CHAPTER I

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE:

—Obvious print and punctuation errors were corrected.

THE OLD IRISH WORLD

THE OLD IRISH WORLD

BY

ALICE STOPFORD GREEN

_Author of “The Making of Ireland and its Undoing”

“Irish Nationality,” &c._

DUBLIN

M. H. GILL & SON, LTD.

LONDON

MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.

1912

PREFACE

SOME Irish friends have asked me to print certain lectures concerning

Ireland to which they had listened with indulgence; and to reprint also

former papers in a manner more convenient for country readers. This

volume is the answer to their request. It will be seen that I have not

attempted to alter the lectures from their first purpose and form.

The various studies, thus accidentally united, have a connecting link

in such evidences as they may contain of civilisation in the old Irish

world. A hundred years ago, in 1821, Dr. Petrie noted that while the

historians of ancient native origin were unable in their poverty and

degradation to pursue the laborious study of antiquities, there were

others of a different class and origin who had taken up the subject to

bring it into contempt; and these indeed succeeded in the cause for

which they, unworthily, laboured. Forty years later he recognised the

same influences at work. It would appear, he said in a letter written

to Lord Dunraven shortly before his death in 1865, to be considered

derogatory to the feeling of superiority in the English mind to accept

the belief that Celts of Ireland or Scotland could have been equal, not

to say superior in civilisation to their more potent conquerors, or

that they could have known the arts of civilised life till these were

taught them by the Anglo-Normans. After the lapse of half a century we

can still trace the same spirit--so powerful have been the hindrances

to serious and impartial enquiry--so slow has been the decline of

racial prejudice and political complacency. But in these latter days

a great change has silently passed over the peoples. The difficulties

of historical research and instruction do indeed remain as great as

ever; but in the new society which we see shaping itself in Ireland on

natural and no longer on purely artificial lines, there is no reason

to fear truth as dangerous or to neglect it as unnecessary. There is

now a public ready to be interested not only in Danish and Norman

civilisation in Ireland, but also in the Gaelic culture which embraced

these and made them its own.

I cannot adequately thank Professor Eoin MacNeill for generously

allowing me to embody in my first chapter some of his researches on

the history of the Scot wanderings between Scotland and Ireland; it is

earnestly to be hoped that he will publish before long the results of

his original work.

I owe my warm thanks also to Mr. F. J. Bigger for his unstinted help

in references and suggestions out of the stores of his topographical

knowledge. I may mention as an instance the grave-stone in Kilclief

churchyard carved with a Celtic cross, which he discovered while these

pages were going through the press, so that I have been able to note it

for the first time among Lecale antiquities.

Mr. R. I. Best has rendered me more services than I can here tell,

however gratefully I acknowledge them.

The account of Ardglass has been re-printed with additions, by the kind

permission of the Editor of the _Nation_. I have to thank the Editor of

the _Nineteenth Century_ for leave to add the article on Tradition in

History, which is inserted at the request of readers in Ireland.

To prevent mistake I may add a word of explanation that the map, or

rather diagram, which is entitled Scandinavian Trade Routes, contains

not only those lines of sea-commerce, but also an indication of the

ways across Europe which were used by Irish travellers from earlier

times. The difference between these routes is clearly indicated in the

text.

ALICE STOPFORD GREEN.

_April 25, 1912._

IN MEMORY OF

THE IRISH DEAD

CONTENTS

Page

I. THE WAY OF HISTORY IN IRELAND 1

II. THE TRADE ROUTES OF IRELAND 63

III. A GREAT IRISH LADY 100

IV. A CASTLE AT ARDGLASS 130

V. TRADITION IN IRISH HISTORY 168

THE OLD IRISH WORLD

CHAPTER I

THE WAY OF HISTORY IN IRELAND

IN all the countries of Europe the study of history for a citizen of

the State is taken for granted, as the study of tides and currents

might be held necessary for a mariner, or of the winds for an air-man,

or that of the map for a merchant. It is only a dozen years ago,

however, that its study was made compulsory in elementary schools

in England, and in that country men are still discussing, by way of

lectures and so forth, “What is the Use of History.” The historical

instinct among the English people has indeed never been very keen,

so that, as learned men tell us, it would be more difficult to form

a folk-museum in England than in any other country, so few are the

objects of a distinctly national character that have survived. The past

is rapidly overlaid among men who live intensely in the present and

the immediate future. A great gulf separates them from a race like the

Irish, to whom the far past and the far future are part of the eternal

present, the very condition of thought, the furniture without which the

mind is bare.

The Irish, nevertheless, have by long effort been brought under

authority to the English mind in history, and an Anglicised Ireland

now lies in the wake of England, a laggard in the trough of the wave,

rocked by the old commonplaces of the early Victorian age. The hope

that our people may win out of that trough lies to a great extent in

the new sails set by the National University, if they may at last

catch the fresh breezes of Heaven, and be swept into the open sea of

free knowledge and candid thinking. In Ireland, as in England, history

has been made compulsory in a sense--a sense, we might irreverently

say, of the “United Kingdom.” It has been made a department of English

Grammar, and has further been portioned out to Irishmen as a fragment

of English history, strictly confined within dates fixed for that

history in the schools of England. The Irish story is thus shut up as

it were like criminals of old in the Tower prison of Little Ease--a

narrow place where no man could stand or lie at length. And Irishmen

are still driven to discuss in belated fashion the question that all

Europe settled long ago--Why should we make the History of our country

our serious study?

The reason of Nature for this study is indeed as profound as the being

of man. There is no other creature on this planet that can create

a history of its kind. To man alone belongs the faculty of looking

“before and after,” and considering the story of his race from the

first human being that walked the earth. Our first forefather brought

with him something new--the power to store up and to celebrate memories

of the great dead. His elemental pieties have become part of the whole

tradition of our humanity; and that history which he began, and to

which we add day by day, is our witness to the separateness of man from

the other creatures of this world. When we cherish this study we are

proclaiming our pre-eminence among all the living beings that we know.

When we let this history fall from us we are sinking to the level of

the dumb beasts. As living men, therefore, “let us enjoy, whenever we

have an opportunity, the delight of admiration, and perform the duties

of reverence.”

There is a practical reason, too, for the knowledge of history. The

individual man left to himself is helpless to stand against the powers

of the world. Alone he can do nothing. His strength lies in the

generations and associations of man behind him, linked by an endless

tradition, who have made for him his art, religion, science, politics,

social laws. It is only in communion with that company of workers that

he can take a step forward. The soul of a country is bound up with the

heroes who still

“... people the steep rocks and river banks,

Her natural sanctuaries, with a local soul,

Of independence and stern liberty.”

Rulers and commanders have known this well. When they have wanted to

exalt peoples or armies under them, they have opened out to them the

glories of their history, and called on them to admit into their souls

the spirit of their fathers.

“Up! up! and drink the spirit breathed

From dead men to their kind.”

When they have wished to depress and subjugate a race they have slammed

the doors of their history on them, and left them alone, spiritless and

forlorn, passed by and forgotten by the Ages, despised of themselves

and of their neighbours.

Whether therefore as men of a reasonable nature, or as members of a

nation, we are bound to make History our all-important study. There is

no question about this in any self-respecting nation in Europe. How

does the case stand with us in Ireland?

When I first began the study of Irish History, I was dissuaded from it

by a man of exceedingly acute mind and wide reading. His argument, I

imagine, is a common one, and shows the kind of scruples that are set

to bar our way to Irish history--as some primeval race once planted the

slope of Cahir Mor on Aran with a forest of jagged standing-stones, to

forbid all entrance to the fortress uplifted there above the expanse

of the Ocean in its freedom. Why, said my typical objector, should we

turn away from the great highways of the world’s progress, with their

sweeping procession of Empires and great Dominions, to lose ourselves

in the maze where humble and unsuccessful nationalities walk obscurely.

Stimulate the spirit of young men by giving them the examples of heroes

whose fame has sounded through the earth, and societies that have been

adorned by triumph. Let the men of local fame, the guardians of smaller

nationalities, rest in darkness, and let us follow the sun in its

strength.

We may remember one of the snares laid by the Prince of Evil for the

Son of Man, when he set Him on a high place above the kingdoms of

the world, to bend His soul before their ostentatious glory. From

the mountain Satan displayed the emblems of their pride, palaces and

towers and treasuries, “knowing that it was by those alone that he

himself could have been so utterly lost to rectitude and beatitude. Our

Saviour spurned the temptation, and the greatest of His miracles was

accomplished.” England was just at the outset of her imperial career

when Milton, in his “Paradise Regained,” pictured that tremendous

scene, the passing of the empires in their state before the judgment of

the Divine Reason. The prodigious procession was marshalled from the

very dawn of history, powers and dominions sweeping over the earth,

and disappearing with the suddenness with which they rose. Not one has

survived. In the shifting scene forms of states move and stir dimly

like the fallen angels from “Paradise Lost” as they lay prone, extended

on the flood of ruin and combustion. One scheme of government after

another is lifted up to be cast down--tyranny, oligarchy, slavery,

commercialism, communism, parliaments, theocracies. The great warriors

and the great statesmen are alike entombed in the ruins of their

empires. “Head and crown drop together, and are overlooked.” On the

other hand, when empires have fallen, the nationalities have not always

perished. They die only with the utter extermination of the people. So

long as the old stock lingers on the soil, there is a spirit that can

outlive all empires, form the scourge of conquerors, and set the last

barrier to pride of dominion. We know how peoples enclosed within small

states, fed from deep sources of heritage and tradition, have given

the impress of their local passion to their art. Out of the intensity

of national life have come those high inspirations that have given

to us all that is best of literature, poetry, painting, sculpture,

music, and however deeply the artist has felt the influence of the

world outside, his ultimate power lies in the spirit which has entered

into him from his native state and the race of which he sprang. The

generous influences of local patriotism were recognised by the greatest

political thinker that modern Ireland has sent out: “To be attached,”

said Burke, “to the sub-division, to love the little platoon we belong

to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public

affections.”

