1839.

sor Association in Dublin: "What am I here for? To CHAP. XXXVIII. call upon all Ireland to rally round the Ministry; to call for my 2,000,000 of Precursors; to call on the inhabitants of all the counties, towns, boroughs, cities, and villages in Ireland, to meet at once, and second me in my undertaking. Do not speak of that Irishman that does not become a Precursor. Let Sunday week be the day, and on that day let every parish meet and adopt petitions on the subject. We want no packed juries, no dishonest judges; we want only equality refuse us this, and then, in the day of your weakness, dare to go to war with the most insignificant of the powers in Europe." And at a meeting held in the Theatre-Royal, Dublin, on April 11, with the Duke of Leinster in the chair, and all the Whig nobility in attendance, he said: "The shout that this day emanates from the Theatre will be heard in St Stephens', and it will cheer the heart of the Queen in St James's. Let her Majesty be menaced by the ferocious despots of the northern desert; let France, a country in which the king and the people seem affected with a periodical insanity, break her fetters again; but let her be governed as she has been by Normanby, and as she would be by Lord Fortescue, and if any hostile step dared to tread upon the Queen's dominions, the Ann. Reg. foe to the throne shall either surrender or be dashed into 62. the sea." 1

1

1839, 61,

manby's

liberation of

The great circumstance which had rendered the govern- 28. ment of Lord Normanby so popular with the populace in Lord NorIreland, was the wholesale liberation of criminals, which, in wholesale spite of all the complaints on the subject in the British Par-offenders. liament, had continued throughout all his administration. Aug. 6. The subject was brought under the notice of the House of Lords by Lord Brougham, in an eloquent speech, in which, amidst some of his habitual exaggeration, there was, it is to be feared, too much truth. He thus described the manner in which these jail-deliveries were conducted "His Excellency came to a certain town, and was imme

XXXVIII.

1839.

CHAP. diately attended by the populace to the jail. He entered the prison, a certain proportion of the prisoners were paraded before him, and those who were recommended by the jailer, often on the spot, were liberated without further inquiry. At Clonmell, lately, fifty-seven prisoners were drawn up in the yard, and received their pardon, while two hundred remained within the walls, who were not so exhibited; so that everything depended on the jailer, and the man who had been oftenest in jail would find most favour in his eyes. The wild bird would flap his wings against the cage, while that which had been hatched in slavery would never assail the wires with a feather of his pinions. Everywhere there was exhibited the same want of caution. In the summer of 1836, two hundred and forty prisoners were discharged by the Lord-Lieutenant by verbal orders, during a progress through part of Ireland. It is absolutely necessary to bring the matter before Parliament; for not only has it been sanctioned by a narrow majority of the House of Commons, but it has been approved by a letter written, the day after the last dissolution of Parliament, by Lord John Russell, then Home Secretary. If no step be taken, and that promptly, to express an opinion upon the true method in which the prerogative of the Crown is to be exercised in these high and paramount duties, you will again see many an instance of that which Ireland has so lately exhibited-of mercy, 1 Parl. Deb, now no longer a solemn duty, but transformed into an 1382; Ann. empty pageant; a pageant which exhibits justice and 90, 91; Re- mercy in altered places-mercy blessed while justice port, 253, weeps." Lord Brougham's resolution, condemning Lord 461,469. Normanby's administration in this particular, was carried by a majority of 34-the numbers being 86 to 52.1

xlix. 1314,

Reg. 1839,

256, 346,

It is humiliating to find that, in the midst of all these multiplied evils-social, economical, and administrative— under which Ireland laboured, the only remedy which the Government had to propose was the extension of the municipal franchise to every occupant of a subject worth

XXXVIII.

1839.

