are supported by a rate upon property, which, when at the highest nominal amount, viz., 7,500,000l., was only one-eighth of the public revenue, one-seventh of the rent assessed to it, about one and a half times the tithe, and only one-fourth of the income or consumption. I conclude, therefore, that in the present mode of management, the support of the poor in Ireland, in proportion to other burthens, or to the general income, is double the rate in England. "There is no means of employment for an Irish peasant, nor any certainty that he has an existence for another year, nor even for another day, but by getting possession of a portion of land on which he can plant potatoes; and, in consequence of the increase of population, which does not seem to be at all checked by the misery which they undergo, the competition for land has attained an appearance something like the competition for provisions in a besieged town, or in a ship that is out at sea; and as there is no check to the demand which may be made by those who may possess the land, the land appears to have risen to prices far beyond what it is possible for the poor peasants to extract from it in the way in which they cultivate it; and the landlord appears to have-by the word landlord, I mean the persons who have, either by leasehold or by freehold, the property or the right of disposing of the land to the actual occupier,-the landlord has, in the eyes of the peasant, the right, in a summary way, to take from the peasant any thing which he has, if he is unable to execute those covenants which he was obliged to enter into from his dread of starvation. "The tenantry of Ireland are almost universally from six months to twelve months and upwards in arrear. There is a distinction among them between what are called Irish tenants and English tenants. The former, the Irish tenant, is he who, according to the custom, is in arrear and in debt to the landlord; being in debt, it is, I believe, in the power of the landlord legally to drive his cattle, under the form of a distress, to the pound, by way of making him pay his rent; but this form of distress is applied not only to the raising of the rent, but to the doing any thing else which the landlord wants. For example, if I want a parcel of people to work for me at eight-pence a-day, and they insist on being paid tenpence, I complain to the landlord that the people are demanding exorbitant wages; that we cannot go on; we will not pay them those wages; the landlord, whose interest it is to have the work go on, in order that money may be paid to his tenantry for the purpose of paying his rent, again sends instant notice, that unless they go to the work on the road at eight-pence a-day, all their cattle will be driven to the pound. Now, I conceive, the object being not to pay rent, but to do the road, this is an illegal use of their power; and, supposing the landlord wished them not to work on the road for me, they would have a like notice for that. Notice has been sent to a man, that if he went to work on the road, his cattle should be driven the next morning to the pound; consequently, he may be made to do any thing the landlord pleases. "I conceive there exists no check to the power of the landlord! It appears to me that under colour of law, the landlord may convert that power to any purpose he pleases; the consequence is, that when he wishes he can extract from the peasant every shilling beyond bare existence, which can be produced by him from the land. The lower orders of peasantry in Ireland can never acquire any thing like property; they are always in a state of beggary; and the landlord, or the middle-man, who is the principal person in those cases, at the least reverse of prices which disables the actual occupier to pay what he may have previously promised, has it in his power, and does come and seize his cow, his bed, and his potatoes in the ground, and every thing he has ; and without referring to any tribunal which might perhaps justify resistance, or the impossibility of paying all instantly, can dispose of his property at any price. I have known a cow sold for a few shillings; nobody would buy, and the driver bought it himself; and this power seems to me to be carried to an absurd extent. In the town of Kilkee, in the county of Clare, when I was passing through it in the time of the distress in the year 1822, the people were in a group at the side of the pound, receiving meal in the way of charity, and at the same time the pound was choke-full of cattle; of course the milk of those catttle would have been worth something, if it could have been obtained." The operation of the system of tithes in augmenting the distresses of the country, was illustrated by many of the witnesses. "The tithe," said Mr. Becher, a member of the House of Commons, "is not a fixed payment; the person who pays it does not know till the end of the year what he shall have to pay for the crop that he has produced; in the next place, the valuator is liable to be influenced by his partialities or his dislikes in increasing the demand upon the person who pays it; he goes at a certain period of the year, I believe rather towards autumn, when the crop has a good appearance, and makes his valuation, which he gives to his employer; the employer has a meeting convened of the parishioners, at a period subsequent to that, and also subsequent to the harvest, and then sets his tithe, as it is called, that is, makes a bargain with each particular farmer