The Irish Race in the Past and the Present

by Augustus J. Thébaud

And what is likely to be the future destiny of a nation of forty million souls, when their present state is such, and such the uncertainty of their dearest interests? They are unwilling to quit the soil; for they have lost all power of expansion by sending colonies to foreign shores; it is difficult for them to take a real interest in their own soil, for the great moving spring of interest is broken up by the total want of security. May God open their eyes to their former folly; for the folly was all of their own making! They have allowed themselves to be thus thoroughly imbued with this revolutionary spirit—the first revolution they hailed with enthusiasm; when they saw it become stained with frightful horrors, they paused a moment, and were on the point of acknowledging their error; but scribblers and sophists came to show them that it failed in being a glorious and happy one only because it was not complete; another and then another, and another yet, would finish the work and make them a great nation. Thus have they become altogether a revolutionary people; and they must abide by the consequences, unless they come at last to change their mind.

But the worst has not been said. This terrible example, instead of proving a warning to nations, has, on the contrary, drawn nearly all of them into the same boiling vortex. England and France have led the whole European world captive: people ask for a government different to the one they have; revolution is the consequence, and, with the entry of the revolutionary spirit, good-by to all stability and security. Let Italy and Spain bear witness if this is not so.

And the great phenomenon of the age is the collecting of all those revolutionary particles into one compact mass, arranged and preordained by some master-spirits of evil, who would be leaders not of a state or nation only, but of a universal republic embracing first Europe, and then the world. So we hear to-day of the Internationalists receiving in their "congresses" deputies not only from all the great European centres, not only from both ends of America, which is now Europeanized, but from South Africa, from Australia, New Zealand, from countries which a few years back were still in quiet possession of a comparatively few aborigines.

To come back, then, to the point from which we started, it is in this revolutionary spirit, in those conspiracies for revolutions to come, that some Irishmen set their hopes for the regeneration of their country. It would be well to remind them of the sayings of our Lord: "Can men gather grapes from thorns?" "By their fruits ye shall know them."

Let the Irish who are truly devoted to their country reflect well on the kind of men they would have as allies. What has Ireland in common with these men? If they know Ireland at all, they detest her because of her Catholicism; and, if Ireland knows them, she cannot but distrust and abominate them.

It has seemed a decree of kind Providence that all attempts at rebellion on her part undertaken with the hope of such help, have so far not only been miserable failures, but most disgracefully miscarried and been spent in air, leaving only ridicule and contempt for the originators of and partakers in the plots.

If the vast and unholy scheme which is certainly being organized, and which is spreading its fatal branches in all directions, should ever succeed, it could not but result in the most frightful despotism ever contemplated by men. Ireland in such an event would be the infinitesimal part of a chaotic system worthy of Antichrist for head.

But we are confident that such a scheme cannot succeed and come to be realized, unless indeed it enter for a short period into the designs of an avenging God, who has promised not to destroy mankind again by another flood, but assured us by St. Peter that he will purify it by fire.

As a mere design of man, intended for the regeneration of humanity and the new creation of an abnormal order of things, it cannot possibly succeed, because it is opposed to the nature of men, among whom as a whole there can be no perfect unity of external government and internal organization, owing to the infinite variety of which we spoke at the beginning, which is as strong in human beings as elsewhere. No other body than the Catholic Church can hope to adapt itself to all human races, and govern by the same rules all the children of Adam. The decree issued of old from the mouth of God is final, and will last as long as the earth itself. It is contained in Moses' Canticle:

"When the Most High divided the nations, when he separated the sons of Adam, he appointed the bounds of each people, according to the number of the children of Israel," or, as the Hebrew text has it, "He fixed the limits of each people." On this passage Aben Ezra remarks that interpreters understand the text as alluding to the dispersion of nations (Genesis xi.). Those interpreters, were clearly right, although only Jewish rabbies.