Land Monopoly in Ireland

Cecil Woodham-Smith

[Excerpts from The Reason Why, published in 1953 by McGraw-Hill Book Co.]

IN THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY ENGLAND STOOD AT THE CENTER OF A GROWING WORLD EMPIRE. TRUE, THE AMERICAN COLONIES HAD GAINED INDEPENDENCE BEFORE THE CENTURY BEGAN, BUT THE EMPIRE WAS PRESENT ON EVERY CONTINENT -- IN CANADA, AUSTRALIA, NEW ZEALAND, AND INDIA. IT SO HAPPENED THAT AFTER ALMOST A QUARTER CENTURY OF RELATIVE PEACE, CZARIST RUSSIA AND ENGLAND BECAME ENTANGLED IN THE CONFLICT KNOWN AS THE CRIMEAN WAR. HOPING TO GAIN CONTROL OF CONSTANTINOPLE (THEN PART OF THE TURKISH EMPIRE) AND ACCESS TO THE MEDITERRANEAN, RUSSIA ATTACKED THE TURKISH FLEET IN OCTOBER 1853. ENGLAND WAS TO COME TO TURKEY'S AID, ITS TROOPS UNDER THE COMMAND OF GENERALS WHOSE PAST EXPERIENCE IN WARFARE STRATEGY, AS WELL AS THEIR INTRIGUES, WAS TO BRING ON DISASTER. HOW THEY ACHIEVED TO SUCH POWERFUL POSITIONS IN THE ARMY AND THE UNDERLYING POLITICAL ECONOMY OF BRITAIN IS TOLD BY MRS. WOODHAM-SMITH. WHAT FOLLOWS ARE EXCERPTS OF HER WORK:

The system of command in any army is, of course, a reflection of the social organization and stratification of the country that raised it. Despite the political and social changes set in train by the Industrial Revolution, England, in the first half of the 19th Century, was still a country in which the aristocracy was regarded with deference and given privileges that were not open to other men.

How this system worked is revealed in the first part of Mrs. Woodham-Smith's book, which describes the early careers of George Bingham (later Lord Lucan) and his brother-in-law James Brudenell (later Lord Cardigan). Both these men advaneed to the rank of lieutenant-colonel before they were 35 years old, and found themselves giving orders to officers with long years of garrison and overseas service Lucan was a barely competent peacetime commander. But even for garrison duty, Cardigan proved to be impossible;

Nathaniel Hawthorne once observed that the Crimean War gave Britain "a vast impulse toward democracy." The revelation of the criminal blunderings of men like Raglan, Lucan and Cardigan cast a cold, clear light on the inadequacies of a system based upon privilege. The resultant demand for reform not only revolutionized the administration of the British army but effected changes in many other areas in the years after the war. The tragic conflict in the Crimea was, therefore, not wholly without positive result, and the valor of the common soldier, so ably portrayed in this fine book; was not in vain.

Gordon A. Craig, Professor of History, Stanford University

THE UNCHALLENGED ARISTOCRACY

And the strange, the astonishing fact was that public opinion accorded these privileges not merely with willingness but with enthusiasm. Foreigners were struck by the extraordinary and eager deference paid by the English to their aristocracy. It was, as Richard Monckton Milnes wrote, "a lord loving country." Honest British merchants quivered with excitement in the presence of a peer) as if they were susceptible young men in the presence of a pretty girl. True, beneath the surface dark and gigantic forces were beginning to move, and in mines and mills, in rural hovels and cholera-infested city rookeries, half-starved, sub-human millions were beginning to stir in their sleep. But die wind of revolution that had blown from France seemed to have died away, and in England rank and privilege had never appeared more firmly entrenched. Flattered, adulated, deferred to, with incomes enormously increased by the Industrial Revolution, and as yet untaxed, all-powerful over a tenantry as yet unenfranchised, subject to no ordinary laws, holding the government of the country firmly in their hands and wielding through their closely knit connections an unchallengeable social power, the milords of England were the astonishment and admiration of Europe.

WEALTH AND POWER OF THE CONQUERER

The Brudenclls and the Binghams sprang from very different roots, and the origin of the Binghams was stern and fierce. The family was founded by thrce brothers, Richard, George, and John Bingham, soldiers of fortune in the Irish wars of Queen Elizabeth. Richard Bingham rose to be military governor of the intractable province of Connaught, and his rule was so merciless that the ferocity of the Binghams became a legend, and to this day his name is execrated in the west of Ireland. Among many massacres, he ordered the execution of all Spaniards shipwrecked on the coast of Connaught after the Armada, and boasted that he had caused the throats of more than a thousand men to be cut.

