performance of its own office; for with its sacred dictates, or with any other
than the broad characteristic distinctions of religion (like the broad charac-
teristics of blue and green, of which there are divers shades) should the
profane hand of law presume to interfere.

In all respects, the minister of every church thus provided for would be a
free citizen, and need not be the slave of any faction, or the minion of
any authority in church or state ; and should he preach the doctrines of
active obedience to a good government, and even long suffering submission to
a bad one, it would be nothing more than the religion of Christianity (as we
find it in the New Testament) requires from all its ministers.



46 IRELAND,

Had this tree been rooted out from the soil of Ireland, by
a timely reformation of the property of the church, issuing in
a deliverance of the peasantry from all ecclesiastical taxation,
by an abolition of the tithe system, and by a parliamentary
provision for the Catholic clergy (not as an auxiliary to the
marriages, funerals, and other impositions of the latter, but
as a substitute for all impositions, present and to come) we
could then have well afforded to forgive the past, after having
dropped a tear upon the mighty hecatombs of human vic-
tims that have been sacrificed upon the altars of church
rapacity, in almost every Christian nation of the world ; but
by none more eminently, alas ! than by those who in Ireland
are called the Bishops of the reformed church, appointed by
a Protestant government to lead the Catholics of that coun-
try, by their doctrine and example, out of the errors of
popery into the light and liberty of that Gospel, of which
these Bishops pretend to be the champions and defenders ?

But although the ecclesiastical system of which we com-
plain is one of the greatest grievances under which Ireland
groans; yet the evils which demoralize the country and
goad the peasant into midnight massacre and blood, do not
end here. The state has contributed to swell these evils, by
a contempt of the labourer's rights; and the landlord or
middle man, by his avarice or neglect. Let the reader turn
to our note on Leitrim, in this volume, and he will see how
the criminal laws (criminal indeed) are made to operate
against the life and liberty of the Irish peasant, by those
gross perversions of justice, of which he is made the perpe-
tual victim, in divers parts of those southern or western dis-
tricts, in which his unfortunate destiny has placed him under
the hands of wicked and unprincipled magistrates, who, in
some instances, have plunged him into the dungeons of his
country, and placed him on trial for his life, on the informa-
tion of women of loose morals, who had been the long and
iciU'mg partners of his crime, if crime it were ! But in addi-
tion to all this, the very possibility of supporting his exist-
ence by honest labour, is nearly cut off in some of those



REVIEW OF HER POLITICAL AND MORAL STATE. 47

districts, by the low prices for labour, and the high prices
for land. Only think of a cottier or small tenant (and this
is no solitary case) without constant employment, and when
employed by his master, receiving from four to sixpence per
day for twelve hours' work ! with a family of perhaps six,
eight, or ten persons to support by the produce of his conacre,
and in many instances compelled to pay for this potatoe plot
(which he sows and digs out at his own expense) at the rate
of eight guineas per acre! (the average farm price for eight
acres of land) and, in the neighbourhood of towns, very fre-
quently ten guineas, (and after this to surrender a tithe of
his crop, to a priest of whom he knows nothing) ; and yet for
these grievous impositions upon the want and poverty of the
peasant, there is no remedy in law ; although there is a
remedy for the gentleman, if he should be overcharged by his
attorney, or defrauded by his baker ; and for the professional
man, should he choose to enforce his fee ; and, in this situa-
tion of the Irish peasant, can the intelligent Englishman feel
surprised that he is a rebel to the laws, and compelled, by
the very necessities of his nature, to make war upon the men
and the institutions which oppress him ; while to maintain
a military establishment, in order to restrain him from acts
of robbery and murder, the trade and capital of Great Britain
and Ireland must be burthened with a system of taxation,
which clogs the wheels of industry, and renders it extremely
difficult for the British merchant to maintain that ascen-
dancy in the scale of commerce, to which his merits and
previous advantages had well entitled him.

