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_MODERN IRELAND IN THE MAKING_
THE EVOLUTION OF
SINN FEIN
BY
ROBERT MITCHELL HENRY
DUBLIN LONDON
THE TALBOT PRESS T. FISHER UNWIN
(LIMITED) (LIMITED)
89 TALBOT STREET 1 ADELPHI TERRACE
1920
CONTENTS
Page
INTRODUCTORY 1
IRISH NATIONALISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 16
SINN FEIN 39
THE EARLY YEARS OF SINN FEIN 71
SINN FEIN AND THE REPUBLICANS 88
THE VOLUNTEER MOVEMENT 106
ULSTER AND NATIONALIST IRELAND 128
SINN FEIN, 1914-1916 158
AFTER THE RISING 213
CONCLUSION 279
THE EVOLUTION OF SINN FEIN
INTRODUCTORY.
It is almost a commonplace of the political moralists that every failure
on the part of England to satisfy the moderate and constitutional demands
of the Irish people for reform has been followed invariably by a
deplorable outbreak of "extremist" activities in Ireland. Unfortunately
for the moral, that constitutional demands should therefore be promptly
and fully conceded, the statement is almost exactly the reverse of the
truth, if Irish history as a whole be taken as the field for induction.
The Irish Nation cannot be said to have at any period abandoned its claim
to independence. Of the meaning of that claim there was no question from
the Conquest to the fall of Limerick. The whole of that period is occupied
by a long struggle between the English and the Irish peoples for the
effective possession of the island. On neither side was there any
misapprehension of the meaning and object of the contest. The English
Government, whether it employed naked force, intrigue or legal fiction,
aimed (and was understood to aim) at the moral, material and political
subjugation of the Irish: the Irish, whether they fought in the field or
intrigued in the cabinets of Europe, whether allied with France or with
Spain or English royalists, had but one object, the assertion of their
national independence. It was a struggle not merely between two nations
but between two civilizations. Men of English blood who were absorbed by
the Irish nation and who accepted the Irish civilization fought as stoutly
for the independence of their adopted (and adopting) country as did the
descendants of the Milesians. England could never count on the fidelity to
her ideals and policy in Ireland of the second generation of her own
settlers. History cannot produce another instance of a struggle so
prolonged and so pertinacious. Whole counties, stripped by fire and sword
of their aboriginal owners were repeopled within two or three generations
and renewed the struggle. But superior numbers and organization, a more
fortunate star and (it seemed) the designs of Providence, prevailed in the
end; and with the fall of Limerick England might have regarded her task as
at last accomplished. The Irish Nation was prostrate, and chains were
forged for it which, heavier and more galling than any forged for any
nation before, seemed to offer a perpetual guarantee of slavery, misery
and degradation. Ireland was henceforth to be administered as a kind of
convict settlement. The law, in the words of a famous judgment, did not
presume the existence of such a person as a Catholic Irishman; that is to
say, two-thirds of the inhabitants of the country had no legal existence.
Legal existence was the privilege of Protestant Englishmen living in
Ireland and of such Protestant Irishmen as claimed it. But legal existence
in Ireland during the eighteenth century was no prize to be grasped at.
The mere fact of residence in Ireland entailed practical disabilities for
which no mere local ascendancy was an adequate compensation. The
manufactures and trade of Ireland were systematically and ruthlessly
suppressed. Englishmen who settled there found that while they were at
liberty to oppress "the mere Irish" they were subject themselves to a
similar oppression by the English who remained at home. No one might enter
that prison house and remain wholly a man. The "garrison" grumbled,
protested and threatened, but in vain. Constitutionalists appealed to the
policy of the Conquest in support of the independence of the country. It
was argued that the Parliament of Ireland, established by the conquerors
as a symbol of annexation, was and ought to be independent of the
Parliament of England. The claim was held to be baseless and treasonable;
so far from being abandoned or weakened, it was enforced and asserted by
the arms of the Volunteers, and in less than a century after the fall of
Limerick the Renunciation Act of 1783 enacted that the people of Ireland
should be "bound only by laws enacted by his Majesty and the parliament of
that kingdom in all cases whatever."
But while this was independence, it was independence in the sense of
Molyneux, Swift and Grattan, not in the sense in which it had been
understood by Hugh O'Neill. The American colonies went farther and fared
better, and the descendants of the race of Hugh O'Neill had to be reckoned
with still. Their position under the settlement of 1783 was what it had
been since the Treaty of Limerick was broken by the Penal Laws, and all
that they gained at first was an indirect share in the prosperity which
began for the country with the assertion of its legislative independence.
The population increased; trade, commerce and manufactures flourished and
multiplied; the flag of Ireland began once more to creep forth upon the
seas; but the ancient race was still proscribed in the land of its birth.
But while it was in human nature to invent, it was not in human nature to
continue to administer, a code so diabolical as that of the Penal Laws.
