IRELAND UNDER THE UNION
1800-1900
The horror of death lay over Ireland; cruelty and terror raised to a
frenzy; government by martial law; a huge army occupying the country.
In that dark time the plan for the Union with England, secretly
prepared in London, was announced to the Irish parliament.
It seemed that England had everything to gain by a union. There was
one objection. Chatham had feared that a hundred Irishmen would
strengthen the democratic side of the English parliament; others that
their eloquence would lengthen and perhaps confuse debates. But it was
held that a hundred members would be lost in the British parliament,
and that Irish doctrines would be sunk in the sea of British common
sense.
In Ireland a union was detested as a conspiracy against its liberties.
The parliament at once rejected it; no parliament, it was urged, had a
right to pass an act destroying the constitution of Ireland, and
handing over the dominion to another country, without asking consent
of the nation. Pitt refused to have anything to say to this Jacobin
doctrine of the sovereignty of the people--a doctrine he would oppose
wherever he encountered it.
The Union, Pitt said, was no proposal to subject Ireland to a foreign
yoke, but a voluntary association of two great countries seeking their
common benefit in one empire. There were progresses of the viceroy,
visits of political agents, military warnings, threats of eviction, to
induce petitions in its favour; all reforms were refused--the
outrageous system of collecting tithes, the disabilities of
Catholics--so as to keep something to bargain with; 137,000 armed men
were assembled in Ireland. But amid the universal detestation and
execration of a Union the government dared not risk an election, and
proceeded to pack the parliament privately. By official means the
Commons were purged of sixty-three opponents, and safe men put in,
some Englishmen, some staff-officers, men without a foot of land in
Ireland. There were, contrary to one of the new laws, seventy-two
place-holders and pensioners in the House. Fifty-four peerages were
given to buy consciences. The borough-holders were offered 1-1/4
millions to console them for loss in sale of seats. There was a host
of minor pensions. Threats and disgrace were used to others. Large
sums were sent from London to bribe the Press, and corrupt the
wavering with ready money. Pitt pledged himself to emancipation.
Thus in 1800, at the point of the sword, and amid many adjurations to
speed from England, the Act of Union was forced through the most
corrupt parliament ever created by a government: it was said that only
seven of the majority were unbribed. An Act "formed in the British
cabinet, unsolicited by the Irish nation," "passed in the middle of
war, in the centre of a tremendous military force, under the influence
of immediate personal danger," was followed, as wise men had warned,
by generations of strife. A hundred years of ceaseless agitation, from
the first tragedy of Robert Emmet's abortive rising in 1803,
proclaimed the undying opposition of Irishmen to a Union that from the
first lacked all moral sanction.
An English parliament, all intermediate power being destroyed, was now
confronted with the Irish people. Of that people it knew nothing, of
its national spirit, its conception of government or social life. The
history and literature which might reveal the mind of the nation is so
neglected that to this day there is no means for its study in the
Imperial University, nor the capital of Empire. The _Times_ perceived
in "the Celtic twilight" a "slovenly old barbarism." Peel in his
ignorance thought Irishmen had good qualities except for "a general
confederacy in crime ... a settled and uniform system of guilt,
accompanied by horrible and monstrous perjuries such as could not be
found in any civilised country."
Promises were lavished to commend the Union. Ministers assured Ireland
of less expenditure and lighter taxation: with vast commerce and
manufactures, a rise in the value of land, and a stream of English
capital and industry. All contests being referred from the island to
Great Britain--to a body not like the Irish influenced by prejudices
and passions--Ireland would for the first time arrive at national
union. The passing over to London of the chief part of Irish
intelligence and wealth would give to Ireland "a power over the
executive and general policy of the Empire which would far more than
compensate her"; and would, in fact, lead to such a union of hearts
that presently it would not matter, Pitt hoped, whether members for
Ireland were elected in Ireland or in England. Ireland would also be
placed in "a natural situation," for by union with the Empire she
would have fourteen to three in favour of her Protestant
establishment, instead of three to one against it as happened in the
country itself; so that Protestant ascendency would be for ever
assured. The Catholics, however, would find in the pure and serene air
of the English legislature impartial kindness, and the poor might hope
for relief from tithes and the need of supporting their clergy. All
Irish financiers and patriots contended that the fair words were
deceptive, and that the Union must bring to Ireland immeasurable
disaster.
