Sections 5-6: Of the Tenantry of Ireland; Of the Labouring Poor

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SECTION V.

Of the Tenantry of Ireland.

IT has been probably owing to the small value of land in Ireland before, and even through a considerable part of the present century, that landlords became so careless of the interests of posterity, as readily to grant their tenants leases for ever. It might also be partly owing to the unfortunate civil wars, and other intestine divisions, which for so long a space of time kept that unhappy country in a state rather of devastation than improvement. When a castle, or a fortified house, and a family strong enough for a garrison were essentially necessary to the security of life and property among protestants, no man could occupy land, unless he had substance for defence as well as cultivation; short, or even determinable tenures were not encouragement enough for settling in such a situation of warfare. To increase the force of an estate leases for ever were given of lands, which from their waste state were deemed of little value. The practice once become common, continued long after the motives which originally gave rise to it, and has not yet ceased entirely in any part of the kingdom. Hence, therefore, tenants holding large tracts of land under a lease for ever, and which have been relet to a variety of under-tenants, must in this enquiry be considered as landlords.

THE obvious distinction to be applied is, that of the occupying and unoccupying tenantry: in other words, the real farmer, and the middle man. The very idea, as well as the practice, of permitting a tenant to relet at a profit rent, seems confined to the distant and unimproved parts of every empire. In the highly cultivated counties of England, the practice has no existence, but there are traces of it in the extremities; in Scotland it has been very common; and I am informed that the same observation is partly applicable to France. In proportion as any country becomes improved, the practice necessarily wears out.

IT is in Ireland a question greatly agitated, whether the system has, or has not advantages, which may yet induce a landlord to continue in it. The friends to this mode of letting lands contend, that the extreme poverty of the lower classes, renders them such an insecure tenantry, that no gentleman of fortune can depend on the least punctuality in the payment of rent from such people; and therefore to let a large farm to some intermediate person of substance, at a lower rent, in order that the profit may be his inducement and reward for becoming a collector from the immediate occupiers, and answerable for their punctuality, becomes necessary to any person who will not submit to the drudgery of such a minute attention. Also, that such a man will at least improve a spot around his own residence, whereas the mere cottar can do nothing. If the intermediate tenant is, or from the accumulation of several farms becomes, a man of property, the same argument is applicable to his reletting to another intermediate man, giving up a part of his profit to escape that trouble, which induced the landlord to begin this system, and at the same time accounts for the number of tenants, one under another, who have all a profit out of the rent of the occupying farmer. In the variety of conversations on this point, of which I have partook in Ireland, I never heard any other arguments that had the least foundation in the actual state of the country; for as to ingenious theories, which relate more to what might be, than to what is, little regard should be paid to them.

THAT A man of substance, whose rent is not only secure, but regularly paid, is in many respects a more eligible tenant than a poor cottar, or little farmer, cannot be disputed, if the landlord looks no farther than those circumstances, the question is at an end, for the argument must be allowed to have its full weight even to victory. But there are many other considerations: I was particularly attentive to every class of tenants throughout the kingdom, and shall therefore describe these middle men, from whence their merit may be the more easily decided. Sometimes they are resident on a part of the land, but very often they are not. Dublin, Bath, London, and the country towns of Ireland, contain great numbers of them: the merit of this class is surely ascertained in a moment; there cannot be a shadow of pretence for the intervention of a man, whose single concern with an estate is to deduct a portion from the rent of it. They are however sometimes resident on a part of the land they hire, where it is natural to suppose they would work some improvements; it is however very rarely the case. I have in different parts of the kingdom seen farms just fallen in after leases of three lives, of the duration of fifty, sixty, and even seventy years, in which the residence of the principal tenant was not to be distinguished from the cottared fields surrounding it. I was at first much surprized at this, but after repeated observation, I found these men very generally were the masters of packs of wretched hounds, with which they wasted their time and money, and it is a notorious fact, that they are the hardest drinkers in Ireland. A circumstance they are almost naturally led to by their situation in life. Indeed the class of the small country gentlemen, chiefly consisting of these profit renters, seems at present to monopolize that drinking spirit, which was, not many years ago, the disgrace of the kingdom at large: this I conjecture to be the reason why those who might improve are so very far from doing it; but there are still greater objections to them.

Living upon the spot, surrounded by their little undertenants, they prove the most oppressive species of tyrant, that ever lent assistance to the destruction of a country. They relet the land, at short tenures, to the occupiers of small farms; and often give no leases at all. Not satisfied with screwing up the rent to the uttermost farthing, they are rapacious and relentless in the collection of it. Many of them have defended themselves in conversation with me, upon the plea of taking their rents, partly in kind, when their undertenants are much distressed:

"What," say they, "would the head landlord, suppose him a great noble-man, do with a miserable cottar, who, disappointed in the sale of a heifer, a few barrels of corn, or firkins of butter, brings his five instead of his ten guineas? But we can favour him by taking his commodities at a fair price, and wait for reimbursement until the market rises. Can my lord do that?

A very common plea, but the most unfortunate that could be used to any one whoever remarked that portion of human nature which takes the garb of an Irish land jobber! For upon what issue does this remark place the question? Does it not acknowledge, that calling for their rents, when they cannot be paid in cash, they take the substance of the debtor at the very moment when he cannot sell it to another? Can it be necessary to ask what the price is? It is at the option of the creditor; and the miserable culprit meets his oppression, perhaps his ruin in the very action that is trumpeted as a favour to him. It may seem harsh to attribute a want of feeling to any class of men; but let not the reader misapprehend me; it is the situation not the man , that I condemn. An injudicious system places a great number of persons, not of any liberal rank in life, in a state abounding with a variety of opportunities of oppression, every act of which is profitable to themselves. I am afraid it is human nature for men to fail in such posts; and I appeal to the experience of mankind, in other lines of life, whether it is ever found advantageous to a poor debtor to sell his products, or wares, to his richer creditor, at the moment of demand.

BUT farther; the dependance of the occupier on the resident middle man goes to other circumstances, personal service of themselves, their cars and horses, are exacted for leading turf, hay, corn, gravel, &c. insomuch that the poor undertenants often lose their own crops and turf, from being obliged to obey these calls of their superiors. Nay, I have even heard those jobbers gravely assert, that without undertenants to furnish cars and teams at half or two thirds the common price of the country, they could carry on no improvements at all; yet taking a merit to themselves for works wrought out of the sweat and ruin of a pack of wretches, assigned to their plunder by the inhumanity of the landholders.