The Volunteers who claimed legislative independence of England asserted
the rights of conscience for their fellow-countrymen. Under the free
Parliament a gradual alleviation took place in the lot of Catholics in
Ireland; in 1793 they were admitted to the franchise and there is a
presumption that had the Irish Parliament really been independent the
Penal Laws would have in time been abolished entirely. But the vigilance
of English policy and English Ministers never ceased; their meddling in
the affairs of Ireland was perpetual and mischievous: the rights of the
Irish Parliament were constantly in danger from the interference of
English Ministers who advised their common Monarch and moulded his Irish
policy through the Viceroy and the Executive. It was but a step from the
admission of Catholics to the franchise to their admission to the House of
Commons, but that step was never taken by the Irish Parliament. The
measures of Parliamentary reform pressed upon them by the popular party
both inside and outside Parliament were constantly rejected, partly
through the mere conservatism of privilege partly through the influence of
the English Cabinet. The United Irishmen, whose aim was to establish a
free and equal representation of all Irishmen irrespective of creed,
despaired of obtaining their object by open agitation and, subjected to
repressive enactments, transformed themselves into a secret association
for the overthrow of the existing government and for complete separation
from England as the only method of securing and maintaining the rights of
Ireland. They were the first Irish Republican Party. They appealed for
assistance to the French Directory, but so jealous were they of their
independence that they seem to have jeopardized the prospect of help by
their insistence that the force sent must not be large enough to threaten
the subjugation of the country. The Government, becoming aware of the
conspiracy, took steps at once to foster it and to crush it. Their agents
went through the country, forming United Irish lodges and then denouncing
the members to the authorities. Under pretence of helping the Irish
Government in its difficulties. English regiments were poured into the
country and, when a sufficient force was assembled, open rebellion was
provoked and crushed with a systematic barbarity which is even now hardly
credible.
To understand the Rebellion and the policy of the Union which followed it,
one must go farther back than the last quarter of the eighteenth century.
The fall of Limerick ended (or seemed to end) the struggle for the
military domination of Ireland. Once it was in the effective possession of
England the period of its commercial subjugation began. Every kind of
manufacture which competed with that of England was suppressed: every
branch of commerce which threatened rivalry with that of England was
forbidden. To ensure at once that military resistance might not be renewed
and that commercial subjugation might be endured the policy was adopted
first (to quote Archbishop Boulter) of "filling the great places with
natives of England" and secondly of perpetuating the animosity between
Protestants and Catholics. It was hoped in this way to form "two nations"
out of one and render the task of government and exploitation easier in
consequence. The remarkable power of absorbing foreign settlers shown by
the Irish Nation since before the Conquest was thus to be nullified and
religion pressed into service against humanity. So clearly was this policy
conceived that Archbishop Boulter could write "The worst of this is that
it tends to unite Protestant with Papist and, whenever that happens,
good-bye to the English interests in Ireland forever." But the agents of
the policy overreached themselves. Irish Protestants turned against a
policy which counted the merit of being a Protestant as less than the
demerit of being Irish. Dean Swift won the favour alike of Irish
Protestant and Irish Catholic by his mordant pamphlets against the English
policy in Ireland and may justly be reckoned as on the whole the most
powerful champion of Irish independence in the sense of the eighteenth
century. The Irish agents of the policy of Protestant Ascendancy
overreached themselves too. Official Irish Protestantism bore almost as
hardly upon Presbyterians as upon Papists, and the United Irishmen at the
end of the century found no support in Ireland warmer than that accorded
them by the best of the Ulster Presbyterians. There is little doubt that
the reversal of the commercial ascendancy by the legislation of 1782 was
regarded by the English Ministry as a merely temporary setback, to be
repaired at the earliest convenient opportunity. In any case the valuable
asset of Protestant Ascendancy, with its possibilities of perpetual
friction and disunion among Irishmen, was still in their hands. When the
rise of the United Irishmen threatened even this, the necessity of
recovering the lost ground and the opportunity of doing so were
immediately recognised. The obstinacy with which the Irish Parliament
opposed Parliamentary reform (an obstinacy directly fostered by the
policy of the English Ministry) drove the United Irish movement into
hostility at once to the English connection and to the existing
constitution of Ireland. They could thus be represented as at once a
menace to England and a menace to Ireland, and it was held to be the duty
of both Governments to combine to crush them. They were crushed by English
troops, but the Irish Parliament was crushed with them. Pitt decided that
direct control by the English Ministry must take the place of indirect
control through an Irish Executive, and the Legislative Union was enacted.
There seemed to be no other permanent or ultimate alternative to the
complete independence and separation of England and Ireland.
Much impressive rhetoric has been expended upon the measures taken to
secure that the members of the Irish Parliament should produce a majority
in favour of the Act of Union. They were bribed and intimidated; they were
offered posts and pensions: some of them were bought with hard cash. But
even a Castlereagh must have been aware that if he should suborn a servant
to betray his master the gravamen of the charge against him would not be
that he had corrupted the morals of the servant by offering him a bribe.
