ENGLISH RULE IN IRELAND.

ENGLISH RULE IN IRELAND.Noone can pass from England into Ireland without being struck by the contrast in the condition of the two countries—a contrast so marked and absolute that it is revealed at the first glance, and in lines so bold and rigid that it seems to have been produced by nature itself. In England there is wealth, thrift, prosperity; in Ireland, poverty, helplessness, decay. Into the great heart of London, through arteries that stretch round the globe, the riches of the whole earth are poured. Dublin is a city of the past, and, in spite of its imposing structures, impresses us sadly. The English cities are busy marts of commerce or homes of comfort, luxury, and learning. The Irish towns are empty, silent, decayed. Into England’s ports come the ships of all the nations; but in Ireland’s hardly a sail is unfurled. There the chimneys of innumerable factories shut out with their black smoke the light of heaven; here the Round Tower or the crumbling ruin stands as a monument of death. England is over-crowded; in Ireland we travel for miles without meeting a human being; pass through whole counties from which the people have disappeared to make room for cattle. Freedom is in the very air of England: the people go about their business or pleasure in a sturdy, downright way, and in a conscious security under the protection of wise laws; in Ireland we cannot take a step without being offended by evidences of oppression and misrule. The people are disarmed and unprotected, guarded by a foreign soldiery, the servants of an alien aristocracy.To what causes must we ascribe this wide difference in the condition of two islands, separated by a narrow strip of sea, with but slight dissimilarity of climate, and governed ostensibly for now nearly seven hundred years by the same laws?The explanation given universallyby English writers, with the tone with which one is accustomed to affirm axiomatic truths, is based upon the dissimilarity of the two peoples in natural character and in religious faith. The Irish, they say, are by nature discontented, idle, and thriftless, and their religion is in fatal opposition to liberty and progress. The subject is worthy of our attention. Ireland is an anomaly in European history. Just at the time when the other Christian nations, after overcoming the divisions and feuds of a barbarous age, were settling down into the unity which renders harmonious development possible, the seed of perpetual discord and never-ending strife was planted ineradicably in her soil. Three hundred years of almost incessant warfare with the Dane had left her exhausted and divided, an easy prey to the Norman barons, who introduced into her national life a foreign blood and an alien civilization.From that day to the present time Ireland’s fate has been the saddest of which history has preserved the record. There has been no peace, no liberty, no progress. Opposing races, contrary civilizations, and opposite religions have clashed in such fierce and bloody battles that we could almost fancy the furies of the abyss had been let loose to smite and scourge the doomed land. Mercy, justice, all human feelings have been banished from this struggle, which has been one of brute force and fiendish cunning. Whatever the stronger has been able to do has been done; and there is no good reason for believing that England, in her dealings with Ireland, has ever passed one just law or redressed one wrong from a humane or honorable motive. From the conquest to theschism of HenryVIII., a period of nearly four centuries, the English colonists, entrenched within the Pale and receiving continually reinforcements from the mother country, formed a nation within a nation, always armed and watching every opportunity to make inroads upon the possessions of the native princes, who were not slow to return blow for blow. There was no security for life or property; the people were left to the mercy of barons and kings, to be robbed and pillaged or butchered in their broils. Nothing could be more inhuman than English legislation in Ireland during these four centuries, unless it be English legislation in Ireland during the three centuries which followed. HenryII.confiscated the whole island, dividing the land among ten of his chief followers; though they were able to hold possession of but a small part of the country. In the legal enactments and official documents of this period the term habitually used to designate the native population is “the Irish enemy.” They were never spoken of except as “the wild Irish,” until, as an English writer affirms, the term “wild Irish” became as familiar in the English language as the term wild beast. They were denied the title of English subjects and the protection of English law. An act, passed in the reign of EdwardII., gave to the English landlords the right to dispose of the property of their Irish dependents as they might see fit. All social and commercial intercourse with the “Irish enemy” was interdicted. An Irishman if found talking with an Englishman was to be apprehended as a spy and punished as an enemy of the king; and the violation of an Irishwoman was not a crimebefore the law. Even exile was not permitted as a mitigation of this misery; for a law of HenryIV.forbade the “Irish enemy” to emigrate. There is no exaggeration in the address which the people of Ireland sent to Pope JohnXXII.:“Most Holy Father,” they say, “we send you some precise and truthful information concerning the state of our nation, and the wrongs which we are suffering, and which our ancestors have suffered from the kings of England, their agents, and the English barons born in Ireland. After having driven us by violence from our dwellings, from our fields and our ancestral possessions—after having forced us to flee to the mountains, the bogs, the woods, and caves to save our lives—they cease not to harass us here even, but strive to expel us altogether from the country, that they may gain possession of it in its entire extent. They have destroyed all the written laws by which we were formerly governed. The better to compass our ruin, they have left us without laws.… It is the opinion of all their laymen, and of many of their ecclesiastics, that there is no more sin in killing an Irishman than in killing a dog. They all maintain that they have the right to take from us our lands and our goods.”In the second period of English rule in Ireland, to the war of races was added a war of religion, in which the “Irish enemy” became the “Popish idolater.” To kill an Irishman was no sin, and to exterminate idolatrous superstition was a mission imposed by Heaven upon the chosen people to whom the pure faith of Christ had been revealed.Then began the series of butcheries, devastations, famines, exterminations,and exiles which have not yet come to an end. The horrors of these three centuries have not been written; they can never be rightly told, or even imagined. Ireland was not only conquered, but confiscated.Elizabeth confiscated 600,000 acres of land in Munster after the revolt of the Earl of Desmond; her successor, JamesI., confiscated a million acres in Ulster. CharlesI.confiscated 240,000 acres in Connaught, and would have confiscated the whole province had he been able to obtain possession of it. Under the Commonwealth 7,708,237 acres were confiscated. William of Orange confiscated 1,060,000 acres. And in these confiscations we have not included the lands of the church, which were all turned over to the Establishment. The atrocity of England’s Irish wars is without a parallel in the history of Christian nations. Women and children were murdered in cold blood; priests were burned to death; churches were pillaged and set on fire; towns were sacked and the inhabitants put to the sword; men and youths were put on shipboard, carried into mid-ocean, and deliberately thrown into the sea. Others were sold as slaves in the Barbadoes. Whatever could serve as food for man was destroyed, that famine might make way with all who escaped the sword. Spenser, the poet, who visited Ireland after the revolt of the Earl of Desmond, in the reign of Elizabeth, has left us a description of the condition of that province as he saw it: “Out of every corner of the woods and glens they came, creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs could not bear them; they looked like anatomies of death; they spake like ghosts crying out oftheir graves; they did eat the dead carrions, happy where they could find them; yea, and one another soon after, inasmuch as the very carcasses they spared not to scrape out of their graves; and if they found a plot of water-cresses or shamrocks, there they flocked as to a feast for the time, yet not able long to continue therewithal; that in short space there were none almost left; and a most populous and plentiful country suddenly left void of man and beast.”[191]Lord Gray, one of Elizabeth’s lieutenants, declared towards the end of her life that “little was left in Ireland for her Majesty to reign over but carcasses and ashes.”Cromwell’s wars were even more cruel, and left Ireland in a condition, if possible, more wretched still. Half the people had perished; and the survivors were dying of hunger in the bogs and glens in which they had sought refuge from the fury of the troopers. Wolves prowled around the gates of Dublin, and wolf-hunting and priest-hunting became important and lucrative occupations. But it is needless to dwell longer upon this painful subject. Let us remark, however, that it would be unjust to hold Elizabeth or Cromwell responsible for these cruelties. They but executed the will of the English people, who still cherish their memories and justify these outrages. No English ruler ever feared being called to account for harshness or tyranny in dealing with Ireland. The public opinion of the nation considered the extirpation of the Irish as a work to be done, and applauded whoever helped forward its consummation. This much we may affirm on the authority of Protestant witnesses.“The favorite object of the Irish governors,” says Leland, “and of the English Parliament was the utter extirpation of all the Catholic inhabitants of Ireland.”“It is evident,” says Warner, “from the Lords-Justices’ last letter to the Lieutenant, that they hoped for an extirpation, not of the mere Irish only, but of all the English families that were Roman Catholics.”The feeling against the Irish was even stronger than against the church, so that the English seemed to feel a kind of pleasure in the adherence of the Celtic population to the old faith, since it widened the chasm between the two races. They really made no serious efforts to convert the Irish to Protestantism. They neglected to provide them with instructors capable of making themselves understood. They put forth no Protestant translation of the Bible in the Irish language, but contented themselves with setting up a hierarchy of archbishops, bishops, and rectors whose lives were often scandalous, and who, as Macaulay says, did nothing, and for doing nothing were paid out of the spoils of a church loved and revered by the people. Some justification for the extermination of the Irish race would be found in the fact that those who perished were only papists. War, famine, confiscation, and exile had, by the close of the seventeenth century, either destroyed or impoverished the native and Catholic population of Ireland. The land was almost exclusively in the hands of Protestants, who had also taken possession of all the cathedrals, churches, and monasteries which had escaped destruction. The Catholics, reduced to beggary, were driven from the towns and, as far as possible, fromthe English settlements into the bleak and barren hills of Connaught. In many instances the confiscated lands had been given to Englishmen or Scotchmen, with the express stipulation that no Irish Catholic should be employed by them, even as a common laborer. In this extremity the Irish people were helpless. Every line along which it was possible to advance to a better state of things was cut off. Their natural leaders had been driven into exile or reduced to abject poverty; their spiritual guides had been murdered or banished; or if any had escaped their pitiless persecutors, a price was set upon their heads, and they led the lives of outlaws, unable to administer the sacraments even to the dying, except by stealth.All their institutions of learning had been destroyed; and England permitted no instruction except in the English tongue—which the Irish neither spoke nor were willing to speak—and in Protestant schools, from which she knew the Catholics were necessarily shut out. They not only had nothing, but were in a condition in which it was impossible that they should acquire anything. Indeed, the little security which was still left them to drag out a miserable existence was found precisely in their utter helplessness and wretchedness. They could no longer be plundered, for they had nothing; they could not be butchered in battle, for they were powerless and without weapons; and so their persecutors paused, not, as the poet says, to listen to their sad lament, but from sheer contempt and indifference, thinking it no longer worth while to take notice of their hapless victims.Three-fourths of the population of the island were nevertheless still Irish Catholics; and in spite ofthe persistent efforts to drive them all beyond the Shannon, the moment the violence of persecution abated large numbers showed themselves in other parts of the country, especially in the province of Munster. It was at this time, and to meet any danger that might arise from the mingling of the Irish Catholics with the Protestant colonists, that the Penal Code was enacted, by which the entire population that still held to the ancient faith was deprived of all rights and reduced to the condition of helots and pariahs. This Code, the most inhuman ever contrived by the perverted ingenuity of man, was the work of the Irish Parliament, which, it is almost needless to say, represented only the Protestants of Ireland. Violence had done its work; the Catholic Irish had been reduced to a condition as wretched as it is possible for man to suffer and live; and now the form of justice and the semblance of law are invoked to make this condition perpetual. Suddenly, and for the first time, the Protestants of Ireland seem animated with religious zeal for the conversion of the Catholics. The extermination of the Irish race was abandoned as hopeless; and, indeed, there seemed to be no good ground for believing that a people who had survived the wars, famines, and exiles by which Ireland had been drained of its population during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries could be extirpated. Nothing remained, therefore, but to convert them. This was the pretext with which men sought to hide the monstrous iniquity of the penal laws. All bishops and monks were ordered to quit Ireland before the 1st of May, 1698, under pain of imprisonment and transportation; and, in case they should return, they were tosuffer death. Heavy fines were imposed upon all who harbored or concealed the proscribed ecclesiastics; and rewards were offered for their discovery or apprehension. Care was taken at the same time to exclude all foreign priests. By thus cutting off from Ireland the fountain-source of orders and ecclesiastical jurisdiction, it was confidently expected that in a few years the Catholic priesthood would cease to exist there, and that the people, left without priests or sacraments, would have no alternative but to become Protestants. Every exterior sign of Catholic worship was suppressed, and it was tolerated only as a hidden cult, whose ceremonies were performed with bated breath, clandestinely in cabins and unfrequented places. Whatever appealed to the heart or the imagination was condemned. The steeple that pointed to heaven; the bell whose religious tones thrilled with accents of a world of peace; the cross that told of the divinity that is in suffering and sorrow; the pilgrimages in which the people gathered to cherish sacred memories and to do homage to worthy deeds and noble lives, were all proscribed. And even the poor huts in which it was possible to offer the Holy Sacrifice were carefully watched by the officers of the law, as to-day, in the great cities, places of infamy are put under the surveillance of the police.Having suppressed the hierarchy and shorn the Catholic religion of its splendor, the rulers of Ireland next proceeded to adopt measures by which every imaginable inducement to apostasy was held out both to the clergy and the laity. An annual pension, first of twenty, then of thirty, and