Could not parliament legislate upon this subject with as
much propriety, as upon the prices of corn, the weight of
bread, the fees of attorneys, or the salaries of officers of jus-
tice ? and in reference to the peace and improvement of
Ireland, is not the call for parliamentaiy interference in
favour of the Irish labourer and his family, at least equally
imperative ?*

* Whether would it be better for parliament to effect a total abolition of
tithes ; to purify our criminal laws ; to provide profitable employment for



48 IRELAND,

Is it not also wicked and unjust to compel the industrious
citizen to pay war prices, by old contracts for lands and
houses, when the owners of these lands and houses receive
from the tenantry of the country in return, twice the quantity
of manufactured goods, and twice the quantity of agricul-
tural produce, that they would have received from the pro-
ducer when these contracts were entered into during the late
war? Here the whole weight of oppression is thrown by
the selfish landlord, and by a government obstinately reject-
ing an equitable adjustment of war contracts, upon the
shoulders of the industrious classes, whose privations and
sufferings under the burthen of this war system, in a period
of profound peace and of unprecedentedly low prices for all
the products of human labour, no language can describe ;
and this mode of proceeding cannot but be rendered doubly
galling, by the good care which is generally taken of the
great and wealthy, whose interests (whether in or out of
office) are seldom neglected by the rulers and legislators of
the land ! In relation to the Irish labourer, the absentee
also steps in to increase his oppressions, by withdrawing
that income from the country which he produces by his
labour, and a proportion of which, in strict justice, should
be applied to the employment and improvement of that
people, by whose labour the income is produced.

In the substitution of cold and unfeeling agents for the
presence of the owners of the soil in the deep and exten-
sive failure of Irish manufactures in the almost total

the poor in the disturbed districts ; and to pat an end to all petty oppressions
of the labourer, by fixing the standard of his wages, and the price of his
potatoe land, and thus make him feel, by blessed personal experience, (the
only way that he can feel it) the advantage which he derives from the pro-
tection of English law : and then if disorderly proceedings did not cease,
(and it could not in reason be expected that a new and equitable sj'stem
of law and government would remove them all at once) have immediate
recourse to the insurrection act, which is a prompt remedy, sheds no blood,
and deprives no man of his day's labour ; or leave Ireland open for ever
(like a field without a fence) to briars and thorns of oppression, upon the
one hand ; and to the lawless ravages of men rendered furious by a wicked
contempt of the rights of nature, upon the other ?



REVIEW OF HER POLITICAL AND MORAL STATE. 49,

absence of public works in the dormant state of our nume-
rous minerals in the similar state of millions of acres of
waste lands in the general dearth of employment for the
poor in the low prices of human labour in the corrupt
state of our criminal laws in the corrupt administration of
justice by petty magistrates in the heavy oppressions and
divisions of our ecclesiastical system ; and in the general
deluge of ignorance, passion, poverty, beggaiy and crime,
which these united causes produce, ma} r be found an answer
to the English reader's inquiry relative to the causes by
which Ireland has been demoralized and laid waste ; and to
these may be fairly added, an unhappy attachment of the
people to ardent spirits, litigation, and party quarrels ; evils
which the progress of education, and a sensible improvement
in the physical and social comforts of the people, would
materially correct.

Regarding, as we have always done, the absentee system
as a great national evil, and the expenditure of the income
of the land in foreign countries, as the deepest source of
poverty and want of employment to the Irish people ; and
being firmly convinced that by the establishment of a local
legislature upon the soil of Ireland (for purposes of domestic
improvement, and for these only) this pregnant spring of
ruin to the country might be subverted ; not only without
prejudice, but with great advantage to the state ; the author
of this work thought it his duty, at the close of his north-west
tour, to publish a pamphlet in Dublin on this subject, in the
form of a letter to the king ; and as this letter contains a
complete answer to all the principal objections that had
been previously made to this useful measure, and divers
important reflections upon the defective state of the legis-
lative government of Great Britain and her colonies ; con-
firmed also by the views taken of the same subject by Sir
John Sinclair (the celebrated Scotch statician), and other
able writers ; he shall make no apology for introducing this
letter to the notice of the English reader, when the last
question of this honest enquirer concerning the author's

E



50 IRELAND,

country has been answered. This vital measure (without
which there is great reason to fear that Ireland will never
be united to England by any better tie than that which
binds to his master the slave, who only wishes for a safe
opportunity to cut his throat) shall be then introduced.

