The Catholic World, Vol. 23, April, 1876-September, 1876. / A Monthly Magazine of General Literature and Science

by Various

CATHOLICS IN THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION.

The moment of England’s triumph in the last century was the dawn of American independence. When England, aided by her colonies, had at last wrested Canada from France, and, forcing that weakened power to relinquish Louisiana to Spain, had restored Havana to the Catholic sovereign only at the price of Florida, her sway seemed secure over all North America from the icy ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, from the shores of the Atlantic to the Mississippi. But her very success had aroused questions and created wants which were not to be answered or solved until her mighty American power was shattered.

While Spain and France kept colonies in leading-strings, England allowed her American provinces to thrive by her utter neglect of them. Monarchs granted charters liberally, and with that their interest seemed to vanish, until it was discovered that offices could be found there for court favorites. But the people had virtually constituted governments of their own; had their own treasury, made their own laws, waged their wars with the Indian, carried on trade, unaided and almost unrecognized by the mother country.

The final struggle with France had at last awakened England to the importance, wealth, and strength of the American colonies. It appeared to embarrassed English statesmen that the depleted coffers of the national treasury might be greatly aided by taxing these prosperous communities. The Americans, paying readily taxes where they could

control their disbursement, refused to accept new burdens and to pay the mother country for the honor of being governed. The relation of colonies to the mother country; the question of right in the latter to tax the former; the bounds and just limits on either side, involved new and undiscussed points. They now became the subject of debate in Parliament, in colonial assemblies, in every town gathering, and at every fireside in the American colonies. The people were all British subjects, proud of England and her past; a large majority were devoted to the Protestant religion and the house of Hanover, and sought to remain in adherence to both while retaining all the rights they claimed as Englishmen.

A small body of Catholics existed in the country. What their position was on the great questions at issue can be briefly told.

They were of many races and nationalities. No other church then or now could show such varieties, blended together by a common faith. Maryland, settled by a Catholic proprietor, with colonists largely Catholic, and for a time predominantly so, contained some thousands of native-born Catholics of English, and to some extent of Irish, origin, proud of their early Maryland record, of the noble character of the charter, and of the nobly tolerant character of the early laws and practice of the land of Mary. In Pennsylvania a smaller Catholic body existed, more scattered, by no means so compact or so influential

as their Maryland brethren—settlers coming singly during the eighteenth century mainly, or descendants of such emigrants, some of whom had been sent across the Atlantic as bondmen by England, others coming as redemptioners, others again as colonists of means and position. They were not only of English, Irish, and Scotch origin, but also of the German race, with a few from France and other Catholic states. New Jersey and New York had still fewer Catholics than Pennsylvania. In the other colonies, from New Hampshire to Georgia, they existed only as individuals lost in the general body of the people. But all along the coast were scattered by the cruel hand of English domination the unfortunate Acadians, who had been ruthlessly torn from their Nova Scotian villages and farms, deprived of all they had on earth—home and property and kindred. With naught left them but their faith, these Acadians formed little groups of dejected Catholics in many a part, not even their noble courage amid unmerited suffering exciting sympathy or kindly encouragement from the colonists. Florida had a remnant of its old Spanish population, with no hopes for the future from the Protestant power to which the fortunes of war and the vicissitudes of affairs had made them subjects. There were besides in that old Catholic colony some Italians and Minorcans, brought over with Greeks under Turnbull’s project of colonization. Maine had her Indians, of old steady foes of New England, now at peace, submitting to the new order of things, thoroughly Catholic from the teaching of their early missionaries. New York had Catholic Indians on her northern frontier. The Catholic Wyandots clustered around the pure

streams and springs of Sandusky. Further west, from Detroit to the mouth of the Ohio, from Vincennes to Lake Superior, were little communities of Canadian French, all Catholics, with priests and churches, surrounded by Indian tribes among all which missionaries had labored, and not in vain. Some tribes were completely Catholic; others could show some, and most of them many, who had risen from the paganism of the red men to the faith of Christ.

Such was the Catholic body—colonists who could date back their origin to the foundation of Maryland or Acadia, Florida or Canada, Indians of various tribes, new-comers from England, Germany, or Ireland. There were, too, though few, converts, or descendants of converts, who, belonging to the Protestant emigration, had been led by God’s grace to see the truth, and who resolutely shared the odium and bondage of an oppressed and unpopular church.

The questions at issue between the colonies and the mother country were readily answered by the Catholics of every class. Catholic theologians nowhere but in the Gallican circles of France had learned to talk of the divine right of kings. The truest, plainest doctrines of the rights of the people found their exposition in the works of Catholic divines. By a natural instinct they sided with those who claimed for these new communities in the western world the right of self-government. Catholics, of whatever race or origin, were on this point unanimous. Evidence meets us on every side. Duché, an Episcopal clergyman, will mention Father Harding, the pastor of the Catholics in Philadelphia, for “his known attachment to British liberty”—they had not yet begun to

talk of American liberty. Indian, French, and Acadian, bound by no tie to England, could brook no subjection to a distant and oppressive power. The Irish and Scotch Catholics, with old wrongs and a lingering Jacobite dislike to the house of Hanover, required no labored arguments to draw them to the side of the popular movement. All these elements excited distrust in England. Even a hundred years before in the councils of Britain fears had been expressed that the Maryland Catholics, if they gained strength, would one day attempt to set up their independence; and the event justified the fear. If they did not originate the movement, they went heartily into it.

The English government had begun in Canada its usual course of harassing and grinding down its Catholic subjects, putting the thousands of Canadians completely at the mercy of the few English adventurers or office-holders who entered the province, giving three hundred and sixty Protestant sutlers and camp-followers the rights of citizenship and all the offices in Canada, while disfranchising the real people of the province, the one hundred and fifty thousand Canadian Catholics. How such a system works we have seen, unhappily, in our own day and country. But with the growing discontent in her old colonies, caused by the attempts of Parliament to tax the settlers indirectly, where they dared not openly, England saw that she must take some decisive step to make the Canadians contented subjects, or be prepared to lose her dear-bought conquest as soon as any war should break out in which she herself might be involved. Instead of keeping the treaty of Paris as she had kept that of Limerick, England for once

resolved to be honest and fulfil her agreement.

It was a moment when the thinking men among the American leaders should have won the Canadians as allies to their hopes and cause; but they took counsel of bigotry, allowed England to retrace her false steps, and by tardy justice secure the support of the Canadians.

The Quebec act of 1774 organized Canada, including in its extent the French communities in the West. Learning a lesson from Lord Baltimore and Catholic Maryland, “the nation which would not so much as legally recognize the existence of a Catholic in Ireland, now from political considerations recognized on the St. Lawrence the free exercise of the religion of the Church of Rome, and confirmed to the clergy of that church their rights and dues.”

Just and reasonable as the act was, solid in policy, and, by introducing the English criminal law and forms of government, gradually preparing the people for an assimilation in form to the other British colonies, this Quebec act, from the simple fact that it tolerated Catholics, excited strong denunciation on both sides of the Atlantic. The city of London addressed the king before he signed the bill, petitioning that he should refrain from doing so. “The Roman Catholic religion, which is known to be idolatrous and bloody, is established by this bill,” say these wiseacres, imploring George III., as the guardian of the laws, liberty, and religion of his people, and as the great bulwark of the Protestant faith, not to give his royal assent.

In America, when the news came of its passage, the debates as to their wrongs, as to the right of Parliament to pass stamp acts or levy

duties on imports, to maintain an army or quarter soldiers on the colonists, seemed to be forgotten in their horror of this act of toleration. In New York the flag with the union and stripes was run up, bearing bold and clear on a white stripe the words, “No Popery.” The Congress of 1774, though it numbered some of the clearest heads in the colonies, completely lost sight of the vital importance of Canada territorially, and of the advantage of securing as friends a community of 150,000 whose military ability had been shown on a hundred battle-fields. Addressing the people of Great Britain, this Congress says: “By another act the Dominion of Canada is to be so extended, modelled, and governed as that, by being disunited from us, detached from our interests by civil as well as religious prejudices; that by their numbers swelling with Catholic emigrants from Europe, and by their devotion to administration so friendly to their religion, they might become formidable to us, and on occasion be fit instruments in the hands of power to reduce the ancient free Protestant colonies to the same slavery with themselves.” “Nor can we suppress our astonishment that a British parliament should ever consent to establish in that country a religion that has deluged your island in blood, and dispersed impiety, bigotry, persecution, murder, and rebellion through every part of the world.”

This address, the work of the intense bigot John Jay, and of the furious storm of bigotry evoked in New England and New York, was most disastrous in its results to the American cause. Canada was not so delighted with her past experience of English rule or so confident of the future as to accept unhesitatingly

the favors accorded by the Quebec act. She had from the first sought to ally herself with the neighboring English colonies, and to avoid European complications. When she proposed the alliance, they declined. She would now have met their proposal warmly; but when this address was circulated in Canada, it defeated the later and wiser effort of Congress to win that province through Franklin, Chase, and the Carrolls. It made the expeditions against the British forces there, at first so certain of success by Canadian aid, result in defeat and disgrace. In New York a little colony of Scotch Catholics, who would gladly have paid off the score of Culloden, took alarm at the hatred shown their faith, and fled with their clergyman to Canada to give strength to our foe, when they wished to be of us and with us. In the West it enabled British officers to make Detroit a centre from which they exerted an influence over the Western tribes that lasted down into the present century, and which Jay’s treaty—a tardy endeavor to undo his mischief of 1774—did not succeed in checking.

