it becomes hardest, therefore, to see a clear way between contending
statements, which seem to meet and thrust one another, as it were at the
very sword's point. That the sale of parliamentary seats--so shocking to
our reformed eyes--was not regarded in the same light at the date of the
Irish Union is certain, and in questions of ethics contemporary judgment
is the first and most important point to be considered. The sale of a
borough carried with it no more necessary reprobation then than did the
sale of a man, say, in Jamaica or Virginia. Boroughs were bought and
sold in open market, and many of them had a recognized price, so much
for the current session, so much more if in perpetuity. We must try
clearly to realize this, in order to approach the matter fairly, and, as
far as possible, to put the ugly word "bribery" out of our thoughts, at
all events not allow it to carry them beyond the actual facts of the
case. Pitt, there is no question, had resolved to carry his point, but
we have no right to assume that he wished to carry it by corrupt means,
and the fact that those who opposed it were to be indemnified for their
seats no less than those who promoted it, makes so far strongly in
his favour.
On the other hand, the impression which any given transaction leaves
upon the generation which has actually witnessed it is rarely entirely
wrong, and that the impression produced by the carrying of the Irish
Union--almost equally upon its friends and its foes--was, to put it
mildly, unfavourable, few will be disposed to deny. Over and above this
general testimony, we have the actual letters of those who were mainly
instrumental in carrying it into effect, and it is difficult to read
those of Lord Cornwallis without perceiving that he at least regarded
the task as a repellent one, and one which as an honourable man he would
gladly have evaded had evasion been possible. It is true that Lord
Castlereagh, who was associated intimately with him in the enterprise,
shows no such reluctance, but then the relative characters of the two
men prevent that circumstance from having quite as much weight as it
otherwise might.
The fact is that the whole affair is still enveloped in such a hedge of
cross-statement and controversy, that in spite of having been
eighty-seven years before the world, it still needs careful elucidation,
and the last word upon it has certainly not yet been written. To attempt
anything of the sort here would be absurd, so we must be content with
simply following the actual course of events.
[Illustration: MARQUIS CORNWALLIS. (_Engraved by James Stow from an
original drawing by S.D. Koster_.)]
The whole of that memorable summer was spent carrying out the orders of
the Prime Minister. The Lord-Lieu tenant and the Chief Secretary
travelled in person round Ireland to assist in the canvass, and before
the Parliament met again the following January, they were able to report
that they had succeeded. Grattan had been suffering from a severe
illness, and was still almost too ill to appear. He came, however, and
his wonted eloquence rose to the occasion. He appealed in the most
moving and passionate terms against the destruction of the Parliament.
Even then there were some who hoped against hope that it might be saved.
At the division, however, the Government majority was found to be
overwhelming, only a hundred members voting against it. The assent of
the Upper House had already been secured, and was known all along to be
a mere formality. And so the Union was carried.
How far it was or was not desirable at the time; how far it was or was
not indispensable to the safety of both countries; to what extent Pitt
and in a less degree those who acted under him were or were not
blameworthy in the matter--are points which maybe almost indefinitely
discussed. They were not as blameworthy as they are often assumed to
have been, but it is difficult honestly to see how we are to exonerate
them from blame altogether. The theory that the end justifies the means
has never been a favourite with honourable men, and some at least of the
means by which the Union of Great Britain and Ireland was carried would
have left fatal stains upon the noblest cause that ever yet inspired the
breast of man. Early in the last century Ireland through her Parliament
had herself proposed a legislative union, and England had rejected her
appeal. Had it been accomplished then, or had it been brought about in
the same fashion as that which produced the Union between Scotland and
England, it might have been accepted as a boon instead of a curse, and
in any case could have left no such bitter and rankling memories behind
it. It is quite possible, and perfectly logical, for a man to hold that
a Union between the two countries was and is to the advantage of both,
and yet to desire that when it did come about it had been accomplished
in almost any other conceivable way.
