successful, compared with other literary undertakings of the day, and
with the just expectations of the proprietors. My father and brother had
capable, willing, illustrious helpers. The first article of the first
number was by Dr. Frothingham, of Boston, than whom no more elegant
scholar, no finer writer was to be found in New England; Hon. Edward
Everett contributed a playful article of some length to the same number.
Hon. George S. Hillard, long known also in Boston for his fine
scholarship, contributed a long review of the "Chanting Cherubs," a
greatly admired piece of sculpture by Horatio Greenough then on
exhibition in Boston. Hon. William Austin of Charlestown contributed a
most ingenious and interesting story, not surpassed by fiction of the
present day. Among the contributors to the first number were also Dr.
Samuel G. Howe, and Hon. Timothy Walker of Cincinnati; Rev. Leonard
Withington of Newbury, Mass., a gentleman who lived long and quietly in
that secluded village, but wielded a vigorous pen, and had a very
thoughtful mind; his contribution was of a very kindly and wise article
on the religious character of Lord Byron,--an article well worth
republication as an introduction to any complete collection of the works
of that great poet. One would say such a combination of the literary
strength of Massachusetts was a good setting off for a new magazine.
The gentlemen above named, all or most of them, continued their
contributions for other months and years. In addition to these whose
names I have given, there were in succeeding numbers articles from
Richard Hildreth, the historian, Park Benjamin, the poet, John G.
Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Professor Longfellow, Miss Hannah F.
Gould, Dr. W. B. O. Peabody, of Springfield, Dr. Andrew P. Peabody, long
known and honored and loved in his position in Cambridge as guardian and
friend of the young men in college. But the list would be too long to
enumerate all the fine scholars and eminent writers who gathered to make
up the NEW ENGLAND MAGAZINE. My father and brother were very successful
in securing the labors especially of young men,--my brother, because he
was young himself,--my father, because always he was quick to discern
rising merit, and ready and earnest to help forward young men to success
and eminence. The list above given is that mostly of men who at that
time were still in early youth.
The fifth volume of the Magazine, in July, 1833, records my brother's
death and the solitude of the senior editor. The number is prefaced by a
picture of my brother, which shows him as a handsome young man, at the
age of twenty-two; but the lithograph cannot give his fair complexion,
the clearness of his large blue eyes. It was accompanied by an elegiac
poem, by Charles Sprague, well known then, and not forgotten since, as
one of our most finished poets, and one of our most pathetic writers.
The work that then devolved upon my father, not only as editor of a
daily paper, but as a man of public activity and usefulness, member as
he was for many years of the Legislature, chairman of committees, to
whose reports he devoted an immensity of labor, was sufficient to
require him to give up the Magazine. Besides its more strictly literary
articles, contributed mostly by others, though my father wrote some of
the literary articles himself, the Magazine presented every month a
review of the public proceedings of Congress and of many of the State
governments, the most of which, I think, were prepared by himself, and
usually a long series of obituary notices. These last were of citizens
of different parts of the country, and came undoubtedly from different
hands. But of people of distinction, citizens of Boston, who died from
1831 to 1835, my father's pen probably produced almost all of the
eulogies. The warmth of his friendship, his readiness to see all good,
to forgive all imperfections, his skill as a writer, made such articles
from his pen exceedingly interesting and admirable.
In December, 1834, my father wrote his valedictory, and on the first of
January, 1835, announced that the proprietorship had passed into the
hands of Dr. Samuel G. Howe and John O. Sargent, Esq. In looking over
the papers of the seven volumes, which filled out my father's
editorship, very many articles are found of the highest merit,--as the
names of the contributors given above would assure the reader; and if
some of inferior worth are at times mingled with them, they probably had
some interest at the time they were written; and the Magazine on the
whole would be pronounced, I suppose, worthy of general commendation.
