strengthened by the adhesion of Smith O'Brien, who, though not a man of
much intellectual calibre, carried no little weight in Ireland. His
age--which compared to that of the other members of his party, was that
of a veteran--his rank and position as a county member, above all, his
vaunted descent from Brian Boroimhe, all made him an ally and a convert
to be proud of. Like the rest he had no idea at first of appealing to
physical force, however loudly an abstract resolution against it might
be denounced. Resistance was to be kept strictly within the
constitutional limits, indeed the very year of his junction with this
the extreme left of the Repeal party, Smith O'Brien's most violent
proceeding was to decline to sit upon a railway committee to which he
had been summoned, an act of contumacy for which he was ordered by the
House of Commons into the custody of the Sergeant-at-Arms, and committed
to an extemporized prison, by some cruelly declared to be the coal-hole.
"An Irish leader in a coal-hole!" exclaims Sir Charles Gavan Duffy,
indignantly, can more unworthy statement be conceived? "Regullus in a
barrel, however," he adds, rather grandly, "was not quite the last one
heard of Rome and its affairs!"
In Ireland matters were certainly sad enough and serious enough without
any such serio-comic incidents. Famine was already stalking the country
with giant strides, and no palliative measures as yet proposed seemed to
be of the slightest avail. Early in January, 1847, O'Connell left on
that journey of his which was never completed, and by the middle of May
Ireland was suddenly startled by the news that her great leader
was dead.
The effect of his death was to produce a sudden and immense reaction. A
vast revulsion of love and reverence sprang up all over the country; an
immense sense of his incomparable services, and with it a vehement anger
against all who had opposed him. Upon the "Young Ireland" party, as was
inevitable, the weight of that anger fell chiefly, and from the moment
of O'Connell's death whatever claim they had to call themselves a
national party vanished utterly. The men "who killed the Liberator"
could never again hope to carry with them the suffrages of any number of
their countrymen.
This contumely, to a great degree undeserved, naturally reacted upon the
subjects of it. The taunt of treachery and ingratitude flung at them
wherever they went stung and nettled. In the general reaction of
gratitude and affection for O'Connell, his son John succeeded easily to
the position of leader. The older members of the Repeal Association
thereupon rallied about him, and the split between them and the younger
men grew deeper and wider.
A wild, impracticable visionary now came to play a part in the movement.
A deformed misanthrope, called James Lalor, endowed with a considerable
command of vague, passionate rhetoric, began to write incentives to
revolt in _The Nation_, These growing more and more violent were by the
editor at length prudently suppressed. The seed, however, had already
sown itself in another mind. John Mitchell is described by Mr. Justin
McCarthy as "the one formidable man amongst the rebels of '48; the one
man who distinctly knew what he wanted, and was prepared to run any risk
to get it." Even Mitchell, it is clear, would never have gone as far as
he did but for the impulse which he received from the crippled desperado
in the background. Lalor was, in fact, a monomaniac, but this Mitchell
seems to have failed to perceive. To him it was intolerable that any
human being should be willing to go further and to dare more in the
cause of Ireland than himself, and the result was that after awhile he
broke away from his connection with _The Nation_, and started a new
organ under the name of _The United Irishmen_, one definitely pledged
from the first to the policy of action.
From this point matters gathered speedily to a head. Mitchell's
newspaper proceeded to fling out challenge after challenge to the
Government, calling upon the people to gather and to "sweep this island
clear of the English name and nation." For some months these challenges
remained unanswered. It was now, however, "'48," and nearly all Europe
was in revolution. The necessity of taking some step began to be
evident, and a Bill making all written incitement of insurrection felony
was hurried through the House of Commons, and almost immediately after
Mitchell was arrested.
Even then he seems to have believed that the country would rise to
liberate him. The country, however, showed no disposition to do anything
of the sort. He was tried in Dublin, found guilty, sentenced to fourteen
years' transportation, and a few days afterwards put on board a vessel
in the harbour and conveyed to Spike Island, whence he was sent to
Bermuda, and the following April in a convict vessel to the Cape, and
finally to Tasmania.
