1768 21,275 209,847 4,197 857 257,047 2,862 4 297 11,625 36,760 46,606 65,289 1,023 24,451 22 927 5,734 27,535 cwts. doz. cwis. stones. 442 950 1,419 45,210 40,039 21,410 49.089 3,840 1,641 16,155 51 28,187 102,943 416 637 16 21,292 43,947 19,255 48.260 2,578 240 4,022 41,073 98,686 76 632 38 762 42.519 17,934 46.824 218 400 249,485 9,050 18,648 22,772 4,686 15,255 1,585 77,866 3,504 3,599 3,796 3,529 3,028 47,934 222,352 61,118 31,106 4,063 39,719 669,559 153,769 4,178 285 1,639 70,066 17.56241,384 3,878 2,165 1,104 7,381 644,504 31,231 3 10,524 4,000 38,564 1,051 740 2,649 1,134 60,618 2,949 1,966 1 36,311 9,402 278 55,488 9,482 1,284 63,750 6,465 | 3,977 47,849 134,801 81,823 16.979 16.220 79,534 186,436 21-699 12,725 1,413 It will be at once seen, by glancing at those tables, that between the year 1764 and the union, a great change had taken place in the articles of provisions exported. At the commencement of that period, Ireland was, to a great extent, dependent on Great Britain for her supply of cerials; before its termination, she furnished England with a very large quantity of grain; but it, will also be perceived, that during the same time, the exportation of beef, hides, and tallow, had enormously decreased. Those alterations might have been the effects, either of augmented wealth causing an increased home consumption of animal food, or of a diminution of live stock. If the former were the operating cause, the number of black cattle should have remained, at least, undiminished, and the quantity of animal food used by the population, ought to have augmented. But so far from either circumstance having happened, that the stock of cows rapidly decreased in number, and the breadth of land applied to pasturage every year became less extended. "From the commencement of the last century," says Frazer,* the well-known writer on the Irish fisheries, "immense quantities of beef, pork, tallow, and butter were sent from Ireland to those countries (the American plantations) for the support of the infant colonies, as well as large quantities exported for the supply of the British navy, and her increased commerce. But, on the rapid extension of tillage, the grazing lands were in great quantities broken up for the production of grain. Even in the maritime counties of Cork, Waterford, and Galway, from which ports, particularly the former, the greatest exports of provision were made, large tracts of pasture ground were converted into tillage, from which circumstance the places from whence the supply of cattle was to be obtained, being removed, they could not be brought to market to the merchant, so that he could not afford to supply his customers, the West Indian planters and navy contractors, at the usual rates; in consequence of which, the planters obtained the greatest part of their provision from America, and the royal navy and commercial interest found the enhanced price a heavy burthen on the nation, and the business of navigation. "In every part of the kingdom," says Arthur Young, writing in 1778, "the common Irish have all sorts of live stock, the tables, already inserted, show this in respect of cows. I should add, pigs are yet more general, and poultry in many parts of the kingdom, especially in Leinster, are in such great quantities as amazed me, not only cocks and hens, but geese and turkeys." In about thirty years after this statement was made, Joshua Kirby Trimmer published an account of the condition of agriculture in the south of Ireland; and describing the filthy hut of the labourer as at once a dwelling, a stable, and a stye, says, "the other side of the cabin is inhabited by the hogs and poultry, and sometimes, but very seldom, by a cow." He adds, "that these (the small farmers) form a very numerous class in the southern part of Ireland; and a larger share of the agriculture of the country may be said to be in their hands than in those of the substantial farmers; with their scanty and slender means, it cannot be expected to prosper much. Their stock consists of one horse, a small car, and perhaps half a dozen sheep, besides some hogs, and in some cases by a cow." And this was written of a country in which, but thirty years before, cattle were abundant, and where every labourer possessed, at least, a cow.§ During the period cattle were so rapidly diminishing in number, it will be seen that the quantity of butter exported, constantly and largely increased; and, when it is considered, that the supply decreased and population greatly augmented, the conclusion * Gleanings in Ireland. By R. Fraser, Esq. pp. 26, 28. London, 1802. + Young's Travels in Ireland. Part the Second, p. 27.' Brief Inquiry into the Present State of Agriculture in the Southern parts of Ireland. By Joshua Kirby Trimmer. London, 1809. § See column headed Butter, in the Table of Exports. See Young's Travels. Part the First, pp. 51, 138, 169, 215, 351, 357, 366, 373, and Part the Second, p. 27. becomes inevitable that the home consumption of this necessary article, one of the luxuries of the poor man's board, enormously diminished. Milk alsoat one time a mensal staple of every cottage in Ireland-must in a great degree have ceased to have been used as an article of diet. The period from the commencement to the termination of the first American war was one of the most disastrous to Ireland, during the last century. The embargo, which prevented trade with France and Spain, and the diminished demand for Irish provisions by the Plantations, induced at once individual distress and