DANIEL O’CONNELL.
Man seeks in nature a hidden sympathy with himself. The quickened beatings of his heart, the restless currents of his mind, make for themselves a reflex image in the forces of the sea and sky. For ever, the white crests of the breakers rolling in from the western ocean curl up and lash themselves against the rocks on the coast of Kerry. For ever, in the gray dusk, the waves, advancing and retreating, moan out a sad and hollow sound. In sorrow and in gladness their monotone is the same. Yet it well might be that the Irish peasant, in the year 1775, gathering kelp for his patch of land from the shallow coves where the sea broke in over his naked feet, felt, without thinking too closely about it, that nature, chill, leaden, and stern, mirrored there his own lot. The sudden gleams of blue sky through the drifting clouds reflected a buoyant humor that no sufferings could quite subdue.
George III. had reigned fifteen years. Dull, bigoted, cruel; striving in a blind way to be honest, but his blood tainted with the stains of centuries of intolerance, he was now the living type of Protestant fanaticism. In Europe, the old order of things existed without break or fissure. In America, the first heavings of the volcano were plainly felt. The King, Lords, and Commons of Ireland existed in name. The Irish Parliament sat in College Green to register the degrees of the English Privy Council. But what a Parliament! Four millions of Catholics without a representative. The broken Treaty of Limerick might still be spoken of among the traditions of the Irish peasantry, but its guaranties had sunk more completely out of the mind of the English and Irish legislatures than the statutes of Gloucester. The Penal Code was in full legal effect. Burke had described it a few years before with the calmness of concentrated passion as “well-digested and well-disposed in all its parts; a machine of wise and elaborate contrivance, and as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment, and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man.” Yet even Burke hardly gave credit enough to the magnificent qualities of the race which was able to survive this code. It failed in its object. It did not succeed in extirpating them. It never could degrade them, for they yielded neither to its blandishments nor its terrors.
But though holding fast the faith with such power as if God’s arm specially supported them therein for providential ends, English Protestant domination had broken down and crushed this once proud race to the very earth, in all material ways. The Israelites sweated not more hopelessly in the Egyptian sands. In some respects the lot of the Irish was worse. Their task-masters were an intruding race; they were aliens in their own land. The face of the country in many places still bore mute witness to Cromwell’s pathway of blood and fire. Then the scriptural image had been reversed, and the Irish had been hewn down like the Canaanites of old. The noonday horrors of Drogheda and Wexford had left a scar in the national memory which time has not yet effaced. Murder, lust, and rapine, under the guise of religious fanaticism, had made this people throw up its hands despairingly to heaven, as if hell itself had been thrown open, and its demons issued forth to scourge the land. The XVIIIth century had opened under changed, but it could hardly be said better auspices. The fury of destruction had ceased, but had been succeeded by the ingenious devices of legislative hatred and tyranny. The sword of Cromwell, dripping with the blood of men, women, and children, had given place to the gibbet of William of Orange. The lawless murderer was followed by the judicial torturer and jailer. The successors of William III. trod faithfully in his footsteps. The parliaments of Anne, of George I., of George II. heaped new fetters on the Irish papist. What wonder that a lethargy like death settled down upon the native race? The national idea was almost lost. It wavered and flickered like an expiring flame, yet was not quite extinguished. In caves and barns, by stealth, and at uncertain times, the Irish priest poured out a little oil from his scanty cruse which kept alive in the heart of his countrymen the memory of his religion and his national history. The “iron fangs” of the code relaxed a little during the first years of the reign of George III. Its victim lay stretched supine. More truly even than on a later occasion the words of Henry Grattan might have been applied to the condition of the country. Ireland “lay helpless and motionless as if in the tomb.” But though politically dead, the vitality of the race was inexhaustible, unconquerable. Population increased. There was little or no emigration except among the Protestant linen weavers of the north. The amazing fertility of the soil, spite of legislative drawbacks, made food plentiful. An English traveller, Arthur Young, in 1776, found the Irish peasantry quiet, apathetic, content to till their wretched holdings, at the mercy of their landlords, without complaint so long as they could keep a shelter over their heads, and had potatoes enough to eat. Political ambition or aspirations, the hope or even desire of shaking off their chains and asserting their rights as freemen, did not seem to exist among them. Thus far the oppression of centuries had done its work. Some efforts at enfranchisement had been made by the Norman Catholic aristocracy and the few old families of pure Irish blood who still held their estates, or portions of them, by sufferance; but the words of Swift continued true of the mass of the native race—not from want of natural capacity or manhood—far from it; but from the effect of this grinding oppression of centuries, and the systematic uprooting of all organization among them by English policy. They were “altogether as inconsiderable,” said the author of Drapier’s Letters, “as the women and children, … without leaders, without discipline, … little better than hewers of wood and drawers of water, and out of all capacity of doing any mischief if they were ever so well inclined.” Swift went further and declared them devoid of “natural courage.” But this was the libel of the Protestant Dean, not the belief of the Irish patriot. The title of the land, with a few unimportant exceptions, had passed completely out of the native race. Under the law none could be purchased. Education was forbidden. Yet such was the ardor of the inherited love of learning which had once distinguished the island, that Arthur Young found everywhere schools under the hedges, or, as he himself says, often in the ditches.
