 1. Our poverty. 
 
 2. Our lawlessness. 
 
 3. Our disregard of truth. 
 
 4. Our bullying propensities. 
 
 5. Our sloth, procrastination, helplessness, &c. 
 
 6. Our insolent content, and savage merriment in 
 
 misery. 
 
 7. Our bad taste, and peevish ingratitude to you. 
 I have already stated that I shall notice those 
 
 accusations only which contain some particle of truth; 
 
 D 
 
50 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. IL 
 
 but I must own that the first two charges in the 
 above black list are true altogether. Poor we are, 
 and he would be a bold man who denied it. Land- 
 lords, farmers, and labourers; these three classes 
 are all poor, and so poor, that if you would support 
 the country by compelling any one of them to main- 
 tain the other two, (to receive in turn no doubt the 
 same assistance,) you act as wisely as if you desired 
 a man to become rich by shiftiug his halfpence from 
 one pocket into the other. Our merchants and ma- 
 nufacturers, also, of whom we have but few, are poor ; 
 you would call them adventurers : our professions are 
 overstocked ; in fact, the only men well paid are the 
 attorneys who put diseased estates out of pain. The 
 lawlessness of Ireland is about equal to the poverty 
 which causes it. I do not speak of this year merely, 
 which has exhibited the somewhat riotous saturnalia 
 of despair ; but, from the earliest times, the people of 
 this country, though very reverential in disposition, 
 have had no respect for the law of the land. They 
 are much addicted to litigation among themselves; 
 but though fond of the law as a game, law as an 
 object of reverence is what they do not understand. 
 This is a grievous calamity; but not enjoying your 
 gift of wondering, we are obliged to contemplate 
 the fact simply with regret. The marvel to us is, not 
 the lawlessness that surrounds us, but that amidst so 
 complete an indifference to the law of the land, as 
 such, civil polity can exist. Society in this country 
 
LET. II.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 51 
 
 is a great Fact for which it is hard to account : under 
 the same circumstances it would at once go to pieces 
 in England. The truth is, that there exists a principle 
 of compensation in all human things, the result of a 
 Providence more compassionate than the theories of 
 the philosophers. There is an unwritten law as well as 
 a written ; and of these, the more merciful has proved 
 the more durable and the stronger. In all countries 
 they flourish in some measure, each class at the other's 
 expense. There are in Ireland social traditions (those 
 immemorial and undefined "mores"without which laws 
 are of no avail but to prolong decay) which have been 
 to us a substitute for law ; there are household affec- 
 tions which extend their peaceful influence far beyond 
 the limit of the hearth ; there is a reverence for anti- 
 quity and eminence, civil or ecclesiastical ; there is 
 a moral sense, profound though perverted ; there is 
 religion, abundant in quantity, whatever you may 
 think of its quality. The consequence of these 
 things is that ther6 has been a Society. 
 
 Society would seem to include permanently its 
 imaginative element as well as its sensual and moral ; 
 and the first, though on it hangs the whole grada- 
 tion of ranks and honorary distinctions, is subject 
 to strange aberrations. In England, fifty years ago, 
 the man who was but a footpad on the common, was 
 a hero at Tyburn. In Ireland, if any one shoots you 
 for your purse, he is hated and despised ; whereas 
 the man who shoots you to revenge an agrarian feud 
 
 D 2 
 
52 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. II. 
 
 meets with pity, and if a reproachful, yet a protective 
 sympathy. That sympathy is for the criminal, not 
 with the crime. If you take the trouble of observing 
 this distinction, it will save you from the sin of much 
 needless calumny. Sympathy with crime is a de- 
 pravity common neither in Ireland nor elsewhere. 
 Sympathy for the criminal, rather than for the law, 
 is an hereditary disease, and national calamity, in 
 itself, a grave offence ; but the necessary result of the 
 fact that, till a very recent period of English domina- 
 tion, law in Ireland was the friend neither of the 
 people nor of justice, but the impartial persecutor 
 of both. Why need it surprise you, Sir, that the 
 law of the land should present itself in a different 
 aspect to your countrymen and to mine ? The 
 same instincts which cause the one to revere, cause 
 the other to hate it. The Englishman reveres the 
 law because his liberty has been its creature, and his 
 prosperity its ward. The Irish peasant has had a li- 
 berty too: but for centuries it was the liberty of moon- 
 light mountains and tufted bogs, that bewildered his 
 pursuers. He enjoyed it; but he gave no thanks to 
 the law. The Irish peasant had his prosperity also. 
 On the domains of his fathers, perhaps beneath the 
 ruins of their hall, the serf not seldom of some in- 
 truder, he devoured the prey he had caught, if in 
 secrecy, then in security. To kill an " Irish enemy " 
 was accounted an excess if not a crime. Within later 
 times he had conacre, and he had a vote. He ate, and 
 
LET. 11.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 5S 
 
 gave thanks — but not to the law. There exists in 
 England, also, a class of laws held, 1 fear, in slender 
 esteem. I mean the game laws. No blacker catalogue 
 of crime and misery was ever registered after an Irish 
 eviction — an act which, even when accompanied by 
 tyranny and cruelty, is often the defence of a starv- 
 ing landlord against a starving peasantry — than some 
 of your own economical writers have lately recorded 
 as attributable to an inordinate passion for pheasants' 
 eggs. Should that time ever arrive when the rest 
 of your laws are protected by no higher sanction 
 than the game laws, the violation of them will be 
 regarded as poaching is now. I would advise you, 
 in that hour, to emigrate to Ireland. Liberty ex- 
 ists in this country, and so does law ; — the former 
 means a liberty to kill ; the latter a legal restraint 
 on him who would protect himself: but, to tell you 
 the truth, law and liberty are the two things on which 
 least store is set. On this subject there has seemed 
 for the last year to exist a conspiracy between 
 the government and the governed. We have, how- 
 ever, our safety notwithstanding. Be civil to every 
 one, and evpry one will be obliging to you. Collect 
 no rents, your own or any other person's : shun the 
 hustings : avoid relief committees and boards of 
 guardians: above all things keep clear of those 
 agrarian feuds, the traditional causes of our social 
 warfare ; and you shall roam through the land as 
 «afely as the lady whom Senanus spurned. Under 
 
54 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. 11, 
 
 the same circumstances your security in your own 
 country would be the security of partridges and of 
 grouse. 
 
 I have referred. Sir, to the past, as though you 
 were acquainted with it : but lest I should seem 
 guilty thereby either of flattery or of malice, let me 
 proceed upon the opposite and more probable sup- 
 position, and write down (since you may, perhaps, 
 be versed in only one side of our annals, as of our 
 character) a short compendium of some past cir- 
 cumstances which have taken place in this island — 
 circumstances which stand to her in place of a history, 
 and which are the chief cause of her present con- 
 dition, as well as of those stains upon her character, 
 on which you enlarge. You have heard of Irish 
 outbreaks and insuiTections ; nor has the information 
 fallen upon an inattentive ear. Are you willing to 
 hear the opposite side ? Faults there were on both 
 sides : if you acquaint yourself with ^ach class, you 
 will have complied with the outward conditions of an 
 impartial judgment. Having adjusted the balance 
 you will be able to form a conclusive judgment. 
 You will then be able to decide whether the severer 
 condemnation is to be passed on that unhappy people, 
 broken in its first fall, whose worst deeds were but 
 the convulsions of one under torture, or on that 
 great nation which held in her hands the destinies 
 of both which initiated the whole policy followed 
 out in the weaker ; and, therefore, by a political 
 
LET. II.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 55 
 
 fatalism decreed its conclusion; that great nation 
 which was just to every people whom it respected, and 
 respected every people, save that one which had not 
 earned respect by a united resistance ; that great 
 nation which, if the past cannot be recalled, has still 
 the power of atoning for it ; unless, as the severest 
 punishment for past offences, she is deprived of the 
 faculty of judging aright where she was too long 
 contented to act wrong. On this subject, I refer 
 you to an admirable book, entitled the " Past and 
 Present Policy of England towards Ireland," which 
 enters into detail more than I can do ; and proves 
 with what clearness, as well as intrepidity, both 
 of thought and expression, an Englishman, when 
 free, can treat this theme. If the rest of his 
 countrymen chose, like him, to exercise their fa- 
 culties on Irish matters, as they do on most beside, 
 I need not have troubled you with this letter ; or 1 
 might have written it in a tone far more agreeable, 
 probably to both of us. 
 
 In the year 1172, England, or rather a warlike 
 race, who, having conquered England, thought they 
 could do no less than conquer Ireland likewise, un- 
 dertook that enterprise which you have no doubt so 
 often deplored. It was not difficult to find a pretext 
 for intermeddling in Irish affairs, for the people were 
 at that time as extravagantly given up to dissensions 
 as they are now ; but an ' appropriation ' of the whole 
 country on the grand scale projected by Henry 11. 
 
66 ENGLISH MISRULE [lET. II. 
 
 requiring a pretext, that sovereign betook himself 
 to an English pope, who conferred Ireland upon 
 the English king, as a fief held from himself, 
 together with the title of "lord," receiving in re- 
 turn certain valuable considerations. Thus, partly 
 through internal dissensions, partly by fallacious 
 treaties, partly by force, partly by imposture, and, in 
 no small degree, by marriages — for the English ad- 
 venturers who settled here were adepts at fortune 
 hunting— the island was subdued with a "fatal faci- 
 lity." Had it caused you more trouble in the con- 
 quest, you would have taken more trouble to govern 
 it aright. 
 
 Lacking, however, then, as in more recent times, 
 the leisure necessary for Irish affairs, you contented 
 yourself with planting a feudal colony, and made 
 over the island to a band of Norman adventurers, 
 the most respectable that ever settled here, not a 
 few of whose titles, the oldest in either country, 
 continue to adorn the Irish peerage. The Norman 
 middlemen, to whom you thus let your enormous 
 dairy farm, were diligent in removing useless fences 
 and securing fixity of tenure. They refused, of 
 course, to pay rent ; and if one of your bailiffs was 
 caught straying beyond the limits of the pale, he 
 received the salutation given to a tithe-proctor in 
 later times ; but they compensated for these affronts 
 by comporting themselves worse to the natives than 
 to you. 
 
LET. II.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 57 
 
 What between the exactions of these middlemen 
 and their feuds, for like other robbers they stabbed 
 at each other over their spoil, the unfortunate natives, 
 seeing no other refuge, were obliged to fly from your 
 agents to your laws, which they vainly invoked, and, 
 for the protection of which, knowing that business 
 should be done after a business-like fashion, they 
 offered, in the year 1278, the sum of 8000 marks. 
 King Edward I., who reigned at that time, was minded 
 to take the ransom, and though not to let the captive 
 go, yet to legalize the servitude : but the Barons, 
 whose interests were inconsistent with any scheme of 
 methodical oppression, disapproved of the project, 
 as at a later period the West-Indian planters disap- 
 proved of negro emancipation ; and partly by open 
 denial, partly by passive resistance, compelled the 
 king to abandon it. 
 
 In the reign of King Edward III. the same en- 
 deavour was made by the Irish : again they suppli- 
 cated participation in English laws and the privilege 
 of being lawful subjects of the English crown ; 
 again the prayer was rejected. Great persons then 
 in power affirmed that the Irish were aliens, and 
 ought so to be treated : nor were their instances un- 
 successful. It has been remarked, that the greatest 
 of the Roman emperors were those that persecuted 
 the early Christians with the most severity: the 
 same observation may be made with reference to the 
 English kings and the Irish people. 
 
 D 3 
 
58 ENGLISH MISRULE [lET. II. 
 
 Sir John Davies observes on the matter thus : " I 
 note as a great defect in the civil poHcy of this 
 kingdom, that for the space of 350 years after the 
 conquest first attempted, the English laws were not 
 communicated to the Irish, nor the benefit and pro- 
 tection thereof allowed to them, though they earnestly 
 desired and sought the same; for as long as they 
 were out of the protection of the law, so that every 
 Englishman might oppress, spoil and kill them with- 
 out controlment, howwas it possible that they should 
 be other than outlaws and enemies to the crown of 
 England ? If the king would not admit them to the 
 condition of subjects, how could they learn to obey 
 
 him as sovereign ? " " In a word, if the 
 
 English could neither in peace govern them by law, 
 nor could in warre root them out by the sword, must 
 they not needs be prickes in their eyes, and thorns 
 in their sides, until the world's end ? " 
 
 Sir John Davies does not seem to have taken 
 otherwise than an indulgent view, on the whole, of 
 this matter, though he notes this one " defect " in 
 England's policy. Probably he had not time to 
 look at these trifles in detail : and it is in detail that 
 sujffering exists. A week appeared a long time to 
 those who passed the last year in Ireland. During 
 the 350 years preceding the period at which Sir John 
 wrote, there must have been much of unrecorded 
 suffering amongst the Irish poor. The famines, for 
 instance, were almost perpetual. Edmond Spenser, 
 
LET. II.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 59 
 
 secretary to the lord deputy thus describes the state 
 of the people, as though he had lived in 1847. 
 " The Irish were brought to such wretchednesse as 
 that any stonie heart would have rued the same. 
 Out of everie corner of the woods and glynnes they 
 came creeping forth on their hands, for the legges 
 would not bear them. They looked like anatomies 
 of death ; they spake like ghosts crying out of their 
 graves ; they did eat the dead carrions ; yea, happy 
 were they who could find them ; yea, and one an- 
 other soon after; insomuch as the carcases they 
 spared not to scrape out of the graves ; and if they 
 found a plot of cresses or shamrocks there they 
 flocked, as to a feast, for the time ; yet not being able 
 to continue long there withal." * At a later period 
 the same writer recommended that the English ca- 
 valry should make frequent irruptions through the 
 disturbed districts, to the end that such of the out- 
 laws as were not cut off by the sword, might, on 
 their return, find their crops torn up by the horses' 
 feet. Practical and imaginative tenderness are dif- 
 ferent things, and each has its reward. Spenser 
 possessed a most tender imagination, for which he 
 has been rewarded by the title of the " Gentle Poet." 
 It is to be supposed that the savages who burned 
 his castle, with the only child of " his Elizabeth " in 
 it, were not readers of the " Fairy Queen." 
 
 * Spenser's " State of Ireland." 
 
60 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. U. 
 
 Let US now cast a glance back, and survey the 
 space we have traversed. When a few words, such 
 as usurpation, confiscation, and outlawry, constitute 
 the whole of a nation's annals, the historian, thus 
 moving through an unresisting medium, advances 
 with a rapidity that deceives the incautious reader. 
 The interval between the reign of King Henry II, 
 and King Edward III. is no inconsiderable one. 
 It exceeds that which has elapsed since the Emanci- 
 pation Act, during which you remark that we have im- 
 proved but slowly. Contrast the progress then made 
 by your country and by your colony. If you turn 
 over the pages of your chroniclers, you will find 
 that not a few of those achievements which " make 
 old story ring" were enacted within that period. 
 If you study your constitutional histories, you will 
 discover that during the same period some progress 
 had been made in the building up of that mighty 
 fabric — your laws. The foundations of your trade 
 had been laid ; the seeds of your etters had been 
 sown ; your arts had budded, and promised no scanty 
 bloom ; your manners had reached a noble elevation 
 of uneffeminate refinement ; cathedrals, which in the 
 day of your wealth you have neither been able to 
 rival nor keep in repair, rose, like an exhalation, from 
 the sacred soil ; the march of your military great- 
 ness had advanced "with the slow motion of a 
 summer cloud," and now hung upon the horizon of 
 Europe, illustrated from fortress to fortress with un- 
 
LET. II,] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. . 6l 
 
 sullied but ominous glories. What aspect did Ire- 
 land then present ? One enormous blot. Great men 
 had been amongst you and enriched you with gifts. 
 They were honoured in their generation ; some of 
 them adorn your annals ; others, content to leave 
 their works behind, have bequeathed you no name. 
 How many such did you suffer to arise in Ire- 
 land, once their native home or hospitable asylum ? 
 Call to memory, Sir, the magnificent court of Ed- 
 ward, and adorn it in your fancy with the last of the 
 tournaments, those more than dramatic, those truly 
 ideal representations, at which, in a theatre larger 
 than any built by mortal hand, the heroic virtues 
 were impersonated by the highest and noblest of the 
 earth, for the delight of those who were taught to as- 
 sociate danger, violence, and the shock of arms with 
 the fair images of justice and of honour. Chaucer, 
 the " morning star of English song " was then 
 living. Imagine him present, and called on like a 
 minstrel of old for a hymn or exulting ode. Of 
 what think you had been his theme } The Cru- 
 sades or the more recent passages of Cressy and 
 Poitiers ? I know not : but had a sudden compul- 
 sion fallen upon him and bade him to celebrate any 
 one of those scenes of massacre and treachery which 
 had so long defaced Ireland, sure I am that his 
 princely audience would have been scattered ere 
 long by the unexpected notes of elegy, and de- 
 
62 . ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. II. 
 
 manded another bard, not too honest to be a pa- 
 triot. 
 
 Such was the state of things from the Conquest to 
 the time of Edward III., and such it continued to 
 the Reformation. Up to that period the people had 
 nothing to complain of, except that they were at 
 once bound as outlaws and oppressed as slaves; two 
 very common evils, but not always inflicted on the 
 same race at the same time. The No¥man-Celtic 
 colony continued to maintain itself over a large pro- 
 portion of the island ; the English dominion was ac- 
 knowledged within the compass of the pale ; that is, 
 within four counties round Dublin. Up to that 
 period the English sovereigns " called for obedience 
 from the people of Ireland, not on principles of 
 subjection, but as vassals and mesne lords between 
 them and the popes." * One bond, that of a com- 
 mon faith, subsisted between the two nations ; and 
 the Irish were attached to that ecclesiastical author- 
 ity, which alone, in the multitude of their masters, 
 they had found to exercise a beneficent sway. Then 
 came the Irish Reformation; and England, exchang- 
 ing the cruelty of a weakness that could not restrain 
 its own proconsuls, for a state tyranny no longer de- 
 legated, initiated this country for the first time, and 
 now unsolicited, in her laws, and subjected serfs and 
 
 Burke. 
 
LET. II.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 63 
 
 masters alike to the civil and religious despotism of 
 the Tudors. 
 
 You know the story. King Henry VIII. was 
 tired of his wife ; but having been a great theologian 
 in his youth, and complimented as such, he knew 
 that he could not have two wives at the same time. He 
 applied to the pope in vain for a divorce, and deter- 
 mined henceforth to be his own pope : accordingly 
 he claimed an absolute sway over the souls of men, 
 and exercised it over their bodies. He was a man 
 of great intellectual and physical energy, formidable 
 alike from mental sharpness of sight and moral 
 blindness; but puffed up to that degree by high- 
 feeding and yain glory, that confounding the office 
 of " Commander of the Faithful " with the humbler 
 ftinctions of '' Defender of the Faith," he established 
 his western caliphate upon two immutable articles of 
 belief — the one, that he himself was in all things to 
 be obeyed ; the other, that he was bound in turn to 
 marry no woman until he had cut off the head of 
 her predecessor. The Reformation had difficulties 
 to contend with in this country, with which, however, 
 Henry was competent to cope. The English sway 
 in Ireland had been originally founded, and subse- 
 quently maintained, on that imposture, now obsolete, 
 that the pope, as a spiritual potentate, had a right 
 to dispose of temporal kingdoms. With an admir- 
 able versatility which generally flourishes at the ex- 
 pense of originality, King Henry had, as if to anti- 
 
^ ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. It. 
 
 cipate the difficulty, appropriated the old theory as 
 to spiritual and temporal power, though he applied 
 it in a converse form, affirming that he himself, as a 
 temporal potentate, possessed absolute authority 
 over the spiritual faith of men. Thus, upon two 
 impostures, alternated by a single juggle, that por- 
 tion of British dominion in Ireland, which rested on 
 fraud, not force, continued to depend. 
 
 I beg, Sir, that you will not suppose me by any 
 thing which I have said respecting the first esta- 
 blishment of the Reformation in Ireland to reflect 
 upon the Anglican Church as it now exists, or on 
 any constitutional theory as to its character and 
 pretensions which it has accredited. I am an un- 
 worthy but obedient son of that Church ; but as I 
 find no fortieth article prescribing to me in what 
 manner I should regard the external circumstances 
 which accompanied a certain period of her fortunes, 
 I must commit myself on that subject to the light 
 of natural reason ; and hold my judgment free to 
 determine whether the Church that now is was in- 
 debted to Henry for aid, or has maintained itself in 
 spite of the scandals by him brought upon it ; and, 
 if the former supposition is to be preferred, whether 
 the aid which he afforded is to be likened to that 
 with which Christianity was advanced in strum en tally 
 by Nero, or piously by Constantine. What we have 
 now to consider is the mode in which the Reforma- 
 tion brought about by him and his successors na- 
 
LET. II.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 6& 
 
 turally presented itself to the people of this country, 
 and the means which were adopted for the correc- 
 tion of their judgment. In this respect, as in most 
 others, you will note a difference in the fortunes of 
 the two countries. In England the Reformation 
 was in accordance with the sympathies of the peo- 
 ple, for reasons of which King Henry knew nothing ; 
 and, the bishops and clergy for the most part con- 
 senting, it was conducted according to the forms of 
 the ecclesiastical constitution. In Ireland it was 
 brought about rather nakedly by royal authority 
 and act of parliament ; and it found little reception 
 among the priesthood, and none among the people. 
 Its effect was not to diffuse Protestantism through 
 the land, but simply to subvert the Roman Catholic 
 Church, desecrating its temples, and scattering its 
 clergy, much after that fashion which prevailed in 
 France at the time of the Revolution. Faith and 
 morals alike disregarded, two things were required — 
 to renounce and to conform. As men skulk in 
 caves when hurricanes prostrate their houses, the 
 people hid their heads till that tyranny should be 
 over-past. When they raised them again to listen, 
 whatever sound struck their ear, it was not the music 
 of the liturgy. As chary of your religion as of 
 your laws, you had banned the use of that liturgy, 
 except in an unknown tongue. If the clergyman, as 
 well as his congregation, was ignorant of English, 
 the service was required to be celebrated in Latin. 
 
66 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. II. 
 
 I need not, Sir, trouble you with the details of 
 
 those religious persecutions which converted that 
 
 ^ J Irish aversion to England, before but a natural in- 
 
 ^^ 4^L*^^^^^^' ^^*° ^ religious passion, sanctioned by what- 
 
 ^ '*^. ever remained in the land of reverence or of loyalty. 
 
 Jiuu-^ During the periods of that struggle feudalism ex- 
 
 ^^•^ ' pired both in England and in Ireland. In England 
 
 Jj ' feudalism had been a tree rooted in the soil, under the 
 
 ylf^f^ ^shelter of which popular institutions gradually rose 
 
 ^^ , /up, and failed not to attain their full stature, when 
 
 ♦^''^ ^ that which had protected, yet overshadowed them, 
 
 '^*7 S^^^ ^^y* ^^ Ireland it was a rock which long had 
 
 , ^ ., lain a tyrannous weight upon the earth ; and when 
 
 it was removed there was nothing but blackness and 
 
 barrenness beneath. English feudalism, by a gentle 
 
 euthanasia, died into constitutional liberty; Irish 
 
 feudalism met with a more bloody end, and left no 
 
 legacy behind to the people, except a legal tyranny 
 
 worse than the outlawry which had preceded it. 
 
 The interval between the reign of Edward III. 
 and the greatest of the sovereigns that succeeded 
 him. Queen Elizabeth, was a long one, and to Eng- 
 land had not been a blank. She had had her strug- 
 gles ; but all that tasked her energies had developed 
 them: her contentions had had a fair field; her 
 destinies had worked themselves out; the wars of 
 the Roses were over; a peaceful and prudent reign 
 had enriched her; religious conflicts had deve- 
 loped her intellect to the utmost; and the wreck 
 
LET. II.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 67 
 
 of the Spanish Armada lay scattered at her feet. 
 When all those elements which constitute national 
 existence, whether on a large or small scale, — arms, 
 laws, trade, arts, sciences, a just gradation of 
 ranks, and a church, — are allowed to mingle and 
 ferment together; when there is a past on which 
 memory can repose, and a future to which hope can 
 look, then, and from a soil thus enriched, great men 
 spring up, its spontaneous growth. These condi- 
 tions having been fulfilled, two states, one in anti- 
 quity, and the other in the middle ages, each less 
 than a province of Ireland, had matured more of 
 mental excellence than vast regions have produced in 
 periods of rude or of emasculate barbarism ; without 
 these a continent is as vacant of greatness as a South- 
 Sea Island, and a century as complete a blank as an 
 hour. In the grave and in the dungeon time is not. 
 The Macchiavellian habit of thought, counted 
 wisdom in the 16th century, had somewhat stained 
 your policy ; but that was a gi'eat period when you 
 had a Cecil for a minister, a Bacon for a Lord Chan- 
 cellor, a Raleigh for a buccaneer, and a Sidney for 
 a fine gentleman. I forget what Irish princess it was 
 that visited Queen Elizabeth. If she was admitted 
 to that court, irradiated by the last gleams of the 
 chivalrous age, in which the prime intellects of the 
 modem world were concentrated, she probably wit- 
 nessed, in common with the men whom I have 
 named, one of those dramatic representations* with 
 
68 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. II. 
 
 which a man greater than all the rest was then sustain- 
 ing his country. Had she been invited to task his 
 universal genius with some new subject, what theme, 
 think you, would she have chosen ? The annals of 
 her country would have supplied her with many tragic 
 remembranceSjbut a small choice — for bloodis like to 
 blood. The struggles of the Elizabethan period had 
 been the most severe that had yet shaken the island ; 
 but the storm of battle was over ; and the Saturnian 
 promise of "Pacata Hibemia" shone auspiciously 
 upon the harvest of destruction. A few years later, 
 the Princes of Tyrconnel and Tyrone — accompanied 
 by all that remained to them — their kinsmen, their 
 friends, and their fame, committed themselves to the 
 waves, contented to find a grave in Rome, the world's 
 chief burial place, in which their bones are still pre- 
 served. Would not this migration have been a theme 
 as poetic as that prescribed to Shakspere by his 
 prosperous mistress — the " Merry Wives of Wind- 
 sor?" 
 
 Subsequently to the Reformation, the Irish cannot 
 justly be said to have been outlaws. To the great 
 mystery of law they were effectually introduced, 
 both by Henr}^ and Elizabeth, through the law of 
 the "Royal Supremacy." The undertaking, if a 
 late, was a great and pious one ; but you will admit 
 that the augurs had not chosen a fortunate day, nor 
 been circumspect to avoid evil omens, when they 
 inaugurated their temple of justice. 
 
LET. II.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 69 
 
 Law once established, institutions follow ; and not 
 long after the period which I have chosen as a 
 momentary resting place, we find that most important 
 changes in the parliamentary representation of the 
 country were made ; the effect of which was to 
 increase the power of the crown by submitting the 
 Irish House of Commons to the influence of the 
 Government. Forty close boroughs were now created, 
 which gave to the Crown the command of eighty 
 votes, and a predominance of power to what was 
 then called the English as distinguished from the 
 Irish party. This noiseless revolution was effected 
 by Queen Elizabeth's successor, the Planter of 
 Ulster. " The accession of James I.," according to 
 Lord Chancellor Clare, " was the era of connection 
 between the sister islands." " The multitude," says 
 Sir John Davies, "being brayed, as it were, in a 
 mortar, with sword, famine, and pestilence together, 
 submitted themselves to the English Govern- 
 ments, received the laws and magistrates, and most 
 gladly embraced the King's pardon and peace." 
 It must be owned of James also, that he had not 
 selected the most auspicious moment for the instal- 
 lation of a parliamentary constitution ; but I am 
 bound to observe that the plantation of Ulster, if 
 distinguished from preceding acts of aggression by a 
 colder atrocity, was, notwithstanding, a statesmanlike 
 device, and the only measure worthy of the name 
 which England had yet carried out in Ireland. It is 
 
70 ENGLISH MISRULE [lET. II. 
 
 remarkable that her stoutest deed, and that one most 
 nearly connected with a purpose, should have pro- 
 ceeded from one of her weakest kings. Had James, 
 when he rooted out the natives, planted them in 
 England, instead of driving them to " the Devil or 
 Connaught;" and had he dispersed the intruders 
 over the whole country, instead of garrisoning a 
 province with them, his enterprise would have done 
 much to amalgamate the two races, and elevate the 
 character and the fortunes of both. 
 
 The period of law having at last set in, tyranny 
 became legal; and a foundation was laid for that 
 system under which Ireland was subsequently 
 governed by the Protestant connection and the penal 
 laws. It was now deemed advisable to take the 
 lands out of the hands of their possessors, who were 
 almost all, except the recent settlers, Roman Catho- 
 lics ; but there was no pretext for carrying out this 
 policy by force. The result may be stated in the 
 words of Burke. " Sir J. Davies boasts of the bene- 
 fits received by the natives by extending to them the 
 English law ; but the appearance of things alone was 
 changed — the original scheme was never deviated 
 from for a single hour — unheard-of confiscations 
 were made in the northern parts, upon grounds of 
 plots and conspiracies, never proved in their sup- 
 posed authors ; the war of chicane succeeded to the 
 war of arms and of hostile statutes, and a regular 
 series of operations was carried on in the ordinary 
 
LET. II.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 71 
 
 courts of justice, and by special commissioners and 
 inquisitions, for the purpose of the total extirpation 
 of the interest of the natives in their own soil, until 
 this species of subtle ravage being earned to the last 
 excess of insolence and oppression under Lord 
 Strafford, it kindled the flames of that rebellion which 
 broke out in 1641. By the issue of that war, and by 
 the total reduction of the kingdom of Ireland in 
 1691, the ruin of the native Irish, and, in a great 
 measure too, of the first races of the English, was 
 completely accomplished." 
 
 A massacre admits neither of justification nor 
 palliation, and I offer neither. The outbreak of 
 1641 was a fearful crime, and fearfully was it avenged. 
 In the mean time. Sit, as there are degrees in guilt, let 
 me recommend to you not to believe without investi- 
 gation whatever you may hear on that subject. The 
 number of English who fell is very differently stated 
 by various writers ; indeed upon no other count of 
 the indictment have your witnesses against us found 
 it more difficult to agree in their testimony. You 
 may find a brief and able summary of the early 
 authorities on this subject, without further trouble 
 than that of referring to the " Dublin Review " for 
 October 1846. Lord Clarendon, in his history, as- 
 serts, " that there were forty or fifty thousand English 
 Protestants murdered before they suspected them- 
 selves to be in any danger." Temple says, " that 
 besides those few which fell in the heat of fight during 
 
fS ENGLISH MISRULE [lET. II. 
 
 the war, there were, in less than two years from the 
 breaking out of the rebellion, 300,000 British and 
 Protestants cruelly murdered in cold blood, accord- 
 ing to the most moderate computation ; " that is to 
 say, 35,000 Protestants murdered beyond the num- 
 ber that existed in the whole of Ireland at the time, 
 according to the calculation of Sir William Petty, 
 who contents himself with affirming, that during the 
 eleven years of war, 122,000 fell, of whom two-thirds 
 were cut off by war, plague, and famine ; thus re- 
 ducing the number of those who were massacred to 
 37,000, in ten years. Rapin states the whole num- 
 ber at 150,000; Hume at 40,000. Carte affirms that 
 the whole number of the English in Ulster at the 
 time could not have exceeded 20,000, of whom a 
 large proportion certainly escaped uninjured. The 
 Scotch he computes at 100,000, of whom it does 
 not appear that any fell except in open war. 
 By others, the number of Protestants destroyed in 
 the war is reckoned at 10,302 ; while Warner as- 
 serts that the number who fell during the first two 
 years are not to be reckoned, at the utmost, above 
 4,028, of whom but a small proportion could have 
 been massacred. At the conclusion of the war, the 
 number of the Roman Catholics was reduced from 
 1,200,000, to 700,000. " Even the private exercise 
 of the Catholic religion was made a capital crime ; 
 and in 1657, the punishment of confiscation and 
 death was denounced against all those, who, knowing 
 
LET. II.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 73 
 
 where a priest was hid, did not make discovery to 
 the government." 
 
 The reign of the Puritans was not favourable to 
 the Irish. Passionate advocates for private judg- 
 ment, they conceded to the Roman Catholics no 
 particle of that which they themselves so vehemently 
 used or abused ; even Milton, no feeble champion 
 of toleration, excepting them alone from its benefits 
 on religious grounds, as Locke did at a later period 
 on political. Lord Clarendon says that the suffer- 
 ings of the Irish from the Puritans had never been 
 surpassed but by those of the Jews in their destruc- 
 tion by Titus. The Puritans no doubt lamented, 
 like Titus, that the exterminating sword was com- 
 mitted to their hand ; no doubt they wept sore and 
 wrestled with the Lord; but they carried the work 
 bravely through, and entered into possession of the 
 chosen land. It is thus that Lord Clare describes 
 their zeal. " His (Cromwell's) first act was to col- 
 lect all the native Irish who had survived the general 
 desolation and remained in the country, and to trans- 
 plant them into the province of Connaught, which had 
 been completely depopulated and laid waste in the 
 progress of the rebellion. They were ordered to retire 
 there by a certain day, and forbidden to repass the 
 river Shannon on pain of death ; and this sentence of 
 deportation was rigidly enforced till the Restoration. 
 Their ancient possessions were seized and given up 
 to the conquerors, as were the possessions of every 
 
 E 
 
74 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. II. 
 
 man who had taken a part in the rebellion, or followed 
 the fortunes of the king after the murder of Charles 
 I., and this whole fund was distributed amongst 
 the officers and soldiers of Cromwell's army, in satis- 
 faction of the arrears of their pay, and adventurers 
 who had advanced money to defray the expenses of 
 the war^ It was thus, you perceive, in no small 
 degree, a pecuniary consideration which consigned 
 the " ancient inheritance of the inhabitants " to 
 the subaltern officers in Cromwell's army ; a motley 
 crew of Ranters, Fanatics, Infidels, and Demo- 
 crats ; and thus added a well venomed social can- 
 cer to the religious and political sores already ex- 
 isting. Suppose, Sir, that the property of — let us 
 say — Yorkshire alone were snatched from its present 
 possessors to-morrow, and transferred, with all its 
 castles, manor-houses and halls, to a regiment of 
 Irish adventurers, the scum cast to the surface by the 
 fermentation of our worst passions and follies, would 
 no interruption to your prosperity take place from 
 this disruption of ties ? If this be so, feeble indeed 
 must be that bond which, in England, connects 
 the lower with the higher nation. In Ireland it left 
 some traces behind; and Tipperary, a county of 
 undesirable celebrity, is supposed to have been more 
 largely enriched with the dregs of the Cromwellian 
 mixture than most parts of Ireland, many of the 
 common soldiers as well as officers of the English 
 army having settled there. 
 
LET. II.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 75 
 
 At the Restoration, the Irish, who had fought and 
 suffered for the royal cause, demanded of King 
 Charles II. not a reward for their loyalty, but the 
 restoration of their lands. They were answered by 
 an Act of Settlement which secured 7,800,000 acres 
 of the country, more than half its productive area, to 
 English adventurers. It should be remembered, 
 however, to the credit of Charles, that he did not 
 sell this portion of his dominions to a foreign power. 
 At this period also was conceived that restrictive 
 system which overlaid Irish trade in its infancy ; a 
 law being passed which prohibited perpetually the 
 importation of Irish cattle into England. " Such 
 was the absurd fury of the English about these 
 cattle, that when, after the fire of London, the Irish 
 proprietors made a contribution of 30,000 beeves 
 for the relief of the sufferers, this act of charity, 
 instead of exciting any sentiment of gratitude, was 
 interpreted into an insidious attempt to defeat the 
 provisions of the prohibitory Act."* On the whole, 
 however, Charles II. being but a weak and dissolute 
 prince, and the nation being sunk in that eb- 
 bauchery which is a frequent recoil from fanaticism, 
 as well as accompaniment of it, the Irish suffered 
 less from legal restrictions in his reign than they were 
 used to. An exception to this exemption occurred 
 consequent upon the " Popish Plot," when a great 
 
 * Leland. 
 
