By MICHAEL MACDONAGH.
The most splendid testimony to the Irish genius in journalism is
afforded by the London press of the opening decades of the twentieth
century. One of the greatest newspaper organizers of modern times is
Lord Northcliffe. As the principal proprietor and guiding mind of
both the _Times_ and the _Daily Mail_, he directly influences public
opinion, from the steps of the Throne and the door of the Cabinet, to
the errand boy and the servant maid. T.P. O'Connor, M.P., is the most
popular writer on current social and political topics, and so amazing
is his versatility that every subject he touches is illumined by
those fine qualities, vision and sincerity. The most renowned of
political writers is J.L. Garvin of the _Pall Mall Gazette_ and the
_Observer_. By his leading articles he has done as much as the late
Joseph Chamberlain by his speeches to democratize and humanize the
old Tory party of England. The authoritative special correspondent,
studying at first hand all the problems which divide the nations of
Europe, and knowing personally most of its rulers and statesmen, is
E.J. Dillon of the _Daily Telegraph_. And when the quarrels of
nations are transferred from the chancelleries to the stricken field
there is no one among the war correspondents more enterprising and
intrepid in his methods, or more picturesque and vivid with his pen,
than M.H. Donohoe of the _Daily Chronicle_. All these men are Irish.
Could there be more striking proof of the natural bent and aptitude
of the Irish mind for journalism?
Dean Swift was the mightiest journalist that ever stirred the
sluggish soul of humanity. Were he alive today and had he at his
command the enormous circulation of a great daily newspaper, he would
keep millions in a perpetual mental ferment, such was the ferocious
indignation into which he was aroused by wrong and injustice and his
gift of savage ironical expression. Swift, as a young student in
Trinity College, Dublin, saw the birth of the first offspring of the
Irish mind in journalism. The _Dublin News Letter_ made its
appearance in June, 1685, and was published every three or four days
for the circulation of news and advertisements. Only one copy of the
first issue of this, the earliest of Irish newspapers, is extant. It
is included in the Thorpe collection of tracts in the Royal Dublin
Society. Dated August 26, 1685, it consists of a single leaf of paper
printed on both sides, and contains just one item of news, a letter
brought by the English packet from London, and two local
advertisements. As I reverently handled it, I was thrilled by the
thought that from this insignificant little seed sprang the great
national organ, the _Freeman's Journal_; the _Press_ of the United
Irishmen; the _Nation_ of the Young Irelanders; the _United Ireland_
of the Land League; the _Irish World_ and the _Boston Pilot_ of the
American Irish; and the _Irish Independent_, the first half-penny
Dublin morning paper, and the most widely circulated of Irish
journals. If Swift did not write for the _Dublin News Letter_, he
certainly wrote for the _Examiner_, a weekly miscellany published in
the Irish capital from 1710 to 1713, and the first journal that
endeavored to create public opinion in Ireland. It was at Swift's
instigation that this paper was started, and he was doubtless
encouraged to suggest it by the success that attended his articles in
the contemporary London publication of the same name, the Tory
_Examiner_, in which his journalistic genius was fully revealed. As
it has been expressively put, he wrote his friends, Harley and St.
John, into a firm grip of power, and thus, as in other ways,
contributed his share to the inauguration and maintenance of that
policy which in the last four years of Queen Anne so materially
recast the whole European situation. About the same time there
appeared in London the earliest forms of the periodical essay in the
_Tatler_ and the _Spectator_, which exhibit the comprehensiveness of
the Irish temperament in writing by affording a contrast between the
Irish force and vehemence of Swift and the Irish play of kindly wit
and tender pathos in the deft and dainty periods of Richard Steele.
Dr. Charles Lucas was, even more than Swift perhaps, the precursor of
that type of Irish publicist and journalist, of which there have been
many splendid examples since then in Ireland, England, and America.
Lucas first started the _Censor_, a weekly journal, in 1748. Within
two years his paper was suppressed for exciting discontent with the
government, and to avoid a prosecution he fled to England. In 1763
the _Freeman's Journal_ was established by three Dublin merchants.
