Ireland--The Causes of its Debasement--Dublin--Mementoes of the
Captivity of the Country--Movements toward Catholic
Emancipation--Its Early Champions--Mr. Grattan--Mr.
Plunkett--Reverend Sydney Smith.
Before specially considering Catholic Emancipation, I will notice two or
three persons who participated in the long struggle which prepared the
way for this great measure of religious toleration. The act of
Emancipation extended to Catholics alike in all parts of the United
Kingdom. But, as the large majority of the professors of that faith
dwelt in Ireland, and as they composed nearly seven-eighths of its
people, and as it was there that the long and fierce conflict was waged
which ultimately compelled English Protestants to yield to their
Catholic fellow-subjects the rights of toleration which they themselves
enjoyed, this was regarded as emphatically an Irish reform.
Ireland! What a throng of associated ideas start to life at the mention
of that name! How varied their aspect--how contradictory their
character--how antagonistic the emotions they kindle, the sentiments
they inspire. Ireland, the land of genius and degradation, of vast
resources and pinching poverty, of noble deeds and revolting crimes, of
valiant resistance to tyranny and obsequious submission to usurpation.
Ireland, the land of splendid orators, charming poets, and brave
soldiers; the land of ignorance, abjectness, and beggary; measureless in
its capacities, stinted in its products, a strange anomaly, a
complication of contradictions.
Though this portraiture, sketched by no unfriendly hand, be but a rude
outline, does it not shadow forth the original? Why are its darker
colors no less faithful delineations of the prominent features than the
brighter? The very problem which a whole century has not been able to
solve! The British Tory will point to what he calls "the malign
character of the Irish," as the prime cause of the debasement and
wretchedness which exist among them. The British Whig, whose zeal for
Protestantism, as a mere _ism_, has clouded his judgment, will assign
the general prevalence of the Catholic religion in the island, as the
source of most of the evils which afflict it. The genuine Irishman, who
regards his native isle as the greenest and fairest the sun ever smiled
to shine upon, will tell you that, giving due weight to many obvious but
secondary influences, the degradation and misery which debase and crush
such masses of his countrymen must be ascribed to the fact that Ireland,
which could once boast of national independence, a regal sovereign, and
a royal Parliament, is now a mere appendage to the English Crown,
without a name, a flag, or a Senate; an oppressed colony crouching under
a hated yoke of vassalage; a captive province paying tribute to a
conqueror, who, having robbed it of nationality, appoints its rulers,
dictates its laws, prescribes its ritual, plunders its wealth, tarnishes
its reputation, and scoffs at its complainings.
Waiving till another occasion the question whether the prime cause of
Ireland's miseries does not lie deeper than her compulsory and unnatural
union with Great Britain, let us enter a little further into the
feelings of the struggling Irishman. Go with him to Dublin. A beautiful
city--one of the fairest in the United Kingdom. But, its beauty is that
of the fading flower nipped by the untimely frost--the beauty of the
chiseled marble, rather than of the living, acting, speaking man.
Consumptive, pale, listless, it lacks the bloom, the freshness, the
vivacity of conscious health. Its manufactures, its domestic trade, its
foreign commerce, since the union with England, have dwindled under the
shadow of its towering rival beyond the channel, until its market days
are as somber as a London Sabbath. Its dull streets and slumbering
wharves, yea, the very gait and air of its populace, give token that its
prosperity is arrested by the hand of decay, whilst its magnificent
public edifices seem to stand only as tame and melancholy monuments of
its departed greatness and glory. From the proud capital of an
independent nation, Dublin has degenerated to the chief mart of a
dependent province, whose owners are "absentee proprietors," whose
husbandmen pay their rents to foreign landlords, whose merchants are the
mere agents of distant capitalists, and whose nobles are proud to hide
their Irish stars under English ribbons.