 E 2 
 
76 ENGLISH MISRULE [lET. II. 
 
 part of the nation fell into a rather sharp fit of a 
 periodic madness. Upon this occasion the "popish 
 ecclesiastics were ordered to depart the kingdom ; 
 the seminaries were suppressed, and the Catholics 
 were disarmed." It was proposed also to expel 
 them from the corporate towns, to which, though 
 previously expelled by law, they had had licence to 
 return, the English inhabitants needing servants. 
 
 Next came the Revolution. The Roman Catholic 
 party in Ireland, having for a short time the ascend- 
 ancy, threatened in concert with King James II. 
 a formidable retaliation of the oppressive laws 
 under which they had suffered for the last 150 
 years. William the Deliverer appeared on the 
 scene. He delivered England from tyranny and 
 arbitrary government ; he delivered Ireland to the 
 penal laws. How happens it. Sir, that even the 
 same event must operate in such opposite modes 
 upon the two countries ; and that Fortune could not 
 extend to the one her open palm without smiting 
 the other with clenched fist.? A Dutchman could 
 not creep out of his native dikes to dethrone his 
 friends and relations, without bringing on this de- 
 voted country a malediction worse than the plague 
 of frogs and the other nine plagues of Egypt. 
 On this occasion, however, only 1,060,792 acres 
 of land were confiscated. " This fund was sold 
 under the authority of an English Act of Parlia- 
 ment to defray the expenses incurred by England in 
 
LET. II.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 77 
 
 reducing the rebels of 1688 ; and the sale introduced 
 into Ireland a new set of adventurers."* Here 
 again, Sir, you will perceive that there was a con- 
 nection between confiscation and very humble 
 pecuniary considerations. A revolution is as ex- 
 pensive as a famine ; and a very rich country did 
 not know how to pay its way. 
 
 During a century and a half there has been no 
 confiscation in Ireland. For a confiscation by force 
 there has been no excuse ; for a confiscation by 
 fraud, like that undertaken by Lord Strafford, no 
 opportunity, unless instead of perverting the old laws 
 a new one had been introduced for the purpose. 
 Let us review the confiscations of comparatively 
 modem times — those that took place since the happy 
 settlement of " Pacata Hibemia.*" 
 Confiscated in the reign of James I., 2,836,837 acres. 
 Set out by the Court of Claims at 
 
 the Restoration .... 7,800,000 „ 
 Forfeitures of 1688 , . . 1,060,792 „ 
 
 Irish acres . 11,697,629; 
 
 being very nearly the whole extent of the kingdom. 
 There is much force in the expression, " the sub- 
 stantial prosperity of England." Our great pro- 
 prietors have been but the shadows that flitted along 
 the wall of your festive halls, or the chalk lines 
 
 * Lord Clare's Speech on the Union, 1800. 
 
T8 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. II. 
 
 erased by the feet of the dancers. Let our constant 
 calamity plead our occasional excuse. Seldom with 
 us have either the rights or the duties of property 
 been defined, until that property was transferred, or 
 the proprietors ceased to exist. 
 
 Power having in England passed from the great 
 nobles to the crown, and from thence to the legisla- 
 ture, the tyranny over Ireland was necessarily trans- 
 ferred also ; and accordingly the English Parliament, 
 by an imposture of its own, claimed a right to bind 
 Ireland by laws made irrespectively of the Irish Par- 
 liament, and commanded Mr. Molyneux's book in 
 defence of his country to be burned. In 1 707, the 
 Irish Houses of Lords and Commons presented an 
 address to the Queen, praying not to be excluded 
 " from so great a blessing " as a legislative union 
 with Great Britain : but the English government 
 rejected their petition as in the reign of Edward 
 III. they had rejected a" proposition for communi- 
 cating to the Irish the protection of English laws. 
 They gave, however, practically to the Irish Par- 
 liament an unlimited authority, so far as it should 
 be exercised for the oppression of the natives; 
 nor is it to be forgotten that that Parliament, 
 whose every act was approved by the Privy 
 Council of England before it could pass the Irish 
 House of Commons, not only fully sanctioned the 
 policy of the penal laws, but finding them esta- 
 blished, followed them up by additional provisions 
 
LET. II.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 79 
 
 no less tyrannical in nature, and more minute in 
 detail. It could hardly have been otherwise ; legis- 
 lation takes the shape of its mould, and advancing, 
 cannot get out of its groove. The people being 
 condemned to servitude, their oppressors saw no 
 safety except in their complete subjugation. Lord 
 Clare insisted especially upon this fact, affirming 
 that unless an amalgamation of the two countries 
 took place, the dominant minority in Ireland had 
 no alternative except that of continuing to coerce 
 the majority or changing places with them. It is 
 thus that he accounts for the refusal of the proposed 
 union in 1707 by the Queen's Government. " The 
 Parliament of England seem to have considered 
 the permanent debility of Ireland as their best 
 security for her connection with the British Crown, 
 and the Irish Parliament to have rested the security 
 of the colony upon maintaining a perpetual and 
 impassable barrier against the ancient inhabitants of 
 the country." The close connection between these 
 two facts does not, however, plead the excuse either 
 of the oppressor or his agent. The Executive of 
 England, less jealous than the Legislature, governed 
 Ireland by contract, a few of the great Irish families 
 undertaking its management in turn. Most of the 
 property of the country being at last vested in the 
 hands of Protestants, a despotic squirearchy was thus 
 set up in the place of the old feudal oppressors, and 
 diffused the virus of the Legislature through the 
 
80 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. II. 
 
 minutest pores of society. To this privileged class 
 the people were committed. A small and new mi- 
 nority was installed as slaves of England and as the 
 delegated tyrants of Ireland ; and again this country 
 suffered alternately from the oppression your might 
 had inflicted, and that which your weakness could 
 not restrain. 
 
 You have heard, Sir, of the penal laws. Incon- 
 sistent with honour, interest, conscience, and shame, 
 they were not only consistent with the whole pre- 
 vious policy of which they were the consummation 
 and triumph, but likewise so admirably consistent 
 with themselves, and apt for their proposed end, 
 that they cannot be appreciated without some know- 
 ledge of their details. 
 
 First, as to religion. On this subject let me quote 
 a passage from Burke. " The law of William and 
 Anne ordered all popish persons exercising eccle- 
 siastical jurisdiction, all orders of monks and friars, 
 and all priests not then actually in parishes and to 
 be registered, to be banished the kingdom ; and if 
 they should return from exile, to be hanged, drawn, 
 and quartered. Twenty pounds reward is given for 
 apprehending them. Penalty on harbouring and 
 concealing. As all the priests then in being and re- 
 gistered are long since dead, and as these laws are 
 made perpetual, every popish priest is liable to the 
 law." 
 
 Second, as to property. Let us consider first the 
 
LET. II.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 81 
 
 case of property already existing ; 1st, then, the right 
 of primogeniture was taken from Roman Catholics ; 
 2nd, that of testamentation ; 3rd, that of settlement. 
 Next as to the acquisition of real property, and 
 the acquisition and security of personal, the law- 
 provided that Roman CathoHcs should be " dis- 
 abled from taking or purchasing directly, or by a 
 trust, any lands, any mortgage upon land, any rents 
 or profits from land, any lease *, interest, or term of 
 any land ; any annuity for life or lives, or years, or 
 any estate whatsoever, chargeable upon, or which 
 may in any manner affect, any lands." If, as Mr. 
 Burke asserts, " those civil constitutions which pro- 
 mote industry are such as facilitate the acquisition, 
 secure the holding, enable the fixing, and suffer the 
 alienation of property," he had a right to say also 
 that the penal laws had for their object the one great 
 mandate, " thou shalt not improve." Do you think 
 that such laws as to property would be ventured 
 upon among the Hindoos ? But Ireland had not the 
 advantage of being governed by a Company obliged 
 to consult at least for its own security and profit. 
 
 Third, as to personal privileges. No Roman Ca- 
 tholic was admitted to any office connected with 
 Church or State, the Army or the Law. An attorney 
 was obliged to swear that he would not employ a 
 Roman Catholic clerk at seven shillings a week. 
 
 * A lease for a term not exceeding thirty-one years is excepted. 
 
 E 3 
 
82 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. II. 
 
 ** No tradesman was capable, by any service or settle- 
 ment, to obtain his freedom in any town corporate ; 
 so that they trade and work in their native towns as 
 aliens, paying, as such, quarterage, and other charges 
 and impositions. They were expressly forbidden, in 
 whatever employment, to take more than two ap- 
 prentices, except in the linen manufacture only."* 
 No Roman CathoHc of any rank was allowed to pos- 
 sess arms without express licence from the Lord- 
 Lieutenant and Council. 
 
 Fourth, as to Education. Let laws ever so strin- 
 gent be passed to keep a nation prostrate, there is a 
 chance of its getting on its feet if education be per- 
 mitted; measures were accordingly enacted con- 
 demning the Roman Catholic population to per- 
 petual ignorance, a precaution at present adopted by 
 the southern states of America with respect to their 
 slaves. All Roman Catholics were excluded from 
 the universities ; and to fonn private academies and 
 schools of their own, was equally prohibited. 
 *' Popish schoolmasters " were proscribed, though 
 teaching in a private family. Any person sent abroad 
 for education, though but in childhood, was " dis- 
 abled to sue in law or equity ; to be guardian, exe- 
 cutor, or administrator ; he was rendered incapable of 
 any legacy or deed of gift ; he forfeited all his goods 
 and chattels for ever, and he forfeited for his life all 
 
 * Burke. Tracts on the Popery Laws. 
 
LET. II.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 83 
 
 his lands, hereditaments, offices, and estate of free- 
 hold, and all trusts, powers, or interests therein."* 
 
 Fifth, as to Morals. To deny political and civil 
 privileges to the great bulk of a nation is to degrade ; 
 to forbid property is to barbarize ; to prevent edu- 
 cation is to brutalize ; to ban religion is worse than 
 all these : but so long as the moral sense and those 
 affections of which it is the seat subsist, there is a 
 chance that a buried humanity may force its way up 
 into the light. The whole constitution of society is 
 founded upon that habit of reverence of which the 
 fifth commandment, ranged first in the second table 
 of the law, and the link between our duties to God 
 and to our neighbour, is the symbol and the sanction. 
 Was it from ignorance of this fact, or from the know- 
 ledge of it, that the penal laws included enactments 
 of which the direct tendency was not only to force 
 subjects into rebellion against their sovereign, but 
 to tempt children to wage war on their parents ? 
 The eldest son, on conforming to Protestantism, was 
 entitled to the paternal estate, his father retaining 
 only a life interest in it ; the other children, on the 
 same conditions, and at any age, could extort from 
 their father a separate and independent maintenance. 
 " Every child of a Popish parent was encouraged to 
 come into what is called a court of equity, to prefer 
 a bill against his father, and compel him to confess 
 
 * Burke. Tracts on the Popery Laws. 
 
84 ENGLISH MISRULE [lET. II. 
 
 upon oath the quantity and value of his substance, 
 personal as well as real, of what nature soever, or 
 howsoever it might be employed ; upon which dis- 
 covery the court was empowered to seize upon, and 
 allocate for the immediate maintenance of such 
 child, or children, any sum not exceeding one third 
 ofthe whole fortune."* If the children discovered that 
 the parent had increased his property subsequently 
 to the award, they were entitled to bring a new bill 
 against him, and thus keep him always in chancery. 
 " The wife of a Roman Catholic had also the power, 
 on changing her religion, to deprive her husband of 
 his children ; and by that hold she inevitably ac- 
 quired a power and superiority over her husband."t 
 She had also the privilege, on conforming, to apply 
 to chancery on her husband's death, in which case 
 " she was to be allotted a portion from his leases, and 
 other personal estate, not exceeding one third of 
 his whole clear substance." The virtue of a nation 
 is, however, a stubborn thing, as well as its vices ; 
 and these provisions ofthe penal laws failed on the 
 whole in their object, though there were not wanting 
 persons weak or vile enough to be seduced by them. 
 It is thus that a countryman of yours comments 
 on this period of English policy in Ireland. He 
 asks " if it be possible to conceive any maxims of 
 policy more detestable, or a more monstrous union 
 
 * Burke. Tracts on the Popery Laws. f Ibid. 
 
LET. II.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 86" 
 
 of human malignity and folly ? Do the pages 
 of Machiavel contain suggestions more profligate ? 
 Was the expulsion of the Moriscoes more barbarous 
 and impolitic ? or the revocation of the edict of 
 Nantes more unwise and intolerant than this delibe- 
 rate and long-sustained system, pursued by a country 
 which plumes itself upon its free constitution, and 
 its own glorious struggles for civil and religious 
 liberty ?"* . . . All which questions I leave you to 
 answer. 
 
 It has happened, Sir, in the remote dependencies 
 of other great nations, that good laws have worked 
 ill, or bad laws worse than was expected, through the 
 corruption or wickedness of the subordinate instru- 
 ments who executed them in detail. In Ireland the 
 matter was otherwise ; the executioners were more 
 merciful than the judges : nor could the men be 
 found, though corrupted by the tyranny obtruded 
 upon them, though blinded by an apparent interest, 
 and inflamed by the animosities both of religion and 
 of race, to carry those laws into full effect, and make 
 them bring forth their perfect fruits. The sentenced 
 priest was spared by the despotic neighbour near 
 whose gate he lurked ; the people still knelt around 
 their broken altars ; the children still revered their 
 fathers if not their laws ; the multitudes condemned 
 to perpetual poverty and apathy, glanced with more 
 
 Past and Present Policy of England towards Ireland/' page 56. 
 
86 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. II. 
 
 toleration at the possessions torn from them, than 
 you, Sir, at their children's rags ; society continued 
 to exist; no rebellion gave a pretext for this 
 oppression; till, partly from a universal disgust, 
 partly from a proved inefficacy, and partly from the 
 terrible warning of the French revolution, those laws 
 were repealed, and the sword of injustice, "fatigata 
 nondum satiata," rested from its labour. 
 
 Before this time two great revolutions had taken 
 place in Ireland, the one, asserting the freedom of 
 her trade, the other, the independence of her Parlia- 
 ment. Neither was achieved without a struggle. 
 " Previous to the year 1780," says Mr. Huskisson, 
 " the agriculture, the manufactures, the commerce, 
 the navigation of Ireland, were all held in the most 
 rigid subserviency to the supposed interests of Great 
 Britain." But Ireland both felt the injury and knew 
 where the remedy lay : the least of the wrongs you 
 had done her worked the cure, for it united her 
 people, and their natural leaders stood at their 
 head. They demanded that room should be made 
 for virtue ; that a sphere should be opened to in- 
 dustry ; that the people of Ireland should be afflicted 
 by no malediction heavier than the primal curse, 
 and at least be permitted to earn their bread by the 
 sweat of their brow. Your " merchants, manu- 
 facturers, shipowners, and country gentlemen, all 
 took the alarm:" Glasgow, Liverpool, and Man- 
 chester interposed, and, with loud prophecies of their 
 
LET. II.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 87 
 
 own approaching downfal, protested against our in- 
 gratitude as well as effrontery. " Towards the close 
 of that year (1779) the events of the war in North 
 America, and the state of things in Ireland, produced 
 a different feeling in the British Parliament. State 
 necessity, acting under a sense of political danger, 
 yielded, without grace, that which good sense and 
 good feeling had before recommended in vain."* 
 Under the same circumstances, and with the like in- 
 auspicious urgency from without, was the legislative 
 independence of 1782 won. " On the old Irish vo- 
 lunteers, I desire to be understood not to convey any- 
 thing like a censure From their first levy, 
 
 till they disbanded themselves, no act of violence or 
 outrage was charged against them; and they cer- 
 tainly did on every occasion, where their services 
 were required, exert themselves with effect to main- 
 tain the internal peace of the country. The gentle- 
 men of Ireland were all in their ranks, and main- 
 tained a decided influence upon them."t Notwith- 
 standing, the volunteers constituted a large army ; 
 and the aspect of it seemed equivocal to an infirm 
 conscience, though to them their trumpet gave "no 
 uncertain sound." They had met at Dungannon, the 
 nobles and the peasants — and a new language sprang 
 
 * Huskisson's Speeches, vol. ii. page 108. 
 f Lord Clare's Speech on the Union. 
 
88 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. II. 
 
 suddenly into existence ; they called the Roman 
 Catholics " fellow-subjects," and themselves " Irish- 
 men and Christians." It was your hour of trial, and 
 England had not strength for it, because justice was 
 against her, and a great fall had dispelled a long ine- 
 briation. The revolution of 1782 was a revolution 
 effected by blood ; but that blood had flowed in a 
 remote land. You lost America ; but you retained 
 Ireland. I cannot say that I admire the mode in 
 which you compelled us to win our liberties. Had 
 we not conquered them with a " fatal facility," such 
 as attended your first successes in Ireland, the strug- 
 gle might have imparted to us that political training 
 of which we stood in need, and we should have been 
 taught how to use what we had won. The patriots 
 who fought the battle of Ireland were great and 
 lionourable men ; but the boon which they won for 
 their country was one which included a bitter in its 
 sweet, and was well characterized by Mr. Pitt, as by 
 no possibility a " final adjustment." " To call that a 
 system which was no more than the mere demolition 
 of another system, could only be the effect of great 
 misconception or great hypocrisy." * Freedom was, 
 however, necessary before we were qualified to treat 
 of a constitution at once free and safe. Freedom 
 and safety were by Mr. Grattan asserted to be but 
 one. " The classic minister must know, Tacitus has 
 
 * Mr. Pitt's Speech, Jan. 31, 1799. 
 
LET. II.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 89 
 
 told him, that between the powerful and the impo- 
 tent there can be no peace. The powers I speak of 
 were powers of peace ; they were powers of protec- 
 tion ; they were the great reserves of the Irish Parlia- 
 ment to secure the trade of Ireland and harmony of 
 the empire."* Without applying this great prin- 
 ciple to the peculiar circumstances of the Union, we 
 may well acknowledge its force as relates to the 
 Irish constitution of 1782. Notwithstanding, I can- 
 not say that I feel as much gratitude to you as if 
 you had afforded us a triumph less lamentable than 
 one over your honour and the good government of 
 both countries. You bullied, and you instructed us 
 in the art ; you conceded pusillanimously what you 
 had refused iniquitously ; and you taught us that 
 rights may be achieved, when they are extorted ; the 
 worst lesson, except one, which can be taught, and 
 the last to be forgotten. 
 
 It has been, Sir, the singular felicity of England 
 in her government of this country, that when com- 
 pelled, by a pressure foreseen by all except herself, 
 to repeal some portion of a code past its work, she 
 has performed the task in a manner so partial as to 
 leave her policy relatively more inconsistent than 
 before, though less unjust. Troubling herself but 
 little about a principle, and acknowledging a neces- 
 sity only so far as it has been felt, she has sub- 
 
 * Mr. Grattan's Speech on the Union, Jan. 16, 1800. 
 
90 ENGLISH MISRULE [lET. II. 
 
 jected herself to unnecessary pain by refusing to 
 allow of an inevitable amputation except at the 
 rate of two or three inches at a time. Thus when 
 the Roman Catholics had ceased to be slaves, she 
 thought it expedient to deliberate for half a century 
 before making them freemen. Another " defect" 
 which you will "note" in your policy is this; that 
 whenever rights have been wrung from you they 
 have been conceded at once too late and too early ; 
 too late for justice or just gratitude, that is to say, 
 for conciliation ; too early, if any relation exists 
 between political privileges and that political edu- 
 cation which is necessary for their use. Tyranny, 
 dying in a hurry, had not time to wind up its affairs ; 
 and our legislative independence, conceded with all 
 that rashness which is the end of a timid policy, 
 was granted unconditionally, and was ours before 
 we knew what it meant. As at that critical pe- 
 riod any serious dissension between the two Par- 
 liaments threatened the most fatal consequences, 
 you found it necessary to substitute for your former 
 government, half by force and half by contract, 
 a new government by corruption, of which the 
 memory still survives to the disgrace of both coun- 
 tries. It is true that many great and honourable 
 men were then in the Irish Parliament who resisted 
 the seduction ; but in a nation of which three-fourths 
 had been slaves and one-fourth tyrants, both sec- 
 tions being therefore equally deprived of a country, 
 
LET. II.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 91 
 
 no duty was less likely to be understood than pub- 
 lic duty ; and the corruption actually existing was 
 such as to recall to memory that which existed in 
 England when Sir Robert Walpole declared, as the 
 record of his experience, that " every man had his 
 price." I know not whether this also ranks among 
 the subjects of your astonishment. At last the 
 Legislative Union was effected, that great measure 
 so necessary for the consolidation of the empire 
 and the eventual prosperity of either part; but it 
 was carried incompletely, and it was carried by 
 corruption. A great man was then living amongst 
 you who proclaimed that "what is morally wrong 
 can never be politically right." 1 believe that no 
 one disputed his sentence. Such positions, if 
 denied, have a chance, as the contest drags on, of 
 being applied as well as acknowledged. Truisms, 
 such as Mr. Fox's noble dogma, are the great 
 truths on which all others rest ; but they sometimes 
 require to be sharpened into sarcasm before they can 
 make their way amid the press of modem thought ; 
 and they fall flat on those who think an expedient 
 a much cleverer thing than a principle. You 
 carried the union by corruption ; and no doubt it 
 will be the fashion for many a year to regard the 
 tempted as much more criminal than the tempter. 
 Without deciding on such delicate questions, I may 
 observe that corruption, as usual, has met with 
 retribution, and that the country, as usual, has had 
 
92 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. II. 
 
 to pay the price. Had the Union been honestly- 
 contracted, it could scarcely have failed to bring 
 forth its promised results : but the persons concerned 
 in that measure made terms for themselves, not 
 for their country ; and the sufferings of the people 
 having therefore continued, discontent continues ; 
 and the Union is by many persons remembered as 
 a fraud and resented as a wrong. Whether it was 
 a fraud or not depends upon the further ques- 
 tion, whether it was or was not intended to produce 
 to this country a participation in English pro- 
 sperity. One of the ablest of the Irish advocates 
 for the Union concluded a remarkable dissertation 
 on the subject, in words which might, perhaps, be 
 closely imitated by several of the Repealers of 
 1847. " Union merely forms my means ; which I 
 am ready to vary, if any man will prove that they 
 are ill chosen. My end, I solemnly declare, is the 
 prosperity of my country."* The Lord Chancellor 
 Clare, in his speech on the Union, characterizes it 
 as " an incorporation of these kingdoms," observing 
 also, " I hope I feel as a true Irishman for the 
 dignity and independence of my country; and 
 therefore I would elevate her to her proper station 
 in the rank of civilized nations. I wish to advance 
 her from the degraded post of a mercenary pro- 
 
 * Speech of Mr. William Smith, reduced to the form of an Address to 
 the people of Ireland, 1799. 
 
LET. II.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 93 
 
 vince to the proud station of an integral and 
 governing member of the greatest empire in the 
 world." It is impossible to read this sentence with- 
 out wishing that the Lord Chancellor's aspiration 
 had been gratified: in the mean time the Union, 
 however incomplete, is in one sense a real one ; 
 and though it does not extend to this country a 
 participation in English prosperity, it must needs 
 admit you to the communion of Irish pauperism, 
 should this country become thoroughly pauperized. 
 Squire Thomhill intended to delude Olivia by 
 means of a false marriage effected by a false clergy- 
 man; but his agent, who had other ends in view, 
 effected a true marriage by the instrumentality of a 
 true clergyman. Should such prove eventually the 
 mischance of your England, the great Minister who 
 earned the Union had an opposite cause for regret. 
 Mr. Pitt meant honestly and wisely. He spoke thus ; 
 — " It is to identify them (the Irish) with us ; it is to 
 make them part of the same community, by giving 
 them a full share of those accumulated blessings 
 which are diffused throughout Great Britain ; it is, 
 in a word, by giving them a full participation of the 
 wealth, the power, and the glory of the British Em- 
 pire," &c., &c. This splendid prospect was dis- 
 trusted by Mr. Grattan *. " All these things are to 
 come : when ? He does not tell you. Where ? He 
 
 * Mr. Grattan's Speech on the Union, Jan. 16, 1800. 
 
94 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. II. 
 
 does not tell you : you take his word for all this. I 
 have heard of a Banker's bill of exchange, Bank of 
 England's notes, Bank of Ireland's notes; but a 
 Prophet's promissory note is a new traffic. All he 
 gets from Ireland is our solid loss : all his promises 
 are visionary, distant, and prophetic advantages " 
 Nothing can be more conclusive than the arguments 
 by which Mr. Pitt proved that without a union the 
 dissolution of the empire must take place ; nothing 
 more delusive, as the event has proved, than the 
 anticipations indulged in by him and its other 
 advocates as to the prosperity which Ireland was 
 to attain. But half his prayer was granted, be- 
 cause but half his design was carried out. Then 
 as now, there were two Englands, and the worse 
 would not allow itself to be guided by the better. 
 
 Year after year you continued to refuse the rights 
 of citizenship to the people you despised, or a mo- 
 tive for affection to those whose enmity you feared. 
 Your great statesmen, however opposed to each 
 other on other questions, were upon our side, with 
 very few exceptions ; but Ireland was the party to 
 be benefited, and her friends laboured in vain. 
 Men spoke of the " United Kingdom," but no one 
 knew where it was. What availed it that we had 
 all the sense of England in our favour, when all 
 its shrewd-witted prejudices, and the pseudo-sense 
 of inertia weighed against us ? On the matter of 
 "Popery" the two great political parties had 
 
LET. II.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 96 
 
 changed sides. The descendants of those old 
 Tories who had drunk the health of Charles Ed- 
 ward, when the Highlanders of Scotland poured 
 forth their blood for him, had found an egg of 
 the old Whigs dropped into their nests, and 
 hatched it as devoutly as if it had been their own. 
 Respectable farmers innumerable, hard-headed and 
 hard-handed, planted their feet firmly, and refused 
 to move. Multitudes who thronged your heathen 
 towns were visited periodically by that dreadful 
 nightmare " No Popery," of which this year they 
 have had a paroxysm, the sharpest since the Gordon 
 Riots, when they were on the point of burning 
 London to vex the Pope. Of the Roman Catholic 
 they knew as little as of any other religion; but 
 they had heard of a certain magician in the dark 
 ages, white-headed, but bright-eyed, who had visited 
 their country, as well as many others, and played 
 conjuring tricks innumerable, building churches by 
 enchantment, binding kings in cobwebs, blowing up 
 Paliament houses, sophisticating wills, extending to 
 their ancestors a cup as intoxicating as that of 
 Liber himself, and making love to their venerable 
 ancestresses — in short, turning the whole house up- 
 side down. There were also scruples in high places ; 
 (honest scruples, without doubt;) but royal scruples 
 have not yet proved friendly to Ireland. More 
 years than constituted the whole existence of the 
 independent Irish Parliament had passed, and 
 
96 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. II. 
 
 Catholic Emancipation seemed as distant as ever: 
 but the time and a man had come ; the Clare elec- 
 tion took place ; all over the country stirrings were 
 seen, like those which agitate the prescient quick- 
 silver on the plates of the engineer, when the 
 countermine approaches him; the necessity which 
 was foretold was believed when it arrived; what 
 you had not the wit to foresee you had the grace 
 to feel ; the greatest warrior and one of the greatest 
 statesmen then living, had the courage to open their 
 eyes, and despise the imputation of fear. They 
 had the virtue, at a great personal sacrifice, in 
 which to a certain extent the public shared, to 
 answer the summons of the time. They brought in 
 the Emancipation Act; and, coercing England as 
 they had been coerced by Ireland, they carried it by 
 force. 
 
 I was a boy when that great measure was passed, 
 but I have not forgotten it. I can recollect stand- 
 ing upon the steps before my father's house; and 
 as I watched the fires of rejoicing which lit up 
 their luminous cypher along the distant hills, growing 
 numerous by degrees as the glow of a summer's 
 evening dissolved, some portion of that enthusiasm 
 which is not denied to the hearts of the very young 
 in a country however outworn kindled within me, 
 and I triumphed in a future radiant with pro- 
 sperity and gratitude. That prosperity has been 
 adjourned; that gratitude I have not yet seen; but 
 
LET. II.] AND lElSH MISDEEDS. 97 
 
 I have seen some reason to believe that not much 
 was due. Gratitude, Sir, is a great word, and 
 should not be used without a meaning. Tt denotes 
 a moral affection, to be bestowed according to the 
 laws of reason,. upon worthy objects, and in measure 
 due. To redress a wrong is to discharge a debt; 
 and though our thanks are due for justice as well as 
 generosity (the former being often the more diflScult 
 virtue), yet if a debt has been paid too late to avert 
 great losses, and if the payment has been accom- 
 panied with insult and injury, our gratitude must 
 suffer a proportionate diminution. In the case of 
 a wrong redressed, as in that of relief bestowed, our 
 .thanks are largely due to those individuals, both 
 numerous and eminent, who made sacrifices in our 
 favour : to England at large they must be paid in a 
 more qualified manner. Gratitude, however, I paid 
 to England also with the prodigality of inexperi- 
 ence ; but with that feeling was mixed a more 
 painfiil tribute. It was strange if I felt for you 
 what you did not feel for yourself; and yet such 
 things have been. The Act had passed, and you 
 had done with it : you had paid off finally a great 
 claim, which discharge you were resolved to con- 
 sider a gift on your part; and if you were not 
 pleased with the act, nothing remained but to be 
 pleased with yourself. I, on the other hand, an 
 Irishman, was humiliated for England's sake; and 
 the cheers then given to your country by men as 
 
 F 
 
9B ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. II. 
 
 quickly surprised into affection as into resentment, 
 but who did not love her well enough to be jealous 
 for her fame, rang with an impaired harmony and 
 imperfect satisfaction on my ear. I lamented that 
 she should have refused the boon to hear the debt 
 demanded, and denied the debt only to surrender 
 the spoil. I was then full of the glories of English 
 history, in the earlier part of which I took an 
 especial interest ; and as for its Irish portion, im- 
 perfectly as I was acquainted with it, I could not 
 but lament that to a course so lame so impotent a 
 conclusion should have been added. 
 
 Such sentiments you will probably resent; but 
 if my gratitude and shame were ill-founded, my 
 hopes were vainer by far. No rational person, 
 grown to man's estate, could have expected the 
 prosperity of Ireland from Catholic Emancipation 
 alone ; no one of its rational advocates had ven- 
 tured on such an anticipation. The removal of the 
 last vestige of the penal laws was a necessary pre- 
 condition, but it could not be in itself an efficient 
 cause of Irish prosperity. If England were re- 
 duced to destitution should you, to revive her 
 prosperity, content yourselves with reading aloud 
 the " Magna Charta" at every market cross? Was 
 the Reform Bill sufficient to feed your paupers .? 
 Catholic Emancipation, like the Union, affi)rded 
 you an opportunity for the introduction of a great 
 remedial policy ; but you did not know that the 
 
LET. II.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 99 
 
 need was great; and you allowed the opportunity 
 to go by. Of all the oppressions with which your 
 England had afflicted this country, there was not 
 one which, by means however various, did not tend 
 towards a common end ; and whether you proscribed 
 her religion, or warred upon her morals ; whether 
 you made it her necessity to despise herself, or her 
 duty to detest you ; whether you engulfed her in 
 apathy, or provoked her to rebellion ; whether you 
 assailed her with confiscations, or withheld from her 
 rights ; whether with plenary authority and the 
 bell, book and candle of the State, you passed an 
 interdict on her for ages, and committed her to 
 darkness and the blank of outlawry ; or imparted 
 to her the perfidious and terrible gift of laws, re- 
 stricting her legally from civil and religious privileges, 
 when these first asserted themselves ; from property, 
 when property was enfi-anchised ; fi-om education, 
 when knowledge moved abroad ; from commerce, 
 when commerce became a power in the world ; the 
 tendency of your versatile policy continued un- 
 changed, and its result has been the reduction of 
 this land to poverty. Poverty, the consummation 
 which you had reached, and if not the chief 
 grievance of Ireland, the joint product of all her 
 wrongs, their concentrated, and abiding, represen- 
 tative record and result — poverty could not be 
 removed by Catholic Emancipation. On the con- 
 trary, by the long denial of that just measure, 
 
 F 2 
 
100 ENGLISH MISRULE [lET. II, 
 
 and the long struggle thus rendered necessary, a 
 new evil was added to those already existing, a 
 more rankling discontent, accompanied by a sys- 
 tematic agitation, less degrading than the servile 
 content of the last century, but unfavourable to an 
 advance in the peaceful arts, because inconsistent 
 with staid expectations. The struggle for emanci- 
 pation bred in the heart of this country a sorer, 
 though not a deeper wound, than fifty years of the 
 penal laws. If this circumstance should surprise 
 you, account for it by the fact, that men may sleep 
 in their chains and be unconscious of them, but 
 that they feel those chains when they strain against 
 them. That poverty. Sir, still remains, though 
 many of its original causes are abolished; and it 
 looks up at you, demanding food, and inquiring of 
 its parentage. 
 
 I fear that you must be fatigued by the journey 
 we have made together. I have snatched you up ra- 
 ther unceremoniously, and carried you from eminence 
 to eminence of our records ; and if from each in turn 
 you have enjoyed no better prospect than that of 
 black and barren wastes illuminated with the fires of 
 smouldering villages, the fault is none of ours. I 
 do not presume to call our humble annals a history. 
 History implies a succession of events dependent 
 each on the preceding, a series of external actions 
 capable of being referred to internal causes, an ex- 
 position of the mind and life of a nation by means 
 
LET. II.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 101 
 
 of impulses flowing from within, and though confused, 
 not seldom by jarring accidents, yet on the whole 
 moulding outward circumstances to an image of it- 
 self, and methodizing them to something of an intel- 
 ligible unity. Other nations, even the most miser- 
 able, have had a history ; and may take refuge from 
 the present in communion with the past: Ireland, 
 thanks to the unprecedented character of British do- 
 mination, has none. She knows not whether she was 
 conquered ; she knows not whether she was colonized ; 
 she has heard of a present union ; she has dreamed 
 of a future peace ; she is certain alone that she has 
 no history. No classic historian has recorded it ; 
 no poet has ventured to select from it one well-known 
 tragic theme ; the philosopher has passed it by with- 
 out wasting a theory on it, as he would have turned 
 from the journals of a madhouse, the calendar of a 
 convict colony, or the battles of wild beasts : — and I 
 can hardly blame you for having shrunk from annals 
 the savageness of which cannot redeem them from 
 monotony. 
 
 I have detained you thus long on a painful sub- 
 ject, because if I can induce you to pore upon 
 those significant characters graven by the foot of 
 your country upon the breast of Ireland, I may 
 spare you the trouble of reading a feeble com- 
 mentary from my pen. You will not now ask me so 
 pertinaciously why we are poor. It is because you 
 impoverished us, confiscating property over and over 
 
102 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. II. 
 
 again, incapacitating the great mass of the people 
 from acquiring or bequeathing it, proscribing industry, 
 and fomenting mutual animosity and common in- 
 security. You will not ask me why the people are 
 reproached for sloth ; — it is because there was no ob- 
 ject for their energy; why they procrastinate — it is 
 because there is no difference between to-day and 
 to-morrow when each is a blank; why they bully 
 you — it is because you bullied them, and failed to 
 make them just concessions except on compulsion ; 
 why they are deficient in truth — it is because truth is 
 the language of freedom ; why they are lawless — it is 
 because for three centuries they knew nothing of 
 your laws, and for three centuries they knew them 
 too well ; why they are reproached with levity — it is 
 because they are not ennobled by the graver happi- 
 ness that entails responsibility ; why they do not 
 love the memory of their masters— it is because they 
 could not love it without hating all they are bound 
 to love. 
 
