FROM THE PREPARATORY MATERIALS ,
I. EXORDIUM. THE EXECUTION
Since our last meeting[3] the object of our discussion, Fenianism, has entered a new phase. It has been baptised in blood by the English Government. The Political Executions at Manchester remind us of the fate of John Brown at Harpers Ferry.(1) They open a new period in the struggle between Ireland and England. The whole Parliament and liberal press responsible. Gladstone.
Reason: to keep up the hypocrisy that this was no political, but a common criminal affair. The effect produced upon Europe quite the contrary. They seem anxious to keep up the Act of the Long Parliament.[214] English [have] a divine right to fight the Irish on their native soil, but every Irish fighting against the British Government in England is to be treated as an outlaw. Suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act.[215] State of siege. Facts from The Chronicle. Governmental organisation of "Assassination and Violence".[216] Case of Bonaparte.[217]
II. THE QUESTION
What is Fenianism?(2) III. THE LAND QUESTION
nK.ckF.Asi-: o r POITI.A I ION
1846
1841: 8,222,664'
1866: 5,571,971
2,650,693
1855: ' 6,604.665] in 1! years 1,032,69 4 1866: 5,571,971 r
1,0:32,694 Population not only decreased, but the number of the deaf-mutes, the blind, the decrepit, the lunatic, and idiotic increased relatively to the numbers of the population.
INCRFASF OF UVF.-STOCK FROM IS.V, lO [1] .Si'Wi
In the same period from 1855 to 1866 [the] number of the live-stock increased as follows: cattle by 178,532, sheep by 667,675, pigs by 315,918. If we take into account the simultaneous decrease of horses by 20,656, and equalise 8 sheep to 1 horse total increase of live-stock: 996,877, about one million.
Thus 1,032,694 Irishmen have been displaced by about one million cattle, pigs, and sheep. What has become of them? 'The emigration list answers.
FMK,RA n O \
From 1st May 1851 to 31 December 1866: 1,730,189. Character of that emigration.
The process has been brought about and is still functioning upon an always enlarging scale by the throwing together or consolidation of farms (eviction) and bv the simultaneous conversion of tillage into pasture.
From 1851-1861 [the] total number of farms decreased by 120,000, while simultaneously the number of farms of 15-30 acres increased by 61,000, that of 30 acres by 109,000 (together 170,000). The decrease was almost exclusively owed to the extinction of farms from less than one to less than 15 acres. Lord Dufferin." 'The increase means only that amongst the decreased number of farms there is a larger portion of farms of large dimension.
HOW IHK l'ROCKSS WORKS
a) The People. The situation of the mass of the people has deteriorated, and their state is verging to a crisis similar to that of 1846.a T h e relative surplus population now as great as before the famine.
Wages have not risen more than 20% since the potato famine. The price of potatoes has risen nearly 200%; the necessary means of life on an average by 100%. Professor Cliffe Leslie, in the London Economist dated February 9, 1867, says:
"Aftet a loss of -/;, of the population in 21 years, throughout most of the island, the rate of wages is now onlv Is. a day: a shilling does not go further than 6d. did 21 years ago. Owing to this rise in his ordinary food the labourer is worse off than he was 10 years ago."
b) The Land. \) Decrease of land under crops.
Decrease in cereal crops: Decrease in green crops:
1861-1866: 470,917 acres 1861-1S66: 128,061 acres
2) Decrease per Statute Acre oj every crop. There has been decrease of yield in wheat, but greater 1847 to 1865 per cent: the exact decrease: oats 16.3, flax 47.9. tut nips 36.1, potatoes 50%. Some years would show a greater decrease, but on the whole it has been gradual since 1847.b
Since the exodus, the land has been underfed and overworked, partly from the injudicious consolidation of farms, and, partly, because, under the corn-acre system,"[18] the farmer in a great measure trusted to his labourers to manure the land for him. Rents and profits may increase, although the profit of the soil decreases. The total produce may diminish, but that part of it, winch is converted into surplus produce, falling to landlord and greater fanners, instead of to the labourer. And the price of the surplus produce has ; isen.
So result: Gradual expulsion of the natives, gradual deteriora-tion and exhaustion of the source of national life, the soil.
PROCESS OF CONSOLIDATION
This process has only begun; it is going on in rapid strides. The consolidation has first attacked the farms of under one to under 15 acres. It will be far from having reached the English point of consolidation, if all farms under 100 acres have disappeared. Now the state was this in 1864:
The total area of Ireland, including bogs and waste land: 20,319,924 acres. Of those [3]/[5] = 12,092,117 acres, still form farms from under 1 to under 100 acres, and are in the hands of 569,844 farmers; [2]/[5] = 8,227,807, form farms from 100 till over 500 acres, and are in the hands of 31,927 persons. Thus to be cleared off 2,847,220, if we number only the farmers and their families.
