IRELAND: AS SHE IS, AS SHE HAS BEEN, AND AS SHE OUGHT TO BE. BY James J. Clancy. ON CO] Faculty lit CHESTNUT HILL, MAf 1 Daughter of Babylon, blessed shall he be who shall repay thee as thou hast paid vs."— Psalms, cxxxvi., 8. NEW YORK : THOMAS KELLY, PUBLISHER, 17 Barclay Street. Copyright, 1877, By Thomas Keixt. 47C 11 PREFACE , EN" J AMES" DISRAELI, being addicted to epi- grams, has said that Ireland is " debauched with legislation." Other Englishmen have a habit of proclaiming her "the spoilt child of the Empire," and averring that her grievances are mere sentimental fictions or vague rhetorical exaggerations. Hence many persons unfamiliar with her history and actual condition are tempted to ask: "What real, substantial grievance has Ireland to complain of, or why is she perpetually clamoring at the doors of the British Parliament like a noisy, petulant babe \ ' ' These questions I propose to answer clearly and exhaustively. The substance of many of the following chapters has already appeared in print at varying intervals. A para- graph from the London Times, elsewhere quoted, first suggested to me the advisability of collecting the scat- tered essays into a concise yet comprehensive hand-book for the enlightenment, chiefly, of American readers. The volume herewith submitted will provoke harsh 1 2 PKEFACE. criticism in some quarters on account of its undisguised animosity toward the British Government and Empire. For this hostile feeling the author has no apology to offer. He does most thoroughly abhor the aforesaid Empire's mountainous iniquity, its varnished savagery, its smooth hypocrisy. For the rest, he simply stands by the facts. J. J. C. CONTENTS. PART FIRST— IRELAND AS SHE IS. I. THE ISSUE STATED. PAGB Grievances — Cause of Discontent — Testimonies — The Duel Must go on — Cui Bono ? — Power of Facts 7 II. LAW AND ORDER. Samples of Anglo-Irish Legislation — Letters-Patent — Killing no Mur- der — Plain Avowals — The Rooting-out Process — Spenser's Advice — Legalized Piracy 18 III. THE LAND. Ownership of the Soil — Ireland's Basal Grievance — " Sacred Rights of Property " — The Brehon (Irish) Contrasted with the Feudal (Anglo-Norman) Tenure — Confiscation Preceding Conquest 28 IV. A NATION OF TENANTS-AT-WILL. Indolence at a Premium — Isaac Butt's Testimony — 94,000 One-Roomed Huts — The Unstanched Hemorrhage, Absenteeism — Illustrative Cases 37 V. NO FIGS FROM THISTLES. No Justice can be Expected by the Cultivators from the Alien Land- lord-Parliament — Gladstone's Delusive and Worthless Act — Land- Tenure in Other Countries 46 VI. THE CONSTITUTION AND EMPIRE. An Organized Imposture— Brazen Pretense of " Constitutional Gov- ernment " in Ireland— Fine Theories and Hard Facts— Disraeli in the Witness-Box 54 VII. INDUSTRIAL STAGNATION. Statistics of Commercial Decadence, Exhaustion, and Pauperism — Why a Country, Rich in Natural Resources and Facilities for Manufacturing, has no Manufactures 65 3 4 CONTENTS. VIII. DEPOPULATION AND FAMINE. pagb The Rooting-out Process, its Modus Operandi, and its Effects — " Worse off by Two Millions than a Desert Island ! " 74 IX. RELIGIOUS INEQUALITY. Squelching the Papists — Penal Legislation against Conscience — Sec- tarian Animosities Deliberately Fomented — The Established Church— Tithes — Orangeism 80 X. EDUCATION. A Nation Forced into Ignorance by Act of Parliament — Intellect Dwarfed and Starved, if not Prostituted — The So-called " Na- tional " School System 91 XL TAXATION. Paying the Imperial Piper — Financial Hocus-Pocus — The Most Heavily Taxed People in Europe, and the Least Able to Bear it . . 100 XII. POLITICAL AND SOCIAL DEBASEMENT. A System of Government specially Designed to Degrade and Impov- erish its Victims, Crush out their Manhood, and Deprive them of all Knowledge of Civil Rights and Duties 105 PART SECOND— IRELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. I. A MODEL ENGLISH HISTORIAN. Mr. Froude's Philosophy, and his Pet Theory as to National Tem- pers, Humors, and Passions Ill II. ANCIENT ERIN. Her Political and Social Condition, Laws, Arts, Literature, and Dis- tinctive Civilization — Arrested Development 116 III. CONVERSION TO CHRISTIANITY. St. Patrick's Mission and its Effects— How Ireland became " The Isle of Saints and Scholars," and "The School of Europe "—Educa- tion Free to all Comers 129 IV. THE DANISH INVASION. Ireland Desolated and Distracted by Scandinavian Pirates— A Pro- tracted Struggle Ending in the Destruction of the Viking Power. . 139 CONTENTS. 5 V. THE ANGLO-NORMAN INVASION. PA6E Henry the Second's Mission of " Civilization," its Ethics and Instru- ments 144 VI. THE ERA OP THE PALE. Progress, Extent, and Character of English Conquest in Ireland from 1170 to 1534 151 VII. THE FEUD IN A NEW PHASE. Reigns of Henry VIII., Edward VI., and Mary Tudor— The Issue Assuming International Proportions for the First Time 158 VIII. ELIZABETH AND THE ULSTER LEAGUE. War to the Hilt — The Two Hughs — Rapine and Exhaustion — A Kingdom of Carcasses and Ashes — " Pacata Hibernia " 165 IX. THE "PLANTATIONS." Rooting out the Irishrie — James I. and Charles I. — The Confedera- tion of Kilkenny — Cromwell — Owen Roe O'Neill — Charles II.. . 178 X. THE WILLIAMITE WARS. James II. and William of Orange — The Boyne — Athlone — Limerick -Aughrim— Sarsfield— St. Ruth— The Violated Treaty 194 XI. THE PENAL CODE. How Queen Anne and the Georges gave the Irish a Living Death 200 XII. THE IRISH IN EXILE. What Fortunes Befel the Banished Wildgeese and their Descendants — Wasted Valor and Intellect 214 XIII. PARTIAL INDEPENDENCE. The Volunteers and Parliament of 1782 — England's Difficulty, Ire- land's Opportunity — Grattan and his Colleagues — Pledges and Guarantees 222 XIV. 'NINETY-EIGHT. Prosperity and Progress under Native Rule— The United Irishmen- Wolfe Tone — A Forced Rebellion, how it was Excited, and how Suppressed 235 XV. THE UNION. Triumph of Fraud and Violence — England's Motive for Breaking the Compact — Emmet's Protest 247 6 CONTENTS. XVI. EMANCIPATION AND REPEAL. PAQB CCormell's Regime— Moral Suasion Tactics — A Calamity in the Guise of a Victory 256 XVII. YOUNG IRELAND. The Gospel of Iron Once More — A Flash in the Pan — A Brilliant School of Agitators among a Cowed, Mistaught, Famine-stricken People 268 XVIII. FENIANISM. The " Corpse " Reanimate — A Movement that Failed, yet did not WhoUy Fail " 281 XIX. FEDERAL HOME RULE. Parliamentary Strategy Resumed — A Mendicant Policy — As Before, No Figs from Thistles 293 XX. IRELAND IN AMERICA. A New and More Vigorous Ireland across the Atlantic — Nemesis Taking Shape 301 PART THIRD— IRELAND AS SHE OUGHT TO BE. I. RIGHTS AND DUTIES. The Tree Known hy its Fruit — Expedients and Finalities — Political Creed of the Nationalist — Gladstone's Suggestive " Somehow" — Watch, Wait, Prepare 307 •+« APPENDIX : England and the United States 319 Index 326 PART FIRST. ^ Ireland as She Is, CHAPTER I. THE ISSUE STATED. Grievances— Cause op Discontent — Testimonies — The Duel must go on— Qui Bono?— Power op Facts. " The Irish blood, which alone flows in my veins, will never cease but with my life to beat in unison with those who have at heart the establishment of Irish liberty."— Andrew Jackson, President of the United States. FAMOUS French author avows his preference for absolutism under certain circumstances, declaring it better to be ruled by one lion at a distance than by a pack of wolves at your door. The illustration is defective, inasmuch as it overlooks the hungry jackals that always attend the footsteps of such " lions;" yet, borrowing the figure, we deliber- ately affirm that the people of Ireland would have more to rejoice at than regret, were the most rigid despotism of the Orient substituted to-morrow for the monstrous mockery of " Constitutionalism " under which they are now strangled. A bold assertion to make ; ridiculous, some will call it ; but its literal truth is capable of the clearest demonstration. From its earliest act to its latest, England's legislation for Ireland, England's gov- 7 8 IKELAND AS SHE IS. eminent in Ireland, have been what the Abolitionists with stinging brevity described negro slavery to be — "the sum of all villainies." Let me open with a few quotations from pens which can scarcely be accused of any blind partiality toward Ireland : "The uniform policy of England has been to deprive Ireland of the use of her own resources, and make her subservient to the interests and the opulence of the English people." — Pitt * (1785). "Ireland has been uniformly plundered and oppressed. 1 ' — Junius. " This is not the slander of Junius nor the candor of Pitt ; it is his- tory."— Chief- Justice Bushe (1799). ' ' A union was the only means of preventing Ireland becoming too great and powerful." — Secretary Cooke. "It [the Anglo-Irish Union] is the denial of the rights of nature to a great nation from intolerance of its prosperity." — Bushe. "England first denied Irishmen the means of improvement, and then insulted them with the imputation of barbarism." — Paulding (an American author). "For generations the proprietors of the land in Ireland have been Spartans among a helot peasantry — almost planters among negro slaves." — London Times (1858). "The peculiar function of Ireland in the United Kingdom seems to be, to illustrate in a startling way the vices of English legislation." — London Examiner (1874). ' ' The land of Ireland, like the land of every other country, belongs to the people who inhabit it ; and when the inhabitants of a country quit it in tens of thousands because the government does not leave them room to live in it, that government is already judged and condemned.'''' — John Stuart Mill. "England has held for seven centuries to the lips of her sister Ire- land a poisoned chalice. Its ingredients were the deepest contempt, the most unmeasured oppression, injustice such as the world hardly saw before. . . In the true, essential statement of the case as it stands to-day, Ireland has conquered England ; she has summoned her before the bar of the civilized world to judge the injustice of her legislation ; she has checkmated her on the chessboard of Europe." — Wendell Phillips. * We shall see further on that this policy was never put in more rigorous operation than under Premier Pitt himself. THE ISSUE STATED. 9 "Ireland is the most deplorable instance of modern history that a great and noble people may, for centuries together, be involved in the same injustice and infatuation, and all the highly praised forms of the Constitution be paralyzed by the force of passion and prejudice. Kings, Lords, and Commons have, alternately or simultaneously, wronged Ireland. How should order, humanity, mildness, and obe- dience to the laws proceed from such an education ? " — Von Raumer's "England in 1835." "The whole scheme [of Union] goes upon the false and abominable presumption that we could legislate better for the Irish than they could do for themselves — a principle founded upon the most arrogant despot- ism and tyranny. There is not a more clear axiom in the science of politics than that man is his own natural governor, and that he ought to legislate for himself. . . We ought not to presume to legislate for a nation in whose feelings and affections, wants and interests, opinions and prejudices, we have no sympathy." — Charles James Fox* (1800). Alluding to the incontrovertible fact that Ireland's population has melted away at the rate of a million in every ten years since 1847, Speranza f cries out : " A million a decade ! What does it mean ? A nation dying of inner decay ; A churchyard's silence where life has been ; The base of the pyramid crumbling away ; A drift of men gone over the sea — A drift of the dead where men should be." Is the picture too highly colored I Look around you, and what do you see % From the shores of Ireland dur- ing the past thirty years white-winged ships have issued, ceaselessly as bubbles from a spring, and turned their prows to every quarter of the globe. What freight mainly did their hatches cover \ A freight of paupers huddled closely together and fleeing, as from a gigantic * The solicitude of British statesmen for liberty— when they are out of office— is some thing sublime. t Lady Wilde of Dublin ; one of the most inspiring teachers of Young Ireland. . . . For statistics see Chapter VIII. 10 IRELAND AS SHE IS. lazar-house, to the remotest ends of earth. The great mass of them went forth to exile without capital, with- out education, without skilled trade or industry — for English law had systematically made these things scarce in Ireland. What, then, could be expected, save what happened? They had to accept the rudest and most menial employments offered them. They sunk into the rookeries and slums of great cities, where the atmosphere was tainted with moral and physical conta- gion, and where their offspring too often graduated as from a great criminal school. Multitudes of them de- spairingly sought to stifle their misery in the poisonous fumes of alcohol. By land and sea they sunk down in legions from the effects of hunger, disease, privation, insanity. This, of course, is the worst side of the pic- ture. Other legions and their descendants have nobly won their way to fame and fortune, battling against heavy odds in every walk of life. But those who have succeeded constitute the exception. The great bulk of the Irish race is yet immersed to the neck in poverty, hardship, and degradation, not because of any inherent viciousness or incapacity, but because of the ruinous environment through which English laws compel it to graduate. America thus shares the penalty of English misrule in Ireland ; consequently America has a vital, per- sonal interest in the political independence of Ireland. * Such are the Irish abroad ; how is it with them at home % Let Speranza again answer : " Ireland rests, 'mid the rush of progression, Like a frozen ship in a frozen sea, And the changeless stillness of life's stagnation Is worse than the wildest waves could be Rending the rocks eternally." * " Like many, I had a prejudice against Ireland and the Irish, and only of late and after repeated proofs have I shaken off some of my dislikes. Last summer I traveled for two months in Europe, and traversed the best part of Ireland, and must say that for real gal- THE ISSUE STATED. 11 The same idea was expressed in different words by an observant American tonrist writing to the Louisville Courier-Journal in 1874. " The rage of the Commnne or the serfdom of Russia," said he, "are glorions liberty by the side of that allowed to the inhabitants of this land." In his history of the Norman Conquest of England, allnding to the deathless hostility of the Irish toward British rule, the philosophic French historian Thierry observes : " This unconquerable obstinacy ; this faculty of preserving and nour- ishing through ages of physical misery the remembrance of their lost liberty ; this disposition never to despair of a constantly vanquished cause that has always been fatal to all such among them as have dared to espouse and defend it, is, perhaps, the most extraordinary and the greatest example that a people has ever given." To any man, however callons or indifferent, who takes up the history of Ireland and scans its crimson pages with a desire to know the truth, this same conviction will irresistibly come. Outlawed, maligned, degraded though the Irish have been, still there is something in- expressibly heroic in the martyrdom of a whole nation for centuries. Scourged with scorpion-rods, the race has been ever defiant. A thousand times defeated, it has never abandoned its distinctive flag. Pursued relent- lessly with fire and sword, it has propagated itself in every zone. Its extirpation vowed again and again by a remorseless enemy, it has shown itself indestructible. With ignorance forced upon it by Act of Parliament, it has contributed a host of luminous names to art, litera- ture, science, industry. To many, no doubt, these state- lantry and hospitality the Irish cannot be equaled. The condition of the Irish in this country [U. S.], however, is to be deplored, and this is owing to the oppression which they suffered and still suffer at home."— Correspondent of Boston Woman's Journal, Feb., 1876.— With a womar's quick intuition, this writer penetrates the core of the evil. 12 IKELAKD AS SHE IS. ments will sound like pompous boasts, but as we proceed further it will be seen that nothing is here set down save on an ample basis of facts. For ages the Anglo-Irish duel has gone on, a national vendetta bequeathed from generation to generation — and the end is not yet. Superficial observers have often asked, still ask, " Why rush so obstinately to renewed defeat and disaster ? Why seek to prolong so ruinous a conflict ? Cannot the Irish compromise their quarrel with England?" To which there is but one answer: Nonpossumus. In the subsequent pages I propose to show why we cannot — that there is no room for compro- mise with the colossal injustice overshadowing this case. In the words of Grattan (replying to the plea that Ire- land should be grateful for sharing "imperial honors"), " ~No man can be grateful or liberal of his conscience, nor woman of her honor, nor nation of its liberty. To say that Ireland will not be satisfied with liberty, because she is not satisfied with slavery, is folly." Having made headway against the most desperate odds, it would be worse than folly, it would be moral suicide and complete material perdition, now to halt (if halt were possible) midway on the road to victory. Whatever creditable status or character belongs to our race in its outcast, im- poverished condition, has been won solely by active, in- domitable resistance. Ireland's fidelity is, says Thierry, "the most extraor- dinary example a people has ever given." But there is no deep mystery at the root of that "unconquerable ob- stinacy" which blossomed forth so frequently in armed insurrection. These Irish outbreaks were inevitable. To borrow Shiel's metaphor, "the rod of oppression is the potent wand of the insurgent enchanter in Ireland ; his book of spells is the penal code." Froude and writ- ers of his school aver that Irish discontent is due to the THE ISSUE STATED. 13 innate lawlessness of the people.* Pshaw! — an argu- ment of such flimsy texture would be spurned by the in- telligence of a school-boy. The Irish fought not alone for their natural right of self-rule, but absolutely for self-preservation. With them submission would have meant extinction, f In revolt they had some chance, however desperate ; had they tamely yielded, they must have perished root and branch. The warfare they car- ried on was almost invariably preferable, with all its risks, to any " peace" which English law would allow them. Hence it was in no mood of empty gasconade that an Irish minstrel sung : " The long resistance of our race May end in rain, not disgrace ! But, end whatever way it will, The quarrel must continue still, Till victory, defeat, or death Shall crown, or else destroy, our faith." Our fathers may not have always argued the issue thus formally, but they realized it in every fiber of their being through the stern logic of events. The very fact that they persisted in living was construed into treason by English tribunals. Now, human beings are not cold clay or granite ; the blind worm turns upon the foot that crushes it ; and had our sires done aught else than resist, they would have merited less compassion than hunted rabbits. Not, therefore, their mere hostility to England is surprising, but the invincible spirit which makes it as fresh and ardent to-day as if it had been nurtured on tri- umphs instead of reverses. Should any reader deem * This puerile and ridiculous theory was admirably refuted in the letter of a thoughtful American, to the New York Tribune, from Paris in 1875. Here is one passage : " No agi- tators, no clubs, no epidemical errors ever were or ever will be fatal to social order in any nation. Nothing but the guilt of the ruling classes— wanton, accumulated, reckless, and merciless — can overthrow them." Reflect also on the saying of John Stuart Mill, quoted a few pages back. t For proof see Chap II. et seq. 14 IKELAKD AS SHE IS. this an extravagant summary of the case, I pray him be patient yet a little longer. Great national crimes inexorably work out their own retribution, often slowly, but none the less surely. Wit- ness the United States and negro slavery. The bonds- man's yoke was imposed by the white on millions of the colored race, and thereby was a poisonous ulcer ingraft- ed on the republic. Weary years of agitation and vio- lent party strife, culminating in a terrible civil war, were required to smash the yoke ; but smashed it was in the end, and to-day the impoverishment and humiliation of one section, together with various galling burdens laid upon the country at large, constitute the penalties that have overtaken a great wrong. They who sow the wind shall reap the whirlwind. Thus, too (while I dare not say with Wendell Phillips that Ireland Tias conquered England), I propose to point out that, intrenched though she is in wealth, pomp, and power, England's retribution is grasping her even now ; that her empire is visibly crumbling away under the weight of its own corrup- tions ; and that the position occupied to-day by Irish Nationalists is the logical, inevitable outcome and fruit- age of seven centuries of monstrous misgovernment. "Cuibono?" somebody may inquire; "what good do you expect to achieve by raking up the embers of old feuds and bitter wrongs ? " Let my answer be found in this extract from the London Times of September, 1845 : "There is an immense power in facts. Wherever there is public opin- ion, wherever there are common sense and common feeling, a fact is sure to have its weight. So we say, if there be a great and distressing body of facts, with some great mystery of iniquity, or error, or misfor- tune connected with it, tell it, and tell it, and tell it again. Tell it in -a thousand forms. Tell it with perpetual variety of circumstance and novelty of view. Tell it of this locality, tell it of that. Tell it of the mass, and tell it of individuals. Before a generation is passed the fact will speak for itself and find a cure." THE ISSUE STATED. 15 Sound advice, which strikes the nail squarely on the head in so far as Ireland is concerned. It was her fate to find a master without heart, honor, or conscience. In dealing with her harassed neighbor, " England never gave a pledge that she did not break, never signed a treaty that she did not violate, the moment she could safely do so." Her uniform policy embraced no better element than confiscation, persecution, brutal repression, massacre. Justice and pity were alike expunged from her code. She dealt with the Irish as if she had been commissioned to heap upon them the maledictions recited by the old Hebraic seer, for we cannot lay finger on that single era during several successive centuries when it might not have been said of them with startling truth : " They are cursed in the city and the field ; they be- troth wives and other men lie with them ; they build houses and other men dwell in them ; they beget sons and daughters but enjoy them not, for they go into cap- tivity ; they serve their enemies in hunger and in thirst and in want of all things ; he puts an yoke of iron on their necks and destroys them." Crushed under this infamous system, to which no peo- ple with a spark of manhood could submit, the Irish were proclaimed- "lawless savages" because they spurn- ed the yoke. Carefully pillaged of their lands and earn- ings, they are taunted with being poor and " thriftless." Their schools, colleges, and churches were razed, their literature and language suppressed by statute ; to teach or to be taught was made a penal offense ; yet the cock- ney footpad whom you might hire to do murder for a guinea will preach you a serious homily with the "h' ig- norant h'Oirish " for his text. Disarmed by unmatched perfidy more than by valor ; with the bayonet ever at his breast, the bailiff at his heels ; wringing out his heart's sweat in ceaseless effort to pay rents and taxes ; 16 IRELAND AS SHE IS. supporting the most ponderous and loathsome oligarchy the world has ever seen — the Irishman is pointed at as "unprogressive." Nevertheless somebody is likely to retorfc that, after all, many of the Irish are ignorant, rough, lawless. In God's name what else could they be \ The wonder to me is that all of them are not so. Can you take your ex-slave and transform him at a mo- ment' s notice into a Jefferson or a Webster? If so, slavery cannot be so debasing an institution as its foes have painted it. These are facts that need to be told, and told, and told again. Seven centuries of bayonet and gibbet law con- stitute a unique historical fact, a solid, mountainous iniquity, which, placed in the light of public opinion, as recommended by the London oracle, may hasten the cure.* Ireland's condition taken into account and contrasted with that of her oppressor, it is astonishing that the former has retained so much of the world's best sym- pathy, seeing that the latter commands the world's ear, and that success so often palliates grievous wrongdoing. The whole pressure of British influence has been cun- ningly exerted to persuade non-Catholics that Ireland's passionate aspiration for freedom springs from a mere fanatical attachment to Popery. British writers, with very few exceptions, paint the Anglo-Irish conflict as a bitterly contested local struggle between Romanism and Protestantism. But no man can peruse an impartial volume of history without speedily learning that this is a crafty and monstrous invention. At one time the line was tightly drawn which made Protestant synonymous with Saxon, and Catholic with Celt. As Saxon at that * " The American people will agree with me in saying that when, after seven hundred years of trial, any people cannot rule another except by the sword, they are bound to give it up." — Wendell Phillips. THE ISSUE STATED. 17 time bore the same relation to Celt that the shark bears to its prey, small wonder that what the one adopted the other angrily spnrned. But the struggle was never im- bittered by religious hate except when England deliber- ately so imbittered it.* Glancing back over such a gloomy record, and then looking around to behold our race to-day scattered along the highways and by-ways of every continent, who can complain if an Irishman bitterly repeats the Jewish im- precation: "O Daughter of Babylon, blessed shall he be who shall repay thee as thou hast paid us ! " * See Chapter IX. CHAPTER II. LAW AND OEDEE. Samples op Anglo-Irish Legislation — Letters-patent — Killing no Murder— Plain Avowals — The Eootlng-out Process— Spenser's Advice— Legalized Piracy. "The English never understood governing their provinces, and have put them under a necessity of casting off their government whenever an opportunity offered." — Carte.* " No faith was kept with the Irish ; no treaty nor agreement was observed any longer than it was the interest of the English settlers to observe it, or whilst they were not strong enough to violate it with safety."— O'Connell. / } JEN that elaborate perversion of truth and fact on 3L which Mr. Froude bestows the dignified name of a history of English rule in Ireland, he attributes all the miseries of the latter to a single prolific source : namely, that while England was resolved to civilize her, she was too stubbornly and ingrainedly savage to submit to the civilizing process. Around this theory (which was invented by Gerald Cambrensis, " the lying Welsh- man") Froude weaves a glittering tissue of artistic false- hoods. His design is to persuade us that Norman and Saxon came to impress religion, laws, and culture on the Gael ; but that the Gael was not and has never since been in a receptive mood for such blessings. Small blame to the Gael, say we ; and perhaps it may be worth noting that Washington and his copatriots of 1776 were all inoculated with the same virus of hostility to British " civilization." * See Chapter I., Part Third. 18 LAW AND OEDEE. 19 To show what the alleged " civilization" of Ireland really meant, through what agencies it was administered, and why it was rejected, we shall content ourselves with putting in evidence some leaves from England's statute- books, and the testimony of English annalists and legis- lators. It is an old observation that in these statute- books the name of Ireland may be distinguished, like the track of a wounded man through a crowd, by the streaks of blood which follow it. After revisiting the old land in 1875, John Mitchel delivered a lecture in New York, in which he said : " Literally and seriously, there is no law in Ireland. The only law in Ireland lies in the suspension of all law." That this has been the case from the very beginning, we proceed to prove. 1. " All Ireland was by Henry II. cantonized among ten of the English nation [A.D. 1172] . . and though they had not gained possession of one-third part of the kingdom, yet in title they were owners and lords of all, so as nothing was left to be granted to the natives." — Davies' Historical Relations* This first act of English domination is an epitome of all subsequent acts. We shall hereafter see how the natives were made to sweat by means of these same " letters-patent " so liberally granted. 2. " Henry II. of his royal grace did extend the benefits of English law to five Irish families,! who were consequently known in pleading as persons de quinque sanguinibus." — Davies. These live tribes excepted, no Irishman had any right * Sir John Davies, from whom I take copious extracts, was Attorney-General to James I. "He was," says MacNevin,"a subtle, pliant lawyer, eloquent and learned, without con- science, the professional apologist of robbery. In the whole range of law-literature there is not a more wonderful instance of unprincipled reasoning than that by which he reconciles the conscience of the king to the ejectment of the native Irish from their lands." Davies freely criticised the rapine of previous administrations, and then coolly perfected the details of fresh raids and wholesale confiscations. + The O'Nials of Ulster, O'Melacluins of Meath, O'Connors of Connaught, O'Briens of Thomond, and HacMurroughs of Leinster. They were known as "of free blood," or " of the five bloods." 20 IEELAND AS SHE IS. which an invader was bound to respect ; the native was regarded simply as a " perpetual enemie " whom it was perfectly lawful to rob or kill. That the statute was no dead letter is certain, for we find it in vigorous operation through many subsequent reigns. Here are a couple of samples abridged from Davies : In the 29th Edward I., at Drogheda, Thomas de Botteler brings action against Robert de Almain for certain goods. The defendant pleadeth that he is not bound to answer the plaintiff, for this, that the plaintiff is an Irishman and not of free blood. . . The jurors decide that the aforesaid Thomas is an Englishman, and therefore it is adjudged that he do receive his damages. — Hist. Tracts, 78. In the 4th Edward II. William Fitz Roger, being arraigned for the felonious slaying of Roger de Cantelon, comes and says he could not commit felony by means of such killing, because the aforesaid Roger was an Irishman not of free Hood. And the jury upon their oath say that the aforesaid Roger was an Irishman, and therefore the said William, as far as regards the said felony, is acquitted. — IMd. 3. "In all the Parliament-rolls which are extant, from the 40th year of Edward III., till the reign of King Henry VIII. we find the degener- ate and disobedient English called rebels, but the Irish which were not in the king's peace are called enemies. (Statute Kilkenny, c. 1, 10, 11 ; 2d Henry IV., c. 24; 10th Henry VI., c. 1, 18; 18th Henry VI., c. 4, 5; Edward IV.. c. 6; 10th Henry VII., c. 17.)"— Tracts, p. 85. 4. "By divers heavy penal laws the English were forbidden to marry, to foster, to make gossips * with the Irish, or to have any trade or com- merce in their markets and fairs ; nay, there was a law made no longer since than the 28th year of Henry VHI. that the English should not marry with any person of Irish blood." . . THE MOTIVE AVOWED. " Whereby it is manifest that such as had the government of Ireland under the crown of England did intend to make a perpetual separation and enmitie between the English and the Irish, pretending, no doubt [i.e., hop- ing] that the English should in the end ROOT OUT the Irish ; which the * Fostering : the children of the chiefs were suckled and reared in infancy by the wives of gome of their clansmen. Gossipred : the chief, in turn, became godfather for the clansman's child. Both customs tended to knit a strong bond of affection. LAW AND OEDEE. 21 English not being able to do caused a perpetual war between the nations, which continued 400 and odd years, and which would have lasted to the world's end if, in the end of Queen Elizabeth's reign, the Irish bad not been broken and conquered by the sword." — Davies, Ibid. 5. In the 10th year of Henry VI. was passed "An Act, that no person, liege or alien, shall take merchandise or things to be sold to fair, mar- ket, or other place among the Irish enemies," under penalty of being " holden and adjudged a felon" and having the goods confiscated. 6. In the 20th of Henry VI. was passed "An Act, that every liege man shall take the Irish conversant as especially amongst the English, and make of them as the king's enemies." This not being sufficiently sanguinary, it was improved in the year 1465 (5th Edward IV.) as fol- lows: "That it shall be lawfull to all manner of men that find any theeves robbing by day or by night, or going or coming to rob or steal, having no faithfull man of good name in their company in English ap- parel, that it shall be lawfull to take and kill those and to cut off their heads, without any impeachment of our sovereign lord the King, his heirs, officers, or ministers, or of any others." The foregoing act was simply a guarantee of impunity for the slaughter of Irishmen, and, lest anybody should slack in the good work, an additional stimulant was given in the subjoined section : 7. "And it shall be lawfull, by authority of the said Parliament, to the said bringer of the said head, and his ayders to the same, for to dis- train and levy by their own hands of every man having one plowland in the barony where said theif was so taken, two pence, and of every man having half a plowland, one penny," etc. Observe here (1) that the head must have been worn by an Irishman ; (2) that it could be taken by anybody sus- pecting the victim of " going or coming to rob or steal ;" (3) that every scalp brought a handsome price in a popu- lous barony ; and you will admit that a man might be far less profitably employed than in hunting Irish under this sweeping parliamentary license. 8. In 1537 (28th Henry VIII.) was passed " An Act against marrying or fostering with or to the Irish." 22 IKELAND AS SHE IS. It was feared that an intermixture of the two races would obstruct the rooting-out process. During all this time, remember, an English sheriff dare not show his nose in two-thirds of Ireland ; indeed, in the time of Henry VIII. the English Pale had narrowed down to four counties. 9. "The most wicked and mischievous custom of all was that of Coin and Livery, which consisted in taking of man's meat, horse meat, and money, of all the inhabitants of the country, at the will and pleasure of the souldier, who (as the phrase of the Scripture is) did eat up the people as it were bread; for that he had no other entertainment. . . It indeed was the most heavy oppression that ever was used in any Chris- tian or heathen kingdom. And therefore vox ojtpressorum, this crying sin did draw down as great or greater plagues upon Ireland than the oppression of the Israelites did draw upon the land of Egypt. For the plagues of Egypt, though they were grievous, were but of short contin- uance ; but the plagues of Ireland lasted four hundred years together. . . . This extortion of Coin and Livery produced two notorious effects: first, it made the land waste; next, it made the people idle; for, when the husbandman had laboured all the year, the souldier in one night consumed the fruits of all his labour. . . And hereupon of necessity came depopulation, banishment, and extirpation of the better sort of subjects." — Davies. You may well say so, Sir John ! Nor has the extortion of Coin and Livery yet ceased, although it is now known by softer names, such as rents, rates, taxes. The same results are visible to-day in the flight of the people, and the continuance of this worse than Egyptian plague. Toward the close of the last century Coin and Livery were expressly legalized in the shape of " free quarters " extended to the Hessian mercenaries. 10. In 1579 the garrison of Smerwick, in Kerry, seven hundred strong, surrendered " upon mercy " to Lord Deputy Grey. How the stipulation was observed we learn from the Anglo-Protestant historian Leland: "Wiugfield was commissioned to disarm them, and when this service was performed, an English company was sent into the fort, and the garrison was butchered in cold blood; nor is it without pain that LAW AET> OKDEK. 23 we find a service so horrible, so detestable, committed to Sir Walter Raleigh ! " * 11. Only a short time before "Walter, Earl of Essex, on the con- clusion of a peace, invited Brian O'Nial of Claneboy, with a great number of his relations, to an entertainment, where they lived together in great harmony, making good cheer for three days and nights; when, on a sudden, O'JSTial was surprised with an arrest, together with his brother and wife, by the earl's orders. His friends were put to the sword before his face, nor were the women and children spared. He was him- self, with his brother and wife, sent to Dublin, where they were cut in quarters. . . This chieftain had been universally esteemed. "--Cap- tain Lee's Report to Elizabeth. 12. Under Sir H. Sidney, in 1577, occurred the hideous massacre of Mulloghmast, which is thus related by the English historian Mor- rison : "The English published a proclamation inviting all the well- affected Irish to an interview on the Rathmore at Mulloghmasten, en- gaging at the same time for their security and that no evil was intended. In consequence of this engagement the well-affected Irish came to the Rathmore aforesaid; and soon after they assembled they found them- selves surrounded by three or four lines of English horse and foot, com- pletely accoutred, by whom they were ungenerously attacked and cut to pieces, and not a single man escaped." . . This was done "with the consent and practice of the deputy, " an English officer records ! 13. "A great part of that unquietness of O'Donnell's country came by Sir William Fitzwilliams, his placing of one Willis there to be sheriff, who had with him three hundred of the very rascals and scum of that kingdom, which did rob and spoil that people, ravish their wives and daughters, and make havoc of all, which bred such a discontentment as that the whole country was up in arms against them." — Morrison. THE MOTIVE AGAIN STATED. 14. " The true cause which for a long time fatally opposed the grad- ual coalition of the Irish and English race under one form of govern- ment was that the great English settlers found it more for their imme- diate interest that a free course should be left to their oppressions ; that many of those whose lands they coveted should be considered as aliens ; that they should be furnished for their petty wars by arbitrary exactions, * Whom many good-natured people nowadays are taught to look upon as a consummate flower of chivalry I For this and other chivalrous services in Ireland Walter got a, grant of 40,000 acres in Cork. 24 IKELAND AS SHE IS. and in their rapines and massacres be freed from the terrors of a rigidly impartial and severe tribunal." — Leland, Book ii., c. 1. THE CONSEQENCES. 15. "Riot, rapine, and massacre, and all the tremendous effects of anarchy were the natural consequences. Every inconsiderable party who, under pretense of loyalty, received the king's commission to repel the adversary in some particular district, became pestilent enemies to the inhabitants. Their properties, their lives, the chastity of their families were all exposed to barbarians, who sought only to glut their brutal passions, and by their horrible excesses purchased the curse of God and man." — Lelakd, Book ii., c. 3. CHARACTER OF THE VICEROYS. 16. "At a distance from the supreme seat of power, and with the ad- vantage of being able to make such representations of the state of Ireland as they pleased, the English vicegerents acted with the less reserve. They were generally tempted to undertake the conduct of a disordered state for the sake of 'private emolument, and their object was pursued without delicacy or integrity, sometimes with inhuman violence." — Leland, Book iii., c. 1. MARTIAL LAW. 17. "Martial law is so frequent and ordinary in Ireland that it is not to be denied, and so little offensive there that the common law takes no exception at it." — Rushworth, viii., 198. The words are as applicable to-day as at the period of which Rushworth wrote. One of the advantages of hav- ing all irksome formalities thus dispensed with is illus- trated in the following extract from Cox's History : 18. "The Earl of Ormond's officers made complaint against Lovell, sheriff of the county Kilkenny, that he had executed martial law on several felons that had lands and goods which would be forfeited to the earl by their attainder, and that the sheriff toolc those lands and goods to his own cause.' 1 '' — P. 395. Observe the admirable forethought of the sheriff in hanging up, without trial or delay, certain suspects who LAW AND 0EDEE. 25 happened to possess desirable lands and goods. He thus got ahead of the earl, who was moving against them with the same intent by a more circuitous channel. The victims may or may not have been hatching " treason ; " but they were indisputably guilty of holding property which the sheriff coveted ! SPENSER'S ADVICE. 19. The author of "The Faerie Queen" was for some years a carpet- bagger in Ireland, and suggested that the land should be laid waste in all directions j for, said he, "altho' there should none of them fall by the sword nor be slain by the soldiour, yet thus being kept from man- urance and their cattle from roaming abroad, by this hard restraint they would consume themselves and devoure one another." — Spenser's Ire- land, 165. That this counsel was energetically carried into effect, two extracts from Leland will show : 20. "Repeated complaints were made of the inhuman rigours prac- tised by Grey [the Deputy] and his officers. The queen was assured that he tyrannized with such barbarity that little was left in Ireland for her Majesty to reign over but ashes and carcasses." — Book iv., c. 2. 21. "Some of her [Elizabeth's] counsellors appear to have conceived an odious jealousy which reconciled them to the distractions and mis- eries of Ireland. 'Should we exert ourselves,' said they, 'in reducing this country to order and civility, it must soon acquire power, conse- quence, and riches. The inhabitants will thus be alienated from Eng- land ; they will cast themselves into the arms of some foreign power, or perhaps erect themselves into an independent and separate state. Let us rather connive at their disorders, for a weak and disordered people can never attempt to detach themselves from the power of England.' " — Book iv., c. 3. Here, for the present, I discontinue my quotations, having no desire to sicken the reader with an unbroken catalogue of ghastly horrors. The later code, known distinctly as The Penal Laws, shall be treated in a sep- arate chapter ; and other repressive statutes shall find 26 IRELAND AS SHE IS. their proper places in the course of the historical review- further on. From the testimonies already adduced, I think no fair-minded person can reach any other conclu- sion than that what Mr. Froude terms a mission of civili- zation was simply a colossal scheme of spoliation and land-piracy. " Rooting-out " is the quaint and sugges- tive name which James the First's Attorney-General gives it. The word briefly and happily expresses the animus of British rule in Ireland for seven hundred years. ]STo doubt some will find it hard to believe that a pro- fessedly Christian nation set to work deliberately and systematically to extirpate the people of another. Nev- ertheless it is the literal, naked truth. How to secure the «spoiler and exterminate the rightful occupant of the soil is the problem to which English statesmen have bent their energies from the time of Henry II. to the time of Victoria. * They succeeded in creating the " perpetual separation and enmity" of which Davies speaks, al- though not in a way to wholly satisfy their expectation. The " rooting-out " process has gone pitilessly on for centuries — at one time hastened by fire, sword, and gib- bet, at another by the slower torture of savage laws, again by the crushing pressure of artificial famine — but an indestructible seed has always survived. Fix your gaze on any intermediate date from 1172 to 1877 : you may note differences in the machinery employed, but the functions it performs are forever the same. It may be Henry II. 's edicts of outlawry and cantonments, or the swords of bandit barons, or Henry VIII. 's grim stat- utes, or Elizabeth's pacification of fire and steel, or the guiles and plantings of the Stuarts, or Cromwell's butch- * Prince Albert, the German peddler whom Victoria married, declared that Russia de- served credit for its barbarous treatment of the Poles, and affirmed that the Irish should be treated in the same manner. LAW AND ORDEE. 27 eries and transportings, or the satanic malice of the penal code, or the Hessian infamies of '98, or the famines, evictions, and coercion-acts of Victoria ; — amid them all there is one constant element : the rooting-ont process never halts or slacks. Conceive, if you can, some idea of all the misery, humiliation, and degradation involved in these facts ; then you will wonder, not at the discon- tent, but at the tameness of Ireland. "The Irish people know and feel," said O'Connell, "that there cannot happen a more heavy misfortune' to Ireland than the prosperity and power of Great Britain." No truer political gospel was ever spoken, although O'ConnelPs practice belied his preaching. England's own deliberate act, her greed of wealth, the insatiable appetites of her vampire oligarchy, have placed her and Ireland at opposite ends of the balance. As either rises, so the other sinks. To protect the monopolies of the one, the manufactures of the other are suppressed. To enrich the one, the other is stripped bare. Ireland independent would, by virtue of natural resources and geographical position, immediately regain her stolen commerce — a fact which Mr. Froude admits, and which he boldly proclaims to be England's justification. The one country is subjected to perpetual martyrdom for the aggrandizement of the other ; but the instinct of self- preservation compels Ireland to struggle against this ruinous and debasing subjection. She must arrest the rooting-out process and control her own destinies. That she cannot do so while a single shred of her British yoke remains, ought by this time be self-evident as a geome- tric axiom. CHAPTER in. THE LAND. ownership of the soil — ireland's basal grievance — " sacked Rights op Property" — The Brehon (Irish) contrasted with the Feudal (Anglo-Norman) Tenure— Confiscation preceding Conquest. " The peculiar function of Ireland in the United Kingdom, seems to be to illustrate in a startling way the vices of English legislation."— London Examiner. " The land of Ireland, like the land of every other country, belongs to the people who inhabit it ; and when the inhabitants of a country quit it in tens of thousands because the government does not leave them room to live in it, that government is already judged and condemned. 1 ' — John Stuart Mux. [HE soil belongs to the people who occupy and cultivate it ; it is their natural, God-given herit W^Tfl age. This fundamental truth, appreciated by the most primitive tribes, formulated by every great pub licist and legislator from Moses to Mill, touches the marrow of Ireland's grievances ; and neither Repeal nor Federalism, nor one nor twenty parliaments in College Green can bring peace and prosperity to Ireland without a radical change in the land system fostered there for centuries. The soil is the birthright of the people, the primal source of their sustenance ; and they must hold it as proprietors, not as tenants ; hold it by right, not merely by landlord sufferance. Stripped of all collateral issues and accidents, you have here the core of the Irish problem, which can be solved in two ways : by Dis- establishment (that is, a peaceful nationalization of the soil) or by Revolution. There is no likelihood whatever 28 THE LAND. 29 that the former will be attempted until the latter is imminent. " For generations the proprietors of the land in Ireland were Spar- tans among a helot peasantry — almost planters among negro slaves." — London Times, May, 1858. These emphatic comparisons only faintly tell the tale. "The sacred rights of property" — who dare dispute or meddle with them under shadow of "the glorious British Constitution ' ' % What other nation is there whose statesmen and editors can deafen you with such sonor- ous platitudes* about freedom, equity, philanthropy? But what does the whole shibboleth amount to % Simply that England shall be privileged to plunder when, where, and how she can, and then meet every protest by telling you that the rights of property — when she holds it — are and must be maintained as sacred. When she starts out to pillage some weaker power, her pet theory is very conveniently shelved away. "Property is theft," says Rousseau. "Property is homicide and the mother of tyranny," says Proudhon. I would not advocate the adoption of these famous and startling maxims as the basis of a new social system any- where; but I will say, without fear of contradiction, that if applied to the tenure of land in Ireland, they are true as Revelation ! Let us take a glance at the matter in its historical aspects. * Here are a few of them, clipped from an old scrap-book : " That government should be for the good of the governed, and that whenever rulers wilfully and persistently postpone the good of their subjects, either to the interest of foreign states or to assist theories of religion or politics, the people have a right to throw off the yoke, are principles too often admitted and acted upon to be any longer questioned. 1 ' — London Times, 1860. " The destiny of a nation ought to be determined, not by the opinions of other nations, but by the opinion of the nation itself. 1 ''— Ibid. " Europe has over and over again affirmed the right of a people to choose its own rulers." — London Daily News. 44 Is it not a maxim of English law, asserted by all free Englishmen, that nations have a right to governors of their own choice f "—Palmerston. 30 IEELAND AS SHE IS. ' ' It has proved a hard task to burn out of the Irish cultivator a recollection of his ancient rights in the soil, and a growing acquaint- ance with the old law of Ireland makes us regret that this task was ever undertaken." — London Examiner.* In Pagan Ireland, under the Brehon laws, and after- ward down to the date of its complete subjugation, land was owned in common by each clan or sept of the same name, and an officer (the Toparch) was elected, who allot- ted it among the separate families, according to the num- ber of children they possessed, f It was held to be the foodstock of the people, a common heritage, in which every household had the right of use in proportion to the number of its inmates. No man could own the land, save the man who cultivated it, and he only so much as his domestic responsibility entitled him to. A portion of the tribe-land was marked off as commonage for grazing, and another portion (with a commodious house attached) was set apart for purposes of public hospitality, so that every traveler should be assured of food and shelter. The occupiers of farms paid a fixed tax or tribute, apart from service-duty, and a share of the farm might be sublet ; hence rents were not altogether unknown. But the sys- tem had in it no element of feudal oppression. The Anglo-Irish war began with the attempt to intrude an alien, a radically different and bad basis of tenure, upon the Celtic cultivators. Through every phase of the sub- sequent conflict two forces may always be seen grap- pling : a rude, unorganized Democracy resisting an ag- gressive, piratical Feudalism; the one trying to hold the soil which the other savagely wrests from it. Henry II., the first English monarch who invaded * In so far as sincerity is regarded, this extract is merely a bit of ornamental writing. When anybody undertakes to undo the wrong complained of, the Examiner promptly adds its voice to the general howl against " Agrarianism " and '• Communism. 1 ' + Compare this system with the tenure instituted among the Israelites.— Numbers xxvi. 61-67. THE LAltfD. 31 Ireland, came, we are told, to civilize the natives. He set about it in a peculiar fashion by distributing the entire island — on paper — among ten of his followers. True, neither he nor they, nor their successors for centuries, so much as laid eye on a twentieth portion of the domain so generously disposed of by letters-patent. Still, the transaction was recorded on parchment, and all that the turbulent Anglo-Norman barons had to do was to con- quer the territory thus liberally bestowed upon them in payment of past services. It was exceedingly easy to write out a title for some estate in Ireland ; how to get hold of it afterward— well, that was the grantee's own look-out and business ! In the time of Henry VIII. there were seven hundred rich monasteries in England, many of them doubtless enjoying excessive privileges, yet constituting the only public hospitals and almshouses then known. On going to loggerheads with the Pope over a trivial matter of polygamy, Henry confiscated the monasteries, their lands, and benefices at a swoop, dividing most of the spoil among his court favorites and concubines. The appe- tite grew as it was fed, until, complaining of the rapa- city of his Parliament and parasites, Hal impetuously exclaimed: "By our Lady, the cormorants when they have got the garbage will devour the dish ! My whole kingdom would not stanch their maws."* Stimulated by such means, the earth-hunger, the taste for pillage of this sort, became an epidemic among the "nobility and gentry" of England, and from this epoch do most of England's landed aristocrats date their opu- lence. Since Henry II.' s time the invaders in Ireland had succeeded in occupying only a small semicircle of Leinster, known as "the Pale;" but in the sixteenth * The English proprietors did not cheerfully submit to the royal mandate until seventy thousand of them bad been slaughtered as examples. Then there was " reace." 32 IEELAND AS SHE IS. century a systematic and desperate effort was made to extend its limits. The English colony had an immense advantage in its feudal concentration of power. The Irish septs fought a losing battle because they fought in isolated groups.* Queen Mary — Catholic or Bloody Mary, as you prefer, for both titles are appropriate — delved in the new field, confiscating that large tract of country on the borders of the Pale to which she gave the name of " King's" and " Queen's" counties. Many of the chiefs thus summarily dispossessed were trapped and butchered by her agents to secure themselves against disturbance. Next came Elizabeth, in whose reign the Anglo-Irish duel for the first time assumed international proportions. She and her advisers resolved to subjugate Ireland thoroughly ; and the Irish, at length beginning to get their eyes open to a proper conception of the crisis, be- gan also to combine for resistance. Years of desolating warfare were the result. After the breaking up of the monasteries, England's cities and hamlets swarmed with mendicants, idlers, and tramps who had previously been employed or fed by the monks. Elizabeth's brandings and hangings made these fellows unspeakably thankful for a chance to join her armies and fight in Ireland. Be- sides the penalties they escaped at home, they were at- tracted by the liberal scale of booty which would reward their success over the Irishrie. To a foot-soldier one hundred and twenty acres, to a horse-soldier two hun- dred and forty acres of Irish soil were the prizes held out to volunteers. Religious rancor was introduced to whet the weapons of the spoilers. Welded, for the first time in five hundred years, into something like a national or- ganization by O'Neill and O'Donnell, the Irish made a * For the cause and consequences of these diverse tactics see Part Second, Chapter IV. THE LAND. 33 gallant stand, holding ont for a dozen years against heavy odds, against Elizabeth's ablest generals, and against treacherous duplicity on the part of the Anglo-Irish gar- rison. But famine and pestilence subdued them in the end. Year after year did the English burn the grow- ing grain and destroy the cattle wherever they could penetrate, at the same time butchering man, woman, and child, without distinction or remorse, until one of the Queen's agents was able to assure her that she now reigned over a kingdom of carcasses and ashes, and that Ireland was at peace ! The devastated fields through the best portion of three provinces were partitioned out among her majesty's troopers according to promise ; also to the impecunious sons of English gentry at three pence per acre. Though sadly wasted by fifteen years of ruthless war, the Ulster chieftains still retained their tribe-lands when out stepped "the crowned lioness," and in sidled Jamie Stuart in her place, with a pack of sanctimonious starve- ling Scots at his heels. These were orthodox after Jamie's own heart, and therefore had to be provided for ; so a conspiracy was sneakingly hatched against O'lSTeill and O'Donnell, "the bulwarks of the north," who fled to the continent in the hope of obtaining material aid to reassert their rights. They were disappointed, and ended their days in exile. With them safely out of the way, the Ulster Plantation was forthwith begun. Six whole counties were distributed among Scotch and English Protestants and favored British corporations. Moreover, Commissioners and Discoverers were appointed to tra- verse the rest of the island and pick out flaws in the titles of occupiers. Of course very few of the native Irish could produce the requisite royal patent, and all who could not do so were summarily ejected — rooted out. Says Leland: "The most iniquitous practices of hardened 3 34 IRELAND AS SHE IS. cruelty, vile perjury, and scandalous subornation were employed to despoil the unoffending people of their lands." Among the plunder thus legally secured were eighteen hundred estates, which under the old Irish system had always been reserved for purposes of public hospitality. Soon came another turn of the wheel, making the Puritans masters of England. They lopped off the curled head of Charles I., and Cromwell set out for Ire- land, ostensibly to chastise the adherents of the Stuart dynasty — really to organize and superintend another general "plantation" for the benefit of his own godly followers. With merciless rigor he chased out whatever remnant of the Irish had yet a stake in their native soil, together with hosts of earlier English settlers, giving them the historic alternative of "Hell or Connaught" for a future abiding-place.* He then parceled out the land among his own hard-hitting disciples, under mili- tary warrants. After the Commonwealth, a Stuart restoration ; and it is hard to say which was worse, the frank brutality of the Protector, or the infamous ingratitude of Charles II. The Irish, fools as they were, had fought and suffered for the Stuarts ; in return for which loyal service they now expected to get back some share of their lands and freedom. They even contrived to raise a princely testi- monial and laid it at his Majesty's feet. The restored monarch coolly pocketed their purse, then signed a fresh law of confiscation, extending especially to Connaught, whither most of the aboriginal Irish had been driven ! EigM million acres were gobbled for English favorites under this searching. * Connaught being the most barren and inaccessible of the four provinces . . . One of the hunted Irish could not resist the opportunity afforded for a rejoinder. " I go to Con- naught," said he, "because I know that Cromwell will need the other place foi himself and his crew." THE LAND. 35 The treaty of Limerick, solemnly signed by "William III. and his consort Mary, guaranteed to the Irish, npon laying down their arms, quiet possession of such lands and chattels as they held at the date of signing (1691). But no sooner had Sarsfield and his soldiers crossed the sea than pledges and treaty were flung to the winds, and a new commission appointed by whose agency two mil- lion acres of the best land remaining were seized and re- distributed after the approved fashion. The appetite for pillage was keen and contagious among the judges, com- missioners, and adventurers of every stamp. Wholesale robbery was the natural consequence. Here is the testi- mony of an English historian, Dr. Smiles : "This extensive seizure of Irish lauds by William III. completed the confiscations of the seventeenth century — a century of war, bloodshed, and spoliation. The mode in which those robberies were latterly effected was thus: The 'Castle party' indicted the Irish gentlemen who possessed any estates of high treason in the several counties of the interior, and then removed the trials by certiorari * to the Court of King's Bench in Dublin." In his masterly work on " Ireland under English Rule," the Abbe Perraud well observes that Ireland is a confiscated rather than a conquered country. Every change of sovereign in England, every fresh demand upon her exchequer, suggested new measures of spolia- tion in Ireland. It has been shown that every acre of arable soil from the Giant' s Causeway to Cape Clear was confiscated three times at least. After all the pillage we have here hastily surveyed, it will readily enough be believed that little remained to the rightful owners of the soil ; yet to cap and consum- mate the iniquity came the elaborate Penal Code, which rendered an Irish Catholic legally incapable of owning a * The motive for this contrivance was that most of the victims would thus lose all chance of making a defense, or that they would he heggared hy logal expenses. 36 IRELAND AS SHE IS. single rood, or of even leasing it for more than thirty- one years ! This enactment remained in force nntil the Protestants and Anglo-Irish, feeling the iron in their own souls, assumed an attitude of armed resistance in 1782. Slight concessions were gradually and grudgingly accorded — how slight is manifest in the present condition of the Irish cultivators after a century of almost constant agitation, varied with spasmodic insurrections. CHAPTER IV. A NATION OF TENANTS-AT-WILL. Indolence at a Premium— Isaac Butt's Testimony— Ninety-four Thousand One-roomed Huts— The Unstanched Hemorrhage, Absenteeism — Illustrative Cases. "Another cause of this nation's misery is that Egyptian bondage of cruel, oppressing, and covetous landlords, expecting all who live under them should make bricks without straw ; who grieve or envy when they see a tenant of their own in a whole coat, or able to afford one comfortable meal in a month ; by which the spirits of the people are broken and made fit for slavery."— Dean S-vift. RANSIENT tourists in Ireland invariably drop into a stereotyped homily on the decay visible all around them. They observe that the fields are poorly cultivated, that the farming is primitive and unscientific, and they naturally jump to the conclusion that the tillers must be slovenly, lazy, unprogressive. No doubt most visitors of this sort will be surprised to learn that the property -regime in force there at the pres- ent hour actually condemns the Irish peasant to poverty, and prohibits him from turning his hand to improve- ment. Instead of giving way to " grief " or " envy," as in Swift's time, the landlords of to-day employ a more ingenious method. When they notice a tenant getting his head above the zero-mark of practical pauperism, they promptly put on the screws, by raising the rent, until they effectually crush him back to the normal level. John Stuart Mill proposes a suggestive query, which the tourist-critics might study to advantage: "What race would not be ' indolent' when things are so arranged 37 38 IEELAND AS SHE IS. that it has nothing to gain from being prudent or indus- trious !■" Mnety-five per cent, of the people in Ireland hold their fields and dwellings from year to year under exter- minating landlords, who, if they notice any signs of im- provement on a farm, are sure to advance the rent. The tenant thus finds industry discouraged by a heavy pen- alty. If the country had a government worthy of the name, improving tenants would be rewarded, or at least secured against extortion. But British rule in Ireland is expressly organized to protect a small caste in preying on the people at large. We have heard of a genial Bohe- mian who, when invited to take a bracing walk, declared that he could not afford the luxury ; it would sharpen his appetite, and he had not a cent wherewith to provide dinner. Just so the Irish cultivator cannot afford to do what anybody would recommend at first sight as benefi- cial to him. If he toils, it is without ultimate profit to himself. If he raises two blades of grass or corn where only one grew before, the additional blade is summarily converted into an increased rent, which, when he is no longer able to pay, out he goes upon the roadside ! Slav-, ery is defined as " the holding of men to forced service or forced tribute." To such service the Irish cultivator is held, while mocked with a hollow pretense of freedom. Like a dog in a cider-mill, he toils but advances not. Of course there are isolated landlords to be found who retain some humane and Christian instincts ; but they are so few and far between as to have practically no effect upon the reckoning. Moreover, the best that such a one can do is extremely little, his hands being tied by laws of entail and primogeniture, which give him only a life- interest in the estate. If the fate of Sodom and Gomor- rah were suspended over Ireland, her ratio of "good landlords " would not avert the threatened doom. A NATION OF TENANTS-AT-WILL. 39 Isaac Butt, head of the home-rule movement, has never been accused of harboring what are termed " agrarian" or " socialistic " notions. He is a peaceful, rotund, and careful constitutionalist ; yet listen to his calm, deliberate opinion on this head, as published in a pamphlet * seven years ago : "Nearly the whole peasant population of Ireland hold their farms as tenants-at-will. Never inthe worst days of the penal laws were the occupiers so much at the mercy of the proprietors. Imperfect as the protection was which he formerly received, even that little is now gone. In the year 1849 more than fifty thousand families were turned out of their wretched dwellings, without pity and without refuge — their cottages tumbled, and themselves driven on to the roads. By what name shall we call such a wholesale extermination ? It is vain to disguise it as the exercise of any right of civilized property. It is an act of war — cruel and ruthless. Enough to say that, if in those twenty years all the horrors of a real and actual war of conquest, all the worst horrors of a civil war and insurrection had swept over Ireland, fewer hearths had been quenched and desolate, and fewer families brought to beggary and destruction. Ireland has endured all that constitutes the agony of a conflict, and more, far more, than the degradation and misery of defeat. These are the doings that almost justify the reasoning of those who argue that it were better for the peasantry of Ireland to risk all in one wild insurrec- tion than wait to be wasted away by the slow combustion of suppressed civil war. Let any man tell me the difference between an expulsion of the whole population in Glenveigh by a squadron of Cromwell's troop- ers, and an expulsion of its population in 1850 by the man who has inherited or purchased Cromwell's patent. The very pomp and circum- stance are the same. Military force ejects the people now as it did then ; the bayonets of the soldiery drive now, as they did then, the old popu- lation from their homes. Cruel men come now as they did, and, amid the wailing of women and the cries of children, level the humble habi- tations that have given shelter to the simple dwellers in that glen. What, I ask, is the difference ? By what mockery of all justice and truth can we call the one the act of inhuman conquest — the other the legitimate exercise of the sacred rights of property with which no one is to interfere ? To evict a tenant in Ireland from Ms bit of land is to reduce him to beggary. The man who can deprive him thus at his will and pleas- *"A Plea for the Celtic Race." 40 IKELAND AS SHE IS. ure, must be his master by a lam more absolute than that which gave the slave- holder the mastery over his slave. And this power is wielded mercilessly by the majority of the Irish landlords. On some of the estates tenants dare not harbor in their houses a stranger, a poor person, or even a poor relative, not immediately belonging to the family. Nor can marriages be consummated without the sanction of the landlord or his agent. Many of the landlords serve notice to quit regularly every gale day after they have received their rents, in order to keep eternally in their hands the power of immediate eviction \, Can slavery be more completely established than this ? Can industry make its way under such circum- stances ? Can enterprise do aught to lift those poor serfs ? Can capi- tal venture out in a community so unsettled, so oppressed, so unsafe ? Landed property in Ireland can show no title which requires us to tol- erate such a terrible condition of society." The author of this graphic passage has for a couple of years past been trying to obtain a hearing in Parliament for a bill to amend Gladstone's mnch-landed though in- efficient Land Act. Mr. Butt' s propositions have always been sat upon with scant ceremony, but they would be of small value even if passed. He perceives the gravity of the disease, but any of the mild tonics for which he could hope to secure a moment' s notice in the landlord legislature would have no more effect on the crucial malady than adhesive plaster on a fractured spinal col- umn. Perhaps some will think that even Mr. Butt is inclined to exaggerate. If so, I shall try to satisfy them from another source. In the British Registrar-General' s official report, 1876, may be found the following item : " Ninety-four thousand houses in Ireland have but one room each, in which an entire family of generally five to seven persons dwell ; male and female, married and single, old and young, lie and rise, eat, drink, and sleep in the presence of each other." This means that one-tenth of the people in Ireland live in a condition of squalid degradation not to be surpassed in Borneo or Caffraria ; and, what is more, every effort they make to rise beyond their woful plight is certain to A NATION OF TENANTS-AT-WILL. 41 throw them back to a lower depth — if such be conceiv- able. Next let us hear from John Bright, who can hardly be suspected of undue partiality. In a speech which he delivered at Birmingham in February, 1876, he said: "One-half of Scotland is owned by forty-one landlords; one great no- ble there holds as much soil as three millions of his poorer countrymen. Six thousand persons own the whole land of Ireland. Five thousand own the whole land of England and Wales. So that fourteen thousand persons own all the lands of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, amounting to about ninety millions of acres. This is the power that makes and administers the laws. It is a power which has been for gen- erations a curse in this country, which is enormous now, and with which, whenever it chooses to act in Parliament — in spite of your house- hold suffrage in boroughs — there is an end of your opinion ; for it car- ries any measure it thinks necessary to its own interests." The area of Ireland is about twenty million (20,157,557) acres, of which about thirteen millions are cultivable. Half the entire island is " owned " by five hundred men and women, who hold it simply by the title of the robber, maintained by British bayonets ; while nine-tenths of the remaining half are in the hands of a few thousand individuals. Here are some facts taken from the last census : Acres. 110 individuals hold, in Ireland, 4,152,142 192 others " " " 2,607,719 440 others " " " 3,071,471 Now examine the opposite page of the ledger : Five and a quarter millions of human beings in Ireland own Not a rood. One-roomed huts (about 12 feet square) inhabited in Ireland, 94,000 Number of families evicted in Ireland during past thirty years, 250,000 Absentee rents drawn yearly from Irish tenants, to be spent abroad (lowest estimate), .... $25,000,000 42 IEELAND AS SHE IS. Can a man hope to grow strong whose life-current steadily oozes ont from an nnstanched hemorrhage? Can a country similarly afflicted grow prosperous % One hundred and fifty years ago Dean Swift wrote : " The rise of our rents is squeezed out of the very Mood and vitals and clothes and dwellings of the tenants, who live worse than English beggars." The words are as true and appropriate in 1877 as they were in 1727. The vast bulk of the Irish people are tenants-at-will, and the tenant-at-will is several degrees below serfdom. He quakes at every footfall of landlord or agent, lives from day to day on the perilous verge of starvation, pouring out his heart-sweat in a ceaseless effort to satisfy the remorseless vampires that will surely choke him in the end.* Within the past thirty years, more than two hundred and fifty thousand families have been evicted in Ireland — flung out like wild beasts, their hearthstones quenched, their roofs leveled, without a penny of com- pensation for the toil and sweat which had fertilized their little farms. A quarter of a million evictions means upward of a million and a half men, women, and chil- dren driven to the emigrant hulk or the pauper grave, exclusive altogether of the still larger number who were compelled to seek safety in exile through less direct pressure of the same agencies. No other country in the world presents so pitiful a spectacle. The organized ini- quity of Irish landlordism surpasses even that of the old seignorial system in France, whose fruits were plucked in the whirlwind of the Kevolution. To show most impressively what tyrannous powers are * From witnessing a similar state of things aronnd him in the beginning of the last cen- tury. Swift was prompted to publish his "Modest Proposal"— a cutting satire, in which he argued that Irish babies should be fattened and slaughtered for landlord food. " As they have already devoured most of the parents," wrote he, "they have the best title to the children." A NATION OF TEjSAj^TS-AT-WILL. 43 placed in the hands of this monstrous oligarchy, let me cite a few illustrative cases : 1. A score of years ago Mr. Grey purchased Ballycohey estate, and sig- nalized his purchase by an advance of twenty per cent, in rents. Having thus augmented the value of the property, he sold out to Mr. Scully, who proposed a lease to the tenants. They, learning that the promised lease was a trap, endeavored to avoid Scully's presence, who thereupon procured a detachment of armed police and proceeded to serve notice- to-quit on all who persisted in declining the "lease." This document (says Sigerson), of which the tenants were so shy, enacted that the tenant should pay all his own and his landlord's rates, cess, taxes, and duties whatsoever, save his quit-rent and tithe-rent charges; that the tenant should abandon all claim to compensation, and give up all his crops in the ground, together with the land, whenever the landlord should see fit to demand it, after giving twenty-one days' notice to that effect at any of the four quarters of the year ; that the tenant should pay all rents and taxes quarterly in advance, bind himself to a multitude of other obliga- tions too tedious to be here quoted, and surrender all former leases, agree- ments, proposals, or contracts. . . In forcing this satanic compact on his luckless serfs, Scully was supported by the armed forces of the gov- ernment ; and this is only one instance culled from thousands of the same kind. 2. In 1864 a titled English satrap, on a flying visit to his estates in Donegal, fixed his dissolute glance on the^ comely daughter of a poor widow whose cot stood within his earlship's domain. The scoundrel's advances were repelled by the girl with virtuous indignation. What, then, did the magnanimous British "nobleman" do ? Within a month he left the widow and her daughter homeless, and threatened to visit the same penalty on any tenant daring to offer them shelter. Foiled in his lustful design, the titled coward rooted them out. 3. In his youthful days Charles Bradlaugh, the English agitator, joined her Majesty's army, and was stationed in the west of Ireland. One bleak wintry afternoon his company was ordered out to support the Crowbar Brigade in ejecting a number of helpless tenants. In one cheerless hovel lay a man consuming with fever-heat, whose pallid wife piteously prayed to be left undisturbed for a week — a day — longer. Vain prayer ! Out went the sufferer upon the roadway, and there he died while the walls of his cabin were being demolished. Sickened with the spectacle, Bradlaugh applied to some friends in London who purchased his discharge from the army. 44 IEELAND AS SHE IS. 4. Delivering judgment on a land-case in 1858 (O'Fay vs. Burke) the Master of the Rolls said: "I am bound to administer an artificial sys- tem, and being so bound I regret much that I must administer injustice in this case/ 1 '' Every consideration of equity was on the side of the evicted tenant, but the iron meshes of the law — a law framed and ad- ministered by landlords — left no loophole through which the voice of equity could be heard. In these few instances, illustrating as they do the social life of the country, there is material which a philosophic student could readily expand into a large and instructive volume. Who can measure or conceive the agony en- dured by a people which, in addition to every other cal- amity, is condemned to "forced service and forced tri- bute ' ' under such masters as are here described 9 Where among the despotisms of Asia can be found so horrible a mockery of government ! Even Froude has the candor to say : "The landlords in Ireland represent conquest and confiscation, and they have gone on with an indifference to the welfare of the people that would never be tolerated in England or Scotland." Such a condition, as Daunt re- marks, necessarily paralyzes the energies of the cultivator by placing a crushing tax on his slightest effort toward im- provement ; and his poverty necessarily impoverishes the laborer and mechanic, depresses the merchant, excludes enterprise — in a word emasculates the country, while it does not benefit even the landlord so much as would a more equitable system. What becomes of Irish rents ? Do not these moneys re- turn to the people through the regular channels of trade, refreshing home industry and stimulating enterprise? Not a bit of it ; they have an entirely different destina- tion. They go abroad for expensive luxuries to England or the continent ; they meet the demands of fashion and aristocratic dissipation in London ; they enrich race- courses, gambling dens, and other haunts of gilded vice. Of the money wrung from the half-starved, half-naked A NATION OF TENANTS-AT-WILL. 45 Irish peasant, fully nine-tenths goes abroad, never to return. Accepting the lowest estimate, and calculating at simple interest, the drain of wealth from Ireland dur- ing the seventy-six years since the Union, through ab- sentee rents, customs, and revenues alone, exceeds five thousand million pounds sterling (or twelve times the United* States public debt). In every other known coun- try the main portion of rents and taxes is spent where they are collected, and thus circulates back again to the producers. But Ireland pours her wealth into an ac- cursed bottomless pit. Is it any wonder that " a deep sense of wrong," "a sullen discontent," brood over the face of such a land ? CHAPTER V. NO FIGS PKOM THISTLES. No Justice can be expected by the Cultivators from the Alien Landlord-Parliament — Gladstone's Delusive and Worthless Act — Land-Tenure in other Countries. " It is a sad and unnatural spectacle to behold able-bodied men and women pouring every year to the ends of the earth in tens of thousands, while, at the very doors they flee from, lie, undrained and wild, the broad acres which might easily be made to yield them abundant sustenance and employment." — O'Neill Daunt. RELAND presents the anomaly of a fertile land overrun with chronic pauperism. Sir Robert Kane, Professor in one of her Majesty's colleges, after long and patient investigation declared that the soil under proper management could and would support twenty million souls. The French publicist De Beau- mont, after a careful survey of the island's natural re- sources, puts the figure at twenty -five millions. Under British management, however, the population has dwin- dled away to less than Hve and a half millions, and about four and a half millions of these subsist on a diet but one remove above starvation. The land is surpassingly fer- tile, but every fifth acre of it is waste ; in other words, out of 20,157,557 acres, 4,205,611 are waste, as we learn from the British official report of 1875. Of the land set down as " not waste," two-thirds are devoted to grazing cattle and sheep for Englishmen to fatten on. Perhaps, some one will say, every fifth acre is irreclaimable ? Not at all. From Kildare to Galway, across the breast of the island, stretches the vast bog of Allen, a deposit of soft, fibrous peat, of which the fringes alone have been re- 46 NO FIGS FKOM THISTLES. 