 We are not to be told. Sir, that all this evil ought 
 to have been converted into good because it is now 
 seventeen years since Emancipation was granted. 
 Bad laws are bad because their effects sink deep. 
 When a people has become free, its laws are moulded 
 mainly by its character ; but even then the laws re- 
 act upon the character. It is a common opinion 
 amongst you that the domestic morality of England 
 has been seriously impaired by certain provisions of 
 
LET. II.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 103 
 
 your Poor Law. Even England, then, is not above 
 outward influences. In your country agriculture is 
 far advanced: your trade, which is called its rival, has 
 greatly contributed to its progress, both by a trans- 
 ference of capital to the soil, and by that more ad- 
 venturous energy which it has enkindled. But could 
 your wastes have been converted into gardens 
 if your farmers had been legally debarred from a 
 prolonged tenure, or a reasonable interest in their 
 land r You are a commercial nation ; could your 
 ships people the seas if, till of late, your trade had 
 been — not fettered only, that your trade was — but 
 strangled by restrictions? You are a manufactur- 
 ing people ; could you have clothed the nations 
 if you had been forbidden to export ? To you the 
 future has been secure as the past : for this reason 
 the present has ever afforded you, not a bed for the 
 repose of apathy, but a firm footing from which to 
 leap forward in advance ; for this reason Hope has 
 been a possibility to you, and Progress has been her 
 gift. 
 
 I pray you not to believe that because Emancipa- 
 tion is granted, and because the people possess arms, 
 if not food, therefore the penal laws are no longer in 
 operation among us. They are removed from the 
 statute book, but they survive elsewhere. It may be 
 prejudice, but I have often fancied, when I remarked 
 the scowl of some poor man in rags as he glanced at 
 a relief committee that could not aid him, or when I 
 
104 ENGLISH MISRULE [lET. II. 
 
 noted the prompt action of a boy catching at a stone 
 with that transmitted hand of skill needed also in 
 your manufactures — it may be a delusion — but I have 
 thought that if the ancestors of those unfortunates 
 (for the poor, too, have ancestors) had not been 
 deprived of their estates two centuries ago (which 
 may well have happened), or if their ancestors who 
 lived one century ago had been allowed to acquire 
 property and ^ain knowledge, those destined male- 
 factors might at this moment be as prosperous and 
 respectable as you are now. I could not guess, 
 unless I knew what connection your family may have 
 had with this country, whether, if your ancestors had 
 also met their deserts, you might not yourself be in 
 the position of those whom you despise. Are, then, 
 the wrongs of past times never to be forgotten in 
 Ireland ? Yes, when they are worthily remembered 
 in England ; but I fear not till then. 
 
 It is a hard thing. Sir, to write down a nation. The 
 press having now become a power in the world, as 
 education and commerce had previously become, it 
 might seem to you an inconsistency if you failed to 
 assail us with that weapon as you did successively 
 with every other placed within your reach. The 
 persistency of your endeavour attests your sincerity, 
 and the ability of many writers, together with the in- 
 dolence of most readers, may do somewhat ; but stiil I 
 advise you to pause and examine your position once 
 
LET. II.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 105 
 
 more. Before you reiterate those charges which brand 
 us with a character below humanity, remember that 
 you have yourselves a human debt, I speak not now of 
 nationalities, — to settle with this people. I will not 
 here charge you with what is erroneously called your 
 original conquest of this island. Most nations rest 
 on the foundation of a conquest (you, indeed, can 
 boast a fourfold foundation) ; and if the lenient hand 
 of time were not allowed to heal old wounds, and 
 prescription to sanction possession, there would be 
 neither peace nor progress in the world. But we 
 have somewhat else against you. For most precious 
 and repeated opportunities vouchsafed and rejected, 
 whereby the past might have become past indeed, or 
 been changed into a blessing ; for a weakness, more 
 fatal than your might, which consigned this people to 
 the delegated tyranny of double betrayers whom you 
 dared not coerce ; for the outlawry of ages, and for 
 laws which taught us to lament our lost outlawry ; 
 for compacts broken and frauds displaced by frauds ; 
 for the ancient religion beaten to the earth amid its 
 bleeding votaries and violated shrines; for a re- 
 formed religion gibbeted on high in ill-omened 
 elevation, amid all that was disastrous and ab- 
 horred ; for Christianity itself discountenanced and 
 discredited on this side and on that; for all the 
 highways of industry blocked up, and every by- 
 road open to corruption in high places and rebel- 
 lion in low; for agriculture discouraged and trade 
 
 F S 
 
t06 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. 11. 
 
 prohibited ; for a common woe preferred sedulously 
 to the weal of either country ; for secrecy rendered 
 necessary and frankness made impossible ; for vir- 
 tues that could not be suppressed, distorted to un- 
 comely shapes and directed to unworthy objects ; 
 for fidelity allied with treason, and reverence for law 
 degraded into the virtue of an informer ; for a pre- 
 sent ever without peace, and a past whose every mo- 
 nument is a stone of offence ; for history, which 
 should be a nation's guide, condemned to become 
 either a babbler of fables, or an instructress in sedi- 
 tion ; for society without arts, resources without use, 
 obscurity without rest, talents without objects, ener- 
 gies without a career, agonies without fame ; for the 
 streams of knowledge choked in their channels, and 
 the springs of virtue poisoned at their source ; for 
 these and other demerits, our misfortune and yours, 
 it remains that the Crown, the Parliament, and the 
 People of England should answer and atone to God 
 and to Ireland. 
 
 Perhaps, Sir, you may think it an ungracious 
 thing to remind England of faults which some of her 
 sons have acknowledged. It is true that the faults 
 of past times have been acknowledged ; and few will 
 affirm that with the past the present has no concern ; 
 for if nations possess a continuity of existence, so 
 they must be subject to a continuity of obligation. 
 Moreover, as all that you have of greatness and of 
 wealth is an inheritance from the past, you must 
 
LET, II.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 107 
 
 accept your estate with its incumbrances. If Eng- 
 land has any part in the glories of Cressy, Agin- 
 court, Blenheim, or Waterloo, the shame of the 
 penal laws is hers; nor, indeed, can you disown it 
 without losing for ever the privilege you claim of 
 visiting on us the sins of our ancestors. That 
 part of your nation which not only in word de- 
 nounces but also in act reverses the past, is pure 
 from its reproach; but even good words are not 
 always equivalent to deeds. Mere acknowledg- 
 ments of a debt are seldom met by a receipt in 
 full. A nation which is its own confessor gets off 
 with a prompt absolution ; but Providence has im- 
 posed a penance notwithstanding, and Nature carries 
 it into effect. I doubt, also, whether your confession 
 is made with suitable dispositions ; because, in the 
 first place, it is generally mixed up with excuses, 
 and occasionally with mention of your merits, which 
 no penitent is called on to confess ; in the second 
 place, it is only made to yourself; and when we 
 venture to repeat your own words, you are far from 
 being pleased. You are, you admit generally, a 
 miserable sinner ; but you have not this or that 
 foible. You have also a boastful way of repre- 
 senting the matter ; not so much bewailing the sins 
 of your fathers as exalting yourselves at their ex- 
 pense, affirming that you have made great improve- 
 ments upon their notions, and that under the like 
 circumstances you would have taken a more en- 
 
108 ENGLISH MISRULE [lET. II. 
 
 lightened course, which I hope you are prepared 
 to prove in action. Simple regret, you will remem- 
 ber, is not repentance, which must be accompanied 
 by true contrition, amendment, and sometimes even 
 restitution. Had you thought of repealing your 
 legislative eccentricities in time, that single act 
 might have been suflficient : but the evil conse- 
 quent on such legislation once achieved, it was 
 your duty to provide an effectual remedy. I 
 will not say that you should have restored to this 
 country the more important blessings of which you 
 had deprived her, for impossibilities are not duties. 
 To descend from moral to pecuniary considerations, 
 I will not say that you ought to have restored to her 
 fourfold the wealth from which you had restricted 
 her, or even a fourth part of it ; but it was your 
 duty, and it would have been your interest, to help 
 lier to walk whom you had so often dashed to the 
 giound. 
 
 It was your duty long since to have established 
 among a people whom you reproached with ignor- 
 ance and prejudice, and among whom you had long 
 prohibited knowledge, an ample system of educa- 
 tion, both intellectual and industrial. It was your 
 duty to have aided her, so far as the State can 
 afford aid without travelling out of its proper sphere, 
 in exploring and realising those vast resources which 
 the poverty produced by a century of restriction 
 and the apathy produced by many centuries of 
 
LET. II.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 109 
 
 degradation could not but otherwise condemn to ii 
 long obscurity. An interference on the part of the 
 State for the promotion of industry may well be 
 withheld where enterprise and progress have become 
 characteristics of a nation fostered by ages of suc- 
 cess ; but it does not therefore follow that such aid 
 would be misapplied among a people at once the 
 most exhausted and the youngest in Europe. It 
 was more obviously your duty to have given to 
 Ireland, whose appointments had for a century been 
 jobbed away among Englishmen for the purpose 
 of governing Ireland through the English interest, 
 her full share in all public patronage and in those 
 great national works effected by the public purse, 
 such as naval stations, dockyards, and the like. 
 Above all, it was your duty to have given her laws 
 firmly administered and apt to promote social im- 
 provement or at least to remove the chief obstacles 
 that stood in its way. You did not apply yourself 
 to this task ; you contented yourself with a legisla- 
 tion from hand to mouth. I will mention but a 
 few instances to illustrate this position. 
 
 Ignorance and poverty had established in this 
 country the potato system of agriculture, by which 
 a crop, nearly the most productive and the most 
 precarious that exists, was created with the least 
 possible amount of that labour which renders class 
 dependent on class and fixes a limit to population. 
 It afforded an easy subsistence, and therefore mi- 
 
no ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. 11. 
 
 nistered to a squalid contentment ; it was con- 
 nected with the con-acre, and therefore produced 
 agrarian outrages ; it was full of vicissitudes, and 
 therefore encouraged recklessness ; when it gave 
 enough it gave more than enough and therefore 
 promoted a habit of squandering; and it abetted 
 a wandering mendicancy, by allowing every one 
 to hang loose on society. Yet, instead of encourag- 
 ing and instructing the Irish in a better mode of 
 agriculture, you appeared in your recent allotment 
 system disposed rather to imitate their example. 
 The improvidence of poverty, and the absence of all 
 except household consolations, had kept up that 
 tradition of early marriages, commenced amongst a 
 short-lived race. The consequence was over-popu- 
 lation. Every one knew that this was a chief evil of 
 Ireland ; that it was increasing and must continue 
 to increase. It was ministered to by that natural 
 Poor Law which had grown up for the want of a bet- 
 ter and which included the con-acre system, the sub- 
 division of land, and the compulsory charity of the 
 farmers. The poor alone, a very numerous order, 
 were rich enough to maintain the poorest ; and on 
 them was that burden immediately thrown, which of 
 course rested ultimately on the land. Every one in 
 this country knew that the excess of the evil in- 
 sured its continuance ; the lawlessness which it pro- 
 duced, rendering it impossible for individual efforts 
 to effect a cure. Laws against sub-letting existed ; 
 
LET. II.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. Ill 
 
 but their provisions were always defeated among a 
 people who, having no resource in manufactures, 
 looked to land alone for their subsistence. Instead 
 of at once correcting the details of those laws, and 
 defining the duties of property, you abandoned as 
 the farmers defeated them ; and you contented yourself 
 with counting a man a fool if he allowed his estate to 
 be cottiered, and a monster if he evicted the in- 
 truders. It is but just to say that in some cases this 
 over-population had been promoted by a short- 
 sighted ambition to increase the number of forty 
 shilling freeholders on particular estates: but this 
 folly did little more than give an occasional direc- 
 tion to an evil which was the result mainly of other 
 causes ; and so thoroughly did all classes appreciate 
 the danger, that if but a breathing time had been 
 allowed, we should not have failed to set our house 
 in order. The difficulty was that of warding off the 
 ruin of all classes without pushing beyond the limits 
 of social existence those who pressed against its out- 
 ward circle. Many proprietors did their best, though 
 it was impossible but that occasional errors should 
 take place, in the way either of precipitation and cru- 
 elty, or, as more frequently happened, of remissness 
 and a too easy good nature. Emigration on a large 
 scale would have given the temporary relief neces- 
 sary; and even by Mr. Malthus was prescribed as 
 the only remedy in such a case. Systematic emigra- 
 tion was, therefore, talked about in Parliament ; but 
 
112 ENGLISH MISRULE [lET. II. 
 
 it was not carried into effect. A Poor Law, passed 
 in time, guarded by severe tests of destitution, and 
 accompanied by emigration, and measures to en- 
 courage industry, would, 1 believe, have worked well, 
 or at least less ill than its practical substitute. Ac- 
 cordingly, a Poor Law was talked about year after 
 year. At last it was imposed ; but not till the evil 
 was too great to be thus grappled with. More re- 
 cently an amended Poor Law has been passed ; but 
 it was passed as a remedy for famine, an object to 
 which it must any where have been inapplicable. It 
 was hurried through Parliament at a time when all 
 caution appeared selfishness, and when to hint a doubt 
 was considered to pass a sentence of death on thou- 
 sands. There was no time to deliberate, yet you 
 resolved to enact permanent laws ; and when appeal 
 was made to authority or evidence, you challenged 
 on the voir dire all economists as too well ac- 
 quainted with general principles, and all Irishmen 
 as knowing too much of their country. It now exists 
 unguarded by tests, unaccompanied by measures to 
 divert the pressure which must crush it, unsup- 
 ported by those public works which ought long 
 since to have been undertaken from their general 
 utility, and unmitigated by any provisions against 
 sub-letting, to protect that property by which alone 
 the rates can be paid. 
 
 You improved the administration of justice by 
 the establishment of the petty sessions courts ; and 
 
LET. II.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 113 
 
 you embodied an admirable police force which 
 would perform its duty, if the functions intrusted 
 to it were such as a police can compass : but for 
 the most part you contented yourself with treating 
 symptoms as they appeared, and treating them em- 
 pirically. If a measure worked ill, you had only to 
 try another ; nor does it seem to have occurred to 
 you that the constitution of a country may be so 
 enfeebled by a long course of quackery, as to be 
 unable to bear a sounder discipline. In this per- 
 petual treatment of symptoms, you discarded some 
 large principles of politics. You forgot that legis- 
 lation to be good must be suitable, and that it will 
 be suitable in proportion as it has grown out of the 
 deep and permanent needs of a country searchingly 
 seen and understood ; that as the morals of a country 
 naturally illustrate its laws, so its manners illustrate 
 its morals ; and, consequently, that to cast the exter- 
 nals of a country in an arbitrary mould, is but to sup- 
 press all timely indications of what is needed, and to 
 deprive yourselves of all guides to a legislation per- 
 manently useful. If the clergy could get no tithes, 
 you lent them a million ; if they could not pay 
 back the million, you made it a gift ; if the tenant 
 would pay none, you put it on the landlord ; if the 
 landlord objected, you cut off one quarter of the 
 estate of the Church, and bestowed it on a Protestant 
 proprietary to appease Roman Catholic scruples. You 
 passed coercion bills, and you repealed them ; you pro- 
 
114 ENGLISH MISRULE [lET. II. 
 
 hibited monster meetings, and you winked at them ; 
 you prosecutedMr.O'Connell,and you coquetted with 
 him ; resolved the House into committees, and com- 
 mittees into the House ; you instituted a great number 
 of commissions and published a great number of re- 
 ports, which you seemed to think must of themselves 
 do the country great ser\dce, as though the patient 
 could recover if he were to swallow the prescription 
 instead of the medicine. Above all, you spoke an 
 infinite deal of the merest nothing upon Irish sub- 
 jects, keeping clear, on the one hand, of large prin- 
 ciples, and on the other, of those nice details suited 
 to our complex circumstances ; you tried all your 
 young statesmen and budding theories on Ireland ; 
 and made her too often the field for English faction 
 fights. I do not know. Sir, whether this course 
 gave signs of a perfect repentance. It certainly did 
 not amount to a restitution for the past, in the most 
 restricted sense, and as certainly it made an in- 
 different provision for the future. In the meantime 
 Nature, which cannot wait the leisure of statesmen, 
 was at work. Certain great principles at which you 
 had glanced occasionally, but ineffectually, were im- 
 pelling a million of noiseless wheels in the darkness 
 under you, and carrying the nation forward to one 
 determined goal. Population was advancing ; pro- 
 duction was augmenting in a lesser degree, that is, re- 
 latively diminishing ; you had failed to perform the 
 first duty of government, that of providing for the 
 
LET. II.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 115 
 
 security of life and property ; without security, capi- 
 tal would not invest itself; and without capital no 
 large increase of production was to be had. If Pro- 
 vidence had not, in its merciful severity, interposed 
 with this calamitous potato blight, the eventual 
 ruin to which we were tending must have been to us 
 even more signal, and to you even more disastrous, 
 than the trial which has overtaken us. 
 
 The end of the whole matter would seem to be 
 this: a certain problem was proposed to you for 
 solution, and you did not solve it. It now forces 
 itself upon you again: it will give you no more 
 time ; you must pay it the attention it demands, 
 and the arrears accumulated by past neglect; it 
 will hear of no " repudiation." You were called on 
 to deal with the poverty you had produced, and you 
 did not deal with it aright. The problem now pro- 
 posed to you is essentially the same ; but with two 
 exceptions. First, a potato failure has occurred, of 
 which the effect is, on the one hand, to increase our 
 poverty in the same measure as if one -fourth had 
 been suddenly added to our numbers ; on the other, 
 to break down forcibly those agricultural traditions 
 and social conventions which opposed an impassable 
 barrier to improvement. Secondly, an agitation, 
 created originally by yourself, still survives ; which, 
 in its turn, may do good if it attracts your wise atten- 
 tion to that country, of whose sufferings, rather than 
 of whose needs, it is the representative ; but which 
 
116 ENGLISH MISRULE [lET. If. 
 
 must do evil if it summons that attention in vain, 
 because it removes the minds of men from industrial 
 pursuits; has hitherto divided classes and disfran- 
 chised the higher orders ; is, of course, obliged to 
 make its appeal to the passions and fancies of the 
 populace, as well as to the hearts of the people ; and 
 substitutes political sentiment for political opinion, 
 since it is the nature of sentiments to ascend from 
 the many who feel, and of opinions to descend from 
 the few who think. The question proposed to you 
 forty-seven years ago, being again propounded, you 
 may reply to it in either of two different ways. All 
 that is certain is, that you must reply to it at once 
 and once for all. A great integral part of your 
 empire, reduced to poverty and comparative help- 
 lessness, by your own suicidal policy, demands your 
 aid, that she may raise herself from her forlorn estate, 
 and walk, your equal mate, along the paths of pro- 
 sperity and greatness. Do you think it advisable, 
 on the whole, to rail at her and bid her be gone ; or 
 to do what you can to help her ? 
 
 With this question I conclude my second letter. 
 
LET. III.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 117 
 
 LETTER III. 
 
 Ireland's Prosperity the only safety for England. — The Consequence to 
 England of Irish Ruin. — The Irish Revenue and Expenditure. — Irish 
 Property spent by Englishmen or in England. — Irish and English 
 Trade. — English Charges on Irish Property. — The Rich the losers. — 
 Invasion of England by Irish Labourers. — English Plagiarisms of 
 Irish Faults. — An exaggerated Charge which might be brought against 
 England. — Slight Suggestions as to Principles of Legislation for 
 Ireland. — Good Measures only good if applied in Time. — Reme- 
 dial Measures. — Security to Life and Property. — Colonization, 
 Agricultural Education. — Amendment of the Poor Law. — Useful 
 Public Works and Waste Lands. — The Tenure of Land. — Provisions 
 for enforcing the Rights as well as Duties of Property. — Simplification 
 of the Law. — Sale of encumbered Estates. — Sanatory Improvements in 
 Towns. — Schools for the Children of the higher Orders. 
 
 Sir, 
 In my last letter I discussed several grave Irish 
 faults which stand in the way of our political and 
 social well-being (to others I shall refer hereafter), 
 and I endeavoured, by a reference to your policy 
 in Ireland during nine-tenths of the period of your 
 domination, to explain the origin and nature of those 
 faults. I pointed out also that English policy in Ire- 
 land, though it had passed through several important 
 changes, had, till a late period, tended always in one 
 direction, namely, the reduction of Ireland to po- 
 
1 18 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. III. 
 
 verty ; and that so signally had it failed, as regards 
 English interests also, that after the lapse of six 
 centuries, both countries were threatened with poli- 
 tical ruin, from which, apparently, the Union was 
 the only refuge of either. I observed that only the 
 wisest men in England understood the full necessity 
 for union, or the mode in which it might be made a 
 reality ; and that England, not allowing these men to 
 have their way, had deluded herself and us by a 
 union which did not bring forth the fruits of peace 
 to either country, or of prosperity to Ireland. At 
 the period of the Union, Mr. Sheridan, opposing 
 that measure, said, "In Ireland the British Govern- 
 ment has two formidable enemies — Poverty and Ig- 
 norance." I stated that these enemies had not 
 yet been subdued. Mr. Grattan said, "I oppose 
 this Union, because, in the first place, it is no 
 Union." I stated that the question now once more 
 proposed to you, is whether that Union shall be 
 made real. Is Ireland to be treated as an alien, 
 or as a sister ? 
 
 I possess. Sir, no seat in either House of Parlia- 
 ment, for which reason I address you with my pen : 
 but if I had a vote, I would record it in favour of 
 the latter alternative ; and I would advise all other 
 persons to do the same, except English and Irish 
 repealers. I do not see what better you have to do. 
 I will not urge this course upon you on the grounds 
 of justice ; for I have compiled a brief epitome of 
 
LET. III.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 119 
 
 your dealings with Ireland, in the hope that the 
 better class of your countrymen might rather them- 
 selves assert the claims of justice on our behalf than 
 leave us to plead our own cause. There is, however, 
 such a thing as a wise expediency. Do England and 
 1 reland constitute two kingdoms, or one ? If the foi-mer, 
 vex yourselves about us no more than about Mexico 
 or Poland : if the latter, consider whether your neigh- 
 bour's side of the house can be burned without your 
 goods suffering damage. You are more than a lodger. 
 Solomon tells us, " He that troubleth his own house 
 shall inherit the wind ; " a proverb which must some- 
 times have recurred to your memory, when buffeted 
 by the " boisterous embraces" of Irish agitation. 
 The second Solomon, while engaged on the planta- 
 tion of Ulster, probably thought that he was only 
 troubling his neighbour's house ; but how it has 
 turned out must now be but too plain to you. There 
 is another proverb, " He that is cruel, troubleth his 
 own flesh." Do not imagine, Sir, that I am going to 
 demand the gift of " another ten millions." I am con- 
 \anced that ever}^ penny given gratuitously to Ireland, 
 beyond what the emergency of the present moment 
 absolutely requires, can only tend to degrade and 
 enfeeble her: but there are other modes in which 
 you can do her a service. 
 
 In the first place, as in the case of a projected 
 building "proportion costs nothing," so good laws cost 
 no more than bad ; indeed, they cost less ; for they 
 
120 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. III. 
 
 require less mending. Something you will have to 
 give to the pauperized districts along the western 
 coast. There are in Ireland nine unions comprising 
 a population of 500,000 persons, in which the Poor 
 Law valuation affords only twelve shillings a head to 
 the inhabitants. You must pay for the support of 
 these people or let them starve : but you have 
 learned, by this time, how to distribute charity, 
 which is best done in a very old-fashioned manner ; 
 and the cost will not, I hope, be much. Spend 
 wisely (Ireland, you are aware, contributes to the 
 revenue in that proportion which her impoverished 
 state permits), and you will not be much out of 
 pocket by treating this countr}^ with a politic jus- 
 tice ; although, at best, a famine is an expensive 
 thing. 
 
 Let us now recur to the other alternative, and con- 
 sider how you are likely to fare if you content your- 
 self with washing your hands, and declaring that the 
 matter is none of yours. Such a proceeding might, 
 perhaps, cement a closer alliance than can be said 
 always to exist between two important parties in Eng- 
 land, viz., its mind and its body ; but I see an objec- 
 tion to it notwithstanding. Have you not heard of 
 one who sealed up the top of his wine cask, and who, 
 on the leak in the bottom being pointed out to him, 
 replied, " Not so ; for below there is wine enough ; it 
 has been stolen from above ?" It is through Ireland's 
 wound, by you inflicted, that England wastes. If you 
 
LET. III.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 121 
 
 cannot stanch it, you must bleed to death. In Ireland 
 we have now come to the end of one period, and are 
 entering upon another. For good or for evil a provi- 
 dential dispensation has broken up the old system, 
 and Ireland must now advance in the direction of a 
 new prosperity, or be ruined ; ruined, at least, so far 
 as this generation is concerned. Let us suppose the 
 latter alternative (the former I shall consider here- 
 after), and imagine Ireland ruined. Whatwouldyou be 
 the better for that ? Is it not, on the contrary, too cer- 
 tain that the one great mistake which your ancestors 
 made, was in the assumption as an intuitive truth, of 
 what at least required proof, that the poorer they 
 could make one-third of their empire, the richer the 
 whole must be. Ireland, though ruined, would still 
 exist ; and if it continued yours, you would still be 
 compelled to pay for it. If you only held the great 
 towns, it would still cost you as much as it does now, 
 or probably more ; for you would have to maintain 
 larger establishments of every kind, except those 
 connected with the Customs and the Excise. Your 
 Irish revenue for the last three years amounted 
 to — 
 
 1845 .... £3,842,000 
 
 1846 .... 4,087,000 
 
 1847 .... 4,333,000; 
 beside the amount of Irish revenue paid in Eng- 
 land; and I perceive that between the years 1823 
 
 G 
 
122 ENGLISH MISRULE [lET. III. 
 
 and 1847 the net excess of revenue over Irish ex- 
 penditure left a net balance in your favour of 
 £9,000,000, which was paid into the Exchequer, at 
 Westminster. Can any thing be more plain than that 
 if your expenditure were to remain stationary, and 
 your revenue to diminish, an accident sure to hap- 
 pen when a nation is ruined, you would suffer before 
 long a greater loss than the £10,000,000 which you 
 so pathetically lament ? 
 
 This consideration is in itself important ; but let 
 me add a few more not less so. A very large num- 
 ber of Irish proprietors are Englishmen or Irish- 
 men resident in England, of whose continued re- 
 sidence you may feel assured until your laws afford 
 security to those who reside in Ireland. They 
 spend their money among you to the great benefit of 
 English artisans : a proportion of it finds its way 
 back to us, no doubt; but, in the meantime, you 
 have the first handling of it. If Irish property were 
 destroyed, you would be losers so far. It may be said 
 that new possessors of Irish estates would replace the 
 old : but consider first how long property might re- 
 main unsold when it was worth nothing; and se- 
 condly, how long a time might elapse, even sup- 
 posing it sold, before your utmost enterprise could 
 make it worth much, supposing that misery still pro- 
 duced lawlessness, and that nobody was allowed to 
 do any thing that he liked with any thing of his own, 
 
LET. III.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 123 
 
 and every one was suffered to do every thing that he 
 liked with what was none of his. My supposition 
 includes these two parts ; first, that not only Irish 
 proprietors should be ruined, but Irish property 
 also (and bad legislation could effect as much as 
 this) ; secondly, that a very large proportion of the 
 native population should continue to live. 
 
 A third consideration is this. The interest of the 
 debts and charges on Irish property is computed at 
 no less than ^4,000,000 annually, which represents, 
 we will say, a capital of nearly £100,000,000. A large 
 part of this debt consists of mortgages in the hands 
 of Englishmen, which would become of little value if 
 the property were ruined ; and a selfishness not well 
 calculated would thus have killed the bird that laid 
 the golden eggs. Consider next the trade of the 
 country. It is not what it might have been ; but we 
 think half a loaf better than no bread, and, without any 
 charity on our part, we share that half loaf with you. 
 I subjoin a table of Irish exports and imports con- 
 cluding with the last year during which the trade 
 statistics of the two countries were separately kept. 
 
 EXPORTS FROM IRELAND. 
 
 
 To Great Britain. 
 
 To all parts. 
 
 1817 . 
 
 . 5,696,000 
 
 6,597,000 
 
 1821 . 
 
 . 7,117,000 
 
 7,782,000 
 
 1825 . 
 
 . 8,531,000 
 
 9,243,000 
 G 2 
 
124 ENGLISH MISRULE [lET. III. 
 
 imports from great britain to ireland. 
 
 (official value.) 
 
 £ 
 
 1817 .... 4,722,000 
 
 1821 .... 5,338,000 
 
 1825 .... 7,048,000*. 
 
 Here again you perceive that a trade amounting 
 to millions is at stake. Were I to ask you what you 
 would do if we could send you no more beef, pigs, 
 grain, butter, or eggs, you would no doubt reply that 
 you would buy as good elsewhere, though there must 
 have been some reason for your preference of our 
 produce hitherto : but how could we possibly buy 
 your cottons, your printed calicos, and your cloth, if 
 we had nothing to give for them in exchange ? Other 
 markets you might doubtless make out; but still 
 there must have been a reason for your preference 
 of ours. Would you, to encourage us, reduce their 
 price at once to our needs, as you expected Irish 
 landlords last year to give their money for one quarter 
 of the indifferent labour previously received in re- 
 turn for it ? If not. Sir, we must withdraw our 
 custom from you without transferring it elsewhere. 
 In this case we should have to clothe ourselves in 
 the skins of beasts ; but when the cattle were once 
 
 * See also Appendix B, Eailway Report, from which it appears that, 
 from 1825 to 1835, the Imports have augmented from £8,596,000 to 
 £10,918,000 ; and the Exports from £9,493,000 to £16,693,000. 
 
LET. III.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 125 
 
 killed, and our first suits worn out, what would then 
 be our condition ? Imagine a whole civilized people 
 ranging about perfectly naked, or only decorated with 
 such ornaments as were worn by the early Picts, that 
 is to say, painted emblems of the sun, the moon, and 
 all the heavenly bodies, together with historical hie- 
 roglyphics and berry-stained battle sketches where- 
 withal to terrify their enemies ? Sure I am that 
 were we ever reduced thus low — which Heaven 
 forbid ! — many of the guides of that animal which you 
 affirm to have been too long ridden by the Irish Si- 
 lenus, would assure you that we had adopted this de- 
 vice merely with a view to extortion. My supposi- 
 tion is not likely to be realized to its utmost ex- 
 tent ; but it is not the less true that for every coat 
 we are obliged to discard, you will lose to the value 
 of the profit on a coat. Having, then, a large stake 
 in this country, comprising these four parts, viz. 
 your revenue, your proportion of absentee property 
 or absentee expenditure, your charges and mort- 
 gages, and your trade, I do not see how you can 
 possibly afford to ruin us. If all England were to 
 rise up like one man, and laying a solemn palm or 
 resolute fist upon green cloth or red box, to swear 
 with invocations and asseverations, that he would do 
 no less than this, I do not see what the issue could 
 be but that all England, like another and more 
 reasonable man, should sit down once more and re- 
 consider the project. What you have already un- 
 
126 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. III. 
 
 wittingly lost in past centuries I dare not even hint, 
 lest you should be a reasonable man no more, and 
 account us seven times greater bullies, beggars, and 
 buffoons than you have yet called us. I stand by my 
 statement. The matter is a matter of money ; " tua 
 res agitur.'''' I have proved, by accredited statistics, 
 that without any malice on our part, or one penny 
 spent on yours, you may suffer ten times more from 
 the ruin of Irish property than you have suffered 
 during 1846-7, including both gift and loan. Ruin 
 is more expensive than a famine. Under the ex- 
 isting law the more an Irish proprietor improves 
 his estate, the larger becomes that proportion of the 
 rate which is defrayed by his estate ; you have im- 
 proved your estate, and you would not allow us to 
 improve ours; therefore the national rate must fall 
 heavily on you. You have a share in the firm ; it 
 is you who have laid by gold ; therefore to you the 
 bankruptcy must be very sore. If blundering legis- 
 lation should once more end in a great loss ; if what 
 Mr. Carlyle calls a " Joe Manton aristocracy " must 
 needs wage war upon a "Midas" middle class, flying 
 from the senate house to the battue, and bestowing 
 one barrel on a famine and the other on a bird of 
 the air, those that pay the cost must be those that 
 have the cash. Would you be greater than Nature 
 herself, you who are not ashamed to believe in " Na- 
 tural Religion ? " 
 
 On the troubles resulting from over -population 
 
LET. III.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 127 
 
 will you leara from a parable ? The ambassador of 
 a foreign power, travelling not long since in the 
 neighbourhood of Derrinane Abbey, was lodged at 
 so poor an inn that his bedchamber was immediately 
 above that of a bull calf, the nocturnal lowings of 
 which so grievously tormented him, that as he com- 
 plained with much point, " though he had had the 
 comfort of a bed, yet he had not enjoyed the luxury 
 of sleep." Why did he not slip down stairs, open 
 the stable door, and let his enemy out ? The bull 
 calf was not lowing at the ambassador, but from dis- 
 like of his prison, and because he was troubled with 
 vague ideas of meads and milk. Depend upon it, 
 Sir, that the traveller wrote in an allegory, meaning 
 you to understand that till the Irish multitude, whose 
 hunger is so importunate, be let forth into a fatter 
 land, English statesmen are destined, no matter how 
 sumptuous their dormitaries, to enjoy but troubled 
 slumbers. 
 
 There is another danger. Sir, worse than all the 
 losses which I have hitherto suggested as the con- 
 sequences of doing nothing effectual to right the 
 condition of Ireland — I mean the danger of an Irish 
 invasion of England. Louis Male, Earl of Flan- 
 ders, had reduced his Flemish insurgents to the 
 point of starvation, when, just as they ought to have 
 died, the whole inhabitants of Ghent waited upon 
 him, without appointment, at Bruges, and consumed 
 a sumptuous dinner which had been prepared for 
 
128 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. III. 
 
 him by the respectable corporation of that town. 
 Beware of an army of specious men who have 
 beaten their swords into reaping-hooks, in order to 
 cut down at once your labourers and your harvests, 
 and to devour the increase. England is nearer 
 to us than America ; Australia is farther than either ; 
 Guernsey and Jersey are both very small. What is 
 to prevent Irish labourers from finding their way to 
 England in thousands where they have hitherto done 
 so in hundreds ? They have an interest in ac- 
 cepting employment from you if they can find 
 none at home ; and the number of half labourers 
 supported hitherto chiefly by their potato patches, 
 which are gone, is at least double that which the 
 agriculture of Ireland can permanently employ. Re- 
 member that, if Irish agriculture is to be improved, 
 the small farms must be consolidated, and that a 
 large additional number of labourers must thereby be 
 thrown on our labour market (as your economists 
 pleasantly call it), a market at present scantily sup- 
 plied with customers, and in which the prices are not 
 determined by the free will of purchasers or sellers. 
 Remember, that after the disproportion between the 
 demand and supply has reached a certain point, the 
 more numerous the candidates for labour are, the 
 worse their labour will be, connivance proving 
 stronger than competition. Remember, that the 
 number of labourers hitherto employed in Ireland, 
 compared with those employed in England, has 
 
LET. III.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 129 
 
 been relatively to the area of cultivated land as 5 to 2, 
 and relatively to the produce raised by them as 4 to 1 . 
 Remember, that good agriculture would diminish, not 
 increase the number of labourers employed. Remem- 
 ber, that the farmers, who, as you think, ought to give 
 more employment, used to pay their labourers in po- 
 tatoes, and with the potato have lost not only a large 
 part of their produce, but what constituted nearly the 
 whole agricultural currency of Ireland. Remember, 
 that half of these farmers are men who elsewhere would 
 till their farms with their own hands ; and that necessity 
 is teaching them to do so. Are you not a free trader 
 in labour as in other commodities ; and if so, ought 
 not our labourer to sell his labour in the dearest 
 market, and your farmer to buy labour in the cheapest ? 
 Your farmers have an interest in engaging them, for 
 none work better, when they are tolerably fed, and 
 when they are removed from a lawless state of so- 
 ciety ; and they can work at a cheaper rate of wages 
 than the English labourer, who expects some small 
 comforts as well as a livelihood. If the unmarried 
 alone were to emigrate to England, or, indeed, if the 
 married men were to join the company, leaving their 
 families, as so many wards in Chancery, to be taken 
 care of by the Board of Guardians, I do not see why, 
 having themselves alone to support, they should not 
 be able to underbid the English labourer in his own 
 market. This country would then have a far better 
 
 G 3 
 
ISO ENGLISH MlSHtTLE [tET. HI. 
 
 chance than at present ; for not only would the 
 numbers be diminished, but we, like Louis Philippe, 
 should have got rid of our " emeuteurs." 
 
