Independence knew the value of words, and that when they spoke of misery
and cruelty, of rapine, treachery and distress, they meant what they
said. Franklin's letter brings us to the eve of the Volunteer Movement,
of which much has been said in a spirit of warm praise, but which seems
to have wrought evil rather than good. This Movement, at first initiated
wholly by the Scottish and English colonists and their adherents, was
later widened so as to include a certain number of the indigenous
population; and an armed force was thus formed, which was able to gain
certain legislative favors from England, with the result that a
Parliament sitting in Dublin from 1782 to 1799 passed laws with
something more resembling justice than Ireland was accustomed to.
But this Parliament was in no sense national or representative. It was
wholly composed of the Scottish and English colonists and their friends,
and the indigenous population had no voice in its deliberations. It is,
therefore, the more honor to Henry Grattan that we find him addressing
that Parliament thus: "I will never claim freedom for six hundred
thousand of my countrymen while I leave two million or more of them in
chains. Give the Catholics of Ireland their civil rights and their
franchise; give them the power to return members to the Irish
Parliament, and let the nation be represented." At this time, therefore,
four-fifths of the nation had neither civil rights nor
franchise,--because they differed from the dominant party in England as
to the precedence of the disciples of Jesus.
It may be supposed, however, that, even without civil or religious
rights, the fate of the people of Ireland was tolerable; that a certain
measure of happiness and well-being was theirs, if not by law, at least
by grace. The answer to this we shall presently see. The Volunteer
Movement, as we saw, included certain elements of the indigenous
population. The dominant party in England professed to see in this a
grave danger, and determined to ward off that danger by sending an army
to Ireland, and quartering troops on the peasants of all suspected
districts. We must remember that the peasants, on whom a hostile
soldiery was thus quartered, had no civil rights as a safeguard; that
the authorities were everywhere bitterly hostile, full of cowardly
animosity towards them.
The result we may best describe in the words of the English generals at
the head of this army. We find Sir Ralph Abercrombie speaking thus: "The
very disgraceful frequency of great crimes and cruelties, and the many
complaints of the conduct of the troops in this kingdom--Ireland--has
too unfortunately proved the army to be in a state of licentiousness
that renders it formidable to everyone except the enemy." Sir Ralph
Abercrombie declared himself so frightened and disgusted at the conduct
of the soldiers that he threw up his commission, and refused the command
of the army.
General Lake, who was sent to take his place, speaks thus: "The state of
the country, and its occupation previous to the insurrection, is not to
be imagined, except by those who witnessed the atrocities of every
description committed by the military,"--and he gives a list of
hangings, burnings and murders.
Finally, we have the testimony of another English soldier, Sir William
Napier, speaking some years later: "What manner of soldiers were these
fellows who were let loose upon the wretched districts, killing, burning
and confiscating every man's property? ... We ourselves were young at
the time; yet, being connected with the army, we were continually among
the soldiers, listening with boyish eagerness to their experiences: and
well remember, with horror, to this day, the tales of lust, of bloodshed
and pillage, and the recital of their foul actions against the miserable
peasantry, which they used to relate."
The insurrection against this misery and violence, which began in May,
1798, and its repression, we may pass over, coming to their political
consequences. It is admitted on all hands that the morality and religion
of England reached their lowest ebb at this very time; we are,
therefore, ready to learn that the Act of Union between England and
Ireland, which followed on the heels of this insurrection, was carried
by unlimited bribery and corruption. The Parliament of Ireland, as we
know, was solely composed of Protestants, the Catholics having neither
the right to sit nor the right to vote; so that the ignominy of this
universal corruption must be borne by the class of English and Scottish
settlers alone.
The curious may read lists of the various bribes paid to secure the
passage of the Act of Union in 1800, the total being about six million
dollars--a much more considerable sum then than now. And it must be
remembered that this entire sum was drawn from the revenues of Ireland,
besides the whole cost of an army numbering 125,000 men, which England
maintained in Ireland at the time the Act was passed. What the amenities
of the last three years of the eighteenth century cost Ireland we may
judge from these figures: in 1797, while the hangings, burnings and
torturings which brought about the insurrection of the following year
were in an early stage, the national debt of Ireland was under
$20,000,000; three years later that debt amounted to over $130,000,000.