The Binghams acquired a baronetcy, a stronghold at Castlebar, and vast acreages of wild land in Mayo, but they never became identified with Ireland. They remained, as such families did remain foreigners, separated from the Irish population by religion and language, preserving through the centuries the outlook and behaviour of conquerors in an occupied country, regarding their Irish estates merely as the source which produced money to pay for English pleasures.

OLIVER CROMWELL TEACHES THE ARISTOCRACY A LESSON

The purchase system, under which a man first bought his commission and then paid for each subsequent step in rank, and which enabled a rich man to buy the command of a regiment over the heads of more efficient officers, appears at first sight so childishly unjust, so evidently certain to lead to disaster, that it is almost impossible to believe that sensible people ever tolerated, much less supported it. Yet the purchase system expressed a principle which is one of the foundations of the British Constitution; famous victories were won by the British Army while it was officered by purchase, and it was upheld by so great a master of military administration as the Duke of Wellington.

No sentiment is more firmly rooted in the English national character than a hatred of militarism and military dictatorship. "An armed disciplined force is in its essence dangerous to liberty," wrote Burke, and Parliament in its dealings with the Army has always been concerned, above all else, to ensure that no British Army shall be in a position to endanger the liberties of the British people.

The vital period in the formation of Britain's policy towards her Army was the period of government by Cromwell's majorgenerals. The people of England were then subjected to a military dictatorship, they were ruled by Army officers who were professional soldiers, and who, though admittedly the finest soldiers in the world, usually had no stake in the country, and often were military adventurers. Their government was harsh and arbitrary, and the nation came to detest the very name of the Army.

After the Restoration, nation and Parliament were equally determined that never again should the Army be in the hands of men likely to bring about a military revolution and impose a military dictatorship. With this object, purchase was introduced when a standing Army was formed in 1683. Men were to become officers only if they could pay down a substantial sum for their commission; that is, if they were men of property with a stake in the country, not military adventurers. As a secondary consideration the purchase price acted as a guarantee of good behaviour; a man dismissed from the service forfeited what he had paid. From that date it was the settled policy both of Parliament and of the Crown to draw the officers of the British Army from the class which had everything to lose and nothing to gain from a military revolution.

THE BEGINNINGS OF CLASS CONFLICT IN ENGLAND AND THE MOVEMENT TOWARD POLITICAL DEMOCRACY

That year of 1832 was the year of the Reform Bill. At this distance of time it seems a moderate and sensible measure, framed to correct the grosser injustices of Parliamentary representation by a redistribution of seats. But it was the cause of extraordinary contemporary violence. The Tory aristocracy, seeing the reins of government slipping from their hands, frantically opposed Reform with coercion, with severe penal laws, with military force; while the great blind mass of the people, sensing that power for the first time was within their grasp, fought as frantically back.

Revolution was averted by the passage of the Bill in June, and in the winter of 1832 the first general election of the Reformed Parliament took place. The Tories gathered themselves together to fight for the control of the country.

THE LANDED ARISTOCRACY REACTS

To James Brudenell, Tory principles were of infinitely more importance than a political creed -- they provided the justification for his existence. His enormous faith in himself was based on the principle of hereditary aristocracy. By virtue of that principle he could brush aside the facts that he was perhaps more stupid than other men, that there were ideas he could not grasp, conclusions which eluded him, results he failed to anticipate. The question was one of divine right; his rank gave him a divine right to command and to be obeyed. It was a conviction which would have aroused no surprise in the seventeenth or even the eighteenth century, but in a world in which railways and steamships had been invented, and in which gaslight was dispelling the gloom of centuries, the divine right of Lord Brudenell appeared startling indeed.

The elections of the winter of 1832 and the spring of 1833 were fought with frightful bitterness, and Tory landlords openly resorted to coercion. Mr. Brown, a tenant of the Earl of Ailesbury, received notice to quit because he had "circulated bills to weaken Lord Ailesbury's influence over the election of members of Parliament," though he protested that he had been obliged to deliver the bills in the performance of his duty as postmaster.

