]{i(0):^^oWO[L[LQAra [Eo*3[L/^.®S■^Lrl0lKi^,lMJcLr, GLADSTONE-PARNELL, AND THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. A GRAPHIC STORY OF THE INJUSTICE AND OPPRESSION INFLlCTEn UPON THE IRISH TENANTRY, AND A HISTORY OF THE GI- GANTIC MOVEMENT THROUGHOUT IRELAND, AMERICA AND GREAT BRITAIN FOR "HOME RULE," WITH BIOGRAPHIES OF THE GREAT LEADERS, GLADSTONE, PARNELL, DAVITT, EGAN, AND VERY MANY OTHERS. BY THE DISTINGUISHED AUTHORS, JOURVALISTS AND FRIENDS OF IRELAND, Hon. THOMAS POWER O'CONNOR. M. P., AND ROBERT McWADE, Esq., Ex-President Municipal Council of Philadelphia, etc., etc. GENERAL INTRODUCTION BY HON. CHARLES STEWART PARNELL, M.P. Canadian Introduction hy A. Burns, D. D., LL.D. American Introduction hy Prof. R. E. TJiompson, D. D. , LL. D. PROFUSELY ILLUSTRATED. HUBBARD BROS., Publishers: PHILADELPHIA, BOSTON, CINCINNATI, KANSAS CITY AND ATLANTA. G. L. HOWE, Chicago ; W. A. HOUGHTON, New York ; A. L. BANCROFT & CO., San Francisco. 63 Oy Entered according to Act of CongresB, in the year 1886, by HUBBARD BBOTHERS, In the OSBce of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. 0. spp-" HON. T. P. O'CONNOR, M P. INTRODUCTION. I HAVE pleasure in writing a few lines of preface to Mr. T. P. O'Connor's volume. I know no one who is better fitted to present the case of Ireland, and especially the history of our movement, before the public of America. His vigorous and picturesque pen makes everything he writes lucid, interesting, and effective ; and he has had the advantage of himself taking a promi- nent and honorable part in many of the scenes he so graphically describes. I believe it espe- cially desirable to have our case properly stated to the American public at the present moment. No Irishman can speak too warmly of the ex-. traordinary assistance that America has rendered to the cause of Ireland. The financial and moral support which our movement has received from the Great Republic has been recognized by eminent English Statesmen as an entirely new Victor in the present movement, and.as giving it Q INTRODUCTION. a strength and a power of endurance absent from many previous Irish efforts. It is at mo- ments of crisis like the present, when other po- litical parties face the expense and difficulties of a political campaign with hesitation and appre- hension, that one really appreciates the enormous position of vantage in which American generosity has placed the Irish party. Then the unanimity of opinion both among the statesmen and the journalists of America has done much to en- courage men like Mr. Gladstone, who are fight- ing for the Irish cause, and to fill Ireland's enemies with the grave misgiving that the policy con- demned by another great and free nation may not be sound or just. For these reasons we are all especially desirous that American opinion should be made acquainted with the merits and facts of this great controversy, and the following pages are eminently calculated to perform that good work. Charles Stewart Parnell. London, August, 1886. CANADIAN INTRODUCTION. BY A. BURNS, D. D., LL. D., President Wesleyan Female College, Hamilton, Ont., Canada. THE following pages cover one of the most interesting periods in Irish history. The story related falls mainly within the memory of most of its readers, embracing scarce the last two decades. It is written by a university man of scholarly attainments, a brilliant journalist and author, one who, although comparatively a young man yet, is fairly entitled to say of most of the strug- gles and scenes he describes, quorum pars magna fui. The book may be taken as a representative putting of the great struggle now going on, and as such it may fairly claim the attention of all in- terested in the peace and prosperity of Ireland. None need be told that that land is now unhappy and somewhat disaffected. Her harp is on the willows, her songs are threnodies. Yet no one can become acquainted with her children without 9 JO CANADIAN INTRODUCTION. discovering that naturally they are cheerful, light- hearted andJiopefuI. Nor can you give to one of them a cup of cold water witjiout waking a genuine inborn gratitude. Whether at home or abroad, the race is "lopeful, grateful, and essen- tially patriotic. A kind word jt deed for Ireland will brighten the eye, quicken the pulse, arouse the enthusiasm, and win the affection of her chil- dren the world over. Have her critics furnished an adequate expla- nation of the present unhappy condition of such a people? The passionate outbursts of her out- raged sons receive due prominence. Her agra- rian crimes are published far and wide. Bu.', few 2,re candid enough to admit that the crimes of Ire- land are chiefly agrarian, and caused by the wholesale confiscation of her soil, and the strug- gles of the descendants of the real owners to re- gain the lands of their fathers. Goldwin Smith tells us " an alien and absentee proprietary is the immediate source of her troubles." " The owner- ship of land in that countr)^ is itself the heritage of confiscation, and of confiscation which has never been forgotten. The struggle is in fact the last stage of a Ion or civil war between the con- quered race and an intrusive proprietary, which was closely identified with the political ascendency of the foreigner, and the religious ascendency of an alien creed." " The districts where aerarian violence has most prevailed have been singularly CANADIAN INTRODUCTION. H free from ordinary crime. The Irish farmer has clung desperately to his homestead, eviction is to him destitution." -■ "The crime (of the Irish) is solely agrarian. In the districts where it has been most rife, even in Tipperary itself, ordinary offences have been very rare," and he continues, "justice requires that we remember the training which the Irish as a nation have had, and of which the traces are still left upon their character. In 1 798 they were goaded into open rebellion by the wholesale flogging, half-hanging, pitch-capping and picketing which were carried on over a large district by the yeomanry and militiamen, who, as soon as the suffering masses began to heave with disaffection, were launched upon the homes of the peasantry." Irish histor}^ is little studied. Few even of my countrymen know anything of the history of our country. A partial excuse may be found in the fact that even in the schools of Ireland the history of the country is not found. Only as it may be considered necessar)' to explain English history Is Ireland ever mentioned, and neither In common school nor In university have the children of Ire- land the faintest opportunity to learn anything of their people, or the causes of the disaffection so generally prevalent. Traditions abound, but they are generally on sectarian lines, and theological bitterness, the worst of all, Is usually added to political. 12 CANADIAN INTRODUCTION. The story that follows will be found real his- tory, the history of our own times. Every page will revive the memory of the stirring scenes of the last decade or two, and as a panoramic vision will fix in the mind the cause of events that had well-nigh passed from us forever. This work will be found exceedingly oppor- tune. Mr. Gladstone's bill for Home Rule in Ireland has been defeated at Westminster, and again by the people of England, because, as we verily believe, it was not understood by the Brit- ish people, while it was grossly misrepresented by those whose interests are at war with the enlargement of popular rights. The following pages will show the emptiness and absurdity of the war cries of the late conflict — " The Empire in Danger," " The Union in Dan- ger," "Protestantism in Danger" — all echoes of the Disestablishment Conflict of 1868, the recol- lections of which ought to have taught the pseudo- prophets wisdom and moderation. There never was a measure more grossly caricatured than the late bill for the relief of Ireland. It was all in vain^that the leaders of Irish thought had declared both with pen and voice that " the proposed Irish Parliament would bear the same relation to the Parliament at Westminster that the Legislature and Senate of every American State bear to the head authority of the Congress in the capitol at Washington." AU.that relates to local business it CANADIAN INTRODUCTION. 13 was proposed to delegate to the Irish Assembly; all questions of imperial policy were still to be left to the imperial government. It was all in vain that the acknowledged Irish leader, Mr. Par- nell, declared in the closing debate that the Irish people were content to have a Parliament wholly subordinate to the imperial Parliament ; that they did not expect a Parliament like Grattan's, which possessed co-ordinate powers. The words of some outraofed exile in America or Australia fur- nished a sufficient pretext for the ungenerous but characteristic vote that followed. In this great struggle I am thoroughly in sym- pathy with my country. With the historian Lecky I believe that " the Home Rule theory is within the limits of the Constitution and supported by means that are perfectly loyal and legitimate.'' The British Colonies have secured it, and it is not too much to say that the bond of union be- tween the Colonies and the Empire depends on its existence. Canadian opposition to Home Rule would seem to show that the denial of the boon implies also the rejection of the Golden Rule. That permanent peace will ever come to Ire- land without it no sane man expects. No foreign power can govern Ireland. The experiment has surely been tried long enough. The unconquer- able spirit possessed so fully by the larger island is no less developed in Ireland, The spirit of j4 CANADIAN INTRODUCTION. the age only strengthens the spirit of indepen- dence, while the millions of her children on this side the Atlantic tell her that Home Rule is the only reasonable rule for freemen. Ireland needs rest. For a long time she has been under terrible provocation, and has suffered as no other country in Europe. She looks around for sympathy, and il is not wanting. But what she needs most is equitable, yea, generous treatment at the hands of England. These pages will show that her poverty is largely the cesult'of misgovernment. England needs the tranquillity of Ireland as much as Ireland herself does. Let Ireland be assured that her rights are to be sacredly respected ; that her wrongs are to be redressed by'England, not grudgingly nor of necessity; that the elevation and comfort of her down-trodden children is to be considered a more pressing subject of legislation than the claims of an independent and irresponsible no- bility. She has given her Burkes, her Welling- tons, her Dufferins and her Tyndalls to enrich the Empire. Let her be told to call her children to the development of her own resources and the improvement of her own polity. Order will then soon come from chaos, and light from her sadly prolonged darkness, and the days of her mourning will soon be ended. Thoroughly satisfied that a generous policy on the part of England, not merely permitting, but CANADIAN INTRODUCTION. j.g encouraging Home Rule, would give to my country peace, prosperity, and enthusiastic loyalty, I take my place with those who plead for a sep- arate Parliament for Ireland, as Illinois, Ohio, and California have separate Parliaments, but still allied to the Imperial Parliament on the principle that binds Illinois, Ohio, and California to the United States of America. Less than that should not be accepted. More has not been asked by any of the leaders sketched in this work. I commend the work to the reader not because I can endorse every sentence that it contains, or approve of all the details of operation therein, for I have not studied carefully every page. But I heartily approve of the object aimed at, and believing that the present struggle is the old con- test of monopoly against the common weal, or, as it has been aptly put recently, of "the classes against the masses," I promptly take my place with the latter, and claim for my countrymen a respectful hearing. As in all past struggles for the enlargement of British liberties the terms "loyal" and "disloyal" have been called into active service, so it is to-day, and " Unionists " and " Loyalists " are posing as the legitimate opponents of Home Rule. These pretensions and assumptions have been torn into tatters a thousand times, and are as meaningless when so used as the terms "orthodox" and "heterodox" among speculative theologians. IQ CANADIAN INTRODUCTION. And as we scan the ranks of the men who on either side of the Atlantic are the self-constituted representatives of loyalty, and monopolize the term, we instinctively ask Risum teneatis ? Some, I admit, may honestly see in Home Rule the dis- memberment of the Empire and innumerable other evils. But I am firmly convinced that there are a thousand thousand good hearts and true, who, like myself, see in Home Rule and its con- comitant legislation not merely harmony and prosperity to Ireland, but an immeasurably brighter future and a more permanent stability to the British Empire. A. Burns. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. Charles Stewart Parnell — His character for grip and grit — His talents — His appearance — His early life and education — His ancestry — Admiral Charles Stewart — Parnell' s first tour in America — The Manchester Martyrs — Parnell's entrance into political life — Isaac Butt and the earlier movements for Home Rule — Parnell and Butt — Joseph Gillis Biggar — Enormous salaries paid to officials in Ireland — The policy of obstruction — Parnell's first speech in the House of Commons 25 CHAPTER II. The era of obsti action — The British House of Commons — Queen's speech — The vote on supplies — How obstruction helped Ire- land's cause — A happy hunting-ground — Flogging in the army — England's treatment of prisoners — The Mutiny Act — Making John Bull listen — The Transvaal bill — The Irish in England and Scotland — The Famine of 1879 — ^ crisis in Ireland's history — • Mr. Butt's defects as a leader — Michael Davitt — The story of his early years — A Fenian movement — Davitt in prison — A ticket- of-leave — Irish-American organizations — Land League — " The Three F's" 78 CHAPTER IIL The land war — The struggle of seven centuries — Illustrations from Irish history — Coin and livery — The wars under the Tudor dy- nasty — Feudal tenure — The Munster undertakers — The settle- ment of Ulster — The Commission of Inquiry — The perfidy of the Stuarts — Cromwell in Ireland — William III., Sarsfield, Limer- ick, and the Penal Code . . . . . . . .120 17 18 CONTENTS. CHAPTER IV. The destruction of Irish industries — An alien proprietary — English legislation for many years directed against Ireland's prosperity — Interference with Irish trade— The depopulation of the land — Woollen manufactures crushed out — Blow after blow dealt at nascent industries — Lord Dufferin on English jealousy of Ireland — Rack-renting, eviction and legalized robbery — Cruelties of the landlords — Dean Swift's pictures of Ireland in the eighteenth century — Beggary and starvation 159 CHAPTER V. The story of Irish Parliament — Poyning's law — Molyneux's " Case of Ireland Stated " — Wood's Half-Pence — The condition of Catholics — The corruptions of the Anglo-Irish Parliament — The Irish Volunteers — The convention at Dungarvan — Grattan's Declaration of Rights — An independent Irish Parliament — Its happy effect on Irish industries and on business in general — Lord Fitzwilliam recalled — The rebellion of 1798 — Castlereagh — How the Union was brought about . . . . -177 CHAPTER VI. After the Union — Ireland heavily taxed for England's benefit — Shameful injustice — The degradation of the tenantry — Absentee- ism — Wholesale eviction — Coercion acts — Worse and worse — Wrong, poverty and hopeless misery — Catholic Emancipation — O'Connell the Liberator — The attitiide of the Orange Tory party — O'Connell in Parliament 226 CHAPTER VII. The great famine of 1845 — Only the culmination of evils — The pota- to-rot — The great struggle in England regarding the Corn-Laws — Protection versus Free Trade — Peel and repeal — Lord John Russell — His criminally stupid Irish policy and its bitter conse- quences — Tenant right the only remedy for Ireland's woes — Co- ercion as a cure for famine — The awful disasters of 1845 and 1847 — Foolish doctrinaire policy of Russell — The Labor Rate act — The Fever — The Soup Kitchen act — Emigration — Death of O'Connell — Young Ireland — John Mitchel and Smith O'Brien — Great Britain the unchecked mistress of Ireland . . . 254 CONTENTS. 19 CHAPTER VIII. Resurrection — The Fenian movement — Gladstone's mental and moral characteristics — The disestablishment of the Irish Church — The Land Bill of 1870, and its fatal defects — The Home Rule movement originally started by Protestants — The Home Rule Association — A complete change of policy — No favors to be asked or accepted from either great English party . . . 289 CHAPTER IX. The old fight again— The crisis of 1879— The election of Mr. Par- nell as chairman of the Irish party — Defects of Mr. Shaw as a political leader — The leaders decide to remain in opposition to both English parties — Mr. Shavir's friends sell themselves for place and pay — The hopeless differences between the Irish party and the English Liberals — Parnell's platform for settling the Irish land problem — English incapacity to deal with Irish ques- tions — The Disturbance Bill — Forster — Irish outrages — Irish members suspended and ordered to leave the House — Land Bill of 1881— No-Rent cry 308 CHAPTER X. In the depths — Merciless war between the Irish people and the au- thorities — Forster and Clifford Lloyd — " Harvey Duff" — Par- nell imprisoned — Parnell triumphant — The Phoenix Park mur- ders — Conservative rule and its benefits — Gladstone's new move- ment for conceding Home Rule — The situation in January, 1886 345 CHAPTER XI. The great Home Rule debate of 1886 — Gladstone, the Grand Old Man — His appearance — His qualities of mind and heart — ^John Morley — Joseph Chamberlain — Mr. Goschen — Hartington — Sal- isbury — Churchill — Justin McCarthy — Thomas Sexton — Arthur O'Connor — Timothy Daniel Sullivan — ^James O'Kelly — His sin- gular and checkered career as soldier, journalist, politician and parliamentarian — John Dillon — Edmund Leamy-^E. D. Gray — T. M. Healy — WilHam O'Brien — J. E. Redmond — T. Harring- ton — The Liberal Parliament of 1886 — Gladstone's grand speech — The debate — Hope again deferred ..... 362 20 CONTENTS. CHAPTER XII. The appeal to the country — Gladstone's popularity with the masses — His brilliant campaign in Scotland — Splendid receptions at Man- chester, Liverpool, and elsewhere — Anti-Gladstonian efforts of Hartington, Chamberlain, Goschen, Churchill, Trevelyan and» Bright — The Primrose League — The attitude of the agricultural laborer and the farmer — The democracy almost unanimously friendly to Ireland — The result of the midsummer elections of 1886 — Ireland not crushed — The revival of hope — Belfast riots — The outlook to-day 445 CHAPTER XIII. THE MOVEMENT IN AMERICA. American Introduction 457 Parnell's Appeal lo America — Founding of the Irish National League of the United Stales— The Buffalo Convention— The " No-Rent Manifesto " — The Chicago Convention — The League's Second National Gathering — Gloomy days for the League — End of the Land League of America — Birth and growth of the Irish Na- tional League of America — Hon. Alexander Sullivan's admin- istration — The emigration question — Irish-American leaders — Patrick Egan takes the reins — Dark days again dawn for the League — Public utterances of eminent Americans — To strengthen Gladstone's hands — Third Annual Convention of the National League — The League under John Fitzgerald's administration . 471 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. FAGB RT. HON. W. E. GLADSTONE {Steetj Frontispiece, THOMAS POWER O'CONNOR 5 A. BURNS, D. D., LL. D 8 CHARLES STEWART PARNELL (5/^^/) =4 ISAAC BUTT — J. G. BIGGAR S3 JOHN DILLON — GEO. J. GOSCHEN 57 J. WAITE 71 LORD R. CHURCHILL — LORD HUNTINGDON 75 LORD SPENCER — MR. TREVELYAN 83 MICHAEL DAVITT 97 F. B. FREEHILL 105 SCENE IN IRELAND — FARMER'S CABIN in RT. HON. JOSEPH CHAMBERLAIN 115 EVICTED — DRIVEN FROM THE HOUSE WE BUILT 131 W.REDMOND — J. E. REDMOND 147 CELEBRATING MASS IN A CABIN 155 LIFE IN IRELAND 165 DESTITUTE FISHERMEN 173 EVICTED — HOMELESS 183 HENRY GRATTAN 189 GRATTAN'S PARLIAMENT 201 DANIEL O'CONNELL 249 DRINKING HIS HONOR'S HEALTH 259 THE OBNOXIOUS PROCESS-SERVER 293 NO RENT 301 T. M. HEALY — JOHN GEORGE McCARTHY 313 MEETING OF LAND LEAGUE COMMITTEE 321 SOLICITING AID 329 LORD SALISBURY— Mr. FORSTER 333 21 22 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. JOHN MORLEY — SIR. W. V. HARCOURT 339 THOMAS SEXTON — W. H. O'SULLIVAN 37' A. M. SULLIVAN — T. D. SULLIVAN 403 GLADSTONE'S SPEECH 437 PARNELL'S NEW NATIONAL MAP 442 ROBERT M. McWADE 46;^ PATRICK A. COLLINS — THOMAS FLATLEY 470 PATRICK EGAN — ALEXANDER SULLIVAN 475 JAMES MOONEY— JOHN J. HYNES 476 REV. PATRICK CRONIN— JOHN F. FINERTY 509 REV. CHARLES O'REILLY, D. D. — REV. THOMAS J. CONATY 510 WILLIAM J. GLEASON — HON. M. V. GANNON 545 REV. DR. GEO. C. BETTS — REV. P. A. McKENNA 546 COL. JOHN F. ARMSTRONG — PATRICK MARTIN 603 MICHAEL J. REDDING — MILES M. O'BRIEN 604 JAMES REYNOLDS — JOHN BOYLE O'REILLY 613 COL. W. P. REND — JOHN GROVES 614 ROGER WALSH — O'NEILL RYAN 651 JOHN FITZGERALD — JOHN P.SUTTON 652 REV. GEO. W. PEPPER — THOMAS .H. WALSH 759 M. J. RYAN — E. JOHNSON ". ,. 76° (P^^ CHAPTER I. CHARLES STEWART PARNELL. GRIP and grit: in these two words are told the secret of Mr. Parnell's marvellous success and marvellous hold over men. When once he has made up his mind to a thing he is inflexible ; immovable by affection or fear or reasoning. Pie knows what he wants, and he is resolved to have it. Throuo-hout his career he o has often had to make bargains ; he has never yet been known to make one in which he gave up a single iota which he could hold. But it takes time before one discovers these qualities. In ordinary circumstances Mr. Parnell is apparently the most easy-going of men. Though he is not emotional or effusive, he is genial and unaffected to a degree ; listens to all comers with an air of real deference, especially if they be good talkers ; and apparently allows himself to follow implicitly the guidance of those who are speaking to him. He is for this reason one of the most agreeable of companions, never raising any difficulties about trifles, ready to subject his will and his conven- ience to that of others; amiable, unpretending, a (25) 26 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. splendid listener, a deliohtful host. But all the softness and the pliancy disappear when the moment comes for decisive action. After days of apparent wavering, he suddenly becomes granite. His decision is taken, and once taken is irrevocable. He goes right on to the end, whatever it may be. In some respects, indeed, he bears a singular resemblance to General Grant ; he has his council of war, and nobody could be a more patient or more respectful lis- tener, and, ordinarily, nobody more ready to have his thinking done for him by others. But when affairs reach a great climax, it is his own judg- ment upon which he acts, and upon that alone. Mr. Parnell has not a large gift of expression. He hates public speaking, and avoids a crowd with a nervousness that sometimes appears almost feminine. He likes to steal dirough crowded streets in a long, heavy Ulster and a small smoking-cap that effectually conceal his identity, and when he is in Ireland is only happy when the quietness of Avondale secludes him from all eyes but those of a few intimates. From his want of any love of expressing himself, it often happens that he leaves a poor impression on those who meet him casually. More than one man has thought that he was litde better than a simpleton, and their mangled reputations strew the path over which the Juggernaut of Parnell's fortunes and genius has mercilessly passed. He is incapable THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 27 of giving the secret of his power, or of explaining the reasons of his decisions. He judges wisely, with instinctive wisdom, just as Millais paints ; he is always politically right, because, so to speak, he cannot help it. This want of any great power and any great desire to expose the line of reason^ ing by which he has reached his conclusions has often exposed Parnell to misunderstandings and strong differences of opinion even with those who respect and admire him. The invariable result is that, when time has passed, those who have dif- fered from him admit that they were wrong and he rieht, and once more have a fatalistic belief in his sagacity. Often he does not "sp.eak for days to any of his friends, and is seldom even seen by them. He knows the enormous advantage some- times of pulling wires from an invisible point. During this absence his friends occasionally fret and fume and wonder whether he knows every- thing that is going on ; and, when their impatience has reached its climax, Parnell appears, and lo ! a great combination has been successfully laid, and the Irish are within the citadel of some time- honored and apparently immortal wrong. Simi- larly it is with Parnell's nerve. In ordinary times he occasionally appears nervous and fretful and pessimistic; in the hour of crisis he is calm, gay, certain of victory, with the fanaticism of a Mussul- man, unconscious of danger, with a blindness half boyish, half divine. 28 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. Mr. Parnell is not a man of large literary reading, but he is a severe and constant student of scientific subjects, and is especially devoted to mechanics. It is one of his amusements to isolate himself from the enthusiastic crowds that meet him everywhere in Ireland, and, in a room by himself, to find delight in mathemadcal books. He is a constant reader of engineering and other mechanical papers, and he takes the keenest in- terest in machinery. It is characteristic of the modesty and, at the same dme, scornfulness of his nature, that all through the many attacks made upon him by gentlemen who wear their hearts upon their sleeves, he has never once made allusion to his own strong love of animals ; but to his friends he often expressed his disgust for the outrages that, during a portion of the agitation in Ireland, were occasionally committed upon them. He did not express these sentiments in public, for the good reason that he regarded the outcry raised by some of the Radicals as part of the gospel of cant for which that section of the Liberal party is especially distinguished. To hear a man like Mr. Forster refusing a word of sympathy, in one breath, for whole housefuls of human beings turned out by a felonious landlord to die by the roadside, and, in the next, demanding the suppression of the liberties of a nation be- cause half-a-dozen of cattle had their tails cut off; to see the same men who howled in delight be- THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 29 cause the apostle of a great humane movement, like Mr. Davitt, had been sent to the horrors of penal servitude, shuddering over the ill-usage of a horse, was quite enough to make even the most humane man regard this professed love of an- imals as but another item in the grand total of their hypocrisy. Mr, Parnell regards the lives of human beings as more sacred than even those of animals, and he is consistent in his hatred of op- pression and cruelty wherever they may be found. His sympathies are with the fights of freedom everywhere, and he often spoke in the strongest terms of his disgust for the butcheries in the Soudan, which the Liberals, who wept over Irish horses, and Irish cows, received with such Olym- pian calm. In 1867 ^^^ ideas that had been sown in his mind in childhood first began to mature. His mother was then, as probably throughout her life, a strong Nationalist, and so was at least one of his sisters. Thus Mr. Parnell, in entering upon political life, was reaching the natural sequel of his own descent, of his early training, of the strongest tendencies of his own nature. It is not easy to describe the mental life of a man who is neither expansive nor introspective. It is one of the strongest and most curious peculiarities of Mr. Parnell, not merely that he rarely, if ever, speaks of himself, but that he rarely, if ever, gives any indication of having studied himself. His mind, if one may use the jargon of the 30 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. Germans, is purely objective. There are few men who, after a certain length of acquaintance, do not familiarize you with the state of their hearts or their stomachs or their finances ; with their fears, their hopes, their aims. But no man has ever been a confidant of Mr. Parneli. Any allusion to himself by another, either in the exu- berance of friendship or the design of flattery, is passed by unheeded ; and it is a joke among his intimates that to Mr. Parneli the being Parneli does not exist. It is plain from the facts we have narrated that Parnell's great strength is one which lies in his character rather than in his attainments. Yet his wonderful successes won in the face of nu- merous and most bitter opponents testify to mental abilities of a very high order. Mr. Glad- stone has said of him, " No man, as far as I can judge, is more successful than the hon. member in doing that which it is commonly supposed that all speakers do, but which in my opinion few really do — and I do not include myself among those few — namely, in saying what he means to say." Mr. Parneli is moreover very strong in not saying the thing which should not be said. Too many of his countrymen, it may be safely as- serted, are of that hasty and impulsive tem- perament which may betray, by a word prema- turely spoken, some point which should have been held from the enemy, and which might easily THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE 3X have been made, at some later time, a stronghold of defence in the parliamentary contest. Mr. Parnell has few qualities which have hitherto been associated with the idea of a successful Irish leader. He has now become one of the most potent of parliamentary debaters in the House of Commons, through his thorough grasp of his own ideas and through his exact knowledge of the needs of his country. But Mr. Parnell has be- come this in spite of himself. He retains to this day, as we have before stated, an almost invin- cible repugnance to public speaking; if he can, through any excuse, be silent, he remains silent, and the want of all training before his entrance into political life made him, at first, a speaker more than usually stumbling. His complete suc- cess in overcoming, not indeed his natural ob- jection to public speaking, but the difficulty with which his first speeches were marked, affords one of the many proofs of his wonderful strength and singleness of purpose. It is not a little re- markable that his first successful speech was crit- icised for its vehemence and bitterness of tone, and for the shrillness and excessive effort of the speaker's voice. It seems probable that the embarrassing circumstances of his position while addressing an unsympathizing body of legislators, combined with a sense of his own inexperience, may have produced the appearance of excessive vehemence of manner. 32 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. Nature has stamped on the person of this re- markable man the qualities of" his mind and tem- perament. His face is singularly handsome, and at a first glance might even appear too delicate to be strong. The nose is long and thin and carved, not moulded ; the mouth is well cut ; the cheeks are pallid ; the forehead perfectly round, as round and as striking as the forehead of the first Napoleon ; and the eyes are dark and un- fathomable. The passer-by in the streets, taking a casual look at those beautifully chiselled features and at the air of perfect tranquillity, would be inclined to think that Mr. Parnell was a very handsome young man, who probably had graduated at West Point, and would in due time die in a skirmish with the Indians. But a closer look would show the great possibilities beneath this face. The mouth, especially the under lip, speaks of a grip that never loosens ; the eye, when it is fixed, tells of the inflexible will be- neath ; and the tranquillity of the expression is the tranquillity of the nature that wills and wins. Similarly with his figure. It looks slight almost to frailty ; but a glance will show that the bones are large, the hips broad, and the walk firm ; in fact, Mr. Parnell tramps the ground rather than walks. The hands are firm, and even the way they grasp a pencil has a significance. This picture of Parnell is very unlike the por- traits which have been formed of him by the THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 33 imagination of those who have never met him. When he was first in the storm and stress of the era of obstruction, he used to be portrayed in the truthful pages of EngHsh comic journalism with a battered hat, a long upper lip, a shillelah in his hand, a clay pipe in his caubeen. Even to this day portraits after this fashion appear in the lower-class journals that think the caricature of the Irish face the best of all possible jokes. Par- nell is passionately fond of Ireland ; is happier and healthier on its soil than in any other part of the world, and is almost bigoted in the intensity of his patriotism. But he might easily be taken for a native of another country. Residence for the first years of his life in English schools has given him a strong English accent and an essen- tially English manner; and from his American mother he has got, in all probability, the healthy pallor, the delicate chiselling, the impassive look, and the resolute eye that are typical of the chil- dren of the great Republic. Such is the man in brief who to-day is perhaps the most potent personality in all the many na- tions and many races of the earth. The Russian Czar rules wider domains and more subjects ; but his sway has to be backed by more than a million armed men, and he passes much of his time shiv- ering before the prospect of a sudden and awful death at the hands of the infuriated among his own people. The German is a more multitudi- 34 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. nous race than the Irish and almost as widely scattered ; but Bismarck requires also the protec- tion of a mighty army and of cruel coercion laws, and the German who leaves the Fatherland re- gards with abhorrence the political ideas with which Bismarck is proud to associate his name. Gladstone exercises an almost unparalleled sway over the minds, hearts, imao-inations of English- men ; but nearly one-half of his people regard him as the incarnation of all evil ; and shallow- pated lieutenants, great only in self-conceit, dare to beard and defy and flout him. But Parnell has not one solitary soldier at his command ; the jail has opened for him and not for his enemies, and except for a miserable minority he is adored by all the Irish at home, and adored even more fer- vently by the Irish who will never see — in some cases who have never seen — the shores of the Green Isle again. In one way or another, through intermixture with the blood of other peoples, the Irish race can lay claim to some twenty millions of the human race. Out of all these twenty millions the people who do not re- gard Parnell as their leader may be counted by the few hundreds of thousands. In cities sepa- rated from his home or place of nativity by oceans and continents, men meet at his command, and spill their money for the cause he recommends. Meetings called under his auspices gather daily in every one of the vast States of America, in THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 35 Canada, in Cape Colony; and die primeval woods of Australia have echoed to the cheers for his name. But this is but a superficial view of his power. A nation, under his guidance, has shed many of its traditional weaknesses ; from being im- pulsive has grown cool and calculating ; from being disunited and discordant has welded itself into iron bands of discipline and solidarity. In a race scattered over every variety of clime and soil and government, and in every stratum of the social scale from the lowest to the highest, there are men of every variety of character and occupation and opinion. In other times the hatred of these men over their differences of method was more bitter than their hatred for the common enemy who loathed alike their ends and their means. Now they all alike sink into equality of agree- ment before the potent name of Parnell, high and low, timid and daring, moderate and extreme. Republics change their Presidents, colonies their pfovernors and ministers; in England now it is Gladstone and now it is Salisbury that rules; but Parnell remains stable and immovable, the apex of a pyramid that stretches invisible over many lands and seas, as resistless apparently as fate, solid as granite, durable as time. It was many years before the world had any idea of this new and potent force that was coming into its councils and affairs. Charles Stewart Parnell was born in June, 1846. He is descended 36 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. from a family that had long been associated with the political life of Ireland. The family came originally from Cdngleton, in Cheshire; but like so many others of English origin had in time proved its right to the proud boast of being Hibernior Hibernis ipsis. So far back as the beginning of the last century a Parnell sat for an Irish constituency in the Irish Parliament. At the time of the Union a Parnell held high office, and was one of those who gave the most substantial proof of the reality of his love for the independ- ence of his country. Sir John Parnell at the time was Chancellor of the .Exchequer and had held the office for no less than seventeen years. It was one of the vices of the old Irish Parliament even in the days after Grattan had attained com- parative freedom in 1782 that the Ministers were creatures of the Crown and not responsible to and removable by the Parliament of which they were members. There was everything, then, in these years of service as a representative of the Crown to have transformed Sir John Parnell into a time- serving and corrupt courtier. But Sir John Bar- ington, the best known chronicler of the days of the Irish Union, describes Sir John Parnell in his list of contemporary Irishmen as " Incorruptible;" and " Incorruptible " he proved ; for he resigned office and resisted the Act of Union to the bitter end. A son of Sir John Parnell — Henry Parnell — ^was afterwards for many years a prominent THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 37 member of the British Parliament, became a Cab- inet Minister, and was ultimately raised to the Peerage as the first Baron Congleton. John Henry Parnell was a grandson of Sir John Parnell. In his younger days he went on a tour through America ; there met Miss Stewart, the daughter of Commodore Stewart, fell in love with her, and was married in Broadway. It is unnecessary to speak to Americans of the immortal " Old Iron- sides." Suffice it to say that the bravery, calm- ness, and strength of will which were characteris- tic of the brave commander of the " Constitution " are inherited by his grandson, the bearer of his name; for the full name of Mr, Parnell, as is known, is " Charles Stewart Parnell." There was also something significant in the fact that the man who was destined to prove the most potent foe of British misrule in Ireland should have drawn his blood on the mother's side from a captain who was one of the few men that ever brought humili- ation on the proud mistress of the seas. The young Parnell, chiefly because he was a delicate child, was sent to various schools in England during his boyhood, and finally went to Cambridge University — the university of his father. Here he stayed for a couple of years, and for' a considerable time thought of becoming a lawyer. But he changed his purpose, with a regret that sometimes even in these days of supreme political glory finds wistful expression. ■^8 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. Almost immediately after his years at Cam- bridge he went abroad for a tour; and like his father he chose America as the first place to visit. While travelling through Georgia — where his brother has now a great peach-orchard — he met with a railway accident. He escaped unhurt; but John, his elder brother, was injured ; and John says to this day that he never had so good a nurse as "Charley." Then Mr. Parnell came back to his home in Avondale, County Wicklow, and gave himself up to the occupations and amusements of a country gentleman. At this time he was known as a reticent and rather retiring young man. He must have had his opinions though ; for he was brought up in a strongly political environment. Probably owing to her father's blood Mrs. Parnell had always a lively sympathy with the rebels against British oppres- sion in Ireland. She had a house in Dublin at the time when the ranks of Fenianism had been descended upon by the government ; and when in Green Street Court-house, with the aid of in- formers, packed juries, and partisan judges, the desperate soldiers of Ireland's cause were being consigned in quick and regular succession to the living death of penal servitude. There were in various parts of the city fugitives from what was called in these days justice ; and among the places where most of these fugitives found a temporary asylum and ultimately a safe flight to freer lands THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE! 39 and till better days was the house of Mrs. Parnell. Fanny Parnell is also one of the family figures that played a large part in the creation of the opinions of her brother. At an early age she showed her poetic talents ; and from the first these talents were devoted to the description of the sufferings of Ireland and to appeals to her sons to rise aoainst Ireland's wrongs. When the Fenian movement was in its full strength it had an organ in Dublin called The Irish People ; and into the office of The Irish People Fanny Parnell stole often with a patriotic poem. In the midst of these surroundinofs came the news of the execution of the Manchester Martyrs. The effect of that event upon the people of Ire- land was extraordinary. The three men hanged had taken part in the rescue of two prominent Fenian soldiers. In the scrimmage a policeman, Sergeant Brett, had been accidentally killed, and for this accidental death several men were put on their trial for murder. The trial took place in one of the periodical outbursts of fury which un- happily used to take place between England and Ireland. The juries were prejudiced, the judges not too calm, and the evidence far from trust- worthy, Three men — Allen, Larkin, and O'Brien — were sentenced to death. Though many hu- mane Englishmen pleaded for mercy, the law was allowed to take its course, and Allen, Larkin, and O'Brien were executed. A wild cry of hate and 3 10 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. sorrow rose from Ireland. In every town multi- tudes of men walked in funeral procession, and to this day the poem of " God Save Ireland," which commemorates the memory of Allen, Larkin, and O'Brien, is the most popular of Irish songs. To anybody acquainted with the nature of Mr. Parnell it will be easy to understand the effect which such a tragedy would have upon his mind. If there be one quality more developed than an- other in his nature it is a hatred of cruelty. When he was a magistrate he had brought before him a man charged with cruelty to a donkey. Fanny Parnell was the person who had the man rendered up to justice, and her brother strongly sympathized with her efforts. The man was con- victed, and was sentenced to pay a fine of thirty shillinofs. The miscreant micrht as w^ll have been asked to pay the national debt, and the fine was a sentence of prolonged imprisonment. The sequel of the story is characteristic of the family. Miss Parnell herself paid the fine and released the ruf- fian. It was his strong sympathy with suffering and his hatred of .cruelty that first impelled Mr. Parnell to lead the crusade against the use of the odious lash in the British army and navy. So deep, indeed, is his abhorrence of cruelty and even of bloodshed, that he is strongly opposed to capital punishment; and once, when one of his colleagues voted against a motion condemnatory of capital punishment in the House of Commons, he TFIE fiREAT IRISH STRUCxGLE. 