Perhaps, we might also suggest to our objector, the lesser

nationalities are even now, in these days of triumphant Imperialism,

beginning to have their revenge. The study of small societies seems to

become fashionable among the new reformers. Do we not hear from all

sides of the education, discipline, and public spirit of countries

compassed within bounds suited to man’s apprehension? With what

respect do not Unionists extol the industrial success of States such

as Holland and Denmark, for example. Even now do we not hear English

Imperialists crying out that perhaps Switzerland has got the secret

of the democratic mind, or Norway, or New South Wales, or Arizona;

might not England take a lesson from some little self-contained and

thrifty community on the use of the referendum? It would seem that the

influence of small commonwealths is not yet extinct among us.

It is very certain that Ireland of all countries, if left to itself,

would never of its own will allow history to lie in a backwater among

the flotsam of the current. History was the early study of the Irish,

the inspiration of their poets and writers. Every tribesman of old

knew, not only the great deeds and the famous places of his own clan,

but of the whole of Ireland. In the lowliest cabin the songs of Irish

poets lived on for hundreds of years, and dying fathers left to sons

as their chief inheritance the story of their race. When war, poverty,

the oppression of the stranger, hindered the printing of Irish records,

there was not a territory in all Ireland that did not give men to make

copies of them, hundreds of thousands of pages, over and over again,

finely written after the manner of their fathers. Through centuries of

suffering down to within living memory the long procession of scribes

was never broken, men tilling small farms, labouring in the fields,

working at a blacksmith’s forge. And this among a people of whom Burke

records that in two hundred thousand houses for their exceeding poverty

a candle, on which a tax lay, was never lighted. As we follow the lines

and count the pages of such manuscripts, we see the miracle of the

passion in these men’s hearts. No relics in Ireland are more touching

than these volumes, and none should be more reverently collected and

preserved. They form a singular treasure such as no country in all

Europe possesses.

But now, in spite of this tradition, history is more backward in

Ireland than in any other country. Here alone there is a public opinion

which resents its being freely written, and there is an opinion, public

or official, I scarcely know which to call it, which prevents its being

freely taught. And between the two, history has a hard fight for life.

Take the question of writing. History may conceivably be treated as

a science. Or it may be interpreted as a majestic natural drama or

poem. Either way has much to be said for it. Both ways have been nobly

attempted in other countries. But neither of these courses is thought

of in Ireland. Here history has a peculiar doom. It is enslaved in the

chains of the Moral Tale--the good man (English) who prospered, and the

bad man (Irish) who came to a shocking end--the kind of ethical formula

which, for all our tutors and teachers could do, never deceived the

generosity of childhood. The good man in the moral tale of Ireland is

not even a fiction of Philosophy or of History. He is, oddly enough,

the offspring of Grammar alone, and carries the traces of his dry

and uninspired pedigree. He owes his being, in fact, to the English

dislike for a foreign language. The Gael, as we know, ever faithful

to the tradition of his race, while he sang and recited and wrote and

copied his story with an undying passion, did these things in his own

speech. The Norman or “Frank” settlers, true “citizens of the world,”

adopted his tongue, his poetry, and his patriotic enthusiasm. When the

English arrived, however, they according to their constant insular

tradition refused to learn a strange language, so that the only history

of Ireland they could discern was that part of it which was written

in English--that is, the history of the English colonists told by

themselves. On this contracted record they have worked with industry

and self-congratulation. They have laid down the lines of a story in

which the historian’s view is constantly fixed on England. All that the

Irish had to tell of themselves remained obscured in an unknown tongue.

The story of the whole Irish population thus came to be looked on as

merely a murky prelude to the civilizing work of England--a preface

savage, transitory, and of no permanent interest, to be rapidly passed

over till we come to the English pages of the book. Thus two separate

stories went on side by side. The Irish did not know the language

which held the legend of English virtue and consequent wealth. The

English could not translate the subterranean legend of Irish poetry,

passion, and fidelity. Religion added new distinctions. Virtues were

Protestant, the sins of the prodigal were Catholic. Finally, class

feeling had its word. The upper class went to their university, and

their manners and caste instincts entitled them as of course to the

entire credence of their own social world; the lower class were alleged

to be men whose manners were common and their prejudices vulgar.

In this way there grew up an orthodox history based on sources in the

English tongue alone. The Colonists laid down by authority its dogmas

and axioms. All that agreed with this conventional history was reputed

serious and scholarly: whatever diverged from it was partial, partizan,

or prejudiced. “Impartiality” and “loyalty” became technical terms,

with a special meaning for Ireland. The two words were held also to be

interchangeable. A strictly “impartial” writer must not let his “loyal”

eye swerve from the fixed point, England. As a judicious Englishman

said of his compatriots, they only think a man impartial when he has

gone over to the opposite side.

The results of this system are conspicuous. A Frenchman may unreproved

write with affection and ardour of France, and an Englishman of

England. An Irishman, however, is in another case. He must have no

patriotic fire for his own people. He must not acclaim their victories

nor mourn their defeats. Take an illustration of this temper. A

clergyman has lately written to the _Church of Ireland Gazette_ to

condemn history readers “written from an anti-English and anti-Church

point of view”; he complains that the writer describes the battle of

the Blackwater in 1598, where the English were routed, as “a glorious

victory for the O’Neill.” Such a phrase as this cannot be allowed to

Irishmen. Or as a writer to the _Irish Times_ puts a similar argument:

“If the Nationalists want for ever to live in the glories of the past

and to harp upon them, why do they not go far enough back ... to the

time when they ate their grandmothers ... and indulged in all sorts of

hellish rites.”

In fact, as we trudge along the dull beaten road of the orthodox

history we never escape, not for a moment, from the monotonous

running commentary which sounds continually at our side. “Nomadic,”

“primitive,” “wigwam,” “aboriginal,” “savage,” “barbarous,”

“lawless”--the words are always at hand. In the moral tale the

accustomed stream of precept and delation never runs dry. It follows

us through all the strictly “impartial” writers. The Irishman was a

“kerne.” The Irish word cethern (kerne) meaning a troop or company of

soldiers, probably foot soldiers, is as old as the Latin _caterva_

with which it is cognate, or the Umbrian _kateramu_, and so is of quite

respectable lineage; but being a foreign word to the Englishman, he

used it as a natural term of contempt, as though a Chinese should cry

“sailor” or “merchant” when he meant to say “English devil.” More than

that, the Irishman was a “nomad,” apparently because he sent his cattle

to graze on the hills in summer--a custom which in modern Switzerland

is held to be quite respectable by admirers of Federalism. This “nomad”

idea is familiarly handed about from one writer to another. One of

the most esteemed historians in Dublin was Mr. Litton Falkiner, who

has added some notable pages to later Anglo-Irish history. Yet he was

satisfied to dismiss the Irish population of mediæval times in one

terse phrase: “the pastoral, and in great measure nomadic Celts, who

stood for the Irish people before the 12th century”--in other words,

before the Norman invasion. This absurd sentence seems to pass current;

no objection has been made to it. What would educated Englishmen think

of a leading historian who dismissed the pre-Norman population of that

island as “boorish Low-Dutch, hut-dwellers round a common field cut

into strips after their barbarous manner, _who stood for the English

people before the Norman Conquest_?” Trivialities and ignorances of

this sort are not in fashion in English history, and it is time that

they were out of fashion in Ireland.

Irishmen of the north still preserved, Mr. Falkiner told us, even to

the end of the 17th century, “all the primitive characteristics of

the scarcely more than nomadic civilisation of Ulster.” With summary

contempt he pretended to dispose of what he fancifully termed “the

lawless banditti who commonly formed the body-guard of an Irish

chief”; and in the orthodox manner confronts “Irish law” and “Irish

lawlessness” under what he called “the English ownership of Ireland.”

The great Hugh of Tyrone is described as looking “on the onward

march of English institutions with feelings not very different from

those with which the aborigines of the American continent beheld the

advance of the stranger from the east.” In the same spirit he informed

Englishmen that Ireland was sadly deficient in the wealth of historical

and literary associations which form the romantic charm of England.

