"I procured an audience of the Emperor of Germany at Schoenbrunn, and found him with a half-dozen of general officers, among whom were Generals O'Donnell and Kavanagh, my gallant countrymen. The latter [he was from Borris in the Queen's County] said something to me in Irish which I did not understand, consequently made him no answer. The Emperor turned quickly on me and said, 'What! O'Kelly, don't you speak the language of your own country?' I replied, 'Please, your Majesty, none but the lower orders of the Irish people speak Irish.' The Emperor laughed loudly. The impropriety of the remark made before two Milesian Generals flashed into my mind in an instant, and I could have bitten off my tongue. They luckily did not, or pretended not to hear."
It is from the middle of the eighteenth century onward that the Irish language begins to die out. I doubt whether before that period any Milesian family either in Ireland or the Scotch Highlands spoke English in its own home or to its own children.
I have been at much pains to trace the decay of the language, and the extent to which it has been spoken at various periods from that day to this, and have consulted all the volumes of travellers and statisticians upon which I have been able to lay hands. The result, however, has not been very satisfactory so far as information goes. It is simply amazing that most Irish and many English writers, who have had to deal with Ireland from that day to this, have in their sketchy and generally unreliable accounts of the island, its people, and its social conditions, simply ignored the fact that any other language than English was spoken in it at all. Perhaps the most trustworthy accounts of the anomalous condition of the Irish-speaking race in their own island are by foreigners who have recorded what they saw without prejudice one way or the other, whereas one cannot help thinking that English and Irish writers who, while going over the same ground, have yet absolutely ignored[32] all allusion to the question of language, did so because they found it a difficult and awkward question to deal with.
The first authorities I know of who speak of Irish as dying out are Dr. Samuel Madden, who, writing in 1738, states that not one in twenty was ignorant of English, and Harris, who, in his description of the county Down six years later, says that Irish prevailed only amongst the poorer Catholics. Both these statements, however, are preposterously exaggerated. In the very year that Madden wrote died O'Neill of Clanaboy, one of the best-known and most influential men of the county Down, and I found in the Belfast Museum the Irish manuscript of the funeral oration pronounced over his body,[33] and any O'Neill would probably at that period have turned in his grave had his funeral discourse been spoken in English.
Madden's statement that in 1738 nineteenth-twentieths of the population knew English is an incredible one and so utterly disproved by all the other evidence, that it is astonishing that so sound and careful a historian as Mr. Lecky should have accepted it as substantially true. The evidence upon the other side is overwhelming. Forty-seven years after Madden wrote this the German, Küttner, travelling through Ireland, wrote a series of letters in which he distinctly says that he found the common people either did not understand English at all or understood it imperfectly.[34]
More than two generations had passed away after Madden's statement that nineteen-twentieths of the population knew English, when we find a Scotchman, Daniel Dewar, in a book entitled "Observations on the Character, Customs and Superstitions of the Irish," writing thus in 1812:—
"The number of people who speak this language [Irish] is much greater than is generally supposed. It is spoken throughout the province of Connaught by all the lower orders, a great part of whom scarcely understand any English, and some of those who do, understand it only so as to conduct business. They are incapable of receiving moral or religious instruction through its medium. The Irish is spoken very generally through the other three provinces except amongst the descendants of the Scotch in the north. It cannot be supposed that calculations on this subject should be perfectly accurate, but it has been concluded on good grounds that there are about two millions of people in Ireland [out of about six millions] who are incapable of understanding a continued discourse in English."
"I have always found," says Dewar, with much shrewdness, "that in places where gentlemen hostile to this tongue assured me there was not a word of it spoken, in these very districts I heard very little English." He gives an amusing account of the various contradictory objections that he found at that time urged against it.
"Some of the Anglo-Hibernians at that time (1808) strongly maintained that this dialect is so barbarous that it cannot answer the purpose of instruction, others that it would awaken the enthusiasm of the Wild Irish (as they call them) to make any attempt of this kind, and consequently that it might prove dangerous to the Government, and others, that they had no desire to be taught in Irish, and that it would be useless to send teachers among them for this purpose."