This system [is a] natural offspring of the famine of 1846, accelerated by the abolition of corn-laws,[219] and the rise in the price of meat and wool, now systematic.
Clearing of the Estate of Ireland,- transforming it in an English agricultural district, minus its resident lords and their retainers, separated from England by a broad water ditch.
CHANGE OF CHARACTER OF THE ENGLISH RULE IN IRELAND
State only tool of the landlords. Eviction, also employed as means of political punishment. (Lord Abercorn. England. Gaels in the Highlands of Scotland.[220]) Former English policy: displacing the Irish by English (Elizabeth), roundheads[221] (Cromwell). Since Anne 18th-century politico-economic character only in the protec-tionist measures of England against her own Irish colony; within that colony making religion a proprietary title. After the Union[2]'[2]
[the] system of rack-renting and middlemen, but left the Irish, however ground to the dust, holder of their native soil. Present system, quiet business-like extinction, and government only instrument of landlords (and usurers).
From this altered state:
1st) Distinguishing character of Fenianism: Socialist, lower-class movement.
2) Not Catholic movement. Priests leaders as long as Catholic Emancipation[223] and their leader, Daniel O'Connell, remained leader of the Irish movement.
Ridiculous Popishism of the English. High Catholic priests against Fenianism.
3) No representative leader in the British Parliament. Character of O'Connell's physical force movement.[224] Extinction of Irish party in Parliament.
4) Nationality. Influence of European movement, and English phraseology.
5) America, Ireland, England—three fields of action, leadership of America.
6) Republican, because America republic.
I have now given the characteristics of Fenianism.
IV. THE ENGLISH PEOPLE
A cause of humanity and right, but above all a specific English question.
a) Aristocracy and Church and Army. (France, Algiers.[225]) b) Irish in England. Influence on wages, etc. Lowering the character of the English and Irish. The Irish Character. Chastity of Irishmen. Attempts at education in Ireland. Diminution of crimes.
Convicted in Ireland
Committed for trial: Convicted:
1852 17,678 10,454 7866 4,326 2,418 The decrease in the numbers of persons committed for trial in England and Wales, since 1855, is partly due to the Criminal Justice Act of 1855, authorising Justices to pass sentences for short periods with the consent of the prisoners, instead of committing for trial to the sessions.
Birmingham. Progress of the English people. Infamy of the English press.
c) The Foreign Policy. Poland, etc. Castlereagh. Palmerston.[226]
V. THE REMEDY
Foolishness of the minor parliamentary propositions. Error of the Reform League.[227]
Repeal as one of the articles of the English Democratic Party.
Endnotes
[213] These notes were written by Marx in English as a conspectus for a speech to be made at a meeting of the General Council of the International Working Men's Association on November 26, 1867, when the discussion on the Irish question, begun on November 19, was to be continued. In view of the immense disturbance caused by the execution of the three condemned Fenians (Larkin, Allen and O'Brien) on November 23, Marx considered this speech as no longer suitable. Feeling that at such a moment it would be more appropriate for one of the English members of the General Council to express sympathy with the Irish revolutionaries, he gave the floor to Peter Fox, who was known for his support of the Irish national liberation movement. Marx described the meeting in great detail in his letter of November 30, 1867 to Engels (see present edition, Vol. 42). Later, preparing for a report on the Irish question in the German Workers' Educational Society in London (see this volume, p. 194), Marx used this draft and the materials he had compiled for it. These notes were first published in English in The General Council of the First International. 1866-1868, Moscow, 1964. Inaccuracies in the figures have been corrected.
[214] A reference to the Act of Settlement adopted by the Long Parliament on August 12, 1652, during the English bourgeois revolution, following the suppression of the 1641-52 national liberation uprising in Ireland. The Act legalised the reign of terror and violence established by the English colonialists in Ireland and sanctioned the wholesale plunder of Irish lands in favour of the English bourgeoisie and the "new" bourgeoisified nobility. This Act declared the majority of Ireland's indigenous population "guilty of revolt". Even those Irishmen who had not been directly involved in the uprising but had failed to show the proper "loyalty" to the English Parliament were considered "guilty". Those declared "guilty" were classified into categories, depending on the extent of their involvement in the uprising, and subjected to brutal reprisals: execution, deportation, confiscation of property. On September 26, 1653, the Act of Settlement was supplemented by the Act of Satisfaction which prescribed the forcible resettlement of Irish people whose property had been confiscated to the barren province of Connaught and to County Clare (see Note 190) and defined the procedure for allotting the confiscated land to the creditors of Parliament, the officers and men of the English army. Both Acts consolidated and extended the economic foundations of English landlordism in Ireland.