finally of forty pounds sterling was offered to all priestswho should abandon their religion. Whether or not they accepted this bribe was held to be of small importance, as their ranks were rapidly thinned by death, and precautions had been taken that the vacancies should not be refilled.The Catholic people were placed in a position like that of the Forty Martyrs, who were exposed naked on the frozen lake, surrounded by warm baths and comfortable houses, which they could enter by renouncing their faith. The deepest and holiest instincts of human nature were appealed to against the most sacred convictions which man is capable of holding. If the father wished to educate his child, schools abounded, but he could enter them only by abandoning his religion. He was not, indeed, forced to send his children to these Protestant schools, but it was made impossible for him to send them to any other. His tyrants went farther. They spared no pains to make it impossible that an Irish Catholic should learn anything even by stealth. All Catholic schoolmasters were banished from Ireland, and, in case of return, were to suffer death.The law made express provision for the money necessary to defray the expenses of transporting these obnoxious persons. Nay, it went yet farther. There were schools on the continent of Europe to which a few Irish children might possibly find their way. This danger was foreseen and met. An act was passed prohibiting Catholics from sending their children across the Channel without special permission, and the magistrates were authorized to demand at any time that parents should produce their children before them. Beyond this it was not possible to go. All that human enactments can do to degrade themind of a whole people to a state of brutish ignorance was done. And let us remark that this applied not to the Irish only, but to all Catholics who spoke the English language. The English government took from them every opportunity of knowledge, made it criminal for them to know anything; and then they were denounced by English writers almost universally as the foes of learning and as lovers of ignorance. We know of no harder or more cruel fate in all history, nor of a more striking example of the injustice of the world towards the church. Even here in the United States we Catholics are still suffering the consequences of this unparalleled infamy. But we have hardly entered on the subject of the Penal Laws: we are as yet on the threshold.The enforced ignorance of the Irish Catholics was but a preparation for innumerable other legal outrages. From all the honorable careers of life they were mercilessly shut out—from the army; the navy, the magistracy, and the civil service. That a Catholic was not permitted to become an educator we have already seen. As little was he allowed to perform the functions of barrister, attorney, or solicitor. He could neither vote nor be elected to office. Shut out from all public life, from every liberal profession, disfranchised, ignorant, despised, was anything else needed to make the Irish Catholic the most wretched of men? His land had been confiscated, he had been robbed; he was a beggar; but might he not hope gradually to lift himself out of the degradation of his poverty? To regain ownership of the soil was out of the question. He was disqualified by law, which, however, permitted him to become a tenant—not to do him a favor,but solely for the benefit of the landlord, to whose arbitrary will he was made a slave. This is but half the truth. The iniquity of the law mistrusted the rectitude of human nature even in an Irish landlord. He was therefore compelled to be unjust to his tenant; to give him but short leases; to force him to pay at least two-thirds of the value of the produce of his farm; to punish him for improving his land by augmenting the rent; and, lest there should be any doubt as to the seriousness of these barbarous enactments, a premium was offered for the discovery of instances of their violation in favor of Catholic tenants. The landlord was not allowed to be just, but he was free to be as heartless and inhuman as he pleased. His tenants had no rights, they belonged to a despised race, they professed an idolatrous religion, and their extermination had been the cherished policy of the English government for six hundred years. If there was no hope here for the Irish Catholic, might he not, with better prospects, turn to commercial or industrial pursuits?Without, for the present, taking a larger view of this question, it will be sufficient to consider the restrictions placed upon Catholics in this matter. Commerce and manufacture were controlled by municipal and trading corporations of which no Irish Catholic could be a member. This of itself, at a time when monopoly and privilege were everywhere recognized, gave to Protestants the entire business of the country.Prohibitory laws were therefore not needed. But no security could lull to rest the fierce spirit of the persecuting Protestant oligarchy. A Catholic could not acquire real estate; he could not even rent land,except on ruinous terms; he could not exercise a liberal profession or fill a public office; he was unable to engage in commerce or manufacture; he had no political rights, no protection from the law; and, to make all this doubly bitter, his masters were at once the enemies of his race and his religion. This, one would think, ought to have been enough to satisfy the worst of tyrants. But it is of the nature of tyranny that the more it oppresses, the more it feels the necessity of inflicting new wrongs upon its victims. Every motive that incites men to activity and labor had been taken from the Catholics, and yet their oppressors, with the cowardice which naturally belongs to evil-doers, were still fearful lest some of them might, by chance or good fortune, acquire wealth enough to lift them above the immediate necessities of life. A universal threat was therefore held over all who possessed anything. A Catholic was not allowed to own a horse worth more than five pounds; any Protestant in the kingdom might take the best he had by paying him that sum. Whenever it was deemed necessary to call out the militia, the law declared all horses belonging to Catholics subject to seizure; and twenty shillings a day for the maintenance of each troop was levied on the papists of the country. Whenever property was destroyed, the law assumed that the Catholics were the offenders, and they were forced to indemnify the owners for their loss. They were taxed for the support of the government, in which they were not allowed to take part and from which they received no protection; for the maintenance of the Established Church, in which they did not believe and which was already richwith the spoils of the Catholic Church.No Catholic was permitted to marry a Protestant; and the priest assisting at such marriage was punished with death. No Catholic could be a guardian; and to the agonies of death this new pain was added: that the dying father foresaw that his children would be committed to Protestants, to be brought up in a religious faith which had been the unclean source of all the ills that had befallen him and his country. The law held out a bribe to Catholic children to induce them to betray their parents, and put a premium on apostasy.This inhuman Code was not framed at one time, nor was there found in its enactments any system or unity of purpose, other than that which is derived from the hate of the persecutor for his victim. To this blind fury whatever helped to crush and degrade the Catholic people of Ireland seemed just.Though it seems almost incredible, it is nevertheless certain, that the execution of these laws was worse than the laws themselves. The whole intent of the legislators being directed to the extermination or perversion of the Irish Catholics, the fullest license was granted to the caprice and cruelty of individuals. The Catholic had no protection. If he sought to defend himself, he was forced to employ a Protestant lawyer, who could bring his case only before a Protestant judge, who was obliged to submit it to a Protestant jury. In these circumstances recourse to the law was worse than useless. The great landed proprietors were accustomed to deal out justice with a high hand. They had prisons in their castles, into which, for or without cause, they threw their helplessdependents; and whenever these outrageous proceedings were complained of, the grand juries threw out the indictments. To horsewhip or beat the poor Catholics was a frequent mode of correction, and they were even deliberately murdered without any fear of punishment. This we have upon the authority of Arthur Young, whose testimony is certainly above suspicion; and he adds that the violation of their wives and daughters was not considered an offence. If the great lord met them on the road, his servants were ordered to turn their wagons and carts into the ditch to make room for his carriage; and if the unfortunate wretches dared complain, they were answered with the lash. For a Catholic to bring suit against his Protestant persecutor would have been at once most absurd and most dangerous.The religious fanaticism which had inspired the Penal Code lost its honesty and earnestness amid these frightful excesses. The tyrant is degraded with his victim, and crimes committed in the name of religion, if they begin in sincerity, end in hypocrisy. Even the poor honesty of blind zeal vanishes, and selfishness and hate alone remain. This is the sad spectacle which Ireland presents to our view after the first fury of persecution had spent itself. The dominant class grew indifferent to all religion, and, having ignominiously failed to make any impression on the faith of the Catholics, connived at their worship.But as zeal grew cold, self-interest became more intense. So long as the Catholics remained in poverty and helplessness no notice was taken of them; but the moment they acquired anything which could excite the cupidity of a Protestant, the law was appealed to againstthem. The priest, who, according to the Code, incurred the penalty of transportation or hanging for saying Mass, could violate this article with impunity, provided he possessed nothing which might serve as a motive for denouncing him. The laws against Catholic worship were kept upon the statute-book, chiefly because they served as an ever-ready and convenient pretext for robbing Catholics. Another end, too, scarcely less important, was thereby gained. The Catholics, even when left in peace, lived in continual fear, knowing that any chance spark would be sufficient to light the flames of persecution. In this way it was hoped that the martyr-spirit in them would give place to the spirit of the slave; and this hope was not altogether delusive. Since there was a kind of security in remaining in abject poverty, in lurking in secret places, in speaking only with bated breath, and in showing the most cringing servility in the presence of their masters, the Catholics came by degrees to look upon this servile condition as their normal state, and hardly dared even hope for a better. We may remark that this is another instance in which the Catholic Church is held responsible for the work of Protestants. Protestant England has enslaved Catholic Ireland; has for centuries put forth the most heartless and cunningly-devised efforts to extinguish in the Irish Catholics every noble and free aspiration of the human heart; and then she has turned round and appealed to the world, with the cant which is twin-born with hypocrisy, to bear witness that Ireland is in fetters because the Catholic Church is opposed to liberty; and the world, in whose eyes success is ever the highest and the best, has smiled approval.Is it, then, possible that six hundred years of hereditary bondage, of outlawry, of want and oppression, should produce no evil effect upon the character of a people, however nobly endowed by God? Are we to expect industry when every motive that incites men to labor is absent? How can he who is forbidden to possess anything be provident? Or is it not natural that the hopelessly wretched should grow desperate, reckless of their deeds or their consequences?Great misfortunes, like great successes, try men as nothing else can. In the lowest depths of misery we are apt to forget that there is a lower deep. For ourselves, the more we study the history of the Irish people, and compare their character with the wrongs which they have suffered, the more wonderful does it seem to us that they should have remained superior to fate. If they have not wholly escaped the evil influences of the worst of all tyrannies, nothing, at least, has been able to destroy their purity, their hopefulness, their trust in God, and belief in the final triumph of right. They are, in our eyes, the highest example of the supremacy of the soul, of the invincible power of faith; the most striking proof of a divine Providence that watches over the destiny of nations. It will not be thought out of place to quote here the words of a Protestant historian who, in his old age, seems to regret the impartiality and generous love of unpopular truth which characterized his earlier manhood.“Such,” says Mr. Bancroft, “was the Ireland of the Irish—a conquered people, whom the victors delighted to trample upon and did not fear to provoke. Their industry within the kingdom was prohibitedor repressed by law, and then they were calumniated as naturally idle. Their savings could not be invested on equal terms in trade, manufactures, or real property, and they were called improvident. The gates of learning were shut on them, and they were derided as ignorant. In the midst of privations they were cheerful. Suffering for generations under acts which offered bribes to treachery, their integrity was not debauched. No son rose against his father, no friend betrayed his friend. Fidelity to their religion—to which afflictions made them cling more closely—chastity, and respect for the ties of family remained characteristics of the down-trodden race.”[192]So long as there was question of oppressing and impoverishing the Irish Catholics the Protestant Ascendency received the hearty approval and efficient co-operation of the English government. But there was danger lest these Irish Protestants, possessing a country of the richest natural resources, should come to compete with England in the markets of the world.There are few countries in the world so fertile as Ireland. About one-half of the island consists of a fat soil, with a chalky sub-soil, which is the very best of soils. The richness and beauty of her meadows were celebrated by Orosius as early as the fifth century. The climate is milder than that of England; the scenery more varied and lovely. The frequent rains clothe the fields with perpetual verdure. From her wild mountains gush numerous rivers, which, as they flow into the sea, form the safest and most capacious harbors, while in their rapid course they develop awater-power, available for purposes of manufacture, unsurpassed in the world. This water-power of Ireland has been estimated by Sir Robert Kane at three and a half millions of horse power. The country abounds in iron ore, and three centuries ago Irish iron was exported to England. Geologists have counted in the island no less than seven immense beds of both anthracite and bituminous coal; and of turf, the heating power of which is half that of coal, the supply is inexhaustible. The soil is most favorable to the growth of the beet-root, from which such large quantities of sugar are made in France and Belgium. The flax and hemp, as is well known, are of the best quality, and the fineness of Irish wool has long been celebrated. The rivers and lakes abound in trout and salmon and pike; and the fisheries alone, if properly managed, might become the source of enormous wealth. Were it not that, in the designs of Providence, the most cunningly-devised plans, when conceived in iniquity, defeat themselves, the English statesmen would have perceived that the most efficacious means for bringing about the result at which the policy of England, in its relations with Ireland, had always aimed, would have been the encouragement of Irish commerce and manufactures. No benefit could have accrued, from such a course, to the Catholic population, which was not only disfranchised, but rendered incapable by law of acquiring or possessing wealth.Had the descendants of the Scotch and English settlers planted by Elizabeth, James, and Cromwell been permitted or encouraged to develop the natural resources of the country, they would not only have grown strong, but opportunitiesof remunerative labor and hope of gain would have attracted new settlers, and in this way Ireland would have been filled with Protestants, whose loyalty would have been firmly secured by this wise and conciliating policy. The agitations which rendered some amelioration of the condition of the Catholics unavoidable as part of a general system would not have taken place; the strength of the Protestant Ascendency would have grown with increasing numbers and wealth; exile would have remained the only refuge of the Catholic remnant from misery and death; and Ireland to-day might be as Protestant as was Ulster in the reign of CharlesI.But no motive of religion or humanity has ever influenced the policy of the English government when there was question of English interests. The desire of acquiring wealth or the necessity of defending one’s possessions are, in the opinion of Englishmen, the only sufficient reasons for going to war.