secured the co-operation of several of the Trinity College fellows, who
agreed to go out with him, and there was to be another addition to the
party who was to intimately share the principal’s life and fortunes
thenceforth—Mrs. Berkeley!
He had married during the progress of his negotiations for the
university scheme, a daughter of the speaker of the Irish house of
commons. The marriage took place August 1, 1728. It was said of Mrs.
Berkeley that “she shared his fortune when he was about to engage in one
of the most romantic moral movements of modern times, and when, in love
with an ideal academic life in the Bermudas, he prepared to surrender
preferment and social position at home in order to devote the remainder
of his life to the great continent of the West.”
* * * * *
In the fullest confidence that he would be able to carry out
successfully his favorite designs, Berkeley, with his wife and college
companions, set sail for the sunny isle in the golden West, of which he
had so long dreamed. He was then in his forty-fourth year. The voyage
occupied four months, and the landing was made at Newport, R. I., where
he had planned to sojourn until he should receive from England the
promised grant from the government. It was necessary also that the good
will and practical interest of the New England colonies should be
enlisted in his efforts.
The population of Newport at this time is said to have been curiously
cosmopolitan. As religious freedom prevailed there, thanks to the
Quaker, Roger Williams, and was unknown in the other New England
colonies, religious refugees found an asylum, as they did in the
Catholic colony of Maryland under Lord Baltimore. The merchants of
Newport appear to have been active and successful in the slave trade, so
we shall be less surprised at the statement that Berkeley purchased
several for service on the farm which he speedily acquired and settled
on for the time being.
* * * * *
Berkeley was quite in demand for sermons. He preached in Trinity Church,
Newport, three days after his arrival, and many times afterward. The
Rhode Island aristocracy of those days maintained, according to
accounts, a good deal of the style and manner of life of the English
gentry, and we can read of fox hunting, and races, and festivities of
various kinds as commonly indulged in. The delays reported from London,
in carrying out the promises of aid gave Berkeley many anxious hours in
his new world home. He found it expedient to build a house on the farm
in the interior, at Whitehall, which he continued to occupy with his
family until he sailed back to England. His house became the resort of
the ministers and gentry of Rhode Island, who delighted in the society
and conversation of the accomplished Irish dean.
Nearly three years passed in waiting and in expectation of the promised
means which never materialized, beyond the sum of private
subscriptions—which he afterward scrupulously returned. Meantime two
children were born to him; one of these, a girl, died and was buried in
Trinity churchyard, Newport. Three of Berkeley’s slaves, according to
the records of the same church—“Philip Berkeley, Anthony Berkeley and
Agnes Berkeley, negroes, received into the church, June 11, 1731.”
All his plans for the utopia he had nourished in his imagination faded
utterly when authoritative news from London convinced Berkeley that the
project must be abandoned. The grant of £20,000 assured by Walpole, and
other important concessions, could not be realized. The prime minister
had given up the project, and employed the proposed grant and
concessions for other purposes. So in the fall of 1731 the disappointed
philanthropist bade farewell to the new world and sailed homeward.
* * * * *
Berkeley’s subsequent career must be briefly told. On his return to
London he wrote a great deal on his favorite philosophical subjects. In
1734 he was appointed bishop of Cloyne, in Ireland, and there he spent
the next eighteen years of his life. He gave much attention to the
social condition of Ireland, attended to his episcopal duties and
occasionally occupied his seat in the Irish house of lords. His
benevolence to the poor in the dark days of famine and disease was said
to be boundless. He certainly won the esteem and gratitude of the
Catholics of Ireland by his liberality and his freedom from the spirit
of cant and proselytizing, then unhappily widespread in that unfortunate
country. His advocacy of tar water as a universal specific for the cure
of disease will be remembered as an example of his amiable philanthropic
enthusiasms. He publishes a poem in praise of his panacea. He was
offered further promotion in the Irish church—even the primacy; but he
put these allurements aside and refused. “For doing good to the world,”
he declared, “I may upon the whole do as much in a lower station.”
* * * * *
In 1752 he decided to resign his bishopric and seek retirement at
Oxford. The unusual proposal excited the curiosity of the King, George
II., who declared, when the application was made to him, that Berkeley
might live where he pleased but that he should die a bishop! So he was
permitted to retire from his see, still retaining his Episcopal rank.
He did not long enjoy the change. He died in Oxford the 14th of January,
1753, and was buried in the university chapel of Christ Church. His
widow survived him thirty-three years, dying in her 86th year. A son and
a daughter were living at the time of his death. In his will he provided
among other items—“that the expense of my funeral do not exceed £20, and
that as much more be given to the poor of the parish where I die.” He
left a very small estate. The well-known lines of his poem, in which he
sought to depict the prospects of his utopian project, may fitly close
this sketch of the amiable and benevolent Irish dean and bishop:
Westward, the course of empire takes its way,
The four first acts already past;
A fifth shall close the drama with the day,
Time’s noblest offspring is the last.
