Extract of a letter from Patrick Ring written from Bennet’s Bridge, Kilkenny, 4th Oct. 1844 to Alexander Somerville in London: “My Dear Sir. I take the liberty of writing to you as I know I am welcome, hoping to find you and your dear mistress, my best friend on earth, well, as this leaves me and my family at present. Them all is recovered from the fever, and you next to God was the means of it, you and your dear mistress.”
In the famine years I was again sent to Ireland by the proprietors of the Manchester Examiner, and on behalf of benevolent persons in England, to trace the courses of the pestilence. Some Irish newspapers and many clergymen catholic and protestant hailed my presence in the country warmly. On my sending to England reports of villages or districts which were especially distressed benevolent persons and societies forwarded money to catholic priests and others whom I named as persons to be entrusted with funds for the relief of the perishing people.
In 1848, I was, with an artist, the representative of the Illustrated London News, sent to Ireland to describe the progress of Smith O’Brien’s insurrection.
These matters are here referred to merely to indicate that, although a Scotchman, I am familiar with the social condition of Ireland; that although bred only to the plough with but small education in schools, almost none, for I was working in the fields at seven years of age to assist in obtaining, as one of a large and poor family a scanty subsistence, I yet had the power and the privilege, as a public writer employed in England, occasionally visiting Ireland, to give material assistance, and obtain redress for oppressed tenants in that district, which owns James Stephens as a native, and which has inspired him with Fenianism. My life has been a battle, and my battle has been the rights of man. Not to pull down, but to build up. My writings have been for a space of thirty or more years, directed to the development of a conservative science, teaching, not alone as Political Economy in its heartless divorcement from human sympathies, has taught, how to produce and accumulate insensate matter as public wealth, but how to diffuse as well as produce in completest abundance the stores of wealth among the producers; and how, among all the people of a nation, to dispense the elements of human happiness.
“Ireland for the Irish.” What would have been done with Richard Shea, the tyrant landlord of Bennet’s Bridge, who in 1841, ’42, ’43, had 247 lawsuits with his tenantry, who by his defiance of justice and of law, yet by the power of the law, had brought the district into a condition of agrarian convulsion? He was an Irishman of ancient lineage, boasted of being descended from the kings of Munster? What of him, and such as he, in expelling the Saxon and giving Ireland to the Irish.
But standing on this land of Canada in presence of a Fenian invasion, recently attempted, again threatened, and possibly to be repeated before these sheets are dry from the press, the mind which has with long fidelity pleaded for the rights of Irish industry, for justice to Irish tenant farmers, revolts against discussion of such, questions now. The people of this Province, reclaiming the wilderness, creating property, building up a country, a social fabric, and desiring to enjoy what they are toiling to establish, what have they done that Irishmen, in the United States, in name of the wrongs of seven centuries, should invade them? Most of them were in their own persons, or in the persons of their fathers, poor, hard-working laborers in England, Scotland, Ireland, before coming to Canada to toil. My forefathers lost their land in Scotland by political revolution as many in Ireland have. Three fourths of all the Scotch in this Province came here for the same reason that the Irish came, because they were landless at home, and doomed to lives of toil at small wages, sometimes to the pressure of famine prices on food, while, in vain, they
Begged some brother of the earth
To give them leave to toil.
And English laborers came to Canada to do battle for fortune and subdue the wilderness, for the same reasons and with similar objects in view as the Irish and Scotch. So also the French of an older day, and the Germans and Dutch.
American Republicans. We are not ignorant of political freedom. As a people, we in Canada, warmly, earnestly sympathized with you in your great war of four years, waged to conserve your nationality, to vindicate legitimate government, and the laws against rebellion, (see [chapter eight] of this Narrative). We possess freedom in the widest amplitude; religious, political, civic, social, industrial. We venerate what is old in the British Constitution, which being at the same time youthful, vigorous and easily adapted to new circumstances, is favorable to stability, public morality, social safety, general happiness.