commercial embarrassment; yet, even during that protracted season of national misfortune, we have the evidence of the most accurate of inquirers, Arthur Young, that the peasantry of Ireland consumed, as their ordinary diet, meal, milk, butter, and fowl, in addition to potatoes, aud that they possessed live stock in abundance. In 1805, twenty-seven years after Young's travels were published, Newenham made the following statement relative to the food of the Irish peasantry :" Instead of England being competent to maintain a greater proportionate population than Ireland, we should find that independently of the acknowledged superiority of the latter, with regard to the natural and general fertility of the soil, the nature of the food on which the great majority habitually subsist, together with other peculiar circumstances, render it competent to support an infinitely more dense population than the former." "Potatoes, it is well known, are the great article of food in Ireland, bread in England; comparatively speaking a very small quantity of animal food is consumed in that country, a very great one in this. Much of that kind of food is saved there by religious fasts, a very small quantity here. By the lowest class, in this country, it is eaten once a week, by the lowest class in that country never. In England, that most numerous class, next above the lowest, eat flesh-meat three times, or at least twice a week. In Ireland the same class, which is in proportion more numerous than here, do not, generally speaking, eat it once a month; a great majority of that class do not eat it oftener than six times a year. Substantial farmers and country artificers in this country live chiefly on animal food, the same description of people in most parts of that country live, chiefly, on potatoes and milk.".. Thus, during the era of Irish independence, in the short period of about twenty years, meal, milk, butter, flesh-meat, and fowl ceased to be consumed by the peasantry, and even by the farmers of Ireland. From being a prosperous and comfortable population they changed into the most wretched and impoverished people in Europe from being well and abundantly fed, potatoes alone became their sole resource for supporting existence.* The line drawn through the table of imports divides it into two equal portions of 18 years before, and 18 after the declaration of Independence in 1782. A comparison of the consumption in each of those periods of the articles, which are usually adopted as a criterion of advancement or decline in national prosperity, will afford some curious results.† A Statistical and Historical Inquiry into the progress and magnitude of the Population of Ireland. By Thomas Newenham; London, 1805.-pp. 335, 336. f No inference can be drawn from the increased consumption of tea in the following table, because before 1767 the duty acted as a prohibition—in that year the duty on green teas was reduced to 6d., on Boheas to 4d. a pound. The consumption of tea, as indicated by the custom-house books, increased from 239,800 pounds, in 1767, to 1,007,693 pounds in 1768. But as the act of 1767 (7 Geo.III., c. 2., s. 6) recited "Whereas great fraud and abuses have been committed by the clandestine importation of tea, we must conclude that the consumption was not really increased, but that the trade was transferred from the smuggler to the fair dealer by the alteration in the revenue.” Wines, taken as a whole, exhibit a small actual increase; but it must be observed, that the consumption of port, a low-priced liquor, doubled, whilst that of French wines, the sparkling beverage of Burgundy, the juice of the rich vines of Champagne, and "claret, the wine, par excellence, of every Irish gentleman of the day," high-priced and costly, declined more than one-half. The use of the delicious and expensive produce of the Hockheimer vintage greatly diminished, the grapes of Spain and Maderia supplied a cheap but inferior substitute. The expenditure for wines, must have, at least, diminished 50 per cent. during the era of Independence. Sugar presents a small advance; but the increase is apparent only, when the quantities of succus liquorice consumed in Ireland, before and after '82, are compared, and the dimunition in the use of loaf sugar estimated, the augmentation (if any) must be an unappreciable fraction. A small increment was added to the consumption of tobacco, but the increase is exceedingly suspicious. The cause of an advance of more than 200 213,714 per cent. in the demand for an article during one year, and that, too, at a time, when the duty was much raised, is not easily comprehended. General Permit, and his most efficient staff, could only satisfactorily explain such a custom-house mystery.t His The annals of the world do not present so rapid a decay in the prosperity of a nation, as that of Ireland, during the era of independence; of a deterioration in the condition of a people so universal and complete-a deterioration which, at once, extended to the palace of the noble, the house of the citizen, and the cottage of the labourer. tory has no parallel of a revolution in the state of a population, which diminished to such an extent, and in so short a period, as that of "82" the luxuries of an aristocracy, the comforts of the middle classes, and the necessaries of a peasantry; by which wealth was so speedily changed into poverty, and indigence transformed into destitution. It would have been exceedingly fortunate for Ireland, if her independent parliament had bestowed on her, during