The other "Young Irelanders," stung apparently by their own previous
inaction, thereupon rushed frantically into rebellion. The
leaders--Smith O'Brien, Meagher, Dillon, and others--went about the
country holding reviews of "Confederates," as they now called
themselves, a proceeding which caused the Government to suspend the
Habeas Corpus Act, and to issue a warrant for their arrest. A few more
gatherings took place in different parts of the country, a few more
ineffectual attempts were made to induce the people to rise, one very
small collision with the police occurred, and then the whole thing was
over. All the leaders in the course of a few days were arrested and
Smith O'Brien and Meagher were sentenced to death, a sentence which was
speedily changed into transportation. Gavan Duffy was arrested and
several times tried, but the jury always disagreed, and in the end his
prosecution was abandoned. The "Young Ireland" movement, however, was
dead, and never again revived.
LVII.
THE FAMINE.
All the time the earlier of the foregoing scenes were being enacted, the
famine had been drawing its python grasp tighter and tighter around the
unhappy island. The first symptoms of the dread potato disease showed
themselves in the autumn of 1845, and even that year there was much
suffering, though a trifle to what was to follow. Many remedies were
tried, both to stop the blight and save the crops, but all alike proved
unavailing. The next year the potatoes seemed to promise unusually well,
and the people, with characteristic hopefulness, believed that their
trouble was over. The summer, however, was very warm and wet, and with
August there came on a peculiarly dense white fog, which was believed by
all who were in Ireland at the time to have carried the blight with it
in its folds. Whether this was the case or not, there is no doubt that
in a single fatal night nearly the whole potato crop over the entire
country blackened, and perished utterly. Then, indeed, followed despair.
Stupor and a sort of moody indifference succeeded to the former buoyancy
and hopefulness. There was nothing to do; no other food was attainable.
The fatal dependence upon a single precarious crop had left the whole
mass of the people helpless before the enemy.
Soon the first signs of famine began to appear. People were to be seen
wandering about; seeking for stray turnips, for watercresses, for
anything that would allay the pangs of hunger. The workhouses, detested
though they were, were crammed until they could hold no single
additional inmate. Whole families perished; men, women, and children lay
down in their cabins and died, often without a sign. Others fell by the
roadside on their way to look for work or seek relief. Only last summer,
at Ballinahinch in Connemara, the present writer was told by an old man
that he remembered being sent by his master on a message to Clifden, the
nearest town, and seeing the people crawling along the road, and that,
returning the same way a few hours later, many of the same people were
lying dead under the walls or upon the grass at the roadside. That this
is no fancy picture is clear from local statistics. No part of Ireland
suffered worse than Galway and Mayo, both far more densely populated
then than at present. In this very region of Connemara an inspector has
left on record, having to give orders for the burying of over a hundred
and thirty bodies found along the roads within his own district.
Mr. W.E. Forster, who, above all other Englishmen deserved the gratitude
of Ireland for his efforts during this tragic time, has left terrible
descriptions of the scenes of which he was himself an eye-witness,
especially in the west. "The town of Westport," he tells us in one of
his reports, "was itself a strange and fearful sight, like what we read
of in beleaguered cities; its streets crowded with gaunt wanderers,
sauntering to and fro with hopeless air and hunger-struck look--a mob of
starved, almost naked women around the poor-house clamouring for
soup-tickets. Our inn, the head-quarters of the road engineer and pay
clerks, beset by a crowd of beggars for work." In another place "the
survivors," he says, "were like walking skeletons--the men gaunt and
haggard, stamped with the livid mark of hunger; the children crying with
pain; the women in some of the cabins too weak to stand. When there
before I had seen cows at almost every cabin, and there were besides
many sheep and pigs owned in the village. But now the sheep were all
gone--all the cows, all the poultry killed--only one pig left; the very
dogs which had barked at me before had disappeared--no potatoes;
no oats."