Any discussion of the Union in its effect on Ireland lies apart from a
discussion of the motives of men who administered the system in the
last century. The system itself, wrongly conceived and wrongly
enforced, contained the principles of ruin, and no good motives could
make it work for the benefit of Ireland, or, in the long run, of
England.
Oppressive financial burdens were laid on the Irish. Each country was
for the next twenty years to provide for its own expenditure and debt,
and to contribute a sum to the general expenses of the United Kingdom,
fixed in the proportion of seven and a half parts for Great Britain
and one part for Ireland. The debt of Ireland had formerly been small;
in 1793 it was 2-1/4 millions; it had risen to nearly 28 millions by
1801, in great measure through the charges of Clare's policy of
martial law and bribery. In the next years heavy loans were required
for the Napoleonic war. When Ireland, exhausted by calamity, was
unable to pay, loans were raised in England at heavy war-rates and
charged to the public debt of Ireland. In 1817 the Irish debt had
increased more than fourfold, to nearly 113 millions. No record was
made in the books of the Exchequer as to what portion of the vast sums
raised should in fairness be allotted to Ireland; there is no proof
that there was any accuracy in the apportionment. The promised lighter
taxation ended in a near bankruptcy, and the approach of an appalling
famine in 1817. Bankruptcy was avoided by uniting the two treasuries
to form one national debt--but the burden of Ireland remained as
oppressive as before. Meanwhile the effect of the Union had been to
depress all Irish industries and resources, and in these sixteen years
the comparative wealth of Ireland had fallen, and the taxes had risen
far beyond the rise in England. The people sank yet deeper under their
heavy load. The result of their incapacity to pay the amount fixed at
the Union was, that of all the taxes collected from them for the next
fifty-three years, one-third was spent in Ireland, and two-thirds were
absorbed by England; from 1817 to 1870 the cost of government in
Ireland was under 100 millions, while the contributions to the
imperial exchequer were 210 millions, so that Ireland sent to England
more than twice as much as was spent on her. The tribute from Ireland
to England in the last ninety-three years, over and above the cost of
Irish administration, has been over 325 millions--a sum which would
probably be much increased by a more exact method both of recording
the revenue collected from Ireland and the "local" and "imperial"
charges, so as to give the full Irish revenue, and to prevent the
debiting to Ireland of charges for which she was not really liable.
While this heavy ransom was exacted Ireland was represented as a
beggar, never satisfied, at the gates of England.
Later, in 1852, Gladstone began to carry out the second part of the
Union scheme, the indiscriminate taxation of the two countries. In a
few years he added two and a half millions to Irish taxation, at a
moment when the country, devastated by famine, was sinking under the
loss of its corn trade through the English law, and wasting away by
emigration to half its former population. In 1896 a Financial
Commission reported that the Act of Union had laid on Ireland a burden
she was unable to bear; and that, in spite of the Union pledge that
the ability of Ireland to pay should always be taken into account, she
was paying one-eleventh of the tax revenue of the United Kingdom while
her taxable capacity was one-twentieth or less. While Great Britain
paid less than two shillings in every pound of her taxable surplus,
Ireland paid about ten shillings in every pound of hers. No relief was
given.
Under this drain of her wealth the poverty or Ireland was intensified,
material progress was impossible, and one bad season was enough to
produce wide distress, and two a state of famine. Meanwhile, the cost
of administration was wasteful and lavish, fixed on the high prices of
the English scale, and vastly more expensive than the cost of a
government founded on domestic support and acceptable to the people.
The doom of an exhausting poverty was laid on Ireland by a rich and
extravagant partner, who fixed the expenses for English purposes,
called for the money, and kept the books.
The Union intensified the alien temper of Irish government. We may
remember the scandal caused lately by the phrase of a great Irish
administrator that Ireland should be governed according to Irish
ideas. Dublin Castle, no longer controlled by an Irish parliament,
entrenched itself more firmly against the people. Some well-meaning
governors went over to Ireland, but the omnipotent Castle machine
broke their efforts for impartial rule or regard for the opinion of
the country. The Protestant Ascendancy openly reminded the Castle that
its very existence hung on the Orange associations. Arms were supplied
free from Dublin to the Orangemen while all Catholics were disarmed.