47 duced to cultivation. Yet the Dutch soldiers of Wil- liam III. said : ' ' Give us our Dutch law of empolder- ing, and we will reclaim this morass." With tenures satisfactorily secured, they would have gone sturdily to work and converted the waste into a garden. The distin- guished engineer Mmmo, in 1815, offered to do the same thing if guaranteed £3 per acre. And the harassed Irish cultivators would do it as thoroughly and quickly as anybody, if reliable guarantee were given them that they might enjoy the fruits of the toil thus applied. What sort of a foolish, dog-in-the-manger policy is it that obstructs such work by refusing to grant the requis- ite security ? Ah, friend, you don't comprehend the " sa- cred-rights-of -property " doctrine. A nation of small proprietors, where every cultivator has an imprescrip- tible right in the fields he tills, is usually a nation of robust, independent men ; hence a dangerous nation for an alien government to trifle with or trample on. The British empire is ruled, administered, and owned by a select oligarchy, a selfish clique, which resents every approach against its own unhallowed privilege as an assault upon the foundations of social order. " Tenant- right is landlord- wrong " is the motto of the tax-eaters ; and budge an inch from this position they never will, unless through dread of imminent violence. Mr. Butt' s proposed solution * of the problem is harmless enough * His aim is to extend to the rest of Ireland by positive enactment a dilution of the Ulster Custom, combined with the principle of revaluation every twenty-one years. " The Ulster Cus- tom " consists in a recognition of the tenant's right of occupation. He has an acknowledged interest in his farm, so that if he desires to surrender it or is ejected, either the succeeding tenant or the landlord has to pay him a sum of money (ranging upward from five to twenty years' purchase) before entering on occupation. This custom had its origin in express stip- ulations at the time of the " plantations ; " it was fostered by the dark English policy which always aimed to dissociate Ulster from the other provinces ; but it is now fast dying out. Flat- tered and cajoled while being used as a catspaw, the Ulster Protestants will feel the goad in their own flesh the moment the zest of Ireland appears manageable. . . The reforms Bought by Mr Butt's bill fall far short of the Ulster Custom ; yet it was rejected by a vote of 323 to 84. 48 IEELAND AS SHE IS. to landlord privilege in all conscience; yet it was de- nounced in the House of Commons by Secretary Hicks- Beach as "ignoring the principles of right and justice ; " by Mr. Kavanagh as "a programme of spoliation ;" by Mr. Plunkett as " a bill to rob the landlord of his prop- erty;" by Mr. Gibson as " monstrous!" In brief, an Irish tenant has no right which the landlord is bound to respect. The most brutal nigger-driver that ever wielded lash was usually careful to avoid maiming or disabling the chattels who represented his capital. The Irish landlord has not even this motive for mercy toward his tenant. But are we forgetting Mr. Gladstone's famous Land Act % Did not that measure remove nearly all cause of complaint ? Softly, friend ; it did not. To use a familiar phrase, it was a case of great cry and little wool. The pith of the act was to make a slight compensation (on a sliding scale, according to size of farm), recoverable at law by the dispossessed tenant. In other words, when the landlord cuts your head, Gladstone hands you a raffle- bag from which you have three chances in ten of draw- ing a small piece of co art-plaster ! That is veritably the sum-total of it. If your farm was worth extremely little, you are entitled to sue for seven years' rent after eviction; if it was moderately remunerative, you may sue for from six to one year's rent — the higher valuation bringing the (comparatively) smaller recompense for dis- turbance. What were the results of this piece of legis- lation 1 Among the chief of them may be mentioned (1) a desire for the consolidation of holdings ; (2) a general weeding-out of small farmers before the law came into operation ; (3) increased rents. The evicted cultivator has to go into the courts and sue for his compensation with a battalion of lawyers against him. A parliament- ary return, published at the close of 1875, shows that in NO FIGS FBOM THISTLES. 49 every hundred suits brought for compensation, under Gladstone's Act, seventy have gone against the tenant, in favor of the landlord. In the remaining thirty per cent., various small sums were recovered by the evict- ed in return for improvements made. If the statute were based on a broad and generous principle (which it is not), those who administer it would still find ways in abundance for evading or misdirecting its pro- visions.* To say that no equally execrable system exists on the face of the globe, is merely to repeat a truism. Of savage tribes, among whom there usually prevails a sort of rude democracy, we need not here speak ; but it may be well to take a rapid glance at a few of the more prominent nations, and see what disposition they make of their re- spective domains. France, before the Revolution of '93, was owned by sixty thousand nobles and churchmen ; the cultivators were serfs. " The deluge " came, however, and the soil, reverting to its rightful owners, has since been held by about six million peasant proprietors. This is the secret of France's industry, prosperity, and strength. Belgium and Holland are gardens of loveliness ; every available foot of land in both is cultivated, because ten- ants-at-will are few and far between. Prussia's commanding position in Europe to-day is due as much to the change in her land tenure as to her thor- ough organization. At the beginning of the century a bastard feudalism had brought her population to a wretched pass, when the government (inspired by Stein and Hardenberg) had the good sense to disestablish the * " Any bill based on the compensation principle is useless in the case of a just landlord, and inefficient to bind the unjust."— Sigerson. . . The simplest way of nullifying Glad- stone's sliding scale is by trebling the rent of the man you desire to eject. He cannot pay what you demand, therefore you fling him out for non-payment of rent, which leaves him no claim at law. 4 50 IRELAND AS SHE IS. landholding clique, paying them an appraised price for the territory taken, and then selling the same territory in small plots to the cultivators on easy terms of pay- ment. This settlement has given general satisfaction, and is the foundation of Prussia' s political importance. In Russia, down to 1864, the nation's entire area was owned by the nobles. The great bulk of the people were serfs attached by law to the estates on which they were born, and literally counted and employed like so many cattle. As intelligence gradually beamed in upon them, the serfs found their condition grow more intolerable. In 1861, realizing that the evil was rapidly leading to a rebellion, the Czar emancipated the serfs and enabled every man of them to secure a farm for himself, the pur- chase money to be paid in small yearly installments. Even the Moslem, with all his faults, has a far less arbitrary land-system than prevails in Ireland. The greater part of Turkey is held as crown-land, and let by government officers at a fair valuation. "The Emperor of China holds all the lands of China as chief trustee for the people," says Mooney ; "the cultivators pay tribute directly to the emperor for using the land. Between them and him there is no middle- man. If the occupier neglects to cultivate his piece of land, it is taken from him and given to another." In the United States every actual settler can obtain two hundred and forty acres of public land at an almost nominal cost. In Hindostan the rising tide of insurrection forced a reform. By the rent-laws of 1859 and '69, applying to most of the Indian peninsula, the cultivators {ryots) are absolutely exempted from increase of rent, save by de- cree of a court of justice, and they cannot be ejected so long as they pay the legal rent. All Britain's colonies and dependencies improve their NO FIGS FROM THISTLES. 51 land-systems in proportion as they break loose from con- trol of the London Parliament. Canada and Australia are cases in point, having really admirable laws in this regard. A still more instructive instance is furnished by Prince Edward's Island, where the exactions of million- aire proprietors became so grinding that the local legis- lature was constrained to step in and nationalize the great estates, afterward partitioning them out among actual cultivators at a fair price. England and Scotland are almost in as bad a plight as Ireland, but do not so sorely feel the evil on account of their extensive manufacturing interests, which give employment to millions, and thus relieve the soil from carrying the whole burden as in Ireland. Nevertheless everybody in Britain is not satisfied with this condition of affairs, as the subjoined extract from the Westmin- ster Review will show : "Pauperism in England has grown with the growth of large estates; our agricultural laborers have been reduced to a condition incompatible with the maintenance of physical strength, and in many cases to the verge of starvation ; the poorer classes driven into the large towns, living in hovels, dens, and garrets, in darkness, ignorance, and want, consti- tute a breeding-ground for crime and disease. The rent derived from the soil has been diverted from its proper purpose, and wasted in fri- volity, immorality, and not unfrequently in crime. 'Wherever the same system has teen tried, it has produced similar results of evil. In ancient Rome, the patricians seized the lands of the small freeholders, and drove the dispossessed and impoverished rural population to the cities, where they were fed by the State, and became in consequence the ready material for military adventurers, who under the leadership of any ambitious general were ready to do battle for pay, which ended, as we all know, in civil wars and the downfall of the Roman empire. We deny that the land-owners of this country, as a body, are entitled to much con- sideration. They have abused their trust and shirked their responsi- bilities. They are grasping and intolerant ; to a man they resist any at- tempt to control them in their dealings with their tenants; they re- fuse security of tenure to the farmer, which is one of the main elements of productive farming; they prefer subservient tenants to increas( d pro- 52 IRELAND AS SHE IS. ductiveness; they harass their tenants by impossible conditions, and plunder them by their game laws, and they see in every laborer a possi- ble incumbrance, and, whether as a pauper or proletaire, they take good care to get rid of him. They have shown utter heartlessness in clearing their estates of the poor, and gross dishonesty in throwing the burden of their maintenance on others. As a class they produce nothing, if we except paupers and poachers, and are rather a hindrance in the way of producers than otherwise. Their training and education unfit them for the business-management of their estates, and Irish absenteeism has shown us how little should we lose were they to take themselves off altogether." Why cannot this aggravating nicer be removed from Ireland as from Enssia or Prnssia % For an exceedingly simple reason, viz., that the law-making and law-admin- istering powers of the so-called United Kingdom are com- pletely in the hands of the landlord faction.* It has been proposed ere now to appropriate all the lands of Ireland, and redistribnte them "for the pnblic good," paying to the dispossessed " gentry" (as in Prussia and Russia) a fair cash price, or settling npon them life-an- nuities of equal value. The requisite funds could readily be obtained in the shape of a State Loan at three and a half per cent, annual interest ; the cultivators would pay four and a half per cent, annually on the loan, and refund the principal in from twenty to thirty years by installments. The margin of one per cent, yearly would more than defray all expenses of management. The scheme has the triple merit of being simple, feasible, and more than just to the tax-eaters ; but it has not the faint- est chance of being adopted. In fact there is a far greater likelihood that the lands of Ireland will soon undergo au official revaluation to put the figure about sixty per cent, higher than at present, and thus give the landlords a new basis of increase, f These insatiable harpies, with the * See John Bright's declaration in preceding chapter. + The average rent in Ireland now is thirty-three per cent above the government valua- tion. The revised valuation proposed by Sir M. Hicks-Beach, March, 1877, will probably be adopted as the standard for fixing rents in future. It advocates an increase of 58.4 per cent. ! NO FIGS FKOM THISTLES. 53 whole machinery of "law" under their control, are ab- normally jealous of what they term their own "vested rights" and interests. With dogged pertinacity they denounce and wage war upon every movement that threatens to trench in the slightest degree on their do- main of pestilent privilege ; and they will never yield to any peaceful method of agitation seeking to alter their purblind, inhuman policy. Said Mr. Herbert, M.P. for Kerry, in a parliamentary debate (March, 1877) : " Fixity of tenure would take two millions sterling out of the pockets of landlords in Kerry alone, and into the pock- ets of farmers." The House displayed its abhorrence of any such transfer by an overwhelming vote. Of what earthly use would the British Constitution be if farmers could retain a little of their own money while the land- lord has so many uses for it ? No amount of lung-power, verbal logic, or moral sua- sion will ever win justice for the Irish tenant from the landlord legislature. You cannot pluck figs from this- tles. CHAPTER VL THE CONSTITUTION AKD EMPIEB. An Organized Imposture — Brazen Pretense of " Constitutional Government" in Ireland— Fine Theories and Hard Facts — Disraeli in the Witness-box. "What name does England's conduct deserve ? . . Having less dependence in their arms than their arts, they are practicing such low and dirty tricks that men of sentiment and honor must hlush at their fall.'"— Geokge Washington. "Literally and seriously there i# no law in Ireland. The only law in Ireland lies in the suspension of all law."— John Mitchel (1875). VERY civilized country is entitled to settle its internal affairs in its own way," writes John Stuart Mill, "and no other country ought to interfere with its discretion, because one country, even with the best intention, has no chance of properly un- derstanding the internal affairs of another." Mr. Mill is an authority of considerable weight in England, and this wise utterance of his is hurled by Englishmen at their neighbors all over Europe ; but to dream of its ap- plication to " the sister isle" — ah, no! that's an excep- tional case, you see. The twin principles of national autonomy and popular government make admirable ral- lying-cries to encourage revolution in Italy, Spain, or Hungary ; but the bare thought of naturalizing any such innovations on Irish soil is enough to infuriate the most placid of British statesmen. Referring to Italy, in 1860, the London Times laid down the following dicta : 54 THE CONSTITUTION AND EMPIEE. 55 "That government should be for the good of the governed, and that whenever rulers willfully and persistently postpone the good of their subjects, either to the interests of foreign states or to assist theories of religion or politics, the people have a right to throw off the yoke, are principles too often admitted and acted upon to be any longer ques- tioned. [The case of Ireland always excepted.] " The goodness or badness of a government should be estimated with reference, not to abstract rules, but to the opinions and feelings of the governed. [Ireland always excepted.] "The destiny of a nation ought to be determined, not by the opinions of other nations, but by the opinion of the nation itself. [Always excepting Ireland, whose destiny must oe determined by English opinion.] "To decide whether they are well governed or not, or, rather, whether the degree of extortion, corruption, and cruelty to which they are subject is sufficient to justify armed resistance, is for those who live under that government — not for those who, being exempt from its oppression, feel a sentimental or a theological interest in its continu- ance." [Ireland always excepted, as before.] The writer of the foregoing political dogmas was so intent on bombarding the Vatican that he quite over- looked the possible recoil of his heavy artillery, and consequently must have felt a sort of sheepish sensation creep over him when he woke to realize that he had been effectively demolishing the bulwarks of British domina- tion in Ireland. Had he written in a more collected mood, he would have somehow modified his teaching as suggested by the words I have added in brackets. I recollect to have seen it somewhere laid down as "a fundamental axiom of the British Constitution, that violence on the one hand justifies resistance on the other." The author (an English barrister, I think) was vindicating the English revolution of 1688 ; but if any- body dared to hint that the aforesaid fundamental axiom ought to hold good twenty leagues westward from the Isle of Man, his audacity would soon land him in limbo. 56 IEELAKD AS SHE IS. The glorious British Constitution, the overshadowing greatness and civilizing influence of the empire — these are themes familiar to our ears from infancy. When in maturer years we came to search for this constitutional marvel, it mysteriously eluded our earnest quest. No- body could tell precisely what it was, and the result of all our seeking was an assurance that the glorious con- stitution was an "segis," "a palladium of popular rights." It is nowhere written or graven, but is a vague, impalpable agglomeration of customs, usages, prece- dents, legal decisions, with Magna Charta tied as a wrapper about the bundle. Yet, if the thing amounts to little, the name is valuable to conjure with. If you recline beneath the shadow of this " palladium," what more can you desire \ — even though several famous Eng- lishmen have rather savagely proclaimed it a sham ; as, for instance, Lord Brougham, who said it was "one lawyer's guess at the opinion of another ;" or Sir Charles Dilke, who said that it was "a plausible excuse whereby the rich were enabled to rob the poor;" or John Bright, who clinched the controversy by averring that "the whole system of the English government is one of out-door relief on a gigantic scale for the mem- bers, the relations, and the friends of the aristocracy" Of course it serves England's purpose to pretend that Ireland is constitutionally governed. But the pretense is a brazen fraud and a lie. Ireland is governed solely by bayonets and martial law ; she has never been gov- erned otherwise from England ; she is governed by cart- loads of blank warrants (Jettres -de-cachet) prepared in Dublin Castle, and by the sweet wills of landlord and policeman. Government is the name applied in Ireland to an engine which grinds down ninety-five per cent, of the population, while greasing its own wheels and fatten- ing the remaining five per cent. THE CONSTITUTION AND EMPIKE. 57 The vast bulk of the Irish people have no civil status whatsoever, beyond being reckoned as machines for pay- ing rents and taxes. A fraction of them enjoys the barren privilege of voting for a member " to represent" them in the alien coercion-factory, where such of these members as remain true to their pledges amuse the assembly by butting their heads against a wall of immovable arro- gance and prejudice. Two thousand garrisons of mili- tary police, with detachments of soldiery sandwiched in among them at strategic centers, uphold and administer "the law" in Ireland. The starved tenants are care- fully disarmed, lest despair should nerve them to smash "the law." This is no novelty ; the country has been rigorously disarmed ever since the Union, for if the peo- ple had been allowed to keep or carry dangerous weap- ons, the bond of Union had long since been untied.* Down to the introduction of rifled guns, blacksmiths in Ireland were not permitted to work without a formal license — iron being a perilous metal. So constant and sensitive is England' s dread in this regard, that Irishmen have been sentenced to penal servitude for merely keep- ing step in walking, or for wheeling with military preci- sion, f The London legislature cannot find time to pass laws which would permit the Irish to live in their own land, but it has always found plentiful leisure to frame coer- cion and extermination laws. During the present cen- tury bills suspending the writ of Habeas Corpus, and thus placing the country in a state of siege, have been passed or renewed in the subjoined years : 1801, 1804, 1807, 1810, 1814, 1815, 1816, 1817, 1822, 1823, 1824, 1825, 1833, 1834, 1839, 1842, 1848, 1849, 1852, 1854, * Advice of the London Times to Spain, November 1875 : " Spain should abandon a distant dependency [Cuba] which can never be governed save by military power." t "The Fenian excitement" furnished abundant examples of this sort. 58 IKELAND AS SHE IS. 1855, 1856, 1858, 1860, 1862, 1866, 1867, 1868, 1869, 1870, 1871, 1872, 1873, 1874, 1875, 1876. Victoria was crowned in 1838. Look at the array of figures intervening between that date and 1877 ; then you will have an idea of what constitutional government in Ireland means. Many persons are unfamiliar with the exact significance of coercion law ; so we shall briefly explain it — or, better, let Benjamin Disraeli explain it for us. In a speech delivered by him, February 10, 1874, condemning Gladstone's policy, the Tory leader said : "I must impress upon you that, if Ireland is now tranquil, it is not in consequence of those [Whig] measures, but it is in consequence of being ruled by coercive legislation of the most severe and most stringent kind. I do not wish to enter into the merits of the question whether those severe and coercive measures are right and necessary, or the re- verse. I am only stating facts. It is a fact that no person can take an evening walk in Ireland without being liable to arrest by the military police. It is a fact that at any time in Ireland the police may enter your house and examine your papers to see whether they can detect any re- semblance between the writing that they find in your house with some anonymous threatening letter that has been sent by a third person. In Ireland, if a man writes an article in a newspaper, and it offends the government, he has a warning ; and if he repeats the offense, his paper is suppressed. I don't say that this is right or necessary ; I don't say that it is not.'*'' Mark how carefully Mr. Disraeli refrains from enter- ing on the merits of the question. He will not say that coercion is wrong in itself, but he says that it is wrong for the Whigs to use, who promised to tranquillize Ire- land. On the merits he afterward did emphatically pro- nounce, when he got into office, by promptly renewing and perpetuating every coercive measure employed by his ousted rivals ! So has it always been, and so is it in the " glorious reign" of Victoria. The case is concisely and graphically stated by the American tourist,* who * Page 11. THE CONSTITUTION AND EMPIKE. 59 declares that "the rage of the Commune or the serfdom of Russia are glorious liberty by the side of that allowed the inhabitants" of Ireland. No Irishman can keep so much as a rusty firelock or an old sword, a gun-cap or a grain of powder, without special warrant from the au- thorities. A man may be arrested at any moment on suspicion, flung into jail without trial or warrant, and left there to rot during the Lord Lieutenant' s pleasure. Habeas Corpus, Magna Charta, and the rest of it are superseded by a single warrant from the Castle. No conscience whatsoever is employed in governing the island ; no brains, save what are found in the cranial cavities of spies ; all reliance is placed in mere brute force. For the supposed interests of a small and selfish caste the welfare and liberty of the whole land are per- ennially sacrificed ; — " sometimes it is a Pale, sometimes a garrison church, sometimes an absentee aristocracy, sometimes a small knot of well-connected place-hunters." Ireland is a sort of experimental school for the callow undergraduates of British statecraft — a subject on which they may try their 'prentice hands with no dread of consequences. "Anyone can govern with the state of siege," said Napoleon ; and in order to lighten the labor for English diplomatic fledgelings, Ireland is kept con- tinually in the state of siege. But have you not got Trial by Jury, and is not that a popular safeguard? somebody will ask. Certainly, friend ; but you are obviously behind the age when you put such a question. " Now that the Irish have stepped into the very roomes of our English," wrote Edmund Spenser three hundred years ago, " we are now to become heedfull and provident in juryes" This Spenserian hint has proven a veritable bonanza. England, you see, is the paragon of "constitutional government," and she does not wish to confess openly before Europe, what is 60 IEELAND AS SHE IS. really the case, that she cannot repress Irish discontent except by martial law. Irishmen, if allowed on juries, will not convict for a political offense ; so what is to be done 3 The dilemma would perplex any continental gov- ernment, but English ingenuity has found a unique mid- dle path in the practice of jury-pacMng. The viceroy appoints the sheriffs ; the sheriffs draw up the panel ; and a little skillful manipulation on the part of the crown prosecutor almost invariably brings in the pre- cise verdict desired. The sanctity of the post-office is pledged by " consti- tutional government;" yet no man willingly risks a secret in the Irish mails, for the practice of opening and reading private letters has prevailed there since 1832.* The Castle has its paid emissaries scattered through the country, whose business it is to wear a mask of hos- tility toward England and join patriotic societies for the purpose of betraying all their aims and workings. Many persons have read Carleton's " Rody the Rover," accord- ing to which the Ribbon Society had its head-quarters in Dublin Castle. Interrogated by a friend on the subject, Carleton replied : " I am now in receipt of a government pension, and I dare not explain the thing to you ; but all that's in 'Rody the Rover' is true, to my own knowl- edge." Compare with this the " constitutional govern- ment" of the American Colonies previous to 1776, as described in the subjoined passage from the Declaration of Independence, impeaching King George : " He has combined with others [the Lords and Commons of England] to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution ; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation, — * Mazzini, an exile in England, corresponded with a number of young Italians (1844) who were planning the overthrow of Austrian rule in Italy. All the letters were opened in the London post-office, copied for the secret service of Austria and Naples, and nine " rash young patriots " thus doomed to capture and execution. THE CONSTITUTION AND EMPIEE. 61 "For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us : "For protecting them, by a mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these States : "For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world : "For imposing taxes on us without our consent: " For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury : " For transporting us beyond the seas to be tried for pretended of- fenses : " For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering, fundamentally, the powers of our governments : "He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people : "He is, at this time, transporting armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation : "He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeav- ored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions. "In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms ; our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury." These words summarize Ireland's grievances with start- ling fidelity. THE EMPIEE. "Some do hold that it is a great and beneficent power, an example and a bulwark of liberty, a great providential agency for humanizing and civilizing mankind. . . Others, on the contrary, pretend that it is a vast organized imposture, a machine for exploiting nations, an unmixed and unredeemed mischief, whose fruits are torture in India, opium in China, famine in Ireland, pauperism in England, disturbance and disorder in Europe, and robbery everywhere." — John Mitchel. " England violated the treaty of Amiens, broke up universal peace, and brought on an universal war. She deluged India in blood, and our war of 1812 [American] grew out of her invasions on the rights of com- merce. " — Headley. "England has violated the rights of all nations, and has thereby put herself outside the pale of justice. May the banner of a European cru- 62 IRELAND AS SHE IS. sade be unfurled against her ! Never was excommunication more de- served ; and when the colossus of clay shall crumble beneath the blows of an indignant people, never in the history of empires will a larger ruin present a more instructive lesson." — Regnault. ' ' In spite of treaties, England is still our enemy. Her hatred is deep- rooted and cordial, and nothing is wanting with her but the power to wipe us and the land we live in out of existence. Her interest, however, is Tier ruling passion." — Thomas Jefferson. " Her interest is her ruling passion." Into this one line President Jefferson condenses the dominant policy of the British empire, and, as his copatriot Washington says, " when arms fail her she has recourse to shameless arts." Accept her own version of it, and she appears the very embodiment of philanthropy, going abroad to all lands in the guise of a benevolent good Samaritan to convert, elevate, civilize. But accept the version of those she goes among, and she will appear in her true charac- ter — a Pecksnifnan hypocrite with the Bible in one hand, a sword in the other, absorbing the milk and honey of every shore she touches. The godly firm in Birmingham which has made a fortune by manufacturing cheap cast- iron idols for the African heathen, is a fitting type of the government which protects the traffic. Through every square mile of Asia the name of Britain is synonymous with pharisee and bandit. Space cannot here be afforded to enter upon any de- tailed review of the means and agencies whereby the British empire has been built up to its present dimen- sions. The intrigues, corruptions, massacres, by which the conquest of Hindostan was effected would, of them- selves, fill a volume. I will confine myself to a single suggestive incident. In February, 1876, a deputation waited on the Marquis of Salisbury, Secretary of State for India, and represented to him that the revenue derived from the British opium trade now amounts to $45,000,000 annually, and is largely increasing ; that ac- THE CONSTITUTION AND EMPIEE. 63 cording to the most eminent physicians and economists of Europe, nothing was more physically or morally inju- rious to the Eastern nations than this villainous drug ; that the officials in India were using every effort to ex- tend rather than restrict its consumption ; that, conse- quently, it was hoped that the government would cease to encourage the use of so deadly and demoralizing a poison. The Marquis replied that "no legislation in the desired direction was probable." Of course not ! The government itself manufactures and vends the drug, and went to war with China for attempting to exclude it. The deputation might as well have asked the spider to tear down its own web and catch no more flies. The British empire means, primarily, the aristocracy and wealthy corporations, whose sustenance is drawn from tolls levied on every subject nation. So long as the enterprises they plan keep English factories going, and English commerce brisk, the producing and shop- keeping classes in England are content and proud. Brit- ain's aristocracy is entitled to the bad eminence of being the worst oligarchy that ever oppressed mankind — profli- gate, besotted, selfish, and corrupt. " The extermination of the native races in Africa and Oceanica, the transportation of African and Irish slaves to America, the raising of race against race and nation against nation in Europe, the interminable fomenting of internal strife in America and Europe, are written in letters of fire, and cry to heaven for vengeance against the only relic of feudal barbarity in Western Europe. " — 1 Leary. There is, however, a large class of men which worships success, regardless of the means by which it has been attained. Meet a person of this class, and you are sure to find an unqualified admirer of the British empire, with no sympathy whatever for the millions crushed under its Juggernaut car. For instance, there is Mr. Philosopher Carlyle, whose idol is Force, and who says : 64 IKELAKD AS SHE IS. " The time has come when the Irish population mnst be improved a little or exterminated. Ireland is a starved rat in the way of an elephant. What is the elephant to do with her % Squelch her, by Heavens ! " This is a breezy, stimulating suggestion : but there are two sides to every question. The Irish people cherish a notion that they have come into the world for some higher purpose than to be eternally trampled on by the British elephant ; some even go further, and express a set resolve to lame the elephant. When that unwieldy animal in his onward march finds himself treading on fire and flint, as well as on " starved rats," he will have to choose some other field wherein to amuse himself. With the sole alternative of squelching or being squelched, Ireland must obey the instinct of self-preservation. CHAPTER VII. INDUSTRIAL STAGNATION. Statistics of Commercial Decadence, Exhaustion, and Pauperism — Why a Country Rich in Natural Resources and Facilities for Manufacturing- has no Manufactures. 44 England, for her own'purposes, condemned the conntry to barrenness, and its inhabit- ants to misery and want." — J. A. Froude. "The malign resnlt of the deprivation of self-government in Ireland at the present day is to check and retard every progressive movement in the country, and to withhold from the people that blessed sense of self-reliance and personal dignity which political freedom alone can create. . . The material perdition of Ireland is the certain consequence of alien rule. . . It is not a matter of sentiment, but a matter of bread and meat, this demand for Ireland's autonomy. England has always been guided by a spirit of the meanest and most cowardly jealousy of Irish prosperity. The objection which she retains to the concession of self-rule to Ireland is her objection to Ireland's advancement in material prosperity."— Dub- lin Nation. T is often alleged that Irishmen, although eminent in the arena of intellectual pursuit, seldom make ccessful business men. It is conceded that they are well represented in the front ranks of orators, statesmen, generals, lawyers, artists, poets, journalists, etc. ; but it is asserted that they lack business tact, that they are deficient in practicality and steady enterprise. I fail to see that this is so ; but if it were so, it would furnish no ground for surprise. To any man who stud- ies the condition of Ireland for centuries past, this aspect of the question can present no difficulty. The island in the middle ages had a lucrative trade * and constant in- * Prior to the English invasion, Irish serge, flannel, cloth, and linen were famous through- out Europe, as the Italian poet Uberti, writing in 1357, attests. . . The Irish white, yellow and purple linens were known and worn in Europe from the earliest dates. The country 5 65 66 IKELAKD AS SHE IS. tercourse with France, Spain, and varions continental ports. But it was her fate to encounter her worst days at the very time that the rest of Europe began to expand westward and colonize the boundless field which the genius of Columbus had opened to emigration. Eng- land's ambition to win supremacy on the sea dates from the reign of Queen Elizabeth, when freebooters like Drake and Raleigh swept the waves in triumph. Gradually from this time England's foothold grew firmer in Asia and America, and her statesmen began to perceive the growing importance of these colonial establishments as depots of supply for raw produce and «narts for manu- factured articles. Like a gigantic sea-monster, with arms radiating in all directions, England proceeded to absorb the wealth of every clime, fix her forts on every coast, and station her warships to patrol every maritime route. Her greedy aristocracy fitted out adventurers, who by violence and treachery established markets far and near for British products. Not content with this, and intol- erant of competition, they waged war on every rival in- dustry, sought to paralyze every effort from which they themselves reaped no immediate profit. Any other power, proceeding on the same plan of sys- tematic piracy, employing the same methods of force, fraud, and cruelty, could have acquired colonial posses- sions as vast as Britain's ; but no other nation in modern times could bring itself to act with such shameless bar- barity, no other government dare violate all principles of right and justice with such reckless audacity. From the era of Elizabeth, Ireland's entire material wealth was doomed to enrich the purse and stomach of had no rival in this branch of manufacture ; yet on the complaint of a few English traders that the exportation of Irish linen was injuring their sales of woolen and silk goods, the ex- port was prohibited. . . The manufacture of cotton was assuming immense proportions in Ireland when it was effectually killed by the extinction of the Irish Parliament. INDUSTKIAL STAGNATION. 67 her Saxon master. The land was confiscated ; trade and manufactures were suppressed as soon as started ; agri- culture was discouraged by grievous imposts whenever it was not totally paralyzed by war ; and, to crown all, edu- cation was prohibited — schoolmaster and priest alike out- lawed. So jealous was England of her own monopoly that special measures were enacted to destroy the woolen and depress the linen trade, which prospered among the Protestant colonists of Ulster and Dublin, but which threatened to injure cognate branches of industry in some parts of Britain. Whenever Ireland seemed likely to profit by any article of import or export, a vigilant ministry in London promptly clapped an extinguisher on the business by means of a load of duties or a direct ukase. How could trade of any sort take root or flourish in such a land ? The resources of the country flowing away, year after year, through the suction-pipe of rents and taxes, Ireland had neither capital nor the chance to make it remunerative — no, not if all the business tact and en- terprise of the planet had centered there. Under such conditions, Irish youth had no opening to acquire a com- mercial or financial training, no opportunity to master profession or skilled trade. The result has always been that the great bulk of Irish emigrants leave home with- out capital or special occupation. Hence they have to accept the rudest, most laborious, and least remunerative employments, and work their way upward with infinite toil and patience in the face of manifold discouragements. The complex processes of mercantile and manufacturing business require capital and special training — two requi- sites which are seldom available to the average Irish emigrant. In this way England's selfish misrule forces a calamitous heritage on unborn generations ; and not a man has ever quitted Irish soil without feeling that he 68 IEELAND AS SHE IS. would have been immeasurably better qualified and equipped to earn his bread and do his part toward ad- vancing the interests of humanity, had he not grown up under the shadow of an accursed blighting legislation. The palpable effect of it upon the race in all lands is to throw them back three or more generations in the great struggle fought on professional and commercial levels. Why should England be thus inimical to Irish manu- factures ? Well, perhaps the briefest and most instruct- ive answer I can give is by recalling a piece of legislation consummated nearly two hundred years ago. Sir Wil- liam Temple outlined a policy * as follows : "Kegard must be had to those points wherein the trade of Ireland comes to interfere with that of England, in which case the Irish trade aught to oe declined so as to give way to that of England.'''' In 1698 the English Peers and Commons petitioned the king (William III.) "to hinder the exportation of wool from Ireland, and to discourage the woolen manufacture in Ireland," as interfering with English trade. William replied: "I shall do all that in me lies to discourage the woolen manufacture in Ireland ;" — and he kept his promise by signing a statutef which outrooted that flour- ishing industry from Ireland, although it was almost exclusively in Protestant hands. Here you have the whole secret laid bare. Ireland, by virtue of her geo- graphical position (the nearest to America, as Jefferson remarks), splendid harbors, abundant water-power, and natural resources, ought to be one of Europe's most thriving commercial centers ; but this is precisely what England will never allow, while she has strength left to prevent it.$ * Which had previously been put in operation by Strafford and other viceroys. t 10 William in., c. 3. X "Why are you not now a woolen country ? Because another country regulated your trade. Why are you not now a country of re-export? Because another country regulated your navigation. ' '— Gbatt an. INDUSTKIAL STAGNATION. 69 Silk manufacture was introduced in Ireland by the ex- iled Huguenots, who took refuge there after the revoca- tion of the Edict of Nantes. The industry made such gratifying progress that two acts of Parliament* were required to discourage and ruin it. Ireland has spacious and secure harbors ; but they are empty, unless where English vessels run in to carry away a load of emigrants, or a cargo of fat beeves for English tables. Ireland has rivers running idly to the sea, with power enough to move all the machinery of Europe and America ; but Ireland has no manufactures worth speak- ing of. The few she ever did have were summarily sat upon until all chance of competition was effectually killed. Ireland's rivers and coasts swarm with fish; but the finny tribe in the fresh waters belongs — by law — to the landlords, and "poachers" may be shot down without parley ; the fish in the salt waters are " protected " by parliamentary bounties paid to Scotch and English fish- ermen for herrings caught on the Irish shore, thus crowd- ing Irish boat-owners out of the trade. This sounds in- credible ; yet, like Mr. Disraeli, ' ' I am only stating facts." Twenty years ago the fisheries of Ireland gave employ- ment to 111,000 men and 20,000 boats. Now there are only 20,000 men and 7,000 boats, f It is customary for the Anglo-Irish viceroy several times annually to respond to the toast " Ireland's pros- perity." By the last British census (1871) we may readily measure the difficulty encountered by this offi- cial in evolving prosperity from the most positive proofs * 25 and 26 George m. t The Irish Parliament of 1782 revived and nurtured the fishing industry by bonuses and loans, which were abolished by the Union. For the next fifty years the Scotch drew $250,000 a year, and have since drawn $60,000 a year, to promote their fishing interests alone. They have commissioners to stamp the quality on every barrel put up, and to award premiuma when they see fit. Of course tbey have thus completely handicapped " the Irish enemie," who Is favored with no such artificial aid or encouragement. 70 IKELAND AS SHE IS. of national exhaustion and decay. For the single de- cade 1861-71 the official record gives the following ex- hibit : From 1861 to 1871. 1. Decrease in tillage (acres) 248,479 2. Decrease in number of houses .... 34,000 3. Decrease in population 386,596 4. Decrease in landed proprietors .... 1, 233 Note 1. The acres lost to tillage are set down as having been con- verted into pasturage, which conversion shows a total of 10,319,764 acres {much more than half the arable land of Ireland) devoted to the work of raising beef and mutton for English markets, instead of giving employment and food to Irish men and women. 2. Although a net decrease of 34,000 houses is shown, the figures do not tell a tithe of the evil. Within the single decade here referred to, the area under towns increased from 49,236 to 100,794 acres — more than one hundred per cent. ! What does this signify ? Simply, that with a decrease of population, the poor are being driven from their little farms into the towns, where they must live on one another — or, rather, starve, for the towns have neither commerce nor factories to employ them. Millions of acres which are now waste and unproductive might be profitably utilized in the growth of beet-root or tobacco, but the cul- tivation of either is prohibited by law. 3. The actual decrease of population far outstrips the apparent de crease of the census-return, because the latter figure takes no account of the natural excess of births over deaths in the interval. 4. The decrease of landed proprietors — above sixteen per cent, in one decade — indicates how rapidly the whole soil is being concentrated and absorbed into possession of the powerful and daily narrowing landlord caste. That clerical humorist, Sydney Smith, believed that he was combining wit and wisdom when he said that the friends of Ireland should abandon the cry of Erin-go- bragh and adopt that of Erin-go-bread-and-c7ieese, etc. England had a fine, hearty laugh over the conceit, and the average Englishman would feel still more amused if told that Ireland has always been trying to "go" decent A GOLD EARRING. A GOLD BROOCH. A GOLD HEAD-DRESS. Relics of Antique Irish Art Preserved in the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin. INDUSTKIAL STAGNATION. 71 food and raiment and shelter, but that England has always barred her from them. . If any man doubts it, we have only to call to the witness-stand the most bitter of anti-Irish historians — J. A. Froude. Read his words at- tentively, for he wasted no sympathy on Ireland ; what he laments is the injury done, not to Ireland, but to Eng- lish and Protestant interests exclusively, by England's malignant policy. Here are his words : "Irish industry was deliberately ruined by the commercial jealousy of England. The Americans* saw there a picture of the condition to which an English colony could be reduced in which the mother country had her own way. Their trade was exclusively in English hands. The sol- diers of the Protector changed their swords into plowshares, repaired the desolation of the civil war, and in a few years so changed the face of Ireland that the growth of prosperity there stirred the jealousy of Lanca- shire. A torrent of emigration was still streaming out of Ulster to the American plantations. The best artisans were going now, because there was no work for them ; and one cause at least was the artificial encouragement given to rival English manufactures, and the duties now levied on the coarse kinds of Irish linen fabrics, in direct breach of the engagement for which their woolen weaving had been sacrificed. . . . "English statesmen were allowing much which they knew to be wrong in Ireland. The worst wrongs of all — the restrictions on indus- try — had continued so long that their character could no longer oe recog- nized. ... "If Ireland had fallen into sloth, England had first annihilated the most flourishing branch of her industry [the woolen trade]. . . She * " Ireland has been impoverished by the same policy that England tried to force on her American colonies, as will appear by the following facts of British legislation : " In 1710 a law was enacted in the House of Commons that declared the erecting of manu- factories in the colonies tended to lessen their dependence on Great Britain. "In 1732 the exportation of hats from province to province, and the number of appren- tices was limited. " In 1750 the erection of any mill or engine for slitting or rolling iron was prohibited. " In 1765 the exportation of artisans was prohibited under a heavy penalty. " In 1781 utensils required for the manufacture of wool or silk were prohibited. "In 1782 the prohibition was extended to artificers in printing calicoes, muslins, or linens. " In 1785 the prohibition was extended to tools used in iron or steel manufacture, and to workmen employed. " In 1799 it was so extended as to even embrace colliers." — Pamphlet by Hon. .Peteb Cooper, of New York, on American Industry. 72 IKELAKD AS SHE IS. had cut off Ireland from the sea by her navigation laws, and had forced her into a contraband trade which enlisted half her population in organized resistance to the law. Even her wretched agriculture had teen discouraged, lest an increasing breadth of corn in Cork or Tipperary should lower the value of English land. Her salt meat and butter were laid under an embargo when England went to war, that the English fleets and armies might be victualed cheaply at the expense of Irish farmers. . . . "England, for her own purposes, condemned the country to barren- ness, and its inhabitants to misery and want. . . She extinguished their manufactures and shipping, and discouraged them long even from cultivating their estates, lest the value of her own lands should suffer from the rivalry." With another lengthy but trenchant quotation I shall bring the chapter to a close. The following facts are taken from O'lSTeill Daunt' s letter to John Bright : " The wealth which God has bestowed on Ireland for the support of her inhabitants is annually carried off by England, and the people by whose labor it was produced, and among whom, if the island were self- governed, it would circulate in a thousand reproductive channels, are forced to fly to the ends of the earth in search of subsistence. Within the last few years our population has decreased by two and a half mil- lions, while our taxation has increased fifty-two per cent ! . . . 11 We have lost not only the cash, but the profit which would have accrued on its expenditure in the land that produced it. Much of it would, doubtless, have been invested in manufacturing enterprise, thus largely diminishing the pressure on the soil and thereby mitigating the evils of insecure tenure. What employment, what support, what an ample stimulant and recompense to Irish industry would not that expen- diture have given at home to the millions of our people who are now compelled to quit the plundered land in search of a livelihood else- where ! And yet it is in the face of this gigantic drain that we are coolly told that Ireland was overpeopled, and that the exodus results from a natural necessity. The necessity is artificial, not natural. If there be a necessity for the flight of the Irish population, it only exists because their country is robbed of the means that should employ and support them at home. Can you wonder that in their inmost hearts they should execrate the system by which they are driven into exile? " LNDUSTKIAL STAGNATION. 73 An honest, humane, unprejudiced English official, Mr. Semore — rarissima avis ! — some years ago testified to parliament that the bulk of the population in Ireland "is worse fed, worse lodged, worse clothed, and worse paid than in any portion of Europe to which my [his] travels have extended." Yet London legislators lift their hands in holy horror at Ireland's chronic discontent, and renew the coercion code at every session. Under so nefarious a system the accumulation of national capital, the de- velopment or utilization of national resources, the crea- tion of national industry, are things palpably impossible. But have not most of these prohibitory statutes been repealed or allowed to lapse into dead letters \ Although there has been grievous oppression in the past, is it not true that there are no direct legislative impediments now ? Quite true, but deceptive. Where is the use of haltering a dead horse 1 — he cannot run away. Direct repressive laws are not now needed, because there is no important industry to be repressed, if we except the linen trade, for which England is not well suited. Ire- land' s trade and commerce will revive only with an independent native legislature. CHAPTER VIIL DEPOPULATION AND FAMINE. The Rooting-out Process, its Modus Operandi and its Effects— " Worse off by Two Millions than a Desert Island." " A million a decade 1 " What does it mean ?' A Nation dying of inner cfecay ; A church-yard's silence where life has heen ; The base of the pyramid crumbling away ; A drift of men gone over the sea — A drift of the dead were Men should be. " A million a decade 1 " of human wrecks, Corpses lying in fever sheds, Corpses huddled on foundering decks, And shroudless dead in their rocky beds ; Nerve and muscle, and heart and brain Lost to Ireland— lost in vain I " WO years ago the British. Registrar-General pub- lished an estimate of the population of the United Kingdom, based on the census of 1871 — the esti- mate being for the middle of 1874. His summaries run as follows : In 1801. In 1874. Population of the United Kingdom . . 15,896,412 32,312,010 " England and Wales . . 8,892,536 23,648,609 " Scotland .... 1,608,420 3,462,916 " Ireland .... 5,395,456 5,300,485 From a moment's study of this table it will be seen (1) that the population of the United Kingdom, as a whole (including Ireland), was in 1874 considerably more than double what it was in 1801, when the first census was taken ; (2) that the population of England and Wales 74 DEPOPULATION AND FAMINE. 75 alone is now seven millions more than double what it was in 1801 ; (3) that the population of Scotland is a quar- ter of a million more than double what it was in 1801 ; (4) that the population of Ireland to-day is literally less than in 1801. England, Wales, and Scotland have far more than doubled their respective populations within three quarters of a century ; Ireland, with a more prolific seed-stock than any of them, is less populous than at the beginning of the century. How is this startling discrep- ancy to be accounted for % Briefly, it is attributable to a well-devised and systematic rooting-out process. During the fifteen years immediately preceding the great famine, Ireland swelled the emigration list by eight hundred thousand (800,000) ; yet in the year 1846 her pop- ulation exceeded eight and a quarter millions (8,250,000) ; consequently during Victoria's " happy reign" alone, from 1838 to 1877, Ireland's population has diminished by three millions on the face of the record. The real loss is much higher, for at a normal rate of increase the eight millions should now have swelled to twelve and a half millions, whereas the number actually is only ^.ve and a quarter millions. Where are the rest \ Two mil- lions of them fell victims to the artificial famine which English statesmanship perfected ; the others found an uncertain escape in emigration. Comparing the popula- tion as it is with what it ought to be, Major O' Gorman spoke a demonstrable truth when he declared in Parlia- ment that " Ireland is worse off by two millions than a desert island ! " It is matter of conspicuous record that Ireland lost more lives through the single agency of famine in 1846, '47, and '48, than America lost in the most desperate civil war of history ; but very few persons are aware that such visitations in Ireland are not merely occasional, nor even periodic, but literally constant in greater or less degree, 76 IKELAKD AS SHE IS. so that the people stand perennially on the verge of starvation. "The exact complement of a comfortable family dinner in England," says Mitchel, "is a coro- ner's inquest in Ireland." In 1817 in the richest counties of Ireland the inhabitants were feeding on weeds. In 1822, in the British House of Commons, Sir John New- port told of a parish in Ireland where "the priest had gone around and administered extreme unction to every soul of his flock — all in articulo mortis by mere starva- tion."* In 1825 a Baron of the Exchequer pronounced the laboring classes in Ireland a prey to "such misery as cannot be described." In 1826 a French economist wrote : " Ireland is the land of anomalies ; the most de- plorable destitution in the richest of soils. Nowhere does man live in such wretchedness. Hunger is the only limit to the island's population." In 1830 a parliament- ary committee had the candor to admit that "the desti- tution and suffering were such as human tongue could not describe." In 1832, Dr. Doyle, being asked what was the condition of the west of Ireland, replied : "Peo- ple are starving there as usual." In 1835 a royal com- mission estimated at three millions the number annu- ally liable to suffer in Ireland from sheer hunger. Of every subsequent year, down to the present, substantially similiar testimony has been given by unimpeachable wit- nesses. English politicians and publicists have elaborated two ingenious theories to account for this unnatural condi- tion. One party holds that it is due to " surplus popu- lation," while the other shifts the blame to "a special visitation of Providence." The latter explanation is blasphemous, as both are false. Sir Robert Kane has * Commenting on this debate, Cobbett wrote in the Register: "The food is there, and we know that the food is there, for since this famine has been declared in parliament thou sands of quarters of corn have been imported every week from Ireland to England." DEPOPULATION AND FAMINE. 77 proven, beyond all chance of doubt or cavil, that the natural resources of the island are easily capable of sup porting twenty million human beings in comfort. Other competent judges * place the figure far higher. Hence the theory of "surplus population" is mere cant and rubbish. In the next place, when English writers have the auda- city to affirm that the famine of 1847 (or of any other year) was "providential," they try to make the Almighty a scapegoat for what was positively and directly the crime of England. True, the potato-crop failed, \ but there was abundance of grain and flocks and herds. While the people famished and rotted by tens of thousands, while in some districts there were not left enough of the living to inter the dead, the harbors were white with English vessels bearing away cargoes of provisions even to South America, which had been seized and shipped to pay Irish rents and taxes. In every other country, Perraud well observes, the word "famine" means absolute want of the necessaries of life ; but in Ireland it signifies that when the cultivator has sold his corn and cattle to pay rents and taxes, then, should the potato-crop fail, he finds him- self suddenly reduced to a fare of wild herbs and grass, which do not long ward off the famine fever. In other lands self-preservation is the first law of nature. In Ire- land there is a special law : First, and above all things, pay your rent, your cess, your rates, your taxes ; if anything remain, live on't ; if nothing remain, lie down and rot ! Thus was it that with a teeming abundance of food around them — product of Nature's bounty and their own sweat — whole armies of the Irish race perished of starva- * Including the French economist De Beaumont, and Alison the historian of modern Europe. t In 1845, and years immediately following, the potato blight prevailed over the whole of Western Europe as well as Ireland ; but only in Ireland under English rule did it cause pes- tilence and famine. 78 IEELAND AS SHE IS. tion in the " glorious reign" of Victoria. What did she, her ministers, and her parliament do? They looked on contentedly, saying: "This is a visitation of Provi- dence ; we cannot interfere with the self -regulating pro- cesses of political economy." How many more hundred thousands would have perished, but for the generous charity of other lands, it is impossible to conjecture. The people of America, of France, the Pope, the Czar, the Sultan, the distant " despots" of Asia and Africa, the very negro slaves — all combined to do for Ireland what her " constitutional" rulers refused to do, namely, to keep her people alive. Mark here, the Irish did not ask for alms ; they demanded simply such legislative action as would permit them to utilize their own re- sources, or a loan for the construction of necessary public works. England responded by appointing commissioners to investigate the potato disease and make doctored re- ports on the number of the dead. When the agony was almost over, the scheme of poor-law relief was put in more active operation, and poor-houses* began to be widely established. Says De Beaumont : " Open the annals of Ireland; calculate the number of souls that per- ished during the religious wars; count the thousands of Irishmen that perished under the sword of Cromwell; to all that the victor massacred add the myriads that he transported ; think of the hundreds of thou- sands who sank under famine; do not overlook the considerable number who yearly died by the hand of the executioner; in fine, add to this the 25,000 or 30,000 individuals who emigrate from the country every year [this was before 1830] — when in the midst of these different crises you see Ireland always the same, always equally wretched, always cram- med with paupers, always bearing about with her the same deep and hideous wounds — you will conclude that it is the nature of her social condition to generate indigence without relief, and distress without limit ! " * These " dens of graduated starvation " take nothing from imperial revenues ; they are supported by local rates, and are so gerrymandered as to make more paupers than they re- lieve. See Chapter on Taxation. DEPOPULATION AND FAMINE. 79 To the foregoing facts add the fatal famine of 1846 and 1847, also the endless series of coercion acts, and you will begin to comprehend why Ireland was more populous in 1800 than she is in 1877.* * ' ' Irishmen at home have given ns trouble enough. What their country would have been, bad there not been the safety-valve of emigration, it is difficult to tell."— London Telegraph, May, 1875. . . Quite mistaken, Mr. Telegraph. If England' s most strenuous efforts are required to keep a decimated and disarmed five millions in check now, it is by no means '•difficult to tell " what would have happened had the bone and sinew remained at home which would have raised these five to twelve millions. CHAPTER IX. EELIGIOUS INEQUALITY. Squelching the Papists— Penal Legislation against Conscience — Sectarian Animosities deliberately Fomented— The Established Church — Tithes— Orangeism. 11 The English do not dislike us as Catholics ; they simply hate us as Irish."— O'Connell (1813). " This anti-Irish feeling is of no modern date, and by no means owes its origin to the introduction of Protestantism."— Rev. R. A. Bybnk's Lecture on the Free Schools of Ancient Ireland. " The malignant principle of intolerance was planted in Ireland by English policy, and has ever been conservative of English power."— MacNevin. HERE are legions of innocent people (Catholics especially) who believe that England's hostile treatment of the Irish is due mainly, if not solely, to the fact that one nation is Protestant and the other Catholic. A grosser delusion was never cherished. The introduction of an element of religious antagonism did not begin the conflict, did not even alter its character essentially ; it merely intensified the bitter hate already existing, and this is precisely what England desired it should do. Centuries before the birth of Luther, while England was Catholic (in name, if not in deed), England's rule was not a whit more merciful or just than in the reigns of Henry VIII. , Elizabeth, or Anne. Catholic or Protestant, her course in Ireland was always the same — a uniform, systematic course of plunder, treachery, and massacre — the only difference being that the practices of Catholic England were in later times digested into a 80 EELIGIOUS INEQUALITY. 81 Penal Code by Protestant England. Dr. J. H. Newman had not thoroughly mastered the subject when he wrote : "It is Protestantism [not England] which has been the tyrannical oppressor of the Irish. . . Neither Cromwell nor William of Nassau waited for the Pope's leave or sought his blessing for his military opera- tions in Ireland." — Hist. Sketches, vol. iii. 257. Strange as it may seem, William of Orange did apply to the Pope, not for a blessing, bnt for a letter to the Emperor of Germany (whose vassal William was) to al- low him to cross over and make war on his own father- in-law. This, however, is an incident of comparatively small importance ; so, passing on, I shall quote some authorities who differ with Dr. Newman. Daniel O'Con- nell was a devoted Catholic, but he had studied Irish his- tory from ori^nal documents, and he therefore knew that religion was not the primary nor the principal source of the Anglo-Irish feud. Here is an extract from one of his published speeches : "The English do not dislike us as Catholics; they simply hate us as Irish. They exhaust their blood and treasure for the Papists of Spain. They have long observed and cherished an affectionate alliance with the bigoted and ignorant Papists of Portugal, and now they exert every sinew to preserve those Papists from the horrors of a foreign yoke. Let us be just; there is no such horror of Popery in England as is supposed, but they have a great dislike to Irish Papists." These words were spoken in 1813, when England scouted the idea of Catholic Emancipation. Were her statesmen opposed to the principle % No ; they were the self-styled champions of civil and religious liberty ; they fought for the " Papists" of Spain and Portugal ; they guaranteed the rights of the " Papists " of Canada. But they declined to apply their theory in Ireland because of the political consequences likely to result from Emanci- pation, and when they finally did grant this measure 6 82 IRELAND AS SHE IS. rather than face the doubtful issue of a rebellion, they took good care to hedge it round with ruinous condi- tions.* The delusion against which O'ConnelTs voice was thus raised is also shattered by an American priest, Kev. R. A. Byrne, in his masterly monograph on "The Free Schools of Ancient Ireland," where he says : 1 ' In this institution [at Downpatrick] was reflected the animus of the English Catholic toward the Irish ; for in 1380 it was enacted that no mere Irishman should be allowed to make his profession in the abbey. This is but in keeping with the spirit of English Catholic domination in Ireland everywhere. This anti-Irish feeling is of no modern date, and by no means owes its origin to the introduction of Protestantism. Henry VUL was a bad man ; . . but the deadly wounds that laid Erin low were struck by the assassin hands of his Catholic forefathers. . . Such had been the spirit of the English monks in Ireland everywhere. The spirit of Keligion with them was the spirit of Conquest." This is a scathing indictment, yet true in every par- ticular. I might extend such testimonies through many pages by quoting from English annalists, such as Da- vies, Leland, Plowden, etc., but the selections from their works, given in a previous chapter, ought to amply suf- fice. For a document of uncommon interest in this con- nection, the reader is referred to Donald O'Neill's letter, in Part Second, Chapter V. Much of the same spirit, refined to a less murderous though not less culpable form, survives among English Catholics at the present day. Numerically they are the merest handful, and whatever legal status or privilege they enjoy was won for them by the Irish. Neverthe- less, to use the words of an English Catholic journal, " The Irish in England are looked upon as pariahs and outcasts by their Protestant compeers, and treated as a separate caste by English Catholics ."f Provoked by * See Part Second, Chapter XVI. t London Catholic Standard. EELIGIOUS INEQUALITY. 83 similar baseness and ingratitude on the part of the Earl of Shrewsbury (who though most notably benefited by Emancipation, which admitted him to the House of Lords, signalized his entrance by a fierce philippic against Irish agitation), O'Connell employed the famous phrase : " Saxon and ingrate, stand forth and meet your benefactor whom you have thus wantonly outraged!" I take no pleasure in exposing this state of things ; I am recording facts, and hew to the line as closely as I can, let the chips fall where they may. Is Protestantism, then, blameless in the whole trage- dy \ By no means. It poured oil upon blazing fagots, it whetted swords, it perpetuated wrong-doing in a thou- sand evil shapes, and it cannot shirk the responsibility. It permitted itself to become a hideous instrument of op- pression in the hands of a bandit, and it cannot shake off the gory stains with which it was thus imbued. As I have already said, it did not inaugurate, but it nurtured and intensified the reign of violence and piracy. Here is the graphic portrait of it drawn by John Mitchel, himself a Protestant : "When the Protestant Church of England was first established in Ireland by laws of Edward VI. and Elizabeth, there were scarcely any Protestants in the island at all, except the English garrison ; and it must be admitted that for the first century of its existence it was not the business, mission, or function of this church to convert Catholics from their faith. On the contrary, the object of British policy in estab- lishing their church, and fortifying it round with penal laws against re- cusants, was to get hold of the lands and goods of those recusants. If the Irish had allowed themselves to be converted to Protestantism this policy would have been defeated, and it would have been needful to devise some other for the same purpose. The Anglican Church, then, was not a Church Missionary, out a Church Predatory. The command given to it was not, ' Feed my sheep, ' but, ' Shear them ; ' and so long as Catholic monasteries and cathedrals yet possessed any of those rich^n dowments vested in them by the piety of ages — which were now wanted to enrich the Anglican Establishment — so long as Catholic families held 84 IEELAND AS SHE IS. the broad lands they inherited from their fathers, it was far from the heart of the new church to convert misbelievers. The Catholics were then more profitable as recusants and rebels than they would have been as catechumens. Confiscation was better than orthodoxy, and the lands of the Irish were more valuable than their souls. This was what Mr. Gladstone would call ' the ideal of a Christian church ! ' " Naturally enough a system, the corner-stone of which was plunder, did not make a favorable or healthy impres- sion on the people it despoiled, nor take any deep root in their affections. The brigandage of the Establishment only made the Irish more attached to the old creed, until Faith and Nationality, being alike warred upon, were welded into a single passion. The more the Irish clung to " Popery," the more sweeping grew the fines and for- feitures leveled at "the damnable idolatry," and not until everything had been grabbed from them was it deemed advisable to attempt their conversion. The change was now desired, not from any solicitude as to the spiritual welfare of the Irish, but in order to wean them away from disaffection, and, if possible, erase from their minds all thought of recovering their stolen lands. But the Establishment, with its power, prestige, and plun- der, with its constant importations from England, with its Articles made a test for the holding of any civil office, was never able to muster within its camp one-eighth of the population, while to its opulence and splendor the other seven-eighths were forced to contribute. In addi- tion to its regal endowments, it levied tithe upon the whole country, absorbing to itself a tenth of all agricul- tural produce and stock raised yearly, down to the ear- lier half of the present century, when the robbery in this particular shape was discontinued through dread of a general insurrection. The tithes were removed with one hand, and then reimposed in a different form (indirect taxation) with the other. In a country where human EELIGIOUS INEQUALITY. 85 beings in droves perished annually of sheer starvation, the Anglican Archbishop of Armagh pocketed $75,000 a year, the Bishop of Deny $50,000, and so on down to their poorest episcopal colleague, who had to preach the gospel of poverty and self-denial on a pittance of $12,000, with house free, and various perquisites thrown in. This church of an alien coterie took two and a half million dollars yearly straight from the pockets of an impover- ished people, who rejected its tenets and loathed its practices. Every parish had its rector, salaried and tithed, although, in hundreds of parishes the congrega- tions varied in number from a dozen souls down to the rector's self, his wife, and the sexton. ISTo wonder that Mr. Roebuck, M. P., denounced it as "the greatest ecclesiastical enormity in Europe," or that essayist Macaulay described it as " the most utterly absurd and indefensible of all the institutions now existing in the civilized world. 5 ' No wonder, either, that seven Angli- can bishops bequeathed nearly ten million dollars in ready money to their relatives ! "The State Church," says O'Callaghan, "is a politico- religious garrison planted by England amongst us to support her unjust ascendency, by enabling them to plunder and oppress the rest, and divide all in the name of religion." "It never cared or sought to make prose- lytes," says MacNevin. " Four-fifths of the people dis- franchised helots, all the emoluments of office, all the distinctions of power, all the pomp, circumstance, and advantages of dominion fell into the lap of the favored few." These definitions portray the institution in its naked deformity. The establishment was a pleasant asylum and pasturage for the younger sons of impecu- nious British gentility, and it became a common saying that when a well-connected English youth was too dull for the bar, too feeble for the army, too slow in fact for 86 IKELAND AS SHE IS. any other profession, his parents invariably made a par- son of him. When the partial boon of Emancipation was granted at the prompting, not of jnstice, but of fear, the estab- lishment remained intact in its pomp and privilege. It was only when the torch of Fenianism threatened* to light a general conflagration, that the old shell of the pensioned enormity was at last pulled down to serve as a barricade in the Fenian path. It was Gladstone's peace-oifering and bribe to the Irish Catholics. From a worldly point of view it must be conceded that the shepherds of the now defunct Establishment had their tents pitched in pleasant places. If their flocks were small, they had the consolation of knowing that their in- comes were large. If " plenty of money and nothing to do" be the climax of mundane bliss, those well-fed par- sons must certainly have felt themselves in elysium. Their disestablishment was effected with gruesome so- lemnity and impressive parliamentary process, and Ire- land was informed that now she had nothing more to complain of. How was the great reform achieved? Thus : the incumbents had to be purchased off, their vested rights compounded, etc. ; so every mother's son of the entire lot received a goodly heap of shekels to maintain him in sweet indolence to the end of his days. And it is matter of historic record that swarms of far- seeing younger sons and other youths of lofty lineage did become suddenly smitten with apostolic fervor, and did most summarily plunge into "holy orders" in season to be counted for their pro rata of the spoils ! The cor- morant church went fittingly down, gorged with stolen meat. OEANGEISM AND SECTARIAN FEUDS. Another and a highly important aspect of the religious question in Ireland must not be passed by unnoticed. EELIGIOUS INEQUALITY. 