"HOW IS OLD IRELAND AND HOW DOES SHE STAND?"
Summing up these pages, how shall I answer the question asked by Napper Tandy in "The Wearin' of the Green" over a hundred years ago—"How is old Ireland, and how does she stand?"
Let us see what changes, for the better or for the worse, there have been during the period—nearly seventy years—covered by these recollections.
Catholic Emancipation had, five years before I was born, allowed our people to raise their voices, and give their votes through their representatives in an alien Parliament.
I am not one to say that no benefit for Ireland has arisen through legislation at Westminster, but the system that allowed our people to perish of starvation has always been, to my mind, the one great justification for our struggle for self-government by every practicable method. It has been a struggle for sheer existence.
If Ireland had had the making of her own laws when the potato crop failed, not a single human being would have perished from starvation. That I am justified in introducing the terrible Irish Famine and its consequences into these recollections as part of my own experiences I think I have shown in my description of its effects upon our people when passing through Liverpool as emigrants or as settlers in England.
I have always endeavoured to look upon the most hopeful aspects of the Irish question. But with the appalling tragedy of the Famine half way in the last century, with half our people gone and the population still diminishing, one is bound to admit that the nineteenth century was one of the most disastrous in Irish history.
Is it surprising that, during my time, driven desperate at the sight of a perishing people in one of the most fruitful lands on earth, we should have made two attempts at rebellion?
In 1848 the means were totally inadequate.
In 1867 the movement looked more hopeful in many respects. The revolutionary organisation had a large number of enrolled members on both sides of the Atlantic. Among them were hundreds in the British army, and many thousands of Irish-American veterans trained in the Civil War, eager to wipe off the score of centuries in a conflict, on something like equal terms, with the olden oppressor of their race.