From the establishment of Illuminated Masonry, its Supreme Council
never lost sight of a discontented population in any part of the earth.
Aspiring to universal rule, it carefully took cognizance of every
national or social movement among the masses, which gave promise of
advancing its aims. It was thus it succeeded with the operative and
peasant population of France, so as to accomplish the first and every
subsequent revolution in that country. The letters of the _Alta Vendita_
and of _Piccolo Tigre_ especially, have carefully had in view the
corruption of the masses of working men, so as to de-Christianize them
adroitly, and fit and fashion them into revolutionists. Now amongst all
the peoples of the earth, those who most impeded Atheistic designs, were
the Catholics of Ireland. Forced to leave their country in millions, they
brought to Scotland, to England, to the United States, to Canada, to the
West Indies, to our growing Colonies—all empires in germ—of Australia,
and as soldiers of England, to India, Africa and China, the strongest
existing faith in that very religion, which Atheistic Freemasonry so
much desires to destroy. It would be impossible to imagine, that the
dark Directories of the Illuminati did not take careful account of
this population. And they did. In the years preceding 1798, they had
emissaries, like those sent subsequently amongst the Catholic Carbonari
of Naples, active amongst the ranks of the United Irishmen. France,
then completely under the control of the Illuminati, sent aid which she
sorely wanted at home, at the instigation of these very emissaries,
to found an Irish Republic, of course on the Atheistic lines, upon
which all the Republics then founded by her arms, were established.
That expedition ended in failure; but organisations on the lines of
Freemasonry continued for many years afterwards to distract Ireland.
As in Italy, the Illuminati had taught the peasantry of Ireland how to
conspire in secret, oath bound, and, of course, often murderous, but
always hopeless, league against their oppressors. These societies never
accomplished one atom of good for Ireland. They did much mischief. But
what cared the hidden enemies of religion for the real happiness of the
Irish? Their gain consisted in placing antagonism between the faithful
pastors of the people and the members of those secret societies of
Ribbonmen, Molly Maguires, and other such associations, organized by
designing and, generally, traitorous scoundrels. In 1848, there was
something like a tendency in Ireland to imitate the secret revolutionary
movements established on the Continent by Mazzini. We had a Young Ireland
Organization. That was not initiated as a secret society. Neither was the
Society of United Irishmen at first. But the open United Irishmen led to
the secret society; and so very easily might the Young Ireland movement
of 1848, if it had not been prematurely brought to a conclusion. As it
was, it led, without its leaders desiring it—indeed against the will of
many of them—to the deepest, most cunningly devised, wide-spread, and
mischievous, secret organization into which heedless young Irishmen have
been ever yet entrapped. This was the Fenian Secret Society.
We can speak of the action of the originators of this movement as
connected with the worst form of Atheistic, Continental, secret-society
organization; for they boasted of having gone over to France “to study”
the plans elaborated by the most abandoned revolutionists in that
country. For my own part, I believe that these hot-headed young men,
as they were at the time, never took the initiative themselves, but
were entrapped into this course of action by agents of the designing
Directory of the Atheistic movement, at that moment presided over by Lord
Palmerston himself. That the association of the Fenians should be created
and afterwards sacrificed to England, would be but in keeping with the
traditions of the _Alta Vendita_, in whose place Lord Palmerston and
his council stood. We read in the life of the celebrated _Nubius_, the
monarch who preceded Palmerston, that he often betrayed into the hands
of the Pontifical Government some lodges of the Carbonari under his own
rule, for the purpose of screening himself and of punishing these very
lodges. If he found a lodge indiscreet, or possessing amongst its members
too much religion to be tractable enough to follow the Infidel movement,
he betrayed it. He told the Government how to find it out; where it had
its arms concealed; who were its members; and what were their misdeeds.
They were accordingly taken red-handed, tried, and executed. _Nubius_ got
rid of a difficult body, for whom he felt nothing but contempt; and his
position at Rome was rendered secure to gnaw, as he himself expressed
it, at the foundations of that Pontifical power, which thought that
any connection, such a respectable nobleman as he was, might have with
assassins, could be only in reality for the good of religion and the
government, to which by station, education, and even class-interest he
was allied. Palmerston, too, if he wanted a blind to lead his colleagues
astray, could, in the knowledge to be obtained of Fenian plots in Ireland
and America, have a ready excuse for his well-known, constant intercourse
with the heads of the Revolution of the world. What scruple would he
have, any more than his predecessor, _Nubius_, in urging on a few men
whom he despised, to revolution; and then using means to strangle their
efforts and themselves if necessary. It was good policy in the sight of
some at least of his colleagues, to manifest Ireland as revolutionary,
especially when such a man as Palmerston had all the threads of the
conspiracy which aimed at the revolution in his hand. They knew that he
knew where to send his spies, and thwart at the opportune moment the
whole movement. He could cause insurrections to be made in the most
insane manner, as to time and place, just as they were made, and cover
the conspirators with easy defeat and ridicule.