its existence, misery and tyranny *The doubling period of populationis assumed with Newenham to be 46 years.Inquiry, &c., ch. 6. f The nickname of a revenue officer, whose salary was reckoned by hundreds, and his expenditure by thousands, in the year-cheating in the morning and swindled at night-he received a large fortune in bribes, and spent it at dice. The smuggling and frauds of the period would form a most instructive chapter in the history of revenue. One firm in Dublin made a large fortune by receiving a drawback on silk, and re-exporting an article five-sixths of which was cotton. Another, from the ships on the quay, pumped rum into their stores through tubes in the cables. And the wealthiest merchant in Ireland made immense sums by importing brandy and wine mixed, under the denomination of the latter, and subsequently rectifying the spirit. alone if it had gifted her with cruelty and crime only, and had not bequeathed as legislative legacies, continued hunger and contingent famine. Taking, for the text-book of its political economy, the "Deserted Village," and adopting the polished nonsense of Goldsmith, as conclusive reasoning, the Irish parliament inverted the process by which "wealth accumulates as men decay;" and performed the operation so effectually, that even the enormous augmentation of human labour, as an instrument of production, scarcely compensated for the diminution of agricultural capital, by extending the conacre system, it, literally, made a "rood of ground maintain its man ;" and by causing serf-wages to be almost universal, rendered the permanent amelioration of the peasantry all but hopeless, and even to afford them temporary relief a matter of extreme difficulty.* THESEUS combined, under one government, the different districts of Attica; effected a legislative union among its tribes; for this act poets contended to honour his memory; orators and statesmen vied to enunciate his fame to perpetuate his glory temples were erected, festivals instituted, and games celebrated: to him, by his grateful country, was dedicated all that was sublime in sculpture, and perfect in architecture; all that could be devised by the most exalted genius, and executed by the most consummate skill. CASTLEREAGH consolidated the British empire, and amalgamated its Celt and Saxon races; yet, a statue of him is not to fill, even a narrow niche, in the palace of that imperial parliament, which, but for his genius, his energy, his virtue, would never have existed. How morally grand was the conduct of Athens? How meanly base the ingratitude of Britain. Whilst the architect of the imperial edifice is neglected, the mechanical labourer, the man of the crow-bar and pick-axe, who has striven, as yet, in vain, by physical violence, to destroy his work, is worshipped by a nation; thousands have been voted for the erection of his statue, and his crowned head made an ornament even of the temple of the deity.t It is true, Castlereagh requires not a marble memorial within the walls of the new palace at Westminster, on an evening, when the destiny of nations is discussed; on a night, in which the doom of dynasties is decided by the imperial parliament. CIRCUMSPICE; that imperial parliament is his monument. But, though Castlereagh requires not a statue to perpetuate his fame, yet, as a matter of imperial policy, its erection is necessary. The Union, it We will take the present crisis as an illustration of this difficulty. In a country, where agriculture is conducted by capitalists, and labourers are paid in money, if it should become necessary to supply employment, in aid, at public works, no labourer required for agriculture would be permanently withdrawn from it; for the competition of the farmer with the contractor would induce, from the public works the desired number of workmen. But, in a country such as Ireland, where the holders of land do not possess capital, where a robot system exists, and the peasantry are paid their serf-wages in land; on a failure of the crop, and subsequent commencement of public works, the farmers, for want of money to supply their labourers with immediate food, have no means of competing with the contractors; the labourer cannot exchange his labour for land, because he would starve whilst performing it; and, even if his wife and children could cultivate a portion of conacre, they will not be able to obtain it, because he cannot make the usual payment for it in duty-work. An abandonment of agriculture, both on the farm and the potato patch would, therefore, be the result of a great extension of public works, thus making a contingent scarcity in this year, the cause of a certain famine in the next. Labour is in a state so rude, farming machinery so deficient, capital so limited, agricultural skill so rare, and the land so burned, exhausted, and neglected, that the population, great as it undoubtedly is, is not much (if anything) more than is necessary for the present inartificial mode of cultivating the soil; notwithstanding the declaration of the Poor Law Inquiry Commission, (which Mr. Barry, in his Prize Essay, has re-produced in all the majesty of capitals, and with all the weight of leaded type,) that for want of employment, there are 2,385,000 persons absolutely destitute. We will demonstrate in a future paper this assertion to be a fallacy an allegation void of proof, founded in error, †The new Roman Catholic Chapel, in James's-street, Dublin, is ornamented or desecrated by the head of O'Connell, surmounted by an Irish crown. |