“Repeal of the Union.”
I did not know what “Repeal of the Union” was when I heard all the
grown-up people around me shouting out “Repeal! Repeal!” It is no harm
now to let my young readers know what Repeal meant when I was a boy in
Ireland.
Before I was a boy--before you or I were in the world at all--Ireland
had a Parliament of her own. Ireland’s representatives met in the
Parliament House in College Green, Dublin. Or, more correctly speaking,
the English breed of people living in Ireland held Parliament in
College Green. The real old Irish people, who remained true to the old
cause and the old faith, had no voice in that Parliament; they had not
even a voice in electing a member to it. Things were so arranged by the
English that only an Englishman, or an Irishman who became a turn-coat,
and changed his nature and his religion, could have anything to say or
do with that Parliament. Yet, when the Englishmen, the Sassenachs and
the Protestants, who came into possession of Ireland, came to find out
that England would rob them of their rights, too, as well as she would
rob the Catholics, they kicked against the robbery, and in the year
1782 they made a show of resistance, and got England to take her hands
off them for awhile. But up to the year 1800 England had intrigued
and bribed so much, that she bought over a majority of the members,
and they voted that our Irish Parliament would be abolished; that they
would not meet in Dublin any more, but that they would have a united
parliament for Great Britain and Ireland in London. The act by which
that was done was called the Act of Union, and it was to repeal that
act that the movement for the “Repeal of the Union,” was started.
Daniel O’Connell, of Kerry, was the head man of that movement. He was
a great man at moving the Irish people, and carrying them with him.
Many of the people thought he meant to fight, too, in the long run,
for at some of his monster meetings, speaking to tens of thousands of
people, he’d cry out “Hereditary bondsmen! Know ye not! Who would be
free, themselves must strike the blow.” But he never seriously meant
fight. If he did he would, in a quiet way, or in some way, have made
some preparation for it. Those same remarks hold good as regards the
later Irish movement of Charles S. Parnell. A great many people said he
meant to fight when he’d cry out that he’d “never take off his coat to
the work he was at, if there was not some other work behind it.” But
he never seriously meant fight either. If he did, he would, in a quiet
way, or in some way, have made some preparation for it.
But England became alarmed at O’Connell’s movement, and she put him and
hundreds of men in prison in connection with it, just as she became
alarmed at Parnell’s movement in the heyday of its vigor, and put him
and hundreds of men to prison in connection with it. England gives
great allowance to Irishmen in showing themselves great and patriotic
in constitutional and parliamentary agitation, but when it goes a
little too far beyond her liking, she is very quick at stopping it.
I recollect when O’Connell was put to prison, and when he was released
from prison. I recollect the night the bonfires were blazing on the
hills throughout the country in celebration of the release of the
prisoners, and the song that was afterward sung about it, a verse of
which is this:
“The year ’44, on the 30th of May,
Our brave liberator, these words he did say:
‘The time is but short that I have for to stay,
When the locks of my prison shall open.
You’ll find me as true--that the laws I’ll obey,
And I’ll always be so, till I’m laid in the clay.
For Peace is the thing that will carry the sway,
And bring parliament back to old Erin.’”
“He’s fined and confined,” said one of the ushers of Beamish’s school,
in my hearing, to his scholars, as I was playing ball outside the
schoolhouse gate, the evening the news of Dan O’Connell’s being found
“guilty” came into Ross. And these scholars seemed to receive the news
with glee. They belonged to the English crowd in Ireland. Four or five
of them were boys named Hickson, sons of one of the Lansdowne agents
in Kerry. Twenty years after, I met a few of them at the races of Inch
Strand, west of Castlemaine.
And what a lively time there was in Ireland those days of the
O’Connell movement! And how delightfully the birds used to sing! There
were more birds and more people there then than there are now. Nine
millions in 1845; four and a half millions in 1895. And those English
savages rejoice over the manner in which they destroy us. They thank
God we are gone, “gone with a vengeance,” they say. What a pity we
haven’t the spirit to return the vengeance. But we are taught to do
good to those that hate us, to bless those that curse us, and to pray
for those who persecute and calumniate us. I can’t do it; I won’t try
to do it; I won’t be making a hypocrite of myself in the eyes of the
Lord; I could sooner bring myself to pray for the devil first.