[Illustration: CRYPT OF CHRIST CHURCH CATHEDRAL.]
LV.
O'CONNELL AND CATHOLIC EMANCIPATION.
Another century had now dawned, and, like the last, it was heralded in
with great changes in Ireland. More than change, however, is needed for
improvement. "_Plus ça change plus c'est la même chose_" has been said
of French politics, and is at least equally applicable to Irish ones.
The Union had not brought union, and the years which followed it were
certainly no great improvement on those that had preceded them. The
growth of political institution is not so naturally stable in Ireland
that the lopping down of one such institution tended to make the rest
stronger or more healthy. It was a tree that had undoubtedly serious
flaws, and whose growing had not been as perfect as it might have been,
but it had admittedly borne some good fruit, and might have borne better
had it been left alone. Anyhow it was gone, and the history of the next
twenty-nine years is a confused and distracting medley of petty
outbreaks--that in 1803 of which Robert Emmett was the leader being the
most important--and of recurrent acts of repression, out of the
monotonous welter of which one great figure presently rises like a
colossus, till it comes to dominate the whole scene.
[Illustration: ROBERT EMMET. (_From a stipple engraving by J. Heath_.)]
At a meeting of Catholic citizens in Dublin in 1800 to protest against
the Union, Daniel O'Connell, then a young barrister of twenty-six, made
his first public speech, and from that time forward his place as a
leader may be said to have been fixed. A Catholic Association had some
years earlier been formed, and of this he soon became the chief figure,
and his efforts were continually directed towards the relief of his
co-religionists. In 1815 a proposal had been made by the Government that
Catholic Emancipation should be granted, coupled with a power of veto in
the appointment of Catholic bishops, and to this compromise a
considerable Catholic party was favourable. Richard Lalor Sheil--next to
O'Connell by far the ablest and most eloquent advocate for
Emancipation--supported it; even the Pope, Pius VII., declared that he
felt "no hesitation in conceding it." O'Connell, however, opposed it
vehemently, and so worked up public opinion against it that in the end
he carried his point, and it was agreed that no proposal should be
accepted which permitted any external interference with the Catholic
Church of Ireland. This was his first decisive triumph.
O'Connell's buoyancy and indomitable energy imparted much of its own
impulse to a party more dead and dispirited than we who have only known
it in its resuscitated and decidedly dominant state can easily conceive.
In 1823 a new Irish Catholic Association was set on foot, of which he
was the visible life and soul. It is curious to note how little
enthusiasm its proceedings seem at first to have awakened, especially
amongst the priesthood. At a meeting on February 4, 1824, the necessary
quorum of ten members running short, it was only supplied by O'Connell
rushing downstairs to the book-shop over which the association met, and
actually forcing upstairs two priests whom he accidently found there,
and it was by the aid of these unwilling coadjutors that the famous
motion for establishing the "Catholic rent" was carried. No sooner was
this fund established, however, than it was largely subscribed for all
over the country, and in a wonderfully short time the whole priesthood
of Ireland were actively engaged in its service. The sums collected were
to be spent in parliamentary expenses, in the defence of Catholics, and
in the cost of meetings. In 1825 the association was suppressed by Act
of Parliament, but was hardly dead before O'Connell set about the
formation of another, and the defeat of the Beresfords at the election
for Waterford in 1826 was one of the first symptoms which showed where
the rising tide was mounting to.
It was followed two years later by a much more important victory.
Although Catholics were excluded from sitting in Parliament the law
which forbade their doing so did not preclude their being returned as
members, and it had long been thought that policy required the election
of some Catholic, if only that the whole anomaly of the situation might
be brought into the full light of day. An opportunity soon occurred. Mr.
Fitzgerald, the member for Clare, having accepted office as President of
the Board of Trade, he was obliged to appeal to his constituents for
re-election, and O'Connell caught at the suggestion made to him of
contesting the seat. His purpose had hardly been announced before it
created the wildest excitement all over Ireland. The Catholic
Association at once granted £5,000 towards the expenses, and £9,000 more
was easily raised within a week. In every parish in Clare the priests
addressed their parishioners from the altar, appealing to them to be
true to the representative of their faith. After a vehement contest,
victory declared itself unhesitatingly for O'Connell, who was found to
have polled more than a thousand votes over his antagonist.