It is profitless to pursue the subject further. We may close it by
saying that hardly can we find in history a story more discreditable to
our common humanity than the conduct of England towards Ireland during
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The French Revolution wrought a salutary change of heart in the
governing class in England, for it must in justice be added that the
tyranny of this class was as keenly felt by the "lower orders" in
England as in Ireland itself. It is fairly certain that only the Reform
Bill and the change of sovreigns which shortly followed prevented an
insurrection of the peasants and servile classes in England which would
have outdone in horrors the French Revolution itself. The Reform Bill
was the final surrender of the baronial class in England; a surrender
rather apparent than real, however, since most of the political and all
the social power in the land still remains in the hands of the
same class.
[Illustration: O'Connell's Statue, Dublin.]
Through the salutary fear which was inspired by the horrors of the
French Revolution, and perhaps through a certain moral awakening, the
governing classes in England came to a less vicious mind in their
dealings with Ireland. They were, therefore, the more ready to respond
to the great national movement headed by Daniel O'Connell, with his
demand that Irishmen might all equally enjoy civil and political rights,
regardless of their form of faith. In 1829, as the result of this great
movement, the Catholics were finally relieved of the burden of penal
laws which, originally laid on them by the Tudors, were rendered even
more irksome and more unjust by Cromwell and William of Nassau,--men in
other things esteemed enlightened and lovers of liberty.
Thus the burden of persecution was finally taken away. To those who
imposed it, the system of Penal Laws will remain a deep dishonor. But to
those who bore that burden it has proved a safeguard of spiritual purity
and faith. The religion of the indigenous race in Ireland was saved from
the degeneration and corruption which ever besets a wealthy and
prosperous church, and which never fails to engender hypocrisy, avarice
and ambition. In England, the followers of the Apostles exercise the
right to levy a second tax on the produce of all tilled lands, a second
burden imposed upon the conquered Saxons. As a result, the leaders of
the church live in palaces, while the people, the humbler part of their
congregation; have sunk into practical atheism. In France, the reaction
against a like state of things brought the church to the verge of
destruction, and led the masses to infidelity and materialism. The
result to the moral life of the people is too well known to need remark.
Not less evil consequences have flowed from the enriching of the church
in other lands. That wealth has always carried with it the curse, so
prophetically pronounced, against those who trust in riches. For the
ministers of religion, in a supreme degree, the love of money has been
the root of evil.
We may, therefore, see in the spirituality and unworldliness of the
native church in Ireland a result of all the evil and persecution the
church suffered during almost three hundred years. From this
purification by fire it comes that the people of Ireland are almost
singular throughout Christendom in believing sincerely in the religion
of gentleness and mercy--the kingdom which is not of this world.
In 1829 the Catholics were at last freed from the galling burdens which
had weighed on them since 1537, when they failed to recognize Henry VIII
as the representative of God on earth. They were still, however, under
the shadow of a grave injustice, which continued to rest on them for
many years. When their church lands were confiscated and their faith
proscribed by law under the Tudors, a new clergy was overlaid on the
country, a clergy which consented to recognize the Tudors and their
successors as their spiritual head. As a reward, these new ministers of
religion were allowed to levy a second tax on land, exactly as in
England; and this tax they continued to collect until their privilege
was finally taken away by Gladstone and the English Liberals. Needless
to say that through three centuries and more four-fifths of this tax was
levied on the indigenous Catholics, in support of what was to them an
alien, and for most of the time a persecuting church.
One heavy disability still lay on the whole land. With its partial
removal a principle has emerged of such world-wide importance in the
present, and even more in the future, that we may well trace its history
in detail.
