Condition of the Irish People

During the greater part of the eighteenth century, the great mass of the Irish suffered constantly, and at times desperately, tinder the operation of the cruel penal laws. The Irish Catholics were treated by their English masters as "enemies." They were shut out from the ownership of land. They were forbidden to enter upon avenues of manufacture, trade, and commerce. They were forced to support, by the payment of tithes, the church of the small Protestant minority, and also to sustain their own priesthood. Their only chance of education lay in deserting their faith. The charter schools were established to make Protestants of poor Catholic children. The landlords were protected by the law and its officers in ruling their tenants with an iron hand; nor was there any bond of sympathy between the oppressed tenants and the oppressing landlords. The tenants believed that their only way to resist landlord tyranny was by secret conspiracy and violence. Even the Irish Protestants suffered so desperately under the laws which crushed out the industries of Ulster, that they were reduced to utter poverty; to escape which, they resorted by thousands to emigration to foreign lands. It is said that, in the middle of the century, twelve thousand Protestants emigrated from Ireland every year.

Famine recurred inevitably among a population so pent up and restricted in its opportunities to labor for existence. Towards the middle of the century (1739-40), the misery of the people in many parts of Ireland was extreme from want of food. The roads were covered with the dead and the dying. Malignant fevers laid whole villages waste. "Whole thousands in a barony," wrote a Protestant clergyman of the period, "have perished; some of hunger, and others of disorders occasioned by unnatural, unwholesome, and putrid diet." It is believed that more than three hundred thousand persons died in Ireland in two years from famine, and the diseases which followed in its train. One great evil, at this very period of utter wretchedness among the poorer Irish, was that many of the Irish landlords absented themselves entirely from the country. The money wrung in rents from the poverty-stricken tenants was spent, not in Ireland, where it might in some degree, at least, have relieved the prevalent distress, but in London, Paris, and other places abroad. The money thus drawn from Ireland to go into foreign pockets amounted some-times to over a million pounds a year.

The poor Irish rapidly fell into the condition of living in wretched mud hovels, where, with scanty clothing and yet more scanty food, they dwelt rather like beasts than human beings. At the same time, the good farming lands, in many parts of the country, were turned into pastures for the rearing of herds and flocks, because the tenants could not afford to enrich and till the soil. The result of this was to produce a crop of wanderers and beggars, who only worked fitfully, and during a large part of the year depended on alms for subsistence. Habits of idleness, of contempt of law, and of crime, naturally sprang from such a condition of things. Beggary easily develops into theft, and theft into robbery and murder. Irish beggars sometimes maimed or blinded their own children, in order to make them objects of pity, and thus of charity. Workhouses were established by the government, to which persons found begging were committed, and wherein they were compelled to work; but the inveterate aversion of even the poorest Irish to the workhouses rendered them of little use in limiting the evil of vagabondage.

The habits of the middle and higher classes in Ireland during the eighteenth century were reckless and extravagant. They lorded it over the lower classes, often with pitiless severity; and were themselves, to a large degree, given over to dissipation and self-indulgence. This was especially the case with the smaller landlords and gentlemen. Drunkenness was habitual among large numbers of them. Dueling was practiced as a settled custom. Horse-racing, cock-fighting, gambling, the sports of the field and forest were more ardently pursued in Ireland than in England. On the other hand, the lavish and generous hospitality for which the Irish were famous from the earliest times, was still a marked feature of Irish society. The Irish gentleman, indeed, lived often in a plain and unsightly, and sometimes in a dilapidated, mansion. He did not spend his money on architectural ornament, or even on domestic convenience. But within his unadorned walls the entertainment of his guests was profuse and prolonged. It is said that, in the dwelling of one Connaught nobleman, the slaughtered ox was hung up whole, and the hungry servitor supplied himself with his dole of flesh sliced from off the carcass." This lord, "from an early dinner to the hour of rest, never left his chair; nor did the claret wine ever quit his table."