for that year; but it is to be observed that at that time the farmer is quite in his power, because he can scarcely avoid being guilty of subtraction of tithe, by housing his corn or consuming some of his potatoes; if he has taken of his potatoes, however small the quantity, he is liable to a charge for subtraction of tithe." "The Irish acts," said Mr. O'Connell, "enable the peasant to hold a kind of battle with the tithe owner upon every thing but potatoes; with other things he can serve a notice to draw, but with potatoes it is not so; there is no statute provision respecting the potatoe; and then if the peasant begins to dig his potatoes, he is completely at the mercy of the tithe owner; and it is right to say, that he is, in general, not very harshly dealt with where the clergyman has the tithes himself; but when they are in the hands of laymen, and frequently persons of the same persuasion with himself, is very badly dealt with; if he begins to dig, he has no mode afterwards of defending himself against the demand." "I believe," said Mr. Newenham, "that it is much the wish of the tithe farmer to get the tenant what he calls into his books; the consequence of which is, that when he comes to make his valuation, perhaps three years hence, he raises the sum for having been out of his money for the two years preceding. 1 have seen corn lying or stacked on the ground near to Christmas, with the corn growing green upon the top of it; I have asked why it was, and they said that the man was not able to make his agreement with the tithe farmer. The corn is diminished in value to all parties, for this man will not take less than a certain sum, as he knows he has him (the owner of the corn) in his power, for he has been in debt to him for two or three years, and the unfortunate tenant is aware that if he does not accede to this valuation that the tithe farmer has put upon him, he (the tithe farmer) comes down upon him for the two or three years, which is enough to ruin him." The mode in which the abuse of legal proceedings tended to the oppression and degradation of the peasantry and small farmers, was stated clearly and forcibly by Mr. O'Connell. In this respect, he conceived the operation of the act of 1817, which gave lessors a power of distraining the growing crops, to have been very mischievous. "That statute," said he, "has contributed extremely to the disturbances in the south, because in all cases of subletting, it gave to every one of those individuals (the intermediate lessors) the power of distraining the growing crop, that growing crop being the subsistence for the family of the peasant; and if he can forbear from digging the po tatoe himself, he cannot restrain his wife and children. I have known numerous instances, where informations, as for a felony, were sworn before a magistrate, and the wretch was committed to a jail for two or three or four months, till the ensuing assizes, when it was discovered it could not be a felony; but then the wretch had lain in jail during that time, and his family of course excessively ill off. The worst crimes of the south, I attribute a great deal to that act of parliament." He was equally strong in his condemnation of the Civil-bill Ejectment. "That act altered and took away the exceptions which formerly existed from the ejectment; there were some excepted cases, in which an ejectment for non-payment of rents did not lie at all, as a case of infancy, coverture, and imprisonment; that act took away those exceptions totally; it also, according to my recollection, gave ejectment against absconding tenants, as they were called; where the premises were left vacant, it gave to two magistrates the power of declaring that vacancy; and any thing that increases the power of the magistracy in Ireland, I take to be a great alteration, not for the better, but for the worse.-The stamp duties (added Mr. O'Connell) with respect to the tenure of land, of course, are paid by the tenant; and with respect to a peasant, the amount of stamp duty would be more money than he possibly could command; the consequence of which is, that he deals in general upon parole, or upon a contract written upon an unstamped paper. The effect of that is, that it gives the landlord a constant power of breaking through the contract, without any remedy. Not even a civil bill action will lie for a breach of the contract, because it requires that it should be stamped before it can be produced: the consequence of which is, that every species of landlords have the means of bringing ejectments, and turning the tenants out. Before the civil-bill ejectment was allowed by act of parliament, a landlord was cautious of bringing an ejectment, for even if defence was not made, it would cost him fourteen or fifteen pounds, at the cheapest, to turn out a tenant; but the civil bill ejectment has very much increased the power of lower landlords, for by means of that he can turn out his tenant for a few shillings; and that horrible murder of the Sheas was occasioned by a civil-bill ejectment brought in that way. I wish to express this opinion strongly to the committee, that the acts of parliament passed since the peace, giving to Irish landlords increased facilities of ejectment and distress, have neces sarily very much increased the tendency to disturbance in Ireland; there have been several of them within the last ten years." In another part of his evidence, Mr. O'Connell stated a very extraordinary species of illegal oppression by