t is, and no reasonable or honest man capable of disencumbering
himself of political prejudices can deny it, that up until a recent
period the great body of the Irish people--the whole people--were mainly
looked upon and used as political instruments in the hands of the
higher classes, but not at all entitled to the possession of separate or
independent interests in their own right. It is true they were allowed
the possession of the forty-shilling franchise; but will any man say
that the existence of that civil right was a benefit to the country? So
far from that, it was a mere engine of corruption, and became, in
the hands of the Irish landlords, one of the most oppressive and
demoralizing curses that ever degraded a people. Perjury, fraud,
falsehood, and dishonesty, were its fruits, and the only legacy it
left to the country was an enormous mass of pauperism, and a national
morality comparatively vitiated and depraved, in spite of all religious
influence and of domestic affections that are both strong and tender.
Indeed it is exceedingly difficult to determine whether it has been more
injurious to the country in a political than in a moral sense. Be that
as it may, it had a powerful effect in producing the evils that we now
suffer, and our strong tendencies to social disorganization. By it the
landlords were induced, for the sake of multiplying, votes, to encourage
the subdivision of small holdings into those that were actually only
nominal or fictitious, and the consequences were, that in multiplying
votes they were multiplying families that had no fixed means of
subsistence--multiplying in fact a pauper population--multiplying not
only perjury, fraud, falsehood, and dishonesty, but destitution, misery,
disease and death. By the forty-shilling franchise, the landlords
encumbered the soil with a loose and unsettled population that
possessed within itself, as poverty always does, a fearful facility of
reproduction--a population which pressed heavily upon the independent
class of farmers and yeomen, but which had no legal claim upon the
territory of the country. The moment, however, when the system which
produced and ended this wretched class, ceased to exist, they became not
only valueless in a political sense, but a dead weight upon the energies
of the country, and an almost insuperable impediment to its prosperity.
This great evil the landlords could conjure up, but they have not been
able to lay it since. Like Franken