“Cathedral cities, in the sense in which the term is understood in

England, Ireland may be almost said to be without. A few of the towns,”

he generously admitted, “contain, indeed, the remains of ecclesiastical

and monastic buildings. But even where these exist they are, with

one or two exceptions, sadly deficient in human interest.” It is a

cheap method, even if it is one out of date elsewhere, to deny human

interest to a subject which one has learned to ignore, and may desire

to see forgotten. Can no human interest touch the heart in Dromahair

or Donegal or Glendalough? There is a remote and little-known road in

the plains of Mayo where a singular sight may be seen. Near it stand

the ruins of a majestic abbey founded over seven hundred years ago

(1189-1190), by Cathal O’Connor (whose foster-father’s tomb has lately

been found at Knockmoy with its Irish inscription). Nave and transepts

were laid bare and open from their immense gable ends, and the tower

flung from the four splendid arches that supported it, but the old

vaulted roof of the choir still remains; and here, it is said, in this

remoteness, is the only ancient church of the Irish where, amid the

universal destruction and confiscation, they have been able to carry

on their old worship from the old days till now. In this land of the

banished--“to hell or Connacht”--mass was without ceasing celebrated

in the choir; and from the hearts of the worshippers kneeling in the

nave and transepts under the open sky a prophecy arose that when the

church was roofed once more Ireland would be freed. Songs still sung

among Connacht peasants tell of such services amid ruins of their holy

places, the priests wet with the rain, the women’s clothes bedraggled,

the men carrying small stone flags so as to have a dry spot for their

knees. Not in any way was such a place like an English cathedral, but

if brave men’s vows and prayers and tears for seven centuries can

confer human interest the stones of Ballintober are precious.

The problem remains, however (for insoluble problems beset every false

position) that according to Mr. Falkiner’s theory the history of towns

and cathedrals only began with “the English ownership.” How was it

that these Englishmen left none of their “romantic charm” there? What

strange history lies hidden behind this saying?

Another historian takes up the same taunt--a true scholar and worker

who has added to our knowledge of the close of Stuart rule in Ireland.

“The Irish,” says Dr. Murray, “are indeed a strange race.... No

monument marks the site where the Irish hero and the Irish thinker

repose.... The graves of a patriot like Owen Roe O’Neill, and of a

statesman like Archbishop King ... are unknown. The thrill that an

Englishman feels in Westminster Abbey when he enters the presence

of the mighty dead is denied an Irishman, for he has not taken care

of the dust of his immortals.” A memorial by the defeated Irish to

Archbishop King of Dublin, ardent supporter of the Dutch conqueror,

passionate worker for the Protestant succession, four times Lord

Justice for the government of Ireland under William in those days of

agony and despair--this is a lofty counsel of perfection, such as we

give to others. The Irish raised no monument to Owen Roe O’Neill--no

monument, with Cromwell’s soldiers abroad in the land, to the general

proclaimed by the English Government “traitor, rebel, disturber of the

common peace”--is that the charge? Alas! I wonder from that day to this

what welcome would have been given in a Protestant churchyard, guarded

by the conquerors, to an Irish memorial over the grave of Owen Roe

O’Neill. The dust of the Irish immortals lies indeed far scattered. Has

Dr. Murray ever stood in the solitary burial places of Rath Croghan,

of Iniscaltra, of Clonmacnois? Has he counted the stones in Athenry

or those heaped up in Burris? Has he seen the bones of the martyrs

strewn from sea to sea? Surely he himself has told us that “the Irish

custom of burying their dead in an old ruined church or monastery

was forbidden,” and that not by the Irish, but by the Church of the

English. From the Reformation until eighty-two years ago every Irish

Catholic was needs carried at death to a Protestant cemetery, and it is

only within the life-time of men now living that, when Catholic prayers

at the grave were denied, the Irish people at last secured in 1829 a

burying place of their own.

This fiction of a “strange race” has become a kind of special

philosophy which is dragged in to interpret the most ordinary actions

of the Irish. For example, “the march of the soldiery upset the balance

of the excitable Irish farmer, and he neglected his land”--a fact

which in any other country would need no “race” explanation. Through

the story of that war, whose end was to transfer the soil of Ireland,

five-sixths of it, to lords of another race and religion, the old

inhabitants of two thousand years’ possession are made to appear as

“the Irish factions”; their vice is patent, while English crimes are

accidental, inadvertent, or high-spirited. If we want to know why the

Irish people lost faith in the Stuarts who had betrayed and outraged

them at every turn, we are referred to the simple habits of a strange

and childish race. “The Celt wants to see a sovereign regularly in

order to adore him”: “A principle must be set forth by a person, and

the more attractive the person the stronger the hold of the principle.”

As we watch the strong ceaseless current of Irish life such theories

are swept beyond our sight. The Irish poet told his people another tale:

“It is the coming of King James that took Ireland from us,

With his one shoe English and his one shoe Irish

He would neither strike a blow nor would he come to terms,

And that has left, so long as they shall exist, misfortune

upon the Gaels.”

In his laborious work on the Norman settlement, Mr. Orpen deals with

the Irish in the usual conventional manner:--“The members of this

family were always killing one another.” “The chieftain ... had no

higher conception of duty than to increase the power of his clan;

with this object in view, he was stayed by no scruples”; as for the

clansman, “the sentiment for ‘country’ in any sense more extended than

that of his own tribal territory, was alike to him and to his chief

unknown.” This description, like the terms “tribal” and “nomad,” has

long been habitual, and accepted with as little enquiry as those words.

Mr. Orpen’s clients, the “Normans,” we may assume to have been nobly

free from any such barbarous notions of individual aggrandisement,

regardless of “their country’s” claims.

Mr. Bagwell, the leading historian of the English occupation under

Tudors and Stuarts, throws his searchlight on the Irish:--“They were

barbarous, but they could appreciate virtue.” “The Irish were subtle,

fond of license, and ready for anything as long as it was not for

their good.” May we remember the saying of the Irish themselves in

those days:--“Ask for nothing that you would not deem a benefit to

you, and before all praise God.” Again, according to Mr. Bagwell, “the

people had no other idea of trade than to extort exorbitant prices.”

This quality scarcely seems to need a racial explanation; it has

been found elsewhere in time of war. But under all circumstances the

“primeval” theory of Irishmen must be maintained. The character of

the “natives”--using this word with its “savage” implication--plays a

great part in our history. Thus, when a boat load of treasure from the

Armada was washed on shore Mr. Bagwell notes that “such unaccustomed

wares as velvet and cloth of gold, fell into the hands of the natives.”

Cloth of gold and velvet had for centuries been known to the wealthy

Irish; even in England they were not the clothing of the “natives,”

if such a term could be applied to Englishmen. Again we are told that

“the Irish, by being held always at arm’s length, had become more Irish

and less civilised than ever”; _held at arm’s length_ is an ingenious

phrase for evicting a people from their homes, and throwing them out

on bogs and mountains. The hardships of hunted famine-stricken outlaws

hanging round their old homes, is represented in this kind of history

as the life which would be naturally chosen by wild Irish “nomads.”

“True children of the mist, they [the O’Tooles] either bivouacked in

the open or crept into wretched huts to which Englishmen hesitated to

give the name of houses. They cultivated no land.” “Thus one by one

did the chiefs of tribal Ireland devour each other.” As for “the men

of free blood, whose business had always been fighting, and who would

never work ... when the chiefs were gone they had nothing to do but to

plunder, or to live at the expense of their more industrious, but less

noble, neighbours.” “The island was poor and the people barbarous, and

no revenue could be expected.” It is true, indeed, that the wealth did

not go the way of the Crown; officials had other uses for it.

In the same way Mr. Chart, in his study of Irish life during the

dark years after the Union--years of acute suffering, hunger,

disillusionment and despair--discovers “a sullen discontent which,

as usually happens in Ireland, broke out occasionally into acts of

lawlessness and barbarity,” as if some special form of iniquity had its

home in Ireland. At a time when the whole people in England were in a

turmoil of revolt, on the verge of revolution, he mourns “the fatal

Irish tendency to rush into extremes,” and that magistrates and police

had to accustom “a hot-headed and violent-tempered race to curb itself

within legal limits”--as if this was an unusual fact, peculiar to this

one race of the world, predestinate to evil. It would seem that in

Ireland alone it is not safe to give any man “full and unconstrained

control over his personal and political enemies,” and therefore

“Ireland is no country for a volunteer police.”

I suppose there is not another history in the world in which this

free slinging of blame and advice is continuously kept up at so fine

a pitch. If a problem in Irish life lifts its head, some puzzling

fact or tendency that demands explanation, a stone is ready in the

orthodox historian’s sling: the dilemma is ended by one of the useful

words--“primitive,” “tribal,” “kerne,” “nomad,” “barbarous,” “Celtic.”

By constant reiteration I fancy writer and reader now scarcely notice

them, so much have they become the symbols of Irish history, and so

deeply have they sunk into the public mind.

Thus the stream of calumny still flows on. The latest voice from

Trinity College, that of Professor Mahaffy, in his Introduction to the

third volume of the “Georgian Society,” is of the old familiar type.