GEORGE BINGHAM, HEIR TO THE ESTATES OF LORD LUCAN IN IRELAND, ENDS HIS FAMILIY'S ROLE AS ABSENTEE LANDLORD

He was, moreover, seriously concerned about the family estates in Ireland. The Binghams had never enjoyed such wealth as the Brudenells, and though their estates round Castlebar in Mayo were vast, they were unremunerative. No industries had been founded, few roads had been built, few buildings erected, the immense aereages of wild land had never been transformed into a smiling countryside of prosperous farms. Mayo remained poverty-stricken, backward, inhospitable, and the Binghams, absentee landlords, turned their backs on Mayo and Castlebar. George Bingham never visited Castlebar until, at the age of twenty-six, he stood as Member for Mayo; his father, after the purchase of Laleham, was never seen at Castlebar at all. The estates were left to an agent, whose business was to squeeze out the utmost possible amount of cash to satisfy the requirements of the second Earl, since, as that gayest of gay gallants flitted between Paris, Florence, Rome, and Laleham, applications for money came constantly to Castlebar.

It had never been easy to extract large sums from the wild lands of Castlebar, but since 1826 the years had been disastrous. Money was slow in coming, then did not come at all; the estate accounts fell into arrears, first for months and then for years. Disquieting reports trickled across the Irish Channel -- the agent was taking extraordinary liberties, had even moved with his family into the family mansion. Someone must go over and take control at Castlebar.

George Bingham had lately become interested in improving the family property. Farm management suited his active, autocratic temperament; he had become converted to the profitable possibilities of new farming methods, and the improvement of cultivation had become an object second only to his desire for an active military career. He made up his mind to go to Ireland to tackle the immense acreages of Bingham property in Mayo. In the autumn he crossed to Ireland and drove to Castlebar.

SUBJECTS OF THE ENGLISH CROWN THE PLIGHT OF THE IRISH PEOPLE

The economic structure of the country was such that a frightful catastrophe was inevitably approaching.

In 1844 Ireland presented the extraordinary spectacle of a country in which wages and employment, practically speaking, did not exist. There were no industries; there were very few towns; there were almost no farms large enough to employ labour. The country was a country of holdings so small as to be mere patches. The people inhabited huts of mud mingled with a few stones, huts four or five feet high, built on the bare earth, roofed with boughs and turf sods, without chimney or window and destitute of furniture, where animals and human beings slept together on the mud floor. In 1843 the German traveller Kohl pronounced the Irish to be the poorest people in Europe. lie had pitied, he wrote, the privations endured by the poor among the Letts, Esthonians, and Finns, but compared to the Irish they lived in comfort. "There never was," said the Duke of Wellington, himself an Irishman, "a country in which poverty existed to so great a degree as it exists in Ireland."

MALTHUSIAN POPULATION GROWTH?

And yet, in spite of misery, the population swarmed. "The population of Ireland," said Disraeli in the Commons on February 15, 1847, "is the densest of any country in the world; the population as regards the arable area is denser even than in China."

Until the last half of the eighteenth century the population of Ireland had been inconsiderable; then abruptly, mysteriously, an extraordinary and fatal phenomenon occurred, and the population began to increase at a rate unknown to history. The accepted Increase for the years 1779 to 1841 is 172 per cent, and many authorities put the figure higher. This increase was linked with the adoption of the potato as the staple, indeed the sole, food of Ireland. The people, in their desperate poverty, lacked land, implements, barns. Potatoes require only one-third of the acreage of wheat, flourish anywhere. need the minimum of cultivation, can be stored in the ground and shared with fowls and pigs. As Ireland became a potato country, the shadow of starvation lifted slightly and the character of the people made itself felt. The Irish people were religious, their family affections strong, their women proverbially chaste. Early marriages became invariable; girls were usually married before they were sixteen, but religion and ignorance combined to make birth control unthinkable, and by their early thirties women were grandmothers. Thus the population spread with the rapidity of an epidemic.

COMPETITION FOR LAND AND THE RISING RENTS

For these people, swarming in the cabins and the fields, there was no employment, no means of earning wages, no possibility of escaping starvation, except the land -- and land became like gold in Ireland. Farms were divided and subdivided until families depended entirely for existence on a plot the size of a suburban garden.