E. R. On casting my eye over certain works that you have
produced on Ireland, in the course of my visits to that
country, I have perceived a considerable part of these works
occupied with descriptions of Irish seats and landscapes
(blended, it is true, with occasional reflections calculated to
draw the attention of strangers to the beauties of your coun-
try, and that of the ow r ners of the soil to some useful and
necessary improvements) but as these do not come up to my
ideas of a work intended to promote the substantial interests
of Ireland, I should be glad to know what end do you pro-
pose to yourself by these descriptions ?

A. As coming from an English merchant, who could not
easily place himself, even in thought, in the circumstances
of an Irish author and his country, I am not surprised at
the question you have put to me. The descriptions, how-
ever, to which you allude; in reference to the resident gen-
tlemen of Ireland, and to the poor that are dependent upon
them, are not altogether useless. They have a tendency to
draw the attention of an Irishman to his native land, and to
encourage a spirit of improvement in the country (as you
yourself appear to acknowledge.) But besides this (and
even this is a right course to be pursued in relation to a
country so deeply neglected,) there are other reasons to
justify these descriptions. To trouble you and the public
with all these reasons in detail, would be an indelicate
trespass upon the reader's feelings and my own ; but in
reference to an accurate account of the rural history of Irish
properties (if such could be procured, which it could not,)
it would prove of more service to Ireland, than all the bulky
volumes that have been written upon its ancient history; as
it would let the public into a very large proportion of the
history of landlord and tenant, of the mode of administering



REVIEW OF HER POLITICAL AND MORAL STATE. 51

justice to the poor, of the prices of land and labour, of the
estates that are well governed by resident landlords, and of
those which are treated as foreign plantations, from which
the sugar is drawn to be sold, and the money expended in
a distant country, without any return being made to the
slave, by whose blood, and sweat, and stripes, and impri-
sonment, the income was raised for the foreign owner. This
is the kind of history that would be developed to the view
of mankind by an accurate report of Irish properties. It
would shew why the tenants upon some estates are moral,
prosperous, and happy, in comparison of others, who are
poor, abandoned, and rebellious ; and to the statesman who
would govern Ireland by just laws, it would furnish no mean
clue to the discovery of those facts by which he should
regulate the spirit and principle of his statutes. While
upon this subject, I feel pleasure in offering a well-merited
compliment to two Irish landlords, with whose persons I
am scarcely acquainted, and with whose political principles I
am totally at variance. I mean Lords Farnham and Lorton,
with the accounts of whose care and kind attention to their
people (received in the progress of my travels from divers
of their own tenants,) I was much edified. These are the
kind of country sermons which make the heart of an Irish-
man leap for joy ; and I cannot but wish that they were
more generally preached by the landlords of Ireland in their
home pulpits, as I am sure they would go far towards work-
ing as useful a reformation in the manners, as in the social
circumstances of the people. But to effect these important
improvements, there must be an almost constant residence
of the landlord on the soil, and an established moral agency
between him and his tenant, distinguished by attention,
humanity, and good sense, pure from proselyting purposes,
and wholly unconnected with the collection and enforcement
of the rents. The valuable purposes of such an agency are
noticed elsewhere in this work ; and therefore I shall only
say concerning them in this place, that they are so pecu-
liarly called for by the circumstances of the peasantry and



52 IRELAND,

small tenantry of Ireland, and still more eminently where
the landlord is an absentee, that to do justice to the subject
would require a distinct and separate volume, embodying
the facts of those rural districts which have been long- aban-
doned by the proprietors of the soil to spoliation, poverty,
and crime ; thus exhibiting in the broad and legible cha-
racters of their living history, the consequences of the ab-
sentee system, and the turpitude of the Irish planters, who
have thus abandoned their estates to ignorance, poverty,
and crime.