It should be, he explains, “the interest and duty” of historians to

maintain certain desirable opinions--this, according to Dr. Mahaffy,

adds to their credibility. Once more, therefore, we have from him

“the elements of primeval savagery which still existed in the Irish

people, and which they had in common with almost all primitive races

and societies” (and this by the way, in the 18th century, after six

hundred years of English compulsion). How well we know the old battered

and time-exhausted phrase! Of course we have again our old friend,

the story of O’Cahan sitting with the naked women, served up as the

ever-repeated type of all the generations of Irish in their habitual

squalor. For, we are told, “since the earliest times the greater part

of the Irish ... have not found any discomfort in squalor.” But for

English law this singular people would apparently never put on clothes

at all, winter or summer, good or bad weather, in any northern gale

from the Arctic ice. Ulstermen now-a-days are certainly a degenerate

race in physical endurance.

It is interesting to follow this story of O’Cahan.

The story begins with a Bohemian baron, name unknown, whom Foynes

Moryson, an Englishman, saw on one occasion. Here is the exact

tale:--“The foresaid Bohemian baron, coming out of Scotland to us by

the north parts of the wild Irish, told me in great earnestness (when

I attended him at the Lord Deputy’s command), that he coming to the

house of the O’Cane, a great lord among them, was met at the door with

sixteen women, all naked, excepting their loose mantles; whereof eight

or ten were very fair, and two seemed very nymphs; with which strange

sight his eyes being dazzled, they led him into the house, and there

sitting down by the fire with crossed legs like tailors, and so low as

could not but offend chaste eyes, desired him to sit down with them.

Soon after O’Kane, the lord of the country, came in all naked excepting

a loose mantle and shoes, which he put off as soon as he came in, and

entertaining the baron after his best manner in the Latin tongue,

desired him to put off his apparel, which he thought to be a burden to

him, and to sit naked by the fire with his naked company.”

Now on this tale let me make two or three remarks.

We may ask, in the first place, why this one story is repeated on every

occasion by historians of what I might call the “savage” type; why,

omitting all other accounts, it is singled out as the typical instance

of daily life in Ireland. Is this one of the views which, according

to Dr. Mahaffy, it should be “the interest and duty” of impartial and

loyal historians to maintain?

The story originated with a “Bohemian baron,” of whom we know nothing;

it was reported by the English secretary of Mountjoy, whom he praises

for the number of “rebels” he had “brought to their last home”; to both

of them the Irish were nothing more than savages of a low type. We may

remember that this is the only story of the kind cited from Ulster. A

Spanish captain, escaped from the Armada, travelled through Connacht

and Ulster and the O’Cahan country for several months of hiding from

English soldiers; he too talked Latin in the many Irish houses which

gave him shelter, but in the book of his wanderings there is no such

incident as this.

There would seem to be need of some strictness of enquiry--some caution

in discussing the tale. At the best the outlines of the baron’s story

are vague. What decorations he himself may have introduced into it,

and what further ornaments Fynes Moryson may have added, we do not

know. We may, perhaps, judge by the embellishments which later writers

have introduced. It is possible that the baron and the secretary,

not inferior to their successors in contempt of the Irish, may have

equalled them also in literary skill and the gift of embroidering a

narrative. Let us see, therefore, some of these decorations.

Froude takes up the tale:--“If Fynes Moryson may be believed, the

daughters of distinguished Ulster chiefs squatted on the pavement

round the hall fires of their father’s castles, in the presence of

strangers, as bare of clothing as if Adam had never sinned.” Here we

see the “women,” who, for all the original story has to tell us, might

be servants, dependants, or refugees gathered in from the war and

pillage by which O’Cahan’s country was then ravaged, are transformed

into “daughters of chiefs,” the “house” turns into “pavements” by the

“hall-fires of castles,” and the incident has become a universal custom.

Then Professor Mahaffy arrives with a series of versions. “O’Cahan,

though living in a hovel, could speak Latin.” More particularly, it

was a shantie of mud and wattles, without rafters, and the cattle

and swine occupied the same room as the masters; so he explains in a

lecture on “Elizabethan Ireland.” A more circumstantial account appears

in “An Epoch in Irish History.” In this the traveller is received by

the “ladies of the chieftain’s household.” “They brought him into the

thatched cabin which was their residence,” and throwing off their

mantles invited him to do likewise before the chief came in--an

invitation which the unknown “women” of the baron’s tale did not give.

The baron’s “house” has already changed into castles with pavements,

then into a hovel, and a thatched cabin, but the picture of savagery

is not yet lurid enough, and there is a further transformation which,

possibly from its supposed importance, is dragged into a description of

society in the Dublin Georgian houses of the 18th century. “The O’Cahan

in his wigwam, surrounded by his stark naked wives (why not squaws?)

and daughters, addressed the astonished foreign visitor in fluent

Latin.” The “wigwam” and the “wives” show the unimpaired fertility

of Professor Mahaffy’s imagination. His pronouncements, the _Irish

Times_ assures us of this essay, “carry historical value of the highest

degree.” It will be interesting to watch his further adornments of his

favourite tale. It will also be interesting to see how long professors

of Trinity College will still invite Irish students to enter there by

offering this curious bait of conventional insults to their race and

country, and new varieties of old slanders.

We might remember the scene in Galway a few years later, where

high-born ladies, plundered of all their property by the rapacious

soldiers, sinking with shame before the gaze of the public in their

ragged clothes, covered themselves with embroidered table-covers,

or a strip of tapestry taken from the walls, or lappets cut from

the bed-curtains, or with blankets, sheets, or table-cloths. “You

would have taken your oath,” says the contemporary writer, “that all

Galway was a masquerade, the unrivalled home of scenic buffoons, so

irresistibly ludicrous were the varied dresses of the poor women.” Why

do not the Colonial historians give this scene as showing the habitual

taste and pleasure of the Galway ladies?

Dr. Mahaffy has some other lights to throw on Irish history. “The

contempt for traders as such ... is,” he says, “like all such

prejudice in Ireland, the survival of the contempt which the meanest

members of any Irish clan felt for any profession save that of arms,

and the preying on the churl.” The despisers of trade whom he is

describing in this passage are the English landowners of the Williamite

settlement, who had finally ousted the Irish from their lands, and

taken them over as Protestant Englishmen, men of “a better race.” This

conquering class naturally felt a contempt for their victims, the

evicted Catholic Irish, who were allowed for the benefit of their lords

and rulers to plough and to trade, while deprived of civil and social

rights. But I do not know how those lordly squires would like to have

heard that they represented the prejudices of “the meanest member of an

Irish clan,” accustomed to prey on “the churl,” whoever he was. As for

the Irish clansman who is supposed to look on traders as outcasts, he

appears to be a fiction of the essayist’s fancy. Where in Irish records

will proofs be found of contempt for a trader? Their story seems to be

quite the other way. It may be convenient, however, for the defaming of

the Irish to despise and ignore those records. Moreover, since Irish

abbeys and cathedrals have been pronounced by Mr. Litton Falkiner not

to be like the English ones, why need an Irish writer stoop into their

ruins to seek out the story written there? No, it is easier to keep

the slander running, to swell its volume, and to increase its violence.

Yet in those ruins any man who will may look upon the countless tombs

of Irishmen who (so long as the conqueror’s law allowed their desolate

companies to enter the ancient shrines) were borne by their friends

to rest in the roofless nave or before the high altar under great

slabs with the signs of their trade, the tailor’s instruments, the

carpenter’s tools, and the mason’s, the labourer’s plough, and the

trader’s ship, deeply graven beside their names--no emblems of shame in

those last sanctuaries of the Irish people.

Social life in Ireland, through all the ages, Dr. Mahaffy describes as

especially immoral. The young girls, he says, were generally accessible

to the squire and his sons all through Irish history, and suffered

no disgrace, but married all the better for such an adventure. “All

through Irish history” is a liberal and characteristic phrase to use

of English squires and their sons. The tradition of absolute landlord

power still lives in the Irish country-side, when girls were told the

price at which they might save their family from being driven out

of the home held by their ancestors for hundreds of years, and left

to die on the roadside of hunger, or in the coffin-ship of plague.

With security of tenure for the Irish poor such ordeals have passed

into history. As for reports of English tourists, they resemble the

travellers’ tales which everywhere and at all times various countries

have heard on the manners of their neighbours. It is well to remember

Gibbon’s reflection on general charges of this sort. Manuel, Emperor

of the East, visited England in 1400, and coming from Constantinople

was shocked at English conduct:--“The most singular circumstance of

their manners,” he reported, “is their disregard of conjugal honour

and of female chastity. In their mutual visits, as the first act of

hospitality, the guest is welcomed in the embraces of their wives and

daughters; among friends they are lent and borrowed without shame; nor

are the islanders offended at this strange commerce.” “We may smile at

the credulity, or resent the injustice of the Greek,” Gibbon reflects,

“but his credulity and injustice may teach an important lesson; to

distrust the accounts of foreign and remote nations, and to suspend

our belief of every tale that deviates from the laws of nature and the

character of man.”