41 expressed the hope, half joke, whole earnest, that some day that colleague might be taught a lesson by being himself hanged as a rebel. The Man- chester tragedy then touched Parnell in his most tender point, and from that time forward he was ;i.n enemy of English domination in Ireland. But he seemed to be in no hurry to put his convictions into action. He is not a man of ex- uberant enjoyment of life. He has too little imagination and too much equability for ecstasies, but he enjoys the hour, has many and varied in- terests in life, and could never, by any possibility, sink to a slothful or a melancholy dreamer. His proud and self-respecting nature, too, saved him from any tendency towards that wretched and squalid viciousness which is the characteristic of so many landlords' lives in Ireland. He is essen- tially temperate ; eats but plainly, and drinks nothing but a small quantity of claret. Nor could he descend to the pure horsiness which makes so many country gentlemen regard the stableman's as the highest of arts and pursuits. One of the reasons why Mr. Parnell delayed his entrance into public life was the state of Irish politics at that moment. There was little move- ment in the country of a constitutional character. The representation was in the hands of knavish office-holders or office-seekers. The professions of political faith were so many lies, and the con- stituencies distrustful of all chance of relief from 42 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. the Legislature, allowed themselves to beboiig.i:, that they might afterwards be sold. All that was earnest and energetic and honest in Ireland sought relief for her misery in desperate enter- prises, or stood aside until better days and more auspicious stars. Then the landlords of the coun- try remained entirely, or almost entirely, aloof from the popular movements. With the single exception of the late Mr. George Henry Moore, the representation of Ireland was abandoned by the country gentlemen, who in other times had occasionally rushed out of their own ranks and taken up the side of the people. It is a curious fact, but the man who, perhaps, had more influ- ence than almost any other in bringing Mr. Par- nell into the arena of Irish nationality, has himself proved a recreant to the cause. In 1 87 1 was fought the Kerry election. This election marked one of the turning-points in the modern history of Ireland. During the Fenian trials Isaac Butt was the most prominent figure in defending the prisoners. He was a man w^ho had started life with great expectations and supreme talents. Before he was many years in Trinity College, Ireland's oldest university, he was a pro- fessor ; he had been only six years at the bar when he was made a Queen's counsel. He was the son of a Protestant rector of the North of Ire- land, and adhered for some years to the prejudices in which he had been reared. In his early days THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 43 every good thing in Ireland belonged to the Protestants. The Catholics were an outlawed and alien race in their own country. O'Connell, not many years before, had carried Catholic emancipation, but Catholic emancipation was alive only in the letter. The offices — the judgeships, the fellowships in Trinity College, the shrievalties, everything of value or power — were still exclusive- ly in the hands of the Protestants. O'Connell, in 1843, was so thoroughly sick and tired of vain ap- peals to the English Legislature that he resolved to start once again a demand for a native Irish Legislature. He opened the agitation by a de- bate in the Dublin Corporation, and Butt, who was a member of that body, though he was but a young man, was chosen by the Conservatives to oppose O'Connell, and delivered a speech so effective that O'Connell himself complimented his youthful opponent, and foretold the advent of a time when Butt himself would be among the ad- vocates instead of the opponents of an Irish Leg- islature. It was not till a quarter of a century afterward that this prophecy was realized. Butt, immediately after the Fenian trials, began an agitation for amnesty, and in this way gradually went forward to a primary place in the confidence and in the affections of his countrymen. There were still some people who believed in the power and the willingness of the English Parliament to redress all the wrongs of Ireland, and there was 44 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. some justification for this faith in the fact that WilHam Ewart Gladstone was then at the head of the English state, and was passing the Disestab- lishment of the Irish Church, the Land Act of 1870, and the Ballot Act, three measures which mark the renaissance, of Irish nationality. But one of these very measures Isaac Butt was able to show was the very strongest proof of the neces- sity for an Irish Legislature. The Land Act of 1870 is an act the defects of which have passed from the region of controversy. Mr., Gladstone himself offered the strongest proof of its break- down by proposing in 1881 an entirely different Land Act. In fact it would not be impossible to show that in some respects the Land Act of 1870 aggravated instead of mitigated the evils of Irish land tenure. It put no restraint on the raising of rents, and rents were raised more mercilessly than ever; it Impeded, but it did not arrest eviction ; it caused as much emigration from Ireland as ever. Yet all Ireland had unanimously demanded a dif- ferent bill. Mass-meetings all over the country had demonstrated the wish of the people, and ex- pectation had been wrought to a high point. The fruit of it all had been the halting and miserable measure of 1870. It was this fact that gave the farmers into the hands of Butt. The population of the towns was always ready to receive and to support any Na- tional leader who advocated an Irish Parliament; THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 45 indeed there is scarcely a year since the Act of Union in 1800 when the overwhelming majority of the Irisl) people were not in favor of the resto- ration of an .Irish Parliament. At that moment, too, another force was working in favor of a re- newed agitation for Home Rule. The Protestants were bitterly exasperated by the Disestablishment of the Irish Church. Some .of the more extreme Orangemen had made the same threats then as they are making now, and, while professing the strongest loyalty to the Queen, had used lan- guage of vehement disloyalty. For instance, one Orange clergyman had declared that if the Queen should consent to the Disestablishment, the Orangemen would throw her crown into the Boyne. To the Irish Protestants Butt could ap- peal with more force than any other man. He was an Irish Protestant himself, brought up in their religious creed and in their political preju- dices. He made the appeal with success, and it was Irish Protestants that took the larg^est share in starting the great Irish movement of to-day. The Home Rule movement received definite form for the first time at a meeting in tlie Bilton Hotel on May 19, 1870. It was held in the Bilton Hotel in Sackville (now O'Connell) street, and among those who were present and took a promi- nent part were Isaac Butt, a Protestant ; the Rev. Joseph Galbraith, a Protestant clergyman and a Fellow of Trinity College ; Mr. Purdon, a Prot- 4g GLADSTONE-PARNELL. estant, and then Conservative Lord Mayor of Dublin ; Mr. Kinahan, a Protestant, who had been High Sheriff of Dubhn ; Major Knox, a Protes- tant, and the proprietor of the IrUh Times, the chief Conservative organ of Dublin, and finally Colonel King Harman, a Protestant, who has since gone over to the enemy and become one of the bitterest opponents of the movement which he was largely responsible in starting. It was a Protestant, too, that won a victory that was decisive. In 1871 there was a vacancy in the representation of the County of Kerry. At once the new movement resolved to make an appeal to the constituency in the name of the revived de- mand for the restoration of an Irish Parliament. The friends of Whiggery, on the other hand, were just as resolved that the old bad system should be defended vigorously. And this elec- tion at Kerry deserves to be gravely dwelt on by those who regard the present movement as a sec- tarian and a distinctly Catholic movement. The Whior candidate was a Catholic — Mr. James- Ar- thur Dease, a man of property, of great intellect- ual powers, and of a stainless character ; and Mr. Dease was supported vehemently and passion- ately by Dr. Moriarty, the Catholic Bishop of the Diocese of Kerry. The Home Rule candidate on the other hand was a Protestant — Mr. Rowland Ponsonby Blennerhassett ; and he had but few ad- herents among the Catholic clergy of the diocese ; THE GREAT IRISH STRUGgLE. * j-jr and the clergy who did support him fell under the displeasure of their bishop. The struggle was fought out with terrible energy and much bitterness ; the end was that the feeling of Na- tionality triumphed over all the influence of the British authorities and of the Catholic bishop, and Blennerhassett, the Protestant Home Rule candi- date, was returned. Blennerhassett belonofed to the same class as Mr. Parnell. He was a landlord, a Protestant, and a Home Ruler. Mr. Parnell was a landlord, a Protestant, and a Home Ruler. The time had ap- parently come when constitutional agitation had a fair chance ; and when men of property who, sym- pathized with the people would be welcomed into the National ranks. A few years after this came the general election of 1874; and Mr. Parnell thought that his time of self-distrust and hesita- tion had passed ; and that he might put himself forward as a National candidate. But his chance vv^as destroyed by a small technicality of which the government took advantage. It is the cus- tom in Ireland to appoint young men of station and property to the position of high sheriffs of the counties in which they live. The high sheriff cannot stand for the constituency in which he holds office unless he be permitted by the Crown to resign his office. Mr. Parnell applied for this permission and was refused. And thus in all probability he was unable to represent his native 48 • GLADSTONE— PARNELL. county in Parliament. But he had not long to wait. When a member of Parliament accepts office he has to resign his seat in the British Parliament and submit himself once more to the votes of his constituency. A Colonel Taylor, a veteran and rather stupid hack of the Tory party, was promoted by Mr. Disraeli to the position of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster — a well- paid sinecure — after many years' service as one of the whips of the party. Colonel Taylor was member for County Dublin, He had to seek re-election on his appointment to the chancellor- ship ; and Mr. Parnell resolved to oppose him. Mr. Parnell was beaten, of course, by a huge majority ; for in those days, though the majority of the people of County Dublin were, as they are now, energetic Nationalists, the franchise suffrage was so restricted that a small minority was able to always win the seat. But Mr. Parnell had borne himself well in the struggle; and though he vv-as held to be absolutely devoid of speaking power, yet he made many friends and admirers by the pluck with which he fought a forlorn hope. The next year the man who had been chiefly instrumental in bringing him into public life died — honest John Martin. At the time of his death John Martin was member for County Meath. The county, always strongly National, looked for a man capable of stepping Into the placf^ of a noble patriot. Parnell was selected. THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 49 Parnell was now at last embarked on the career of an Irish poHtlcian. He had wot been long in the House when he discovered that things were not as they should be, and that the movement, though it appeared powerful to the outside pub- lic, was internally weak and to some extent even rotten. Butt, the leader of the Irish party, was a man of great intellectual powers, and was hon- estly devoted to the success of the cause. He was ready also to work very hard himself, and he drafted all the bills that were brouoht in on va- rious subjects by his followers. But he was old, had lived an exhausting life, was steeped in debt, and had to divide his time and energies between the calls of his profession as a lawyer and his duties as a legislator. Such double calls are especially harassing in the case of a man who is at once an Irish lawyer and an Irish politician. The law courts are in Dublin, the imperial Parliament is in London; the journey between the two cities, part by sea and part by land, is fatiguing even to a young man, and thus it was quite impossible that Butt could attend to his duties as a lawyer in Dublin and as a politician in London without damage to both. This seriously interfered with his efficiency, and was partly accountable for the break-down of himself and his party. But he had, besides, personal defects that made him unfit for difficult and stormy times. He was a soft-tempered, easy-going man who was without 50 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. much moral courage, incapable of saying No, and with a thousand amiable weaknesses which leaned to virtue's side as a man, but were far from vir- tuous in the politician. As a speaker he was the most persuasive of men. He discussed with such candor, with such logic, with temper so beautiful, that even his bitterest opponents had to Hsten to him with respect. But the House of Commons has respect only for men who have votes behind them, and can turn divisions, and Butt was unable to turn divisions. This brings us to the second defect in the Home Rule party of Butt, Most of his followers were rotten office-seekers. When in 1874 Butt had an opportunity of getting a party elected he was beset by the great weakness of all Irish move- ments — the want of money. The electoral insti- tudons of England were, and to a certain extent still are, such as to make political careers impossi- ble to any but the rich or the fairly rich. The costs of election are large, members of Parliament have no salary, and living in London is dear; and thus as a rule nobody has any chance of entering into political life unless he has a pretty full purse. The result was that when the contest came Butt was in a painful dilemma. The constituencies were all right, and were w-illing to return an hon- est Nationalist, but there were no honest candi- dates, for there was no prospect but starvation to anybody who entered into political life without THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 51 considerable means. Butt himself was terribly pressed for money at that very moment. He had to fly from a warrant for debt on the very morn- ing when Mr. Gladstone's manifesto was issued, and John Barry, now one of the members for County Wexford, tells an amusing tale of how he received the then Irish leader in the early morn at Manchester, where Barry lived. It was from Enofland that Mr. Butt had to direct the electoral campaign, and his resources for the whole thing amounted to a few hundred pounds. To Ameri- can readers these facts ought especially to be told, for they serve two objects: First, they show how it is that though the feeling of Ireland has always been strongly National, representatives of these opinions have not found a place in Parlia- ment until a comparatively recent period; and secondly, because they bring out clearly the enor- mous influence which America has exercised in the later phases of Irish policy by her generous sub- scriptions to the combatants for human rights and human liberty in Ireland. The result of all these circumstances was that Butt was compelled to fight constituencies with such men as turned up, and in the majority of cases to be satisfied with the old men under new pledges. Of course, these old representatives were quite as ready to adopt the new princi- ples of Home Rule as they would have adopted any other principles that secured them re-election, 52 GLAbSTOiSTE— fARNELL. and through re-election the opportunity of selling themselves for office. Many of the members of the Home Rule party of 1874 were men, accord- ingly, who had been twenty or thirty years engaged in the ignoble work of seeking pay or pensions from the British authorities, and as ready as ever to sell themselves. Of course, such a spirit was entirely destructive of any chance of getting real good from Parliament. The English ministers felt that they were dealing with a set .of men whose votes they could buy, and were not going to take any steps for the redress of the grievances of a country that was thus represented. It was no wonder, then, that when Mr. Parnell entered Parliament he at once began to meet with painful disillusions. Mr. Butt's plan of action was to bring forward measures, to have them skilfully and temperately discussed, and then to submit to the vote when it went against him. The Home Rule question was opened every year. Mr. Butt himself introduced the subject in a speech of'great constitutional knowledge, of intense closeness of reasoning, and of a statesmanship the sagacity of which is now proved by the adoption of Butt's views by the leading statesmen of England. Then the leaders of both the English parties got up; each in turn condemned the proposal with equal emphasis; the division was called; Whig and Tory went into the same lobby; the poor Irish party was borne down by hundreds of English THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 55 votes, and Home Rule was dead for another year. Parnell's mind is eminently practical. Great speeches, splendid meetings, imposing proces- sions — all these thino-s are as nothinof to him unless they bring material results. He was as great an admirer as anybody else of the genius of Isaac Butt, but he could see no good whatever in great speeches and full-dress debates that left the Irish question exactly where it was before. He saw, too, that Isaac Butt was the victim of one great illusion. Butt founded his whole policy on appeals to and faith in the reason of the House of Commons. Parnell saw very clearly that at that period the keeper of the conscience in the House of Commons on the Irish question was the division lobby. "Appeal to the good sense and good feeling of the House of Commons," said Butt; and the House of Commons replied by quietly but effectually telling him that it didn't care a pin about his feelings or his opinions — its resolution was fixed never to oTant Home Rule to Ireland. Parnell naturally began to think of an opposite policy. "Attack the House through its own interests and convenience," said he to Butt, "and then you need not beg it — you can force if to listen." When Parnell entered into Parliament there was already another member there whose mind was of an even more realistic order than his own. At the general election of 1874 Joseph Gillis Big- 50 GtAbsfONfi— PARNELL. gar had been returned for the County of Cavan. Biggar is an excellent type of the hard-headed Northerner, He was all his life in the pork trade, and had the reputation of being one of the closest, keenest and most successful business men of Belfast. Biggar is not a man who has read much — he does not even read the newspapers which contain attacks upon himself; but he has an extremely shrewd, -penetrating mind, a judg- ment that is often narrow but is nearly always sound, and that once formed is unchangeable by friend or foe. But above all things, Biggar has extraordinary and marvellous courage. This courage exhibits itself in smalf as well as in big things. He has the courage to refuse an exorbi- tant fare to a cabman or a fee to a waiter; will oppose the best friend as readily as the bitterest enemy if he think him wrong; can speak unpleas- ant truths without the least qualms; and is not so much indifferent as unconscious of what other people say about him. In these respects he was the very opposite of poor Butt, who was childishly sensitive to opinion either of friend or foe. Big- gar had been greatly disgusted with the way things were going in the House of Commons even before Parnell had become his colleague. He has a wonderfully keen eye in seeing through falsehood and pretense, and if he be once con- vinced that a man is dishonest he loathes him for- ever afterwards. THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 57 Joseph Gillis Biggar was born in Belfast, on August I, 1828. He was educated at the Belfast Academy, where he remained from 1832 to 1844, The record of his school-days is far from satisfac- tory. He was very indolent — at least he says so himself — he showed no great love of reading — he was poor at composidon, and, of course, ab- jectly hopeless at elocution. The one talent he did exhibit was a talent for figures. It was, per- haps, this want of any particular success in learn- ing, as well as delicacy of health, which made Mr. Biggar's parents conclude that he had better be removed from school and placed at business. He was taken into his father's office in the provision trade, and he continued as assistant until 1861, when he became head of the firm. Mr. Biggar's first attempt to enter Parliament was made at Londonderry in 1872. He had not the least idea of being successful ; but he had at this time mentally formulated the policy which he has since carried out with inflexible purpose — he preferred the triumph of an open enemy to that of a half-hearted friend. The candidates were Mr. Lewis, Mr. (afterwards Chief Baron) Palles, and Mr. Biggar. At that moment Mr. Palles, as Attorney-General, was prosecuting Dr. Duggan and other Catholic bishops for the part they had taken in the famous Gal way election of Colonel Nolan — and Mr. Biggar made it a first and indis- pensable condition of his withdrawing from the 4 58 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. contest that these prosecutions should be dropped. Mr. Palles refused; Mr. Biggar received only 89 votes, but the Whig was defeated, and he was satisfied. The' bold fight he had made markejd out Mr. Bieear as the man to lead one of the as- saults which at this time the rising Home Rule party was beginning to make on the seats of Whig and Tocy. He himself was in favor of try- ing his hand on some place where the fighting would be really serious, and he had an idea of contesting Monaghan. When the general elec- tion of 1874, however, came, it was represented to Mr. Bies^ar that he would better serve the cause by standing for Cavan. He was nominated, and returned, and member for Cavan he has since^ remained. Finally, let the record of the purely personal part of Mr. Biggar's history conclude with mention of the fact that, in the January of 1877, he was received into the Catholic Church. The change of creed for a time produced a slight estrangement between himself and the other members of his family, who were staunch Ulster Presbyterians, and there were not wanting mali- cious intruders who sought to widen the breach. But this unpleasantness soon passed away, and Mr. Biggar is now on the very best of terms with his relatives. Not long after the night of Mr. Biggar's cele- brated four hours' speech, a young Irish member took his seat for the first time. This was Mr. THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 59 Parnell, elected ior tiie county of Meath in suc- cession to John Mcirtin. The veteran and incor- ruptible patriot had died a few days before the opening of this new chapter in Irish struggle. There was a strange fitness in his end. John Mitchel had been returned for the county of Tip- perary in 1875. After twenty-six years of exile he had paid a brief visit to his native country in the previous year. He had triumphed at last over an unjust sentence, penal servitude, and the weary waiting of all these hapless years, and had been selected as its representative by the premier constituency of Ireland. But the victory came too late. When he reached Ireland to fig-ht the election he was a dying man. A couple of weeks after his return to his native land he was seized with his last illness, and after a few days suc- cumbed, in the home of his early youth and sur- rounded by some of his earliest friends. John Martin had been brought by Mitchel into the na- tional faith when they were both young men. They had been sentenced to transportation about the same time ; they had married two sisters ; they had both remained inflexibly attached to the same national faith throughout the long years of dis- aster that followed the breakdown of their at- tempted revolution. Martin, though very ill, and in spite of the most earnest remonstrances of friends, went over to be present at the death-bed of his life-long leader and friend. 60 GLAbStONE— PARNELL. At the funeral he caught cold, sickened, and in a few days died. He was buried close to Mitchel's grave. After Mr. Parnell's first election to Parliament, he, in common with his associate, Mr. Biggar, was deeply impressed by considering the impotence that had fallen upon the Irish party. Both were men eager for practical results, and debates, how- ever ornate and eloquent, which resulted in no benefit, appeared to them the sheerest waste of time, and a mockery of their country's hopes and demands. Probably they drifted into the policy of " obstruction," so called, rather than pursued it in accordance with a definite plan originally thought out. There was in the Irish party at this time a man who had formulated the idea from close reflection on the methods of Parliament. This was Mr. Joseph Ronayne, who had been an enthusiastic Young Irelander, and though, amid the disillusions that followed the breakdown of 1848, he had probably bidden farewell forever to armed insurrection as a method for redressing Irish grievances, he still held by an old and stern gospel of Irish nationality, and thought that polit- ical ends were to be gained not by soft words, but by stern and relentless acts. He, if anybody, de- serves the credit of having pointed out, first to Mr. Biggar and then to Mr. Parnell, the methods .of action which have since proved so effective in the cause of Ireland. THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 61 When one now looks back upon the task which these two men set themselves, it will appear one of the boldest, most difficult, and most hopeless that two individuals ever proposed to themselves to work out. They set out, two of them, to do battle against 650 ; they had before them enemies who, in the ferocity of a common hate and a common terror, forgot old quarrels and obliterated old party lines ; while among their own party there were false men who hated their honesty and many true men who doubted their sagacity. In this work of theirs they had to meet a perfect hurricane of hate and abuse ; they had to stand face to face with the practical omnipotence of the mightiest of modern empires; they were accused of seeking to tram- ple on the power of the English House of Com- mons, and six centuries of parliamentary govern- ment looked down upon them in menace and in reproach. In carrying their mighty enterprise, Mr. Parnell and Mr. Biggar had to undergo labors and sacrifices that only those acquainted with the inside life of Parliament can fully appre- ciate. Those who undertook to conquer the House of Commons had first to conquer much of the natural man in themselves. The House of Commons is the arena which gives the choicest food to the intellectual vanity of the British sub- ject, and the House of Commons loves and re- spects only those who love and respect it. But 62 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. the first principle of the active policy was that there should be absolute indifference to the opin- ion of the House of Commons, and so vanity had first to be crushed out. Then the active policy demanded incessant attendance in the House, and incessant attendance in the House amounts almost to a punishment. And the active policy required, in addition to incessant attendance, considerable preparation ; and so the idleness, which is the most potent of all human passions, had to be gripped and strangled with a merciless hand. And finally, there was to be no shrinking from speech or act because it disobliged one man or offended another; and therefore, kindHness of feeling was to be watched and guarded by re- morseless purpose. The three years of fierce conflict, of labor by day and by night, and of iron resistance to menace, or entreaty, or blandish- ment, must have left many a deep mark in mind and in body. " Parnell," remarked one of his fol- lowers in the House of Commons one day, as the Irish leader entered with pallid and worn face, " Parnell has done mighty things, but he had to go through fire and water to do them." Mr. Biggar was heard of before Mr. Parnell had made himself known; and to estimate his character — and it is a character worth study — one must read carefully, and by the light of the present day, the events of the period at which he first started on his enterprise. In the session of THE GRKAr IRISH STRUGGLE. QQ 1875 he was constantly heard of; on April 27 in that session he " espied strangers ; " and, in ac- cordance with the then existing rules of the House of Commons, all the occupants of the different galleries, excepting those of the ladies'. gallery, had to retire. The Prince of Wales was among the distinguished visitors to the assembly on this particular evening, a fact which added considera- ble effect to the proceeding of the member for Cavan. At once a storm burst upon him, be- neath which even a very strong man might have bent. Mr. Disraeli, the Prime Minister, got up, amid cheers from all parts of the House, to de- nounce this outrage upon its dignity ; and to mark the complete union of the two parties against the daring offender. Lord Hardngton rose imme- diately afterwards. Nor' were these the only quarters from which attack came. Members of his own party joined in the general assault upon the audacious violator of the tone of the House. Mr. Biggar was, above all other things, held to be wantinor in the instincts of a grentleman. "I think," said the late Mr. George Bryan, another member of Mr. Butt's party, "that a man should be a gentleman first and a patriot afterwards," a statement which was, of course, received vAth wild cheers. F"inally, the case was summed up by Mr. Chaplin. "The honorable member for Cavan," said he. " appears to forget that he is now admitted to the society of gentlemen." This was 54 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. one of the many allusions, fashionable at the time — among genteel journalists especially — to Mr, Biggar's occupation. It was his heinous of- fence to have made his money in the wholesale pork trade. Caste among business men and their families is regulated, both in England and Ireland, not only by the distinction between wholesale and retail, but by the particular article in which the trader is interested. It was not, therefore, surprising that an assembly which tol- erated the more aristocratic cotton should turn up its indignant nose at the dealer in the humbler pork. But much as the House of Commons was shocked at the nature of Mr. Biggar's pursuits, the horror of the journalist was still more ex- treme and outspoken. " Heaven knows" (said a writer in the World), "that I do not scorn a man because his path in life has led him amongst pro- visions. But though I may unaffectedly honor a provision dealer who is a Member of Parliament, it is with quite another feeling that I behold a Member of Parliament who is a provision dealer. Mr. Biggar brings the manner of his store into this illustrious assembly, and his manner, even for a Belfast store, is very bad. When he rises to address the House, which he did at least ten times to-night, a whiff of salt pork seems to float upon the gale, and the air is heavy with the odor of the kippered herring. One unacquainted with the actual condition of affairs mioht be forgiven if THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 65 he thought there had been a large failure in the bacon trade, and that the House of Commons was a meeting of creditors, and the right honorable gentlemen sitting on the Treasury Bench were members of the defaulting firm, who, having con- fessed their inability to pay ninepence in the pound, were suitable and safe subjects for the abuse of an ungenerous creditor." These words are here quoted by way of illus- trating the symptoms of the times through which Mr. Biggar had to live, rather than because of any influence they had upon him. On this self-re- liant, firm, and masculine nature a world of ene- mies could make no impress. He did not even take the trouble to read the attacks upon him. The newspapers of the day were full of sarcasm against Mr, Biggar, the chief points made against him being directed at his alleged " grotesque ap- pearance " and "absurdity." Indeed, the impres- sion made upon such Americans as have derived their information regarding Irish affairs chiefly from the London periodicals has been that Mr. Biggar was a man of no sort of intelligence, and of no possible weight in Parliamentary counsels, but that he was simply a hornet who was always ready to sting John Bull's leathern sides. That this hornet was a sore annoyance it was very evident. That he was fearless and persistent was equally plain. No man was more ready to assert Biggar's lack of scholastic acquirenientp 66 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. than he himself was prompt to admit the fact. Even the proud tide of " father of obstrucdon " has been denied him, since obstructive action has long been recognized as a legitimate weapon in the hands of otherwise hopeless legislative mi- norities. Mr. Biggar's real title to eminence lies largely in his persistence. He is emphatically a vir tenax propositi. Others may have had more definite plans for the future of Ireland. Others may have far excelled him in political skill and tactics. Beyond a doubt there are many others who surpass him in the gifts and graces of oratorical display. He does not despise these gifts ; he simply does not possess them, and he knows the fact right well. Another point in his favor is his singleness of purpose and childlike simplicity of character. A certain un-Irish insen- sibility to attack has also helped Mr. Biggar. The attacks made in the House of Commons in his own hearingf neither touch him nor an- ger him. The only rancor he ever feels against individuals is for the evil they attempt to do to the cause of his country. This little man, calmly and placidly accepting every humiliation and insult that hundreds of foes could heap upon him, in the relentless and untiring pursuit of a great purpose, may by-and-by appear, even to Englishmen, to merit all the affectionate respect with which he is regarded by men of his own country and principles. Before he was long a member 'THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. g7 of Butt's party he had seen that more than half the number were rascally self-seekers who didn't mean a word of what they said, and who were only looking out for the opportunity to don the English livery. And here, perhaps, it would be as well to pause for a moment and explain to an American reader what are the means which a British government has at its disposal for corrupting political oppo- nents. Few Americans realize the splendor of the prizes that are at the disposal of the British authorities. Americans kTiow that members of Parliament are paid no salary; they hear the boasts of the enormous and immaculate purity of public life in England ; and they, many of them, infer that political life in England is preceded by the vows of purity and poverty. As a matter of fact, there is no country in the world In which politics has prizes so splendid to offer. The sala- ries reach propordons unexampled in ancient or modern times. The Lord Chancellor of England, for instance, has a salary of fifty thousand dollars a 3ear as long as he is in office, and once he has held office — if it be only for an hour — he has a pension of twenty-five thousand dollars a year for the remainder of his days. The Lord Chancellor, besides, has extraordinary privileges. He is the head of the judiciary of the country; he is Speaker of the House of Lords ; he is a peer with right of succession to his children ; he is a member of the gg GLADSTONE— PARNELL. cabinet. The Speaker of the House of Commons has a salary of twenty-five thousand dollars a year, a splendid house in the Parliament buildings; fire and light and coal free ; and when he retires he gets a pension of twenty thousand dollars a year for life and a peerage. Several of the cab- inet ministers receive salaries of twenty-five thousand dollars a year. The Lord Chief-Justice of the Queen's Bench gets a salary of forty thousand dollars a year, and the puisne judges get a salary each of twenty-five thousand dollars a year. In Ireland — one of the poorest countries in the world — the official salaries are on almost an equal scale of extravagance. The Lord-Lieutenant re- ceives a salary of one hundred thousand dollars a year and many allowances. The Chief Secre- tary for Ireland receives a salary of twenty-five thousand dollars a year, with many allowances. The Lord Chancellor has a salary of forty thou- sand dollars a year during office, and, as in the case of the Lord Chancellor of England, has a pension for life even if he have held the office for but an hour; the pension is twenty thousand dol- lars a year. The Chief-Justice of the Queen's Bench Court has a salary of twenty-five thousand dollars a year; and the puisne judges, who, as in England, hold their offices for life, have a salary of nineteen thousand dollars a year. The Attor- ney-General in Ireland has a nominal salary of tttE GkEAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 69 ;|5i 2,895, ^^^ ^^ ^^'^^ ^^^^ besides lor every case in which he prosecutes ; and, as times of disturbance bring many prosecutions, he thrives on the un- happiness of the country. Frequently the salary of the Irish Attorney-General, in times of dis- quiet, has run up to fifty thousand dollars in the year, or even more. Then, as everybody knows, England has innumerable colonies, and in all her colonies there are richly paid offices. The average salary of a governor of a colony is twenty-five thousand dollars, and there are chief-justiceships, and puisne judgeships, and lieutenant-governor- ships, and a thousand and one other things which can always be placed at the disposal of an obe- dient and useful friend of the administration. The difficulty of the Irish struggle will be understood when it is recollected that, in antago- nism to all this, the Irish people have nothing to offer their faithful servants. In Ireland there are, practically speaking, no offices in the gift of the people. From the jud^'eships down to a place in the lowest rank of the police, everything is in the gift of the British government. Nor. is this all. The Irish patriot, up to the last year, always ran the risk of collision with the authorities, and, in consequence, faced the chances of imprisonment. Mr. Parnell has been in prison ; Mr. Dillon has been twice in prison ; Mr, O'Kelly has been in prison ; Mr. Sexton has been in prison ; Mr, William O'Brien has been in prison ; Mr. Healy has been 70 GLADSTONE— PATINELL. in prison; Mr. Timotliy H:iriington lias been three times in prison ; Mr. Edward Harrington has been in prison ; Dr. O'Doherty was sent to penal servitude in '48 ; Mr. J. F. X. O'Brien was sent to penal servitude in 1867, having first been sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. Out of the eighty-six Irish members of the present Irish party no less than twenty-five have been, on one excuse or other, and for longer or shorter terms, imprisoned by the British authorities. The choice, then, of the Irish politician lay between wealth, dignity, honors, ease, which were offered for traitorous service by the British government, and the poverty and hardship and lowliness, with a fair prospect of the workhouse and the gaol, which were the only rewards of the faithful servant of the Irish people. Isaac Butt himself was a signal and terrible example of what Irish patriot- ism entails. We have already described how hard he had to work in his closing days to meet the strain of professionaJ and political duties. When he was wrestlino- with the o^rowinor disease that ultimately killed him, he was beset by duns and bailiffs, and his mind was overshadowed with the dread thought that he had left his children unprovided for. And to-day, in poverty — perhaps in misery — they are paying the penalty of having been begotten by a great' and a true Irishman. Any man of political experience or reading will know how easy it is for a government to rule a ■'^/' v' February, and ending in the second week of August each year. It meets for five out of the seven days of the week for the transaction of business. On every one of those days except Wednesday the hour for assembling is lo minutes to 4 o'clock. The sittir^g has no definite time of closing, and cases have been known where it has been ex- tended to forty-one hours, or almost two days, continuously. The House cannot adjourn unless on a motion carried by the members present. So rigid is this rule that a story is told how, on one occasion, the Speaker was left alone in his chair; the official whose duty it was to move the ad- journment havine forgotten to attend to do so, and that ofiicial had to be sent for, in order that the necessary formality might be complied with. 78 THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 79 On Wednesdays the House meets at 1 2 and closes at 6 o'clock. The business of the House is divided into two categories, viz. : First, what is called government business ; and, secondly, the business of "private" members. Mondays and Thursdays throughout the session are what are called "Government Nights," and on these occasions the business of the executive administration has precedence over all others. Tuesdays and Fridays are private members' nights, and on these occasions the business of the private menibers has priority over that of the government. On the nights devoted to the private members the business usually con- sists of resolutions upon some of the questions of the day which are not yet actually ripe for legis- lation. A member makes, say, a motion calling for the abolition of capital punishment; or for a change in the licensing laws ; or for the cessation of the traffic in opium ; or for the abolition of the House of Lords ; or for the disestablishment of the church; or for some such kindred purpose. Members sometimes make an attempt to carry their proposals into law, and introduce bills for that object; but, generally speaking, the efforts of members are confined to abstract motions. Tuesday night belongs entirely to private mem- bers- — the government not even making an at- tempt to get any portion of the time for the transaction of its own work. Oh Friday nights. 