“Even in dreams to the chink of his penceThis huckster put down war.”It was not to be expected that Ireland, with her harbors and rivers, her fertile fields and unnumbered flocks, would be permitted to tempt capital to her shores or to stimulate enterprise. Nothing seemed more shocking to the English traders and manufacturers than the thought of having to compete in the home and foreign markets with the products of Irish industry. It was deemed intolerable that this nest of popery, this den of ignorance and corruption, should be dealt with in the same manner as England. The Parliament was therefore called upon to “make the Irish remember that they were conquered.”England had assisted the Protestantsof Ireland to crush the Catholics; she had for this purpose placed at their service her treasures, and her armies; and now the Irish Protestants were required, in evidence of their gratitude, to sacrifice the commercial and industrial interests of their country to English jealousy.At the end of the seventeenth century the manufacture of woollen stuffs had attained to considerable importance in the southern provinces of Ireland. The superiority of the Irish broadcloths, blankets, and friezes was recognized, and it was therefore resolved that they should no longer be manufactured. The Lords and Commons, in 1698, called upon WilliamIII.to protect the interests of English merchants; and his majesty replied in the well-known words “I shall do all that in me lies to discourage the woollen manufacture of Ireland.” Accordingly, an export duty of four shillings in the pound was laid on all broadcloths carried out of Ireland, and half as much on kerseys, flannels, and friezes. This, in fact, was equivalent to a prohibition, and the ruin of the Irish woollen manufactures which followed was not an unforeseen, but the directly intended, consequence of this measure. The linen manufacture, since there were at the time no rival English interests, was opposed only in an indirect way by offering large bounties for the making of linen in the Highlands of Scotland, bounties on the exportation of English linen, and by imposing a tax of 30 per cent. on all foreign linens, with which most of the Irish linens were classed.Still other measures were needed for the complete destruction of Irish commerce and industry. TheNavigation Lawsforbade all direct trade between Ireland and the British colonies; so that all produce intended for Ireland had first to be unloaded in an English port. The Irish were not allowed to build or keep at sea a single ship. “Of all the excellent timber,” said Dean Swift in 1727, “cut down within these fifty or sixty years, it can hardly be said that the nation hath received the benefit of one valuable house to dwell in, or one ship to trade with.” The forests of Ireland, which so greatly added to the beauty of the country, were felled and carried to England to build ships which were to bring the wealth of the world into English ports. Even the Irish fishery “must be with men and boats from England.”By these and similar measures, commercial and industrial Ireland was blotted out of existence, and even the possibility of her ever entering into competition with England for the trade of the world disappeared. The unjust legislation by which Irish industry was repressed was not inspired by religious passion nor directed against the Catholic population. Their condition was already so wretched and helpless that it would have been difficult to discover anything by which it could have been made worse. “The aboriginal inhabitants,” says Macaulay—“more than five-sixths of the population—had no more interest in the matter than the swine or the poultry; or, if they had an interest, it was for their interest that the caste which domineered over them should not be emancipated from all external control. They were no more represented in the Parliament which sat at Dublin than in the Parliament which sat at Westminster. They had less to dread from legislationat Westminster than from legislation at Dublin.… The most acrimonious English Whig did not feel towards them that intense antipathy, compounded of hatred, fear, and scorn, with which they were regarded by the Cromwellian who dwelt among them.”[193]Molyneux, who at this time came forward as the champion of Ireland and of liberty, demanded nothing for the Irish Catholics but a more cruel slavery; and Dean Swift, who gained much popularity for his advocacy of Irish rights, declared he would as soon think of consulting the swine as the aboriginal inhabitants of the island.Indisputable as the fact is that the Irish Catholics had no direct interest in the contest in which the commerce and industry of their country were destroyed, the consequences of the iniquitous policy of England proved nevertheless most disastrous to them. Manual labor was the only work which they were permitted to do, and there now remained for them nothing but the tillage of the soil, either as tenants-at-will or common laborers. Ireland was to supply England with beef and butter, and the work of exterminating the Irish Catholics was not to be pushed further than the exigencies of successful cattle-grazing might demand. Society was constituted in the simplest manner. There were but two classes—the possessors of the soil and the tillers of the soil: the lord and the peasant; the master and the slave; the Protestant and the Catholic; the rich man and the beggar. There were but two kinds of human dwellings—the castle, with its high walls and splendid park, and the mud cabin, in whichit was impossible that there should be anything but filth and rags. The multitude lived for a few men, by whom they were valued as their horses or their dogs, but not treated so humanly. A contrast more absolute has never existed, even in the despotisms of Asia. The picture is revolting; it cannot be contemplated even in imagination without loathing, or thought of with any composure. It is a blot on humanity, an infamy which no glory and no services can condone. Ireland was in the hands of the worst class of men whom history has ever made odious—an aristocracy which hated the land from which it derived its titles, despised the people from whom it received its wealth, shirked the duties and responsibilities imposed by its privileges, and used its power only to oppress and impoverish the nation. The Irish people were thus under the weight of a double tyranny—that of England and that of their lords; and the fiend best knows which was the worst.The Southern planter felt a kind of interest in his slaves—they were his property; an Irish landlord felt no interest of any kind in the people by whom he was surrounded. It was important that they should remain slaves, beggars, and outcasts; that the chasm which separated him from them should in no way be diminished; but for the rest he gave no thought whether they starved or murdered one another or were drowned in the deep. He spent most of his time in England, living in luxury, leaving his estates to the care of brutal agents, who pleased him the better the more cruel and grinding their exactions were. English in origin and sympathy, Protestant in religion, there was no bond of union between himand his people. He cared neither for the country nor its inhabitants. He was unwilling to risk capital even to improve his own lands; for he had no faith in the permanence of a social and political state which was possible only because it outraged the holiest and best instincts of mans nature. When it was proposed to take steps to drain the bogs and bring the waste lands of Ireland under cultivation, the Protestant party strenuously opposed the measure, on the ground that this would be an encouragement to popery. Nothing, therefore, was done either by the government or the landlords to improve the soil or to introduce better methods of tillage. The great proprietors, living in London, spending their time and fortune in a life of pleasure and display, let out their estates to land speculators, who were generally capitalists. These speculators sublet them, in lots of several hundred or a thousand acres, to a class of persons called middlemen, who divided them up into portions of five, ten, or twenty acres, and rented them to the poor Catholics. By neither the proprietors nor the speculators nor the middlemen was any risk of capital made. The peasant was therefore compelled to rent his little plot of ground, bare of everything—he found on it neither dwelling nor stabling, nor implements of any kind. He had nothing himself, and those whose interest it would have been to advance him money were unwilling to risk a penny. All that he could do was to put up a mud-cabin, and to get a wretched spade with which to begin work. If by honest labor he could have looked forward to an improvement in his condition, his lot would not have been altogether comfortless. Thepioneers who in this new world have led the army of civilization from the Atlantic to the Pacific began life almost as poor as an Irish peasant of the seventeenth or the eighteenth century; but for them no law of man reversing nature’s first law made labor sterile. How was the poor Irish Catholic, with but a few acres of ground, and without the necessary means for proper cultivation, to pay the exorbitant rent which was to support the landlord, the speculator, and the middleman?—for upon him alone rested the burden of maintaining all three in a life of ease and luxury. The soil refuses to satisfy the unreasonable demands made upon it; the tenant finds that he is unable to pay his rent; and without the least ceremony he and his wife and children are turned upon the road. England having destroyed the commerce and manufactures of Ireland, he can find nothing to do, and, if he is unwilling to see his wife and children starve, he must beg. And even beggary, with its frightful degradations, affords little relief; for the rich spurn him and the poor have nothing to give. Few words are needed to bring home to us the significance of this state of affairs. We have only to recall the tragedy Which was enacted under our eyes in 1849. In that one yearfifty thousand familieswere turned upon the road to die;two hundred thousand human beings, without shelter, without bread, sent up their piteous moan of hunger and despair to God from the midst of a Christian nation, the richest in the world. The terrible famine of 1847 and 1848, which was only an unusually startling outbreak of an evil that has long been chronic in Ireland, was not caused by excess of population. The country, if its resources wereproperly developed, is capable of supporting a far larger number of inhabitants than it has ever had. There were but eight millions of people in Ireland in 1847, and it has been conclusively proven that under favorable circumstances fifteen millions would not be an excessive population. In fact, in the so-called years of scarcity, when the people were dying, by thousands, of starvation, the country produced enough to feed its inhabitants; but they had to sell their wheat, barley, and oats to pay the rent, and, the potato crop having failed, they had nothing to eat. In 1846 and 1847 enormous quantities of grain and live-stock were exported from Ireland to England, and yet the people of Ireland were starving. During the four years of famine Ireland exported four quarters of wheat for every quarter imported. The food was in the country, but it had to be sent to England to pay the rent of the landlords. The people were starving, but that was no concern of these noble gentlemen, so long as their rent was paid. The cry of hunger has rarely been hushed in Ireland. All through the eighteenth century the people died of starvation. In 1727 Boulter, the Protestant Archbishop of Armagh, declared that thousands of families were driven from their homes by hunger; and Dean Swift has given us an account of the condition in his time of even the better class of tenants. “The families,” he says, “of farmers who pay great rents live in filth and nastiness, upon buttermilk and potatoes, without a shoe or stocking to their feet, or a house as convenient as an English hog-sty to receive them.” In 1734 the famous Bishop Berkeley asked this question: “Is there on the face of theearth any Christian and civilized people so destitute of everything as the mass of the people of Ireland?” In 1741 the cemeteries were too small for the burial of the multitudes who died of hunger.In 1778, while we were struggling for freedom from English tyranny, Lord Nugent declared, in the House of Commons, that the people of Ireland were suffering all the destitution and misery which it is possible to human nature to endure. Nine-tenths of them earned no more than fourpence a day, and had no nourishment but potatoes and water. In 1817 the fever, brought on by hunger, attacked one million five hundred thousand persons—nearly half of the entire population of the country. In 1825, 1826, 1830, 1832, 1838, 1846 to 1850, and finally in 1860, 1861, and 1862, the melancholy cry of multitudes dying of hunger was heard throughout the land. In 1843 Thackeray, travelling in Ireland, declared that “men were suffering and starving by millions”; and a little later we know from the most accurate statistics that more than a million of the Irish people died of hunger within a period of two years. The history of Ireland is, we are persuaded, the sublimest and the saddest of all histories. It has never been written, and the grandest of themes awaits the creative power that will give it immortal life on the pictured page. It will be written in the English language, and it will link the English name and tongue for all time with the greatest social crime which one people ever committed against another. In another article we hope, by the aid of the faint and glimmering light that shines so fitfully in this blackness, to be able to trace the doubtful and devious way along which this providentialrace seems to be slowly rising into the promise of a better day. For the present we shall conclude with a quotation from De Beaumont, whose careful and conscientious studies on theSocial, Political, and Religious Condition of Irelandwe recommend to all who are interested in this subject.“I have seen,” he wrote in 1835, “the Indian in his forests and the negro in chains, and I thought, in beholding their pitiable state, that I saw the extreme of human misery; but I did not then know the fate of poor Ireland. Like the Indian, the Irishman is poor and naked; but he lives, unlike the savage, in the midst of a society which revels in luxury, and adores wealth. Like the Indian, he is deprived of every material comfort which human industry and the commerce of nations procure; but, unlike him, he is surrounded by fellow-creatures who are enjoying all that heis forbidden even to hope for. In the midst of his greatest misery the Indian retains a kind of independence which is not without its charm and its dignity. Destitute as he is, and famishing, he is yet free in his wilderness; and the consciousness of this freedom softens the hardships of life. The Irishman suffers the same destitution without having the same liberty. He is subject to laws, has all kinds of fetters; he dies of hunger, and is under rule; deplorable condition, which combines all the evils of civilization with the horrors known elsewhere only to the savage! Doubtless the Irishman who has shaken off his chains, and still has hope, is less to be pitied than the negro slave. Nevertheless he has to-day neither the liberty of the savage nor the bread of the slave.”[194][191]“A View of the State of Ireland,” by Edmund Spenser.[192]History of the United States,vol. v. chap. iv. p.73.[193]History of England,vol. v. p.45.[194]L’Irlande: Sociale, Politique et Religieuse.Par Gustave de Beaumont, Membre de l’Institut.Tom. i. p.222.

