The official British attitude to Irish emigration in the period
1851-1901 was favourable and even thankful, with scarcely a
dissentient voice; of popular British opinion in the matter
one cannot write, since more is discernible. It may be
instructive
to examine first the official British and Anglo Irish attitude
to the general Irish emigration. The dangerous question of
assisted emigration, both Irish and English, may then be
reviewed
along with the parliamentary treatment of these topics, as
revealed in the important debates.
It may not be fanciful to link the well-known and comfortable
reflections of The Times, on Irish emigration as a kind of self-
effacement of that troublesome nation, with a document, quite
unconnected with Ireland, in the papers of the Colonial Office.
This was from the pen of the Government emigration agent for
Trinidad, resident in Calcutta. He described thus the process
of Indian coolie migration to the British West Indies and
elsewhere;
A system, which has benefited the natives of this country
so largely, that had it been undertaken in the name of
philanthropy, instead of a matter of business, the great good
of it has achieved would have caused it to be lauded to the
skies.(1)
Allowing for a cobbler's partiality for leather, this is no
bad transliteration of some weighty opinion upon the virtues
of the Irish dispersal as a self-regulating and beneficent
process. The Times continued its previous train of thought on
the subject with observations that the New World was eminently
the place for "the Celtic race",(2) even if this should mean
that
"we must gird our loins to encounter
Notes at the End of p1
(1) 7th August, 1877, to H.M. Emigration Commissioners
(P.R.O., C.O. 384/116).
(2) The Times, quoted Cork Constitution, 4th May, 1860
P2
the nemesis of seven centuries" misgovernment, viz that
America would become "more than half Celtic.(1) Dufferin held
that emigration was always preferable to subdivision of land.(2)
Another Irish landowner thought, in 1870, that the character
of emigration had changed, and that emigrants now left "for
convenience" and not "from discontent. (3) The Richmond
Commission
advocated voluntary, planned emigration, making migration within
Ireland merely a doubtful alternative.(4) To Ruttledge - Fair,
with
his experience of local Government Board work, emigration was a
plain necessity for Ireland.(5)
Opinion of this type and in Parliament was equally decided
that nature's way with the Irish emigration was the best, and
that there must be no intervention by our over-zealous
government. This belief in a form of free trade in humanity
survived even the manifest difficulty of getting the
supernumerary
population away not from Ireland but England, after 1870, as
fast as they fell out of employment. The difficulty was not
lessened by the increasingly strong position of overseas
governments as arbiters of the question.
The annual appropriation for the Colonial land and
Emigration Commission was sometimes closely scrutinized in the
eighteen fifties. In 1855 a member thought it bad policy "to
send out of this country the industrious and enterprising,
while the drones were left at home. The Government ought
rather to check than encourage emigration." In reply, Grey
explained that it was not the Government s policy to promote
emigration, but to protect.
(Notes at the End of Page 2)
1 Ibid, quoted, Cork Examiner, 7th May,1860. Twenty years
later Charlotte O'Brien thought it as natural that the English
should whish to see emigration from Ireland as that the Land
League and clergy should oppose it. "The emigration and
wasteland clauses," in Fortnightly Review, xxix (June, 1881).
2 Dufferin, Irish emigration and the tenure of land in
Ireland,
1867, e.g.,p.274
3 The Times, 25th April,1870.
4 Royal commission on the depressed condition of the
agricultural
interest, 1881, Preliminary report, p,7.
5 Report From the Select Committee on Colonization, 1889,
QQ.2230,
2293,etc., H.C., 1889 (274),X.
emigrants;(1) and habouchere after him had to advance the same
assurance.(2) A highly significant debate of 1869, primarily on
English pauperism, included the argument enunciated by
Granville that emigration must not be financed from Imperial
Funds, because such expenditure would have to include Ireland,
and then what would become of the process of Irish emigration
financed? by remittances?(3) Of this flow of money, he said; I
believe it now comes, almost without exception, in the form
of passage warrants; but in future they would of course send
money to the person who wished to emigrate, and he would then
claim to be carried over the sea at the public expense.(4) In
the
following year the Emigration Commission (5) made it a prime
argument
against assisted emigration that the flow of remittances
would thereby be inhibited. There were a dozen useful reasons
against doing anything noteworthy on behalf of a process that
for decades in Ireland, and now more recently in England, was
from the Treasury's point of view so cheap and painless.
In a continuation of the debate on pauperism, Monsell exalted
the leave-it-to-nature principle in what seems a peculiarly
brutal piece of reasoning:
Did his hon. Friend conceive that the poor Irish who went
over to America and half - starved themselves...to pay for the
emigration of their friends, would have contributed anything
had they known that by dragging at the public coffers they
would be able to procure the money?(6)
Monsell thought the whole question had been dead since
1848,"because then it was seen what effect would be produced
by leaving migration to natural causes.(7) The air of parsimony
Notes at the End of P3
(1) Hansard, cxxxviii, 208-9 (7th May,1855).
