MR. JOHN O’CONNELL ASSUMES THE PRESIDENCY OF THE REPEAL
ASSOCIATION—INFLUENCE OF THE REPEAL AGITATION UPON THE GENERAL ELECTIONS IN IRELAND.
The death of Mr. O’Connell, it was generally supposed in England, would allow agitation in Ireland to die of itself. Others supposed that it would now assume a worse form, in consequence of the absence of those restraints which the superior sagacity of the arch agitator laid upon the more fiery and imprudent ringleaders. The latter opinion was the correct one, and the people of England were astonished to find that Mr. O’Connell’s son John not only became the chairman at Conciliation Hall, but the recognised leader of the agitation. The priests gave him their confidence, and, at first, the people very generally; but he was not possessed of those qualities which enabled him to hold the reins of power. As Richard Cromwell to the deceased Oliver, so John O’Connell exhibited a contrast to his father, which soon caused the people to fall off from his leadership: his name, and the influence of the priests, were the means of retaining it for him for a time. After the death of his father, the temporary inheritor of his position indicated much energy and activity, although, even in this respect, none of the agitators approached their late chief: O’Connell’s powers of physical endurance and toil had been prodigious.
A general election, the policy of which will be noticed on another page, called out the leadership of John O’Connell, and the action of the committee at Conciliation Hall, in a manner to test whether the people were disposed to follow them. The general impression in England was, that the popular fervour had ebbed, and that the repeal members would not generally be returned: the English press made confident predictions to that effect. John O’Connell and the clique at Conciliation Hall accepted the ordeal, and were backed by priests and people in their policy. An extraordinary meeting was convened, and an address to the electors of Ireland resolved upon. It was a document which ought to be retained upon the page of history, for it discloses the spirit and temper of the repeal party, and of the Roman Catholic electors who responded practically to such an appeal. The repealers, as has been already shown, were not confined to Roman Catholics, nor were all that communion repealers; but, on the whole, the religious division of Protestant and Romanist defined the boundary between anti-repealers and repealers.
The following is copied from Saunders’ News Letter of the 12th of June:—
Address of the Loyal National Repeal Association to the Electors of Ireland.
“‘God prosper the cause!—oh! it cannot but thrive, While the pulse of one patriot heart is alive. How sainted by sorrow its martyrs have died! Far, far, from the footprint of coward or slave, The young spirit of freedom shall shelter their grave!’
“On you—fellow-countrymen—electors—at this moment devolves the good and holy task of protecting the graves of the sorrow-sainted martyrs of Ireland from the polluting tread of coward or of slave. None such will be found amongst you—none such will dare to show themselves if you be true.
“In this year of death, our country still survives! Weeping, fainting, bleeding, yet she lives; and lives to claim, aye, and to have—the services of her true children.
“Yes! although from him whose life’s devotion to Ireland was repaid by her confidence and her love, and from those without whose potent aid his labours had been vain—the beloved clergy of the people—down throughout all ranks and orders of the national organisation, Death has been busy, still enough remain of devoted, determined, patriot hearts, to carry out the good work he began, and to make it, with the blessing of a merciful God, speedily triumphant!
“Rally, then—rally, electors of Ireland—your country calls! Your dead brethren, even from their graves, invoke you. Drive from your hustings the men who shall have dared to think you cowards—who shall dare to ask you to continue slaves! And there are those who will so dare;—mark you not the exulting tone of Whig and Tory, and every other class of panderers to English passions and prejudices:—‘Repeal,’ they say, ‘is gone!’ ‘Ireland is at last subdued—she begs for bread, and is fearful to demand her rights lest we withhold our alms!’ It is false; how foully false you know, and at the elections you will prove. Deep as is the baseness of those who build their party hopes upon a nation’s misery, deeper still would be our baseness if ever, even amid all the heart-crushing calamities of the time, we shrunk in aught from our high purposes, and from our vows for Ireland’s regeneration.
“Nay, if but the hope of relief from our present distress were to animate us, even so should we cry out for that home parliament which alone can bring back wealth and abundance to the land—alone can guard her from recurring season after season of want, of pestilence, of death!