One more extract more piteous even than the rest: "As we went along our
wonder was not that the people died, but that they lived; and I have no
doubt whatever that in any other country the mortality would have been
far greater; that many lives have been prolonged, perhaps saved, by the
long apprenticeship to want in which the Irish peasant had been trained,
and by that lovely touching charity which prompts him to share his
scanty meal with his starving neighbour."
Of course all this time there was no lack of preventative measures.
Large sums had been voted from the Treasury; stores of Indian corn
introduced; great relief works set on foot. An unfortunate fatality
seemed, however, to clog nearly all these efforts. Either they proved
too late to save life, or in some way or other to be unsuitable to the
exigencies of the case. Individual charity, too, came out upon the most
magnificent scale. All Europe contributed, and English gold was poured
forth without stint or stay. Still the famine raged almost unchecked.
The relief works established by the Government, with the best intentions
possible, too often were devoted to the most curiously useless,
sometimes even to actually harmful, objects. To this day "Famine roads"
may be met with in the middle of snipe bogs, or skirting precipices
where no road was ever wanted or could possibly be used. By the time,
too, they were in full working order the people were, in many cases, too
enfeebled by want and disease to work. For close upon the heels of the
famine followed an epidemic hardly less fatal than itself. In the course
of the two years that it raged over two hundred thousand people are said
to have perished from this cause alone, and three times the number to
have been attacked and permanently enfeebled by it.
In 1849 a Relief Act was passed which established soup kitchens
throughout the unions, where food was to be had gratis by all who
required it. Long before this similar kitchens had been privately set on
foot, and men and women had devoted themselves to the work with untiring
energy and the most absolute self-devotedness. Of these self-appointed
and unpaid workers a large number shared the fate of those whom they
assisted. Indeed, it is one of the most singular features of the time
that not only old, or feeble, or specially sensitive people died, but
strong men, heads of houses--not regarded as by any means specially
soft-hearted--raised, too, by circumstances out of reach of actual
hunger, died--just as O'Connell had died--of sheer distress of mind, and
the effort to cope with what was beyond the power of any human being to
cope with. In the single county of Galway the records of the times
show--as may easily be verified--an extraordinary number of deaths of
this type, a fact which alone goes far to disprove those accusations of
heartlessness and indifference which have in some instances been too
lightly flung.
After the famine followed ruin--a ruin which swept high and low alike
into its net. When the poor rate rose to twenty and twenty-five
shillings in the pound it followed that the distinction between rich and
poor vanished, and there were plenty of instances of men, accounted well
off, who had subscribed liberally to others at the beginning of the
famine, who were themselves seeking relief before the end. The result
was a state of things which has left bitterer traces behind it than even
the famine itself. The smaller type of landowners, who for the most part
had kindly relations with their tenants, were swept away like leaves
before the great storm, their properties fell to their creditors, and
were sold by order of the newly established Encumbered Estates Courts.
No proposing purchaser would have anything to say to estates covered
with a crowd of pauper tenants, and the result was a wholesale
clearance, carried out usually by orders given by strangers at a
distance, and executed too often with a disregard of humanity that it is
frightful to read or to think of. Most of the people thus ejected in the
end emigrated, and that emigration was under the circumstances their
best hope few can reasonably doubt. Even here, however, misfortune
pursued them. Sanitary inspection of emigrant ships was at the time all
but unheard of, and statistics show that the densely crowded condition
of the vessels which took them away produced the most terrible mortality
amongst the already enfeebled people who crowded them, a full fifth of
the steerage passengers in many cases, it is said, dying upon the
voyage, and many more immediately after landing. The result of all this
has been that the inevitable horrors of the time have been deepened and
intensified by a sense of ill-usage, which has left a terrible legacy
behind--one which may prove to be a peril to generations still unborn.
