In a climate soft as a mother's smile, on a soil fruitful as God's love, the Irish peasant mourns.
He is not unconsoled. Faith in the joys of another world, heightened by his woe in this, give him hours, when he serenely looks down on the torments that encircle himthe moon on a troubled sky. Domestic love, almost morbid from external suffering, prevents him from becoming a fanatic or a misanthrope, and reconciles him to life. Sometimes he forgets all, and springs into a desperate glee or a scathing anger; and latterly another feelingthe hope of better daysand another exertionthe effort for redresshave shared his soul with religion, love, mirth, and vengeance.
His consolations are those of a spirithis misery includes all physical sufferings, and many that strike the soul, not the senses.
Consider his griefs! They begin in the cradlethey end in the grave.
Suckled by a breast that is supplied from unwholesome or insufficient food, and that is fevered with anxietyreeking with the smoke of an almost chimneyless cabinassailed by wind and rain when the weather ragesbreathing, when it is calm, the exhalations of a rotten roof, of clay walls, and of manurewhich gives his only chance of food, he is apt to perish in his infancy.
Or, he survives all this (happy if he have escaped from gnawing scrofula or familiar fever),
Advancing youth brings him labour, and manhood increases it; but youth and manhood leave his roof rotten, his chimney one hole, his window another, his clothes rags (at best muffled by a holiday cotamorehis furniture a pot, a table, a few hay chairs and rickety stoolshis food lumpers and waterhis bedding straw and a coverlethis enemies the landlord, the tax-gatherer, and the lawhis consolation the priest and his wifehis hope on earth, agitationhis hope hereafter, the Lord God!
For such an existence his toil is hardand so much the betterit calms and occupies his mind; but bitter is his feeling that the toil, which gains for him this nauseous and scanty livelihood, heaps dainties and gay wines on the table of his distant landlord, clothes his children or his harem in satin, lodges them in marble halls, and brings all the arts of luxury to solicit their sensesbitter to him to feel that this green land, which he loves and his landlord scorns, is ravished by him of her fruits to pamper that landlord; twice bitter for him to see his wife, with weariness in her breast of love, to see half his little brood torn by the claws of want to undeserved graves, and to know that to those who survive him he can only leave the inheritance to which he was heir; and thrice bitter to him that even his hovel has not the security of the wild beast's denthat Squalidness and Hunger, and Disease, are insufficient guardians of his homeand that the puff of the landlord's or the agent's breath may blow him off the land where he has lived, and send him and his to a dyke,
Aristocracy of Ireland, will ye do nothing?will ye do nothing for fear? The body who best know Irelandthe body that keep Ireland within the lawthe Repeal Committeedeclare that unless some great change take place an agrarian war may ensue! Do ye know what that is, and how it would come? The rapid multiplication of outrages, increased violence by Magistrates, collisions between the People and the Police, coercive laws and military force, the violation of houses, the suspension of industrythe conflux of discontent, pillage, massacre, warthe gentry shattered, the peasantry conquered and decimated, or victorious and ruined (for who could rule them)there is an agrarian insurrection! May heaven guard us from it!may the fear be vain!
We set aside the fear! Forget it! Think of the long, long patience of the Peopletheir toils supporting youtheir virtues shaming youtheir huts, their hunger, their disease.
To whomsoever God hath given a heart less cold than stone, these truths must cry day and night. Oh! how they cross us like Banshees when we would range free on the mountainhow, as we walk in the evening light amid flowers, they startle us from rest of mind! Ye nobles! whose houses are as gorgeous as the mote's (who dwelleth in the sunbeam)ye strong and haughty squiresye dames exuberant with tingling bloodye maidens, whom not splendour has yet spoiled, will ye not think of the poor?will ye not shudder in your couches to think how rain, wind, and smoke dwell with the blanketless peasant?will
Will ye do nothing for pitynothing for love? Will ye leave a foreign Parliament to mitigatewill ye leave a native Parliament, gained in your despite, to redress these miserieswill ye for ever abdicate the duty and the joy of making the poor comfortable, and the peasant attached and happy? Doif so you prefer; but know that if you do, you are a doomed race. Once more, Aristocracy of Ireland, we warn and entreat you to consider the State of the Peasantry, and to save them with your own hands!