English writers have forgotten a grave disadvantage to themselves in

the moral tale of the good and bad man (besides its incredibility

and its dullness). In this version of Irish history the Englishman’s

triumph remains a poor thing, destitute of interest or value, where

the fame of the victor is abased and confounded by the worthlessness

of his foe. The Irish warriors are mostly described as drunkards,

cowards, and barbarians. Dr. Mahaffy likens Shane O’Neill to a Moor

or a Zulu. Hugh of Tyrone “was a polished courtier on the surface,

with a barbarous core.” Here is Mr. Bagwell’s portrait of Shane,

whose organisation and defence of Ulster cost Elizabeth over £147,000

of English money (in modern money probably over £1,500,000) without

counting the enormous cesses laid on the country, and three thousand

five hundred of her soldiers slain. “He is said to have been a

glutton, and was certainly a drunkard.” The story of drunkenness

seems to have originated in his mud-baths, such as are now commonly

ordered for rheumatism. Once started, the fable was persistent. “That

drunken brain was, nevertheless, clear enough to baffle Elizabeth for

a long time.” His conduct of a war which cost Elizabeth so much is

described:--“Shane, who had been indulging as usual in wine or whisky,

came up at the moment.” “Shane, who was never remarkable for dashing

courage, retired into the wood.” “Shane, whose reputation for courage

is not high, slipped out at the back of his tent.” So, I believe, did

de Wet, instead of waiting to be killed. At the last, “the love of

liquor probably caused his death”; here indeed Mr. Bagwell contradicts

the Lord Deputy Sidney himself, who boasts that Shane was tricked

and murdered by a Scotsman in Sidney’s pay, the last of a series of

attempts at assassination. From the point of view that “barbarians”

are usually childish, Mr. Bagwell tells how the important chiefs,

MacWilliam Burke and MacGillapatrick, were given titles and robes of

Earl and Baron, “in the belief that titles and little acts of civility

would weigh more with these rude men than a display of force.” He

complains that the best-laid English military plans of occupation of

this country, instead of proceeding without interruption from the

natives, might be “frustrated by one of those unexpected acts of

treachery in which Irish history abounds.” However, even in treachery

the Irish were incompetent. “Irish plots are commonly woven in sand.”

“In this, as in so many other Irish insurrections, there was no want of

double traitors; of men who had neither the constancy to remain loyal,

nor the courage to persevere in rebellion.”

With such a rabble we can only wonder that there was any need of an

English army at all; or how the conflict could last a year (not to

say a few hundreds of them); or why England should have sent over her

very best generals, her stoutest governors, and a prodigious deal

of her gold. It was the bogs, apparently, that swallowed up those

inconceivable hosts and coins.

Under the “savage” theory military matters lose all interest; but

they are given to us with pitiless detail. Expeditions of soldiers

against famine-stricken peasants without arms, raids of mere slaughter,

the chasing of outlaws from a lake island, are described with the

minuteness of a genuine campaign. These things, no doubt, are in the

books. There are plenty of reports from officials, very humanly anxious

to justify themselves or to magnify their feats. But history after all

claims some revising power, and we need another standard of proportion

than the vanity of a lieutenant. It is impossible to give vitality to

a story in which highly armed and civilised Englishmen are represented

as wiping out with cannon and gunpowder a savage and unarmed crowd

of peasants--in which honour, courage, and progress are supposed to

be eternally confronted with chicanery, barbarity, and treachery. No

one wants to hear that tale. Such a history turns to inconceivable

tediousness, of no use to any living soul.

Meanwhile vast tracts of history have been set aside as apparently

not worth exploring. Where, for example, shall we find a serious

account, with the guidance of modern scholarship, of the hundred and

fifty years between the battle of Clontarf and the landing of the

Norman barons. The people were no longer in the tribal state. The

change to a kind of feudalism had come. What was the form of that

feudalism? How did it differ from the system that had grown out of

other conditions elsewhere? There is not so much as a chapter in any

book, or a pamphlet, occupied with the land system of the earlier

middle ages, what changes the Norman settlement brought, or what forms

of social life did actually exist. The campaign of Edward Bruce is

usually said to be a central turning point in Irish history, but who

will guide us to any adequate study of it? There are no monographs on

Desmonds, O’Neills, O’Donnells, Fitzgeralds, Butlers, Clanrickards,

and so on. No annals of the provinces or kingdoms have been compiled,

nor chronologies. The work of the two great Earls of Kildare is one

of the most critical periods of Irish history: it still awaits a

historian. Who has examined the history of the schools and education?

Who has worked out the industrial development? How can we learn what

were the negotiations by which Henry VIII. carried the claim to be King

of Ireland? Here are fields too long deserted waiting for workers.

Here are a few of the immense voids, into which our writers fling,

like bundles of dried straw, their vain words--“savage,” “primeval,”

“lawless,” “brutish,” and the rest. In the history of Ireland nothing

has been completed. That which is unknown disturbs, and may overturn

the vulgar conclusions from the fragments known. We are for ever

walking through a country unmapped. To be sure it is full of sign-posts

put up at hazard--“To English Civilisation.” Where every road is marked

to lead to the same inn, why should travellers discuss, debate, and ask

questions? What reason can there be to loiter by the way? The English

fingerpost is always there.

Some day perhaps the Irish race in this island will no longer seem to

lie beyond the need, and below the honour, of the historical method.

Ireland will have a history like other nations. It is possible to

conceive that out of its peoples, English or Irish, there may arise

some great thinker or poet who will set before us the two civilizations

that have met here; in other words, the efforts by which two highly

endowed races endeavoured to solve the problem that has perplexed

every people that has ever yet appeared in this world--how to shape a

community where men may live in safety, freedom, and happiness. The

Celts had waged the fight for their civilization to the walls of Rome

itself. They had left the valleys of the Danube and the Rhine and the

plains of Gaul red with their blood. Now, on the outermost border of

the world their last conflict awaited them. Within the mountain rim

of Ireland, with silent Nature to keep the lists, two peoples met to

fight out the last issues on that fatal soil. Here, imprisoned by

the Ocean, the antagonists stood for centuries to their battle: every

passion exalted, the splendours of courage, the majesty of despair,

all skill of surprises, all glory of chivalry, triumph and sorrow,

Christian pieties, and the surging up amid the upheaval of human

nature of the mysterious superstitions of elemental man, and of his

ferocities. What affections of race lay behind such a struggle? What

was its meaning? What of beauty, of happiness, or of virtue did each

civilization in fact offer to man? What was gained, what was lost? Here

would have been a history of fire and flame, a new outlook on the fate

of commonwealths, a theme worthy of an English or an Irish patriot.

In the long task of giving its true balance to the history of Ireland,

by the discovery of all the facts, and the adjudging of their place,

controversy will be lively. Every Irishman for certain will be ready

for a battle of wits. But let us keep our intelligence perfectly

clear on one point. We shall hear a great deal of “impartiality” and

a “judicial mind.” Here we must make no mistake. Impartiality of

intellect need not mean insensibility of heart. Let us suppose that the

intellect should have no pre-possession at all, not even in favour of

English civilization, nor of the idol of the market-place, “the Wealth

of Nations”--its delicate balance should drop now on this side, now on

that, without a shadow of prejudice or a hint of obstinacy, abhorrent

of convention, with never a predilection. But impartiality of the

heart--that is another matter. Who will pretend to comprehend human

life who has no great affection of the soul? The generous heart knows

no balancing hesitation between the man who deserts his country and the

man who defends it; he alone can interpret the hero in whose soul some

answering passion flames; and I suppose that the understanding of a

commonwealth will best come to him who is most responsive to a variety

of human emotions. I think we could do with a change of partialities in

Ireland--fewer orthodox predilections of the head, if it might be so,

and some illumination from the heart.

A new examination of Irish history is indeed of the utmost importance

to our people. The leading reviews, text-books, and histories in

England with one accord have presented Ireland to the English people

under the “savage” aspect, and their statements have been too

frequently accepted. Hear the common opinion as Tennyson put it:

“Kelts are all made furious fools.... They live in a horrible island,

and have no history of their own worth the least notice. Could not

anyone blow up that horrible island with dynamite and carry it off

in pieces--a long way off?” The same gloomy picture is still spread

before England. Mr. Fletcher, a Fellow of All Souls, records that “it

was quite common to bleed a cow for a refreshing drink of blood,” and

that “there were no exports save the said cow-skins,” though with these

the Irish apparently managed to buy “red seas of claret.” Shane O’Neill

was killed “by his own people whom he was plundering!” Degradation

was universal, as we learn from a sentence absolutely amazing in its

colossal and unscrupulous ignorance--“though his name had once been

FitzNigel or de Burgh, it gradually became O’Neill or O’Bourke!” Mr.

