IRISH DISTRESS.

INFLUENCE ON ENGLISH LABOUR AND POORRATES-POOR-LAWS FOR IRELAND.

THE friends of Ireland often act as if they believed that her people were in so lamentable a condition, ut nec mala nec remedia ferre possent. Thus they make them the victims of ill-conceived experimental measures, whilst by continually holding out the hope of amendment, and ever varying its bearing, they hide from the mass the utter worthlessness of the specious pretexts by which they are flattered. Is it not a disgrace upon us as a nation, that one of our most important sections is exposed periodically to the evils which pertain only to the lowest state of civilisation-famine and pestilence? Is it not a disgrace, that thousands of families, in the very heart of the wealthiest and most civilised country on earth, should be suffering the privations and sharing the crimes of savage life? Is it not a disgrace, that the outpourings from this evil fountain should carry into every part of the kingdom the seeds of misery, and there become fertile sources of discontent and suffering? And yet, such is the state of a considerable portion of the Irish population,-living like savages, half-starved, half-housed, and half-clad! The social system of other countries seems to be denied to Ireland. Her landed proprietors fly her shores; her established religion is that of a few individuals, having no national spirit; and her people starve in the midst of plenty, and while surrounded by resources which require only to be examined to become available.

The reaction of this state of things upon England is fearful. We are nursing, with the most extraordinary wilfulness, turbulence, and anarchy, which year after year is gaining strength, and which before long will make itself felt to our very centre.

The most strenuous efforts are now making amongst ourselves to lessen the burden of our overgrown Poor's-rates. These have attained their present magnitude during the rapid extension of manufactures, and the changes incident to an industrial transition; and yet, powerfully as these causes have operated, they have been largely aided by the suffering condition of the Irish labourers. Compelled to quit their own country to avoid absolute starvation, they come upon us in shoals; and habituated as they have been to a miserable rate of wages, and a correspondent miserable style of living, they are content with a pittance upon which the English labourer cannot subsist. What happens during our harvest season? Is not this a period of rural activity-one requiring exertion, and consequently a period when the agricultural labourer expects not only employment, but

profitable employment? Does it prove so to him? Does he find this active season a resource against the autumnal and winter partial inactivity? No; because bodies of Irish labourers traverse the kingdom from end to end, and from side to side, and compete with him on his own soil, and upon terms that drive him from the market, or bring down his earnings to the shilling a day of his opponents, and this drives him to the parish. The number of these immigrant labourers, who annually visit us, is perhaps not less than 150,000; and the labour of these men, reckoning it only at one shilling per day, and confining them to working-days, costs us upwards of a third of a million, or, in other words, this sum is abstracted from the labour fund of the English labourer. Were these men wanted,-w was there a dearth of labour amongst us,-we should hail them as auxiliaries, and view their accession as a blessing; but, in place of this, there is one general outcry resounding through the country, of want of employment, that labour is so abundant that it cannot find a profitable market, and that the English labourer is thus forced to the parish to save him from starvation.

If it be asked why does the Irish labourer come to us,-the answer is, that he has no choice, he has no relief fund to appeal to; and private charity, or temporary government aids, are as a drop of water in the bucket. How are they situated at home? When employed, they earn from twopence to seven pence per diem; they sleep without beds or bedsteads; they have seldom more than two meals in the twenty-four hours; their diet is almost exclusively the worst kind of potato, called the "lumper potato;" shoes and hats are luxuries hardly known; their houses have no fireplaces, and generally consist of a single room common to all the family, and in which old and young, male and female, sleep together. And let us bear in mind that this is no new state of things. Swift, whatever his other failings might be, was a noble advocate to his own country, and most eloquently described her miserable people in his day:There are thousands," says he, "who think themselves blessed if they can obtain a hut worse than the squire's dog-kennel, and an acre of ground for a potato-plantation, on condition of being as very slaves as any in America." Thus conditioned, the dread and constant visitations of famine make the miserable cottier hunt after land, and take it, reckless of all consequences and of the amount of rent he pays for it. Eight and ten pounds per acre is thus obtained for small plots. The taker has no manure, the land is stripped and burnt, and, thus prepared, it is planted with lumper potatoes." This done, his home agriculture is finished; he leaves his wife and family, and he comes to England to get his rent. When this purpose is effected as far as lies in his power, he returns: the factor's despotism is omnipotent-" no rent, no potatoes." If therefore he has not the means of payment, he is ejected; his potatoes are left to rot in the ground, and himself and his family turned pennyless on the world to settle themselves down, as chance or fate may direct; or to wander as beggars till they can find means to come to England, to swell our amount of misery. The actual condition of the peasantry is most horrible; thus in the parish of Borisloon, in which the