Ordinary morality may not apply to politics, but if it does, Pitt and
Castlereagh were guilty of a far greater crime than that of bribing a few
scores of venal Irishmen; and the members of the Irish Parliament who took
their money were guilty not of corruption but of treason. For the Act of
Union was intended to accomplish the destruction of the national
existence. The members of Parliament who voted against it, knew this: the
Irish people who petitioned against it, knew this: Pitt and Castlereagh
knew it: the men they paid to vote for it, knew it too.
The politics of Ireland during the nineteenth century would have been
tangled enough at the best, but the Act of Union introduced a confusion
which has often seemed to make the situation inexplicable to a normal
mind. But, to leave details aside, the main lines of the problem are clear
enough. The Act of Union was designed to end the separate national
existence of Ireland by incorporating its legislative and administrative
machinery with that of England. To secure control to the "Predominant
Partner" (as the incorporating body has since been called) the
representation of Ireland in the Imperial Parliament was fixed at a total
which at the time of the Act was less than half that to which it was
entitled on the basis of the population. While the intention of the
authors of the measure (as their published correspondence makes perfectly
clear) was to subordinate Irish national interests to those of England,
the measure was presented to Parliament as one designed to further the
mutual interests of the two kingdoms. But to Protestant waverers it was
commended in private as a necessary means of securing the Protestant
interest, while to the Catholics hopes were held out that the removal of
the Catholic disabilities maintained by the Protestant ascendancy in
Ireland might be hoped for from the more liberal Parliament in England.
There is no doubt that many Catholics, especially among the nobility and
higher clergy, were induced at least to discourage resistance to the
measure, partly for this reason, partly out of fear of the republican
sympathies and aims of the reforming United Irishmen. The extreme
Protestants, such as the Orangemen who helped to suppress the rebellion,
viewed the measure with a certain suspicion, if not with definite
hostility. They looked forward, now that the rebellion was crushed, to a
prolonged tenure of unchallenged ascendancy. But the bulk of the more
liberal Protestants were against it, and the wiser Catholics. They
foretold the ruin of trade, the burden of increased taxation, the loss of
all real independence and freedom that were bound to, and did, result. But
they were neither consulted nor listened to and the measure was passed
after free speech had been bought over in Parliament and suppressed by
military force outside.
The measure once passed brought about an unnatural shifting of parties in
Ireland. Many of those who had opposed the measure before it became law,
now decided to make the best of what could no longer be prevented. The
orators of the Patriot Party passed over to the English Parliament and
were practically lost to Ireland. The aristocracy who had upheld the Irish
Parliament gravitated towards the new seat of Government and abandoned a
capital deserted by the Parliament of their pride. They sent their
children to be educated in England, and in the second generation they
began to call themselves not Irishmen but Englishmen. The representatives
of both these parties became in time convinced upholders of the Union and
their influence in Ireland was thrown in favour of the maintenance of the
_status quo_. To this "Unionist" party must be added the Orange party who
stood for Protestant ascendancy. Much as they disliked the Union to begin
with they came to see in the end that, unaided, they could not stand for
long against the claim of their Catholic fellow-countrymen for political
equality. The one thing that reconciled them to the Union was its
possibilities in securing the Protestant interest. To this attitude they
have remained faithful ever since, and in the course of the century they
were joined by the majority of the Protestants of Ireland. Ulster, at one
time the chief strength of the United Irishmen, became the headquarters of
extreme and even fanatical support of the Union. Here "the Protestant
interest," carefully fostered as an instrument of English influence in
Ireland, founded its citadel, the rallying point of opposition to "Irish"
claims. After Connaught, the most definitely "Celtic" portion of Ireland
(in spite of the Ulster Plantations), its extreme Protestant sympathies,
carefully fostered by the Protestant clergy into a bigotry that has become
grotesque, converted the dominions of the O'Neills and the O'Donnells into
a desperate and apparently irreconcilable antagonist of Irish national
interests. Besides, Ulster suffered less than the rest of Ireland from the
economic effects of the Union. Though the population of Ulster has been
almost halved as the result of it, the "Ulster custom" saved the tenants
from some of the worst abuses of the land system of the other provinces,
and the prosperity of the linen trade, never endangered by collision with
English interests, did not suffer by the measure; while the greater wealth
of the manufacturing districts made the burden of unfair taxation (which
repressed commercial and industrial enterprise in the rest of Ireland)
less felt than it might have been. A mistaken view of their own interests,
and an equally mistaken view of the real aims of the rest of their
countrymen (a mistake sometimes encouraged by the tactics of their
opponents) converted Protestant Ulster into an attitude which ignorance
has represented as a consciousness of a racial difference between itself
and the rest of Ireland. But even in Ulster there still remain many
Protestant Irishmen to whom the recollection of the days of the United
Irishmen is like the recollection of the Golden Age. Still faithful to the
doctrines of equality, fraternity and freedom they are the last links of
the chain which once bound Ulster to the cause of Ireland.