 It may be said that your farmers would not avail 
 themselves of this cheap labour if it had the eflPect 
 of reducing the existing labouring class to destitu- 
 tion, and thus increasing the poor rates ; but this 
 belief cannot be indulged in by those who know 
 that a present advantage comes more home to men 
 than a remote danger, or who remember how willing 
 English farmers were to beat down the rate of wages 
 to the minimum when they had to pay out of the 
 rates the additional sum necessary to enable their la- 
 bourers to live ; thus pauperising labour itself, a far 
 worse evil than the support of bona fide paupers out 
 of the proceeds of bona fide labour. 
 
 It is true that you have passed a law enabling 
 you to transport any Irish beggar to Ireland. If 
 this law were ever to come generally into operation, 
 we should insist upon your making it a part of your 
 Poor Law system instead of your Penal system. 
 An English pauper is sent back to his parish for 
 relief: an Irishman, guilty of a sea voyage, who has 
 applied for casual relief somewhere on your western - 
 coast, is to be sent, not to his own home, but to Bel- 
 fast, Dublin, or Waterford, — favoured spots, which 
 have thus a chance of becoming sinks of destitution suf- 
 ficient to furnish a pretext whenever you have a fancy 
 
LET. III.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 131 
 
 to try how a rating by the union, the county, or the 
 province, would answer in place of that by electoral 
 divisions. I should not be surprised if those cities 
 of refuge were to show their gratitude by returning 
 your present to you. The paupers would thus be 
 supported on the lowest computation for every al- 
 ternate week at your expense, and in many cases for 
 two weeks out of three. Moreover, a race possessed 
 of extraordinary wisdom and experienced virtue 
 would thus be formed. There is not a nook in your 
 island, or a creek on your coasts with which the man 
 of many labours would not have formed an acquaint- 
 ance ("modo me Romae ponit, modo Athenis"); 
 and on bis final return, when old age demanded its 
 dues, there is not a hovel in Kerry that would not 
 boast a separate Odyssee, for every Irish Ulysses 
 would have the wit to be his own Homer. A class of 
 men truly Anglo-Irish would also arise, men of two 
 countries and no prejudices, who might undertake 
 the whole carrying trade of abuse which you seem 
 desirous to establish between the two countries. 
 
 But I have been guilty of a digression, which is 
 the more inexcusable, as the law that suggested it 
 is itself but a poetic dream. If it works, its effect 
 must be to encourage emigration to England. It 
 only enables you to take up those who are con- 
 victed of begging. The invading army will be an 
 army of labourers; a certain proportion of each 
 detachment will find work ; and the rest being sent 
 
132 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. III. 
 
 back free of expense will try their chance again, 
 and make their way where they find an opening. 
 This invasion is not to be prevented except by vio- 
 lence on the part of the English labourers, which 
 in England must be but local, and therefore una- 
 vailing ; for it would not suit a country, at once com- 
 mercial and crowded, to encourage Lynch Law. 
 
 Judge, Sir, what are likely to be the ultimate con- 
 sequences of this Irish settlement in England, as- 
 suming as data your well-known opinions of us. 
 By degrees your favoured land will be as much 
 over-peopled as Ireland. Emigration will become 
 every day more obviously necessary. You will still 
 be talking about it, but you will probably have only 
 succeeded in discovering difficulties which you 
 ought to have overcome. Emigration being still 
 unaided, the question is who the emigrants are to 
 be, Saxon or Celt. You affirm that the Saxon 
 makes much the better emigrant ; I admit that the 
 Saxon is much the richer man ; and all agree that 
 he has more enterprise. The Saxon race therefore 
 will begin to move off; and, in place of the forest 
 giants which you fell, you will make a young 
 "plantation" of your own in New Brunswick, as 
 you did in Ulster. In the meantime, population 
 being thus reduced at home, wages will rise ; and 
 your " Irish enemy" in every parish having waxed 
 prosperous, will think it his duty to marry. The 
 Irish are a people of sanguine temperament, af- 
 
LET. III.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 138 
 
 fectionate dispositions, and strong social needs, 
 with a considerable regard for household morality, 
 and only a finite power of calculating conse- 
 sequences ; the aggregate of which qualities points 
 ominously in the direction of holy matrimony. 
 Let no one deceive you : the question with them 
 will very soon be narrowed into this small com- 
 pass, " With whom are they to contract marriage, 
 Saxon or Celt?" The Saxon might probably 
 frown upon their suit; but it is possible that an 
 infinite number of modest young Irish women, with 
 violet eyes, a winning mirth, and a bold innocence, 
 hearing of the prosperity of their brothers, might 
 find their way to England also: and it might 
 happen that she who was one man's sister, not 
 standing in that relation to another, would become 
 his wife. What next ? for this is only the beginning 
 of the end. There is not one in a thousand of 
 those young wives, who before the end of one year 
 would not have brought into the world another 
 being exactly like his father, with the exception 
 of being smaller. These are amongst the arts 
 of war; and it was the young women beyond the 
 Danube and the Caspian that blew up the Roman 
 Empire. What is to stop this process? In what 
 can it result but the diffusion of one single brogue 
 swallowing up the sixty -four dialects of England ? 
 
 Moreover, Pope Pius IX., whom you were lately on 
 the point of setting down for an enlightened man, has 
 
134 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. III. 
 
 thrown off the mask, and openly declared that he 
 prefers his religion to yours ; nay that he is a Roman 
 Catholic Puseyite, though a liberal in politics ; in con- 
 firmation of which he is constituting in England a hier- 
 archy, built up of bishops, archbishops, and probably 
 a cardinal at the summit. An Irish settlement in 
 England cannot but stimulate his zeal. What, if on 
 finding this church, though in all other respects per- 
 fectly appointed, yet deficient in a laity, he should 
 resolve to put up with yours, and issue orders for 
 your conversion accordingly ? 
 
 I forbear. Sir, to enlarge upon subjects which, 
 being serious, should be entertained with a graver 
 attention than I can expect from you. Indeed, 
 the dangers to which I have drawn your notice 
 are serious enough, too: but you may avoid them 
 if you choose ; and if you choose to incur them, 
 I choose to laugh. There is a seriousness in laugh- 
 ter at times; and I avouch to you my own settled 
 opinion, that if when summoned again to grave 
 deliberation, you should content yourself with play- 
 ing once more that childish game " beggar my 
 neighbour," and doubling your stakes, then every 
 danger that I have announced to you is imminent ; — 
 and one more besides. Suppose these vast Irish 
 settlements to have taken place in England, and 
 that, by the seductions of time and depraved habit, 
 you had grown reconciled to our vices, as im- 
 poverished labourers grow accustomed to Indian 
 
LET. III.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 135 
 
 meal in place of wheaten bread, what is more pro- 
 bable than the gradual amalgamation of the two 
 races by intermarriage ? Now, Sir, qualities both 
 physical and moral are transmitted by descent — eagles 
 give birth to eagles, adders to adders. Do not 
 imagine that our bitters would be neutralized by 
 your sweets : for while the coasts of Cork, Kerry, and 
 Mayo, are comparatively peaceful, the counties of 
 Limerick, Tipperary, and Clare, inhabited by a race 
 who, though you call them Celts, are no more Celts 
 than Hindoos, are amongst the most lawless in Ire- 
 land. , You will reply, that they enjoy too small a 
 tincture of your English blood, and that a little 
 medicine does but stir up the evil : but I have already 
 shown you that in many parts of England also the 
 Celtic element may in time predominate. See the 
 matter as it is (for an Englishman without moral 
 courage is nothing), and sum up your account. You 
 assert, after an acquaintance of six centuries with 
 us, that the Irish character is a compound of all 
 that is hateful and all that is base. What result but 
 one can follow from the " incorporation '"■ of this per- 
 nicious race with your pure breed .? If you have 
 any vices, is it not probable that the vices of the 
 two countries will blend into no quasi union, as 
 vices have always a tendency to conspire ? Is it not 
 absolutely certain that your nobler qualities would 
 become gradually dissipated in our follies ? 
 
 " Damnosa quid non imrainuit dies ? " 
 
136 ENGLISH MISRULE [lET. III. 
 
 In fine, Sir, having first lost a large proportion 
 of your historical remembrances, which could not 
 be enjoyed in common by each section of this 
 strange composite, and, after these, all your pe- 
 culiar virtues, you would find betimes that those 
 beggarly Irishmen had not only beguiled you 
 of your ten millions and indeed of all your pro- 
 perty, but, with no gentle magic, actually " robbed 
 you of yourself." You would miss the great 
 thoughts that now stimulate your industry, and the 
 bodings which now direct your anger: reduced 
 to plough with an ox and an ass, your agriculture 
 would languish, or your fields turn up spontane- 
 ous potato crops: bewitched through Irish wrong- 
 headedness, your costliest fabrics would be woven 
 awry ; your enemy would have got into your own 
 shoes while they were still on your feet ; and you 
 would have to beat yourself instead of your neigh- 
 bours, as Sancho Panza lashed the trees instead of 
 himself: English obstinacy, superinduced upon Irish 
 giddiness, would make all your errors irrevocable ; 
 nay, I doubt whether English resolution, trepanned 
 into Irish recollections, would not render martial law 
 permanently necessary : and, to make an end of this 
 hideous anticipation, I can see no other prospect 
 than that going on yearly from bad to worse, frantic 
 dispositions producing foolish institutions, and these 
 reacting upon the former, all business should cease, 
 the sound of the hammer should be heard no more 
 
LET. III.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 137 
 
 in your populous cities, but in its place a Babel of 
 garrulity and blows, no man rightly understanding 
 his brother or himself; until, within a century 
 and a half, or at most two centuries, you should 
 have been sophisticated into a generation of very 
 baboons ; whereof what final issue can be expect- 
 ed but that the land should be conquered by the 
 French ? 
 
 I can fancy. Sir, that I hear a voice which expresses 
 a surly, certainly a puzzled, discontent at this very 
 " un-English" doctrine. " It is hard," you say, 
 " that, do what we may, we are equally doomed to 
 suffer. If we take our part of this Irish load, we 
 suffer at once to that extent : if we let Ireland alone, 
 by this means, also, we are to suffer indirectly and 
 later, but to a much greater and indefinite extent. 
 Here is some attempt to cheat us. Moreover, the 
 Irish are losing even their speciousness. For hours 
 John Bull sat very far back in his chair, with his 
 hands half in his pockets and half out, deliberating 
 whether he would give or not, and how much. He 
 was talked round. People said that every one ex- 
 pected him to give ; and that all the world would be 
 surprised if he did not give when every one was 
 giving. Once assured that the charity is a fit 
 one, John scorns to give a paltry sum ; so he gave 
 ten millions : but he swore a little, because he sus- 
 pected he was made a fool of, and he vowed he 
 would give no more. Now he is to be told that he 
 
138 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. III. 
 
 must do more, and do it for his own sake ; that the 
 best he can do will only remove part of the mischief 
 which he has done ; and that, when he has done all, 
 he is not an indulgent master, but an unprofitable 
 servant." Who told you, Sir, that all these things 
 had happened to our good friend, John Bull ? I 
 thought that he had given very willingly ; and I 
 should be very sorry if any disgrace or trouble 
 incurred by you were to fall on him. Again, I hear 
 another and shriller voice, which says, " Please, Sir, 
 to name your demand. There is nothing that makes 
 one so nervous as not to see one's way. You say you 
 do not want a great money gift, and you seem to resent 
 some part of what we last bestowed on you ; but call it 
 gift, loan, good legislation, repentance, restitution, or 
 by any fine name you can invent, only tell us what 
 the sum total amounts to. Is it any certain quan- 
 tity ? " Yes, it is a certain quantity ; but both you 
 and I must remain quite uncertain what it is until 
 we have worked out the equation. You will then 
 see at the right-hand side of the line of figures what 
 X, Y, Z, represent. At present all I can say is, 
 that the certain but unknown quantity amounts 
 exactly to whatever is necessary to make Ireland a 
 prosperous kingdom, minus what she may herself 
 contribute without a violation of possibility or of 
 proportion. 
 
 Why should I, Sir, flatter England by magnifying 
 her virtues, with which she is already acquainted, or 
 
LET, III.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 139 
 
 by concealing from her the difficulties that beset her 
 path, or by kindling an agreeable, or by calming a 
 painful indignation ? I have heard the cry of a 
 hungry people ; and therefore all the fury of an 
 incensed nation must be to me a trivial sound. 
 Be the mob clad in rough jerkin or broad cloth, 
 what more can the storm that masters it effect than 
 to blow a certain quantity of water into a certain 
 quantity of foam. If an Englishman, on other occa- 
 sions upright and wise, is seduced into an ignorant 
 impatience, the question with him must be, not 
 not how angry he is, but whether his anger be just; 
 not how ignorant he is, but whether knowledge 
 can or cannot be gained. With an Englishman of 
 another order, the question must be, not how great 
 his anger and ignorance are, but whether he can 
 afford to keep such expensive infirmities ; since the 
 recent English invective so fatally impedes the pass- 
 ing of remedial measures for Ireland, that every single 
 foolish word that is spoken in public must cost the 
 parent country between sixpence and ten shillings, 
 according to the influence of the speaker. We 
 axe much concerned that you should be annoyed, 
 but we cannot help you. If England must of 
 old snatch a mess from Pope Adrian's plate, and 
 a bone has stuck in her throat, is that our fault? 
 On the contrary, we have our own grievance in this 
 matter ; and it would be our interest to help you if 
 we could. We are far from being comfortably 
 
140 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. III. 
 
 lodged. If, by the laws of nature, an over-crowded 
 popidation finds a vent, as hot air does, are we 
 answerable ? If an increased competition, produced 
 by an influx of Irish labourers, should reduce the 
 rate of wages in England, and not reduce her poor 
 rate, is that our fault ? Certainly not. The laws of 
 political economy are proof against all the eloquence 
 and anger in the world. They have held their 
 ground against Irish lawlessness, and do you think 
 they will flee before the face of English law ? If you 
 had known that a union was to take place binding 
 together the living and the dead, I suppose you 
 would not, in old times, have committed the justi- 
 fiable homicide. What is that to us ? It is in the 
 nature of things, that those who learn by experience 
 exclusively should learn too late. Successful and 
 ensnared by your success, you would now retreat 
 from the land you have laid waste; but she conquers 
 you by her bareness, and the winter of her discon- 
 tent makes a mock of your summer triumphs. Her 
 gods are "gods of the hill country :" barbaric gods, 
 that laugh at you from granite promontories, girt with 
 cloud, whereupon golden harv^est never waved. There 
 is much in our constitution of things which justly dis- 
 pleases you ; but we might ask, " Are we then on a bed 
 of roses?" Be not incensed with your handy work; 
 nor think that even the omnipotence of Parliament 
 can recall the past. The stone, once flung, will 
 descend in a parabolic curve, whatever predilection 
 
LET. III.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 141 
 
 you may have for an ellipse. An Englishman is an 
 honest man, even in adversity. Would you annul 
 all connection between the past and present, between 
 offence and retribution ? Would you sit at the feast 
 of unreason, and shirk the bill ? Would you break 
 lamps, and refuse to pay half-a-crown as a fine ? 
 What, Sir, must you alone drink port, and your 
 neighbour alone have the gout ? It is very conde- 
 scending of you to nail up our wild crab trees in 
 your garden, but I cannot see why both sides 
 of your wall must be the south side. You had 
 your season of good things. Being angry now, 
 you ask us, vehemently, whether we are or are 
 not poor, lawless, slothful, procrastinating, and much 
 more. I have answered by referriug to a certain 
 old almanack, of which every second letter is red 
 letter : I inferred that, to a greater or lesser degree, 
 we must needs be guilty of those faults, unless 
 we were faultless. Have you already forgotten my 
 brief epitome of the past ? You would then have 
 forgotten it yet sooner, if I had taken more care 
 that it should give you no offence. History has 
 been called, " Philosophy teaching by example." If 
 you think this method of instruction too tedious, let 
 me try the catechetical instead. 
 
 You who object to our disloyalty, what do you 
 mean by the word ? If to revere our present institu- 
 tions be a righteous loyalty, to how many of our in- 
 stitutions in time past can you point — 
 
142 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. III. 
 
 " Which it were not, by consequence converse, 
 A treason against nature to uphold ?" * 
 
 Loyalty means a reverence for law impersonated 
 in rulers who may lawfully be loved. Why would 
 you sophisticate that venerable principle into a ser- 
 vile affection for a perpetual sentence embodied in 
 an unseen executioner ? You who object to our 
 poverty, why did you allow to the great mass of this 
 people no other means of acquiring wealth than 
 those of the gambler, the adventurer, and the miser ? 
 Why did you render it more natural for a poor man 
 to grope for gold among ruins, than to win a hardy 
 support by spreading his canvas to the winds ? Did 
 you think that our mother-wit was suflScient to 
 squeeze oil out of pebbles ? Habitudes, not expe- 
 dients, enrich ; and trade commits herself neither to 
 a timid caution nor to an impulsive enterprise, but 
 to courage and to a pnidence which looks with its 
 own simplicity to average results, the increase of 
 equal laws. You who attribute to the Irish peasant 
 a want of truth, why did you render it impossible 
 for the Irish peasant to answer plainly a simple ques- 
 tion, " Where does your priest live ? " But these faults 
 are more than of your teaching ; — they are your own. 
 What can be more lawless than to leave a whole 
 nation without laws ? What policy ever called im- 
 
 Philip van Artevelde.' 
 
LET. III.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 143 
 
 penal was more beggarly than to make the subjects 
 of your empire beggars ? What could be more de- 
 ceitful than to demand a nation's submission, and 
 not in return to impart to it safety ? You who accuse 
 us of bullying, why did you accord to our agitation 
 what you withheld from our patience and denied to 
 your own reason ? You who accuse us of sloth, 
 what could be more slothful than to leave your vast 
 national absentee estate to the tender mercies of the 
 wicked and to the wisdom of the weak ? You who 
 accuse us of procrastinating, why did you, in later 
 times, content yourselves with endless debating, in- 
 stead of doing what was to be done ? Year after 
 year the same great question, Catholic Emancipa- 
 tion, was brought before you, an annual farce. Year 
 after year the sages on one side of the House rose up, 
 and wove the same flimsy tissue of transparent falla- 
 cies, with the same command of countenance and the 
 same success. Year after year honourable gentlemen 
 on the opposite side stood up, and by a sudden trans- 
 formation made the same arguments assume the most 
 opposite shape. " They must not be citizens, because 
 they were always rebels." " Lest they should be al- 
 ways rebels they must be made citizens." Then you 
 changed hands, and the series of transformations 
 recommenced. What could Ireland gain from this 
 grave game of political cat's cradle ? You were not 
 so slow in your conquest of India. In the enact- 
 ment of remedial measures you were slower still. 
 
144 ENGLISH MISRULE [lET. III. 
 
 You wlio have a distaste to our barbarous levity 
 under ordinary afflictions, why do you occasionally 
 indulge in uncivil merriment at our extraordinary 
 trials ? You who chide us for being peevishly dis- 
 contented with you, are not you greatly discontented 
 with yourself? You who wonder at our bad agri- 
 culture, why did you think it sufficient to sow the 
 dragon's teeth ? You now advise our farmers to 
 cultivate green crops : they are much obliged, and 
 will do so if they can find time, space, and money : 
 otherwise not. You think us presumptuous; how 
 happens it that an English gentleman is filled with 
 wrath when he hears the amount of an Irish rental, 
 without having ever heard of the difference between 
 an Irish and an English acre ? Why are you shocked 
 at the price paid for con-acre without inquiring whe- 
 ther the land thus let out (and often let by compul- 
 sion) is manured land or unmanured, and whether the 
 rent is paid in sterling coin or spurious labour ? I 
 must bring to an end this tedious historical catechism. 
 Have you patience for one question more ? You 
 who turn in disgust from Irish poverty, slovenliness, 
 and filth, why did you collect and why do you retain 
 the whole fermenting mass of Irish pauperism, which 
 would be your wealth if those paupers were spread 
 over your colonies, a heap that threatens plague at the 
 gate of your palace ? A countryman of yours. Sir, 
 remarkable for his wit as well as his knowledge, but 
 who never uses the former but for the delight, nor 
 
LET. III.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 145 
 
 the latter but for the benefit of mankind, remarked 
 when he first saw the hills of this country, often as blue 
 as distant mountains, that " the very air of Ireland 
 had caught the trick of exaggeration." Surely, Sir, 
 some of your less amiable fellow-countrymen, when 
 enlarging on Irish vices, are themselves guilty of an 
 exaggeration, which cannot be accounted discreet, 
 considering how many of those vices constitute our 
 only property in common. Am I beguiled by par- 
 tiality, or can you have prejudices ? 
 
 It may, perhaps, be asked, whether I have not in 
 turn brought exaggerated charges against England. 
 I have taken some pains not so far to injure a strong 
 cause. Against individuals, even in past times, con- 
 sidered with reference to their own motives, I say 
 nothing ; for every age has its own temptations, and 
 hard deeds might once have pleaded the same pallia- 
 tion, on the ground of inconsiderateness, as may still 
 be pleaded for hard words. At that time also, as 
 at present, the familiar course could hardly have 
 been repulsive to a virtue that was not vigilant. A 
 plain statement of the wrongs inflicted on Ireland 
 must appear exaggerated, because the natural though 
 hasty inference from it would be, that England must 
 ever have been that wicked and base nation which 
 thousands of Englishmen represent Ireland to be 
 now. No inference could be more unsound. I be- 
 lieve England to have been and to be on the whole 
 the justest, the wisest, and the strongest nation in 
 
 H 
 
146 ENGLISH MISRULE [lET. III. 
 
 the world : 1 believe also that the miserable state of 
 Ireland proceeds mainly from her injustice, folly, 
 and weakness. Man is an inconsistent being. Jus- 
 tice does not always take time to be just ; wisdom 
 sometimes turns the dark side of her lantern toward 
 those she does not love ; and strength becomes 
 weakness when divorced from these its accustomed 
 allies. If we have not had the benefit even of Eng- 
 land's virtues, although that circumstance may per- 
 haps be no additional fault on her part, yet we may 
 be permitted to count it among the number of our 
 misfortunes. 
 
 You will perhaps ask, '' If good legislation is 
 really necessary for Ireland, upon what principles 
 are we to legislate ? — in short, what is to be done ?" 
 As to principles, that is a large and hardly a modest 
 demand. Principles are not to be had every day, 
 though indeed I do not know how you can quite 
 dispense with them. Without entering upon this 
 subject at present, I may observe that there are 
 several principles which you would do well to 
 eschew. One somewhat specious but unsound prin- 
 ciple is put forward, rhetorically rather than philo- * 
 sophically, by those who insist on your giving us 
 exactly the same laws in Ireland as suit you in 
 England. The author of the " Esprit des Lois" 
 lays it down as a fundamental position that laws 
 are good relatively and not absolutely. There 
 seems to be truth in this position. A nation forms 
 
LET. III.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 147 
 
 its institutions, as a fish forms its shell, by a sort 
 of slow exudation from within, which gradually 
 hardens to an external deposit, and must therefore 
 be fitted to the shape of that which it invests and 
 protects. The Irish are a race more dissimilar 
 from the English than from most other European 
 races, and they have reached a very different period 
 of social progress ; it may therefore well be inferred, 
 that the same institutions will not always work in 
 the same manner amongst both. It will require 
 some tact, as well as a comprehensive philosophy, 
 to give Ireland what she needs, which is, not the 
 same laws as England possesses, but equal justice 
 and analogous laws. Another principle, more con- 
 venient at the moment than salutary on the whole, is 
 that of centralization. In a country the energies of 
 which have become amply developed, centralization 
 is necessary in order to direct and harmonize the 
 divergent activities of many minds. In Ireland it was, 
 you will remember, the policy of England for cen- 
 turies to suppress all native energies ; and, even after 
 the period of the penal laws, to fill the various ad- 
 ministrative offices with strangers ; in other words 
 to render torpid those social activities which in their 
 excess need the restriction and counterbalance of 
 a central authority. The more you can intro- 
 duce of local administration in conjunction with 
 central legislation, the more you can reconcile 
 of municipal independence with political unity, the 
 
 H 2 
 
148 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. III. 
 
 more you will communicate to this country (for 
 such instruction is only gained by practice) that 
 political education without which we could make 
 no more use of your laws, transferred to us in their 
 details, than you could of our traditions. It is not 
 in London that the mass of our people can acquire 
 an initiation into public business or the habitual 
 sense of public duty. 
 
 Another principle from which I would fain dis- 
 suade you is that of setting class against class, ac- 
 cording to the adage, " Divide et impera." This 
 was your policy when you promoted the intestine 
 wars of Ireland; this was your policy when you 
 planted your undertakers, and bade them rule over 
 the serfs ; this was your policy when you governed 
 by " Protestant Ascendancy," and more recently 
 when you fostered the Orange party ; this, if your 
 recent course has had any thing of a purpose, must 
 have entered into your views in your late en- 
 deavours to write down the Irish landlords as the 
 oppressors of the people. I would advise you at 
 the least to confine your exertions on this subject 
 to newspaper paragraphs. If you persist in stig- 
 matizing Irish proprietors as a race of tyrants and 
 exterminators, the result may be no worse than the 
 addition of a certain per-centage to the number of 
 murders which would otherwise have taken place. 
 If the Legislature takes the matter into its own 
 hands, the evil will be complex and lasting. At 
 
LET. III.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 149 
 
 the time of the Revolution you surrendered the 
 poor a prey to the rich, the former class being then 
 weak. Power having since then in some measure 
 shifted its position, and democratic influences having 
 made progress here as elsewhere, the England of 
 your affections has shown a disposition, without any 
 infidelity to past principles, to modify their applica- 
 tion, and pay court to the strong, by confiscating, 
 for the perpetuation of pauperism rather than the 
 support of paupers, the property of that class which 
 it had used up. This will not answer. As the two 
 countries have but one real interest, so the different 
 classes in Ireland can have but one interest,— a fact 
 which a common ruin would teach them with a 
 convincing force. The agitation which has hitherto 
 existed has included elements that repelled the sym- 
 pathies of the higher orders ; but if, after contracting 
 a fraudulent engagement that you would feed the ma- 
 jority on the minority, you were reduced in the end 
 to leave the masses hungry, I can foresee a remote 
 possibility that anger, which by its heat has a great 
 power to fuse, or despair, whereof the frost some- 
 times knits together dissimilar substances, should 
 cement a union between all classes in Ireland, most 
 inauspicious to another Union. At best, after you 
 had thrown the landlords to your pursuers, the pack 
 would come up with you again, and come up with 
 appetites sharpened by having tasted blood. I am, 
 
150 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. III. 
 
 therefore, wholly against the principle of propitiating 
 Qne class by the sacrifice of another. 
 
 Having thus recorded a protest against a few of the 
 principles heretofore in use, I will prosecute that sub- 
 ject no further at present (recommending it, how- 
 ever, to your best attention), because even a single 
 principle would require a complete essay for its ex- 
 position and vindication. And 1 will now pass on 
 to what may perhaps meet a readier acceptance 
 from you, namely, practical measures. Of these I 
 shall omit all which, being organic or constitutional, 
 might invite a prolonged discussion. I will not here 
 express any opinion on such questions as the en- 
 dowment of the Roman Catholic Church, the revi- 
 sion of the Registry, an increase to the numbers of 
 the Irish representatives, the assembling of the Im- 
 perial Parliament in Dublin, instead of London, 
 from time to time, &c. &c. I will refer only to such 
 as are directly remedial in their character. I do 
 not offer these suggestions as new discoveries cf my 
 own ; were they mine only, they would deserve but 
 little attention ; and not much did they rest on any 
 single or exclusive authority. But be they old or 
 be they new, and come they with credentials or 
 without, it will be an unprecedented proof of origi- 
 nality on your part, should you not only approve 
 of good measures, but act on them before the time is 
 gone by. On this condition only I offer them to 
 
LET. III.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 151 
 
 your cousideration. A few years hence they would 
 be bad measures. Art, it is true, is long, but life is 
 short — especially in Ireland. 
 
 I. The first thing that I would recommend to you 
 is to maintain at any cost the peace of the country, 
 unless you choose to abolish all law impartially, 
 and thus restore to the inoffensive that natural right 
 of self-defence which men surrender when the 
 State guarantees their protection. A government. 
 Sir, though functions not its own are sometimes 
 thrust upon it, ought to govern. Your governments, 
 I admit, have an excuse for their ineptitude in this 
 respect ; for, in the first place, England has less ac- 
 quired that art than any other nation, her own peo- 
 ple exercising so much self-government that they 
 need little from without, and having so little indo- 
 lence that they would hardly tolerate a strong con- 
 trol ; and in the second place the Irish are a rather 
 ungovernable people, and will remain such as long 
 as their present misery remains. The nation, how- 
 ever, will not rest till it finds some one who can 
 govern it. The worst political evil resulting from 
 our disturbed state is not the loss of life ; although 
 the staid habits of improvement cannot coexist with 
 that recklessness which constant danger engenders, 
 and the indecent levity with which men speak of 
 crimes that occur daily cannot but be in itself 
 prejudicial to morals. No person not living in 
 
152 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. III. 
 
 the country can guess the thousand modes in which 
 insecurity affects the prosperity of the country. 
 Agricultural improvements must be effected by the 
 joint efforts of landlord, tenant, and labourer ; if then 
 the landlord is the slave of cottiers squatting on his 
 land, and may not dispose of a farm as he will ; if the 
 farmer must grow such crops as the labourer pleases, 
 and fatten no calf because the poor want milk ; and 
 if the labourer who works better than his fellows has a 
 chance of being beaten for his pains (the work which 
 should be done by a few being thus extended to the 
 many competitors), such improvements will not be 
 made. If guardians are bullied, the relief system is 
 paralyzed ; if charity be extorted, it is but a " black 
 mail " which provokes fresh extortions ; if popularity 
 be necessary for safety, few will be honest ; if men 
 are not respected by their neighbours, they cease to 
 respect themselves ; if farmers may not look for their 
 profits to those laws which work in peace, they 
 must take the chances of war ; and while one man 
 sows his whole field with potatoes, on the impulse of 
 " double or quits," another hides his money in the 
 thatch, because of all banks to which he could com- 
 mit it, that which offers the highest rate of interest, 
 the land, is most liable to stop payment. Not 
 only men's actions, but their words, their looks, and 
 their thoughts, are depraved from their natural bent 
 by habitual insecurity. Responsibility, the gravi- 
 tating principle of society, becomes the one thing 
 
LET. HI.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 153 
 
 hated. It were an endless labour to point out the 
 modes by which insecurity, in a community ham- 
 pered but not restrained by law, and bondage under 
 the name of freedom, tangle the skein of society, 
 and lock the wheels of progress. The spontaneous 
 movements of society will not take place where con- 
 vulsion reigns. Where each man by himself is no- 
 thing and not his own ; where multitudes, composed 
 of men each of whom in his hovel is a model of 
 patient suffering, catch fire from each other's breath, 
 and exult in the intoxication of a momentary might, 
 there it matters little what laws nominally prevail. 
 When punishment is not practically their sanction, 
 laws are lamentably blunted by non-natural interpre- 
 tations ; and the legislator who has tied down the 
 executive arm has legislated for Babel. 
 
 Let me make a very few specific suggestions here. 
 They are not, of course, intended to apply where an 
 extraordinary amount of disturbance exists : in such 
 cases stronger measures would be more merciful, and 
 esteemed such by all but the most pedantic of the con- 
 stitution's verbal critics. First, whenever a murder has 
 been committed, a fine should be levied immediately 
 on the district, and paid to the family of the mur- 
 dered man ; half the sum to be contributed, if the mur- 
 derer is discovered and proved to belong to a distant 
 parish, by the district in which he has resided. Se- 
 condly, let disturbed districts be proclaimed by the 
 Lord Lieutenant, either on his own responsibility, or 
 
 H 3 
 
154 ENGLISH MISRULE [lET. III. 
 
 on sufficient representations made by its assembled 
 magistrates ; and in such proclaimed districts let the 
 possession of arms be prohibited except under condi- 
 tions to be prescribed by law, with which those already 
 holding arms should be required to conform. Arms 
 that must be concealed are not easily kept in repair. 
 Thirdly, whenever a poor man assailed has made an 
 efficient defence, and done the state a service, the state 
 should reward him. I would observe, with reference 
 to my first suggestion, that a fine, called by the name 
 of a fine, would be far more effectual than the more 
 tortuous policy of supporting by a tax on the district 
 the additional police force rendered necessary for 
 its protection. The State is bound to protect its 
 peaceable subjects; and men whose property is en- 
 dangered may not be rich enough to pay for its 
 defence. This tax would also be very considerable; 
 and as it would be foreseen and calculated on, it 
 would be simply so much deducted from the rate 
 or from the rent ; in other words, the charge would 
 fall upon those whom no one suspects of connivance 
 in agrarian outrage. You must remember that, when 
 a country is once impoverished, the threat of large 
 pecuniary loss becomes a " hrutum fulmen^'' an 
 argument in itself against pauperising a country. 
 The tine, however, would be felt as a punishment if 
 imposed at once on the commission of an offence, 
 and being a sudden as well as a small demand, it 
 would be paid. The more you reduce these mat- 
 
LET. III.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 155 
 
 ters to a calculation of pounds, shillings, and pence, 
 the more you will strike at the root of the evil, and 
 bring the Irish out of the region of chance and 
 into that of probabilities. Each person, at present, 
 thinks he has a fair chance of not being the man 
 shot, and the discovery of the offenders being every 
 one's business is no one's business ; but if each were 
 sure of having to pay his seven and sixpence or 
 pound sterling, that certainty would be a sore hin- 
 drance to the present system of connivance, which 
 is based partly on intimidation and partly on sym- 
 pathy. As for my third suggestion, what mode 
 can there be of dealing with assassins (especially 
 where it is hard to procure evidence) so natural, sig- 
 nificant and cheap as to shoot them in the act ? 
 Promptitude and certainty are what give a salutary 
 efficiency to punishment. If you have any thing to 
 say on the score of time for repentance, pray con- 
 sider whether there is any better time for repentance 
 than about five minutes before the commission of the 
 crime ; and whether a speedy consummation of j ustice 
 would not be a seasonable aid to such reflection as 
 might indefinitely adjourn the commission of many 
 an offence. On the subject of security, 1 will only 
 add that the law never can be loved till it is re- 
 spected, and never will be respected until it is ren- 
 dered efficient as well as just. Shun all fine 
 phrases, and attempt no petty saving in this matter. 
 Send down special commissions at once, and in any 
 
156 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. III. 
 
 number, wherever they can expedite justice. Let 
 the law be made supreme. Till it reigns, you seek 
 in vain that spot on which improvement, whether 
 industrial, social, or political, can plant the fulcrum 
 of her lever. 
 