Lucas, who had returned from a long exile and was a member of the
Irish parliament, contributed to it, sometimes anonymously but
generally over the signature of "A Citizen" or "Civis." The editor
was Henry Brooks, novelist, poet, and playwright. His novel, _The
Fool of Quality_, is still read. His tragedy, _The Earl of Essex_,
was, wrongly, supposed to contain a precept, "Who rules o'er freemen
should himself be free," which led to the more famous parody of Dr.
Samuel Johnson, "Who drives fat oxen should himself be fat." The
object of Lucas and Brooke, as journalists, was to awaken national
sentiment, by teaching that Ireland had an individuality of her own
independently of England. But they were more concerned with the
assertion of the constitutional rights of the parliament of the
Protestant colony as against the domination of England. Therefore,
the first organ of Irish Nationality, representative of all creeds
and classes, was the _Press_, the newspaper of the United Irishmen,
which was started in Dublin in 1797, by Arthur O'Connor, the son of a
rich merchant who had made his money in London. Its editor was Peter
Finnerty, born of humble parentage at Loughrea, afterwards a famous
parliamentary reporter for the London _Morning Chronicle_, and its
most famous contributor was Dr. William Drennan, the poet, who first
called Ireland "the Emerald Isle."
Irishmen did not become prominently associated with American
journalism until after the Famine and the collapse of the Young
Ireland movement in 1848. The journalist whom I regard as having
exercised the most fateful influence on the destinies of Ireland was
Charles Gavan Duffy, the founder and first editor of the _Nation_, a
newspaper of which it was truly and finely said that it brought a new
soul into Erin. Among its contributors, who afterwards added lustre
to the journalism of the United States, was John Mitchel. In the
_Southern Citizen_ and the _Richmond Enquirer_ he supported the South
against the North in the Civil War. The Rev. Abram Joseph Ryan, who
was associated with journalism in New Orleans, not only acted as a
Catholic chaplain with the Confederate army, but sang of its hopes
and aspirations in tuneful verse. Serving in the army of the North
was Charles G. Halpine, whose songs signed "Private Miles O'Reilly"
were very popular in those days of national convulsion in the United
States. Halpine's father had edited the Tory newspaper, the Dublin
_Evening Mail_; and Halpine himself, after the war, edited the
_Citizen_ of New York, famous for its advocacy of reforms in civic
administration. Perhaps the two most renowned men in Irish-American
journalism were John Boyle O'Reilly of the _Boston Pilot_ and Patrick
Ford of the _Irish World_. O'Reilly was a troop-sergeant in the 10th
Hussars (Prince of Wales's Own), and during the Fenian troubles of
1866 had eighty of his men ready armed and mounted to take out of
Island Bridge Barracks, Dublin, at a given signal, to aid the
projected insurrection. Detected, he was brought to trial, summarily
convicted, and sentenced to be shot. This sentence was commuted to
twenty-five years' penal servitude; but O'Reilly survived it all to
become a brilliant man of letters and make the _Boston Pilot_ one of
the most influential Irish and Catholic newspapers in the United
States. Ford, who had served his apprenticeship as a compositor in
the office of William Lloyd Garrison at Boston, founded the _Irish
World_ in 1870. This newspaper gave powerful aid to the Land League.
A special issue of 1,650,000 copies of the _Irish World_ was printed
on January 11, 1879, for circulation in Ireland; and money to the
amount of $600,000 altogether was sent by Ford to the headquarters of
the agitation in Dublin. A journalist of a totally different kind was
Edwin Lawrence Godkin. Born in County Wicklow, the son of a
Presbyterian clergyman, Godkin in 1865 established the _Nation_ in
New York as an organ of independent thought; and for thirty-five
years he filled a unique position, standing aside from all parties,
sects, and bodies, and yet permeating them all with his sane and
restraining philosophy.
In Canada, Thomas D'Arcy Magee won fame as a journalist on the _New
Era_ before he became even more distinguished as a parliamentarian.