Pamphlets, attacking or defending the Quebec act, appeared on both sides of the Atlantic. In the English interest it was shown that the treaty of Paris already guaranteed their religion to the Canadians, and that the rights of their clergy were included in this. It was shown that to insist on England’s establishing the state church in Canada would justify her in doing the same in New England. “An Englishman’s Answer” to the address of Congress rather maliciously turned Jay’s bombast on men like himself by saying: “If the actions of the different sects in religion are inquired into, we shall

find, by turning over the sad historic page, that it was the —— sect (I forget what they call them; I mean the sect which is still most numerous in New England, and not the sect which they so much despise) that in the last century deluged our island in blood; that even shed the blood of the sovereign, and dispersed impiety, bigotry, superstition, hypocrisy, persecution, murder, and rebellion through every part of the empire.”

One who later in life became a Catholic, speaking of the effect of this bill in New England, says: “We were all ready to swear that this same George, by granting the Quebec bill, had thereby become a traitor, had broke his coronation oath, was secretly a papist,” etc. “The real fears of popery in New England had its influence.” “The common word then was: ‘No king, no popery.’”

But though Canada was thus alienated, and some Catholics at the North frightened away, in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and the French West the fanaticism was justly regarded as a mere temporary affair, the last outburst of a bigotry that could not live and thrive on the soil. Providence was shaping all things wisely; but we cannot be surprised at the wonder some soon felt. “Now, what must appear very singular,” says the writer above quoted, “is that the two parties naturally so opposite to each other should become, even at the outset, united in opposing the efforts of the mother country. And now we find the New England people and the Catholics of the Southern States fighting side by side, though stimulated by extremely different motives: the one acting through fear lest the king of England should succeed in establishing among us

the Catholic religion; the other equally fearful lest his bitterness against the Catholic faith should increase till they were either destroyed or driven to the mountains and waste places of the wilderness.”

Such was the position of the Catholics as the rapid tide of events was bearing all on to a crisis. The Catholics in Maryland and Pennsylvania were outspoken in their devotion to the cause of the colonies. In Maryland Charles Carroll of Carrollton, trained abroad in the schools of France and the law-courts of England, with all the learning of the English barrister widened and deepened by a knowledge of the civil law of the Continent, grappled in controversy the veteran Dulany of Maryland. In vain the Tory advocate attempted, by sneers and jibes at the proscribed position of the foreign-trained Catholic, to evade the logic of his arguments. The eloquence and learning of Carroll triumphed, and he stood before his countrymen disenthralled. There, at least, it was decided by the public mind that Catholics were to enjoy all the rights of their fellow-citizens, and that citizens like Carroll were worthy of their highest honors. “The benign aurora of the coming republic,” says Bancroft, “lighted the Catholic to the recovery of his rightful political equality in the land which a Catholic proprietary had set apart for religious freedom.” In 1775 Charles Carroll was a member of the first Committee of Observation and a delegate to the Provincial Convention of Maryland, the first Catholic in any public office since the days of James II. “Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the great representative of his fellow-believers, and already an acknowledged leader of the patriots, sat in the Maryland Convention as the

delegate of a Protestant constituency, and bore an honorable share in its proceedings.”

When the news of Lexington rang through the land, borne from town to town by couriers on panting steeds, regiments were organized in all the colonies. Catholics stepped forward to shoulder their rifles and firelocks. Few aspired to commissions, from which they had hitherto been excluded in the militia and troops raised for actual service, but the rank and file showed Catholics, many of them men of intelligence and fair education, eager to meet all perils and to prove on the field of battle that they were worthy of citizenship in all its privileges. Ere long, however, Catholics by ability and talent won rank in the army and navy of the young republic.

We Catholics have been so neglectful of our history that no steps were ever taken to form a complete roll of those glorious heroes of the faith who took part in the Revolutionary struggle. The few great names survive—Moylan, Burke, Barry, Vigo, Orono, Louis, Landais; here and there the journal of a Catholic soldier like McCurtin has been printed; but in our shameful neglect of the past we have done nothing to compile a roll that we can point to with pride.

When hostilities began, it became evident that Canada must be gained. Expeditions were fitted out to reduce the British posts. The Canadians evinced a friendly disposition, giving ready assistance by men, carriages, and provisions to an extent that surprised the Americans. Whole parishes even offered to join in reducing Quebec and lowering the hated flag of England from the Castle of St. Louis, where the lilies had floated for nearly two centuries. But the bigotry that inspired some

of our leaders was too strong in many of the subordinates to permit them to reason. They treated these Catholic Canadians as enemies, ill-used and dragooned them so that almost the whole country was ready to unite in repulsing them. Then came Montgomery’s disaster, and the friends of America in Canada dwindled to a few priests: La Valiniere, Carpentier, the ex-Jesuits Huguet and Floquet, and the Canadians who enlisted in Livingston’s, Hazen’s, and Duggan’s corps, under Guillot, Loseau, Aller, Basadé, Menard, and other Catholic officers.

Then Congress awoke to its error. As that strategic province was slipping from the hands of the confederated colonies, as Hazen’s letters came urging common sense, Congress appointed a commission with an address to the Canadian people to endeavor even then to win them. Benjamin Franklin was selected with two gentlemen from Catholic Maryland—Samuel Chase and Charles Carroll. To increase their influence, Congress requested the Rev. John Carroll to accompany them, hoping that the presence of a Catholic priest and a Catholic layman, both educated in France and acquainted with the French character, would effect more than any argument that could be brought to bear on the Canadians. They hastened to do their utmost, but eloquence and zeal failed. The Canadians distrusted the new order of things in America; the hostility shown in the first address of Congress seemed too well supported by the acts of Americans in Canada. They turned a deaf ear to the words of the Carrolls, and adhered to England.

Canada was thus lost to us. Taking our stand among the nations of the earth, we could not hope to

include that province, but must ever have it on our flank in the hands of England. This fault was beyond redemption.

But the recent war with Pontiac was now recalled. Men remembered how the Indian tribes of the West, organized by the mastermind of that chief, had swept away almost in an instant every fort and military post from the Mississippi to the Alleghanies, and marked out the frontier by a line of blazing houses and villages from Lake Erie to Florida. What might these same Western hordes do in the hands of England, directed, supplied, and organized for their fell work by British officers! The Mohawks and other Iroquois of New York had retired to the English lines, and people shuddered at what was to come upon them there. The Catholic Indians in Maine had been won to our side by a wise policy. Washington wrote to the tribe in 1775, and deputies from all the tribes from the Penobscot to Gaspé met the Massachusetts Council at Watertown. Ambrose Var, the chief of the St. John’s Indians, Orono of Penobscot, came with words that showed the reverent Christian. Of old they had been enemies; they were glad to become friends: they would stand beside the colonists. Eminently Catholic, every tribe asked for a priest; and Massachusetts promised to do her best to obtain French priests for her Catholic allies. Throughout the war these Catholic Indians served us well, and Orono, who bore a Continental commission, lived to see priests restored to his village and religion flourishing. Brave and consistent, he never entered the churches of the Protestant denominations, though often urged to do so. He practised his

duties faithfully as a Catholic, and replied: “We know our religion and love it; we know nothing of yours.”

Maine acknowledges his worth by naming a town after this grand old Catholic.

But the West! Men shuddered to think of it. The conquest of Canada by a course of toleration and equality to Catholics would have made all the Indian tribes ours. The Abnakis had been won by a promise to them as Catholics; the Protestant and heathen Mohawks were on the side of England, though the Catholics of the same race in Canada were friendly. If the Indians in the West could be won to neutrality even, no sacrifice would be too great.

Little as American statesmen knew it, they had friends there. And if the United States at the peace secured the Northwest and extended her bounds to the Mississippi, it was due to the Very Rev. Peter Gibault, the Catholic priest of Vincennes and Kaskaskia, and to his sturdy adherent, the Italian Colonel Vigo. Entirely ignorant of what the feeling there might be, Col. George Rogers Clark submitted to the legislature of Virginia, whose backwoods settlement, Kentucky, was immediately menaced, a plan for reducing the English posts in the Northwest. Jefferson warmly encouraged the dangerous project, on which so much depended. Clark, with his handful of men, struck through the wilderness for the old French post of Kaskaskia. He appeared before it on the 4th of July, 1778. But the people were not enemies. Their pastor had studied the questions at issue, and, as Clark tells us, “was rather prejudiced in favor of us.” The people told the American commander they were convinced

that the cause was one which they ought to espouse, and that they should be happy to convince him of their zeal. When Father Gibault asked whether he was at liberty to perform his duty in his church, Clark told him that he had nothing to do with churches, except to defend them from insult; that, by the laws of the state, his religion had as great privileges as any other. The first Fourth of July celebration at Kaskaskia was a hearty one. The streets were strewn with flowers and hung with flags, and all gave themselves up to joy. But Clark’s work was not done. The English lay in force at Vincennes. Father Gibault and Colonel Vigo, who had been in the Spanish service, but came over to throw in his fortunes with us, urged Clark to move at once on Vincennes. It seemed to him rash, but Father Gibault showed how it could be taken. He went on himself with Dr. Lefont, won every French hamlet to the cause, and conciliated the Indians wherever he could reach them. Vigo, on a similar excursion, was captured by British Indians and carried a prisoner to Hamilton, the English commander at Vincennes, but that officer felt that he could not detain a Spanish subject, and was compelled by the French to release him. When Clark, in February, appeared with his half-starved men, including Captain Charlevoix’s company of Kaskaskia Catholics, before Vincennes, and demanded its surrender with as bold a front as though he had ten thousand men at his back, the English wavered, and one resolute attack compelled them to surrender at discretion. What is now Indiana and Illinois, Wisconsin and Upper Michigan, was won to the United States. To hold it and supply the

Indians required means. Clark issued paper money in the name of Virginia, and the patriotic Colonel Vigo and Father Gibault exhausted all their resources to redeem this paper and maintain its credit, although the hope of their ever being repaid for their sacrifice was slight, and, slight as it might have been, was never realized.[138] Their generous sacrifice enabled Clark to retain his conquest, as the spontaneous adhesion of his allies to the cause had enabled him to effect it. The securing of the old French posts Vincennes, Fort Chartres, and others in the West which the English had occupied, together with the friendship of the French population, secured all the Indians in that part, and relieved the frontiers of half their danger. Well does Judge Law remark: “Next to Clark and Vigo, the United States are more indebted to Father Gibault for the accession of the States comprised in what was the original Northwestern Territory than to any other man.”