The months which followed were months of the wildest and most feverish
excitement all over Ireland. O'Connell, though he used his "frank," did
not present himself at the House of Commons. He devoted his whole time
to organizing his co-religionists, who by this time may be said to have
formed one vast army under his direction. In every parish the priests
were his lieutenants. Monster meetings were held in all directions, and
it may without exaggeration be said that hardly a Catholic man escaped
the contagion. So universal a demonstration was felt to be irresistible.
A sudden perception of the necessity for full and unqualified
Emancipation sprang up in England. Even the Duke of Wellington bent his
head before the storm. In the king's speech of February, 1829, a
revision of the Catholic disabilities was advised. The following month
the Catholic Relief Bill was carried through the House of Commons by a
majority of 180, and received the royal assent on the 13th of April.
Thus the victory was won, and won too without a single shackling
condition. It was won, moreover, by the efforts of a single individual,
almost without support, nay, in several cases against the active
opposition of some who had hitherto been its warmest advocates, a fact
for which O'Connell's own violence was undoubtedly largely responsible.
This seems to be the place to attempt an analysis of this extraordinary
man, setting down the good and the evil each in their due proportion.
The task, however, would in truth be impossible. For good or ill his
figure is too massive, and would escape our half inch of canvas were we
to try and set it there. The best description of him compressible in a
few words is Balzac's--"He was the incarnation of an entire people."
Nothing can be truer. Not only was he Irish of the Irish, but Celt of
the Celts, every quality, every characteristic, good, bad, loveable, or
the reverse which belongs to the type being found in him, only on an
immense scale. To the average Irishman of his day he stands as Mont
Blanc might stand were it set down amongst the Magillicuddy Reeks. He
towers, that is to say, above his contemporaries not by inches, but by
the head and shoulders. His aims, hopes, enthusiasms were theirs, but
the effective, controlling power was his alone. He had a great cause,
and he availed himself greatly of it, and to this and to the magnetic
and all but magical influence of his personality, that extraordinary
influence which he for so many years wielded is no doubt due.
[Illustration: DANIEL O'CONNELL, M.P. (_From a pen-and-ink sketch by
Doyle, in the Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum_.)]
Two points must be here set down, since both are of great importance to
the future of Ireland, and for both O'Connell is clearly
responsible--whether we regard them as amongst his merits or the
reverse. He first, and as it has been proved permanently, brought the
priest into politics, with the unavoidable result of accentuating the
religious side of the contest and bringing it into a focus. The
bitterness which three generations of the penal code had engendered
only, in fact, broke out then. The hour of comparative freedom is
often--certainly not alone in Ireland--the hour when the sense of past
oppression first reveals itself in all its intensity, and that biting
consciousness of being under a social ban which grew up in the last
century is hardly even yet extinct there, and certainly was not extinct
in O'Connell's time. Another, and an equally important effect, is also
due to him. He effectually, and as it has proved finally, snapped that
tie of feudal feeling which, if weakened, still undoubtedly existed, and
which was felt towards the landlord of English extraction little less
than towards the few remaining Celtic ones. The failings of the upper
classes of Ireland of his day, and long before his day, there is no need
to extenuate, but it must not in fairness be forgotten that what seems
to our soberer judgment the worst of those failings--their insane
extravagance, their exalted often ludicrously inflated notions of their
own relative importance; their indifference to, sometimes open hostility
to, the law--all were bonds of union and sources of pride to their
dependants rather than the other way. It needed a yet stronger
impulse--that of religious enthusiasm--to break so deeply rooted and
inherent a sentiment. When that spark was kindled every other fell away
before it.