 II. Emigration demands the second place in the 
 order of remedial measures ; the second in the order 
 of time, the first in that of importance. Whatever 
 arguments may be urged in favour of the former 
 are equally applicable to my present suggestion ; for 
 over-population is the chief cause of lawlessness, and 
 as lawlessness prevents the investment of that ca- 
 pital which might employ the super-abundant labour, 
 there can be no remedy for an ever-increasing evil 
 except death by famine, or emigration. To this para- 
 mount consideration I will add three or four others not 
 -unimportant. Without a large measure of emigra- 
 tion you render it physically and morally impossible 
 for your new Poor Law to work beneficially, or long 
 to work at all. That crop upon which nearly our whole 
 population was fed, and which, underlying our entire 
 social system, alone afforded subsistence to one- 
 fourth of our numbers — that crop, which to the 
 labourer was food and to the farmer food and money, 
 having failed, we are reduced to nearly the same 
 condition as if one-fourth had been suddenly added 
 to our numbers. If in England your population 
 were suddenly increased by one quarter; or if, which 
 
LET. III.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 157 
 
 amounts to the same thing, your manufactures were 
 in a moment to break down ; if, for instance, your 
 supplies of cotton were wholly to cease, like our 
 potatoes, you would neither be able to provide em- 
 ployment for those multitudes whom your cotton- 
 mills had rejected, nor to support them unem- 
 ployed on the rates, though backed by your enor- 
 mous unrated property, a support of which little is 
 known in Ireland. As for your common cry that 
 " Irish property must support Irish poverty," you 
 will find, on examination, that under average cir- 
 cumstances it is a truism, and that, as applied to the 
 existing state of things, it cannot embody the truth, 
 because it does not contain a meaning. Until the 
 potato failure, Irish property did support Irish 
 poverty. From what source do you suppose our 
 beggars derived their subsistence ? From English 
 or from Irish land ? A professed poor law is but a 
 more scientific mode of distributing the burden. 
 Irish property supported, however, as much poverty 
 as it could bear; of which the proof is, that all 
 classes in Ireland were poor of their kind. The 
 highest class were, of course, ill-paid functionaries, 
 as the fund on which they depended was small, and 
 had many prior claimants ; the tenants were farmers 
 without capital ; the labourers for half the year had 
 no hire ; and the beggars were the poorest beggars 
 in the world. Perhaps with none of these classes, 
 certainly with none but the last, can British society 
 
\99 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. III. 
 
 dispense : and remember that it is good economy to 
 allow to each, until absolutely cashiered, the wages 
 which nature assigns to it, and without which it can- 
 not keep its tools in order and do its work. When the 
 gunwale touches the water, Sir, I would not advise you 
 to press the boat down even a quarter of an inch 
 lower. Ask yourselfwhat you mean by property. How 
 comes it that Australia, which is larger than Ireland, 
 could not at once support the inhabitants of Rutland } 
 Property is not land, but the produce of labour ex- 
 pended on land, or on aught else ; and it ^' supports 
 poverty" chiefly by paying wages to poor people. A 
 proportion must, therefore, exist between the number 
 of people whom land can support, and the number whom 
 it can profitably employ. The balance was seriously 
 inclining against us even before the potato failure ; 
 and if the existing labour fund, instead of being in- 
 vested in reproductive labour, should be applied for 
 the most part to unproductive labour, such as the 
 distribution of Indian meal, no omnipotence of Par- 
 liament will prevail upon a property every day wan- 
 ing, to support a poverty every day waxing. Property 
 supports the poor through that labour which produces 
 property : if you would make it support any large 
 number in a mode prejudicial to labour, you may 
 indeed feed the poor for one year on the fruit hang- 
 ing from the bough, but you have cut down the tree. 
 Another motive for the encouragement of emi- 
 gration is to be found in the fact that you are a 
 
LET. III.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 159 
 
 manufacturing people, and that, while your other 
 customers buy your manufactures at the rate of 
 ten shillings or a pound, your own colonists con- 
 sume at the rate of £b or ^10 a head annually. 
 Remember, also, that you have to guard not only 
 against the ordinary competition of foreign nations, 
 but also against the caprices of trade. Take an 
 instance. The discovery of the passage round the 
 Cape of Good Hope left the commercial cities of 
 Italy like stranded ships, and rolled a tide of pro- 
 sperity up every English river. If some mechanical 
 change, such as a canal cut through the Isthmus 
 of Suez, should readjust the balance (and to pre- 
 dict of the future is as hard as it is dangerous to 
 disregard it) ; or if, when railroads become a cheap 
 means of conveyance, and when all the cities of 
 Europe are connected by iron rivers with double 
 tides that run in opposite directions, at the rate of 
 thirty miles an hour, your dominion of the waters 
 should avail you less than at present for the pur- 
 poses of European commerce ; under such circum- 
 stances your markets would be steadier as well as 
 larger, in proportion as you had multiplied your 
 colonies. Of your existing trade, more than a 
 fourth is carried on with your own colonies and the 
 United States, once your colonies. The declared 
 value of British and Irish produce and manufacture 
 exported in 1846 to the colonies was £8,813,340, 
 that of the exports to the United States £6,830,460. 
 
160 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. III. 
 
 The total declared value of British exports was 
 ^£57,786,876. If these countries had never been 
 peopled, what proportion of your present commercial 
 and manufacturing population could find employ- 
 ment, or indeed could exist ? The practical power of 
 a nation, that political momentum, as it may be called, 
 which is the joint result of its physical energies and 
 its capital, depends in no small degree on the pres- 
 sure of a population, though not crowded, yet large 
 in proportion to the territory it occupies. With a 
 smaller trade and a smaller population, could England 
 have proved equal to her great trials during the early 
 part of this century ? In founding new colonies you 
 will form new allies as well as markets for your goods ; 
 and Ireland, no longer pauperised, will be the greatest 
 of them all. 
 
 The lamentable sufferings endured by emigrants 
 this year, notwithstanding the activity and zeal of 
 your Emigration Commissioners and Colonial Agents, 
 who made the best use of the small resources at their 
 command, sufficiently prove the necessity of a State 
 superintendence of emigration on a large and com-- 
 manding scale. Emigrants left to their own resources 
 have now only to choose between fever and possible 
 famine abroad, or pestilence and certain starvation at 
 home. There is, however, a moral motive in favour 
 of colonization, which, with a true statesman, would 
 weigh yet more. Of all the evils resulting from over- 
 population, the worst by far is the moral evil which 
 
LET. III.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 161 
 
 it engenders. This requires a speedy as well as 
 effectual remedy. In proportion as Irish society 
 becomes exasperated and demoralised, Irish emi- 
 grants will cease to be, what they now are, amongst 
 the best in the world. Is it not better, Sir, that 
 these should be the harbingers of your civilization 
 than the pauperised and anti-English fugitives from 
 a famine, the indirect result of that past legislation 
 which tempted and permitted a whole people to 
 depend upon one crop ? 
 
 It is said," These are things that should be left to 
 themselves." It may be that the " laissez faire" 
 principle works well in mature society ; but colonies 
 are children ; and it does not follow that, if you 
 leave your children to go their own way, that way 
 will prove the best for themselves or for you. 
 Hitherto the State has contributed to her colonies 
 little except her convicts, a species of guano 
 manure which has helped to force up a rapid crop 
 of industrial improvements ; it remains to be seen 
 whether this method of breeding great nations by 
 sending out your worst characters to those re- 
 gions in which laws are weakest, religion crudest, 
 and opinion least formed, is to create a society 
 as edifying morally as it may be (for a time) phy- 
 sically prosperous, and as worthy of perpetuating 
 the lineaments of England as it is certain to trans- 
 mit her name. In your colonial as in your Irish 
 policy you have sins of commission, and yet 
 
162 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. III. 
 
 more of omission, to repent and to repair. Where 
 nations, and not companies, are to be bred, the com- 
 plete seed of society must be sown. Amongst the 
 earlier nations of the world, and under far less favour- 
 able circumstances, thus much was effected. The out- 
 ward aspect of the paternal land alone was changed ; 
 emigrants, representing the various classes of the 
 country they had left, went forth together, and taking 
 with them its religion, its laws, its arts, and its man- 
 ners, continued associated in civil polity, and created 
 new States which re-embodied the image of the parent 
 city and transmitted its greatness. In mere material 
 advance, the progress of recent English colonies has, 
 perhaps, been the most rapid ever known ; but this in 
 itself is a doubtful gain. Let the State look to it : 
 rejoice in your colonists., not your convicts : rejoice 
 in them as they are good men and good citizens, not 
 as they are multitudinous only and busy ; and if 
 England cannot increase like the nations of old, by 
 national propagation, do not make it your boast that 
 she has vivified more vermin than the less pampered 
 nations of Europe. Difficulties there are ; but you- 
 are summoned to overcome them ; and the necessity 
 must find a man who will find the means. 
 
 Surely, Sir, it is an a priori argument in favour 
 of emigration, that in large districts in Ireland 
 there exists a starving population of two persons 
 to an acre, and that in New Brunswick there are 
 11,000,000 of acres nearly uninhabited in the hands 
 
LET. III.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 163 
 
 of tlie Crown. Surely it is to be deprecated that iij 
 Ireland a million of labourers should pine for work, 
 and in Australia a million of sheep should be boiled 
 down into tallow for want of shepherds. I know where 
 this argument stops ; but I decline to believe that, 
 because there is a limit to its application, it is there- 
 fore without a great and guiding significance. This 
 is not the place to propound a complete scheme of 
 colonization ; yet 1 will say that, the more 1 have re- 
 flected on the subject, the more has it seemed to me 
 practicable for the State, if she will not bow away 
 her responsibilities like a frightened Irish poor law 
 guardian, at once to elevate the character of emigra- 
 tion and to extend it to the measure of large but not 
 unreasonable expectations. I will mention some 
 suggestions, without comment. 
 
 First. To receive a larger than the usual number of 
 emigrants, it is absolutely necessary that the demand 
 for labour in the American colonies should be in- 
 creased. Might not public works be undertaken for 
 this purpose, promoted at once by the empire and 
 by the colony ? I can imagine no investment more 
 likely to be useful. Besides the reproductive na- 
 ture of the works to be undertaken (without which 
 the progress of a colony may be delayed until some 
 formidable rival has grown up and made its neigh- 
 bourhood precarious), the home country would thus 
 be enabled to enrich those paupers whom previously 
 it could not maintain; whose passage-money is hardly 
 
164 ENGLISH MISRULE [lET. IIL 
 
 more than one year's interest of what is required for 
 their support at home ; whose turbulence is a heavier 
 tax than their food; and whose gradual degradation 
 is a greater evil than their sufferings. 
 
 Secondly. Would it not be possible to plant the 
 germs of new colonial establishments, like those which 
 within the last ten years have sprung up on the 
 southern coast of Australia ? It is a common, but 
 unfair answer to this question, to reply that such a 
 plantation cannot be effected at a cost less than £20 
 a head, and therefore that our demand amounts to 
 one of £20,000,000 or £30,000,000 sterHng. My sug- 
 gestion relates only to the germs of colonies which 
 in a short time would be able, if their positions were 
 well chosen, to import thousands of immigrants annu- 
 ally by the proceeds of their land sales, and pro- 
 bably to maintain themselves by their exports. The 
 colonies of South Australia and Port Phillip at pre- 
 sent contain about 50,000 inhabitants, a very small 
 proportion of which came from Sydney and Van 
 Diemen's Land. To have sent over that number of 
 colonists at the expense of the State would have, 
 cost (if you count them at £20 per head) the sum of 
 jgl, 000,000. What has. the State actually expended 
 on these colonies ? On the latter, I believe, little or 
 nothing ; on the former, about one-fourth of the sum I 
 have named ; and that only on account of accidental 
 difficulties, the result of over-speculation. In the 
 meantime they will for many a year import thou- 
 
LET. Ill J AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 165 
 
 sands of labourers who would otherwise be starving 
 at home. 
 
 Thirdly. Might not private capital and enterprise 
 be made available through the instrumentality of com- 
 panies, not by committing to their short-sighted 
 policy the destinies of infant nations, but by in- 
 trusting to their energy distinct functions of detail, 
 such as the transmission of emigrants, the sale of 
 particular tracts, and the undertaking of specific 
 public works ? 
 
 Fourthly. Colonial labour markets being thus ex- 
 tended, might not proprietors be empowered to expend 
 some portion of the money borrowed by them from 
 the State for improvements at present often rendered 
 impossible by local disturbance, in paying the pas- 
 sage money of a portion of their poor, who hunger 
 and thirst after emigration .? It is at best but a sad 
 spectacle to behold a race profoundly attached to 
 their country, imploring leave to bid adieu for ever 
 to a mother who will not support them with her milk, 
 and who summons them too imperatively to her rest. 
 Those who have their true interests at heart will 
 scruple to retain them, or attract them in larger multi- 
 tudes, by the delusion of an employment that must 
 soon be over ; but surely, if the bond of country is to 
 be torn asunder, there ought to be the least possible 
 disruption of other ties ; and comforts as well as neces- 
 saries ought to be provided for them by those who 
 are conferring the last of many gifts, though the 
 
I6i5 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. III. 
 
 most welcome. Moreover, part of the money thus 
 lent will be recovered by the proprietors from the 
 emigrants after they have become prosperous (I 
 speak of this from knowledge and experience); and 
 the State will thus have succeeded in a desirable but 
 difficult matter, that of making the emigrants contri- 
 bute to the fund expended on their own passage. 
 
 Fifthly. Might not many improvements be made 
 as to details of colonial management, the aggregate of 
 which would amount to much ; such as a better sys- 
 tem than the State has yet provided for the distri- 
 bution of newly arrived labourers, who may starve in 
 the streets of Sydney while hundreds of farmers 
 would compete for them in the interior of the 
 country ? Might not a portion of the money, occa- 
 sionally required by the colony for the importation 
 of labourers, be safely advanced on the credit of the 
 colonial lands ? To prevent the possibility of the 
 labour market becoming accidentally overstocked 
 by an unforeseen immigration, might not the Govern- 
 ment undertake some small public works susceptible 
 of discontinuance and resumption at will, to provide 
 a temporary employment ? Are there not means, 
 such as the sale of land with reserved lots, and a tax 
 upon wild lands, &c., which would increase the even- 
 tual value of colonial property ? Whoever reads 
 the evidence given before the recent Emigration 
 Committee of the House of Lords will be convinced 
 that, if but a few of the suggestions there made by 
 
LET. III.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 167 
 
 persons who have acquired a long experience in the 
 colonies, and have a deep stake in their fortunes, 
 should prove well founded, very much might be done 
 to promote colonization by a better management of 
 details. 
 
 Sixthly. It will be asked, How are the necessary 
 funds to be procured? I ask in return, Which 
 are the parties to be benefited ? The State 
 gains because she is thus relieved from the bur- 
 then that at present embarrasses all her move- 
 ments — Ireland is her "great difficulty;" and over- 
 population is the gi'eat difficulty of Ireland. She 
 gains, in the second place, because she provides a 
 market for the future industry of her children. 
 Proprietors gain, because, having room to move, 
 the faculties nominally theirs, become theirs in re- 
 ality. The colonies gain, because their resources 
 are unlocked. The emigrants gain, because, when 
 labour could not possibly come to them, they have 
 been enabled to go to the labour. Let then the fund 
 necessary be contributed by those four parties who 
 share in the profit ; and let each party, as far as pos- 
 sible, transact the details included within its proper 
 sphere. Useless works will not be undertaken if the 
 colonies have a due voice in the selection of them, 
 nor unfit emigrants be sent out if they have agents 
 at home sufficiently numerous to look after their 
 interests : the money spent upon passages will not 
 be squandered, if proprietors who are to repay it 
 
168 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. III. 
 
 are permitted to direct its application ; nor will the 
 enterprise of individual emigrants be repressed if 
 they are assisted by the public only in proportion 
 as they help themselves. 
 
 These suggestions are all founded upon one ob- 
 vious principle, which I hope is not to be despised 
 merely because every peasant who has to carry a 
 load understands it. It is this ; that the weight, which 
 locally and at the moment presses with an intolerable 
 force, should be evenly distributed and dispersed 
 over a larger space and time. The empire should 
 assist a member of the empire, and the future should 
 make an advance to aid the present, that what might 
 otherwise become a common pauperism may be 
 changed into a common and permanent wealth. 
 
 The first measure for Ireland passed by the Im- 
 perial Parliament was Martial Law — a sad necessity : 
 let not a great remedial measure, part of the foun- 
 dation of Irish prosperity, be the last introduced 
 into that assembly, lest it should be too late. If 
 you cannot assist us, at least do not mock us by 
 stating in opposition, I will not say to common 
 sense, but certainly to the evidence of our senses, 
 that we require no assistance. Do not tell us of 
 the industrial resources of our country : we are 
 acquainted with these as well as you can be ; and 
 therefore we know why they are not ours. They 
 exist in Ireland as the strength of the man exists 
 latently in the child : if you wish the child to grow 
 
LET. III.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 169 
 
 to man's estate, do not heap upon him the burden of 
 a man. Above all, do not imagine that he can support 
 it, if it is flung upon him suddenly and from a height. 
 
 III. The third suggestion which I shall make, is 
 on the necessity of instituting in Ireland a large 
 system of agricultural education. If such assistance 
 is useful elsewhere, is it not absolutely necessary 
 where a sudden dispensation has rendered the 
 established method of agriculture as obsolete as 
 the canon law, and made a system altogether differ- 
 ent, and nearly unknown, indispensable ? Without 
 an improved agriculture, emigration, though it will 
 for the present diminish pauperism, will not neces- 
 sarily increase the relative productiveness of the soil ; 
 for the cultivation of the land may recede in pro- 
 portion as the numbers it has to sustain are dimi- 
 nished; in which case, Ireland might again be visited 
 by those famines from which she was not exempt 
 before she numbered 2,000,000 of souls. It is also 
 to be remembered that the diminution of numbers is 
 a thing necessary only for a short time, in order to 
 give her that peace without which her resources can- 
 not be developed. Let those persons who imagine 
 that Ireland is not over-peopled, because her ideal 
 resources might sustain a larger number, ask them- 
 selves whether the fact that England may hereafter 
 support a population larger by one-fourth than that 
 which she now includes, proves that she would be 
 
 i 
 
170 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. III. 
 
 able to maintain that additional number at present. 
 Long before she was populous Ireland was over- 
 peopled, because she was not allowed to make her 
 resources available in the same proportion as her 
 numbers increased. Give her but the key of her 
 casket (you snatched it from her long since, and 
 now forget where you have hidden it), and in twenty 
 years hence she may support 2,000,000 of free and 
 contented children, beyond the number of outcasts 
 that now rot above the mines of her hidden trea- 
 sures. Surely, if you have the smallest faculty either 
 legislative or administrative, it would not over-task 
 it were you to establish throughout Ireland, at no 
 wide intervals, agricultural schools, with model 
 farms, to which the farmers could send their sons. 
 In every national school a manual of agriculture 
 ought to form part of the course. If to each school 
 you were also to attach a garden farm of five 
 acres, it would not only increase the salary of the 
 master and bind him to the spot, but would also 
 instruct the children in the science of green crops 
 and the art of using their hands, cure many a head- 
 ache, send them back better pleased to their books, 
 quicken many a smile upon faces foredoomed to 
 tears, and give the sons of a happier age the best 
 possible introduction to their native land. 
 
 IV. The fourth practical hint which I would 
 throw out to you is the necessity of amending your 
 
LET. III.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 171 
 
 amended Poor Law, if you would give it a chance 
 of permanence. At best it must encounter great 
 obstacles, from the difficulty of finding in the country 
 the machinery necessary to work it. That machinery 
 ought to be tough and seasoned, and you have not 
 extended to this country the practical education 
 of local business which your own has enjoyed for 
 centuries. Besides your numerous subjects for asto- 
 nishment, there is yet another reserved for you if you 
 suppose that Irish guardians, suddenly summoned 
 to the impossible task of subduing a famine by a Poor 
 Law, will acquit themselves either with the same 
 success or perseverance as English guardians, 
 trained to the task from their youth up, and required 
 only to administer an accustomed relief to an ordi- 
 nary pauperism. The best assistance which you can 
 give them is that which you found necessary at 
 home — a test of destitution. Increase then the 
 number of our poor houses, which at present cannot 
 afford relief to more than about 100,000 paupers. 
 In England if you had introduced no test, the con- 
 sequence would have been the gradual ruin of the 
 country ; in Ireland there is a chance that the result 
 may be nothing worse than the sudden ruin of the 
 measure. I should regret its failure both be- 
 cause great immediate suffering would be the con- 
 sequence, no substitute being provided for the relief 
 of the people; and because on the subject of a poor 
 law I agree more nearly with you than with those 
 
 I 2 
 
172 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. III. 
 
 whose judgment I hold in more respect. I fear, 
 however, that our conchisions, so far as they concur, 
 have been arrived at on very different principles. I 
 believe that the State morally guarantees at least 
 the lives of her subjects as long as they obey her 
 laws, and are willing to obey the great law of 
 nature — work. Though in the abstract one tend- 
 ency of poor-law relief may be to discourage in- 
 dustry, I believe that other tendencies are at work 
 also, and that the worst of its tendencies will not 
 necessarily be realized if a sound system of moral 
 education also exists, and if the relief afforded be 
 severe and unalluring. I believe that it is only in 
 savage life that the fear of death is necessary to 
 alarm idleness, and that in a civilized community 
 hope is a more effectual spur to steady exertion than 
 fear. I believe that the poor man may advance on 
 his road with a firmer courage when he feels that his 
 country cares for him ; and when, without hearing 
 far behind him the cry of the pursuer, he sees in 
 the distance the goal of an honest ambition. I be- 
 lieve that where applied without necessity, not only 
 the tendency but the effect of a Poor Law must be 
 to enervate and impoverish : but that in a society 
 crowded and pushing foi-ward it shuts out worse 
 corruptions. It is said to supersede private charity. 
 I believe that where a country is greatly over- 
 peopled, the amount of pauperism will be such as 
 either to preclude private charity, or degrade it to 
 
LET. III.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 173 
 
 that indiscriminate bounty which curses hira that 
 gives and him that takes ; but that where the State 
 has under-propped the social edifice, private charity 
 has again its sphere, being left to deal with indi- 
 vidual casualties, not with classes and with their 
 chronic condition; and that it may well exert itself 
 in saving a poor and deserving man, not from death 
 by starvation, but from the workhouse. This creed 
 is, however, consistent with the strongest disappro- 
 bation of the amended Poor Law for Ireland. From 
 the want of religious and moral education and from 
 long corruptions of detail, the principle of a Poor 
 Law has never yet had a fair trial even in England : 
 in Ireland your late experiment is rash indeed. A 
 clever and apparently sincere writer proclaimed 
 not long since in a newspaper, with no uncommon 
 parade of sound principles misapplied, that now at 
 last Ireland must flourish, because she had the be- 
 nefit of English law, which did not consist so much 
 in king, lords, and commons, &c., as in the pa- 
 rochial system. I am not sure that the same law 
 would produce the same effect if it were applied 
 to a different purpose, and under different cir- 
 cumstances. But to waive this consideration, we 
 happen. Sir, not to have your parochial system. 
 Instmcted Englishmen often wander widely in their 
 conjectures about Ireland, from the habit of read- 
 ing books without knowing how to transpose and 
 interpret. All things are different in the two coun- 
 tries, and yet in each there is a relative con- 
 
174 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. III. 
 
 sistency ; accordingly, words have an utterly dif- 
 ferent meaning as applied to each, and you are 
 but deceived by the common nomenclature. You 
 stumble upon a theory, true or false in England, 
 here unmeaning; you buy one in a shop, or you 
 borrow one fi*om a friend, or snatch one from a 
 rival: — having got it, you become its slave, and 
 seek to square every Irish circle by its tyranny, 
 substituting the sensation for the sense of certainty, 
 and ready to stone any one who denies that the red 
 coat of an English soldier is exactly like the sound 
 of an Irish rebel's trumpet. Your parochial sys- 
 tem is altogether unlike ours. Our electoral divi- 
 sions are three times as large as your parishes, and 
 our unions as your unions. This you will say is a 
 question only of degree. The difference between 
 medicine and poison is one of degree. If you think 
 it unimportant, we do not; and therefore, you have 
 no excuse for not exchanging systems with us. 
 
 Suppose the case of an electoral division valued 
 at £30,000 per annum, in which there resides a pro- 
 prietor whose estate is rated at £3,000. Such a 
 proprietor may, if he has money or credit, give 
 considerable employment: yet he will diminish but 
 little the rate on the electoral division at large, and, 
 besides paying wages, he will have to pay a larger 
 rate than he did before, in proportion as his im- 
 provements have increased the rated value of his 
 property. Did you not substitute in England a 
 rent-charge in place of tithes, on the ground that 
 
LET. III.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 175 
 
 the latter had ceased to be a tribute from the ground, 
 which it may be called in early periods of cultiva- 
 tion, and had become a tax upon industry and a check 
 to the investment of capital ? In Turkey all men are 
 invited to trade as vigorously and grow as rich as they 
 can : but the moment any man in particular is known 
 to have realized the fruits of his industry, some 
 Pacha who does not believe in political economy 
 fines him severely lest he should grow avaricious. 
 Why should not Irish industry be "stimulated" (to 
 use a phrase now fashionable) rather after the Eng- 
 lish than the Turkish manner ? 
 
 I do not recommend a town-land rating. If it were 
 possible, I should think it inexpedient : but whereas 
 your problem was that great one, how to reconcile 
 individual responsibility with joint action, your solu- 
 tion of it has been to swamp the former and paralyze 
 the latter. You will ask what practical evil results 
 from the size of our unions. The evil is that the 
 business becomes oppressive, the detail unma- 
 nageable, and the more tightly we grasp it the 
 more quickly the sand slips through our fingers. 
 The physical obstacles alone are not inconsiderable. 
 The district being large, it is necessary for the guard- 
 ians to meet often ; the distances being gi-eat, the 
 best of them often cannot meet, and the business is 
 left; to a knot of guardians whose residence is not 
 remote from the workhouse. You may think it a great 
 scandal that a man should scruple to go fifteen or 
 
176 ENGLISH MISRULE [lET. III. 
 
 twenty miles and back again once every week, and 
 yet there may be very humble reasons for this 
 scruple. He may have other business, or he may 
 not have a horse, or he may have an objection to 
 being shot ; and an unpopular man whose iniquities 
 have just been commented on by the less scrupulous 
 part of the English press, one of those landlords who 
 are occasionally described by it as " fiends or some- 
 thing worse," and who, as you assure our inflamma- 
 ble populace, are waiting with impatience to see the 
 people around them starved to death, shot down, or 
 hanged up,merely that the rates maybe diminished, — 
 such a person would not be always safe in calculating 
 on Irish field sports not beginning before the first of 
 September. 
 
 There is one respect in which our Poor Law differs 
 wisely from yours ; I allude to that provision which 
 divides the rate between landlord and tenant. The 
 chance which the law has of working well consists 
 in its tendency to bind these two classes in a league 
 of mutual defence, by the large employment of la- 
 bour, that labour being encouraged by the landlord's 
 liberality as well as example, but applied chiefly by 
 the tenant in occupation. Should these two parties 
 possess, even in appearance, an opposite interest, 
 should each imagine that the plank can sustain 
 but one, then neither can possibly do his duty, 
 and each will save what he can to provide for the 
 evil day. 
 
LET. III.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 177 
 
 V. The next observation which I shall make is on 
 the expediency of undertaking useful public works 
 in Ireland, such as railways, piers, harbours, and the 
 like. It would be very unreasonable, if because you 
 failed recently in an extempore attempt to execute 
 worthless works through the instrumentality of pau- 
 per labourers, you were to shrink from undertaking 
 useful works which could not be executed to better 
 purpose than at a crisis when employment is needed. 
 Upon those works you should employ only able- 
 bodied men, and these only as long as they worked 
 honestly. In the case of public works, as well 
 as private employment, it is well worthy of con- 
 sideration whether an emigration fund might not 
 be created by giving a preference to young men 
 desirous to emigrate, on condition of a propor- 
 tion being reserved for that purpose out of their 
 wages. 
 
 The reclamation of waste lands might occasionally, 
 and on a small scale, be useful as an example and 
 incitement ; but such enterprises ought for the most 
 part to be left in the hands of private individuals, or 
 of societies, such as many a pauperised union might 
 perhaps supply. In the natural course of things, the 
 land first cultivated is that which yields its increase 
 with good will, and meets its master's hand halfway; 
 at a later period men are reduced to wring a reluctant 
 harvest from a niggardly soil which will do little more 
 than pay a small interest on the money invested in it. 
 
 I 3 
 
178 ENGLISH MISRULE [lET. III. 
 
 Every year, however, as new capital seeks an invest- 
 ment, the circle of civilization is pushed further out, 
 and the new accessions of productive land are con- 
 temporaneous with a corresponding improvement in 
 agriculture at large. Such is the natural course, and 
 an intervention which disturbs it will hardly bring 
 about beneficial results. If the State steps in, and, 
 taking the matter into its own hands, does in ten years 
 the work of a century, the local improvements made, 
 though they may not even satisfy the needs of an 
 emergency, may yet outstrip the general progress of 
 society, and mar its proportions. Having also no 
 root in themselves, there is also a risk of their not 
 being permanent. Proprietors whose estates have 
 been relieved of a pauper population without their 
 participating in the expense and trouble, will not 
 have learned their lesson ; the poor will be deluded 
 by the promise of tracts more extensive than pro- 
 ductive ; population will again make a bound in ad- 
 vance ; and, when the void is filled up, agriculture 
 will have no margin left. The loss of the potato 
 throws also a great additional obstacle in the way of 
 reclaiming wastes. The first crop yielded by the 
 improved land was one of potatoes, and the indus- 
 trial detachments that waged war on the wilderness 
 thus carried their commissariat with them. This re- 
 source being now apparently cut off*, it would be ne- 
 cessary for a much longer time than before to supply 
 the new settlers with provision ab extra. In addition 
 
LET. III.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 179 
 
 to these considerations, T need not remark how much 
 any such officious proceeding would be at variance 
 with a well-known maxim, namely, that the State 
 should not forsake her proper sphere to intrude 
 into the regions of private enterprise. The utmost 
 improvements that are looked for would not provide 
 in the end for more than half a million of souls ; 
 and this temporary advantage would have been pur- 
 chased at the expense of the poor as well as the 
 rich, if, in the removal of obstacles, the State herself 
 had, by a questionable transgression of individual 
 rights, added to the existing insecurity of property, 
 and proportionally discouraged the general invest- 
 ment of capital in labour. Moreover, public money 
 expended upon emigration, railroads, harbours, &c., 
 ought to be laid out so as to produce a proportionate 
 outlay of private money, whereas that which is spent 
 in the reclamation of wastes will be the beginning 
 and the end ; unless, as is not improbable, the work 
 should require to be done a second time. 
 
 We must not mix up together two subjects so 
 different as the cultivation of waste lands by the 
 State, and the establishment of a class of small 
 proprietors in Ireland ; for, if we create a law for 
 two different purposes, it will probably effect nei- 
 ther. A class of small proprietors would confer 
 upon 'this country very great advantages, not only 
 of an economical, but of a moral and political 
 character. It would, in the first place, add to the 
 
180 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. III. 
 
 security of property, by widening the basis on which 
 it rests. It would give the poor a deeper stake in 
 the stability of all our institutions. It would break 
 that hard line of demarcation which at present se- 
 parates classes, and make it no longer coincident 
 with that which distinguishes orders and races. 
 Above all, by extending privileges and with them 
 responsibilities and duties, it would help to stamp 
 upon the minds of the people that great idea of law, 
 without which men may be subjects, but can hardly 
 be citizens likewise. The sale of estates in small 
 portions would therefore be a most desirable thing ; 
 but the small estates thus formed ought to be scat- 
 tered among the large ones. If they were all situ- 
 ated together in vast reclaimed tracts, it would be 
 difficult to make the same institutions work in the 
 aristocratic and democratic sections of the country. 
 I do not see, however, why the State might not con- 
 tribute by gift or loan to companies for the reclama- 
 tion of waste lands, as well as to companies formed 
 for other useful purposes, such as the promotion of 
 fisheries, the working of mines. 
 
 VI. A law which should give the tenant security 
 for the value of real and permanent improvements 
 would be useful, because it would call forth the 
 capital of that class whose capital has been the most 
 unemployed, and the labour of that class which least 
 understands its value. Such a security perhaps 
 
LET. IIT.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 181 
 
 would best be effected by provisions for the pur- 
 pose of recording and giving validity to all written 
 agreements between landlord and tenant. This 
 proposition is not to be confounded with that wild 
 scheme of " tenant-right," which would entitle the 
 tenant to remain in possession at the existing rent, 
 or to sell, at his pleasure, not merely his interest in 
 his farm, valued according to the conditions of his 
 lease, but the farm itself considered as a property with 
 a fixed charge upon it. Such a " tenant-right" means 
 neither more nor less than the right of the tenant to 
 the property of the landlord, who would become but 
 an annuitant on his own estate, a public pensioner 
 without more duties or responsibilities than a fund- 
 holder. In those parts of the country where there 
 are no manufactures to disguise the evil, the 
 natural effect of such a system would be discovered 
 very soon. The capital which ought to be spent 
 upon the improvement of a farm would be sunk in 
 buying up the interest of the former tenant. With 
 the exception of the farmers already in occu- 
 pation, that class would therefore not be en- 
 riched. The higher orders would be disinherited ; 
 and the poor man, not having the money neces- 
 sary to purchase the interest of a farm, would 
 be excluded by an impassable barrier from the 
 farmer class. One generation of one class would 
 be enriched ; and the rights of all other classes, 
 actual and potential, would be sacrificed. 
 
182 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. III. 
 
 VII. If you wish property to fulfil its duties, enable 
 property to enforce its legal rights. Make the laws 
 against subdivision of land, and those for enforcing 
 covenants, operative in detail. Abolish those technical 
 obstacles which render the enforcement of contracts 
 so expensive, tedious and uncertain, as to be practi- 
 cally impossible. Nothing could more conduce to 
 agricultural improvements than that landlords should 
 build good farm houses ; yet at present, if a landlord 
 undertakes such outlay, he has not the power, without 
 much difficulty and delay, of recovering his own pro- 
 perty on the violation of those conditions on which it 
 was let. This is but one out of many hindrances, se- 
 parately harassing, and ruinous in their aggregate, 
 which leave a proprietor in possession of faculties on 
 condition he does not apply them ; privileges till he 
 uses them ; an occasional power of doing injustice ; 
 and a general dominion over his estate about equal to 
 that which he exercises over the air above it. If you 
 were but to render it obligatory to commit all en- 
 gagements to paper, you would preclude much litiga-. 
 tion and promote combination for lawful purposes. 
 
 VIII. Laws which should diminish the prepos- 
 terous legal expenses connected with the transfer 
 of property, as well as simplify proceedings and 
 abridge litigation, would open out new roads to 
 social improvement and be very popular among all 
 classes except that of lawyers. 
 
LET. III.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 183 
 
 IX. A bill was introduced into the last Parlia- 
 ment for the purpose of enabling the proprietors of 
 entailed estates to sell a portion of them under cer- 
 tain conditions, for the purpose of liberating the rest 
 from debt. I would advise you to introduce it again, 
 and carry it through. Besides many lesser benefits, 
 it would not only enable many a man of honour to 
 become an honest man, but would actually change 
 many an estate, now as dangerous as a rock under 
 water, into an honest estate. 
 
 , X. Grants in aid of municipal funds for the pur- 
 pose of improving the sanatory condition of large 
 towns, as well as of attaching to them parks and 
 gardens for the health and recreation of the citizens, 
 would be a useful object in itself, and would provide 
 employment where it is much wanted at the present 
 moment. Schools of design, academies, museums, 
 &c., have, I believe, been established in some of the 
 great towns in England, and are almost universally 
 attached to those in the more civilized foreign 
 countries. Perhaps there is no countr}^ that stands 
 more in need of such assistance than Ireland, or 
 that would repay it so quickly. But this cannot be 
 counted as among the pressing needs of the time. 
 
 XI. Still more useful perhaps would it be if there 
 were established in this country schools for the chil- 
 dren of the higher classes, based upon that religious 
 
184 ENGLISH MISRULE [lET. III. 
 
 and patriotic principle on which the early collegiate 
 schools of England were founded, and in connection 
 with that discipline from which they have degene- 
 rated. The great moral purposes of such an insti- 
 tution can never be attained in a school which is 
 only set up as a pecuniary speculation. To breed 
 up gentlemen, a school must be in the hands of gen- 
 tlemen, for whom some generous provision has been 
 made, and whose toils as instructors are mitigated 
 by the humanities of a fellowship in letters, the 
 family tie of chapel, library, and hall, and, above all, 
 by a consciousness of the dignity of their calling. In 
 these establishments the boys should be thoroughly 
 instructed in the classics and in the language and 
 grammar of their country ; and every thing around 
 them should be an auxiliary to religion, morals, and 
 manners. Such would seem to have been the 
 original intention of our schools of royal founda- 
 tion. One such institution has more recently been 
 founded in Ireland by the liberality of individuals : 
 but more such are required ; and although the 
 patriotism of Irishmen could direct itself to no 
 worthier task than their establishment, yet the State 
 might well contribute to an undertaking in which 
 she has so deep an interest. Those classes that 
 represent mind and receive reverence, sit at the 
 centre of the social fabric ; and the little money 
 necessary for the purpose of making them apt for 
 their office is not money thrown away. 
 