The jobbing of the grand juries to enrich themselves out of the
poor--the traffic of magistrates who violated their duties and their
oaths--these were unchanged. Justice was so far forgotten that the
presiding judge at the trial of O'Connell spoke of the counsel for the
accused as "the gentleman on the other side." Juries were packed by
the sheriffs with Protestants, by whom all Orangemen were acquitted,
all Catholics condemned, and the credit of the law lowered for both by
a system which made the juryman a tool and the prisoner a victim. It
is strange that no honest man should have protested against such a use
of his person and his creed. In the case of O'Connell the Chief
Justice of England stated that the practice if not remedied must
render trial by jury "a mockery, a delusion, and a snare"; but
jury-packing with safe men remained the invariable custom till 1906.
Nothing but evil to Ireland followed from carrying her affairs to an
English parliament. The government refused the promised emancipation,
refused tithe reform. Englishmen could not understand Irish
conditions. The political economy they advocated for their own country
had no relation to Ireland. The Irish members found themselves, as
English officials had foretold in advocating the Union, a minority
wholly without influence. Session after session, one complained,
measures supported by Irish members, which would have been hailed with
enthusiasm by an Irish parliament, were rejected by the English.
Session after session measures vehemently resisted by the Irish
members were forced on a reluctant nation by English majorities. When
Ireland asked to be governed by the same laws as England, she was told
the two countries were different and required different treatment.
When she asked for any deviation from the English system, she was told
that she must bow to the established laws and customs of Great
Britain. The reports of royal commissions fell dead--such as that
which in 1845 reported that the sufferings of the Irish, borne with
exemplary patience, were greater than the people of any other country
in Europe had to sustain. Nothing was done. Instead of the impartial
calm promised at the Union, Ireland was made the battle-cry of English
parties; and questions that concerned her life or death were important
at Westminster as they served the exigencies of the government or the
opposition.
All the dangers of the Union were increased by its effect in drawing
Irish landlords to London. Their rents followed them, and the wealth
spent by absentees founded no industries at home. A land system
brought about by confiscation, and developed by absentees, meant
unreclaimed wastes, lands half cultivated, and neglected people.
Landlords, said an indignant judge of wide experience in a charge to a
jury in 1814, should build their tenants houses, and give them at
least what they had not as yet, "the comforts of an English sow." To
pay rent and taxes in England the toilers raised stores of corn and
cattle for export there, from the value of eight million pounds in
1826 to seventeen million pounds of food stuffs in 1848, and so on.
They grew potatoes to feed themselves. If the price of corn fell
prodigiously--as at the end of the Napoleonic war, or at the passing
of the corn laws in England--the cheaper bread was no help to the
peasants, most of whom could never afford to eat it; it only doubled
their labour to send out greater shiploads of provisions for the
charges due in England. On the other hand, if potatoes rotted, famine
swept over the country among its fields of corn and cattle. And when
rent failed, summary powers of eviction were given at Westminster
under English theories for use in Ireland alone; "and if anyone would
defend his farm it is here denominated rebellion." Families were flung
on the bogs and mountain sides to live on wild turnips and nettles, to
gather chickweed, sorrel, and seaweed, and to sink under the fevers
that followed vagrancy, starvation, cold, and above all the broken
hearts of men hunted from their homes. In famine time the people to
save themselves from death were occasionally compelled to use blood
taken from live bullocks, boiled up with a little oatmeal; and the
appalling sight was seen of feeble women gliding across the country
with their pitchers, actually trampling upon fertility and fatness, to
collect in the corner of a grazier's farm for their little portion of
blood. Five times between 1822 and 1837 there were famines of lesser
degree: but two others, 1817 and 1847, were noted as among the
half-dozen most terrible recorded in Europe and Asia during the
century. From 1846 to 1848 over a million lay dead of hunger, while in
a year food-stuffs for seventeen million pounds were sent to England.
English soldiers guarded from the starving the fields of corn and the
waggons that carried it to the ports; herds of cattle were shipped,
and skins of asses which had served the famishing for food. New
evictions on an enormous scale followed the famine, the clearance of
what was then called in the phrase of current English economics "the
surplus population," "the overstock tenantry." They died, or fled in
hosts to America--Ireland pouring out on the one side her great stores
or "surplus food," on the other her "surplus people," for whom there
was nothing to eat. In the twenty years that followed the men and
women who had fled to America sent back some thirteen millions to keep
a roof over the heads of the old and the children they had left
behind. It was a tribute for the landlords' pockets--a rent which
could never have been paid from the land they leased. The loans raised
for expenditure on the Irish famine were charged by England on the
Irish taxes for repayment.
