Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 8.djvu/141

 IRELAND IRELAND where a woman ate her dead child. Men died from cold as well as from hunger. They died on the roads and in the fields, at the relief works and on their way to them, at the workhouses and at the workhouse doors. They died in their cabins unattended, often sur- rounded by the dying and frequently by the dead. Flying from the country they died in the hospitals of Liverpool or Glasgow, or on board the sailing vessels to America. And thousands who crossed the ocean reached America only to die. In 1848 and in 1849 the famine was only partial, but in the latter year cholera appeared. In 1851 the famine was over, and such was the havoc wrought that a population, which at the previous rate of increase should have been 9,000,- 000, was reduced to 6,500,000. The conduct of the landlords during this terrilile time was selfish and cruel. With few exceptions they gave no employment and no subscriptions to the re- lief funds. Unable to get rents from tenants unable to pay, they used their right to evict, and in thousands of cases the horrors of eviction were added to the horrors of famine. Retribution soon followed. The evictors, without rents and crushed by poor-rates, lie- came hopelessly insolvent. The British Parliament considered them a nuisance and a curse, and in 1S49 passed the Encumbered Estates Act, under which a creditor might petition to have the estate sold and his debt paid. Insolvent landlords were thus sent adrift, and solvent men took their places, and to such an ex- tent that in a few years land to the value of £20,000,- 000 changed hands. But the new landlords were no better than the old. They raised rents, confiscated the tenant's improvements, worried him with vexa- tious estate rules, evicted him cruelly; and from 1S50 to 1870 was the period of the great clearances. The necessary result was a constant and ever-increasing stream of emigration from Ireland, chiefly to America. Nor would British statesmen do anything to stem the tide. Lord John Russell would not interfere ith the rights of property by passing a Land Act. Lord Derby was a landlord with a landlord's strong preju- dices. Lord Palmerston declared that tenant right was landlord wrong. Nothing could be expected from the Irish members. Sadleir and Keogh broke up the Tenant Right party; Lucas was dead; Duffy in despair went to Australia; Moore was out of Parlia- ment; and from 1855 to 1870 the Irish members were but placehunters and traitors. In these circumstances the Irish peasant joined the Ribbon Society, which was secret and oath-bound, and specially charged to defend the tenants' interests. Agi-arian outrages nat- urally followed. The landlord evicted, the Ribbon- man shot him down, and theevictor fell unpitied by the people, who refused to condemn the assassin. After 1860 the Ribbonmen were gradually merged in the Fenian Society, which extended to America and Eng- land, and had national rather than agrarian objects in view. The Irish are not good conspirators, and the attempted Fenian insurrection in 1867 came to notiiing. But the meditated assault on Chester Castle, the Clerkenwell explosion, and the Fenian raids into Canada showed the extent and intrepidity of Irish dis- affection. _ An increasing number of Englishmen be- gan to think that the rwn possumiis attitude of Lord Palmerston was no longer wise ; and with the advent to power of Mr. Gladstone in 1868, at the head of a large Liberal majority, the case of Ireland was taken up. The Catholic masses had a threefold grievance call- ing urgently for redress: the state Church, landlord- ism, and educational inequality. Mr. Gladstone called them the three branches of the Irish ascendancy upas tree. Commencing with the Church, he introduced a Bill disendowing and disestablishing it. Clommission- ers were appointed to wind it up, taking charge of its enormous property, computed at more than £15,000 - 000 (.?75,000,000). Of this sum, £10,000,000, ulti- mately raised to £11,000,000, was given to the dis- established Church, part to the holders of existing offices, part to enable the Church to continue its work. A further sum of nearly £1,000,000 was distributed between Maynooth College, deprived of its annual grant, and the Presbyterian Church deprived of the Kcgium Donum, the latter getting twice as much as the former. The surplus was to be disposed of by Parliament for such public objects as it might deter- mine. This was generous treatment for the state Church which had been so conspicuous a failure. Sup- ported with an ample revenue, and by the whole power of the State, its business was to make Ireland Protest- ant and English. It succeeded only in intensifying their attachment to Catholicity and their hatred of Protestantism and England. In 1861, after the havoc wrought by the famine, the Catholics were seven times as nimierous as the members of the state Church. There were many parishes without a single Protestant; and in a poor country a Church numbering but 600,- 000 persons had an income of nearly £700,000, mostly drawn from people of a different creed, who at the same time had their own Church to support. Yet there were members of Parliament who described Mr. Gladstone's Bill as robbery and sacrilege. The House of Lords, afraid to reject it altogether, emasculated it in committee. And Ulster Protestants declared that if it became law they would kick the Queen's crown into the Boyne. Ignoring these threats, Mr. Glad- stone rejected the Lords' amendments, though on some minor points he gave way, and in spite of all opposition the Bill became law. And thus one branch of the upas tree came crashing to the earth. The Land Act of 1870 was well-meant, but in reality gave the tenants no protection against rackrenting or e'ic- tion. Two years later the Ballot Act freed the Irish tenant from the terrors of open voting. In 1873 the education question was reached. And first as to the primary schools. What the Catholic primary schools were in the early years of the nine- teenth century we learn from Carleton. The teacher, the product of a local hedge-school and of a Munster classical school, or perhaps an ex-student of May- nooth, had first been employed as a tutor in some