Those Western Catholics did good service in many an expedition, and in 1780 La Balm, with a force raised in the Illinois settlements and Vincennes, undertook to capture Detroit, the headquarters of the English atrocities. He perished with nearly all his little Catholic force where Fort Wayne stands, leaving many a family in mourning.

The first bugle-blast of America for battle in the name of freedom seemed to wake a response in many Catholic hearts in Europe. Officers came over from France to offer their swords, the experience they had acquired, and the training

they had developed in the campaigns of the great commanders of the time. Among the names are several that have the ring of the old Irish brigade. Dugan, Arundel, De Saint Aulaire, Vibert, Col. Dubois, De Kermorvan, Lieut.-Col. de Franchessen, St. Martin, Vermonet, Dorré, Pelissier, Malmady, Mauduit, Rochefermoy, De la Neuville, Armand, Fleury, Conway, Lafayette, Du Portail, Gouvion, Du Coudray, Pulaski, Roger, Dorset, Gimat, Brice, and others, rendered signal service, especially as engineers and chiefs of staff, where skill and military knowledge were most required. Around Lafayette popular enthusiasm gathered, but he was not alone. Numbers of these Catholic officers served gallantly at various points during the war, aiding materially in laying out works and planning operations, as well as by gallantly doing their duty in the field, sharing gayly the sufferings and privations of the men of ’76.

Some who came to serve in the ranks or as officers rendered other service to the country. Ædanus Burke, of Galway, a pupil of St. Omer’s, like the Carrolls, came out to serve as a soldier, represented South Carolina in the Continental Congress, and was for some time chief-justice of his adopted State. P. S. Duponceau, who came over as aide to Baron Steuben in 1777, became the founder of American ethnology and linguistics. His labors in law, science, and American history will not soon be forgotten.

Meanwhile, Catholics were swelling the ranks, and, like Moylan, rising to fame and position. The American navy had her first commodore in the Catholic Barry, who had kept the flag waving undimmed on the seas from 1776, and in 1781

engaged and took the two English vessels, Atlanta and Trepassay; and on other occasions handled his majesty’s vessels so roughly that General Howe endeavored to win him by offers of money and high naval rank to desert the cause. Besides Catholics born, who served in army or navy, in legislative or executive, there were also men who took part in the great struggle whose closing years found them humble and devoted adherents of the Catholic Church. Prominent among these was Thomas Sims Lee, Governor of Maryland from 1779 to the close of the war. He did much to contribute to the glorious result, represented his State in the later Continental Congress and in the Constitutional Convention, as Daniel Carroll, brother of the archbishop, also did. Governor Lee, after becoming a Catholic, was reelected governor, and lived to an honored old age. Daniel Barber, who bore his musket in the Connecticut line, became a Catholic, and his son, daughter-in-law, and their children all devoted themselves to a religious life, a family of predilection.

In Europe the Catholic states, France and Spain, watched the progress of American affairs with deepest interest. At the very outset Vergennes, the able minister of France, sent an agent to study the people and report the state of affairs. The clear-headed statesmen saw that America would become independent. In May, 1776, Louis XVI.. announced to the Catholic monarch that he intended to send indirectly two hundred thousand dollars. The King of Spain sent a similar sum to Paris. This solid aid, the first sinews of war from these two Catholic sovereigns, was but an earnest of good-will. In

France the sentiment in favor of the American cause overbore the cautious policy of the king, the amiable Louis XVI.. He granted the aid already mentioned, and induced the King of Spain to join in the act; he permitted officers to leave France in order to join the American armies; he encouraged commerce with the revolting colonies by exempting from duties the ships which bore across the ocean the various goods needed by the army and the people. The enthusiasm excited by Lafayette, who first heard of the American cause from the lips of an English prince, soon broke down all the walls of caution. An arrangement was made by which material of war from the government armories and arsenals was sent out, nominally from a mercantile house. A year after the Declaration of Independence, France, which had opened her ports to American privateers and courteously avoided all English complaints, resolved to take a decisive step—not only to acknowledge the independence of the United States, but to support it. Marie Antoinette sympathized deeply with this country, and won the king to give his full support to our cause. On the 6th of February, 1778, Catholic France signed the treaty with the United States, and thus a great power in Europe set the example to others in recognizing us as one of the nations of the earth. America had a Catholic godmother. Amid the miseries of Valley Forge Washington issued a general order: “It having pleased the Almighty Ruler of the universe to defend the cause of the United American States, and finally to raise us up a powerful friend among the princes of the earth, to establish our liberty and independence upon a lasting foundation, it

becomes us to set apart a day for gratefully acknowledging the divine goodness and celebrating the important event, which we owe to his divine interposition.” France now openly took part in the war, and in July, 1778, a French fleet under d’Estaing appeared on our coasts, neutralizing the advantage which England had over us by her naval superiority. The ocean was no longer hers to send her army from point to point on the coast. This fleet engaged Lord Howe near Newport, and co-operated with Sullivan in operations against the English in Rhode Island. After cruising in the West Indies it again reappeared on our coast to join Lincoln in a brave but unsuccessful attack on Savannah, in which fell the gallant Pulaski, who some years before had asked the blessing of the pope’s nuncio on himself and his gallant force in the sanctuary of Our Lady of Czenstochowa, before his long defence of that convent fortress against overwhelming Russian forces.

In July, 1780, another fleet, commanded by the Chevalier de Ternay, entered the harbor of Newport, bringing a French army commanded by an experienced general, John Baptiste de Vimeur, Count de Rochambeau. An army of Catholics with Catholic chaplains, observing the glorious ritual of the church with all solemnity, was hailed with joy in New England. The discipline of that army, the courteous manners of officers and privates, won all hearts. What that army effected is too well known to be chronicled here in detail. When Lafayette had cornered Cornwallis in Yorktown, Washington and Rochambeau marched down, the fleet of the Count de Grasse defeated Admiral Graves off the

capes of Virginia, and, transporting the allied armies down, joined with them in compelling Cornwallis to surrender his whole force; and old St. Joseph’s Church, in Philadelphia, soon rang with the grand Te Deum chanted in thanksgiving at a Mass offered up in presence of the victorious generals.

None question the aid given us by Catholic France. Several who came as volunteers, or in the army or fleet, remained in the United States. One officer who had served nobly in the field laid aside his sword and returned to labor during the rest of his life for the well-being of America as a devoted Catholic priest.

But France was not the only Catholic friend of our cause. Spain had, as we have seen, at an early period in the war, sent a liberal gift of money. She opened her ports to our privateers, and refused to give up Captain Lee, of Marblehead, whom England demanded. She went further; for when intelligence came of the Declaration of Independence, she gave him supplies and repaired his ship. She subsequently sent cargoes of supplies to us from Bilbao, and put at the disposal of the United States ammunition and supplies at New Orleans. When an American envoy reached Madrid, she sent blankets for ten regiments and made a gift of $150,000 through our representative. When the gallant young Count Bernardo de Galvez, whose name is commemorated in Galveston, was made governor of Louisiana, he at once tendered his services to us; he forwarded promptly the clothing and military stores in New Orleans; and when the English seized an American schooner on the Louisiana lakes, he confiscated all English vessels in reprisal.

Spain had not formally recognized the United States. She offered her mediation to George III., and on its refusal by that monarch, for that and other causes she declared war against England. Galvez moved at once. He besieged the English at Baton Rouge, and, after a long and stubborn resistance, compelled it to surrender in September, 1780; he swept the waters of English vessels, and then, with the co-operation of a Spanish fleet under Admiral Solano and de Monteil, laid siege to the ancient town of Pensacola. The forts were held by garrisons of English troops, Hessians, and northern Tories, well supplied and ready to meet the arms of the Catholic king. The resistance of the British governor, Campbell, was stout and brave; but Pensacola fell, and British power on our southern frontier was crushed, and neutralized. Spain gave one of the greatest blows to England in the war, next in importance to the overthrow of Burgoyne and Cornwallis.

On the Northwest, too, where English influence over the Indians was so detrimental, Spain checked it by the reduction of English posts that had been the centre of the operations of the savage foe. America was not slow in showing her sense of gratitude to Catholic Spain. Robert Morris wrote to Galvez: “I am directed by the United States to express to your excellency the grateful sense they entertain of your early efforts in their favor. Those generous efforts gave them so favorable an impression of your character and that of your nation that they have not ceased to wish for a more intimate connection with your country.” Galvez made the connection more intimate by marrying a lady of New Orleans,

who in time presided in Mexico as wife of the Viceroy of New Spain.

But it was not only by the operations on land that the country of Isabella the Catholic aided our cause. Before she declared war against England, her navy had been increased and equipped, so that her fleets co-operated ably with those of France in checking English power and lowering English supremacy on the ocean.

Yet a greater service than that of brave men on land or sea was rendered by her diplomacy. Russia had been almost won by England; her fleet was expected to give its aid to the British navy in reasserting her old position; but Spain, while still neutral, proposed an armed neutrality, and urged it with such skill and address that she detached Russia from England, and arrayed her virtually as an opponent where she had been counted upon with all certainty as an ally. Spain really thus banded all Continental Europe against England, and then, by declaring war herself, led Holland to join us openly.

Nor were France and Spain our only Catholic friends. The Abbé Niccoli, minister of Tuscany at the court of France, was a zealous abettor of the cause of America. In Germany the Hessians, sent over here to do the work of English oppression, were all raised in Protestant states, while history records the fact that the Catholic princes of the empire discouraged the disgraceful raising of German troops to be used in crushing a free people; and this remonstrance and opposition of the Catholic princes put a stop to the German aid which had been rendered to our opponent.