IN a word, the case is reducible to a short compass; intermediate tenants work no improvements; if nonresident they cannot , and if resident they do not; but they oppress the occupiers, and render them as incapable as they arc themselves unwilling. The kingdom is an aggregate proof of these facts; for if long leases, at low rents, and profit incomes given, would have improved it, Ireland had long ago been a garden. It remains to enquire, whether the landlords security is a sull recompence for so much mischief.

BUT here it is proper to observe, that though the intermediate man is generally better security than the little occupier; yet it is not from thence to be concluded, as I have often heard it, that the latter is beyond all comparison beneath him in this respect: the contrary is often the case; and I have known the fact, that the landlord, disappointed of his rent, has drove (distrained) the undertenants for it at a time when they had actually paid it to the middle man. If the profit rent is spent, as it very generally is in claret and hounds, the notion of good security will prove visionary, as many a landlord in Ireland has found it: several very considerable ones have assured me, that the little occupiers were the best pay they had on their estates; and the intermediate gentlemen tenants by much the worst.

BY the minutes of the journey it appears, that a very considerable part of the kingdom, and the most enlightened landlords in it, have discarded this injurious system, and let their farms to none but the occupying tenantry; their experience has proved, that the apprehension of a want of security was merely ideal, finding their rents much better paid than ever. At the last extremity it is the occupier's stock which is the real security of the landlord. It is that he distrains, and finds abundantly more valuable than the laced hat, hounds, and pistols of the gentleman jobber, from whom he is more likely in such a case to receive a message , than a remittance.

AND here let me observe, that a defence of intermediate tenants has been founded upon the circumstance of lessening the remittance of absentee rents; the profit of the middle man was spent in Ireland, whereas upon his dismission the whole is remitted to England. I admit this to be an evil, but it appears to be in no degree proportioned to the mischiefs 1 have dwelt on. It is always to be remembered, that in the arrangement of landed property, the produce is the great object; the system of letting, which encourages most the occupying tenant, will always be the most advantageous to the community. I think I have proved that the middle man oppresses the cottar incomparably more than the principal landlord; to the one he is usually tenant at will, or at least under short terms, but under the other has the most advantageous tenure. This single point, that the person most favoured is in one instance an idle burthen, and in the other the industrious occupier, sufficiently decides the superiority. To look therefore at the rent, after it is paid, is to put the question on a wrong issue; the payment of that rent, by means of ample products, arising from animated industry, is the only point deserving attention; and I had rather the whole of it should go to the antipodes, than exact it in a manner that shall cramp that industry, and lessen those products.

WHEN therefore it is considered, that no advantages to the estate can arise from a non-resident tenant, and that a resident intermediate one improves no more than the poor occupiers who are prevented by his oppressions, that the landlord often gains little or nothing in security from employing them, but that he suffers a prodigious deduction in his rental for mere expectations, which every hour's experience proves to be delusive. When these facts are duly weighed, it is presumed, that the gentlemen in those parts of the kingdom, which yet groan under such a system of absurdity, folly and oppression, will follow the example set by such a variety of intelligent landlords, and be deaf to the deceitful asseverations with which their ears are assailed, to treat the anecdotes retailed of the cottar's poverty, with the contempt they deserve, when coming from the mouth of a jobber; when these bloodsuckers of the poor tenantry boast of their own improvements, to open their eyes and view the ruins which are dignified by such a term, and finally determine, as friends to themselves, to their posterity and their country, TO LET THEIR ESTATES TO NONE BUT THE OCCUPYING TENANTRY.

HAVING thus described the tenants that ought to be rejected, let me next mention the circumstances of the occupiers. The variety of these is very great in Ireland. In the North, where the linen manufacture has spread, the farms are so small, that ten acres in the occupation of one person is a large one, five or six will be found a good farm, and all the agriculture of the country so entirely subservient lo the manufacture, that they no more deserve the name of farmers than the occupier of a mere cabbage garden. In Limerick, Tipperary, Clare, Meath and Waterford, there are to be found the greatest graziers and cow-keepers perhaps in the world, some who rent and occupy from £3000 to £10,000 a year; these of course are men of property, and are the only occupiers in the kingdom, who have any considerable substance. The effects are not so beneficial as might be expected. Rich graziers in England, who have a little tillage, usually manage it well, and are in other respects attentive to various improvements, though it must be confessed not in the same proportion with great arable farmers; but in Ireland these men are as errant slovens as the most beggarly cottars. The rich lands of Limerick are in respect of fences, drains, buildings, weeds, &c. in as waste a state as the mountains of Kerry; the fertility of nature is so little seconded, that few tracts yield less pleasure to the spectator. From what 1 observed, I attributed this to the idleness and dissipation so general in Ireland. These graziers are too apt to attend to their claret as much as their bullocks, live expensively, and being enabled, from the nature of their business, to pass nine tenths of the year without any exertion of industry, contract such a habit of ease, that works of improvement would be mortifying to their sloth.

IN the arable counties of Louth, part of Meath, Kildare, Kilkenny, Carlow, Queen's, and part of King's, and Tipperary, they are much more industrious. It is the nature of tillage, to raise a more regular and animated attention to business; but the farms are too small, and the tenants too poor, to exhibit any appearances that can strike an English traveller. They have a great deal of corn, and many fine wheat crops; but being gained at the expence and loss of a fallow, as in the open fields of England, they do not suggest the ideas of profit to the individual, or advantage to the state, which worse crops in a well appointed rotation would do. Their manuring is trivial, their tackle and implements wretched, their teams weak, their profit small, and their living little better than that of the cottars they employ. These circumstances are the necessary result of the smallness of their capitals, which even in these tillage counties do not usually amount to a third of what an English farmer would have to manage the same extent of land. The leases of these men are usually three lives to protestants, and thirty- one years to catholics.

