DEAR ABRAHAM,—In the correspondence which is passing between us, you are
perpetually alluding to the Foreign Secretary; and in answer to the
dangers of Ireland, which I am pressing upon your notice, you have
nothing to urge but the confidence which you repose in the discretion and
sound sense of this gentleman. I can only say, that I have listened to
him long and often with the greatest attention; I have used every
exertion in my power to take a fair measure of him, and it appears to me
impossible to hear him upon any arduous topic without perceiving that he
is eminently deficient in those solid and serious qualities upon which,
and upon which alone, the confidence of a great country can properly
repose. He sweats and labours, and works for sense, and Mr. Ellis seems
always to think it is coming, but it does not come; the machine can’t
draw up what is not to be found in the spring; Providence has made him a
light, jesting, paragraph-writing man, and that he will remain to his
dying day. When he is jocular he is strong, when he is serious he is
like Samson in a wig; any ordinary person is a match for him: a song, an
ironical letter, a burlesque ode, an attack in the newspaper upon
Nicoll’s eye, a smart speech of twenty minutes, full of gross
misrepresentations and clever turns, excellent language, a spirited
manner, lucky quotation, success in provoking dull men, some half
information picked up in Pall Mall in the morning; these are your
friend’s natural weapons; all these things he can do: here I allow him to
be truly great; nay, I will be just, and go still further, if he would
confine himself to these things, and consider the _facete_ and the
playful to be the basis of his character, he would, for that species of
man, be universally regarded as a person of a very good understanding;
call him a legislator, a reasoner, and the conductor of the affairs of a
great nation, and it seems to me as absurd as if a butterfly were to
teach bees to make honey. That he is an extraordinary writer of small
poetry, and a diner out of the highest lustre, I do most readily admit.
After George Selwyn, and perhaps Tickell, there has been no such man for
this half-century. The Foreign Secretary is a gentleman, a respectable
as well as a highly agreeable man in private life; but you may as well
feed me with decayed potatoes as console me for the miseries of Ireland
by the resources of his _sense_ and his _discretion_. It is only the
public situation which this gentleman holds which entitles me or induces
me to say so much about him. He is a fly in amber, nobody cares about
the fly; the only question is, How the devil did it get there? Nor do I
attack him for the love of glory, but from the love of utility, as a
burgomaster hunts a rat in a Dutch dyke, for fear it should flood a
province.
The friends of the Catholic question are, I observe, extremely
embarrassed in arguing when they come to the loyalty of the Irish
Catholics. As for me, I shall go straight forward to my object, and
state what I have no manner of doubt, from an intimate knowledge of
Ireland, to be the plain truth. Of the great Roman Catholic proprietors,
and of the Catholic prelates, there may be a few, and but a few, who
would follow the fortunes of England at all events: there is another set
of men who, thoroughly detesting this country, have too much property and
too much character to lose, not to wait for some very favourable event
before they show themselves; but the great mass of Catholic population,
upon the slightest appearance of a French force in that country, would
rise upon you to a man. It is the most mistaken policy to conceal the
plain truth. There is no loyalty among the Catholics: they detest you as
their worst oppressors, and they will continue to detest you till you
remove the cause of their hatred. It is in your power in six months’
time to produce a total revolution of opinions among this people; and in
some future letter I will show you that this is clearly the case. At
present, see what a dreadful in state Ireland is in. The common toast
among the low Irish is, the feast of the _passover_. Some allusion to
_Bonaparte_, in a play lately acted at Dublin, produced thunders of
applause from the pit and the galleries; and a politician should not be
inattentive to the public feelings expressed in theatres. Mr. Perceval
thinks he has disarmed the Irish: he has no more disarmed the Irish than
he has resigned a shilling of his own public emoluments. An Irish
peasant fills the barrel of his gun full of tow dipped in oil, butters up
the lock, buries it in a bog, and allows the Orange bloodhound to ransack
his cottage at pleasure. Be just and kind to the Irish, and you will
indeed disarm them; rescue them from the degraded servitude in which they
are held by a handful of their own countrymen, and you will add four
millions of brave and affectionate men to your strength. Nightly visits,
Protestant inspectors, licenses to possess a pistol, or a knife and fork,
the odious vigour of the _evangelical_ Perceval—acts of Parliament, drawn
up by some English attorney, to save you from the hatred of four millions
of people—the guarding yourselves from universal disaffection by a
police; a confidence in the little cunning of Bow Street, when you might
rest your security upon the eternal basis of the best feelings: this is
the meanness and madness to which nations are reduced when they lose
sight of the first elements of justice, without which a country can be no
more secure than it can be healthy without air. I sicken at such policy
and such men. The fact is, the Ministers know nothing about the present
state of Ireland; Mr. Perceval sees a few clergymen, Lord Castlereagh a
few general officers, who take care, of course, to report what is
pleasant rather than what is true. As for the joyous and lepid consul,
he jokes upon neutral flags and frauds, jokes upon Irish rebels, jokes
upon northern and western and southern foes, and gives himself no trouble
upon any subject; nor is the mediocrity of the idolatrous deputy of the
slightest use. Dissolved in grins, he reads no memorials upon the state
of Ireland, listens to no reports, asks no questions, and is the
“_Bourn_ from whom no traveller returns.”