No Irish parliament, no matter what its constitution, could have
allowed the country to drift into such irretrievable ruin. O'Connell
constantly protested that rather than the Union he would have the old
Protestant parliament. "Any body would serve if only it is in
Ireland," cried a leading Catholic nationalist in Parnell's time; "the
Protestant synod would do." In the despair of Ireland, the way was
flung open to public agitation, and to private law which could only
wield the weapons of the outlaw. All methods were tried to reach the
distant inattention of England. There were savage outbursts of men
often starving and homeless, always on the edge of famine--Levellers,
Threshers, and the like; or Whiteboys who were in fact a vast trades
union for the protection of the Irish peasantry, to bring some order
and equity into relations of landlord and tenant. Peaceful
organisation was tried; the Catholic Association for Emancipation
founded by O'Connell in 1823, an open society into which Protestants
and Catholics alike were welcomed, kept the peace in Ireland for five
years; outrage ceased with its establishment and revived with its
destruction. His Association for Repeal (1832-1844) again lifted the
people from lawless insurrection to the disciplined enthusiasm of
citizens for justice. A Young Ireland movement (1842-1848) under
honoured names such as Thomas Davis and John Mitchel and Gavan Duffy
and Smith O'Brien and others with them, sought to destroy sectarian
divisions, to spread a new literature, to recover Irish history, and
to win self-government, land reform, and education for a united people
of Irish and English, Protestant and Catholic. The suppression of
O'Connell's peaceful movement by the government forced on violent
counsels; and ended in the rising of Smith O'Brien as the only means
left him of calling attention to the state of the country. The
disturbances that followed have left their mark in the loop-holed
police barracks that covered Ireland. There was a Tenant League (1852)
and a North and South League. All else failing, a national physical
force party was formed; for its name this organization went back to
the dawn of Irish historic life--to the Fiana, those Fenian national
militia vowed to guard the shores of Ireland. The Fenians (1865)
resisted outrage, checked agrarian crime, and sought to win
self-government by preparing for open war. A great constitutionalist
and sincere Protestant, Isaac Butt, led a peaceful parliamentary
movement for Home Rule (1870-1877); after him Charles Stewart Parnell
fought in the same cause for fourteen years (1877-1891) and died with
victory almost in sight. Michael Davitt, following the advice of Lalor
thirty years before, founded a Land League (1879) to be inevitably
merged in the wider national issue. Wave after wave of agitation
passed over the island. The manner of the national struggle changed,
peaceful or violent, led by Protestant or Catholic, by men of English
blood or of Gaelic, but behind all change lay the fixed purpose of
Irish self-government. For thirty-five years after the Union Ireland
was ruled for three years out of every four by laws giving
extraordinary powers to the government; and in the next fifty years
(1835-1885) there were only three without coercion acts and crime
acts. By such contrasts of law in the two countries the Union made a
deep severance between the islands.
In these conflicts there was not now, as there had never been in their
history, a religious war on the part of Irishmen. The oppressed people
were of one creed, and the administration of the other. Protestant
and Catholic had come to mean ejector and ejected, the armed Orangeman
and the disarmed peasant, the agent-or clergy-magistrate and the
broken tenant before his too partial judgment-seat. In all cases where
conflicting classes are divided into two creeds, religious incidents
will crop up, or will be forced up, to embitter the situation; but the
Irish struggle was never a religious war.
Another distinction must be noted. Though Ireland was driven to the
"worst form of civil convulsion, a war for the means of subsistence,"
there was more Irish than the battle for food. Those who have seen the
piled up graves round the earth where the first Irish saints were
laid, will know that the Irishman, steeped in his national history,
had in his heart not his potato plot alone, but the thought of the
home of his fathers, and in the phrase of Irish saints, "the place of
his resurrection."
If we consider the state of the poor, and the position of the millions
of Irishmen who had been long shut out from any share in public
affairs, and forbidden to form popular conventions, we must watch
with amazement the upspringing under O'Connell of the old idea of
national self-government. Deep in their hearts lay the memory carried
down by bards and historians of a nation whose law had been maintained
in assemblies of a willing people. In O'Connell the Irish found a
leader who had like themselves inherited the sense of the old Irish
tradition. To escape English laws against gatherings and conventions
of the Irish, O'Connell's associations had to be almost formless, and
perpetually shifting in manner and in name. His methods would have
been wholly impossible without a rare intelligence in the peasantry.