Everything in Dublin reminds the Irishman of the captivity of his
country. He feels a blighting shame when he conducts a stranger through
the stately halls of the Bank of Ireland; for there the Lords and
Commons of the Emerald Isle once legislated. He is pained when you extol
the grandeur of this noble building; for, to his eye, its glory has
faded and fled. Walk with him through that broad and beautiful avenue,
Sackville street, and your praise of its elegant mansions only reminds
him that the Irish nobility that once resided there have gone to swell
the brilliant pageant of the conqueror at Hyde Park and St. James's
Palace. Wander with him amidst the filth and squalor of the lanes of the
city, and he points to wretchedness and want as the fruits of English
legislation. Go with him to the Castle, and, as the soldiery file
through its turreted gate, clad in the uniform of the Saxon, he regards
them not as the troops of a legitimate ruler, but as the trained
assassins of an alien despot.
With such mementoes of the departed power and present captivity of
Ireland, meeting his eye at every turn, was it not natural that the
genuine Irishman, who submitted to the rule of England for the same
reason that the slave wears the chain of his master, should, with the
free blood which his Creator gave him boiling in his veins, twenty
years ago present to his oppressor the alternative of civil war or
unqualified toleration in the exercise of his hereditary religious
faith--that nine years ago he should rush to Conciliation Hall, and
agitate for his civil rights under the motto, "No People, strong enough
to be a Nation, should consent to be a Province"--and that in the past
year, when the last hope of civil emancipation by peaceful means had
died out, and all Europe was in arms, casting away the chains of ages,
he should light the fires of revolution on the hights of Tipperary,
resolved to strike one despairing blow for the deliverance of a
long-oppressed country? He who would brand Washington a traitor, may
sink the iron into the foreheads of Mitchel, O'Brien, and Meagher.
Prominent among the early champions of Catholic Emancipation, stood MR.
GRATTAN. To prove that, for nearly a century past, Ireland has
constantly exhibited on the floor of the British Commons some of the
most eloquent men who have swayed the councils of the United Kingdom, I
only need mention the names of Burke, Flood, Sheridan, Grattan,
Plunkett, O'Connell, and Shiel. Perhaps Canning may be included in the
list. Both his parents were pure Irish, and he was, as it were,
accidentally born in England. In this galaxy, Grattan shone unrivaled,
except by Burke and Canning. He was the equal of the latter in many
respects--his superior in some. As a practical Parliamentarian, he ranks
scarcely below the former. And he stands at the head of all of his
countrymen who have been strictly _Irish_ members, representing Irish
constituencies.
Graduating at Dublin, and entering the Middle Temple, London, in 1767,
when just turned 21, Grattan was an eager observer, from the galleries
of the Lords and Commons, of the fierce struggles of North, Grenville,
Chatham, and Burke, then in the zenith of their fame. Throwing Coke and
Plowden on the dusty shelf, he employed his leisure hours in writing
sketches of these "Battles of the Giants," for the perusal of his Irish
friends. He became enamored of politics, and resolved to shine in the
Parliament of his native island. Some of his sketches found their way
into the Dublin newspapers, and their point and power gave plausibility
to the charge at one time made, that he was the author of Junius. In
answer to a direct application to him, in 1805, to know if he were the
famous author, he laconically replied:
"SIR: I am not 'Junius,' but your good wisher and obedient
servant, HENRY GRATTAN."
On his permanent return to Ireland, he immediately connected himself
with the opposition to the Vice-Regal Government, opening the attack by
a series of newspaper articles in vindication of Irish rights, which
attracted much attention, and came near subjecting him to a royal
prosecution. From that moment, he gave his whole mind and soul to public
affairs, and, during the subsequent fifty years, every page of Irish
history records his name, associated with some measure for the
amelioration of Irish wrongs. He is the author of what is miscalled
"Irish Independence." On the accession of George III to the throne, the
government of Ireland was then, as it is now, the chief difficulty of
Ministers. During the American Revolutionary war, intestine commotions,
from the incendiary proceedings of the "Whiteboys," (a rabble band which
fired the houses of the landlords, and now and then put to death a
non-complying tenant,) and the danger of invasion from France, impelled
the middle classes to petition Government for succor and protection.