On the other hand Catholic Ireland as a whole, and especially its leaders,
ecclesiastical and other, viewed the enactment of the legislative Union
with a kind of apathetic despair. Nothing apparently was to be hoped from
the Irish Parliament in the direction of real religious equality or
reform of the franchise: nothing more could be expected from armed
resistance after the signal failure of the rebellion. The country was
occupied by an English army and, whatever they thought, they must think in
silence. Hopes were held out that the Union might bring Catholic
Emancipation, that the Catholic clergy might receive a State subsidy
similar to that given to the Presbyterian ministers. They were to find
that Catholic Emancipation was no more to the taste of England than to
that of the Irish Parliament and that a State subsidy to the Catholic
Church would only be granted at the price which Castlereagh desired the
Presbyterian ministers to pay for the _Regium Donum_. But for the moment
they did nothing and there was nothing that could be done. Entitled to
vote but not to sit in Parliament, but half-emancipated from the bondage,
material and moral, of the Penal Laws, they had no effective weapon at
their disposal within the constitution, and the only other weapon that
they had had broken in their hands. They were forced into a position of
silent and half-hearted protest, and have ever since been at the
disadvantage of having to appear as the disturbers of the existing order.
The hopes held out by the promoters of the Union were not realized without
prolonged and violent agitation, and the cause of Ireland appeared doubly
alien, clothed in the garb of a Church alien to the legislators to whom
appeal was made. That the national cause was first identified with the
claims of Irish Catholics to religious equality is the _damnosa hereditas_
of Irish Nationalism in the nineteenth century. The music of "the Pope's
Brass Band" drowns the voice of orator and poet. The demand that the
nation as a whole should no longer be compelled to support the
establishment of the Church of a minority was represented as a move on the
part of the Roman Curia to cripple Protestantism in the United Kingdom.
The demand for the reform of the worst land system in Europe was looked
upon as a resistance to the constitution inspired by the agents of the
Vatican. The Irish people asks for nothing, but the Pope or the Irish
Catholic hierarchy, working in darkness, is supposed to have put it into
their heads, though the Irish people have taught both Pope and Bishops
many lessons upon the distinction between religious authority and
political dictation.
Thus there gradually developed during the nineteenth century the Unionist
and the Nationalist parties, the former upholding the legislative Union
though not averse (upon pressure) to the concession of administrative
reforms: the latter under many forms claiming in greater or lesser measure
the abolition of the _fons et origo malorum_, the withdrawal from the
people of Ireland of the right to an independent legislature. The historic
claim to complete independence has on many occasions been modified in
theory or abated in practice by the National leaders: but a survey of the
history of Ireland since the Union shows that, with whatever apparent
abatements or disguises the claim may have been pressed, there has always
been deep down the feeling that behind the Union lay the Conquest, the
hope that to repeal the one meant a step upon the road to annul the
other.
IRISH NATIONALISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
The political history of Post-Union Ireland opens with an armed rebellion.
Robert Emmet for an abortive attempt to seize Dublin Castle was condemned
and executed in 1803. His rising was the last effort of the United
Irishmen. Since the Union, and for more than a century after his death,
the country was governed under a species of martial law, and Coercion Acts
were matters of almost annual enactment. The Government could not count on
the steady loyalty of any class of the community. The Orange societies
required to be placated, the Presbyterians to be muzzled, the Catholics to
be suppressed. Castlereagh's administration was a frank recognition of the
fact that Irishmen as a body were hostile to the Union, and that any means
might be employed to keep them quiet. For more than twenty years the
Catholics waited in vain for the fulfilment of the hopes of emancipation
held out at the time of the Union. Meanwhile "the bonds of Empire"
continued to be drawn tighter and tighter. In 1817 the Irish Exchequer,
the belated relic of Ireland's independent existence, was amalgamated with
that of England, and the long history of the financial oppression of the
country began. At last in 1823 Catholic Ireland began the public
agitation of its claims for civil equality with Irish Protestants. The
agitation, justifiable and necessary in itself, natural and dignified had
it taken place in an independent Ireland and had it been of the nature of
an appeal to the justice of their fellow-countrymen, assumed the
inevitable form of an appeal to a foreign legislature for a justice denied
them at home. The Catholic Association founded in 1760 was revived by
Daniel O'Connell and in six years' time, so strong was the feeling
aroused, the English Government yielded, for fear (as the Duke of
Wellington confessed) of a civil war. O'Connell had talked as if he were
ready for anything and the Duke of Wellington seems to have thought that
he meant what he said. It was the first victory for "moral force" and
O'Connell became enamoured of the new weapon. Next year the Tithe War
broke out and ended in 1838 in an incomplete victory, the Tithes, instead
of being abolished, being paid henceforth in money as an addition to the
rent. But before the Tithe War ended, O'Connell (now member for Clare in
the Imperial Parliament) had founded the Constitutional Party by giving
his support to Lord Melbourne's Government. For O'Connell's policy there
was this to be said: that, the Union being an accomplished fact, the only
way to secure legislative benefits for Ireland was through the only means
recognized by the constitution: that, both English parties being equally
indifferent to the special interests of Ireland, it was sound practical
policy to secure by an alliance with one or other, as occasion might
dictate, some special claim upon its consideration and (incidentally) some
hope of appointments to Government positions of Irishmen in sympathy with
the majority in Ireland: that the only alternative was open defiance of
the Constitution and the sacrifice of what otherwise might be gained by
its recognition. Against his policy it could be urged that to employ
constitutional forms was to recognize a constitution repugnant to his
declared convictions; that appeals to the Parliament of the United Kingdom
tended in practice to intensify Irish divisions and to break up the nation
into two groups of litigants pleading before a bar which viewed them with
an indifferent disdain; that in any case success in the appeal would be
the result of accident and circumstance or be dictated by the interests of
English policy. Between these two views of Irish national policy Ireland
has been divided and has wavered ever since.