Never was there such harmonious Catholic action as that in favor of American independence a hundred

years ago. The Catholics in the country were all Whigs; the Catholics of Canada were favorable, ready to become our fellow-citizens; France and Spain aided our cause with money and supplies, by taking part in the war, and by making a Continental combination against England; Catholic Italy and Catholic Germany exerted themselves in our favor. Catholics did their duty in the legislature and in the council-hall, in the army and in the navy; Catholics held for us our northeastern frontier, and gave us the Northwest; Catholic officers helped to raise our armies to the grade of European science; a Catholic commander made our navy triumph on the sea. Catholic France helped to weaken the English at Newport, Savannah, and Charleston; crippled England’s naval power in the West Indies, and off the capes of Virginia utterly defeated them; then with her army aided Washington to strike the crowning blow at Cornwallis in Yorktown. Catholic Spain aided us on the western frontier by capturing British posts, and under Galvez reduced the British and Tories at Baton Rouge and Pensacola. And, on the other hand, there is no Catholic’s name in all the lists of Tories.

Washington uttered no words of flattery, no mere commonplaces of courtesy, but what he felt and knew to be the truth, when, in reply to the Catholic address, he said: “I presume that your fellow-citizens will not forget the patriotic part which you took in the accomplishment of their Revolution and the establishment of their government, or the important assistance which they received from a nation in which the Roman Catholic faith is professed.”

[138] “Father Gibault, but especially Vigo, had on hand at the close of the campaign more than $20,000 of this worthless trash (the only funds, however which Clark had in his military chest), and not one dollar of which was ever redeemed.”

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THE IRISH HOME-RULE MOVEMENT.[139]

What is the real nature of the new political movement or organization in Ireland which emblazons on its banner the device “Home Rule”? Beyond all question it has attained to national dimensions. It has concentrated upon itself more of the attention and interest, hopes and sympathies, of the Irish people than any political endeavor on the same field of action for many years. More than this, it seems to have succeeded in exacting a tribute to its power and authority which no previous movement received from the adverse ministers, publicists, and people of England. These, while they combat it, deal with it as “Ireland.” It makes propositions, exacts terms, directs assaults, assents to arrangements on behalf of and in the name of the Irish people; and, as we have indicated, the singular part of the case is that not only is its action ratified and applauded by them, but its authority so to act in their name is virtually recognized by the government. In the House of Commons it takes charge of Irish affairs; has almost an Irish (volunteer) ministry, certainly an organized party not inferior, if not superior, in discipline to that of the “government” or “opposition.” We hear of its “whips,” its councils, its special division-lists, its assignment

of particular duties, motions, or bills to particular individuals; and, lastly, we hear of it boldly challenging the Disraelian hosts, fighting them in debate throughout a set field-day, and, despite the actual government majority of forty-eight and working majority of seventy, running the ministerialists to within barely thirteen votes.

In all this there is much that is new in the history of Irish politics; and it were impossible that it should not intensely interest, if not affect, the Catholic millions of America, bound, as most of them are, to Ireland by the sacred ties of faith and kindred and nationality.

What, then, is Home Rule? Is it Fenianism, “veiled” or unveiled? Is it Repeal? Is it less than repeal, or more than repeal? Is it a surrender or a compromise of the Irish national demand; or is it, as its advocates claim, the substance of that demand shaped and adjusted according to the circumstances, requirements, and necessities of the present time?

With the fall of the Young Ireland party, and the disastrous collapse of their meditated rather than attempted insurrection in 1848, there seemed to foes and friends an end of national movements in Ireland for the balance of the century. It is almost a law of defeats that the vanquished are separated into two or three well-defined parties or sections: those whom the blow has intensified and more embittered in their opposition; those whom it wholly overawes, who thereafter consider they have done enough for

honor, and retire entirely from the field; and, lastly, those who recognize, if they do not accept, the defeat; who admit the impossibility of further operations on a position so advanced, fall back upon some line which they imagine they can hold, and, squaring round there, offer battle with whatever of strength and resources survive to them. This is just what resulted in Ireland in 1848-49. The Young Ireland movement of 1848 was never national in dimensions or acceptance. O’Connell’s movement was, from 1842 to 1844; but from that date forward, though there were two or three rival movements or parties, having for their leaders respectively O’Connell, Smith O’Brien, and John Mitchel, no one of them had the nation at its back. The Young Irelanders led away from O’Connell the youth, talent, enthusiasm, and, to a large extent, though not entirely, the resolute earnestness and honesty of the old Repeal party. It is a very common but a very great fallacy that they broke away on a “war policy” from the grand old man whose fading intellect was but too sadly indicated in the absurd conduct that drove the young men from his side. They had no “war” policy or design any more than he had (in the sense of a war attack on England), until they caught up one in the blaze and whirl of revolutionary intoxication scattered through Europe by the startling events of February, 1848, in Paris. They seceded from O’Connell on this point,[140] because they would not subscribe to the celebrated test resolutions (called “Peace Resolutions”) declaring that under no circumstances was it or would it be

lawful to take up arms for the recovery of national rights. Spurning such a declaration, but solemnly declaring they contemplated no application of its converse assertion in their political designs for Ireland, the seceders set up the “Irish Confederation.” But the magic of O’Connell’s name, and indeed the force of a loving gratitude, held the masses of the people and the bulk of the clergy in the old organization. The Confederates were in many places decidedly “unpopular,”[141] especially when, the Uncrowned Monarch having died mournfully in exile, his following in Conciliation Hall raised the cry that the Young Irelanders “killed O’Connell.” Soon afterwards the seceders were themselves rent by a secession. The bolder spirits, led by John Mitchel and Devin Rielly, demanded that the Confederation, in place of disclaiming any idea of an armed struggle against England, should avowedly prepare the people for such a resort. The new secession was as weak in numbers, relatively towards the Confederation, as the original seceders were towards the Repeal Association. The three parties made bitter war upon one another. A really national movement there was no more.

Suddenly Paris rose against Louis Philippe, and throughout Europe, in capital after capital, barricades went up and thrones came down. Ireland caught the flame. The Mitchel party suddenly found themselves masters of the situation. The Confederation leaders—O’Brien, Duffy, Dillon, O’Gorman, Meagher, and Doheny—not only found their platform abandoned, but eventually, though not without some hesitation

and misgiving, they themselves abandoned it too, and threw themselves into the scheme for an armed struggle in the ensuing summer or autumn. It was thought, perhaps, that although this might not reunite the O’Connellites and the Young Irelanders, it would surely reunite the recently-divided sections of the O’Brien following; but it did so only ostensibly or partially. There were two schools of insurrectionists in the now insurrectionary party: Mitchel and Rielly declared that O’Brien and Duffy wanted a “rosewater revolution”; O’Brien and Duffy declared the others were “Reds,” who wanted a jacquerie. The refusal of the leaders to make the rescue of Mitchel the occasion and signal for a rising, led to bitter and scarcely disguised recrimination; and when, a couple of months later, they themselves, caught unawares and unprepared by the government, sought to effect a rising, the result was utter and complete failure. The call had no real power or authority behind it. The men who issued it had not the mandate of the nation in any sense of the word. They were at the moment the fraction of a fraction. They had against them the bulk of the Repeal millions and the Catholic clergy; not against them in any combative sense, but in a decided disapproval of their insurrection. Some, and only some, of the large cities became thoroughly imbued with and ready to carry through the revolutionary determination—an impress which Cork has ever since retained; but beyond the traditional vague though deep-rooted feeling of the Irish peasantry against the hateful rule of England, the rural population, and even the majority of the cities and towns, had scarcely any participation in “the Forty-Eight movement.”

When, therefore, all was over, and the “Men of ’48,” admittedly the flower of Ireland’s intellect and patriotism, were fugitives or “felons”—some seeking and receiving asylum and hospitality in America, others eating their hearts in the hulks of Bermuda or the dungeons of Tasmania—a dismal reaction set in in Ireland. The results above referred to as incidental to defeats as a rule were plainly apparent. Of the millions who, from 1841 to 1848, whether as Repealers, O’Connellites, Confederates, Mitchelites, Old Irelanders, or Young Irelanders, partook in an effort to make Ireland a self-governed or else totally independent nation, probably one-half in 1849 resigned, as they thought, for ever, all further hope or effort in that direction. Of the remainder, a numerically small party—chiefly, though not all, men who had belonged to John Mitchel’s section of the Young Irelanders—became only the more exasperated by a defeat in which they felt that their policy had not had even a chance of trying what was in it; a defeat, too, that left the vanquished not one incident to solace their pride and shield them from humiliation and ignoble ridicule. Chafing with rage and indignation, they beheld the rest of what remained at all visible of the national party effecting that retrograde movement alluded to in a foregoing page. Of all the brilliant leaders of Young Ireland, Gavan Duffy alone now remained to face on Irish soil the terrible problem, “What next?” Openly proclaiming that the revolutionary position could not be held, he ordered a retreat all along the line. Halting for a while on an attempt to revive the original Irish Confederation policy—an attempt which he had to abandon for want of support—he at

length succeeded in rallying what could be called a political party on a struggle for “Tenant Right.” It raised in no way the “national” question. It gathered Presbyterians of the north and Catholics of the south, repealers and anti-repealers, in an organization to force Parliament to pass a bill preventing the eviction of tenant-farmers unless for non-payment of rent; preventing also arbitrary increasing of rent that might squeeze out the farmer in another way. “Come, now, this is something practical and sensible,” said matter-of-fact non-repealers and half-hearted nationalists. “Why, it is craven surrender and sheer dishonor!” cried the irreconcilable section of the ’48 men. A band of thirty or forty members of Parliament were returned at the instance of the Tenant League to work out its programme. They were mostly corrupt and dishonest men, who merely shouted the new shibboleth for their own purposes. Were the people thoroughly in earnest, and did they possess any really free voting power (there was no vote by ballot then), all this could be cured; but as things stood, the parliamentary band broke up in the first three months of their existence. The English minister bought up its noisiest leaders, of whom Keogh (now a judge) and Sadleir are perhaps most widely remembered. In some cases the constituencies, priests and people, condoned their treason, duped into believing it was not treason at all, but “a great thing to have Catholics on the bench.” In other places the efforts of priests and people to oppose the re-election of the traitors were vain; free election amongst “tenants at will” being almost unknown without the ballot. The tenants’ cause was lost. Thus ruin,

in its own way as complete and disastrous as that which overtook the insurrectionary attempt of 1848, now overthrew the experiment of a great popular campaign based on constitutional and parliamentary principles. Not only was there now no movement for nationality in Ireland; there was not an Irish movement of any kind or for any Irish purpose at all, great or little. It was Pacata Hibernia as in the days of Carew and St. Leger.