Over great tracts of Ireland any form of cooking beyond boiling a potato in a pot became unknown -- greens were unknown, bread was unknown, ovens were unknown. The butcher, the baker, the grocer did not exist; tea, candles and coals were unheard of. The miserable cultivation of the horse potato occupied only a few weeks, and through the dark, wet winters the people, wrapped in rags and tatters, crouched over the turf fire. "Not a bit of bread," said a tenant of the Marquis of Conyngham in 1845, "have I eaten since I was born; we never taste meat of any kind or bacon … the common drink to our potatoes is pepper and water."

As the population increased, the continual subdivision of farms into patches brought the landlord higher and still higher rents, and the potato patches of Ireland first equalled what the rich farmlands of England fetched in rent, and then went higher. Men bid against each other in desperation, and on paper the landlords of Ireland grew rich; but the rents were not paid -- could not be paid. Castlebar was only one of hundreds of estates in Ireland which, prosperous on paper, were sliding in to hopeless confusion. "If you ask a man," reported the Devon Commission in 1844, "why he bid so much for his farm, and more than he knew he could pay, his answer is, 'What could I do? Where could I go? I know I cannot pay the rent; hut what could I do? Would you have me go and beg?'"

THE GREAT POTATO FAMINE BEGINS

By 1845 the population of Ireland had swollen to eight million, and the enormous majority of these people were living exclusively on the potato, were feeding such animals as they possessed on the potato, were consuming fourteen pounds of potatoes per head per day. The structure of the country, crazily rising higher and higher, was balanced on the potato. And the potato was treacherous: over and over again it had proved itself to be the most uncertain, the most dangerous, the most unpredictable of crops.

In 1739 the potato harvest had failed, and again in 1741, when deaths had been so numerous that the year was named the year was named the year of slaughter. In 1806 the crop partially failed, and in the west of Ireland it failed in 1822, 1831,1835, 1836 and 1837. In 1839 failure was general throughout Ireland.

ARE THE LANDLORDS RESPONSIBLE?

The Land Commission of 1830 had stated that in their opinion the poverty and distress of Ireland were principally due to the neglect and indifference of landlords. Large tracts were in the possession of individuals whose extensive estates in England made them regardless and neglectful of their properties in Ireland. It was not the practice of Irish landlords to build, repair, or drain; they took no view either of their interest or their duties which caused them to improve the condition of their tenants or their land. "All the landlord looks to is the improvement of his income and the quantity of rent he can abstract." "Regard for present gain, without the least thought for the future seems to be the principal object which the Irish landlord has in view," wrote an English obscrver.

THE SOLUTION OF THE ARISTOCRATIC LANDLORDS

The solution, the only possible solution, was to reduce the number of potato patches, to throw the small holdings together into farms, and give the people work for wages. But how was this to be done, where were the people to go, helpless, penniless, and without resources as they were? The Irish peasant dreaded the "consolidating landlord"-and prominent among consolidating landlords was the third Earl of Lucan.

NATURAL RIGHTS (OF THE IRISH PEOPLE) AND THE LAWS OF ENGLAND

Between the Irish tenant and the Irish landlord not only was there no hereditary attachment, there was hereditary hatred.

Ireland was a country the English had subdued by force, and Irish estates were lands seized from a conquered people by force or confiscation. But Ireland had refused to acknowledge herself conquered, religion had prevented assimilation, and down the centuries rebellion succeeded rebellion, while underground resistance, assassinations, secret societies, anonymous outrages had never ceased. Moreover, the English, normally kind, behaved in Ireland as they behaved nowhere else; the Irish had earned their undying resentment by persistently taking sides with the enemies of England.

The laws of Ireland were laws imposed by a conqueror on the conquered, and the conditions under which an Irish peasant leased his land were intolerably harsh.

In Ireland alone [wrote John Stuart Mill] the whole agricultural population can be evicted by the mere will of the landlord, either at the expiration of a lease, or, in the far more common ease of their having no lease, at six months' notice. In Ireland alone, the bulk of a population wholly dependent on the land cannot look forward to a single year's occupation of it.

The power of the landlord was absolute. Lord Leitrim, for instance, passing by a tenant's holding, noticed a good new cabin had been built, and at once ordered his bailiff to pull it down and partially unroof it. James Tuke was told in 1847 that his Lordship used to evict his tenants "as the fit took him." Only in Ulster had a tenant any rights. In Ulster a tenant could not he evicted if he had paid his rent, and when he left his farm he had a right to compensation for any improvements. Elsewhere in Ireland the tenant had no rights. All impiovements became the property of the landlord without compensation. Should a tenant erect buildings, should he improve the fertility of his land by drainage, his only reward was eviction or an immediately increased rent, on account of the improvements he himself had laboured to produce.