But O'Connell, having been successful once, seems to have conceived it
possible to be successful always, and he decided to attempt the Repeal of
the Union. It is hard to suppose that he thought this possible by any
means which he was prepared to use. In 1840 he founded the Repeal
Association, and in two years' time he had practically the whole of
Catholic Ireland, and a small but enthusiastic body of Protestants, behind
him. Monster meetings were held all over the country. Repeal Clubs were
founded, recruits pressed in, "moral force," in the form of threats that
"he would either be in his grave or a freeman" within a reasonable time,
was employed by the leader. But when the Government proclaimed the
meeting, announced to be held on Sunday, October the 8th, 1843, at
Clontarf, chosen as the scene of Brian Boroimhe's crowning victory over
the Danes, O'Connell yielded at discretion. No reform, as he proclaimed
afterwards, was worth the shedding of a single drop of human blood; and
Brian's battlefield saw the troops wait all day long for the foe that
never came. Unable to persuade, O'Connell was unprepared to fight, the
enemies of Repeal. But the Repeal Association continued: the Repeal
members of Parliament either were (like O'Connell) arrested and imprisoned
or withdrew from Westminster to deliberate in Ireland upon Committees of
the Repeal Association on matters of national moment. As time went on,
O'Connell (and still more his worthless son, John) gave the Association an
ever-increasing bias towards sectarianism and away from Nationalism. He
fought the "Young Ireland" Party, as Davis, Gavan Duffy, John Mitchel and
their associates were called, who carried on the purely national and
liberal traditions of the United Irishmen, and finally forced them to
secede. Their paper _The Nation_, founded in 1842, was until its
suppression the mouthpiece of the liberal and really National Party. It
voiced in impassioned prose and verse the aspirations of the historic
Irish nation. Its guiding spirit, Thomas Davis, was a member of a
Protestant family in Mallow, and its contributors comprised men of all
creeds, Irish and Anglo-Irish, who looked forward to the revival of Irish
culture, of the Irish language and of an Irish polity in which room would
be found for all sons and daughters of Ireland, free to develop as one of
the family of European nations, released from all outside interference in
national concerns. But Irish divisions, fostered by the Union, fomented by
statecraft and furthered by many Irishmen, grew steadily more pronounced.
Thomas Davis and his friends, at the risk of misunderstanding and
misrepresentation, did their utmost to promote union on the basis of a
common pride in Ireland's past and a common hope for Ireland's future. The
Committees of the Repeal Association worked hard at reports upon Irish
needs and Irish conditions. They promoted the composition and publication
of Repeal Essays pointing to the results of the Union in diminishing
manufactures and in an impoverished national life. They had a temporary
success, and their writings were destined to supply inspiration to their
successors, but they were battling with a running tide. The moderate
people, tired of the struggle, were finding in Federalism a resting place
between conviction and expediency or had made up their minds to accept the
Union. The gradual process of Anglicization went on apace. The
establishment in 1831 of the Board of National Education under the joint
management of Catholic, Protestant and Presbyterian dignitaries was, in
spite of much opposition, making sure headway. It was destined to destroy
for all practical purposes the Gaelic language which till then had been in
common use in all parts of Ireland. It proscribed Irish history and Irish
patriotic poetry in its schools. It was seized upon by ecclesiastics of
all persuasions and made, in the name of religion, a potent instrument of
a policy of internal division and mistrust. It placed education, with all
its possibilities of national culture and national union, in the hands of
a Board definitely anti-national in its outlook, working through
instruments to whom sectarian prejudices meant more than national welfare.