The breath of liberty was beginning to stir among the Protestants of the north, and the Volunteer movement was soon to lead the way to the short-lived recognition of the legislative independence of Ireland which terminated with the Union. But among the mass of the Catholic Irish peasantry no corresponding feeling as to their political rights was manifested, or was even in any degree possible. Arms were forbidden them. Terrible as the appellation sounds applied to that chivalrous race which had won a deserved renown on so many battlefields of Europe, at home they, were, in all outward respects, helots. The risings which sometimes took place were seldom or never political. They were solely agrarian. The infamous tithe-proctor roused a spasmodic, bloody resistance, which ended with the removal of the special cause exciting it, never extending to any effective organization against the political slavery under which they lay torpid. The Whiteboys and Hearts of Steel were not the material, nor were their aims and programmes the policy, out of which could spring such a revolution as was contemporaneously taking place in the American colonies. The mass of the people looked on in hopeless indifference at the outbreaks of those secret societies, or in some instances voluntarily combined against their indiscriminate violence. The native Irish bore their misery alone, without friends or sympathy except from France; and the interference of this power, by means of some feeble and unsuccessful landings in Ireland, served only to irritate England and tighten the chains of her captive. The mighty lever of moral support which is now wielded by the united voice of her sons in every quarter of the globe did not exist. In some counties, such as Kerry, where the native language was chiefly spoken, and the Milesian Irish largely predominated, the harsh hand of the law was never stretched out but to seize upon the substance or the life of the people. The memory of liberty could scarcely be said to exist in the hearts of this ancient race. That gift which the Greek fable had declared to have remained at the bottom of Pandora’s box when all else escaped, seemed to have taken wing from Ireland. Hope had fled.
In that age, under those skies, Daniel O’Connell was born.
One hundred years have passed. Rises now the Genius of the Irish race in America to celebrate the centennial anniversary of that glorious birth, to invoke in tones that peal across the waves—the memory of that illustrious and beloved name. A majestic, youthful presence, daughter of Erin, robed in white and with a garland of green upon her brow, comes with her sisters to lay a wreath upon the tomb of the Liberator of his country. Non omnis moriar, wrote the Latin poet:
“I shall not wholly die. Some part,
Nor that a little, shall
Escape the dark Destroyer’s dart
And his grim festival.”
Conquerors and statesmen have repeated his words. But neither the glories of war nor the triumphs of politics have won for any a surer immortality than O’Connell’s. His fortunes waning at the close, his blighted hopes, the broken column of his labors, have only endeared his memory the more to his countrymen. Time has terminated discussion or softened its asperity. Nothing is remembered but his love and his labors for Ireland. From Montreal to New Orleans, from the first shore on which the Irish exile set his foot, across the continent to the Pacific Coast, over an expanse of country so vast that the parent isle would form but an oasis in its central desert—myriad voices repeat his name, proclaiming in various forms of words, but with one meaning, this eternal truth, that freedom beaten to the earth will rise again. If in spirit the heroic figure of the great Tribune could top once more the Hill of Tara, what a spectacle would spread out before his eye unobscured by its earthly veil! A mightier multitude would listen to his strong and mellow voice. The descendants of the men into whose bruised and downcast hearts he first breathed the hope and the ardor of liberty have built up a greater Ireland in America. Sharing in the glories and faithful to the traditions of American freedom—yielding to none in the duties of citizenship—they have yet carried with them, and handed down to their sons, that love of the mother country which seems ever to burn with a brighter flame in man’s heart in enforced or unmerited exile. Irish-American generals have equalled or eclipsed the fame of those distinguished soldiers whose exploits in the service of foreign powers are household words in the military history of the race.
Citizens and soldiers unite to commemorate the birth of the man whose single arm struck off the fetters that had bound their fathers for nearly three hundred years.
If we turn to Ireland itself, we shall find the change which has been accomplished in those one hundred years in some respects more profound and startling than the corresponding advance in the fortunes of the Irish in America. The latter has been the regular and graduated result of causes working in ascertained channels; the former has all the character of a moral revolution. Ireland has not, it is true, gained that political independence with which her sons in these United States started. But over the far longer road before her to reach that goal her stride has been vast and, if we consider the growth of nations, rapid. To appreciate the transformation in the character and position of the Irish peasant we must recall what he was in 1775. Catholic emancipation was a wrench to the religious and social traditions of the English nation, and at the same time a dead-lift to the moral status of the Irish, to which no parallel will be found in history. Repeal failed from causes which we can now easily discern, but which were hidden from O’Connell by his proximity to the Union. But no Coercion Bills can conceal the fact that the strength of Ireland is growing in a ratio greater than her bonds. The tendency of modern European politics, and, willingly or unwillingly, of English legislation itself, and the increasing material prosperity of Ireland, are adverse to them, and continuously wearing them away. Her national spirit is indomitable. The hour may be distant, but it is inevitable, when they will fall from around her, and she will step forth in all the majesty of freedom.
What, then, is the place O’Connell holds in the national development of his race during those one hundred years? What are the achievements, greater than all defeats, which demand from his countrymen a recognition that no centennial celebration of his memory can too honorably offer.
In any view of modern Irish history it is essential to a clear understanding of its motives that we should distinguish the character and position of the three great races occupying the island. It is not enough to divide the people into Saxon and Celt. The native Irish race, the blended result of the successive ancient colonizations of the island, remained essentially distinct from the Catholic Norman Irish even after the Reformation. The intermarriages and adoption of Irish customs, which had early given to the descendants of Strongbow’s followers the title “Hibernicis Hiberniores,” had still left them a higher caste. They retained a not inconsiderable portion of their great estates through all the civil wars. The Penal Code never fell upon them with the rigor and leaden weight that paralyzed the native Irish. Their wealth purchased immunity. Although formally ostracized from political life, their influence as landowners secured them consideration. The observance of the duties enjoined by their religion was connived at. In other cases they were powerful enough to make it respected.