THE tenantry in the more unimproved parts, such as Corke, Wicklow, Longford, and all the mountainous counties, where it is part tillage, and part pasturage, are generally in a very backward state. Their capitals are smaller than the class I just mentioned, and among them is chiefly found the practice of many poor cottars hiring large farms in partnership. They make their rents by a little butter, a little wool, a little corn, and a few young cattle and lambs. Their lands at extreme low rents, are the most unimproved, (mountain and bog excepted,) in the kingdom. They have, however, more industry than capital; and with a very little management, might be brought greatly to improve their husbandry. I think they hold more generally from intermediate tenants than any other set; one reason why the land they occupy is in so waste a state. In the mountainous tracts, I saw instances of greater industry than in any other part of Ireland. Little occupiers, who can get leases of a mountain side, make exertions in improvement, which, though far enough from being complete, or accurate, yet prove clearly what great effects encouragement would have among them.

IN the King's county and also in some other parts, I saw many tracts of land, not large enough to be relet, which were occupied under leases for ever, very well planted and improved by men of substance and industry.

THE poverty, common among the small occupying tenantry, may be pretty well ascertained from their general conduct in hiring a farm. They will manage to take one with a sum surprizingly small; they provide labour, which in England is so considerable an article, by assigning portions of land to cottars for their potatoe gardens, and keeping one or two cows for each of them. To lessen the live stock necessary, they will, whenever the neighbourhood enables them, take in the cattle at so much per month, or season, of any person that is deficient in pasturage at home, or of any labourers that have no land. Next, they will let out some old lay for grass potatoes to such labourers; and if they are in a county where corn acres are known, they will do the same with some corn land. If there is any meadow on their farm, they will sell a part of it as the hay grows. By all these means the necessity of a full stock is very much lessened, and by living themselves in the very poorest manner, and converting every pig, fowl, and even egg into cash, they will make up their rent, and get by very slow degrees into somewhat better circumstances. Where it is the custom to take in partnership, the difficulties are easier got over, for one man brings a few sheep, another a cow, a third a horse, a fourth a car and some seed potatoes, a fifth a few barrels of corn, and so on, until the farm among them is tolerably stocked, and hands upon it in plenty for the labour.

BUT it is from the whole evident, that they are uncommon masters of the art of overcoming difficulties by patience and contrivance. Travellers, who take a superficial view of them, are apt to think their poverty and wretchedness, viewed in the light of farmers, greater than they are. Perhaps there is an impropriety in considering a man merely as the occupier of such a quantity of land; and that instead of the land, his capital should be she object of contemplation. Give the farmer of twenty acres in England no more capital than his brother in Ireland, and I will venture to say he will be much poorer, for he would be utterly unable to go on at all.

I shall conclude what I have to say upon this subject, with stating, in few words, what I think would prove a very advantageous conduct in landlords towards the poor tenantry of the kingdom, and I shall do this with the greater readiness, as I speak not only as a passing traveller, but from a year's residence among several hundred tenants, whose circumstances and situation I had particular opportunities of observing.

LET me remark, that the power and influence of a resident landlord is so great in Ireland, that whatever system he adopts, be it well or ill imagined, he is much more able to introduce and accomplish it than Englishmen can well have an idea of; consequently, one may suppose him to determine more authoritatively than a person in a similar situation in this kingdom could do. The first object is a settled determination never to be departed from, to let his farms only to the immediate occupier of the land, and to avoid deceit not to allow a cottar, herdsman, or steward, to have more than three or four acres on any of his farms. By no means to reject the little occupier of a few acres from being a tenant to himself, rather than annex his land to a larger spot. Having, by this previous step, eased these inferior tenantry of the burthen of the intermediate man, let him give out, and steadily adhere to it, that he shall insist on the regular and punctual payment of his rent, but shall take no personal service whatever. The meanest occupier to have a lease, and none shorter than twenty-one years, which I am inclined also to believe is long enough for his advantage. There will arise, in spite of his tenderness, a necessity of securing a regular payment of rent: I would advise him to distrain without favour or affection, at a certain period of deficiency. This will appear harsh only upon a superficial consideration. The object is to establish the system, but it will fall before it is on its legs, if founded on a landlord's forgiving arrears, or permitting them to increase. He need not be apprehensive, since they, who can under disadvantages, pay the jobber , can certainly pay the landlord himself, when freed from those incumbrances. At all events, let him persist in this firmness, though it be the ruin of a few; for he must remember, that if he ruins five, he assuredly saves ten; he will, it is true, know the fall of a few, but many with an intermediate tenant might be destroyed without his knowing it. Such a steady regular conduct would infallibly have its effect, in animating all the tenantry of the estate to exert every nerve to be punctual; whereas favour shewn now and then would make every one, the least inclined to remissness, hope for its exertion towards himself, and every partial good would be attended with a diffusive evil; exceptions however to be made for very great and unavoidable misfortunes, clearly and undoubtedly proved. This stern administration on the one hand should be accompanied on the other with every species of encouragement to those, who shewed the least disposition to improve; premiums should be given, rewards adjudged, difficulties smoothed, and notice taken, in the most flattering manner, of those whose conduct merited it. I shall in another part of these papers point out, in detail, the advantageous systems; it is here only requisite to observe, that whatever novelties a landlord wishes to introduce, he should give seed gratis, and be at a part of the expence, promising to be at the whole loss, if he is well satisfied it is really incurred. From various observations I am convinced, that such a conduct would very rarely prove unsuccessful. The profit to a landlord would be immense; he would in the course of a lease find his tenantry paying a high rent, with greater ease to themselves, than they before yielded a low one.

A few considerable landlords, many years ago, made the experiment of fixing at great expence, colonies of palatines on their estates. Some of them I viewed, and made many enquiries. The scheme did not appear to me to answer. They had houses built for them; plots of land assigned to each at a rent of favour, assisted in stock, and all of them with leases for lives from the head landlord. The poor Irish are very rarely treated in this manner; when they are, they work much greater improvements than common among these Germans; witness Sir William Osborne's mountaineers! a few beneficial practices were introduced, but never travelled beyond their own farms; they were viewed with eyes too envious to allow them to be patterns, and it was human nature that it should be so: but encourage a few of your own poor, and if their practices thrive they will spread. I am convinced no country, whatever state it may be in, can be improved by colonies of foreigners, and whatever foreigner, as a superintendent of any great improvement, asks for colonies of his own countrymen to execute his ideas, manifests a mean genius and but little knowledge of the human heart; if he has talents, he will find tools wherever he finds men, and make the natives of the country the means of increasing their own happiness. Whatever he does then, will live and take root; but if effected by foreign hands, it will prove a sickly and short lived exotic; brilliant perhaps, for a time, in the eyes of the ignorant, but of no solid advantage to the country that employs him. But I found this observation merely in agriculture; for every one's recollection will tell him instances of manufactures being established and advanced by foreigners.