Had Davis lived he might have done much with his great gifts, his tolerant
spirit and his heroic temper: his death in 1845 was one of the greatest
losses which Ireland suffered during the nineteenth century. O'Connell,
whose later activities had been almost wholly mischievous, died two years
later just as the full horror of the Famine burst upon the country. The
Government which had assumed responsibility for the interests of Ireland,
met this awful visitation with an ineptitude so callous as almost to
justify John Mitchel's fiercest denunciations. While the crops were being
exported from the country over 700,000 persons died of starvation and as
many again by famine fever. When the fever and famine had done their work,
the clearances began. The population fled from the country where there was
nothing left for them or, if they did not fly, they were shipped off by
the landlords to leave room for the development of grazing farms. From
1846 to 1851, one million and a quarter of the population "emigrated," and
in the next nine years they were followed, thanks to the same causes, by
another million and a half. During the same period 373,000 families were
evicted from their holdings to provide room for a handful of graziers.
The Famine and its consequences seemed a final proof of the failure of the
English Government to preserve the elementary interests of Ireland, and a
section of the Young Irelanders could see no other remedy than an appeal
to force, if they were to regain independence and keep Ireland from
destruction. John Mitchel seceded from _The Nation_ and founded _The
United Irishman_, in which week after week with extraordinary eloquence
and courage he advocated the policy of resistance. He advised the
peasantry to procure arms, to manufacture pikes, if nothing better could
be had, to resist the official searches for arms (for a stringent Coercion
Act had been one of the weapons with which the Government combatted the
Famine) and to refuse to allow food to leave the country. He appealed in a
series of letters to the Protestant farmers of Ulster to help Ireland as
they had helped before in the days of the United Irishmen. Had all the
leaders of the Young Ireland Party possessed the spirit of Mitchel, and
had any of them known how to organize a rebellion, they would not have
lacked a very formidable following. But Mitchel was arrested, sentenced
and transported before anything was done and the actual outbreak under
Smith O'Brien and Meagher was doomed to failure from the outset.
Mitchel had advanced far beyond "moral force" and the Repeal of the Union.
He had definitely renounced the idea of arguing the Union out of
existence: he regarded no policy as either practicable or manly which did
not begin and end in the assertion that Ireland was a free country and was
prepared to adopt any and every means to put her freedom into practice.
Like all the Young Irelanders, he had begun his political life as a
Repealer and a follower of O'Connell; he had appealed to the Irish gentry
to act again as they had acted in 1782. But Irish history since the Union
and especially the experiences of the Famine years (there had been several
partial famines before 1846) was making some serious thinkers very
sceptical of a political solution which left one of the main factors of
politics out of account. The man who saw the defects of the Repeal
solution and exposed them most trenchantly and convincingly was James
Fintan Lalor. In a series of letters and articles written for _The Nation_
and for the _Irish Felon_ he expounded a theory of nationality which went
to the very roots of political facts. His policy was not Repeal; "I will
never," he said, "contribute one shilling or give my name, heart, or hand,
for such an object as the simple repeal by the British Parliament of the
Act of Union." The facts of everyday life in Ireland showed that a new
social system was required, the old having had its day. "There was no
outrise or revolt against it. It was not broken up by violence. It was
borne for ages with beggarly patience, until it perished by the irritation
of God in the order of nature." So long as a system remained in which the
land of Ireland was not in possession of the people of Ireland, no repeal
or other measure purely political would avail. If the landlords were to
remain (and Lalor had no desire to expel them if they were willing to
submit to the paramount right of the nation) they must accept their titles
to whatever rights should be theirs from the Irish nation and the Irish
nation only. "The principle I state, and mean to stand upon, is this" (he
wrote) "that the entire ownership of Ireland, moral and material, up to
the sun and down to the centre, is vested of right in the people of
Ireland; that they, and none but they, are the landowners and lawmakers of
this island; that all laws are null and void not, made by them, and all
titles to land invalid not conferred and confirmed by them; and that this
full right of ownership may and ought to be asserted and enforced by any
and all means which God has put in the power of man." The coming of the
lean years culminating in the Famine had taught Lalor the overwhelming
importance of the question: "A revolution is beginning to begin which will
leave Ireland _without a people_ unless it be met and conquered by a
revolution which will leave it without landlords." Failure to observe (or
to see the importance of) the land question had led to the defeat of
Mitchel and Smith O'Brien. "They wanted an alliance with the landowners.