population amounts to 11,671 souls, 7841 are dependent ou agricultural labour, and only one-half are employed at eightpence per day. In the parish, 3931 are absolutely without ordinary clothing, and 9338 persons are without beds, except bundles of rushes; and of this number nearly 6000 actually sleep on the bare floor. The mere recital of such facts is enough to make us curse a system, which thus condemns multitudes of industrious people to all the evils of the deepest and most hopeless poverty. What are these evils?— Discontent, violence, immorality, and depravity in its most loathsome forms "Since," says Sir Hussey Vivian, "I assumed the command of the army in Ireland on the 1st of July, 1831, (he writes when he had been there about a year,) I have received from officers commanding detachments in different parts, reports of no less than fiftytwo murders, not including those of Carrickshock, that have been committed in the immediate vicinity of their cantonments,-for such only are reported to me; consequently there may be others which never came to my knowledge. Many of these have been perpetrated with a degree of deliberation adding considerably to their atrocity;-such, for instance, as a party breaking into a house, placing a man on his knees, and blowing out his brains; walking up to a man at work in a field, and shooting him; entering a shop and shooting a man; waylaying a man on the road, and shooting him in his gig; shooting the overseer of a mine whilst engaged in the discharge of his duties,and many others of the same description, to say nothing of the numerous instances of men having been beaten to death with sticks or stones." Fearful additions have been made to this catalogue; and instances of violence are almost of daily occurrence, the only parallels to which are the conflicts between the early settlers of America and the Red Indians.

We have briefly adverted to the depressing agencies exercised upon the great body of our agricultural labourers, by the influx of supernumerary Irish hands; and we have said that the majority of these hands return to their cabins, and place their hard-won earnings in the hand of their landlords. Great multitudes of Irish, however, independently of these migratory hordes, settle themselves in the manufacturing districts, and here they employ themselves in the very lowest offices of labour, whilst their wives and children infest the streets as beggars. No justice can be done by any description to the miserable hovels which these individuals inhabit; they constitute the cellar population of our towns. Their dwelling-places are damp, and uniformly badly ventilated and lighted. In Manchester alone it has been computed that there are upwards of 20,000 cellars of this description, chiefly occupied by hand-loom weavers and Irish families. A well-informed writer has thus described these habitations:-"The beds are loathsome with filth; a whole family is often accommodated on a single bed, and sometimes a heap of filthy straw and a covering of old sacking hide them in one undistinguished beap, debased alike by penury, want of economy, and dissolute habits. Frequently two or more families are crowded into one small house containing only two apartments, one in which they slept, and another in which they ate; and often more than one

family live in a damp cellar, containing only one room, in whose pestilential atmosphere from twelve to sixteen persons are crowded. To these were sometimes added the keeping of pigs and other animals, with other nuisances of the most revolting character." This is a dreadful picture, but it is in the main correct, and shows the frightful habits which have been generated by the state of the Irish poor.