However this may be, the Fenian movement after being nursed in America,
appeared in Ireland, as a society founded upon lines not very unlike
those of the Carbonari of Italy. It was Illuminated Freemasonry with, of
course, another name, in order not to avert the pious Catholic men it
meant to seduce and destroy from its ranks. But being what it was, it
could not long conceal its innate, determined hostility to the Catholic
religion; and it proved itself in Ireland, and wherever it took a hold of
the people in the three kingdoms, one of the most formidable enemies to
the souls of the Irish people that had ever appeared.
When I say this, do not imagine that I mean for a single moment to infer,
that many of those who joined it, held or knew its views. If all I have
hitherto stated proves anything, it is this: The nature of the infernal
conspiracy which we are considering is essentially hypocritical. It comes
as Freemasonry comes, with a lie in its mouth. It comes under false
pretences always. So it came to Italy under the name of Carbonarism. It
came not only professing the purest Catholic religion, but absolutely
made the saying of prayers, the frequentation of the sacraments, the open
confession of the Faith, and devotion to the Vicar of Christ, a matter
of obligation. I do not believe that Fenianism came to Ireland with so
many pious professions. But it came in the guise of patriotism, which in
Ireland, for many centuries, was so bound up with religion, that in the
minds of the peasantry, one became inseparably connected with the other.
The friend of one was looked upon as the friend of the other; and the
enemy of the one was regarded as the enemy of the other. Hence, in the
minds of the Irish, in my own boyhood, the French who came over under
Hoche, were regarded as Catholic. The Irish would have it, that France
was then as it was when the “wild geese” went over to fight for the
Bourbons, a Catholic nation. The truth was, of course, quite the other
way; but so long were the Irish people accustomed to regard the French
as Catholic, that they still cherished the delusion, and would hear or
believe nothing to the contrary. It was enough, therefore, for Fenianism
to appear in the guise of a national movement meant to free the country
from Protestant England, that it should without question be looked upon
as—at least in the first instance—essentially Catholic. Nevertheless,
after its leaders had gone to Paris to study the methods of the French
and Italian Carbonari, and returned to create circles and centres on the
plan of the _Vendite_ of the Italians, they showed a large amount of the
Infidel spirit of the men they found in France, and determined to spread
it in Ireland. They well knew that the Catholic clergy would be sure to
oppose and denounce them as would every wise and really patriotic man in
the country. The utter impossibility of any military movement which could
be made by any available number of destitute Irish peasantry, succeeding
at the time, was in itself reason enough why men of any humanity, not
to speak at all of the clergy, should endeavour to dissuade the people
from the mad enterprise of the Fenians. Every good and experienced
Irishman; Smith O’Brien; the editors of the _Nation_; and others did so;
yet strange to say, the leaders of the disastrous movement, the Irish,
and the American organizers, were permitted by the English Government,
at least so long as Lord Palmerston lived, to act almost as they pleased
in Ireland. The Government knew, that while impotent to injure England,
these agitators and conspirators were doing the work which English
anti-Catholic hate desired to do, more effectively than any delusion, or
bribe, or persecution which heresy had been able to invent. They were
undermining the Faith of the people and destroying secretly but surely
that love and respect for the clergy which had distinguished the country
ever since the days of St. Patrick. A paper edited by one of these men,
was circulated for at least two years in the homes of nearly all the
population. It contained, to be sure, much incitement to revolution; but
it contained also that which in Lord Palmerston’s eyes compensated for
the kind of revolution Fenians could make a thousand fold—it contained
the most able, virulent, and subtle attacks upon the clergy. This paper
remained undisturbed until Palmerston passed away, and affairs in America
made Fenianism a real danger for his successors in office. Its issues
contained letters written in its own office, but purporting to come from
various country parishes, calumniating many of the most venerable of the
priests of the people. Men who so loved their flocks as to sacrifice all
for them during the famine years—men who had lived with them from youth
to old age, were now so artfully assailed as foes of their country’s
liberation, that the people maddened and deluded by such attacks, passed
them on the road without the usual loving salutation Catholics in Ireland
give to and receive from their priests. The secret sect backed up the
action of the newspaper. Its leaders got the “word of command” for that
purpose, and had to be obeyed. Matters proceeded daily from bad to worse,
until at last Divine Providence manifested clearly the deadly designs
against religion underlying the Fenian movement, and the people of
Ireland recoiled from it and were saved.