Now came the turn for the unchanged and exasperated section of the ’48 war party. Few in numbers, and scattered wide apart, they had hissed forth scorn and execration on Duffy’s parliamentary experiment as a departure from the revolutionary faith. If he in 1849 answered to their invectives by pointing to the fiasco of the year before, they now taunted him with the collapse of 1853. Not more than two or three of the ’48 men of any prominence, however, took up this actually hostile attitude. Most of them—O’Brien, Dillon, Meagher, O’Gorman, and even Martin—more or less expressly approved the recent endeavor as the best thing practicable under the circumstances in Ireland. Now, however, the men who believed in war and nothing but war, in total separation and nothing short of separation, would take their turn. The Fenian movement thus arose.

If neither of the sections or subsections of the Irish nationalists in 1848 could be said to have succeeded in rallying or representing the full force, or even a considerable proportion, of Irish patriotism, this new venture was certainly not more fortunate in that respect. Outside its ranks, obstinately refusing to believe in its policy, remained the bulk of the millions who had followed

O’Connell or Smith O’Brien. Yet the Fenians worked with an energy worthy of admiration—except where the movement degenerated into an intolerance that forbade any other national opinions save those of its leaders to be advanced. In truth, their influence on Irish politics was very mixed in its merits. In some places it was a rude and vaunting rowdyism that called itself Fenianism; in others an honest, manly, self-sacrificing spirit of patriotism marked the men who were its confessors and martyrs. If in their fall they drew down upon Ireland severities worse than anything known since 1798, it is only fair, on the other hand, to credit in a large degree to the sensations aroused by their trials the great awakening of public opinion on the Irish question which set in all over England at the time.

And now once more the board was clear. England had won the game; not a pawn remained untaken on the Irish side. Not an Irish association, or society, or “agitation,” or demand of any kind challenged Britannia’s peace of mind. Once more it was a spectacle of the lash and the triangle; state-trials, informers, and prosecutors; the convict-ship and the hulk; the chain-gangs at Portland and Chatham.

“Who will show us any light?” exclaims one of the Young Ireland bards in a well-known and beautiful poem. Such might well have been the exclamation of Ireland in 1867. Was this to be the weary cycle of Irish effort, for ever and for ever? Was armed effort hopeless, and peaceful effort vain? Was there no alternative for Irishmen but to become “West-Britons,” or else dash their brains out against a dungeon wall? Could no one devise

a way whereby to give scope and vent to the Irish passion for national existence, to give a field to Irish devotion and patriotism, which would be consonant with the spirit of manhood, without calling for these hecatombs of victims?

Suddenly a new element of consideration presented itself; new, indeed, and rather startling.

It was Irish Protestantism offering the hand of reconciliation to Ireland.

The Tory party had come into power in the course of the Fenian prosecutions, and had carried on the work in a spirit which Cromwell himself would approve. They really held office, not because they had an effective majority in the House of Commons, but because the liberals were broken up and divided, unable to agree on a policy. To turn to his own account the “Fenian scare” was Mr. Gladstone’s brilliant idea. To make a dash on the Irish Church establishment would rally all the mutinous fractions of liberalism, on the principle of “hit him, he has no friends.” It would gratify all England as a sort of conscience-salve for the recent dragonnades and coercion laws. Yes; this was the card with which to beat Disraeli. True, Mr. Gladstone had only a few years before put down his foot and declared that never, “no, never,” could, would, or should that Irish Church be disestablished or interfered with in any way. What was he to say now to cover this flank movement, made for purely party purposes? In all Britain there is no brain more subtle, none more fertile of strategic resource, than that of W. E. Gladstone. He put it all on Fenianism. He had changed his mind, not because he was out of office with a weak and

broken party, and wanted to get back with a strong and united one, but because he had opened his eyes to Fenianism! He never hit on a more successful idea. On the cry of “Down with the Irish Church!” he was swept into office at the head of the most powerful majority commanded by any minister since Peel in 1841. It must not be thought that Mr. Gladstone was insincere, or meant anything but service to Ireland (while also serving his party) by this move. He has the faculty of intensely persuading himself into a fervid conscientiousness on any subject he likes, whether it be Free Trade, Church Establishment, Church Disestablishment, or Vaticanism.

The Irish Protestants had an unanswerable case against England—that is, as between them and her—on this matter of disestablishment. It was, on her part towards them, an open, palpable, and flagitious breach of faith—breach of formal treaty in fact. The articles of the Union in 1800 expressly covenanted that the maintenance of the Irish Church establishment was to be one of the cardinal, fundamental, essential, and everlasting conditions of the deed. Mr. Gladstone snapped his fingers at such considerations. “Mind, you thereby repeal and annul the Union,” cried Irish conservatives. “We will kick another crown into the Boyne,” said Parson Flanagan at an Orange meeting. “We have held by this bargain with you with uneasy consciences,” said and wrote numbers of sincere Irish Protestants; “break it, and we break with you, and become Irishmen first and before everything.”

It was rightly judged by thoughtful observers that, though noisy braggarts of the Parson Flanagan

class would not only let the crown alone, but would cringe all the more closely by England’s side even when the church was swept away, there was much of sober earnestness and honest resolve in what hundreds of Protestant laymen (and even clergymen) spoke upon this issue. Yes, though the bulk of Irish Protestants would prove unequal to so rapid a political conversion, even under provocation so strong, there would still be a considerable movement of their numbers towards, if not into, the Irish camp. Time, moreover, and prudent and conciliatory action on the part of their Catholic countrymen, would be always increasing that rapprochement.

And so in the very chaos and disruption and upheaval of political elements and parties in Ireland from 1868 to 1870 there was, as by a mysterious design of Providence, a way made for events and transformations and combinations which otherwise would have been nigh impossible.

The church was disestablished; Irish Protestants were struck with amazement and indignation. England had broken with them; they would unite with Ireland. But, alas! no; this was, it seemed, impossible. They could never be “Fenians.” No doubt they, after all, treasured in their Protestant hearts the memory, the words, and, in a way, the principles of their great coreligionists, Grattan and Flood, Curran and Charlemont. In this direction they could go; but towards separation—towards an “Irish republic,” towards disloyalty to the crown—they would not, could not, turn their faces. These men belonged in large part to a class, or to classes, never since 1782 seen joining a national movement in any great numbers. They were men of high position; large landed proprietors,

bankers, merchants, “deputy-lieutenants” of counties, baronets, a few of them peers, many of them dignitaries of the Protestant church, some of them fellows of Trinity College. Such men had vast property at stake in the country. They saw a thousand reasons why Irishmen alone should regulate Irish affairs, but they would hold by a copartnership with Scotland and England in the empire at large. This, however, they concluded, was not what the bulk of their countrymen was looking for; and so it almost seemed as if they would turn back and relapse into mere West-britonism as a lesser evil for them than a course of “rebellion” and “sedition.”

At this juncture there appeared upon the scene a man whose name seems destined to be writ large on the records of a memorable era in Irish history—Isaac Butt.

When, on Friday evening, the 15th of September, 1865, the British government seized the leading members of the Fenian Society and flung them into Richmond jail, it became a consideration of some difficulty with the prisoners and their friends how and by whom they should be defended. In one sense they had plenty of counsel to choose from. Such occasions are great opportunities for briefless advocates to strike in, like ambitious authors of unacted plays who nobly offer them to be performed on Thanksgiving day or for some popular public charity. No doubt the prisoners could have had attorneys and lawyers of this stamp easily enough; but it was not every man whom they would trust equally for his ability and his honesty. Besides, there was the money difficulty. The crown was about to fight them in a costly law duel. To retain men

of the front rank at the bar would cost thousands of pounds; to retain men of inferior position would be worse than useless. Could there be found amongst the leaders of the Irish bar even one man bold enough and generous enough to undertake the desperate task and protracted labor of defending these men, leaving the question of fee or remuneration to the chance of funds being forthcoming? What of the great advocates of the state trials of 1843 and 1848? Holmes—clarum et venerabile nomen—dead! Shiel—gone too; Whiteside—on the bench; O’Hagan—also a judge; Sir Colman O’Loghlen—a crown prosecutor; Butt—yes, Butt, even then in the front rank, the most skilful, the boldest, the most eloquent, and most generous of them all—he is just the man! Where is Butt?

Where, indeed? He had to be searched and sought for, so utterly and sadly had a great figure silently disappeared from the forum. Thirty years before Isaac Butt was the young hope of Protestant conservatism, the idol of its salons. He had barely passed his majority when he was elected to the professorship of Political Economy in Trinity College; and, at an age when such honors were unprecedented, was elevated to a “silk-gown,” as Queen’s Counsellor at the bar. Yet there was always about young Butt an intense Irishism; he was a high-spirited Protestant, a chivalrous conservative; but even in that early time the eagle eye of O’Connell detected in him an Irish heart and a love of the principles of liberty that would yet, so he prophesied, lead Butt into the ranks of the Irish people. The English Tory leaders enticed him over to London, and sent him into Parliament for one of their boroughs—Harwich.