80 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. however, the government sometimes succeeds In getting through a (qw of Its proposals. "Supply," or "appropriation" as It is called in America, is put down for that night. It is a principle of the English (Constitution that the statement of a grievance shall precede supply. On Friday nights, accordingly, before the government are able to get a penny of money from the House, they have to listen to anything that a private member has to say. Sometimes half a dozen motions on half a dozen different subjects are put upon the paper, and are discussed. A private member even has the right to stand up in his place, and talk about any subject without putting a notice upon the paper. It thus very often hap- pens that the discussion of a grievance proceeds till 1 2 or I o'clock at night ; and when the debate has been extended to this period the government give up the project of getting rnoney ; and there- upon no supply is taken that night. There is another rule which has a most Im- portant effect upon the transaction of business in the House of Commons. This is " the half-past 12 o'clock rule," under which no business that is opposed can be taken. The Cabinet proposes, for instance, a bill for the future government of Ireland. At once a member of the Tory party, or of the Liberals who are opposed to it, puts down an " amendment " moving that the bill in question be read that day six months, which is the official THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. gj way of moving the rejection of the measure. As long as this amendment appears upon the paper the bill cannot be taken after half-past 12 o'clock at night. An amendment of the kind is what is known in Parliamentary vocabulary as a " block- ing" motion. It often happens that a bill which is very much objected to seems to have a chance of coming on about half-past 11 or 1 2 o'clock. When this occurs a number of members opposed to it immediately begin to talk against time, with the result that half-past 1 2 o'clock is reached ; then the bill has to be postponed till another day. Wednesday, to a great extent, is a dies non in Parliament. It is entirely given up to private members, and the subjects discussed are usually something in the nature of a fad or crotchet or an "■ ism," A change in the ecclesiastical law and other pious matters used to form the leading sub- jects of discussion, and this earned for Wednes- day the reputation of being the special day for religious bills. At a quarter to 6 on the Wednes- day the debate, if proceeding, has to cease upon any bill which is the subject of discussion. Ac- cordingly, whenever a division is not considered desirable on that day, a speaker will get up about 5 o'clock or later, and talk on until a quarter to 6. The debate has then to be interrupted, and thus a division is avoided. Between a quarter to 6 and 6 business can be done to which no objection is made; and often that short space of time is occu 82 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. pied most usefully by a member of the government or private member in getting a bill through its final stage. But if any member get up and use the words, " I object," the bill cannot be advanced any stage, and is postponed till another day. The first thing to be remembered about the House of Commons is, that it is a machine en- tirely incapable of transacting the amount of work put upon it. The affairs of India, colonial rela- tions, international relations, the domestic affairs of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales — all these subjects have to be dealt with in one single Parliament. Frequently there are questions which involve such pith and moment as a threat- ened war between England and Russia, down to the less significant matter of a complaint about the defective paving of a street in London, or the neglect of a -pauper in an Irish workhouse. There is no division between imperial and local government such as there is in the United States. In fact, the imperial Parliament is in the same position as the Congress at Washington would be if the State Legislatures throughout the whole country were abolished, and their work trans- ferred to the central assembly in the national capitdl. The result of the arrangement of the imperial legislature is, that the mam work of government is to attempt a victory in an ever- failing race with time. The history of every administration and, indeed, of every session of Parliament is the same, THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. gg The basis of the poHcy of Mr. Parnell and Mr. Biggar was, that the Irish party should take ad- vantage of the way -in which the rules of the House of Commons thus left the English ministries at the mercy of any resolute body of men. They pointed out to Mr. Butt that his annual debates were not advancing the Irish cause by one step, and that he must adopt entirely different methods if he hoped to succeed in his mission. Mr. Butt, however, was a man of amiability that reached to weakness. He knew that a policy of this kind could not be carried out without coming into fierce collision with the House of Commons, even without evoking a storm of interruption and of passion there, too, and an equally violent storm of passion outside. Kindly himself, he trusted to conciliation, and he had not the nerve to face the frowns and the hootinos of men with whom he was in daily intercourse. For a long time Mr. Parnell and Mr. Biggar pressed their views upon the Irish leader over and over again, but with no satisfactory result; and they finally came to the conclusion that it was perfectly impossible to hope for anything from- Mr. Butt's initiative, and that they must take the work in hand themselves. It was acdng upon these ideas that Mr. Parnell and Mr. Biggar started the movement known as the " Policy of Obstruction." They began by blocking every bill brought in by the government. This single step alone created a revolutionary 86 GLADSTONE— PARN ELL. change in the situation. Up to this time the gov- ernment had been able to get through some of their bills at whatever hour of the sitting they came on — whether i or 2 or 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning. Now, however, their operations could not reach beyond half-past 1 2 o'clock. This is how the new and the old system worked. Sup- pose half a dozen government bills put down on Monday or Thursday night; under the old system four or five of these bills would have a fair chance of being considered on the same night. Under the new system it rarely happened that more than one of the bills w^as even discussed. Mr. Parnell and Mr. Biggar were there to speak at length, sometimes for an hour, other times for two hours, and frequently talking even nonsense. The result was, that a debate, which began at 5 o'clock and was expected to finish at 8 o'clock, would be prolonged by these indefatigable talkers until 1 1 or 12 o'clock, and then some one of their friends would start up at midnight, and, by speaking till half-past i 2 o'clock, prevent the gov- ernment from brinaino- on bill No. 2. In the House of Commons talk begets talk, and the speeches of the Irish members always resulted in eliciting speeches from the English members. Sometimes the speeches of their opponents took the form of violent attack and personal vitupera- tion, but Mr. Parnell and Mr. Biggar did not care a pin. In fact they were only too delighted, for THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. g^ those attacks not only wasted time in themselves, but produced that feverish temper in the House during which abundant speech became infectious. Whenever; too, there were litde interstices of time, which in the easy-going good old days the government were able to fill up with litde bills, there was either Mr. Parnell or Mr. Biggar ready to stand up and fill in the chasm, and so prevent the bills from coming on. " Supply " was their happy hundng-ground. On - every item which gave the least promise of fruitful discussion they raised a debate. This was especially the case with Irish supply. On the votes for the constab- ulary, or for the state prosecutions, or for money to the Chief Secretary, they inidated discussions that dragged into the light every dark place in the English administration of Irish affairs. That put the government upon their defence, and sometimes kept the subject of Ireland before the House and the country for weeks in succession. The vote for the police alone has been known to occupy a week in discussion ; and the entire Irish votes have rarely taken less than three or four weeks in stormy times. Nothing will bring more clearly before the mind of the reader the difference between the old and the new time than a single incident diat occurred with regard to these Irish estimates. One night Mr. Butt and his followers were dining in the House of Commons. They had intended to raise 88 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. some kind of a debate upon the government of Ireland upon the Irish estimates. In the middle of the dinner somebody came, breathless and dis- mayed, to announce that the Irish estimates had all passed through in the course of a few minutes without a word of comment or a whisper of disap- proval. It was fortunate for Mr. Parnell and Mr. Biggar that at this time also the government, which at the moment belono-ed to the Conserva- tive party, resolved to bring in a series of measures which were of much length and vast perplexity. Some of these measures, besides, raised questions upon which Mr. Parnell knew some feeling would be raised in England. He had known of the ex- istence for a long time of a party violently opposed to flogging in the army — an odious institution, which survived in England alone, of all civilized countries In the world. Mr. Parnell readily con- cluded from this that if he raised a debate upon flogging in the army he would be followed by a certain number of Englishmen ; that they would talk and divide along with him, and that in this way the progress 'of any bill in which flogging in the army was mentioned might be indefinitely delayed. Another subject on which he knew there was a great deal of feeling was the treatment of pris- oners, English feeling generally was confined to dissatisfaction at the manner In which untried prisoners were treated under the prison rules ; THE GREAT TRTSH STRUGGLE. gg but the Irish Nadonalists had a further and even more serious grievance : that was, the treatment of poHtical prisoners. Almost alone among the civilized nations of the earth England had up to this time confounded the political and the ordinary prisoners. Men of high character, whose only offence was to feel for the deep distress and the wrongs and miseries of their country and too eagerly desire to redress them — men of educa- tion, good social position, and refined minds — were compelled by the British government to herd with the murderer and the burglar and the lowest and vilest scum of English society. Ac- cordingly Mr. Parnell was able to organize con- siderable support both amongst the English and Irish members in favor of attacks upon the prison discipline of the country. Finally during the Conservative regime the annexation of the Trans- vaal was accomplished. It is needless now to argue the right or the wrong of that act. The iron hand of time has crushed its advocates. But when tjie annexation first took place public opinion in England was not ripe, and information did not exist. The only persons who were pre- pared to give the annexation any effective oppo- sition were a small group of Radicals, chief among whom was Mr. Leonard Courtney, now Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons. The forcible conquest of any people against their will was naturally repugnant to Irish National- 90 GLADSTONE-PARNELL. ists, and thus they were drawn to the side of the Boers from the very first. A junction of their forces with their Enghsh Radical alHes made it possible to embitter and prolong the fight. These preliminary observations will enable the reader to understand the line of tactics now adopted by the Irish obstructives. Every year the House of Commons has to pass what is called the " Mutiny Act." This act establishes the discipline of the British army ; and under the British Constitution the army cannot exist with- out the annual passage of this act. The act was originally passed for the purpose of maintaining the control of Parliament over the standing army. If this act should cease to exist the soldier would again become a private citizen, subject only to the common law, and could no longer be punished for disobeying his officers or even quitting the colors. The Mutiny Act in the present form con- sists of about 193 clauses, and in its old shape it was about the same length. But up to the advent of Mr. Parnell and Mr. Biggar it was regarded as simply a piece of formality that was hurried through in inaudible whispers from the Speaker and imaginary ayes and noes of the members of the House. In fact, it probably never at any period occupied more than ten minutes of the many months during which Parliament sits. But Mr. Parnell, casting his eyes through its Innumer- able clauses, discovered the section maintaining THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 91 flogging in the army. He at once saw the im- portance of the point ; raised the question again and again ; was attacked furiously by the Conser- vative Ministers, and for a long time was left alone by the members of the English parties, and even by the members of the Irish party too. The Minister for War at this period was a man now known as Lord Cranbrook, but then Mr. Gathorne Hardy. Lord Cranbrook is a man of vacuous mind and boisterous temper. To watch him well there night after night — compelled to argue and reargue with tortured reiteration in reply to Mr. Parnell and Mr. Biggar — was, to use a colloquial expression, like the sight of a hen on a hot grid- iron. He would try this form, then that form in treating this obstinate and terrible Irish group. He was civil, and they replied with equal civility, but at the same time with equally lengthy speeches. He sulked in silence, and then they moved mo- tions for adjournment of the debate or of the House that compelled him to answer. He was violendy angry, and then he exposed himself to merciless torture. Night after night, week after week, month after month, the Mutiny Bill dragged its slow length along, not passing itself and not permitting any other measure to pass. The same thing took place with regard to other measures. The introduction of a Prison's Bill removing the control of prisoners from local authority to the Home Office, or, as it would be f)2 GT.ADSTONE— PAKNt^T,L. callf'd in America, to thc^ Drpartmcnt of the In- terior, afforded an opportunity for raising the question of prison disciphne. Again night after night, week after week, and month after month passed, and still the Prisons Bill had not got through its innumerable clauses. And, finally, there was the Transvaal Bill, with its multi- farious clauses also ; and in its case likewise night after night, week after week, and month after month almost passed, and still the bill had not become a law. It was the policy of himself and Mr. Biggar (as he told one of the writers of this work when they were travelling over to Ireland together to organize the great election campaign of 1885) always to avoid stand-up fights with the Govern- ment. The work of delaying legislation and wasting time was done more effectively in quiet- ness and without any of these great struggles. This remark of Mr. Parnell's is quite characteris- tic of the man's whole nature and policy. The showy fights were not to his taste half as much as the quiet andunseen work ; for the quiet and unseen work produced practical results, whereas the showy fights sometimes were not so effective. In one respect this criticism upon his own policy was not altogether correct. These show}' fights had the effect of drawing the attention of all man- kind to the Irish question, and had a second, and even equally important effect — they "enthused" THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 93 the Irish race at home and abroad. When Mr. Parnell came to America in 1880, Wendell Phillips best pithily described the effect of Mr. Parnell's action, when he said he had come to see the man who had made John Bull listen. And the second effect is best shown by the extraordi- nary union of the Irish nation now i*n his support. In the midst of the struggle between the active section, as the Obstructives were called, of the Irish party, and the loggards, or trimmers, or traitors, who formed the bulk of that party, Mr. Butt died. Mr. Parnell was still at this time a young man and had only made a short record. The country was not yet quite certain of his power to take the position of leader. In addition to all this the then Home Rule Party consisted mostly of men who disliked him personally and loathed his policy. Under these circumstances it was vain to think of his being appointed the leader; and Mr. William Shaw was elected as a stop-gap leader. The reasons for this election were, that Mr. Sliaw was a Protestant, supposed to be very rich, and that he had a moderate mind and an easy and genial temperament. Under the rules of the Irish party the leader is elected for only one year, and the time was bound soon to come when Mr. Shaw would have once more to submit his claims for the position of chief The selection was perhaps the best that could have b'-en made at the time. Mr. Shaw was not with- 6 94 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. out many admirable qualities. He, however, was too cautious and timid, and had not imagination or mind large enough for the sublime and gigantic evils that had now to be grappled with once and for all. The year 1879 marked a crisis in the history of Ireland. Owing to crrcumstances which will be presendy detailed the potato crop has occupied in Irish life a position of extraordinary importance. With- out any exaggeration the potato crop may be described as the thin partition which used to di- vide large masses of the Irish people from whole- sale starvation. The years 1877-78 had both been years in which the crops had largely failed to come up to the expectations of the people. The following table will prove this fact conclu- sively : Value of Potato Crop. 1876 160,321,910 1877 26,355,110 1878 35,897.560 It will therefore be seen that by 1879 there had been two bad seasons; and three bad seasons in Ireland as it then was were sufficient to make all the difference between the chance of weather- ing the storm and going down in awful ship- wreck. But the year 1879 disappointed all the expectations that had been formed of it. The potato crop, instead of rising, went down to a lower point than it had reached even in the dis- astrous year of 1877. The figures are: THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 95 Value of Potato Crop. 1879 ^15,705,440 In Other words two-thirds of the potato crop had not come to maturity, and in some parts of the country it had entirely disappeared. Thus Ireland stood face to face with famine. The time had come now for making a choice between either of two courses, each of which presented enormous difficulties and terrible dangers. Either the country had to remain quiet and sub- missive to the decree of British law and of Irish landlords, when the result would probably be a considerable amount of starvation, an enormous number of evictions, and an immense amount of emigration, as well as the break-down of all spirits and of all hopes in the people. The other course was that of passive resistance to the law of eviction, and of strong agitation which would make the landlords pause in , their tyranny, and compel the British Parliament to bestow reform. The latter course could not be entered upon without the risk of violent collision with the law and the chances of penal servitude and perhaps death on the gallows ; and above all, without the sickening dread when the hour of trial came that the people might prove unequal to the opportun- ity, and allow themselves to be again driven back by the dark night of hunger and of despair. If Mr. Butt had remained at the head of affairs It is more than probable that the first of these two 96 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. courses would have been adopted. It was the only course that recommended itself to timid and constitutional lawyers like him, and to all the other large sections of society in Ireland, that always wish to avoid open collision with the great powers of the British government. But Mr. Parnell is a very different type of man to Mr. Butt. His iron nerve and his daring mind induced him to believe that the bold course was the true course, that eviction should be grappled with, that the landlords and the law should be encountered, and that in this way the threatened famine of 1879, in place of being a night of darkness and despair, might make a morning of hope and resurrection to the Irish people. His choice of weapons was largely influenced by a very remarkable man who at about this time began to have considerable influence over the course of Irish affairs. This was Michael Davitt. The life of Michael Davitt is in many respects like that of hundreds of thousands of Irishmen. Evic- tion, Exile, Poverty — these are Its main features. Michael Davitt was born at Strald, in the County Mayo, in the year 1846. That year, as will be seen afterwards, was one of Ireland's darkest hours. Famine was in the country; thousands were dying in every hospital, work- house, and jail, and the roads were literally thick with the corpses of the unburied. The landlords were aggravating this terrible state of things by MICHAEL DAVITT. THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 99 their merciless eviction of all their helpless ten- antry whose means of living and power of paying their rent had been entirely destroyed by this economic cyclone. The father of Davitt was one of these victims. Davitt's earliest recollection is of an eviction under circumstances 'of cruelty and heartlessness. He was but four years of age when his father was turned out of his house and farm. It was the curious irony of fate that he afterwards held a Land League meeting at Straide, and that the platform from which he spoke stood on the very spot where he h^d first seen light. His family emigrated to Lancashire, where to-day there are thousands of other Irish families who sought refuge in English homes from their own country. The fate of the Irish in England has been one of the many tragedies in the sorrowful history of the Irish race. Coming mostly from the country and from rural pursuits, the Irish exiles were thrown into the midst of large manu- facturing industries. For such industries of course they had had no training whatever. The result was that the only work they could obtain was the work which was hardest and ~ worst paid. To- day, if you pass through a Lancashire, Northum- brian, or Scotch district you will find that the stokers in the gas-works, the laborers in the blast furnace and chemical works are nearly all men of Irish birth and descent — people or the sons of people who were driven from Ireland by hunger 100 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. and by eviction. In his early years Davitt led the same life as that of the other Irishmen around him. As soon as he was able to work he had to be sent to the mill in order to eke out the scanty subsistence of his family. While employed in the mill his arm was caught in the machinery and wrenched off. This misfortune, terrible as it was, perhaps influenced his life for the future. He was taken away from the mill, and was able in this way to devote time to the improvement of his mind. He was living at this time at Has- lingden, a town iij the Lancashire constituency, which is represented at present by the Marquis of Hartington. He was employed there for some years in a stationer's shop and afterwards as a letter-carrier. In Haslingden there is a large Irish population, and the young Irish boy grew up amid Irish surroundings and Irish influences. However, it was not until one night he attended a meeting addressed by an Irish orator that he really began to have strong political opinions. This orator told him the history of his country, of her wrongs, of her plans, of her hopes. The whole soul of the young man was fired; his im- pressions were crystallized into convictions, and from that time forward he was an ardent Irish Nationalist. It is a singular circumstance that the man who gave to Davitt this new birth of conviction afterwards proved recreant to the cause; for the orator who first made Davitt THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE iQi an Irish , Nationalist was Mr. John O'Connor Power. In those days there was no place in politics for an honest Irish Nationalist save in the ranks of the revolutionary party. That party found some of its bravest and fiercest recruits among the Irish in England, and Davitt was one of them. The English Branch of the Fenian oro^anization contemplated some of the most desperate enter- prises of the movement. Among many other plots they resolved to make an attack on Chester Castle, where there used to be a large supply of arms. Davitt, although very young at the time, was one of those who were present at the tryst- ing-place. He escaped arrest at this time, and then he became prominent by his energy and talents, and after a while was one of the foremost organizers of the movement. He was mainly concerned in the purchase of arms and their transportation to Ireland to prepare men for the fight, which was then supposed to be ripening fast. One evening he was arrested at a London railway station and was brought before the courts on the charge of levying war against the Queen. The main evidence arainst him was that of o Corydon, an infamous ruffian, who first joined and then sold the organization. From the onset Davitt knew there was no escape. In his "Leaves of a Prison Diary," which contains an account of his life, he describes his feelings at this terrible hour : 102 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. " I recollect," he writes, " having occupied the half-hour during which the jury was considering whether to believe the evidence of respectable witnesses or accept that of a creature who can be truly designated a salaried perjurer in my case, in reading the inscriptions M^hich covered the walls of the cell — the waiting-room of fate — in Newgate prison, to which I was conducted while my future was being decided in the jury-rocxn overhead. Every available inch of the blackened mortar contained, in few words, the name of the writer, where he belonged to, the crime with which he was charged, the dread certainty of conviction, the palpitating hopes of acquittal, or the language of indifference or despair. What thoughts must have swept through the minds of the thousands who have passed through that cell during the necessarily brief stay within its walls! Loss of home, friends, reputation, honor, nanie — to those who had such to lose ; and the impend- ing sentence of banishment from the world of pleasure or business for years — perhaps forever — with the doom of penal degradation, toil, and suffering in addition ! "Yet, despite all these feelings that crowd upon the soul in these short, fleeting, terrible moments of criminal life, the vanity — or what shall I term it? — of the individual prompts him to occupy most of them in giving a short record of himself, his crime or imputed offence, scratched THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 103 upon these blackened walls, for other succeeding unfortunates to fead ! " Most of these inscriptions were in slang, showing that the majority of those who had writ> ten them were of the criminal order, and guilty of some, if not of the particular, offence for which they were doomed to await the announcement of their punishment within that cliamber of dread expectancy. Not a few, however, consisted of declarations of innocence, invocations of Divine interposition, appeals to justice, and confidence in the 'laws of my country ; ' while others denoted the absence of all thoughts except those of wife, children, or sweetheart. Some who were await- ing that most terrible of all sentences — death — could yet think of tracing the outlines of a scaffold amidst the mass of surrounding inscriptions, with a ' Farewell to Life' scrawled underneath. Giv- ing way to the seeming inspiration of the place, and picturing jurors' faces round that dismal den — dark and frowning, into which the sun's rays never entered, lit only by a noisy jet of gas which seemed to sing the death-song of the liberty of all who entered the walls which it had blackened — I stood upon the form which extended round the place and wrote upon a yet uncovered por- tion of the low sloping roof: 'M. D. expects ten years for the crime of being an Irish Nationalist and the victim of an informer's perjury. — July, 1870.' From the ghastly look of the place, the 104 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. penalty I was about to undergo, and my own thoughts at the moment, I might have most ap- propriately added the well-known lines from the * Inferno,' which invite those who enter its portals of despair to abandon hope." The anticipations in this heart's cry proved cor- rect. Davitt was found guilty and was sentenced to fifteen years' penal servitude. Replying in the month of May last (1886) to Lord Randolph Churchill's incitements to civil war, Mr. Davitt gave a scathing reply, and at the same time a neat summary of his miseries in penal servitude. "The treason for which I was tried and con- victed in 1870 was more justifiable in reason and less culpable to law than the treason which this ex-cabinet minister commits in telling the people of Ulster that they will be entided to appeal to the arbitrament of force if the imperial Parliament passes a certain law. In 1870, when I was tried in London, the Castle system of government still obtained in Ireland — a system of rule which, by the measure which the Prime Minister of England — (loud cheers) — has introduced for the better government of Ireland, is now proved to be un- just and unconstitutional. Nevertheless, I was sentenced to fifteen years' penal servitude for sending firearms to Ireland to be used against a system of government in that country which was not objectionable to the minority, but which was looked upon by the mass of the Irish people as a F. B. FREEHILL, M. A., PresiJc-nt Irish National Lc;igue, New South Wales. THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 107 tyranny. (Applause.) Now, what will be the position of this precious ex-minister of the Crown in 1887 if he be true to his words in sending fire- arms to the North of Ireland? (Applause.) Lord Churchill will be in insurrection against his Dwn Queen and country. (Hear, hear.) He 'vIU not be in revolt against a despotic Castle system, but against the legally-constituted Irish Parliament, and, therefore, this treason which he commits by anticipation will have no earthly justification or extenuation. (Cheers.) Well, I will give the noble lord some friendly advice to- night — (laughter) — based upon a good deal of prison experience. (Renewed laughter.) I will assume that in 1887, when Paddington's lordly representative will become a rebel against impe- rial authority, Mr. Gladstone will be Prime Minis- ter of England. (Cheers.) He was England's ■Prime Minister in 1870, when I left the Old Bailey to undergo penal servitude. If Lord Randolph Churchill receive the same sentence for a similar offence without any justification for committing it, I will tell him what he will have to undergo. (Hear, hear.) If he is treated in prison as I was under Mr. Gladstone's adminis- tration, he will be chained to a cart with murder- ers and pick-pockets for the first four years of imprisonment, and if he goes through that ordeal without quarrelling with his new chums — (laughter and loud applause) — it may be his good fortune, 108 GLADSTONE— PA RNELL. as it was mine, to be in six years' time piomoted to tlie position of turning a wringing macliine in the Dartmoor convict laundry. (Loud laughter and applause.) Well, after seven years and eight months' imprisonment, I hope he will be released on ticket-of-leave, as I was, and then, perhaps, it may be my duty, rising from the opposite benches of the Irish Parliament — (cheers) — to do for him what he did for me in i88r, when he called upon the then Chief Secretary of Ireland to send me back to penal servitude to undergo fifteen months' additional imprisonment." (Cheers.) Several attempts were made to procure Davitt's release from prison, which attempts failed for years ; but at last, on the morning of December 19, 1877, the governor of Dartmoor jail brought Davitt the informadon that he was a free man. The release, however, was not unconditional. He was let out on a ticket-of-leave. This at the time might well have appeared nothing more than a hollow formality. But it afterwards proved to be a grim safeguard for Davitt's political orthodoxy in the future. After his release he took to lectur- ing. In the course of time his family had been further scattered, and having first left Ireland for England they had subsequently quitted England for America. They were settled in Manayunk, Pennsylvania. Davitt went over to America to see his mother and sister, and also probably with the view to his career thereafter. When he ar- THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 109 rived In America he had not more than a few acquaintances in the country. The chief of these was Mr. James O'Kelly, then connected with the New York press, now a member of the British House of Commons. At this time there had come an important crisis in the history of Irish-American organizations. A larofe number of the men who had been en- gaged In revolutionary effort had made up their mind that the Hberation of Ireland could not for the moment be advanced by immediate resort to physical force. Several of the men of the keenest intelligence and of thoughtful and states- manlike minds had come to the conclusion that other devices should be employed. Of these men perhaps the most noteworthy was Mr. John Devoy. It required some courage to preach to men of the revolutionary party any doctrine save the attempt to liberate Ireland by force of arms. Constitutional agitators had been proved in so many cases liars and traitors that constitutional agi- tation was regarded by vast numbers as a delusion and a snare ; and any plan that had even the least approach to constitutional agitation in its character was condemned beforehand. But some of the leading spirits of the revolutionary party were men above the cant of faction or the emptiness of phrases. They saw that the Land question was, after all, the fundamental question with the vast mass of the Irish people ; that that was the ques- 110 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. tion which touched their hearts, their homes, and their daily hves, and that accordingly, if some movement were started in which the land would play a prominent part, the adhesion of the farmers to the National movement would be' easily ob- tained. Revolutionists were accordingly advised to take up the ; tgitation of the Land question as the best means by which they could reach the goal of National revival. This was known at one time as " the new departure." Mr. Davitt was brought into contact with the men of this new school ; his mind was captured by the idea ; and when he returned to Ireland it was with a determination to put this new plan of action into operation. For a year he met with but little success ; the revoludonaries would not accept his plan because it was too constitutional. The con- stitutionalists rejected it as too revolutionary. The period of Davitt's arrival in Ireland was the period of dark distress from the failure of the crop which has been already described. Another event which lent force to Davitt's ideas was the action of the land-owners. They proceeded to deal with their tenantry in exactly the same way as they had done at all previous periods of dis- tress. That is to say, they took advantage of their tenants' distress to drive them out of their holdings. This will be seen more plainly by put- ting side by side the increase of the distress and the number of evictions : tHE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE 113 No, of Evictions Year. Value of Potato Crop. by Families. 1876 $60,321,910 1,269 1877 26,355,110 1,323 1878 35.897,560 1,749 1879 15,705,440 2,667 From this short table it may be gathered that the number of evictions increased in exact pro- portions to the deepening of the distress, Davitt saw how this state of things could be used for the purpose of advancing his ideas. He after- wards thus describes his mode of action : " I saw the priests, the farmers, and the local leaders of the Nationalists. I inquired and found that the seasons of 1877 ^^^ 1878 had been poor, and that a famine was expected in 1879. All the farmers and cotters were in debt to the landlords and the shopkeepers. One day in Claremorris, County Mayo — it was in March, 1879 — I was in company with John W. Walsh, of Balla, who was a commercial traveller. He is now in Australia in the interests of the Land League. He knew the circumstances of every shopkeeper in the west of Ireland — their poverty and debt, and the pov- erty of the people. He gave m.e a good deal of valuable information. I met some farmers from Irishtown, a village outside of Claremorris, and talked to them about the crops and the rent. Everywhere I heard the same story, and I at last made a proposition that a meeting be called in Irishtown to give expression to the grievances of the tenant farmers, and to demand a reduction of 1 ] 4 GLADSTONE—PARNELL. the rent. We were also to urge the abolltiori of landlordism. I promised to have the speakers there, and they promised to get the audience. I wrote to Thomas Brennan, of Dublin, John Fer- guson, of Glasgow, and other Irishmen known for their adherence to Ireland's cause, and I drew up the resolutions. The meeting was held and was a great success, there being between ten thousand and twelve thousand men present. In the pro- cession there were fifteen hundred men on horse- back, marching as a troop of cavalry; and this feature, inaugurated at Irishtown, has been con- tinued ever since at every meeting of the Land League. The meeting was not fully reported in the Dublin papers, but was, as far as the object went, a success ; for the landlords of the neigh- borhood reduced the rents 25 per cent," From this meeting at Irishtown o-rew the orreat o 00 Land League movement. However, Davitt had yet to gain the adhesion of the Parliamentary leader. The fierce obstructive fiahts in the House of Commons happened by a fortunate coincidence to be going on exactly at the same time as the threatened famine and the increasing evictions prepared the mind of Ireland for a new land movement. These strug-crles had roused the spirit and the hopes of the people, and they were above and beyond all pointing to the possibility of their finding a leader who had the necessary courage, determination, and skill to lead a new MR. JuoEi'H CHAMBERLAIN, M. P. THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 115 land movement to victory. Mr. Davitt early appreciated the fact that if he were to make a successful land movement he should secure the leadership of Mr. Parnell for it, as he alone among the Parliamentarians of that day had the necessary magnetism and other qualities for such an arduous and perilous enterprise. But he did not find in Mr. Parnell inmiediate assent to his proposals ; for Davitt's schemes, not merely in their means but in their ends, went far beyond any plans that had yet been formulated by any Irish organization or any Irish politician. The Land reformers in Ireland had always demanded as the goal and limit of its efforts what came to be known as the " Three F's ; " that is to say, Fixity of tenure, Free sale, and Fair rent. The demands for these con- cessions had been urged for more than forty years, and had formed the subject of innumerable bills in the House of Commons, of countless mis- sions, and of many successive agitations ; and in 1879, when Davitt was preparing the new move- ment, the three " F's " seemed nevertheless to be as far off realization as ever, ' Davitt's startling proposal was that in place of urging this moderate demand, which appeared unattainable, they should advance to a far more drastic proposal for the settlement of the land question. This suggestion, curiously enough, had first been made by English statesmen. John Stuart Mill, the great English economist, Mr. Bright, the great English tribune, lie GLADSTONE— PARiSTELL. had both suggested that the real and final remedy for the land struggle of Ireland was the establish- ment, through the state, of that system of peasant proprietors which had brought wealth and inde- pendence out of poverty and servitude in France, Germany, and Austria. Davitt now proposed to drop the proposal for the three Fs, and to stop nothing short of the declaration that the occupy- ing tenantry of Ireland should be transformed into proprietors of the soil. Mr. Parnell, although he is bold and audacious in enterprise, is a cool and cautious calculator of means towards ends. Up to this time he had never dreamt of making- a step beyond the demand for the three F's ; and he long hesitated before he' could accept the pro- posal of Davitt; but at last he embraced Davitt's programme ; he went to a meeting at Westport, and preached the doctrine of peasant proprietor, and so the most popular figure of Ireland had crossed the Rubicon : the land movement now must go on to great victory or disastrous shame. Thus it was that the great Land League move- ment took its start. It was a movement that grew rather than was made. The circumstances of the time made it necessary. All that was wanted was now supplied. There was a leader of the necessary boldness and adroitness to direct and to guide it ; and soon from one end of Ireland to another there were bodies of farmers ready to go in for the struggle. THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. I17 Matthew Harris is one of the most interesting and strikinor figures of the Irish movements of the last thirty years. During all this period he has devoted himself with self-sacrificing and unremit- ting zeal to the attainment of complete redress of his country's grievances. In this respect poli- tics are with him an absorbing passion, almost a religion. In the pursuit of this high and noble end he has risked death, lost liberty, ruined his business prospects. Eager, enthusiastic, vehe- ment, he has at the same time that grim tenacity of purpose by which forlorn hopes are changed into triumphant fruitions. He has fought the battle against landlordism in the dark as well as in the brightest hour with unshaken resolution. Reared in the country, from an early age he saw landlordism in its worst shape and aspect ; his childish recollections are of cruel and heartless evictions. Thus it is that in every movement for the liberation of the farmer or of Ireland during the last thirty years he has been a conspicuous figure, as hopeful, energetic, laborious in the hour of despair, apathy, and lassitude, as in times of, universal vigor, exultation, and activity. Matthew Harris made war on landlordism, which in the county of Gal way had been particu- larly atrocious for many years before the Land League was thought of; and in this way his ac- tions became the germ of a new movement. And now we have come to a point in our nar- 118 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. rative that makes it necessary to give a short his- torical retrospect.