LET. IV.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 185 
 
 LETTER IV. 
 
 Necessity of acting on a large Principle. — A Cure worth its Cost. — Self- 
 love one Cause of English Dislike to Ireland. — England has her 
 Blemishes as well as Ireland. — Mining Districts, — Manufacturing 
 System. — False Civilization. — Alienation of Classes. — India. — The 
 Colonies. — English Pauperism. — No Popery. — Covetousness. — Verbal 
 Truth compatible with HoUowness and Pretence. — Some Characteristics 
 of the Irish Peasant. — Position of an Irish Proprietor. — Dangers that 
 lie before England. — Their connection with her present Policy towards 
 Ireland. — Both Countries now on their trial. — Safety only in a true 
 Union. — Two Destinies lie before England, each connected with her 
 present Course. — The Bankruptcy of a great National Company. — The 
 possible Greatness of a united Empire founded on Virtue and on 
 Trade. — Practical Hints as to Principles of Irish Policy. — What has 
 been effected by an approach to Union. 
 
 Sir, 
 In my last letter I mentioned certain pressing in- 
 conveniences, with which England cannot fail to be 
 visited, unless she closes with the present oppor- 
 tunity of uniting Ireland to her by the bonds of 
 mutual interest and affection ; and I then proceeded 
 to indicate a few remedial measures likely to make 
 that union a blessing to England, instead of a curse, 
 by removing those two great evils, poverty and law- 
 lessness, which will continue to be the scourge of 
 the empire till they are effectually dealt with. On 
 
186 ENGLISH MISRULE [lET. IV. 
 
 those remedial measures I touched but sHghtly; 
 because the object of these letters is one more 
 largely practical than any specific measure : but 
 those who approve the general tenour of my sugges- 
 tions will easily acquire far more valuable informa- 
 tion, as to the necessary details, than I pretend to 
 supply. In this concluding letter my purpose is to 
 urge upon you the danger of rashly throwing re- 
 medial measures to one side, and the necessity 
 of rising above petty considerations, and carry- 
 ing out a consistent, simple and remedial policy 
 in Ireland. Such a course would deal at once with 
 all our evils ; and, in the absence of it, you will 
 struggle in vain with the least of them. The actions 
 of men are, however, often determined not by the 
 motives which they assign to others or to them- 
 selves, but by an influence of which they are un- 
 conscious ; at one time an aspiration which scarcely 
 has a name, or a great creative idea, which secretly 
 moulds their immature conceptions; and, at other 
 times, a mere passion or obscure pre;iudice. Believ-* 
 ing that that nobler England, which never before was 
 found on a great occasion unequal to a great exer- 
 tion, is at present disinclined to adopt a course 
 worthy of her by reason of the strong distaste 
 felt to Ireland by a certain meaner England, the 
 enemy of both countries ; and believing that distaste 
 to proceed mainly from inordinate self-love, I shall 
 in this letter point out the not surprising fact, 
 
LET. IV.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 187 
 
 that England has blemishes as well as Ireland ; 
 from which it may be inferred that each country 
 would do better to repent of her own sins than to 
 open her eyes exclusively to those of her neighbour. 
 I shall then drop a few brief hints on Irish character, 
 Irish society, and the principles of a sound policy 
 in Ireland. Finally, I shall describe two different 
 destinies, which probably lie before England ; be- 
 tween which she must herself decide, and which 
 will be decided in a large measure by the course 
 now adopted towards Ireland ; one of these desti- 
 nies being a short-lived prosperity succeeded by a 
 shameful fall ; the other, the consolidation of a great, 
 a virtuous and a united empire. 
 
 To revert at once to what is practical — do you not 
 think. Sir, that your countrymen might spend some 
 of their leisure time as usefully in passing such 
 remedial measures as I have roughly indicated, as 
 in calling Ireland bad names ? But some of these 
 measures will cost money. Certainly they will; 
 but remember that the first loss is the least. How 
 often have you said that you scorned to buy an 
 inferior article that must wear out soon and is but 
 a sham — like empirical legislation. I have already 
 proved to you, that lose you must by inaction, though 
 gain you may by timely vigour : why then lose time 
 also by choosing where there is a choice for the will 
 but none for the reason ? The medicine will not be 
 the better for being sipped. In a town near this 
 
188 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. IV. 
 
 place there resides an honest and thriving, but very 
 obstinate tradesman, who had lately a diseased leg, 
 but could by no means be prevailed on to allow any 
 one to prescribe for him but himself; and whose 
 mode of treating the malady was to eat whatever he 
 pleased, for his appetite was good. His opinion was 
 that he had already spent too much on his leg. Phy- 
 sicians at last came in, who told him to his surprise 
 (for they not abiding in his house cared nothing for 
 his temper), that he and his leg could no longer go 
 on living together, but that they did not know how 
 to cut it off. The end of the matter was that he had 
 to send to Dublin for the Surgeon -General, who 
 made peace between him and his leg, charging him, 
 however, a fee equal to one year's profits. If you 
 have been as obstinate hitherto as this man. Sir, I 
 hope you will end by being as wise. 
 
 From the beginning, you had but the alternative 
 of keeping Ireland your slave, or making her your 
 mate ; and from the moment that you swerved from 
 the former, you should have adopted the latter 
 policy ; unless you had a demonstration of the fact 
 that it had been the will not of England, but of 
 Providence, that Ireland should be always poor and 
 England rich, just as some races are black and 
 others white, some animals are web-footed and others 
 have cloven hoofs. All your eminent statesmen are 
 now agreed that the very best possible thing you 
 can do with Ireland is to make her prosperous, i 
 
LET. IV.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 189 
 
 doubt whether there is one of them who does not 
 speak the truth in saying that he wishes her well. If, 
 then, it is not the will, but the power, that is want- 
 ing to them ; and if knowledge and money are 
 power; and if the former might be acquired by 
 your legislators with less labour than a lawyer 
 bestows on the studies necessary for his profession, 
 do you not think that the latter might also be in some 
 way found ? Suppose that all those eminent states- 
 men were to go to their masters, and make a 
 joint declaration that capital wisely invested in the 
 redemption of Ireland would pay an interest of 
 seven per cent., would not the middle classes com- 
 mand them at once to spend boldly .? Would they 
 venture to answer No ? I hope not. What can be 
 said of a country that does not allow its wisest and 
 strongest to govern it, but that it is a foolish and 
 weak country ? In all countries the few govern, 
 and the fewest direct. If a nation be not directed 
 by what is high and thoughtful, or governed by 
 what is strong and pure, what can be said, but that 
 it carries its brains in its belly, and its active 
 power in its heel rather than its hand ? What can 
 be hoped but that going ever ahead, it must reach 
 at last that slough in which no corn grows ? If those 
 who should be the servants of the people are made 
 the servants of its prejudices ; if those who should 
 vindicate its interests are required to pander to its 
 passions; if those whose high station, as states- 
 
190 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. IV. 
 
 men and ministers, summons them to the honour- 
 able office of chief toil, are permitted only to toil 
 in chains ; what else can a nation so infatuated 
 expect, but that those men who had asked in vain 
 to be trusted should decline to be used ? — that they 
 should refuse utterly to come down into the vulgar 
 fight, remaining apart and wasting away, till the 
 whole breed of capable statesmen had ceased from the 
 land .? The true statesmen of England at this day 
 are not Anti-Irish ; they belong to England, not to 
 a section of England; and not to England alone, 
 but to the empire. Let these men have their way. 
 They will be equal to the emergency, if they are 
 above one weakness — that of counting motives in- 
 stead of weighing reasons. An incapable politician 
 would now be tempted to determine his conduct 
 towards Ireland by a multitude of small considera- 
 tions — a little thought of English prejudice — a 
 little of Irish misconduct — a little jealousy of a rival 
 — little difficulties of detail, such as beset all great 
 measures — a little clinging to a maxim that gives way 
 — a little reaching after an advantage that fleets — 
 a little fright at our temporary financial pressure — a 
 compound of all these littlenesses would decide 
 a waverer. A great statesman would recognise a 
 great emergency, would meditate till he had dis- 
 covered a great principle, and then would act on it 
 at all hazards. 
 
 If the empire possesses neither money nor credit, 
 
LET. IV.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 191 
 
 there is no help for it ; and she had better tell us so 
 at once, for there is no shame in being poor, but 
 much in being one of those of whom the wise man 
 says " there is that saveth, but to his own hurt." If, 
 however, she possesses even credit, I suppose she is 
 as well justified in using it as an Irish proprietor can 
 be ; and she has, like him, the prospect that by 
 spending a guinea now she will be spared the ne- 
 cessity of spending ten guineas hereafter. If this 
 country were in a prosperous condition, and one-half 
 of England, owing to past oppressions and present 
 afflictions, were reduced to an economical state that 
 threatened destruction, would not this great empire be 
 as willing to spend a few millions within the next few 
 years, supposing such expenditure a necessary part 
 of the remedial process, as she was, when much less 
 rich, to spend thirty millions annually on a war with 
 a tyrant, or as the King of the French, though no 
 fool, has shown himself to spend seven millions on 
 the fortifications of Paris, and seventy on Algeria } 
 A great nation can even less afford to be parsi- 
 monious than profuse. She may err either way ; 
 but the chief danger of prodigality is not her spend- 
 ing too much, but spending foolishly ; for money 
 thrown away always involves worse losses than the 
 loss of money. It is but due to you to say, as we 
 have always said, that last year you were very libe- 
 ral in the money spent on palliatives. Money so 
 
192 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. IV. 
 
 spent must always do harm as well as good. But we 
 aspire after a cure, both as the cheapest and best 
 course. I hope that no person will assert, unless he 
 is prepared to prove his proposition, that to spend 
 money on a curative process would be against the 
 canons of political economy. These canons are 
 sometimes sophisticated by the doctors of the science; 
 and we live in times when several who believe in the 
 divinity have doubts as to the priest. Some people 
 laugh at political economy. I am disposed to think 
 it no laughing matter. I am not so much of ail adept 
 in the science as to presume to be its advocate ; but, 
 unless all financial matters happen by chance, they 
 must take place according to laws ; the science 
 must therefore exist, and it must exercise great in- 
 fluence whenever men clearly understand more than 
 its simpler axioms and their own definitions; or, 
 whenever, understanding its principles on a larger 
 scale, they can agree as to the application of them. 
 In the meantime one proof of the greatness of the 
 science is, that it always does great mischief, in a very 
 scientific way, when incautiously made use of. It 
 cost the empire about two millions last year in hard 
 cash ; it cost Ireland yet more, through the depre- 
 ciation of labour and a social disorganisation partly 
 the fault of the relief system and partly our own ; 
 and it allowed several hundreds of thousands to die, 
 not of starvation, but of the diseases produced by 
 
LET. IV.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 193 
 
 want. For the good done, and the good intended, 
 we are grateful : but we want a cure. Why not spend 
 money on that ? 
 
 If the truth were told, I fear the fact is that you 
 dislike us. Why do you dislike us ? Is it merely 
 because you have injured us ? No. It proceeds also 
 from inordinate self-love. You are, however, a lover of 
 justice as well as of self: and to the better of this ill- 
 matched pair I appeal. There are not wanting others 
 who act on a diplomacy the opposite of mine, and 
 experience the truth of that adage, " That if you can 
 but fill a man full of self-satisfaction, whatever flows 
 over will be the servitor's share." A powerful man, 
 now no more, was sometimes obliged to adopt this ex- 
 pedient with regard to the Irish people ; and in this 
 respect, as in others, he is closely imitated by his 
 graver English rival of the press, the agitator of 
 a more occupied and orderly people, who, however, 
 instead of assembling mobs, waits upon every gentle- 
 man at his own house, with six-columned broadsheet, 
 substitutes for the fascinations of the human eye and 
 voice, an accommodating disposition ever willing to 
 sit at one side of the domestic hearth, while the 
 tankard rests at the other; wields at least as vehe- 
 ment a tail ; has his country's good, as well as his 
 own, in no small measure at heart ; strongly resents 
 injustice and corruption in other people ; mimics, 
 impersonates, and gives a direction to much of the 
 good and evil that is abroad ; and apparently had 
 
 K 
 
194 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. IV. 
 
 sense enough to perceive long since, that Brentford 
 was not large enough to support two kings. It 
 does not suit me, Sir, to conciliate your affec- 
 tions in this manner ; you will, therefore, suffer 
 me to provoke your love, if I can, by stirring 
 up within you an insurrectionary sense of justice. 
 If you worship yourself, it is because somebody told 
 you that you are a god. I doubt the fact. An Irish- 
 man is sometimes reproached with a want of self- 
 respect : yet it may be urged, in extenuation, that 
 a recognition of what we are ought always to 
 occupy a humble place at the footstool of our self- 
 ideal, and that he may be acquainted with qualities 
 in himself unworthy of respect. Perhaps, Sir, in you 
 also there may lurk some less admirable qualities, 
 although you are not acquainted with them. If you 
 were acquainted with your own vices, you would 
 still, I hope, continue to hate ours ; but if you 
 were tempted to hate us too, you would remember 
 that the sword of justice is two-edged. Can there 
 be any thing more ridiculous than a solid conceit ? 
 Shall a judge cut capers, or harlequin be made 
 a judge ? What say you, Sir, of a mere robust, 
 determined, opulent man, descending from an omni- 
 bus, and walking up Fleet Street in the erroneous 
 opinion that he, a lord of bales, is a sort of respect- 
 able divinity ? Imagine such an one, the broker of the 
 nations, taking his stand at last upon 'Change, lifting 
 his hands up in worship, and giving thanks thus to 
 
LET. IV.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 195 
 
 that exacting divinity — himself: — " Lord ! I thank 
 thee that I am not as other men are, or even as this 
 Celt. My granaries are enlarged : I am filled 
 with marrow and fatness ;" and so to proceed ; " I 
 hate superstitious vanities : I give tithes of nothing 
 that 1 possess ; I hardly pray one day out of seven." 
 What say you, Sir .? Must not any genuine English 
 merchant who passed by, the representative of that 
 manly and uncovetous industry which once was emi- 
 nently England's and in a measure is hers still, — 
 must not such a man look on our friend as one whom 
 much money had made mad, and refuse all dealings 
 with him ? Must not even the most waggish of those 
 who sign their names " Clericus," at the close of a 
 newspaper homily, inform his neophyte, that it be- 
 came not the same man to unite in his single person 
 the pride of a Pharisee, the faith of a Sadducee, and 
 the morals of a Publican ? 
 
 Your artists have often drawn the lineaments 
 of Ireland. A quick fancy never halts for want of 
 materials. Leonardo tells us that the chance folds 
 of a curtain, or the cracks on a plaster wall, had 
 sometimes suggested to him the groups that satisfied 
 every eye except the most penetrating that ever 
 looked on man. The genius of many an artist who 
 has amused the public with Irish sketches yet never 
 breathed Irish air, has evidently been quickened by 
 such slight aids as a visit to the Zoological Gardens, 
 or a child's book of demonology. Would you like 
 
 K 2 
 
196 ENGLISH MISRULE [lET. IV. 
 
 a portrait of England drawn by an Irish pencil ? 
 From me you have nothing of the sort to fear. I love 
 England more than you do, but not your England. 
 I have already said, and I take every occasion to 
 repeat, that there are two Englands : one of these, of 
 which you are a representative, may be called "Ame- 
 rica in England;" an expression which I cannot use, 
 lest I should be supposed to join in the common 
 clamour against America, without observing that 
 America in England must needs resemble the Ame- 
 rica of the west in its faults chiefly, and be, on the 
 whole, a very inferior thing. To your England 
 I desire to pay no homage. But there is another 
 England which you never saw, and for which I 
 have long felt (may it not have been too long) 
 a reverential affection which refuses to be blind. 
 Many of those whom I have been allowed most to 
 love and honour are English ; and in them I have ob- 
 sened strong traces of their country. They belong 
 not to the number of those imbeciles who only desire 
 to hear the truth when it is in their favour; nor is it 
 for their sake that I shrink from a complete portraiture 
 of their country. Mine is not the hand that can paint 
 that countenance in which two mysterious characters 
 are mingled, and in which alternately two opposite 
 expressions predominate. A powerful writer, one de- 
 servedly popular in England, and certainly not par- 
 tial to Ireland, has exhibited a picture of your 
 state, so deplorable, that if I believed in its general 
 
LET. IV.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 197 
 
 truth, no greatness to which this country could ever 
 attain would compensate me for my loss. I refer 
 you not to that book*, lest you should either believe 
 it and despair, or but seem to yourself a believer, 
 and allow feelings skin deep to be worn into a shal- 
 lower thinness by the pleasure of an incredulous ex- 
 citement. The scandals which deface your glories 
 have been exposed with an unsparing compassion 
 by those men, poets, philosophers, and divines, who 
 embody indeed the spirit of an unspiritual age, and 
 will remain its monuments. To these direct your 
 thoughts, removing them for a time from material 
 pursuits, if you would learn to hate what is to be 
 hated in your country, or wisely to love the rest. If 
 this task be too tedious, then inspect your blue 
 books and reports. 
 
 You inveigh, Sir, against the squalidness of many 
 an Irish village ; have you read the report of a 
 Commission which was instituted not long ago to 
 inquire into the state of certain English mining 
 districts ? If it does not recount fables, your mines 
 contained, not long since, a degree of misery and a 
 peculiar species of degradation, whereof we in this 
 country know nothing. Amongst us, women have 
 never toiled in the attitude of beasts, amid slimy 
 caverns, and surrounded by a savage race, naked, 
 blasphemous and brutal. In this country, children of 
 twelve years old are not to be found who do not know 
 
 * " Past and Present." By T. Carlyle. 
 
198 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. IV. 
 
 the name of their country or their sovereign. Whe- 
 ther these atrocities have since been amended I know 
 not ; but they existed two years ago : nor can aught 
 else so pointedly illustrate the degradation that had 
 sunk through the social into the moral being, as the 
 fact, that when the Legislature found it necessary 
 to interfere, and, supplying the place of morals 
 with laws, to protect womanhood and in it huma- 
 nity itself from outrage, those unfortunates raised 
 up from the depths and remanded to their native 
 air but to die, bewildered and helpless, staggering 
 between contending claims, for their own sake and 
 that of their starving children, petitioned to be 
 indulged again in what was there accounted but 
 freedom of labour. You are offended at the cot- 
 tiered and foodless wastes of Kerry ; have you ever 
 visited the alleys of your manufacturing districts ? 
 Have you ever read any of the Parliamentary Reports 
 on that subject? Against the manufacturing class 
 of England I bring no charge. Accusations levelled 
 against a class are generally unjust and always foolish. 
 I honour every recognised class in your land to which 
 Providence has intrusted high functions, allotting se- 
 verally to each for the good of all ; and if any class 
 has been made the object of undistinguishing and 
 noisy attack, that is the last mark against which I 
 should be disposed to cast a stone : notwithstanding, 
 Sir, the manufacturing system has been allowed to 
 grow up, a body without a soul, and well-nigh without 
 
LET. IV.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 199 
 
 a directing mind ; and it includes within its region a 
 misery that may well challenge competition in Ire- 
 land. Where else do strong men marry that they 
 may become the pensioners of their young children ? 
 Where else, in times of depression, does " Godfrey's 
 Cordial " supersede a mother's milk ? Little fingers 
 are most apt for delicate work. If unfortunately 
 fingers and hands cannot be brought into the world 
 without having bodies in connection with them, and 
 if these bodies must needs include souls, small care, 
 I fear, for one half century, was taken for the health 
 of the one, or the hopes of the other. Great efforts 
 have been recently made, I know, to correct these 
 abuses ; nor are there in your land men who deserve 
 better of their country than some of your great 
 manufacturers ; but these gentlemen know how diffi- 
 cult it is to make straight a system that is awry, 
 and they will be the last to join in that outcry which 
 has been raised against a class, condemned like 
 themselves, to struggle with a time that is out of 
 joint — I mean the landlords of Ireland. In Irish 
 hovels you meet with a worship which you con- 
 demn ; it is in English manufacturing districts that 
 you are confronted by multitudes who have never 
 heard of the existence of a God, or named that 
 name at which the nations bow. 
 
 You may perhaps reply, that the scandals existing 
 in your mines and manufacturing districts result 
 necessarily from the rapid strides with which civiliza- 
 
200 ENGLISH MISRULE [lET. IV. 
 
 tion has been advancing in England, whereas the 
 evils with which you reproach us are the indications 
 of a savage state that forbids all progress. In Ire- 
 land it is true that you find a barbarism which dis- 
 pleases you; the very virtues of the Irish peasant 
 have, you say, an element of the barbaric in them ; 
 his hospitality, his rude fidelity, his vehement hearti- 
 ness, his devotion to the ties of kindred and of clan. 
 Is barbarism then only to be sanctioned when begirt 
 and over-browed by haughty civilization .? Is it to 
 be allowed as a pensioner in the city courts, and 
 denounced as an outlaw on the moor } Are you quite 
 sure that in your better life there is no tincture of 
 the barbaric still to be found ? If so, I fear that your 
 rapid advance is to be accounted for by the fact that 
 you have passed the summit of the ascent, and are 
 sliding down the smooth declivity. Civilization is, 
 of course, on the whole, a great improvement on 
 barbarism ; but that is a depraved and effete civiliza- 
 tion in which there remains no mixture, mastered, 
 but not merged, of barbaric fervour, with its natural 
 accompaniments, a passionate simplicity and a homely 
 refinement: and when a nation has advanced thus 
 far I fear it is tending to a dead level, of which the 
 ultimate limit is a social stale-mate, such as for cen- 
 turies has held China in check. You think the Irish 
 peasant servile to the objects of his reverence ; and 
 there is a certain kind of truth in the statement ; for 
 affection is a bondage, and the imagination, though 
 
LET. IV.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 201 
 
 lawless, is not free ; but in Ireland you will not find 
 the servility of a London shopman, with his " bated 
 breath," his whispering " humbleness," and his 
 practised smile. With us the man sundves in the 
 tradesman ; and the unthrifty hand that rests on the 
 counter is a hand of flesh and blood. The Irish 
 gentleman, you say, is asleep to public duties and 
 awake to trivialities. Is there not among you a cer- 
 tain Dilettantism which is neither asleep nor awake ? 
 Do not you also find it amongst the difficulties of 
 the time to provide employment for men of wealth 
 and station ? It is true that in Ireland, with much 
 political excitement, we have had but little politics ; 
 but zeal for public duty does not, even amongst 
 those who have a grave regard for the duties of 
 friendship, kindred, honour, morals, and religion, 
 spring up quite so quickly as a new branch of trade. 
 You will remember that till lately we were excom- 
 municated from the pale of European politics, the 
 tyrant being raised above political responsibility, 
 while the slave is depressed below it : and that, since 
 the period of the penal laws, we have hardly had time 
 to graduate in English politics, or take up with un- 
 wavering credence either class of those great party 
 watchwords, by you for the most part mistaken for 
 the symbols of eternal principles. It is frequently 
 said that in Ireland there are no friendly relations 
 between the higher orders and the lower. There 
 can be no greater misconception ; and it is a 
 
 K 3 
 
202 ENGLISH MISRULE [lET. IV. 
 
 remarkable fact, that notwithstanding the diversities 
 both of race and of reUgion, and the sedulous en- 
 deavours made in this country and in England to 
 effect an estrangement between classes that ought to 
 be at one, there exists in Ireland a strong bond of 
 mutual good-will between the high and low, in de- 
 spite of agrarian animosities aggravated at present by 
 a social crisis. During the existing convulsion, and 
 while English intolerance can see but the darker side 
 of the Irish peasant's character, the higher orders in 
 Ireland meet with an invincible good humour that ex- 
 asperated state of society from which they are cer- 
 tainly the chief sufferers. Each man goes about his 
 usual avocations, and protects himself as well as the 
 law permits from perils which the existing law cannot 
 avert. He remembers that the agrarian outrages which 
 stain our fields with blood constitute a guerilla warfare, 
 regulated by its own code, which indicates the senti- 
 ments of the people on one subject only. He knows 
 that the man whom you look on, and rightly, as an 
 assassin, looks on himself as an executioner; and 
 that he would no more shoot his victim on another 
 quarrel than a lawyer of character would deceive 
 out of court. If murders are committed, he thinks 
 it less base that they should proceed from revenge 
 than from love of money ; and he remembers that 
 last spring when the pay clerks of the Board of 
 Works were travelling about the country, and pay- 
 ing about d£40,000 in the course of a day, only two 
 
LET. IV.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 
 
 instances of robbery occurred. In England we hear 
 of two great social circles which touch but at one 
 point ; and of two classes which know so little of 
 each other, that, while there is room for both, they 
 have scarcely a pretext for enmity. 
 
 You are proud of your colonial possessions : how 
 have you acquitted yourself towards them ? A par- 
 ticular order is endowed with privileges, not for its 
 own sake, but for that of the nation : a nation is 
 elected for the benefit of the world to some high 
 function, which if it fails to discharge its candle- 
 stick is removed. What you cannot use becomes 
 soon abused; and nature works the cure. America 
 was your colony : you did not plant your church in 
 her soil ; you did not impart to her your arts, your 
 sciences, your manners, or the spirit of your laws. 
 Without a portion you sent your Prodigal into the 
 wilderness, and bade her prosper, honestly if she 
 could, on condition that you shared in her pro- 
 sperity ; you moulded your coarser half into a dis- 
 tinct personality, and bade her be your pioneer along 
 a perilous path ; and now you denounce, while you 
 emulate her, as though her errors were not your 
 shame, and her short-comings your warning example. 
 India is yours ; but its hundred millions belong not 
 to your Master. Till lately, if you did not dis- 
 courage the endeavour to include that vast region 
 within the bounds of Christendom, you made no 
 effort to promote it. Till lately your swarthy sub- 
 
204 ENGLISH MISRULE [lET. IV. 
 
 jects doubted whether you were gods, but knew only 
 that you were without gods. Till lately, many a 
 British soldier who had sworn that the Mass was 
 idolatry and deprived its votaries of citizenship, 
 was compelled to ask pardon for " this one thing," 
 if when a Hindoo idol was rolled forth in procession 
 from its temple, he bowed himself and the standard 
 of England before it. How comes it, Sir, that you 
 are sometimes less smitten with remorse by the 
 scandal of a century, than elated by some recent 
 and partial attempt to abate it ? Is not this also a 
 repentance that halts upon its way ? New colonies 
 were to be formed. To sow a new nation with 
 sound and perfect seed would have been to act on 
 a principle : to turn the main drain of your house un- 
 der your neighbour's garden-wall was an expedient : 
 therefore you preferred it, and colonized with con- 
 victs. You boast 'of an empire on which the sun 
 never sets. If you understand your responsibilities, 
 you will not boast ; if you proscribe the recollection of 
 them among the subjects deemed obsolete or trouble- 
 some, better for you to have ruled an empire upon 
 which the sun never rose ; an empire of poten- 
 tialities like the " industrial resources of Ireland;" 
 better never to have ruled at all — better, I had 
 almost said, to have been ruled as Ireland was ruled 
 by England. 
 
 You exult, Sir, in your boundless wealth, and 
 you despise the poverty of this land. Your wealth 
 
LET. IV.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 205 
 
 was honestly come by, and yet it seems at times to 
 mount with an insurgent insolence, and threaten 
 your moral ruin. Our poverty was the necessary 
 result of English oppression ; and yet how can you 
 know but that it may tend to our eventual good ? 
 It is now some time since I witnessed a scene which 
 I have not yet forgotten. Entering with difficulty 
 a mud hovel, I heard on all sides the murmur of 
 the afflicted before I saw their faces, for there was 
 neither window nor door, and the narrow inclosure 
 was filled with smoke. Through a rift in the roof 
 the light of the rising sun found entrance, and 
 streamed, a solid beam, athwart the smoke from 
 end to end. Right beneath that beam, there sat 
 upon the earthen floor a little naked infant, an 
 orphan, who laughed as if in scorn of the misery 
 around him. In his hand he held a green hazel 
 wand, moist with autumnal shoots, and, exulting in 
 such strength as was his, lifted it with beautiful 
 gesture and beat it with rapture against the ground, 
 as if he possessed power to summon spirits out of 
 the earth. It was probably the contrast between 
 that fearless child and the haggard group around 
 him that impressed me ; and I have since thought 
 that the outcast I then saw, so unprotected, yet so 
 well protected, might be a symbol of his country. 
 Since it was the will of God, while many strong men 
 dropped, to preserve that child whom there was no 
 mother to cherish, and whom, if a casual hand of 
 
206 ENGLISH MISRULE [lET. IV. 
 
 charity maintained, many a more charitable heart 
 must have sighed to retain — perhaps he has been 
 preserved to some good end. Perhaps, also, this 
 country may be preserved for some good end. Let 
 this, Sir, be determined by the event; but mean- 
 time be assured that your wealth is not exempt 
 from corruption. If Irish pauperism be a lament- 
 able spectacle to the eye, English pauperism is 
 more awful far to the mind. That men should 
 hunger amid blighted wastes is intelligible enough ; 
 that they should be lawless is its obvious con- 
 sequence : but that a vast and growing pauperism 
 should exist in the heart of infinite wealth, is an 
 evil not transitory or superficial, but indicative of 
 some disease preying upon the vitals of the land. 
 Your pauperism, Sir, is more than your misfortune ; 
 in the endeavour to relieve it you have found the 
 severest tests to be necessary; but you have not 
 found them to be availing ; nor can any pallia- 
 tive, unaided by a moral medicine, be of avail ; for 
 your disease is a moral disease. There is a direct 
 connection between the wealth of your nation and 
 the poverty of the obscure millions who produce 
 that wealth. Your large capital and complex deal- 
 ings render it necessary for you to have at hand a 
 more numerous band of labourers than you can find 
 employment for during the intervals of a depressed 
 trade. Alternations between severe labour and 
 compulsory idleness produce recklessness ; extra- 
 
LET. IV.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 207 
 
 ordinary prudence and self-control are required to 
 lay up a store against the evil day ; these quali- 
 ties are not to be found amongst men who have been 
 taught to work, but not to reflect or to pray ; and 
 the result is a pauperism that has increased while 
 your wealth has increased, deepening as the shadow 
 deepens while the light augments. To what does 
 this amount, but that the virtue of England has 
 not increased in proportion with her wealth, — that 
 it has therefore relatively declined ? I doubt, Sir, 
 whether, on the whole, I would exchange our pau- 
 perism for yours. 
 
 You are astonished at the vehemence with which 
 the Irish demand what you regard as the imagin- 
 ary remedy for an imaginary grievance. Perhaps 
 it is you who are unreasonable in wondering. The 
 fact is, that the people feel that they suffer ; and in 
 this they are not mistaken : the exact cause of their 
 suffering they do not know ; neither is it within their 
 province to know it. Why did not you know it 
 long since ; for none ought to have known it better } 
 Social evils will always be mistaken by the many for 
 political grievances. The cry of a people has 
 more significance than their words; and to neg- 
 lect the former is a greater mistake than to attach 
 undue importance to the latter. Refer the clamour 
 qf the Irish not to the objects which they affect, 
 but the causes that provoke it; and then judge 
 whether there has not of late been as good reason 
 
208 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. IV. 
 
 for a Repeal cry in Ireland, as for a " No Popery " 
 cry in England. 
 
 But I will glance no longer at subjects on which I 
 am unwilling to enlarge, and which you may not be 
 unwilling to evade. My desire was but to hint that 
 there are reasons for which you ought not to con- 
 centrate the whole of your affections at home, and 
 thus deprive us of that moderate good-will which 
 is necessary if you would form a sane judgment on 
 our affairs. England has her faults, and so has Ire- 
 land : let the faults of both be exposed, that they 
 may be corrected. Concealment of faults is a 
 hazardous thing. I have acknowledged many of 
 ours already ; and have made no attempt to prove 
 that our faults are not faults, because they can be 
 accounted for, and because England in many in- 
 stances partakes of their reproach. Would you 
 hear our confessions more frequently ? Then do 
 not make candour an impossible virtue to us, by 
 such an amount of prejudice and exaggeration as 
 distorts our concessions and turns our truth into 
 falsehood. If there be one impartial person in either 
 kingdom, let him decide where I forbear to dogma- 
 tize, and pronounce on which side the balance de- 
 clines. Let him resolve us whether a people is 
 more to be pitied for being poor, or for putting their 
 trust in wealth ; for having no power, or for mis- 
 using it. Let him conclude which is more to be 
 condemned, a Parliament that sits in Dublin without 
 
LET. IV.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 209 
 
 functions and legislates without power, or a Parlia- 
 ment in London, which, intrusted with highest func- 
 tions, is so engrossed with railway business that it 
 has hardly time to consider the chief matters of the 
 State ; let him tell us whether he prefers political 
 sentimentalism or political materialism, and augurs 
 best for a province that aspires to be a nation or a 
 nation that degenerates into a firm. 
 
 There is one charge more. Sir, which I am forced 
 to bring against you, lest you should misinterpret 
 an admission which, with great reluctance, I have 
 made to the discredit of my countrymen. I said 
 that I considered them inferior to you in the 
 virtue of verbal truth. The accusations brought 
 against them on this subject in England are unjust, 
 because they take no note of the various infirmities 
 which, under various circumstances, lead to a want 
 of truth ; or to the fact that its worst cause, dis- 
 honesty, is no Irish vice. It proceeds in them from 
 many causes, beside an insufficient appreciation of 
 truth; — from an inconsiderate good nature; from an 
 abuse of metaphor ; from a habit of precipitation 
 and vehemence ; from an extraordinary readiness 
 and inaccuracy of thought; from vanity, and from 
 sensitiveness. After all due deductions, however, 
 the charge still remains; and I have said that in 
 part it is just. It may be worth observing, that de- 
 grading and enfeebling as want of truth must be to 
 individuals, it is yet more injurious to a nation. 
 
210 ENGLISH MISRULE [lET. IV. 
 
 People who would unite, must understand each other 
 and themselves: therefore even punctuality and ac- 
 curacy, the humbler duties of truth, are virtues 
 without which cooperation, collective force, and 
 consequent prosperity, cannot exist, and, in the 
 absence of which those who would raise the social 
 fabric build with round stones and mortar that will 
 not cohere. All things, however, are matters of 
 degree ; and the Irish are not inferior, even in ver- 
 bal ti-uth, to the average of European nations, 
 though they are inferior to the English. And 
 now, lest I should leave you under a false impres- 
 sion, I must add, that I cannot consider the English 
 to be an eminently truthful people, though they 
 speak the truth. We hear a great deal about "cant" 
 in England. What does "cant" mean ? Not truth, 
 I imagine. In whatever society we may be, we are 
 told of shams, hoUowness, and pretence. This 
 sounds serious. HoUowness, I presume, is incon- 
 sistent with the substance of truth : why, then, set 
 such store by the shadow ? Is it possible that what 
 has been said of modesty is applicable to truth 
 also — that when allowed no other resting-place 
 it sometimes seeks refuge on the tongue ? Be- 
 ware, Sir, lest by a subtle change moral truth 
 should have died out from amongst you, and com- 
 mercial truth have assumed the relinquished garb 
 and strutted where her predecessor walked. Trade 
 requires combination, and combination mutual trust ; 
 
LET. IV.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 211 
 
 we may therefore perhaps infer, that where trade 
 continues to flourish, there verbal truth at the least 
 must remain, if but as part of the stock in trade. 
 But beneath these fair externals the living body of 
 truth may have wasted away, and the void be un- 
 perceived by a fat and gross eye that rests on the 
 surfaces of things. 
 