87 The conception which many foreigners entertain of the country is that Papist and Protestant there are forever ready to cut one another' s throats on the slightest prov- ocation, or without provocation ; that the country, if left to take care of itself, would be immediately plunged into a desperate war of creeds ; that consequently England is compelled to interfere as a policeman, a guardian of the peace, and a protector of the minority. This notion is industriously circulated and plausibly fostered by English organs ; but it is a false and crafty fabrication. England's own influence is alone responsible for having made Christianity in Ireland the parent of discords and abominations. In the attainment of her ends Britain has always used to advantage the policy of " divide and conquer." Hence, whenever a point had to be gained, she did not hesitate to pit creed against creed, and fire the loyal heart by adroit rumors of fresh papal aggression. In a land where nine-tenths of the people have been disfran- chised and beggared to enrich an alien minority, and where the bandit &nd the victim have generally professed different tenets, it was always easy to create distrust and enmity. British statecraft was not slow to avail itself of the circumstance, and more than once has Britain' s hold on the island been preserved by the insidious wiles with which she fomented sectarian jealousies at critical junctures. Even the New York Times (an organ of pro- nounced English sympathies), after lavishing praise on Froude's History in a flattering notice, felt constrained to dissent from him on one point, saying that in his de- sire to cast all the odium on the Irish, "he gives no suffi- cient weight to one of the most prominent features in the policy of the government — that of making religious belief the standard of loyalty and disloyalty, and using the Orangemen to conflict the Catholics." 88 IRELAND AS SHE IS. England's own modest theory is that she is heartily sick of governing Ireland, and that she wonld gladly wash her hands out of it, only that she is in honor bound to protect the lives and properties o^her Protest- ant subjects in that benighted land. And those poor dupes, the Orangemen, are foolish enough to believe it. Now, I fearlessly challenge contradiction or disproof of this proposition : That the Irish Catholics, though persecuted as no other race has been, did never attempt to coerce the conscience of any man. Many Anglo- Protestant and hostile historians are forced to bear wit- ness to the generous and tolerant spirit of the Irish. Says Taylor: "It is but doing justice to the members of a much calumniated party to say, that on three occasions they had the upper hand, and that they never either injured or killed any one for professing a religion different from their own. By suffering perse- cution they learned to be merciful." Parnell relates how, not only were the rights of the Irish Protestants respected, but when the English Protestants had to flee from the proscriptions of their own Parliament in Mary's time, they sought and found a refuge among Irish Catholics. Dublin merchants rented and fur- nished seventy -four houses to shelter the fugitive Protestants of Bristol, provided for all their wants, and had them conveyed back to England in safety after Mary's death. The descendants of these very fugitives in later years petitioned William III. to sup- press Irish manufactures ! In 1689 the persecuted Irish had a brief triumph. Their representatives met in legislative assembly, and here is the first law they passed: "We hereby decree that it is the law of this land of Ireland that neither now nor ever again shall any man be persecuted for his religion." At the present day, in Irish constituen- EELIGIOUS INEQUALITY. 89 cies having a Catholic majority, the religion of a candi- date is neither help nor hindrance to him, provided he is not a bigot ; in fact, if he is a Protestant, and at the same time an ontspoken Irishman, his chances with the vast bnlk of Catholic voters are better than those of a Catholic having the same claims in every other respect. But what about " Orange riots " % Let me be allowed to say that a great deal of dense ignorance and mis- conception prevails with respect to Orangeism, its char- acter and objects. Some people think that " Orange- man" and " Irish Protestant" are convertible terms. They are nothing of the sort. Probably two- thirds of the Protestants of Ireland could not be more directly insulted than by describing them as members of the saffron brotherhood. Every decent Protestant in Ire- land regards the Orangeman as a noisy fanatic, whose narrow bigotry is carefully cultured by England. The Orangeman is trained from infancy to view in every Catholic an embryo Grand Inquisitor ; he is fed on old parrot-cries that have long lost their meaning, and he seldom has a chance to get rid of the vicious sediment thus deposited in his brain. Stubborn and sincere in his delusion, he believes that the Catholic majority would gladly persecute him, if England's re- straining arm were withdrawn, and he therefore seeks to inflict on them the same penalties which he mis- takenly imagines they would impose upon him. He holds that all Papists are disguised enemies of civil liberty, and consequently can have no rights which admirers of "the glorious and immortal memory" are bound to respect. In a word, Protestant ascendency, not equality, is the cardinal principle of the Orange creed; "Papist lie down," its favorite motto. The honest though misguided dupes are confirmed in their folly by crafty inspiration from England, which thus 90 IEELAND AS SHE IS. contrives to array a "loyal, armed Protestant yeomanry of Ulster" against the disaffected and disarmed resi- dents of the other provinces. It is for permitting itself to be thus hoodwinked and made the pliant cat's-paw of oppression, that the Yellow Garrison is despised and hated in Ireland. If there were no 'political objects to be subserved, the religious prejudices of Orangemen would fade away within a single decade. To give them due credit, it must be added that English statesmen have frequently deluded and cajoled the Catholic lead- ers also by means of fine promises, and that the Catho- lic element in places has often been as much to blame as the Orange for violent collisions, which brought no profit to anybody except their common plunderers. It was no further back than November, 1875, that the Anglo-Irish Secretary of State, Sir M. Hicks-Beach, went up to Belfast to attend an Orange banquet, told the "boys" that Home Rule was vailed sedition, and en- couraged them to keep their powder dry ; — commenting on which indecent demonstration by a high official, the London Telegraph said : 1 ' It was the cue of the Orangemen of Ireland once to force all Papists into rebellion, because by this means they retained the honors and emol- uments of office in their own hands. ' The Castle ' called in the aid of Orange yeomen, who added brutality to repression — of Orange magis- trates, who perverted justice — of Orange parsons, who preached intol- erance : and they were the worst allies of any the government ever had." Yet, if seriously menaced to-morrow, the Government would call the same allies to the front again ; and, what is more, the Telegraph would applaud its action. Ire- land will never get wholly rid of sectarian jealousies and hatreds while English intrigue can prevent a consumma tion so perilous to the empire. CHAPTER X. EDUCATION. A Nation Forced into Ignorance by Act of Parliament — Intellect Dwarfed and Starved, if not Prostituted — The so-called "National" School System. "Ireland is, we believe, the one example in Europe of a country whose educational system was deliberately destroyed by its government. Every other country preserved an unbroken series of parish and commercial schools, that went back to the abbey schools of the middle ages. But in Ireland the priest and the schoolmaster were alike the subject of the penal laws.'"— London Weekly Register. CANNOT too frequently or too forcibly impress f upon the American reader' s mind this one fact, |y$ which if it stood alone would suffice to damn Eng- lish rule, the fact, namely, that education in Ireland was not only neglected and discouraged, but was actually proscribed by English law for centuries. British states- men were keen enough to realize that the cultivation of popular intelligence would be a sure means of overturn- ing their own citadel ; therefore they sought to degrade the subject people in the hope of thus leading them to wear the yoke in stolid submission. It is only within the past hundred years that an Irish Catholic could learn to read, save by stealth ;* it is only * The continental institutions established by the Irish, and for their benefit, since the Reformation— that is, since education was made penal and impossible to them at home— are standing monuments to their love of learning. Among the most widely known of the^e may be mentioned the "Irish Colleges" founded at Alcala, Lisbon, Louvaine, Paris, Rome, Sal- amanca. Santiago, and Seville. A manuscript written in 1620 by Father Conway, now pre- served among the archives of the Irish College at Salamanca, says: "Finally the Catholic 91 92 IEELAND AS SHE IS. within the past forty-five years that anything in the shape of a common school has been known in the land since England got control of its destinies. Ignorance was forced npon the people with all the weight of crashing and rigorons law. The schoolmaster was classed with the priest and wolf, as one of the " three wild beasts " to be pitilessly extirpated. Is it not marvelous that the Irish Celt preserved any remnant of manhood or intelli- gence through so fiendish an ordeal \ The island possessed a splendid groundwork for a na- tive literature, but every vestige of it was pursued and harried with a vandal vindictiveness never surpassed. Fragments of it, however, survived ; and foreign scholars (Germans especially) of late years have devoted great attention to Celtic studies. Britain could never afford to encourage research in the same field ; the needs of her denationalizing policy forbade it. Only recently, in Sir Henry Maine's "Early History of Institutions" (the chief place in which is assigned to them), have the an- cient Irish been studied by an Englishman in the scien- tific spirit. Under the operation of violence and penal law Ire- land's intellectual development was effectually arrested for more than six centuries. When the force of events, external and internal, repealed the penal code and gave Catholics a civil status, it became at once apparent that the Irish would drink thirstingly of the springs so long closed against them ; and herein did the Briton perceive a new danger. His victims were parched for knowledge, they were also poor. If allowed to educate their own children, what mental food would they be most likely to laity, seeing everything was against them, and in a state of irremediable desperation sent those children whom they intended for the divine ministry to foreign parts to prosecnte their studies, that the holy faith might not be completely extinguished, but in the course of time preserved and augmented. . . And many noble youths, virtuous and deserving, left the country with this object." EDUCATION. 93 select? Why, clearly, such perilous and inflammatory stuff as stories of cruel repression and stout resistance, of robbery and wrong, which would not tend to engender loyalty in the uprising generation. In the face of its moral certainty on this point what was a paternal gov- ernment to do \ One thing was plain : it could not allow the young Irish to be fed on a mental diet so stimulating as their own history, truthfully told, would supply. In this dilemma the National System was devised and elaborated — a mixed, unsectarian, and in some respects admirable system of elementary instruction, but with one definite object permeating its remotest and minutest fiber — namely, to denationalize the pupils. The very name is an unintentional satire. Here in the United States, for instance, we are not afraid to let scho- lars roam back into the by-paths of colonial history ; we have no dread that their explorations will lead them to desire a renewal of colonial dependence. In Ireland, on the other hand, every allusion to the past is carefully eliminated and avoided. Is there not enough disaffec- tion in the country already, and seething commotion of disarmed men who shout for Repeal or Home Rule? Think you that Britain can afford to foster and intensify the bad spirit by teaching the impressible young Irish how much they have lost ? Would it be politic to inform them that the soil, on which they now are helots, once belonged to their sires, and that these sires never knew peace or justice under the shadow of British domination ? Emphatically not ; and this will throw light on the char- acter of the text-books compiled by her Majesty's com- missioners for the instruction of Irish youth. Let us take a glance at a few of these manuals. The " Fifth Book of Lessons" is the most advanced reading-book employed. It is a substantial volume, with about a third of its bulk devoted to history. From 94 IKELAND AS SHE IS. cover to cover the name of Ireland occnrs just twice : (1) when we learn that Henry II. invaded Ireland and " received the homage of its kings ;" (2) in a chronologi- cal table where it is smoothly slipped in that in 1800 occurred ' ' the Union of Great Britain and Ireland. ' ' This manual was edited by a Scotch Presbyterian minister, under Archbishop Whately's supervision. Dr. Whately himself contributed Easy Lessons on various subjects, descanting impressively on the immense wealth and re- sources of England — for it is eminently desirable to con- vey the idea that Britain is a colossal power, who, out of pure generosity, supports and disciplines her pauper neighbor. As to Ireland, the youth in quest of knowl- edge discovers that her manufactures and commerce were destroyed "by unlawful combinations" of her own arti- sans. That stone is expected to kill two birds — (1) to conceal the fact that Irish industry was strangled by London law ; (2) to impress upon the plastic minds of juvenile Hibernians the enormity of "unlawful combi- nations." In the "Sequel to the Second Book of Lessons" we meet the following choice morsel : "The Government (that is, those who govern in the Queen's name) got leave of the Parliament (that is, the gentlemen who are chosen to overlook the Government and watch over the concerns of the people) to set apart a sum of money for building schools, paying teachers, and other expenses belonging to them. . . So you see there are many persons in your country and in England who are kind and care for you, though most of them never saw you." Now could any little Irish boy or girl be so callous an ingrate as ever to harbor an unkind thought of those philanthropic souls? Again, in the "Geography" we stumble on the paragraph annexed : "To the east of Ireland is England, where the Queen lives. Many uU. .-II CI CI -1 Ul n^> A w4 ^ < Jl ^ < H C-n -il w <, -Jl ^ <| >-> Oil ^-> <^ u\ v^ Oil ^ <-4( VA >v w\ ex /^ \a ~< ur d u u« <^* EDUCATION. 95 people who live in Ireland were born in England, and we speak the same language and are called one nation." With, grizzly irony John Mitchel adds : "Now, can any human being object to this statement ? Are not these things facts ? Is not England actually to the east of Ireland ? Is it not true that many persons who live in Ireland were born in England ? Archbishop Whately himself, for instance, who devours ten thousand pounds a year of Irish money under the pretense of being Archbishop of Dublin ? Let us be reasonable. I put it to any gentleman of well-regu- lated mind how the school-book would have looked if the sentence had run thus : ' East of Ireland lies England, the country from which our famines and ejectment acts come, the island to which our harvests and herds go, and from whence we bring our rent receipts and archbishops ? ' Would not this be directly exciting disaffection and sedition ? " Into the first edition of the " Fonrth Book of Lessons," by some strange oversight of the censor, crept Camp- bell's spirited lyric, " The Downfall of Poland," which speaks of Kosciusko and Liberty ; also Scott' s patri- otic invocation, " Breathes there the man with soul so dead ;" also some lines by Miss Balfour, " To the Irish Harp," and a prose description of the Lakes of Killar- ney. A little reflection on the part of Dr. Whately and his colleagues convinced them that such reading was pal- pably immoral in its suggestiveness ; accordingly a re- vised edition was soon published, with the obnoxious passages expunged ! These straws clearly enough indi- cate in what direction the " National " system of educa- tion was designed to lead Irish aspirations. Another thing which caused the system to be viewed with distrust was the well-grounded fear of Catholics that it would be used as an engine of proselytism to wean away the children from the faith of the parents by in- sidious hints and artifices under the guise of non-sec- tarianism. To this latent tendency such stubborn hos- tility was manifested that the Government, to save the 96 IEELAND AS SHE IS. whole scheme from collapse, consented to leave the schools in Catholic districts under supervision of the local Catholic pastors, and in Protestant districts under the rectors. Nevertheless, so little satisfaction has the compromise given that in large centers of population the Catholics, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians have flou- rishing denominational schools of their own.* When you mention the so-called " National" schools, you have practically exhausted all that her rulers have done for popular education in Ireland. The commis- sioners, in their report incorporated with the census of 1871, admit that the highest intellectual life of the country is "dwarfed and starved" — strong language to come from British officials. The material pauperism of the country is fitly reflected in its mental destitution. Of course the poverty and hardship everywhere preva- lent compel the peasants to make their children toil in the fields and bogs, when the little ones should be learning to read, write, and cipher. Apart from this, there are no adequate facilities afforded for higher training. Out of a population exceeding Hve millions, the whole island musters only 2,100 University students f —1,200 in Trinity, 700 in the Queen's Colleges, 200 in the Catholic University. Trinity is essentially Protest- ant, so thoroughly so, that no honest Protestant would advise a Catholic parent to send his child there, if desirous to have him remain a Catholic. The Queen's * With all its defects the " National " system, of course, is better than none at all ; for, as Thomas Davis sagaciously remarked, " Education anyhow will only intensify Irish hate of English rule.' 1 t Maynooth College is devoted exclusively to the training of Catholic priests, and its endowment was a bribe flung to the Catholics at a critical moment for imperial iuterests. The original design was to have it admit lay students as well as clerical, and the scheme was opposed at the outset by many Catholics, who penetrated the real motive of the Govern- ment's sudden liberali y. Says Fronde: "The hope of the party of revolution was the union of Catholics and Protestants. The aim of England was to prevent this union from being accomplished. The motives for the establishment of the college on one side, and for the opposition to it or the other, were both exclusively political." EDUCATION. 97 Colleges — in Belfast, Galway, and Cork — are not only secular, but pagan, having been made such in the effort to render them "all things to all men." What can the professors do if they honorably abide by the rules, which prohibit them from trenching on any debata- ble point between Catholicity and Protestantism, not merely as theologians, but even as historians or littera- teurs % Hence these institutions are merely waste-pipes into which the public money is yearly drained. Catho- lic and Protestant alike fight shy of them. Some non-Catholics may think that the Irish are over- scrupulous in the matter of religious education. But it matters not wnat anybody else may think on the sub- ject ; it is a question of conscience with them, and they have a perfect right to insist that their children shall be taught as they desire, not as England desires. Bearing on this feature of the case, I may quote an incisive pas- sage from the pen of England' s foremost critic and soci- ologist, Matthew Arnold, who writes : "I had also a right, I think, to say that while we would not give the Irish a public university, where religion, philosophy, and history were taught by Catholics, we, English and Scotch, had for ourselves public universities where religion, philosophy, and history are taught by Pro- testants. . . The Protestant public of Great Britain wishes to regard Catholicism as an idolatry which we cannot stamp out indeed, but with which we must have no dealings, and which will sooner or later die of its own abominations. For a very long while yet our only course will be to take Irish Catholicism as a fact, and to do the best we can with it — now, the worst we can do with it is to shut it up in itself. This is what we are doing in Ireland. We are forcing Catholicism to remain shut up in itself because we will not treat it as a national religion. And why will we not ? In deference to two fanaticisms : a secularist fanaticism which holds religion in general to be noxious, and, above all, a Pro- testant fanaticism which holds Catholicism to be idolatry. Mr. Glad- stone's Irish University Bill is spoken of as the extreme of concession ever to be offered by England to Irish Catholicism. Yet that famous bill was in truth — if one may say so without disrespect to Mr. Glad- 7 98 IRELAND AS SHE IS. stone, who had to propound his University Bill under the ej e ol his secularist and non-conformist supporters — simply ridiculous. Religion, moral philosophy, and modern history are, probably, the three matters of instruction in which the bulk of mankind take most interest, and this precious university was to give no instruction in any one of them." The Catholic University (so termed in courtesy) is sup- ported by voluntary contributions of the denomination it represents ; but, still clouded by the shadow of the penal code, it is legally precluded from granting degrees, and is thus impotent to discharge the functions of a uni- versity. Of the two hundred students on its rolls, more than half are engaged in the study of medicine, prepar- ing for their profession merely, and do not receive any university training in the strict sense of the word. Com- menting on this state of intellectual barrenness and dry- rot, a foreign critic recently wrote : " Even the Protest- ants won't go to their own university as formerly. They send their young men more than ever, it appears, to Oxford or Cambridge — or nowhere!" Principally no- where. Britain's dog-in-the-manger policy won't give the people an acceptable system, and won't even allow them to provide it at their own expense.* The effects of this repressive policy are deplorable. The young men who, inspired and equipped by a spirit- ed training, should be the accomplished leaders of the nation, are, for the lack of such training, dwarfed and lost. They vegetate into rural shoneens, or gladly seek promotion in the ranks of their worst enemy. Mr. Butt has introduced to the notice of Parliament a lengthy and complicated bill for the purpose of partially curing the evil by converting the Catholic University into a * Vide the Dublin Catholic University, which is not permitted to confer degrees. With this compare Germauy, which has twenty-one universities ; or Italy, which has twenty-two ; or Austria, which has seven ; or the United States, or France, where the State encourages and charters such institutions, where every denomination may have its own universities, and State officials assist in examining aspirants and conferring degrees. EDUCATION. 99 second college of the University of Dublin, with all the rights and privileges thereunto belonging. The plan, although cumbrous, has the approval of nine-tenths of the Irish people, yet the verdict of its most sanguine friends is that the measure has no immediate chance of being approved. Of the population of Ireland, according to the last census, 2,349,229 can read and write ; 821,735 can read, but not write ; the rest (including infants under five years) are classified as illiterate. The showing is a poor one enough, in all candor, yet it is misleading for any purposes of comparison with other countries, because under the "National" programme the child who can recognize and combine even two letters of the alphabet, is set down as reading, and when able to scrawl, how- ever rudely, the forms of some of the letters, is set down as writing. It is England's deliberate design to restrain the intel- lectual development of Ireland, to render sluggish and impotent the manhood of the nation, if she cannot mold both to her own desire and model. CHAPTER XI. TAXATION. Paying the Imperial Piper — Financial Hocus-Pocus — The most heavily Taxed People in Europe, and the least able to BEAR IT. " Taking into account the ability to bear taxation, England is the most lightly and Ire- land the most heavily taxed country in Europe, although both are nominally liable to the same taxation."— Mb. Semorb (an English official). " 111 fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates and men decay."— Goldsmith. y *T remained for British legislation to produce a still ypfL worse condition of things than is pictured in the §£$ familiar lines of Goldsmith. Ireland is steadily decaying both in wealth and population, like a cask tapped at both ends. Statistics are not commonly the best material from which to construct an entertaining literary feast, and they are less so when dealing with so funereal a topic as we now approach ; nevertheless I shall try to make the figures as brief and comprehensive as possible. From 1801 to 1861 taxation in Great Britain was re- duced twenty per cent, per head, while the ability of the people to meet it increased. During the same period of sixty years in Ireland, while destitution increased, taxa- tion per capita was doubled ! This suggestive item leads us to review one of the most infamous pieces of jugglery and fraud ever perpetrated. From 1782 to 1800 Ireland was partially self -governed, and the consequence was that she had no national debt 100 TAXATION. 101 until between two and three millions of the cost of the American war were saddled on her, against her wish and despite her protest. England determined on a legisla- tive union as the most effectual mode of beating down Ireland's commercial rivalry. To secure the requisite vote for this purpose, several millions had to be used as a corruption fund, and these millions too were imposed on the very people whom they were employed to be- tray. To allay in some measure the indignation aroused by the scheme, it was solemnly promised that Ireland should have to pay only the interest on her own debt (£28,000,000)— that she should not be held liable for any expense in connection with Britain's separate debt of £450,000,000 (sixteen and a half times as large as Ire- land's). No sooner, however, was the Union infamy consummated than the British financiers began to in- flate the Irish debt,* so that by sixteen years of fraud- ulent management they were able to report it raised to £112,000,000 (an increase of 400 per cent.), while the British debt stood at £734,000,000 (an increase of only 38 per cent.). Having thus put the two countries on what they were pleased to designate " an equal footing," Parliament decreed that both should thenceforth be taxed indiscriminately, and that separate quotas of con- tribution were abolished. Ireland possesses one- seventeenth of the assessed wealth of the United Kingdom ; she pays one-ninth of the gen- eral taxes. Within the past twenty-four years in Ireland taxation has advanced from 9s. 6d. to 32s. 6d. per head, while the population has diminished by two and a half millions. The income of England is estimated by her assessors at £800,000,000, on which she pays a tax, local and impe- * Additional light is thrown on the transaction in Chapter XV., Part Second. 102 IEELAND AS SHE IS. rial, of £84,000,000— equivalent to 10 J per cent. The income of Ireland is estimated at £48,000,000; her tax, local and imperial, is £12,000,000, or 25 per cent, of her total income ! With the Romans it was a fixed principle that the provinces shonld defray the expenses of the empire. England proceeds on the same principle, bnt by more de- vious methods. She derives no direct revenue from her colonies, although she lays out enormous sums yearly in their defense. ' * Thirty millions of Englishmen* in Great Britain and Ireland," says Sir John Lubbock, "pay £12,000,000 a year for naval purposes ; two hun- dred millions of our fellow-subjects in the colonies and India pay scarcely anything." Well, the colonies reap some benefit from the arrangement, though they do con- tribute their full quota indirectly in the shape of com- mercial profits ; but it would be interesting to find out where any profit or advantage accrues to Ireland in the transaction. She has to pay her seventh share direct to all imperial expenses, while she has neither commerce nor manufactures to compensate her therefor. She has to pay the wages of the bully who plunders and scourges her. A British parliamentary committee on Irish taxation was appointed in 1865, differing from most committees of its kind in being passably honest, intelligent, and not disposed to " whitewash." Accordingly in its report we meet the subjoined passage : "The pressure of taxation will be felt most by the weakest part of the community, and as the average wealth of the Irish taxpayers is less than the average wealth of the English taxpayers, the ability of Ireland to bear heavy taxation is evidently less than the ability of England. Mr. * Sir John doubtless thinks he bestows a high compliment on the five millions of Irish at home and the three millions of them in Britain by classifying them as "English ; " so let him pass. TAXATION. 103 Semore, whose evidence on the position of Ireland will be found very suggestive, remarks that the taxation of England is both the heaviest and lightest in Europe — the heaviest as regards the amount raised, the lightest as regards the ability to bear that amount. But in the case of Ireland it is heavy both as regards the amount and as regards the ability of the contributor ; and he adds that England is the most lightly taxed, and Ireland the most heavily taxed country in Europe, although both are nominally liable to equal taxation." The author of the foregoing weighty passage was no less a personage than Hon. W. E. Gladstone ; yet when he got the treasury helm into his own hands Irish tax- payers did not find their burdens grow miraculously lighter.* To summarize this financial grievance, I shall limit my- self to the estimates of O'Neill Daunt, a conspicuously moderate and careful authority, who has made the mat- ter a special study, and who has never been accused of leaning toward "Fenian extravagances." First, then, the Irish people are the poorest in Europe, yet they have to pay (contrary to express compact) their pro rata share of the heaviest public revenue in Europe. Absentee landlords take from them, at the lowest figure, fifteen million* dollars annually, through which drain the island has lost since the union more than a thousand million dollars, without computing interest. Every cent of this has been lost as irrevocably as if it had sunk with Pharaoh' s chariots in the Red Sea. Second, in 1801 the British public debt was four hun- dred and fifty million pounds, the Irish twenty-eight million pounds ; and three-fourths of the latter had been * Some English placemen, like Hon. Bob Lowe, are fond of remarking that Ireland is exempted from several special taxes collected in Great Britaii These are a land tax and a railway passenger tax, which, if levied in Ireland, would amount to only three hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds. To be robbed of your good coat and to be left a threadbare pocket-handkerchief, is not much to be thankful for. t Twenty-Jive millions would be nearer the mark. 104 IEELAND AS SHE IS. incurred in carrying the Union. It was stipulated that the two debts should be kept distinct ; but in 1817 they were consolidated, and the beggared tenants of Ireland had to assume the crushing British load. Moreover, Gladstone's ingenuity so gerrymandered the income tax that over one and a half dollars are extracted from every Irish pound, where less than one dollar is taken from the English equivalent. When there is any surplus revenue, never a copper of it reaches Ireland. A com- mittee of the Dublin Corporation, having made an ex- haustive inquiry, found that the Irish revenue spent out of Ireland in the year 1860 was four million ninety-five thousand four hundred and fifty-three pounds (more than twenty million dollars). Add that to the absentee drain, and then ask yourself why is Ireland so backward in trade and industry. CHAPTER XII. POLITICAL AND SOCIAL DEBASEMENT. A System of Government Specially designed to Degrade and Im- poverish its Victims, Crush out their Manhood and Deprive them of all Knowledge of Civil Rights and Duties. " The upper and upper-middle classes are loyal because for them Emancipation has been a reality ; it has given them the rights and privileges which follow rank and wealth. It is not so with the millions, for whom Emancipation has had no practical or appreciable result." —Bishop Moriartt.* " When we remember the barefooted children of the Irish laborers, with clouts about their waists like the Polynesian women ; when we think of the condition of the ninety- four thousand families in Ireland who live, eat, drink, sleep, and rise in wretched one-roomed huts ; when we think of these descendants of a once illustrious race reduced to a lower level of social slavery than the black slaves of Jamaica or America ever experienced, the blood boils with indignation in our veins." — T. Mooney. "N the previous chapters I have produced abun- dant unimpeachable testimony to demonstrate the country's woful exhaustion and decay, to prove beyond cavil that under alien rule it is steadily losing everything that goes to make up the dignity or happi- ness of a nation. But I shall probably be met on the threshold with this argument: "The condition of the people has improved somewhat of late years, wages are higher, and the coercion laws have operated to diminish crime." Well, I freely concede that Ireland is in some- what a better plight to-day than (for instance) in 1847, when the priest could not shrive the dying nor the coro- ner count the dead. I admit, too, that the tide of emi- * Dr. Moriarty was perhaps the most conspicuous! t bitter foe of the Fenian movement in Ireland ; hence his evidence here is not ex parte. 105 106 IKELAND AS SHE IS. gration has fallen — could it keep on for ever ? — and that labor has become dearer because scarcer. I admit even that the bulk of the people are a few degrees further removed from starvation than formerly. But here my admissions cease, and I recall the profound observation of De Tocqueville in commenting on the fact that as the condition of the French people improved, prior to the Kevolution, their discontent grew stronger. " Experi- ence," he says, "has repeatedly shown that a bad gov- ernment is never in such danger as when it mends its ways and enters on a course of reform." The British Government has not voluntarily entered on any course of reform in Ireland, but it has been driven to grant some concessions which have let in enough light to make dark ness visible ; and hence its danger. The low percentage of crime in Ireland (where there are less prisoners than in the State of New York) is often cited as a proof of the country's well-regulated condi- tion. The same reason would justify the proclamation of martial law in every land under heaven. The Irish are by nature law-abiding, if the law be such that human nature can at all abide it ; and their religion is full of wise restraints. Hence the criminal calendar among them is seldom weighted with any heavier offense than drunkenness, assault,* illicit distillation, the writing of a " threatening letter" to a landlord, or some transgres- sion of the curfew law which prohibits them from being out of doors after dark. If this result be a vindication of the coercion code, then the safeguards of civil law in * The demoralizing practice of faction-fights was patronized and encouraged by " the gentry." Sir John Hawley tells that once when about to pass sentence on a man for murder committed in one of these broils, all the magistrates sitting on the bench with him remon- strated and ur^ed the necessity of inflicting a merely nominal punishment. " When I asked what they meant by k necessity,' they frankly declared they could not live in the country unless the system of faction-fighting were kept up, as they believed it was necessary for their own safety to keep the people divided I " Of course it was. POLITICAL AND SOCIAL DEBASEMENT. 107 every other land should be promptly demolished and re- moved in the interests of public morality. The material perdition to which Ireland is condemned surpasses the power of language to exaggerate, yet above and beyond it must be placed her political and social loss through the deprivation of civil liberty. In his pamphlet on " Vaticanism, " with eyes so strained upon the mote afar off that he cannot see the beam at his nose, Mr. Gladstone says : "As a rule, the real independence of states and nations depends upon the exclusion of foreign influence proper from their civil affairs. Wher- ever the spirit of freedom, even if ever so faintly, breathes, it resents and reacts against any intrusion of another people or power into the circle of its interior concerns, as alike dangerous and disgraceful." The same thought is amplified and improved on in a recent pamphlet by Mr. MacCarthy, M. P., who says : "If there be any one thing about which it is safe to say that all the civilized world and all political thinkers are agreed, it is that, ordi- narily speaking, a community gets on better when it manages its own affairs, than when those affairs are managed for it by another commu- nity ; just as, ordinarily speaking, a man gets on better when he has the management of his own affairs, than when he is in bondage or tute- lage to any one else. This thought underlies all the praises of civil lib- erty that were ever said or sung. Unless the community or the man be mad, they know their own business better than any one else knows it. Unless they be sneaks, they will feel as an intolerable grievance the pre- tension of any one else to supersede them in it. Keep a man in such bondage or tutelage, you will make him a milksop. All inventiveness, all brightness of genius, all force of character, all aspiration to achieve- ment will die out in him. No such man does any real good for himself or any one else. Keep a community in such bondage or tutelage, and you emasculate it for all good purposes, and put it in the way of temp- tation for all bad ones. Public spirit, self-reliance, self-control, self- knowledge, national faith, national hope, national charity, will decline. No such community prospers, or ever yet prospered since the world began." 108 IRELAND AS SHE IS. This is precisely the sort of tutelage to which the Irish people are chained down. They are strangers to every right and blessing comprehended under the term " self- government." They have, it is true, a counterfeit repre- sentation in the London coercion-factory, but the thing is a pretense and a mockery. The British constitution recognizes no such Yankee novelty as manhood suf- frage ; the voter must possess a property qualification, and through this limitation every possible artifice is availed of to minimize the popular franchise in Ireland. The Irish vote has practically nothing to say in the dis- posal of imperial revenues ; and it is equally impotent in the matter of local assessments at home, which are manipulated by grand juries. The grand jury, a power- ful wheel in the engine of British administration, is a clique of loyal aristocrats in every county, who are asso- ciated together by Castle appointment for the misman- agement of county affairs. They have power to impose taxes for local purposes, and their general behavior is accurately described as being animated by three princi- ples — snobbery, jobbery, and robbery. The injustice of " taxation without representation" never cost these magnates a thought. Having manufactured widespread destitution in Ire- land, the British legislators a few decades since resolved that it should be relieved where it occurred. Accord- ingly they divided the island into a couple of thousand districts, and enacted that every district must support its own poor. The measure in its philanthropic scope reminds one of the traveler who dined off his dog's tail, and then generously threw the bone to the dog. Every great landholder can exempt himself from poor-rates by simply evicting all the poor from his estates ; then, hav- ing no paupers on his land, he has none to pay for. The ejected tenants are driven into the towns, and ultimately POLITICAL AND SOCIAL DEBASEMENT. 109 to the town poor-house, where they become an additional bnrden on the artisans and small shopkeepers. Thus it has frequently happened that when a town, filled with poor, was paying a poor-rate of five shillings in the pound, the landlord's estate within stone's throw of it was not paying five pence I* The British idea of the British Government was sharply expressed in 1775 in the answer, written by Dr. Johnson, to the resolutions and address of the American Congress — "that the King and Parliament have the power of dis- posing, without the consent of the subjects, of their lives, liberties, and properties ."f This delusion was effec- tively shattered, in so far as it was designed to coerce the United States, but it falls far short of formulating the principle on which Ireland is ruled to-day. The powers claimed by Johnson for king and. parliament have been delegated in Ireland to landlord and aristocrat. In fact, as Mr. John Bright deliberately affirms, "the whole sys- tem of the English Government is one of out-door relief on a gigantic scale for the members, the relations, and the friends of the aristocracy." But is there not an Irish aristocracy, racy of the soil and so forth \ Yes, the hawk is nursed in the same element with the spar- row, yet, for all that, it rends and devours the sparrow. So with your Irish aristocrat — "an alien in heart, a des- pot by instinct, an absentee by inclination, ashamed of the land that bore him, he is (in nineteen cases out of twenty) more hostile to the cause of his country and the liberties of its people than the most prejudiced English- man." "Stagnating in the fields of sloth, or bowed in servile adultation before the altar of a foreign power," * Repeated efforts have been made, but fruitlessly, to equalize the rates by levying on Unions (of which there are only one hundred and sixty-nine) instead of on districts. The landlord parliament would never tolerate the proposed change. t The Italics are in the authentic print. 110 IRELAND AS SHE IS. he is the most treacherous enemy of his country and his race. Under such malign conditions the Irish people can acquire no familiarity with the ennobling duties and responsibilities of the citizen. They are helots in every thing, save their undying aspiration to rise above this debasing state. And the worst of it all is that much of their best blood and brain has gone to vitalize and exalt the remorseless Moloch which beggars and degrades them. PART SECOND. Ireland as She has Been. CHAPTER I. A MODEL ENGLISH HISTOEIAN. Me. Feoude's Philosophy, and his Pet Theory as to National Tempers, Humors, and Passions. " They [the Irish] have no secular history, for as a nation they have done nothing that posterity will not he anxious to forget."— J. A. Froude. (HE subsequent pages I shall devote to a rapid survey of Irish history. To what purpose % Will not the labor furnish another proof of what Eng- lish writers term the weakness of our people for brood- ing over the "legendary" exploits of their forefathers, dreaming of the "mythical" glories of Tara, and build- ing gorgeous castles in the air while neglecting the stern realities which face them in the present or loom up in the future % This very distortion of the facts is at once my justification and my spur in writing. I engage to show that Ireland' s olden civilization is not mythical or legend- ary. ' ' Well, but admitting even that, ' ' somebody will in- terpose, "what has it got to do with Ireland's condition and destiny to-day?" I answer: A great deal, friend. Gerald Barry (Cambrensis), Welshman by birth, monk 111 112 IEELAKD AS SHE HAS BEEN. by profession, knave and sycophant by natnre, was the first British historian to deal with Anglo-Irish affairs. James A. Fronde, Englishman by birth, ex-theologne by profession, bigot and partisan by temperament and edu- cation, is the latest adventurer who has donned the cap of Cambrensis. Each may be accurately described as the historian- laureate of England, bound to earn his porridge by prais- ing his master through thick and thin, and halting at no obstacle of rude fact while doing so. The Welshman was commissioned by Henry II. to paint the Irish as a lawless, graceless, godless crew ; so Gerald promptly reported that " their chief characteristics were treach- ery, thirst for blood, unbridled licentiousness, and invet- erate detestation of order and rule" ! Of the scribe who penned these words it has been said that he never spoke the truth, unless by accident ; for which reason, proba- bly, he is the favorite authority quoted by his disciple, Froude, who, after copying Gerald's paragraph about the " chief characteristics," affixes thereto his own im- primatur, as if to put the statement absolutely beyond the pale of doubt. The subjoined extracts are taken from the opening chapters of Mr. Froude' s history of the English in Ireland : "They [the Irish] have little architecture of their own, and the forms introduced from England have been robbed of their grace." " To give to Ireland everything which she most valued — her laws and liberties, her orderly and settled government, the amplest security for person and property — was England's first desire. . . The temper in which she was met exasperated her into harshness, and at times into cruelty, till it seemed at last as if no solution of the problem was possible, save the expulsion or destruction of a race which appeared INCURABLE." Again, he says that England's aim was "to extend the forms of Eng- lish liberty, her trials by jury, her local courts, her parliaments, to a peo- ple essentially unfit for them." Finally: "The Irish would neither resist courageously nor submit A MODEL ENGLISH HISTOKIAN. 113 honorably. But thsy irritated England into severities which gave their accusations some show of color." So many flagrant, deliberate untruths were never yet compressed into so small a compass. The reader cannot fail to observe — indeed, no effort is made to conceal — the purpose lurking behind every adroit falsehood here co- pied. Eager to invent some coloring of justification for the enormities of English rule, Froude, with a vaulting audacity that o'erleaps its mark, essays at one broad sweep to alter the whole historical canvas. With many, no doubt, his gymnastics have partially succeeded ; — when a man is set standing on his head, he perceives the landscape apparently turned upside down. But to men whose faculties retain their normal poise, this audacious juggling brings no change of conviction. Mr. Froude' s pet theory is that every nation deserving to be independent is independent ; and around this gra- tuitous assumption, with consummate art, he weaves a glittering tissue of generalities until the unwary reader is persuaded that Ireland, from the very fact of not be- ing free, is unworthy of freedom. To refute the villain- ous sophism one has only to state it clearly. Stripped of Froude' s brilliant coloring, and presented in its naked deformity, it will find few advocates outside of the school which deifies Force in any shape. If Froude' s teaching were accepted, neither the negro in America nor the Catholic in Ireland would have been emancipated (and, by the way, Froude regrets that the Catholic was emancipated, holding that extirpation would have been a much better policy !). Again, in the year 1780 the United States should have been pitilessly crushed, be- cause, not having yet won their complete freedom, they obviously did not deserve to win it. To give another illustration : suppose a burly bandit had suddenly seized and gagged you, had bound your hands behind your 8 114 IEELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. back, and had then complacently sat down on yonr chest while he rifled your pockets with one hand and held a pistol to your ear with the other. Would not that be a pretty bad fix? Yet Job's Comforter Froude would say : " Serve you right ! If you deserved to be free, you would be free!" It may be retorted that my illustra- tion does not apply in so far as the United States are concerned, seeing that they triumphed a few years after the date given, and thereby proved their claim. Well, if this novel theory is to be endowed with such magical elasticity as to fit all cases and conditions, I am willing to accept it. Ireland has more than once won a recogni- tion of her rights in the face of desperate odds. More- over, she is winning her freedom to-day even by inches, and link after link shall be broken until not a shred of the fetters remain. " Ireland as a nation," says the model English histo- rian, "has done nothing that posterity will not be anx- ious to forget." Whose posterity? Ireland as a nation has been constantly doing things which England is anx- ious to see blotted from memory; and Ireland's work as a nation is not yet done. But there is no use in delaying over this and similar statements, in making which (unless he is a person of curiously twisted mental calibre) Mr. Froude must well have known that he was sacrificing truth to an evil and mercenary purpose. To wind up, the Model Historian should never have undertaken a task for which, by Ms own confession, he was constitu- tionally unfitted. In a lecture once delivered by him on "The Influence of the Reformation on Scottish Charac- ter," he expressed the following convictions : " The subject is one with which it is presumptuous for a stranger to meddle. Great national movements can only be understood properly by the people whose disposition they represent. We say ourselves about our own history that Englishmen only can properly comprehend it. A MODEL ENGLISH HISTOEIAN. 115 Nations work out their own political and spiritual lives through tem- pers, humors, and passions peculiar to themselves, and the same dispo- sition that produces the result is required to interpret it afterwards." Now, without indorsing this doctrine in its totality, I would ask why had Mr. Froude no such diffidence in approaching the Irish problem % He avows that it is presumption in him, an Englisman, to hazard any ana- lysis of Scotch tempers, humors, and passions. He holds that none but an Englishman can properly comprehend English history. He lays down the broad principle that national movements can be rightly interpreted only by those who directly inherit their results. And then, with sleeves rolled up, he proceeds to lay bare the inmost recesses of Ireland' s political and spiritual life ! Could audacity and inconsistency further go % Speaking of his pet theories, I must not omit this pas- sage : "The rights of man — if such rights there be — are not to liberty, but to wise direction and control." The conditional clause here emphasized possibly indi- cates one reason why Englishmen alone can understand English " tempers " and "humors." Finally, mark this author's deep insight of Ireland's " spiritual life." Every student knows that the religion of the Irish peo- ple has always been a vital element in the drama of their suffering. Yet the Model Historian coolly jerks it out of sight with the profound remark that it is "a matter of which one knows as much as another, and all of us know nothing" I The absurd antics and extravagances of a literary charlatan are, perhaps, unworthy of such prominent notice ; but he has compiled the most widely read and plausible defense of English rule in Ireland ; conse- quently it is well to be familiar with the salient outlines of his position. CHAPTER II. ANCIENT EEIN. Hek Political and Social Condition, Laws, Arts, Literatobe and Distinctive Civilization — Arrested Development. " What noble deed doth history trace Outside the Anglo-Saxon nation ? "— Myles O'Reilly. NG-LISH writers, from the days of Cambrensis, have systematically labored to traduce Ireland, and scoff at the slightest allusion to her olden civilization. A cheap and graceless work, yet it has had its effect, for England possessed the ear of the world. The educational text-books, as well as the literature of the United States, are largely based on English models ; hence the average American student, gifted with neither inclination nor leisure for much research in this direc- tion, is easily persuaded that previous to the Anglo- Norman invasion the Irish were little better than a barbarian herd, sadly in need of a civilizing discipline. And there is a point to be gained by propagating this notion, slightly though it bears on living issues, as will soon be made apparent. At the risk of shocking a rooted prejudice, which many mistake for knowledge, I will here distinctly state that this conception of An- cient Ireland stands on a substratum of elaborate false- hood, the product of English ingenuity. Your Briton would like to claim a monopoly of civilization, as ol every other good thing, but his claim will not bear in- 116 AKCIENT EKH5T. 117 vestigation. Within the limited compass of these pages I cannot cite authorities at any great length ; I can merely outline the political and social condition of pre- Christian Erin. The force of preconceived opinion will impel some to view the narrative with distrust. That I expect, and I shall only invite the doubters to examine further and satisfy themselves ; the labor will not be without its reward. " The genius of every British government that ruled for the ]ast seven hundred years," says Mooney, "has ex- cluded Ireland from the study of youths, has labored to decry her old institutions, deny her former fame, and destroy every vestige of her history." The same ten- dency has been commented on by nearly every impartial writer, and the motive of the vandal policy is admitted by Webb, who states that down to a late period "the object of the Government was to discover and destroy every literary remain of the Irish, in order the more fully to eradicate from their minds every trace of their ancient independence" The effort has, however, only partially succeeded. To him who can decipher the language of the past, the very gravestones and crumbling ruins tell an eloquent tale. From our American poet, Willis, they win the following tribute to "the Western Eden" : "The inhabitant of another country looks upon the small space occupied by Ireland on the map of the world with mingled wonder and admiration. The vail that obscures her past glory is withdrawn ; the cloud that lowers over her social horizon melts away ; and the distant observer, opening the volume of her mournful history, counts the long roll of her illustrious names, and reads in those pages of shame and sorrow, blotted by the best blood of her children, the true character of an enthusiastic people." At the same time it must not be supposed that Ire- land' s monuments consist entirely of ruined abbeys 118 IRELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. and ivy-clad towers. We have it on the authority of Sir J. Mackintosh and others, that " there still remain manuscripts of more remote antiquity in Ireland than in any other country, not only in the Irish but in. the Latin tongue, and the oldest in the libraries of the continent are the productions of Irishmen, who were the teachers of the early ages of Christian Europe as well in learning as in religion." Four distinct waves of colonization are recorded to have reached pre - Christian Erin, the latest of them being the Milesian,* which element gradually subju- gated, overshadowed, and absorbed the earlier occu- pants. The product was a simple, upright, patriarchal people — courageous, clannish, ardent, imaginative, with merits and defects peculiarly their own. Their religion was an exalted form of Pantheism, under the care of a Druid priesthood ; their worship being directed to the sun, the grandest object in the visible universe, and through it to the Infinite Life, of which it was the outward symbol. Fully nine hundred years before the advent of Christ Erin had a national legislature, which met triennially at Tara. At its first session "the crowned philosopher," Ollamh Fodhla, delivered to the assembly a history of the nation and a digest of the laws framed by his pre- decessors ; whereupon were established a written con- stitution and a code of jurisprudence, which were the organic law of the land for two thousand years there- after. When St. Patrick arrived in Ireland he found * According to John O'Donovan's erudite work on the Ancient Irish, the Milesians were of Scythian extraction, being sprung from JViul, son of Fenius, the great-grandson of Japhet. Niul, a teacher of langugaes, was given in marriage Scota, daughter of the king of Egypt, and begot Gaodhil (Gael), from whom Milesius was twentieth in descent. Heber and Heremon were sons of Milesius, and led the colony which settled in Ireland. Strictly speaking, the Irish and French are of Finnish (Scythian) rather than Celtic (Aryan) origin ; but the name " Celt " is universally applied to both peoples to-day. THE HARP OF BEIAN BORTJ. (Preserved in Trinity College Museum.) COVER OP ST. PATRICK'S BELL. Antique Irish Art AKCIENT EBTN". 119 it governed by four provincial kings, and one chief king {Ardrigh). The former acknowledged obedience to the latter, and paid tribute to him in cattle, pro- duce, and bullion. The Salic law prevailed, excluding females from the throne, nor could a male with any serious bodily blemish occupy it. The successor of every king was elected during the lifetime of him whom he was to succeed, and was designated the Tanist. Even at this early formative period of Irish society, the rule of king or chief was never permitted to lapse into the iron tyranny of Feudalism. In war the king was commander-in-chief ; in peace he was simply the head of the Executive, guided by sage counsel of the Brehons (lawgivers), while the office itself was elective, not hereditary.* Nine centuries before the Christian era, it was decreed in the written law of the Irish nation that bards, judges, scholars, and historians should hold social rank next to the sovereign, and their persons were declared inviolable. This single decree, if no other proof remained, would show that even in Pagan times our Milesian sires had attained no mean level of progress, inasmuch as they had begun to subordinate physical to intellectual vigor. Chivalry, hospitality, music, science, art, literature — all were promoted and fostered by their laws \ and customs. * "There are four dignitaries of a territory who may be degraded: a false-judging king, a stumbling bishop, a fraudulent poet, and a chieftain who does not fulfil his duties." —The Senchus More, an ancient law which no Brehon could abrogate or suspend. . . The resemblance of the old Irish Constitution to that of the United States is in many features striking. Compare the functions of Ardrigh with those of President ; Provincial Kings with State Governors ; the Feis of Tara with the Federal Congress : the one system might have furnished the model of the other. The principal defect of the Irish Constitution was, that it was too theoretically perfect for the age and the people. The central authority was not strong enough to insist on its rigid enforcement, or to suppress the incessant jealousy, raids, and bloodshed, of which the tribal system was the natural parent. t The historical importance of these ancient laws has recently come to be appreciated, especially by foreign scholars and jurists. Such men as Zeuss, Schleicher, Dieffenbach, Ebel, Pictet, Windisch, and Nigra, by their independent research and impartial testimony have proven that the ancient language, laws, customs, history, and literary remains of thia 120 IEELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. Every other nation of the West is indebted in a great measure to the Roman conqueror for its first lessons in art and industry. Ireland is an exception ; she was never subject to the Roman yoke. Her civilization, drawn from the primal founts of Phoenicia and Egypt, was coeval with, if not anterior to, that of u the mistress of the world." That the Pagan Irish were well versed in peace- ful arts and manufactures is attested by the splendid memorials which have survived the ruthless vandalism of Dane and Anglo-Norman. They were noted for mag- nificent apparel of silk and wool dyed in rich colors. They worked valuable mines ; their weapons and domes- tic furniture were adorned with precious metals artisti- cally carved. "Long before the birth of Christ," says Bishop Mcholson, "the Irish had stamped money,* and their artists seem to have been as unrivaled in the fabri- cation of metals as they confessedly were in lignarian architecture and martial music." Although their dwellings consisted chiefly of wood, the people who built the Round Towers were certainly no novices in architecture, f Many of these mysterious structures face the storm as solidly and proudly to-day island are of immense value to philologists, scientists, and publicists. The pressure thus exerted has induced the British Government to make some niggardly advances for the trans- lation and publication of a portion of the treasure thus lying undeveloped. . . Sir Henry Maine verifies what has been said of the Brehon laws by making them the principal subject of his famous lectures on the " Early History of Institutions." "They form," says the Albany Law Journal, " an authentic monument of a very ancient group of Aryan institu- tions," and it adds that one great cause of their historic value is their entire distinctness from the Roman system of the Twelve Tables and its modern offshoots. * There may be seen in the museum of Trinity College, Dublin, some coins struck in the reign of Eadhna Dearg, seven hundred years before Christ. An urnful of them was found in Clare in 1639. . . It may be of interest to state that the imperial crown of Napoleon I. was made in part from a crown which had been worn by Brian Boroimhe. . . A copy of the will of Cathair More (who lived in the second century) is yet preserved in the Irish College at Paris. Among its bequests are golden, silver, and copper vessels ; arms and war- chariots ; embroidered mantles ; ships, banners, swords, trumpets and other musical instru- ments ; backgammon tables and chess-boards with ivory pieces. The items in this document alone would suffice to show that Ireland was then possessed of all the arts, fabrics, and luxu- ries which the world at the time could boast of. t Some further light on the subject of architecture is afforded in the next chapter. ANCIENT ERIN. 121 as when they were first erected, three thousand years ago ; and the most searching analysis of modern chem- istry fails to discover the nature of the indestructible cement which knits the stones into shafts of everlasting granite ! Two favorites hath Time — the pyramids of Nile And the old mystic temples of our own dear isle ; As the breeze o'er the seas where the halcyon hath its nest, Passeth Time o'er Egypt's tombs and the temples of the West. — D. F. McCarthy. O' Curry has translated from the ancient Book of Le- cair* a minute description of the palace of Cruachain, built seventeen hundred years before Christ. The inte- rior consisted of " beautifully carved red yew;" seven compartments with fronts and shutters of bronze. The house from this out was built of pine, with shingles of oak, and the special apartment of the women was still more elaborately decorated. Whoever holds — as most people do — that the position occupied by women is the crucial test of any civilization, will learn how Ireland stands in this regard by reading McElerhan' s compre- hensive work on the " Condition of Women and Child- ren" among the Gothic, Saxon, Celtic, and other nations. The literature of the Pagan Irish was cradled in a dis- tinctively Irish alphabet, the Ogham — on the charac- ters of which, singularly enough, our modern system of short-hand writing is modeled. A modification of the Latin alphabet was afterward introduced with Chris- tianity, and was used in the illuminated manuscripts \ of which the island became so prolific. * The Book of Acaill, translated by the same scholar, is a digest of laws enacted by a famous Feis (Parliament) in the third century, which was presided over by Cormac (son of AtV, often called " the Irish Charlemagne." A wealth of similar material is to be fohnd in Professor O'Curry's Lectures on the " Manuscript Materials of Irish History." t These manuscripts, often inaccessible to the most favored and persistent student (as is the case with the Ashburnham collection) are scattered over Europe. Immense numbers of them were taken over to France by the "Wild Geese," and deposited in the Bibliotheque 122 IEELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. The offspring of Milesius was enthusiastically devoted to music, and no careful student or musician will deny- that Ireland has always shown herself a fond nurse and patron of the seraphic art. The Irish harp (of which the modern piano is a modification) is admittedly as much superior to all other ancient instruments — Grecian, Roman, Hebrew, or Egyptian — as the note of a linnet to the twitter of a sparrow. The Italian Gemiani declared that the music of Ireland found no equal west of the Alps ; * and Handel averred that he would rather be the author of Eileen Aroon than of his own grandest com- position. It should be understood, moreover, that Ire- land had a musical notation of her own (specimens of which are extant) centuries before St. Patrick came, and many more centuries before the Gregorian scale was outlined or developed. Even Dr. Burney, the English critic, says : " It is certain, the further we explore while yet any light remains, the more highly is Irish border minstrelsy extolled. The oldest Irish tunes are said to be the most perfect." Which may readily be believed when we recollect that Moore's incomparable Royale ; the Vatican and St. John Lateran have their share ; they lie hidden away among the shelves of Louvain, Brussels, Wurtzburg, Milan, St. Gall, Munich, Salamanaca, Copen- hagen, and many another distant abiding-place. If Ireland had a native government, these treasures would long ago have been exhumed, classified, translated, and utilized. Says Digby Wyatt : " In delicacy of handling and minute but f aultl&ss execution the whole of paleography offers nothing comparable to the ancient manuscripts of Ireland ; especially the Book of Kells, the most marvelous of them all." This manuscript, written and illumi- n&ted fourteen hundred years ago, is preserved in Trinity College. Mr. Wyatt attempted to copy the ornaments, but broke down in despair. In one space, about a quarter of an inch in surface, he counted (with the aid of a magnifying-glass) no less than one hundred and fifty-eight interlacements of a slender ribbon pattern formed of white lines edged by black on a dark ground. " No wonder," says he, " that tradition should allege that these wonder ful lines were traced by angels." * The French historian Michelet makes allusion to the same excellence in an eloquent pas- sage : " Ireland, the eldest of the Celtic race ! all-fertile Ireland, whose men shoot up like blades of grass, and frighten England with the ominous sound that daily rings in her ears— 1 There's a million more of them ! ' Land of poets, of men of daring thought, of John Sco- tus Erigena, of Berkeley, of Toland, of Moore, and of O'Connell People of the brilliant word and of the swift sword ; people that in this the decrepitude of the world still retain the gift of song /" ANCIENT ERIN. 123 melodies are all set to old Irish music. Of the produc- tions of the Bards, Spenser, who was no lover of them, wrote: "I have caused divers of these poems to be translated unto me, and surely they savored of sweet wit and good invention, . . sprinkled with some pretty flowers of their natural device, which gave good grace and comeliness unto them." The land system of Ancient Ireland, under which the soil was held jointly by the sept or clan, has been already explained (Part First, Chapter III.). A portion of the tribal territory was set apart as commonage ; and another portion, with a commodious house, reserved for the main- tenance of public hospitality. The Brugaid (keeper) was obliged to supply food and lodging free to any transient guest. The law of gavelkind — which is substantially embodied in the organic law of this republic— compelled an equitable distribution of property among the wife and children after the father's death. On the whole, this antique Brehon system was somewhat ahead of modern Landlordism, Primogeniture, and Poor-Law Regulations. The foregoing statements are placed beyond reach of controversy by the splendid relics yet preserved in Irish and continental museums, the extreme age and native workmanship of which are universally conceded. Never- theless, some will remain incredulous, asking why a peo- ple so remarkable is so seldom mentioned in " classical" authors. The question serves to show in what a narrow groove modern scholarship often travels, for the olden civilization of which I speak is a determinate fact, recog- nized as such by the most eminent scholars of Europe. The recognition comes even from learned and honest Englishmen, as, for example : 11 The ages which deserve exact inquiry are those — for such there were — when Ireland was the School of the West, the quiet habitation of sanctity and literature." — Dr. Johnson. 124 IKELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. " Ought we Englishmen rather not take shame to ourselves, that we have hitherto always treated that ancient, gallant people with such illib- eral contempt, who had the start of the Britons for many ages in arts and sciences, in learning and laws ? " — Dr. Warner. " ' Art cultivated in Ireland, and by Irishmen, and known as Keltic, was absolutely distinct from that of all other parts of the civilized world ; it attained in Ireland a perfection almost marvelous, and it was in after ages adopted by the continental schools visited or established by Irish missionaries. " — Prof. Westwood. Sir J. Mackintosh, the distinguished Scottish histo- rian, writes : "The Irish nation are yet enabled to boast that they possess genuine history several centuries more ancient than any other nation possesses in its present spoken language. Indeed, no other nation possesses any monument of its literature which goes back within several centuries of these chronicles. No one, I think, after perusing his [Dr. O'Connor's] proofs, can deny that the Irish were a lettered people while the Saxons were still immersed in darkness and ignorance." And onr American ~R. W. Emerson, who certainly will not be credited with any pro-Irish bias, says : 11 Some people are deciduous or transitory. Where are the Greeks ? where the Etrurians ? where the Eomans ? But the Celts are an old family of whose beginning there is no memory, and their end is likely to be still more remote in the future, for they have endurance and productiveness. They planted Britain* and gave to the seas and mountains names which are poems and imitate the pure voices of nature. They are favor- ably remembered in the oldest records of Europe. They had no vio- lent feudal tenure, but the husbandman owned the land. They had an alphabet, astronomy, and priestly culture, and a sublime creed. They have a hidden and precarious genius, and made the best popular litera- ture of the middle ages." The reader may also, if he wishes, consult the works of Betham, Yallancy, Plowden, Cobbett, and Lingard. These men are exceptions, in greater or less degree, * "England was originally peopled by a wave of Celtic migration. ANCIENT ERIN. 125 among the swarm of ignorant and prejudiced British writers who have, with definite and malicious purpose, heaped upon Ireland every calumny they could invent. Froude, for instance, rejects the substance of Irish his- tory as fabulous, although from his ignorance of the Celtic language his judgment is not worth a pin' s weight. More than this, the declamatory charlatan penned a de- liberate falsehood, for abundant evidences to disprove his assertion lay before his face, so palpable and con- vincing that he could not wholly fail to realize their significance. Now a word in reference to the " classical" objection. It is easy to account for Ireland's conspicuous absence from Koman annals : she was the only nation of the West which the Caesars never conquered. The dawn of the Christian era found the Romans masters of nearly all the then known world ; but upon Irish soil their eagles were never planted.* Six hundred years before, Hugony More had led forth an Irish army which ravaged the ter- ritory now covered by France and Piedmont. Invasion, war, and pillage were the fashion of the time. Mankind had not yet learned the gospel of " live and let live ; " so the Irish legions, crossing over to Gaul or Scotia Mi- nor f (which latter was for ages a tributary colony to * Professor Sullivan, President of the Queen's College, Cork, inclines to the helief that the dread Fermoria, so often mentioned in Irish annals, were none other than the Romans. t Young readers may need to he informed that at this epoch, as for ages after, Ireland was known to Europe by the name of Scotia. Subsequently the name was extended to Caledo- nia, and the two were distinguished by the Latin equivalents of Greater and Lesser. Some twelve hundred years before Christ, a colony of Picts, sailing from the eastern shores of the ^Egean, sought to settle in Ireland. Heremon refused to admit them, but advised them to seek a home on the opposite coast of Alba, whither the adventurers went, after having first obtained wives in Erin. From that time, down to the sixth century of our era, Scotia Minor was a colony tributary to Scotia Major, and sent deputations to the national assem- bly at Tara. The alliance thus sustained between the Picts and Scots made them more than a match for the Romans. In 590, the Irish Hugh, finding Alba grown rich, resolved to make her pay for it ; but St. Columbkille, though himself an Irishman, raised the banner of resist- ance, and proclaimed Scotia Minor independent. 126 IKELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. Scotia Major, i.e., Ireland), made many a fierce onslaught upon the mail-clad veterans of Italy, and finally drove them back. The great Roman wall, built across the northern border of England, was an extraordinary mon- ument dedicated by Roman skill to Celtic valor. Fur- thermore, at the time here spoken of, the banner of the sunburst waved over many parts of continental Europe, and two Irish chieftains led victorious hosts across the plains of Gaul, and up to the very confines of the Caesars' domain in Italy. Mall of the Hostages met his death on the banks of the Loire, and his successor, Dathi, was slain by a thunderbolt at the foot of the Alps as he was preparing to rival the feat of Hannibal by crossing those icy ramparts and swooping down on the fertile plains of Italy. Alluding to those wild fo- rays, the Latin poet Claudian sings : "Totam cum Sootus Iernam Movit, et infesto spumavit remige Tethys." * And the historian Tacitus (writing in the first cen- tury) states that the waters and harbors of Ireland were, through her commerce, better known to navigators than those of Britain, although the latter had become a Ro- man province scores of years before. Elsewhere Tacitus recommends the invasion of Ireland "in order to remove from the Britons that desire for freedom which the spec- tacle of a free ally so near them must naturally ex- cite." Rome knew that Scotia Major was rich, fertile, and a dangerous rival ; why then did no Roman general essay her subjugation 1 Because, says Anglican Bishop Barnard, the Roman general "had work enough cut out * The couplet has been thus translated : " When Scots came thundering from the Irish shores, The ocean trembled 'neath their hostile oars." ANCIENT EEIN. 127 for him* by the valor of the Irish and Caledonians, with- out crossing the sea in search of a new enemy. A closer contact and more extended conflict with Ro- man civilization, such as it was, would have been an undoubted benefit to the Irish, by teaching them better methods of organization, and suggesting various im- provements in their political institutions. Of course, forays into the heart of Europe for no better purpose than pillage, slave- snatching, and throat-slitting are not much to boast of ; but as most empires have been built up by similar agencies and methods, the incidents have a historical value. They serve to show what foundation of inherent vigor and resources the nation had on which to rest its subsequent progress, had not its development been arrested by external influences. With all these facts before him, Mr. Froude calmly asserts that the ancient Irish were only a herd of trans- planted Digger Indians. Against his dogmatic dictum we may quietly place the subjoined declaration, wrung from the London Tory Standard in a review of Prof essoi Bourke's book on the Ancient Irish : ' ' He refutes, for example, beyond all question, the common myth that the Pagan Irish were barbarians, and that civilization only came to them through the preaching of St. Patrick. A thousand years before 'the saint of saints' landed on the shores of Ireland, a highly civilized race, of Celts lived in that kingdom, skilled in architecture, in painting, in music, in sculpture, in glass-making, in enameling, in dyeing, in the workmanship of brass, silver, gold, and iron, in the knowledge of read- ing and writing, with schools not only for boys, but for girls, with arts of coloring glass and metals which are now unknown, with laws of social life of the highest type of civilization, and with a constitutional govern- ment partly monarchial and partly republican. All this is evidenced * At the time Bishop Barnard speaks of, a formidable force was operating in North Britain under an Irish general. . . In his sketch of the Menapii, John Savage relates how Carausius, a native of Wexford, took service under the Romans, tamed the Scandinavian sea-kings, the Franks, and the Saxons, and (A.D. 285-288) assumed the imperial purple, com- pelling Maximian to acknowledge him as associate emperor, and taking Britain as his share. 