Noone can pass from England into Ireland without being struck by the contrast in the condition of the two countries—a contrast so marked and absolute that it is revealed at the first glance, and in lines so bold and rigid that it seems to have been produced by nature itself. In England there is wealth, thrift, prosperity; in Ireland, poverty, helplessness, decay. Into the great heart of London, through arteries that stretch round the globe, the riches of the whole earth are poured. Dublin is a city of the past, and, in spite of its imposing structures, impresses us sadly. The English cities are busy marts of commerce or homes of comfort, luxury, and learning. The Irish towns are empty, silent, decayed. Into England’s ports come the ships of all the nations; but in Ireland’s hardly a sail is unfurled. There the chimneys of innumerable factories shut out with their black smoke the light of heaven; here the Round Tower or the crumbling ruin stands as a monument of death. England is over-crowded; in Ireland we travel for miles without meeting a human being; pass through whole counties from which the people have disappeared to make room for cattle. Freedom is in the very air of England: the people go about their business or pleasure in a sturdy, downright way, and in a conscious security under the protection of wise laws; in Ireland we cannot take a step without being offended by evidences of oppression and misrule. The people are disarmed and unprotected, guarded by a foreign soldiery, the servants of an alien aristocracy.

To what causes must we ascribe this wide difference in the condition of two islands, separated by a narrow strip of sea, with but slight dissimilarity of climate, and governed ostensibly for now nearly seven hundred years by the same laws?