SECTION VI.

Of the Labouring Poor.

SUCH is the weight of the lower classes in the great scale of national importance, that a traveller can never give too much attention to every circumstance that concerns them; their welfare forms the broad basis of public prosperity; it is they that feed, cloath, enrich, and fight the battles of all the other ranks of a community; it is their being able to support these various burthens without oppression, which constitutes the general felicity; in proportion to their ease is the strength and wealth of nations, as public debility will be the certain attendant on their misery. Convinced that to be ignorant of their state and situation, in different countries, is to be deficient in the first rudiments of political knowledge, I have, upon every occasion, made the necessary enquiries, to get the best information circumstances would allow me. What passes daily, and even hourly, before our eyes, we are very apt entirely to overlook; hence the surprizing inattention of various people to the food, cloathing, possessions and state of the poor, even in their own neighbourhood: many a question have I put to gentlemen upon these points, which were not answered without having recourse to the next cabbin; a source of information the more necessary, as I found upon various occasions, that some gentlemen in Ireland are infected with the rage of adopting systems as well as those of England: with one party the poor are all starving, with the other they are deemed in a very tolerable situation, and a third, who look with an evil eye on the administration of the British government, are fond of exclaiming at poverty and rags, as proofs of the cruel treatment of Ireland. When truth is likely to be thus warped, a traveller must be very circumspect to believe , and very assiduous to see.

	£.	s.	d.
THE average rent of a cabbin and garden in the minutes is	1	13	10
Ditto rent for a cow's grass	1	11	3

FROM the minutes of the journey it will be found, that there is no determinate quantity of land for the potatoe garden; it is usually an acre; sometimes half an acre, and sometimes one acre and an half; but according to the soil, that quantity which is understood (right or wrong) to be necessary, is called the garden. The grass for a cow is for the green food only, the cottar himself finds or buys hay. Respecting the number of cows, it generally appeared, that by far the greater part have one or more.

BUT it is necessary here to explain the common cottar system of labour in Ireland, which much resembles that of Scotland until very lately, and which was probably the same all over Europe before arts and commerce changed the face of it. If there are cabbins on a farm, they are the residence of the cottars; if there are none the farmer marks out the potatoe gardens, and the labourers who apply to him on his hiring the land raise their own cabbins on such spots; in some places the farmer builds; in others he only assists them with the roof, &c. a verbal compact is then made, that the new cottar shall have his potatoe garden at such a rent, and one or two cows kept him at the price of the neighbourhood, he finding the cows. He then works with the farmer at the rate of the place, usually sixpence half-penny a day, a tally being kept (half by each party) and a notch cut for every day's labour: at the end of six months, or a year, they reckon, and the balance is paid. The cottar works for himself, as his potatoes require.

The rates of	£	1	13	10
And,		1	11	3
Forming together		3	5	1

for milk and potatoes appear to be very reasonable; if two cows are kept, it is only £4 16s. 4d. from whence it is evident, as far merely as this charge goes, there is no oppression upon them which can ever amount to starving. In particular instances, where there is much inhumanity in the greater tenants, they are made to pay too high a rent for their gardens; and though the price, at which their cows are supported, may not appear high, yet they may be so poorly kept as to make it very unreasonable. I believe, from what I saw, that such instances are not uncommon.

POTATOES.

	Expence per acre.				Product, Barrels per acre.		Price per barrel.			Produce value.				Prime cost.			Rent pota- toe ground.
Averages of the journey per Irish acre	10	4	9		82		4	9		16	12	6		2	7½		5	16	2
Averages per Engish acre	6	7	6		52		4	9		10	7	0		2	7½		3	8	6

THESE tables together will enable the reader to have a pretty accurate idea of the expences at which the poor in Ireland are fed. The first column is the total expence of an acre of potatoes, the third is the price at which potatoes are bought and sold, for seed, or food. The prime cost is the price formed by the first and second columns, being the rate at which they are eaten by those who raise them. The last column requires rather more explanation to those who were never in that country. There are a great many cabbins, usually by the road side, or in the ditch, which have no potatoe gardens at all. Ireland being free from the curse of English poor laws, the people move about the country and settle where they will. A wandering family will fix themselves under a dry bank, and with a few sticks, furze, fern, &c. make up a hovel much worse than an English pigstie, support themselves how they can, by work, begging and stealing; if the neighbourhood wants hands, or takes no notice of them, the hovel grows into a cabbin. In my rides about Mitchelstown, I have passed places in the road one day, without any appearance of a habitation, and next morning found a hovel, filled with a man and woman, six or eight children, and a pig. These people are not kept by any body as cottars, but are taken at busy seasons by the day or week, and paid in money, consequently having no potatoe garden, they are necessitated every year, to hire a spot of some neighbouring farmer, and in the preceding table, the last column, is the rent per acre paid for it. The cabbins in little towns are in the same situation.

I THINK £5 10s. 2d. for liberty to plant a crop so beneficial to the land as potatoes, a very extravagant rent, and by no means upon a fair level with the other circumstances of the poor. The prime cost of two shillings and seven pence half-penny per barrel, generally of twenty stone, being equal to about eight pence the bushel of seventy pounds, is not a high price for the root, yet might it be much lower, if they gave up their lazy bed method of culture, and adopted that of the plough, for the average produce of three hundred twenty-eight bushels, or eighty-two barrels per acre, compared with crops in England, is perfectly insignificant, yet to gain this miserable produce, much old lay, and nineteen twentieths of all the dung in the kingdom are employed. A total alteration in this point is therefore much to be wished.

