PREFACE
The term Fenian is derived from the Irish word Feine, the genitive case of Fian (plural Fiana), the designation of a band, or rather several bands of warriors, whose duty was to defend the coasts of Ireland from foreign invasion.
The Fians, Fiana, or Fenians flourished in the third century of our era, and employed their time alternately in war, the chase, and the cultivation of poetry. As their protecting power extended to part of Scotland, hence the traditions of them in that country, on which Macpherson’s celebrated poems of ‘Ossian’ are founded. Their chief was Fin or Fionn (the Fingal of Macpherson), and their most celebrated bards were Ossian, or Oisin, and Fergus (sons of Fin), and Daire, sometimes called Gunire.
James Stephens, who claims to be originator of Fenianism, was born at Kilkenny, Ireland, in 1827. He was probably familiar with the agrarian disturbances around Kilkenny in the years 1842-43. While it falls to me in the year 1866 to write this, “Narrative of the Fenian Invasion of Canada,” and to deprecate, deplore, denounce it, so it fell to me in the years 1843 and 1844, when vindicating the rights of industry against injustice to produce a work, “A Cry from Ireland” of which the late Daniel O’Connell spoke thus at a public meeting in Dublin, afterwards, nearly in the same words, in London:
“The impartial, vivid descriptions of the wrongs of Irish industry and sufferings of the tenantry at Bennet’s Bridge, by Alexander Somerville, are all the more emphatic that he is neither an Irishman, a catholic, nor a repealer. To him more than to any individual we owe the commission of Inquiry into the operation of the Laws of Landlord and Tenant. This work of Mr. Somerville which I hold in my hand (and from which he had cited passages) will be read by generations of Irishmen yet unborn.”
On February 14th, 1844, Sir Robert Peel, then Prime Minister, having announced that a commission of Inquiry was to be sent to Ireland, Lord John Russell, leader of the opposition, made a speech of which this is a passage: “Government have appointed a commission for farther inquiry into the subject. I doubt whether farther evidence be necessary seeing how much evidence we already have upon it, and see statements in the book by Alexander Somerville, ‘A Cry from Ireland’ of a heart rending kind; statements which I would not venture to refer to unless they were fully ascertained to be true; statements which show that with the powers of the law, and in name of the law, some landlords in Ireland, are exercising a fearful and a dreadful power.”
The Prime Minister said in the same debate: “The noble lord has referred to a book called A Cry from Ireland. Sir, I have read that work, and I think it is impossible for any man whatever to read it without being shocked with the manner in which landlords, as there described, have in many instances perverted their powers for harsh purposes.”
Extract from the evidence of Patrick Ring, one of seventy and odd tenant farmers on the Bennet’s Bridge estate near Kilkenny, for some of whom I obtained justice and re-instatement in the lands from which they had been evicted. Commission Blue Books, Reports to both Houses of Parliament, 1844; Vol. III. p. 363. [See also “Somerville’s Book of a Diligent Life in the Service of Public Safety in Britain,” published by John Lovell, St. Nicholas Street, Montreal].
Patrick Ring, examined before the Royal Commission at Kilkenny, Oct. 8, 1844: “There was a gentleman came over to Ireland of the name of Somerville. He had heard of my case and how I was persecuted. He hired a car and went out to Bennet’s Bridge, and got up to the place and saw my mother out in the ruins with an infant in her arms, after she had come out from the mother [his wife] striving to mind the mother and to mind the child. They [family of children] were in a famishing way; and he saw her and left her Morning Chronicle in London, and he laid it also before Mr. O’Connell” &c.