As regards England, unfortunately, the concession of Emancipation was
spoilt not merely by the sense that it was granted to force rather than
to conviction, but even more to the intense bitterness and dislike with
which it was regarded by a large proportion of English Protestants. A
new religious life and a new sense of religious responsibility was
making itself widely felt there. The eighteenth century, with its
easy-going indifferentism, had passed away, and one of the effects of
this new revival was unhappily to reawaken in many conscientious breasts
much of the old and half-extinct horror of Popery, a horror which found
its voice in a language of intolerance and bigotry which at the present
time seems scarcely conceivable.
The years which followed were chiefly marked by a succession of efforts
upon O'Connell's part to procure Repeal. An association which had been
formed by him for this purpose was put down by the Government in 1830,
but the next year it was reformed under a new name, and at the general
election in 1831 forty members were returned pledged to support Repeal.
The condition of Ireland was meanwhile miserable in the extreme. A
furious tithe-war was raging, and many outrages had been committed,
especially against tithe proctors, the class of men who were engaged in
collecting the tax. Ribbon associations and other secret societies too
had been spreading rapidly underground. Of such societies O'Connell was
through life the implacable enemy. The events of 1798 and 1803 had left
an indelible impression on his mind. The "United Irishmen," in his own
words, "taught me that all work for Ireland must be done openly and
above board." The end of the tithe struggle, however, was happily
approaching. In 1838 an Irish Tithes Commutation Act was at last
carried, and a land tax in the form of a permanent rent charge
substituted.
Repeal was now more than ever the question of the hour, and to Repeal
henceforward O'Connell devoted his entire energies. In 1840 the Loyal
National Repeal Association was founded, and a permanent place of
meeting known as Conciliation Hall established for it in Dublin. 1841,
O'Connell had early announced, would be known henceforward as the year
of Repeal, and accordingly he that year left England and went to
Ireland, and devoted himself there to the work of organization. A
succession of monster meetings were held all over the country, the
far-famed one on Tara Hill being, as is credibly asserted, attended by
no less than a quarter of a million of people. Over this vast multitude
gathered together around him the magic tones of the great orator's voice
swept triumphantly; awakening anger, grief, passion, delight, laughter,
tears, at its own pleasure. They were astonishing triumphs, but they
were dearly bought. The position was, in fact, an impossible one to
maintain long. O'Connell had carried the whole mass of the people with
him up to the very brink of the precipice, but how to bring them safely
and successfully down again was more than even he could accomplish.
Resistance he had always steadily denounced, yet every day his own words
seemed to be bringing the inevitable moment of collision nearer and
nearer. The crisis came on October the 5th. A meeting had been summoned
to meet at Clontarf, near Dublin, and on the afternoon of the 4th the
Government suddenly came to the resolution of issuing a proclamation
forbidding it to assemble. The risk was a formidable one for responsible
men to run. Many of the people were already on their way, and only
O'Connell's own rapid and vigorous measures in sending out in all
directions to intercept them hindered the actual shedding of blood.