 There are signs which make against you. I have 
 known English tradesmen who cheated, yet who re- 
 tained, notwithstanding, an alarming scrupulosity 
 about verbal truth. They seemed to have a kind of 
 conscience on the subject. Is not truth without 
 honesty the virtue of one who dares not be true 
 even to himself ? Orthodoxy is a word which now 
 sounds pedantic ; yet it was once respected as 
 denoting the integrity of revealed Truth. As such 
 it was watched for by lovers who could be reverent 
 as well as ardent, who were "made up of patience" 
 as well as "impatience;" and whose observance was 
 ever fortified by purity and trial. At present this 
 sort of truth does not suit your taste. Moral Truth 
 is a thing the existence of which many philosophers 
 amongst you doubt. Once there was no doubt on this 
 subject ; and perhaps the sages of old time ac- 
 counted verbal truth not a thing precious in itself, 
 but rather a slight tax of attention and sobriety, to 
 be paid in the hope that men who had shown them- 
 selves faithful in little things might be advanced 
 to a higher command and an ampler prospect. Ab- 
 
212 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. IV. 
 
 stract Truth is not appreciated save where it mi- 
 nisters to the mechanical arts; and the sciences 
 you cultivate most are those which promote the 
 conveniences of life. Truth as to outward details 
 is itself but a superficial thing ; truth as to what 
 is within us presupposes a substance of genuine 
 and stable feeling within: and yet your eloquent 
 men stigmatise your age as the very triumph of 
 conventionalities. Is there then no practical inner 
 tiTith, or can your eloquence itself be untruthful ? 
 Even in your churches there sometimes appears to 
 exist a convention of a singular character between 
 clergyman and congregation. The former does 
 not always expect his words to be taken literally; 
 and the latter preserve a composure, during the 
 discharge of very strong statements, as remarkable 
 as that of trained horses during the firing at a 
 review. A congregation in an Irish chapel, severely 
 rated for the last agrarian outrage, is either down- 
 cast for the time or seriously displeased ; so that a 
 man, going out after the sermon, asks his neigh- 
 bour whether it would not be a good deed to throw 
 a stone at the priest on his way home, or to bring 
 no Easter offering. This has an air of honesty on 
 both sides. In Parliament great statesmen seated 
 at one side of the House often make insinuations, 
 which, if translated into the vulgar tongue, would 
 amount to an assertion that great statesmen at the 
 other side were in reality great liars and cheats, who 
 
LET. IV.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 213 
 
 under pretence of advancing the public weal in 
 reality consulted only for their own credit and gain. 
 In those cases there must be some want of truth on 
 the part either of those who bring the charges, or of 
 those against whom they are brought ; and I must 
 add, that they are sometimes received with a very 
 indecent serenity. You will say, perhaps, that such 
 accusations are not resented because it is under- 
 stood that they are not intended. Indeed ! then 
 perhaps your charges against Ireland were not in- 
 tended ! This should have been explained. In 
 Ireland the passions have a sincerity. 
 
 I do not affirm, or imply, that England possesses 
 less of moral truth than other nations which make it 
 less their boast. I state simply that it does not bear 
 that proportion which it ought to bear to her verbal 
 truth, and therefore that she has nothing to boast 
 of in this particular. Does a truthful nation, when 
 called on to act, allow the gates of new and ser- 
 viceable knowledge to be blocked up by a litter of 
 wilful and sottish prejudices ? Is it a truthful act to 
 judge where you have no materials, and to condemn 
 where you pause not to judge? You often depict 
 with minuteness and consistency the character of an 
 Irish peasant or proprietor. As long as a class of 
 men seems to you stamped with one common image, 
 conclude that you see it but from a distance, and 
 as a mask. On a closer inspection you would trace 
 the diversities of individuality. You know no more 
 
214 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. IV. 
 
 of the Irish peasant or proprietor than the former 
 knows of you, and you as little care to know them. 
 I do not call the Irish the finest peasantry in the 
 world, although, if their characters were equal to 
 their dispositions, they might, perhaps, justly be so 
 termed ; but I have no reason to believe that they 
 are inferior, in aught but happiness and a sphere for 
 goodness, to the same class in England. The Irish 
 peasant, Sir, is rich in virtues which you know not 
 of because you only know the worst class of Irish, 
 and only hear of the rest when they have been found 
 wanting under the severest temptations. Amongst 
 his virtues are many which, perhaps, no familiarity 
 would enable you to recognise. I speak of the Irish 
 peasant as a man and as a Christian, not as a citizen 
 merely. There is a difference between public and 
 individual virtues : to the latter class belong many 
 which, by their own nature, remain exempt from 
 applause or material reward ; and among the former 
 there are commonly counted several vices. Self- 
 confidence, ruthlessness, and greediness — these are 
 not virtues ; but notwithstanding, when associated 
 with a manliness as willing to suffer as to inflict 
 pain, and an industry if not disinterested yet dutiful, 
 these defects may help to swell the prosperity of a 
 nation, as long as she swims with the tide. Many 
 of the crowning virtues of personal character may 
 be possessed where several fundamental virtues of 
 civil society are wanting. The Irish peasant has a 
 
LET. IV.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 215 
 
 patience under real sufferings quite as signal as his 
 impatience under imaginary grievances; and, in spite 
 of a complexional conceit not uncommon, he has a 
 moral humility that does not help him to make his 
 way. He possesses a reverence that will not be re- 
 pulsed; a gratitude that sometimes excites our re- 
 morse ; a refinement of sensibility, and even of tact, 
 which reminds you that many who toil for bread are 
 the descendants of those who once sat in high places ; 
 aspirations that fly above the mark of national great- 
 ness ; a faith and charity not common in the modern 
 world ; an acknowledged exemption from sensual 
 habits, both those that pass by that name, and those 
 that invent fine names for themselves ; and an 
 extraordinary fidelity to the ties of household and 
 kindred, the more remarkable from being united 
 with a versatile intellect, a temperament mercurial 
 as well as ardent, and an ever salient imagination. 
 These virtues are not inconsistent with grave faults, 
 but they are virtues of the first order. I will 
 only add, that if England has wit enough to make 
 these virtues her friends, she will have conciliated 
 the affections of a people the least self-loving in the 
 world, and the services of a people amongst whom, 
 in the midst of much light folly, there is enough of 
 indolent ability to direct the whole counsels of Eng- 
 land, and of three or four kingdoms beside — provided 
 only that Ireland be not of the number. 
 
 I have already recommended you to study the 
 
216 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. IV. 
 
 Irish if you would learn how to govern Ireland ; 
 and though I cannot undertake to be your master, 
 yet I would seriously advise you not to allow 
 yourself to dwell only on the worst side of the na- 
 tional character. If you laugh at an Irish peasant's 
 helplessness, remember that he is as willing to help 
 a neighbour as to ask his aid; and that he has a 
 remarkable faculty for doing all business not his 
 own. If you think him deficient in steadiness 
 under average circumstances, remember that he 
 possesses extraordinary resource and powers of adap- 
 tation in an unforeseen juncture. If you think him 
 easily deluded, remember that the same quick and 
 fine temperament which makes him catch every 
 infection or humour in the air renders him equally 
 accessible to all good influences; of which the 
 recent temperance movement is the most remark- 
 able example exhibited by any modern nation. 
 You accuse the Irish peasant of want of gravity: 
 one reason of this characteristic is, that with him 
 imagination and fancy are faculties not working by 
 themselves, but difiused through the whole being; 
 and remember that, if they favour enthusiasm, so on 
 the other hand they protect from fanaticism. If you 
 speak of his occasional depression and weakness, 
 you should know that Irish strength does not consist 
 in robustness, but in elasticity. If you complain of 
 his want of ambition, remember that this often 
 proceeds from the genuine independence of a mind 
 
LET. IV.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 217 
 
 and temperament which possess too many resources 
 in themselves to be dependent on outward position ; 
 and do not forget that much of the boasted progress 
 of England results from no more exalted a cause 
 than an uncomfortable habit of body, not easy when 
 at rest. If you think him deficient in a sound 
 judgment, ask whether his mental faculties may 
 not be eminently of a subtle and metaphysical 
 character, and whether such are not generally dis- 
 connected from a perfect practical judgment. You 
 are amused because he commits blunders: ask 
 whether he may not possibly think wrong twice as 
 often as the English peasant, and yet think right 
 five times as often, since he thinks ten times as 
 much, and has a reason for every thing that he does. 
 You call him idle : ask whether he does not possess 
 a facility and readiness not usually united with 
 pains-taking qualities ; and remember that, when 
 fairly tried, he by no means wants industry, though 
 he is deficient in energy. You think him addicted 
 to fancies rather than realities : — poverty is a great 
 feeder of enthusiasm. You object to his levity : 
 — competence is a sustainer of respectability; and 
 many a man is steadied by the weight of the cash in 
 bis pocket. You call him wrong-headed : ask whe- 
 ther the state of things around him, the bequest 
 of past misgovernment, is not so wrong as to puzzle 
 even the solid sense of many an English statesman, 
 not inexperienced in affairs ; and whether the good 
 
 L 
 
218 ENGLISH MISRULE [lET. IV. 
 
 intentions and the actions of those who would benefit 
 the Irish peasant ai-e not sometimes, even now, so 
 strangely at cross purposes as to make the quiet ac- 
 ceptance of the boon no easy task. You think him 
 slow to follow your sensible precepts : remember 
 that the Irish are imitative, and that the imitative 
 have no great predilection for the didactic vein : 
 and do not forget that for a considerable time your 
 example was less edifying than your present precepts. 
 You affirm that no one requires discipline so 
 much ; remember that none repays it so well ; and 
 that, as to the converse need, there is no one who re- 
 quires so little of aid to second his intellectual de- 
 velopment. The respect of his neighbour, you say, 
 is what he hardly seeks : remember how often he 
 wins his love, and even admiration, without seeking 
 it. You think that he hangs loosely by his opinions : 
 ask whether he is not devoted in his attachments. 
 He seems to you inconsistent in action : reflect 
 whether extreme versatility of mind and consistency 
 of conduct are qualities often united in one man. 
 You complain of the disposition of the Irish to col- 
 lect in mobs : ask whether, if you can once gain the 
 ear of an Irish mob, it is not far more accessible to 
 reason than an English one. I have addressed my- 
 self to Irish mobs under various circumstances in the 
 last two years, and encountered none that was not 
 amenable. Ask also whether in most countries the 
 lower orders have not enough to do, as well as enough 
 
LET. IV.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 219 
 
 to eat in the day, and consequently a disposition to 
 sleep at night. If half your English population had 
 only to walk about and form opinions, how do you 
 think you would get on ? You say that the Irish have 
 no love of fair play, and that three men of one faction 
 will fall on one man of another: ask those who reflect 
 as well as observe, whether this proceeds wholly from 
 want of fair play or from other causes beside. Ask 
 whether in Ireland the common sentiment of race, 
 kindred or clan, does not prevail with an intensity 
 not elsewhere united with a perfect appreciation 
 of separate responsibilities and immunities ; and 
 whether an Irish beggar will not give yon as 
 hearty a blessing in return for a halfpenny bestowed 
 on another of his order as on himself. Sympathy 
 includes a servile element, and servile sympathy will 
 always lead to injustice ;— thus I have heard a hundred 
 members of Parliament (and of party) drown in one 
 cry, like that of a well-managed pack, the voice of some 
 member whom they disapproved, and whom probably 
 they considered less as a man than as a limb of a 
 hated enemy. Sympathy, however, often ministers 
 to justice also, as you will find on asking an Irish 
 gentleman whether he has not often been astonished 
 at that refinement of fair play with which an Irish 
 peasant makes allowances for the diflliculties of some 
 great neighbour, whose aid is his only hope. 
 
 I have thrown out these few suggestions as to Irish 
 character, not for the purpose of superseding your 
 
 L 2 
 
220 ENGLISH MISRULE [lET. IV. 
 
 own inquiry, but to incite and direct it. You will find 
 that character very unlike the gross notion of it which 
 you may have formed from a farce at the theatre. 
 You will find also that it is formed on a type ex- 
 tremely different from that of the English character ; 
 and that one reason why you are tempted to intoler- 
 ance as to our faults, and an inappreciation of our 
 virtues, is that both happen to be the opposite of your 
 own. You will be enabled to make innumerable 
 practical inferences from the moment that you pos- 
 sess that key to them all. Perhaps one of these may. 
 be, that the Irish require to be governed by a strong 
 hand, as well as a just and generous one ; that a 
 hand alternately strong and weak would be utterly un- 
 able to govern them ; and that, if left without restraint 
 during a period of peculiar excitement, their good qua- 
 lities might for the moment suffer an eclipse, like those 
 of children during a day of licence. Another infer- 
 ence, perhaps, would be that the Irish require leaders 
 as well as laws ; and, consequently, that if some of 
 your wise men could succeed in tearing up by the 
 roots the influence of the resident proprietors and 
 the Roman Catholic clergy, the only substantial au- 
 thority in the country, you might neither benefit the 
 condition of that people nor your own. A know- 
 ledge of Irish character would enable you to under- 
 stand, amongst other things, an anomaly not always 
 observed, namely, that there is comparatively 
 little of public opinion in this country. In the first 
 
LET. IV.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 2*21 
 
 place, public opinion can neither grow up during 
 the period of despotism, nor during the tumultuous 
 recoil from it. In the second place, public opinion 
 is made up of countless private opinions, each per- 
 son retaining with stubbornness a portion of his own 
 judgment, while yet he is willing to make a com- 
 promise as to another portion, for the sake of 
 acting with others. In Ireland, the instinct of 
 sympathy is too strong to admit a perfect independ- 
 ence of judgment. Opinions are not formed sepa- 
 rately, and therefore cannot bring each its distinct 
 contribution to the common stock ; the strongest 
 predominates, and spreads as a sentiment, the rest 
 being merged in it instead of duly modifying it. The 
 formation of public opinion is a sort of crystalliza- 
 tion which must take place .by a slow process, if the 
 result is to be solid or definite in shape ; and in 
 Ireland the ardour of our political temperature pro- 
 duces too rapid a precipitation. The effect of all 
 these circumstances is, that we have more of politi- 
 cal passion than of public opinion, and more licence 
 of debate than freedom of speech. Perhaps this 
 evil might be diminished if you were no longer to 
 bind together the Irish people by the common tie of 
 an insulted race, provoked to animosity often and 
 not always permitted to be gi'ateful. Two courses 
 were from the beginning open to England ; one 
 of these was to establish in Ireland institutions 
 grounded upon Irish character; the other was to 
 
•2*22 ENGLISH MISRULE [lET. IV. 
 
 assimilate, as far as possible, both institutions and 
 character to the English. Either of these courses 
 would have led to a result, but you adopted neither; 
 and if you would now unite the two, you will re- 
 quire a deep knowledge of the people whom you 
 have to deal with, and no small knowledge of politi- 
 cal philosophy. 
 
 The Irish proprietors are a class of whom you per- 
 haps know no more than that in good report and in 
 evil report, when the country was at peace and 
 when in rebellion, from the Revolution to the Re- 
 peal agitation, they have stood fast, the firm and 
 faithful friends of England and the British connec- 
 tion. Had they served their country with the fidelity 
 with which they served their employer, they might 
 in the hour of calamity have been deserted, but they 
 would not have been betrayed. The existing gene- 
 ration, however, have, under the most adverse cir- 
 cumstances, done much to vindicate their true posi- 
 tion ; and, if they fall, they will not have the conso-. 
 lation of seeing either country the gainer by their 
 loss. In the meantime it has been their singular 
 fortune that the charges brought against them have 
 included too little truth to have much verisimilitude, 
 while the violence with which they have been assailed 
 will probably provoke a reaction. You have possibly 
 met with individual Irish proprietors ; I will leave 
 you, therefore, to judge of their character by your 
 own lights. If you possessed an estate in this 
 
LET. IV.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 223 
 
 country, I suspect that absentee landlords would 
 be judged of as gently by you as they are by us, 
 who suffer most by their absence, but who know that 
 residence is in Ireland a difficult virtue, whereas 
 in England it is among the agreeable duties. You 
 will perhaps be surprised that an Irish proprietor's 
 position should be a troublesome one in the midst 
 of a people such as I have described. The reason 
 is this; that he has to deal not only with their good 
 qualities, which God made, but with their circum- 
 stances which have been made by man ; and with 
 their worst qualities exaggerated at times by well- 
 meant but blundering legislation. 
 
 The position of an Irish proprietor is that of a 
 man called to the discharge of functions not his 
 own, through the instrumentality of resources not 
 at his command. The charges on his estate re- 
 maining undiminished, and his rents being reduced 
 to one-half, he is suddenly invited to quadruple the 
 quantity of labour he has hitherto given, although 
 that labour has already, in many cases, far exceeded 
 the amount given by persons similarly circumstanced 
 in England, and although the value of labour is 
 greatly lessened by the pauperizing relief employ- 
 ment of last year. How does it happen that those 
 who see so clearly that the State cannot perform the 
 functions of proprietors, shut their eyes to as plain 
 a truth, namely, that proprietors cannot assume the 
 duties of farmers } A proprietor may, indeed, ride 
 
2^ ENGLISH MISRULE [lET. IV. 
 
 down to a hundred farms, and request a hundred 
 fanners to cultivate their land in a manner exactly 
 the opposite of that which they are used to, and 
 twice as expensive ; but his enterprise will probably 
 be attended by much the same results as if he had 
 admonished every tradesman in the neighbouring 
 town to engage another apprentice. The land held 
 in their own hands they may often improve, and are 
 improving, urged not only by public duty, but also 
 by the consideration that in many cases that small 
 proportion of their estate constitutes the chief part 
 of their present support ; but I will not promise you 
 that our landlords can quite at once change them- 
 selves into land-manufacturers, or get ten per cent, 
 instead of four per cent, annually on the present 
 value of their domains. In the meantime, the land 
 refusing to bring forth its increase, the lord of the soil 
 is set up as the most conspicuous mark for malignant 
 shafts ; and, stirred up by interested reports, those 
 of his own order in England turn on him not sel- 
 dom as the stags in their own parks turn on a 
 wounded brother. This is but a small part of his 
 trial. He is obliged daily to witness the misery 
 which he did not cause, and cannot relieve. He is 
 reproached by the patience of thousands to whom 
 he can offer no aid, and by the impatience of hun- 
 dreds who will not let him aid them. If he sinks 
 into apathy or recklessness, he becomes an insigni- 
 ficant in a crisis when every thing has its signifi- 
 
LET. IV.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 2*25 
 
 cance. If he rouses himself to the exercise of those 
 rights without which the duties of property are ab- 
 stractions, he is proclaimed a tyrant and exterminator. 
 De jure he has a right to his patrimony : de facto not 
 quite to his life. It may be well that when the days of 
 man become very evil they should become very few. 
 One of the chief duties of an Irish proprietor is to 
 entertain cordial feelings that resist distrust, towards 
 all of a class whose misery only is a certainty, and 
 whom he cannot serve if he does not love. Another 
 of his duties is to be of a cheerful courage under 
 circumstances that would depress those who object 
 to peril without honour and labour without a return ; 
 for, if he once yields to despondency, the springs of 
 action, and ])robably of health, must give way. If 
 in any part of this letter you have observed a levity 
 which you thought unbecoming, I desire that you 
 will excuse me. I am not an Irish proprietor, but I 
 associate a good deal with that much-abused order : 
 both they and I are obliged in these times of care to 
 laugh now and then in self-defence ; and of course 
 I do not require you to laugh at indifferent jests that 
 make against yourself. Irish proprietors, till the 
 last two years, were reproached as idle. Idleness 
 at least leaves time for courtesy ; and I have heard 
 not a few of them remark, in passing, upon English 
 calumnies, with a good-humoured allowance for pre- 
 judice as well as ignorance, for which neither the me- 
 
 L 3 
 
22(5 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. IV. 
 
 chanics that rush along your streets, nor the gentle- 
 men who rush from the committee room to the House, 
 would appear always to find leisure. Buy an estate, 
 Sir, in Ireland, and teach the native landlords their 
 duty. Near this spot there is a farm of 120 acres, 
 the valuation of which is £120 per annum, and its 
 population only 280 persons, about the proportional 
 population of several unions. I pledge myself that 
 you shall have the fee-simple of that farm for £6, if 
 you will pledge yourself to live near it for five weeks. 
 I fear that you hesitate ; and yet on the whole if you 
 balance the troubles of an Irish landlord, with what- 
 ever dignity may belong to the most arduous of posi- 
 tions, his great duties to the public, his honourable 
 responsibilities, his powers, such as they are, of right- 
 ing wrongs and helping the weak, his endless opportu- 
 nities of defying calumny, and occasional chances of 
 surmounting it, the success of a few efforts, the disin- 
 terestedness and the moral reward of all — taking these 
 things into account, I am not sure that I would not 
 prefer an Irish estate in Munster to the most comfort-' 
 able citizen's retirement in Surrey, though backed by 
 a large sum of money in the funds, and exalted by a 
 seat in the House of Commons. 
 
 If you should feel any surprise at my preferring the 
 position of an Irish proprietor to that of an English 
 citizen, your surprise will not be diminished when I 
 
LET. IV.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS^ 2*27 
 
 avow my doubts as to a further question respecting 
 the remoter prospects of the two countries impartially 
 compared. The evils of Ireland lie on the surface, 
 and are easily explained ; the evils of England are 
 internal, and proceed in no small measure from 
 the circumstances which ought to have worked her 
 well-being. Those who revere England most, and are 
 most worthy of the solicitudes which chasten patriotic 
 love, look with fear, as well as hope, to her futurity. 
 The agrarian outrages of Ireland are atrocities to 
 which you are not tempted; but remember that 
 the commercial prosperity, which softens national 
 manners, corrupts them also. Spain was reduced 
 from greatness by the gold mines of America, be- 
 cause she put her trust in them and neglected her 
 industrial resources. I fear lest England should be 
 seduced by the domestic mines of her industrial 
 prosperity to neglect those moral resources which 
 support her industry and disarm it of its dangerous 
 influences. It is not easy to despise wealth when we 
 have it ; it is harder still to estimate it aright, neither 
 over-valuing it, nor despising it. Government, with 
 you, is a feeble thing ; and for many a year religion 
 and the manners have been the two sheet anchors 
 which have held England safe in her moorings. Both 
 of these are at present infirm ; and should either 
 yield your vessel will drift. 
 
 You have also external dangers. A very lament- 
 able truth, but not a very surprising one, was 
 
228 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. IV. 
 
 thus pointedly put forward, almost half a century 
 ago, by an advocate for a real Union. " The 
 received maxim is not to forego the opportunity of 
 foreign war to press forward Irish claims and ripen 
 every difference and discontent with the British 
 Government into a ground of permanent and ran- 
 corous national hostility ; insomuch that, in times 
 of difficulty and danger, Great Britain, so far from 
 deriving support or security from her connection 
 with Ireland, feels it as a millstone hung upon her 
 neck. ... Is it to be expected that all this can 
 continue ; or, if it should continue long, that it must 
 not involve both countries in common ruin ? " * Great 
 shocks you have encountered ; great shocks may yet 
 await you ; there is hardly any shock which a great 
 nation cannot bear, while she is still sound at heart ; 
 but a scratch may be fatal if her blood be diseased. 
 Impart to Ireland a share in your fortunes, and 
 you may trust with more confidence to a prosperity 
 which you have not hoarded : make peace with 
 Ireland in the interval accorded to you ; and when 
 that European peace, which has lasted for thirty 
 years is at an end, you will not fear again to 
 tempt the fortunes of war. If domestic disunion 
 should, in the meantime, render your foreign policy 
 pusillanimous, your loss of fame will hardly post- 
 pone a danger which it will aggravate in the end. 
 
 Lord Clare's Speech on the Union. 
 
LET. IV.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 229 
 
 Nor is it your enemies only that you have to 
 fear. A great success is dangerous to a nation as 
 to an individual : your success has been great, let 
 it not make you blind. A great task is necessary 
 to a great people; and many a nation has fallen 
 upon the last of its own victorious battle-fields, 
 supported no longer by the helpful opposition of 
 a foe with whom, breast to breast, it had wrestled 
 long. Ireland still presents a great task to the 
 noblest of England's energies ; let her confront it 
 bravely, and not shuffle it to one side. Mr. Pitt, re- 
 commending the Union, speaks thus: ''Great Bri- 
 tain has always felt a common interest in the safety 
 of Ireland, and that common interest was never 
 more obvious than when the common enemy (the 
 French Republic) made her attack upon Great 
 Britain through the medium of Ireland. . . . When 
 that danger threatened Ireland, the purse of Great 
 Britain was open for the wants of Ireland as for the 
 necessities of England." Is not pauperism now the 
 common enemy ? Is it not certain that, if allowed 
 to make a conquest of Ireland, it will from that plat- 
 form assail England ? Could a nation in a pet, or 
 a nation in a fright, have contended with that com- 
 mon enemy which Mr. Pitt looked in the face and 
 overcame .? Is it not certain that she would have 
 gone on indulging in evasions and recriminations, 
 till the time for action had passed, the time for suf- 
 fering succeeded, and the bitterest of lessons been 
 
230 ENGLISH MISRULE [lET. IV. 
 
 taught her by a common enemy who looked a great 
 way before him and always knew how to make up his 
 mind? If England proves equal to this emergency, 
 she may be equal to the next, from whatever quarter 
 it may assail her : and she may not be unequal to the 
 greater danger of too smooth a path and a pre- 
 scribed inaction. 
 
 England should remember, when she boasts of her 
 free institutions, that there are other drawbacks con- 
 nected with these, besides that turbulence which 
 they are more apt to produce than efficient to con- 
 trol. Let us consider but one of them. Her lead- 
 ing statesmen must be successful debaters. A suc- 
 cessful debater must be a master of the indirect arts 
 of rhetoric ; which circumstance is a hindrance to him 
 as a statesman, for the latter ought to be a man of 
 sense. No qualities are more necessary for a states- 
 man than simplicity, courage, magnanimity, and an 
 indifference to all indirect advantages. These are 
 not the virtues which are acquired by habits of 
 debate. Again, in proportion as the faculty of the 
 advocate is acquired, the judicial faculty is stunted. 
 A man of judgment is not often an orator. He does 
 not marshal arguments in rank and file; he is not 
 skilful to make a hundred points, and a hundred 
 arrows glance from off him unheeded; but, by a tact 
 not to be illustrated in words, he sees what is the one 
 main view of the question, and commits himself to 
 that. He possesses the inspiration of a sound mind. 
 
LET. IV.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 231 
 
 which is next to that of original genius, and has 
 little to say for himself. On the whole, it may be 
 doubted whether if a man full of words shall not 
 prosper— a nation full of words — a nation, the affairs 
 of which are conducted in parliaments, public meet- 
 ings, public dinners, and the newspapers — has not 
 at least difficulties to contend with. 
 
 The dangers which are incidental to your pro- 
 sperity and your freedom you cannot avoid; but you 
 may guard against them by making the most of the 
 opportunities of good placed equally at your com- 
 mand. A great question is now submitted to the as- 
 sembled wisdom of the nation ; but that assembly 
 includes also by necessity a large representation of 
 provincial follies and prejudices. Let those who 
 debate the Irish question discuss it at least in the 
 spirit of British fair play and British practical sense. 
 Should they deny to Ireland alone the benefit of those 
 virtues for which England is renowned, let them not 
 deny us the benefit of a plain confession that justice 
 and truth are not to be observed in dealing with poli- 
 tical heretics. If many of those principles which 
 have hitherto associated and divided British parties 
 are superseded ; if consequently there is a danger of 
 opinion degenerating into prejudice, and parties 
 into factions; let not those prejudices be concen- 
 trated on the most momentous of subjects, let not 
 those factions make Ireland the arena of their gla- 
 diatorial sports. The elections being now over, 
 
282 ENGLISH MISRULE [lET. IV. 
 
 there is the less excuse for such invective as was 
 prompted, in the case of some English radical mem- 
 bers, by the need of popularity at the hustings. A 
 wary politician will also remember that an excess 
 of popularity is amongst the dangers against which 
 he should guard ; and that, while a wise man knows 
 how to make the ** popularis aura" turn the wheel of 
 his mill, a great gust of it is apt to make shipwreck 
 of political cockle-shells with high rigging. 
 
 Above all, let England remember the one great 
 danger and temptation which lies before her, that 
 of irresponsibility. Few men have virtue and wisdom 
 suflScient to dispense with the restraint of responsi- 
 bility, which has therefore ever been attached to power 
 by the institutions of a free State. Even where 
 governments are not free in name, rulers are effectu- 
 ally held in check by an indirect responsibility, with- 
 out which, as a silent convention, the minority would 
 not be allowed to rule. The government by the 
 majority is held back by no such restraint : where 
 no one is answerable in particular, responsibility is 
 but a name ; and if supported by popular sym- 
 pathies, and not held in awe by moral scruples, a po- 
 pular assembly is the most perfect form of tyranny. 
 
 The press is an illustration of irresponsible power. 
 Consistency is hardly expected from a newspaper, 
 which is therefore in a large measure irresponsible. 
 It has been said, that whoever is indifferent as to his 
 own life can always take away that of another. A 
 
LET. IV.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 233 
 
 newspaper, whether it assails an individual, a class, or 
 a nation, has a mark at which to aim. Its opponent 
 has none, and can but fling a stone through the air. 
 It has no life to lose. Nor is this all. A newspaper 
 which can afford to keep a large staff of writers, indi- 
 vidually holding different opinions, may vary its course 
 every day, and yet each day produce an article written 
 with that efficiency as well as ability which is not 
 found but in conjunction with real convictions. It 
 thus unites the occasional force which results from 
 sincerity, with that habitual power which irrespon- 
 sibility arms and makes reckless. Let the gentlemen 
 of the press look to this evil, which must, if not recti- 
 fied, break down either the nation or their own influ- 
 ence. Many of them are plainly men of high ability 
 and doubtless of upright intentions ; and we have come 
 to a time when the largest Parliament House cannot 
 contain all those who are practically senators. Let 
 each man who exerts influence exert an honest in- 
 fluence, not thinking slightly of his own position ; 
 let each be faithful to himself and the welfare of his 
 country; and let him neither abuse his own gifts, 
 nor suffer them to be abused. An irresponsible 
 press is the symbol of an irresponsible people. 
 Unless it can realize a responsibility, it must be a 
 firebrand, not a guiding lamp. 
 
 It is a common remark that great nations have 
 often been the most oppressive to their dependen- 
 cies. The reason is, that nations do not recognise 
 
234 ENGLISH MISRULE [lET. IV. 
 
 their responsibilities ; and that their temporary 
 greatness bhnds them to the fact of their own reci- 
 procal dependence. Before the existence of the 
 Imperial Parliament, England remembered neither 
 her responsibilities as relates to Ireland, nor her 
 reciprocal dependence ; and one of the most emi- 
 nent of those who sat in the last British Parliament 
 implied significantly enough, while resisting the pro- 
 jected Union, that the Imperial Parliament would not, 
 in these respects, differ much from those which had 
 legislated before 1782. It is thus that Mr. Grey 
 expressed himself: " I am far from supposing that 
 British members will wantonly abuse their powers ; 
 but the property of a nation should not be left 
 at the discretion of any man, or any set of men 
 who are strangers, however just or generous he or 
 they may be ; and it is impossible for Ireland to 
 enjoy that security which her constitution at present 
 affords her, if she is united to England in the man- 
 ner proposed."* Mr. Grattan thus illustrated the 
 insecurity which he and the late Lord Grey antici- 
 pated from an *•' absentee parliament." *' Does he 
 say (he is not speaking of Mr. Pitt) that such a par- 
 liament will have no prejudices against Ireland? 
 Let him look to his own speeches ; a capital under- 
 standing, a comprehensive knowledge ; and a tran- 
 scendent eloquence : hear him with all these pow^ers 
 
 * Speech of Mr. Grey on the Union, April 21, 1800. 
 
LET. IV.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 235 
 
 speak on the subject of Ireland, whether it be the 
 conduct of her administration, the character of her 
 people, her commerce, her covenants or her con- 
 stitution ; and he betrays an ignorance that would 
 dishonour an idiot." Pointing out the connection 
 between national sympathy and political respon- 
 sibility, Mr. G rattan proceeded thus : " How came 
 the Irish Parliament, with all its borough members, 
 in 1779, to demand a free trade — in 1782 to demand 
 a free constitution ? Because it sat in Ireland ; be- 
 cause they sat in their own country, and because at 
 that time they had a country ; because, however 
 influenced, as many of its members were, by places, 
 however uninfluenced, as many of its members were, 
 by popular representation, yet were they influenced 
 by Irish sympathy. They did not like to meet every 
 hour faces that looked shame upon them ; they did not 
 like to stand in the sphere of their own infamy ; 
 thus they acted, as the Irish absentee at the very 
 same time did not act ; they saved the country 
 because they lived in it ; the others abandoned the 
 country because they lived out of it." God forbid 
 that the event should corroborate these judgments of 
 which we are now and again painfully reminded ! God 
 forbid that prejudice, ignorance, resentment, or any 
 other evil, should ultimately prevail against those two 
 countries which in union may indeed be miserable 
 each, but the separation of which would proba- 
 bly be the ruin of both ! If England has not 
 
236 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. IV. 
 
 as yet felt her responsibilities, at least she has 
 been warned. If she has been hitherto one of those 
 nations found wanting, let it not be said hereafter 
 that she was one of those found impenitent ; for 
 England, believe me, as well as Ireland, is at this 
 time on her trial. She is called upon now to prove 
 whether she be a nation capable of dealing with a 
 great crisis ; whether she knows how to use her own 
 resources ; whether her better mind be her directing 
 and tutelary spirit, or one that stands on the thresh- 
 old and bids her farewell. 
 
 Two destinies lie before England* To the free- 
 will of every man two destinies are proposed, inter- 
 woven for a time, though issuing forth at last in op- 
 posite directions ; and in each there is a necessary 
 sequence, from event to event. England must de- 
 termine which part of her twofold nature is to rule 
 in her; and in that act she determines which of these 
 two destinies is hers. One destiny is this — that her 
 prosperity should increase yet more and more ; that 
 her commerce should extend itself still further; 
 that her cottons should clothe a yet larger num- 
 ber of customers; that her self-gratulation should 
 mantle yet higher in her cup ; that of her prayers, 
 all, except the best, should have been granted — and 
 that none of these things should be for her good. 
 Her wealth may culminate, but her worth de- 
 cline ; her physical power may advance, but her 
 
LET. IV.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 237 
 
 moral energies retrograde ; her manufactures may 
 change all England into one Lancashire, but she 
 may never learn how to submit the gregarious to the 
 social, or to elevate a social system into a human ; 
 her mines may bring forth daily yet more of iron 
 and of coal, and every stream in her land may 
 turn awheel; but the mines of ancient learning may 
 be abandoned, and the fresh springs of imagination 
 and affection dried up : her colonies may increase, 
 but not to her praise; her zeal against "Popery" 
 may become hotter, but her Christian love daily 
 more cold ; her scorn of Irish nationality may grow 
 hourly more acrid, but that national bond which 
 now feebly compasses her own thousand interests, 
 parties, and sects, may yearly relax its hold. Of 
 such prosperity. Sir, what must be the end ? Bank- 
 ruptcy — first moral, then political, lastly, financial 
 bankruptcy. Beware of your allies, if your vices 
 be of their number; beware of your foes, if the 
 spirit of the future and the hopes of man fight 
 against you. Do you trust your own fortunes, because 
 they are so great .^ Do you suppose that the world 
 could not dispense with England .? Let it be your 
 more becoming pride, after your ruin, that England 
 — the England that once was — could not dispense 
 with her virtue. The world. Sir, can very well dis- 
 pense with many whom it has used ; and Fortune 
 sometimes seeks a younger mate. Your fall would be 
 less alarming than you imagine, and the echo would 
 
238 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. IV. 
 
 vibrate less far : it would be the tale of the day, and 
 one more warning, probably despised. The whole 
 fabric of your prosperity, such as I have supposed 
 it, would drop, when its hour came, like one of those 
 factory chimneys which one moment astonish the 
 gazer by their height, and the next relax, and sub- 
 side — a heap of bricks piled about their own base. If 
 such should be the end of England, may I not be 
 of those who survive to see it ! Many would rejoice 
 because they were your rivals, many because they 
 were your foes ; some because you had outstripped 
 them, some because you had oppressed them ; a few 
 because in your humiliation they would have wit- 
 nessed a mighty retribution, and a salutary triumph 
 of the right. To none of these classes should I be- 
 long. I should lament the downfal of the nation that 
 I had revered ; of the land of my ancestors, native 
 not less to my affections ; — my own country still 
 when she suffered me no longer to be her son.. 
 With a larger than national sentiment I should be- 
 wail the rejection of her who, as I had hoped, be- 
 longed not to herself, or to Europe, but to the 
 world. With an awe not human only, but religious, 
 and with a boding trouble for those I most revere, 
 I should contemplate the instability, not of human 
 greatness alone, but of human virtue, and of that 
 greatness which Virtue counted but as one among 
 the attributes of her divinity and the insignia of her 
 command. Nations, like men, die out ; and of all 
 
LET. IV.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 239 
 
 the exits from national life few are unshaken by a 
 pang, fewer still unhonoured by a tear. Some na- 
 tions have fallen across the threshold of a great 
 enterprise ; some, like Herod, have dropped, stricken 
 in a moment upon the noon-tide throne of permit- 
 ted might; some have not relinquished a sceptre 
 worthily upheld, until it sank into a worthier 
 hand : but if the elect of nations stands con- 
 demned, because she fulfilled not that vocation 
 with which she alone was called ; and if the sword 
 upon which, tried and sentenced, she fell, was no 
 other than that weapon with which she was gloriously 
 apparelled for unguilty conquests ; then, Sir, all 
 those who retain any commerce with human frailty 
 or pious fear may be permitted in sad perplexity to 
 wonder and to sigh. Let that come which must; 
 yet England had never been made the richest and 
 most powerful of the nations, if she had not at one 
 time been the bravest, the most laborious, and the 
 wisest ; and if, by the most lamentable of declines, 
 virtue drew corruption from her own reward ; if 
 industry produced wealth, wealth covetousness, cove- 
 tousness all that is weak and base, and these their 
 appointed end ; let all who speak remember ; let 
 friend and foe, those who weep, and those who 
 laugh, be warned ; and let no man make mention of 
 what England became, till he has called to mind 
 what England was. 
 
