The Irish Race in the Past and the Present

by Augustus J. Thébaud

The civil right of acquiring land and enjoying its products has so far been the only one considered by us; and the subject has been entered upon at some length, as agriculture has at all times formed the chief occupation of the Irish people. But the penal laws embraced many other objects; and, as their intent was evidently to debase the people and reduce it to a state of actual slavery and want, other civil rights were equally invaded by their tyrannical provisions.

A portion of the population in all countries devotes itself to the intellectual pursuits necessary for the life of every cultivated nation. Whoever chooses must have the right of devoting his life to the professions of medicine and law, of entering the Church or the army, if his tastes run in any one of those directions. Not so in Catholic Ireland. The oath to be taken by every barrister prevented the Catholic Irishman from devoting his powers to such a purpose. There was only one Church for him, and that one proscribed. In the army not only could he not attain to any rank, but he was not allowed to enter it even as a private, the holding of a musket being prohibited to him. So that, through mere fanatical hatred of every thing Catholic, England deprived herself for a whole century of the services of a people, forming to-day more than half of her army and navy, whose efforts have helped to cover her flag with honor, and whose memorable absence from the English ranks at Fontenoy wrung that bitter expression from the heart of George II. when the victorious tide of the English battle was rolled back by the Irish brigade, "Cursed be the laws which deprive me of such subjects!"

These few words are enough to show that the penal laws were in reality a decree of outlawry against the Irish—stamping them, not as true subjects, but as mere slaves and helots, fit only to be hewers of wood and drawers of water at the bidding of their lords and masters.

But there are mere human rights, inalienable in man, and sacred among all nations, which were trampled upon in that desolated land together with all inferior rights. Such are the rights of worshipping God, of properly educating children, of preserving a just subordination in the family and promoting harmony and happiness among its members. These natural rights were more openly and shamelessly violated, if that were possible, than all others; and this in itself would have made the eighteenth century one of gloom and woe for Irishmen.

It was for their religion chiefly that the Irish had undergone all the calamities and scourges which have been described. Had they only, at the very beginning of the Reformation, bowed to the new dogma of the spiritual supremacy of the English kings; had they a little later accepted the Thirty-nine Articles of Queen Elizabeth; had they, at a subsequent epoch, opined in chorus with the Scotch Presbyterians, and given the Bible as their authority for all kinds of absurdities and atrocities, mental and moral; had they, in a word, as they remarked to Sussex, changed their religion four times in twelve years, they would have escaped the wrath of Henry VIII., the crafty and cruel policy of Elizabeth, the shifty expediency of the Stuarts, the barbarity of the Cromwellian era, and finally the ingenious atrocities of the penal laws.

Even if, in the midst of some of the extremities to which they had been reduced, they had at any time resolved to conform and take the oaths prescribed, all their miseries would have been at an end, and their immediate admission to all the rights and privileges of British citizens secured. From time to time, in individual cases, they witnessed the sudden and magical effect produced by conformity on the part of those who gave up resistance altogether, and who, from whatever motive, bowed to the inevitable conditions on which men were admitted to live peaceably on Irish soil, and to the enjoyment of the blessings of this life; such condition being the abjuration of Catholicity. But so few were found to take advantage of this easy chance forever held out to them, that a man might well wonder at their constancy did he not reflect that they set their duty to God above all things. The fact is patent—they had a conscience, and knew what it meant.

Having then surrendered their all for the sake of their religion, the free exercise of that might at least have been left them; and since the choice lay between the two alternatives of enjoying the natural right of worshipping their God or submitting to all the sacrifices previously mentioned (seemingly the meaning of the various oaths prescribed by law), it can only be looked upon as an additional cruelty to violently deprive them of what they chose to preserve at all cost. But the authors of the statutes did not see the matter in this light. They could not lose such an opportunity of inflicting new tortures on their victims; on the contrary, they would have considered all their labor lost had they not endeavored to coerce the very thing least subject to coercion, the religious feeling of the human soul. Accordingly, the resolution was taken to deprive them of every possible facility for the exercise of their religion, that the fire within might give no sign of its warmth.

True, the Irish Catholics were not, as the Christians under the edicts of old Rome, to be summoned before the public courts and there abjure their religion or die. It is strange that the rulers of Ireland stopped short at this; that they invented nothing in their laws at least equivalent, unless the statutes that compelled every person under fine to be present at Protestant worship on Sundays be interpreted to mean, what it very much resembles, an attempt at coercion of the very soul. Still there was no edict openly proscribing the name of Catholic, and punishing its bearer with death.

But the measures adopted and actually enforced were in reality equivalent, and would more effectually than any pagan edict have produced the same result, if the Irish race had shown the least wavering in their traditional steadiness of purpose.

The first of the measures devised for this end would have been completely efficacious with any other people or race. It was a twofold measure: 1. All bishops, priests, and monks, were to depart from the kingdom, liable to capital punishment should they return. 2. All laymen were to be compelled to assist at the Protestant service every Sunday, under penalty of a fine for each offence: the fine mounting with the repetition of the offence, so that, in the end, it would reach an enormous sum. Only let such a policy as this be persevered in for a quarter of a century in any country on earth except Ireland, and, in that country the Catholic religion will cease to exist.