The danger of an immediate insurrection is now, I _believe_, blown over.
You have so strong an army in Ireland, and the Irish are become so much
more cunning from the last insurrection, that you may perhaps be
tolerably secure just at present from that evil: but are you secure from
the efforts which the French may make to throw a body of troops into
Ireland? and do you consider that event to be difficult and improbable?
From Brest Harbour to Cape St. Vincent, you have above three thousand
miles of hostile sea coast, and twelve or fourteen harbours quite capable
of containing a sufficient force for the powerful invasion of Ireland.
The nearest of these harbours is not two days’ sail from the southern
coast of Ireland, with a fair leading wind; and the furthest not ten.
Five ships of the line, for so very short a passage, might carry five or
six thousand troops with cannon and ammunition; and Ireland presents to
their attack a southern coast of more than 500 miles, abounding in deep
bays, admirable harbours, and disaffected inhabitants. Your blockading
ships may be forced to come home for provisions and repairs, or they may
be blown off in a gale of wind and compelled to bear away for their own
coast; and you will observe that the very same wind which locks you up in
the British Channel, when you are got there, is evidently favourable for
the invasion of Ireland. And yet this is called Government, and the
people huzza Mr. Perceval for continuing to expose his country day after
day to such tremendous perils as these; cursing the men who would have
given up a question in theology to have saved us from such a risk. The
British empire at this moment is in the state of a peach-blossom—if the
wind blows gently from one quarter, it survives; if furiously from the
other, it perishes. A stiff breeze may set in from the north, the
Rochefort squadron will be taken, and the Minister will be the most holy
of men: if it comes from some other point, Ireland is gone; we curse
ourselves as a set of monastic madmen, and call out for the unavailing
satisfaction of Mr. Perceval’s head. Such a state of political existence
is scarcely credible: it is the action of a mad young fool standing upon
one foot, and peeping down the crater of Mount Ætna, not the conduct of a
wise and sober people deciding upon their best and dearest interests: and
in the name, the much-injured name, of heaven, what is it all for that we
expose ourselves to these dangers? Is it that we may sell more muslin?
Is it that we may acquire more territory? Is it that we may strengthen
what we have already acquired? No; nothing of all this; but that one set
of Irishmen may torture another set of Irishmen—that Sir Phelim
O’Callaghan may continue to whip Sir Toby M’Tackle, his next door
neighbour, and continue to ravish his Catholic daughters; and these are
the measures which the honest and consistent Secretary supports; and this
is the Secretary whose genius in the estimation of Brother Abraham is to
extinguish the genius of Bonaparte. Pompey was killed by a slave,
Goliath smitten by a stripling, Pyrrhus died by the hand of a woman;
tremble, thou great Gaul, from whose head an armed Minerva leaps forth in
the hour of danger; tremble, thou scourge of God, a pleasant man is come
out against thee, and thou shalt be laid low by a joker of jokes, and he
shall talk his pleasant talk against thee, and thou shalt be no more!