They made much of him—and were his ruin. In the whirl of parliamentary life, in the fascination of London society, he abandoned his professional business and fell into debt difficulty, and dissipation. Had he been less independent and less self-willed, he would no doubt have been richly placed by his ministerial friends. Somehow or another he and they drew apart as he went sullenly and recklessly downward. In 1864 he had almost dropped out of sight, having just previously ceased to sit in Parliament.

To the solicitation to undertake the defence of the Fenian prisoners he responded by giving them, it may be said, three whole years of his professional life. He flung himself into that fight for the men in the dock with the devotion, the enthusiasm, the desperate energy of a man striving for life itself. His genius and ability, conspicuous before, shone out more than ever. He was admittedly the first lawyer of his day; and now not only the crown counsel but the judges on the bench felt they were dealing with their master. Of money he took no thought. Indeed, in the best and worst days of his fortunes he gave it little heed. He has been known in the depth of his difficulties to hand back a special fee of a hundred guineas which he knew a poor client could not spare, and the same day pay his hotel bill with a check doomed never to be cashed. The incident is unfortunately only too typical of one phase of his nature.

Three or four years immersed in such labors—one protracted series of state trials—dealing in the most painfully realistic way with the problem of Ireland’s destiny, could not fail to have a profound effect on a

man like Butt. Meantime, he grew into immense popularity. His bold appeals for the prisoners, which soon came to be the sentiments of the man rather than the pleadings of the advocate, were read with avidity in every peasant’s cottage and workman’s home. The Fenians, broken and defeated as an organization, yet still ramifying throughout the country, looked to him with the utmost gratitude and confidence. Under his presidency and guidance a society called the Amnesty Association was established for the purpose of obtaining the royal clemency for at least some of the Fenian convicts. A series of mass-meetings under its auspices were held throughout the island, and were the largest assemblages seen in Ireland since the Repeal meetings of Tara and Mullaghmast. In fine, Mr. Butt found himself a popular leader, at the head of at all events the pro-Fenian section of Irish political elements, and daily becoming a power in the country.

The resentful Protestants, just now half-minded to hoist the national flag, were many of them Butt’s old comrades, college-chums, and political associates. He noted their critical position, and forthwith turned all his exertions, in private as well as in public, to lead them onward to the people, and to prevent them from relapsing into the character of an English garrison. In his public speeches he poured forth to them the most impassioned appeals. In private he sought out man by man of the most important and influential among them. “Banish hesitation and fear,” he cried. “Act boldly and promptly now, and you will save Ireland from revolutionary violence on the one side, and from alien misgovernment on the other. You, like myself, have been early

trained to mistrust the Catholic multitude, but when you come to know them you will admire them. They are not anarchists, nor would they be revolutionists if men like you would but do your duty and lead them—that is, honestly and faithfully and capably lead them—in the struggle for constitutional liberty.” The Protestants listened, almost persuaded; but some sinister whisper now and again of the terrors of a “Catholic ascendency” in an Irish parliament—a reminder that Irish Catholics would vote for a nominee of their clergy right or wrong, and consequently that if the Irish Protestant minority threw off the yoke of England, they should bear the yoke of Rome—seemed to drive them, scared, from the portals of nationality.

About this time, the beginning of 1870, Mr. Gladstone raised to the peerage Colonel Fulke Greville Nugent, M.P. for Longford County. He was a respectable and fairly popular “liberal” in politics, was a good landlord, and, though a Protestant, kindly and generous to the Catholic clergy and people around him. He had held his seat by and from the priests; for Longford County, from the days when it heroically won its independence a generation before, had been virtually in the gift of the Catholic clergy. This vacancy occurred in the very fever of the Amnesty excitement. A few months before Mr. Gladstone had rather harshly refused the appeal for Amnesty; and Tipperary made answer and commentary thereon by electing to Parliament one of the Fenian convicts, at the moment a prisoner in Chatham. It was proposed to imitate this course in Longford, but a more worthy resolve was

taken: John Martin of Rostrevor—“Honest John Martin”—one of the purest, most heroic, and lovable of Irish patriots, was put in nomination, although at the moment he was travelling in America and unaware of the proceedings. But the clergy had at a private conference committed themselves to the son of their late member—a brainless young officer in the army. Neither party would withdraw their man; and out of this arose a conflict as fierce, bitter, and relentless as if the parties to it had been ancient and implacable foes instead of lifelong and loving friends. Altar denunciations of the most terrible kind were hurled at the men who dared to “oppose their clergy” by advocating John Martin. Platform denunciations were hurled at the men who dared to go “against Ireland” by preferring to a stainless and devoted patriot a brainless little fop who had not a political idea in his head or a spark of Irish patriotism in his heart.

Ireland, and England too, looked on in intense amazement and curiosity. Here was a great problem brought to a critical test. The old story of the anti-Catholic English press, that Irish Catholics would slavishly “vote black white at the ordering of their priests,” was about to be proved true or put to shame. The Longford clergy defeated John Martin and carried their man, but he was subsequently unseated on petition. The experiment otherwise, however, was decisive. For John Martin, a Presbyterian Protestant, a Catholic people fought their own clergy as vehemently as they and those clergy had ever fought the Tory landlords. It was an exceptional and painful incident, but at the moment one of vast importance, which proudly vindicated

both priests and people from a damaging calumny.[142]

There was no misunderstanding all this. No Irish Protestant, patriotically inclined, could any longer be scared by the bugbear of “Catholic intolerance.” The time at last had come for the step they meditated. The moment had arrived also for some attempt to answer the aspirations of Ireland. And “the Hour had brought the Man.”

On the night of Thursday, the 19th of May, 1870, there were quietly assembled in the Bilton Hotel, Upper Sackville Street, Dublin—the most exclusive and aristocratic of the quasi-private hotels in that city—a strange gathering. Such men had never met to confer or act together before. It was a “private conference of Irish gentlemen to consider the state of Ireland.” But looking around the room, one might think the millennium at hand, when the wolf would lie down with the lamb and the lion slumber with the fawn. Men who were Tories, nay, Orangemen; men who were “ultra-montanes,” men who had been Repealers, men who were Whigs, men who had been rebels; Protestants, Catholics, Presbyterians, Quakers, Fenians, anti-Fenians, knights, high sheriffs, aristocrats, democrats—a strange array, about fifty in all.[143] Soberly and earnestly

and long they discussed and debated and deliberated. The men seemed thoroughly to realize the gravity of what they were about.

They did not claim any representative character whatever; they spoke each man for himself. The questions they had proposed to discuss dealt merely with “absenteeism and the consequent loss of trade and national prosperity,” and “the advantages of a royal residence in Ireland in a political and financial point of view.” But in the very first moments of discussion even the new converts to nationality took up bolder ground. Lord Mayor Purdon, a Protestant Conservative, a man universally respected in Dublin; Sir William Wilde (husband of the Young Ireland poetess “Speranza”), an archæologist of European fame; the Hon. Capt. King-Harman; and the Rev. J. E. Galbraith, fellow of Trinity College, one of the most distinguished mathematicians of the age, were amongst the men of conservative politics who came especially to the front. The nationalists, both “extreme” and “moderate,” interfered but little in the discussions, looking on greatly astonished at all they heard and saw; but their part of the case was well handled by the man who was really the guiding spirit of the scene, and who eventually rose and in a brief speech of thrilling power proposed:

“That it is the opinion of this meeting that the true remedy for the evils of Ireland is the establishment of an Irish parliament with full control over our domestic affairs.”

A dozen men rose to second this resolution of Mr. Butt, which was carried in the meeting not only without a dissentient voice, but with enthusiasm. Considering the composition of the assemblage, this was one of the most startling incidents in Irish politics for half a century. Having appointed a committee to report resolutions to a future meeting, the assembly adjourned.

This was the birth of the Home-Rule movement.

The course of procedure adopted, following upon the above events, was one quite unique in Irish politics. Usually the promoters in such cases would hold a meeting as “we the people of Ireland” and begin to act and speak in the name of the country. Not only was this line of conduct eschewed, it was expressty repudiated, by the semi-private society or association which at first grew out of the Bilton Hotel meeting. It was only four months afterwards (1st of Sept., 1870) that they ventured to assume public form or shape as a political organization. During all this interval they announced themselves simply as a number of Irishmen associated together in an endeavor to ascertain the feeling of the country upon the subject of national autonomy. They had themselves arrived at certain general conclusions or resolutions (hereafter to be noticed), but they declared they could not arrogate to themselves any right or authority to speak for the nation at large. When at length they broke ground and took the field publicly as the “Irish Home Government Association,” they still disclaimed the

right to assume the authoritative functions or tone of a great national organization.[144] That would come at the right time, if the country thought well of calling forth such a body; but this was at best a sort of “precursor society” projecting certain views, and submitting them to public examination by the people, with the avowed intention on the part of these “precursors” of some day, if they found encouragement for their course, calling on the country to pass its deliberate and decisive verdict upon those views, so that Ireland, the nation, might speak, and, speaking, command obedience from all loyal and faithful sons.

This was all Butt’s sagacity. Festina lente was the motto that befitted work so grave and momentous as an effort to lift Ireland up and bid her hope and strive once more. There was need of this deliberation and caution. The experiment of bringing together such elements as he gathered around this new venture was a hazardous one. There were prejudices to be allayed, objections to be removed, antipathies to be conquered. Notoriously there were men who wanted not to go very far on a road so new to them, and whom a very little bit indeed of self-government would satisfy. Just as notoriously were there men who wanted to go a great deal further than they could get the rest of their countrymen to join them in attempting. These two sections—the Protestant loyalists and the Fenian secessionists—were

the most widely opposed. Then there were men of the “Old Ireland” school and men of the “Young Ireland” school—men who objected to “repeal” as worthless without the addition of a separate and responsible Irish administration; and men who objected to repeal as dangerous without stronger guarantees against conflict and separation of the kingdoms.