 Draw we now the other lot. Who is she that 
 
240 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. IV. 
 
 issues forth from the cloud, the Pallas of the nations } 
 One who, gifted with highest gifts, remained the mis- 
 tress of them all, and never became their slave ; one 
 who possessed them not for her own good alone, but 
 for the good of all ; and possessed her own soul in 
 the quietude of strength and in the wisdom of peace. 
 From the beginning she was destined to a great 
 work. Descended from great and various races, 
 she seemed by inheritance or by emulation to unite 
 their virtues ; for she manifested a Roman magnani- 
 mity, fortitude in the field, and reverence for law, in 
 conjunction with a Saxon robustness and domestic 
 faith, and all the chivalry of the Norman. She was 
 seated sufficiently near to the great republic of 
 European States, to challenge them to feats of arms, 
 or sport with them in warlike games ; and yet her 
 insular position had imparted to her that exemption 
 from external chances which secured the equable, 
 simultaneous, and proportionate development of all 
 her internal energies, and made her history the 
 history of her mind. All those great principles 
 which elsewhere have been allowed a separate expan- 
 sion in separate places found, therefore, in her a 
 common asylum, and either coalesced in her multi- 
 form unity, or contended on equal terms on her 
 stage. She was as commercial as Tyre, and as 
 given to agriculture as Egypt. She united an aris- 
 tocracy the greatest in the world, not from its an- 
 tiquity or prescriptive delusiveness, but its noble- 
 
LET. IV.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 241 
 
 ness and its ministries of public duty, with whatever 
 in popular institutions opens out a sphere for the 
 energies of the many, without debarring from them 
 objects of reverence, or exacting a forfeiture of their 
 peace. Tier nobles were the bastions of the throne, 
 and the pillars of the people. Her throne was the 
 sanctuary of her state and the unity of the nation. 
 She was as ardent in the prosecution of new 
 science as though all knowledge were yet to be 
 won, and as vigilant in the conservation of ancient 
 truth as though its whole increase were stored in her 
 gamers ; and while literature and invention were with 
 her unshackled, an apostolical church, the deposi- 
 tory of a traditional creed, was careful lest one crumb 
 of the complete faith should be lost, or one drop 
 inclosed in holy vessels should suffer violation. She 
 stood between the old world and the new, belonging 
 to neither, yet to both ; rooted in all the recollec- 
 tions of ancient times, and fanned by the gales of 
 promise that blew from a younger shore. 
 
 If such should be the account rendered hereafter 
 of the time that is now past, what worthy consumma- 
 tion shall be added for the future } Upon this wide 
 platform and deep foundation what structure is to be 
 reared ? A new era has dawned upon the world ; and 
 discoveries which have quadrupled the speed of loco- 
 motion, and made the transmission of intelligence 
 instantaneous, must affect the interests of mankind 
 as though the earth had been, with reference to phy- 
 
 M 
 
242 e;ngush misrule [let. iv. 
 
 steal obstacles, compressed into one-fourth of its 
 former size, while the intellectual sphere had been 
 enlarged fourfold. How the change will affect social 
 relations we know not, except that this sudden 
 increase of human power must work great things for 
 evil or for good, according as evil or good predomi- 
 nates in those on whom the responsibility of the boon is 
 imposed. In proportion as the barriers of nationality 
 and neighbourhood are broken down, there must rise, 
 founded on the ruins of a narrower system, a Baby- 
 lonian empire or a city of peace. A ruler will still 
 be needed ; or an instructress to supersede rule. 
 That nation, we may well believe, will gain most 
 from these new opportunities, which possesses most 
 the energies necessary to use them, and the wis- 
 dom to use them aright. England, if she forfeits 
 not her place, must be that nation ; but before 
 she is mighty without she must first be strengthened 
 within. Let her prove to those who can but dream 
 about the past, that heroism and piety are restricted 
 to no conventional forms, but hang like the air above 
 the world, and can embody themselves wherever 
 there is a human heart to receive them and a hand 
 the servant of that heart : let her prove that heroism 
 needs not the fence of feudal towers ; and that piety 
 can pray and watch, though embosomed no longer 
 in cloisters which harmonize the city tumults with 
 their anthems, or fling the light of a midnight 
 shrine from rocky island and on from M^ave to 
 
LET. IV.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 243' 
 
 wave. Let her educate her people, and let her first 
 lesson be that education does not consist chiefly 
 in verbal instruction, but in whatever acquaints 
 men with their duties and familiarizes them with 
 honest refinement. If she looks for a minister to 
 aid her that which she has long sought after stands 
 beside her still. Let her strengthen and honour 
 her Church, that great institution, the oldest as the 
 noblest in the land, the mother of her early civiliza- 
 tion and the harbinger of her modern freedom, 
 who wears upon her front the scars of England's 
 whole history, who never slept but for England's 
 calamity, nor woke but to remember her former 
 deeds, nor was powerless till she was bound, nor 
 dumb till none would hear. Let this Church, which 
 long since and often has stirred in her sleep, be 
 awakened if but by the tread of advancing events, 
 and lift up her '^ mitred head" not only in the courts 
 of princes^ but what is better and more needed now, 
 in the darkness of many a Pagan English town. 
 Let her meet her great adversary with learning for 
 learning, and temple for temple ; let her send forth 
 her voice, and the circumference of your sea-girt 
 isle will send back a response. Let her be no 
 longer the constable alone of the State, but a priest 
 ministering at its altar and a larger one ; and con- 
 tent no longer with that praise which now she claims 
 as hers only, that whatever may be her defects or 
 deficiencies, she has preserved the fiilness of the 
 
 M 2 
 
244 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. IV. 
 
 primeval faith and united it to a worship undefaced 
 by modern additions ; let her cleanse her household 
 as she purged her missal, shut out the profane from 
 her tree of life, and re-enact the commandments. 
 Thus confirmed in virtue at home, the paths of Eng- 
 land will be made plain abroad ; and since she alone 
 of the nations possesses that divine faculty, to fill 
 with her own spirit each one of her sons, who, move 
 where he may, is covered with the consciousness of 
 his country, and strengthened by her arm, let her 
 move forth in her colonial children for the good of 
 furthest climes, and behold the whole countenance of 
 England, surmounted by the crowns of past ages, 
 reflected in other than Britannic waters. She will 
 then be able to consummate an empire not only more 
 universal than any which has preceded it, but nobler 
 by far, and of an order never before revealed. Anti- 
 quarians and sentimentalists make a mock of trade. 
 Your trade will be the most glorious of instruments 
 when its moral end is recognised as its sanction. 
 It is not aught that you possess which alarms your 
 friends, but that which you lack ; not what you 
 seek to multiply, but what you forget to retain. 
 The precious metals are the circulating medium, 
 or "lingua communis" of trade ; trade is the cir- 
 culating medium of nations ; the nervous tissue 
 through which there flows a common life, power, and 
 mind. The trade of a mean nation has ever dif- 
 fused a mean infection, because it is itself mean ; 
 
LET. IV.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 245 
 
 but if the body of your prosperity be nerved by he- 
 roic energies and uplifted by an indwelling spirit of 
 greatness, then you can never minister to the phy- 
 sical needs of mankind, without enriching them 
 likewise with your moral treasures. It has been said 
 that trade is the golden girdle of the globe : that 
 cincture may minister at a grave office if it be clasped 
 by the Urim and Thummim of British religion and 
 British law. A world that England truly sei*ves 
 will not soon be able to dispense with her services ; 
 for in honourable rivalships the competitors are 
 few, although the reward is great. Empires have 
 hitherto been founded on violence and blood : if any 
 one scorns the notion of an empire founded on virtue 
 and on trade, let him consider that authentic canon 
 and clear definition of power — " He that would be 
 greatest among you, let him be as he that serves.'* 
 The Roman, in old time, exulted in that mandate, 
 **Tu regere gentes:" let it rather be the praise of 
 England that she neither trampled on the proud nor 
 spared the submiss alone ; that from no unjust and 
 tyrannous elevation she overshadowed a subject 
 world ; but that she raised the nations to her 
 height, and enfranchised them into her common 
 dominion of illumination and peace. Be assured 
 that, however an abject sympathy may delight in 
 the glitter of an oppressive sword, all power lastingly 
 honoured has included some true service extended to 
 the subject people in protection or needful restraint ; 
 
i246 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. IV. 
 
 and that that authority will not soonest be re- 
 jected which alone has never demanded an external 
 badge. Let England govern by serving; and the 
 noblest of empires will be the longest lived. Should 
 it ever yield to the common lot, it will die the 
 noblest of deaths; for it will sink back amid the 
 royal concourse of those nations whom it had reared 
 up to be the inheritors of its excellence as well as 
 the successors of its power. I have drawn the pic- 
 ture of what may be ; what will be I cannot foretell : 
 but even in your corrupt age there have been augu- 
 ries that consoled the desponding, and eagles on the 
 ■right hand. It was England who was summoned 
 to stand up and to hurl from its seat that tyranny, 
 a sudden and all but universal apparition, which 
 covered the monuments of the European Past and 
 threatened the civilization of the Future. It was 
 England who first threw wide her prison gates and 
 bade her slaves to breathe. When in your populous 
 districts hope itself was lost, save the hope of a merely 
 physical and therefore fatal prosperity, and the barba- 
 rism of gold seemed destined to a dominion rather 
 shared than alternated with the anarchy of ignorance 
 and vice ; voices were heard, however feeble, amid that 
 jarring and formless void, commanding order and 
 invoking law. Never in England has any oppro- 
 brium arisen, but some man has been raised up to 
 speak against it. From these and the like omens, 
 I see already the promise of England's future, re- 
 
llEt. IV.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 247 
 
 fleeted like the light of an unascended sun from a 
 thousand mountain -tops down on the plains below. 
 
 Let me hasten to the end. If the better of 
 'these two lots is to be drawn, it must be drawn by a 
 united people. Whoever glances at a map of the 
 world will wonder at the smallness of that centre 
 upon which its best interests, enshrined within the 
 British Islands, rest for support. That centre con- 
 sists of two parts : that inmost wheel is formed of 
 two segments : of these, if one be suffered to decay, 
 or if the twain fall asunder, the whole niighty fabric 
 will collapse, and your conquering progress be 
 stayed for ever. On the lOth of February, 1800, a 
 very ardent advocate for the Union, one who states 
 that he had pressed that subject on the English Go- 
 vernment for seven years before he could engage 
 their serious attention upon it, spoke thus : '* The 
 British Islands are formed by nature for mutual 
 security or mutual destruction, and if we are to pilr- 
 isUe the course we have thought fit to run for the last 
 twenty years it may become a question of doubtful 
 iiss^iie, whether, at a crisis of difficulty and danger, 
 Great Britain will be enabled to support us, or we 
 shall sink Great Britain." If Lord Clare thought 
 that nothing but a substantial union, by which he 
 meant " an incorporation of these kingdoms," was a 
 protection from this danger, is not the experience of 
 the last twenty yeais, nay of the last twenty months, 
 
248 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. IV. 
 
 sufficient to prove that the mere name of a legisla- 
 tive Union is an insufficient safeguard ? Others may 
 deem of this matter otherwise : but I desire to record 
 in these words my own conviction, that England can- 
 not dispense with the aid of Ireland, nor receive 
 that aid unless she raises her from her present low 
 estate. Whatever honest purpose, skill, or power, 
 are necessary for this work, she must possess or 
 acquire. Do you ask me how high the hand of 
 England is to raise the land that England laid low ? 
 — As high as her own head. 
 
 Is it better. Sir, that two kingdoms which must be 
 one or nothing should live together in peace, or 
 be perpetually engaged in rancorous, objectless, and 
 fratricidal war ? Is it better that two kingdoms which 
 form one empire should club together the worst 
 follies of each into a common folly, and the worst 
 passions of each into a common ruin, or that they 
 should summon to a synod the best faculties and 
 affections of each to direct the energies of both and 
 provide for the common safety ? You are a com- 
 mercial people : what commerce can there be more 
 profitable than the mutual interchange of good 
 offices, attended perhaps at last by a higher bless- 
 ing, the communication of good qualities recipro- 
 cally given and received? Let no one say, that 
 he is pledged by the past ; to what opinion can 
 any statesman stand more pledged than to the good 
 of his country ? Establish, if you need them, hos- 
 
LET. IV.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 249 
 
 pitals for decayed reputations and principles past 
 their work : but call your strong men to the tasks of 
 strength, and bid them labour in the spirit of free- 
 dom. 
 
 Begin, Sir, at last to govern Ireland in the spirit 
 of a statesman. It is not too late yet : and it can- 
 not be said to be too early. For six centuries you 
 rested from thought on this matter: six centuries 
 were to you sabbatical : therefore labour now on the 
 sabbath day. You may plead for such profanation 
 the threefold excuse of charity, of piety, and of neces- 
 sity. Cast about and find some large and sound 
 principles of action : and if you cannot find a 
 political principle at once, remember that even a 
 moral or ethical principle may be of use negatively, 
 that is to say, may be significant as to what it pro- 
 hibits. Another temporary guide to you would be 
 this — note down whatever looks most like a prin- 
 ciple or at least systematic practice in your govern- 
 ment of Ireland till the last few years, and revolve 
 how a course exactly the opposite might work. At 
 one time it was a maxim to oppose the English in- 
 terest on all occasions to the Irish, on a presup- 
 position that they were incompatible : at another 
 time to oppose class to class in Ireland. The 
 troubles of last year in Ireland, which have embit- 
 tered some old sores, have also tended to heal 
 many differences. The clergyman of the Establish- 
 ment and the Roman Catholic priest, the proprietor 
 
 M 3 
 
2o0 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. IV. 
 
 and the farmer, have sat in the same relief com- 
 mittee, received the same blessings from the starving 
 poor, been occasionally assailed by the same mob 
 in the neighbouring town, and not seldom by the 
 same missiles from England. Rather encourage 
 than snap asunder those friendly relations; and 
 make the union of classes in Ireland contemporaneous 
 with a closer union of affections between the two 
 countries. If it should occur to you, after reading 
 our annals, that you forgot to conquer the country 
 which ever and anon you overran, remember that 
 this is no fault of ours, Ireland having been always 
 too much divided to make the resistance which you 
 met in Scotland; and that it is now too late to 
 mend in this respect, except you had spirit enough 
 to attempt an industrial conquest, by means of a 
 copious investment of capital. 
 
 Wise m6n are men who can pick some instruction 
 out of their own errors, otherwise worthless ; but fool- 
 ish men learn nothing by experience, because, pass- 
 ing through a variety of accidents but not having 
 had courage or time to digest their chance observa- 
 tions into any consistent scheme of retrospective 
 thought, they have in reality acquired no experience 
 and stored up nothing but blows. The experience 
 of last year alone has enriched you with several ex- 
 cellent negative principles. That the proper busi- 
 ness of one single man cannot be done by a whole 
 college of fellow-workers sounds paradoxical, though 
 
LET. IV.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 251 
 
 many simple instances of the fact will occur to you ; 
 but a principle, of which this is one application, was 
 scientifically demonstrated last year by a vain at- 
 tempt to place the labour of the country at the 
 disposal of baronial boards. On this occasion the 
 principle arrived at may be rendered useftil at once, 
 if applied in a converse form ; for instance, it may 
 be inferred that what is, at least in part, the work 
 of the State cannot be efficiently carried out by iso- 
 lated individuals; and of this colonisation may bfe 
 an example. That what should be done by direct 
 legislation cannot be effected by indirect, was also 
 proved last year. The great mass of the population 
 being left without food, you resolved to call charity 
 by the name of employment, and a premium on 
 pauperism by that of a test of destitution, in 
 the hopes of eliciting private capital : but the 
 effect of this indirect proceeding was to pauperise 
 labour, and make what private capital existed 
 hide in holes. Here also you would seem to have 
 touched on a principle without digging it up into 
 the light. Let us try to apply it in a converse 
 form. It is probable, for instance, that what ought 
 to be effected by indirect cannot be effected by 
 direct legislation ; that a direct tax on absentees 
 would be an illustration of this; and that a more 
 fatal one would be found in any law which interfered 
 with the rights of property, for the purpose of en- 
 forcing its responsibilities, instead of asserting both 
 
'252 ENGLISH xMISRULE [LET. IV. 
 
 with equal plainness, and allowing the laws that vin- 
 dicated and defined each to act and react upon each 
 other indirectly. Here are two principles, each with 
 a twofold application, to begin with. I have indicated 
 a principle with regard to the Poor Law, namely, that 
 a Poor Law is not a scheme for the support of an in- 
 definite number of paupers, which could only be 
 realized for a short time, because this process would 
 eat up the labour fund; but that its economical value 
 consists in its making the pressure of over-population 
 onerous at an early stage, on those who possess the 
 power to deal with it, and have the deepest stake in the 
 country ; thus suggesting to them in time the need of 
 remedial measures, such as emigration, education, &c. 
 Should this principle be sound, a corollary from it 
 must be, that a Poor Law rendered fit to counteract 
 a famine by the removal of tests then especially 
 necessary, must thus be made unfit for its proper 
 functions. An Irish peasant is always in favour of 
 substituting his hat for a pane of glass, and making" 
 every thing do the work of every thing else ; but 
 English legislators ought to be above such devices. 
 
 If what looks like a great principle, and yet an 
 obvious one- should appear to you corruptly denied, 
 inquire whether it be really controverted, and re- 
 member that a great principle misapplied is a great 
 mischief, which does in one year an amount of evil 
 that otherwise must have required ten. If any expe- 
 dient, very clever, but a little malignant, should occur 
 
LET. IV.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 253 
 
 to you suddenly, think about it twice lest it should 
 prove an ingenious way of going wrong. Thus, the 
 suppression of the class of Irish proprietors might 
 help you out a little for the first year, and it is cer- 
 tainly a pleasant charity to give the goods of one's 
 neighbour to the poor ; but the suppression of a class 
 is a serious thing, every class having some function to 
 discharge in the State which it can hardly evade 
 though ever so selfish. If all the soap-boilers in 
 England were to be banished in a day, a shock would 
 ])e felt ; and if you were to abolish that whole class 
 in Ireland on which British dominion chiefly rests, 
 you would be nothing the more secure. The Irish 
 peasant sawed off the branch on which he was sitting ; 
 but English legislators should be more circumspect. 
 You have discovered that Ireland wants a middle class. 
 It wants it, because for a century you prohibited the 
 acquisition of property by the poor ; but remember that 
 to attempt the creation of such a body by confiscating 
 the property of the rich would be as foolish and 
 immoral a proceeding as if you endeavoured to pro- 
 duce a middle class, relatively strong at least, by 
 allowing the upper classes to be shot off by degrees, 
 and the lower to be hanged off or starved out. A 
 middle class is produced by capital, and capital by 
 security of property, not confiscation. Irish rents 
 are said to be too high. Remember that the value 
 of land, like that of other commodities, is not deter- 
 mined by the caprice of the owners, but by general 
 
254 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. IV. 
 
 laws. The farmer in Ireland demands a less share of 
 the produce raised than in England because he invests 
 less capital in the land, and because he is more 
 pressed by competition. Rents are high relatively 
 to the farmer's profits, not to the productive powers 
 of the land ; and wherever the land is let at a rate 
 unusually low the agriculture is worst. I fear to tire 
 you with suggestions; yet I must make a few more. 
 Suppose not, because Ireland is full of old errors, 
 that you are to create in her a system altogether new. 
 You cannot build upon air. You can benefit no indi- 
 vidual without first discovering what is good in him 
 and making your appeal to that. In Ireland you can 
 dispense with nothing that is good, and not at once 
 with every thing that is bad : you must work accord- 
 ing to the machinery you find, joining on the 
 new to the old ; and if any of your own institutions 
 are not congenial with the character of this country, 
 rather than bid them serve us in our own de- 
 spite, you will do well to modify and accommodate 
 them. Commit not to the rash and spleenftil pre- 
 tence of a flying season the grave task of legislating 
 for the future in the present, and for two nations in 
 one. Procrastinate no longer, nor cheat yourselves 
 with half measures from a natural desire to distri- 
 bute an inevitable expense over a large series of 
 years, for the time of action is to-day, and you may 
 clear by a bound a stream which you cannot com- 
 posedly walk across. Even when you feel almost 
 
LET. IV.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 255 
 
 sure that we have deserved punishment, punish us 
 not by any injury certain to recoil upon yourselves. 
 I have heard of forty Irish freeholders, who, being 
 locked up near the court-house during an election, 
 threatened to hang themselves, in order on the 
 opening of the door to spite their landlord, who had 
 made a point of being obliged by their votes : but 
 British senators should make the best of all con- 
 tingencies. Remember that foolish laws are foolish, 
 .not because in a nation of philosophers they must 
 necessarily work ill, but because, all laws being sus- 
 ceptible of divers modes of operation, these in particu- 
 lar are likely to work ill in a nation so unwise as to 
 require laws. Do not even despise an exhausted 
 populace; for a rat dying in its hole may expel 
 you from your house. Keep yourselves from unwise 
 astonishment at the aberrations of the unwise ; for 
 wilder fancies than Repeal will float across brains 
 delirious with hunger; and the eyes of those that 
 watch on the rock now the seventh day will mis- 
 take far off foam for a white sail. Abstain from 
 unreasonable anger at the frustration of unreason- 
 able hopes; for it is not possible that the cripple 
 taken out of your cage should at an early period 
 dance to the satisfaction of polite company. For cen- 
 turies this country has suffered from one disease, the 
 moral heart-burn produced by energies that preyed on 
 her inwardly, because they were allowed no outward 
 object : help her, in the first instance, to help herself; 
 
256 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. IV. 
 
 and show her no more favour when you have once 
 given her a free stage. Do not experimentalize " in 
 corpore vivo," though it be also "in corpore vili :" 
 the Irishman, being asked whether he could play the 
 fiddle, made answer that he knew not, for he had 
 never tried: but great statesmen should know be- 
 forehand what enterprises they can carry out and what 
 they cannot. Consult for the common good, in a 
 spirit of hope, because there is no cause for despair, 
 and you have to deal with a people who eminently 
 require hope, and yet are much subject to depression ; 
 of patience because, though you do your best, you 
 have great difficulties to contend with; of humility, 
 because the chief of those difficulties result from your 
 own past delinquencies ; of courage, because weak 
 courses turn out the most dangerous ; of wisdom, 
 because unwise courage is the heroism of a fool — in 
 one word, of Duty. Having consulted, should it be 
 found absolutely necessary that Ireland must be 
 ruined, leave her, if you can possibly afford it, her 
 good name. In Ireland, that has always counted for 
 something ; and the vainer amongst us are disposed 
 to attach the more importance to it since it has be- 
 come their only possession. 
 
 Finally, be not incensed at being reminded of 
 what you know, for prejudice and anger make us 
 forget our better knowledge. A century ago you 
 must have known that civil rights and political pri- 
 vileges were distinct things ; yet you deprived the 
 
LET. IV.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 257 
 
 Roman Catholics of property to preserve Protestant 
 ascendancy. Another principle which you must have 
 heard of was this, that the domestic was distinct from 
 the civil or political sphere, and should not be in- 
 vaded by them ; yet the State departed from its 
 proper functions to inform the son and wife when 
 they were to take the property of the father and 
 husband. You probably could have informed another 
 that Church and State, though in alliance, are not 
 one ; yet you jobbed the Episcopal appointments 
 to keep up the "English interest;" and an arch- 
 bishop now and then governed all Ireland except 
 his own diocese. Among the various distinctions 
 of office necessary in a limited monarchy, there 
 is, perhaps, none more important than that which 
 keeps the judicial function apart from the Execu- 
 tive : yet, in Ireland, judges were too often made 
 on political grounds, and magistrates who had no 
 politics were sometimes official hacks. This strange 
 state of the body politic, in which all the vital parts 
 were unnaturally squeezed together, was not the less 
 a tyranny, because it was one too weak for courage 
 or generosity, and too clumsy to carry out a purpose ; 
 but what I would here remark is, that as you could 
 hardly have been ignorant of those great principles 
 which your policy violated, no harm could have fol- 
 lowed had you been occasionally reminded of them. 
 I have now. Sir, suggested, besides eleven practical 
 measures before discussed, a yet larger number of 
 
^21^8 ENGLISH MISRULte [LET. IV. 
 
 practical hints, to be expanded at your leisure by 
 one in whose discretion you confide far more than 
 in mine ; which hints, if they pretend not to the 
 name of principles, are yet of that high family and 
 blood: and I will only add that should you act 
 upon these suggestions, or such as are not opposed 
 to them, we in Ireland will forgive the remote past 
 because it is past, and the recent past because of 
 its deeds most were well intended and many good, 
 and its words were but wind ; establishing it as our 
 principle, to cleave in all herfbrtunes to England, and 
 adopting as our motto the sound and simple dogma 
 of Mr. Pitt, " We must stand or fall together — we 
 should live and die together." 
 
 Alas, Sir, we contend upon unequal terms when 
 England reviles Ireland, and Ireland England. 
 You, in hating Ireland, hate but what you have 
 always disliked, and never known : we, when com- 
 pelled by justice or the common spirit of a man 
 to accept the challenge and retort upon a plain- 
 spoken with a courteous scorn, are reduced to 
 ispeak against that country with which many of us 
 have associated their most venerated remembrances 
 and their most forward-looking hopes. Plainly we 
 must speak or be silent; and if I err not in im- 
 puting to England the eminent possession of justice, 
 that great virtue which is the corner-stone of the 
 social edifice, the manlier of her sons will not re- 
 pine at strong words if just, whether the voice 
 
LET. IV.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 259 
 
 of justice alone, or that with which justice cannot 
 always dispense, a just resentment. Yet still it is 
 England that we speak against. It was your po- 
 licy to sow in this land a race of men with no 
 country ; but Providence raised up in its place a 
 race of men owing fealty to two countries. We have 
 lately heard much of Irish nationality. There 
 never was a time when I did not feel Ireland 
 to be ray country; and the stormy scorn with 
 which for a year and more you have assailed her, 
 trampling upon her in the hour of her sorest 
 adversity, and embittering the iSavour of the bread 
 you gave, has pressed that sentiment around me with 
 a closeness for which I thank you : but yet I once 
 thought that those who have neither country for 
 their interests, might have both for their affec- 
 tions; and I still distrust the soundness of that 
 patriotism, which renounces the past to be faithful to 
 the present, and responding to all claims that live 
 in the circle around us, forgets the successive 
 monuments of household generations gone by, 
 which repose in no alien land. If the relations 
 between England and Ireland be indeed such as 
 you would make them, then I ought to apologize 
 for not having touched with the hghter pen of a 
 foreigner upon certain scandals in your country 
 with which you may conclude me to have an im- 
 perfect acquaintance and no concern. Old habit, 
 however, breaks out at times ; and I have spoken of 
 
260 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. 17. 
 
 England's existing blots, not with resentment only, 
 but with such resentment as is not lavished save on 
 corruptions that vitiate what we love. Can these 
 two countries never be united save by a Union 
 the result of a mutual necessity, the memorial of 
 a partaken corruption, the provoker of a recurrent 
 hostility, but never yet the spousal pledge of a com- 
 mon hope ? Is it impossible that the sons of either 
 should ever be true to the other, without being false 
 to a nearer claim ? Must our choice always halt be- 
 tween that mother who fed our bodies with her milk, 
 and her who nursed our spirits from the stores of 
 Shakspere and Bacon ? It may be so ; yet circum- 
 stances once promised better : and fruits that moulder 
 immature put forth a goodly bloom. A very few 
 years had elapsed after the enfranchisement of Ire- 
 land, when she stood up no mean citizen of no mean 
 city. When the French Revolution broke out as a 
 plague, and threatened with peril and temptation the 
 whole soul of the world ; when the infection had al- 
 ready reached your shores and spotted your inmost 
 chambers, two men stood up in England between 
 the living and the dead : those two men were Pitt 
 and Burke : one wielded the energies of your 
 country, the other directed its mind ; one was an 
 Englishman, the other an Irishman. When the 
 great republic had become the greatei empire, and 
 kingdoms, no longer rival, murmured " Who next must 
 fall?" two men stood at the head of EngRsh affairs: 
 
LET. IV.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 261 
 
 one directed her diplomacy, the other conducted 
 her armies ; both were Irishmen. To descend from 
 those memorable epochs to more recent dangers, 
 when the most warlike of the eastern nations precipi- 
 tated itself upon your path, and all asked to whom 
 India was to belong, two men rode, side by side, into 
 the battle : one governed that empire, the other 
 commanded her hosts ; one was an Englishman, the 
 other an Irishman. On those great occasions the 
 soldiers who fought in common ranks were of no ex- 
 clusive race : death was there impartial; and if that 
 Saxon and Celtic blood had never met before, it 
 mingled on the plain of Waterloo, and on the banks 
 of the Sutlej. I know not. Sir, whether any of 
 those who fought in the former field are permitted, 
 now grey-headed, to haunt your English coasts : 1 
 know not whether the fathers of any who fought in 
 that more recent field, grey, but not with years alone, 
 are of those who have wandered from the land that 
 gave them birth to that land to which their sons 
 gave victory : but if it so should be, and if that hand 
 which helped to lift the fortunes of England so high 
 be now extended miserably in solicitation of a with- 
 holden crust ; — all I can say is that it is a sorry sight. 
 Let the boys in the market-place laugh as they may, 
 I am not of their number. 
 
 I have said, Sir, what I had to say, and I release 
 
262 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. IV^. 
 
 you. Amid the din of conflict one voice is not heard 
 far : but duty, which rests but slightly on hope, leaves 
 us nothing to fear. Truth in the end must prevail. 
 That certainty is a confirmation of faith, but no un- 
 bounded promoter of finite expectations ; for her bat- 
 tle-field is larger than the British Empire, and during 
 the agony of her strife generations live and die. 
 Where the strongest are every day found wanting no 
 one who is conscious of an upright purpose need stay 
 to ask whether he be weak, or what the weak can effect. 
 Such sentiments as I have expressed must excite 
 the hostility of a large section of the British public ; 
 and, coupled with the admissions I have made, will 
 win me no popularity in Ireland. I have not 
 shunned such hostility nor sought such popularity. 
 Connected with no party, and attached profoundly, 
 reverentially, and sorrowfully, to both countries, I 
 have endeavoured to serve both by bearing witness 
 to whatever truth, or fragment of the truth, it has 
 been permitted me to see : and if in this endeavour 
 I have failed, as is probable, no lesser matter is 
 worth my seeking or shunning. Should my advice 
 pass for nothing, may England receive wiser ad- 
 vice from the wiser, stronger reproofs from the 
 stronger, and from the source of wisdom, wisdom to 
 use them both. May that nation, the greatest in the 
 world, so great that in erring it errs from itself and 
 cannot err less than greatly, possess now that true 
 
LET. IV.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. *263 
 
 greatness which will enable her to profit by her past 
 errors in renouncing them, and to summon up her 
 noblest faculties to provide that the commonwealth 
 take no harm. May the two kingdoms hitherto in- 
 tertangled, not united, retaining each with its own 
 name whatever is best in its separate character and 
 recollections, blend together the excellence of both 
 into a common excellence, and bury the past ani- 
 mosities of both in a common oblivion. May their 
 union be a union of mutual respect, good-will, and 
 good deeds ; and, with these conditions, may it be 
 perpetual. May the imperial nation thus built up be 
 worthy of its destinies, and show to the inferior 
 nations of the earth for what cause nationalities 
 exist. Should the better of those two destinies 
 which I have pourtrayed be reserved for England, 
 it will be said of her by the future historian, that at 
 a period then long past she had been tried and not 
 found wanting. It will be said, that after the termi- 
 nation of her most arduous war, when she was flushed 
 by the greatest of her military triumphs, and flown with 
 the insolence of a long and peaceful prosperity, the 
 sins of her youth were allowed suddenly to overtake 
 her, and she was summoned in a moment to con- 
 front and deal finally with that people, at whom, 
 from the beginning to that hour, she had but glanced 
 askance. It will be said, that she was equal to the 
 emergency and to herself; and that putting from 
 
264 ENGLISH MISRULE [LET. IV. 
 
 her, as another's madness, the whole burden of the 
 past and the cloud of self-willed delusion, she had 
 seized the moment and consummated the triumph. 
 With nations, as with men, the hour of temp- 
 tation and of trial is the hour of rapid advance. 
 Men do not grow either physically or morally by 
 equable progress, but shoot forward at particular 
 periods, especially after disease and suffering; and 
 nations which sometimes sleep for centuries, at 
 other times make in a few years the progress of a 
 century, the blossom unfolding in an hour when the 
 seasonable preparation has previously been made in 
 secret. Ireland, like England, has now reached a 
 period of transition, and possibly of transformation. 
 The period of outlawry is past ; the period of legal 
 tyranny is past ; and the period of agitation, toge- 
 ther with that strong man who embodied and directed 
 it, may likewise be past, if for England also is 
 past the period of empirical legislation, of prejudiced 
 discussion, and of contemptuous and capricious be- 
 nevolence. Never was there more room for hope 
 than now, if the two countries, wakened by so pain- 
 ful a shock, be capable of understanding themselves 
 and their mutual relations. In vain would you legis- 
 late for Ireland until you have learned from what 
 point of view the relations between the two countries 
 are to be regarded : in vain would you even consult, 
 until you have learned with what disposition, founded 
 
LET. IV.] AND IRISH MISDEEDS. 265 
 
 on the past and on the future, the subject is to be 
 approached. This treatise is the endeavour of one 
 man to point out, as a prehminary to all sound judg- 
 ment and sane action, those relations and that dis- 
 position. If it sounds like a message of war, I beg 
 you, nevertheless, to believe that it is sent in the 
 spirit of peace. 
 
 Cdrrah Chase, 
 November, 1847. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 G. Woodfall and Son, Printers, Angel Court, Skinner Street, London. 
 
-iJ ,■": lO