Far different was the case of the Milesian Irish. Their history had been a series of heroic struggles, ending in what appeared to be irretrievable disaster. Before the process of consolidation, which was simultaneously going on all over Europe, and which would have welded the various septs and kingdoms into one nation, could be completed, the Norman invasion under Strongbow had introduced a new and more furious element of strife. The Reformation only changed their masters, but changed them for the worse. Hitherto they had been serfs. They now became helots. The glorious deeds of arms of the O’Neals and other chieftains, which more than once threatened to drive the English into the sea, delayed but could not finally avert the complete triumph of combined craft and superior resources. Projects for the extirpation of the native race were freely mooted. Famine, the sword, and the gallows at one time seemed almost to promise it. The same price was set on the priest’s and the wolf’s head. A non-Catholic writer, Lecky, gives this summary of the Penal Code as it existed when O’Connell was born:
“By this code the Roman Catholics were absolutely excluded from the Parliament, from the magistracy, from the corporations, from the bench, and from the bar. They could not vote at parliamentary elections or at vestries. They could not act as constables, or sheriffs, or jurymen, or serve in the army or navy, or become solicitors, or even hold the position of gamekeeper or watchman. Schools were established to bring up their children as Protestants; and if they refused to avail themselves of these, they were deliberately consigned to hopeless ignorance, being excluded from the university, and debarred under crushing penalties from acting as schoolmasters, as ushers, or as private tutors, or from sending their children abroad to obtain the instruction they were refused at home. They could not marry Protestants; and if such a marriage were celebrated, it was annulled by law, and the priest who officiated might be hung. They could not buy land, or inherit or receive it as a gift from Protestants, or hold life annuities, or leases for more than thirty-one years, or any lease on such terms that the profit of the land exceeded one third of the rent. If any Catholic leaseholder so increased his profits that they exceeded this proportion, and did not immediately make a corresponding increase in his payments, any Protestant who gave the information could enter into possession of his farm. If any Catholic had secretly purchased his old forfeited estate, or any other land, any Protestant who informed against him might become the proprietor. The few Catholic landholders who remained were deprived of the right which all other classes possessed, of bequeathing their lands as they pleased. If their sons continued Catholic, it was divided equally between them. If, however, the eldest son consented to apostatize, the estate was settled upon him, the father from that hour becoming only a life-tenant, and losing all power of selling, mortgaging, or otherwise disposing of it. If the wife of a Catholic abandoned the religion of her husband, she was immediately free from his control, and the chancellor was empowered to assign her a certain proportion of her husband’s property. If any child, however young, professed itself a Protestant, it was at once taken from its father’s care, and the chancellor could oblige the father to declare upon oath the value of his property, both real and personal, and could assign for the present maintenance and future portion of the converted child such proportion of that property as the court might decree. No Catholic could be guardian either to his own children or those of any other person; and therefore a Catholic who died while his children were minors, had the bitterness of reflecting upon his deathbed that they must pass into the care of Protestants. An annuity of from twenty to forty pounds was provided as a bribe for every priest who would become a Protestant. To convert a Protestant to Catholicism was a capital offence. In every walk of life the Catholic was pursued by persecution or restriction. Except in the linen trade, he could not have more than two apprentices. He could not possess a horse of more than the value of five pounds, and any Protestant upon giving him five pounds could take his horse. He was compelled to pay double to the militia. He was forbidden, except under particular conditions, to live in Galway or Limerick. In case of a war with a Catholic power, the Catholics were obliged to reimburse the damage done by the enemy’s privateers. The legislature, it is true, did not venture absolutely to suppress their worship, but it existed only by a doubtful connivance, stigmatized as if it were a species of licensed prostitution, and subject to conditions which, if they had been enforced, would have rendered its continuance impossible. An old law which prohibited it, and another which enjoined attendance at the Anglican worship, remained unrepealed, and might at any time be revived; and the former was in fact enforced during the Scotch rebellion of 1715. The parish priests, who alone were allowed to officiate, were compelled to be registered, and were forbidden to keep curates, or officiate anywhere except in their own parishes. The chapels might not have bells or steeples. No crosses might be publicly erected. Pilgrimages to the holy wells were forbidden. Not only all monks and friars, but also all Catholic archbishops, bishops, deacons, and other dignitaries, were ordered by a certain day to leave the country, and, if after that date they were found in Ireland, they were liable to be first imprisoned and then banished; and if after that banishment they returned to discharge their duties in their dioceses, they were liable to the punishment of death. To facilitate the discovery of offences against the code, two justices of the peace might at any time compel any Catholic of eighteen years of age to declare when and where he last heard Mass, what persons were present, and who officiated; and if he refused to give evidence they might imprison him for twelve months, or until he paid a fine of twenty pounds. Any one who harbored ecclesiastics from beyond the seas was subject to fines which for the third offence amounted to the confiscation of all his goods. A graduated scale of rewards was offered for the discovery of Catholic bishops, priests, and schoolmasters; and a resolution of the House of Commons pronounced the prosecuting and informing against papists ‘an honorable service to the government.’”[154]
This is a dark picture. Yet it is drawn by an unwilling hand. Instances might be accumulated where the severity of the law was outstripped by the barbarity of its execution. Important relief bills were passed in 1777 and 1793. But they provided only for the removal of some of the civil and political disabilities of the Catholics. The badge of religious degradation remained untouched. The heaviest fetters of that iron code still trailed after the limbs of the Irish Catholic. It is the glory of O’Connell that he finally snapped them in twain, and trampled them for ever in the dust. Englishman, Norman, and Milesian—the British colonist who clung to a proscribed faith in every quarter of the globe—shared in the results of that herculean labor.
