CHAPTER XLI.

A CHRONIC INTERVAL.-PREMIERSHIP AND DEATH OF

THE

LORD PALMERSTON.

HE Repeal Association and O'Connell were dead. The trial and conviction of O'Brien and the Young Irelanders finally crushed the Irish Confederation. All appearance of organized rebellion ceased. Order reigned. The government had acted with becoming vigour. Resistance was forcibly put down. Society was satisfied, and affected to believe that now these abominable leaders of sedition were got out of the way, Ireland would retire into contentment and obscurity.

For seventeen years, from 1849 to 1865, however much or little the contentment might be, events favoured the obscurity so far as the English public was concerned. The period was in great part taken up with the Crimean and American wars, together with the exciting and disturbing course of events in France. It was generally believed in England that acute sedition had ceased, and that a hopeful state of convalescence was entered upon. That was a popular delusion. The acute form of the disease had been reduced, but it was not convalescence, but a chronic state of smothered discontent that had set in. Of the causes and consequences of that chronic state there is now abundant evidence. During those seventeen years, order reigned, but, with a United Parliament, it seemed then, as before and since, that it was impossible for order to govern!

The harvests of 1848 and 1849 were abundant, and the potato disease only partially appeared. Irish productions had scarcely ever been more plentiful, but they did not feed the Irish people, who were almost as much in a state of famine as ever. The food that should

TIONS.

MERCILESS EVICTIONS.

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and would have amply fed them was being operated upon by the bailiffs who seized it; by the jobbers who shipped it off at every tide; by the merchants who were gambling with it in English corn and provision markets; by the hucksters who were running up the prices, and hence making their account out of Ireland, in the English shops, where the deluded British workman was charged five, six, and eight-fold what the grower had ever been able to get for it.

The extermination by eviction that had set in, and had increased from 1829 until 1849, was resumed and continued during the next three or five years with more and more severity. The blessings of the Incumbered Estates Act were beginning to pour upon the Irish with a vengeance. A quantity of land equal in amount to the annual value of all Ireland had suddenly changed masters, and had most of it fallen into the hands of land-jobbers who knew no motive but their own immediate gain; who had most of them bought it with the avowed intention of making their account by raising the rents or by introducing new forms of culture.

The Quarterly

The evictions were most merciless and appalling. Review (not a tenants' advocate) said, in March, 1854, "The cabins of the peasantry are pulled down in such numbers as to give the appearance, throughout whole regions of the south and west, of a country devastated and desolated by the passage of a hostile army."

In the parish of Aughagower and its vicinity there were two hundred square miles, out of which every living soul, except a few herds, was banished without remorse by the Marquis of Sligo. An eviction machine of ropes and pullies was invented by Mr. Scully, a Tipperary landlord, for the speedier unroofing and demolition of homesteads, which supplemented bands of landlords' operators, who got to be called, "crowbar brigades.”

Mr. Drew, a well-known Presbyterian minister, wrote, "I wish my lot had never been cast in rural places. As a clergyman I hear what neither landlords nor agents ever hear. I see the depression of the people; their sighs and groans are before me. They are brought so low as often to praise and glorify those who, in their secret hearts, are

the objects of abhorrence. All this came out gradually before me. Nor did I feel as I ought to feel in their behalf until, in my own person and purse, I became the victim of a system of tyranny which cries from earth to heaven for relief."

Other authenticated accounts state that in one case "seven hundred human beings were driven from their homes on the same day, and set adrift on the world, to gratify the caprice of one, who, before God and man, probably deserved less consideration than the last and least of them. There was not a shilling of rent due on the estate at the time, except by one man.”

The Crow-bar Brigade was employed on the occasion to extinguish the hearths and demolish the homes of honest, industrious men, and the brigade worked with a will at their awful calling from morning till evening. At length an incident occurred that varied the monotony of the grim, ghastly ruin which they were spreading all around. They stopped suddenly, and recoiled with terror from two dwellings which they were directed to destroy with the rest. They had just learned that a frightful typhus-fever held those houses in its grasp, and had already brought pestilence and death to its inmates. They, therefore, supplicated the agent to spare their houses a little longer; but the agent was inexorable, and insisted that the houses should come down. The ingenuity with which he extricated himself from the difficulties of the situation, was alike characteristic of the heartlessness of the man, and of the cruel necessities of the work in which he was engaged. He ordered a large winnowing sheet to be secured over the beds in which the fever victims lay-fortunately they happened to be perfectly delirious at the time-and then directed the houses to be unroofed cautiously and slowly, "because," he said, "he very much disliked the bother and discomfort of a coroner's inquest."