When the history of Australian journalism is written it will contain
two outstanding Irish names: Daniel Henry Deniehy, who died in 1865,
was called by Bulwer Lytton "the Australian Macaulay" on account of
his brilliant writings as critic and reviewer in the press of
Victoria. Gerald Henry Supple, another Dublin man, is also remembered
for his contributions to the _Age_ and the _Argus_ of Melbourne. In
India one of the first--if not the first--English newspapers was
founded by a Limerick man, named Charles Johnstone, who had
previously attained fame as the author of _Chrysal, or the Adventures
of a Guinea_, and who died at Calcutta about 1800.
Stirring memories of battle and adventure leap to the mind at the
names of those renowned war correspondents, William Howard Russell,
Edmond O'Donovan, and James J. O'Kelly. Russell, a Dublin man, was
the first newspaper representative to accompany an army into the
field. He saw all the mighty engagements of the Crimea--Alma,
Balaclava, Inkerman, Sebastopol--not from a distance of 60 or 80
miles, which is the nearest that correspondents are now allowed to
approach the front, but at the closest quarters, riding through the
lines on his mule, and seeing the engagements vividly, so that he was
able to describe them in moving detail for readers of the _Times_.
O'Donovan--son of Dr. John O'Donovan, the distinguished Irish scholar
and archaeologist--was in the service of the London _Daily News_.
That dashing campaigner--as his famous book, _The Merv Oasis_, shows
him to have been--perished with Hicks Pasha's Army in the Sudan in
November, 1883. At the same time James O'Kelly, also of the _Daily
News_, was lost in the desert, trying to join the forces of the
victorious Sudanese under the Madhi. Ten years before that he had
accomplished, for the New York _Herald_, the equally daring and
hazardous feat of joining the Cuban rebels in revolt against Spain.
He escaped the perils of the Mambi Land and the Sudan, and survived
to serve Ireland for many years as a Nationalist member in the
British parliament. John Augustus O'Shea, better known, perhaps, as
"The Irish Bohemian", also deserves remembrance for his quarter of a
century's work as special correspondent in Europe--including Paris
during the siege--for the London _Standard_.
Indeed, no matter to what side of journalism we turn, we find
Irishmen filling the foremost and the highest places. John Thaddeus
Delane, under whose editorship the _Times_ became for a time the most
influential newspaper in the world, was of Irish parentage. The first
editor of the _Illustrated London News_ (1842)--one of the pioneers
in the elucidation of news by means of pictures--was an Irishman,
Frederick Bayley. Among the projectors of _Punch_, and one of its
earliest contributors, was a King's county man, Joseph Sterling
Coyne. The founder of the _Liverpool Daily Post_ (1855), the first
penny daily paper in Great Britain, was Michael Joseph Whitty, a
Wexford man. His son, Edward M. Whitty, was the originator of that
interesting feature of English and Irish journalism, the sketch of
personalities and proceedings in parliament. Of the editors of the
_Athenaeum_--for many years the leading English organ of literary
criticism--one of the most famous was Dr. John Doran, who was of
Irish parentage. "Dod" is a familiar household word in the British
Parliament. It is the name of the recognized guide to the careers and
political opinions of Lords and Commons. Its founder was an Irishman,
Charles Roger Dod, who for twenty-three years was a parliamentary
reporter for the _Times_. And what name sheds a brighter light on the
annals of British journalism for intellectual and imaginative force
than that of Justin MacCarthy, novelist and historian, as well as
newspaper writer?
At home in Ireland the name of Gray is inseparably associated with
the _Freeman's Journal_. Under the direction of Dr. John Gray this
newspaper became in the sixties and seventies the most powerful organ
of public opinion in Ireland; and in the eighties it was raised still
higher in ability and influence by his son and successor, Edmund
Dwyer Gray. In the south of Ireland the most influential daily
newspaper is the _Cork Examiner_, which was founded in 1841 by John
Francis Maguire, who wrote in 1868 _The Irish in America_. It is
doubtful whether any country ever produced a more militant and able
political journal than was _United Ireland_ in the stormy years
during which it was edited by William O'Brien as the organ of the
Land League.
The Irish mood is gregarious, expansive, glowing, and eager to keep
in intimate touch with the movements and affairs of humanity. That, I
think, is the secret of its success in journalism.