Even where those who emigrated have prospered most, and where they or
their sons are now rich men, they cling with unhappy persistency to the
memory of that wretched past--a memory which the forty years which have
intervened, far from softening, seem, in many cases, to have only lashed
into a yet more passionate bitterness.
In Ireland itself the permanent effects of the disaster differed of
course in different places and with different people, but in one respect
it may be said to have been the same everywhere. Between the Ireland of
the past and the Ireland of the present the Famine lies like a black
stream, all but entirely blotting out and effacing the past. Whole
phases of life, whole types of character, whole modes of existence and
ways of thought passed away then and have never been renewed. The entire
fabric of the country was torn to pieces and has never reformed itself
upon the same lines again. After a while everyday life began again of
course, as it does everywhere all over the world, and in some respects
the struggle for existence has never since been quite so severe or so
prolonged. The lesson of those two terrible years has certainly not been
lost, but like all such lessons it has left deep scars which can never
be healed. Men and women, still alive who remember the famine, look back
across it as we all look back across some personal grief, some
catastrophe which has shattered our lives and made havoc of everything
we cared for. We, too, go on again after a while as if nothing had
happened, yet we know perfectly well all the while that matters are not
the least as they were before; that on the contrary they never can
or will be.
LVIII.
THE LATEST DEVELOPMENT.
The story of the last forty years must be compressed into a nutshell.
The famine was over at last, but its effects remained. Nearly a million
of people had emigrated, yet the condition of life for those remaining
was far from satisfactory. The Encumbered Estates Act, which had
completed the ruin of many of the older proprietors, pressed, in some
respects, even more severely upon the tenants, a large number of whom
found themselves confronted with new purchasers, who, having invested in
Irish land merely as a speculation, had little other interest in it. In
1850 an attempt at a union of North and South was made, and a Tenant
League Conference assembled in Dublin. Of this league the remnants of
the "Young Ireland" party formed the nucleus, but were supplemented by
others with widely different aims and intentions. Of these others the
two Sadleirs, John and James, Mr. Edmund O'Flaherty, and Mr. William
Keogh, afterwards Judge Keogh, were the most prominent. These with their
adherents constituted the once famous "Brass Band" which for several
years filled Parliament with its noisy declamations, and which posed as
the specially appointed champion of Catholicism. In 1853 several of its
members took office under Lord Aberdeen, but their course was not a long
one. A bank kept in Ireland by the two Sadleirs broke, ruining an
enormous number of people, and on investigation was found to have been
fraudulently conducted from the very beginning. John Sadleir thereupon
killed himself; his brother James was expelled from the House of
Commons, and he and several others implicated in the swindle fled the
country and never reappeared, and so the "Brass Band" broke up, amid the
well-deserved contempt of men of every shade of political opinion.
After this succeeded a prolonged lull. Secret agitations, however, were
still working underground, and as early as 1850 one known as the Phoenix
organization began to collect recruits, although for a long time its
proceedings attracted little or no attention.
In 1859 several of its members were arrested, and it seemed then to die
down and disappear, but some years later it sprang up again with a new
name, and the years 1866 and 1867 were signalized by the Fenian rising,
or to put it with less dignity, the Fenian scare. With the close of the
American War a steady backward stream of Americanized Irishmen had set
in, and a belief that war between England and America was rapidly
approaching had become an article of fervent faith with a large majority
in Ireland. The Fenian plan of operation was a two-headed one. There was
to be a rising in Ireland, and there was to be a raid into Canada across
the American frontier. Little formidable as either project seems now, at
the time they looked serious enough, and had the strained relations then
existing between England and America turned out differently, no one can
say but what they might have become so. The Fenian organization, which
grew out of the earlier Phoenix one, was managed from centres, a man
called Stephens being the person who came most prominently before the
world in the capacity of Head centre. In 1865 Stephens was arrested in
Dublin, but managed to escape not long afterwards from Richmond prison
by the aid of two confederates within its walls. The following May,
1866, a small body of Fenians crossed the Niagara river, but the United
States authorities rigidly enforced the neutrality of the American
frontier, and so the attempt perished. The same spring a rising broke
out in Ireland, but it also was stamped with failure from its onset, and
the famous snowstorm of that year finished the discomfiture of its
adherents.