* * * * *
It is the Nemesis of pedantry to be always wrong. Your true prig of a
pedant goes immensely out of his way to be vastly more correct than
other people, and succeeds in the end in being vastly more
ungrammatical, or vastly more illogical, or both at once.--_Cornhill
Magazine._
IRISH HOME RULE AGITATION:
ITS HISTORY AND ISSUES.
BY REV. H. HEWITT.
By far the most thorny problem of British statesmanship at the present
moment is the persistent and pressing demand made by the Irish people
through the Irish press and their representatives in Parliament for the
repeal of the Union and the recognition of their right to national
self-government. Incessantly, earnestly, eloquently, the question has
been agitated for the past dozen years or so. Adroitly and skilfully it
has been manipulated by some of the most brilliant, sagacious, and
resolute agitators Ireland has ever known. Slowly but steadily it has
grown, passing from stage to stage with ever-brightening prospect of
ultimate success, until it has now become the aspiration, we might
almost say, the one, quenchless, all-absorbing passion of the Irish
people. The consequence is that the first calm moment after a most
exciting and vigorous electoral contest, during which "the fire out of
the bramble" has devoured many "cedars of Lebanon," the two great
parties in the State find themselves face to face with a difficulty
which, even for the most zealous aspirant to place and power, robs the
honors and emoluments of office of more than half their charm. Neither
Liberal nor Conservative will care to incur the displeasure of the Queen
and the implacable wrath of the English aristocracy--both Whig and
Tory--by consenting to the political divorcement of Ireland, and to what
would be regarded as the disruption of the empire. For it is felt, not
without good reason, that the indirect and ultimate consequences of the
severance would be far more serious than any direct and immediate
effects. The efforts of popular statesmen, in recent times, have been
mainly directed toward the maintenance of the prestige of the Crown.
This was the sole motive of Lord Beaconsfield's "spirited foreign
policy." It was the one consideration that made the "Imperial Titles
Bill," and the imperial measures of which it proved to be the too
significant prelude, so immensely popular in London. So sure was he of
the strength and predominance of this patriotic sentiment in England
that he made his appeal almost exclusively to it, in asking in 1880 for
a fresh lease of power. The occasion was critical, he said. "The peace
of Europe, and the ascendency of England in the councils of Europe"
depended upon the verdict the country was now called upon to give. The
policy of the party opposed to his own was declared to be a "policy of
decomposition." But the concession of self-government in the form
demanded by the Irish Parliamentary party, whatever might be the
political necessity pleaded in justification of it, would be certain to
be interpreted in England, in the colonies and dependencies of the
British empire, and by all foreign States, as a sure omen of the decline
of the British Crown. To us it is utterly inconceivable that the Queen,
who is profoundly conscious of her power, keenly sensitive as to her
royal dignities, rights, and prerogatives, and proud, as she has reason
to be, of her long and prosperous reign, should ever consent to a policy
of dismemberment, by whatever political party proposed. The
Conservatives cannot afford to purchase the influence and assistance of
the Irish vote at the price Mr. Parnell has fixed and is every way
likely to insist on. They would have to belie the best traditions of the
party, and discredit the cardinal principles of their once powerful and
still deeply revered chief--the late Lord Beaconsfield--to whom Home
Rule meant "veiled rebellion," and presented a danger "scarcely less
disastrous than pestilence and famine." The Liberals are equally
unlikely to risk the integrity and unity of the party by the concession
of a claim which even an advanced Radical like Mr. Chamberlain has
condemned as unwarrantable, unwise, and impossible to be granted. Still
this and nothing less than this is the hope and expectation of the great
majority of the Irish people. This and nothing less will be the demand
of the Irish leaders as soon as Parliament assembles at the beginning of
the ensuing year.