[215] See Note 142.
[216] Marx uses an appraisal of the Fenian movement given in Queen Victoria's address to Parliament of November 19, 1867 (see The Times, No. 25973, November 20, 1867) to describe the brutal policy of the English Government towards the Irish Fenians.
[217] During an abortive coup in Boulogne in 1840, Prince Louis Bonaparte wounded an officer of the government troops. This crime did not prevent the English Government from obsequiously recognising the Bonapartist regime after the usurpation of power by Louis Bonaparte in 1851. In 1867, however, three Irish Fenians were sent to the gallows purely on suspicion of having made an attempt on the life of a policeman while attacking a prison van in Manchester.
[1] In the autumn of 1867 the General Council of the International Working Men's Association launched a widespread campaign among the English workers in support of the Irish national liberation movement led by the Fenians. The memorial written by Marx was an integral part of this campaign. The Fenians were Irish revolutionaries who named themselves after the "Féne"— a name of the ancient population of Ireland. Their first organisations appeared in the 1850s in the USA among the Irish immigrants and later in Ireland itself. The secret Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood, as the organisation was known in the early 1860s, aimed at establishing an independent Irish republic by means of an armed uprising. The Fenians, who expressed the interests of the Irish peasantry, came chiefly from the urban petty bourgeoisie and intelligentsia and believed in conspiracy tactics. The British Government attempted to suppress the Fenian movement by severe police reprisals. On September 18, 1867, the Fenians made an armed attack on a prison van in an attempt to liberate Kelly and Deasy, two of their leaders. The latter managed to escape but a policeman was killed during the clash. Five Irishmen (Maguire, Condon, Larkin, Allen and O'Brien) were charged with murder and brought to trial. Although there was no direct evidence, they were sentenced to death. Maguire was subsequently pardoned, and Condon, as an American citizen, had his sentence commuted to life imprisonment. The others were executed. The Fenian trial in Manchester aroused a storm of protest in Ireland and England. On the insistence of Marx, the General Council of the International began, on November 19, a discussion on the Irish question during which the leaders of the international proletarian organisation expressed their solidarity with the struggle of the Irish people for independence and condemned the position of the reformist trade union leaders who, in the wake of the English bourgeois radicals, denied the right of the Fenians to resort to revolutionary methods in the struggle. The discussion was scheduled to continue on November 26 (see this volume, pp. 189-93), but when the news of the conviction was received, the General Council convened a special meeting on November 20 and addressed a memorial to the Home Secretary asking for the commutation of the death sentence. The British Government ignored the memorial. Because of opposition from the trade union leaders, the English labour press did not publish the memorial in its original wording. A report on the special meeting of the General Council, published in The Bee-Hive, No. 319, November 23, 1867, only summarised it, and named the General Council members who had signed it. The French translation was published by Le Courrier français, No. 163, November 24. In English the memorial was first published in full in The General Council of the First International. 1866-1868, Moscow, 1964. This document is also preserved in the form of the manuscript copy made by Mrs. Marx which fully coincides with the text entered into the Minute Book. Written as an article, this copy was apparently to be sent to the press. In this volume the memorial is reproduced from this copy.
[18] In the spring of 1868, the workers of the Charleroi coalfield declared a strike, in reply to the mine-owners' reduction of production to four days a week and lowering of wages by ten per cent. In the bloody clashes between the miners and police troops, twenty-two people were arrested and put on trial. The Brussels Central Section launched a broad campaign in support of the strikers both in Belgium and abroad. It organised meetings of protest and gave wide coverage of the events in the columns of La Tribune du Peuple, La Liberté and other newspapers. On April 12, 1868 it issued a manifesto to the workers of Belgium and other countries (see La Tribune du Peuple, No. 4, April 19, 1868). The section maintained regular ties with the General Council of the International. The Council discussed the Charleroi events at its meetings of April 21, May 12 and June 2, 1868 and organised aid to the strikers. The Brussels Section set up a special committee to brief lawyers for the defence of the detainees. The lawyers managed to swing public opinion in favour of the accused, and on August 15 they were acquitted by the jury. This led to a rise in membership of the International in Belgium.
[219] The repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 led to a reduction in grain prices due to the fall in the demand for Irish grain in England, and the rise in the demand for wool and other stock-breeding products from Ireland (see Marx's letter to Engels of November 30, 1867, present edition, Vol. 42). This made landlords and rich farmers switch to extensive pasture farming which resulted in the mass eviction of small Irish tenants from the land ("clearing of estates") in the mid-nineteenth century (see also this volume, pp. 201-03).
