Emancipation’s Impact on Ireland

The tenant usually sublet his tenancy, and on the great rise of prices resulting from the war, the subtenant usually took a similar course, and the same process continued till there were often four or five persons between the landlord and the cultivator of the soil.

Continuing Catholic Emancipation in Ireland,
with a selection from Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland by William E.H. Lecky published in 1871. This selection is presented in 6.5 installments, each one 5 minutes long. For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

Previously in Catholic Emancipation in Ireland.

Time: 1829

They were probably less uncultivated, and they were certainly much less bigoted, than the corresponding class in England, and as long as they consented to be frankly Irish, their people readily followed them. Occasional instances of deliberate tyranny and much sudden violence undoubtedly took place; but it should be remembered that during the whole of the eighteenth century the greater part of Ireland was let at very long leases, and that the margin between the profits of the tenant and the rent of the landlord was so great that the former almost invariably sublet his tenancy to an increased rent. The distress of the people was much more due to this system of middlemen, and to their own ignorance and improvidence, than to landlord tyranny; and the faults of the upper classes, in dealing with their tenants, were rather those of laxity and imprudence than of harshness. The absence of any legal provision for the poor produced great misery and had a bad economic effect in removing one of the great inducements to the gentry to check pauperism; but, on the other hand, it fostered a very unusual spirit of private charity through the country. Absenteeism was much complained of; but this probably sprang more from the great tracts of confiscated land which had been given to great English proprietors, than from the systematic absence of the natives. The presence of a Parliament secured a brilliant society in Dublin; and in the country travelers represent the roads as rather better than in England, and the country seats as numerous and imposing. The absence of rival authority and of religious intolerance, and the character of the people, made the social system work better than might have been expected.

Good-nature is, perhaps, the most characteristic Irish virtue and if it is not one of the highest, it is at least one of the most useful, qualities that a nation can possess. It will soften the burden of the most oppressive laws and of the most abject poverty, and the only evil before which it is powerless is sectarian zeal. O’Connell evoked that zeal, and the bond between landlord and tenant was broken. “I have polled all the gentry and all the fifty-pound freeholders,” wrote Fitzgerald to Sir Robert Peel when giving an account of his defeat— “the gentry to a man.” The attitude which the landlord class afterward assumed during the agitation for repeal completed the change, and they have never regained their old position.

It must be added that another important train of causes was operating in the same direction. The economic condition of Ireland had long been profoundly diseased. The effect of the confiscations, and of the penal laws, had been that almost all the land belonged to Protestants, while the tenants were chiefly Catholics. The effect of the restrictions on trade had been that manufacturing industry was almost unknown, and the whole impoverished population was thrown for subsistence upon the soil. At the same time the English land laws, which are chiefly intended to impede the free circulation and the division of land, were in force in the country in which, beyond all others, such circulation is desirable. One of the most important objects of a wise legislation is to soften the antagonism between landlord and tenant by interweaving their interests, by facilitating the creation of a small yeoman class who break the social disparity, and by providing outlets for the surplus agricultural population. In Ireland none of the mitigations existed; and the difference of religion, and the memory of ancient violence, aggravated to the utmost the hostility.

The tithes, levied for the most part on the poor Catholics for the support of the church of the landlords, were another element of dissension. All the materials of the most dangerous social war thus existed, though the personal popularity of the landlords, and the prostrate condition of the Catholics, for a time postponed the evil. The habits of disorder, and the secret organizations which had arisen in the middle of the eighteenth century, continued to smolder among the people, and in the great distress that followed the sudden fall of prices which accompanied the peace, they broke out afresh. The land, as I have said, in the closing years of the eighteenth century was chiefly let at moderate rents on long leases. The tenant usually sublet his tenancy, and on the great rise of prices resulting from the war, the subtenant usually took a similar course, and the same process continued till there were often four or five persons between the landlord and the cultivator of the soil.

The peasants, accustomed to the lowest standard of comfort, and encouraged by their priests to marry early, multiplied recklessly. The land was divided into infinitesimal farms, and all classes seemed to assume that war prices would be perpetual. Many landlords, bound by their leases, were unable to interfere with the process of division, while others acquiesced in it through laxity of temper or dread of unpopularity; and others encouraged it, as the multiplication of forty-shilling freeholders increased the number of voters whom they could control. In such a condition of affairs, the fall in the value of agricultural produce after the peace proved a crushing calamity. Large sections of the people were on the verge of starvation, and among all agricultural laborers there was a distress and a feeling of oppression which alienated them from their landlords and predisposed them to follow new leaders.

When introducing the Roman Catholics to Parliament, the ministers brought forward two or three measures with the object of diminishing their power, the only one of any real value being the disfranchisement of the forty-shilling freeholders. This measure greatly lessened the proportion of the Roman Catholic electors. It struck off a number of voters who were far too ignorant to form independent opinions, and it in some degree checked the fatal tendency to subdivision of lands. It would have been well if the ministers had stopped here, but with an infatuation that seems scarcely credible they proceeded in this most critical moment to adopt a policy which had the effect of irritating the Roman Catholics to the utmost, without in any degree diminishing their power, and of completely preventing the pacific effects that concession might naturally have had.

Their first act was to refuse to admit O’Connell into Parliament without reelection, on the ground that the Emancipation Act had passed since his election. It was felt that this refusal was purely political and designed to mark their reprobation of his career. It was, of course, utterly impotent, for O’Connell was at once reelected but it was accepted by the whole people as an insult and a defiance. O’Connell himself was extremely irritated, and to the end of his life his antipathy to Sir Robert Peel was of the bitterest and most personal character. He said of him that “his smile was like the silver plate on a coffin.” There was, perhaps, no single measure that
did so much to foster the feeling of discontent in Ireland as this paltry and irrational proceeding.

William E. Gladstone begins here. William E.H. Lecky begins here. Daniel O’Connell begins here.

More information here and here, and below.

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