128 IKELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. by more than fwelve hundred manuscripts, which have come down from the earliest times, by the Round Towers and other architectural remains, by coins, by tombs, by gold ornaments, and a multitude of relics of Ire- land's pristine glory which modern discovery has raised from the for- gotten sepulchre of ages. It is not merely the magnitude and the mag- nificence of ancient Irish civilization upon which this writer insists, but on its characteristic and dominant originality, showing, as he does, that it imposed the laws of civilization on surrounding nations, and was subject to no laics but its own. Everything that is most beautiful in Irish antique art belongs to the pre-Norman Was Ireland, then, an earthly paradise, and were her people faultless? somebody may be tempted to ask. No: they had their weaknesses and crimes like every other branch of the hnman family. Prior to their con- version, they looked upon outside races as fair subjects to be despoiled and hewed to pieces ; they were of fiery temper ; they fostered distinctions of caste ; they kept slaves. For the rest, in their domestic institutions, laws, manners, arts, literature, and chivalrous respect for women, they were ages ahead of the best among their neighbors. CHAPTER III. CONVEESION TO CHKISTIANITY. St. Patrick's Mission and its Effects— How Ireland became "the Isle of Saints and Scholars " and "the School of Europe" — Propagandist Fervor— Education Free to all comers. " From thy shores, on darkened Europe, Did the light of science blaze." thunderbolt that laid Dathi low, as "with Jura at his back" he marched in triumph to- ward Rome, foreshadowed the fall of Paganism in Ireland. Among the captives brought back by Mall from one of his raids in Gaul — or, according to other authorities, a pilgrim in search of knowledge — was a Christian youth named Succath, who for years tended swine on the hills of Antrim. Escaping from captivity, the youth studied for the ministry under his uncle, St. Martin of Tours, was ordained, and was soon afterward consecrated a bishop, receiving the name of Pateicius. This was the Apostle of Ireland.* Landing in the year 432, he proceeded toward Tara at the season when the great Druidic festival of Beat- tinne\ was being celebrated. During this solemn Pagan * In his Memorial, or report, written in Rome at the close of the fifth century, St. Patrick states that some other missionaries had previously visited the island, but had made no deep impression on it. These precursors were Kieran, Declan, Ailbe, and Ibhar. In the same document is given an account of the Druidic rites and tenets, which admitted no blood- sacrifices, human or otherwise. In this respect the sun-worship of the Milesians differed radically from that of the Mexicans and other ancient nations. t The Baal-fire in honor of Baal, the sun-god. 9 129 130 IKELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. ceremonial, it was forbidden to light any fire in the ter- ritory until the signal had been given by the kindling of the sacred flame on Tara hill. In direct violation of this ordinance Patrick kindled his Paschal fire on the opposite slope of Slane, and was quickly arrested to answer for the offense. Confronting the monarch and the Druids, he boldly declared that the design of his mission was to quench forever the fires of Pagan sacri- fice in Erin. The multitude was naturally angered at so audacious an attack upon its divinities — for, whether Pagan or Christian, all the Celtic races have been noted for a deep, ineradicable religious sentiment. Yet, mark, the Irish at Tara neither stoned nor crucified the bold intruder who thus stood up to dethrone their gods. Overlooking the insult offered to Baal in their philo- sophic curiosity to learn and examine the tenets of the new-comer, the Druids and jurists entered into discus- sion with him. Many were then and there converted, and the result of Patrick's mission furnishes the only instance on record of a whole nation won to Christianity without the shedding of blood ; — the age of martyrs was to come later on ! This single fact constitutes a signal and impregnable proof of Ireland' s early civilization : had not the soil been prepared for the seed, no such harvest could have been garnered. And in this fact every Irishman, whether Catholic or non-Catholic, is entitled to take just pride, for in St. Patrick's time there was but one Christian Church ; professed followers of the meek and holy Nazarene had not yet begun to slit throats for the enforcement of orthodoxy. It is no exaggeration to say that the results of Pat- rick' s work fill some of the grandest pages in human annals. Under the inspiration of his teaching Ireland won the proud pre-eminence of being designated "the School of Europe" and "the Isle of Saints and Scho- CONVERSION TO CHRISTIANITY. 181 lars." Under Pagan rule the island had already been a famous literary center, and large portions of the pub- lic lands had been set apart to promote and sustain educational progress. Christianity did not give birth to either the literature or civilization of the country, but it did impart to both a fresh current of vitality and the spirit of propagandism. Patrick brought with him no lay learning, nor books, nor instruments ; he brought only his religious teachings and ceremonies. He intro- duced the Latin tongue and alphabet. For the rest, he found his converts familiar with all the arts of the time, and possessed of the best code of laws then known. Toland, in his History of the British Druids, says : "At this era the Irish were the most enlightened cultivators of letters in Europe, and so great was the respect in which their learning was held by the Saxons and North Britons, that the Druids of these countries for ages were initiated into their arts, knowledge, and mysteries by the Irish Druids." The English writer Camden says : " St. Patrick found the Irish Druids, who contended with him at Tara, eminently versed in Grecian literature and astronomy." Bishop Stillingfleet, another adverse authority, writes : "St. Patrick certainly brought no accession of literature to the Irish, as their Druids were then the most learned body of men in Europe, and stood unrivaled in the cultivation of letters." With such a foundation to build on, the nation ad- vanced and grew under the benign influence of Christian- ity at a rate little short of miraculous. Schools, churches, monasteries were raised by the magic of a profound popular enthusiasm. Every valley became the abode of sanctity and science, every lake and river reflected the smile of peaceful industry. In a brief space Ireland became the University of Europe ; and, observe, hers 132 IRELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. were free schools, to which all who came were wel- come and were not only taught, but fed and maintained gratuitously. To these halls nocked students from cen- tral, southern, and western Europe. They could not go elsewhere, for, at the very time when Ireland approached the pinnacle of her scholastic fame, the whole continent was quaking under the tread of the " barbarians," who swept across it like a hurricane. The Koman empire was crumbling before the impetuous onset of northern hordes, who followed in the path first marked out by Mall and Dathi. Britain groaned beneath the iron heel of Hengist and his Saxons. Clovis led his nomadic legions across the Rhine into Gaul. In Spain and the South-west, as in the north of Africa, the Yandal forged his sword into a scepter. In Italy, the last bulwark of Pagan Rome went down, like a dry reed, before the irrup- tion of the Goths. The trembling Christians hid them- selves in the depths of the catacombs, and it seemed as if the world were about to lapse back into barbarism and ignorance more dense than ever. But one bright spot remained. Tranquil and secure in the Atlantic's bosom, away from all the wreck and turmoil, Ireland proved an ark of refuge to science, re- ligion, art, and literature ; and from her shores set in the reaction which rescued Europe from its threatened doom. The Irish missionaries went forth to every land, found- ing schools and abbeys, restoring the shattered temples of faith and learning, refining morals, preaching the pure ethics of the gospel to races sunk in animalism, and earning for themselves undying fame and gratitude. One paragraph here from Camden : "The disciples of St. Patrick made so great a progress in Christian- ity, that in the following age Ireland was called ' the Island of Saints ; ' and none could be more holy and learned than the Irish monks, both in their own country and Britain, who sent swarms of most holy men into all Europe." CONVEESION TO CHRISTIANITY. 133 Another historian says : M The Irish Church, the most active, the most missionary, the most instinct with life, was the only one that did not rest its success on the accumulation of wealth and dignities. A despoiled shrine seemed all the holier to an Irish monk. No other Church left to future times the example and the certain element of success." It is on record that a single Irish university, that of Lismore, during the ages of its fame educated more stu- dents than have Oxford and Cambridge together since their foundation. Do not forget that these were free schools, in which there was "no royal road to learning." All were welcome to travel the same broad path ; and Alfred the Great of Britain, or Prince Dagobert of Aus- tria, drew his knowledge from the same generous fount that fed the son of Irish kerne or Caledonian mountain- eer. Ten centuries have since elapsed, new worlds have been discovered, new sciences developed, steam-engine and printing-press invented ; but no nobler system of education has since been devised and put in operation, even under the broad segis of the Western Republic* Alfred of Northumbria, as we have said, was educated here, was made familiar with the literature, laws, and customs known and practiced here, and hence he im- ported to England the groundwork of all that is best in her civilization, f From Ireland he borrowed the law of * For his masterly essay on " The Free Schools of Ancient Ireland," a debt of lasting gratitnde is due to the late Father Byrne, of Toledo, Ohio. t Alfred wrote a poem, called his Itinerary, in recognition of the hospitalities extended tc him in Ireland. I quote a few verses from Mangan's translation of it : " I traveled its fruitful provinces round. And in every one of the five I found, Alike in church and in palace-hall, Abundant apparel and food for all. Gold and silver I found, and money, Plenty of wheat and plenty of honey ; I found God's people rich in pity, Found many a feast and many a city. I found strict morals in age and youth, I found historians recording truth," etc 134 IKELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. Gavel, * the trial by jury,f tlie Parliament or assembly of estates, the partition of the country into shires or counties for administrative purposes, $ and, in fact, the superstructure of the whole Brehon code. An English writer has boasted that, had his country never done aught else for mankind than to give us the trial by jury, this gift alone would earn for her the world' s unceasing praise. How few, any more than he, know that the Trial by Twelve was "an ancient custom of Ireland" — was mentioned as such by St. Patrick, who retained it when revising the Brehon code ! It is an easy matter for any callow, heedless student nowadays to talk glibly of " the lazy monks," as the ste- reotyped phrase runs ; but wise and learned men never fail to recognize the extent to which every later gen- eration is indebted to those grand, unselfish workers, the monks of the middle ages, with whom veritably work was worship. To appreciate their labors, we must recol- lect what Europe was down to the middle of the fifteenth century. All means of intercourse between nations were necessarily limited ; roads were few and unsafe, travel- ing conveyances rude and slow ; navigation had not yet been revolutionized by the discovery of new conti- * The law of gavel, upon the death of a man owning a specified amount of property, com- pelled an equitable distribution of lands and chattels among his family. It was the very opposite of the later feudal English laws of entail and primogeniture, which invest the eld- est male heir with the entire possessions of the family. Entail is designed to create and foster an aristocracy, for which reason, as also for its inherent injustice, the United States abolished it, after winning their independence, and substituted the Irish law of gavel. t " No scholar or jurist will venture to say that trial by the jury of twelve was known to the laws of any of the Greek islands. It cannot be found among the laws of the Twelve Tables of Home, nor is it in the Pandects of Justinian— a work which embodied the entire laws of the Roman empire. No feature of trial by twelve can be found in the institutions of the Visigoths, whose kings succeeded those of Eome in Italy, and who introduced through the south of Europe a new code of jurisprudence ; nor can it be traced in the laws of the Ostrogoths, who swarmed about the Baltic ; nor, least of all, amongst the customs of the Saxons, the most ferocious and illiterate of the barbarians of ancient Europe.* 1 — Moonet. % Ireland was divided into one hundred and eighty-four tuaths, corresponding substantially with the present " baronies." SCULPTURED PORTAL OP THE ABBEY OP CLONMACNOlSE. ANCIENT CROSS AT CLONMACNOISE. RUTN8 OF HOLY CROSS CHURCH, TIPPERARY. (A. D. 1110.) Antique Irish Sculpture, CONVEKSION TO CHEISTIANITY. 135 nenfcs ; learning was unavoidably confined to ecclesiastics, scribes, and a few nobles, for printing, which, diffused all knowledge so quickly and successfully, was yet an art unknown. " Every architect and scholar knows,'' says Mooney, "that these monks were the workmen of Europe for ^.ve hundred years ; they were the architects, the masons, the carpenters, the plumbers, smiths, glass- makers, sculptors, painters. A great many societies of these holy men joined together for the purpose of erect- ing churches and bridges, from motives of pure charity to others, in obedience to a strong religious feeling. Of course this is incredible to the great mass of vulgarity who continue to call the monks 'lazy,' in defiance of the literary and scientific monuments they have left be- hind. But scholars know that the stone bridges and churches through Europe, which were erected before the tenth century, were all built by the hands and under the direction exclusively of the monks." Besides, they were the teachers of youth, the guardians of the widow, the orphan, and the poor ; they protected and guided travelers, tended and relieved the sick, translated, copied, and multiplied manuscripts, preached the gospel, fos- tered art and literature ; — in a word, performed every humane and humanizing duty. Be it remembered that in the ages here spoken of Protestants themselves main- tain that the Church was at its purest and its best ; con- sequently even non- Catholics will not accuse me of color- ing the historical picture to suit any latent theological design. Come we now to the Irish monks in particular, and briefly sum up what they accomplished. They evangel- ized Europe, carrying civilization to peoples on whom not all the elegance of Athens nor the prowess of Rome could ever make a permanent impression. In addition to the multitudes from all lands whom they instructed 136 IRELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. in Ireland, they themselves went ont singly or in com- panies, and the record of their missionary zeal is inef- faceably carven on the breast of Western Europe. In 563 Columbkille founded Iona, the fount of Scottish civilization. Next came Lindisfarne, in northern Eng- land ; while Diumha and Killach, in Mercia and the Mid- lands, made war on Saxon barbarism. The lamps that illuminated Britain were lighted in the north long before Augustine set foot in Kent. Columbanus, crossing into Gaul, founded Luxeuil, and passing thence to Lom- bardy, Bobbio sprang up beneath his ardor. His com- panion, St. Gall, gave his name to an abbey, afterward a town, finally a canton, of Switzerland. Ratisbon was another great missionary center raised by the same en- thusiasm. Each of those institutions became, in turn, the parent of a hundred others — for, as soon as one monastery was filled, a detachment of twelve was sent out to establish a new branch ; and thus was the impulse sent, wave by wave, "from the Atlantic to the Euxine, from the Arctic to the Mediterranean." The oldest universities in Europe are those of Paris, Pavia, and Oxford — the first two of which were estab- lished by Irishmen under the patronage of Charlemagne, the third by an Irishman under the patronage of Alfred. At the head of Paris and Pavia stood Clemens and Albi- nus ; the corner-stone of Oxford was laid under the guid- ance of John Scotus Erigena (Irish John), a man marvel- ously skilled in all the learning of his time. Another Irishman, Virgilius (O'Farrel), wrote a famous treatise on natural science and astronomy, in which he boldly main- tained the theory of the sphericity of the earth and the existence of the antipodes, centuries before Copernicus gave to the world the outlines of that planetary system which now bears his name. It would be an endless labor to enumerate in detail the names of the Irish missiona- CONVEESION TO CHRISTIANITY. 137 ries who in those ages dissipated the intellectual and moral darkness hanging, like a mephitic vapor, over Europe. In brief, they had thirteen monasteries in Scot- land, twelve in England, twelve in Armoric Gaul, sixteen in Bavaria, eleven in Burgundy, ten in Alsatia, nine in Belgium, seven in Lotharingia, seven in other parts of Gaul, six in Italy, twenty-five in Rhetia, Helvetia, Sue- via, Thuringia, and the left bank of the Rhine. In an address to O'Connell (1844) the Germans thus gracefully acknowledged their indebtedness to Ireland : "We never can forget to look upon your beloved country as our mother in religion, that already at the remotest periods of the Christian era sent forth her spiritual sons to rescue our Pagan ancestors from idol- atry," etc. More notable still is the fact that these Irish scholars were called upon to revive theology and the Latin tongue in Rome itself ! In the Breviary of Paris we read : ' ' She [Rome] sent to Ireland for learned men to expound to herself and her people the canticles of the holy law, which the Irish had almost by heart" Finally, it is now held by eminent historical critics and investigators that these Irish monks originated, as they are conceded to have improved and developed, the sublime order of architecture known as "Gothic," but which did not re- ceive that name before the sixteenth century. Cormac's Chapel on the Rock of Cashel, in Ireland, is the oldest specimen of the true pointed-arch style of architecture in Europe ; it was erected in the year 880, and after it was modeled St. Peter's Church at Oxford. Salisbury Cathe- dral, the first complete English structure in the pointed- arch style, was fashioned after Holy Cross Abbey in Limerick. The grand church of Charlemagne at Aix-la- Chapelle was built by Irish monks from the Abbey of St. Gall, who attached to the edifice a Round Tower — the only one on the continent. The finest specimen of old 138 IRELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. " Gothic M architecture in Portugal is the church at Ba- tallia ; it, too, was built by an Irishman. Well might that learned Englishman, Dr. Milner, ask : 4 ' Who, sir, were the luminaries of the western world when the sun of science had almost set on us ? Who were the instructors of nations during four whole centuries, but the Irish ? To them you are indebted for the preservation of the Bible, the Fathers, and the classics — in short, of the means by which you yourselves have acquired whatever literature you Yet Mr. Froude glibly asserts that the Irish never had any architecture of their own, and, moreover, "robbed of its grace" that which was generously imported to them from England. A suggestive commentary on this fiction is the fact that, when England recently undertook to build herself a magnificent Parliament House, she came to Ireland for an architect (Barry) to plan it, and a painter (Maclise) to adorn it. * From a hostile source— namely, Harper's Magazine, Oct., 1871— comes a similar declara- tion : " It should he remembered that the Irish were the first to impress upon the barbarians of the north the necessity of popular education, the priceless importance of the public school." CHAPTEK IV. THE DANISH INVASION. Ireland Desolated and Distracted by Scandinavian Pirates — A Protracted Struggle ending in the Destruction of the Vdjing Power. " Curses darker than Ben Heder light upon the craven slave Who prefers the life of traitor to the glory of the grave ! Freedom's guerdon now awaits you, or a destiny of chains- Trample down the dark oppressor while one spark of life remains ! " the midst of the domestic tranquillity and mis- sionary energy just described, Ireland was fated jjyj to undergo a fiery ordeal from the irruptions of those Scandinavian pirates who, toward the middle of the ninth century, astonished and alarmed the continent. These fierce sea-rovers, commonly known as Norsemen or Normans, seem to have been the first maritime peo- ple to recognize the advantage of a prominent keel in making seaworthy ships, and their galleys were in con- sequence long and firm, with sharp lines and a cloud of sail. Swooping down from their cold northern fastnesses the ferocious adventurers made sudden descents on every exposed coast, plundering and massacring the in- habitants, and were off to sea again, to repeat the same violence elsewhere, before any organized resistance could be made to their lightning onset.* A fearless and daring, though cruel, race were those mail-clad warriors, whose raven banner affrighted Eu- * From a biographical sketch by Jon A. Hjatalin we learn that the famous Danish sculp- tor Thorwaldsen was remotely descended from the daughter of an Irish chieftain who mar- ried one of the stalwart Vikings. 139 140 IRELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. rope as a scourge until in every litany of the time was incorporated the petition : A furore JVormanorum, libera nos, Domine ! * Observing none of the usual conditions of warfare, they respected neither sex, age, nor condition ; gave no quarter, and made it their especial care to de- stroy every vestige of literature they could reach. They pillaged Hamburg, and penetrated far into Germany. They sacked London, and gave a new race of kings to England. They founded a kingdom in the heart of Gaul, whence a second time they vanquished Britain, and gave to it a new dynasty in the person of William of Nor- mandy. Ireland alone, among all the western nations, sternly and steadily repelled them, finally shattered their power, and thereby transferred the scepter of the sea to the Spaniards and Portuguese. When, in their usual business-like fashion, the pirates began to ravage the Irish coasts, and, growing more audacious, to settle down in colonies near the maritime verge, there began a series of isolated though bloody duels, in which every Irish chieftain undertook to defend his own slice of territory from invasion — a ruinous pol- icy, which protracted the conflict for more than two hundred years, with scarcely a single interval of repose. This reflection brings us to what was the radical weak- ness of the old Irish Constitution — its decentralizing ten- dency. It was literally too democratic for the times in which it flourished. Under it the country was divided into five provincial kingdoms, ruled by elective sove- reigns of their own choice ; and one of the five, with the title of Ardrigh, exercised a sort of federal jurisdiction over the whole island. In theory the Ardrigh was arbi- ter of all important disputes and custodian of the com- mon interests ; but in practice his functions were too * M From the fury of the Northmen, Lord, deliver us ! " THE DANISH INVASION. 141 often overlooked and direct appeals made to the arbitra- ment of the strong hand, which he had not the power to prevent. The nation was always nnited enough, but its strength was seldom consolidated or centralized. This simple distinction sweeps away three-fonrths of the cant and rubbish spoken about " Irish disunion." True, they did not solve the problem of harmonizing the full- est degree of local self-government with a powerful cen- tral authority ; yet, before ridiculing their failure, we might recollect that the same problem shook these United States to their center with the tread of armed legions not a score of years gone by. Of the innumerable battles fought with the Danes prior to Clontarf, one deserves special prominence, inas- much as it proves that even in the tenth century Ireland fitted out a fleet which vanquished the Vikings on their own domain — the sea. Sorely harassed by the Irish tribes under Callachan, the Danish leader, Sitric, made propo- sals for peace, and by perfidious breach of faith seized the Irish leader. He then retreated to Dundalk, where his ships lay, and, being pursued by the Irish army, took refuge aboard his vessels. Before he could sail, the Munster fleet appeared in the harbor, and the rival navies grappled in one of the most sanguinary combats on record. The Celtic commander being slain, the fight was progressing in favor of the Norsemen, under their gigantic leaders, the brothers Sitric, Tor, and Magnus, when suddenly from the opposing ranks sprang three Irish chieftains — Fingal, Connal, and Leagha — who, grasping the Danish brothers in their arms, sprang with them into the sea and found a single grave. Reanimated by this heroic feat, the Irish redoubled the vigor of their assault until not a solitary follower of Sitric was left to mourn his defeat. Wherein should Salamis take the palm from Dundalk ? 142 IKELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. Pass we now to the year 1001, which saw Brian of the Tribute (Boroimhe) proclaimed Ardrigh of Ireland. He repaired the ravages of war, restored the public roads, and established so vigilant a police system that a beau- tiful, gem-clad maiden is said to have passed, unattended and unguarded, from end to end of the island without molestation. * Encouraged by their easy triumph in Eng- land, the Danes now began to muster for a final effort to subjugate Ireland. The whole Scandinavian race, from Anglesey and Man northward to Norway, sent in its contingents to swell the force of Sigurd, famous Earl of Orkney, and the prize was thought secure, especially as Brian's brother-in-law was in traitorous communication with the enemy. But for once the central authority in Ireland was held by a man capable of utilizing it. See- ing that a supreme effort would be required, Brian rallied the tributary chieftains under a single standard, and shoulder to shoulder they charged at Clontarf — "For red vengeance on the spoiler, whom the blazing temples trace For the honor of our maidens and the glory of our race. " The battle of Clontarf was fought on Good Friday, 1014, and so pitilessly was the invader there scourged that his reign of .terror was ended, although his power was not completely annihilated in Ireland for nearly a century later. One result of the encounter, as has been already stated, was to transfer the scepter of naval supremacy to the nations bordering on the Mediterra- nean ; and for this alone, if for no other reason, Clontarf deserves to be reckoned among the decisive battles of history. Ireland, though victorious, was well-nigh exhausted. The incessant warfare of two and a half centuries had * On which alleged incident Moore wrote the charming lyric, " Rich and rare were the gems she wore." THE DANISH INVASION. 143 necessarily left its imprint deep upon her breast. Col- leges, monasteries, libraries had been sacked and bnrned, commerce and industry interrupted, and (at the mini- mum estimate of six thousand per annum) one and a half million Irishmen must have perished during this destructive conflict. To add to the evils of the situation, Brian had fallen in the hour of his triumph, leaving the sovereignty to become a bone of contention among a swarm of selfish aspirants. Nevertheless, the members of learned professions emerged from their hiding-places and labored so diligently that, despite the demoraliza- tion of war and internal dissension, the nation began to reassume its scholastic position. What was the condi- tion of England at the time? Let her own annalist, William of Malmesbury (quoted by Dr. Milner), answer : U A few years before the Norman Conquest [of England] the clergy could hardly stammer through the service of the Church, and he who knew the rules of grammar was viewed as a prodigy. " Remember that at the epoch here mentioned, even more than at the present day, the highest culture of a nation was gauged by the attainments of its clergy. CHAPTER V. THE ANGLO-NORMAN INVASION. Henry the Second's Mission op " Civilization, " Its Ethics and Instruments. " If there be in the annals of the human race a transaction of deeper and more melancholy depravity than the conquest of Ireland by Henry II., it has not fallen under my notice."— President John Quenct Adams. [DT only was Britain evangelized and civilized by Irish missionaries, bnt "the Saxons received, in $$ the sixth century, their literature and the very form of their letters from the Hibernians," as Bede, Camden, and a host of old British writers attest ; bnt of conrse no modern Briton with a proper consciousness of his own greatness will make any such acknowledgment ; he would rather devour his own head. How did Eng- land repay the benefits thus conferred \ The American author Paulding gives a concise reply: " England first denied Irishmen the means of improvement, and then insulted them with the imputation of barbarism." For more than six hundred years every English statute re- lating to literature or education in Ireland made both the one and the other a contraband article. Rather a curious plan for civilizing a nation on which Europe in grateful admiration had bestowed the title " Isle of Scholars" ! But does not Mr. Froude assert that the Anglo -Nor- mans came to Ireland with the sole desire of " extend- ing the forms of English liberty — her trials by jury, her 144 ANGLO-NORMAN INVASION. 145 local courts, her parliaments — to a people essentially unfit for them" ? Gabble and rubbish. That the Irish were then constitutionally unfit to accept the Norman yoke, as that they have ever since been unable to ap- preciate the blessings of English legislation, I concede. Small blame to them for their unfitness ; for forms of liberty in this connection can be mentioned only as a grim satire. The English could not give what they them- selves had not. At the very time of which Froude here speaks, and for ages after, the English were bought and sold like cattle in open market, four oxen being the average price of an Englishman ; * the country was gov- erned by baron law ; the edict of the king was para- mount ; and even the trial by jury, originally trans- planted from Ireland by Alfred, was suspended. After the Norman conquest, the first assembly known as a Parliament in England was held in the year 1300. As late as 1844 Lord Brougham pronounced the laws of England to be " the greatest gathering of fraud, villainy, rubbish, and absurdity that ever the world heard of" — and England, mind you, had been making progress since 1172 ! Mr. Froude, however, is resolute to maintain that the English were not led to Ireland solely by their keen scent for plunder ; so he endows his pirates with all the graces of an angelic host. Nobody pretends that the Irish in that age were per- fect. They had been engaged for nigh three centuries in an incessant warfare, through which morals and re- ligion had necessarily suffered, and this degeneracy was the more conspicuous by reason of Ireland's previous pre-eminence. But the conscience of the nation was be- * This we have on the authority of an English historian, Wade, who adds : "Contumely was added to oppression, and the unfortunate natives were reduced to such a state of ser- vility, meanness, and poverty, that far ages the English name became a term of reproach." What admirable " forms of liberty " to impose upon a neighbor 1 10 146 IRELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. ginning to reassert itself, in proof of which may be men- tioned the fact that at the Synod of Kells (1152) simony, usury, concubinage, and other abuses were formally con- demned. Prominent among those deserving to come under the ban some years later, was Dermot MacMur- rough, provincial king of Leinster, who had abducted the wife of O' Rouark, prince of Breffni. The offense was discussed at a national council, and " unbridled" though the " licentiousness " of the people was (according to Froude and Cambrensis), this council decided that Der- mot was unworthy to longer exercise civil authority, and sentenced him to be deposed. With the prompt instinct of a profligate, MacMur- rough fled to lay his grievance at the feet of his co-liber- tine,* Henry II. of England. The latter, having on hand as much as he was able to attend to at the time, could only give Dermot permission to raise recruits. By dili- gent efforts and magnificent promises the outcast in- duced Strongbow to muster a little band of adventurers to accompany him. Landing in Ireland, a force suffi- cient to annihilate them was quickly under arms ; but by a pretense of abject sorrow and contrition Dermot man- aged to secure forgiveness, and was reinstated over a portion of Wexford. During the winter he secretly carried on negotiations, and in May, 1169, another con- tingent came to him from Wales. They laid siege to Wexford town and were three times repulsed, when the little garrison capitulated by the advice of the clergy, who were anxious to stay the effusion of blood. This trifling success gave prestige to MacMurrough and his auxiliaries ; but the affair caused little excitement or alarm throughout the country, the presence of the ad- venturers being looked upon as a mere transient phase * This civilizer, of fragrant memory, seduced the woman who was betrothed to his own son Richard. Nice stamp of a man he was to teach the Ten Commandments I ANGLO-NORMAN INVASION. 147 of local warfare. When Strongbow came, however, in the following year, and captnred Waterford, matters assumed a graver aspect, and the Ardrigh, Roderick O'Connor, led an army into Leinster. MacMurrough and his allies by a rapid march reached Dublin ; but, finding the citizens prepared to resist, proposed a par- ley. A deputation led by the clergy, and eager to pre- vent bloodshed, met the besiegers in their camp, and while everybody sat awaiting the result, a thousand picked men succeeded in surprising the city, giving it over to slaughter, pillage, and outrage. With the capi- tal thus treacherously secured, Strongbow had now a firm footing ; yet the comparatively small number of his followers, added to the fact that his triumph was re- garded as a purely local affair, lulled the other provinces into such a false sense of security that when St. Law- rence O' Toole (now fully awake to the character of the foe) sought to unite the Irish chieftains in a single reso- lute effort to expel him, the patriotic prelate failed — merely inducing Roderick 0' Connor to make a bootless advance against the intrenched capital. Meantime Henry II., who had long yearned to acquire the mastery of Ireland, grew alarmed lest his vassal, Strongbow, should assume an independent sovereignty (which the latter might claim through his marriage with MacMurrough' s daughter). The consequence was, that in 1172 Henry arrived with four thousand five hundred men, and exhibited a papal bull investing him with the sovereignty of Ireland. This document, alleged to have been given by Adrian IV. — the only Englishman that ever wore the Roman tiara — is a grievous stumbling- block to some people, and countless are the controver- sies based upon it. There is little practical value in such discussions, whether the bull was forged, as some say, or genuine, as is commonly conceded. Had Henry 148 IRELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. brought a shipload of such bulls, and every one of them authentic, they would not have improved his title one jot, and would have no more essential bearing on the case to-day than so many military orders signed by Ju- lius Caesar. No document can sanctify injustice or vin- dicate deliberate fraud. Above and beyond all traffick- ing parchments rest the inalienable rights of mankind. It is an amusing fact that this bull of Adrian is the one solitary papal utterance for which the English people profess gratitude and respect.* They hoot and howl at Rome, yet they would be ineffably thankful if Rome engaged in the holy and wholesome work of forcing loyalty down the Irish throat. It is to be regretted that the Irish clergy (who of course were an influential class) took no decisive and resolute stand against Henry's impudent claim. A large portion of them, deceived by the bull and desirous of peace at almost any price, ad- vised the recognition of Henry's authority, which, be it remembered, was claimed to be a merely titular sove- reignty. Acting on this advice, Roderick O'Connor signed a treaty defining their mutual relations, and ex- pressly stipulating that the English monarch should occupy only the position of feudal suzerain in Ireland. Every subsequent act of English aggression was a viola- tion of that first solemn compact. Having gained a somewhat slippery footing, the saintly Henry began to execute his "mission." He had come to teach the ten commandments — so say his apologists — and he did it after his own peculiar fashion by breaking every one of them ! In his train were a number of needy barons, apt disciples of so brilliant a master, among * Froude says that the Pope at that time claimed temporal sovereignty over all islands. But what is the use of beating around the bush so persistently in quest of a title that never existed? Supposing that Adrian had a right to transfer Ireland to Henry II., was not the bull of excommunication against Elizabeth equally authoritative, absolving all her subjects from their allegiance ? If one was worth a straw, so was the other. ANGLO-NOKMAN INVASION. 149 whom lie proceeded to parcel out the entire island in royal grants. The majority of the recipients, of course, never even saw a rood of the land so bounteously lav- ished on them. But what matter? The royal donor merely desired to impress upon those wicked Irish a sense of respect for law and property ! He gave away the entire kingdom of Meath (800,000 acres) to De Lacy. The rightful occupant, O' Ruarc, demanding redress, was invited to meet the Norman claimant in a conference at Tara. They met, and a kinsman of De Lacy made him- self arbiter of the case by assassinating the Irish chief, whose nature was too noble to dread or suspect so das- tardly a crime. Leaving a large contingent of his followers to seize on whatever portions of Leinster they could hold, and there breed ruin and dissension for ages, Henry returned home. Is it not evident, somebody will ask, that the Irish were a weak, factious, and turbulent herd, when they allowed themselves to be conquered by a few thou- sand adventurers? Well, factious and near-sighted they certainly were ; but there was no conquest, often though the term is employed. It was the fashion of every province, sometimes of every tribe, to fight its own battles. MacMurrough and most of his people were allied with a foreign contingent ; only the authority of the Ardrigh was plainly jeopardized ; so English procla- mations were laughed at outside the Pale* for nearly four hundred years. Says Sir John Davies : "Henry departed out of Ireland without striking one blow, or build- ing one castle, or planting one garrison among the Irish ; neither left behind him one true subject more than those he found there at his first coming over, which were only the English adventurers spoken of before, * The Pale at first embraced a semicircle of seven counties in Leinster. It afterward dwindled away to four, always retaining the capital ; and beyond this belt Anglo-Norman authority did not extend until the time of Henry VIII. 150 IRELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. who had gained some port towns in Leinster and Munster, and pos- sessed some scopes of land thereunto adjoining." What the result would have been, had the Anglo-Nor- man invasion been decisively repelled at the outset, it is vain now to conjecture or speculate on. But this much is certain : Ireland' s independence would have materially altered the face of European history, would have checked British arrogance and aggression, and would have given to human annals a chapter of splendid achievements now unwritten. CHAPTER VL THE ERA OF THE PALE. Pbogeess, Extent, and Character op English Conquest nr Ieeland feom 1170 to 1534. 14 Adversus hostem ceterna auctoritas! " ROM tlie reign of Henry II. to that of Henry VIII. (1170-1534), a period of more than three and a half centuries, the English occupation of Ireland was confined to the semicircle of the Pale in Leinster, with occasional possession of some walled cities in the south ; yet during all this interval they bated not a jot of their insolent pretensions. Never holding more than an eighth of the island, they claimed to be the owners of it de jure from sea to sea, and bank- rupt kings in London awarded princely domains outside the Pale to retainers who never dared pluck blade of grass on the fields to which " title" was so easily pro- cured. The whole land was confiscated in law centuries before it was won or even traveled over. The barons who had settled in Leinster were a class of reckless broilers and spoilers, but fearless and of martial habit. Through their attempt to naturalize the feudal system on a soil completely unsuited to it, a prolific source of discord and turbulence was intruded upon the national life. An Irish clansman was far less docile and less easily imposed on than an English serf ; hence the adventurers were quick to discover that by fomenting 151 152 IKELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN". dissension and keeping the country in perpetual agita- tion, they could shirk the payment of feudal fines, trib- utes, and forfeitures to their liege in London ; and thus, under the various influences of political sympathy, fam- ily ties, or personal ambition, they began to array them- selves with the Irish septs against one another or against England. The jealousies and petty squabbles of the na- tive chiefs afforded ample scope for proving the value of this astute though treacherous policy. It passed into a proverb that the Anglo-Normans became "more Irish than the Irish themselves ; " which, taking Irish as the equivalent of anti- English, was often the case ; for (as Thierry remarks) they sometimes became as impoverished as the Irish themselves. But, as a rule, the Anglo-Nor- man nobles found their profit in carrying out the behests of England, and only when their own corns were rudely trodden on did they combine forces with the Celt. Meanwhile every year brought over a fresh swarm of rapacious soldiers of fortune, with royal patents in hand granting them large slices of Irish territory in payment of service done. An endless series of raids, plots, mas- sacres, and spasmodic campaigns attested their eager- ness to plunder and possess the whole island. Their occupation of Leinster had abolished the office and authority of the Ardrigh or King-paramount ; * conse- quently there was no central power to subdue and chas- tise them. Yet so stoutly did the separate Irish chiefs maintain themselves during the era here spoken of, that every new effort to widen the boundaries of the Pale re- coiled on those within it, until, in the reign of Henry VI. (1430), all the English settlers — those in Dublin alone ex- * Roderick O'Connor's last resolute stand was taken at Thurles, in 1174, where he cut one thousand seven hundred of the invaders to pieces and administered a needed lesson to them. He did not follow up the advantage thus gained, hut retired soon after to a monastery, ending his days in pious seclusion. He was not a man of the fit fiber to grasp the helm of Btate in such troublous times. THE EEA OF THE PALE. 153 cepted — paid annnal tribute to the Celtic chieftains near them for protection. In any year of the fifteenth cen- tury the Irish, had they so wished, might have extir- pated the whole Sassenach brood by a single concentrated blow ; but they seem to have viewed the game as posi- tively not worth the chasing. Every clan guarded its own territory, leaving its neighbors to do the same. The history of these three and a half centuries is in nowise very notable, except for the evidence it affords of England's unchanging animus. Before she had yet subdued a tenth of the country, she had every acre of it confiscated on paper, and had proclaimed every Irishman to be literally an alien and an outlaw in his own home. The Attorney- General of James I. candidly avows the purpose of his predecessors totally to "root out the Irish." Of historical facts to verify his avowal there is no lack. Henry II. handed over the management of the island to his son John, a cruel, capricious, and profligate scamp, who succeeded in quickly arousing a first-class insurrec- tion, which as quickly subsided after his departure. John's successor on the English throne, Henry III., con- vened Irish Parliaments in 1253 and 1269 ; from which fact it appears that the Anglo -Irish had a domestic legis- lature as early as England had hers — if either assembly deserved the name. In the reign of Edward I. many of the Irish leaders, wearied of incessant strife, offered the king eight thousand marks on condition that a uniform system of law and administration should be applied to the whole country. The Palesmen vehemently opposed and defeated the concession, knowing that it would greatly abridge their own powers and privileges. At the Parliament held in Kilkenny, in 1309, the murder of an Irishman or the violation of an Irishwoman was de- clared to be a not punishable offense under English law. 154 IRELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. A few years later Robert Bruce, of Scotland, thrashed the English at Bannockburn. His brother, Edward, came to Ireland, and was crowned king at Dundalk. After gaining some signal triumphs he found his army in a wretched plight through scarcity of provisions, and in his impatience staked and lost everything on the issue of a pitched battle under disastrous auspices, instead of waiting for the help which his brother Robert was bring- ing from Scotland. Lionel, second son of Edward III., was appointed Lord Deputy in 1361, and during his term were passed the famous Statutes of Kilkenny (1367), which prohibited all intercourse between the English and " the Irish enemie " under pain of high treason. In the last decade of the fourteenth century Richard II. embarked for Ireland "with all the forces he could collect throughout his kingdom from sea to sea," re- solved to make an end of Irish contumacy forever. He inveigled MacMurrough into a curious treaty, stipulating that the latter should quit Leinster before a specified date, surrendering all his tribe-lands to the English ; in compensation for which removal he should have full license to seize and hold any territory belonging to an Irish sept elsewhere that he could grasp at the sword's point ! When the appointed day arrived, MacMurrough, as if anxious to redeem the stained escutcheon of his line, broke the compact and defied Richard.* The lat- ter, to chastise this breach of a league which was cer- tainly more honored in the breach than the observance, led his army against the offender. MacMurrough, how- ever, with only three thousand men, so harried the in- vaders that they were glad to fall back upon Dublin — and the Leinster men kept their lands. In the time of Henry V. an appeal was made to the * The one sole instance on record wherein an Anglo-Irish treaty was not first violated by the English ; and this one they adhered to because it was infamous. THE EEA OF THE PALE. 155 Pope, begging him to excommunicate the rebelly Irish ; and within the Pale it was taught by English priests that the killing of an Irishman was no sin. The application to Rome was not successful ; probably Donald O'Neill's letter (quoted a little further on) was not yet forgotten. At the Parliament of the Little Pale (Trim, 1463) it was enacted that all persons suspected of going or coming to rob or steal, by day or night, having no English person in their company, might be summarily put to death ; and a handsome price was set upon the head of such sus- pects. It was also enacted that every Irish person with- in the Pale should take an English name and wear English apparel. The condition of the country in Henry VII. 's time may be illustrated by one or two incidents. The O' Neill wrote to the O'Donnell : " Send me tribute, or else ." The answer was : "I owe you no tribute, and if . ' ' These pithy missives resulted in war. . . The Earl of Kil- dare was accused in London of having burned the church of Cashel. " True," was his defense; "but I thought the Archbishop was inside of it ! " " All Ireland cannot govern this Earl," said his accusers. "Then this Earl shall govern all Ireland," replied Henry, and forthwith made him Deputy. . . The native Irish were foolish and factious enough to frequently espouse the quarrels of the Anglo-Norman nobles, and the thanks they got for it is admirably illustrated in Lord Gormanstown's proposal to the Earl of Kildare after their hard- won vic- tory at the battle of Knocktow. " We have slaughtered our enemies," said he ; "but to complete the good deed we should proceed yet further and cut the throats of those Irish of our own party." . . In this reign was passed Poyning's Act shackling the Dublin Parliament.* * See Chapter XIH., Part Second. 156 IBELAKD AS SHE HAS BEEN. In closing, I shall reproduce a somewhat lengthy but intensely interesting document, bearing date A.D. 1315, and containing a right sturdy Declaration of Independ- ence. It is the letter* of Donald O'Neill, King of Ul- ster, to Pope John XXII., giving a concise and forcible description of English rule in Ireland as known to the writer : To John, Pope — Donald CPNeyl, King of Ulster, together with the other princes of that territory, and the whole Irish people. Most Holy Father: We transmit to you some exact and candid particulars concerning the state of our nation and the wrongs we suffer, and which our ancestors suffered from the kings of England and their agents, and from English barons born in Ireland. After driving us by violence from our habitations, our fields, and our paternal inheritances, and compelling us, in order to save our lives, to make our abode in the mountains, marshes, woods, and caverns of the rocks, they incessantly harass us in these miserable retreats, to expel us from them and appro- priate to themselves the whole extent of our country. Hence, there has resulted an implacable enmity betwixt them and us ; and it was a former Pope who originally placed us in this miserable condition. They had promised that Pope that they would fashion the people of Hibernia to good morals and give them good laws ; so far from doing which, they have annihilated all the written laws by which we were formerly governed. They have thus not only left us without those laws, but, the better to accomplish our ruin, have established among us a detestable code, of which the following are specimens : It is a rule, in the king of England's courts of justice in Ireland, that every man who is not of Irish extraction may institute a judicial process of any kind, and that a like power is denied to the Irish, whether clergy or laity. If, as too frequently happens, an Englishman murders an Irish clerk or layman, the assassin is neither punished corporally, nor is he even amerced in a pecuniary fine ; but, on the contrary, the more considerable the murdered person was amongst us, the more his mur- derer is excused, honored, and rewarded by his countrymen, and this even by their religious men and their bishojis. No Irishman can dispose of his property on his death-bed ; the English appropriate it to themselves. The religious orders established in Ireland, which are situated within the * Translated from Thierry (ex Joaan. de Fordun. Scotichron., p. 908, ed. Hearue). THE EEA OF THE PALE. 157 English territory, are forbidden to receive into their monasteries men of the Irish nation. The English who have dwelt among us for many years, and are styled 14 men of mixed race," are not for that less cruel to us than are the others. Sometimes they invite to their table the first men of our nation, and treacherously kill them in the midst of the banquet, or during their sleep. Thus it was that Thomas de Clare, having allured to his house Brian the Ked of Thomond, his brother-in-law, put him to death by surprise, after partaking of the holy communion with him, the same con- secrated Host being divided in two parts. These crimes appear to them honorable and praiseworthy; and it is the belief of all their laymen and many of their churchmen that there is no more sin in killing an Irish- man than in killing a dog. Their monks say with assurance, that, after killing a man of our nation (which but too often happens), they should not think themselves bound to abstain from saying mass for a single day. As a proof of this, the Cistercian Monks established at Granard, in the Diocese of Armagh, and those of the same order at Tnes (Innis, an island) in Ulster, are daily attacking us with arms, wounding and killing the Irish, yet say their masses as usual. Brother Simon, of the Order of Friars Minors, a relative of the Bishop of Coventry, has pub- licly preached that there is not the smallest harm in killing or robbing an Irishman. In short, they all maintain that it is allowable for them to take from us whatsoever they can of our lands and goods ; nor are their consciences at all burdened in consequence, not even in the hour of their death. All these grievances, added to the difference of lan- guage and manners existing between them and us, preclude all hope of our ever preserving a peace or truce with them in this life ; so great is in them the lust of dominion ; so eager in us is the lawful and natu- ral desire of escaping from an intolerable bondage, and recovering the inheritance of our forefathers. We cherish in our breasts an inveterate hatred, produced by lengthened recollections of injustice, by the murder of our fathers, brothers, and kindred, and which will not be extinguished in our time nor in that of our sons. So that as long as we have life we will fight against them, without regret or remorse, in defense of our rights. "We will not cease to fight against and annoy them until the day when they themselves, for want of power, shall have ceased to do us harm, and the Supreme Judge shall have taken just vengeance on their crimes ; which we firmly hope will sooner or later come to pass. Until then we will make war upon them unto death, to recover the independence which is our natural right ; being compelled thereto by very necessity, and will- ing rather to face danger like brave men than to languish under insults. CHAPTEE VII. THE FEUD IN A NEW PHASE. Reigns op Henky VIII., Edward VI., and Mary Tudob— The Issue Assuming International Proportions for the first time. Not a Church missionary, but a Church predatory."— Mitchel. T was in the time of Henry VIII. that the Anglo- Irish duel first began to assume international proportions. From the domestication of Feudal- ism in England the nation's full power had always been largely centralized in the person of the sovereign; his own positive, tenacious will combined with the progress of events to make Henry VIII. the most absolute mon- arch that ever swayed scepter in that dominion. In its military aspect this centralization of power conferred an immense advantage, inasmuch as it enabled the ruler to concentrate his kingdom's entire strength on any chosen objective point. How Ireland came to be singled out for the energetic and persistent attack thus rendered possi- ble, we shall now see. Designed in youth for the service of the Church, Henry received a more careful education than was usu- ally given to princes in those days, but by the death of his elder brother he became heir-apparent, and ascended the throne in 1509. He distinguished himself in the field of letters by writing a book to vindicate the Roman Catholic Church against the assaults of Luther, for which 158 THE FEUD IN A NEW PHASE. 159 labor lie received the title* "Defender of the Faith." He married Catherine, daughter of Philip of Spain, but after fourteen years of wedded life grew tired of her, began to develop " scruples," and asked the Pope to annul their marriage on account of an alleged irregular- ity. The royal Bluebeard was anxious to form another matrimonial alliance, and his " scruples" were encour- aged by Cardinal Wolsey, a prelate of boundless ambi- tion, who (according to Abbe MacGeoghegan) aimed at making Henry's favor a stepping-stone to the Papacy. The decision of Rome was adverse to Henry' s desire ; so he abruptly broke with the Pope and clasped hands with Martin Luther, f Having a pliant Parliament, Henry now procured the passage of an act making him supreme head of the Eng- lish Church, and a supplementary act making it treason to deny his supremacy. Finding the legislature docile, he proceeded to emphasize the meaning of " English lib- erties." He had borrowed large sums of money which he could not repay, and he quietly euchred his creditors by pushing a bill through Parliament canceling all his debts. To complete and crown his constitutional repute, he next carried a measure giving to his royal proclama- tions the force of Acts of Parliament ! (Blackstone. ) From that day forth his power was virtually irresponsi- ble and unchecked, and well might even Hume aver that "the English in that age were so thoroughly subdued that, like Eastern slaves, they were inclined to admire even those acts of violence and tyranny which were exer- cised on themselves and at their own expense." The English may have been a great people then, with a sub- * A title still retained by his successors, as may be seen from the face of any British coin. t Such complimentary epithets as •'German hog" and "English boar" had previously passed between them. 160 IRELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. lime attachment to freedom of conscience and so forth ; bnt I can find no proof of it in the craven readiness with which the whole nation became converted at the beck of its Mormon master. The people accepted Protestantism without mnch protest ; they swung back to Romanism just as readily in company with Mary ; and their anchor- age in the new position was not too firm to prevent them from going off again at a tangent with Elizabeth. To resume : Henry wanted money, and the best oppor- tunity he saw for plunder was in the confiscation of the rich monasteries, of which there were upward of two dozen in every English and Irish county. He began im- partially at home, and there is this much to be said of him : he was the only English sovereign that ever put the two countries on an equal footing, inasmuch as he pillaged and scourged both alike without fear or favor. The Parliament had severe qualms of conscience about surrendering so much plate, money, lands, and valuable possessions into the privy purse of the king ; conse- quently a vigorous faction of reformers had to be pla- cated by a division of the spoils. When the opposition adopted tactics of delay, Henry strode into the House, " and looking angrily from side to side, exclaimed: 'I hear that my bill will not pass ; but I will have it pass, or I will have some of your heads ! ' " As he was known to be a man of his word in such matters, the measure was soon upon his table awaiting the royal signature. Religion by this time was at a pretty low ebb, yet enough spirit remained to drive the people here and there to insurrection. In the course of a few years sev- enty-two thousand of them were slaughtered for their recusancy, and the nation was " pacified." Says the English Protestant writer, Cobbett : " The whole country presented the appearance of a land recently invaded by barbarians. Nothing has ever yet come to supply the THE FEUD IN A NEW PHASE 161 place of what was thus destroyed." Whatever opinion any non-Catholic may have of the monasteries or their occupants, this much is certain, namely, that they fos- tered art and education, cared for the indigent, and solaced the sick. On being suppressed, their revenues went into the private purses of Henry and his sycophan- tic courtiers, and that was the end of their well-doing. Having exhausted England, the king and his counsel- ors now bethought them that Ireland afforded a prom- ising field for a reforming mission, with an abundance of fine monasteries to reward the labor. How to get at them was the problem ; for, upon inquiry being made, it was discovered from the Privy Council in Dublin, that " neither the English order, tongue, nor habit was used, nor the king' s laws obeyed above twenty miles in com- pass."* This was in the year 1534 or 1535, and is not to be wondered at after the issue of the Geraldine rebellion. The Earl of Kildare having, in his capacity of viceroy, displeased the king, was seized and flung into the Tower when he visited London. Thereupon his son, " Silken" Thomas, proceeded to wage hot war upon the Dublin garrison, and made himself so formidable that the new Deputy promised him protection and his father's release if he would lay down his arms. Now mark the perfidy and blasphemy which accompanied the rest of the trans- action. The Lord Deputy and the Greraldine, " lest any treachery might be misdeemed, both received the Sa- crament openlie in campe [Henry yet believed in the Mass] as an infallible seale of the covenants and condi- tions, "f " Silken" Thomas went to London, but instead of finding his father released, he was himself promptly manacled and jailed. At the same time, by secret in- structions, his five uncles were decoyed and bagged in State Papers, 63. t Hollmshed, vi. 302. 11 162 IKELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. Ireland ; and the whole six were hanged at Tyburn. Henry desired to extirpate the troublesome family at one stroke, but an infant boy survived who re-estab- lished it. Precisely how matters stood after the removal of the Geraldines, will be made more intelligible from another State paper of the same reign, which says : "And fyrst of all, to make his Grace understande, there byn more than sixty countrys called regyons in Ireland, inhabited with the king's enemies; . . where reigneth more than sixty chief captaines that liveth only by the sworde and obeyeth to no other temporal person, but only to himself that is strong. And every of the said captaines maketh war and peace for himself, and holdeth by sworde, and hath imperiall jurisdiction within his rome, and obeyeth to no other person English or Irish, except only to such persons as may subdue him by the sword." A visibly chaotic and evil system was this, necessarily breeding domestic dissension and perennial warfare ; but it was just the system which England had zealously labored to promote and extend. When Henry, how- ever, prepared to sweep the land, the rival chieftains suddenly manifested a disposition to unite cordially against him in self-defense. Thereupon he changed his tactics and began to shower presents, titles, honors, and emoluments on every Irish leader who would consent to acknowledge his supremacy. Divide et impera. The venal little assembly in Dublin, miscalled a Parliament, passed whatever bills he submitted to it, and the fiat quickly went out for the sacking of monasteries. Some of the abbots, terrified at what had been done in Eng- land, yielded at once, surrendering the property in their charge and receiving pensions for life. Tithes were transferred to the clergy of the new Tudor dispensation, and the rich abbey-lands parceled out to rapacious lay- men. If Henry could not always squeeze the full value of the spoils into his own coffers, he had the gratification THE FEUD IN A NEW PHASE. 163 of feeling that, at all events, he was squaring accounts with the Pope. So, during the remainder of his reign, he sought to build up his " reforming" faction in Ire- land, and won constant accessions to its strength by lavishly confirming to his own partisans whatever prop- erty they could wrench from their popish neighbors. EDWARD VI. Upon Henry' s death the crown fell to his son Edward, a feeble boy, who survived only six and a half years. His guardians carried out the usual policy in Ireland, beginning with an act of base perfidy. 0' Moore and O'Connor, chiefs of Leix and Offally, having come in conflict with the Anglo-Irish colony, were invited to London to compose the difficulty, under solemn promise of protection. Untaught by past warnings, they were credulous and foolhardy enough to walk into the trap, and paid forfeit to their folly by dying behind British prison-bars, while their lands were ravaged and ha- rassed. MARY TUDOR. Edward was succeeded in 1553 by his sister Mary, al- though she did not attain the throne without opposition. She was a rigid Catholic, and was therefore antagonized by the Protestant faction, under the leadership of Cran- mer and Northumberland, who aimed at securing the crown to Lady Jane Grey. Mary, victorious over her rival, restored and legalized the faith which her sire had banished, and put upward of three hundred persons to death — some for heresy, the majority for treason. Hence she is designated " Bloody," although her father, who butchered seventy -two thousand, and her sister and suc- cessor, who swelled the score to half a million, enjoy no such sanguinary prominence in the pages of English 164 IKELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. history. It is far from my intention or desire to screen Mary from the blame which legitimately attaches to her ; the whole seed and breed were bad ; bnt I do not want to paint her blacker than she really was. Her re- ligion is of little moment in this connection, for religion never softened the heart of any English ruler toward Ireland. Mary was a Catholic, but her agents in Ireland were not a whit less merciless or less rapacious than those of her father. Her deputy it was that planned and directed the fiendish massacres of Leix and Offally — a deed which permitted the confiscation of enough Irish soil to form two new counties (" the King's" and "the Queen's") named after Mary herself and her absentee Spanish consort. In her brief reign occurred another event which furnishes a signal proof of the Irish people's tolerance and generosity. Fearing persecution at home, a number of her Protestant subjects fled to Ireland for shelter. The Catholic Irish had had ample provocation to retaliate on the fugitives, but, instead of doing so, they received, supported, and protected the refugees. What return was made for this noble service has been already told.* * Part First, Chapter IX. CHAPTER VIII. ELIZABETH AND THE ULSTER LEAGUE. Was to the Hilt— The Two Hughs— Rapine and Exhaustion— A Kingdom op Carcasses and Ashes— Pacata Hebernia. •' The Irish believed that Ireland was theirs : that the English were invading tyrants who had stolen their lands, broken np their laws and habits, and proscribed their creed. The English believed that Ireland was a country attached inseparably by situation and circum- stances to the English crown." — Fkoude. UEEN MARY, when dying, demanded of Eliza- beth a frank avowal of religions belief, and ^M Bess promptly prayed that the earth might open and swallow her if she were not a true Roman Catholic. Thus assured, Mary closed her eyes to the world, and into her vacant place stepped the younger sister.* A maddening obstacle met her at the very threshold: the Pope refused to recognize her, on the ground of her illegitimacy. This refusal naturally an- gered and alarmed her, especially as the rival claimant was her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots. Mary Stuart was married to the young king of France, was sovereign of Scotland in her own right, and became heir to the English crown by the bastard- izing of Elizabeth. With Mary's claim made good, England would have become a province of France, and in that fact lay Elizabeth's great strength. The two nations had been fighting for centuries, were natural * Both were daughters of Henry Vni. by different mothers. 165 166 IPwELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. enemies in their struggle for supremacy, and the mere apprehension of being subjected to Gallic rule was an abomination which England's national spirit could not brook. Then, too, there was the dread of a reversal of title in the case of thousands of estates which the "reformers" had niched from monastic endowments. Taking advantage of these prevailing sentiments, Eliza- beth' s counselors advised her to appeal to the sympa- thies and interests of the powerful class which had supported her father's arm against the Pope, and she did so. Francis II. (Mary's husband) dying within eighteen months, the chief danger was removed ; but England was now squarely committed to the new path. A succession of treacheries and misfortunes threw the luckless Mary of Scotland into the hands of her "dear cousin." She was kept in prison eighteen years; but as Elizabeth was in constant dread of her escape, the captive was finally beheaded by order of the "crowned lioness." "I blush," says an English historian, "to think this infamy was done by an English queen." Inheriting much of her father's resolute will-power, Elizabeth began her reign by having penal laws passed against all who refused to acknowledge her spiritual as well as temporal supremacy, which was a smart rap afc the Pope's knuckles for having proclaimed her illegitimate. Since the suppression of the monasteries by her saintly sire, there were large bands of destitute people roaming over the country in search of food or work, and committing various depredations. She has- tened to cure the evil by branding them with red-hot irons, and her commissioners were censured for not hanging the vagrants more rapidly. William Cobbett, an Anglo-Protestant, says of her : "It is impossible for us not to reflect with shame upon what we have so long been saying of the Spanish Inquisition, which frore its ELIZABETH A^D THE ULSTER LEAGUE. 167 first establishment to the present hour has not committed so much cruelty as this ferocious tyrant committed in any one year of the forty- three years she ruled England." Wade, a modern English historian, writing of the ' ' con- stitutional" agencies she employed, says: "First was the Court of the Star Chamber, whose members held their places during the pleasure of the Crown, and might fine, imprison, and punish corporally by whipping, branding, and slitting the nostrils and ears. The Queen, if present, was sole judge, and the jurisdiction of the Court extended to all sorts of offenses, contempts, and disorders that lay out of reach of the common law. "The Court of High Commission was a still more arbitrary jurisdic- tion. Its vengeance was directed against heresy, which was defined as a difference in religion and morals with the Queen ! "Against these enormities the subject had no redress ; neither judge nor jury dared to acquit when the Crown was bent on a conviction." What a glorious era for Constitutional Law ! Such being the machinery employed to govern Eng- land, of course it would be illogical and unreasonable to expect any improvement on the other side of the water ; and, sure enough, Ireland was anything but well-ordered or submissive. In Gonnaught two rival branches of the powerful Burke family were struggling for the mas- tery. In Leinster those who had escaped the massacres of Leix and Offally took red vengeance on the spoiler. In Munster the Earl of Thomond was grappling with the O'Briens, the Butlers with the Geraldines. Of Ulster Shane O'Neill was master by grace of stout arm and sharp sword. In 1560 Elizabeth directed her deputy to convoke a Parliament in Ireland. Six counties responded — that was the limit of the Pale. Even those who did respond were not as pliant as the deputy desired ; so her Majesty was forced to inaugurate her religious " reforms" grad- ually and circuitously by means of bribes until a major- 168 IKELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN". ity was molded to her wishes. Then, in due order, con- fiscation was the first measure to be adopted. District after district was parceled out among the swarm of pil- lagers who now sought the Irish shores with the instinct of the buzzard for its prey. Treachery, carnage, spolia- tions were the tactics especially favored. The towns of England were thronged with starving vagabonds who gladly embraced the munificent chances afforded in Ire- land (where the scale of booty had been fixed at one hundred and twenty acres for a foot soldier, two hundred and forty for a horseman), until at length it was said that half the population of both England and Scotland was in motion for pillage and butchery of the Irish. It is to be said of Elizabeth that, in addition to her own masculine nerve and intellect, she had some of the ablest and most astute, as they were also the most unscrupulous, advisers that ever surrounded any sove- reign ; through whom were laid the foundations of Brit- ish colonial power and commercial enterprise. These men were far - sighted enough to realize that Ireland stood directly between their posterity and the rich prom- ise of the Western continent ; which fact supplied an additional incentive for subjugating Ireland. A series of desperate though isolated battles ensued, in which the English by their superior resources and concentration of strength made gradual headway, yet with such frequent and disastrous reverses that they fell back on the tactics suggested by Spenser,* thus described by O'Connell: "The harvests were burned year after year as soon as they became ripe ; the cattle were driven away and slaughtered ; provisions of every kind were destroyed ; the country was devastated ; the population perished for want of food. Then came famine and pest- * For the " gentle " poet-carpet-bagger's cold-blooded advice see Pail First, Chapter IL ELIZABETH AND THE ULSTEE LEAGUE. 169 ilence, the irresistible arms used by England to obtain dominion." Shane O'Neill was assassinated and his estates " divided up among the queen's agents." He had boldly entered London under escort of a battalion of his own galloglasses to discuss his case with the queen. She had openly promised to respect his claims, but had privately declared that if he could be goaded on to ruin, " there will be estates enough for those who lack." Fitzmaurice in the south was pushed to the wall until he fled to the continent in quest of foreign aid. The Pope furnished him with money and men. Of the two thousand troops promised, however, more than half were led away into Africa, from Portugal, by a rascally adventurer, so that only a small battalion followed the Geraldine to Ireland. Disembarking, they fortified Smer- wick (in Kerry), where, after some local successes, they were besieged by a large force under Deputy Grey. A few weeks of stubborn resistance ended in a capitulation under advantageous terms : but no sooner did the brave garrison lay down their arms than they were deliberately massacred.* I have neither space nor inclination to recount a tithe of the cowardly atrocities which marked these campaigns. I shall merely copy from English chroniclers a few samples of the way in which those chivalrous Britons waged war. Of the armies operating against Desmond in the south, Hollinshed relates that "as they went, they drove the whole countrie before them into Yentrie, . . and all such people as they met, they did without mercy put to the sword" Again: "The soldiers likewise in the camp were so eager upon the vile rebels that day they spared neither man, woman, nor child, but all was com- * The shameful butchery was done under superintendence of Sir Walter Raleigh. 