In such a general dereliction of public duty, (and, properly
speaking, of private interest,) it affords the heart of huma-
nity pleasure to notice such landlords as Lords Farnham
and Lorton, whose services to themselves and their tenantry
derive additional value from those parts of the country which
they occupy, and which cannot boast, like the Downshire,
Hertford, and Belfast estates, of the advantages of a long-
established and wealthy manufacturing population, in the
neighbourhood of a great mart of trade. Their services to
a comparatively poor country, are therefore the more valu-
able, and furnish a more worthy object of imitation to other
landlords ; and besides these, there are other gentlemen who
live very much at home, and spend a large proportion of
their fortunes in the bosom of their country ; but the con-
trary cases are so numerous, and their effects so fatal, that
I have frequently lamented the total impossibility (in my
peculiar circumstances,) of getting at all the facts that would
be necessary to a complete political and moral survey of
Irish properties; as through this medium, and perhaps
through it alone, many lurking causes of discontent, of
poverty, of idleness and rags, of emigrations to America,
and of insurrections, midnight massacres, and burnings of
property, would be discovered, that otherwise could never
be arrived at, and made known to the statesman, whose
duty it is to regulate his political and parliamentary pro-
ceedings, by the circumstances of the various countries for
which he is bound to provide just and salutary laws.



REVIEW OF HER POLITICAL AXD MORAL STATE. 53

The nearest approach to a history of this kind that has
been made in Ireland, within our memory, was that of a sta-
tistical account (in imitation of Sir John Sinclair's, of Scot-
land,) of all the parishes in the country ; attempted to be
collected from the Protestant clergy some sixteen or eighteen
years since, by a gentleman (equally respectable in character
and station) who holds (or recently held) an employment at
the castle of Dublin. This gentleman, however, found him-
self unable to complete the work, as many of the Protestant
clergy would not undertake the troublesome, and (as some of
them conceived) invidious task of exhibiting to the world
the rural history of their parishes ; which, in reference to
education, and other subjects in which their most respectable
parishioners were concerned, should be freely developed, if
all the questions proposed to them in the compiler's list, were
fully and truly answered. The plan, however, of appealing to
the Protestant clergy only, in reference to the rural history of
a country, inhabited by various, and violently hostile parties,
was obviously defective ; as few of the Protestant clergy would
like to enter deep into any subject, that might, by any pos-
sibility, be considered as offensive to the feelings of the class
just noticed ; such as questions of rents, prices of labour,
peasantry improvement institutions, and other items in which
the gentry are personally concerned; and still less into
questions connected with the church, such as the influence of
tithes and vestry laws, upon the peace and prosperity of their
parishes, &c. The consequence of this mode of proceeding
was, that a large proportion of the clergy declined the office
that was assigned to them ; and after a few volumes of such
unconnected parishes as the Editor could collect were pub-
lished, (for his materials did not enable him to produce a
symmetrical division of the work into Sees, Provinces, or
Counties,) he was compelled to abandon his design.

Had it been consistent with the Editor's plan, (or perhaps,
in strict propriety, we should say, with the narrow views
and feelings of his patron) to have opened a correspondence
at the same time, with the Roman Catholic and Presbyte-