- How comes it that the Land question- in Ireland has grown to be a question of life and death to the Irish people ? Is the land system in Ireland the same as in America or in other countries ? And how is it that there has grown up between the landlord and the occupier of the Irish soil a feud so bitter, a hatred so deadly ? These questions compel a short sketch of the land struggle. A short sketch, indeed ; and yet any sketch, however long, would, in point of fact, be all too brief to convey any adequate idea of the wretched history of Ireland's wrongs. For the struggle in Ireland, from the very outset, has been a land struggle. Every combination against the Saxon invader has been a land league ; almost every new creation in the Irish peerage has been simply the transfer of some land grabber into the galaxy of the Anglo-Hibernian aristocracy. It is a mis- erable story, sickening in its details ; but there is no alternative. Any view of the situation which leaves out of the account this lono- catalogue of the crimes of the rich man against the poor man in Ireland must altogether fail of its purpose. The sketch is brief, not for lack of material to make it long ; but our purpose in this book is not to repeat in detail the old story of shame and crime and misery. Our narrative is not designed as a chronicle of Ireland's wrong's so much as a THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 119 new gospel of hope, and a prophecy of future peace and prosperity for that unhappy country. The situation at present is, indeed, full of hope and promise ; but the full end is not yet attained. The goal seems near at hand ; but the need for united action, wise counsels, persistence and pa- tience, was never greater than now. England has been forced to hear Ireland's complaints ; her best statesmen have been found not unwilling to concede the essential part of what Ireland claims ; and even the majority of those who oppose most strongly the plans of settlement which have been offered profess to object to the details of those plans rather than to the essential principles in- volved. There is, then, every reason for the friends of Ireland to be of good cheer. CHAPTER III. THE LAND WAR. THE history of Ireland for centuries — the his- tory of Ireland to-day — is largely the strug- gle for the possession of the land. Behind the Land question stands the larger and higher ques- tion of National rights ; but the land struggle has always been present to add fierceness to the de- sire for National liberty. The possession of the land forms in most coun- tries the ground and bottom subject of struggle ; but the fierceness of the fight is naturally pro- portioned to the prominence which agriculture holds in the economy of a state. In countries with huge manufacturing industries the struggle for the land has not the same intensity as in coun- tries where farmingr is the main if not the sole re- source of the people. Again, the keenness of land struggles is proportionate to the other dif- ferences in the combatants by which it may be accompanied. There are states where the strug- gle between the owner and the occupier of the soil is a struggle between men of the same race and the same creed ; and naturally struggles in (120) THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. ;I21 such countries have not the terrible and passion- ate hatred of struggles in countries where the di- vergence of interest is accompanied by difference of faith and blood. And finally, the battle for the land is fiercest of all in a country where the power on the side of the owner is that of another and a foreign nation. In Ireland all the conditions that make the land-owner fierce and relendess coexist. The ownership of the soil was transferred from the Catholic and the Celt to a Protestant and a Saxon ; the occupier of the soil was robbed of his heritao-e in a land where the cultivation of the soil O was the one and only means of making a liveli- hood, and all this was done through the agency of England and in the interests of Englishmen and English policy. The struggle between the native race of Ireland and the intrusive English landlord-class for the possession of the soil of that oppressed country may be said to date from 1169, when Richard Fitzstephen landed near Wexford with the advance party of Strongbow's famous bands. The first invaders were Norman and Welsh rather than English ; and the first enemies they met were Danes rather than Irish. Still from this time dates the attempt (long continued, but for centuries unsuccessful) to substitute feudal laws and the feudal land tenure for the semi-commuqal land systen? which was that of the native Irish popu- lation. From this seed sprang the baleful upas 122 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. tree of English op[)ression, which was destined to overshadow the whole country for ages. There is little doubt that the first cause of the difficulty between the English and natives was largely a misapprehension The Anglo-Normans were ignorant of the Irish land tenures, and of their system of septs and tribes ; and they seem never to have suspected that there was any people in the world which did not hold their land by a tenure like their own. Dermod MacMorrough is said to have given Strongbow his only child Eva in marriage, and with her to have granted certain lands in perpetuity. Now it is most certain, first, that the lands which Dermod is said to have granted were never his ; and next that if they had been his, he would have had no right, by Irish law, to convey them out of his sept. The Norman feudal laws, however, w^ould have made Eva sole heiress of her father's pow-er (a thing unknown in old Irish law), as well as the inheritress of all the lands in his kingdom. Quite in the same line of stupidity and ignorance has been the much more recent experience of the British in India, where, for more than a century, they kept confis- cating and granting lands to wdiich they had no right. Until very recent years they seem to have had no conception or suspicion of the fact that they wej-e violating all the immemorial land laws and traditional rights of an ancient and intelli- gent people, and making deep wounds which THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 123 the East Indian races will never forget nor forgive. As early as 121 7 marks of strong mutual hatred between the Irish and Anglo-Irish begin to appear. All through the later feudal reigns there were fre- quent de^ds of blood. The English looked upon the Irish as no better than wild beasts ; and the Irish returned their scorn with the bitterest hatred. The " great Talbot," immortalized by Shakes- peare, was in truth an able soldier, though feeble in council; yet towards the Irish people he acted with extreme barbarity. An old Irish chronicle says that he was " a son of curses for his venom, and a devil for his evil deeds ; and the learned say of him that there came not from the time of Herod [Pilate], by whom Christ was crucified, any one so wicked in evil deeds." It is not necessary to go back to the first In- vasion of Ireland by the English or even to some centuries later in order to find the origin of the present land system. For several centuries after the English had invaded Ireland the English kings had but a small extent of territory; and their authority was shadowy and shifting. More- over the English invaders in time mingled with the Celtic inhabitants ; adopted their customs, their dress, and their sentiments ; took their wives from among them ; and in time were so thoroughly transformed. that they were described in the well- known phrase, Hiberniores Hibernis ipsis. But the -English authorities looked on these proceed- 124 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. ings with evil eye ; passed laws inflicting heavy fines upon the English settlers who thus inter- mingled with the Irish race. Indeed they went even further; for one of the laws passed in the reign of Henry VI. made it felony on the- part of an English merchant to sell his goods to an Irish- man. The relations between the English settled in the counties around Dublin — the region was known as The Pale — and the Irish throughout the rest of Ireland, throughout all those centuries, were those of perpetual and incessant war. The Irish were regarded as .enemies whom it was lawful to rob and to slay and desirable to exter- minate. Then, as for many centuries afterwards, it was the policy of English statesmen and soldiers to exterminate the Irish race from the face of Ire- land and substitute therefor a purely English population. The Irish were foreigners In every sense of the word. The whole policy of this period is put with excellent terseness and lucidity by Sir John Davies. Sir John Davies was At- torney-General of the English authorities in the reign of James I., and he has left most interesting and valuable accounts of his times. " In all the Parliament Rolls," he writes, " which are extant, from the fortieth year of Edward III., when the statutes of Kilkenny were enacted, till the reign of King Henry VIII., we find the de- generate and disobedient English called rebels; but the Irish which were not in the King's peace THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 125 are called enemies. Statute Kilkenny, c. i, lo and II ; 2 Henry IV., c. 24; 10 Henry VI., c. i, 18 ; 18 Henry VI., c. 4, 5 ; Edward IV., c. 6 ; 10 Henry VII., c. 17. All these statutes speak of English rebels and Irish enemies ; as if the Irish had never been in the condition of subjects, but always out of the protection of the law, and were indeed in worse case than aliens of any foreign realm that was in amity with the crown of Eng- land. For by divers heavy penal laws the English were forbidden to marry, to foster, to make gos- sips with the Irish, or to have any trade or com- merce in their markets or fairs ; nay, there was a law made no longer since than the twenty-eighth year of Henry VIII., that the English should not marry with any person of Irish blood, though he had gotten a charter of denization ; unless he had done both homage and fealty to the King in the Chancery, and were also bound by recogni- zance with sureties, to continue a loyal subject Whereby it is manifest, that such as had the gov- ernment of Ireland under the crown of England did intend to make a perpetual separation and enmity between the English and the Irish, pre- tending, no doubt, that the English should in the end root out the Irish ; which the English 7tot be- ing able to do, caused a perpetual war between the nations, which continued for four hundred and odd years, and would have lasted to the world's end, if in the end of Queen Elizabeth's reign the 126 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. Irish had not been broken and conquered by the sword, and since the beginning of his majesty's reign been protected and governed by the law." It will be remarked that in the extract just given Sir John Davies illustrates his statements with true lawyer-like accuracy by references to the leading cases which corroborate them. In the same series of historical tracts — as they are called — in which he lays the foregoing propositions down, he illustrates the ideas of the times still more clearly by quoting some well-known trials in which there was an Englishman of The Pale on one side and an Irishman on the other. In the one case the Irishman sues the Englishman for trespass ; and the plea of the Englishman is not a denial of the offence but that the Irishman is not an Englishman nor a member of five families whom the English King Henry II. exempted from the laws against the Irish ; and the plea being es- tablished the Irishman is non-suited. In the sec- ond case an Englishman is charged with the mur- der of an Irishman ; and his plea is a confession of guilt as to the murder accompanied by the de- mand that, as the murdered man was an Irishman, the punishment should not be death but the pay- ment of a fine. On the other hand the Irishman that killed an Englishman was always hanged. Indeed there are several statutes that openly preached the assassination, , of Irishmen- found THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 127 within English territory as a duty and a service to the state. Thus in the re'iQ-n of Edward IV. a statute was passed, intituled — " An Act that it shall be law- full to kill any that is found robbing by day or night, or going or coming to rob or steal, having no faithfull man of good name or fame in their company in English apparrel : " Whereby it was enacted — "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, in or out, going, or coming, having no faithfull man of good name in their company in English apparrel upon any of the liege people of the King, that it shall be lawfull to take and kill those, and to cut off their heads, without, any impeachment of our Sovereign Lord and King, his heirs, officers, or ministers, or of any others." "Thus, in truth," justly comments Daniel O'Connell, " the only fact necessary to be ascer- tained, to entitle an Englishman to cut off the head of another man, was, that such other should be an Irishman. For if the Irishman was not rob- bing, or coming from robbing, who could say but that he might be going to rob ; ' in, or out,' as the statute -has it. And the Eng-Hshman — the cutter-off of the head— was made sole judge of where the Irishman was eoing", and of what he in- tended to do. The followers of Mahomet, with regard to their treatment of their Grecian sub- 128 GLADSTONE— PAkNELL. jects, were angels of mercy when compared with the Enorlish in Ireland. Care was also taken that no part of the effect of the law should be lost by the mistaken humanity of any individual English- man ; for an additional stimulant was given by the foUowinof section of the Act : "'And that it shall be lawful by authority of the said Parliament to the said bringer of the said head, and his ayders to the same, for to destrain and levy by their own hands, of every man having one plow-land in the barony where the said thief was so taken, two-pence, and of every man hav- ing half a plow-land in the said barony, one- penny, and every other man having- one house and goods to the value of fourty shillings, one- penny, and of every other cottier having house and smoak, one half-penny.' " There was one other provision of the English dealings with the Irish people which was as de- structive to prosperity as those cited were to the safety of Irish life. It has been the constant refrain of those who have demanded land reform for many generations that the Irish tenant gained nothing from industry ; that a premium was placed upon laziness, for, as the tenant made the land more fertile, the landlord came and pocketed the increase by raising the rent. At an early stage in Irish history the Irish tenant had to live under this destructive condition. Again let us ijo to the writings of an English official for our description of this grievance. THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 129 "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 soldier ; Avho, as the phrase of the Scripture is, did eat up the people as it were bread ; for that he had no other entertain- ment. This extortion was originally Irish ; for they used to lay bonaghf^ upon their people, and never gave their soldiers any other pay. But when the English had learned it they used it with more insolence, and made it more intolerable ; for this oppression was not temporary, nor limited either to place or time ; but because there was everywhere a continual war, either offensive or 'defensive, and every lord of a county, and every marcher, made war and peace at his pleasure, it became universal and perpetual ; and indeed was the most heavy oppression that ever was used in any Christian or heathen kingdom. — And there- fore, vox oppi^essorum, 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 continuance ; but the plagues of Ireland lasted four hundred years together." The natural consequences followed; they may * " Bonaght " was the Iiish term for billeting of soldiers, with a right to be maintained in food. 130 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. as well and cannot be better described than in the words of Davies : " 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 labored all the year, the soldier in one niorht consumed the fruits of all his labor, longique perit labor writus anni. — Had he reason then to manure the land for the next year? Or rather, might he not complain as the shepherd in Virgil : " ' Impius h£EC tarn culta novalia miles habebit? Barbaras has segetes ? En quo discordia cives Perduxit miseros ? En quels consevimus agros ? ' "And hereupon of necessity came depopulation, banishment, and extirpation of , the better sort of subjects ; and such as remained became idle and lookers-on, expecting the event of those miseries and evil times, so as their extreme extortion and oppression hath been the true cause of the idle- ness of this Irish nation, and that rather the vulgar sort have chosen to be beggars in foreign countries than to mShure their fruitful land at home." It will probably occur to the reader that the horrible oppression thus inflicted on the Irish must have been largely the result of their own folly or ferocity. It will be answered that it was a case of constant and incessant war between two forces equally barbarous, relentless, and irrecon- THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 131 cllable, and that if the Irish were savagely treated and regarded as foes to be exterminated by the En^hsli of The Pale, it was because the Engflish of The Pale were as savagely treated by the Irish and equally regarded as wild beasts to be extir- pated. But against this theory we call in again the evidence of the English monarch's Attorney- General : " But perhaps," writes Sir John Davies, antici- pating this objection, "the Irish in former times did wilfully refuse to be subject to the laws of Eng- land, and would not be partakers of the benefit thereof, though the Crown of England did desire it; and therefore they were reputed aliens, out- laws, and enemies. Assuredly the contrary doth appear." And in page loi he expressly declares, — * "That for the space of two hundred years at least, after the first arrival of Henry II. in Ireland,, the Irish would have gladly embraced the laws of England, and did earnestly desire the benefit and protection thereof; which, being denied them, did of necessity cause a continual bordering war be- tween the Eng-lish and Irish." And finally he admirably sums up the whole case when he w^-ites : " This, then, I note as a great defect in the civil policy of this kingdom ; in that for the space of three hundred and fifty years at least after the conquest first attempted, the English laws were J32 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. not communicated to the Irish, nor the benefit and protection thereof allowed unto them, though they earnestly desired and sought the same : for as long as they were out of the protection of the law, so as every Englishman might oppress, spoil, and kill them without control, how was it possible they should be other than outlaws and enemies to the Crown of England ? If the king would not admit them to the condition of subjects, how could they learn to acknowledge and obey him as their sovereign ? When they might not con- verse or commerce with any civil man, nor enter into any town or city without peril of their lives, whither should they fly but into the woods and mountains, and there live in a wild and barbarous manner?" Before leaving this part of the subject there is one other point that deserves to be noticed. The continuance of the destructive estrangement al- ready described between the English authorities and the Irish population was not merely against the wishes of the Irish but possibly also against the wishes of English kings and of prudent Eng- lish ministers. It was the great Lords who really stood between the two peoples. Thus the reason why that wise monarch, King Edward III., did not extend the benefit of English protection and Eng- lish law to the Irish people was, that the great Lords of Ireland, the Wicklows, the Stanleys, and the Rodens of the day, certified to the king, — tHlS GREAT IkrStt STRUGGLE. 133 "That the Irish might not be naturalized, with- out being of damage or prejudice to them, the said Lords, or to the Crown." This point is put still more clearly in the history of Ireland written by a Protestant clergyman, named Leland : " The true cause which for a long time fatally opposed the gradual coalition of the Irish and English race, under one form of government, was, that the great English settlers found it more for their immediate interest, that a free course should be left to their oppressions ; that many of those whose lands they coveted should be considered as aliens ; tha,t they should be furnished for their petty wars by arbitrary exactions ; and in their rapines and massacres be freed from the terrors of a rigidly impartial and severe tribunal." These extracts sufficiently indicate the rela- tions that existed between the English conquerors and the Irish inhabitants. It was not unnatural under such circumstances that the territories of the English kings did not increase ; at one time they had fallen as low as four counties out of the entire country. The wars of the Roses too so much occupied the attention of the English at home that the Irish were able to drive the English out of town after town, and finally out of county after county until the reign of Henry VIII. The reign of Henry VIII. was marked by several rebellions against the English authority. i34 GLADSTONE— f>Akl^feLL. In the course of these rebellions many severe battles were fought ; Irish chiefs were conquerors and conquered ; if they conquered they were ac- cepted, if they were conquered they were brought to London and after a short period in the Tower were hanged as traitors at Tyburn. In this way the seeds were sown of severe and bitter trouble in the reign of Elizabeth. By this time too the design of extending the Protestant religion in Ireland and crushing the Catholic had taken shape; and wars ensued which were embittered by re- ligious passion and by the still more destructive factor of greed for land. It is not our purpose to detail the history of these wars. They have im- portance for the present purpose only in so far as they bear upon the land struggle and explain the state of the land question as it exists to-day. Suffice it then to say that all the great families of Ireland, and in particular the great Anglo-Irish families, rose in succession against the Queen's power. Of all these chiefs the most important was Shane O'Neill. Shane O'Neill is one of the great men of human history. With his cunning he baffled the skilful councillors of Elizabeth ; in bat- tle after battle he conquered the largest and bravest armies the British Queen could send against him, and finally, when he had become master of all Ulster, he ruled it with greater order than had ever been even approached before his time. In the end, after many changes of fortune, his forces were THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 135 routed ; he himself, flying before the triumphant English army, was assassinated, and his kingdom was broken up and scattered. A short time previously rebellions under the Geraldines had been beaten in the southern parts of the country. With the defeat of the O'Neill the conquest of Ireland by Elizabeth was complete, and then Eliza- beth proceeded to carry out the second part of the English policy. This was to transfer the owner- ship, and, so far as possible, the occupation of the soil from the native Irish to English lords and English husbandmen. Thus began the first great era of confiscation and plantation. A preliminary to these steps was deemed necessary. There was a series of expeditions to the different parts of Ireland, which should prepare them still better for the new regime. These expeditions had purposes as fell and were carried out by means as execrable as any re- corded in history. The purpose was not simply to break the forces or quell the spirit of the native population : the object was to actually clear the island of Irish settlers by a war of extermination. Previously and simultaneously was there made another and a disastrous change in the Irish law. " Before the introduction of the feudal English system of tenure," writes T. • M. Healy, "the lands of Ireland belono-ed to the clans of Ireland. The chief, subject to certain privileges appur- tenant to his chieftaincy, held only as trustee for 136 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. the tribe, and if by his misfeasance he became personally dispossessed, the rights of his people were in no wise affected. When, however, the councillors of Elizabeth determined to subjugate the entire island, and to substitute British for Brehon law throughout its whole extent, prince and people alike suffered when defeated. Victory for the English resulted in the dispossession and spoliation of the clansmen as well as of the chiefs who led tliem to the battle; English adventurers, Ky the Queen's patent, obtained lordship and dominion over the conquered territory ; and clan ownership gave place to private property in land." And now for the military expeditions which were to complete the work that had been begun by the conquest of O'Neill and the change in the land law. These expeditions, like other events already recorded, we can describe, fortunately, not in the hot language of modern Irish writers, but in -the frigid and unadorned characters of the Englishmen who themselves enacted them and immediately after described them. Mr. Froude transcribes from his own report the following letter written in the year 1576, by Malby, the President of Connaught : "At Christmas,'- he wrote, "I marched into their territory [Shan Burke's], and finding courteous dealing with them had like to have cut my throat, I thought good to take another course, and so THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. ^37 with determination to consume them with fire and sword, sparing neither old nor young, I entered their mountains. I burnt all their corn and houses, and committed to the sword all that could be" found, where were slain at that time above sixty of their best men, and among them the best leaders they had. This was Shan Burke's country. Then I burnt Ulick Burke's country. In like manner I assaulted a castle where the o-arrison surrendered. I put them to the misericordia of my soldiers. They were all slain. Thence I went on, sparing none which came in my way, which cruelty did so amaze their followers, that they could not tell where to bestow themselves. Shan Burke made means to me to pardon him, and forbear killing of his people. I would not hearken, but went on my way. The gentlemen of Clanrickard came to mc. I found it was but dallying to win time, so I left Ulick as little corn and as few houses standing as I left his brother, and what people was found had as little favor as the other had. It was all done in rain, and frost, and storm, journeys in such weather bringing them the sooner to submission. They are humble enough now, and will yield to any terms we like to offer them." There are descriptions of similar expeditions in Munster. They are also drawn by English hands. It is a report by Sir George Carew, the English General. 138 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. " The President having received certaine infor- mation that the Mounster fuo-itives were har- boured in those parts, having before burned all the houses and corne, and taken great preyes in Owny Onubrian and Kilquig, a strong and fast countrey, not farre from Limerick, diverted his forces into East Clanwilliam and Muskeryquirke, where Pierce Lacy had lately beene succoured ; and harassing the country, killed all mankind that were found therein, for a terrour to those as should o-ive releefe to runagfate traitors. Thence wee came into Arleaghe woods, where wee did the like, not leaving behind us man or beast, corne or cattle, except such as had been conveyed into castles," — Pacata Hibernia, 659. " No spectacle," writes Morrison, an English Protestant historian of these wretched times, " was more frequent in the ditches of the towns, and especially in wasted countries, than to see multitudes of these poor peoplfe, the Irish, dead, with their mouths all colored green by eating nettles, docks, and all things they could rend above ground." And now that the native race had thus been destroyed, there comes the result for which the destruction had taken place. Confiscation follows extirpation, "Proclamation," says Godkin, in his "Land War," " was made throughout England, inviting 'younger brothers of good families' to undertake THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. I39 the plantation of Desmond — each planter to ob- tain a certain scope of land, on condition of set- tling thereupon so many families — ' none of the native Irish to be admitted.' Under these condi- tions, Sir Christopher Hatton took up 10,000 acres in Waterford ; Sir Walter Raleigh, 12,000 acres, partly in Waterford and partly in Cork ; Sir William Harbart, or Herbert, 13,000 acres in Kerry ; Sir Edward Denny, 6,000 acres in the same county ; Sir Warren St. Leger, and Sir Thomas Norris, 6,000 acres each in Cork ; Sir William Courtney, 10,000 acres in Limerick; Sir Edward Fitton, 11,500 acres in Tipperary and Waterford; and Edmund Spenser, 3,000 acres in Cork, on the beautiful Blackwater. The other notable undertakers were the Hides, Butchers, Wirths, Berkleys, Trenchards, Thorntons, Bourch- ers, Billingsleys, etc. Some of these grants, es- pecially Raleigh's, fell in the next reign to Richard Boyle, the so-called ^ great Earl of Cork ' — proba- bly the most pious hypocrite to be found in the longr roll of the ' Munster Undertakers.' " And so ended the first great work of trans- ferrinor the soil of Ireland. The work continued throughout the three following reigns. The Irish hailed the accession of the son of the Catholic Mary of Scotland with great joy and hopes for a happier era for their faith and coun- try, but they were destined to be cruelly and quickly undeceived, One gf the earliest acts of 140 GLADSTONE— PARNELL, the King was a declaration that liberty of con- science was not to be granted; but it soon be- came evident that the policy of Anglicising Ire- land begun in' the previous reign was to be carried > out in the present in a thorough and systematic manner. The King had fixed his eyes on Ulster as a fitting quarter in which to carry out a scheme of plantations, and a scheme for getting rid of the native chiefs was speedily developed. This was found in the discovery of an anonymous letter conveniently discovered at the door of the Coun- cil Chamber in Dublin Castle, disclosing a con- spiracy on the part of the Earls of O'Neill and O'Donnell against the authority of the Crown. No evidence was then nor has been since discov- ered, of this alleged conspiracy, but the earls were at once proclaimed traitors and fled the kinofdom with their families and a few friends and retainers. Ulster was now ready to James' hand. It was described as a fertile province, well watered, plentifully supplied with all the necessaries for man's subsistence, and yielded abundant products for purposes of commerce. The lands were in- deed occupied by the Irish natives, who had on the King's accession been assured in their possession of their fields on a tenure which would remain un- affected by the submission or rebellion of their chiefs. But they could be easily dealt with. A proclamation was issued confiscating and THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 141 vesting in the Crown six counties in Ulster — Tyrone, Derry, Donegal, Armagh, Fermanagh, and Cavan, comprising in all three and three- quarter millions of acres. The scheme of settle- ment was carefully designed to avoid the errors of former plantations. Those in previous reigns had been acknowledged failures, by reason of the enormous size of the grants made to the " under- takers." The J' undertakers," as Sir Walter Ra- leigh and his countrymen were called, found their grants too large to settle and farm personally. They returned for the most part to England, took no trouble to plant English farmers in the land, suffered the Irish to remain on the land, and drew their rents in peace. In Ulster, however, the tracts were to be of manageable extent ; the natives were to have lo- cations of their own to which they were to be removed ; the new settlers, drawn from England and Scotland, were to be massed and grouped together for mutual protection. The escheated lands were to be divided into lots of from i,ooo to 2,000 acres, at rents of i^d. to 2^^^, per acre, and distributed partly among the new settlers, pardy among English servitors, and partly among the well-affected natives. Every "undertaker" bound himself to plant on the soil a certain num- ber of fee-farmers, lease-holders, artisans, and laborers, down to the lowest grade ; all grantees and their tenants were to take the oath of su- ;^42 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. premacy, and none were permitted to employ natives or Catholics in any capacity whatsoever. Of the three and three-quarter millions of acres which were confiscated, about one-fifth was valua- ble or " fat " land, and this was mainly appor- tioned in this manner. Fifty Englishmen and fifty-nine Scotchmen (the needy countrymen of the King) got among them 162,500 acres. The most noticeable names among the .English plant- ers were Powell, Heron, Ridgway, Willoughbie, Parsons, Audley, Davis, Blennerhasset, Wilson, Cornwall, Mansfield, and Archdale, and among the Scotch Douglas, Abercorn, Boyd, Stewart, Cunningham, Rallston, and the prolific breed of the Hamiltons, who obtained estates by the thousand acres in every one of the six counties, and whose descendants are to be found to-day in every office of profit and emolument in the country. Sixty servitors, or persons who had served the Crown in a civil or military capacity, swallowed up 50,000 acres, and among these were some of the prominent organizers of this wholesale plun- der and some of the cruel enemies and oppressors of the Celtic population. Chief amongst these were Sir Toby Caulfield, Sir William Parsons, surveyor-general of the lands, ancestor of the present Lord Rosse, Sir Robert Wingfield, astute legal sycophant, Sir John Davis, Sir Henry Fol- liot, the merciless Sir Arthur Chicester, lord THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 143 deputy and superintendent of the plantation, and captains and lieutenants of lesser fame, Cooke, Atherton, Stewart, Vaughan, Browne, Atkinson, etc. Seventy-seven thousand acres fell to the share of the Protestant bishops, deans and chap- ter, who had already obtained possession of all the Catholic churches and abbeys throughout the island. Trinity College, Dublin, founded in the late reign, obtained 30,000 acres (47,101 acres were reserved for corporate towns), and the 286 so-styled loyal Irish received about 180 acres each, of what, it may be safely asserted, was the most unprofitable portion of the "lean." The Corporation of the City of London, and the twelve City Guilds, the Companies of Skinners, Fishmongers, Haberdashers and the like, took up the whole county of Derry, 209,800 acres in ex- tent, and absentee proprietors on a large scale have draw^n rents from that time to the present from lands they have never seen. Meantime, the native peasantry were driven out of their tribal lands, the rich glens of Antrim, the meadow lands of Fermanagh, the fertile plains of Armagh, into the waste-lands, mountain, moor, bog, marsh of these and the adjoining counties. Shielded, favored, and aided by the law, the success of the plantation made itself apparent when in a few years commissioners were sent down to report progress. The English and 144 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. Scotch grantees were actually occupying their lands with their wives and families. The village of Derry had become the town of " London- derry," with ramparts twelve feet thick, and bat- tlemented gates. Castles, mansions, farm-houses, sprang up everywhere; millwheels turned, or- chards bloomed, villages and towns rose all around. Nevertheless the strict letter of the scheme was not and could not be carried out. Sufficient laborers of British birth could not be obtained, and numbers of the natives had to be employed as " hewers of wood and drawers of water," and also as tenants, who, in order to remain in their beloved homes, were willing to pay double rents to new masters. And many English and Scotch tenants, failing to obtain from the large proprie- tors the long leases guaranteed to them by the terms of the act of settlement, sold their interest in their holdings to the Irish and others, and re- tired in disgust from the country. It was mainly in this manner sprang up the custom of Ulster Tenant-right as a part of the unwritten law of the province, destined to share largely in the causes which operated to contrast the well-being of its land-occupiers with the insecurity and misery of the same class in other parts of Ireland. The effect of the Ulster settlement was to create a lesser Britain in Ireland, composed of men whose very proximity to their plundered THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 145 neighbors seemed to arouse their worst passions of hatred and sectarian bitterness. It deprived the native Irish of all title to the lands which their race had held from time immemorial, and reduced them at one sweep from the position of owners of the soil they tilled to that of oudaws or tenants- at-will, only countenanced through sheer neces- sity, and established between Ulster and the other provinces of Ireland a contrast at once pro- found and painful, and a discord of religion, feel- ing and nationality which has often manifested themselves since in civil disorder and disgraceful feuds, and which are only slowly disappearing in our own day. The coffers of James were so well filled with the profits of the Ulster settlement — with the pro- ceeds of the sale of broad acres and brand-new baronetcies — that his eyes turned to the other parts of Ireland for similar spoil. And a system of plunder by legal chicanery was invented. The counties still inhabited by the native Irish were Wicklow, Wexford, and those lying along the left bank of the Shannon, viz., Leitrim, Longford, and the western portion of Westmeath, Kings, and Queens Counties. "A Commission of Inquiry Into Defective Titles " was sent down into these districts with directions to collect evidence as to the holding of the land therein, and what title the Crown had in any part of the same. It was gravely asserted -[ 46 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. that, whereas the Anglo-Norman settlers to whom the Plantagenet Kings granted these lands 300 years back had in later evil days been driven from their grants by the original native owners, and retired to England, the deserted lands had, through the action of various statutes against absentees, reverted" to the Crown. To give an appearance of legality to the pro- ceedings of the Commission, juries were empan- elled and forced to give verdicts in favor of the Crown ; witnesses were compelled to supply satisfactory evidence — the means employed for the purpose being of the most revolting descrip- tion. Courts-martial were held before which un- willing witnesses, were tried on charges of treason,, imprisoned, pilloried, branded with red-hot irons, and even put to death, some being actually roasted on gridirons over^ charcoal fires. A horde of " discoverers" sprang up whose business it became to pick holes in men's titles to estates,' sharing the proceeds with the King. Every legal trick and artifice w^as unscrupulously resorted to. The old pipe-rolls in Dublin and the patent rolls in the Tower of London were searched to dis- cover flaws in titles, clerical errors, inaccurate wording, every defect in fact which might frighten the present holder of the land into paying a heavy amount for a fresh patent, or, failing his ac- quiescence, would entitle the handing over of his estate to some " discoverer," willing to lay down THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 24*7 a round sum for it. By such means as these over 430,000 acres were confiscated in the coun- ties above mentioned. The old proprietors were required to sign surrenders of their lands, and after setting apart a considerable portion for glebes, etc., and a fourth part for English " under- takers," the remainder was restored to " the more deserving- " at fixed rents. In Longford the natives obtained less than one- third of the land promised them, in Leitrim half, in Queens county about two-thirds. In Wexford thirty-one "undertakers " obtained 33,000 acres, and only fifty-seven natives received any land at all, and that to the amount of 24,615 acres of the most unprofitable portion. The residue of the in- habitants of this county, some 14,500 persons, were given merely the choice of being evicted or becoming tenants-at-will. Many of the old pro- prietors took to the woods and became " outlaws;" others like the tribe of the O'Moores in Queens county were transplanted bodily into Kerry. In Wicklow the O'Byrnes, whose estates cov- ered half the county, were imprisoned on a charge of conspiracy, trumped up against them by Sir William Parsons, Lord Esmond, Sir Richard Graham and other prominent undertakers, on the evidence of notorious thieves. They were ulti- mately declared innocent and set at liberty, but their lands had been in the meantime declared forfeit and divided between Parsons and Esmond, and were not afterwards restored to them. 148 GLADSTONE— MRNELL. The King profited immensely by the various fines and forfeitures, and the customs duties swelled in a single year from ;^5o to ^10,000. The plantation policy flooded Ireland with a host of impecunious Englishmen and Scotch- men — admittedly the scum of both nations — debtors, bankrupts, fugitives from justice, land- jobbers and land-speculators, who soon, through ownership of land, secured power, influence and rank. They held aloof from the natives, culti- vated the " Castle," and were the embryo of the Protestant ascendency and aristocracy of later days. More than half the present Irish peerage sprang from such beginnings, of which two ex- amples will serve as types of the whole. The most remarkable of the new nobility was Richard Boyle. He was the son of a Herefordshire squire, fled from England on account of his perjuries and forgeries, and landed in Dublin with only a few pounds in his pocket. He man- aged to get the office of deputy escheator of the lands of Munster, fraudulently became pos- sessed of a considerable extent of forfeited Irish estates ; and though imprisoned for felony six times in five years cheated justice, ingratiated himself with the various lord-deputies, and finally became first Earl of Cork and a privy-councillor. Of the same kidney was William Parsons, an- cestor of the Earls of Rosse. An Enijlish ad- THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 149 venturer, arriving in Ireland with only £40 in his pocket, he married a niece of the Surveyor- General, succeeded to that office, and became a commissioner of the escheated lands in Ulster, obtaining for himself 1,890 acres in Tyrone, and 2,000 acres in Fermanagh alone. Ultimately ilirough means as unscrupulous as those by which he deprived the O'Byrnes of their lands he se- cured over 8,000 acres and amassed an immens6 fortune. The system of " inquiry into defective titles " in Leinster had proved so remunerative that James determined to extend it to hitherto un- touched parts of the island. The province of Connaught was the only one which had not been planted. The proprietors had in 161 6 made a surrender of their lands to the Kincf to receive new patents, for which they paid fees amounting to ;!^3,o0o. Owing, however, to the neglect of the clerks in Chancery, neither the surrenders nor regrants were enrolled, and the titles were all declared defective and the lands held to be vested in the Crown. A proclamation was issued for a new plantation, but the alarmed proprietors, aware that it was money the King was most in need of, offered him a bribe of ;!