170 IEELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. mitted to the sword." On the same page he tells us how, having slain about four hundred in one raid, the lords were "not satisfied with the daie's service;" so next day they made amends, for they "spoiled and consumed the whole country until it was night." . . Eliza- beth instructed Sir George Carew to put the Irish to the rack, and torture them whenever he found it convenient, and of course Sir George was too gallant to neglect a lady's message. Here is a specimen of his earnest- ness : "The President, having received certaine information that the Mun- ster fugitives were harbored in these parts [he] having before burnt all the houses and corn, . . diverted his forces, and harassing the country, hilled all mankind that were found therein, for a terrour to those who should give relief to runagate traitours. Thence we came into Arleaghe woods, where we did the like, not leaving behind us man or beast, come or cattle. . . It was thought no ill policy to make the Irish draw blood upon one another, whereby their private quarrels might ad- vance the public [i.e., the English] interest." — Pacata Hibernia, 189. Through the agencies described, the province of Mun- ster had been " brayed as in a mortar." Desmond's head had been sent as a gift to her Majesty. Neither man, nor woman, nor child, nor sick, nor wounded was ever voluntarily spared. Tossing Irish infants on their spear points, the soldiers used to say that they were saving the wolf-cubs from growing up into Popish rebels. Another of their diversions was to hang women from the trees, and strangle the babe in the long locks of its sus- pended mother's hair. At length from Smerwick to Waterford (one hundred and twenty miles), Hollinshed assures us, there could be found neither human being nor brute beast, nor fruit nor corn, scarcely even a blade of grass. All the lands thus desolated were divided among the spoilers. When " nothing was left to rule over save ashes and carcasses," a medal was struck in ELIZABETH AND THE ULSTEE LEAGUE. 171 London bearing the legend Hibemia Pacata (." Ireland Pacified"); bnt the congratulation was somewhat pre- mature. THE ULSTEE UPKISING. While crushing the south and east, Elizabeth's depu- ties contrived to keep on neutral ground with regard to the north, craftily directing all their strength to humble one section at a time. With Munster laid waste, atten- tion was now turned to Ulster, where Hugh O'Neill held richer estates and greater influence than any loyal, apos- tolic Englishman could view without a pang of keen regret. Accordingly it was resolved in Dublin that O'JSTeill must be driven into rebellion ; but the plotters little suspected what stamp of a man they had now to deal with, or what serious trouble they were brewing for themselves. Hugh had been educated at the English court, and had there borne himself with such consummate address as to deceive the shrewdest diplomats around him. The queen expected that the young Irishman whom she was petting would yet prove useful among his "vile rebelly" countrymen. Hugh accepted all the favors and titles bestowed on him, though he valued them not a feather's weight in his heart. Warily he bore himself, always maturing a great purpose deep in his own breast. Fully mastering the details of England's diplomacy and military tactics, as well as the war- methods of the continent, he seemed for years in Lon- don the pliant tool of British state-craft. But at home, where his ancestral honors had been restored to him, he was steadily laying the foundations of a national league and army, which defied all the power of England for fifteen years and in the end compelled her to sign an honorable peace. It was his practice to disband one 172 IKELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. company as soon as the men became thoroughly disci- plined, and then recruit a fresh company from the fields. These in turn gave way to others, who under- went the same course of practical instruction. Their teacher had the wrongs of generations to avenge ; the heads of his slaughtered kinsmen, grinning from ghast- ly pikes, were a constant admonition to him; and he was vigilant, cautious, energetic. Camden describes him as follows : "His industry was great, his soul large, and fit for the weightiest businesses ; he had much knowledge in military affairs, and a profound dissembling Tieart, so as many deemed him born either for the great good or ill of his country." England had designed him as a suitable instrument to complete the degradation of his native land. He disappointed that hope ; therefore Spenser says of him: " Though lifted up by her Majesty out of the dust to that he hath now wrought himself into, now he playeth like the frozen snake." Ay, he stung them sorely, did this wicked Irish Hugh, Earl of Tyrone, who had cajoled even his red-headed royal benefactress with his blarneying tongue and steel-blue eye, pretending to worship her dazzling beauty from afar! Now that the bloodhounds were on his track, Hugh's plan was perfected in all respects but one. He still lacked the hearty co-operation of the powerful septs of Tyrconnel, whose leader, Red Hugh O'Donnell, kid- napped in 1587, was still chained in a strong tower of Dublin Castle. On Christmas Day, 1592, the fiery stripling escaped, waded through icy streams, and plunged through snow and hail,* until at length he * His brave young comrade, Art O'Neill, perished by bis side from hunger and exposure on the Wicklow mountains. ELIZABETH AKD THE ULSTER LEAGUE. 173 found his way to the bosom of the north ; and a sore escape it was for the managers of English rule in Ireland. Almost before the startled Clan- Sassenach could realize it, the two Hughs were in the field, with all Ulster arrayed in arms at their back. Alarmed at the formidable front presented, the deputy made over- tures for peace, which O'Neill agreed to accept on three conditions : (1) Complete freedom of worship ; (2) a general amnesty ; (3) removal of all English gar- risons and civil officials from Ulster. A compliance with these terms would have left the two Hughs in command of the situation, without any loop-hole for treachery to disarm them. Negotiation was futile, and war to the hilt was declared. Deputy Russell got defeated at Kilcluona, and gave way to Sir John Nor- ris, who quickly met the same fate at Clontibret. Lein- ster raised the banner of revolt under Rory O' Moore and gallant young Fiach MacHugh 0' Byrne, routing two detachments of Essex' s army. This royal favorite had brought over a reinforcement of twenty thousand men, and avoiding O'Neill, expected to have a trium- phal march through Munster ; but the province had recovered some of her former life, and now girt her • self anew for the conflict. Essex was thwarted and harassed at every step, gaining neither fame nor suc- cess in his wanderings. Meantime Hugh O'Neill had reduced Armagh by stratagem, killing or capturing the entire garrison; Barnewell's column was hewn to pieces at Tyrrel's Pass; O'Donnell chased Clifford through Connaught, and began to scourge beyond its boundaries with whip of fire every man who could not speak to him in the Gaelic tongue. The two Hughs rode as they pleased anywhere above the Shannon, and almost to the walls of Dublin. Of O'Donnell' s exploits Mitchel says : 174 IRELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. " One must admit that all the expeditions of this wild leader, though daring and dashing, resembled more the cruel and predatory raids of a horde of savages, or the border clans of Scotland a century before, than any more regular military achievements ; but an intense hatred of the Saxons and of all Saxon usages was Red Hugh's master passion ; his whole life was vowed to vengeance ; those cruel fetters of Perrot had worn his young flesh, had burned into his proud heart ; his crippled feet yet bore the shooting pangs that had benumbed him while he lay perishing, in his flight, upon the snowy mountains ; and his daily thoughts, his dreams by night, were of rooting out and utterly exter- minating those treacherous foes of his race, and all who held with them. The smoke of their blazing towers was pleasant as incense to his soul, and he deemed a hecatomb of their slain the offering most grateful to heaven." , Red Hugh, paid them back in their own coin ; he believed in fighting fire with fire, and he had no com- punction about striking when, where, and however he could strike effectively. Would that others, in former as in after years, had been animated by the same spirit of retributive justice ! Elizabeth's cabinet redoubled its efforts, sending to the front its ablest generals and scouring the whole face of England for conscripts. The Blackwater was dyed red with English blood at Drumfluich, and the carnage was repeated at the battle of the Yellow Ford (Bealanathabuithe). Marshal Bagenal,* in an effort to relieve the English garrison of Portmore, encountered the two Hughs ; the veteran marshal, twenty-four of his principal officers, and two thousand of his rank and file perished on the hard-fought field. In fact, wherever in the course of those brilliant campaigns the opposing hosts met on anything at all like an equal footing, the Irish were invariably the victors ; and this was the only campaign in centuries that wore any semblance of national dimensions. * Who cherished a personal grudge against O'Neill for having carried off and married his sister, the Lady Mahel Bagenal. ELIZABETH AND THE ULSTEE LEAGUE. 175 Enraged at this succession of disasters, the queen sent peremptory orders to Essex to advance against O'Neill, but the elegant courtier- captain moved with slow and hesitating pace. At last he sent word to his lieutenant, Sir Conyers Clifford, to make a diversion toward the north of Connaught. Clifford set out from Boyle, but Ked Hugh had tidings of his movement, and swooped down to intercept him. In a pass of the Corsliabh mountains Clifford's ears were abruptly startled by the war-cry of Clan-Conal, himself slain, and fourteen hun- dred of his followers hacked into mince-meat for the eagles of Clash Currin. Essex, with twice the force of O'Neill, attempted no further battle, but held a confer- ence with the Irish chieftain, pronounced his demands fair and reasonable, signed a six weeks' truce, and set out precipitately for London, where his failure and intrigues were punished by the loss of his head. Hugh O'Neill marched southward to strengthen the confederacy in Munster, and chastised on his way such local magnates as refused to uphold the good cause — while England strained every sinew toward a more vehe- ment assault. Fresh brigades of adventurers poured weekly in, and now Mount joy and Carew, with the largest armies ever yet assembled in Ireland, opened war upon the harvests, taking with them bands of men for the exclusive purpose of destroying the growing corn. Following Bacon's suggestion of "a toleration of religion for a time not definite" the English Government stayed its crusade against Popery, aiming thereby to sever the only bond which held the Anglo-Norman Catholic ele- ment to the confederacy.* Gold was scattered profusely through Munster ; bribes and titles were rained on every traitor. Important strongholds were gradually won, and * This temporary indulgence of worship more than satisfied the expectations of its authors. 176 IRELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. special heed was given to the destruction of crops and cattle. Desmond was defeated and betrayed in the south. Two engagements in Ulster had cost the Eng- lish four thousand lives, and estimating them at ten shil- lings per carcass, Elizabeth offered £2,000 reward for the head of wicked Hugh, who, in earlier days, with his " dissembling heart" had flattered the lean and scrawny harlot into the belief that he loved her. In the opening years of the new century (1601-3) the destruction of their food stock and the exhaustion of in- cessant warfare began to tell upon the Irish ranks. The expected succor from Spain came in scattered contin- gents, which surrendered one after another. The capitu- lation of Kinsale by Don Juan del Aquila was not only disgraceful to himself, but inflicted a serious disaster on the cause, as O'Neill, hurrying southward to support him, was drawn into premature battle with Mount joy, and was worsted in the encounter. The Spaniards re- turned to Spain,* whither they were soon followed by Hugh O'Donnell, anxious to obtain from Philip a still stronger expedition for a supreme and final struggle. He was doomed to disappointment, and his proud heart brake within him far away among Iberian olive-groves. Beneath the pavement of Valladolid rest the ashes of Dauntless Red Hugh, the shield of Tyrconnel. Placed on the defensive by his reverse at Kinsale, Hugh O'JNeill retreated northward again in good order, * Indignant at their cowardly departure, Donal O'Sullivan Beare and Richard MacGeoghe- gan, with one hundred and forty-one picked men, fortified themselves in the castle of Dun- boy. Five thousand English troops besieged them. Cannon made wide breaches in the walls, against which three storming columns were successively hurled, only to be as often flung back by the indomitable garrison. A fourth and most desperate assault, lasting throughout an entire day, carried the fort, and the wounded MacGeoghegan was slain out- right as he was about to hurl a flaming brand into an open barrel of powder. Exasperated by their fearful losses, the cowardly victors butchered not only the remnant of the heroic defenders, but every man, woman, and child for leagues around. This last sentence is grow- ing monotonous ; I may as well say, once for all, that such slaughters were the invariable practice of the English. ELIZABETH AND THE ULSTER LEAGUE. 177 but sorely beset by famine and pestilence.* After a few more skirmishes the deputy received tidings, by special courier, of Elizabeth's death, and in his solicitude and uncertainty as to the changes which might follow this event, he determined to conclude peace promptly with O'Neill, who still stood at bay among the Ulster defiles. After fifteen years of sanguinary fighting, broken and exhausted, the Irish were yet able to dictate their own terms, which embraced (1) a general amnesty, (2) free- dom of worship, (3) the retention of their lands — the same identical things that O'Neill had demanded from the beginning. With her last breath Elizabeth confessed that the war in Ireland had broken her heart, as it had almost beg- gared her kingdom. Her appetite for revenge upon the Earl of Tyrone depleted her treasury and diminished her population. "The war in Ireland," wrote Sir Robert Naughton, " may be styled the distemper of the reign of Elizabeth, having proved such an expenditure as affect- ed and disorganized the constitution of the princess." Nevertheless the leaven was working which she had thrown into the mass. Ceaseless impact of invasion, car- nage, rapine, and pestilence had wasted the blood and marrow of Ireland — had left deep and indelible scars upon her breast. * On the last day of December, 1602, Dermod and Donal O'Snllivan, finding half their clan massacred, and the rest surrounded by the foe, took the desperate resolve to cut their way through the English lines and push northward to join O'Neill. Four hundred men, six hundred women and children, they set out in mid-winter and fought their way every league from Cork to Leitrim. In seventeen days the thousand had diminished to thirty-five souls, through wounds, privations, and desertions ; yet competent critics say that the daring enterprise takes rank among the grandest exploits of military genius. The gallant chiefs who led it founded a distinguished family in Spain. 12 CHAPTER IX. Rooting Out the Irishrie — James I. and Charles I.— The Con- federation op Kilkenny — Cromwell — Owen Roe O'Neill — Charles IL "A good time wa3 coming for the undertakers of the sword and cassock." — Mitchel. LTHOUGfH Elizabeth at one time, in view of a dreaded contingency, had abruptly called on Parliament to pass a law legitimizing a poten- tial royal bastard * — a singular statute to frame at the express request of a " virgin queen" — her precaution seems to have been needless. At all events she left no direct heir, and was succeeded by the driveling, filthy pedant, James I., founder of a race of profligate scoun- drels. He began by making a pretense of justice and toleration toward the Irish, even conferring an earl- dom on Roderick O'Donnell, brother of Red Hugh, and confirming the peace with O'JSTeill ; but Cecil and other courtiers, preying on .his weak mind with artful devices and flatteries, soon led him back into the old rut of " reformation " — i.e., a fresh crusade against the lands and chattels of Irish unbelievers. Cecil was the author of this latest scheme of confiscation and for- feiture. The Act of Uniformity and the penal code of Elizabeth were re-enacted, and in 1607 was made the "providential discovery" of an embryo rebellion in Ireland. An anonymous letter, dropped in the Dublin * See Cobhett's History of the Befowmtion. 178 THE PLANTATIONS. 179 Council Chamber, stated that a murderous conspiracy was hatching, in which the Earls of Tyrone and Tyr- connel were deeply implicated. Another version of the story alleges that these chieftains were actually inveigled into a sham plot concoeted by Cecil. Two years had not yet elapsed since the frustration of the memorable Gunpowder Plot ; * England was insane with alarm on this particular subject ; so a charge of treason was readily trumped up against the earls. The country was in no condition to make an effective resistance ; and knowing what an English "trial" meant under such circumstances, O'Neill and O'Donnell fled to the conti- nent, with the futile expectation of procuring help to win back the birthright of their people. The hour of their embarkation marks the date when Ireland as a nation fell, wholly spent and helpless, into the hands of England. Commenting on their departure, the English Leland remarks: "Nothing could be more favorable to that passion which James indulged for reforming Ireland by the introduction of English law and civil- ity." Exactly ; and he inaugurated his reform by seiz- ing, at a single swoop, six whole counties embracing five hundred thousand acres of the best soil in Ulster, which tract was partitioned out among Scotch and Eng- lish " undertakers," on condition that no portion of the lands should be let or sold, except to Protestants. Heretofore Ulster had been the backbone of contumacy and rebellion ; but with this garrison in the heart of it, most of the rightful owners were soon dispossessed at the sword' s point. In order to guard his flanks, James made large seizures in Leinster and Munster also ; and * November 5, 1605, Guy Fawkes and several English companions were on the eve of blowing up the London Parliament-house in full session, when they were accidently dis- covered, and made meat for the executioner. Some maintain that this plot, too, was really devised and developed by Cecil. 180 IKELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. in order to invest his piracy with the semblance of legal sanction, he packed a Parliament in Dublin — cre- ating forty new boroughs in one day* — to go through the burlesque of ratifying his acts. The next project of " reform" was the appointment of a Commission for the Discovery of Defective Titles. Its function, as suggested in its name, was to pick out pretended flaws in the titles of Irish occupiers to their estates, in order that the Crown might either confiscate the property or levy a weighty fine for the granting of an amended title. At the head of the commission was placed Sir William Parsons, whose zeal as a reformer is well illustrated in his conduct of the case against Byrne of the Ranelaghs. Finding no available flaw on which to escheat Byrne's lands, Sir William accused him of treason, and had an array of witnesses to swear what- ever was demanded of them. One of these, named Archer, declined to play the part set for him, where- upon Sir William brought him to terms by roasting him naked over a charcoal tire until the blistered wretch consented to swear anything that might be desired ; and on Archer's evidence the Byrnes were despoiled. Down to this time the robbery or murder of an Irish- man, or the rape of an Irishwoman, by an Englishman, was not a punishable offense under English law. The Attorney-General, Sir John Davies, endeavored to ob- tain a uniform code for the whole country, in the belief that it could thus be most safely and easily governed, but he did not succeed. There were years upon years of "good stealing" yet left in it, and it did not come within the scope of British reforms to close the gate against further trespass. In 1625 James conferred one * " It is worthy of r*ms>rk," vays W. O'N. Daunt, " that if it had not heen for the creation of those forty clow boroughs, the Union could never have been carried in the Irish House of Commons." THE PLANTATIONS. 181 favor on the Irish — he died — and was succeeded by his son, CHAELES I., who also at the outset made plenteous promises of toleration and fair play, but promptly lapsed into the policy of all his predecessors, proving himself treacher- ous, bigoted, and despicable. Needlessly fearing that his plausible promises might be bottomed on some slight shell of sincerity, the Anglo-Protestant bishops in Ire- land solemnly declared that the toleration of Popery was " a grievous sin," and that all persons concurring in such toleration were " involved in the guilt of the Cath- olic apostasy." The dear prelates might have spared their rhetoric : Charles had no intention of disappoint- ing them. Not yet strong enough to attempt an open defiance, and knowing that the nearest path to the royal heart lay straight through the royal pocket, the Irish Catho- lics adopted the crafty suggestion of the English dep- uty, and sent agents to London to proffer their services and money to his Majesty in return for some share of good government. The tricky, mendacious Stuart freely pledged himself to secure to them their civil and reli- gious rights by means of " royal graces"* in exchange for hard cash. He received £120,000 (a sum equivalent at that time to more than two million dollars in our day), and then coolly informed the contributors that it was unreasonable to ask for those graces ! It is some slight satisfaction to know that both he and his hench- man, Strafford, afterward met their deserts under the headsman's axe. * The "graces" were to confer security of property, freedom of worship, political am- nesty, removal of the restrictions on Irish trade, and abolition of the private prisons kept by the Protestant clergy for the incarceration of persons condemned in the ecclesiastical courts. 182 IRELAND AS SHE HAS BEExS". Having administered this brilliant rebuke to Papist pretensions, Charles energetically resumed the work left unfinished by his sire. The Commission to Inquire into Defective Titles was reorganized into a Court of Claims, in which twenty per cent, of the value of all estates for- feited, together with the first year's rent, were given to the judges for their services. Obstinate jurors were brought to their senses by fines ranging in some instances as high as £4,000, and some had their ears cut off, their noses slit, their tongues perforated, and their foreheads branded for refusing to bring in a verdict for the Crown ! These facts may be found chronicled in the journals of the Anglo-Irish House of Commons, vol. i., p. 307. Meanwhile Deputy Strafford took pains to crush the woolen manufacture of Ireland, as it was competing with a rival industry in England ; but he kindly informed the Irish that they might continue to cultivate flax, as Eng- land had no home-trade in that staple. THE COtfFEDEBATION OF 1641. Drunken with blood and pillage, the plunderers now resolved to wage a war of extermination. A member of the English Parliament solemnly assured his colleagues that the conversion of Irish Papists must be effected with " the Bible in one hand, the sword in the other ; " and Sir William Parsons publicly affirmed that " within a twelvemonth no Catholic should be seen in Ireland." " The Parliament party," says Clarendon, " had sworn to extirpate " the whole Irish nation.* With these plain avowals before them, the Irish did the only thing that was left them to do ; they took the field with such force as they could muster. English reinforcements were at * A petition was extensively signed by the undertaker faction praying that all Papists should be compelled either to turn Protestant or quit the kingdom, and that those who would not submit should be hanged at their own doors. THE PLANTATIONS. 183 once sent over with orders to spare neither man, woman, nor child, * and they obeyed their orders literally. " Not a child, were it but a hand high, was left alive." f Froude, following a well-beaten track, wastes a pail of ink in trying to make it appear that this war was pro- voked by a general massacre of Anglo-Irish Protestants. He might have spared himself the toil expended in re- vamping the tatters of a sensation so often refuted. The old English settlers of the Pale, and some Irish insur- gents outside of it, did slay several hundred of the new colonists, not for being Protestants, but for being brig- ands ; and they were completely justified in doing so. But as to the stories of the " general massacre," Warner (himself a Protestant) says : " It is easy enough to dem- onstrate the utter falsehood of every Protestant histo- rian of the rebellion. " John Milton has recorded that six hundred thousand fell in this remarkable holocaust ; Burton and Temple are content with three hundred thousand ; Warwick reduces the figure to one hundred thousand ; and so the number is gradually whittled down. There were in Ireland at the time only two hun- dred and twenty thousand Protestants altogether, and if the whole lot, or the half of them, were butchered so ex- peditiously on the night of October 23, 1641, it is surely strange that the Lords Justices made no mention of it in their proclamations or dispatches % during the next two months. The story of the stupendous massacre was an inspired afterthought, industriously elaborated and circulated by the adventurers who had recently got possession of Irish estates ; they had their own purpose to serve in whetting * Carte's Ormond, an English authority. + Coote, the testimony of an English commander. X These dispatches are extant, dated October 25, November 25 and 27. and December 23, 1641. 184 IRELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. the fanatical passions of their conntrymen at home, and alienating every vestige of sympathy from the plundered Irish. History is against Mr. Froude — and I regret it ! I am sorry that the Irish of that epoch did not adopt the tactics with which he credits them. They shonld have fought their battle with the lex talionis for a motto. Had they hanged, burned, and harried the enemy, as the enemy hanged, burned, and harried them, many a cam- paign had reached a different ending. In waging war as it was declared against them — " a war of extirpation " — they would have been doing their plain duty. In fail- ing to do so, they weakened their own arms and en- couraged the butchers who opposed them. For every English soldier or settler spared, the Irish merely nursed, an adder to sting themselves. By sentimental respect for "the usages of civilized warfare," which England invariably treated with derision, the Irish effectually assured their own ruin. , February 23, 1642, saw issued from the Council Cham- ber an order to the deputy, "with his Majesty's forces to wound, kill, slay and destroy, by all the ways and means he may, all the said rebels, their adherents and relievers ; and burn, waste, spoil, consume, destroy and demolish all the places, towns and houses where the said rebels are or have been relieved or harboured, and all the hay or corn there ; and kill and destroy all the men there inhabiting capable of bearing arms. ' ' Bravo ! Lord Ormond relates that at the battle of Rathmines, "most of them that were killed (six hundred he admits) were butchered after they had laid down their arms and had been almost an hour prisoners." The same authority informs us that his friends Sir W. Parsons and Sir A. Loftus had written to advise "the burning of corn, and to put man, woman and child to the sword." In some places thousands of feeble and decrepit non-com- THE PLANTATIONS. 185 batants were burned alive in the woods where they had songht refuge. October 24, 1644, the English Parlia- ment passed the subjoined resolution : "That officers and commanders shall except all Irishmen and all Papists horn in Ireland out of all capitulations hereafter to be made with the enemy, and shall, upon the taking of such Irishmen, forthwith put every such person to death. " These flagrant atrocities, added to the wholesale rapine legalized by the Court of Claims, forced the Anglo-Cath- olic nobles (after they had failed to obtain any better terms for themselves) to cast their lot with the Milesian septs already in the field ; and from this coalition once more uprose a formidable, because national, league. The accession of the Anglo-Irish Palesmen brought im- mediate success to the cause, but wrought its ultimate ruin. Representatives from the four provinces met at Kil- kenny, and there perfected the constitution and plan of the Confederation. "Magna Charta, and the common and statute laws of England, in all points not contrary to the Roman Catholic religion or inconsistent with the liberty of Ireland, were declared the basis of the new government." As their most bitter foe was the Puritan party in England, which was antagonizing Charles, the Irish saw fit to recognize the supremacy of the king, a double-faced Pharisee, who played fast and loose with them as long as he lived. The Confederates were fortunate in obtaining the ser- vices of a distinguished soldier fresh from continental battle-fields, " where his genius outshone every captain of the age."* He was a Spaniard by birth, but he bore * In 1640, with nineteen hundred men, he held the ruined ramparts of Arras for two months against thirty-four thousand French veterans, until there was not an ounce of food in the town. Then he capitulated, but on the unexampled conditions that his whole "army" should be allowed to withdraw, with all its arms and baggage, drums beating and banners flying, and with a squadron of French cavalry to act as escort to Douai ! The articles were signed by three French marshals and ratified by King Louis. 186 IKELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. the well-known name of Eoghan Rua O'Neill, and was the nephew of Hugh, Earl of Tyrone. Landing in Ulster in 1642, he steadily drilled his raw recruits until 1646. Meantime so solid and bold a front did the rebellion show that Charles sent peremptory orders to his lieuten- ant (Ormond) to make an immediate peace at any cost. So a truce was signed, suspending hostilities for one year, the king's object being to gain time. Perhaps, too, the perjured " martyr" had a premonition that he would soon need friends, for his Puritan adversaries were growing decidedly stubborn and aggressive. Soon he came to an open rupture with Parliament, and pushed his divine-right prerogative so far as to raise up a do- mestic rebellion. Defeated and pursued from Naseby, he took refuge with the Scots, "on invitation," who with characteristic enterprise sold him to the Parliament for four hundred thousand pounds — a large price for so worthless a piece of carrion. The English brought him to the block, and established a Protectorate, of which Cromwell soon obtained the mastery. The treacherous character of his race shone through Charles to the last. While a close prisoner at Carisbrook, he contrived to have a letter conveyed to Ormond, authorizing him to grant every concession demanded by the Irish. "But be not startled at this," he added, "for they will come to nothing." Going back three years, we find that when the first truce was ratified the Parliament protested vehemently against the "sin" of holding any terms with Papists, and ordered their generals to break a truce, "the obser- vance of which would provoke the wrath of a jealous God" ! Monroe, accordingly, with nineteen thousand men moved against Owen Roe. They met at Benburb, June 6th, 1646, and the Parliamentarian army was scat- tered like chaff in a storm before the poorly equipped THE PLANTATIONS. 187 and half -naked battalions of O'Neill. In addition to the immense booty captured, three thousand two hun- dred and fifty of the Scotch and English lay stark upon the plain, while the loss of the victors did not reach one hundred men. No such disastrous rout was again experienced by Britain until Lord Hay's column met the Brigade at Fontenoy. Benburb smashed the Eng- lish power to fragments in Ulster; but the fruits of the brilliant triumph were largely thrown away when O'NeilJ, in obedience to a summons from the Papal Nuncio (Rinuccini), marched southward to save the undeserving Anglo-Irish. This latter faction had no heart in the conflict it was waging. It took more inter- est in the progress of events in England than in the condition of Ireland. It had no cordial sympathy in common with its native Irish allies. Selfish and rapa- cious, its real aim was to re-establish itself in the royal favor, and with this sole intent did it intrigue and labor. Between the plottings of these Anglo-nobles and the intermeddling of Rinuccini, the Confederation was dis- rupted and split into sections. Again and again had the banner of the Red Hand saved the ingrate Pales- men from the swords of the Parliamentarians ; and no sooner were they safe than they began to hatch new plots for the ruin of O'Neill. At length they trans- formed their wing of the Confederacy into a royalist league on behalf of Charles, turning over their com- mand to their former enemies, Ormond and Inchiquin,* and preparing to crush the man who had been their shield and saviour — Owen Roe. But a few months later Oliver Cromwell was smiting them with fire and steel. * Ormond was the favorite tool of Charles in deluding and betraying the Irish. He sold out the Confederates at the first opportunity. . . Murrogh O'Brien, Lord Inchiquin, was a renegade, time-server, and cut-throat, " a savage by instinct," who fought alternately on every side except that of his country. 188 IKELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. THE CROMWELLIAST SETTLEMENT. It is a wearisome task to wade through those bloody annals, streaked though they may be here and there with broad flashes of defiant heroism. In origin, in character, in results, every one of these Anglo-Irish campaigns is substantially a counterpart of all the rest. Beginning in unbearable oppression, conducted with daring devotion on the one hand, with pitiless barbarity on the other, we find them all end in heavier shackles, wider confiscations, more ruthless savagery of persecu- tion. Ex uno disce omnia. In addition to the internal dissensions and distractions which beset them, the Irish always fought under the fatal disadvantage of having the war brought to their own doors and never getting an interval of repose to recuperate their shattered strength. In 1644, as has been already stated, the English Parlia- ment issued a general death-warrant against u all Irish- men and Papists born in Ireland ; " and to enforce this sweeping sentence Cromwell landed in Ireland (1649) with 12,000 well-appointed troops, artillery, etc. "I believe in freedom of conscience," said he, "but if by that you understand leave to go to Mass, by the horns of Beelzebub you shall repent your error." The Irish espoused the Stuart cause (1) because it was unpopular in England ; (2) because they were craftily assured that the troubles and death of Charles I. were attributable to his efforts to give fair play and toleration in Ireland. Anyhow, " For King and Creed" was the best motto they had at the time. Cromwell's first assault was made on Drogheda, where a garrison of less than 5,000 made a desperate defense against a besieging force which more than twice out- numbered them. When the battered walls became no longer tenable, the Irish laid down their arms upon THE PLANTATIONS. 189 Cromwell's formal promise that their lives should be spared. When the city was completely in his power the canting butcher — " resolved," says Leland, "to ter- rify the whole Irish party" — ordered that no quarter be given, and (here is Clarendon's testimony) "they put every man that related to the garrison, and all the citi- zens who were Irish — man, woman, and child — to the sword." In his dispatch to London Cromwell wrote : "I believe we put to the sword the whole number of the defendants. 1 wish that all honest hearts may give the glory of this to God alone, to whom indeed the praise of this mercy The blasphemous missive might well send a shudder through the spinal marrow of a Thug ; but the English Parliament coolly proceeded to mark out a red-letter day of national thanksgiving for so laudable an exploit ! Oliver next attacked Wexford, which fell into his hands by treachery. Says the English historian Lingard: "No distinction was made between the defenseless in- habitant and the armed soldier ; nor could the shrieks and prayers of three hundred females, who had gath- ered round the great cross, preserve them from the swords of these ruthless barbarians. By Cromwell him- self the number is reduced to 2,000, by some writers it has. been swelled to 5,000." The Protector met worse fare at Dungannon, where he was repulsed, and at Clon- mel, where another Hugh O'Neill, with only 1,400 raw levies, slew 2,000 of the Ironsides. Captive in their train they had a Catholic bishop, taken at Ross, who marveled why he had been spared an hour. He soon learned, when they told him: "Advise your country- men to surrender Clonmel, and we shall let you go free." They led him within ear-shot of the ramparts, and he spake vigorously in Irish: "Countrymen! as you value soul or body, keep your swords unsheathed 190 IRELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. against these canting wolves. They ask me to deliver a contrary message ; they will take my life ; bnt mark you my dying injunction — Resist ! " The brave prelate was led back and hewn to pieces, but his words still ring in the air of Ireland. As Cromwell moved southward, spreading carnage and desolation in his wake, the treacherous royalists, now quaking with dismay, bethought them of the vete- ran general whose skill had never been at fault — Owen Roe. They had outraged and outlawed him, but now, in their dire extremity, they craved and implored him to save them. Vanquishing his just resentment and contempt, the victor of Arras and Benburg consented to do what in him lay toward beating back the Crom- wellian tide ; but he died on his first march, poisoned (tradition says) by an English hand. In his grave was buried the last hope of the Confederation. Post after post was reduced, the strength and resources of the defenders grew scarcer, until the whole land lay pros- trate under the iron heel of Clan Oliver.* And what a conquest it was ! An eye-witness, one who served under the Puritan banner, has left this picture : " About the year 1652 or 1653 the plague and famine had so swept away whole counties that a man might travel twenty or thirty miles and not see a living creature, either man, beast, or bird, they being either all dead, or had quit those desolate places." Which well bore out Cromwell's declaration that "it was a country worth fighting for." Thousands of Irish youths and maidens were trans- ported as slaves to the malarial plantations of the West Indies. To the rest was given the memorable alterna- * " The dead do not come back, and if the mothers and babies are slaughtered with the men, the race gives no further trouble. . . In justice to the English soldiers, however, it must be said that it was no fault of theirs if any Irish child of that generation was allowed to live to manhood."— Fboude's Hist. England, vol. x., p. 507. THE PLANTATIONS. 191 tive : " Go to Hell or ConnaugM " — the barren moor- lands beyond the Shannon being deemed so unfit for human occupation that the fugitives were expected to starve there. At the same time an edict was issued that every Romish priest captured should (1) be hanged until half dead, (2) then beheaded and his body quartered, (3) his bowels taken out and burned, (4) his head set upon a pole as a warning. It was hard to teach these wild Irishrie that freedom of conscience meant freedom to believe only as their English masters for the moment believed. Three entire provinces were confiscated by Cromwell, and divided under military warrant among his own stout gospelers ; but death overtook him before he could reach the secret goal of his ambition — the crown. Ten years of his military dictatorship had created so many malcontents as to soon afterward open clear passage for a Stuart restoration in the person of Charles II. , son of the decapitated Charles I. CHARLES II. When Charles I. was brought to the block, his son was proclaimed king in Ireland by Ormond, who, at the same time, signed a treaty of peace with the insurgents. The young prince wrote from Holland that he " had re- ceived and was extremely well satisfied with the articles of peace with the Irish Confederates, and would confirm wholly and entirely all that was contained in them." Whether from choice or necessity — it matters little which— the Irish had fought the battles of the Stuart claimant after everybody else had deserted him. They were scattered, starved, pulverized in consequence. Now was the day of their reward! With Charles back in London, what might they not expect in return for their signal loyalty to his cause % But it happened that the 192 IKELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. English, while changing their form of government, did not change its chronic abhorrence of the Irish. With the quick instinct of a trimmer, Charles saw that the Irish were crushed and dispersed. He had no more to expect from them, of either succor or annoyance, whereas the Puritan interest was still so formidable as to require politic conciliation. Under such circum- stances Charles was not long in making up his resolu- tion. He publicly declared in Scotland that he "did detest and abhor Popery, superstition, and idolatry, to- gether with prelacy ; resolving not to tolerate, much less to allow, those in any part of his dominions, and to endeavor the extirpation thereof to the utmost of his power." As to the treaty confirmed with the Irish, he coolly pronounced it "null and void;" "he was convinced in his conscience of the sinfulness and un- lawfulness of it, and of his allowing them the liberty of the Popish religion ; for which he did desire from his heart to be humbled before the Lord, and for having sought unto such unlawful help for the restoring of him to his throne" It was a clear case of misplaced confi- dence all around. In proof of his sincere conversion and change of heart, the crowned cheat confirmed the Cromwellian adven- turers in possession of the stolen lands of the Irish, and told the latter to go whither Cromwell had sent them. Such was their reward for lavishing their blood and treasure in support of an English king.* Charles, like his sire and grandsire, was a spiritless, perfidious snob. His reign was chiefly remarkable for sham plots and conspiracies in which the most despe- * String by this base ingratitude, Colonel Costello sent to Charles a rasping petition. " For ten years," said he, " I have been beggared and hunted in your service. I ask no favor or reward therefor ; I know it would be useless. But, in the ardor of youth I fought one year against you. Am I not entitled to some compensation for that, since you are neglect- ing your friends and rewarding your enemies ? M THE PLANTATIONS. 193 rate and sanguinary designs were attributed to the Pa- pists, who, in consequence, were hunted and hanged with the zeal befitting so civilized a people as their ene- my. Among the victims was Oliver Plunkett, Catholic primate of Ireland, a learned and virtuous prelate, whose very virtue was his greatest crime. He was put to death without being allowed time to disprove the trumped-up charges brought against him. Charles went to his account in 1685, leaving to Eng- land a festering legacy of debauched morals. 13 CHAPTER X. THE WILLIAMITE WAES. James II. and William of Orange — The Boyne — Athlone — Limb- rick — Aughrlm — Sarsfield — St. Ruth — The Violated Treaty. "Though the Saxon snake unfold At thy feet his scales of gold, And pledge thee love untold, Trust him not, Green Land ! Touch not with gloveless clasp A coil'd and deadly asp, But with strong and guarded grasp In your steel-clad hand ! "—Davis. AMES II. , brother and successor to Charles, was a Catholic, and openly professed his creed when ascending the throne. One of his first acts was to issue a declaration affirming the right of all sects and classes to equal freedom of worship. The civil incapaci- ties of Catholics, Quakers, Presbyterians, and other dis- senters were thus removed, and this example of tolerance began to bear beneficent fruit, especially in Ireland, inaugurating the promise of general peace and concilia- tion. But the old demon of fanaticism had taken too fast a grip on the English spirit to be exorcised by soft words. The High Church party (one of whose funda- mental tenets was the supremacy of the king in religious matters) grew indignant at the prospect of equal rights, feeling that under such a regime they themselves would occupy an anomalous position, and might possibly lose the loaves and fishes of office. Accordingly they con- spired to invite over the Dutch prince, William of Nas- 194 THE WILLIAMITE WAES. 195 san, who was the son-in-law of James. It would never do to have a change of religion now which might lead to a rearrangement of estates — nay, perhaps to a restoration of clerical celibacy. So William, ' ' the Deliverer, ' ' landed with a small force, recruits flocked to his standard, and James, not having enough iron in him to make a reso- lute stand, fled to France. In Ireland at the time all religions were tolerated ; but the majority of the Episcopal faction, fretting under the apprehension of having to disgorge some share of their spoils, at once flung up their caps for William. The mass of the people, keenly realizing that William's triumph would mean for them only a renewal of ascendency and proscription, clung to the cause of fugitive James as the best alternative they had. Observe, they were not fight- ing against any equitable claim of Protestants or of Pro- testanism,* but against the unholy engine of torture which had always heretofore strangled their conscience and worship. " It required," says Lord Macaulay, "no great sagacity to perceive the inconsistency and dishonor of men who, dissenting from almost all Christendom, would suffer none to dissent from themselves ; who de- manded freedom of conscience, yet refused to grant it ; who execrated persecution, yet persecuted ; who urged reason against the authority of one opponent, and au- thority against the reasons of another." The Irish sprung to arms once more. Strange, some will think, that a nation so often defeated, twice almost extirpated, should so miraculously recover strength to try the battle over anew. Well, the race was always fertile and quick of growth. In the next place, weak though it was in comparison with England, resistance was the only decent or manly course left open to it. Bet- * William had a large contingent of Catholics among his followers, as had James of Pro- testants. 196 IRELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. ter meet death in the wild fever of the battle' s shock than nnder the slow torture of a savage code. Moreover, the races had by this time become considerably inter- mingled. The Celt has ever displayed a wondrous faculty for assimilating other peoples to himself, and each fresh incursion of immigrants grew to be in the course of a few generations "more Irish than the Irish." The reason was plain. As soon as the foreign colonists lost their distinctively foreign character, and began to have a vital interest in Ireland, as distinct from England, that moment they began to feel the crushing weight of English misrule as keenly as their Milesian neighbors. Identity of interests and common suffering generated an identity of feeling and aspiration. The Irish of to-day are only in small part Milesian, they draw their blood from many founts, but a single spirit permeates the great bulk of them ; and it is their boast, as it is also a proof of the justice of their cause, that thousands of their best and bravest are sprung from the loins of men who came originally to plunder and destroy. Well, James was induced to sail from Prance to Ire- land, taking with him a staff of French officers, and he found Derry (which had been held for the Prince of Orange) ready to capitulate on honorable terms. Like a fatuous old donkey as he was, James pronounced the terms too liberal, and summoned the town to surrender at discretion. Its defenders were merely Irish rebels, and for them he had no compassion. The place was strongly fortified, well garrisoned, and, to its credit, flung back King James's arrogant demand. Before he could reduce the city succor arrived from England, and a post of vital consequence, containing forty cannon and 60,000 stand of arms, was lost through self-conceit and stupidity. Had James only remained in France or been drowned in crossing, the Irish would probably THE WILLIAMITE WAES. 197 have put a different face on the Williamite campaigns. Shortly after, when the English army under Schomberg was enfeebled by an epidemic, the Irish generals were eager to attack and scatter it, but James's mood had altered. He objected, overruled the wish of his officers, and compelled them to sit idle for months, while fresh battalions from England were daily pouring in.* It would have been a good riddance for the Irish had they hanged James, or closely confined him the day he landed, and then entered the field on an independent footing. But that was not the fashion of the time — they always needed a royal figurehead of some sort to rally around, and lie seemed the smaller of two evils. He made the fairest promises, and signed an act restor- ing to the rightful owners the estates obtained under the Cromwellian Settlement. Schomberg 5 s campaign reaching no decisive result, William set out to take command in person ; and now, seeing no help for it, James consented to give him battle, after waiting until his rival had concentrated every available man on the spot. They met at the Boyne, July 1, 1690. " Behold a land worth fighting for!" said William. " Spare, oh ! spare my English sub- jects ! " piped James from the summit of a convenient hill. Here, again, his timidity and incapacity wrought disaster. When requested to send a brigade to protect the bridge of Slane, which commanded his left wing, and by which the Irish flank was subsequently turned, he sent — fifty dragoons ! He wanted to keep all the rest between himself and the enemy. William had fifty-one thousand veteran soldiers, fifty pieces of artillery, and four mortars, led by himself, a * Some historians say that he forbade the attack out of compassion for his sick subjects, ft was on this occasion that Marshal Rosen said to him: "Sire, if you had a hundred kingdoms you would lose them all.'" Assuredly he deserved to lose them. 198 IRELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. brave and accomplished commander. The Irish had twenty-three thousand men, mostly raw levies, with only six pieces of artillery, under the misdirection of a quak- ing poltroon, James, who, having done what he could to invite defeat, prudently withdrew to a neighboring sum- mit, taking with him the six thousand French troops as a body-guard, and leaving the seventeen thousand Irish to "go it alone." With all these deadly odds, few bat- tles in history have been more obstinately contested. " Ten separate times," says the English historian Smiles, did the Irish troops charge, "though inferior in num- bers, in appointments, in discipline, in artillery." At one time, "had James but ordered the French troops to the aid of the Irish, there can be little doubt but the day would have been decided in his favor,*" "but he was a safe and inglorious spectator of the struggle," "the French were never brought into action," and so, from an overwhelming pressure of numbers, the Irish had to retire — one of their officers indignantly shout- ing: "Change kings, and we loill fight the battle over again/" The victory, as this English sympathizer re- marks, was little to boast of — fifty-one thousand to sev- enteen thousand — yet the issue was doubtful all day ; no prisoners, no baggage captured. The Irish, under Tyr- connel and Sarsfield, retreated in good order beyond the Shannon. James ran away at headlong speed to Dub- lin,* and thence embarked for France. On his passage he met a French fleet coming to aid him, with the inten- tion of patroling the Irish coasts and destroying Eng- lish transports. The fleeing coward took every ship of them back again, as a convoy to protect his own precious carcass. William's next step was to send General Douglas, with * Tyrconnel's wife received him at the Castle, and he told her " the Irish had run away.** In a flash she replied : u I see your Majesty has won the race I ** THE WILLIAMITE WAKS. 199 ten regiments of foot, five of horse, twelve guns, and two mortars, to reduce Athlone, which was held by stout old Colonel Grace with only eight hundred men — one against eleven. Grace retired to the " Irish side" of the town, a splendid position for defensive operations, cut down the bridge behind him, and told Douglas to " blaze away." They did blaze away for seven days, and then, repulsed at every point, Douglas decamped with bag and baggage to rejoin his master. Their allied force (twenty-five thousand men) now laid furious siege to Limerick, the key of the south. Of the opposing Irish, only ten thousand had arms. An additional train of heavy siege guns and ammunition was coming to Wil- liam from Dublin, and had got within five miles of his camp, when Sarsfield swooped down upon it like a hawk, sabered the escort, loaded every cannon to the muzzle and set them mouth downward in the earth, piled all the baggage over the powder, and then blew the whole train into the clouds with a shock which almost rent the granite hills. Back to Limerick in safety rode the Galloping Earl and his troops, though every squadron in the English camp was scouring the country to intercept him. For twenty -seven consecutive days forty cannon belched forth their iron summons at the leaguered walls, and at length a practicable breach was reported. Six thousand veterans, with a reserve of eight thousand behind them, were ordered to the assault, and entered the breach with steady tramp while line after line was mowed down like grass. For four hours they struggled in the crimson gap, then fell back to mend their shat- tered ranks. In this repulse the women * of Limerick * The William ite armies had committed such foul ahominations elsewhere that these noble women declared they would rather be torn in pieces than submit to the caprice of wretches so brutal. . . Thank God, the spirit of Limerick's maids and matrons has not 200 IKELASTD AS SHE HAS BEEN. fought side by side with their husbands, sires, and sons, "and sometimes," says the English historian Storey, "they were nearer to our men than their own." Again the column was led to the attack, and this time it was ' not only beaten back, but was pursued into its own trenches, while two thousand of its stoutest veterans lay stark before the unconquered city. A truce was asked in order to bury the dead. It was refused by the Irish, and William sullenly withdrew, setting fire before he went to the houses where the sick and wounded lay. On reaching London, he sent over the famous Marlbo- rough to besiege Cork and Kinsale. For the lack of am- munition neither city could make a stubborn defense. The garrison held out as long as men could, then capit- ulated as " prisoners of war." Their treacherous captor imprisoned every man of them until, from starvation and disease, not one was left alive. A more energetic campaign than ever was now re- solved upon. The regular English army in Ireland consisted of thirty-seven thousand five hundred men, supported by twelve thousand yeomanry, or militia, all well armed and appointed, with the richest part of the country in their grasp and a powerful nation to draw upon for supplies. The Irish force was mainly re- cruited from scattered bands, "the fearless Eapparees." The population of the island was only one million five hundred thousand, half of which was in the English in- terest.* The " rebels" were enfeebled by constant war, harassed for lack of resources and material, and suc- cored only by an occasional French legion, which was departed from us yet, but rings out clear as a clarion-note in the electric utterances of the Marchioness of Queensberry, "Speranza," "the Nun of Kenmare," in Ireland ; of the late lamented "Una" on this side of the wave ; and abides in the aspirations of thousands of other pure and high-souled women less widely known, but not less devoted to Right and Freedom. * The Cromwellian settlers naturally enough did their utmost to guard their own booty, which was seriously imperiled. THE WILLIAMITE WAKS. 201 often more of a hindrance than a help. An unequal con- test, surely — so unequal that, in looking back upon it, one scarcely knows whether amazement or admiration is uppermost. The French auxiliaries, numbering six thousand, were under command of St. Ruth, to whom James trans- ferred also the command of the Irish army. It was an unfortunate choice, but some curse seemed ever to at- tend the Stuart cause. Had the Irish insisted on having the chief command intrusted to Sarsfield, as the Ameri- can colonists a century later insisted on the military supremacy of Washington, the course of their struggle would have shown more substantial gains. To obviate possible jealousy as to rank or precedence, Sarsfield (like Washington) might easily have been given a general's commission in the French service. Ginckle, at the head of seventeen thousand men, ad- vanced upon Athlone,* and first proceeded to storm the " English " (or eastern) side of the town, which was held by less than four hundred Irishmen. Four thousand English musketeers carried the fortifications after more than half the little band of defenders had been slain. Yet the remnant, expecting reinforcements from St. Ruth, held the four thousand at bay until it had demol- ished the stone arches of the bridge, and then retired, as Grace had previously done, to the " Irish" side of the river. The British batteries were plied against them so furiously that "a cat could scarcely live upon the ram- parts," Ginckle' s design being to repair the broken arches and thus afford footing for another assault. Cannon * On his way he encountered an old castle, held by a sergeant and fifteen men. This handful trained their guns on the advancing army, and did not yield until the walls were tumbled around their heads. The gallant sergeant was hanged for his " rashness " ! His was an act of heroism, at once deliberate and reckless, which, if done in any other land, would have earned a marble shaft, not a rope's end, for the leader. An honorable enemy would have been the first to admire it. 202 IKELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. were planted to sweep the narrow passage, and nnder cover of their fire beams were thrown across the chasm. Ont sprang brave Sergeant Custume and ten of his com- rades, rnshed along the deadly lane and plied the beams with axe and bar. Before they could complete the work every man of them was torn to pieces in the storm of round-shot and grape ; yet out sprang eleven more to take their place. When the smoke next cleared away, nine of these, too, had disappeared,* but Grinckle's bridge was — every spar of it — floating down the Shan- non ! He next attempted to cross the river on pontoons, but found St. Ruth at length posted to meet him, and, hopeless of success, was about to raise the siege (after expending fifty tons of powder, twelve thousand cannon balls, and six hundred bombs), when he was informed that St. Ruth had withdrawn two miles away and was giving a grand entertainment in honor of the victory ; also that a fordable spot in the river had just been dis- covered. Ginckle resolved on a final dash, and next morning advanced for the fourth time. Word was sent to the French head-quarters that the enemy was making a suspicious movement, as if about to ford the river. " Impossible," rejoined St. Ruth, "that they should make another attempt while I am so near." He realized his mistake when the town was captured, mainly be- cause of his stupid vanity and self-delusion. The Irish were so disgusted with their ally, that Sarsfield, Tyrcon- nel, and other leaders withdrew their commands from his camp. * The names of nearly all the gallant party are lost. " Unknown, unnamed, unspoken, Their praise no minstrels sing, For them no chord is woken, No laurels round them cling ; But never yet has Freedom More brave defenders known, Than those bold hearts that guarded The old bridge at Athlone."— Wm. Collins THE WILLIAMITE WAES. 203 Beginning now to perceive the consequences of his folly, St. Ruth posted his army (fifteen thousand strong) in an advantageous position near Aughrim, and sought to regain the co-operation of Sarsfield. The English at- tacked him with twenty-five thousand, and were so im- petuously met that the whole course of the campaign seemed about to be reversed, when a double disaster abruptly turned the tide of battle. 1. An important pass was lost for lack of ammunition, the casks at that critical point being filled, through some fatal mistake, with cannon balls instead of musketry bullets. 2. At the decisive moment of the battle an eight-pound shot tore off St. Ruth's head. None of his subordinates knew or could carry out his plans, a panic spread among his army, and what had promised to be a victory was changed into a rout. Most of the Irish succeeded in cutting their way out, for they had learned by this time not to trust an Englishman nearer than sword' s point ; but upward of two thousand captives taken during the day were butchered in cold blood ! The total Irish loss was about four thousand, the English three thousand- figures which plainly indicate how dearly the field of Aughrim was won. As soon as Sarsfield heard of the French leader's death he swept down with his matchless cavalry, too late to save the day, but in time to cover the retreat and pre- vent a wholesale massacre. Through this entire cam- paign the Irish fought against crushing odds ; yet harder battles, say competent authorities, were never contested in Europe. THE TREATY OF LIMERICK. To Limerick once more — city of glorious memories and inspirations — and with Patrick Sarsfield, Earl of Lucan, in command. The whole southwest held itself boldly 204 IRELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. and firmly, with the Galloping Earl sweeping like a whirlwind across the breast of it, cutting into mince- meat every British squadron or battalion that dared straggle beyond gunshot of the main body. For two and a half months Grinckle's artillery battered down Limerick's walls, his shells rained into Limerick's streets, but he attempted no nearer assault. Irish agents were meantime soliciting aid from France, and Louis promised it, although James the Runaway bewailed his kingdom as lost. William at the same time began to have grave doubts of his ability to subdue the Irish, full as his hands were with continental and domestic work ; so he sent word to Ginckle to conclude a peace on any terms, provided the Irish would acknowledge his (William's) sovereignty. The Irish leaders asked if he would grant and guarantee the rights in defense of which they had espoused his father-in-law' s cause. Answer — Yes ; and, preferring the lion to the stag, they accepted. A solemn treaty was drawn up and ratified, securing to them, 1. The free exercise of their religion. 2. Untrainmeled liberty of trade and commerce. 3. An Irish Parliament. 4. Protection of estates held by Irishmen or Catholics. 5. General amnesty for participators in the war. These surely were not the demands of a vanquished army. The Irish did not give up their arms, but marched out with the customary honors of war, retain- ing even the best part of their artillery and ammunition. The binding covenant was formally signed October 3, 1691, on the famous Treaty Stone, in presence of both armies. Two days afterward a French fleet sailed up the Shannon with reinforcements, money, and sup- plies. The English, shivering with apprehension that Sarsfield might now pay them back in their own coin by resuming the offensive, began to prepare themselves THE WILLIAMITE WAES. 205 for a fresh encounter. They could not conceive that the Irish, with so much now in their favor, would re- spect the Treaty ! To their amazement, Sarsfield proud- ly yet bitterly said: "I have signed the contract, and Ireland's honor is pledged." Having thus secured, as they thought, peace and jus- tice to their countrymen (for William had been always looked upon as a man of sturdy fidelity to his word), the Irish soldiers refused to live under the alien banner of Britain, and embarked for France, where they formed the nucleus of the historic Brigade. To Sarsfield the grateful land of his adoption has raised a costly monu- ment inscribed with letters of gold. At home he was only a leader of " outlaws" and "rebels." CHAPTER XI. THE PENAL CODE. How Queen Anne and the Georges gave the Irish a Living Death. " The Treaty Stone of Limerick ! the monument unbuilt Of Irish might, and Irish right, and Saxon shame and guilt ; That saw the hope of Lucan's Earl — his own unconquered band— With stem resolve, but broken hearts, around it take their stand ; That 6aw him sign the Treaty, but saw him sign in vain, For shamefully 'twas broken ere the Wildgeese crossed the main." EFORE signing the national compact at lime- rick, Sarsfield, resolute to leave no loop-hole or pretext for its subsequent repudiation or eva- sion, insisted that the Lords Justices should come down from Dublin to sign the document, and that it should then be ratified by William and Mary. His demands were fully complied with, and the Irish were thus put in possession of a fair share of civil and religious lib- erty, under the influence of which changed conditions the marvelous recuperative power of the nation was prompt to manifest itself. Commerce and industry revived with quick pulsations, the seeds of enterprise began to strike firm root, and everything looked hope- ful. But these very symptoms aroused the jealousy and rapacity of England. The Wildgeese had sailed away, leaving Ireland helplessly leaning on the weak reed of a parchment treaty. Now was the time to stran- gle her before she could again grow strong enough tc protect herself. So the solemn Treaty was torn to pieces, its every pledge shamelessly violated — Dr. Dop- 206 THE PENAL CODE. 207 ping* delivering "a philippic in Christ Church, Dublin, in presence of the Lords Justices, on "the crime of keeping faith with Papists " ! When William concluded his continental war, he owed a million sterling to his soldiery, and his ex- chequer was bare as a miser's palm. What was he to do? Why, just what all his predecessors had done when opportunity offered — he confiscated upward of two million acres of the best land in Ireland ! Many other patrimonies were saved only by the payment of large bribes, not alone to the courtiers, but into his "immortal" Majesty's private purse, as the English commissioners testify. Yet this wholesale pillage of the soil did not suffice. Ireland had still too much vitality left ; so it was resolved to paralyze her in every limb by striking down simultaneously her conscience, intellect, and trade. In pursuance of this intent, many of the penal statutes of Elizabeth's reign were embodied in a couple of Acts now passed by William and his legisla- ture. The Catholics were disarmed, disabled from edu- cating their children, prohibited from filling any public position down to that of gamekeeper, and all their clergy were ordered to quit the kingdom. In 1698 the Peers and Commons of England presented an address to William, praying him to discourage the woolen manufacture in Ireland, f as it was operating "to the great prejudice of the trade of this kingdom." What was William's answer ? 1 ' i" shall do all that in me lies to discourage the woolen manufacture in Ireland.'''' \ * Dopping was Anglican Bishop of Meath. It is gratifying to be able to add that hia appeal was rebuked and refuted (though without avail) by another Protestant prelate, Dr. Moreton of Kildare. t See Part First, Chapter VII. t To soften the blow to the Irish Protestant artisans, he promised at the same time to encourage the linen trade ; but dispart of the promise he totally forgot. 208 IRELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. Pronibitory duties were forthwith (10 William III., chapter 3) imposed upon the export of the famous Irish woolens, and the prospering industry was uprooted by fraud and force.* The prohibition was improved upon by the Embargo Laws forbidding Irish merchants to trade directly with any foreign nation, or to import or export any article except from or to English ports. One solitary exception was made, and let it never be forgot- ten. To " preserve " the morals of the Irish people, and to assist a colonial monopoly, Ireland was permitted to import, free of duty — what do you think ? — Jamaica rum ! These infamous laws drove two hundred thousand skilled artisans out of Ireland — most of them Hugue- nots and Ulster Protestants — and would have driven out five times as many if they could only have es- caped. Froude curses the " idiocy," "the accursed legislation, and yet more unpardonable policy" which thus alienated and expelled "the rank and file of the loyal Protestant garrison of the north;" and he adds : "They went with bitterness in their hearts, cursing and detesting the aristocratic system of which the ennobling qualities were lost, and only the worst retained. The South and West were caught by the same movement, and ships could not be found to carry the crowds who were eager to go." Observe, Mr. Froude has no sympathy to waste on those Irish, no regret for the wrong in so far as it affected merely them. His indignation arises from the fact that it was the offspring of these very men who were after- ward mainly instrumental in winning American Inde- pendence ! * In addition to breaking faith with the Irish, William is responsible for the massacre of Glencoe. An entire Scottish clan laid down arms and took the oath of allegiance on promise of amnesty. They were set upon and butchered in a night. THE PENAL CODE. 209 QUEEN ANNE AND THE GEOKGES. Dying in 1701, William was succeeded by his sister- in-law, Anne Stnart, a bigoted old vixen who kept the machinery of persecution steadily going, and under whom the Penal Code was brought to its highest stage of perfection. Never before or since did the genius of intolerance conceive a code more barbarously cruel and malignant. It is hard in our day to believe that human nature could lower itself to the deliberate and constant use of an instrument so satanic ; but there it stands on the brazen tablets of history, an eternal monument of shame. Says Johnson : ' ' The sanguinary English code outstripped the Ten Persecutions on the early Christians inflicted by pagan Rome." "It was," says Sir J. Barrington, "the most dexterous but atrocious iniquity that ever stained the annals of legislation." "It was," says Edmund Burke, "a machine of wise and elaborate contrivance, as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment, and de- gradation of the people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man." "It was," says the great French jurist, Montesquieu, "a code con- ceived by devils, written in human gore, and registered in hell." The salient features of the code are summarized as follows by John Mitchel : "They took charge of every Catholic from his cradle and attended him to his grave. Catholic children could only be educated by Protest- ant teachers at home ; and it was highly penal to send them abroad for education. " Catholics were excluded from every profession, except the medical; and from all official stations without exception. " Catholics were forbidden to exercise trade or commerce in any cor- porate town. " Catholics were legally disqualified to hold leases of land for a longer tenure than thirty-one years ; and also disqualified to inherit the lands of Protestant relatives. 14 210 IRELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN". "A Catholic could not legally possess a horse of greater value than five pounds ; and any true Protestant meeting a Catholic with a horse of fifty or sixty pounds in value, might lay down the legal price of five pounds, unhorse the idolater, mount in his place, and ride away. u A Catholic child, turning Protestant, could sue his parent for main- tenance ; to be determined by the Protestant Court of Chancery. "A Catholic's eldest son, turning Protestant, reduced his father to a tenant-for-life, the reversion to the convert. "A Catholic priest could not celebrate Mass under severe penalties ; but any priest who recanted was secured a stipend by law." Barrington (who, like Dr. Johnson, Burke, and Mit- chel, was himself a Protestant) describes the operation of the code as follows : "A code, which would have dishonored even the sanguinary pen of Draco, had inflicted every pain and penalty under which a people could linger out a miserable existence. By these statutes the exercise of religion had been held a crime, the education of children a high misde- meanor ; the son was encouraged to betray his father, the child rewarded for the ruin of his parent ; the house of God was declared a public nui- sance, the officiating pastor proclaimed an outlaw ; the acquirement ot property [by Catholics] absolutely prohibited ; plunder legalized in courts of law, and breach of trust rewarded in courts of equity ; the Irish Catholics excluded from the possession of any office or occupation in the state, the law, the army, the navy, the municipal bodies, or the chartered corporations ; and the mild doctrines of the Christian faith perverted, even in the pulpit, to the worst purposes of religious perse- cution." The motive of these ferocious enactments is readily found in the dread of the ascendant faction that the Papists might try to recover their ancestral domains. To prevent any such deplorable consummation, it was politic to depress and debase the aforesaid Papists as much as possible. And they were debased. Restrained from owning house, or land, or ship ; from carrying on school, or trade, or profession ; from voting or holding office ; from cultivating their native tongue or practicing THE PENAL CODE. 211 their religion — is it any wonder that they were rednced to ignorance, pauperism, serfdom % When Anne relinquished the British scepter (1714), it passed into the grasp of George I., "a Hanoverian hog," ignorant, brutal, and licentious, under whom the good work of exploiting the Papists was not allowed to slack. In his reign the patriotic Irish Protestant divine, Dean Swift, began to probe the abuses around him with caus- tic pen ; and in the same reign was passed an Act assert- ing the positive and inherent right of England to bind Ireland by every British law, thus tearing away the thin vail which had heretofore covered the worthlessness and impotence of the parrot-Parliament in Dublin. In 1727 came George II., another chip of the same block — illiterate, stupid, and bigoted, by whom was signed a statute dissolving all marriages between Prot- estants and Papists ; also a statute decreeing the pen- alty of death against any Catholic priest who should marry a Protestant and Papist. Hard work it was to keep the orthodox fold free from contamination ! The most memorable words George II. ever uttered were an imprecation on the laws which " deprived me [him] of such subjects" as the Irish legion which whipped his best generals through Europe. Toward the middle of his reign his jurisdiction in Ireland was mainly exercised by the Protestant Primate, Stone, an imported English bishop, " who converted his house into a brothel in order to winthe support of the younger members of Parlia- ment." In this reign were broadened and extended the foundations of Britain's Eastern empire — foundations built of human bones, cemented with gore — and British lust of conquest flung back the civilization of Asia for centuries. The butchery of the Hindoos* so shocked and infuriated the other Asiatic peoples that Christianity was proscribed from the Euphrates to the Amoor, be- 212 IEELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. cause it was professed by the English. Missioners and converts were everywhere killed or banished, lest they might open a way for similar invasions. George III. ascended the throne in 1760. What the condition of the Irish then was may be faintly conceived from the subjoined description by an English author, Smiles : " Any descriptive detail that we could give of the sufferings of the Irish people during this lamentable period must fall far short of the reality. We can readily appreciate the miseries and horrors of a period of destructive civil warfare. We see the blood, we hear the groans, we witness the deaths ; the circumstances make a deep impression on our minds, and we imagine them to be the worst that civilized society can suffer. But there is a greater misery than this, though one that is cal- culated to make less impression on the mind of the general observer. It is a period of slow national torture by means of the law ; of quiet op- pression and tyranny inflicted by a bigoted ascendency ; of insult and cruelty and wrong heaped upon a crushed and plundered people, for the exclusive benefit of the smallest and least deserving class in the State."* Four years after the accession of George III., an exiled Irishmanf in Philadelphia began to foster " sedi- tion" by propagating the doctrine that a London Par- liament had no right to tax the American colonies, which had no representation therein. That agitation was the cloud no larger than a man's palm, which grew and swelled apace until in twelve years it rode a tempest that split King George's dominion in twain. And (to quote Smiles again), " as the Irish Brigade struck down the British power at Landen and Fontenoy, so did the refugee Irish in the ranks of the American patriot army contribute to pluck from the brow of Britain the palm of empire." * It is almost superfluous to remark that Smiles has never enjoyed much repute in Eng- land as a historical writer. Froude would pronounce him afflicted with softening of the brain. t Charles Thompson, afterward Secretary of Congress. THE PENAL CODE. 213 Anticipating the conrse of my narrative by a few decades, I may here reproduce Thackeray's stinging, because accurate, epitome of the lives of the Four Georges : " George the First most vile was reckoned; Viler still was George the Second ; And what mortal ever heard % Any good of George the Third ? When George the Fourth to hell descended, God be praised ! the Georges ended ! " * * As a companion-piece to Thackeray's, I clipped the following scrap from a book-review in the New York Tribune: "The story of the Georges is a sickening record of nnbridled licentiousness, grasping selfishness, treachery, tyranny, and mental incapacity. Think of the Marchioness of Hertford, the favorite mistress of George IV. when he was Prince Re- gent, being spoken of in the Courier, the then ministerial journal, as 'Britain's Guardian Angel,' because her saintly influence had been used to hinder the carrying of any measure of relief for the Irish Catholics 1 " CHAPTER XII. THE IRISH IN EXILE. What Foetune Befel the Banished Wildgeese and their Descendants — Wasted Valor and Intellect. " And exiled in those penal days, Our banners over Europe blaze."