I have written that neither O’Connell nor Parnell meant fight, because
neither of them made any preparation for fight. While all of us talk
much of fight, and glorify in song and story those who fought and fell,
is it possible that something degenerate has grown into us, that always
keeps us from coming to the point when the crisis is at hand! There
is no doubt that we fight bravely the battles of all the nations of
the earth. But then, we are _made_ to do it. We join their armies, and
we are shot down if we don’t do it. There is no power, no discipline,
to compel us to fight for Ireland, and it is surprising the facility
with which the leaders of Irish physical-force organizations of the
present day can lead their forces into the fields of _moral_ force,
to obtain for their country a freedom that they swore they were to
fight for. ’Tis desertion of that kind that made Parnellism; ’tis base
desertion of that kind that leaves heroic Irishmen dead and dying in
the dungeons of England to-day. I’m getting vexed. I’ll stop.
Why do I make these remarks? I don’t know. I have been talking of
O’Connell and I have been thinking of John O’Donovan, the great Irish
scholar, and what he said to me one time about O’Connell. In a letter
he wrote to me, about the year 1856, he says: “There were no two men
of the age who despised the Irish name and the Irish character more
than did Daniel O’Connell, and the late Dr. Doyle, Bishop of Kildare
and Leighlin. Dr. Miley, in whose hands O’Connell died, told me this at
this table, and I firmly believe it.”
John O’Donovan was intimately acquainted with Father Meehan, the author
of the History of the Confederation of Kilkenny and other historical
works. I met Father Meehan at John O’Donovan’s house one night in 1859.
I was after being released from Cork jail, and we had some talk at
table about the Phœnix movement. John O’Donovan thought I was somewhat
over-sanguine. “The bishops won’t let the people fight,” said he. Dr.
Meehan never said a word. I’ll now go back to my story.
I told you I shook hands with O’Connell when he was coming from the
great meeting in Skibbereen, in the year 1843. I remember the morning
the Ross men were going to that meeting. Some of them had white wands.
I see Dan Hart having one of those wands, regulating the men into
line of march. Those wandmen were the peace-police of the procession.
Paddy Donovan-Rossa was prominent in command, giving out new Repeal
buttons. Some years after, he was in New York with his wife and his six
sons--all dead now: all belonging to him dead now, I may say. Meeting
him here in the year 1863, I said to him--“Uncle Paddy, I remember you,
the time you had all the Repeal buttons in Ross to free Ireland.”
I was sorry for saying it, for the tears ran down his cheeks. The
movement I myself was connected with ended no better, and we are in
no position to say anything hurtful to O’Connellites. We all turned
out to be O’Connellites, or Parnellites, which is much the same; all
putting our trust in England to free Ireland for us--“without striking
a blow.” No, there were not ten men of the whole Fenian movement, and
the whole I. R. B. movement in America, that did not turn in to the
Parnell movement. That is how England feels strong to-day, and that is
how she feels she can treat with contempt all the resolutions passed
by Irishmen in Ireland and America, about the release of the Irish
political prisoners that she holds in her English prisons. No society
of Irishmen exists now that she is afraid of. She has everything in her
own hands. And, until England is made afraid, she will do nothing for
Ireland, or give nothing to Irishmen.
The Repeal movement, the Father Mathew movement, the Young Ireland
movement, and the English-made famine movement, ran into one another,
from the year 1840 to the year 1848. I was in the whole of them--not
much as a man, but a great deal as a little boy. I remember on Sundays,
how I’d sit for hours in the workshop of Mick Hurley, the carpenter,
at the lower side of the Pound Square, listening to Patrick (Daniel)
Keohane reading the _Nation_ newspaper for the men who were members of
the Club. He was the best scholar in our school; he was in the first
class, and he was learning navigation. And he _did_ go to sea after
that, and sailed his own ship for years. When last I saw him he kept
shop, or kept store, as we here call it, in that part of the town where
the Courceys and Crokers and Moloneys lived. And he is there yet. Won’t
he be surprised, if he reads what I am writing, to know that he had a
hand in making a “bad boy” of me, listening to him reading the _Nation_
newspaper fifty odd years ago! It is very possible it was through his
reading I first heard of the death of Thomas Davis. It was in 1845
Thomas Davis died, and Patrick Keohane and I were in Ross then. It was
the first of the years that are called the “famine” years; years that
will require from me the whole of the next chapter.