They were frankly told that no aid could be afforded them, and they must
take care of themselves. Acting on this license, a volunteer militia was
enrolled in all parts of the island, the Government furnishing arms,
which swelled till it numbered 100,000 men, of the bone and sinew of
Ireland. The "Whiteboys" shrunk into the caves, the threatened invasion
was abandoned, and the popular leaders, who had been active in mustering
the volunteers, took advantage of their strong position to demand the
removal of onerous restrictions on Irish commerce, and the amelioration
of the Catholic penal code. The British Government essentially modified
the commercial regulations between the two countries, and though some of
the darker features of the code were relaxed, it still remained a
disgrace to civilization. The greatest burden yet existed--_the
supremacy of the British Parliament over Irish affairs_. Emboldened by
success, an attempt was made to procure its repeal. Flood, the rival of
Grattan, demanded a distinct disavowal, by the British Parliament, of
the right to govern Ireland. Grattan, who had the hearts of his
countrymen in his hand, avowed that he would be satisfied if Britain
would repeal all existing laws interfering with Irish rights. The
measure was adopted, and the Irish Parliament became the supreme
legislature of Ireland, subject to the supervision of the King in
Council. Hibernia was intoxicated with joy, and, in the fervor of their
gratitude, the countrymen of Grattan voted him L50,000. Thus, in 1782,
was _quasi_ legislative independence granted to Ireland. But British
gold and intrigue were ever able to seduce the integrity and distract
the counsels of its legislators, till, eighteen years afterward, all was
obliterated in the Act of Union. It was in allusion to the rise and fall
of legislative independence that Grattan, years subsequently, so
beautifully said, "I watched its cradle; I followed its bier." During
these eighteen years, he did all that great talents and vigilant
patriotism could to secure the prosperity and save the honor of his
native land. The leader of the liberals in the Irish Parliament, he
resisted the oppressions of the Saxon, and spurned his bribes, and
appealed to Hibernia to be true to herself, and to maintain her national
identity. Exasperated beyond endurance, Irish patriotism fomented the
rebellion of 1798-9, which precipitated upon the heads of the "United
Irishmen" the whole weight of British hatred and revenge. The scaffold
ran blood, and the cheek of Ireland turned pale. In 1799, Pitt proposed
the Union. Undaunted by the defection around him, Grattan, in the Irish
Commons, resisted it with such vehement eloquence, that it was postponed
till the next year. In the mean time, British gold proved more potent
than its bayonets. Half the Irish Parliament was bribed into compliance
with England's base proposals, and in 1800, after a last effort to rally
the drooping spirits of his countrymen, Grattan followed the bier of
Hibernian Independence to its resting place in St. Stephen's Chapel.
Said his compatriot, young Emmet, the martyr, about to perish upon the
scaffold, "When Ireland becomes a nation, let my epitaph be written!"
Forty years afterward, in the midst of an excited throng, in the Dublin
Corn Exchange, I heard O'Connell say, "Men of Ireland! I swear by your
wrongs that Ireland shall yet become a nation!" Those wrongs are yet
unavenged, the vow is yet unredeemed, the epitaph unwritten. BUT THEY
WILL BE!
Grattan entered the British Parliament in 1805, where he remained till
his death, in 1820. Ever in the front rank of Reformers, he was the
special champion of Catholic emancipation, divided the House almost
every year, and frequently two or three times in a session, on various
propositions looking to ultimate emancipation, but without success; and
in his last effort was defeated by only two majority--an earnest that
the "good time" was coming. He met with the common misfortune of
displeasing the ultras of both parties. He asked too little to please
the extreme Catholics--too much to win the favor of the extreme
Protestants. He asked for a part, and got nothing. At a later day,
O'Connell demanded the whole, and got the greater part. History is
philosophy teaching by examples.