The Normans, as we saw, paid themselves for conquering the Saxons and
Angles by assuming a perpetual right to tax their produce; a right still
in full force, and forming the very foundation of the ruling class in
England. The land tenure thus created was, under the Tudors and the
first Stuarts, bodily transferred to Ireland. In Ireland the land had
ever been owned by the people, each tribe, as representing a single
family, holding a certain area by communal tenure, and electing a chief
to protect its territory from aggression. For this elective
chieftainship the English law-courts substituted something wholly
different: a tenure modeled on the feudal servitude of England. This new
principle made the land of the country the property not of the whole
people but of a limited and privileged class: the favorites of the
ruling power--"hungry parasites" as the Congress of 1775 called them.
This "landed" class continued to hold absolute sway until quite
recently, and it was this class which succumbed to bribery in 1800, and
passed the Act of Legislative Union with England. The clergy of the
Established church were little more than the private chaplains of the
"landed" class, the two alien bodies supporting each other.
Folly, however, was the child of injustice; for so shortsighted were
these hungry parasites that they developed a system of land-laws so bad
as to cause universal poverty, and bring a reaction which is steadily
sweeping the "landed" class of Ireland to extinction and oblivion. The
fundamental principle of these bad land-laws was this: the tenant was
compelled to renew his lease from year to year; and whenever, during the
year, he had in any way improved the land in his possession,--by
draining marshes, by reclaiming waste areas, by adding farm-buildings,
the "owner" of the land could demand an enhanced rent, as the condition
of renewing the lease. The tenant had to submit to a continually
ascending scale of extortion, sanctioned by law and exacted by armed
force; or, as an alternative, he had to give up the fruit of his
industry without compensation and without redress.
Anything more certain to destroy energy, to cut at the roots of thrift,
to undermine all the best qualities of manhood, it would be impossible
to imagine. The slave on the plantation could in time purchase his
freedom. The tiller of the soil in Ireland found, on the contrary, that
the greater his industry, the greater was the sum he had to pay for the
right to exercise it. We saw that there never was any pretence of free
contract in the feudal land-tenure of England; that there never was any
pretence of an honest bargain between farmer and landlord, for their
mutual benefit. The tenant paid the landlord for services rendered, not
to him, but to his Norman conqueror. So it was, in an even greater
degree, in Ireland. There was no pretence at all that tenant and
landlord entered into a free contract for their mutual benefit. Nor did
either law, custom, religion or opinion require the landlord to make any
return to his tenants for the share of the fruit of their toil he
annually carried away.
The tiller of the soil, therefore, labored from year to year, through
droughts and rains, through heat and cold, facing bad seasons with good.
At the end of the year, after hard toil had gathered in the fruit of the
harvest, he saw the best part of that fruit legally confiscated by an
alien, who would have been speechless with wonder, had it been suggested
to him that anything was due from him in return. Nor was that all. This
alien was empowered, and by the force of public opinion incited, to
exact the greatest possible share of the tiller's produce, and, as we
saw, he was entitled to the whole benefit of whatever improvements the
tiller of the soil had made; and could--and constantly did--expel the
cultivator who was unable or unwilling to pay a higher tax, as the
penalty for improving the land.
It may be said that bad as this all was, it was not without a remedy;
that the cultivator had the choice of other occupations, and might let
the land lie fallow, while its "owner" starved. But this only brings to
mind the fact that during the eighteenth century England had legislated
with the deliberate intention of destroying the manufactures and
shipping of Ireland, and had legislated with success. It should be added
that this one measure affected all residents in Ireland equally,
whatever faith or race. There was practically no alternative before the
cultivator. He had the choice between robbery and starvation.
It would be more than miraculous if this condition of things had not
borne its fruit. The result was this: it ceased to be the interest of
the cultivator of the land to till it effectively, or to make any
improvement whatever, whether by drainage, reclaiming waste land, or
building, or by adopting better agricultural methods. In every case, his
increase of labor, of foresight and energy, would have met with but one
reward: when the time came to renew the lease, he would have been told
that his land had doubled in value during the year, and that he must,
therefore, pay twice as much for the privilege of tilling it. If he
refused, he at once forfeited every claim to the fruit of his own work,
the whole of his improvements becoming the property of the land owner.
The cultivators, as an inevitable consequence, lost every incentive to
labor, energy, foresight and the moral qualities which are fostered by
honestly rewarded work. They worked as little as possible on their
farms, and the standard of cultivation steadily declined, while the mode
of living grew perpetually worse. If it were intended to reduce a whole
population to hopeless poverty, no better or more certain way could
be imagined.