It was expected that the greatest difficulty would be with the (Irish) Fenians; but this was not so. Mainly through Mr. Butt’s great influence with them, but partly because adversity had taught them useful lessons, they either came into the new scheme or else declared for a friendly neutrality. Not that any of them did so in the sense of recanting their Fenian principles. They expressly reserved their own convictions, but announced their determination to give a fair trial and a friendly aid to an honest endeavor in the direction proposed. Some of their body, absent in America, disapproved of this resolve, and bitterly decried the idea of letting any patriotic scheme but their own find tolerance, much less favor, from their ranks. In England, however—i.e., among the Irish in England—where the wreck and disorganization that had broken up Irish Fenianism had had little effect, and where for several years past there had resided whatever of strength and authority remained of that body, the proposals of Mr. Butt were taken up heartily, and even enthusiastically, by them.

A much more formidable work it was found to be to assure the men of large property that this was not an embryo scheme for rebellion and revolution; to persuade the Catholic clergy that it was not either a

cloak for Fenianism or a snare of Orangeism; and to convince the Protestants that it was not a trap laid for them by Cardinal Cullen and the Jesuits.

And now what was the scheme or plan or “platform” put forward after such deliberation, inquiry, negotiation, and investigation? What specifically has been the Irish national demand as put forth to the world in 1870, solemnly ratified in a great National Conference in 1873, and unmistakably and triumphantly endorsed at the general elections of February, 1874?

Substantially the old demand and declaration on the basis of which Ireland has been ready enough any time for the last two hundred and fifty years to compromise with the English connection—equality in a copartnership, but no subjugation; the national autonomy of Ireland secured; the right of Ireland to legislate for and control her own affairs established. The Irish Confederate government of 1642, the free Irish parliament of 1690, the free Irish parliament of 1782, and the decree of the Irish millions organized in the Repeal movement of 1843 formulated just that programme—modified somewhat, no doubt, each time, it might be, according to the requirements of the period; but still, as the student of authentic historical documents will discover, it was on all those memorable occasions in substance the same. The Catholic Confederation at Kilkenny in the seventeenth century, and the Protestant convention at Dungannon in the eighteenth, spoke in almost identical tones as to Ireland’s position under the triple crown of Scotland, England, and Ireland. It was very much as if Virginia in 1865 said: “I have fought you long and bravely; recognize

and secure to me the fulness of state rights, and I will loyally cast in my lot as a member of the United States.” How closely the founders of the new Irish movement kept on the old lines may be seen from the subjoined “platform” laid down by the “Home Government Association” in 1870:

“HOME GOVERNMENT ASSOCIATION.

“GENERAL PRINCIPLES.

“I.—This association is formed for the purpose of obtaining for Ireland the right of self-government by means of a national parliament.

“II.—It is hereby declared, as the essential principle of this association, that the objects, and THE ONLY OBJECTS, contemplated by its organization are:

“To obtain for our country the right and privilege of managing our own affairs, by a parliament assembled in Ireland, composed of her majesty the sovereign, and her successors, and the Lords and Commons of Ireland:

“To secure for that parliament, under a federal arrangement, the right of legislating for and regulating all matters relating to the internal affairs of Ireland, and control over Irish resources and revenues, subject to the obligation of contributing our just proportion of the imperial expenditure:

“To leave to an imperial parliament the power of dealing with all questions affecting the imperial crown and government, legislation regarding the colonies and other dependencies of the crown, the relations of the United Empire with foreign states, and all matters appertaining to the defence and the stability of the empire at large.

“To attain such an adjustment of the relations between the two countries, without any interference with the prerogatives of the crown, or any disturbances of the principles of the constitution.

“III.—The association invites the co-operation of all Irishmen who are willing to join in seeking for Ireland a federal

arrangement based upon these general principles.

“IV.—The association will endeavor to forward the object it has in view, by using all legitimate means of influencing public sentiment, both in Ireland and Great Britain, by taking all opportunities of instructing and informing public opinion, and by seeking to unite Irishmen of all creeds and classes in one national movement, in support of the great national object hereby contemplated.

“V.—It is declared to be an essential principle of the association that, while every member is understood by joining it to concur in its general object and plan of action, no person so joining is committed to any political opinion, except the advisability of seeking for Ireland the amount of self-government contemplated in the objects of the association.”

Though rather diffidently and unostentatiously projected, the new movement was hailed with general approbation. Yet it had for some time hanging on either flank very bitter though not very numerous assailants. The ultra-tories, led by the Dublin Daily Express, shrieked fiercely at the Protestant conservatives that they had entered the camp of Fenianism and Romanism; the ultra-whigs, led by the Dublin Evening Post, howled wildly at the Catholics that they were the tools of Orangemen who shammed Home Rule merely to spite Mr. Gladstone for disestablishing the Protestant Church. There can be no doubt this latter idea had long a deterrent effect on the Catholic bishops and clergy; they thought the new movement too like a Protestant revenge on an English minister whom they regarded as a benefactor. “The newly-born patriotism of these Tory-nationalists will soon vanish,” they said (not without show of reason); “wait until they have driven Mr. Gladstone from office, and got Disraeli back again—they will then draw off quick enough

from Home Rule.” “Very likely,” answered the Catholic Home-Rulers; “we are quite prepared to find a large percentage of these men fall off, but enough of them will remain faithful and true to make the movement a success; and especially the Protestant youth of the country henceforth will be ours.”

Time—at all events such time as has since elapsed—has quite vindicated this view.

Meantime the country was pronouncing gradually but decisively on the movement. Within the first six months the following corporations, town commissions, and boards of guardians passed formal votes endorsing its principles:

Cork	(Municipal Council).
Limerick	“	“
Athlone	(Town Commission).
Ballinasloe	“	“
Clones	“	“
Dungarvan	“	“
Galway	“	“
Kingstown	“	“
Longford	“	“
Nenagh	“	“
New Ross	“	“
Mullingar	“	“
Queenstown	“	“
Tuam	“	“
Dublin	(Board of Guardians).
Cork	“	“
Drogheda	“	“
Galway	“	“
Kilkenny	“	“
Kilmallock	“	“
Millstreet	“	“
Limerick	Farmers’ Club
Cork	“	“
Mallow	“	“

This was barely a few months’ work as to the pronouncement of popularly-elected public bodies. A number of public meetings in various parts of the country, attended by tens of thousands of the

people, gave a further stamp of approval and a cheer of welcome to the movement.

The mode of electing the governing body or council of the association was peculiar. In place of the usual mode—proposing the list at the annual public meeting, and passing it there and then—the members of the council were elected by ballot-papers; each member of the association, no matter where resident, receiving his paper and exercising his vote as well as if he lived on the spot in Dublin. Much curiosity existed to see the result of this secret ballot-vote in a large body so mixed in religious class and (in a sense) political opinions. Two-thirds or three-fourths of the voters would be Catholics—was it not a grievous peril that by any chance they might ballot in a nearly exclusively Catholic council, and thus sow misgiving and mistrust amongst the Protestants? But never yet have the Catholics of Ireland, in private or in public, failed to refute by a noble tolerance the evil suspicions of their foes. The very first council thus elected (under circumstances, too, that precluded concert or arrangement as to either general or particular result) turned out to be composed of thirty-two Catholics and twenty-nine Protestants; and two Protestants headed the poll![145] The announcement had a profound effect, not only in cementing and solidifying the new union of parties and creeds within the organization, but also in spreading its principles abroad. A good idea of the varied

classes composing the governing body thus elected may be gathered from the following analysis of the Home-Rule Council for 1872:

Catholic clergy,	5
Protestant clergy,	4
(The late) Lord Mayor,	1
Aldermen,	7
Deputy lieutenants,	3
Doctors of medicine,	3
Knights,	3
Justices of the peace,	4
Lieutenant-Colonel,	1
Members of Parliament,	5
Queen’s counsel,	1
Solicitors,	2
Town councillors,	3

The British Liberal party, who at first pooh-poohed the “Home-Rule craze,” at length began to take alarm; for without the Irish vote that party could neither attain to nor retain office. They warned the Catholic hierarchy to discourage this mischievous business. It was at best “inopportune”; it would arrest Mr. Gladstone’s beneficent design of settling the Catholic university education question; and would only “play the Tory game.” Liberalism was not going to die easily. Things came to a crisis in the Kerry election of 1872. On the death that year of Lord Kenmare, his son, Viscount Castlerosse, then Catholic-whig-liberal member for Kerry, attained to the earldom, and thus created a vacancy in the parliamentary representation. By a compact between the great landlords of the county, Whig and Tory, thirty years previously, it was agreed to “halve” the county between themselves: one Protestant Tory member from the great house of Herbert of Muckross, and one Catholic Whig from the noble house of Kenmare—an “alliance offensive and defensive” against all third parties

or popular intruders being thus established. On this occasion the new Earl of Kenmare nominated as his successor in the family seat his first cousin, Mr. James A. Dease, an estimable Catholic gentleman acceptable to the people in every way but one: he was not a Home-Ruler. Although the Catholic bishop, Right Rev. Dr. Moriarty, joined the county landlords in nominating Mr. Dease, the bulk of the Catholic clergy, and the people almost unanimously, revolted, and, amidst a shout of derision at such a “hopeless” attempt, hoisted the flag of Home Rule. They, Catholics almost to a man, chose out as their candidate a young Protestant Kerryman barely home from Oxford University—Roland Blennerhassett, of Kells. He was a Home-Ruler, and much loved even as a boy by the Celtic peasantry of that wild Iveragh that breaks the first roll of the Atlantic billows on the stormy Kerry coast. Ireland and England held breath and watched the struggle as a tacitly-admitted test combat.

“Who spills the foremost foeman’s life,

His party conquers in the strife.”