legal forms. "I know that, in practice, decrees are obtained without a service of civil bill at all, and very many decrees. I know, in practice, instances, and the cases are not few, in which individuals obtain decrees in this way; they file a civil bill at the sessions: John Brown, for example, wishes to get a decree, and he files a civil bill at the sessions in the name of John Geary, or John Sullivan; there is no service of course; he goes in, and though he is the person intending to have the decree himself, he proves the case, and gets the decree, and goes and makes the distress, and sells the goods, before there is a possibility of discovering the fraud. That has been attempted to be met by taking the bailiff up for a capital felony, as for stealing the cattle, or whatever he seized, and when the assizes came on I have seen him indicted for the felony, and he produced the civil bill decree: then it was said, it was a fraud, and the man ought to be prosecuted for the fraud and for the perjury; for the perjury it is impossible, for who is to identify the person to be the swearer at the sessions. I have known this flagrant instance: there was a tenant of mine, who, for a cottier tenant, was comfortable; the man had five milch cows, he got a typhus fever, which extended to his wife and children; while he was lying in that state, two decrees were stolen upon him, every particle he had in the world was sold, and he was reduced to complete beggary: when I came to the country after wards, and he made a complaint of this, I found that the man who had done so was also living as a tenant of mine, and I had no remedy in the world but to turn him off, for I found it impossible to institute a prosecution with success." The following is another peculiarity of Irish law. "The Custodiam," said Mr. O'Connell, "is a grant from the Crown to the creditor of the debtor's land; it commences in the court of Com mon Pleas by a civil outlawry, and that outlawry being estreated into the Exchequer, a grant is made in the Exchequer, called a custodiam; the potential effect of which is, to entitle the creditor to all the rents of the debtor, and to enable him, by a motion, which is a matter of course, a side bar rule, as it is called, to compel the tenants of the outlaw to pay their rents to the custodee; and also, by another order or motion in court, to demise under the court any lands not in lease. The mode in which rents are levied under it is by personal demand, and if there be a refusal, an attachment; liberty is given occasionally to distrain; but the usual course, and that most productive to the attorney, and I inay add, therefore, that generally pursued, is by attachment. The outlaw will himself distrain the tenants; he has other creditors, who have mortgages and annuities, and conflicts eternally take place between them, which may be settled, and ought to be settled by the court, upon motion, but which frequently are not; and when they are not, the person who actually suffers is the occupying tenant, for he is compelled, under distress, to pay his rent; and after he has paid it to one, he is attached for not paying it to the custodiam creditor. I have known instances, in which the wretched peasants have lain in jail for years under that process of attachment; and it is cruel to the debtor, because the legal expenses of it are enormous." Such were some of the most important facts which were brought under the notice of the legislature by the investigations of the Lords' Committee. The evidence went to a great variety of other topics such as, the encouragement of emigration; the extension of public works of unquestionable utility, by reasonable facilities afforded by the government; the extension of the fisheries; improvements in the state of the lunatic asylums and houses of industry; the regulation or abolition of Manor Courts; the constitution and powers of vestries; and many details in the subordinate administration of justice, particularly the abuses of grand jury presentments, the execution of the process of the Civil-bill Courts, and the regulation of the office of sub-sheriff. And lamentable as the picture was which it presented of the state of Ireland, yet it seemed to be generally admitted, and the committee concurred in the opinion, that the establishment of the police and constabulary force, the revision of the magistracy, the meeting of the magistrates in petty sessions, the administration of justice by the assistant barristers, the composition for tithes under the late acts, the change in the mode of appointing sheriffs, the public works undertaken by the Executive government, the alteration in the system of the distillery laws, and in the general mode of collecting the revenue, the remission of all direct taxes, the repeal of the union duties, and the increased facility of commercial intercourse, had contributed to improve the situation of the country in no small degree. Much still remained to be done, before Ireland could be brought into a state which would give full scope to all her natural advantages. But it was evident, that those who ascribed the evil under which she laboured solely or even in any considerable degree to the disabilities annexed to the profession of the Roman Catholic religion, had altogether mistaken the nature of the disease. The source of the mischief lay much deeper in the frame of society; and the only remedies, from which much good was to be expected, were such as would operate slowly upon |