The steady lowering of the arts of cultivation, the restriction of
crops, the tendency to keep as close as possible to the margin of
sustenance, thus zealously fostered, opened the way for the disastrous
famine of 1846 and 1847, which marks the beginning of a rapid decline in
population,--a decrease which has never since been checked. The
inhabitants of Ireland shortly before the famine numbered considerably
over eight millions. Since that time, there has been a decrease of about
four millions--a thing without parallel in Christendom.
The amendment of the land-laws, which were directly responsible for
these evil results, was by no means initiated in consequence of the
famine. It was due wholly to a great national agitation, carried out
under the leadership of Charles Stewart Parnell, which led to the
land-acts of 1881 and 1887. These new laws at last guaranteed to the
cultivator the fruit of his toil, and guarded him against arbitrary
increase of the tax levied on him by the "owner" of the land. But they
did not stop here; they initiated a principle which will finally make
the cultivator absolute owner of his land, and abolish the feudal class
with their rights of private taxation. This cannot fail to react on
England, so that the burdens of the Angles and Saxons will at last be
lifted from their shoulders, as a result of the example set them by the
Gaels, for generations working persistently, and persistently advancing
towards their goal. Nor will the tide thus set in motion spread only to
Saxon and Angle; its influence will be felt wherever those who work are
deprived unjustly of the fruit of their toil, whether by law or without
law. The evils suffered by Ireland will thus be not unavailing; they
will rather bring the best of all rewards: a reward to others, of
whatever race and in whatever land, who are victims of a like injustice.
The story of Ireland, through many centuries, has thus been told. The
rest belongs to the future. We have seen the strong life of the prime
bringing forth the virtues of war and peace; we have seen valor and
beauty and wisdom come to perfect ripeness in the old pagan world. We
have seen that old pagan world transformed by the new teaching of
gentleness and mercy, a consciousness, wider, more humane and universal,
added from above to the old genius of individual life. With the new
teaching came the culture of Rome, and something of the lore of Hellas
and Palestine, of Egypt and Chaldea, warmly welcomed and ardently
cherished in Ireland at a time when Europe was submerged under barbarian
inroads and laid waste by heathen hordes. We have seen the faith and
culture thus preserved among our western seas generously shared with the
nascent nations who emerged from the pagan invasions; the seeds of
intellectual and spiritual life, sown with faith and fervor as far as
the Alps and the Danube, springing up with God-given increase, and
ripening to an abundant harvest.
To that bright epoch of our story succeeded centuries of growing
darkness and gathering storm. The forces of our national life, which
until then had found such rich expression and flowered in such abundant
beauty, were now checked, driven backward and inward, through war,
oppression and devastation, until a point was reached when the whole
indigenous population had no vestige of religious or civil rights; when
they ceased even to exist in the eyes of the law.
The tide of life, thus forced inward, gained a firm possession of the
invisible world, with the eternal realities indwelling there. Thus fixed
and founded in the real, that tide turned once again, flowing outwards
and sweeping before it all the barriers in its way. The population of
Ireland is diminishing in numbers; but the race to which they belong
increases steadily: a race of clean life, of unimpaired vital power,
unspoiled by wealth or luxury, the most virile force in the New World.
It happens very rarely, under those mysterious laws which rule the life
of all humanity, the laws which work their majestic will through the
ages, using as their ministers the ambitions and passions of men--it
happens rarely that a race keeps its unbroken life through thirty
centuries, transformed time after time by new spiritual forces, yet in
genius remaining ever the same. It may be doubted whether even once
before throughout all history a race thus long-lived has altogether
escaped the taint of corruption and degeneration. Never before, we may
confidently say, has a single people emerged from such varied
vicissitudes, stronger at the end in genius, in spiritual and moral
power, than at the beginning, richer in vital force, clearer in
understanding, in every way more mature and humane.