RELATIVE to the cottar system wherever it is found, it may be observed that the recompence for labour is the means of living. In England these are dispensed in money, but in Ireland in land or commodities. In the former country paying the poor with any thing but money has been found so oppressive, that various and repeated statutes have been made to prohibit it. Is it to be considered in the same light in Ireland? this is a question which involves many considerations. First let me remark that the two modes of payment prohibited in England but common in Ireland, are not exactly the same, though upon similar principles. In England it is the payment of manufacturing labourers in necessaries, as bread, candles, soap, &c. In Ireland it is a quantity of land for the support of a labourer a year. The former it must strike every one, is more open to abuse, involving more complex accounts than the latter. The great question is, which system is most advantageous to the poor family, the payment to be in land for potatoes and milk, or in money, supposing the payment to be fairly made: here lies the discussion.

ON one hand, the Irish labourer in every circumstance which gives him any appearance of plenty, the possession of cattle is subjected to chances which must be heavy in proportion to his poverty; ill fed cattle, we know from the experience of English commons, are very far from being so advantageous to a man as they at first seem; accidents happen without a resource to supply the loss, and leave the man much worse than him who being paid in money is independant of such events. But to reverse the medal, there appear advantages, and very great ones, by being paid in land, he has plenty of articles of the utmost importance to the sustenance of a family, potatoes and milk. Generally speaking, the Irish poor have a fair belly full of potatoes, and they have milk the greatest part of the year. What I would particularly insist on here is the value of his labour being food, not money; food not for himself only, but for his wife and children. An Irishman loves whisky as well as an Englishman does strong beer; but he cannot go on saturday night to the whisky house, and drink out the week's support of himself, his wife and his children, not uncommon in the alehouse of the Englishman. It may indeed be said, that we should not argue against a mode of payment because it may be abused, which is very true, but we certainly may reason against that which carries in its very principles the seed of abuse. That the Irishman's cow may be ill fed is admitted, but ill fed as it is, it is better than the no cow of the Englishman; the children of the Irish cabbin are nourished with milk, which, small as the quantity may be, is far preferable to the beer or vile tea which is the beverage of the English infant, for nowhere but in a town is milk to be bought. Farther, in a country where bread, cheese or meat are the common food, it is consumed with great oeconomy, and kept under lock and key where the children can have no resort; but the case with potatoes is different, they are in greater plenty, the children help themselves; they are scarce ever seen about a cabbin without being in the act of eating them, it is their employment all day long. Another circumstance not to be forgotten, is the regularity of the supply. The crop of potatoes, and the milk of the cow, are more regular in Ireland than the price at which the Englishman buys his food. In England complaints rise even to riots when the rates of provisions are high; but in Ireland the poor have nothing to do with prices, they depend not on prices, but crops of a vegetable very regular in its produce. Attend the English labourer when he is in sickness, he must then have resort to his savings, but those will be nought among nine- tenths of the poor of a country that have a legal dependance on the parish, which therefore is the best off, the Englishman supported by the parish, or the Irishman by his potatoe bed and cow?

MONEY I am ready enough to grant has many advantages, but they depend almost entirely on the prudence with which it is expended. They know little of the human mind who suppose that the poor man, with his seven or eight shillings on a saturday night, has not his temptations to be imprudent as well as his superior with as many hundreds or thousands a year. He has his alehouse, his brandy shop, and skittle ground, as much as the other his ball, opera or masquerade. Examine the state of the English poor, and see if facts do not coincide here with theory; do we not see numbers of half starved, and half cloathed families, owing to the superfluities of ale and brandy, tea and sugar. An Irishman cannot do this in any degree, he can neither drink whisky from his potatoes, nor milk it from his cow.

BUT after all that can be said on this subject, the custom of both countries is consistent with their respective circumstances and situations. When great wealth from immense branches of industry has brought on a rapid circulation, and much of what is commonly called luxury, the more simple mode of paying labour with land can scarcely hold. It does not, however, follow that the poor are in that respect better off, other advantages of a different kind attend the evils of such a situation, among which, perhaps, the employment of the wife and all the children, are the greatest. In such a country, also markets and shops will be established in every corner, where the poor may buy their necessaries without difficulty; but in Ireland there are neither one nor the other; the labourer there with his pay in his pocket would find nothing readily but whisky.

I have gone into this enquiry in order to satisfy the people of Ireland, that the mode there common of paying the labouring poor is consistent with the situation of the kingdom: whether it is good or bad, or better or worse than that of England, it is what will necessarily continue until a great increase of national wealth has introduced a more general circulation of money, they will then have the English mode with its defects as well as its advantages.

FOOD.

THE food of the common Irish, potatoes and milk, have been produced more than once as an instance of the extreme poverty of the country, but this I believe is an opinion embraced with more alacrity than reflection. I have heard it stigmatized as being unhealthy, and not sufficiently nourishing for the support of hard labour; but this opinion is very amazing in a country, many of whose poor people are as athletic in their form, as robust, and as capable of enduring labour as any upon earth. The idleness seen among many when working for those who oppress them is a very contrast to the vigour and activity with which the same people work, when themselves alone reap the benefit of their labour. To what country must we have recourse for a stronger instance than lime carried by little miserable mountaineers thirty miles on horses back to the foot of their hills, and up the steeps on their own. When I see the people of a country, in spite of political oppression, with well formed vigorous bodies, and their cottages swarming with children; when I see their men athletic, and their women beautiful, I know not how to believe them subsisting on an unwholesome food.

AT the same time, however, that both reason and observation convince me of the justice of these remarks, I will candidly allow that I have seen such an excess in the laziness of great numbers, even when working for themselves, and such an apparent weakness in their exertions when encouraged to work, that I have had my doubts of the heartiness of their food. But here arise fresh difficulties; were their food ever so nourishing, I can easily conceive an habitual inactivity of exertion would give them an air of debility compared with a more industrious people. Though my residence in Ireland was not long enough to become a perfect master of the question, yet I have employed from twenty to fifty men for several months, and found their habitual laziness or weakness so great, whether working by measure or by day, that I am absolutely convinced 1S. 6d. and even 2s. a day, in Suffolk or Hertfordshire, much cheaper than six-pence halfpenny at Mitchelstown: it would not be fair to consider this as a representation of the kingdom, that place being remarkably backward in every species of industry and improvement; but I am afraid this observation would hold true in a less degree for the whole. But is this owing to habit or food? Granting their food to be the cause, it decides very little against potatoes, unless they were tried with good nourishing beer instead of their vile potations of whisky. When they are encouraged, or animate themselves to work hard, it is all by whisky, which though it has a notable effect in giving a perpetual motion to their tongues, can have but little of that invigorating substance which is found in strong beer or porter, probably it has an effect as pernicious, as the other is beneficial. One circumstance I should mention, which seems to confirm this, I have known the Irish reapers in Hertfordshire work as labouriously as any of our own men, and living upon potatoes which they procured from London, but drinking nothing but ale. If their bodies are weak, I attribute it to whisky, not potatoes; but it is still a question with me whether their miserable working arises from any such weakness, or from an habitual laziness. A friend of mine always refused Irishmen work in Surrey, saying his bailiff could do nothing but settle their quarrels.