But it is the special claim of O’Connell to the eternal gratitude of that native Irish race to which he belonged, that he, first of all, after that bondage of centuries, taught them to lift up their heads to the level of freemen. Had his work stopped at Emancipation, had his claim to fame and a place in the national memory been included solely in the noble title of Liberator, enough had been done by one man for humanity and his own renown. But in the course of that long struggle a greater and further-reaching consequence was involved. A transformation took place in the character of the native Irish, the full results of which are not yet visible. In their journey through the desert, in their marchings and counter-marchings, their victories and transient defeats, as they neared the borders of the promised land towards which he led them, a change wonderful, but not without parallel, became visible in their spirit and their hopes. Insensibly and by slow degrees the political torpor of centuries yielded to a new and living warmth. A generation sprang up which had flung aside the isolation and submissive hopelessness of 1775, yet was capable of a greater and more sustained effort than the frenzy of despair which prompted ’98. Under the ardor of O’Connell’s burning words, a full understanding of the functions of self-government permeated a race which had hitherto seemed to exist by the sufferance of its masters. He not only liberated his countrymen from religious bondage, he organized them into a nation. He gave them the first impact of self-government since the Invasion. And that impact is never again likely to be lost.
Daniel O’Connell did not, like some other great popular leaders, spring directly from the midst of the people whose passions he swayed and whose actions moved obedient to his will. His family belonged to the old Irish gentry. He had the advantages of that collegiate course in France which was the only way then open to Catholics of the upper classes to afford their sons a liberal education. Yet his family was allied closely enough to the people to make him share in all their feelings, sympathies, and sufferings. The author whom we have already quoted, with that curious blindness, the result of unconscious prejudice, which makes most non-Catholic writers, however otherwise acute, miss the true threads of Irish history, and insult the national sensibility at the very moment they think themselves the most liberal, sets down as a defect in O’Connell what was in reality the secret of his power. “With the great qualities,” he says, “of O’Connell there were mingled great defects, which I have not attempted to conceal, and which are of a kind peculiarly repulsive to a refined and lofty nature. His character was essentially that of a Celtic peasant.”
Yes, this was at once his glory and his strength. O’Connell’s personal traits of character reflected faithfully, on a heroic scale, the national features of his race. Not the coarseness nor scurrility ascribed to it by the stage buffoon or the unsympathetic publicist, but the powerful yet subtle understanding which has won for Irishmen in every age the highest distinction in the field and in the schools, the large, warm heart, easily swayed by generous impulses, the humor closely allied to tears which is the secret of the most popular oratory. It is this thorough identification with the national spirit, with the religion which the persecution of centuries had made inseparable from it, that makes O’Connell without equal or second among the great men who nobly contended for their country’s freedom at the end of the last and beginning of the present century. He stands alone, gifted with a power to which neither the highest intellect nor the most brilliant oratory could otherwise obtain. He swayed the force of the nation he had welded into shape. It was this tremendous lever—obedient, one might almost say without figure of speech, to his single arm—that enabled him to wrest Catholic Emancipation from the combined determined opposition of the King, Parliament, and people of England.
For forty years Henry Grattan labored with chivalrous devotion in the service of Ireland. His eloquence has a charm, a poetical inspiration, a classical finish O’Connell’s never equalled. It thrilled the Irish Parliament like the sound of a trumpet, and held spell-bound the hostile English House of Commons. His patriotism was as unselfish, his zeal, in a certain sense, as ardent as O’Connell’s. Yet what did Grattan ultimately accomplish? What was the end of all these noble gifts and labors? Having, as he said, “watched by the cradle” of the constitutional independence of the Irish Parliament, he lived to “follow its hearse”; and when he died in 1820, Catholic Emancipation, the cause of which had been committed to his hands, became more hopelessly distant than ever. His was individual genius, individual energy, of a very high, if not the highest, type. But it needed something more to win in such a cause. Classical eloquence was thrown away in such a struggle. The concentrated strength of national enthusiasm, careless of form, animated only by a single giant purpose, was demanded. Grattan, though such a man as Irishmen of every creed might well be proud of, was, unfortunately for his success in the attainment of great national aims, neither a Catholic nor identified with the “Celtic peasant.” He lacked the fundamental force bred of the soil. O’Connell, on the other hand, might truly be likened to that fabled giant of antiquity, Antæus, who gained a tenfold strength each time he was flung upon his mother earth. Well might he declare, when reproached on one occasion for the violence of his language, “If I did not use the sledge-hammer, I could never crush our enemies.” It was a war of extremities. It was an epoch surcharged with the elements of moral explosions, when men’s passions were roused to the highest pitch. Those who read now the measured language of Disraeli in Parliament will pause in astonishment when they turn back to the frenzied raving with which he replied on a memorable occasion to the terrible invective of O’Connell. In such an era of violence, of anarchic strife, Grattan’s “winged words” fell harmless, but O’Connell’s “sledge-hammer,” wielded with the arm of Thor, thundered its most effective blows.
Another great Irishman had passed off the stage while the young Dublin law student, Daniel O’Connell, was still only dreaming of the liberation of his country. Edmund Burke—revered and illustrious name!—had rounded off the labors of his long and honorable life in the cause of oppressed humanity, wherever found, by some strenuous and well-directed efforts for the relief of his Catholic fellow-countrymen. Yet he too failed, or at best gained but an indifferent success. The principles he enunciated are imperishable; his arguments will be preserved for ever among the grandest vindications of religious liberty in the English tongue. But in that age they fell upon deaf ears. He too wanted that element of success which comes from identity of race, religion, feelings, opinions, sympathies. To that native Irish race which must ever determine the destinies of Ireland he was a stranger. What a satire upon humanity to expect that men in their position—bondsmen, systematically, and under legal penalties, deprived of all education, of every means of information—could appreciate the teachings of a political philosopher, living in what they regarded, with good cause, as a foreign or even hostile country. It was well if they knew of his existence. He was no leader for them. Nor did Burke ever affect to act with them, but rather for them, upon the convictions of the higher English and Irish classes. Hence it is that O’Connell is to be regarded as the purely national type of leader; by means of action exercising a more powerful influence on human affairs through the wide-spread Irish race than Burke by means of thought.