Rudyard Kipling joins Mr. Fletcher in declaring that Irish history

“was all broken heads and stolen cows, as it had been for a thousand

years,” and that Irishmen had no interest or care for their religion

till they discovered a use for it as a warcry against England. Accounts

of Ireland equally contrary to fact and common sense serve in political

controversy. English politicians assert on platforms that Irishmen

of themselves had never any national life or duty at all, that the

first gleam of true patriotism was taught them by England since the

Union, that Ireland had no conception of a Parliament till England

gave it to her people, when the boon was so misused and misunderstood

by an incompetent race (the English in Ireland, be it remembered)

that in the higher interests of man it had to be withdrawn. As for

the desire of self-government, “some people said it was a matter of

historical sentiment. The humour of it was that there never was a real

Irish kingdom at all. The Parliament which it was sought to restore

to Ireland was given to it by England. The historical sentiment and

loyalty which Mr. John Redmond was talking was the greatest humbug that

was ever preached.” There are others who argue, Dr. Mahaffy among them,

that practically there is not any more a Celtic race in Ireland, but

one so mixed in blood that it no longer, if it ever did, contains the

materials of a nation. The Celtic people, to their honour, have never

denied a national brotherhood to Danes, Normans, English, or Palatines,

who loyally entered into the Irish commonwealth. But as to political

theories of the vanishing of the race, we have only to examine them

by known facts, and turn to the Report of the Registrar-General in

1909 for proof that in the mingling of peoples the Celtic is still the

predominant element over all the rest; and if this proof is conclusive,

even in the register of merely Irish names, how enormous would be its

increased weight if we could reckon in Celtic families the change from

Irish names which has gone on ceaselessly since the thirteenth century,

and is still constantly occurring at this moment--a change which,

however lamentable, cannot alter the blood and the inheritance.

Irishmen are often warned to waste no time in looking back at the past.

But if England draws the moral from her interpretation of history,

we must learn our lesson too--only it must be a lesson more serious,

exact, and worthy of an educated people. We have had experience of

how profound and vicious may be the practical effect of a history

unscientific, irresponsible, prejudiced, and incomplete. Out of

ignorance of the past, what sound policy can grow for the future? I

suppose that in civilized Europe, among the speeches on State affairs

of prominent statesmen, we could find no parallel to historical

verdicts so crude and unsubstantial as those which are given to us by a

certain group of political leaders and writers in England, concerning

the Irish portion of the “Empire” of which they make their boast.

How many are the ignorances and negligences which still do service

unreproved among those who claim to be the chief upholders of a “United

Kingdom,” and exponents of the “Imperial” faith.

In Ireland we have still indeed a heavy road to travel. When history

has been written, what about the teaching of it, or the learning, in

this country? Who will make the way free for that?

Let me put this matter before you by way of contrast. You have heard

the fame of Sparta, the land of heroes who won at the Thermopylæ a

far-shining glory that will ever stir the hearts of men. Montaigne

reminds us that in the matchless policy of Sparta to build up a noble

State, it is worthy of great consideration that the education of the

children was the first and principal charge. “And, therefore, was it

not strange,” he says, “if Antipater requiring fifty of their children

for hostages, they answered clean contrary to what we would do, ‘that

they would rather deliver him twice so many men’; so much did they

value and esteem the loss of their country’s education.” Now in this

training up of men to be citizens of the finest quality, the only one

book-study absolutely enforced in Sparta was History--to the mockery

and contempt of neighbouring Doctors of letters and literature of the

time. “Idiots and foolish people,” scoffed the high-class Athenian

professor, adept in polite languages and fine phrasing and the

elegancies of culture, and not neglectful of the profits to be got by

professing them; “idiots and foolish people, who only amuse themselves

to know the succession of kings, and establishing and declination of

estates, and such-like trash of flim-flam tales.” Socrates, you may be

sure, did not join in these sarcasms. Sparta had shown the honour and

manhood that history can teach, and how it can make of men champions of

their country, keepers of their forefathers’ fame, and rivals of their

own ancient heroes.

Side by side with this ancient instance we may put one of our own day.

There is a country which has suddenly risen to great eminence in war

and organisation, as it had long been famous in the arts, with which

England hastened to make alliance. That country is Japan. In Japan,

when the eldest son comes of age, it is the custom for his father to

take him a tour on foot round the country, visiting every place of fame

in its history, so that the youth may enter on man’s estate as a worthy

citizen of the State that bred him. These honourable pilgrims can be

met on every road. They have known, like the men of Sparta, the power

of history to fortify the mind and expand the soul. Every Japanese man

of character will tell you that in any serious enterprise he is in the

presence, in the company of the great Dead of his people. That by them

his purpose is ennobled, his courage uplifted, his solitude changed

into a great communion. We have seen how that spirit has exalted a

people.

With such instances in our minds we may ask what we are doing in

Ireland. What kind of citizens are we building up for our own land?

As in England, so in Ireland, history has in the last dozen years been

made compulsory in the schools. But there is a difference. For Ireland

history is not a subject in itself. In our primary and intermediate

education Irish history is now a department of English language and

literature. At the age when impressions made on a youth’s mind are

certain to become the all-compelling habits of his later life, it is

suggested to him that the history of his country is less important

than the rules of English grammar, and that the achievements of his

father may at the best rank with the model sentences in which English

essayists write of Friendship and Gardens and Christmas. The student

for honours under the Intermediate system may, at his own will, prefer

a continental language to history. A pass-student might choose to gain

all the necessary marks in English grammar and composition alone; if he

has drunk in all that the amiable and unimportant Alexander Smith can

tell him “Of the Importance of a Man to Himself,” he may omit all that

the world can tell him “Of the Importance of a Man to his Country,” or

of his Country to him. Such knowledge may be left to the “idiots and

foolish people, who only amuse themselves to know the succession of

kings, and establishing and declination of estates, and such-like trash

of flim-flam tales.”

Nor is this the worst of the matter. Suppose that an Irish boy has

been stirred by what he has seen in his country home. There was,

perhaps, beside it a Danes’ Fort, a Giants’ Ring, one of the two

thousand mounds piled up in Ireland by human hands, a Rathcroghan, or

a mighty Ailech of the kings where legendary monarchs sleep on their

horses waiting for the day that shall call them to ride out. He may

have lived by a solemn burial place of great chiefs, by a round tower,

by a high cross deeply carved, by some island of saints rich in ruins

and sculptured slabs. He may have been taken to the Irish Academy and

seen the Psalter of Columcille; or to Trinity College to look on the

book of Kells; or to the National Museum to be turned loose among the

carved rocks, the copper cauldrons, the golden diadems and torques,

the mighty horns of bronze, the heavy Danish swords, the weights for

commerce, the marvels in metal and enamel work, the Tara brooch, the

Ardagh chalice, the Cross of Cong, the long array of crosiers and bells

and shrines and book-covers. He may learn by chance that his country

is the wonder of Europe for the wealth and beauty of its relics of the

past. Desire may come on him to know the story of a land so astonishing

in the visible records left by his ancestors. Descended from a race who

had history in their very blood and the glorious tradition of their

fathers, he may feel that old hereditary passion burn in his heart. He

will add history to his study of the English language and the essays of

Smith.

But even in that case, once entered on the course of education provided

for him by the Intermediate Board, he will find through the whole of

his pass work or of his honour work not one word to tell him who made

the marvels he has seen. For in Anglicised Ireland it is ordered that

history shall begin in 1066. The Irish annals record a comet in that

year. But it is not for the comet the year is chosen, but because

the date of the Norman Conquest of England is to mark the beginning

of history for Ireland. From the first the student is caught by the

pleasant fiction which is now proclaimed on every Unionist platform

that Ireland “under the English ownership,” has no life save that which

England gives. Irish history is not to be the story of Ireland, but

of the “United Kingdom.” It is to travel with the fortunes of England

step by step. An exact care conducts the student through the centuries.

All dates are ruled by English text-books, never by periods of change

in Ireland. According to the step by step theory, if the Irish student

must begin his story of Ireland with William’s Conquest of England, he

must pause at the end of the English Wars of the Roses. What matter

if that close of a period in England happens in Ireland to be in full

midway of a very extraordinary racial and constitutional movement full

of vital energy? The teacher must by order cut his story in half,

and start again to pull up his next course sharply at the death of

Elizabeth, a merely nominal date in Ireland, which ended or began

nothing. There the next period opens by order, and ended this present

year at a date (1784) when it would be absolutely impossible for an

Irish teacher to call a halt except by stopping in the middle of a

sentence; and for the coming year is to close at 1760, before the first

movement for the emancipation of the Irish Parliament. Not a word will

the Irish youth hear of the Irish kingdoms and schools and craftsmen

and merchants, nor of the Danes and their fleets, nor of the Irish

culture spread over Europe. He would know nothing of Columcille and the

work of Iona, nor of Columbanus and the work of St. Gall and of Bobio.

Nothing will be told of St. Brendan and his sailing to the west; nor

of learned Fergil the Geometer, who in spite of the orthodox theories

of an impassable equator, alone maintained that there were living men

at the antipodes; nor of the Irish goldsmiths and builders. Cormac’s

chapel must go. The very name of Brian Boru is expunged. There can be

no mention of the five hundred years of Irishmen’s fame in Europe as

classical scholars, philosophers, saints, merchants, or travellers.

The centuries of Ireland’s history as a free and independent country

are blotted out, and he may catch no glimpse of his people save in

the various phases of their material subjugation. During his entire

course he can turn no wandering eye on an Ireland that had any art,

literature, or industry of its own--a place where anything may have

happened on its own account, or where any interest may lie detached

from an English book of chronology.