A Catholic Bishop (Dr. Nulty, of Meath) adds, "I administered the last sacrament of the Church to four of these fever victims next day; and, save the winnowing sheet, there was not then a roof nearer to me than the canopy of heaven. The horrid scenes I then witnessed I must remember all my life long. The wailing of women—the screams,

the terror, the consternation of children-the speechless agony of honest, industrious men-wrung tears of grief from all who saw them. I saw the officers and men of a large police force, who were obliged to attend on the occasion, cry like children at beholding the cruel sufferings of the very people whom they would be obliged to butcher had they offered the least resistance. The heavy rains that usually attend the autumnal equinoxes descended in cold copious torrents throughout the night, and at once revealed to those houseless sufferers the awful realities of their condition. I visited them next morning, and rode from place to place administering to them all the comfort and consolation I could. The appearance of men, women, and children, as they emerged from the ruins of their former houses-saturated with rain, blackened and besmeared with soot, shivering in every member from cold and misery-presented positively the most appalling spectacle I ever looked upon."

The landed proprietors in a circle all around the place just referred to—and for many miles in every direction-warned their tenantry, with threats of their direst vengeance, against the humanity of extending to any of them the hospitality of a single night's shelter. Many of these poor people were unable to emigrate with their families; while, at home, the hand of every man was thus raised against them. They were driven from their birthplaces, and, in the state of society surounding them, every other walk of life was rigidly closed against them. After battling in vain with privation and pestilence, they at last graduated from the workhouse to the tomb; and, in little more than three years, nearly a fourth of them were in their graves.

The eviction thus described must not be considered an isolated exceptional event, which could occur only in an obscure locality, where public opinion could not read and expose it. The United Parliament, in such cases, whatever it may profess, does not care a button about public opinion; and therefore every district of Ireland was, and is, perfectly familiar with evictions oftentimes surrounded by circumstances, and distinguished by traits of even darker and more disgusting atrocity. Near to Mullingar there was an expanse, as far as the eye could reach,

where extermination was so complete, that not a single human being of the many who had formerly made it their home, nor the vestige of human habitation, was anywhere discernible. There had been several quite respectable houses, but it was difficult to distinguish the spot whereon one had stood. Not far from there, houses that had sheltered three hundred human beings were razed to the groud. Batches of seventeen families at a time, or thereabouts, were cleared out at short intervals.

Ejectments of this character were so universal that a parliamentary return places them as high as 37,164 in six years. They were going on with the utmost activity during the Crimean war, and during the years immediately succeeding, and during the American war. Throughout the whole time there were frequently recurring instances of fierce retaliations; but the columns of the English papers were too full of news from Sebastopol, or from Paris, or from the federal and confederate armies of America, to allow of giving prominence to Irish grievances or Irish crimes. Plenty of them are on record, but it is unnecessary to count the numbers. The course of legislation supplies the void permitted by the journalists. That legislation was of a character almost frantic. There were Party Concessions Acts, Crime and Outrage Acts, Unlawful Oaths Acts, and numerous suspensions of Habeas Corpus, in all, seventeen Coercion Acts in the seventeen years. In addition to these there were Acts for further increasing the already extravagant powers and immunities of the constabulary. On this subject Parliament seemed to know so little of its own mind that three Constabulary Acts were passed in one year. All that force and severity could do was to no purpose. Every Coercion Act was, on the face of it, passed in distinct and emphatic admission of the impotency of ordinary law and the flagrant existence of consequent evils, and yet under the impression that the evils it was directed against were temporary; each one clearly implied the hope that a season of wholesome severity would stop the course of outrage. The hope was delusive to the end of the chapter. Union legislation was as much mistaken as ever, and as powerless as ever for good. England said