BUT of this food there is one circumstance which must ever recommend it, they have a belly full, and that let me add is more than the superfluities of an Englishman leaves to his family: let any person examine minutely into the receipt and expenditure of an English cottage, and he will find that tea, sugar, and strong liquors, can come only from pinched bellies. I will not assert that potatoes are a better food than bread and cheese; but I have no doubt of a bellyfull of the one being much better than half a bellyfull of the other; still less have I that the milk of the Irishman is incomparably better than the small beer, gin, or tea of the Englishman; and this even for the father, how much better must it be for the poor infants; milk to them is nourishment, is health, is life.

IF any one doubts the comparative plenty, which attends the board of a poor native of England and Ireland, let him attend to their meals: the sparingness with which our labourer eats his bread and cheese is well known; mark the Irishman's potatoe bowl placed on the floor, the whole family upon their hams around it, devouring a quantity almost incredible, the beggar seating himself to it with a hearty welcome, the pig taking his share as readily as the wise, the cocks, hens, turkies, geese, the cur, the cat, and perhaps the cow—and all partaking of the same dish. No man can often have been a witness of it without being convinced of the plenty, and I will add the chearfulness that attends it.

Is it, or is it not a matter of consequence, for the great body of the people of a country, to subsist upon that species of food which is produced in the greatest quantity by the smallest space of land? One need only to state, in order to answer the question. It certainly is an object of the highest consequence, what in this respect is the comparison between wheat or cheese, or meat and potatoes?

THE minutes of the journey will enable us to shew this.

No. 1.	At Shaen castle, Queen's county, a barrel of potatoes lasts a family of six persons a week.
No. 2.	At Shaen castle, Antrim, six people eat three bushels, and twenty pounds of oatmeal besides, in a week, twenty pounds of meal are equal to one bushel of potatoes; this therefore is a barrel also.
No. 3.	Leslie hill, a barrel of four bushels six persons a week.
No. 4.	Near Giant's causeway, a barrel six people eight days.
No. 5.	Castle Caldwell, a barrel of eighteen stone six people a week.
No. 6.	Gloster, a barrel five persons a week.
No. 7.	Derry, five persons eat and waste two barrels a week.
No. 8.	Cullen, two barrels six persons a week.

			Barrels.		Persons.		Days.
No. 1		——	1	——	6	——	7
2		——	1	——	6	——	7
3		——	1	——	6	——	7
4		——	1	——	6	——	8
5		——	1	——	6	——	7
6		——	1	——	5	——	7
7		——	2	——	5	——	7
8		——	2	——	6	——	7

A BARREL is twenty stones, or two hundred and eighty pounds, which is the weight of four English bushels; the average of these accounts is nearly that quantity lasting a family of six people six days, which makes a year's food sixty barrels. Now the average produce of the whole kingdom being eighty-two barrels per acre, plantation measure, one acre does rather more than support eight persons the year through, which is five persons to the English acre. To feed on wheat those eight persons would require eight quarters, or two Irish acres, which at present, imply two more for fallow, or four in all.

WHEN, however, I speak of potatoes and buttermilk being the food of the poor, the tables already inserted shew, that in some parts of the north that root forms their diet but for a part of the year, much oatmeal and some meat being consumed. I need not dwell on this, as there is nothing particular to attend to in it, whereas potatoes, as the staple dependance, is a peculiarity met with in no country but the other parts of Ireland.

CLOATHING.

THE common Irish are in general cloathed so very indifferently, that it impresses every stranger with a strong idea of universal poverty. Shoes and stockings are scarcely ever found on the feet of children of either sex; and great numbers of men and women are without them: a change, however, in this respect as in most others, is coming in, for there are many more of them with those articles of cloathing now than ten years ago.

AN Irishman and his wife are much more solicitous to feed than to cloathe their children: whereas in England it is surprizing to see the expence they put themselves to, to deck out children whose principal subsistence is tea. Very many of them in Ireland are so ragged that their nakedness is scarcely covered; yet are they in health and active. As to the want of shoes and stockings I consider it as no evil, but a much more cleanly custom than the beastiality of stockings and feet that are washed no oftner than those of our own poor. Women are oftner without shoes than men; and by washing their cloaths no where but in rivers and streams, the cold, especially as they roast their legs in their cabbins till they are fire spotted, must swell them to the wonderful size and with the horrid black and blue colour always met with both in young and old. They stand in rivers and beat the linen against the great stones found there with a beetle.

I remarked generally, that they were not ill dressed on sundays and holidays, and that black or dark blue was almost the universal hue.

HABITATIONS.

THE cottages of the Irish, which are all called cabbins, are the most miserable looking hovels that can well be conceived: they generally consist of only one room: mud kneaded with straw is the common materials of the walls; these are rarely above seven feet high, and not always above five or six; they are about two feet thick, and have only a door, which lets in light instead of a window, and should let the smoak out instead of a chimney, but they had rather keep it in: these two conveniencies they hold so cheap, that I have seen them both stopped up in stone cottages, built by improving landlords; the smoak warms them, but certainly is as injurious to their eyes as it is to the complexions of the women, which in general in the cabbins of Ireland has a near resemblance to that of a smoaked ham. The number of the blind poor I think greater there than in England, which is probably owing to this cause.

