The Irish Race in the Past and the Present

by Augustus J. Thébaud

But as soon as Protestantism came to contest, not only the temporal, but even the spiritual supremacy of the Popes; when, taking advantage of the trouble of the Church, the so-called Catholic sovereigns, while pretending to render all honor to the spiritual supremacy of the sovereign Pontiffs, refused to acknowledge in them any right of lifting their warning voice, and calling on the powers of the world to obey the great and unchangeable laws of religion and justice, then did the long- established stability of Europe begin to give way, while the whole continent entered upon its long era of revolution, which is still in full way, and, as yet, is far from having produced its last consequences.

England, the most guilty, was the first to feel the effect of the shock. The Tudors flattered themselves that, by throwing aside what they called the yoke of Rome, they had vastly increased their power, and so they did for the moment, while the dynasty that succeeds them sees rebellion triumphant, and the head of a king fall beneath the axe of an executioner.

She is said to have benefited, nevertheless, by her great revolution, and by the subsequent introduction of a new dynasty. She has certainly chanted a loud paean of triumph, and at this moment is still exultant over the effects of her modern policy, from the momentary success of the new ideas she has disseminated through the world, and above all from that immense spread of parliamentary governments which have sprung into existence everywhere under her guidance, and mainly through her agency.

And the cause of her triumph was that, after a few years of commotion, she seemed to have obtained a kind of stability which was a sufficiently good copy of the old order under the Popes, and won for her apparently the gratitude of mankind; but that stability is altogether illogical, and cannot long stand. There is an old, though now trite, saying to the effect that when you "sow the wind you must reap the whirlwind," and no one can fail to see the speedy realization of the truth of this adage on her part. Over the full tide of her prosperity there is a mighty, irresistible, and inevitable storm visibly gathering. At last she has come to nearly the same state of mental anarchy which she has been so powerful to spread in Europe. After reading "Lothair," the work of one of her great statesmen, all intelligent readers must exclaim, "Babylon! how hast thou fallen! " Within a few years, possibly, nothing will remain of her former greatness but a few shreds, and men will witness another of those awful examples of a mighty empire falling in the midst of the highest seeming prosperity.

When a nation has no longer any fixed principle to go by, when the minds of her leaders are at sea on all great religious and moral questions, when the people openly deny the right of the few to rule, when a fabric, raised altogether on aristocracy, finds the substratum giving way, and democratic ideas seated even upon the summit of the edifice, there must be, as is said, "a rattling of old bones," and a shaking of the skeleton of what was a body.

How long, then, will the mock stability established by the deep wisdom of England's renowned statesmen have stood? A century or two of dazzling material prosperity succeeded by long ages of woe, such as the writer of the "Battle of Dorking," with all his imagination, could not find power enough to describe; for no Prussian, or any other foreign army, will bring that catastrophe about, but the breath of popular fury.

But our purpose is not to utter prophecies—rather to rehearse facts already accomplished.

England, then, was the first to feel the shock of the earthquake which was to overthrow the old stability of Europe. It is known how Germany has ever since been a scene of continual wars, dynastic changes, and territorial confusion. What evils have not the wars of the present century brought upon her! Yet, owing to the phlegmatic disposition, one might call it the stolidity of the majority of Germans, the disturbances have been so far external, and the lower masses of society have scarcely been agitated, except by the first rude explosion of Protestantism, and the sudden patriotic enthusiasm of young plebeians, in 1814. But mark the suddenness with which, in 1848, all the thrones of Germany fell at once under the mere breath of what is called "the people!" It is almost a trite thing to say that, where religion no longer exists, there no longer is security or peace. Impartial travellers, Americans chiefly, have observed of late that, in certain parts of France, there is, in truth, very little religious feeling; while in all Protestant Germany, particularly in that belonging to Prussia, there is none at all. How long, then, is the "new Germanic Empire," so loudly trumpeted at Versailles, and afterward so gloriously celebrated at Berlin, without the intervention of any religion whatever, likely to stand? How long? Can it exist till the end of this century? He would be a bold prophet who could confidently say, "Yes."

As to France, formerly the steadiest of all nations, so deeply attached to her dynasty of eight hundred years, although some of her kings were little worthy true affection; many of whose citizens have been born in houses a thousand years old, from families whose names went back to the darkness of heroic times; which was once so retentive of her old memories, living in her traditions, her former deeds of glory, even in the monuments raised in honor of her kings, her great captains, her illustrious citizens; which was chiefly devoted to her time- honored religion, mindful that she was born on the day of the baptism of Clovis; that she grew up during the Crusades; that a virgin sent by Heaven saved her from the yoke of the stranger; that, on attaining her full maturity, it was religion which chiefly ennobled her; and that her greatest poets, orators, literary men, respected and honored religion as the basis of the state, and, by their immortal masterpieces, threw a halo around Catholicism—France, which still retains in her external appearance something of her old steadiness and immutability, so that to the eye of a stranger, who sees her for the first time, solidity is the word which comes naturally to his mind, as expressive of every thing around him, has only the look of what she was in her days of greatness, and on the surface of the earth there is not to-day a more unsteady, shaky, insecure spot, scarcely worthy of being chosen by a nomad Tartar as a place wherein to pitch his tent for the night, and hurry off at the first appearance of the rising sun on the morrow. Can the shifting sands of Libya, the ever-shaking volcanic mountains of equatorial America, the rapidly-forming coral islands of the southern seas, give an idea of that fickleness, constant agitation, and unceasing clamor for change, which have made France a by-word in our days? Who of her children can be sure that the house he is building for himself will ever be the dwelling of his son; that the city he lives in to-day will tomorrow acknowledge him as a member of its community? Who can be certain that the constitution of the whole state may not change in the night, and he wake the next day to find himself an outlaw and a fugitive?

It is a lamentable fact that for the last hundred years a great nation has been reduced to such a state of insecurity, that no one dares to think of the future, though all have repudiated the past, and thus every thing is reduced for them to the present fleeting moment.