(2) Ibid., cxli (14th April, 1856).
(3) Ibid., cxcv 957 (16th April, 1869)
(4) Ibid., 955
(5) 30th General report, 1870, pp. 4-11 [c. 196], H.C. 1870,
xvii.
(6) Hansard, cxcix, 1022 (1st March, 1870).
(7) Ibid., 1019.
P4
which pervaded the debate was heightened when Gladstone inquired
how the emigration was to be subsidized, and whether or not by
the colonies. He made a soundly laissez - faire statement of the
position, and posed the dilemma: either no money from the
colonies, or the colonies must choose their own immigrants.(1)
A colonial office minute of 1878 slightly extended Monsell's
argument: An Imperial vote would perhaps relax the efforts
of Colonial Governments and Colonists in making pecuniary
provision for the passages of Emigrants, however glad they
might be to get Emigrants at our own expense.(2)
The Bessbourgh Commission thought no case had been made for
state - aided emigration or migration.(3) In the House of Lords
in 1883 a motion by the Earl of Dunraven for a larger scheme of
emigration, with the corollary of assisted family emigration
to Canada, was withdrawn, in spite of Landowne s ominous
pronouncement that it was almost...a mathematical
demonstration,
that the only thing to be done was to emigrate them
altogether, (4)
a precept he was fond of implementing on own Irish estates.
In the same year Viscount Lymington spoke, a lonely voice,
in favour of state - aided emigration from Ireland; he was
opposed, as he said, by the clergy.(5) About the same time,
Goldwin Smith was writing with acerbity and some originality
on the emigration problem of Ireland, where "misery and
barbarism have multiplied on the brutish, precarious and
philoprogenitive potato, the last attribution a revival of
an Elizabethan superstition. He was, therefore, in favour of
removing the redundant Irish, by means unspecified, but
neither to the United States nor Canada, in both of which
countries the enemies of England, including the imperfectly
loyal Canadian parliament (he wrote from Toronto), were
already numerous enough. By the mid - eighties the point
Notes p 4
1 Hansard, 1065.
2 19th December, 1878 (P.R.O., C.O. 384/121).
3 Report of Her Majesty's commissioners of inquiry into
the working of the Landlord and Tenant (Ireland) Act,
1870, and the Acts amending the same. Report,
paragraph 101.
4 Hansard, cclxxviii, 859-86 (23rd April, 1883)
5 Ibid, cclxxvii, 2005 (10 April, 1883). He had, of course, the
concurrence of such specialists in Irish emigration as James
Hack Tuke and
Vere Foster, cf. Second Report from the select committee of
the House of
Lords on Land Law (Ireland), QQ. 7704-8. 7654, 7657, 7758,
H.C. 1882 (379).
xi
6 Goldwin Smith, Why send more Irish to America? in
Nineteenth Century, xiii,
913-19 (June, 1883).
P5
was reached at which the Canadian government was declining
responsibility in any private schemes of emigration, and
the British Treasury was declining, broadly, responsibility
for anything.(1) The likelihood of a new scheme of state - aided
emigration, on a significant scale, from the United Kingdom
or any part thereof was thus small. It should perhaps be
recorded that the Colonization Board, constituted in 1888
to promote the emigration to Canada and settlement therein
of Scots crofters, did receive an advance of £10,000 from
the Treasury, and was the only colonization scheme so to be
financed. (2) It is significant that the Colonization Board,
and the Parliamentary Colonization Committee,(3) formed in
1887 after some years spadework, bore these titles and
not any ascription of emigration. The time had gone when
the feelings of the imperial settlement areas could be
ignored; assisted emigrants must therefore become "colonists,"
that is, persons upon whom attention and public money must
be bestowed after as well as before arrival in Canada or
elsewhere.(4) In view of the Treasury's attitude it is not
surprising that colonists, so defined, were exceedingly
few, and perhaps none of them Irish. The transition about
1870 from themes of emigration to theories of colonization
was a very important turning - point in British opinion,
coincident also with the reviving interest in Britain's
imperial destiny. It was, perhaps, one were misfortune for
Ireland that Irish emigration as an autonomous problem
lost thereby a little of whatever status it had hitherto
held in the British mind. This evolution,
Notes p5
1 cf Colonial Office, register of correspondence, 1884-6
(P.R.O.Ind. 15551, pp. 360-1).
2 Report from the select committee on colonization, third
session, Append. No.1, Summary of evidence, ix, H.C.
1890-91 (152), xi.
3 Also known as the state - directed colonization
committee of the House of Commons, ibid., second session, Q.