His prosecution and that of some of his principal adherents was the next
important event. By a Dublin jury he was found guilty, sentenced to two
years imprisonment, and conveyed to prison, still earnestly entreating
the people to remain quiet, an order which they strictly obeyed. The
jury by which he had been condemned was known to be strongly biassed
against him, and an appeal had been forwarded against his sentence to
the House of Lords. So strong there, too, was the feeling against
O'Connell, that little expectation was entertained of its being
favourably received. Greatly to its honour, however, the sentence was
reversed and he was set free. His imprisonment had been of the lightest
and least onerous description conceivable; indeed was ironically
described by Mitchell shortly afterwards as that of a man--"addressed by
bishops, complimented by Americans, bored by deputations, serenaded by
bands, comforted by ladies, half smothered by roses, half drowned in
champagne." The enthusiasm shown at his release was frantic and
delirious. None the less those months in Richmond prison proved the
death-knell of his power. He was an old man by this time; he was already
weakened in health, and that buoyancy which had hitherto carried him
over any and every obstacle never again revived. The "Young Ireland"
party, the members of which had in the first instance been his allies
and lieutenants, had now formed a distinct section, and upon the vital
question of resistance were in fierce hostility to all his most
cherished principles. The state of the country, too, preyed visibly upon
his mind. By 1846 had begun that succession of disastrous seasons which,
by destroying the feeble barrier which stood between the peasant and a
cruel death, brought about a national tragedy, the most terrible perhaps
with which modern Europe has been confronted. This tragedy, though he
did not live to see the whole of it, O'Connell--himself the incarnation
of the people--felt acutely. Deep despondency took hold of him. He
retired, to a great degree, from public life, leaving the conduct of his
organization in the hands of others. Few more tragic positions have been
described or can be conceived than that of this old man--so loved, so
hated, so reverenced, so detested--who had been so audaciously,
triumphantly successful in his day, and round whom the shadows of night
were now gathering so blackly and so swiftly. Despair was tightening its
grip round the hearts of all Irishmen, and it found its strongest hold
upon the heart of the greatest Irishman of his age. Nothing speaks more
eloquently of the total change of situation than the pity and respectful
consideration extended at this time to O'Connell by men who only
recently had exhausted every possibility of vituperation in abuse of the
burly demagogue. In 1847 he resolved to leave Ireland, and to end his
days in Rome. His last public appearance was in the House of Commons,
where an attentive and deeply respectful audience hung upon the
faultering and barely articulate accents which fell from his lips. In a
few deeply moving words he appealed for aid and sympathy for his
suffering countrymen, and left the House; within a few months he had
died at Genoa. Such a bare summary leaves necessarily whole regions of
the subject unexplored, but, let the final verdict of history on
O'Connell be what it may, that he loved his country passionately, and
with an absolute disinterestedness no pen has ever been found to
question, nor can we doubt that whatever else may have hastened his end
it was the Famine killed him, almost as surely as it did the meanest of
its victims.
LVI.
"YOUNG IRELAND."
The camp and council chamber of the "Young Ireland" party was the
editor's room of _The Nation_ newspaper. There it found its inspiration,
and there its plans were matured--so far, that is, as they can be said
to have been ever matured. For an eminently readable and all things
considered a wonderfully impartial account of this movement, the reader
cannot do better than consult Sir Charles Gavan Duffy's "Four Years of
Irish History," which has the immense advantage of being history taken
at first hand, written that is by one who himself took a prominent part
in the scenes which he describes.
The most interesting figure in the party had, however, died before those
memorable four years began. Thomas Davis, who was only thirty at the
time of his death in 1845, was a man of large gifts, nay, might fairly
be called a man of genius. His poetry is, perhaps, too national to be
appreciated out of Ireland, yet two, at least, of his ballads,
"Fontenoy" and "The Sack of Baltimore," may fairly claim to compare with
those of any contemporary poet. His prose writings, too, have much of
the same charm, and, if he had no time to become a master of any of the
subjects of which he treats, there is something infectious in the very
spontaneousness and, as it were, untaught boyish energy of his
Irish essays.
The whole movement in fact was, in the first instance, a literary quite
as much as a political one. Nearly all who took part in it--Gavan Duffy,
John Mitchell, Meagher, Dillon, Davis himself--were very young men, many
fresh from college, all filled with zeal for the cause of liberty and
nationality. The graver side of the movement only showed itself when the
struggle with O'Connell began. At first no idea of deposing, or even
seriously opposing the great leader seems to have been intended. The
attempt on O'Connell's part to carry a formal declaration against the
employment under any circumstances of physical force was the origin of
that division, and what the younger spirits considered "truckling to the
Whigs" helped to widen the breach. When, too, O'Connell had partially
retired into the background, his place was filled by his son, John
O'Connell, the "Head conciliator," between whom and the "Young
Irelanders" there waged a fierce war, which in the end led to the
indignant withdrawal of the latter from the Repeal council.