THE RENAMING OF WOLHURST.
The following remarks were made by President Taft in renaming
“Wolhurst,” the estate of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas F. Walsh, “Clonmel,” on
September 22, 1909:
_Ladies and Gentlemen_:
I think our bounteous and generous and lovely hostess and our host
should have called in the clerical profession rather than a politician
to baptize this new home, for it is a part of their profession, I
think, to make sacred places that we all venerate; but I hope to be
able to prove equal to the occasion, because a politician is subject
to every sort of exigency. Because I am asked I re-baptize with great
pleasure this beautiful estate and call it “_Clonmel_.” “_Clonmel_” is
a beautiful place in the County Tipperary. The determined immigrants
from Tipperary and from every part of the Emerald Isle have come to
the front as they deserved in America. There is no element and no
strain in our civilization that has manifested itself to be stronger,
more enterprising, more shrewd in business, more tenacious of its
principles than the Irishmen, from North and South, who come to this
country to make it their own.
I have the greatest pleasure in calling this place after that
beautiful town in the golden vale of Tipperary. I consecrate this the
estate of “_Clonmel_.” I wish I could connect with it in some way the
name of _Walsh_, but as that goes without saying, both in Denver and
throughout the country, it is unnecessary.
I congratulate the people of this vicinity that Mr. and Mrs. Walsh are
their neighbors. We in Washington feel delighted that they are
neighbors of ours. Their generosity and kindly courtesy are known the
country over.
HISTORICAL FALSIFICATIONS AGAINST THE IRISH.
BY CAPT. JAMES CONNOLLY, VICE-PRESIDENT OF THE SOCIETY FOR CALIFORNIA.
The beginning of Scotch and English falsification of history against the
Irish dates as far back as the end of the eleventh century. Taking full
advantage of the civilization and education which the Irish Monks had
gratuitously carried to them over seas and spent the best of their
lifetime in diffusing amongst them, they used the very power with which
the Monks thus endowed them to betray and despoil their benefactors.
“Those brilliant names in the history of European scholarship, who
distinguished themselves under Charlemagne, and his son and his
grandson, Clemens, Ducil and Scotus Erigena, who all taught in the Court
schools, Dungal, who taught in Pavia, Sedalius, who worked in Luttich,
Fergual who ruled in Salzburg and Morngal, the teacher of St. Gall, were
not altogether without successors,” says Douglas Hyde, in his Literary
History of Ireland.
“It is true,” he goes on, “that Ireland’s great mission of instruction
and conversion came to a close with the eleventh century, yet for two
centuries more, driven by the innate instinct for travel and adventure
which was so strong within them that it resembled a second nature, we
find Irish monks new foundations on the continent, especially in
Germany.” The number of monasteries which Dr. Hyde names as being
founded by these Irish monks on the continent during the next half
century is simply amazing. “Most of these monks who came from Ireland
brought books with them which they presented to the German monasteries.”
Says Dr. Hyde again:
“The century which succeeded the Battle of Clontarf, was the most
flourishing period of Irish monks in Germany. Once the English had
commenced the conquest of Ireland the monasteries ceased to be recruited
by men of sanctity and learning but were resorted to by men who sought
rather material comfort and a life of worldly freedom. The result was,
that towards the end of the thirteenth century most of the Irish
establishments in Germany had come to an end, being made over to the
Germans, like those of Vienna and Wurzburg, or else altogether losing
their monastic character like that of Vuremberg.
“As for the parent monastery of St. James of Ratisbon, its fate was most
extraordinary and deserves to be told at greater length. It had, of
course, always been from its foundation, inhabited by Irish monks alone,
and was known as the monasterium Scotorum, or monastery of Irishmen. But
when in process of time the word Scotus became ambiguous, or rather had
come to be exclusively applied to what we now call Scotchmen, the Scotch
prudently took advantage of it, and claimed that they and not the Irish
were the real founders of Ratisbon and its kindred institutions, and
that the designation monasterium Scotorum proved it, but the Irish had
gradually and unlawfully intruded themselves into these institutions
which did not belong to them. Accordingly it came to pass, by the very
irony of fate—analogous to that which made English writers of the last
century claim Irish books and Irish script as Anglo-Saxon—that the great
parent monastery of St. James of Ratisbon was actually given up to the
Scotch by Leo X., in 1515, and all the unfortunate Irish monks there
living were driven out. The Scotch, however, do not seem to have made
much of their new abode, for though the monastery contained some able
men during the first century of its occupation by them, it exercised,
says Zimmer, no influence worth mentioning upon the general cultivation
of the German people of that region and may be considered but a small
contribution towards medieval culture in general, for the only share the
Scotch monks can really claim in a monument like that of the church of
St. James of Ratisbon is the fact of their having collected the gold for
its erection from the pockets of the Germans. In comparison with these,
how noble appear to us those apostles from Ireland of whom we find so
many traces in different parts of the kingdom, of the monks from the
beginning of the seventh to the end of the tenth century.”