54 IRELAND,

rian clergy of the country (in which case the omissions in
one meagre report, would have been supplied by the corpu-
lent fulness in another) he would have been able, at the
favourable juncture when he undertook that work, (under
high official patronage) to have collected the most valuable
body of Irish statistical and rural history that was ever pub-
lished in the sister country. It is in fact a desideratum that
has never been supplied ; and which, had it been completed,
would have constituted an excellent guide for English state
secretaries going over to conduct that country (that is, if they
would read the books thus prepared for their instruction,
and which would probably amount to about twenty thick
octavo volumes ! ) But this liberal and extended mode of
procuring information from all the clergy, does not appear
to have tallied with the views of Mr. Peel, the acknowledged
patron of the work, who was then His Majesty's principal
Secretary of State in Ireland ; and to his contracted views,
(though probably by the Right Hon. Gentleman himself
considered conscientious, as the prejudices sucked in with the
milk of our Alma Mater usually are) I impute the failure
of the plan. This distinguished statesman, however, has
since learned to make both his pride and his prejudices
yield with a little more convenient pliancy to the force of
circumstances ; and were he to resume his former station in
Ireland, it is not improbable, with his present experience,
but he would take the true and successful course of procur-
ing that body of Irish rural history which is still wanted ;
and which the Catholic and Presbyterian clergy of Ireland
would be much more likely to communicate, than the order
of clergy upon whom he exclusively depended; and he
might also perhaps see the necessity of extending the origi-
nal plan of the work, by adding a few questions to his
former list, of which I have only a partial recollection at this
distant period of time, and no copies of the queries connected
with that work before me, to supply any defects of memory
into which I may have accidentally fallen.

Having thus adverted to the part which Mr. (now Sir



REVIEW OF HER POLITICAL AND MORAL STATE. 55

Robert) Peel is supposed to have taken (and with good
reason) in a plan for procuring a development of the
resources of the soil of Ireland and the circumstances of its
population, I shall avail myself of the opportunity which
this introduction of his name affords me, to offer a brief
remark upon his character as a statesman.

Deriving, as this gentleman did, whatever rank and con-
sequence he possessed, exclusively from the walks of trade ;
it might be supposed that, with the sympathies and senti-
ments congenial to men who have received their ALL in life
from the pure and unsullied source of honest industry, he
would have felt a lively interest in the prosperity of British
trade, and in the comfort of the working classes, to which
his family originally belonged ; and that with such feelings
and sympathies, in aid of a good natural understanding and
polished education, he would have proved himself to be the
friend of the people, and the useful minister of a free and
commercial nation. The event, however, (if indeed the nation
looked up to him for a redress of grievances) appears to have
disappointed this expectation ; as this statesman of plebeian
birth had scarcely entered into public life, until he proved
himself to be the enemy of popular rights, and the unbend-
ing advocate of vested oppression ! his mockery of criminal
law reform his military remedies for the disorders of a
country, whose wrongs he had neither the principle nor the
spirit to redress the corrupt and criminal indifference with
which he beheld the sufferings of the Irish poor (although
sprung himself, as it is commonly reported, from the very
lowest of the people) the complacency with which he
regarded the boroughmongering oppressors of his country,
and the bloated bishops of his church the resistance which
he gave to the Catholic claims and to parliamentary reform
the sufferings of widows and orphans, for whose family
wrongs he procured from parliament no free tribunal of jus-
tice ; and the little and low partialities by which it is said
some portion of his private patronage had been governed ;
altogether produced such an impression of his character in



50 IRELAND,

Ireland, as (with the exception of the reptiles who had fat-
tened upon the spoils of the country) left very little room in
the bosoms of the people of that country for the entertain-
ment of any other sentiments towards him, than those of
hatred, disapprobation, or contempt : and had this penalty
been incurred in the cause of truth and justice (as has some-
times been the case) and not in that of pride, bigotry, and
intolerance ; instead of regarding such penalty as a brand
upon his character, we would have beheld it with veneration,
as a garland placed upon his brow by the hand of VIRTUE,
and which would crown that character with future and
imperishable fame.

The fact, however, of having lent his name and patronage
to a parochial account of Ireland, sufficiently proves, that
the rural history of this country has not been regarded by
all the statesmen into whose hands our destiny has thrown
us, as a useless department of research. The queries pro-
posed to the Protestant clergy on that occasion (if our recol-
lection has not deceived us) could not be answered without
entering, more or less, into the policy by which Irish estates
were governed, and the tenantry residing on them, improved
or degraded in their character and circumstances, as the
reputed citizens of a free and independent state ; and hence,
in all probability, the deep dislike which many clergymen
felt to what they conceived to be, the invidious and unprofit-
able task of working for the statesman's information and the
compiler's profit, with a reasonable prospect of procuring