By the influence of O'Connell and the Catholic
Association, the forty-shilling freeholders broke away from landlord
influence in the great General Election of 1826, and supported the
candidates who promised to vote for Catholic Emancipation, in spite of
every threat. From that day their doom was sealed; the landlords began
to call loudly for their disfranchisement, and accordingly they were
disfranchised by the Relief Bill of 1829, but of course they still
retained their little holdings. Immediately the landlords began to utter
bitter complaints of surplus population; they began to ventilate their
grievances through the English and Irish press, saying that their land
was overrun by cottiers and squatters--the main cause of all this being
kept in the background, namely, the immense and continuous increase of
forty-shilling freeholders, by themselves, and for their own purposes.
But the moment those poor men presumed to vote according to the letter
and the spirit of the Constitution, they were sacrificed to landlord
indignation; they were declared to be an incumbrance on the soil that
ought to be removed. Landlords began to act upon this view: they began
to evict, to exterminate, to consolidate; and in this fearful work the
awful Famine of '47 became a powerful, and I fear in many cases even a
welcome, auxiliary to the Crowbar Brigade.
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