In order to a clear and correct understanding of the position of Irish
affairs at the present juncture, and of the nature and ground of the
Home Rule demand, it will be necessary briefly to sketch the history of
the agitation's genesis and growth. It is all the more necessary to do
this as there are few political or social problems, even in England
itself, more grievously misunderstood and wantonly misstated. It is
truly surprising how much confusion, ignorance, and irrational antipathy
may be nursed and maintained by an excited state of public feeling and a
partisan and prejudiced press. Mr. Justin McCarthy complains with some
bitterness that "people found their deepest sympathies stirred by the
sufferings of cattle and horses in Ireland, who never were known to feel
one throb of compunction over the fashionable sin of torturing pigeons
at Hurlingham." And the words he quotes from a letter addressed to the
_Times_ of Dec. 3, 1880, by the illustrious General Gordon, after a
visit to the much afflicted country, show with equal clearness the sad
condition of affairs in Ireland, and the apparent incapability of the
English public to realize it. "I have been lately over the south-west of
Ireland," he wrote, "in the hope of discovering how some settlement
could be made of the Irish question, which, like a fretting cancer, eats
away our vitals as a nation." After the bold and, as some would think,
unstatesmanlike proposal, "that the government should, at a cost of
eighty millions, convert the greater part of the south-west of Ireland
into Crown lands, in which landlords should have no power of control,"
Gordon concluded, "I must say, from all accounts and my own
observations, that the state of our fellow-countrymen in the parts I
have named is worse than that of any people in the world, let alone
Europe. I believe that these people are made as we are, that they are
patient beyond belief, loyal, but at the same time broken-spirited and
desperate, living on the verge of starvation, in places where we would
not keep our cattle.... Our comic prints do an infinity of harm by their
caricatures. Firstly, the caricatures are not true, for the crime in
Ireland is not greater than that in England; secondly, they exasperate
the people on both sides of the Channel, and they do no good. It is ill
to laugh and scoff at a question which affects our existence."
To Gordon's appeal on behalf of Ireland no one was more ready to listen
with sympathy than the Prime Minister himself. The claims and grievances
of the people whose magnanimous endurance, self-restraint, and patience
had so excited Gordon's admiration and called forth his warmest words of
praise, the great Liberal statesman had never been slow to recognize.
Ireland has not always been willing to be grateful to him; but he has
always striven to be more than just to her, and has more than once
incurred the odium and reproach of the aristocracy of England, and even
the disaffection of many of his followers, in his truly heroic "attempts
to mitigate the miseries of the Irish people." When he surprised the
country by his sudden and unexpected dissolution of Parliament in 1874,
he had certainly done something to earn the gratitude and confidence of
Ireland. He had disestablished the Irish Protestant Church. He had
passed a Land Act, which at the time (1870) was regarded as a valuable
contribution to the settlement of the land problem, aiming, as it did,
first, to give the tenant some security of tenure where, as in the
majority of cases, he had been practically unable to plead any rights as
against the landlord; second, to encourage the making of needful
improvements throughout the country; and, thirdly, to promote the
establishment of a peasant proprietorship. In the attempt to confer a
third great boon on the discontented nation in the shape of the Irish
University Education Bill, he and his administration went to pieces on
the immovable rock of Protestant prejudice.
Of course the provisions of the Land Act, while they occasioned some
fretting and exasperation among the land-owners, who are in the habit of
regarding every effort of legislation for the benefit of their tenants
with a fixed sense of calamity, failed entirely to satisfy the more
aggressive and eager of the Irish Parliamentary party. The Land Act had
not taken its place upon the statute book before a meeting of
representative Irishmen was called in Dublin with the view of framing
some scheme of Home Government, and organizing measures for its advocacy
in Parliament, and in the towns and cities of Ireland. In the course of
discussion, one of the speakers used the words "Home Rule," and they
were formally and forthwith adopted as the war-cry of the Nationalist
party.