The explanation given universallyby English writers, with the tone with which one is accustomed to affirm axiomatic truths, is based upon the dissimilarity of the two peoples in natural character and in religious faith. The Irish, they say, are by nature discontented, idle, and thriftless, and their religion is in fatal opposition to liberty and progress. The subject is worthy of our attention. Ireland is an anomaly in European history. Just at the time when the other Christian nations, after overcoming the divisions and feuds of a barbarous age, were settling down into the unity which renders harmonious development possible, the seed of perpetual discord and never-ending strife was planted ineradicably in her soil. Three hundred years of almost incessant warfare with the Dane had left her exhausted and divided, an easy prey to the Norman barons, who introduced into her national life a foreign blood and an alien civilization.

From that day to the present time Ireland’s fate has been the saddest of which history has preserved the record. There has been no peace, no liberty, no progress. Opposing races, contrary civilizations, and opposite religions have clashed in such fierce and bloody battles that we could almost fancy the furies of the abyss had been let loose to smite and scourge the doomed land. Mercy, justice, all human feelings have been banished from this struggle, which has been one of brute force and fiendish cunning. Whatever the stronger has been able to do has been done; and there is no good reason for believing that England, in her dealings with Ireland, has ever passed one just law or redressed one wrong from a humane or honorable motive. From the conquest to theschism of HenryVIII., a period of nearly four centuries, the English colonists, entrenched within the Pale and receiving continually reinforcements from the mother country, formed a nation within a nation, always armed and watching every opportunity to make inroads upon the possessions of the native princes, who were not slow to return blow for blow. There was no security for life or property; the people were left to the mercy of barons and kings, to be robbed and pillaged or butchered in their broils. Nothing could be more inhuman than English legislation in Ireland during these four centuries, unless it be English legislation in Ireland during the three centuries which followed. HenryII.confiscated the whole island, dividing the land among ten of his chief followers; though they were able to hold possession of but a small part of the country. In the legal enactments and official documents of this period the term habitually used to designate the native population is “the Irish enemy.” They were never spoken of except as “the wild Irish,” until, as an English writer affirms, the term “wild Irish” became as familiar in the English language as the term wild beast. They were denied the title of English subjects and the protection of English law. An act, passed in the reign of EdwardII., gave to the English landlords the right to dispose of the property of their Irish dependents as they might see fit. All social and commercial intercourse with the “Irish enemy” was interdicted. An Irishman if found talking with an Englishman was to be apprehended as a spy and punished as an enemy of the king; and the violation of an Irishwoman was not a crimebefore the law. Even exile was not permitted as a mitigation of this misery; for a law of HenryIV.forbade the “Irish enemy” to emigrate. There is no exaggeration in the address which the people of Ireland sent to Pope JohnXXII.:

“Most Holy Father,” they say, “we send you some precise and truthful information concerning the state of our nation, and the wrongs which we are suffering, and which our ancestors have suffered from the kings of England, their agents, and the English barons born in Ireland. After having driven us by violence from our dwellings, from our fields and our ancestral possessions—after having forced us to flee to the mountains, the bogs, the woods, and caves to save our lives—they cease not to harass us here even, but strive to expel us altogether from the country, that they may gain possession of it in its entire extent. They have destroyed all the written laws by which we were formerly governed. The better to compass our ruin, they have left us without laws.… It is the opinion of all their laymen, and of many of their ecclesiastics, that there is no more sin in killing an Irishman than in killing a dog. They all maintain that they have the right to take from us our lands and our goods.”

In the second period of English rule in Ireland, to the war of races was added a war of religion, in which the “Irish enemy” became the “Popish idolater.” To kill an Irishman was no sin, and to exterminate idolatrous superstition was a mission imposed by Heaven upon the chosen people to whom the pure faith of Christ had been revealed.

Then began the series of butcheries, devastations, famines, exterminations,and exiles which have not yet come to an end. The horrors of these three centuries have not been written; they can never be rightly told, or even imagined. Ireland was not only conquered, but confiscated.

Elizabeth confiscated 600,000 acres of land in Munster after the revolt of the Earl of Desmond; her successor, JamesI., confiscated a million acres in Ulster. CharlesI.confiscated 240,000 acres in Connaught, and would have confiscated the whole province had he been able to obtain possession of it. Under the Commonwealth 7,708,237 acres were confiscated. William of Orange confiscated 1,060,000 acres. And in these confiscations we have not included the lands of the church, which were all turned over to the Establishment. The atrocity of England’s Irish wars is without a parallel in the history of Christian nations. Women and children were murdered in cold blood; priests were burned to death; churches were pillaged and set on fire; towns were sacked and the inhabitants put to the sword; men and youths were put on shipboard, carried into mid-ocean, and deliberately thrown into the sea. Others were sold as slaves in the Barbadoes. Whatever could serve as food for man was destroyed, that famine might make way with all who escaped the sword. Spenser, the poet, who visited Ireland after the revolt of the Earl of Desmond, in the reign of Elizabeth, has left us a description of the condition of that province as he saw it: “Out of every corner of the woods and glens they came, creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs could not bear them; they looked like anatomies of death; they spake like ghosts crying out oftheir graves; they did eat the dead carrions, happy where they could find them; yea, and one another soon after, inasmuch as the very carcasses they spared not to scrape out of their graves; and if they found a plot of water-cresses or shamrocks, there they flocked as to a feast for the time, yet not able long to continue therewithal; that in short space there were none almost left; and a most populous and plentiful country suddenly left void of man and beast.”[191]

Lord Gray, one of Elizabeth’s lieutenants, declared towards the end of her life that “little was left in Ireland for her Majesty to reign over but carcasses and ashes.”

Cromwell’s wars were even more cruel, and left Ireland in a condition, if possible, more wretched still. Half the people had perished; and the survivors were dying of hunger in the bogs and glens in which they had sought refuge from the fury of the troopers. Wolves prowled around the gates of Dublin, and wolf-hunting and priest-hunting became important and lucrative occupations. But it is needless to dwell longer upon this painful subject. Let us remark, however, that it would be unjust to hold Elizabeth or Cromwell responsible for these cruelties. They but executed the will of the English people, who still cherish their memories and justify these outrages. No English ruler ever feared being called to account for harshness or tyranny in dealing with Ireland. The public opinion of the nation considered the extirpation of the Irish as a work to be done, and applauded whoever helped forward its consummation. This much we may affirm on the authority of Protestant witnesses.“The favorite object of the Irish governors,” says Leland, “and of the English Parliament was the utter extirpation of all the Catholic inhabitants of Ireland.”

“It is evident,” says Warner, “from the Lords-Justices’ last letter to the Lieutenant, that they hoped for an extirpation, not of the mere Irish only, but of all the English families that were Roman Catholics.”

The feeling against the Irish was even stronger than against the church, so that the English seemed to feel a kind of pleasure in the adherence of the Celtic population to the old faith, since it widened the chasm between the two races. They really made no serious efforts to convert the Irish to Protestantism. They neglected to provide them with instructors capable of making themselves understood. They put forth no Protestant translation of the Bible in the Irish language, but contented themselves with setting up a hierarchy of archbishops, bishops, and rectors whose lives were often scandalous, and who, as Macaulay says, did nothing, and for doing nothing were paid out of the spoils of a church loved and revered by the people. Some justification for the extermination of the Irish race would be found in the fact that those who perished were only papists. War, famine, confiscation, and exile had, by the close of the seventeenth century, either destroyed or impoverished the native and Catholic population of Ireland. The land was almost exclusively in the hands of Protestants, who had also taken possession of all the cathedrals, churches, and monasteries which had escaped destruction. The Catholics, reduced to beggary, were driven from the towns and, as far as possible, fromthe English settlements into the bleak and barren hills of Connaught. In many instances the confiscated lands had been given to Englishmen or Scotchmen, with the express stipulation that no Irish Catholic should be employed by them, even as a common laborer. In this extremity the Irish people were helpless. Every line along which it was possible to advance to a better state of things was cut off. Their natural leaders had been driven into exile or reduced to abject poverty; their spiritual guides had been murdered or banished; or if any had escaped their pitiless persecutors, a price was set upon their heads, and they led the lives of outlaws, unable to administer the sacraments even to the dying, except by stealth.

