not build houses for
strangers to enjoy. This would be taken as an axiom anywhere out of
Ireland. Of all the people in Europe, the Irish have suffered most
from the oppression of those who, from age to age, had power in the
country. Whoever fought or conquered, they were always the victims;
and it is a singular fact that their sufferings are scarcely ever
noticed by the contemporary annalists, even when those annalists
were ecclesiastics. The extent to which they were slaughtered in the
perpetual wars between the native chiefs, and in the wars between
those chiefs and the English, is something awful to contemplate, not
to speak of the wholesale destruction of life by the famines which
those wars entailed. On several occasions the Celtic race seemed very
nearly extinct. The penal code, with all its malign influence, had one
good effect. It subdued to a great extent the fighting propensities
of the people, and fused the clans into one nation, purified by
suffering. Since that time, in spite of occasional visitations of
calamity, they have been steadily rising in the social scale, and they
are now better off than ever they were in their whole history. When
we review the stages by which they have risen, we cannot but feel at
times grieved and indignant at the opportunities for tranquillising
and enriching the country which were lost through the ignorance,
apathy, bigotry, and selfishness of the legislature. There was no end
of commissions and select committees to inquire into the condition
of the agricultural population, whenever Parliament was roused by the
prevalence of agrarian outrages. They reported, and there the matter
ended. There were always insuperable difficulties when the natives
were to be put in a better position. Between 1810 and 1814, for
example, a commission reported four times on the condition of
the Irish bogs. They expressed their entire conviction of the
practicability of cultivating with profit an immense extent of land
lying waste. In 1819, in 1823, in 1826, and in 1830, select committees
inquired into and reported on drainage, reclamation of bogs and
marshes, on roads, fisheries, emigration, and other schemes for giving
employment to the redundant population that had been encouraged to
increase and multiply in the most reckless manner, while 'war
prices' were obtained for agricultural produce, and the votes of the
forty-shilling freeholders were wanted by the landlords. When, by the
Emancipation Ac