THE roofs of the cabbins are rafters, raised from the tops of the mud walls, and the covering varies; some are thatched with straw, potatoe stalks, or with heath, others only covered with sods of turs cut from a grass field; and I have seen several that were partly composed of all three; the bad repair these roofs are kept in, a hole in the thatch being often mended with turf, and weeds sprouting from every part, gives them the appearance of a weedy dunghill, especially when the cabbin is not built with regular walls, but supported on one, or perhaps on both sides by the banks of a broad dry ditch, the roof then seems a hillock, upon which perhaps the pig grazes. Some of these cabbins are much less and more miserable habitations than I had ever seen in England. I was told they were the worst in Connaught, but I found it an error; I saw many in Leinster to the full as bad, and in Wicklow, some worse than any in Connaught. When they are well roofed, and built not of stones, ill put together, but of mud, they are much warmer, independently of smoak, than the clay, or lath and mortar cottages of England, the walls of which are so thin, that a rat hole lets in the wind to the annoyance of the whole family. The furniture of the cabbins is as bad as the architecture; in very many, consisting only of a pot for boiling their potatoes, a bit of a table, and one or two broken stools; beds are not found universally, the family laying on straw, equally partook of by cows, calves, and pigs, though the luxury of sties is coming in in Ireland, which excludes the poor pigs from the warmth of the bodies of their master and mistress: I remarked little hovels of earth thrown up near the cabbins, and in some places they build their turf stacks hollow, in order to afford shelter to the hogs. This is a general description, but the exceptions are very numerous. I have been in a multitude of cabbins that had much useful furniture, and some even superfluous; chairs, tables, boxes, chests of drawers, earthenware, and in short most of the articles found in a middling English cottage; but upon enquiry, I very generally found that these acquisitions were all made within the last ten years, a sure sign of a rising national prosperity. I think the bad cabbins and furniture the greatest instances of Irish poverty, and this must flow from the mode of payment for labour, which makes cattle so valuable to the peasant, that every farthing they can spare is saved for their purchase; from hence also results another observation, which is, that the apparent poverty of it is greater than the real; for the house of a man that is master of four or five cows, will have scarce anything but deficiencies; nay, I was in the cabbins of dairymen and farmers, not small ones, whose cabbins were not at all better, or better furnished than those of the poorest labourer: before, therefore, we can attribute it to absolute poverty, we must take into the account the customs and inclinations of the people. In England a man's cottage will be filled with superfluities before he possesses a cow. I think the comparison much in favour of the Irishman; a hog is a much more valuable piece of goods than a set of tea things; and though his snout in a crock ¹ of potatoes is an idea not so poetical as

— —Broken tea cups, wifely kept for shew,
Rang'd o'er the chimney, glisten'd in a row.

Yet will the cottar and his family, at christmas, find the solidity of it an ample recompence for the ornament of the other.

LIVE STOCK.

IN every part of the kingdom the common Irish have all sorts of live stock: the tables already inserted shew this in respect of cows. I should add here that pigs are yet more general, and poultry in many parts of the kingdom, especially Leinstcr are in such quantities as amazed me, not only cocks and hens, but also geese and turkies; this is owing probably to three circumstances; first, to the plenty of potatoes with which they are fed; secondly, to the warmth of the cabbins; and thirdly, to the great quantity of spontaneous white clover (trifolium repens) in almost all the fields, which much exceeds any thing we know in England; upon the seeds of this plant the young poultry rear themselves; much is sold, but a considerable portion eaten by the family, probably because they cannot find a market for the whole. Many of the cocks, hens, turkies, and geese, have their legs tied together to prevent them from trespassing on the farmers grounds. Indeed all the live stock of the poor man in Ireland is in this sort of thraldom; the horses are all hopping about, the pigs have a rope of straw from around their necks to their hind legs. In the county of Down they have an ingenious contrivance for a sheep just to feed down the grass of a ditch, a rope with a stake at each end and the sheep tied to a ring, through which it passes, so that the animal can move from one end of the rope to the other, and eat whatever grows within two or three feet of it.

THE following is the price and rise of labour upon an average of the kingdom:

	£.	s.	d.
In hay and harvest	0	0	8¼
In winter	0	0	6½
The year round	0	0	6½
Rise in 20 years	0	0	1¾

THE rise is very near a fourth in twenty years; and it is remarkable that, in my Eastern Tour through England (vol. iv. p. 338.) I found the rise of labour one fourth in eighteen years; from which it appears, that the two kingdoms, in this respect, have been nearly on a par.

THE following are upon an average of the whole journey:

	£.	s.	d.
A carpenter per diem	0	1	9
A mason	0	1	9
A thatcher	0	1	3

WHEN it is considered that common labour in Ireland is but little more than a third of what it is in England, it may appear extraordinary that artizans are paid nearly, if not full, as high as in that kingdom.

OPPRESSION.

BEFORE I conclude this article of the common labouring poor in Ireland, I must observe, that their happiness depends not merely upon the payment of their labour, their cloaths, or their food; the subordination of the lower classes, degenerating into oppression, is not to be overlooked. The poor in all countries, and under all governments, are both paid and fed, yet is there an infinite difference between them. This enquiry will by no means turn out so favourable as the preceding articles. It must be very apparent to every traveller through that country, that the labouring poor are treated with harshness, and are in all respects so little considered, that their want of importance seems a perfect contrast to their situation in England, of which country, comparatively speaking, they reign the sovereigns. The age has improved so much in humanity, that even the poor Irish have experienced its influence, and are every day treated better and better; but still the remnant of the old manners, the abominable distinction of religion, united with the oppressive conduct of the little country gentlemen, or rather vermin of the kingdom, who never were out of it, altogether bear still very heavy on the poor people, and subject them to situations more mortifying than we ever behold in England. The landlord of an Irish estate, inhabited by roman catholicks, is a sort of despot who yields obedience in whatever concerns the poor, to no law but that of his will. To discover what the liberty of a people is, we must live among them, and not look for it in the statutes of the realm: the language of law may be that of liberty, but the situation of the poor may speak no language but that of slavery; there is too much of this contradiction in Ireland; a long series of oppressions, aided by many very ill judged laws, have brought landlords into a habit of exerting a very lofty superiority, and their vassals into that of an almost unlimited submission: speaking a language that is despised, professing a religion that is abhorred, and being disarmed, the poor find themselves in many cases slaves even in the bosom of written liberty. Landlords that have resided much abroad, are usually humane in their ideas, but the habit of tyranny naturally contracts the mind; so that even in this polished age, there are instances of a severe carriage towards the poor, which is quite unknown in England.

