The Irish Race in the Past and the Present

by Augustus J. Thébaud

When will all this come to pass? Who can tell? But stranger things than these have already taken place in Ireland, and we are confident that future historians of the race will have to record greater wonders still, and facts more stubborn and difficult of explanation.

At all events, should the inflexible Puritanism of the Scotch colony stand proof against the allurements of a motherly and tender-hearted Church, they must at least become subject to the iron laws of population and absorption. When the public statutes are no longer drawn up for their special benefit, when no new swarms of brethren come to swell their ranks, when they are abandoned to the merciless laws of loss and gain in numbers, then will people soon see on which side is true morality, and by which the ordinances of God are really respected; then will many vapid accusations against the holy Catholic Church of themselves disappear, and the eyes of men will open to the great fact that Ireland must be and remain one in race, feeling, and, above all, in religion. The foreign element will have dwindled to insignificance, if it shall not have utterly disappeared. Indeed, it may be safely predicted that the day will arrive when the announcement of the natural demise of the last Puritan in Ireland will appear in the daily newspapers as a curious piece of intelligence, not devoid of a certain interest.

Though moral force, as the agent of the regeneration of Ireland, has been our theme all through, we would not have our readers infer that Irishmen should adopt the do-nothing policy, and leave to God alone the work of raising them up. The moral force spoken of is that of human beings endowed with activity and determination; steady and persevering in the pursuit of well- organized plans of their own conception.

Let Irishmen lift up their eyes and behold what they might do, did they only appreciate their strength and husband it. Dire calamities, which God designed from the first to convert into blessings, have scattered them over the world, and brought out that power of expansion which was always in their nature, but lay dormant and cramped under the pressure of terrible circumstances. They again show themselves as that old race which three thousand years ago spread itself all over Europe and Asia. They now bear in their hands an emblem which they had not then— the cross of Christ! And the cross is the sign of universality in time and space. To that sign, since the triumph of the Saviour on the day of his resurrection, is given the rule of the world till the end of time. Now that our globe is known at last, the cross must be planted all over its surface, and in this great work the Irish race is clearly destined to bear a conspicuous part.

In the fulfilment of that divine vocation they are dispersed, and whatever is dispersed is deprived of a great part of its strength. How can the disjecta membra, scattered far and wide by Typhon, become again Osiris? Under the guidance of God, by that great instrument of modern times, the power of association and organization, aided by a steady, energetic will.

Ezekiel has admirably described the process in his thirty- seventh chapter. The Lord must first speak: "Ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. . . . Behold, I will send spirit into you, and ye shall live; and I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to grow over you, and will cover you with skin; and I will give you spirit, and ye shall live."

All this seems to be the work of God alone, yet, in the very words of the prophet, the dry bones have their part to perform:

"As I prophesied, there was a noise, a commotion, and the bones came together, each one to his joint."

There is the whole process; it supposes a noise, a commotion, a rising, an assembling together, and a fitting each one into his own joint. They possess an activity of their own, which they must use. And the phenomenon is to take place in the midst of "a vast plain "—two great continents—over the surface of which the "bones" are found on every side, appearing "exceeding dry."

With what a power will that army be invested when it rises up and stands upon its feet! We may form some faint idea of it, when in our large cities any thing occurs to excite the interest and warm up the feeling of that apparently inert Celtic mass. The largest halls constructed cannot contain the multitudes who have only read the announcement of a meeting, a lecture, or a charitable undertaking. Such scenes are witnessed every day along the banks of the St. Lawrence, the Hudson, and the Delaware Rivers; by the shores of Chesapeake Bay; in all the great centres of population dotting the Atlantic coast; in the heart of the continent along the winding course of the Mississippi and Missouri; and already, even in the far West, on the spreading shores of the Pacific Ocean. The same is occurring all over the inhabited portion of Australia and the adjacent islands. What power, then, would be theirs did those "bones" know how to come together each in his own joint!