It will thus be seen that we place O’Connell on a high plane—above, and different from, that of mere orators, or statesmen administering established affairs, however great. He is to be ranked with the nation-builders of all ages. This was the verdict of most contemporary European observers, of Montalembert, of Ventura, and other exponents of continental public opinion. To the English mind he was, and probably will always be, a demagogue, pure and simple. But so no doubt was Themistocles to the Persians. O’Connell stormed too many English prejudices—stormed them with a violence which to his opponents seemed extravagant and unendurable, but without which he could never have gained his end—to be forgiven. The judgment of his countrymen, however—the supreme arbiter for him—is already maturing to a decision in his favor which will place him in a niche in the hall of Irish heroes above all others, and side by side with that old king whose memory recalls the ancient glories and victories of Ireland.
But what of his defeats?—of the failure of Repeal? This is not a panegyric on O’Connell, but a sincere examination of his place in Irish history. In many instances, and above all on the question of Repeal, he miscalculated his forces and the strength of the forces opposed to him. Like the greatest men of action in every age, his movements were directed by the circumstances and exigencies of the occasion, by experience, by the shifting currents of events, by his ability to create those currents, or to turn them to his own purpose. The cast-iron rules of policy which political philosophers formulate in their closets may be singularly inappropriate for the uses of popular leaders. In 1829, under the banner of Moral Force, with the nation arrayed behind him, he had wrested Emancipation from the king and ministry. It was an immense triumph. His temperament was sanguine—an element of weakness, but also of strength. In the hopeless state in which he found Ireland, only a character of the most enthusiastic kind would have ventured on the crusade he opened. In 1843, he thought he could repeat his victory on the question of Repeal. But in 1829 Peel and Wellington yielded, not to moral force, which, so far as Ireland is concerned, is a term unknown in English politics, but to the armed figure of rebellion standing behind it. They were not prepared for the contest. In 1843, the English ministry were ready to crush opposition with an overwhelming military force. If they did not invite rebellion, as in ’98, they were equally ready to ride roughshod over Ireland. The circumstances of the contest had also changed. Catholic Emancipation attacked the religious prejudices of England; Repeal threatened its existence as a nation. It could grant the one, and still maintain its hatred of Popery; it could not yield the other without setting up a legislature with rival interests in politics and trade. The instinct of self-preservation was evoked. No argument will ever convince the average Englishman that in restoring a separate, independent Parliament to Ireland, he is not laying the foundation of a hostile state. The result in 1843 was inevitable. As soon as a sufficient military force was concentrated, remonstrance or negotiation ceased. England simply drew her sword and flung it into the scale. O’Connell and his associates were thrown into prison, and the guns of the Pigeon-House Fort were trained on the road to Clontarf.
In the varied history of the human race few spectacles have ever been presented of equal moral grandeur to those immense peaceful open-air meetings which gathered to hear the great tribune. No greater testimony was ever given of a nation’s confidence and love. Competent judges put down the number who assembled at the Hill of Tara at half a million of people. Yet to the unbiassed observer there is something almost as pathetic in the helplessness of this great multitude—hoping to wrest their independence from England without arms—as grand in the mighty surge of its numbers. It was the confederacy of the sheep against the wolves. O’Connell’s failure shows vividly how narrow is the plank upon which the popular leader walks between an immortal triumph and a prison cell. It reveals the tremendous power residing in an organized government, capable only of resistance by a people in arms and inured to the use of arms. That was a monster meeting of a different kind held on Bunker Hill one hundred years ago, and commemorated this year by these United States.
We are neither impeaching here the wisdom of the course pursued by O’Connell in 1843, nor advising armed rebellion against England at the present day. We discuss simply the historical aspects of the question in the light of the experience of other nations. Nothing can be more hazardous, however, or often absolutely fallacious, than broad generalizations from the history of other countries as capable of determining a particular line of policy for any given state. In nothing else did O’Connell show a higher wisdom as a leader of the Irish people than in rejecting those specious appeals to the success of arms in America, made by the more ardent patriots in 1845-46.
The circumstances of the two countries were radically different. The Americans exhausted every kind of “moral force” at their disposal, and their revolution, when it finally came to blows, was not aggressive but defensive; the policy of England made it incumbent on Ireland to strike the first blow in a contest which she would quickly have found herself unable to sustain. The Americans had a boundless territory; the Irish a narrow island, capable of being pierced from shore to shore by English troops in three weeks. The Americans were trained to arms by a war of one hundred years with the French and Indians, in which they were drilled and fought side by side with English regiments; the Irish—the native Catholic Irish, the people for whom O’Connell was responsible before God and mankind—could not keep a pike since the Treaty of Limerick. An Irish rebellion, therefore, would have meant simply a massacre; and O’Connell, in choosing the wiser course of present submission to superior force, merited as much, although in defeat, the gratitude of his countrymen as he did in his triumph in the cause of Emancipation. For it will have been gathered from what we have already said that we regard O’Connell’s greatest achievement in the service of his country—its political organization, the education of its sons in the knowledge of the rights and duties of freemen—as going on with equal step as well with the unsuccessful agitation for Repeal as with the triumphant struggle for Emancipation. His defeats carried with them the germs of victory. The most ardent lover of his country can scarce escape an uneasy feeling when he reads in the annals of Ireland that story, reiterated with painful monotony, page after page, of the harryings, the devastations, the ceaseless intestine wars, which mark its early history. It would seem sometimes as if the ancient learning of Ireland which produced those numerous and minute chronicles, served only the purpose of a reproach to the island which fostered it. Other nations had struggled through this transition period—common to the whole of Europe—and finally consolidated themselves into peaceful and harmonious states. But it was the misfortune of Ireland that this opportunity of domestic organization was snatched from her by a foreign invasion ending in a domination of which the cardinal principle was to “divide and conquer.” English writers satirize the civil discord of the Irish race, forgetful that from the time of Henry II. to that of George III. it was the steady, and as it then seemed intelligent, policy of successive English statesmen to foster wars between the rival chieftains and clans, to employ them against one another, and in every way to break down any incipient attempt at union, which must have been dangerous, if not fatal, to English power. No man had arisen among the Irish race till O’Connell’s time who neutralized that policy. He showed that they were capable of organization and self-government in a patriotic common cause. In those immense meetings which marked his progress, where men of every county united in one vast brotherhood, he proved, first, that the Irish people loved domestic peace and co-operation as much as any other race; and, secondly, that under happy auspices they possessed a wonderful capacity for order and self control. Even hostile observers concur in expressing as much admiration for the undisturbed peacefulness of those assemblages of from a quarter to half a million of people, as amazement at their vastness, unprecedented in history. They were the foundation of the political education of Ireland.