For this is the real fruit of so much evil valiantly endured: a deep
love of freedom, a hatred of oppression, a knowledge that the wish to
dominate is a fruitful source of wrong. The new age now dawning before
us carries many promises of good for all humanity; not less, it has its
dangers, grave and full of menace; threatening, if left to work
unchecked, to bring lasting evil to our life. Never before, it is true,
have there been so wide opportunities for material well-being; but, on
the other hand, never before have there been such universal temptations
toward a low and sensual ideal. Our very mastery over natural forces and
material energies entices us away from our real goal, hides from our
eyes the human and divine powers of the soul, with which we are
enduringly concerned. Our skill in handling nature's lower powers may be
a means of great good; not less may it bring forth unexampled evil. The
opportunities of well-being are increased; the opportunities of
exclusive luxury are increased in equal measure; exclusion may bring
resentment; resentment may call forth oppression, armed with new
weapons, guided by wider understanding, but prompted by the same corrupt
spirit as of old.
In the choice which our new age must make between these two ways, very
much may be done for the enduring well-being of mankind by a race full
of clean vigor, a race taught by stern experience the evil of tyranny
and oppression, a race profoundly believing the religion of gentleness
and mercy, a race full of the sense of the invisible world, the world of
our immortality.
We see in Ireland a land with a wonderful past, rich in tradition and
varied lore; a land where the memorials of the ages, built in enduring
stone, would in themselves enable us to trace the life and progress of
human history; we see in Ireland a land full of a singular fascination
and beauty, where even the hills and rivers speak not of themselves but
of the spirit which builds the worlds; a beauty, whether in brightness
or gloom, finding its exact likeness in no other land; we see all this,
but we see much more: not a memory of the past, but a promise of the
future; no offering of earthly wealth, but rather a gift to the soul of
man; not for Ireland only, but for all mankind.
INDEX.
Abbey-Dorney, 303
Abbey-feale, 303
Abbey-leix, 303
Abbey of Ballintober, 305
Abbey-quarter, 29
Abercrombie, Sir Ralph, words of, 369, 370
Achill Island, 30
Act of Union, 371
Aed Allan, 225, 231
Aed Finnliat, 247
Aed Roin, 225
Aed, son of Colgan, 226
Ailill, 130, 131, 132, 141, 142, 146, 147, 152
Aiterni, 150
Alfred, king of the Northumbrian Saxons, 232
Alfred, king, ode of to the country he visited, 232, 233
Alny, 120, 129
Amargin, 150
Ambigatos, 103
Ancient seats of learning, 221
Ancient seats of learning, studies therein, 221, 222
Anglicans, 322
Angus, the Young, 92, 95, 96, 173
"Annals," history of the times as recorded in the, 235, 252
"Annals," quotations from, 224, 244, 264, 277, 293
Antrim, 5, 196
Archaic Darkness, 11
Archaic Dawn, 12
Ardan, 120, 129
Ard-Maca, 200
Armagh, 200, 208, 232, 241
At-Cliat, 242, 243, 275
Athlone, 140, 350, 354
Ath-uincé, 163
Aughrim, 354, 355
Ballinasloe, 354
Ballysadare, 27, 87, 90
Balor of the Evil Eye, 90, 91, 93
Bangor, 221, 239, 240, 250, 342
Bann, 146
Bantry Bay, 104
Barrow, valley of the, 42
Battle of Kinvarra, 162
Battle of the Headland of the Kings, 13
Battle-verses, 248, 249
Bay of Murbolg, 143
Bay of Sligo, 29
Bective Abbey, 301
Bede, Venerable, 218
Belgadan, 85
Beltane, festival of, 47
Beltaney, 47
Black Lion Cromlech, 46
Blackwater, 39, 82
Bonamargy Abbey, 306
Book of Kells, 209, 249
Boyne, the, 5, 150, 242, 350
Brandon Hill, 42
Breagho, 34
Breas, 83, 84, 99, 91, 105
Breg, 149
Brehon Laws, the, 206
Brehon Laws, changes of, effected by St. Patrick, 207, 316
Bruce, Edward, invasion by, 292
Bruce, Edward, death of, 293
Brugh, on the Boyne, 93, 95
Bundoran, 29