You tell me, in spite of all this parade of sea-coast, Bonaparte has
neither ships nor sailors: but this is a mistake. He has not ships and
sailors to contest the empire of the seas with Great Britain, but there
remains quite sufficient of the navies of France, Spain, Holland, and
Denmark, for these short excursions and invasions. Do you think, too,
that Bonaparte does not add to his navy every year? Do you suppose, with
all Europe at his feet, that he can find any difficulty in obtaining
timber, and that money will not procure for him any quantity of naval
stores he may want? The mere machine, the empty ship, he can build as
well, and as quickly, as you can; and though he may not find enough of
practised sailors to man large fighting-fleets—it is not possible to
conceive that he can want sailors for such sort of purposes as I have
stated. He is at present the despotic monarch of above twenty thousand
miles of sea-coast, and yet you suppose he cannot procure sailors for the
invasion of Ireland. Believe, if you please, that such a fleet met at
sea by any number of our ships at all comparable to them in point of
force, would be immediately taken, let it be so; I count nothing upon
their power of resistance, only upon their power of escaping unobserved.
If experience has taught us anything, it is the impossibility of
perpetual blockades. The instances are innumerable, during the course of
this war, where whole fleets have sailed in and out of harbour, in spite
of every vigilance used to prevent it. I shall only mention those cases
where Ireland is concerned. In December, 1796, seven ships of the line,
and ten transports, reached Bantry Bay from Brest, without having seen an
English ship in their passage. It blew a storm when they were off shore,
and therefore England still continues to be an independent kingdom. You
will observe that at the very time the French fleet sailed out of Brest
Harbour, Admiral Colpoys was cruising off there with a powerful squadron,
and still, from the particular circumstances of the weather, found it
impossible to prevent the French from coming out. During the time that
Admiral Colpoys was cruising off Brest, Admiral Richery, with six ships
of the line, passed him, and got safe into the harbour. At the very
moment when the French squadron was lying in Bantry Bay, Lord Bridport
with his fleet was locked up by a foul wind in the Channel, and for
several days could not stir to the assistance of Ireland. Admiral
Colpoys, totally unable to find the French fleet, came home. Lord
Bridport, at the change of the wind, cruised for them in vain, and they
got safe back to Brest, without having seen a single one of those
floating bulwarks, the possession of which we believe will enable us with
impunity to set justice and common sense at defiance.
Such is the miserable and precarious state of an anemocracy, of a people
who put their trust in hurricanes, and are governed by wind. In August,
1798, three forty-gun frigates landed 1,100 men under Humbert, making the
passage from Rochelle to Killala without seeing any English ship. In
October of the same year, four French frigates anchored in Killala Bay
with 2,000 troops; and though they did not land their troops, they
returned to France in safety. In the same month, a line-of-battle ship,
eight stout frigates, and a brig, all full of troops and stores, reached
the coast of Ireland, and were fortunately, in sight of land, destroyed,
after an obstinate engagement, by Sir John Warren.
If you despise the little troop which, in these numerous experiments, did
make good its landing, take with you, if you please, this _prècis_ of its
exploits: eleven hundred men, commanded by a soldier raised from the
ranks, put to rout a select army of 6,000 men, commanded by General Lake,
seized their ordnance, ammunition, and stores, advanced 150 miles into a
country containing an armed force of 150,000 men, and at last surrendered
to the Viceroy, an experienced general, gravely and cautiously advancing
at the head of all his chivalry and of an immense army to oppose him.
You must excuse these details about Ireland, but it appears to me to be
of all other subjects the most important. If we conciliate Ireland, we
can do nothing amiss; if we do not, we can do nothing well. If Ireland
was friendly, we might equally set at defiance the talents of Bonaparte
and the blunders of his rival, Mr. Canning; we could then support the
ruinous and silly bustle of our useless expeditions, and the almost
incredible ignorance of our commercial orders in council. Let the
present administration give up but this one point, and there is nothing
which I would not consent to grant them. Mr. Perceval shall have full
liberty to insult the tomb of Mr. Fox, and to torment every eminent
Dissenter in Great Britain; Lord Camden shall have large boxes of plums;
Mr. Rose receive permission to prefix to his name the appellative of
virtuous; and to the Viscount Castlereagh a round sum of ready money
shall be well and truly paid into his hand. Lastly, what remains to Mr.
George Canning, but that he ride up and down Pall Mall glorious upon a
white horse, and that they cry out before him, Thus shall it be done to
the statesman who hath written “The Needy Knife-Grinder,” and the German
play? Adieu only for the present; you shall soon hear from me again; it
is a subject upon which I cannot long be silent.