— Davis. FEW pages may here appropriately be spared to trace some of the far-reaching consequences of the Treaty of Limerick and its violation. The effect of that instrument, as has been already seen, was to create first a voluntary, then a compulsory exodus of Irish brain and muscle ; and the story of many of the men thus expatriated justifies the lofty compliment paid to the race by our American poet, Willis, who mentions as characteristic of it "an undying love of liberty, and an untamed and restless genius." When your enemy applauds you, the praise must be deserved ; so let Mr. Froude once more appear upon the stand. He says : " The Irishman of the last century rose to his natural level whenever he was removed from his own unhappy country. In the Seven Years' War Austria's best generals were Irishmen. Brown was an Irishman ; O'Donnell's name speaks for him; and Lally Tollendal, who punished England at Fontenoy,* was O'Mullaly of Tollendally. Strike the names of Irishmen out of our own public service, and we lose the heroes of our own proudest exploits — we lose the Wellesleys, the Pallizers, the Moores, the Eyres, the Cootes, the Napiers ; we lose half of the officers and half the privates who conquered India for us, and fought our battles in the * O'Brien, not Lally, commanded the Brigade at Fontenoy. 214 THE IEISH IN EXILE. 215 Peninsula. What the Irish could do as enemies, we were about to learn* when the Irish exiles in America crowded to the standard of Wash- ington." The Irish army which went abroad from Limerick won imperishable laurels on the reddest battle-fields of Europe, and gave eminent statesmen to every conti- nental court. Nineteen thousand men sailed directly for France, where, with a few scattered regiments already in the service, they formed the nucleus of the historic Brigade. Official records in the French War Office show that during a single century four hundred and fifty thousand natives of Ireland died in the military service of France. A much smaller number of the exiles car- ried their swords and talents into the employ of Spain, Austria, Russia, and other States. At Fontenoy,f Ramillies, Landen,J Lafeldt, Cremona, § Almanza, they snatched victory out of the grasp of disaster. Their leaders gained the highest civil as well as military hon- ors,, winning distinction not only as soldiers but also as diplomatists and statesmen. Sarsfield and O'Brien became marshals of France ; Hamilton, Lally, and McCarthy, generals ; Sheldon, Galmoy, 0' Carroll, O'Gara, Fitzgerald, O'Mahony, O'Neill, Power, MacMahon, Burke, Murphy, Maguire, Dillon, Roche, McDonnell, Lee, McElligott, and a host of others commanded regiments, many of them founding families whose representatives play an important part in French public affairs to-day. In the Irish World's re- port of the St. Patrick's Day celebration in Paris, 1875, occurs the annexed passage : * Query : Why " were about to learn " ? Better say " did learn." + Davis's ringing ballad bae made tbe story of Fontenoy " familiar as a household word." % Sarsfield was mortally wounded in a charge at Landen. § Prince Eugene surprised Cremona, and was almost in possession of it, when O'Ma- hony's single regiment, clad only in shirts and belts, drove him out and held the town. 216 IEELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. " Among those assembled were men whose family names are house- hold words in Ireland and France. There was the veteran Nugent, the friend and relative of the great Austrian marshal ; O'Neill de Tyrone, the descendant of the victors of the Yellow Ford and Benburb; O'Brien, who led the chasseurs to the Malakoff ; and MacDermott, who charged with the cuirassiers at Solferino ; and there was O'Farrel, whose ancestor marched with ' Myles the Slasher ' through Longford, and died beside him on the Bridge of Finae ; and O'Kelly, and O'Leary, and O'Ryan (how proudly these Irish Frenchmen cling to the ' O ' and 1 Mac'), and a hundred others, whose fathers had fought with Dillon in the old Brigade, or tramped with Humbert from Castlebar to the heart of Ireland, or fought against British tyranny, with Lafayette and Wash- ington, at Brandywine and Yorktown." To most people, no doubt, it will be a surprise to learn that the organization and tactics of modern armies in Europe were perfected by a Franco-Irish colonel, who bore the familiar name of Daniel O'Connell. He joined Clare' s regiment at the age of fourteen ; by his native energy and talent he speedily raised himself to the rank of major-general and inspector-general of the French army. His most conspicuous service is thus described by so careful an authority as Sir Bernard Burke : "The French Government resolved that the Art of War should un- dergo revision, and a Military Board was formed for this purpose (in 1788) comprising four general officers and one colonel. The colonel selected was O'Connell, who was esteemed one of the most scientific officers in the service. Without patronage of family, he had risen to a colonelcy before he had attained his fortieth year. Only a few meet- ings of the Board had taken place when the superior officers, struck with the depth and accuracy of the information, great military genius, and correct views displayed by Colonel O'Connell, unanimously agreed to confide to him the renewal of the whole French military code, and he exe- cuted the arduous duty so perfectly that his tactics were those followed in the early campaigns of revolutionized France, adhered to by Napoleon, and adopted by Prussia, Austria, Bussia, and England." O'Reilly, Kavanagh, and Prince Nugent are historic names in Austria. 0' Sullivan, Lawless, Gardiner, O' Don- THE IEISH IN EXILE. 217 nell, and another O'Reilly became grandees of Spain ; and men yet living can recall the time when O'Donnell was dictator at Madrid. Lacy and Browne were mar- shals of Russia, and won the most brilliant victories of their era. Nugent and one of the Kavanaghs were Aulic councilors in Austria. Marshal Maurice Kava- nagh was chamberlain of Poland ; Colonel Harold filled a similar station in Bavaria. To the Count of Clonard was intrusted the education of the heir to the throne of France. Marquis MacMahon (grandsire of the marshal- president) was one of the first agents sent to investigate the condition of the American colonies and suggest plans for their liberation. Patrick Lawless was ambassador from Portugal to France ; 0' Reilly represented Spain at the court of Louis XVI. "It is strange," said Napoleon, on his second entry to Vienna (1809), "that now, as in 1805, on entering the Austrian capital, I find myself in intercourse with Count O'Reilly." Napoleon* had good reason to know the Count, for it was he, with his band of exiled '98 men, that saved the broken army of Austria after Austerlitz. In that army at that very time were over forty Irish names ranging from the grade of colonel to that of field-marshal ; and when Maria-Theresa of Hungary in- stituted fifty crosses of the Legion of Honor, to be given to the men most distinguished in her service, forty-six of the fifty decorations were worn on the breasts of Irish- * O'Donovan mentions a tradition yet extant in Corsica to the effect that the first Napo- leon himself was the grandson of an Irish fugitive, Gaul Burke, whom fate had flung on the Corsican shore after the battle of Aughrim. The tradition has little value in the absence of more positive proof, yet there's nothing impossible in it. Andrew Jackson was, in hie sphere, as great a prodigy as Napoleon ; yet " Old Hickory" was " the son of a poor Irish emigrant.'" MacMahon to-day fills as responsible a post a? did the Little Corsican ; but had the family name been modified (as it readily might have been) to Mamone or something of that sort, people would ridicule the idea of his descent from an expatriated Irishman. Cha- teaubriand and Robespierre are names which give no direct suggestion of a Milesian origin ; yet both the author of La Genie du Chretianisme, and the grim leader of the Mountain party in the Reign of Terror, were of Irish extraction. 218 IRELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. men. In 1787 the Russian fleet sailed into the Bay of Naples under command of Admiral O'Dwyer. The part played by the Irish element in the United States is reserved for a separate chapter. In moving for a repeal of the Penal Code, Lord Mountjoy startled the British Parliament with the avowal: " England lost America by Ireland ! " Nowhere have Irish valor and genius been more con- spicuous than in framing the governments and winning the freedom of the South American republics. O'Hig- gins was Captain-general and President of Chili, and is there venerated as another Washington. His executive chair is occupied in our own day by President Vicuna MacKenna. O'Donoghue was Captain-general in Mex- ico. O'Brien, O'Reilly, Devereux, were generals; Mac- Kenna, O'Leary, O'Connor, O' Carroll, commanded regi- ments ; — in fact, most of Bolivar's staff consisted of men who were Irish by birth or descent. In the same way Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, Greece, Turkey, and even China and Japan have profited by the activity, enterprise, and talent which British legislation banned and banished from Irish soil — " Flooding foreign lands with glory, but their motherland with tears." They carved for themselves a shining record while they wrought grand achievements for the nations in whose employ they served ; but in so far as any material bene- fit to Ireland is concerned, their intellect and valor may be set down as wasted. Upon her was reflected the shadow of their glory — and no more ! The irony of fate and circumstances deprived her of the hearts and arms which should have made her a star among the nations, and guarded her bounteous wealth for her own people's sustenance. Some months ago the London Spectator asked : " What THE IEISH IN EXILE. 219 is it in the climate of Ireland that affects the brains of her statesmen V 9 * The question is not much of a puzzle. The aforesaid climate is pregnant with exhalations from the misery and decay which it enshrouds. If an Irishman is honest and self-respecting, his conscience compels him to denounce and oppose the flagrant mis- rule and legalized robbery around him ; and, doing this, his chances of being recognized as a " statesman" in Britain are infinitesimally small. For being humane and manful he earns the name of " a dangerous ranter." Should he grow weary of butting his head against the granite arrogance of an alien Parliament, or should some bold utterance drag him within the meshes of the "law," he may be thankful to find a path open to exile. Once in a foreign atmosphere, he finds that what was " treason" in Ireland becomes patriotism and states- manship abroad. The man is not changed in any essen- tial, but his surroundings are. Charles Gavan Duffy had no more "gas on the brain" when he stood in- dicted as a felon in Dublin thirty years ago, than he had two decades later when his administration of a re- mote Australian colony won for him words of earnest praise from the foremost legislators of Europe and * Here is the extract in extenso : " What is it in the climate of Ireland that affects the brains of her statesmen ? Man after man rises to notoriety, gets into some mad political scrape, is pronounced by the entire empire a dangerous ranter with gas on the brain, goes away, and thenceforward makes his way in the world with the energy and the moderation commonly supposed to be a monopoly of Scotch- men. Either he makes a fortune, or he becomes a premier of a colony, or he leads a success- ful army, or he achieves in some way a recognition which makes the most prejudiced Eng- lishman regret that he should ever have been forced to go. It is almost the same with Irishmen who have no gas on the brain, but are recognized from the first as capable men ; they all seem to expand the moment they are delivered from the pressure of their native atmosphere, and expand in such a way— for that is the first peculiarity of the change— that Englishmen and Scotchmen, as well as Irishmen, perceive at once what noteworthy people they are. Judging by our recent colonial history, by the conduct not only of men like Sir Gavan Duffy or Mr. Pope Hennessy, but of men like Lord Dufferin, it would almost seem as if the first want of an Irishman was room— something big to do, big enough to overcome in him that temptation to the grandiose which is in most Irishmen the most visible intellectual defect. Perhaps, however, the want is not so much work as sunlight. 11 220 IEELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. America. Had Charles Carroll's progenitors remained in Ireland, "the Last of the Signers" would probably have been hanged, drawn, and quartered on suspicion of exciting rebellion in Cork or Tipperary. Had the parents of Andrew Jackson remained in Ireland, the victor of New Orleans would probably have had a stub- born wrestle through life with the wolf of hunger, un- less his career were abruptly ended with a hempen neck- tie. Had the ancestor of MacMahon remained in Ire- land, the present executive head of the French republic would probably be an inconspicuous squireen or third- rate lawyer — always assuming that his family record did not terminate with a rope-knot. What is most to be regretted is that so large a portion of this proscribed brain and sinew has gone to build up, solidify and embellish England's power. The most brilliant names in her annals during the past century — statesmen, orators, warriors, artists — are Celtic. Take away Burke, Wellington, Goldsmith, Moore, Sheridan, Barry, Hogan, M'Clise, Foley, Doyle, Balfe* — and what a chasm you have left ! England admitted no Catholic Irish into her army until Burgoyne surrendered at Sara- toga ; but from that time to the present the Irish have done more than half her fighting by land and sea. Circumstances fitted them to be mercenaries and led them to strengthen the hand of their own oppressor. When the Duke of Richmond was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, he was told that the tradesmen of Dublin were starving. " Oh ! " replied he, " a dear loaf and scanty wages in Ireland are the best recruiting sergeants for his Majesty ! " In 1843 Napier went into action on the banks of the Indus with three thousand troops, and * The British Museum was founded by an Irishman, Sir H. Sloane ; the Academy of Arts, by his countrymen Barrett and Barry ; the British Parliament House was built by Barry and adorned by the pencil of M'Clise. THE IEISH IN EXILE. 221 defeated twenty-five thousand of the picked soldiers of Scinde. Napier had only four hundred Europeans, but this handful charged the whole army of Scinde, and their commander (recollecting where the reckless bat- talion had been enlisted) cried aloud : ''Magnificent Tip- perary ! " At that very moment a bill was on its way through the London coercion-factory to disarm Ireland. For all this wasted valor and intellect there is but one gleam of consolation : the Irish race is world-wide, and its hostility to English misrule and plunder in the cra- dle-land is propagated more zealously from day to day. When the scattered fragments shall succeed in welding their hostility into a single well-directed effort, Britain's empire will suffer from the shock. CHAPTER XIII. PAETIAL INDEPENDENCE. The Volunteers and Parliament op 1782— England's Difficulty, Ireland's Opportunity — Grattan and his Colleagues — Pledges and Guarantees. " During that eighteenth century the Catholics disappear from history and politics. Such sallies of resistance as were made in those years against the encroachment of British power were made by Protestants (Swift, Lucas, Molyneux) in assertion of a Protestant Nationality and for the independence of a Protestant Parliament." — Mitchel. " Consecutive Irish administrations had consecutively impoverished the land, ruined its trade, traded on its politics, hunted the Catholics, humbugged the Protestants, chained the peasantry, and manacled with mock dignity the peers."— Savage. ROM the time that Henry II. and his barons got a secure foothold in Leinster, Dublin became the seat of a miniature court and government fashioned after the London model. In the lapse of years the viceregal council developed into the semblance of a Parliament, whereupon the " superior wisdom" en- throned on the other side of the channel saw fit to exer- cise a vigilant and controlling influence over the deliber- ations of this local assembly. Accordingly, in the reign of Henry VII., a statute was framed by the Attorney- general, Poyning, to restrain the Irish chambers from originating any law whatever. Before a bill could be introduced for debate or amendment in Dublin, a draft of it had first to be submitted to the Lord Lieutenant and his Privy Council, who might either summarily squelch it or transmit it to England. If sent to England, it had there to pass the ordeal of another examination, during which it was either consigned to the flames, or, 222 PAETIAL INDEPENDENCE. 223 having been remodeled at will, was sent back to Ireland for formal enactment. All this time, be it remembered, the puppet Parliament in Dnblin was essentially English in composition and sympathy, and, moreover, from the time of Henry VIIL, was intensely and intolerantly Protestant. To this corrupt clique and its adherents (representing hardly a tenth of the population) was given complete control of the Church, the laws, the revenues of Ireland, and of every institution receiving or extending patronage. Consequently, observes Savage, "in the English connection alone they beheld security ; and England, profiting by their weaknesses, gave them her protection, and took in exchange the commerce and liberties of Ireland." In course of time, however, their dependence began to gall them. They resented especially the restrictions placed upon their trade (which touched them in the pocket), and murmurs began to be heard. Molyneux wrote his "Inquiry how far England possesses Author- ity to bind Ireland." The book was burned by the com- mon hangman, which fate helped to advertise and pop- ularize its doctrines ; and in 1768 a trifling reform was achieved in the passage of Flood's Octennial Bill.* Swift plied a tireless and trenchant pen in favor of home manufactures, always leading to the epigrammatic coun- sel : " Burn every tiling that comes from England, except Tier coals ! " Charles Lucas, a Protestant patriot of wide and warm sympathies, waged hot battle against British supremacy in things political, commercial, and religious, and addressed resonant appeals to his Catholic country- men to wake up from their stupor of despair. This spirited champion of the popular cause had to seek safety in exile, but the seed planted by him and his co- * Previously the members of the Irish Parliament held their seats during the life of the king. Now the term was reduced to eight years at furthest. 224 IKELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. workers took root and blossomed under a system which was visibly beggaring the whole land. Animated by his words, three or four distinguished men among the Catho- lics — Curry, O' Conor, Wise, Keogh — began to agitate, and secured some trifling concessions for their co-religionists. Like a revelation came sudden tidings of the American colonial rebellion. Although the actual proportions of the conflict or the pregnant issues involved in it were not fully comprehended for years after, still the example was inspiring ; the spirit of independence seemed dif- fused through every gale that crossed the Atlantic ; the spell of servile submission in Ireland was broken. The coalition of France with the United States forced England to put forth all her energies, but vainly did she empty her coffers in hiring Hessian mercenaries ; the valor, persistence and ardor of Washington and Lafay- ette were surely uprooting the foundations of her empire in the West. At this juncture, in order to embarrass England's offensive measures, France intimated an inten- tion to invade Ireland. It was only a feint, designed to create a formidable diversion in favor of the struggling colonies ; yet so genuine was the alarm it excited that French and Yankee privateers were reported to be in readiness to descend upon the Irish coast and sack the seaports. Paul Jones had already shown the feasibility of such attacks, and England was thunderstruck. With her military forces and fleets dispersed through distant camps and stations of three continents, with resources already strained, with an unpopular ministry and heavy taxation, she could afford no contingent at all capable of protecting Ireland from the menaced invasion. The Catholics of Ireland at that time, like the Irish- men of to-day, were not permitted to carry, to have, or to learn the use of arms ; it would have been too perilous a privilege. But the Protestants, who labored under no PAETIAL INDEPENDENCE. 225 such restraint, began at once to form volunteer compa- nies for self-defense. The movement was everywhere welcomed with enthusiasm, until, in an incredibly brief space of time, Ireland was held by a citizen army a hun- dred thousand strong. The exclusively Protestant char- acter of the association was a product of English policy, which had maintained the ascendency of a sect in Ire- land with a view to divide the land between two hostile camps, making each a check upon the other. The Cath- olics, overwhelmingly strong in numbers, had neither a vote nor a gun, and were literally at the mercy of their Protestant neighbors. The Volunteers continued to enroll and drill. For many weeks, while the movement was yet in its incep- tion, the Castle authorities were puzzled to know whether the force would be a national militia subject to the mili- tary code, or whether the companies would be severally independent. The companies organized simply as volun- teers, to be supplied with arms by the government as far as possible, to be drilled and clothed at their own ex- pense, and to elect their own officers. Whether many of them, after the first abrupt scare, placed much cre- dence in the rumor of French invasion, or anticipated any trouble from that quarter, is doubtful. Most of them probably foresaw that their campaign would be conducted against an enemy nearer home. They were animated by the example of the American colonies, were heartily tired of England's ruinous interference with their commerce, and were as conscious of her weakness as of their own strength. Self -created and self -governed, they accepted no commissions from the crown, gave to it no pledges. So ardent was the military enthusiasm that (Sir J. Barrington tells us) " almost every independent Protestant in Ireland was enrolled as a patriot soldier ; and the whole body of the Catholics declared themselves 15 226 IEELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. the decided auxiliaries of their armed countrymen." The Catholics actually combined to purchase arms for those Volunteers who had not been supplied by the gov- ernment — the generosity of which conduct will be appa- rent when we remember that, at the outset, the vast majority of the Volunteers ,were stanch advocates of Protestant ascendency, and had little sympathy in com- mon with the fettered Papist element. The spirit of the citizen soldiery transfused itself into the legislative chamber, and the first aim of the Irish leaders was to liberate Irish manufactures and com- merce from the strangling prohibitory laws of England. Henry Grattan, the noblest intellect of the time, moved a resolution (1799) the pith of which is contained in these lines: "The only means left to support the expiring trade of this miserable part of your Majesty's dominions is to open a free export trade and let your Irish subjects enjoy their natural birthright." The words here italicized mark the limit at which the most advanced reformers of that epoch halted. They not only conceded, but maintained that Ireland had be- come by conquest an integral, inseparable part of his " Majesty's dominions." The nature of the connection between the kingdoms was, however, definitely and ex- plicitly stated. Its salient features were (1) a complete equality of rights ; (2) that the countries were subject to one king, but that he governed Ireland through the crown of Ireland — that he was monarch of two distinct nationalities ; (3) that Ireland possessed a resident Par- liament of her own, in no way connected with or subor- dinate to that of Great Britain ; (4) that the sovereign should rule each country by its own laws and by advice of its own independent legislature — not the one through the other — and that the Irish people were bound to obey no laws save those enacted by their own representatives PAETIAL INDEPENDENCE. 227 in Dublin ; (5) that the oath of allegiance was taken to the king of Ireland, not to the king of England, as such, nor to the British Parliament. Such were the claims expounded to and adopted by the Volunteers. Grattan's motion in favor of unrestricted trade was somewhat altered, but the substance of it was carried. Still, in the suggestive words of Barrington, ' ' Great Britain was not yet sufficiently alarmed to become just. . . Paramount to justice and to policy, she felt too proud to bend her attention to the grievances which she had herself inflicted." Thereupon Ireland retaliated, as did the American colonists prior to the Revolution, by a non-importation agreement. The whole people re- solved " neither to import, purchase, nor consume any British manufacture or commodity whatsoever." The popular agitation soon reached fever-heat, as was indi- cated by a parade of the Dublin Volunteer Artillery, under command of ISTapper Tandy, with this significant label on the mouth of every gun: "Free Trade or / " England, now thoroughly alarmed, sullenly gave what she dare no longer withhold — her ungracious assent. But the English sovereign, while giving this assent, defined it to be a favor conferred rather than a right restored — in brief he reasserted the supremacy of England. Hence the Irish, while rejoicing at the partial recovery of their commerce and industry, resented the patronizing air of almsgiving which accompanied it. Meetings were held, and fourteen counties at once re- corded their resolve "to establish the independence of the Irish legislature beyond the power of British reas- sumption." The other counties registered the same vow at close intervals, and " A Free Parliament" became the watchword of the nation. Free trade was the entering point of the wedge : it was now to be followed by more important demands, pushed with irresistible vigor. 228 IEELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. In February, 1780, the British Cabinet was startled to hear that a movement was afoot in Ireland to repeal Poyning's statute and the Sixth of George I. Secret instructions were sent to the Viceroy to resist and defeat the project at almost any cost ; but the task was be- yond his strength. On April 19, 1780, Grattan rose from his seat, and, after an outburst of magnetic eloquence, moved his historic resolution — "That the King, Lords, and Commons of Ireland are the only power competent to enact laws to bind Ireland." The motion, though not rejected, was adroitly shelved — a result which created neither astonishment nor dismay. A substantial victo- ry had been won in bringing the subject thus formally before the country. The Castle party fought with des- perate and unscrupulous energy, tendered lucrative offices to Grattan, Charlemont, and other leaders, but sank back, almost paralyzed, from the shock it received when came the news that Cornwallis had surrendered at Yorktown, and that the United States had not only "declared," but firmly established their independence in the face of England's best endeavor to prevent it. The Volunteers of the northern province now decided to hold a Convention, and (February 15, 1782) two hundred and forty-two delegates met at Dungannon. A series of resolutions, drafted by Grattan and Flood, was sub- mitted to the Convention and unanimously adopted. The clause relating to religious liberty * is worth repro- ducing : ' ' That, as men and as Irishmen, as Christians and as Protestants, we rejoice at the relaxation of the penal laws against our Catholic fellow- subjects; and that we conceive the measure to be fraught with the hap- piest consequences to the union and prosperity of the inhabitants of Ireland." * This clause was not approved by Flood, who was rigidly opposed to Catholic Emanci- pation; but Grattan stuffed it with the rest into the saddle-bags of his messenger starting for Dungannon. PAETIAL INDEPENDENCE. 229 The careful wording of the resolution gave no distinct pledge of further reforms ; still it was encouraging ; it indicated the passing away of olden prejudices and intol- erance ; and such as it was (to their eternal credit be it said) the Volunteers adopted it. Conventions in the other three provinces repeated the action of their Ulster prototype. Strengthened by these demonstrations, with the nation standing a unit at his back, on April 16, 1782, Henry Grattan " commenced the most luminous, bril- liant, and effective oration ever delivered in the Irish Parliament," concluding with a declaration of Ireland's indefeasible right to Legislative Independence, and of her people's set resolve to yield it only with their lives.* The House responded with acclamations, and an address embodying the demands of Grattan was dispatched to London. Poyning' s Act and the Sixth of George I. were repealed by the English Parliament, and the Duke of Portland wrote back : "These benevolent intentions of his Majesty, and the willingness of his Parliament of Great Britain to second his gracious purposes, are un- accompanied by any stipulation or condition whatever. The good faith, the generosity, the honor of this nation, afford thern the surest pledge of a corresponding disposition on your part to promote and perpetuate the harmony, the stability, and the glory of the empire." "Good faith, generosity, honor" — with what unctuous ease the words glide from a British ministerial pen ! King George's Cabinet and his Dublin agents well knew that, either with their consent or without it, Ireland's legislative freedom would be achieved by the Volun- teers ; hence his Majesty's " benevolent intentions." * " That the Kingdom of Ireland is a distinct kingdom, with a Parliament of her own, the Bole legislature thereof ; that there is no body of men competent to make laws to bind the nation, but the King, Lords, and Commons of Ireland ; . . that we humbly conceive that in this right the very essence of our liberty exists— a right which we, on the part of all the people of Ireland, do claim as their birthright, and which we cannot yield but with our lives." 230 IKELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN But at that very moment the English Government was privately discussing and devising plots to overthrow the structure at the erection of which it professed to be so profoundly pleased ! Grattan, too generous and straightforward to suspect that any duplicity lurked behind the smooth phrases of the Duke of Portland, affirmed that, as England had repealed the obnoxious' laws, and as the king had pro- nounced this adjustment final, Ireland would not compel England to give any guarantees for the future or to acknowledge that she had played the part of a usurper. Other men, however, more penetrating and more suspi- cious than Grattan, placed but little confidence in the vague platitudes of King George, and demanded that England should explicitly renounce every pretense of a right to legislate for Ireland. On this issue there arose two parties. Grattan led those who thought that to demand further guarantees would be only imposing a needless humiliation on England. But Flood — and the nation went instinctively with him — refused to be satis- fied without more definite pledges of good behavior in the future. He knew that £ c England' s honor ' ? occupied the same plane with Punica fides — was only a synonym for treachery. The base intent cherished by the British ministry soon became apparent through various acts and decisions, which caused the Volunteers to array themselves almost unanimously beside Flood. The peo- ple everywhere burnished up their guns, and England, more thoroughly alarmed than ever, came to her knees and enacted a statute expressly and unequivocally re- nouncing all future claim to legislate for Ireland. Here is the substance of the document, and its phrase- ology merits close attention : 1 ' Anno vicesino tertio Georgii IIL Regis. " Chapter XXVHI. An Act for removing and preventing all donbts PAETIAL INDEPENDENCE. 231 which have ai.sen, or might arise, concerning the exclusive rights of the Parliament and courts of Ireland, in matters of legislation and judica- ture, etc. . . [Preamble.] "Therefore, be it declared and enacted by the King's Most Excellent Majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the Lords spiritual and temporal, and Commous, in this present Parliament assembled, and by the authority of the same, that the said right, claimed by the people of Ireland., to be bound only by laws of that kingdom, in all cases what- ever, . . shall be, and it is hereby declared to be, established AND ASCERTAINED FOREVEK, AND SHALL AT NO TIME HEREAFTER BE QUESTIONED OR QUESTIONABLE." The foregoing Act was passed at the demand of the Irish people without the intervention of the Irish Parlia- ment — a circumstance which shows the latter to have been neither so vigilant nor so independent as its con- stituents. And this brings us to consider the character and composition of that historic body. Briefly described, Ireland's last Parliament was an Orange Lodge in most of its characteristics. Every man in it was a Protestant, for under the penal code, even when relaxed and soft- ened down, a Catholic could neither vote nor be voted for. The mere fact that the Dublin assembly was exclu- sively Protestant, while not necessarily giving it an in- tolerant complexion, proves that it represented only a section of the Irish people — and a very, very limited section at that. The House of Commons then contained only English and Scotch placemen, Anglo-Irish, and the decendants of Irishmen who had apostatized. Among these, of course, were to be found many unprejudiced, noble-minded, patriotic men, whose desire and aim it was to extend to their Catholic fellow-countrymen every right and privilege they claimed for themselves. But the canker of proscription had eaten too deeply into the hearts of most of them to be easily eradicated ; and thus we find the overwhelming majority of them steadfastly opposed to Catholic Emancipation. Even Flood, with IEELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. all his acuteness, talent, and distrust of England, was hostile to the enfranchisement of Papists,* as was also Lord Charlemont, the chief of the Volunteers. Some little relief was extended to the oppressed people toward the end of 1777, when the news of Burgoyne's surrender had reached Europe. In 1781 a further relaxation was attempted, but without avail. Then, with the exception of the resolution adopted by the Volunteers in 1782, no further attention was given to Catholic grievances until the pariahs plucked up enough courage to enter the lists themselves. Had the declaration of Irish independence hung solely upon the patriotism of the legislature, it would have been smothered in the first debate ; the devotion, elo- quence, and ardor of Grattan and his associates would have failed to infuse the requisite manhood into that House. What really brought the agitation to a tri- umphant issue was the irresistible, overshadowing influ- ence of the armed Volunteers, f When their resolute attitude had pronounced an ultimatum, giving England the sole alternative of concession or revolution, Grat- tan' s motion secured a majority in the law-shop. The result was gratifying in a measure ; the defeat of Grat- tan' s motion would have been a far better result, since it would probably have nerved the patriot army to abandon all delusive thought of " compromises " and " guarantees," and put them boldly on the guarantee of their own right arms. Another thing to be noted is that the Commons in question can be termed a " representative assembly" only by a stretch of courtesy. Literally it was nothing of the * Apart from this failing, Flood was patriotic and unselfish. He bequeathed the bulk of his fortune to aid in the cultivation and exploration of Ireland's language, history, and antiquities ; but by some legal hocus-pocus his purpose was defeated. t " The departed Volunteer did more public good to Ireland than all her institutions." — Grattan. PARTIAL INDEPENDENCE. 233 kind. Of its three hundred members, seventy-two were elected by the people — that is, by Protestant voters ; the remaining two hundred and twenty-eight were returned on the "rotten borough" system. Fifty-three peers had the power to nominate one hundred and fifty-three members and to secure the election of ten others ; fifty- two wealthy commoners nominated ninety -one, and con- trolled the choice of four others. " The constitution of what ought to have been the people's house was, there- fore, substantially in the hands of an oligarchy of about a hundred great proprietors, banded together by the spirit of their class, by intermarriage, and by the heredi- tary possession of power." Thus was developed a herd of greedy political jackals, who, yielding to the inevita- ble and anxious to preserve their own positions, floated with the current in 1782, became boisterous in their patriotic fervor, but vied with one another in 1800 for the Judas-price of the country's betrayal. Their ethics were admirably condensed in the reply made by one of them when reproached with having sold his country. "Bedad," said he, "it's a fine thing to have a country to sell !" Of the House of Peers, which helped at the time to embarrass and impede legislation, little need be said. The sympathies, aspirations, and allegiance of most of its members naturally turned to the source of their titles and dignities — England. If such, then, was the character of the Parliament of 1782, why do Irishmen refer to it with pride and satisfac- tion? Why has its restoration been so frequently de- manded \ Easily explained. In the first place, with all its faults, its intolerance, its corruption, the Parliament of 1782 did more service to Ireland than did all the Eng- lish Parliaments on record. In fact, had it merely sat in Dublin and done nothing at all, it would still have conferred an incalculable benefit on the country by 234 IRELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. shielding her from the blight of London legislation. Then, again, sectional though it was, it proclaimed itself Irish, and it contained a grand minority of illustrious men who stamped it with the seal of their genius and patriotism. It is admired for the promise it held forth of growing more just and liberal from day to day ; for, had not England's treacherous policy doomed it to pre- mature dissolution, it bore within itself the seeds of re- generation which would have purified and exalted it. Lastly, when an Irishman speaks of restoring the Par- liament of 1782, he does not desire to see its defects and abuses revived ; its independence is the feature which fills his mind. CHAPTER XIV. 'ninety-eight. Prosperity and Progress under Native Rule — The United Irish- men—Wolfe Tone— A Forced Rebellion, How it was Excited and How Suppressed. " No nation on the habitable globe advanced in cultivation, commerce, and manufactures with the same rapidity as Ireland from 1782 to 1800."— Lord Clare. *HE revolution, with wand of fire, had touched and awakened torpid Ireland. Under a home legis- lature, sectional and corrupt though it was in many respects, the nation's burdens were lightened, her material and intellectual progress wondrously acceler- ated. The entire annual revenue was about four and a half million dollars, the bulk of which was spent at home. The budget of 1783 shows the following appro- priations : Interest of the national debt $600,000 Army, Ordnance, and Executive ..... 2,250,000 Premiums and bounties to manufactures and commerce . 1,250,000 Unappropriated surplus 400,000 Total (£900,000) .... $4,500,000 From this summary it will be observed that nearly a third of the whole public income was applied to the re- vival and encouragement of prostrate industries. Hence some shallow fault-finders ridicule the Irish Parliament for "frittering away time and money in granting public subsidies to private enterprise." That it did grant such 235 236 IRELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. subsidies is the best evidence of its statesmanship. Irish trade and commerce had been systematically choked and paralyzed by English legislation ; therefore they required a helping hand before they could survive the rivalry of long-established British monopolies. Grattan was fore- most in advocating and carrying out this sagacious poli- cy, and he trampled under foot the canting maxims of English political economy. Knowing that his country's productive energies had been sterilized by artificial pres- sure, he knew also that an external quickening impulse was needed to vitalize and restore them. The establishment of Ireland's legislative indepen- dence was followed by a brief era of unexampled na- tional prosperity. Every domestic resource was culti- vated and developed. Agriculture, fisheries, mines, arts, manufactures of linen, cotton, wool, and silk, all were fostered and stimulated by public bounties. Eoads were repaired, rivers made navigable, ships built ; and skilled artisans flocked in from other lands. The old leaven of sectarian prejudice had not yet been wholly eliminated, but it was fast passing away in the growth of a whole- some national spirit, and the infamous Penal Code began to be wiped piecemeal from the statute-book. In 1782 the clauses relating to property were repealed, and Cath- olics were thus allowed to acquire land in freehold or fee-simple.* Further valuable concessions were made in 1784 and 1788 ; and in April, 1793, the Catholic Relief Bill was passed, removing the most galling penalties and disabilities imposed on conscience, f * The victories of Washington are chiefly to be thanked for the granting of this " grace." t Catholics were still excluded from Parliament and the Bench, "hut the franchise, the juries, the professions, and the university were important concessions. Their first fruits were Daniel O'Connell and Thomas Moore. 1 ' The Relief Bill was passed when the French Revolution was sweeping like a tornado over Europe, and John Bull was sore in need of Hibernian recruits. Defeated by Doumourier at Gemappe, England favored the extension to Irish Papists of those very immunities which she had previously persuaded her fatuous dupes— the Irish Protestant faction— to refuse. She then claimed that the boon originated 'ninety-eight. 237 Secure in so far as English pledges could give security, the Volunteers demanded a reform of the Irish Parlia- ment, to rid it of the rotten-borough ulcer and emanci- pate it from the corrupt influence of the Castle — changes urgently needed if the assembly was to be the guardian of a nation's liberties. Another Convention met in Dub- lin, November, 1783, adopted a Reform Bill, and pre- sented it to the House of Commons. The document was thrown out as " coming from an armed organization seeking to overawe Parliament;" and the action of the House was right in theory, although in fact the Conven- tion at the Rotundo far more legitimately represented the people than did the coterie in College Green. The agitation did not, however, cease with this reverse. The partial independence already achieved was glar- ingly weak in two places : (1) the Dublin legislature had no separate Irish ministry ; (2) most of the Irish leaders were lulled into a fatal security by the solemn guaran- tees which the English king and Parliament had given. They neglected to put their citizen army on a solid and effective footing, for the British Cabinet was all suavity and courteous respect. Was not William Pitt one of the framers of the solemn charter whereby (in his own words) the right of the people of Ireland to self -legisla- tion was " declared to be established forever, and shall at no time hereafter be questioned or questionable"? And had not Pitt added, of his own accord, publicly in Parliament, that if England should ever attempt to resume the pretensions thus abandoned, "her own Act of Parliament would be her condemnation all over Europe ; every cabinet would exclaim against her base- ness, and think themselves authorized to assist the op- in her generosity, and Pitt afterward made nse of the circumstance to assure the Catholics that they had more to expect from a British than an Irish Parliament— his design heing to make one element distrust the other. 238 IRELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. pressed subjects whom her own act would prove not to be rebels" 2 It is scarcely credible, yet it is the naked truth of history, that Pitt at that very time was meditating the suppression of the Irish Parliament. His solemn assur- ances and protestations were deliberate falsehoods, in- tended to delude his victims. To his nefarious design he devoted eight years of unscrupulous energy, and in the end succeeded. One motive which prompted Pitt's villainy was that England had an enormous public debt, Ireland a trifling one, and he wanted the latter to shoulder a share of the former's financial burthen. Another motive had root in his well-founded dread of total separation and a com- mercial competition which would seriously injure Brit- ish interests. Later on he was personally piqued be- cause the Irish legislature decided the Regency question (1789) by a vote adverse to his policy. He bent his mind to carry the Union, but the task was not free from peril. In the first place it was necessary to disband the Volun- teers, which could not be safely done while the French Revolution lasted. Meantime every available agency was employed to sow dissension between creed and creed, section and section, in Ireland. While secretly working to augment the growth of ill-feeling, the Eng- lish Government adroitly contrived to throw the odium of sustaining it on the Irish Protestant minority. The bigotry of the Orangemen was assiduously stirred up, arms were freely supplied to them, and care was taken that no punishment should overtake their ex- cesses. William Orr, the champion of the Presbyterian patriots, was hanged (October, 1797) on a trumped-up charge,* every man in the jury-box having been made * Orr was guilty of the crime of patriotism, but notoriously innocent of the charge for which he was executed. 239 helplessly drunk before the desired verdict could be obtained. The clear vision of Wolfe Tone, Hamilton Rowan, and other far-seeing Protestants, was quick to penetrate this infamous policy, and they exposed and denounced it. When reverses began to overtake the French arms, England's attitude of ostensible friendliness ceased, and Pitt began to show his hand. The Volunteers were gradually disbanded,* their arms withdrawn, and hired mercenaries poured in to fill their places. Out of this state of affairs grew the Society of United Irishmen — ardent, tolerant, patriotic, republican. The parent club was founded by Tone, its avowed object being by consti- tutional agitation to reform the legislature, remove all the civil disabilities of Catholics, and bury sectarian differ- ences for the common good against the common enemy. The association grew apace and openly ; but when its meetings were dispersed by force (May, 1794) it changed base, met in secret, and began to preach the gospel of iron as Ireland's sole salvation. Tone sounded the key- note when he wrote : " We must conquer England, or she will conquer us." He plainly saw that the issue was total separation or ruinous subjugation. Equally plain was the issue to William Pitt, who saw that to make the Union possible he must first crush the United Irishmen, in whom the national spirit was fast crystallizing for effective resistance ; and in order to do this he must force an insurrection, or (to borrow the phrase of his favorite henchman, Castlereagh) "to * A large and influential wing of the Volunteers thought that to pursue their object fur- ther by a display of force would be to array themselves against both England and their own Parliament. Others were in favor of boldly keeping their arms and facing all the risks. The timidity of their leader, Charlemont, wrought the disruption of the association. Hurriedly and arbitrarily he adjourned an important council sine die, recommending the Volunteers at the same time to present an address to the king. Charlemont and men of his stamp, fond enough of harmless parade and mock show, were more loyal to the Crown than to Ire- land or the Right. 240 IRELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. make the United Irish system explode." The hopes of the aforesaid system were largely centered on foreign aid, as the country, though ripe for revolt, lacked mili- tary training and munitions of war. A disciplined nu- cleus was required, around which to rally and consoli- date the rude strength of the nation. Wolfe Tone, who had been compelled to seek shelter in America, was urged to sail for France and plead with the Directory, which had sworn undying hostility to British aggression. He set out on the mission (January, 1796) without money, without friends, without diploma or title, without even a knowledge of the French lan- guage ; yet in the short space of six or eight months he had gained from the Directory an expedition of forty- three ships, fifteen thousand men, sixty thousand stand of arms, and a park of artillery — all under command of Hoche. As of old the stars in their courses fought against Sisera, so the elements now combined to scatter this splendid force, which, in the opinion of Napoleon, had it once landed, could not have been resisted. Lord Edward, MacNevin, Emmet, and Arthur O'Connor com- posed the Irish Directory when moved from Belfast to Dublin in 1796. Men died on the rack, but refused to di- vulge the secrets of the society. Nevertheless indications were plentiful to show Pitt that the storm was rapidly gathering. December 15th, 1796, the French fleet sailed. A sudden tempest blew back a portion of it, and on board one of the vessels thus dispersed were Hoche and the admiral. A dozen ships, with Tone and Grouchy, reached Bantry Bay, but the rear-admiral, refusing to disembark in the absence of his superior, after five or six days' waiting put back to sea. Had he landed with his cannon, ammunition, and six thousand five hundred men, as Tone passionately urged him to do, the work would probably have been accomplished. All that the 'ninety-eight. 241 United Irishmen needed was arms and drill-masters. Fate, however, was against them. Baffled, bnt not disheartened, Tone now had reconrse to the Batavian or Dutch republic, and so vigorously did he plead his country's cause that the next year (1797) beheld another formidable armament assembled in the Texel to invade Ireland. But again the elements were unpropitious. For more than a month the wind blew steadily on shore, until at last, discouraged, the troops were recalled and the expedition abandoned. Up to this time England' s garrison in Ireland did not number fifty thousand, and the United Men of Ulster asked the Council that they might take the field alone, as they could depend upon one hundred thousand to respond to the word of command. Waiting for foreign auxiliaries, the Council checked them. Hope deferred maketh the heart sick ; and most of the Ulster men, dispirited by this delay, lost confidence and heart in the movement. Despite repeated failures, the indomitable Tone be- took himself again to France, and late in 1797 saw the formation of " The 'Army of England" begun, the com- mand of which was intrusted to the young Napoleon, who was yet a servant of the republic. In May, 1798, the fleet sailed, not for Ireland, but for Egypt — whither it was ordered at the last moment — the Directory thus hoping to rid itself of the dangerous young Corsican, who afterward declared at St. Helena that this was the grand mistake of his career. Angered at the course of the Directory, and resolved to commit it to action in Ire- land, General Humbert, a gallant though rash officer, levied from the town of Rochelle supplies and means of transport for one thousand men, with whom he landed at Killala. With him were Bartholomew Teeling and Matthew (brother of Wolfe) Tone. After some signal successes, the little force succumbed to twenty thousand 16 242 IRELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. men led against them by General Lake. Tone and Teel- ing were executed, and all the Irish who had joined them were butchered. The rest of Wolfe Tone's story is soon told. Through his impetuous energy in France, another small squadron was fitted out by private effort, only to be hemmed in at Lough Swilly by a British fleet which cut it to pieces and captured it. Tone was urged to escape, and might have done so, but he refused to desert his friends, though he knew that he could expect no mercy, while they would be treated as prisoners of war. Hurried to Dub- lin in chains and tried by a drum-head court-martial, he asked in consideration of his rank (chief of brigade in the French service) to be adjudged the death of a sol- dier ; but the cowards sentenced him to be hanged with- in forty-eight hours. Rather than see his uniform dis- graced, he opened a vein in his neck. Lingering for a week, the government was in favor of taking him out and strangling him half-dead as he was, and would have done it, only that they feared an upheaval of popular wrath. November 19, the heroic soul was at peace. Struck with consternation at the threat of Napoleon's coming in the spring of 1798, England determined that she must lose no time in goading the Irish into a prema- ture insurrection and thus effectually crushing them. An informer (Reynolds) was found, through whose treachery the delegates to a provincial meeting were surprised and arrested, March 12. Lord Edward Fitz- gerald escaped, and an address was promptly circulated, calling on the people to be cool and cautious, so that they might " throw away the scabbard" when it suited themselves, not when it suited the enemy. Hessian hire- lings were rapidly poured into the country, and to them and to the infuriated Orange yeomanry were given " free quarters" upon the hapless people, in order that un- 'ninety-eight. 243 curbed lust and ruffianism might provoke partial risings before the date (May 23) appointed for the general insur- rection. On May 19 Lord Edward was captured in Dub- lin, after a desperate personal struggle, and, mortally wounded, was thrown into prison. This arrest of the leader caused widespread dismay, and, had England now wished it, there need have been no insurrection, for within twelve months the army of occupation in Ireland had been raised to close upon one hundred and thirty thousand. But nothing was further from Pitt's purpose than any such easy termination of the contest. Blood, and plenty of it, was needed to cement the Union. Martial law was proclaimed, and the hired butchers of England were let loose to work their pleasure on a defenseless land. The troops toere expressly authorized to administer "jus- tice" without waiting for the intervention of any civil tribunal ; and to such lengths did the licentious sol- diery go, that the commander, Sir Ralph Abercrombie, resigned in disgust and horror at the atrocities which he was not permitted to check. Every man suspected of rebel sympathies was shot or hanged without the for- mality of a trial. Thousands were flogged and tortured to death in order to extort confessions from them.* The Brothers Sheares, two popular and patriotic young law- yers in the south, were gibbeted by Toler's summary process, having been treated to the mockery of a trial. Fired to desperation by these atrocities, the Irish rose here and there in isolated groups on May 23. A brief * Among the various modes of torture the favorite were : (1) The Pitch Cap, a canvas cap filled with boiling pitch and placed on the closely cropped head of the victim, from which it removed both hair and scalp. (2) Singeing: au operation in which the hair was cut in close furrows, the chaunels filled with gunpowder, and the whole sportively touched off with a match ; hence the name " Croppies." (3) Picketing, which consisted in suspending a hu- man body by the wrists or thumbs at full length, and leaving only a single sharp stake (or picket) for the feet to rest on. Half-hanging, flogging, «litting ears and noses, were other ingenious devices of the system. 244 IRELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. and bloody campaign ensued, in many respects a glori- ous one for the unarmed, undisciplined, scattered bands of peasants. No need to dwell upon the engagement in detail. The first action was at Naas, and other conflicts soon occurred in Dublin, Meath, Carlow, and Wicklow ; the mails were stopped, and terror spread over the coun- try. There was no concert among the insurgents, and they were armed almost exclusively with pikes. The middle counties were soon depressed ; the south gave hardly any sign. M'Cracken met with several successes in Antrim, but his forces, separated by an accident, were eventually decimated and dispersed, and the brave leader gibbeted. In June the men of Down had a severe en- gagement with the English forces at Saintfield, and later at Ballinahinch, sturdily holding their own on both fields ; but they melted away shortly afterward, when their commander, Munroe, was taken and beheaded. It was in Wexford that the insurrection held out most desperately, and it is a noteworthy fact that this county had been one of the poorest recruiting grounds of the United Irishmen. It was not even mentioned in Lord Edward? s list of organized counties. But the people were driven to madness by pitch caps, hangings, and similar phases of martial law administered by the North Cork militia — a ruffian band of yeomanry. The burning of his church and the adjoining village, added to the massacre of several parishioners, roused Father John Murphy to inaugurate an armed crusade, although he had hitherto stoutly opposed the United Irishmen. The outraged farmers flocked to his standard and secured some firearms by routing the Camolin cavalry. Increas- ing in numbers, they cut to pieces the North Cork in- fantry at Oulart Hill, marched upon and captured En- niscorthy, compelled the evacuation of Wexford, and were victorious at Tubberneering and Clough. But 'ninety-eight. 245 through all these temporary successes they remained sadly deficient in arms, ammunition, and discipline. Neither Father Murphy nor his lieutenant, Bagenal Har- vey, could impress order and solidity on the tumultuous mass of material around them, and their defeat was fore- doomed to take place the moment a powerful force of regulars was concentrated against them. This was soon done, and the last glimmering hope of the insurgents went out at Vinegar Hill. Some English historians aver that the rebels fought like savages, massacring the loyalists, etc. This charge is put forward with the design of justifying or palli- ating the excesses of the British soldiery. Wherever they went, houses, grain, cattle, were wantonly de- stroyed, men slaughtered, women defiled, children stab- bed in sport, and prisoners butchered as fast as they laid down their arms. The maddened Irish did occa- sionally retaliate by slaying some of the enemy, * but not one-tenth as often as they ought to have done, and would have been perfectly justified in doing. To the honor of the Irish be it said that, unlike their enemy, they never offered violence to woman, child, or non- combatant. I have not the slightest desire to screen them from the full responsibility of any act they com- mitted — my sole regret being that they did not always make reprisals on their foe after the very same fashion that he set them.f * The accusation against the insurgents is based mainly on the fact that they fired a barn in Scullabogue (Wexford), containing a number of Protestant and Catholic loyalists (dis- armed prisoners). This is true, but the burning was done by a crowd of fugitives from the battle of Boss, who had just seen their own wounded and captured friends slain in cold blood by the English mercenaries. The loyalists, says Gordon, as a rule slwt down every man they met, and seldom encumbered themselves with prisoners. They massacred three hundred fugitives— mostly women and children — on the hill of Kilmacthomas, burning a hundred cabins the same day. This, because done by England, is " civilized warfare," but any retaliation on the part of the Irish is pure " savagery " ! t The only man at the time who repaid the yeomen and Hessians in their own coin was gallant Michael Dwyer. For six years afterward, as an outlaw on the hills of Wicklow, 246 IEELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. When Ireland again starts into rebellion (as assuredly she will) she must not leave all the hanging to be done with impunity, by England. If for every patriot put to death in violation of just methods, two prominent loyalists are made to walk the plank, there will be less " barbarity" to complain of afterward. Self -protection imperatively demands that all puerile sentiment in this regard shall be at once and forever abandoned.* Fight fire with fire. The rising of '98, says Wendell Phillips, " was trod- den out in blood, and the barbarities which followed are revolting in their details. "No tongue can describe the atrocities committed on the Irish by their besot- ted, ignorant conquerors. The Protestant soldiery were loosed upon the helpless Catholic peasants. Children, with diabolical cruelty, were tossed from bayonet to bayonet down half a company, while wretched mothers were compelled to witness the scene. Daughters were outraged in the presence of their parents, and hus- bands murdered before the horror-stricken eyes of their wives." William Pitt was highly pleased with the unfolding of his own scheme. he defied, eluded, and punished every force that the government could send against him. He seemed to bear a charmed life, and his hairbreadth escapes would fill a volume. At last the Castle authorities offered to make him a present of the £500 reward placed on his head if he would consent to leave the country. Seeing that further resistance was futile after Emmet's failure, Dwyer accepted the proffered terms, though not until Mr. Hume (a local landowner of large influence and well-known integrity) had pledged his honor as a guaran- tee of the Viceroy's good faith. The outlaw laid down his arms, and was summarily trans- ported! To Mr. Hume's indignant remonstrance, the Lord Lieutenant coolly answered : " Oh ! we cannot be expected to keep faith with rebels I " Dwyer's offspring have achieved distinction in Australia. * In 1799 Napper Tandy, delivered up by Hamburg, was condemned to death in England for his participation in the Irish rebellion. But he happened to hold a coihmission in the French army, and as soon as tidings of the affair reached Napoleon, the Hamburgers were promptly fined four million francs for their cowardice, and the brief message was sent to King George : " I have some of your general officers my prisoners, and I mean to hang half a dozen of them in Tandy's stead. Yours, Buonaparte." The Irishman was soon landed on French soil 1 CHAPTER XV. THE UNION. Triumph of Fraud and Violence — England's Motive for Break- ing the Compact — Emmet's Protest. " Do not make an Union with us, sir ; we shonld unite with you only to rob you."— Dr. Johnson. ORCE having performed its part, the stage was now clear for fraud to enter and complete the tragedy. England loves to adhere — outwardly at least — to constitutional forms and precedents ; so it was necessary to gain a majority vote of the Irish legis- lature to decree and accomplish its own extinction. When we recollect of what material the assemblage was composed, the number of pocket-boroughs repre- sented in it by British parasites and carpet-baggers, it will readily be conceived that the task of persuading it offered no insuperable difficulty to an unprincipled jobber. Verily the times were propitious for him who "had a country to sell." The flood-gates of corruption were thrown open by Pitt and his mate, Castlereagh. Mem- bers of both Houses were personally canvassed and I courted on behalf of their votes. Titles, pensions, and offices were freely promised. Yast sums of secret-ser- vice money (afterward added to the Irish public debt) were sent over from London. A horde of phamphlet- eers was subsidized to write in favor of "the consolida- 247 248 IRELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. dation of the empire." Tlie Orangemen were confirmed in loyalty by a promise of continued ascendency. Many of the Catholics were deluded by a promise of imme- diate emancipation. The Protestant clergy were well satisfied with an assurance that the security of their establishment would be a fundamental article of the Union. The landed oligarchy was to be liberally repaid for the loss of its rotten-borough patronage. Then came a tentative viceregal speech in the House, hinting at the necessity of Union, because "our enemies persevere in their avowed design of endeavoring to effect a separa- tion of this kingdom from Great Britain." A clause embodying and accepting this hint was defeated in 1799 by only one vote — 106 to 105. But the question was to come up again, and by the time it was revived Castlereagh* had taken effectual means to secure "the majority of not less than fifty," which Pitt deemed requisite to give the crime a semblance of legality. So barefaced and shameless was the process of pur- chase and sale that lists f were published at the time showing the prices paid to every advocate and sup- porter of the measure. I append a few samples, taken from Barrington' s valuable work : J. Galbraith— A baronetcy. W. Gore— Cash. R. Hare — A peerage. B. Henniker— A regiment and £3,500. H. Howard— Made Postmaster-General. *W. Haudcock— A peerage : he wrote songs against the Union in 1799 ; and songs for it in 1800. G. Jocelyn— Promotion ; and a bishopric for his brother. W. Johnson — Judgeship. *J. Keane— Pension. W. Knox— Office, £800 a year. H. Langrishe— £15,000. Lord Loftus— Created a marquis ; and £30,000. Lord Boyle — An immense sum for many bor- oughs, at £15,000 per borough. S. Bruce — Baronetcy ; a Castle servitor. G. Burdet— Office, £500 a year. *A. Brown— Made Prime Sergeant. *J. Bagwell, Sen.— Changed twice ; cash, etc, *J. Bagwell, Jun. — Cash and commission. *W. Bagwell — A deanery. Castlereagh— Pitt's chief agent. G. Cavendish— Secretary of Treasury. H. Cavendish— Receiver-General. *J. Cane— Pension. T. Casey— Two fat berths. * Castlereagh never had any scruple about admitting " the profligacy of the means by which the measure was accomplished." The scoundrel fittingly died by his own hand. t A Bed and a Black List. The former contained the names of those who voted against the Union ; the latter the names and rewards of those who voted for it. THE UNION. 249 •C. Cope— Regiment and patronage. C. H. Coote— Regiment, peerage, and £7,500. J. Corry— Chancellor of Exchequer. *A. Creighton— Cash. *J. Creighton— Cash. "W. A. Crosbie— Comptrollership. J. Cuffee— A peerage to his father. *R. Crowe— Avowed being bribed. C. Fitzgerald— Pension and peerage. *C. Fortescue— Lucrative office. A. Ferguson— Office, title, and £500 per an- num. W. Fortescue— Secret pension. R. Aliridge— An English clerk ; obeyed or- ders. H. Alexander — His brother made bishop, himself Colonial Secretary. J. Beresford, Jun. — Made parson and lord. J. Bingham— Peerage and £23,000. J. Blacquiere— Peerage, offices, pensions. A. Botet— £500 a year. R. .Butler— Changed sides ; cash. Gen. Lake — One of Castlereagh's henchmen. H. D. Massey— £4,000. *S. Moore— Postmaster at will. W. T. Mansel— Confessed the bribe. R. Musgrave— Office, £1,200 year. W. G. Newcomen — Cash ; peerage for wife. *C. Rowley— Office. *B. Stratford— £7,500. *R. Trench— Earldom, etc. Lord Tyrone— 104 offices in the gift of his family ; proposed the Union by a speech written in the crown of his hat. [* NoTE.--Of those who voted against in 1799, twenty-five (having been bought in the interval) voted for the Union in 1800 ; which accession made a difference of fifty votes. The names of these mercenaries are distinguished by a star prefixed,] The Irish Independent party, led by Grattan, Plunket, Bushe, Saurin, Curran, Foster (the Speaker), Ponsonby, and Jebb, fought to the last with noble fidelity and persistency, but the Irish Parliament was doomed. On May 21, 1800, Castlereagh (by a vote of one hundred and sixty to one hundred), obtained leave to bring before the House his bill for " A Legislative Union between Great Britain and Ireland ; " and the 7th of June beheld the infamy consummated. The House of Peers offered no opposition worth speaking of — only twenty of them signed a formal protest to acquit themselves of having been instrumental in the degradation of their country and posterity. Henry Grattan had arisen from his bed of sickness and appeared before the House like an accus- ing spirit. The scales had now fallen from his eyes, but his passionate indignation could not turn back the hands upon the dial. Only when it was too late did he real- ize that any trust reposed in England's pledges or Eng- land's " honor" was the extreme of folly and insanity. The luminous historian of that epoch lets the curtain 250 IRELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. fall* with the observation that " Ireland, as a nation, was extinguished" Not so. The Parliament was ex- tinguished, was smothered in bribes ; bnt the national- ity survives and no traitor votes can destroy it. In the words of Plunket : " As well might the frantic suicide imagine that the act which destroys his miserable body should also extinguish his eternal soul." Somebody may urge that an assemblage so hopelessly rotten as to barter its country for place and cash was hardly worth preserving. The objection is plausible, but fallacious, as has been demonstrated in the previous chapter. Yery few of the Judas band were Irish in blood or name. Most of them were British by birth, as were all of them by sympathy. Besides, the receiver is as bad as the thief, and the thieves, in this instance, as Wendell Phillips observes, "were only toiling, panting in their narrow capacity to lift themselves up to the level of corruption with their English brothers." At that very time the English Parliament was as corrupt a body as ever disgraced any nation. One of its most noted states- men had risen to eminence on the dishonor of his sister, who was the king's mistress. " Every man in it had his hand ready for a bribe." Is the Union binding % Let O'Connell answer : "The Irish people nominated them [the Members of Parliament] to make laws, and not legislatures. They were appointed to act under the constitution, and not annihilate it. Their delegation from the people was confined within the limits of the constitution, and the moment the Irish Parliament went beyond those limits and destroyed the constitu- tion, that moment it annihilated its own power, but could not annihi- late the immortal spirit of liberty, which belongs, as a rightful inherit- ance, to the people of Ireland. Take it, then, from me that the Union * " The fatal sentence was now pronounced ; for an instant the Speaker stood statue-like, then indignantly and with disgust flung the hill upon the table, and sunk into his chair with an exhausted spirit. An independent country was thus degraded into a province— Ireland, as a nation, was extinguished."— Barrington's Last Night of the Irish Parliament. THE UNION. 251 is void. I admit there is the force of a law, because it has been sup- ported by the policeman's truncheon, by the soldier's bayonet, and by the horseman's sword ; because it is supported by the courts of law and those who have power to adjudicate in them; but I say solemnly, it is not supported by constitutional right. The Union, therefore, is to- tally void." Did the Union strengthen England ? Let Barrington answer : ' ' A measure which, under the false colors of guarding forever against a disunion of the empire, has taken the longest and surest stride to lead to dismemberment. " A measure which, instead of ' consolidating the strength and resources of the empire, ' as treacherously expressed from the throne of the viceroy, has, through its morbid operation, paralyzed the resources of Ireland ; whilst England is exhausting her own strength, squandering her own treasures, and clipping her own constitution to uphold a measure effected by corruption and maintained by oppression. "A measure which, pretending to tranquilize, has in fact excited more hostile, and I fear interminable disgust, than had ever before ex- isted between two nations." Did the Union benefit Ireland \ Let Lord Byron an- swer : "Adieu to that Union, so called, as lucus a non lucendo — a Union from never uniting — which in its first operation gave a death-blow to the independence of Ireland, and in its last may be the cause of her separa- tion from this country. If it must be termed a Union, it is the union of the shark with its prey ; the spoiler swallows up his victim, and thus they become one and indivisible. Thus has Great Britain swallowed up the parliament, the constitution, and the independence of Ireland. " As O'Connell, Barrington, and Byron were always pro- Irish in feeling, I shall collate some further testimonies bearing on the subject from men of pro-English bias. When the measure was brought before the London Par- liament for ratification — General Fitzpatrick said : "If ever there was a compact solemnly 252 IRELAND AB SHE HAS BEEN. entered into and binding between one state or kingdom and another, the compact of 1782 was of that character and description." Mr. W. Bird : " As to the resolutions of 1782, I certainly do look upon them as final with regard to Ireland. I perfectly well remember the words of Lord Auckland on that occasion, that ' it would be as easy to make the river Thames flow up Highgate Hill as that England should continue to legislate for Ireland.' " Mr. (afterward Earl) Grey: " If a union were effected by such means, it would more than anything endanger the separation of the two coun- tries." Lord Holland: "I do not believe there is a well-informed man out of this House who is not of opinion that the measure has been carried through the Parliament of Ireland by corruption within the walls and intimidation without." Going back eighteen years to the debate of 1782, in London, we find Lord Shelbnrne, the ministerial leader, declaring : "Now that Ireland was united, religious disputes all composed, grow- ing in wealth and strength, fast improving in all the arts of peace [war, he meant !], it was impolitic, it would be unjust, and it would be impos- sible to resist her claim." And in the House of Commons, Fox (Secretary of State) affirmed it to be the intention of the Ministry " to make a complete, absolute, and perpetual surrender of British legislation and judicial supremacy in Ire- land." He also "vowed to God he would rather relinquish the depend- ence of Ireland on the crown of England altogether than see her sub- jected to it by force of arms." As to Pitt, his enthusiastic protestations have been quoted in an ear- lier chapter. England's present attitude in the matter is thns set forth by the London Times: "The Union was accom- plished by the very basest of means. . . Yet if it were gall, it mnst be maintained." Adopting this text, every English politician insists that, although the Act of Union was fraudulent in con- ception and execution, it has resulted in extending to Ireland the boon of constitutional government, that the THE UNIOIT. 253 fractious member has merely undergone a somewhat rough but salutary discipline in order to make her a sharer in the opulence and strength of the empire. The falsity and dishonesty of such a pretense have already been fully exposed. The Anglo-Irish Union was not a treaty, was not a compact ; it was simply the mask of a monstrous wrong, generated in corruption, imposed upon the Irish people by violence, and having no force whatever except what it receives from bayonets. Petitions were signed in Ireland against it, in a brief space, bearing seven hundred and seven thousand signatures, "while all the signatures the government could procure in its favor amounted to not more than about three thousand, though schools were canvassed for the names of their pupils, and jails raked for the names of their criminals." Nor was the measure allowed to take effect without more emphatic protest. The fiery ardor of young Robert Emmet had compelled him to flee to the continent, where, in 1802, there was a reunion of a scattered band of patriots. They were led to believe that if another bold attempt were made, Napoleon would reinforce it with an expedition strong enough to complete the work.* Emmet accordingly proceeded to Dublin, and his gallant comrade Thomas Russell to Bel- fast, to organize another blow for the Irish Republic. And it was one of the most extraordinary attempts on record. Extensive preparations were made, loads of arms and ammunition manufactured, proclamations printed, and the emeute exploded in the very heart of the capital before a whisper of direct information reached the gov- ernment in regard to it. The plan contemplated the sur- prise and seizure of Dublin Castle, and the distribution of its well-filled arsenal among the disarmed provinces. * Napoleon afterward said to his physician, Barry O'Meara, at St. Helena : " Had I taken my army to Ireland instead of to Egypt, the destiny of the world might have been changed.' 