All their institutions of learning had been destroyed; and England permitted no instruction except in the English tongue—which the Irish neither spoke nor were willing to speak—and in Protestant schools, from which she knew the Catholics were necessarily shut out. They not only had nothing, but were in a condition in which it was impossible that they should acquire anything. Indeed, the little security which was still left them to drag out a miserable existence was found precisely in their utter helplessness and wretchedness. They could no longer be plundered, for they had nothing; they could not be butchered in battle, for they were powerless and without weapons; and so their persecutors paused, not, as the poet says, to listen to their sad lament, but from sheer contempt and indifference, thinking it no longer worth while to take notice of their hapless victims.

Three-fourths of the population of the island were nevertheless still Irish Catholics; and in spite ofthe persistent efforts to drive them all beyond the Shannon, the moment the violence of persecution abated large numbers showed themselves in other parts of the country, especially in the province of Munster. It was at this time, and to meet any danger that might arise from the mingling of the Irish Catholics with the Protestant colonists, that the Penal Code was enacted, by which the entire population that still held to the ancient faith was deprived of all rights and reduced to the condition of helots and pariahs. This Code, the most inhuman ever contrived by the perverted ingenuity of man, was the work of the Irish Parliament, which, it is almost needless to say, represented only the Protestants of Ireland. Violence had done its work; the Catholic Irish had been reduced to a condition as wretched as it is possible for man to suffer and live; and now the form of justice and the semblance of law are invoked to make this condition perpetual. Suddenly, and for the first time, the Protestants of Ireland seem animated with religious zeal for the conversion of the Catholics. The extermination of the Irish race was abandoned as hopeless; and, indeed, there seemed to be no good ground for believing that a people who had survived the wars, famines, and exiles by which Ireland had been drained of its population during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries could be extirpated. Nothing remained, therefore, but to convert them. This was the pretext with which men sought to hide the monstrous iniquity of the penal laws. All bishops and monks were ordered to quit Ireland before the 1st of May, 1698, under pain of imprisonment and transportation; and, in case they should return, they were tosuffer death. Heavy fines were imposed upon all who harbored or concealed the proscribed ecclesiastics; and rewards were offered for their discovery or apprehension. Care was taken at the same time to exclude all foreign priests. By thus cutting off from Ireland the fountain-source of orders and ecclesiastical jurisdiction, it was confidently expected that in a few years the Catholic priesthood would cease to exist there, and that the people, left without priests or sacraments, would have no alternative but to become Protestants. Every exterior sign of Catholic worship was suppressed, and it was tolerated only as a hidden cult, whose ceremonies were performed with bated breath, clandestinely in cabins and unfrequented places. Whatever appealed to the heart or the imagination was condemned. The steeple that pointed to heaven; the bell whose religious tones thrilled with accents of a world of peace; the cross that told of the divinity that is in suffering and sorrow; the pilgrimages in which the people gathered to cherish sacred memories and to do homage to worthy deeds and noble lives, were all proscribed. And even the poor huts in which it was possible to offer the Holy Sacrifice were carefully watched by the officers of the law, as to-day, in the great cities, places of infamy are put under the surveillance of the police.

Having suppressed the hierarchy and shorn the Catholic religion of its splendor, the rulers of Ireland next proceeded to adopt measures by which every imaginable inducement to apostasy was held out both to the clergy and the laity. An annual pension, first of twenty, then of thirty, and finally of forty pounds sterling was offered to all priestswho should abandon their religion. Whether or not they accepted this bribe was held to be of small importance, as their ranks were rapidly thinned by death, and precautions had been taken that the vacancies should not be refilled.

The Catholic people were placed in a position like that of the Forty Martyrs, who were exposed naked on the frozen lake, surrounded by warm baths and comfortable houses, which they could enter by renouncing their faith. The deepest and holiest instincts of human nature were appealed to against the most sacred convictions which man is capable of holding. If the father wished to educate his child, schools abounded, but he could enter them only by abandoning his religion. He was not, indeed, forced to send his children to these Protestant schools, but it was made impossible for him to send them to any other. His tyrants went farther. They spared no pains to make it impossible that an Irish Catholic should learn anything even by stealth. All Catholic schoolmasters were banished from Ireland, and, in case of return, were to suffer death.

The law made express provision for the money necessary to defray the expenses of transporting these obnoxious persons. Nay, it went yet farther. There were schools on the continent of Europe to which a few Irish children might possibly find their way. This danger was foreseen and met. An act was passed prohibiting Catholics from sending their children across the Channel without special permission, and the magistrates were authorized to demand at any time that parents should produce their children before them. Beyond this it was not possible to go. All that human enactments can do to degrade themind of a whole people to a state of brutish ignorance was done. And let us remark that this applied not to the Irish only, but to all Catholics who spoke the English language. The English government took from them every opportunity of knowledge, made it criminal for them to know anything; and then they were denounced by English writers almost universally as the foes of learning and as lovers of ignorance. We know of no harder or more cruel fate in all history, nor of a more striking example of the injustice of the world towards the church. Even here in the United States we Catholics are still suffering the consequences of this unparalleled infamy. But we have hardly entered on the subject of the Penal Laws: we are as yet on the threshold.

The enforced ignorance of the Irish Catholics was but a preparation for innumerable other legal outrages. From all the honorable careers of life they were mercilessly shut out—from the army; the navy, the magistracy, and the civil service. That a Catholic was not permitted to become an educator we have already seen. As little was he allowed to perform the functions of barrister, attorney, or solicitor. He could neither vote nor be elected to office. Shut out from all public life, from every liberal profession, disfranchised, ignorant, despised, was anything else needed to make the Irish Catholic the most wretched of men? His land had been confiscated, he had been robbed; he was a beggar; but might he not hope gradually to lift himself out of the degradation of his poverty? To regain ownership of the soil was out of the question. He was disqualified by law, which, however, permitted him to become a tenant—not to do him a favor,but solely for the benefit of the landlord, to whose arbitrary will he was made a slave. This is but half the truth. The iniquity of the law mistrusted the rectitude of human nature even in an Irish landlord. He was therefore compelled to be unjust to his tenant; to give him but short leases; to force him to pay at least two-thirds of the value of the produce of his farm; to punish him for improving his land by augmenting the rent; and, lest there should be any doubt as to the seriousness of these barbarous enactments, a premium was offered for the discovery of instances of their violation in favor of Catholic tenants. The landlord was not allowed to be just, but he was free to be as heartless and inhuman as he pleased. His tenants had no rights, they belonged to a despised race, they professed an idolatrous religion, and their extermination had been the cherished policy of the English government for six hundred years. If there was no hope here for the Irish Catholic, might he not, with better prospects, turn to commercial or industrial pursuits?

Without, for the present, taking a larger view of this question, it will be sufficient to consider the restrictions placed upon Catholics in this matter. Commerce and manufacture were controlled by municipal and trading corporations of which no Irish Catholic could be a member. This of itself, at a time when monopoly and privilege were everywhere recognized, gave to Protestants the entire business of the country.

Prohibitory laws were therefore not needed. But no security could lull to rest the fierce spirit of the persecuting Protestant oligarchy. A Catholic could not acquire real estate; he could not even rent land,except on ruinous terms; he could not exercise a liberal profession or fill a public office; he was unable to engage in commerce or manufacture; he had no political rights, no protection from the law; and, to make all this doubly bitter, his masters were at once the enemies of his race and his religion. This, one would think, ought to have been enough to satisfy the worst of tyrants. But it is of the nature of tyranny that the more it oppresses, the more it feels the necessity of inflicting new wrongs upon its victims. Every motive that incites men to activity and labor had been taken from the Catholics, and yet their oppressors, with the cowardice which naturally belongs to evil-doers, were still fearful lest some of them might, by chance or good fortune, acquire wealth enough to lift them above the immediate necessities of life. A universal threat was therefore held over all who possessed anything. A Catholic was not allowed to own a horse worth more than five pounds; any Protestant in the kingdom might take the best he had by paying him that sum. Whenever it was deemed necessary to call out the militia, the law declared all horses belonging to Catholics subject to seizure; and twenty shillings a day for the maintenance of each troop was levied on the papists of the country. Whenever property was destroyed, the law assumed that the Catholics were the offenders, and they were forced to indemnify the owners for their loss. They were taxed for the support of the government, in which they were not allowed to take part and from which they received no protection; for the maintenance of the Established Church, in which they did not believe and which was already richwith the spoils of the Catholic Church.

No Catholic was permitted to marry a Protestant; and the priest assisting at such marriage was punished with death. No Catholic could be a guardian; and to the agonies of death this new pain was added: that the dying father foresaw that his children would be committed to Protestants, to be brought up in a religious faith which had been the unclean source of all the ills that had befallen him and his country. The law held out a bribe to Catholic children to induce them to betray their parents, and put a premium on apostasy.

This inhuman Code was not framed at one time, nor was there found in its enactments any system or unity of purpose, other than that which is derived from the hate of the persecutor for his victim. To this blind fury whatever helped to crush and degrade the Catholic people of Ireland seemed just.

Though it seems almost incredible, it is nevertheless certain, that the execution of these laws was worse than the laws themselves. The whole intent of the legislators being directed to the extermination or perversion of the Irish Catholics, the fullest license was granted to the caprice and cruelty of individuals. The Catholic had no protection. If he sought to defend himself, he was forced to employ a Protestant lawyer, who could bring his case only before a Protestant judge, who was obliged to submit it to a Protestant jury. In these circumstances recourse to the law was worse than useless. The great landed proprietors were accustomed to deal out justice with a high hand. They had prisons in their castles, into which, for or without cause, they threw their helplessdependents; and whenever these outrageous proceedings were complained of, the grand juries threw out the indictments. To horsewhip or beat the poor Catholics was a frequent mode of correction, and they were even deliberately murdered without any fear of punishment. This we have upon the authority of Arthur Young, whose testimony is certainly above suspicion; and he adds that the violation of their wives and daughters was not considered an offence. If the great lord met them on the road, his servants were ordered to turn their wagons and carts into the ditch to make room for his carriage; and if the unfortunate wretches dared complain, they were answered with the lash. For a Catholic to bring suit against his Protestant persecutor would have been at once most absurd and most dangerous.