Two other Fenian demonstrations, not to mention an abortive project to
seize Chester Castle, were shortly afterwards made in England. In 1867,
some Fenian prisoners were rescued in Manchester, while on their way to
gaol, and in the attempt to burst the lock of the van in which they were
being conveyed a police officer named Brett, who was in charge of it,
was accidentally shot. Five men were found guilty for this offence. One
Macquire was proved to have been arrested by mistake, another Conder had
the sentence commuted, but three--Allen, Larkin, and O'Brien--were hung.
Another Fenian exploit of a somewhat different character followed in
December, 1867, when an attempt was made by some desperados belonging to
the party to blow up the Clerkenwell House of Detention, in which two
Fenian prisoners were then confined. Luckily for them, as it turned out,
they were not in that part of the prison at the time, or the result of
their would-be liberators' efforts would have simply been to kill them.
As it was, twelve other people were either killed on the spot or died
from its effects, and over a hundred were more or less badly wounded.
For this crime six persons were put upon their trial, but only one was
convicted and actually executed.
The next Irish event of any moment stands upon a curiously different
platform, though there were not wanting suggestions that the two had an
indirect connection as cause and effect. In 1868 the Liberal party came
into power after the General Election with Mr. Gladstone as Prime
Minister, and the session of 1869 saw the introduction of a Bill for the
Disestablishment of the Irish Church. The controversies to which that
measure gave rise are already quite out of date, and there is no need
therefore to revive them. Few measures so vehemently opposed have
produced less startling effects in the end. It neither achieved those
great things hoped by its supporters, nor yet brought about the dire
disasters so freely threatened by its opponents. To the Roman Catholics
of Ireland the grievance of an alien State Church had, since the
settlement of the tithe question, lapsed into being little more than a
sentimental one, so that practically the measure affected them little.
As an institution, however, the position of the Irish State Church was
undoubtedly a difficult one to defend, the very same arguments which
tell most forcibly for the State Church of England telling most forcibly
against its numerically feeble Irish sister. Whatever the abstract
rights or wrongs of the case it is pretty clear now that the change must
have come sooner or later, and few therefore can seriously regret that
it came when it did. The struggle was protracted through the entire
session, but in the end passed both Houses of Parliament, and received
the royal assent on July 26, 1869.
It was followed early the following year by the Irish Land Act, which
was introduced into the House of Commons by Mr. Gladstone on February
15, 1870. This Act has been succinctly described as one obliging all
landlords to do what the best landlords did spontaneously, and this
perhaps may be accepted as a fairly accurate account of it. Owing to the
fact of land being practically the only commodity of value, there has
always been in Ireland a tendency to offer far more for it than could
reasonably be hoped to be got in the form of return, and this tendency
has led, especially in the poorest districts and with the smallest
holdings, to a rent being offered and accepted often quite out of
proportion to the actual value of the land, though in few instances do
the very highest rents attainable seem even in these cases to have been
exacted. The Act now proposed was to abolish one passed in 1860 which
had reduced all tenant and landlord transactions in Ireland to simple
matters of free contract, and to interpose the authority of the State
between the two. It legalized what were known as the "Ulster customs;"
awarded compensations for all improvements made by the tenant or his
predecessors, and in case of eviction for any cause except non-payment
of rent a further compensation was to be granted, which might amount to
a sum equal to seven years' rent; it also endeavoured to a partial
extent to establish peasant proprietorship. That it was a conscientious
attempt to deal with a very intricate and perplexing problem may fairly
be conceded, at the same time it has been its misfortune that it proved
satisfactory to neither of the two classes chiefly concerned, being
denounced by the one as the beginning of spoliation, by the other as a
mere worthless, and utterly contemptible attempt at dealing with the
necessities of the case.