^i 0,000 (equal to ;^i 00,000 at the present day) to induce him to abandon his design. The death of James put an end to the negotiations, and it was reserved for his son, Charles I., to replenish the royal 160 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. coffers at the expense of the Connaught land- owners. His agent in this matter was the no- torious Wentworth, who carried out his policy of " thorough " by dragooning both the Irish Parliament and the Irish Church, forcing the one to vote enormous subsidies, and the other to ac- cept his ideas in matters of religion. Under threats of confiscation, various subsidies were ob- tained, but at last after an elaborate hunting up and inquiry into old title-deeds and royal grants, the whole of Connaught was declared to be the property of the Crown ; and Commissioners with Wentworth at their head went into the province to find verdicts for the Kinsf. These were ob- tained by the same means as had succeeded in Leinster, extreme resistance being only met with in Galway alone, where juries were fined ^4,000 apiece, and lodged in prison until the fines were paid, or their decisions retracted. The landlords at last submitted, paid heavily in fines, gave up a portion of their estates for Church purposes, and were so left in peace. The Irish met this ill-treatment on the part of the perfidious Stuart with a loyalty that may be de- scribed according to taste as generous or imbecile. When the rebellion broke out in England, Charles appealed for help to his subjects in Ireland. They rose in arms, both Catholic and Protestant, and came nearer to victory than they had been for many a long year ; and then, when Charles THE UKEAT IRISH STRUGGLE. \^l was defeated and beheaded, Vae meat's was the cry. Oliver Cromwell came to Ireland. He suc- ceeded in quelling the revolt in favor of the King after the most wholesale massacres ; and then oc- curred the greatest scheme of confiscation yet de- scribed in the history of the Irish nation. The whole of Ireland, 20,000,000 acres, was declared forfeit, and three-fourths of the inhabitants were to be expelled. Exemption was made in favor of some husbandmen, plowmen, laborers, and artificers, who would be necessary to the new planters, and of a few well affected to the Com- monwealth. The Irish soldiers who laid down their arms were forced to enlist for foreign ser- vice. The widows, wives and families of the sol- diery to the number of 100,000 souls were trans- ported to the West Indies to be the slaves or mistresses of the planters there. The rest of the Irish people — of Munster, Leinster, Ulster — gentle and simple, land-owners and burgesses, Presby- terians and Catholics, were forced, in the depth of the winter of 1655, ^^ leave their homes, and cross the Shannon to allotments assigned to them in Clare and Connaught, the most barren portions of all Ireland, where they were hemmed in by the sea on the one side and a ring of soldiers on the other, who had orders to shoot down all who attempted to cross the boundary. The evacuated land, 15,582,487 acres in extent, was then dis- tributed, the government first reserving to itself 152 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. the cities, church-lands, tithes, and the four coun- ties of Dublin, Kildare, Carlow and Cork. The cities were afterwards cleared of their inhabitants (who were nearly all of English descent) and sold to English merchants. The other twenty- three counties were then divided between those "adventurers" who had advanced money (amounting to ;^36o,ooo) to the Parliamentary army and the Parliamentary troops in lieu of arrears of pay due to them amounting to £i,- 550,000. County Louth was given wholly to the adventurers, and the counties of Donegal, Derry, Tyrone, Leitrim, Fermanagh, Cavan, Mpnaghan, Wicklow, Wexford, Longford, Kilkenny and Kerry wholly to the soldiers. Then Antrim and Limerick and the nine counties lying diagonally between them, viz., Down, Armagh, Meath, West- meath, Kildare, Carlow, Kings, Queens, and Tip- perary were divided amongst both classes of claimants. Afterwards portions of Connaught, viz., the county ^ of Sligo and parts of Mayo and Leitrim, were taken from the transplanted Irish to satisfy arrears of pay due to part of the English army who had fought in England during the civil war. Debentures were issued In recognition of each claim, and localities assigned to each regi- ment. These debentures were put up to auction, and large estates were put together by the pur- chase of them. And yet the plantation failed in its main object, THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. I53 as previous ones had done, through the gradual absorption of the planters among the native Irish notwithstanding strict prohibitions against mutual intercourse. And many estates through purchase or marriage fell again into the hands of old masters. Forty years after the settlement, it is related that numbers of the children of Crom- well's soldiers could not speak a word of English. Thus ended the last great unsettlement of the Irish land. In the rei^n of William III. there o were some large confiscations, but they sunk into insitjnificance beside the wholesale confiscations in the days of Elizabeth, James and Cromwell. The reign of William III. is mainly remarkable for the passing of what Is known as the Penal Code. The horrors of this code are increased by the fact that it was passed in spite of the solemn compact between the English and the Irish. In the civil war between James 11. and William III. the Irish with characteristic imbecility had fouofht on the side of the State. The final issue was before the city of Limerick, which was defended by Sarsfield, an Irish general of genius. After a long siege it was finally agreed that the garrison should surrender with all the honors of war, and that in return they should get con- cessions establishing fully their religious liberty. The first article of the new treaty provided that "the Roman Catholics of this kingdom shall enjoy such privileges in the exercise of religion 154 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. as are consistent with the laws of Ireland, or as they did enjoy in the reign of Charles II,, and their Majesties, as soon as their affairs will permit them to summon a Parliament in this kingdom, will endeavor to procure the Roman Catholics such further security in that particular as may preserve them from any disturbance upon the ac- count of their said religion," The ink of this was scarcely dry when Catholics were ordered at the meeting of the Irish Parliament to take an oath denying the Catholic doctrine of transub- stantiation and pronouncing the sacrifice of the Mass damnable and idolatrous. No Catholic could, of course, take such an oath, and the de- sired result was brought about. The Irish Par- liament consisted exclusively of Protestants. The penal code first took precautions against the education of Catholics, They were forbidden to keep school in Ireland and were prohibited at the same time to send their children to be edu- cated abroad ; then they were disarmed, and statutes were passed prohibiting the makers of weapons from receiving Catholic apprentices, and that authorized the authorities to search for arms in the houses of Catholics by night and by day. Catholic priests were commanded to leave the kingdom before May 9th, 1668. The bisHops and priests who ventured to enter the country were subjected to imprisonment and banishment for the first oTfence, and put to death on the second. In THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 157 'the relo^n of Anne the code was rendered still more severe. In order further to prevent the chance of education, a Catholic could not employ or act as a private tutor. He could not buy land, and if he did possess land he was obliged to leave it in equal parts among all his 'children, so that the papist land might be distributed and have no chance of accumulating. Then there was an atrocious law by which an eldest son, on becoming a Protestant, could obtain possession of the entire land and disinherit the rest of his relatives. A Catholic could not have a lease for more than thirty-one years. All the Civil Service, all the Municipalities, all the Army and the Navy, and the Professions, except that of jnedicine, were closed to the Catholics. A Catholic could not go more than five miles from his house without a pass- port. He could not keep a horse above the value of ^5. If the farm of a Catholic yielded one-third more than the yearly rent a Protestant by swearing to that fact could evict him ; and if a Protestant could be proved guilty of holding an estate in trust for a Catholic he could be dis- possessed. The Penal Code invaded domestic life. A son becoming a Protestant could demand one-third of his father's income ; a wife be- coming a Protestant was free from her husband's control and could demand alimony. The decrees against priests were rendered also severe ; 3,000 were registered, and others were liable to death, 1 58 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. and in order that no further priests might be ordained no bishop was allowed in the country. Under these laws there grew up the hateful race known to Irishmen as Priest-Hunters, who for the sake of fifty pounds' reward in the case of a bishop, twenty in the case of a priest, and ten pounds in that of a school-master, betrayed min- isters of religion and the humble promoters of education to the authorities. The Catholics refused to conform to these hideous laws. Mass was said on the mountains with scouts watching to see whether the British soldiers were approaching, and many priests fell martyrs to their creed. Finally the Catholics were prevented from voting for members of Parliament or members of cor- porations. The whole code was well summed up by the judge who declared that the law did not suppose the existence of any such person as an Irish Roman Catholic, nor could the people even breathe without the surveillance of the govern- ment. CHAPTER IV. THE DESTRUCTION OF IRISH INDUSTRIES. THE final result of it all — the massacre, the confiscation, the Penal Laws — was that at the beginning of the eighteenth century the Irish Catholics were owners of just one-seventh of the soil of Ireland. On the other hand, the landlords were placed in a position that developed between them and the tenantry the worst and the fiercest passions. They were foreigners, and they had acquired the lands of the natives by robbery or by massacre. They were Protestants, and the Penal Code, making the Catholic religion a legal offence, gave to the Protestant creed a social as- cendancy. On the one side the landlords re- garded themselves as by race and by creed ele- vated as much above the tenant as ever had South Carolina planter been over negro slaves ; and on the other hand the tenant saw in the landlord a tyrant with the hated additions of foreign blood and a different creed. From this evil state of things grew up the melancholy relations between the Irish landlord and the Irish tenant which have produced in Ireland a more morbid condition of 169 IQQ GLADSTONE— PARNELL. things than exists in any other part of the world and involved the two classes in a persistent, re- lentless, sanguinary war, which is not even yet closed, the landlords on their side treating the tenants as creatures, not merely of another race and creed, but of another and inferior species. They inflicted upon them sufferings that few men would care to inflict on the lower animals ; and the tenants responded by forming assassination lodges and perpetrating murders cold-blooded, systematic, unrepented. " Of all the fatal gifts," says Mr. Froude, deal- ing with this part of the case, " which we bestowed on our unhappy possession [Ireland], the greatest was the English system of owning land. Land, properly speaking, cannot be owned by any man — it belongs to all the human race. Laws have to be made to secure the profits of their industry to those who cultivate it ; but the private property of this or that person is that which he is entitled to deal with as he pleases ; this the land never ought to be and never strictly is. In Ireland, as in all primitive civilizations, the soil was divided among the tribes. Each tribe collectively owned its district. Under the feudal system the proprietor was the Crown, as representing the nation ; while subordinate tenures were held with duties attached to them, and were liable on their non-fulfil- ment to forfeiture. In England the burden of defence was on the land. Every gentleman, ac- THE GREAT JRISH STRUGGLE. iQl cording to his estate, was bound to bring so many men into the field properly armed and accoutred. When a standing army was substituted for the old levies, the country squires served as unpaid magistrates on the commission of the peace. The country squire system was, in fact, a develop- ment of the feudal system ; and, as we gave the feudal system to Ireland, so we tried long and earnestly to give them our landownership. The in- tention, doubtless, was as good as possible in both cases, but we had taken no trouble to understand Ireland, and We failed as completely as before. The duties attached to landed property died away or were forgotten — the ownership only re- mained. The people, retaining their tribal tra- ditions, believed that they had rights upon the land on which they lived. The owner believed that there were no rights but his own. In Eng-- land the rights of landlords have similarly sur- vived their duties, but they have been modified by custom or public opinion. In Ireland the pro- prietor was an alien, with the fortunes of the resi- dents upon his estates in his hands and at his mercy. He was divided from them in creed and language ; he despised them, as of an inferior race, and he acknowledged no interest in common with them. Had he been allowed to trample on them, and make them his slaves, he would have cared for them, perhaps, as he cared for his horses. But their persons were free, while their 132 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. farms and houses were his ; and thus his only object was to wring- out of them the last penny which they could pay, leaving them and their children to a life scarcely raised above the level of their own pigs." Meantime the British authorities took care to aggravate all the evils of the land system by an- other set of laws. Manufactures might have drawn away a section of the people from agricul- ture, and would thus have relieved the pressure upon the soil. There would then have been less of the competition which placed the tenantry at the mercy of the landlords : the landlords would have been compelled to offer the tenant lower rents : and thus manufactures would have fulfilled a double purpose — they would have given employ- ment to the persons immediately engaged in the manufactories, and would have made life easier to those outside manufacturing altogether: to those especially who were engaged in cultivating the soil. But even this outlet was forbidden, and a series of laws were passed, the effect and the deliberate object of which were to kill Irish manufactures. The attempts of England to interfere with Irish trade were made in two directions, namely, through legislative enactments in the English Parliament, and through the sinister influence of England over a too servile Irish Parliament. Looking at the relative commercial positions of THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. ]63 England and Ireland at the present day, we are apt to overlook the fact that they were considered on terms of greater natural equality in past years, and that any advantage was rather on the side of the now poorer country. England had always been jealous of the least prospect of Irish prosperity ; but it was only in the reign of Charles II. that any direct attempt was made to interfere with her growing industries. Ireland was, as of old, " rich in catde ; " and at this time had a large cattle-trade with England. Acts were passed in 1660-3 prohibiting all exports from Ireland to the colonies, also prohibiting the importation into England of Irish cattle, declaring the latter to be "a publick nuisance;" likewise forbidding the importation of Irish sheep, beef, pork, and, later on, of butter and cheese. Ire- land was also omiy;ed from the " Navigation Act," in consequence of which no goods could thenceforward be carried in Irish-built ships under penalty of forfeiture of ship and cargo. The result of these acts was to destroy the shipping trade of the country at a blow, and to so reduce the value of cattle in Ireland that " horses which used to fetch thirty shillings each were sold for dog's meat at twelve pence each, and beeves that before brought fifty shillings were sold for ten." Unable to make a profit from growing cattle, the Irish turned their pastures into sheepwalks, 164 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. and set to work to improve their woollen manu- factures with such success that the anger and jealousy of English traders were once more ex- cited, and the ruin of this trade also was decided on. An address was presented in 1698 by both English Houses of Parliament to William III., complaining of the injury done to the English woollen trade by the growth of that trade in Ire- » land, recommending its discouragement, and the encouragement, in lieu thereof, of the linen tr^de, to which both Houses promised their utmost, assistance. To this address His Majesty vouch- safed the following gracious reply : " I shall do all that in me lies to discourage the woollen man- facture in Ireland, and encourage the linen man- ufacture there, and to promote the trade of England." In view of promises of ejicouragement of the linen trade, the Irish Parliament, moved on by the King's Irish ministers, placed forthwith a pro- hibitive duty on all flannels, serges, and such like woollen stuffs ; but, not content with this, the English Parliament passed an act prohibiting the export of Irish wool or woollen goods to any port in the world, except a few English ports, and for- bidding its shipment from any but five or six ports in Ireland. It might have been expected that the promise to promote Irish linen industry would have been honorably kept. But the promise was distinctly THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 165 violated. The importation of foreign linens into the kinofdom was encourag^ed, and a disablino- duty was laid on Irish sail-cloth, in which branch of the linen trade Ireland had prospered so much as to supply sails for the whole British navy. It was, however, not only in these large indus- tries that the infatuated jealousy of England was felt ; such smaller matters as the Irish trade in glass, cotton, beer, and malt being struck at by heavy prohibitive duties. " England," says Froude, writing of these laws, " governed Ireland for her own interests ... as if right and wrong had been blotted out of the statute book of the uni- verse." The general result of these successive blows at nascent Irish industries was most disastrous. The mischief was dealt, not so much on the crushed Celtic race, as on the wealthy citizens of the towns and seaports, English-descended, and the main- stay of English ascendancy. The destruction of the woollen and linen trades fell most severely on the Protestants, and in fifty years as many as 200,000 persons left the country for North America, where they afterwards formed the back- bone of resistance to England in the War of Inde- pendence. We conclude by summarizing this sad relation of facts in the words of Lord Dufferin : " From Queen Elizabeth's reign until within a few years of the Union, the various commercial 10 1(36 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. confraternities of Great Britain never for a mo- ment relaxed their relentless grip on the trades of Ireland. One by one each of our nascent in- dustries was either strangled in its birth or bound to the jealous custody of the rival interest in England, until at last every fountain of wealth was hermetically sealed, and even the traditions of commercial enterprise have perished through desuetude. What has been the consequence of such a system, pursued with relentless pertinacity for over 250 years ? This : that, debarred from every other trade and industry, the entire nation flung itself back on 'the Imid'' with as fatal an im- pulse as when a river whose current is suddenly impeded rolls back and drowns the valley it once fertilized."* " The entire nation flung itself back on the land," with the result that the tenants were placed at the absolute mercy of the landlords. Deprived of every other form of making a livelihood, the possession of land meant the chance of life ; the want of land, the certainty of death. With such a population craving for land as hope, food, life, the landlord was in a position as supreme as the armed keeper of the stores might be with the famished victims of a shipwreck on a raft in the middle of the ocean : and most cruelly did the landlord use the omnipotence which British laws * "Irish Emigration, and the Tenure of Land in Ireland." THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 167 had thus placed in his hands. The pictures of Irish life in the eighteenth century are drawn, as those of the preceding centuries, mainly by Eng- lish 5ind Protestant hands; and they give pictures almost as horrible of the manner in which a nation can be murdered. Rack-renting and eviction and robbery by act of Parliament had been sub- stituted for massacre by the sword, but the re- sults remained the same : the people were de- stroyed. Above all, one great weapon of the days of the gentle and poetic Spenser and of the pious Cromwell still remained. Famine was at once a means and a result. English writers of the eighteenth century teem with denunciations of the rack-renting and the other cruelties inflicted by landlords upon the tenants. Bishop Berkeley describes the landlords as " men of vulturine beaks and bowels of iron." Swift, writing about 1 724, said: " These cruel land- lords are every day unpeopling the kingdom, for- bidding their miserable tenants to till the earth, against common reason and justice, and contrary to the practice and prudence of all other nations, by which numberless families have been forced to leave the kingdom, or stroll about and increase, the number of our thieves and beggars. . . . The miserable dress and diet and dwellings of the peo- ple ; the general desolation in most parts of the kingdom ; the old seats of the nobility and gentry all in ruins, and no new ones in their stead ; the 26,q GLADSTONE— fARNELL. families of farmers, who pay great rents, living in filth and nastiness, upon buttermilk and potatoes, without a shoe or stocking to their feet, or a house so convenient as an English hogsty to receive them — these, indeed, may be comfortable sights to an English spectator, who comes for a short time only to learn the language, and returns back to his own country, whither he finds all our wealth transmitted. . . . Nostra miseria magna est. There is not one argument used to prove the riches of Ireland which is not a locjical demonstration of its poverty. . . . The rise of our rents is squeezed out of the very blood and vitals and clothes and dwell- ings of the tenants, who live worse than English beggars. . . . ' Ye are idle, ye are idle,' answered Pharaoh to the Israelites, when they complained to His Majesty that they were forced to make bricks without straw." It was the sight of mis- eries such as these that sug-ofested tO' Swift his most savage and most terrible satire. It is worth while crivine an extract from his " Modest Pro- posal for Preventing the Children of the Poor from being a Burden to their Parents." It is a most eloquent picture of Ireland in those days : "The number of souls," he writes, "in this kingdom being usually reckoned one million and a half, of these I calculate there maybe about two hundred thousand couple whose wives are breeders ; from which number I subtract thirty thousand couple who are able to maintain their THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. IQQ own children (although I apprehend there cannot be so many under the present distresses of the kingdom). . . .The question, therefore, is how this number (one hundred and twenty thousand children annually born) shall be reared and pro- vided for? — which, as I have already said, under the present situation of affairs, is utterly impos- sible by all the methods hitherto proposed. . . . I do therefore offer it to the pubhck consideration, that, of the one hundred and twenty thousand chil- dren already computed, twenty thousand may be reserved for breed. . . . That the remaining one hundred thousand may, at a year old, be offered in sale to persons of quality and fortune through the kingdom, always advising the mother to let them suck plentifully in the last month, so as to render them plump and fat for a good table. . . , I have reckoned, upon a medium, that a child just born will weigh twelve pounds, and, in a solar year, if tolerably nursed, will increase to twenty- eight pounds. I grant this food will be somewhat dear, and, therefore, very proper for landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, have the best title to the children." After dilating on the succulent properties of infant flesh for nurses : " I have already computed the charge of nursing a beggar's child (in which list I reckon all cottagers, laborers, and four-fifths of the farm- ers) to be about two shillings per annum, rags included ; and I believe no gentleman would re- 170 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. pine to give ten shillings for the carcass of a good fat child, which, I have said, will make four dishes of excellent, nutritive meat, when he has only some particular friend or his own family to dine v/ith him. Thus the squire will learn to be a good landlord and grow popular among the tenants ; the mother will have ei^ht shillinors neat profit, and be fit for work till she produces an- other child." He then suggests to the " more thrifty (such as the times require) to flay the car- cass, the skin of which, artificially dressed, would make admirable gloves for ladies, and summer boots for fine gentlemen ; " " the establishment of shambles, butchers being sure not to be wanting," and the " buying the children alive, and dressing them hot from the knife as we do roasting pigs." Having thus disposed of the infants, he came to the grown-up portion of the " beggars," and at the suggestion of "a very worthy person, a true lover of his country," recommends that " the want of venison might be well supplied by the bodies of young lads and maidens, not exceeding four- teen years, nor under twelve — so great a number of both sexes being ready to starve in every county for want of work and service. . . . Neither, indeed, could he deny that if the same use were made of several plump, young girls in this town [Dublin], who, without one single groat to their fortunes, cannot stir abroad without a chair, and appear at a play-house and assemblies in foreign THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 171 fineries which they never will pay for, the king- dom would not be the worse." And lastly, as to " these vast number of poor people who are aged, diseased, and maimed," he was " not in the least pained upon that matter, because it was very well known that they were every day dying and rot- ting by cold-, famine, and filth, and vermin, as fast as could be reasonably expected." "Such," comments Healy, in his "Word for Ireland," " is the picture of Irish wretchedness when our population was only one million and a half, and before the phrase * congested districts ' was invented." The result of this state of things was that semi- starvation was chronic throughout Ireland and absolute famine periodic. In \'j2^-26—2'j-2Z there were bad harvests; and in 1739 there was severe frost. In every one of these cases there was famine. In 1 739 there was a prolonged frost, with the result that in 1740-41 there was one of the most severe famines in Irish history. This was the first occasion on which was observed the phenomenon that, as will be seen afterwards, has played a terrible and important part in Irish life. The frost brought on potato-rot, and the potato- rot brought on universal famine. There are plenty of contemporaneous records of the suffer- ing which this created. "Want and misery in every face, the rich unable to relieve the poor, the roads spread with dead and dying; mankind* of 172 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. the color of the weeds and nettles on which they feed ; two or three, sometimes more, on a car, going to the grave, for the want of bearers to carry them, and many buried only in the fields and ditches where they perished. Fluxes and malig- nant fevers swept off multitudes of all sorts, so that whole villages were laid waste/ If one for every house in the kingdom died, and that is very probable, the loss must be upwards of 400,000 souls. This is the third famine I have seen in twenty years, and the severest ; these calamities arise from the want of proper tillage laws to pro- tect the husbandmen." " I have seen," says Bishop Barclay, "the laborer endeavoring to M'ork at his spade, but fainting for the want of food, and forced to quit it. I have seen the aged father eat- ing grass like a beast, and in the anguish of his soul wishing for his dissolution. I have seen the helpless orphan exposed on the dunghill, and none to take him in for fear of infection ; and I have seen the hungry infant sucking at the breast of the already expired parent." " I am well acquainted," said Fitzgibbon in the Irish House of Commons, in 1787 — a man who will reappear as one of the most violent sup- porters of British rule in Ireland — " with the prov- ince of Munster, and I know that it is impossible for human wretchedness to exceed that of the miserable peasantry of that province. I know that the unhappy tenantry are ground to powder THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 175 by relentless landlords. I know that far from being able to give the clergy their just dues [Protestant tithes], they have not food or raiment for themselves ; the landlord grasps the whole. The poor people of Munster live in a more abject state of poverty than human nature can be sup- posed able to bear ; their miseries are intoler- able," These sufferings led to reprisals on the part of the tenants ; and from this period there dates the rising of the organizations which gave back assas- sinations in answer to rack-rents and eviction. "White Boys," "White Feet," " Peep-of-Day Boys," " Hearts of Steel" — these are among the many designations which these bodies were called by. They were sometimes founded by Catholics and sometimes by Protestants. The " Hearts of Steel," for instance, were all Protestants, who rose against the exactions on the estates of. Lord Donegal. The Irish Parliament answered the ex- cesses of the tenants by laws the savagery of which can scarcely be understood at this day. Death became a penalty for the most trivial offence, and every assize was followed by num- bers of executions. This, then, was the condition to which British law, confiscations, and the land system had brought the Irish nation. The vast majority of the natives were in a state of beggary and starvation. The land was over- run ; manufactures were dead ; between the land- 176 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. lords and the tenants there raged civil war. All these phenomena will unfortunately reappear in the earlier part of the present century. For the present we have to pause to describe a brilliant but too brief interval in the tale of monotonous gloom. We have to tell the story of the Irish Parliament CHAPTER V. THE STCRY OF THE IRISH PARLIAMENT. IT will not be necessary for the purposes of this book to trace the history of the Irish Parlia- ment back to the dim ages in which it took its origin. It will suffice for our purpose to start from the point when the controversy between the demands of an Irish Parliament for supremacy in Ireland and the demands of the English Parlia- ment to control its proceedings came to be a burning question. The first great enactment which limited the power of the Irish Parliament is known as Poyn- ing's Law. This was passed in the reign of Henry VII. The Irish had taken the side of the Pretender Perkin Warbeck, and Sir Edward Poyning had been sent over by the King to put down the rebellion. Poyning, after some doubt- ful successes in the field, called together a Parlia- ment in Drogheda, and immediately induced it to pass a series of severe enactments against the native Irish and those English who had taken up their side and their habits. It has been seen in a preceding chapter how efforts had. been made 177 178 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. by means of the most savage laws to keep up the separation between the two races, and how, in spite of these things, the two races had com- bined and had gradually melted in spite of their different origins into one common Jiationality. In a Parliament which had met in the city of Kil- kenny in the reign of Edward III., the act known as the Statute of Kilkenny had been passed, by which it had been made high treason to bring up, marry with, foster or stand sponsor to a Celtic native of Ireland. It was also enacted that any Englishman who should dress himself after the fashion of the Irish people, adopt an Irish name, speak the Gaelic tongue, wear a moustache, as was the custom in Ireland, or ride without a sad- dle, as was also an Irish custom, had his property confiscated or was imprisoned for life if he was poor. Poyning's Parliament confirmed the Statute of Kilkenny, with important modifications made necessary by the failure of the previous enact- ment. For instance, the portions of the Statute of Kilkenny were omitted which prohibited the use of the Irish language, for by this time that language had become common even in the Eng- lish pale, and the custom of riding without a sad- dle had also become so general that it was deemed hopeless to try to prevent it. The im- portant business, however, done by the Parlia- ment of Drogheda was the passing of an act THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 179 which made two memorable and fatal laws. First, no Parliament was in future to be held In Ireland "until the chief governor and council had certified to the Kino-, under the Great Seal, as well the causes and considerations as the acts they designed to pass, and till the same should be approved by the King and Council." The effect of this act was that when any bill was passed by the Irish Parliament, it had to be approved by the English Privy Council, and the act had to be for- warded to England for the purpose of receiving their sanction or disapproval. Often bills were returned by the Privy Council completely di- vested of their orimnal meanlno-. On beino- re- turned to the Irish House of Commons no further alteration In the bill was permitted. The effect of this disastrous act was to deprive the Irish Parliament of any real power ; the au- thority given to the English Parliament was fre- quently and scandalously used, and prevented the application to Ireland of any of that broadening of popular liberties which had become apparent in England. For a considerable period the Eng- lish settlers In Ireland raised some objection to this degradation of their Parliament — for It was their own Parliament — but In later years they fully accepted it. It was made up of men of their creed and race. The Parliament was deemed by them to serve a useful purpose, because It was through the decrees of that body they were able 180 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. to finish by chicanery the transfer of the soil that had been begun by the sword. The Irish Parlia- ment was employed to pass acts of attainder and forfeiture by which the estates of the Catholic Irish landlords were handed over to the English Protestant settlers, to confirm the defective titles that had been won on the field or in the law courts, and finally to pass the penal code by which the Catholics were excluded from the ownership of property and all possible share in the govern- ment of their country. But as time went on, the Irish Protestants found that the authority of the English Parliament was intended for use against all men of Irish birth whatever their creed or their original de- scent. The great positions of the country — the judgeships, the bishoprics, the places in the House of Peers and the House of Commons, the com- mands in the army and the navy, and all the high offices of state, were, in most cases, conferred on Englishmen. Englishmen were the " fathers in God " of dioceses that they never saw ; sate for constituencies which they had never cast eyes upon ; drew the salaries of offices in which they had never done a day's work ; and outside all these great things stood shivering the Irish Prot- estants of English blood, naked and scorned. Meantime, the poverty of the country became daily deeper ; the exaction of rent grew more difficult ; the kingrdom was infested with bands of THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 181 wandering beggars ; and gentlemen of title, long descent and of ancestral homes sharing in the general ruin, found the refusal of all positions a serious aggravation of their misfortunes. In the days of Dean Swift the government of Ireland was almost entirely in the hands of the Arch- bishop of Armagh, Primate Boulter. The cor- respondence of this prelate survives, and through it we are enabled to get many valuable glimpses of what the government of Ireland meant in his days. " Boulter," writes Lecky, in " Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland," " was an honest but narrow man, extremely charitable to the poor, and liberal to the extent of warmly advocating the endowment of the Presbyterian clergy; but he was a strenuous supporter of the Penal Code, and the main object of his policy was to prevent the rise of an Irish party. His letters are chiefly on questions of money and patronage, and it is curious to observe how entirely all religious mo- tives appear to have been absent from his mind in his innumerable recommendations for church dignities. Personal claims, and above all the fitness of the candidate to carry out the English policy, seem to have been in these cases the only elementseconsidered. His uniform policy was to divide the Irish Catholics and the Irish Protes- tants, to crush the former by disabling laws, to destroy the independence of the latter by con- ferring the most lucrative and influential posts J 82 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. upon Englishmen, and thus to make all Irish in- terests strictly subservient to those of England. The continual burden of his letters is ^ the neces- sity of sending over Englishmen to fill important Irish posts. "The only way to keep things quiet here," he writes, "and make them easy to the Ministry is by filling the great places with natives of England." He complains bitterly that only nine of the twenty-two Irish bishops were Eng- lishmen, and urges the Ministers " gradually to get as many English on the Bench here as can decently be sent hither." On the death of the Chancellor, writing to the Duke of Newcastle, he speaks of "the uneasiness we are under at the report that a native of this place is like to be made Lord Chancellor." "I must request of your Grace," he adds, "that you would use your influence to have none but Englishmen put into the great places here for the future." When a vacancy in the See of Dublin was likely to occur he writes: "I am entirely of opinion that the new archbishop ought to be an English- man either already on the bench here or in Eng- land. As for a native of this country I can hardly doubt that, whatever his behavior has been and his promises may be, when he is once ij;i that sta- tion he will put himself at the head of the Irish interest in the church at least, and he will natur- ally carry with him the college and most of the clergy here." EVICTED-HOiMELESS. THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. J 83 Up to this time the protests against the degra- dation of the Irish Pariiament had been confined to the native Irish. In a famous assemblage, known as the Confederation of Kilkenny, the claim of the Irish Parliament to the exclusive power to make laws for Ireland had been asserted ; and it was laid down with even more emphasis in a Parliament called together by James II. during his war with William III. It was not till 1698 that the first Protestant voice was raised in em- phatic protest. The author of this protest was Molyneux — one of the members for Trinity Col- lege ; Molyneux was, of course, a Protestant; no- body but a Protestant at the time had a seat in the Parliament. He was a man of great learning and ability ; of which among many other proofs is the fact that he was the " ingenious friend " to whom Locke dedicated his immortal essay. Moly- neux in his book, " The Case of Ireland Stated," laid down the claim of the Irish Parliament in clear and unmistakable language. He had been induced to this train of thought by the infamous laws which had destroyed the woollen trade of Ireland, and in destroying that trade had terribly aggravated the miseries of the unhappy nation. The book was written in moderate and decorous language ; but it was too strong for the govern- ment of the day; the English Parliament decreed that it was dangerous, and that accordingly it should be burned by the common hangman. 11 ] 84 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. But the spirit which Molyneux .aroused was immortal, and indeed lies at the root of the Na- tional movement of to-day. There soon came, too, an event which was destined to aggravate the feelings of resentment which had been created by the restrictions on trade and by the rigid ex- clusion of the Irish gentry from all offices of pay and power. In the year 171 9 Hester H. Sherlock brought an action against Maurice Annesley in reference to some property in the county of Kildare. The case was tried before the Irish Court of Ex- chequer, which decided in favor of Maurice An- nesley, the respondent in the case. Hester Sher- lock brought the case on appeal to the Irish House of Peers, and they reversed the judgment of the Court'of Exchequer. Annesley then took the case to the English House of Peers, and they reversed the decision of the Irish Peers and con- firmed that of the Irish Court of Exchequer. This was regarded throughout Ireland as a gross infringement of the rights of the Irish Parliament. The Sheriff of Kildare acted upon the general opinion and recognized only the decision of the Irish House of Peers. He declined to obey the decree both of the Irish Court of Exchequer and the English House of Lords, and refused to com- ply with an order for placing Annesley in posses- sion of the property. The Court of Exchequer thereupon inflicted a fine upon the sheriff. The THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 185 Irish House of Lords removed the fine and passed a resolution declaring that the sheriff had be- haved with integrity and courage. The English Parliament was not slow to respond tothis open defiance of its authority, and it passed the famous law known as the Vlth of George I. The following extract will show what this law is : " Whereas, . . . the lords of Ireland have of late, against law, assumed to themselves a power and a jurisdiction to examine and amend the judg- ments and decrees of the courts of justice in Ire- land ; therefore, ... it is declared and enacted , . . that the King's Majesty, by and with the ad- vice and consent of the lords spiritual and tempo- ral and Commons of Great Britain in Parliament assembled, had, hath, and of right ought to have, full power and authority to make laws and stat- utes of sufficient force and validity to bind the people of the kingdom of Ireland. And it is fur- ther enacted and declared that the House of Lords of Ireland have not, nor of right ought to have, any jurisdiction to judge of, affirm, or re- verse, any judgment . . . made in any court in the said kingdom." It was in the height of the exasperation caused by arrogant denial of the rights of the Irish Par- liament that there came into Irish affairs one of the most potent influences by which they were ever guided. Dean Swift had about this time re- turned to Ireland, as he said himself, " like a rat 1 86 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. dying in its hole." He saw all around him the fearful sufferings of the people, the gross injus- tice of the landlords, the cruel harvest which the wicked legislation of England was reaping in barren fields, depopulated villages, and crowded and tumultuous beggary. It was then he began to pubUsh that series of pamphlets on the Irish question which can be read with as much profit at this day as when they were first pub- lished. They afford, perhaps, the most graphic and telling picture of a nation's misery ever pro- duced. An accident soon enabled him to bring- the growing resentment of Ireland into direct and successful collision with English authorities. Sir Robert Walpole, an English Premier of the time, gave a patent to a man named Wood for the pur- pose of coining ^8,000 in half-pence. The im- pression to-day is that the copper was badly wanted ; that Wood's half-pence were as good as those already existing, and that the Minister had no sinister idea of debasing the coinage of the country. "But," as Lecky remarks, "there were other reasons why the project was both dangerous and insulting-. Thougrh the measure was one profoundly affecting Irish interests, it was taken by the Ministers without consulting the Lord Lieutenant or Irish Privy Council, or the Parlia- ment, or any one in the country. It was another and a signal proof that Ireland had been reduced to complete subservience to England, and the THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. ]87 patent was granted to a private individual by the influence of the Duchess of Kendal, the mistress of the King, and on the stipulation that she should receive a large share of the profits." Swift published a number of letters upon the new coin, with the result that the country was roused to a state of fury. Both Houses of the Irish Parliament passed addresses against it ; grand juries of Dublin and the gentry all over the country condemned it, and finally it had to be withdrawn from circulation. The indirect effects of this were more important than the mere small point of whether the coin was genuine or base. Swift, in his book, laid down clearly the same doctrine as Molyneux of the sole right of the Irish Parliament to pass measures for Ireland. He.was a loyal subject of the King, he declared, not as King of England, but King of Ireland. Ireland was a free nation, which implied in it the power of self-legislation, for such " Government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery," says Swift ; a maxim, by the way, that applies as much to the case of Ireland to-day as to the case of Ireland in his days. Thus the demands of Ireland were once more put forward in clear terms that resounded all over the country. The second important re- sult was the union between the much-divided classes and sections of the Irish nation, which this legislation produced for almost the first time. "I 188 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. find," wrote Primate Boulter, " by my own letters and others' enquiry, that the people of every reli- gion, country, and party, here are alike set against Wood's half-pence, and that their agree- ment in this has had a very unhappy influence on the state of this nation, by bringing on intimacies between Papists and Jacobites and the Whigs." The third and most satisfactory result of all was that it marked the first peaceful triumph of Ire- land over English interference. " There is," says Lecky, " no more momentous epoch in the his- tory of a nation than that in which the voice of the people has first spoken, and spoken with success. It marks the transition from an age of semi-bar- barism to an age of civilization — from the govern- ment of force to the government of opinion, Before this time rebellion was the natural issue of every patriotic effort in Ireland. Since then rebellion has been an anachronism and a mistake. The age of Desmond and of O'Neill had passed. The apfe of Grattan and of O'Connell had begun." It was these various causes that produced the rise in the Irish Parliament of the historic body of men known as the patriot party. When first these champions of Irish rights started out on their enterprise never did difficulties appear more gigantic, never task more hopeless. By various methods both Houses of Parliament had been reduced to a state of corruption and of subservi- THE LATE .MR. HENKV GRATTAN, .M. P. THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 191 ency perhaps unequalled In the annals of legisla- tive assemblies. The Catholics had no share whatever* in the election of the Parliament, and even the Protes- tant minority was practically excluded from any real control. The plan of the English kings had been, in general, to make no increase whatever in the number of county constituencies; all- new members were given to the boroughs. In some cases the new boroughs might be described as non-existent ; others consisted of but a few houses and inhabitants. The Stuarts had been the most shameless in this manufacture of unin- habited boroughs, James I. summoned a Parlia- ment in 1 613, There being about one hundred Catholics to one Protestant in Ireland at this time, it was naturally feared that there would be a Catholic majority in the Parliament (this was before the Catholics were excluded), and imme- diate measures were taken to prevent such a ma- jority from being elected. Seventeen new coun- ties and forty boroughs were created by royal charter in places thinly or not at all inhabited, and towns as yet only projected on the estates of the leading undertakers were named as boroughs. " Forty boroughs," quoth the King, when remon- strated with ; " suppose I had made four hundred — the more the merrier." There was, after all, a very strong Catholic minority in the lower House, but after an unseemly dispute about the 192 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. Speakership the Catholics left the House in a body. James I. passed away, and left his throne and some of his propensities to his son Charles before another Parliament met in Dublin, in 1 634. Straf- ford was Lord Deputy, and in pursuance of his policy of " Thorough," exerted all his energies to satisfy his master's eager requests for money. One of his first acts was to summon a Parliament, in which, by judicious management, the 'propor- tion of Catholics was reduced from nearly one- half to one-third of the assembly. By further official manipulation the two Houses were soon brought into a condition satisfactory to the Lord Deputy. The House of Lords consisted of about one hundred and seventy-eight temporal and twenty-two spiritual peers. Many of the temporal peers were Scotchmen and Englishmen, having no connection whatsoever with the coun- try, and having never seen it in their lives. The Bishops, nominees of the Ministry, were alto- gether out of sympathy with the people ; half of them were Englishmen, to account for whose con- duct Swift could only suggest that the real pre- lates sent over from England had been waylaid, robbed and stripped outside London by highway- men, who now masqueraded in their clothes. The lower House consisted of three hundred members, the bulk of whom were nominees of the great Protestant land-owners, members of the THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 193 upper House; two hundred being returnable by single individuals, and altogether two-thirds by less than a hundred persons, who openly made large sums of money by the sale of seats. Place- men and pensioners of the government filled many seats. There was no Ministry responsible to the Parliament ; the administration consisted of the English Viceroy and his English Secretary, nominees of the English government, together with a Privy Council, over none of whom had the Houses any control, and whose chief business was the carrying of measures pleasing to their mas- ters across the channel, by means of bribes, of tides and places, and the playing off of the differ- ent factions against each other. The patriot party of later days, headed by men like Flood, Lucas, Daly, and Burgh, made, night after night, persistent attacks along the whole line of monopoly and misgovernment — the* law of Poyning, the Penal Code, the absence of an Irish Mutiny Bill, the bloated Pension List, the jurisdiction of the British Parliament. The government,. harassed and perplexed, tried their old arts of seduction, but with only trifling success. The weakest of the patriots were bought over, but the remainder closed up their ranks and came on again to the assault. The first victory achieved by them was to obtain, in 1 768, the pass- ing of a bill limiting to seven years the duration of Parliament, which hitherto lasted during an eri- 194 GLADSTONE-^ PARNELL. tire reign, an act which Lecky describes as having laid " the foundation of parHamentary influence and independence m Ireland." To the first House of Commons elected under this act, the patriots were returned in greater force than be- fore, and soon to their ranks was added the power, the genius, the eloquence, and the enthu- siasm of Henry Grattan, who entered Parliament in 1775 for the borough of Charlemont. The next year the revolt in the North Ameri- can colonies broke out, and England, her avail- able troops being employed against the colonists, was obliged to leave Ireland defenceless, though American privateers and French men-of-war were hovering round her. coasts. The Irish applied to the English authorities for soldiers to defend Ire- land ; the authorities declared that they had no troops to spare for Ireland. The Irish, under the circumstances, felt justified in taking means for their own defence. Men were enrolled rapidly all over the country ; before long no less than 150,000 men were in arms, and thus arose the body known as the Irish Volunteers. Raised originally for the defence of Ireland against the enemies of England, the "Volunteers" naturally turned their eyes to the evils of their own country. The position of England, too, at that moment, showed that the hour had come when Ireland could demand her rights, with a reasonable chance of having them accepted. The THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 195 Volunteers outside Parliament and the patriot party inside Parliament then devoted themselves to demanding an immediate redress of all their grievances. It is characteristic of the whole his- tory of Ireland that this National party displayed the highest spirit of religious toleration. The volunteers were Protestant to a man. The very first thing they did was to proclaim the right of every man in Ireland to the free exercise of his religion and to his due share of political rights altogether apart fi'om his religious persuasion. Towards the close of the year 1781 the officers of the First Ulster Regiment of Volunteers, com'- manded by Lord Charlemont, resolved to hold a convention of the Ulster Delegates at Dungan- non, and this convention assembled in the church in that ancient city in 1782. Then "the repre- sentatives," writes Mitchell, "of the regiments of Ulster — one hundred and forty-three corps — marched to the sacred place of meeting, two and two, dressed in various uniforms, and fully armed. Deeply they felt the great responsibilities which had been committed to their prudence and cour- age ; but they were equal to their task, and had not lightly pledged their faith to a trustful coun- try. The aspect of the church, the temple of re- ligion, in which, nevertheless, no grander cere- mony was ever performed, was imposing, or, it might be said, sublime. Never, on that hill where ancient piety had fixed its seat, was a nobler 196 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. offerinof made to God dian this, when two hun- dred of the elected warriors of a people assem- bled in His tabernacle, to lay the deep founda- tions of a nation's liberty." The convention then passed several resolutions, of which the following are the more important First, it was " resolved unanimously, that a claim of any body of men, other than the King, Lords and Commons of Ireland, to make laws to bind this kingdom, is unconstitutional, illegal, and a grievance." Second, resolved with one dissent- ing voice only, " that the powers exercised by the Privy Councils of both kingdoms, under, or under color or pretence of, the law of Poyning, are un- constitutional and a grievance." " Resolved unani- mously, that the independence of judges is equally essential to the impartial administration of justice in Ireland as in England, and that the refusal or delay of this right to Ireland makes a distinction where there should be no distinction, may excite jealousy where perfect union should prevail, and is in itself unconstitutional and a grievance." But, perhaps, the two most important resoludons of all were the final closing ones : " Resolved, with two dissenting voices only to this and the following resolution, that we hold the right of private judgment in matters of religion to be equally sacred in others as ourselves." "Re- solved, therefore, that as men and as Irishmen, as Christians and as Protestants, we rejoice in the THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLfc;. 