The religious fanaticism which had inspired the Penal Code lost its honesty and earnestness amid these frightful excesses. The tyrant is degraded with his victim, and crimes committed in the name of religion, if they begin in sincerity, end in hypocrisy. Even the poor honesty of blind zeal vanishes, and selfishness and hate alone remain. This is the sad spectacle which Ireland presents to our view after the first fury of persecution had spent itself. The dominant class grew indifferent to all religion, and, having ignominiously failed to make any impression on the faith of the Catholics, connived at their worship.

But as zeal grew cold, self-interest became more intense. So long as the Catholics remained in poverty and helplessness no notice was taken of them; but the moment they acquired anything which could excite the cupidity of a Protestant, the law was appealed to againstthem. The priest, who, according to the Code, incurred the penalty of transportation or hanging for saying Mass, could violate this article with impunity, provided he possessed nothing which might serve as a motive for denouncing him. The laws against Catholic worship were kept upon the statute-book, chiefly because they served as an ever-ready and convenient pretext for robbing Catholics. Another end, too, scarcely less important, was thereby gained. The Catholics, even when left in peace, lived in continual fear, knowing that any chance spark would be sufficient to light the flames of persecution. In this way it was hoped that the martyr-spirit in them would give place to the spirit of the slave; and this hope was not altogether delusive. Since there was a kind of security in remaining in abject poverty, in lurking in secret places, in speaking only with bated breath, and in showing the most cringing servility in the presence of their masters, the Catholics came by degrees to look upon this servile condition as their normal state, and hardly dared even hope for a better. We may remark that this is another instance in which the Catholic Church is held responsible for the work of Protestants. Protestant England has enslaved Catholic Ireland; has for centuries put forth the most heartless and cunningly-devised efforts to extinguish in the Irish Catholics every noble and free aspiration of the human heart; and then she has turned round and appealed to the world, with the cant which is twin-born with hypocrisy, to bear witness that Ireland is in fetters because the Catholic Church is opposed to liberty; and the world, in whose eyes success is ever the highest and the best, has smiled approval.

Is it, then, possible that six hundred years of hereditary bondage, of outlawry, of want and oppression, should produce no evil effect upon the character of a people, however nobly endowed by God? Are we to expect industry when every motive that incites men to labor is absent? How can he who is forbidden to possess anything be provident? Or is it not natural that the hopelessly wretched should grow desperate, reckless of their deeds or their consequences?

Great misfortunes, like great successes, try men as nothing else can. In the lowest depths of misery we are apt to forget that there is a lower deep. For ourselves, the more we study the history of the Irish people, and compare their character with the wrongs which they have suffered, the more wonderful does it seem to us that they should have remained superior to fate. If they have not wholly escaped the evil influences of the worst of all tyrannies, nothing, at least, has been able to destroy their purity, their hopefulness, their trust in God, and belief in the final triumph of right. They are, in our eyes, the highest example of the supremacy of the soul, of the invincible power of faith; the most striking proof of a divine Providence that watches over the destiny of nations. It will not be thought out of place to quote here the words of a Protestant historian who, in his old age, seems to regret the impartiality and generous love of unpopular truth which characterized his earlier manhood.

“Such,” says Mr. Bancroft, “was the Ireland of the Irish—a conquered people, whom the victors delighted to trample upon and did not fear to provoke. Their industry within the kingdom was prohibitedor repressed by law, and then they were calumniated as naturally idle. Their savings could not be invested on equal terms in trade, manufactures, or real property, and they were called improvident. The gates of learning were shut on them, and they were derided as ignorant. In the midst of privations they were cheerful. Suffering for generations under acts which offered bribes to treachery, their integrity was not debauched. No son rose against his father, no friend betrayed his friend. Fidelity to their religion—to which afflictions made them cling more closely—chastity, and respect for the ties of family remained characteristics of the down-trodden race.”[192]

So long as there was question of oppressing and impoverishing the Irish Catholics the Protestant Ascendency received the hearty approval and efficient co-operation of the English government. But there was danger lest these Irish Protestants, possessing a country of the richest natural resources, should come to compete with England in the markets of the world.

There are few countries in the world so fertile as Ireland. About one-half of the island consists of a fat soil, with a chalky sub-soil, which is the very best of soils. The richness and beauty of her meadows were celebrated by Orosius as early as the fifth century. The climate is milder than that of England; the scenery more varied and lovely. The frequent rains clothe the fields with perpetual verdure. From her wild mountains gush numerous rivers, which, as they flow into the sea, form the safest and most capacious harbors, while in their rapid course they develop awater-power, available for purposes of manufacture, unsurpassed in the world. This water-power of Ireland has been estimated by Sir Robert Kane at three and a half millions of horse power. The country abounds in iron ore, and three centuries ago Irish iron was exported to England. Geologists have counted in the island no less than seven immense beds of both anthracite and bituminous coal; and of turf, the heating power of which is half that of coal, the supply is inexhaustible. The soil is most favorable to the growth of the beet-root, from which such large quantities of sugar are made in France and Belgium. The flax and hemp, as is well known, are of the best quality, and the fineness of Irish wool has long been celebrated. The rivers and lakes abound in trout and salmon and pike; and the fisheries alone, if properly managed, might become the source of enormous wealth. Were it not that, in the designs of Providence, the most cunningly-devised plans, when conceived in iniquity, defeat themselves, the English statesmen would have perceived that the most efficacious means for bringing about the result at which the policy of England, in its relations with Ireland, had always aimed, would have been the encouragement of Irish commerce and manufactures. No benefit could have accrued, from such a course, to the Catholic population, which was not only disfranchised, but rendered incapable by law of acquiring or possessing wealth.

Had the descendants of the Scotch and English settlers planted by Elizabeth, James, and Cromwell been permitted or encouraged to develop the natural resources of the country, they would not only have grown strong, but opportunitiesof remunerative labor and hope of gain would have attracted new settlers, and in this way Ireland would have been filled with Protestants, whose loyalty would have been firmly secured by this wise and conciliating policy. The agitations which rendered some amelioration of the condition of the Catholics unavoidable as part of a general system would not have taken place; the strength of the Protestant Ascendency would have grown with increasing numbers and wealth; exile would have remained the only refuge of the Catholic remnant from misery and death; and Ireland to-day might be as Protestant as was Ulster in the reign of CharlesI.

But no motive of religion or humanity has ever influenced the policy of the English government when there was question of English interests. The desire of acquiring wealth or the necessity of defending one’s possessions are, in the opinion of Englishmen, the only sufficient reasons for going to war.

“Even in dreams to the chink of his penceThis huckster put down war.”

“Even in dreams to the chink of his penceThis huckster put down war.”

“Even in dreams to the chink of his pence

This huckster put down war.”

It was not to be expected that Ireland, with her harbors and rivers, her fertile fields and unnumbered flocks, would be permitted to tempt capital to her shores or to stimulate enterprise. Nothing seemed more shocking to the English traders and manufacturers than the thought of having to compete in the home and foreign markets with the products of Irish industry. It was deemed intolerable that this nest of popery, this den of ignorance and corruption, should be dealt with in the same manner as England. The Parliament was therefore called upon to “make the Irish remember that they were conquered.”

England had assisted the Protestantsof Ireland to crush the Catholics; she had for this purpose placed at their service her treasures, and her armies; and now the Irish Protestants were required, in evidence of their gratitude, to sacrifice the commercial and industrial interests of their country to English jealousy.

At the end of the seventeenth century the manufacture of woollen stuffs had attained to considerable importance in the southern provinces of Ireland. The superiority of the Irish broadcloths, blankets, and friezes was recognized, and it was therefore resolved that they should no longer be manufactured. The Lords and Commons, in 1698, called upon WilliamIII.to protect the interests of English merchants; and his majesty replied in the well-known words “I shall do all that in me lies to discourage the woollen manufacture of Ireland.” Accordingly, an export duty of four shillings in the pound was laid on all broadcloths carried out of Ireland, and half as much on kerseys, flannels, and friezes. This, in fact, was equivalent to a prohibition, and the ruin of the Irish woollen manufactures which followed was not an unforeseen, but the directly intended, consequence of this measure. The linen manufacture, since there were at the time no rival English interests, was opposed only in an indirect way by offering large bounties for the making of linen in the Highlands of Scotland, bounties on the exportation of English linen, and by imposing a tax of 30 per cent. on all foreign linens, with which most of the Irish linens were classed.

Still other measures were needed for the complete destruction of Irish commerce and industry. TheNavigation Lawsforbade all direct trade between Ireland and the British colonies; so that all produce intended for Ireland had first to be unloaded in an English port. The Irish were not allowed to build or keep at sea a single ship. “Of all the excellent timber,” said Dean Swift in 1727, “cut down within these fifty or sixty years, it can hardly be said that the nation hath received the benefit of one valuable house to dwell in, or one ship to trade with.” The forests of Ireland, which so greatly added to the beauty of the country, were felled and carried to England to build ships which were to bring the wealth of the world into English ports. Even the Irish fishery “must be with men and boats from England.”

