dangerous state. The question which remains to be considered is, whether
for the state in which Ireland is Her Majesty's Ministers are to be held
accountable.
Now, Sir, I at once admit that the distempers of Ireland must in part be
attributed to causes for which neither Her Majesty's present Ministers
nor any public men now living can justly be held accountable. I will not
trouble the House with a long dissertation on those causes. But it is
necessary, I think, to take at least a rapid glance at them: and in
order to do so, Sir, we must go back to a period not only anterior to
the birth of the statesmen who are now arrayed against each other on
the right and left of your chair, but anterior to the birth even of the
great parties of which those statesmen are the leaders; anterior to the
days when the names of Tory and Whig, of court party and country party,
of cavalier and roundhead, came into use; anterior to the existence
of those Puritans to whom the honourable Member for Shrewsbury (Mr
Disraeli.), in a very ingenious speech, ascribed all the calamities of
Ireland.
The primary cause is, no doubt, the manner in which Ireland became
subject to the English crown. The annexation was effected by conquest,
and by conquest of a peculiar kind. It was not a conquest such as we
have been accustomed to see in modern Europe. It was not a conquest
like that which united Artois and Franche Comte to France, or Silesia
to Prussia. It was the conquest of a race by a race, such a conquest as
that which established the dominion of the Spaniard over the American
Indian, or of the Mahratta over the peasant of Guzerat or Tanjore. Of
all forms of tyranny, I believe that the worst is that of a nation over
a nation. Populations separated by seas and mountain ridges may call
each other natural enemies, may wage long wars with each other, may
recount with pride the victories which they have gained over each other,
and point to the flags, the guns, the ships which they have won from
each other. But no enmity that ever existed between such populations
approaches in bitterness the mutual enmity felt by populations which
are locally intermingled, but which have never morally and politically
amalgamated; and such were the Englishry and the Irishry. Yet it might
have been hoped that the lapse of time and the progress of civilisation
would have effaced the distinction between the oppressors and the
oppressed. Our island had suffered cruelly from the same evil. Here the
Saxon had trampled on the Celt, the Dane on the Saxon, the Norman on
Celt, Saxon, and Dane. Yet in the course of ages all the four races had
been fused together to form the great English people. A similar fusion
would probably have taken place in Ireland, but for the Reformation. The
English settlers adopted the Protestant doctrines which were received
in England. The Aborigines alone, among all the nations of the north
of Europe, adhered to the ancient faith. Thus the line of demarcation
between the two populations was deepened and widened. The old enmity
was reinforced by a new enmity stronger still. Then came those events
to which the honourable Member for Shrewsbury referred. The spirit of
liberty in England was closely allied with the spirit of Puritanism, and
was mortally hostile to the Papacy. Such men as Hampden, Vane, Milton,
Locke, though zealous generally for civil and spiritual freedom, yet
held that the Roman Catholic worship had no claim to toleration. On the
other hand, all the four kings of the House of Stuart showed far
more favour to Roman Catholics than to any class of Protestant
nonconformists. James the First at one time had some hopes of effecting
a reconciliation with the Vatican. Charles the First entered into secret
engagements to grant an indulgence to Roman Catholics. Charles the
Second was a concealed Roman Catholic. James the Second was an avowed
Roman Catholic. Consequently, through the whole of the seventeenth
century, the freedom of Ireland and the slavery of England meant the
same thing. The watchwords, the badges, the names, the places, the days,
which in the mind of an Englishman were associated with deliverance,
prosperity, national dignity, were in the mind of an Irishman associated
with bondage, ruin, and degradation. The memory of William the Third,
the anniversary of the battle of the Boyne, are instances. I was much
struck by a circumstance which occurred on a day which I have every
reason to remember with gratitude and pride, the day on which I had the
high honour of being declared one of the first two members for the great
borough of Leeds. My chair was covered with orange ribands. The horses
which drew it could hardly be seen for the profusion of orange-coloured
finery with which they were adorned. Orange cockades were in all the
hats; orange favours at all the windows. And my supporters, I need
not say, were men who had, like myself, been zealous for Catholic
emancipation. I could not help remarking that the badge seemed rather
incongruous. But I was told that the friends of Catholic emancipation
in Yorkshire had always rallied under the orange banner, that orange was
the colour of Sir George Savile, who brought in that bill which caused
the No Popery riots of 1780, and that the very chair in which I sate
was the chair in which Lord Milton, now Earl Fitzwilliam, had triumphed
after the great victory which he won in 1807 over the No Popery party,
then headed by the house of Harewood. I thought how different an effect
that procession would have produced at Limerick or Cork, with what howls
of rage and hatred the Roman Catholic population of those cities
would have pursued that orange flag which, to every Roman Catholic in
Yorkshire, was the memorial of contests maintained in favour of his own
dearest rights. This circumstance, however slight, well illustrates
the singular contrast between the history of England and the history of
Ireland.