254 IRELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. The attempt was a rash, forlorn hope, and resulted in dismal failure (July 23, 1803). Emmet* and Russell t were captured and executed, and martial law again put in operation. In 1797 the debt of Ireland was only three million pounds. Twenty-one million pounds were borrowed by England to carry the Union, and were then added on to Ireland'' s debt. The latter had to purchase the rod that scourged her, and her body was sold to pay the wages of her executioners. The money was appropriated as follows : Increased military outlay £16,000,000 Cash bribes to owners of pocket-boroughs . . . 1,500,000 " To suffering loyalists " 1,500,000 Blood-money to spies and informers .... 1,000,000 Increased expenses of judicial tribunals \ 500, 000 Compensation to public officers 500, 000 £21,000,000 In the Act of Union it was stipulated that the debts of both countries should remain distinct, Ireland starting * Emmet might have made his escape, but he was resolved not to quit Ireland without bidding a personal farewell to his betrothed, Sarah Curran. Keenly pursued by the blood- hounds of the Castle, devoted friends contrived to conceal him for a month; but Major Sirr at length traced and arrested him. His faithful housekeeper, Anne Devlin, was offered bribe? to betray him. She spurned them. A troop of yeomen then seized her, prodded her with their bayonets until she was covered with blood, finally hanged her for nearly three minutes from the tilted shafts of a cart, but no torture could wring a word of information from the noble woman. . . Emmet's speech in the dock is a masterpiece of lofty elo- quence, which fittingly reflects the heroic character of the author. The evening before his execution, the governor of the prison entered Emmet's cell abruptly. The prisoner wag seated at his little deal table, twining a lock of hair through his fingers. " This little tress," said he to the jailer, " has long been dear to me ; I am plaiting it to wear on the scaffold to-morrow." The tress was from the head of Sarah Curran. . . Thomas Addis Emmet (brother to the martyr) found a home in New York, where his sterling talent in a short time caused him to be recognized as the leader of the American bar. t Thomas Russell had entered the Anglo-Indian service as a volunteer, but quit it after he had been thoroughly sickened with the brutalities perpetrated and encouraged by the British Government. t " There was trial by jury going on by daylight, And martial law hanging ' the lavins ' by night."— Sharrms O^Brien. THE UNION. 255 with twenty-eight million pounds, England with fonr hundred and forty-six million pounds. But in 1816 the two exchequers were fraudulently consolidated, and taxation "equalized." [The inside history of the trans- action is given in Part First, Chaper XL, of this vol- ume.] Ireland, broken and beggared, had to assume a big slice of England's colossal load — that foul roc's egg which will yet hatch out an unprecedented and calami- tous bankruptcy. CHAPTER XVI. EMANCIPATION AND EEPEAL. O'Connell's Regime — Mobal Suasion Tactics— A Calamity in thi Guise of a Victoby. " In the year 1792 we were despised and rejected ; in 1793 we were flattered and favored. The reason is obvious ; in 1792 England was safe ; in 1793 fortune had changed and she wanted help." — O'Connell. HYSICAL resistance thoroughly trampled out in 1803, the country became a scene of horror and decay. The men who had given it vitality were in the prisons and convict-hulks, if not dead or exiled. Terror and despair brooded over the land ; with its commerce paralyzed, factories suspended, machinery rusting, artisans fleeing in thousands from the gloomy charnel-house. The kindly interest and substantial aid which had fostered domestic industry were swept away, and the people, decimated, plundered, cajoled, seemed lost in hopeless apathy. It was at this juncture that the towering form of 0' Connell appeared in the national arena. He brought with him new, peculiar tactics, Protean devices. On him devolved the task of lifting up his countrymen once more from the slough of despond, and marvel- ous was his success in arousing, sustaining, and di- recting popular fervor. The first objective point to which his energies were bent was the removal of civil disabilities affecting the Catholics. In order to con- ciliate this outlawed element toward the Union, Pitt had pledged himself in writing that their emancipation 256 EMANCIPATION AND BEPEAL. 257 should immediately follow the passage of that abhorred measure, and swore that he would never act with any ministry unfavorable to their claims. The trickster's promise deceived many of the Catholic hierarchy and "gentry," but not the priesthood nor the people. The expected relief was not granted, and Mr. Pitt did not hesitate to violate both pledge and oath. So, for the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the Irish papists plodded along in the deep shadow, while a knot of prosy aristocrats and ambitious lawyers held select meetings and wrote petitions for the removal of grievances. Stepping in with his watchword of " Constitutional Agitation," O'Connell gradually marshaled the people at his own back, and became something more than chieftain or leader ever was before. He became the popular idol and dictator of a disarmed nation. Edu- cated in the legal profession, he placed unlimited faith in the efficacy of "moral suasion," approving no meth- ods which did not come within the pale of the law. A witness of some of the bloody scenes enacted both in France and at home in the last wild decade of the pre- ceding century, he cherished an intense hatred of civil war and bloodshed. A born orator, quick, shrewd, humorous, genial, magnetic, he could sway the emotions of an audience as with the wand of an enchanter. He spoke, he wrote,* he organized, he held monster meet- ings, until the country was governed by a single impulse, and his lightest whisper was obeyed as readily as a czar's decree. He denounced, exposed, and defeated " the Yeto."f * It was no easy matter to conduct an honest newspaper in Ireland then. There was a tax of two pence (four cents) on every impression struck off ; sixty cents duty levied on every advertisement ; and bonds of two thousand four hundred pounds had to be given as security of good and loyal behavior. . . The gag-law of the present day is, if anything, more severe, as the entire " plant" of a journal may be summarily seized and confiscated. t English diplomacy in Rome had secured from Cardinal Quarantotti a special Rescript conceding to the English sovereign the right of vetoing episcopal nominations in Ireland. 17 258 IRELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. A hired bully (D'Esterre) was induced to challenge the troublesome agitator ; they met, and the bully fell. In 1823 the Catholic Association was founded, and the plan of a " penny-a-month " conceived and tested. With Napoleon buried in St. Helena, the English ministry could afford to carry a high hand ; so the association was formally dissolved by act of Parliament. But it went down in one shape only to reappear immediately in another. O'Connell's fertility of device was inex- haustible, and the increasing income from the "rent" enabled him to carry out his projects. In 1793 the Catholics had been admitted to the elective franchise, qualified by a clear income of forty shillings annually from house or land, or both. This measure had the effect of multiplying small farmers, the land- lords readily cutting up their domains in order to secure additional political influence. In 1826 the Forty-Shil- ling Freeholders voted for their own candidates, regard- less of landlord dictation, and a Parliamentary revolu- tion was wrought by their change of front. The offended oligarchy began a course of wholesale eviction, but the persecution was arrested by a threat of buying up en- cumbrances and foreclosing mortgages.* Wellington, a pronounced opponent of Emancipation, became leader of the British cabinet. One of his chosen colleagues, Fitz- gerald, was M.P. for Clare. When he came back for re-election (according to British usage) in 1828, O'Con- nell entered the lists against him, and, to the consterna- tion of loyal landlords and gentry, defeated him. The barrier was broken down, and Wellington introduced the Emancipation bill in the House of Lords with an The measure would have put the whole spiritual life and ecclesiastical machinery of Ireland under direct control of Dublin Castle. The Irish people and clergy therefore so hotly resented the scheme that it was soon abandoned and the offensive rescript withdrawn. * Through riotous living and extravagance three-fourths of the Irish landed proprietors had managed to encumber their estates heavily. EMANCIPATION AND EEPEAL. 259 assurance that the measure was as unpalatable as ever, but that it must be granted rather than take the risk of a civil war.* His colleague, Peel, in the House of Com- mons said : "I have for years attempted to maintain the exclusion of the Roman Catholics from Parliament and from the high offices of the State. I now yield to a necessity which I cannot control, which might endanger the establishment which I wish to defend." The bill was passed, and the driveling old bigot, George IV., wept as he signed it. May 15, 1829, O'Con- nell entered Parliament, and was handed the old oath of "abjuration and supremacy." He tossed it from him, saying: "Part of this oath I do not believe to be true, and part I know to be false." He was refused admission, was again elected, and in 1830 took his seat without opposition, the test-oaths meantime having been forged into a less offensive form. As a condition to emancipa- tion, Peel brought in and passed a bill disfranchising the Irish Forty- Shilling Freeholders. The twin mea- sures were a positive triumph for England ! What was the Catholic Emancipation Act ? Few men have ever studied the musty document in its original entirety ; else, instead of regarding it as a victory and a blessing, they would see it to be a calamity and a yoke of bondage. Davis tells us "it was but admission to the Bench, the Inner Bar, and Parliament. It put a silken badge on a few members of one profession. It dignified a dozen Catholics with a senatorial name in a foreign and hostile legislature. It was won by self-denial, ge- nius, vast and sustained labors, by submission to insult- ing oaths, and lastly, by the sacrifice of the Forty- Shil- ling Freeholders — the poor veterans of the war. On it were expended more treasures, more intellect, more pas- * Half the British army and navy at the time consisted of Irish Catholics, among whom a spirit of disaffection had spread. 260 IRELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. sion, more of all which makes life welcome, than had been needed for war." Everybody hnrrahed for the " great victory" — few comprehended its real spirit or provisions. Even to-day many people believe that it was in substance a repeal of the Penal Code. It was nothing of the kind. It simply permitted the aristocratic Catho- lics of Britain and Ireland to sit in Parliament and hoist their yonnger sons, nephews, and cousins into comforta- ble office, from which they had heretofore been debarred. It created a class of loud-mouthed place-hunting patriots, who bombarded "the brutal Saxon" with red-hot ex- pletives until the aforesaid Saxon pitchforked them into some lucrative position, whereupon their wrath was in- stantly appeased and they grew gentle as any sucking dove. It alienated, bribed, converted to " loyalty" those who should have been the leaders of the people ; but to the great bulk of the people it brought no shred nor semblance of substantial benefit. Emancipation reduced by five hundred thousand the number of voters in Ireland, and inaugurated an era of ruthless eviction. The Forty-Shilling Freeholders, no longer of any use either to the landlords or to the O'Con- nellites, were pitilessly swept away, the small farms con- solidated, the fields laid waste. Under the obligations expressly imposed by the Act, every Catholic taking a government position must swear (1) to act as a spy and informer ; (2) to defend the Protestant succession to the throne ; (3) to disavow and abjure any intention of sub- verting the Established Protestant Church. The Act also provides for the expulsion of "Jesuits and mem- bers of other religious orders" — a standing menace which has never been put into effect. Nevertheless, the "great victory" was hailed with joyous acclamations by "the finest peasantry in the world," who little thought, poor fellows, how completely EMANCIPATION AND REPEAL. 261 their birthright had been sold. O'Connell — now "The Liberator" — achieved more absolute power than king ever wielded, and he promptly raised the standard of REPEAL. At this juncture, animated by O'Connell' s apparent success, the English people loudly demanded Reform, which was sadly needed in every institution among them. " The government, the colonies, the law, the public companies, the army, navy, church, corporations, civil list, annuitants, etc., were all a leavened mass of corruption." Robbery, peculation, profligacy, and dis- honesty ran riot among the "upper ten." O'Connell and his adherents allied themselves with the Whigs, under promise of unlimited concessions to Ireland after the ejection of Peel and Wellington. The battle was long, obstinate, and violent, but the Reform Bill was at last carried through the aid of the Irish contingent, and sixty rotten boroughs were cut away. Now were the Irish to be rewarded for their conspicuous services. In 1833 the Reformed Parliament met, and its very first oc- cupation was to forge new coercion laws for Ireland ! Here are a few sample clauses : " The Lord Lieutenant of Ireland may suppress, by order, the meet- ing of any assembly deemed by him dangerous to the public safety. u He may proclaim any county in a state of ' disturbance,' and order the inhabitants to remain in their houses between sunset and sunrise. "He may appoint any commissioned officers of the line to try offenses under this Act ; five to be a court, three to be a majority, and to have all the powers of judges of the land to imprison, punish, transport, and hang. " Armed with these powers, Anglesey at once pro- claimed down all existing associations in Ireland ; even the exercise of the right of petition was prohibited. Be- fore dispersing, the associations resolved that all their powers and resources should be centered in the hands of O'ConnelL He brought up a motion for Repeal of the 262 IRELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. Union ; the Honse of Commons rejected it by five hundred and twenty-three to thirty-five, only two English mem- bers voting with him. A new ministry adopted a new line of strategy — conciliation. A popular viceroy was sent over, who began forthwith to bribe the leaders. Office was flung open to the Repealers, and every man of any consequence among them obtained lucrative place for himself or his friends. 0' ConnelT s own sons, rela- tives, and lieutenants swam with the current, " and be- tween those who had obtained and those who expected place, the country was brought under a spell." The Liberator made triumphal tours, and waited to see the outcome of the " experiment." Meantime destitution was fastening its grip tighter and tighter on the tenant class. They were " emanci- pated," but they could find no decrease of rents or taxes in consequence. On the contrary, they had forfeited the forbearance of Protestant landlords, had put in office a swarm of Catholic cormorants, and between these upper and nether millstones they were being ground out by patent ejectment-process under supervision of the Crow- bar Brigade. The produce of their fields was carted away from them as fast as it matured, and " distress " grew apace. In 1836 Lord John Russell sent over a com- mission to inquire into the state of the poor, which re- ported back to him that the average earnings of a laborer in Ireland ranged from two shillings to two shillings and sixpence (fifty to sixty cents) a week — from which muni- ficent income a man and family had to be housed, fed, and clothed. It reported, also, that during thirty weeks of every year there were five hundred and eighty-five thousand (585,000) adult males out of employment, on whom were dependent one million eight hundred thou- sand (1,800,000) persons — making a total of two million three hundred and eighty-five thousand (2,385,000) de- EMANCIPATION AND REPEAL. 263 pendent on public or private charity for subsistence during seven months of every year. The Chartist agitation* was raging in England, and at such high heat that only a spark was needed to ex- plode its formidable, pent-up wrath. In 1841 the Char- tists sent in a petition with three and a half million sig- natures attached, and among the reforms prayed for was "a repeal of the legislative union between Great Britain and Ireland." Here was the working manhood of Bri- tain championing the removal of Ireland' s pivotal griev- ance ; yet with those men 0' Connell broke, spurning their assistance, and writing :f "We will not accept their aid. They petition for the release of men who have taken up arms against our beloved sovereign!" The mercenary experiment lasted for four or five years, and left Ireland steeped in beggary. A commer- cial panic had passed over the land, and everywhere was dismay and squalid misery. His eyes opened at last by some earnest men in Dublin, O' Connell now tried to re- deem his error by abandoning compromises and declar- ing u in the face of heaven never to look for anything for this country short of a Repeal of the Union." No need to follow the revived movement through its varied phases, the monster meetings, the plot and counterplot, the final arrest and imprisonment of the leader and his * So called on account of its demand for a written charter embracing five reforms, via. : 1. Universal Suffrage ; 2. The Ballot ; 3. Annual Parliamentary Elections ; 4. Abolition of Property Qualifications for M.P.'s ; 5. Payment of Legislators from the public treasury for services rendered. The second and fourth of these demands have since been carried. One of the leading spirits of this great movement, which came near revolutionizing England, was Feargus O'Connor (Dephew of Arthur the '98 man) — in some respects an abler man than O'Connell, as he certainly was a more consistent one. t Letter to Ray. . . Some aver that jealousy of Feargus O'Connor's influence had not a little to do with determining " Dan's " attitude toward the Chartists. At all events, he stood up stoutly for his "beloved sovereign " Victoria, who was crowned in 1837, married in 1840, and who was so unpopular with a powerful faction at the very time we speak of that her virtue was openly impugned in several English journals— notably in the London Times, which threw a cloud of suspicion around the fact that her eldest child was born within eight months after her marriage. 264 IEELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. associates,* which showed that his magic mantle of im- munity had fallen from him. After nearly half a cen- tury of arduous wrestling with the Law, the champion was grappled and thrown; his prestige of invincibility was lost. In one of his speeches he said : ' ' Injustice, degradation, comparative weakness, wide-spreading pov- erty, unendurable political inferiority — these are the fruits of the Union. The restoration of the national legislature is therefore insisted upon, and no compromise, no pause, no cessation of that demand shall oe allowed until Ireland is herself again. One word to close. No honest man ever despaired of his country. No wise enemy will place his reliance on the difficulties which may lie in the way between seven millions of human beings and that liberty which they feel to be their right. For them there can be no impossibility. I repeat it, that as surely as to-morrow's sun will rise, Ireland will assert her right for herself, preserving the golden and unonerous link of the crown, true to the principles of unaffected and genuine allegiance, but determined, while she preserves her loyalty to the British throne, to vindicate her title to constitutional freedom for the Irish people." Herein is apparent the fatal error which underlaid O'Connell's whole political career. He tried to combine two irreconcilable elements — to keep Ireland loyal to the British throne, and at the same time secure justice for her by means of legal argument and logic. Prom his demand for Repeal "free from any alternative" we may borrow a phrase which concisely expresses the grand mistake he made, namely, that while insisting on his country's right to self-government, and proclaiming the unalterable resolve of seven millions to secure it, he left himself absolutely without alternative in case of a refusal. The Volunteers of 1782 hung upon their can- * The sentence was reversed by the House of Lords, on appeal, some months afterward, Chief Justice Deuman declaring that " under the administration of law in Ireland no man's life was worth a pin's fee," and that "the trial by jury was a mockery, a delusion, and a snare. " Denman was a Whig partisan, and his scathing denunciation was designed mainly as a rap at the Tory administration then in power. EMANCIPATION AND EEPEAL. 265 nons' mouths the significant label: " Independence, or else !" Sixty years later the Repealers threatened to win their demands or — talk Parliament to death ! The man who taught that England had never yet conceded a right except through fear, through dread of a bloody alternative, deliberately cast aside and repudiated that alternative, thereby paralyzing his own hand. More- over, he did compromise, and pause, and delay, always with the best intention, always with the expectation of obtaining some fragment of justice from the rapidly changing ministries, all of which held out the most allur- ing promises and (it is superfluous to add) never fulfilled them. O'Connell's potent personal sway, his broad and gener- ous sympathies, his wondrous gift of oratory, together with the peculiar social and political conditions of the time, combined, as Davis said, to " place the strength of all the land like a falchion in his hand." But his extravagant no-drop-of -blood doctrine flattened the fal- chion's point and dulled its edge, day by day assuring England that, when a crisis came, it would be used, like the tin blade of a harlequin, to dazzle the eyes of children, not like the trenchant weapon of a soldier, to smite and punish the wrong-doer.* In his speech in his own defense (State Trials of 1844), O'Connell boasted of being the consistent apostle of "that political sect who held that liberty was only to be attained under such agencies as were strictly consistent with the law and the constitution — by perseverance in the courses of tranquillity and good order, and b^j an utter abhorrence of violence and bloodshed. Other politicians have said : ' Win your liberties by peaceful means if you can;' but there was always an arriere pensee in this admonition, and they always had in contemplation an appeal to physical force in case other means should prove abortive. But I am not of these. I have * "If Jefferson and Washington were right, O'Connell was wrong, and vice versa."— Savage. 266 IEELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. preached under every contingency, and I have again and again declared my intention to abandon the cause of Repeal if a single drop of human blood were shed by those who advocated the measure." The man had profound faith in the potency of his favorite methods for the accomplishment of all he aimed at, and his belief in their efficacy was strengthened by the passage of the Emancipation Bill in the face of tena- cious prejudice and bigotry. Nevertheless the semi- insane extravagance of his " no-drop-of -blood " teach- ing is something we can hardly comprehend or account for. A hundred times he professed his readiness to empty his own veins, at the head of his countrymen, in defense of "British honor" and the British flag. He bragged of the prowess of Irish troops in the Brit- ish service, delaring them to be the stanchest bulwark of crown and constitution. Fight for the Queen % Ay, with pleasure he " would lead a million Irishmen to die in her defense."* Fight for Ireland's rights % Never ! Doubtless he felt that no common effort was required to keep in subjection the martial tendencies of an ardent, high-spirited race, smarting under an intoler- able burden of insult and wrong ; consequently, seeing them unarmed, undisciplined, he did everything in his power to subdue and fetter their impetuosity. At the outset of his career his views in this regard were mode- rate, sagacious, and commendable. He taught his hear- ers that they were in no condition to regain their rights by an appeal to physical force, that they might attain their ends equally well without it, and that any re- course to violence would merely give an advantage to the enemy. As years went by, however, the old man's opinions narrowed, and were intensified into a species of monomania regarding " the golden link of the crown," * His own recorded words. His speeches teem with similar affirmations. EMANCIPATION AND REPEAL. 267 leading him to such extreme utterances as to call forth a public protest from a Catholic priest at the great Mayo meeting of 1840, in presence of Archbishop MacHale. On that occasion Rev. James Hughes said : 1 ' I feel it right and my duty to protest, in limine, against the doctrine which Mr. O'Connell is perpetually preaching and inculcating; and that is that he shall not resort to or seek for a separation of Ireland from England. . . I must tell him that we have got too much of that doc- trine, and the time is come when such views of Irish politics are both ludicrous and mischievous. . . What Ireland wants, and what she shall no longer do without, is a Parliament of her own, a repeal of the union with England ; and if that cannot be achieved or accomplished except by separation, I feel convinced, as every other Irishman must, that a separation would be a blessing to Ireland." This and similar protests, however, wrought no altera- tion in O'Connell' s views, and when Young Ireland be- gan to cultivate the arriere pensee, he bitterly denounced its aspiration. His dominant influence paralyzed the efforts of the more youthful and ardent generation. A million of Irish sunk into unhonored graves under the pressure of hunger and pestilence. It would have been far nobler and less disastrous for them had they seized such weapons as they could find and boldly risked the fortune of war in defense of the food which would have saved them, instead of seeing it carted away to enrich the pockets of the spoiler. There can be no doubt that O'Connell' s loyalty, merging into fanaticism as it did, defeated its own object. Had he so directed his policy as to make England dread a general and simultaneous uprising in Ireland at the first favorable opportunity, his long years of agitation might not have been so bar- ren of practical results, and the famine might have been speedily arrested. He made a different choice, and all men know the consequence. CHAPTER XVII. YOUNG IRELAND. The Gospel of Iron once more— A Flash in the Pan— A Brilliant School op Agitators among a Cowed, Mistaught, and Famine- stricken People. " If any man thinks that Irish liberty is incompatible with the British empire, perish the empire ! "— Grattan. |? HE agitation for Repeal went on, steady and cla morons, bnt impotent.* For twoscore years We* O'Connell had incessantly hammered into the people's heads the dnty of being loyal to the crown above all things, and impressed npon them that the lib- erties of mankind were not worth the shedding of one drop of blood. England had sworn in 1800 never more to imperil her own supremacy b$" relaxing the bond of Union, unless forced to it by the strong hand. Here was a square issue ; and England no longer feared O'Con- nell, for he had pinioned his own arms. In one emer- gency she had doubted his power to control and hold back the surging mass which he had conjured up and welded together ; therefore she yielded to the demand for Emancipation, not without reluctance, it is true, yet * It certainly did not lack material to work on, for in 1841 was compiled the following table showing the amount of which the country was then annually robbed : Rents to absentee landlords ...... $30,000,000 Revenue to alien government . . . . • • 20,000,000 Profits to English manufacturers ..... 37,500,000 Profits to English banks and insurance companies . . . 2,500,000 Ninety million dollars yearly drained from the land without the shadow of a benefit in return ! The figures should be enlarged to meet the case to-day. 268 YOUNG IRELAND. 269 with a certain mixture of satisfaction when she perceived that the measure would bind over the wealthy Catholics irrevocably to the support of British interests. Later, when she came to perceive the real extent of O'ConneLL's influence and the deep root his teachings had taken, she tightened the fetters without fear or hesitation. She knew that the falchion was blunted. But a new generation of political thinkers was grow- ing up in Ireland, with genius in its brain, hope and devotion in its heart, fluid lightning in its veins. The spirit of " Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," was once more breathing warmly over Europe, reanimating the peoples. Far and wide its pulsations were felt, and under the very gaze of O'Connell it began to shape out a distinct political element — Young Ireland. " At the head of this party," says Savage, " blazed a galaxy of genius — poets, orators, scholars, writers, and organizers." The sun and center of the galaxy, for too brief a day, was Thomas Davis. Around him circled a brilliant constellation of young, ardent, gifted, patriotic Irishmen. The Nation newspaper was issued, and im- mediately won the recognition and support to which its merits entitled it. Then, at a reunion in MacNevin's house, the " Library of Ireland" was projected; the design being to educate the Irish people in the history of their own land, its rights and wrongs ; to infuse into them a national, self-reliant ambition ; to foster and cultivate the very energies which English legislation had systematically trampled on, but could never wholly kill. To the zeal and ability brought to bear upon this work is due, in no small degree, the basis of earnest manhood which has since sustained the national senti- ment of Ireland. The fourth volume of the series was the "life of Aodh O'Neill," the Ulster chieftain, who had defeated Elizabeth's ablest generals, battled and 270 IBELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. outwitted her craftiest statesmen. Written by John Mitchel, and destined to become a classic, the book was finished just in time to be dedicated to the memory of Thomas Davis, who had died, "Like the summer-dried fountain, When our need was the sorest." Removing to Dublin soon after, Mitchel took the place of his lamented friend as chief writer on the Na- tion and a bold adviser in the councils of Young Ireland. Many circumstances soon combined to bring this ad- vanced guard into collision with both the moral-suasion Repealers and the Castle authorities. The black cloud of famine had already begun to loom up above the horizon. The potato crop, stricken with fatal blight, rotted in the soil, and men began to utter fierce threats and imprecations as the other crops were gathered in to pay rents and taxes, while thousands grew pale with sharp pangs of hunger, and the Govern- ment declined to move a finger for their relief. In 1844, when it began to be feared that O'ConnelTs agitation might crystallize into insurrection, the Devon Commis- sion was appointed. It was composed entirely of land- lords, and they naturally recommended consolidation of farms and emigration : "The calculation is put forward showing that the consolidation of the small holdings up to eight acres would require the removal of about one hundred and ninety-two thousand three hundred and sixty-eight (192,368) families " [representing fully a million souls !] . " Emigration is considered by the committee to be peculiarly appli- cable as a remedial measure." — Report, p. 564. At that very moment there were four million acres of arable waste-lands in Ireland. Well, the potato rotted in the soil, and thereby (according to official estimates) sixteen million pounds' worth of produce was lost ; but . YOUNG IRELAND. 271 enough still remained to feed the people. In the winter of 1845 persons began to die of starvation in the south. The corporations and Irish representatives, repudiating the very mention of English charity, demanded that their own revenues should be applied to the construction of public works in the shape of a loan, asked that the navigation law prohibiting the importation of grain in foreign ships should be suspended, and that Parliament should be called together earlier than usual. All re- fused ; but a scientific commission was appointed to re- port on the potato-blight. Parliament met in the end of January, 1846, and the Queen's speech recommended — a coercion act! As to the famine, she had " taken precautions." She would also favor a repeal of the Corn Laws — to cheapen the one commodity which the Irish had to sell and the Eng- lish to buy ! In order to pay their masters the Irish had now to export more of their grain and cattle than ever, and they did send seventeen million pounds' worth to England. The work of ejecting tenants and consoli- dating farms went bravely on. Bills were passed for seizing arms, for domiciliary visits by the police, and for curfew regulations. In this year (1846) three hundred thousand persons died of famine and of typhus fever, the sure concomitant of famine. The Government report for the year gives two thousand and forty-one " registered " deaths from hunger — which is a palpable fraud. They sent over ten thousand blank books and some thirty-two thousand pounds' weight of red tape and general station- ery. As Mitchel says, if reports were eatable, the famine had been stayed. In 1847, the same familiar tale : an abundant har- vest, the death-rate ascending with fearful velocity, and eighty-five million dollars' worth of products exported to England. Captain Larcom, a Government commis- 272 IKELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. sioner, made a careful census of the island's agricul- tural produce for the year, fixing it at two hundred and twenty-four million eight hundred and ninety thousand six hundred dollars ($224,890,600). This should have sufficed t$ feed eighteen millions of people, but as Eng- land and her pet oligarchy wanted fully three-fourths of it to themselves in the shape of rents, taxes, etc., it readily becomes apparent that Ireland had a " surplus population." Accordingly a Relief Act was passed, with "the Quarter- Acre clause" incorporated. Its sub- stance was that, if a farmer should be forced to apply for aid under this Act, he must first surrender his holding to the landlord, with the exception of one rood. This was the most efficient of all exterminating statutes. Public works were started, and the official returns show that seven hundred and thirty thousand (730,000) heads of families (representing three and a half millions of population) sought employment. The works were badly conceived and soon abandoned, throwing the toilers on the already exhausted country as able-bodied paupers. Now a Vagrant Act was passed to punish tramps and mendicants. As it applied to nearly half the popula- tion, one may easily conceive how it hastened emigra- tion. The poorhouses were crammed ; coffins could not be found to encase the dead, so they were dumped into pits by the cartload ; and it was a common spectacle in hospitals to see three or four fever-patients in one bed, some dead, others dying. Later on, Captain Larcom fur- nished another report, compiled from data collected by local police inspectors. The subjoined extract must have been read with pleasure by the Devon Commission : "Year 1847. In the number of farms of from one to five acres the decrease has been twenty-four thousand one hundred and forty-seven (24, 147) ; from five to fifteen acres, twenty-seven thousand three hundred and seventy-nine (27, 379) ; from fifteen to thirty acres, four thousand two hundred and seventy-four (4,274)." YOUNG IRELAND. 273 Upwards of sixty thousand families rooted out in a single year — it was a gratifying exhibit to British states- men, who perceived clearly enough that the " constitu- tional " farce could not last forever, and that the excited people would sometime break their parliamentary lead- ing-strings to have recourse to sterner logic. Judging from the racket that had been kept up for years under CT Con- nell's guidance, the country was obviously "too popu- lous; "so the famine was looked upon as being a de- cidedly providential occurrence rather than otherwise, and the British ministry quickly stimulated it and bade it God-speed ! Under such pressure, political excitement in Ireland began to rise toward fever-heat. The Nation's freedom of utterance led to a government prosecution. Defended by the venerable Robert Holmes, Young Ireland won a substantial victory in the jury's disagreement. There can be no doubt that at this time anxieties, years, and labors were rapidly sapping the mental and physical strength of O'Connell, leading him into such extreme positions as were irreconcilable even with his own re- corded teachings. " In his constant brooding over the dangers of an insurrection, in which the people would be slaughtered like sheep," he framed a test declaration for members of the association, "repudiating, disclaiming, denouncing, and abhorring the use of physical force under any possible circumstances, or in any age or country" This glaring and irrational absurdity, born of the old man's brain-softening, was applauded by the sycophants and place-hunters who clung to his skirts. Smith O'Brien, Mitchel, Meagher, Gavan Duffy, Devin Reilly, Rev. C. P. Meehan, and others eloquently pro- tested against the outrageous folly of a condemnation which would embrace every brave man from Leonidas to Washington. All in vain. The test was pushed until 18 274 IKELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. Young Ireland must either swallow the degrading pledge or quit Conciliation Hall. They quit ; and their depar- ture drew a sharp line between 0' Connellism and Na- tionalism in Ireland. Meantime the funeral pall of famine settled down in denser folds over wider areas than ever. I can find no more graphic picture of the situation than the following paragraph from Mitchel's pen in 1854 : THE IEISH FAMINE. "At the end of six years I can set down these things calmly; but to see them might have driven a wise man mad. There is no need to re- count how the assistant-barristers and sheriffs, aided by the police, tore down the roof-trees and plowed up the hearths of village after village; how the quarter-acre clause laid bare the parishes; how the farmers and their wives and little ones, in wild dismay, trooped along the high- ways; how, in some hamlets by the seaside, most of the inhabitants being already dead, an adventurous traveler would come upon aome family eating a famished ass ; how maniac mothers stowed away their dead children to he devoured at midnight ; how Mr. Darcy, of Clif den, describes a humane gentleman going to a village near that place with some crackers, and standing at the door of the house, ' and when he threw the crackers to the children (for he was afraid to enter), the mother attempted to take them from them ; ' how husband and wife fought like wolves for the last morsel of food in the house ; how families, when all was eaten and no hope left, took their last loolc at the sun, built up their cottage doors, that none might see them die or hear their groans, and were found, weeks after- ward, skeletons on their own hearth; how the 'law' was vindicated all this while ; how the arms-bills were diligently put in force, and many examples were made ; how starving wretches were transported * for steal- ing vegetables at night; how overworked coroners declared they would hold no more inquests ; how Americans sent com, and the very Turks, yea, negro slaves, sent money for alms, which the British Government was not ashamed to administer to the 'sister country; ' and how, in every one of these years — 1846, 1847, and 1848 — Ireland was exporting to England Bantry Sessions.— Timothy Leary and Mary Leary were indicted for that they, on the 14th January, at Oakmonnt, did feloniously steal twenty turnips and ffty parsnips, the property of James Gillman. Pound guilty. Sentence : Transpoi'lation for seven years. This is but one of many instances. YOUNG IEELAND. 275 food to the value of fifteen million pounds sterling, and had on her own soil at each harvest good and ample provision for double her own population, notwithstanding the potato Might. " No exaggeration is it to say that such scenes might drive men mad — nay, they did drive men mad, and drove two and a half millions of mistaught Irish, famish- ing, nerveless, and despairing, into the emigrant hulk, the pauper-pen, or the coffinless pit on the hillside. Every week deepened the desolation and dull stupor until the French Revolution of February, 1848, over- turning the monarchy at a single effort, animated the republicans of Ireland with fresh hope. Ireland, it is true, was " depopulated, starved, cowed, and cor- rupted ; " but the logic of Young Ireland was that forty years of moral suasion had resulted in weakness and disaster ; that, however desperate the odds, it was better to fling out the standard of revolt than lie prostrate under the slow agony of starvation. " Better that men should perish by the bayonets of the enemy than by their laws. No carnage could be so cruel as the famine." Such was Mitchel's teaching, the boldness of which so alarmed Gavan Duffy that he declined to make room any longer in the Nation for Mitchel's "sedition." The latter promptly established the United Irishman as the organ and advocate of revolution, the avowed mouth- piece of what was termed "sedition" and "treason." The purpose of the new journalistic meteor was plainly written on its face — to rekindle the torch of '98, with this difference, " that whereas the revolutionary organi- zation of ' 98 was a secret one, which was ruined by spies and informers, that of '48 was to be an open one, con- cerning which informers could tell nothing that its pro- moters were not ready to proclaim from the housetops." The young men were eagerly grasping such weapons as they could lay hands on, and waiting for the signal. 276 IRELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. In April a bill was rushed through Parliament, by which to print or publish " seditious " matter was classified as treason-felony, punishable with the forfeiture of the journal as well as the transportation of the responsible editor.* All the legal machinery being in proper order, Mitchel was arrested on two charges of felony, May 13, 1848, brought to trial, and found guilty on the 26th, and next morning was sailing toward Spike Island to begin his fourteen years of penal servitude. Not a single Catholic, not one decent or independent Protestant, was permitted on the jury before which he had been tried, f It consisted of twelve henchmen of the Castle. The prisoner was swept away thus quickly because there were rumors of a forcible attempt at rescue to be made by the " 'Eighty-two Clubs." % The Council of the Confederates announced its set intention to take the field in autumn, and urged prepa- rations to that end, but was forestalled by the Govern- ment. The editors of outspoken journals (John Martin, Duffy, 0' Doner ty, Williams) were arrested ; a prompt suspension of the habeas corpus permitted the instant seizure and imprisonment of any number of suspects without trial or formality. The curfew law was bur- nished up, empowering the Lord Lieutenant to prohibit * Offenses of this sort had previously heen dealt with as misdemeanors, which rendered the editor personally liahle but left the newspaper intact ; hence the new law was framed with special reference to forfeiture. t One of Mitchel's gravest "crimes" was the winning over of large accessions to the national ranks from among the deluded loyalists of the North. Being himself an Ulster man and the son of a Unitarian clergyman, he was admirably qualified to accomplish this work. In one of his letters he said, with peculiar vitriolic sarcasm : " The Pope may be Antichrist, but he does not issue ejectments in Ulster " — and that single trenchant text won many a stout Presbyterian farmer from the Orange to the National camp. . . Mitchel had promised to force the Lord Lieutenant publicly and notoriously to pack a jury for con- viction, or else he would walk from the court a free man to push the contest in another field. He was resolved to show what " constitutionalism " in Ireland meant. " Now," said he from the dock, " I have shown that British law in Ireland sustains itself by packed juries, by partisan judges, by perjured sheriffs." \ Many of the clubs were in favor of making a bold dash to recover the prisoner, but the leaders overruled them, being unwilling to precipitate a rebellion before harvest- time. YOUNG IBELAND. 277 the residents of any district or county from appearing out of doors after dark under penalty of seven years' transportation ; and any two magistrates could try, con- vict, and sentence under this act without appeal. Thus driven to the wall, the Young Irelanders at once put themselves "on the country" without waiting for harvest-time. Smith O'Brien, Dillon, Meagher, Doheny, MacManus, 0' Gorman, Smyth, Reilly, O'Mahony, Sav- age, scattered themselves westward and southward in the forlorn hope of giving the struggle some solid front. The result was an almost unexampled fiasco. Famine had fixed its iron grip on the vitals of the land. The people writhed and perished in agony — perished of star- vation in the midst of plenty ; and British statesman- ship, seeing 'in it " a providential visitation," moved not a finger to succor or save them. Moral suasion with England was now seen of all men to be a farce and a failure ; yet the people were dazed, bewildered, be- witched, so that they knew not what to do. The instinct of a martial race told them that death by the enemy' s bayonets in a wild dash for freedom was preferable to the slow torture imposed on them by his political econ- omy. But long years of monster meetings, electioneer- ing humbug, and hurrahing for Repeal, had unnerved them like a contagion. The leader in whose footsteps they had trustfully walked, as in the wake of another Moses, had again and again led them up to the very verge of insurrection without ever violating a letter of the law. On the trembling brink his marvelous magnet- ism, coupled with their own implicit trust, had always restrained them, under the assurance that to go a single pace further was to commit a crime* With timber so * Such fatuous teaching wrung from J. C. Mangan the thrilling protest of his " Song of Hatred " : " How long shall the hideous ogre, Power, Rear column of skulls on column ? 278 IRELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. dampened and soaked, it was evidently a herculean task to kindle any vigorous blaze. Even with these disadvantages to contend against, the Young Irelanders might have rallied strength enough to do some desperate work, but for the incomprehensible scruples of their leader, Smith O'Brien,* who, though destitute of provisions, refused to levy on the surround- ing estates, and refrained from striking a blow until the enemy should assail him with an overt act of war ! The consequence was that his force melted away as fast as it gathered, and the leaders were soon captured, except about half a dozen who contrived to elude a close and vigilant pursuit. The abrupt ending of the insurgent attempt was also due, in no small degree, to the admonitions of the Cath- olic clergy, who dissuaded their flocks from joining it. They felt it was doomed to failure, and unquestionably their counsel under the circumstances was sage and timely, saving the land from profitless carnage. But it is also to be noted that, only for the blind adherence of so many o'f the clergy to O'Connell's policy after that policy had run to seed, the Famine era would have opened under far more hopeful auspices. In the words of Savage, "they had talked 'the Emancipator' into an impromptu immortality, cheered him with a frenzy that grew delighted with its own delusive exuberance, shouted themselves into the belief that they were ac- tually redeemed and disenthralled." They did not O Justice ! hasten thy judgment-hour, And open thy doomsday volume ! No more oiled speech I it is time the drove Of tyrants should hear their fate read ; We have all had quite enough of love- Test now the talisman Hatred! " * Wo man ever questioned Smith O'Brien's hravery or honesty. He was a man who would have calmly walked into the crater of Vesuvius if satisfied that duty called him to the sacri- fice. But, like many of his younger associates, he was an enthusiastic theorist rather than a practical organizer of revolution. * YOUNG IKELAND. 279 fathom the deep design of Palmerston, who kept every organ at his command vociferously asserting that the priests were the main fomenters of rebellion in Ireland. They fell into the trap, and labored like Titans to crush out every incipient tendency to rebellion, in order to prove Palmerston a slanderer ! Here are a conple of choice extracts from the Premier's correspondence with his Roman agent, Lord Minto : "I send you a letter from Clarendon, the whole of which you may, I think, read to anybody with whom you are in communication on the part of the Pope. But you may safely go further than Clarendon has chosen to do, and you may confidently assure the Papal authorities that, at present in Ireland, misconduct is the rule and good conduct the exception in the Catholic priests ; that they in a number of cases are the open and fearless and shameless instigators to disorder, to violence, and murder. "There is evidently a deliberate and extensive conspiracy among the priests and the peasantry to kill off or drive away all the proprietors of land, to prevent and deter any of their agents from collecting rent, and thus practically to transfer the land of the country from the landowners to the tenants. . . The hanging of a dozen of these miscreants all in a row may have some effect in deterring others from following their ex- ample." Now, if both priests and people had been conspiring for the object here credited to them — namely, to root out landlordism and invest the tenants with proprietary rights — they would have been doing a holy and a whole- some work. But, in point of fact, they were doing no- thing of the kind. Tens of thousands of the people were lying down to die like cattle in a plague, while their food was borne away to pay the robbers' rents and taxes ; and the clergy shrived their souls and advised them to obey the law ; and Palmerston chuckled over so phenomenal a case of surplus population. Had the Irish of that generation graduated in a more virile school of politics, they would not have lacked bread while the fruits of their own toil lay in bursting granaries around 280 IEELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. them. Palmerston's truculent Roman correspondence showed that lie dreaded an outbreak of his frenzied vic- tims, and therefore he adroitly pushed his diplomacy in order to have the Irish clergy warned to repress any such explosion.* Ireland's population in 1841 was 8,175,125. In 1851, by natural increase according to official estimate, It should have been It actually was .... Balance to be accounted for 9,018,799 6,552,385 2,466,414 A million had emigrated ; nearly a million and a half had died of hunger, privation, and typhus. The Celts had "gone with a vengeance," the danger that men- aced the empire was deftly warded off. The jails were packed with untried felons, the judges condemned them in batches, and her Majesty's transports bore them away to the antipodes. And Ireland was " pacified." * The letters to Minto (published in Palmerston's Memoirs) almost compel admiration bj their dexterity, audacity, and their surprising fecundity of falsehood. CHAPTER XVm. FENIANI8M. The "Cobpse" Reanimate— A Movement that Failed, iet did NOT WHOLLY FAIL. "The struggle for Ireland's freedom is an assault upon England's power."— Fenian Motto. ^HARLES GAVAIST DUFFY, and many others like him discouraged with the experiment of 1848, sailed away from the pest-house where, to all appearance, they had left a nation "as a corpse on the dissecting table." But what they mistook for death was only the torpor of exhaustion. They little imagined how soon again would the potent touch of oppression galvanize this prostrate cadaver into new life and energy. Ireland was, indeed, pitilessly stricken down by the iron arms of law and famine, but she could not be kept down. Like Antseus, she touched earth only to be endowed with fresh vitality. Moreover, the procession of events now tended to urge the national impulse along a more direct and consistent groove. With all its shortcomings and failure, the Young Ireland movement did revolutionize the island in one respect — it exposed the impotency of moral suasion as a factor in the Anglo-Irish problem, and banished (for a while at least) the abortive phantom of constitutionalism. Compromised in the 1848 attempt, John O'Mahony contrived to elude the police and reached Paris, .where he fell in with another refugee, James Stephens, who had been severely wounded at Ballingarry. Together 281 282 IRELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN". they began to deliberate on the best means of organizing a more successful crusade against alien misrule in their native land. The volcanic state of the whole continent at the time brought them into contact with kindred spirits from every part of Europe, and gave them ample facilities for comparing notes on the most desirable agen- cies of revolution. The failure of 1848 they attributed to the want of quiet, earnest, secret preparation. This defect they resolved to remedy by elaborating a system and propagating it among the Irish race at home and abroad. O'Mahony selected the United States as his field of action ; Stephens was to plant and nurse the seed in Ireland. The latter, in conjunction with Luby and one or two others, laid the framework of the Phoenix Society, which after a while developed into the I. R. B., or Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood. In 1853 Mitchel was rescued from penal banishment by P. J. Smyth, and made his way to New York. O'Mahony left Paris to join him, and in 1856 the two were at the head of a considerable body of Irish Nation- alists in New York, which went under the name of the Emmet Monument Association.* This was the period of the Crimean war, and the exiles did their best to utilize the occasion by asking the Czar to send an armed expe- dition to Ireland. Some hopes were held out that the diversion would be attempted, but the treaty of Paris (March, fc 1856) closed the negotiations. In 1858 the E. M. A. was rebaptized as the Fenian Brotherhood (F. B.), and toward the end of that year its numerical strength did not exceed forty members, prom- inent among whom were Michael Doheny and Colonel Corcoran. Five years afterward its ramifications extend- ed to the furthest corners of the continent. Its propa- * E. M. A.— a name suggested by the closing passage of Robert Emmet's memorable Bpeech in the dock. FENIANISM. 283 gandism received a mighty impulse through the outbreak of civil war in the United States, for the event created a whirlwind of military ardor and opened a splendid train- ing school for the Irish- American element to familiarize itself with the art of war — which was exactly what was needed to give efficacy to its threats against Britain. It had the men in Ireland ; it now found a nursery for com- manders and a depot for munitions in America. Besides, there was a strong probability that England would try to crush the Federal Government. All these motives, added to the master motive of patriotic attachment to the Union, combined to give the Irish element an immense represen- tation in the Federal armies, with a considerable sprin- kling of them on the Confederate side also — and they were Fenians almost to a man. The organization, says one of its historians, " spread like a prairie-fire. The ranks swelled rapidly, and money poured like a tide into its treasury. The society in Ireland received a rapid de- velopment, and soon began to put on a bold front toward the Government." In 1863 was issued a call for the first National Con- gress in the United States, in response to which the delegates met in Chicago, November 3. Sixty-three " circles" were represented, aggregating about fifteen thousand men, of whom half at least were then making history far away on the banks of the Potomac or some other war-plowed river. This Congress drew up a consti- tution and by-laws for the government of the Brother- hood which it defined as follows : u An association having for its object the national freedom of Ireland, and composed for the most part of citizens of the United States of America, of Irish birth or descent, but open to such other dwellers on the American continent as are friendly to the liberation of Ireland from the domination of England by every honorable means within our reach, collectively and individually, save and except such means as may be in 284 IRELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. violation of the Constitution and laws under which we live, and to which all of us who are citizens of the. United States owe our alle giance." The Irish people were declared to constitute a distinct nationality, and the embryo Irish Republic was pro- claimed, with James Stephens as Chief Executive. O'Ma- hony was elected Head Center of the American branch. The second National Congress assembled in Cincinnati, Ohio, January 17, 1865, at which date the sixty -three circles had widened to three hundred, and the financial exhibit was most encouraging. In the Head Center's address occurred the following passage : "It is no idle boast to say that the English Government has been influenced in no small degree by the actions of the Fenians, here and at home, in abstaining thus long from openly aiding in the dismember- ment of our Union. Thus, perhaps fortunately for our cause, while working for the liberation of Ireland, we are also serving the best inter- ests of America." Meanwhile Stephens and his colleagues at home had not been idle ; the organization had struck root and found ardent supporters in the remotest hamlets of the land, thereby furnishing a sure index to the extent of popular discontent. Its propagandism was something marvelous. In the Irish capital it had eighteen thou- sand men passably drilled and disciplined, with a mod- erate supply of arms. In Cork it had twenty thousand men, and arms enough to go around among three-fourths of them. In England and Scotland it had a daring and powerful contingent, anxious to avenge bitter wrongs by means of a desperate diversion in the enemy's own camp. Still more startling, the Brotherhood had fifteen thousand sworn confederates in the ranks of the British army, who were ready to pull trigger for their own kith and kin even against the peace and comfort of her gra- cious Majesty. That the Fenians had the sympathy of PENIANISM. 285 • the United States Government, and that some high offi- cials were willing to strain a point in their behalf, are facts well known. That they had some encouragement from other quarters ; too, is to be inferred from the state- ments of Earl Derby, who, when asked for information on this identical subject, replied that he " could not imagine a course more likely to embroil England with foreign powers than that the Government should lay before Parliament all the information it possessed with regard to the countenance and support which such con- spiracies may have received from foreign states." The Government, of course, had abundant indications to warn it that a storm was gathering. Its eyes were first opened when fifty thousand men fell into line in Dublin (November, 1861), to accord a fitting sepulture to the remains of T. B. MacManus. The Irish People newspaper, conducted with striking vigor and audacity, was a weekly mouthpiece of blistering sedition. Event followed event so rapidly that the Government had to act with more precipitation than at previous crises. Irish regiments were hurriedly transferred to foreign stations, and English and Scotch battalions substituted. The po- lice and military barracks were fortified and strength- ened. On the evening of September 15, 1865, the Irish People was seized and suppressed, the plant confiscated, the editors and managers flung into jail, and wholesale arrests became the order of the day. Among the first seized were T. C. Luby, John O'Leary, J. O' Donovan Eossa, and shortly after C. J. Kickham, James Stephens, Ed. Duffy, and Hugh Brophy. Two weeks later Ste- phens was released mysteriously from Richmond, to the consternation of the Government. The other prisoners were given the usual sham trial and sentenced to various lengthy terms of penal servitude. At the same time, conscious that repressive measures 286 IKELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. alone would not suffice to allay the storm, Mr. Gladstone prepared to disestablish the Protestant Church in Ire- land and to bring in a sweeping tenant-right bill. The measures were of little substantial benefit to the country, but, whatever their worth, Gladstone carried them in Parliament only through dread of the mysterious F. B. — a name at whose vague and terrible import the cheeks of British legislators used to blanch with fear. Premier Gladstone's promises had, however, one effect — they gave a platform to Cardinal Cullen from which to denounce the sinful objects of Fenianism ; and, to tell the plain truth, his Eminence displayed more zeal than knowledge, more loyalty to the Queen than to an exact statement of facts, in his campaign against the Fratres Feniones. At all events he utilized every instrument at his command to weaken the " wicked association " ^nd convict its im- prisoned leaders. No calumny invented by the enemy was too outrageous for his indorsal.* I do not mean to say that he was responsible for the collapse of the move- ment ; but the part he played in the drama was by no means creditable to the head of the Catholic Church in Ireland, and it awoke a resentful chord in the hearts of the people. With all its self-sacrifice and devotion, the Fenian movement had in itself and in its environment the seeds of defeat ; nevertheless, as a manifestation of national faith and spirit, as the effort of a dispersed, disarmed people against a wealthy and powerful oppressor, it will win admiration rather than ridicule from the unbiased student who peers below the surface of events. Hired British organs, of course, allege that the whole scheme never contemplated anything more than the personal * Bishop Moriarty of Kerry surpassed the Cardinal in vehement denunciation, saying on one occasion that "hell was not deep enough nor eternity long enough" to punish ade- quately the conspirators ! ■ FENIANISM. 287 comfort and luxury of the leaders, and impressive is the condolence extended to the "hoodwinked laborers" and "poor servant girls" who contributed to maintain it. Nothing is easier than to gabble about "Fenian frauds " and spatter calumny on those who were fore- most in an unsuccessful movement. In every movement of the sort there is necessarily an opening for some selfish and mercenary men to creep through ; but any man who conscientiously devotes himself to the liberation of Ire- land, or any other oppressed nationality, will make no money out of his mission. On the contrary, he is much more likely to sacrifice wealth and every material com- fort at the shrine of patriotic fidelity. Such, beyond doubt, was the case with almost all the men who were most conspicuous in Fenian circles, although their abili- ties would readily have won them distinction and more solid reward if directed in narrow and selfish channels. Their chief, John O'Mahony, lived in extreme poverty, and died " leaving not even his funeral expenses." The seizure of the Irish People newspaper in Dublin, and the subsequent reign of terror throughout the island, gave a fresh impetus to the organization in America, and another Congress assembled at Philadelphia, October 16, 1865. At this meeting some dissatisfaction was shown regarding the manner in which the executive functions had been discharged, and a party opposed to O'Mahony endeavored to have him unseated. The difficulty was bridged over by a compromise ; O'Mahony retained his post under the new title of President, and to advise and assist him were appointed a Senate and Cabinet com- posed of representatives of all parties. This scheme of adopting and parading the administrative machinery of an Irish republic on American soil excited much ridicule and was widely looked upon as a disastrous mistake. However, things prospered at the outset under the new 288 IKELAKD AS SHE HAS BEEN. arrangement, and from the fall of 1865 to the summer of 1866 was the halcyon era of Fenianism. Multitudes of men were studying military tactics. Large quantities of arms were purchased for shipment to Ireland, and, in fulfillment of an agreement with Stephens, one hundred and fifty experienced officers were sent over to be ready to take command of an Irish insurgent army. But these days were short. Two different campaign plans were proposed, and each found earnest, sturdy advocates within the society. The consequence was the formation of a " Senate party," the adherents of which disapproved many details of management favored by the President. Each line of action had its partisans, impul- sive though sincere, and the dispute grew so hot that Colonel W. R. Roberts and many other prominent mem- bers of the Brotherhood seceded in December, 1865, and established the independent wing, which soon afterward became identified with the projected invasion of Canada. In order to lessen the effect of the rupture, O'Mahony hastened to call another convention, which met in Clin- ton Hall, New York, during the first week of January, 1866, and comprised four hundred delegates from all quarters of the globe. The old Constitution was re- stored, the Senate abolished, an address issued, O'Ma- hony reinvested with his former title and prerogatives of Head Center, and sentence of expulsion pronounced upon the seceders. During the spring the excitement gave no sign of abat- ing — the news from Ireland was well calculated to keep it at boiling-point — and everybody was vociferous for " action ! " The breach between " the Irish party " and "the Canadian party" grew wider, and while the latter was girding itself to invade the Dominion, the former made a futile attempt to occupy Campo Bello as a military depot. In order, if possible, to adjust differ- FENIANISM. 289 ences and effect a reconciliation between the two wings, O'Mahony now resigned his head-centership, making way for Stephens, who had jnst arrived in New York, but whose presence, notwithstanding, failed to heal the breach. The invasion of Canada was attempted by Colonel J. O'Neill, with a small band which met and routed the Queen's Own regiment of volunteers at Limestone Ridge. But the preparations were halting and incomplete, so that before a sufficient force could be thrown forward the United States authorities had massed enough troops on the frontier to end the expedition.* Aiming to coun- teract the effect of this raid, as well as to satisfy the universal demand for action, Stephens now began to make rash promises of a " rising" in Ireland by a stated time — promises which he must have known to be mis- leading — and he suddenly sunk out of sight, retiring to France before the storm he had conjured up. Not so with the military leaders of the Brotherhood. A number of high-spirited, earnest men, who had won their laurels on American battle-fields, had pledged themselves to participate in the fight promised by Ste- phens ; and when he so abruptly retired they took no thought of shrinking back from the forlorn hope. In the beginning of 1867 they set out for Ireland in scat- tered groups and diligently went to work to organize an armed outbreak. Time and circumstances were alike adverse to the attempt. The country was chilled from repeated disappointments, and the arms expected from America had not arrived. A premature rising in Kerry, February 13, due to a miscarriage of orders, caused the jails to be again packed with suspects. Two days pre- * The United States Government was bound by international comity to use all due dili- gence toward preventing an armed invasion of Canada from United States soil. But the United States Government was not inclined at the time to make any excessive haste if a strong force had been promptly thrown across the line. 19 290 IRELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. viously Captain McCafferty had startled England by a daring dash within her own borders : the warning of an informer had been almost too late to prevent the " des- perate Yankee" from capturing the castle of Chester and transporting its rich magazine to Ireland. He, like General Bourke and several others, was condemned to death, but the sentence was afterward commuted. On the night of March 5, a more concerted attempt was made in Dublin, Louth, Tipperary, Cork, Water- ford, Limerick, and Clare ; but the insurgents were wretchedly armed, hemmed in on all sides by powerful garrisons, and to quell them at the very outset a snow- storm of unexampled severity and duration drenched and froze the unsheltered bands. The Fenian insurrec- tion had collapsed, and nothing remained but to pursue and punish the instigators — which, of course, was done with fitting rigor. When the news was flashed abroad that hostilities had actually broken out, the men in America, believing that the attempt could not be at once suppressed, ex- erted themselves to redeem their promise of sending officers and arms to Ireland. In April a party of nearly fifty men boarded the brigantine Jackmel off Sandy Hook, New York, under command of Generals Kerrigan and Kavanagh. The vessel had a cargo of arms and am- munition. On Easter Sunday she was rechristened the ErinJs Hope. Running the gauntlet of British fleets, she spent twenty -four days around the Irish coast, touched three times in Ireland and once in England, landed most of her officers, and, finding the country tranquil, brought her cargo back in safety after a voy- age of nine thousand two hundred and sixty-five miles, and a score of hair-breadth escapes. Of those who landed from her, many were arrested and brought to trial— Halpin, Warren, and Costello among the number. They FENIANISM. 291 were condemned to penal servitude, but have since been released. In September, Colonels Kelly and Deasy, holding high commands in the Brotherhood, were arrested in Man- chester, and great was the rejoicing over their capture ; but while being carried from police office to prison in a closely guarded van, the vehicle was surprised, the escort scattered, and one policeman (Brett) accidentally killed by a pistol-shot fired to explode the lock. The released prisoners were never recaptured, but England went wild with rage and terror, and furiously howled for "Blood ! " Threescore men were soon under arrest on suspicion of having participated in the rescue, and the first batch placed in the dock was speedily sentenced to the gal- lows in order to appease the public appetite for blood. The evidence against the five men thus sent to the gib- bet was demonstrably " cooked" and perjured. One of them chanced to be a loyal British subject, who was leagues away from Manchester at the time of the rescue ; he was pardoned. Another, an Irish- American citizen (Condon), was saved by a telegram from Washington, but he still languishes in prison on account of Charles Francis Adams's snobbery and negligence. The remain- ing three — Allen, Larkin, O'Brien — were hanged, No- vember 23, 1867, on the testimony of hired perjurers.* Even the ignominious death of the Martyred Three was preferable to the slow and exquisite torture inflicted on most of their companions who remained in prison. I have no space to adequately describe the ruffian system which drove to insanity and death so many of the Irish political prisoners. The atrocious brutality practiced in these English dungeons has been exposed by several who * The Courrier Franqais denounced these judicial murders as " organized outrage and assassination," and to mark their abhorrence of the slaughter the Irish in every land paid solemn obsequies to the memory of the Martyred Three. 292 IRELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. survived a few years' experience of it. The gradual leak- ing out of the facts, and the universal horror and indig- nation excited by the recital, forced England to grant an amnesty to most of her victims. She yet retains, how- ever, the military prisoners * as a warning to disaffected soldiers, and Condon as a warning to American sympa- thizers, of the possible fate in store for them. The Fenians failed ; but of them it may be said as of another patriot band : " Their graves have voices; if they threw Dice charged with fates beyond their ken, Yet to their instincts they were true, And had the genius to be men. Fine privilege of Freedom's host, Of even foot-soldiers for the Right ! — For centuries dead, ye are not lost, Your graves send courage forth, and might." — J. R. Lowell. * Half a dozen of them were brilliantly carried off from Australia a year ago by John J. Breslin, in the American brig Catalpa, which was chartered and sent oat for the purpose. CHAPTER XIX. FEDERAL HOME RULE. Parliamentary Strategy Resumed— A Mendicant Policy— As BEFORE, NO FlGS FROM THISTLES. "In reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery ; hut, in fact, eleven men well armed will certainly subdue one single man in his shirt."