197 relaxation of the penal laws against our Roman Catholic fellow-subjects, and that we conceive the measure fraught with the happiest consequences to the union and prosperity of the inhabitants of Ireland." Meantime the patriot party in Parliament acted in co-operation with the armed patriots outside. They saw that the time had come for pressing forward the claims of Ireland. Grattan was now the leader of the patriot party, and he first made an attack upon the law preventing Ireland from carrying on trade with the colonies. After some hesitation the motion was carried, and Ireland's right to free trade with other countries was estab- lished. Immediately after this came a move in favor of a greater and more important reform. Grattan brought in a Bill declaring in almost the same language as the resolutions passed at the Dungannon convention, that the King, Lords, and Commons of Ireland were the only persons com- petent to enact the laws of Ireland. A similar measure had been brought forward in the year 1780, but then it had been rejected. But in 1782 things were in a very different position. England had been beaten at Saragossa ; American inde- pendence had been established, and the patriot party had a backing of 100,000 armed men. At last the British government yielded, and the Duke of Portland was sent over as Lord Lieutenant to grant the prayer of Ireland. On the i6th of 198 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. April, 1782, Grattan brought forward his Decla- ration of Independence. " On that day a large body of the Volunteers were drawn up in front of the Old Parliament House of Ireland. Far as the eye could stretch the morning sun glanced' upon their weapons and upon their flags ; and it was through their parted ranks that Grattan passed to move the emanci- pation of his country. Never had a great orator a nobler or a more pleasing task. It was to pro- claim that the strife of six centuries had termi- nated ; that the cause for which so much blood had been shed, and so much genius expended, in vain, had at last triumphed ; and that a new era had dawned upon Ireland. Doubtless on that day many minds reverted to the long night of op- pression and crime through which Ireland had struggled towards that conception which had been as the pillar of fire on her path. But now at last the promised land seemed reached. The dream of Swift and of Molyneux was realized. The blessings of independence were reconciled with the blessings of connection ; and in an emanci- pated Parliament the patriot saw the guarantee of the future prosperity of his country and the Shekinah of liberty in the land. It was impos- sible, indeed, not to perceive that there was still much to be done — disqualifications to be re- moved, anomalies to be rectified, corruption to be overcome ; but Grattan at least firmly believed THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 199 that Ireland possessed the vital force necessary for all this, that the progress of a healthy public opinion would regenerate and reform the Irish Parliament as it regenerated and reformed the Parliament of England ; and that every year the sense of independence would quicken the sym- pathy between the people and their representa- tives. It was, indeed, a noble triumph, and the orator was worthy of the cause. In a few glowing sentences he painted the dreary struggle that had passed, the magnitude of the victory that had been achieved, and the grandeur of the prospects that were unfolding. ' I am now,' he exclaimed, ' to address a free people. Ages have passed away, and this is the first moment in which you could be distinguished by that appellation. I have spoken on the subject of your liberty so often that I have nothing to add, and have only to admire by what heaven-directed steps you have proceeded until the whole faculty of the nation is braced up to the act of her own deliverance, I found Ireland on her knees ; I watched over her with paternal solicitude ; I have traced her pro- gress from injuries to arms, and from arms to liberty. Spirit of Swift, spirit of Molyneux, your genius has prevailed ! Ireland is now a nation ! In that character I hail her ; and, bowing in her august presence, I say, Esto perpetual' " In England the change in the position of the Irish Parliament obtained the approval of all en- 200 GLADSTONE— FARNELL. lightened men. Edmund Burke wrote to Lord Charlemont: " I am convinced that no reluctant tie can be a strong one ; I believe that a natural, cheerful alliance will be a far more secure link of connection than any principle of subordination borne with grudging and discontent." Fox and Grey, the leaders of the English Whig party, were equally delighted with the change. " I would have the Irish government," said Fox in 1797, " regulated by Irish voters and Irish prejudices, and I am convinced that the more she is under Irish government the more she will be bound to English interests." The independence of the Irish Parliament was now achieved, and, following quickly in its wake, came the attainment of objects which had been striven for long and vainly while that body was under the thumb of an alien administration. Par- Hament met yearly, and not at fluctuating inter- vals as before. The independence of the judicial bench was secured by an act providing that their commissions should be valid during good beha- vior, their salaries ascertained and established, and their removal dependent on an address from both Houses. The rieht of the Commons to originate money bills, as in England, was estab- lished, as was also their right to assign how money voted by them should be expended. But there were some points on which Grattan appealed for further reform. The pension list, as Ti-tE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 201 has been seen, was one of the most potent agen- cies in the hands o^ the Crown for the corruption of members. The enormity of the grievance is sufficiently shown by the fact that the money spent in pensions in Ireland was not merely rela- tively, but absolutely, greater than was expended for that purpose in England ; that the pension list trebled in the first thirty years of George III. ; and that in 1793 it amounted to no less than ;!^i 24,000. As a proof of the number of persons to whom pensions were given, it may be men- tioned that on the Irish Pension List there were the names of the mistresses of George I., of the Queen Dowager of Prussia, sister of George II., and of the Sardinian Ambassador who negotiated the peace of Paris. The efforts of Grattan to reduce this scandalous list were repeated over and over again. He brought forward the subject in 1785 and in 1791, but the government always opposed him, and he was as often defeated. The legislation of the Irish Parliament upon one question, however, proceeded with rapidity and with extraordinary liberality. The reader is already aware that the Irish Parliament at this time consistedexclusively of Irish Protestants and Irish landlords, but that Parliament had scarcely received its independence when it proceeded to carry out the great principles which had been laid down by the Protestant volunteers' meeting in the Protestant Church of Dungannon. The 12 202 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. toleration, indeed, of the Irish ParHament began at a date even anterior to its independence. In 1768 a Bill had been passed without a division against the Penal Code, and its rejection was due to the English Parliament. In 1774-78 and 1782, and finally in 1792, other relief Bills were also enacted, and by this time some of the worst griev- ances of the Irish Catholics were removed. But there were other grievances which still remained, and which were of the very utmost importance. The Irish Catholic had not a right to vote for a member of Parliament or to become a member of Parliament, and he had no place in the higher ranks of the law or the army. Under the influ- ence of a native legislature the feeling against the Catholics was now rapidly passing away; indeed, it had begun to disappear at even an earlier date. Lecky quotes the following passage from the preface to Molyneux's " Case of Ireland," which proves that as far back as 1770 religious bigotry was already disappearing: " The rigor of Popish bigotry is softening very fast ; the Protestants are losing all bitter remem- brance of those evils which their ancestors suf- fered, and the two sects are insensibly gliding into the same common interests. The Protestants, through apprehensions from the superior numbers of the Catholics, were eag-er to secure themselves in the powerful protection of an English Minister, and to gain this were ready to comply with his THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 203 most exorbitant demands ; the Catholics were alike willinor to embarrass the Protestants as their natural foes ; but awakening from this delusion, they begin to condemn their past follies, reflect with, shame on having so long played the game of an artful enemy, and are convinced that with- out unanimity they never can obtain such con- sideration as may entitle them to demand, with any prospect of success, the just and common rights of mankind. Religious bigotry is losing its force everywhere. Commercial and not re- ligious interests are the objects of almost every nation in Europe." But in a moment the Irish Parliament was in full possession of its powers. The car of progress proceeded with unexampled rapidity. In 1793 a bill was introduced the object of which was to allow the Catholics to vote. This act was per- haps the most noteworthy ever carried by the native legislature. The Independent native Legislature proceeded to justify its existence in other respects also. During its existence the country had its first gleam of prosperity. On this point evidence is abounding and incontestable. The testimony comes as emphatically from the men who de- stroyed the Legislature as from those who de- fended it. The Increase of Ireland's prosperity under the native Legislature was by a curious reversal of facts and ideas one of the arguments 204 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. by which Pitt justified the extinction of Parh'a- ment. "As Ireland," he said, " was so prosperous under her own Parliament, we can calculate that the amount of that prosperity will be trebled by a British Legislature." Pitt then went on to quote a speech of Mr. Foster, a member of the Irish Legislature in 1785, in these words: "The ex- portation of Irish produce to England amounts to two millions and a half annually, and the exporta- tion of British produce to Ireland arnounts to one million," Quoting Foster again, he said, " Britain imports annually ^2,500,000 of our products, all, or very nearly all, duty free, and we import almost a million of hers, and raise a revenue on every article of it." Pitt went on to say, " But how stands the case now (1799) ? The trade at this time is infinitely more advantageous to Ire- land. It will be proved from the documents I hold in my hand, as far as relates to the mere in- terchange of manufactures, that the manufactures exported to Ireland from Great Britain in 1797 very little exceeded one million sterling (the arti- cles of produce amount to nearly the same sum), whilst Great Britain, on the other hand, imported from Ireland to the amount of more than three millions in the manufacture of linen and linen yarn, and between two and three millions in pro- visions and cattle, besides corn and other articles of produce." Fitzgibbon, Lord Clare, was Pitt's most unscrupulous and ablest instrument in car- THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 205 rying the Union; yet in 1798 Lord Clare said: "There is not a nation on the face of the habita- ble globe which has advanced in cultivation, in aofriculture, in manufactures,, with the same ra- pidity, in the same period, as Ireland," namely, between 1782 and 1798. In this opinion Lord Grey, Lord Plunket, and many others fully concur. The question will at once occur to the mind of the American reader why it was that an institution that was thus daily proving its fitness for the country ever ceased to exist. The explanation is easily found in the constitution of the Parliament, and pardy also in the nature of the settlement made in 1 782. First, as to the constitution of the Parliament; attention has already been called to the character of both Houses of that body. Grattan and the other patriot leaders saw the immense danger there was to the continuance of Ireland's independence if this state of things was allowed to continue. Session after session, time after time, Grattan and others brought in Bills, the object of which was to procure the reform of Parliament, both in its own constitution and in the electorate. In speech after speech the cor- ruptions of the. existing system were pointed out ; and attention was especially called to the system by which at one stroke both the House of Lords and the House of Commons were corrupted. The House of Lords was corrupted by the admis- sion to its ranks of men who had bought their 206 ' GLADSTONE— PARNELL. peerages, and the House of Commons was at the same time corrupted by the sale to the govern- ment of the seats which belonged to the men who had bought the peerages. " Will any man," says Flood, "say that the Constitution is perfect when he knows that the honor of the peerage may be obtained by any ruffian who possesses borough interest?" Grattan accuses the Minister of the Crown of having " introduced a trade or com- merce, or, rather, brokerage of honors, and thus establishing in the money arising from that sale a fund for corrupting representation." But these remonstrances proved in vain ; and the government, times out of number, refused to make any change of a really practicable character in the composition and constitution of either House of Parliament, and the House of Commons con- tinued to consist for the most part of placemen and pensioners and the creatures of the propri- etors of rotten boroughs, openly and flagrantly ready for sale. The attempts to reform the Parliament by the admission of Catholics thereto met with an equal fate. At one time, however, it seemed as if this question were about to be decided. In 1794 Lord Westmoreland — a Lord Lieutenant who was unfavorable to Catholic claims — was succeeded by Lord Fitzwilliam, who was equally known as a strong advocate of those claims. Lord Fitzwil- liam was a man of great importance in those days. THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 207 He was the most prominent member of the Whig party. He was a friend of Grattan's, and his views on Catholic emancipation had been over and over again pronounced. When he landed in 1794 accordingly he was received everywhere with enthusiasm. Petitions in favor of Catholic emancipation were sent in not merely by the Catholics but also by the Protestants. And Lord Fitzwilliam himself was able to speak to the King of " the universal approbation, with which the emancipation of the Catholics was received on the part of his Protestant subjects." Ireland at the moment became as one man, religious bigotry was forgotten, loyalty was universal. Within the last few weeks the change that Lord Fitzwilliam's viceroyalty made was brought into relief by a significant episode. Lord Aberdeen, a popular London viceroy of the Queen, and bearer of another message of peace, visited Kenmare, in the month of May, 1886. He was received by a popular band of music, which played " God save the Queen." It was the first time the National Anthem of England had been played in this town since 1795 ; and then in honor of a visit from Lord Fitzwilliam, but he now was recalled, and the hopes of Ireland were blasted. "We have," said Grattan, "no Irish Cabinet. Individuals may deprecate, may dissuade, but they cannot enforce their principles ; there is no embodied authority in Ireland. Again, your 208 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. Government constantly fluctuates; your viceroys change every day ; men of different parties and different principles, faithful to private engage- ments but not bound to any uniform public sys- tem. Again, you have no decided responsibility in Ireland; the objects of your inquest might not be easily found ; in short, you have in this country the misfortune of a double administration, a double importunity — a fluctuating government, and a fugacious responsibility." Some years later Mr. Grattan says, "Are the Ministers of Ireland fonder of the people of this country than the Ministers of the sister country are of Great Britain ? Are they not often aliens in affection as well as birth, disposed to dispute your rights, censure your proceedings, and to boast that you cannot punish them, and that, therefore, they do not fear you ? Are they not proud to humble you and ambitious to corrupt you ? " In 1798 the rebellion which had been smoul- dering throughout the country at last broke forth. Though Catholics took mainly the chief part in the insurrection it was originally started by a body of Protestants in Belfast, who formed a society known as the " United Irishmen." The testimony is overwhelming that the United Irish- men contemplated at first only constitutional methods of action ; but, as they themselves after- wards stated, their despair of obtaining reform through the continued opposition of the govern- THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 209 ment to Grattan's proposals drove them into rebellion. The rebellion was crushed by the most terrible cruelty. One of its worst effects was to revive the religious passions between dif- ferent sections of Irishmen by which the benefi- cent policy of the Irish party and the patriot leaders was obliterated. Pitt, and Lord Cas- tlereagh, his agent in Ireland, aggravated the cruelties by giving every form of encouragement to the persons mainly occupied in carrying out his cruelties. "The Protestants," says Lecky, "passed into that condition of terrified ferocity to which ruling races are always liable when they find themselves a small minority in the midst of a fierce re- bellion." 'The minds of the people,' wrote Lord Cornwallis, after the suppression of the revolt, * are now in such a state that nothing but blood will satisfy them.' 'Even at my table, where you will suppose I do all I can to prevent it, the con- versation always turns on hanging, shooting, burning and so forth ; and if a priest has been put to death the greatest joy is expressed by the whole company.' " The native Irish, maddened by these cruelties, replied with cruelties of great if not equal fe- rocity. At last the rebellion of 1798 was put down, and the British authorities now thought the time had come for proposing the Act of Union. On the destruction of the Irish Legislature Pitt 210 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. had been resolved from an early date. He had sent to Ireland as a means of carrying out this policy Lord Castlereagh, an Irishman by birth, but English in all his sympathies and aims. This remarkable man, who played so sinister a part in Irish and afterwards in English history, had the qualities exactly suitable for carrying out an enterprise of this kind. He had cool courage and an utter absence of either shame or of scruple. While Lord Cornwallis, the Lord Lieu- tenant at the time, spoke, as will be seen, with loathing of the work at which he was employed, Lord Castlereagh pursued it with perfect equa- • nimity, and sometimes described it as though he gloried in the shame. Preparations went on for years to make the Parliament ready for the final blow, and the patriots of the time over and over again saw how the work of corruption was pro- ceeding, and the hour of destruction drawing nigh. "We are no longer," writes Dr. Browne, one of the members for Trinity College, "attacked by the stern violence of prerogative, but a new and more dangerous foe has arisen — a corrupt and all-subduing influence which, with a silent but resistless course, has overwhelmed the land and borne down every barrier of liberty and virtue." "Then," says Sir L. Parsons, "those acquisitions in 1782, which the people thought would have brought good government, have brought bad, and. THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 211 why? Because it has been the object of the English Ministers ever since to countervail what was obtained at that period, and substitute a surreptitious and clandestine influence for that open power which the English Legislature was then obliged to relinquish." It was in the year 1 799 that the Union was proposed for the first time. The government put forward every means they could employ for the purpose of carrying it. But it was, nevertheless, opposed by all the in- tellect and all the conscience of Ireland. " It is scarcely an exaggeration to say," observes Lecky, " that the proposal to make the Union provoked the whole of the unbribed intellect of Ireland to oppose it." The result was that the bill was re- jected by 109 to 104 votes. Castlereagh, however, was a man of persistent purpose, and he now set himself to work to adopt more certain means of carrying out his resolve. He employed a mixture of force and fraud. Mar- tial law was proclaimed all over the country, and wherever there was any attempt to procure an open expression of public feeling, violence was either threatened or employed against it. The people of Dublin had signified their joy at the rejection of the government measure, and they were attacked without notice by a body of soldiers and some people were shot down. A body of the gentry had gathered together in Kings county for the purpose of declaring their opinions 212 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. upon the proposed legislation ; they had no sooner assembled than a column of troops under Major , Rogers were seen to be advancing, armed with four cannon; by which it was made perfectly clear that if the meeting were persevered with the building would have been destroyed. Major Rogers was remonstrated with ; but his answer was, that but for one word from the sheriff he might blow them all to atoms. And in several other parts of that county — according to Sir Jonah Barrington, a well-known contemporary chron- icler — people were restrained from expressing their opinions by the dread of grapeshot. Steps were taken against all those encouraging public opinion against the Union, or who did anything to promote the national protest. The Marquis of Downshire sent out a circular urging petitions against the Union ; and he was dismissed from the lord-lieutenancy of his county and his name was erased from the list of privy councillors. In the same way in the House of Commons all men who held office and who refused to vote for the destruction of the country's liberties were dis- missed. Among the persons who thus gave hon- orable testimony to the consistency of their prin- ciples was Sir John Parnell, the ancestor of the present leader of the Irish people, who had been Chancellor of the Exchequer for seventeen years. Petitions at the same time were sent over the wholfc country to gather signatures in favor of the THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. . 213 Union ; and so eacrer was Castlereaeh for even the appearance of popular adhesion to his de- mand that felons in jail were offered their pardon on condition of attaching their names. Never- theless, when the signatures came to be counted up, 700,000 protested against the Union ; and only 3,000 were found to demand it. These were but a small portion of the plans adopted to carry the Union on the second at- tempt. Castlereagh, having made up his mind that corruption was the best of all means for gain- ing votes, resorted to this means in the most open manner. The seats in the House of Commons, owing to the system of bribery, had become as valuable as any other article of merchandise, and Castlereagh determined to take the same view of the question as the owners themselves. Accordingly, he announced three plans on the part of the government, which together made as complete a system of corruption as perhaps ever prevailed in the history of any country. In brief, then. Lord Castlereagh boldly an- nounced his intention to turn the scale by- bribes to all who would accept them, under the name of compensation for the loss of patronage and interest. He publicly declared, first, that noblemen who re- turned Union members to Parliament should be paid, in cash, ^15,000 for every member so re- turned ; secondly, that every member who had purchased a seat in Parliament should have his 214 ■ GLADSTONE— PARNELL. purchase-money repaid to him out of the treasury of Ireland ; thirdly, that all members of Parlia- ment, or others, who were losers by the Union should be fully recompensed for their losses, and that ^1,500,000 should be devoted to this ser- vice. In other words, all who should affection- ately support his measure were, under some pretext or other, to sha;-e in this " bank of cor- ruption." Meantime seats had been vacated by men who had obtained good sums fordoing so ; and by the time that Parliament met again Lord Castlereagh could feel sure that the mine was laid and that it only required the fuse to burst up the Parliamen- tary edifice. Another of his methods was to hold out vague promises to the Catholics and their bishops, that when the Irish Parliament was destroyed Irish Catholic claims would obtain a hearinof from the Imperial Parliament ; and in this way undoubtedly a few of the Catholic leaders were lulled into security. The Irish Parliament was opened January 15, 1800. Lord Castlereagh thought it good tactics to keep all mention of the Union out of the King's speech. He wanted more clearly to prospect his ground ; and he also wanted the poison of corrup- tion to have a further chance of workinof. When an army is demoralized, small desertions lead to general panic. Accordingly Lord Castlereagh THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 215 put up Viscount Loftus to move the address in reply to the speech from the throne. Lord Loftus was a man of grotesque vacuity of mind, and was now known by an uncompHmentary nickname; but there was wisdom nevertheless in putting him into a prominent place. He was the son of the Marquis of Ely, who had three rotten boroughs, and his speech in favor of the policy of the gov- ernment showed that the Marquis, his father, would receive his bribe of ;^45,ooo. Such a splendid award for perfidy was sure to have its good effect on weak and wavering minds. Dr. Browne, one of the members for the University of Dublin, and, we regret to say, an American by birth, served a similar purpose. He had voted against the Union the previous session. He de- clared that he had now become more inclined to the Union from "intermediate circumstances." The intermediate circumstances were that he had been promised the place of Prime Serjeant for his vote. The patriot par|;y insisted on raising the question of the Union on the address, and a very picturesque incident occurred In the course of the debate. Mr. Grattan had retired in disgust and despair from Parliament shortly before the rebel- lion broke out ; he was in bad health, and had sought recovery in change of air and scene. His friends induced him to accept a seat for the borouofh of Wicklow. The return of the writ was delayed as long as possible ; but by a series of 216 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. Stratagems, including the employment of a num- ber of swift horses, the return reached Dublin at 5 o'clock in the morning. The proper officer was compelled to get out of bed in order to present the document to Parliament. The House at that moment was in warm debate on the amendment denouncingtheproposeddestructionofthe Houses of Parliament. A whisper, writes Mitchell, ran ■ through every party that Mr. Grattan was elected, and would immediately take his seat. The Min- isterialists smiled with incredulous derision, and the Opposition thought the news too good to be true. Mr. Egan was speaking strongly against the measure, when Mr. George Ponsonby and Mr. Arthur Moore (afterwards Judge of the Common Pleas) walked out, and immediately returned lead- ing, or rather helping, Mr. Grattan, in a state of total feebleness and debility. The effect was electric. Mr. Grattan's illness and deep chagrin Ii-ad reduced a form, never symmetrical, and a visage at all times thin, nearly to the appearance of a spectre. As he feebly tottered into the House every member simultaneously rose from his seat. He moyed slowly to the table ; his lan- guid countenance seemed to revive as he took those oaths that restored him to his pre-eminent station ; smiles of inward satisfaction obviously illuminated his features, and reanimation and en- ergy seemed to kindle by the labor of his mind. TkE great IRISH STRUGGLE. 217 The House was silent. Mr. Egan did not resume his speech. Mr. Grattan, almost breathless, at- tempted to rise, but found himself unable at first to stand, and asked permission to address the House from his seat. Never was a finer illustra- tion of the sovereignty of mind over matter Grattan spoke two hours with all his usual vehe. mence and fire against the Union, and in favor of the amendment of Sir Lawrence Parsons. The Treasury Bench was at first disquieted, then be- came savage ; and it was resolved to bully or to kill Mr. Grattan. But these attempts did not succeed. At lo o'clock in the morning the division was taken, when 96 voted for the amendment of Sir Law- rence Parsons, protesting against the Union ; and 138 against. Thus at the very first fight Castle- reagh had a majority of 42. This greatly encour- aged the Unionists. But still Castlereagh thought that some time would be necessary before the House could be made quite ready for the accept- ance of his proposal. It was not till the 15th of February that he brought the proposed measure before the Parlia-. ment. Debates, eloquent and fierce, took place on his proposals. Grattan was so grossly in- sulted by one of the officials of Castlereagh that he declared the crovernment had resolved to " pistol him off," and at once accepted a challenge and fought with Corry, his assailant. All this 13 218 GLADSTONE— PARNELL time the secret agents of Castlereagh were busy in promising peerages, pensions, and bribes; and military were constantly drawn up around the old House in College Green to terrorize the people against any expression of popular discontent. Nobody has more tersely or eloquently de- scribed the means by which the Union was passed than Mr. Gladstone. Speaking at Liverpool on June 29th, 1886, he said: "Ah, gendemen, when I opened this question in the House of Commolns on the 8th of April I said very little about the Act of Union — for two reasons : first of all, because looking at the facts, whatever that act may have been in its beginning, I do not think that it could safely or wisely be blotted out of the Statute Book, and for another reason, that I did not wish gratuitously to expose to the world the shame of my country. But this I must tell you, if we are compelled to go into it — the position against us, the resolute banding of the great and the rich and the noble, and I know not who, against the true genuine sense of the people, compels us to unveil the truth, and I tell you this, that so far as I can judge, and so far as my knowledge goes, I grieve to say in the pres- ence of distinguished Irishmen that I know of no blacker or fouler transaction in the history of man than the making of the Union. It is not possible to tell you fully, but in a few words I give you some idea of what I mean. Fraud is bad, and "^HE GREAT IRISrt STRUGGLE. 219 force — violence as against rights — is bad, but if there is one thinof more detestable than another it is the careful, artful combination of the two. The carrying of the Irish Union was nothing in the world but a combination of force and fraud applied in the basest manner to the attainment of an end which all Ireland — for the exceptions might be counted on your fingers — detested, Protestants even more than Roman Catholics. In the Irish Parliament there were 300 seats, and out of these there were 116 placemen and pensioners. The government of Mr. Pitt rewarded with places which did not vacate the seat, as they do in this country if 1 remember aright, those who voted for them, and took away the pensions of those who were disposed to vote against them. Notwith- standing that state of things, in 1797, in the month of June, the proposal of union was rejected in the Irish Parliament. The Irish Parliament, in 1 795, under Lord Fitzwilliam, had been gallantly and patriotically exercised in amending the condition of the country. The monopolists of the Beres- ford and other families made Mr. Pitt recall Lord Fitzwilliam, and that moment it was that the rev- olutionary action began among the Roman Cath- olics of Ireland ; from that moment the word 'sep- aration,' never dreamt of before, by degrees insinuated itself in their councils ; an uneasy state of things prevailed, undoubted disaffection was produced, and it could not but be produced by 220 GLADSTONE— PA RNELL. abominable misgovernment. So produced, It was the excuse for all that followed. Inside the walls of Parliament the terror of withdrawing from Par- liament and wholesale bribery in the purchase of nomination boroughs were carried on to such an extent as to turn the scale. Outside Parliament martial law and the severest restrictions prevented the people from expressing their views and senti- ments on the Union. That the detestable union of fraud and force might be consummated the bribe was held out to the Roman Catholic bishops and clergy, in the hope of at any rate slackening their opposition, that if only they would consent to the Unipn it should be followed by full admis- sion to civil privileges and by endowments, which would at any rate have equalized the monstrous anomaly of the existence of the Irish Church. That was the state of things by which — by the use of all those powers that this great and strong country could bring into exercise through its command over the executive aofainst the weak- ness of Ireland — by that means they got together a sufficient number of people — with 1 16 placemen and pensioners out of 300 persons, with a large number of borough proprietors bought at the cost of a million and a half of money — at last they suc- ceeded in getting a majority of between 42" and 45 to pass the Union. I have heard of more bloody proceedings — the massacre of St. Bartholomew was a more cruel proceeding — but a more base THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 221 proceeding, a more vile proceeding, is not re- corded in my judgment upon the page of history than the process by which the Tory government of that period brought about the union with Ire- land in the teeth and in despite of the protest of every Liberal statesman from one end of the country to the other." When the question came before the English Parliament the Union was opposed by Grey, after- ward Lord Grey, Sheridan, Lord Holland, and all the other great leaders of the Whig party. But Pitt succeeded in carrying all his proposals through. The question finally came before the Irish Parliament in the shape of a bill for the Legislative Union. Again Grattan, Plunkett, Saurin, afterward Attorney-General under the British Crown ; Bushe, afterward a Chief-Justice, and all the other men of genius in the Irish Par- liament, protested against the destruction of the Irish government. Grattan's final speech sounds prophetic at the present hour. "The constitu- tion," he said, " may for a time be lost, but the character of the people cannot be lost. The Min- isters of the Crown may perhaps at length find out that it is not so easy to put down forever an ancient and respectable nation by abilities, how- ever great, or by corruption, however irresistible. Liberty may repair her golden beams, and with redoubled heat animate the country. The cry of loyalty will not long continue against the princi- 222 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. pies of liberty. Loyalty is a noble, a judicious, and a capacious principle, but in these countries loyalty distinct from liberty is corruption, not loy- alty. The cry of the connection will not in the end avail against the principles of liberty. Con- nection is a wise and a profound policy, but con- nection without an Irish Parliament is connection without its own principle, without analogy of con- dition, without the pride of honor that should attend it — is innovation, is peril, is subjugation — not connection. . . . Identification is a solid and imperial maxim, necessary for the preservation of freedom, necessary for that of empire ; but with- out union of hearts, with a separate government and without a separate Parliament, identification is extinction, is dishonor, is conquest — not identi- fication. Yet I do not give up my country. I see her in a swoon, but she is not dead. Though in her tomb she lies helpless and motionless, still there is on her lips a spirit of life, and on her cheek a glow of beauty : " ' Thou f.rt not conquered : beauty's ensign yet Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks, And death's pale flag is not advanced there ' While a plank of the vessel stands together, I will not leave her. Let the courtier present his flimsy sail, and carry the light bark of his faith with every new breath of wind; I will remain an- chored here with fidelity to the fortunes of my country, faithful to her freedom, faithful tg her THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 223 fall." These were the last words of Grattan in the Irish Parliament. On the 7th of June the Union bill was to be read for the third time. Most of the anti-Union- ists left the House so as not to be present at the destruction of the nation. ''The day of extin- guishing the liberties of Ireland had now arrived," writes Sir Jonah Barrington, a contemporary chronicler, "and the sun took his last view of in- dependent Ireland ; he rose no more over a proud and prosperous nation. She was now condemned by the British Minister to renounce her rank amongst the states of Europe ; she was sentenced to cancel her constitution, to disband her Com- mons, and to disfranchise her nobility, to proclaim her incapacity, and register her corruption in the records of the Empire. The Commons House of Parliament on the last evening afforded the most melancholy example of a fine, independent peo- ple, betrayed, divided, sold, and, as a State, anni- hilated. British clerks and officers were smue- gled into her Parliament to vote away the consti- tution of a country to which they were strangers, and in which they had neither interest nor con- nection. They were employed to cancel the royal charter of the Irish nation, guaranteed by the British government, sanctioned by the British Legislature, and unequivocally confirmed by the words, the signature, and the great seal of their pionarch, 224 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. " The situation of the Speaker on that night was of the most distressing nature. A sincere and ardent enemy of the measure, he headed its op- ponents ; he resisted it with all the power of his mind, the resources of his experience, his influence, and his eloquence. " It was, however, through his voice that it was to be proclaimed and consummated. His only alternative (resignation) would have been un- availing, and could have added nothing to his character. His expressive countenance bespoke the inquietude of his feeling; solicitude was per- ceptible in every glance, and his embarrassment was obvious in every word he uttered. "The galleries were full; but the change was lamentable. They were no longer crowded with those who had been accustomed to witness the eloquence and to animate the debates of that de- voted assembly. A monotonous and melancholy murmur ran through the benches ; scarcely a word was exchanged amongst the members. Nobody seemed at ease ; no cheerfulness was ap- parent, and the ordinary business for a short time proceeded in the usual manner. "At length the expected moment arrived. The order of the day — for the third reading of the bill for a ' Legislative Union between Great Britain and Ireland ' — was moved by Lord Castlereagh. Unvaried, tame, cold-blooded — the words seemed frozen as they issued from his lips ; and, as if a THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 226 simple citizen of the world, he seemed to have no