[220] A reference to the forcible eviction from the land of the population of the Scottish Highlands (the Gaels) by the Anglo-Scottish nobility in the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, a process similar to the "clearing of estates" in Ireland. Marx describes this process in Chapter XXVII of Volume I of Capital and in his article "Elections.— Financial Clouds.—The Duchess of Sutherland and Slavery" (present edition, Vol. 11).
[221] Roundheads—the nickname given by the Royalists to the Parliamentarians during the seventeenth-century English revolution because of their puritan custom of cutting their hair close, while the cavaliers—supporters of the King — wore their hair long.
[223] Early in the nineteenth century the Irish national movement developed under the slogan of the abolition of political restrictions for the Catholic population and the granting to Catholics (who formed the majority of the population) of the right to stand for election to Parliament. In 1829 the British Parliament, under pressure of a mass movement in Ireland, lifted some of the restrictions (Catholic Relief Act). Catholics were granted the rights to be elected to Parliament and hold certain government posts. Simultaneously the property qualification for electors was increased fivefold. With the aid of this manoeuvre the British ruling classes hoped to win over to their side the upper crust of the Irish bourgeoisie and Catholic landowners and thus split the Irish national movement.
[224] In the 1820s the demand for the repeal of the Union became the most popular slogan of the Irish national liberation movement. In 1840 a Repeal Association was founded whose leader, Daniel O'Connell, stood for a compromise with the English ruling circles and reduced the programme of the movement to the demand for autonomy and other political concessions. In the mid-forties the supporters of the liberation of Ireland by revolutionary methods, up to and including armed uprising against English rule (Young Ireland — a revolutionary patriotic society), gained ground in the Repeal Association. The differences between O'Connell and those advocating the use of "physical force" led to a split in the Association and the formation of the more radical Irish Confederation (the beginning of 1847). Its Left, revolutionary wing headed the national liberation movement and became the target of severe reprisals in 1848. Eventually, the Repeal Association broke up completely.
[225] Marx refers to France's colonial wars in Algeria which began in the 1830s and lasted (with intervals) for 40 years.
[226] A reference to the reactionary foreign policy pursued by Castlereagh, the British Foreign Secretary (1812-22). He supported the efforts of the Holy Alliance to strengthen the reactionary feudal monarchies in Europe, notably the measures against the revolutionary movements in Italy and Spain. The counter-revolutionary Tory policy of Castlereagh was continued by Palmerston, the Whig leader, who relied on the support of the Right wing of the party. He, however, masked the real nature of this policy with liberal phrases and hypocritical expressions of sympathy with the oppressed peoples. Marx showed in his pamphlet Lord Palmerston (see present edition, Vol. 12) that, as Foreign Secretary, Palmerston played an ignoble role with regard to the Polish struggle for independence during the general uprising of 1830-31 and the uprising in the free city of Cracow in 1846. While inciting the Poles to action by his false promises of assistance, Palmerston sanctioned the suppression <>f the Polish movement by Tsarist Russia, Austria and Prussia.
[227] Marx refers to an error which the leadership of the Reform League (see Note 39) committed by refusing to give any real support to the Irish national liberation movement, although many of the League's rank-and-file members expressed sympathy with it. The meeting of the League's Council on November 1, 1867 adopted a resolution condemning Fenianism, tabled by bourgeois radicals. When the Irish question came up for discussion in the General Council of the International in November 1867, the speeches were spearheaded against this chauvinistic and anti-revolutionary position of the Reform League and its supporters among the liberal trade unionists, p. 193
[3] Marx wrote this item on the basis of a letter from Johann Baptist Schweitzer dated April 29, 1868. The item was included in the report of the General Council meeting of May 12, 1868 published in The Bee-Hive Newspaper, No. 344, May 16, 1868, but is not to be found in the Minute Book. Informing Engels of Schweitzer's letter, Marx wrote to him on May 4, 1868 that he intended "to use this question in the interests of the Party", and insisted on an inquiry into the condition of the workers employed in the iron trade of the Rhine Province (see this letter and Marx's letter to Engels of May 7 and the latter's reply of May 6-7, 1868, present edition, Vol. 43).
[5] This refers to the Aliens Law adopted in Belgium on September 22, 1835 and prolonged every three years. Despite the widespread protest campaign in the press and at meetings, it was renewed at the end of June 1865. In May 1868, the Belgian Government, for fear of fresh mass action, prolonged it without discussion in the Chamber of Deputies.
[2] Marx means an extensive amnesty granted by President Lincoln in A 863 and President Johnson in 1865 to persons who had fought in the US Civil War on the side of the South.