3181, H.C. 1890 (354) xii.
4 The Colonization Committee made the following definition:
Emigration is merely the transfer of surplus labour from the
Mother Country to the Colonies...Colonization...is the
settlement of unoccupied colonial lands , and proposed a
publicly subscribed colonization stock, with interest
guaranteed
by the imperial government, etc. Select committee on
colonization,
third session, 1890 - 91, nt sup., Append p 87 Memorandum by
Parliamentary Colonization Committee.
P6
or regression, may be traced to same extent in the parliamentary
treatment of the topic, to which I now return.
Between 1864 and 1868, Government opinion as it emerged
in Parliament was consonant with some other British news,
already summarized, upon the Irish emigration. In 1864 the
Chief Secretary said: You should not believe the emigration
which is going on. The Government has nothing to do with it.
Politics and religion have nothing to do with it. It was
in fact a result of natural laws ;(1) and in the following year
have thought Irish emigration a benefit to those who went
and those who stayed,(2) a view echoed, of course, in the
House of Lords by Dufferin,(3) Grey, although on the same
occasion he deplored the emigration, thought it had its uses.(4)
Consciences could be easy about the Irish emigrants after a
debate, such as that of 1864, wherein Peel could pronounce:
These people are quite right. They are going where they
will earn an adequate remuneration for their colony, (5) or
after
another which Palmerston wound up with an emollient advocacy
of the natural forces that drew the Irish away, gratuitously,
to the high wages of the United States.(6)
In the Debate of June 1864, Hennessy statistically
refuted, to little purpose, the Government's expressed hope
that emigration would produce an increase in livestock and grain
crops, and a diminution in poor law expenditure.(7) He was one
of
the most persevering fighters for the Irish cause. From the
Irish debates of this year and the next the impression
nevertheless arises that, for these fighters, emigration
was a convenient because apparently permanent stalking-horse.
Behind it the attack could be mustered
Notes p6
1 Hansard, clxxlii, 1872 (11th March, 1864).
2 Ibid., clxxvii, 767 (27th February 1865).
3 Ibid., clxxxii, 390 (16th March, 1866).
4 Ibid., 360
5 Ibid., clxxiii 1872 (11th March, 1864).
6 Ibid., clxxvi, 76 (21st June, 1864).
7 Ibid., 47-57. For a similar demonstration in 1883, see
A.M.Sullivan, Why send more Irish out of Ireland? in
nineteenth century, xiv, 134 (July, 1883).
P 7
against any other Irish grievance. Thus, in March, 1864,
Hennessy, O'Reilly and others were lamenting emigration as
due, to some extent, to the condition of the Irish workhouses;
therefore, their argument proceeded, assimilate
the Irish to the English provisions for out - relief.(1)
Returning in June to the subject of emigration, Hennessy
moved: that this House observes with regret that the
Agricultural Population of Ireland are rapidly leaving the
Country, and urged appropriate legislation in the spheres of
tenant right, land drainage and reclamation.(2) Maguire
and McMahon followed on the land question. One is not,
perhaps entitled to reproach such men with lacking the
foreknowledge, which to us is hindsight, that more of
these reforms in itself touched the problem of emigration
from Ireland. Again, in February 1865, Hennessy was moving
for any well devised measure to stimulate the profitable
employment of the people, and pointing out that the
imperial parliament had voted nearly a million pounds for
canals in Canada.(3) The Irish who dug canals in Canada were
not given the same scope in their own country; but it is
doubtful if emigration. forensically so valuable, was
really closely linked with lack of profitable employment.
The important debate in the House of Lords(4) on pauperism,
in 1869,was held in a significant year, that in which
British emigration first exceeded Irish. The House would
no doubt gladly have seen a still greater excess,
since Lord Haughton pointed out that, in spite of the
growing wealth, the pauper population of nearly one
million was apparently growing also, by five per cent,
per annum. He discreetly blamed the high birth - rate,
almost never referred to, unless by a curmudgeon like
Goldwin Smith, in discussions of the analogous Irish
problem. From this time onwards the problem of population
was never far from British discussion of the problem of
poverty, and expressions such as population, increasing
Notes for p 7
1 Hansard, clxxiii, 1835-72 (11th March, 1864).
2 Ibid., clxxvi, 47-76 (21st June, 1864).
3 Ibid., clxxvii, 661-73 (24th February, 1865).
4 Ibid., cxcv, 943-71 (16th April, 1869).
P 8
as it does at rate of 1,000 a day (1) haunted the statesmen
of the later nineteenth century. The question imposed
itself, though it was never framed in the 1869 debate:
was the misery of Ireland to be a a foreshadowing of
the doom of England herself?(2) The whole debate carries
a most suggestive implication of an England now for the
first time faced with sundry elements of the Irish
problem, over and above the pressure of poverty and
population. English guardians of the poor, like Irish
ones, are unreliable in the disposal of public money;(3)
the English, like the Irish, get drunk in the colonies,(4)
and unlike the Irish seem indisposed to offset this failing
by sending home remittances.(5) But the House took heart,
decided there was no real overpopulation because imports of
food could be indefinitely increased and finally Haughton,
who earlier was pressing for a royal commission, agreed
that any general system of emigration (6) was unnecessary.