But what is the effect of this immigration, and the settlement of these wretched colonists in the heart of our manufacturing districts? In the first place, an over-crowding of the labour mart, as in the agricultural counties; in the second, a heavy pressure upon the PoorRates; and in the third, the demoralising influence of bad example. Let us take Manchester, and inquire into the effect produced upon the Poor-Rates. We select Manchester in preference to any other, because it is about the most favourably situated in that respect; great care, as we can bear testimony, being taken by the authorities to keep down the parochial expenditure to its lowest possible limit. The population of the township in 1831 was 142,026: according to returns lying before us, there were in that year recorded 321,172 separate acts of relief, which were continued through varying periods; of this number, 68,000 related to Irish who had no settlement. Deducting this from the gross amount leaves 253,172 for assistances rendered to parties who had obtained settlements. These are classed in the town's books indiscriminately as English and Irish; but from a very careful analysis, and by a frequent examination of the persons applying, it is quite certain that more than one-half are Irish. Thus we find that considerably more than one half of the entire pauper fund of Manchester is absorbed by the surplus labourers thrust upon us by the miseries of their mother-country. This pressure upon the rates originates in these parties, from the miserable pittance for which they are willing to barter their labour—a sum utterly insufficient to provide for the commonest decencies of life; and what is still worse than this is, that this minimum price of labour becomes the standard value; it is in the market at that price, so that should the agricultural labourer, when driven from his legitimate occupation, seek a field for his industrial energies in these districts, he is at once repulsed, as there is a crowd of Irish waiting to fill up every opening that may offer for employment-and that too upon terms that an English workman, till completely broken down, will not and ought not to accept. We have thus no outlet for the oppressed agriculturist. On the one hand, vast manufactories filled with "Iron Men" are annually throwing out hundreds and thousands of operatives; and on the other, the common paths of outdoor labours are choked by foreign competitors. What happens to him? he either sinks into that " slough of despond "-hand-loom weaving, and starves himself by working, or he is passed back to his own parish a confirmed pauper.

And now, having briefly adverted to the influences produced upon English industry and English parochial expenditure, by the crowding in of Irish labourers, let us examine what happens to Ireland from this degraded and impoverished condition of her labouring com

munity. In the first place, she is inhabited by a producing but not a consuming population. Thus the exports from Ireland are perpetually on the increase-a fact which, monstrous as it may sound, proves only the increasing distress of the producer. High rents, and grasping factors, drive away all marketable commodities; and as there is no home market for these, cattle, and butter, and corn, and all other available kinds of agricultural produce, are sent to England at an enormous cost--a cost to be deducted from the profit of the seller. Nothing is taken back from us but money, as it is proved upon the most incontestable evidence, that upwards of five millions of the Irish never consume any thing British. Again, the productive capabilities of Ireland are left in a great measure uncultivated; her manufactures have withered away beneath the blighting touch of neglect. The Linen Manufacture, only a few short years ago, was widely diffused through several counties, and afforded, in the various processes connected with it, home employment for nearly 2,000,000 of hands. This is now in a very great measure lost, and, what is more, it cannot be regained. Bad management and inattention to the staple have forced our manufacturers to look for their supplies from other quarters; whilst the improvement in machinery in England has entirely withdrawn the spinning and heckling from the cottage manufacturer. Again, in addition to this loss of a staple and important trade, and one capable of great extension, what can more strongly illustrate the unhappy condition of Irish labour and Irish labourers, than the fact, that with eight millions of a population her annual produce does not exceed £40,000,000; whilst England, with a population of twelve millions, produces annually to the value of £500,000,000?

These are truths plainly told, and capable of being tested by official returns. What then, we ask, is to be done for Ireland? Is poverty-is famine-is disease-is crime in its most deadly shapestill to be her portion? There is no need that it be so. Neither religion, nor education, nor aught else, can remedy her evils till her people are employed where they ought to be employed-on her soil, and employed profitably; and this will never be effected till they enjoy the protection of a system of Poor-Laws: the evil day may be staved off by voluntary grants; money raised by lotteries and other schemes may amuse, and plans for locating the starving labourer upon wastes and bogs may sound well: they may be, and are good so far as they go, but they stop short of the point wanted. We require that the labourer be placed upon the same footing as the English labourer; we require that a compulsory rate be placed upon property; and we require that the owners of property shall feel that the producing labourer has some hold upon his interests.

Mr. O'Connell was a late and an unwilling convert to the necessity of applying a system of Poor Laws to Ireland. We do not wish to impugn any man's motives, but we may be allowed to question the wisdom of the measures to which he gives his sanction. His opinion as to Poor Laws was obviously unformed, and, in point of fact, was the mere echo of the murmuring of thousands of his starving countrymen. The idea of raising money by lottery, there