— Dean Swift. [HE year 1868 saw Ireland once more decimated, pulverized, and conquered, the flower of her man- Vw^pl hood in exile or in the chain-gang, " law " every- where triumphant. Yet if she had been disposed to abandon at once and forever the wearisome, disastrous struggle, the chafing of her yoke would not allow her to do so. It was the old, old story. Resistance in some shape was her only hope of life ; sola salus metis nul~ lam sperare salutem ! By the Act of .Union in 1800 it had been expressly covenanted that the maintenance of the Irish Protest- ant Establishment should be a cardinal, immutable con- dition of the deed. In an imperial strait, Mr. Gladstone had broken this covenant, had knocked away the key- stone of state-support from the edifice. So palpable a breach of faith angered a majority of the Irish Protestants and taught them a somewhat bitter lesson as to the su- premacy of imperial interests. They began to discover that their own personal comfort was now much more closely bound up with the welfare of Ireland than with that of the empire, and they manifested a disposition to 293 294 IKELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. kick against the goad. At the same time, they would not countenance any separatist movement ; some middle ground had to be sought, and it was found in the scheme of Federal Home Rule devised by Isaac Butt. Mr. Butt, an Ulster Protestant and an ex-professor of Trinity College, had begun his political career as the champion of Toryism against Repeal ; but, being a man of keen insight and broad sympathies, the passing years expanded his views. He perceived the moral and ma- terial ruin wrought in Ireland by alien, shave-beggar misrule, and he grew more and more Irish in feeling until, when the leading Fenians were arraigned for their sham trial, he was chosen to defend them. To their cause he devoted his time, energy, and forensic ability for three years. If the labor did not bring him a large pecuniary reward, it intensified his previous feelings and won for him the popular gratitude and confidence. Under his guidance was established the Amnesty Association, the object of which was to obtain royal clemency for some or all of the Fenian felons. The country responded to his call, and almost unconsciously Isaac Butt found himself discharging the functions of a popular leader. From this confused state of affairs the transition to another constitutional agitation was easy and natural. The Protestant element for awhile held aloof through dread of Catholic ascendency ; but a couple of elections in which priests and people took opposite sides wrought a disillusion, and Mr. Butt's following received large accessions from among his own co-religionists. Conventions of any kind in Ireland are rigorously pro- hibited and illegal ; the people cannot choose delegates to represent them (except in Parliament) ; consequently it was rather difficult to launch the new movement in any effective shape. Ultimately a requisition was pub- lished inviting all friends of the project to attend a FEDERAL HOME RULE. 295 " conference" in Dublin, November 18, 1873, whereat the subjoined programme of resolutions was adopted : THE FEDERAL HOME-RULE PLATFORM. " I. That, as the basis of the proceedings of this Conference, we de- clare our conviction that it is essentially necessary to the peace and pros- perity of Ireland that the right of domestic legislation on all Irish affairs should be restored to our country. "EL That, solemnly reasserting the inalienable right of the Irish people to self-government, we declare that the time in our opinion has come when a combined and energetic effort should be made to obtain the restora- tion of that right. ' ' HI. That, in accordance with the ancient and constitutional rights of the Irish Nation, we claim the privilege of managing our own affairs by a Parliament assembled in Ireland, and composed of the Sovereign, the Lords, and the Commons of Ireland. u IV. That in claiming these rights and privileges for our country, we adopt the principle of a Federal arrangement, which would secure to the Irish Parliament the right of legislating for and regulating all mat- ters relating to the internal affairs of Ireland, while leaving to the Im- perial Parliament the power of dealing with all questions affecting the Imperial Crown and Government, legislation regarding the colonies and other dependencies of the Crown, the relations of the Empire with For- eign States, and all matters appertaining to the defense and stability of the Empire at large, as well as the power of granting and providing the supplies necessary for Imperial purposes. "V. That such an arrangement does not involve any change in the existing constitution of the Imperial Parliament, or any interference with the prerogatives of the Crown, or disturbance of the principles of the constitution. " VI. That, to secure to the Irish people the advantages of constitu- tional government, it is essential that there should be in Ireland an administration for Irish affairs, controlled, according to constitutional principles, by the Irish Parliament, and conducted by ministers consti- tutionally responsible to that Parliament. "VII. That, in the opinion of this Conference, a federal arrange- ment, based upon these principles, would consolidate the strength and maintain the integrity of the Empire, and add to the dignity and power of the Imperial Crown. ' ' VIII. That, while we believe that in an Irish Parliament the rights and liberties of all classes of our countrymen would find their best and 296 IRELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. surest protection, we are willing that there should be incorporated in the Federal Constitution articles supplying the amplest guarantees that no change shall be made by that Parliament in the present settlement of prop- erty in Ireland, and that no legislation shall be adopted to establish any religious ascendency in Ireland, or to subject any person to disabili- ties on account of his religious opinions." For the men who, with the best intentions, were promi- nent in framing this programme of compromise, no Irish Nationalist entertains any other feeling than one of good will and personal esteem ; bnt as to the programme it- self, it is contradictory, vague, impracticable — profitless even if it were practicable. The First and Second Reso- lutions, dealing with general principles, are irreproacha- ble ; but they are antagonized and rendered meaningless by the subsequent rubbish. What are " Irish affairs" as distinct from " imperial affairs" ? The question has never been answered to the satisfaction of London legis- lators, to whom every Irish affair is an imperial affair ; and hence they have always kicked out Federal motions with exceeding scant courtesy. The Eighth Resolution alone is enough to wreck and damn the whole platform. It solemnly disclaims and disavows all intention of grappling with the Land Ques- tion — the fundamental grievance of Ireland ! Shorn vol- untarily of this power, Mr. Butt's " local vestry board," if set up in Dublin, would be the very sheet-anchor of Landlordism. It is not easy to make out what the "Federal arrange- ment" really means, because its limitations are purposely left vague and indefinite in order to accommodate the machinery to whatever trivial concessions England might be induced to grant. But England holds all the trumps at present, and will concede nothing. She puts no faith in the alleged desire of the Irish people to " consolidate the strength and maintain the integrity of the empire." FEDEKAL HOME KULE. 297 If a Home Ruler asks for the revival of an Irish citizen army, he is quickly answered: "My dear sir, do you think I am going to invigorate your masked sedition by putting rifles into the hands of ex-Fenians !" A sham representation is the shoal on which Home Rule, like its predecessor Repeal, is stranded. The peo- ple delude themselves, weaken their cause, and occupy a palpably illogical position so long as they continue to send "representatives " to an alien legislature, against the jurisdiction of which they constantly and strenuous- ly protest. If their chosen members could accomplish the slightest good in that assembly, there would be some excuse for the inconsistency, but they can accomplish nothing of the kind ; hence the folly of practically re- cognizing England's usurpation while eternally clamor- ing against it. In sending members to the British Par- liament, Ireland helps to frame British legislation — a fact which is adroitly used in rebuttal of the charge that government in Ireland does not enjoy the consent or ap- proval of the governed. Three-fourths of the Irish par- liamentary contingent may (as has often happened) vote for some desirable reform in Ireland, but their voice is overborne and smothered by five hundred English and Scotch M.P.'s, and there's an end of it. Irishmen should not accept or exercise so worthless a semblance of the freeman's franchise, unless for the elec- tion of irreconcilables like John Mitchel, who will repre- sent them outside Parliament. The proper course for their present "representatives" to pursue would begin with a withdrawal from the alien coercion-factory in which they are hopelessly outnumbered and ignored. Somebody will say: "Would they be any better oft* then, with their places filled by government henchmen I." Well, perhaps not at first sight, and it would require an act of national heroism to carry out the suggestion. But 298 IRELAND AS SHE HA'S BEEN. the attitude of passive resistance thus assumed would be fully understood, the hollow mockery of ' ' constitutional government" would be exposed, and the safety-valve through which so much discontent now evaporates would be closed. Ireland would be taught a lesson of self- reliance ; Europe and America would be enlightened ; England would have to take the risk of an explosion. The advocates of Federal compromise rest themselves on the words of Dean Swift quoted at the head of this chapter, and add: "We aim at being practical. We are statesmanlike in recognizing facts and trying to do, not the ideal best, but the best we can. We do not seek the unattainable. We represent a people disarmed, helotized. Is it not right that we should look to sub- stance more than to form, get what ameliorations we can, and trust to time for the rest \ Half a loaf is better than no bread." So runs the logic of the demand, plausible but decep- tive. As the case stands, Federalism between Britain and Ireland is pre-eminently an unattainable scheme. No jury of constitutional lawyers will examine it and give a different verdict. But suppose it were feasible in some shape, is that " half -a-loaf " doctrine universally applicable in the domain of morals and politics as in the case of a famishing mendicant % The Nationalist will emphatically answer No ! and will refuse to barter away half his inalienable right for a small morsel of the re- maining half. The fraudulent claimant before King Solomon would have been content with half the infant whose maternity was in dispute ; she who claimed all or none was adjudged to be the rightful mother. The laws of every civilized state forbid the compounding of a felony : can Ireland afford to put herself on record as condoning the Union in return for some insignificant changes of local administration ? EEDEEAL HOME EULE. 299 Bat if the Home Rule demand be thus harmless and easily satisfied, why does not England grant it at once and have done with the chronic annoyance % One need not go far to seek the answer — simply because England knows full well that no such trivial ameliorations would be accepted as a finality in Ireland. Says Mr. Froude : "Home Rule is a thing England will never submit to : neither that, nor anything else which would give the Irish people poioer to advance in that direction, will England ever surrender until she is beaten to her knees." This is the blunt, square truth. Neither Federalism, nor Repeal, nor anything of the sort will England ever concede until it is wrested from her in the hour of her difficulty and travail ; and when that hour comes, may Ireland be forever doomed if she accepts anything short of her plenary right — absolute independence ! Meantime the Home-Rule agitation, by reason of its brutal reception and repulse in the London legislature, is gradually forcing into the National ranks many high- spirited, conscientious men who had previously been hopeful advocates of a dual government under a single crown. The accessions from this source, however, will hardly make atonement for the most grievous sin of the Federal leaders, namely, their resolve to endeavor to teach that Ireland' s future is inseparably bound up with that of the empire, and that the victim's sole relief must come through suing in forma pauperis at the footstool of her oppressor ; — which is equivalent to teaching that a monstrous wrong will forever triumph. From a lesson so obviously immoral and debasing, the people instinc- tively recoil, and hold themselves in readiness to take up the cue where Federalism leaves off. Mr. Butt has, of late, shown a strong inclination to recede rather than to advance, and it is by no means unlikely that a consider- able number of his followers would gladly throw off 300 IKELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. their thin mask of professional patriotism in exchange for ministerial favors. Every popular agitation of the kind is sure to be made the catspaw of tricky place- hunters. Of a totally different quality and stamp is the little group of Irish representatives known as obstructionists, chief of whom are Messrs. Biggar, Parnell, O'Connor Power, Gray, and O'Donnell. Indignant at the bullying and brute force of numbers, which prevented them from securing a fair or free discussion of any Irish measure, this wing of the Home-Rule party broke away from Butt's timid guidance and proceeded to pay the major- ity of the House in its own coin by throwing a thousand parliamentary obstacles in the way of every " Govern- ment bill," and tempting the assembled wisdom of Britain to make a conspicuous display of its mingled arrogance, boorishness, and imbecility. The tactics of obstruction have incurred the censure of Mr. Butt, and have been almost universally applauded by the Irish people. Of course, peaceful or constitutional agitation is the only kind of agitation which can at present be made available in Ireland ; but this, in order to be of any per- manent benefit, should be carried on outside Parliament altogether, teaching the people their rights and duties without any gong-beating or bombast. Then trust to God and self-reliance. CHAPTER XX. IEELAND IN AMEEICA. A New and more Vigorous Ireland across the Atlantic— Nemesis taking Shape. " On a given day— God knows the hour— they, ' the American brethren,' will recross the sea to bring liberty, independence, separation from England. They will fight and conquer." —Baron Hubner. 9f JNGrLAND lost America by Ireland," said Lord Mountjoy fourscore years ago. England's keenest dread to-day is that she will lose Ireland by America. For upward of three centuries after Columbus, ven- turously steering straight away from the Pillars of Her- cules, had given to mankind a new world, such colonies as gained a foothold on these shores remained firmly wedded to feudal parents in Europe. A hundred years ago, however, the hardy dependencies of the North Atlantic seaboard showed a decisive change of front ; an inspiration born of outrage and resentment thrilled through them from the pine woods to the orange groves, and they resolved to rid themselves of a galling yoke. They triumphed, and then began a marvelous experi- ment in civil government under the guidance of far-see- ing, liberty -loving men. The infant republic threw open its hospitable arms as a refuge for the oppressed of other lands, and hither in legions came the victims of feudal oppression, to tame the prairies, to breed a race of free- men, and to react upon the systems which had out 301 302 IRELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. rooted them. Conspicuous in the forefront of the great migratory movement were men and women of Irish birth, in myriads. Although it was only after 1845 that the exodns attained the immense proportions familiar to the living generation, it would be a grave mistake to assume that Irish emigra tion to America dates no further back than the Victorian famine. During the greater part of the eighteenth cen- tury a continuous stream of exiles flowed hither from the north-east and south-west of Ireland, and these men and their descendants it was who bore the heaviest brunt of conflict in Washington's campaigns; and to put on record his appreciation of their devotion and services in that struggle the illustrious Father of his Country joined the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick in Philadelphia, thereby becoming an adopted Irishman. It is said to be an ill wind that blows nobody good, and even the Penal Code had one indirect good effect. In the words of Gr. C. Verplanck: "In the glorious struggle for our inde- pendence, and in our more recent contest for national rights, these laws gave the American flag the support of hundreds and thousands of brave hearts and strong arms, at the same time contributing an equal portion of intellectual and moral powers." The adopted son of Washington (G. W. P. Custis) bears still more striking testimony to what is here said of the Irish element in the Revolution. He writes : u Of the operatives of the war — I mean the soldiers — up to the com- ing of the French, Ireland had furnished in the ratio of one hundred for one of any foreign nation whatever. . . Then honored be the old good service of the sons of Erin in the War of Independence. Let the sham- rock be entwined with the laurels of the Revolution, and truth and justice, guiding the pen of history, inscribe on the tablets of America's remembrance : ' Eternal gratitude to Irishmen.'' " The English historian, Plowden, writes : IKELAND IN AMEEICA. 303 "It is a fact beyond question that most of the early successes [of the patriots] in America were immediately owing to the vigorous exertions and prowess of the Irish emigrants who bore arms in that cause." Arthur Lee, agent of the Colonies abroad in 1777, wrote home that Irishmen, entrapped under false pre- tenses, had to be tied and thus sent aboard ship to join the English service in America ; and he significantly added : "Most certainly they will desert more than any other soldiers whatsoever." In 1809, before the second Anglo-American war, one of the offenses charged against Irishmen by Britain was that sixteen thousand of them had fought for Colonial Independence. Among the let- ters of the Marquis Chastellaux, who came hither with Lafayette, we find this paragraph : " An Irishman, the instant he sets foot on American soil, becomes ipso facto an American. While Englishmen and Scotchmen were treated with jeal- ousy and distrust [during the war] even with the best recommendations of zeal and attachment to the cause, the native of Ireland stood in need of no other certificate than his dialect.'''' The cause of this exceptional and creditable distinc- tion is outlined in the following extract from the North- American Review of January, 1841 : "Ireland has strong claims to the good-will and affection of America. Let it be remembered that when the war of our Revolution broke out, the inhabitants of Belfast were the first European community that gave open expression to their good wishes for the American cause. Public meetings, quickly following the first, were held throughout the country to encourage the transatlantic resistance ; and as the contest went on, Ireland, catching inspiration from the example of the New World, took that noble attitude of resistance which gained for her in 1782 the legis- lative and commercial independence which were destined to so short a life. But from that period of a common sympathy — which ought not to be affected by success or failure — Irishmen have never ceased to look toward America with ardent affection ; loving the people who won the freedom for which they vainly sighed and valiantly fought, and regarding this country as the natural haven for hopes too often shipwrecked in the tempest of hard fate that assails their native land." 304 IBELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. The Irishman on touching American soil has no con- flicting allegiance to renounce. Some object to the fact that he retains so distinct an individuality, and never forgets the old land, no matter how much absorbed in his loyalty to the new. The criticism is harsh and nar- row. It has well been said that a man can faithfully love and cherish his wife without disowning the mother who bore him. The freedom attained on American soil is, rightly, to the Irishman an incentive to extend that same freedom to his harassed motherland. Her misery necessarily reflects upon him, if he has in him the timber of a freeman. I have designedly dwelt upon the earlier days of the republic, because the part then played by the Irish ele- ment is less generally known and appreciated than it should be ; while their services in later epochs are too widely chronicled and acknowledged to need any special mention here. A hundred years ago Irish-American manhood was nobly represented by such sterling pa- triots as Montgomery, Barry, the Sullivans, the Carrolls, Wayne, Stark, Knox, Greene, Lynch, Eutledge, McClea- ry, Patrick Henry, Moylan, Morgan, O'Brien, Charles Thompson, Read, Nixon, and many others whose names are graven deeply on the annals of the Revolution. In- herited from them, common interests, common aspira- tions, and a common arch-enemy have bound Ireland to the United States as with hooks of steel, making her (in the words of Henry Clay) a European State of the Union rather than a foreign nation. Thus a new and a stronger Ireland has arisen in the west, intelligent, aggressive, vigilant, which will never rest content while its cradle-land remains under the shadow of a wither- ing serfdom. On the 14th of October, 1788, Benjamin Franklin was commissioned by Congress to communicate its senti- IRELAND IN AMERICA. 305 ments to "the good people of Ireland;" and he wrote from Paris : "The misery which your unfortunate country has suffered from a combination of rapine, treachery, and violence, such as would have dis- graced the name of government in the most arbitrary country in the world, has most sincerely affected your friends in America, and engaged the most serious attention of Congress. I have in commission to repeat to you the cordial concern that Congress takes in all that concerns the happiness of Ireland. . . We have to congratulate you, however, on the bright prospects which the United States have afforded to you, and the oppressed of every nation ; and we trust the liberation of your coun- try has teen effected in America." Franklin spoke prophetically. It was the sword of Washington that upraised the Irish Volunteers of 1782. The results of the movement were lost by folly and cre- dulity, but the "American brethren" (as Hubner calls them) have not yet abandoned the cause as hopeless. Their efforts are assailed with scoffs and sneers, but ridi- cule will not swerve them from their purpose. Venal British organs may affect to view them with contempt, but Britain dreads them for all that, and her smile is forced. She knows that the Irish race the world over shares the disadvantages and humiliation resulting from the plunder and degradation of the cradle-land. Years ago the inevitable outcome of this inheritance was de- tected by a keen intellect in London, and, somehow or other came to be pointed out in the Times * of May 4, 1860. Here is the pith of the article : NEMESIS. "Ireland will become altogether English, and the United States Re- public altogether Irish. . . There will be again an Ireland, but a colossal Ireland, and an Ireland placed in the New World. We * The same journal which, when lahoring to arouse England's hostile spirit at a critical juncture, described the United States as " a republic of scoundrels and ruffians, with a few honest men [presumably British residents] mixed in." 20 306 IEELAND AS SHE HAS BEEj^. shall have only pushed the Celt westward ; — ceasing for the future to be imprisoned between the Liffey and the Shannon, he will spread from New York to San Francisco. . . We must gied our loins to en- counter THE NEMESIS OF SEVEN CENTURIES OF MISGOVERNMENT. To the end of time a hundred millions of people, spread over the largest habitable area in the world, and confronting us everywhere by sea and land, will remember that their forefathers paid tithe to the Protestant clergy, rent to the absentee landlords, and forced obedience to the laws which these had made. And even though the rancorous Celt were to forget and forgive, that will not prevent the sure development of an in- tractable race, and the introduction of intractable elements into the character of the great American nation. It will be more than half Celtic* Doubtless, the Saxon, Danish, German, African, and other races besides will be found in it ; out the preponderating race of all will he that one which has attained the climax of its perfection and its glory on the lanlcs of the Seine, and which has been precipitated into the deepest abysses of degradation and despair on the western shores of Ireland. So we shall have nourished and brought up by us, at home, a power which is called to rule over the New World, to extend its influence over both the oceans, and to become the master of an entire hemisphere. This New World is the true and final home of the Celtic race." Not an inglorious destiny, surely, though it might have been worked out without paying so fearful a price as was exacted by England's atrocious laws. Ireland has not yet become " altogether English," and the race is yet far from " a hundred millions," but already Eng- land has had to gird up her loins to encounter the men- acing vengeance. Through all reverses, defeats, and discouragements, the thunderbolt is steadily forging in America that will ultimately shatter the British empire. * " The history of emigration, and the peculiarity of our language, so different from the Saxon dialects of East and North England, prove that our ancestors came from the Celtic South and West of England and the other persecuted Celtic parts of the three kingdoms, not to mention Celtic Spain, Celtic France, and Celtic Belgium. The Celto-Germans from the borders of the Rhine probably outnumbered the Gothic immigrants from North Europe, whose type has been-submerged in the general Celtic tide. THE TEUE AM ERICAN TYPE IS THEREFORE NOT A HYBRID ANGLO-SAXON, BUT A PURE-BRED CELTIC RACE, as their language, their history, their physique, and impulsive, versatile genius tes- tify.' 1 ''— American Medical Monthly, December, 1855. PAET THIKD. Ireland as She Ought to Be. CHAPTER I. EIGHTS AND DUTIES. The Tree Known by its Fruit — Expedients and Finalities — Po- litical Creed of the Nationalist— Gladstone's Suggestive "Somehow" — Watch, Wait, Prepare. "A nation of slaves mnst always be a nation of paupers."— Rev. Jer. Vaughan. "We live too near the British nation to be less than equal to it."— Henry Grattan. " No agitators, no clubs, no epidemical errors ever were or ever will be fatal to social order in any nation. Nothing but the quiet of the ruling classes— wanton, accumulated, reckless, and merciless — can overthrow them."— New- York Tribune. ft 'HE tree shall be known by its fruits : by the ac- tual condition of Ireland to-day are England's centuries of legislation judged and condemned. Are the Irish people a whit better affected toward their drivers to-day than in any previous decade since 1173 1 The question was answered in England a couple of years ago by John Bright when he said that, were Ireland un- anchored and moved a thousand miles to westward of her present location, the whole network of British land- lord government would be cut loose and cast into the sea before twenty-four hours. The Declaration of Independence assumes it to be a 307 308 IEELAND AS SHE OUGHT TO BE. self-evident truth that all just governments are based on the consent of the governed. English rule in Ireland will bear no such test, being based exclusively on bayo- nets and brute force. Underlying every form of consti- tutional government is the broad truth that no nation is ever profoundly and permanently discontented, unless misgoverned. Ireland has to be kept rigorously dis- armed in order to "pacify" her ; and England stands condemned by her own laws, by her violated pledges, by the confessions of her own statesmen, by the unani- mous voice of civilized communities. The modern Irish, Fronde tells us, are at once a "most mixed and most homogeneous race. They are descend- ants of Nmnedians, Milesians, Norse, Vikings, Dutch, German, British and Saxon slaves, Norman adventurers, and refugees of all countries." Quite true ; and herein we find an impregnable argument, for the modern Irish- man (always excepting the garrison), no matter how many currents mingle in his veins, loathes and abomi- nates British misrule. Why could not England make her own graftings loyal, even though she could not change the rooted hostility of the parent stock ? For the transparent reason that all elements alike have suf- fered outrage and indignity at her hands* The air of * " Since then [Elizabeth's time] the nation has never varied. Its history is one unbroken series of the same heroic facts, the fame terrible misfortunes. The actors change continu- ally ; the outward circumstances at every moment present new aspects, so that the interest never flags ; but the spirit of the struggle is ever the same, and the descendants -of the first O'Neills and O'Donnells burn with the same sacred fire and are inspired by the same heroic aspirations as their fathers."— Thebattd. " The English," says Carte, "never understood governing their provinces, and have put them under a necessity of casting off their government whenever opportunity offered." Carte's remark was induced by certain harsh and wanton law's which injured the very adventurers who had not been ten years in Ireland ! There was no fiercer enemy of the Irish than Edmond Spenser. Yet, Prendergast tells us, this man's grandson, William Spenser, was found guilty of Laving " become Irish " in Cromwell's time, and was ordered to "transplant" into the Connaught mountains. Per- haps the blood of Edmond runs to-day in the veins of Fenians. Thus every wave of colo- nization mingled inextricably with the native tide, became itself native, and ergo necessarily liable to persecution and pillage. RIGHTS AND DUTIES. 309 a country does not foster rebellion ; it is no fanciful sentiment born of dreamy enthusiasm, but is generated and nurtured on pillaged fields, empty harbors, cheer- less firesides. I have endeavored to depict Ireland as she is — her population, dwellings, tillage decreasing year by year ; five millions of people "overcrowding" a fertile land which Alison says should support forty millions ; her intellect dwarfed or banished ; her children steeped in squalid misery and enforced ignorance ; her acquaint- ance with constitutional government limited to the Penal and Coercion codes.* Keverse this picture in imagina- tion, and you see Ireland as she ought to be : — support- ing her own people in comfort ; feeding, clothing, edu- cating them ; training them in the rights and duties of responsible citizenship ; her fields owned by those who till them ; her harbors dotted with the peaceful messen- gers of commerce ; her rivers making music through the wheels of busy factories ; her now barren wastes of moorland reclaimed and cultivated. How shall Ireland attain to this condition ? how re- gain the exercise of her natural right to be mistress of her own resources and destiny ? how be transformed from what she is to what she ought to be % Only by emerging from slavery can she cease to be the prolific parent of pauperism. Hence the problem resolves itself into the plain question : How shall Ireland rid herself completely and absolutely of the British yoke % "By moral suasion," responds one party, and not without a show of plausibility. There stands England, a wealthy and powerful nation, with her ironclads on * The administration of Irish affairs to-day is carried on nnder half a dozen kindred laws, the existence of any one of which suffices to establish a state of siege. They are known by such soft names as "The Crime and Outrage Act" (1847), "The Peace Preservation Act "(1870), "The Protection of Life and Property Act" (1871), "The Unlawful Oaths Act," " The Convention Act," " The Suspension of Habeas Corpus Act. 310 IKELAND AS SHE OUGHT TO BE. the sea, her battalions and batteries conveniently dis posed at central stations, her arsenals filled with wai material, her garrisons posted in every village. On the other side is Ireland, weak, disarmed, helpless, like Sam- son shorn of his strength. Can two snch adversaries come to blows, with any hope for the weaker % Is it not madness to raise naked hands against bayonet and grape- shot % Is it not, then, the part of sagacions statesman- ship to accept accomplished facts, and by means of reason, logic, dignified protest, snbmit to the least of two evdls \ The conrse here advised is the proper course to pursue so long as no other is fairly open : but we must realize that it is a temporary expedient, not a finality. It is curious, as it certainly is instructive, that the most ar- dent (I might say the most fanatical) advocate of Moral Suasion — O'Connell — always laid special emphasis on the fact that England never yet made a concession to justice, unless actuated by a wholesome sense of fear. In other words, when dealing with a vicious bully, your moral suasion is simply efficacious in proportion to the quantity of muscle at the back of it. " Leave it all to your fine orators and parliamentarians, " say some ; but, if eloquence could do it, Ireland had been free long ago. You might just as well spit against the wind in the hope of lulling it as try to exact any meed of justice from the tax-eating Parliament by the logic of speech. Besides, the half of these "fine speakers" are sure to be place- hunters at heart. Molasses plentifully mixed with chaff is, no doubt, a good diet for filling, but of its fattening properties there is room to be skeptical. The malignant agencies heretofore described are still in vigorous opera- tion. The British Government-mill grinds out its grist of Irish paupers and corpses to-day as relentlessly as ever, and no fine words shall stop the machinery any EIGHTS AND DUTIES. 311 more than a handful of dry grass will appease the tiger's craving for flesh. When the Hungarian statesman Deak was dying, a couple of years ago, the New York pro-British Times published a review of his career, and vehemently de- nounced the policy of "brutal repression' ' which Aus- tria exercised toward Hungary until the disaster of Ko- niggratz brought the imperial cabinet to reason. "For the first time in history, a Hapsburger learned wisdom from misfortune." Hungary regained a virtual inde- pendence under a constitution analogous to that of Ire- land in 1782. What was the result ? Let the Times * tell: "Under this ingenious policy, Hungary attained the essential things she had struggled for — independence of municipal and county institu- tions, a national parliament and separate ministry, and the control of her own taxes and internal affairs. Austria was stronger by having a peaceful and harmonious province, from which to draw men and means, and to develop her own internal resources. Under the union and the Deak policy, Hungary has entered on a material progress such as she has never known. Railroads have connected every portion of the coun- try ; mines have been developed ; agriculture improved ; commerce and manufacture have built up splendid streets ; capital has flowed in from Germany, and the whole country has begun a new career of success and prosperity. Schools also have been improved, and the education of the people has entered on a fresh course of progress. Both liberty and pros- perity have taken up their abode in the land. The old fires of revolu- tion have been quenched, and enduring peace seems to have descended on the country, so long cursed by war and its effects." The blessings conferred by self-government could not be more strikingly portrayed. But no compromise of the same kind is possible between England and Ireland. The gulf between them is too deep and wide to be thus bridged over. The experiment was tried in 1782, and * How self-interest does often warp men's judgments! This very journal invariably essays to defend EnglancTs policy of " brital repression " in Ireland and elsewhere. 312 IRELAND AS SHE OUGHT TO BE. England swore never again to tolerate a divided juris- diction while she has strength to prevent it. The Bruns- wicker and his aristocracy have not since 1782 encoun- tered enough misfortune to teach them wisdom. England must suffer before her victims can freely breathe. What, then, is to be done? Mr. Gladstone in 1866 (when the Tories were in power) declared that if English- men were placed in the same position as Irishmen, " they would find their way out of it somehow;" and this " somehow" was rapturously applauded, not of course for its suggestion to the Irish, but for its deft compli- ment to British grit. Well, the Irish are in a trap ; they must get out of it somehow, and their only pos- sible egress must be through the walls of the trap. Self-preservation dictates that they shall not be over- delicate or sensitive as to methods and weapons. Des- perate cases require desperate remedies, and Ireland must make her oppressor feel that it does not pay to maintain the Union by coercion and bayonet law. Some sleek Pharisees roll their eyeballs in sanctimonious hor- ror at Wendell Phillips' suggestion "to stab England in the back." They favor " open, honorable fight," etc. Suppose a burly ruffian grasps you by the throat and is choking you to death ; you have a pistol in your hand, but in steps your bland pacificator and says: "Fight with your fists — do it in manly style." Would you accept such advice, or would you not disable the assas- sin by striking when, where, and how you could % The Irish Nationalist believes that England will never give except what Ireland is in a position, without Eng- land' s consent, to take ; and this belief is verified by all experience. But it is not therefore to be inferred that the Nationalist of to-day advocates any rash or prema- ture outbreak. Every failure has brought its lesson. The motto still is : "England's difficulty, Ireland's op- portunity;" — but there has been added to it: "We RIGHTS A1ST> DUTIES. 313 must labor to hasten and complicate the difficulty, and we must be prepared for the opportunity." It may not come in one year, or in ten, or in twenty years ; but come some time it must. To pave the way for it, methods of agitation and organization are improving. Heretofore there has been too much good-humor of a certain kind, too much of the enthusiasm that could be tickled with a straw, too little calm reflection and unswerving purpose. The Irish character, developed under defective leadership and adverse circumstances, has had in it too much of the mercurial element, too lit- tle of the iron ; too much of the capacity for desperate spurts, too little of the grim tenacity which selects one straight path and firmly abides therein. The meetings have usually had too much " rapturous applause," too little of the eloquent silence which marks the sinking of truths fixedly into the mind. A great part of the polit- ical education of the country from 1800 to the present day has been a mere chase after gaudy phantasms ; nor even yet has the idea been wholly abandoned of asking what England may be induced to give, when the sole in- quiry should be : What can our own hands take ? Are not the probabilities strong that future, like past, attempts will be futile and disastrous ? Not necessarily. Heretofore England has always contrived to explode Irish insurrections at the moment when she herself was at peace with the world. She has no guarantee that the same good fortune will attend her unvaryingly. The day of pikes and pitchforks against muskets and artil- lery is gone by. Science is revolutionizing modern war fare, and the humble torpedo defies the stately ironclad. Moreover, England's prestige of omnipotence has de- serted her. She is no longer the arrogant dictator of Eu- rope. Her foundations are honeycombed with decay.* * British victories for a hundred years and more have been won by money subsidies, costly alliances, and hired mercenaries, not by English muscle. To-day her only ally in 314 IKELAND AS SHE OUGHT TO BE. Her colonies no longer pay such bounteous tribute as in former days ; the competition of younger rivals tells against her in the marts of the world ; and as her trade decreases, her gigantic debt must become an intolerable burden. Wherever she has a garrison, there, too, has she vigilant enemies praying and watching for her fall. Intrenched though she seems in pride and pomp, she is weak at heart, weak at her center, and there will a fatal blow first reach her. Within her borders she has an Irish element three millions strong, with both the will and the ability to paralyze her in an emergency. Ireland has heretofore been the arena of every Anglo- Irish duel ; in future the tactics will be changed and England will be made the battle-ground. This may sound like empty boasting, but those who have ample facilities for observation Tcnow that a generation is now girding itself which will inflict the plagues of Egypt upon Britain until (to borrow her own cant) she will be glad to " cut Ireland adrift." The nation of shopkeep- ers can be stricken with mortal terror, and her commer- cial marine shattered. Her armor presents a thousand vulnerable points to a cool, daring, intelligent enemy. This mode of warfare will by some be stigmatized as ferocious, or worse. JSTo matter — adjectives are cheap. He must be a clever juggler who will now entice away the vanguard from its work. To achieve any great re- form, some stalwart pioneers must go ahead in the face of sneers and obloquy. They will be surely followed. "And where the vanguard stands to-day, The rere will rest to-morrow." To put the essence of the subject more plainly, take an illustrative case. If an Irishman, for instance, after Europe is the Turk. The poorhouses and squalid misery of Ireland do not fill up the gang in her regiments as formerly. She has lowered her terms of service from twenty-one years to ten, has increased the pay of her troops, and offers a comfortable bounty to all who serve the full term ; yet she is at her wit's end for recruits. EIGHTS AND DUTIES. 315 years of ceaseless toil and privation, saw the frnit of all his effort mercilessly devonred by landlord and tax- gatherer (as under English rule in Ireland happens every day) ; if at the end of all those years he found himself and his babes flung out upon the roadside to starve like leprous dogs (as under English rule in Ireland happens every day) ; if he beheld his ragged, emaciated wife and offspring borne from some pauper kennel to a shallow grave (as under English rule in Ireland happens every day) ; if he remembered that the bones of his sire and kindred lay bleaching in the coffinless pits where they had been tumbled in when famine wrung from them the spark of life ; — if such a man (and there are legions of him) harbored a vengeful thought against landlordism or any other British institution, or would like to heave a can of dynamite into one of her most gracious Majesty's arsenals, would not " atrocious" be an extremely mild word with which to characterize his " crime" ? Has not England the " right of conquest " ? Have not bandit and pirate the same right? In some cases con- quest absolves itself, when its responsibilities are fit- tingly discharged, when it brings a compensating ben- efit in its train, and when it is acquiesced in by the vanquished.* Has England fulfilled any of these condi- tions in Ireland? Why, her own audacity never pre- sumed to press such a title, f * " Conquest cannot give title ; it is a means to obtain ; and that title cannot be good except by the consent, express or tacit, of the people."— Bitrlemachi. . . "If the people do not voluntarily submit, a state of war exists."— Vattel. . . "But the Irish never gave up the fight, they never gave up the hope of their national freedom. Peel, the English premier, confessed that Ireland could be ruled only by force. It is my conv'ction that the American people will agree with me in saying that when, after seven hundred years of trial, any people cannot rule another except by the sword, they are bound to give it up." —Wendell Phillips. t In the posthumous Act of Attainder against Shane O'Neill, in 1569, Elizabeth's ministers affected to trace her title back to a period antedating the Milesian arrival. They invented the ludicrous fiction of a certain " King Gurmond, son to the noble King Belan of Great Britain," whose descendants only renewed to Henry II. the allegiance pledged by their sires to Gurmondus ! The subterfuge stands on a par with many other lofty British claims. 316 IRELAND AS SHE OUGHT TO BE. Has not Tennyson, minstrel-lacquey to her Majesty, hurled his poetic anathema at " the blind hysterics of the Celt" 2 Then, is not this hysterical Celt an irrespon- sible savage whom it were cruel to intrust with the man- agement of his own affairs ? Not so fast, Mr. Laureate ; it is easy to fling mud at the man who has so often failed. The Irishman has certainly caused Britain a good deal of annoyance and anxiety without being able to make war upon her with stately fleets or well-appointed armies. If he is therefore "hysterical," the fault is more with his environment than himself. But the Celt has been a credulous dupe in trusting to British prom- ises. Credulity has been his besetting, unpardonable sin ; after which ranks his soft-headed folly in not pro- claiming and enforcing the lex talionis. Had he simply dealt with his enemies as they with him, exacting eye for eye, tooth for tooth, the Celt would to-day be more respected and more feared. Has not Mr. Thomas Carlyle declared Ireland to be " a starved rat in the path of an elephant," and encouraged the aforesaid elephant to " squelch" it, by heavens!" Mr. Carlyle may be a sage and a philosopher, but, grant- ing his assumption, is the rat bound to lie still and be squelched ? Others, viewing the subject in a more moderate light, will say with a recent English writer : " We have inherited the burden of our forefathers. They ate sour grapes, and our teeth are set on edge. But, since we thus find our- selves condemned to take up a thread which we have not spun, we may ask for patience, and even for assistance, in passing through the period of transition which is to conduct us from the methods of force em- ployed in the past to the freedom of the future. We have to deal with the facts as they are to-day." This is the plausible plea of "liberal" England, but it will not bear scrutiny. The alleged transition from EIGHTS AND DUTIES. 317 force to freedom lias been coming for centuries, yet has never got within telescopic range of Ireland, and the real transition is likely to be by force to freedom. In the millennial era that is to be, men may see the peaceful federation of the world ; but in our less fortunate era the sage aphorism of Napoleon holds good, that " Europe shall never know peace until she is governed according to nationality" — a thought which might be amplified and amended by adding u and according to the dictates of justice." The laws of a victor nation, enforced at the sword's point, never sit easily on the vanquished, even when those laws are substantially just. Much less can they be borne when fundamentally despotic and de grading, as is the case in Ireland. APPENDIX. ENGLAND AND THE UNITED STATES. (Copied from " English Items," * by Matt. F. Ward, of Arkansas.) HERE are some of our citizens who seem to be troubled with a mawkishly tender regard for the sensibilities of "the dear old Mother Country." The truth must not even be told for fear of giving offense to the burly inhab- itants of the sweet land of our ancestors. "What have we ever received from that country but injustice ? She oppressed us as colonies ; she twice attempted to crush us by war ; and yet, according to these puling lovers of "the Old Country," we must be humbly grateful now because she magnanimously permits us to advance in power and prosperity when she could not possibly restrain us. When has she ever omitted an opportunity of injur- ing us when she could do so with impunity ? She has always interfered with our commercial relations when she dared. She has invariably attempted to shackle our progress, whilst profess- ing to protect the rights of weaker nations. She has assailed us through her press, slandered us in her books, struggled to excite the animosities of other countries against us ; and yet we must raise no murmur of retort, because, forsooth, she happens to be "the Old Country." What, I beg to be informed, is this " Old Coun- try " to us that we should truckle to her ? Out upon those who preach the miserably servile doctrine ! My contempt, is scarcely surpassed by what the English must feel for them. . . * Mr. Ward's book, published by Appleton & Co., 1853, reflects the disgust of a keen an 1 traveled American gentleman at English snobbery, flunkyism, arrogance, and hypocrisy ; it also pitilessly scourges the " familiar whine of ' the mother country,' ' our common ances- tors,' " etc., so often heard from the lips of anglicized and shoddy Americans. 319 320 APPENDIX. What do we owe her that we should so meekly bow to her man- dates ? Not even the doubtful boon of our birth. The royal miser, Henry VII. , refused to assist Columbus in his voyage of discovery, and, after it was accomplished without him, what English monarch ever essayed to people the new-found world ? To the enterprise of Ealeigh, aided by English tyranny toward our forefathers, we are indebted for our appearance among na- tions. Uncared for and despised we remained until our growth made us important to the support of our "tender parent," whose earliest solicitude for the long-neglected foundling was manifested by oppression. She first attempted to rob us by means of venal laws. She then tried to crush us in an unequal contest, and finally yielded to force the rights she had meanly refused to sup- plication. Does such a course deserve gratitude, or contempt ? We should treat her now as we treated her then : command her respect by our boldness, not beg her toleration by obsequious complaisance. She must feel our power before she will acknowl- edge it. . . The English are eager to impress upon us the fact that undi- vided devotion to our country is "provincial." They kindly warn us of the danger of "narrow-minded prejudices," and descant with tumid eloquence upon the liberality of enlarged understandings and cultivated minds. They condescendingly inform us that a man who could continue to think "there's no place like home," would be very justly suspected of never having wandered beyond the limits of his native country. If he desires to be appreciated as a traveler and a man of the world, he must give up such old-fashioned notions. He must take England as his model, and sneer at the deficiencies of America, or else he will incur the danger of being considered an individual of limited understanding and narrow-minded prejudices. Should he feel any curiosity as to what constitutes this particular genus of pre- judices, which is so industriously harped upon by Englishmen, he will discover that their ideas of "narrow-minded prejudices" consist in doing justice to the two countries. To be "provin- cial " is to adhere to America — to display a cultivated taste, ad- mire England. . . APPENDIX. 321 A few meek, submissive, anglicized Americans are nervously anxious to convince England and America that the deepest, most abiding affection subsists between them. They most assiduously labor to prove by facts and figures that certain prejudiced trav- elers and narrow-minded journalists do but waste ink in their efforts to disturb the harmony of two nations allied in origin and bound by common ties. They blandly assure England that America still bases her national pride upon the triumphs of " the mother country." They confidently assert that the Ameri- can people, proud of their English descent, still insist upon shar- ing with Great Britain the glories of their common ancestors. They cajole Americans with the soft assurance that England regards their progress with that sort of interest which the pa- rental heart alone can feel ; they protest that she is proud of her offspring, and that she glories in their success at home and abroad as new evidence of the invincibility of the Anglo-Saxon race. They hope by judiciously tickling the vanity of John Bull, to restrain him from the commission of excesses to which even Americans would fail to submit. And by dinging into our ears the familiar whine of "the mother country," "our common an- cestry," and the glory of being descended from a people who "can claim Shakspeare and Milton as countrymen," they hope to reconcile Americans to the degradation of a tutelage which must prove a stain on our national character. They would fain convince us that we must be servile in order to be proud ; they insult us by attempting to convince us that we could maintain our honor at the sacrifice of our independence. According to the convenient doctrine of these complying syco- phants, gratitude for the honor conferred on us by our English relationship should make us forgive any offense and submit to any imposition England may be pleased to inflict. We are con- siderately warned of the danger of offending our " parent ; " her insults must be treated as badinage, her hostility deemed all a joke. If we should resent her outrages, she may declare us to be no longer her heirs ; if we excite her ire, she might cut us off from the rich inheritance of her glory. But "to crook the pregnant hinges of the knee, when thrift may follow fawning," is some- 21 322 APPENDIX. thing that America has yet to learn. On our own strength, and not on England's favor, we rely for success. We renounce all claim to England's glory, by succession. "We scorn to be honored as the reputed descendants even of Great Britain. As American citizens we present to the world our claims to respect ; as Ameri- can citizens we are ready to maintain them. That solitary relic of England's absurdities, that honor could be derived from an- cestors, has never been received with favor in our land. Our theory and our practice have ever been that "true nobility looks to the future, not to the past." If we wear any of England's laurels, we have won them — not borrowed them; and if we are proud of being Americans, it is not because we may, as descend- ants of Englishmen, share their national pride, but because as foemen in equal fight we have humbled it ! . . "We are assured that England regards us with a most parental affection ; we are informed that she is proud of her offspring. She has indeed been most touchingly affectionate. Nature affords but a single parallel to her maternal affection. She gloats over us with that sort of appetizing tenderness which might be supposed to animate a sow that "hath eaten her nine farrow." We are probably indebted to our strength and numbers for not having been subjected to the same practical illustration of her extreme devotion enjoyed by the pigs. Twenty millions of hardy freemen would prove a troublesome meal even for ogre- ish England. But England regards our progress with parental exultation. That she does watch our advancing strides with the deepest inter- est, I am most ready to admit. But hers is a keener anxiety than ever animates even a parent's breast. It is the feverish, all-absorbing interest of an apprehensive rival, whose soul is racked by mingled hate and fear. If she pretends to glory in our success, as her "kindred of the Anglo-Saxon race," she has been rather too tardy in discovering the tie of relationship to make its acknowledgment at all flattering now. The truth is, that even her purblind jealousy at last permits her to feel that some honor might arise from claiming us as of her own family, and she has become wondrously proud of a connection that she APPENDIX. 323 has been something less than a hundred years in finding out. In defiance of her persecutions, wars, and slanders, we haye assumed such a position that even she might derive consequence from patronizing us. But she strangely mistakes our relations when she supposes that the American people would submit to being treated as inferiors. Having shown ourselves her equals in peace, her superiors in war, we must respectfully decline her patronage as we have steadily defied her malice. The hope that she could flatter us into bolstering up her tottering empire is eminently worthy of her selfishness, but does not reflect much credit on her judgment. She gave us no assistance in our rise ; she must ex- pect none from us in her decline. She must not hope, by play- fully claiming us as her "American cousins," that the reflection of our rising glory will illumine her waning power. We disclaim all sympathy with people who can only remember that they are related to us when it becomes their interest to do so. We should have despised them less had they continued to assail us as ene- mies, instead of making pusillanimous professions of friendship it is impossible for them to feel. . . The subjoined picture of American society is highly interest- ing, as it emanates from the leading British periodical (the For- eign Quarterly Review). It is often gratifying to know what our neighbors think of us ; the English have been always very candid : "Peopled originally by adventurers of all classes and castes, America has been consistently replenished ever since by the dregs and outcasts of all other countries. . . The brigand confederation grew larger and larger every day. All it required to strengthen itself was human muscles ; it lacked nothing but workmen, craftsmen, blood, bones, and sinews. Brains were little or no.hing to the purpose — character, morality, still less. . . The best blood America boasts of was injected into her at the time of the Irish rebellion, and she looks up with a justifiable pride (taking into con- sideration the peculiar quality of her other family and heraldic honors) to such names as those of Emmet and McNevin. Can poetry spring out of an amalgam so monstrous and revolting ? Can its pure spirit breathe an air so fetid and stifling ? " It would be cruel to restrain England in her propensity to vil- lify us when she displays such remarkable fluency in a slander- 324 APPENDIX. ous style of speech. When the ability to calumniate is the only power which has survived the gradual encroachment of bowels upon intellect in Great Britain, it would be a pity to rob the English even of this miserable evidence of mind. . . The weaker rival ever nurses the bitterest hate ; and England cannot escape from the consciousness that her strength must wane as ours grows, though she may attempt to deceive others by her boasts and sneers. INDEX. [Where an asterisk (*) is attached to a number, it denotes that the subject referred to Is spoken of in pages immediately following.] Abebcrombie, Sir R., 243. Absenteeism, 41. Acaill, the Book of, 121. Adams, John Quincy, 144. Adrian IV., Pope, Bull of, 147. Agitation, constitutional, 257.* Albany Law Journal (N. Y.), 119. Albert, Prince-Consort, 26. Albinus, 136. Alfred the Great, 133. Alison, historian, 77, 309. Allen, Bog of, 46. Allen, Larkin and O'Brien, 291. America and Ireland, 10, 71, 208, 323. American Medical Monthly, 306. Amnesty Association, the, 294. Ancient Ireland, 111, 116.* Anglesey and his powers, 261. Anglo-Catholics, 81,* 185,* 196. Anglo-Normans, 18, 31, 144,* 185.* Anne, Queen, 206.* Appendix, 319. Archer's testimony, 180. Architecture, Irish, 112, 120,* 137. Ardrigh, the, 118, 152. Area of Ireland, 41. Aristocracy, British, 47, 63— Irish, 109, 233, 249 260. Army, British, 259, 284, 292, 314. Arnold, Matthew, 97. Arras, CNeill's defense of, 186. Artisans, expulsion of, 208. Arts, ancient Irish, 116.* Athlone, siege of, 199.* Aughrim, battle of, 203. Austerlitz, 217. Austria, 214, 311. Baal-worship in Ireland, 118, 129. Bacon, Lord, his crafty suggestion, 175. Bagenal, Marshal, 174. Balfe, composer, 220. Bantry Bay, 240. Barnard, Bishop, 127. Barons, Anglo-Norman, 151. Barrington, Sir Jonah, 209, 210, 22-5,* 248, 251. Barry, architect, 138, 220. Barry, Commodore, 304. Batavian Republic, the, 241. Battles and Sieges : Dundalk, 141— Clontarf, 142— Wexford, 146, 189— Waterford and Dublin, 147— Thurles, 152— Bannockburn, 154 — Knocktow, 155 — Smerwick, 169— TyrrePs Pass and Clontibret, 173— Drum- fluich, the Yellow Ford, and Corsliabh, 174— Kinsale, 176— Naseby, 186— Arras and Benburb, 186— Drogheda, 188— Dun- gannon and Clonmel, 189— The Boyne, 197— Athlone and Limerick, 199*— Augh- rim, 203— Fontenoy, Landen, Cremona, etc., 214— The Indus, 220— Yorktown, 228-Gemappe, 236— Lough Swilly, 242— of 'Ninety-eight, 244.* Belfast, 303. Belgium, 49. Benburb, 186. Bird (M. P.), 252. Bishops, Anglo-Protestant, 85, 181. Black List, the, 248. Blacksmiths, licensed, 57. " Bloods, the Five," 19. Bolivar, Simon, and his aides, 218. Booty, scale of, 32, 168. Boru, Brian, 120, 142. Bourke, Gen. T. F.,290. Bourke, Prof. U. J., 127. Boyne, battle of the, 197. Bradlaugh, Charles, 43. Brehon Laws, 30, 118, 134. Breslin, J. J., 292. Brett, Sergeant, 291. Bribes for the Union, 248. Brigade, the Franco-Irish, 205, 215. Bright, John, 41, 56, 72, 109, 307. Britain, land tenure in, 51— population of, 74 Brophy, Hugh, 285. Brougham, Lord, on the British Constitu- tion, 56, 145. Browne, Marshal, 214. Bruce, Robert and Edward, 154. Budget, Irish, o 1783,235. Bull of Adrian 1 \, 147. Burgoyne's surreuder, effects of, 220, 233. Burke, Edmund, 209, 220. Burke, Sir Bernard, 216. Burlemachi, on the right of conquest, 315. Burney, Dr., on Irish music, 122. Burton, 183. 325 326 ItfDEX. Bushe, Chief -Justice, 8, 249. Butt, Isaac, 39, 47, 98, 294.* Byrne, Rev. R. A., 80, 82. Byron, Lord, on the Union, 251. Calumnies, 286. * Cambrensis, Gerald, 18, 111.* Camden, historian, 131, 182, 144, 172. Canada, land laws of. 51— Fenian invasion of, 288.* "Carcasses and ashes," 170 Carew, Sir George, 170, 175 Carleron, William, 60. Carlyle, Tom, the squelcher, 6% 316. Carroll, Charles, 220, 304. Carte, historian, 18, 183, 308. Castlereagh, Lord, 239, 247.* Catalpa, the, 292. Cathair More, will of, 120. Catholic Association, the, 258. Catholics, Irish, 16, 80, 181, 220,* 236,* 247* 294. Catholic Standard (London), 82. Catholic University (Dublin), 98. Cecil, Lord Burleigh, 178.* Celts, the, 118, 124, 306. Charlemagne, 136. Charlemont, Lord, 232, 239. Charles, the First, 34, 181* — the Second, 191.* Chartists, the, 263. ' Chastellaux, Marquis de, 303. Chateaubriand, of Irish descent, 217. China, 50, 62. Church, the Established, 83,* 293. Civilization, ancient Irish, 111, 116.* Civilization, monopoly thereof claimed by Britain, 18, 112, 116. Civil rights and responsibilities, 107. Clare Election, the, 258. Clarendon, 182, 189. Claudian, Latin poet, 126. Clay, Henry, 304. Clemens, 136. Clergy, Catholic, and Palmerston, 279. Clifford, Sir Convers, 173, 175;. Clonard, Count of, 217. Clonmel, 189. Clontarf, battle of, 142. Clontibret, " 173. Cobbett, William, 76, 160, 166, 178. Coercion Laws, 58, 261, 271. Coin and Livery, 22. Colleges, Irish foreign, 91, 136. Collins, William, 202. Colonies, British, 50, 66, 102, 196, 212. Colmnbkille.St., 125, 136. Commerce, Irish, 68,* 72, 168, 206. S2?, Commissioners and discoverers, 33. Condon, Capt. E. O'M., 291. •Confederation of 1641 . the, f '2. * Confiscation, who csale, 19, 3 ,* 148, 151,* 168, 179, 190, 207. Congress, U. S., 304. Congresses, Fenian, 283.* Connaught, 24. Conquests, English, 151.* 313. Constitution, ancient Ir sh, 118,* 14 "". Constitutionalism, and satires ther on, 7, '29, 54,* 159. 167, 247, 276, 297. Convention Act, the, 294. Cooke, Secretary, 8. Cooper, Hon. Peter, on American industry, 71. Coote, 183. Copernican system, the, 136. Corcoran, Col., 282. Corn Laws repealed, 271. Cormac's Chapel, Cashel, 137. Cork, 200, 284. Corruption, barefaced, 248,* 254. Corsican tradition, a, 217. Costello, Capt. A. E., 290. Costello, Col., his petition, 192. Courrier Francais (Paris), 291. Courier- Journal (Louisville), 11. Court of Claims, the, 182. Cox, historian, 24. Cremona, defense of, 215. Crime in Ireland, 105.* Crimean war, the, 282. Cromwell, Oliver, 34, 186.* Croppies, 243. Crowbar Brigade, the, 262. Cuba, 57. CUllen, Cardinal, 286. Curfew law, 106, 261, 271, 276. Curran, John P., 249— Sarah, 254. Custis, G. W. P., 302. Custume, Sergeant, 202. Danish invasion, the, 139.* Dathi, King, 126. Davies, Sir John, 19,* 149, 180. Davis, Thomas, 194, 259, 269. Daunt, W. J. O'N., 44, 46, 72, 180. Deak, Francis, 311. Deasy, Col., 291. Debasement, political and social, 105.* De Beaumont, M., 46, 77. Debt, public, of Ireland, 101,* 238, 254. Decay, statistics of, 70,* 272.* Declaration of Independence, American, 60, 307. Decline of the British Empire, 313, 322. " Defender of the Faith," 158. Denman, on jury-packing, 264. Depopulation of Ireland, 9, 46,* 70, 74,* 280. Derby, Earl, 285. Derry, siege of, 196. D'Esterre, duelist, 258. De Tocqueville, 106. Devlin, Anne, tortured, 254. Devon Commission, the, 270. Dilke, Sir C, on the British Constitution, 56. Dillon, B., 277. Directory, French and Irish, 240.* Disarmed, why Ireland is, 57, 224, 271, 297, 307. Disestablishment of the Anglo-Irish Protest- ant Church, 86, 28>>. Disraeli, Benjamin, 58. Dissenters, 194. Doheny, Michael, 277, 282. Dopping, Dr., and his ethics, 207. Douglas, Williamite general, 198. Doyle, artist, 220. Drogheda, massacre at, 18S. Druidism in Ireland, 118,* 129.* Dublin, surprise of, 147— Fenians in, 284. Duffy, Charles Gavan, 219, 273.* Duffy, Ed., 285. Dunboy, defense of, 176. Dundalk, naval battle at, 141. INDEX. 327 Dungannon Convention, the, 228. Dwyer, Michael, 245. Education proscribed, 91,* 144. Edward, the First, 153— the Sixth, 163. Egypt, 120, 241. 'Eighty-two Clubs, the, 276. Elephant and rat, 64, 316. Elizabeth, Queen, 25, 32, 66, 165.* 315. Emancipation, Catholic, 81,* 105, 231, 256.* Embargo Laws, 72, 208. Emerson, R. W., 124. Emigrants, Irish, 9, 67,* 75, 302. Emmet, Robert, 253*— Thomas Addis, 254. Emmet Monument Association, the, 282. Empire, British, the, 54,* 66, 109, 211, 313*— Irishmen in the service of, 214, 219.* Encumbered estates, 258. England and the United States, 60, 319.* Entail and primogeniture, 134. Era of the Pale, the, 151.* Essex, Earl Robert, 173, 175. Essex, Earl Walter, 23. Evictions, 41, 72, 258, 272.— Eviction an act of war, 39. Examiner (London), ft, 28, 30. Exodus, the Irish, 76, 105, 270, 302. Experiment, a mercenary, 151.* Faction-fights, how fostered, 106. Famine in Ireland, 74,* 270.* Farming, Irish, 37, 70. Federal Home Rule, 293.* Feis (or parliament) of Ancient Ireland, 118.* Fenianism, 281.* Fermoria, the, 125. Fertility of Ireland, 76. Feudal land-tenure, 30, 151. Financial hocus-pocus, 100.* Fisheries. Irish 69. 236. Fitzgerald, Lord Edward, 240.* Fitzgerald, Vesey, 258. Fitzmaurice, Earl of Desmond, 169. Fitzpatrick, Gen., on the Union, 251. Flood, Henry, 223, 228.* Foley, sculptor, 220. Fontenoy, 214.* Foster 2 Speaker of the Irish Commons, 249. Fostering, Irish custom of, 20. Fox, Charles James, 9, 252. France, 42, 49, 165, 204, 240*— Irishmen in the service of, 215.* Franchise, the, in Ireland, 108, 258,* 297. Franklin, Benjamin, 304. Freeholders, the " Forty Shilling," 258.* Free Quarters, 22. Free Schools of ancient Ireland, 91, 131. Fronde, J. A., the model historian, 12, 18, 44, 65, 71, 96, 111,* 125, 144, 165, 183, 190, 208, 214, 299, 308. Gael, 118. " Gas on the brain, n 219. Gavelkind, law of, 123, 134. Gemappe, 236. George, the First, 211— the Second, 211 — the Third, 60, 212, 229*— the Fourth, 259 — the four in a bunch, 213. Geraldine rebellion, the, 160. German address to O'Connell, 137. Gibson (M. P.), 48. Ginckle, Williamite general, 201.* Gladstone, W. E., 40, 48,* 86, 103, 107, 286, 319 Glencoe, massacre, 208. Goldsmith, Oliver, 100, 220. Gormanstown's proposal, 155. Gossipred, Irish custom of, 20. Gothic Architecture, origin of, 137.* Governmental machinery, 56, 309. Grace, Col., at Athlone, 199. " Graces," royal, 181. Grand Juries, 108. Grattan, Henry, 12, 68, 226,* 268, 307. Greene, Gen., 304. Grey, Deputy, 22, 169. Grey, Earl, on the Union, 252. Grievances, Irish, 3. Grouchy, 240. Guarantees, 230. " Guardian Angel, Britain's," 213. Gunpowder Plot, the, 179. " Gurraondus, King," 315. Habeas Corpus suspended, 57, 27ft. Half-a-loaf doctrine, the, 298. Halpiu, Col., 290. Hamburgers fined, 246. Hamilton, Gen., 215. Handel, composer, 122. Harold, Col., in Bavaria, 217. Harp, the Irish, 122. Harper's Magazine, 138. Harvey, Bagnal, 245. Headley, historian, 61. Henry, the Second, 19, 31, 146,* 153- the Fifth, 155— the Seventh, 155 -the Eighth, 31, 151, 158.* Henry, Patrick, 304. Herbert (M. P.), 53. Heresy defined, 167. Hessian mercenaries, 5J2, 242. " Hibernia Pacata," 171, 280. Hicks-Beach, Secretary, 48, 52, 90. Hindostan, 50. Historians, English, 124— the flower of t h e flock, 111.* Hoche, Gen., 240. Hogan, sculptor, 220. Holland, Lord, on the Union, 252. Holland, 49. Hollinshed, historian, 169, 170. Holmes, Robert, 273. Home Rule movement, the, 293.* Hospitality, public, of ancient Irish, 32. Hubner, Baron, 301. Hughes, Rev. James, 267. Hugony More, 125. Huguenots in Ireland, 208. Humbert, Gen., 241. Hume, historian, 159. Hungary and self-government, 811. Huts, 94,000 one-roomed, 40. Illiteracy in Ireland, 99. Illumination of manuscripts, 121.* Hlustrations of landlord power, 43. Inchiquin, Lord, 187. Independence, Ireland's partial, 222.* Industrial Art among the ancient Irish, 120. Industry, harried and crippled by English rule in Ireland, 65,* 103, 236, 256— encouraged and fostered under native rule, 235. Insurrections, cause of, 12,* 243, 308. Intellect " dwarfed and starved," 96. 328 INDEX. Iona, 136. I. R. B., the, 283. Ireland, as she is, 7— as she has been, 111— as she ought to be, 307— in America, 10, 215, 301— in exile, 10, 67, 214. Irish People (Dublin), 285. Irish World (New York). 215. M Isle of Saints and Scholars," 130. Italy, 54, 126, 132. Jackmel, cruise of the, 290. Jackson, Andrew, 7, 217, 220. James, the First, 32, 178*— the Second, 194.* Jebb, 249. Jefferson, Thomas, 62, 68, 263. Jesuits, in the Emancipation Act, 260. John XXIL, Pope, letter to, 155. Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 123, 209, 247. Jones, Paul, 224. Junius, 8. Juries, and the art of packing them, 59, 108, 182, 238, 264, 276. Kane, Sir Robert, 46, 76. Kavanagh (M. P.), 48. Kavanaghs in Austria and Poland, 216.* Kavanagh, Gen., 290. Kells. Synod of, 146— Book of, 122. Kelly, Col., 291. Kerrigan, Gen., 290. Kickham, Charles J., 285. Kildare, Earls of, 155, 160. Kilkenny, Statutes of, 153, 154— Confedera- tion of, 185. Killala, 241. Kinsale, 176, 200. Knox, Gen., 304. Lacy, Marshal, 217. Lafayette, 224, 303. Lake, Gen., 242. Lally, Gen., 214. Land Question, the, 28,* 46,* 123; 296. Landlordism in Ireland, unchecked powers of, 37,* 51, 315. Larcom, Capt., official reports by, 271.* Law and Order, 18,* 309. Laws, ancient Irish, 116*— English, in Ire- land, 19,* 73, 144, 153,* 180, 188,* 206, 309. Lawless, Patrick, in Spain, 216. Lecair, Book of, 121. Lee, Arthur, 303. Leland, historian, 22,* 179, 189. Lex Talionis, 184, 245, 316. " Liberator, the," 261.* Library of Ireland, the, 269. Limerick, 35, 199*— women of, 199. Linen trade, Irish, 67.* Lingard, historian, 189. Lismore university, 133. Literature, ancient Irish, 121. Little Pale, parliament of the, 155. Loftus, Sir A., 184. Lords Justices, 183, 206. Lubbock, Sir J;, 102. Luby, Thomas Clarke, 282. Lucas, Charles, 223. Luther, Martin, 159. Lynch, signer of the Declaration of Indepen- dence, 304. Macaulay, Lord, 85, 195. MacCarthy, J. G., 107. MacGeoghegan, Richard, at Dunboy, 178. MacHale, Archbishop, 267. MacKenna, President of Chili, 218. Mackintosh, Sir J., 118, 124. MacMahons in France, 217.* MacManus, Terenoe B., 277, 285. MacMurrough, 146,* 154. MacNevin, 19, 80, 85, 240. McCafferty, Capt. J., 290. McCarthy, Gen., 215. McCleary, 304. McElerhan, 121. M'Clise, painter, 138, 220. M'Cracken, Henry Joy, 244. Mails, sanctity of the, 60. Maine, Sir Henry, 92, 120. Manchester rescue, the, 291. Mangan, James Clarence, 133, 277. Manufactures, Irish, 65,* 88, 120, 225.* Manuscripts, old Irish, 118.* Maria Teresa's Legion of Honor, 217. Marlborough, 200. Martin, John, 276. Martial law, 24, 57,* 106, 243, 254, 26« Mary, Queen of Scots, 165. Mary Tudor, 32, 163.* Massacres, alleged and actual, 22,* 183, 188,* 245. Maxims and theories, 29, 54, 247.* Maynooth College, 96. Meagher, Thomas Francis, 273. Meehan, Rev. C. P., 273. Menapii, the, 127. Michelet, historian, 122. Milesians, the, 118.* Mill, John Stuart, 8, 28, 37, 54. Milner, Dr., 138, 143. Milton, John, 183. Minto, back-door diplomat, 279. Missionaries, early Irish, 132.* Mitchel, John, 19, 54, 61, 76, 83, 95, 158, 178, 178, 209, 222, 270,* 274. Model English historian, the, 111. Modern Irish, the, 308. Molyneux, 223. Monasteries, spoliation of, 31, 160.* Money, early coinage of, in Ireland, 120. Monks and their labors, 134.* Monroe, English commander, 186. Montesquieu on the Penal Code, 209. Montgomery, Richard, 304. Mooney, Thomas, 105, 117, 134. Moore, Thomas, 122, 220. Moral suasion, 257,* 281, 309.* Moreton, Dr., 207. Morgan, Gen., 304. Moriarty, Bishop, 105, 286. Morrison, historian. 23. Mosaic land laws, 30. Moslem " 50. Mountjoy, Lord No. 1, 175— Lord No. 2, 218, 301. Moylan, Gen., 304. Mulloghmast, massacre at, 23. Munroe, patriot leader, 244. Murphy, Rev. John, 244. Music, Irish, 122. Napier, 220. Napoleon, 59, 120, 216, 217, 241, 246, 253, 317. Nation (Dublin), 65, 269.* INDEX. 329 Nationalists, Irish, 14, 297, 312.* " National " Schools, 93.* Naughton, Sir R., 177. Newman, Dr. J. H., 81. Newspapers, Irish, how gagged, 257, 276. Niall of the Hostages, 126. Nicholson, Bishop, 120. Nimmo, engineer, 47. 'Ninety-Eight, 235.* Nixon, John, 304. No-drop-of -blood doctrine, the, 265.* N on -importation agreement, Irish, 227. Norris, Sir John, 173. Norsemen, the, 139.* North- American Review, 303. North Cork Militia, 244. Nugent, Prince, 216. Nun of Kenmare, the, 200. Oaths of abjuration and supremacy, 259. O'Brien. Jeremiah, 304. O'Brien, Lord Clare, 214.* O'Brien, William Smith, 273,* 278. Obstructionists, 300. O'Byrne, Fiach MacHugh, 173. O'Callaghan, 85. O'Connell, Daniel, 18, 27, 80, 83, 250, 256,* 310. O'Connell, Gen., and modern warfare, 216. O'Connor, Arthur, 240. O'Connor, Feargus, 263. O'Connor, Roderick, 147, 152. Octennial Bill, the, 223. O' Curry, Eugene, 121. O'Doherty, Kevin I., 276. O'Donnell, Red Hugh, 33, 172.* O'Donnell, Earl Roderick, 178.* O'Donnells in Spain, 216. O'Donoghue in Mexico, 218. O'Donovan, John, 118, 217. O'Donovan (Rossa), Jer., 285. O'Dwyer, Russian Admiral, 218. Ogham alphabet, 121. O'Gorman, Major P., 75. O'Gorman, Richard, 277. O'Higgins, of Chili, 218. O'Leary, John, 285. O'Leary, Rev. J., 63. Ollamh Fodhla, 118. O'Mahony, Col., at Cremona, 215. O'Mahony, Col. John (H. C), 277, 281.* O'Moore, Rory, 173. O'Moore and O'Connor, 163. O'Neill, Donald, his letter to Pope John, 82, 155. O'Neill, Hugh, Earl of Tyrone, 33, 171,* 269. O'Neill, Owen Roe, 186.* O'Neill, Shane, 167, 169, 315. O'Neill, Col. John, 289. O'Nial, Brian, 23. Opium, British monopoly in, 62. Orangeism, 86,* 238. Orders, official, 184. O'Reillys in Spain and Austria, 216.* Ormond, Earl of, 24, 184.* Orr, William, 238. O'Ruarc and De Lacy, 149. O'Sullivan, Dermot and Donal, 176,* 216. O'Toole, St. Lawrence, 147. Oxford university, 136. Ownership of the Soil, 28, 41. Pale, the Anglo-Norman, 22, 31, 149, 151,* 167. Palmerston, Lord, 29, 279. Papists, penal legislation against, 81,* 188, 207,* 257.* Paris, university of, 136. Parliament, Anglo-Irish, 69, 153, 211, 222 * 231*— English, 47, 57, 145, 159, 297— Old Irish, 118.* Parnell, historian, 88. Parnell, Bigsrar, etc., 300. Parsons, Sir William, 180.* Patrick, Saint, 129.* Patriots, American, 18, 212. Paulding, 8, 144. Pauperism in Ireland, 262. Pavia, university of, 136. Peel, Sir Robert, 259.* Penal Code, the, 35, 206,* 236, 302 Perraud, Abbe, 35, 77. Persecution for conscience' sake, never prac- ticed by Irish Catholics, 88, 164. Petitions against the Union, 253. Pet theories of Mr. Fronde, 114. Phillips, Wendell, 8, 14, 16, 246, 250, 315. Phoenicia, 120. Phoenix Society, the, 282. Picketing, 243. Picts and Scots, 125.* Pitch cap, the, 243. Pitt, William, 8, 237,* 247,* 252, 256. Place-hunters, 260, 300. Plantations, the, 178.* Plowden, historian, 303. Plunket, member of Irish legislature, 249. Plunkett, Archbishop Oliver, 193. Plunkett, English M. P., 48. Political and social debasement, 105. Ponsonby, 249. Poor-houses and poor-laws, 78, 108, 272. Population, decrease of, in Ireland, 9, 46,* 74.* Portland, Duke of, 229. Potato-blight, 77, 270. Poyning's Act, 155, 222, 228. Prendergast, John P., 308. Press-gagging, 257, 276. Priest-hunting. 190, 211, 279. Prince Edward's Island, 51. Prisoners, Irish political, tortured, 291. Property and Cant, 28,* 47, 296. Proselytism, 95. Prosperity, viceregal parrot-cry, 69— real, in Ireland under home rule, 235. Protestantism in Ireland, 16, 47, 68, 80,* 222,* 236,* 293. Proudhon on property, 29. Prussia, 49. Puritans, the, 34, 186. Quarantotti, Cardinal, 257. Quarter-acre Clause, the, 272* Quarterly Review (the Foreign), 323. Queen sberry. Lady Caroline, 200. Queen's Colleges, 96. Raleigh, Sir Walter, 23, 169. Rapparees, the, 200. Ray, T. M., letter to, 263. Read, George, 304. Red List, the, 248. Reform Bill, the English, 261. Regency Question, the, 238. Regnault, 62. 330 INDEX. Reilly, T. Devin, 273. Relief Bill, the Catholic, 236. Religion as a factor in the Anglo-Irish prob- lem, 16, 80,* 164, 175, 194, 220, 228, 238, 256,* 268, 278,* 294. Rents, Irish, and what becomes of them, 41* 49, 52, 268. Repeal of the Union, 261.* Renunciation Act, the, 230. Representation, parliamentary, a sham in Ire- land, 57, 297. Repression of industry, 73, 236. Republics of South America, Irish services to, 218. Rescript, Quarantotti's, 257. Revaluation, a proposed, and its object, 52. Revenue, Irish, of 1783, how expended, 235. Revolution, American, 224, 302*— French, of 1793, 42; of 1848, 275. Reynolds, the '98 informer, 242. Ribbon Society, the, 60. Richard the Second, 154. Richmond, Duke of, and the "dear loaf," 220. Right of conquest, 315. Rights and duties, 307. Rinuccini, the Nuncio, 187. Roberts, Col. W. R., 288. Robespierre, 217. Roebuck, English M. P., 85. Roman annals and empire, 120,* 125, 132. Rooting-out process, the, 20,* 153, 182. Rosen, Marshal, 197. Ross, patriot Bishop of, 189. Rotten-boroughs, 180, 233, 237, 261. Round Towers, the, 120, 137. Rousseau, J. J., 29. Rowan, A. H., 239. Rum, exceptional legislation in favor of, 208. Rushworth, historian, 24. Russell, Lord John, 262. Russell, Thomas, 253. Russia, 50, 282. Rutledge, Edward, 304. Salic law in Ireland, 119. Sarsfield, Patrick, Earl of Lucan, 35, 199* 215. Saurin, 249. Savage, John, 127, 222, 263, 269, 277. Schomberg, Gen., 196. Schools. Irish, ancient and modern, 91* 131.* Scotia, Major and Minor, 125. Scotland, 51, 125. Scotus Erigena, 136. Scullabogue, 245. Sectarian feuds, 86.* Self-government, blessings conferred by, 107, 311. Semore, English official, 73, 100. Senate, Fenian, 287.* Senchus More, the, 119. Settlement, the Cromwellian, 188.* Sheares, John and Henry, 243. Shelburne, Lord, on the Union, 252. Sheridan, Richard B., 220. Shi el, on Irish discontent, 12. Sigerson, Dr., 49. Si-iurd, the Dane, 141. Silk, manufacture of, suppressed in Ireland, " Silken " Thomas, the Geraldine, 160. Singeing, 243. Sirr, Major, 254. Slavery, 14, 16, 38, 309. Sloane, Sir Hans, 220. Smerwick, massacre at, 22, 169. Smiles, historian, 35, 198, 212. Smith, Sidney, 70. Smyth, P. J., 277, 282. South America, Irish in, 218. Spain, succor from, 176 — Irish exiles in, 215.* " Special providence," 77. Spectator (London), 218. Spenser, Edmund., 25, 59, 123, 168, 172— his grandson, 308. Speranza (Lady Wilde), 9, 74, 200. Standard (London), 127. Star-chamber, Court of, 167. Stark, Gen., 304. Statutes, English, 19,* 73, 144, 153.* Stephens, James, 281.* Stillingfleet, Bishop, 131. Stone, Anglican primate, 211. Storey, historian, 200. Strafford, Earl of, 68, 181.* Strongbow, 146.* St. Ruth, Marshal, 201.* Stuart dynasty, the, 34, 188.* Sullivan, Gen., 304. " Surplus population,' 1 76, 272. Swift, Dean, 37, 42, 211, 223, 293. Tacitus, Roman annalist, 126. Tandy, Napper, 227, 246. Tanist, the, 119. Tara, 118, 129. Taxation in Ireland, 72, 100,* 108, 255. Taylor, Protestant historian, 88. Teeling, Bartholomew, 241. Telegraph (London), 79, 90. Temple, Sir William, 68. Tenants-at-will, a nation of, 37,* 262. Tennyson, Alfred, 316. Test-declaration, O'Connell's, 273. Thackeray, W. M., 213. Thebaud, Rev. A., 308. Thierry, French historian, 11, 156. Thompson, Charles, 212, 304. Thorwaldsen, sculptor, 139. Times (London), 3, 8, 14, 29, 54^ 252, 263, 305. Times (New York), 87, 311. Tithes, 84, 162. Titles, defective, 180, 182. Toland, 131. Tolerance practiced by the Irish Catholics, 88. Tone, Theobald Wolfe, 239*— Matthew, 241. Toparch, the, 30. Torture, favorite modes of, 243, 291. Treason and patriotism, 219. Treaties, Anglo-Irish, 154. Treaty of Limerick, the, 35, 204. Trial by jury, how worked, 59, 264— or'gin of, 112, 134. Tribune (New York), 13, 213. Tribute wrung from poverty, 100, 268. Trinity College (Dublin), 96, 122. Tyrconnell, Lord, 198. Tyrone and Tyrconnell, Earls of, 171.* Tyrrel's Pass, 173. Ulster Custom, the, 47. INDEX. 331 Ulster League, the, 171.* Ulster, plantation of, 33. "Una" (Mrs. A. Ford), 200. Undertakers, 168. Union, the Anglo-Irish : what it has cost Irelaud in cash, 45 — how it was carried, 101,* 243,* 247, 254— opinions on, 251.* United Irishman (Dublin), 275. United Irishmen, the, 239.* United States, the, 14, 50, 93, 113, 134, 141, 224, 282,* 301*— and England, 319.* Universities, in Ireland and elsewhere, 91*— the oldest in Europe, 136. Vagrant Act of 1847, the, 272. Valor, wasted, 218. Vandalism, British, 117. Vattel on the right of conquest, 315. Vaughan, Rev. Jeremiah, 307. Verplanck, Gulian C, 302. Veto, the, 257. Viceroys, character of the, 24. Victoria, reign of, 57, 75,* 263.* Vinearar Hill, 245. Virgilius, 136. " Virgin Queen, the," 178. Volunteers, Irish, of 1782, 225.* Von Raumer, on Ireland, 9. Wade, historian, 145, 167. Ward, Matt. F., 319.* Warner, historian, 124, 183. Warren, Col., 290. Warwick, 183. Washington, George, 18, 54, 201, 215, 224, 236, 263,302. Waste Lands, 46, 270. Wayne, Gen. Anthony, 304. Wealth lost to Ireland since th'i Union, 45. Webb, 117. Wellington, Duke of, 220, 258.* Westminster Review (London), 51. Westwood, Prof., 124. Wexford, 146, 189. 244.* Whately, Archbishop, 94.* Whigs, the, 261. " Wfld beasts, the three. " 92. Wildgeese, the, 214 * William of Malmesbury, 143. William of Oramje, 35, 68, 81. 194.* Willis, N. P., 117, 214. " Wolf-cubs," 170. Wolsey, Cardinal, 159. Woman's Journal (Boston), 11. Woman, hi