The English problem was thus evaded in the same manner
as the Irish. In a Commons debate on the same subject in
the following year it was decided that, although there
was much unemployment and hardship in Britain, it was
immoral to pour the scourings of our population on colonies
which had not the protection of a Poor Law (7) again a
striking if unspoken analogy with the Irish position. Two
years later, the Colonial Under - Secretary had the
courage to inquire: Are we striving to supply colonial
wants, or to relieve an Imperial embarrassment? (8) It was a
question repeated a good deal in Canada and the United
States about ten years later, as impoverished Irish
emigrants poured in. Perhaps with a new understanding
of what the policy of leave it to nature might mean,
the House of Lords heard Dunraven assert that 2,000,000
of people had disappeared
Notes for p 8
1 Select committee on colonization, 1889, at sup.,Q.1179, etc.
2 CF. G.M.Young, Victorian England portrait of an age,
pp.20-21
3 Hansard, cxcv. 954 (16th April, 1869).
4 Ibid., 964.
5 Ibid., 951.
6 Ibid., 970.
7 Hansard, cxcix, 1057 (1st March, 1870).
8 Ibid., ccix, 781 (20th February, 1872).
P9
[from Ireland] somehow, and in a way far from creditable
to our administration. (1)
The important select committee on colonization of
1889 91 heard much evidence on Ireland; but the reference
to Ireland in its draft report was limited to a platitude
about the congested districts. Their needs were linked with
those of the Highlands and Hebrides, and the Irish
position of the zone was said to be amply catered for
by the Land and Congested districts (Ireland) Bill.(2) The
Scottish crofters received more attention. It was
perhaps symbolic of the place that Ireland took in
what was primarily an inquest of empire when the
Colonial Under - Secretary was ashamed to say that I
know nothing about Ireland I have never been there. (3)
A long discussion in the first session of the
Committee (4) served to reveal its mind upon general
aspects of colonization and, distinct from this
emigration. Colonization ideally meant settling
families on land; emigration might mean the
evacuation of unmarried unemployed and unemployables.
Into which category the Irish emigration was considered
principally to fall did not appear, and there was
throughout the discussion little reference to Ireland.
The committee was absorbed with the crises of English
unemployment in 1880 and 1886. The impression that
remains is that the Colonial Office did not believe
in colonization in the sense of colonizing emigrants.
The testimony that emerges from the mass of
evidence before the committee appears to be that it
was relatively easy to turn an emigrant into a more contented
and prosperous person than he was at home; decidedly
difficult to put a colonist on land and recover your
outlay from him, not to speak of any profit on your
investment. The abiding problem was as follows. An
emigrant of any kind might be a liability or an asset
to the country of attraction: how was the financial
incidence of the former possibility to be
Notes for p 9
1 Ibid., cclv. 610 (9th August, 1880).
2 Select Committee on Colonization, third session,
1890-91 ut sup. draft report.
3 Ibid., 1889, Q. 1223.
4 Ibid., QQ. 707-986.
distributed between the country of attraction and
the country of extrusion? Recurring attempts to deal
with this situation ad hoc may be traced in the
history of Irish emigration.
The committee's final report(1) recommended that,
since no general scheme of state emigration was
needed, matters might be left broadly where they were.
Ireland provided a convenient testimonial in support
of this principal of inertia:
The most wholesome process is the most natural viz,
where supply meets demand, or where surplus finds
went in a vacuum seeking replenishment, spontaneously
or with voluntary assistance; and of such character,
as has been shown, has been by far the largest portion
of the emigration from all parts of the United
Kingdom, and notably from Ireland.
As Palmerston and Peel in 1864, so Wyndham in 1901
assured the House of Commons that nothing could be
done to halt Irish emigration; he implied that
nothing need be done. In answer to the member for
Mayo West, he said:
There is no official information showing to what
causes this emigration is due, though I conceive
it is attributable to the state of the labour
market abroad. I fail to see how legislation could
be designed to interfere with the demand for labour.(2)
In its field. it is epitome of half a century of
British opnion.
G.R.C. KEEP.
1 Ibid., third session, 1890-91, p. xvi.
2 Hansard, 4th ser., [series?] xciii, 614 (3rd MAY, 1901).
Transcribed by Gordon Drummond