“Be ready then in time, fellow-countrymen, the elections are at hand; give us repealers—true and trusty repealers—men pledged to the safe, peaceful, constitutional principles you have been taught by him whom you followed so devotedly, and whom you mourn so affectionately and sincerely!
“On you—on each one and all of you together, and on none but you, the task now lies of helping Ireland at this fearful crisis of her fortunes. Yours, and yours alone, will be the glories of success, or the shame of not having sought it. Your distress has left the Repeal Association without funds to aid your contest, and we can do no more than to exhort and to advise. Let not the wily enemies of your freedom delude you. The duty is upon you; the means are in your hands, not in ours; if the duty be not done, poor Ireland will suffer the disastrous and ruinous consequences; but the blame of them, and the shame, will be upon you. Fellow-countrymen, this must not be—nay, this will not be. We answer for you. Unaided, undirected, as you are, you will bestir yourselves—on yourselves will depend, and you will achieve the victory. Meet in your committees; encourage the timid, cheer up the desponding; turn away with contempt from the whig or tory dependent, who would counsel you to dishonour, and vote for none but a staunch repealer—for one who will maintain the peace principles of the association, and aid it to work out and re-establish the inalienable and imperishable right of Ireland to legislate for herself.
“Had our own parliament ruled us, the landlords would not have had their tyrannies sanctioned and increased in license till the suffering people were reduced down to the lumper potato for a wretched, and, alas! a fatally precarious subsistence. Our manufactures would yet exist, giving comfort to our skilful artizans, and offering refuge to the peasant, unable to obtain a maintenance upon the land. In every village neighbourhood, the money raised by the hard toil of the labourer would be finding its way back, and briskly circulating there, by reason of the thousand sources of employment that would arise around the restored residence of the large proprietor. Irish money would thus stay at home to create and increase Irish wealth, and to support Irish poverty; and the grudging doles of an alien parliament would never more be needed in the land.
“Fellow-countrymen, for such results the association has been struggling—for such objects you are now called upon to work. By all that this wretched land has yet endured from English misrule,—by the accumulated and aggravated suffering of the last disastrous forty-seven years, with their fell climax in this year of death,—by the myriads of fresh graves, the fearful husbandry of death, that are ridging your fields and even your humble homesteads,—by the holy and most adorable name of the Deity, who chasteneth whom He loveth,—we entreat, we implore, we exhort, we adjure you to stand true to Ireland at these elections; to spurn Whig and Tory, and to prove yourselves worthy of your rights by returning none but those who will unflinchingly assert them;—and foremost amongst those rights, before all and above all, the right to make your own laws in your own parliament at home.”
The elections issued in a triumph for which the Repeal Committee itself was hardly prepared. There was a great increase in “repeal members.” This arose from a variety of causes. The Conservatives had lost heart in connection with the expenses which the famine had imposed upon their estates. The people universally attributed their distress to the government, and to their connection with heretic England. The priests made great exertions throughout the country. Fearful scenes of violence took place, “the moral-force repealers,” lay and clerical, inciting the people to these outrages by the most inflammatory appeals to their fanaticism, and by examples which were calculated to encourage them. The most awful denunciations were heaped upon the heads of “all bad Catholics who should vote against their religion and country.” These denunciations came from sacerdotal lips, and from the altar as well as the pulpit. The popular press rivalled the priests in anathemas against all who were not willing “to vote for Ireland against the Saxon.” Public placards might be seen in town and country, headed, like the address of the Repeal Committee to the electors, with inflammatory poetry: a favourite couplet on these occasions was—
“On our side is virtue and Erin, On theirs is the Saxon and guilt.”
The context of these lines was judiciously omitted from the placards, but not from the speeches of the electioneering agents and orators—
“Then onward—our green banner rearing— Go, flesh every sword to the hilt.”
If this injunction was not obeyed to the letter, it was nearly so, and at all events it was carried out in spirit.
Of green banners there was abundance, and if the sword gave place to the brickbat and the bludgeon, the consequences were pretty much the same—“Green Erin” gained a great victory over Erin of the Orange preferences, and over the Saxon in general. The spirit in which this result was received at Conciliation Hall, and its effect upon the hopes and aspirations of the people, may be gathered most readily from the address of the General Election Committee of the Repealers to the people of Ireland, when the elections had closed.