Local gatherings conducted by voluntary groups over the country;
conciliation courts where justice was carried out apart from the
ordinary courts as a protest against their corruption; monster
meetings organised without the slightest disorder; voluntary
suppression of crime and outrage--in these we may see not merely an
astonishing popular intelligence, but the presence of an ancient
tradition. At the first election in which the people resisted the
right of landlords to dictate their vote (1826), a procession miles
in length streamed into Waterford in military array and unbroken
tranquillity. They allowed no rioting, and kept their vow of total
abstinence from whisky during the election. A like public virtue was
shown in the Clare election two years later (1828) when 30,000 men
camped in Ennis for a week, with milk and potatoes distributed to them
by their priests, all spirits renounced, and the peace not broken once
throughout the week. As O'Connell drew towards Limerick and reached
the Stone where the broken Treaty had been signed, 50,000 men sent up
their shout of victory at this peaceful redeeming of the violated
pledges of 1690. In the Repeal meetings two to four hundred thousand
men assembled, at Tara and other places whose fame was in the heart of
every Irishman there, and the spirit of the nation was shown by a
gravity and order which allowed not a single outrage. National hope
and duty stirred the two millions who in the crusade of Father Mathew
took the vow of temperance.
In the whole of Irish history no time brought such calamity to Ireland
as the Victorian age. "I leave Ireland," said one, "like a corpse on
the dissecting table." "The Celts are gone," said Englishmen, seeing
the endless and disastrous emigration. "The Irish are gone, and gone
with a vengeance." That such people should carry their interminable
discontent to some far place seemed to end the trouble. "Now for the
first time these six hundred years," said _The Times_, "England has
Ireland at her mercy, and can deal with her as she pleases." But from
this death Ireland rose again. Thirty years after O'Connell Parnell
took up his work. He used the whole force of the Land League founded
by Davitt to relieve distress and fight for the tenants' rights; but
he used the land agitation to strengthen the National movement. He
made his meaning clear. What did it matter, he said, who had
possession of a few acres, if there was no National spirit to save the
country; he would never have taken off his coat for anything less than
to make a nation. In his fight he held the people as no other man had
done, not even O'Connell. The conflict was steeped in passion. In 1881
the government asked for an act giving them power to arrest without
trial all Irishmen suspected of illegal projects--a power beyond all
coercion hitherto. O'Connell had opposed a coercion act in 1833 for
nineteen nights; Parnell in 1881 fought for thirty-two nights.
Parliament had become the keeper of Irish tyrannies, not of her
liberties, and its conventional forms were less dear to Irishmen than
the freedom of which it should be the guardian. He was suspended, with
thirty-four Irish members, and 303 votes against 46 carried a bill by
which over a thousand Irishmen were imprisoned at the mere will of the
Castle, among them Parnell himself. The passion of rage reached its
extreme height with the publication in _The Times_ (1888) of a
facsimile letter from Parnell, to prove his consent to a paid system
of murder and outrage. A special commission found it to be a forgery.
With the rejection of Gladstone's Home Rule bills in 1886 and 1893,
and with the death of Parnell (1891), Irish nationalists were thrown
into different camps as to the means to pursue, but they never
faltered in the main purpose. That remains as firm as in the times of
O'Connell, Thomas Davis, John O'Leary, and Parnell, and rises once
more to-day as the fixed unchanging demand, while the whole Irish
people, laying aside agitations and controversies, stand waiting to
hear the end.
The national movement had another side, the bringing back of the
people to the land. The English parliament took up the question under
pressure of violent agitation in Ireland. By a series of Acts the
people were assured of fair rents and security from eviction. Verdicts
of judicial bodies tended to prove that peasants were paying 60 per
cent. above the actual value of the land. But the great Act of 1903--a
work inspired by an Irishman's intellect and heart--brought the final
solution, enabling the great mass of the tenants to buy their land by
instalments. Thus the land war of seven hundred years, the war of
kings and parliaments and planters, was brought to a dramatic close,
and the soil of Ireland begins again to belong to her people.