In another country, and a more remote age, another man of kindred, kingly spirit and organizing power, with whom O’Connell is not unworthy to be compared, had built up his vast empire by like national meetings, not less than by force of arms. In the great national meetings of the Franks, the Champs de Mai, Charlemagne gave the first impress of government to Europe, torn to pieces after the fall of the Roman Empire. O’Connell, another “king of men”—such as the Homeric legend sings of—emulated his labors on a less extended scale in Ireland. But the empire of Charlemagne fell to pieces with his death. Chaos reigned again. O’Connell’s work was more homogeneous, and promises to be more enduring. We are only entering upon the dawn of a more hopeful Irish history.
When we seek a comparison of individual action, in the history of England, with O’Connell’s, we are struck at once with the grand but sorrowful isolation of his position. Fortunate the country which has never needed a liberator! Happy the kingdom whose greatest revolution meant only a change of dynasty, a stronger leaven of republicanism, and surer guarantees against religious toleration! The growth of constitutional government in England has been comparatively steady and uniform. Never—since the amalgamation of races following the Norman invasion—subjected to the terrible consequences of conquest and occupation by a race alien in language, religion, and national prejudices, her political and religious struggles have been wrought out to an issue among her own population. Whenever her civil liberty or parliamentary privileges were threatened, sturdy champions were not wanting among her own sons. Her Pyms, Hampdens, and Eliots find their counterparts in the Grattans and Floods of Ireland. But the deliverer of a crushed and hopeless people, the inspired guide who led them out of bondage and defied their taskmasters, is a figure happily absent in English history.
The imagination naturally turns with vivid interest to great deeds of arms. The pomp and panoply of war, the heroic daring of the headlong charge, the valor, disdainful of death, that awaits with constancy an overwhelming foe—these are incentives to action, in presence of which the labors and even triumphs of peaceful agitation appear tame and slow. And the Irish are a people strongly susceptible to those influences. They are a warlike race. Wherever the tide of battle turns against great odds, where the smoke is thickest, and the carnage deadliest, there will be found some Irish name upholding the traditions of his country’s fame. O’Connell had therefore no easy task in restraining within peaceful limits the immense agitation he had evoked. And in estimating his place in history the same considerations place him at a disadvantage compared with those great warriors, the glitter of whose victories is identified with the warlike glories of their country. The “Bridge of Lodi,” the “Sun of Austerlitz”—these are talismanic words which then rang in people’s ears with startling sequence? Yet if we compare O’Connell’s labors and their results with those of the great soldier whose career had closed while the former was only beginning his peaceful struggle with England, there is no reason to shrink from the verdict. Emancipation was worth many Marengos. The rôle of the Liberator may fairly be set off against that of the Conqueror. The civic crown of green and gold placed on O’Connell’s head on the Rath of Mullaghmast, in the presence of 400,000 men, was an emblem of true sovereignty greater in many ways than that iron crown which Napoleon lifted with his own ambitious hands from the altar at Milan. One was rust-eaten, it might be said, with the blood and tears of unknown thousands; the other was invested with the halo of peace, which the attainment of religious liberty and education in the rights of freemen had introduced into a million humble homes. The career of both Napoleon and O’Connell ended in defeat. But how conflicting the emotions of each as he gazed for the last time on the shores of his country! One, preoccupied by the shattering of his gigantic ambition, and the assertion of petty details of etiquette in the midst of the ruin around him; the other, oblivious of self, weighed down by the doom of famine impending over his country—his last words a solemn and pathetic appeal for its protection. In the hour of adversity, stripped of the adventitious circumstances of power, O’Connell stands forth a figure of greater moral grandeur. Of the victories of Napoleon nothing remains but their name, and the terrible retribution that has followed them. The influence of O’Connell’s unselfish labors in the cause of religious freedom has a future practically endless; and after a season of adversity and apparent forgetfulness, his political maxims and principles are again reviving in Ireland in the constitutional agitation for Home Rule. Not in the demand itself, stopping short as it does of Repeal, but in the means by which alone its advocacy may be made successful.
It is a curious instance of the ebb and flow of historical movements that O’Connell was at one time prepared to take up, under the name of “Federalism,” the present demand for “Home Rule.” Ultimately, as is well known, he was forced to abandon it by the mutiny of his followers, who would be satisfied with nothing less than simple “Repeal.” And this reluctance to adopt a middle course was natural enough at the time. In 1840-45 the Irish people were still too close to the Union; the infamous history of that measure and the burning eloquence of Grattan and Plunkett in denouncing it were too strongly impressed upon the national memory, to allow any hope of success to a leader who would promise less than its total erasure from the statute book. Too many were still living—like O’Connell himself—who could remember the brief yet glorious history of Irish legislative independence, to give up the belief that it was yet possible to see an Irish parliament sitting in College Green. Experience, and the statesmanship which does not aim at the unattainable, have shown the practical superiority of the lesser demand as a political programme at the present day. But this does not impugn the wisdom of the Repeal agitation. The true course of a people in its national affairs is necessarily learned slowly. There is no ready-made chart in politics; and were any offered, Burke’s satire upon geometrical demonstrations in state affairs would be conclusive against it. Experience, even the experience of failure, is the only trustworthy guide; and successive agitations, though varying in their object, keep alive the cause in the national memory.