sensation on the subject. " The Speaker, Mr. Foster, who was one of the most vehement opponents of the Uniori from first to last, would have risen and left the House with his friends, if he could. But this would have availed nothing. With grave dignity he presided over 'the last agony of the expiring Parliament.' He held up the bill for a moment in silence, then asked the usual question, to which the response, 'Aye' was languid, but unmistakable. Another momentary pause ensued. Again his lips seemed to decline their office. At length, with an eye averted from the object which he hated, he pro- claimed, with a subdued voice, 'The ayes hate if' For an instafit he stood statue-like ; then, indig- nantly and in disgust, flung the bill upon the table, and sunk into his chair with an exhausted spirit." The bill passed through the House of Lords in spite of protests from some of its ablest members. On the 1st of August the royal assent was given, and the new act was to take effect from January ist, 1801. So ended Ireland's legislative inde- pendence. The following pages are cTiiefly cov- ered with the efforts to procure its restoration. CHAPTER VI. AFTER THE UNION. THE destruction of the Irish Parliament was accompanied by several acts which aggra- vated the misfortune. With the destruction of Parliamentary representation, and, above all, in the distribution of debt, Ireland was scandalously treated. The strength of the Irish representation in the British Parliament was settled by -Lord Castle- reagh in a most arbitrary, not to say contradic- tory, manner. He first publicly demonstrated that the number of Irish representatives entitled to sit in the British Parliament was 108, and sub- sequently, for no specified reason, subtracted what he no doubt looked upon as the superfluous eight and decided the proper number was the round 100. He arrived at the conclusion that 108 was che proper number thus: In the relative population of the two countries, taking it that Great Britain had 558, that for the proportionate population of Ireland she was entitled to 202 representatives, for exports 100, for imports 93, for revenue 39, making a total of 434, and taking 226 THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 227 the mean of these quantities it makes loSjE/^. But Castlereagh omitted from his calculations all mention of the Irish' rental, an admitted factor in Irish questions in England. If rental had been taken into account, the Irish representation should have been 169^. In. 1 821 the question was again raised, O'Connell showed that Ireland had seven millions to England's twelve millions of popula- tion ; and that on this basis of population Ireland should have 291 members; and that taking rev- enue and population as joint basis, Ireland should have 176 members. As a matter of fact, she never since the Union had more than 105. The scheme by which Ireland was cheated in the question of debts is well summarized in the following extracts from Mitchell's " History of Ireland : " "In 181 6 was passed the act for consolidating the British and Irish Exchequers — it is the 56th George III., cap. 98. It became operative on the 1st January, 181 7. "The meaning of this consolidation was — charging Ireland with the whole debt of England, pre-union and post-union ; and in like manner charging England with the whole Irish debt. " Now, the enormous English national debt, both before and after the Union, was contracted for purposes which Ireland had not only no in- terest in promoting, but a direct and vital interest in contravening and resisting; that is, it had beep 228 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. contracted to crush American and French liberty, and to destroy those very powers which were the natural allies of Ireland. " But this is not all. We have next to see the proportions which the two debts bore to each other. It will be remembered that, by the terms of the so-called ' Union,' "I. Ireland was to be protected from any liabil- ity on account of the Bridsh national debt con- tracted prior to the Union. " II. The separate debt of each country being first provided for by a separate charge, Ireland was then to contribute two-seventeenths towards the joint or common expenditure of the United Kingdom for twenty years ; after which her con- tribution was to be made proportionate to her ability, as ascertained at stated periods of revision by certain tests specified in the act. " III. Ireland was not only promised that she never should have any concern with the then ex- isting Bridsh debt, but she was also assured that her taxation should not be raised to the standard of Great Britain undl the following condidons should occur: " I. That the two debts should come to bear to each other the propordon of fifteen parts for Great Britain to two parts for Ireland ; and, " 2. That the respective circumstances of the two countries should admit of uniform taxation, THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 229 "It must be further borne in mind that, pre- vious to the Union, the national debt of Ireland was a mere trifle. It had been enormously in- creased by charging to Ireland's special account, first, the expenses of getting up the rebellion ; next, the expenses of suppressing it ; and, lastly, the expenses of bribing Irish noble lords and gentlemen to sell their country at this Union. Thus the Irish debt, which before the Union had been less than three millions sterling, was set down by the Act of Union at nearly twenty-seven millions. "On the 20th of June, 1804 (fo^u* years after the Union had passed), Mr. Foster, Chancellor of the Irish Exchequer, observed, that whereas in 1794 the Irish debt did not exceed two millions and a half, it had in 1803 risen to forty- three mil- lions ; and that during the current year it was increased to nearly fifty-three millions. " During the long and costly war against France, and the second American war, it happened, by some very extraordinary species of book-keeping, that while the English debt was not quite doubled, the Irish debt was more than quadrupled ; as if Ireland had twice the interest which England had in forcing the Bourbons back upon France, and in destroying the commerce of America. "Thus, in 18 1 6, when the Consolidation Act was passed, the whole funded debt of Ireland was found to be\;^i 30,561,037. By this management .230 Gt.ADSTONE— PAkNELL. the Irish debt, which in 1801 had been to the British as one to sixteen and a half, was forced up to bear to the British debt the ratio of one to seven and a half. This was the proportion re- quired by the Act of Union as a condition of sub- jecting Ireland to indiscriminate taxation with Great Britain. Mr. Gladstone sums up admirably in the Liver- pool speech already quoted the immediate con- sequences of the Union : "How have we atoned," he asked, "since the Union for what we did to bring about the Union? Now, mind, I am making my appeal to the honor of Englishmen. I want to show to Englishmen who have a sense of honor that they have a debt of honor that remains to this hour not fully paid. The Union was followed by these six conse- quences — firsdy, broken promises ; secondly, the passing of bad laws; thirdly, the putting down of liberty ; fourthly, the withholding from Ireland benefits that we took to ourselves; fifthly, the giving to force and to force only what we ought to have given to honor and justice ; and, sixthly, the removal and postponement of relief to the jnost crying grievances. (Cheers.) I will give you the proof in no longer space than that in which I have read these words. Broken promises — the promises of the Roman Catholics of eman- cipation and the promise of endowment. Eman- cipation was never given for twenty-nine years. THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 231 It would have been given if the Irish Parhament had remained — you would have been given it in the time of Lord Fitzwilliam. It.was never given for twenty-nine years after the Union, but no endowment. Well, you will say, and I should say, ' for that I cannot be sorry.' (Cheers.) 1 cannot wish that the Roman Catholics should have received endowment. But on the other hand, it was a base thing to break your promises to them. Passing bad laws — yes, slow as it was to pass good laws, the English Parliament could pass bad laws quick enough. In 1815 it passed a law most oppressive to the Irish tenant. It was the only law relating to the Irish land of any corl- sequence that ever received serious attention until the year 1870. Restraint of liberty. What happened after the Union? In 1800 the people met largely in Dublin. Almost all the Roman Catholics of wealth and influence in the country, and a great deal of the Protestant power, too, met in Dublin for the purpose of protesting against the Union. Not the slightest heed was given to their protest. In 1820 there . was a county meeting of the shire of Dublin for the purpose of paying compliments to George IV. The people moved a counter-resolution and this counter-resolution complained of the Act of Union. The sheriff refused to hear them, re- fused to- put their motion, left the room, and sent in the soldiers to break up a peaceful county 232 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. meeting. (Shame.) Oh, it is shame, indeed, Fourthly, they withheld from Ireland what we took ourselves. .We took the franchise. The franchise in Ireland remained a very restricted franchise until last year. In England it had been largely extended, as you know, by the Acts of 1867 and 1868. In England you thoroughly re- formed your municipalities, and have true popular bodies, but in Ireland the number of them was cut down to twelve, and after a battle of six years, during which Parliament had to spend the chief part of its time upon the work, I think about twelve municipalities were constituted in Ireland with highly restricted powers. Inequality was branded upon Ireland at every step. Education was established in this country, denominational education, right and left, according as the people desired it; but in Ireland denominational educa- tion was condemned, and until within the last few years it was not possible for any Roman Catholic to obtain a degree in Ireland If he had received his education in a denominational college. "Such Is the system of Inequality under which Ireland was governed. We have given only to fear what we ought to have given to justice. I refer to the Duke of Wellington, who, in 1821, himself said with a manly candor, that the fear of civil war and nothing else was the motive for, I might almost say, for his coercing the House of Lords, certainly for bringing the House of Lords, THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 233 to vote a chano-e which It was well known that the large majority of them utterly detested. Well, sixthly, we shamefully postponed the relief of crying grievances — yes, we shamefully postponed it. In 1815 we passed an act to make infinitely less independent the position of the Irish tenant. Not till 1843 did we inquire into his condition. Sir Robert Peel has the honor of having^ ap- pointed the Devon Commission — that Devon Commission represented that a large number of the population of Ireland were submitting with exemplary and marvellous patience — these peo- ple whom we are told you cannot possibly trust — were submittina- with marvellous and unintel- ligible patience to a lot more bitter and deplora- ble than the lot of any people in the civilized world. Sir James Graham in the House of Commons ad- mitted that the description applied to three and a half millions of the people of Ireland, and yet with all that we went o'n certainly doing a great deal of good, improving the legislation of this country in a wonderful manner, especially by the great struggle of Free Trade, but not till 1870 was the first effort made — seventy years after the Union — to administer in any serious de- gree to the wants of the Irish tenant, the Irish occupier — that means In fact the wants and ne- cessities of the mass of the people of Ireland. (Cheers.) I say that that is a deplorable narra- tive, it is a narrative which cannot be shaken. I 14 234 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. have been treading upon ground that our an- tagonists carefully avoid. It is idle to say that we have done some good to Ireland. Yes, we have done some good to Ireland by the Land Act of 1870 and 1 88 1, and by the Disestablishment of the Irish Church we have done some good to Ireland, and by the Enlargement of Maynooth grants Sir Robert Peel did good to Ireland. Yes, and it is the success of these very acts alone that the Paper Unionists can claim as showing that we have done good to Ireland. These very acts are down to the present day denounced by the tory party — the Church Act as sacrilege, the Land Act as confiscation. (Cheers.) I humbly say it is time that we should bethink ourselves of this question of honor and see how the matter stands, and set very seriously about the duty, the sacred duty, the indispensable and overpowering duty of effacing from history, if efface them we can, these terrible stains which the acts of England have left upon the fame of England, and which constitute the debt of honor to Ireland that it is hieh time to consider and to pay." We have already spoken of the first charge of Mr. Gladstone against the Union, that of broken promises with reference to Catholic emancipation. The second charge is that of making bad laws, which for the most part were ap- plied to the occupation of land. The new Parlia- •THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 235 ment had scarcely been in existence twenty years when already there had been passed a whole new code of laws, the main purpose of which was to enable landlords to get rid of their ten- ants at the very earliest moment possible. In 1816 an act was passed which gave the landlords power they never had before to distrain. Under this act the landlords were able to do things that must be astonishing to Americans with their protection in the homestead laws for a man's household and instruments of labor. Under the statute referred to the landlord had the power to seize growing crops, to keep them till reaped, to save and sell them when reaped, and to charge upon the tenant the accumulation of expenses. Under this act the landlord had the power to ruin the tenant by seizing his growing crop. A_nother statute, however, was necessary to complete the authority of the land- lord and the helplessness of the tenant. Under an act passed in 1818 the landlord received the power to turn his tenant out of his holding. Act followed act then, in quick succession, for the purpose of making eviction easy. Under one, for instance, if a landlord brought an action against a tenant for ejectment, he had the power to make the tenant give security for costs. The working of this was that he did not have money saved sufficient to defend a case. The case was adjudicated against him as though he had no de- 236 GLADSTONE— PARNELL fence. In other words in the condition in which the Irish farmers then were, this act gave the landlord a certainty of a verdict in his favor in all cases in which he might care to go to law. Then another act diminished the time which could elapse between the landlord obtaining his verdict and the tenant leaving his fields and house. Thus at every point the landlord was armed cap- a-pie ; the tenant was defenceless. Never in the history of mankind was there a code more com- plete in the interests of one class and against the interests of another. The law was well summed up by an Irish judge. **The entire landlord and tenant code," said Baron Penne- father, "goes to give increased facilities to the landlords." It should be remarked, too, that these laws were not only different from the laws of all other civilized countries in enabling the landlord to throw the tenant and his family on the world starving and penniless, but they were different even from laws passed in the landlords' favor by the landlords of England. " The laws," said Mr. W. Pickens, in his " Economy of Ireland," "in the landlords' favor are already more summary and stronger than they are in England, and he is yet calling for additional assistance." The tenant then, in Ireland, stood in a unique position. Forming as he did more than half the population he was left absolutely at the mercy of the landlord. Ignorant and timid in THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 237 most cases he had never gone more than a few- miles beyond the limits of his own farm ; he had never learned any occupation but that of farming. In other countries he could find in a near town a factory which opened wide its doors to willing la- bor. But, as has been seen, the Union had com- pleted the work that the laws of the Imperial Parliament had begun. Manufactories were in ruins ; the looms were silent ; the artisan either fled to other countries or remained in the towns to increase the ever-growing army of deso- ladon. 'To the peasant, then, eviction meant emigration, if by some lucky chance the landlord had left him so much money as would pay for his passage to America, and in the vast majority of cases the tenant had to starve or enter the work-house. To be allowed to remain in his farm was life ; to be evicted was death. The landlord then, by the code of the Imperial Parlia- ment, was given power of life or death over the tenant. It has already been shown how this terrible au- thority, for which no body of men would be fitted, was especially dangerous in the hands of such a body as the Irish landlords had become under the Union. Every day they were more and more divorced from the people in sympathy and in interest, and thus it was that the' Irish landlords perpetrated upon the Irish tenants crueldes that seem doings of human beings without hearts to 238 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. feel, and without consciences to reproach. It has been seen through various quotations from the days of Spenser down to those of Lord Clare, who helped to carry the Union, that the landlords had shamefully rack-rented their tenants during all their history. The reader will not forget such sentences as these, Edmund Spenser said : "The landlords there most shamefully rack their ten- ants." Dean Swift uses these words : *' Rents squeezed out of the blood and vitals and clothes and dwellings of the tenants, who live worse than English beggars." -To these may be added two quotations, the one from a great American and the other from a great English writer. Benjamin Franklin said : " The bulk of the people are ten- ants, extremely poor, living in the most sordid wretchedness, in dirty hovels of mud and straw, and clothed only in rags. . . . Had I never been in the American colonies, but were to form my judgment of civil society by what I have lately seen, I should never advise a nation of savages to admit of civilization, for I assure you that in the possession and enjoyment of the various comforts of life, compared to these people, every Indian is a gentleman, and the effect of this kind of civiliza- tion seems to be the depressing multitudes below the savage state, that a few may be raised above it." Arthur Young wrote: "It must be very ap- parent to every traveller through the country that THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 239 the laboring poor are treated with harshness, and are in all respects so little considered, that their want of importance seems a perfect contrast to their situation in England. A long series of op- pressions, aided by many ill-judged laws, have brought landlords into a habit of exerting a very lofty superiority, and their vassals into that of an almost unlimited submission; speaking a lan- guage that is despised, professing a religion that is abhorred, and being disarmed, the poor find themselves in many cases slaves even in the bosom of written liberty." But evil as was the system before the Union, it became still worse after the Union, w^hen the landlords had no longer the Irish population around them to look on in reproach and gradually to punish by the use of constitutional weapons. One of the main causes of this was the increase of absenteeism. On this subject we have abun- dant material for forming a judgment. In a well- known work — " Dalton's History of the County Dublin " — a comparative table is drawn up of the annual absentee 'rental : 1691, ^136,018; 1729, ^627, 799; 1782, ;^2,223,222; 1783, ^1,608,932; 1804, ^3,000,000; 1830, ^4,000,000; 1838,^5,- 000,000. Absentee landlords naturally had no feeling about their tenants except that of drawing as much money from them as they could. And this is one of the many reasons why the Irish landlord 240 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. compares unfavorably with the EngHsh landlord. In England, with all his faults, the landlord is al- ways conscious of the sense of his social obliga- tions to his tenantry. Thus in hard times the English landlord and the English farmer have managed to divide their loss between them, and in sickness and misery the children of the English farmer or of the English laborer have been vis- ited by the Ladies Bountiful of the landlord's house. But in Ireland the absentee-landlord never saw his tenants. To him they were mere ciphers, representing so much money for his interests and his pleasures. Testimony is unanimous as to the terrible state of things which was in this manner brought about ; and the testimony is often strongest from English pens. "Landlords in Ireland, among the lesser orders, extort exorbitant rents out of the bowels, sweat and rags of the poor, and then turn them adrift ; they are corrupt magistrates and jobbing grand-jurors, oppressing and plundering the mis- erable people." — Bryan's View of Ireland. " The Irish country gentleman," says the Dub- lin Pilot of 1833, "is, we are sorry to say, the most incorrigible being that infests the face of the globe. In the name of lavv^ he tramples on jus- tice ; boasting of superiority of Christian creed, he violates Christian charity — is mischievous in the name of the Lord." So speak these writers about the Irish landlord. THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 241 The House of Commons Committee of 1824, after having carefully taken the evidence, said : "The situation of the ejected tenantry, or of those who are obliged to give up their small holdings in order to promote the consolidation of farms, is necessarily most deplorable. It would be impos- sible for language to convey an idea of the state of distress to which the ejected tenantry have been reduced, or of the disease, misery or even vice which they have propagated where they have settled ; so that not only they who have been ejected have been rendered miserable, but they have carried with them and propagated that misery. They have increased the stock of labor, they have rendered the habitations of those who have received them more crowded, they have given occasion to the dissemination of disease, they have been obliged to resort to theft and all manner of vice and iniquity to procure subsist- ence ; but what is perhaps the most painful of all, a vast number of them have perished of want." By-and-by will be seen the terrible Nemesis which came upon the Irish people owing to a flao^rant violation of all law and all sense in these proceedings. This state of affairs, attested to by the statements of travellers and the evidences given before committees, laid the foundation for one of the most wide-spread and horrible famines in human historv. Meantime, what had the 242 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. Imperial Parliament been doing? Despite all the testimony of travellers, despite all the evi- dence of witnesses, in spite of all the reports of committees, Parliament refused to do one single thing, to pass one single act for the relief of the Irish tenant. All this time. the Imperial Parliament had been busy with another form of legislation. The Act of Union had been passed in spite of the wishes of the Irish people. It was a government of tyranny and not of Union, and accordingly it pro- voked revolts and had to be maintained by the same methods as are sacred to despotism through- out all the world's history. The landlords, driv- ing out a number- of starving and desperate wretches upon the world without the protection of the laws or hope from the legislature, turned them into criminals of the most desperate char- acter. Wholesale eviction led to the formation of secret societies in which the tenant soueht to inspire in the mind of the landlord that fear of wrong-doing and cruelty which under a native legislature would have been imposed by the laws. With these inevitable outbreaks of frenzy, igno- rance and despair the Imperial Parliament showed itself extraordinarily ready to deal, but always in the same senseless and heartless way. Coercion Act followed Coercion Act. In 1800, iSoi, 1802, 1803, 1804 and 1805 the Habeas Corpus Act was suspended. It was again suspended from 1807 to THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 243 rSio; from 1814 to 1817; from 1822 to 1828; from 1829 to 1831; from 1833 to 1835. There were in addition several other and special Coer- cion Acts. Often there -were two Coercion Acts enforced in the same year. In the first year of the Union five exceptional laws were passed. Many of these acts abolished trial by jury, some established martial law. Transportation, flog- ging, death were the common sentences. We will now draw up a list of the Coercion Acts, passed during the Act of Union: 1800 to 1805. Habeas Corpus Suspension. Seven Coercion Acts. 1807. February ist, Coercion Act. Habeas Corpus Suspension. August 2d, Insurrection Act. 1808-9. Habeas Corpus Suspension. 1814 to 18 1 6. Habeas Corpus Suspension. Insurrection Act. 181 7. Habeas Corpus Suspension. One Coercion Act. 1822 to 1830. Habeas Corpus Suspension. Two Coercion Acts in 1822, and one in 1823. 1830. Importation of Arms Act. 1 83 1. Whiteboy Act. 1 83 1. Stanley's Arms Act. 1832. Arms and Gunpowder Act. 1833. Suppression of Disturbance. 1833. Change of Venue Act. 1834. Disturbances, Amendment, and Con- tinuance. 244 GLADSTONE— PA RNELL. 1834. Arms and Gunpowder Act. 1835. Public Peace Act. 1836. Another Arms Act. 1 838. Another Arms Act. 1839. Unlawful Oaths Act. 1840. Another Arms Act. 1 841. Outrages Act. 1841. Another Arms Act. 1843. Another Arms Act. 1843. -^ct Consolidating all Previous Coercion Acts. 1844. Unlawful Oaths Act. 1845. Additional Constables near Public Works Act. 1845. Unlawful Oaths Act. 1846. Constabulary Enlargement. 1847. Crime and Outrage Act. 1848. Treason Amendment Act. 1848. Removal of Arms Act. 1848. Suspension of Habeas Corpus. 1848. Another Oaths Act. 1849. Suspension of Habeas Corpus. 1850. Crime and Outrage Act. 1851. Unlawful Oaths Act. 1853. Crime and Outrage Act. 1854. Crime and Outrage Act. 1855. Crime and Outrage Act. 1856. Peace Preservation Act. 1858. Peace Preservation Act. i860. Peace Preservation Act. THE GREAt IRISH STRUGGLE. 245 1862. Peace Preservation Act. 1862. Unlawful Oaths Act. 1865. Peace Preservation Act 1866. Suspension of Habeas Corpus Act. 1866. Suspension of Habeas Corpus. 1867. Suspension of Habeas Corpus. 1868. Suspension of Habeas Corpus. 1870. Peace Preservation Act. 1 87 1. Protection of Life and Property. 1 87 1. Peace Preservation Con. 1873. Peace Preservation Act. 1875. Peace Preservation Act. 1875. Unlawful Oaths Act. 1 88 1 to 1882. Peace Preservation Act (sus- pending Habeas Corpus). 1881 to 1886. Arms Act. 1882 to 1885. Crimes Act. 1886 to 1887. Arms Act. Under a system like this it was inevitable that there should be discontent ; and, whenever there seemed even a chance of success, open rebellion. In most of the active insurrections Irish Protes- tants took a leading part. Of the heroic men who sacrificed their lives to rescue their country from the dread evils that the Act of Union was inflicting upon it the best remembered is Robert Emmet. Emmet was a young man of good family' and position ; and had inherited from his father what was considered a good fortune in those days. In conjunction with Thomas Addis Emmet, 246 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. who Still is remembered as one of New York's greatest lawyers — he and several other Protes- tants attempted a rebellion ; the rebellion failed, and he was hanged in Thomas street, Dublin. The spot is still pointed out ; is the object of reverent attention ; and the memory of Emmet is celebrated every year in almost all the important cities of America. Meantime the condition of the country grew worse from day to day. In 1817 there was an extensive famine ; and it is recorded that the people in several parts of the country were well content to live on boiled nettles. In 1822 there was an even severer and more extensive famine. Sir John Newport, a well-known and prominent member of the Imperial Parliament, attempted over and over again to extort some attention from the Legfislature to the dreadful state of things in Ireland. He pointed out that in one parish fifteen had already died of hunger; that twenty-eight more were past recovery ; that 1 20 were down in famine fever. He went on to state another fact which throws a lurid light on the state to which the Union had reduced the Irish people ; in one parish he said the priest had give.n extreme unction — the sacrament which is administered in the Catholic Church to those only who are in almost certain danger of imme- diate death — to every man, woman and child in the place ; every one of them he expected to THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 247 die. But the Imperial Parliament, which had undertaken the government of Ireland, had no remedy to offer for this state of things. A com- mittee was appointed ; evidence was taken, some specimens of which have already been quoted; but the one thing the Legislature had to offer as a remedy for the national disease of hunger was a small grant of money in the shape of alms. The close of the war with Napoleon aggravated all the evils from which the Irish farmer was suffering, by causing a great depreciation in the price of agricultural produce ; and also by the removal of the one reason the British authorities had for being ordinarily civil to the Irish nation. And thus the country went down deeper daily in the slough of poverty, despond, despair. Taxes were rising, rents increasing. The drain on the country through absenteeism in each successive year became larger, and entire or partial famine followed each other at shorter intervals and with intensified suffering. The picture is com- pleted by the passage of Coercion laws in the abundance already set forth, so as to stifle the voice of impatient and savage hunger, and by the sanguinary crimes in which tiger passions and tiger appetites avenged or sought to protect themselves. The assizes rarely ended without the hanging of several unhappy peasants. The fate of the Irish peasant came to this ; he the right to eat two meals of potatoes 248 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. and salt in his own land and out of the earninors of his own arms and capital. For potatoes were all that the landlords left to the consumption of the tenants ; occasionally the peasant was refused even this small privilege ; with wife and child was put on the roadside to die. Then he went to the assassination lodge ; and risked, and perhaps lost, life to defend the right to two meals of po- tatoes daily. This tale of wrong, poverty and hopeless mis- ery became so loud and plain that in 1810 the Repeal of the Union, the fatal act by which the sufferings of the country had been so terribly ag- gravated, was demanded at a great meeting in the city of Dublin, at which Protestants and Catholics joined in equally fervent denunciation of the de- struction of the Irish Parliament. But the demand fell upon deaf ears, and that policy was plainly hopeless. By a number of circumstances not re- quiring elaborate description. Catholic Emancipa- tion was held to be a more practicable reform, and was pushed to the front of all other Irish demands. The leader of this great movement was Daniel O'Connell. O'Connell is one of his- tory's most marvellous products. In physique he had the stamp of strength and greatness. Tall, brawny, muscular, active, he was of dauntless courage, of exhaustless industry, of never-sleeping energy. His oratory, perhaps, has received more unanimous and more lofty eulogy than that of any DANIEL O'CONNELL, THE GREAT IRISH AGITAI'OR. THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 251 Other leader in history. He was equally potent with a great monster gathering- of his own people on the Irish hillside and in the House of Com- mons, surrounded by foes and compelled to ad- here most closely to dry statement of fact. He had every quality of the orator — an abounding humor, immense powers of pathos, close reason- ing, masterly preparation and skilful presentation of facts. Laughter and tears followed each other in rapid succession when he addressed his own people, and when he confronted opponents there was no fallacy which he was not able to pierce and annihilate. In addition to all this he had great .organizing genius. Above all things, he was rich in the orator's mightiest weapon ; his voice was like the sound of some strange music ; powerful as an organ — as varied in tone as the violin ; as artfully modulated as the throat of the prima donna. Armed with the single weapon of his tongue alone, he achieved some of the great- est victories of history. For nearly half a century he exercised over a race, mobile, impatient, often desperate, a dictatorship as complete as ever Czar has been able to wield by the aid of multitudinous armies, vast fleets, ubiquitous police. He wrung from the greatest and the most hostile Ministers, and from the even more violently hostile King of England, one of the greatest triumphs of modern politics. He was able to raise the income of a principality from his self-ordained subjec-ts, and he 15 252 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. was able finally to soar away from all rivals as an Alpine mountain from the plains below. The final event that precipitated Catholic eman- cipation was the Clare election. In England when a member of Parliament accepts a high office he has to vacate his seat, and submit him- self once more to his constituency. Mr. Vesey Fitzgerald, the member for County Clare, had been appointed to the presidency of the Board of Trade. He was a popular Irishman, a good land- lord, a staunch friend to Catholic claims, and of personally estimable character. But some daring spirit suggested that the great Agitator himself should stand for the vacancy. It was known that, as a Catholic, he could not take his seat ; but it was assumed that the experiment would bring things to a crisis, and compel the wavering gov- ernment finally to yield. After a contest of un- exampled excitement, O'Connell was returned. The world was astounded ; the Orange party in Ireland was driven almost out of its senses, and statesmen at last saw that Catholic emancipation could no longer be delayed. O'Connell after an interval presented himself at the bar of the House of Commons. He was asked to take the oath which was still in existence. This oath declared that the King: of Eno-land was head of the Church and that " the sacrifice of the mass was impious and idolatrous." It was an oath which of course no Catholic could take, and O'Connell rejected THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 253 it. He was refused admission ; and Avhen finally Catholic emancipation was carried, the English ministers took a last and a mean revenge by tacking on a provision which prevented the act from being retrospective, and thereby compelled O'Connell to be elected over again. So ended the first great struggle after the Union, Ireland gave herself up to a delirium of joy; O'Connell was idolized; was given the sobriquet of the Liberator, by which he was pop- ularly known for the rest of his life ; and it was supposed that, after the long night, the sun of Ireland was at last high in the heavens. In the next chapter it will be seen how bitterly these hopes were disappointed ; how the real roots of Irish maladies were untouched ; how the disease went on aettino" ao:0;ravated until it ended in one of the most awful tragedies in history. CHAPTER VIi; THE GREAT FAMINE. THE dreadful famine of 1845 "^^^ only the culmination of evils. The distress of the country for many years had been great. It was officially reported in 1824 " that a very consider- able proportion of the population, variously esti- mated at a fourth or a fifth of the whole, is con- sidered to be out of employment ; that this, combined with the consequences of an altered system of managing land, produces misery and suffering which no language can possibly describe, and which it is necessary to witness in order fully to estimate. The situation of the ejected ten- antry, or of those who are obliged to give up their small holdings in order to promote the con- solidation of farms, is most deplorable. It would be impossible for language to convey an idea of the state of distress to which the ejected tenantry have been reduced, or of the disease, misery, or even vice which they have propagated where they have settled ; so that not only they who have been ejected have been rendered miserable, but they have carried with them and propagated 254 THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 265 that misery. They have increased ihe 'stock of labor, they have rendered the habitations of those who have received them more crowded, they have given occasion to the dissemination of disease, they have been obhged to resort to theft and all manner of vice and iniquity to procure subsist- ence; but what is perhaps the most painful of all, a vast number of them have perished of want." The Poor Law Inquiry of 1835 reported that 2,235,000 persons were out of work and in dis- tress for thirty weeks in the year. The Devon Commission reported that it " would be impossible to describe adequately the sufferings and priva- tions which the cottiers and laborers and their families in most parts of the country endure," " their cabins are seldom a protection against the weather," "a bed or a blanket is a rare luxury," "in many districts their only food is the potato, their only beverage water." " Returning noth- ing," Mr. Mill writes of the Irish landlords, " to the soil, they consume its whole produce minus the potatoes strictly necessary to keep the in- habitants from dying of famine." It was this state of affairs between the landlord and tenant that gave to the potato its fatal importance in the economy of Irish life. All the wheat and oats which were orrown on the land must o-o to the payment of the rent ; and also so much of the potato crop as was not required to keep the tenant and his family from absolute starvation, 256 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. The potato was well suited for the position of the tenant. It produced a larger amount per acre than any other crop ; it suited the soil and the climate. The potato meant abundant food or starvation, life or wholesale death. It was the thin partition between famine and the Irish people. The plant had its bad qualities as well as its good ; it was fickle, perishable, liable to whole- sale destruction, and more than once already had given proof of its terrible uncertainty. The readi- ness of the potato to fail was the main factor in Irish life, not merely in the epoch with which we are now dealing, but in a period a great deal nearer to our own time. But in 1845 ths fields everywhere waved green and flowery, and there was the promise of an abundant harvest. There had been whispers of the' appearance of disease; but it was in coun- tries that in those days appeared remote — in Belgium or Germany, in Canada or America. In the autumn of 1845 it made its appearance for the first time in the United Kingdom. It was first detected in the Isle of Wight, and in the first week of September the greater number of the potatoes in the London market were found to be unfit for human food. In Ireland the autumnal weather was suggestive of some calamity. For weeks the air was electrical and disturbed: there was much lightning, unaccompanied by thunder. At last THE. GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 257 traces of the disease began to be discovered. A dark spot — such as would come from a drop of acid — was found in green leaves; the disease then spread rapidly, and in the time there was nothing in many of the potato-fields but withered leaves emitting a putrid stench. The disease soon appeared on the coast of Wexford, and before many weeks were over re- ports of an alarming character began to come from the interior. The plague was stealthy and swift, and a crop that was sound one day the next was rotten. As time passed on the disaster spread ; potatoes, healthy when they were dug and pitted, were found utterly decayed when the pit was opened. All kinds of remedies were pro- posed by scientific men — ventilation, new plans of pitting and of packing, the separation of the sound and unsound parts of the potato. All failed ; the blight, like the locust, was victor over all obstacles. At this moment England was in the very agony of one of her greatest party struggles. The advent of the Irish famine was the last event that broke down Peel's faith in protection. When these warnings of impending disaster and these urgent prayers for relief came from Ire- land, Peel was in the unfortunate position of being convinced of the danger, and at the same time impotent as to the remedies. He was at that moment in the midst of his attempts to carry 258 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. over his colleagues to free trade ; and so his hands were tied. He did propose that the ports should be opened by order in Council, but to this proposal he could not get some of his colleagues to agree. Then there came a min- isterial crisis: Peel resigned; Lord John Russell was unable to form an administration ; and Peel aeain resumed office. The result of these various occurrences was that the ports were not opened and that Parliament was not summoned ; and thus three months — every single minute of which involved wholesale life or death — were allowed to pass without any effective remedy. Under such circumstances, O'Connell and the leaders of the National party were justified in drawing a contrast between this deadly -delay and the promptitude that a native Legislature would have shown. "If," he exclaimed at the Repeal Association, " they ask me w^iat are my propositions for relief of the distress, I answer, first, Tenant-i^ght. I would propose a law giving to every man his own. I would give the land- lord his land, and a fair rent for it ; but I would give the tenant compensation for every shilling he might have laid out on the land in permanent improvements. And what next do I propos'e? Repeal of the Union." And then he went on : " If we had a Domestic Parliament, would not the ports be thrown open — would not the abun- dant crops with which Heaven has blessed her be THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 259 kept for the people of Ireland — and would not the Irish Parliament be more active even than the Belgian Parliament to provide for the people food and employment ? " The opening hours of the next Parliamentary- session were sufficient to damp all hopes. On means of affording relief the Queen's Speech was vague ; but on the question of Coercion it spoke in terms of unmistakable plainness. "I have observed," said that document, " with deep regret, the very frequent instances in which the crime of deliberate assassination has been of late committed in Ireland. It will be y.our duty to consider whether any measures can be devised calculated to give increased protection to life and to bring to justice the perpetrators of so dread- ful a crime." The characteristic contrast be- tween the tender solicitude of the Government for the landlords, and its half-hearted res^ard for the tenants — at the moment when of the tenants a thousand had died through eviction and hunger for every one 'of the landlords who had met death through assassination — roused the bitterest resentment in Ireland. "The only notice," ex claimed the Nation, "vouchsafed to this country is a hint that more gaols, more transportation and more gibbets might be useful to us. Or, possibly, we wrong the Minister ; perhaps when her Majesty says that ' protection must be af- forded to life,' she means that the people are not 260 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. to be allowed to die of hunger during- the ensu- ing summer — or that the lives of tenants are to be protected against the extermination of clear- ing landlords — and that so ' deliberate assassi- nation ' may become less frequent ; — God knows what she means." The measures for limiting the distress were, first, the importation of corn on a lowered duty ; and, secondly, the advance of two sums of 50,000/., one to the landlords for the drainage of their lands, and the other for public works. The ridiculous disproportion of these sums to the magnitude of the calamity was proved before very long; but to all representations the Govern- ment replied in the haughtiest spirit of official optimism, "Instructions have been given," said Sir James Graham, " on the responsibility of the Government to meet any emergency." Only one good measure was covered by the generous self- complacency of this round assertion. Under a Treasury minute of December 19, 1845, the Min- istry had instructed Messrs. Baring and Co, to