And then it was hard to keep, even the leaders themselves, bad to the
end. At death, few of them like to face the God they have outraged,
without reconciliation. But in life these men, like the informers with
whom they are so often in alliance, do desperate things to deceive
first, and then, for a passing interest, to ruin their unfortunate dupes
afterwards. For my own part, I am of opinion that the man who deludes
a number of brave young hearts to rush into a murderous enterprise,
hopeless from the outset, is as dangerous as the man who seduces men to
become assassins and then sacrifices their lives to save his own neck
from the halter. At most there is but the difference of degree in the
guilt and malignity of the leaders who urged on impetuous youth to such
risings as those of the snowstorms in 1867, and of the scoundrel who
planned assassination, entrapped and excited the same kind of youth to
execute it, and then swore their lives away to save himself from his
justly deserved doom. I am led to this conclusion inevitably from the
account given of the Fenian rising, by one of the purest Irish patriots
of this century, one just gone amidst the tears of his fellow-countrymen,
with stainless name, and a career of glorious labour, to his eternal
reward. Mr. Alexander M. Sullivan in his interesting “Story of Ireland”
says:
“There was up to the last a fatuous amount of delusion maintained by the
‘Head Centre’ on this side of the Atlantic, James Stephens, a man of
marvellous subtlety and wondrous powers of plausible imposition; crafty,
cunning, and quite unscrupulous as to the employment of means to an end.
However, the army ready to hand in America, if not utilized at once,
would soon be melted away and gone, like the snows of past winters. So in
the middle of 1865 it was resolved to take the field in the approaching
autumn.
“It is hard to contemplate this decision or declaration, without deeming
it either insincere or wicked on the part of the leader or leaders, who
at the moment knew the _real_ condition of affairs in Ireland. That the
enrolled members, howsoever few, would respond when called upon, was
certain at any time; for the Irish are not cowards; the men who joined
this desperate enterprise were sure to prove themselves courageous, if
not either prudent or wise. But the pretence of the revolutionary chief,
that there was a force able to afford the merest chance of success, was
too utterly false not to be plainly criminal.
“Towards the close of 1865 came almost contemporaneously the Government
swoop on the Irish Revolutionary executive, and the deposition—after
solemn judicial trial, as prescribed by the laws of the society—of
O’Mahony, the American ‘Head Centre,’ for crimes and offences alleged to
be worse than mere imbecility, and the election in his stead of Colonel
William R. Roberts, an Irish American merchant of high standing and
honourable character, whose fortune had always generously aided Irish
patriotic, charitable, or religious purposes. The deposed official,
however, did not submit to the application of the society rules. He set
up a rival association, a course in which he was supported by the Irish
Head Centre; and a painful scene of factious and acrimonious contention
between the two parties thus antagonised, caused the English Government
to hope—nay, for a moment, fully to believe—that the disappearance of
both must soon follow.”
Mr. A. M. Sullivan, after speaking of the history of the Fenian movement
in America, continues:—
“This brief episode at Ridgeway was for the confederated Irish the one
gleam to lighten the page of their history for 1866. That page was
otherwise darkened and blotted by a record of humiliating and disgraceful
exposures in connection with the Irish Head Centre. In autumn of that
year he proceeded to America, and finding his authority repudiated
and his integrity doubted, he resorted to a course which it would be
difficult to characterize too strongly. By way of attracting a following
to his own standard, and obtaining a flush of money, he publicly
announced that in the winter months close at hand, and before the new
year dawned, he would (sealing his undertaking with an awful invocation
of the Most High) be in Ireland, leading the long-promised insurrection.
Had this been a mere ‘intention’ which might be ‘disappointed,’ it was
still manifestly criminal thus to announce to the British government,
unless, indeed, his resources in hand were so enormous as to render
England’s preparations a matter of indifference. But it was not as an
‘intention’ he announced it and swore to it. He threatened with the most
serious personal consequences any and every man soever, who might dare
to express a doubt that the event would come off as he swore. The few
months remaining of the year flew by; his intimate adherents spread the
rumour that he had sailed for the scene of action, and in Ireland the
news occasioned almost a panic. One day, towards the close of December
however, all New York rang with the exposure that Stephens had never
quitted for Ireland, but was hiding from his own enraged followers in
Brooklyn. The scenes that ensued were such as may well be omitted from
these pages. In that bitter hour thousands of honest impulsive, and
self-sacrificing Irishmen endured the anguish of discovering that they
had been deceived as never had men been before; that an idol worshipped
with phrenzied devotion was, after all, a thing of clay.”
The plottings of the “Head Centre,” however, were not at an end. Mr. A.
M. Sullivan continues:—
“In Ireland, where Stephens had been most implicitly believed in, the
news of this collapse—which reached early in 1867—filled the circles with
keen humiliation. The more dispassionate wisely rejoiced that he had not
attempted to keep a promise, the making of which was in itself a crime;
but the desire to wipe out the reproach supposed to be cast on the whole
enrolment by his public defection became so overpowering, that a rising
was arranged to come off simultaneously all over Ireland on the 5th
March, 1867.