Though the best and truest friends of Ireland, including that venerable hierarchy which has steadily seconded every rational movement for justice and equal rights, have never hesitated to give their support to O’Connell’s policy of moral force, there have not been wanting from the first restless spirits who have made it their bitterest reproach against him, that he was unwilling to fling away the scabbard and plunge the country into rebellion. It would be unjust to speak of all these men as influenced by unworthy motives. Some of them breathed, and still breathe, the purest aspirations of patriotism. But it was a mistaken patriotism, influenced by examples which might indeed make martyrs, but which would never lift one chain from the neck of their country. They might make good soldiers, but were poor leaders. Ireland was not then, and is not now, in a position to gain anything by a policy of violence.
But there are others, inflamed not with a love of Ireland, but with a spirit of hostility to all governments, who would plunge their country into bloodshed in hope of themselves floating to the top. These men are infected with the spirit of the Commune. They are revolutionists—not in the sense in which Washington or Hampden or O’Connell were revolutionists—leaders of great movements for the liberties of peoples—but socialists, whose single incentive is the envy and hatred of all superior authority. Most of all, they desire to supplant the Irish priesthood as the guides of the people. A sorry exchange, from the well-tried friends, proved by the exacting ordeal of a thousand years, to men of no responsibility—mere political gamblers—whose highest motive is ambition, but a lower and more common one, the love of easy-gotten money from confiding people. These conspirators are the promoters of the secret societies against which O’Connell warned the Irish people. But unfortunately they too often find that generous-hearted race—embittered by the recollection of centuries of oppression—willing to give ear to their delusive promises. Indifferent to their own future, these men rejoice in anarchy. Some of them are no doubt poltroons, who would fly as soon as they had led their dupes into danger. But it would be false to deny them all the attributes of courage. Others would die bravely enough behind a barricade. But their wars are essentially wars of the barricades. If defeated they would perish recklessly, having nothing at stake to make life valuable—absolutely indifferent to the slaughter, to the burned homes, to the widows and orphans of the unfortunate people who had submitted to their fatal guidance. If successful, their next attack would be upon the Catholic Church. But success under such leadership is a delusion wilder than the most exaggerated dream of fiction. They have no conception of a national revolution higher than a conspiracy. The elevated principles, the far-sighted calculations of a Washington, an Adams, or a Franklin, which almost assured success from the start, are an unknown language to them. Blind hatred, even of an existing tyranny, is a poor basis upon which to sustain a long and exhausting war. And no one, with the history of the American Revolution before him, can doubt what the character of an armed struggle with England for the independence of Ireland would be.
The same spirit of patriotism, therefore, that urged Washington to throw his sword into the scale in the contest with Great Britain, animated O’Connell with a contrary purpose in the case of Ireland. Yet not less is the latter deserving of the title of “Father of his Country.” Success has crowned the American patriot with a more splendid fame. But when we weigh the individual exertions of each in his gigantic struggle with the great empire opposed to him, and consider the incalculable advantages which a boundless territory and an intervening ocean afforded to the American leader, the Irish liberator will not suffer from the comparison. Washington was surrounded and sustained by a group of great men who would seem to have been providentially raised up at that momentous epoch to lay the foundations of the noble structure of American liberty. O’Connell, standing alone, an Atlas supporting the fortunes of six millions of Irish Catholics on his shoulders, is a figure unexampled in history. His herculean labors recall the fables of antiquity. In the whole parliamentary history of England we read of no other example of one man facing and trampling over the utmost hostility of that proud and powerful assembly—the English House of Commons.
Yet though the pre-eminence of O’Connell makes him appear almost a solitary figure in the records of that day, it would be unjust, in a notice of him, to pass over the assistance he received from the brilliant rhetoric and astute intellect of Richard Lalor Sheil. Though holding a subordinate place to that of the great Agitator, and accused of lukewarmness, in the end, by O’Connell himself, whose “Sheil, Sheil! this will never do,” has become historic, his early exertions merit a grateful remembrance. Nor can any Irishman ever forget the profound learning, the masterly reasoning, the weight of character which Dr. Doyle, the celebrated “J. K. L.,” brought to the contest in the early days of the Catholic Association. Rivalling Swift in the keenness of his satire, and “Junius” in the brilliancy of his style, he united to those qualities a purity of purpose and freedom from personal rancor which neither of those writers possessed. His life is an imperishable monument of the patriotism of the Catholic hierarchy of Ireland.
It is not the purpose of this article to speak of O’Connell’s position in the English House of Commons, of his action on the question of Reform, or the revenues of the Irish Church, on which he anticipated the tardy measure of Mr. Gladstone; nor of the truly liberal and tolerant spirit which made him welcome into the ranks of the Repealers the talented Protestant youth of Ireland, and oppose every manifestation of religious rancor wherever he found it. We have sufficiently pointed out what we believe to be his enduring claims to immortality—Catholic Emancipation, and, in pursuance of that aim and of Repeal, the new level of political thought and action to which he lifted the Irish race. He is the grandest representative of the pure Celtic blood of Ireland that the ages have produced. His power, like that of all other great national leaders, depended upon that representative quality. And he used his power faithfully. Unlike the great German chancellor of the present day, who, beginning with the rôle of a national liberator and organizer, has ended in a career of foreign domination and domestic persecution, O’Connell never perverted the strongest and noblest of popular forces to the uses of tyranny under any form. Prince Bismarck’s plans lead up to that very régime of hate, cruelty, and oppression which O’Connell combated in Ireland, and if they become the settled policy of the Empire, must in time give birth to a German Liberator.