Such an election-struggle probably had not stirred Ireland since that of Clare in 1829. It resulted in an overwhelming victory for Home Rule. Deserted by every influence of power that should have aided and befriended them (save their ever-faithful priests, who, in nearly every parish, marched to the poll at the head of their people)—the frieze-coats of “O’Connell’s county,” rising in their might, tore down the territorial domination that had ruled them for thirty years, and struck a blow that decided the fortunes of the Home-Rule movement.

Barely less important (and only less important because of some peculiar features in the Kerry struggle) was another election being fought out in Galway County at the same moment. That county, about a year previously, had elected unopposed, on Home-Rule principles, a man the value of whose accession to the national ranks it would be almost impossible to overestimate. This was Mitchell Henry, of Kylemore Castle, near relative by descent of that Patrick Henry illustrious in American annals. Not because of his large wealth—he is said to have succeeded on his father’s death to a fortune of over a million pounds sterling—but for his high character, his great ability and thoroughly Irish spirit, he was a man of great influence, and his espousal of Home Rule was quite an event. Now, however, another election, this time contested, fiercely contested, had arisen; the candidates being Colonel Trench, son of Lord Clancarthy, Whig and Tory landlord nominee, and Captain John Philip Nolan, Home-Rule candidate, under the auspices of the great “Prelate of the West,” the world-famed Archbishop of Tuam. For years the grand old man had not interfered in an election or emerged from the sorrowful reticence into which he retired after the ruin of the Tenant League. But Ireland was up for the old cause, and “John of Tuam,” O’Connell’s stoutest ally in the campaign for Repeal, was out under the old flag. Not to let his name and his influence be discredited in his old age was as much the point of battle, certainly the point of honor, on the part of the people, as to return the Home-Ruler. The struggle was one of those desperate and merciless encounters between landlord tyranny

on the one side and conscience in the poor man’s breast on the other, which used to make Irish elections as deadly and disastrous as armed conflicts in the field. Happily, it was the last of its class ever to be seen in Ireland; for the Ballot Act, passed a year after, closed for ever the era of vote-coercion. Captain Nolan was triumphantly returned. The famous “Galway Election Petition,” in which Judge Keogh so distinguished himself, unseated him (for a time) soon after; but Kerry and Galway struck and won together that week in February, 1872; and the one blaze of bonfires on the hill-tops of all the western counties, the following Saturday night, celebrated the double victory for the national cause.

In the course of the next succeeding year every election vacancy in Ireland but one resulted in the return of a Home-Ruler, Mr. Butt himself being among the number. There was now no longer any question as to the magnitude of the dimensions to which the movement had attained. “Home Rule” had become a watchword throughout the land; a salutation of good-will

on the road-sides; a signal-shout on the hills. To this had grown the work begun almost in fear and trembling that night at the Bilton Hotel in 1870. The hour could be no longer delayed for convening the whole Irish nation in solemn council to make formal and authoritative pronouncement upon the movement, its principles, and its programme. In the end of the summer of 1873 it was accordingly decided that in the following November an Aggregate Conference of Delegates from every county in Ireland should be convened in the historic Round Room of the Rotunda, memorable as the meeting-place of the Irish Volunteer Convention more than three-quarters of a century before.

But the history of that important event fitly belongs to another chapter of such a record as this. The point now arrived at closes the first stage of the Home-Rule movement—from 1870 to 1873. The second three years—from 1873 to 1876—will exhibit it in a new light, with the mandate of a nation as its authority, and a powerful parliamentary party as its army of operation.

[139] The above article is from the pen of Mr. A. M. Sullivan, M.P. for Louth, editor of the Dublin Nation, and one of the leaders in the national movement for Home Rule in Ireland. The movement is one of great importance and significance. It has many enemies. It has been and continues to be much misrepresented. For these reasons we open our pages to one of its ablest and most eloquent exponents to give its history to our readers. Mr. Sullivan will resume and close the subject in the next number of The Catholic World.—Ed. C. W.

[140] There were certain other issues, chiefly as to alleged profligacy of financial expenditure, and as to audit and publication of accounts, etc., which need not be considered here.

[141] Their meetings in Dublin were constantly “mobbed” for some time.

[142] Not many months later the climax was capped by the triumphant return of Mr. Martin for Meath, probably the most Catholic constituency in Ireland; the candidate whom he defeated (in a stiff but thoroughly good-humored contest) being the son of Lord Fingal, one of the best and most popular of the Irish Catholic nobility.

[143] As this assembly has become in a degree historical, it may be interesting to give the following list (never before published) of those who attended it, and others added by vote thereat to make up a Committee on Resolutions. In nearly every case an indication of the political and religious opinions of the parties is now added. The list includes some of the largest merchants in Dublin:

The Rt. Hon. Edward Purdon, Lord Mayor, Mansion House, Protestant Conservative.

Sir John Barrington, ex-Lord Mayor, D.L., Great Britain Street, Prot. Cons.

E. H. Kinahan, J.P., ex-High Sheriff, Merrion Square, Tory.

James V. Mackey, J.P., Beresford Place, Orangeman.

James W. Mackey, ex-Lord Mayor, J.P., 40 Westmoreland Street, Catholic Liberal.

Sir William Wilde, Merrion Square, F.R.C.S.I., Prot. Cons.

James Martin, J.P., ex-High Sheriff, North Wall, Cath. Lib.

Cornelius Denehy, T.C., J.P., Mountjoy Square, Cath. Lib.

W. L. Erson, J.P., Great Charles Street, Or.

Rev. Joseph E. Galbraith, F.T.C.D., Trinity College, Prot. Cons.

Isaac Butt, Q.C., Eccles Street, Prot. Nationalist.

R. B. Butt, Eccles Street, Prot. Nat.

R. W. Boyle, Banker, College Green, Tory.

William Campbell, 26 Gardiner’s Place, Cath. Lib.

William Daniel, Mary Street, Cath. Lib.

William Deaker, P.L.G., Eden Quay, Prot. Cons.

Alderman Gregg, Sackville Street, Prot. Cons.

Alderman Hamilton, Frederick Street, Cath. Repealer.

W. W. Harris, LL.D., ex-High Sheriff of the County Armagh, Eccles Street, Prot. Cons.

Edward M. Hodson, Capel Street, Prot. Cons.

W. H. Kerr, Capel Street, Prot. Cons.

Major Knox, D.L., Fitzwilliam Square (proprietor of Irish Times), Prot. Cons.

Graham Lemon, Town Commissioner of Clontarf, Yew Park, Prot. Cons.

J. F. Lombard, J.P., South Hill, Cath. Repealer.

W. P. J. McDermott, Great Britain Street, Cath. Rep.

Alexander McNeale, 104 Gardiner Street, Prot. Cons.

W. Maher, T.C., P.L.G., Clontarf, Cath. Rep.

Alderman Manning, J.P., Grafton Street, Prot. Cons.

John Martin, Kilbroney, “Forty-eight” Nationalist, Presbyterian.

Dr. Maunsell, Parliament Street (editor of Evening Mail), Tory.

George Moyers, Richmond Street, Or.

J. Nolan, Sackville Street (Secretary Fenian Amnesty Association), Cath. Nat.

James O’Connor, Abbey Street (late of Irish People), Cath. Fenian.

Anthony O’Neill, T.C., North Strand, Cath. Rep.

Thomas Ryan, Great Brunswick Street, Cath. Nat.

J. H. Sawyer, M.D., Stephen’s Green, Prot. Nat.

James Reilly, P.L.G., Pill Lane, Cath. Nat.

Alderman Plunket, James’ Street, Cath. Nat. Rep.

The Venerable Archdeacon Goold, D.D., M.B., Protestant Tory—son of Goold of ’82.

A. M. Sullivan, T.C., P.L.G., Abbey Street, Cath. Nat. Rep.

Peter Talty, Henry Street, Cath. Rep.

William Shaw, M.P., Beaumont, Cork (President of Munster Bank), Prot. Lib.

Captain Edward R. King-Harman, J.P., Creevaghmore, County of Longford, Prot. Cons.

Hon. Lawrence Harman King-Harman, D. L., Newcastle, County of Longford, Prot. Cons.

George Austin, Town Commissioner of Clontarf, Winstonville, Prot. Cons.

Dr. Barry Rathmines, Cath. Lib..

George Beatty, Henrietta Street, Prot. Cons.

Joseph Begg, Capel Street, Cath. Nat. (Treasurer of Fenian Amnesty Association).

Robert Callow, Alderman, Westland Row.

Edward Carrigan, Bachelor’s Walk, Cath. Lib..

Charles Connolly, Rogerson’s Quay, Cath. Lib..

D. B. Cronin, Nassau Street, Cath. Fenian.

John Wallis, T. C., Bachelor’s Walk, Prot. Cons.

P. Walsh, Merrion Row, Cath. Nat.

John Webster, Monkstown, Prot. Cons.

George F. Shaw, F.T.C.D., Trinity College, Prot. Cons.

P. J. Smith, Dalkey, Cath. Nat. Repealer.

George E. Stephens, Blackhall Place, Prot. Cons.

Henry H. Stewart, M.D., Eccles Street, Prot. Cons.

L. J. O’Shea, J.P., Margaret Place, Cath. Rep.

Alfred Webb, Abbey Street, Nat., “Quaker.”

[144] “This association has never proposed to itself the position and duties of such a great popular organization as must eventually take up and carry out to the victorious end the national question. It has rather proposed to itself the less ambitious though not less arduous task of preparing the ground for such a comprehensive organization.”—First Report of the Irish Home Government Association. Dublin: Falconer, Upper Sackville Street. 1871.

[145] Every year nearly the same five or six men have been returned at the head of the paper; Isaac Butt always first, next to him either O’Neill Daunt or John Martin; the others almost invariably being Rev. Professor Galbraith, A. M. Sullivan, J. P. Ronayne, and Mitchell Henry.—[Mr. Ronayne, we regret to say, died while this article was in our hands.—Ed. C. W.]

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