By these and similar measures, commercial and industrial Ireland was blotted out of existence, and even the possibility of her ever entering into competition with England for the trade of the world disappeared. The unjust legislation by which Irish industry was repressed was not inspired by religious passion nor directed against the Catholic population. Their condition was already so wretched and helpless that it would have been difficult to discover anything by which it could have been made worse. “The aboriginal inhabitants,” says Macaulay—“more than five-sixths of the population—had no more interest in the matter than the swine or the poultry; or, if they had an interest, it was for their interest that the caste which domineered over them should not be emancipated from all external control. They were no more represented in the Parliament which sat at Dublin than in the Parliament which sat at Westminster. They had less to dread from legislationat Westminster than from legislation at Dublin.… The most acrimonious English Whig did not feel towards them that intense antipathy, compounded of hatred, fear, and scorn, with which they were regarded by the Cromwellian who dwelt among them.”[193]

Molyneux, who at this time came forward as the champion of Ireland and of liberty, demanded nothing for the Irish Catholics but a more cruel slavery; and Dean Swift, who gained much popularity for his advocacy of Irish rights, declared he would as soon think of consulting the swine as the aboriginal inhabitants of the island.

Indisputable as the fact is that the Irish Catholics had no direct interest in the contest in which the commerce and industry of their country were destroyed, the consequences of the iniquitous policy of England proved nevertheless most disastrous to them. Manual labor was the only work which they were permitted to do, and there now remained for them nothing but the tillage of the soil, either as tenants-at-will or common laborers. Ireland was to supply England with beef and butter, and the work of exterminating the Irish Catholics was not to be pushed further than the exigencies of successful cattle-grazing might demand. Society was constituted in the simplest manner. There were but two classes—the possessors of the soil and the tillers of the soil: the lord and the peasant; the master and the slave; the Protestant and the Catholic; the rich man and the beggar. There were but two kinds of human dwellings—the castle, with its high walls and splendid park, and the mud cabin, in whichit was impossible that there should be anything but filth and rags. The multitude lived for a few men, by whom they were valued as their horses or their dogs, but not treated so humanly. A contrast more absolute has never existed, even in the despotisms of Asia. The picture is revolting; it cannot be contemplated even in imagination without loathing, or thought of with any composure. It is a blot on humanity, an infamy which no glory and no services can condone. Ireland was in the hands of the worst class of men whom history has ever made odious—an aristocracy which hated the land from which it derived its titles, despised the people from whom it received its wealth, shirked the duties and responsibilities imposed by its privileges, and used its power only to oppress and impoverish the nation. The Irish people were thus under the weight of a double tyranny—that of England and that of their lords; and the fiend best knows which was the worst.

The Southern planter felt a kind of interest in his slaves—they were his property; an Irish landlord felt no interest of any kind in the people by whom he was surrounded. It was important that they should remain slaves, beggars, and outcasts; that the chasm which separated him from them should in no way be diminished; but for the rest he gave no thought whether they starved or murdered one another or were drowned in the deep. He spent most of his time in England, living in luxury, leaving his estates to the care of brutal agents, who pleased him the better the more cruel and grinding their exactions were. English in origin and sympathy, Protestant in religion, there was no bond of union between himand his people. He cared neither for the country nor its inhabitants. He was unwilling to risk capital even to improve his own lands; for he had no faith in the permanence of a social and political state which was possible only because it outraged the holiest and best instincts of mans nature. When it was proposed to take steps to drain the bogs and bring the waste lands of Ireland under cultivation, the Protestant party strenuously opposed the measure, on the ground that this would be an encouragement to popery. Nothing, therefore, was done either by the government or the landlords to improve the soil or to introduce better methods of tillage. The great proprietors, living in London, spending their time and fortune in a life of pleasure and display, let out their estates to land speculators, who were generally capitalists. These speculators sublet them, in lots of several hundred or a thousand acres, to a class of persons called middlemen, who divided them up into portions of five, ten, or twenty acres, and rented them to the poor Catholics. By neither the proprietors nor the speculators nor the middlemen was any risk of capital made. The peasant was therefore compelled to rent his little plot of ground, bare of everything—he found on it neither dwelling nor stabling, nor implements of any kind. He had nothing himself, and those whose interest it would have been to advance him money were unwilling to risk a penny. All that he could do was to put up a mud-cabin, and to get a wretched spade with which to begin work. If by honest labor he could have looked forward to an improvement in his condition, his lot would not have been altogether comfortless. Thepioneers who in this new world have led the army of civilization from the Atlantic to the Pacific began life almost as poor as an Irish peasant of the seventeenth or the eighteenth century; but for them no law of man reversing nature’s first law made labor sterile. How was the poor Irish Catholic, with but a few acres of ground, and without the necessary means for proper cultivation, to pay the exorbitant rent which was to support the landlord, the speculator, and the middleman?—for upon him alone rested the burden of maintaining all three in a life of ease and luxury. The soil refuses to satisfy the unreasonable demands made upon it; the tenant finds that he is unable to pay his rent; and without the least ceremony he and his wife and children are turned upon the road. England having destroyed the commerce and manufactures of Ireland, he can find nothing to do, and, if he is unwilling to see his wife and children starve, he must beg. And even beggary, with its frightful degradations, affords little relief; for the rich spurn him and the poor have nothing to give. Few words are needed to bring home to us the significance of this state of affairs. We have only to recall the tragedy Which was enacted under our eyes in 1849. In that one yearfifty thousand familieswere turned upon the road to die;two hundred thousand human beings, without shelter, without bread, sent up their piteous moan of hunger and despair to God from the midst of a Christian nation, the richest in the world. The terrible famine of 1847 and 1848, which was only an unusually startling outbreak of an evil that has long been chronic in Ireland, was not caused by excess of population. The country, if its resources wereproperly developed, is capable of supporting a far larger number of inhabitants than it has ever had. There were but eight millions of people in Ireland in 1847, and it has been conclusively proven that under favorable circumstances fifteen millions would not be an excessive population. In fact, in the so-called years of scarcity, when the people were dying, by thousands, of starvation, the country produced enough to feed its inhabitants; but they had to sell their wheat, barley, and oats to pay the rent, and, the potato crop having failed, they had nothing to eat. In 1846 and 1847 enormous quantities of grain and live-stock were exported from Ireland to England, and yet the people of Ireland were starving. During the four years of famine Ireland exported four quarters of wheat for every quarter imported. The food was in the country, but it had to be sent to England to pay the rent of the landlords. The people were starving, but that was no concern of these noble gentlemen, so long as their rent was paid. The cry of hunger has rarely been hushed in Ireland. All through the eighteenth century the people died of starvation. In 1727 Boulter, the Protestant Archbishop of Armagh, declared that thousands of families were driven from their homes by hunger; and Dean Swift has given us an account of the condition in his time of even the better class of tenants. “The families,” he says, “of farmers who pay great rents live in filth and nastiness, upon buttermilk and potatoes, without a shoe or stocking to their feet, or a house as convenient as an English hog-sty to receive them.” In 1734 the famous Bishop Berkeley asked this question: “Is there on the face of theearth any Christian and civilized people so destitute of everything as the mass of the people of Ireland?” In 1741 the cemeteries were too small for the burial of the multitudes who died of hunger.

In 1778, while we were struggling for freedom from English tyranny, Lord Nugent declared, in the House of Commons, that the people of Ireland were suffering all the destitution and misery which it is possible to human nature to endure. Nine-tenths of them earned no more than fourpence a day, and had no nourishment but potatoes and water. In 1817 the fever, brought on by hunger, attacked one million five hundred thousand persons—nearly half of the entire population of the country. In 1825, 1826, 1830, 1832, 1838, 1846 to 1850, and finally in 1860, 1861, and 1862, the melancholy cry of multitudes dying of hunger was heard throughout the land. In 1843 Thackeray, travelling in Ireland, declared that “men were suffering and starving by millions”; and a little later we know from the most accurate statistics that more than a million of the Irish people died of hunger within a period of two years. The history of Ireland is, we are persuaded, the sublimest and the saddest of all histories. It has never been written, and the grandest of themes awaits the creative power that will give it immortal life on the pictured page. It will be written in the English language, and it will link the English name and tongue for all time with the greatest social crime which one people ever committed against another. In another article we hope, by the aid of the faint and glimmering light that shines so fitfully in this blackness, to be able to trace the doubtful and devious way along which this providentialrace seems to be slowly rising into the promise of a better day. For the present we shall conclude with a quotation from De Beaumont, whose careful and conscientious studies on theSocial, Political, and Religious Condition of Irelandwe recommend to all who are interested in this subject.

“I have seen,” he wrote in 1835, “the Indian in his forests and the negro in chains, and I thought, in beholding their pitiable state, that I saw the extreme of human misery; but I did not then know the fate of poor Ireland. Like the Indian, the Irishman is poor and naked; but he lives, unlike the savage, in the midst of a society which revels in luxury, and adores wealth. Like the Indian, he is deprived of every material comfort which human industry and the commerce of nations procure; but, unlike him, he is surrounded by fellow-creatures who are enjoying all that heis forbidden even to hope for. In the midst of his greatest misery the Indian retains a kind of independence which is not without its charm and its dignity. Destitute as he is, and famishing, he is yet free in his wilderness; and the consciousness of this freedom softens the hardships of life. The Irishman suffers the same destitution without having the same liberty. He is subject to laws, has all kinds of fetters; he dies of hunger, and is under rule; deplorable condition, which combines all the evils of civilization with the horrors known elsewhere only to the savage! Doubtless the Irishman who has shaken off his chains, and still has hope, is less to be pitied than the negro slave. Nevertheless he has to-day neither the liberty of the savage nor the bread of the slave.”[194]

[191]“A View of the State of Ireland,” by Edmund Spenser.

[192]History of the United States,vol. v. chap. iv. p.73.

[193]History of England,vol. v. p.45.

[194]L’Irlande: Sociale, Politique et Religieuse.Par Gustave de Beaumont, Membre de l’Institut.Tom. i. p.222.

Back to IndexNext