Grattan was a model orator. His style had the genius, the enthusiasm,
the brilliancy, the pathos, which mark Hibernian eloquence, and was
divested of many of those peculiarities which often mar the forensic
displays of a country where, as an accomplished Irishman says, "you may
kick an orator out of every bush." If he was fertile in illustrations,
he was redundant in principles--if his speech was replete with epigram,
it abounded in terse reasoning--if it sparkled with wit, it was luminous
in its calmer statements--if it blighted with its sarcasm, it mellowed
with its pathos--if it was charged with the lightning of invective, it
was freighted with the most ponderous argument--if it could wither a
groveling enemy with its scorn, it could persuade a manly opponent with
its logic. Nor did he overlay the solid parts of his oratory with the
lighter graces of declamation, nor smother them under a redundancy of
poetical illustration. He was a master of the compressed, nervous,
rapid, racy style of argumentation--the very perfection of the art.
On the death of this great man, the cause of Catholic emancipation fell
under the guidance of MR. PLUNKETT, who, next to him, was the ablest
Irish representative in the Commons. Sir James Mackintosh sketches him,
in one of his dashing conversational profiles, thus: "If Plunkett had
come earlier into Parliament, so as to have learned the trade, he would
probably have excelled all our orators. He and Counselor Phillips (or
O'Garish, as he is nicknamed here) are at the opposite points of the
scale. O'Garish's style is pitiful to the last degree. He ought, by
common consent, to be driven from the bar." Plunkett brought to his work
a true Irish heart, talents of the first class, eloquence cast in a rare
mold, and a reputation unsurpassed at the Dublin bar. He bore a
conspicuous part in all those violent throes, in and out of Parliament,
in regard to Catholic emancipation, which convulsed the country from
1820 to 1829, and drove Ireland to the borders of rebellion. He won
several partial triumphs over Ministers, preliminary to the granting of
the great boon in the latter year, when the kingdom held its breath
while O'Connell, the dreaded "Agitator," appeared at the bar of the
Commons, to demand his seat for the county of Clare. When the Whigs rose
to power, in 1830, Mr. Plunkett was made Lord Chancellor of Ireland.
Even this meager notice of the early friends of Catholic emancipation
would be incomplete without the name of SYDNEY SMITH, the founder of the
Edinburgh Review. Of all English Protestants, out of Parliament, he
rendered the most effective aid to that cause. In six or eight articles
in that influential periodical, in an equal number of speeches and
sermons, and as many pamphlets, he pressed the Catholic claims upon
public attention during twenty-five years, in a style which no mortal
man but Sydney Smith could do. He did not so much argue the claims of
the Catholics as ridicule the fears of their opponents. And never were
wit, drollery, humor, irony, and sarcasm, rained down upon a bad cause
in greater variety or rarer quality. He fairly drowned the High Church
party in their own absurdities. His ten letters, signed Peter Plymley,
addressed to "My Brother Abraham, who lives in the country," are the
very effervescence of ridicule. They will be read when test acts are
remembered only to be execrated. They will preserve them from the
rottenness of oblivion. They are inimitable--capable of driving the
blues from the cloister of an Archbishop. In the preface to his works,
Mr. Smith says: "I have printed in this collection the letters of Peter
Plymley. The Government of that day took great pains to find out the
author. All that they _could_ find was, that they were brought to Mr.
Budd, the publisher, by the Earl of Lauderdale. Somehow or other it came
to be conjectured that I was that author. I have always denied it. But
finding that I deny it in vain, I have thought it might be as well to
include the letters in this collection. They had an immense circulation
at the time, and I think above 20,000 copies were sold." This is cool.
But the letters were _cooler_. They gibbeted the absurd opposition which
his Episcopal brethren made to emancipation, "without benefit of
clergy." The services of Mersrs O'Connell and Shiel will be noticed in
the next chapter.