FORE:The evils of the social state of Ireland were bad enough without being aggravated by the virulence of faction. The result of numerous Parliamentary inquiries, and the observations of travellers from foreign countries, was to present a state of society the most deplorable that can well be imagined in any civilised country under a Christian Government. Many of the lower orders, especially in Munster and Connaught, as well as in mountainous districts of the other provinces, maintained a state of existence the most wretched that can be conceived. They lived in cabins built of mud, imperfectly covered with sods and straw, consisting generally of one room, without any window, with a chimney which admitted the rain, but did not carry off the smoke. They had little or nothing that deserved the name of furniture; their food consisted of potatoes and salt, with milk or a herring sometimes as a luxury; their wages, when they got work, were only sixpence or fourpence a day. They subsisted on small patches of land, which were continually subdivided as the children got married, the population at the same time multiplying with astonishing rapidity. When the potatoes and the turf failed, towards summer, the men went off to seek harvest work in the low lands and richer districts of the country, and in England and Scotland. The women, locking up the doors, set forth with the children to beg, the youngest of the lot being wrapped up in blankets, and carried on their backs. They passed on from parish to parish, getting a night's lodging, as they proceeded, in a chimney corner or in a barn, from the better part of the peasantry and farmers, who shared with them their potatoes, and gave them "a lock of straw" to sleep on. Thus they migrated from county to county, eastward and northward, towards the sea, lazily reposing in the sunshine by the wayside, their children enjoying a wild kind of gipsy freedom, but growing up in utter ignorance, uncared for by anybody, unrecognised by the clergy of any church. The great proprietors were for the most part absentees, who had let their lands, generally in large tracts, to "middlemen," a sort of small gentry, or "squireens," as they were called, who sublet at a rack-rent to the peasantry. Upon these rack-rented, ignorant cultivators of the soil fell a great portion of the burden of supporting the Established clergy, as well as their own priesthood. The tithes were levied exclusively off tillage, the[247] rector or vicar claiming by law a tenth of the crop, which was valued by his "tithe proctors," and unless compounded for in money, which was generally done by the "strong farmers," before the crop left the field, the tenth sheaf must have been set aside to be borne away on the carts of the Protestant clergyman, who was regarded by the people that thus supported him as the teacher of heresy.Regardless of all advice, Buonaparte hastened to precipitate matters with Russia. He seized and confiscated fifty Swedish merchantmen, and further to express his determination to punish Bernadotte for his refusal to be his slavehe boasted before his courtiers that he would have him seized in Sweden, and brought to the castle of Vincennes, and he is said to have planned doing itin January of this year he ordered Davoust to enter Swedish Pomerania and take possession of it. Buonaparte followed up this act of war by marching vast bodies of troops northwards, overrunning Prussia, Pomerania, and the Duchy of Warsaw with them. They were now on the very frontiers of Russia, and Alexander was in the utmost terror. He saw already four hundred thousand men ready to burst into his dominions, and as many more following. He had only one hundred and forty thousand to oppose them; he had no generals of mark or experience; confusion reigned everywhere. In the utmost consternation he demanded an interview with Bernadotte, now the sole hope of Europe, at Abo; and Bernadotte, who had his objects to gain, took his time. When the Russian Ambassador, in great trepidation, said to him that the Emperor waited for him, he rose, laid his hand on his sword, and said, theatrically, "The Emperor waits! Good! He who knows how to win battles may regard himself as the equal of kings!"
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