icted. The habits of the
Irish gentry grew beyond measure brutal and reckless, and the coarseness
of their debaucheries would have disgusted the crew of Comus. Their
drunkenness, their blasphemy, their ferocious duelling, left the squires
of England far behind. If there was a grotesque side to their vices
which mingles laughter with our reprobation, this did not render their
influence less pestilent to the community of which the motive of destiny
had made them social chiefs. Fortunately, their recklessness was sure,
in the end, to work, to a certain extent, its own cure; and in the
background of their swinish and uproarious drinking-bouts, the
Encumbered Estates Act rises to our view."[42]
Mr. Goldwin Smith deals with agrarian crime thus:
"The atrocities perpetrated by the Whiteboys, especially in the earlier
period of agrarianism (for they afterwards grew somewhat less inhuman),
are such as to make the flesh creep. No language can be too strong in
speaking of the horrors of such a state of society. But it would be
unjust to confound these agrarian conspiracies with ordinary crime, or
to suppose that they imply a propensity to ordinary crime either on the
part of those who commit them, or on the part of the people who connive
at and favour their commission. In the districts where agrarian
conspiracy and outrage were most rife, the number of ordinary crimes was
very small. In Munster, in 1833, out of 973 crimes, 627 were Whiteboy,
or agrarian, and even of the remainder, many, being crimes of violence,
were probably committed from the same motive.
"In plain truth, the secret tribunals which administered the Whiteboy
code were to the people the organs of a wild law of social morality by
which, on the whole, the interest of the peasant was protected. They
were not regular tribunals; neither were the secret tribunals of Germany
in the Middle Ages, the existence of which, and the submission of the
people to their jurisdiction, implied the presence of much violence, but
not of much depravity, considering the wildness of the times. The
Whiteboys 'found in their favour already existing a general and settled
hatred of the law among the great body of the peasantry.'[43] We have
seen how much the law, and the ministers of the law, had done to deserve
the peasant's love. We have seen, too, in what successive guises
property had presented itself to his mind: first as open rapine; then as
robbery carried on through the roguish te
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