29.

on the misery of Ireland, and the inade

heada

remedies

five pounds a-year; and the only remedy of the Conser- CHAP. vatives to raise it to ten pounds, at which it was finally fixed! Poor-laws to a certain extent had been already introduced-in 1837; but there was no attempt to Reflections establish railways or manufactures, to extend industry in any way in a country where the wages of labour were sixpence a-day, or to promote emigration in one where quacy of the above two millions were in a state of pauperism! To bleed proposed. the plethoric patient was obviously the only remedy when he was labouring under apoplectic symptoms; but whenever anything of the kind was proposed in the House of Commons, the matter was adjourned till next session, or the House was counted out. The emigration during the years of intense suffering-from 1838 to 1842 was inconceivably small, when it is recollected what it has since become. In 1838 it was only 33,222 from the whole empire! Much of this unfortunate blindness is no doubt to be ascribed to the unfortunate dogma of the political economists, then so generally received, that emigration was worse than useless, because it only made those who remained at home increase the faster. "Our present radical evil," said Lord Jeffrey, "is the excess of our productive powers, the want of demand for our manufactures and industry, or, in other words, the excess of our population. And for this, I am afraid, there is no radical cure but starving out the surplus, 1 Cockhorrible as it is. Emigration can do comparatively burn's Life nothing."1 It is a curious commentary on these opin- ii. 189. ions, which for a quarter of a century entirely governed the country, that in ten years prior to 1856, no less than 2,080,000 emigrants left Ireland alone, and that in consequence the workhouses were deserted, and the wages 2 Census of labour, for the first time in the memory of man, in sioners' Rethe Emerald Isle, rose to a level with those in Great 42. Britain.2

But much also of the extraordinary blindness of all parties to the real cause of the misery of Ireland is to be

VOL. VI.

2 D

of Jeffrey,

Commis

port, vi. 27,

XXXVIII.

1839.

30.

Which

mainly arose

land being

field of

parties.

CHAP. ascribed to the circumstance of its having become, from an unforeseen consequence of the Reform Bill, the great battle-field for the parties which contended for the mastery in the country. Ministers having come to depend on a majority of 15 to 20 in the House of Commons, comthe battle posed entirely of Irish Roman Catholic members, it became vital to the one party to secure their supportto the other to diminish their numbers. Hence the battle of parties was fought in Ireland; and the main thing attended to in any measures relating to that country was, not the good of its inhabitants, or the alleviation of its suffering, but the adoption of measures which might gratify the Romish priesthood, and secure or extend their influence in the elections. The project to take £100,000 a-year from the Protestant Church, and to give every starving peasant worth £5 a-year a municipal vote, had not the slightest tendency to remove the real causes of Irish distress, but a very great one to secure the support of the Roman Catholic priesthood and their nominees in the House of Commons. Thus Ireland was worse than neglected-it was misunderstood; and though its concerns were continually brought before the legislature, they were so in relation to projects which, by endangering a fierce party-strife, and occasioning a prolonged struggle between the two houses of Parliament, rendered the nation every day more insensible to the only measures which could by possibility administer to it any relief.

31.

state of the finances.

But pressing as the state of Ireland was, it and all Deplorable other considerations yielded to a still more urgent matter, and that was the state of the FINANCES. Under the combined effect of five bad seasons in succession, and the contraction of the currency, which, under the existing system, was the inevitable result of the import of grain and export of gold which they occasioned, the revenue had declined to such a degree that all the efforts to effect retrenchment in every department made by the

XXXVIII.

Government-and they were great and many-had been CHAP. unable to prevent a great and growing deficit. The 1839. national income, which in 1836 had been £48,591,000, had sunk in 1840 to £47,567,000; while the national expenditure, in spite of every effort at economy, had increased from £48,093,196 in the former, to £49,169,000 in the latter. In this state of matters, the desperate plunge in quest of popularity made by the Government in adopting the penny postage brought matters to a crisis; for it at once cut £1,780,000 off the revenue-viz., £1,000,000 in direct and admitted loss of income from the Post-office, and £780,000 additional charge imposed on the navy after the change, for the packet service. The result was, in 1841, a deficit of above £2,100,000; a state of things, in a period of Continental peace, so disastrous, that it struck universal consternation into the country. Sir R. Peel, who had the best access to correct reports of income, stated the amount of the deficits, when he came into office in the end of 1841, for the five preceding years, at the enormous sum of £10,000,000 sterling. This state of things was the more alarming

* INCOME AND EXPENDITURE OF THE NATION FROM 1836 TO 1841.

-SIR R. PEEL'S Statement, March 8, 1842; Parl. Deb. DOUBLEDAY, ii. 343.