“Of all the insensate attempts at revolution recorded in history, this
one assuredly was preëminent. The most extravagant of the ancient Fenian
tales supplies nothing more absurd. The inmates of a lunatic asylum
could scarcely have produced a more impossible scheme. The one redeeming
feature in the whole proceeding was the conduct of the hapless men who
engaged in it. Firstly, their courage in responding to such a summons
at all, unarmed and unaided as they were. Secondly, their intense
religious feeling. On the days immediately preceding the 5th March,
the Catholic churches were crowded by the youth of the country, making
spiritual preparations for what they believed would be a struggle in
which many would fall and few survive. Thirdly, their noble humanity to
the prisoners whom they captured, their scrupulous regard for private
property, and their earnest anxiety to carry on their struggle without
infraction in aught of the laws and rules of honourable warfare.
“In the vicinity of Dublin, and in Tipperary, Cork, and Limerick
counties, attacks were made on the police stations, several of which
were captured by or surrendered to the insurgents. But a circumstance
as singular as any recorded in history intervened to suppress the
movement more effectually than the armies and fleets of England ten
times told could do. On the next night following the rising—the 6th
March—there commenced a snowstorm which will long be remembered in
Ireland, as it was probably without precedent in our annals. For twelve
days and nights without intermission, a tempest of snow and sleet raged
over the land, piling snow to the depth of yards on all the mountains,
streets, and highways. The plan of the insurrection evidently had for
its chief feature desultory warfare in the mountain districts, but this
intervention of the elements utterly frustrated the project, and saved
Ireland from the horrors of a protracted struggle.”
Who that reads over this brief history of the contest between the
Fenian leaders and the priesthood of Ireland, may not see the wisdom
and goodness of the religious guides of the people, and the reckless
cruelty and callousness of the secret society seducers? It was a life and
death struggle. The true friends of the people could not look on and see
them led to ruin of soul and body. They knew by a Light from on high,
more certain than any that guides ships from danger, the real nature
of the secret conspiracy that laid its meshes to deceive, to ruin, and
to betray. They raised the warning voice, and for this were secretly
assailed, maligned, circumvented, and even threatened in body, in life,
in means, and in character. But the minister of God is not to be deterred
by any such menaces. He that in the penal days braved the dungeon and the
halter for them, and who every day braves pestilence, want, and death
if necessary for their sakes, who is of them and with them from the
cradle to the grave, whose only interest is their interest, has surely
more claims upon their love and allegiance than any conspirator. We
learn wisdom from the end of all the secret-society seducers—men first
seduced themselves, and who then try to seduce others. But surely the
Irish people and the young men of Ireland especially, have had experience
enough of the whole lot of them. All seduce them into fatal courses under
pretence of benefiting Ireland. Nearly all sell and betray them. All
profit—if profit their wretched gain can be called—by the folly of our
too fervid, too generous, too confiding youth.
Some of these same seducers are found, I am informed, plying their deadly
trade amongst Irish working men in the large manufacturing districts of
England and Scotland. For aught I know they may be found in this very
city or its neighbourhood. They certainly are no friends of the Irish
working man or of his family. Hopeless and criminal as were the Fenian
conspiracies, the attempts of these openly lecturing, or worse still,
secretly agitating, secret-society seducers, are much worse. At best
they are idlers who, instead of devoting themselves to honest toil, find
it more congenial and easy to live upon the “subscriptions” of poor
working men, who give to these oily-tongued vagabonds a portion of their
hard earnings “to liberate Ireland.” God help us! To liberate Ireland
by means of such heartless schemers, who would be only too happy to
sell Ireland and their dupes into the bargain, for a wonderfully small
consideration. It is well if these dangerous prowlers do not do worse
and “swear in” some incautious, hot-headed, simple boys into societies
which are seen to eventually bring the prison plank-bed if not the
halter. The Irish working man in England, in Scotland, or in America,
has no worse enemy than these itinerant agitators who perambulate the
country, creating excitement at one time, and encouraging secret-society
practices at another. They render the condition of the Irish working
man often intolerable. They lead him from home and to the public house.
They encourage him in the worst possible habits for himself and his
little family. They drag him from his God, from his religion, and often
to his ruin. The best way, believe me, for the Irish working man to
serve Ireland in this country is to keep strictly sober, to mind his
employment, to attend well to the Catholic education of his children,
to live frugally, to practise economy, to become a respectable member
of society. He will then have a voice and a voice that will be heard
in the land, and when he comes to use the franchise he will benefit
his fellows, and do something real and tangible in the Parliament of
England, to serve Ireland. The victim of the secret society agitators is
kept in his vices and drunkenness. He is never religious. He lives in
rags and wretchedness, and dies in the workhouse or in the gaol.