They chose to consider them as Irishmen, and imagined they could induce
them to hoist the green flag. They wished to preserve an Aristocracy. They
desired, not a democratic, but merely a national revolution. Who imputes
blame to them for this? Whoever does so will not have me to join him. I
have no feeling but one of respect for the motives that caused reluctance
and delay. That delay, however, I consider as a matter of deep regret. Had
the Confederation, in the May or June of '47, thrown heart and mind and
means and might into the movement I pointed out, they would have made it
successful, and settled at once and for ever all quarrels and questions
between us and England." But though Lalor insisted on the importance of
the question of the ownership of the soil and confessed complete
indifference to Repeal, an indifference which he claimed was largely
shared by the people of Ireland (for Repeal, as he said, the Irish wolf
dog "will never bite, but only bark") he was a land reformer, not out of a
lack of interest in political questions, but out of an intense belief in
the realities of politics. He never joined the Repealers, partly because
O'Connell and his following disgusted him; as he says in a letter to Gavan
Duffy: "Before I embarked in the boat I looked at the crew and the
commander; the same boat which you and others mistook in '43 for a war
frigate because she hoisted gaudy colours and that her captain swore
terribly. I knew her at once for a leaky collier-smack, with a craven
crew to man her, and a sworn dastard and a foresworn traitor at the
helm--a fact which you and Young Ireland would seem never to have
discovered until he ordered the boat to be stranded and yourselves to be
set ashore." This language may be unnecessarily vigorous and hurtful but
the judgment is not essentially unjust. But it was not merely disgust
which kept Lalor out of the Repeal ranks. He disbelieved utterly in the
Repeal of the Union as a solution for the Irish question. It was in the
first place impracticable. "You will _NEVER_, in form of law, repeal the
Act of Union. _Never_, while the sun sits in heaven, and the laws of
nature are in action. _Never_, before night goes down on the last day."
What was, however, practicable was to claim the land, refuse to pay rent
for it, and institute a protracted, obstinate and violent resistance to
the attempt on the part of English troops to take it back again. Once the
land was again in the possession of the people of Ireland their ultimate
policy would be clear. "Not the repeal of the Union, then, but the
Conquest--not to disturb or dismantle the Empire, but to abolish it
utterly for ever--not to fall back on '82 but act up to '48--not to resume
or restore an old constitution, but found a new nation and raise up a free
people, and strong as well as free, and secure as well as strong, based on
a peasantry rooted like rocks in the soil of the land--this is my object."
"Not the constitution that Wolfe Tone died to abolish, but the
constitution that Wolfe Tone died to obtain--independence; full and
absolute independence for this island, and for every man within this
island." Lalor knew well enough that this meant fighting in the long run,
but he thought that it was worth fighting for while Repeal of the Union
was not: but who was to lead the fight? Little was to be looked for from
the Repeal leaders, content with "a small Dublin reputation," with neither
the desire nor the talents to lead a nation. His last article in the
_Irish Felon_, written while Smith O'Brien and Meagher were in prison, is
an impassioned appeal for someone to lead a nation that was only waiting
for a man. "Remember this--that somewhere and somehow and by somebody, a
beginning must be made. Who strikes the first blow for Ireland? Who draws
first blood for Ireland? Who wins a wreath that will be green for ever?"
The _perenni fronde corona_ which Lalor promised has not yet been won and
may never be won by the means which Lalor thought of, but the influence of
his writings upon later Irish political thought has been profound. The
Repeal Movement brought out three men of real genius--Davis, Mitchel and
Lalor. Davis was always more than a simple Repealer; his mind took in too
great a range, his knowledge was too wide, his commonsense too great, to
see in Repeal of the Union the ultimate end of Irish political endeavour.
Mitchel abandoned Repeal for Revolution in hot blood and out of a haughty
heart. Lalor had the cool head and the keen eye and the sense of reality
which Mitchel lacked; but though he wrote less and did less and suffered
less, what he lost in immediate reputation he gained in his influence over
a later age and in a wider field.
The situation of Ireland in the years immediately following the Famine was
tragic. On the one side was starvation, impotence, despair. The starvation
might have been, and in any normally governed country would have been,
averted: but Ireland was in the unnatural position of being governed by
outsiders who had absolutely no interest in the country beyond that of
ensuring that it should not govern itself: seeing the remedy for its
misery, but unable to employ it, in the face of an army which not all the
fiery eloquence of Mitchel and Meagher could persuade the starving people
was capable of being defeated by a mob of pikemen, Ireland sank back into
an apathetic and moody despair from which it took many years to recover,
during which the life of the nation almost drained away. On the other side
was the Government, indifferent to the misery of its victim, determined
that nothing, not even the extinction of the race, should alter the fixed
resolve of England to be absolute and sole master in Ireland. The failure
of the Rebellion of '48 was not to the rulers of England a matter
altogether of congratulation. A highly-placed personage, able to gauge
with accuracy the sentiment of the English ruling classes, wrote: "There
are ample means of crushing the rebellion in Ireland and I think it is now
very likely to go off without any contest, which people (and I think with
right) rather regret. The Irish should receive a good lesson or they will
begin again." The awful mortality from famine and pestilence was regarded
with a kind of chastened and reverential gratitude, as an unexpected
interference of Providence for the extirpation of the hated race. In the
then temper of England no revolution had the least chance of sympathy or
success. It would have been crushed, whatever the cost.
