THE PROSPECTIVE REVIEW. No. IX. ART. I.-STATE AND PROSPECTS OF IRELAND. 1. State and Prospects of Ireland. By Eyre Evans, Esq. Liverpool. 1846. 2. The Morning Chronicle on the State of Ireland. November and December 1846. 3. Mr. Trevelyan's Letter of December 15th, to the Commissioners of Public Works for Ireland. We should scarcely fulfil to the Public the duties of a quarterly Periodical, if we excluded from our pages the subject of Ireland: yet there are many things, in approaching it, which hang so heavy round the heart, that we are ready to drop the pen. Worst of all, perhaps, is the fear that in this, as in so many parallel cases, the current of events will prove too violent and self-willed for control, and that wisdom is not merely impotent, but unseasonable. Before the lines which we write can appear before the public, we know not whether the malady to be dealt with may not have displayed new forms of evil, demanding different treatment from that which we prescribe : yet unhappily, (such is the complication of affairs,) it was never to be expected that the English public would understand, or an English ministry dare to apply, the remedies which are required, until the symptoms were highly alarming. Much progress however has been made in the last year, in convincing an influential minority of the CHRISTIAN TEACHER.-No. 35. B urgency of the case and establishing its true nature. Whatever are our fears, there is still room for hope; and with a deep sense of the folly of dogmatizing, where the opinions of the most thoughtful are divided, it seems to be incumbent on us to contribute our part towards the general deliberation of the English people, on what is now the first and most vital question of Politics, How is Ireland to be saved? A slight survey of the past should suffice to dispel the fond fancy that things will wear round comfortably without convulsion and without cutting remedies. How far back indeed our retrospect should extend, we know not; perhaps to the hour when Norman adventurers first set foot on Irish ground, and commenced the unwilling union from which Ireland has reaped misery, England weakness and disgrace. The mutual atrocities, which constitute for ages the chief events of Anglo-Irish history, came to a head in the great war of religion more than a century and a half ago. The English had discarded their king, the last of the Stuarts, because he was using the prerogative unconstitutionally against the established Protestant Church. To the Romanist Irish such conduct cannot have seemed very blameable, nor could any one have expected them to submit without a struggle to the superior will of England, and receive for their monarch a Dutchman of whom they knew nothing, except that he had specially been called in as an enemy to their religion. The war was inevitable; but if England could have been wise, its wounds might speedily have closed. Could bigotry possibly do to others as it would be done by, mercy in the hour of victory would have seemed a positive right of the vanquished, whose sole offence was that of adhering to a legitimate king. On the contrary, not only were there sweeping confiscations of estates, but a far more permanent and cruel infliction in the execrable Penal Code. The mischiefs which it worked have not been undone by its repeal. The spirit which originated the Civil War at the beginning of this century was its legitimate offspring; and the same spirit still lives, burning with hatred against England, and grimly waiting for the hour of vengeance. In such feelings the peasantry at large do not share; they are too light-hearted and too circumscribed in thought and knowledge to cherish historical enmities: but as they have always found the law to be their oppressor, reverence for law is a sentiment wholly unknown to them; and a secret code of honour has grown up, which leads them to perpetrate murder at the command of an invisible tribunal, with the good conscience of a hangman and the heroism of a soldier. The chief incitement to such deeds is found in the agrarian question. Land being essential to life in that country, to be driven from the land is to be driven to starvation and beggary; and as the peasants know no right by which others than themselves are called owners of the soil, they pay rent only by force, and regard ejection as an intolerable cruelty. Moreover, they are not without a traditionary remembrance of the confiscation of the estates, which, truly or falsely, many of them believe to have belonged to their ancestors: and they understand pretty well, why it is that there are so many Protestant landlords, as well as why they have a Protestant Church. What elements of confusion and violence are here! On the one hand, we see active and fierce minds, panting for revolution, democracy, and that elevation which they believe themselves to deserve as well as a Franklin or a Jefferson; on the other, an ignorant, excitable, halfstarved populace, long since accustomed to despise the public law, and venerate the command of conspirators. Can any one imagine that when five millions of men are in such a state, we may leave things to the operation of common causes, and expect all to come right? In truth, we are disposed to pardon the ignorant attacks often made on Political Economy, when we hear the language of mere Economists concerning Ireland. We must insist: Ireland has long been suffering under slow fever, from the wounds of a revolution which never were healed. No remedies therefore can be effectual but such as will (with more or less plausibility) be called violent, unconstitutional, revolutionary, confiscating, unprincipled. Inequitable and oppressive measures have long since obtained legal sanction, and have not to this hour become less unjust or less oppressive. To give justice to Ireland without offending the claims of the landlords and clergy is as hopeless as to redress the wrongs of slaves without offending their mas ters. America well understands that although we could purchase from our West Indians the freedom of hundreds of thousands, there is no one to give compensation for her millions of slaves. Equally is it impossible to give direct satisfaction to the ruling body of the Irish, while rescuing the peasants from their wretched degradation. In order to see the question from all its sides, it may not be amiss to run over the different remedies which have found advocates. First of all we ought to name the Orange, Clerical or Protestant view; which teaches that the cardinal evil of Ireland is Popery, and that the only cure is found in converting the whole land to Protestantism. It is vain to urge upon the partizans of this opinion, that the Irish do not choose to be converted; for this appears to them like saying that a drunkard does not choose to be reformed: they only moralize on the heaven-sent infatuation of a guilty people. It is more to the point to tell them, that, without proselytism, the numbers of the Catholic Irish increase immensely faster than those of the Protestants: the latter therefore must submit to expect that Protestantism will soon be swamped; and if they once hoped that the English would support its supremacy at the cost of civil war, the dullest Orangemen must now have been enlightened by the discussions on the Maynooth Grant. Their business is now to leave religious politics, and do what can be done from other sides. So much to the men but as to the question itself, it is obvious to remark that no other "Popish" country suffers the same depression and peculiar features of misery and tumult as Ireland; that England, in spite of Popery, grew up and worked on, from the Norman Conquest to the reign of Henry VIII. We are no admirers of Romish religion; but it is an evident calumny to treat this as the one sufficient cause of Irish wretchedness. When Ireland is as happy, and physically as prosperous, as Catholic Belgium, the Rhine, Lombardy, or France, it will then be time to talk of the Catholic religion as impeding any higher advance. : Next to this, and of course in direct contrast to it, is the favourite Whig theory, that the grand enemy of Ireland is the Protestant Church Establishment, and that by its abolition or abatement some great and unexplained benefits |