Well, Sir, twice during the seventeenth century the Irish rose up
against the English colony. Twice they were completely put down; and
twice they were severely chastised. The first rebellion was crushed by
Oliver Cromwell; the second by William the Third. Those great men did
not use their victory exactly in the same way. The policy of Cromwell
was wise, and strong, and straightforward, and cruel. It was comprised
in one word, which, as Clarendon tells us, was often in the mouths of
the Englishry of that time. That word was extirpation. The object of
Cromwell was to make Ireland thoroughly Anglo-Saxon and Protestant. If
he had lived twenty years longer he might perhaps have accomplished that
work: but he died while it was incomplete; and it died with him.
The policy of William, or to speak more correctly, of those whose
inclinations William was under the necessity of consulting, was less
able, less energetic, and, though more humane in seeming, perhaps not
more humane in reality. Extirpation was not attempted. The Irish Roman
Catholics were permitted to live, to be fruitful, to replenish the
earth: but they were doomed to be what the Helots were in Sparta, what
the Greeks were under the Ottoman, what the blacks now are at New York.
Every man of the subject caste was strictly excluded from public trust.
Take what path he might in life, he was crossed at every step by some
vexatious restriction. It was only by being obscure and inactive that
he could, on his native soil, be safe. If he aspired to be powerful
and honoured, he must begin by being an exile. If he pined for military
glory, he might gain a cross or perhaps a Marshal's staff in the
armies of France or Austria. If his vocation was to politics, he might
distinguish himself in the diplomacy of Italy or Spain. But at home he
was a mere Gibeonite, a hewer of wood and a drawer of water. The statute
book of Ireland was filled with enactments which furnish to the Roman
Catholics but too good a ground for recriminating on us when we talk
of the barbarities of Bonner and Gardiner; and the harshness of those
odious laws was aggravated by a more odious administration. For, bad as
the legislators were, the magistrates were worse still. In those evil
times originated that most unhappy hostility between landlord and
tenant, which is one of the peculiar curses of Ireland. Oppression and
turbulence reciprocally generated each other. The combination of rustic
tyrants was resisted by gangs of rustic banditti. Courts of law and
juries existed only for the benefit of the dominant sect. Those priests
who were revered by millions as their natural advisers and guardians,
as the only authorised expositors of Christian truth, as the only
authorised dispensers of the Christian sacraments, were treated by the
squires and squireens of the ruling faction as no good-natured man would
treat the vilest beggar. In this manner a century passed away. Then came
the French Revolution and the great awakening of the mind of Europe. It
would have been wonderful indeed if, when the happiest and most tranquil
nations were agitated by vague discontents and vague hopes, Ireland had
remained at rest. Jacobinism, it is true, was not a very natural ally
of the Roman Catholic religion. But common enmities produce strange
coalitions; and a strange coalition was formed. There was a third great
rising of the aboriginal population of the island against English and
Protestant ascendency. That rising was put down by the sword; and it
became the duty of those who were at the head of affairs to consider how
the victory should be used.
I shall not be suspected of being partial to the memory of Mr Pitt. But
I cannot refuse to him the praise both of wisdom and of humanity, when I
compare the plan which he formed in that hour of triumph with the plans
of those English rulers who had before him governed Ireland. Of Mr
Pitt's plan the Union was a part, an excellent and an essential part
indeed, but still only a part. We shall do great injustice both to his
head and to his heart, if we forget that he was permitted to carry
into effect only some unconnected portions of a comprehensive and
well-concerted scheme. He wished to blend, not only the parliaments, but
the nations, and to make the two islands one in interest and affection.