There was yet another stirring of the national idea. In its darkest
days the country had remained true to the old Irish spirit of
learning, that fountain of the nation's life. In O'Connell's time the
"poor scholar" who took his journey to "the Munster schools" was sent
out with offerings laid on the parish altars by Protestants and
Catholics alike; as he trudged with his bag of books and the fees for
the master sewn in the cuff of his coat, he was welcomed in every
farm, and given of the best in the famishing hovels: "The Lord prosper
him, and every one that has the heart set upon the learning." Bards
and harpers and dancers wandered among the cottages. A famous bard
Raftery, playing at a dance heard one ask, "Who is the musician?" and
the blind fiddler answered him:
"I am Raftery the poet,
Full of hope and love,
With eyes that have no light,
With gentleness that has no misery.
Going west upon my pilgrimage,
Guided by the light of my heart,
Feeble and tired,
To the end of my road.
Behold me now,
With my face to a wall,
A-playing music
To empty pockets."
Unknown scribes still copied piously the national records. A Louth
schoolmaster could tell all the stars and constellations of heaven
under the old Irish forms and names. A vision is given to us through a
government Ordnance Survey of the fire of zeal, the hunger of
knowledge, among the tillers and the tenants. In 1817 a dying farmer
in Kilkenny repeated several times to his sons his descent back to the
wars of 1641 and behind that to a king of Munster in 210
A.D.--directing the eldest never to forget it. This son took his
brother, John O'Donovan, (1809-1861) to study in Dublin; in Kilkenny
farmhouses he learned the old language and history of his race. At the
same time another Irish boy, Eugene O'Curry (1796-1862), of the same
old Munster stock, working on his father's farm in great poverty,
learned from him much knowledge of Irish literature and music. The
Ordnance Survey, the first peripatetic university Ireland had seen
since the wanderings of her ancient scholars, gave to O'Donovan and
O'Curry their opportunity, where they could meet learned men, and use
their hereditary knowledge. A mass of material was laid up by their
help. Passionate interest was shown by the people in the memorials of
their ancient life--giants' rings, cairns, and mighty graves, the
twenty-nine thousand mounds or moats that have been counted, the raths
of their saints and scholars--each with its story living on the lips
of the people till the great famine and the death or emigration of the
people broke that long tradition of the race. The cry arose that the
survey was pandering to the national spirit. It was suddenly closed
(1837), the men dismissed, no materials published, the documents
locked up in government offices. But for O'Donovan and O'Curry what
prodigies of work remained. Once more the death of hope seemed to call
out the pieties of the Irish scholar for his race, the fury of his
intellectual zeal, the passion of his inheritance of learning. In the
blackest days perhaps of all Irish history O'Donovan took up Michael
O'Clery's work of two hundred years before, the Annals of the Four
Masters, added to his manuscript the mass of his own learning, and
gave to his people this priceless record of their country (1856).
Among a number of works that cannot be counted here, he made a
Dictionary which recalls the old pride of Irishmen in their language.
O'Curry brought from his humble training an incredible industry,
great stores of ancient lore, and an amazing and delicate skill as a
scribe. All modern historians have dug in the mine of these men's
work. They open to Anglo-Irish scholars such as Dr. Reeves and Dr.
Todd, a new world of Irish history. Sir Samuel Ferguson began in 1833
to give to readers of English the stories of Ireland. George Petrie
collected Irish music through all the west, over a thousand airs, and
worked at Irish inscriptions and crosses and round towers. Lord
Dunraven studied architecture, and is said to have visited every
barony in Ireland and nearly every island on the coast.
These men were nearly all Protestants; they were all patriots. Potent
Irish influences could have stirred a resident gentry and resident
parliament with a just pride in the great memorials of an Ireland not
dead but still living in the people's heart. The failure of the hope
was not the least of the evils of the Union. The drift of landlords to
London had broken a national sympathy between them and the people,
which had been steadily growing through the eighteenth century. Their
sons no longer learned Irish, nor heard the songs and stories of the
past. The brief tale of the ordnance survey has given us a measure of
the intelligence that had been wasted or destroyed by neglect in
Ireland. Archbishop Whately proposed to use the new national schools
so as to make this destruction systematic, and to put an end to
national traditions. The child who knew only Irish was given a teacher
who knew nothing but English; his history book mentioned Ireland
_twice_ only--a place conquered by Henry II., and made into an English
province by the Union. The quotation "This is my own, my native land,"
was struck out of the reading-book as pernicious, and the Irish boy
was taught to thank God for being "a happy English child." A Connacht
peasant lately summed up the story: "I suppose the Famine and the
National Schools took the heart out of the people." In fact famine and
emigration made the first great break in the Irish tradition that had
been the dignity and consolation of the peasantry; the schools
completed the ruin. In these, under English influence, the map of
Ireland has been rolled up, and silence has fallen on her heroes.