For the first five years the new organization made little headway. Its
leader, Mr. Isaac Butt, was an able man--a lawyer of some distinction
and a Protestant--but he was not a man to set the Thames on fire; he was
not the man to control the fierce and fiery young politicians that had
begun to flock to the standard of the National cause. With unromantic
dutifulness to his place and his party, he annually brought his motion
for Home Rule before the notice of the House, and was supported by some
fifty or sixty members and a few sympathetic Radicals, but the
Conservative government and its solid majority were of one mind on the
matter. Mr. Butt died in 1879, and Mr. Shaw succeeded to the leadership,
but on the organization of the Land League in the same year, he was
quietly shunted in favor of Mr. Parnell, who, as the _Corypheus_ of the
party, has so far displayed great skill, coolness, and self-command,
and has been rewarded in Ireland by regal ovations, and by the
suggestive title of the "uncrowned king."
Mr. Charles Stewart Parnell, who was declared by one of the speakers at
a recent meeting of Irish citizens held in Faneuil Hall, and more
recently by Mr. J. B. O'Reilly in the _North American Review_, to be of
American birth, is really a man of English descent. One of his ancestors
was the poet Parnell. Another, Sir Henry Parnell, afterwards created
Lord Congleton, was the associate of Lord Grey and Lord Melbourne in the
reform movement of 1829-32. He was a graduate of Cambridge University,
and a Protestant in religion. By birth, by training, and by creed, he
seemed to be of all persons the most unsuited to the task in which he
has been so eminently successful. "In 1871, after some years of travel
in America, among other places, he settled down on his estate at
Avondale, in Wicklow, within whose boundaries is to be found Moore's
Vale of Avoca, with its meeting waters." Like many who in spite of early
failures have afterwards risen to distinction, Mr. Parnell's first
public appearance was a great disappointment to himself and his friends.
Before the electors of Dublin he completely broke down in his first
attempt at public speaking, and the great city which has since showered
upon him the highest honors it can give, rejected him. In 1875, he
entered the House of Commons for the first time as member for Meath. For
the first few years of his Parliamentary life he was mainly
distinguished for the skill and unwearied persistency of his tactics as
an obstructionist, though he also succeeded in carrying useful
amendments to such measures as the Factories and Workshops Bill and the
Bill for the Abolition of Flogging in the Army and Navy.
The Land League organization gave him just the kind of political
machinery he wanted, though the credit of its creation belongs more to
Michael Davitt and John Dillon than to him. It soon became immensely
popular in Ireland, and, for a time, its orders and decrees superseded
the established law of the land, with the seeming result of replacing
social order and tranquillity by a condition of widespread anarchy,
confusion, and lawlessness. It is only fair to say, however, that the
Land League meetings did not create but only revealed the misery,
distress, and discontent of the Irish rural populace. The country had
recently suffered from a severe visitation of famine. Evictions for
non-payment of rent had been steadily increasing for several years past.
In 1877 the number stood at 463; in 1878 it swelled to nearly 1,000; at
the end of 1880 it had actually reached 2,110. A bill was introduced by
one of the Irish members with a view to mitigating the rigors of the law
as regarded the impoverished tenantry. The government refused to adopt
the measure, but sought to meet the case by framing a remedial scheme of
their own which was introduced under the name of the Compensation for
Disturbance Bill. This bill, which was vigorously assailed from opposite
quarters in the Commons, was unceremoniously rejected by the Lords, who
denounced it as a flagrant encroachment on the rights of property. It
must ever be regretted in the interests of mere humanity that Mr.
Gladstone's government did not compel the recalcitrant peers to abandon
their attitude of defiance in regard to that much-needed piece of
ameliorative legislation. The House of Lords takes nothing so ill as
open and avowed conflict with a powerful and popular ministry. In such a
case the issue is never doubtful. And if the ministry had shown a
determination to nail their colors to the mast, the Lords would have
lost no time in unfurling a flag of truce. As it was, their practical
acquiescence in the rejection of the bill consummated the rupture
between the Irish party and themselves. The speeches of the chiefs of
the Land League grew fierce, and at times violent, in their denunciation
of Her Majesty's ministers. Mr. W. E. Forster, especially, the Chief
Secretary for Ireland, a man of invincible resolution and ineradicable
prejudices, and yet withal a man of much rugged kindliness of nature,
became the victim of incessant interrogation and attack in Parliament,
and the object of an unrelenting and quenchless hate in Ireland.