The vice of absenteeism on the part of the Irish landlords, produced a large number of middle-men, who acted as agents to the landlords. These, with the smaller landlords, formed a class largely given over to dissolute and reckless habits. "They sublet their lands in rack rents," says Lecky; "kept miserable packs of half-starved hounds, wandered from fair to fair, and from race to race, in laced coats, gambling, fighting, drinking, swearing, and sporting; parading everywhere their contempt for honest labor, and giving a tone of recklessness to every society in which they moved." These were the men who ground down the tenants most pitilessly, who turned with deaf ear from the most heart-rending tales of destitution and starvation, and who gave to the classes below them the example of the worst vices with which Ireland was afflicted. Their brutal example taught the ignorant that "idleness and extravagance were noble things, and that parsimony, order, and industry were degrading to a gentleman."

Happily, there is a brighter side to the picture of Irish life in the eighteenth century. Side by side with the abject wretchedness and slavery of the many, with the headlong dissipation of the middle class, there existed much intellectual activity and an energetic public spirit. In the early part of the century, many Irishmen became eminent in literature. The greatest name among these was that of Jonathan Swift. Bishop Berkeley was another whose works are still honored and remembered. Archbishop Icing, provost Browne, Parnell the poet, Skelton, Hutcheson, Brooke, were among the Irish writers of distinction. Later in the century a brilliant galaxy of Irish authors appeared in Lawrence Sterne, Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund Burke, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Societies devoted to philosophy, literature, and art, flourished in Ireland.

The most notable of these were the Dublin Philosophical Society, founded in the latter part of the preceding century; the Physico-Historical Society; and, most important of all, the Dublin Society (1731). The object of the Dublin Society was "to improve husbandry, manufactures, and other useful arts." Lord Chesterfield said of it, that "it did more good to Ireland, with regard to arts and industry, than all the laws that could have been formed."

In the last half of the century, the Dublin Society did a good work in devoting itself to fostering the ornamental arts in Ireland. The country had already produced several portrait painters of merit, and a school of engraving was established in Dublin. An academy of art was founded, and exhibitions of paintings were annually held at the capital. Some improvements in architectural adornment were carried to a higher perfection in Ireland than in any other country. Later in the century, an Irishman, James Barry, rose to the highest grade of eminence as a historical painter. Intellectual discussion was active and earnest among the scholarly circles of Ireland for many years. Men of learning engaged in controversies on theology, political economy, political reform, industrial theories, and social conditions, by means, principally, of pamphlets. Prominent among these were Berkeley, Madden, Prior, Lord Molesworth, Edward Synge, and archbishop Boulter. The most earnest of these discussions were those which related to the position of the two churches in Ireland.

As the century wore on, the bitterness of feeling early and middle parts of the century became less prevalent towards its close. Drunkenness was less universal, and dueling was ceasing to be a regular custom among the choleric squires. No people ever clung more tenaciously to their old homes, traditions, customs, religious beliefs, and affections; and in spite of oppressions and miseries which had endured for centuries, the Irish remained in the eighteenth century, what, indeed, they are in the nineteenth, a singularly light-hearted, cheerful, imaginative race. Tyranny had failed to quench not only their national spirit, but the joyousness and gayety of their natures.

Some of the large towns of Ireland vied, in the eighteenth century, in population and varied activities, with the towns of England. Dublin was the second town in Great Britain and Ireland, in the number of its inhabitants. At one period its population was somewhat over a hundred thousand (1750). It is said that its St. Stephen's Green was the largest public square in Europe. Dublin had broad quays, several fine public buildings, a flourishing university, and some elegant residences. The castle in which the lord-lieutenant held his court was often the scene of brilliant levees and banquets. The theatres, public gardens, and music-halls were filled with pleasure-loving crowds. Handel's "Messiah "was first produced in Dublin; and Garrick there played "Hamlet" for the first time. Among the larger Irish towns, Cork had a population of sixty thousand, and Limerick over twenty thousand. The county towns next in importance were Waterford, Kilkenny, and Galway. Upon all of these towns, indeed, rested the blight of the penal laws, and of those laws which from time to time had imposed restrictions on Irish trade and commerce. Yet, in the eighteenth century, each of them presented some features of thrift, which proved that the business capacity of Irishmen, under greater freedom, would have created wealth and prosperity.