This disastrous conception of the “Union” as a kind of amalgamation

of countries in which all national limits are submerged and lost

follows the Irishman at home and abroad. He can scarcely set foot in

Europe save in the track of Irish wanderers of every age whose fame

should be his glory. But the shadow of this distorted notion hangs

round him--the shadow of the predominant sharer of all the effort

and fortune of his people. In the published Catalogue of the MSS. in

the Royal Library at Brussels, he must look for the Irish Annals and

historical documents under the one heading _Angleterre_, without even a

sub-heading _Irlande_. In Switzerland, surrounded by relics of the six

hundred and thirteen dependent houses of St. Gall, whence Irish monks

restored civilization to that land, he will be told at S. Beatenberg by

the guide-books that S. Beatus was _British_, and by local tradition

that he was Scotch. At the shrine of San Pellegrino in the Apennines,

he will hear praises of a _Scotch_ king’s son. In Rome he will learn

that _England_ was “the Isle of Saints.” Against these ignorances his

training in Ireland gives him no protection. Similar fallacies pursue

him across the Atlantic. Let him go to America, and Washington Irving

will tell him of the mariner whose story was one of the moving causes

that led Columbus to enquire of the land beyond the Ocean, and will

inform him that this famous St. Brendan was a _Scotch_ monk. Many

others he will find ignorant of history, and above all anxious not to

identify Ireland with any of her children that have done great things.

Mr. Whitelaw Reid will explain to him that the emigrants from Ulster to

America, the Ulster-born leaders who fought for American independence

in counsel, in convention, and in the field; the “Sons of St. Patrick”

who poured out their money and their blood for Washington--that all

these were _Scotchmen_, of no Irish kin or race, whose followers and

descendants have manfully rejected the term “Scotch-Irish” because it

“confused the race with the accident of birth,” and called themselves

“Ulster Scots” to show they had no part or lot with the Irish by blood

(_Celtic Review_, Jan., 1912). He apparently sees in the Presbyterian

religion of the “Ulster Scot” some subtle evidence of a nobler and

more distinguished origin than the “Scotch Irish,” some guarantee of

Low-German or English stock.

The new school of American Irish, who under the influence of the

“Anglo-Saxon” enthusiasm, or with a desire to be on the winning side,

lay claim to a “Scotch” descent, ignore the historical meaning of the

word “Scot,” or the origin of the name “Scotland.” In vain for them

authentic history may tell of the ceaseless wanderings of the Gaelic

people across the narrow seas. From Ireland the Scots in early times

spread over the Hebrides and western Highlands, and carried their

settlements and speech over the Lowlands of the Picts and Britons

to the very borders of the little English colony of the Lothians,

leaving the western and middle Lowlands the most Celtic region in

Scotland. Irish folk settled freely in Scotland until the confiscation

of Ulster; as for example when the Monroes and Currys crossed the

sea, about 1300, with a number of other noble families who obtained

grants of land. Inter-marriage was very frequent at all times. Back

to Ireland again came streams of immigrants from the “Scot” or Irish

settlements across the water. The mingled race of Celts and Norse from

the Hebrides and the Highlands, all alike talking Irish and claiming

Irish descent, poured colonies into Ireland without ceasing from 1250

to 1600, forefathers of hundreds of thousands to-day of Irish family.

The western and middle Lowlands (along with the Highlands) sent from

1600 the main body of settlers of the Ulster Plantation, chiefly

of Picto-Celtic stock; most of the first settlers must have been

bi-lingual, speaking not only “Broad Scots” but their native Gaelic,

which in 1589 was still the chief language of Galloway. Scots and Irish

were the same to Henry VIII., whose servant Alen protested in 1549

against any “liberty” for the Irish, which, he said, was “the only

thing that Scots and wild Irish constantly contended for.” The Scots

of the Isles were known to Elizabeth as “those Yrishe people,” “the

Yrishes”; the “English Scots” whom she employed in her Irish wars were

so called from their political faction and Protestant religion, not

from any difference of blood from their brethren. In 1630 the scholar

Bedell included Irish and Scots in one single group; “and surely it

was a work agreeable to the mind of God that the poor Irish, being a

very numerous nation, besides the greater half of Scotland, and all

those islands called Hebrides, that lie in the Irish Sea, and many of

the Orcades also that speak Irish, should be enabled to search the

Scriptures.” The old Irish of Ulster in 1641 excepted the Scots from

their hostile measures as being of their own race, and this only a

generation after the Plantation, when most of the evicted Irish must

have been still alive. Jeremy Taylor in 1667 describes the Scots and

Irish of north-east Ulster as “_populus unius labii_ and unmingled with

others.” Over whole districts, where half the population at least were

Presbyterian descendants of Scottish immigrants, the speech of the

people even in the eighteenth century was Gaelic. For some fourteen

centuries indeed common schools of learning, a common literature,

common national festivals, maintained the unbroken tradition of unity

of race; it was from Ireland, in an Irish translation, that the Bible

reached the Highlands. The kings of Scotland long kept the remembrance

of their connexion with the remote generations of the race of Gaedhel

Glas. Dr. Norman Moore in his “Medicine in the British Isles,” (149)

has preserved a Highland tradition told him by Field-Marshal Sir

Patrick Grant whose memory was full of the old Gaelic stories and

verses; that at the Scottish coronation of Charles I. ancient Gaelic

phrases of installation were used for the last time.

Among the men whom Mr. Whitelaw Reid selects to give glory to the

“Scotch” race as distinguished from the Irish, we may take at chance

three examples. President MacKinlay came of the Hebridean race of

Gaelic Scots with a strong infusion of Norse blood, who, Norsemen and

Scots alike, boasted of Irish descent; they settled in Ireland about

1400 A.D., nor did the Antrim MacKinlays in later days ever speak of

themselves save as Irish. President Monroe belonged to an Irish Gaelic

family which had crossed to Scotland with a number of other noble

families about 1300, and obtained grants of land among their kin there.

Patrick Henry, whether he was of old Ulster race or of the Scottish

lowlands, unless clear proof to the contrary can be given by a detailed

pedigree, must be counted as a Celt or a Picto-Celt: one group of

Henrys in Ulster is descended from the MacHenry sept of the O’Neills

who lived on the Bann-side at the time of the Plantation; another

family, more ancient and probably more numerous, O h-Inneirghe, whose

surname is now written Henry, was the ruling sept of a district in the

south of Derry country. No one, unless he proves his case by direct

evidence, could truthfully and with knowledge assert that Patrick

Henry, or President Monroe, or President MacKinlay, were other than

representative Celts by race.

It would have been a strange doctrine to the Irish emigrants themselves

to tell them that they were Scotch. From 1720 they swarmed over to

people Pennsylvania, as if, men said at the time, Ireland was sending

out all its inhabitants--in one year alone (1729) no less than 5,655

Irish, to 267 English and Welsh, and 43 Scotch. There was a Scotch

Society of St. Andrew’s in Philadelphia (1749); but the emigrants from

Ireland, Catholic and Presbyterian alike, looked on themselves as plain

Irishmen, not Scotch; they gave to their settlements Irish names; the

wealthier men among them established in 1765 an “Irish Club”; out of

this they formed in 1771 the leading Irish organisation before and

during the Revolution--the famous Society of the “Friendly Sons of St.

Patrick.” There were at first but three Catholics in the Society, but

the Irish Presbyterians and Episcopalians of that day chose for their

patron the Saint of Ireland, not of Scotland, and for their President

a Catholic, Moylan, certainly not a Scotchman; they met on St.

Patrick’s Day; their medal bore figures of _Hibernia_ with a harp, and

_St. Patrick_ carrying a cross and trampling on a snake. The heroic

services of that devoted Society of Irishmen cannot be told here. After

the war it founded and became merged in the _Hibernian_ Society of “the

natives of Ireland or descendants of Irishmen” (so little did they fear

the name), for the relief of emigrants from Ireland. These Irishmen had

not yet learned to despise their race and country, and to invent for

themselves a new nation without any root in history.

In English history, where certain general lines of knowledge have

been laid down as the common property of educated men, serious lapses

are held a reproach: in Irish history an ambassador from the United

States to Great Britain and Ireland can allow himself to tell us that

an “Ulster Scot” is no more an Irishman than a man would be a horse if

born in a stable.

The imaginations of a mock “Imperial history,” by which all treasure

found is thrown “impartially” into the common stock of the United

Kingdom, in other words of Great Britain, leaving Ireland bare, belong

not to science but to politics. By such a perverted history the

honourable pride of a people may be transformed into humiliation and

self-distrust. They are made to stand before Europe with the appearance

of defeat, ruin, and rebuke; a race without the dignity of ever having

had a true civilization, incapable of development in the land they

wasted. What vigour or self-respect can grow out of a maimed history

such as this? Or can any promise of material advancement serve as

the substitute for a good reputation, or consolation for spiritual

impoverishment?

We may take one notable instance of how since the Union ignorance of

Irish history has been officially fostered. In 1828 a lofty enterprise

was opened by Sir Thomas Larcom, director of the central office of

the newly-appointed Irish Ordnance Survey. The Survey maps were to be

constructed on such a scale as to be of use in correcting the unequal

pressure of taxation, and to serve as guides for local improvement.