Sir Charles Trevelyan, a far from sympathetic observer, wrote of Ireland in 1845 " … what was the condition of the peasant? Work as he would, till and rear what he might, he could never hope to benefit. His portion was the potato only, shared, it may be said, with his pig." No ordinary amount of hard work, no thrift or self-denial could bring a better life to the Irish peasant.

PARLIAMENT DECIDES NOT TO ACT: THE PROBLEM IS SIMPLY TOO MASSIVE

In 1844 it was reported that the potato crop had failed in North America, but no apprehension was created in Ireland, for the country was occupied with her own concerns. That year was a restless one. rents were at their highest, evictions numerous, secret societies active, and more than one thousand agrarian outrages occurred.

A start was made, too, towards establishing a system of public works to provide the people with money with which food might be purchased, since wages in Ireland were almost unknown.

In England, too, the potato crop failed partially, and potatoes became a luxury. In France, Belgium, Holland, and Italy both potato and rye crops entirely failed. Prices rose steeply, freight charges more than doubled and such supplies of grain and other foods as were available, instead of being sent to relieve Ireland, were diverted to the Continent.

Famine began in earnest. The magnitude of the disaster was almost inconceivable. The people of Ireland had no food, no honey, were in any case entirely unaccustomed to buying food; in the west of Ireland no organisation existed, no corn factor, miller, baker, or provision dealer, through which to bring food to them. The evils of subletting and subdividing now disclosed themselves with frightful effect. Captain Mann quotes a typical case of a landlord occasionally resident, who let his land to a middleman at 10 shillings an acre. The middleman also re-let it. It was again and again re-let, until the price received for a quarter of an acre was £1 10s. In 1846 the landlord, by no means a hard-hearted man, applied to the Society of Friends for food for his starving tenants. He calculated that he had about sixty to provide for and was "terrified" to receive over six hundred applications. He had never inspected his farms.

All over Ireland famished multitudes, whose existence was utterly unsuspected and unknown, rose like spectres from the ground, demanding food.

The Government of Great Britain regarded the starving multitudes with the utmost apprehension. Distress and starvation in Ireland -- the very words. woefully familiar, evoked hopelessness. Was the Government to tie the frightful burden of responsibility for the support of eight million people round the neck of the British tax-payer? It was decided to proceed with great caution.

Meanwhile, in London the Government became seriously disturbed. The number of persons on relief was increasing with terrifying speed: by January, 1847, half a million men were employed on relief work on the roads, and more than two million were receiving food; and each day added fresh tens of thousands. There was apparently no end to the helpless starving multitudes of Ireland.

PARLIAMENT TURNS ON THE IRISH LANDLORDS

Parliament turned angrily on the Irish landlords: How had they ever allowed this state of things to come about? What had they done to prevent or to remedy the disaster? The Irish landlords had come forward with no plan, they had provided the Government with no information, they had assumed no responsibility, the miserable hordes perishing on their very doorsteps had been callously ignored. All they had done was to "sit down and howl for English money."

A PARTIAL "SOLUTION": EMIGRATION AND "THE WEALTH OF NATIONS"

That spring the roads to the ports of Ireland became thronged with people flying from certain death. Not half the land had been sown with any kind of crop: the people were accustomed only to a primitive method of potato culture, and though the Government had sent round lecturers to teach them to sow wheat, they had not been able to understand what was said. In some districts the starving peasantry had received pamphlets containing extracts from Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.

THE FINAL "SOLUTION": THE EMPTY LANDS

Once the patches had been given up, the landlords would not let the people stay: a new race of beggars must not be allowed to grow up on the land. Flight or death was the choice. The people tramped to the ports, for as little as half a crown were transported across the Irish Channel, and the destitute and starving came into the industrial towns of England like an avalanche.

The winter of 1847 was again exceptionally severe, with heavy falls of snow, sleet, and gales of icy wind. But when spring came, a change had taken place. …the period of mass evictions was over. Thousands had died, thousands had fled, thousands were still dying and fleeing, and the problem was solved -- the people had disappeared. In Mayo alone it was estimated that 100,000 acres lay without a single tenant.