VIII CONCLUSION IT remains only to take a brief retrospect. Whether we regard the material well-being of the Irish people or their political relations with England, the period following the famine must fill the mind with a sense of depression. Looking back from the point which has been taken for the conclusion of our historical survey, namely, the year 1870, we can observe, indeed, some signs of material progress, though in dwelling upon them we run the risk of exaggerating their importance. The total wealth of the country had greatly increased. The rate of agricultural wages had risen considerably,1 and more regular employment could be obtained. The houses of the people had improved, or, to speak more correctly, the number of oneroomed mud cabins had greatly diminished. Their food was better and more varied; and except in the poorest districts of the west, where the peasants still remained dependent on the potato, the danger of general famine had, to all appearance, finally passed away. Here and there some bright feature thus appears to relieve the sombre aspect of the period, and to convince us that the mass of the people had risen to a higher level. Nevertheless, the level was still miserably low. Judged by no ideal test, but 1 If we take, as the first point of the comparison, some year just before the famine, we may say that the rate had doubled; but from 1851 to 1869 the rise is comparatively slight. Professor Cliffe Leslie, writing in 1868, says that he "has for many years been collecting statistics of prices in connection with a different question, and can affirm that wages have remained at Is. a day throughout the greater part of Ireland since 1859" ("Land Systems of England, Ireland, and the Continent,” p. 98). In 1878 the average was 8s. or 95. a week (Irish Statistical Society's Journal, vol. vii. p. 308). See also, on the subject of Irish wages, Lord Dufferin, "Irish Emigration and Land Tenure," p. 276; Murphy, "Ireland," p. 204; Butt, "Irish People, etc." p. 146. 1849] RETROSPECT 505 by the realised prosperity of neighbouring nations and other parts of the United Kingdom, the condition of Ireland was dark and cheerless, suggesting rather stagnation than healthy vigour. Her progress, moreover, had been suddenly arrested. The second of the two decades which we have reviewed added little to what had been accomplished during the first. The onward movement, which began after the famine, was stopped by the unfavourable seasons of 1860-1862, and there had been no recovery from the sudden check which agriculture then received. There is little exaggeration in saying that the Ireland of 1869 was scarcely a step in advance of the Ireland of 1859.1 Lastly, the improvement can for the most part be attributed to the thinning of the population. On this point the evidence of so unprejudiced an observer as Sir James Caird is very valuable. Writing in 1869, he says, "I visited the worst and most distressed, and also some of the best districts of that country in 1849, immediately after the famine, and on recently traversing nearly the same tract, after an interval of twenty years, I cannot say that its agriculture presented much evidence of general improvement. The people are better clothed, better housed, and better fed, not because the produce of the ground has been materially increased, but because it has become of more value, and is divided among two-thirds of the numbers who shared it then. Most of the wet land is still undrained. The broken, worn, and gapped hedges remain too much as before. Except in Ulster and the eastern seaboard of the country, there is little appearance of any investment of capital in cultivation. What the ground will yield from year to year at the least cost of time, labour, and money is taken from it. The change consequent on the diminution of the population has been followed by an equivalent decrease of the area under corn, and the substitution of live stock in about the 1 See the passage from Dr. Hancock's pamphlet on "The Alleged Progressive Decline of Ireland," quoted by Lord Dufferin, “Irish Emigration, etc.," p. 341; and compare Judge Longfield's account of the progress of Ireland in his address to the Social Science Association (Dublin, 1861) with any description of the state of the country a few years later. same proportion. The produce is thus more secure, and obtained at less cost, and being divided among a smaller number of people, they have each a larger share. But there is little spirit or enterprise, and scarcely a sign over a large portion of Ireland of that immense stride which has marked the progress of agriculture in England and Scotland during the same period." The progress which Ireland had made was due, in short, rather to a mechanical than to an organic change. A third of the people had gone: but the habits, the fortunes, and the hopes of those who remained were not essentially altered. Nor was the stagnation in agriculture, the staple industry of the country, compensated by advance in other directions. The flax trade, indeed, had received a great stimulus from the stoppage of American cotton supplies during the war, but on the whole Irish manufactures remained in a very feeble condition. "In 1868," says Mr. Murphy, "Great Britain had 6205 spinning and weaving factories, in which were 44,179,050 spindles, 532,709 power looms, and 781,280 persons employed; while in Ireland there were only 198 such factories, numbering 938,381 spindles, 13,910 power looms, and 72,963 persons employed." Of the 72,963 persons employed, 57,050 were engaged in the linen manufacture.2 Is the political retrospect brighter? The story told in the previous pages should give the answer. So far, indeed, as a judgment of the conduct of England towards Ireland is involved, we must bear in mind what is often forgotten-the extraordinary difficulty of the task imposed upon English statesmen after the famine. It was the task of governing a country which for centuries had been treated as a halfconquered province, whose aristocracy were unpatriotic, largely non-resident, and unmindful of the duties of property, and whose artificial land system had at last suddenly collapsed; a country where the rich were of one religion and the poor of another, where there existed a strong national feeling but no national institutions, and where the bulk of the people, having lost faith in English good1 "The Irish Land Question (1869), p. 19. 2 See statistics of Irish manufactures in Murphy, "Ireland," pp. 32-56. 1870] FAILURE OF ENGLISH POLICY 507 will and English wisdom, had come to hate English rule. It was, in short, the remaking rather than the governing of Ireland that English statesmen had to undertake, and no judgment would be just which ignored the formidable difficulties that confronted them. But the actual result is not altered by accounting for it. Twenty years ago a fair-minded Englishman, reviewing the Irish policy of his countrymen, would have been bound to admit almost universal failure. The English land laws had failed. The English Church had failed. The English administration had failed. Disaffection had so increased that, outside the circle of the Castle, the Church, and the landlord class, hardly a single Irishman of intelligence could be found who did not believe government by the English Parliament to have hopelessly broken down. The causes of failure were not far to seek. Ireland had serious and manifest grievances. In a great measure they were capable of legislative remedy; yet no earnest and spontaneous effort was made to deal with them, and so long as it was safe they were almost contemptuously put aside. But for the alarm which Fenianism excited, and the fierce light which it threw on the state of Ireland, the disestablishment of the Church might have waited for long years, and a Parliament of landlords would not have sanctioned what they had often called a plan of robbery. English politicians clung to the idea that things would right themselves. The old bad system under which the peasants' passion for land had become a hunger and a disease, seemed to be crumbling away before men's eyes; the power of the priest, which alone, according to a common belief, kept the people from Protestantism and prosperity, was thought to be declining; and time, it was said, would complete the work. The hope of Whig and Tory alike lay in the denationalisation of Ireland. They sought to remove everything that fostered a dangerous patriotism, to weed out irregular customs which checked the progress of agriculture, and gradually to win the country over to English ideas and English habits. It was an impossible policy, exhibiting not only ignorance |