“Fellow-countrymen,—Even in this hour of triumph—even now, when you have so nobly vindicated at the elections the glorious cause of repeal—our congratulations must, in sad accordance with the unvarying fate of Ireland ever since Englishmen have controlled her fortunes, be mingled with considerations of mournfulness and peril! It is not merely—and, alas! that such a calamity should have to be treated as of secondary magnitude—it is not merely that the niggard state charity of England is now at once to cease and be entirely withdrawn, but we have to contemplate a still more fearful and far wider-spreading misery at the end of autumn and in the early winter.
“All-bounteous Heaven has blessed our fields with abundance; but Ireland’s poverty—the unholy doing of man—must cause the produce of her harvest to be exported away from her starving people, and sold at the rich markets of England, to meet the enormous rents of cruel absentees. Five millions of your money go annually to those absentees; and so many have lately fled from the sight of the calamities their carelessness for their country had allowed England to inflict, that more than an additional million must be drained away this year!
“What is there to save our people? The potato has not been sown in one-third of the extent of former years. The substitute crops, though promising, will be fearfully short of the deficiency caused by the loss of the potato; and those crops would be taken from us by the high prices in England, even if we had not to send them there to get money for the absentees. Food gone, and money gone, what is to become of us? The stinted relief that England gave us is out. The means voted with grudging and insult are expended and gone. Her representatives are pledged to give us no more, and not only to refuse if the government should propose a further advance, but to call upon the minister to insist strictly and speedily on repayment of that which has been given. We therefore have no hope of money from England! Have we then any money at home? Alas! it is but as the dribblings of the mountain stream when the winter floods have passed, and the summer heats are exhausting and absorbing its waters; and had we tenfold what little remains, how are the rates to be paid, when, according to even the starvation scale of the government soup-kitchens, the cost of maintaining our poor will exceed by nearly double the whole rated value of the property in Ireland! No Whig nor Tory can tell us of the means of meeting the coming disaster. The members of the ministry have not touched upon it at any of their elections. The press of England is mute, save when it gives utterance to calumnies and insults. Ireland is not in the thoughts of any of our English fellow-subjects. Their own interests, their own monetary perils, their own necessities, absorb their whole attention.
“Should we not then take counsel from ourselves? Should not our newly-elected members agree to come together here in Dublin, and consult for the safety of the country, and decide upon the matters they will urge upon the reluctant ear of the English parliament? Should they not meet, if only to concert how best to recall the absentees to their long-neglected duties at home; how best to compel all the monies of the country to be spent at home; and thus to give a chance of saving our unhappy people from being swept off the face of the earth by widely-desolating famine, or the yet more desolating and dreadful agency of a bloody, a bootless, a criminal, and all-destroying civil war?
“Again we shall address you, when the time is near that parliament is to assemble, and ask of you to announce to your representatives your opinions. We shall carefully make use of the intervening time to collect and concentrate the expression of your sentiments respecting each particular point of policy that should be pressed upon your members’ attention, as well as respecting the great leading principles of the national movement. Thus shall the ‘Council of National Distress and National Safety’ come to its labours with materials prepared and suitably digested, and thus be enabled all the readier and speedier to take, boldly and explicitly, its decisions and resolves, and maintain them firmly, undauntedly, and perseveringly in the British House of Commons. Thus shall the Irish members best show themselves to be worthy of the high trust with which they have been honoured, and of the far higher and prouder distinction of being again, and at no distant time, deputed to represent their beloved country in her restored native parliament.”
The representation that the relief England had given to the people was stinted, was a vile calumny, showing the utter want of principle of the party from which it emanated. The intimation that it was not the intention of government to do more; that the “stinted relief” which England gave was “out;” and that nothing but ruin remained, although rich England was at hand to save, if she were only charitable and just,—was well calculated to keep up disaffection in the public mind.
The success of the repealers at the elections might be supposed as tending to quiet the country, as it afforded a constitutional medium of expressing their views. But it had not that effect: the desire to procure arms which showed itself in 1846 continued through 1847, and notwithstanding the great distress so generally felt, the expenditure of money upon aggressive weapons was in some parts of the country larger than in the previous year.