A landlord in Ireland can scarcely invent an order which a servant labourer or cottar dares to refuse to execute. Nothing satisfies him but an unlimited submission. Disrespect or any thing tending towards sauciness he may punish with his cane or his horsewhip with the most perfect security, a poor man would have his bones broke if he offered to lift his hand in his own defence. Knocking down is spoken of in the country in a manner that makes an Englishman stare. Landlords of consequence have assured me, that many of their cottars would think themselves honoured by having their wives or daughters sent for to the bed of their master; a mark of slavery that proves the oppression under which such people must live. Nay, I have heard anecdotes of the lives of people being made free with without any apprehension of the justice of a jury. But let it not be imagined that this is common; formerly it happened every day, but law gains ground. It must strike the most careless traveller to see whole strings of cars whipt into a ditch by a gentleman's footman to make way for his carriage; if they are overturned or broken in pieces, it is taken in patience, were they to complain, they would perhaps be horsewhipped. The execution of the laws lies very much in the hands of justices of the peace, many of whom are drawn from the most illiberal class in the kingdom. If a poor man lodges a complaint against a gentleman, or any animal that chuses to call itself a gentleman, and the justice issues out a summons for his appearance, it is a fixed affront, and he will infallibly be called out. Where MANNERS are in conspiracy against LAW, to whom are the oppressed people to have recourse? It is a fact that a poor man having a contest with a gentleman must—but I am talking nonsense, they know their situation too well to think of it; they can have no defence but by means of protection from one gentleman against another, who probably protects his vassal as he would the sheep he intends to eat.

THE colours of this picture are not charged. To assert that all these cases are common, would be an exaggeration; but to say that an unfeeling landlord will do all this with impunity, is to keep strictly to truth: and what is liberty but a farce if its blessings are received as the favour of kindness, instead of being the inheritance of RIGHT?

CONSEQUENCES have flowed from these oppressions which ought long ago to have put a stop to them. In England we have heard much of white-boys, steel-boys, oak-boys, peep-of-day-boys, &c. But these various insurgents are not to be confounded, for they were very different. The proper distinction in the discontents of the people is into protestant and catholic. All but the white-boys were among the manufacturing protestants in the north. The white-boys catholic labourers in the south: from the best intelligence I could gain, the riots of the manufacturers had no other foundation, but such variations in the manufacture as all fabrics experience, and which they had themselves known and submitted to before. The case, however, was different with the white-boys; who being labouring catholics, met with all those oppressions I have described, and would probably have continued in full submission, had not very severe treatment in respect of tythes, united with a great speculative rise of rents about the same time, blown up the flame of resistance: the atrocious acts they were guilty of made them the object of general indignation; acts were passed for their punishment which seemed calculated for the meridian of Barbary; this arose to such a height that by one they were to be hanged under certain circumstances without the common formalities of a trial, which though repealed, the following sessions marks the spirit of punishment; while others remain yet the law of the land, that would, if executed, tend more to raise than quell an insurrection. From all which it is manifest that the gentlemen of Ireland never thought of-a radical cure from overlooking the real cause of the disease, which in fact lay in themselves, and not in the wretches they doomed to the gallows. Let them change their own conduct entirely, and the poor will not long riot. Treat them like men who ought to be as free as yourselves: put an end to that system of religious persecution which for seventy years has divided the kingdom against itself; in these two circumstances lies the cure of insurrection, perform them completely, and you will have an affectionate poor, instead of oppressed and discontented vassals. A better treatment of them is a very material point to the welfare of the whole British empire. Events may happen which may convince us fatally of this truth—If not, oppression must have broken all the spirit and resentment of men. By what policy the government of England can for so many years have permitted such an absurd system to be matured, is beyond the power of plain sense to discover.

EMIGRATIONS.

BEFORE the American war broke out, the Irish and Scotch emigrations were a constant subject of conversation in England, and occasioned much discourse even in parliament. The common observation was, that if they were not stopped, those countries would be ruined, and they were generally attributed to a great rise of rents. Upon going over to Ireland, I determined to omit no opportunity of discovering the cause and extent of this emigration, and my information, as may be seen in the minutes of the journey, was very regular. I have only a few general remarks to make on it here.

THE spirit of emigrating in Ireland appeared to be confined to two circumstances, the presbyterian religion, and the linen manufacture. I heard of very few emigrants except among manufacturers of that persuasion. The catholics never went, they seem not only tied to the country but almost to the parish in which their ancestors lived. As to the emigration in the north, it was an error in England to suppose it a novelty which arose with the increase in rents. The contrary was the fact; it had subsisted, perhaps, forty years, insomuch, that at the ports of Belfast, Derry, &c. the passenger trade , as they called it, had long been a regular branch of commerce, which employed several ships, and consisted in carrying people to America. The increasing population of the country made it an increasing trade, but when the linen trade was low, the passenger trade was always high. At the time of Lord Donnegal's letting his estate in the north, the linen business suffered a temporary decline, which sent great numbers to America, and gave rise to the error that it was occasioned by the increase of his rents: the fact, however, was otherwise, for great numbers of those who went from his lands actually sold those leases for considerable sums, the hardship of which was supposed to have driven them to America. Some emigration, therefore, always existed, and its increase depended on the fluctuations of linen; but as to the effect there was as much error in the conclusions drawn in England as before in the cause.

IT is the misfortune of all manufactures worked for a foreign market to be upon an insecure footing, periods of declension will come, and when in consequence of them great numbers of people are out of employment, the best circumstance is their enlisting in the army or navy, and it is the common result; but unfortunately the manufacture in Ireland (of which I shall have occasion to speak more hereafter), is not confined as it ought to be to towns, but spreads into all the cabbins of the country. Being half farmers, half manufacturers, they have too much property in cattle, &c. to enlist when idle: if they convert it into cash it will enable them to pay their passage to America, an alternative always chosen in preference to the military life. The consequence is, that they must live without work till their substance is quite consumed before they will enlist. Men who are in such a situation that from various causes they cannot work, and won't enlist should emigrate, if they stay at home they must remain a burthen upon the community; emigration should not, therefore, be condemned in states so ill governed as to possess many people willing to work, but without employment.

---

¹ The iron pot of an Irish cabbin.

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