How well Germany remembers her debt of gratitude to those early Irish
monks was most eloquently expressed at the great German Catholic
Congress at Dusseldorf, less than a year ago. A pilgrimage of the
delegates to Keiserswerth to visit the grave of St. Suitbertus, the
first Irish monk who spread the light of faith and learning in that
land. During this pilgrimage Cardinal Fischer delivered an eloquent
discourse on the brotherhood of nations in faith and spoke feelingly on
the debt of Catholic Germany to the missionary monks of Ireland.
The one egregious thing which the reading of English history teaches is
the English historian’s palpable inability to be candid and unbiased
when he comes to deal with Ireland and the Irish. With the true-born
Englishman this innate prejudice against his neighboring island and her
people comes to him as a heritage of many ages. It is deep-rooted in his
very nature and is nourished and fructified by his inordinate vanity and
super-consciousness of his own real or imaginary superiority. The
average Englishman believes himself and his little islanders to be
divinely endowed with prerogatives and powers to govern the rest of the
world in their own way. He goes about it in a supercilious, patronizing
sort of fashion as though he were conferring an unspeakable kindness on
the governed, even while he is shooting or bayoneting him into
submission to his law.
The very fact, unnatural as it is, that the Englishman believes himself
right and just in all this inhumanity should seem at least to be some
palliation of his offences. But failing utterly to make the thus
governed see his treatment of them in any such “kindly light” he governs
them the more.
John Bull is, in fact, about the only ruler in the governing business
who seems not to have yet learned that a people who are least governed
are best governed. He has exploited his monarchical powers on about
every continent and ocean of the globe with more or less success. The
more heroic and manly was the resistance of a smaller country and weaker
people to his invasions the more he misrepresented and traduced them in
his press and on his platforms. England’s main purpose in this has even
been to lower, even abase the countries and peoples which she has thus
assailed, in the estimation of other nations. Nothing can be more
offensive to the delicate sensibilities of truth and justice than the
false show of benevolent unselfishness with which England has embarked
upon her campaigns of conquest. She has ever been conspicuously,
unmercifully cruel to her Irish subjects in their protests against her
oppression. There is scarcely any limit to the extremes into which an
individual or a nation’s vanity may lead them. England’s claiming
Irishmen of great distinction in arts, arms, statesmanship, and the like
to be real Englishmen is probably the most absurd case in point.
But it was left to the Scotch historian, David Hume, to most falsely and
malevolently chronicle the dominant characteristics of the Irish people.
He was, of course, writing English history from the then English
standard viewpoint, at the time when the American colonists were about
to rebel against the intolerable tyranny of George III. The Sons and
Daughters of Liberty were, in fact, holding their meetings under the old
Liberty tree in Boston at the very time Hume was writing his most false
annals of Ireland and the Irish. Hearing of Jerry O’Brien’s capture of
the British schooner Margaretta, in Machias Bay, several months before
the Battle of Bunker Hill, no doubt intensified Hume’s dislike of the
Irish. Nor does that “flavor of the old classical culture of Scotland,”
pervading his work extenuate in the least the enormity of his falsehood.
Nay, the very fact that he must have known better—he to whom was given
as a historian “first rank among English writers,”—makes his offence
against intellectual integrity all the more despicable. And yet it has
been by just such means as this that England has, throughout the past
ten centuries, succeeded in keeping the greater part of the rest of the
world more or less ignorant of the real characteristics and acquirements
of the Irish.
On page 99, Vol. 1, of Hume’s History of England, writing of the “State
of Ireland—1172,” he says: “The Irish from the beginning of time had
been buried in the most profound _barbarism_ and _ignorance_....”
Now, with Hume’s wide knowledge of the civilized world, it can scarcely
be believed that he wrote in real ignorance of the general status of the
Irish people. His classical culture and profound erudition must
certainly have enabled him to know the real facts in the case. He could
not have so closely surveyed and studied the past history of “the Irish”
without knowing that for centuries before the time of which he wrote,
Ireland had excelled England in culture “to a very marked degree.” It
had, indeed, been the custom for ages for the better class of Englishmen
to not only send their sons to Ireland but to go themselves for their
education, that they might learn Irish Gaelic, so that by means of it
they might study Greek and Latin. “The fame of these early Irish
schools,” says Dr. Douglas Hyde in his Literary History of Ireland, page
220, “attracted students in the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries from
all quarters to Ireland, which had now become a veritable land of
schools and scholars.” English, French and German princes flocked to
Ireland to reap the benefits of the better educational advantages there
than were to be had in their own countries. King Alfred of Northumbria,
who was educated in Ireland, had been so pleased with the Irish ways
that he ever after “aided and abetted the Irish in England in opposition
to Wilfred, who opposed them.”