It remains only to say a word upon the future of that Irish people to whom O’Connell devoted his life. We will not venture upon hazardous speculations. The wisdom of his policy was never more apparent than to-day. The motives upon which it was founded repeat themselves anew. There are too many interests in Ireland—Irish and Catholic interests—opposed to revolutionary violences, to make rebellion either desirable or practicable. It is only those who want to confiscate and live by tumult that cry out for it. The same communists who burned Paris and murdered its priests and archbishop under the name of liberty, would like to sack Dublin under the cry of “Down with the Saxon!” National ideas are everywhere the footballs of those radicals, by which they lead the easily-swayed multitude to follow them in their game of plunder. But an Irish communist—that is, one born of a Catholic Irish stock—is a creature of abnormal growth. He will never make much headway in Ireland.
The true course of modern Irish politics points to the assertion of that principle of federalism which has been established as the basis of government in Austro-Hungary, in Canada and all the great free British Colonies, and in the United States, and which, under the name of “Home Rule,” is now the matured policy of the trustworthy exponents of Irish public opinion. We would not be understood to commit ourselves to any particular political programme, but before any of what may be termed sentimental considerations, it would seem that the leaders of public opinion in Ireland must direct their energies to build up its material prosperity, and this can be best accomplished by local self-government. Unanimity in its pursuit is therefore demanded even of those who ultimately look beyond it. A rich and prosperous community will not long remain enslaved. It is only the poor who are trampled on, among nations as among individuals. It must be admitted, however, that nothing could well appear more hopeless than the present position of the Home Rulers in the English House of Commons. The decisive triumph of the Conservative reaction has put them out of the calculations of both parties. But this state of things is not likely to exist in the next Parliament, nor in the one after. Courage and endurance, therefore—the virtues of O’Connell—are the virtues that are needed in this temporary Slough of Despond. The contempt, so loudly and persistently expressed as to imply some apprehension, the frenzy of opposition, Home Rule has evoked in the House of Commons, we do not count for more than it is worth. It is not more bitter or uncompromising than the same feeling prior to Emancipation or even Reform. The same threats of eternal opposition were then common. It took sixty years of active opposition to gain the former; the same number at least and enormous outside agitation to carry the latter. The success of great national movements is necessarily slow against existing forces, and must often be transmitted from generation to generation. There is no need therefore of discouragement at a temporary check. Local self-government—the same that exists in New York and Massachusetts, and for the same objects—leaving foreign and exclusively national questions for the consideration of an Imperial Parliament, as for Congress—is a demand that commends itself to the feeling of justice of all mankind, a feeling which England will eventually be unable to resist. We are not of those who inculcate an eternal policy of revenge. This is easy for irresponsible demagogues to preach, but blows are not given without being received. The reality, the dreadful experiences of war, soon teach moderation where war is felt. Even were the two states independent, peace with England would be the true policy of Ireland.
As for the Irish in America, the future lies before them brilliant, unclouded. It is bounded only by their own ability to make it honorable and useful. Relying primarily, like every other man in the community, upon his own industry, sobriety, and energy, the Irishman in the United States or Canada may attain to any position he is fitted for. If in some instances he has to encounter native prejudices, these will be best overcome by an earnest effort on his own part to observe faithfully all the duties of citizenship. No one who does so will ever fail to obtain the respect and support of his Protestant neighbors. Those who make foreign grudges their first consideration must expect to be looked upon as strangers. Yet we must face what exists. So long as the stream of immigration continues to pour into this country, so long will there be a large body of our countrymen, receiving continual accessions, whose dearest thoughts will be directed towards Ireland, their bitterest towards England. This is inevitable. England reaps the fruit of her past. She is now in the position of a jailer who would fain take off the handcuffs from her prisoner, but dares not, for fear of retrospective revenge. The misgovernment of ages cannot be blotted out from the memory of the misgoverned in a day—nor in a hundred years. It is a national Nemesis; and it will be well for England if it do not overtake her in some dreadful form. This feeling naturally finds its strongest expression in the United States. Sympathy with the mother country will never fail. And God forbid that it should do so. But let that sympathy take a proper direction, an efficient form. Give the strength of your moral support—of your purses, if you will—to the men who are carrying on under a different form the work of O’Connell in Ireland—who are now bravely struggling for Home Rule. But turn a stern countenance on those adventurers and desperadoes who have nothing wiser to advise than wild and criminal incursions into a friendly province, where Irishmen possess all the rights they do here, or conspiracies and secret societies in Ireland—projects which make the honest patriotism and tried courage of Irishmen a farce for the laughter of mankind. The Irish in America have many traps laid for their nationality and their faith; but let them avoid the snares of revolutionary, infidel leaders for themselves, and of godless schools for their children, and the day will eventually dawn when the weight of their support will turn the scale in favor of their country’s rights against England. This is the true way to follow the example and honor the memory of O’Connell.
In spirit, the Great Liberator still beckons the way to his countrymen. The echo of that voice, sonorous, but clear and sweet as a silver bell, is heard no more on the hillsides of Erin. The clover springs up where the feet of thousands pressed closer to listen to its magic spell. But his memory is eternal as the hills themselves.
“By constancy like his sustained,
Pollux, of yore, and Hercules,
The starry eminences gained.”[155]
Unwearied by labors, animated by a single passion—the love of country—men like him “becoming the heroes and benefactors of the human race, attain to the glory of immortality.” The national historian, in a future age, will date the rehabilitation of Ireland from the birth of O’Connell.