Even out of this deep there came a revival. Whitley Stokes published
his first Irish work the year after O'Curry's death; and has been
followed by a succession of laborious students. Through a School of
Irish Learning Dublin is becoming a national centre of true Irish
scholarship, and may hope to be the leader of the world in this great
branch of study. The popular Irish movement manifested itself in the
Gaelic League, whose branches now cover all Ireland, and which has
been the greatest educator of the people since the time of Thomas
Davis. Voluntary colleges have sprung up in every province, where
earnest students learn the language, history, and music of their
country; and on a fine day teacher and scholars gathered in the open
air under a hedge recall the ancient Irish schools where brehon or
chronicler led his pupils under a tree. A new spirit of self-respect,
intelligence, and public duty has followed the work of the Gaelic
League; it has united Catholic and Protestant, landlord and peasant.
And through all creeds and classes a desire has quickened men to
serve their country in its social and industrial life; and by
Agricultural Societies, and Industrial Development Societies, to
awaken again her trade and manufactures.
The story is unfinished. Once again we stand at the close of another
experiment of England in the government of Ireland. Each of them has
been founded on the idea of English interests; each has lasted about a
hundred years--"Tudor conquest," Plantations, an English parliament, a
Union parliament. All alike have ended in a disordered finance and a
flight of the people from the land.
Grattan foretold the failure of the Union and its cause. "As Ireland,"
he said, "is necessary to Great Britain, so is complete and perfect
liberty necessary to Ireland, and both islands must be drawn much
closer to a free constitution, that they may be drawn closer to one
another." In England we have seen the advance to that freer
constitution. The democracy has entered into larger liberties, and has
brought new ideals. The growth of that popular life has been greatly
advanced by the faith of Ireland. Ever since Irish members helped to
carry the Reform Acts they have been on the side of liberty, humanity,
peace, and justice. They have been the most steadfast believers in
constitutional law against privilege, and its most unswerving
defenders. At Westminster they have always stood for human rights, as
nobler even than rights of property. What Chatham foresaw has come
true: the Irish in the English parliament have been powerful
missionaries of democracy. A freedom-loving Ireland has been
conquering her conquerors in the best sense.
The changes of the last century have deeply affected men's minds. The
broadening liberties of England as a free country, the democratic
movements that have brought new classes into government, the wider
experience of imperial methods, the growing influence of men of
good-will, have tended to change her outlook to Ireland. In the last
generation she has been forced to think more gravely of Irish
problems. She has pledged her credit to close the land question and
create a peasant proprietary. With any knowledge of Irish history the
religious alarm, the last cry of prejudice, must inevitably disappear.
The old notion of Ireland as the "property" of England, and of its
exploitation for the advantage of England, is falling into the past.
A mighty spirit of freedom too has passed over the great Colonies and
Dominions. They since their beginning have given shelter to outlawed
Irishmen flying from despair at home. They have won their own pride of
freedom, and have all formally proclaimed their judgment that Ireland
should be allowed the right to shape her own government. The United
States, who owe so much to Irishmen in their battle for independence,
and in the labours of their rising prosperity, have supported the
cause of Ireland for the last hundred years; ever since the first
important meeting in New York to express American sympathy with
Ireland was held in 1825, when President Jackson, of Irish origin, a
Protestant, is said to have promised the first thousand dollars to the
Irish emancipation fund.