[Illustration:
HONORABLE JOHN B. O’MEARA,
Of St. Louis.
Ex-Lieutenant-Governor of Missouri, and
Vice-President of the Society for Missouri.
]
But the brilliant Irish scholar, Johannas Scotus Erigend, finally went
over to England for the sole purpose of establishing at Oxford
University the beginning of classical learning on English soil. He was
also summoned to France by King Charles the Bold to lay the foundation
of the classics in his kingdom. Yet for more than a century after the
classics had been established at Oxford, well-born Englishmen continued
to send their sons to Ireland, where the older seats of such learning
offered more effective advantages for such studies. Nor was it for the
study of the Humanities alone that they were sent. The arts of writing,
illuminating and music were also taught with the success that is made
possible only by centuries of cultured experience.
Speaking of King Edward’s last visit to Ireland at that time, Harper’s
Weekly recently said, editorially, after relating in detail the many
other ways in which “Ireland was England’s superior in culture” ... “the
Harp, which is the National symbol of Ireland, is really the record of
centuries of Musical culture.”
Knowing, as King Alfred certainly must have known, that as early as the
beginning of the sixth century the heathen classics were taught by
learned Irish monks in their schools of theology, it is easily
understood how he came to have such admiration for the Irish and
Ireland. Their skill in Greek and Latin poetry as well as in Irish
appealed to him so that on leaving Ireland he wrote a poem of sixty
lines in the Irish bardic manner. In this poem he compliments the five
provinces for their several hospitalities and courtesies to himself. It
breathes the spirit of thankful gratitude to the whole nation for all it
had done for him.
No people buried in barbarism and ignorance “from the beginning of time”
could have evoked such a tribute to their culture and hospitality as
that, from an English King whom they had educated. (Pardon the
hyperbole.)
But it had not yet become the well established custom and purpose of the
writers of English history to pervert their chronicles so as to traduce
the Irish people all that their subject matter would bear without
seeming to be deliberate untruth. There was, in fact, no English
historian at all at the time Ireland’s scholars were thus laying the
foundations of classical learning over a great part of Europe. The
crowds of strangers that were meantime flocking to Ireland to receive
the classical educations which could not be had in their own countries
were not only warmly welcomed but were entertained and fed every day
free of cost. Free books were furnished them and they were given
gratuitous instructions by the Irish masters.
In this atmosphere of culture, hospitality and true Christian refinement
was fostered that love of learning and of the unselfish characters of
the men who imparted it to those strange princes and kings, which they
took home with them to their own countries. Englishmen, especially, had
long looked upon Ireland as “the land of scholars and the nurse of
arms.”
This marvelous educational activity and open-handed generosity of the
Irish had, in fact, become the wonder and admiration of the nations
whose sons were being most benefited thereby. “This outburst of
religious zeal, glorious and enduring as it was,” says Dr. Hyde,
“carried with it, like all sudden and powerful movements, an element of
danger.” The danger to which he here refers was that of a clash between
the civil and religious authorities on some minor points of the
administration of justice at home. Such obstacles in the way of human
and spiritual amity seem to have never been for long inseparable from
the lives of nations. They spring up suddenly. They are balked at for a
time, and it often seems as if such barriers were destined to be the
stumbling blocks over which kingdoms would fall.
But it was not until the Norman invasion and complete subjugation of
England, and Norman laws, customs and ideals had completely dominated
that country and the semi-Latin tongue now known as English had taken
the place of the Anglo-Saxon spoken till the Normans came, that the real
breach of amity between the English and Irish happened.
It was against the aggressive spirit of this Anglo-Norman power that
Ireland first rebelled and rebels to this day. The Normans found the
conquest of Ireland a far more difficult undertaking. They were, it is
true, by their under-handed system of parceling out portions of the
conquered sections to the traitor native chiefs, successful in dividing
Ireland against herself. Yet during all the centuries of the persecution
made possible by the weakness caused by this division, the Normans
failed to dominate Ireland. The free Irish spirit outlived those
centuries of “warfare and famine and prison.” Throughout the greater
part of that beleaguered land Irish princes and Irish laws ruled. The
soul of the nation was nurtured and sustained by the continued use of
the mother tongue. To the ranks of the native Irish who were rendered
disloyal to their country by Norman influences, the religious schism of
the Reformation added many more. Cromwell’s disastrous invasion nearly a
century later cut still wider gaps in the loyal ranks of the Irish. In
addition to those who were starved or persecuted into submission to
Cromwellian rule, many more who could not be tortured into such
submission fled the country. Those were “the wild geese,” that flew
hither and yonder, lighting, like birds of passage, where instinct or
destiny led them.