Enquiry indeed was needed into the resources and conditions of a

country which Petrie describes--“the habitations of the people

miserable and comfortless, and the people themselves the most wretched

in the world. Joy will never brighten the prospect, misery never

disappear.” To carry out these orders Larcom planned a scheme on

noble lines. He held it necessary to complete the maps by making a

study in each parish of the state in which Nature had placed it, the

condition to which it had been brought by art, and the uses now made

by the people of their combination; in other words, there must be an

exact knowledge of the natural products of the country, its history

and antiquities, and its economic state and social condition. In this

scheme of elevated science an enquiry into past history was considered

necessary as a prelude to the proper understanding of the present

state--an enquiry which was to include all monuments of the past, Pagan

and Christian, all the traditions and accounts of them that remained,

the state of society in which they arose, the earliest history of the

people whose descendants might still inhabit the district, and the

changes which led to the present establishments for government.

The opportunity for carrying out this work was as surprising as its

conception. The great scholar Petrie, who was at the time founding the

museum of the Royal Irish Academy and in great measure founding too

its library, was in 1833 set at the head of the historical department

of the Survey, and charged with the task of collecting the true names

of baronies, townlands, and parishes, and the investigation of ancient

monuments. He gathered round him a staff of Irish scholars--men of the

soil, heirs of the Irish tradition--John O’Donovan, Eugene O’Curry, J.

O’Connor, P. O’Keefe, along with Clarence Mangan, Du Noyer, Wakeman,

and others, all filled with the same spirit, and fired with the

desire of producing a perfect work. Never perhaps had there been such

a combination of talent directed to the one end of restoring Irish

knowledge. For the first time during centuries of exclusion, Irish

students were brought into close and constant communication in their

own country with men of trained intelligence, and encouraged to use

their skill for the benefit of their country. Once more Ireland had

such a school as those which in the periods of her great revivals

in the twelfth and fifteenth centuries gathered up and left to us

all the relics of Irish history that we possess. Once more a kind of

peripatetic University was set up, in the very spirit of the older

Irish life.

The astonishing enthusiasm of these zealots is shown by the almost

incredible record of their work in half a dozen years. It is such

things as these that reveal to us the soul of Irish Nationality and

the might of its repression. We can but stand astonished before the

unstinted labour, before the miraculous accomplishment, of that

company of workers. The work was new, travel was slow, and hardship

frequent: but every difficulty vanished before their consuming ardour.

Petrie’s band has left, besides maps, sketches, and documents of a

general nature, not less than four hundred and sixty-eight large

volumes of documents relating to Irish topography, language, history,

and antiquities. A collection was made of over sixty thousand names,

of their mutations, their various spellings, their meanings, and

translations in English; when this work was completed a skilled Irish

scholar was sent to every district to learn there from Irish speakers

the vernacular name, and to collect traditions and legends, and note

any antiquities that had been omitted. The traditions of Ireland at

that time had not been wholly broken. In Petrie’s writings we can still

see the Irish multitudes who in the depth of their poverty preserved

the memories of their race and their holy places, and the national

pilgrims gathering round their old shrines “with the utmost fervency

of devotion, and in all their movements an abstracted intensity of

feeling that carries the mind back to remote times.” In spite of much

destruction, in spite of the lamentable absence in the new landlords

of Ireland of proper pride and national feeling, there still remained

a mass of ancient monuments preserved by the pious memories of the

people, crosses, graveyards, old paths, and names and histories; which

have been since swept away in the horrors of famine and emigration and

the devastating land commercialism let loose by the Encumbered Estates

Act.

The first memoir published by the Ordnance Survey in 1837, the account

of Derry, was hailed with universal enthusiasm. “Irishmen of all sects

and parties felt that in such work as this they would have for the

first time the materials for a true history of their country.” But

the Government interfered. The Topographical Survey was closed, the

staff discharged, and the vast mass of material, comprising among

other things upwards of four hundred quarto volumes of letters and

documents relating to the topography, language, history, antiquities,

productions, and social state of almost every county in Ireland, were

ordered to be kept, idle and useless, in the Survey Office at Mountjoy

barracks. The reason given was the cost. At this time England was

drawing from Ireland to her own use some three millions a year above

her expenditure there. It was shown that the sale of the memoir

was such as would probably defray the whole expense. The Government

objected to treating history and political economy as subjects which

might re-open questions of Irish party divisions: it was answered that

the events of history could not be buried in oblivion, since they had

occurred and their effects continue, and it was well for the public to

have a plain impartial record of bare facts, since on neither side were

the facts yet known.

In answer to the vehement protests of all Ireland, a Commission

was appointed under a new Government in 1843. It advised that the

work should be continued, and urged the importance of the time,

for monuments and language were alike disappearing: it recommended

that the vast mass of collected material now lying waste should

be published, since “no enquirer until the officers of the Survey

commenced their labours, has ever brought an equal amount of local

knowledge, sound criticism, and accurate acquaintance with the Irish

language to bear upon it.” The Government took no notice. It was

believed by the best-informed that some strong concealed influence

urged on ministers that it was dangerous to open up to the people the

memory of their fathers and their old society, or remind them of the

boundaries of their clans and families. In vain the best Irishmen of

the day, of every race and religion, pleaded for a braver view of

truth and statesmanship. Political influences, the fears of absentee

landlords or of a Protestant ascendancy, prevailed in London. English

rulers dreaded the knowledge of the Irish more than they dreaded their

ignorance; and the door was shut on history, science, and truth, with

the results that we have seen in succeeding generations.

By this act much knowledge was finally obliterated: no such opportunity

can ever occur again. Much more was set back for a hundred years, and

ignorance still left enthroned. We may still hear men professing, as

though time had stood still, the doctrines Petrie reported in vogue a

century ago: “The history and antiquities of Ireland previous to the

English Invasion, are wholly unworthy of notice, or, at best, involved

in obscurity and darkness such as no sane mind would venture to

penetrate.” Irish history, buried by two Governments, was supposed to

have no resurrection: instead of the serious enquiry inaugurated by the

old Survey, modern statesmen will assure us through Mr. Balfour that

for talk of Irish ideas and institutions, “there is no historic basis

whatever.”

The Royal Irish Academy applied for the custody of a part of the Survey

records, which were given to its keeping in 1860; and have there been

consulted for local or county histories. Meanwhile the Survey was

continued in an innocuous form without the historic virus. Directed

from Southampton, English “division officers” in Dublin, Belfast and

Cork conduct the Irish Survey. Their maps may serve practical purposes

of buying and selling land, and even present accurately all modern

features, police barracks and the like. But they offer doubtful help to

the curious historian on the road of scientific enquiry. The spirit and

purpose of the older research has been banished. Irish antiquities are

no longer objects of interest or of skilled observation; Irish names

are treated in many cases as an insurmountable difficulty; any ordered

attempt at their right spelling is abandoned. The ancient fort of

Lisnalinchy in Antrim has been allotted the happy name of _Silentia_,

as if to give to a deep-buried Irish history the respectability of a

mock Roman tombstone. Port-na-veadog, the port of the plover, appears

as Dog’s Bay. Professor Macalister, examining the ancient ruins on the

Carrowkeel mountain in Co. Sligo, has reported there the remarkable

site of one of the oldest village settlements in northern Europe,

with remains of over forty-seven structures; and hard by an ancient

cemetery with fourteen carns left by the old builders. The Survey

has been there, and has marked the height of the beacon it erected

on one of the finest of the carns, but has left on the map no record

of this conspicuous and striking carn as an ancient monument. The

most important of the structures, eighty-seven feet in diameter and

twenty-five in height, is marked by an indefinite symbol, and not

as having any character of antiquity. While nearly all the chief

carns were omitted, by some chance or curious scruple of conscience

one or two of the smaller examples have been noted. Of twenty-three

place names in the square mile of country only nine are recorded.

Names here and elsewhere are set down in an Anglicised and phonetic

spelling, often atrocious in form. As Professor Macalister observes,

nothing could more clearly prove than this characteristic effort of

the Ordnance Survey in Ireland the absolute necessity of a thorough

re-survey, under expert superintendence, of the archæology and place

names of the country. All historians, all Irishmen alike, must ardently

join in such an entreaty, for the honour of their land. Is it too much

to hope that this national work may not be for ever left to indifferent

hands, but that Irish scholars may yet be given the patriotic task of

saving what yet remains on Irish soil of the inheritance of her people.

Of one thing, however, we may be sure. The reform of Irish history

must begin in our own country, among our own people. Since it is

public opinion that at the last decides what our people shall learn of

their father-land, we ourselves must be the keepers of our fame and

the makers of our history. Let us in Ireland therefore remember that

we have an ancestry on which there is no need for us to cry shame.

Chivalry, learning, patriotism, poetry, have been found there, even “in

huts to which an Englishman would have hesitated to give the name of a

house.” No people have ever surpassed them in exaltation or intensity

of spiritual life. The sun has risen and set in that land on lives

of courage, honour, and beauty. The seasons have watched the undying

effort to make Ireland the honoured home of a united people. Not a

field that has not drunk in the blood of men and women poured out for

the homes of their fathers. Why should not we, the sons and daughters

of Ireland, take our rich inheritance? “Let us enjoy, whenever we have

an opportunity, the delight of admiration, and perform the duties of

reverence.” So long as the Spirit of life is over us, I do not know,

and I hope you do not know, why we in this country should not be worthy

of our dead.

[Illustration: SCANDINAVIAN TRADE ROUTES]