In Ireland itself we see a people that has now been given some first
opportunities of self-dependence and discipline under the new
conditions of land ownership and of county government. We see too the
breaking up of the old solid Unionist phalanx, the dying down of
ancient fears, the decaying of old habits of dependence on military
help from England, and a promise of revival of the large statesmanship
that adorned the days of Kildare and of Grattan. It is singular to
reflect that on the side of foreign domination, through seven hundred
years of invasion and occupation, not a single man, Norman or English,
warrior or statesman, has stood out as a hero to leave his name, even
in England, on the lips or in the hearts of men. The people who were
defending their homes and liberties had their heroes, men of every
creed and of every blood, Gaelic, Norman, English, Anglican, Catholic,
and Presbyterian. Against the stormy back-ground of those prodigious
conflicts, those immeasurable sorrows, those thousand sites
consecrated by great deeds, lofty figures emerge whom the people have
exalted with the poetry of their souls, and crowned with love and
gratitude--the first martyr for Ireland of "the foreigners" Earl
Thomas of Desmond, the soul of another Desmond wailing in the Atlantic
winds, Kildare riding from his tomb on the horse with the silver
shoes, Bishop Bedell, Owen Roe and Hugh O'Neill, Red Hugh O'Donnell,
Sarsfield, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Robert Emmett, O'Connell, Davis,
Parnell--men of peace and men of war, but all lovers of a free nation.
In memory of the long, the hospitable roll of their patriots, in
memory of their long fidelities, in memory of their national faith,
and of their story of honour and of suffering, the people of Ireland
once more claim a government of their own in their native land, that
shall bind together the whole nation of all that live on Irish soil,
and create for all a common obligation and a common prosperity. An
Irish nation of a double race will not fear to look back on Irish
history. The tradition of that soil, so steeped in human passion, in
joy and sorrow, still rises from the earth. It lives in the hearts of
men who see in Ireland a ground made sacred by the rare intensity of
human life over every inch of it, one of the richest possessions that
has ever been bequeathed by the people of any land whatever to the
successors and inheritors of their name. The tradition of national
life created by the Irish has ever been a link of fellowship between
classes, races, and religions. The natural union approaches of the
Irish Nation--the union of all her children that are born under the
breadth of her skies, fed by the fatness of her fields, and nourished
by the civilisation of her dead.
SOME IRISH WRITERS ON IRISH HISTORY
JOYCE, P.W.--Social History of Ancient Ireland. 2 vols. 1903.
This book gives a general survey of the old Irish
civilisation, pagan and Christian, apart from political
history.
FERGUSON, SIR SAMUEL.--Hibernian Nights' Entertainments. 1906.
These small volumes of stories are interesting as the effort of
Sir S. Ferguson to give to the youth of his time an impression
of the heroic character of their history.
GREEN, A.S.--The Making of Ireland and its Undoing (1200-1600).
1909. An attempt is here made to bring together evidence, some
of it unused before, of the activity of commerce and
manufactures, and of learning, that prevailed in mediaeval
Ireland, until the destruction of the Tudor wars.
MITCHELL, JOHN.--Life and Times of Aodh O'Neill. 1868. A small
book which gives a vivid picture of a great Irish hero, and of
the later Elizabethan wars.
TAYLOR, J.F.--Owen Roe O'Neill. 1904. This small book is the best
account of a very great Irishman; and gives the causes of the
Irish insurrection in 1641, and the war to 1650.
DAVIS, THOMAS.--The Patriot Parliament of 1689. 1893. A brief but
important study of this Parliament. It illustrates the Irish
spirit of tolerance in 1689, 1843, and 1893.
BAGWELL, RICHARD.--Ireland under the Tudors and the Stuarts. 5
vols. 1885, 1910. A detailed account is given of the English
policy from 1509 to 1660, from the point of view of the English
settlement, among a people regarded as inferior, devoid of
organisation or civilisation.
MURRAY, A.E.--Commercial Relations between England and Ireland.
1903. A useful study is made here of the economic condition of
Ireland from 1641, under the legislation of the English
Parliament, the Irish Parliament, and the Union Parliament.
LECKY, W.E.H.--History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century. 5
vols. 1892. The study of the independent Parliament in Ireland
is the most original work of this historian, and a contribution
of the utmost importance to Irish history. Mr. Lecky did not
make any special study of the Catholic peasantry.
Two Centuries of Irish History (1691-1870). Introduction by JAMES
BRYCE. 1907. These essays, mostly by Irishmen, give in a
convenient form the outlines of the history of the time. There
is a brief account of O'Connell.
O'BRIEN, R. BARRY.--Life of Charles Stewart Parnell. 1898. 2 vols.
This gives the best account of the struggle for Home Rule and
the land agitation in the last half of the nineteenth century.
D'ALTON, E.A.--History of Ireland (1903-1910). 3 vols. This is the
latest complete history of Ireland.
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End of Project Gutenberg's Irish Nationality, by Alice Stopford Green