With that view the Roman Catholic disabilities were to be removed: the
Roman Catholic priests were to be placed in a comfortable and honourable
position; and measures were to be taken for the purpose of giving to
Roman Catholics the benefits of liberal education. In truth, Mr Pitt's
opinions on those subjects had, to a great extent, been derived from a
mind even more powerful and capacious than his own, from the mind of Mr
Burke. If the authority of these two great men had prevailed, I believe
that the Union with Ireland would now have been as secure, and as
much beyond the reach of agitation, as the Union with Scotland. The
Parliament in College Green would have been remembered as what it was,
the most tyrannical, the most venal, the most unprincipled assembly
that ever sate on the face of this earth. I do not think that, by saying
this, I can give offence to any gentleman from Ireland, however zealous
for Repeal he may be: for I only repeat the language of Wolfe Tone.
Wolfe Tone said that he had seen more deliberative assemblies than most
men; that he had seen the English Parliament, the American Congress,
the French Council of Elders and Council of Five Hundred, the Batavian
Convention; but that he had nowhere found anything like the baseness and
impudence of the scoundrels, as he called them, at Dublin. If Mr Pitt's
whole plan had been carried into execution, that infamous parliament,
that scandal to the name of parliament, would have perished unregretted;
and the last day of its existence would have been remembered by the
Roman Catholics of Ireland as the first day of their civil and religious
liberty. The great boon which he would have conferred on them would have
been gratefully received, because it could not have been ascribed to
fear, because it would have been a boon bestowed by the powerful on the
weak, by the victor on the vanquished. Unhappily, of all his projects
for the benefit of Ireland the Union alone was carried into effect; and
therefore that Union was an Union only in name. The Irish found that
they had parted with at least the name and show of independence, and
that for this sacrifice of national pride they were to receive no
compensation. The Union, which ought to have been associated in their
minds with freedom and justice, was associated only with disappointed
hopes and forfeited pledges. Yet it was not even then too late. It was
not too late in 1813. It was not too late in 1821. It was not too late
in 1825. Yes: if, even in 1825, some men who then were, as they now are,
high in the service of the crown, could have made up their minds to
do what they were forced to do four years later, that great work of
conciliation which Mr Pitt had meditated might have been accomplished.
The machinery of agitation was not yet fully organized: the Government
was under no strong pressure; and therefore concession might still
have been received with thankfulness. That opportunity was suffered to
escape; and it never returned.
In 1829, at length, concessions were made, were made largely, were made
without the conditions which Mr Pitt would undoubtedly have demanded,
and to which, if demanded by Mr Pitt, the whole body of Roman
Catholics would have eagerly assented. But those concessions were made
reluctantly, made ungraciously, made under duress, made from the mere
dread of civil war. How then was it possible that they should produce
contentment and repose? What could be the effect of that sudden and
profuse liberality following that long and obstinate resistance to the
most reasonable demands, except to teach the Irishman that he could
obtain redress only by turbulence? Could he forget that he had been,
during eight and twenty years, supplicating Parliament for justice,
urging those unanswerable arguments which prove that the rights of
conscience ought to be held sacred, claiming the performance of promises
made by ministers and princes, and that he had supplicated, argued,
claimed the performance of promises in vain? Could he forget that two
generations of the most profound thinkers, the most brilliant wits, the
most eloquent orators, had written and spoken for him in vain? Could he
forget that the greatest statesman who took his part had paid dear for
their generosity? Mr Pitt endeavoured to redeem his pledge; and he was
driven from office. Lord Grey and Lord Grenville endeavoured to do but
a very small part of what Mr Pitt had thought right and expedient; and
they were driven from office. Mr Canning took the same side; and his
reward was to be worried to death by the party of which he was the
brightest ornament. At length, when he was gone, the Roman Catholics
began to look, not to cabinets and parliaments, but to themselves. They
displayed a formidable array of physical force, and yet kept within,
just within, the limits of the law. The consequence was that, in two
years, more than any prudent friend had ventured to demand for them was
granted to them by their enemies. Yes; within two years after Mr Canning
had been laid in the transept near us, all that he would have done, and
more than he could have done, was done by his persecutors. How was it
possible that the whole Roman Catholic population of Ireland should not
take up the notion that from England, or at least from the party which
then governed and which now governs England, nothing is to be got
by reason, by entreaty, by patient endurance, but everything by
intimidation? That tardy repentance deserved no gratitude, and obtained
none. The whole machinery of agitation was complete and in perfect
order. The leaders had tasted the pleasures of popularity; the multitude
had tasted the pleasures of excitement. Both the demagogue and his
audience felt a craving for the daily stimulant. Grievances enough
remained, God knows, to serve as pretexts for agitation: and the whole
conduct of the Government had led the sufferers to believe that by
agitation alone could any grievance be removed.