But though prostrate, despairing and depleted Ireland still claimed her
rights, though for a few years it seemed as if they had been tacitly
waived. The Repeal agitation died, and its place was taken by the Irish
Tenant League which aimed not at interference with constitutional
arrangements but at the solution of the land question, not in the radical
method advocated by Lalor but by legislation securing certain rights to
the tenant, the claim of the landlord to be owner of the land being left
untouched. Lalor had foretold that on the land question Ulster instead of
being "on the flank" of the rest of Ireland would march with it side by
side: and Gavan Duffy in his League of the North and South went some
length in the way of securing the co-operation of the Northern Tenant
Righters. At the same time the Irish representatives in Parliament formed
the beginning of an Independent Parliamentary Party, holding aloof from
any binding alliance with either English Party but combining at need with
the party most favourable at the moment to Irish claims. But the new
policy proved a failure within three years, partly by the treachery of
members of the party, but chiefly through the inherent hopelessness of the
position of any Irish party then in Parliament. Besides, the Tenant League
had to contend with the masterful personality of Cardinal Cullen, an
ecclesiastic of the Ultramontane School, who spent his life in the
endeavour, temporarily successful, to throw the whole weight of his Church
against the just claims of the nation.
During the abortive attempt at a constitutional policy, the survivors of
the party of Mitchel and Lalor were not idle. It cannot be said that
Ireland had at this time come to recognize the futility of parliamentary
agitation, for it cannot be said to have given it a sufficient trial: but
the results of it had so far been disappointing, and the tradition of
independence was still fresh, and its spirit strong. The new form which
was assumed by the Separatist movement after the failure of '48 was that
known as the Fenian Society, or the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Its
chief organizers, James Stephens, John O'Mahony, John O'Leary and Thos.
Clarke Luby had all been "out" in '48. Stephens and O'Mahony had lived in
Paris till 1850; Stephens then returned to Ireland, gaining his living as
a teacher of French, while O'Mahony went to New York. Both in Ireland and
New York the teaching of the two friends found ready listeners, and an
amazing success. The Irish in America were only too ready to return to
Ireland to overthrow the Government in whose authority they saw the source
of their country's misfortunes and their own exile. On the conclusion of
the American War thousands of Irishmen who had fought under Grant or
Jackson were ready to place their services at the disposal of an Irish
leader. But they found no one of sufficient ability and prestige to lead
them. Smith O'Brien and the other survivors of the Young Ireland Party had
become constitutionalists. John Mitchel, though he went to Paris to act as
treasurer for the Society, refused to take any more active part. O'Mahony
and the Americans wanted to equip and despatch an expedition: James
Stephens, who had undertaken to organize the movement in Ireland, insisted
that American assistance should be confined to money. The money came in
slowly and though Stephens could enrol a revolutionary army he could not
equip it. The Americans too wanted the rising to take place before
Stephens thought the time was ripe, and the consequent quarrel between the
Irish and American leaders was fatal to the chance of success. In any case
little real progress was made until the year 1865, but the work of
preparation went steadily on. The organization in Ireland, which at first
was without a name, the oath of membership being merely an oath of
allegiance to the Irish Republic, was formally inaugurated on St.
Patrick's Day, 1858. In 1859 the Government, becoming alarmed, broke up
the Phoenix Society of Skibbereen, an independent organization, and the
members later on joined the Fenians. All the forces of the Church and the
influence of such recognized leaders as were left were arrayed against
the new organization. Fenians were refused the rites of the Church for
being members of a secret oath-bound society, and at least one member has
left upon record that having to choose between Faith and Country he chose
Country. The Fenians boldly defied Cardinal Cullen and his clerical
agents. The _Irish People_, founded in 1862 under John O'Leary as editor,
took up the Cardinal's challenge and faced consistently and courageously
the question of "the priest in politics." It did incalculable service to
the Fenians by its courage and frankness. In the same year Belfast and
Ulster were brought within the Fenian Circle. By 1865 there were, it was
claimed, 13,000 sworn Fenians in the army, rather more in the militia, and
a good many of the police had joined as well. Stephens judged it time to
prepare for action, but his despatches to the country ordering
preparations to begin fell into the hands of the police. The office of the
_Irish People_ was seized, Habeas Corpus was suspended and the jails were
filled. Stephens himself was arrested some weeks afterwards. After his
escape from Richmond Prison he lay hid for three months in Ireland and
then escaped to France and America. Whether better fortune would have
crowned his work if he had gone on in spite of the arrests is a nice
question. Some at any rate of his followers judged that he had missed his
chance. The subsequent attempt in '67 under American leaders fared no
better; and General Massey, arrested at Limerick Junction, judged it
better to avoid bloodshed by giving full information to the Government.
The Fenian Movement, as it was called, was both in Ireland and America
avowedly republican and separatist from the very first. Stephens wished to
establish one form of government only--an Irish Republic, and he believed
in only one method--that of armed revolution. He refused steadily to have
anything to do with tenant rights or parliamentary parties or tactics.