purchase 100,000/. worth of Indian corn. This they introduced secretly into Ireland, and its dis- tribution proved most timely. The Irish mem- bers pressed for more definite assurances. But their suggestions and Peel's beneficent intentions were frustrated by the fatal entanglement of Irish sorrows in personal ambitions and partisan war- fare. Peel had put forward the Irish famine £15 THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 261 the inain reason for his change of opinion on the Corn Laws ; and the Irish famine became one of the great debatable topics between the adherents of free trade and of protection. All the organs of the landlords in Ireland united in the state- ment that the reports of distress were unreal and exaggerated. " The potato crop of this year," wrote the Evening Mail (1845), " ^^^ exceeded an average one ; " " the corn of all kinds is so far abundant" — which, indeed, was quite true — "the apprehensions of a famine are unfounded, and are merely made the pretence for withholding the payment of rent." Some days after it re- peated, "there was a sufficiency, an abundance of sound potatoes in the country for the wants of the people." "The potato famine in Ireland," exclaimed Lord George Bentinck, " was a gross delusion ; a more gross delusion had never been practised upon any country by any Government." "The cry of famine was a mer'e pretence for a party object." "Famine in Ireland," said Lord Stanley, " was a vision — a baseless vision." Nothing brings the position of the Irish tenant with more terrible clearness to the mind than the fact that the awful warning of 1845 ^^^*^ t*^ ^e unheeded. In 1846 the potato was still cherished as the single resource of the peasant. In his circumstances the potato, and the potato alone, offered him hope. Contemporary testimony is unanimous in de- 262 ■ GLADSTONE— PARNELL. scribing the peasants as working- at that period with a determination to risi'C all on the one cast that exhibited a whole people in a state of desperation. "Already feeling the pinch of sore distress, if not actual famine, they worked as if for dear life ; they begged and borrowed on any terms the means whereby to crop the land once more. The pawn-offices were choked with the humble finery that had shone at the village dance or christening feast ; the banks and local money- lenders were besieged with appeals for credit. Meals were stinted ; backs were bared." The spring was unpromising enough. Snow, hail and sleet fell in March. But when the summer came, it made amends for all this. The weather in June was of tropical heat; vegetation sprang up with something of tropical rapidity; and everybody anticipated a splendid harvest. To- wards the end of June there was a change for the worse. So also in July, there was the alter- nation of tropical heat and thunder-storm, of parching dryness and excessive rain. After this there was a continuous downpour of rain. Still the crop went on splendidly; and all over the country once again wide fields promised exuber- ant abundance. In the early days of August symptoms of coming disaster were seen. A strange portent was seen simultaneously in several parts of Ire- land. A focT — which sorne describe as extremely THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 263 white and others as yellow — was seen to rise from the ground ; the fog was dry, and emitted a disagreeable odor. The fog of that night bore the blight within its accursed bosom. The work of destruction was as swift as it was uni- versal. In a single night and throughout the whole country the entire crop was destroyed, al- most to the last potato. "On the 27th of last month" (July), writes Father Mathew, "I passed from Cork to Dublin, and this doomed plant bloomed in all the luxuriance of an abundant harvest. Returning on the 3d instant (August), I beheld with sorrow one wide waste of putre- fying vegetation." Some of the people rushed into the towns, others wandered listlessly along the high roads in the vague and vain hope that food would some- how or other come to their hands. They grasped at everything that promised sustenance ; they plucked turnips from the fields; many were glad to live for weeks on a single meal of cab- bage a day. In some cases they feasted on the dead bodies of horses and asses and dogs ; and there is at least one horrible story of a mother eating the limbs of her dead child. The characteristic merriment of the peasantry totally disappeared. People went about, not speaking even to beg, with a " stupid, despair- ing look ; " children looked " like old men and women ; " and even the lower animals seemed to 264 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. feel the surrounding despair. Parents neglected their children, and in a few localities children turned out their aged parents. But such cases were very rare, and in the most remote parts of the country. There are, on the other hand, numberless stories of parents willingly dying the slow death of starvation to save a small store of food for their children. The workhouse was then, as now, an object of loathing. Within its walls take refuge the vic- tims of vice and the outcasts of the towns. En- trance into the workhouse was regarded not merely as marking social ruin, but moral degra- dation. Fathers and mothers died themselves, and allowed their children to die alono- with them within their own hovels, rather than seek a refuge within those hated walls. But the time came when hunger and disease swept away these pre- judices, and the people craved admission. Here, again, hope was cheated ; the accommodation in the workhouses was far below the requirements of the people. At Westport 3,000 persons sought relief in a single day, when the work- house, though built to accommodate 1,000 per- sons, was already " crowded far beyond its ca- pacity." The streets were crowded with wan- derers sauntering to and fro with hopeless air and hunger-struck look. Driven from the work- houses, they began to die on the roadside, or within their own cabins. Corpses lay strewn by THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 265 the side of once-frequented roads, and at doors in the most crowded streets of the towns. Dur- ing that period, roads in many places became as charnel-houses, and car and coach drivers rarely drove anywhere without seeing dead bodies strewn along the roadside. In the neighbor- hood of Clifden one inspector of roads caused no less than 140 bodies to be buried which he found along the highway. It was a common occurrence to find on opening the front door in early morn- ing, leaning against it, the corpse of some victim who in the night-time had rested in its shelter. Men with horse and cart were employed to go around each day and gather up the dead. The bodies of those who had fallen on the road lay for days unburied. Husbands lay for a week in the same hovels with the bodies of their un- buried wives and children. Often when there was a funeral it bore even ghastlier testimony to the terror of the time. " In this town," writes a correspondent from Skibbereen, " have I wit- nessed to-day men, fathers, carrying perhaps their only child to its last home, its remains enclosed in a few deal boards patched together ; I have seen them, on this day, in three or four instances, carrying those coffins under their arms or upon their shoulders, without a single individual in at- tendance upon them ; without mourner or cere- mony — without wailing or lamentation. The people in the street, the laborers congregated 266 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. in the town, regarded the spectacle without sur- prise ; they looked on with indifference, because it was of hourly occurrence." • Meantime, what had Government been doing? They had been aggravating nearly all the evils that were causing so rich a harvest of suffering and death. Donations to the amount of ^100,000 had been given from the Treasury under Peel in aid of subscriptions raised by charitable organiza- tions. A more important step was the setting on foot of works for the employment of the destitute. Lord John Russell suddenly closed the works which had been set on foot by Peel. At the time there were no less than 97,900 persons employed on the relief works ; and the effect of adding this vast army of unemployed to the population whose condition has just been described can be imag- ined. Russell's policy was announced on August 17, 1846; and, well-intentioned as his scheme doubt- less was, there was scarcely a sentence in it which did not do harm. The Government did not pro- pose to interfere with the regular mode by which Indian corn and other kinds of grain might be brought into Ireland. The Government proposed "to leave that trade as much at liberty as pos- sible." " They would take care not to interfere with the regular operations of merchants for the supply to the country or with the retail trade." Relief works were to be set on foot by the Board TtlE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 267 of Works when they had previously been pre- sented at presentment sessions. For these works the Government were to advance money at the rate of 3^ per cent., repayable in ten years. In the poorer districts the Government were to make grants to the extent of ^50,000. The evil effects of this legislation were not long in showing themselves^ The declarations with regard to non-intervention with trade were espe- cially disastrous. The price of grain at once went up, and while the deficiency of food was thus enormously increased, speculators were driven to frenzy by the prospect of fabulous gains. Wheat that had been exported by starving tenants was afterwards reimported to Ireland ; sometimes be- fore it was finally sold it had crossed the Irish Sea four times — delirious speculation offering new bids and rushino- in insane eagerness in search of the daily increasing prices. Stories are still told of the ruin that was the Nemesis to some of the greedy speculators in a nation's starvation. More than one who kept his corn obstinately in store while the people around him were dying by the thousand, when he at last opened the doors iound, not his longed-for treasure-house, but an accumulation of rotten corn. "A client of mine," writes Fitzgibbon, "in the winter of 1846-47 be- came the owner of corn carg^oes of such number and magnitude that if he had accepted the prices pressed upon him in April and May, 1847, ^""^ 16 268 GLADSTONE— PARNELI ,. would have realized a profit of ;^7o,ooo. He held for still higher offers, until the market turned in June, fell in July, and rapidly tumbled as an abundant harvest became manifest. He still held, hoping for a recovery, and in the end of October he became a bankrupt." Thus did this man's fatal avarice overreach itself and ruin him. The Government did not interfere with the regular mode by which Indian corn might be brought into Ireland. In Cork alone one firm was reported to have cleared ^40,000, and an- other ^8'o,ooo, from corn speculations. The reason for the non-intervention with the supply of Indian corn was that the retail trade might not be interfered with ; and at this period retail shops were so few and far between for the sale of corn that the laborer in the public works had sometimes to walk twenty or twenty-five miles in order to buy a single stone of meal. Meantime a bitter calamity was added to those from which the people were already suffering. Pestilence always hovers on the flank of famine, and combined with wholesale starvation there were numerous other circumstances that rendered a plague inevitable — the assemblage of such im- mense numbers of people at the public works and in the workhouses, the vast number of corpses that lay unburied, and finally the consumption of unaccustomed food. 'The plague which fell upon THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 269 Ireland in 1846-47 was of a peculiarly virulent kind. The name applied to it at the time sufficiently signified its origin. It was known as the " road fever." Attacking as it did people already weak- ened by hunger it was a scourge of merciless severity. Unlike famine, too, it struck alike at the rich and poor — the well-fed and the hungered. Famine killed one or two of a family; the fever swept them all away. Food relieved hunger; the fever was past all such surgery. The people, worn out by famine, had not the' physical or mental energy even to move from their cabins. The panic which the plague every- where created intensified the miseries. The annals of the time are full of the kindly, but rude attempts of the poor to stand by each other. It was a custom of the period to have food left at the doors or handed in on shovels or sticks to tlie people inside the cabins ; but very often the wretched inmates were entirely deserted. Lying beside each other, some living and some dead^. their passage to the grave was uncheered by one act of help, by one word of sympathy. "A terri- ble apathy hangs over the poor ; starvation has destroyed every generous sympathy ; despair has made them hardened and insensible, and they sullenly await their doom with indifference and without fear. Death is in every hovel ; disease and famine, its dread precursors, have fastened 270 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. on the young and the old, the strong and the feeble, the mother and the infant ; whole families lie together on the damp floor devoured by fever, without a human being to wet their burning lips or raise their languid heads ; the husband dies by the side of the wife, and she knows not that he is beyond the reach of earthly suffering ; the same rag covers the festering remains of mortality and the skeleton forms of the living, who are uncon- scious of the horrible contiguity ; rats devour the corpse, and there is no energy among the living to scare them from their horrid banquet ; fathers bury their children without a sigh, and cover them in shallow graves round which no weeping mother, no sympathizing friends are grouped ; one scanty funeral is followed by another and another. Without food or fuel, bed or bedding, whole families are shut up in naked hovels, drop- ping one by one into the arms of death." Before accommodation for patients "approached anything like the necessity of the time, most mournful and piteous scenes were presented in the vicinity of fever hospitals and workhouses in large towns. Day after day numbers of people, wasted by famine and consumed by fever, could be seen lying on the footpaths and roads waiting for the chance of admission ; and when they were fortunate enough to be received their places were soon filled by other victims!" "At die gate leading to the temporary fever THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 271 hospital, erected near Kilmainham, were men, women and children, lying along the pathway and in the gutter, awaiting their turn to be admitted. Some were stretched at full length, with their faces exposed to the full glare of the sun, their mouths opened, and their black and parched tongues and encrusted teeth visible even from a distance. Some women had children at the breast who lay beside them in silence and appa- rent exhaustion — the fountain of their life being dried up ; whilst in the centre of the road stood a cart containing a whole family who had been smitten down together by the terrible typhus, and had been brought there by the charity of a neighbor." Outside the workhouses similar scenes took place. "Those who were not admitted — and they were, of course, the great majority — having no homes to return to, lay down and died." Admission to the fever hospital and to the workhouse was but the postponement or often tile acceleration of death. Owing to the unex- pected demands made upon their space, the offi- cials of these institutions were utterly unable to adopt measures for diminishing the epidemic. The crowding rendered it impossible to separate even the dead and the dying — there were not beds for a tithe of the applicants ; and thus the epidemic was spread and intensified. "Inside the hospital enclosure" (the fever hospital at 272 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. Kilmainham), says a writer, "was a small, open shed, in which were thirty-five human beings heaped indiscriminately on a little straw thrown on the ground. Several had been thus for three days, drenched by rain, etc. Some were uncon- scious, others dying ; two died during the night." " We visited the poorhouse at Glenties " (county of Donegal), says Mr. Tuke, "which is in a dreadful state ; the people were, in fact, half starved, and only half clothed. They had not sufficient food in the house for the day's supply. Some were leaving the house, preferring to die in their own hovels rather than in the poorhouse. Their bedding consisted of dirty straw, in which they were laid in rows on the floor, even as many as six persons being crowded under one rug. The living and the dying were stretched side by side beneath the same miserable covering." The general effect of all this is summed up thus pithily but completely in the report of the Poor Law Commissioners for 1846: "In the present state of things nearly every person admitted is a patient; separation, of the sick, by reason of their number, becomes impossible; disease spreads, and by rapid transition the workhouse is changed into one large hospital." Workhouses and hospitals were not the only institutions which were filled. The same thing happened to the gaols. The prison came to be regarded as a refuge. Only smaller offences THE CxREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 273 were at first committed ; and an epidemic of glass-breaking- set in. But as times went on, and the pressure of distress became greater, graver crimes became prevalent. Thus sheep- stealing grew to be quite a common offence ; and a prisoner's good fortune was supposed to be complete if he were sentenced to the once loathed punishment of transportation beyond the seas. Tiie Irishman was made happy by the fate which took him to any land, provided only it V\^as not his own. But the prisons, without a tithe of the accom- modation necessary for the inmates, became nests of disease ; and often the offender who hoped for the luck of transportation beyond the seas found that the sentence of even a week's imprisonment proved a sentence of death. The total deaths between 184I and 1851 from fever were 222,029. But, allowing for deficient returns, 250,000 — a quarter of a million of people — perished from fever alone. The famine and the fever were naturally accom- panied and followed by other maladies which re- sult from insufficiency and unsuitability of food. The potato blight continued with varying viru- lence until 1 85 1, its existence being marked by the prevalence in more or less severe epidemics of dysentery, which carried off 5,492 persons In 1846, 25,757 In 1847, the annual totals swelling, until in 1849 the deaths from this disease alone 274 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. amounted to 29,446; cholera, which destroyed 35,989 lives in 1848-49; small-pox, to which 38,275 persons fell victims in the decennial pe- riod between 1841 and 1851. It should be added that as a direct consequence of the famine many thousands suffered severely from scurvy, and the terrible mortality of these epidemics, especially of the fever, led to the most repulsive methods of dealinor with the dead. The hideous magnitude of the sufferings of Ireland at that moment was bound to increase the tendency to discord. The young and strong and brave can never reconcile themselves to the gospel that there is such a thing in this world as inevitable evil. The sight of so many thousands of people perishing miserably naturally sug- gested a frenzied temper, and the extreme course that such a temper begets. Among the young men, therefore, who fathered round the leaders of the Nation newspaper, there was a constant feeling that enough was not being done to save the people. O'Connell was now approaching the close of a long and busy life. One of the great causes of the split between Young and Old Ireland was in reference to what are called the " peace resolutions." Some of the utterances of the Young Irelanders had suggested the em- ployment of physical force under certain circum- stances ; and O'Connell insisted upon the Repeal Association solemnly renewing its adhesion to THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 275 the resolutions. These resokitions, passed at its formation, laid down the doctrine that no po- litical reform was worth purchasing by the shed- ding of even one drop of blood. It is hard to believe that O'Connell ever did accept in its en- tirety the doctrine that physical force was not a justifiable expedient under any imaginable cir- cumstances, O'Connell probably meant to say, that Ireland was so weak at that time when com- pared to England, that an exercise of physical force could have no possible chance of success, and that it was as well to reconcile the people to their impotence by raising it to the dignity of a great moral principle. - From this time forward there were rival organizations, rival leaders and rival policies in the National party. O'Connell did not survive to see the complete wreck of the vast organization which he had held together for so long a period. Rarely has a great, and on the whole successful, career ended in Moom so unbroken. He worked on as ener- getically as ever, for he was a man whose indus- try never paused. But both he and his policy had lost their prestige. The young and ardent began to question his power, and still more to doubt his policy. Then came 1846 and 1847, with the people whom he had pledged himself to bring into the promised land of self-government and prosperity dying of hunger and disease, fleeing as from an accursed spot, or bound to 276 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. the fiery wlieel of oppression more securely than ever. On April 3d, 1846, he delivered a length- ened speech to the House of Commons, of which an entirely inaccurate description is given in Lord Beaconsfield's " Life of Lord George Bentinck." However much the voice and other physical attributes of O'Connell may have appeared to have decayed, this speech, in its selection of evi- dence, and in its arrangement of facts, and its presentation of the whole case against the land system of Ireland, may be read even to-day as the completest and most convincing speech of the times on the question. He spoke in the Llouse of Commons for the last time in Feb- ruary, 1847, and the next day was seriously ill. He went abroad, and was everywhere met by demonstrations of respect and affection. But his heart was broken. A gloom had settled over him which nothing could shake off. He died at Genoa, on May 15th, 1847. His last will was that his heart should be sent to Rome, and his body to Ireland. He lies in Glasnevin Cemetery. The removal of his imposing personality from Irish politics aggravated the dissensions between Old and Young Ireland. The evils of the country grew daily worse ; hope from Parliament died in face of a failure so colossal as that of O'Connell ; and some of the Young Irelanders, seized with despair, resolved rg try physical force. THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 277 The apostle of this new gospel was John Mitchel — one of the strangest and strongest figures of Irish political struggles. He was the son of an Ulster Unitarian clergyman ; and he was one of the early contributors to the Natio7i, and started a paper on his own account. In this paper insurrection was openly preached; and es- pecially insurrection against the land system. The people were asked not to die themselves, nor let their wives and children die, while their fields were covered with food which had been pro- duced by the sweat of their brows and by their own hands. It was pointed out that the reason why all this food was sent from a starving to a prosperous nation was that the rent of the land lord might be paid, and that the rent should therefore be attacked. The Ministry, in order to cope with the results of a period of universal hunger and disease, suc- ceeded in having a whole code of coercion laws passed. The Cabinet had changed its political complexion. Lord John Russell had been the leader of the Whigs in the triumphant attack on coercion ; and now transformed from the leader of Opposition to the head of the Government, brought in coercion bills himself It has been already told how, when O'Connell was tried and convicted by packed juries and par- tisan judges, the Whig leaders in the House of Commons denounced jury-packing as the vilest 278 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. and meanest of expedients to crush political op- ponents ; within a year or so of these declarations the Whigs were packing juries before partisan judges, and were getting verdicts to order which sent political opponents beyond the seas. There was in these years in Dublin a sheet called the World, a blackmailing organ. Its editor — a man named Birch — had been tried and convicted of attempting to obtain hush-money from helpless men and women whom chance had placed in his power. Lord Clarendon, the Whig Lord Lieu- tenant, was forced to confess in a trial in public court some years afterwards, that he had given Birch between £2,000 and ;^3,ooo to turn his slanderous pen against the leaders of the Young Ireland party. Mitchel was brought to trial ; Lord John Rus- sell pledged himself that it should be a fair trial. He had written, he declared, to Lord Clarendon that he trusted there would not arise any charge of any kind of unfairness as to the composition of the juries, as, for his own part, "he would rather see those parlies acquitted than that there should be any such unfairness." Yet was the pledge most flagrantly broken ; and the packing of the jury of John Mitchel under the premier- ship of Lord John Russell was as open, as relent- less, as shameless, as the packing of the jury of O'Connell under the premiership of Sir Robert Peel. The Crown challenged thirty-nine of the THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 279 jurors, with the final result that there was not a single Catholic on the jury, and that the Prot- estants were of the Orange class who would be quite willing to hang Mitchel without the for- mality of trial. Mitchel was sentenced to fourteen years' transportation ; in a few hours after the sentence he was on the way already to the land to which he was now exiled. His own expectation was that the Government would never be allowed to con- quer him without a struggle, and that his sen- tence would be the longed-for and the necessary signal for the rising. But it was deemed wisest by the other leaders of the Young Ireland party that the attempt at insurrection should be post- poned. By successive steps, however, these men were in turn driven to the conviction that an attempt at insurrection should be made. Mr. Smith O'Brien was the member of an aris- tocratic family. His brother afterwards became Lord Inchiquin, and was the nearest male relative to the Marquis of Thomond. For years he had been honestly convinced that the Liberal party would remedy all the wrongs of the Irish people. But as time went on, and all these evils seemed to become aggravated instead of relieved, he was driven slowly and unwillingly into the belief that the legislative Union was the real source of all the evils of his country. By successive steps he was driven into the ranks of Young Ireland, and 280 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. by degrees into revolution. When he, Mr. John Blake Dillon, Mr. D'Arcy M'Gee, and Mr. (now Sir) Charles Gavan Duffy were finally forced into the attempt to create an insurrection, they had a strong feeling that they were called upon to make it rather through the calls of honor' than the chances of success. The attempt at all events proved a disastrous failure. After an attack on a police barrack at Ballingarry, the small force which O'Brien had been able to call and keep to- gether was scattered. He and the greater num- ber of the leaders were arrested after a few days, and were put on their trial. The juries were packed as before, the judges were partisans, and O'Brien and the rest were convicted, were sen- tenced to death, and, this sentence being com- muted, were transported. This was the end of the Young Ireland party. The party of O'Con- nell did not survive much longer. In 1847 there was a general election. The account of that elec- tion is one of the most depressing and most in- structive chapters in Irish history, and makes sev- eral years of Irish history intelligible. The idea of the Young Irelanders was an inde- pendent Irish party. But O'Connell's heirs, as he himself, taught a very different creed. It was O'Connell's persistent idea that his supporters were justified in taking offices under the Crown. It is easy to understand his reasons for adopting such a policy.- When O'Connell started his po- THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 281 litical career, every post of power in Ireland was held by die enemies of the popular cause. All men in any public position, great or small, were Protestants, and most of them Conservatives. Ireland had all the forms which in England are the guarantees of freemen and freedom, but these forms became the bulwarks and Instruments of tyranny. It was in vain that there were in Ire- land judges who had the same indeperfdence of the Crown as their brethren in England, if, from political partisanship, they could be relied upon to do the behests of the Government. Trial by jury was ^a " mockery, a delusion, and a snare," if it meant trial by a carefully selected number of one's bitterest political and religious opponents. And no laws could establish political or social or religious equality when their administration was left to the unchecked caprice of political partisans. O'Connell thought, therefore, that one of the first necessities of Irish progress was that the judiciary and the other official bodies of the country should be manned by men belonging to the same faith and sympathizing with the political sentiments of the majority of their countrymen. O'Connell was the leader of a democratic move- ment w^ith no revenue save such as the voluntary subscriptions of his followers supplied. It was not an unwelcome relief to his cause if occasion- ally he was able to transform the pensioners on his funds into pensioners on the coffers of the 282 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. State. At this period the Irish leader had a much more circumscribed class from which to draw his Parliamentary supporters than at the present day. There were large classes of the population who, while they had the property qualification, were in other respects entirely un- suited for the position of members of a popular party. The landlords were almost to a man on the side of existing abuses, and the greater num- ber of the members of this body whom O'Connell was able to recruit to his ranks were usually men of extravagant habits and of vicious lives, and politics was the last desperate card with which their fortunes were to be marred or mended. It was all very well for half a million of people to meet O'Connell at the monster meedngs, and to show that he commanded, as never did popular leader before, the affections, the opinions, and the right arms of a unanimous nation. But when it came to the time for obtaining a Parliamentary supporter for his struggle with English Ministries, it was not upon the voice of the people that the decision rested. He could carry most of the counties, even though support of him meant sen- tences of eviction and of death, or of exile to his adherents. In the boroughs it was half a dozen shopkeepers, face to face with always impending bankruptcy, who had the decision of an election. Finally, O'Connell, in this matter of place-hunting, as in so many others, was led astray by reliance THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 283 upon the English Whig party. The result was the creation in Ireland of a school of politicians which has been at once her dishonor and her bane. This was the race of Catholic place- hunters. It will be found that in exact proportion to their success and number were the degradation and the deepening misery of their country; that for years the struggle for Irish prosperity and self-government was impeded mainly through them ; and that hope for the final overthrow of the whole vast structure of wrong in Ireland showed some chance of realization for the first time when they were expelled forever from politi- cal life. A profligate landlord, or an aspiring but brief- less barrister, was elected for an Irish constituency as a follower of the popular leader of the day and as the mouthpiece of his principles. He soon gave it to be understood by the distributors of State patronage that he was open to a bargain. The time came when in the party divisions his vote was of consequence, and the bargain was then struck. The wretched following which in the course of his long struggle O'Connell had gathered about him gave that apparent uncleanness to his proceedings which excited the just indignation of young and ardent and high-minded men and caused the demand for an independent Irish party, with no mercv to place-hunters. Richard 17 284 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. Lalor Shell, one of the most eloquent colleagues of O'Connell in the old struggle, had kept out of all popular movements — some said because the despotic will of the great tribune made life intol- erable to any but slaves — and had in time sunk to the level of a Whig office-holder. In 1846 he stood for Dungarvan, and the Young Irelanders demanded that he should be opposed by a man who was not in favor with the Government, O'Connell stood by his old associate, and Shiel was elected. In 1848 the famine had not passed away. The succeeding year was the very worst in the cen- tury, except 1847. But by this time Lord John Russell entirely changed his tune. He met every demand for reform with an uncompromising neg- ative, or with the absolute denial that any relief was needed. " While," said Lord John Russell, " I admit that, with respect to the franchise and other subjects, the people of Ireland may have just grounds of complaint, I, nevertheless, totally deny that their grievances are any sufficient reason why they should not make very great progress in wealth and prosperity, if, using the intelligence which they possess in a remarkable degree, they would fix their minds on the advantages which they might enjoy rather than upon the evils which * they suppose themselves to suffer under." Then he made allusion to a Bill which had THE GREAT. IRISH STRUGGLE. 285 been brought in by Sir William Somerville for dealing with the Land question. Its proposals were indeed modest. It gave compensation to tenants for permanent improvements ; but those improvements had to be made with the consent of the landlords, and it was not proposed that the Bill should be retrospective. But, modest as these proposals were, it did not gain the full approval of the Prime Minister, and they did not secure the safety of the Bill. To any such proposal as fixity of tenure the Liberal Prime Minister could offer his strongest hostility. " But, after all," said Lord John Russell, " that which we should look to for improving the rela- tions between landlord and tenant is a better mutual understanding between those who occupy those relative positions. Voluntary agreements between landlords and tenants, carried out for the benefit of both, are, after all, a better means of improving the land of Ireland than any legislative measure which can be passed." The "better mutual understanding" on which the Prime Minister relied for an improvement in the relations of landlord and tenant at this mo- ment was hounding the landlords to carry on wholesale clearances which, in the opinion of Earl Grey, were "a disgrace to a civilized coun- try;" which had been denounced over and over again by Lord John Russell himself; and which, in the opinion of most men, remain as one of the 286 GLADSTO'NE— PARNEI.L blackest records in all history of man's inhumanity to man. In that year, following the exhortation of the Prime Minister to voluntary agreements "for the benefit of both," the landlords had evicted no less than half a .million of tenants. The frightful state of things in 1847 naturally produced a considerable amount of disturbance. Many of the tenants were indecent enough to object to being robbed of their own improve- ments and went the length of revolting against their wives and children being massacred whole- sale. In short, the rent was in danger, and in favor of that sacred institution all the resources of British law and British force were promptly despatched. The Legislature had shown no hurry whatever to meet in '46 or '47, when the question at issue was whether hundreds of thou- sands of the Irish tenantry should perish of hunger or of the plague. Now Parliament could not be summoned too soon, and a Coercion Bill could not be carried with too much promptitude. It will not be necessary to recall the quotations which have just been made from the speech of Lord John Russell in opposing the Coercion Bill of 1846. Suffice it to say that while in 1846 he had objected to the Coercion Bill, " above all " because it was not accompanied with measures " of relief, of remedy, and conciliation," and that he had gone so far as to pledge himself to the principle that some such proposals ought to ac- THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 287 company any measure which tended to " increased rigor of the law," Lord John Russell was now himself proposing a measure for greatly "in- creased rigor of the law," not only without ac- companying it with any measure of "relief, of remedy, of conciliation " on his own part, but vehemently opposing any such measure when brought in by any other person. Lord Grey has been quoted for his opinion on the clear- ance system, and here was the clearance system going on worse than ever, and Lord Grey re- maining a member of the Ministry. The police were urged to unusual activity, and large bodies of the military even were pressed into the service of the landlords, seized the pro- duce of the fields, carried them to Dublin for sale — acted in every respect as the collectors of the rent of the landlord, and tl;ius shared the honor of starving the tenants. In 1848 a number of Irishmen, as has been seen, driven to madness by the dreadful suffering they everywhere saw around, and by the neglect or incapacity of Parliament, had sought the des- perate remedy of open revolt. The men who, for wrongs much less grievous, rose in the same year in Hungary or France or Italy, were the idols of the British people, and were aided and encour- aged by British statesmen. But British action towards Ireland was to pass a Treason Felony Act, and to suspend the Habeas Corpus Act 288 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. Parliament came together. Lord John Russell brouijht forward his bill. Sir Robert Peel at once "gave his cordial support to the proposed meas- ure." Mr. Disraeli "declared his intention of giving the measure of government his unvarying and unequivocal support." Mr. Hume was " obliged, though reluctantly, to give his consent to the measure of the government." Lord John Russell said that " as the House had expressed so unequivocally its feeling in favor of the bill, it would doubtless permit its further stages to be proceeded with mstanter. He moved the second reading." Of course the House permitted the further stages to be proceeded with instanter, and the bill, having passed through committee, "Lord Russell moved the third readinof " which was agreed to, "and the bill was forthwith taken up to the House of Lords." " On the next day but one, Monday, July 26," goes on the ."Annual Reg- ister," '* the bill was proposed by the Marquis of Lansdowne, who concluded his speech in its favor by moving 'that the public safety requires that the bill should be passed with all possible de- spatch.' " Of course the motion was accepted by their Lordships " that the bill should be passed with all possible despatch ; " and " the bill passed nem. dis. through all its stages." This was the action of liberty-loving Englishmen in 1848. CHAPTER VIII. RESURRECTION. THE Fenian movement was largely the crea- tion of Irish-America. Thither had fled at various periods men who, having taken part in revolts against the intolerable tyranny of Eng- land in Ireland, were unable to remain in their own country. The Irish in America were besides impelled to resentment against the unhappy posi- tion of their country by the sight of the prosperity of a free Republic. Thus in many ways the new world in spite of its official neutrality deeply influ- ences the history of the old. James Stephens and John O'Mahony were the two main spirits in organizing this attempt by armed force to destroy British dominion in Ireland. They were able to gather into their ranks many earnest and brave men in some parts of Ireland ; they got a strong hold on the military ; and in fact they made a movement the propordons of which were a formidable threat against the English power. But the movement had many weaknesses — above all it suffered from the want of war material. It made several attempts at a rising ; but the men 289 290 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. were without arms and were easily overcome. Successive batches of leaders were tried before packed juries ; and there was the old story in Irish life of perjury, bribed informers, partisan judges ; and then after conviction followed sentences of unjustifiable cruelty. • Indf ed, in most cases the cruelty began before the sentences were passed. The Imperial Parliament, which could never find time or will to stand between Ireland and de- struction by eviction and emigration, turned all its force to the passing of coercion laws. The Habeas Corpus Act was suspended without cere- mony. On one occasion the Houses of Parlia- ment sat through all Saturday and even iiito the Sabbath in order to more speedily pass such a law. Then men were seized all over the coun- try, were cast into prison and were kept there sometimes as long as a year without being brought to trial. While thus confined they were treated exactly as if they had been convicted — in some cases worse ! The result was that several of them went insane, and afterwards more than one ended his own life. When the Fenian prisoners were convicted they were sent among the ordinary prisoners : thieves, burglars, mur- derers — the scum and refuse of English society. The Fenian movement as an armed revolt against the forces of England failed ; but as a trumpet-call to Ireland to rouse herself from her lethargy of death it succeeded. Two events came THE GREAT IRISH STRUGGLE. 291 finally in connection with Fenianism that exer- cised a strong- influence on the future of Ireland. The one was the blowing down of the prison in London in which a prominent Fenian prisoner was confined ; and the other was the rescue of Captain Kelly, the successor to Mr. Stephens in the leadership of the movement, and a companion named Deasy from a prison van in Manchester. In the blowing down of Clerkenwell there was unhappily a large loss of innocent life ; in the attack on the prison van at Manchester a ser- geant of police was accidentally killed. Three men were executed for the Manchester rescue — Allan, Larkin, and O'Brien. Their trial took place under circumstances of popular panic and amid a tempest of popular hatred in England. The evidence against them was weak; it was proved afterwards to be grossly false in some particulars ; while on the other hand there was abundant testimony that the shooting of Sergeant Brett was accidental and unintentional. Several attempts were made to have the sentence on the three Irishmen commuted, but all failed; and they were executed. The event created terrible ex- citement all through the Irish world, wherever it might be. O'Mara Condon, one of the men tried at the same time and condemned to death, but afterwards sentenced to penal servitude, used the phrase " God Save Ireland " from the dock. Mr. T. D. Sullivan wrote a poem to this refrain in the 292 GLADSTONE— PARNELL. Nation newspaper ; it spread like wild-fire, and to- day it may be described as the national anthem of Ireland. It was fortunate for Ireland that at this moment the Liberal party was led by Mr. Gladstone. The features, moral, physical and mental, of this re- markable man are already familiar to every American. He was the man above all others suited for the CTreat occasion which had now arisen. There has scarcely ever been an English- man who exercised so great a control over the hearts and minds of the English people. He has always appealed to their higher and better emo- tions; and thus he has been able to raise a moral tempest in which they were caught up and carried away. The marvellous combination of different and apparently contradictory gifts is one of the striking thines in his nature. There is no man more indmately acquainted with the technique of a Parliamentary and official life. He has been several times Chancellor of the Exchequer. In that position it has been his business to become master of the details and inner life of many of the trades of the countr}-'. He has been able to meet all comers in the debates on the smallest items of the annual budget. But there is another side to this o-reat character. There is no man who understands better the great heart-throbs of humanity, and that can bet- ter employ the chords to which they thrill. He ■lllL ul,.\iiAloLiS FK