Our historian when he comes and writes of us may take as the motto of his book Virgil's comment on the honey-making of the bees. "Sic vos non vobis." Long ago we spread the gospel of the Cross over the dark places of Europe. The monasteries of our monks, the churches of our missionary preachers were everywhere. But our own land is still the prey of that acrimonious theological bitterness which is of all things the most utterly opposed to the spirit of Christ. So we, but not for ourselves, made sweetness. Kant is a German. Bergson is a Frenchman. All the world knows it. Who knows or cares that John Scotus Erigena or Bishop Berkeley were Irish? The greatness of their names has shed no luster over us. Our captains and soldiers have fought and won under every flag in Europe and under the Stars and Stripes of America. Under our own flag they rarely fought and never won. Statesmen of our race have been among the governors of almost every nation under the sun. Our own land we have never governed yet. The names of Swift, of Goldsmith, of Sheridan, of a score of other men of letters add to the glory of the record of English literature, not of ours. Our people by their toil of mind and muscle have made other lands rich in manufacture and commerce. Ireland remains poor.
That is why there is not and cannot be a history of Ireland. It is never in Ireland that our history has been made. The threads of our story are ours, spun at home, but they are woven into splendid fabrics elsewhere, not in Ireland. But the history of the Irish people will be a great work when it is written. There will be strange chapters in it, and none stranger than those which tell of our part in the making of America. It will be a record of mingled good and evil, but it will always have in it the elements of high romance. From the middle of the 18th century, when the tide of emigration set westward from Ulster, down to to-day when with slackening force it flows from Connaught, those who went have always been the men and women for whom life at home seemed hopeless. There was no promise of good for them here. But in spite of the intolerable sadness of their going, in spite of the fact that at home they were beaten men, there was in them some capacity for doing things. We can succeed, it seems, elsewhere but not here. This is the strange law which has governed our history. We recognize its force everywhere for centuries back. America gives the latest example of its working. An Irishman returns from a visit to America wondering, despairing, hoping. The wonder is in him because he knows those who went and has seen the manner of their going. Success for them seemed impossible, yet very often they have succeeded. The despair is in him because he knows that it has always been in other lands, not in their own that our people succeed, and because there is no power which can alter the decrees of destiny. But hope survives in him, flickering, because what our people can do elsewhere they can certainly do at home if only we can discover the solution of the malignant riddle of our failure.
Transcriber's Notes
p. 82 "passerby" was changed to "passer-by"
The spelling of all other words, and the punctuation, are as in the original.
[The end of From Dublin To Chicago by James Owen Hannay (1865-1950) [writing as George A. Birmingham]