At one time the tone and temper of leading agitators were all that could
be desired. "Abstain," said Mr. Davitt, "from all acts of violence,
repel every incentive to outrage. Glorious indeed will be our victory,
and high in the estimation of mankind will our grand old fatherland
stand, if we can so curb our passions and control our actions in this
struggle for free land, as to march to success through privation and
danger without resorting to the wild justice of revenge, or being guilty
of anything which could sully the character of a brave and Christian
people." Later on Mr. Davitt's feelings were less calm and his language
less measured, mild and sober; as when, for instance, he pictured to
his excited auditors "the wolf-dog of Irish vengeance leaping across the
Atlantic to redress and avenge the wrongs of Ireland." Mr. John Dillon
went further still, and ventured to intimate in a speech delivered at
Kildare the advisability of military drill and general preparation for a
resort to arms should the necessity arise.
Among the various means, legitimate and otherwise, adopted by the League
for the accomplishment of its ends, was that form of social ostracism
now familiarly known as "boycotting." Captain Boycott was an Englishman,
employed as agent of Lord Earne, and occupied a farm at Ballinrobe, near
Lough Mask. Emboldened by the powerful protection of the League, Lord
Earne's tenants had refused to pay the stipulated rents, and Boycott
served notices of eviction upon them. Whereupon not only the tenants on
the estate but the population for miles on every side of him resolved
not to have anything to do with him in any shape, whether of barter,
business, or intercourse, nor was any one else permitted to relieve his
isolation, or do him or his family any service, or supply him with any
necessity of life. The Orangemen of Ulster organized and went armed to
his relief, and under the protection of a small band of soldiers and
police, his harvests were gathered in, and his produce conveyed to the
nearest available market. Boycott went to England for a short time, and
on his return to Lough Mask at once extricated himself from his painful
and perilous position by giving up his agency. His unexpected surrender,
strange to tell, brought about a complete revulsion of feeling among the
dwellers of that wild and lovely district. He now became as popular as
he had before been obnoxious. In the course of a speech delivered at a
mass meeting of from fifteen to twenty thousand men at Waterford, in
September, 1883, Michael Davitt said, "It was better for all concerned
that the truth should be plainly and bluntly told, in order that English
quack statesmen might be saved the trouble of proposing half measures to
satisfy the Irish people.... Let the landlords of Ireland resign their
unpopular positions, follow the example of Captain Boycott, and nobody
would molest them, but if they did not, they would be grievously
surprised by and by, for they would make the discovery which Captain
Boycott had made, that the English government would find that it did not
pay from an Imperial point of view to support a worse than useless
class against the Irish nation. The 'lifeboat for the landlords,' as
Lord Derby had once called the Land Act (1881), rescued them from the
rocks upon which they were hurled by the waves of the Land League, but
they had not reached the shores of safety yet. There were other breakers
ahead that would do more damage to their rotten system than the storm of
the Land League. When the laborers and the artisans of Ireland or of
England and Scotland were enfranchised, was it to be supposed that the
educated millions of industry would allow the national patrimony--the
land--to be any longer the property of a useless class? In the language
of scripture, the landlords would be asked to give an account of their
stewardship, for they could be no longer stewards."
While, however, the Land Leaguers were jubilant at the success of their
movement, the government were preparing to take strenuous measures for
its suppression. Its leaders, Mr. Parnell, Mr. Dillon, Mr. T. D.
Sullivan, Mr. Sexton, along with the Treasurer, Mr. Egan, and the
Secretary, Mr. Brennan, and several others, were prosecuted by the Crown
on the charge of inciting to outrage. The prosecution, however, broke
down, as everybody expected it would, through disagreement of the jury.